[TheClimate.Vote] January 26, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Tue Jan 26 11:27:51 EST 2021

/*January 26, 2021*/

[changes in Congress]
*Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer just called on Biden to declare a 
national emergency. *
WATCH: Senate Majority Leader Schumer calls on President Biden to 
"explore" using emergency powers to declare climate an emergency.
"If there ever was an emergency, climate is one
https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1353895948133543936?s=20

[Reuters ENVIRONMENT]
JANUARY 23, 2021
*Biden administration to unveil more climate policies, urges China to 
toughen emissions target*
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-idUSKBN29S0PA

[From the Guardian]
*Helping poorest tackle climate crisis will boost global growth, says 
IMF head*
Kristalina Georgieva says investing to create resilient economies is a 
‘win-win-win-win’ scenario
- -
Otherwise, the world risked billions of dollars of economic damage in 
the near future, as most countries were unprepared for the effects of a 
rapidly heating climate, she warned.

“The good news is that it can be win-win-win-win,” she said. “Building 
resilience can be good for nature and ecosystems; it can be good for 
economic growth; at a time when economies have lost low-skilled jobs, it 
boosts job creation; and the fourth win is that it can bring health 
benefits [such as reduced air pollution].”...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/25/helping-poorest-tackle-climate-crisis-will-boost-global-growth-says-imf-head

[CBS]
January 24, 2021
*Climate refugees: The quest for a haven from extreme weather events*
- -
Of course, not everybody has the option of moving. "It's not easy for 
folks to just pick up and leave a place," said Jalonne White-Newsome, a 
consultant, researcher and advocate who focuses on climate and racial 
justice. She said that extreme weather hits communities of color 
disproportionately hard, yet their residents may be the least able to move.

"It's not that folks want to stay in harm's way," she said, "but the 
fact that they might not have the resources to move, that they have 
invested all that they have into their home, whether they're renting or 
owning it. And then there's also this sense of community. It's that 
sense of connection not only with their neighbors, but their faith 
community, their jobs, their kids are in school."

Still, 40 million Americans do move every year. They retire, they 
graduate, they get jobs or lose jobs, they fall in love or break up.

If you have the luxury of choosing where to live, and climate change is 
a factor, here's the formula:

You want to be far enough inland to avoid the rising seas and flooding … 
far enough north to avoid the worst of the heat waves … far enough west 
and north to avoid the hurricanes … and far enough east to avoid the 
wildfires...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-refugees-the-quest-for-a-haven-from-extreme-weather-events/

[Opinion]
*We Want a ‘New Normal.’ It’s Not in the Forecast.*
Climate change is upending the world as we know it, and coping with it 
demands widespread, radical action.

By Roy Scranton
Mr. Scranton is the director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities 
Initiative and the author of “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.”

Jan. 25, 2021
- -
But what does normal even mean anymore?

It’s easy to forget that 2020 gave us not just the pandemic, but also 
the West Coast’s worst fire season, as well as the most active Atlantic 
hurricane season on record. And, while we were otherwise distracted, 
2020 also offered up near-record lows in Arctic sea ice, possible 
evidence of significant methane release from Arctic permafrost and the 
Arctic Ocean, huge wildfires in both the Amazon and the Arctic, 
shattered heat records (2020 rivaled 2016 for the hottest year on 
record), bleached coral reefs, the collapse of the last fully intact ice 
shelf in the Canadian Arctic, and increasing odds that the global 
climate system has passed the point where feedback dynamics take over 
and the window of possibility for preventing catastrophe closes.

President Biden has recommitted the United States to the Paris 
Agreement, which is great except that it doesn’t really mean much, since 
that agreement’s commitments are voluntary. And it might not even matter 
whether signatories meet their commitments, since their pledges weren’t 
rigorous enough to keep global warming “well below” two degrees Celsius, 
or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels to begin with. 
According to Climate Action Tracker, a collaborative analysis from 
independent science nonprofits, only Morocco and Gambia have made 
commitments compatible with the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees 
Celsius above preindustrial levels, and the commitments made by several 
major emitters, including China, Russia, Japan and the United States, 
are “highly insufficient” or “critically insufficient.”
- -
It’s also worth noting that the two degrees Celsius benchmark is 
somewhat arbitrary and possibly fantastic, since it’s not clear that the 
earth’s climate would be safe or stable at that temperature. In the 
words of a widely discussed research summary published in the 
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even if the Paris 
Agreement targets are met, “we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of 
feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a ‘Hothouse 
Earth’ pathway.”

