[TheClimate.Vote] June 9, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*June 9, 2020*/

[first and last line of article in the Washington Post]
Capital Weather Gang
*New bill would prohibit the president from nuking a hurricane*
The measure is a direct response to President Trump's reported 
suggestion of using nuclear bombs to defuse Atlantic tropical cyclones...
- -
"If we have a leader who would contemplate using a nuclear weapon on a 
hurricane," he said, "we have a much more extensive and serious problem 
than could be covered by a specific bill like this one."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/06/08/new-bill-would-prohibit-president-nuking-hurricane/



[watch the money]
*Borrowed time: Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market*
"Everyone is exposed" as taxpayer-backed loans and insurance face a 
coming storm.
U.S. taxpayers could be on the hook for billions of dollars in 
climate-related property losses as the government backs a growing number 
of mortgages on homes in the path of floods, fires and extreme weather.

Violent storms and sunny-day flooding are on the rise, and more houses 
are being built on at-risk land. But fewer people are buying federally 
backed flood insurance despite requirements that homeowners in flood 
plains be insured if their mortgage is backed by taxpayers.
In short, the government's biggest housing subsidies -- mortgage 
guarantees and flood insurance -- are on course to hit taxpayers and the 
housing market as the effects of climate change worsen, a POLITICO 
analysis finds. A series of disasters in a single region could trigger a 
full-blown housing crash.

"Where catastrophe happens and physical climate really manifests itself, 
the public tab will end up carrying this," said Ivan Frishberg, vice 
president for sustainability banking with Amalgamated Bank. "Everyone is 
exposed in this. I've had conversations with all of the big banks and we 
are kind of all aware of this."

That scenario has a growing collection of finance experts, progressives 
and congressional Democrats pressuring financial institutions and their 
regulators to give more weight to the systemic risks of climate change.
To understand the risk, consider Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the 
government-sponsored, taxpayer-backed enterprises that stand behind 
roughly half of the nation's $11 trillion in residential mortgages. For 
decades, the companies have bought and guaranteed home loans in 
floodplains and other places vulnerable to natural disasters.

To reduce risk, the companies rely on another government enterprise, the 
National Flood Insurance Program, to cover the cost of flood damage to 
homes with Fannie and Freddie mortgages. But the flood insurance program 
itself is insolvent after years of paying out more than it collects. 
When Congress tried to fix the program in 2012, it was forced to 
backtrack after flood insurance premiums billed to homeowners spiked.

Despite public reassurances that the risk of climate-related loss was 
minimal and insured, Fannie Mae sounded an alarm at least as early as 
2017, according to a confidential document obtained by POLITICO...
- -
And if floods do wallop Fannie- and Freddie-backed loans, it would be 
difficult for the companies to divine which among the millions of loans 
they guarantee have flood insurance and which don't, Ouazad said.

"You can imagine the administrative cost," Ouazad said. "It's like 
taking a carpet and trying to remove every single thread."
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/08/borrowed-time-climate-changemortgage-market-304130
More about Fannie Mae - 
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000172-86b3-d4f1-adf3-87b7f1300000
More about Freddie Mac - 
http://www.freddiemac.com/research/insight/20160426_lifes_a_beach.page
- - -
*Renewable energy is taking off -- but not in bank boardrooms*
When it comes to investing in a sustainable future, do we really have to 
pick between fossil fuels and renewable energy?

Well, yes. But many of the world's top banking executives and directors 
haven't gotten the memo. At least, that's what a new analysis from 
Bloomberg suggests: Entanglements with major emitters are surprisingly 
prevalent in the boardrooms of 20 major U.S. and European banks. And 
even if those banks have publicly announced significant climate 
commitments, they are also "the most active financiers" for nonrenewable 
energy projects. The biggest banks, the authors noted, have backed big 
oil and gas companies with nearly $1.4 trillion in loans since the Paris 
Agreement was negotiated at the end of 2015.

