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<font size="+1"><i>April 28, 2018</i></font><br>
<br>
[Legal opinion]<br>
<b><a
href="https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/04/26/extreme-weather-attribution-climate-liability/">Proving
Extreme Weather Link to Climate Will Drive Liability Suits,
Paper Says</a></b><br>
The emerging science that is increasingly able to determine how much
of an extreme weather event is attributable to climate change may
drive growth in climate liability suits, according to a new paper
published in the Journal of Energy and Natural Resources Law...<br>
"Scientists are now able to better understand the drivers of extreme
weather, and quantify the extent to which climate change shifts the
goal posts of expected weather patterns," the authors wrote.<br>
The science of extreme weather attribution analyzes the relationship
between extreme events and long-term climate disturbances such as
volcano eruptions, solar variations, changes in land use and carbon
emissions. It makes connections and predictions by using advanced -
and rapidly improving - computational data to develop increasingly
sophisticated climate models.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/04/26/extreme-weather-attribution-climate-liability/">https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/04/26/extreme-weather-attribution-climate-liability/</a></font><br>
- - - - -<br>
[Source: Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law] <br>
<b><a
href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02646811.2018.1451020">Extreme
weather event attribution science and climate change litigation:
an essential step in the causal chain?</a></b><br>
Sophie Marjanac & Lindene Patton<br>
Abstract<br>
The 2017 North Atlantic hurricane season caused the highest
disaster-related losses ever seen in the United States, with many
people asking questions about the causes and liabilities for the
impacts of these kinds of events. As climate-related loss and damage
mount, there is growing interest in the role of law in dealing with
the complex and multi-scalar problem of climate change. This article
builds on a shorter piece entitled 'Acts of God, human influence and
litigation' published by the authors in Nature Geoscience in August
2017. It is an interdisciplinary and cross-jurisdictional analysis
of the emerging science of extreme weather event attribution (which
analyses the human impact on extreme weather events), and the
implications this new science may have for the law, litigation and
the scope of the duty of care of a range of actors. We suggest that
the science of event attribution may become a driver of litigation,
as it shifts understanding of what weather is expected and,
relevantly for law, foreseeable. This may have an impact on the
duties of government actors as well as private parties. We explain
the discipline of event attribution science to lawyers, discuss some
technical issues related to the use of this evidence in court and
make some suggestions regarding the types of 'climate change' cases
it may influence. We conclude that the first kind of litigation to
emerge is most likely to arise from failures to adapt to, or to
prepare for, our changing climate.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02646811.2018.1451020">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02646811.2018.1451020</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Oil Change International]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://priceofoil.org/2018/04/26/fund-managers-recognise-imminent-risks-posed-to-fossil-fuel-investments-from-climate-change/">Fund
managers recognise "imminent risks posed to fossil fuel
investments from climate change"</a></b><br>
Andy Rowell, <br>
Earlier today, oil giant Shell surprised analysts with better than
expected first quarter results, as earnings "surged" on the back of
rising oil prices.<br>
Shell's CEO, Ben van Beurden, was bullish in a statement: "Shell's
strong earnings this quarter were underpinned by higher oil and gas
prices, the continued growth and very good performance of our
Integrated Gas business, and improved profitability in our Upstream
business", he said.<br>
Even the press was optimistic about the prospects for Big Oil in the
short-term. "The latest figures come at a time when the environment
for oil companies is dramatically improving, amid signs the energy
market is rebalancing and crude futures have rallied to multi-year
highs," reported CNBC.<br>
But Shell's short-term profit surge masks much deeper storm clouds
that are gathering on the horizon. As an article in Forbes today
reports: "Three risks that are haunting Big Oil … A recent survey
reported that fund managers believe International Oil Companies
(IOCs) will be negatively revalued within a few years due to climate
change related risks."<br>
Forbes was writing about the results of a new survey, entitled "Not
long Now" by the UK's Sustainable Investment and Finance Association
(UKSIF) and the Climate Change Collaboration, which examined the
views of fund managers on the issue of oil and climate change. The
three risks concerned are squeezing the industry from all sides:<br>
<blockquote>-"Reputational damage because of their role in causing
climate change;<br>
-Litigation for losses from climate change; and<br>
-Regulation to curtail fossil fuel pollution."<br>
</blockquote>
The 30 fund managers surveyed hold collectively over $18 trillion in
assets under management. Despite this financial influence, fund
managers are often the hidden link in the oil chain. However, if
they lose confidence in the companies they invest in, believing that
their investments will become stranded assets and the finance for
the industry dries up, even corporate Goliaths like Shell could be
in real trouble. And that could happen much sooner than the
companies themselves predict...<br>
