Maybe they can start burning dog $hit:
"Nations must drop fossil fuels, fast, world energy body warns" by Brad Plumer New York Times, May 18, 2021
Nations around the world would need to immediately stop approving new coal-fired power plants and new oil and gas fields and quickly phase out gasoline-powered vehicles if they want to avert the most catastrophic effects of climate change, the world’s leading energy agency said Tuesday.
In a sweeping new report, the International Energy Agency issued a detailed road map of what it would take for the world’s nations to slash carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050. That would very likely keep the average global temperature from increasing 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth faces irreversible damage.
[How much you want to get that it dovetails with this?
That's to where all the agendas being pushed in my pre$$ lead back]
While academics and environmentalists have made similar recommendations before, this is the first time the International Energy Agency has outlined ways to accomplish such drastic cuts in emissions.
That’s significant, given the fact that the influential agency is not an environmental group but an international organization that advises world capitals on energy policy. Formed after the oil crises of the 1970s, the agency’s reports and forecasts are frequently cited by energy companies and investors as a basis for long-term planning.
“It’s a huge shift in messaging if they’re saying there’s no need to invest in new fossil fuel supply,” said Kelly Trout, senior research analyst at Oil Change International, an environmental advocacy group.
“The sheer magnitude of changes needed to get to net-zero emissions by 2050 is still not fully understood by many governments and investors,” Fatih Birol, the agency’s executive director, said in an interview.
Net-zero emissions doesn’t mean countries would stop emitting carbon dioxide altogether. Instead, they would need to sharply reduce most of the carbon dioxide generated by power plants, factories and vehicles. Any emissions that could not be fully erased would be offset, such as by forests or artificial technologies that can pull carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere.
To reach that goal of net zero worldwide by 2050, every nation would need to move much faster and more aggressively away from fossil fuels than they are currently doing, the report found.
For instance, the annual pace of installations for solar panels and wind turbines worldwide would have to quadruple by 2030, the agency said. For the solar industry, that would mean building the equivalent of what is currently the world’s largest solar farm every day for the next decade.
For now, the world remains off course. Last month, the agency warned that global carbon dioxide emissions were expected to rise at their second-fastest pace ever in 2021 as countries recovered from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic and global coal burning neared a high, led by a surge of industrial activity in Asia.
“We’re seeing more governments around the world make net-zero pledges, which is very good news,” Birol said, “but there’s still a huge gap between the rhetoric and the reality.”
President Biden has made climate action a top priority of his administration and is pushing for an aggressive pivot away from fossil fuels at home and abroad, but his own pledge to cut US greenhouse gases at least 50 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade faces significant political obstacles, and at a virtual summit of 40 world leaders that Biden hosted last month, Japan, Canada, and Britain joined the European Union in committing to steeper cuts but China, India, and Russia did not.
[Shut down the war machine, Joe]
If the world’s governments want to change course quickly, the International Energy Agency has essentially offered a step-by-step guide for how they might do so. The agency sketched out one potential timetable:
— This year, nations would stop approving new coal plants unless they are outfitted with carbon-capture technology to trap and bury their emissions underground. Nations would also stop approving the development of new oil and gas fields beyond those already committed.
— By 2025, governments worldwide would start banning the sale of new oil and gas furnaces to heat buildings, shifting instead to cleaner electric heat pumps.
— By 2030, electric vehicles would make up 60 percent of new car sales globally, up from just 5 percent today. By 2035, automakers would stop selling new gasoline- or diesel-fueled passenger vehicles. By 2050, virtually all cars on the roads worldwide would either run on batteries or hydrogen.
— By 2035, the world’s advanced economies would zero-out emissions from power plants, shifting away from emitting coal and gas plants to technologies like wind, solar, nuclear, or carbon capture. By 2040, all of the world’s remaining coal-fired power plants would be closed or retrofitted with carbon-capture technology.
— In 2035, more than half of new heavy trucks would be electric. By 2040, roughly half of all air travel worldwide would be fueled by cleaner alternatives to jet fuel, such as sustainable biofuels or hydrogen.
