#gas utility

[rjzimmerman]

In a First, a Gas Utility Is Sued Over Global Warming Deception (New York Times)

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

Oregon officials have added the state’s largest natural gas utility as a defendant in their $50 billion lawsuit against fossil fuel companies over their contribution to climate change.

The suit — the first to make climate-related deception claims against a utility, experts said — alleges that the company, NW Natural, knew that the burning of natural gas contributed to global warming, but misled its customers about the consequences. It is an expansion of a lawsuit that was first filed last year by Multnomah County, which includes Portland.

The complaint alleges that Exxon, Shell and other companies, now including NW Natural, had schemed to “rapaciously” sell fossil fuel products and cover up what they knew about the risks to the planet, and that the companies bear responsibility for the effects of climate change including a deadly heat wave in 2021 that killed at least 69 county residents.

Experts said the addition of NW Natural to the amended lawsuit on Monday was the first instance of a gas utility being named as a plaintiff in a case like this. Overall there are about two dozen lawsuits by state and local governments alleging that oil companies covered up the dangers of climate change.

[t4t4t]

Hi !

I got bottom surgery on July 25th :3

I'm recovering well but I'll be on bedrest for a while. Collie and I will need rent help for September/food/gas/utilities/etc. Two disabled trans women. Anything helps ! Thank yall so much for all you've helped so far, it's saved my life ❤️

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https://www.paypal.me/NoraEstherRose

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules

Today (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

It's a breathtaking fraud: SoCal Gas, the largest gas company in America, spent millions secretly paying people to oppose California environmental regulations, then illegally stuck its customers with the bill. We Californians were forced to pay to lobby against our own survival:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article277266828.html

The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in a superb investigative report by Joe Rubin and Ari Plachta for the Sacramento Bee, which names the law firms and individual lawyers involved in the scam.

Here's the situation: SoCal Gas is California's private, regulated gas monopoly. They are allowed to lobby, but are legally required to charge their lobbying activities to their shareholders, and are prohibited from raising customer rates to pay for lobbying.

The company spent years secretly violating this rule, in the sleaziest way possible: working with corporate cartels like the California Restaurant Association and BizFed, the monopoly paid BigLaw white-shoe firms to procure people who posed as concerned citizens in order to oppose climate regulations that are essential to the state's very survival.

The bill topped $36 million – and it was illegally charged to its customers, the Californians whose immediate health and long-term survival these efforts opposed. SoCal Gas refuses to disclose the full extent of the spending, as do its lawyer-procurers, who cite legal confidentiality and a First Amendment right to secretly seek to influence policy in their refusal to disclose their profits from this illegal conduct.

The law firms involved are a who's-who of California's most prominent corporate fixers, including Reichman Jorgensen and Holland & Knight. The partners involved have a long rap sheet for anti-climate dirty tricking, most notably Jennifer Hernandez, notorious in climate justice history for an incident where activists claim she posed as one of them, infiltrating a campaign to force corporate despoilers to clean up their pollution in order to sabotage it, while secretly on a wealthy, prominent landowner's payroll.

Hernandez claims to care about the environment and says that her longstanding, corporate-funded, extensive campaigns and lawsuits against state environmental regulations are motivated by concern over their impact on working people. Her firm, Holland & Knight, denies serving SoCal Gas in opposing gas regulations, but it received $594k in ratepayer dollars, and submitted comments opposing the rules on its own behalf. Those comments were nearly identical to the comments submitted by SoCal Gas.

Hernandez also represents an obscure organization called The Two Hundred for Home Ownership in "a flurry of lawsuits" over California Air Resources Board rules on pollution, seeking to overturn the state's landmark climate change regulations.

Two Hundred for Home Ownership was founded by Robert Apodaca, who told the Bee that Hernandez's work for him is pro bono and not funded by SoCal Gas, but his entry into the fray occurred just as SoCalGas was founding an astroturf group called Californians for Fair and Balanced Energy (C4BES), which pretended to be an independent organization, disguising its relationship with SoCal Gas.

Apodaca is also founder of United Latinos Vote, an organization that had been largely dormant for seven years, not receiving any donations, until 2018, when the California Building Industry Association gave it $99k. The CBIA is a large-dollar recipient of donations from SoCal Gas, and its CEO insists that it was not acting on SoCal Gas's behalf when it made its unpredented donation to Apodaca.

