Renewable Revolution

Agelbert NOTE: Back in 1979 Americans were rather tired of paying through the nose for energy and all things related to energy (food, housing, transportation, breathing, etc. you get the idea). The Hydrocarbon Hellspawn were happy as pigs in poop, blaming OPEC for all those bad nasty oil high prices (that was making the Big Oil in the USA mind bogglingly rich from PRICE GOUGING Americans at the pump and everywhere else).

The blame was put on OPEC while the crooks and liars passing the cost to American public did everything they could to keep their gravy train going. President Carter put his finger on the cause without naming the industries that pushed rampant comsumerist materialism (as far back as Bernays in the 1930's - see: Century of Self) from planned obsolescence to "new" car models each year to feed our status seeking greed. When Carter gave the following speech, it threatened Big Oil (and the Republican Party already owned by Big Oil).

WHY? Because their entire profit over people and planet business model has always been based on making us addicted to pigging out on energy use, no matter the pollution cost, so Big Oil can buy or bop any politician that wants to stop their direct and indirect subsidy welfare queen gravy train.

 
So, their man George H. Bush made SURE Carter lost in 1980 by engaging in a treasonous conspiracy to not release the US State Department hostages  taken in Iran until AFTER the election, so Reagan could use it as a propaganda attack on Carter during the campaign. It worked.

Then Reagan did his part for Big Oil by telling everyone to consume (i.e". "Moring in America" = "make America great again" ). Big Oil drops the price of oil to ZIP to boost their people in the US Petrostate, even while they wail and moan about low oil prices.

Yes, the history books just don't want to talk about how Big Oil managed to drop prices so fast, IMMEDIATELY after Reagan was elected, despite OPEC still wanting more money for their oil. As soon as Reagan got in, Big Oil in the USA was able to control OPEC crude oil prices just fine, even though they just couldn't seem to "control" OPEC prices while Carter was in power... 

Big Oil disngenuously claims it was the "genius" of the "petro-dollar" scheme cooked up by another tool of Big Oil, Kissinger that lowered prices. That is 100% bullshit. WHY? Besides the fact that Kissinger started petro-dollar ball rolling BEFORE Carter became President (Kissinger was part of the Nixon Adminsitration), said duplicitous claim TOTALLY ignores the decision (irrefutably evidenced - SEE: The Tryranny of Oil by Antonia Juhasz) by Big Oil to help the US economy under Reagan in the opposite way that they (NOT OPEC!) HURT the US economy during the Carter Administration (the Bush+Iran Treason was icing on the 'make Carter lose' cake ).

I was there. I  was a Republican. The anti-Carter propaganda was so thick you could cut it with a knife. I fell for it. I voted for Reagan (just in 1980).


Learn from me and from history.

It's far worse now, but the Hydrocarbon Hellspawn game plan 🐉🦕🦖 😈 👹 💵 🎩 🍌 🏴‍ ☠️🚩 is identical.  🕵️

We kill Big Oil or Big Oil kills us, along with all the greedy, empathy deficit disordered, abysmally stupid Wall Street Capitalist bastards that support their "business model".




July 16, 2018 | By The Conversation

Guest post by David Swartz of Asbury University/The Conversation



Nearly 40 years ago, on July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter went on national television to share with millions of Americans his diagnosis of a nation in crisis. “All the legislation in the world,” he proclaimed, “can’t fix what’s wrong with America.” He went on to call upon American citizens to reflect on the meaning and purpose of their lives together.

Carter made several specific policy prescriptions. But in a presidency animated by spirituality perhaps more than any other in American history, this speech called more generally for national self-sacrifice and humility.

At a time when political strongmen, hypernationalism, and xenophobia have risen in the U.S. and the world, Carter’s speech offers a powerful counterexample to these trends.

A nation in ‘very serious trouble’

In 1979, Jimmy Carter was three years into his presidency. The burdens were many. Leading a divided Democratic Party, he faced a staunch and growing Republican opposition. The nation suffered from stagflation, a combination of economic stagnation and 12 percent inflation.

