I was having class one day and in the front row was a veteran of several combat tours in Iraq. The class got into a spirited discussion about a woman’s time of the month and the things you can buy like tampons and pads to help with that very common malady.
My combat veteran laid his head on the desk, covered his ears with his hands and tried to make the subject go away. I doubt if he was successful. We were friends, probably still are, haven’t heard from him in some years. I respected his service and gave him class time to talk about it.
Not everyone is going to be comfortable with every topic brought up in class. And I understand that.
But removing the phrase, “Climate Change” is different in a major and important way.
Climate Change is real, observable, and needs to be dealt with. And our government is supposed to dealing with it.
Before we go any further, let me give you a link and a quote from the current topic:
“Please ensure that every member of your team is aware that this is the latest list of words to avoid — and continue to be conscientious about avoiding any terminology that you know to be misaligned with the Administration’s perspectives and priorities,” the directive from acting director of external affairs Rachel Overbey said.
“Misaligned with the administration’s perspectives and priorities,” the weasel words for pitiful stupidity from the reality denying loons that currently form our ruling regime.
(Admiring the latest delusion at the Dept. of Energy.)
Tell me, do you think that covering your ears and making racket will drop the earth’s temperature? Because I don’t.
What are these idiots doing? Well, they are completely devoted to chasing fossil fuel money, billions of dollars, and in pursuit of that money, there is no action no matter how obviously moronic and stupid that they won’t do.
And this is one of the stupid and moronic decisions that these people are embracing in the hope of stalling effective action against climate change so that fossil fuel companies can rake in the cash.
It is wrong. It is immoral. It is pathetic. And I hope and pray for the time when these fools are driven from the government, polite society and any hope of profit.
I was amazed. My first response was “What??” My second response was to quickly mentally review the many articles I have read about the efficiency and practicality of solar panels. while noting that my high school physics text book “claimed” that electricity was a form of energy.
And don’t let the facts like the little tiny obscure fact that I’m typing on a machine powered by electricity confuse you.
Shomik Sen Bhattacharjee writing for the site, Benzinga, wrote an article: Energy Secretary Says Wrapping Earth With Solar Panels Would Produce 20% Of Global Energy, X Users Swiftly Community Note Official.
Energy researchers at MIT note that Earth receives on the order of 173,000 terawatts of solar energy continuously, orders of magnitude more than humanity’s total energy use, highlighting that the constraint is not raw solar resource but economics, siting, transmission and storage.
Global solar already supplies a rising share of electricity and is projected to keep growing through 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.
So, Energy Secretary is “unfamiliar” with the nature of electricity. And there I was thinking that vaccine denial was bad. Foolish me.
And he also appears to believe that solar energy barely exists and is almost useless which is contrary to any simple examination of the facts.
You have to wonder what kind of decisions results from these two misconceptions. Just imagine how many other misconceptions he has.
It really makes you wonder. This is a very minor news story but before the age of Trump, it would be front page news and dominate the news cycle.
But it can’t. Because we as a nation have long ago come to the realization that competence, truth telling or even the most mediocre levels of ability are absent in those chosen for high office in this administration.
That cabinet secretaries can deny basic facts with complete certainty is not a surprise.
But it does bode ill for all of us who had come to expect capable public servants.
In Brazil, organized crime and a wave of loggers and prospectors have murdered and raped their way across the Amazon Basin. In Asia, forest destruction and the immense fires that resulted have devestated many lives. These are terrible, terrible crimes but a twenty year study finds that there is collateral damage in the form of heat related illness.
(This is from a book of detective stories from more than 120 years ago. It is dramatic and indicates important issues are about to be resolved. I am using it for my writing on this occasion.)
In the United States, we have the largely unpunished and uninvestigated murders of indigenous women although there is a local, state and federal preference of a kind of quasi-legal seizure and destruction of natural resources. Of course, no intelligent human being can fail to mention the massive corruption of our current regime, its wholesale destructions of regulations and enforcement agencies, not to mention the “open for business” attitude that if a corporation has a problem, arrangements can be made.