- - - - <br>
It adds the fund manager sector is "clear that International Oil
Companies (IOCs) will be negatively revalued within a few years
because of climate change related risks". Some 90% of fund managers
expect at least one of the risks above "to impact significantly the
valuation of IOCs within 2 years"....<br>
- - - - <br>
Indeed, the dirty tar sands, risky fragile Arctic or filthy
carbon-munching coal might be the first places where investors take
flight from fossil fuels but soon it could be any fossil fuel
investment, anywhere. Times they really are a changing.<br>
But as Forbes says: "The question, as ever, remains to what extent
Shell, it its compatriots like Chevron and Exxon, have really
understood how the market (and perceptions of the market) are
changing, and the extent to which they are prepared to face that
change."<br>
<font size="-1">More at:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://priceofoil.org/2018/04/26/fund-managers-recognise-imminent-risks-posed-to-fossil-fuel-investments-from-climate-change/">http://priceofoil.org/2018/04/26/fund-managers-recognise-imminent-risks-posed-to-fossil-fuel-investments-from-climate-change/</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Margaret Swedish]<br>
<b>News of the planet and the nexus of culture, ecology, justice,
and spirituality.</b><br>
Wednesday, April 25, 2018<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://newcreationews.blogspot.com/2018/04/chaos-and-collapse-part-ii.html">Chaos
and Collapse, Part II</a></b><br>
There is no way out of our predicament, but there is a way through
it.<br>
So let's look at what experience, our own deep personal experience,
is telling us - when we pay attention to it, when we can work
through the fear of looking at this irresolvable mess that humans
have made and begin to see clearly how dire our situation really is.
Let's surface that stuff and then see what it tells us about how to
live now - because that's where we begin to discover, to perceive
the way through...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://newcreationews.blogspot.com/2018/04/chaos-and-collapse-part-ii.html">https://newcreationews.blogspot.com/2018/04/chaos-and-collapse-part-ii.html</a><br>
- - -- - <br>
[Part 1]<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://newcreationews.blogspot.com/2018/04/chaos-and-collapse-along-with-some.html"><br>
Chaos and collapse, along with some seriously crazy weather -
Part I</a></b><br>
Refusal to know, one of the mental illnesses of our time. But that
time is over. We know now because the results of living on the
planet like this, voraciously and greedily, are coming in. They have
arrived. And, as I think most of you know by now, I'm pretty much
done trying to soften the message. We don't have time for that. We
have to get motivated. We have to figure out what we're going to do
now in the face of this reality...<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://newcreationews.blogspot.com/2018/04/chaos-and-collapse-along-with-some.html">https://newcreationews.blogspot.com/2018/04/chaos-and-collapse-along-with-some.html</a>.</font><br>
<br>
<br>
[coined term: <i>technofideism</i>]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/geoengineering-climate-change_us_5ae07919e4b061c0bfa3e794">The
Dangerous Belief That Extreme Technology Will Fix Climate Change</a></b><br>
It boils down to a failure to question capitalism, civilization, and
the notion of progress.<br>
Aleszu Bajak <br>
<blockquote>"It's a failure to accept complexity of the system, and
the system includes people," Ehrenfeld told me recently over
coffee. For decades, Ehrenfeld, who is now retired, researched and
promoted the concept of sustainability. But to Ehrenfeld, after
all the climate conferences, all the stakeholder roundtables, all
the debates on market-driven solutions, the questions and answers
being debated never questioned capitalism, civilization, and the
notion of progress.<br>
<br>
Tackling a problem as deeply ingrained as global warming,
Ehrenfeld said, will require humanity to face an existential
question that geoengineering alone cannot address: Are we willing
to sacrifice growth to ensure the survival of our species?<br>
<br>
"Absent decoupling growth from progress," Ehrenfeld said, "we
won't address the core of the problem."<br>
</blockquote>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/geoengineering-climate-change_us_5ae07919e4b061c0bfa3e794">https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/geoengineering-climate-change_us_5ae07919e4b061c0bfa3e794</a></font><br>
- - - - - -<br>
[slides and talk by Oreskes]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://slideslive.com/38893068/technofideism-and-climate-change">Technofideism
and Climate Change</a></b><br>
by Naomi Oreskes · Feb 25, 2015 · PACITA<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://slideslive.com/38893068/technofideism-and-climate-change">https://slideslive.com/38893068/technofideism-and-climate-change</a><br>
"an uncritical techno-fideism - a 'blind confidence in technical
solutions' - the market logic that harnesses it with a
single-minded focus on profit, without thinking about the actual
goals of human activity."<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFxejbcpE1U">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFxejbcpE1U</a></font><br>
- - - - - - <br>
[A passage from their book Merchants of Doubt:]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942">Merchants
of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on
Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming</a></b> <br>
Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway <br>
<blockquote>"Cornucopians hold to a blind faith in technology that
isn't borne out by the historical evidence. We call it
'technofideism.'<br>
<br>
Why do they hold this belief when history shows it to be untrue?
