[✔️] September 22, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Wed Sep 22 08:52:25 EDT 2021
/*September 22, 2021*/
[Serious academic discussion on current disinformation - 90 minute video ]
https://youtu.be/0dsr-VSp65U?t=447
*Defending Against Disinformation*
Sept 21, 2021
UC Berkeley Events
Disinformation — the intentional dissemination of false information to
shape political and social outcomes — is increasingly a feature of the
U.S. political landscape. The effects are pernicious: By causing
confusion, disinformation amplifies division and aggravates discord. By
creating a false but widely held alternate reality, it can destabilize a
society. Just in the past year, disinformation has had direct, harmful
effects on efforts to check the spread of COVID-19, on initiatives for
racial justice and on the 2020 election and its aftermath. Clearly,
disinformation costs lives and erodes democracy.
On Wednesday Sept. 21 at 12 noon, a panel of eminent Berkeley scholars
will explore one of the most critical questions facing U.S. democracy:
How can we counter disinformation without compromising America’s core
principles?
The panelists will be: Geeta Anand, dean of the School of Journalism;
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law; Hany Farid, associate dean and
head of the School of Information; Susan D. Hyde, chair of the
Department of Political Science; john powell, director of the Othering &
Belonging Institute; and moderator Henry Brady, former dean of the
Goldman School of Public Policy.
The event is sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy, Berkeley
Law, and the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, with support
from the Social Science Matrix.
https://youtu.be/0dsr-VSp65U?t=447
/[weathers have changed]/
*An unpreparable storm*
With sustained winds of 150 mph when it came ashore, Hurricane Ida was
the strongest landfalling hurricane in Louisiana history — tying last
year’s Hurricane Laura. It’s the first time in history there’s been a US
state that’s endured two hurricanes that strong in back-to-back years.
Ida brought unimaginable wind far inland, its 40-foot waves showed up on
seismic equipment, and its storm surge was so strong that it temporarily
reversed the flow of the Mississippi River. Going from non-existent to a
near-Category-5 landfall in 72 hrs is something no hurricane had ever
done before in the Atlantic.
The sounds this storm made were like hell:
https://twitter.com/thegoprodad/status/1432049760496758791
In pandemic New Orleans, mandatory evacuations now require 72 hours
notice. That means that Ida’s rapid intensification put Louisiana in
uncharted territory. It was literally impossible for New Orleans to
prepare for something like Ida.
As a meteorologist, that’s a chilling fact. We’re in a situation where
hurricanes can now grow more powerful and more quickly than our cities
can make themselves safe.
We knew this was going to happen. We know that climate change is making
storms like this happen more often. Still, Ida was shocking — the sixth
tropical storm or hurricane to hit Louisiana in little more than a year.
There was no way that Louisiana could be ‘resilient’ to something like
this. This is trauma — an intentional, repeated wound that keeps being
opened over and over again...
- -
“Resilience” has its limits. We’re there.
Climate change is a trauma that’s moving all of us physically and
emotionally to places that make us feel unsafe. What happens when
there’s nowhere else to go?
My overwhelming feelings of the past several months are shock, worry,
sadness, desperation, and empathy. If you’re feeling this way too, it’s
OK to call this trauma.
From California to Haiti to Afghanistan to New Orleans, from fires to
flood to injustice to revolution, it’s all so much. And I’m just an
observer — safe in my home with my kids and my garden and our pet
hamster. Nothing makes sense.
This summer, I’m realizing that this is just how it is now. For the rest
of my life. For the rest of my kids’ lives.
I don't know what else there is to say. My heart is breaking for people
I've never met, for injustice and more layers of trauma we knew were coming.
https://thephoenix.substack.com/p/lets-stop-talking-about-climate-resilience?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNjgzNTA5LCJwb3N0X2lkIjozNzQxMzAzMCwiXyI6InI3Mk5tIiwiaWF0IjoxNjMyMjg0MDMwLCJleHAiOjE2MzIyODc2MzAsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0xMDIzOTkiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.k8zwejj10V-upEYhhJ092PJBw6jpq7KDzyfm-kpD5kM
/[following the flow of money]/
*Special Report: BP gambles big on fast transition from oil to renewables*
By Ron Bousso
- -
"BP is still looking to sell assets, at a time when demand for them is
not great, and recycle that cash into renewable-energy assets, where
competition for them is fierce," Mould said in an August note to
investors. "That sounds like a potential recipe for selling low, buying
high and destroying shareholder value along the way."...
