Jul 4
The factory that never sleeps.
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Japan
seen from Yemen
seen from Germany
seen from Mexico
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Japan
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Sweden
The factory that never sleeps.
I asked Siri when the last refinery was built! I think 50 years is plenty old! We need to gear up new refineries! Fuck green energy!
In the United States, there is strong pressure to prevent the development of new refineries, and no major refinery has been built in the country since Marathon's Garyville, Louisiana facility in 1976.
Old bridge and refinery/factory in Florida
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TO DRINK UP THE SEA
Islands of Weirdhope, the maritime expandalone to ECO MOFOS!!, by the fearsome pairing of David Blandy and Daniel Locke, is currently crowdfunding.
Scant hours left! The Backerkit campaign ends Tuesday. Go back it NOW.
You should back it because I am part of it. I will be in Four Fathoms Deep, an adventure anthology launching together with the core rulebook. I will be in very good company.
I am still writing my adventure. But I have a title, and I have a blurb:
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TO DRINK UP THE SEA The tide is falling---continuing to fall. The tide has been falling for three days, now. On the sand are jellyfish lumps, drying out. Look closer! Their tentacles are bundles of optic fiber. On the surf is a dolphin, poisoned, dying. "Stay away!" he wheezes. His blowhole sputters blue blood. In the middle of the bay the waves are breaking. What is it---a shoal, a wreck? A head, a metal head, the size of a comet. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its temples. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its eyes. Its eyes are open. It is awake. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its hungry mouths.
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This is a follow up to TO PUT AWAY A SWORD, the dead-mecha adventure I wrote for ECO MOFOS!!.
In SWORD the giant robot was an obvious metaphor for hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry. In SEA the giant robot will be the same. I keep writing about the same things; hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry is personal to me, I guess? I live in a petrogas town. Every breath I take reminds me of hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry.
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Was going to post some images / references that make up my moodboard for this adventure.
The first is the Salton Sea Monster, from the Hellboy / BPRD comics:
A kaiju sitting at the edge of a dead sea, spewing a deadly gas. I can't help read her as a refinery gas flare.
But she also lays eggs. BPRD as a whole concludes by the world ending---but also beginning again, with the earth now an Eden for the amphibian people born from monsters like her.
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Another is "Dragon's Breath", one of five short stories in AS Byatt's The Djinn In The Nightingale's Eye.
I've never liked this story, but also I've never forgotten it: its disgusting dragon(s) like lava flows, like landslides. I believe Byatt wrote the story for / during the Siege of Sarajevo?
In it is the sense of unavoidable catastrophe. That to be human is to dodge around it, prod at it, find boredom in it, rescue what you can from it.
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The most recent is from my own life.
Last week, Senyar, a tropical cyclone, formed in the Straits of Malacca. This never happens in the Strait of Malacca, you understand? Ours are relatively halcyon waters, protected from monsoons, weather systems, tsunamis.
Not any more, I guess.
Hundreds have lost their lives in Sumatra and Thailand.
Senyar hit my hometown last Thursday. The wind wailed; the trees did jigs. I shut what I could, and tried to sleep. The next morning I woke to mess: pools of rainwater in the living room; a porch strewn with pots and branches; trunks and power lines had fallen all around town. (Later the news would report a hundred homes damaged.)
After checking in on loved ones the next thing I did was hurry to our favourite beach, to check in on our favourite mangrove trees. These trees would've been worst-hit by the storm.
They survived---though the bedrock around them has eroded further. I worry for them.
Still: our mangroves survived. They survived when concrete did not. During the night, a jetty platform owned by the Petron refinery collapsed into the sea. This is a platform where the tankers moor, to offload crude.
That morning I squinted at the jetty's rump remainder, water gushing from its broken edge. (No oil spills, thankfully!)
Is the giant in TO DRINK UP THE SEA the cyclone storm, or the petroleum platform?
I don't know yet. I'll be writing to find out. It will be an ecocidal disaster, of course. But perhaps such disasters will be calamities for each other---
And I hope imagine us rescue ourselves from them, and belonging, transformed, to the world that comes after.
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Go back Islands of Weirdhope >>>HERE<<<
Crude Oil Refinery Process Overview
A large fire at ExxonMobil's Baton Rouge oil refinery late on February 11 lit up the sky for miles and continued until dawn. The night of the fire, ExxonMobil representatives claimed that air monitoring inside the plant and in surrounding neighborhoods did not detect the release of harmful
Excerpt from this story from DeSmog Blog:
A large fire at ExxonMobil's Baton Rouge oil refinery late on February 11 lit up the sky for miles and continued until dawn. The night of the fire, ExxonMobil representatives claimed that air monitoring inside the plant and in surrounding neighborhoods did not detect the release of harmful concentrations of chemicals, a claim echoed by first responders and state regulators. What unfolded, however, reinforced a growing community movement to require real-time independent air pollution monitoring at industrial facilities.
A week after the incident, Exxon filed a required “seven-day report” to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) indicating the plant released four toxic chemicals during the incident, including benzene, butadiene, and sulfuric acid in quantities above allowable limits, and sulfur dioxide. Exxon said in its report that thousands of pounds of unspecified flammable vapor released in the incident were burned off by the fire and that little, if any, escaped the refinery in concentrations that could have posed a risk to nearby residents.
However, many in the community were outraged about how much time passed before they were notified of potential hazards and expressed doubt that the fire had no significant effect on the air quality around the plant.
The incident reignited calls from environmental advocates for more real-time monitoring of a class of potentially toxic chemicals known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at chemical plants and refineries. They say that with this kind of publicly available monitoring, residents near such facilities won’t have to rely on industry for health warnings in case of an emergency.