I want you to understand that I am well aware that greed and evil are international problems and that while deforestation is a more dramatic crisis in east Asian and South America, the United States and its corruption are in no way exempt for causing and profiting from forest destruction.
What kind of collateral damage are we talking about? Over the last twenty years, over half a million have died from heat related illness and many, many millions more have suffered such illness.
I don’t see much need for a business ethics analysis. Destroying huge swaths of the planet to make money is wrong.
There should fines, imprisonment and shaming. The people who do these horrible things should have their pictures published and their names removed from colleges, dorms and cultural institutions. They should at all times be exposed for the destructive cockroaches that they are. But be well aware, a good and moral society would not just rely on shame but would punish them for their crimes.
James Alan Pilant
Jonathan Watts writing for The Guardian has an article: Deforestation has killed half a million people in past 20 years, study finds.
Deforestation has killed more than half a million people in the tropics over the past two decades as a result of heat-related illness, a study has found.
Land clearance is raising the temperature in the rainforests of the Amazon, Congo and south-east Asia because it reduces shade, diminishes rainfall and increases the risk of fire, the authors of the paper found.
Deforestation is responsible for more than a third of the warming experienced by people living in the affected regions, which is on top of the effect of global climate disruption.
About 345 million people across the tropics suffered from this localised, deforestation-caused warming between 2001 and 2020. For 2.6 million of them, the additional heating added 3C to their heat exposure.
The Climate web site whose staff was fired and operations halted is getting a second shot at life. This time as a private venture, climate.us.
Anyone with any concern for our future on this planet should add this to their browser as a useful and important web site.
Rebecca Lindsey is quoted in the article linked to below as saying:
“What’s happening can feel so overwhelming that it’s easy to feel like you’re powerless to do anything about it,” said Lindsey’s team member. “But sometimes you have to just look out and see what’s within your reach. And this problem is within our reach, so we just see it as sort of doing our part.”
And she is right. Every day some new horror, some new obscenity, some new assault on justice, on knowledge, on actual Christianity is thrown out there like a stain on white silk by the current administration and it is easy to get exhausted by the flood.
Eric Holthaus writing for the Guardian wrote the following article: Scientists breathe new life into climate website after shutdown under Trump.
Earlier this summer, access to climate.gov – one of the most widely used portals of climate information on the internet – was thwarted by the Trump administration, and its production team was fired in the process.
…
Now, a team of climate communication experts – including many members of the former climate.gov team – is working to resurrect its content into a new organization with an expanded mission.
Their effort’s new website, climate.us, would not only offer public-facing interpretations of climate science, but could also begin to directly offer climate-related services, such as assisting local governments with mapping increased flooding risk due to climate change.
This is an important lesson, an act of defiance against the fools and charlatans running the current regime.
We must never give into hopelessness.
Our democracy is at stake.
We must fight. They are fighting for scientific knowledge and a respect for factual data. Look at their courage and hard work and realize that what we do matters.
Environmental destruction is a world wide problem. Some nations are taking the problem seriously. I don’t live in one of those. I live in the United States where environmental rules and regulations are on the chopping block, victims of dark money, ruthless corporate officials and the right wing media machine.
But other nations have not given up the struggle and one of them is Sri Lanka.
I want you to know that fines as in this case are a good way of punishing miscreants who do severe harm. Money is useful in repairing environment damage and making victims whole.
But a message that resonates requires imprisonment and other directly personal penalties. It is one thing to require a corporation to pay a billion dollars but another to make the CEO pay money out of his own pocket, suffer travel restrictions and and an inability to do financial transactions or serve on corporate boards. Those kinds of penalties will get corporate officials’ attention. Corporations have a lot of money. What they don’t have are officials willing to suffer.
We can also destroy corporations who sin against the nation’s collective interest. The corporate death penalty where the corporation’s legal existence is ended and its assets sold as a penalty would also serve to get the attention of the wrong doers.
