[TheClimate.Vote] March 4, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*March 4, 2021*/

[following the money]
*Exxon vs activists: can disenchanted investors force change?*
CEO Darren Woods faces a campaign for board reform and a shift in strategy
- -
“It’s not surprising that you’re seeing an activist investor,” he added. 
“What makes it surprising is the size of the company — it’s Exxon.”

The message is similar from several other big investors. Resentment at 
Exxon’s perceived offhand treatment of shareholders and hostility to 
change, coupled with the impression that it is not taking climate change 
risks as seriously as investors do, is breeding discontent.

“They haven’t played the environmental game very well, and ticked off 
that crowd,” said an executive at an asset manager with a large position 
in the company. “And their returns are terrible. They’ve kind of spun 
cash away and pissed off the pure-play financial investors.”
- -
https://www.ft.com/content/3f73a55b-ac59-4737-b7c8-2f575d32920b


[brief interview with a professor of public policy ]
*Daniel Cohan PhD: The "Systemic Collapse" of Gas in Texas' Blackout*
Mar 3, 2021
greenmanbucket
What made natural gas "uniquely vulnerable" to collapse during the Texas 
Freeze and Blackout of February 2021?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaJlGW2jwHs



[Weather from global warming]
*A Small Hint of Big Trouble in the Oceans*
Some scientists fear that meltwater from Greenland may be affecting 
ocean currents that help regulate far-reaching weather patterns.
March 3, 2021
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff and Jeremy White
A northern branch of the Gulf Stream — the vast ocean current that runs 
from West Africa to the Americas, up the East Coast and back across the 
Atlantic to the British Isles — has served for ages as a kind of 
planetary heat pump that helps regulate the planet’s climate.

Now, some scientists think melting ice from Greenland could be 
inhibiting this crucial northern branch of the current. If that’s the 
case, they fear, the meltwater could tip the delicate balance of hot and 
cold that defines not only conditions around the North Atlantic, but 
life far and wide.

To learn more, researchers have slung necklace-like sensor arrays across 
the ocean, not only on the surface, but hundreds of feet deep.

Why it matters: Consequences could include faster sea level rise along 
parts of the Eastern United States and Europe, stronger hurricanes 
barreling into the Southeastern United States, and perhaps most 
ominously, reduced rainfall across the Sahel, the semi-arid swath of 
land running the width of Africa that is already a geopolitical tinderbox...
*Quotable: *“We’re all wishing it’s not true,” Peter de Menocal, 
president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said 
of the shifting ocean currents. “Because if that happens, it’s just a 
monstrous change.”...
- -
*The big picture:* Other cities and counties face similar climate 
challenges, and they’ll watch to see whether Miami can adapt without 
crimping its coastal real-estate market.

*Quotable: *“What adaptation actually means — and that’s the scary part, 
I think, for many elected officials and administrators — is adaptation 
may mean ceding land,” said Mike Hernández, a Democratic consultant who 
worked for the previous county mayor. “It’s unfortunately not going to 
be pretty.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/climate/a-small-hint-of-big-trouble-in-the-oceans.html



[highway washouts]
*California's Pacific Coast Highway is falling into the ocean. Is this 
the end of the road for one of America's most scenic drives?*
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/03/pch-climate-change-california-big-sur-highway-1/4560256001/

- -

[Opinion]
*Some of Our Highways Are Missing*
By Tom Lewis | March 2, 2021
The term “coastal highway” is fast becoming an oxymoron in the age of 
global climate change — which, while we were distracted by Donald Trump 
denying that it was coming, has arrived. The triple threat of rising sea 
levels, intensified storms and, on the west coast at least, raging 
wildfires has made it increasingly difficult and expensive to keep 
seaside roads open.

California’s spectacular Highway 1, for example, whose 650 miles of 
breathtaking views are on bucket lists around the world and draw 
millions of tourists every year, is seldom completely open from one end 
to the other. The latest worst case scenario was a landslide of mud 
scoured from 125,000 acres of land burned over by a wildfire, by a 
record 16-inch rainfall, which wiped out 150 feet of the highway 165 
miles south of San Francisco, closing a 23-mile stretch for months.

Three years ago, a similar slide 140 miles south of San Francisco buried 
a quarter mile of the highway and relocated 15 acres of land. That 
repair took a year and cost $54 million. In a little over 5 years, 
keeping the road open has cost California $200 million in emergency funds.

