[✔️] June 1, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*June  1, 2022*/

/[  Storm in the Gulf ] /
*‘It could happen fast:’ Meteorologist tells Floridians to monitor Gulf 
system*
The tropical system could bring impacts to Tampa Bay as early as Friday, 
says the National Weather Service’s Paul Close...
/- -/
“The guidance to this point is really all over the place,” said Close. 
“People here should be checking in at least a couple of times a day. If 
it does develop, it could happen fast.”

Should the storm center in on Florida’s west coast, Close says the 
region would begin feeling impacts Friday night through Saturday. 
Regardless of whether Alex organizes into a tropical storm or not, the 
National Hurricane Center says all of Florida’s west coast should 
prepare for four to six inches of rain this weekend...
/- -/
“The water is warm enough and right now that’s all it really needs,” 
said Close.

https://www.tampabay.com/hurricane/2022/05/31/it-could-happen-fast-meteorologist-tells-floridians-to-monitor-gulf-system/


[ Politics ]
*Us older people must fight for a better America, and world, for younger 
generations*
Baby boomers were complicit in the decay of our civic life and cultural 
fabric – and we must play a serious role in fixing it
Bill McKibben  - -  Tue 31 May 2022
I’ve spent the last year helping to start a coalition of people over 60 
to work for progressive change – Third Act, it’s called – and, based on 
hundreds of conversations, I’d say “gobsmacked” is the operative word 
for how people feel. We had taken for granted the physical stability of 
our planet – and now its poles are melting. We had taken for granted the 
stability of our democracy and now people invade Congress to stop the 
counting of votes. We had taken for granted the slow but sure scientific 
progress of our society and now a third of the country does not want to 
take vaccines. (For those of us who can remember our polio jabs, that’s 
truly shocking.)

Since we’re complicit in this decay (there’s a reason young people 
started saying “OK Boomer”) we need to play a serious role in fixing it 
up. It’s been inspiring to watch older people protesting outside 
fossil-fueled banks, or writing tens of thousands of postcards to high 
school seniors helping them register to vote or figuring out how to make 
sure Black voters have access to mail-in voting.

But along with that kind of work we have another gift to offer: 
sufficient perspective to say, loudly and clearly, that what we are 
living through now is nuts. There’s another kind of society, within 
living memory, that more or less worked. It had institutions and norms 
that allowed some kind of common conversation to take place. And saying 
so is not nostalgia – it’s a highly useful act of witness.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/31/us-older-people-must-fight-for-a-better-america-and-world-for-younger-generations


/
/

/[ the Guardian discovers the rhetorical question -- the answer: "duh!"]/
*Did Joe Manchin block climate action to benefit his financial interests?*
Recent revelations that Democratic West Virginian senator quietly made 
millions from his coal business could come back to haunt him as he eyes 
a run for re-election
Chris McGreal in Fairmont, West Virginia
Tue 31 May 2022
Nancy Hilsbos, a former coalminer living in the West Virginia county 
that Senator Joe Manchin calls home, barely noticed the nondescript 
office block she passed almost daily...

- -

For years, Manchin has justified voting against curbs on the burning of 
fossil fuels and other measures to tackle the climate crisis on the 
grounds that they were bad for West Virginia, whose economy and culture 
are rooted in coal mining. Last year, he used his vote in a hung US 
Senate to block President Biden’s $3.5tn economic plan in part because 
he said he was “very, very disturbed” that its climate provisions would 
kill the coal industry.
But after the revelations that Manchin has made what most West 
Virginians would regard as a fortune from the Grant Town power plant, 
Hilsbos was left wondering if US climate policy, and by extension the 
global response to the crisis, has been held hostage to the senator’s 
financial interests.

“If he used it to slow the responsible addressing of climate change 
issues then that’s an international responsibility,” she said. “What’s 
wrong is him throwing so much weight against the public interest when he 
has so much to gain by the continued existence of this kind of facility.”

Hilsbos is not alone in her concern.

Christopher Regan, a former vice-chair of the West Virginia Democratic 
party who worked as an aide to Manchin, recalled a time when the senator 
painted prominent Republican officials in the state as “involved in 
self-service as opposed to public service”, a line Regan then promoted.