Corporations are creations of the state. Their charters can be revoked and they can be ended. It is a choice we should have. Corporate incompetence and villainy have resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, billions upon billions of dollars in damages and massive destruction eco-systems. If we “killl” a few, they might do less harm. We might at least get the idea across that we take their destruction of the planet seriously.
We have a responsibility as patriots to protect our nation. That includes the land, the water and the air. It is a profoundly moral duty. For those of us who believe in Christianity, we also have a responsibility to act as stewards of God’s creation. That also calls us to action.
Let us go forth armed with righteousness and a willingness to confront and defeat evil.
James Pilant
(Probably the proper attitude for hauling a dangerous cargo and chemicals and microplastics.)
In an article written for The Cool Down, Alexis McDonell, writes in an article entitled:
Shipping giant hit with $1 billion fine after causing one of worst marine disasters in history: ‘Unprecedented devastation’
The Supreme Court of Sri Lanka found a shipping company liable for a billion.
In June 2021, the MV X-Press Pearl caught fire and sank off the coast of Colombo while carrying a cargo of chemicals.
The Supreme Court described the result as “unprecedented devastation to the marine environment of Sri Lanka,” citing the deaths of 417 turtles, 48 dolphins, eight whales, and countless fish that washed ashore. Debris from the ship, including several tons of plastic pellets used to manufacture bags, spread across beaches and into the ocean.
“This marine environmental disaster … resulted in the widespread release of toxic and hazardous substances into the marine environment, poisoning ocean waters, killing marine species, and destructing phytoplankton,” the judgment stated.
You would think that in a democracy what a majority of the people want would matter. You’d think. But very often it seems that the distance between what Americans wish for and want to happen and what our government does is wider than the Grand Canyon.
Can I give you an example? Quite a few but let us do just one. Do Americans want subsidies for solar energy?
(Quote from the article above.) An Instagram Reel by EnergySage — a platform that helps homeowners save up to $10,000 on rooftop solar panels — shared the stunning results of a recent study.
“Nearly 90% of Americans are in favor of government programs to help homeowners go solar,” the video says. “That includes 78% of 2020 voters for President Donald Trump.”
The clip also cites a survey from 2019, in which 92% of respondents said America should expand solar power. The lack of partisan split was equally encouraging: 86% of Republicans and 96% of Democrats backed the idea. The clip finishes with a map of the United States, highlighting the states that installed the most solar power in 2023, the year the Inflation Reduction Act went into full effect. Seven of the 10 backed the Republican candidate in 2024. (End quote.)
Those number would seem to suggest with great certainty that the American people want solar energy to be subsidized and it implies that they believe the future is going to be one of sustainable energy. So, how are their views reflected in the actions of their “democratically” elected government.
The federal government abolished a major tax credit for solar energy. See the link below.
President Trump signed the “Big Beautiful Bill” into law on Independence Day, cutting the 30% residential solar tax credit by December 31, 2025—nearly a decade ahead of schedule.
But that wasn’t the only thing cut. The current administration used its power to destroy a solar energy program of quite a large size in Ohio. Note the link below.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to end the “Solar for All” grant program – created by the Biden administration – has eliminated cash that would have provided solar power to over 900,000 homes nationwide. For Ohio, the impact is severe.
But don’t the American people want solar energy? What’s happening here? What happened to the a government “of the people, for the people?”
According to the report, Big Oil’s total known spending in the last election cycle amounted to “an astounding $445 million.”
“Importantly, however, the oil and gas industry also routes undisclosed funds through dark money groups that do not have to reveal their donors, making it nearly impossible to understand the full scope of their impact,” the report notes.
So, not so much a government of the people as a government purchased and operated for the benefit of giants corporations like the associated group know as “Big Oil.”
That explains a lot.
It explains why the President and his crawling minions in the House and Senate are entirely comfortable with defying the will of the people.
