Methane Methinks

To break the monotony of discussing carbon, oil, and gas emissions we’ll include one more greenhouse element that ought to be included while we’re on the topic. EPA is taking yet another major step in overturning emission rules which ultimately continues on their agenda to erase footsteps left by Barack Obama during his tenure to undo climate change -- with or without Scott Pruitt, who had been the EPA’s chief of staff before throwing in the towel in the middle of the game out of guilt from ethic scandals and had his place taken by former coal lobbyist and President George Bush righthand man, Andrew Wheeler – while they already have vehicle tailpipes and coal-fired plants checked off (New York Times, 09/11/2018, U.S. Is Set to Weaken Rules on Methane From Oil and Gas Wells, A1-A13). Their next step is to loosen requirements set by Governor Tom Wolf for companies to regularly survey their natural gas well sites and compressor stations for methane leaks (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 09/12/2018, PA Strives to Maintain Stricter Testing for Gas Leaks At Well Site, B6-B7).

From top to bottom: a typical natural gas compressor station 

and well site.

It’s just as Cecilia Muñoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council in the Obama administration, said, the administration is diverting us with idiot policymakers while behind the climate curtains they have bought in lawmakers who work quickly and “know exactly where the levers are” (New York Times, 09/11/2018, U.S. Is Set to Weaken Rules on Methane From Oil and Gas Wells, A1-A13). Now methane isn't thought of as the deadliest of all things in the world to exists like the ebola virus, malaria and sickle cell disease, or even oil and has no history as the direct product of an outbreak but has been targeted by Barack Obama's climate change prevention agenda just as long. Methane, by itself, makes up only 9 percent of greenhouse gases, but it is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide when trapping heat in the atmosphere. Not surprisingly, one-third of methane is claimed to be the main ingredient in oil and gas operations as well (New York Times, 09/11/2018, U.S. Is Set to Weaken Rules on Methane From Oil and Gas Wells, A1-A13). The plan for the proposal, as the New York Times reviewed in documents while the officials were distracted by the bigger fish in politics being fried just dreading to see the administration’s ambition to repeal Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act gone downhill and to make the occasional bust in looking thoroughly into the campaign’s connection with Russia -- and right now the whole Kavanaugh scandal -- is that companies would only need to check for methane leaks at well sites once a year, instead of twice a year and low-producing sites would only need to be monitored once every two years (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 09/12/2018, PA Strives to Maintain Stricter Testing for Gas Leaks at Well Site, B6-B7). In addition, the interior department of EPA are keeping their noses to the grindstone on a final draft for a proposed rule that would essentially repeal a restriction on intentional venting and “flaring,” or burning of methane during drilling or fracking (New York Times, 09/11/2018, U.S. Is Set to Weaken Rules on Methane From Oil and Gas Wells, A1-A13). What else is that it would double the periods between inspections for the equipment that operates the natural gas flytrap project from once every three months to once every six months. Even, scratch that, especially the oil and gas industries on the Alaskan North Slope would be taken care of where there is never good weather to inspect the equipment. There were no days off, especially not on Labor Day weekend when gas prices averaged $3.04 per gallon, the highest price for anything on a Labor Day weekend in five years as pointed out by East Central AAA public and community relations superintendent Jim Garrity. It was no Jewish holiday, though, because Labor Day is the best day for shopaholics to get the rush out of their system. On Friday, the Pennsylvania Turnpike saw 750,000 vehicles (the heaviest day with a peak in the afternoon) and on Tuesday, 615,000. You're only young once and nobody likes to eat bacon unless it's crusted and sugared over (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 08/31/2018, Holiday Weekend to Feature Costly Gas, Humid Weather, A8-A9).

