[TheClimate.Vote] March 30, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Tue Mar 30 12:20:22 EDT 2021
/*March 30, 2021*/
[early flowers]
*Japan’s Kyoto cherry blossoms peak on earliest date in 1,200 years, a
sign of climate change*
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/03/29/japan-kyoto-cherry-blossoms-record/
- -
[early fires]
*'Active and dangerous scene': Mount Rushmore closed, 400 homes
evacuated as multiple wildfires spread in South Dakota*
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/29/south-dakota-wildfires-mount-rushmore-evacuations-power-outages/7054347002/
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[early melting]
*This Russian Arctic coast has planet's quickest warming*
Parts of the Russian Arctic were up to 7℃ warmer than normal in 2020.
Massive melting of sea-ice on the Northern Sea Route now paves the way
for a hike in shipping.
March 29, 2021
It was the second warmest year in the Arctic on record, and parts of the
vast region saw air temperatures far beyond the traditional freeze. The
year 2020 follows the trend of the past decades and its spring months
were the absolutely warmest since measurements started more than 100
years ago, a weather report from Russian meteorological service
Roshydromet reads...
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/climate-crisis/2021/03/unprecedented-arctic-warming-opens-gates-northern-sea-route
- -
[overview video]
*Arctic disintegration is worse than we thought.*
Sep 13, 2020
Just Have a Think
Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than we thought! That's a phrase
we've seen so often in the news recently that it's become quite easy to
just tune it out. But a raft of research published in the Summer of 2020
finds that it's not just the sea ice but ALL of the feedbacks loops in
the region that are gaining pace at an alarming rate, including the
atmospheric temperature, the heat stored in the oceans, the release of
methane from thawing permafrost and the melting of the Greenland ice
sheet, all of which directly contribute to the catastrophic climate
change we're witnessing everywhere on the planet.
Video Transcripts available at our website
http://www.justhaveathink.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz6WxTH-p3o
- -
[a classic rant]
*Blue Ocean Event : Game Over?*
Apr 7, 2019
Just Have a Think
A Blue Ocean Event, or Ice-Free Arctic, is the source of almost fever
pitch speculation in the climate science world. The consequences of the
disappearance of sea ice from the arctic ocean, however briefly, at the
end of a summer melt season some time in the not too distant future, are
potentially very ominous for the way we organise our human
socio-economic structures today. This week, we consider what those
consequences may look like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo3cznpfIpA
- -
[Wikipedia article]
*Tipping points in the climate system*
["Runaway climate change" redirects here. It is not to be confused with
Runaway greenhouse effect.]
Possible tipping elements in the climate system.
Interactions of climate tipping points (bottom) with associated tipping
points in the socioeconomic system (top) on different time scales. [1]
A tipping point in the climate system is a threshold that, when
exceeded, can lead to large changes in the state of the system.
Potential tipping points have been identified in the physical climate
system, in impacted ecosystems, and sometimes in both.[2] For instance,
feedback from the global carbon cycle is a driver for the transition
between glacial and interglacial periods, with orbital forcing providing
the initial trigger.[3] Earth's geologic temperature record includes
many more examples of geologically rapid transitions between different
climate states.
see graphic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_system#/media/File:Social_tipping_dynamics_for_stabilizing_Earth%E2%80%99s_climate_by_2050_-_Figure_3_-_Social_tipping_elements_and_associated_social_tipping_interventions_with_the_potential_to_drive_rapid_decarbonization_in_the_World%E2%80%93Earth_system.jpg
Climate tipping points are of particular interest in reference to
concerns about global warming in the modern era. Possible tipping point
behaviour has been identified for the global mean surface temperature by
studying self-reinforcing feedbacks and the past behavior of Earth's
climate system. Self-reinforcing feedbacks in the carbon cycle and
planetary reflectivity could trigger a cascading set of tipping points
that lead the world into a hothouse climate state.[5][6]
Large-scale components of the Earth system that may pass a tipping point
have been referred to as tipping elements.[7] Tipping elements are found
in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, possibly causing tens of
meters of sea level rise. These tipping points are not always abrupt.
