Context Starting Part 3:
- Part 2 wasn’t incredibly insightful except that it hammered home the idea that corporate interests, specifically with regard to climate change, are lobbied for incredibly hard and effectively
Late Obama Administration:
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Promised to be the climate president
- In the middle of a recession, one of the few rays of job growth in oil and gas, it was a great story for the oil industry to sell — oil and gas refining helped obama safe face from period of economic tensions domestically
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Us split between being energy superpower and being a climate forward country
-While the Obama administration was pivotal in helping break up the spread of misinformation about climate change culturally (watershed moment where the environmentally forward president wins and it becomes an accepted prevailing and existential concern to the american public) — little happened at all during the administration due to decisions to shy away from fossil fuel reductions and in fact increasing them and lauding them for helping in part to keep the US Economy poised to maintain its status as economic hegemon after 2008)
Fracking
- Quest to unlock new domestic fossil fuels in the USA after Oil Embargo during Obama years.
- Fracking was born. Fluid driven fracture, known as fracking, is the process of extracting oil and gas from shale rock formations.
- Would take decades to get fracking technology to perfect, but worked during timeline of video
Hurricane Katrina
- Because of the damage to natural gas production done by Hurricane Katrina in 2008, oil and gas started using shale deposits to get natural gas, then shale tech got even better very quickly.
- Coal was the primary energy generator at this time
- Natural gas came afterwards due to more shale mining operations
- Natural Gas is cleaner than coal, it emits less, adopting natural gas instead of coal was seen as vaguely green at the time (at least where I am from, I remember this clearly)
- Obviously not lol
- Exxon Mobile works on fracking
- Dar-Lon Chang, Engineer, knowing that if natural gas is leaked into the atmosphere, methane specifically, could do more damage to the atmosphere than ghgs from coal - nearly raw methane shooting into the atmosphere not good!
- Plan was to not have leakage obviously, but inevitably, there is leakage.
- Natural gas when burned produces half of the emissions as coal… but without measurements to make sure that the plant is not leaking, there is no telling if they are polluting even more than if they were using coal
Early Obama administration years did not really have the steps forward to take on alternative energy
Nowadays, technology is good enough
Late Obama admin - see attacks now on the oil and gas industry from people, environmentalists protest much more often
Paris COP 21 - Obama speaks at and ratifies Paris Agreement (Donald Trump would later take us out of this)
Republican Attourney General coalitian backed by coal oil and natural gas industries,fought back against Obama’s more climate forward second term, framing it as an infringement on states rights (looool)
Trump immediately scrapped all clean climate initiatives from the Obama administration
October 2021, oil execs called out by court for historically spreading misinformation — Ro Khanna involved in this (fuck yeah)
- Mostly just political theater
Carbon Capture + Storage, spends billions to capture CO2 and keep it in the earth while extracting.
- False solution, not really a way to reduce emissions - more fossil fuel investment is what it is, it’s not going to stop climate change or prevent global warming
Great message, I learned a lot from this, nice!