All Fuels Oil Quotes

Because methane is so powerful as a greenhouse gas, let’s phase it out as fast as we practically can, while we absolutely stop burning coal. It’s everything-all-at-once time. Coal, gas, oil … ultimately, they all have to go. The real key for the Next Great Generation will be to build a society that doesn’t need natural gas or fossil fuels of any kind at all.

Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.

Human beings are not simple. We are, in fact, quite complicated. In recent American history, we have engaged in such contradictions as owning slaves, while declaring all people to have equal rights, while heading to church to pray for peace and tranquility, while dropping bombs on Middle Eastern nations to secure the oil we need to fuel our vehicles in order to drive to church. We're a mess, and we have to count ourselves as part of the whole, because we're all complicit.

But what my car needs is gas, not memories! How can you make a car go on memories?' B.D. scratched under her Admiral's hat. 'What'd you think gas was, girl? 'Course there's all sorts of fuel, wind and wishes and chocolate cake and collard greens and water and brawn, but you're wanting the kind that burns in an engine. That kind of gas is nothing more than the past stored up and fermented and kept down in the cellar of the earth till it's wanted. Gas is saved-up sunlight. Giant ferns and apples of immortality and dimetrodons and cyclopses and werewhales drank up the sun as it shone on their backs a million years ago and used it to be a bigger fern or make more werewhales or drop seeds of improbability.' Her otter's paws moved quick and sure, selecting a squat, square bottle here and a round rosy one there. 'It so happens sunshine has a fearful memory. It sticks around even after its favorite dimetrodon dies. Gets hard and wily. Turns into something you can touch, something you can drill, something you can pour. But it still remembers having one eye and slapping the ocean's face with a great heavy tail. It liked making more dinosaurs and growing a frond as tall as a bank. It likes to make things alive, to make things go.

Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colourless liquid with a slight chemical odour. It is used as an antiseptic, a solvent, in medical wipes and antibacterial formulas because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins. Ethanol is an important industrial ingredient. Ethanol is a good general purpose solvent and is found in paints, tinctures, markers and personal care products such as perfumes and deodorants. The largest single use of ethanol is as an engine fuel and fuel additive. In other words, we drink, for fun, the same thing we use to make rocket fuel, house paint, anti-septics, solvents, perfumes, and deodorants and to denature, i.e. to take away the natural properties of, or kill, living organisms. Which might make sense on some level if we weren’t a generation of green minded, organic, health-conscious, truth seeking individuals. But we are. We read labels, we shun gluten, dairy, processed foods, and refined sugars. We buy organic, we use natural sunscreen and beauty products. We worry about fluoride in our water, smog in our air, hydrogenated oils in our food, and we debate whether plastic bottles are safe to drink from. We replace toxic cleaning products with Mrs. Myers and homemade vinegar concoctions. We do yoga, we run, we SoulCycle and Fitbit, we go paleo and keto, we juice, we cleanse. We do coffee enemas and steam our yonis, and drink clay and charcoal, and shoot up vitamins, and sit in infrared foil boxes, and hire naturopaths, and shamans, and functional doctors, and we take nootropics and we stress about our telomeres. These are all real words. We are hyper-vigilant about everything we put into our body, everything we do to our body, and we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this, and we follow Goop and Well+Good, and we drop 40 bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor. The global wellness economy is estimated to be worth $4 trillion. $4 TRILLION DOLLARS. We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.

It is impossible to know how many years a human will live, or in what manner they will die. Life is like the oil within a lamp. It can be measured, but the pace at which it burns depends upon how the dial is turned day by day, how bright and fierce the flame. And there is no predicting whether the lamp might be knocked to the ground and shatter, when it could have blazed on a great while longer. Such is the unpredictability of life. It is good you do not have many questions; I do not have any answers. A portion of the fuel, the life force that once belonged to you and Master Thorn—I hold it now within myself. That is all I can tell you. The rest remains uncertain.

We basically used oil and aquifer water to temporarily boost the carrying capacity of the land, all for economic growth demanded by Wall Street investors. It’s a crazy system that only makes sense when you foist all the costs onto taxpayers in the form of crop subsidies that benefit agribusiness, and defense spending to secure fossil fuels. We’re basically paying for corporations to seize control of the food supply and dictate to us the terms under which we live.

In fact, Wen'an was the prefect location for the scrap-plastics trace: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry - farming - was disappearing as the region's once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region's rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can't help but wonder: How much of the plastic that Wen'an recycles was made from the oil pumped from Wen'an's soil? Are all those old plastic bags blowing down Wen'an's streets ghosts of the fuel that used to run beneath them?

SINCE the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that’s been increasing by as much as six percent annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today—a little over four hundred parts per million—is higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years. Quite probably it is higher than at any point in the last several million years. If current trends continue, CO2 concentrations will top five hundred parts per million, roughly double the levels they were in preindustrial days, by 2050. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit, and this will, in turn, trigger a variety of world-altering events, including the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. But this is only half the story.

For the first time his senses began to register the exotic, heady atmosphere of Mumbai...the odors most insistently demanded his attention. There were layers upon layers of them, all present at once but individually distinct. They shifted in strength and character with the ocean breeze that blew soft, irregular gusts across his face. First came the sharp tang of engine fuel mingled with an even more acrid burning smell, as though something unnatural had been set alight to blanket the city with a smoldering stench. A shift in the air's direction brought a fresher aroma of salt and brine floating in from the sea. It gave way to the hot smell of spices frying in oil, which in turn incongruously merged with the subtle reek of garbage.

America experienced its first oil shock. Within days of the cutoff, oil prices rose from $2.90 to $11.65 a barrel; gasoline prices soared from 20 cents to $1.20 a gallon, an all-time high. Across America, fuel shortages forced factories to close early and airlines to cancel flights. Filling stations posted signs: 'Sorry, No Gas Today.' If a station did have gasoline, motorists lined up before sunrise to buy a few gallons; owners limited the amount sold to each customer. Motorists grew impatient. Fistfights broke out, and occasionally, gunfire. President Nixon called for America to end its dependence on foreign oil. 'Let us set as our national goal. . . that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy source,' he said. We have still not met this goal.

Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism describes how despair Of the future leads people to fixate on youth. The Rites teach women to fear our own futures, our own wants. To live in fear of one’s body and one’s life is not to live at all. The resulting life-fearing neuroses are everywhere. They are in the woman who will take a lover, go to Nepal, learn to skydive, swim naked, demand a raise, “when she loses this weight”—but in the eternal meantime maintains her vow of chastity or self-denial. They are in the woman who can never enjoy a meal, who never feels thin enough, or that the occasion is special enough, to drop her guard and become one with the moment. They are in the woman whose horror of wrinkles is so great that the lines around her eyes shine with sacred oil, whether at a party or while making love. Women must await forever the arrival of the angel of use, the bridegroom who will dignify the effort and redeem the cost; whose presence will allow us to inhabit and use our “protected” faces and bodies. The expense is too high to let us fire the wick, to burn our own fuel to the last drop and live by our own light in our own time. Where the Rites of Beauty have instilled these life-fearing neuroses in modern women, they paralyze in us the implications of our new freedoms, since it profits women little if we gain the whole world only to fear ourselves.

There is a tendency among environmentalists to single out the big players in the market as the principal culprits: to pin environmental crime on those – like oil companies, motor manufacturers, logging corporations, agribusinesses, supermarkets – that make their profits by exporting their costs to others (including others who are not yet born). But this is to mistake the effect for the cause. In a free economy such ways of making money emerge by an invisible hand from choices made by all of us. It is the demand for cars, oil, cheap food and expendable luxuries that is the real cause of the industries that provide these things. Of course it is true that the big players externalize their costs whenever they can. But so do we. Whenever we travel by air, visit the supermarket, or consume fossil fuels, we are exporting our costs to others, and to future generations. A free economy is driven by individual demand. And in a free economy individuals, just as much as big businesses, strive to pass on their costs to others, while keeping the benefits. The solution is not the socialist one, of abolishing the free economy, since this merely places massive economic power in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats, who are equally in the business of exporting their costs, while enjoying secure rents on the social product.16 The solution is to adjust our demands, so as to bear the costs of them ourselves, and to find the way to put pressure on businesses to do likewise. And

...fossil fuels are forms of energy in which great quantities of space and time, as it were, have been compressed into a concentrated form. One way of envisioning this compression is to consider that a single litre of petrol used today needed about twenty-five metric tons of ancient marine life as precursor material, or that organic matter equivalent to all of the plant and animal life produced over the entire earth for four hundred years was required to produce the fossil fuels we burn today in a single year.

