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Fracked Gas LNG Exports Were Centerpiece In Promotion of Panama Canal Expansion, Documents Reveal

Fracked Gas LNG Exports Were Centerpiece In Promotion of Panama Canal Expansion, Documents Reveal

At the center of that business, a DeSmog investigation has demonstrated, is a fast-track export lane for gas obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the United States. The expanded Canal in both depth and width equates to a shortened voyage to Asia and also means the vast majority of liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers — 9-percent before versus 88-percent now — can now fit through it.

Emails and documents obtained under open records law show that LNG exports have, for the past several years, served as a centerpiece for promotion of the Canal’s expansion by the U.S. Gulf of Mexico-based Port of Lake Charles.

And the oil and gas industry, while awaiting the Canal expansion project’s completion, lobbied for and achieved passage of a federal bill that expanded the water depth of a key Gulf-based port set to feed the fracked gas export boom.

Control of the Panama Canal by U.S. big business and Wall Street has, for over a century, served as a focal point of U.S. foreign policy in the Americas.

While no longer in de facto control of the isthmus as it was during the days of the Panama Canal Zone, Jill Biden’s presence as part of an official Presidential Delegation at the expanded Canal’s opening ceremony symbolized the importance of the waterway and de jure role of the U.S. government in pushing for its expansion over the past several years. So too did the attendance of the U.S. military’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).

And in turn, the reported participation of LNG exports giant Cheniere Energy at the kick-off serves as a portrayal of the importance of the Canal’s expansion to the oil and gas industry. The Panama Canal Authority estimates that 20 million tons of LNG may pass through on an annual basis.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Peak Oil: Are We Not Better Than This? Pt 9

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There are—almost always—at least two sides to any story of significance and potential impact upon others. The greater the impact and potential for a range of outcomes, the more certain one can be that there are more than a handful of factors, considerations, and perspectives to be accounted for if the issue at hand is to be both understood and resolved effectively.

Ignoring the “other side” of the issue may be effective if one prefers their narrative to remain unchallenged and to provide reassurance to fellow believers, but beyond that, it’s hard to understand what the benefit might be to those seeking information if what’s shared is inaccurate or purposely incomplete.

From the second article I’ve been referencing throughout this series:

In the USA, hydraulic fracturing has taken petroleum production to its highest level since 1972, and oil imports to their lowest level since 1995. America now exports crude oil, natural gas and refined products.
The fracking genie cannot be put back in the bottle. In fact, it is being adopted all over the world, opening new shale oil and gas fields, prolonging the life of conventional fields, leaving less energy in the ground, and giving the world another century or more of abundant, reliable, affordable petroleum. That’s plenty of time to develop new energy technologies that actually work without mandates and enormous subsidies.

FACTS OFFER A DIFFERENT TAKE

But in the real world where facts are actually important, a different story is told. Two days before the above-referenced article was published, we had this:

[N]ow, over 1.5 years into the price collapse, production declines in shale oil are finally starting to appear as low oil prices have slashed company investments in new supply, and production begins to decline from existing wells….
The array of spending cuts and production declines announced by dozens of separate companies may be difficult to wrap one’s head around. 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Faced With a Fracking Giant, This Small Town Just Legalized Civil Disobedience

Faced With a Fracking Giant, This Small Town Just Legalized Civil Disobedience

A new first-in-the-nation law will shield residents from arrest as they use direct action to stop fracking-wastewater injection wells.
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Grant Township had seen what happens when people nationwide take to the streets to protest bullying corporations: Arrests. Lots of them.

So Grant Township planned ahead. Two weeks ago, it passed a law that protects its residents from arrest if they protest Pennsylvania General Energy Company’s (PGE) creation of an injection well.

Residents believe this law is the first in the United States to legalize nonviolent civil disobedience against toxic wastewater injection wells. “We’re doing it to safeguard the residents and protect as many people as possible,” Township Supervisor Stacy Long said.

Long said legalizing direct action is a response to the ongoing problem of rural residents seeing their voices excluded from discussions between state governments and big corporations on issues that have local ramifications.

Like so many other people in communities dealing with fracking and its waste, residents worry the injected wastewater will leak into their drinking-water sources.

PGE wants to repurpose an existing well in Grant Township into a Class II disposal well. These wells are used to deposit toxic wastewater deep underground. The wastewater is a byproduct of oil and gas drilling and can contain toxic metals, benzene, and radioactive materials, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates 180,000 Class II injection wells currently operate, injecting more than 2 billion gallons of brine a day. About 20 percent are disposal wells.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Groundwater Contamination from Fracking Changes over Time: Study

Groundwater Contamination from Fracking Changes over Time: Study

Texas study finds quality fluctuates as nearby industry evolves.

