#Extraction Oil and Gas

[coochiequeens]

Ladies, we can participate in their conference by registering on WECAN’s website. It started June 23 but there is still a few days left.

The Ecofeminist Movement Is Surging. Here’s What Its Advocates Want

More women are connecting environmental degradation with attacks on women's rights, seeing both as rooted in similar values. They’re drawing on personal experiences and reams of research to make their case.

By Katie Surma June 21, 2025

Ayshka Najib (second from right), a climate activist based in the United Arab Emirates, protests at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, UAE, in 2023. Credit: Courtesy of Ayshka Najib

It was an audacious moment. During a recent government hearing, allies of former President Jair Bolsonaro berated Brazil’s environment and climate minister, telling Marina Silva she was “hindering our country’s development,” didn’t deserve respect and should “know your place.”

“You just want me to be a submissive woman,” Silva replied. “But I am not.”

A lifelong Amazonian environmentalist credited with helping slash Brazil’s deforestation rates, Silva walked out after further verbal attacks from members of the powerful ruralista caucus—a pro-agribusiness bloc known for pushing policies that drive deforestation and land conflict with the people living in the rainforest. 

For a growing women’s climate movement, the exchange was more than political theater. It revealed a connection between aggressive resource extraction and attacks on women.

Ecofeminism, a theory that emerged in the 1970s, argues that the conquest of nature and the control of women stem from the same values. Brazil’s own history, ecofeminists argue, reflects this: During the 1964 to 1985 military dictatorship, the regime oversaw widespread gender-based violence and launched “Operation Amazonia,” a campaign to colonize the rainforest and eradicate its Indigenous residents.

In the era of climate change, this theory is gaining traction and urgency from the Amazon to the Middle East. Armed with data and their own experiences, women in this new climate movement are pushing beyond calls to simply increase female leadership in forums like the United Nations’ climate talks. They want to take down the systems they see as root causes of climate change, including patriarchy, capitalism and extractivism—the global pursuit of natural resources for export.

“We didn’t just arrive at this moment of climate chaos,” said Osprey Orielle Lake, founder and executive director of the U.S.-based advocacy organization Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network. “It is built upon systems that have created the conditions for us to be at war with our planet instead of living in harmony with nature.”

WECAN, founded in 2009, is one of several organizations convening women across movements and borders around these ideas. From June 23 to 28, the group will hold its 7th “Women’s Assembly for Climate Justice,” a virtual summit featuring more than 125 women leaders from 50 countries. Speakers will include scientists, policymakers, Indigenous leaders and grassroots organizers across two dozen panels covering topics such as food sovereignty, forest protection, land rights, climate justice, alternative economies and the rights of nature. The public can participate by registering on WECAN’s website.

Osprey Orielle Lake (second from left) marches with the Women for Climate Justice contingent at the Rise For Climate March in San Francisco. Credit: Emily Arasim/WECAN

Past participants have included Jane Goodall and Vandana Shiva. This year’s lineup features Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland; Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change during creation of the Paris Agreement; and a wide range of Indigenous and grassroots leaders from around the globe.

For WECAN’s Lake, the movement’s work has never been more urgent. Already this year, the planet has seen climate-fueled wildfire, flooding and triple-digit heat waves across multiple regions. 

“This is not just an environmental crisis,” she said. “It is a justice crisis and a societal crisis, and how we respond and who is centered in that response matters deeply.” 

The Land and Its Heartbeat

Lake and other women in the movement describe climate change not as a glitch in the system, but the system’s logical outcome, the result of centuries of extractive economies built on disconnection from the natural world. For these women, the path forward isn’t just cleaner energy—it’s a deeper transformation that heals the relationship between people and the Earth. 

Ayshka Najib, a climate activist based in the United Arab Emirates, put it this way: “Capitalism is only 500 years old—we created these systems, and we can create newer ones rooted in equality, justice and respect for everyone’s rights.”

To do that, the movement increasingly is looking to women in the Global South—the Indigenous, Quilombola and local communities that have resisted extractive industries while cultivating their own sustainable economies. 

For this, the Kichwa women of Sarayaku, Ecuador, are providing a master class. For decades, multinational corporations have sought to extract oil and minerals from their ancestral lands in the Amazon. With the arrival of industry to the region came workers. And with workers came prostitution, alcohol and violence, said Patricia Gualinga, co-founder of the Amazonian Women Defenders of the Rainforest (Mujeres Amazónicas Defensoras de la Selva).

A participant of WECAN’s Reforestation and Forest Protection Project sorts collected seeds to sow in plant nurseries in Sarayaku, Ecuador. The project, led by Patricia Gualinga, aims to restore trees threatened by extinction and to reforest lands damaged by climate change and extractive industries. Credit: WECAN

“Women a generation before mine suffered tremendous consequences,” Gualinga said in an interview conducted in Spanish. “Many were sexually raped by workers.”

As forests were razed and waterways polluted, women—responsible for cultivating food—bore gendered impacts. Their workload increased, their health suffered and their traditional knowledge became threatened. “We’re always in constant touch with the land,” Gualinga said. “We can feel it, we can feel the land and its heartbeat.”

Driven by escalating threats, Gualinga and others formed Mujeres Amazónicas Defensoras de la Selva, a coalition of women from multiple Indigenous nationalities, around 2012. They organized protests, partnered with groups like Amnesty International and defended their territories by physically monitoring the forest and turning to the courts. Gualinga’s testimony, for instance, helped Sarayaku win a landmark victory based on the Indigenous right to free, prior and informed consent at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2012. 

Their activism has come at a cost: They’ve faced threats, harassment and arson attacks. Still, the women have persisted. 

