Yes, Environment! One of the ESGs.
Things we can do, NOW, to phase them out.
– Human Cleverness
This blog, wasterush.info, looks for the encouraging things that we humans can do to harmonize with planet Earth. The problem that stands out and never seems to stop is fossil fuel. Here too, there are ways to work on phasing them out. Now!
In this post:
The totally greedy/blind eye of fossil fuel,
The Dust Bowl of the 1930’s WHAT DID WE LEARN?
Civilian Conservation Corps
How Can we Save OUR Planet? Sir David Attenborough
Maping Methane in the Permian Basin – The Tools
The methane Hunters
CLOSING methane-spewing oil wells – Well Done Foundation
…Remember a list at the bottom of other posts about WASTE to Energy
credit: Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
The totally greedy/blind eye of fossil fuel
- From Reuters: The World Meteorological Organization says the planet’s oceans haven’t been this warm and acidic in 26,000 years.
- Earthworks’ Tricks of the Trade report tracks climate commitments (in their own words) from eight of the leading oil and gas companies operating in the United States—Shell, bp, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Equinor, Occidental, TotalEnergies, and ConocoPhillips. They attempt to decipher what those commitments mean in terms of absolute emissions reductions so they can be compared to what science tells us we must do.
The report finds that:
- In 2021 between 40-60% of the claimed emissions reductions for Shell, bp, TotalEnergies, and ConocoPhillips were from divestiture of polluting assets, which pass pollution off to other companies without any effect on global greenhouse gases.
- Every company’s climate ambitions fall far short of the IPCC’s directive to cut emissions in half by the end of the decade because they omit Scope 3 emissions which make up between 75-90% of their total emissions.
- No company is providing the data necessary to compare its commitments to reality or to understand what they are committing to in terms of total emissions, especially for their most immediate and critical 2030 goals. Additionally, climate commitments lack consistency in vernacular and reporting, making accountability extremely difficult.
- Every company is calculating emissions reductions using a reporting process which is known to underestimate methane emissions by as much as 100%
- Every company is falling short of achieving the goals they have set.
This is NOT the first time the USA has dealt with natural disasters, that were made worse by Humans.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930’s
Manifest Destiny: a phrase coined in the USA in 1845, the belief that white Americans were called by God to expand the United States and spread democracy and capitalism. This belief drove the US territorial expansion for the rest of the 1800’s. Eventually it led to the large influx of inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains and “the Dust Bowl”.
What did we learn by the end of the 1930’s? This 1937 film is supposed to answer that. But we see that the philosophy of that industrial Era still failed to see the bigger picture in pursuit of short-term goals. I have only used the end of this film, but enough that you can see where our understanding came from….and how much more we have to learn and Change.
What should we have learned by the end of the 1930’s?
With better weather the suitcase farmers returned and the same process that caused the dust bowl started again in the 1940s. What lessons can we take from what happened during the Dust Bowl.
Time makes people forgetful and we have to learn yet another problem with our experiences…………..water.
Lessons are hard:
Clearly, we have never understood what is causing Desertification…………
Allan Savory
A Very Hard Lesson Learned – worth your time to listen !
Civilian Conservation Corps
One of the good things we learned during the Dust Bowl and have continued to practice was how to use our people to fix the problems in an efficient and helpful way. Good for our young people and good for our land…….
Young people today have the same problems that existed for them in the 1930’s and as Climate Change shows us, so does our land. There are still Civilian Conservation Corps all around the USofA. There could be a lot more!
The USA needs more Civilian Conservation Corps!
Sir David Attenborough, UN Champion of the Earth – Lifetime Achievement
How Can we Save OUR Planet? “Change”
Sir David Attenborough:
Biodiversity equals stability and stability is what we need most of all.
Can we turn this situation around? Can we re-wild the world? Well maybe, due to one key change. As societies develop, something is happening that has never happened before. People are having fewer children. Globally, since the year 2000, the number of people under 16 years old has hardly changed. The main reason our population is still rising is because people are living longer. If this continues, our population may finally stop growing by the turn of the century. By investing in education and women’s rights and raising people out of poverty, we could bring about “peak human” even sooner. This changes everything it gives us [humans] the opportunity we need to regain our balance.
