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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>January 26, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[changes in Congress]<br>
<b>Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer just called on Biden to
declare a national emergency. </b><br>
WATCH: Senate Majority Leader Schumer calls on President Biden to
"explore" using emergency powers to declare climate an emergency.<br>
"If there ever was an emergency, climate is one<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1353895948133543936?s=20">https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1353895948133543936?s=20</a><br>
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</p>
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[Reuters ENVIRONMENT]<br>
JANUARY 23, 2021<br>
<b>Biden administration to unveil more climate policies, urges China
to toughen emissions target</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-idUSKBN29S0PA">https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-idUSKBN29S0PA</a><br>
<br>
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[From the Guardian]<br>
<b>Helping poorest tackle climate crisis will boost global growth,
says IMF head</b><br>
Kristalina Georgieva says investing to create resilient economies is
a ‘win-win-win-win’ scenario<br>
- -<br>
Otherwise, the world risked billions of dollars of economic damage
in the near future, as most countries were unprepared for the
effects of a rapidly heating climate, she warned.<br>
<br>
“The good news is that it can be win-win-win-win,” she said.
“Building resilience can be good for nature and ecosystems; it can
be good for economic growth; at a time when economies have lost
low-skilled jobs, it boosts job creation; and the fourth win is that
it can bring health benefits [such as reduced air pollution].”...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/25/helping-poorest-tackle-climate-crisis-will-boost-global-growth-says-imf-head">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/25/helping-poorest-tackle-climate-crisis-will-boost-global-growth-says-imf-head</a><br>
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[CBS]<br>
January 24, 2021<br>
<b>Climate refugees: The quest for a haven from extreme weather
events</b><br>
- -<br>
Of course, not everybody has the option of moving. "It's not easy
for folks to just pick up and leave a place," said Jalonne
White-Newsome, a consultant, researcher and advocate who focuses on
climate and racial justice. She said that extreme weather hits
communities of color disproportionately hard, yet their residents
may be the least able to move.<br>
<br>
"It's not that folks want to stay in harm's way," she said, "but the
fact that they might not have the resources to move, that they have
invested all that they have into their home, whether they're renting
or owning it. And then there's also this sense of community. It's
that sense of connection not only with their neighbors, but their
faith community, their jobs, their kids are in school."<br>
<br>
Still, 40 million Americans do move every year. They retire, they
graduate, they get jobs or lose jobs, they fall in love or break up.<br>
<br>
If you have the luxury of choosing where to live, and climate change
is a factor, here's the formula:<br>
<br>
You want to be far enough inland to avoid the rising seas and
flooding … far enough north to avoid the worst of the heat waves …
far enough west and north to avoid the hurricanes … and far enough
east to avoid the wildfires...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-refugees-the-quest-for-a-haven-from-extreme-weather-events/">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-refugees-the-quest-for-a-haven-from-extreme-weather-events/</a><br>
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[Opinion]<br>
<b>We Want a ‘New Normal.’ It’s Not in the Forecast.</b><br>
Climate change is upending the world as we know it, and coping with
it demands widespread, radical action.<br>
<br>
By Roy Scranton<br>
Mr. Scranton is the director of the Notre Dame Environmental
Humanities Initiative and the author of “Learning to Die in the
Anthropocene.”<br>
<br>
Jan. 25, 2021<br>
- -<br>
But what does normal even mean anymore?<br>
<br>
It’s easy to forget that 2020 gave us not just the pandemic, but
also the West Coast’s worst fire season, as well as the most active
Atlantic hurricane season on record. And, while we were otherwise
distracted, 2020 also offered up near-record lows in Arctic sea ice,
possible evidence of significant methane release from Arctic
permafrost and the Arctic Ocean, huge wildfires in both the Amazon
and the Arctic, shattered heat records (2020 rivaled 2016 for the
hottest year on record), bleached coral reefs, the collapse of the
last fully intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic, and increasing
