[TheClimate.Vote] May 19, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sun May 19 10:20:59 EDT 2019
/May 19, 2019/
[Hope goes down under]
*Australia's ruling Coalition claims election victory in major upset*
Scott Morrison's government set to hang on to power despite polls
predicting his demise
It was billed as the climate change election, and the climate lost.
Despite enduring its hottest year on record and a series of
environmental calamities that have brought the climate emergency into
sharp relief, Australia has voted for the centre-right Liberal party and
its coalition partner, and against taking forceful action on the climate
crisis.
The ruling Coalition looks set to be returned to government, albeit
possibly with the support of independents, in a remarkable victory given
that the Labor opposition has won every opinion poll since mid-2016...
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/18/australias-ruling-coalition-claims-election-victory-in-major-upset
- -
["suspicion of trolls?"]
*Australia Election: A Shocking Defeat Of The Left, Despite MSM And
Polls Predicting Otherwise*
Labor leader Bill Shorten After conceded and announced he would be
stepping down as head of the party, after losing an election which many
mainstream media and exit polling described as "unlosable" for the left.
https://saraacarter.com/australia-election-a-shocking-defeat-of-the-left-despite-msm-and-polls-predicting-otherwise/
- -
[Down under turns upside down]
*Labor lost the unlosable election - now it's up to Morrison to tell
Australia his plan**
*The big losers are action on the climate emergency and the likelihood
that Labor will never be as ambitious with its policies again
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/19/labor-unloseable-election-morrison-australia-plan
- - -
*Teenagers on Australia's election: 'I wake up each morning afraid of
what the future holds'*
Many teenagers feel ignored or confused by politicians. Five talk about
what matters to them most this election day
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2019/may/18/teenagers-on-australias-election-i-wake-up-each-morning-afraid-of-what-the-future-holds
- - -
[possibly unrelated]
*Australia printed 400 million banknotes with the word 'responsibility'
spelled wrong*
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-what-to-do-when-you-make-an-epic-typo-at-work-like-cbs-evening-news-misspelling-its-own-ceos-name-on-air-2018-08-03?mod=mixifeed&mod=mixi
[no walls for US diaspora]
*Louisiana's New Climate Plan Prepares for Resilience and Retreat as Sea
Level Rises*
People are already migrating inland as the ocean rises with global
warming and the delta sinks. The state's new plan looks at ways to ease
the transition.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17052019/louisiana-climate-migration-plan-retreat-sea-level-rise-global-warming
[Bookmark this drought map]
*Current Conditions - Experimental Objective Blends of Drought Indicators*
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentConditionsandOutlooks/CurrentConditions.aspx
- -
[I live in Washington State]
*3.8 million people are now in Washington's drought zone. And it's only
mid-May*
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?WA
https://kuow.org/stories/3-8-million-people-are-now-in-washington-s-drought-zone-and-it-s-only-mid-may
- -
[for the US]
*Looking Ahead*
This week, a strong jet stream with several embedded storm systems
will move into the continental U.S. and will interact with copious
amounts of moisture. Though the evolution of each of the storm
systems remains in question, moderate to heavy rain is possible in
parts of the Great Plains and Midwest from this weekend into next
week, including in areas that have received heavy rain recently, in
addition to a risk for severe storms. Moderate to heavy
precipitation amounts are also forecast in the Sierra Nevada and in
some other parts of the West as the storm systems move from west to
east. Warmer temperatures are forecast to occur in parts of the
Southeast from this weekend into early next week.
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
[AOC zings GOP]
*Ocasio-Cortez calls out GOP hypocrisy on abortion and climate change*
"The GOP doesn't care about babies at all - especially brown, black, or
poor ones."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Verified account @AOC
To the GOP extremists trying to invoke "the unborn" to jail people
for abortion:
Where are you on climate change? OH right, you want to burn fossil
fuels til there's hell on Earth.
If they were truthful about their motives, they'd be consistent in
their principles. They're not.
11:13 AM - 17 May 2019
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1129449948288815105
At the same time, the few congressional Republicans willing to admit
climate change might be a serious problem offer no real solutions.
Instead, they repeat poll-tested words like "innovation" while opposing
the kind of near-term carbon targets that climate scientists say are
needed to avert catastrophic impacts.
