Jan 31, 2026
Aaron Dunbar
editorial@newsandsentinel.com)
In my previous Climate Corner column, I discussed “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” the explosive new documentary from journalist Abby Martin, which details the U.S. military’s role as the single worst institutional polluter on our planet. The film had its Columbus and Cleveland premieres last weekend, both of which I’d planned to attend. Keen-eyed observers may have noticed, however, that we’ve spent the better part of the past week buried under ice and snow, which had the unfortunate impact of hampering my travel plans.
Never one to miss a chance to unleash his special brand of psychosis onto the world, our esteemed president took to social media to remark upon this extreme winter weather:
“Record Cold Wave expected to hit 40 States. Rarely seen anything like it before. Could the Environmental Insurrectionists please explain — WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???”
I’m not going to waste space here explaining the difference between climate and weather, or the ways in which the heating of our planet might actually be making winter storm systems worse. If you’re reading this column you’ve probably heard it all a thousand times before, and at this point you either accept factual reality or you don’t.
What I want to highlight, instead, is how Trump’s own insane foreign policy goals are at direct odds with his longstanding and outspoken denial of the climate crisis.
Author Jason Pargin put it succinctly in a recent social media post: “Do you get that Greenland is strategically important specifically because they believe in climate change? The melting ice is opening up new shipping lanes, that’s why it’s suddenly a big deal. Everyone involved is explicitly agreeing ‘Global warming will make this area crucial.’”
For all their bluster about how the climate crisis is just some elaborate Chinese hoax, Trump and his braying acolytes have fully tipped their hand with this frothing imperial bloodlust for Greenland and its resources. It’s now abundantly clear that Trump, along with the entire U.S. national security apparatus, is fully aware of the effects that human-produced greenhouse gas emissions are having on the planet – and on our future.
There’s an extremely timely segment in “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” which helps set the stage for Trump’s seemingly arbitrary interest in the conquest of Greenland. At one point, Abby Martin attends a panel called “Guarding the Northern Tier: Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic,” held at an Air and Space Forces Association conference.
Like all of her interactions with military brass in the film, Martin’s questioning here proves to be incredibly revealing. Not only does our military believe that it has the self-appointed right to dominate the melting arctic landscape (including its mineral wealth, plus more of the oil and gas resources responsible for this calamity in the first place), but indeed they view the apocalyptic boiling of our planet as an “opportunity” for the further enrichment of billionaires and corporations. At one point an officer infuriatingly refers to a rapidly melting Alaska as “a place to come and experiment.”
The film deftly lays out the case that the primary function of our military has been the violent theft and extraction of resources since its inception, rather than serving any kind of legitimate purposes of self-defense. One need only look at our recent barbaric actions in Venezuela as evidence of this claim.
While this isn’t a topic examined directly in “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” Abby Martin has done extensive reporting on Venezuela. For an easily digestible yet equal parts staggering breakdown of the propaganda we’ve been subjected to regarding our assault on their country for oil, I highly recommend the video “Leftist Debunks John Oliver’s Venezuela Episode” from Martin’s husband and producer Mike Prysner, which can be found on YouTube.
Trump’s kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro, along with the slaughter of approximately one hundred Venezuelans in the process, is one of the most brazen acts of energy imperialism I’ve seen in my adult life. Though make no mistake, efforts to swindle Venezuela out of its gargantuan oil reserves have been a bipartisan affair many years in the making.
On Oct. 10 of last year, Barack Obama praised Nobel Peace Prize laureate and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado for her “courageous struggle to bring democracy to Venezuela.” This, despite anti-war organization Code Pink referring to Machado as “the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine,” having backed multiple coup attempts against democratically elected leaders. Machado has since gone on to gift her Nobel Prize directly to Donald Trump as thanks for kidnapping the nation’s president and murdering a hundred of her countrymen.
The media response to Washington’s coup has been no less abhorrent. It’s been reported that both the Washington Post and the New York Times received the leaked plans to capture Maduro before the raid took place, but declined to publish the information in advance – cementing both publications’ legacies as little more than faithful stenographers for the Pentagon, as well as accomplices to mass murder.
Shortly following the raid, a slackjawed Piers Morgan took to Twitter to marvel, “Incredible operation. Maduro was protected by massive security. How Delta Force got him out will be the stuff of movies.”
Though Hollywood, it seems, is already ten steps ahead of him, as television writer Annie Jacobsen couldn’t help but brag about her role in “predicting” Maduro’s capture in season two of “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” an Amazon series in which Jim from “The Office” smirks at the camera while committing war crimes for the CIA.
“The Venezuela plot we wrote into S2 seems prophetic because CIA operators have been thinking about (+ possibly rehearsing) an assault on Venezuelan presidential complex since Hugo Chavez began destroying the country decades ago,” Jacobsen wrote.
“A lot of what happens next can be seen in the Jack Ryan Season 2 assault on the VZ complex. Nothing [CIA operator Billy Waugh] told me — or any of the ‘former military folks’ I had zoom into the Jack Ryan writers’ room — was classified because the assault never happened. Billy taught it as a power point at Ft. Bragg.”
It’s been extensively documented by this point that the CIA and the Pentagon inject massive amounts of propaganda into the film and television industry (see Roger Stahl’s 2022 documentary “Theaters of War”), but it’s nevertheless stunning to witness an imperialist footsoldier so proudly and nakedly admit to their role in brainwashing the American public with predictive programming disguised as entertainment.
When I began my modest role providing animation for “Earth’s Greatest Enemy” back in 2023, it was with a keen awareness that this ambitious project set out to do something that no other film had ever done before. Our entire media and political landscape has been captured and corrupted by elite megalomania and corporate greed, its shadowy agents almost entirely successful in preventing the public from understanding the truth about both the climate crisis as well as the scourge of Western imperialism — to say nothing of the myriad ways in which the two issues converge and feed off one another.