“This thing with the coal plant turns that around on him. What’s he 
doing? Is this for West Virginia? Or is this just strictly for his own 
narrow pecuniary interest?” he said.

Regan said that’s a question that could haunt Manchin as he considers a 
run for re-election in two years...
Manchin founded Enersystems in 1988 with his brother, Roch, at about the 
time the state was considering an application to build a power plant in 
Grant Town, a small former mining community less than 20 minutes’ drive 
north of Fairmont.

Manchin, then a state senator, helped clear the way for the construction 
of the power plant while negotiating a deal to become the only supplier 
of its fuel. Not just any fuel but discarded coal known as “garbage of 
bituminous”, more popularly called “gob”, which is even more polluting 
than regular coal.

When the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) raised concerns that 
the Grant Town plant was too close to other coal burning facilities, 
increasing pollution levels in the area, Manchin intervened and the 
objections went away. Later, as his state’s governor, Manchin used his 
political influence to win approval for an increase in the rate charged 
for electricity charged by the plant, which increased bills for ordinary 
West Virginians. The New York Times reported that, in a highly unusual 
arrangement, the senator has been getting a cut of those bills...
After his election to the US Senate in 2010, Manchin sat on the energy 
committee, and then became its chair, from where he has blocked 
environmental regulations that would have hit the Grant Town plant and 
other gob-burning facilities. Manchin also stood in the way of Biden’s 
multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better plan which could have threatened 
the power plant with tighter federal climate regulations. The senator 
defended the move as necessary in the midst of the Covid crisis, 
economic uncertainty, and with fuel supplies threatened by Russia’s war 
on Ukraine...
But the suspicion remains that he was, at least in part, acting in his 
own interests. Hilsbos said that the first she knew about the source of 
Manchin’s wealth came from recent revelations in the Intercept and later 
the New York Times. They prompted demonstrations outside the power plant 
in April to demand its closure because of the additional pollution 
caused by gob.

Although Hilsbos said she sympathised with the protesters’ concerns, she 
also understood the fears of people in Grant Town, once home to the 
largest underground mine in the world by the amount of coal produced. 
The mine closed in the mid-80s, shedding hundreds of jobs. Now the power 
plant, with about 50 workers, is the only large private employer in a 
town without a gas station or convenience store.

“Some neighbours came forward and said, I’ve always hated that place. 
But when we went to the town council meeting and tried to explain to 
them why people were coming from everywhere to demonstrate here, they 
said, ‘We don’t want you here, don’t come,’” said Hilsbos.

“A lot of the people involved in the town council have worked in the 
mines themselves. They feel like this is what we can do to hold on to 
our homeland, not have to move away, have this little plant as long as 
we can.”

While few in neighbouring Fairmont knew where Enersystems was, Manchin 
maintained a highly visible campaign office opposite the county 
courthouse in the heart of the city, between Bill’s Bail Bonds and a 
yoga studio. From there, he built a strong loyalty among West Virginia 
voters as a conservative Democrat prepared to stand up to the liberal 
wing of his party and to defend coal.

Regan said the senator spent years cultivating an image of himself as 
his own man, above party politics.

“He’s done a good job of it. He had his famous rifle ad, shooting the 
climate bill during the Obama administration, that he used to gain 
distance from the Democratic party on the national scale. But the 
effectiveness of that strategy may be running out. The magnitude of the 
shift within the state is too large for it to work any more,” he said...
- -
For all that, Greg Thomas, a prominent West Virginia Republican 
operative and Manchin opponent, does not think the coal plant 
revelations will damage the senator with most voters.

“If you’re a West Virginia politician and you’re not under some sort of 
investigation, you’re not trying hard enough to help your people,” he 
said. “No one here cares about environmentalists protesting Joe 
Manchin’s personal financial holding. It’s gotten to the point where 
it’s like, who cares if he does? We assume they’re all corrupt.”

Thomas said that Manchin’s political stands against his fellow Democrats 
have reinvigorated support.

