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Jane Fonda gets arrested for climate protest, plans to do it again

Jane Fonda has joined many a protest in her eight decades on God’s green earth. She has marched with working mothers, supported the Black Panthers, and sat on an anti-aircraft gun in Vietnam. Now, the star of Barbarella, Monster-In-Law, and dozens more movies, TV shows, and exercise videos is lending her voice and influence in a new way to an old cause: climate change.

For the next 13 Fridays, the 81-year-old Academy Award winner will demonstrate on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to ask lawmakers to put an end to fossil fuel drilling. She’ll have to stop protesting in December so she can start filming the seventh season of Grace and Frankie, her Netflix comedy series.

Fonda is calling the protests “Fire Drill Fridays,” and they’re like a combination of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future protests and the activist group Extinction Rebellion’s civil disobedience. Fonda says she plans to protest each week until she is arrested. “I’m going to take my body, which is kind of famous and popular right now because of the [television] series and I’m going to go to D.C. and I’m going to have a rally every Friday,” the actress said in an interview with the Washington Post. “Greta said we have to behave like it’s a crisis,” she added. “We have to behave like our houses are on fire.”

True to her word, Fonda, sporting a red pea coat and a spiffy checkered cap, was arrested alongside other protesters on the steps of the Capitol building on Friday.

Assuming she’s released in time, Fonda will host online teach-ins on Thursday evenings that will include lectures from climate scientists and discussions about how environmental concerns overlap with social issues, in addition to her Friday protests, which will start every week at 11 a.m.

The eight-time Golden Globe winner has protested in the name of climate change before, at Standing Rock in 2016 and at regional protests on the West Coast, including the climate rally in Los Angeles last month. Now, her number one priority is “cutting all funding and permits for new developments for fossil fuel and exports and processing and refining.”

Celebrities are often keen to wade into activism, but it doesn’t always have the intended effect (and the media has a tendency to bungle the message). Yahoo News covered actress Shailene Woodley’s protests at Standing Rock thusly: “Shailene Woodley’s Mug Shot Is as Beautiful as Her Message.” Other celebs have advocated for eliminating straws but seem to have no problem flying private jets all over the damn place, a great way to fry the planet, reusable straws and all.

But Fonda’s multi-pronged approach, which pairs civil disobedience with education and raises awareness about student strikes, seems to be in line with what a bunch of experts told Grist is the right way for a celebrity to support environmental activists. As Barbarella herself would say, “Decarbonize or I’ll melt your face!”

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Jane Fonda gets arrested for climate protest, plans to do it again

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‘Historic breakthrough’: Norway’s giant oil fund dives into renewables

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Norway’s $1 trillion oil fund, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, is to plunge billions of dollars into wind and solar power projects. The decision follows Saudi Arabia’s oil fund selling off its last oil and gas assets.

Other national funds built up from oil profits are also thought to be ramping up their investments in renewables. The moves show that countries that got rich on fossil fuels are diversifying their investments and seeking future profits in the clean energy needed to combat climate change. Analysts say the investments are likely to power faster growth of green energy.

Norway’s government gave the go-ahead on Friday for its fund to invest in renewable energy projects that are not listed on stock markets. Unlisted projects make up more than two-thirds of the whole renewable infrastructure market, which is worth trillions of dollars.

Previously, it had warned that such investments could be at risk from political interference. But now the sum the fund can invest in green projects has been doubled to $14 billion. “Even a fund built on oil is seeing that the future is green,” said Jan Erik Saugestad, CEO of Storebrand Asset Management.

In March, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund said it would dispose of its investments in 134 companies that explore for oil and gas, worth almost $8 billion. But it is retaining stakes in oil firms such as Shell and BP that have renewable energy divisions.

Norway also announced on Friday that the fund would sell off its stakes in more coal companies, having set a new limit for them of 20 million tons of reserves. This may see its investments in giants Glencore and RWE dumped. The fund divested $6.5 billion of coal-related investments in 2015.

Across the world, almost 1,000 institutional investors, managing more than $6 trillion, have now committed to fossil fuel divestment, driven by concerns about global warming and financial losses if climate action cuts the value of coal, oil, and gas investments.

“Unlisted renewable energy is a growth industry,” said Tom Sanzillo at IEEFA. “Investments by Norway’s fund now allow it to take advantage of this growth and to use its resources to develop the market for decades. This is a strong step for the health of the fund and the planet.”

