Month: August 2022
Colorado Basin at Turning Point
Whiskey’s for drinkin’, water’s for fightin’.
And we’re all out of whiskey.
Orphaned Black: Taxpayers Will Plug Abandoned Gas/Oil Wells
Texas will begin plugging about 800 abandoned oil and gas wells this fall, the state’s oil and gas agency said, after receiving an initial $25 million grant from a program included in President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan.
It’s a fraction of the approximately 7,400 documented abandoned oil and gas wells that need to be plugged in the state — and industry observers believe the figure to be an undercount. Several more millions of dollars are expected to be disbursed to Texas through the newly created federal program.
Abandoned oil and gas wells leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is the second-largest contributor to climate change after carbon dioxide. The wells, if not properly plugged, also can leak toxic water and chemicals in the surrounding areas. One orphan well, leaking extremely saline groundwater and hydrogen sulfide gas, has created a massive artificial lake in West Texas, known as Lake Boehmer.
Methane lasts in the atmosphere for less time. Cutting methane emissions is one of the most effective short-term tools to reduce the effects of climate change, scientists say.
The projected cost to plug and clean up the pollution from all 7,400 documented wells is approximately $482 million, according to the commission’s notice of intent to apply for federal funding obtained by The Texas Tribune.
But an estimate from the Department of the Interior shows that Texas likely will be eligible for less than that — about $344 million in federal funds.
The bipartisan infrastructure law passed last year by Congress dedicated $4.7 billion to create a new federal orphan oil and gas well remediation and plugging program. Both Republican U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz voted against the law — as did every Republican House member from Texas.
The first grant of $25 million to Texas is part of an initial award of $560 million in 24 states. There are more than 10,000 high-priority well sites ready for remediation, according to the department’s estimates based on state applications.
Is There a Vaccine for Misinformation?
No cure for stupid, but….
Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen, and his Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally led some supporters to attackthe U.S. Capitol. Members of Congress, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), have repeatedly shared covid-19 misinformation and embraced QAnon conspiracy theories. And more than 100 Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms continue to promote Trump’s election fraud claims.
The media has routinely reported on these falsehoods, making it seem like misinformation is rampant in politics. But are candidates for Congress actually sharing more misinformation in 2022 than 2020?
Yes, according to our analysis of congressional candidates’ Facebook posts. We found that politicians in the 2022 election are sharing more links to unreliable news sources than they did in 2020, and the increase appears to be driven by nonincumbent Republican candidates.
–But there’s one outlier who’s throwing off the 2022 data: Sarah Palin, who is running as a Republican for Alaska’s sole House seat. As of July 12, 2022, she has shared 849 links to unreliable sources, out of 853 total, for more than 99 percent of her shared sources this year. Palin mostly shares blog posts from her own website, which NewsGuard rates as unreliable. The next closest is Rob Cornicelli, a Republican running in New York, who has shared 88 links to unreliable sources, or 65 percent of his total.
From the COVID-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine, misinformation is rife worldwide. Many tools have been designed to help people spot misinformation. The problem with most of them is how hard they are to deliver at scale.
But we may have found a solution. In our new study we designed and tested five short videos that “prebunk” viewers, in order to inoculate them from the deceptive and manipulative techniques often used online to mislead people. Our study is the largest of its kind and the first to test this kind of intervention on YouTube. Five million people were shown the videos, of which one million watched them.
We found that not only do these videos help people spot misinformation in controlled experiments, but also in the real world. Watching one of our videos via a YouTube ad boosted YouTube users’ ability to recognize misinformation.
As opposed to prebunking, debunking (or fact-checking) misinformation has several problems. It’s often difficult to establish what the truth is. Fact-checks also frequently fail to reach the people who are most likely to believe the misinformation, and getting people to accept fact-checks can be challenging, especially if people have a strong political identity.
Studies show that publishing fact-checks online does not fully reverse the effects of misinformation, a phenomenon known as the continued influence effect. So far, researchers have struggled to find a solution that can rapidly reach millions of people.
