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<p><font size="+2"><i><b>November 24, 2021</b></i></font><i><br>
</i></p>
<i>[ large paycheck guy expresses one opinion - free with your
fill-up. text and audio reading ] </i><br>
<b>Exxon lobbyist questions urgency of climate’s catastrophic risks</b><br>
Speaking on panel, ExxonMobil lobbyist highlights carbon capture’s
potential and says of global warming: ‘Is it catastrophic inevitable
risk? Not in my mind.’<br>
By Desmond Butler<br>
Nov 24, 2021<br>
Just last month, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods assured lawmakers his
company neither disputed the scientific consensus on climate change
nor lobbied against efforts to cut carbon pollution. But a lobbyist
for the oil giant struck a different tone less than two weeks later,
according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post, suggesting
global warming might not be so dire.<br>
<br>
Complete coverage from the COP26 U.N. climate summit<br>
Erik Oswald, a vice president and registered lobbyist for Exxon,
during a Nov. 9 panel hosted by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact
Commission in Santa Fe, N.M., highlighted his firm’s financial
interest in curbing carbon emissions rather than the dangers posed
by climate change.<br>
<br>
“Is it catastrophic inevitable risk? Not in my mind. But there is
risk,” he said, according to a recording that the watchdog group
Documented shared with The Post...<br>
- -<br>
“ExxonMobil has captured more CO2 than any other company since the
inception of the technology,” the company said in one news release.<br>
<br>
Oswald, who became vice president of strategy/advocacy at the
company’s low-carbon solutions division this year, outlined some of
Exxon’s plans for carbon capture technology during the panel
discussion. Exxon is exploring whether it and other companies can
make Houston a hub for a project to remove huge amounts CO2 released
by Texas’ oil and gas industry, he said, by storing massive
quantities of captured carbon underneath the shallows of the Gulf of
Mexico.<br>
<br>
Many scientists believe carbon capture could play a helpful role in
keeping the global average temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius
(3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial levels. The world
has already warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees
Fahrenheit), and researchers warn that a temperature rise of 1.5
degrees Celsius or more could trigger dangerous tipping points such
as the melting of vast ice sheets and massive sea level rise...<br>
- -<br>
Last month’s congressional hearing was sparked by a secretly
recorded conversation with an Exxon executive, who called the Biden
administration’s goals for cutting greenhouse gases “insane” and
said that the company had funded “shadow groups” that fought
government action on global warming. The activist group Greenpeace
UK taped the executive under the pretense of a job recruiting
session, and a British news channel broadcast it in July.<br>
<br>
The controversy prompted Woods to issue a statement calling the
executive’s comments “entirely inconsistent with our commitment to
the environment, transparency and what our employees and management
team have worked toward since I became CEO four years ago.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/11/24/exxon-global-warming-climate-skepticism/">https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/11/24/exxon-global-warming-climate-skepticism/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<i>[ BBC reports on the misinformation battles ] </i><br>
<b>Climate change: Conspiracy theories found on foreign-language
Wikipedia</b><br>
By Marco Silva - - Climate change disinformation specialist<br>
November 24, 2008: In an interview on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow
Show," Robert Redford denounces the Bush administration's plan to
have the Bureau of Land Management hold an oil and gas lease auction
in Salt Lake City, Utah on December 19, 2008. That auction would
become famous for Tim DeChristopher's act of civil disobedience
during the event, as well as the auction's illegality.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://youtu.be/fmgYX8gfxfs">http://youtu.be/fmgYX8gfxfs</a> <br>
Yumiko Sato, a Japanese writer based in the US who has investigated
misinformation on the platform, said: "Wikipedia only works if the
editing community is large and diverse."<br>
<br>
Launched in 2001, the online encyclopaedia is one of the world's
most visited websites.<br>
<br>
The English-language version, the largest, has more than 40,000
users actively editing it each month.<br>
<br>
Its climate-change pages have a group of dedicated volunteer editors
who actively patrol for any sign of bad information or
pseudoscience.<br>
<br>
But the same does not apply to many of the pages in languages other
than English.<br>
<br>
In more than 150 languages, fewer than 10 people a month regularly
edit any pages.<br>
<br>
"[These versions] are much smaller and lack editorial diversity, so
that makes them vulnerable to manipulation," Ms Sato said.<br>
<br>
<b>Push back</b><b><br>
</b>One of Wikipedia's core principles is self-governance.<br>
So, unless the community of editors steps in, the Wikimedia
Foundation can do little.<br>
<br>
"The foundation has never intervened on editorial policies directly
and that is not what we do," Mr Stinson said.<br>