The plan for our planet is remarkably simple.
Reduce our [human] impact by making sure that everything we do, we can do forever.
For the biggest gains, we could concentrate our efforts on four goals:
1. Phasing out fossil fuels and replacing them with renewables. This will not only slow the warming of the planet and the acidification of the ocean, but it will lead to clean air for all of us.
2. Upgrading to efficient food production and reducing our consumption of meat will require far less space to provide for ourselves, leaving more for grasslands, reducing deforestation and our demand for fresh water and feeding more people with healthier more affordable food,
3. Working together to properly manage our ocean. A global network of no fish zones and a treaty on the use of international waters would restore the health of the ocean so it actually produces more fish for us all to eat.
4. Working hard to keep hold of the wild populations we still have. Encouraging nature wherever we can, in the ocean, on land we no longer need and even in our cities.
If we make these changes we’ll be a long way to becoming a species in balance with nature. Once again we will have taken a remarkable journey from a million people struggling to survive to several billion living long healthy lives on a stable planet able to provide for all our needs. Only at that point will the Anthropocene, the age of humans, be truly underway. At that point we will be proud to call it our planet.
How do we create a future in which both people and nature can thrive? We open our eyes to this moment in history, think on a planetary scale, embrace the challenge we face and
do something we humans are very good at…………Change the world!
For the largest gains, Sir Attenborough suggests we concentrate our efforts on four goals. The first of these Key solutions is:
An energy revolution
Phasing out fossil fuels* and replacing them with renewables will slow the warming of the planet and the acidification of the ocean and create clean air for all of us.
Are enough people actively working on changing and solving that very first issue of An energy revolution?
phase out fossil fuel
Groundbreaking New U.N. Report Shows
Reducing Global Methane Emissions
Would Have Major Climate Benefit at Virtually No Cost
Methane is a harmful super pollutant that warms the planet more than 80 times more than carbon dioxide, over the first 20 years. It accounts for a quarter of today’s global warming, and its levels in the atmosphere are surging. Clean Air Task Force has long advocated for more stringent regulation of methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, and a recent CATF study found that the U.S. can cut methane emissions by up to 65 % with currently available technologies.
*FF Pollution Solvers:
Do you have enough guts to work on the Solution?
Hi-Tech Cameras reveal “invisible” Methane Leaks – The Tools
Preventing wasted gases and other forms of methane emissions will help fight rapid climate change.
The Methane Hunters
Sr. Field Advocate & Optical Gas Imaging Thermographer
Sharon is a 5th generation Texan who worked for the oil and gas industry in Ft. Worth, but was unaware of any environmental issues. After 12 years, she left the industry and bought 42 acres in Wise County adjacent to the LBJ National Grasslands. Unknown to her at the time was that George Mitchell was experimenting in Wise County to figure out how to produce oil and gas from shale. She had a ringside seat at the sneak preview called Fracking Impacts.
https://www.youtube.com/c/Earthworks/playlists
As she watched her air turn brown and, eventually, her water turn black she documented it all on her blog texassharon.com. Sharon and her son moved to Denton, Texas thinking the city would provide more protection. That irony still burns, but it brought her life’s work with Earthworks’ Oil & Gas Accountability Project in 2010.
Sharon has briefed NATO Parliamentary Assembly, EPA regulators and even former Administrator Gina McCarthy on the impacts of oil and gas extraction. In 2014, she became a certified optical gas imaging thermographer and now travels across the U.S. making visible the invisible methane pollution from oil and gas facilities and giving tours to media, Members of Congress, state lawmakers, regulators, and investment bankers.
