Running, running, running

PRESENTED BY MOLLIE MATCHES

The oil and gas industry has delivered an average of $2.8 billion a day in pure profit for the last 50 years, a new report from Aviel “the Milkman” Verbruggen finds. He tells the Guardian:

At noon today the Climate Clock in New York City ticked down to six years and counting. Speaking of which, the Boston triathlon scheduled for this weekend has been canceled and the NYC triathlon halved due to extreme heat. Running out of time indeed.

TICK TICK BOOM: A drought in Italy’s risotto heartland is killing the rice. The amount of Greenland ice that melted last weekend could cover West Virginia in a foot of water. The taps have run dry in Monterrey, Mexico. Chinese paddlefish and wild Yangtze sturgeon are extinct. Across Australia, dead frogs are turning up in the thousands. The current heat wave has killed more than 2,000 people in Spain and Portugal.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature has declared the monarch butterfly endangered, a collapse caused primarily by fossil-fueled global warming, habitat loss, and Monsanto’s wildly profitable pesticide glysophate, brand-name Roundup.

In 2020, the Trump administration was forced by a lawsuit to admit the butterfly should be placed on the endangered species list, but Trump’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Aurelia “Poison Jenny” Skipwith refused to add it and many other disappearing birds and butterflies. Skipwith previously worked for Monsanto and is now on the board of coal company Ramaco Resources.

The monarch butterfly has been placed on the FWS Domestic Listing Workplan for review in fiscal year 2024, behind 110 other species being driven to extinction. The Foreign Species Workplan is similarly grim.

The current director, Martha “Grizzly” Williams, was only confirmed this February after Biden dawdled on her nomination until October. She requested an increase of $326 million for her agency’s budget to help deal with the backlog. The Democrat-run House felt the need to pinch pennies after voting to give the Department of Defense $839,300 million—about $37,000 million more than Biden requested—and authorized only a $230 million increase. The funding bill now goes to the U.S. Senate with a September 30 deadline for passage.

Big Oil is very worried that the Biden administration might crack down on their out-of-control pollution of the Permian Basin in Texas, saying that limits on the deadly smog their fracking operations are generating might hamper production.

Familias Unidas del Chamizal, the Sierra Club, and the City of Sunland Park have been suing for years to compel the EPA to regulate El Paso’s smog, caused by “a dramatic increase in emissions from oil and gas operations in the Permian Basin.”

The oil industry’s complaints are so weird, because I’ve been reading in the Axios and Politico daily climate newsletters PRESENTED BY Enbridge and the American Petroleum Institute that the industry is “integrating sustainability across our businesses.” Is it weirder than a tardigrade frolicking with a dachsund? You decide.

While upending climate legislation, Joe “Maserati Lucy” Manchin and his wife Gayle directed over $15 million in federal funding to protected wetlands where the couple owns property, Daniel “Poodle Dan” Boguslaw reports.

Yesterday, Manchin finally held a confirmation vote in his committee for Laura “Sir Daniel” Daniel-Davis, Biden’s nominee to be assistant secretary of the Interior for land and minerals management. The vote split 10-10 on partisan lines, which allows the full Senate to take up the nomination.

“IMPACT YOU CAN SEE”: Achieving greater heights of satire than Bruce “Silver” Sterling could ever hope to reach, LandLife, a tech-buzzword-based carbon-offset company, keeps setting devastating wildfires in its efforts to plant trees.

In other tech news, Pat “Diamond Pat” Garofalo reports that the New York Power Authority is refusing to reveal how big a discount it handed to Amazon for installing a distribution center in Niagara, New York—and is even refusing to admit the existence of such a deal.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE: “The city of Chicago is violating the civil rights of its residents by relocating polluting businesses from white communities into Black and Latino areas that already are overwhelmed with environmental and health issues, federal officials have found after a nearly two-year investigation.”

Congraulations are in order for Jeff “Rock & Roll” Marootian. The White House has nominated this sustainable transportation expert to be Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Marootian has been working in the White House in charge of hiring climate personnel.

Climate Action Today:

• 12 PM: Climate Clock
  Climate Emergency Day

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

Subscribe to Hill Heat

Climate science, policy, politics, and action