Get the Vapors
Gas Stoves
Natural gas appliances in homes have become a flashpoint - sorry - as evidence mounts they can cause dangerous air quality in homes. Now, a Stanford University study finds they may be releasing large amounts of harmful methane gas even when they are turned off:
The researchers in Thursday’s study measured emissions from stoves in 53 homes across seven California counties. They used their findings to estimate that methane emissions from gas stoves in the United States have a comparable climate impact to about 500,000 gas-powered cars driven for a year, Jackson said.
Methane, the main component of natural gas, is the second-largest contributor to climate change among greenhouse gases. Although it dissipates more quickly than carbon dioxide, it is more than 80 times as powerful in the first 20 years after it is released into the atmosphere.
The researchers also found that more than three-quarters of the methane emissions occurred when the gas stoves were turned off, suggesting that leaks persist even when the appliances are not being used for cooking or heating. Emissions of nitrogen dioxide, meanwhile, were more closely correlated with the amount of gas burned.
Not good! Gas stoves are bad for the planet, and they’re bad for the people who use them without proper ventilation, a problem disproportionately affecting poor families:
…in 2018, the EPA set a one-hour outdoor exposure limit of 100 parts per billion for nitrogen dioxide, a common pollutant that forms when fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal are burned at high temperatures. Exposure can have a range of harmful effects on the lungs, including increased asthma attacks and inflammation of the airways, according to the American Lung Association.
Thursday’s study found that families who don’t use their range hoods or who have poor ventilation can surpass the one-hour outdoor standard within a few minutes of stove usage, particularly in more cramped kitchens, which are more common in poorer communities.
The EPA can’t do anything about indoor pollution because it lacks the authority under the Clean Air Act, and - of course - the natural gas lobby is very powerful:
The American Gas Association, a trade group that represents more than 200 companies, has defended the industry’s efforts to reduce its climate impact, noting that total methane emissions from natural gas systems have declined 16 percent from 1990 to 2019 and that residential natural gas use amounts to only a small portion of U.S. emissions.
“We are committed to going even further by investing nearly $30 billion each year to modernize our system and $4.3 million every day to help our customers and communities shrink their carbon footprint through energy efficiency improvements,” Karen Harbert, the association’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.
It’s a pretty normal thing for an industry to invest $30 billion to “modernize” its “system”, whatever that is, and to allegedly dole out millions of dollars a day to its customers, because its product is very safe. They’ve also spent millions fighting cities and states who want to ban natural gas appliances in new homes:
The oil supermajor ExxonMobil emerged as a leading foe of the legislation. In September, the company paid for Facebook ads that urged New Yorkers to sign a petition opposing the bill…
Ultimately their pro-gas campaign failed, and New York City passed a law banning the appliances. It’s a good start, but only applies to new construction, and takes effect five years from now in high-rise buildings in the city.
New York was following in the footsteps of some California cities, Denver, and Seattle, on the front lines of a nationwide battle with the gas industry:
But the American Gas Association, a trade group, and its members are campaigning in statehouses across the country to prohibit the new local ordinances. Four states last year adopted such laws, and this year similar legislation has been introduced in 12 more.
Sound familiar? We talked last week about how two-thirds of states have laws on the books blocking EV sales, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the natural gas industry has pushed bills to block appliance bans in states with destroying-the-earth-friendly legislatures:
So far, laws to protect natural gas use have been adopted in Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Similar laws have been proposed in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Utah, Indiana, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi.
That article was written a year ago, and the number of states with such laws has increased to twenty. The gas lobby paints it as an issue of personal choice:
“The average American likes choice and doesn’t want to be told what kind of fuel to use in their homes,” said Karen Harbert, chief executive of the American Gas Association. “Municipalities cannot take away that choice.”
I mean, maybe not, but if a gas stove came with a giant warning sticker like a pack of cigarettes, informing the consumer it would expose them to dangerously high levels of nitrogen dioxide, and leak methane into their home while they sleep, they might make a different choice? I don’t know.
It seems unlikely the EPA will be granted any further oversight into gas appliances, since the Supreme Court doesn’t believe government regulators should be able to regulate things, but some cities and a few states are taking positive steps at the local level.