A flare pit in the Bakken oil field between the United States 

and Canada

Neil Shader, spokesperson for the PA Department of EPA, said all they need to do next is to look into how the new proposal would affect Pennsylvania’s current state permits, GP-5 and GP-5A, that went into effect on August 8th. The permits required oil and gas drillers to perform equipment inspections twice a year on end and gave them thirty days to make the repairs (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 09/12/2018, PA Strives to Maintain Stricter Testing for Gas Leaks At Well Site, B6-B7). The upcoming proposal would lengthen that to sixty days, however, the EPA rule should not apply to leak inspections at shale well site and compressor stations built circa August 8th, according to Robert Routh, staff attorney for the Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council (New York Times, 09/11/2018, U.S. Is Set to Weaken Rules on Methane From Oil and Gas Wells, A1-A13).
Last June, the house of representative passed a bill relating to conventional wells and the development of oil, gas and coal; imposing powers and duties on the Department of Environmental Protection; and providing for preliminary provisions, for general requirements, for underground gas storage, for enforcement and remedies, for related funds, parties and activities and for miscellaneous provisions, dubbed "House bill 2154" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 09/26/2018, Senate panel advances measure to help drillers, B-7). Inspections aside, if the EPA's proposal is accepted, energy companies in the states gets more slack cut for them. And let's not forget the high costs to oil and gas industries by the year 2025 that would've charged them $530 million and they would've had the Obama administration and their regulations to thank. Oil and gas industries could save $484 million by the end of the each year. Let Florida have their solar panels and California its "Buy Clean" law. And if the Green Climate Fund isn't anymore successful and ends up being shut down, isn't that just a damn shame. It was bound to leave us in tears -- laughing or crying. The future is looking a different kind of "green" for oil and gas industries.

Shining sun where the sun does shine

Orlando, Fl expect eight percent of its power grid to be
supplied by solar panels.

Now we’ll discuss in greater detail on how Orlando, Florida is carrying out its part in turning climate change into water over the dam and the first thing we want to remember from the last blog is California’s “Buy Clean” law. And while the law was established to assure California a profitable assortment of building material straight from a source that’s just as clean as its condition was when it was supplied to them by their companies, a performance review of their inventory and supply chain never did any harm. It’s the neat freaks who act like they read every single word in the Paris agreement policy. (The New York Times, 08/31/2018, Making a Sunshine Statement: Thinking Carbon-Free in Florida B1-B3) So there was a need for Climate Earth’s services. The little things that come in 100's in our big world are endless and yet the notion of 100 percent carbon-free may not actually mean 100 percent zero emissions. If you want to be carbon-free, you most certainly welcomed to, but only through borrowing credits accumulated by other carbon-free power plants. Los Angeles has proposed to have the surviving coal-plants sold to natural gas producers that produces half the carbon regular power sectors produce. If consumers are willing to pay out their pockets for a coal-plant's bankruptcy and the new equipment to add to the transformation, then yeah (The New York Times, 08/31/2018, Making a Sunshine Statement: Thinking Carbon-Free in Florida B1-B3). Orlando's petroleum and diesel mix comes from the Curtis H. Stanton Energy Center, where diesel fuel is stored in two power supplies. Orlando also has its own little natural gas station at a vehicle maintenance shop that supplies its fleet of trucks -- nothing much of use to garbage trucks with their hybrid engines and less for the city-owned police department with their electric motorcycles. The connection, aside from the fact that you’ve never heard of any outsourcing done in either California or Florida, is that both are working to reaffirm the goals of the Paris climate accord since Trump declared a withdraw, only Florida is spinning gold out of something much different (The New York Times, 08/31/2018, Making a Sunshine Statement: Thinking Carbon-Free in Florida B1-B3). 
It's something of a mantra to Florida's reputation as the "sunshine state." A vindication of Orlando’s greenhouse aspirations are hidden in a majority of its ponds that were dug in Central Florida to collect its runoffs from various rainfalls. From these ponds, rise floating solar panels to collect solar energy for Orlando's power grid. Plenty more of them can be found in the immediate vicinity of Orlando where they are directly empowered by municipal utility districts (The New York Times, 08/31/2018, Making a Sunshine Statement: Thinking Carbon-Free in Florida B1-B3). These so-called municipal utility districts generate 20 megawatts of community solar energy. That's enough energy, plenty in fact, to power 3,200 houses. In the year 2017, EIA traced half the nation's energy consumption to transportation and the industrial sector while one-third of the nation's energy consumption was traced to the electric power industry. You'll need to remember that for a possibility such as that, electric companies will look for any surcharge such as a night light left on to add to their premium and Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan would've caused electric prices to skyrocket in 40 states. A drawback like that can only be topped with net metering as an incentive for consumers to purchase solar energy and donate an additional 10 megawatts from equipment on their rooftops with discount installation and an inclusive, but very expensive, offer of batteries to add to the experience. You can easily make a job like that worth a cooperative person's while with a good piece of change or even three paydays, but greenhouse energy is a powerful enough push for Florida (The New York Times, 08/31/2018, Making a Sunshine Statement: Thinking Carbon-Free in Florida B1-B3). With a little help from Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles' most prominent business models, consumers will be able to buy all the necessities in bulk. After all, the best things in life are free. The vehicle maintenance shop receives 60 percent of its power from the 1,530 resident-owned solar panels and they'll receive plenty more if Orlando's Venus flytrap project for carbon emissions from power plants and vehicles in algae pools is successful (The New York Times, 08/31/2018, Making a Sunshine Statement: Thinking Carbon-Free in Florida B1-B3).