Sverre Thornes, CEO of Norwegian pension fund KLP, said: “This move will most likely expand the market further and faster. Our overall renewables infrastructure rate of return was around 11 percent last year. Clean energy is what will move us away from the dangerous and devastating pathway we are currently on.”

Per Kristian Sbertoli, at the Norwegian climate think tank Zero, said the decision on unlisted renewable infrastructure was a “historic breakthrough” and welcomed the further divestment from coal: “These actions by the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund are noticed and contribute to reducing the cost for renewables, whilst accelerating the global shift away from coal.”

Charlie Kronick, at Greenpeace U.K., said such moves were “genuinely good news” but that all investors would have to follow suit to beat climate change.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund sold its last investment linked to oil and gas last week, with the sale of its $69 billion stake in Saudi Basic Industries Corporation to the nation’s oil company, Aramco.

Other Middle East oil funds are moving to diversify into renewable energy, according to Reuters, but are stopping short of following Norway in shedding oil and gas investments.

Individual sovereign wealth funds make little information public about their investments, but data on total private equity investments involving such funds suggests a strong shift from fossil fuels to renewables.

In 2018, $6.4 billion went into hydrocarbons, compared with $5.8 billion in renewable energy, according to the data firm PitchBook. In 2017, $18.8 billion went into fossil fuel investments, compared with just $0.4 billion into renewables.

Mark Lewis, at BNP Paribas Asset Management, said: “Renewables are the new rust for the oil-and-gas industry, and if the industry does not adapt to this new reality they will corrode its future profits just like rust corrodes oil rigs.”

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‘Historic breakthrough’: Norway’s giant oil fund dives into renewables

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‘We won’t stop striking’: The New York 13-year-old taking a stand over climate change

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Alexandria Villasenor looks a slightly incongruous figure to stage a lengthy protest over the perils of catastrophic global warming. The 13-year-old, wrapped in a coat and a woolen hat, has spent every Friday since December seated on a frigid bench outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City with signs warning of climate change’s dire consequences.

Most passersby, probably hardened to confronting New York street scenes, scurry past, eyes diverted downwards. But some mutter words of support, while the odd passing driver rolls down their window to offer a thumbs up.

There is media interest, too. On a recent Friday protest stint, a microphone was being pinned to a shivering Villasenor by an NBC crew. “I stayed out there for four hours and I lost circulation in my toes for the first time,” she said afterwards.

Cold weather in winter is routinely used by President Donald Trump to disparage climate science — in January, the president tweeted: “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” — but Villasenor has experienced enough in her nascent years to grasp the scale of the threat.

Her concern has driven her to help organize the first nationwide strikes by U.S. school students over climate change, on March 15. More than 100,000 young people are expected to skip school on the day and attend rallies demanding radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Villasenor was born and raised in Davis, California, in the teeth of the state’s fiercest drought in at least 1,200 years. She recalls seeing the dead and dying fish on the shores of nearby Folsom Lake as it dried up. In November, Davis was shrouded in a pall of smoke from record wildfires that obliterated the town of Paradise, 100 miles to the north.

“I have asthma so it was a very scary experience for me, I couldn’t leave my house at all,” Villasenor said. “Just walking to the car would make my eyes sting. We rolled up towels and put them under the windows. A lot of my friends were going out in the smog and I was texting them to see if they were OK, as I’m the mom of the group.”

Villasenor’s family subsequently moved to New York, the switch hastened by concerns over her health due to the smoke. The young student then swiftly became an activist after reading how warming temperatures are making the western U.S. far more prone to the sort of huge wildfires that menaced her hometown.

After bouncing around a few youth-led climate groups, Villasenor struck up a rapport with fellow students Isra Hirsi, in Minnesota, and Haven Coleman, from Colorado. The trio set about creating Youth Climate Strike U.S., the first major American response to the recent mass school walkouts by European students frustrated by adults’ sluggish response to climate change.

“My generation knows that climate change will be the biggest problem we’ll have to face,” Villasenor said. “It’s upsetting that my generation has to push these leaders to take action. We aren’t going to stop striking until some more laws are passed.”

The American students preparing to join a global wave of school strikes on March 15 have been spurred by the actions of Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old Swede who started taking every Friday off school to call for more rapid action by her country’s leaders.

