Can you keep a secret?

On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez struck Prince William Sound's Bligh Reef at 12:04 a.m.[1] local time and spilled 11 to 38 million US gallons (260,000 to 900,000 bbl; 42,000 to 144,000 m3) of crude oil[2][3] over the next few days. It is considered to be one of the most devastating human-caused environmental disasters.[4] The Valdez spill was the largest in US waters until the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in terms of volume released.[5] However, Prince William Sound's remote location, accessible only by helicopter, plane, or boat, made government and industry response efforts difficult and severely taxed existing plans for response. The region is a habitat for salmon, sea otters, seals and seabirds. The oil, originally extracted at the Prudhoe Bay oil field, eventually covered 1,300 miles (2,100 km) of coastline,[6] and 11,000 square miles (28,000 km2) of ocean.[7]

It gets better.

At a meeting in Exxon Corporation's headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world's use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.

It was July 1977 when Exxon's leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.

A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon's Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.  Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.

End result.

Exxon responded swiftly. Within months the company launched its own extraordinary research into carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and its impact on the earth. Exxon's ambitious program included both empirical CO2 sampling and rigorous climate modeling. It assembled a brain trust that would spend more than a decade deepening the company's understanding of an environmental problem that posed an existential threat to the oil business.

Then, toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon curtailed its carbon dioxide research. In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront of climate denial. It put its muscle behind efforts to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming its own scientists had once confirmed. It lobbied to block federal and international action to control greenhouse gas emissions. It helped to erect a vast edifice of misinformation that stands to this day.

As often stated in BRT, it's all about the money so the question to ask again is .... Barak, why did you let Shell go up to the Arctic to drill for oil?

Off by almost 20 years

[Source Photo: svengine/iStock]

Exxon knew about global warming back in 1977, a fact known by many but what isn't known is the fact big oil knew about the relationship of fossil fuel burning and the greenhouse effect almost 20 years earlier.

At an old gunpowder factory in Delaware—now a museum and archive—I found a transcript of a petroleum conference from 1959 called the “Energy and Man” symposium, held at Columbia University in New York. As I flipped through, I saw a speech from a famous scientist, Edward Teller (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning industry executives and others assembled of global warming.

“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. . . . Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.” If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, “all the coastal cities would be covered,” he warned.

1959 was before the moon landing, before the Beatles’ first single, before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, before the first modern aluminum can was ever made. It was decades before I was born. What else was out there?

We were betrayed.

These companies had a choice.

Back in 1979, Exxon had privately studied options for avoiding global warming. It found that with immediate action, if the industry moved away from fossil fuels and instead focused on renewable energy, fossil fuel pollution could start to decline in the 1990s and a major climate crisis could be avoided.

But the industry didn’t pursue that path. Instead, colleagues and I recently found that in the late 1980s, Exxon and other oil companies coordinated a global effort to dispute climate science, block fossil fuel controls, and keep their products flowing.

Factoid ... 1977 was the actual date regarding Exxon.

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public. 

The company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic.  Credit: Getty Images

Even earlier ...

The Shell logo is pictured at a gas station in London on February 2, 2023. 

(Photo: Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images)

Exxon knew about climate change in the 70's. Seems Shell knew about GW even earlier but hey, it's all about the money, right?

However, as Follow the Money detailed, the newly unveiled records show that "Shell already began collecting knowledge about climate change in the 1960s. The company not only kept well abreast of climate science, but also funded research. As a result, Shell already knew in the 1970s that burning fossil fuels could lead to alarming climate change."

Faced with a global oil crisis, rather than using its climate information to publicly sound the alarm and shift to cleaner practices, the company "focused instead on a nonsustainable profit model," launching Shell Coal International in 1974.

Lest we forget ...

View of ExxonMobil storage tanks of the petrochemical industry in the port of Rotterdam, Netherlands.

AP Photo/Peter Dejong

In “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections,” researchers from Harvard and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research show for the first time the accuracy of previously unreported forecasts created by company scientists from 1977 through 2003. The Harvard team discovered that Exxon researchers created a series of remarkably reliable models and analyses projecting global warming from carbon dioxide emissions over the coming decades. Specifically, Exxon projected that fossil fuel emissions would lead to 0.20 degrees Celsius of global warming per decade, with a margin of error of 0.04 degrees — a trend that has been proven largely accurate.

