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Here are the top ways the world could take on climate change in 2020

by BernieSeidel Posted on March 19, 2020

The climate think tank Project Drawdown first took on the question “what’s really the best way to stop climate change” in 2017 — and came up with a hundred answers, from cutting food waste to implementing alternative refrigerants. Now, Project Drawdown has updated its original list to incorporate the latest findings.

The name references the day when humanity switches from emitting carbon dioxide to storing it and begins drawing down the carbon we’ve dumped into the atmosphere. The team compiled its recommendations, which were first published as a bestselling coffee table book, based on rigorous scientific analysis of the costs and carbon savings of every solution available at scale today.

Jonathan Foley, an environmental scientist and the executive director of Project Drawdown, chatted with us about the changes — and explained why we don’t need technological breakthroughs or political miracles to bring the world to net-zero carbon emissions. Our interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. To start off, can you tell me a little bit about what stayed the same? 

A. The top-line message remains the same essentially, which is that with solutions that exist now — not ones that are in the lab, not ones that are just science fiction or wishful thinking — but with solutions that actually exist today, we can stabilize our climate at 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees C. It wouldn’t be easy. It requires a lot of political will, a lot of leadership, and a lot of mobilization. But it’s all stuff that exists right now. That’s pretty amazing.

The other thing that stayed the same was the message that we have to do a lot of different things to get there. There are no silver bullets when it comes to climate change. We may have silver buckshot, but that’s about it.

Q. And what have been the most substantial changes to the recommendations from the original Project Drawdown?

A. The numbers are actually pretty different, especially on the cost. Things got cheaper and with better returns on investments compared to the original analysis. And a lot of that is because things have gotten cheaper in renewables in the last few years. So I think we’re seeing a stronger economic case for climate solutions every year.

A lot of people remember the rankings of solutions from the first book, and we did provide new rankings in this one. We presented two sets of rankings — one for a scenario that gets us 2 degrees C and one for a scenario that could get us to 1.5 degrees C.

I think the message is that we still have to do all of these solutions. It doesn’t matter to me much that a solution was ranked No. 3 and that it’s now No. 6. The same kinds of things still appear near the top: The food system, like food waste and diets, is up there are pretty high, and things like refrigerants, which people kind of forget about — these potent greenhouse gases called hydrofluorocarbons. And of course, sprinkled throughout all the rankings are items that address the fossil fuel problem from many different angles. Whether it’s energy efficiency or renewable electricity or different ways of transportation, fossil fuels are found everywhere on that list from top to bottom.

Q. Even though the Project Drawdown guide is backed by a lot of rigorous science, it isn’t meant for scientists or policymakers — it’s for regular people. How do you accurately and succinctly explain issues that often have a lot of complex science behind them to the general public?

A. Usually when somebody does a study, the first thing they do is write it up for a scientific journal or a white paper, where it’s written basically in almost incomprehensible language, for maybe a hundred people in the world who could read it. Then later they’ll say, “OK, now we’re going to make the more public version of this.”

We’re flipping the model. People find it inspiring that there are solutions to climate change, and that when you do the math, they seem to work. So we systematically go through all the different solutions, and use the same technique to look at them — we’re comparing an apple to an apple to an apple when we compare our forestry solutions to a nuclear energy solution to a different type of car, and that’s what had never been done before. I think universities are very good at what they do, and we need the real in-depth experts on every single one of those solutions. But we’re not a university. None of us are working on getting tenure.

Q. It seems extremely likely that in November, we’re either going to have either a President Trump, a President Biden, or a President Sanders for the next four years. Which of the Drawdown solutions are you the most hopeful about regardless of the election outcome, and which ones do you think require more political willpower to make happen?

A. We have to remember that this is a 30-year effort we’re talking about. One four-year term can make a big difference, but it’s not game over, regardless of who wins in November. The world will not be fried if Trump gets reelected. It just won’t help much. And the world will not be saved if Bernie wins with the Green New Deal. So I don’t really think it’s wise to clip all our hopes on one election outcome — or all our fears.

There are so many levers of power to pull: at the local level, states, banks, Wall Street, businesses, our own behavior and communities. This is an international problem, from our neighborhoods to the international markets.

What we need now is time. Saying, “That’s who’s going to save us: the U.S. House of Representatives, or the U.S. federal government, or the United Nations,” is how we managed to waste the last three decades. I think we need to start leading elsewhere and hope that Washington and the U.N. will follow.

Q. Coronavirus is something that’s changing a lot of personal behaviors right now. Do you think there’s a potential for a ripple effect after the pandemic crisis is resolved that might shift around things on the list for dealing with the climate crisis?

A. Recessions suck for everybody. No one in the environmental community should be celebrating this virus — this is a tragedy and there’s no other way to say it. But it does, at least in the short run, mean a drop in emissions. And hopefully, there’ll be some lasting lessons from this. Hey, there are other ways to do things besides flying all the time and driving all the time. Working from home and telecommuting might be really viable options now, so let’s learn how to do those really well. That might help reduce some of the emissions long term after this crisis if people stick to those habits a bit more.