Barely a month into the new year, it now feels like something of a miracle that such a film as “Earth’s Greatest Enemy” exists at all. This is a piece of work whose warnings could not be more prescient, and whose message only grows more urgent with each new omnicidal gambit of a flailing U.S. empire.
It is incumbent upon each and every one of us living in the imperial core to resist these deadly machinations, to take back power from our deranged institutions and demand a just, equitable future for every human being with whom we share this beautiful, life-sustaining planet.
***
Aaron Dunbar is a member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.
Posted: February 14, 2026 by main_y0ke11
Climate Corner: Listen to the scientists
Feb 14, 2026
Randi Pokladnik
editorial@newsandsentinel.com
I was born in 1955, at a time when the USA was entering a new age of technology characterized by the dawn of computing, and when we were first attempting to get a satellite into orbit. This was accomplished in 1958, and in 1961 President John F. Kennedy announced the initiative to put a man on the moon before the decade was out. Like a lot of kids in the 1960s, this convinced me that I wanted to be an astronaut. My grandma gave me my first telescope when I was in fourth grade. Back then, Americans were glued to our black and white TVs watching each step the USA took towards landing on the moon, and those scientists were our heroes. I never became an astronaut, but I did become a research chemist.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), created by President Eisenhower and Congress, took the lead to get Americans into this new frontier. The main competitor in this space race was the former United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR). On Aug. 2, 1955, the USA announced their intention to launch an artificial satellite. The USSR responded with its intention as well, and in 1957 they launched Sputnik I into orbit.
On Feb. 20, 1962, John Glenn, a local Ohioan, became the first American to circle the Earth; making three orbits in his Friendship 7 Mercury spacecraft. President Kennedy set the USA’s goal of getting a man on the moon by the end of the decade a priority. We achieved that goal, when on July 20, 1969 we watched Neil Armsorng step out on the surface of the moon and utter his famous declaration, “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”
One unique thing about every astronaut that has landed on the moon, or watched our planet from space, is their realization that in space, Earth is just a fragile blue marble, lacking geopolitical boundaries. This is what is known as the “overview effect.” U.S. astronaut Ron Garan, who spent 178 days on the International Space Station, said this, “I saw the unbelievable thinness of our planet’s atmosphere. In that moment, I was hit with the sobering realization that that paper-thin layer keeps every living thing on our planet alive; we should be a lot more concerned about global warming, deforestation, and biodiversity loss.”
In 2021, 90-year old actor, William Shatner, famous for his role on Star Trek as Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise, went into space on Bezos’ Blue Origin. He said this, “I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there (space), it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.”
He said, “It (being in space) was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands; the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna, things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”
Contrary to what some billionaires might believe, colonizing Mars is not going to happen in our lifetimes, if ever. This means the urgency to protect that fragile blue marble is even more important. Yet, at a time when the U.S.A. needs real, cutting-edge science to combat the biggest threat to life on Earth, climate change, the current administration has done everything in its power to curtail research, including defunding universities and cutting federal research programs.
The Trump administration has ended the federal funds for plugging orphan wells. This will result in more climate changing methane gas entering the atmosphere and more water pollution from brine wastes. The Environmental Protection Agency stated in an April 2021 report that there could be as many as 3.4 million abandoned oil and gas wells nationally. West Virgina had put aside 212 million federal dollars to plug some of the over 6000 known orphan wells, but close to $90 million of those dollars may be cut, leaving West Virginia citizens to pick up the tab. Ohio has documented over 20,000 orphan wells, but the $4.7 billion orphaned well program created under the Biden Administration was paused in early 2025 by the Trump administration.
Ohio’s politicians have fallen in step with Trump and his failure to address climate-changing emissions. The state has gone as far as “dubbing” methane gas “green energy”. SB294 declares it to be state policy that Ohio will “employ affordable, reliable, and clean energy sources,” which includes hydrocarbons from the state (fracked gas). The bill’s sponsors (Senators Romanchuk and Lang) are not climate scientists. If they were, they would know that methane gas cannot by any means be considered “clean energy.” True green energy such as solar and wind have all but been banned in Ohio via anti-renewables legislation like SB 52.
Trump and Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum recently introduced us to the new pro-coal mascot “Coalie,” in an effort to “unleash beautiful clean coal” while West Virginia communities are still dealing with over 8000 streams contaminated with acid, iron and sulfur from coal mining. Many towns still have no access to potable water sources.
Facts still matter. Coal is not clean or beautiful. Fracked gas is not green energy. Climate change is not a hoax. We need science-literate politicians, not pro-corporation mouth pieces who care nothing about the citizens or our planet as long as there is money to be made in back-room deals. We need to listen to the scientists.
**
Randi Pokladnik, Ph.D., of Uhrichsville, is a retired research chemist who volunteers with Mid Ohio Valley Climate Action. She has a doctorate degree in environmental studies and is certified in hazardous materials regulations.
Posted: February 7, 2026 by main_y0ke11
Climate Corner: Data centers – Where’s the beef?
Feb 7, 2026
George Banziger
editorial@newsandsentinel.com
Data centers are growing exponentially all around the country. One is being discussed in Washington County, Ohio. There is no data center being planned in Wood County, W.Va., but the state government is doing everything it can to attract data centers to the Mountain State, and four sites are under consideration. At the governor’s urging, the WV state legislature passed HB 2014, which prohibits local jurisdiction over any data centers; the state will be diverting taxes from these sites from local bodies.
In Washington County there is a data center under consideration in the Waterford area. But the county commissioners have signed a non-disclosure agreement with the developer so little is publicly known about this plan. Many people in the Waterford community are concerned about this troubling and secretive arrangement.
There are many reasons for such concern. Data centers use a tremendous amount of electricity. A large data center can use 20-100 megawatts (iaeimagazine.org, 2026). If we assume that the data center planned for Waterford is medium sized, it will use up to five megawatts, and this would be fully one fourth of the total electricity used in Washington County (gridinfo.com). Data centers also use a great amount of water, mainly for cooling purposes (since they generate a lot of heat). A large data center can use 20 million gallons of water per day, and a medium-sized data center can use 310,000 gallons per day (Data Center News, 2025).