For example, at some level of temperature rise the melt of a large part
of the Greenland ice sheet and/or West Antarctic Ice Sheet will become
inevitable; but the ice sheet itself may persist for many centuries.[8]
Some tipping elements, like the collapse of ecosystems, are irreversible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_system
[Journal of Frontiers in Forests and Global Change - says the CO2 sink
is becoming a source]
*Carbon and Beyond: The Biogeochemistry of Climate in a Rapidly Changing
Amazon*
The Amazon Basin is at the center of an intensifying discourse about
deforestation, land-use, and global change. To date, climate
research in the Basin has overwhelmingly focused on the cycling and
storage of carbon (C) and its implications for global climate.
Missing, however, is a more comprehensive consideration of other
significant biophysical climate feedbacks [i.e., CH4, N2O, black
carbon, biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs), aerosols,
evapotranspiration, and albedo] and their dynamic responses to both
localized (fire, land-use change, infrastructure development, and
storms) and global (warming, drying, and some related to El Niño or
to warming in the tropical Atlantic) changes. Here, we synthesize
the current understanding of (1) sources and fluxes of all major
forcing agents, (2) the demonstrated or expected impact of global
and local changes on each agent, and (3) the nature, extent, and
drivers of anthropogenic change in the Basin. We highlight the large
uncertainty in flux magnitude and responses, and their corresponding
direct and indirect effects on the regional and global climate
system. Despite uncertainty in their responses to change, we
conclude that current warming from non-CO2 agents (especially CH4
and N2O) in the Amazon Basin largely offsets—and most likely
exceeds—the climate service provided by atmospheric CO2 uptake. We
also find that the majority of anthropogenic impacts act to increase
the radiative forcing potential of the Basin. Given the large
contribution of less-recognized agents (e.g., Amazonian trees alone
emit ~3.5% of all global CH4), a continuing focus on a single metric
(i.e., C uptake and storage) is incompatible with genuine efforts to
understand and manage the biogeochemistry of climate in a rapidly
changing Amazon Basin.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2021.618401/full
[really? really?]
*Should We Block the Sun? Scientists Say the Time Has Come to Study It.*
The National Academies said the United States must study technologies
that would artificially cool the planet by reflecting away some
sunlight, citing the lack of progress fighting global warming.
WASHINGTON — The idea of artificially cooling the planet to blunt
climate change — in effect, blocking sunlight before it can warm the
atmosphere — got a boost on Thursday when an influential scientific body
urged the United States government to spend at least $100 million to
research the technology.
That technology, often called solar geoengineering, entails reflecting
more of the sun’s energy back into space through techniques that include
injecting aerosols into the atmosphere. In a new report, the National
Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said that governments
urgently need to know whether solar geoengineering could work and what
the side effects might be.
“Solar geoengineering is not a substitute for decarbonizing,” said Chris
Field, director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford
University and head of the committee that produced the report, referring
to the need to emit less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into
the atmosphere. Still, he said, technology to reflect sunlight “deserves
substantial funding, and it should be researched as rapidly and
effectively as possible.”
The report acknowledged the risks that have made geoengineering one of
the most contentious issues in climate policy. Those risks include
upsetting regional weather patterns in potentially devastating ways, for
example by changing the behavior of the monsoon in South Asia; relaxing
public pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and even creating an
“unacceptable risk of catastrophically rapid warming” if governments
started reflecting sunlight for a period of time, and then later stopped.
But the authors argue that greenhouse gas emissions are not falling
quickly enough to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, which means
the world must begin to examine other options. Evidence for or against
solar geoengineering, they found, “could have profound value” in guiding
decisions about whether to deploy it.
That includes evidence about what the authors called the social risks:
For example, if research showed that the side effects would be
concentrated in poorer nations, Dr. Field said, it could be grounds not
to pursue the technology, even if it benefited the world as a whole.
The report also argued that by publicly funding geoengineering research,
the United States could ensure that the work is transparent and
accountable to the public, with clear rules about when and how to test
the technology.
Some critics said those safeguards weren’t enough.
