L.A. is on fire and Big Oil are the Arsonists.
Facts and analysis to shut up the MAGA efforts to deflect culpability on Democrats and DEI. In other words, the Truth.
Los Angeles is on fire and big oil are the arsonists
Every barrel of oil, every cubic meter of gas, and every ton of coal burned brings us closer to environmental catastrophe
by Tzeporah Berman
The Guardian / Opinion, January 11, 2025
Excerpt...
These powerful interests are ignoring what is fanning wildfire flames – fossil fuel driven climate change – and trying to deflect attention elsewhere. This is not surprising. Denying science and promoting false narratives squarely falls within the playbook of the fossil fuel industry and its proponents. Take for example, Trump calling climate change a hoax and once again threatening to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement.
Oil, gas and coal companies have been lying to us for decades. A 2015 investigation by Inside Climate News revealed that ExxonMobil’s own scientists knew as early as the 1970s that burning fossil fuels would cause global warming and increase the likelihood of extreme weather events. Instead of pivoting toward cleaner energy solutions, Exxon and other major players funded misinformation campaigns to sow doubt about climate science, delaying action and worsening the crisis.
California is part of a growing number of states and local governments challenging these lies through litigation. The legal suits against six oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute accuse them of deceiving the public regarding the connection between fossil fuels and climate crisis and profiting from that deception. The aim of the litigation is to redirect those profits into funds to address the damage of climate crisis on California. The litigation is still underway.
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The California governor Gavin Newsom is one of a small yet growing number of political leaders around the globe calling out fossil fuels for their role in climate crisis and generating health and environmental risks. In fact he has called oil, gas and coal “the polluting heart of the climate crisis” and has enacted new laws to limit their expansion and phase them out. Cities across California are joining him. Los Angeles, which has oil production within its jurisdiction, has banned new oil and gas drilling and committed to phasing out the use of coal and gas in its infrastructure among other efforts.
These leaders recognize they cannot go it alone. That international coordination is needed to hold oil and gas companies accountable and to manage a fair shift away from oil, gas and coal with no community, work or country left behind. That’s why the state of California, the city of Los Angeles, Richmond and many other communities where fossil fuel extraction is taking place have joined other states and cities around the world, as well as 14 countries, in calling for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/11/los-angeles-fire-fossil-fuel-big-oil
= new reply since forum marked as read
to pass 1.5C global warming limit
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd7575x8yq5o
Similar to the growth in inequality, temperatures started to take off in the 80s and really took off in the 2000s, i.e. GQP led.
From 2017, a warning...
What the world will look like 4°C warmer
Will your grandchildren live in cities on Antarctica?
Those on the fact-based side of this argument should realise that continuously bombarding the opposition with doom and gloom is likely to reinforce their resistance to accepting the new paradigm.
This map offers an alternative: lots of misery and disaster, but also plenty of hope and solutions. Not solutions that will lead us back to the climate of a few decades ago – costly and pointless – but solutions that work for the world as it will be, when it will be much warmer than it is now.
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https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look-like-4degc-warmer/
Personally, I'll fight with all I got to keep it from becoming reality, the smart money is on doom and gloom.
... we get more Big Oil. For example, President Carter tried. Then, the greedheads struck back.
Certain quarters objected when President Jimmy Carter instituted "Human Rights" over economic and business interests as the main objective of U.S. foreign policy. The President understood reliance on Saudi Arabia and oil was a danger to national security. So, he began to move the nation toward "Energy Independence" and renewable, clean sources over dependence on Big Oil for energy. The people who own the oil companies and the governments of oil-rich nations objected.
Three unidentified US hostages speak to the press while their Iranian captors (L and R) watch closely, at the besieged US embassy in Tehran, November 1979. [IRNA-FILES/AFP via Getty Images] Source: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231104-on-this-day-the-iran-hostage-crisis/
How a Deep State Plot Sank Jimmy Carter
PETER DALE SCOTT
WhoWhatWhy.Org, 11/02/14
The Safari Club was an alliance between national intelligence agencies that wished to compensate for the CIA’s retrenchment in the wake of President Carter’s election and Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms. As former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once told Georgetown University alumni,
In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. (1)
After Carter was elected, the Safari Club allied itself with Richard Helms and Theodore Shackley against the more restrained intelligence policies of Jimmy Carter, according to Joseph Trento. In Trento’s account, the dismissal by William Colby in 1974 of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton,
combined with Watergate, is what prompted the Safari Club to start working with [former DCI Richard] Helms [then U.S. Ambassador to Iran] and his most trusted operatives outside of Congressional and even Agency purview. James Angleton said before his death that “Shackley and Helms … began working with outsiders like Adham and Saudi Arabia. The traditional CIA answering to the president was an empty vessel having little more than technical capability.”(2)
Trento adds that “The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations. With the official blessing of George Bush as the head of the CIA, Adham transformed . . . the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine.”(3) Trento claims also that the Safari Club then was able to work with some of the controversial CIA operators who had been forced out of the CIA by Turner, and that this was coordinated by Theodore Shackley:
Shackley, who still had ambitions to become DCI, believed that without his many sources and operatives like [Edwin] Wilson, the Safari Club—operating with [former DCI Richard] Helms in charge in Tehran—would be ineffective. . . . Unless Shackley took direct action to complete the privatization of intelligence operations soon, the Safari Club would not have a conduit to [CIA] resources. The solution: create a totally private intelligence network using CIA assets until President Carter could be replaced. (4)
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https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/government-integrity/the-deep-state-plots-the-1980-defeat-of-jimmy-carter/
In addition to turning down the thermostat and wearing a sweater to stay warm, President Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House and ordered the federal highway speed limit of 55, which saved about 150,000 barrels of oil per day and about 4,000 lives per year. President Reagan took the solar panels down and Big Oil really hasn't worried much about getting replaced ever since.