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A new Texas study is the first to measure groundwater quality from private water wells before, during, and after the expansion of fracking. Water photo via Shutterstock.

A new Texas study has found that horizontal oil wells fractured by the injection of high volumes of chemicals, sand, and water contaminate nearby water wells with a variety of heavy metals and toxic chemicals that fluctuate over time.

In the last decade, North America’s $40-billion fracking industry has punctured uneconomic or ”unconventional” rock formations from British Columbia to Texas with long lateral wells that extend for miles underground.

Then they blast open the surrounding formation with injections of water, chemicals, sand, fluids, or hydrocarbons. But industry can’t always control the direction of the fractures.

”In our most recent study, we found that as more unconventional wells were drilled and stimulated, more drilling-related contaminants were found in the groundwater,” study author Zacariah L. Hildenbrand told The Tyee.

Dichloromethane, an industry chemical and potential human carcinogen, was found in quantities above safe drinking water levels in water wells on highly fracked landscapes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the chemical ”poses health risks to anyone who breathes the air when this compound is present.”

Hildenbrand, a native of the Okanagan Valley, is a scientist (and cancer biologist by training) with the Collaborative Laboratories for Environmental Analysis and Remediation at the University of Texas in Arlington.

The study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, is the first to measure groundwater quality from private water wells before, during, and after the expansion of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Movement to Stop Fossil Fuel Development Is Winning

The Movement to Stop Fossil Fuel Development Is Winning

Colorado’s high court today struck down the rights of Coloradans to enact local fracking bans. It’s no surprise, given the massive sway of the oil and gas industry in the state. The suit was brought against Longmont (which passed a popular fracking ban in 2012) by Gov. John Hickenlooper and his industry cronies. While it’s easy to be discouraged by this decision, the fact is, it will help activate citizens to pass statewide ballot measures to ban fracking in November.

And let’s not forget: The movement to stop fossil fuel development just keeps winning.

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On Earth Day, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo put a stop to the Constitution pipeline, a dangerous project to shipped fracked gas from Pennsylvania into New York, intersecting almost 300 bodies of water. His action sent a clear message that protecting the safety of the state’s drinking water was more important than expanding Big Oil’s profits. And the move didn’t come out of nowhere; the same grassroots pressure that successfully pushed Cuomo to ban fracking in 2014 pushed him to reject this dirty fracked gas pipeline.

It wasn’t just Earth Day that brought good news for the planet. Two days before, the Kinder Morgan energy behemoth canceled a gas pipeline that would have run through parts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The company faced stiff opposition from activists and residents of the towns where the pipeline would have been constructed.

While it’s good to see Big Oil pull the plug on a bad idea, citizens must put pressure on their elected officials to make sure fossil fuels stay in the ground. That’s what the residents of Prince George’s County in Maryland did this month, convincing the county council to pass a resolution banning fracking. The vote was unanimous.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Gov. Cuomo Rejects the Constitution Pipeline, Huge Win for the Anti-Fracking Movement

Gov. Cuomo Rejects the Constitution Pipeline, Huge Win for the Anti-Fracking Movement

In a win for climate activists and the anti-fracking movement, and a blow to fossil fuel polluters and the federal regulatory agencies that enable them, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) denied a key permit to companies seeking to build a 124-mile fracked gas pipeline.

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The Constitution Pipeline Project—a joint venture between four oil and gas companies—was proposed to transport fracked natural gas from Susquehanna County in Pennsylvania through Broome, Chenango, Delaware and Schoharie counties in New York to existing interstate pipelines. The pipeline route would have crossed hundreds of streams and wetlands, including those supplying drinking water to families along the proposed route. Using the power granted under the Clean Water Act, DEC officials rejected the companies’ permit application, citing damage the project would do to water supplies along the pipeline route.

“Today is an incredible Earth Day! Thank you again to Governor Cuomo and the Department of Environmental Conservation for putting the protection of our precious water and the public health and safety of New Yorkers ahead of the special interests of the oil and gas industry,” Mark Ruffalo, advisory body member of New Yorkers Against Fracking, said. “This is what real climate leadership looks like.”

The nonprofit environmental law organization Earthjustice has been staunchly opposed to the project and represented a coalition of groups—Catskill Mountainkeeper, Riverkeeper, Clean Air Council, Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society, Delaware Riverkeeper Network, and the Pennsylvania and Atlantic chapters of Sierra Club—in pipeline approval proceedings before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC.)

