From the score of the 1987 movie of same name.
Peak Tom Berenger. Mimi Rogers at her most gorgeous.
Month: June 2022
“Desperate Times” – Will Utah Pump Pacific Water to Great Salt Lake?
Recent New York Times article sparked a lot of interest in the crisis happening in Utah.
Local coverage here of a frankly, crazy – scheme to pump water from the Pacific into Utah.
No mention of asking people to stop it with the damn lawns already.
Gotta love those assurances that “we’ll just adapt” will be cheaper than actually doing something about the problem.
The Weekend Wonk: Putin Exploits our Fossil Dependence, and Climate’s Pressure on Food Supplies
Another example of the chaotic knock-on effects of a warming climate, and our too-slow transition from fossil fuels.
We failed to learn from 9-11, an the disastrous Iraq war for oil.
Now the world faces a brutal, reportedly cancer-stricken, Petro-dictator with nothing too lose, who is willing, apparently, to exploit our vulnerability, and starve millions to achieve his ends.
Timothy David Snyder is an American historian specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe, who is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Russia has a hunger plan. Vladimir Putin is preparing to starve much of the developing world as the next stage in his war in Europe.
In normal times, Ukraine is a leading exporter of foodstuffs. A Russian naval blockade now prevents Ukraine from exporting grain.
If the Russian blockade continues, tens of millions of tons of food will rot in silos, and tens of millions of people in Africa and Asia will starve.
The horror of Putin’s hunger plan is so great that we have a hard time apprehending it. We also tend to forget how central food is to politics. Some historical examples can help.
The idea that controlling Ukrainian grain can change the world is not new. Both Stalin and Hitler wished to do so.
For Stalin, Ukraine’s black earth was to be exploited to build an industrial economy for the USSR. In fact, collectivized agriculture killed about four million Ukrainians.
Notably, as people began to die in large numbers, Stalin blamed the Ukrainians themselves. Soviet propaganda called those who drew attention to the famine “Nazis.”
Actual Nazis had related ideas. They liked the idea of controlling Ukrainian agriculture. This was in fact Hitler’s central war aim.
Hitler wished to redirect Ukrainian grain from the Soviet Union to Germany, in the hope of starving millions of Soviet citizens.
Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Putin Exploits our Fossil Dependence, and Climate’s Pressure on Food Supplies”The Second World War was fought for Ukraine and in considerable measure in Ukraine, between dictators who wanted to control food supplies.
We’re Going to Get More Familiar with Heat Waves. Might as Well Start Naming Them.
Meteorologists are starting to name heat waves the same way they have named Hurricanes, and more recently, Winter Storms. The giant winter storm that caused the deadly Texas blackouts of last year, is referred to as “Uri”.
There’s also talk of rating heat waves for intensity, the way we do Hurricanes and Tornadoes.
There’s a growing effort to name and categorize heat waves the way we do hurricanes — to call attention to their significance, alert people to dangerous temperatures and prod public officials into action.
Why it matters: Heat waves are the deadliest type of weather emergency in the U.S. They’re bigger killers than floods, tornadoes or hurricanes — and they’re growing in frequency and intensity due to global warming.
- Excessive heat — which hits low-income communities the hardest — doesn’t lend itself to dramatic TV coverage, so people sometimes underestimate the risk.
- Proponents of a more formal public warning system say it could save lives and trigger measures like opening community cooling stations and asking people to stay indoors.
Driving the news: This month Seville, Spain is poised to become the first city to start naming severe heat waves.
- Five other cities — Los Angeles; Miami; Milwaukee; Kansas City, Missouri; and Athens — have also started piloting a similar initiative, using weather data and public health criteria to categorize heat waves.
- They’ll use a three-category system that organizers want to standardize. Each city’s system will be tailored to its particular climate.
- A “category three” heat wave in L.A., for example, will look and feel quite different from the same designation in Milwaukee.
“Some of the places least accustomed to heat are the most at risk,” says Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (known colloquially as Arsht-Rock), which is spearheading efforts to name and categorize heat waves.
Details: Under the warning system starting up in the six global cities, “category one” is the least severe, while “category three” would be “the top 10% of terrible heat waves,” said Larry Kalkstein, Arsht-Rock’s chief heat science adviser.
- “For all three of them, we’d recommend to stay indoors in air conditioning as much as possible,” he tells Axios.
- Each participating city “has a different set of formulas” that will determine what the categories look like, based in part on their urban structure, Kalkstein said. For example: Philadelphia has lots of brick row homes with black tar roofs that trap heat.
- Any of the designations would ideally prompt city pools to open, outdoor sports to be curtailed, emergency heat lines to be activated, and workers to go door-to-door checking on the elderly and at-risk.
Where it stands: Arsht-Rock and its two-year-old Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance are pressing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the World Meteorological Organization to make naming and ranking of heat waves standard practice.
Below, Phoenix Meteorologist Amber Sullins on Heat as the “Silent Killer”.
Continue reading “We’re Going to Get More Familiar with Heat Waves. Might as Well Start Naming Them.”Stopping Fox New’s War on Reality
A nonprofit aiming to defund disinformation online that has taken money out of the pockets of several prominent far-right websites now has its sights set on its most formidable target yet: Fox News.
