from NOLA.com

Louisiana has 8 of the worst water-polluting refineries in the country, study says

From oil price.com

Big Oil Set To Report Record $200 Billion Profits For 2022

Just found out about this. The US has always been tolerant with these sort of pollutants. Lead in paint and gasoline went on for far too long. While the cleanup is costly, the costs of poisoning large numbers of Americans is high, too. The lead-crime hypothesis also indicates that lead poisoning is responsible for recent crime waves in the US and elsewhere.

White House unveils plan to replace every lead pipe in the U.S.

Over 300,000 old 78 rpm records digitized on the Internet Archive.

The Great 78 Project

A series of these going on in the US right now. This one involves propping up uncompetitive nukes in Ohio. From the Guardian (UK).

In exchange for the millions to Householder, FirstEnergy got $1.4bn of subsidies for two of its ailing nuclear plants, prosecutors allege. The subsidies came in the form of HB-6, a bill championed by Householder as one of the signature pieces of legislation of his speakership. The law slapped a surcharge on to the electric bills of everyday Ohioans and went toward making the two nuclear plants profitable.

Ohio Republicans accused of taking $60m in bribes as corruption trial opens

Quite a while back I settled on Plex as my media server. I have thousands of MP3s, thousand of photos, plus personal videos and even ripped movies and TV shows from DVDs. I happen to use my Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu as a server, but Plex works with most popular platforms. You pay for the server, and clients are free.

We mostly listen to music on Amazon Alexa using Spotify these days or just stream WWOZ using Alexa and TuneIn. I thought it would be nice to be able to listen to my old MP3s on Alexa, since the alternative is using the Apple TV Plex client. Not a huge hassle, but not as easy as Alexa. I recall trying this a while back, unsuccessfully. The Alexa plugin still gets poor reviews and two stars, but thought I would give it a try.

With instructions from Plex, got it working almost immediately. Now I can just say Alexa, ask Plex to play music by John Coltrane and it works!

I am pretty much 100% in agreement with Prof Jacobson, although I’m sure he is much more informed than I am. On thing you have to remember is there are millions (billions?) of dollars being spent on sophisticated advertising campaign to keep established players (oil, gas and coal) in charge. Will it be “easy”? Actually I don’t see any reason for it to be difficult. Certainly easier (and much cheaper) than dealing with the effects of doing nothing. From the Guardian (UK).

‘No miracles needed’: Prof Mark Jacobson on how wind, sun and water can power the world

I dont usually comment on this sort of nonsense, but I happen to like M&Ms quite a bit, and have for as long as I can remember. So the Right Wingers don’t like the cartoon spokescandies? If Mars had any guts they would make a special Tucker Carlson edition with all white candies. BTW, I thought the green one wore heels.

M&M’s replaces cartoon ‘spokescandies’ with Maya Rudolph following ‘woke’ backlash from Fox News

Many years ago I worked in Minneapolis. One day I was at lunch with my friend Kamal from New Delhi and Adel from Cairo. We started talking about the weather, and then which city was further south, New Orleans, Cairo or Delhi. We argued a bit, and I don’t remember exactly what side each of us took. It was intense enough that when we got back from the office we found a world map and checked. All were darn near the same latitude. Just had a look at the on line Latitude and Longitude Finder and sure enough, New Orleans: 29.951065, Cairo: 30.044420 and Delhi, India: 28.613939.

When I look around I mostly see strong trends of renewables replacing oil, gas and coal. Ran across a chart today that shows one place this trend is broken. Data only up to 2021. From Our World in Data.

Electricity generation from fossil fuels