- -
It will be years before investors know the outcome of Looney's wager on
renewables. Still, even BP's relatively fast transformation doesn't go
far enough in reducing climate damage, said Kim Fustier, an oil-and-gas
analyst at HSBC bank. She expects BP's earnings from renewables and
low-carbon businesses to represent 4% to 5% of total earnings by the
middle of the decade and 10% to 15% by 2030.
"This is nowhere near enough for investors to start thinking of these
companies as being part of the solution," Fustier said.
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/bp-gambles-big-fast-transition-oil-renewables-2021-09-20/
/[CNBC calling out the controversy]/
*Bill Gates says partisan politics hurts climate change battle, and the
U.S. is ‘one of the worst’*
Catherine Clifford -- SEP 21 2021
- - “Sadly, the U.S. is one of the worst in the issue being partisan in
nature, but we need to change that,” Bill Gates said in an interview
that aired Tuesday during Climate Week NYC.
- - The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft is also the founder of the
climate innovation and investment company Breakthrough Energy and the
founder and chairman of the advanced nuclear company TerraPower.
- - “This is hard enough to drive innovation and deployment and cost
reduction in this 30-year deadline even if there is not a single day of
pause in that,” Gates said.
Decarbonizing economies and infrastructures is a monumental task.
“I see momentum building, I see awareness building, but this will be the
hardest thing humanity has ever done,” Gates said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/21/bill-gates-partisan-politics-hurts-climate-change-fight-in-us.html
/[distressing opinion]/
*Democrats May Be on the Verge of Climate Disaster*
The party’s climate measures suddenly face a tough battle in Congress.
By Robinson Meyer
*I’m starting to become concerned about President Joe Biden’s ability to
pass a climate bill. *They’re speaking sotto voce, but still: In the
past few days, Democrats on the party’s left and right flanks have
started to hint that, well, in some circumstances, given some
contingencies, they might prefer no bill to a negotiated compromise with
the rival flank.
The most worrying signs so far have come from Senator Joe Manchin, the
West Virginia Democrat who has received more donations from the coal,
gas, and oil industries in the current election cycle than any other
senator. Manchin was never going to be an easy customer; in 2010, he
shot a bullet through President Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade bill. Yet
he seemed on board with the Clean Electricity Performance Program, the
all-important (if fluidly named) Democratic proposal that would push
utilities to generate more of their energy from zero-carbon sources
every year. The CEPP would eliminate the greater part of 1 billion tons
of climate pollution by itself and is essential to meeting the U.S. goal
under the Paris Agreement.
Manchin has waffled on the plan through the year, but has never rejected
it outright as he has a carbon tax. As West Virginia’s governor in 2009,
he signed a relatively weak version of the policy into law. Now,
however, he is writing an alternate version of the clean-electricity
plan, The New York Times reported this week, that allots a larger role
for natural gas and does not require utilities to decarbonize as quickly.
More worrying is the prospect that Manchin will not allow any change at
all. He has privately said that Democrats should take a “strategic
pause” and wait until 2022 to pass the reconciliation bill, Axios
reported on Sunday. Such a proposal suggests that he is disquietingly
comfortable with failing to pass anything at all. Democrats control the
Senate by only a single vote, and 17 of their caucus’s members,
including Manchin, are older than 70. Their House majority isn’t much
bigger. Given that lawmakers have a counterproductive fear of doing much
of anything ambitious in the same year that they face a midterm
election, Manchin’s pause is akin to saying that no bill might be better
than something.
The other wavering vote is that of Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who comes
from the fossil-fuel-rich state of Arizona. She can be a wild card in
negotiations but so far has seemed to focus more on Democrats’
health-care policy than their climate wrangling.
Also ominous, though, is that a small group of far-left environmental
groups have started to strike the same note. They have demanded that any
Clean Electricity Performance Program allow only solar, wind, and
geothermal energy, leaving no role for other zero-carbon energy sources
such as nuclear. They were joined, somewhat shockingly, by the otherwise
mainstream progressive group Indivisible. Such a mandate is disconnected
from reality: Insisting on a renewables-only grid would not just cost
more than the entire reconciliation bill, but violate the pro-nuclear
plank of the bipartisan infrastructure plan, which progressive lawmakers
in the House agreed to last month. In other words, the decision to allow
some nuclear power in this bill has already been made; the groups are
telling someone not to eat a sandwich when the crumbs and empty wrapper
are already on the ground. Even the Union for Concerned Scientists,
which was founded in 1969 as an anti-nuclear watchdog, now says that
existing nuclear plants must remain open if the United States hopes to
reduce its carbon pollution fast enough to avoid catastrophe. Yet
Indivisible and other groups have warned that no plan that deviates from
renewables would be better than a flawed plan, according to Politico.