Carter's renowned 1979 "malaise speech" [...] is little remembered for what it actually was: a call to arms for fixing our nation's dire energy future. "Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977--never" [...] Carter was going to use all the weapons at his disposal: import quotas, public investment in coal, solar power, and alternative fuel, and [...] "a bold conservation program" where "every act of energy conservation ... is more than just common sense; I tell you it is an act of patriotism.

I stress again, as I did with climate, that the designated experts were catastrophizers, not that all researchers were. There were other experts in resources, such as MIT’s M. A. Adelman and University of Maryland’s Julian Simon, who predicted correctly that fossil fuel resources and other resources would expand. But just as with climate, the mainstream knowledge system chose to designate the catastrophizers as experts. (This was not due to their superior qualifications—while Adelman and Simon were resource economists, Paul Ehrlich’s primary background was in the study of butterflies. I will explain what it is due to in chapter 3.)

I recently had dinner with George. We did not eat fish. Instead we ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant. I had lemon-grass chicken with chile, and George had stir-fried vegetables. Both meals were excellent, and both consisted of foods originating far from Spokane. Although we didn’t ask the cook where the chicken and other foodstuffs came from, it isn’t difficult to construct an entirely plausible scenario. Here it is: the chicken was raised on a factory farm in Arkansas. The factory is owned by Tyson Foods, which supplies one-quarter of this nation’s chickens and sends them as far away as Japan, The chicken was fed corn from Nebraska and grain from Kansas. One of seventeen million chickens processed by Tyson that week, this bird was frozen and put onto a truck made by PACCAR. The truck was made from plastics manufactured in Texas, steel milled in Japan from ore mined in Australia and chromium from South Africa, and aluminum processed in the United States from bauxite mined in Jamaica. The parts were assembled in Mexico. As this truck, with its cargo of frozen chickens, made its way toward Spokane, it burned fuel refined in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Washington from oil originating beneath Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, Texas, and Alaska. All this, and I have chickens outside my door.

In all likelihood, we will not have oil one hundred years from now. Realistically, the world’s easily obtainable petroleum will be gone much sooner than that—by mid-century at the latest. There will be nothing of comparable versatility to replace it. As hard as that will be, good riddance. Fueling the light-driven engine of corporate capitalism, petroleum has swollen the human population and destroyed our communities, our atmosphere, and our world. Good riddance, I say, even if I die. I will die anyway. Everything does. The petroleum bubble briefly allowed us to live in denial of that most fundamental of all fundamental facts: that all things return to their Mother.

According to one recent study [...] the [climate change] denial-espousing think tanks and other advocacy groups making up what sociologist Robert Brulle calls the “climate change counter-movement” are collectively pulling in more than $ 900 million per year for their work on a variety of right-wing causes, most of it in the form of “dark money”— funds from conservative foundations that cannot be fully traced. This points to the limits of theories like cultural cognition that focus exclusively on individual psychology. The deniers are doing more than protecting their personal worldviews - they are protecting powerful political and economic interests that have gained tremendously from the way Heartland and others have clouded the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $ 1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and the late conservative funder Richard Mellon Scaife. Just how much money the think tank receives from companies, foundations, and individuals linked to the fossil fuel industry remains unclear because Heartland does not publish the names of its donors, claiming the information would distract from the “merits of our positions.” Indeed, leaked internal documents revealed that one of Heartland’s largest donors is anonymous - a shadowy individual who has given more than $ 8.6 million specifically to support the think tank’s attacks on climate science. Meanwhile, scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, who gave the 2011 conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his consulting company’s income comes from oil companies (Cato itself has received funding from ExxonMobil and Koch family foundations). A Greenpeace investigation into another conference speaker, astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that between 2002 and 2010, 100 percent of his new research grants had come from fossil fuel interests.

Mestre. Say the word without hissing the conurbated villain, and pitying its citizens. As quickly as they can, two million tourists pass through, or by, Mestre each year, and each one will be struck by the same thought as they wonder at the aesthetic opposition that it represents. Mestre is an ugly town but ugly only in the same way that Michael Jackson might be desccribed as eccentric or a Tabasco Vindaloo flambéed in rocket fuel might be described as warm. Mestre is almost excremental in its hideousness: a fetid, fly-blown, festering, industrial urbanization, scarred with varicose motorways, flyovers, rusting railway sidings and the rubbish of a billion holidaymakers gradually burning, spewing thick black clouds into the Mediterranean sky. A town with apparently no centre, a utilitarian ever-expandable wasteland adapted to house the displaced poor, the shorebound, outpriced, domicile-deprived exiles from its neighbouring city. For, just beyond the condom- and polystyrene-washed, black-stained, mud shores of Marghera, Mestre's very own oil refinery, less than a mile away across the waters of the lagoon in full sight of its own dispossessed citizens, is the Jewel of Adriatic. Close enough for all to feel the magnetism, there stands the most beautiful icon of Renaissance glory and, like so much that can attract tourism, a place too lovely to be left in the hands of its natives, the Serenissima itself, Venice.

the mainstream knowledge system, especially its disseminators and evaluators, is fundamentally distorted by the anti-impact framework, which causes it to consistently ignore fossil fuels’ fundamental benefits to human flourishing and to catastrophize fossil fuels’ thus far masterable side-effects. Its catastrophizing includes, as we saw in chapter 2 and chapter 4, wildly and negatively distorting the various environmental side-effects of fossil fuels—including by elevating the minority of specialists with the most extreme negative views to the status of designated experts. And in the previous chapter we saw pervasive climate mastery denial that makes all catastrophe predictions we hear from our knowledge system suspect.

I see how dance transforms the bodies of the stars on the show. I need to lose weight--can it do the same for me? I’m so unmotivated! Absolutely. Dancing you enjoy, so you forget that you’re working out. We associate working out with work and with pain. But dancing is fun and you should go for it if it motivates you to move. All consistent movement helps your metabolism. But I’m not going to say don’t change anything else in your life. You have to be consistent with how often you move, and you need to eat healthily. You can’t dance in the morning and eat cheeseburgers and fries for lunch. What you see on DWTS is a combination of people dancing and changing their habits and their whole lives. In order to do the show, they need to be stronger and they need to be fueled. Your body is your machine; you’ve got to make sure it’s well-oiled.

Even the most recent IPCC report, dire as it is, spells out solutions of a sort. There are ways to mitigate things, there are ways to fix them. Ban fossil fuels. Stop eating meat and dairy; according to an IPCC report from 2014, animal agriculture contributes at least as much to global greenhouse gas emissions as the combined exhaust of all the world’s vehicles. What’s that you say? Too difficult? Can’t switch to an oil-free economy overnight? Okay, here’s something that’s effective, simple, and as convenient as a visit to the nearest outpatient clinic: stop breeding. Every child you squeeze out is a Godzilla-sized carbon bootprint stretching into the future—and after all, isn’t 7.6 billion of us enough? Are your genes really that special? If even half the men on the planet got vasectomies, I bet we could buy ourselves a century—and as an added bonus, child-free people not only tend to have higher disposable income than the sprogged, they’re also statistically happier.

Identify your strengths, and then—this is important—major in them. Take a few irons out of the fire so this one can get hot. Failing to focus on our strengths may prevent us from accomplishing the unique tasks God has called us to do. A lighthouse keeper who worked on a rocky stretch of coastline received oil once a month to keep his light burning. Not being far from a village, he had frequent guests. One night a woman needed oil to keep her family warm. Another night a father needed oil for his lamp. Then another needed oil to lubricate a wheel. All the requests seemed legitimate, so the lighthouse keeper tried to meet them all. Toward the end of the month, however, he ran out of oil, and his lighthouse went dark, causing several ships to crash on the coastline. The man was reproved by his superiors, “You were given the oil for one reason,” they said, “to keep the light burning.”1 We cannot meet every need in the world. We cannot please every person in the world. We cannot satisfy every request in the world. But some of us try. And in the end, we run out of fuel. Have a sane estimate of your abilities and stick to them.