[The WEF playbook if I've ever seen one]
The American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry trade group, said it agreed with the goal of a lower carbon future but still saw a role for oil and gas going forward. “Any pathway to net zero must include the continued use of natural gas and oil, which will remain crucial to displacing coal in developing nations and enabling renewable energy,” said Stephen Comstock, the institute’s vice president of corporate policy.
[Good luck getting the financing from the bankers]
The International Energy Agency warned that an energy transformation on the scale necessary would require “unprecedented” global cooperation, with wealthier nations helping poorer countries that lack the technological expertise or investment capital to decarbonize.
[That means the end of all life because what do you think makes things grow?
These psychopaths are sick and their pre$$ whores are pathetic]
China still has plans for dozens of new coal-fired power plants, although President Xi Jinping said his country would “strictly limit increasing coal consumption” in the next five years, and companies in the United States and Canada are still targeting new oil and gas fields for development. The unevenness in global action comes even as scientists warn that the damages from rising temperatures are already reverberating around the globe. A report by the Environmental Protection Agency published last week found that in the United States, wildfires are now starting earlier in the year, heat waves are more frequent, and flooding is more common.
[Just because they say it doesn't make it true, and the odds are the exact opposite is the truth]
Related:
"Ozone and fine particulate matter from vehicle emissions claimed approximately 7,100 lives in 12 states and Washington, D.C., in 2016, including about 620 in Massachusetts, a new study from Harvard and the University of North Carolina found. The study, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, was led by researchers from the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute for the Environment, the Chan School said in a statement. The team, the statement said, reviewed 2016 data for ozone and particulate matter formed from on-road vehicle emissions, taken from the most recent national emissions inventory....."
It's enough to make you choke on the pollution of the propaganda pre$$, as fossil fuel burning is really at the heart of this. If we don't tackle fossil fuel burning, the problem is not going to go away."
So whom, 'er, what to save, hmmmmm?
"What to save? Climate change forces brutal choices at national parks" by Zoë Schlanger New York Times, May 18, 2021
For more than a century, the core mission of the National Park Service has been preserving the natural heritage of the United States, but now, as the planet warms, transforming ecosystems, the agency is conceding that its traditional goal of absolute conservation is no longer viable in many cases.
Late last month the service published an 80-page document that lays out new guidance for park managers in the era of climate change. The document, along with two peer-reviewed papers, is essentially a tool kit for the new world. It aims to help park ecologists and managers confront the fact that, increasingly, they must now actively choose what to save, what to shepherd through radical environmental transformation, and what will vanish forever.
“The concept of things going back to some historical fixed condition is really just no longer tenable,” said Patty Glick, a senior scientist for climate adaptation at the National Wildlife Federation and one of the lead authors of the document.
[Just like with CVD, which is the cover for this $cam based on lies as they turn up the heat]
The new research and guidance represent a kind of “reckoning” for the Park Service, Glick said.
For a profession long tied to maintaining historical precedents, the change is brutal, said Gregor W. Schuurman, a scientist with the climate change response program at the Park Service who helped to write the new guidance.
“It’s bargaining. Nobody wants to do this. We all got in this game, as the Park Service mission says, to ‘conserve unimpaired,’ ” Schuurman said, “but if you can’t do that in the way you thought, you have to see what you can do. There’s often more flexibility there than one imagines.”
[Schuurman, huh?]
The team behind the report kept a low profile during the Trump administration, when the Park Service was at the center of frequent political battles. In 2018, for example, managers tried to delete humanity’s role in climate change from a report on sea-level rise. The day before Joe Biden’s inauguration, they began publishing their papers, which were years in the making.
The first one, titled “Resist, Accept, Direct,” aims to help park employees triage species and landscapes. In some cases, that will mean giving up long efforts to save them. The second outlines how to assess risks when relocating species. That may be crucial to saving plants and animals that can no longer survive in their natural habitat.
[They mean people, too!]
Those two papers were the basis for the guidance published last month. On the very first page of that document, set over a photo of the charred Santa Monica Mountains after the 2018 Woolsey Fire, the authors state that “it will not be possible to safeguard all park resources, processes, assets, and values in their current form or context over the long term.”
