Shrinking budgets, rising seas: How local newsrooms can cover climate change
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Shrinking budgets, rising seas: How local newsrooms can cover climate change
Tag Archives: climate
Climate gets a prime spot in the sixth Democratic debate
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At COP25, indigenous groups are making sure their voices are heard
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At COP25, indigenous groups are making sure their voices are heard
GOP elites helped create climate skepticism. They can undo it, too.
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GOP elites helped create climate skepticism. They can undo it, too.
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Tagged climate, congressional republicans, news, Ona, ultima
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How indigenous Bolivians lost faith in Evo Morales after the Amazon blaze
Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized
Tagged bolivia, climate, environmental justice, evo morales, justice, lai, news, Ona
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Wait — Republicans used to like the Green New Deal?
Most Republicans once liked the Green New Deal. And no, you’re not reading climate fiction. This was reality just a year ago.
Some 64 percent of Republican voters initially supported the package of climate and green jobs policies, according to a poll from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. This was in December of last year, when those polled weren’t familiar with the name “Green New Deal.” Some 82 percent of them hadn’t even heard the phrase, let alone any nonsense about banning hamburgers. (For the record, that’s not part of the resolution introduced in Congress.)
Bipartisan support for the policy was short-lived, thanks in large part to a TV network that rhymes with “Lox Blues.” A new study published in Nature Climate Change found that the more Republicans heard about the Green New Deal, the less they liked it. Among those who watched Fox News more than once a week, support for the GND plunged from 54 percent in early December to 22 percent by early April. In other words, the majority of Republican voters supported what was in the package then changed their minds once they heard Fox’s talking heads seize on the ambitious scope of the program and trash it. On Tucker Carlson’s show, it was rebranded as the Green New Mess, as well as an excuse to usher in socialism.
The resolution was introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York City and Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts in February, then shot down by the Senate in March. After its introduction in Congress, the Green New Deal was covered by Fox more frequently than other networks, and some of that coverage included straight-up lies. Analysis from media watchdog Media Matters found that more than half of Fox’s segments on the Green New Deal in mid-February didn’t even bring up climate change. Most of the discussion centered on political wins or losses rather than on how the resolution might work or what problems it would address.
By April, only 4 percent of Republicans who had heard a lot about the resolution backed it, compared to 96 percent of Democrats. Fast forward to now, and it’s hard to believe that the idea — and before that, the political will to take on climate change more generally — ever had bipartisan support.
The environment wasn’t always so polarizing. President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, after all. But over recent decades, Republicans and Democrats have been driven further and further apart from each other on not just political opinions but on basic facts. That’s the case with climate change along with immigration, gun laws, and other issues. The so-called “Fox News effect” is a part of that story.
The good news? Younger Republicans now sound nearly identical to Democrats when it comes to a federal carbon tax, further restrictions on methane emissions, and a national renewable energy standard, according to a recent survey from Ipsos and Newsy. (Label them as part of the Green New Deal and results may vary.) The surge of environmental concern among young conservatives could bring big changes to the GOP in the years ahead.
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Climate change gets a single question at the fifth Democratic debate
Ten Democratic candidates for president took the stage in Atlanta to talk impeachment, health care, the economy, paid leave, and, oh yeah, our overheating planet.
Those hoping for a debate heavy on what Bernie Sanders called “the existential threat of our time” were surely disappointed. Climate change was awarded a single question, though candidates found chances to bring it up throughout.
Moderators from MSNBC and the Washington Post opened the night with a question about impeachment. Healthcare and the economy also dominated the conversation (no surprise there). About halfway through the night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked the debate’s only question about rising temperatures. Many viewers care deeply about climate change, she said, then Maddow offered up a question from a viewer in Minnesota: What do candidates plan to do about it, and how do they aim to drum up bipartisan support for their plan?
The question went to a frontrunner, naturally. Just kidding. Representative Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii got first dibs. Gabbard said she aims to prioritize climate action if elected, a promise that would be easier to take at face value if she wasn’t the only candidate on stage who hasn’t unveiled a comprehensive plan to combat rising emissions. To be fair, Tulsi introduced the OFF act, a bill to wean the United States off fossil fuels, in Congress last year. Tom Steyer, the billionaire who runs a progressive advocacy group called NextGen America, got a chance to take a stab at the climate issue next and made a more passionate case for action.
“Congress has never passed an important climate bill ever. That’s why I’m saying it’s priority one,” Steyer said (an echo of Governor Jay Inslee’s line: “If it’s not number one it won’t get done.”) Steyer was the only candidate on stage who said he aims to declare a national emergency over climate change as president.
Sanders was the first to bring up the subject on his own, calling it “the great existential threat of our time.” Later, he talked about climate change refugees, something he said will become a major security issue in the coming year. He promised to go after oil and gas companies, an industry he said could be criminally liable for knowingly misleading the public about the effects of burning fossil fuels. “They have lied and lied and lied,” Sanders said. He also took issue with the idea that the effects — drought, floods, and extreme weather — are decades away. “If we don’t get our act together in eight or nine years,” he said, major cities will be underwater all over the world.
