..."When news outlets shut down in a city, that creates what's often called a news desert. But in Richmond, California, NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik says the situation is more like a news mirage.
Energy giant #Chevron is the biggest employer - and the biggest polluter in the #California city. Chevron also owns the local news site. How does that impact the community there?"
"The production of plastic, which is made from #FossilFuels, is greenhouse gas-intensive.
By the middle of the century, global #emissions from #plastic production could triple to account for one-fifth of the Earth’s remaining carbon budget, an analysis has found.
The report was released before the 4th Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC4) meeting for a global plastics treaty set to start next week in Ottawa, Canada."
I recently had the misfortune to travel past Shell's huge new plastic factory at Pittsburgh PA, fed by ethane from nearby fracking. And:
"Saudi Arabian Oil, the world’s largest oil company, plans by 2030 to send about a third of its oil to chemical plants, mostly to be used for #plastics.
#Chevron, whose CEO has said that no large-scale fuel refinery will ever again be built in the U.S., is constructing two major chemical plants —one in Texas and one in Qatar."
#CarbonMajors is a database of historic production data from 122 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal, and cement producers.
• Investor-owned companies account for 31% of emissions, with Chevron, ExxonMobil, and BP the three largest contributors.
• State-owned companies are linked to 33%, with Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, and the National Iranian Oil Company being the largest contributors.
• Nation-states account for the remaining 36%.
“The #CarbonMajors database makes it dramatically easier to document, calculate, and visually demonstrate the growing chasm between the urgent demands of climate reality and the continued reckless and intentional growth of oil and gas production,” said Carroll Muffet, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law #CIEL.
Donziger v Chevron is an issue of immense proportions and I hope more people will become aware of what it’s all about and get behind justice to stop mega rich corporations getting away with murder and environmental destruction.
In the 1990s Steven Donziger worked with indigenous communities in the Amazon to hold Chevron account after dumping billions of cancer causing oil waste into the rivers and streams of the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador - they did it for 25 years.
A legal case was won and Chevron ordered to pay $10B in damages.
Chevron hasn’t paid a cent but instead hired 1000s of lawyers to take Steven Donziger down. The crime remains and a battle is underway to obtain a Pardon for Donziger from President Biden.
Oil giant Chevron owns one American city's news site. Many stories aren't told.
@NPR reports: "Chevron is the [Richmond, Calif.'s] largest employer, largest taxpayer and largest polluter. Yet when it comes to writing about Chevron, The Richmond Standard consistently toes the company line."
The penalties come after an investigation by The Desert Sun and ProPublica found that companies were profiting from illegal spills and California’s oversight of the industry was lax.
Today in Labor History March 4, 1998: In Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal laws banning sexual harassment in the workplace also apply when both parties are the same sex. Joseph Oncale had been subjected to repeated sexual harassment by male coworkers on a Chevron Oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.
It would be more useful to separate individual actions from collective actions. If I want to know what /I can do now/ to ensure I’m doing all I can, the collective stuff is just clutter.
Switch to Ecosia
Ecosia looks like a greenwash to me:
Microsoft syndicate
MS partnered with the absolute worst of the worst oil companies to help them find places to drill for oil (#Chevron and #ExxonMobil) which also feeds the republican party and climate denial lobbyists
Patronizes Amazon for hosting (it’s hard to be more evil than Amazon)
Reverse proxies through Cloudflare who then pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs (see ¶9)… not to mention being responsible for compromising the privacy of everyone in the world while enshitifying 30% of the web.
Forces use of Paypal so they can sell swag, yet Paypal was caught under estimating their CO₂ footprint by something like 4000%.
Ties to Google, who helps Total Oil find places to dig for oil.
The list just goes on and on… And Ecosia hopes planting some trees will somehow offset the damage of their own existence. Not even close. Mojeek does less environmental harm by far.
Prioritize transit over cars
W.r.t. individual actions public transport doesn’t improve much because public transport systems are also quite harmful. Bicycles are the answer here. I had to take the car → tram step because it’s psychologically harder to make the big change to bicycle. But then eventually realized I could skip the wait at stops by going to bicycle. I wish I had been faster to upgrade from tram to bicycle.
Ride your bicycle instead of the car
Ah, so you had that already… that’s the problem with this list. I guess the public transport prioritization was a collective action.
-More widespread use of contactless payments
Cash is better for the environment. The #WarOnCash is giving far too much power to banks, who also have a huge CO₂ footprint that shadows what the armored trucks do. Those banks are dumping huge amounts of money into oil companies – see the Banking on Climate Chaos report. And see the environmental abuses column on this page. The best move is to use cash for everything.
-Require all office work to be done from home for as much as possible
Suppose it’s the middle of winter or middle of summer and 1000 employees work in an insulated energy efficient commercial building. Sending 1000 people home to heat or cool 1000 uninsulated homes is not favorable, even if those homes have heat pumps. Teleworking likely only makes sense during moderate climate times of the year.
-Improve insulation in older buildings
Perhaps a rule that employees who live in a passive home or heavily insulated home can telework all year long would inspire that.
Increase energy efficient standards with new houses with solar panels mandatory
I heard Belgium has mandated that all new builds must be a passive, meaning the not just insulated but designed with big south facing windows and everything necessary to not even need a heating or cooling system. They go as far as not even allowing a windowsill to act as a thermal bridge. Whereas in much of the US people haven’t even heard the term passive house. I spoke to a real estate agent who never heard of a passive house but he was confident that no such house existed in his state.
Someone living in a significantly sized city in the US could not find a single roofer who could install a vegetated roof. So what do you do there? Ideally roofers would get asked for a vegetated roof often enough that they come to realize they should adapt.
@dromografos Only #ClimateCriminals would boast about #fossilfuels production when our planetary home is burning and flooding. Shame on every shareholder of #Exxon and #Chevron and every govt subsidizing these criminals.
"Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta combined more than doubled their energy consumption between 2017 and 2021."
And they will double their energy and water and material demand again by 2026.
Is anyone anywhere in government paying the least bit of attention to the environmental catastrophe that Big Tech is massively accelerating? Or have all our politicians been bought off by Big Tech?
DIVESTMENT NEWS: Hayward, #California votes to remove Intel, #Hyundai, #Caterpillar, and #Chevron from its investment portfolio. All four companies are complicit in #Israel's #humanrights violations. It's time for other US cities and institutions to divest from #genocide and apartheid!
The #HaywardCityCouncil voted to divest the city’s stock ownership stakes in four #companies that have ties with Israel — apparently the first city in the Bay Area to take such a measure.
Wouldn’t it be cool if we made a wiki list of every action we as a society/individual can take against climate change?
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/15354536...