The principal energy sources of our present industrial civilization are the so-called fossil fuels. We burn wood and oil, coal and natural gas, and, in the process, release waste gases, principally CO2, into the air. Consequently, the carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing dramatically. The possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect suggests that we have to be careful: Even a one- or two-degree rise in the global temperature can have catastrophic consequences. In the burning of coal and oil and gasoline, we are also putting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere. Like Venus, our stratosphere even now has a substantial mist of tiny sulfuric acid droplets. Our major cities are polluted with noxious molecules. We do not understand the long-term effects of our course of action. But we have also been perturbing the climate in the opposite sense. For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have been burning and cutting down forests and encouraging domestic animals to graze on and destroy grasslands. Slash-and-burn agriculture, industrial tropical deforestation and overgrazing are rampant today. But forests are darker than grasslands, and grasslands are darker than deserts. As a consequence, the amount of sunlight that is absorbed by the ground has been declining, and by changes in the land use we are lowering the surface temperature of our planet. Might this cooling increase the size of the polar ice cap, which, because it is bright, will reflect still more sunlight from the Earth, further cooling the planet, driving a runaway albedo* effect? Our lovely blue planet, the Earth, is the only home we know. Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. But the Earth is just right, a heaven for humans. After all, we evolved here. But our congenial climate may be unstable. We are perturbing our poor planet in serious and contradictory ways. Is there any danger of driving the environment of the Earth toward the planetary Hell of Venus or the global ice age of Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows. The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown.

The point is, you must show them how to live and not just teach them theory while contradicting yourself in practice, because cynicism, hypocrisy and insincerity are adult character traits that children have no way of appreciating. Children learn by imitating our behavior, and if it contradicts our thinking then at best they learn to simply ignore what we say and at worst become troubled by it. Suppose you teach them about the environmental devastation they will witness during their lives, and explain to them that it is being caused by burning fossil fuels, and that during their lives fossil fuels will disappear altogether with nothing to replace them … while continuing to burn hundreds of gallons of heating oil to heat an oversized house, driving all over creation in an oversized vehicle, jetting off to the tropics on brief winter holidays and going on shopping sprees to buy on a whim things you don’t need. Then what you would be teaching them is that you can’t be trusted. And this doesn’t help them; instead, it damages their spirit. It is better to have an ignorant fool for a parent than a well-informed hypocrite because being a fool is not a moral failing. Fools deserve pity and mercy; hypocrites—neither.

Modern economics does not distinguish between renewable and non-renewable materials, as its very method is to equalise and quantify everything by means of a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels, like coal, oil, wood, or water-power: the only difference between them recognised by modern economics is relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and “uneconomic.” From a Buddhist point of view, of course, this will not do; the essential difference between nonrenewable fuels like coal and oil on the one hand and renewable fuels like wood and water-power on the other cannot be simply overlooked. Non-renewable goods must be used only if they are indispensable, and then only with the greatest care and the most meticulous concern for conservation. To use them heedlessly or extravagantly is an act of violence, and while complete non-violence may not be attainable on this earth, there is nonetheless an ineluctable duty on man to aim at the ideal of non-violence in all he does… As the world’s resources of non-renewable fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature which must almost inevitably lead to violence between men.

The Mississippi is surrounded by a vast network of concealed plumbing that underlies the whole of the American Midwest. As for the great river at the heart of this maze, it is now for all intents and purposes a man-made artifact. Every inch of its course from its headwaters to its delta is regulated by synthetic means—by locks and dams and artificial lakes, revetments and spillways and control structures, chevrons and wing dams and bendway weirs. The resulting edifice can barely be called a river at all, in any traditional sense. The Mississippi has been dredged, and walled in, and reshaped, and fixed; it has been turned into a gigantic navigation canal, or the world’s largest industrial sewer. It hasn’t run wild as a river does in nature for more than a hundred years. Its waters are notoriously foul. In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi was well known for its murkiness and filth, but today it swirls with all the effluvia of the modern age. There’s the storm runoff, thick with the glistening sheen of automotive waste. The drainage from the enormous mechanized farms of the heartland, and from millions of suburban lawns, is rich with pesticides and fertilizers like atrazine, alachlor, cyanazine, and metolachlor. A ceaseless drizzle comes from the chemical plants along the riverbanks that manufacture neoprene, polychloroprene, and an assortment of other refrigerants and performance elastomers. And then there are the waste products of steel mills, of sulfuric acid regeneration facilities, and of the refineries that produce gasoline, fuel oil, asphalt, propane, propylene, isobutane, kerosene, and coke. The Mississippi is one of the busiest industrial corridors in the world.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

This terrifying experiment has already been set in motion. Unlike nuclear war—which is a future potential—climate change is a present reality. There is a scientific consensus that human activities, in particular the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, are causing the earth’s climate to change at a frightening rate.7 Nobody knows exactly how much carbon dioxide we can continue to pump into the atmosphere without triggering an irreversible cataclysm. But our best scientific estimates indicate that unless we dramatically cut the emission of greenhouse gases in the next twenty years, average global temperatures will increase by more than 3.6ºF, resulting in expanding deserts, disappearing ice caps, rising oceans and more frequent extreme weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons.8 These changes in turn will disrupt agricultural production, inundate cities, make much of the world uninhabitable, and send hundreds of millions of refugees in search of new homes.9 Moreover, we are rapidly approaching a number of tipping points, beyond which even a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough to reverse the trend and avoid a worldwide tragedy. For example, as global warming melts the polar ice sheets, less sunlight is reflected back from planet Earth to outer space. This means that the planet absorbs more heat, temperatures rise even higher, and the ice melts even faster. Once this feedback loop crosses a critical threshold it will gather an unstoppable momentum, and all the ice in the polar regions will melt even if humans stop burning coal, oil, and gas. Therefore it is not enough that we recognize the danger we face. It is critical that we actually do something about it now. Unfortunately, as of 2018, instead of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the global emission rate is still increasing. Humanity has very little time left to wean itself from fossil fuels. We need to enter rehab today. Not next year or next month, but today. “Hello, I am Homo sapiens, and I am a fossil-fuel addict.

There is no fault that can’t be corrected [in natural wine] with one powder or another; no feature that can’t be engineered from a bottle, box, or bag. Wine too tannic? Fine it with Ovo-Pure (powdered egg whites), isinglass (granulate from fish bladders), gelatin (often derived from cow bones and pigskins), or if it’s a white, strip out pesky proteins that cause haziness with Puri-Bent (bentonite clay, the ingredient in kitty litter). Not tannic enough? Replace $1,000 barrels with a bag of oak chips (small wood nuggets toasted for flavor), “tank planks” (long oak staves), oak dust (what it sounds like), or a few drops of liquid oak tannin (pick between “mocha” and “vanilla”). Or simulate the texture of barrel-aged wines with powdered tannin, then double what you charge. (““Typically, the $8 to $12 bottle can be brought up to $15 to $20 per bottle because it gives you more of a barrel quality. . . . You’re dressing it up,” a sales rep explained.) Wine too thin? Build fullness in the mouth with gum arabic (an ingredient also found in frosting and watercolor paint). Too frothy? Add a few drops of antifoaming agent (food-grade silicone oil). Cut acidity with potassium carbonate (a white salt) or calcium carbonate (chalk). Crank it up again with a bag of tartaric acid (aka cream of tartar). Increase alcohol by mixing the pressed grape must with sugary grape concentrate, or just add sugar. Decrease alcohol with ConeTech’s spinning cone, or Vinovation’s reverse-osmosis machine, or water. Fake an aged Bordeaux with Lesaffre’s yeast and yeast derivative. Boost “fresh butter” and “honey” aromas by ordering the CY3079 designer yeast from a catalog, or go for “cherry-cola” with the Rhône 2226. Or just ask the “Yeast Whisperer,” a man with thick sideburns at the Lallemand stand, for the best yeast to meet your “stylistic goals.” (For a Sauvignon Blanc with citrus aromas, use the Uvaferm SVG. For pear and melon, do Lalvin Ba11. For passion fruit, add Vitilevure Elixir.) Kill off microbes with Velcorin (just be careful, because it’s toxic). And preserve the whole thing with sulfur dioxide. When it’s all over, if you still don’t like the wine, just add a few drops of Mega Purple—thick grape-juice concentrate that’s been called a “magical potion.” It can plump up a wine, make it sweeter on the finish, add richer color, cover up greenness, mask the horsey stink of Brett, and make fruit flavors pop. No one will admit to using it, but it ends up in an estimated 25 million bottles of red each year. “Virtually everyone is using it,” the president of a Monterey County winery confided to Wines and Vines magazine. “In just about every wine up to $20 a bottle anyway, but maybe not as much over that.