The group, Check My Ads, is hoping the success it has had in stripping advertising dollars from right-wing provocateurs including Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck and Dan Bongino will give it momentum as it attempts to confront a powerful media empire.
On Thursday, the outfit announced a new campaign directed at Fox’s website and its popular YouTube channel calling on the public to pressure online ad exchanges to stop doing business with Fox. It comes just as the House committee investigating the Capitol riots kicks off a series of hearings focused on violence that unfolded on Jan. 6.
Former marketer Claire Atkin, who co-founded Check My Ads, argues that Fox “encouraged and supported” the attack on the Capitol.
Continue reading “Stopping Fox New’s War on Reality”“Advertisers have said over and over again, ‘We don’t want to fund violence,’ so it’s shocking that Fox News is still receiving these ad dollars,” she said.
CBS News on Great Salt Lake Crisis
Arrested Candidate was Vocal Against Clean Energy
Michigan’s Gubernatorial race is a bit of a zoo on the Republican side, with 5 candidates disqualified recently for submitting tens of thousands of fraudulent nominating signatures.
Now one of the remaining candidates, Ryan Kelley, has been arrested by the FBI for his role in the attack on the nation’s capitol, and the attempted coup of January 6, 2021.
ALLENDALE, Mich. (WILX) – A Michigan candidate for governor of was arrested and charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot.
A Federal Bureau of Investigation representative confirmed with News 10 that Kelley was arrested and a search was executed at his home Thursday morning.
Kelley, 40, was among the Republican candidates looking to run in the 2022 August gubernatorial primary. He was seen at the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, though he has said he didn’t go inside the building.
I knew the name because, in addition to famously urging his followers to sabotage voting machines, Mr Kelley was a featured speaker at an anti-wind energy rally in Central Michigan earlier this year.
With a band, local comedian, prepared signs and two candidates for governor as speakers, opponents of wind energy in Montcalm County, Mich. held a Feb. 5 rally against attempts to build a wind farm in their community. The rally was conducted at the Wildflower Schoolhouse in Trufant, Mich. and was sponsored by Montcalm County Citizens United.
During the rally, several local residents told Checks and Balances Project (C&BP) that wind power hurts property values, while others said they hurt the health of people living nearby.
David Stevens, who lives near the Meridian Wind Park in Midland County, said the last four years have been “terrible. It only gets worse from here.” That wind farm, which is owned by Michigan utility DTE, is set to go online this summer.
Several residents said wind companies use conflicting sets of data and stealth tactics to push the wind farm through the approvals process.
“They had registered with the state before you knew about it,” said LouAnn Mogg, a wind opponent from adjacent Isabella County, where a new wind project by Apex Clean Energy opened last year.
While organizers had posted signs saying shooting video or recording audio was prohibited, the rally was recorded by cameras as two Republican candidates for governor, Ryan Kelly and Ralph Rebandt, joined the speakers.
The rally came as a growing number of townships in the county, located north of Grand Rapids, have debated or approved zoning ordinances that would make it difficult to develop wind farms within their boundaries.
Anti-wind activist Kevon Martis spoke to rally goers, saying that wind developers are “not honest brokers.”
The above-mentioned Mr Martis is an operative of the Washington DC based E&E Legal Foundation, a lobbying firm funded by the fossil fuel industry. Mr Martis has suggested on his Facebook page that dirty energy activists intimidate their local officials, who, he says, will only respond to fear.
Continue reading “Arrested Candidate was Vocal Against Clean Energy”Katey Walter Anthony on Arctic Lakes
There are literally millions of “thermokarst” lakes that form and reform as arctic permafrost changes over time. I talked to Dr Katey Walter Anthony of University of Alaska-Fairbanks on what that meant in the past, and implications for the future.
On Jimmy Kimmel, Biden Talks Climate
Climate discussion begins at 8:00.
Republicans Climate Action has No Action. And Doesn’t Mention “Climate”. Other than That, Good.
Republicans still floundering on climate policy, again this week. It was the topic of a Yale Climate Connections vid from a few months ago.
Dana Milbank in Washington Post:
It might feel as if The End Is Near. But fear not: House Republicans are swinging into action.
After a quarter century of Republican climate denialism, The Post’s Maxine Joselow and Jeff Stein revealed this exciting news last week: “House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) plans to unveil a strategy Thursday outlining how Republicans would address climate change, energy and environmental issues.”
But there were just a couple of small problems with the resulting two-pager put out by the House GOP “Energy, Climate, & Conservation Task Force.” The strategy didn’t, er, actually mention the word “climate.” Neither did it make any commitment to decreasing greenhouse-gasemissions. The only indirect acknowledgment that climate change is even a thing was a call to mine more rare minerals of the sort used in batteries. And the strategy included a gusher of proposals to boost oil and gas production.
The Sierra Club’s legislative director, Melinda Pierce, called the plan “McCarthy’s latest attempt to greenhouse gaslight the American public.”
In fairness, the man in charge of the Republican task force, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), says the group plans to outline a fuller climate-change strategy later this year. In an interview, he told me that “global emissions as a result of our strategy would go down more than they would under Biden,” who has set a target for cutting U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2030. No climate denier, Graves also said he wants to “try and change the trajectory and try to hit that 1.5 C target” — the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.