Another reason to be skeptical about data centers is the unfulfilled promises of jobs, economic development, and tax benefits to the local tax base promoted by developers who are eager to purchase the large swaths of land required for their purposes. In a study of the economic impacts of data centers conducted by the Ohio River Valley Institute (2025), it was reported that despite the generous tax breaks offered by state and local governments to developers, an average of only 10 employees (after initial construction) are hired per facility. This additional job growth is equivalent to that of one Olive Garden restaurant and, at most, one typical American high school according to the ORVI study. A total of $2.75 billion were added to Pennsylvanians electric bills after the establishment of data centers. This relates to another fear about data centers — i.e., that they will result in higher electric bills for all electric consumers in the state.
There is one approach to data centers that local communities like Waterford can do to mitigate these costly impacts, and that is called community benefit agreements (CBAs). A CBA, for example, may require that at least 40-50% of jobs be filled by local residents at a prevailing wage; that funded apprenticeships be offered leading to permanent jobs; that there be annual disclosure of water and energy use; that there be independent audits and public dashboards; and that long-term studies of public health impacts be conducted. The group, ReImagine Appalachia, often has webinars and resources on the topic of CBAs.
Opposition to data centers is growing in the wake of the astounding growth and attendant risks of this phenomenon. According the website Heatmap 25 data center projects were canceled in 2025, and 60 local governments declared a moratorium on the development of data centers.
I have a friend who lives in the Columbus suburb of Hilliard. This is what she told me in a personal message about her experience with the development of a data center in her community: “Any local official in Ohio needs to understand that if they approve a data center in their jurisdiction, that data center will bring with it a gas plant …There will be no public notice, no public information session, no public hearing. It will be on a fast track to be approved by the state in just 45 days… It won’t matter if the data center is next to a residential neighborhood, park, school, shopping center, or animal shelter. The state can and will put it there, and there will be nothing local officials can do to stop it.”
Many of us who are skeptical about data centers have also expressed opposition to injection wells in Washington County. It might appear that we are against everything being proposed related to economic development. Such is not the case. Speaking for myself, I am eager and optimistic to support ideas such as those described in the document, “Appalachian Manufacturing Action Plan,” created by the group ReImagine Appalachia. These ideas involving the full utilization of the hard-working labor force and resources within northern Appalachia rely upon labor-intensive economic development, not the capital -intensive industries such as data centers, injection wells, and high-pressure hydraulic fracturing (i.e., fracking), which primarily direct profits to those outside the region. In my Climate Corner offering of Dec. 27, 2025, in the Parkersburg News and Sentinel (and shortly afterward in the Marietta Times), I presented several details on these ideas.
***
George Banziger, Ph.D. was a faculty member at Marietta College and an academic dean at three other colleges. He is a member of the Green Sanctuary Committee of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Marietta, group leader of Citizens Climate Lobby, and a contributor to Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action team.
Posted: January 31, 2026 by main_y0ke11
Climate Corner: Earth’s greatest enemy, part two
Jan 31, 2026
Aaron Dunbar
editorial@newsandsentinel.com)
In my previous Climate Corner column, I discussed “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” the explosive new documentary from journalist Abby Martin, which details the U.S. military’s role as the single worst institutional polluter on our planet. The film had its Columbus and Cleveland premieres last weekend, both of which I’d planned to attend. Keen-eyed observers may have noticed, however, that we’ve spent the better part of the past week buried under ice and snow, which had the unfortunate impact of hampering my travel plans.
Never one to miss a chance to unleash his special brand of psychosis onto the world, our esteemed president took to social media to remark upon this extreme winter weather:
“Record Cold Wave expected to hit 40 States. Rarely seen anything like it before. Could the Environmental Insurrectionists please explain — WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???”
I’m not going to waste space here explaining the difference between climate and weather, or the ways in which the heating of our planet might actually be making winter storm systems worse. If you’re reading this column you’ve probably heard it all a thousand times before, and at this point you either accept factual reality or you don’t.
What I want to highlight, instead, is how Trump’s own insane foreign policy goals are at direct odds with his longstanding and outspoken denial of the climate crisis.
Author Jason Pargin put it succinctly in a recent social media post: “Do you get that Greenland is strategically important specifically because they believe in climate change? The melting ice is opening up new shipping lanes, that’s why it’s suddenly a big deal. Everyone involved is explicitly agreeing ‘Global warming will make this area crucial.’”
For all their bluster about how the climate crisis is just some elaborate Chinese hoax, Trump and his braying acolytes have fully tipped their hand with this frothing imperial bloodlust for Greenland and its resources. It’s now abundantly clear that Trump, along with the entire U.S. national security apparatus, is fully aware of the effects that human-produced greenhouse gas emissions are having on the planet – and on our future.
There’s an extremely timely segment in “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” which helps set the stage for Trump’s seemingly arbitrary interest in the conquest of Greenland. At one point, Abby Martin attends a panel called “Guarding the Northern Tier: Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic,” held at an Air and Space Forces Association conference.
Like all of her interactions with military brass in the film, Martin’s questioning here proves to be incredibly revealing. Not only does our military believe that it has the self-appointed right to dominate the melting arctic landscape (including its mineral wealth, plus more of the oil and gas resources responsible for this calamity in the first place), but indeed they view the apocalyptic boiling of our planet as an “opportunity” for the further enrichment of billionaires and corporations. At one point an officer infuriatingly refers to a rapidly melting Alaska as “a place to come and experiment.”
The film deftly lays out the case that the primary function of our military has been the violent theft and extraction of resources since its inception, rather than serving any kind of legitimate purposes of self-defense. One need only look at our recent barbaric actions in Venezuela as evidence of this claim.
