#fossil fuel imports

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

The announcement came after hourslong negotiations at an OPEC+ meeting — the grouping of the 13-member Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), headed by Saudi Arabia, and the group's 10 partners, led by Russia.

The meeting was closely watched as a tough one, with Russia seen as wanting to maintain production levels, and Saudi Arabia seeking to push prices(..)

P.S. This is another good reason to replace ICE vehicles with electric ones...

[nepalenergyforum]

Nepal's EV market attracts Indian, Chinese investors

As oil-less Nepal makes a sharp turn towards electric vehicles (EVs), neighbouring auto giants India and China have lunged forward to establish assembly plants in the Himalayan republic. Almost a dozen Indian and Chinese investors have proposed to set up factories in Nepal following a jump in sales of battery-powered automobiles, the Department of Industry said. In the last two fiscal years, two…

[politijohn]

Source

To be clear, Biden approved an oil project that will release an estimated 287 million metric tons of emissions over 30 years and likely harm local wildlife. But yay for 300 long-term jobs.

A reminder of what Biden campaigned on in 2020: “No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill”

[secretmellowblog]

i just dont really understand why theyd target les mis? and like. its interrupting the work of actors and crew and house staff who dont have anything to do with fossil fuel corps. people who just paid to see the show who dont have anything to do with it.

i understand les mis is a show about rebellion and humanity but to me it doesnt make any sense.

( i say this as someone whos probably very unaware and very slow to realize the deeper meaning of things so i apologize if it comes off snobby i am just confused !! /genuine )

I'm very sorry if this comes off as rude but like.... "I don't understand why people would use Les Mis as the symbolic centerpiece of an act of protest/rebellion against the government" is just a very strange thing to say, and I'm genuinely not quite sure how to begin to respond XD. Like....it's literally Les Mis. It is Do You Hear the People Sing. The original novel was written to be a political rallying cry, it was written to bind together activists, and it has been used that way thousands of times since its publication in 1862. It's Les Mis, I don't know what else to tell you XD. Also I know this next comparison isn't perfect, but:

“I don’t understand why Les Amis interrupted Lamarque’s funeral.  Obviously I agree with Les Amis’s goals, but was this really the right way to protest? Obviously the government is doing something bad— but was this symbolic event really the right place to talk about it? Why even choose to interrupt this event, and the lives of the workers leading it and everyday people attending it? It wasn’t responsible for what was happening! 

Okay, yeah, I get the funeral is ‘symbolically significant.’  I get that Lamarque has become, in popular culture, a symbol of rebellion and resistance against a government’s unfair policies.  I get Lamarque’s funeral is a pretty big public event that has a lot of symbolic significance ties to ideas of rebellion against the state.

I get that Lamarque’s words are often seen as a rebellious call to action, so illegally interrupting his funeral could be a statement about resisting tyranny. It could be a call to action playing off the popularity and symbolic role that Lamarque has in the public consciousness.

 But at the same time— shouldn’t Les Amis have just gone to the palace and attacked the king directly? Why disrupt this symbolic event instead? They’re not really going after the people responsible! 

After all, there were so many people there who just wanted a normal day. They weren’t responsible for what the government was doing and had nothing to do with it.  They wanted to see the procession, to hear Lafayette’s speech and grieve a political figure they cared for. They wanted to hear people praise ‘resistance’ in the abstract, without actually doing it.

 Weren’t Les Amis disrupting that?  

Aren’t Les Amis bad activists? Isn’t disrupting people’s everyday lives for the sake of 'activism' always inherently a bad thing? I’m not against activism, but isn’t doing that kind of disruptive activism rude? Isn’t disrupting the lives of ordinary people just doing their jobs or going out for a special event evil— no matter why you’re doing it, or what your goals are, or whether the government actually is doing something vile that we should start to stage great events rallying against?

Even if this Lamarque's funeral has special significance because of its symbolic pop cultural ties to rebellion against tyranny—shouldn’t they have just avoided rudely interrupting some regular people’s everyday lives? 

Protests shouldn’t disrupt things. they should be big parades that don’t make anyone uncomfortable, don’t interrupt anything, and don’t disrupt any aspects of ‘normal people’s daily life.’ No one should ever target symbolic events— like a funeral for a political figure or a musical about revolution—  to make a political statement. Protests should be little quiet festivals that cause absolutely no interruption in everyday life so that we can all just safely ignore them, until the climate catastrophe they’re warning us about arrives.”  

