Bad Crow Review: Cleansing Flames
Burn baby burn
Links are at the end.
We’ll be returning to yesterday’s help help they’re killing us theme, but first:
Some cryptobros spent more than $600,000 on this 30-foot sculpture which they delivered to Tesla headquarters in the hope that Musk will promote their Elon-based cryptocurrency. His body is claimed to be a goat but it sure looks like a segmented worm with legs. That’s a Shiba Inu to the left of the rocket, a tribute to Musk’s promotion of the once-and-again worthless dogecoin. The photo is from Insider, and here’s a story from artnet news.1
Living near or downwind of unconventional oil and gas development linked with increased risk of early death
Elderly people living near or downwind of unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD)—which involves extraction methods including directional (non-vertical) drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—are at higher risk of early death compared with elderly individuals who don’t live near such operations, according to a large new study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.2
The map showing oil pipelines and refineries, natural gas pipelines and processing plants, and shale fields in North America is courtesy the Fractracker Alliance. You can select the national energy, chemical and petrochemical map — the one shown above, from which we’ve omitted the chemical factories — among several others on their maps page.3
“Although UOGD is a major industrial activity in the U.S., very little is known about its public health impacts. Our study is the first to link mortality to UOGD-related air pollutant exposures,” said Petros Koutrakis, professor of environmental sciences and senior author of the study. Added co-author Francesca Dominici, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science, “There is an urgent need to understand the causal link between living near or downwind of UOGD and adverse health effects.”
. . .
The closer to UOGD wells people lived, the greater their risk of premature mortality, the study found. Those who lived closest to wells had a statistically significant elevated mortality risk (2.5% higher) compared with those who didn’t live close to wells. The study also found that people who lived near UOGD wells as well as downwind of them were at higher risk of premature death than those living upwind, when both groups were compared with people who were unexposed
You can see from the map that living apart from some source of fossil fuel pollution, whether from pipelines, fossil fuel processing plants, traditional drilling or the more exotic wells looked at by the Harvard study, can be a challenge. Below is the same map with offshore wells, petroleum and petrochemical ports, ammonia and petrochemical plants, various power plants (including renewables but mostly not) and what are called ethylene crackers—plants that convert ethane into ethylene and ethylene into the charmingly named "nurdles," minute plastic pellets used in many things plastic.4 Those plants are typically major polluters.
We watched part of Gasland Part II, the sequel to the Gasland documentary we wrote about yesterday;5 "part," because any more would have haunted us all night. Among the most disturbing observations in the films is that a 2005 amendment to the Safe Drinking Water Act, known as "the Halliburton loophole," exempted fracking companies from most reporting requirements other than in cases where frackers use diesel fuel.
Accordingly, those companies are not required to tell governments, individuals or the EPA what chemicals they use in the process; hence no one knows precisely what chemicals in what quantity are potentially poisoning the groundwater around the wells because the information is proprietary (which also offers deniability to the offenders), and hence the methane-fueled exploding water that after more than a decade of wrangling and continued pollution eventually led to a fracker-financed public clean water system for Dimock, Pennsylvania, one of the towns featured in the original Gasland.
The researchers at oilandgaswatch.org, who provided the description of ethylene cracking that informs today’s discussion, say that fossil fuel companies are looking at plastics manufacturing, and other industries using ethylene, as hedges against the encroachment of renewable energy sources on their industries. Because ethylene manufacturing — it’s the most widely manufactured chemical in the world — depends directly on the production, processing and transportation of fossil fuels, the map above isn’t likely to change much in the next decade or two, and frackers will continue to ruin aquifers and atmospheres much as they do today.
And killing old folks such as yr. editors at an accelerating pace.
Two of the more infuriating clips in Gasland II feature secretary of state Hillary Clinton bragging about her agency’s evangelizing for the fracking industry, helping US companies gain footholds in countries around the world, and Barack Obama bragging about his “all of the above” approach to increasing U.S. fossil fuel production.
Let no one think they didn’t know they were poisoning people.
Yr. editors are sitting at a desk in their palatial Honolulu estate, looking out at the beautiful Ko’olau mountains, in a state of utter despair. This calls for cartoons.
Courtesy of an old Fray acquaintance, two from Flobots: “Flobots Present: Platypus” and “The Circle In The Square.” “Platypus” features an excellent tune called Handlebars. No losers on either album. Follows The Cardigans with “Emmerdale;” we’re letting them play us out because they’re smart enough, they’re good enough and doggone it, people like them.
That, comrades, is all we got. Be well, take care.
It's not a quandary.; it's paralysis by design.
If it's inevitable I guess there's no point in debating it. I don't think it's inevitable but I do think it's going to take a lot of time to transition to "green" energy.