More evidence that the Amazon was once highly civilized
Much more detail about Amazonia below:
http://jonjayray.com/amazonia.html
Archaeologists have uncovered a cluster of lost cities in the Amazon rainforest that were home to at least 10,000 farmers around 2,000 years ago.
A series of earthen mounds and buried roads in Ecuador was first noticed more than two decades ago by archaeologist Stéphen Rostain.
But at the time, "I wasn't sure how it all fit together," said Mr Rostain, one of the researchers who reported on the finding on Thursday.
Recent mapping by laser-sensor technology revealed those sites to be part of a dense network of settlements and connecting roadways, tucked into the forested foothills of the Andes, that lasted about 1,000 years.
"It was a lost valley of cities," said Mr Rostain, who directs investigations at France's National Centre for Scientific Research.
"It's incredible."
The settlements were occupied by the Upano people between around 500 BC and 300 to 600 AD — a period roughly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire in Europe, the researchers found.
Residential and ceremonial buildings erected on more than 6,000 earthen mounds were surrounded by agricultural fields with drainage canals.
The largest roads were 10 metres wide and stretched for 10 to 20 kilometres.
While it's difficult to estimate populations, the site was home to at least 10,000 inhabitants — and perhaps as many as 15,000 or 30,000 at its peak, said archaeologist Antoine Dorison, a study co-author at the same French institute.
That's comparable to the estimated population of Roman-era London, then Britain's largest city.
"This shows a very dense occupation and an extremely complicated society," said University of Florida archaeologist Michael Heckenberger, who was not involved in the study.
"For the region, it's really in a class of its own in terms of how early it is."
José Iriarte, a University of Exeter archaeologist, said it would have required an elaborate system of organised labour to build the roads and thousands of earthen mounds.
"The Incas and Mayans built with stone, but people in Amazonia didn't usually have stone available to build — they built with mud. It's still an immense amount of labour," said Mr Iriarte, who had no role in the research.
The Amazon is often thought of as a "pristine wilderness with only small groups of people. But recent discoveries have shown us how much more complex the past really is," he said.
Scientists have recently also found evidence of intricate rainforest societies that predated European contact elsewhere in the Amazon, including in Bolivia and in Brazil.
"There's always been an incredible diversity of people and settlements in the Amazon, not only one way to live," said Mr Rostain.
"We're just learning more about them."
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New EPA Regulations Are a Death Sentence for Small Oil and Gas Producers
Republican Rep. Bill Johnson, chair of the Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Materials subcommittee, convened the hearing in response to new regulations on methane emissions promulgated by the EPA at the recent COP28 climate change conference in Dubai. Empowered by the Inflation Reduction Act to impose Biden’s radical green agenda on the nation, the EPA has devised inflexible, unworkable regulations for methane emissions that will destroy small and mid-sized domestic oil and gas producers.
New Methane Regulations Burden Small Producers
The full text of these latest EPA regulations can be found in a 1,700-page document — why use one word when 100 will do? — that essentially functions as a death sentence for smaller, independent petroleum producers.
In order to reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere, the EPA now requires that oil and gas producers capture all methane released during drilling, production, and operations, even though this capture is economically and technologically impossible for many companies. The EPA regulations contain novel bans on routine practices used by producers to convert methane into carbon dioxide, a less harmful atmospheric gas. By requiring companies to adopt new practices and invest in new technologies — not to mention pay new taxes and fees — the EPA places a significant economic burden on the domestic energy sector. (RELATED: Green Mytholody Runs Rampant at COP28)
The compliance costs are massive — far too large for small producers. The EPA’s one-size-fits-all regulations fail to recognize the diversity within the domestic energy sector, subjecting small family businesses to the same regulations as massive corporations. While big oil producers can afford to transition their operations to accord with the EPA’s regulations, small producers are watching their livelihoods disappear in real time.
New Costs to Small Businesses
Drew Martin, the managing member and director of finance at Miller Energy, testified that the EPA’s regulations would add an estimated over $8 million in additional expenses. Last year, the company’s total operating budget was $11.1 million.
“That’s over 70 percent cost to my bottom line,” Martin said. “I can’t survive that. I don’t believe many of my peers in Michigan producing marginal wells can survive that.”
Patrick Montalban, who is chairman and CEO of his family oil and gas business in Montana, similarly testified that the “dozens of new EPA reporting requirements alone would be enough to put his small company out of business due to the time and manpower that would be needed to comply.”