[psychotrenny]

People who are against both fossil fuels and nuclear really need to read up on their early modern history. Even at a bare minimum subsistence level humans need energy for cooking and (in a great deal of the world) heating and if you want to support a certain level of population (I.e. a level that most of the world passed by 1900 and and the rest by 2000) in most of the world you're gonna need the products of industry to produce sufficient food (like have fun doing earthworks on heavy soil without metal tools). By 1800 much of Western Europe and Eastern Asia (especially the more densely populated parts like like England and France in the former and Shandong and the Yangzi delta in the latter) were facing severe ecological stress due to the high wood demand for both household and industrial uses(even while they imported large amounts of it from less dense areas like the Baltic coast, North America and South East Asia). This loss of forest lead to a range of issues like soil erosion, rising water tables, increased flood damage and even localised climate change (many people believe that the "European Monsoons" of the late 18/early 19th century were the result of deforestation while forest loss is used to explain north Chinese rainfall patterns to this day).

Southern China was only barely able to stabilise the situation through developments in cooking/hating fuel use efficiency and the use of a range of alternative fuels like dung and crop residues (and maintaining this level of crop and livestock production required yet more imports like beancake fertiliser from Manchuria) while the situation in the North continued to deteriorate into the 20th century. Meanwhile forest cover and soil health in Europe only began to recover when use of coal both fully displaced wood as an an energy source and allowed the development of other technologies to reduce the level of land clearance necessary to support society. That's not to say this solution was perfect of course (I'm sure we all know what effects this use of coal has had on the global climate, while part of the return to forest in Europe was the result of Europeans importing land intensive commodities from other parts of the world; essentially exporting the forest clearance) and we are in desperate need of an alternative, but when deciding on which alternative you need to reckon with this. Flat out "de-industrialisation" is not only an intensely cruel solution in human terms but simply isn't environmentally viable either. Wind, water and biofuel could barely support a planet of 1 billion people how well do you think it'll fare with almost 8 billion. And if you think modern renewable technologies can make up the difference you're gonna need the number to back that up; good vibes is no substitute for the quantity of kilojoules humans needs to survive

[lies]

Sometimes when I'm birdwatching

[probablyasocialecologist]

At its fastest rate of deployment, mining quantities for low-carbon energy will be 500 to 1000 times less than current fossil fuel production.

But even this underestimates the differences in these quantities: the numbers for fossil fuels are the amount we need every year because they’re the ‘running’ costs.

Mining quantities for low-carbon energy is hundreds to thousands of times lower than mining for fossil fuels

[aficionadoenthusiast]

happy earth day!

[navigatorwrongway]

thank fuck they were able to rescue van gogh’s sunflowers, save for some damage to the frame. there was glass over it so the fucking soup wasn’t able to destroy it.

[the-psudo]

[source]

We've never had a time when we've exported more crude oil than we've imported, but there are times that we've exported more petroleum products than we've imported. Petroleum products includes crude oil, gasoline, diesel fuels, jet fuel, plastics, and much more. Anything that can be made from what comes out of oil wells.

That negative net imports era began in 2020 under Trump, and he touted it as 'energy independence.' Exporting more plastics than we import doesn't really relate to energy independence, though. Real energy independence starts with exporting more crude oil than we import.

But the net exports of petroleum products that Trump celebrated as an accomplishment are greater now than they ever were then.

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

How [war criminal] Putin made Europe go green faster

DW Planet A

One year after Russia invaded Ukraine, analysts think Putin's aggression may have sped up Europe's energy transition. How's that?

[headspace-hotel]

USAmericans

Read the Project 2025 manifesto RIGHT NOW

It's MUCH worse than y'all have been hearing

There is so much here you'll have to look at it for yourself, but the climate policy alone is nightmare fuel.

The republican coalition wants to essentially end funding for green energy, dramatically promote and expand fossil fuel industries, and eliminate funding and regulations in all sectors promoting climate change mitigation. Task forces and offices related to clean energy and lowering carbon emissions will be eliminated and replaced with offices for promoting fossil fuels.

They want to LOG NATIONAL FORESTS TO "THIN" THE TREES TO STOP WILDFIRES.

