[✔️] May 20, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Dave Roberts - net zero, Most heat for wildfires due to fossil fuels, thousands of methane links, GOP and ESG letters. Maureen Dowd in 2001

Sat May 20 04:07:23 EDT 2023

/*May*//*20, 2023*/

/[ David Roberts is a wise and serious interviewer - 50 min audio ]/
MAY 19. 2023
*The trouble with net zero*
A conversation with Holly Jean Buck.
- -
Over the course of the 2010s, the term “net-zero carbon emissions” 
migrated from climate science to climate modeling to climate politics. 
Today, it is ubiquitous in the climate world — hundreds upon hundreds of 
nations, cities, institutions, businesses, and individuals have pledged 
to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. No one ever formally decided to 
make net zero the common target of global climate efforts — it just 
happened.

The term has become so common that we barely hear it anymore, which is a 
shame, because there are lots of buried assumptions and value judgments 
in the net-zero narrative that we are, perhaps unwittingly, accepting 
when we adopt it...

https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-trouble-with-net-zero?utm_source=podcast-email%2Csubstack&publication_id=193024&post_id=119631811&utm_medium=email#details

/[ careful with your campfire -- ]/
*2/3s of the Extra Dry Air that encourages Wildfires comes from Humanity 
burning Fossil Fuels*
JUAN COLE
05/18/2023
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The earth’s atmosphere can make things 
wet or dry them out depending on the water vapor pressure. When there is 
a Vapor Pressure Deficit, it dries the earth out. VPD is defined as “a 
measure of atmospheric water demand defined as the difference between 
the amount of water vapor in the air and the amount of water vapor that 
air would hold at saturation.” If there is a lot less water vapor than 
the atmosphere would normally hold, all other things being equal, you 
have a bigger deficit. A dry atmosphere also makes the earth beneath it 
drier. Dry land conditions are conducive to wildfires. The dryness of 
the atmosphere can also be seasonal. But more than 66% of the summertime 
vapor pressure deficit in the West has been caused by human activity in 
burning fossil fuels.

Kristina Dahl et al. conclude that carbon dioxide emissions put out by 
88 major carbon producers contributed 48% of the long-term rise in Vapor 
Pressure Deficit between 1901 and 2021. The paper is published in 
Environmental Research Letters. Ms. Dahl is the principal climate 
scientist for the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned 
Scientists.

We’ve seen massive wildfires in the US and Canadian West in recent 
years. You might think, well, there have always been wildfires. But how 
big an area the wildfires burn, the length of the fire season, the 
number of large fires each season, how high the fires climb up into the 
hills, and the amount of forested land that burns at “high severity” all 
vary. All of these measurements of how bad the situation is have 
increased in the past few decades. So not a random variation. Things 
have gotten very bad recently, and that needs to be explained.

It’s the 88 companies? It’s the 88 companies.

Some 5 years ago, Tess Riley at The Guardian blamed most of global 
climate change on 100 companies.
12 News: “Heavy fuels, climate change create uncertainty for Arizona 
wildfire season”
/[ See the video ] /https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsbHqPWeizw

Dahl and her colleagues concluded that of the blackened earth left 
behind by forest fires from 1986 to 2021 in the west of the two 
countries, these 88 companies caused the carbon dioxide emissions that 
contributed to 37%, over a third, of that burn area. In California, 
Oregon, Washington State and Vancouver, etc. there has been a big 
increase in Vapor Pressure Deficit, which in turn has caused more 
wildfires and contributed to the prolonged Megadrought, which has lasted 
now for two decades and used to be a once-in-five-hundred years event.

So, no, there haven’t always been wildfires just like the ones we have 
been experiencing recently. Some 88 companies selling petroleum, coal, 
fossil gas and cement have made it twice as dry as it would otherwise 
be, two-thirds drier in summer, and have caused the wildfires to be over 
a third more destructive than they otherwise would be.

Even before this new study, researches had established that carbon 
dioxide and methane produced by Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Cement were 
responsible for more that 40% of the increasing temperatures around the 
world, for a quarter of all the world’s sea level rise, and for half of 
ocean acidification.
https://www.juancole.com/2023/05/encourages-wildfires-humanity.html

/[  Thousands of jobs plunging thousands of leaks  ] /
*New Report Finds Methane Mitigation in Texas Could Create Thousands of 
Jobs*
Texas officials have vowed to oppose federal regulations aimed at 
reducing methane emissions from oil and gas operations. But the report 
says plugging leaks and upgrading wells is poised to be a big business 
in the Lone Star State.
By Martha Pskowski
May 17, 2023
A new report finds that methane regulations proposed by the 
Environmental Protection Agency  could spur job growth in Texas as oil 
and gas operators measure, monitor and mitigate the harmful greenhouse gas.

While Texas officials argue the methane regulations would kill jobs, the 
report, published today by the Texas Climate Jobs Project and the Ray 
Marshall Center at the University of Texas, Austin, found that new 
federal methane regulations could create between 19,000 and 35,000 jobs 
in the state.

Oil and gas producing regions, including the Permian Basin, would need a 
significant workforce to detect methane leaks, replace components known 
to leak the gas and plug abandoned wells. Previous research shows the 
methane mitigation industry is already growing.

In the absence of state methane rules, the EPA’s draft methane rule, 
first issued in November 2021 and strengthened in a supplemental filing 
last November, along with a new methane fee under the Inflation 
Reduction Act, will have a major impact on oil and gas operations in the 
Lone Star state. ..
- -
A 2021 Environmental Defense Fund report found that the methane 
mitigation sector was already growing rapidly. The report identified 215 
firms manufacturing technology or providing services to manage methane 
emissions in the oil and gas industry. The number of manufacturing firms 
had increased by 33 percent from 2014 to 2021 and the number of service 
firms had increased by 90 percent between 2017 and 2021.