People also learn how to be more resilient as a society to these kinds of shocks. Whether it’s a virus next time, or a big storm, or a hurricane, or fires, people are going to be a little bit better on the resiliency side of the equation. If there is any silver lining about this incredibly dark cloud, that might be it.

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Here are the top ways the world could take on climate change in 2020

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Elizabeth Warren’s new climate plan can go the distance, even if her campaign can’t

by ltrdeclan642 Posted on March 1, 2020

Elizabeth Warren once again trailed her top competitors in Saturday’s South Carolina primary. Another poor showing on Super Tuesday — the day when the greatest number of Democrats can go to the polls — could spell the end of her presidential aspirations.

But regardless of what happens to the Massachusetts senator this week, her climate plans, some of the most detailed and thoughtful in the primary, could live on — much like those of Jay Inslee, the campaign’s original climate candidate, who left the race last August. (Warren, among others, adopted elements of the Washington State governor’s climate platform upon his exit.)

That’s especially true of her latest proposal, aimed at stopping Wall Street from continuing to finance the climate crisis. As far as Warren’s climate plans go, this one is as on-brand as they come. Evoking the 2008 financial crisis, she writes in the plan, posted to Medium Sunday morning: “Once again, as we face the existential threat of our time –– climate change –– Wall Street is refusing to listen, let alone take real action.” (Larry Fink over at BlackRock might disagree, nevertheless, Warren persists.)

Many other candidates, including Warren herself, have previously unveiled climate risk-disclosure plans, designed to compel corporations to reveal to stockholders and the public potential climate-related liabilities to their business — ranging from fossil fuel investments on their books to parts of their operations with exposure to, say, sea-level rise. But this plan, introduced as the stock market continues to plunge amid coronavirus fears, is different in that it is aimed directly at Wall Street banks.

Climate change, she says in the Medium post, destabilizes the American financial system in two major ways: physical property damage (think the wreckage of coastal cities in the wake of catastrophic hurricanes or Western towns post-wildfires) and so-called “transition risks.” For those of you without a degree in economics, transition risks in the context of climate change means, for instance, investments in the fossil fuel industry that could suddenly lose value as the nation switches to a green economy. Theoretically, such a shift could create conditions for a financial meltdown.

“We will not defeat the climate crisis if we have to wait for the financial industry to self-regulate or come forward with piecemeal voluntary commitments,” Warren writes. So she suggests taking aggressive steps to reign in Wall Street and avoid financial collapse by using a number of levers at a president’s disposal — some old, some new.

First, she says, if elected, she’ll use the regulatory tools in the Dodd-Frank Act — enacted in the wake of the 2008 crash — to address climate risks. Specifically, she would ask a group created by that legislation — the Financial Stability Oversight Council, comprised of heads of regulatory agencies — to assess financial institutions based on their climate risk and label them “systemically important” where appropriate.

Next, she’d require American banks to self-report how much fossil-fuel equity and debt they acquire yearly, in addition to the assets they hold in that sector. She’d also mandate insurance companies disclose premiums they derived from insuring coal, oil, and gas concerns. She’d ask the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Labor, the two agencies in charge of regulating pensions, to identify carbon-intensive investments. Current pension systems, she writes, are “leaving all the risk of fossil fuel investments in hard working Americans’ retirement accounts.” In addition, she’d staff federal financial agencies with regulators who understand the connection between financial markets and climate change, “unlike Steven Mnuchin,” she says (seemingly unable to pass up the opportunity to drag Trump’s unpopular Treasury secretary).

Perhaps the most important piece of Warren’s plan concerns international cooperation, which echoes a theme in previous climate plans she’s introduced. She’d join other world powers in making climate change a factor in monetary policymaking, and prompt the Federal Reserve to join the Network on Greening the Financial System, a global coalition of central banks. And she’d make implementation of the Paris Agreement a prerequisite for future trade agreements with the U.S. “Addressing the financial risks of the climate crisis is an international issue,” Warren writes on Medium.

As is her calling card, Warren’s latest plan is designed to protect consumers from a potential financial bubble that could burst on the horizon. And if she’s unable to continue campaigning after this week, her competitors might be smart to heed her warning and give this plan a good look, particularly the international components. As John Donne famously wrote, no market is an island.

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Elizabeth Warren’s new climate plan can go the distance, even if her campaign can’t

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UK court ruling: Heathrow airport expansion doesn’t fly under Paris Agreement

by MarcellaEstell Posted on February 28, 2020

Terms like “flight shame” might be new to many of us, but environmental activists have been waving their arms about the aviation industry’s ginormous carbon footprint for decades. And on Thursday, they triumphed in a fight over an airport expansion at London’s Heathrow Airport that’s been brewing for years.