Blowback, AKA the law of unforeseen consequences, rule.

A large plume of smoke rises from BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig in 2010. The explosion killed 11 people and is being pointed to by some legal experts who argue that oil companies should be prosecuted for climate-related homicide. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

A hellscape awaits ...

The worm is turning ... finally

The worm is turning ... finally on companies like Exxon, the guys that lied about climate change back in the 70's but decided to cover it up in order to gin profits ever further into the stratosphere.

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.  

The worm makes its move ...

The oil industry, long a political heavyweight in Washington, suffered a series of extraordinary blows on Wednesday after shareholders, customers and the courts turned on the industry out of concern over climate change.

In the space of a few hours, Exxon Mobil Corp. was bested by an upstart shareholder seeking to shake up the company’s board. Chevron Corp. investors instructed the company to cut its greenhouse gas emissions. A Dutch court ordered Royal Dutch Shell to slash emissions by 45 percent. And while the oil industry was taking its hits, longtime ally Ford Motor Co. widened its distance from fossil fuels.

“Game-changer is an overused metaphor, but surely this is one,” Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp said of the day’s events. “The policy environment for companies has already changed and will change more.”

The company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic.  Credit: Getty Images

It's about time, right?

121.3 & climbing ...

Yours truly won't wax poetic about crimes against humanity perpetrated by big oil save for the fact  Exxon knew about global warming back in 1979 but decided to lie about it in order to gin ever more profits for invested parties instead of warning the world about a possible dire future if nothing was done. Well ... nothing was done and here we are in 2021 seeing the first salvo of a hellscape coming our way 24/7.

To whit ...

Last week, I noted that on June 27, Canada smashed its all-time heat record with a temperature of 116 degrees Fahrenheit, besting the previous record by three whole degrees. It turns out that was just the start: The same small town of Lytton that broke the national record broke it again the next day by hitting 118 degrees, and a third time the following day with a temperature of 121.3 degrees — or more than eight degrees higher than any previous recorded temperature in Canadian history.

"This is the most anomalous regional extreme heat event to occur anywhere on Earth since temperature records began. Nothing can compare," weather historian Christopher Burt told Yale Climate Connections. The heat roasted the forests surrounding Lytton, accelerating wildfires that produced their own "pyroculmulus" storms, creating more lightning and even more blazes. The day after setting the record, fire ripped through Lytton and burned it to the ground just 15 minutes after the first appearance of smoke.

Exxon's 2021 response ...

During that same period last week, Greenpeace published a recording of an ExxonMobil lobbyist, Keith McCoy, in which he boasted about working with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and the Biden administration to weaken Democrats' climate policy, discussed the company's role in funding climate denial, and suggested the company's support of a carbon tax is purely a "talking point" because they expect it will never happen. (The company denied this was true, but there's no reason to take their word for it.)

The "what if" scenario

If the same scale of heat wave had hit a poor, densely populated country, the death toll would be exponentially greater. Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson's recent book The Ministry of the Future opens with a gripping, terrifying account of a near-future heat wave in India that kills 20 million people in a matter of weeks.

Absent a Second World War-scale global policy mobilization that is nowhere in sight, something like Robinson's scenario is absolutely certain to happen somewhere on the planet, sooner or later. Here's why: Beyond a "wet-bulb" temperature of about 95 degrees (the combined heat and humidity level at which the body can no longer cool itself by sweating), no human being can survive for long and even the healthiest person sitting motionless in the shade will cook themselves to death from the inside within a few hours.

Any questions?

The Perils of Pauline

When looking at XL, one cannot reasonably expect said project's technological capabilities will mirror the  Perils of Pauline flicks where the heroine continually faces horrifying situations, like the one seen below, that are always successfully resolved just in the nick of time, something simply not possible whenever an "oil" spill, consisting of the corrosive and polluting tar sands dibit  occurs, as seen not only on the map above but also in Mayflower, AK, when 210,000 gallons of Canadian crude made its presence known to the town on March 29, 2013.