The CBIA donation to United Latinos Vote was forerunner to a flood of corporate donations from the likes of Chevron, Marathon and Phillips 66. Shortly after receiving this cash, United Latinos Vote ran a full page ad in the LA Times, accusing the Sierra Club of pushing for anti-gas appliance rules that would harm working class Latino families.

This ad, in turn, featured prominently in advocacy by the SoCal Gas front group C4BES, funded with $29.1m in ratepayer money, which it then spent seeking to link clean appliance rules with anti-Latino racism. A quarter of California's carbon emissions come from home gas use.

SoCal Gas is regulated by the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC), which tolerated this mounting illegal conduct for many years, even as the company circulated internal memos as early as 2015 discussing its plans to oppose electrification in the state on the basis that it constituted "a significant risk to our business."

But last year, CPUC fined SoCal Gas $10m. Now, CPUC's Public Advocate office has filed a damning, extensive report on SoCal Gas's unlawful conduct, seeking $80m in rate cuts to compensate Californians for the funds misappropriated to protect the company's shareholder interests:

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M517/K407/517407314.PDF

Additionally, the Public Advocate is demanding $233m in fines for the company's refusal to allow investigators to audit its books and discover the full extent of the fraud.

SoCal Gas is the nation's largest utility, but (incredibly), it's not the dirtiest. That prize goes to Ohio's FirstEnergy, which handed $60m in ratepayer dollars to state politicians in illegal bribes in exchange for coal and nuclear subsidies and cancellation of state climate rules. That scandal led to GOP speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder being sentenced to 20 years in prison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

There is something extraordinarily sleazy about using ratepayers' own money to lobby against their interests. SoCal Gas and its Big Law enablers have funneled millions in Californian's money into campaigns to poison us and boil us alive, and they did it while using workers and racialized people as human shields.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/19/cooking-the-books-with-gas/#reichman-jorgensen

Image: Maryland GovPics (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mdgovpics/6635539089/

Jackie (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/79874304@N00/197532792

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[deep-space-netwerk]

please please please PLEASE share more on your Thoughts about gas giants!! i'd love to learn in a way that doesnt leave me baffled and half my brain leaking from my ears! you explained things so well in the psyche post and also i think things are generally more fun to learn from someone who is Excited To Share than from Published Research Papers where everything has been dried out For Professional Reasons- understandably so, mind, but i am not In The Field and dont know the terms lol

Okay it's taken me forever to get back to this but I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED.

Like other planets, it all starts with a disk made of gas and dust orbiting an infant star, called a protoplanetary disk. Like these in the Orion Nebula, discovered by the Hubble!

To form terrestrial planets (rocky planets with relatively thin atmospheres like Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), the gas in the protoplanetary disk coalesces to form hundreds and hundreds of rocky bodies called planetesimals, about a kilometer across. These planetesimals collide, and form dozens of protoplanets about the size of the moon. The protoplanets then collide as well, and stabilize to form the solar system as we know it today.

But, in the case of gas giants, colliding protoplanets don't form fully-finished planets. Instead, they form a core, or a seed.

We think the only thing that determines whether a planet will be terrestrial or a gas giant is simply how far away from the sun it forms - that's it. As a new sun warms its evolving solar system, it heats up the material in the protoplanetary disk. Close to the sun, the disk gets hotter, and things like water and other ices melt and evaporate into gas, making them difficult for the protoplanets to gravitationally capture. However, further away, the icy compounds stay cold enough to remain solid and coalesce along with rocky particles.

That boundary in the solar system - where ices evaporate to gas on the sunward side, and remain solid on the other - is called the "Frost Line". In our solar system, the Frost Line is right between Mars and Jupiter.

The protoplanets that form past the Frost Line turn into gas giant seeds, and are able to (kinda literally) snowball, picking up both rocky and icy material. With all that solid ice available, they grow far larger and far faster than planets in the inner solar system, and their gravity gets stronger and stronger. More gravity causes them to collect even MORE material until they're heavy enough to capture extremely lightweight elements like hydrogen and helium. Which, of course, makes them get even bigger and even heavier! Runaway growth!