Sam was about to travel to Asia with her boyfriend and she was fretting about what her backers would think if she released some of her new songs while she was 'on vacation'. She was worried that posting pictures of herself sipping a Mai Tai was going to make her look like an asshole. What does it matter? I asked her, where you are whether you're drinking a coffee, a Mai Tai or a bottle of water? I mean, aren't they paying for your songs so that you can... live? Doesn't living include wandering and collecting emotions and drinking a Mai Tai, not just sitting in a room writing songs without ever leaving the house? I told Sam about another songwriter friend of mine, Kim Boekbinder, who runs her own direct support website through which her fans pay her monthly at levels from $5 to $1,000. She also has a running online wishlist of musical gear and costumes kindof like a wedding registry, to which her fans can contribute money anytime they want. Kim had told me a few days before that she doesn't mind charging her backers during what she calls her 'staring at the wall time'. She thinks this is essential before she can write a new batch of songs. And her fans don't complain, they trust her process. These are new forms of patronage, there are no rules and it's messy, the artists and the patrons they are making the rules as they go along, but whether these artists are using crowdfunding (which is basically, front me some money so I can make a thing) or subscription services (which is more like pay me some money every month so that I can make things) or Patreon, which is like pay per piece of content pledge service (that basically means pay me some money every time I make a thing). It doesn't matter, the fundamental building block of all of these relationships boils down to the same simple thing: trust. If you're asking your fans to support you, the artist, it shouldn't matter what your choices are, as long as you're delivering your side of the bargain. You may be spending the money on guitar picks, Mai Tais, baby formula, college loans, gas for the car or coffee to fuel your all-night writing sessions. As long as art is coming out the other side, and you're making your patrons happy, the money you need to live (and need to live is hard to define) is almost indistinguishable from the money you need to make art. ... (6:06:57) ... When she posts a photo of herself in a vintage dress that she just bought, no one scolds her for spending money on something other than effects pedals. It's not like her fan's money is an allowance with nosy and critical strings attached, it's a gift in the form of money in exchange for her gift, in the form of music. The relative values are... messy. But if we accept the messiness we're all okay. If Beck needs to moisturize his cuticles with truffle oil in order to play guitar tracks on his crowdfunded record, I don't care that the money I fronted him isn't going towards two turntables or a microphone; just as long as the art gets made, I get the album and Beck doesn't die in the process.

Jones described what followed in his official report: All the oil, the tanks, barrels,engines for pumping, engine-houses, and wagons- in a word, everything used for rising, holding, or sending it off was burned. The smoke is very dense and jet black. The boats, filled with oil in bulk, burst with a report almost equaling artillery, and spread the burning fuel down the river. Before night huge columns of ebony smoke marked the meanderings of the stream as far as the eye could see. By dark the oil from the tanks on the burning creek had reached the river and the whole stream was a sheet of fire. A burning river, carrying destruction to our merciless enemy, was a scene of magnificence that might well carry joy to every patriotic heart.- General William E. " Grumble" Jones

As of now, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of food energy for humans—somewhere between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for a calorie of food. The fossil fuel is in both the fertilizer and the pesticides, and it’s essential to the machinery needed to plant, harvest, process, and transport grain. All told, an acre of corn drinks about fifty gallons of oil.

SINCE the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that’s been increasing by as much as six percent annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today—a little over four hundred parts per million—is higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years. Quite probably it is higher than at any point in the last several million years. If current trends continue, CO2 concentrations will top five hundred parts per million, roughly double the levels they were in preindustrial days, by 2050.

The new GST: A halfway house In spite of all the favourable features of the GST, it introduces the anomaly of having an origin-based tax on interstate trade he proposed GST would be a single levy. 1141 words From a roadblock during the UPA regime, the incessant efforts of the BJP government have finally paved way for the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST). This would, no doubt, be a major reform in the existing indirect tax system of the country. With a view to introducing the GST, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has introduced the Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill 2014 in Parliament. The new tax would be implemented from April 1, 2016. Both the government and the taxpayers will have enough time to understand the implications of the new tax and its administrative nuances. Unlike the 119th Amendment Bill, which lapsed with the dissolution of the previous Lok Sabha, the new Bill will hopefully see the light of the day as it takes into account the objections of the state governments regarding buoyancy of the tax and the autonomy of the states. It proposes setting up of the GST Council, which will be a joint forum of the Centre and the states. This council would function under the chairmanship of the Union finance minister with all the state finance ministers as its members. It will make recommendations to the Union and the states on the taxes, cesses and surcharges levied by the Union, the states and the local bodies, which may be subsumed in the GST; the rates including floor rates with bands of goods and services tax; any special rate or rates for a specified period to raise additional resources during any natural calamity or disaster etc. However, all the recommendations will have to be supported by not less than three-fourth of the weighted votes—the Centre having one-third votes and the states having two-third votes. Thus, no change can be implemented without the consent of both the Centre and the states. The proposed GST would be a single levy. It would aim at creating an integrated national market for goods and services by replacing the plethora of indirect taxes levied by the Centre and the states. While central taxes to be subsumed include central excise duty (CenVAT), additional excise duties, service tax, additional customs duty (CVD) and special additional duty of customs (SAD), the state taxes that fall in this category include VAT/sales tax, entertainment tax, octroi, entry tax, purchase tax and luxury tax. Therefore, all taxes on goods and services, except alcoholic liquor for human consumption, will be brought under the purview of the GST. Irrespective of whether we currently levy GST on these items or not, it is important to bring these items under the Constitution Amendment Bill because the exclusion of these items from the GST does not provide any flexibility to levy GST on these items in the future. Any change in the future would then require another Constitutional Amendment. From a futuristic approach, it is prudent not to confine the scope of the tax under the bindings of the Constitution. The Constitution should demarcate the broad areas of taxing powers as has been the case with sales tax and Union excise duty in the past. Currently, the rationale of exclusion of these commodities from the purview of the GST is solely based on revenue considerations. No other considerations of tax policy or tax administration have gone into excluding petroleum products from the purview of the GST. However, the long-term perspective of a rational tax policy for the GST shows that, at present, these taxes constitute more than half of the retail prices of motor fuel. In a scenario where motor fuel prices are deregulated, the taxation policy would have to be flexible and linked to the global crude oil prices to ensure that prices are held stable and less pressure exerted on the economy during the increasing price trends. The trend of taxation of motor fuel all over the world suggests that these items