Decisions about what to protect are especially imminent for forests, where changes are leading some researchers to wonder if the age of North American woodlands is coming to an end.
In the Southwest, for example, research suggests that, in the event of wildfires, up to 30 percent of forest might never grow back because global warming favors shrubs or grasslands in their ranges. Joshua trees appear likely to lose all of their habitat in their namesake national park by the end of the century.
[Sure looks like some sort of arson to me, given that the blaze is the state’s largest wildfire since April 1999 and broke out in an area that is difficult to reach and spread quickly, due to “dry leaf litter and surface fuel combined with low humidity and steep terrain” so “stay clear for your own health and safety.”]
The guidelines essentially ask park managers to think beyond resistance to change and begin considering transformation as the prevailing theme to be greeted and managed. In some isolated cases, resisting ecological change might work for a while. In other cases, losses must be accepted, but just as often, there may be room to shepherd changes in a less calamitous direction.
For example, some native tree species in Acadia National Park, Maine, are struggling to survive as temperatures warm. Invasive, brambly shrubs, brought to the United States as ornamental plants, are much better at adapting to the warmer temperatures than native species and are quickly moving in to take their place. The invasives produce leaves earlier in spring than native species, shading out any young tree that tries to emerge. And, as mild weather arrives earlier and earlier (the growing season has already lengthened by two months in coastal Maine over the last century and a half because of global warming), the brambles only get more successful and abundant.
“They’re dense thickets and you can’t walk through them,” said Abraham Miller-Rushing, an ecologist and the science coordinator at Acadia National Park. They’re also a perfect habitat for ticks that can carry Lyme disease.
For the past 30 years, the park has sent out teams of people to cut down and pull out the shrubs, but that won’t work for long. “The models show that of the 10 most common tree species in the park, nine of them are predicted to lose habitat over the next 80 years, either declining a lot or disappearing entirely,” Miller-Rushing said. That includes red spruce, which make up 40 percent of the trees in the park. If those disappear, much of the forest floor would suddenly open to the invasive shrubs, which would fill the open space faster than any manual effort could stop them.
[Here we go again, basing decisions on inaccurate and wildly flawed, agenda-pushing models]
Right now, park managers are still finding new red spruce saplings around the park, which is a good sign, but that could change very quickly — much sooner than 80 years from now. “That decline could be rapid,” Miller-Rushing said. Red spruce is very sensitive to drought. “You could imagine a scenario where we get a drought combined with an insect pest or pathogen. That could knock back the spruce really quickly.”
It’s already happened to the red pine. Almost every one of the species in the park has been wiped out over the past six years by a single invasive insect, the red pine scale.
Acadia park managers are already using the Resist, Accept, Direct framework to decide what to do. Right now, they are considering selecting certain southerly tree species to hand-plant inside the park, in the hope that they will avoid a forest full of brambles.
Whatever action they take, in the coming decades, the park won’t look like the Acadia of the past. “When our forests change to hardwoods, or, God forbid, invasive shrub land, the postcards would look different then,” Miller-Rushing said.
Related:
"A new bill passed by Maine’s Legislature requiring the state to divest its pension investments and other funds from fossil fuel companies is being hailed by climate activists as a major milestone, fueling optimism that more states and influential institutions could follow. Once a fledgling protest movement mostly confined to college campuses, the demand for climate-conscious investments has gained momentum and institutional support, with some state and local governments already reducing their investments. Maine is the first state to authorize divestiture....."
It's “beginning to look like there’s kind of a groundswell,” and it is a “snowball effect that is accumulating speed and size as it’s rolling down the hill” as advocates say divesting from fossil fuel companies is one of a number of critical steps that humans must take to combat climate change.
If that means cutting a swath through the forests, God forbid, to provide power to Massachusetts, then the Globe isn't touching that controversy as they let the courts sort it out and troll the woods of Maine as lawmakers are considering legislation that would prohibit offensive language on vanity license plates because they “regularly receives complaints from motorists who are appalled.”