While this isn’t a topic examined directly in “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” Abby Martin has done extensive reporting on Venezuela. For an easily digestible yet equal parts staggering breakdown of the propaganda we’ve been subjected to regarding our assault on their country for oil, I highly recommend the video “Leftist Debunks John Oliver’s Venezuela Episode” from Martin’s husband and producer Mike Prysner, which can be found on YouTube.
Trump’s kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro, along with the slaughter of approximately one hundred Venezuelans in the process, is one of the most brazen acts of energy imperialism I’ve seen in my adult life. Though make no mistake, efforts to swindle Venezuela out of its gargantuan oil reserves have been a bipartisan affair many years in the making.
On Oct. 10 of last year, Barack Obama praised Nobel Peace Prize laureate and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado for her “courageous struggle to bring democracy to Venezuela.” This, despite anti-war organization Code Pink referring to Machado as “the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine,” having backed multiple coup attempts against democratically elected leaders. Machado has since gone on to gift her Nobel Prize directly to Donald Trump as thanks for kidnapping the nation’s president and murdering a hundred of her countrymen.
The media response to Washington’s coup has been no less abhorrent. It’s been reported that both the Washington Post and the New York Times received the leaked plans to capture Maduro before the raid took place, but declined to publish the information in advance – cementing both publications’ legacies as little more than faithful stenographers for the Pentagon, as well as accomplices to mass murder.
Shortly following the raid, a slackjawed Piers Morgan took to Twitter to marvel, “Incredible operation. Maduro was protected by massive security. How Delta Force got him out will be the stuff of movies.”
Though Hollywood, it seems, is already ten steps ahead of him, as television writer Annie Jacobsen couldn’t help but brag about her role in “predicting” Maduro’s capture in season two of “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” an Amazon series in which Jim from “The Office” smirks at the camera while committing war crimes for the CIA.
“The Venezuela plot we wrote into S2 seems prophetic because CIA operators have been thinking about (+ possibly rehearsing) an assault on Venezuelan presidential complex since Hugo Chavez began destroying the country decades ago,” Jacobsen wrote.
“A lot of what happens next can be seen in the Jack Ryan Season 2 assault on the VZ complex. Nothing [CIA operator Billy Waugh] told me — or any of the ‘former military folks’ I had zoom into the Jack Ryan writers’ room — was classified because the assault never happened. Billy taught it as a power point at Ft. Bragg.”
It’s been extensively documented by this point that the CIA and the Pentagon inject massive amounts of propaganda into the film and television industry (see Roger Stahl’s 2022 documentary “Theaters of War”), but it’s nevertheless stunning to witness an imperialist footsoldier so proudly and nakedly admit to their role in brainwashing the American public with predictive programming disguised as entertainment.
When I began my modest role providing animation for “Earth’s Greatest Enemy” back in 2023, it was with a keen awareness that this ambitious project set out to do something that no other film had ever done before. Our entire media and political landscape has been captured and corrupted by elite megalomania and corporate greed, its shadowy agents almost entirely successful in preventing the public from understanding the truth about both the climate crisis as well as the scourge of Western imperialism — to say nothing of the myriad ways in which the two issues converge and feed off one another.
Barely a month into the new year, it now feels like something of a miracle that such a film as “Earth’s Greatest Enemy” exists at all. This is a piece of work whose warnings could not be more prescient, and whose message only grows more urgent with each new omnicidal gambit of a flailing U.S. empire.
It is incumbent upon each and every one of us living in the imperial core to resist these deadly machinations, to take back power from our deranged institutions and demand a just, equitable future for every human being with whom we share this beautiful, life-sustaining planet.
***
Aaron Dunbar is a member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.
Posted: January 24, 2026 by main_y0ke11
Climate Corner: Fossil fuels, war and home
Jan 24, 2026
Jean Ambrose
editorial@newsandsentinel.com
I write this column not as a historian or a policy expert, but as someone who lives in a region that has been asked, again and again, to give more than it can. Each morning, when I look out from the ridges where I live in the Mid-Ohio Valley, I am reminded that the places we love are never abstract. They hold our bodies, our memories, our dead. We are part of them, and they are part of us. And they carry the marks of the choices we make about energy.
When I watch what is unfolding in Venezuela, I do not see a distant crisis, but a familiar pattern. Deep beneath Venezuela lie immense oil reserves, and for decades that oil has been treated as that nation’s destiny. Instead of bringing security, it has brought instability, foreign interference, poisoned land, and deep human suffering. Oil promised abundance; it delivered scarcity. Families now face shortages of food and medicine, while rivers and wetlands bear the residue of spills and neglect.
Fossil fuels do not simply power our lives; they reorder them. Where oil and gas dominate, power concentrates. Decisions move farther away from ordinary people. Violence becomes normalized–sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly. In Venezuela, when oil prices collapsed and political pressure tightened, the social fabric tore. Those with the least power paid the highest price.
History tells me this is not new. In Iran, oil once raised hopes of self-determination. In 1953, when Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh sought to reclaim Iran’s oil for its own people, the response from abroad — particularly the United Kingdom, aided by the United States — was swift and devastating. A democratic government was overthrown. Authoritarian rule followed. That wound has never fully healed. Oil again proved itself not a gift, but a trigger for long-lasting conflict.
The United Kingdom’s own rise was fueled first by coal, then by oil. Industrial wealth was built alongside exhausted miners, polluted cities, and colonies stripped of resources. Oil became essential to maintaining global power, binding Britain to faraway lands and conflicts that still shape our world today. Energy did not simply light homes; it lit the fuse of empire.
The great global wars of the 20th Century were, at their core, energy wars. World War I marked the moment when oil became essential to military power. In World War II, entire campaigns turned on access to fuel — Germany’s push toward the Caucasus oil fields, Japan’s expansion into Southeast Asia, and the Allies’ relentless targeting of refineries and supply lines. The oil embargo imposed by the United States and its allies on Japan in 1941, cutting off access to vital fuel supplies, led directly to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Energy scarcity pushed nations toward catastrophic violence. Millions died, in part because oil had become something nations were willing to kill for.