Again we turn to Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, where
he claimed that "the great advances of civilization, in industry
or agriculture, have never come from centralized government." To
historians of technology, this would be laughable had it not been
written (five years after Sputnik) by one of the most influential
economists of the second half of the twentieth century. <br>
<br>
The most important technology of the industrial age was the
ability to produce parts that were perfectly identical and
interchangeable. Blacksmiths and carpenters couldn't do it; in
fact, humans can't do it routinely in any profession. Only
machines can. It was the U.S. Army's Ordnance Department that
developed this ability to have machines make parts for other
machines, spending nearly fifty years on this effort - an
inconceivable period of research for a private corporation in the
nineteenth century. Army Ordnance wanted guns that could be
repaired easily on or near a battlefield by switching out the
parts. Once the basic technology to do this - machine tools, as we
know them today - was invented, it spread rapidly through the
American economy. Despite efforts to prevent it, it soon spread to
Europe and Japan, as well. Markets spread the technology of
machine tools throughout the world, but markets did not create it.
Centralized government, in the form of the U.S. Army, was the
inventor of the modern machine age.<br>
<br>
Machine tools are not the exception that proves the rule; there
are many other cases of government-financed technology that were
commercialized and redounded to the benefit of society. Even while
Friedman was writing his soon-to-be-famous book, digital computers
were beginning to find uses beyond the U.S. government's weapons
systems, for which they were originally developed. Private
enterprise transformed that technology into something that could
be used and afforded by the masses, but the U.S. government made
it possible in the first place. The U.S. government also played a
major role in the development of Silicon Valley. In recent years,
something we now all depend on - the Internet, originally ARPANET
- was developed as a complex collaboration of universities,
government agencies, and industry, funded largely by the
Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was
expanded and developed into the Internet by the government support
provided by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act
of 1991, promoted by then-senator Al Gore.<br>
<br>
In other cases, new technologies were invented by individual or
corporate entrepreneurs, but it was government action or support
that transformed them into commercially viable technologies;
airplanes and transistors come to mind. (Transistors were
explicitly promoted by the U.S. government when they realized that
Minutemen missiles needed onboard rather than remote controls, and
vacuum tubes would not suffice.) Still other technologies were
invented by individuals but were spread through government policy.
Electricity was extended beyond the major cities by a federal
loan-guarantee program during the Great Depression. The U.S.
interstate highway system, which arguably created postwar America
as we know it, was the brainchild of President Dwight Eisenhower,
who recognized the role it could play both in the U.S. economy and
in national defense; it became the model for similar highway
systems around the globe. And nuclear power, which may help us out
of the global warming conundrum, was a by-product of the
technology that launched the Cold War: the atomic bomb. The
relationship between technology, innovation, and economic and
political systems is varied and complex. It cannot be reduced to a
simple article of faith about the virtues of a free market." <font
size="-1"><br>
</font></blockquote>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942/ref=sr_1_1">https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942/ref=sr_1_1</a></font><br>
- - - - -<br>
[Oreskes radio interview 54 mins]<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-collapse-of-western-civilization3f/5674090"><b>The
Collapse of Western Civilization?</b></a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-collapse-of-western-civilization3f/5674090">http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-collapse-of-western-civilization3f/5674090</a><br>
<blockquote>Naomi Oreskes says scientists have given up on the much
talked about two-degree ceiling as the absolute maximum for a rise
in average global temperature ; we need to consider an average
increase more like four or five degrees. Yet despite what is being
recorded and what everyone can see, some people still say it isn't
happening and there's nothing to worry about. But the heat will
change the Earth as we know it. Naomi Oreskes draws on scientific
reports to describe the world four hundred years from now. She
offers analysis as to why denialism still exists, and why some are
prepared to fund their campaigns of disinformation.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-collapse-of-western-civilization3f/5674090">http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-collapse-of-western-civilization3f/5674090</a><br>
Hear the MP3 or save to your device:<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2014/08/ssw_20140816.mp3">http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2014/08/ssw_20140816.mp3</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<font size="+1"><b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/42809364#42809364">This
Day in Climate History - April 28, 2011</a> - from D.R.
Tucker</b></font><br>
April 28, 2011: On MSNBC's "The Last Word," guest host Chris Hayes
and guests Chris Mooney and Jonathan Kay analyze the right wing's
fixation on denying climate change and other objective truths. <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/42809364#42809364">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/42809364#42809364</a><br>
<br>
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