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<font size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>March</b></i></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b> 1, 2024</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font><br>
<i>[ nothing personal, just business ]</i><br>
FEBRUARY 28, 2024<br>
<b>Better air quality is linked to reduced suicide rates, study
finds</b><br>
by University of California - Santa Barbara<br>
Researchers in the United States and China have discovered a curious
link between air pollution and suicide rates that prompts us to
reconsider how to approach this issue. China's efforts to reduce air
pollution have prevented 46,000 suicide deaths in the country over
just five years, the researchers estimate. The team used weather
conditions to tease apart confounding factors affecting pollution
and suicide rates, arriving at what they consider to be a truly
causal connection.<br>
<br>
The results, published in Nature Sustainability, unearth air quality
as a key factor influencing mental health.<br>
<br>
Issues like air pollution are often framed as a physical health
problem leading to a spectrum of acute and chronic illnesses such as
asthma, cardiovascular disease and lung cancer. But co-lead author
Tamma Carleton, an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara's Bren
School of Environmental Science & Management, knows these
environmental factors can take a toll on mental health as well.
She's previously studied the effect of temperature on suicide rates
in India, finding that excessive heat drives those rates up...<br>
- -<br>
<b>The team faced a tricky task.</b><br>
"One of the bigger challenges with prior work on this problem is
that air pollution is correlated with a lot of things," said
Carleton. For instance, economic activity, commuting patterns, even
industrial output correlate with pollution. And these activities can
also affect suicide rates. "Our goal was to isolate just the role of
pollution on suicide as opposed to all the other things that might
be correlated with air pollution."<br>
To this aim, they took advantage of an atmospheric condition called
an inversion, where warm air traps a layer of cold air beneath it
like a lid on a pot. This can concentrate air pollution near the
surface, leading to days with higher pollution levels that aren't
correlated with human activity. This relatively random phenomenon
enabled Carleton, Zhang and their co-authors to isolate the effects
of air pollution on suicide rates. By decoupling pollution levels
from human activity—which influences human behavior—the authors
believe they've truly identified a causal effect.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://phys.org/news/2024-02-air-quality-linked-suicide.html">https://phys.org/news/2024-02-air-quality-linked-suicide.html</a>
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<i>[ "We have met the enemy, and he is us" ]</i><br>
<b>People displaced by climate crisis to testify in
first-of-its-kind hearing in US</b><br>
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will hear how climate is
driving forced migration across the Americas<br>
Communities under imminent threat from rising sea level, floods and
other extreme weather will testify in Washington on Thursday, as the
region’s foremost human rights body holds a first-of-its-kind
hearing on how climate catastrophe is driving forced migration
across the Americas.<br>
<br>
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) will hear from
people on the frontline of the climate emergency in Mexico,
Honduras, the Bahamas and Colombia, as part of a special hearing
sought by human rights groups in Latin America, the US and the
Caribbean.<br>
A growing number of migrants and refugees trying to seek sanctuary
in the US and other countries are being displaced by hurricanes,
heatwaves and drought, as well as slow-onset climate disasters such
as ocean acidification, coastal erosion and desertification.<br>
The witnesses will include Higinio Alberto Ramírez from Honduras,
who last year suffered life-altering injuries when a fire razed a
detention center in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, killing 43 migrants from
Latin America. Ramírez is from Cedeño, a coastal fishing town that
is disappearing under rising sea levels, and was trying to reach the
US to pay off family debts after tidal waves destroyed the shrimp
nursery where he and his father worked.<br>
<br>
“The case of the Ramírez family is a tragic reminder that forced
migration is not an issue for the future. Sea levels have been
rising due to climate change for decades. States and humanitarian
systems must catch up and ensure that protections are in place,”
said Gretchen Kuhner, director of the Mexico based Institute for
Women in Migration (Imumi), one of the groups which requested the
hearing.<br>
<br>
The climate crisis poses an existential threat to coastal
communities such as Cedeño, where at least 300 metres of land – and
with it scores of hotels, restaurants, shops, schools and homes –
have been submerged over the past few years amid increasingly
frequent and destructive tidal floods and storm surges.<br>
<br>
Honduras, and the vast majority of countries and island nations in
the region, have contributed minimally to the greenhouse gases
driving global heating. Yet they are among some of the world’s most
vulnerable, thanks to a mix of geography, poverty, political
instability and limited access to climate adaptation and mitigation
measures.<br>
<br>
Thursday’s hearing is part of a push for the IACHR to formally
recognise forced displacement as a consequence of the climate
crisis, to carry out country visits, and to establish guidelines to
protect people internally displaced and those seeking refuge in
other countries.<br>
As immigration and refugee policies in the US, Mexico and beyond
become increasingly cruel, and the criteria for asylum increasingly
narrow, experts will also push for the IACHR to remind states of the
non-refoulement principle, which prohibits returning displaced
persons to situations that put their lives or freedoms at risk due
to the effects of climate crisis.<br>
<br>
“The testimonies of people directly impacted show that the slow and
rapid onset effects of climate change are negatively impacting the
most basic rights of entire communities, particularly those already
marginalized and racialized, and the so-called sacrifice zones,”
said Adeline Neau, Amnesty International’s researcher for Central
America.<br>
<br>
“We ask the IACHR to show the states the correct path putting human
rights at the center, instead of more measures of contention,