When I think about these histories, I cannot separate them from home. The Mid-Ohio Valley has lived its own version of this story. Coal, oil, and gas arrived with promises of prosperity and security. For some, those promises were briefly real. For many others, they ended in black lung, contaminated water, fractured hillsides, and towns hollowed out once the profits moved on. We were never bombed, but we have lived through slow violence–the kind that settles into lungs and streams and does not leave when the companies do.
Wars fueled by fossil energy are not always fought with guns. Some are fought quietly, over generations. They are wars against health, against land, against the possibility that our children might inherit something whole. Venezuela’s crisis makes visible what is often hidden: when an economy is built on extraction at any cost, suffering follows–through coups, sanctions, displacement, or environmental collapse.
From Venezuela’s oil fields to Iran’s broken democracy, from British imperial power to the oil embargo that helped lead to Pearl Harbor, and down to the creeks and communities where I live, the pattern is the same. The colonial mindset that treated land and people as resources to be controlled has never fully disappeared. Today it is reborn through sanctions, resource grabs, and energy politics that once again decide whose lives are expendable.
A wounded land can only carry so much. I still choose joy in this place — watching birds at the feeder, noticing the light shift on the hills — but that joy carries responsibility. If we want fewer wars, fewer sacrifices of people and places, we must choose energy systems rooted in care rather than conquest.
Sustainable energy fundamentally changes the story because it breaks the link between power and scarcity. Sunlight, wind, and moving water are not finite prizes to be seized or controlled by force; they are widely distributed and locally available. When communities generate energy where they live, the incentive to dominate distant lands and fuel supplies retreats. By decentralizing energy production, sustainable systems weaken the concentration of power that has so often fueled conflict, replacing competition with cooperation and resilience.
Venezuela’s crisis should be read as a warning, not an anomaly. As communities in the Mid-Ohio Valley weigh injection wells, methane hubs, and expanded extraction, we are also choosing what kind of stability we want — and for whom. A just and lasting peace, whether globally or locally, depends on breaking the cycle that links fossil fuels to concentrated power, environmental harm, and conflict, and investing instead in energy systems that sustain people, place, and peace.
***
Jean Ambrose is a member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action, a mother, grandmother, bird watcher, and gardener.
Last Updated: January 21, 2026 by main_y0ke11
Climate Corner: Standard of living – questioned
Jan 17, 2026
Vic Elam
editorial@newsandsentinel.com
Aldo Leopold, a man considered by many as the father of modern conservation wrote, “Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.” That was around 1949, and I think that if Aldo could fathom what the world has become now, he would consider not only the cost to things natural, wild, and free, but also the welfare of mankind. Aldo’s world was shaped by events closer to his time like the passing of the last passenger pigeon. Once one of the most abundant bird species on earth numbering in the billions, passenger pigeons were reduced to extinction by over-hunting and habitat degradation. No doubt the wholesale forest harvesting that occurred in the MOV and throughout the eastern U.S. contributed mightily to that.
Unlike the Indigenous peoples of this country who respected natural resources and were careful not to use more than needed and act with reciprocity, helping heal the land from which they garnered sustenance; European settlers came to this country and saw a bounty that was theirs to plunder. Forests were cleared, bison were nearly hunted to extinction, the prairies were broken and converted to cropland resulting in the dust bowl era, which also saw severe declines in waterfowl populations. You get the idea.
Today the human impact on the environment is enormous and we seem to have forgotten the hard-earned lessons of our country’s youth. We enacted laws intended to protect us from ourselves, but constantly weakening those laws, or providing loopholes, or just flat out ignoring those laws has become commonplace. Some say that deregulation is in the interest of productivity; but the question I would ask is, considering environmental harm, is producing more plastic bottles, or destroying our fresh water supply, or exposing the least among us to toxic air worth more than the cost of our and our environment’s health.
The human body is made up of 50-70% water. When astrophysicists look into the heavens for presence of life, one of the primary conditions they look for is presence or evidence of water. Even in the dryest of deserts life hangs on waiting for that rare presence to burst forth.
In last week’s Climate Corner, Eric talked about the impact from the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in our area. I would like to dig a little deeper into that morass. Many studies have been showing a trend in freshwater declines and a recent study shows those declines increasing at alarming rates, globally. The primary culprit for this is shown to be global warming, but another major component is aquifer extraction and what’s worse is that we are draining crucial water from our aquifers and filling the oceans with it – contributing to sea level rise. Data centers use a huge amount of water for cooling, some more than a million gallons a day. Many reuse the water by running it through cooling towers, but even with those efforts it is hundreds of thousands to more than a million gallons a day. Hydraulic fracturing uses 1.5 million to more than 16 million gallons. One major difference is that “brine” produced by fracking is lost from the freshwater cycle by injection underground. On the other hand, water that has been used by data centers is often diverted into storm water systems and is overwhelming many municipal water treatment facilities. This wastewater contains some or all of the following: heavy metals, corrosion inhibitors, biocides, glycols, PFAS (forever chemicals), elevated Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) and nitrates.
In the state of Ohio, the Ohio EPA is responsible for issuing permits for data center wastewater discharge which has been contentious due to the OEPA’s track record of failure to hold violators accountable. To make things worse OEPA is planning to and received public comments on allowing data centers to discharge water into the state’s lakes and streams. This is occurring already in some states including West Virginia where it is controlled by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection – again with a less than stellar track record for adequate monitoring and violator enforcement.
I think that Aldo Leopold would seriously question the benefit of a better ‘standard of living’ at the cost of so much in many of the things we do today. I recommend “A Sand County Almanac” by Aldo Leopold, for some quality reflection on this and many of today’s issues.