I feel for these groups, to be honest. They may be trying to even the
stakes, which remain tilted in the centrists’ favor. As the Michigan
State University political-science professor Matt Grossmann recently
observed, Manchin and Sinema would prefer no deal to what progressives
want, while progressives would prefer Manchin and Sinema’s version to no
deal. But if this sort of brinkmanship renders legislation unpalatable,
then lawmakers won’t swallow it. And the U.S. will go at least another
decade without a climate law.
Democrats are haunted by 2009. That year, President Obama came to office
promising to reform America’s health-care system and finally get serious
about reversing climate change. He managed to do the first. His failure
to accomplish the second has spawned a decade of appraisals.
The most authoritative of these was written by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard
political scientist. In 2013, she argued that environmentalists had gone
astray by focusing too much on elite bipartisan wrangling in Washington,
D.C. Despite months of reaching out to Republicans and supplying
conservative-friendly climate bills, climate groups failed to secure a
single GOP vote in support of the 2009 bill. She also faulted the U.S.
environmental movement for building membership organizations solely at
the state or municipal level.
What was needed, she wrote, was a mass climate movement: “a
climate-change politics that includes broad popular mobilization on the
center left.” Only a broad movement could overcome the “right-wing elite
and popular forces” that stood in the way of actually doing something.
From this proposal, and others like it, a decade’s worth of climate
groups were born. In September 2014, more than 300,000 people marched in
New York City with the People’s Climate March. The Citizens’ Climate
Lobby, a membership-based group that supports carbon pricing, gained
steam, as did the left-wing activist group 350.org. In 2017 came the
Sunrise Movement and, the next year, its demand for a Green New Deal.
These groups all aimed to engineer the kind of mass mobilization around
climate change that Skocpol had called for.
Today, the fate of another climate bill hangs in the balance, and I
think it’s fair to ask: What role can these groups actually play? If you
look at Sunrise’s power, specifically, it seems far more subtle than was
once advertised. Back in June, Sunrise held a protest at the White
House, demanding that Biden commit to creating a Civilian Climate Corps,
a New Deal–inspired program that would employ young people to retrofit
buildings and manage national wildland. The activists held signs with
slogans like biden, you coward, fight for us. At the time, some
commentators criticized Sunrise for not focusing on the true opponents
of climate policy. “If you want to protest someone, protest the tiny
handful of House Republicans who hold seats that Biden won and try to
pressure them into backing the bill,” the center-left pundit Matthew
Yglesias said. Others suggested that they protest Manchin.
Yet the nature of Sunrise’s power is more convoluted than that. Sunrise
has little ability to coerce Manchin or Sinema, the most ardent critics
of climate action in the Democratic caucus. Its power flows from its
credibility with parts of the Democratic electorate: When Sunrise
speaks, a cohort of educated, climate-terrified progressives listen. And
if Sunrise says that a certain bill is inadequate to solving the climate
crisis, or that Biden has sold the party out to fossil-fuel interests,
those progressives will hear—and become so discouraged they’ll toss
their hands up. And although Manchin might not need that cohort’s votes,
other Democrats do.
Sunrise, in other words, holds a Damoclean sword above blue-state
Democrats. The initial promise of Sunrise was that it would mobilize
progressives to fight climate change. But its most potent power is the
ability to demobilize, by instructing progressives that Democrats aren’t
serious about climate change and aren’t worth their time, money, and
effort. That isn’t a very enviable position for either Sunrise or the
mainstream Democratic Party to be in. With any luck, nobody will need to
discover what will happen if it changes—and the sword comes clattering
to earth.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/democrats-may-be-verge-climate-disaster/620148/
/[Wars of Opinion Manipulation]/
*Facebook steps up fight against climate misinformation – but critics
say effort falls short*
**New efforts will let vast amounts of false material slip through the
cracks, according to climate advocates
SEPTEMBER 16, 2021
- -
“Climate change disinformation is spreading rapidly across Facebook’s
social media platform, threatening the ability of citizens and
policymakers to fight the climate crisis,” the groups wrote.
One recent study conducted by Friends of the Earth, an environmental
organization, found about 99% of climate misinformation about the
February 2021 power outages in Texas went unchecked.
The study found misleading reports that wind turbines were at fault in
the outage had run rampant on the social media platform. It also showed
how such theories make their way from the fringes of Facebook to the
mainstream, finding that though the windmill claim was debunked on local
and major news outlets, the falsehoods became talking points for
prominent politicians within four days...
- -
The features announced on Thursday, Facebook said, would further reduce
misinformation on the platform.