In terms of business ethics, it is a catastrophe. Morally wrong, it not only subverts democracy, it has the government enacting laws that results in policies that make money for contributors but in the long term are disastrous for the nation and the larger planet as well.
And it is a symbol to every student in the United States who sees that human beings educated in the finest institutions and elected by the American people sell themselves, their honor and their votes for money.
The death of more than 1300 people at the Hajj in Saudi Arabia is tragedy for the world. First, pilgrims from all over the planet including the United States died. Second, the Hajj has been going on since the 7th century and there is strong evidence that these pilgrimages started in the time of Abraham, but there was no death toll like this caused by heat recorded in all of those years. This is new.
The temperatures that caused this tragedy exceeded fifty degrees centigrade and there were reports of temperatures of one-hundred twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit. And these measurements are expected to grow higher in the years to come as global warming accelerates.
This is just May, The first day of summer is weeks away. And many parts of the United States are already suffering from excessive heat. I worry that this is just the first mass casualty event for 2024. I very much hope that it is not. But while many of our pundits and politicians (Florida) pretend that climate change is an exaggerated threat, the thermometer cares little for political posturing and high temperatures kill.
Like it or not, climate change is big business. Over the next decade, the United States will spend at least $500 billion to “combat” climate change. To keep the money flowing, the government needs an endless list of scary predictions to keep the alarmist narrative going. The good news is Americans are beginning to realize that they are being lied to about climate change. More and more, polls show that Americans no longer automatically believe that climate change is an existential threat. Because they are starting to lose their hold, the alarmists are resorting to even more desperate measures.
I had no idea that I was a climate alarmist! I have mainly reported temperature events and today I am reporting deaths, a good number of them. On the other hand, this fellow may be right – I just might be desperate. And I am desperate because I am afraid there is little chance of effective actions before millions die.
He says, “Climate Change is big business.” Wow. And then had adds numbers, 500 billions dollars. The fossil fuel industry is 7.2 Trillion dollars. It doesn’t sound very even, does it?
He clearly implied that people like me are part of this “big business.” If he believes or anyone believes that I am making money off this, I don’t. I am just a concerned American worried about the future of the nation. I like to think of myself as a patriot. I want this nation, I want the United States to both survive and thrive.
Temperatures of over 125 degree in this country will severely damage the economy, the environment, our life styles and it will kill a good number of us.
I was looking at a poll the other day that found that 12% of the members of the Republican Party thought climate change was an important issue.
This is fascinating. I live in the middle of the United States. It is hotter than it has ever been and the weather more dramatic and powerful than it has ever been. You can literally feel climate change in the middle United States.
And yet, the great majority of one of the major political parties in the United States look at the thermostat and mutter, “Oh, no big deal.”
Looking at the news over the last few days, one sees that in the Philippines, it has gotten so hot that schools have been closed and classes moved online. India is in the grip of a huge heatwave.
And just today, now, here is a lead news article that indicates that thirty states are in the midst of record breaking heat wave.
“My Goodness” That looks surprisingly like objective evidence of climate change and maybe even a looming emergency.
So, surely Republicans will notice, right?
That would be nice. It would be part of the duty of a citizen in participative democracy to pay attention to facts and adjust their views accordingly but they will not change their minds. They live in a world where “owning the libs” is much of the meaning in their lives. And you can say, “James, that can’t be much of a life?” Well, yes, it is not much of a life. Thus there is just a ton of hysterical anger.
If you think I’m wrong. Look at the other stuff they are denying. They deny there is any significant racism in the United States (except against white people). Simply, reading the daily new should thoroughly prove that racism continues in America. It seems they don’t read. They deny the evidence of poverty and hunger in the United States to the point of refusing to supplement school lunch programs to feed children during the summer. And I could go on.
Florida has passed legislation removing climate change from consideration when making policy and abandoning a variety of green initiatives while also forbidding the construction of wind turbines on the coast.
To quote the governor of Florida:
“We’re restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots,” DeSantis said in a post on the X social media platform.