In a historic decision, the United Kingdom’s Court of Appeal ruled that a controversial plan to build a third runway at Heathrow is illegal because it fails to take into account the country’s commitment to cutting carbon emissions under the landmark Paris Agreement. The U.K. government has said it will not appeal the court’s decision.

Heathrow is already one of the busiest airports in the world, and the expansion would have brought in about 700 more planes per day, undoubtedly leading to a boom in emissions. Plaintiffs argued this runs counter to the law the U.K. passed last June to align its climate policy with the Paris Agreement. That law requires the U.K. to bring its contribution to global warming down to net-zero by 2050 by vastly reducing its emissions and offsetting any remaining greenhouse gases through other solutions like tree planting and carbon capture technology.

The court’s decision is a big deal, and not just for the U.K. This is the first time a court has cited the Paris Agreement to strike down a major infrastructure project — or any project — and could have implications all over the world. As more and more countries, states, and cities enact their own climate policies, courts will inevitably be asked to adjudicate projects that expand the use of fossil fuels, which could be anything from airport expansions to new gas pipelines to highways.

We’ve gotten a taste of cases like this in the U.S., where we don’t even have national emissions targets. Last year a U.S. district court temporarily blocked oil and gas drilling on public land in Wyoming because the Bureau of Land Management didn’t assess the emissions footprint of the projects. The decision was based on a requirement in the National Environmental Policy Act, a requirement which the Trump Administration is now trying to toss out. But in places like the European Union that remain members of the Paris Agreement, the Heathrow decision will only make challenges to emissions-increasing projects look stronger.

The ruling was also a major victory for Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, plaintiffs in the suit that have been fighting the project for more than a decade. In 2007, activists clashed with police after setting up camp near Heathrow for a week of protests against a proposed expansion. In 2008, members of the activist group Plane Stupid climbed to the roof of Parliament and unfurled a banner that read “no 3rd runway at Heathrow.”

In 2009, the actress Emma Thompson helped activists buy a piece of land where the runway would have been built to delay its development. Then there was the custard incident, in which activist Leila Deen threw green custard onto then-Business Secretary Peter Mandelson as he was on his way into a “low-carbon summit.” Deen called it a “lighthearted way of making a very serious point” about what she called the government’s hypocritical policy on climate change, since Mandelson was a supporter of the third runway at Heathrow.

So does the ruling put an end to the protests? In a blog post about the decision, Greenpeace cautioned against celebrating too soon. While the government doesn’t plan to appeal, the company that owns the airport does. The government also has the option of pushing the project forward by submitting an amended plan that shows how a third runway could comply with the country’s commitment to the Paris Agreement.

But there doesn’t look to be much appetite for reviving the fight. When he was mayor of London, now-Prime Minister Boris Johnson railed against the proposed runway, saying he would lie down “in front of those bulldozers and stop the building, stop the construction.”

It would also be a bad look given that the U.K. is hosting the next Conference of the Parties, the U.N.’s annual climate change conference, in November.

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UK court ruling: Heathrow airport expansion doesn’t fly under Paris Agreement

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Major news networks devoted less than 4 hours to climate change in 2019. Total.

by fishing1461955 Posted on February 27, 2020

When it comes to climate change, television news is covering little more than the tip of the iceberg.

That’s according to a just-released report from Media Matters for America, which found that global warming garnered a tiny sliver — well under 1 percent — of overall broadcast news coverage. The progressive research nonprofit also found that, while these news outlets did cover climate change more often in 2019 than in the year prior, the quality of coverage was “generally shallow.” And when it came to giving voice to those hit first and worst by extreme weather and other climate-related disasters, the networks fell short: People of color were “massively underrepresented” in coverage.

“In spite of the increase in coverage from 2018 to 2019, climate coverage as a whole still made up only 0.6% of overall corporate broadcast TV nightly news in 2019, showing that these programs’ climate coverage does not adequately reflect the urgency and severity of the climate crisis,” the report found.

The study analyzed four nightly news programs and four Sunday morning political shows, focusing both on segments devoted to climate change as well as substantial mentions of the topic in other segments. Yet even with significant year-to-year increases in coverage — for example, a 180 percent increase in climate coverage on nightly news in 2019 compared to 2018 — corporate broadcasters failed to substantially improve the overall quantity and quality of their climate coverage, according to Media Matters.

The analysis focused on four nightly news programs — ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC’s Nightly News, and public broadcaster PBS’s NewsHour — as well as four Sunday morning political shows: ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, and Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday. Media Matters has produced variations of this analysis annually since at least 2012, including reports in 2018 and 2017.

Among the report’s key findings for 2019:

Although the volume of climate change coverage on the corporate broadcast nightly and Sunday morning news shows increased 68 percent from 2018 to 2019 (142 minutes to 238 minutes), the report noted that this was not difficult to achieve because the amount of coverage in 2018 was “so pitiful” that news shows had a low bar to meet the following year. This climate coverage represented just .07 percent of the overall broadcast nightly and Sunday morning news shows in 2019.