In a gently excoriating speech, Thunberg told governments at U.N. climate talks in December that “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”

Those under 20 years old have never known a world where the climate isn’t rapidly heating, ensuring that their lifetimes will be spent in average temperatures never before experienced by humans.

For someone getting their first taste of politics it can be hard to digest that precious little has been done to avert a future of disastrous droughts, floods, and storms since James Hansen, then of NASA, delivered his landmark warning on climate change to Congress 30 years ago.

“It was confusing at first because I expected politicians to be on to this, given what the scientists were saying,” said Chelsea Li, a 17-year-old at Nathan Hale high school in Seattle and local strike organizer. “But I didn’t see any action. We are going to have to do the things the adults are too afraid to do because it’s our futures we are fighting for.”

The American strikers’ challenge appears particularly steep. It’s one thing protesting in the U.K., where carbon dioxide emissions have plummeted to levels not seen since Queen Victoria’s reign, or Germany, where the government has pledged to phase out all coal use within 20 years.

It’s quite another to appeal to Trump, who has called climate science an elaborate Chinese hoax and has overseen the dismantling of Obama-era efforts to reduce emissions from coal plants and vehicles.

Youth-led groups like the Sunrise Movement and Zero Hour have seized the initiative from traditional green groups but have been met with the same unyielding political establishment. In a videoed exchange since parodied on Saturday Night Live, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the veteran Democrat, clasped her hands behind her back and patiently told a group of middle and high schoolers that they weren’t yet able to vote for her and their demands on climate were unrealistic.

There was no way to pay for the Green New Deal, a plan to decarbonize the economy championed by progressives, according to Feinstein. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” she said, an assurance alluding as much to political inertia as political experience.

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“I think she was trying to dismiss me,” said Isha Clarke, a 16-year-old from Oakland who had confronted Feinstein. “I think she was making excuses for why she didn’t have to listen to us. For older people there’s no urgency, they are used to the system and compromising.”

Clarke said the interaction with Feinstein was disappointing but the backlash was “amazing,” with the California senator releasing and then dropping her own climate plan after it was savaged for being too weak. Feinstein also offered Clarke an internship, which she has yet to accept.

“It’s sort of tricky because you have to play the game to change it but I don’t want it to cover up everything that happened,” Clarke said. “Most young people are very aware of climate change, a lot of them are super passionate about it but they don’t have the resources to make their voices heard. They don’t realize they have the power to create change.”

That voice will be heard on March 15 when students forgo their classes in order to make a plea that they hope won’t be dismissed as indulgent truancy. Parents and teachers may have to brace themselves for future walkouts.

“My parents are very supportive, they understand my beliefs,” said Villasenor, as she repositioned her placards for the cameras. “If we’re not going to have a future, then school won’t matter anymore.”

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‘We won’t stop striking’: The New York 13-year-old taking a stand over climate change

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Hurricane Florence’s catastrophic flooding is a sign of what’s to come

Since barreling into North Carolina on Friday morning with gusts of up to 112 mph, Hurricane Florence has already submerged homes, left nearly 700,000 households without power, and killed at least five people. More than 200 people were rescued in Bern, North Carolina, where a 10-foot storm surge flooded town.

The hurricane is massive: at 400 miles wide, its hurricane-force winds stretch across a 160-mile span, as ABC reported.

Yet the long-ranging, torrential winds are not the primary concern. It’s the sheer volume of water, in the form of tidal surges, rain, and anticipated flash flooding that make this Category 1 storm unusually dangerous. As meteorologist Janice Dean put it, “The legacy of the storm is not going to be the winds. It’s going to be the rain.”

Florence may drench the Carolinas with an unthinkable amount of water this weekend: 18 trillion gallons, or enough to fill the Chesapeake Bay. As of early Friday afternoon, 20 inches of rain had already fallen in parts of North Carolina — and some resolution models are predicting that by Sunday, the southeastern part of the state could see 50 inches of rain.

We’ve seen a slow-moving storm like Hurricane Florence before. Last year, Hurricane Harvey brought record-breaking rains to Southeast Texas. “Slower forward movement means a hurricane has more time to inundate a region with rain and storm surge,” an article in Vox explains. “It’s a longer time to blow dangerous, power line-snapping winds.”

The extreme level of rain from Florence and Harvey shouldn’t be chalked up to coincidence. Researchers at Stony Brook University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate that 50 percent of the rainfall from Hurricane Florence can be attributed to climate change.