Sharon Wilson, Contacts:
Email: swilson [at] earthworks [dot] org
Blog: texassharon.com
Twitter: @txsharon
Location: Dallas, TX
Reverse Climate Change – One Well at a Time
Closing methane-spewing oil wells
Career Oil Exec Dedicates Himself to Capping Millions of
Abandoned Oil Wells to Help the Planet
One by one, however, the wells are being sealed by none other than a non-profit created by a career oil executive who became concerned by the mess which drilling activities left behind. Mr. Curtis Shuck – A 30-year veteran of the oil industry, has stepped in. He’s created the Well Done Foundation, a not for-profit dedicated to closing the old wells.
According to the EPA, there are 2,150,000 unsecured oil wells, some lying mere meters away from people’s homes, across America. They regularly emit more than 7 million tons per year of methane, which carries a huge climate change impact due to its effects on localized warming.
Located in the Waterford Township of Erie County, PA, this well was spudded in 1982 and abandoned in 2009. Plugging was completed on July 7, 2022!
The Well Done Foundation is excited to announce the completion of our most complicated well plugging to-date! Our Lady of Angels #1 well was located in the center of Franciscan Village, a residential complex for low income older adults.
A Scalable Model for Plugging Orphaned Wells Across North America
What started as a pilot project in Northern Montana has moved into legacy oil states such as Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Ohio and more. The Well Done Foundation can’t plug 2.15 million orphaned wells by itself, but our goal is to provide a template and scalable model to reverse climate change in an immediate, tangible way…one well at a time.
The Well Done Foundation (WDF) is sponsoring the first of its kind “Carbon Methodology” for orphaned and abandoned oil & gas well closing with the American Carbon Registry (ACR) which will be a game changing project finance tool that will allow the WDF’s important work to scale up more quickly without burdening taxpayers with the expense and liability. Beginning in September 2021 WDF began plugging orphaned and abandoned wells in Pennsylvania and has organized in Ohio, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and California.
Land Owners – Let Us Help Now! If you think you may have an Orphan Oil or Gas Well on your property, the Well Done Foundation would like to help. Take Action!
Please email Jimmy at [email protected]
Our Process Identification, Qualification, Adoption, Closure, Place Restoration
Other ways we can fix the environment also apply to USA
New life for aging and defunct coal-burning power plants:
July – 2022 – Coal-fired power stations, once a huge source of greenhouse gases, are being retired across the United States. But they still have a useful feature: They’re wired to the electricity grid. New renewable power ventures like wind and solar farms are staring to take advantage of that infrastructure to save lots of time and money.
Other posts on the subject of WASTE to Energy
Anaerobic Digestion In Full Swing – #1 Waste To Energy?
CNG, LNG, RNG Fuelling Stations – #2 Waste To Energy
#3 Municipal Solid Waste – MSW To BioFuel? Yes!
Finally In The Mood To Phase Out Fossil Fuel? Environment
Finally In The Mood To Phase Out Fossil Fuel? People-Civic
Finally In The Mood To Phase Out Fossil Fuel? – Governance
The “Relief” Of Phasing Out Fossil Fuel! …Now!
ALL Islands: Just Go Zero – NOW! – Like Tilos
We CAN Deal With The #1 Mistake: Fossil Fuel – Today
Look To Garbage Dump Sites For The Energy We Need! Sure Fire!
Other approaches to waste to energy in these posts
Useful Green WASTE Business Ideas That Scale To Any Size
Harvesting Waste Ideas. Waste Rushes? NOW!
Climate Retrofits On Land Or At Sea
Shipping’s Carbon Footprint And Your Small Business >> Your Vote
Industrial Zone – Closed-Loop Networking
Cellulosic Ethanol – One Of Many DSM Sustainability Projects
what needs to be cleaned
Too Much Methane !
The Greenhouse Gases List …..A Re-Review
cleaning up the mess
Can We, Are We Pulling In The Excess CO₂ ?
Fuel From Air? – Capture CO₂
Carbon Dioxide – Who Else Has Ideas To Pull It DOWN And OUT?
Urban Mining for clean energy
Urban Mining ! – More Important Than Ever
Critical Minerals & Rare Elements! ….. COLOSSAL WASTE RUSH