Patricia Gualinga was the president judge at the 6th International Rights of Nature Tribunal. Gualinga is a Kichwa leader from Sarayaku, Ecuador. Credit: Katie Surma/Inside Climate News

Gualinga and other women in her community have become prominent human rights defenders and promote the idea of the “Living Forest,” a worldview that recognizes the forest as a living, self-regulating being. They’ve launched reforestation projects, held inter-generational trainings and are leveraging their traditional knowledge to build businesses like the creation of all-organic hair products. 

“Ultimately, we are here to support other women and amplify their voices,” Gualinga said. 

Growing Danger for Women

In communities around the world, extractive companies, climate change and pollution hit women and girls hardest or in gender-specific ways, particularly in low-income populations. These impacts range from adverse pregnancy outcomes to likelihood of displacement and heightened risk of gender-based violence. 

More than 842 environmental conflicts worldwide from the late 1960s through 2022 involved “women environmental defenders as visible leaders,” according to an academic analysis of environmental conflicts documented by the watchdog group Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), considered an undercount. At least 81 of those women were assassinated. 

In the United States, violence against Indigenous women is so widespread it has its own name: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, or MMIW. Many of these cases are linked to the presence of extractive industries, like oil and gas development, near tribal lands. A 2016 federal study found that 84 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime, with more than half reporting sexual violence. 

Osprey Orielle Lake (left) stands with the Indigenous Women’s Tongass Delegation in Washington, D.C., advocating for forest protections. Credit: Melissa Lyttle

The danger isn’t receding. Climate impacts are growing more severe, and the world is on course to exceed the Paris Agreement’s temperature limits. At the same time, governments and corporations are ramping up extractive projects to secure so-called “transition minerals” like lithium, cobalt and nickel, as well as land for carbon offset schemes. The result: a new wave of land conflicts, often in territories that already have a history of violence linked to extractive industries.

Just this month, in Mexico, state police detained Indigenous land defender Estela Hernández Jiménez as she documented alleged abuses against other members of her community, according to the watchdog group Front Line Defenders. At least 10 officers were involved, with witnesses reporting that police used “physical aggression directed at sensitive areas of her body” and that officers “ripped off a button of her blouse, partially exposing her chest, and violently subdued her,” according to Front Line Defenders.

The Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to requests for comment. 

“The Same Systems” at the Root of Problems

Experiencing climate-intensified flooding is what first pulled Najib, the UAE-based activist, into the movement. 

In 2018, when she was 14 years old, Najib was visiting her grandmother in South India when the region’s worst flood in decades hit. Trapped inside their home for days without electricity and water, the family eventually fled to safety. The trauma lingered.

“I was afraid to go to sleep because if I fell asleep, the next time I opened my eyes, I’d be underwater,” she recalled during a recent interview. 

Ayshka Najib speaks with youth climate activists. Najib works with the Untied Nations, focusing on just transition work in the Middle East and North Africa region. Credit: Courtesy of Ayshka Najib

Now, Najib works with the United Nations and other organizations focused on the gendered impacts of climate change in the Middle East and North Africa. There, worsening heat, water scarcity and ecosystem collapse are magnifying existing inequalities. In communities along Egypt’s Red Sea, for example, many women depend on fishing and farming. But marine life is vanishing, crop cycles are shifting and women—often the primary earners—are losing their ability to provide.

That economic strain, Najib said, has a domino effect: a rise in domestic violence, early child marriage and school dropout rates among girls, as well as growing barriers to basic health needs, including menstrual hygiene.

For those who may balk at the mention of the word patriarchy, Najib underscored the bevy of laws in the region that prevent women from owning land, depriving them of revenue and power to make decisions about their livelihoods. 

Ayshka Najib protests at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, UAE, in 2023. Credit: Courtesy of Ayshka Najib

“We have to understand that the same systems that fuel climate change are the same systems that inflict violence on women’s bodies and restrict their rights,” Najib said. 

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific body convened by the U.N., has said that colonization is a reason some places face worse risks from climate change.

Zukiswa White, a Johannesburg-based climate activist, traces her country’s climate vulnerability back to colonial land theft and resource plunder. First Dutch settlers, then the British, pushed Black South Africans off fertile lands to establish mining and agriculture projects for European profit. 

That legacy, White said, persists. Today, extractive industries still dominate the economy and marginalized communities bear the brunt of environmental harm. White works with some of those communities, many of which are impacted by large industries like oil and mining. Those groups, she said, reject Western ideas of progress and are reclaiming or prioritizing other ways of being. 

Zukiswa White speaks at a press conference at the United Nations climate change talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November 2024. Credit: Katherine Quaid/WECAN

“We’ve been sold the lie that there’s only one path to development,” White said. “But we know things haven’t always been like this—and around the world, there are millions resisting a culture of endless growth and exploitation.”

This, she said, is a core struggle for the women’s climate movement: “Big business has captured peoples’ imaginations. We need to break that.”

“They Are the Solution”

What alternatives does the movement promote? 

When asked, Lake began by drawing a sharp line between the dominant extractive economy and the women-led models rising in its place. Extractivism, she said, is rooted in domination of nature and labor of the many by the few. It thrives on hierarchy and treats the Earth as a thing to be exploited. But women-led alternatives offer a different path, grounded in collective care for all and a reciprocal relationship with the natural world.

This ethos has naturally aligned ecofeminists with the growing rights of nature movement, which seeks legal recognition of ecosystems as living entities with inherent rights—like a river’s right to flow or a whale’s right to migrate.

Many tribal nations as well as countries including Spain, Bolivia, Colombia, New Zealand and India have passed such laws, making the rights of nature a gateway to rethinking how societies are structured. The laws aren’t merely symbolic. In Ecuador, a forest has defeated a mining company in the country’s highest court. In Panama, they’ve been used as a basis for establishing a marine protected area for sea turtles. And in Peru, a river basin degraded by decades of oil spills can now go to court, through its Indigenous legal guardians, to fight back. 

