[✔️] April 21, 2024 Global Warming News |Big Oil "climate homicide", Suborning murder, Crisis for next president, The Deluge, Sarcasm, 2004

[Richard Pauli]

/*April *//*21, 2024*/

/[  From Grist ]/
*Taking Big Oil to court for ‘climate homicide’ isn’t as far-fetched as 
it sounds*
Are fossil fuel companies guilty of actual murder?
A new legal theory suggests that oil companies could be taken to court 
for every kind of homicide in the United States, short of first-degree 
murder.
Kate Yoder, Staff Writer
Apr 19, 2024
The idea of “climate homicide” is getting attention in law schools and 
district attorney’s offices around the country. A paper published in 
Harvard Environmental Law Review last week argues that fossil fuel 
companies have been “killing members of the public at an accelerating 
rate.” It says that oil giants’ awareness that their pollution could 
have lethal consequences solidly fits within the definition of homicide, 
which, in its basic form, is causing death with a “culpable mental 
state.” In other words, the case can be made that oil companies knew 
what they were doing.

“It’s sparking a lot of conversation,” said Aaron Regunberg, senior 
policy counsel at the advocacy group Public Citizen. After discussing 
the idea with elected officials and prosecutors, Regunberg said, many of 
them have moved from “‘Oh, that’s crazy’ to ‘Oh, that makes sense.’”

Starting around the 1970s, oil companies like Exxon understood the 
dangers that burning fossil fuels would unleash — unprecedented warming 
that would render parts of the globe “less habitable,” submerge coastal 
cities, and lead to extensive drought and mass famine. Yet instead of 
switching away from coal and oil, they doubled down, working to block 
legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and spreading doubt about 
the science of climate change. Today, with atmospheric CO2 climbing to 
levels last seen 14 million years ago, the predicted consequences have 
begun to arrive. Since the start of the 21st century, climate change has 
killed roughly 4 million people, according to one conservative estimate.
By 2100, that same number of people could be killed by the effects of 
climate change every single year, according to the new paper by David 
Arkush, the director of Public Citizen’s climate program, and Donald 
Braman, a law professor at George Washington University. “[T]he scope of 
the lethality is so vast that, in the annals of crime, it may eventually 
dwarf all other homicide cases in the United States, combined,” they write.

Criminal law cases are normally brought against individuals, but 
Regunberg says there’s a strong case for applying it more broadly. “It’s 
supposed to be about protecting us from dangerous actors that would harm 
our communities. What if we actually use this system to protect us from 
dangerous corporate actors that are doing incomprehensible harm?”

Homicide opens up a new flank in the strategy to bring climate change 
into the courts. Climate litigation is now in its “third wave,” 
according to Anthony Moffa, a professor at the University of Maine 
School of Law. The first lawsuits sought to force power companies to 
limit their emissions by way of federal public nuisance claims, a 
strategy the Supreme Court shot down in 2011. Then people started suing 
the U.S. and state governments using the argument that they had a duty 
to protect their citizens from climate change. The approach bore fruit 
last year, when young climate activists won a suit against Montana that 
claimed the state’s failure to evaluate climate risks in approving 
fossil fuel projects violated their constitutional right to a healthy 
environment.

That phase also includes a flood of climate lawsuits filed against oil 
companies in state courts using laws meant to protect people from 
deceptive advertising, and those cases are finally moving closer to 
trial after years of delays. Now the strategy has expanded to include 
racketeering lawsuits, which use the laws that took down the Mafia 
against Big Oil, and potentially criminal law cases including homicide 
or reckless endangerment.

Arkush and Braman’s paper suggests that all types of homicide are on the 
table except for first-degree murder, which requires premeditated 
intent. One option is “involuntary manslaughter,” or engaging in 
reckless conduct that causes death, even if it’s unintentional. 
“Negligent homicide” is similar, but for neglectful behavior. There’s 
also “depraved heart murder,” which requires engaging in conduct where 
you knew there was a substantial risk someone would be killed. Other 
variants include “felony murder” and “misdemeanor manslaughter.” 
Criminal law differs between states, so an attorney general or district 
attorney’s approach would depend on the jurisdiction.