More alarming, recent observed increases in atmospheric methane, a 
greenhouse gas more than 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over the 
short term, are so large that if they continue they could effectively 
overwhelm the pledged emissions reductions in the Paris Agreement, even 
if those reductions were actually happening. Which they’re not.

Meanwhile, the earth’s climate seems to be changing faster than 
expected. Take the intensifying slowdown in the North Atlantic current, 
a global warming side effect made famous by the film “The Day After 
Tomorrow.” According to the climatologist Michael Mann, “We are 50 years 
to 100 years ahead of schedule with the slowdown of this ocean 
circulation pattern, relative to what the models predict … The more 
observations we get, the more sophisticated our models become, the more 
we’re learning that things can happen faster, and with a greater 
magnitude, than we predicted just years ago.”

In 2019, the Greenland ice sheet briefly reached daily melt rates 
predicted in what were once considered worst-case scenarios for 2060 to 
2080. Recent research indicates that rapidly thawing permafrost may 
release twice as much carbon dioxide and methane than previously 
thought, which is pretty bad news, because other recent research shows 
very cold Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years earlier than expected.

Going back to normal now means returning to a course that will 
destabilize the conditions for all human life, everywhere on earth. 
Normal means more fires, more category 5 hurricanes, more flooding, more 
drought, millions upon millions more migrants fleeing famine and civil 
war, more crop failures, more storms, more extinctions, more 
record-breaking heat. Normal means the increasing likelihood of civil 
unrest and state collapse, of widespread agricultural failure and 
collapsing fisheries, of millions of people dying from thirst and 
hunger, of new diseases, old diseases spreading to new places and the 
havoc of war. Normal could well mean the end of global civilization as 
we know it...
- -
Now, as a new administration takes office and we look ahead to life 
after both Covid and Donald Trump, we need to face the fact that the 
world we live in is changing into something else, and that coping with 
the consequences of global warming demands immediate, widespread, 
radical action...
The next 20 years will be a period of deep uncertainty and tremendous 
risk, no matter what. We don’t get to choose what challenges we’ll face, 
but we do get to decide how we face them. The first thing we need to do 
is let go of the idea that life will ever be normal again — elsewhere, 
I’ve called this “learning how to die.” Beyond that, we need stop living 
through social media and start connecting with the people around us, 
since those are the people we’ll need to depend on the next time 
disaster strikes. And disaster will strike, you can be sure of that, so 
we must begin preparing today for the next shock to the social order, 
and the next, and the next.

None of this will matter, though, if our preparations don’t include 
imagining a new way of life beyond this one, after the end of 
fossil-fueled capitalism: not a new normal, but a new ethos adapted to 
the chaotic world we’ve created.

Roy Scranton is the author of “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.” He 
teaches English and environmental humanities at the University of Notre 
Dame, where he is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities 
Initiative.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/opinion/new-normal-climate-catastrophes.html

[Brookings-event-invitation]
*Climate change and financial market regulations: Insights from 
BlackRock CEO *Larry Fink and former SEC Chair Mary Schapiro

Tuesday, February 2, 2021, 3:00 - 4:00 p.m. EST
Online: 
https://www.brookings.edu/events/climate-change-and-financial-market-regulations-insights-from-blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-and-former-sec-chair-mary-schapiro/
RSVP to watch - 
https://connect.brookings.edu/register-to-watch-climate-change-financial-market-regulations

There is growing interest among regulators around the world in helping 
to address climate change through the levers of financial market 
regulation. Private companies are starting to elevate the importance of 
climate and sustainability risk for investment decisions. These 
developments are essential for influencing the behavior of market 
participants towards low-carbon investments and mitigating climate risks 
for companies and investors.

On Tuesday, February 2, the Center on Regulation and Market at Brookings 
will host Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, and Mary Schapiro, 
vice chair of global public policy at Bloomberg L.P., former chair of 
the Securities and Exchange Commission, and head of the Secretariat of 
the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. This event will 
shed light on ideas and trends in climate change and financial market 
regulations, an increasingly important area...