Lake pointed to a range of other thriving initiatives: reforestation projects, “well-being economies,” the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, seed saving networks and cooperatives focused on agriculture, locally owned power and childcare. 

“Research is pretty clear that when you take a lot of these community-led solutions, often run by women, they’re highly successful,” Lake said. “When you add them all up, it creates a very large solution that supports local communities and cares for more people than these top-down programs.”

But that cumulative impact, she said, is often ignored or dismissed.

“If you look at one person or community doing a food sovereignty project, you might think, ‘Oh gosh, they’re only feeding 1,000 people. How can that save the world?’ But people fail to mention that if you add up hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions, of these small, local solutions—they are the solution.”

WECAN executive director Osprey Orielle Lake addresses media at the United Nation climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November 2024. Credit: Katherine Quaid/WECAN

Next week’s Women’s Assembly for Climate Justice comes against a global backdrop of backsliding on women’s rights and environmental protection. 

In March, the U.N. reported that one in four countries is seeing increased gender discrimination, weaker legal safeguards for women and diminished funding for gender-related programs—or all three. That includes the United States, where President Donald Trump has championed broad rollbacks, from defunding women’s health services to gutting mentions of “women,” “gender” or “climate crisis.” He has repeatedly dismissed climate change as a hoax and has presided over one of the most sweeping assaults on environmental and public health safeguards in modern U.S. history, including cuts to renewable energy initiatives.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

“It’s called drill, baby, drill,” Trump told Congress in March.

Women leaders in the movement are using the turbulence to underscore what’s at stake and to fight harder. “If we don’t push back,” Lake said, “we will keep losing ground.”

Having honed its organizing process over the past 15 years, WECAN plans to take the insights from next week’s assembly and turn them into a call to action aimed at governments, financial institutions and international agencies in the lead-up to the COP30 global climate change gathering later this year in Brazil. In the past, the organization’s advocacy has contributed to milestones such as the establishment of the first Gender Action Plan under the U.N. climate negotiations.

“What’s really essential in terms of how we create the world we want is to have direct interventions with policy makers and government leaders,” Lake said. “Our narrative, our solutions will be brought into the mainstream.”

[nando161mando]

Trump announces oil executive Chris Wright as his pick for energy secretary. "There is no climate crisis, and we're not in the midst of an energy transition either," Wright said

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/16/nx-s1-5191868/trump-energy-secretary-chris-wright

[eaglesnick]

“It seems the most logical thing in the world to believe that the natural resources of the Earth, upon which the race depends for food, clothing and shelter, should be owned collectively by the race instead of being the private property of a few social parasites.

— Ralph Chaplin

While more and more homes in Britain suffer severe flooding because of climate change, Rishi Sunak has decided that North Sea oil and gas extraction should be speeded up.

“Hundreds of new North Sea oil and gas licences to boost British energy independence and grow the economy. ”  (GOV.UK: 31/07/23)

This policy has now been confirmed and will be included in the king’s speech. More concerned with winning votes than the catastrophic effects of climate change:

“Sunak has already watered down the government’s climate targets, pushing back the deadline for selling new petrol and diesel cars and the phasing out of gas boilers, prompting furious condemnation from the automobile and energy industries.” (Guardian:05/11/23)

The excuse used by Sunak to justify his planned increase in fossil fuel production  is "to reduce emissions and boost UK energy independence."

These claims are simply not true.

Encouraging more oil and gas production does not reduce emissions - it increases them. If you expand the global market for fossil fuels then more will be used with the obvious accompanying increase in emissions. What is more, Rystad Energy, an independent advisory and business intelligence company, has stated that:

“ UK oil rigs are among the highest carbon emitters in Europe. CO2 emissions released into the atmosphere from extracting North Sea oil and gas reached 13.1MM metric tonnes in the UK in 2019, or 21kg of carbon dioxide for every barrel of oil produced – far greater than the Norwegian North Sea, which produced 4MM metric tonnes of CO2 in 2019, or 8kg of CO2 a barrel.”  (Guardian: 13/10/22)

But let us put this evidence aside for the moment and give Sunak the benefit of the doubt regarding emissions, and look at his other claim that increase extraction of gas and oil from the North Sea will “boost UK energy dependency".

Again, simply not true. It was reported only a few weeks ago that the UK EXPORTS 80% of North Sea oil which is processed abroad and then sold back to us at whatever international price makes the oil and gas industries the most profit. (CNN Business: 27/09/23)

The only way to secure energy independence is to have state ownership of our natural assets. But that is not The Tory way.

Unlike the Norwegian government, who invested their countries enormous oil and gas revenues in economic sectors across the world, creating a State owned sovereign wealth fund now worth $1.2 trillion in assets, our Tory government squandered the money, continues to allow private investors to reap the profits, and have refused to create a UK Sovereign Wealth Fund because they are ideologically opposed to public ownership.

While Sunak is forced to sell licenses for oil and gas extraction in order to secure at least some  benefits from our natural resources, the Norwegians impose  a 78% tax levy on private oil and gas companies.

“UK should match Norway’s 78% North Sea oil and gas tax, thinktank says.” (guardian:28/10/22)

But that isn’t going to happen. Instead, our ideologically driven Tory government, opposed to taxes of any kind and especially those aimed at the rich and corporate world continue to draw  headlines like these.

“Shell and BP paid zero tax on North Sea gas and oil for three years.” (Guardian: 30/10/22)

and

“North Sea oil and gas industry offered ‘get-out’ clause on windfall tax.”(Guardian:09/06/23)

The stark contrast between the way successive Tory Government’s in the UK have managed the “bonanza” of North Seal oil and gas and the way the more socialist Norwegian governments have utilised their natural resources couldn’t be more stark.

[hugevampiretits]

i desperately want to believe in a better future but it all just looks so bleak

[summersfirstsnow]

There's also how weird they are about whales. Like the "wind turbines are bad for whales" thing being used to shutdown a conversation about wind energy. It's the what-about-ism thing, going "well what about how wind turbines also impact whales checkmate libs."

