Americans are driving and paying, just like always

I don't claim to know how things are going to end up, including politically.

“For now, gasoline demand has shown absolutely no signs of buckling under the pressure of higher prices, even as California nears an average of $6 per gallon,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.

“It’s not impossible that gas prices would still have to climb a considerable amount for Americans to start curbing their insatiable demand for gasoline,” he said.

With the market slow to curb U.S. oil consumption, some experts are urging more action from governments — including leaders calling for more voluntary conservation.

The International Energy Agency — the West’s counterpart to OPEC — (two weeks ago) published a four-month plan to cut oil consumption by 2.7 million barrels a day, equivalent to all the cars in China.

The10-point plan calls for reducing highway speed limits by about 6 mph (estimated to save 290,000 barrels daily), working from home three days a week (170,000 barrels a day) and curtailing air travel for business (260,000 barrels daily).

Many of those practices echo pandemic-era behaviors, so they’re proven to be within reach, said Pete Erickson, climate policy program director at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Such efforts could still meaningfully impact energy markets, he added, without the disruption, isolation or scale of Covid-19’s lockdowns.

“From the perspective of trying to fill a Russia-size hole in the global oil market, it’s really significant what we’ve shown we can do through behavioral measures,” Erickson said.

“The U.S. is a major player in the oil market. It can make changes in its consumption faster than in its production — we have direct proof of that. And the scale of that [change] really matters,” he said.

To be sure, this approach is very different from what’s needed in the long term for climate, Erickson added. This short-term strategy doesn’t require building new infrastructure. That’s why it can work so quickly, but it’s also the reason it’s insufficient for deep and long-term change. - E&E News

Sanctions on Russia are just the usual cruel, ineffective crap

Like everywhere else, ordinary people suffer while the "elites," and the policies and governance they favor, aren't going anywhere.

“To bring the Russian state to heel, we must focus sanctions on the thin social layer of multimillionaires upon which the regime relies: a group much larger than a few dozen people, but much narrower than the Russian population in general,” argues Piketty. “To give you an idea, one could target the people who hold over €10m ($11m) in real estate and financial assets, or about 20,000 people, according to the latest available data. This represents 0.02% of the Russian adult population (currently 110 million)…. To implement this type of measure, it would be sufficient for western countries to finally set up an international financial registry (also known as a ‘global financial registry’ or GFR) that would keep track of who owns what in the various countries.”

Unfortunately, such measures will be exceedingly difficult to impose, and for one reason: Russia’s billionaires are sustained and protected by the same financial system that sustains and protects Western and Chinese billionaires. The latter group will not willingly abandon these self-serving rules of capitalism, even if it means allowing Putin and his allies to remain largely untouched amid the suffering of the people. - Truthout

Of course Big Tech wants to exploit social-emotional learning

And that's exactly what it's doing.

The connections between the Along platform and corporate technology giant Facebook are a good example of how these companies can operate in schools while maintaining their right to use personal information of children for their own business purposes.

Given concerns that arose in a congressional hearing in December 2021 about Meta’s Instagram Kids application, as reported by NPR, there is reason to believe these companies will continue to skirt key questions about how they play fast and loose with children’s data and substitute a “trust us” doctrine for meaningful protections.

As schools ramp up these SEL digital tools, parents and students are increasingly concerned about how school-related data can be exploited. According to a recent survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology, 69 percent of parents are concerned about their children’s privacy and security protection, and large majorities of students want more knowledge and control of how their data is used.

Schools are commonly understood to be places where children can make mistakes and express their emotions without their actions and expressions being used for profit, and school leaders are customarily charged with the responsibility to protect children from any kind of exploitation. Digital SEL products, including Along, may be changing those expectations. - Nation of Change

Does social media just reinforce gullibility?

I think many people use Twitter (for example) well, in informative and/or entertaining ways. And I'm never a fan of when essayists just blithely use collective pronouns like "we" and "our." Seems kind of presumptuous, to me. So by no means do I agree with everything in this article. But I do find it thought-provoking, and that's always cool.

Whether you’re R-Patz or a tiresome “influencer activist,” you act in response to an existing appetite: you spin a yarn about getting suspended for school for trying to save some snails, you promote the healing power of “perineum sunning” on Instagram, you tweet progressive-sounding nonsense about queer people in Ukraine that conflates several categories of “marginalized people” in a coloring book-level analysis of the current Russian invasion because the vibes just seem right. It’s what’s expected. Who really cares if it’s not true?

Content is content and all press is good press. Whether Pattinson really did lay down some sick beats in the Batcape is immaterial: Search for the answer and all you’ll find is page after page of music news sites repeating the claim rather than verifying it. Details and nuance don’t make for snappy headlines and successful SEO. And why would they? We’ve seen over and over that there are few genuinely worrisome or irreperable repercussions for lying, grifting, and fabulism online.