odds that the global climate system has passed the point where
feedback dynamics take over and the window of possibility for
preventing catastrophe closes.<br>
<br>
President Biden has recommitted the United States to the Paris
Agreement, which is great except that it doesn’t really mean much,
since that agreement’s commitments are voluntary. And it might not
even matter whether signatories meet their commitments, since their
pledges weren’t rigorous enough to keep global warming “well below”
two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial
levels to begin with. According to Climate Action Tracker, a
collaborative analysis from independent science nonprofits, only
Morocco and Gambia have made commitments compatible with the goal of
limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels,
and the commitments made by several major emitters, including China,
Russia, Japan and the United States, are “highly insufficient” or
“critically insufficient.”<br>
- -<br>
It’s also worth noting that the two degrees Celsius benchmark is
somewhat arbitrary and possibly fantastic, since it’s not clear that
the earth’s climate would be safe or stable at that temperature. In
the words of a widely discussed research summary published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even if the Paris
Agreement targets are met, “we cannot exclude the risk that a
cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a
‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway.”<br>
<br>
More alarming, recent observed increases in atmospheric methane, a
greenhouse gas more than 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over
the short term, are so large that if they continue they could
effectively overwhelm the pledged emissions reductions in the Paris
Agreement, even if those reductions were actually happening. Which
they’re not.<br>
<br>
Meanwhile, the earth’s climate seems to be changing faster than
expected. Take the intensifying slowdown in the North Atlantic
current, a global warming side effect made famous by the film “The
Day After Tomorrow.” According to the climatologist Michael Mann,
“We are 50 years to 100 years ahead of schedule with the slowdown of
this ocean circulation pattern, relative to what the models predict
… The more observations we get, the more sophisticated our models
become, the more we’re learning that things can happen faster, and
with a greater magnitude, than we predicted just years ago.”<br>
<br>
In 2019, the Greenland ice sheet briefly reached daily melt rates
predicted in what were once considered worst-case scenarios for 2060
to 2080. Recent research indicates that rapidly thawing permafrost
may release twice as much carbon dioxide and methane than previously
thought, which is pretty bad news, because other recent research
shows very cold Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years earlier than
expected.<br>
<br>
Going back to normal now means returning to a course that will
destabilize the conditions for all human life, everywhere on earth.
Normal means more fires, more category 5 hurricanes, more flooding,
more drought, millions upon millions more migrants fleeing famine
and civil war, more crop failures, more storms, more extinctions,
more record-breaking heat. Normal means the increasing likelihood of
civil unrest and state collapse, of widespread agricultural failure
and collapsing fisheries, of millions of people dying from thirst
and hunger, of new diseases, old diseases spreading to new places
and the havoc of war. Normal could well mean the end of global
civilization as we know it...<br>
- -<br>
Now, as a new administration takes office and we look ahead to life
after both Covid and Donald Trump, we need to face the fact that the
world we live in is changing into something else, and that coping
with the consequences of global warming demands immediate,
widespread, radical action...<br>
The next 20 years will be a period of deep uncertainty and
tremendous risk, no matter what. We don’t get to choose what
challenges we’ll face, but we do get to decide how we face them. The
first thing we need to do is let go of the idea that life will ever
be normal again — elsewhere, I’ve called this “learning how to die.”
Beyond that, we need stop living through social media and start
connecting with the people around us, since those are the people
we’ll need to depend on the next time disaster strikes. And disaster
will strike, you can be sure of that, so we must begin preparing
today for the next shock to the social order, and the next, and the
next.<br>
<br>
None of this will matter, though, if our preparations don’t include
imagining a new way of life beyond this one, after the end of
fossil-fueled capitalism: not a new normal, but a new ethos adapted
to the chaotic world we’ve created.<br>
<br>
Roy Scranton is the author of “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.”
