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Researchers took on Exxon’s dare to prove it misled the public about climate change

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

Two years ago, Inside Climate News and L.A. Times investigations found that while ExxonMobil internally acknowledged that climate change is human-made and serious, it publicly manufactured doubt about the science. Exxon has been trying unsuccessfully to smother this slow-burning PR crisis ever since, arguing the findings were “deliberately cherry picked statements.” But the company’s problems have grown to include probes of its business practices by the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Now, science historian Naomi Oreskes and Harvard researcher Geoffrey Supran have published the first peer-reviewed, comprehensive analysis of Exxon’s climate communications that adds more heft to these charges. Exxon dared the public to “read all of these documents and make up your own mind,” in a company blog post in 2015. The new paper, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Climate Change Communications,” in the journal Environmental Research Letters, takes up the challenge. Oreskes and Supran systematically analyze nearly 40 years of Exxon’s scientific research, reports, internal documents, and advertisements, and find a deep disconnect between how the company directly communicated climate change and its internal memos and scientific studies.

“The issue of taking things out of context or cherry-picking data is an important one, and one all historians and journalists deal with,” Oreskes tells Mother Jones. “When ExxonMobil accuses journalists of cherry-picking, there is a way we can address that. There are analyses we can do to avoid these issues. Well, if you think the LA Times is cherry-picking [examples], we’ll look at all of them. Nobody can say we are selecting things out of context.”

Their content analysis examines how 187 company documents treated climate change from 1977 through 2014. Researchers found that of the documents that address the causes of climate change, 83 percent of its peer-reviewed scientific literature and 80 percent of its internal documents said it was real and human-made, while the opposite was true of the ads. The researchers analyzed ads published in the New York Times between 1989 and 2004. In those ads, 81 percent expressed doubt about the scientific consensus, tending to emphasize the “uncertainty” and “knowledge gap,” while just 12 percent affirmed the science.

The same pattern holds for how Exxon has addressed the seriousness of the consequences of climate change. Downplaying the impacts is another tactic climate deniers tend to use to call for more delays in implementing policies that curb fossil fuel use. Sixty percent of Exxon’s peer-reviewed papers and 53 percent of its internal documents acknowledge serious impacts — a 1982 internal document lists flooding and sea-level rise and a 2002 paper lists coral reef bleaching and the disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet among them — but Exxon’s ads were more likely to claim, “The sky is not falling.”

Oreskes and Supran write that Exxon “contributed quietly to the science and loudly to raising doubts about it.”

This distinction is important, argues Supran. “Exxon’s response to the allegations from journalists and investigators was a kind of gloss or straw man,” he says. “They were contributing to climate science. The problem was the company still had a much louder doubt-promoting position in public. It was the discrepancy that confused people.”

Exxon did not return a request for comment on the study before publication, but in the past it has dismissed similar criticisms by pointing to its decades of promoting climate science research, which the paper does not dispute.

Of course, Exxon’s media strategy has shifted over time, and the company adopted a more uniform position where executives acknowledged climate change is human-made when it became untenable to say otherwise. Oreskes and Supran also included one issue that’s caused more recent trouble for the industry than its advertising campaigns. There’s intense debate over what are known as “stranded assets,” a term used to describe assets that have become anachronisms when faced with new business realities. In this case, it is the serious risk that Exxon’s business model is overvalued and incompatible with the world taking serious action to limit global warming. Two dozen of the company’s publications and internal documents acknowledged stranded assets, but it is not mentioned in any of the ads through 2004.

Shareholders actually sued Exxon last fall over stranded assets, claiming the company was aware it would not be able to extract all its fossil fuel reserves but its public statements dismissing the risks were “materially false and misleading.” And shareholders have stepped up the pressure in other ways, too: This May, two-thirds of shareholders voted to force the company to publish an annual report on its climate impacts. The moment was a rare defiance of Exxon’s management, which opposed the report, and maybe a step toward more transparency.

Oreskes, who’s written extensively about industry campaigns to undermine scientific findings, says that Exxon’s message inevitably changes over time as it adapts to new circumstances and old positions become discredited. But Exxon is still following the same general playbook. “They are promoting a different kind of doubt,” she says. “It’s a doubt that says, ‘There’s climate change, but we have to still use fossil fuels because there’s no alternative.’” But, Oreskes adds, there are alternatives.