The point isn't to actually have a conversation about offshore wind turbines and whales, it's to distract from the conversation where reasonable humans are pointing out that there are a lot of environmental impacts of fossil fuel burning and extraction.

P.S. Here's a good and accessible article comparing the impacts on wildlife of wind power and oil drilling: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250129-oil-vs-wind-which-is-worse-for-birds-and-whales

objectively the funniest moral panic to come from conservatives is "alternative energy is bad because birds might fly into the wind turbines". birds, which notoriously have no other man-made obstacles, such as the window

[mossadegh]

• Australian media archive on Iran (1951-1954)

[appalachianfuturism]

“For activists and experts who keep a close eye on the oil and gas industry, Eureka’s troubles raise doubts about the economic viability of using Pennsylvania’s fracking wastewater as a source for lithium, since Eureka is the only company in the state to successfully extract lithium from wastewater. It’s also the latest example of the problems created by a sprawling and under-regulated oil and gas waste disposal system.”

[reasonsforhope]

"It is 70 years since AT&T’s Bell Labs unveiled a new technology for turning sunlight into power. The phone company hoped it could replace the batteries that run equipment in out-of-the-way places. It also realised that powering devices with light alone showed how science could make the future seem wonderful; hence a press event at which sunshine kept a toy Ferris wheel spinning round and round.

Today solar power is long past the toy phase. Panels now occupy an area around half that of Wales, and this year they will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity—which is almost three times as much electrical energy as America consumed back in 1954. Yet this historic growth is only the second-most-remarkable thing about the rise of solar power. The most remarkable is that it is nowhere near over.

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.

To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.

As our essay this week explains, solar power faces no such constraint. The resources needed to produce solar cells and plant them on solar farms are silicon-rich sand, sunny places and human ingenuity, all three of which are abundant. Making cells also takes energy, but solar power is fast making that abundant, too. As for demand, it is both huge and elastic—if you make electricity cheaper, people will find uses for it. The result is that, in contrast to earlier energy sources, solar power has routinely become cheaper and will continue to do so.

Other constraints do exist. Given people’s proclivity for living outside daylight hours, solar power needs to be complemented with storage and supplemented by other technologies. Heavy industry and aviation and freight have been hard to electrify. Fortunately, these problems may be solved as batteries and fuels created by electrolysis gradually become cheaper...

The aim should be for the virtuous circle of solar-power production to turn as fast as possible. That is because it offers the prize of cheaper energy. The benefits start with a boost to productivity. Anything that people use energy for today will cost less—and that includes pretty much everything. Then come the things cheap energy will make possible. People who could never afford to will start lighting their houses or driving a car. Cheap energy can purify water, and even desalinate it. It can drive the hungry machinery of artificial intelligence. It can make billions of homes and offices more bearable in summers that will, for decades to come, be getting hotter.

But it is the things that nobody has yet thought of that will be most consequential. In its radical abundance, cheaper energy will free the imagination, setting tiny Ferris wheels of the mind spinning with excitement and new possibilities.

This week marks the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. The Sun rising to its highest point in the sky will in decades to come shine down on a world where nobody need go without the blessings of electricity and where the access to energy invigorates all those it touches."

-via The Economist, June 20, 2024

[argumate]

A new report, titled “Foundations,” captures the country’s economic malaise in detail. The U.K. desperately needs more houses, more energy, and more transportation infrastructure. “No system can be fixed by people who do not know why it is broken,” write the report’s authors, Sam Bowman, Samuel Hughes, and Ben Southwood. They argue that the source of the country’s woes as well as “the most important economic fact about modern Britain [is] that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere.” The nation is gripped by laws and customs that make essentials unacceptably scarce and drive up the cost of construction across the board.

...

The story for transit and energy is similar: Rules and attitudes that make it difficult to build things in the world have made life worse for the British. “On a per-mile basis, Britain now faces some of the highest railway costs in the world,” Bowman, Hughes, and Southwood write. “This has led to some profoundly dissatisfying outcomes. Leeds is now the largest city in Europe without a metro system.” Despite Thatcher’s embrace of North Sea gas, and more recent attempts to loosen fracking regulations, Britain’s energy markets are still an omnishambles. Per capita electricity generation in the U.K. is now roughly one-third that of the United States, and energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7. By these measures, at least, Britain may be the most energy-starved nation in the developed world.

Scarcity is a policy choice. This is as true in energy as it is in housing. In the 1960s, Britain was home to about half of the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors. Today, the U.K. has extraordinarily high nuclear-construction costs compared with Asia, and it’s behind much of Europe in the share of its electricity generated from nuclear power—not only France but also Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Romania.

What happened to British nuclear power? After North Sea oil and gas production ramped up in the 1970s and ’80s, Britain redirected its energy production away from nuclear power. Even this shift has had its own complications. In the past few years, the U.K. has passed several measures to reduce shale-gas extraction, citing earthquake risks, environmental costs, and public opposition. As a result, gas production in the U.K. has declined 70 percent since 2000. Although the country’s renewable-energy market has grown, solar and wind power haven’t increased nearly enough to make up the gap.

The comparison with France makes clear Britain’s policy error: In 2003, very large businesses in both countries paid about the same price for electricity. But by 2024, after decades of self-imposed scarcity and the supply shock of the war in Ukraine, electricity in the U.K. was more than twice as expensive as in France.

an omnishambles...

[iamthepulta]

@joemomrgneissguy SPACE MINING. HO BOY.

So when mining comes into a conversation, there are several 'laws' of mining and processing that I like to consider that people tend to forget:

Location and rarity of commodity

Location and rarity of extraction techniques/reagents

What is necessary for this operation to work?

Where does the finished product go?

