Author Archives: BridgetYGFX

Exxon Mobil’s insane argument against action on climate change

by BridgetYGFX Posted on February 27, 2016

Exxon Mobil’s insane argument against action on climate change

By on 26 Feb 2016commentsShare

Exxon Mobil has devised a bizarre new argument to wriggle away from its shareholders’ demands: Humanity can’t fix the problem we created, so we shouldn’t even try. Yep — as it turns out, Exxon Mobil’s shareholders care a lot more about climate change than the company itself does.

The planet’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company challenged a resolution about climate change regulations from its own shareholders on Friday, arguing that it’s a practical improbability that the emissions-restricting goals set forth by the recent climate accord in Paris will actually be achieved. Therefore, Exxon Mobil says, it shouldn’t have to address the impact that the regulations would have on its business.

“It’s a little bit like a toddler putting their fingers in their ears and saying, ‘If I can’t hear you then what you’re saying isn’t true,’” Shanna Cleveland, manager of the Carbon Asset Risk Initiative, told InsideClimate.

The resolution, originally brought by the New York State Comptroller and four other Exxon Mobil shareholders earlier this week, had asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to force the company to address how its business would be impacted by climate mitigation efforts. Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, whose office manages a state pension fund that has a large stake in the oil and gas giant, told Reuters that investors “need to know how Exxon Mobil’s bottom line will be impacted by the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and what the company plans to do about it.”

For decades, other investors have been filing resolutions asking Exxon Mobil to take action on climate change, with most of them falling on deaf ears. Among their demands: Transparency about its anti-climate action lobbyists, a board member devoted to climate issues, and even a request for it to take “moral responsibility” for its contribution to climate change.

With Exxon Mobil blatantly ignoring climate science on one hand and giving up on emissions regulations on the other, the company seems to have flipped from willful ignorance to purposeful complacency. We’re not sure which one is worse, but either way: Exxon Mobil is clearly a nightmare for the planet.

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Exxon Mobil’s insane argument against action on climate change

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Why Is Closed Captioning So Bad?

by BridgetYGFX Posted on March 22, 2015

Mother Jones

Over at Marginal Revolution, commenter Jan A. asks:

Why is the (global) state of subtitling and closed captioning so bad?

a/ Subtitling and closed captioning are extremely efficient ways of learning new languages, for example for immigrants wanting to learn the language of their new country.

b/ Furthermore video is now offered on phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, televisions… but very frequently these videos cannot be played with sound on (a phone on public transport, a laptop in public places, televisions in busy places like bars or shops,…).

c/ And most importantly of all, it is crucial for the deaf and hard of hearing.

So why is it so disappointingly bad? Is it just the price (lots of manual work still, despite assistive speech-to-text technologies)? Or don’t producers care?

I use closed captioning all the time even though I’m not really hard of hearing. I just have a hard time picking out dialog when there’s a lot of ambient noise in the soundtrack—which is pretty routine these days. So I have a vested interest in higher quality closed captioning. My beef, however, isn’t so much with the text itself, which is usually pretty close to the dialog, but with the fact that there are multiple closed captioning standards and sometimes none of them work properly, with the captions either being way out of sync with the dialog or else only partially available. (That is, about one sentence out of three actually gets captioned.)

Given the (a) technical simplicity and low bandwidth required for proper closed captions, and (b) the rather large audience of viewers with hearing difficulties, it surprises me that these problems are so common. I don’t suppose that captioning problems cost TV stations a ton of viewers, but they surely cost them a few here and there. Why is it so hard to get right?

POSTSCRIPT: Note that I’m not talking here about real-time captioning, as in live news and sports programming. I understand why it’s difficult to do that well.

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Why Is Closed Captioning So Bad?

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Yet Another Oil Train Disaster

by BridgetYGFX Posted on March 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Another day, another oil train derailment. Early Saturday morning, a Canadian National Railway train carrying Alberta crude derailed outside the tiny town of Gogama in northern Ontario. Thirty-eight cars came off the tracks, and five of them splashed into the Mattagami River system. The accident caused a massive fire and leaked oil into waterways used by locals—including a nearby indigenous community—for drinking and fishing. No one was injured, but according to CN Railway’s Twitter feed, fire fighters were still suppressing fires earlier today. People in the area, including members of the Mattagami First Nation, have been complaining of respiratory issues from the smoke.

This oil train derailment was the second in three days in Canada and the fifth in three weeks in North America. An oil train derailed last week near Galena, Illinois. The oil boom in Canada and the United States has resulted in a dramatic increase in the use of these trains, and derailments now appear to be the new normal.

After the 2013 derailment and explosion of an oil train killed 47 people in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, many pointed to old, unsafe DOT-111 tanker models as a main reason for the disaster and others like it. But at least four of the five recent incidents have involved newer, and theoretically safer, CPC-1232 models.

Environmental and safety advocates say oil-by-rail needs even more stringent safety measures, but they have been slow coming. The US government reportedly balked at creating national standards to limit the amount of potentially explosive gas in tankers carrying oil from North Dakota. And the White House Office of Management and Budget has said it will need until May to finalize rules proposed by the Department of Transportation last summer that would slow down crude-by-rail deliveries and require tankers to have insulated steel shells. The CPC-1232 tankers that derailed in Galena did not have these shells. I asked the Canadian National Railway Company if the tankers involved in Saturday’s derailment had these shells. The company didn’t directly answer that question. In an email, it stated: “The tank cars involved were CPC 1232 tank cars. The exact specifications will be information gathered as part of the ongoing investigation.”

Below are Twitter pictures of Saturday’s derailment in northern Ontario.

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Yet Another Oil Train Disaster

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