In 1973 the OPEC cartel, comprised mostly of Middle Eastern countries, had cut oil production and imposed an embargo against nations that supported Israel. In the late 1970s production declined again. Coupled with high global demand, this generated an energy crisis that increased gasoline prices by 55 percent in the first half of 1979.

In protest, truckers set bonfires in Pennsylvania, and Carter’s approval rating sank to 30 percent. An anxious Carter cut short his overseas trip to Vienna where he was holding nuclear-arms talks with the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev.

After a brief stop in Washington, the President retreated to Camp David for ten days. As he considered the severe and interlocking problems facing his administration, Carter read the Bible, historian Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, and economist E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, a meditation on the value of local community and the problems of excessive consumption.

He also invited representatives from many sectors of American life – business and labor leaders, teachers and preachers, and politicians and intellectuals – to consult with him. By the end of his retreat, Carter had concluded that the country faced more than a series of isolated problems. Collectively they comprised a fundamental cultural crisis.

The malaise speech


Having cloistered himself for an unprecedented length of time, the President emerged from Camp David with great drama on July 15, 1979. In a nationally televised speech that was watched by 65 million Americans, Carter intoned an evangelical-sounding lament about “a crisis of the American spirit.”

He said,

“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

Indeed, the President’s sermon expounded at length about excess. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns,” he preached. But “owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”


It was a penetrating cultural critique that reflected Carter’s spiritual values. Like the writers of the New Testament, he called out sin. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, he confessed to personal and national pride.

In the mode of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, he noted the limits of human power and righteousness. In this moment of national chastening, he committed himself and the nation to rebirth and renewal.

As a scholar of American religious history, this so-called “malaise speech” (though Carter never actually used the word “malaise”) was, in my opinion, the most theologically profound speech by an American president since Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

A squandered opportunity

This articulation of economic and political humility sounded the perfect pitch for a nation whose confidence in civil institutions had been shaken. The Watergate scandal had revealed corruption in the nation’s highest political offices. The Vietnam War had ended with a Communist victory.

The “malaise speech” was a continuation of a long-running theme for Carter. In his 1977 inaugural address, he intoned, “We have learned that ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better,’ that even our great nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems … we must simply do our best.”

Popular memory suggests that the nation reacted negatively to his speech. In The Age of Reagan, historian Sean Wilentz writes that Carter appeared to be blaming the American citizens for their problems. Others panned Carter’s idealistic approach to the energy crisis as naïve.


But that was not how most Americans received the speech. In fact, Carter enjoyed an immediate 11 percent bump in his job approval rating in the days that followed. Clearly many agreed with Carter’s line that the nation was mired in a “moral and spiritual crisis.”

The President, however, failed to capitalize on the resonance with his meditation. Just two days after his speech, Carter fired his entire cabinet, which seemed to suggest that his government was in disarray.

The President’s poll numbers immediately melted. As Time magazine described it, “The President basked in the applause for a day and then set in motion his astounding purge, undoing much of the good he had done himself.” Ronald Reagan soon capitalized on the disillusionment. “I find no national malaise,” said Carter’s successor, who campaigned on a platform of America as “a shining city on a hill.

About to win the Cold War, America was ready for some exuberant nationalism, not a plain-style president who insisted on carrying his own garment bag aboard Air Force One.

New resonance

Forty years later, national jingoism pervades both political parties. Republicans and Democrats alike speak of the United States as a “city on a hill,” and Donald Trump’s “America first” rhetoric has lifted hubris to new heights and alienated allies around the world.

The Conversation Jimmy Carter’s sermon of humility speaks more than ever to crises of our times.

David Swartz is Associate Professor of History, Asbury University. This article was originally published on The Conversation.

https://www.who2.com/president-carter-national-malaise-speech-sermon-1979/

“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.” ― Fyodor Dostoyyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Tomorrow is Yesterday...

