Methane

For years, discussions about curbing emissions have focused on CO2, the ‘carbon’ that we want to tax, capture, and cudgel consumers with. However, despite CO2 emissions plateauing in recent years as countries decarbonize, the planet continues to get hotter at an alarming rate. Turns out another, more damaging greenhouse gas has been increasing at an alarming rate:

The project’s “Global Methane Budget” report, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, finds that human-caused methane emissions grew as much as 20 percent between 2000 and 2020 and now account for at least a third of total annual releases. The largest growth came from expanding landfills, booming livestock production, increased coal mining and surging consumption of natural gas.

This is a problem because methane traps thirty times more heat than CO2 if allowed to stay in the atmosphere. If we don’t take immediate, dramatic action to curb methane levels, we could be on track for a ‘worst case’ warming scenario:

The primary causes of the continued increase in methane are livestock and landfills, two monuments to our colossal overconsumption. The 1.5 billion cows we use for beef and dairy products generate nearly one third of all human-caused emissions - cows belch and fart out methane as they digest food. Not only is our demand for cheap meat deforesting the planet, it’s releasing the gasses that are further cooking it.

Landfills, where our waste goes to decompose and turn toxic, are literally burning in poor countries, creating unsafe conditions for people who live nearby. Landfill methane emissions have grown even faster than livestock, climbing twenty five percent since the year 2000, now accounting for a fifth of the total.

The fossil fuel industry has been unable to keep up - even though its methane emissions continue to rise as the US especially pursues a boom in oil and gas production.

Humans manage to generate methane in other inadvertent ways - runoff from farms supercharges methane production from microbes in lakes and wetlands, as do the dams we erect to create reservoirs.

All this superheating could push us past warming targets and set off a cascade of deadly climate catastrophes as air patterns and ocean currents are permanently disrupted. We’re already seeing the double whammy of removing sulfur from the air as methane helps cook our oceans. Entire cities are burning to the ground in massive wildfires, which have also moved underground to feed on carbon deposits.

The good news, if there is any, is that methane dissipates from the atmosphere much more quickly than CO2, so if the world takes curbing emissions seriously, we could slow the warming of the planet dramatically before we reach the point of no return. Thus far, only Europe has made any progress reducing methane, which leaves, well, a whole lot of places where it continues to elevate unchecked. We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Microsoft

We are taking climate change so unseriously, that every major tech firm in the US is busy drafting plans to dramatically increase carbon-spewing datacenters to run chatbots. Oracle’s Larry Ellison is building an 800 megawatt datacenter to host ‘acres’ of NVidia GPUs, enough energy to power half a million homes. Ellison’s personal wealth has swelled as markets push his company’s stock higher on the promise of massive energy consumption without any clear promise of tech innovation.

The AI boom has, thus far, been a massive wealth transfer to the datacenter industry. Much of OpenAI’s ‘investment’ from Microsoft comes in the form of cloud computing credits at steep discounts.

Speaking of Microsoft, the company has already admitted the AI boom will unravel its ‘net zero’ climate pledge by 2030, but it doesn’t end there - the company is pitching AI to fossil fuel companies to help them extract more efficiently:

During an internal conference call with more than 200 employees last September, a Microsoft energy exec named Bilal Khursheed noted that, since the company’s generative-AI investments, the energy industry was turning to Microsoft for guidance on AI in a way that had perhaps “never happened before.” “We need to maximize this opportunity. We need to lay out the pathway to adopting generative AI,” he said, according to a transcript of the meeting I viewed. One such pathway? Using generative algorithms to model oil and gas reservoirs and maximize their extraction, Hema Prapoo, Microsoft’s global lead of oil and gas business, said later in the meeting.

It is refreshing (?) to see executives proposing actual use cases for AI rather than giving speeches claiming it will solve climate change and cure cancer (Altman, 2023). In fact, Microsoft has been working with fossil fuel companies for years through its cloud platform:

In March 2021, for example, Microsoft expanded its partnership with Schlumberger, an oil-technology company, to develop and launch an AI-enhanced service on Microsoft’s Azure platform.

Not only is Microsoft planning on building enough new datacenters to cook the planet:

Within the next six years, the data centers required to develop and run the kinds of next-generation AI models that Microsoft is investing in may use more power than all of India. They will be cooled by millions upon millions of gallons of water.

It’s focusing on using those tools to empower and enrich the world’s worst corporate polluters other than, as we’ve seen, livestock and landfill owners. Except, of course, Microsoft does sell AI products to JBS.