Homicide suits could be a powerful force for holding oil companies 
accountable and forcing them to change their polluting ways. “Where tort 
law merely prices harmful conduct, criminal law prohibits it — and 
provides tools to stop it,” Arkush and Braman wrote in the Harvard 
Environmental Law Review paper. A successful lawsuit could result in 
courts requiring fossil fuel companies to restructure as “public benefit 
corporations” that have to balance profits with a commitment to the 
public good, replace their boards with new members, or make legally 
binding commitments to forgo certain practices.

To promote the idea of “climate homicide,” Public Citizen has been 
organizing panel discussions in recent weeks at law schools including 
Yale, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and 
the University of Chicago. Another panel will be held at Vermont Law 
School on Monday. Public Citizen is also looking into staging mock 
trials to see how jurors might react to these kinds of cases and what 
evidence they find compelling.

“There are a number of prosecutorial offices that seem interested in 
giving these legal theories serious consideration,” Regunberg said. 
“They understand that climate disasters — extreme heat, wildfires, 
floods, and more — are endangering their communities, and if there’s a 
way to stop criminally reckless conduct that’s contributing to these 
threats, they’re going to explore that possibility.”

The idea has been embraced by Sharon Eubanks, who led the United States’ 
racketeering lawsuit against tobacco companies in 2005, in which the 
court found that companies had conspired to deceive the public by 
covering up the health dangers of smoking. “There were a lot of people 
who said we were crazy to charge big tobacco with racketeering and that 
we could never win,” Eubanks told The Guardian. “But you know what? We 
did win. I think we need that same kind of thinking to deal with the 
climate crisis.”

So why has no one seriously considered suing oil companies for homicide 
until now? Recent years have brought advances in the science that 
connects climate change to extreme weather events and quantifies how 
corporate emissions have fueled disasters like wildfires, paving the way 
for these types of cases. Still, the need to include attribution science 
adds a layer of complexity that hasn’t been present for similar 
litigation against tobacco or opioid companies, according to Moffa.

And then there’s the fact that prosecutors are reluctant to take 
corporations to court with criminal law charges. The first time that a 
corporation was charged under a criminal statute for manslaughter was in 
1904, when a steamship owner was found guilty after its ship caught fire 
and 900 passengers drowned, but the legal strategy never really took 
off. “So then to say, ‘Why haven’t they ever done this in the 
environmental law?’ They haven’t really done it in almost any context,” 
Moffa said.

In their paper, Arkush and Braman argued that fossil fuel companies have 
been acting as if they were above the law. “Under a plain reading of the 
law in jurisdictions across the United States, they are committing mass 
homicide,” they conclude. “Prosecutors should act accordingly.”
https://grist.org/accountability/big-oil-court-climate-homicide-lawsuits/

- -

/[ Since 2009 this opinion has been lost to search engines ]/
*Suborning Murder, Encouraging Mass Suicide*
By Richard Pauli on July 9, 2009
Define Suborn - To induce (a person) to commit an unlawful or evil act.

    Hey EnergyTomorrow, API and the entire fossil fuel industry - we
    have to speak out.   You suborn murder by heavily promoting carbon
    fuel usage.  You actively encourage species suicide.

    You have known for decades that CO2 causes global warming.  And you
    know that fossil fuels are the major human source of CO2 greenhouse
    gasses that cause catastrophic heating.

    You hide it from consumers, you deny the science and you secretly
    fund skeptics, and now you seek political support for your carbon
    fueled campaign of mass suicide.

    Science pretty much knows now that we are a doomed species.   It
    will be a tough life for all our grandchildren, and we cannot expect
    many humans after that.

    And you continue lying when you could have been educating and
    researching and deploying non-polluting energy.   Now your momentum
    traps us all.

    Your most evil act is to discount the danger and continue promoting
    ignorance and doubt.   You have pushed the world into total adoption
    of carbon based fuels, and like big tobacco you covered up science
    and distracted your market, and now you are groveling for political
    support to keep your industry going through the chaos ahead...

    More than any other industrial segment, yours - oil, gas, coal, all
    the CO2 carbon fuels - are the most directly responsible for the end
    of our species.  You continue to worsen the struggle and cause an
    early death for our progeny.

    It is no comfort that your grandchildren are just as doomed as
    mine.   Eventually we will all be dying for your sins.   But now we
    know, and we will neither forgive nor forget this mass murder for money.