Highway engineers are increasingly desperate. Debris from wrecked 
seawalls thrown up to buy some time litter the shore for miles along the 
highway. Plans are afoot to relocate 40 miles of the road much farther 
inland. Which of course will leave 610 miles of road still exposed.

On the other coast, similar desperation is rising around Florida’s 
Highway One, especially south of Miami as it reaches for the Keys. The 
highway and its associated networks of streets that serve the small Keys 
communities are at sea level, and are increasingly plagued by what 
Floridians now call “sunny-day flooding” — floods that are not caused by 
rain or storm, but simply by the rising sea. Every spring and fall, 
so-called king tides, augmented by the proximity of the moon and sun to 
the earth, bring the worst of sunny day flooding.

During the fall king tides of 2019, parts of the highway system serving 
the Keys stayed underwater for 90 days.  In the fall of 2020, large 
sections of Key Largo had to deal with submerged streets and highways 
for 82 straight days. They Keyshave asked the state for an emergency 
appropriation of $150 million to deal with sea level rise. (Until 
recently, the Florida state government forbade the use of the terms 
“global warming,” or “sea level rise” in state applications, legislation 
or official documents of any kind. The ban had no effect on the problem, 
however, and has since been abandoned.)

If approved, it will take almost all the emergency funds to do one 
project — to raise the level of a three mile stretch of highway on 
Sugarloaf Key, where 30 people live. So that’s taken care of then, 
mission accomplished. It’s only 166 miles from Miami to Key West.

Slowly, reluctantly, and with great strife, the communities of the Keys, 
along with many towns and cities along the coastal highway in 
California, Oregon and Washington, are beginning to face the fact that 
they cannot win this fight. You can ignore it, you can prohibit 
discussion of it, but there is no way to ignore the fact that the water 
has reached your knees and is still rising. (King Canute, please go to 
the nearest courtesy phone, you have an urgent call.)

  In 2019, the Keys began a program of buying and demolishing homes 
substantially damaged by Hurricane Irma, focusing on the ones most in 
danger from rising sea levels. Similar struggles began at the same time 
in places such as Packifica, Imperial Beach and about40 other 
communities in California and along the west coast; Norfolk, Virginia 
and South Miami Beach, Florida. (See “Don’t Say Anything, But We’re 
Losing This War,” the Daily Impact July 16, 2019)

In every one of the places where this is happening the situation is 
highly fraught, the contention between those trying to face reality and 
those who prefer to scream, “You have no right to take my house,” at 
fever pitch to start, with nowhere to go but worse. We are about to 
learn what happens when the unstoppable —  climate change — meets the 
immovable — the profoundly ignorant and supremely arrogant know-nothings 
who make up a distressing proportion of America’s ruling class.
http://www.dailyimpact.net/2021/03/02/some-of-our-highways-are-missing/



[because analysts should never be surprised by the future]
*Why The Intelligence Community Needs a Climate Change Task Force*
Kristin Wood, Sr. Climate Editor, The Cipher Brief
Erin Sikorsky, Deputy Director, Center for Climate and Security
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — President Biden’s 27 January Executive Order (EO) 
on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad demonstrates a strong 
commitment to preparing the United States for addressing the climate 
crisis. It assigns experienced climate experts into powerful new roles 
and issues extensive orders for a whole-of-government response. This 
article analyzes the Intelligence Community aspects of the EO.

For national security agencies, the EO orders agencies to assess within 
90 days:

    —  Climate impacts relevant to broad agency strategies in particular
    countries or regions;

    —  Climate impacts on their agency-managed infrastructure abroad
    (e.g., embassies, military installations), without prejudice to
    existing requirements regarding assessment of such infrastructure;

    —  How the agency intends to manage such impacts or incorporate risk
    mitigation into its installation master plans; and

    —   How the agency’s international work, including partner
    engagement, can contribute to addressing the climate crisis.

Fully maximizing the effectiveness of the 18 IC agencies’ individual 
responses to the EO will require a coordinated strategy. While the EO 
calls for a National Intelligence Estimate on climate change, 
representing coordinated analysis among all agencies is only one piece 
of the puzzle.

Building a true climate security intelligence strategy will require an 
evaluation of how the IC’s core missions of collection and analysis can 
contribute to addressing climate threats. This will require an 
assessment of the IC’s people, programs and policies as well as what is 
missing, what needs to be adjusted, and what new skills, capabilities 
and resources are required.