In her final tweet, Ocasio-Cortez said that the GOP is trying "to turn
the United States into a far-right Christian theocracy" -- and doing so
in a "dishonest" way.
"At least be forthright about your desire to subvert and dismantle our
democracy into a creepy theological order led by a mad king," she added
Calling Trump a "mad king" may be a reference to HBO's "Game of
Thrones," which will air its series finale Sunday. Ocasio-Cortez is a
big fan of the show and has made many comparisons between the show and
U.S. politics.
In the show, the "mad king" is King Aerys II Targaryen, who, when his
city was being overrun by rebels, infamously gave the order to set it on
fire and kill the half million inhabitants: "Burn them all. Burn them in
their homes. Burn them in their beds."
Certainly the pro-pollution policies of Trump and Republican -- if they
aren't reversed soon -- will lead to catastrophe for all babies born now
and for decades to come...
https://thinkprogress.org/ocasio-cortez-gop-babies-hell-on-earth-climate-change-c7d5e7f14910/
[Bezos report]
*Amazon says it's a leader on fighting climate change. 5,000 employees
disagree.*
They want the company to stop using fossil fuels entirely.
https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2019/4/11/18306389/amazon-employees-climate-change-plan
[shocking but not surprising]
*A MAJOR COAL COMPANY WENT BUST. ITS BANKRUPTCY FILING SHOWS THAT IT WAS
FUNDING CLIMATE CHANGE DENIALISM.*
Lee Fang - May 16 2019,
THE BANKRUPTCY OF one of the largest domestic coal producers in the
country has revealed that the company maintains financial ties to many
of the leading groups that have sowed doubt over the human causes of
global warming.
The disclosures are from Cloud Peak Energy, a Wyoming-based coal mining
corporation that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 10. The company
had been battered by low coal prices, including in international markets
cultivated by the firm.
The documents in the court docket show that the coal giant gave
contributions to leading think tanks that have attacked the link between
the burning of fossil fuels and climate change, as well as to several
conservative advocacy groups that have attempted to undermine policies
intended to shift the economy toward renewable energy. The documents do
not include information on the size of the contributions, yet, taken as
a whole, the list of groups Cloud Peak Energy helped fund are indicative
of how the company prioritized pushing climate denialism. The company
did not respond to a request for comment.
The contributions are revealed in a filing that lists recipients of
grants, creditors, and contractors. The document shows that Cloud Peak
Energy helped fund the Institute of Energy Research, a Washington,
D.C.-based group that has dismissed the "so-called scientific consensus"
on climate change and regularly criticizes investments in renewable
energy as a "waste" of resources...
- - -
Four years ago, falling coal prices led to a series of bankruptcies of
the largest coal companies in America. The filings, first reported by
The Intercept, similarly revealed that the coal industry had financed a
range of activists and organizations dedicated to spreading doubt about
the science underpinning climate change. Alpha Natural Resources
disclosures showed that the firm had quietly paid Chris Horner, an
activist known for hounding climate scientists.
Many political organizations are organized as 501(c) nonprofits, an
Internal Revenue Service designation that allows donors to remain
anonymous. Bankruptcy filings, which force companies to open their
books, provide a rare window into secret political donations...
- - -
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/16/coal-industry-climate-change-denial-cloud-peak-energy/
[Poet-s quote]
*AN EXCERPT FROM EP 98 **Kate Schapira*
"It's possible that we can't imagine it, the world after the
world--that we can only imagine what we would do if we were here. But we
are here, at the moment. What will our actions be in the next moment? In
what ways will they matter, if they can't matter in a human way forever?"
http://www.essaypress.org/ep-98/#mCIxESRzOLDmIrQ7.99
MAY 17, 2019
*Climate Change was No Accident*
by JILL RICHARDSON FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Years ago, tobacco companies discovered the link between their products
and lung cancer. Did they warn their customers? No -- they denied the
link entirely, misleading the public for decades while killing their
customers.
Similarly, ExxonMobil scientists made startlingly accurate predictions
about climate change as early as 1982 -- and then spent millions of
dollars on a misinformation campaign to sow public doubt about climate
change.
They didn't need to convince the public that the climate crisis wasn't
happening. They just had to muddy the waters enough to prevent us from
doing anything.