When it came to racial and gender diversity in their climate coverage, Media Matters found that broadcast television also failed: People of color were “massively underrepresented” as news guests, even though communities of color are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Just 10 percent of guests interviewed or featured in these news segments were people of color, and 2019 was the third year in a row that representation came in at this percentage or lower.

Scientists and women were also underrepresented by broadcasters, comprising 22 and 27 percent of guests, respectively. Women of color were featured even less prominently — a troubling reminder that women “typically play second fiddle to white men” in discussions of climate change, according to Media Matters. “A lack of women’s voices in media coverage of climate change is part of a pattern of racism and sexism that these broadcast networks need to address,” the report stated.

Not all of the findings in Wednesday’s report were grim. In 2019, more than a third of climate segments on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox mentioned solutions or actions to address climate change — a significant increase over the previous two years. The broadcasters focused most often on climate adaptation and renewable energy technologies when discussing solutions, but advocacy and direct action, such as youth climate activism, were also featured. The report cited studies showing that media coverage of climate change solutions can help spur collective action from viewers. “Much of this shift in public debate to talking about solutions is being driven by TV weathercasters, who are often trusted and knowledgeable members of local news,” the study added.

Media Matters praised PBS NewsHour for its climate coverage, noting that it has outpaced its broadcast counterparts in climate reporting for the past six years. PBS Newshour aired 121 climate segments in 2019, an average of 10 segments per month. “This is more coverage than we found from the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news shows combined,” the report found.

The analysis also found that climate change coverage last year was driven in large part by reporting on the Green New Deal congressional resolution, extreme weather, climate activism, and the 2020 presidential election. Coverage of climate activism, which comprised about 16 percent of the overall climate coverage from these broadcasters, focused in large part on activist Greta Thunberg and climate strikes, which took place across the globe last year. The report also found that broadcasters did a “pretty poor job overall” covering the connection between climate change and specific extreme weather events.

Media Matters is hardly alone in its withering analysis of major media coverage of climate change — and news outlets’ failure to link global warming to wildfires and other extreme weather events that are becoming the new normal.

Some of those critics are starting to offer solutions. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor Leah C. Stokes and Ph.D. candidate Emily Williams have compiled a concise fact sheet intended to help journalists and citizens understand the scientific evidence linking climate change to wildfires. They are also working on a project with Climate Signals, a science information project from the nonprofit Climate Nexus, to help journalists more easily access academic journal articles on climate change, which are typically behind paywalls, according to a radio interview Stokes gave in September.

As Grist recently reported in a story about how local journalists are tackling climate coverage, a comprehensive approach to covering climate change should include going beyond analyzing the evidence supporting global warming. John Morales, a meteorologist at NBC6 in Miami, Florida, has been covering climate change for decades. He said that local news needs to cover “how fast things are changing, the links between the observed symptoms and causes of rising temperatures, and move on to ‘what do we do about this?’”

As Media Matters made clear on Wednesday, Morales is way ahead of television’s largest news providers.

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Major news networks devoted less than 4 hours to climate change in 2019. Total.

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The Future We Choose – Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac

by Myrna Posted on February 25, 2020

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The Future We Choose

Surviving the Climate Crisis

Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: February 25, 2020

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


Climate change: it is arguably the most urgent and consequential issue humankind has ever faced. How we address it in the next thirty years will determine the kind of world we will live in and will bequeath to our children and to theirs. In The Future We Choose , Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac–who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015–have written a cautionary but optimistic book about the world's changing climate and the fate of humanity. The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a carbon neutral, regenerative world. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can and must do to fend off disaster.

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The Future We Choose – Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac

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Ahead of the caucuses, Nevadans say climate change is on their minds

by xyrbrock6766 Posted on February 21, 2020

After the disastrous Iowa caucuses and far smoother New Hampshire primary, all eyes now turn to Nevada, which will hold its Democratic primary caucuses on Saturday. On Wednesday night, presidential hopefuls took to the debate stage in Las Vegas to compete for Nevadans’ affections. In between viral verbal smackdowns, the candidates took a full 16 minutes to talk about climate policy.

It was a canny choice by the moderators, which included the very first climate journalist to helm a presidential debate, to spotlight climate. That’s because Democratic caucus-goers in Nevada — and Latino caucus-goers in particular — care deeply about climate policy, according to a recent poll.

The poll, released by the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) and the Nevada Conservation League, reveals that 86 percent of Nevada Democrats likely to attend the caucuses on Saturday believe that the climate crisis is either “a very important issue” or “the most important issue.” And climate change is the second most important issue to likely Democratic caucus-goers, after universal healthcare, when deciding which candidate to support.

For likely Latino caucus-goers in the state, climate change is a more important issue than health care or immigration. This makes sense because climate change is not a single issue, but one that affects every other issue — and its impacts are felt differently depending on race, income, gender, immigration status, and other factors.