<br>
"We need to push back on this disinformation in science - but that
only works if the science-literate show up in that language, in that
context, and that Wikipedia [version]."<br>
<br>
Listen to The Denial Files: 'We fight climate denial on Wikipedia'
on the BBC World Service.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/americans-rejected-drill_b_144499">https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/americans-rejected-drill_b_144499</a> <br>
<p>- -</p>
<i>[ BBC audio reports ] </i><br>
Trending<br>
The Denial Files<br>
<b>5. ‘We fight climate denial on Wikipedia’</b><br>
Released On: 20 Nov 2021Available for over a year<br>
At the grand old age of 20, Wikipedia remains one of the world’s
most popular websites. The fact that anyone with internet access can
edit its pages is a key part of its success. But the website’s
openness to the public is also the reason why it has become an
unlikely battleground on global warming.<br>
<br>
Despite the overwhelming body of science proving climate change is
real and man-made, deniers are still active on Wikipedia. Whether it
is by editing climate pages or spreading conspiracy theories, they
have for a long time tried to reframe our understanding of climate
change.<br>
<br>
But a small group of dedicated volunteers is determined to keep them
at bay, setting the record straight on the facts and the science
behind global warming.<br>
<br>
In this episode of the Denial Files, we set out to meet some of
those volunteers and investigate how vulnerable Wikipedia remains to
climate denial today.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct2yqn">https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct2yqn</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[clips from a classic prognostication</i><i> from The Atlantic</i><i>]</i><br>
<b>We’re Heading Straight for a Demi-Armageddon</b><br>
What happens when we do something—but not enough—to stop climate
change?<br>
By Emma Marris<br>
NOVEMBER 3, 2021...<br>
- -<br>
The world is wandering into a kind of gray area between total
failure and real global commitment to containing global warming. In
a recent video call to supporters, Varshini Prakash, the head of the
Sunrise Movement, which advocates for aggressive action on climate
change, said she felt two ways at once—proud “that we forced
Democrats and the president to care about our generation” and also
angry.<br>
<br>
“I feel disappointed that this is all that we’ve won,” she said.<br>
<br>
It is hard to know how to feel. A future of possibly 5 degrees
Fahrenheit of warming seems like an unknown country. Is it a
civilization-ending crisis? Or is it a more familiar version of
awful—a bit sweatier, more chaotic, and less just than the world we
currently inhabit?<br>
<br>
Brian O’Neill, the director of the Joint Global Change Research
Institute, a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy and
the University of Maryland at College Park, has a clearer view of
this question than most of us. He was one of the lead architects of
the five different futures—called “shared socioeconomic pathways,”
or SSPs—developed for the latest IPCC report.<br>
<br>
These five futures aren’t just versions of 2100 at different
temperatures. Each started with a different idea about how society
might develop. The SSP 1 pathway, which keeps us under that
1.5-degree-Celsius goal, for example, is the “Sustainability” path.
In this scenario, the global economy still expands, but humanity
“shifts toward a broader emphasis on human well-being, even at the
expense of somewhat slower economic growth over the longer term.”
The highest-temperature scenarios are SSP 4, in which inequality
accelerates to even more grotesque levels, but advanced technology
zaps some emissions, and SSP 5, where the world simply charges
forward with fossil-fuel-powered turbo-capitalism.<br>
<br>
The path we seem to be on, at least for now, looks closer to SSP 2,
which the authors call “Middle of the Road.” This is a world in
which “social, economic, and technological trends do not shift
markedly from historical patterns.” A world, in other words, in
which we do not heroically rise to the occasion to fix things, but
in which we also don’t get much worse than we already are.<br>
<br>
So what does this SSP 2 world feel like? It depends, O’Neill told
me, on who you are. One thing he wants to make very clear is that
all the paths, even the hottest ones, show improvements in human
well-being on average. IPCC scientists expect that average life
expectancy will continue to rise, that poverty and hunger rates will
continue to decline, and that average incomes will go up in every
single plausible future, simply because they always have. “There
isn’t, you know, like a Mad Max scenario among the SSPs,” O’Neill
said. Climate change will ruin individual lives and kill individual
people, and it may even drag down rates of improvement in human
well-being, but on average, he said, “we’re generally in the
climate-change field not talking about futures that are worse than
today.”<br>
<p>But all the current physical impacts of climate change—drought,
extreme heat, fire, storms, sea-level rise—would get significantly
worse by 2100 under SSP 2. And say goodbye to coral reefs. “At 2.5
degrees [Celsius], it’s probably a world in which we don’t have
them,” O’Neill said. “They don’t exist.” The Arctic? “My guess is
that we would have a permanently ice-free Arctic in the summer.