They provoked uncertainty: Maybe the climate crisis isn't happening. And
even if it is, maybe it's not caused by humans burning fossil fuels. (Of
course, it is happening and it is caused by humans.)
The result was inaction.
If we aren't even sure that a human-caused climate crisis is afoot, why
should we wean ourselves off of fossil fuels? It would be highly
inconvenient and very expensive to go to all of that trouble unless
we're absolutely certain that we need to.
After all, the argument went, "only" 97 percent of scientists believe
that human are causing a climate crisis.
I'm a scientist. Let me tell you, when 97 percent of scientists agree on
anything, the evidence must be overwhelming.
Scientists are trained to critique and argue with one another. We make
our careers by pulling apart other scientists' theories and exposing the
flaws in them and then supplanting them with better theories of our own.
You couldn't get 97 percent of scientists to agree that puppies are cute
or chocolate is delicious.
What about other 3 percent? You can always find one or two nutty
so-called scientists with inaccurate, fringy theories out there. There's
probably a scientist somewhere attempting to publish a study asserting
that Bigfoot exists -- or that climate change isn't happening.
Science is a community endeavor in which we try to collectively discover
and advance the truth. The goal is that the community as a whole
achieves a consensus or near-consensus that is as accurate as possible.
If 97 out of 100 scientists agree that humans are causing catastrophic
climate change, that's a consensus.
The difference between lying about the deadliness of tobacco and lying
about the deadliness of fossil fuels is who gets harmed by those lies.
Tobacco is deadly -- I've lost two grandparents to its ill effects --
but tobacco is most harmful to those who use it. The climate crisis is
deadly to everyone, whether they are responsible for causing it or not.
It will continue to hurt people for generations, even after humans stop
polluting at such alarming levels as they do now.
The Exxon Mobil executives who've profited from fossil fuels did so
while knowing that they were trading a few decades of profits for the
entire future of the planet and all of the species on it.
We're beyond the point where we tell ourselves that changing our light
bulbs can help. The fix for the climate crisis must come from the
highest levels. It requires large'scale systemic changes and not a few
insufficient individual actions.
And it could start with consequences for the industry that caused the
crisis on purpose.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/17/climate-change-was-no-accident/
- - -
[Even more info - Book Review]
Petroleum and Propaganda
*The Anatomy of the Global Warming Denial Industry*
by John W. Farley - (May 01, 2012)
John W. Farley teaches physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
"Our Last Chance to Save Humanity?" a review of James Hansen's Storms of
My Grandchildren, appeared in Monthly Review in September 2010. He blogs
at rabett.blogspot.com.
James Lawrence Powell, The Inquisition of Climate Science (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011), 232 pages, $27.95, hardcover.
James Powell was inspired to write this important new book because
of a remarkable paradox: among climate scientists, there is a
near-unanimous consensus that global warming is occurring now, is
largely human-made, and will cause very severe environmental
problems if humanity continues business as usual. However, among the
lay public the picture is much more mixed: only about half of the
U.S. public agrees with the climate scientists. Why the enormous
discrepancy?
Powell argues that "in the denial of global warming, we are witnessing
the most vicious, and so far most successful, attack on science in
history." Although Powell himself is not a climate science researcher,
he has an appropriate background to understand the field: he holds a
doctorate in geochemistry from MIT and became a geology professor,
teaching at Oberlin College for over twenty years. He has been a college
president at three institutions, and served for a dozen years on the
National Science Board. Powell's book is a sharp attack on the
global-warming denial "industry," a network comprised of corporate
funding, think tanks, popularizers, and propagandists, who all work with
a compliant mass media.
Corporate Funders
Powell details the support of ExxonMobil for denialism, but omits the
combative Koch brothers, owners of Koch Energy, the world's largest
privately held energy company. ExxonMobil is the biggest funder of
global-warming denialism, spending nearly $16 million on more than forty
organizations over the period 1998-2005. Powell also mentions in passing
funding by ideological conservative foundations, motivated by opposition
to government regulation of the economy.
Think Tanks
Chapter nine describes "Toxic Tanks"--think tanks that promote
global-warming denial. These toxic tanks have swell-sounding names
(e.g., "Frontiers of Freedom") that do not hint they are climate-change
deniers. Powell describes in detail four (out of a much larger number)
of these fossil-fuel-company-funded think tanks.