THEY WANT TO FORCE OREGON AND CALIFORNIA TO LOG THEIR NATIONAL FORESTS AND TREAT THEM AS FOR TIMBER PRODUCTION

There are specific provisions in Project 2025 to essentially destroy the Endangered Species Act, causing it to defer to the rights of "economic development" and "private property." The plan includes delisting gray wolves, cutting the budget so that a "triage" system is used to determine which species will get protection, removing funding for research, removing experts and specialists from the decision-making process, and preventing "experimental" populations of animals from being established.

This is so much worse than I expected it to be and there's much more past that: They want to deregulate pesticides and remove much of the EPA's ability to regulate pollutants as well.

Also included in the manifesto is that we should

withdraw from nuclear weapons nonproliferation agreements, build more nuclear weapons, and resume nuclear weapons testing

The manifesto comprehensively outlines the scorched-earth elimination of abortion access, down to ensuring doctors aren't even trained to perform abortions. There are plans in here to disrupt abortion access GLOBALLY, not just domestically.

Not only that,the Republicans plan on reframing family planning programs around "fertility awareness" and "holistic family planning."

I can't even describe it all. I'm trying to give screenshots of the most important things but there's so much.

The foreign policy is a nightmare. They plan to push fossil fuels onto the Global South and promote the development of fossil fuel industry in the "developing world."

It is aggressive and antagonistic towards other nations, strongly pro-military, proposing that we INCREASE (!!!!!) defense spending, improve public opinion of the military and military recruitment, and increase the power to fund new weapons technology.

Just read the Department of Defense section. It's about greatly increasing and strengthening the military-industrial complex, collaborating more closely with weapons manufacturers, removing regulatory barriers to arming our allies and to inventing new military weapons, and recruiting more people into the military. They include provisions to develop AI technology for surveillance. And of course, continuing to support Israel is in there.

Elsewhere it proposes interfering in foreign countries with creepy pro-USA propaganda campaigns, even establishing international educational programs where faculty have to pledge to promote USA interests.

There's a line in here about getting rid of PBS because SESAME STREET is LEFTIST for God's sake.

HOW are people claiming democrats have the same policies. I feel like i'm losing my mind.

[politijohn]

Source

Democracy, baby!

[kp777]

By Jessica Corbett

Common Dreams

Aug. 7, 2024

"If President Biden's climate commitments are to be taken seriously, his administration must take immediate, meaningful steps that stop EXIM from supporting polluting industries," said one campaigner.

Climate advocates on Wednesday formally urged the Biden administration to instruct the United States' export credit agency to stop financially supporting activities that are fueling the climate emergency.

"Over the last two centuries, human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have led to global warming of 1.1ºC above preindustrial levels by 2020 and caused detrimental changes in Earth's climate," Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the Global Law Alliance for Animals and the Environment wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Stressing the threat that global heating poses to "our planet and its biodiversity" as well as "human rights, national security, and global financial stability," the pair warned that "greenhouse gas emissions must be cut in half by 2030 if warming is to be limited to 1.5ºC, the limit necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."

Their letter calls on Blinken to "make a determination pursuant to the Chafee Amendment in the Charter of the U.S. Export-Import Bank... that EXIM should deny applications for financial support for all activities and projects whose life-cycle emissions intensity substantially contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and the climate crisis."

As the letter lays out:

EXIM is an independent federal agency that facilitates the export of U.S. goods and services in order to support the employment of American workers. EXIM provides loans, guarantees, insurance, and credit to American exporters, providing funding when "private sector lenders are unable or unwilling to" and helping to make U.S. exports competitive against foreign exports. In fiscal year 2023, EXIM approved more than $8.7 billion in direct loans, loan guarantees, and insurance. EXIM's total portfolio exposure as of September 2023 was more than $34 billion. Major industrial sectors supported by EXIM include oil & gas (24%), manufacturing (20.2%), and power projects (8.2%)—all of which are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. In just a four-year period, from 2017 to 2021, EXIM financed $5.78 billion for fossil fuel projects alone. EXIM's financial support is backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.

Erica Lyman, a law professor and director of the Global Law Alliance at Lewis & Clark Law School, explained in a statement that "administrations in the past have utilized the Chafee Amendment when national interests hang in the balance, and the catastrophic impacts of climate change are among the worst human rights, environmental, and national security challenges we face."

"The administration now has an important opportunity to continue to stand by its climate commitments to end federal funding for overseas fossil fuel projects," Lyman added.

