[TheClimate.Vote] November 28, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*November 28, 2020*/

[Wall Street Journal $]
*States Explored Litigation to Challenge U.S. Policy on Climate Change*
Options included getting courts to require federal action to reduce 
emissions of greenhouse gases, documents show
By Timothy Puko - Nov. 28, 2020
WASHINGTON—Nearly two dozen Democratic-led states at odds with the Trump 
administration on climate-change policy joined forces last year to 
explore using the courts to secure federal mandates on greenhouse-gas 
emissions, according to records and interviews.

The coalition agreed to cooperate in planning litigation against the 
federal government and consulted with former Environmental Protection 
Agency officials as part of the discussions, according to documents 
reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and people involved in the...
- -
The initiative lost momentum in recent months, some of these people 
said, amid fears of an uphill fight in federal court and because state 
leaders wanted to await results of the Nov. 3 election , which saw 
Democrat Joe Biden defeat President Trump. Some lawyers and people 
involved expect that these states are now more likely to focus on 
advancing their own policies rather than launching federal litigation. 
Even so, the plans speak to how aggressive state governments have become 
in their efforts to sway Washington. Presidents have faced increasing 
opposition from state attorneys general from the opposite political 
party, and many expect Republican-led states to continue the trend with 
challenges to President-elect Biden's agenda.  How actively do you want 
your state's attorney general to be trying to influence federal policy?...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/states-explored-litigation-to-challenge-u-s-policy-on-climate-change-11606559400
- -
[other documents]
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/greenhousegovernance_chapter.pdf



[glimpses of a battlefield of misinformation]
*How the oil industry made us doubt climate change*
By Phoebe Keane
BBC News
Published19 September
- -
To understand what's happening today, we need to go back nearly 40 years.

Marty Hoffert leaned closer to his computer screen. He couldn't quite 
believe what he was seeing. It was 1981, and he was working in an area 
of science considered niche.

"We were just a group of geeks with some great computers," he says now, 
recalling that moment.

But his findings were alarming.

"I created a model that showed the Earth would be warming very 
significantly. And the warming would introduce climatic changes that 
would be unprecedented in human history. That blew my mind."
Marty Hoffert was one of the first scientists to create a model which 
predicted the effects of man-made climate change. And he did so while 
working for Exxon, one of the world's largest oil companies, which would 
later merge with another, Mobil.

At the time Exxon was spending millions of dollars on ground-breaking 
research. It wanted to lead the charge as scientists grappled with the 
emerging understanding that the warming planet could cause the climate 
to change in ways that could make life pretty difficult for humans.

Hoffert shared his predictions with his managers, showing them what 
might happen if we continued burning fossil fuels in our cars, trucks 
and planes...
- -
The tobacco companies may have eventually lost their battle to hide the 
harms of smoking, but the blueprint drawn up by John Hill and his 
colleagues proved to be very effective.

"What he wrote is the same memo we have seen in multiple industries 
subsequently," says David Michaels, professor of public health at George 
Washington University, and author of The Triumph of Doubt, which details 
how the pesticides, plastics and sugar industries have also used these 
tactics.

"We called it 'the tobacco playbook', because the tobacco industry was 
so successful.

"They made a product that killed millions of people across the world, 
and the science has been very strong [about that] for many years, but 
through this campaign to manufacture uncertainty, they were able to 
delay first, formal recognition of the terrible impact of tobacco, and 
then delay regulation and defeat litigation for decades, with obviously 
terrible consequences."

We asked Hill and Knowlton about its work for the tobacco companies, but 
it did not respond.

In a statement, ExxonMobil told the BBC that "allegations about the 
company's climate research are inaccurate and deliberately misleading".

"For more than 40 years, we have supported development of climate 
science in partnership with governments and academic institutions. That 
work continues today in an open and transparent way.

"Deliberately cherry-picked statements attributed to a small number of 
employees wrongly suggest definitive conclusions were reached decades ago."

ExxonMobil added that it recently won the court case brought by the New 
York Attorney General which had accused the company of fraudulently 
accounting for the costs of climate change regulation.

But academics like David Michaels fear the use of uncertainty in the 
past to confuse the public and undermine science has contributed to a 
dangerous erosion of trust in facts and experts across the globe today, 
far beyond climate science or the dangers of tobacco.

He cites public attitudes to modern issues like the safety of 5G, 
vaccinations - and coronavirus.