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Vic Elam, is a father, land manager, outdoor enthusiast, and proud member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action (MOVCA).
Posted: January 10, 2026 by main_y0ke11
Climate Corner: Pass the torch
Jan 10, 2026
Giulia Mannarino
editorial@newsandsentinel.com
I feel ancient when I think about being born in the 1900s. Then I remind myself that growing old is a privilege not all people are given. I also remind myself that older does not automatically mean wiser. Although experience is important, no one can deny that aging takes a toll on both mind and body. For this reason, I prefer that the individuals involved in decisions that affect my and my grandchildren’s futures be in the prime of their youth and trained in the most updated knowledge of their specialties. For me, this includes all elected government officials at the federal, state or local level including Special Districts which can be operated by local governments. These provide a particular public service such as drinking water or schools, often with an elected Board. These vary and are defined by state laws. Elected officials of various groups are having to address the consequences caused by a warming Earth. Their decisions will affect the future of the planet and all its species. It just makes sense that younger people, the ones more likely to still be alive in the not too distant future, become more involved in determining what actions should be taken to address this existential world crisis.
By the time the current 119th Congress adjourns in January 2027, if every member stays in office, 140 of the total 541 members will be aged 70 years or older. This group includes the oldest “freshman” Senator ever sworn in, West Virginia’s 73-year-old Jim Justice. Among the several octogenarians, it includes Vermont’s 84-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders. The oldest member of Congress, 91-year-old Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, was first elected in 1980. And, on average, our country’s state governors are even older than the current Congress. John F. Kennedy, who had already served 8 years in the Senate, was the youngest elected president at age 43. Theodore Roosevelt was actually the youngest president to serve when, at 42, he became president following William McKinley’s assassination. As someone enjoying retirement, I don’t understand why anyone, especially those who have adequate personal funds, would choose to work past a sensible retirement age. Perhaps love of power or money?
Across all the 50 states, in order to run for a political office, individuals must be registered voters as well as meet certain criteria including residency and minimum age requirements. For some positions this can be as young as 18 years old. No state has a maximum age. An unusual qualification for candidates in West Virginia is that they must have never competed in a duel. Dueling became obsolete after the Civil War, but a few states, including Kentucky, have not repealed dueling laws. Any form of a traditional duel remains a serious crime everywhere in the U.S. Interestingly, in all states but Wisconsin, convicted felons are not prevented from holding the office of governor. Eligible persons, who seek to hold political party positions need to declare their candidacy by filing a “certificate of announcement” by a specified date and time. This required paperwork needs to be filed with a certain government office, such as the Secretary of State or County Clerk. Which government office to file in depends on if the position is to be filled by voters of a single municipality, a single county or more than one county.
Regardless of a candidate’s age or whether it is a federal, state or local position, running for any political office can be daunting, confusing and difficult. And, funds for campaign expenses need to be raised. The major political parties are interested in, willing and able to help potential candidates. Some positions may be part-time and can be held by persons that have additional employment while others require full-time hours. The salaries and per diem for political positions vary widely across our region. Hopefully, politics will never again be corrupted by racism or sexism but ageism makes sense. All levels of government need to transition to a new generation of leadership. Whether federal, state or local, more young people need to be politically involved in decisions being made about the future of our warming planet. The Post War and Boomer generations need to step aside because it’s past time for them to pass the torch of public service to the Millennials and Gen Zs
Posted: January 3, 2026 by main_y0ke11
Climate Corner: Data centers taking pages from coal baron playbook
Jan 3, 2026
Eric Engle
editorial@newsandsentinel.com
“Data Centers and bitcoin mines are remaking rural America the same way coal once did. They move into weak regulatory terrain, rewrite the rules in their favor, drain the resources that communities rely on and send the value somewhere else.”
This quote is from a piece in Salon titled “Data centers are West Virginia’s new strip mines: The Mountain State is experiencing a data center boom–and using the old coal playbook” by Sean Carlton. I read the piece recently on Facebook, where it was shared by Tucker United – a group of Tucker County residents and their supporters opposing data center buildout in their breathtaking home. Tucker United describes themselves as “a coalition of Tucker County residents and allies that demand the power to shape our future and protect our community, families, natural resources, and economy.”
“Data centers are the same kind of extraction,” says Carlton, “only this time the corporations are hiding them behind fences, nondisclosure agreements and a lot of glossy PR about ‘upcycling’ coal mines and powering the future.” “Strip mining used to at least throw a few hundred jobs at a county while it hollowed everything else out,” Carlton continues. “Now, West Virginia is trading away water, land, noise and grid capacity for a workforce small enough to fit inside a school bus.”
According to Noman Bashir, Computing and Climate Impact Fellow at MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) and a postdoc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), “The demand for new data centers cannot be met in a sustainable way. The pace at which companies are building new data centers means the bulk of the electricity to power them must come from fossil fuel-based power plants.”
Power consumption by U.S. data centers is expected to more than double by 2030, according to projections by the Pew Research Center using data from the International Energy Agency’s base case scenario, to 426 terawatt-hours per year. A report earlier this year by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen found that “Residents’ electricity costs in some data center-dense areas have surged over 250% in just five years. At PJM — the world’s largest power market [West Virginia is in PJM] — capacity auction prices spiked 800% in 2024, in part due to data center growth. That same year, consumers across seven PJM states paid $4.3 billion more in electricity costs to cover data centers’ new transmission infrastructure.”A report by CNBC earlier this month shared findings from a separate watchdog report showing that “PJM’s 65 million consumers will pay a total of $16.6 billion to secure future power supplies needed to meet demand from AI data centers from now until 2027, approximately $255 per person on average.” That’s just from AI-related data centers, not separate data centers for cryptocurrency or cloud computing.
Data centers use massive amounts of water for cooling and create high demand for fracked gas (fracking being a process that causes permanent loss of enormous quantities of water from the water table that can never be made potable again, at least on human timescales). With passage of House Bill 2014 earlier this year in the WV Legislature, municipalities and counties will be deprived of the vast majority of tax revenue data centers in West Virginia generate in their backyards.
