the ‘scandal of Leonardo DiCaprio vaping at the Golden Globes. Maybe he doesn’t want to use an open flame so close to the methane blowout…

UPDATE: DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

I’m pleased to announce that Huffington Post finally put this article on their website. Huzzah! You can find it here.

Background: I have this FB friend named Angie Cordeiro. She has what has been called an ‘eclectic’ background–studying (and writing about) everything from human nutrition, early childhood development, religion, natural and holistic healing to (more recently) the question (and the inevitability) of omnicidal extinction. She has been blogging for Huffington Post for seven years now, and many of her more recent posts have to do with NTHE (near-term Human extinction) and climate collapse. A couple weeks ago, she was interviewed on Nature Bats Last radio on the subject of the disastrous methane releases at Porter Ranch in California.

She posted this recently on FB and I’m using it with permission. She had put together an article for The HuffPo about the methane release. There are nightmarish problems arising from this incident–it’s as big an environmental disaster as the BP spill a few years ago. But (as you can see), much of Angie’s article was about the corruption of the officials who should’ve been watching the store. She starts out her FB post this way (rest of article in italics):

My Huffington Post Blog has been “in review” for over a week! I have a feeling I’ve been put on the radical list 

Monitoring Money and Methane

In 2013 SoCalGas was granted a yearly budget of approximately $3,898,000.00 to replace 5 percent of its safety valves at Aliso Canyon Natural Gas Storage Facility. To date no accountability of how these funds were spent. This comes at a time when the public sees politicians and corporations as untrustworthy bedfellows.

“…2013, SoCalGas applied for and received money to do upgrades on equipment like safety valves–money that the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) says should have been used to prevent a leak like this. The regulatory decision filing shows that SoCalGas was granted $898,000 per year (in addition to the regular fund of about $3 million per year for repairs) to replace 5 percent of its safety valves at Aliso Canyon. According to EDF, these extra funds weren’t used as they should have been–to prevent a leak of this magnitude.”

“Some are also alleging a blatant conflict of interest, owing to the fact that Gov. Brown’s sister, Kathleen L. Brown, sits on the Board of Directors at Sempra Energy, which owns the Southern California Gas Company (and the Aliso Canyon gas facility where the rupture occurred). The company doesn’t expect the valve to be fixed until late February or early spring.

Serving as a director of Sempra Energy, Ms. Brown received $188,300 in compensation in 2015. Federal filings show “she also holds stock in the company currently worth about $400,000.” Gov. Brown has repeatedly said that fossil fuels (like methane) would be phased out by the end of the century, and of having the dubious distinction of attributing the statewide drought to global warming. Numerous studies say otherwise.

More dubious is that Gov. Brown has received over “$100,000 in campaign contributions from Sempra Energy and its employees, pulling in $96,800 from the corporation and $7,200 from employees throughout his political career,” according to the state’s campaign finance records. The watchdog group OpenSecrets.org shows that since 1992, Sempra has made over “$3 million in total political contributions, with 55 percent of those donations going to Democrats.”

Over seven million dollars are unaccounted for and a state of emergency declared by Gov. Brown. What does that say about our society when an environmental catastrophe of this magnitude pales in comparison to why Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t share his vape at the Golden Globes.

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In the Empire, our scandals are passed to us via a media establishment that knows what’s safe to cover and what isn’t. Will update when/if Huffington Post publishes this.

Angie Cordeiro