[✔️] June 25, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | misinformation lawsuit, opinion manipulation, millions spent last 5 years, new book on fire, 2008 EPA battles

Richard Pauli Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Sun Jun 25 09:15:09 EDT 2023 

/*June*//*25, 2023*/

/[ lawsuits about the misinformation agents  ]/
*Oregon County Sues Fossil Fuel Entities and Enablers for Contributing 
to Deadly 2021 Heatwave*
The climate lawsuit filed by Multnomah County is the first to name 
consulting firm McKinsey & Company as a defendant.
By Dana Drugmandon   Jun 22, 2023

Major fossil fuel entities and trade associations including Koch 
Industries, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Western States 
Petroleum Association, as well as consulting behemoth McKinsey & 
Company, were slapped with the latest climate liability lawsuit today 
with the filing of a complaint in the Oregon Circuit Court in Multnomah 
County, Oregon.

The northwestern Oregon county is the state’s most populous and includes 
the city of Portland. In this new lawsuit, it seeks to hold fossil fuel 
companies and their “misinformation agents” accountable for the 
unprecedented 2021 heat dome that saw temperatures in the county reach 
116º Fahrenheit. Climate scientists and researchers in attribution 
science have determined that this extreme heat event would have been 
“virtually impossible” without anthropogenic climate change, which is 
driven primarily by burning fossil fuels.

“Multnomah County is utilizing irrefutable climate science to hold 
corporate polluters accountable for their role in causing a discreet and 
disastrous event, as well as recent wildfires,” attorney Roger 
Worthington — a partner at Worthington & Caron, one of the firms 
representing the county — stated in a press release.

“This lawsuit is about accountability and fairness, and I believe the 
people of Multnomah County deserve both. These businesses knew their 
products were unsafe and harmful, and they lied about it,” added Jessica 
Vega Pederson, chair of the Multnomah County Board of County 
Commissioners, in the press release.

Named defendants in Multnomah County’s lawsuit include ExxonMobil, 
Chevron, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Motiva, Occidental Petroleum, 
Anadarko Petroleum, Space Age Fuel, Valero Energy, Total Specialties 
USA, Marathon Petroleum, Peabody Energy, Koch Industries, American 
Petroleum Institute, Western States Petroleum Association, and McKinsey 
& Company. DeSmog reached out to the American Petroleum Institute, 
Western States Petroleum Association, McKinsey & Company, ExxonMobil, 
and Chevron for comment.

“Suits like these continue to waste time, resources and do nothing to 
address climate change. This action has no impact on our intention to 
invest billions of dollars to leading the way in a thoughtful energy 
transition that takes the world to net zero carbon emissions,” an 
ExxonMobil spokesperson said via email.

It is the first time that McKinsey & Company has been named as a 
defendant in a climate accountability lawsuit. It is also the first 
climate case to name the WSPA as a defendant; other climate cases filed 
by California communities have invoked the Big Oil trade association — 
which spent more than any other group lobbying in California last year — 
as a relevant non-party.

McKinsey & Company has a sordid history of working with industries that 
have deliberately deceived the public about the harms of their products, 
from Big Tobacco to opioid manufacturers. The consulting firm has also 
served the fossil fuel industry. As explained in the 2022 book When 
McKinsey Comes to Town, since 2010, McKinsey has worked for at least 43 
of the 100 largest corporate carbon polluters. These companies, “when 
accounting for the customers who use their products, were responsible 
for more than 36 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions from 
fossil fuels in 2018,” authors Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe 
write. Chevron, one of the defendants in the new case, has been one of 
McKinsey’s biggest clients, generating at least $50 million in 
consulting fees in 2019.

The targeting of a consulting firm working for fossil fuel clients may 
be just the beginning of efforts to hold those enabling the industry 
accountable through litigation, according to Ben Franta, senior research 
fellow and head of the Climate Litigation Lab at Oxford University.

“Fossil fuel majors have collaborated with ad agencies, public relations 
firms, and others over the decades to create misleading public 
communications campaigns,” he told DeSmog. “Much as the consulting firm 
McKinsey has faced liability in the context of opioid litigation, third 
parties beyond fossil fuel producers might conceivably face liability in 
the context of climate litigation.”

The lawsuit filed by Multnomah County brings charges of public nuisance, 
negligence, and fraud. It seeks $50 million in actual damages and $1.5 
billion in future damages. Additionally, the county seeks $50 billion in 
costs for an abatement model to study, plan, and upgrade public 
healthcare services and infrastructure to safeguard against future 
extreme heat events...
- -
Montana-based climate scientist Steven Running said during a youth 
climate trial last week in Helena, Montana, that this extreme heat dome 
is an “example of the sort of thing that may happen in the future [under 
climate destabilization]. As long as fossil fuel emissions continue, 
“the Earth will keep trapping this additional heat and then periodically 
we will end up with surprises like this,” he testified...

https://www.desmog.com/2023/06/22/oregon-county-sues-fossil-fuel-entities-and-enablers-for-contributing-to-deadly-2021-heatwave/

- -

/[ legacy of opinion manipulation and serious persuasion ]/
*New analysis: More than $183 million spent on climate & energy Facebook 
ads in 5 years*
A roundup of the climate conversation across social media this week
JUN 22, 2023
Welcome to Climate Monitor, a weekly, data-driven report on the digital 
strategies polluters and pro-Climate groups are using to shift public 
opinion and move legislation. Here’s what we found:

Toplines:
Over the past 5 years, the top 100 highest spending climate and energy 
advertisers on Facebook have dropped a cumulative $183 million on ads. 
The top spender? Exxon Mobil, which has spent over $23 million on the 
platform since 2018

Shell ramped up its digital advertising last week, promoting its work to 
support EV chargers and “renewable energy”

The Biden admin shared several climate-related posts on Facebook last 
week that earned decent engagement on the platform

NRDC Action is targeting Pennsylvanians with a new YouTube ad campaign 
in support of Gov. Josh Shapiro and the Regional Greenhouse Gas 
Initiative...
- -
*Exxon and API Spent Over $33 Million On Instagram And Facebook Ads In 
Past 5 Years*
This week's Climate Monitor has some rather big numbers on climate 
disinfo advertising: "The highest-spending advertiser across the climate 
and energy sector continues to be fossil fuel giant Exxon Mobil, which 
has spent over $23.1 million since June 2018 on Facebook and Instagram 
ads."

