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30 DAYS UNTIL JOE BIDEN AND KAMALA HARRIS TAKE THE OATH OF OFFICE

Dana Drugmand at DeSmog writes—San Antonio's City-Owned Energy Utility Is Paying a Quarter Million Dollars a Year to Gas Industry Groups:

Deep in the heart of Texas, by far the nation's top oil producer, the city of San Antonio is starting to grapple with its reliance on fossil fuels.

But the key player in implementing the Alamo City’s energy transition — the local energy utility CPS Energy — remains committed to carbon-based fuels like coal and natural gas, even while it begins to invest more in renewable alternatives. Climate and clean energy advocates in the community have become fed up with the city-owned utility, which is not only stalling in efforts to phase out its fossil fuel portfolio, but is actively funding two gas industry trade associations to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars each year.

According to records obtained by the watchdog Climate Investigations Center and shared with DeSmog, CPS Energy pays over $50,000 in annual membership fees to the American Public Gas Association (APGA), and over $200,000 annually in membership dues to the American Gas Association (AGA). Both groups lobby for continued dependence on methane gas, such as direct use of gas in buildings for things like heating and cooking, and oppose efforts to slash emissions by electrifying sectors like buildings and transportation. Their members and sponsors include large energy utilities and pipeline and fossil fuel companies like Duke Energy, Enbridge, TransCanada, and BP.

As DeSmog previously reported in this “Unplugged” series, the California city of Palo Alto is also helping to fund the American Public Gas Association via membership dues amounting to over $20,000 annually and which are paid by the city’s municipally owned utility. Some in the community said they see this funding as a conflict with Palo Alto’s ambitious climate goals.

Similarly, several environmental activists from the community in San Antonio told DeSmog that their municipal utility’s funding and support for the methane gas lobby does not seem to square with San Antonio’s goal, prescribed in a new city climate plan, to reduce the city’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.

“To have a goal of being carbon neutral by 2050, while at the same time paying money to a gas association whose primary goal is to keep us hooked on fossil fuels, yeah, absolutely that’s a conflict,” said DeeDee Belmares, a San Antonio resident and climate justice organizer with the nonprofit organization Public Citizen.  […]

THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING

• The CIA Is Running Death Squads in Afghanistan, by Jeet Heer. Reports of atrocities supported by the American intelligence agency underscore the need to end America’s longest war.  
• In Chile, Scientists Scrutinize Lithium Mining, by Ian Morse. In October, Chilean citizens voted to rewrite their constitution, setting the stage for a dramatic reassessment of the nation’s relationship with the environment. The country’s classification of lithium brine could have consequences for ecosystems, communities, and the powerful mining industry.  
• Arkansas Could Give Amy Coney Barrett Her Big Abortion Moment, Rachel Cohen. The "Unborn Child Protection Act" was filed ahead of Arkansas' next legislative session meant to more directly challenge Roe v. Wade.

TOP COMMENTS • RESCUED DIARIES

QUOTATION

“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, 'although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,' wrote Orwell, tends to be 'uninterested in what happens in the real world.' Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism 'has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.' A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”           ~~Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)

TWEET OF THE DAY

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Republicard: spend like there’s no tomorrow:

Introducing the Republicard. First practiced under the record deficit-spending of the Reagan-Bush administrations, and now re-issued under the fiscal wreckage of George Bush with a trifeca of Republican-rule to again spend like theres no tomorrow. Miles, the creator of the card:

Last week I was hearing about a proposal that had been introduced into Congress to honor Ronald Reagan by putting him on the dime coin. Aside from the fact that FDR, creator of the "March of Dimes", certainly deserves to stay on that coin (and Nancy Reagan agrees)... it occurred to me that if someone were to honor George W. Bush, given his enormous deficits, the most appropriate place to do so would be... a credit card. So I imagined what it might look like, and came up with the RepubliCard: (This idea simultaneously occurred to political cartoonist Tom Toles who had a cartoon on this theme appear the very next day).