Small producers across America like Miller Energy and Montalban Oil and Gas Operations are facing eradication by the EPA. Across the nation, independent producers will be forced to close their doors and abandon productive wells, leaving hardworking Americans jobless in Biden’s nightmare economy.
EPA Representative Breaks Promise to Congressman
Prior to Martin’s and Montalban’s testimonies about the unworkable burdens of the EPA’s new regulations, an EPA administrator gave testimony of his own. Joseph Goffman, who is the principal deputy assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, repeatedly insisted that the EPA had consulted with industry members when constructing the methane regulations.
Rep. August Pfluger pushed Goffman on that claim, asking him to name just two or three of the companies that his department at the EPA had spoken with. Goffman couldn’t — or didn’t want to.
“I’m not sure that anybody at a small, independent level was consulted,” Pfluger said. “Maybe Exxon was, but I’m not sure that the industry [was].”
Pfluger asked whether Goffman would commit to staying and listening to the panel of small producers, Martin and Montalban among them. Goffman immediately committed to listening to their testimony. But as soon as his testimony ended, Goffman and his retinue of EPA underlings stood up and exited the room. Promises made, no promises kept.
Men like Goffman, who say one thing and do another, get to sit in Washington and dream about a quixotic green energy revolution. Meanwhile, across America, hardworking men and women are all but powerless against the encroachments of an administrative state bent on destroying their livelihood. Today, small to mid-sized oil and gas producers are in the crosshairs. But they are only the first casualties in the Left’s advancing green agenda.
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Green Mythology Runs Rampant at COP28
Incoherent logic galore
More than 70,000 attendees of the COP28 conference from around the world flew to Dubai, one of the global hubs of oil wealth, a shining beacon of development in the desert, to commiserate over the state of the world. Unlike many of the climate “warriors” attending a winter party in the Arabian Peninsula, where the daytime temperatures hovered dreamily between 80–90 degrees Fahrenheit and sunsets glowed over the Persian Gulf, I, at least, had flown commercial.
Slogans like “Action Builds Trust” and “Action Creates Hope” were printed on billboards towering over the highways and peppered across the COP28 Expo grounds. Alas, “Action Burns Carbon” went unmentioned. Inside one of the technological expo spaces, Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA) gave a presentation. While most of its power comes from oil, the company has already built one of the largest solar arrays on earth providing power production for a not-insignificant portion of the city and its surroundings electricity needs.
More than 8 square miles of solar panels darken the desert, and the installation includes a concentrated solar power (CSP) system. These mirror systems have been made famous in the Mojave Desert for vaporizing birds in mid-flight with the massive heat generated by the focused sunlight. As I looked at a model of this system that directs concentrated solar energy at a massive tower surrounded by circles upon circles of mirrors, reflecting the sun’s powerful rays to a peak where they heat molten salt to power a turbine to generate energy, I mentioned to a local woman, dressed conservatively, employed by the power company, that the array must produce an incredible amount of heat. “Yes, in fact, we measured 565 degrees Celsius [1049 degrees Fahrenheit] at the apex of the tower,” she replied. “We have to warn air traffic to avoid the airspace for their own safety.” It appears this “green” energy produces a lot of hot air.
A collection of start-ups and existing energy companies wrangle for both private capital and government money to implement “green technology.” Elon Musk has become a billionaire with the help of U.S. taxpayers. The U.S. subsidizes electric car purchases, increasing the national debt while further enriching Musk. His rocket company, SpaceX, is contracted by NASA to spew methane into the atmosphere out of flaming rockets as they are fired through the “greenhouse” and atmosphere upon which life on earth depends.
With his profits off American debt, Musk flies around the world on a fleet of private jets, taking at least 441 flights in 2023, more than double his number from 2022, a year he burned at least 221,358 gallons of jet fuel on 171 private jaunts. Besides jet exhaust, we never seem to be told just how much carbon is emitted in the building of an electric car. From the diesel burned in the mining and extraction of the rare earth metals to produce the batteries, to the materials to build the frame, seats, and dashboard, every part of every electric car leaves a carbon footprint. (READ MORE: Al Gore for President)
One recent congressional bill included close to $400 billion for “clean energy” and “decarbonization.” The problem is that every one of those dollars spent is a petro-dollar in a fossil-fuel-powered market, where everything bought or sold is shipped and manufactured using carbon-burning infrastructure. Can emissions really go down when expenditures, development, deforestation, manufacturing, mining, and construction are going up?
