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

Israeli assassination of journalist gets the standard U.S. corporate media treatment

Most U.S. Jews don't support Israeli extremism. You'd never know that based on the behavior of our corporate "journalism."

Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known and much-loved Al Jazeera reporter who covered Palestine for two decades, was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper May 11 while documenting an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the Occupied West Bank...

The context of escalating Israeli attacks on freedom of the press and on journalists in the Occupied Territories did not enter the frame of most US news coverage. Instead, many used a back-and-forth blame frame for reporting the murder of a veteran war correspondent who knew well how to negotiate crossfire in the field of battle. This was acknowledged by Ali Samoudi, who said from his hospital bed, if there had been crossfire, they wouldn’t have been there.

Amidst the debunking of the Israeli messaging, by late Wednesday some news outlets, including NBC (5/11/22), noted that Israel “appeared to step back from that claim” that Abu Akleh may have been killed by Palestinian gunmen.

Yet most big media would continue to include Israeli messaging in their reporting, while failing to disclose any of the factchecking done on the Israeli video. They “balanced” on-the-ground testimony with Israeli statements, keeping the propaganda story alive. - FAIR

Facts about the food price crisis

This explains it, succinctly yet thoroughly, as well as anything I've seen does.

At the center of this crisis is the fact that the production of the world’s staple crops destined for export is concentrated in a small number of countries, and they are shipped around the world by a handful of trading firms. Much of this globally traded food is grown from a narrow range of seed varieties, using uniform industrial agricultural methods.

So, is it any wonder that a war involving two countries that specialize in producing two of these staples should spark a major global food crisis?

As we detail in the latest report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), the world’s food security is built on a house of cards—the whole edifice can tumble when one card falls. The concentrated nature of the global food system creates vulnerabilities, which can have cascading consequences when there are disruptions to any part of it. These economies of scale might be designed for profitable efficiency, when things operate according to plan. But they’re neither stable, resilient, nor dependable in the face of risks, especially for vulnerable people.

Add to this concentrated global food system the financial markets, which can further exaggerate the effects of price shocks. - Civil Eats

Tuesday's primaries were solid for progressives

Most of the results seem to be leaving Conservadems at a loss. But that's their problem.

Tuesday’s primary elections were defined by historic super PAC spending attempting to quash a number of progressive candidates and an attempted hostile takeover of the Democratic primary process like we’ve never seen. At last count, just a handful of super PACs had dumped $18 million to influence the outcome in favor of moderates.

The expectation in politics is that the person with the most money wins. And that played out in several races Tuesday night. In numerous races, massive super PAC money backed moderate candidates with institutional endorsements and little enthusiasm. But surprisingly, progressives largely won the argument that voters want to see their representatives fighting for an agenda rather than fighting to stop it. The candidates most tied to trying to slam the brakes on progress were defeated. The candidates who organized their communities in favor of getting things done for the people were successful. And in one incredible instance, voters saw through the hollowness of millions of outside dollars. - The American Prospect

Also worth noting is that attempts by MAGA kooks to take over school boards mostly failed. The author of that correctly points out that this is clearly a winning issue for Democrats, and many should make more effective use of it.

Rather intriguing, the most extreme Party of Trumpers did markedly better in races east of the Mississippi River. Maybe just an anomaly, maybe not.