Thompson hasn’t been fishing much. Ever since Exxon Mobil’s Pegasus pipeline burst in March and spilled an estimated 210,000 gallons of Canadian heavy crude oil two miles from his house, he’s had headaches of preternatural intensity, so bad they wake him up in the middle of the night. He has nosebleeds, and hemorrhoids even though he’s only 36; there’s a rash on his neck that has only gotten worse in the eight months since the spill; and some days he feels so weak that he can hardly get out of bed. He estimates that he has lost almost 35 pounds since the rupture, falling from a fit 220 down to 185. When he went to see a doctor in April, he was told he has a mysterious spot on one lung—but he hasn’t been able to afford to go back.

GLENDIVE, Montana — When an oil pipeline burst in July 2011 and poured 63,000 gallons of crude into the Yellowstone River 200 miles upstream from Dena Hoff’s farm of wheat, beans and corn on the Great Plains in Glendive, she felt disgusted.

When it happened again Saturday, she felt terror. This pipeline breach was underneath the Yellowstone River, just a few feet from her sheep pasture. The new spill poured out some 50,000 gallons of crude oil. Leaders of this small riverside farming and ranching community in northeastern Montana warned residents not to drink their tap water, because benzene, a carcinogen, was found in the municipal water system. Oil slicked the river for dozens of miles, almost to the border with North Dakota. Hoff’s property smelled sickeningly like diesel.

If XL is built, check out how much toxic sludge will be going over the largest aquifer in North America.

About 40 percent of the total project has been built so far, in two segments: a 298-mile stretch from Steele City, Neb., to Cushing, Okla., and a 485-mile segment between Cushing and Nederland, Texas. Oil is flowing through these pipelines from the increased production currently happening in the middle of the U.S.

The remaining segment, if approved, would run between Alberta and Steele City. If fully completed, the Keystone XL pipeline would be able to move up to 830,000 barrels a day of crude from Canada's oil sands south to the U.S. Gulf Coast. There, refineries would process it into gasoline and other fuels.

Sounds like a rather dubious plan given that:

1. The XL needs a price point of $65/barrel to make it profitable 
2. Monies made from the sale & transport of the sludge to China & significant others, go to the oil companies and not to the US as the oil companies desperately need the money to continue to frack and drill for natural gas and shale oil as both enterprises, like the tar sands, need the $65/barrel price point to stay in business and...
3. The tar sands dibit is, as stated before, the dirties fossil fuel on the planet.

Sugar High

Yours truly was a sugar junky. Still am but no longer does this rube pig out on sweets as this was and is the right thing to do. Said diet change started 5 months ago and the impact has been pretty amazing but this blurb is not about how "virtuous" this writer is but rather about yet another pay to play scheme, this time with Harvard and the sugar industry.

NEW YORK (AP) — The sugar industry began funding research that cast doubt on sugar's role in heart disease — in part by pointing the finger at fat — as early as the 1960s, according to an analysis of newly uncovered documents.

The analysis published Monday is based on correspondence between a sugar trade group and researchers at Harvard University, and is the latest example showing how food and beverage makers attempt to shape public understanding of nutrition.

In 1964, the group now known as the Sugar Association internally discussed a campaign to address "negative attitudes toward sugar" after studies began emerging linking sugar with heart disease, according to documents dug up from public archives. The following year the group approved "Project 226," which entailed paying Harvard researchers today's equivalent of $48,900 for an article reviewing the scientific literature, supplying materials they wanted reviewed, and receiving drafts of the article.

The resulting article published in 1967 concluded there was "no doubt" that reducing cholesterol and saturated fat was the only dietary intervention needed to prevent heart disease. The researchers overstated the consistency of the literature on fat and cholesterol, while downplaying studies on sugar, according to the analysis.

"Let me assure you this is quite what we had in mind and we look forward to its appearance in print," wrote an employee of the sugar industry group to one of the authors.

The sugar industry's funding and role were not disclosed when the article was published by the New England Journal of Medicine. The journal did not begin requesting author disclosures until 1984.

It gets better

As nutrition debates raged in the 1960s, prominent Harvard nutritionists published two reviews in a top medical journal downplaying the role of sugar in coronary heart disease. Newly unearthed documents reveal what they didn’t say: A sugar industry trade group initiated and paid for the studies, examined drafts, and laid out a clear objective to protect sugar’s reputation in the public eye.

That revelation, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, comes from Dr. Cristin Kearns at the University of California, San Francisco, a dentist-turned-researcher who found the sugar industry’s fingerprints while digging through boxes of letters in the basement of a Harvard library.