Also see:
"President Biden traveled to Michigan Tuesday to visit the factory where Ford will produce the first electric version of its signature F-150 pickup truck, seeking to harness the horsepower of an American icon as he continues to make the case for his $4 trillion economic agenda. Biden’s remarks at the Ford Rouge Electric Vehicle Center centered on the hundreds of billions of dollars for domestic manufacturing, electric vehicle deployment, and research into emerging technologies like advanced batteries that are included in the first half of his two-part economic agenda. “My name is Joe Biden,” the president said at the start of his remarks, “and I’m a car guy.” In a state that helped deliver the White House to Biden last year, after going for Donald Trump in 2016, the president pitched the idea that a transition to electric vehicles can position the United States to beat out China in the global automotive market while creating high-paying union jobs. He did so flanked by trucks from the best-selling vehicle line in the country. “The future of the auto industry is electric,” Biden said. “There’s no turning back. The American auto industry is at a crossroads, and the real question is whether we’ll lead or fall behind in the race to the future,” he said. Upon arrival in Michigan, Biden huddled for several minutes with Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who has criticized Biden for siding too heavily with Israel in the ongoing conflict with Palestinians in Gaza. Biden singled her out in his remarks. “I admire your intellect, I admire your passion and I admire your concern for so many other people,” he said. “From my heart, I pray that your grandma and family are well. I promise you that I’m going to do everything to see that they are, on the West Bank.’' Biden made an unscheduled stop Ford’s test track, where he hopped into the new all-electric F-150 pickup truck and took a spin. “This sucker’s quick,” Biden said after pulling up in front of reporters accompanying him. “I’m just gonna step on it. I’ll come off at 80 miles per hour. Okay, here we go. Ready?”
How did he get there (not on a bike I pre$ume), and what was the hypocritical carbon footprint on that?
Someone should sue the guy and there is no going back to ‘Taxachusetts.’
Related:
"Carmakers have been promising to scrap the internal combustion engine, and now it’s the truckmakers’ turn, but the makers of giant 18-wheelers are taking a different route. Daimler, the world’s largest maker of heavy trucks, whose Freightliners are a familiar sight on American interstates, said last week that it would convert to zero-emission vehicles within 15 years at the latest, providing another example of how the shift to electric power is reshaping vehicle manufacturing with significant implications for the climate, economic growth and jobs. The journey away from fossil fuels will play out differently and take longer in the trucking industry than it will for passenger cars. For one thing, zero emission long-haul trucks are not yet available in large numbers, and different technology may be needed to power the electric motors. Batteries work well for delivery vehicles and other short-haul trucks, which are already on the roads in significant numbers, but Daimler argues that battery power is not ideal for long-haul 18-wheelers, at least with current technology. The weight of the batteries alone subtracts too much from payload, an important consideration for cost-conscious trucking companies; instead, Daimler and some rivals are betting on fuel cells that generate electricity from hydrogen. Fuel cells produce no tailpipe emissions, and hydrogen fuel tanks can be refilled as fast as diesel tanks — a distinct advantage compared with batteries, which typically take at least twice as long to recharge. In April, Daimler began testing a prototype “GenH2” long-haul truck capable of going 600 miles between visits to the hydrogen pump, but lots of work is needed to bring down the cost of the equipment and there is not yet a network of hydrogen fueling stations or an adequate supply of hydrogen produced in a way that does not cancel out the environmental benefits. Last week Daimler provided details of how it plans to solve these problems, with the goal of selling hydrogen-fueled long-haul trucks by 2027 that will be cheaper to buy and operate than diesel models....."
PFFFFFFT!
Their $elf-$erving $olutiuons always make things worse!
"Go green or go bipartisan? Biden’s big infrastructure choice" by Lisa Mascaro and Matthew Daly The Associated Press, June 12, 2021
WASHINGTON — President Biden’s hopes of channeling billions of dollars into green infrastructure investments to fight climate change are running into the political obstacle of winning over Republican lawmakers who oppose that approach as unnecessary, excessive spending.
As negotiations unfold in Congress in search of a bipartisan deal, the White House's ability to ensure a climate focus in Biden's sweeping infrastructure package is becoming daunting — so much so that key Democrats are warning the administration to quit negotiating with Republicans, calling it a waste of time that will produce no viable compromise.
