War on life

By
Dr. Luis Contreras
-
497

Our economy is at war with many forms of life on Earth, including human life. – Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein, an award-winning writer, explains how a polluting economy based on extraction, use, and waste, for profit, needs to change to deal with the climate emergency. This is great news, changing the economy is easier than changing how to boil water.

War on climate, war on life

Climate criminals Scott Morrison, Jair Bolsonaro, and Donald Trump have chosen profits over life.

While Australia burns, Morrison ignores the blazing wildfires and demands we adapt to the climate catastrophes. Morrison plans to build a massive coal mine.

Bolsonaro refused $21 million in aid to fight the Amazon Rain Forest fires. The Group of Seven met in Paris and Bolsonaro picked a fight with the host, Emmanuel Macron. Bolsonaro wanted to clear the 55-million-year-old tropical rainforest for mining and cattle. The Amazon belongs to Brazil, said Bolsonaro, giving a finger to Macron and the G7.

Trump is selling our national monuments for drilling and mining, with new rules for the Department of the Interior and other federal agencies. Climate warriors are seen as criminals.

Methane and LNG

Methane is sold as natural gas, transported in gas pipelines at high pressure. Unlike crude oil, NG is difficult to store and ship. Methane leaks from end to end. EPA proposes to ignore these leaks and remove all “burdensome” regulations.

After blockading Qatar, the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, with massive reserves of conventional natural gas, a low-cost producer, Trump tried to sell LNG to Poland during his 2017 visit. He offered to make a deal for LNG “within the next 15 minutes.” Poland’s president Duda laughed. A deal is not a deal until the deal is done!

Using methane hydrate is a climate crime

To replace fracking, a high-cost wasteful process, Trump wants to sell LNG from permafrost, vast deposits of frozen methane hydrates. These methane molecules trapped inside ice crystals remain stable so long as they are constrained by low temperatures and high pressure. Methane hydrate deposits are found thousands of feet below the seabed in deep, cold-water environments, or held captive under a thick layer of permafrost.

The Arctic contains much of the world’s permafrost, a “sleeping giant,” made of greenhouse gases. As the ground warms, the microbes in the soil wake up and start belching greenhouse gases – 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide lurk beneath the Earth’s permafrost. That’s more than 40 times as much CO2 as humans released into the atmosphere last year.

Fossil fuel economy

The U.S. “roaring economy,” the foundation of the Republican Party, is based on exporting fossil fuels, subsidized and sold at a loss. The real economy, what you live every day, is deep in debt with budget deficits. Trump just released his budget proposal for 2021, and it slashes funding for Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program by billions of dollars.

You can tell a lot about the health of the economy by looking at the homeless and the prison population. There are more than 2.3 million people in state and federal prisons, juvenile correctional facilities, local jails, Indian Country jails, immigration concentration camps, and many other facilities. Local jails are popular destinations with more than 11 million admissions per year.

Incarceration is a high-profit industry. Private companies provide phone, medical care, and commissary, at low quality and high prices.

Choose life

Please see “Rollbacks – An Assault Against Life on Earth” on YouTube.

Disinformation campaign: The American Petroleum Institute has new YouTube videos under the category of “Nonprofits & Activism.” Beware of the lies and make a comment online to help others.

Here is one: Energy for progress says, “Thanks to continuous research and development, investment in technology… we’re now producing more energy than ever while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Learn how our partnerships have been helping us combat climate change www.energyforprogress.org

Climate warrior, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said, “I refuse to be an accomplice in the destruction of our children’s home. I will not be a silent witness to this crime.”