detention and criminalization measures that only increase the risks
to the lives of these people.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/29/hearing-forced-migration-climate-change-us-central-america">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/29/hearing-forced-migration-climate-change-us-central-america</a><br>
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</p>
<i>[ the sue me, sue you blues ]</i><br>
<b>ExxonMobil is suing investors who want faster climate action</b><br>
FEBRUARY 29, 2024<br>
By Michael Copley<br>
ExxonMobil faces dozens of lawsuits from states and localities
alleging the company lied for decades about its role in climate
change and the dangers of burning fossil fuels. But now, ExxonMobil
is going on the offensive with a lawsuit targeting investors who
want the company to slash pollution that's raising global
temperatures.<br>
<br>
Investors in publicly-traded companies like ExxonMobil try to shape
corporate policies by filing shareholder proposals that are voted on
at annual meetings. ExxonMobil says it's fed up with a pair of
investor groups that it claims are abusing the system by filing
similar proposals year after year in an effort to micromanage its
business.<br>
ExxonMobil's lawsuit points to growing tensions between companies
and activist investors calling for corporations to do more to shrink
their climate impact and prepare for a hotter world. Interest groups
on both sides of the case say it could unleash a wave of corporate
litigation against climate activists. It is happening at a time when
global temperatures continue to rise, and corporate analysts say
most companies aren't on track to meet targets they set to reduce
their heat-trapping emissions.<br>
"Exxon is really upping the ante here in a big way by bringing this
case," says Josh Zinner, chief executive of an investor coalition
called the Interfaith Center on Corporate Accountability, whose
members include a defendant in the ExxonMobil case. "Other companies
could use this tactic not just to block resolutions," Zinner says,
"but to intimidate their shareholders from even bringing these
[climate] issues to the table."<br>
<br>
ExxonMobil said in an email that it is suing the investor groups
Arjuna Capital and Follow This because the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC) isn't enforcing rules governing when
investors can resubmit shareholder proposals. A court is the "the
right place to get clarity on SEC rules," ExxonMobil said, adding
that the case "is not about climate change."<br>
Other corporations are watching ExxonMobil's case, says Charles
Crain, a vice president at the National Association of
Manufacturers, which represents ExxonMobil and other industrial
companies.<br>
<br>
"If companies are decreasingly able to get the SEC to allow them to
exclude proposals that are obviously politically motivated, then the
next question is, well, can the courts succeed where the SEC has
failed — or, more accurately, not even tried?," Crain says.<br>
Activists push companies for more aggressive climate strategies<br>
The shareholder proposal from Arjuna and Follow This called for
ExxonMobil to cut emissions faster from its own operations and from
its supply chain, including the pollution that's created when
customers burn its oil and natural gas. That indirect pollution,
known as Scope 3 emissions, accounts for 90% of ExxonMobil's carbon
footprint, according to Arjuna and Follow This. The proposal is
similar to others that the investor groups submitted to ExxonMobil
in recent years and which ExxonMobil says received scant support
from other shareholders.<br>
After ExxonMobil sued the groups in federal court in Texas in
January, Arjuna and Follow This withdrew the proposal and promised
not to submit it to ExxonMobil again. But ExxonMobil refuses to drop
its case.<br>
<br>
Arjuna declined to comment. The firm said in a court filing that
ExxonMobil''s climate targets aren't as ambitious as those of other
big oil and gas companies, and that its shareholder proposal was
meant to "foster better investment outcomes by addressing the
material threat that climate change poses" to the company.<br>
<br>
Mark van Baal, founder of Follow This, said in a statement that
ExxonMobil is trying to stifle shareholders.<br>
<br>
"Apparently, Exxon does not want shareholders to vote on whether the
company should accelerate its efforts to reduce emissions," van Baal
said. "This is the concern of more and more investors who want [to]
safeguard the long-term future of the company and the global economy
in view of the climate crisis."<br>
Companies are offering more transparency on climate, but activists
say they need to see action<br>
Last year was the hottest ever recorded on Earth, and the effects
were devastating. Rising temperatures are driving more extreme
weather, from heat waves to floods and droughts. And scientists say
the impacts will only get worse because humans keep putting more
greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil
fuels like coal, oil and natural gas.<br>
<br>
Thousands of peoples' lives are disrupted or harmed by extreme
weather, and the economic costs are enormous. Weather disasters in
the United States last year inflicted at least $92.9 billion in
damages, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration.<br>
<br>
Those threats put pressure on companies. Corporations regularly
issue reports on climate change and sustainability. And many,
including ExxonMobil, say they're trying to eliminate or offset
their greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury. But independent
researchers say few companies have shown credible plans to achieve
their targets.<br>
<br>
What we've seen, unfortunately, is that even in the face of
disclosure and more transparency from these companies, not much has
actually changed from a strategy perspective," says Kevin Chuah, an
assistant professor at Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim
School of Business.<br>
The impact of rising temperatures has also led states and
municipalities to sue ExxonMobil and other oil and gas companies for
the threats that their communities are facing, and the industry's
alleged efforts to muddy the public's understanding of climate
science. The latest lawsuits were filed by the city of Chicago and
the state of California.<br>
<br>
An industry group called the American Petroleum Institute says the
lawsuits are meritless and politicized. ExxonMobil says it has
acknowledged repeatedly that "climate change is real." The company
noted in its statement to NPR that it is pursuing more than $20
billion of "low emission investments" between 2022 and 2027.