Richard Pauli   July 4th 2009
http://www.noenergytomorrow.org/2009/07/suborning-murder-encouraging-mass-suicide.html



/[ from an Opinion in the NYTimes ]/
*A Planetary Crisis Awaits the Next President*
April 20, 2024
By Stephen Markley
Mr. Markley is a novelist.
In the 12 years it took me to write “The Deluge,” my novel of the 
climate crisis, I watched as chaotic weather, record temperatures and 
shocking political events outpaced my imagination. The book depicts the 
human tipping point, when the damage becomes irreversible and the 
foundations of our economy, our politics and our world begin to crack. 
The plot points I was concocting in 2010 would become a constant 
drumbeat of headlines into 2024.

Last year alone, the warning signs included soaring ocean temperatures, 
a record loss of Antarctic Sea ice and the highest global average 
temperature in recorded human history. Wildfires, droughts, floods and 
extreme weather of every variety have come to shock even the scientists 
who study the shocking stuff. This is not the history we want to be 
living through.

Yet here we are, and those gears of history will grind together again 
this year as another presidential election meets our permanent 
emergency. The stakes of the climate crisis render the cliché of “This 
is the most important election of our lifetimes” increasingly true 
because every four years those stakes climb precipitously alongside the 
toppling records of a radically new climatic regime.

The White House may soon be recaptured by Donald Trump, who called the 
climate crisis a “hoax” and even when backing off that assertion 
insisted, “I don’t know that it’s man-made.” He has demonstrated his 
thinking again and again, as when he told a scientist, “It’ll start 
getting cooler, you just watch.”

There has recently been a great deal of reporting on Project 2025, a 
900-plus-page road map for a second Trump administration assembled by 
the conservative Heritage Foundation. On climate, the report is 
succinct: “The Biden administration’s climate fanaticism will need a 
whole-of-government unwinding.”

The report recommends a repeal of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs 
Act and Inflation Reduction Act, which would shred the tax credits that 
have led to hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in clean 
energy, the jump-starting of factory openings and the creation of jobs 
in virtually every corner of the country. Also lost will be investments 
in environmental justice, those measures that aim to reduce pollution in 
marginalized communities, provide affordable clean energy and create 
jobs in low-income neighborhoods. As for electric cars, which are 
critical to meeting the nation’s climate goals, the report recommends an 
end to all federal mandates and subsidies.

A second Trump administration would most likely grant permits for fossil 
fuel drilling and pipelines basically anywhere it has the say-so, scrap 
the methane fee on oil and gas producers and dismantle new pollution 
limits on cars, trucks and power plants. It would almost certainly 
revoke California’s waiver to approve higher standards under the Clean 
Air Act, seek repeal of the Antiquities Act used to protect endangered 
landscapes and attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act.
But perhaps most ominously, a Trump presidency would impede Americans’ 
ability to find out what’s being done to them. Project 2025 proposes 
dismantling and privatizing parts of the National Oceanic and 
Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency that studies and monitors 
the climate, and using an executive order to “reshape” the Global Change 
Research Program, apparently to muddy its assessments of the pace of 
climate change and the potential impact. We would walk into this new 
dark era with a blindfold on.

Mr. Trump is at heart a billionaire doing favors for other billionaires 
by cutting their taxes and eliminating or not enforcing rules that 
protect the rest of us from asthma and cancer. During his four years in 
office, he managed to dismantle or degrade over 100 environmental rules, 
which brought real-world death and suffering. The medical journal The 
Lancet estimated that in the year 2019 alone these policies led to 
22,000 excess deaths from heart disease, asthma and lung cancer, among 
other causes.

For all the damage that was done, Mr. Trump and his administration 
fortunately proved incompetent at making the government fulfill his 
intentions. We shouldn’t delude ourselves with thinking that he and his 
allies will be caught as flatfooted as they were by their surprise 
victory in 2016. What Project 2025 demonstrates is that an enormous 
amount of thinking has gone in to how to destroy the government’s 
capacity to enforce environmental protections, conduct research or even 
assess the scientific reality of our situation. Of course, the 
worst-case scenario, a full or partial repeal of the Inflation Reduction 
Act, will depend on the composition of Congress.

My advice is to not tell yourself comforting bedtime stories about the 
political resiliency of that law when so many of its benefits lie in the 
years ahead.

One can hold up a document like Project 2025 and shout from the rooftops 
just how extreme it is. One can attempt to use numbers to describe this 
danger. But everyone will fall short — and, surely, I’ve fallen short — 
in describing just how frightening a second Trump presidency could 
actually be.