Her paper recounts how two famous Harvard nutritionists, Dr. Fredrick Stare and Mark Hegsted, who are now deceased, worked closely with a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, which was trying to influence public understanding of sugar’s role in disease.

Just think about the results of this skewed finding regarding not only cardiac but also obesity, diabetes and cancer in terms of the numbers of people adversely affected by the intake of refined sugar that was blessed by Harvard back in the 60s. This fubar goes in concert with Exxon gaming the system back in the 70's regarding climate change and the use of fossil fuels. 

As often stated in BRT, It's all about the money.

Timeframes

It's easy to pollute a stream in minutes with an oil spill or heat up the ocean in decades but how long does it take to recover from such actions? The answer, at least on the gw side, is alarming to say the least.

Ocean ecosystems that experience rapid upheaval because of climate change can take thousands of years to recover, according to an examination of fossilized ocean fauna on the seafloor by the University of California, Davis.

The study, published online March 30 in the Early Edition of the journal PNAS, is the first record of disturbance and recovery of seafloor ecosystem biodiversity in response to abrupt climate change.

The work, led by Sarah Moffitt, a scientist from UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory and Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute, shows that while climate change and the deoxygenation of seawater can alter ocean ecology very quickly, recovery can be on a 1,000-year scale, not the 100-year scale previously thought.

Any questions?

Addendum: The Exxon Valdez oil spill continues on ... 25+ years later.

Event Horizon

When looking at this photograph of a cornfield in Nebraska, one is struck by the sheer size of the landscape in question, where the sky seems to extend to forever and simple breaks in the horizon attain a significance in ways impossible to imagine outside of a place such as this. Now imagine this place poisoned, where nothing grows and restoration to it's former state is simply not possible due to the kind of product Keytone XL will ship to Texas refineries if the pipeline comes to pass.

Trans­Canada, the $48 billion Canadian company that owns the Keystone, has repeatedly said the XL will be “the safest pipeline ever built on U.S. soil,” a technological marvel with automatic shut-off valves and satellite monitoring. The exact composition of what will flow through the pipeline is not publicly available, but it will include bitumen — a thick, semisolid petroleum product — blended with natural gas that has been pressurized to become a liquid. If the line is approved, it could carry 830,000 barrels a day of this “diluted bitumen” across Nebraska, over 275 miles and through 515 private properties. No one knows exactly what a leak would do, but evidence from past malfunctions suggests catastrophe. In 2010, a spill from Enbridge’s Line 6B dropped 840,000 gallons of bitumen to the bottom of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. Four years and more than a billion dollars later, the cleanup continues. Last spring, Exxon’s Pegasus line burst near a residential area of Mayflower, Ark., spreading 210,000 gallons of bitumen through neighborhood streets, causing evacuations and leaving residents complaining of respiratory problems, nausea and headaches.

Something to consider, don't you think?

Now it gets Interesting

Now it gets interesting...

Officials discovered that gas hydrates, ice-like crystals lighter than water, had built up inside the 100-ton metal container. The hydrates were beginning to make the dome buoyant, and they also plugged up the top of the dome,  preventing it from being effective.

“I wouldn’t say it has failed yet,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said at a news conference in Robert, La. “What we attempted to do last night hasn’t worked.”

As a consequence, crews had to lift the dome off the well and place it on the seabed."

What BP is not telling us is whether the hydrate in question is merely a  Gas Hydrate, or it's volatle variant, Burning Ice (both can cause  the coffer dam to levitate), as Methane Hydrates are not stable when pressure is released or if the temperature goes above freezing, conditions which will not hold when hot oil fills up the cofferdam, thus releasing the methane from the water lattice of the hydrate. As seen in the map below, MH appears to be the answer. If so, as the saying goes, now it gets interesting.

 Click here to get a take on BP.  Interesting to say the least. Last but not least, methane hydrate caused the blast in the firs place. To quote Physorg.com...

"The deadly blowout of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP's internal investigation."


The Spill may be much worse then reported. :(


It is. According to scientists, the spill is more like 70,000 barrels a day, which means, in less then 4 days, more oil is going into the gulf then the 250,000 barrels dumped from the Exxon-Valdez. 


Last but not least, the bastards at BP have no shame...


"If the experts' estimates are closer to the mark, that would be raised that to nearly three million gallons a day.

