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<i><font size="+1"><b>August 26, 2020</b></font></i><br>
<br>
[symbolic]<br>
<b>Exxon Mobil Exits: The Dow Drops Its Oldest Member</b><br>
August 25, 2020<br>
CAMILA DOMONOSKE<br>
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is the classic blue-chip stock
index. Exxon Mobil is an iconic blue-chip stock.<br>
<br>
But starting next week, the oil giant -- currently the Dow's
longest-tenured member -- will be dropped from the influential
index, which for many people is shorthand for the stock market.<br>
<br>
The change is driven by Apple's decision to split its stock,
according to S&P Dow Jones Indices, which is responsible for the
Dow. Its impact on Exxon will be more symbolic than substantive.<br>
<br>
But it reflects just how once-dominant Exxon has diminished. Many
oil companies are struggling on the stock market as climate concerns
mount, Silicon Valley stocks massively outperform petroleum and the
coronavirus keeps global oil demand well below expectations...<br>
- - <br>
Exxon joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1928, as Standard
Oil, one of companies descended from John D. Rockefeller's
world-transforming oil monopoly. Mobil was another branch of
Rockefeller's empire.<br>
<br>
The two companies by themselves were behemoths. When Exxon and Mobil
merged in 1999, it was the biggest merger in history, creating the
world's largest privately held oil company. For years, Exxon Mobil
was the world's largest publicly traded company.<br>
<br>
Today, after the long rise of the tech giants and the abrupt
collapse of the oil market, there are some three dozen companies
more valuable than Exxon.<br>
<br>
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is an index of 30 large U.S.
companies, designed to roughly track the stock market performance of
many sectors of the economy at once....<br>
- - <br>
As other oil and gas giants have pledged to transform their business
model to reduce their contribution to climate change, Exxon has
doubled down on petrochemicals. Early in March, the company laid out
a strategy for huge new investments in oil and gas, despite dropping
oil prices and public pressure to reduce emissions.<br>
<br>
Those plans have been disrupted by the precipitous drop in demand
for oil due to the pandemic. Instead of funding big new projects,
Exxon Mobil has slashed its investments and its expenses so it can
keep paying out hefty dividends to its stockholders.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.npr.org/2020/08/25/905818004/exxon-mobil-exits-the-dow-drops-its-oldest-member">https://www.npr.org/2020/08/25/905818004/exxon-mobil-exits-the-dow-drops-its-oldest-member</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[new estimates]<br>
<b>Methane released in gas production means Australia's emissions
may be 10% higher than reported</b><br>
Analysis shows the government, which has committed to a 'gas-led
recovery', has failed to properly account for methane's effect on
global heating<br>
- - <br>
The update announced by Taylor increased the estimated warming
potential of methane - effectively, how much heat it traps - from 25
times greater than carbon dioxide to 28 times greater, calculated
over a century. The change matters because methane emissions are
converted to their "carbon dioxide equivalent" and then counted in
national CO2 emissions.<br>
<br>
The 2014 IPCC report suggested the warming power of methane from
fossil fuels was 30 times greater than CO2. The warming power of
"biogenic methane" - released from living organisms such as cows -
was 28 times greater.<br>
<br>
A later reassessment, published in the journal Geophysical Research
Letters in 2016, found it was greater still: 34 times greater than
CO2 for "fossil methane" and 32 times greater for biogenic methane.<br>
<br>
Baxter said these figures were still not truly representative as
they did not factor in the feedback effects caused when greenhouse
gases are released. The IPCC report in 2014 cited research that
found the feedback from methane emissions increased its warming
potential by a further 20%. Baxter calculated this would lift the
warming rate for biogenic methane to 39 and for fossil methane to
40.<br>
<br>
He said the additional, unexplained methane in the atmosphere
suggested the emissions from the gas industry were being
systematically underreported.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/26/methane-released-in-gas-production-means-australias-emissions-may-be-10-higher-than-reported">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/26/methane-released-in-gas-production-means-australias-emissions-may-be-10-higher-than-reported</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Behavioural Public Policy]<b><br>
</b><b>Identifying the most important predictors of support for
climate policy in the United States</b><br>
<b>Abstract</b><br>
Reducing global warming will require enacting strong climate
policies, which is unlikely to happen without public support. While
prior research has identified varied predictors of climate change
policy support, it is unclear which predictors are strongest for the
American electorate as a whole, and which predictors are strongest
for Democrats and Republicans. In a nationally representative sample
of registered voters (n = 2063), we use relative weight analysis to
identify the strongest predictors of public climate policy support.