Bloomberg's report, released last week, focused on these banks' 
leadership, analyzing current and former professional affiliations for 
more than 600 bank executives and board members. It found that at least 
73 had once held positions with big corporate emitters around the globe, 
including fossil fuel companies, manufacturers, utilities, retailers, 
and other companies with sizable carbon footprints. In contrast, 
Bloomberg found only four connections between banks' leadership and 
green energy companies.

Among the banks with significant emitter connections was JPMorgan Chase 
& Co., whose board has included former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond for 
more than 30 years. Over the past five years, JPMorgan has raised $228 
billion in bonds and loans for the fossil fuel industry, by Bloomberg's 
count...
- -
Climate savvy has yet to make its way into these banks' boardrooms, but 
it will be urgently needed in the coming years --even a green "mindset" 
could help, according to Dieter Wemmer, one of the few executives found 
to have green energy bona fides. "It is the right time to focus on a 
green future," he told Bloomberg. Hopefully, that mindset will 
eventually oust some oilmen and funnel more dollars into the renewable 
energy sector.
https://grist.org/climate/renewable-energy-is-taking-off-but-not-in-bank-boardrooms/



[an important research paper]
*Learning to rebel*
Elsie Luna & Andrew Mearman
Sustainable Earth volume 3, Article number: 4 (2020) Cite this article
Abstract
Background

    As a response to collective failure to move adequately towards
    sustainability, youth movements have grown. This article explores
    the experiences of one young climate activist, Elsie Luna. The
    article is the product of conversations between the co-authors,
    augmented by written material by Elsie Luna. The article seeks to
    avoid adultism, that is, the power that adults have over children;
    hence it is written principally using Elsie's own words, with
    minimal translation or interpretation. The article reflects on three
    key recent events in Elsie Luna's activism: her approach to the
    London headquarters of several oil companies; her 'dying'
    symbolically at the BBC in Berlin; and her recent involvement in the
    large Extinction Rebellion actions in London.

more at - https://rdcu.be/b4IR4 or at
https://sustainableearth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42055-020-00028-z

- - -

[quick tips]
*6 tips for becoming a youth activist (as told by a youth activist)*
By Rachel Ramirez on Jun 2, 2020

Back in 2017,  Jamie Margolin, a Seattle high school student, founded an 
organization called Future Voters for 350ppm. ("Future voters" meaning 
young people who can't vote yet, and "350 ppm" referring to a safe level 
of atmospheric carbon dioxide that the world blew past long ago). But 
things didn't go as planned, and the group ended up being short-lived.

"Keep failing and failing until you get it right," Margolin writes in 
her book Youth To Power, released on June 2. "My failure with that 
organization was the precursor to starting Zero Hour. So it all paid 
off." Soon afterward, Margolin co-founded Zero Hour, a youth-led 
nonprofit that advocates for climate action and environmental justice 
and organized the Youth Climate March in Washington, D.C., in 2018.

Her new book serves as a step-by-step guide to becoming a youth activist 
for any cause. Margolin, now 18, discusses how to lobby, volunteer for a 
campaign, manage a nonprofit, write press releases, and more. Margolin 
interviews a diverse field of youth activists advocating for different 
causes -- such as Black Lives Matter, indigenous rights, disability 
rights, and ending gun violence -- to get their advice on how to be a 
successful youth activist.

Young people, Margolin writes, have fresh energy and possess a profound 
power to create change. She explains how they have played a major role 
in sparking political change throughout American history, from the civil 
rights movement in the 1960s to the Standing Rock protests that started 
in 2016. Last year was momentous for young climate activists -- and as 
another crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, wreaks havoc on the planet, the 
youth are still finding ways to keep the momentum going through virtual 
platforms.

Youth to Power includes a foreword by Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old 
climate activist who sparked a worldwide youth climate movement by 
skipping school every Friday to protest outside the Swedish Parliament 
building. "This book is your toolbox," Thunberg writes. Here are some of 
the book's best tips.

