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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>April 3, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[symptom]<br>
<b>China sandstorms highlight threat of climate crisis</b><br>
Experts say extreme weather including droughts will become more
common as planet heats...<br>
Recent sandstorms that shrouded Beijing in a post-apocalyptic orange
haze and intensive droughts in other parts of the country are
bringing into stark relief the challenges China faces from rising
temperatures induced by the climate crisis.<br>
<br>
The widespread sandstorms that pelted the capital and spread as far
as central China for several days in mid-March and again at the end
of the month were brought on by lower than average snow cover and
precipitation, as well as higher than normal temperatures and winds
across Mongolia and northern China.<br>
<br>
The combination provides perfect conditions for creating sandstorms
and could signal more frequent dusty weather as temperatures climb
in the region...<br>
- -<br>
According to studies of temperature increases across China, Yunnan
is the province with the most climate-related warming over the past
decade and has been affected by frequent droughts in recent years.<br>
<br>
“I was recently in Yunnan to check out the weather, and it’s even
more horrible than in previous years,” Liu said. “On the whole, the
government still doesn’t consider that climate change has a big, big
impact on biodiversity.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/03/china-sandstorms-highlight-threat-of-climate-crisis">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/03/china-sandstorms-highlight-threat-of-climate-crisis</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[courts back down]<br>
<b>Oil Giants Win Climate Suit</b><br>
by Bloomberg|Chris Dolmetsch, Erik Larson|Friday, April 02, 2021<br>
(Bloomberg) -- New York City suffered another setback in its effort
to make Exxon Mobil Corp., BP Plc and other energy companies help
cover the public costs of dealing with climate change, as a federal
appeals court ruled the global problem demands political rather than
legal action.<br>
<br>
The ruling Thursday by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan is a
warning sign for those trying to use the courts to hold the industry
responsible for a problem that could cost taxpayers trillions of
dollars in coming years. Chevron Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc and
ConocoPhillips were also sued in the case.<br>
<br>
The court said global warming “is a uniquely international concern”
that requires the federal government to step in rather than judges.
Only the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to
regulate domestic greenhouse gas emissions, the unanimous
three-judge panel held.<br>
<br>
New York City “sidestepped” federal procedure with a state-law tort
suit against the energy companies even though their commercial
activity of selling fossil fuel products around the world is
“admittedly legal,” U.S. Circuit Court Judge Richard Sullivan wrote
for the court...<br>
- -<br>
“Today’s unanimous opinion by a distinguished panel of judges
appointed by presidents from both parties explains in clear detail
why the U.S. climate tort lawsuits are meritless, applying
established law as agreed upon by the Justice Department under the
previous two U.S. administrations,” Chevron General Counsel R.
Hewitt Pate said in a statement.<br>
<br>
About a dozen cities, counties and states across the U.S. have sued
Exxon, Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and their peers. The suits
seek to reimburse taxpayers for the costs of adapting to climate
change — from building multibillion-dollar sea walls to repairing
damage from powerful storms and, perhaps soon, moving whole
communities inland.<br>
<br>
The federal appeals court in San Francisco in 2019 rejected a
lawsuit brought on behalf of young people who sought to force the
government to draw up a plan to phase out fossil fuel emissions. The
majority in the case held in a split decision that climate change
should be addressed by Congress and the electorate, not the courts.<br>
<br>
Exxon is also fighting a case in Massachusetts, where the state’s
Democratic attorney general last year accused the company of
misleading consumers and investors about the financial impact of
climate-change on its business as well as the “green” value of some
of its products. The company says the suit amounts to illegal
punishment for the energy giant’s views about fossil fuels, and has
asked the judge to dismiss it.<br>
<br>
Exxon in December 2019 prevailed in a similar but narrower lawsuit
filed by the state of New York, which also accused the energy
company of misleading investors by giving false information about
how it accounted internally for the future cost of climate change on
its business.<br>
<br>
Minnesota and Baltimore are among the other state and local
governments that are pursuing climate litigation.<br>
<br>
The case is City of New York v. Chevron, 18-2188, U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Second Circuit (New York).<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.rigzone.com/news/wire/oil_giants_win_climate_suit-02-apr-2021-165067-article/">https://www.rigzone.com/news/wire/oil_giants_win_climate_suit-02-apr-2021-165067-article/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[misinformation battleground ]<br>
<b>Mike Rowe’s New Discovery+ Show Is Big Oil-Funded Propaganda</b><br>
Dharna Noor - April 2, 2021<br>
Reality show host Mike Rowe’s new series Six Degrees, which is
currently streaming on Discovery+ and will soon air on television,
begins how I expected it would: with him on screen in a t-shirt,
jeans, and baseball cap, and smiling wryly. It’s classic Rowe,
posturing as an avatar for the “average” American.<br>
<br>
The conceit of the show is to tie seemingly unrelated events
together. In the first episode, Rowe traces the history of the
dating app Tinder back to the invention of the horseshoe. He
explains that in the 1700s, a young blacksmith melted horseshoes to
create the first iron plow, and that decades later, Australian
outlaw Ned Kelly used an iron plow to create the first suit of
armor. Kelly then became the subject of the world’s first
feature-length film, which contributed to the rise of the movie
industry. Hollywood made actress and inventor Hedy Lemarr famous.
