[TheClimate.Vote] April 3, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*April 3, 2021*/

[symptom]
*China sandstorms highlight threat of climate crisis*
Experts say extreme weather including droughts will become more common 
as planet heats...
Recent sandstorms that shrouded Beijing in a post-apocalyptic orange 
haze and intensive droughts in other parts of the country are bringing 
into stark relief the challenges China faces from rising temperatures 
induced by the climate crisis.

The widespread sandstorms that pelted the capital and spread as far as 
central China for several days in mid-March and again at the end of the 
month were brought on by lower than average snow cover and 
precipitation, as well as higher than normal temperatures and winds 
across Mongolia and northern China.

The combination provides perfect conditions for creating sandstorms and 
could signal more frequent dusty weather as temperatures climb in the 
region...
- -
According to studies of temperature increases across China, Yunnan is 
the province with the most climate-related warming over the past decade 
and has been affected by frequent droughts in recent years.

“I was recently in Yunnan to check out the weather, and it’s even more 
horrible than in previous years,” Liu said. “On the whole, the 
government still doesn’t consider that climate change has a big, big 
impact on biodiversity.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/03/china-sandstorms-highlight-threat-of-climate-crisis



[courts back down]
*Oil Giants Win Climate Suit*
by Bloomberg|Chris Dolmetsch, Erik Larson|Friday, April 02, 2021
(Bloomberg) -- New York City suffered another setback in its effort to 
make Exxon Mobil Corp., BP Plc and other energy companies help cover the 
public costs of dealing with climate change, as a federal appeals court 
ruled the global problem demands political rather than legal action.

The ruling Thursday by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan is a 
warning sign for those trying to use the courts to hold the industry 
responsible for a problem that could cost taxpayers trillions of dollars 
in coming years. Chevron Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc and ConocoPhillips 
were also sued in the case.

The court said global warming “is a uniquely international concern” that 
requires the federal government to step in rather than judges. Only the 
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate 
domestic greenhouse gas emissions, the unanimous three-judge panel held.

New York City “sidestepped” federal procedure with a state-law tort suit 
against the energy companies even though their commercial activity of 
selling fossil fuel products around the world is “admittedly legal,” 
U.S. Circuit Court Judge Richard Sullivan wrote for the court...
- -
“Today’s unanimous opinion by a distinguished panel of judges appointed 
by presidents from both parties explains in clear detail why the U.S. 
climate tort lawsuits are meritless, applying established law as agreed 
upon by the Justice Department under the previous two U.S. 
administrations,” Chevron General Counsel R. Hewitt Pate said in a 
statement.

About a dozen cities, counties and states across the U.S. have sued 
Exxon, Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and their peers. The suits seek to 
reimburse taxpayers for the costs of adapting to climate change — from 
building multibillion-dollar sea walls to repairing damage from powerful 
storms and, perhaps soon, moving whole communities inland.

The federal appeals court in San Francisco in 2019 rejected a lawsuit 
brought on behalf of young people who sought to force the government to 
draw up a plan to phase out fossil fuel emissions. The majority in the 
case held in a split decision that climate change should be addressed by 
Congress and the electorate, not the courts.

Exxon is also fighting a case in Massachusetts, where the state’s 
Democratic attorney general last year accused the company of misleading 
consumers and investors about the financial impact of climate-change on 
its business as well as the “green” value of some of its products. The 
company says the suit amounts to illegal punishment for the energy 
giant’s views about fossil fuels, and has asked the judge to dismiss it.

Exxon in December 2019 prevailed in a similar but narrower lawsuit filed 
by the state of New York, which also accused the energy company of 
misleading investors by giving false information about how it accounted 
internally for the future cost of climate change on its business.

Minnesota and Baltimore are among the other state and local governments 
that are pursuing climate litigation.

The case is City of New York v. Chevron, 18-2188, U.S. Court of Appeals 
for the Second Circuit (New York).
https://www.rigzone.com/news/wire/oil_giants_win_climate_suit-02-apr-2021-165067-article/



[misinformation battleground ]
*Mike Rowe’s New Discovery+ Show Is Big Oil-Funded Propaganda*
Dharna Noor - April 2, 2021
Reality show host Mike Rowe’s new series Six Degrees, which is currently 
streaming on Discovery+ and will soon air on television, begins how I 
expected it would: with him on screen in a t-shirt, jeans, and baseball 
cap, and smiling wryly. It’s classic Rowe, posturing as an avatar for 
the “average” American.

The conceit of the show is to tie seemingly unrelated events together. 
In the first episode, Rowe traces the history of the dating app Tinder 
back to the invention of the horseshoe. He explains that in the 1700s, a 
young blacksmith melted horseshoes to create the first iron plow, and 
that decades later, Australian outlaw Ned Kelly used an iron plow to 
create the first suit of armor. Kelly then became the subject of the 
world’s first feature-length film, which contributed to the rise of the 
movie industry. Hollywood made actress and inventor Hedy Lemarr famous. 
One of her inventions was a precursor to wifi, which we use to surf 
dating apps. Rowe describes this all circuitously, stopping along the 
way for jokes and whiskey shots. It’s dumb but seemingly innocuous—until 
you get to the end.