Viewers can submit questions via email to events at brookings.edu or via 
Twitter using #ClimateRegulation.
https://www.brookings.edu/events/climate-change-and-financial-market-regulations-insights-from-blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-and-former-sec-chair-mary-schapiro/

[precarity = that which is precarious]
JOURNAL ARTICLE
*Climate Change and the Everyday: Becoming Present to Precarity*
Russell Duvernoy
Ethics and the Environment
Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall 2020), pp. 73-95 (23 pages)
Published By: Indiana University Press
https://doi.org/10.2979/ethicsenviro.25.2.04
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/ethicsenviro.25.2.04
Abstract

    Concepts of the everyday typically correlate with the normal and
    regular, while narratives of climate change are structured by
    predictions that exceed the normal. Since extreme events of climate
    change are not assimilable into the everyday, their destabilizing
    effects heighten destructive feedback loops mediated through fear.
    Developing psychic and social resilience necessary for re-routing
    climate change predictions from their direst outcomes thus requires
    transformed relations to the everyday. After analyzing how a default
    conception of the everyday hinders existential adaptation, I draw on
    Jean-Luc Nancy, Alfred North Whitehead, and William James to develop
    a concept of the everyday that emphasizes precarity, multiplicity,
    and creativity as better fostering social and psychic resilience
    amidst destabilization. This different concept of the everyday is
    necessary for learning how to live meaningful daily lives not
    predicated on an illusion that all is well or the fantasy that
    climate change can be resolved through a perpetuation of current
    norms of the everyday.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/ethicsenviro.25.2.04?seq=1

[Classic - 2018 -tangential to climate change]
*Was There a Civilization on Earth Before Humans?*
A look at the available evidence
ADAM FRANK - APRIL 13, 2018
It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me.

Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies 
(a.k.a. GISS) a world-class climate-science facility. One day last year, 
I came to GISS with a far-out proposal. In my work as an astrophysicist, 
I’d begun researching global warming from an “astrobiological 
perspective.” That meant asking whether any industrial civilization that 
rises on any planet will, through their own activity, trigger their own 
version of a climate shift. I was visiting GISS that day hoping to gain 
some climate science insights and, perhaps, collaborators. That’s how I 
ended up in Gavin’s office.

Just as I was revving up my pitch, Gavin stopped me in my tracks.

“Wait a second,” he said. “How do you know we’re the only time there’s 
been a civilization on our own planet?”

It took me a few seconds to pick up my jaw off the floor. I had 
certainly come into Gavin’s office prepared for eye rolls at the mention 
of “exo-civilizations.” But the civilizations he was asking about would 
have existed many millions of years ago. Sitting there, seeing Earth’s 
vast evolutionary past telescope before my mind’s eye, I felt a kind of 
temporal vertigo. “Yeah,” I stammered, “Could we tell if there’d been an 
industrial civilization that deep in time?”

We never got back to aliens. Instead, that first conversation launched a 
new study we’ve recently published in the International Journal of 
Astrobiology. Though neither of us could see it at that moment, Gavin’s 
penetrating question opened a window not just onto Earth’s past, but 
also onto our own future.

We’re used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of the sunken 
statues and subterranean ruins. These kinds of artifacts of previous 
societies are fine if you’re only interested in timescales of a few 
thousands of years. But once you roll the clock back to tens of millions 
or hundreds of millions of years, things get more complicated.

When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization—things 
like cities, factories, and roads—the geologic record doesn’t go back 
past what’s called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For 
example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the 
Negev Desert. It’s “just” 1.8 million years old—older surfaces are 
mostly visible in cross section via something like a cliff face or rock 
cuts. Go back much further than the Quaternary, and everything has been 
turned over and crushed to dust.

And, if we’re going back this far, we’re not talking about human 
civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn’t make their appearance on the 
planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. That means the question 
shifts to other species, which is why Gavin called the idea the Silurian 
hypothesis, after an old Doctor Who episode with intelligent reptiles.