There are not enough precious metals on earth to build all the batteries needed to “transition” the entire global transportation fleet to electric cars, which are being sold as “zero-emission vehicles” (and subsidize Elon’s private jet travel). The solution provided by the green confidence game is to mine asteroids, bringing back precious metals from space to “solve the bottleneck.” But at what point in time will we be able to launch a rocket into space without increasing greenhouse emissions?
It is impossible to make a solar panel without burning fossil fuels. From the mining, crushing, and melting of the silicon to make the panels, to the massive amounts of carbon and water expended in mining and transporting the cobalt, lithium, and rare earth metals that go into the battery arrays to store the energy, it’s a very carbon intensive process. And so every petro-dollar spent on introducing new technology has a corollary carbon footprint. The trucks and ships that are transporting and delivering all the concrete that builds the foundation of all those industrial wind farms are burning diesel gas.
At the conference, I was speaking to a man who works at Total Energy about one of their solar arrays in southern Texas. They have converted 4,000 acres of what was productive farmland, mostly soybean- and rice-growing operations, into what is now a vast solar array dotted with natural gas wells. With a growing human population with inevitable caloric-intake needs, one has to wonder whether solar panels can be recycled back into food.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that covering huge swaths of the earth with dark colored, reflective, heat- and power-generating panels and mirror arrays that focus the sun’s power at towers full of molten salt that raise the surrounding ambient temperatures to nearly 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit) is going to create a heating effect on the surface temperature of the earth that will, in terms of basic logic, contribute to the ultimate heating of the atmosphere. The scientific discoveries regarding the greenhouse effect were demonstrated in the late 1800s.
Would it be a surprise to discover that harvesting energy from the jet stream with thousands of wind turbines off the coasts of the United States, Canada, and Northern Europe is going to alter the climate and precipitation patterns in Southern and Eastern Europe and perhaps as far away as Australia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai? Here we are, collectively installing jet-stream-energy-harvesting wind turbines around the world at the same time as we are being told that the jet stream is weakening as the result of climate change. I remember learning about the butterfly effect as a middle schooler: that when a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it can create a downstream effect 1,000 miles away.
Action might build hope, but this collective action, subsidized by taxpayers, looks set to further heat up the atmosphere. I’m not arguing that the status quo is clean and sustainable, but I am arguing against printing billions of dollars and putting generations of future Americans in debt to add more carbon emissions and demand through increased development and manufacture of novel technologies of which we don’t understand the long-term consequences.
Republican President Theodore Roosevelt began a campaign to break up the biggest monopolies threatening this republic over 100 years ago because monopoly is the enemy of democracy. Do private interests want the American people fighting “carbon” instead of entrenched monopolistic power? The fortunes of Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos were all born on the internet, a U.S. taxpayer–funded technology that has allowed these men to take control of so much of our collective spending power, intellect, and government. How did we ever get to the point where, instead of being taxed to control their monopolistic power, Bezos and Musk are instead literally being subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars and subcontracted by the U.S. government on U.S. taxpayer dimes to launch rockets into space. Shouldn’t these men whose wealth was built by taxpayer-funded technology be paying down our national debt, not driving it up?
Even if we weren’t calling loudly for controls on the explosive monopolization rising worldwide, perhaps we could all agree to not subsidize billionaires with taxpayer dollars, which only increases their power to purchase our government away from their elected purpose: to represent the citizens who elected them.
To actually clean up the mess we’ve made, we’d have to ban new manufacture of plastics to create a demand for all the plastic we’ve littered the environment with, develop a 100 percent recycling economy, and prohibit companies from making products that are built to break (planned obsolescence). We’d repurpose manufacturing hubs and prohibit the manufacture and sale of chemicals, pesticides, and herbicides that are killing the living web of life around us, exponentially decreasing a healthy earth’s ability to sequester carbon, increasing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, and making us ill. If we actually wanted to cut emissions, wouldn’t we phase out the personal vehicle model and transition to efficient high-speed rail systems? Wouldn’t we repopulate small-town America by demonopolizing the millions of acres of farmland that have been concentrated into the hands of a few giant corporations that are poisoning and depleting topsoil and return it to small-scale, permaculture-based farming operations that build topsoil and sequester carbon while supplying human caloric needs?