“Latinx communities are hit first and hardest by climate,” Rudy Zamora, program director of Chispa Nevada — an organizing program under LCV — said in a statement. “So it’s not surprising to see that climate change is the most important issue for Nevada Latinx voters in deciding who to support for president.”

A majority of those who participated in the survey said they are much more likely to vote for a candidate with a climate plan that prioritizes communities most affected by pollution, including low-income communities of color. And 43 percent say they “strongly support” a Green New Deal.

These results line up with recent national polls showing that Democratic voters believe climate change is an important issue for presidential candidates to address this election.

But the issue has particularly hit home in Nevada, which has experienced dangerous heat waves in the last few years. Since 1970, Nevada has warmed 2.8 degrees F on average. Last August, the state broke a record for the most consecutive days with temperatures over 105 degrees F. Las Vegas is the fastest-warming city in the country. And the Colorado River has been dwindling due to an increasing loss of snow in the Nevada mountains, forcing Nevadans to cut down their water use.

Given all that, it’s no surprise that climate change will be on Nevadans’ minds when they head to the caucuses this weekend.

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Ahead of the caucuses, Nevadans say climate change is on their minds

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Calls for law firm to #DropExxon go national with law student boycott

by shanelidriess7 Posted on February 10, 2020

What started as a single protest against the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP by law students from Harvard University last month is now growing into a movement.

During a recruitment event in New Haven, Connecticut on Thursday night for Yale Law students, 40 protestors unveiled a “#DROPEXXON” banner and began to chant at the other students and Paul, Weiss partners mingling with glasses of wine and cocktails at the bar.

“You heard it from students at Harvard, and now you’ll hear it from us,” they shouted in a call-and-response speech. “We will not work for you as long as you work for ExxonMobil. Our future is on fire and you are fanning the flames.”

Paul, Weiss recently helped ExxonMobil win a case brought by the New York district attorney alleging that the company misled investors about the costs of climate change to its business. The firm is also representing Exxon in a similar case in Massachusetts, as well as other climate cases brought by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, California and Baltimore, Maryland. In those cases, the cities are seeking damages from multiple fossil fuel companies to pay for impacts of climate change they are already experiencing and to fund adaptation measures.

The action at the Yale reception went on for just over 10 minutes before the students pointedly filed out and left the reception. “I think it went well,” Tim Hirschel-Burns, one of the organizers, told Grist. “It is discouraging that the partners from Paul, Weiss continue to not take the climate crisis seriously, but law students certainly are, and I think they’re going to continue seeing that students are not going to accept their indifference.”

Now Harvard and Yale law students are working together to build momentum and start a larger movement. After Thursday’s protest, the coalition launched a #DropExxon pledge that asks law students around the country to refuse to interview with or work for Paul, Weiss until it drops ExxonMobil as its client. Organizers of the pledge said that students at other schools are planning additional protests.

In a press release, Yale students involved with the protest pointed out that Paul, Weiss claims that it does not “sacrifice culture and values in favor of the bottom line,” and that it has a commitment “to serve the broader public interest.” They argued that the firm cannot live up to these values while helping Exxon, citing investigative reporting that found that the company has known the dangers of climate change since the 1970s but chose to fund climate denial to protect its business.

Paul, Weiss did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

An age-old ethical dilemma

The movement raises questions about the role of lawyers in society and the right to equal representation before the law. In Harvard’s newspaper, the Crimson, Harvard student Andrew Liang wrote, “In providing such representation, Paul, Weiss is not defending climate change. It is defending the law. The legal profession does not exist to pass moral judgment on a client, but to uphold the process.”

Organizers at Yale told Grist that they are not disputing that people and companies deserve representation but said that doesn’t mean the firm does not have a choice in whom it represents. “Paul, Weiss has no shortage of paying clients to choose from, but is giving priority to a company that is sabotaging humanity’s chance to address climate change,” Yale Law School student Ify Chikezie said in a press release.

Charles Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School, said that these are questions students need to think through as they move ahead in the profession. “A lot of students face this problem of going off into law firms and making money to pay off their student debts and finding that they’re doing work that may not be completely savory as far as the climate is concerned or justice is concerned,” said Nesson. “The amount of acceptance within the profession of legal tactics that produce unjust results is considerable.”

Nesson recently had students discuss the protest against Paul, Weiss in a class called Ideal Discourse. He said that most of his class approved of the protest, but brought up concerns about whether the action would be effective, whether it would hurt the protesters’ careers, and why they were targeting Paul, Weiss over other firms. In an online class discussion board for the class, one student wrote, “This discussion about how we square our principles with our professional roles is so important and for a lot of us, hard.”

Divestment campaigns ramp up

Outside of the law schools, others in the Harvard and Yale communities made strides last week in their campaigns to get the two universities to divest their endowments from fossil fuel companies.

