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Is It about the Oil?
“No War for Oil” is one of the most popular slogans in the many emergency demonstrations sprouting up around the world in response to the criminal kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores from their residence in Caracas, Venezuela and their forced removal to detention in the US. For many outraged by the naked military […]
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Energy Affordability+, Not Energy Dominance
Two of the most significant dates in my life as a progressive activist and organizer are April 4, 1968 and August of 2003. The 1968 date is the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. His killing pushed me to finally do something about racial injustice and the Vietnam War rather than just reading and […]
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Thank You for Emitting: The Hypocrisies of COP29
COP29 was always going to be memorable, for no other reason than the hosting country, Azerbaijan, is a petrostate indifferent to the issue of emissions and scornful of ecological preachers. It has seen its natural gas supply grow by 128% between 2000 and 2021. Between 2006 and 2021, gas exports rose by a monumental 29,290%. […]
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Methane Emissions “Fastest in Decades”
A new study shows methane (CH4) emissions behaving like a sprinter on speed, setting decadal records. This is bad news. It’s 80-times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat. Global emissions of methane, a powerful planet-heating gas, are ‘rising rapidly’ at the fastest rate in decades, requiring immediate action to help avert a dangerous escalation […]
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The Death of Paris ‘15
The Paris climate agreement of 2015 set the standards for how nation/states must approach the net zero target year 2050 by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in stages, starting with major reductions by 2030. Paris ’15 is dead. According to a new report by Global Energy Monitor of San Francisco, at least 20B barrels of oil […]
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Climate Agreements Suck
Climate agreements suck. There are no real enforcement provisions. Many signatories cheat. Some don’t rep0rt at all. Moreover, reported data is highly suspect. It’s a worldwide scandal recently exposed by YaleEnvironment360. Evidence of cheating is found in the atmosphere: Global CO2 is on a rampage, skyrocketing upwards like never before, double-to-triple rates of only one […]
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False Transitions and Global Stocktakes: The Failure of COP28
The time has come to treat the sequence of UN Climate Change Conferences, the latest concluding in Dubai, as a series of the failed and the abysmally rotten. It shows how a worthless activity, caked (oiled?) with appropriately chosen words, can actually provide assurance that something worthwhile was done. Along the way, there are always […]
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Climate TRACE Detects Underreported Soaring Emissions
COP28, the UN Conference of the Parties in oil-rich Dubai currently underway will not resolve the issue of oil and gas companies agreeing to slow down oil production. To the contrary, all signals point to an increase according to formal plans already laid out by the industry, as stated by the International Energy Agency. Reuters […]
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COP28: Where Fossil Fuel Industries Go to Gloat
The sequence of COP meetings, ostensibly a United Nations forum to discuss dramatic climate change measures in the face of galloping emissions, has now been shown for what it is: a luxurious, pampered bazaar for the very industries that fear a dip in their profits and ultimate obsolescence. Call it a drugs summit for narcotics […]
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Hypocrisy Sours COP28
Hypocrisy runs rampant at COP28 even before the doors swung open to 70,000 delegates on Thursday, November 30th. This is the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties (“COP”) held at Expo City, Dubai. It’s the big annual event for scientists to meet to decide on the fate of anthropogenic climate change, […]