[TheClimate.Vote] August 26, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*August 26, 2020*/

[symbolic]
*Exxon Mobil Exits: The Dow Drops Its Oldest Member*
August 25, 2020
CAMILA DOMONOSKE
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is the classic blue-chip stock index. 
Exxon Mobil is an iconic blue-chip stock.

But starting next week, the oil giant -- currently the Dow's 
longest-tenured member -- will be dropped from the influential index, 
which for many people is shorthand for the stock market.

The change is driven by Apple's decision to split its stock, according 
to S&P Dow Jones Indices, which is responsible for the Dow. Its impact 
on Exxon will be more symbolic than substantive.

But it reflects just how once-dominant Exxon has diminished. Many oil 
companies are struggling on the stock market as climate concerns mount, 
Silicon Valley stocks massively outperform petroleum and the coronavirus 
keeps global oil demand well below expectations...
- -
Exxon joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1928, as Standard Oil, 
one of companies descended from John D. Rockefeller's world-transforming 
oil monopoly. Mobil was another branch of Rockefeller's empire.

The two companies by themselves were behemoths. When Exxon and Mobil 
merged in 1999, it was the biggest merger in history, creating the 
world's largest privately held oil company. For years, Exxon Mobil was 
the world's largest publicly traded company.

Today, after the long rise of the tech giants and the abrupt collapse of 
the oil market, there are some three dozen companies more valuable than 
Exxon.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is an index of 30 large U.S. companies, 
designed to roughly track the stock market performance of many sectors 
of the economy at once....
- -
As other oil and gas giants have pledged to transform their business 
model to reduce their contribution to climate change, Exxon has doubled 
down on petrochemicals. Early in March, the company laid out a strategy 
for huge new investments in oil and gas, despite dropping oil prices and 
public pressure to reduce emissions.

Those plans have been disrupted by the precipitous drop in demand for 
oil due to the pandemic. Instead of funding big new projects, Exxon 
Mobil has slashed its investments and its expenses so it can keep paying 
out hefty dividends to its stockholders.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/25/905818004/exxon-mobil-exits-the-dow-drops-its-oldest-member



[new estimates]
*Methane released in gas production means Australia's emissions may be 
10% higher than reported*
Analysis shows the government, which has committed to a 'gas-led 
recovery', has failed to properly account for methane's effect on global 
heating
- -
The update announced by Taylor increased the estimated warming potential 
of methane - effectively, how much heat it traps - from 25 times greater 
than carbon dioxide to 28 times greater, calculated over a century. The 
change matters because methane emissions are converted to their "carbon 
dioxide equivalent" and then counted in national CO2 emissions.

The 2014 IPCC report suggested the warming power of methane from fossil 
fuels was 30 times greater than CO2. The warming power of "biogenic 
methane" - released from living organisms such as cows - was 28 times 
greater.

A later reassessment, published in the journal Geophysical Research 
Letters in 2016, found it was greater still: 34 times greater than CO2 
for "fossil methane" and 32 times greater for biogenic methane.

Baxter said these figures were still not truly representative as they 
did not factor in the feedback effects caused when greenhouse gases are 
released. The IPCC report in 2014 cited research that found the feedback 
from methane emissions increased its warming potential by a further 20%. 
Baxter calculated this would lift the warming rate for biogenic methane 
to 39 and for fossil methane to 40.

He said the additional, unexplained methane in the atmosphere suggested 
the emissions from the gas industry were being systematically underreported.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/26/methane-released-in-gas-production-means-australias-emissions-may-be-10-higher-than-reported 




[Behavioural Public Policy]*
**Identifying the most important predictors of support for climate 
policy in the United States*
*Abstract*
Reducing global warming will require enacting strong climate policies, 
which is unlikely to happen without public support. While prior research 
has identified varied predictors of climate change policy support, it is 
unclear which predictors are strongest for the American electorate as a 
whole, and which predictors are strongest for Democrats and Republicans. 
In a nationally representative sample of registered voters (n = 2063), 
we use relative weight analysis to identify the strongest predictors of 
public climate policy support. We find that, among registered voters in 
the USA, the five most important predictors of climate policy support 
are: worry about global warming; risk perceptions; certainty that global 
warming is happening; belief that global warming is human-caused; and 
general affect toward global warming. Collectively, these five variables 
account for 51% of the variance in policy support. Results split by 
political party indicate that pro-climate injunctive norms and global 
warming risk perceptions are the variables that differ most between 
Republicans and Democrats, accounting for significantly more variance in 
policy support among Republicans. These findings can inform policymakers 
and advocates seeking to build public support for climate action.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-policy/article/identifying-the-most-important-predictors-of-support-for-climate-policy-in-the-united-states/84A5C161B704056947AAC20A571C8CF9


[just science]
*Yes, climate change is almost certainly fueling California's massive fires*
Thousands of lightning strikes have sparked hundreds of fires across 
California, forcing thousands to evacuate.
by James Temple
Thousands of lightning strikes have sparked hundreds of fires across 
California in recent days, producing several major clusters burning 
around the San Francisco Bay Area.