Do not limit your imagination.

Mr. Trump himself offered a glimpse in a recent meeting with oil and gas 
executives at Mar-a-Lago, where, The Washington Post reported, he said, 
“I hate wind.” He also told the executives that they should contribute 
to his campaign, that his policies would be much better for oil and gas 
than President Biden’s and that he’d do much of what they wanted “on Day 1.”

History will fork, and in a single day our window of opportunity for 
keeping the climate crisis from spiraling out of control could very well 
slam shut. Global emissions must peak this decade and begin a rapid 
decline for the world to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic 
warming. When I began writing my novel, we had something like 20 years 
to accomplish that task. After the election, we will have 62 months.

This makes the 2024 election a singular event in the climate crisis. 
Despite a number of headwinds, renewable energy capacity boomed last 
year, increasing 50 percent globally. According to the International 
Energy Agency, global renewable capacity is on course to be at two and a 
half times current levels by 2030, which means the world is edging 
closer to achieving a key climate target of tripling renewable energy 
capacity by 2030. The risks of the crisis are growing rapidly, but so is 
our capacity to confront this challenge at the speed and scale 
necessary. We must accelerate that momentum at all costs.

The other major candidate in the race, President Biden, has been a 
steadfast proponent of that acceleration.

I fully admit, Mr. Biden was not my first, nor even my seventh, choice 
in the 2020 Democratic primary. Yet when it came to the immense 
challenge of confronting this crisis, I am forever grateful that he 
proved me wrong, delivering a game-changing victory with the narrowest 
of congressional margins. Even as much of the rest of Mr. Biden’s 
ambitious policy agenda got hacked away in Congress, one thing remained: 
re-industrialization through clean energy investment.

This led to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the most 
significant climate legislation the country has ever seen and a more 
important achievement than the Paris climate accord. In just two years, 
that bill has galvanized clean energy investment in the United States 
and set a pace for the rest of the world to compete in the growing clean 
energy economy. These investments are expected to create more than nine 
million jobs over the next decade. That growth in clean energy is not 
only breaking records by the year but also by the quarter, with the end 
of 2023 seeing a 40 percent increase in investments in clean energy and 
transportation over the last quarter of 2022.

As those industries of decarbonization spread to every state and to many 
congressional districts, people’s lives and livelihoods increasingly 
will become intertwined and invested in clean energy. When a Texas 
congressman can’t survive an election in a solidly Republican district 
without the backing of the wind and solar industries, when a battery 
factory in Hardin County, Ky., is employing 5,000 people, when the 
fossil fuel economy is falling to the zero-carbon infrastructure we 
demand, that will change a politician’s calculations. The increasing 
political and economic clout of those clean energy industries will 
challenge the fossil fuel status quo. We are at the beginning of an 
absolute revolution of the American economy that will send manufacturing 
soaring and pollution plummeting.

Any climate hawk could try to encumber my argument with caveats, 
unaddressed pet issues and whatabouts, but as far as our shared 
atmosphere is concerned, there are only three pieces of relevant 
information: who Joe Biden is, who Donald Trump is, and the urgency of 
the crisis before us. While it’s true the United States continues to 
produce record amounts of fossil gas and near-record amounts of oil, 
these numbers reflect the all-of-the-above energy policies of the past 
15 years. The Inflation Reduction Act and several critical regulations 
from Mr. Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency will drive the 
decarbonization that should put us within striking distance of our Paris 
climate agreement target by 2030, something that seemed unfathomable 
four years ago.

It’s worth dissecting how we achieved such progress. This stunning 
victory was made possible only by Stacey Abrams’s tenacious work in 
Georgia to flip two U.S. Senate seats in 2020, giving Mr. Biden a Senate 
majority on top of a House majority (which he narrowly lost in 2022).

Work is also underway on the state and local levels. In the last four 
years, Democrats have led efforts in Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, 
Massachusetts, Michigan and Washington to pass ambitious climate laws 
when voters demanded it. In major cities, we see aggressive action like 
Minneapolis’s Climate Equity Plan and Chicago’s push to end natural gas 
hookups for new construction.