On Tuesday, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a motion, 179 to 20, to call on the Harvard Management Company, the school’s endowment gatekeepers, to divest from companies that “explore for or develop further reserves of fossil fuels.” An online petition started by a group called Harvard Faculty for Divestment now had almost 1,000 signatures as of Friday. While the faculty vote has no direct influence on the endowment, University President Lawrence Bacow said he would bring the motion to the school’s governing body for consideration.

The faculty vote follows another successful campaign by Harvard alumni to nominate five candidates who will support divestment for election to the Board of Overseers, which has the power to approve who is on the board that manages the school’s endowment.

At Yale, the undergraduate student government voted unanimously on January 25 to become a part of the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition and support the group’s mission to get the school to cancel its holdings in Puerto Rican debt and divest from fossil fuel companies.

Outside of the Ivy League, Georgetown University’s president announced on Thursday that the school’s board of directors has decided to divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies.

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Calls for law firm to #DropExxon go national with law student boycott

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How the oil industry pumped Americans full of fake news

by bpyroyal959013 Posted on February 7, 2020

The world has known about the dangers of climate change for decades — so why are oil and gas companies still drilling for crude as if there’s no tomorrow? There’s no simple answer. But any explanation would have to give some credit to the wizards of public relations. For more than a century, these spinmasters downplayed misdeeds, twisted facts, and cajoled the media into mimicking their talking points.

“A lot of what we have as PR today, in general, was built in service of the fossil fuel industry,” said Amy Westervelt, the host of Drilled, billed as “a true-crime podcast about climate change.” The first season of Drilled investigated the history of climate denial, and the second looked at the West Coast crabbers suing Big Oil for contributing to warmer oceans and throwing the marine food web out of whack. In the latest season launched last month, Westervelt introduces the “Mad Men of Climate Denial” — the publicists who coached the fossil fuel industry how to shape public opinion over the past century.

Creating a cloud of confusion around established science is one of their well-known tactics. Exxon and the coal industry knew about global warming as early as the 1960s; instead of telling the public, they spread doubt about the science behind it. That’s just one facet of the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda machine. (“Propaganda” might seem too strong of a word, but Westervelt says it’s the very definition: “a one-sided message with the aim of shifting public opinion or policy.”) Digging through archives, presidential libraries, and old PR books, Westervelt found the pushy executives, manipulative schmoozers, and “inventive” storytellers who made it work.

“People are largely unaware that there’s a massive system running underneath everything,” Westervelt said in an interview with Grist. “A lot of the ideas they have about the fossil fuel industry and even the language they use has been crafted very carefully by the industry itself.”

She takes us on a wild journey from a turn-of-the-century massacre in Colorado coal country to the messaging strategy of, yes, Nazi Germany, telling the stories of the people who worked to boost oil’s image and how their experiences taught them to influence the media, politicians, and the courts. Here are just a handful of the wild strategies they came up with, all still in use.

Fake news: “Fake news” proliferates on the internet today, a plague of modern life with a long pedigree. You can trace it back to Ivy Ledbetter Lee, often called the father of modern public relations. In the early 1900s, Lee was tasked with rehabilitating the public image of the tycoon John D. Rockefeller. His company, Standard Oil, had brutally stamped out a workers strike at a Colorado coal mine in 1913, setting tents on fire and spraying their camp with machine guns. Lee crafted a story to smooth things over, claiming that the strikers were actually plants hired by a labor union, and that the whole thing had been orchestrated by Mother Jones, a famous labor organizer (he also made up that she ran a nearby brothel). “What are facts anyway but my interpretation of what happened?” Lee said later on.

Corporate philanthropy: Lee’s coverup went so well that Rockefeller kept him on board for the rest of his life. In addition to inventing the press release (imagine, the newspaper prints your version of the story word for word!), Lee prodded Rockefeller to donate to charitable causes, like museums, to burnish his reputation. The approach gained traction as other robber barons realized that they, too, could be remembered as kindly philanthropists. The arts are now soaked with oil money — and with their names emblazoned on art museum walls and festivals signs, corporations get a similar reputational boost.

Herb Schmertz and Sheila O’Malley Fuchs attend a party at the Parrish Art Museum in 2007. Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

Astroturfing: What better way to counter grassroots activists than to fake your own grassroots group? This practice, called “astroturfing,” was the brainchild of Daniel Edelman, a PR whiz who advised Mobil Oil, Big Tobacco, and many other companies in the mid-20th century. There are now hundreds of fake front groups backed by oil-funded lobbying groups like the Western States Petroleum Association, said Christine Arena, former vice president of the firm Edelman (yes, named after Daniel), in the podcast. They go by friendly names like “California Drivers Alliance” or “Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy.”