The steps urged in the report to protect the interests of poorer
countries — for example, accounting for farmers in South Asia whose
lives could be upended by changes in rain patterns — could fall away
once the research begins, according to Prakash Kashwan, a professor of
political science at the University of Connecticut.
“Once these kinds of projects get into the political process, the
scientists who are adding all of these qualifiers, and all of these
cautionary notes, aren’t in control,” Dr. Kashwan said.
Jennie Stephens, director of the School of Public Policy and Urban
Affairs at Northeastern University, said that geoengineering research
takes money and attention from the core problem, which is cutting
emissions and helping vulnerable communities cope with the climate
disruptions that are already happening.
“We need to double down on bigger transformative changes,” Dr. Stephens
said. “That’s where the investment needs to be.”
Solar geoengineering has bipartisan support in Congress, which in late
2019 gave the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration $4 million
to research the technology.
“America needs to be on the cutting edge of climate research,”
Representative John Curtis, Republican of Utah, said in a statement.
“More knowledge is always better.”
The calculation could be more difficult for President Biden, who has
tried to gain the support of the party’s progressive wing, some of whom
are skeptical about geoengineering. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont
has called it a “false solution,” grouping it with nuclear power or
capturing carbon dioxide and burying it underground.
Asked for comment on the report, a White House spokesman, Vedant Patel,
said by email that President Biden “has been clear about addressing the
climate crisis.” He added, “innovative solutions that can help
accomplish this should be looked into and studied.”
Tylar Greene, a spokeswoman for NASA, which helped fund the report, said
in a statement that “we look forward to reviewing the report, examining
recommendations, and exploring how NASA and its research community can
support this effort.”
Ko Barrett, deputy assistant administrator at NOAA, which also helped
fund the report, said in a statement that the agency looked forward to
“carefully reviewing” it. The Department of Energy, another funder,
didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The endorsement by the National Academies might make some lawmakers feel
more comfortable supporting the technology, according to Michael
Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the
Columbia Law School and editor of a book on solar geoengineering.
And rather than causing people to care less about curbing greenhouse gas
emissions, he said, a large new federal research program into
geoengineering might have the opposite effect: Jolting the public into
taking climate change seriously by demonstrating that more extreme and
dangerous options may soon be necessary.
“It could be so scary that people will be even more motivated to reduce
emissions,” Mr. Gerrard said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/climate/geoengineering-sunlight.html
[heaping blame onto affluence]
*Cutting your carbon footprint matters a lot — if you’re rich*
A new book pushes back against the narrative that individual actions
make little difference to the climate.
Maddie Stone - Mar 25, 2021
It was the summer of 2012 when sustainability scientist Kimberly
Nicholas decided she couldn’t live like this anymore. She was attending
a climate change conference in Austria, listening to talk after talk
about how bad global warming was and how much worse it was going to get.
All the while, Nicholas was thinking about all of the planet-heating
carbon that she, like most other attendees, had dumped into the
atmosphere by flying there.
“It really felt like a conference of doctors smoking cigarettes and
telling our patients to quit,” Nicholas said.
But after a beer with a U.K.-based friend who took a train to the
conference, Nicholas, who is American but lives and conducts research in
Sweden, realized something: She could have done that too. Since then,
Nicholas has stopped flying within Europe, cutting her air travel
emissions by 90 percent in the process. She has also stopped eating meat
and gone car-free. To ensure she’s making lifestyle changes that will
have the biggest carbon bang for their buck, Nicholas conducted
peer-reviewed research on the subject. In 2017, she and her colleague
Seth Wyens published a paper on the individual behavioral changes that
have the greatest benefits for the climate. Topping the list? Flying
less, followed by driving less and eating a plant-based diet.
Nicholas has now expanded that paper into a book, Under the Sky We Make.
A crash-course on why climate change is happening and how to fix it
interwoven with beautifully written, witty anecdotes about a scientist’s
personal journey toward sustainability, Under the Sky We Make pushes
back — politely, but with science — against the narrative that
individual actions make little difference to the climate. Rather, if
you’re a wealthy person living in a wealthy country, the book makes a
compelling case that your individual choices matter a lot. For the
“carbon elite,” as Nicholas describes her intended audience, the
decision to take fewer flights or install solar panels on your roof
materially reduces the amount of carbon in the sky forever, not least
because it can inspire similar behavioral changes amongst your peers.