Inoculation theory is the notion that you can forge psychological resistance against attempts to manipulate you, much like a medical vaccine is a weakened version of a pathogen that prompts your immune system to create antibodies. Prebunking interventions are mostly based on this theory.
Most models have focused on counteracting individual examples of misinformation, such as posts about climate change. However, in recent years researchers including ourselves have explored ways to inoculate people against the techniques and tropes that underlie much of the misinformation we see online. Such techniques include the use of emotive language to trigger outrage and fear, or the scapegoating of people and groups for an issue they have little-to-no control over.
“Apocalyptic” – More on Pakistan’s Flood
US Media finally waking to the story, above NBC.
Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone echoing my thoughts. These blokes are in deep trouble, are in a hostile part of the world, and they have nukes.
Some years ago I interviewed Lonnie Thompson, one of Glaciology’s greatest, and he specifically mentioned prospect for crisis that melting glacier’s would bring. His context was eventual lack of water, but obviously, this is what it looks like along the that path.
This is an example of where climate pressures will clearly intersect with geo-political concerns and create situations undreamt of by the majority of our leaders.
Continue reading ““Apocalyptic” – More on Pakistan’s Flood”Music Break: Bernadette Peters – Children Will Listen
Lyrics:
Guide them along the way,
Children will glisten
Children will look to you for which way to turn
To learn what to be
Careful before you say, listen to me.
Children will listen.
Careful the wish you make,
Wishes are children
Careful the path you take,
Wishes come true.
No free.
Careful the spell you cast,
Not just on children
Sometimes the spell may last
Past what you can see,
And turn against you.
Careful the tale you tell
That is the spell,
Trees in Trouble Raise Carbon Sink Question
We can’t count on trees to sequester carbon if they’re dying faster than we can plant them.
Below, bonus from Norman Blake
Continue reading “Trees in Trouble Raise Carbon Sink Question”New Wave of Floods Across US
Pakistan’s Cataclysmic Flood
This kind of disaster has the power to shake governments and societies to their foundation.
Worth thinking about when you consider that 15 percent of Pakistan’s population is now homeless, they have a shaky, coup-prone government, a strong faction of radical Islamic sentiment, and nuclear arms.
The numbers—a thousand dead, 33 million affected—don’t mean that much (and are doubtless underestimates; it will take weeks to reach every corner of the remote northwest frontier where some of the worst damage is reported). But just try and imagine the number of lives turned upside down.
“The house which we built with years of hard work started sinking in front of our eyes,” Junaid Khan, 23, told the AFP news agency. “We sat on the side of the road and watched our dream house sinking.”
Or
“She told me: ‘Daddy, I’m going to collect leaves for my goat,'” Muhammad Fareed, who lives in the Kaghan Valley in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said.
“She went to the bank of the river and a gush of water followed and took her away.”
There’s no doubt that this is what happens when you heat an atmosphere: warm air holds more water vapor than cold; in Sindh province, where some of the worst flooding is taking place, rainfall is nearly five times the average. Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister, called the flooding a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster” of “epic proportions.” According to Bloomberg,
Millions of acres of farmland, including part of the prized cotton crop, have been destroyed in a country where the agricultural sector accounts for about a quarter of the economy.
And there’s no doubt that the people of Pakistan are not to blame for their tragedy: on average each Pakistani is responsible for about one fifteenth as much carbon dioxide as each American, and even that is fairly recent; over the whole span of the fossil fuel era, America has produced a quarter of the earth’s greenhouse gases; Pakistan, with about 220 million people, produces about one half of one percent of the world’s emissions. And yet, before the flooding, they suffered through a savage springtime heatwave; urban temperates reached 121 Fahrenheit, in a place where, as of 2018, there were fewer than a million air conditioners.
So, help, if you can.
The Red Crescent Society is at work—details here
So is the World Food Programme—details here
Continue reading “Pakistan’s Cataclysmic Flood”