Last month FERC gave the go-ahead to pipeline developers to clear-cut 20 miles of treesalong the pipeline’s planned route through Pennsylvania. Pointing to the fact that New York State had not yet issued a permit, Earthjustice and other environmental groups called FERC’s move premature and illegal.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘People should be terrified fracking is spreading’ – Australian MP who set river on fire to RT

‘People should be terrified fracking is spreading’ – Australian MP who set river on fire to RT

Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham © RT
Fracking should be banned as a “global threat” as it causes methane leaks contaminating water in the communities near gas wells, says an Australian MP who literally set a river ablaze to draw attention to the adverse effects of the practice.

The companies that extract coal seam gas via fracking are duping people into believing that their technology is safe, while in reality it has contributed greatly to the pollution of sites like Condamine river located in the Australian state of Queensland just near the fracking site, Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham said in an interview to RT.

“This gas is leaking out of the ground because of the fracking. They have thousands of gas wells around this river, around this site. They drill, they frack, but the gas isn’t just flowing up their gas wells, it’s coming through the ground,” he said, stressing that Origin Energy company, that operate the wells, “should be condemned for polluting one of our most important rivers.”

Speaking of how to prevent the fracking industry from damaging the environment, he said that Australia should ban fracking as an unsafe practice altogether.

“What we are waiting in Australia is a moratorium on fracking,” he said, adding that fracking should be viewed as a global threat and its spreading should make people around the world “terrified.”

Earlier this month, Buckingham came to Chinchilla, in southwest Queensland, while campaigning against fracking as part of the Green’s party’s agenda. To show the dire effect on nature caused by the technology, Buckingham set the Condamine river on fire with a kitchen lighter and later unloaded the video on the web.

‘Industries should be fixing problems instead of doing propaganda’

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Top Shale Fracking Executive: We Won’t Frack the Rich

Top Shale Fracking Executive: We Won’t Frack the Rich

“’We heard Range Resources say it sites its shale gas wells away from large homes where wealthy people live and who might have the money to fight such drilling and fracking operations,’ said Patrick Grenter, an attorney and Center for Coalfield Justice executive director, who attended the lawyers’ forum,” the Post-Gazette reported. “A handful of attorneys in the audience confirmed that account,” and added that the Range Resources official had prefaced his remarks by saying “To be frank”.

The comments were made by Terry Bossert, Range Resources’s vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs, during a presentation at the Pennsylvania Bar Institute’s Environmental Law Forum on April 7. In 2004, Range Resources was the first company to drill in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale – but it has racked up a string of environmental violations so severe that state regulators slapped it with a record-breaking $4.15 million fine in 2014, followed the next year by an $8.9 million fine over a different incident.

The company has also repeatedly been sued by landowners – and not just in Pennsylvania, but also in their home state of Texas. It made international headlines when a gag order – part of a $750,000 settlement agreement between the company and a family over a contaminated 10-acre farm in Mount Pleasant, PA – barred two children from speaking about fracking for life (a ban that the company later repudiated, after the settlement terms were unsealed and made public).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Study: Fracking, Not Just Fracking Wastewater Injection, Causing Earthquakes in Western Canada

Study: Fracking, Not Just Fracking Wastewater Injection, Causing Earthquakes in Western Canada 

A groundbreaking study published today in Seismological Research Letters has demonstrated a link, for the first time, between hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for oil and gas and earthquakes.

Hydraulic Fracturing and Seismicity in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin” confirms the horizontal drilling technique (which in essence creates an underground mini-earthquake to open up fissures for oil and gas extraction) is responsible for earthquakes, above and beyond what is already canonized in the scientific literature. We already knew that injecting fracking waste into underground wells can cause quakes. But now it’s not just the injections wells, but the fracking procedure itself that can be linked to seismicity.

The study focuses on an area in Canada known as the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin (WCSB), one of Canada’s biggest shale basins and tight oil and gas producing regions.

The researchers “compared the relationship of 12,289 fracking wells and 1,236 wastewater disposal wells to magnitude 3 or larger earthquakes in an area of 454,000 square kilometers near the border between Alberta and British Columbia, between 1985 and 2015,” explained a press release. They “found 39 hydraulic fracturing wells (0.3% of the total of fracking wells studied), and 17 wastewater disposal wells (1% of the disposal wells studied) that could be linked to earthquakes of magnitude 3 or larger.”

If that sounds like a fairly small percentage, Atkinson and colleagues readily admit that is the case in the study. Yet they also write that it could portend worse things to come as more and more wells are fracked in the region.

“It is important to acknowledge that associated seismicity occurs for only a small proportion of hydraulic fracturing operations,” they wrote, proceeding to cite another paper written in 2015 by lead author Gail Atkinson — a professor of earth sciences at the University of Western Ontario — and colleagues on the impacts of induced seismicity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fracking Contaminates Groundwater: Stanford Study

Fracking Contaminates Groundwater: Stanford Study

Another scientific report finds evidence of industry’s impact on public resource.

