Bad place for bikes. Oil companies need reinvention. Wind farms didn't turn off Texas' lights. Biden wants your ideas for public land protection. America's worst Senator - so many to choose from, but Ted Cruz gets my vote.
America's Least Rideable City - Los Angeles is in the Running
“The weather here is so perfect that you really don’t need a car to shelter like you do in other parts of the country,” said Phil Gaimon, a former professional cyclist turned author and YouTube star. “But LA is also the shittiest city in the most beautiful part of the world.”
At least 36 cyclists were killed in Los Angeles county in 2019, according to statistics compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), accounting for about a third of all cycling deaths in California that year. Just last month Branden Finely, 46, was killed while riding his bike through downtown, struck by the driver of a stolen pick-up truck weaving in and out of traffic.
Regardless of the arguments over which oil major is doing what, and whether they are doing enough, it is certainly true that fossil fuel companies are becoming increasingly vocal about their lower carbon efforts. That may be in part because some – Shell and BP for example – are headquartered in countries that are signed up to the Paris Agreement. It may also be because they are coming under increasing pressure, both from investors and in the courts.
In the UK, for example, the Supreme Court has just ruled that Nigerian farmers can sue Shell for damage to their land from oil spills. Meanwhile, Nigerian farmers also won compensation from the giant in the Dutch courts. And that’s before we even get started on the potential of young people suing over climate impacts, or major investment groups pulling their money.
Whether or not oil companies can successfully move away from fossil fuels remains to be seen. It seems likely, however, that we’ll be hearing a lot more about their various efforts to try.
...if your party is hostile to government and exercising regulatory power because it is beholden to a donor class and right-wing ideologues, you will not be prepared for disasters when they strike.
And that brings us to Texas.
The Post reports, “As millions of people across Texas struggled to stay warm Tuesday amid massive cold-weather power outages, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) directed his ire at one particular failure in the state’s independent energy grid: frozen wind turbines.” There is one problem: That is not remotely true (as you might have guessed from a state with an enormous oil and gas sector). “The governor’s arguments were contradicted by his own energy department, which outlined how most of Texas’s energy losses came from failures to winterize the power-generating systems, including fossil fuel pipelines.”
It was an executive order that made waves in environmental circles: after only a week in office, President Joe Biden pledged to preserve 30% of US lands and waters by 2030.
The so-called 30 by 30 conservation goal has already met with bipartisan support in Congress, and it aligns with science-based global preservation targets to reach an eventual target of 50% by 2050.
The US Geological Survey reports that only 12% of US lands are permanently protected, with roughly 23% of its coastal waters protected. That means that in order to reach Biden’s goals, the country will have to conserve more than 400m acres land and inland waterways alone in the next 10 years.
Beto O'Rourke vs. Ted Cruz pic.twitter.com/4Sls4kugx1
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) February 18, 2021
It was a bad decision then and looks worse every day that goes by.
No comments:
Post a Comment