“We all have to take responsibility for what we can control,” Nicholas
said. “And people like me, and like my friends from college who I
initially started writing this book for, are one of the major sources of
emissions.”
Individual responsibility has become something of a flashpoint in the
climate discourse. On the one hand, oil companies love to harp on about
personal carbon footprints as a way of distracting from their much
larger contributions to the climate crisis, both through the fossil fuel
products they make and their longstanding, ongoing efforts to delay
climate action and misinform the public. At the same time, prominent
journalists and scientists have waved off individual climate actions as
a distraction from the systemic changes that are needed to solve the
crisis — changes like overhauling our electricity and transit systems
through governmental investments in clean energy, better regulation, and
carbon pricing. They’re joined by a growing chorus of climate justice
advocates who rightly point out that asking poor people to make
difficult dietary shifts or give up the car they need to get to work is
completely unfair.
That’s not what Nicholas is doing. Her message isn’t aimed at folks
struggling to make ends meet, but at people making a middle-class income
or higher who live in a wealthy country like the United States, Germany,
or France. Far from a distraction, Nicholas argues that the climate
impact of the carbon elite is something we need to focus on —
individually and systematically. She points out that globally, more than
two-thirds of climate pollution can be attributed to household
consumption, and that the richest 10 percent of the world population —
those making more than $38,000 a year — is responsible for about half of
those emissions.
The wealthier you are, the higher your individual share of the carbon
pie tends to be due to “luxury emissions” associated with extra steak
dinners, owning and driving more cars, and the carbon footprint elephant
in the room, flying. Nicholas notes that the 1 percent of the world
population who fly most often are responsible for half of all air travel
emissions. (Flights are responsible for 2.4 percent of emissions
globally, but they drive an estimated 7.2 percent of warming due to
high-altitude atmospheric effects.) Wealthy high emitters, Nicholas
argues, must support policies that get the world to net-zero emissions
quickly, but they must also take steps to reduce their luxury emissions
in order to make the energy transition easier for everyone.
What is a billionaire’s role in saving the planet?
Eve Andrews
“The quicker that high-income folks reduce our own personal emissions to
a sustainable level, that makes a huge difference for how fast we can
actually make this transition happen,” Nicholas said.
Cutting back on luxury carbon emissions doesn’t have to be a sacrifice.
Nicholas says she’s had numerous adventures she wouldn’t have had
otherwise “by traveling more slowly and more creatively and more
adventurously” across Europe on the train. In 2017, when Georgia
Institute of Technology climate scientist Kim Cobb decided to start
biking 3 miles to work twice a week instead of driving, she says it
“seemed like a cliff I would never be able to fall off and not die.” A
month later, she was biking to work every day.
“It has become one of the true joys of my life,” Cobb told Grist. “And
I’m kicking myself for never trying it before. It keeps me wondering:
what other assumptions am I making about this transition in front of us
that are so deeply false?”
Cobb said that while most of her friends and colleagues are “just kind
of intrigued” by her new lifestyle choices, a few have been inspired to
start biking more themselves, or to install solar panels on their roofs
as Cobb did in 2019. In her book, Nicholas cites other examples of
personal climate actions having a social ripple effect, including how
teen climate activist Greta Thunberg and her mother, the opera singer
Malena Ernman, have helped bring about a no-fly movement in Sweden
through their individual decisions to stay on the ground.
Individual actions are no panacea. After reading Nicholas’ book, I used
the University of California, Berkeley’s Cool Climate Calculator to take
a peek at my own carbon footprint.* I was alarmed to discover that, at
around 25 metric tons of CO2 per year, it’s 10 times higher than the 2.5
metric tons per person per year researchers say we need to reach by 2030
to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). But when I
simulated doing everything I reasonably could do to reduce my footprint
in the calculator, including getting rid of my car and going vegan, my
footprint only shrank by 3 metric tons. I couldn’t very well stop eating
entirely, and as much as I’d like to, I can’t afford to retrofit my
natural gas-heated home to use an electric heat pump instead.