“Six Degrees is sponsored by the oil and natural gas industry. Why? 
Because oil and natural gas connects everything,” Rowe says at the 
episode’s conclusion. He goes on to explain that Lemarr’s inventing 
process was funded by the fortune her boyfriend made in the oil fields.

I knew that Big Oil funded Six Degrees—the blog Reality Blurred caught 
wind of the sponsorship in January. In fact, I started watching it 
because I’d read it was funded by the American Petroleum Institute (the 
oil and gas industry’s biggest trade group) and Distribution Contractors 
Association (a lobbying group for fossil fuel pipeline contractors). 
Still, watching this unfold on screen, I nearly fell out of my chair.

It turns out Rowe shouts out the oil and gas industry in some capacity 
in every episode. I couldn’t believe he was so up front about it. But as 
jarring as it was to hear him praise the industry that is largely 
responsible for frying the planet, this sponsorship makes sense. It fits 
right in with the industry’s current favorite media strategy: Reminding 
us that their products are used in everything.

“They want to impress upon us that they’re responsible for making a lot 
of the cool shit we use, starting with when you wake up in the morning 
and you take a hot shower, and then when you fry an egg, and then when 
you turn on your iPhone,” said Kert Davies, director of Climate 
Investigations Center.

It’s true that across the U.S., water heaters, stoves, and electricity 
that keeps your phone charged largely run on fossil fuels. Yet none of 
it has to. We have the technology to power each of those things with 
clean energy. Delaying that transition would lock in catastrophic 
climate damage. That’s what makes Rowe’s show and other fossil fuel PR 
campaigns like it so insidious.

“If all you know about this industry, if all you see, is that that they 
sponsor a cool show you like, you’ll probably subconsciously think, ‘how 
bad could they be?’” said Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard researcher who has 
studied the fossil fuel industry’s misinformation campaigns.

Davies was a little more, uh, direct: “The point of the ads is, back 
off, don’t fuck with us, you need us. It’s all to do with social license.”

Though the blatant shilling for Big Oil on the show is shocking, it’s 
not surprising. Rowe has a history of pro-fossil fuel messaging, and 
according to tax forms obtained by Earther, his nonprofit has raked in 
six-figure donations from the likes of Koch Industries. (He declined to 
comment for this story through Discovery+, and Earther did not receive a 
response from his nonprofit.)

Before Six Degrees, Rowe made a name for himself as the host of Dirty 
Jobs‚ a show with an obvious—if shallow—appeal as an ode to the American 
working class, particularly if you think of the working class as 
exclusively white dudes in hard hats. On each episode, he worked in 
different thankless and sometimes gross professions, including a 
roadkill collector, sewer inspector, and “avian vomitologist,” which is 
exactly what it sounds like.

This was an unlikely career path for Rowe, who before the show began was 
an opera singer—far from the stereotypical conception of a good ol’ 
rugged American dude he portrays on TV. But Dirty Jobs gave him a 
certain credibility as an advocate for forgotten workers.

In 2008, Rowe launched mikeroweWORKS, a nonprofit promoting vocational 
training for blue-collar jobs. The organization provides scholarships 
for job training programs in fields including automotive technology, 
HVAC, manufacturing, and diesel technology, which in itself isn’t a bad 
thing. But the foundation is premised on the idea that the reason people 
are struggling to find good-paying work in these sectors is because of a 
skills gap for those in blue-collar fields—a thoroughly debunked myth 
pushed by industry leaders to make workers feel underqualified for 
positions, which research suggests helped companies to put more 
conditions on their job listings and offer lower rates of pay. 
mikeroweWORKS also fails to grapple with the reality that amid the 
worsening climate crisis, many of these fields will have to undergo 
major changes (and in the case of diesel, at least, be fully phased out).

“He’s to the oil and gas industry what Ronald Reagan was for General 
Electric, a charming pitch man.”
In the years since starting his nonprofit, Rowe started a parallel media 
career as a pundit, frequently appearing on Fox News to openly speak out 
against regulating oil and gas extraction.

Despite his posturing as a friend of the working class, Rowe doesn’t 
have much to say how the industry mercilessly lays off employees while 
paying shareholders or that working in the fossil fuel industry comes 
with notoriously dangerous conditions for workers and long-term health 
risks. (Instead, he suggests safety concerns are overblown). He’s also 
failed to show much support for labor organizing in the energy sector, 
even though they could desperately use his support. Federal data shows 
rates of unionization in the coal, oil, and gas sector is dwindling.

“He’s to the oil and gas industry what Ronald Reagan was for General 
Electric, a charming pitch man,” Adam Johnson, the co-host of the 
podcast Citations Needed, wrote in an email.

That’s likely no accident. As Johnson’s podcast uncovered on a 2019 
episode, Rowe’s foundation is funded by anti-regulation groups including 
the Distribution Contractors Association (yes, the same group funding 
his new show), auto parts manufacturer Ford-Mogul Motor Parts, a 
subsidiary of the British multinational energy firm Centrica, and 
perhaps most damning of all, the massive fossil fuel and petrochemical 
conglomerate Koch Industries. A document the Climate Investigations 
Center found on Guidestar, which is marked “not open to public 
inspection,” shows that Koch Industries and the Koch Foundation, both 
tied to the massive fortune amassed by the Koch brothers, have together 
donated more than $1 million dollars to Rowe’s foundation since it was 
founded.