Khoo, of Friends of the Earth, argued Facebook could do far more. “For a
company that makes $85bn a year, a $1m program that outsources the
problem they’ve created shows that Facebook is not serious about solving
climate disinformation,” he said.
Evan Greer, deputy director at the digital rights organization Fight for
the Future, said that Facebook faced other critiques when it comes to
combating climate misinformation, noting that the platform had been
accused of suppressing posts and information from reliable organizations
in the field.
In 2020 July, a prominent climate scientist said the platform was
restricting her ability to research and factcheck posts containing
climate misinformation. The company reportedly flagged the posts the
scientist’s posts as “political”.
Facebook declined to comment further.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/09/facebook-climate-misinformation-lies-trump-propaganda-spreading-rapidly/
- -
/[one of the worst - what happened to Falun Gong?]/
*Climate denial newspaper flourishes on Facebook*
By Scott Waldman | 08/27/2021 05:32 AM EST
One of the most-viewed sites on Facebook in the last few months is a
subscription page for a conservative media outlet that publishes climate
denial.
The Epoch Times, a far-right newspaper that echoes anti-vaccine messages
and promoted former President Trump’s false election claims, received
44.2 million views between April and June for a page that offers to sign
up subscribers, according to a report released by Facebook last week.
That was 10th overall.
It’s a remarkable achievement for a media outlet that has been banned
from advertising on Facebook for hiding its connection to ads that
supported Trump’s candidacy. It also raises questions about how an
outlet that spreads climate misinformation was able to reach millions of
people through a social media platform that has voiced commitments
against spreading false assertions about science.
The Epoch Times, which was founded by members of the Chinese spiritual
group Falun Gong, pivoted hard toward conservative politics during the
Trump administration. And while the paper had a history of objective
climate coverage before then, it has become one of the larger media
sources of climate denial...
- -
Some of the commentary printed by the paper is from writers at think
tanks that have received energy industry funding and that promote
climate denial, such as the Heartland Institute and the Texas Public
Policy Foundation.
Since its shift into hard-right politics, The Epoch Times has flourished
financially, public tax records show. The Epoch Times Association
reported $15.5 million in revenue in 2019, $12.5 million in 2018, $8.1
million in 2017 and $3.9 million in 2016, public tax records show. The
paper claims to publish in 22 languages in 36 countries.
The Facebook report suggests that the social media behemoth has helped
fuel that rise.
The Epoch Times’ Facebook page has millions of followers and adds
thousands of people every week. Its growth comes as the outlet has faced
sanctions for deceptive pro-Trump ads.
The Facebook report is “essentially a PR effort” to tamp down criticism
of the platform’s elevation of misinformation, said Jennifer Grygiel, an
associate professor of communication at Syracuse University’s Newhouse
School of Public Communications....
https://www.eenews.net/articles/climate-denial-newspaper-flourishes-on-facebook/
/[New word has a touch of self-mockery - add it to your spell-check
dictionary - //*Collapsology*//]/
*The term collapsology is a neologism* used to designate the
transdisciplinary study of the risks of collapse of industrial
civilization.[1] It is concerned with the "general collapse of societies
induced by climate change, scarcity of resources, vast extinctions, and
natural disasters."[2] Although the concept of civilizational or
societal collapse had already existed for many years, collapsology
focuses its attention on the contemporary, industrial and globalized
society.
- -
Etymology
The word "collapsology" is a neologism invented "with a certain
self-mockery" by Pablo Servigne, an agricultural engineer, and Raphaël
Stevens, an expert in the resilience of socio-ecological systems. It
appears in their book published in 2015
It is a portmanteau derived from the Latin collapsus, "to fall, to
collapse" and from the suffix "-logy", logos, put for "study " , which
is intended to name an approach of scientific nature.[8]
Since 2015 and the publication of How everything can collapse in French,
several words have been proposed to describe the various approaches
dealing with the issue of collapse: collapso-sophy to designate the
philosophical approach, collapso-praxis to designate the ideology
inspired by this study, and collapsonauts to designate people living
with this idea in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapsology
[Democracy Now - trusted news -- video]
*“We Need to Deliver”: Anger Grows at Sens. Manchin, Sinema over
Obstruction of Democratic Priorities*
SEPTEMBER 21, 2021
Democrats are still divided over President Biden’s sweeping $3.5
trillion spending plan to expand the social safety net, increase taxes
on the rich and corporations, improve worker rights and combat the
climate crisis. Senate Democrats are hoping to use the budget
reconciliation process to pass the bill, but this will only work if the
entire Democratic caucus backs the deal, and conservative Democrats have
balked at the price tag. Progressive Democrats in the House, meanwhile,
say they won’t vote for a separate $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill
passed by the Senate unless the reconciliation bill is part of the
package. “We want to pass the full agenda that President Biden has set
forth,” says Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressmember from California.