“From my perspective, no climate, no deal,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. “I won’t just vote against an infrastructure package without climate action — I’ll fight against it.″
The debate is similar to the political and policy differences complicating Biden’s broader talks over his ambitious infrastructure agenda, the sweeping $1.7 trillion American Jobs Plan making its way through Congress, as Democrats and Republicans argue over what, exactly, constitutes infrastructure and how much is needed.
The White House is holding firm to Biden's initial ideas, which tally nearly $1 trillion in climate-related investments that aim to bolster the electric vehicle market, make buildings and property more resilient to harsh weather patterns and push the country's electrical grid to become carbon-free by 2035.
The president is seeking a newer definition of infrastructure, trying not only to patch up the nation’s roads and highways, but also to rebuild its economy with new kinds of investments for the 21st century. The Republicans prefer a more traditional approach that touches modestly on some climate-related elements but focuses more specifically on transportation and other typical developments.
As Biden courts a new bipartisan group of 10 senators, who are eyeing a scaled-down proposal, leading Democrats are worried their party is losing an opportunity with control of the House, Senate and White House to make gains on its climate change priorities.
“The President has underscored that climate change is one of the defining crises we face as a nation," White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said Friday, "and he and his team have continuously fought for leading on the clean energy economy and on clean energy jobs – which is critical for our economic growth, competitiveness, and middle class.”
At a climate forum Friday, former Vice President Al Gore, who spoke to Biden last month, said: “I know he is committed to this issue. I know it very well because he knows and has said inaction is simply not an option."
[I am so sick of the gaseous spew coming from the likes of him]
For all the divisions, there may be some common ground between the White House and the Republicans, particularly with the GOP senators now engaged in bipartisan talks.
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a lead GOP negotiator, said he brought up flood resiliency and energy provisions that would benefit his state during a call with Biden on Tuesday. He was also seen engaged in a lengthy and somewhat animated conversation with Biden on the tarmac last month when the president visited Louisiana.
[He is one of a bipartisan group of 10 senators that have been huddling behind closed doors negotiating an infrastructure deal with Biden]
Hailing from a coastal state familiar with the hazards of harsh weather, Cassidy supports a bipartisan bill to offer tax breaks to property owners that protect homes and businesses against natural disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes, floods and drought, and another to support projects that ”capture” and store carbon dioxide produced by coal-fired plants and other fossil fuels. Louisiana has several sites vying to become a national hub for carbon capture.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has been largely silent on the bipartisan effort, and other GOP leaders are cool to this latest negotiation, doubtful their five Republican colleagues will find a compromise.
Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 in Republican leadership, told reporters, “The things you’re going to need to do to get Democratic votes, it'd be hard to get any Republicans.”
With the Congress narrowly split, and the Senate evenly divided, 50-50, Biden would need support from at least 10 Republicans to reach the 60-vote threshold required to break a filibuster by opponents. The president is encouraging Democrats to also launch a parallel track using budget reconciliation rules that would allow passage with 51 votes, achievable because Vice President Kamala Harris can cast a tiebreaking vote.
[That's what dictatorships do]
Still, the White House and Republicans remain far apart on key details, including the overall scope of the package and how to pay for it.
Biden wants to hike the corporate tax rate, from 21% to 28%, which Republicans oppose as a red line they will not cross.
Instead, the emerging bipartisan proposal from the 10 senators is expected to include an increase in the federal gas tax, which consumers pay at the pump, by linking it to inflation. Biden rejects that approach because he refuses to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. The group also may tap unspent COVID-19 relief funds and go after unpaid income taxes.
[That means when inflation soars, you will be priced out of the gas Biden doesn't want you to have anyway. Hmmm]
Jamal Raad, executive director of Evergreen Action, an environmental group, said after months of negotiations that “it’s clear there will never be 10 votes from the GOP caucus” for major investments like those proposed by the White House.