Dr. Luis Contreras

14 COMMENTS

  1. Boiling water is a complicated process involving combustion, conduction and convection. Heat transfer at a molecular level is not as easy as it seems. Many people depend on boiling water to avoid diahrea and many other health problems.
    https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/public/water_diseases.html

    EPA allows dumping raw sewage into rivers!
    The actions are the latest example of the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back nearly 95 environmental rules that it has said are too costly for industry or taxpayers. That list grew on Thursday, when the administration stripped clean-water protections from wetlands, streams and other waterways.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/climate/epa-sewage-rivers.html

    Convection is an important process for the rain cycle, some of the energy is used for motion (kinetic energy) along with evaporation.
    https://prezi.com/wuxseimrslpd/what-is-convection-how-does-it-affect-the-water-cycle/

    ==========================

    Why is EPA allowing raw sewage in our water? Call your representatives and find out, I will

  2. Essential information! I didn’t realize that (some or all) of LNG is from permafrost. If/when the permafrost thaws, we are in very bad trouble!
    A recent program on PBS told about the plan for Pleisticene Park, a plan by eccentric Russian scientist/genius to keep the permafrost where it is.

  8. American prisons show a broken economy

    How police and jails are misused to respond to social problems: Arrest, Release, Repeat

    Police and jails are supposed to promote public safety. Increasingly, however, law enforcement is called upon to respond punitively to medical and economic problems unrelated to public safety issues. As a result, local jails are filled with people who need medical care and social services, many of whom cycle in and out of jail without ever receiving the help they need.

    Please visit this website and help solve this unjustice: No one is free until everyone is free

    https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/repeatarrests.html

  10. Trump says LNG gas deal with Poland should take “15 minutes”

    July 2017 – President Trump said Thursday that he wants American and Polish companies to sign a long-term liquefied natural gas (LNG) deal quickly. In a joint press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda, both said that they want a long-lasting deal to export LNG regularly from the United States to Poland’s import terminal in the Baltic Sea.

    “America stands ready to help Poland and other European nations diversify their energy supplies, so that you can never be held hostage to a single supplier,” Trump said in his prepared remarks in Warsaw.

    “I think we can enter a contract for LNG within the next 15 minutes,” he said later to Duda. “Do you have anybody available to negotiate? It will take about 15 minutes.”

    Duda laughed in response, saying that it is up to private companies in both countries, not the presidents, to negotiate such a deal.

    https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/340805-trump-wants-natural-gas-export-deal-with-poland-in-15-minutes

  11. 2021 Budget cuts

    Trump just released his budget proposal for 2021, and it slashes funding for Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program by billions of dollars.

    Trump’s budget for Fiscal Year 2021 is a roadmap for his destructive policies to cut Medicaid and lay the groundwork for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. It continues his ongoing war against access to affordable health care.

    https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/482431-president-trumps-budget-is-a-reflection-of-his-state-of-the

  12. Glaciers and the permafrost are a key component of the climate system.

    If you take an ice cube and place it on a plate, it will melt and all you have is a puddle of water. Melting is irreversible, the ice cube is gone forever. Melting glaciers or thawing permafrost are alarming.

    “Across the continent, in West Antarctica, scientists deployed at the Thwaites Glacier made the first observations of a pool of warm water melting the ice from below. Scientists drilled through the ice right near the “grounding zone,” the boundary between the part of the glacier that’s resting on the seafloor and the part of it that extends over the open ocean, forming a shelf. They measured temperatures below the ice of more than 2 degrees F above the freezing point of the seawater.”

    “The fact that such warm water was just now recorded by our team along a section of Thwaites grounding zone where we have known the glacier is melting suggests that it may be undergoing an unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea-level rise.”

    https://grist.org/climate/antarcticas-glaciers-are-melting-so-fast-you-can-swim-in-them-in-a-speedo/

  13. Here is one of the fake videos used by the American Petroleoum Institute (API) to sell Natural Gas as a climate solution.

    “How America is leading the way”

    Thanks to continuous research and development, investment in technology, and a commitment to collaboration, we’re now producing more energy than ever while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Learn how our partnerships have been helping us combat climate change while meeting the rising demand for cleaner energy at http://www.energyforprogress.org

    Nonprofits & Activism

    https://youtu.be/37Znn7I16Gw

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