Climate Monitor has put together a list of the top 100 advertisers on 
Meta’s platforms, and right behind Exxon Mobil is the American Petroleum 
Institute, with over $11 million spent on Facebook and Instagram 
advertising between June 2018 and June 15, 2023. In third place is the 
California Public Utilities Commission, with $9.76 million in ad 
expenditures.

Overall, the organizations on the list, including environmental groups, 
"have dropped a cumulative $183 million on ads," with plenty of that 
money coming from green groups like the Sierra Club, the Natural 
Resources Defense Council, and the League of Conservation Voters (ranked 
4th, 6th, and 7th, respectively, for their $7.6, nearly $6.0, and $5.0 
million budgets on Meta ads over the last five years).

Call us old fashioned, but wouldn't it be nice if green groups were 
sending their ad dollars to local media to try to slow the 
disinfo-friendly desertification of local news, instead of subsidizing 
billionaire egomaniacs?
https://newsletter.climatenexus.org/20230623-mosquitoes-paris-finance-summit-scotus-navajo-nation-water
- -
/[ Looking for the obvious .]/
*New analysis: More than $183 million spent on climate & energy Facebook 
ads in 5 years*
A roundup of the climate conversation across social media this week
JUN 22, 2023
Welcome to Climate Monitor, a weekly, data-driven report on the digital 
strategies polluters and pro-Climate groups are using to shift public 
opinion and move legislation. Here’s what we found:

    Over the past 5 years, the top 100 highest spending climate and
    energy advertisers on Facebook have dropped a cumulative $183
    million on ads. The top spender? Exxon Mobil, which has spent over
    $23 million on the platform since 2018

    Shell ramped up its digital advertising last week, promoting its
    work to support EV chargers and “renewable energy”

    The Biden admin shared several climate-related posts on Facebook
    last week that earned decent engagement on the platform

    NRDC Action is targeting Pennsylvanians with a new YouTube ad
    campaign in support of Gov. Josh Shapiro and the Regional Greenhouse
    Gas Initiative

https://climatemonitor.substack.com/p/new-analysis-more-than-183-million



/[ New book on fire ]/
*Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World*
John Vaillant (Author)
A stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of 
the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the 
award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce
"Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page...Captures the majesty 
and horror of one of [our] great disasters." --David Wallace-Wells, #1 
bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada's oil industry and 
America's biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The 
multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire 
neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes 
in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic 
conflagration--the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina--John 
Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview 
of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, 
shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has 
enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the 
machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source 
has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of 
intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power 
unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.

With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting 
journey through the intertwined histories of North America's oil 
industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented 
devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever 
changed by these disasters. John Vaillant's urgent work is a book 
for--and from--our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
Price $32.50  $30.23

Reviews
"Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page. John Vaillant is one 
of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world, and here he 
captures the majesty and horror of one of its great disasters--and what 
made it tragically possible."
--David Wallace-Wells, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth

"In John Vaillant's vivid anatomy of the apocalyptic Fort McMurray 
inferno, the histories of humankind's ever-accelerating consumption of 
fossil fuel, and of our ever-increasing vulnerability to extreme 
wildfire, converge with the relentlessness of fate -- and the urgency of 
prophecy."
--Philip Gourevitch, bestselling author of We Wish to Inform You That 
Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

"A compulsively readable journey into our fiery times. At the center, 
Vaillant gives us fire itself as a character--fast, hungry, and evolving 
to shape the warming decades to come. You might never hear an engine or 
watch a bonfire the same way again."
--Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast
"The Fort McMurray fire was a vortex of people, ideas, institutions, 
forest, oil, city, and wind, the quirky and the existential, all 
mutating under the wanton impress of the Anthropocene Age. Fire Weather 
offers a compelling account of that tragedy, and a reimagining of a 
pyric infection that threatens to remake the planet."
--Stephen Pyne, author of The Pyrocene
"Fire Weather is a towering achievement: an immense work of research, 
reflection and imagination that will, I believe, come to be seen as a 
landmark in non-fiction reportage on the Anthropocene, or what Vaillant 
here calls 'the Petrocene' -- that epoch defined primarily by humanly 
enhanced combustion. Fire Weather is extraordinary in terms of its scope 
and range; it also sings and surprises at the level of the sentence. It 
grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to 
the core."
--Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland..

https://bookshop.org/p/books/fire-weather-a-true-story-of-survival-and-community-in-our-new-century-of-fire-john-vaillant/18751510?ean=9781524732851&sscid=61k7_1098od&utm_source=ShareASale&utm_medium=Affiliate&utm_campaign=314743&utm_term=1535322


/[The news archive - looking back at battles with EPA ]/
/*June 25, 2008*/
June 25, 2008: The New York Times reports: "The [George W. Bush] White 
House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection 
Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be 
controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing 
the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/washington/25epa.html

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2008/06/26/174068/epa-email-denial/


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