- -
_Under the Sky We Make _is a breezy field guide on how to align your
lifestyle with your values that avoids being overly prescriptive. That’s
perhaps best illustrated by the book’s neutrality on one of the most
controversial climate choices of all: whether or not to have kids. While
Nicholas’ 2017 study found that having one more kid — and bringing an
additional lifetime worth of emissions into the world in the process —
was the single most significant individual climate choice a person could
make, she sees it as more of a philosophical decision than a scientific
one.
After all, Nicholas argues, the adults alive today will create the
climate conditions that future generations will inherit. If we make the
right decisions, children not yet born will have a world they can thrive
in. Whether those are our kids, or members of the global community we’re
fighting to secure a future for, the sky they live under will be the one
that we make for them.
https://grist.org/culture/cutting-your-carbon-footprint-matters-a-lot-if-youre-rich/
[Notice how this appears in a foreign press ]
*The lawyer who took on Chevron – and now marks his 600th day under
house arrest*
Steven Donziger has been detained at home since August 2019, the result
of a Kafkaesque legal battle stemming from his crusade on behalf of
Indigenous Amazonians
Oliver Milman - Sun 28 Mar 2021
Many of us will have felt the grip of claustrophobic isolation over the
past year, but the lawyer Steven Donziger has experienced an extreme,
very personal confinement as a pandemic arrived and then raged around
him in New York City.
On Sunday, Donziger reached his 600th day of an unprecedented house
arrest that has resulted from a sprawling, Kafkaesque legal battle with
the oil giant Chevron. Donziger spearheaded a lengthy crusade against
the company on behalf of tens of thousands of Indigenous people in the
Amazon rainforest whose homes and health were devastated by oil
pollution, only to himself become, as he describes it, the victim of a
“planned targeting by a corporation to destroy my life”.
Since August 2019, Donziger has been restricted to his elegant Manhattan
apartment, a clunky court-mandated monitoring bracelet he calls “the
black claw” continuously strapped to his left ankle. He cannot even
venture into the hallway, or to pick up his mail. Exempted excursions
for medical appointments or major school events for his 14-year-old son
require permission days in advance. An indoor bike sits by the front
door in lieu of alternative exercise options.
“There’s no comparison to quarantine because I can’t even go outside for
a walk. If my kid is sick I can’t go to the drug store to get a
prescription,” Donziger said. “I never truly understood freedom until I
was put in this situation.”
The nights are hardest for Donziger, when he has to struggle to get his
jeans off over the boxy tag and lie in bed next to his wife “with the
government still there on my ankle”. Each morning he wakes up in angst.
A flag reading “SOS Free Steven” sometimes flutters defiantly from the
window, but efforts to end the unusually long detention have yet to be
granted.
“It’s been brutally difficult for him,” said Paul Paz y Miño, associate
director of Amazon Watch, a conservation group allied to Donziger. “It’s
taken a huge toll on him and his family. Chevron wants the narrative to
be that he’s a criminal. The implications of that for the entire
environmental movement against oil companies is terrifying.”
There are moments of relief, such as sticking his head outside to taste
a sunny day or talking to his growing legion of outraged supporters,
which now spans Alec Baldwin, Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters and dozens
of Nobel laureates. “There’s never a day off, I can never properly
relax,” Donziger said. “But you either grow or die in a situation like
this. And I’ve been growing.”
The dispute with Chevron centres upon a landmark 2011 decision by the
Ecuador courts to order the company pay $9.5bn in damages to people
blighted by decades of polluted air and water. Chevron has never paid
up, claiming “shocking levels of misconduct” and fraud by Donziger and
the Ecuadorian judiciary.
But the subsequent web of events that has led to Donziger being detained
and stripped of his law license is befuddling even to legal scholars.