He teaches English and environmental humanities at the University of
Notre Dame, where he is director of the Notre Dame Environmental
Humanities Initiative.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/opinion/new-normal-climate-catastrophes.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/opinion/new-normal-climate-catastrophes.html</a><br>
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[Brookings-event-invitation]<br>
<b>Climate change and financial market regulations: Insights from
BlackRock CEO </b>Larry Fink and former SEC Chair Mary Schapiro<br>
<br>
Tuesday, February 2, 2021, 3:00 - 4:00 p.m. EST <br>
Online:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.brookings.edu/events/climate-change-and-financial-market-regulations-insights-from-blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-and-former-sec-chair-mary-schapiro/">https://www.brookings.edu/events/climate-change-and-financial-market-regulations-insights-from-blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-and-former-sec-chair-mary-schapiro/</a><br>
RSVP to watch -
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://connect.brookings.edu/register-to-watch-climate-change-financial-market-regulations">https://connect.brookings.edu/register-to-watch-climate-change-financial-market-regulations</a><br>
<br>
There is growing interest among regulators around the world in
helping to address climate change through the levers of financial
market regulation. Private companies are starting to elevate the
importance of climate and sustainability risk for investment
decisions. These developments are essential for influencing the
behavior of market participants towards low-carbon investments and
mitigating climate risks for companies and investors.<br>
<br>
On Tuesday, February 2, the Center on Regulation and Market at
Brookings will host Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, and
Mary Schapiro, vice chair of global public policy at Bloomberg L.P.,
former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and head of
the Secretariat of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial
Disclosures. This event will shed light on ideas and trends in
climate change and financial market regulations, an increasingly
important area...<br>
<br>
Viewers can submit questions via email to <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:events@brookings.edu">events@brookings.edu</a> or
via Twitter using #ClimateRegulation. <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.brookings.edu/events/climate-change-and-financial-market-regulations-insights-from-blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-and-former-sec-chair-mary-schapiro/">https://www.brookings.edu/events/climate-change-and-financial-market-regulations-insights-from-blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-and-former-sec-chair-mary-schapiro/</a><br>
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<p><br>
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[precarity = that which is precarious]<br>
JOURNAL ARTICLE<br>
<b>Climate Change and the Everyday: Becoming Present to Precarity</b><br>
Russell Duvernoy<br>
Ethics and the Environment<br>
Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall 2020), pp. 73-95 (23 pages)<br>
Published By: Indiana University Press<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://doi.org/10.2979/ethicsenviro.25.2.04">https://doi.org/10.2979/ethicsenviro.25.2.04</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/ethicsenviro.25.2.04">https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/ethicsenviro.25.2.04</a><br>
Abstract<br>
<blockquote>Concepts of the everyday typically correlate with the
normal and regular, while narratives of climate change are
structured by predictions that exceed the normal. Since extreme
events of climate change are not assimilable into the everyday,
their destabilizing effects heighten destructive feedback loops
mediated through fear. Developing psychic and social resilience
necessary for re-routing climate change predictions from their
direst outcomes thus requires transformed relations to the
everyday. After analyzing how a default conception of the everyday
hinders existential adaptation, I draw on Jean-Luc Nancy, Alfred
North Whitehead, and William James to develop a concept of the
everyday that emphasizes precarity, multiplicity, and creativity
as better fostering social and psychic resilience amidst
destabilization. This different concept of the everyday is
necessary for learning how to live meaningful daily lives not
predicated on an illusion that all is well or the fantasy that
climate change can be resolved through a perpetuation of current
norms of the everyday.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/ethicsenviro.25.2.04?seq=1">https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/ethicsenviro.25.2.04?seq=1</a><br>
<br>
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<p>[Classic - 2018 -tangential to climate change]<br>
<b>Was There a Civilization on Earth Before Humans?</b><br>
A look at the available evidence<br>
ADAM FRANK - APRIL 13, 2018<br>
It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me.<br>
<br>
Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space
Studies (a.k.a. GISS) a world-class climate-science facility. One
day last year, I came to GISS with a far-out proposal. In my work
as an astrophysicist, I’d begun researching global warming from an
“astrobiological perspective.” That meant asking whether any
industrial civilization that rises on any planet will, through
their own activity, trigger their own version of a climate shift.