    *Find your "why." *The first step to your activism journey may
    involve some soul-searching. According to Margolin, your why isn't
    exactly a specific goal, but rather the core, driving reason you're
    taking action. She became a climate justice activist, for instance,
    to protect her Pacific Northwest home and future generations from
    climate change.

    *Find your allies. *Joining an organization, a community group, or
    political campaign that fights for the same cause as you will help
    you learn more about an issue and see how these kinds of
    organizations are run. "Share the workload, share the burden," said
    Pidgeon Pagonis, 33, an LGBTQ+ rights advocate and one of the
    activists Margolin talked to. "The best work happens when you're
    doing it in solidarity with community."

    *Be loud. *Sara Jado, an 18-year-old Black Lives Matter activist,
    told Margolin, "If someone tells you you're too loud, tell them,
    'Well, you're not being loud enough about these issues.'" Join
    protests, be outspoken, and raise awareness in physical spaces or
    online platforms. You don't need a big platform to make changes, she
    says. "Organizing isn't about the followers you get, it's about the
    change you make in the community."

    *Be creative and tell a story.* Think outside the box. If you're an
    artist, use your art to send a message. When lobbying, tell a
    compelling story or narrative instead of simply stating facts and
    numbers, Margolin writes. For rallies, get creative with signs, come
    up with clever slogans, or write a song. "If you authentically
    convey your message in art, people will gravitate to what you're
    making," Sofya Wang, a 21-year-old queer Asian advocate, told Margolin.

    *Make time.* Fitting activism into your busy life with school,
    friends, and family can be a challenge. "It's not about having time,
    it's about making time," Margolin writes. She also advises not to
    multitask and to be fully present in whatever you're doing.

    *Search for healthy escapes*. Activism can take a toll on your
    mental health, and burnout is real. When you're tired, take a
    breather. It's important to stay healthy, because you are needed in
    this fight, Margolin writes. "If you keep moving fast, you're going
    to become depressed and burn out," Malia Hulleman, 24, a Kānaka
    Maoli environmental defender, told Margolin. Hulleman says to take
    it day by day, as her elders advise, and know that you're not alone.

"This is the manifesto of the youth revolution," Margolin writes in the 
introduction of her book. "Dog-ear it, write in it, read it out of 
order, highlight what you want, rip out pages and tape them to your 
bedroom wall. Keep reading, and we can be scrappy activists together."
https://grist.org/justice/6-tips-for-becoming-a-youth-activist-jamie-margolin/



[where there's heat, where there's drought -- there's fire]
*Wildfire Season Is Here*
Brian Kahn*
*Over the past few months, the U.S. has been buffeted by a pandemic, 
protests over racist police violence, and two tropical storms. Add 
wildfires to the list as well, as the West prepares to start the week 
with tinderbox conditions.

An area from California to the Texas Panhandle is under a red flag 
warning on Monday. Relative humidity could plummet into the single 
digits, and you don't need to be a fire scientist to know that's not a 
good sign. With dry air and fuels, all it will take is an errant spark 
to start a fire. High temperatures and gusty winds are in turn expected 
to fan flames of already-burning fires and could spread new ones.

Arizona is home to the largest fire in the U.S. right now, according to 
data from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). The Sawtooth Fire 
began last week in the Superstition Wilderness area to the east of 
Phoenix and has burned through nearly 25,000 acres. Though it's mostly 
contained at this point, fires burning elsewhere in the state are out of 
control. That includes the Blue River Fire, which was up to 18,000 acres 
as of Sunday, and the Bighorn Fire near Tucson, which stood at 1,000 
acres and was largely uncontained...
- -
Climate change has increased the odds more destructive, larger fires, as 
well as lengthened fire season as a whole. The season now stretches 105 
days longer, largely due to rising temperatures that melt snowpack 
sooner and can keep blazes burning later into the year. Humans have also 
moved into harm's way, and decades of forest fire policy have left 
forests with more fuel to burn. We've seen the impact in the form of 
town-consuming fires and policy responses like California's preemptive 
blackouts. The coronavirus is throwing yet another stressor on top of 
fire season, by both forcing people who evacuate into close contact and 
unleashing plumes of smoke that can agitate the respiratory system, 
potentially making people more vulnerable to respiratory illness like 
covid-19. If you were hoping from a break from calamity and heartbreak, 
it's probably not coming anytime soon.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/wildfire-season-is-here-1843951271