We find that, among registered voters in the USA, the five most
important predictors of climate policy support are: worry about
global warming; risk perceptions; certainty that global warming is
happening; belief that global warming is human-caused; and general
affect toward global warming. Collectively, these five variables
account for 51% of the variance in policy support. Results split by
political party indicate that pro-climate injunctive norms and
global warming risk perceptions are the variables that differ most
between Republicans and Democrats, accounting for significantly more
variance in policy support among Republicans. These findings can
inform policymakers and advocates seeking to build public support
for climate action.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-policy/article/identifying-the-most-important-predictors-of-support-for-climate-policy-in-the-united-states/84A5C161B704056947AAC20A571C8CF9">https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-policy/article/identifying-the-most-important-predictors-of-support-for-climate-policy-in-the-united-states/84A5C161B704056947AAC20A571C8CF9</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[just science]<br>
<b>Yes, climate change is almost certainly fueling California's
massive fires</b><br>
Thousands of lightning strikes have sparked hundreds of fires across
California, forcing thousands to evacuate.<br>
by James Temple<br>
Thousands of lightning strikes have sparked hundreds of fires across
California in recent days, producing several major clusters burning
around the San Francisco Bay Area.<br>
<br>
The blazes quickly ripped through hundreds of thousands of acres,
forcing thousands to evacuate, filling the skies with smoke, and
raining down ash across much of the region.<br>
<br>
The fires follow a bone-dry winter in Northern California and a
stretch of record-setting summer heat waves across the state,
conditions that effectively turned grasslands and forests into
tinder. The infernos come on the heels of several of the most
destructive and deadly fire seasons in California history.<br>
<br>
All of which raises the question, once again: Is human-driven
climate change to blame? Did it make the latest fires more likely or
more severe?<br>
<br>
Climate scientists, who long resisted linking global warming to any
specific extreme event, now say its influence is all but certain.<br>
<br>
David Romps, director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center,
said in an email that we're living in a fundamentally
climate-altered world. He noted that average daily highs for this
time of year are now about 3 or 4 F warmer in Berkeley, California,
than at the beginning of the 20th century. He was also the lead
author of a 2014 Science paper finding that every additional 1 C
(1.8 F) of warming could increase lightning strikes over the US by
about 12%.<br>
<br>
"To cut to the chase: Were the heat wave and the lightning strikes
and the dryness of the vegetation affected by global warming?