Bottom Line: Big Oil, the Saudi Roils and the global Petrogarchs HATE democracy. They can't live as large as they want if they have to share the loot with other people, including the people who live on top of the "black gold." Evidently, they want to get every last penny, from every last drop, this extracted mineral can yield. Too bad if it kills most of us in the process, the wealthy figure they'll survive.
The same guy holding Just-us John "Make the Check Out to Jane" Roberts' feet to the fire is working to raise awareness of Big Oil's role in the environmental crisis. It looks like a lonely job in the Senate. Glad Representative Jamie Raskin in the House also understands what We the People are up against.
Unveiling Big Oil's Campaign of Lies
An explosive hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget has unveiled more details of Big Oil’s campaign to block climate action.
by Zanagee Artis
May 10, 2024
The fossil fuel industry has never been a part of the solution to the climate crisis, and new documents uncovered by a congressional investigation spanning the last two years make that abundantly clear. On the contrary, Big Oil is actively fighting to maintain fossil fuels for decades to come. The United States Senate Committee on Budget recently held a hearing on Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change.
Ahead of the hearing, the committee published a joint bicameral congressional staff report detailing the depth of the fossil fuel industry’s deception and campaigns to block climate action. Not only has the fossil fuel industry known about the causal relationship of greenhouse gases and climate change since at least 1959, the industry has fought to block the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy the whole time. For more than 60 years, the fossil fuel industry has chosen profit and shareholder value over people’s lives. It is time for Big Oil accountability, and this joint investigation by the Senate Budget Committee and House Oversight Committee is just the beginning. Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said, “That’s what this hearing is about, because what is protecting the massive fossil fuel subsidies and what is preventing policies to reduce the danger is the same thing: the fossil fuel industry itself.” Here is a look at some key findings from the investigation:
Big Oil knew
In 1959, nuclear scientist Edward Teller explained to a symposium hosted by the American Petroleum Institute that carbon dioxide emissions from burning oil would melt ice caps and raise sea levels. The fossil fuel industry later engaged in climate science research themselves, and in 1979 Exxon admitted that, “[t]he present trend of fossil fuel consumption will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.” In the ensuing years, Exxon, its peers, and a collection of industry-funded front groups have waged marketing and lobbying campaigns to convince lawmakers and the public that the science behind climate change is not certain.
Fossil fuel industry doublespeak
Multiple companies, including BP, Exxon, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips, have been actively deceiving the public about their commitment to achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement and net zero emissions by 2050. Internal documents produced to the House Oversight Committee reveal that BP went so far as to say that, “No one is committed to anything other than to stay in the game,” the game being the development and production of the fossil fuels that they know are devastating communities and the climate. Earlier this year, BP announced that it would increase oil and gas production from 2024 through 2027.
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https://www.nrdc.org/bio/zanagee-artis/unveiling-big-oils-campaign-lies
If that fire gets to refinery werld of LA. Won't be long now. Whittier is the northernmost that O know of at the ARCO refinery. The So Central produce market isn't too far south of Altadena... three more days of hot wind blowing southward.
City of Commerce and other important economic centers coming right up.
One of the wealthiest parts of the nation, and the money and all the power it brings were not able to protect the people from a calamity wrought by the many needs of our petroleum-based economy and precipitated by an act of nature.
A massive wildfire reached Getty Villa in LA. How the museum protected its collection.
Christopher Cann
USA TODAY, January 8, 2025
As videos and images circulated of flames and smoke from an explosive wildfire approaching the Getty Villa museum in Los Angeles, art lovers worried the facility's world class collection of antiques and ancient artifacts would be burnt to a crisp.
Officials for the museum and education center were quick to dispel those concerns – citing extensive "fire mitigation efforts" they had implemented throughout the year.
Those efforts include clearing brush from the surrounding land, the maintenance of on-site water storage and "state-of-the-art air handling systems," which sealed off museum galleries and library archives from the pluming smoke outside. Another layer of protection: the double-walled construction of the galleries.
The blaze has had only limited impacts to the museum's grounds, which sits off the scenic Pacific Coast Highway in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. "Some trees and vegetation on site have burned, but no structures are on fire, and staff and the collection remain safe," said a statement released on the facility's social media pages.
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The villa features the museum's collection of Roman and Greek antiquities and also has an outdoor theater that hosts classic and classically inspired theater productions, according to the museum's 2023 fact book. The rest of Getty's collection is housed at the Getty Center in Brentwood, California.
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/01/08/getty-villa-museum-protection-from-pacific-palisades-wildfire/77542145007/
Perhaps we need to take the route of the museum made possible by the philanthropist J. Paul Getty, who, ironically, grew incredibly wealthy through the family oil business. Cost should be secondary when it comes to the safety of our children, nation and planet. No matter what, we should be treating our people like we do the treasures in museums, like the Getty Villa, which used all available resources to protect its collection.
The American artist Edward Ruscha created a most prescient work, "The Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire" circa 1966. The masterpiece today is part of the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
Ed Ruscha: About this time that I was painting this picture, I had some oh, maybe personal gripes about the art world in general. And I felt like the museums were not really doing their jobs as far as opening their doors to contemporary art.
I didn’t have a hatred for museums, but maybe, like, I had a healthy distrust for museums. And so I guess part of this painting grew out of that. I didn’t know how this painting would be perceived. The museum actually had a notion to possibly buy that painting, which really surprised me, and then didn’t surprise me so much when they didn’t.
Source: https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/334/4456