Though Florence is a Category 1 storm, the risks from the staggering levels of water should not be underestimated. As an article in Time noted, “Hurricane Florence’s rapid downgrade from a Category 4 to a Category 1 underscores a potential public safety issue with the way hurricanes are measured and discussed.”

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Hurricane Florence’s catastrophic flooding is a sign of what’s to come

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Hawaii’s Hurricane Lane is already a flooding catastrophe

A rare hurricane is dousing Hawaii, producing flooding, power outages, and washing away roads — damage the National Weather Service is calling “catastrophic.” It’s increasingly clear that the Aloha state is already feeling the effects of a changing climate.

As of Friday morning, Hurricane Lane is at Category 2 strength and continues to move towards Oahu, home to Honolulu and Hawaii’s most densely populated island. Though the latest projections showed Lane’s center remaining offshore, the most powerful side of the storm will still wash over nearly all of Hawaii’s main islands, bringing torrential rainfall for more than 24 hours to a million people.

As Lane approached Thursday evening, civil defense sirens pierced the cloudy Honolulu skies and federal officials pre-staged plane-loads of supplies in the country’s most isolated state, hoping to prevent a repeat of the government’s bungled response to Hurricane Maria’s in Puerto Rico. The Big Island has been hardest hit so far with rainfall exceeding 30 inches, transforming normally tranquil waterfalls into violent torrents.

As a result of Lane’s slow motion, the National Weather Service in Honolulu has boosted its maximum rainfall prediction to 40 inches in some parts of the islands — months worth of rain, even for Hawaii’s lushest locations. In an update late Thursday Hawaii time, the NWS said Lane is “expected to lead to major, life-threatening flash flooding and landslides over all Hawaiian Islands.”

There has never been a hurricane landfall in Maui or Oahu in recorded history. Even if Lane doesn’t achieve that feat, it’s already the closest a storm has ever approached central Hawaii. Water temperatures near Hawaii are as much as 4.5 degrees F warmer than normal this week, supporting Lane’s high winds and heavy rains.

As the waters of the Pacific warm, heavy rainfall has become an increasingly dangerous problem for Hawaii. Lane is Hawaii’s second major flooding disaster this year, after torrential rainfall on Kauai in April produced nearly 50 inches in 24 hours, a new U.S. record. Our warmer atmosphere can now hold more water vapor, resulting in heavier rainfall during both regular thunderstorms and hurricanes. Since the 1950s, the amount of rain falling in the worst storms in Hawaii has increased by about 12 percent, according to a University of Hawaii study.

As the the country’s only ocean state, Hawaii is on the front lines of climate change. Hurricane Lane is the latest example that Hawaii’s warmer, wetter reality is already here.

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Hawaii’s Hurricane Lane is already a flooding catastrophe

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A federal judge pressed ‘pause’ on construction of the Bayou Bridge pipeline.

Facing backlash from professors, Tennessee Technological University president Philip B. Oldham sent a letter to EPA administrator Scott Pruitt on Monday asking him to ignore the results of a study produced by his own university.

Here’s what happened.

Tennessee Republican Representative Diane Black, who has been pushing the EPA to adopt looser regulations for big trucks, asked Pruitt to roll back regulations on a certain kind of freight truck called a glider last July.

Previous EPA tests found gliders produce somewhere between 40 and 50 times more pollution than new trucks, but a study from Tennessee Tech published in 2016 found that gliders produce about the same levels of emissions as other trucks.

It turns out that the largest manufacturer of gliders, Tennessee-based Fitzgerald Glider Kits, funded the study and offered to build the university a spanking new research center to boot.

In November, Pruitt cited the study when he announced plans to ease up regulations on gliders. Faculty at Tennessee Tech asked the university to denounce the study on Friday, arguing that, among other things, it was a) conducted by an unsupervised graduate student and b) unverified. Then, on Wednesday, the EPA said in a statement that Pruitt’s decision didn’t have anything to do with the controversial study. … OK.

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A federal judge pressed ‘pause’ on construction of the Bayou Bridge pipeline.

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Interested in the Grist fellowship? You now have an extra week to apply!

If you’d like to apply for Grist’s spring 2018 fellowship, listen up. The new application deadline is Friday, January 5, 2018. What can we say, we’re all caught up in the holiday spirit.

New to the Grist fellowship? Here’s the deal: We’re once again looking for early-career journalists to come work with us for six months and get paid. This time around, we’re looking for all-stars in three areas: news, environmental justice, and video. You’ll find a full program description and application requirements here.