“Frankly, I scratch my head when I look at this case,” said Larry Catá
Backer, a professor of international law at Penn State University. “It
is this strange multi-front battle with one extraordinary explosive
development after another. It has had this magical quality to enrage
everyone involved in it.”
Donziger was first touched by the case that would consume his life as a
young lawyer acting as a public defender in Washington. In 1993, he
joined a legal team investigating reports of pollution in the Lago Agrio
region of northern Ecuador, nestled next to the country’s border with
Colombia.
The oil company Texaco had carved out drilling outposts in this tract of
the Amazon since the 1960s, leaving what Donziger calls “grotesque”
Olympic swimming pool-sized waste pits of oil. Pollution flowed freely
into rivers and streams used by the Indigenous population for drinking
water. Cancers of the stomach, liver and throat reportedly became more
common in the region, as did childhood leukemia. “People there are
living in a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions,” Donziger said.
A Spanish speaker, Donziger became ever more enmeshed in the case,
traveling to Ecuador hundreds of times to assemble a case in behalf of
local people. Despite lengthy attempts by Chevron, which bought Texaco,
to block the case, the action ultimately went to trial and resulted in a
historic judgement against the oil company.
Donziger’s elation was short-lived, however, with Chevron claiming that
his team ghostwrote what should have been an independent assessment and
offered a $500,000 bribe to sway the judgment. Donziger denied any
wrongdoing and the Ecuador supreme court later affirmed the original
ruling, but Chevron has refused to pay the $9.5bn in damages.
A US federal judge then concurred with the fraud allegations, negating
the possibility of wrenching the money from Chevron in its home country,
finding that Donziger conducted a “pattern of racketeering activity”
under statutes more commonly used to target mob bosses.
Donziger was made liable for millions of dollars in Chevron’s legal
costs and the company was granted seizure of his laptop and cellphone.
When he appealed this, claiming the devices contained sensitive client
information, the judge, Lewis Kaplan, hit him with criminal contempt
charges, upheld on appeal, that led to his house arrest.
In one of the stranger episodes in this saga, Chevron relocated Alberto
Guerra, an Ecuadorian judge, and his family to the US, paid for his
health insurance and a car while meeting with him more than 50 times
before he provided testimony that Donziger discussed the bribe with him
at a Quito restaurant. Guerra has since admitted that his testimony was
exaggerated in parts, untrue in others.
This deception, the unprecedented length of detention for a misdemeanor
charge, legal disbarment and personal financial wipeout has fueled a
sense of persecution in Donziger. Kaplan’s conduct, Donziger said, has
been an “abomination, unethical and abusive. I never thought this could
happen in the US.” Other lawyers have voiced more measured concerns over
Kaplan. Chevron has “captured” the judge, Donziger said, and now the oil
company seems omnipresent in his fate.
His contempt charge will be heard by Judge Loretta Preska, who was on
the advisory board of the New York chapter of the Federalist Society,
who took the unusual step of appointing a law firm that has previously
done work for Chevron, Seward & Kissel, to prosecute Donziger after the
department of justice declined to take the case. “Why am I being tried
by a Chevron-connected judge and prosecuted by a Chevron-connected
lawyer? It’s just wrong,” Donziger said. “This is all part of a plan
concocted by Chevron to dismantle my life. They want to do this to avoid
paying up and to turn me into a weapon of intimidation against the whole
legal profession.”
Christiana Ochoa, an expert in environmental law at Indiana University,
said Kaplan and Preska’s connections do not themselves prove any sort of
bias, and that Kaplan’s strongly worded judgment suggests “not great
behavior” by Donziger. But she added that the severity of Donziger’s
treatment is “odd” and that questions remain over the conflict of
interest in his prosecution.
“Certainly it’s very important to corporations like Chevron to protect
themselves from liability from ecological harms,” she said. “They’ve
refused to apologize to the victims. They don’t want to show any
vulnerability.”
A Chevron spokesman said an international tribunal has confirmed the
Ecuadorian decision was “fraudulent” and he denied the company has
persecuted its longtime adversary. “Donziger has no one to blame but
himself for his problems,” the spokesman said. “The court initiated the
pending criminal case against him. Chevron is not involved in that case.”