Data centers are a driving force behind Governor Patrick Morrisey’s “50 by 50” energy initiative, whereby Morrisey wants West Virginia to produce 50 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, 35 gigawatts more than the 15 gigawatts the state produces today, driven almost exclusively by coal and gas. This initiative is ludicrous on its face regardless of what sources the electricity would come from–which I made clear in comments I offered to the state’s Office of Energy recently–but to focus almost entirely on coal and gas, with a bone thrown to extremely expensive nuclear, is completely asinine.
The focus of energy policy in West Virginia should be twofold: 1) Generation by cleaner, safer, healthier and far cheaper renewables–especially solar, wind and hydro–with multiple storage operations to solve for intermittency; and 2) maximization of energy efficiencies across our built environments (residential, commercial and industrial) and deployment of smart grid technologies and other demand management systems. We need community solar solutions and assistance for households and rental property owners who have suitable properties to help them with the upfront costs of going solar and relying less on the grid or even going off grid with home energy storage options.
Generations of West Virginians sacrificed everything to power civilization and build the modern world. Our people have given enough. We shouldn’t have to continue being the same extraction colony and sacrifice zone we’ve been since June 20, 1863, so delusional bitcoin investors can feel like they’re doing something futuristic and special and so AI can continue becoming the next technological Frankenstein’s monster. Mountaineers deserve better.
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Eric Engle is board president of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.
Posted: December 27, 2025 by main_y0ke11
Climate Corner Reimagining economic development in the Mid-Ohio Valley
Dec 27, 2025
George Banziger
editorial@newsandsentinel.com
t a recent meeting of the Marietta Area Chamber of Commerce, I posed the following question to Brian Chavez, who represents the 30th Ohio Senate District and is chairman of the Ohio Senate Energy Committee: “What economic benefit does the injection-well industry (which pumps millions of barrels of production waste from hydraulic fracturing) present to Washington County, and how would you assess the economic cost/benefit ratio of this industry for our region?”
Since Mr. Chavez did not really answer my question, I attempted to answer it at the Dec.18 meeting of the Washington County Commissioners. The costs of this industry are huge: risks to the water aquifers, increased seismic activity, air and water pollution, and trucks labeled “brine,” plying our state and county roads bearing their toxic and radioactive brew. The benefits — a few jobs for brine haulers who are taking great risks to their own health in dealing with the dangerous material. If there are any benefits of the larger industry of high-pressure hydraulic fracturing, i.e., fracking, very little of it comes to Washington County and the Mid-Ohio Valley.
But what actually are the benefits of the fracking industry to the larger area of northern Appalachia (West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania and the 32 counties of Ohio within the Appalachian region)?
Although fossil-fuel interests have promised economic growth, and jobs in the region as a result of the fracking boom, the strategic economic triad of natural gas, petrochemicals and hydrogen, are actually dragging down northern Appalachia, according to a recent study by the Ohio River Valley Institute (2025). The expansion of natural gas extraction has not delivered on its promise of jobs and economic development.
The growth in production of natural gas in northern Appalachia has not translated into job growth; income growth in this region lags the U.S. by over 30%. The gas-producing areas of Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania are getting poorer, older and less populated relative to the rest of the U.S., according to this ORVI report. In the 30 counties of this tri-state region that produce natural gas, jobs declined by 1%, while nationally they grew by14%, and population declined by 3% (it grew by 10% nationally). Meanwhile, the ARCH2 hydrogen hub, the Appalachian manifestation of a national initiative to produce hydrogen mainly from methane (i.e., natural gas), is moribund. A third of ARCH2’s projects and developers have dropped out, ARCH2’s effort to replace them failed, the only ARCH2 project to advance to the construction phase recently declared bankruptcy and laid off its workers, and ARCH2’s managers have not updated its website or responded to inquiries since last spring.
The group ReImagine Appalachia, which focuses on sustainable economic development and good-paying jobs, has offered an alternative to the extractive fossil-fuel industries, which have exploited Appalachia for decades — first with timber and coal and then with oil and gas. RA has provided a document called “Appalachian Manufacturing Action Plan,” which provides compelling models for economic development rooted in the manufacturing infrastructure of the region and our highly capable, hard-working labor force. Among these ideas are: repurposing retired coal-fired power plants (an approach already being pursued by the Southeast Ohio Port Authority), the manufacture of wind-turbine parts, investing in applied research to derive rare-earth metals from coal ash, producing wood-binding layers and “ecobricks” for construction materials, growing hemp (absent the THC) as an alternative to plastics, producing bioplastics from algae and mushroom roots, researching and improving battery technology (as is being done in Ravenswood). The traditional model of manufacturing — that is, the linear model, where a raw material is extracted, shipped to a manufacturer and the waste discarded — should be replaced by a circular model, where raw materials are recycled, reclaimed, repurposed and reused. The latter model is actually being realized in western Pennsylvania and in Morganton, North Carolina, where an “industrial commons” has been established.
The proliferation of data centers in Ohio and throughout the country requires a tremendous amount of energy. Natural gas will not be sufficient to provide this voracious appetite for electricity. Renewable sources like wind and solar will be needed to complement this energy need — an all-of-the above approach to energy. And manufacturing will be needed to provide the supplies and equipment in the form of wind turbines, solar panels and attendant items. Appalachian industries can help to provide these important resources for the economic development of the 21st century.
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George Banziger, Ph.D. was a faculty member at Marietta College and an academic dean at three other colleges. He is a member of the Green Sanctuary Committee of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Marietta, of Citizens Climate Lobby, and a contributor to Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action team.