False equivalence: Herb Schmertz, who advised Mobil starting in the 1960s, took an aggressive stance toward the press. He’d attack any journalist or outlet critical of his company, arguing that they weren’t hearing Mobil’s side of the story, and then watch them overcorrect in the next edition. The approach eventually expanded to demanding airtime for climate deniers. One study looking at climate change articles in major U.S. outlets between 1988 and 2002 found that more than half of them presented climate science and fringe, Big Oil-friendly theories as equivalent. “It took a while for newspapers to realize that this was not a great way to go,” Westervelt said.

It seems like many in the media have decided to stop playing along. And there are other signs that the tide is turning against the oil industry. Once the world’s most valuable company, Exxon’s stock has dropped by a third over the last five years, wiping away nearly $200 billion in market value. Jim Cramer, the loudmouth host of CNBC’s Mad Money, recently said that it’s time to ditch oil stocks. Even public relations companies are now taking their services elsewhere.

“As soon as an industry starts to get an irretrievably bad image, the PR folks start dropping off, and the industry has to find somebody else to do this stuff,” Westervelt said. She said she has seen oil companies turn to more obscure consulting groups, like FGI Consulting and the DCI group, to do their PR work.

The fossil fuel industry is starting to move away from publicly denying the facts about climate change (which isn’t working as well these days) and back toward pro-oil, all-American messaging, like the new ads from the American Petroleum Institute that tout oil and natural gas as “energy progress.” If only Big Oil was as good at cutting greenhouse gas emissions as it was at marketing.

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How the oil industry pumped Americans full of fake news

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How to tell if a Republican is serious about climate action (or not)

by AudreyL83a Posted on February 7, 2020

Nowadays, the left’s definition of a climate hawk is clear. The progressive wing of the Democratic party has unified behind a shared litmus test: Does the person in question support the Green New Deal? Sterling environmental voting records and support for a carbon tax no longer cut the mustard. A Democrat worthy of the climate hawk label must have all those things plus enthusiasm for Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey’s economy-wide proposal to wean the United States off of fossil fuels while strengthening the social safety net.

But what about Republicans?

The GOP has had an aversion to climate science for decades now. It’s grown so severe that acknowledging the reality of climate change has been politically risky for virtually any Republican public figure. Politicians who dare touch the subject have been swiftly excommunicated (pour one out for Representative Bob Inglis of South Carolina).

But the party is beginning to shift, thanks in large part to young Republicans whose opinions on climate policy now align more closely with those of Democrats than with those of older members of their own party. For proof that the GOP is starting to budge on climate change, look no further than the House and Senate. Recently, bipartisan climate action groups in both chambers have attracted several unexpected members (including Lindsey Graham). A few GOPers have started to act more aggressively to combat rising temperatures locally, particularly in the wake of catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, and floods.

And last month, House Republicans unveiled a new set of climate proposals coordinated by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California. The plan — the GOP’s response to Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal — won’t include an emissions-reduction target, Axios reported. Instead, it focuses on capturing CO2 from the air with trees, reducing plastic pollution, and funding new clean-energy technology.

On the precipice of what could become a major party reversal on climate action from the right, how do conservatives who care about climate change discern Republican politicians who are actually serious about tackling the issue from those who are just jumping on the green bandwagon? More importantly, what are the markings of a genuine conservative climate plan versus a smokescreen plan aimed at waylaying real solutions?

To answer these questions, Grist turned to three Republicans who’ve been beating the climate drum for years.

Alex Bozmoski, the managing director of a climate group founded by Inglis and aimed at building grassroots support for conservative climate solutions, starts by looking at rhetoric. Rhetoric might seem like a useless benchmark, as words aren’t binding, but Bozmoski says a lot can be gleaned from language. “There is substance in what politicians say about what they are doing,” he said. “When a lawmaker is talking about climate change, do the risks compel action or patience and demand for further certainty? Is it a calamity, or is it framed more as a nuisance?” Freshman Senator Mike Braun of Indiana, he says, is a good example of a Republican whose rhetoric hints at a genuine commitment to action. In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Braun called climate change the country’s “next biggest issue.”

Quillan Robinson, who graduated from the University of Washington in 2018, is government affairs director at the American Conservation Coalition, an environment group that’s dedicated to engaging young conservatives on environmental issues. His standard is simple and reflects the fact that Republican climate policy is just in its nascency. Robinson asks: Has the person put his or her name on a piece of climate legislation? “We’re looking for folks who are willing to actually put pen to paper when it comes to real policy solutions which will lower global greenhouse gas emissions — that should be the litmus test for climate action,” he said.

Kiera O’Brien, a recent Harvard graduate and president of Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends, a group that galvanizes student support for a carbon tax, thinks it’s important to discern between Republicans who are climate hawks and Republicans who are just conservationists. “The reality these days is there’s a difference between conservation and issues of climate change,” she said. “Anyone who’s fundamentally serious about conservation should be serious about climate as well, but that’s not always the case, especially among elected Republicans.”

For O’Brien, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s new climate plan doesn’t make the cut. “It does not take that step into what I would call a true Republican rebuttal to the Green New Deal by offering a comprehensive plan for reducing emissions,” she said.