Floating solar panels in a pond that rise and fall in 

the water, sending power to the grid.      

By the year 2020, Orlando expects at least eight percent of its electric grid supplied by much of its municipal utility districts, catered also to Universal studios and Sea World, to come from solar energy. Orlando's game is one where other cities and municipals are playing at but only under the distinction of net-zero energy usage by the year 2030. And can one city, with three of the wealthiest capitals behind them, really compete with a bunch carbon kingpins that dominate a world where health is a small price to pay for greater energy, as well as an entire government that is determined to keep one and crush the other? That's really up to selective perception now, is it? It works through everybody.     

Coals to Newscastle, not really.

Lots could learn from the Deep water Horizon Oil spill that occurred in 2010, when the BP struck oil at the Maconda Prospect and it leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. There was no telling how so much trouble could be made at the cost of a snippet of carelessness even by the ones who imposed the “Clean Power Plan” and it was quite a recipe for persuasion for states that are now substituting fossil fuel for other safer green power sources. Though the incident was powerless to prevent Petroteq Energy of Canada from expediting for wads of oil sands in the Asphalt Ridge in Utah and they really should've quit after numerous failures in the Middle East, South America, and Canada, just like all the other prominent oil companies even in the vicinity of Canada, where oil sands are typically called "carbon bombs" (The New York Times, 08/22/2018, A New Bet on Oil, and a Different Way of Extracting It, in Utah B1-B4). 

Since Orlando, Florida was one of those cities near the site of the incident, they are especially aware of the sincerity in the situation alongside California, more aware than the other countries, in fact. Statistics have shown that North America and Europe are doing well in plunging homemade fossil fuel usage on their own -- most countries have been doing well long before the Paris Agreement (Britain’s emissions, for instance, dropped one-third from 1990 to 2015) -- but the question is what on earth else are they doing with it (The New York Times, 09/06/2018, Trailing Carbon Footprints Across Borders B1-B5)? They are all too smart to resort to just gathering up all that petroleum power in huge piles and throwing it away into the ocean, thus, a second time, putting pollution where pureness should be. There are special cases for countries like China, India, Cambodia, or the Congo where petroleum is the current gold standard for the existence of electricity in such primitive regions. The Chinese buy it the way all the other carbon producing countries afford their fossil fuel, the cement and steel they outsource overseas, plus 23 percent more of their own per ton of steel which is twice as much as American or German manufacturers make. The richer countries are into the outsourcing of fossil fuel as much as the developing countries are and they have plenty of connections to help them advance it as well. Britain’s paid interest on global emissions is the steel used to make London’s skyscrapers and vehicles. Include that in Britain's carbon footprints and you'll see that Britain's emission have actually tip-toed upwards behind the rackets (The New York Times, 09/06/2018, Trailing Carbon Footprints Across Borders B1-B5). This is all conservatism that really could be used to contribute to the Green Climate Fund, a program designed in 2009 to set an alternative for developing countries whose one-third of economy is depend on fossil fuel, giving rise to another country-sized Christmas club for already developed countries to put their money into rather than just send good vibes. In the last decade and decades long ago, there were many Christmas clubs of this size and there were as many Ponzi schemes disguised just like it and the Green Climate Fund was one more program in which nobody should have counted their chickens before they hatched (The New York Times, 09/10/2018, Promised Billions for Climate Change, Poor Countries Are Still Waiting A10).