Emissions of carbon dioxide reasonable commercial For those who do not know each other with the phrase "carbon footprint" and its consequences or is questionable, which is headed "reasonable conversion" is a fast lens here. Statements are described by the British coal climatic believe. "..The GC installed (fuel emissions) The issue has directly or indirectly affected by a company or work activities, products," only in relation to the application, especially to introduce a special procedure for the efforts of B. fight against carbon crank function What is important? Carbon dioxide ", uh, (on screen), the main fuel emissions" and the main result of global warming, improve a process that determines the atmosphere in the air in the heat as greenhouse gases greenhouse, carbon dioxide is reduced by the environment, methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs more typically classified as). The consequences are disastrous in the sense of life on the planet. The exchange is described at a reasonable price in Wikipedia as "...geared a social movement and market-based procedures, especially the objectives of the development of international guidelines and improve local sustainability." The activity is for the price "reasonable effort" as well as social and environmental criteria as part of the same in the direction of production. It focuses exclusively on exports under the auspices of the acquisition of the world's nations to coffee most international destinations, cocoa, sugar, tea, vegetables, wine, specially designed, refreshing fruits, bananas, chocolate and simple. In 2007 trade, the conversion of skilled gross sales serious enough alone suffered due the supermarket was in the direction of approximately US $ 3.62 billion to improve (2.39 million), rich environment and 47% within 12 months of the calendar year. Fair trade is often providing 1-20% of gross sales in their classification of medicines in Europe and North America, the United States. ..Properly Faith in the plan ... cursed interventions towards closing in failure "vice president Cato Industries, appointed to inquire into the meaning of fair trade Brink Lindsey 2003 '. "Sensible changes direction Lindsay inaccurate provides guidance to the market in a heart that continues to change a design style and price of the unit complies without success. It is based very difficult, and you must deliver or later although costs Rule implementation and reduces the cost if you have a little time in the mirror. You'll be able to afford the really wide range plan alternatives to products and expenditures price to pay here. With the efficient configuration package offered in the interpretation question fraction "which is a collaboration with the Carbon Fund worldwide, and acceptable substitute?" In the statement, which tend to be small, and more? They allow you to search for carbon dioxide transport and delivery. All vehicles are responsible dioxide pollution, but they are the worst offenders? Aviation. Quota of the EU said that the greenhouse gas jet fuel greenhouse on the basis of 87% since 1990 years Boeing Company, Boeing said more than 5 747 liters of fuel burns kilometer. Paul Charles, spokesman for Virgin Atlantic, said flight CO² gas burned in different periods of rule. For example: (. The United Kingdom) Jorge Chavez airport to fly only in the vast world of Peru to London Heathrow with British Family Islands 6.314 miles (10162 km) works with about 31,570 liters of kerosene, which produces changes in only 358 for the incredible carbon. Delivery. John Vidal, Environment Editor parents argue that research on the oil company BP and researchers from the Department of Physics and the environment in Germany Wising said that about once a year before the transport height of 600 to 800 million tons. This is simply nothing more than twice in Colombia and more than all African nations spend together.

More preposterous is an outlier company like Encana, whose hallucinations led to even more bright optimism. For 2015, the Canadian natural gas behemoth decided not to cut spending at all, taking a complete blind eye towards collapsing prices. Instead, it chose to increase spending for 2015 from $2.55b to $2.8b. In this strategy, Encana is virtually alone in the oil space. CEO Doug Suttles has called the oil drop merely an “annoyance, but not threatening” and is continuing with his two-year plan to increase Encana’s ratio of oil production from natural gas. What made Encana so special? Why was it alone choosing to step on the accelerator while virtually everyone else was feathering the brakes? Well, it probably had a bit to do with Suttles’ mistimed buy of Athlon Energy, a Permian basin start-up company that rocketed in share price in its less-than-two-year life span. In September 2014, Encana had the idea to buy Athlon for an astounding $5.9 billion, paying more than $58 a share for the fledgling company. That buy should have been accepted as a monumental error in timing, but instead has seemed to fuel the Encana fantasy. But if you’ve bought the top of the oil market, as Encana’s Doug Suttles has, then why not—I suppose it makes perfect sense to double down and ignore collapsing oil and gas markets going forward. Encana plans to increase oil production by 26% in 2015.

Climate change alarmism is a belief system, and needs to be evaluated as such. There is, indeed, an accepted scientific theory which I do not dispute and which, the alarmists claim, justifies their belief and their alarm. This is the so-called greenhouse effect: the fact that the earth’s atmosphere contains so-called greenhouse gases (of which water vapour is overwhelmingly the most important, but CO2 is another) which, in effect, trap some of the heat we receive from the sun and prevent it from bouncing back into space. Without the greenhouse effect, the planet would be so cold as to be uninhabitable. But, by burning fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—we are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and thus, other things being equal, increasing the earth’s temperature. But four questions immediately arise, all of which need to be addressed, coolly and rationally. First, other things being equal, how much can increased atmospheric CO2 be expected to warm the earth? (This is known to scientists as climate sensitivity, or sometimes the climate sensitivity of carbon.) This is highly uncertain, not least because clouds have an important role to play, and the science of clouds is little understood. Until recently, the majority opinion among climate scientists had been that clouds greatly amplify the basic greenhouse effect. But there is a significant minority, including some of the most eminent climate scientists, who strongly dispute this. Second, are other things equal, anyway? We know that over millennia, the temperature of the earth has varied a great deal, long before the arrival of fossil fuels. To take only the past thousand years, a thousand years ago we were benefiting from the so-called medieval warm period, when temperatures are thought to have been at least as warm, if not warmer, than they are today. And during the Baroque era we were grimly suffering the cold of the so-called Little Ice Age, when the Thames frequently froze in winter and substantial ice fairs were held on it, which have been immortalised in contemporary prints. Third, even if the earth were to warm, so far from this necessarily being a cause for alarm, does it matter? It would, after all, be surprising if the planet were on a happy but precarious temperature knife-edge, from which any change in either direction would be a major disaster. In fact, we know that, if there were to be any future warming (and for the reasons already given, ‘if’ is correct) there would be both benefits and what the economists call disbenefits. I shall discuss later where the balance might lie. And fourth, to the extent that there is a problem, what should we, calmly and rationally, do about it?

Biodiesel is an inexhaustible, clean-Ignite diesel substitution to reduce dependence on foreign petroleum use, create jobs and improve the environment. Recycled cooking oil, soybean oil and animal fats made from a diverse mix of feedstock including was the first and only EPA - 1 billion gallons of annual production to reach across the Biodiesel Plants country and the first commercial scale production of advanced biofuels named. Strict technical fuel quality and engine performance specifications meeting, this amendment without existing diesel engines to be used in and all major engine manufacturers ' warranty is covered by, most often 5 percent or 20 percent biodiesel blend.

We’ve reached a point where nations are addicted to oil, in part because the most profitable business on the planet is arms, and all war machines run on petroleum, either as fuel or lubricants. But

But he imagined no such thing. In this he was like apparently all agribusiness executives. They don’t imagine farms or farmers. They imagine perhaps nothing at all, their minds being filled to capacity by numbers leading to the bottom line. Though the corporations, by law, are counted as persons, they do not have personal minds, if they can be said to have minds. It is a great oddity that a corporation, which properly speaking has no self, is by definition selfish, responsible only to itself. This is an impersonal, abstract selfishness, limitlessly acquisitive, but unable to look so far ahead as to preserve its own sources and supplies. The selfishness of the fossil fuel industries by nature is self-annihilating; but so, always, has been the selfishness of the agribusiness corporations. Land, as Wes Jackson has said, has thus been made as exhaustible as oil or coal.

In the past year, a new divestment campaign has caught on, faster than any other such campaign in history, according to a recent Oxford university study. Investors representing more than $2.5tn in assets under management, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Norway’s giant oil fund and the Church of England (whose archbishop is a former oil executive) have all joined the chorus saying sayonara to their dirtiest fossil fuel investments. They reason this is not about biting the hand that fed them; rather, it is about morality and economics. It is about the morality of not standing on the sidelines of climate change, “the most pressing moral issue in our world” in the words of the lead bishop on the environment for the Church of England. It is also about the economics of not getting stuck holding a bag of stranded fossil fuel assets that cannot be burnt if the world is to adhere to a given carbon budget, a topic on which Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, has expressed concerns. And it is about not missing out on the transition from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy. The president of Harvard University, whose endowment is estimated to have a carbon footprint as big as that of Jamaica, is not convinced. As Drew Faust argues, constraining investment options risks significantly constraining investment returns, while divestment is unlikely to have a financial impact on the affected companies. It also raises the troubling problem of boycotting a whole class of companies whose products and services we rely on.