One of her inventions was a precursor to wifi, which we use to surf
dating apps. Rowe describes this all circuitously, stopping along
the way for jokes and whiskey shots. It’s dumb but seemingly
innocuous—until you get to the end.<br>
<br>
“Six Degrees is sponsored by the oil and natural gas industry. Why?
Because oil and natural gas connects everything,” Rowe says at the
episode’s conclusion. He goes on to explain that Lemarr’s inventing
process was funded by the fortune her boyfriend made in the oil
fields.<br>
<br>
I knew that Big Oil funded Six Degrees—the blog Reality Blurred
caught wind of the sponsorship in January. In fact, I started
watching it because I’d read it was funded by the American Petroleum
Institute (the oil and gas industry’s biggest trade group) and
Distribution Contractors Association (a lobbying group for fossil
fuel pipeline contractors). Still, watching this unfold on screen, I
nearly fell out of my chair.<br>
<br>
It turns out Rowe shouts out the oil and gas industry in some
capacity in every episode. I couldn’t believe he was so up front
about it. But as jarring as it was to hear him praise the industry
that is largely responsible for frying the planet, this sponsorship
makes sense. It fits right in with the industry’s current favorite
media strategy: Reminding us that their products are used in
everything.<br>
<br>
“They want to impress upon us that they’re responsible for making a
lot of the cool shit we use, starting with when you wake up in the
morning and you take a hot shower, and then when you fry an egg, and
then when you turn on your iPhone,” said Kert Davies, director of
Climate Investigations Center.<br>
<br>
It’s true that across the U.S., water heaters, stoves, and
electricity that keeps your phone charged largely run on fossil
fuels. Yet none of it has to. We have the technology to power each
of those things with clean energy. Delaying that transition would
lock in catastrophic climate damage. That’s what makes Rowe’s show
and other fossil fuel PR campaigns like it so insidious.<br>
<br>
“If all you know about this industry, if all you see, is that that
they sponsor a cool show you like, you’ll probably subconsciously
think, ‘how bad could they be?’” said Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard
researcher who has studied the fossil fuel industry’s misinformation
campaigns.<br>
<br>
Davies was a little more, uh, direct: “The point of the ads is, back
off, don’t fuck with us, you need us. It’s all to do with social
license.”<br>
<br>
Though the blatant shilling for Big Oil on the show is shocking,
it’s not surprising. Rowe has a history of pro-fossil fuel
messaging, and according to tax forms obtained by Earther, his
nonprofit has raked in six-figure donations from the likes of Koch
Industries. (He declined to comment for this story through
Discovery+, and Earther did not receive a response from his
nonprofit.)<br>
<br>
Before Six Degrees, Rowe made a name for himself as the host of
Dirty Jobs‚ a show with an obvious—if shallow—appeal as an ode to
the American working class, particularly if you think of the working
class as exclusively white dudes in hard hats. On each episode, he
worked in different thankless and sometimes gross professions,
including a roadkill collector, sewer inspector, and “avian
vomitologist,” which is exactly what it sounds like.<br>
<br>
This was an unlikely career path for Rowe, who before the show began
was an opera singer—far from the stereotypical conception of a good
ol’ rugged American dude he portrays on TV. But Dirty Jobs gave him
a certain credibility as an advocate for forgotten workers.<br>
<br>
In 2008, Rowe launched mikeroweWORKS, a nonprofit promoting
vocational training for blue-collar jobs. The organization provides