ExxonMobil said that would be on top of the nearly $5 billion it
recently spent buying a company that specializes in capturing carbon
dioxide emissions and injecting them into oil wells to boost
production.<br>
<br>
However, those investments are a fraction of what the company is
spending on its traditional energy business. A deal ExxonMobil
struck last year to buy the oil and gas company Pioneer Natural
Resources alone is valued at almost $60 billion.<br>
<b>Critics say ExxonMobil's lawsuit is part of a broader effort to
limit investor activism</b><br>
Activist investors like Arjuna and Follow This use shareholder
proposals to push corporations to go further on climate. But they've
struggled in recent years to get support from broader groups of
shareholders. Experts say investors are hesitant to back new climate
proposals when companies already have policies to disclose and cut
emissions. And they say investors worry that proposals have gotten
too prescriptive and might interfere with how companies are run.<br>
Despite a drop in support for shareholder proposals on climate
change, investors aren't giving companies a pass, according to an
investor survey by the accounting firm EY. The firm said 56% of the
investors it talked to still want companies to make climate change
and environmental conservation a priority this year.<br>
<br>
"I think these are financially material issues," says Chuah of
Northeastern University. "And therefore many investors are bringing
these concerns up."<br>
<br>
ExxonMobil says it is committed to cutting emissions from its
operations. But the idea that activist investors like Arjuna and
Follow This can quickly push the company out of the oil and gas
business with new climate policies is "simplistic and against the
interests of the vast majority of ExxonMobil shareholders," the
company said in a court filing in Texas.<br>
<br>
ExxonMobil said in a statement to NPR that while shareholders are
entitled to submit proposals to the company, they don't have "an
unlimited right to put forth any proposal to do anything."<br>
<br>
"Their intent is to advance their agenda rather than creating
long-term value for shareholders," ExxonMobil said of Arjuna and
Follow This.<br>
<br>
Parts of corporate America have grown frustrated with the
shareholder proposal process since the SEC issued guidance in 2021
that made it harder for companies to turn away some resolutions. The
SEC specifically cited shareholder proposals that ask companies to
set targets and timeframes to address climate change, saying it
would no longer view those kinds of resolutions as inappropriate as
long as companies are free to decide how to meet the goals.<br>
<br>
The National Association of Manufacturers has argued that forcing
companies to publish shareholder proposals that deal with
"contentious issues unrelated to [their] core business or the
creation of shareholder value," including climate change, violates
their First Amendment right of free speech. And Republicans in
Congress introduced legislation last year that would allow companies
to reject shareholder proposals concerning environmental, social or
political issues.<br>
<br>
"Certainly, there are material climate-related topics that are going
to be relevant for a company considering its growth into the
future," Crain says. But he says activists too often pursue a
"political goal" rather than try to help companies "understand and
mitigate those climate related risks or opportunities for their
operations."<br>
<br>
Crain declined to discuss individual companies or shareholder
proposals, and he says there isn't an objective way to determine
when a shareholder proposal is politically motivated.<br>
<br>
ExxonMobil's critics say its lawsuit is part of a broader effort to
curtail shareholder activism, especially around social and
environmental issues. "And the reason is because it's one of the few
effective avenues left to hold companies accountable," says Zinner
of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Accountability.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.npr.org/2024/02/29/1234358133/exxon-climate-change-oil-fossil-fuels-shareholders-investors-lawsuit">https://www.npr.org/2024/02/29/1234358133/exxon-climate-change-oil-fossil-fuels-shareholders-investors-lawsuit</a><br>
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<i>[ faster than a silly putty cracks ]</i><br>
<b>An 80-mph speed record for glacier fracture helps reveal the
physics of ice sheet collapse</b><br>
by Hannah Hickey, University of Washington<br>
FEBRUARY 28, 2024<br>
There's enough water frozen in Greenland and Antarctic glaciers that
if they melted, global seas would rise by many feet. What will
happen to these glaciers over the coming decades is the biggest
unknown in the future of rising seas, partly because glacier
fracture physics is not yet fully understood.<br>
A critical question is how warmer oceans might cause glaciers to
break apart more quickly. University of Washington researchers have
demonstrated the fastest-known large-scale breakage along an
Antarctic ice shelf. Their study, recently published in AGU
Advances, shows that a 6.5-mile (10.5 kilometer) crack formed in
2012 on Pine Island Glacier—a retreating ice shelf that holds back
the larger West Antarctic ice sheet—in about five and a half
minutes. That means the rift opened at about 115 feet (35 meters)
per second, or about 80 miles per hour.<br>
<br>
"This is to our knowledge the fastest rift-opening event that's ever
been observed," said lead author Stephanie Olinger, who did the work
as part of her doctoral research at the UW and Harvard University,
and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. "This
shows that under certain circumstances, an ice shelf can shatter. It
tells us we need to look out for this type of behavior in the
future, and it informs how we might go about describing these
fractures in large-scale ice sheet models."<br>
A rift is a crack that passes all the way through the roughly 1,000
feet (300 meters) of floating ice for a typical Antarctic ice shelf.