So could researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species built a 
relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before our own? 
Perhaps, for example, some early mammal rose briefly to civilization 
building during the Paleocene epoch, about 60 million years ago. There 
are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life that gets fossilized is 
always minuscule and varies a lot depending on time and habitat. It 
would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that lasted 
only 100,000 years—which would be 500 times longer than our industrial 
civilization has made it so far.

Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of 
years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to 
answer this question is to figure out what evidence we’d leave behind if 
human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development.

Now that our industrial civilization has truly gone global, humanity’s 
collective activity is laying down a variety of traces that will be 
detectable by scientists 100 million years in the future. The extensive 
use of fertilizer, for example, keeps 7 billion people fed, but it also 
means we’re redirecting the planet’s flows of nitrogen into food 
production. Future researchers should see this in characteristics of 
nitrogen showing up in sediments from our era. Likewise our relentless 
hunger for the rare-Earth elements used in electronic gizmos. Far more 
of these atoms are now wandering around the planet’s surface because of 
us than would otherwise be the case. They might also show up in future 
sediments, too. Even our creation, and use, of synthetic steroids has 
now become so pervasive that it too may be detectable in geologic strata 
10 million years from now.

And then there’s all that plastic. Studies have shown that increasing 
amounts of plastic “marine litter” are being deposited on the seafloor 
everywhere from coastal areas to deep basins, and even in the Arctic. 
Wind, sun, and waves grind down large-scale plastic artifacts, leaving 
the seas full of microscopic plastic particles that will eventually rain 
down on the ocean floor, creating a layer that could persist for 
geological timescales.

The big question is how long any of these traces of our civilization 
will last. In our study, we found that each had the possibility of 
making it into future sediments. Ironically, however, the most promising 
marker of humanity’s presence as an advanced civilization is a 
by-product of one activity that may threaten it most.

When we burn fossil fuels, we’re releasing carbon back into the 
atmosphere that was once part of living tissues. This ancient carbon is 
depleted in one of that element’s three naturally occurring varieties, 
or isotopes. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more the balance of 
these carbon isotopes shifts. Atmospheric scientists call this shift the 
Suess effect, and the change in isotopic ratios of carbon due to 
fossil-fuel use is easy to see over the past century. Increases in 
temperature also leave isotopic signals. These shifts should be apparent 
to any future scientist who chemically analyzes exposed layers of rock 
from our era. Along with these spikes, this Anthropocene layer might 
also hold brief peaks in nitrogen, plastic nanoparticles, and even 
synthetic steroids. So if these are traces our civilization is bound to 
leave for the future, might the same “signals” exist right now in rocks 
just waiting to tell us of civilizations long gone?

Fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the Paleocene-Eocene 
Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the planet’s average 
temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above what we 
experience today. It was a world almost without ice, as typical summer 
temperatures at the poles reached close to a balmy 70 degrees 
Fahrenheit. Looking at the isotopic record from the PETM, scientists see 
both carbon and oxygen isotope ratios spiking in exactly the way we 
expect to see in the Anthropocene record. There are also other events 
like the PETM in the Earth’s history that show traces like our 
hypothetical Anthropocene signal. These include an event a few million 
years after the PETM dubbed the Eocene Layers of Mysterious Origin, and 
massive events in the Cretaceous that left the ocean without oxygen for 
many millennia (or even longer).

Are these events indications of previous nonhuman industrial 
civilizations? Almost certainly not. While there is evidence that the 
PETM may have been driven by a massive release of buried fossil carbon 
into the air, it’s the timescale of these changes that matter. The 
PETM’s isotope spikes rise and fall over a few hundred thousand years. 
But what makes the Anthropocene so remarkable in terms of Earth’s 
history is the speed at which we’re dumping fossil carbon into the 
atmosphere. There have been geological periods where Earth’s CO2 has 
been as high or higher than today, but never before in the planet’s 
multibillion-year history has so much buried carbon been dumped back 
into the atmosphere so quickly. So the isotopic spikes we do see in the 
geologic record may not be spiky enough to fit the Silurian hypothesis’s 
bill.

