Saudis Bled Arizona’s Aquifers Dry? Legally? It appears so:
For nearly a decade, the state of Arizona has leased this rural terrain west of Phoenix to a Saudi-owned company, allowing it to pump all the water it needs to grow the alfalfa hay — a crop it exports to feed the kingdom’s dairy cows. And, for years, the state did not know how much water the company was consuming.
The lack of information was a choice.
Soon after the company, Fondomonte Arizona, arrived in the Butler Valley in 2015, state planners suggested asking the company to install meters and report its water use, according to a memo reviewed by The Washington Post. That way, the memo argued, the state could “at least obtain accurate information” on water drained from the valley — water that could otherwise serve as backup for booming urban areas.
But the proposal “hit a stone wall,” John Schneeman, one of the planners, told The Post. It was spurned, he said, by officials in the administration of then-Gov. Doug Ducey (R) who were “cautious of tangling with a powerful company.” The proposal also ran headlong into a view, deeply held in the rural West, that water is private property that comes with access to land, rather than a public resource.
The inaction was an early sign of how state officials gave leeway to Fondomonte as a global fight for water took root in the Arizona desert. Leaving water unprotected amid a drought worsened by climate change has been a boon to Saudi Arabia, where industrial-scale farming of forage crops such as alfalfa is banned to conserve the Persian Gulf nation’s limited water supply.
Got it, makes perfect sense. Saudi Arabia is taking water from parched Arizona to grow alfalfa that is then sent to Saudi Arabia. They need Arizona’s water because, what was that phrase again, “industrial-scale farming of forage crops such as alfalfa is banned to conserve the Persian Gulf nation’s limited water supply.“
Betcha that water also goes to irrigate those Arizona golf courses so that MBS’ mercenaries can play there.
Nothing wrong with any of this. Right? An award-worthy story. Read it.
‘Jew-Sparing Bioweapons’. Just one more phrase I never thought I’d write. Never thought I’d link to the NY Post either. I’ll make an exception for my first, and last, reference to RFK, Jr.:
“COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
“We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact,” Kennedy hedged.
Kennedy’s remark echoes well-worn anti-Semitic literature blaming Jews for the emergence and spread of coronavirus which began circulating online shortly after the pandemic broke out, according to The Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at the University of Tel Aviv’s 2021 Antisemitism Worldwide Report.
That boy ain’t right.
Guess Who’s Reneging On Their Climate Pledges? I knew you’d be able to guess:
Oil majors have, over the past several years, rolled out pledges to decrease oil and gas production and slash their emissions, citing concerns about the climate crisis. But more recently, many have walked those plans back.
Amid record-shattering warmth this February, BP scaled back an earlier goal of lowering its emissions by 35% by 2030, saying it will aim for a 20 to 30% cut instead. ExxonMobil quietly withdrew funding for a heavily publicized effort to use algae to create low-carbon fuel. And Shell announced that it would not increase its investments in renewable energy this year, despite earlier promises to dramatically slash its emissions.
Climate-fueled extreme weather persisted through spring and summer. But fossil fuel companies have only doubled down on their oil- and gas-filled business models. Shell promised to cut oil production by 20% by 2030, but then this year said it already met that goal by selling off some operations to another oil company –thereby not reducing emissions in the atmosphere. BP has also expanded gas drilling. And Exxon’s CEO, Darren Woods, told an industry conference last month that his company plans to double the amount of oil produced from its US shale holdings within the next five years.
I think it’s time for DOJ to go after them. Past time, really. Destroying the climate has to be prosecutable under RICO, doesn’t it?
Some fun, eh? Yes, Elk Have Their Own Regional Dialects. Consider this a dialectic:
Bugles are the telltale sound of elk during mating season. Now, new research finds that male elk’s bugles sound slightly different depending on where they live. Other studies have shown that whale, bat and bird calls have regional dialects, too, but a team led by Jennifer Clarke, a behavioral ecologist at the Center for Wildlife Studies and a professor at the University of La Verne in California, is the first to identify such differences in any species of ungulate.
Pennsylvania’s elk herds were translocated from the West in the early 1900s, and today they have longer tonal whistles and quieter bugles than elk in Colorado. Meanwhile, bugles change frequency from low to high tones more sharply in Wyoming than they do in Pennsylvania or Colorado.
Clarke isn’t sure why the dialects vary. She initially hypothesized that calls would differ based on the way sound travels in Pennsylvania’s dense forests compared to Colorado and Wyoming’s more open landscapes, but her data didn’t support that theory. Clarke hopes to find out whether genetic variation — which is more limited in Pennsylvania’s herd — might explain differences in bugles, and whether those differences are learned by young males listening to older bulls.
Hmmmm, might it be something as simple as elks who drink the pee of Rolling Rock drinkers are impacted differently than elk who drink the watered-down pee of Coors Lite aficionados? That’s my theory. Prove me wrong.
What do you want to talk about?