Johnson described Rowe as the “greatest anti-worker avatar money can 
buy,” because he’s “someone who a lot of working people genuinely love 
... but who is 100% against their interests.”

Rowe’s an especially useful ally to the fossil fuel sector because he 
continually perpetuates the age-old conservative myth that environmental 
regulation must come at the expense of jobs, despite mountains of 
evidence that the opposite is true and that a just transition for fossil 
fuel employees is possible (and needed).

“The dirty truth about fossil fuels and the petrochemical industry is 
that it is really dangerous dirty work all the way from the frack fields 
and wellheads to the refineries and chemical plants,” said Davies. 
Workers get sick and die. Fenceline communities get sick and die. There 
are cancer clusters, increased asthma and other health problems 
associated with petrochemicals, plastics and pesticides.”

In Six Degrees, Rowe doesn’t take an explicitly anti-renewable stance. 
In an episode connecting sheep to how we do our taxes, he speaks with a 
solar installer and asks him when the energy source will “become not 
just an alternative but one of the go-to choices.” But even then, he 
doesn’t say anything about why solar might be preferable because oil and 
gas have created an existential threat.

“API is hitching its wagon to a show that appears to promote discourses 
of fossil fuel essentialism and fossil fuel solutionism,” Supran said.

In another episode of the show, for instance, Rowe says electricity is 
“made possible by spinning turbines—turbines powered by wind and solar, 
but mostly by oil and gas.”

“In other words, the audience is not-so-subtly indoctrinated with the 
idea that fossil fuels will inevitably be essential for the foreseeable 
future, which is a political judgement, not a scientific necessity, and 
a recipe for climate disaster,” said Supran.

In an email, a spokesperson for Discovery+ said that Six Degrees is the 
only program on the network that is funded by advocacy or trade groups. 
Though he said he could not disclose exactly how much money the American 
Petroleum Institute or Distribution Contractors Association contributed 
to the production of Six Degrees, he said that the groups didn’t 
influence the show’s content.

“This sponsorship was simply to get production started,” he said. “There 
was no creative input or influence on the series.”

But it’s clear why the industry itself would want to sponsor this kind 
of endeavor now. Public concern about the climate crisis is growing. The 
Biden administration has imposed new regulations limiting extraction, 
and organizers who correctly state these moves are insufficient are 
pressuring officials to do far more. There’s also the reality that 
climate change poses an existential threat if left unchecked. And the 
fastest way to reduce carbon emissions is to wind down the fossil fuel 
industry while simultaneously protecting the workers Rowe says he stands 
in support of. From Six Degrees, though, you’d never know that phasing 
out fossil fuels is a necessary step to securing working people a 
livable future.

“As the stakes around climate change continue to get higher—and more 
people point toward fossil fuels as the main culprit to the warming of 
our planet—Big Oil’s sponsorship of Mike Rowe’s new show on Discovery+ 
is concerning,” said Allison Fisher, climate and energy program director 
at Media Matters for America. “Unlike the conservative audience that 
tunes in when Rowe talks about the oil and gas industry on Fox News and 
Fox Business News, Discovery+ is reaching a new and unwitting audience 
who may not have an opinion on Big Oil one way or another, but could be 
persuaded by Rowe.”

Six Degrees is right—currently, fossil fuels do provide the foundation 
of society and are connected to nearly everything. But that’s not an 
immutable truth, it’s a problem to be solved by creating a just, green 
economy. It’s precisely because of the interconnectivity of everything, 
the premise on which the show is built, that we need to forge that new 
world. Rowe’s new show is a roadblock to do just that, and that’s 
exactly the way the Six Degrees’ sponsors want it.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/mike-rowe-s-new-discovery-show-is-big-oil-funded-propa-1846585716


[Cosmological conjecture: Intelligent life originated on Mars - audio 
interview]
*Where Did the Laws of the Universe Come From? With Paul Davies*
Mar 25, 2021
Event Horizon
Where Did the Laws of Physics Come From?
Why is the universe just right for life?
Paul Davies joins John Michael Godier to discuss why the universe seems 
to be fine-tuned for life. How did the universe begin and how will it end?

Paul Davies Books
Affiliate Links
_The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving 
the Mystery of Life _
https://amzn.to/3vXPiOH​

_The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World_
https://amzn.to/3d6DLUC​

_The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?_
https://amzn.to/2QrgWTV​

_God and the New Physics_
https://amzn.to/3fc6IRV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3qo1moPQOs



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - April 3, 1980 *
April 3, 1980: "The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" reports on 
the role coal plays in fueling global warming.
*1980: Walter Cronkite on Climate Change*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU9s0XyEctI
Perhaps if the late Senator Paul Tsongas had lived, more progress could 
have been made by now.
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/01/23/1980-cronkite-on-climate/


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