Even though moderators asked one question about rising temperatures, several candidates were able to weave the topic into responses to other questions. Andrew Yang and Steyer shared a moment of camaraderie when Yang gave Steyer props for using his money to tackle the climate crisis. “You can’t knock someone for having money and spending it in the right way,” Yang said.
Pete Buttigieg talked about a farmer in Boone, Iowa who told him farmers would rather be focusing on conservation over trade wars. “American farmers should be one of the key pillars of the solution to climate change,” he said. Elizabeth Warren plugged her proposal to employ 10,000 young Americans and veterans in public parks and climate resiliency projects. Toward the beginning of the debate, Steyer incorporated the need for sustainability in urban planning and development.
Climate change has been the topic of less than 10 percent of the questions asked at each of the previous four debates, and this debate was no different. But the fifth debate did demonstrate once again that candidates are ready to talk climate, even if moderators aren’t.
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Climate change gets a single question at the fifth Democratic debate
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Tagged Accent, alo, billionaire, climate, climate debate, major, news, Ona, tulsi, washington
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What critics of Bernie Sanders’ climate plan are missing
Bernie Sander’s $16 trillion climate plan, which he calls the Green New Deal, would transition the electricity and transportation sectors to renewable energy by 2030, allegedly create 240,000 jobs a year, and essentially nationalize the nation’s power sector. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and legions of climate activists have thrown their support behind the proposal, arguing the Vermont Senator is the only candidate in the primary whose climate ambitions are commensurate with the scale of the crisis. What’s not to love?
A lot, according to a bunch of climate scientists and energy economists interviewed by New York Times reporter Lisa Friedman. In a nutshell, those experts say the plan is “technically impractical, politically unfeasible, and possibly ineffective.” Friedman’s sources argue that Sanders’ resolute stance against building new nuclear projects would kneecap his ability to make the leap from fossil fuels to wind and solar. Then there’s the fact that many of the exciting projects he has planned for the American people, like high-speed rail and mass transit, require CO2-intensive resources to build.
The paper of record isn’t the first to question Sanders’ climate plan. “I find it very difficult to imagine that we can reach a completely decarbonized electricity and transport system by 2030, especially if we’re limiting our options exclusively to wind and solar, as well as geothermal,” Nader Sobhani, a climate policy associate at the think tank Niskanen Center, told InsideClimate News. In the Washington Post, columnist David Drehle wrote, “The wall is child’s play compared with the risible fantasy that Sanders has rolled out in lieu of an actual climate change strategy.”
Obviously, experts and pundits can and should criticize a policy proposal on its merits. But what Sanders’ critics miss is that even if it’s impractical or unfeasible, his Green New Deal still serves a political purpose. The plan moves the Overton window, the range of political ideas that the public considers acceptable or mainstream, several notches to the left.
In fact, Sanders has already moved the Overton window on climate. In 2016, Sander’s climate strategy centered around a carbon tax, an idea that his rival, Hilary Clinton, couldn’t even get behind. In 2019, a carbon tax is barely on the menu, not because it’s too ambitious, but because it’s not ambitious enough. The extraordinary evolution of our climate discourse over the past couple of years is, in part, thanks to the groundwork Sanders laid in 2016. (It’s also thanks to Green New Deal champion Ocasio-Cortez, who credits Sanders for inspiring her to run for Congress.)
Sanders has long been adept at shifting the Overton Window. In 2016, Clinton called talk of a single-payer system “a theoretical debate about some better idea that will never, ever come to pass.” Now, more than half of the crowded Democratic field supports some version of it. That’s in large part because Sanders started beating the Medicare-for-All drum on a national stage during his 2016 presidential run. Sanders has also influenced the national conversation around immigration, publicly funded higher education, and, yes, capitalism itself.
His $16 trillion climate plan may not be entirely feasible, but pulling his most serious competitors further left has always been well within Sanders’ grasp. At the end of the day, that may be the most indelible mark Sanders leaves on the 2020 race.
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Here’s why Twitter’s political ad ban gives Big Oil a free pass
If you’re fortunate enough not to have a Twitter account, then you might have missed the news that the website’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, took the unprecedented step of banning political ads last week. In a Twitter thread (what else?), Dorsey explained the logic behind the move, which sets the social network apart from major competitors like Facebook, which has not banned much of anything, including neo-Nazis, in the name of “free speech.” “We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” he wrote.
Twitter’s decision, which will take effect on November 22, was hailed as a win for democracy and civic discourse. In a tweet, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York called the move a “good call,” adding, “if a company cannot or does not wish to run basic fact-checking on paid political advertising, then they should not run paid political ads at all.”