 From small cities like Athens, Ohio, which has a citywide carbon fee, 
to high school students campaigning for solar panels and electric buses, 
citizens can drive the movement to electrify everything and crush demand 
for fossil fuels. State public utility commissions remain ignored 
players with their hands on the controls of enormous amounts of carbon, 
ripe for campaigns to elect or appoint climate-oriented members. Whether 
we’re voting for president or state legislator or dogcatcher, we should 
vote for a dogcatcher who recognizes the imperative of the climate crisis.

The lesson being that the only thing that has worked, and must continue 
to work, is democracy at every level. None of us have the option to be 
cynical, to disdain electoral politics or to pretend we’re not making a 
distinct moral choice when voting for a third-party candidate or sitting 
out an election.

Right now, this means electing Democrats. The expiration of many of the 
Trump tax cuts in 2025 could create the leverage to push climate efforts 
even farther. We must look at this election and understand that it’s now 
or never — that we can create the opportunity for the United States to 
smash past its emission reduction goals and spur the rest of the world 
to follow. The climate movement can either fight like hell for Mr. 
Biden’s re-election or watch as Mr. Trump and his allies set fire to the 
planet.

Climate is not just another issue. I do not deny that we live in a 
complex and precarious world or that our consciences are torn by a web 
of domestic challenges and geopolitical upheavals. But we are in denial 
if we do not recognize that this is the crisis that will define this 
century, and if we fail, the entire human future. Our fossil fuel system 
is driving the planet to a set of conditions that humanity has never 
experienced, where even the imagination of novelists will fail us.

And yet the climate crisis is also the foundation on which we can build 
a more just, equitable and prosperous world. Every election is precious, 
every ballot we cast a moral record of what we did in this crucial 
historical moment. Do not sit on your hands, do not deny the stakes, do 
not waste that vote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/opinion/trump-biden-climate-election.html

- -

/[ Stephen Markley is the author of “The Deluge” ]/
*The Deluge *
by Stephen Markley (Author)

A New York Times Notable Book
“This book is, simply put, a modern classic. If you read it, you'll 
never forget it. Prophetic, terrifying, uplifting.” —Stephen King

 From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting 
a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening 
solidarity.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its 
governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological 
crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and 
extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist 
studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate 
will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, 
a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning 
eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young 
activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a 
project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

 From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, 
their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of 
accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to 
their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As 
their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a 
reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at 
a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation 
novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.
"To let the infotainment bath of the day stream over you was to slowly 
scrub away at the skin of your own humanity."
Highlighted by 91 Kindle readers
https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-Stephen-Markley/dp/1982123109/ref=sr_1_1



/[ sarcasm or humor -- disinformation funnies ]/
*Chris Packham presents…the Porky Pie Press awards for terrible climate 
journalism*
Extinction Rebellion (XR) UK
Streamed 4-19-24  #PorkyPiePressAwards #RebelForTruth #StopSellingLies
In the hottest year on record, the UK’s billionaire-owned national 
newspapers are still busy convincing millions that the climate crisis is 
either not real, or not serious.

To recognise their starring role in setting everyone’s future on fire, 
Extinction Rebellion launched the Porky Pie Press Awards for the Most 
Climate Wrecking National Newspapers of 2024.

BBC wildlife legend Chris Packham announces the winners and runners up - 
and the XR showbiz team present Golden Porky Pies to stunned newspaper 
editors and staff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_blgSUGY5Y



/[The news archive -  Earth Day ]/
/*April 21, 2004 */
April 21, 2004: At a Washington, D.C. press conference, Martha Marks of 
Republicans for Environmental Protection issues an Earth Day message to 
the GOP, urging the party to "[pursue] bipartisan solutions to the very 
real problem of global warming, instead of stonewalling and hoping the 
problem will go 
away."http://web.archive.org/web/20040602191537/http://www.rep.org/opinions/speeches/44.html 

- -
/[ yes it is a real organization ]/
Today, the sad remnants of our once-proud Republican Party ignore the 
idea of conservation and environmental protection, which were 
traditional hallmarks of the true conservatives who made up the 
Republican Party for well over a hundred years.

Sadly, there is nothing left for us “Green Republicans” in today’s GOP. 
But here, on this website, we’ve chosen to preserve the record of how 
for fifteen years we did our best to save both our country’s natural 
resources and our party’s long and proud tradition of protecting them.
- -
*REPUBLICANS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION*
Once upon a time, between 1995 and 2010 to be precise, there was an 
active and energetic national organization called Republicans for 
Environmental Protection.
https://rep.org/



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