- -

[disease trumps fire]
*California Was Set To Spend Over $1 Billion to Prevent Wildfires. Then 
Came COVID-19*
With the coronavirus pandemic eroding state budgets across the country, 
many communities risk having this disaster make them less prepared for 
looming climate-driven disasters...
- -
The wildfire funding left in California's budget this year will likely 
go to firefighting and emergency response.
"We're staring down the barrel of another intense wildfire season given 
how dry it was this winter," says Wade Crowfoot, California's Secretary 
for Natural Resources. "So we are anticipating actually having to juggle 
disaster response from different disasters."

Supporters of the resiliency initiatives say spending money to prepare 
for disasters in advance is substantially more economical than waiting 
for them to hit.

"A dollar spent today saves you about six dollars in future 
emergencies," says Kate Gordon, director of California's Office of 
Planning and Research. "And if you think about that, it's really 
logical. The cost of emergency response is enormous. Look at Paradise -- 
rebuilding an entire town and relocating folks."

State officials say they're looking for other ways to fund climate 
preparation in hopes of preserving momentum after the recent disasters.

"We are retooling in real time to really continue to drive forward those 
same priorities, particularly climate resilience, in a more constrained 
fiscal environment," says Crowfoot. "Our residents get it. Californians 
want us actually to do more to protect communities from impacts."

California, like many states, is looking to federal stimulus funding to 
fill in the gaps, since climate-related projects could qualify as 
infrastructure spending. They're also looking at partnerships with 
private industry.

"There is a moment at which this kind of economic disaster creates 
opportunity for thinking differently about how to build forward," says 
Gordon. "Not to bounce back, but bounce forward."
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/07/867395353/california-was-set-to-spend-over-1-billion-to-prevent-wildfires-then-came-covid-



[History]
*Book Review: Industrial Strength Denial*
Industrial-Strength Denial author Barbra Freese calls for increased 
corporate responsibility, but we need to think much bigger if we're 
going to survive the climate crisis.

The climate crisis writ large has been called a "problem from hell" and 
the description is accurate. The litany of roadblocks to effective 
climate action is as well-known as it is long: the economic 
self-interest of nations and the "imperative" of economic growth, the 
necessity of international cooperation, the challenge of motivating 
individuals around a long-term issue whose consequences are too 
devastating for any one of us to grasp in their entirety.

The current state of climate politics in the US, however, is the product 
of a deliberate, decades-long campaign--orchestrated largely, but not 
exclusively, by the fossil fuel industry--of misinformation, 
misrepresentation, and the outright denial of scientific facts. As the 
focus of the climate movement has increasingly pivoted from a focus on 
individual responsibility (finally, we recognize that recycling our 
yogurt cups won't save the planet) to the need for systemic change, 
there has been a concurrent surge of interest from journalists and 
academics--from Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's classic Merchants of 
Doubt to Amy Westervelt's climate-denial-as-true-crime podcast 
Drilled--in documenting and exposing the roots of contemporary 
narratives of climate denial.