scholarships for job training programs in fields including
automotive technology, HVAC, manufacturing, and diesel technology,
which in itself isn’t a bad thing. But the foundation is premised on
the idea that the reason people are struggling to find good-paying
work in these sectors is because of a skills gap for those in
blue-collar fields—a thoroughly debunked myth pushed by industry
leaders to make workers feel underqualified for positions, which
research suggests helped companies to put more conditions on their
job listings and offer lower rates of pay. mikeroweWORKS also fails
to grapple with the reality that amid the worsening climate crisis,
many of these fields will have to undergo major changes (and in the
case of diesel, at least, be fully phased out).<br>
<br>
“He’s to the oil and gas industry what Ronald Reagan was for General
Electric, a charming pitch man.”<br>
In the years since starting his nonprofit, Rowe started a parallel
media career as a pundit, frequently appearing on Fox News to openly
speak out against regulating oil and gas extraction.<br>
<br>
Despite his posturing as a friend of the working class, Rowe doesn’t
have much to say how the industry mercilessly lays off employees
while paying shareholders or that working in the fossil fuel
industry comes with notoriously dangerous conditions for workers and
long-term health risks. (Instead, he suggests safety concerns are
overblown). He’s also failed to show much support for labor
organizing in the energy sector, even though they could desperately
use his support. Federal data shows rates of unionization in the
coal, oil, and gas sector is dwindling.<br>
<br>
“He’s to the oil and gas industry what Ronald Reagan was for General
Electric, a charming pitch man,” Adam Johnson, the co-host of the
podcast Citations Needed, wrote in an email.<br>
<br>
That’s likely no accident. As Johnson’s podcast uncovered on a 2019
episode, Rowe’s foundation is funded by anti-regulation groups
including the Distribution Contractors Association (yes, the same
group funding his new show), auto parts manufacturer Ford-Mogul
Motor Parts, a subsidiary of the British multinational energy firm
Centrica, and perhaps most damning of all, the massive fossil fuel
and petrochemical conglomerate Koch Industries. A document the
Climate Investigations Center found on Guidestar, which is marked
“not open to public inspection,” shows that Koch Industries and the
Koch Foundation, both tied to the massive fortune amassed by the
Koch brothers, have together donated more than $1 million dollars to
Rowe’s foundation since it was founded.<br>
<br>
Johnson described Rowe as the “greatest anti-worker avatar money can
buy,” because he’s “someone who a lot of working people genuinely
love ... but who is 100% against their interests.”<br>
<br>
Rowe’s an especially useful ally to the fossil fuel sector because
he continually perpetuates the age-old conservative myth that
environmental regulation must come at the expense of jobs, despite
mountains of evidence that the opposite is true and that a just
transition for fossil fuel employees is possible (and needed).<br>
<br>
“The dirty truth about fossil fuels and the petrochemical industry
is that it is really dangerous dirty work all the way from the frack
fields and wellheads to the refineries and chemical plants,” said
Davies. Workers get sick and die. Fenceline communities get sick and
die. There are cancer clusters, increased asthma and other health
problems associated with petrochemicals, plastics and pesticides.”<br>
<br>
In Six Degrees, Rowe doesn’t take an explicitly anti-renewable
stance. In an episode connecting sheep to how we do our taxes, he
speaks with a solar installer and asks him when the energy source
will “become not just an alternative but one of the go-to choices.”