Green groups including FOE have repeatedly sounded the alarm about EXIM's actions since President Joe Biden—who campaigned on various climate pledges—took office in 2021, including its October decision to fund the Liwathon oil tank project in Estonia and its March move to provide a $500 million loan for oil and gas expansion in Bahrain.

"Although President Biden has taken significant steps towards lowering greenhouse gas emissions, EXIM has refused to implement the president's commitment to end government support for fossil fuel projects abroad in nearly all circumstances," the letter states. "Instead, it continues to provide hundreds of millions—and sometimes billions—of dollars each year towards activities and projects whose life-cycle emissions intensity substantially contributes to high greenhouse gas emissions."

"EXIM's decision to continue providing this financial support undermines the administration’s commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fighting climate change," the letter argues. "The president should use the Chafee Amendment to force EXIM to stop its harmful financing decisions that run counter to U.S. national interests and policies."

FOE president Erich Pica emphasized that "a commitment from President Biden is meaningless without requisite action."

"This is where the rubber meets the road," he said. "If President Biden's climate commitments are to be taken seriously, his administration must take immediate, meaningful steps that stop EXIM from supporting polluting industries."

[shailion]

Does anyone know how to hire dragonflies?

I desperately need some allied air support to protect me from the mosquitoes out here.

[scottishcommune]

Below the cut is a template email to send to Edinburgh Pride regarding sponsorship from Aegon, who have investments linked to the genocide in Palestine. Please feel free to use this text or edit it and make it your own and send it to contact@prideedinburgh.co.uk

Dear Edinburgh Pride,

As a queer person living in Edinburgh, I was deeply saddened to learn that the march partner for Edinburgh Pride 2024 is Aegon.

In December 2023 the ‘Don’t Buy Into Occupation Coalition’ published a report that showed Aegon have US$564million invested via shares and bonds in companies operating in illegal settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territories. Source: https://dontbuyintooccupation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2023_DBIO-III-Report_11-December-2023.pdf

We are watching a live-streamed genocide every day - over 36,000 people in Palestine have been murdered by Israeli forces, including at least 15,000 children. The brutality of these atrocities are unthinkable, with evidence of torture and targeting of hospitals, ambulances and refugee camps.

We all have a responsibility to do what we can to end this genocide. As queer people, we are part of a rich history of resisting oppression and dehumanisation - of both ourselves and those we stand in solidarity with. Pride started as a protest against homophobia, transphobia and police violence. It is an important moment to come together as a community to celebrate queer joy and resilience.

But how can we celebrate using profits stained with the blood of our siblings in Palestine?

Aegon has $564million invested in companies that have been listed by the UN as “raising human rights concerns” for their operations in illegal settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territories, In 1948, 750,000 Palestinian people were displaced from their homes and lands and since then, Israeli settlements have been used to spread this process of colonisation.

In addition to this figure, Aegon also has major investments in Eaton Corp Plc., who supply parts for helicopters and fighter jets to the Israeli military and have recently been the target of major protests at their factory in Dorset. They also invest in Amazon, who support the Israeli military with surveillance technology used against Palestians.

Israel has long used ‘pinkwashing’ as a tactic to justify the brutal repression of Palestinians, using queer people to legitimise this horrific violence. We refuse to allow this to be done in our name.

The tide is turning on companies like Aegon that profit from investments in the companies complicit in genocide. Recently, both Hay and Edinburgh Book Festival have dropped Baillie Gifford as a sponsor after over 800 authors called on them to divest from companies involved in Israel and the fossil fuel industry.

I ask that Edinburgh Pride:

Calls on Aegon to commit to divest from companies involved in supplying technology to Israel and operating in illegal settlements.

Drop Aegon as a sponsor until they are able to show evidence of divestment.

Publicly call for a ceasefire and a free Palestine.

There is no pride in genocide.

I look forward to hearing your response.

XX

Sources:

Investments in companies operating in illegal settlements https://dontbuyintooccupation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2023_DBIO-III-Report_11-December-2023.pdf

Investments in Eaton https://extranet.secure.aegon.co.uk/static/sxhub/pdf/client-pen-distribution.pdf

Investments in Amazon https://www.aegon.co.uk/content/dam/auk/assets/publication/fund-factsheet/standard_bkj9zs0.pdf

Israel’s pinkwashing: https://bdsmovement.net/pinkwashing

War on Gaza statistics: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

Edinburgh book festival ends Baillie Gifford sponsorship: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm553zrr3e4o