The EDF report found that more companies mitigating methane had 
employees located in Texas than any other state. Companies headquartered 
in Texas include Solar Injection Systems in Odessa, which manufactures 
solar-powered chemical injection pumps; Cimarron Energy, an emissions 
control company in Houston, and CI Systems in Carrollton, which 
commercializes infrared remote sensing technology.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17052023/texas-methane-epa-regulations-jobs/

/[ ESG ==  Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) -- are important 
factors ]/
*GOP Sending Angry ESG Letters To Do Billionaire's Bidding*
There have been a few great pieces lately chronicling the $1.6 billion 
donation that Leonard Leo got to spread conservative propaganda and disinfo.

This week, Nina Burleigh at The New Republic went deep on Barre Seid, 
the erstwhile billionaire who gave his $1.6 billion company to Leo, 
providing the most comprehensive history of Seid that we've seen to 
date. (We will just note that we flagged back in 2014 that Seid was 
funding climate denial and add that he was for years a Hot News 
subscriber and Denier Roundup reader!)

Earlier this month at Politico, Heidi Przybyla looked at how Leo met 
billionaire Barre Seid through the supposedly nonpartisan Federalist 
Society. Przybyla warns that "Leo appears to be planning to use Seid’s 
money to create a new ecosystem of conservative activism that he’s 
likening to a Federalist Society for cultural institutions from schools 
to boardrooms." Sure enough, Rebecca Davis O'Brien at The New York Times 
attempted to track where the $182.7 million Leo spent in 2021 went. And 
while tens of millions are getting tossed to and fro, unfortunately, "it 
is impossible to directly trace where" all the money ended up, thanks to 
deliberately opaque disclosure laws.

So what'd all that money buy? We know millions of dollars are changing 
hands, but what's Leo getting for all Seid's money?

By the looks of it, the money bought a revival of McCarthy-era communist 
witch hunts, only now the communists are supposedly in Wall Street as 
well as Hollywood. While we can't trace where the money went, we can see 
where the disinfo is coming from and connect some dots.

For example, on Tuesday and Wednesday, three successive stories broke in 
right-wing media about Republicans sending threatening anti-ESG letters.

  We can't know for sure, but odds are, had a billionaire not dumped 
money into fighting against responsible investing that incorporates 
environmental, social, and governance risks into financial decisions, 
Fox News wouldn't be reporting that Republicans are sending a letter 
pressing the Federal Reserve to deny climate risks under the guise of 
the anti-ESG campaign that Seid's money seeded.

  And we can probably assume that without Seid’s money, Republican state 
attorneys general would be doing something more helpful with their 
position as the state's top law enforcement officers than sending 
threatening letters to insurance companies for factoring in climate 
risk, again in keeping with the anti-ESG crusade.

And of course, the Seid/Leo-funded State Financial Officers Foundation 
(SFOF) wouldn't be pushing GOP state treasurers into sending threatening 
letters to major financial institutions — costing their states billions 
of dollars for their anti-ESG efforts — without billionaire backing.

But hey, who cares if the public's losing money, so long as Leonard Leo 
and friends are rolling in it? Apparently not Republicans!

https://newsletter.climatenexus.org/ccworse?ecid=ACsprvsHvk45eEE-pxg-ZfS-wZq3kA9KtAAanKxeA9uzwRcuVHlDCsvvV6bo9CFx0uyRvUq52LH6&utm_campaign=Hot%20News&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=259013569&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9TWjjO5bwEQOrq0bC6bpqgwL75MtczHpOy6QGO1iu4S8SWHhQToKZbF9iPIEJI6uf44oTmKsRAcJeGqZUC28zNKxz3XQ&utm_content=259013569&utm_source=hs_email

/[The news archive - looking back at how Maureen Dowd understands GW Bush ]/
/*May 20, 2001*/
May 20, 2001: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd summarizes the 
anti-conservation mentality of the George W. Bush administration:

    "We'll bake the earth. We'll brown & serve it, sauté it, simmer it,
    sear it, fondue it, George-Foreman-grill it. (We invented the
    Foreman grill.) We might one day bring the earth to a boil and pull
    it like taffy. (We invented taffy.)

    "If rising seas obliterate the coasts, our marine geologists will
    sculpt new ones and Hollywood will get bright new ideas for disaster
    movies. If we get charred by the sun, our dermatologists will
    replace our skin.

    "If the globe gets warmer, we'll turn up the air-conditioning. (We
    invented air-conditioning.) We'll drive faster in our gigantic,
    air-conditioned cars to the new beaches that our marine geologists
    create.

    "We will let our power plants spew any chemicals we deem necessary
    to fire up our Interplaks, our Krups, our Black & Deckers and our
    Fujitsu Plasmavisions.

    "We will drill for oil whenever and wherever we please. If tourists
    don't like rigs off the coast of Florida, they can go fly fishing in
    Wyoming. We won't be deterred by a few Arctic terns. We don't care
    about caribou. We don't care for cardigans. Give us our 69 degrees,
    winter and summer. Let there be light -- no timers, no freaky-shaped
    long-life bulbs. (We invented the light bulb.)

    "We want our refrigerators cold and our freezers colder. Bring on
    the freon. Banish those irritating toilets that restrict flow. When
    we flush, we flush all the way.

    "We will perfect the dream of nuclear power. We will put our toxic
    waste wherever we want, whenever we waste it. We have whole states
    with nothing better to do than serve as ancestral burial grounds for
    our effluvium. It can fester in those wide open spaces for thousands
    of years."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/opinion/liberties-drill-grill-and-chill.html?pagewanted=print 

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