Barbara Freese's _Industrial-Strength Denial_, as the title suggests, 
joins this chorus, investigating a series of historical examples in 
which corporate interests ran counter to health, safety and/or ethics, 
and the processes by which those industries were brought to heel. Though 
they can be gruesome in their gritty detail, none of her case studies 
are particularly new or surprising. Across eight chapters, Freese 
explores the phenomenon of denialism vis-a-vis slavery; radium; "that 
wonderful stimulant"; car design and safety; leaded gasoline; 
chloroflourocarbons (CFCs); tobacco; the financial crisis of 2008-10; 
and, last but not least, climate change. Climate denialists are, in 
Freese's book, people with "an unshakeable belief that climate change is 
simply no big deal and there is no reason to go out of our way to 
prevent more of it." This definition, as she notes in an aside, creates 
a problematic grey-zone when it comes to companies like ExxonMobil. 
Though Exxon believes that climate change is both real and a 
problem--which, by Freese's definition, would mean it does not fall into 
the 'denier' category--as a company, it continues to fund people and 
organizations that do deny the reality of the climate crisis. Moreover, 
Exxon's purported acceptance of the science has not led it to, say, cut 
production in the way one might expect from a company that truly 
internalized the gravity of the crisis we face. Considering the timeline 
we're working with, inaction or insufficient action on climate is 
climate denial and it matters that we be able to call it out as such.

Freese has spent her career as an environmental lawyer and energy policy 
analyst and it is the climate crisis--and, more specifically, the 
deeply-rooted skepticism of climate science that she has encountered in 
her work--that motivated this book. She is, in effect, searching for an 
answer to a question we've all asked ourselves: "What is wrong with 
these people? How could they be so impervious to the mountains of 
evidence and so willing to expose the world to truly catastrophic risk?" 
The most immediate answer that comes to mind is "economic 
self-interest," but while Freese acknowledges this, her interest lies in 
attempting to understand the messier psychological motivations of the 
individuals who comprise the corporations, from the lowly sales rep to 
the CEO, and the relationship of corporate conduct to social norms. She 
seeks to set her analysis apart from other accounts of corporate 
malfeasance and denial by focusing on the "social context within which 
these denials take place" rather than on recounting the manipulation and 
misrepresentation of scientific facts themselves.

The human ability to rationalize knowledge that is inconvenient, 
uncomfortable, or otherwise contradictory to deeply-held beliefs is 
well-recognized. As Freese sees it, it is this ability that is at the 
root of corporate denialism. She identifies a cornucopia of denial's 
manifests, from the more straightforward kind of self-deception 
exhibited by makers and advertisers of radium-laced products and the 
powerful conviction that one's products are, regardless of their 
potential harms, on the whole for the good of society. Perhaps the most 
striking example of the power of self-deception comes in the chapter on 
radium, in which the same men responsible for promoting radium as a 
health tonic and denying its devastating effects often themselves died 
of radium poisoning. Long forgotten, the saga of radium-poisoned factory 
girls in the US is was brought again to the forefront of public 
consciousness by of the 2018 movie Radium Girls, which, ironically, 
received the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Award (in a 
subsequent chapter on GM's resistance to safer car design, Freese writes 
of Sloan, a former GM executive that "despite his evident interest in 
social welfare and alleged interest in auto safety, with his corporate 
hat on, [he] defined his responsibility so narrowly that it did not 
include trying [to reduce] thousands of deaths every year.")

Other "blame shelters," as Freese calls them in a phrase meant to evoke 
tax shelters, include the well-trodden "I was just following orders"; 
it's "not my job"--Sloan's excuse; ignorance ("No one could have known 
the consequences, therefore we are not responsible"); and the distinct 
but related "side effects" rationalization--that any harm caused was 
unintended and therefore also not something for which a company or an 
individual need feel responsible. Compounding the perils of 
self-deception are other human tendencies: a propensity for tribalism 
and a penchant for aggressively doubling-down to defend oneself or one's 
group from "outside" criticism; and a congenital predilection to 
"underestimate dangers that are hard to conceive of." All of these 
factors are at play in climate denialism, along with the more mundane 
reason of profit. Moreover, as Freese demonstrates, many of the tactics 
of denial currently deployed by climate denialists--the sowing of doubt 
and misinformation; the blaming the consumer and claiming the the 
futility of trying to do anything differently; the portrayal of critics 
as zealots or crusaders, and the assumption that one's opponents are 
themselves motivated by self-interest--were part of the arsenal of 
corporate denial long before the climate crisis appeared on our radars.