Absolutely yes," Romps said. "Were they made significantly hotter,
more numerous, and drier because of global warming? Yes, likely
yes, and yes."<br>
<br>
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California,
Los Angeles, said that the prolonged lightning storms in recent days
are such a rare occurrence in Northern California that it's hard to
assess whether climate change played a role in sparking the fires.<br>
<br>
But so-called extreme weather attribution studies have clearly and
repeatedly found that climate change exacerbates heat waves, which
help create the conditions for wildfires to burn intensely and
spread rapidly.<br>
<br>
"The answer is basically always that climate change played a large
role in the severity or likelihood [of heat waves]," he says. "It's
almost just a question of how much."<br>
<br>
Friederike Otto, acting director of the University of Oxford's
Environmental Change Institute and co-lead of World Weather
Attribution, echoed that view in an email: "There is absolutely no
doubt that the extremely high temperatures are higher than they
would have been without human-induced climate change. A huge body of
attribution literature demonstrates now that climate change is an
absolute game-changer when it comes to heat waves, and California
won't be the exception."<br>
<br>
Over the last four decades, the combined forces of higher
temperatures and lower precipitation levels have already doubled the
risk of extreme wildfire conditions in California during the fall,
according to a recent paper in Environmental Research Letters that
Swain coauthored. And unless the world begins cutting emissions
significantly and soon, the odds could double again in the coming
decades, the researchers found.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/20/1007478/california-wildfires-climate-change-heatwaves/">https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/20/1007478/california-wildfires-climate-change-heatwaves/</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Monbiot in the Guardian]<br>
<b>Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate
crisis they are fuelling</b><br>
Rising consumption by the affluent has a far greater environmental
impact than the birth rate in poorer nations<br>
George Monbiot
<br>
Wed 26 Aug 2020<br>
When a major study was published last month, showing that the global
population is likely to peak then crash much sooner than most
scientists had assumed, I naively imagined that people in rich
nations would at last stop blaming all the world's environmental
problems on population growth. I was wrong. If anything, it appears
to have got worse.<br>
Next week the BirthStrike movement - founded by women who, by
announcing their decision not to have children, seek to focus our
minds on the horror of environmental collapse - will dissolve
itself, because its cause has been hijacked so virulently and
persistently by population obsessives. The founders explain that
they had "underestimated the power of 'overpopulation' as a growing
form of climate breakdown denial".<br>
It is true that, in some parts of the world, population growth is a
major driver of particular kinds of ecological damage, such as the
expansion of small-scale agriculture into rainforests, the bushmeat
trade and local pressure on water and land for housing. But its
global impact is much smaller than many people claim.<br>
<br>
The formula for calculating people's environmental footprint is
simple, but widely misunderstood: Impact = Population x Affluence x
Technology (I = PAT). The global rate of consumption growth, before
the pandemic, was 3% a year. Population growth is 1%. Some people
assume this means that the rise in population bears one-third of the
responsibility for increased consumption. But population growth is
overwhelmingly concentrated among the world's poorest people, who
have scarcely any A or T to multiply their P. The extra resource use
and greenhouse gas emissions caused by a rising human population are
a tiny fraction of the impact of consumption growth...<br>
Yet it is widely used as a blanket explanation of environmental
breakdown. Panic about population growth enables the people most
responsible for the impacts of rising consumption (the affluent) to
blame those who are least responsible.<br>
<br>
At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, the primatologist Dame
Jane Goodall, who is a patron of the charity Population Matters,
told the assembled pollutocrats, some of whom have ecological
footprints thousands of times greater than the global average: "All
these things we talk about wouldn't be a problem if there was the
size of population that there was 500 years ago." I doubt that any
of those who nodded and clapped were thinking, "yes, I urgently need
to disappear".<br>
<br>
In 2019, Goodall appeared in an advertisement for British Airways,
whose customers produce more greenhouse gas emissions on one flight
than many of the world's people generate in a year. If we had the
global population of 500 years ago (around 500 million), and if it
were composed of average UK plane passengers, our environmental
impact would probably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion alive
today.<br>
<br>
She proposed no mechanism by which her dream might come true. This
could be the attraction. The very impotence of her call is
reassuring to those who don't want change. If the answer to
environmental crisis is to wish other people away, we might as well
give up and carry on consuming.<br>
<br>
The excessive emphasis on population growth has a grim history.
