[TheClimate.Vote] January 9, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*January 9, 2021*/

[see DeSmogBlog reports for links]
*Climate Deniers Moved Rapidly to Spread Misinformation During and After 
Attack on US Capitol*
Sharon Kelly | January 8, 2021
Prominent climate science deniers moved rapidly to spread false and 
misleading conspiracy theories online during and after the attack on the 
U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters this week.

Some climate deniers, including some with ties to the Heartland 
Institute and other organizations that have historically helped to 
create the false impression that there is sizeable scientific 
disagreement on climate change, also directly expressed support for the 
attackers and called for more violence.
“Striking fear in politicians is not a bad thing,” the @ClimateDepot 
Twitter account tweeted on the afternoon of January 6 in a message 
describing the Capitol as then-“under siege.”

“Thomas Jefferson: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to 
time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” @ClimateDepot tweeted 
seconds later.

“What's needed next is mass protests to storm state Capitols and the CDC 
to end Covid lockdowns once and for all,” the thread continued, 
referring to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The @ClimateDepot Twitter account, created in April 2009, is held by 
Marc Morano, the communications director for the Committee for a 
Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington, D.C.-based think-tank with 
a history of receiving funding from ExxonMobil and the conservative dark 
money organization Donors Trust. Morano serves as the executive director 
of CFACT’s climatedepot.com website, which as DeSmog’s database profile 
puts it, “regularly publishes articles questioning man-made global 
warming.”...
- -
Morano has for many years played a prominent role in the climate denial 
movement. The Heartland Institute currently maintains a biography of 
Morano under its “Who We Are” section, noting his prior role as a 
“climate researcher for U.S. Senator James Inhofe,” who has regularly 
made speeches rejecting mainstream climate science. Rolling Stone once 
called Morano “the Matt Drudge of climate denial.” He more recently 
authored a book titled, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate 
Change. CFACT’s most recent tax filings show Morano was its 
highest-compensated employee, bringing in over $209,000 in pay and 
benefits in 2018.

On January 6, after the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) — 
whose board of directors includes senior officials with ExxonMobil and 
numerous other fossil fuel companies — posted a statement condemning the 
violence at the Capitol Building, @ClimateDepot retweeted a reply to 
that statement reading: “NAM has always been a bootlicking organization 
groveling at the booted feet of their governmental masters.”

Many fossil fuel industry groups immediately condemned the insurgency in 
statements or social media posts, and some long-time climate deniers did 
as well. But Morano was not the only prominent science denier to express 
support online for the mob attack in D.C.

William M. Briggs, described by the Heartland Institute as one of its 
policy advisors, published a post on January 7 headlined, “we fought the 
good fight and we lost — this battle.” In the piece, Briggs claims that 
“Congress had an unarmed Air Force veteran shot and killed” and 
misleadingly claims that “the crowd, by doing very little, by remaining 
inside the tourist ropes inside the building, even, forced the startled 
regime into hiding.”...
- -
Briggs' post goes on to describe Republican politicians' later 
condemnation of Wednesday’s attack as “the most disgusting display of 
cowardice and abject surrender we’re likely to see in our lifetimes.”

“Some of us will be in deep kimchi because of this, but there are no 
regrets,” Briggs's post continued. “One thing is certain. They will be 
coming for us.”

DeSmog reviewed numerous accounts during and in the wake of the Capitol 
attack. Social media posts show that several other climate science 
deniers, like the UK-based columnist James Delingpole and Steve Milloy, 
publisher of the JunkScience.com website, joined many on the far-right 
in circulating false information suggesting that it was not the visible 
pro-Trump participants who had been planning online for weeks to “occupy 
the Capitol,” but instead members of their opposition — the loose, 
left-wing movement known as antifa — that actually invaded the building. 
On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that there was “no substantive 
evidence” that any antifa supporters had participated in the pro-Trump 
insurrection, adding that many claims of antifa involvement had cited a 
soure that had, in fact, reported neo-Nazi participation...
- -
Others in DeSmog's Climate Disinformation Database, like the 
conservative media organization Prager U, used their social media 
presence to share messaging that sought to shift focus to last summer's 
Black Lives Matter uprisings.

Detailed information about precisely what happened inside the Capitol 
Building on Wednesday — and what led to those events — is still 
continuing to emerge. But what is clear is that neo-Nazis and long-time 
far-right Trump supporters were documented, and in many cases documented 
themselves, participating in the mob violence inside the Capitol Building...
- -
“The goal isn’t necessarily to convince anyone of anything,” Melissa 
Ryan, author of the Ctrl Alt-Right Delete weekly newsletter covering the 
alt-right and CEO of CARD Strategies, told DeSmog. “The goal is to sow 
so much confusion that it’s actually hard for people to tell the truth 
from fiction.”