I was visiting GISS that day hoping to gain some climate science
insights and, perhaps, collaborators. That’s how I ended up in
Gavin’s office.<br>
<br>
Just as I was revving up my pitch, Gavin stopped me in my tracks.<br>
<br>
“Wait a second,” he said. “How do you know we’re the only time
there’s been a civilization on our own planet?”<br>
<br>
It took me a few seconds to pick up my jaw off the floor. I had
certainly come into Gavin’s office prepared for eye rolls at the
mention of “exo-civilizations.” But the civilizations he was
asking about would have existed many millions of years ago.
Sitting there, seeing Earth’s vast evolutionary past telescope
before my mind’s eye, I felt a kind of temporal vertigo. “Yeah,” I
stammered, “Could we tell if there’d been an industrial
civilization that deep in time?”<br>
<br>
We never got back to aliens. Instead, that first conversation
launched a new study we’ve recently published in the International
Journal of Astrobiology. Though neither of us could see it at that
moment, Gavin’s penetrating question opened a window not just onto
Earth’s past, but also onto our own future.<br>
<br>
We’re used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of the
sunken statues and subterranean ruins. These kinds of artifacts of
previous societies are fine if you’re only interested in
timescales of a few thousands of years. But once you roll the
clock back to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years,
things get more complicated.<br>
<br>
When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial
civilization—things like cities, factories, and roads—the geologic
record doesn’t go back past what’s called the Quaternary period
2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch
of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It’s “just” 1.8
million years old—older surfaces are mostly visible in cross
section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much
further than the Quaternary, and everything has been turned over
and crushed to dust.<br>
<br>
And, if we’re going back this far, we’re not talking about human
civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn’t make their appearance
on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. That means the
question shifts to other species, which is why Gavin called the
idea the Silurian hypothesis, after an old Doctor Who episode with
intelligent reptiles.<br>
<br>
So could researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species
built a relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before
our own? Perhaps, for example, some early mammal rose briefly to
civilization building during the Paleocene epoch, about 60 million
years ago. There are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life
that gets fossilized is always minuscule and varies a lot
depending on time and habitat. It would be easy, therefore, to
miss an industrial civilization that lasted only 100,000
years—which would be 500 times longer than our industrial
civilization has made it so far.<br>
<br>
Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many
millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist?
The best way to answer this question is to figure out what
evidence we’d leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its
current stage of development.<br>
<br>
Now that our industrial civilization has truly gone global,
humanity’s collective activity is laying down a variety of traces
that will be detectable by scientists 100 million years in the
future. The extensive use of fertilizer, for example, keeps 7
billion people fed, but it also means we’re redirecting the
planet’s flows of nitrogen into food production. Future
researchers should see this in characteristics of nitrogen showing
up in sediments from our era. Likewise our relentless hunger for
the rare-Earth elements used in electronic gizmos. Far more of
these atoms are now wandering around the planet’s surface because
of us than would otherwise be the case. They might also show up in
future sediments, too. Even our creation, and use, of synthetic
steroids has now become so pervasive that it too may be detectable
in geologic strata 10 million years from now.<br>
<br>
And then there’s all that plastic. Studies have shown that
increasing amounts of plastic “marine litter” are being deposited
on the seafloor everywhere from coastal areas to deep basins, and
even in the Arctic. Wind, sun, and waves grind down large-scale
plastic artifacts, leaving the seas full of microscopic plastic
particles that will eventually rain down on the ocean floor,
creating a layer that could persist for geological timescales.<br>
<br>
The big question is how long any of these traces of our
civilization will last. In our study, we found that each had the
