[✔️] August 17, 2022 - Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*August 17, 2022*/

/[ understandable ]
/*Water-Rationing Worry Haunts US West With 40 Million at Risk *
Aug. 16, 2022
- -
The Colorado River Basin for the past 20 years has experienced worsening 
drought, with record low water levels right now, as the seven states in 
the Colorado River Compact — Colorado, Arizona, California, Nevada, New 
Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — collaborate to tackle the crisis without 
imposing more punishing measures on themselves...
- -
Congress enacted the plan submitted by the states in 2019; shrinking 
water levels trigger more austere measures. Under Tier 2, farmers and 
other agricultural sectors would experience more cuts in water 
consumption. At Tier 3, more communities and cities will start to face 
water rationing.

Arizona has less seniority compared to other states in the basin. Those 
states with senior water rights have a higher priority date and are at 
the head of the line for water. Arizona uses about 2.8 million acre-feet 
of water annually.

“This has got to be an entire basin approach; it can’t just be on 
Arizona,” Kelly said. “This has got to be a collaborative effort between 
the states, and the federal government has a role.”

Kelly on Tuesday asked Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to outline the 
department’s “options and legal authorities” for intervening to prevent 
“drastic consequences” for the basin states after they failed to reach 
consensus by Reclamation’s deadline.

“Such options should recognize and account for the early and consistent 
contributions that Arizona has made and will continue to make to 
preserve water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell,” Kelly wrote in the 
letter.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/water-rationing-fears-cloud-unveiling-of-western-drought-outlook/
/

/
/

/
/

/[ The flames in Spain blow fast across the plain  ]/
*Wildfires tear through forests in Spain's south-eastern Valencia region*
Aug 16, 2022  Firefighters are struggling to contain large wildfires 
tearing through forests in Valencia. Powerful winds have made the fires 
difficult to put out and it has swept through 6,500 hectares.

More than 1,000 people have been evacuated from nearby villages because 
of the blaze. Spain has been simultaneously struggling with another 
blaze in the Aragon region, which has forced authorities to evacuate 
1,500 people. According to data from the European Forest Fire 
Information System, 659,541 hectares of land burned across the continent 
between January and mid-August, 260,000 of which has been in Spain alone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHFEj0T6kew




/[ This is the ONE video talk to hear for this year - a bit academic - 
but it is nice to hear the science explained again ]/
*"The Antropocene: Where on Earth are we going " by Will Steffen. 
Euroapeum Winter School 2022*
Feb 23, 2022  Will Steffen, an Earth System scientist, is a Councillor 
on the Climate Council of Australia that delivers independent expert 
information about climate change. On Tuesday, February 22, he gave the 
lecture "The Anthropocene: Where on Earth we are going", as part of the 
Europaeum Winter School held at UPF.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2C6NfFIK_g&



[  "Let's all go to the court rooms" ]
*Opioid ruling boosts Big Oil defense in Hawaii climate case*
By Lesley Clark | 08/10/2022
A landmark federal court ruling that rejected efforts to force three 
opioid distributors to pay up for the addiction crisis is already being 
cited by oil and gas companies in at least one lawsuit from local 
governments seeking compensation for erosion, wildfires and other 
effects of a warming planet.

In a Hawaii state court filing late last month asking to dismiss Maui 
County’s climate-related claims against Sunoco LP and other companies, 
lawyers for the fossil fuel industry cited the July 5 West Virginia 
opioid ruling to argue that the climate liability case doesn’t properly 
raise a nuisance claim.

“A public nuisance [claim] based on the sale and distribution of a 
product has been rejected by most courts because the common law of 
public nuisance is an inept vehicle for addressing such conduct,” oil 
industry attorneys wrote, quoting the decision in the opioid case City 
of Huntington v. AmerisourceBergen Drug Corp.

The attorneys argued that extending nuisance laws “to cover the 
marketing and sale of petroleum products is inconsistent with the 
history and traditional notions of nuisance.”

Maui’s lawsuit is among nearly two dozen climate liability cases filed 
by local governments that want fossil fuel companies to help shoulder 
the cost of dealing with the effects of climate change, such as 
sea-level rise and flooding. Maui filed its lawsuit two years ago 
against 20 oil companies, citing a decadeslong campaign of deception.