The overriding question for collection and analysis is: what decision 
advantage can the IC offer the President when it comes to climate 
issues?  What unique climate change-related information can the 
intelligence community collect and analyze that would serve US national 
security? Are there new forms of collection and analysis, especially 
scientific analysis needed? How could the CIA’s unique capabilities, for 
example, be brought to bear? A rigorous process aimed at answering these 
questions should examine what new requirements need to be levied, what 
new sources HUMINT, SIGINT, and other collectors need to find, and what 
partnerships need to be deepened or created.

To conduct this evaluation, we suggest creating an ODNI National 
Security and Climate Change Task Force that looks at each agency’s 
contributions to the EO and stitches them into a whole-of-IC approach to 
climate across all missions. A blue-ribbon panel of climate and security 
experts from both outside and inside government would offer a fresh 
perspective on how the IC could best contribute to tackling this 
mission.  In addition to offering expertise that mostly resides outside 
the IC, external participants would be a check on agencies’ tendencies, 
which we’ve experienced multiple times over the decades, to relabel 
existing entities with a new name as an answer to executive requirements.

Such a task force is likely to identify necessary adjustments to IC 
spending, personnel, and infrastructure. Additional leadership positions 
or new structures within agencies may be needed to implement task force 
recommendations in the longer term. For example, better integration of 
climate modeling and data, open-source collection, and classified 
information may require new tools and new teams to fully implement. On 
top of adjustments to collection and analysis, the IC also must consider 
direct climate change risks to its facilities and infrastructure. 
Therefore, the task force should include an IC Climate Resilience and 
Adaptation Subcommittee with finance, facilities and security expertise.

We offer below some issues such a task force could consider, drawn from 
engagements with hundreds of experts on climate security issues over the 
past few years:

IC strategic foresight and early warning capabilities and talent have 
been diminished over time by other priorities. They are very much needed 
to support threat anticipation and preparedness on a range of 
intersecting risks linked to climate change, from water and food 
insecurity, regional conflicts, infectious diseases, and natural 
disasters. Global trends work — often relegated to the physical and 
metaphorical basement — needs to be front and center. The Biden 
Administration has already signaled its prioritization of a more 
integrated approach to monitoring global threats by its call for the 
creation of a National Center for Epidemic Forecasting and Outbreak 
Analytics to modernize global early warning and trigger systems to 
prevent, detect, and respond to biological threats. The types of 
contributions the IC would make to such a center could and should be 
replicated in the climate security realm.
Climate security risks also create opportunities to use the CIA’s unique 
overseas partnerships in new ways. CIA stations and bases would be ideal 
leadership nodes for partnering on climate change, allowing the Agency 
to tap into existing liaison relationships to generate projections that 
no one else could. The CIA could play a critical role in helping US 
policymakers understand other countries’ plans and intentions to respond 
to climate security threats. Additionally, climate change could be an 
area of partnership with countries such as Russia and China.
While conducting climate science within the US government will remain 
the purview of scientific agencies such as NOAA, NASA, and others, IC 
agencies need more personnel with scientific literacy and backgrounds. 
At a minimum, agencies will need more climate scientists on their teams 
and closer partnerships with them so that deep scientific understanding 
is included in collection requirements and analytic writing.
Finally, we note the National Climate Task Force created by the EO does 
not include the DNI as a member. While that seems a logical choice as 
the task force is focused domestically, the reality is that the division 
between foreign and domestic operations just doesn’t work for climate. 
For example, the IC can answer foreign policy and homeland security 
questions on topics such as prospects for climate-expanded migration to 
US borders, actual versus publicly provided achievement of other 
countries’ climate objectives, among many other things. The IC can also 
leverage its unique capabilities to understand how other actors are 
responding to climate change effects–i.e., not just what will they do in 
emissions negotiations, but explain how issues such as water scarcity 
concerns drive Chinese foreign policy in the region.