"By cynically manipulating and distorting scientific evidence, the 
manufacturers of doubt have seeded in much of the public a cynicism 
about science, making it far more difficult to convince people that 
science provides useful - in some cases, vitally important - information.

"There is no question that this distrust of science and scientists is 
making it more difficult to stem the coronavirus pandemic."

It seems the legacy of "the tobacco playbook" lives on.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53640382



[2 videos]
*Given Abrupt Climate System Change, can we keep our Earth habitable? 
Part 1 and 2*
Nov 26, 2020
Paul Beckwith
We risk an uninhabitable Earth if we allow abrupt climate change to 
continue unchecked, at its ever accelerating (even exponential) pace.

How do we stabilize our climate? Can we stabilize our planet, or are we 
too far gone, as more and more people think?

Years ago I brought up the concept of a three-legged barstool approach 
to stabilize climate. To recap, we need to:
1) Slash fossil-fuelled Greenhouse Gas emissions to zero
2) Pull carbon out of the atmosphere/ocean system. This includes CH4 as 
well as CO2.
3) Deploy Solar Radiation Management methods to reduce surface heating 
to buy us time to do the first two steps.

There are all kinds of ideas for doing these three steps, and I will 
discuss them in detail in future videos. They include things like: cloud 
brightening; Iron Salt Aerosols (ISA) which simultaneously reduces CH4, 
increases cloud reflectivity, and seeds the ocean with iron stimulating 
carbon sucking phytoplankton; injecting sulphur dioxide in the 
stratosphere to block some sunlight; regrowing sea ice in the Arctic 
(using wind-turbine powered pumps to put sea water on top of the ice to 
accelerate freezing, distributing glass nano-beads onto the ice surface 
to reduce surface melt, increasing cloud reflectivity over the Arctic); etc.

I chat about a recent paper claiming that we have already passed the 
tipping point with thawing Arctic permafrost, and even with zeroed 
emissions in 2020 (obviously not feasible) we would get additional 
warming for centuries.
Part 1  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbLzWBOyFX0
Part 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0ZQEKnaSL0


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - November 28, 2014 *
In the New York Times, Paul Krugman observes:

    "Of course, polluters will defend their right to pollute, but why
    can they count on Republican support? When and why did the
    Republican Party become the party of pollution?

    "For it wasn't always thus. The Clean Air Act of 1970, the legal
    basis for the Obama administration's environmental actions, passed
    the Senate on a bipartisan vote of 73 to 0, and was signed into law
    by Richard Nixon. (I've heard veterans of the E.P.A. describe the
    Nixon years as a golden age.) A major amendment of the law, which
    among other things made possible the cap-and-trade system that
    limits acid rain, was signed in 1990 by former President George H.W.
    Bush.

    "But that was then. Today's Republican Party is putting a conspiracy
    theorist who views climate science as a 'gigantic hoax' in charge of
    the Senate's environment committee. And this isn't an isolated case.
    Pollution has become a deeply divisive partisan issue.

    "And the reason pollution has become partisan is that Republicans
    have moved right. A generation ago, it turns out, environment wasn't
    a partisan issue: according to Pew Research, in 1992 an overwhelming
    majority in both parties favored stricter laws and regulation. Since
    then, Democratic views haven't changed, but Republican support for
    environmental protection has collapsed.

    "So what explains this anti-environmental shift?

    "You might be tempted simply to blame money in politics, and there's
    no question that gushers of cash from polluters fuel the
    anti-environmental movement at all levels. But this doesn't explain
    why money from the most environmentally damaging industries, which
    used to flow to both parties, now goes overwhelmingly in one
    direction. Take, for example, coal mining. In the early 1990s,
    according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the industry
    favored Republicans by a modest margin, giving around 40 percent of
    its money to Democrats. Today that number is just 5 percent.
    Political spending by the oil and gas industry has followed a
    similar trajectory. Again, what changed?

    "One answer could be ideology. Textbook economics isn't
    anti-environment; it says that pollution should be limited, albeit
    in market-friendly ways when possible. But the modern conservative
    movement insists that government is always the problem, never the
    solution, which creates the will to believe that environmental
    problems are fake and environmental policy will tank the economy.

    "My guess, however, is that ideology is only part of the story — or,
    more accurately, it's a symptom of the underlying cause of the
    divide: rising inequality."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/28/opinion/paul-krugman-pollution-and-politics.html?ref=opinion&_r=0


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