The level of irony in the words of the governor are difficult to approach. Florida is in the middle of very serious heat wave, there are coral die offs all along the coast, and insurance companies are fleeing the state like so many rats from an overheated and perhaps burning ship.
I am concerned. Not about the Republicans, their current fantasies are really just silly. Saving them from nonsense is not something I can do. When you surrender your judgment to a cult, an online posting, the rants of hate radio or some weird conspiracy theory, the death of judgment and intelligence follows. What concerns me is that this nation where I make my home will probably be unable to deal intelligently and effectively with climate change. And because of our enormous economic power, we may doom much of the world with us.
It is the greed enshrined in our society’s goals and the way our corporations are set up solely to take money as their sole goal that will probably doom us and our future generations. It is very sad. We live in a nation developed in the ideas of the Enlightenment. We have the words of Lincoln and Thomas Paine to guide us – and all of that history or righteousness and glory is being denied, diminished and attacked.
Oh well, if I am to die of heat stroke or flooding or some other interesting element of climate change, I will die here in the United States. It is my home and I consider myself a patriot.
It is unfortunate that the limitations, foolishness and greed of a some Americans are going to do so much damage to so many.
An essay in Vox suggests that there is real hope for climate improvement provided we don’t see a second Trump Term. (From the article:)
Last year, more solar panels were installed in China — the world’s largest carbon emitter — than the US has installed in its entire history. More electric vehicles were sold worldwide than ever. Energy efficiency is improving. Dozens of countries are widening the gap between their economic growth and their greenhouse gas emissions. And governments stepped up their ambitions to curb their impact on the climate, particularly when it comes to potent greenhouse gases like methane. If these trends continue, global emissions may actually start to decline.
Climate change is a critical business ethics issue. The danger of rising temperatures calls into question the social utility of many common industries and business practices. We are at a critical point. The article is optimistic but very guardedly and there are dozens of caveats. We are in dangerous waters with very few sure ways to go on these matters.
Ellen DeGeneres is back on the comedy circuit.
Now she tells it as a joke but back in the day, while the show was running, it was a classic case of power corrupting a celebrity.
The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday voted 3-2 in favor of adopting a historic and far-reaching ban on noncompete agreements, potentially giving more leverage in the job market to millions of U.S. workers. The agency has said that the agreements, in which workers are forbidden from seeking a job with a competing business for a certain period of time, lead to an “unfair method of competition” and violate federal law. The vote by the agency’s five commissioners this week means the ban will move forward.
From time to time, the world of business ethics coughs up a good story, a positive story. The Federal Trade Commission has approved a ban on noncompete agreements. This has been long overdue. Originally non-compete agreements were targeted at employees whose inside knowledge of the company would give an unfair advantage to any company that hired them. Unfortunately, many employers realized they could use the agreements to make it difficult for employees to leave since the agreement made it very difficult for them to get a job in the same field. They argued that knowledge given in fast food places like how to make a sandwich were proprietary and required a non-compete agreement. This legal bufoonery did not disguise the intent of making life more difficult for employees and empowering the company to treat them badly since the workers had difficulty finding new jobs with the agreement in place.
Musk on Tuesday responded to an interim court order from Australia’s eSafety Commission requesting that X hide graphic and distressing videos of the recent Sydney stabbing within 24 hours with a Wizard of Oz meme: it’s all shits and giggles over at X. In further posts, he took aim at the eSafety commissioner, claiming she wants “authority over all countries on Earth”, after labelling her a “Commissar” for requesting the removal of the video in the first place, which depicted an attack that the NSW police have since classified as a terrorist incident.
The idea that freedom of speech is served by these horror postings of crimes and other savagery is just nonsense. Media has the power to exalt, to educate and to entertain. But here it is simply a horror fest in which demented criminals are given free publicity encouraging copycats and universal cynicism from the nihilistic values on display by these internet companies.