BP has estimated that there are at least 50 million barrels of oil in the undersea reservoir that is gushing into the Gulf, according to The New York Times.

BP chief executive Tony Hayward, meanwhile, played down the size of the spill, saying it was "tiny" when compared to the expanse of water it was pouring into.

"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume," BP chief executive Tony Hayward told British daily The Guardian."

It goes beyond words the anger and helplessness one feels in a disaster which, if unchecked, could be an extinction level event even though, it's a very big ocean...

The real reason ...

The real reason why the Koch brothers want XL to happen.

“Visualized data from online sources tracking leases in the tar sands territory shows that the Koch brothers, who have more money that any single person on the planet, hold close to two million acres in Alberta, making Koch the largest U.S. leaseholder with almost as many carbon assets at stake than Exxon, Chevron and Conoco’s combined,” according to International Forum on Globalization press release."

And ...

“Keystone XL’s failure could potentially leave Koch with a family fortune of ‘stranded assets’ in Alberta, a fifty year bet on Canadian crude gone bad for the world’s biggest billionaires that would be a boon for our rapidly warming Earth,” International Forum on Globalization concluded."

Any questions?

Ahead of schedule ...

Richmond, Vt., on Tuesday. Credit...Video by Gretchen Powers

Showing up early applies regarding the up and coming hellscape man is already experiencing in drips and drabs in the summer of 2023, which will be the warmest for planet earth until next year. When thinking about GW, Exxon and Shell, among significant others, comes to mind when they lied to us back in the 70s regarding GW as they knew fossil fuels, in their ability to generate copious amounts of Co2, when burned, would heat up the world with possible catastrophe results. Well, said results are beginning to happen, ahead of schedule.

LINCOLN, Vt. — The capital of Vermont — the state that often tops those “best states to move to and avoid climate change” lists — was, until Tuesday afternoon, mostly underwater.

Swollen by record-breaking rainfall, the Winooski River claimed nearly the entire downtown area of Montpelier late Monday. Swift-water rescue teams helped people escape from the upper floors of apartment buildings not far from the gold-domed State Capitol. Even the governor was forced to hike from his house on a snowmobile trail to reach an emergency response center in time to lead a news conference on the still unfolding disaster. By Wednesday morning, residents and business owners were stepping through the mud caking their front steps and basements to assess how much they had lost.

As the world heats up, our benchmarks are becoming increasingly useless — as useless as the notion that there are any places to move to and avoid climate change. Americans suffer from a longstanding delusion, a hangover of sorts from the Manifest Destiny era, that there will always be some corner of our vast country to escape to. Its 21st-century form is the notion that one can just pick up stakes and move somewhere else to get away from all this quickening climatic chaos.

It's different now ...

The World is a Business

Transcript/Network

"You have meddled with the primary forces of nature, Mr Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear?

You think you merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tide and gravity. It is ecological balance.

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rands, rubles, pounds and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today.

And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And you will atone.

Am I getting through to you, Mr Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their Councils of State? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, mini-max solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bye-laws of of business. The world is a business, Mr Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

And our children will live, Mr Beale, to see that ... perfect ... world in which there is no war nor famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit. In which all men will hold a share of stock.

All necessities provided. All anxieties tranquilized. All boredom amused."

Network strikes again

Wooden Ships

Dystopian Reality

Wooden Ships, the 1969 dystopian read on nuclear war, indirectly relates as the end of empire is nigh for America while global warming and environment degradation continues unabated. From eating the world via AI data centers to the inequality of wealth, aided and abetted by governments all over the world, the connect to Wooden Ships is not too far fetched in this writer's opinion.

At the end of every empire, fools accelerate the process.

Trump threw a state fair to celebrate America’s 250th birthday and nobody came. His Great America celebration has been an utter and complete flop. Tens of people showed. Seriously. It’s empty. Fox is there “reporting” that thousands are showing up, even though they’re set up in front of a giant empty lawn. 10 states didn’t even participate. They couldn’t get anybody to perform except for Vanilla Ice and the only attractions are a ferris wheel, a mock arch, and baptisms. Yes, there are baptisms being performed at Trump’s great American festival.