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Drilling photo via Shutterstock.

Another scientific study has confirmed that fracking, the controversial technology that blasts apart low-grade rocks containing molecules of hydrocarbons, can contaminate groundwater.

“We have, for the first time, demonstrated impact to Underground Sources of Drinking Water (USDW) as a result of hydraulic fracturing,” says the study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Researchers from Stanford University published their findings after combing through publicly available data on the drilling, fracking and cementing of scores of tight gas wells in Pavillion, Wyoming.

“Given the high frequency of injection of stimulation fluids into USDWs to support [coalbed methane] extraction and unknown frequency in tight gas formations, it is unlikely that impact to USDWs is limited to the Pavillion Field, requiring investigation elsewhere.”

The scientists matched chemical compounds used in fracking to chemicals found in two groundwater monitoring wells drilled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2008.

No jurisdiction in Canada has yet set up long-term groundwater monitoring wells to track the movement of contaminants from oil and gas drilling into groundwater.

The industry routinely contends that fracking is safe because it is occurring miles underground.

But shallow fracking of coal seams and other formations in Colorado, Wyoming, Alabama and Alberta from the 1980s onward has resulted in lawsuits, public protests and evidence of extensive groundwater contamination.

The new study also found that different companies in Pavillion, Wyoming used acid and hydraulic fracturing treatments at the same depths as water wells in the area. Waste disposal pits contaminated groundwater, too.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Steam Injection Fractures Caprock in Big Alberta Spill, Regulator Confirms

Steam Injection Fractures Caprock in Big Alberta Spill, Regulator Confirms

Incident highlights fragility of high-cost energy extraction.

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Large fractures in earth seeped bitumen at one of four well sites operated by CNRL near Cold Lake, Alberta. Photo: CNRL, September 2013.

Three years after an eruption of 10,000 barrels of melted bitumen contaminated the boreal forest and groundwater near Cold Lake, Alberta, the provincial energy regulator has now officially blamed hydraulic fracturing, or the pressurized injection of steam into the ground for fracturing nearby rock.

The bitumen blowout occurred sometime between May and June 2013 at Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.’s Cold Lake project, an operation that uses steam injection to melt bitumen and bring it to the surface.

In this case, the pressure from the steam cracked rock between different formations, allowing melted bitumen to find natural fractures and flow to the surface at five different locations, including under a lake.

In some places, the bitumen erupted through fissures in the ground as long as 159 metres deep.

The event, not the first of its kind as an earlier Tyee investigation revealed, killed wildlife and seeped nearly 20 barrels of bitumen a day into muskeg over a five-month period.

In a lengthy report, the Alberta Energy Regulator concluded what experts had suggested all along — that all five bitumen seeping events “were caused by excessive steam volumes, along with an open conduit (wellbore or natural fracture or fault) or hydraulically induced vertical fractures.”

That panel submitted “that CNRL’s approach had insufficiently addressed the impact of geological variability” and how natural fractures would respond to increases in steam pressures.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fracking Supply Chain a Climate Disaster, Doing Little to Uplift Poor Communities: Studies

Fracking Supply Chain a Climate Disaster, Doing Little to Uplift Poor Communities: Studies 

One of those studies, published in Environmental Research Letters and titled, “Just fracking: a distributive environmental justice analysis of unconventional gas development in Pennsylvania, USA,” concludes that “the income distribution of the population nearer to shale gas wells has not been transformed since shale gas development.”

The other, a report released by Environmental Integrity Project titled, “Greenhouse Gases from a Growing Petrochemical Industry,” examines the post-fracking supply chain and concludes that the petrochemical industry’s planned construction and expansion projects announced in 2015 alone are the “pollution equivalent to the emissions from 19 coal-fired power plants.”

Not Quite “Shaleionaires”

Two academics from outside of the U.S. and employed by the United Kingdom’s Newcastle University published the fracking environmental justice report. Lead author Emily Clough serves as a political science lecturer at Newcastle, while co-author Derek Bell serves as a professor of environmental political theory.

Both of them undertook an effort, as they write in the study’s introduction, to examine “income distribution and level of education in addition to race and poverty” and how these juxtaposed communities fared both “before and after shale gas development.” As it turns out, if you are poor and live in close proximity to a Marcellus Shale basin oil or gas well, you will receive some economic benefit — but not a very big one.