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Researchers took on Exxon’s dare to prove it misled the public about climate change

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Trump halted a study of coal’s health effects in Appalachia

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

The Trump administration has told the National Academy of Sciences to stop working on a study about the potential health risks for people living near mountaintop coal-removing sites in Central Appalachia.

“Everyone knows there are major health risks living near mountaintop removal coal mining sites,” Bill Price, the senior Appalachia organizer at the Sierra Club, said in a statement. “It’s infuriating that Trump would halt this study on the health effects of mountaintop removal coal mining, research that people in Appalachia have been demanding for years.”

In 2014, a West Virginia University study found that dust from mountaintop removal coal-mining sites was linked to increased incidences of lung cancer. The following year, the state formally asked the Obama administration for help in studying these health effects, and in 2016, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) gave the NAS $1 million to determine the human health effects for people living near coal mine operations.

But last week, in an Aug. 18 letter to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the OSMRE said that the Department of the Interior has begun an agency-wide review of all its grants and cooperative agreements that exceed $100,000, as part of the department’s “changing budget situation” and that the agency should halt all work on the study. The NAS says that it is ready to resume work on the study when the review is complete.

“Communities living with daily health threats were counting on finally getting the full story from the professionals at the National Academies of Science,” Price said. “To take that away without warning or adequate reason is beyond heartless.”

Not only can coal have an impact on public health, burning it releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has been aligned with climate skeptics, and throughout his campaign and presidency, Trump expressed support for the coal industry.

When he announced a new agenda for the EPA, Administrator Scott Pruitt told a group of coal miners that “the coal industry was nearly devastated by years of regulatory overreach, but with new direction from President Trump, we are helping to turn things around for these miners.” At an Iowa rally in June, Trump promised to put coal miners back to work. “We’ve ended the war on clean, beautiful coal,” he said.

Bill Price, from the Sierra Club, says that revoking this study demonstrates the administration’s real priorities when it comes to coal. “It appears that the only people Trump cares about in Appalachia are coal executives,” he wrote, “not the people who’ve lived and worked here for generations.”

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Trump halted a study of coal’s health effects in Appalachia

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You can expect to see more Oroville-style dam disasters in our future.

The industry is growing so fast it could become the largest source of renewable energy on both sides of the Atlantic.

In America, wind power won the top spot for installed generating capacity (putting it ahead of hydroelectric power), according to a new industry report. And in the E.U., wind capacity grew by 8 percent last year, surpassing coal. That puts wind second only to natural gas across the pond.

In the next three years, wind could account for 10 percent of American electricity, Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, said in a press release. The industry already employs over 100,000 Americans.

In Europe, wind has hit the 10.4 percent mark, and employs more than 300,000 people, according to an association for wind energy in Europe. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, and Lithuania lead the way for European wind growth. In the U.S., Texas is the windy frontier.

“Low-cost, homegrown wind energy,” Kiernan added in the release, “is something we can all agree on.”

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You can expect to see more Oroville-style dam disasters in our future.

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This young girl just wants to know if Congressman Jason Chaffetz believes in science.

The industry is growing so fast it could become the largest source of renewable energy on both sides of the Atlantic.

In America, wind power won the top spot for installed generating capacity (putting it ahead of hydroelectric power), according to a new industry report. And in the E.U., wind capacity grew by 8 percent last year, surpassing coal. That puts wind second only to natural gas across the pond.

In the next three years, wind could account for 10 percent of American electricity, Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, said in a press release. The industry already employs over 100,000 Americans.

In Europe, wind has hit the 10.4 percent mark, and employs more than 300,000 people, according to an association for wind energy in Europe. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, and Lithuania lead the way for European wind growth. In the U.S., Texas is the windy frontier.

“Low-cost, homegrown wind energy,” Kiernan added in the release, “is something we can all agree on.”

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This young girl just wants to know if Congressman Jason Chaffetz believes in science.

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Banning Lobbyists Might Sound Like a Good Idea. But Here’s What Trump Is Missing.