And so we would have all of the ecological consequences that would
come along with that.”</p>
All the IPCC scenarios might be wrong. They’re using statistical
extrapolation and models, and as O’Neill reminded me, history is
always wilder than people expect. (Just as Mad Max scenarios are
missing from the SSPs, so are “no growth” scenarios.) But the world
we are heading toward may be one in which the average human is
living longer and making more money than ever, but some vulnerable
humans and many nonhumans are collateral damage.<br>
<br>
This is why many climate activists frame global warming as a problem
of justice.<br>
<br>
John Paul Jose is a young climate activist based in Kerala, India,
where a series of flash floods linked to climate change have killed
hundreds of people since 2018. “In all seasons throughout the year,
there is cyclones, extreme rainfall and flood, heat waves,” he says.
“And the place where I live is an ecologically fragile and sensitive
hill, an extension of Western Ghats. The immediate danger we have is
of landslides and flooding in low-lying areas. So anything could
happen in future; the only thing is to live in fear and hope.” He
wants to see drastic emissions cuts promised at COP26, along with
serious money flowing from rich countries that have historically
emitted the most toward poor communities where the impacts are the
worst. At COP16, in 2010, wealthy nations promised to send $100
billion a year to “developing countries” by 2020, but Oxfam
International estimates that climate-specific net assistance is
currently more like $20 billion a year.<br>
<p>Climate advocates like Leah Stokes, a political scientist at UC
Santa Barbara and an adviser to congressional Democrats on climate
policy, are determined to find a way through this gray area. For
her, the action that is happening is a motivation to push for even
more action. “If they are able to pass this bill, it won’t just be
okay; it will be transformative,” she told me. But there’s more to
do after the celebrations. “The climate crisis is not going to be
solved in one bill. Every ton matters. Every dollar we get
invested in this matters. It all adds up,” she said.</p>
Fighting for incremental investment dollars is not as dramatic as a
single sweeping intervention to avoid total planetary ruin, and
activists moved by horrific visions of human extinction may not be
as motivated by the quest to steer the globe from SSP 2 to SSP 1, to
shave just a few degrees off the total average warming. But anyone
who needs an apocalypse to focus on can rest assured that it’s
happening, unequally, for some. Even at today’s 1 degree Celsius
(1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, for many individual people,
communities, and species, climate change has already meant the end
of their world.<br>
<br>
Emma Marris is a freelance writer based in Klamath Falls, Oregon,
and the author of Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the
Nonhuman World.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/how-bad-will-climate-change-get/620605/">https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/how-bad-will-climate-change-get/620605/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ Clips from an Opinion in Scientific American ]</i><br>
<b>Marine Oxygen Levels are the Next Great Casualty of Climate
Change</b><br>
Julie Pullen, Ph.D. in physical oceanography from Oregon State
University.<br>
Nathalie Goodkin, Ph.D. from a joint program of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.<br>
November 23, 2021<br>
- -<br>
The increasing frequency of dead zones will affect billions of
people who rely on the ocean for survival<br>
Last summer, more than 100 miles of Florida’s coastal waters became
an oxygen-depleted dead zone, littered with fish that could be seen
even into Tampa Bay. On the other side of the country, Dungeness
crabs were washing onto Oregon’s shoreline, unable to escape from
water that has, in dramatic episodes, become seasonally depleted of
oxygen over the past two decades. <br>
<br>
While much of the conversation around our climate crisis focuses on
the emission of greenhouse gases and their effect on warming,
precipitation, sea level rise and ocean acidification, little is
said about the effect of climate change on oxygen levels,
particularly in oceans and lakes. Water without adequate oxygen
cannot support life, and for the three billion people who depend on
coastal fisheries for income, declining ocean oxygen levels are
catastrophic.<br>
<br>
As ocean and atmospheric scientists focus on climate, we believe
that oceanic oxygen levels are the next big casualty of global
warming. To stop this, we need to build on the momentum of the
recent COP26 summit and expand our attention to the perilous state
of oceanic oxygen levels—the life support system of our planet. We
need to accelerate ocean-based climate solutions that boost oxygen,
including nature-based solutions like those discussed at COP26<br>
<br>
As the amount of CO2 increases in the atmosphere, not only does it
warm air by trapping radiation, it warms water. The interplay
between oceans and the atmosphere is complex and interwoven, but
simply,oceans have taken up about 90 percent of the excess heat
created by climate change during the Anthropocene. Bodies of water
can absorb CO2 and O2, but only to a temperature-dependent limit.