Some of these are extraneous. Theoretically, we don't have to care that iron is common on earth and might be present on the moon, so it changes the conversation from "why?" to "how would we?". Same with extraction and reagents. If you don't care how expensive it is to ship- for example: water and carbon dioxide to the moon because you want to process He-3, nothing can stop you.

However, what will stop planning, is processing. Blowing up a rock is easy. Collecting the rock and breaking it into a usable form is not. If there isn't a plan for exactly what commodity is being mined and how to separate it and all the equipment that needs to be made to get it into a usable form, and a plan to get that equipment into space. God help the poor bastard.

And fundamentally, no matter HOW you turn it, people use the finished product. If there are no people where you are mining the Thing, you need to have a way for the Thing to get back to the people who need it. WHY are you mining the Thing? What is economic about the Thing being made? and Is it worth the money?

[angry geologist rant under the cut]

So the thing about space and asteroids is metals come in native form a lot of the time because there's nothing to oxidize them; it makes processing simpler and the density increases profit. This is usually what people talk about when they go off about space mining: Ohh, if we just reach this asteroid 400 years away there's so much Gold and Platinum! Ohh, if we just crashed a FUCKING ASTEROID INTO EARTH OR MARS we could be so rich!

However this is a LIE for two reasons: It's actually harder to process straight sulfides or straight metal because they aren't brittle. Instead of breaking into smaller pieces you can separate and process, they jam the crusher. Universities with mining departments often have huge chunks of impressive high-grade sitting around that were donated by companies when they jammed their fucking system. If you can't break it down, it's a useless fucking clump of rock.

Secondly, even if you have native metals clumped together like an iron-nickel asteroid, unless you want an iron-nickel product, you have to separate them. Since it's not brittle, you would have to pour a bunch of hydrochloric on it and wait for the reaction to dissolve the outer surface.

And all this is assuming the metals are on Earth. If not, you have to figure out how to do this in space. How much HCl will you need? How are you going to fly it up there? How are you going to break it down? How are you going to replace parts when they inevitably break?

The big "commodity" on the moon is Helium-3, which is extremely rare on Earth. (So yes, we have a need, and yes, there's substantial reason to mine it in a place where it's more accessible.) The logic starts breaking down around "getting it back" and "how does the operation work": In moon quantities (up to 15 parts per billion (ppb)), you have to mine about 150 tons to extract 1g of He-3. That's not unreasonable, to be honest, since economic gold hovers around 7-12 ppb. And technically you'd only have to heat the rock to 600-700 C. However, things do melt at those temperatures. Then you have to get it back to earth. Either a SpaceX-style return and come back, or a drop shipments- It's just insane to me though that we would use SO MANY RESOURCES to rip up the fucking moon, even with an automated system, when if you look at He-3 we already produce what equals 11 pounds of He-3 yearly from Oil and Gas deposits, it's just not collected.

I have more beef with planets that are theoretically resource-rich, but people just- don't care about getting them back to Earth? Venus has significant metal-Sulfides and Tellurides in its atmosphere, which is why people joke about the "floating oxygen colonies" on Venus. But congratulations! You've colonized a planet that is inaccessible to human technology because anything we've ever designed will dissolve. Same with Europa. To design something that works on Venus - not to mention extracts things in the proper form to be used in human conditions - and/or get them back to Earth means redesigning how we think of the properties of the periodic table.

With extraction, we play a lot with oxidation states, and one of the rules is to stay within Earth's aqueous conditions. If you oxidize anything too much, your solution will want to vaporize to oxygen. Reduce anything too much, and your solution will want to vaporize to hydrogen gas.

So, if you design anything on Earth designed for conditions on Venus, it will be unstable. If you design anything on Venus meant for Earth, it will be unstable.

Which is kind of the end of my rant, I guess. Don't crash something into Earth unless you can process it. If you can process it in space, can you get it back? Who's responsible when the thing breaks? Why the fuck is money being spent when 9 times out of 10 we have it here on earth with the conditions we're familiar with?

If we've somehow depleted Earth enough that we need resources from other planets, which would insinuate we have not figured out how to recycle our own metals, which is untrue, and likewise we have no business in space anyway- Where did all our resources go? Are we leaving for those other planets? Do we have faster-than-light travel to collect the new resources in a timely manner?

There isn't even water in space half the time and if you do have a colony on Mars and tech bros are going to process all the hematite to build their shitty underground Martian city, are they shipping water from the north and south poles to do this? Have they figured out how to renew the carbon filters that are going to be needed to get all the waste and organics out of it once it's used?

In my opinion, it's all just fucking stupid. Space mining tries to answer a question that doesn't need to be asked with people who don't know how mineral processing works who haven't thought what the logistics require and don't care that entropy demands even minerals in stasis don't last forever. But it's ~new~ and the dollar signs on metallic asteroids gleam in their eyes and I want to take out Elon Musk's kneecaps.

[eaglesnick]

“Reform UK’s climate denial undermines democracy." – London School of Economics. (17/06/24

Nigel Farage is “incredibly popular” because he speaks "common sense" says Reform candidate Robert Barrowcliffe.

 Let's examine that statement a little closer, not by looking at Farage’s anti-immigration policies, his war against woke, or his Brexit credentials. Instead lets look at climate change and how Nigel Farage plans to protect us.

Only an idiot would argue the climate isn’t changing. That is now a given for all sensible people. From the 1300 who died during the annual Hajj in Saudi Arabia last week, where temperatures were 50 degrees Celsius, to the severe flooding across Europe this month where 120 people died and hundreds more are unaccounted for, the effects of climate change are all around us.

The Met Office says:

 “Across the UK, we expect to see:

Warmer and wetter winters

Hotter and drier summers

More frequent and intense weather extremes

Globally things are even worse.