Google Ads
We talked a little about Jedi Blue, Google’s deal with Facebook giving the company special access to some of its “display” - think banners - inventory. In the same trove of newly unredacted documents about Google, the WSJ uncovered some damning evidence of the tech giant fixing ad auctions to make itself more money:
Google misled publishers and advertisers for years about the pricing and processes of its ad auctions, creating secret programs that deflated sales for some companies while increasing prices for buyers, according to newly unredacted allegations and details in a lawsuit by state attorneys general.
Google has, since it first began selling advertising, claimed it uses a “second-price auction” which means the highest bidder for a particular ad spot only pays what the second-highest bidder bid. In plain terms, if you are willing to pay up to $100 for a click on Google, and the next highest bid is only $30, you will be charged $30 for the click. That is how it’s supposed to work, at least:
In the first version [of Project Bernanke], Google misled publishers and advertisers to believe they were participating in a “second-price auction,” where the winner pays the price of the second-highest bid, when using its advertising exchange, AdX, according to allegations from the complaint. However, under Google’s Bernanke program, AdX would at times knock out the second-highest bid, allowing the third-highest bid to win, thus depriving the publisher of revenue, according to the complaint. At the same time, Google would charge advertisers the price of the second-highest bid and pocket the difference, the complaint said.
Google pooled the advertisers’ overpayments and used the money to manipulate auctions on its systems, at times boosting bids from advertisers bidding through its ad-buying tools to ensure it would win an auction it otherwise wouldn’t have, the complaint said.
It affected billions of ad impressions sold each month and Google’s research found that it dropped publishers’ revenue by as much as 40%, according to the complaint. “Bernanke is powerful,” one Google employee said, according to internal company communications quoted in the complaint.
This is a big deal - Google was openly manipulating what its advertisers were paying and what its publishers (the operator of the site the ads were displayed on) were earning.
Google used similar tactics to force small advertisers to overpay for clicks on its search engine:
A second version of the program, dubbed Global Bernanke, used the pool of money Google gathered to inflate only the bids belonging to Google’s ad-buying tool for small advertisers, originally known as AdWords and now called Google Ads, when these bids were poised to otherwise lose auctions on Google’s exchange, the complaint alleges.
For years Google has been allowed to operate a black box auction system. It told advertisers they were getting the best possible price for their clicks and ads, but there was no way for an advertiser to verify or audit that information - Google fiercely protected all of its technology as trade secrets. So, if you purchased that $30 dollar click on Google Ads, you had to take their word for it the click was worth $30, and the auction was conducted fairly. It turns out not only was Google fixing those prices for advertisers, it was skimming money from its publishers and driving down their ad revenues.
The truth is, Google (and Facebook) can charge whatever they want, because they have an effective duopoly on digital advertising. Lawsuits like the one in Texas, revealing emails between employees effectively admitting they’re running a rigged marketplace, will hopefully lead someone to step in and force these companies to be more transparent.
Train Robbery
It’s been awhile since we talked about train crime, which is a shame, because there’s something delightfully old-timey about it. Well, trains are in the news in LA:
Seventeen Union Pacific train cars derailed last week along the same tracks experiencing mass looting in Los Angeles. Union Pacific recently blamed the staggering 160 percent increase in thefts since September 2020 on the Los Angeles district attorney, but the fault may lie, at least in part, with plain old short-sighted greed.
As the author mentions, the cause of the sudden uptick in train robbing may be related to the railroad laying off a bunch of employees - including security guards - during the height of the pandemic:
But it turns out that Union Pacific laid off an unspecified amount of workers, including railroad police, in September 2020. Two months later, the thefts began.
Huh! According to the company’s annual reports, Union Pacific laid off almost 5,000 workers during the pandemic. The pandemic has been a boon to the rail operator, with freight and container costs hitting record highs due to supply chain disruptions. Here’s their press release from a week ago:
“The Union Pacific team concluded its most profitable year ever in 2021. We produced double digit fourth quarter revenue growth by leveraging our great rail franchise to generate positive business mix and core pricing gains, despite ongoing global supply chain challenges that impacted volumes,” said Lance Fritz, Union Pacific chairman, president and chief executive officer.
Good for you, Lance! It’s a shame his PR team is also issuing shameful statements blaming the LA district attorney’s office and bail reform - a popular dog whistle among conservatives and pro-business groups - for train crime:
Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals.