It’s no wonder, then, that in the eyes of the wider public, the “blue tick” journalist has fallen far lower in esteem than the entrepreneurial everyman. Unfortunately, both are infected with posters’ disease, or rather, the impulse to literally just say shit; the void of trustworthy news sources has fast been filled by hucksters (Joe Rogan), conspiracists (QAnon), and celebrities from both the right and the nominal left. And the components of critical thinking—the shared understanding of things like context, subtext, hyperbole, and metaphor—have been consistently undermined by the face-value, rapid-response urgency of social media. - Bitch Media

"Missile defense" still doesn't work

As the article explains, the answer to what I've quoted is still very much a big fat "no."

But given how far computers, drones, and laser technologies have come since the Cold War era, one might think that advanced technology could deter a nuclear weapon threat. Indeed, back in 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced the initiation of a program — derisively called "Star Wars" by critics — by which America could protect itself from ballistic strategic nuclear weapons from space.

Yet it's been 39 years since that announcement. So, are we there yet? In other words: if a foreign nation's military did, say, launch an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) — meaning a missile with a minimum range of 5,500 kilometers — could the U.S. or another country block or intercept it? - Salon

Lab-produced dairy isn't the big answer

There's probably nothing wrong with it that I know of, in context. But the real, mega-problem is called "Big Ag."

And yet while these “animal-free” dairy brands are promising lower-carbon, kinder products through technology, they may also be benefiting from the fact that most consumers know little to nothing about the science it relies on. And a number of the scientists and food system advocates Civil Eats spoke to worry that a loophole at the U.S. Food and Drug and Administration (FDA) has allowed the company to declare its own products safe, despite being an ultra-processed food made with a novel set of proteins that have never before been on the market. There are also big questions about whether Perfect Day and its peers are simply providing a very expensive distraction from other more—to use their own word—urgent systemic solutions.

Or, as Anna Lappé, sustainable food advocate and author of Diet for a Hot Planet (and a Civil Eats advisory board member), put it in a recent interview about the phenomenon: “I don’t think the conversation about alternative meat and dairy should take the place of the important conversation about how dominant the meat and dairy industry is, how it needs to be regulated better. We’re not going to take on that corporate power by choosing a different [product] in the marketplace.” - Civil Eats

Maybe think again about sanctions

They rarely, if ever, "work."

The current invasion is raising a dilemma for progressives in the U.S. who are sympathetic to the plight of the people of Ukraine, who believe that the invasion is abhorrent and unacceptable, and who want to stop Russia’s actions, but who question the notion that the U.S. can intervene in a way that is ultimately good and not harmful.

In particular, we are faced with the question of whether to support economic sanctions against Russia. Those of us who are grappling with the question are right to be skeptical...

Of course, those who have the fewest resources to survive in Russia — not the most powerful — will be hurt the most.

This was entirely predictable. As London-based financier and campaigner against Putin’s government Bill Browder told NPR about blocking Russia from SWIFT, “This is what was done against Iran. And it basically knocks them — any country that’s disconnected — back to the Dark Ages economically.” - Truthout

What should be done about Big Meat

Trenchant.

President Joe Biden has declared war on Big Meat. Yup, Biden’s war. The president pinky swears new rules and a billion dollars in new funding will somehow end decades of what amounts to a meat monopoly in the beef, pork and chicken industries.

In announcing the plan, Biden noted, “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation. That’s what we’re seeing in meat and poultry industries now.”

...Biden acknowledges that Big Meat has for years put its collective thumb on the meat scale to cheat ranchers, farmers and yes, all of us, at our local grocery store meat counter. And the president believes it's high time to do something about it...

But like presidents that have gone before (most recently Barack Obama anybody?) Biden's plan as introduced in January falls short. Way, way, WAY, WAY short.

Because Biden's plan at the moment would not break up Big Meat. - Investigate Midwest

Big questions about funds meant for oil/gas well cleanup

There's also the possibility that right-wing "judges" will block any rules that are established.

After the Biden administration’s bipartisan infrastructure law was passed, the administration hailed the bill’s $4.7 billion package to cap orphaned oil and gas wells as a move to tackle “super-polluting methane emissions,” saying it will combat the climate crisis and create jobs. But it is possible that, without tight rules, these public funds could be spent in ways that contradict those goals — and go to the very entities that enabled these environmental messes in the first place.

Though the administration claims it will establish safeguards, currently there are no rules to compel state oil and gas regulators to use the federal funds in a way that prioritizes plugging the inactive and supposedly ownerless wells that are emitting the most methane, or even any methane at all. The law’s current implementation also offers no assurances that the new jobs promised for oil and gas industry workers will materialize, although it is a stated goal of the law. - DeSmog