This is how we die, I guess

Tesoro is recruiting other Big Oil companies, including BP, to repeal California climate and clean energy laws
[Via Climate Progress]

This exclusive report by Wonk Room is part of a Progressive Media blogging series on the fossil fuel-funded Prop 23 effort to repeal California’s clean energy climate law. Read more on Prop 23’s economic impact, national repercussions, and funding from Texas oil companies.

Working with veteran tobacco lobbyists in Sacramento, Texan oil companies are orchestrating a campaign to roll back California’s landmark clean energy climate change law, AB 32. So far, the largest donations have came from San Antonio-based Valero, which has ponied up over $1 million for the effort, and refining giant Tesoro, also based in San Antonio, contributing $525,000. Today, the Sacramento Bee reports that state Democrats are asking Attorney General Eric Holder to open an investigation into these donations.

In public, the repeal AB 32 campaign — given the Orwellian moniker “California Jobs Initiative” — says it is about helping low income people, small businesses, and improving the California economy. But behind closed doors, it’s about boosting already sky high oil company profits. According to Valero’s 10-Q corporate disclosure forms, the company views compliance with AB 32 as a risk to their bottom line.

According to a PowerPoint presentation obtained by the Wonk Room, Tesoro has been courting other oil companies to join their crusade to rescind AB 32. At an April 13th presentation to the Western States Petroleum Association, Dave Reed, a Tesoro refinery executive in Los Angeles, pitched his clean energy repeal initiative, Proposition 23. The Western States Petroleum Association is an oil trade group, like the American Petroleum Institute on the national level, that advocates for the interests of their industry, including expanded offshore drilling off California’s coast. The Association is made up of many oil companies operating in California, including BP, ExxonMobil, and Shell Pipeline. Reed’s PowerPoint drives home the message that cleaning the air and diversifying California’s energy sources will have a negative “impact on [Tesoro's] business.”

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So, this “citizen’s” proposition funded by outside companies will prevent needed clean energy-climate change legislation from being put in place until unemployment is less that 5.5%.

UCLA just came out with an economic forecast for California. It has unemployment in California not dropping below 6% until 2018! And that was before the bad jobs report that just came out.

If this Proposition is based, the legislation would be halted for a decade – remember there has to be under 5.5% unemployment for 4 consecutive quarters pushing the deadline very close to 2020.

It will be very, very hard indeed to change our course if California has to twiddle its thumbs for a decade.

This is what happens when corporations are allowed to corrupt our political system. These guys must fail!

Why we have such great sunsets this time of year?

Why did smoke cause the a reddish sun?
[Via Cliff Mass Weather Blog]

On Sunday a number of you noted the reddish color of the sky and the orange-red hue of the sun. I mentioned in my blog that day that this was the result of smoke from wildfires, blowing in from BC (the main origin) and eastern Washington.

But why does smoke cause the red coloration?

The reason? The scattering of light by small particles in the atmosphere–also known as Rayleigh Scattering. It also explains why the sky is blue!

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NIce explanation with pictures.

We get a lot of haze in the air from smoke and such. And then, this time of year, it takes a long time for the sun to get below the horizon. Part of the fun for being so far North; during the wintr the Sun is over the horiszon in the blibk of an eye.

When crazy people win elections, sane people lose

Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty
[Via Daring Fireball]

Fascinating piece by David Corn for Mother Jones, on Bob Inglis, a very conservative South Carolina Republican who lost the primary election to a “Tea Party” candidate. Why? Because Inglis is not insane:

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!”

And because he wouldn’t falsely smear President Obama as a “socialist”:

For me to go around saying that Barack Obama is a socialist is a violation of the Ninth Commandment. He is a liberal fellow. I’m conservative. We disagree… But I don’t need to call him a socialist, and I hurt the country by doing so. The country has to come together to find a solution to these challenges or else we go over the cliff.

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Pretty nutty stories. I am sure that those who are checking out Social Security cards are a very small part of the Tea Party movement. I sure hope so.

Because we need people who can rationally deal with the complex problems we have to face.

If we only end up with people who retreat to their own made up worlds based on weird conspiracies and lies, then we are in real trouble.

Funniest Pulp Fiction parody ever

Pulp Fiction scene redubbed with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse voices
[Via Boing Boing]

“Descwibe what Mawcewwus Wawwus wooks wike!”

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Here is the video. Only 304 views so far.

We need some very specific denials from Google

by Johan Larsson

Google, Champion of Net Neutrality
[Via Daring Fireball]

Cecilia Kang:

Specifically, Google and Verizon’s agreement could prevent Verizon from offering some prioritization to the biggest bidders who want better delivery of content on its DSL and fiber networks, according to the sources. But that wouldn’t apply to mobile phones, the sources said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the companies have not officially made their announcement.

