A real effort to deal with orphaned oil and gas wells

If Big Filthy Fossil Fuels had any measure of responsibility or integrity, they'd pick up the tab. But, yeah, that's a laugh.

The Biden administration has awarded $560 million to plug orphaned oil and gas wells across 24 states, the largest single investment in oil field cleanup in history, officials said (August 25).

The funding is part of a $4.7 billion orphaned well program greenlighted by last year’s Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act. The bipartisan program offers grant dollars to qualifying states to pay for finding abandoned wells, tracking their methane releases, plugging them to stem polluting gases and restoring the land at the surface...

All told, states have flagged more than 10,000 high priority wells for cleanup, the first in line of a nearly 130,000 backlog of unreclaimed known well sites, Interior reported...That number is expected to rise as federal funds bolster state efforts to identify hidden or lost orphans. - E&E News

U.S. jobs are coming back

With plenty of caveats.

Thanks, Joe Biden! The Wall Street Journal is reporting that U.S. companies are moving nearly 350,000 overseas jobs back to the United States this year—a new record—as companies become a wee bit more wary about chasing cheap labor overseas and look to move infrastructure a bit closer to home. Again: Thanks, Joe Biden!

I'm kidding, mostly. The ability of presidents to shift global economic patterns is marginal at best, and business trends 18 months into a presidency may still likely be the result of corporate decisions made even earlier. There's really only one way for a U.S. president to dramatically reconfigure worldwide capitalism in a short period of time, and that's to screw something up to near-apocalyptic levels. To so botch world markets that they're on the brink of collapse. So what we really should be saying here is: Thanks, Donald Trump! - Daily Kos

Fracking is an enemy of humanity

For example:

Adding further evidence of the negative public health impacts associated with planet-heating fossil fuel pollution, new research published Wednesday found that children living in close proximity to fracking and other so-called "unconventional" drilling operations at birth face significantly higher chances of developing childhood leukemia than those not residing near such activity.

The peer-reviewed study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, examined the relationship between residential proximity to unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) and risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood leukemia...

The new study adds to a growing body of literature documenting the deleterious health and environmental consequences of fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction. - Common Dreams

Expect a boom in ever-more-flagrant greenwashing

A particularly odious example.

A major exporter of U.S. liquefied natural gas is “seeking to greenwash” its operations in order to portray gas exports as a climate solution and clear the way for further expansion, according to a new report...

In recent months, Cheniere Energy, the largest LNG exporter in the United States, has begun providing emissions data, which it calls “carbon emissions tags,” or CE tags, for its gas.

The tags quantify the greenhouse gas emissions of a given LNG cargo, with the aim of easing buyers’ concerns. The CE tags include emissions from where the gas is drilled upstream, all the way down to the point of export on the coast. The logic is to offer transparency to buyers overseas by disclosing the emissions of each shipment, which would help to clean up the supply chain over time.

But a new report from Oil Change International and Greenpeace USA says the program is riddled with flaws and is broadly aimed at portraying LNG as a clean fuel, rather than actually cleaning up the supply chain, at a time when gas developers are hoping to take advantage of the war in Ukraine to expand operations. - DeSmog

Pentagon contractors cleaned up, via fraud and graft, in Afghanistan

This sort of thing has actually been taken for granted, in U.S. military spending, for a very long time. That needs to change, and there's no good reason that it can't do so.

Pentagon contractors operating in Afghanistan over the past two decades raked in nearly $108 billion—funds that "were distributed and spent with a significant lack of transparency," according to a report published Tuesday.

"These contracts show the shadowy 'camo economy' at work in Afghanistan," said report author Heidi Peltier, director of programs for the Costs of War Project at Brown Univesity's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

"Military contracting obscures where and how taxpayer money flows, who profits, and how much is lost to waste, fraud, and abuse," she added. "It also makes it difficult to know how many people are employed, injured, and killed through military contracting." - Common Dreams

The reality of right-wing tin god Orban

That would be Viktor Orban, current boss of Hungary. Like every right-winger he's stupid and incompetent when it comes to actual governing.

To the cowboy fascists, Orban must sound like one tough hombre — except that he is currently on his knees before the European authorities, ten-gallon hat in hand, as he pleads for their financial assistance. Years of his incompetent rule have inflicted fiscal and monetary disaster on Hungary, and he is begging the "globalists" to bail him out. But his admirers in the West are much too polite (and dishonest) to mention these embarrassing realities...

In Brussels, meanwhile, the European Union leaders have given Hungary's finance ministry a long list of demands that Orban must meet before any bailout funds will be released. The conditions include restoring the rule of law, curbing the government's dictatorial tendencies and dealing more transparently with Hungary's rampant corruption. Rather than defying the EU as he suggested in Dallas, Orban meekly stopped baiting Brussels over LGBTQ issues — and has instead proclaimed his eagerness to make a deal.

Yes, like most bullies, he retreats when anyone his own size hits back. - National Memo

Blue hydrogen is turning into a dud

Which is good.

The oil and gas industry’s plan to convince the world to switch from natural gas to hydrogen made from natural gas is being upended by an unexpected cause: economics.

As the climate emergency has gotten more and more impossible to ignore and the world has started moving away from natural gas, the industry has hyped a new technology: so-called blue hydrogen. Blue hydrogen produces no carbon emissions when burned or converted into electricity, but the main component in producing blue hydrogen is methane, the most potent greenhouse gas.

...In Europe, green hydrogen is now cheaper than liquefied natural gas. And oil and gas companies, in turn, are increasingly investing in green hydrogen instead of using methane to produce blue hydrogen.

This is a remarkable development. As recently as September 2020, oil major Shell was making the case that “blue hydrogen can help create the demand and transport networks for hydrogen whilst green hydrogen costs fall.” In an article this month in the New Statesman that claimed green hydrogen wasn’t viable, Bethan Vasey, energy transition manager for Shell’s Upstream U.K. division, stated that blue hydrogen technology was “ready for deployment at scale now.” Meanwhile, Shell just announced that it is building the largest green hydrogen production facility in Europe. Shell could have built a blue hydrogen facility, but it chose green. - The Intercept

Companies are already selling info on who's pregnant

As if surveillance capitalism wasn't bad enough before.

And thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to overthrow Roe v. Wade, a good chunk of the nation’s police and private citizens can go after people seeking abortions and the doctors that would serve them if there’s enough evidence.

And in 2022, there is plenty of data to go around and plenty of players willing to pawn it off if the price is right. A Gizmodo investigation into some of the nation’s biggest data brokers found more than two dozen promoting access to datasets containing digital information on millions of pregnant and potentially pregnant people across the country. At least one of those companies also offered a large catalogue of people who were using the same sorts of birth control that’s being targeted by more restrictive states right now.

In total, Gizmodo identified 32 different brokers across the U.S. selling access to the unique mobile IDs from some 2.9 billion profiles of people pegged as “actively pregnant” or “shopping for maternity products.” Also on the market: data on 478 million customer profiles labeled “interested in pregnancy” or “intending to become pregnant.” You can see the full list of companies for yourself here. - Gizmodo