In the House, the Congressional Progressive Caucus' Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., tweeted: “An infrastructure bill that doesn’t prioritize the climate crisis will not pass the House. Period,” and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a leading climate hawk, said he is “nervous” that Democrats may not be serious about addressing climate change in the infrastructure bill. “We are running out of time.’’
Biden administration officials say they understand the concerns. White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy said she and other officials “are going to fight like crazy” to make sure provisions, including a clean electricity standard, are included in the final bill.
The standard calls for making the nation’s electricity sector carbon-free by 2035, a key aspect of Biden's goal of halving the nation's greenhouse gas emissions.
[After what happened in Texas this past winter?]
Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said he and others are concerned about the extended effort to win over GOP votes they consider unlikely to succeed.
From his home in California, he said he sees the threat of wildfires and drought fueled by climate change on a daily basis. “We are in a dire moment, and we don’t always have leadership that reflects that,” he said.
I mean, your Kia is being recalled for a second time and customers are suing Tesla over price hikes related to their roof product as Air France launches its first long-haul flight with sustainable fuel that refueled in Montreal before continuing on to Japan to pick up some chips.
Just greasing you up for the rentals is all as Americans increased their borrowing to a record of $14.6 trillion in March, driven by home and auto loans, but the growth masked what Federal Reserve Bank of New York researchers called a “confounding” decline in credit-card balances during a quarter when retail sales soared and travel resumed.
I imagine that someday coal will be like gold as environmental justice isn’t only about where power plants get built and which neighborhoods have enough trees or where power plants get built and which neighborhoods have enough trees. Sometimes, it’s about something smaller and less visible than that — about the people who are left out, even when we’re making progress.
That was yesterday's Exhibit A, and the missing piece of the puzzle in manufacturing is the spending billions to boost high-tech industries to prevent Big Oil from getting clean and keeping the world dirty.
That's why the gas pipeline in Weymouth must be shut down, but it's okay to go to the beaches this year!
I had intended to do a single post regarding the cyberattack that forced a shutdown of a top U.S. pipeline, but then the "authorities" came out with this laughable cover story. The Globe immediately downplayed it because the state gets most of its transportation fuels from the Port of New York and New Jersey via barge while also minimizing the shortages and climb in gas prices.
Incredibly, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm had a warning for service station operators and said ’'pipe is the best way to go,’' while Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was at the briefing, said, ’'the threat is not imminent, it is upon us.’'
This comes as he is willfully blind to the border crisis -- I guess our streets aren't violent enough as it is -- while one wonders what pipe Granholm is hitting after they closed down Keystone and are now, according to reports, importing oil from Iran.
That was before gas prices hit $3 and the Wa$hington Compo$t warned us that ransomware attacks could reach ‘pandemic’ levels and here is what you need to know after the oil pipeline hack:
Gee, how convenient!
It's all a mystery to the pre$$, just like Event 201, as they rehearse and prepare to destroy the economy and cut off the power, food, and water, in an attempt to enslave humanity and enforce their their evil agenda of vaccination and genocide. It was done 100 years ago, and they are now brazenly telling us they will do it again only worse with their global kill shots -- complete with pre$$ mouthpieces supporting it the whole way (what did that do to the environment, and speaking of bad apples, the Webby goes to. . .).
The $y$tem was blinking red to anyone who can see it, and it was Joe Lieberman tried to sound the alarm! The false flag beta test by the usual suspects(!) has just been confirmed and now the Biden administration will require pipeline companies to report cyberattacks (cur bono as the communi$ts get their fingers even more entrenched in bu$ine$$).
That's the meat of the world’s largest meat processing company cyberattack by REvil(!) as suddenly, ransomware has begun to feel like a digital pandemic, crippling one critical business after another. Last month, it was a pipeline delivering gasoline to the Southeast. This week, ransomware took down about one-fifth of the nation’s beef production, and on Wednesday, an attack hit the ferry service to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, but what is ransomware, why is it so devastating, and what can be done about it?
I'm going to keep chugging along after abandoning the ship, and ransomware expert Allan Liska of the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future said JBS was the largest food manufacturer yet to be hit by ransomware, in which criminal hackers paralyze entire networks by scrambling their data, but he said at least 40 food companies have been targeted by ransomware gangs over the last year, including brewer Molson Coors and E & J Gallo Winery Food companies, Liska said, are at “about the same level of security as manufacturing and shipping.