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August 29th, 2018 by Steve Hanley

Last Saturday afternoon, lighting strikes in Australia temporarily interrupted transmission lines that interconnect the electrical grids in the eastern part of the country. For a time, the grids in Queensland and South Australia were turned into energy islands, cut off from the national grid infrastructure. The Australian Energy Market Operator termed the incident a “power system emergency.”


Customers in New South Wales and Victoria experienced widespread power outages while those in in Queensland and South Australia noticed little more than a momentary flicker of their lights. In Queensland, that happy circumstance was due to an abundance of renewable energy available to meet that state’s energy needs. Some of the excess was being shared with NSW before the transmission line between the two was put out of commission.

South Australia was largely unaffected, thanks to the Hornsdale Power Reserve, known affectionately in SA as the “Tesla Big Battery.” It kicked in immediately to add 84 MW of power to the state’s electrical grid and stabilize the frequency of the local grid, which was disturbed when the link to neighboring Victoria was disrupted.

The success of the “Big Battery” was a silent rebuke to new Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a Donald Trump wannabe who channeled US senator James Inhofe when he brought a lump of coal onto the floor of parliament earlier this year to demonstrate his love of coal. In July, Morrison uttered these sage words to demonstrate his vast storehouse of knowledge about energy policies:

“I mean, honestly, by all means have the world’s biggest battery, have the world’s biggest banana, have the world’s biggest prawn like we have on the roadside around the country, but that is not solving the problem.” The Big Banana is an amusement park located in Coffs Harbor in northern NSW.



Last year, Morrison went out of his way to mock the Tesla battery installation in South Australia. “I don’t care if it’s wind, coal, the world’s biggest battery, but you’ve got to measure it on its contribution, and it doesn’t measure up to a big solution. 30,000 SA households could not get through watching one episode of Australia’s Ninja Warrior with this big battery. So let’s not pretend it is a solution.”

As RenewEconomy so cogently points out, “The Tesla big battery, also known as the Hornsdale Power Reserve, was able to play a key role in helping keep the grid stable and the lights on in South Australia on Saturday, in its biggest threat since the 2016 blackout. It did solve a problem. Morrison’s Big Banana, on the other hand, wasn’t able to lift a finger to help customers in NSW. Such a shame they didn’t have a battery to help them.” It also noted that people in SA were able to watch their tellies uninterrupted by the crisis.

The outage occurred on the first day of Morrison’s term in office after ousting Malcolm Turnbull last week. Compounding the ignorance of his administration, Matt Canavan, the country’s new resources minister, told The Australian after the event, “The system has heightened vulnerability because of the reliance on interstate and unreliable power. More investment in coal, gas or hydro would firm up the system, create more supply and bring down prices.”

That’s a lie. When the interstate transmission lines went down, NSW was forced to shed 724 MW of load and Victoria 280 MW. In South Australia, no load was shed. None. As in, not any. AEMO said after the event the outages had nothing to do with any loss of generation. In fact, no generator — whether coal, gas, wind or solar — tripped off as a result of the transmission failure. So, sorry, Matt Canavan — no amount of extra generating capability would have helped the situation.

Morrison has appointed Angus Taylor, a fierce critic of renewable energy policies, as his new energy minister, leading the Australian Clean Energy Council to declare that is is now up to the individual states to move the renewable energy revolution forward with no expectation of assistance from the federal government, according to a report by Energy Matters.

If you think it is merely a coincidence that Australia and the US are both now hostages to fossil fuel advocates 🐉🦕🦖 , you are simply not paying attention. Despite some recent efforts to greenwash themselves, the fossil fuel interests are busy committing crimes against humanity in the background while they continue to stuff their pockets with oil-soaked cash and coal-polished coins, and then use some of that money to buy influence at the highest levels.

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/29/tesla-big-battery-responds-to-power-system-emergency-in-australia/

BY William Rivers Pitt Truthout
PUBLISHED September 13, 2018

SNIPPET:

The reasons why climate scientists don’t sleep well at night can be condensed into one word: methane. The current methane situation within ongoing planet-wide climate change is already dire. In his ruinous quest to erase the legacy of his predecessor, Donald Trump intends to make matters even worse.

