Be the potato

Corrupt corporate cash tries to bury climate candidates

Author

Brad Johnson
May 16, 2022

PRESENTED BY SQUIDS OF GLASS

It’s crunch time for candidates in tomorrow’s primary elections, including several races featuring progressive climate hawks battling oil-backed opponents. In Oregon:

Pharma is laundering millions through dark-money groups to back Schrader, and crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has now pumped in more than $11.3 million trying to install Flynn.1 But they’re both so unlikable that Jamie and Andrea look like the front-runners.

The Sunrise-backed Nida, Erica, and Summer are effectively running against the fracking billionaire Stacy Schusterman, who has bankrolled the DMFI Super PAC that is funding the smear campaigns against them.

Be the potato.

BURN BABY BURN: Saudi Aramco is now the world’s most “valuable” company with a market capitalization of $2.4 trillion, reporting a record net income of $39.5 billion in the first quarter of 2022.

One of President Joe Biden’s closest White House advisors is the very, very oily Amos Hochstein, a natural-gas executive with a striking resemblance to Darwin Mayflower. Friends of the Earth has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out how much Hochstein is responsible for Biden’s insanely bad moves to increase LNG exports to Europe. Lukas Ross, program manager at Friends of the Earth, is not happy with Hochstein:

“A former LNG executive presiding over an official effort to increase LNG exports is disturbing to say the least. This conflict of interest is flatly at odds with President Biden’s climate commitments.”

It’s gotten even hotter in India and Pakistan, reaching 50°C—122°F. That’s hot enough to drop birds out of the sky. The Indus river has shrunk by 65 percent. “It’s like fire burning all around.”

It’s only May, and fossil-fueled wildfires are everywhere. Mansions burn in California, and mobile homes burn in Colorado. There are wildfires in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the forest of northern Michigan. Oregon has passed new workplace safety rules to cope with extreme heat and smoke from wildfires. The mega-fire in desertifying New Mexico continues to burn.

From Zach Despart, the new Texas plan for federal Hurricane Harvey aid yields the same old result: Funds diverted away from poor, black and brown Gulf Coast communities and to inland, rich, conservative white communities.

John Oliver exposes the corruption of public utility commissions and the viral voracity of pea-eating ducks:

There are enough Congressional hearings this week that I’m going to include them in a second post coming later today. So be on the lookout!

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. DMs are open—@climatebrad

1 Bitcoin’s carbon footprint is now equivalent to the Czech Republic, and Ethereum’s to Libya. Their combined energy consumption of 300 terawatts per year is greater than that of Italy.

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