A plan to commemorate America’s 250th birthday has been in the works for a decade and Trump ruined everything by trashing all of the existing plans and creating a nonprofit to produce his own event on a whim instead. He called his nonprofit, “Freedom 250” and made himself the chair. JD Vance is the vice chair and they have corporate partners such as Exxon Mobil, Northrop Grumman, and John Deere. He trashed all existing non-partisan plans in lieu of a strictly partisan, MAGA event. He gets to keep his donors secret.

He made a 20 minute speech and people walked out halfway through it. He claimed 45,000 people were there. There could have been 1,000.

The US Marine Band was forced to play YMCA. Alexis Wilkins sang the national anthem. Who is Alexis Willkins? FBI director Kash Patel’s girlfriend. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy made a speech and referred to the artists who refused to perform as “libtards.”

While the Reflection Pool resembles the above pix save for the skulls looking upward in despair.

It's all about the money/rev XXX

A flame burns at an oil facility run by Saudi Aramco in the Rub al Khali desert. McKinsey has advised the energy company for decades.Credit...Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

It's all about the money. This time, McKinsey and their blue chip polluter clientele.

As world leaders prepare to meet in Glasgow next week to address the devastating impact of wildfires, floods and extreme weather caused by rising greenhouse gases, a revolt has been brewing inside the world’s most influential consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, over its support of the planet’s biggest polluters.

An excerpt from a letter McKinsey employees sent to the firm's top partners.

More than 1,100 employees and counting have signed an open letter to the firm’s top partners, urging them to disclose how much carbon their clients spew into the atmosphere. “The climate crisis is the defining issue of our generation,” wrote the letter’s authors, nearly a dozen McKinsey consultants. “Our positive impact in other realms will mean nothing if we do not act as our clients alter the earth irrevocably.”

A coal-burning power plant in South Africa run by Eskom, which McKinsey has advised.

Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times

Ah, but's the money's too good to resist ...

Among the 100 biggest corporate polluters over the past half-century, McKinsey has advised at least 43 in recent years, including BP, Exxon Mobil, Gazprom and Saudi Aramco, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the firm.

Across the world, from China to the United States, McKinsey’s work with these companies is often not focused on reducing their environmental impact, but rather on cutting costs, boosting productivity and increasing profits

Yet it is McKinsey, with its 95-year history and its position at the apex of the consulting world, that stands out. Its corps of consultants, peppered with Rhodes scholars and Harvard Business School standouts, could focus their talents on helping the firm’s oil, gas and coal clients cut their emissions. But these well-funded clients, such as Chevron, Shell and Canada’s Teck Resources, hire McKinsey to further business goals that often have little connection with the global push to limit greenhouse gases.

It's all about the money ... 

Of Mice & Men

BRT posted this World is a Business clip from Paddy Chayefsky's masterpiece, Network back in 2009, right after the outrageous bank bailout but now, more then ever, the Jensen speech rings ever more true as we slowly become a plutocracy, run by the rich, for the rich, while we, the middle class, slows melts away.

Arthur Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Howard Beale: Why me?

Arthur Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Howard Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Arthur Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

Any questions?

3C & counting

Santa Monica Pier, California today contrasted with the project sea level rise with 3C warning. Composite Climate Central

Without action, the world's temperature will rise by 3C - 5.4 F by 2100. With luck, knowing how phase transitions are exponential and not linear, the heat index could be even higher.

Fifty major cities, mostly in Asia, and at least one large nation on every continent but Australia and Antarctica are at risk. Many small island nations are threatened with near total loss of their land.

The collection of images and videos produced by the non-profit Climate Central visualize future sea level rise if the world fails to meet emissions reduction targets. The images show what areas of the world can be saved and which could be lost, taking with them the heritage and history of these coastal communities.

Space Center Houston, present day

Space Center Houston, +1.5C

Space Center Houston, +3C

Santa Monica Pier, present day

Santa Monica Pier, +1.5C

Santa Monica Pier, +3C

The researchers applied different scenarios of warming to determine where communities are most vulnerable within the next 200 to 2,000 years.

“We’ve seen about a foot of sea level rise over the last century,” Strauss said. “Looking forward we’re talking about 10 feet rise in the best case scenario and 30 feet in the worst.” In a higher warming scenario of 4C, sea level could rise to cover land where 15% of the global population live.

Remember, Lovelock warned us, Exxon deceived us ... Houston, we have a problem.