It is one thing to investigate how corporate denialism operates--the 
mental gymnastics industry representatives perform to reconcile 
themselves to the harm of their work--but it is another thing entirely 
to investigate why, and it is not always clear in Industrial Strength 
Denial which set of questions Freese is trying to answer. Her grasp on 
her thesis seems to slip when it comes time to connect her broader 
narrative to corporate denialism on climate in particular, perhaps 
because she is trying to tell a story that is still unfolding. The 
critical issue when it comes to corporate climate denialism, though, is 
not why individuals deeply invested in industries that rely on or 
benefit from the extractive status quo would support the continuation of 
that status quo, but rather how fossil fuel corporations in particular 
have been so overwhelmingly successful at turning scientific facts into 
a question of partisan politics--and what climate activists can do to 
change this.

What is clear from the last thirty years is that more information, more 
science, is not a panacea. We are far beyond the point where a climate 
version of an Unsafe at Any Speed or a Silent Spring could galvanize 
public sentiment on climate change in the way that those books did for 
auto safety and environmental pollution--indeed, the last decade or so 
has witnessed a relative avalanche of "game-changing" books on the 
climate crisis, from Nathaniel Rich's Losing Earth and Bill McKibben's 
Falter to David Wallace-Wells's The Uninhabitable Earth, all published 
in 2019. The problem is not and has never been a lack of information. 
The problem is that corporations with a massive amount of money and, by 
extension, power, are deeply and irreversibly invested in the extraction 
of fossil fuels.

What, then, might be drawn from her analysis of what underlies an 
individual's defense of bad practices? It is commonly said that the 
simplest explanations are the truest, and in many of her chapters, it is 
often the case that the people responsible for the relevant human 
destruction simply don't believe that the problem is a problem. If 
anything, the last four years of US history ought to have taught us 
this: the fungibility of reality and truth. Another key factor at play 
is the structure of the corporation itself, which is, in Freese's view, 
perfectly engineered to undermine people's "moral instincts" and her 
simple, clear-sighted explanation of how, exactly, that happens is 
perhaps the most compelling single section of the book. The "corporate 
form," with its many narrowly defined roles, its steep hierarchy, its 
"independent legal existence," limited liability and the existence of 
shareholders, and the constant external demands of competition, 
innovation, and profit, combine to create a environment that excels at 
detaching any sense of personal responsibility for the consequences of 
one's work.

Freese clearly sees, also, the methods by which corporations accused of 
doing harm will respond: "They will deny causal links between their 
actions and the harm in question, express baseless confidence in their 
future exoneration, exaggerate any shred of doubt to maintain the status 
quo, minimize the alleged harm, shift blame for it to other causes, 
and/or find ways to justify the harm by viewing it as unavoidable or 
surely better than the alternatives." The corporate interest left to 
itself is not and has never been aligned with the public interest, 
because the profit motive is not aligned with the public interest, 
regardless of what Charles Wilson said. Yet the idea that profit and 
public interest could be aligned--that corporate denialism is an 
aberration rather than a completely predictable and necessary result of 
institutional incentives--is a crucial premise of this book. Corporate 
responsibility, as Freese defines it, is the idea that companies have 
"some responsibility beyond increasing profits"--that "corporate 
leaders" ought to "expand their hori- zon of responsibility to consider 
the welfare of the economy and community broadly." The problem with 
corporate social responsibility, however, is that it is essentially 
self-regulating. Corporate accountability, on the other hand, which 
requires us to build power in a way that corporate responsibility does 
not, means having control over policy such that standards for corporate 
behaviour can be monitored, regulated, and enforced if and when 
companies cause harm.