possibility of making it into future sediments. Ironically,
however, the most promising marker of humanity’s presence as an
advanced civilization is a by-product of one activity that may
threaten it most.<br>
<br>
When we burn fossil fuels, we’re releasing carbon back into the
atmosphere that was once part of living tissues. This ancient
carbon is depleted in one of that element’s three naturally
occurring varieties, or isotopes. The more fossil fuels we burn,
the more the balance of these carbon isotopes shifts. Atmospheric
scientists call this shift the Suess effect, and the change in
isotopic ratios of carbon due to fossil-fuel use is easy to see
over the past century. Increases in temperature also leave
isotopic signals. These shifts should be apparent to any future
scientist who chemically analyzes exposed layers of rock from our
era. Along with these spikes, this Anthropocene layer might also
hold brief peaks in nitrogen, plastic nanoparticles, and even
synthetic steroids. So if these are traces our civilization is
bound to leave for the future, might the same “signals” exist
right now in rocks just waiting to tell us of civilizations long
gone?<br>
<br>
Fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the
Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the
planet’s average temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees
Fahrenheit above what we experience today. It was a world almost
without ice, as typical summer temperatures at the poles reached
close to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Looking at the isotopic
record from the PETM, scientists see both carbon and oxygen
isotope ratios spiking in exactly the way we expect to see in the
Anthropocene record. There are also other events like the PETM in
the Earth’s history that show traces like our hypothetical
Anthropocene signal. These include an event a few million years
after the PETM dubbed the Eocene Layers of Mysterious Origin, and
massive events in the Cretaceous that left the ocean without
oxygen for many millennia (or even longer).<br>
<br>
Are these events indications of previous nonhuman industrial
civilizations? Almost certainly not. While there is evidence that
the PETM may have been driven by a massive release of buried
fossil carbon into the air, it’s the timescale of these changes
that matter. The PETM’s isotope spikes rise and fall over a few
hundred thousand years. But what makes the Anthropocene so
remarkable in terms of Earth’s history is the speed at which we’re
dumping fossil carbon into the atmosphere. There have been
geological periods where Earth’s CO2 has been as high or higher
than today, but never before in the planet’s multibillion-year
history has so much buried carbon been dumped back into the
atmosphere so quickly. So the isotopic spikes we do see in the
geologic record may not be spiky enough to fit the Silurian
hypothesis’s bill.<br>
<br>
But there is a conundrum here. If an earlier species’s industrial
activity is short-lived, we might not be able to easily see it.
The PETM’s spikes mostly show us the Earth’s timescales for
responding to whatever caused it, not necessarily the timescale of
the cause. So it might take both dedicated and novel detection
methods to find evidence of a truly short-lived event in ancient
sediments. In other words, if you’re not explicitly looking for
it, you might not see it. That recognition was, perhaps, the most
concrete conclusion of our study.<br>
<br>
It’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that
you don’t support. Gavin and I don’t believe the Earth once hosted
a 50-million-year-old Paleocene civilization. But by asking if we
could “see” truly ancient industrial civilizations, we were forced
to ask about the generic kinds of impacts any civilization might
have on a planet. That’s exactly what the astrobiological
perspective on climate change is all about. Civilization building
means harvesting energy from the planet to do work (i.e., the work
of civilization building). Once the civilization reaches truly
planetary scales, there has to be some feedback on the coupled
planetary systems that gave it life (air, water, rock). This will
be particularly true for young civilizations like ours still
climbing up the ladder of technological capacity. There is, in
other words, no free lunch. While some energy sources will have
lower impact—say solar versus fossil fuels—you can’t power a
global civilization without some degree of impact on the planet.<br>
<br>
Once you realize, through climate change, the need to find
lower-impact energy sources, the less impact you will leave. So
the more sustainable your civilization becomes, the smaller the
signal you’ll leave for future generations.<br>
<br>
In addition, our work also opened up the speculative possibility
