Raven's Eye View 3/26/21
Great new stuff I've been reading and watching
The Raven is going to periodically bring you some of the juiciest articles, videos and social media posts I’ve been tracking. Here’s some stuff from the past week or so.
Why people are locking themselves to pipeline equipment in Minnesota: The rationale for direct action against the Line 3 pipeline.
Fellow Substacker Emily Atkin is on the ground in Minnesota covering the indigenous struggle to stop this threat to their lands and waters for her HEATED newsletter. She’s doing great work at some risk. Emily has previously documented how Enbridge-funded police are harassing activists, especially women, who are leading the struggle. Not sure a male journalist would have picked up on this.
Georgia State Rep. Arrested While Protesting Restrictive Voting Law, Video Shows
They wear suits and state trooper uniforms. Might as well be white sheets. East Atlanta Georgia State Representative Park Cannon arrested for trying to witness Governor KKKemp sign the new voter suppression law. In the tradition of John Lewis.
Explaining John and Yoko’s passion for peace
I never knew until I read this twitter string from Yoko Ono that she was under the Tokyo firebombings. Gen. Curtis LeMay, who oversaw them, said if the U.S. had lost he would be prosecuted as a war criminal. I did know John was born during the Battle of Britain when Liverpool was the second most bombed place after London. Partly explains their common passion for peace.
Banking on Climate Chaos
Big banks have invested more than $3 trillion in fossil fuel companies since the Paris Climate Accords was reached. RAN exposes their criminal record. Chase on top.
Tom Hayden must be smiling from the other world
The University of Michigan was the birthplace of Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. Now a later generation of student activists has won a huge victory in the movement to divest from fossil fuels.
Penises are shrinking because of pollution
I’ve read men are resistant to green products because they seem less manly. Maybe this will get more of us members of the male sex active to save our members.
US sinks to new low in rankings of world's democracies
Want democracy? Try Mongolia. Or maybe Argentina. U.S. drops a stunning 11 points in a year.
Solar Is Cheapest Electricity In History, U.S. DOE Aims To Cut Costs 60% By 2030
In a world full of bad news, solar is one of the bright spots. If we ever get a power source too cheap to meter, it will be solar PV.
Bill Gates’ bad bet on plutonium-fueled reactors
Here some people who know something about nuclear power, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, tell why Gates’ investment in his old partner Nathan Myrhvold’s TerraPower brings back an old technology that has long been abandoned by many nations.
Why Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Won’t Help Counter the Climate Crisis
And Arjun Makhijani, a real expert on nuclear power, tells why small reactors Gates is funding are not a way “to stop a climate disaster.”
Bill Gates Is Thinking About Dimming the Sun
Hey, Bill, I’m really not trying to pick on you. But I do have a bone to pick with you about the SCoPEx project you’re funding at Harvard. The problem is that if geoengineering experiments are not done under an international protocol, rather than private, unregulated initiatives such as yours, it opens the door for some nation to go ahead with full application. Making this a Wild West proposition. You can say SCoPEx is not doing actual geoengineering. But planned experiments will release particles into the atmosphere and test how they block sunlight. That paves the way for solar shielding to eventually be done. Sulphates released anywhere in the world will spread globally. If any powerful nation decided to put up a global solar energy shield to protect it’s own interests, there would be little to stop them. Other countries would probably be secretly rooting for them. This sets a dangerous precedent. Time to slow down and re-think.
The ‘Green Energy’ That Might Be Ruining the Planet
We’ve heard a lot of criticism about the U.S. biomass industry feeding the EU’s renewable power directives, that it is far from carbon neutral. This is maybe the best piece so far busting biomass. It documents that they are clearcutting to produce bioenergy, and using pulp wood that otherwise might have made paper and other products, thus increasing demand and not just using “waste wood.” The EU’s misguided Renewable Energy Directive, which has also driven rainforest clearing for palm plantations in Southeast Asia, must change or it will continue to actually make the climate crisis worse.
The best carbon capture technology? Leaving forests alone
The forest industry and its complicit scientists have created a huge mythology that we need to log forests to reduce wildfires and improve carbon storage. Nobody’s done more to bust that myth than Oregon State University forest scientist Beverly Law. For that, she has been attacked by the timber industry. Here she joins leading international environmental policy expert William Moomaw documenting why leaving forests standing is the best policy.
One of Earth’s giant carbon sinks may have been overestimated - study
One of those everything you know wrong stories. Greater growth of plants including trees sucks carbon out of soils, not puts more carbon in as had been thought.
Global Warming Is 'Fundamentally' Changing The Structure of Our World's Oceans
Salmon populations have been crashing off the West Coast, threatening endangered Orca populations dependent on them. This is partly explained by the way global heating is locking off currents of nutrient-rich deep ocean water from the surface, undermining the ocean food chain. If we don’t stop the heating, everything else we do to save salmon and Orcas might be in vain.
It’s not too late for Australia to forestall a dystopian future that alternates between Mad Max and Waterworld
Australia was just hit with ravaging “100-year” floods after recent droughts that were the worst in centuries. Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, author of The New Climate War, has a special affinity for Australia, having spent part of his recent sabbatical there. Here he tells what they face down under, and why one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters needs to turn the corner or destroy itself.
How Consumerism Destroys Our Minds
Just got hep to this new progressive media venture. Here, George Monbiot urges us to overthrow consumerism and the celebrity culture that is “the face of the machine.”
Don’t Buy Exxon’s Fable Of The Drunken Captain
The Exxon Valdez spill happened 32 years ago Wednesday March 24, 1989. They blamed the captain sleeping off his bender. Greg Palast reports what really happened. The ship would never have collided with Bligh Reef if the third mate on the bridge had looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker’s radar was left broken and disabled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate. In so many ways, Exxon is one of the greatest corporate criminals in history, if not the greatest.
Can we supply raw materials for renewables without making things worse?
I appreciate the consistently balanced and thoughtful approach Dave Borlace brings to climate science and solutions on his Just Have a Think YouTube channel. Here in his newest piece he takes on the gnarly issue of raw materials used in making new energy technologies, and their environmental impacts. He doesn’t soft pedal it. He features work going to understand and reduce impacts, which will be critical as wind, solar, EVs and other such technologies are widely adopted. Cost trends alone make this inevitable. They are becoming cheaper than the fossil-fueled alternatives, which in any event have far greater climate impacts. New assessment tools allow us to understand what significantly increased raw materials demand means for carbon, water, etc. Then we will need to work for policies to demand lower impact materials. This trend will not be stopped. We just need to curve it in the right direction.