What might, in Industrial Strength Denial, be a full-throated call for 
corporate accountability, given the long and sordid history of corporate 
denial, is instead somewhat of a meek bleating that we should "try to 
imagine how [social norms] might be shifted to advance the greater 
good." "The exact nature of a corporation's social responsibility will 
always be hard to define," she writes, "but it surely helps if 
executives at least accept that they have some responsibility beyond 
increasing profits." She mentions that her search to understand the 
motivations behind corporate denialism does not mean "abandoning the 
push for accountability," but also seems to bring to the table a basic 
faith in the goodness of businessmen's hearts--that they would do "the 
right thing" if only the corporate cultural context rewarded it--on 
which we cannot rely. In addition, throughout Industrial Strength 
Denial, there is a marked absence of attention to and analysis of power 
structures within the industries she discusses, particularly when it 
comes to the oil and gas companies. Freese's cast of characters consists 
primarily of white-collar executives, scientists, lawyers, and 
government officials, but an executive at BP and an offshore oil rig 
worker in Lousiana do not share the same set of material calculations 
when it comes to investing in climate denial and, as Trish Kahle, Kate 
Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni and others have argued, labor and the climate 
movement can, should and must be allies. Building such an alliance is 
complicated, but analyzing the psychology of the bosses doesn't get us 
very far when it comes to understanding the needs and motivations of 
their workers. Yes, we need to change social norms. But the immediacy of 
the crisis that we are in demands that we first amass the power to 
change the rules of the game, and let the norms follow suit.

The fundamental weakness of the book, though, is that the existential 
threat of the climate crisis is not really akin to the dangers of 
smoking, much as we might have to learn about the tactics of corporate 
ad campaigns from Big Tobacco, and even though the chlorofluorocarbons 
that ate away at the ozone layer could have constituted a planetary 
threat, the author herself admits that "the companies that made 
CFCs…merely faced losing one of their many products and might profitably 
sell substitutes." Fossil fuel companies, on the other hand, "[face] the 
prospect of the world mobilizing against the product at the core of 
their corporate existence…[the agreement to phase out CFCs] is not a 
good historical analogy for climate denial, because the stakes for the 
industry were so much lower." The abolition of slavery, insofar as it 
constituted a direct attack on an established world order, is perhaps 
the closest analogy to the scale of the current fight. Freese ends her 
book with a call to revamp corporations, but this is not enough. We 
can't just daydream about a shift in norms that would make corporate 
social responsibility the new normal; we need more--much more--than 
corporate social responsibility in order to begin adequately addressing 
the climate crisis. We need a radical restructuring of production, 
consumption, and mobility, and we need corporate accountability more 
than we need corporate responsibility. It is well and good for 
corporations to behave benevolently because we succeed in changing the 
social norms and expectations around corporate behavior, but we cannot 
entrust the future of our planet to good intentions.

Emma Herman is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she 
studied history and philosophy. She is interested in the intersection of 
racial and environmental justice, with a particular focus on security 
and urban policy. She tweets @e_lherman.
https://www.the-trouble.com/content/2020/6/6/book-review-industrial-strength-denial



[Alarming graphic to accompany the article - interactive choose a scenario]
*CLIMATE CLOCK
*ADDING THE METRIC OF TIME TO THE GLOBAL WARMING CONVERSATION
https://climateclock.net/


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - June 9, 2008 *
June 9, 2008:
Deputy EPA administrator Jason Burnett resigns; he later claims that he 
did so after repeated interference from the White House on issues 
related to carbon pollution.
https://www.sfgate.com/green/article/Ex-EPA-aide-tells-of-White-House-censorship-3205205.php 

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-07-09/news/36799342_1_climate-change-epa-deputy-associate-administrator-congressional-testimony 

http://youtu.be/IPjyauzrrv0

/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

/Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote

/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
to news digest./

*** Privacy and Security:*This is a text-only mailing that carries no 
images which may originate from remote servers. Text-only messages 
provide greater privacy to the receiver and sender.
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for democratic 
and election purposes and cannot be used for commercial purposes.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote 
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, 
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at 
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for 
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct 
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List 
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to 
this mailing list.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20200609/d3c3f280/attachment.html>