“UN chief says world is on ‘highway to climate hell’ as planet endures 12 straight months of unprecedented heat."  (CNN: 06/05/24)

As food and water supplies fail across Africa, huge swathes of people will be forced to migrate as a matter of life or death, and the majority will be heading for the rich countries of Europe, including Britain.

What does Nigel Farage and his Reform UK Party  propose to do to help us adapt and survive these new changes to our environment? The first thing of note is that “climate change” is not mentioned once in the Reform manifesto and neither is “global warming”. It’s as if the problem doesn’t even exist!

 More concerned with saving money, than saving the planet, Farage promises to “scrap” subsidies for renewable energy development, to “fast-track” more licences for North Sea gas and oil extraction and to begin fracking.

When the tide of immigration to the UK becomes overwhelming, when peoples homes are flooded again and again, when the old and frail are dying of heat stroke let's remember the "common sense" attitude of Nigel Farage and the billionaire backers of his Reform UK  Party and give them the popularity they deserve.

[mariacallous]

As the war in Ukraine enters its fourth year, the toll of relentless drone attacks, grim front-line updates, and the psychological strain of protracted conflict have shifted Ukrainian public opinion. Roughly one-third of Ukrainians surveyed are now open to territorial concessions and 44 percent believe negotiations are overdue.

Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signaled his openness to negotiations and suggested to the Trump administration that U.S. military support—or a potential NATO path—be traded for access to Ukraine’s vast rare earths and natural resources. Instead of strengthening Kyiv’s negotiating position, however, the proposal invited what many Ukrainians view as economic colonization: a draft agreement granting Washington control over critical minerals, oil and gas deposits, strategic infrastructure, and half of Ukraine’s resource extraction revenues—all without firm security guarantees. Ultimately, Ukraine rejected the deal.

At the same time, the diplomatic landscape has grown more complex as U.S. President Donald Trump has decided to end Russia’s international isolation and normalize U.S.-Russia relations. After a three-year effort by the United States to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine, Trump talked to him on the phone last week, which was followed by U.S.-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia. Notably, the conversations excluded Ukrainian and European representatives.

U.S. officials have begun checking off items on Putin’s wish list. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently dismissed the idea of Ukraine joining NATO and urged Kyiv to abandon its goal of reclaiming all occupied territory. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Vice President J.D. Vance’s remarks signaled a growing rift within the Western alliance, which was welcomed by Moscow.

The next possible item on the list? Forcing early elections in Ukraine before any peace agreement is signed—an effort to remove Zelensky from power. On Feb. 18, Trump suggested Ukraine was to blame for starting the war and said Ukraine should have new elections as a precondition for negotiations.

Kyiv may soon find itself caught between two foreign leaders, both eager to see a change in its leadership for their own reasons. Delegitimizing another country’s leader is a familiar ploy in the Russian playbook, and while Ukraine falling back into Russia’s sphere of influence might seem unthinkable now, it could, in fact, become a reality over the course of a decade. Recent Ukrainian history and broader geopolitical trends provide ample evidence of this risk.

Removing Zelensky and initiating elections is exactly what Russia is waiting for. Putin has claimed Zelensky is “illegitimate” because Ukrainian elections scheduled for 2024 were postponed and said he has no right to sign any peace agreements as a result. More importantly, ousting him would allow Putin to claim progress on one of his war’s key objectives: “denazification.” Despite Zelensky’s Jewish heritage, Russian propaganda has cast him as the leader of a “Nazi-controlled” Ukraine—a narrative that Putin has used to justify the invasion and rally domestic support.

Trump has his own grievances. Zelensky was at the center of Trump’s first impeachment, after he attempted to pressure Kyiv into investigating Joe Biden. On Feb. 19, Trump, who has previously criticized Ukraine’s push for U.S. aid, called Zelensky a “dictator without elections,” after the Ukrainian leader said that the U.S. president is living in a “Russian disinformation bubble.”

A change in power would hand Putin the leverage he needs to achieve his ultimate goal—erasing Ukraine as an independent state. Russia has mastered the art of infiltrating foreign governments by using the Kremlin’s well-worn playbook, which includes spreading disinformation, as well as promoting pro-Russian narratives and political candidates. Often referred to as hybrid warfare, it is used to shift the political direction of nations aligned with Western ideals, pulling them back under Moscow’s influence.

In Ukraine’s case, this strategy would allow Russia to exploit internal divisions and political corruption, gradually maneuvering pro-Russian leadership into power through political subversion. From there, Ukraine could be pulled back into Russia’s orbit, especially if the United States continues to treat Kyiv as a resource to be extracted rather than a partner to be defended and if Europe remains unwilling and unable to confront Moscow directly. The consequences of such a scenario would be far more devastating in the long run than any negotiated settlement over territory or security guarantees.

Ukraine’s recent history offers a stark example of how pro-Russian forces can reemerge, even after a seemingly decisive defeat.

The 2004 Orange Revolution famously thwarted Viktor Yanukovych’s presidential ambitions and brought a pro-Western leader, Viktor Yushchenko, to power. But in 2010, just six years later, Yanukovych returned and won the Ukrainian presidency, demonstrating how quickly political momentum can shift. What appeared impossible in 2004 became a sobering fact in 2010, a reminder that Moscow’s favored candidates can rebound if Western support for Ukraine falters or fragments.

The experiences of Georgia and Moldova, too, show that even countries that have faced Russian aggression and partial occupation of their territories can still fall back under the Kremlin’s influence.

Despite Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and ongoing Russian occupation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Moscow was eventually able to steer the ruling Georgian Dream party toward a pro-Russian position. With the help of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the Georgian government froze European Union accession talks and pushed through a “foreign agents” bill similar to Russian legislation, which was seen by many Georgians as a betrayal of their nation’s pro-Western aspirations. Sustained propaganda, political corruption, and voter intimidation have all contributed to this slow drift eastward.