The blazes quickly ripped through hundreds of thousands of acres, 
forcing thousands to evacuate, filling the skies with smoke, and raining 
down ash across much of the region.

The fires follow a bone-dry winter in Northern California and a stretch 
of record-setting summer heat waves across the state, conditions that 
effectively turned grasslands and forests into tinder. The infernos come 
on the heels of several of the most destructive and deadly fire seasons 
in California history.

All of which raises the question, once again: Is human-driven climate 
change to blame? Did it make the latest fires more likely or more severe?

Climate scientists, who long resisted linking global warming to any 
specific extreme event, now say its influence is all but certain.

David Romps, director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center, said 
in an email that we're living in a fundamentally climate-altered world. 
He noted that average daily highs for this time of year are now about 3 
or 4 F warmer in Berkeley, California, than at the beginning of the 20th 
century. He was also the lead author of a 2014 Science paper finding 
that every additional 1 C (1.8 F) of warming could increase lightning 
strikes over the US by about 12%.

"To cut to the chase: Were the heat wave and the lightning strikes and 
the dryness of the vegetation affected by global warming? Absolutely 
yes," Romps said. "Were they made significantly hotter, more numerous, 
and drier because of global warming?  Yes, likely yes, and yes."

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los 
Angeles, said that the prolonged lightning storms in recent days are 
such a rare occurrence in Northern California that it's hard to assess 
whether climate change played a role in sparking the fires.

But so-called extreme weather attribution studies have clearly and 
repeatedly found that climate change exacerbates heat waves, which help 
create the conditions for wildfires to burn intensely and spread rapidly.

"The answer is basically always that climate change played a large role 
in the severity or likelihood [of heat waves]," he says. "It's almost 
just a question of how much."

Friederike Otto, acting director of the University of Oxford's 
Environmental Change Institute and co-lead of World Weather Attribution, 
echoed that view in an email: "There is absolutely no doubt that the 
extremely high temperatures are higher than they would have been without 
human-induced climate change. A huge body of attribution literature 
demonstrates now that climate change is an absolute game-changer when it 
comes to heat waves, and California won't be the exception."

Over the last four decades, the combined forces of higher temperatures 
and lower precipitation levels have already doubled the risk of extreme 
wildfire conditions in California during the fall, according to a recent 
paper in Environmental Research Letters that Swain coauthored. And 
unless the world begins cutting emissions significantly and soon, the 
odds could double again in the coming decades, the researchers found.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/20/1007478/california-wildfires-climate-change-heatwaves/


[Monbiot in the Guardian]
*Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate crisis 
they are fuelling*
Rising consumption by the affluent has a far greater environmental 
impact than the birth rate in poorer nations
George Monbiot
Wed 26 Aug 2020
When a major study was published last month, showing that the global 
population is likely to peak then crash much sooner than most scientists 
had assumed, I naively imagined that people in rich nations would at 
last stop blaming all the world's environmental problems on population 
growth. I was wrong. If anything, it appears to have got worse.
Next week the BirthStrike movement - founded by women who, by announcing 
their decision not to have children, seek to focus our minds on the 
horror of environmental collapse - will dissolve itself, because its 
cause has been hijacked so virulently and persistently by population 
obsessives. The founders explain that they had "underestimated the power 
of 'overpopulation' as a growing form of climate breakdown denial".
It is true that, in some parts of the world, population growth is a 
major driver of particular kinds of ecological damage, such as the 
expansion of small-scale agriculture into rainforests, the bushmeat 
trade and local pressure on water and land for housing. But its global 
impact is much smaller than many people claim.

The formula for calculating people's environmental footprint is simple, 
but widely misunderstood: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology 
(I = PAT). The global rate of consumption growth, before the pandemic, 
was 3% a year. Population growth is 1%. Some people assume this means 
that the rise in population bears one-third of the responsibility for 
increased consumption. But population growth is overwhelmingly 
concentrated among the world's poorest people, who have scarcely any A 
or T to multiply their P. The extra resource use and greenhouse gas 
emissions caused by a rising human population are a tiny fraction of the 
impact of consumption growth...
Yet it is widely used as a blanket explanation of environmental 
breakdown. Panic about population growth enables the people most 
responsible for the impacts of rising consumption (the affluent) to 
blame those who are least responsible.

At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, the primatologist Dame 
Jane Goodall, who is a patron of the charity Population Matters, told 
the assembled pollutocrats, some of whom have ecological footprints 
thousands of times greater than the global average: "All these things we 
talk about wouldn't be a problem if there was the size of population 
that there was 500 years ago." I doubt that any of those who nodded and 
clapped were thinking, "yes, I urgently need to disappear".