Full article:

https://truthout.org/articles/trump-lights-the-fuse-on-a-deadly-methane-bomb/



 The Fossil Fuelers 🦖 DID THE Clean Energy  Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, human health depleting CRIME,   but since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks 🦀, they are trying to AVOID   DOING THE TIME or   PAYING THE FINE!     Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on!   

September 18, 2018



SNIPPET 1:

America’s amoral military planning during the Cold War echoes the hubris exhibited by another cast of characters gambling with the fate of humanity. Recently, secret documents have been unearthed detailing what the energy industry knew about the links between their products and global warming. But, unlike the government’s nuclear plans, what the industry detailed was put into action.


SNIPPET 2:

The documents make for frightening reading. And the effect is all the more chilling in view of the oil giants’ refusal to warn the public about the damage that their own researchers predicted. Shell’s report, marked “confidential,” was first disclosed by a Dutch news organization earlier this year. Exxon’s study was not intended for external distribution, either; it was leaked in 2015.

Nor did the companies ever take responsibility for their products. In Shell’s study, the firm  argued that the “main burden” of addressing climate change rests not with the energy industry  , but with governments and consumers.

That argument might have made sense if oil executives , including those from Exxon and Shell, had not later lied about climate change and actively prevented governments from enacting clean-energy policies.

Full IRREFUTABLE article:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/19/shell-and-exxons-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings



 
 The Fossil Fuelers 🦖 DID THE Clean Energy  Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, human health depleting CRIME,   but since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks 🦀, they are trying to AVOID   DOING THE TIME or   PAYING THE FINE!     Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on!   

September 27, 2018



The Trump 🦀 administration 🐉🦕🦖 has proposed brutal 👹 changes to the Endangered Species Act. But hundreds of scientists and organizations, including the Center, are fighting back. We've called on the administration to withdraw the proposed rules, which ignore science, would strip protection from many species, and would speed up habitat destruction.

And you've spoken up too: On Monday we delivered more than 56,000 comments from Center supporters, defending the Act, to Interior Secretary Zinke. Thank you. We'll keep you posted.

EcoWatch


By Olivia Rosane

Oct. 05, 2018 09:12AM EST

The upper chamber of the Senate is set to vote at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time Friday on whether to end debate on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. If the motion passes, the Senate could vote whether to confirm him Saturday, CNN reported.

Much of the outcome will depend on whether key swing voters believe Christine Blasey Ford's testimony that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party when they were both in high school, or if they accept Kavanaugh's denials. But anyone paying attention to how he represented his environmental record would have reason to doubt his credibility, The Intercept reported Thursday,

In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh presented himself as pro-environment overall.

"In some cases, I've ruled against environmentalists' interests, and in many cases I've ruled for environmentalists' interests,"

he said.

But an analysis from Earthjustice found that of 26 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cases he had written opinions for, he had ruled for rolling back clean air and water protections 89 percent of the time. The Natural Resources Defense Council came out against a Supreme Court nomination for the second time in 25 years to oppose his advance to the nation's highest court. And an analysis by William Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, found that in 18 decisions he had made on wildlife cases, including split ones, he had ruled against protecting animals in 96 percent of them.

"He lied. He abjectly lied," Snape told The Intercept of Kavanaugh's testimony. "And if he's going to lie about his record on environmental cases, what's he not going to lie about?" 

In one moment in particular during his testimony on Sept. 5, Kavanaugh said he had upheld environmental regulations in several cases, including what he described as "the Natural Resources Defense Council case versus EPA, a ruling for environmentalist groups."

When senior NRDC attorney John Walke (National Resources Defense Council), who argued the case in question before Kavanaugh, heard his testimony, he was stunned.

"My immediate reaction was, I thought I had misheard him," Walke told The Intercept. "But as he kept talking, I realized he 😈 was talking about my clean air case before him. And then, I honestly could not believe that a federal judge and Supreme Court nominee was misrepresenting my case to U.S. senators in order to bolster his environmental credentials."