Moldova’s continued vulnerability is obvious, given the de facto occupation of Transnistria since 1992. The Kremlin’s playbook—spanning clandestine financing of pro-Russian political forces, election meddling, and organized intimidation—resurfaced in Moldova’s recent presidential elections. President Maia Sandu claimed that Russian money aimed to buy 300,000 votes for a pro-Russian candidate. The country staved off a turn toward Russia due to Sandu’s eventual victory, which hinged on the support of Moldovans living abroad, beyond Moscow’s reach.

Additionally, Hungary and Slovakia also show how Russia manipulates political corruption to steer EU and NATO members closer to its orbit.

In Hungary, Moscow capitalizes on Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government through lucrative projects financed largely by Russian loans and high-profile sponsorship deals, such as Gazprom’s support for the Ferencvaros football club. Such economic entanglements benefit Orban’s inner circle while pro-Russian media outlets like Voice of Europe spread Kremlin-friendly narratives. Hungary has become a low-risk hub for Russian intelligence activities and a shield for key Kremlin allies from EU sanctions, positioning Budapest as a Trojan horse within Western institutions.

Slovakia, meanwhile, offers a parallel cautionary tale. By fueling disinformation networks that framed NATO and the United States as aggressors in Ukraine, the Kremlin helped propel nationalist leader Robert Fico back to power in Slovakia’s 2023 parliamentary elections. Once in office, Fico halted direct arms shipments to Ukraine. His next step was to weaken democratic safeguards by dismantling the Special Prosecutor’s Office, which was investigating corruption cases and taking greater control over media. Today, Fico continues to align Slovakia’s policies more closely with Russian interests.

These examples demonstrate how consistently Russia applies the same methods, from choosing and backing a figure with electoral prospects to installing authoritarian pro-Russian regimes, funding them through corruption and supporting them by spreading disinformation.

If Ukraine is pushed into early elections now, Moscow would have the perfect opportunity to promote a candidate who promises an end to the bloodshed, a return to “normalization” with Russia to avoid everyday terror, or simply a seat at the negotiating table—offering, at least on the surface, better terms than Zelensky’s isolation.

A Kremlin-backed candidate wouldn’t need to win outright; they would only need to fracture Ukraine’s political landscape, erode unity, and create a perception that a pro-Russian alternative is viable. In the short term, this might appear as a path to peace, offering war-weary Ukrainians relief from relentless attacks. However, in the long run, it would pull Ukraine back under Russia’s influence, especially without a strong Western alternative to counterbalance Moscow’s grip.

For Trump, this would amount to a strategic loss, allowing Russia to achieve its objectives without a military victory. Worse, it could happen before the end of his term, shaping a legacy of defeat in one of the most significant conflicts of the 21st century. This would not only empower Moscow but also send a message to U.S. allies across the world that U.S. commitments are unreliable.

If Ukraine falls, the Kremlin’s success would echo far beyond Eastern Europe, encouraging further geopolitical shifts in Russia’s and, more importantly, China’s favor. To prevent this, the Trump administration should approach Ukraine’s future with patience and strategy, resisting quick fixes that could ultimately embolden the Kremlin and signal waning U.S. influence on the global stage.

[yourlocalmeta1head]

I hate seeing these fucking videos of people who voted for Donald Trump regretting voting for him. If they had just done more research and didn't vote for him just because then the can "afford gas and groceries" they would've learned that if you are the average American your taxes will be higher and you will have larger bills. Donald Trump's tax plan does include a few cuts for the middle class but 83% of tax cuts that are included in Donald Trumps tax plan go to the people that are making over half a million dollars a year. Kamala Harris's tax plan would've been better because 100% of the tax cuts in her plan would go to members of the middle and low class.

Donald Trump has also reported "not being associated with project 2025" and "having nothing to do with project 2025" which is obviously false seeing that many people who are involved in project 2025 have served Donald Trump in one way or another. For example; Paul Dans, who is a former chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personal Management under Trump is leading the project. In addition, Trumps campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt has appeared in Project 2025 promotion videos.

Here are ways project 2025 could affect you and your personal life. Project 2025 would stop people from earning overtime pay. He wants to undo recent policy that made over 4 million people newly eligible for overtime. Project 2025 also wants to weaken child labor protections. In quote "The young people should be able to work inherently dangerous jobs" and work in rolls that are not allowed thanks to protections from the department of labor.

Project 2025 also says that they will quote "Secure the border, finish building the wall, and deport illegal aliens" Donald Trump is planing on doing mass deportations. He declared that once he takes office that he will use military to do mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

They want to make it harder for women to get abortions by removing it from laws and taking away approval for abortion pills. They want to stop some services that give out birth control and instead suggest less reliable methods. That might take away funding from clinics that provide abortions which could also affect other services those clinics offer. They want to promote traditional roles for men and women. They will take away protections and programs that help gay people, thus making it harder for them to be treated fairly and get the support they need. They might cut back on programs that help poor people get healthcare and other support meaning it could be harder for poor families to get the help they need.

These are some of the ways project 2025 will affect the climate. Project 2025 would rewrite the most legal tool we have for protecting wildlife in ways that would harm imperilled species. For example, it specifically calls for removing protections from gray wolves and Yellowstone grizzlies. They also propose to repeal the Antiquities Act, which would strip the president of the ability to protect the public land and waters of national monuments. Project 2025 would have agencies that manage the federal lands and waters to maximise corporate oil and gas extraction. Speaking of oil, the agenda directly aims to expand the Willow Project which the largest proposed oil and gas undertaking on the U.S. public land. This also calls for drilling into Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and mining into Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness.

If you go to a public school congratulations. You are now required to take the military entrance exam. Page 134/ 135, "Improve military recruiters’ access to secondary schools and require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery—the military entrance examination—by all students in schools that receive federal funding." "Increase the number of Junior ROTC programs in secondary schools"

If you voted for Trump I promise you will regret it in the next 4 years.