In the opioid litigation, more than 3,000 state and local governments 
have targeted drug manufacturers and distributors since 2014. The cases 
— several of which have resulted in multimillion-dollar settlements — 
have been parsed by lawyers from both sides of the climate liability 
cases (Greenwire, Aug. 27, 2019).

But the recent ruling out of West Virginia has climate litigants 
adjusting their arguments.

In the case, the city of Huntington and Cabell County argued that 
AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. created a 
public nuisance by shipping millions of opioid pills to West Virginia. 
The local governments asked for more than $2.5 billion to reduce the 
drug flow and to pay for misuse and addiction treatment.

But Senior Judge David Faber of the U.S. District Court for the Southern 
District of West Virginia in a 184-page decision, wrote that most courts 
have rejected claims of public nuisance involving “the sale and 
distribution of a product.”

Faber, a George H.W. Bush appointee, said West Virginia’s Supreme Court 
of Appeals has only applied nuisance law in cases involving “conduct 
that interferes with public property or resources” and that the state’s 
high court would likely decline to extend the law.

The oil and gas industry, which has embraced Faber’s decision, in the 
past has argued that there are major differences between the climate 
cases and the opioid litigation.

Chief among those differences, companies say, is that oil and gas has 
been a necessary element of U.S security.

Ted Boutrous, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP who represents 
Chevron Corp. in a number of the climate liability cases, including the 
challenge from Maui, made that point in May 2021 during oral arguments 
over Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings’ (D) lawsuit against 31 
fossil fuel firms.

“This is not like an opioid case or an asbestos case,” Boutrous told a 
federal judge at the time. “This is a claim challenging the production 
of a product that has been essential to our national security.”

The West Virginia opioid decision, however, “adds to the continued 
jurisprudence that says public nuisance is not about how you market and 
make products,” said Phil Goldberg, special counsel for the 
Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, an initiative of the National 
Association of Manufacturers that opposes the climate liability litigation.

“There’d be no limitation to these types of lawsuits if that were to be 
the case,” he said.

‘Completely different situation’
Environmental attorneys have found common cause with the opioid cases, 
arguing that just as pharmaceutical companies seemingly misled the 
public about the addictive nature of opioids, oil companies allegedly 
deceived the public about the environmental dangers of burning fossil fuels.

But attorneys involved in climate litigation said the West Virginia 
opioid ruling doesn’t reduce their odds, noting that nuisance laws vary 
from state to state and that the decision came from a federal court.

Most of the cases against the oil and gas industry were filed in state 
courts and — like the opioid cases — rest on state-level laws like 
public nuisance and consumer fraud, with litigants arguing that climate 
change is a burden to local governments and that companies have 
contributed to the problem through misleading marketing. The cases have 
been embroiled in a jurisdictional battle for years, with industry 
attorneys urging judges to move the cases to the federal bench where oil 
and gas companies believe they have a better chance of success.

Local courts have upheld the lawsuits, and federal appeals courts have 
largely ruled in favor of state jurisdiction. The Supreme Court has 
sided with one of industry’s early jurisdictional arguments and may soon 
have the chance to weigh in again (Climatewire, June 9).

David Bookbinder, chief counsel at the Niskanen Center and a member of 
the legal team representing three Colorado governments in their climate 
liability case, noted that the municipalities in the West Virginia 
opioid case had won in two state courts before losing in federal court.

If oil and gas defendants cited the West Virginia opioid decision in the 
Colorado climate case, Bookbinder said, “I’d say, ‘OK, here are two West 
Virginia state courts whose judges are paid to interpret state law 
saying just the opposite.’”

He said the climate cases are also focused on proving deception and 
showing that companies “produced and marketed fossil fuels knowing that 
they were going to cause global warming. … That’s a completely different 
situation than a bunch of distributor pharmacies.”

In the opioid ruling, Faber wrote that the West Virginia governments had 
“presented no evidence” that the drug distributors had made deceptive 
claims.

In a June filing opposing dismissal of the Maui climate case, county 
attorneys noted that courts across the country have approved similar 
nuisance claims brought against manufacturers for injuries “caused by 
the deceptive promotion of asbestos, cigarettes, chemicals, gasoline 
additives, guns, lead, opioids, and other harmful products.”