As President Biden said when signing the climate executive order last 
month, his action made “it official that climate change will be the 
center of our national security and foreign policy.” The security 
threats posed by climate change grow with each passing day and 
addressing them requires innovation and new conceptions of national 
security. As it has so many times before, on many different threats, the 
IC can and should step up to play a leading, transformative role on 
climate security risks, integrating across missions to deliver the most 
insightful analysis possible in support of the President’s directive and 
in service to the American people.
https://climateandsecurity.org/2021/03/why-the-intelligence-community-needs-a-climate-change-task-force/
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/article/climate/why-the-intelligence-community-needs-a-climate-change-task-force


[professional government]
*Reversing Trump, Interior Department Moves Swiftly on Climate Change*
By Lisa Friedman - Updated March 3, 2021,
WASHINGTON — As the Interior Department awaits its new secretary, the 
agency is already moving to lock in key parts of President Biden’s 
environmental agenda, particularly on oil and gas restrictions, laying 
the groundwork to fulfill some of the administration’s most 
consequential climate change promises.

Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico, Mr. Biden’s nominee to lead 
the department, faces a showdown vote in the Senate likely later this 
month, amid vocal Republican concern for her past positions against oil 
and gas drilling. But even without her, an agency that spent much of the 
past four years opening vast swaths of land to commercial exploitation 
has pulled an abrupt about-face.

The department has suspended lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico under an 
early executive order imposing a temporary freeze on new drilling leases 
on all public lands and waters and requiring a review of the leasing 
program. It has frozen drilling activity in the Arctic National Wildlife 
Refuge, delayed Trump-era rollbacks on protections of migratory birds 
and the northern spotted owl, and taken the first steps in restoring two 
national monuments in Utah and one off the Atlantic coast that Mr. Trump 
largely dismantled.

As early as this week, one administration official said the Interior 
Department is poised to take the next steps in preparing a review of the 
federal oil and gas leasing program...

Even critics of the administration’s agenda said they have been 
surprised by the pace of the agency’s actions.

“They’re obviously moving forward quickly and aggressively,” said 
Nicolas Loris, an economist who focuses on environment policy at the 
conservative Heritage Foundation.

That aggressiveness, along with Ms. Haaland’s long history of pushing to 
shut down fossil fuel drilling and pipelines, has put the agency in the 
line of fire from Republicans and the oil and gas industry...

“I almost feel like your nomination is sort of this proxy fight over the 
future of fossil fuels,” Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, 
told Ms. Haaland during her confirmation hearing last week...

The Environmental Protection Agency will ultimately take center stage in 
the regulatory battles over climate change because it is the lead agency 
policing emissions from the electricity and transportation sectors — the 
two largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

But the Interior Department, which decides when and whether to sell 
publicly owned coal, oil and gas, is at the heart of the always 
contentious fight over keeping such resources “in the ground” — that is, 
whether the vast majority of America’s fossil fuels should remain 
untapped to avoid dangerous concentrations of greenhouse gases in the 
atmosphere.

Mr. Biden already has appointed nearly 50 top Interior officials across 
the vast agency, many of them veterans of the Obama administration, 
adept at pulling the levers of policy. They include Kate Kelly, who 
spent six years at the Interior Department before going to the liberal 
Center for American Progress where she focused on public lands policy, 
and Laura Daniel Davis who served as chief of staff to former 
secretaries Sally Jewell and Ken Salazar. This time around, she is a 
principal deputy assistant secretary over land and minerals management.

Perhaps the most significant driver of the agency’s most aggressive 
early action, supporters of the administration said, has been David 
Hayes, who served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations as 
deputy secretary of Interior. Mr. Hayes worked on Mr. Biden’s transition 
and ahead of Inauguration Day was tapped to be a special adviser to the 
president on climate change policy.

“These are people who know how to get things done,” said Sarah 
Greenberger, interim chief conservation officer at the National Audubon 
Society.

The appointments have had immediate effects. The day after Mr. Biden 
named a new offshore energy regulator at the Bureau of Ocean Energy 
Management, for example, the office revived the review of an offshore 
wind farm near Martha’s Vineyard that the Trump administration had moved 
to cancel...

Ms. Greenberger noted that actions like suspending the Trump-era rule 
that gutted protections for migratory birds required particularly fast 
planning since the Biden administration had only a short window to act 
before the rule was set to take effect, on Feb. 8. Similarly when an 
Alaska Native group missed a deadline to conduct a seismic survey in the 
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the department moved to effectively 
kill the survey.

“There was an enormous amount of thought put in during the transition, 
especially into understanding what needed to happen and what were the 
opportunities,” Ms. Greenberg said.

Critics took a dimmer view.

“Makes you wonder if they’re treating the new secretary as a figurehead 
and the deputies are going forward with what they had planned 
regardless,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy 
Alliance, a Denver-based oil and natural gas association.