Our first day’s run out of Pampatar was our best day’s run to date on the whole voyage from San Diego—171 miles. That’s over the twenty-four hours noon to noon. The second day’s run beat it—174 miles. On the evening of the third day out we were at anchor in Frederiksted, on the island of St. Croix. That’s 420 miles in sixty hours. That’s the crossing of the Caribbean Sea, from south to north, in two and a half days. That’s flying. Total fuel consumption—one pint of diesel oil to charge batteries. Breakages, nil; and that was a fully loaded trimaran—loaded to traditional, oceangoing monohull standards and more. There were, don’t forget, three months’ supplies of canned food for three men on board, plus the remaining dried and packaged food, say six weeks’ supply, plus eighty-two gallons of cheap diesel fuel and eighty-two gallons of fresh water, plus all our personal effects, the three of us, together with the ship’s equipment. That was a total payload of around four tons. I suggest that this is the most important statistic, besides the speed of the passage, in this account. I suggest that, together with the safety factors built into Outward Leg—the self-righting system, and the cool-tubes to prevent capsize—we realized at St. Croix that what we had under our feet was one of the fastest, and one of the safest, cruising vessels afloat under sail. Hitherto multihulls had been considered as either hair-shirt racing craft, for speed-drunk masochists with tiny appetites, or boxy floating sheds for short cruises and always downwind, because they were thought—and quite rightly in most instances—to have the windward ability of Carnegie Hall.

Can these systems produce enough total calories, enough carbohydrates, proteins and oils to feed the human race? Over and over again this issue is brought up and, in my opinion, is somewhat of a red herring. “This all sounds good, but we’ve got to feed the world.” I agree with this sentiment and hereby turn the question back onto the asker and state that the current agricultural system is not feeding the world! Not only is annual agriculture not feeding the rapidly increasing population, it is destroying ecosystems worldwide while doing so. The current agricultural system is dependent on extraordinary labor or cheap fossil fuels or increasingly scarce mined inputs in order to not feed the world. It contributes to the greenhouse effect and the inequitable distribution of wealth worldwide while still not feeding the world.

Essentially, GE operates its own social network for heavy industrial machinery. It’s sort of like all these power grids and oil refineries and MRI machines have their own Instagram accounts, but instead of pictures of beaches or food, they’re sharing fuel consumption, hydraulic pressure, usage hours, decay rates. “First there was the consumer internet, and then the enterprise internet,” as Barzdukas said, “and now we’re moving into the third generation: the industrial internet. It’s not just about having our phones connected or our enterprise applications connected and operating on subscriptions models. Now it’s the big machines.” So far GE has built more than 600,000 of these digital twins. And just as social networks changed our world, this third-generation industrial internet is going to transform manufacturing.

What we cannot do, under any circumstances, is precisely what the fossil fuel industry is determined to do and what your government is so intent on helping them do: dig new coal mines, open new fracking fields, and sink new offshore drilling rigs. All that needs to stay in the ground.

What we cannot do, under any circumstances, is precisely what the fossil fuel industry is determined to do and what your government is so intent on helping them do: dig new coal mines, open new fracking fields, and sink new offshore drilling rigs. All that needs to stay in the ground. What we must do instead is clear: carefully wind down existing fossil fuel projects, at the same time as we rapidly ramp up renewables until we get global emissions down to zero globally by mid-century. The good news is that we can do it with existing technologies. The good news is that we can create millions of well-paying jobs around the world in the shift to a postcarbon economy - in renewables, in public transit, in efficiency, in retrofits, in cleaning up polluted land and water.

For eons, humans had transformed sunlight into food, through the growing of edible plants and animal feed. In recent decades all that changed. Modern industrial farming relied not on the sun but on fossil fuels, refined into pesticides, fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, and the oil and gas needed to transport food hundreds of miles to market. Our farming system represented a net loss of energy. Whereas sunshine was infinite, oil would one day run out. In the meantime, the damage of industrial farming to the world’s soil might be irreversible.

The share of global power that comes from burning coal (roughly 40 percent) hasn’t changed in 30 years. Oil and natural gas together have been hovering around 26 percent for three decades. All told, fossil fuels provide two-thirds of the world’s electricity. Solar and wind, meanwhile, account for 7 percent.

Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that’s been increasing by as much as six percent annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today—a little over four hundred parts per million—is higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years. Quite probably it is higher than at any point in the last several million years.

We read labels. We shun gluten, dairy, processed foods, and refined sugars. We buy organic. We use natural sunscreens and beauty products. We worry about fluoride in our water, smog in our air, hydrogenated oils in our food, and we debate whether plastic bottles are safe to drink from. We replace toxic cleaning products with Mrs. Meyer’s and homemade vinegar concoctions. We do yoga, we run, we SoulCycle and Fitbit, we go paleo and keto, we juice, we cleanse. We do coffee enemas and steam our yonis and drink clay and charcoal and shoot up vitamins and sit in infrared foil boxes and hire naturopaths and shamans and functional doctors and we take nootropics, and we stress about our telomeres (these are all real words). We are hypervigilant about everything we put into our body, everything we do to our body. And we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this and follow Goop and Well + Good and drop forty bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor. The global wellness economy is estimated to be worth four trillion dollars. Four trillion dollars. We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.

Sonnet of Renewable Energy There is a plug point in the sky, Which is beaming electricity 24/7. Yet we drill holes into the earth, To suck oil and power our concrete heaven. When humankind first started drilling, They had no idea of its implication. But eventually scientists raised warnings, Yet drilling continued due to lack of efficient solution. Fossil fuel has already damaged the climate, And we no longer have time for scholarly fight. So I say to scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, Come up with affordable home solar-grid. Electric cars won't do anything for climate emergency, Unless all electricity comes from renewable energy.

But our biggest enemies are all the knee-jerk politically correct folks who still don’t understand that wind power doesn’t lower greenhouse gases or fossil fuel use, but it destroys environments, property values, human health, millions of birds and bats and many other things. And that it only exists because of huge taxpayer subsidies, billions and billions that can never be repaid, money that goes straight into the pockets of the oil companies and investment banks behind these schemes … They make billions but never risk a cent.

If humans do not belong in California or Arizona, where do they belong? In Reisner's native Minnesota where there's many lakes? Of course, this is absurd. Very few people could survive in Minnesota without the energy that is produced there from fuel brought from elsewhere without rapidly deforesting it and belching the pollution of numerous wood fires. So what about further south? Just about everywhere you go, humans are out of their "natural" element—which is some place in Africa. Even where they are in their element, they are there in numbers that are unsustainable based on using only very local resources. (Unless we allow trains, trucks, ships, and planes into our "natural" world.) Indeed, most human habitations make little sense in some way, just as Speaker Hastert said of New Orleans. But, yet, there they are. Hastert's remark was just one comment made in the wake of terrible suffering, and was probably driven by his human sympathy, not wanting to see this go on again. But it was insensitive on another level and he was criticized for it. Reisner's whole book is basically saying the same thing about the entire Southwestern United States. The irony is that this book was largely written at a time when it was abundantly clear than energy, not water, was the common denominator in resource policy. A few short years after the oil shocks, the Iranian revolution, during the Iran-Iraq War, and revised months after the First Gulf War, Resiner and other water conservationists must realize they are the junior varsity. This is before all of this activity unleashed the events of the Bush era.

Together, furnaces and water heaters account for a third of all emissions that come from the world’s buildings. And unlike lights and A/C units, most of them run on fossil fuels, not electricity. (Whether you use natural gas, heating oil, or propane depends largely on where you live.)

the three major sectors (electricity, transportation, and industry) all produce comparable emissions. But they’d be affected very differently by an economy-wide carbon price. For example, coal fueled about one-quarter of US electricity in 2019, and each metric ton of that coal was sold for about $39.7 A carbon price of $40 for each ton of CO2 emitted would effectively double that cost to power plant operators and so be a strong inducement for them to forswear coal. In contrast, that same carbon price would increase the effective price of crude oil by only about 40 percent above $60 per barrel. And if that cost were passed through to the pump, gasoline would increase by only some $0.35 per gallon. Since that’s small compared to how much pump prices have varied historically, consumers wouldn’t have much incentive to move away from gasoline. So reductions in emissions from power (and, as it turns out, heat) are much easier to encourage than reductions from transportation, fundamentally because oil packs a lot more energy per carbon atom than does coal.