They argued that while the oil and gas industry contends that nuisance 
law does not cover injuries involving the sale of lawful products, 
courts have rejected those claims.

Industry lawyers in the Maui climate case are also arguing that the 
county is trying to hold the companies “liable for statements they made 
anywhere in the world, over the past many decades, that allegedly led to 
an increase in fossil fuel demand.”

But Boutrous, the Chevron attorney, said in a statement that Maui’s case 
does not meet Hawaii’s statute of limitations on lawsuits.

“The plaintiff concedes their complaint fails to identify a single 
alleged misrepresentation within the last 20 years, and certainly none 
within the two-year statute of limitations,” he said, adding that 
“federal courts across the country have consistently held that 
developing effective solutions to combat climate change is a matter of 
national and global importance that will require comprehensive policy 
solutions, not a patchwork of litigation.”
https://www.eenews.net/articles/opioid-ruling-boosts-big-oil-defense-in-hawaii-climate-case/



/[ not surprising ] /
*Rise in extreme heat will hit minority communities hardest*
By Thomas Frank | 08/15/2022
https://www.eenews.net/articles/rise-in-extreme-heat-will-hit-minority-communities-hardest/

- -

/[ Aljazeera tells us how -- ]/
*How should we adapt to climate change? | Inside Story*
Aug 13, 2022  "Adapting to climate change is no longer an option. It's 
an obligation."

That's the warning from France's green transition minister as people in 
Europe experience intense droughts, wildfires and heatwaves.

Temperature records have been broken, and dry conditions are fanning the 
flames of wildfires in France, Spain and Portugal.

So how do we prepare our cities and change our behaviour to cope with 
extreme weather patterns?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwRVetLTx9A



/[ Video Game Review ]/
*Endling - Extinction is Forever is a game that is not afraid to hurt you*
And it will hurt you, a lot. Seriously.
By Ash Parrish  Aug 12, 2022,
In a video game climate that bends over backwards to assure you the cute 
little creatures you play as or with cannot be harmed, it was shocking 
to hear the mother fox’s neck snap in Endling - Extinction is Forever. I 
was running with my trio of kits, trying to escape the murderous 
clutches of a furrier when he caught me. I struggled as he held me down 
before I heard the crack of the bones as the screen went dark, informing 
me I had failed as a mother and that my cubs were going to die. And 
while I thought that was a little too much, that kind of unflinching 
look at the reality of survival in a world ruined by climate change is 
exactly what the developers were going for...
- -
It would have been easy for Endling to paint all humans as these wholly 
vicious creatures while upholding the fox family as moral and virtuous. 
Instead, Endling paints the picture, “nothing is good or bad when 
survival is at stake.”

“We have put a lot of effort into trying to make the refugees, which are 
climate refugees, into survivors,” Romello said. “They will do anything 
in their power in order to keep surviving in this dystopian future.”

So as much as the furrier is a bastard, I can’t fault him. Nor do I 
fault Herobeat Games for taking a less-than-hopeful tack with Endling. 
Nobody’s got time for the feel-good morality play Endling could have 
been. Shit’s dire now.

“I think it’s very important for everyone to be aware of what may 
happen,” Romello said. “It’s up to each one of us to decide how we can 
help save the situation.”
https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/12/23300035/endling-extinction-is-forever-climate-change-revie 




/[The news archive - looking back at VP Al Gore]/
/*August 17, 2000*/
At the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Al Gore, the 
Democratic Presidential nominee, declares:

    "In my first term [in Congress], a family in Hardeman County,
    Tennessee wrote a letter and told how worried they were about toxic
    waste that had been dumped near their home. I held some of the first
    hearings on the issue. And ever since, I've been there in the fight
    against the big polluters.

    "Our children should not have to draw the breath of life in cities
    awash in pollution. When they come in from playing on a hot summer
    afternoon, every child in America, anywhere in America, ought to be
    able to turn on the faucet and get a glass of safe, clean drinking
    water.

    "On the issue of the environment, I've never given up, I've never
    backed down, and I never will.

    "And I say it again tonight: we must reverse the silent, rising tide
    of global warming."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EbnKxBNcvI


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