Climate Policy

It is incredibly naive to expect any of the companies responsible for destroying the planet to alter their behavior when they’ve got nothing but financial incentives to do otherwise. This is where governments are supposed to step in and say hey, you are not allowed to destroy the planet, and we can pass laws and force regulations on you to prevent it from happening.

And, as we’ve covered, in some places (Europe, China, parts of South America) governments have been able to force companies to emit less, transition to green energy, recycle, et cetera.

But we live in America, with a Supreme Court that has decided the government cannot regulate such basic things as keeping our air and water clean. Post-Chevron, we are going to see any and all attempts to curb emissions get sued out of existence by the right wing legal vigilantes representing the extractive industries and the tiny number of rich white men who own them.

Our government has been captured by conservative zealots who both deny climate change and actively seek to make it worse. The problem is, they aren’t even representing the interests of the people who keep electing them:

Nearly 8 in 10 Americans support funding research into renewable energy, and 3 out of 4 support regulating carbon emissions. Two-thirds believe Congress should do more to address climate change.

Even in Jack County, Texas, where Donald Trump received 90% of the vote in 2020, 58% support regulating carbon emissions. That’s the lowest of any U.S. county.

The right has successfully made the specter of the earth deep frying less important to its voters than other forms of culture war bullshit:

Still, when election season comes around, climate isn't his top concern. He plans to vote for Rep. Lauren Boebert, even though she's been an outspoken opponent of climate policies, famously dismissing the issue by claiming, "climate change occurs four times a year," referring to the seasons.

For Arnauch, other issues -- like his farm, family and the local economy, which relies heavily on farming and fracking -- take priority.

We have clearly not yet reached the point at which climate issues are economic and safety issues for a significant enough portion of the population who continues to be fleeced by politicians who represent only the interests of the worst polluters.

Eric Adams

Hahahahahaha:

New York Mayor Eric Adams was hit with five charges: conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery, and to receive campaign contributions by foreign nationals; wire fraud; solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national; solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national; and bribery.

I typically write this newsletter on Thursday morning (for procrastination reasons, not breaking news reasons) and I was preparing to talk about this piece detailing all the people in the Adams administration who had resigned, had their homes raided by the FBI, plead guilty, etc, when the DoJ went ahead and gave me a new headline. That said, it is never good when the New York Times has to create a color coded chart to keep up with your (alleged) crimes:

Some of the people involved in the Adams affair did stuff like shake down bar owners, but others were real pieces of work, like this guy:

A top adviser to Mayor Eric Adams under federal investigation delayed for months a multimillion-dollar contract to provide caseworkers at migrant shelters, an investigation by THE CITY has found — hampering urgent efforts to help asylum-seekers get work papers and exit the shelter system as their numbers in the city skyrocketed.

You may recall Adams spent months demonizing migrants, claiming the city was going broke trying to care for them, while the crooks in his office were actively making their lives worse by holding up funding for their own venal reasons:

In one suit, his co-workers quote him allegedly discussing his apparent desire to personally benefit from his work overseeing shelter contracts. “I have to get mine. Where are my crumbs?” he allegedly said.

The Adams indictment details years of the mayor receiving bribes in exchange for favors, which seems awfully common these days as politicians and their advisers openly take money from foreign governments. But stories about the rest of the people in his administration reveal a network of cruel, greedy, awful people who’ve been running New York like a private members club for the last three years. I don’t know how we get all these people out of power and ensure they never come anywhere near it ever again, but we should look into it, strongly.

Short Cons

CBNC - “Caroline Ellison, the star witness in the prosecution of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced in New York federal court in Manhattan to two years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion.”

ESPN - “Instead, not long after the Pulitzers were announced, the former governor sued Mississippi Today for defamation, setting off a battle that not only soured Wolfe's and Mississippi Today's moment but, more troubling to Wolfe, turned the focus away from the scandal itself.”

NYT - “In April, Mr. D’Esposito added someone even closer to him to his payroll: a woman with whom he was having an affair, according to four people familiar with the relationship. The woman, Devin Faas, collected $2,000 a month for a part-time job in the same district office.”

WSJ - “Goldman began experimenting with consumer finance after the 2008 financial crisis as a way to smooth out the up-and-down returns of investment banking and trading. But competing for middle-class customers proved both difficult and costly—and contributed to internal strife inside the firm.”

ProPublica - “What Patterson didn’t know, and what she said Exeter didn’t tell her, was that every penny of her next five payments would go to the interest that built up during the reprieve. That meant she didn’t pay down the original loan balance at all during that time.”

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