Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Trump's Greenland New Deal:
• Whistleblower says ND liquid gas leak reported as just 10 gallons may actually have been 11 million gallons: Justin Nobel at DeSmog reported Monday that workers at the Garden Creek Gas Processing Plant, in Watford City, North Dakota, noticed a leak in July 2015 that they put down in government paperwork as 10 gallons. Officially, the spill remains at that level. But the state is known for regulators that shrug off or ignore spills, vastly reduce fines for violations, and are generally cozy with the industry they’re supposed to regulate to protect the health and safety of the state’s residents and its eco-systems. Apparently, a shrug is what happened here:
The Garden Creek spill “is in fact over 11 million gallons of condensate that leaked through a crack in a pipeline for over 3 years,” says the whistle-blower, who has expertise in environmental science but refused to be named or give other background information for fear of losing their job. They provided to DeSmog a document that details remediation efforts and verifies the spill’s monstrous size.
“Up to 5,500,000 gallons” of hydrocarbons have been removed from the site, the 2018 document states, “based upon an…estimate of approximately 11 million gallons released.”
The AP reported Wednesday that the spill was at least 240,000 gallons. A company spokesman asserted that the leaked document’s figures were hypotheticals meant to underpin the design of a vendor’s equipment used to remediate the spill.
• Assault on the 76-year-old Jefferson Monument by bugs, lichen, and weather have spurred the National Park Service to begin an $8.2 million repair-and-replace project on the building.
• Youngstown will become the largest U.S. city without a daily newspaper when the combative, investigative newspaper Vindicator shuts its doors at the end of this month: The 150-year-old publication is yet another casualty in a change that seen newspapers gobbled up and eviscerated by giant corporations or shuttered altogether over the past 30 years. In the past 15 years, 2,000 U.S. newspapers have shut their doors. Not many can look at a past like this:
It was in the late 1920s that the Ku Klux Klan regularly began gathering outside the home of William F Maag Jr in Youngstown. Maag owned the Vindicator newspaper, which unlike others in this once prosperous part of Ohio, had been willing to criticize the racist Klansmen.
Men on horseback, clad in white robes and hoods, would burn crosses and flaunt rifles and shotguns, in an attempt at intimidation. It didn’t work. The men of the Maag family would stand outside their home, themselves armed, refusing to be cowed, as the Vindicator continued to expose government officials who were part of the Klan.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Trail cameras show Florida panthers and a bobcat stumbling and seemingly barely able to move their back legs: Experts suspect a possible neurological problem. This is especially worrisome for the panthers, a sub-species of mountain lion of whom there are just 120-230 adults, the gap explained by the fact the creatures are so secretive.
• Planting trees: A guide to small- and large-scale reforestation efforts.
• With the value of Iran’s currency plummeting because of economic sanctions, the Tehran parliament ponders bill to cut four zeroes off the rial. The Trump regime withdrew from the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran and imposed the sanctions despite the fact that Iran has been in verified compliance with the accord. When that agreement was signed four summers ago, one dollar bought 32,000 rials. On Wednesday, that figure was 116,500.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: We're back on, live! Even though this player actually links to the podcast, of course. But it’s one featuring Greg Dworkin and Joan McCarter in our best effort to catch up on one of the most 25th Amendment-able weeks yet. But lol/yolo/nm, as you well know.