If there were ever a use for AI robots, we would have them working constantly to remove all toxic substances and recyclable materials from the world’s dumps and landfills, because we’ve already produced a global surplus of material that we just need to repurpose instead of building more mines and wasting precious fresh water supplies. Instead of doubling down on a planet-wide mental-conditioning system that would have us accept lies as truth and madness as sanity, let’s create an economy that doesn’t manufacture never-ending debt and a big environmental mess.
At COP28 in Dubai, a myth was propagated that we can spend our way into a “clean” energy future by implementing massive technological development when all of that development is destined to remain dependent on the exploitation of fossil fuel resources. It reminds me of the news that was just reported about a group of “scientists” at the South Pole who were celebrating their use of hot water to drill down 600 meters through the ice to the sea floor. To study melting ice, the “scientists” literally melted the ice.
https://spectator.org/green-mythology-runs-rampant-in-the-desert/
***********************************************Over 300 Endangered Eagles Killed or Injured by Wind Turbines in Tasmania: Study
Over the past decade, wind turbines and transmission lines have led to the deaths or injuries of 321 endangered eagles in Tasmania, according to a study.
More cases are believed to be unreported due to a lack of systemic research on wind farms and public information.
Published in Australian Field Ornithology, the study looked at Australia’s two largest raptors, the wedge-tailed and white-bellied sea eagles.
It found that from 2010-2022, wind farms caused the deaths of 268 eagles and injured 53, with state-owned power company TasNetworks reporting 139 deaths, and eagle rescuers witnessing 91 deaths and 50 injuries.
Study author Gregory Pullen said the number of eagle deaths was a “stark reminder” that an urgent solution was needed to mitigate further harm to the vulnerable species.
“The real number can only be higher since surveying at wind farms is incomplete,” Mr. Pullen noted in the study.
“Specifically, it is only close to turbines, is periodic, and does not involve all turbines or all habitat around each turbine, scrub often being excluded.”
Of great concern is that 272 deaths involved the endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, and 49 of the vulnerable white-bellied sea eagles.
Future of Birds Unclear
Both species could face further risk as the expansion of wind turbine construction continues amid the federal government’s net-zero push.
“Accelerated deaths of the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle and white-bellied sea-eagle are a grim reality if thousands of new wind turbines and hundreds of kilometres of transmission lines are erected across Tasmania to meet a legislated doubling of renewable energy production by 2040,” Mr. Pullen said.
The study estimated that less than 1,000 Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagles remain and emphasised ongoing monitoring to ensure the species does not become extinct.
It includes observing the number of eagles, stability of breeding pairs, nesting success and surviving chicks, presence of juvenile birds, and whether disruption to the natural habitat causes dislocation.
While the Tasmanian government has guidelines in place to protect threatened eagles, Mr. Pullen found that these have not contributed to real-life decisions regarding wind farm placement.
For instance, despite great differences in eagle densities across Tasmania, there are currently no designated “no turbine zones.”
Some researchers have suggested Tasmanian eagles be fitted with GPS trackers, but the concept has been slow to establish and has yet to be used in wind farm planning.
The study comes as Tasmanian authorities continue their push towards net zero, recently inking a deal with the German city Bremen.
State Energy Minister Guy Barnett said the collaboration was evidence of the state’s plan to become a leader in large-scale green hydrogen production by 2030 to meet both domestic and international demand.
“This joint declaration demonstrates the opportunity the rest of the world sees in Tasmania and confidence in the government’s renewable energy agenda,” Mr. Barnett said in a statement on Sept. 17.
“Tasmania is well placed, with our 100 percent renewable electricity, abundant water supplies, and excellent port infrastructure to seize these important opportunities with international partners.”
Scientist Questions Wind Power Reliability
There are concerns, however, over the viability of large-scale renewable energy generation.
One Oxford University mathematician and physicist has criticised wind power saying it is historically and scientifically unreliable, noting that governments are prioritising “windfarm politics” over numerical evidence.
Professor Emeritus Wade Allison made the assertion in response to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, where the “instinctive reaction” around the world was to embrace renewables.
“Today, modern technology is deployed to harvest these weak sources of energy. Vast ‘farms’ that monopolise the natural environment are built, to the detriment of other creatures,” Mr. Allison said in the report, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
“Developments are made regardless of the damage wrought. Hydro-electric schemes, enormous turbines, and square miles of solar panels are constructed, despite being unreliable and ineffective.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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