Doing something about dark money

This article gets into some recent efforts.

Politicians would be much more responsive to their constituents if these dark money donors had to show their game faces to the world instead of surreptitiously subverting the public’s health, fortunes and wellbeing.

But here’s good news. A workable strategy is emerging that can rip the masks from the faces of would-be oligarchs and force their deeds into the sunlight, the best disinfectant. Change for the better has already begun to work without the help or hindrance of Congress...

Eventually, citizens working together can find cracks in the campaign finance system and keep adding pressure until something gives way. This is precisely what democracy needs in this country now—added pressure so that campaign finance and our political system can work for all of us, not as a gamed system driven by the demands of the greedy among the wealthy. - DCReport

School deformer arrogance took a hit in 2021

I saw about the SCOTUS call on Maine. Not good, but it was no surprise, and it probably won't have wide practical effect. Opposition to school privatization in fact runs wide and deep.

But what voucher proponents had not counted on was the pushback—not just from the usual coalition of teachers’ unions, progressives, and grassroots public school advocates, but from bipartisan lawmakers in politically “red” states...

“The fact that private school voucher bills fail even in states where Republicans have full control shows that these schemes are not nearly as popular as Betsy DeVos and others say they are,” says Jessica Levin, the director of Public Funds for Public Schools, a national campaign that uses litigation, advocacy, and research to oppose vouchers and other forms of school privatization.

“There are multiple reasons for these failures,” she says, “including that Republicans representing rural areas know vouchers won’t benefit their constituents because of the lack of private schools in these areas and because public schools often are important for jobs and community-building.” - Jeff Bryant/The Progressive

78 trillion from ditching coal

Obviously, assumptions were made, in projecting out to a number like this. But, and unlike what you see from, say, right-wing propaganda mills (sorry, “conservative think tanks‘), they’re legitimate, fact-based assumptions.

The world would generate $78trn in net ‘social benefits’ by replacing coal with renewable energy, according to a new working paper from Imperial College Business School.

The net gain in switching from coal to renewable energy sources would be equivalent to about 1.2% of global GDP per year until the end of the century, according to the study. Per tonne of coal, that would represent a net gain of around $125 and $55 per tonne of avoided coal emissions. - Energy Monitor

Those "little" oil spills really add up

And there are a lot of them.

On (June 9), an oil spill into the St. Mary’s River at the Ontario, Canada-Michigan border halted boat traffic between Lake Superior and Lake Huron for about three hours. This spill is small, relative to the massive incidents that usually make the news. Spills of this scale rarely make headlines, and that’s a problem: Small events are the large majority of oil spills, and together they have a big impact.

5,300 gallons of oil originating from Algoma Steel fell into the river at around 10:30 am, according to a press release from the U.S. Coast Guard.

...Spills like this happen all the time. The overwhelming majority of oil spills don’t show up in headlines at all. There are thousands of instances of oil leaking, oozing, pouring, and, yes, spilling into U.S. waters every year...

Sure, the St. Mary’s River spill is no Deepwater Horizon. But maybe all these small(er) spills should be big(er) news. It’s difficult to find reliable and comprehensive data on smaller spills. As far as Gizmodo can tell, there is no centralized tracker that shows volumes for all oil spill incidents that occur in the United States. But NOAA does keep tabs on a lot of spills via its incident tracker, which covers “selected oil spills off US coastal waters and other incidents.”

So far, in 2022 alone, NOAA has recorded more than 50 recorded oil incidents. Of that 50, the 45+ below both the ITOPF and NOAA thresholds have cumulatively spilled a potential 234,220 gallons of oil into our waterways. - Earther

Big corporate donors demand ag school influence

That this has been going on with economics programs is well documented. It's not ending there.

Since 2010, corporations have given at least $170 million in donations to public university agricultural programs, according to data collected by Harvest Public Media and Investigate Midwest in four states.

The figure likely undercounts the impact because it represents just four schools: University of Illinois, Iowa State University, Oklahoma State University and University of Missouri. The media organizations were denied records sought from several other universities that cited state privacy laws shielding donor information.

That corporate money has paid for research centers and specific studies at universities. That influence might limit the scope of what areas of research universities tackle, said Gabrielle Roesch-McNally, who advocates for women’s ownership with the American Farmland Trust. As an Iowa State doctoral student, McNally worked on a large federally funded research project.

”Corporate influence has that kind of much more tacit control over the research agenda,” she said. “It’s a way for people to say, ‘Well, they’re not controlling us. They’re not our puppet masters.’ But we only research the crops that they’re heavily investing in.” - Investigate Midwest

Methane as a "bridge fuel" is pure propaganda

This is replete with disturbing facts that are not being widely reported.

Perhaps the confusion over the motivation for the latest petroleum war is an unfamiliarity with natural gas, whose main component, methane (CH4), is a potentially worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2). Associated hydrocarbon gases are typically found wherever there is oil, mostly methane (70-90%), with some ethane, propane, butane, and hexane. [2] Combusting at roughly the same temperature of about 2000 °C in air, methane and ethane are sold on as natural gas, considered a better fuel than coal or coal gas. Since both are invisible, odourless gases, the foul-smelling, sulphur-based odorant mercaptan is added to warn about leaks and potential explosions.

After 70 years of interventions in the Middle East, we’re used to the black stuff gushing from the ground, but fighting over an invisible gas is new. Most of us also know about the toxicity of oil and its main refined product, gasoline, yet we readily burn natural gas in our homes for heating and cooking, unaware of the dangers from noxious by-products and leaks. Methane comes with good PR too, thanks to a Madison Avenue style makeover. Brought ashore for the first time to the United Kingdom in 1967 near Hull, North Sea gas was given the more environmentally and commercial friendly “natural gas” moniker to distinguish it from coal gas, which is much dirtier to produce and very unnatural. Customers quickly absorbed the conversion costs for heating and cooking. Celebrity cooks swear by it.

Alas, natural gas is just as dirty and unnatural as coal gas when burned, producing all sorts of toxic waste from incomplete burning, chiefly carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulphide, ammonia, volatile organic components, and particulate matter, as well as carbon dioxide and water vapour. Incomplete burning of methane is bad in the same way that burning any petroleum product is bad. We get the same toxic waste and respiratory damage from burning gasoline, plastic, vinyl, or asphalt, smells not easy to forget. - CounterPunch

There's nothing "empowering" about "school choice"

A thorough takedown.

Furthermore, school choice likely won’t empower parents because the parents are making these choices without being able to access all of the relevant information. This is a clear example of asymmetric information, a phenomenon in marketplace transactions where a seller knows more than the buyer.

In theory, consumer regulations are designed to balance this division. But, in the world of school choice, there’s almost nothing in place to require a charter school to disclose how it compares to other schools—other than, of course, school-wide scores from the annual Big Standardized Test. For private schools, the information gap is even wider, as what they choose to disclose is usually crafted by the school itself. Plus, third-party rankings for both, such as the list put out by GreatSchools and U.S. News & World Report, typically nudge families toward whiter, more affluent schools.

Parents, as a result, have few sources of reliable information when making a choice that is supposedly transparent. This is especially true in states like Michigan, where there are fewer rules around what charter or private schools need to disclose.

School marketing is also largely unregulated, allowing charter and private schools to make whatever claims they choose about everything from programming and the financial stability of the school to the very use of the word “public” in their title. Public schools, by contrast, may be reluctant to be as transparent as parents would like, but the law is on parents’ side when it comes to requirements for district transparency. - The Progressive