Walke wrote a Twitter thread explaining how Kavanaugh had misrepresented his own ruling. Walke pointed out that Kavanaugh had ruled against the NRDC and the Sierra Club, who had also participated in the case, on three out of four counts. He 🦖 upheld lax pollution limits for soot, lead, arsenic and other metal emissions from cement plants and let the EPA grant polluters  a two-year extension to meet the weakened limits. 😠  🤬 He only ruled in favor of the environmental groups on a procedural question.

"[T]he claim is revealing because my case was one of his own leading examples of pro-environmental rulings: that it is a very poor example ends up reinforcing the relative paucity of his 'rulings in favor of environmentalists' interests," Walke tweeted.

https://www.ecowatch.com/kavanaughs-environmental-record-2610220986.html

October 9, 2018



By Ilana Novick —  Deputy Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt is “the ultimate D.C. swamp creature,” according to watchdog organizations.

Read more:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/a-former-oil-lobbyist-quietly-wields-power-behind-the-scenes-at-the-interior-department/

Make Nexus Hot News part of your morning: click here to subscribe.

October 15, 2018


A report commissioned by the Trump administration whose findings ran contrary  to the administration's 🦖 claims that propping up coal and nuclear is necessary for national security has yet to be made public, the report's author said last week.

Michael Webber of the University of Texas’s Webber Energy Group tweeted Friday that a report finding that onsite coal storage is not a "critical factor" for grid resilience was delivered to the DOE six months ago, but has yet to see the "light of day." "The three points the report makes are useful and counter to the [administration's] narrative--and squashed," Webber told Bloomberg.

Read more:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-12/study-that-fails-to-back-trump-coal-rescue-plan-kept-under-wraps





It’s been 632 days since Trump took office and the halls of the White House are filled with the dirty footprints of the countless fossil fuel insiders. How could industry possibly assume more power in this administration?

Well, move over, coal-dusted smog lovers, and take a seat, gassy pipeline boosters, because last week the Senate officially confirmed one of the oiliest swamp creatures of all, Jeffrey Bossert Clark 🦖, to the top environmental position in the Justice Department.



Who is Clark, you may ask? Why, none other than the lawyer who successfully defended BP against state lawsuits in the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. He’s also involved in lawsuits against the Clean Power Plan, has voraciously challenged the government's ability to regulate carbon emissions, and has called climate science “contestable.” Clark’s also got full-throated support from CEI’s Marlow Lewis Jr., one of the fossil fuel industry’s favorite frontmen.

Clark’s nomination was officially announced last summer, so his confirmation isn’t exactly a surprise. But because we needed more depressing confirmation votes on our schedule this month, the Senate just got around to clearing Clark last week. In the 52 to 45 vote, Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (WV) and Claire McCaskill (MO) crossed the aisle to join Republicans in clearing Clark for the gig. (We’re not exactly shocked about Manchin...and white women haven’t been great firewalls for democracy recently, either.)

Per the Hill, Clark’s  job at the DOJ “will include being the top law enforcement official in pursuing claims against polluters and companies that violate environmental laws” and “defending Trump’s aggressive deregulatory agenda against an onslaught of lawsuits.” Since he’s questioned the legality of tying the EPA's endangerment finding to IPCC science multiple times, we’re not too confident he’ll hew to the IPCC when making his decisions. 

Want to protest Clark’s appointment? Better do it soon. The Trump administration has a proposal in the works that would block protests outside the White House and on parts of the National Mall.

They claim protests are costing too much money, but we have a sense it’s maybe something else going on... (If you want to preserve your ability to trample all over Trump’s lawn, the public comment period is open until the end of the day today.)

So congrats to the oil and gas industry’s latest shill to join the rest of the swamp creatures in Washington. There’s a chance that we may soon lose the ability to show them how we really feel on their home turf. But maybe it would be good to stay away: if Clark’s plans for the DOJ look anything like what he defended in the Gulf, DC will be a very messy place indeed.