“His popularity in West Virginia is coming back after it dropped over 
his fights with Trump. Pushing back against Biden has helped. His 
position on energy issues has been big,” he said...
- -
Regan said the last election left Manchin with a margin of victory of 
fewer than 20,000 votes – a narrow cushion to soak up the loss of angry 
Democrats who will not turn out to vote for him. He said the Grant Town 
power plant revelations are likely to stoke the dissatisfaction within 
that part of the electorate...
- -
“I think anybody in 2024 who is not prepared to say that Trump won the 
election is not going to be an acceptable candidate any more,” he said. 
“He can’t walk into the Republican camp, and he’ll have alienated too 
many Democrats to win.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/31/joe-manchin-hold-climate-policy-hostage-to-benefit-his-financial-interests



/[ Well, there goes that dream .. ]/
*Hawaii Homeowners Must Tell Prospective Buyers If Sea Level Rise 
Threatens Their Property*
This week Hawaii became the first state to require real estate sellers 
to disclose to potential buyers if their property is threatened by sea 
level rise...
- -
“What’s the market value of a house that’s about to fall in the ocean?” 
said University of Hawaii climate change expert Chip Fletcher, interim 
dean at the University of Hawaii’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and 
Technology. “Every beachfront house will eventually fall into the ocean, 
yet they’re still selling for $10 million.”...
https://www.civilbeat.org/2022/05/hawaii-homeowners-must-tell-prospective-buyers-if-sea-level-rise-threatens-their-property/



/[ Fewer fires, but more intense. https://youtu.be/4oJ0j1OZSTU ] /
*The climate science behind wildfires: why are they getting worse?*
22,589 views  Aug 20, 2021  We are in an emergency. Wildfires are raging 
across the world as scorching temperatures and dry conditions fuel the 
blazes that have cost lives and destroyed livelihoods.

The combination of extreme heat, changes in our ecosystem and prolonged 
drought have in many regions led to the worst fires in almost a decade, 
and come after the IPCC handed down a damning landmark report on the 
climate crisis.

But technically, there are fewer wildfires than in the past – the 
problem now is that they are worse than ever and we are running out of 
time to act, as the Guardian's global environment editor, Jonathan 
Watts, explains

Heat, drought and fire: how climate dangers combine for a catastrophic 
‘perfect storm’ 
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/10/heat-drought-and-fire-how-climate-dangers-combine-for-a-catastrophic-perfect-storm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oJ0j1OZSTU


/[  Clips from //David Wallace-Wells'//SUBSCRIBER-ONLY NEWSLETTER   ] /
*How Putin Has Played His Energy Cards*
May 31, 2022
- -
Among the key propositions of their essay was that during the 
transition, as many wealthy countries backed away from fossil fuels, the 
power of petrostates would at least temporarily grow, since they would 
control a growing share of fossil energy supplies that much of the world 
still considered necessary.
To me, this suggested one way of understanding Russia’s invasion: an 
autocratic leader of a petrostate facing long-term decline but enjoying 
short-term strength and choosing to push his advantage while he still 
enjoyed it. During a visit to The Times to discuss climate policy last 
week, former Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus made the same point: “One 
of the many gross miscalculations that Putin made was that Europe would 
not stand against this, because of their dependence on Russian oil and 
gas,” he said. A few days later, Cristiana Figueres, the former head of 
the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change and a central 
architect of the Paris climate accord, described Putin’s handling of 
Russia’s energy supply more bluntly to me: “blackmail.”...
- -
*Right, though even those investments are, among other things, 
investments in dependency and leverage.**
*
O’SULLIVAN: There’s a good book by Thane Gustafson called “Klimat” on 
how climate change affects Russia and how the Russians have started to 
realize this climate change thing is real, relatively recently, and that 
it’s going to affect their markets with Europe, because of the more 
serious conversation in Europe about the cross-border adjustment mechanism.
- -
O’SULLIVAN: I do think that’s a relevant backdrop.

Europe’s energy dependence on Russia, you mean.

O’SULLIVAN: But if I were arguing on the other side, that the energy 
situation might have led Putin to wait rather than rush ahead, I would 
say, if Putin was really being strategic, he would have waited for Nord 
Stream 2 to be up and running.

That’s the Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline that was all but ready to 
open, then pulled offline just as the war began.

O’SULLIVAN: It’s just so crazy he didn’t wait. He would have been in a 
much better position. And had he waited until more gas pipelines were 
connecting Russia to Asia, he would have also been in a better position. 
This would have taken several years, but right now, it’s just a tiny bit 
of gas that can be redirected there.

Which means if Russia can’t sell its gas to Europe, it won’t be so easy 
to sell it elsewhere.