“This is what President Biden campaigned on, and we need to deliver.”
Khanna also discusses U.S. immigration policy, raising the refugee cap,
investigating the full 20 years of the War in Afghanistan and bringing
U.S. troops home from Iraq.
*REP. RO KHANNA:* You know, Amy, I have a decent relationship with
Senator Manchin. I’ve never questioned his integrity. My point is,
let’s get to the right policy. Let’s have a conversation. I mean, I
understand that there are fossil fuel industry in his state. And so,
if he has a view that we need to have more investment in his state
in clean energy so that these jobs are first in West Virginia and he
can go to his constituents and say, “This is not going to cost the
economy in West Virginia; it’s actually going to add to it,” I’m
open to having that conversation. Many progressives are open to
having a conversation with him.
We don’t know exactly where he and Senator Sinema are coming from.
For example, on voting rights, his plan, it’s not one I fully agree
with, but it’s a good one, and the progressives can rally around his
voting rights plan. I guess my question to the senator, about
Manchin and Sinema, is: What is their plan? Where is their — what
are they proposing? That, as an initial matter, is necessary for us
to get to a yes. And we made that clear to both the White House and
those senators, that they have to come up with a proposal.
*AMY GOODMAN: *He, Manchin, has said he has a concern about the
money. Manchin has received more campaign donations from the oil,
coal and gas industries than any other senator. Maybe that’s the
money he’s concerned about?
*REP. RO KHANNA:* Well, Amy, look, I’m having a hearing, as the
environment chair, where we’re going to get the fossil fuel
companies in for the first time — Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell. So,
we’re certainly going to realize and find out what they’ve been
doing to kill legislation, to have lobbying influence.
I will say this: I mean, West Virginia has a large fossil fuel
industry. So, if there are individuals who are supporting him in
those industries, that, to me, in and of itself, doesn’t — isn’t
what is the decisive factor. What is the decisive factor is: What is
he for? And if he comes onto the table and says, “Look, I want these
things for West Virginia,” I think he’ll find a lot of people in the
caucus are willing to do that. We want to have a dialogue with him.
I personally have never questioned his integrity. What I want to do
is: How do we get to a yes for the president’s agenda? And it’s in
all of our interests as Democrats to do that.
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/9/21/35_trillion_spending_bill_ro_khanna
[High aspiration award goes to...]
*Walmart has a plan to tackle the climate crisis. Can it pull it off?*
Walmart is attempting to erase its huge climate footprint while
continuing to sell tens of millions of low-priced products
- -
Walmart has declared its mission to tackle these climate impacts, which
means focusing on every part of the chain – from the electricity sourced
in its stores to the palm oil in the candy bars sold on its shelves. But
while some experts celebrate the scale of the retailer’s efforts, others
wonder whether they go far enough...
- -
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/walmart-climate-change-plan-can-it-work
/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming September 22, 2014*
"John D. Rockefeller built a vast fortune on oil. Now his heirs are
abandoning fossil fuels.
"The family whose legendary wealth flowed from Standard Oil is
planning to announce on Monday that its $860 million philanthropic
organization, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, is joining the
divestment
movement that began a couple years ago on college campuses.
"The announcement, timed to precede Tuesday’s opening of the United
Nations climate change summit meeting in New York City, is part of a
broader and accelerating initiative.
"In recent years, 180 institutions — including philanthropies,
religious organizations, pension funds and local governments —
as well
as hundreds of wealthy individual investors have pledged to sell
assets tied to fossil fuel companies from their portfolios and to
invest in cleaner alternatives. In all, the groups have pledged to
divest assets worth more than $50 billion from portfolios, and the
individuals more than $1 billion, according to Arabella Advisors, a
firm that consults with philanthropists and investors to use their
resources to achieve social goals."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/us/heirs-to-an-oil-fortune-join-the-divestment-drive.html?smid=nytcore-iphone-share&smprod=nytcore-iphone
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/big-oils-heirs-join-call-for-action-as-climate-summit-opens/2014/09/21/ab27b1ce-40ea-11e4-b0ea-8141703bbf6f_story.html?tid=HP_more
http://www.msnbc.com/now/watch/sounding-the-alarm-on-climate-change-332140099937#
http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/the-rockefellers--huge-climate-announcement-332248643972
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