Posted: December 20, 2025 by main_y0ke11
Climate Corner: Make energy policy boring again
Dec 20, 2025
Griffin Bradley
editorial@newsandsentinel.com
Over the last decade, I would venture to guess that Americans have heard more about energy policy than ever before. One party’s moonshot solution to climate contrasted with the other party’s appeal to traditional energy systems. The outcome is always the same: division, vitriol, and ultimately a tit-for-tat repeal of existing policy every few years that puts America back at square one.
Here’s the deal: policy has become more of a cultural flashpoint than an actual solution to a problem. In the not-too-distant past, politics and policy making were boring. It was a necessary task for civil society that didn’t receive much fanfare. Now, it seems that everyone has a pet issue, ideology, or, God forbid, a “favorite politician”who they are willing to go to the mat for.
But on the policy front, these ways of thinking do no good. The best policy is a boring one. One that is built on proven technology, implements steady regulation, and supports infrastructure that makes little to no headlines. And this is especially true for the energy industry who relies on policy and regulatory consistency more than most.
To be clear, “boring” in this sense doesn’t mean slow or unambitious. A boring policy can still build a strong industry and support reliability. But incrementalism, redundancies, and repetition are what make it happen. Many strong examples of this exist in the energy space, especially in Appalachia. Rural electrification, infrastructure build out, and the development of new industries top the list.
Here’s where America has gone wrong on energy policy in recent years. Both parties — yes, both of them — have pushed a narrative of constant shaming of one another and instituted bans on proposed solutions they deem irresponsible or unworkable. Meanwhile, the public has grown skeptical, not just of the ideas but also the process. Delays in policy implementation stall progress, causing projects to never materialize. By the time solutions pass the administrative and regulatory smell test, a newly elected political majority repeals the original policy. Sound familiar? Example: the Inflation Reduction Act.
So, what’s the solution? If every policy is a potential political football, is there a way to actually move forward? Enter: the boring policy framework. For energy policy, this might mean focusing less on discovering new silver bullets and more on effective and efficient deployment of proven technologies. Grid modernization, building electrification, increased energy efficiency, and demand-response — all policy solutions that are proven to lower emissions, improve reliability, and save ratepayers money.
The best part? Debates around these issues are a snoozefest for everyday Americans — and that’s the point. Boring policies attract little attention and bluster, making them durable and, when the results are displayed in plain English, hard to demonize.
The goal of policymaking should not be to get some political “win,” but to create lasting policy that benefits as many stakeholders as possible without creating a shift in everyday practices. For energy policy, that means a transition to cleaner solutions that are barely noticeable. And the outcome? Steadier energy bills, cleaner, quieter power plants, and, maybe the best part, less talk about politics.
If you want strong policy that lasts, stop trying to make it exciting and start making it inevitable.
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Griffin Bradley is a lifelong Wood County resident, a graduate of West Virginia University, and a contributing author for Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.
Posted: December 13, 2025 by main_y0ke11
Climate Corner: COP 30 – not all the news was bad
Dec 13, 2025
Rebecca Phillips
editorial@newsandsentinel.com
If you paid any attention at all to COP 30, the United Nations Climate Change Conference held last month in Belem, Brazil, you probably know about what didn’t happen: the United States refused to send an official delegation, petro-states led by Saudi Arabia and Russia fought to protect their fossil fuel interests, and the final set of recommendations issued by the conference failed to include a roadmap for the elimination of fossil fuels.
But COP 30 was not the total failure some in the media have claimed. True, we are not where we need to be, and the government and business interests of countries like the U.S., Russia, and Saudi Arabia are largely to blame. Yes, our country has renounced the scientific consensus and allied itself with authoritarian petro-states rather than the world’s democracies. We are in danger of overshooting 1.5 degrees of warming. The world is still in deep trouble.
And yet, the news is not all dire. In our absence, 195 countries negotiated an agreement that, if fully implemented, will go a long way toward easing the climate crisis and helping communities cope.
The final agreement opens with a recognition that a “clean, healthy, and sustainable environment” is a human right. It further recognizes the land rights of Indigenous people and calls for intergenerational equity in the development of climate policy. In other words, the signatories recognize that the people most affected by climate change — the young and those who live close to the land — should have a say.
Acknowledging that some degree of climate change is inescapable and that nations and communities will have to adapt, a major focus of the conference was on building resilience. One outcome was the Global Goal on Adaptation, which lists a set of 59 indicators of community resilience. These indicators include water security, food systems, infrastructure resilience, and the reach of early warning systems, all essential for human thriving in our world of extreme weather.
Perhaps most important, the conference approved a framework for a just transition mechanism and a plant on funding that transition. This means that those communities and individuals whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels or carbon-intensive industries will have both financial and technical assistance for developing a clean energy economy.
Another initiative with great potential is the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, a financing mechanism that would turn forest conservation into an investment. The idea behind it is that more is to be gained by helping countries maintain their standing forests than by replanting after deforestation. The process is complicated, but the World Resources Institute offers a good explanation on its website (https://www.wri.org/insights/financing-nature-conservation-tropical-forest-forever-facility). Protecting these carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots is one of the most effective methods of carbon sequestration.
In addition to the final agreement, there were other positive outcomes. The COP 30 Action Agenda is a framework that unites and organizes actions taken by a range of national and local governments, businesses, and civil society organizations, recognizing that all levels and sectors need to work together. At the Local Leaders Forum, 14,000 cities, states, and regions formally committed to climate action. In addition, 77 countries and the European Union have committed to local/national collaboration on climate issues.
Essentially, COP 30 focused on the “people” aspects of the fight against climate change. While the scientific facts and technical possibilities must underlie all climate action, this year’s COP centered people, especially those who are most affected by climate change because of their age, income, location, or occupation. While it is disappointing (and for me as a U.S. citizen, frankly embarrassing) that our government has chosen to deny the existence of climate change and instead continues to exacerbate the problem, it is heartening to know that at least most other countries are willing to work together to create a better future for all of us.
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Rebecca Phillips is an emeritus professor at WVU Parkersburg and a member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.
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