These cracks are the precursor to ice shelf calving, in which large
chunks of ice break off a glacier and fall into the sea. Such events
happen often at Pine Island Glacier—the iceberg observed in the
study has long since separated from the continent.<br>
"Ice shelves exert a really important stabilizing influence on the
rest of the Antarctic ice sheet. If an ice shelf breaks up, the
glacier ice behind really speeds up," Olinger said. "This rifting
process is essentially how Antarctic ice shelves calve large
icebergs."<br>
<br>
In other parts of Antarctica, rifts often develop over months or
years. But it can happen more quickly in a fast-evolving landscape
like Pine Island Glacier, where researchers believe the West
Antarctic Ice Sheet has already passed a tipping point on its
collapse into the ocean<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2024/80-mph-speed-record-fo-1.jpg">https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2024/80-mph-speed-record-fo-1.jpg</a><br>
Satellite images provide ongoing observations. But orbiting
satellites pass by each point on Earth only every three days. What
happens during those three days is harder to pin down, especially in
the dangerous landscape of a fragile Antarctic ice shelf.<br>
<br>
For the new study, the researchers combined tools to understand the
rift's formation. They used seismic data recorded by instruments
placed on the ice shelf by other researchers in 2012 with radar
observations from satellites.<br>
<br>
Glacier ice acts like a solid on short timescales, but it's more
like a viscous liquid on long timescales.<br>
"Is rift formation more like glass breaking or like Silly Putty
being pulled apart? That was the question," Olinger said. "Our
calculations for this event show that it's a lot more like glass
breaking."<br>
<br>
If the ice were a simple brittle material, it should have shattered
even faster, Olinger said. Further investigation pointed to the role
of seawater. Seawater in the rifts holds the space open against the
inward forces of the glacier. And since seawater has viscosity,
surface tension and mass, it can't just instantly fill the void.
Instead, the pace at which seawater fills the opening crack helps
slow the rift's spread.<br>
<br>
"Before we can improve the performance of large-scale ice sheet
models and projections of future sea-level rise, we have to have a
good, physics-based understanding of the many different processes
that influence ice shelf stability," Olinger said.<br>
<br>
Study co-authors are Brad Lipovsky and Marine Denolle, both UW
faculty members in Earth and space sciences who began advising the
work while at Harvard University.<br>
<br>
More information: Stephanie D. Olinger et al, Ocean Coupling Limits
Rupture Velocity of Fastest Observed Ice Shelf Rift Propagation
Event, AGU Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1029/2023AV001023<br>
<br>
Journal information: AGU Advances <br>
Provided by University of Washington <br>
This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial
process and policies. <br>
Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the
content's credibility:<br>
fact-checked<br>
peer-reviewed publication<br>
trusted source<br>
proofread<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://phys.org/news/2024-02-mph-glacier-fracture-reveal-physics.html">https://phys.org/news/2024-02-mph-glacier-fracture-reveal-physics.html</a><br>
<br>
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<font face="Calibri"><i>[The news archive - ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> <font size="+2"><i><b>March 1, 2001 </b></i></font>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font> March 1, 2001: <br>
Energy lobbyist Haley Barbour sends a memo to Vice President Dick
Cheney calling on President George W. Bush to abandon his September
2000 campaign pledge to cut CO2 emissions.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/26/us/white-house-shifted-policy-after-lobbyist-s-letter.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/26/us/white-house-shifted-policy-after-lobbyist-s-letter.html</a>
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