Environment
Slacktivism may have reached its final frontier. Video gaming.
Grist’s Jesse Nichols touted efforts of University of Washington scientist Dargan Frierson to create climate change video games. The lefty environmental website asked, “Could a video game help us solve climate change?”
Part 5 (otherwise known as season 3, part 1) of The Ranch, starring Ashton Kutcher, was released June 15 on Netflix and our heroes just found out that the gas pipeline, which was going to bring them some much-needed financial relief, has been canceled thanks to protesters. When Rooster meets one of the protesters in a bar, he tells her she "fucked up a lot of peoples' lives with that protest" and realizes that is the one thing that could stop him from hitting on an attractive woman.
The New York Times loves its public transit and dislikes the limited-government Koch Brothers. Combine those trends and you have: “Kochs Finance High-Tech War Against Transit – Targeting Voter Data to Kill Buses and Rail” in Tuesday’s off-lead story slot. Not “War Against Federal Over-Spending...” the Kochs are apparently against people moving around. Climate reporter Hiroko Tabuchi sounded mildly alarmed throughout the long feature, following anti-public transit canvassers in Nashville.
On Monday, the Associated Press launched a series of planned articles marking the 30th anniversary of former NASA scientist James Hansen's "opening salvo of the age of climate change," as Douglas Brinkley it. Seth Borenstein and Nicky Forster trumpeted how "we were warned" by Hansen's June 1988 congressional testimony, and underlined that "thirty years later, it’s clear that Hansen and other doomsayers were right." Borenstein also filed a glowing accompanying report about Hansen, which cited just one critic of the academic turned climate activist.
The Aquaman movie will turn the typical Hollywood environmental themes on its head — with a villain at war with mankind over pollution. On June 15, Entertainment Weekly reported that actor Patrick Wilson would play Aquaman Arthur Curry’s antagonist and half-brother King Orm in the movie which will be in theaters in December.
An investment conference isn’t the typical place to hear climate change complaints and attacks on capitalism, but that’s exactly what attendees heard at the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago on June 12. Investor Jeremy Grantham, co-founder of $70 billion global asset management firm, Grantham Mayor Van Otterloo (GMO), blamed capitalism for threatening the planet, according to CNBC.
On the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, environmental reporter Coral Davenport devoted over 2,000 words to the Trump administration's alleged "retreat from scince." The headline made the proposition clear: “In the Trump Administration, Science Is Unwelcome. So Is Advice.” To Davenport, "science" includes support for the liberal climate change consensus, and the Iran deal.
The Canadian federal government will intervene to save an oil pipeline expansion project in western Canada, after environmentalists took credit for stopping it with their protests.
EcoWatch and Canadian Press reported that environmental groups took an early victory lap when energy company Kinder Morgan Canada announced in April 2018, that it had temporarily halted its efforts to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline. The pipeline would carry oil from Alberta’s tar sands to a port in British Columbia — opening up export prospects.
Robert Mueller's investigation into whether President Donald Trump and the Russians colluded to rig the 2016 presidential election so far has borne little fruit. The Democrats and their media allies would love to find some Russian collusion and interference. I can help them discover some, but I doubt that they will show much interest.
The folks at CNN were fuming Tuesday after a correspondent and her cameraperson, along with those from the Associated Press, were kept out of a press event held by the EPA to discuss a plan to deal with a certain kind of toxin in water supplies. And during The Situation Room that evening, a host of CNN personalities threw hissy fits about not being allowed in. They even seemed to suggest the EPA couldn’t be held accountable unless CNN was in that room.
California is king when it comes to environmental regulations, but the latest decision to mandate solar panels comes at a high price. For homeowners.
Those costs of freedom of choice and almost $10,000 higher construction expenses per home didn’t matter much to California’s proponents of solar panels or the liberal media which downplayed costs and critics when they mentioned them at all.
The saga of the environmental crusade against Chevron over pollution in Ecuador will be coming to San Francisco theater this month.
Filmmaker and investigative journalist Phelim McAleer co-wrote the play The 18-Billion Prize, with Jonathan Lear. Broadway World described as a “shocking and at times farcical tale of how an environmental lawsuit turned into the world's biggest fraud.”