In a statement Jennifer Van der Heide, chief of staff at the Department 
of Interior, said those already in place at the agency are working to 
implement Mr. Biden’s campaign promises until Ms. Haaland is confirmed.

“There are some actions we can or must move quickly on, but when we have 
a secretary, she will provide the leadership, experience and vision to 
restore morale within the department, build a clean energy economy, 
strengthen the nation-to-nation relationships with tribes, and inspire a 
movement to better conserve our nation’s lands, waters, and wildlife,” 
Ms. Van der Heide said.

The Interior Department manages about 500 million acres of public lands 
and vast coastal waters. Its agencies lease many of those acres for oil 
and gas drilling as well as wind and solar farms. It oversees the 
country’s national parks and wildlife refuges, protects threatened and 
endangered species, reclaims abandoned mine sites, oversees the 
government’s relationship with the nation’s 574 federally recognized 
tribes, and provides scientific data about the effects of climate change...

That sprawling range of authorities has allowed Interior to move more 
quickly than smaller agencies that rely more on the slow churn of 
regulations, experts noted. Interior has initiated consultations with 
tribal leaders to hear their suggestions on federal policies and 
reversed restrictions that Mr. Trump’s Interior secretary, David 
Bernhardt, had imposed on the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which 
prevented money from being used to buy public land.

But some major actions — such as an expected revision of the Endangered 
Species Act, which Mr. Trump’s administration curtailed through 
regulation — must await a Senate-confirmed secretary.

Mr. Biden’s Interior Department will ultimately be defined by its 
reversals on fossil fuels after four years in which the Trump 
administration aggressively pursued energy production on public lands.

At Ms. Haaland’s confirmation hearing Senator John Barrasso, Republican 
of Wyoming, noted that she has advocated for keeping fossil fuels “in 
the ground.” He pressed her on where oil and gas workers in his state 
and others that depend on drilling will work if Mr. Biden’s drilling 
pause becomes permanent.

Ms. Haaland sought to reassure Republicans that she would enact Mr. 
Biden’s policies of pausing future fracking, not banning it. In fact, 
Mr. Biden’s position is not far from Ms. Haaland’s. He campaigned on a 
promise of “banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and 
waters,” and it remains unclear for now whether the Biden administration 
will move forward with a permanent moratorium.

Ms. Sgamma, whose group has filed a lawsuit challenging Mr. Biden’s 
executive order, said she believes the administration’s review of the 
leasing program is actually designed to drag on for the duration of Mr. 
Biden’s term.

“In the meantime, we will expect no leasing and a slowdown in other 
permitted activity. That’s why this is not a pause’ on leasing,” she 
said, adding, “Whether you call it a ‘pause’ or a yearslong ban, it is 
unlawful and I like our chances in court.”

Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation at EarthJustice, an 
environmental group, said he hopes the early pause will be a down 
payment on Mr. Biden’s campaign pledge.

“The climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis isn’t standing still,” 
he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/climate/biden-interior-department-haaland.html



[Big ice]
*Radar images capture new Antarctic mega-iceberg*
By Jonathan Amos
BBC Science Correspondent
Radar satellites got their first good look at Antarctica's new 
mega-iceberg over the weekend.

The EU's Sentinel-1 and Germany's TerraSAR-X spacecraft both had passes 
over the 1,290-sq-km (500-sq-mile) block, informally named "A74".

Their sensors showed the berg to have moved rapidly away from the Brunt 
Ice Shelf - the floating platform from which it calved on Friday.

The good news is that no disturbance was felt at the UK's nearby base.

The Halley research station is sited just over 20km from the line of 
fracture, but GPS stations installed around the facility reported 
continued stability.

"We didn't think there would be a reaction simply because, 
glaciologically speaking, the ice around Halley is slightly separated 
from the area that produced A74; there's not a good way for stress to be 
transmitted across to the ice under the station," explained Dr Oliver 
Marsh from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

"Since Friday's calving, we've had a lot more high-precision GPS data 
that measures centimetre changes in strain along a whole range of 
baselines, and none of these show anything different from what was 
happening before the calving," he told BBC News...
https://twitter.com/laura_gerrish/status/1366331794900017160
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56241503



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - March 4, 2013 *

On Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," Daryl Hannah discusses the 
documentary "Greedy Lying Bastards."

http://video.foxnews.com/v/2203432541001/daryl-hannah-enters-no-spin-zone/#sp=show-clips


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