Edit from after the election: Donald Trump is not lowering gas prices and adding tariffs to companys that import goods and to make up for that he will be increasing the price of these goods.

Trump has aslo started mass deportations and ICE has been spoted waiting at schools, breaking down doors, and there have even been reports of ICE deporting people who are AMERICAN CITIZENS. People should not be scared to do basic things in fear of being deported by ICE.

edit: here is a link to the project 2025 document where I got my sources from

[matthewdwhite]

Vermilion Parish, LA 8/14

Vermilion Parish, on the Gulf in southwest Louisiana, combines small towns north of a vast expanse of wetlands that have not been too badly carved up by the oil and gas industry. The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway cuts straight through the entire parish, running east and west. You can sit by it and watch the barges go by, day and night. There's a restaurant and general store on route 35 south of Kaplan called Suire's, which in my opinion has the best Cajun fare in the whole area. It doesn't seem like there's much happening in this quiet parish, but a lot going on is hidden. Out in the wilds, accessible only by boat, there are scattered luxury hunting camps, some of which have hosted presidents and CEO types. Land parcels and mineral rights are owned by family trusts going back to the 19th century. There's a lot of land-swapping and leasing, cattle ranching, oil and gas extraction, and rice growing. There are also two state-controlled wildlife refuges. Odd thing about Vermilion Parish is its coastline is only accessible by water. No roads lead to any beach. I have seen the coastline in person once, when I was given permission to visit Cheniere au Tigre, a ridge near the coast that at one time had a dance hall and rustic inn for visitors who in the early 20th century came to take the cure by bathing in the mineral rich sea water. The land is still privately owned by descendants of the original settlers, most of whom have part-time or weekend homes there.

2014 was the year I shot everything outside with a polarized filter, with not too much regret, but I'm glad I didn't stick with it relentlessly. At the time I was interested in cutting through the thick summer haze, which the filter does do, as seen in these photographs, but nowadays I figure it's best to just work with the haze that is ever-present in coastal parishes in the hottest part of the summer.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

After months of deliberation, the New Mexico Water Quality Control Commission on May 14 voted to prohibit any discharge of treated “produced water” from oil and gas extraction to ground and surface waters. 

Produced water flows back to the surface during fracking and conventional oil and gas drilling and contains chemicals used in the extraction process as well as numerous other hazardous compounds, including arsenic and benzene, both human carcinogens. 

New Mexico creates around two billion barrels—84 billion gallons—of this toxic wastewater each year. Cleaning through multi-stage filtration, desalination and other processes could allow for the reuse of produced water for irrigation and other commercial applications, saving precious water resources. But environmental advocates, scientists and the New Mexico Environmental Department (NMED) have urged that proper regulations are not yet in place to make such reuse safe. 

“We thank the Commission for protecting our clean water, of which we have so little. This decision could not be more prudent,” said Rachel Conn, deputy director of Amigos Bravos, a nonprofit that testified against allowing discharge, along with the Western Environmental Law Center and the Sierra Club. 

The new rule “will ensure that the ground and surface waters of the state are protected while allowing for further study of viable treatment technologies for this difficult-to-treat water source,” NMED said in an email to Inside Climate News. 

In April, the commission drafted a rule that would have allowed pilot projects to release up to 84,000 gallons of treated produced water per day. Four pilot projects are already completed, and another eight are underway, with the goal of researching different ways to purify produced water and use it to grow plants and trees, or replace freshwater needs in industrial manufacturing. 

Produced water is regularly reused within the oil and gas industry, in closed processes where no water is released, or disposed of in underground “injection” wells. Use of produced water outside of that context is not allowed in New Mexico.

If pilots are able to demonstrate the water can be cleaned and decontaminated to the point that it is safe for other purposes, it could go a long way toward supplementing New Mexico’s dwindling water supply—the state is projected to lose 25 percent of its ground and surface water in the next 50 years due to climate change. 

The state is one of the largest producers of oil and gas in the country, and that could soon increase—the House’s newly drafted budget reconciliation bill would mandate quarterly lease sales of onshore oil and gas lands in New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Nevada and Alaska. More drilling would also mean more produced water.

[reasonsforhope]

"Governor Janet Mills announced that Maine has, two years ahead of time, surpassed its goal of installing 100,000 new heat pumps by 2025, a milestone that represents significant progress in reducing Maine’s reliance on heating oil, lowering heating costs, and curbing harmful carbon emissions.

To continue Maine’s momentum, Governor Mills also unveiled a new target: installing another 175,000 additional heat pumps in Maine by 2027, thereby bringing the number of heat pumps installed in Maine homes, businesses, and public buildings during her time in office to 275,000.

If this target is achieved, Maine would have more than 320,000 heat pumps in total installed across the state.

Heat pumps can be thought of as temperature recycling machines. They are filled with refrigerant fluid and contain a compressor, and they work by extracting excess heat and moving it around, either in or out of a house depending on whether it’s hot or cold.

It’s believed they work best in hot weather, but in February, Maine’s temperatures in some places plummeted during a cold snap to -60°F. Efficiency Maine, which aided in the state’s adoption of heat pumps by organizing rebates for customers under the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, did a survey of owners they had helped the previous year.

Many of [the heat pump owners] reported they were comfortable and warm, and offered to bring up the fact that by February they had already saved hundreds of dollars on home heating systems, over boilers, gas furnaces, and heating oil.

“We are setting an example for the nation,” said Mills at the announcement event. ​“Our transition to heat pumps is… curbing our reliance on fossil fuels, and cutting costs for Maine families, all while making them more comfortable in their homes—a hat trick for our state.”

The transition began in 2019 with bipartisan support of the Legislature, when Governor Mills enacted laws setting ambitious targets for transitioning to renewable energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions."

-via Good News Network, July 31, 2023