Top: Parch land in Bang Pla Ma district. Bottom: Flooded
streets of Handoi

The data provided by the program estimates that there are currently seventy-four projects approved for Green Climate Funding and enough money has been delivered to cover only three projects in Southeast Asia, worth $156 million in total, while the rest would be worth $904 million. The money was submitted through large development banks and private-sector enterprises and rather than the promised $10.3 billion, it came in only $3.5 billion per year. The Obama administration submitted $1 billion on a pledge of $3 billion. Since its cities are located in the red zone near the pacific ocean, and also since its collieries are expected to multiply in the coming years, it would be easy to imagine the same fate befalling Southeast Asia as Mexico. They know that somewhere down in places like Bangkok, Thailand, there are unwed teenage mothers in the child support hole and homeless scared straight with only an elm as shelter for a storm and there are people who are praying for a miracle to solve those things and yet Vietnam got its storm-proof shelters for the possibility of tempests in the area as part of a $30 million grant from the program (The New York Times,09/10/2018, Promised Billions for Climate Change, Poor Countries Are Still Waiting A10). Instead it's "If a bunch of kowtows on a panel in Le Bourget, France wants us to knock off the air pollution, so the world can breathe its fresh air again, no problem. Let's just stop producing our own and borrow a good many loads of petroleum from another party and if anybody discovers that our own load was left untouched and asks where the other one came from, we’ll have a reason convincing enough." Under the Paris Agreement, countries are held responsible only for the emissions produced within their borders. Maybe the BP weren’t such pros at keeping their backs covered but nobody can be charged for using carbon that wasn’t theirs to begin with and neither should those who needed it more than they did. So, yes, when you’ve got connections like those, who needs dump trunks or an over-sized Christmas club? Coals to Newcastle. You're better of having an huge plan that could've save the whole world gone up in a huge puff of carbon, not that it would be you're problem anyway (The New York Times, 09/06/2018, Trailing Carbon Footprints Across Borders B1-B5).

Top: The City of Pangakaraya. Bottom: Protest in Bangkok

Californians have been the fairer players. The previous year, San Francisco, California renewed its Bay bridge with material drawn, not from domestic manufacturers, but from an industrial Chinese mill. Next thing you know, California Governor Jerry Brown has enacted a new state law codenamed AB269, that sends LA taxpayer money to far better usage than more petroleum and more diesel. California’s new expenditures are building material approved under the LEED label by the U.S. Green Building Council: steel, flat glass, and fiber glass insulation (The New York Times, 09/06/2018, Trailing Carbon Footprints Across Borders B1-B5). They could’ve informed their contractors about this great new corporation called Climate Earth, figuring they should seek advice from them about how to find the right brand of goods for their supply chains. Their technology can do within minutes what it would take a thousand metal detectors to accomplish, detecting all usable material around the earth with one-third of an industrial average carbon footprint. The commission of steel and cement production on global emissions worldwide is 5 percent. One-fourth of the global carbon emissions pass through the carbon loophole each year. Because people from California are addicted to keeping their hands busy without getting them dirty just like how all countries are becoming addicted to carbon loopholes, it’s no wonder they called it the “Buy Clean” law (The New York Times, 09/06/2018, Trailing Carbon Footprints Across Borders B1-B5). Utah is home to the world's largest deposits of oil sands. Let's just trust the results of the Utah Geological Survey and say there's enough to fill a boatload of 15 billion barrels. Though the company has leased over 2,500 acres of land, the targeted amount is 5,000 barrels a day within three years but in an additional 25 years it will increase to 10,000 barrels. Environmentalist are almost certain that the whole project smells like another fool's errand. Remnants in the aftermath of the project could create an infectious airborne virus, left out in the open waiting to poison a hungry animal, or leach into the water. And during the strip-mining procedure, the topsoil could disintegrate into highly flammable dust. If it was snowing, the dust would stain the snow and combined with the absorption of solar heat, the snow would melt away quicker which equals useless water flow. Dirt-stained snow does melt away in the sun as quickly as a Popsicle in case you didn't know. The lack of proper water flow can assure unsuccessful farming or forest fires (The New York Times, 08/22/2018, A New Bet on Oil, and a Different Way of Extracting It, in Utah B1-B4). But Petroteq just gave them the head-shake and told them not to worry. Not like what they got out of the Deep water Horizon Oil spill. They were geniuses at figuring out loopholes for contingencies. The first step is to mine and crush the oil-saturated sands into smaller chunks. Second, the chunks will be picked up and placed onto a conveyor belt leading into a tank full of solvents to mix with the material and won't be left just lying on the ground for some animal to sink its teeth into it. Third, the solvents will be transferred to a second tank in which the oil and sand will be separated via a centrifuge. Finally, the solvents are discharged from the liquid and dispatched for reuse and you've got yourself oil as natural as maple syrup. The leftover sand that the oil was separated from gets hosed before it gets caught in the wind (The New York Times, 08/22/2018, A New Bet on Oil, and a Different Way of Extracting It, in Utah B1-B4). So, it can be agreed, contributing $30 million to Asian pacific countries like Vietnam and Southeast Asia where 93 million people live and where an economy worth more than $200 billion is ran is coals to Newcastle, but so is drilling for oil near the gulf of Mexico or in Utah. And when you're already knee-high to 30 percent of what it takes to see them through at least a decade, you might as well keep on carrying the coal, cause there's no turning back.