that some planets might have fossil-fuel-driven cycles of
civilization building and collapse. If a civilization uses fossil
fuels, the climate change they trigger can lead to a large
decrease in ocean oxygen levels. These low oxygen levels (called
ocean anoxia) help trigger the conditions needed for making fossil
fuels like oil and coal in the first place. In this way, a
civilization and its demise might sow the seed for new
civilizations in the future.<br>
<br>
By asking about civilizations lost in deep time, we’re also asking
about the possibility for universal rules guiding the evolution of
all biospheres in all their creative potential, including the
emergence of civilizations. Even without pickup-driving
Paleocenians, we’re only now learning to see how rich that
potential might be.<br>
<br>
ADAM FRANK is a professor of astrophysics at the University of
Rochester. His work has appeared in Scientific American, The New
York Times, and NPR. He is the author of Light of the Stars: Alien
Worlds and the Fate of the Earth.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/">https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/</a><br>
<br>
- -<br>
[Cornell University]<br>
<b>The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an
industrial civilization in the geological record?</b><br>
Gavin A. Schmidt, Adam Frank<br>
If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions
of years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and
would they be detectable today? We summarize the likely geological
fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear,
it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known
events in the geological record. We then propose tests that could
plausibly distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise
naturally occurring climate event.<br>
Accepted for publication in the International Journal of
Astrobiology<br>
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)<br>
DOI: 10.1017/S1473550418000095<br>
Cite as: arXiv:1804.03748 [astro-ph.EP]<br>
(or arXiv:1804.03748v1<br>
Submission history<br>
From: Adam Frank<br>
[v1] Tue, 10 Apr 2018 23:26:11 UTC (80 KB)<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748">https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748</a><br>
pdf <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03748.pdf">https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03748.pdf</a> The Silurian Hypothesis<br>
<br>
</p>
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</p>
[last year report]<br>
<b>Exxon Spends Millions on Facebook To Keep the Fossil Fuel
Industry Alive</b><br>
Aided by a right-wing political consulting firm, the company is
rallying supporters to fight for oil and gas interests at every
level of government.<br>
CHRISTINE MACDONALD OCTOBER 20, 2020<br>
- -<br>
As GOP digital strategist Mindy Finn explained to Politico:
“[Digital organizing is] not just raw numbers. It’s analyzing and
determining who those people [who are engaging] are and matching
them back to voter profiles. … It’s not having the most Facebook
likes and clicks, because the ‘who’ matters.”<br>
<br>
While only age, sex and state information for each ad is provided by
the Facebook Ad Library, Facebook allows ad buyers to target ads
based on actual online behavior, in addition to self-reported
characteristics like work and education. It can target using online
shopping and browsing history, for example, and whether a person is
likely to engage with conservative or liberal political content. <br>
<br>
“With that kind of targeting,” Lucy Purdon says, “you don’t know
what information has been gathered about you, from who, and how
you’ve been targeted.” <br>
<br>
“Facebook says it’s not a one-to-one match of an identifiable
individual,” says digital technology critic Sara Watson, “but the
more elements that you start to target against,” the closer you can
get to identifying individual people. <br>
<br>
Exxon’s social media approach is unusually brazen, according to
Collins of InfluenceMap. He tells In These Times that Exxon’s use of
social media to lobby the public goes way beyond the rest of the
industry, a claim supported by the company’s abnormally high
spending on Facebook political ads. Typically, such tactics would be
used by political organizations or trade associations, not directly
by corporations...<br>
- -<br>
In the 11,622 Exxon ads examined for this article, on average, 16%
of those who saw each ad were men older than 65, 16% women older
than 65, and another 16% men between 55 and 64. In contrast, only
about 15% were users 18 – 34 (of any gender). Despite the fact that
people older than 65 were a third of those who saw a typical Exxon
ad, the group represents only 16% of the total U.S. population.