She added, “You can say carbon capture, you can say we’re gonna plant a million trees, but if you’re not actually fundamentally serious about putting a price on carbon or putting another economy-wide mechanism for reducing carbon emissions, you’re not actually serious about climate change.” Going forward, she wants Republicans to advocate for a revenue-neutral carbon tax, which would return the revenue generated by the tax to Americans every year.

Bozmoski reached a different conclusion about the House Republican climate plan. “You measure ambition not by dollars, not by economic reorganization, not by risk. You measure the policy of climate change by the tons,” he said. “Does the policy that they’re supporting abate, avoid, capture, or sequester greenhouse gases and how much?” That’s why he thinks McCarthy’s plan to plant a bunch of trees isn’t half-bad — it will take tons of carbon dioxide out of the air, he said. (The science behind this is actually disputed.) “I know some environmentalists scoff because they’re more interested in attacking the supply side of greenhouse gases,” he said, “but if it makes a dent, that’s how you gauge the ambition of a climate policy.”

For Robinson, McCarthy’s plan is reason for optimism that serious climate change legislation is viable under President Trump. “It’s focusing on policies we can pass today which will reduce global greenhouse emissions,” he said. In general, however, Robinson’s under no illusions about where Trump stands. “Is the president where we want him to be on the issue? Absolutely not. But we’re really encouraged by some of the things that have happened recently,” he said.

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How to tell if a Republican is serious about climate action (or not)

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Miami can have one last Super Bowl, as a treat

by AbbeyAGWvozn Posted on January 31, 2020

The San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs will face each other in the Super Bowl on Sunday in Miami. The game will only last a few hours, but Florida is just beginning a decades-long war with a foe that can’t be beat: sea-level rise. If emissions continue to rise unchecked, Miami’s football stadium could be flooded with standing water and America’s holiest championship game will have to be played somewhere else.

For a sneak peek at what Miami Garden’s Hard Rock Stadium, the venue for Super Bowl LIV, could look like in a few decades, look no further than Florida’s coastline. Nearly 600,000 people in South Florida face “extreme” or “high” risk from sea-level rise, according to the Trump administration’s 4th National Climate Assessment. Already, the sea level around Florida is 8 inches higher than it was 70 years ago. Over the past decade, the rate of acceleration has sped up. Florida seas are now rising an inch every three years. Floods are inundating low-lying cities like Miami even on sunny days.

A new report from Climate Central — an organization that analyzes how climate change affects the public — shows that Hard Rock Stadium, between 4 and 6 feet above sea level, is likely to experience some of this flooding in the coming century. It’s not just the football field that’s at risk of getting swamped by climate change. Local roads, the stadium’s $135 million training facility, the tennis center, and parking lots will face higher odds of being submerged.

Developers recently completed a three-year-long, $500 million renovation of the stadium. But the stadium’s state-of-the-art canopy and high-definition screens won’t save it when the floods come. The Hard Rock Stadium property has at the very least, a 1 percent chance of being submerged by rising seas every year by 2070 if the world continues emitting greenhouse gases business-as-usual. By 2090, the risk of the stadium experiencing serious flooding each year rises to 10 percent.

Remember, this is likely an underestimate. A 2019 U.N. report found that the kind of floods this report is talking about will occur in Miami every year as soon as 2050. Plus, the Climate Central analysis didn’t account for rain-induced flooding, seepage, backed-up storm drains, or other reasons why water might make its way into low-lying areas.

Nickolay Lamm / Climate Central

Flooding isn’t the only climate-related issue facing American football teams and their legions of dedicated fans. Extreme heat and bad air quality also threaten players’ abilities to pass, tackle, and run. Another Climate Central analysis that looked at temperatures during football season shows that all 30 National Football League cities have warmed, on average, 2.3 degrees F over the past 50 years. Miami is in the middle of the pack when it comes to rising temperatures, but the home cities of the Nevada Raiders, Minnesota Vikings, and Arizona Cardinals have all warmed more than 4 degrees since 1970.

Hard Rock Stadium is taking some measures to reduce its impact on the planet. In November, the home of the Miami Dolphins announced it aims to eliminate 99.4 percent of single-use plastics by the end of 2020. The move would divert 2.8 million pieces of plastic from landfills every year. And at the upcoming 54th Super Bowl, fans will sip drinks out of aluminum cups instead of plastic ones, pee in waterless urinals, forgo straws, and make their way out to the parking lots under LED lights. It’s a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t address the outsized carbon footprints of events like the Super Bowl. Fans attending a mega sporting event have carbon footprints about seven times larger than people going about their daily lives.

After Sunday’s game, Miami will have hosted 11 Super Bowls, more than any other city. It doesn’t matter how many single-use plastics the Miami Dolphins ban from their stadium — if the world keeps emitting carbon business-as-usual, Miami won’t be able to hold onto that record for long.

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Miami can have one last Super Bowl, as a treat

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