O’SULLIVAN: He would have had even more leverage if he’d waited. But I 
think that just speaks to his idea that there is nothing that would lead 
Europe to shut down these energy flows. I think he really had confidence 
that dependency really brought him immunity.
- -
Before the invasion, obviously there were big failures of reaching the 
$100 billion-a-year target.
*That’s the green financing pledge made by the rich countries of the 
world to the world’s poor.*
O’SULLIVAN: Which we know is insufficient as it is. So it’s just 
interesting to think, is one of the ways the developed world is going to 
get more serious that they’re going to be putting more money into the 
developing world? I haven’t seen any evidence of that yet because one of 
the other legacies of this invasion is likely to be a recession.
BORDOFF: But one other thing I also believe is true is from your book: 
There are going to be tipping points with this transition and tipping 
points in technology, and I have no doubt there will also be tipping 
points in social mobilization and the collective sense of urgency with 
the climate crisis. That’s going to happen. But I don’t know if it’s 
three years or five years or 10 years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/ukraine-energy-war-europe-gas.html



/[  new book  ] /
*'City of Orange' is a post-apocalyptic tale starting with memory loss*
May 28, 2022
LELAND CHEUK
City of Orange
G.P. Putnam's Sons
The double threat of climate change and the global pandemic has made 
post-apocalyptic fiction an undeniably thriving and popular genre.

 From Cormac McCarthy's The Road to Emily St. John Mandel's Station 
Eleven, not to mention countless others, authors aren't getting tired of 
imagining what happens after the end of the world as we know it — and it 
appears readers aren't tired of reading about it either.

For every new conjuring of our modern lives turned upside down by 
wildfires, floods, and drought, the relevant question is not whether the 
latest post-apocalyptic work is well-written, but whether the new 
entrant in the category is additive. In the case of City of Orange by 
award-winning sci-fi author David Yoon, the answer isn't straightforward.

The book's twist on the familiar post-apocalyptic setup is that the main 
character can't remember anything. Adam Cheung wakes to find himself in 
the middle of nowhere. He remembers only that he is on Earth. He doesn't 
remember his name, whether he has a family, what he used to do for a 
living, or perhaps most importantly, how the world ended, the details of 
which are kept murky throughout the novel, limited to incomplete 
explanations such as the following, from a character Adam meets:

"I mean, first there's the whole financial meltdown, then all the 
investors pull out, then a fire hits. The flames were scary huge. The 
river was the only thing that kept us from burning up with it, like a 
firebreak? . . . That was like six months ago . . ."

Adam is Tom Hanks in Castaway without Wilson the Volleyball, though 
there is a talking crow. Adam has to find water, boil it, and forage. 
Adam spends much of the book piecing together his past via flashbacks 
while figuring out how to survive. His backstory is a tragic one. Before 
the apocalypse, his wife and young child were killed in an auto 
accident, rear-ended during a traffic stop by a car leading the police 
on a high-speed chase. The flashbacks, intended to make Adam's 
pre-apocalyptic existence relatable to readers, start to feel like less 
than the sum of their parts as the book goes on. By the second half of 
the novel, we're not learning much new information about Adam's family, 
only that Adam is still mourning.

What he does and doesn't remember also seems somewhat arbitrary. Adam's 
internal monologues occasionally slip into '90s slang. Adam observes 
that a fellow survivor is "insane in the membrane," a phrase made 
popular by the 1993 Cypress Hill song of the same title. Later in the 
book, however, he struggles to remember the financial term "underwater" 
and initially thinks of the word's literal meaning.

Amidst the survivalist misery, City of Orange poses an interesting 
question about manmade climate catastrophes. At one point, Adam thinks:

"If Man is fundamentally evil, the evil is simply an inescapable part of 
nature. Man creates tools, discovers fires, leaps to the top of the food 
chain. Creates culture and science. Then sets about murdering himself in 
the pursuit of dominance . . . If Man is fundamentally evil, is this 
apocalypse really anything to mourn?"

The narrative, however, doesn't answer this question. Adam doesn't have 
anything to do with the apocalypse, and the apocalypse doesn't have 
anything to do with the loss of his family. The metaphysics of 
humanity's negligence of its responsibility for the planet's survival 
aren't addressed thematically or through the book's characters.