Furthermore, younger people use social media more than older ones.
Pew Research Center has used polling to track social media adoption
for the past several years, reporting last year that 79% people 18-
to 29-years-old are on Facebook and 67% use Instagram, compared to
just 46% and 8%, respectively, of senior citizens. Although both
Facebook and Exxon declined to comment on what filters Exxon uses to
target its ads, this disproportionality suggests the ads are not
being sent at random...<br>
Since Exxon’s primary business does not involve selling directly to
individuals (the company decided to exit the gas station business in
2008), Watson says Exxon’s personal targeting could build a case for
consumer protection, since “most consumers should not have a direct
relationship with Exxon.” She adds, “So what right does Exxon have
in collecting any consumer data at all, aside from aggregate
information about consumer trends?”...<br>
- -<br>
“It breaks my heart,” says climate scientist Peter Kalmus, “that we
are basically skewing the planet’s future for the next 10 million
years in exchange for a few more years of fracking, of fossil fuel
CEOs raking in record profits. … It’s just madness.”...<br>
- -<br>
But the trend is clear: Exxon turns to social media to push its
national agenda and try to reverse its general waning public
support. Exxon spent up to $1.4 million on social media ads
promoting pipeline jobs, for example, appearing 40 million times
over the two-year period investigated for this article and
particularly targeting residents in states such as Michigan, where
pipeline construction is controversial. Other ads pushed for
offshore drilling in federal waters and the new trade agreement with
Canada and Mexico...<br>
- -<br>
“Quite frankly, grassroots lobbying is probably the lion’s share of
lobbying that goes on at the federal and state levels — and it goes
entirely unreported,” says Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist
with the nonprofit group Public Citizen. “As long as [lobbyists]
don’t actually knock on the door in D.C. of a member of Congress,
it’s not actually reported.”<br>
<br>
Reported or not, indirect lobbying is changing the corporate
lobbying business, as illustrated by the 2019 annual report of the
New York State Joint Commission. In New York state alone in 2019,
24% of registered lobbyists had expanded into indirect lobbying
efforts, though only 1% engage exclusively in indirect lobbying. Out
of a total of $16.8 million that lobbyists spent on advertising in
2019, digital advocacy and websites accounted for $3.6 million,
surpassing the $2.9 million spent on print advertising.<br>
<br>
Holman adds that the extent of Exxon’s social media operation
“probably is evidence that [indirect lobbying] is far more
prevalent today than it used to be. Social media now and the
internet provide a perfect vehicle for deceptive advertising.”<br>
<br>
“Companies will do it until they can’t,” says Sara Watson.
“Facebook and other platforms aren’t going to care about it until
the public cares.”...<br>
- -<br>
Stephanie Prufer, an oceans campaigner at the Center for Biological
Diversity, says she doesn’t think Exxon’s strategy will work for the
company, especially among youth.<br>
<br>
“I’m not surprised that Exxon is targeting the demographic that they
are,” she says, referring to the fact that Exxon ads
disproportionately appear on the screens of older social media
users. “They know they are not going to be able to get the support
of people who are afraid for their own futures. I’m 24 and I worry
every single day about what will become of my future if the oil
companies keep drilling.”<br>
<br>
“The science is so clear,” she adds. “We need to keep oil in the
ground. We need to end drilling on our coast, not revive it.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/exxon-facebook-instagram-advertising-fracking-climate-fossil-fuels">https://inthesetimes.com/article/exxon-facebook-instagram-advertising-fracking-climate-fossil-fuels</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 -
January 26, 2014 </b></font><br>
<p>The New York Times reports on state-level efforts by Republicans
to promote renewable energy.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/us/politics/fissures-in-gop-as-some-conservatives-embrace-renewable-energy.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/us/politics/fissures-in-gop-as-some-conservatives-embrace-renewable-energy.html</a>
<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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