That misinformation benefits the far-right, she said.

“They did the same after Charlottesville,” said Ryan, who has previously 
written about interactions between climate deniers and QAnon conspiracy 
theorists. “They do the same after any of their protests that cause 
violence. The goal is to cause confusion amongst viewers, those amongst 
their audience that might have a little trepidation about being 
associated with violent extremist groups, so ‘both sides’ is sort of how 
they neutralize that.”

Several accounts associated with climate science deniers focused in 
particular on pictures of Jake Angeli, who wore face paint and a horned 
helmet on January 6, with these accounts suggesting that Angeli was a 
member of antifa. Angeli, however, is better known as “the QAnon shaman.”

“He’s absolutely a QAnon right-wing follower,” said Ryan.

Attempts to shift blame away from those visibly participating in the 
invasion and to antifa were later also spread in Congress by Republican 
Matt Gaetz of Florida who was met with audible boos on the House floor 
when he suggested that the Capitol attack was by people “masquerading” 
as Trump supporters — a word choice made all the more ironic by the fact 
that many participating in the apparent coup attempt were not wearing 
masks despite the raging COVID-19 pandemic.

And of course, President Trump himself may perhaps be the world’s 
best-known climate science denier. Earlier in the day on January 6, he 
had addressed members of the soon-to-be mob in person, calling on them 
to “walk down to the Capitol” and adding that “you will never take back 
our country with weakness.” Later that day, in a recorded video, he told 
them, “We love you. You’re very special. Go home.”

On Thursday night, in a tweeted video message lasting less than three 
minutes, President Trump said that the “demonstrators” — the same 
individuals whom he had personally addressed before the attack — had 
“defiled” the Capitol and called for their prosecution. Today, he 
resumed using his Twitter account to praise and encourage his base.

Today, Trump faces renewed calls for his impeachment or removal under 
the 25th Amendment. But the disinformation-fueled movement backing him 
is extremely unlikely to simply fade away — and may in fact be further 
emboldened by the images of Trump and Confederate flags that were waved 
inside the Capitol Building.

“I feel like it’s a very clear end of the Trump administration,” said 
Ryan, “but what’s terrifying is what it is the birth of.”

Far-right organizers have already reportedly posted calls to gather 
again on January 20, inauguration day. On Thursday, USA Today quoted 
from a “white-supremacist Telegram channel” that called for “Pro-Trump 
and other nationalist crowds” to gather in D.C. that day.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2021/01/08/climate-deniers-morano-briggs-heartland-misinformation-trump-capitol



[Good idea, opinion from great names]
*Early next step: Add risk management to National Climate Assessment*
Adding the essential but missing risk management considerations to the 
next national climate assessment is an important step for the incoming 
Biden administration.
By Gary Yohe, Henry Jacoby, Richard Richels, and Benjamin Santer
January 5, 2021
Imagine a major climate change law passing the U.S. Congress 
unanimously? Don’t bother. It turns out that you don’t need to imagine 
it. Get this:

The Global Change Research Act of 1990 was passed unanimously (100-0) in 
the United States Senate and by voice vote in the House of 
Representatives. Wow.

The law instructed all relevant federal agencies to intensify their 
separate research activities into climate change trends, impacts, and 
uncertainties and to coordinate their efforts under a newly created 
United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). Congress also 
recognized the need to communicate to the general public the societal 
and natural vulnerabilities derived directly or indirectly from current 
or projected climate change. To do that, the law mandated that the 
federal research community prepare regular national climate assessments 
(NCAs) to be distributed to the American people every four years by the 
sitting President.

The first assessment (NCA1), approved and released in November of 2000, 
effectively began the communication process. It alerted Americans of 
growing threats posed by human-induced changes in local and regional 
climates.

Beginning around 2007, risk assessment became the accepted approach to 
understanding and communicating climate change impacts around the world. 
NCA3 in 2014 and NCA4 in 2018 therefore instructed writing teams to 
characterize important climate change effects in terms of the two key 
principles of risk: the likelihoods of climate change impacts, and their 
consequences as measured by dollars, lives, other public health metrics, 
etc.

