I Wonder If The Russians Had Anything To Do With This? -- March 2, 2017

I love these stories, and I love it when I seem them in The Washington Post: EPA halts inquiry into oil and gas industry emissions of methane, "a powerful greenhouse gas."

Photo at the linked Washington Post story, wahoo!

The lede:

The Environmental Protection Agency Thursday announced it was withdrawing a request that operators of existing oil and gas wells provide the agency with extensive information about their equipment and its emissions of methane, undermining a last-ditch Obama administration climate change initiative.

The EPA announcement was a first step towards reversing an Obama administration effort – which  only got underway two days after Donald Trump’s election – to gather information about  methane, a short-lived but extremely powerful climate pollutant which is responsible for about a quarter of global warming to date.

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The Literature Page

The Boy Who Could Change The World: 

The Writings of Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz

c. 2017

essay by Ben Jackson

The opening paragraph of a review of this book in London Review of Books:

In January 2011, Aaron Swartz was arrested for downloading 4.8 million academic articles from the digital archive JSTOR, using a laptop hidden in a broom cupboard on the MIT campus.

He was 24, and already a respected and influential computer programmer.

As a teenager, he had helped develop RSS, a syndication format that led to the explosion in popularity of blogging, and Markdown, an easy to use tool that converted text to HTML.

He wrote the code for the Creative Commons license, which helped distribute work on the internet more freely than traditional copyright would permit. He was also a successful entrepreneur.

He could easily have carried on working in the tech industry, where people like him can make millions, but instead he became a political activist, and that’s how he got in trouble.

The JSTOR episode led to his facing four felony counts, with a maximum sentence of 35 years; two years after his arrest, he hanged himself with his belt in his Brooklyn apartment.