But there’s a significant downside to Twitter’s decision. Ads that “advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance,” like immigration, health care, and, yes, climate change, are on the chopping block. And when it comes to the issue of climate change, Twitter’s new policy gives oil and gas companies a leg up, and the folks who want to regulate those companies a kneecapping.
In recent years, Big Oil has finally wiped the smog off its glasses and read the writing on the wall: the public knows that a shortlist of multinational corporations are responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s planet-heating emissions. So those corporations shifted tactics lickity-split. Instead of denying that climate change exists, fossil fuel companies want you, and government regulators, to think that they’ve changed their oily ways. ExxonMobil says it’s investing heavily in developing a clean biofuel from algae. Shell produced several climate change manifestos with hopeful titles like “the Sky scenario” that it says have the potential to stop climate change. Chevron is saving turtles in the Philippines.
The problem is that these great initiatives are just a tiny sliver of what Big Oil actually does, which is — you guessed it! — dig up and sell oil. Algae biofuel is Exxon’s hobby (read: marketing ploy), oil is its day job. But it wants you, the consumer, to think that its top scientists are in the lab day and night working tirelessly to save the planet. Meanwhile, in Congress, these same companies are spending hundreds of millions every year to lobby against any kind of climate regulation that will hurt their bottom lines.
Twitter’s new policy allows ExxonMobil to keep filling up your newsfeed with ads about a biofuel that isn’t going to be commercially viable for at least another decade. But it bans a politician from buying ad space to tell you that, if elected, they plan to go after Big Oil.
Exxon’s efforts may not appear overtly political, but they absolutely are. Trying to hoodwink voters and regulators so that the government doesn’t hold polluters accountable is fundamentally at odds with Dorsey’s vision of earning reach instead of buying it. Has Big Oil earned the right to clog our newsfeeds with pictures of green gunk that’s ostensibly going to save the earth? Certainly not.
Twitter has put us in a tough spot. Yes, it’s good that, pretty soon, politicians and dark-money-fueled super-PACs won’t be able to force whatever nonsense they want onto the public. But the new ban will also tilt the online playing field in favor of companies that want to keep burning fossil fuels and against the politicians and groups that want to legislate them out of existence. Which is all to say that regulating civic discourse on social media is a gargantuan task and one that’s nearly impossible to do right. If you came here looking for an answer to this ethical dilemma, I’m sorry to disappoint. Go tweet @jack.
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Here’s why Twitter’s political ad ban gives Big Oil a free pass
Supreme Court permits Baltimore suit against energy companies to continue
This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A court case between the city of Baltimore and a group of energy companies will be permitted to continue after the Supreme Court earlier this week rejected the latter’s attempt to freeze the case. The litigation, which the city initiated in 2018, alleges that the energy companies are liable “for their direct emissions of greenhouse gases” and the damages they’ve caused the city and its residents.
No explanation accompanied the Supreme Court rejection, but Baltimore is considering it a victory, since its case against companies including BP, Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Citgo can now continue. Though the ultimate decision of where the case should be heard may end up being more significant than the high court ruling.
The energy companies’ request to halt the case is part of their broader legal fight to move the case from state to federal court. The companies hope to establish a precedent in which climate cases are largely heard by federal courts, where “climate-related cases have been largely decided in the companies’ favor,” reports Climate Liability News. In a recent article on the Supreme Court’s rejection of the freeze, New York Times columnist Adam Liptak points out that cases in state courts disadvantage big corporations because cities have a “home-court advantage before local judges.”
The strategy of choice among big energy companies is to appeal to the federal courts — in this case the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals — that its cases belong there, then request a stay on the state case while the appeal is decided, citing the costliness of multiple concurrent cases. The recent New York Times article elaborates on the one-two punch:
In the Supreme Court, the energy companies argued that the issues in the case require adjudication in federal court.
“It is difficult to imagine,” they told the justices in court papers, “claims that more clearly implicate substantial questions of federal law and require uniform disposition than the claims at issue here, which seek to transform the nation’s energy, environmental, national security and foreign policies by punishing energy companies for lawfully supplying necessary oil and gas resources.”
Letting the state court suit move forward in the meantime, the companies said, would subject them to needless litigation expenses. Baltimore responded that such costs did not amount to the sort of irreparable injury that would warrant a stay of proceedings while the question of the proper forum is resolved.
It’s not the first time the energy companies have tried to remove the case from a state court. In June, a federal court in Baltimore ruled that the defendants’ attempt to push the case out of local courts was “improper.” A similar request lodged to the circuit court while it still decides on the legitimacy of the defendants’ appeal was also denied.
With the appellate court still deciding if the case can be elevated to the federal level, the final arena is undecided. If the battle between Baltimore and the energy companies remains in a local court, the implications for future cases are substantial, paving the way for court battles with energy companies at the local level.
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Supreme Court permits Baltimore suit against energy companies to continue