Moving Fastly now as it only took a technical blunder at a little-known Internet company to shut down a host of the world’s best-known websites Tuesday morning [as] a software glitch on a content delivery network run by San Francisco-based Fastly blocked online access to the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC, as well as the popular forum Reddit, videogame streaming service Twitch, and a number of other websites, the latest in a series of major Internet disruptions with national and global impact. Cyber criminals shut down a major US fuel pipeline in May, causing serious gasoline shortages, while a similar attack last week briefly closed down meatpacking plants that produce much of the nation’s beef, pork, and chicken. The Fastly outage wasn’t a deliberate attack, and it lasted for less than two hours, but it shows how vulnerable we all are to single points of failure on the Internet.
Those behind it are starting to pour the Champagne after cloud services company Fastly apologized for a global outage that temporarily hobbled Amazon, Hulu, the New York Times, and other high-traffic websites in a blog post that said an “undiscovered software bug” was triggered by routine activity by a single customer.
If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you as power prices and crop prices surge amid the $corching heat in what appear to be manmade crisis as a Boston-area company is offering a subscription service for grass-fed beef, free-range chicken, and wild-caught seafood through a new partnership with online delivery giant Instacart, which will bring ButcherBox products to customers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and Miami this summer through a pilot program, launched last Wednesday that “meets the customers where those customers are.”
You will never have to leave the house, and thus no need for gas.
Related:
"Hackers working for profit and espionage have long threatened American information systems, but in the last six months, they’ve targeted companies running operational networks like the Colonial Pipeline fuel system, with greater persistence. These are the systems where water can be contaminated, a gas line can spring a leak or a substation can explode. It isn’t entirely clear why ransomware hackers -- those who use malicious software to block access to a computer system until a sum of money has been paid -- have recently moved from small-scale universities, banks and local governments to energy companies, meatpacking plants and utilities. Experts suspect increased competition and bigger payouts as well as foreign government involvement. The shift is finally drawing serious attention to the problem. The U.S. government began taking small steps to defend cybersecurity in 1998 when the Clinton administration identified 14 private sectors as critical infrastructure, including chemicals, defense, energy and financial services. This triggered regulation in finance and power. Other industries were slower to protect their computers, including the oil and gas sector, said Rob Lee, the founder of Dragos. One of the reasons is the operational and financial burden of pausing production and installing new tools. Much of the infrastructure running technology systems is too old for sophisticated cybersecurity tools. Ripping and replacing hardware is costly as are service outages. Network administrators fear doing the job piecemeal may be worse because it can increase a network’s exposure to hackers, said Andrea Carcano, co-founder of Nozomi Networks, a control system security company. Although the Biden administration’s budget includes $20 billion to upgrade the country’s grid, this comes after a history of shoulder shrugging from federal and local authorities. Even where companies in under-regulated sectors like oil and gas have prioritized cybersecurity, they’ve been met with little support. Take the case of ONE Gas Inc. in Tulsa, Oklahoma....."
I'm told the industry is finally focused on fighting back, but I had to go to and link another source to confirm it. Whether they have enough clout left is an open que$tion.
UPDATE:
"Ford expects 40 percent of its global sales to be battery-electric vehicles by 2030 as it adds billions to what it’s spending to develop them. The automaker said in a presentation for investors Wednesday that it will add about $8 billion to its EV development spending from this year to 2025. That would bring the total to nearly $20 billion as Ford begins to develop and build batteries in a joint venture with SK Innovation of Korea. CEO Jim Farley said the company’s financial performance hasn’t been acceptable in recent years, but it has accelerated its turnaround plan and made progress in the past few quarters. The company is now generating cash flow so it can grow the scale of its electric and commercial vehicle businesses, he said. The company also announced it would create a separate business called Ford Pro that will focus on commercial and government fleet buyers. It also expects to have about 1 million vehicles capable of getting over-the-internet software updates by the end of this year. Ford says it will have more vehicles capable of this than Tesla by July of 2022."