In 2019, Goodall appeared in an advertisement for British Airways, whose 
customers produce more greenhouse gas emissions on one flight than many 
of the world's people generate in a year. If we had the global 
population of 500 years ago (around 500 million), and if it were 
composed of average UK plane passengers, our environmental impact would 
probably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion alive today.

She proposed no mechanism by which her dream might come true. This could 
be the attraction. The very impotence of her call is reassuring to those 
who don't want change. If the answer to environmental crisis is to wish 
other people away, we might as well give up and carry on consuming.

The excessive emphasis on population growth has a grim history. Since 
the clergymen Joseph Townsend and Thomas Malthus wrote their tracts in 
the 18th century, poverty and hunger have been blamed not on starvation 
wages, war, misrule and wealth extraction by the rich, but on the 
reproduction rates of the poor. Winston Churchill blamed the Bengal 
famine of 1943, that he helped to cause through the mass export of 
India's rice, on the Indians "breeding like rabbits". In 2013 Sir David 
Attenborough, also a patron of Population Matters, wrongly blamed 
famines in Ethiopia on "too many people for too little land", and 
suggested that sending food aid was counter-productive.

Another of the charity's patrons, Paul Ehrlich, whose incorrect 
predictions about mass famine helped to provoke the current population 
panic, once argued that the US should "coerce" India into "sterilising 
all Indian males with three or more children", by making food aid 
conditional on this policy. This proposal was similar to the brutal 
programme that Indira Gandhi later introduced, with financial support 
from the UN and the World Bank. Foreign aid from the UK was funding 
crude and dangerous sterilisation in India as recently as 2011, on the 
grounds that this policy was helping to "fight climate change". Some of 
the victims of this programme allege that they were forced to 
participate. At the same time, the UK government was pouring billions of 
pounds of aid into developing coal, gas and oil plants, in India and 
other nations. It blamed the poor for the crisis it was helping to cause.

Malthusianism slides easily into racism. Most of the world's population 
growth is happening in the poorest countries, where most people are 
black or brown. The colonial powers justified their atrocities by 
fomenting a moral panic about "barbaric", "degenerate" people 
"outbreeding" the "superior races". These claims have been revived today 
by the far right, who promote conspiracy theories about "white 
replacement" and "white genocide". When affluent white people wrongly 
transfer the blame for their environmental impacts on to the birthrate 
of much poorer brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces 
these narratives. It is inherently racist.

The far right now uses the population argument to contest immigration 
into the US and the UK. This too has a grisly heritage: the pioneering 
conservationist Madison Grant promoted, alongside his environmental 
work, the idea that the "Nordic master race" was being "overtaken" in 
the US by "worthless race types". As president of the Immigration 
Restriction League, he helped to engineer the vicious 1924 Immigration Act.

But, as there are some genuine ecological impacts of population growth, 
how do we distinguish proportionate concerns about these harms from 
deflection and racism? Well, we know that the strongest determinant of 
falling birth rates is female emancipation and education. The major 
obstacle to female empowerment is extreme poverty. Its effect is felt 
disproportionately by women.

So a good way of deciding whether someone's population concerns are 
genuine is to look at their record of campaigning against structural 
poverty. Have they contested the impossible debts poor nations are 
required to pay? Have they argued against corporate tax avoidance, or 
extractive industries that drain wealth from poorer countries, leaving 
almost nothing behind, or the financial sector in Britain's processing 
of money stolen abroad? Or have they simply sat and watched as people 
remain locked in poverty, then complained about their fertility?

Before long, this reproductive panic will disappear. Nations will soon 
be fighting over immigrants: not to exclude them, but to attract them, 
as the demographic transition leaves their ageing populations with a 
shrinking tax base and a dearth of key workers. Until then, we should 
resist attempts by the rich to demonise the poor..
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/26/panic-overpopulation-climate-crisis-consumption-environment



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - August 26, 2001 *
The Los Angeles Times reports:
"Throughout February and March, executives representing electricity, 
coal, natural gas and nuclear interests paraded quietly in small groups 
to a building in the White House compound, where the new 
administration's energy policy was being written.

"Some firms sent emissaries more than once. Enron Corp., which trades 
electricity and natural gas, once got three top officials into a private 
session with Vice President Dick Cheney, who headed the energy task 
force. Cheney did 'a lot of listening,' according to a company spokesman.

"Many of the executives at the White House meetings were generous donors 
to the Republican Party, and some of their key lobbyists were freshly 
hired from the Bush presidential campaign. They found a receptive task 
force. Among its ranks were three former energy industry executives and 
consultants. The task force also included a Bush agency head who was 
involved in the sensitive discussions while his wife took in thousands 
of dollars in fees from three electricity producers.

"The final report, issued May 16, boosted the nation's energy 
industries. It called for additional coal production, and five days 
later the world's largest coal company, Peabody Energy, issued a public 
stock offering, raising about $60 million more than expected. While 
Peabody was preparing to go public, its chief executive and vice 
president participated in a March 1 meeting with Cheney."

http://articles.latimes.com/2001/aug/26/news/mn-38530

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