Gas solubility decreases with warming temperatures; that is, warmer
water holds less oxygen. This decrease in oxygen content, coupled
with a large-scale die-off of oxygen-generating phytoplankton
resulting not just from climate change, but from plastic pollution
and industrial run-off, compromises ecosystems, asphyxiating marine
life and leading to further die-offs. Large swaths of the oceans
have lost 10–40 percent of their oxygen, and that loss is expected
to accelerate with climate change.<br>
<br>
The dramatic loss of oxygen from our bodies of water is compounding
climate-related feedback mechanisms described by scientists in many
fields, hundreds of whom signed the 2018 Kiel Declaration on Ocean
Deoxygenation. This declaration has culminated in the new Global
Ocean Oxygen Decade, a project under the U.N. Global Ocean Decade
(2021–2030). Yet, despite years of research into climate change and
its effect on temperature, we know comparatively little about its
effect on oxygen levels and what falling oxygen levels, in turn, may
do to the atmosphere. To address this unfolding crisis, we need more
research and more data.<br>
<br>
In the past 200 years, humans have shown remarkable ability to
change the planet by altering the timescales in which the Earth
cycles chemicals such as CO2. We need to evaluate any possible
solutions for their impact on not just greenhouse gases but other
critical elements of life, such as oxygen levels. As the financial
world invests in climate change solutions focused on CO2 drawdown,
and possibly including future geoengineering efforts such as iron
fertilization, we run the risk of causing secondary harm by
exacerbating oxygen loss. We need to evaluate potential unintended
consequences of climate solutions on the full life support system.<br>
<br>
Beyond enhanced monitoring of oxygen and the establishment of an
oxygen accounting system, such an agenda encompasses fully valuing
the ecosystem co-benefits of carbon sequestration by our ocean’s
seaweed, seagrasses, mangroves and other wetlands. These so-called
“blue carbon” nature-based solutions are also remarkable at
oxygenating our planet through photosynthesis. The theme of COP26
chosen by the host country (U.K.) was “nature-based solutions.” And
we saw a lot of primarily terrestrial focused (forestry) initiatives
and commitments that are an excellent step forward. We hope this
year’s conference and next year’s COP27 help oceanic nature-based
solutions to come into their own, propelled by the U.N. Global Ocean
Decade.<br>
<br>
Putting oxygen into the climate story motivates us to do the work to
understand the deep systemic changes happening in our complex
atmospheric and oceanic systems. Even as we celebrated the return of
humpback whales in 2020 to an increasingly clean New York Harbor and
Hudson River, dead fish littered the Hudson River in the summer as
warmer waters carried less oxygen. Ecosystem changes connected to
physical and chemical systems-level data may point the way to new
approaches to climate solutions—ones that encompass an enhanced
understanding of the life support system of our planet and that
complement our understanding of drawdown to reduce emissions of
carbon dioxide. Roughly 40 percent of the world depends on the ocean
for their livelihoods. If we do not stop marine life from
oxygen-starvation, we propagate a further travesty on ourselves.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/marine-oxygen-levels-are-the-next-great-casualty-of-climate-change/">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/marine-oxygen-levels-are-the-next-great-casualty-of-climate-change/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ “It’s about drive it’s about power, we stay hungry, we
devour” VICE news video 22 min ]</i><br>
<b>We Can’t Beat the Climate Crisis Without Rethinking This | Planet
A</b><br>
Nov 22, 2021<br>
VICE News<br>
In this episode of ‘Planet A’, Professor Pamela McElwee explains the
environmental impacts of our food production systems and how the
degradation of the earth can be directly traced to structures like
colonialism and racism, before explaining some of the possible
solutions that could get us out of this mess.<br>
<br>
In 'Planet A', VICE World News takes viewers on a global tour of the
ecosystems that sustain life on earth to expose the existential
threats that reach far beyond climate change. <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyXjW-A60oc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyXjW-A60oc</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<i>[ The news archive - looking back - Robert Redford interviewed by
Rachel Maddow ]</i><br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming
November 24, 2008</b></font><br>
November 24, 2008: In an interview on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow
Show," Robert Redford denounces the Bush administration's plan to
have the Bureau of Land Management hold an oil and gas lease auction
in Salt Lake City, Utah on December 19, 2008. That auction would
become famous for Tim DeChristopher's act of civil disobedience
during the event, as well as the auction's illegality.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://youtu.be/fmgYX8gfxfs">http://youtu.be/fmgYX8gfxfs</a> <br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/americans-rejected-drill_b_144499">https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/americans-rejected-drill_b_144499</a> <br>
<br>
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