We have a right to see that evil deeds not be celebrated, to not see vicious anti-social clowns in action and absolutely a right to not ever have to be treated to the half wit, degenerate manifestos of mass murderers and terrorists.
If the auto company has your car connected to the internet, your driving can be monitored and your insurance costs can increase.
Automakers have been selling data about the driving behavior of millions of people to the insurance industry. In the case of General Motors, affected drivers weren’t informed, and the tracking led insurance companies to charge some of them more for premiums. I’m the reporter who broke the story. I recently discovered that I’m among the drivers who were spied on.
People were led to believe that OnStar got you help when you had car or travel problems but that is not all that the program does. Get a load of this:
My husband’s LexisNexis report had a breakdown of the 203 trips we had taken in the car since January, including the distance, the start and end times, and how often we hard-braked or accelerated rapidly. The Verisk report, which dated to mid-December and recounted 297 trips, had a high-level summary at the top: 1,890.89 miles driven; 4,251 driving minutes; 170 hard-brake events; 24 rapid accelerations; and, on a positive note, zero speeding events.
Once they’ve got your data, it can be sold to anyone at anytime and it never goes away. It can raise your insurance rates. It has raised insurance rates on many individuals. Your data is in real way, digital currency and when stacked with other such digital data, you pay the costs of that knowledge.
Google is going to delay its plan to eliminate cookies. I find this a depressing development. We consumers should have the right to not have our internet choices tracked and reported. However, Google still plans on eliminating cookies, just when is still up in the air.
Quote below from the link above from Yahoo Finance:
Google has spent years preparing to get rid of cookies following similar moves by Apple and Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser. It has promoted the change as a way to improve consumer privacy and developed an alternative set of technologies known as the Privacy Sandbox to replace many of their features. The plans have encountered several roadblocks from industry participants. Google first announced plans to block cookies in early 2020, targeting the end of 2022 for their elimination.
Gateway Pundit is seeking bankruptcy protections as it attempt to deal with a flood of lawsuits.
Quote from the link listed above:
For two decades, the site has published falsehoods and conspiracy theories on everything from vaccines to election fraud. Donald Trumpfrequentlyshares its material. The most notable lawsuit against the website is from Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. In 2021, they sued the Gateway Pundit, Hoft and his twin brother, and website contributor Joe Hoft in St. Louis Circuit Court for defamation and emotional distress. The website had falsely alleged that the mother-daughter pair had purposefully manipulated the vote count in Joe Biden’s favor.
I won’t miss them. They deserve the economic penalties derived from their misbehavior.
An Iranian court sentenced outspoken rapper Toomaj Salehi to death after his arrest over songs that criticized the government, his lawyer said Wednesday.
This is an extremely sad story, a tragedy. Civilizations advance along a number of different avenues simultaneously although often at different speeds. Artistic movements are often less noticed than economic or technological or even political developments but it can be argued that artistic developments are the most important in the long term. Songs are strong indicators of the health of a society. If songwriters have great freedom to create, that says a lot about the creative environment in which they function.
We may safely conclude that Iran is a zone devoid of progress for artistic expression. This is a sure sign of a fearful, incompetent and reactionary government. The United States even with its turbulent political activity and struggling factions is a far more healthy environment for art. That is a good sign for the nation’s future and its effect on the larger development of worldwide civilization.
The President has tossed Social Security on the negotiating table. The new jobs report is a horror story worthy of Stephen King. Sometimes, you think the world is just going to pieces. Just when you think good news is impossible to come by, you get some (at least, I hope that is how it works).
Take a look at this. We can build a better energy future. We are already starting to do it.
James Pilant
by Tafline Laylin, inhabitat.com, July 6 2011 http://tinyurl.com/3zl8lwa A recent report published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration reveals that America now receives more of its energy from [so called] "renewable" sources than it does from nuclear generation plants. In the first three months of 2011, the countrys biomass/biofuel, hydropower, wind, geothermal, and solar energy generation plants produced a combined 2.245 quadrillion … Read More
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