A 2017 International Monetary Fund study pegged the global value of direct and indirect fossil fuel subsidies at $5.2 trillion — that’s 6.4 percent of global GDP. David Roberts, Volts, 09 April 2021 President Joe Biden has released the tax plan that is meant to pay for his $2-trillion-plus infrastructure plan. You can read the New York Times for a full breakdown. The bulk of the revenue will …
Oil firms knew decades ago fossil fuels posed grave health risks, files reveal
Exclusive: documents seen by Guardian show companies fought clean-air rules despite being aware of harm caused by air pollution, by Oliver Milman @olliemilman, 18 Mar 2021 The oil industry knew at least 50 years ago that air pollution from burning fossil fuels posed serious risks to human health, only to spend decades aggressively lobbying against clean air regulations, a trove of …
State methane emissions worse than anticipated: states may need to weigh their gas origin
The accepted manuscript can be found here. Note: These production-stage methane emissions add 16 – 65% (GWP-100; 38 – 157%, GWP-20) to combustion carbon dioxide emissions, not even accounting for downstream leaks that further increase the total GHG footprint of gas. States looking to decarbonize may need to weigh their gas’s origin – study EXCLUSIVE Thursday, March 18, 2021 3:44 PM …
Oil and gas on public lands accounts for a quarter of US GHG emissions and we give that away for as little as $2 acre (may be raised to $5)
U.S. senators introduce bipartisan oil and gas leasing reform bill, March 10, 2021, by Reuters staff (Reuters) – Two U.S. senators on Wednesday said they have introduced a bipartisan bill aimed at boosting taxpayer returns from federal oil and gas leasing, the latest in a string of moves in Washington seeking to reform drilling on public lands. The bill, authored …
Fossil fuel risk bond programs underway in Oregon and Washington, now part of national legislation
Center for Sustainable Economy’s (CSE) work on fossil fuel risk bond programs (FFRB) – a signature ‘polluter pays’ project on fossil fuel infrastructure that was launched about 2 years ago — would provide a major deterrent for building new fossil fuel infrastructure as well as incentives to retire existing infrastructure early in any jurisdiction that adopts it. 2019 and 2020 brought …
Phil Doe: A better Suncor plan: continuous real-time pollution reporting
March 2021 A Denver Post editorial recently congratulated the Suncor corporation for planning to introduce air +6 monitoring equipment into the communities surrounding the refinery it has owned for 19 years. Cultivando, a community- based nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the Latino community develop a stronger sense of civic importance and cohesiveness, has a better proposal. It was developed over …
Cutting Out Beef Could Cut Agricultural Land Use In Half: Going vegan would reduce it by three-quarters.
By Lloyd Alter, Treehugger, March 05, 2021, Fact checked by Haley Mast Treehugger has been writing about the problems of meat forever, we have been pitching vegetarian and vegan diets for years as a way of reducing one’s carbon footprint, and we keep writing posts about reducing our intake of meat. But it is a hard sell; as Bill Gates writes in his new book, “I can see …
Some Colorado Oil Workers Can See The Shift Away From Fossil Fuels Coming — And They Say They Need Help Navigating It
By Miguel Otárola, CPR, February 26, 2021 Trucks come and go from the EVRAZ Rocky Mountain Steel mill, a massive facility south of Pueblo. One of the main products workers make here are casings used for oil and gas wells in Texas and North Dakota. Production of the casings stopped last spring when the coronavirus pandemic and low oil prices halted …
Oppose False Solutions to the Climate Crisis: CCS, Biogas, Offsets Generally, any nuclear building for the foreseeable future
The expansion of fossil fuels threatens our climate, public health and economic prosperity. It necessitates an end to new fossil fuel infrastructure and production, along with a managed decline of the industry. To stay alive, the fossil fuel industry is pushing a number of policies that further investment in fossil fuels, under the guise of addressing the climate crisis. Chief …
Hail, America’s most under-rated climate risk has expanded footprint across the country + ‘staggering increase in heat deaths’. Fossil fuel and coal downturn
Hail! It’s America’s most underrated climate risk, Atlantic, February 9, 2021. (See bottom of this post) Wisconsin researchers in a new study find that over the last 40 years hail has expanded its footprint across the country and has become more frequent in the so-called Hail Alley stretching from Wyoming to Texas. Study: Warmer weather will increase flooding in the Columbia River Basin this …