So here I am on vacation, trying to relax, and the hotel management thinks it's a good idea to slide a New York Times under the door each morning. How's a girl supposed to unwind with reality literally seeping in under the door?
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Crossposted at Truth & Progress and here below is a summary of some of the extraordinary columns and articles that have found their way into my vacation. Oh, how I wish I could claim credit for these headlines. See if you can spot the dotted lines between them.
1. Nicholas Kristof almost sent me back to bed yesterday morning with his "Big Burp Theory of the Apocalypse". Kristof takes us on a sci-fi journey back 251 million years ago to the Permian Extinction and then forward to the near future. Methane hydrates are enough to scare the gaseous emissions right out of ya.
Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. And thousands of gigatons of methane, equivalent to the total amount of coal in the world, lie deep within the oceans in the form of ice-like solids called methane hydrates.
The big question is whether global warming -- temperatures have risen about one degree Fahrenheit over the last 30 years -- will thaw some of these methane hydrates. If so, the methane might be released as a gargantuan oceanic burp. Once in the atmosphere, that methane would accelerate the greenhouse effect and warm the earth and raise sea levels even more.
2. Oil futures are streaking to new highs closing over $74 today. Meanwhile, U.S. gas stocks (supply) are slumping.
Oil hit a record $74 a barrel Wednesday on fears Iran's intensifying dispute with the West may hit oil supplies and after U.S. gasoline stocks dropped.
London's Brent crude settled $1.22 higher at $73.73 a barrel after peaking at a record $74.
U.S. gasoline stocks slumped more than 5 million barrels last week, government data released Wednesday showed. It was a larger fall than analysts polled by Reuters expected, and supplies are now nearly 5 percent below last year's level.
"Where the top is is pretty hard to say at this point," said New York-based oil broker Tom Bentz.
3. And then there's Paul Krugman's mince-no-words headline "Enemy of the Planet" where he excoriates Lee Raymond, CEO of Exxon, not for his large slice of the pie, but for impact his leadership has had on the planet.
The people and institutions Exxon Mobil supports aren't actually engaged in climate research. They're the real-world equivalents of the Academy of Tobacco Studies in the movie "Thank You for Smoking," whose purpose is to fail to find evidence of harmful effects.
But the fake research works for its sponsors, partly because it gets picked up by right-wing pundits, but mainly because it plays perfectly into the he-said-she-said conventions of "balanced" journalism. A 2003 study, by Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, of reporting on global warming in major newspapers found that a majority of reports gave the skeptics -- a few dozen people, many if not most receiving direct or indirect financial support from Exxon Mobil -- roughly the same amount of attention as the scientific consensus, supported by thousands of independent researchers.
4. Governmental ethics are central to this discussion on the relationship between governments and oil companies in exploring the Arctic (photo credit: The Guardian and Corbis) for more fossil fuels:
British scientists are at loggerheads with US colleagues over a controversial plan to work alongside oil companies to hunt for fossil fuel reserves in the Arctic.
The US Geological Survey is lining up a project with BP and Statoil to find oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean, under the auspices of a flagship scientific initiative intended to tackle global warming.
But the head of the British Antarctic Survey, which coordinates UK activity at the poles, has said he is "very uncomfortable" with the idea and has questioned its ethical and scientific justification.
I'm sure you've noticed by now that these four stories are all perversely connected and each simultaneously heating up on its own burner. For now though, I must return to other important cyclical thinking...
Hmmmm. I wonder if there are any petroleum products in this sunscreen here?