But there is a conundrum here. If an earlier species’s industrial 
activity is short-lived, we might not be able to easily see it. The 
PETM’s spikes mostly show us the Earth’s timescales for responding to 
whatever caused it, not necessarily the timescale of the cause. So it 
might take both dedicated and novel detection methods to find evidence 
of a truly short-lived event in ancient sediments. In other words, if 
you’re not explicitly looking for it, you might not see it. That 
recognition was, perhaps, the most concrete conclusion of our study.

It’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you 
don’t support. Gavin and I don’t believe the Earth once hosted a 
50-million-year-old Paleocene civilization. But by asking if we could 
“see” truly ancient industrial civilizations, we were forced to ask 
about the generic kinds of impacts any civilization might have on a 
planet. That’s exactly what the astrobiological perspective on climate 
change is all about. Civilization building means harvesting energy from 
the planet to do work (i.e., the work of civilization building). Once 
the civilization reaches truly planetary scales, there has to be some 
feedback on the coupled planetary systems that gave it life (air, water, 
rock). This will be particularly true for young civilizations like ours 
still climbing up the ladder of technological capacity. There is, in 
other words, no free lunch. While some energy sources will have lower 
impact—say solar versus fossil fuels—you can’t power a global 
civilization without some degree of impact on the planet.

Once you realize, through climate change, the need to find lower-impact 
energy sources, the less impact you will leave. So the more sustainable 
your civilization becomes, the smaller the signal you’ll leave for 
future generations.

In addition, our work also opened up the speculative possibility that 
some planets might have fossil-fuel-driven cycles of civilization 
building and collapse. If a civilization uses fossil fuels, the climate 
change they trigger can lead to a large decrease in ocean oxygen levels. 
These low oxygen levels (called ocean anoxia) help trigger the 
conditions needed for making fossil fuels like oil and coal in the first 
place. In this way, a civilization and its demise might sow the seed for 
new civilizations in the future.

By asking about civilizations lost in deep time, we’re also asking about 
the possibility for universal rules guiding the evolution of all 
biospheres in all their creative potential, including the emergence of 
civilizations. Even without pickup-driving Paleocenians, we’re only now 
learning to see how rich that potential might be.

ADAM FRANK is a professor of astrophysics at the University of 
Rochester. His work has appeared in Scientific American, The New York 
Times, and NPR. He is the author of Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and 
the Fate of the Earth.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/

- -
[Cornell University]
*The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial 
civilization in the geological record?*
Gavin A. Schmidt, Adam Frank
If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions of 
years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and would 
they be detectable today? We summarize the likely geological fingerprint 
of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not 
differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the 
geological record. We then propose tests that could plausibly 
distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise naturally occurring 
climate event.
Accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology
Subjects:    Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
DOI:    10.1017/S1473550418000095
Cite as:    arXiv:1804.03748 [astro-ph.EP]
      (or arXiv:1804.03748v1
Submission history
From: Adam Frank
[v1] Tue, 10 Apr 2018 23:26:11 UTC (80 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03748.pdf The Silurian Hypothesis

[last year report]
*Exxon Spends Millions on Facebook To Keep the Fossil Fuel Industry Alive*
Aided by a right-wing political consulting firm, the company is rallying 
supporters to fight for oil and gas interests at every level of government.
CHRISTINE MACDONALD OCTOBER 20, 2020
- -
As GOP digital strategist Mindy Finn explained to Politico: “[Digital 
organizing is] not just raw numbers. It’s analyzing and determining who 
those people [who are engaging] are and matching them back to voter 
profiles. … It’s not having the most Facebook likes and clicks, because 
the ‘who’ matters.”

While only age, sex and state information for each ad is provided by the 
Facebook Ad Library, Facebook allows ad buyers to target ads based on 
actual online behavior, in addition to self-reported characteristics 
like work and education. It can target using online shopping and 
browsing history, for example, and whether a person is likely to engage 
with conservative or liberal political content.

“With that kind of targeting,” Lucy Purdon says, “you don’t know what 
information has been gathered about you, from who, and how you’ve been 
targeted.”

“Facebook says it’s not a one-to-one match of an identifiable 
individual,” says digital technology critic Sara Watson, “but the more 
elements that you start to target against,” the closer you can get to 
identifying individual people.