In Donziger’s eyes, the only real corruption has occurred in the US
system, not Ecuador’s, a symptom of what he views as a “colonial”
mindset that has airily dismissed judgements made outside the US and
obscured the ultimate protagonists of this saga, the people of Lago
Agrio. Shortly before his house arrest, in the summer of 2019, Donziger
toured some villages in Ecuador, discovering some people he’d previously
met had died of cancer. The toxic pits remain, despite a piecemeal
attempt by the government at a cleanup.
“The human suffering is immense,” he said. “It was hard to see.
Ultimately, all this isn’t about me. It’s about what has happened to
these people.”
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/28/chevron-lawyer-steven-donziger-ecuador-house-arrest
- -
[Tweet]
Steven Donziger
@SDonziger
*To be clear, the judge who put me under house arrest—Loretta Preska—is
a leader of the Chevron-funded Federalist Society.*
A Chevron law firm is prosecuting me; Chevron lawyers are witnesses; and
the charging judge has investments in Chevron.
How it all begins to fail.
https://twitter.com/SDonziger/status/1376676895001997312
[harsh information]
*Why Climate Change Denial Still Exists In The U.S.*
Dec 20, 2020
CNBC
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, some American politicians
continue to deny that climate change exists, while others question the
severity of its impact. But public opinion is shifting, and today even
oil and gas companies publicly admit that climate change demands action.
So why does climate denialism continue to influence U.S. politics?
Here's a look into who is funding the movement, and why denial is mainly
a U.S. problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1rxv1yPQrc&t=1s
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - March 30, 2 *
December 30, 2014:
The Washington Post reports:
"The methane that leaks from 40,000 gas wells near this desert trading
post may be colorless and odorless, but it’s not invisible. It can be
seen from space.
"Satellites that sweep over energy-rich northern New Mexico can spot the
gas as it escapes from drilling rigs, compressors and miles of pipeline
snaking across the badlands. In the air it forms a giant plume: a
permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud, so vast that scientists
questioned their own data when they first studied it three years ago.
'We couldn’t be sure that the signal was real,' said NASA researcher
Christian Frankenberg.
"The country’s biggest methane “hot spot,” verified by NASA and
University of Michigan scientists in October, is only the most dramatic
example of what scientists describe as a $2 billion leak problem: the
loss of methane from energy production sites across the country. When
oil, gas or coal are taken from the ground, a little methane — the main
ingredient in natural gas — often escapes along with it, drifting into
the atmosphere, where it contributes to the warming of the Earth.
"Methane accounts for about 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions,
and the biggest single source of it — nearly 30 percent — is the oil and
gas industry, government figures show. All told, oil and gas producers
lose 8 million metric tons of methane a year, enough to provide power to
every household in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia.
"As early as next month, the Obama administration will announce new
measures to shrink New Mexico’s methane cloud while cracking down
nationally on a phenomenon that officials say erodes tax revenue and
contributes to climate change. The details are not publicly known, but
already a fight is shaping up between the White House and industry
supporters in Congress over how intrusive the restrictions will be.
"Republican leaders who will take control of the Senate next month have
vowed to block measures that they say could throttle domestic energy
production at a time when plummeting oil prices are cutting deeply into
company profits. Industry officials say they have a strong financial
incentive to curb leaks, and companies are moving rapidly to upgrade
their equipment.
"But environmentalists say relatively modest government restrictions on
gas leaks could reap substantial rewards for taxpayers and the planet.
Because methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas — with up to 80 times
as much heat-trapping potency per pound as carbon dioxide over the short
term — the leaks must be controlled if the United States is to have any
chance of meeting its goals for cutting the emissions responsible for
climate change, said David Doniger, who heads the climate policy program
at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
"'This is the most significant, most cost-effective thing the
administration can do to tackle climate change pollution that it hasn’t
already committed to do,' Doniger said."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/delaware-sized-gas-plume-over-west-illustrates-the-cost-of-leaking-methane/2014/12/29/d34c3e6e-8d1f-11e4-a085-34e9b9f09a58_story.html
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