This risk-based framing meant that national assessments should report 
high-risk possibilities of all sorts: high-risk circumstances that 
could, for example, be (1) highly likely to occur with modest to 
moderate consequences; or (2) more-likely-than-not to occur with more 
serious consequences; and/or (3) unlikely to occur but with enormous and 
sometimes calamitous consequences.

By law, the incoming Biden administration will be responsible for 
preparing the NCA5 for release in 2023, and the time is right for that 
assessment to advance to the next level by adding risk management to its 
organizational structure. The new USGCRP assessment team will clearly 
have to work within the already approved prospectus for NCA5. But unless 
it pushes itself beyond the boundaries of past assessments, it will not 
focus stronger attention on how climate risks are being managed now and 
how they might be managed better in the future.

*Moving beyond risk assessment to still more difficult questions*
Would that be a step forward? Clearly. Consider, for instance, what it 
could have added to the key findings about increased vulnerability to 
coastal flooding reported in NCA4. They included several cautions:

Vulnerability had been driven by human-induced sea level rise for 
decades, but it had not been evenly distributed along the nation’s 
coastlines;
The frequency of high-tide flooding had increased 5- to 10-fold in some 
communities since 1965, but not in others;
Flooding from extreme coastal storms like Nor’easters and hurricanes had 
generally made landfall with exaggerated storm surges and ponderous 
rainfall totals over short periods of time; and
Adverse impacts from these types of storms are expected to increase as 
the planet warms over the next century.
NCA4 also estimated that highly cost effective adaptation programs could 
reduce cumulative discounted future damages to coastal properties across 
the lower 48 states through 2100 by many billions of dollars, at the 
very least, and perhaps up to a few trillions of dollars along higher 
emissions futures.

A focus on risk management in upcoming NCA5 chapters could lead the 
authors to move beyond these assessments of risks and confront more 
difficult questions like: “What level of preparation at local, city, 
state, and regional levels would be required for investment in 
adaptation to achieve the damage avoidance earlier author teams had 
suggested would be feasible given changed conditions from those 
prevalent in 2018? And how might the federal government help (or hinder) 
in that regard?

NCA4 did present some examples of ongoing efforts to adapt to, mitigate, 
and provide relief from climate damages, but assessing capacities to 
manage risk could have brought more critical questions to the fore. For 
example:

    - Do decision-makers across our federalist system work well together?
    - Do they have and share the necessary information?
    - Are their financial and human resources sufficient?
    - Do bottlenecks or competing agendas impede efforts to reduce net
    damages?

*Le**ssons learned from pandemic … and meeting growing needs of courts*
Finally, consider what management lessons can be drawn from our 
challenging experiences in trying to manage the COVID-19 pandemic?

A substantial and growing number of insightful documents have been 
published, notably including the five volumes of America’s Climate 
Choices. Authors have described and dissected examples of success and of 
frustration in dealing with all sorts of external threats to human 
welfare:  There is plenty of material to assess, integrate, and 
synthesize for the first time to help us fine-tune our capacities to 
attack climate change over a large and diverse country. Such an approach 
could lead to including risk management sections in sectoral and 
regional chapters of NCA5 with analyses that will inform and enhance an 
expanded adaptation chapter.

Increasing NCA5 attention to risk management is critical also for the 
judicial system. As climate effects multiply and management 
responsibilities grow, more cases involving the management of climate 
risks likely will arise in court dockets across the U.S. The Supreme 
Court has already charged judges at every level “to determine whether 
proffered scientific testimony or evidence satisfies the standard of 
evidentiary reliability” because “a judge must ascertain whether it is 
ground[ed] in the methods and procedures of science.”

Jurists frequently look to federally prepared scientific reports for 
guidance in this regard. They will certainly look more frequently to the 
NCA5 if its coverage of risk management practices provides insights into 
what might reasonably be expected of plaintiffs or defendants in cases 
involving climate risks.

Bringing risk management into the NCA is the next important step in its 
evolution in communicating climate vulnerabilities to the public. Doing 
so will illuminate what we know about  incorporating the exploding 
knowledge of intensifying climate risk into public and private 
decision-making processes.
- -
Gary Yohe is the Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and 
Environmental Studies, Emeritus, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. 
He served as convening lead author for multiple chapters and the 
Synthesis Report for the IPCC from 1990 through 2014 and was vice-chair 
of the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Henry Jacoby is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management, Emeritus, 
in the MIT Sloan School of Management and former co-director of the MIT 
Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is 
focused on the integration of the natural and social sciences and policy 
analysis on threats to the global climate.