Since the clergymen Joseph Townsend and Thomas Malthus wrote their
tracts in the 18th century, poverty and hunger have been blamed not
on starvation wages, war, misrule and wealth extraction by the rich,
but on the reproduction rates of the poor. Winston Churchill blamed
the Bengal famine of 1943, that he helped to cause through the mass
export of India's rice, on the Indians "breeding like rabbits". In
2013 Sir David Attenborough, also a patron of Population Matters,
wrongly blamed famines in Ethiopia on "too many people for too
little land", and suggested that sending food aid was
counter-productive.<br>
<br>
Another of the charity's patrons, Paul Ehrlich, whose incorrect
predictions about mass famine helped to provoke the current
population panic, once argued that the US should "coerce" India into
"sterilising all Indian males with three or more children", by
making food aid conditional on this policy. This proposal was
similar to the brutal programme that Indira Gandhi later introduced,
with financial support from the UN and the World Bank. Foreign aid
from the UK was funding crude and dangerous sterilisation in India
as recently as 2011, on the grounds that this policy was helping to
"fight climate change". Some of the victims of this programme allege
that they were forced to participate. At the same time, the UK
government was pouring billions of pounds of aid into developing
coal, gas and oil plants, in India and other nations. It blamed the
poor for the crisis it was helping to cause.<br>
<br>
Malthusianism slides easily into racism. Most of the world's
population growth is happening in the poorest countries, where most
people are black or brown. The colonial powers justified their
atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about "barbaric", "degenerate"
people "outbreeding" the "superior races". These claims have been
revived today by the far right, who promote conspiracy theories
about "white replacement" and "white genocide". When affluent white
people wrongly transfer the blame for their environmental impacts on
to the birthrate of much poorer brown and black people, their
finger-pointing reinforces these narratives. It is inherently
racist.<br>
<br>
The far right now uses the population argument to contest
immigration into the US and the UK. This too has a grisly heritage:
the pioneering conservationist Madison Grant promoted, alongside his
environmental work, the idea that the "Nordic master race" was being
"overtaken" in the US by "worthless race types". As president of the
Immigration Restriction League, he helped to engineer the vicious
1924 Immigration Act.<br>
<br>
But, as there are some genuine ecological impacts of population
growth, how do we distinguish proportionate concerns about these
harms from deflection and racism? Well, we know that the strongest
determinant of falling birth rates is female emancipation and
education. The major obstacle to female empowerment is extreme
poverty. Its effect is felt disproportionately by women.<br>
<br>
So a good way of deciding whether someone's population concerns are
genuine is to look at their record of campaigning against structural
poverty. Have they contested the impossible debts poor nations are
required to pay? Have they argued against corporate tax avoidance,
or extractive industries that drain wealth from poorer countries,
leaving almost nothing behind, or the financial sector in Britain's
processing of money stolen abroad? Or have they simply sat and
watched as people remain locked in poverty, then complained about
their fertility?<br>
<br>
Before long, this reproductive panic will disappear. Nations will
soon be fighting over immigrants: not to exclude them, but to
attract them, as the demographic transition leaves their ageing
populations with a shrinking tax base and a dearth of key workers.
Until then, we should resist attempts by the rich to demonise the
poor..<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/26/panic-overpopulation-climate-crisis-consumption-environment">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/26/panic-overpopulation-climate-crisis-consumption-environment</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
August 26, 2001 </b></font><br>
The Los Angeles Times reports:<br>
"Throughout February and March, executives representing electricity,
coal, natural gas and nuclear interests paraded quietly in small
groups to a building in the White House compound, where the new
administration's energy policy was being written.<br>
<br>
"Some firms sent emissaries more than once. Enron Corp., which
trades electricity and natural gas, once got three top officials
into a private session with Vice President Dick Cheney, who headed
the energy task force. Cheney did 'a lot of listening,' according to
a company spokesman.<br>
<br>
"Many of the executives at the White House meetings were generous
donors to the Republican Party, and some of their key lobbyists were
freshly hired from the Bush presidential campaign. They found a
receptive task force. Among its ranks were three former energy
industry executives and consultants. The task force also included a
Bush agency head who was involved in the sensitive discussions while
his wife took in thousands of dollars in fees from three electricity
producers.<br>
<br>
"The final report, issued May 16, boosted the nation's energy
industries. It called for additional coal production, and five days
later the world's largest coal company, Peabody Energy, issued a
public stock offering, raising about $60 million more than expected.
While Peabody was preparing to go public, its chief executive and
vice president participated in a March 1 meeting with Cheney."<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://articles.latimes.com/2001/aug/26/news/mn-38530">http://articles.latimes.com/2001/aug/26/news/mn-38530</a> <br>
<br>
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