- -
*The Tobacco Strategy: "Doubt Is Our Product"*
One important source for Powell is Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's
Merchants of Doubt: How A Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on
Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. The global-warming deniers
do not have to win the argument, they just have to get a draw. Their
goal is to create the impression that there is a serious scientific
controversy about whether or not modern anthropogenic global warming is
really happening. The global-warming deniers are following today the
same strategy adopted by the tobacco companies decades earlier--as one
tobacco company executive proclaimed, "Doubt is our product."
- - -
*Conclusion*
Powell is not a radical or leftist in any way, but his book could be
evaluated bearing in mind Marx's dictum that the ideas of the ruling
class become the ruling ideas of the whole society. The Inquisition of
Climate Science explains in detail how the global-warming-denialist
ideas that serve the interests of the oil companies (and fossil-fuels
industry) become sincerely held beliefs for a significant fraction of
society. Denialist ideas are rejected by the vast majority of climate
scientists, and the oil companies themselves know better from their own
scientists (as the Bernstein Report mentioned above shows).
Nevertheless, they continue to promote and subsidize a denialist
literature blocking the crystallization of mass demands for far-reaching
social transformation, even though this is precisely what is required to
avoid catastrophic global warming.
My bookshelf holds a number of books about global warming, but The
Inquisition of Climate Science is unequalled, combining scientific
accuracy with clarity of exposition. It is comprehensive in its scope
despite its modest length of 232 pages. A typical chapter is ten pages
long, with cute titles and subtitles ("Aren't You Embarrassed, Mr.
Will?"). The book is written in a lively manner that is accessible to
the lay public; Powell is able clearly to explain phenomena that only a
few decades ago were unclear even to specialists. Inquisition is the
definitive popular refutation of many of the denialist arguments that
are frequently heard in the media and on the web. Everyone who cares
about global warming should have a copy.
https://monthlyreview.org/2012/05/01/petroleum-and-propaganda/
[spoken poetry for the Anthropocene]
*The Human Emergency by Liv Torc*
Hip Yak Poetry Shack
Published on May 10, 2019
Hi there! This week i posted a poem called 'The Human Emergency' about
what it's like being a mum and a human and trying to talk about climate
change and how scared we are for our kids. Lots of you asked me to make
a recording of the poem and here it is. Thanks to Mike Grenville who
generously came with me to the woods this morning to make the film. It
gets a bit emotional at the end.
[clip:]
So when she asks me that question
about life on Earth
Dad I've weighed up your truth
and I don't query the facts
but I question its worth
Isn't it better to say
'It's incredibly scary
It's as bad as they say
But you are alive
And you are a miracle
And that has to mean something
It's true, you might stand at the moment
when everything ends
but your generation has the power to save the whole world
and I'm going to help you
because I've got your back
and I am a miracle too
And guess what, there is something out there
more courageous and potent than science,
I believe it will help us
because I've touched it
and felt it
and I've seen it in you.'
Liv Torc (C) 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IuL-ks048
*This Day in Climate History - May 19, 2008 - from D.R. Tucker*
May 19, 2008: The Guardian reports:
"A shareholder revolt at ExxonMobil led by the billionaire
Rockefeller family has won the support of four significant British
institutional investors who will call on Monday for a shakeup in the
governance of the world's biggest oil company.
"Guardian.co.uk has learned that F&C Asset Management, Morley Fund
Management, the Co-Operative Insurance Society and the West Midlands
Pension Fund are throwing their weight behind a resolution demanding
that ExxonMobil appoints an independent chairman to stimulate debate
on the company's board.
"Exxon is facing a rebellion from its investors over its hardline
approach to global warming. The firm has refused to follow rival oil
companies in committing large-scale capital investment to
environmentally friendly technology such as wind and solar power.
"The Rockefeller dynasty, whose ancestor John D. Rockefeller founded
the original oil business at the core of ExxonMobil, have sponsored
four shareholder resolutions demanding changes at Exxon. One of
these calls on Exxon's chief executive Rex Tillerson, to relinquish
his role as chairman in favour of an outsider to bring in an
alternative point of view."
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/may/19/exxonmobil.oil
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