Richard Richels directed climate change research at the Electric Power 
Research Institute (EPRI). He served as lead author for multiple 
chapters of the IPCC in the areas of mitigation, impacts, and adaptation 
from 1992 through 2014. He also served on the National Assessment 
Synthesis Team for the first U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Ben Santer served as convening lead author of the climate change 
detection and attribution chapter of the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report 
and has contributed to all five IPCC assessments.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/commentary-early-next-step-add-risk-management-to-national-climate-assessment/


[New product for your electric car, 1 min audio and text]
*App helps electric vehicle drivers share private charging stations*
EVmatch wants to make it easier for drivers to find places to power up.
Peer-to-peer networks like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb have made it easy to 
grab a phone, open an app, and find someone who can offer you a ride or 
a place to stay. Now drivers can share electric car chargers the same way.

On the EVmatch app, people who own an electric car charger can list it 
as available. Then other EV drivers can locate a charger, reserve a time 
to use it, and pay for the electricity they use.

“With electric cars, many people who buy them today are single-family 
homeowners who charge at home overnight,” says founder and CEO Heather 
Hochrein. “But for all of the people who live in apartments or park on 
the street or don’t have access to home charging, there really needs to 
be better solutions to help make it easy to drive electric. So that’s 
what EVmatch is focused on.”

Hochrein says to grow its network, EVmatch is also working with 
utilities to deploy charging stations to apartment buildings and businesses.

So far, there are about 500 chargers in the nationwide EVmatch network. 
Many are in California.

As the platform grows, Hochrein hopes it helps more drivers switch from 
gas to electric – “and make that switch more quickly,” she adds. 
“Because with climate change, every moment counts.”
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/app-helps-electric-vehicle-drivers-share-private-charging-stations/

  - -

[Think of it as ridesharing for electrons]
*UNLOCK MORE ELECTRIC VEHICLE CHARGING OPTIONS*
EVmatch is a nationwide network for sharing and renting private EV 
charging stations
https://www.evmatch.com/ and https://blog.evmatch.com/



[keep trying]
*Exxon Mobil Is Twisting Itself in Knots to Justify Pumping Even More Oil**
*In its annual Energy and Carbon Summary, the oil company offers a 
bizarre account of how it’s going to help address climate change while 
increasing production.

Kate Aronoff/January 8, 2021

Seemingly a month ago, on Tuesday, Exxon Mobil released its annual 
Energy & Carbon Summary. For the first time, the company reported its 
Scope 3 emissions. Those are emissions generated across the so-called 
value chain of its products, from the steel it buys to build drilling 
rigs to the emissions given off when the oil Exxon sells is burned in a 
gas tank on the highway. Traditionally, Exxon has reported only 
emissions from its production process and energy use, holding out as 
competitors began disclosing end-use emissions as well. As it happens, 
Exxon’s Scope 3 emissions for 2019—the year this report analyzed—were 
roughly on par with the national emissions of Canada.

This was the detail most coverage focused on. But in fact, the report is 
a much stranger document than that single statistic suggests. Its 54 
pages are an example of a slick new public relations campaign, dressed 
as scientific pragmatism. Conveniently, the report ignores that Exxon 
spent years funding groups that cast doubt on the scientific consensus 
about the climate crisis. And it deflects questions about what kind of 
action is now needed to respond to it.

Boasting that the company is “proactively engaging on climate-related 
policy,” Exxon states that it has “participated in the Intergovernmental 
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since its inception in 1988.” What 
exactly was it doing there?

Exxon Mobil was an early member of the Global Climate Coalition, or 
GCC.  Members of the innocuous-sounding and now defunct nonprofit, 
founded in 1989, included some of the most carbon-intensive companies on 
earth, from fossil fuel producers to electric utilities to car 
companies. A primary goal was to undermine the IPCC process, sending 
large delegations to IPCC meetings, targeting IPCC scientists with 
accusations of “scientific cleansing,” and cherry-picking data to 
suggest warming might simply be “part of a natural warming trend which 
began nearly 400 years ago.” The group’s “IPCC Budget Tracker” received 
two and a half times the average funding of other program areas. At one 
point, Exxon appealed to the White House to block the reappointment of 
IPCC chairman Robert Watson. (It did.)

