The Warmists at the NY Times think they’re on to Something Big
Maui Sued Big Oil in 2020, Citing Fire Risks and More
The words were strikingly prescient: Because of climate change, lush and verdant Maui was facing wildfires of “increased frequency, intensity and destructive force.”
They appeared in a 2020 lawsuit filed by Maui County seeking damages from Exxon, Chevron, and other giant oil and gas companies, accusing them of a “coordinated, multifront effort to conceal and deny their own knowledge” that the burning of fossil fuels would heat the planet to dangerous extremes.
Now, after wildfires driven by conditions linked to climate change have devastated the Hawaiian island, the lawsuit carries renewed heft.
I’m pretty sure darned sure that fossil fuels and anthropogenic climate change had nothing to do with there being lots and lots of invasive grasses which were basically creating a tinder box. Nor were they responsible for the denial of water to attempt to control the blaze. Nor the failure to use sirens, etc and so on
Ryan Meyers, senior vice president and general counsel at the American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry lobby group, called the Maui wildfires a tragedy but stressed that their immediate cause was still under investigation.
He called the litigation brought by Maui part of a “coordinated campaign to wage meritless lawsuits against our industry” and “nothing more than a distraction from important issues and an enormous waste of taxpayer resources.”
Maui is among more than two dozen states and municipalities, including Honolulu, which is about 100 miles from Maui, that are suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages.
Hawaii would be nothing without fossil fuels. Their economy is utterly dependent on tourism and the military, and almost no one would want to take a sailing ship to Hawaii, especially since Hawaii depends on fossil fueled shipments of foods and goods. They grow very little, except for personal consumption. The sugar industry is barely afloat. What does Hawaii produce? In small amounts, things like honey, pineapples, coffee, and macadamia nuts, but, how do they do that in 2023 without fossil fueled ships? How do tourists come without fossil fueled airplanes? Do tourists want to travel on foot or in cars? Do they want to take an expensive vacation when the power is intermittent? What powers all those highrise hotels? What powers the ships that bring in the fish for tourists to eat?
Without fossil fuels, Maui would be a stuck in the 16th Century. No one would visit. Why bother? Taking a 2,000+ mile trip on a sailboat? It’d be funny as hell if Exxon and the rest closed all their stores, stopped selling their products on the islands.
Too bad those companies are not led by the kind of men who FOUNDED them – they would have said “OK – I guess we can stop shipping you the fuel”!!
I was in Hawaii over 10 years ago, and at that time, 99% of the electricity generated on the big island was generated by one oil fired plant. If the American Petroleum Institute stopped shipping them fuel oil, there’d be turmoil to make the Watts’ riots look docile and benign.
[…] HotCold Take: Maui Sued Oil In 2020 Over Fire Risks Or Something […]
Methane combusts when oxygen is present and you have an ignition source, a spark.
After the combustion, there is carbon dioxide and water.
What is important is the energy from the methane combusting with oxygen can be used to have heat, electricity, propulsion.
Make a machine that moves, a machine that can generate electricity, have power to do work that makes life and living better.
A 300 foot boom on the dragline is going to move some ground, dig down to the coal bed and trucks can haul the coal to the power plant, voila, electricity. Electricity powers the dragline.
No sense in going without when it can be there to be used for various reasons. Nikola Tesla knew how to make the stuff with a little help from his brain. People know how to solve problems and improve their lot in life. Nothing wrong with that.
The kelp beds in the oceans are large, absorb lots of carbon dioxide. Grasses and trees do the same, no carbon dioxide, no green grass and no green leaves.
You exhale carbon dioxide with every breath. You would die if you didn’t. Amounts to one kilogram per day, that’s 8 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere every day.
In the winter months, your house will have 1500 ppm of carbon dioxide inside.
One million cubic feet of atmosphere will have 400 cubic feet of carbon dioxide. Oxygen and nitrogen occupy 999,600 cubic feet of the one million cubic feet of air. Water vapor, clouds, are there too.
Roger Revelle did a lot of the heavy lifting studying the effects of carbon dioxide on the earth’s climate.
Remember, back in 1986, Lake Nyos in Africa belched a big bubble of carbon dioxide resulting in livestock and people dying tragically.
Nobody invented carbon dioxide, nobody invented methane and nobody invented a chemical reaction that forms carbon dioxide and water. It happens naturally, don’t need no stinking humans to make it happen.
Mother Nature helped, methane on other planets translates to the Universe is busting out everywhere.
Live with it, get over it.
The combustion of the complex hydrocarbons in coal, gas and oil in oxygen produces carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O). For millions of years, the hydrocarbons in coal, gas and oil were locked below ground, but since the industrial revolution, we humans have converted billions of tons of hydrocarbons into billions of tons of carbon dioxide. The Earth’s oceans have absorbed much of the carbon dioxide (hence, ocean pH dropping), Earth’s green plants have absorbed some, powered by photosynthesis (Thanks! Sol), converting CO2 to complex carbohydrates/oils and releasing oxygen.
CO2 hangs around in the atmosphere for years, and as a greenhouse gas, slows the transit of infrared radiation (IR; heat!) from Earth to space, warming the atmosphere and Earth.
The increase in atmospheric CO2 from 260 ppm to 420 ppm over the past century and a half resulted from our combustion of fossil fuels.
the CO2 issue is total bull. in the way past, the entire atmosphere was CO2. so by rights, the planet should have fried right up and life would never had take place. They use venus as an example of CO2 heating destroying a planet. but lets not forget: Venus is millions of miles closer to the sun. its atmosphere is 70 time heavier than ours, it is the most volcanic planet in the solar system, It rains sulfuric acid.