So Verizon and Google agree that net neutrality applies to Verizon’s DSL and fiber networks, where Google and Verizon have no shared interest. But mobile, where Verizon and Google are partners? Verizon can totally fuck over anyone except Android?

Imagine the uproar if Apple and AT&T worked out such a deal.

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Apple has gotten skewered on rumors less substantial than this. It would seem that there would be some sort of restraint of trade entanglement of Verizon worked a deal with Google to give priority on the Internet to Android mobile phones sold by Verizon.

Any anti-Google people out there at all?

Let’s see what the Supreme Court decides

US court rejects warrantless GPS surveillance
[Via Boing Boing]

Big news just in from EFF: “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit today firmly rejected government claims that federal agents have an unfettered right to install Global Positioning System (GPS) location-tracking devices on anyone’s car without a search warrant.”

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The fact that the Executive Branch was arguing FOR putting GPS on cars is disconcerting. The EFF site says this about the case:

In United States v. Maynard, FBI agents planted a GPS device on a car while it was on private property and then used it to track the position of the automobile every ten seconds for a full month, all without securing a search warrant. In an amicus brief filed in the case, EFF and the ACLU of the Nation’s Capital argued that unsupervised use of such tactics would open the door for police to abuse their power and continuously track anyone’s physical location for any reason, without ever having to go to a judge to prove the surveillance is justified.

The FBI did this under Bush but Obama’s Justice department continued to argue the case. At least the Circuit Court was able to recognize the dangers. Otherwise, 24 hour surveillance by the Executive branch and civl authorities of anyone could occur without any oversight by another branch of our government.

More travel information to consider

Green travel: rail rules, cars drool (and planes do alright)
[Via Ars Technica]

What mode of transportation is most environmentally friendly? A paper released online by the journal Environmental Science and Technology attempts to answer this question. Using a powerful, predictive chemical climate model that takes into account the effect of a wide range of pollutants, the authors examine the overall effect on temperature and radiative forcing from a given transport work unit and extend the analysis many years into the future. Turns out, air travel will result in a lower temperature rise than the equivalent car travel, but only after a long period of time.

The paper uses as inputs one year’s worth of emissions from various transportation methods, both freight and personal. The authors computed the rise (or fall) in temperature over 5-, 20-, and 50-year horizons, as well as the radiative forcing impact over 20-, 100-, and 500-year periods.

To account for obvious differences in capacity and capability, effects were measured against comparable units. Freight transport’s effect is measured per ton-km or per vol-km; likewise, passenger transport is measured per passenger-km, or per passenger-hour.

The freight categories were aviation, light-duty trucking, heavy-duty trucking, rail, and ship. For passenger transport, the authors looked at aviation, car, motorcycle/moped/scooter, bus, and rail.

Ship and rail were the respective winners in freight and passenger transport; both resulted in lower average global temperatures over the 5-year horizon windows. These drops in mean temperature are the result of a stronger cooling effect from sulfate aerosols and methane destruction (via ozone creation), which more than offset the rise in temperature due to the added CO₂.

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So flying may not be so bad after all. And everything should be transported by train or boat. An interesting comparison.

Realizing how different Americans are from everyone else

by isawnyu

Lawrence Krauss on faith and foolishness
[Via Butterflies and Wheels]

Religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth, while pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo.

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The fact that the NSF chose to leave out information that demonstrates just how off America is from the rest of the world was something I discussed back in April.

Krauss’ article in Scientific American retells some astounding facts, facts that demonstrate how far many people in America have gone in order to deny the facts around them. Only 45% feel that the statement “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,” is true, while 78% of the Japanese and 70% of the Europeans marked true. At least this number is better than the survey in Texas where only 35% agreed. Just think, twice as many people in Japan than in America know that humans evolved.

Similarly, only 33% of all Americans answer the statement “The universe began with a huge explosion.” It was 63% in Japan.

It turns out that Americans actually do know the answers to those statements. Curiously, if the first question is prefaced with ” According to the theory of evolution,…” or the second starts with “According to astronomers, …” substantially more people answer true. So, Americans know what the right answer is. Something else is preventing them from answering the same way everyone else in the world does when the qualifying preface is removed. Something is making them change their answers, even though they know what the right answer is.

Something is depressing the factual responses of Americans to scientific questions. What could that be?

Religion holds the best explanation. When people were asked why they did not believe in evolution the majority gave religious reasons – 72% of them say it is religion The more often someone attended church, the more likely they were to believe the world was only 10,000 years old. 24% of the people who seldom attend church believe that. It skyrockets to 70% for those who attend church once a week.

We have factual data demonstrating that Jericho was founded over 11,000 years ago, with other cities in the area being founded possibly several thousand years earlier than that. Yet most of those who attend church regularly apparently see these facts as lies.

Believing that verifiable facts are a lie is often how Cargo Cult Worlds are constructed. I really wonder how most of that 70% of Americans that believes humans were placed here 10,000 years ago deal with the fact of Jericho?