Vaccination, DEI, and climate change will no longer exist at these Houston public schools.
"The board of trustees for the Cypress Fairbanks independent school district in #Houston voted 6-1 earlier this month to redact certain chapters in science #textbooks, including those about vaccines, human growth, diversity, and #ClimateChange.
The motion to remove the chapters was made by the board’s vice-president Natalie Blasingame and almost unanimously supported."
I find it quite astonishing that climate mitigation systems - as great as they are - are being talked about so liberally without even a hint of who is to blame for their need at all. The fossil fuel companies should be paying every single penny of these infrastructural projects. Not the tax payer.
Second of the three European EPR ( Evolutionary Power Reactor) #nuclear projects - #France#Flamanville - will be shortly connected to the grid. The projects caused many controversies due to long delays… but they are getting completed:
🇫🇮 Olkiluoto 3 ✅ connected in 2023
🇫🇷 Flamanville ✔️ finished, will be connected by end of 2024 : 🇬🇧 Hinkley Point C 🕓 will be completed by 2027
The moment these projects get connected, they start delivering gigawatt-hours of low-carbon electricity to the grid, which is desperately needed for #ClimateChange prevention and mitigation.
Each of these has been criticised for delays (which is factually true but unfair) and “huge cost” (which is unfair and untrue).
Talking about the total investment cost in case of clean electricity sources that may live up to a century is a popular manipulation but what matters is LCOE.
It’s the cost of investment and operations divided by value of electricity produced over its life time. In case of nuclear power LCOE is quite low, in the range of $60/MWh because the relatively big initial costs is divided by decades of delivery of huge amounts of power. This is exactly the same case with very costly off-shore wind farms (e.g. the Doggerbank project) or huge solar farms (e.g. Ouarzazate in Morocco).
The reasons for delays are… complex. This article[1] by Joris van Dorp is probably the best explainer to why exactly Hinkley Point C was delayed so much. It’s a mix of reasons, starting from “first of kind” scale of the project to prohibitive and often absurd safety requirements lobbied after Fukushima by countries who saw an opportunity in replacing EU nuclear by Russian fossil gas. And they were absurd, for example because you don’t get earthquakes and tsunamis on the La Manche Channel.
And the reasons are complex, for example due to general UK attitude to funding infrastructure projects - they exclusively opt for private funding, which means the investors need to get a direct financial profit. Most people see the absurdity of private ownership of UK water utilities (which leads to no investments in the network and dumping of sewage into rivers by underregulated companies) but nobody sees the same absurdity in funding the electricity grid (which is in turn overregulated).
Oil companies contaminated a family farm. The courts and regulators let the drillers walk away.
The oil and gas industry has reaped profits without ensuring there will be money to plug and clean up their wells. In Oklahoma, that work could cost more than $7 billion if it falls to the state. #ClimateChange
‘Nothing left’: How climate change uprooted an Indigenous village.
In Latin America today, nearly half of all Indigenous peoples have migrated to urban areas due to land degradation, territorial dispossession, climate change and conflict, according to the World Bank. #ClimateChange
Some of the changes that we are beginning to experience are not simply rising sea levels or more extreme weather. It doesn’t look good and mitigation will be expensive.
Ah, #capitalism. Neoclasical (mainstream) economic theory tells us it ensures resources will be put to the best, most efficient use. However, ignores the obvious: wealth equals power, so that what is "best" for society is what the richest value.
Like chasing everlasting youth by getting weekly blood transfusions from your teenage son and $40,000 gym membership add-ons.
Gas appliances are more than a #ClimateChange issue and the estimated societal cost of $1B annually would buy a lot of induction stoves:
“We found that gas and propane stoves may contribute up to 19,000 adult deaths annually in the United States. We also estimated that long-term NO2 exposure from gas and propane stoves is responsible for approximately 50,000 current cases of pediatric asthma.” https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adm8680
"With the rising temperatures of #ClimateChange, homeowners face a new type of threat: invasive #termites. Previously unaffected areas could see an influx of termites, and the financial implications are substantial. Currently, termites cause over 40 billion USD worth of damage each year, and as their population expands, this cost is sure to grow."
What Trump promised oil CEOs as he asked them to steer $1 billion to his campaign
"Donald Trump has pledged to scrap President Biden’s policies on electric vehicles and wind energy, as well as other initiatives opposed by the fossil fuel industry."
The press is still failing at covering Trump properly.
"Take that New Jersey rally where he pledged to block #OffshoreWind farms (he also promised to go after electric cars). This didn’t get much attention because of Trump’s praise for “Hollywood’s most famous cannibal,” as a Post headline writer succinctly put it. “The late, great #HannibalLecter is a wonderful man,” Trump declared. Try arguing that #ClimateChange should have been the lead of the story that day."