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Plugging in more stuff can slash Cascadia’s climate-warming emissions at modest cost. But that means moving much faster.
Amid the 1970s Arab oil embargo, a gasoline company’s TV ads showed an aging wooden windmill. As the wind died, it slowed to stillness.
The ad asked: “But what do you do when the wind stops?”
For the next several decades fossil fuel providers continued to denigrate renewable energy. Big power utilities piled on with claims that fluctuating solar and wind power could black out the grid. Even the U.S. Energy Department deemed renewables “too rare, too diffuse, too distant, too uncertain, and too ill-timed” to meaningfully contribute, as a top agency analyst put it in 2005.
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Nalleli Cobo was nine years old when her nose started bleeding, off and on throughout the day, and often into her pillow at night. Then came the headaches and heart palpitations; for a while, her doctor had her wear a heart monitor. “I got to the point where I couldn’t walk,” Cobo, who is now 20, says. “My mom had to carry me from place to place.”
Doctors were stumped as to what was wrong. “I’d always been a healthy little girl,” Cobo recalled. “And then all of a sudden I’m meeting cardiologists and neurologists and all these other -ologists, and no one could figure out what I had.” Only after being sick for four years, in 2013, did she get a possible answer. Physicians for Social Responsibility, a public-health nonprofit, sent a toxicologist to Cobo’s South Los Angeles community to talk about how certain chemical byproducts of oil extraction, among them benzene and hydrogen sulfide, can cau
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The bill, authored by state Sens. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, and Monique Limón, D-Santa Barbara, would prohibit new permits for hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, and block companies from renewing existing permits for the controversial technique.
(David McNew/Getty Images)
Legislation that would gradually phase out fracking and other extraction methods that account for most of California s petroleum production faces its first big test in Sacramento on Tuesday.
The nine-member Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee is set to vote on a proposal, Senate Bill 467, that would bar new permits for hydraulic fracturing, cyclic steaming, steam flooding and water flooding.
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Sep 12, 2018 @ 09:00
Nearly all of the world’s largest 200 industrial companies have directly or indirectly opposed climate policy since the landmark Paris Agreement was signed three years ago, according to new research.
Analysis by InfluenceMap, a UK-based think tank, examined the lobbying activities of 200 of the world’s biggest companies and 75 of the most powerful trade groups and the links between them since December 2015.
It found that 30 percent of all companies analysed have directly lobbied against climate policy in the last three years and that 90 percent of them retain membership to trade associations which have actively opposed climate policy around the world.
Anti-fracking bill could severely curtail oil and gas extraction in California
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Oil wells in San Ardo earlier this week a bill before the state Legislature would outlaw fracking and could lead to a severe limitation on fossil fuel extraction in California.Nic Coury / Special to The ChronicleShow MoreShow Less
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A bill before the state Legislature would limit several methods of oil extraction in California. These wells are in San Ardo.Nic Coury / Special to The ChronicleShow MoreShow Less
California may soon take one of its most aggressive steps yet to fight climate change.
A bill before the state Legislature seeks to ban the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, in response to a high-profile request by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who last year urged lawmakers to move to halt the fossil fuel extraction technique.