It's not until Adam encounters a teen named Clay that the novel begins 
to serve up some surprises. The boy lives in a solar-powered model home 
with video games and basic cable. Clay turns on the news to show Adam 
that the apocalypse he believes has occurred might not have occurred for 
everyone everywhere. When Clay's mother shows up in a van to take her 
son to her sister's house, it becomes clear that, for some, the world 
might be just fine.

Perhaps the most memorable scene happens near the end of the book when 
Adam meets a man in a sea kayak, fully equipped with "seventy-two 
thousand calories of durable rations in waterproof containers plus a 
water purifier below deck." The man intends to paddle from Orange County 
to Hawaii. City of Orange could have used more inspired, surreal 
exchanges like that one to transcend the post-apocalyptic genre tropes 
that this novel mostly rehashes, rather than reinvents.

Leland Cheuk is an award-winning author of three books of fiction, most 
recently No Good Very Bad Asian. His writing has appeared in The 
Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, among other outlets.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/28/1101706286/city-of-orange-is-a-post-apocalyptic-tale-starting-with-memory-loss


/[ disinformation  for power and money  - a victim in panic -- book 
interview ]/
*Biden Admin Disinformation Chief Taken Down by… Disinformation | 
Amanpour and Company*
26,931 views  May 24, 2022  Homeland Security’s newly launched 
Disinformation Governance Board lasted only a few weeks, while facing 
intense criticism. Now its leader, Nina Jankowicz, has resigned. A 
renowned expert on countering disinformation, Jankowicz speaks with 
Michel Martin about her experience under attack online.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrrlxruxGhE

- -

/[  articles //By Nina Jankowicz//]/
*How Disinformation Corrodes Democracy*
Biden’s Summit Must Confront the Scourge of False Narratives
By Nina Jankowicz - November 30, 2021
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2021-11-30/how-disinformation-corrodes-democracy

   ---

*The Day the Internet Came for Them*
Washington Wakes Up to the Dark Reality of Online Disinformation
By Nina Jankowicz
January 12, 2021
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-01-12/day-internet-came-them


/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*June 1, 2004*/
The Boston Phoenix's Dan Kennedy calls out the Boston Globe for running 
an op-ed by Jim Taylor of the Heartland Institute attacking the film 
"The Day After Tomorrow" without disclosing that the Heartland Institute 
is a front group for the fossil-fuel industry.

    AND NOW, THE REST OF THE STORY. The Boston Globe recently announced
    that it will begin accepting ads on the op-ed page. A column today
    that attempts to debunk concerns about global warming, by one James
    M. Taylor, would appear to fall into that category. Unfortunately,
    the Globe presents it not as a paid ad but, rather, as an earnest
    opinion piece by someone who is identified only by the
    respectable-sounding title of "managing editor of Environment &
    Climate News."...
    - -
    Environment & Climate News, as it turns out, is a publication of the
    Chicago-based Heartland Institute, a right-wing organization founded
    in 1984 that is "devoted to turning ideas into social movements that
    empower people." How nice. Scroll down its home page, and you will
    see that it promotes relatively benign, conservative-oriented causes
    such as school choice - and some truly out-there ideas, such as the
    notion that genetically modified crops are necessary to preserve
    water resources, that new air-pollution standards "will do
    significant economic harm but little environmental good," that the
    government should do nothing about the obesity epidemic, and that
    second-hand cigarette smoke is harmless.

    It gets better. According to Disinfopedia.com, the Heartland
    Institute's directors include current and retired officials of
    ExxonMobil, Amaco, General Motors, and Philip Morris. Its funding
    comes from ExxonMobil and a number of right-wing foundations,
    including the notorious John M. Olin Foundation and the Scaife
    Foundations. (As in Richard Melon Scaife, who reportedly once told a
    journalist attempting to ask him a question, "You fucking communist
    cunt, get out of here.") In addition, Heartland co-founder David
    Padden is a right-wing activist long involved in such organizations
    as the Cato Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies.

    According to Bill Berkowitz, writing for WorkingForChange.com, "The
    Heartland Institute ... is one of the foremost right-wing purveyors
    of the carbon dioxide is good for you theory."

http://medialogarchives.blogspot.com/2004/06/and-now-rest-of-story.asp


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