Exxon climate scientist Brian Flannery served in the IPCC’s working 
group III—dealing with mitigation—from 1998 through 2004, having 
previously argued that there was too much “scientific uncertainty” to 
justify the emissions reductions outlined in the IPCC’s first report. 
Contradicting evidence found internally at Exxon more than a decade 
previously, he stated in a 1996 speech that “observations do not confirm 
that human activities have led to any global warming.” The same year, 
Exxon Biomedical Sciences’ D.J. Devlin gave a presentation to the GCC 
undermining emerging scientific consensus that climate change could have 
a disastrous impact on human health.

Exxon’s “proactive” engagement with climate policy has usually meant 
blocking it. George W. Bush administration officials credited Exxon 
Mobil for the White House’s decision to reject the Kyoto Protocol, which 
the United States had signed onto during the Clinton administration in 
1997. Exxon for years denied it had any involvement in the government’s 
choice, but State Department briefing notes obtained by Greenpeace 
strongly suggest otherwise. “Potus [the president of the U.S.] rejected 
Kyoto in part based on input from you [the GCC],” reads one. Exxon, 
administration officials said, believed joining “would be unjustifiably 
drastic and premature.”

Exxon representatives didn’t necessarily argue that the climate wasn’t 
changing or that every piece of data about warming was bunk. Instead, 
they created enough plausible deniability to confuse the public and 
policymakers and stop anything being done about it. This meant 
weaponizing uncertainties that are a standard part of scientific 
knowledge production. The GCC accordingly informed lawmakers and 
journalists in 1989 that the “role of greenhouse gases in climate change 
is not well understood.”

Exxon’s new report, despite its green language, tells a similar story. 
This time, the company isn’t debating the scope and scale of climate 
change itself. The planet is certainly warming, and that needs to be 
addressed, it underlines. But who’s to say how the world should do that?

Limiting the world to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of 
warming, the reports argues, is a complicated matter with few clear 
directives. “Given a wide range of uncertainties, no single pathway can 
be reasonably predicted,” the authors write. “A key unknown relates to 
yet-to-be-developed advances in technology and breakthroughs that may 
influence the cost and potential availability of certain pathways toward 
a 2°C scenario. Scenarios that employ a full complement of technology 
options are likely to provide the most economically efficient pathways.” 
What Exxon seems to be arguing here is that the best pathways—the ones 
it’s choosing to base its plans around—are the ones that rely most on 
unproven negative emissions technologies rather than limiting fossil fuels.

The report then proceeds to paint a wildly optimistic picture of both 
negative emissions technologies and the future of oil and gas over the 
next several decades. Far from curtailing its oil production, Exxon 
seemingly intends to increase it: The report predicts climbing fossil 
fuel demand for the next 40 years. Staying under two degrees, it argues, 
still requires “significant” new investment—$12 trillion worth, 
according to the International Energy Agency—in new fossil fuels. That 
means not only can all Exxon’s reserves be safely exploited, but plenty 
of new exploration can be greenlit as well. As even BP has gotten 
nervous about the prospect of stranded assets (meaning, for example, 
reserves that couldn’t be profitably exploited if certain climate 
policies are put in place), Exxon is focused on acquiring new assets, 
replenishing “existing proved reserves entirely by 2040.”

For reference, the latest United Nations Production Gap report finds 
that the world is currently on track to produce 50 percent more fossil 
fuels than is consistent with a world warmed by just two degrees 
Celsius, and 120 percent more than is consistent with capping warming at 
1.5 degrees. Nevertheless, Exxon Mobil reports that its own plans—which, 
again, include massively increasing production—are perfectly consistent 
with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. As sustainability 
nonprofit Ceres’s Andrew Logan said of Exxon’s recently announced 
emissions reduction pledge, “Nothing suggests any change in strategy.… 
They are just optimizing the path they are already on.”

None of this is all that unique for fossil fuel companies, which, for 
years now, have been advocating for climate policies that will keep 
their profits flowing. But it’s a striking reminder of just how much 
cognitive dissonance the company is willing to pack into a report 
claiming to show its good intentions. And as a new administration 
prepares to take power, peppered with officials keen to include oil 
companies in policy discussions, it’s a good reason for skepticism.

Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic.

https://newrepublic.com/article/160839/exxonmobil-twisting-knots-justify-pumping-even-oil



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - January 9, *

January 9, 1989: In a letter to House Speaker Jim Wright and Vice 
President George H. W. Bush, President Ronald Reagan writes: "Because 
changes in the earth’s natural systems can have tremendous economic and 
social effects, global climate change is becoming a critical concern."
(Apparently, Reagan's reference to the "critical concern" of climate 
change has never been acknowledged by right-wing media entities such as 
the Fox News Channel.)

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=35346


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