Our dynamic duo of current fellows keeps raising the bar for excellence. Justice fellow Justine Calma and video fellow Angela Fichter recently teamed up to drop a powerful miniseries on the connection between severe storms and mental health. Make sure to read Justine’s story and watch Angela’s video. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: We ❤️ our fellows.

So what are you waiting for? Oh, right, the last possible minute. As long as we receive your application by 11:59 p.m. PT on January 5, no judgment here.

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Interested in the Grist fellowship? You now have an extra week to apply!

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After burning for months, Montana looks like a fiery apocalypse.

On Thursday, explosions and black plumes of smoke were seen coming from a chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, 15 miles east of Houston’s city center.

Arkema, the company that owns the plant, said there was nothing they could do to prevent further explosions. The volatile chemicals stored onsite need to be refrigerated at all times to prevent breakdown, but flooding from Harvey cut the plant’s power. The “only plausible solution” now is to let the eight containers, containing 500,000 pounds of organic peroxides, explode and burn out, Arkema CEO Rich Rowe said at a press conference on Friday.

That’s bad news for Arkema’s neighbors. On Thursday, 15 public safety officers were taken to the hospital after breathing in acrid smoke from the plant. After local officials took a peek at Arkema’s chemical inventories, they ordered everyone within a 1.5-mile radius of the plant to evacuate. We don’t know precisely what’s in the noxious fumes, as Arkema has refused to release details of the facility’s chemical inventories.

In the worst-case scenario documented in the company’s 2014 risk-management plan, the air pollution coming from the plant could put the 1 million people living within 20 miles radius in danger. That seems unlikely — but then again, Harvey has outdone plenty of worst-case scenario predictions so far.

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After burning for months, Montana looks like a fiery apocalypse.

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A flooded chemical plant near Houston is just going to keep exploding.

On Thursday, explosions and black plumes of smoke were seen coming from a chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, 15 miles east of Houston’s city center.

Arkema, the company that owns the plant, said there was nothing they could do to prevent further explosions. The volatile chemicals stored onsite need to be refrigerated at all times to prevent breakdown, but flooding from Harvey cut the plant’s power. The “only plausible solution” now is to let the eight containers, containing 500,000 pounds of organic peroxides, explode and burn out, Arkema CEO Rich Rowe said at a press conference on Friday.

That’s bad news for Arkema’s neighbors. On Thursday, 15 public safety officers were taken to the hospital after breathing in acrid smoke from the plant. After local officials took a peek at Arkema’s chemical inventories, they ordered everyone within a 1.5-mile radius of the plant to evacuate. We don’t know precisely what’s in the noxious fumes, as Arkema has refused to release details of the facility’s chemical inventories.

In the worst-case scenario documented in the company’s 2014 risk-management plan, the air pollution coming from the plant could put the 1 million people living within 20 miles radius in danger. That seems unlikely — but then again, Harvey has outdone plenty of worst-case scenario predictions so far.

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A flooded chemical plant near Houston is just going to keep exploding.

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Rome, once known for flowing water, is now running dry.

The Eternal City’s water utility, Acea, had proposed cutting off water to 1.5 million residents for eight hours a day starting on Monday. The city avoided that fate on Friday when the central government allowed the city to keep drawing from a drought-ravaged lake.

The summer heat is partly to blame for the water shortage. Much of Western Europe has been sweltering, with heatwaves stoking fires in Portugal and setting record temperatures in France. Italy is suffering through one of its hottest, driest, wildfiriest times in history. Several regions have declared a state of emergency or asked for relief from the climate change–fueled drought, which has already taken a $2.3 billion toll on the country’s farming industry.

Rome’s other problems are making things worse. The city’s aqueducts are chronically leaking. Diminished snowpack on nearby mountains means less meltwater to replenish its aquifers. Rome had planned to stop drawing from one of its big sources of fresh water, Lake Bracciano, which has sunk nearly six feet in the last two years.

City officials have switched off iconic fountains and lowered water pressure, causing residents to lug buckets up the stairs to their apartments. Nearby small towns have already resorted to rationing, the New York Times reports.

Minus a drought in the Dark Ages, clean drinking water has been constantly flowing through Rome for millennia. Now, it looks like things are changing (the climate certainly is).

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Rome, once known for flowing water, is now running dry.

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