But weirdly, as we study more exoplanets (planets that orbit stars other than our sun), we keep finding these huge gas giants incredibly close to their stars! Like, even closer than Mercury is to ours, which is insane. These "Hot Jupiters" break so many rules - gas giants "should" only be able to form where ice stays frozen, but here they are up close and personal with their stars, like this artist's concept!

It's possible that these planets are in the process of migrating closer to their stars, and we're managing to see them before they evaporate, but we just! Keep! Finding them!

One of my favorite parts of planetary science is how much we still have to learn. We'll think we have a pretty good idea of how things work out there, and then suddenly we'll find something that we can't explain. And there's an entire universe of weird shit - we've barely begun to scratch the surface!

[fuckyeah-bears]

whhhhyyyyyyyyy is everything sooooo motherfucking expensive????? don’t they know I can’t afford all this shit???

[the-badger-mole]

Kind of impressive that you talk about katara as though you're defending her from racist and misogynistic interpretations and then turn around and imply shit 100x worse than your most exaggerated strawman.

Go bug your mom

[yakourinka]

look at this funky lad from the new chapter. he's getting his steps in

[rustchild]

.

[todayisafridaynight]

paparazzi

[reasonsforhope]

Non-paywall version here.

"Shortly after a federal appeals court ruling threatened to hamstring Berkeley’s ban on new natural gas hookups, New York state has passed a budget barring gas appliances in new buildings.

New York, which was America’s sixth-largest state consumer of natural gas in 2020, became the first state to enact such a ban when the state’s 2023-24 budget was passed [on May 2, 2023].

“Changing the ways we make and use energy to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels will help ensure a healthier environment for us and our children,” New York House Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat, said in a news release.

Los Angeles is among more than 70 California cities and counties that have banned or discouraged natural gas hookups in new buildings. The City Council voted in May to do so, citing climate change. However, no state had passed such a ban until now.

The requirements for electric construction will be phased in starting in 2025, and include some exemptions: “Hospitals, critical infrastructure and commercial food establishments” will be left out, according to Heastie’s statement, as will “buildings where the local grid is not capable of handling the load.” ...

The ban is part of an overall strategy “to reduce our state’s carbon emissions and move us away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources,” Assemblymember and Energy Committee Chair Didi Barrett said...

Gov. Kathy Hochul... released a statement touting the budget and its “$5.5 billion investment to promote energy affordability, reduce emissions, and invest in clean air and water, building on more than $30 billion committed to climate action. ”

The budget, according to Hochul’s website, includes “nation-leading building decarbonization proposals that will prohibit fossil fuel equipment and building systems in new construction, phase out the sale and installation of fossil fuel space and water heating equipment in existing buildings, and establish building benchmarking and energy grades.”"

-via Los Angeles Times, 5/3/23

[loonarmuunar]

No bc the deal with BNHA is that, because of quirks, you can put the characters in almost any and every situation with little to no explanation other than “they got hit by a quirk” or “they have x quirk”.

This ALSO applies to Epithet Erased. You do have to get craftier with it bc the power has to be connected to a word, but you have the same amount of freedom. Cmon y’all we need to get crazy with this

[phantomrose96]

So I know this isn't anything that like actually needs an apology but it'll make me feel a bit better to say it. Oof whoops this ABoT chapter is super late. Timing kinda sucks since I wanted to have some updates out while s3 was airing but

Been kinda mega busy and stressed since October with the whole condo buying thing which rolled right into immediate day 0 plumbing and boiler issues I had to get fixed and general moving hassle and financial commitment stress and I kinda just fried myself hard. Plus then acclimating to a new place without my familiar street or familiar grocery store or familiar room or any of that. Like there's no "just go home and take your mind off it" to this cuz home is the "it". So I'm just kinda enduring until I can calm the hell down.

And anyway I definitely have progress on ch47, like 7000-ish words of it, but it's the kind of like "there is writing there" and hasn't exactly hit the "there is substance there" that I want ABoT chapters to be. Like this in particular is a chapter I want to be good, not just be done. So it's taking time to get my brain somewhere that can do that.

[baejax-the-great]

So the one reason to go to Arkansas is to drive through a town named "Flippin," where everything sounds like a euphemism. Flippin Fire Dept. Flippin School. Flippin Police. Etc.

While that does sound charming, I don't know that justifies a trip to Arkansas

[benechillax]

man i think i’m 5 seconds away from a mental breakdown