And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it.

Climate Activists (not all) have turned into Climate Karens, which has done nothing for the climate crisis, but has only added one more crisis to the list. BLM activists don't go about abusing white people, Pride activists don't go about harassing straight people, and yet, that's precisely what has become the norm in climate protests. Vandalism isn't activism, you morons! If you want to help the climate, help the green energy industry become mainstream.

About 85 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil fuels, and about 80 percent of those come from just two sources: coal (46 percent) in its various forms, including anthracite and lignite; and petroleum (33 percent) in its various forms, including oil, gasoline, and propane. Coal and petroleum are used differently. Most petroleum is consumed by individuals and small businesses as they heat their homes and offices and drive their cars. By contrast, coal is mainly burned by heavy industry: coal produces the great majority of the world’s steel and cement and 40 percent of its electricity. The percentages vary from place to place, but the pattern remains. Coal provides about two-thirds of China’s energy, but almost all of it is used by big industries. Coal provides less than a fifth of U.S. energy, but again almost all of it is for industry. In both places petroleum consumption is on a smaller, more individual scale.

President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 invited all forty-six U.S. governors to the White House to decry the “imminent exhaustion” of fossil fuels and other natural resources—“the weightiest problem now before the nation.” Afterward Roosevelt asked the U.S. Geological Survey to assay domestic oil reserves, the first such analysis ever undertaken. Its conclusions, released in 1909, were emphatic: if the nation continued “the present rate of increase in production,” a “marked decline” would begin “within a very few years.” Output would hit zero about 1935—a prophecy the survey repeated, annual report after annual report, for almost twenty years.

We armed ourselves with pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles. We knew that the government had us impossibly outgunned but nevertheless felt obliged to not only prepare ourselves for the upcoming collapse of society as we had known it, but also to do whatever it took to speed the day when that collapse occurred. The government was illegitimate; a puppet regime manipulated by a shadowy and sinister force that was hellbent on our destruction. The supposed democracy that seated traitorous politicians had been tainted by mass media that poisoned the minds and souls of our people to not only blind them against what was happening, but also to con them into complicity in their own downfall. Our guns served many purposes. In addition to the simple purpose they were designed for-to kill people-our firearms endowed with us a sense of destiny befitting an epic struggle against fearsome odds. The deadly seriousness of the situation was underlined, italicized, and emboldened by the smell of gun oil and the clack of magazines sliding into position as we recruited new soldiers into our movement. According to the founding Fathers, it was not only our right, but our duty to bear arms against the tyrants who had usurped our beloved nation. I spent 7 years immersed in that world. A reality where I was constantly looking over my shoulder to reveal the handiwork of the enemy. Every aspect of our culture faced a relentless assault. Everything that was good about America-Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit of Happiness-had been denigrated and disparaged by those that sought to impose Marxist equality. I hated them for that. I hated them with the passion of a patriot. That hate was fueled by what I truly believed was a love for my race. Oops! Did I say "race?" I meant a love for my country, Or was it a love of Christ? Or Allah? It could have been any of a number of allegiances-any number of ways to identify myself-that I built walls around and bristled at those outside, and it was all in the name of love. Roads to a lot of really bad places are paved with that kind of bizarro love. A vampiric, soul-depleting love-substitute that beckons to those who never know the real thing. I was very lucky to realize the true love of a little girl-my daughter-otherwise I'd likely be dead or in prison like so many of my former comrades. Simply by playing with other children, she taught me that the walls and guns and hate that had seemed to give me purpose were in fact unnecessary constructs that threatened to separate us. The children she shared toys, laughs, and smiles with also shared the same need for love and compassion that we all do-regardless of the color of our skin, our family's choice of spirituality, or the part of the world we come from. I made a decision to cast aside the fear that masqueraded as love, and to live my life in wonderful affection for diversity instead of scorn for it.

Pollux talked about the bricks of the house down the street, the pillars of a stone gate, mentioned gas tanks and roots, hidden aquifers, metals. ‘All that is from the earth, right? We’ve drawn life from below for too long,’ he said. ‘You’re going to start talking about fossil fuels any minute.’ ‘Sucking out oil and digging up minerals.’ ‘Here we go.’ ‘Things will improve when we start living on the top of the earth, on wind and light.

Neither fossil fuel nor artificial intelligence is the problem - the real danger is greed. Do you think everybody will live happily ever after, once you replace fossil fuel with green energy! No - they won't! Apekind will simply use green energy to power their greed instead of oil and gas. They will use green energy to wage war, they'll use green energy to kill people. US military is already developing a high-endurance unmanned solar powered aircraft, to be used as a communication relay platform and for surveillance. Besides, solar powered reconnaissance drones have already been in military use for some years now, in various parts of the world. Which means, the planet will be safer, but the people will be in just as much muck as they are today. Apparently, there is a limit to fossil fuel, but there is no limit to human stupidity. Apekind will find one way or another to continue with their "kill or be killed" nonsense, just like any other animal in the wild. And every time government officials will make the same old statement, "it's necessary for national security" - just as power hungry tribal chiefs have been saying since our jungle days, before putting millions upon millions to death! So, my question is - what good is green energy if it's used for the same inhuman purposes as fossil fuel! Treat greed first, you fools - treat greed first! Then you won't need to make a ton of empty promises and winded policies for a sustainable future - because where there is no greed, sustainability flows like spring water. Treat greed first, then I shall call you humankind - until then, you are nothing but apekind. Without the green of heart, what green apes, what oil apes - all energy leads to but one color - the color of blood - red! Energy used to sustain the same old paradigm of greed, control and disparity, is anything but clean - no matter what it says on the label.

The next morning the Arizona took on a full load of fuel oil, nearly 1.5 million gallons, in preparation for her upcoming trip to Bremerton. The trade winds blew steadily over the island that morning, but the heavy smell of oil still lingered. Besides that, the ship held 180,000 gallons of aviation fuel for the scouting planes it had on board and over a million pounds of gunpowder in the forward magazines for the big guns. There was enough fuel on board to get us to Japan, and nearly enough firepower to sink the entire Imperial Fleet, should Hirohito be foolhardy enough to fire so much as a round across our bow.

the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn’t say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to “get this fixed.” Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they’d done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn’t have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I’d misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn’t say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to “get this fixed.” Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they’d done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn’t have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I’d misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse

Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly eats just nine, of which just three – rice, wheat and maize – provide 50 per cent of all calories. Add potato, barley, palm oil, soy and sugar (beet and cane) and you have 75 per cent of all the calories that fuel our species.

On the other hand, if you have been worried or frightened by what you have read, that’s good, you should be, especially on behalf of your children and their children. But don’t let fear feed inertia. Fear does not have to be paralysing. Indeed, it is often the driver of effective action. No one ever won a war while knowing no fear, and make no mistake, this is a war. Wherever we live on this magnificent planet, we all need to do our utmost to try to keep it that way. The fact that the future looks dismal is not an excuse to do nothing, to imagine it’s all too late. On the contrary, it is a call to arms. So, if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, then do it. In his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm argues convincingly that, such is the scale of the climate crisis, sabotage and property damage are absolutely justified in the battle against fossil fuel companies and others working against the public good. I understand that this is not to everyone’s taste, but there is plenty more you can do. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle; stop flying; switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat; spread the word about the predicament we find ourselves in among your friends and family; lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the climate emergency.

St. Jerome says that wine and youth are two incentives to impurity. (Ad Eustoch, de Cust. Virg.). Wine is to youth what fuel is to fire. As oil poured upon the flames only increases their intensity, so wine, like a violent conflagration, heats the blood, enkindling and exciting the passions to the highest pitch of folly and madness. Witness the excesses into which man is led by hatred, love, revenge, and other passions, when stimulated by intoxicating liquors. The natural effect of this fatal indulgence is to counteract all the results of the moral virtues. These subdue and control the baser passions, but wine excites and urges them to the wildest licentiousness. Judge, therefore, with what vigilance you should guard against the attacks of such an enemy.