Exxon’s social media approach is unusually brazen, according to Collins 
of InfluenceMap. He tells In These Times that Exxon’s use of social 
media to lobby the public goes way beyond the rest of the industry, a 
claim supported by the company’s abnormally high spending on Facebook 
political ads. Typically, such tactics would be used by political 
organizations or trade associations, not directly by corporations...
- -
In the 11,622 Exxon ads examined for this article, on average, 16% of 
those who saw each ad were men older than 65, 16% women older than 65, 
and another 16% men between 55 and 64. In contrast, only about 15% were 
users 18 – 34 (of any gender). Despite the fact that people older than 
65 were a third of those who saw a typical Exxon ad, the group 
represents only 16% of the total U.S. population. Furthermore, younger 
people use social media more than older ones. Pew Research Center has 
used polling to track social media adoption for the past several years, 
reporting last year that 79% people 18- to 29-years-old are on Facebook 
and 67% use Instagram, compared to just 46% and 8%, respectively, of 
senior citizens. Although both Facebook and Exxon declined to comment on 
what filters Exxon uses to target its ads, this disproportionality 
suggests the ads are not being sent at random...
Since Exxon’s primary business does not involve selling directly to 
individuals (the company decided to exit the gas station business in 
2008), Watson says Exxon’s personal targeting could build a case for 
consumer protection, since “most consumers should not have a direct 
relationship with Exxon.” She adds, “So what right does Exxon have in 
collecting any consumer data at all, aside from aggregate information 
about consumer trends?”...
- -
“It breaks my heart,” says climate scientist Peter Kalmus, “that we are 
basically skewing the planet’s future for the next 10 million years in 
exchange for a few more years of fracking, of fossil fuel CEOs raking in 
record profits. … It’s just madness.”...
- -
But the trend is clear: Exxon turns to social media to push its national 
agenda and try to reverse its general waning public support. Exxon spent 
up to $1.4 million on social media ads promoting pipeline jobs, for 
example, appearing 40 million times over the two-year period 
investigated for this article and particularly targeting residents in 
states such as Michigan, where pipeline construction is controversial. 
Other ads pushed for offshore drilling in federal waters and the new 
trade agreement with Canada and Mexico...
- -
“Quite frankly, grassroots lobbying is probably the lion’s share of 
lobbying that goes on at the federal and state levels — and it goes 
entirely unreported,” says Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist 
with the nonprofit group Public Citizen. “As long as [lobbyists] don’t 
actually knock on the door in D.C. of a member of Congress, it’s not 
actually reported.”

Reported or not, indirect lobbying is changing the corporate lobbying 
business, as illustrated by the 2019 annual report of the New York State 
Joint Commission. In New York state alone in 2019, 24% of registered 
lobbyists had expanded into indirect lobbying efforts, though only 1% 
engage exclusively in indirect lobbying. Out of a total of $16.8 million 
that lobbyists spent on advertising in 2019, digital advocacy and 
websites accounted for $3.6 million, surpassing the $2.9 million spent 
on print advertising.

Holman adds that the extent of Exxon’s social media operation “probably 
is evidence that [indirect lobbying] is far more prevalent today than it 
used to be. Social media now and the internet provide a perfect vehicle 
for deceptive advertising.”

“Companies will do it until they can’t,” says Sara Watson. “Facebook 
and other platforms aren’t going to care about it until the public 
cares.”...
- -
Stephanie Prufer, an oceans campaigner at the Center for Biological 
Diversity, says she doesn’t think Exxon’s strategy will work for the 
company, especially among youth.

“I’m not surprised that Exxon is targeting the demographic that they 
are,” she says, referring to the fact that Exxon ads disproportionately 
appear on the screens of older social media users. “They know they are 
not going to be able to get the support of people who are afraid for 
their own futures. I’m 24 and I worry every single day about what will 
become of my future if the oil companies keep drilling.”

“The science is so clear,” she adds. “We need to keep oil in the 
ground. We need to end drilling on our coast, not revive it.”
https://inthesetimes.com/article/exxon-facebook-instagram-advertising-fracking-climate-fossil-fuels

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - January 26, 2014 *

The New York Times reports on state-level efforts by Republicans to 
promote renewable energy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/us/politics/fissures-in-gop-as-some-conservatives-embrace-renewable-energy.html 

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