Truly disgusting. Also, strange that Union Pacific has been victimized by these serial criminals and its major competitor who didn’t lay off a fifth of its workforce during the pandemic has not.
Listen, I am not glorifying train crime, but if your employees are mad enough at you to derail seventeen box cars full of Amazon packages, maybe you need to examine your business practices instead of blaming criminal justice reform.
Quadriga
Years ago, I wrote about Quadriga, an old school Bitcoin scam that made international news when one of the founders allegedly died. Quadriga is such a wild story people are still making podcasts about it. One thing that stuck with me long after writing about Quadriga was the HYIP community, groups of people who basically Ponzied each other for…fun? I wrote:
Unlike Ponzi schemes, HYIPs do away almost entirely with the pretense that there is any sort of underlying investment. It’s essentially a game of musical chairs, except you’re sending and receiving actual money. As you’d expect, the creators of the HYIPs inevitably make off with the proceeds, and then a second game begins; they resurface on the forums and deflect criticism for long enough for the aggrieved parties to give up on their claims. Then, it begins again.
I also wrote:
During his HYIP years, Cotten joined forces with a person calling himself Michael Patryn, formerly named Omar Dhanani. He’d been arrested and deported from the US after serving prison time for using online marketplaces to launder money and sell stolen goods.
So, what has Michael Patryn aka Omar Dhanani been up to lately?
A decentralized-finance project called Wonderland is being rocked by controversy following the disclosure that it was being run in part by a felon with ties to one of the biggest cryptocurrency scandals.
Turns out he’s a key player in a crypto thing called Wonderland, which I confess I only vaguely understand, but here’s a decent Twitter thread explainer:
Now that Patryn has been outed, he appears to be draining funds from the project. It’s all a bit in the weeds and I apologize for introducing terms such as “sustainable ponzinomics” to you on a Friday morning, but I thought it was noteworthy that the (living) Quadriga guy appears to have resurfaced to steal more crypto. Also, it’s darkly funny that a $169 million dollar crypto scam wouldn’t even make the top five for 2021.
Overdraft Fees
Last month, we talked about Capital One slashing overdraft fees. I wrote:
Even if it’s a bit cynical, Capital One eliminating overdraft fees is a big deal, especially if it triggers other large banks to follow suit.
Well! About that:
Bank of America Corp. said Tuesday it would cut overdraft fees to $10 from $35 beginning in May, following other big banks that have rolled back or ditched such charges.
Even the country’s most sleazy major bank is making changes:
Wells Fargo said Tuesday that it was planning changes in the near future to minimize overdraft fees, including getting rid of fees for nonsufficient funds. The bank also announced several changes it said would help customers avoid overdraft fees. Wells Fargo will give customers 24 hours to cover an overdrafted amount and allow them earlier access to direct deposits, the bank said.
They’re going to try to offset the revenue hit by doing…payday lending:
By the end of 2022, Wells Fargo plans to offer short-term loans of up to $500 to consumers, including some customers who might otherwise incur overdraft fees.
I’m sure that’ll go well, given their track record. Again, this is all likely motivated by the CFPB announcement that it is going to closely scrutinize and move to regulate the fees banks can charge, but we’ll take wins wherever we can get them.
Short Cons
NY Times - “Bourbon in 2022 is, in other words, a counterfeiter’s dream, shaped by enormous demand, limited supply and a steady inflow of new and naïve fans all too willing to part with their money — and unlikely to go to the authorities when they realized they’ve been swindled in a transaction that is by definition illegal.”
The Atlantic - “If someone had wanted to invent a surreal provocation designed to unnerve Americans in the summer of 2020, it’s difficult to conceive of a better one than a deluge of unsolicited Chinese seeds.”
FTC - “More than 95,000 people reported about $770 million in losses to fraud initiated on social media platforms in 2021. Those losses account for about 25% of all reported losses to fraud in 2021 and represent a stunning eighteenfold increase over 2017 reported losses.”
CFPB - “From 2018 to 2020, the CFPB estimates that Americans paid roughly $120 billion per year in credit card interest and fees. That works out to about $1,000 per year for every American household.”
Tips, thoughts, or train cars full of Amazon packages to scammerdarkly@gmail.com