The liberals would cheer her death. They would light marijuana cigarettes and drive to their sushi restaurants and eat fresh food that had traveled eight thousand miles. They would spend all of supper complaining about people like her, and when they got home their houses would be cold and they'd press a button on a wall to get warm, the whole time complaining about big oil.

But most scientists studying the western climate believe the freak will become the norm. Researchers recently concluded that the extended dry period in the West over the last ten years is the worst in eight hundred years—that is, since the years between 1146 and 1151. Eight hundred years! If we were just talking about another decade of this or, worse, a decade of the type of heat we were seeing in the summer of 2012, the results would be catastrophic. But climate scientists believe it will keep getting hotter. If so even drought-resistant plants will die, reservoir levels will continue to fall, crop production will drop. Worse, as vegetation withers, it will no longer be able to absorb carbon dioxide, further exacerbating climate change. And now to this precarious and combustible mix we have decided to add fracking. We have chosen to do this not with caution but on a massive scale, and to do it right next to our precious rivers, right smack in the middle of aquifers. We go into these places and use, mixed with the millions of gallons of water, a secret recipe of chemicals, many of them poisonous to humans, which we then force into fissures of rock with high-powered blasts to flush out the fuel we are seeking. The man in the bar had warned about earthquakes, but fracking is, in essence, a small seismic event, designed to blast out minerals. We have decided to inject poisons into the ground, then shake that ground, in a region where potable water is more precious than gold. But not, we have decided, more precious than oil. One thing is crystal clear. Though fracking is unproven technology, we are not treating it that way. Instead we are conducting a vast experiment all over the country, from the hills of Pennsylvania to the deserts of Utah. Since we are moving into unfamiliar territory you would think, if we were wise, that we would carefully monitor any and all results. We are not. When people in the fracked area complain that their water is fizzling out of their taps in a foamy mix, smelling of petroleum, the companies are quick to offer other water sources, like cisterns, but not quick, of course, to question the enterprise itself. In fact, the corporate response to the contaminated water supplies and groundwater has been consistent. They tell the landowners and anyone else who complains that they are concerned but that they will not slow down until there is conclusive proof that what they are doing is dangerous and poses a health risk. This is standard operating procedure in today’s world, but it is also, to anyone with a dollop of common sense, an ass-backwards way of doing things. “Despite the troubles people are having, we’ll keep going full-speed ahead until someone proves to us the trouble is real,” they tell us. Never, “Maybe we should slow down until we learn the facts.

talk a lot about a ketogenic diet in this book because of the miraculous health benefits it provides. This is a diet that helps shift your body’s metabolic engine from burning carbohydrates to burning fats. Interestingly, the cells of your body have the metabolic flexibility to adapt from using glucose for fuel to using ketones, which are a byproduct of breaking down fats. We will talk about this more in the cancer section of this book, but cancer cells do not have this metabolic flexibility to use fat as energy. They require glucose to thrive, which makes a ketogenic diet so effective for treating and preventing cancer.   A ketogenic diet calls for minimizing carbohydrates and replacing them with healthy fats and moderate amounts of high-quality protein. A ketogenic diet requires that roughly 50 to 70 percent of your food intake come from healthy fats, such as avocado, coconut oil, grass-fed butter, organic pasture raised eggs, and raw nuts. This diet will also help optimize your weight and prevent virtually all chronic degenerative diseases. Because you are minimizing carbs and replacing them with healthy fats, your body will shift from burning carbs as your primary fuel to burning fat.   Dr. Peter Attia, a Stanford University trained physician specializing in metabolic science, applied the ketogenic diet to his lifestyle to see what would happen. He essentially used himself as a lab rat and received incredible results. Although he was an active and fit guy, he always had a tendency toward metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions – increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist, and abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels – that occur together, increasing your risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. He decided to experiment with the ketogenic diet and see if it could improve his overall health status.

These good white liberals want monuments and wilderness to protect the places they recreate, to keep out companies that want to suck the fossil fuels out from under the sandstone. But the oil and gas will be burned by and large by them, to travel to Utah’s public lands. And it’s used by us - you in your big red Cadillac and me in my Toyota truck - although I’ve recently downgraded to a more fuel-efficient Subaru, the preferred method of transport that’s most often frosted with bike, ski, and boat racks for outdoor enthusiasts across the nation. The land and those who live off it know this arrangement breeds no symbiosis. We all want to get to, and get off on, a body corralled and commodified. Our orgasmic need for release and relief eclipses the fact this is the living, breathing body of the Beloved - the naked desert that has demarcated and delineated - ribbed, we believe, for our pleasure.

On 7 December 1941, all major combatant ships at Pearl Harbor were in condition "X" with two machine guns manned and two 5-inch anti-aircraft guns with ready ammunition and crews near at hand. After the attack began, the ships assumed condition "Y" or "Z" as rapidly as possible. The battleships had been in port for several days and had been refueled. Most of the ships were ninety-five percent full of fuel oil. The degree of closure of water-tight doors and hatches is determined by the conditions named. Condition "X" is the minimum safety condition, while condition "Z" is the battle closure condition. Condition "Y" is between the two. These are usually designated by their alphabetical names, that is "X-ray," "Yoke," and "Zed.

Raleigh is an unusual case. The ship was almost lost even with moderate damage. The Commander Battleships commended the captain and crew for saving the ship by remedial actions. The ship's force and repair ships repaired most of the inside damage to the ship, after removing almost all of the fuel, oil, and water which were aboard. It was not until 3 January that the Navy Yard had Drydock Number One available. Then the Yard completed permanent repairs to the hull and bulkheads until undocking on 14 February. Soon Raleigh departed on one engine for Mare Island where new engine parts were provided and electrical repairs made.

Since the time of Edison, American business innovation and entrepreneurship have given the United States a technological edge over geopolitical rivals and ensured U.S. military supremacy. Ford’s mass-produced trucks and cars proved critical in many battles of World War I in overcoming Germany’s advantageous access to European railroad transport. Over the course of the war, the United States manufactured more than 70 percent of all allied war material, with Ford Motor Company alone contributing more than the entire Italian national war effort. By the 1940s, the U.S. domestic oil industry, dominated by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, constituted two-thirds of world oil production and was a crucial factor in closing Britain’s fuel deficit compared to Germany and Japan.

As he watched his traders run from office to office, Howell had a pivotal realization. Every time a trader sold a barrel of oil, the transaction produced an ultravaluable by-product: information. Each sale was a price signal. And as Koch bought and sold hundreds of thousands of barrels of fuel around the world, it began to accumulate this ultravaluable information in one place. This information could then be paired with yet more ultravaluable information that only Koch Industries had access to: the huge output of price signals that were generated by Koch’s oil refineries and pipelines. These physical plants gave Koch’s traders a window into the future. Koch knew, for example, when it was about to shut down the Pine Bend refinery for repairs, or when it might be shutting down a pipeline. When this happened, Howell’s traders could start gaming the downstream effects on local energy markets—all those opaque nodes that would be affected. And they could do this before any other traders even knew it was happening. There is no way to overstate the value of this kind of inside information.

The fleet Dubose oversaw initially consisted of five large barges. They each carried about 8,500 barrels of oil. Each barge had a skipper and crew who lived on the craft while it traveled from port to port. The first matter of business that Dubose focused on was keeping costs down. Fuel was the largest cost the barges incurred. Rather than let the skippers fuel up the ships when they wanted to, Dubose required them to call his office when they were running low on gas. Then he would call the local ports and find the best price for gas, sending the skipper to the best location. This helped cut costs right away. The tools from Deming helped Dubose go even further. Of all the charts he learned to make, he found that by far the most useful was called a run chart. Even decades later, he’d talk about run charts as if he were discussing a cherished family pet. “The best chart out of all of them . . . is that old-fashioned run chart. It’ll tell you where you’ve been and where you’re going,” he said. A run chart broke down all the costs that a barge would incur. It had a separate category for each cost: groceries, fuel, maintenance, ship damage, and supplies. The run chart allowed you to track these costs as they shifted from month to month, letting you see “where you’ve been and where you’re going.” Dubose was taught to look for cost spikes. The reason was simple: you figured out what caused costs to spike, and you avoided it. Then you figured out what caused costs to fall, and you replicated it.