“In the 2009–2013 data, we found that the percentage of those living below the poverty threshold was slightly lower in areas close to unconventional wells than in areas further away,” they wrote. “This difference is small but statistically significant.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lawsuit Filed Over Oklahoma’s ‘Fracking’ Earthquakes as Its Third Largest Quake Is Felt in 7 Other States

Lawsuit Filed Over Oklahoma’s ‘Fracking’ Earthquakes as Its Third Largest Quake Is Felt in 7 Other States

The Sierra Club and the public interest law firm Public Justice have filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against three energy companies engaged in hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, in Oklahoma.

The suit against New Dominion, Chesapeake Operating and Devon Energy Production Company alleges that wastewater from fracking and oil production have contributed to the state’s alarming spike in earthquake activity.

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Map of Oklahoma. The orange dots represent the number of earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0 and higher from 2010 to date. The blue dots represent the state’s wastewater disposal wells. Photo credit: Earthquakes in Oklahoma

The lawsuit demands the companies, as a first step, to “reduce, immediately and substantially, the amounts of production waste they are injecting into the ground.”

The lawsuit was filed the same day that the Oklahoma Corporation Commission made their largest push yet to curb the state’s seismic activity. According to the Associated Press, the state’s oil and gas regulator ordered operators of nearly 250 injection wells to reduce the amount of wastewater they inject underground.

The commission released a plan that covers more than 5,200 square miles in northwest Oklahoma and called for a reduction of more than 500,000 barrels of wastewater daily, or about 40 percent less than previous levels, the AP reported.

The commission’s measure comes three days after a 5.1 magnitude earthquake shook northwest Oklahoma. Not only was the quake felt in seven other states, it’s the third-strongest temblor ever recorded in the state, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said.

“Without knowing more specifics about the wastewater injection and oil and gas production in this area, the USGS cannot conclude whether or not this particular earthquake was caused by industrial-related, human activities,” the agency said. “However, we do know that many earthquakes in the area have been triggered by wastewater fluid injection.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The US: A Nation In Dire Need of Energy and Climate Policy

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A new Harvard University study finds that world methane emissions have recently spiked, and that the US appears to be the site of most of the increase. Natural gas fracking is the apparent culprit. This finding should be (though I wouldn’t bet on it) the final nail in the coffin of the “natural gas as bridge fuel to a clean energy future” argument.

The Obama administration has fixated on replacing coal with natural gas for electricity generation as a major pathway to meeting Paris COP 21 commitments for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Its strategy required the EPA to begin regulating CO2 as a pollutant (as the centerpiece of the “Clean Power Plan” or CPP). But industry fought the regulation all the way to the Supreme Court, which did something quite rare. It stepped in to block federal regulations going into effect until a lower court made a ruling, even though the lower court itself had denied a similar request. Now, following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia (who sided with the “conservative” majority halting implementation of the regulation), there appears to be the possibility for an eventual reprieve of CPP.

But what’s the point? If natural gas from fracking harms the climate about as much as coal (higher methane emissions on one hand versus higher CO2 emissions on the other), then the entire strategy is revealed as ill-conceived and useless.

What is really needed is a national plan for a systemic energy transition, including policies, goals, and funding. Such a plan would break out the economy sector by sector, exploiting ways of radically reducing energy consumption over all while replacing oil, coal, and natural gas with renewable resources like solar, wind, biomass, hydro, and geothermal.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Renewables: The Next Fracking?

Renewables: The Next Fracking? 

I’d meant this week’s Archdruid Report post to return to Retrotopia, my quirky narrative exploration of ways in which going backward might actually be a step forward, and next week’s post to turn a critical eye on a common but dysfunctional habit of thinking that explains an astonishing number of the avoidable disasters of contemporary life, from anthropogenic climate change all the way to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Still, those entertaining topics will have to wait, because something else requires a bit of immediate attention. In my new year’s predictions a little over a month ago, as my regular readers will recall, I suggested that photovoltaic solar energy would be the focus of the next big energy bubble. The first signs of that process have now begun to surface in a big way, and the sign I have in mind—the same marker that provided the first warning of previous energy bubbles—is a shift in the rhetoric surrounding renewable energy sources.

Broadly speaking, there are two groups of people who talk about renewable energy these days. The first group consists of those people who believe that of course sun and wind can replace fossil fuels and enable modern industrial society to keep on going into the far future. The second group consists of people who actually live with renewable energy on a daily basis. It’s been my repeated experience for years now that people belong to one of these groups or the other, but not to both.

As a general rule, in fact, the less direct experience a given person has living with solar and wind power, the more likely that person is to buy into the sort of green cornucopianism that insists that sun, wind, and other renewable resources can provide everyone on the planet with a middle class American lifestyle.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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