Dear Friends,
CLICK HERE FOR THIS WEEK’S PODCAST: (1) the opioid epidemic, (2) beating Putin through climate action, and (3) our monthly Garden Q & A (plant seeds now!)
CO2 PIPELINE UPDATE: On February 1, Summit Carbon Solutions CEO, Bruce Rastetter, said, “we’ve had early success signing hundreds of pipeline easements with farmers who have a vested interest in our success.”
Really? A report out today by Reuters shows that less than 2 percent of Iowa landowners have signed up along the proposed 703-mile route. If that’s what Rastetter calls success, I wonder what failure looks like. At any rate, kudos to landowners for standing strong and not letting Summit bully them into a hasty and irreversible decision.
“Bill McKibben Portrait, Hi Res” by 350.org is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
UKRAINE. As I process the carnage in Ukraine and consider what I might say, I think it’s best to share what I’m learning from others:
BILL MCKIBBEN. In a March 7 RNS column, McKibben writes, “If you want to stand with the brave people of Ukraine, you need to find a way to stand against oil and gas.
“[N]ow is the moment to remind ourselves that, in the last decade, scientists and engineers have dropped the cost of solar and wind power by an order of magnitude, to the point where it is some of the cheapest power on Earth. The best reason to deploy it immediately is to ward off the existential crisis that is climate change, and the second best is to stop the killing of nine million people annually who die from breathing in the particulates that fossil fuel combustion produces. But the third best reason – and perhaps the most plausible for rousing our leaders to action – is that it dramatically reduces the power of autocrats, dictators, and thugs.”
As I and others have been saying for years, a quick shift from oil and gas to renewables (and most importantly, conservation!) can and must happen quickly. The US response to Hitler in the 1940s proves that when Americans are united and driven, we can rapidly and radically transform our economy.
As McKibben points out, “In 1941, in Ypsilanti, the world’s largest industrial plant went up in six month’s time, and soon it was churning out a B-24 bomber every hour. A bomber is a complicated machine with more than a million parts; a wind turbine is, by contrast, relatively simple. … Do we think that it’s beyond us to quickly produce the solar panels and the batteries required to end our dependence on fossil fuel?”
Predictably, Big Oil is now using Russia’s assault on Ukraine as an excuse to increase fossil fuel production.
FROM TODAY’S NEW YORK TIMES: Somini Sengupta writes, “Exactly a week after a major scientific report warned of accelerating climate impacts driven mainly by the combustion of fossil fuels, and 10 days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the titans of the global oil and gas industry gathered for their annual conference in Houston. … Oil and gas producers who are not Russian are, as my colleague David Gelles put it, ‘suddenly feeling very good about themselves.’”
It’s no surprise that Big Oil execs would try to use this crisis — or any crisis, for that matter — to further entrench their power and wealth. Don’t let them! Tell President Biden and other elected officials the only sane response to the carnage in Ukraine is to move with lightening speed to a renewable energy economy — not by doubling-down on domestic oil and gas production.
Beyond the energy debate, one encouraging sign that democracy may yet prevail across the globe is the huge anti-war response from within Russia itself.
THE GUARDIAN reports this week that, “More than 4,300 people have been arrested after demonstrators took to the streets in 21 Russian cities to condemn Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”
To close, I’ll again quote McKibben: “We should be in agony today – people are dying because they want to live in a democracy, want to determine their own affairs. But that agony should, and can, produce real change. (And not just in Europe. Imagine not having to worry about what the king of Saudia Arabia thought, or the Koch brothers – access to fossil fuel riches so often produces retrograde thuggery.) Caring about the people of Ukraine means caring about an end to oil and gas.”
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Dr. Charles Goldman and I discuss:
(01:33) An MD’s take on what we should learn from the opioid epidemic;
(35:10) Stopping Putin through climate action;
(52:52) Q&A for your March gardening activities, with Kathy Byrnes.
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Ed Fallon