What Have I, What Have I, What Have I Come Into The Kitchen For? Tabs, Friday May 10, 2024

It's the news roundup, rounding up news!

Tabs gif by your friend Martini Glambassador!

In a follow-up to that story a little while back about Donald Trump telling a meeting of oil bidness billionaires “I hate wind!” the Washington Post reports that at the same meeting, Trump asked them to please give his campaign a billion dollars and he’ll undo every part of Biden’s clean energy agenda, from the “EV mandate” that doesn’t exist, to leaving the Paris Climate Agreement again. [WaPo (gift link)]

In what sounds like a related story but isn’t necessarily, Big Oil is drawing up a load of executive orders for Donald Trump to sign if he’s inaugurated, not only because they’re super-helpful that way, but because they worry Trump will forget about Big Oil in all the excitement of the campaign. (Or the putsch if he needs to install himself after losing?) [Politico]

Seems there’s a lot of fretting going around about stuff like that. Those nice bigots at the Family Research Council are worried Republicans will forget to end marriage equality. [Joe. My. God.]

Mike Johnson told “Fox & Friends” he’s all good with Trump’s logistically impossible plan to round up and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, but he worries they might hide. [Aaron Rupar on Twitter]

Microsoft has some very ambitious climate goals (yay!), but that hasn’t kept the computing giant from working closely with oil companies to help them find and extract oil even faster (oh no!). But angry Microsoft employees are trying to apply pressure on the company from inside, to get them to step away from that dirty business (yay!) [Grist]

In light of the current book banning unpleasantness in Florida, the New York Times looks back at the madness that erupted in Panama City, Florida, in 1986 over Robert Cormier’s classic young adult novel The Chocolate War (Wonkette gets-a-subsidy link). There were angry school board meetings, death threats against middle school teachers, and almost all the crap we still deal with today. Cormier, who died in 2000, lent his own voice to that fight for freedom to read. The good guys won, eventually. [NYT (gift link)]

Jesse Watters is super mad that Democrats have been encourage people to register to vote, even on federal websites. Since when are people using government services allowed to have a say in government? Shocking! [Media Matters / Fox News]

The Wall Street Journal’s Molly Ball explained on CNN why we need print journalism: So porn actresses will have something to spank horrible men with. [Mediaite]

Remember weirdo ex-congressman Jeff Fortenberry (R) of Nebraska, who in 2018 had a huge hissy fit about “political violence” when some goofball vandalized one of his billboards to make his name “Fartenberry,” and then threatened the job of a professor who “liked” a Facebook picture of said violence vandalism?

Fortenberry resigned from Congress in 2022 after being convicted of three felonies related to illegal campaign donations, invoking Mother Teresa in his farewell letter, as one does. But one of the convictions, for lying to an FBI agent, was later thrown out on appeal because the case was tried in the wrong venue. Anyway, he’s been charged again on the same charge, giving us the excuse to say FARTENBERRY again. [Politico]

Iceland has switched on the world’s biggest-yet “direct air capture” plant to suck carbon dioxide right out of the air and lock it away in rocks. It’s an energy-intensive technology, but it runs on carbon-free geothermal energy because Iceland is one freaking steamy place. The Mammoth plant — that’s its name and description — is built on a lava field and run by a company called Climeworks, and can capture up to 36,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. That’s a tiny drop in the bucket of annual emissions, but Climeworks plans a much bigger facility for the US, and if the tech scales up efficiently, lots and lots of such plants, powered by renewables, could help the world meet its carbon reduction targets. We still have to get altogether off the fossil fuel teat, though. [Canary Media]

Photo: Climeworks.

I can’t wait to listen to this week’s Volts podcast, in which host David Roberts discusses portrayals of climate change in popular media with Anna Jane Joyner, head of a nonprofit called Good Energy that consults with media people on how to do that better. [Volts]

You know, I really don’t know everything my cat Thornton gets up to. According to the Denver Post (subscriber-only link), he’s just gotten a new water pipeline approved in Colorado. Mysterious little creatures, aren’t they? I suppose the pipe segments would be nice to nap in.

Here’s the lad himself, comfortable in his little cat tree house. Don’t reach in to pet him, that’s one of those things that just annoys him, so of course I can’t resist. Worth the claws and teeth.

OK, that’s all!

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