But even then, he doesn’t say anything about why solar might be
preferable because oil and gas have created an existential threat.<br>
<br>
“API is hitching its wagon to a show that appears to promote
discourses of fossil fuel essentialism and fossil fuel solutionism,”
Supran said.<br>
<br>
In another episode of the show, for instance, Rowe says electricity
is “made possible by spinning turbines—turbines powered by wind and
solar, but mostly by oil and gas.”<br>
<br>
“In other words, the audience is not-so-subtly indoctrinated with
the idea that fossil fuels will inevitably be essential for the
foreseeable future, which is a political judgement, not a scientific
necessity, and a recipe for climate disaster,” said Supran.<br>
<br>
In an email, a spokesperson for Discovery+ said that Six Degrees is
the only program on the network that is funded by advocacy or trade
groups. Though he said he could not disclose exactly how much money
the American Petroleum Institute or Distribution Contractors
Association contributed to the production of Six Degrees, he said
that the groups didn’t influence the show’s content.<br>
<br>
“This sponsorship was simply to get production started,” he said.
“There was no creative input or influence on the series.”<br>
<br>
But it’s clear why the industry itself would want to sponsor this
kind of endeavor now. Public concern about the climate crisis is
growing. The Biden administration has imposed new regulations
limiting extraction, and organizers who correctly state these moves
are insufficient are pressuring officials to do far more. There’s
also the reality that climate change poses an existential threat if
left unchecked. And the fastest way to reduce carbon emissions is to
wind down the fossil fuel industry while simultaneously protecting
the workers Rowe says he stands in support of. From Six Degrees,
though, you’d never know that phasing out fossil fuels is a
necessary step to securing working people a livable future.<br>
<br>
“As the stakes around climate change continue to get higher—and more
people point toward fossil fuels as the main culprit to the warming
of our planet—Big Oil’s sponsorship of Mike Rowe’s new show on
Discovery+ is concerning,” said Allison Fisher, climate and energy
program director at Media Matters for America. “Unlike the
conservative audience that tunes in when Rowe talks about the oil
and gas industry on Fox News and Fox Business News, Discovery+ is
reaching a new and unwitting audience who may not have an opinion on
Big Oil one way or another, but could be persuaded by Rowe.”<br>
<br>
Six Degrees is right—currently, fossil fuels do provide the
foundation of society and are connected to nearly everything. But
that’s not an immutable truth, it’s a problem to be solved by
creating a just, green economy. It’s precisely because of the
interconnectivity of everything, the premise on which the show is
built, that we need to forge that new world. Rowe’s new show is a
roadblock to do just that, and that’s exactly the way the Six
Degrees’ sponsors want it.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://earther.gizmodo.com/mike-rowe-s-new-discovery-show-is-big-oil-funded-propa-1846585716">https://earther.gizmodo.com/mike-rowe-s-new-discovery-show-is-big-oil-funded-propa-1846585716</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Cosmological conjecture: Intelligent life originated on Mars -
audio interview]<br>
<b>Where Did the Laws of the Universe Come From? With Paul Davies</b><br>
Mar 25, 2021<br>
Event Horizon<br>
Where Did the Laws of Physics Come From?<br>
Why is the universe just right for life?<br>
Paul Davies joins John Michael Godier to discuss why the universe
seems to be fine-tuned for life. How did the universe begin and how
will it end?<br>
<br>
Paul Davies Books<br>
Affiliate Links<br>
<u>The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are
Solving the Mystery of Life </u><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://amzn.to/3vXPiOH">https://amzn.to/3vXPiOH</a><br>
<br>
<u>The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World</u><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://amzn.to/3d6DLUC">https://amzn.to/3d6DLUC</a><br>
<br>
<u>The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?</u><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://amzn.to/2QrgWTV">https://amzn.to/2QrgWTV</a><br>
<br>
<u>God and the New Physics</u><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://amzn.to/3fc6IRV">https://amzn.to/3fc6IRV</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3qo1moPQOs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3qo1moPQOs</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
April 3, 1980 </b></font><br>
April 3, 1980: "The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" reports
on the role coal plays in fueling global warming.<br>
<b>1980: Walter Cronkite on Climate Change</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU9s0XyEctI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU9s0XyEctI</a><br>
Perhaps if the late Senator Paul Tsongas had lived, more progress
could have been made by now.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://climatecrocks.com/2013/01/23/1980-cronkite-on-climate/">http://climatecrocks.com/2013/01/23/1980-cronkite-on-climate/</a><br>
<br>
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