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s transition team announced one phase of the president-elect’s plan to “drain the swamp” of corruption—a prohibition on registered lobbyists serving in his administration and a five-year lobbying ban for Trump officials who return to the private sector. Trump’s plan effectively doubles down on a policy that the Obama administration already has in place—one that many good government groups and lobbyists alike believe may have created a new problem: un-lobbyists—that is, influence-peddlers who avoid registering as lobbyists to skirt the administration’s rules.

Obama, like Trump, campaigned on a platform of aggressively rooting out the influence of lobbyists. After taking office, he put in place several major good-government initiatives, including a ban on lobbyists serving in his administration and a two-year cooling-off period before ex-administration officials could register to lobby. Once Obama’s lobbying rules took effect, there was a sharp decline in the number of registered lobbyists. Industry insiders and watchdog groups that track the influence game noted that the decrease was not due to lobbyists hanging up their spurs as hired guns for corporations and special interests. Rather it appeared that lobbyists were finding creative ways to avoid officially registering as such. There was no less influence-peddling going on, but now there was less disclosure of the lobbying that was taking place.

The problem lies with the definition of who is a lobbyist. The federal government requires anyone who spends more than 20 percent of their time on behalf of a client while making “lobbying contacts”—an elaborate and specifically defined type of contact with certain types of federal officials—to register as a lobbyist and file quarterly paperwork disclosing their clients and the bills or agencies he or she sought to sway. But by avoiding too many official “lobbying contacts” and limiting how much income that kind of work accounts for, lobbyists can shed the scarlet L, describing themselves as government affairs consultants or experts in advocacy and public policy. In 2014, the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics examined the trend of the “un-lobbyist” and found that 45 percent of the lobbyists who had shed their designation in the previous year still worked for the same employer. In many cases, the lobbyists didn’t leave their jobs, CRP found, they just changed their titles.

The Trump plan, which just tacks three years on to the Obama administration’s existing ban, does stop short of the Obama rules in one area. Under Obama’s policy, people who had been registered lobbyists could not work for agencies they had previously lobbied, though he did offer “waivers” to certain officials. According to Trump aides, registered lobbyists will be eligible for administration jobs if they de-register as lobbyists. The Washington Post reports that Josh Pitcock, a close aide to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, took the step on Monday, sending the Senate Clerk’s office notice that he is no longer a lobbyist for the State of Indiana.

In the end, said Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, the Trump plan may only perpetuate the problem of un-lobbyists.

“People are going to react to the Trump thing in the same way,” Painter notes, by saying, ‘I’ll figure out a way to not be a lobbyist.'”

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Banning Lobbyists Might Sound Like a Good Idea. But Here’s What Trump Is Missing.

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The farmers who voted for Trump may be in for disappointment.

On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump vowed to make the industry great again. “If I win we’re going to bring those miners back,” he said to an audience in West Virginia before donning a miner’s hat and doing a little working-in-the-coal-mine dance.

But for the coal industry — which donated about $223,000 to Trump’s campaign — reality is less rosy. Sure, shares in the bankrupt coal company Peabody soared nearly 50 percent the day after Trump’s victory. But that’s just Wall Street’s knee-jerk response. The fact is, the coal industry’s future is — at best — flat, according to analysts.

Over the last eight years, coal’s portion of the American electricity supply has dropped from half to a third, a result of falling natural gas prices, declining demand from China, and regulatory efforts to reduce carbon emissions. The best Trump can do, says Bloomberg News, is halt coal’s steep decline.

But even though Trump can’t save Big Coal, he can severely damage the planet by enabling the industry. He has promised to dismantle the Clean Power Plan, ignore the Paris climate agreement, and end investments in renewables. Just as coal can’t be revived, the planet can’t either.

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The farmers who voted for Trump may be in for disappointment.

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California Lawmakers Vote to Expand Overtime Pay for Farmworkers

Mother Jones

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For the last 80 years, farm workers have toiled for long hours in grueling conditions with little or no overtime pay. On Monday, California lawmakers passed a bill that would change that. If signed by the governor, the law would make the Golden State the first to require the agricultural industry to meet the federal labor standards applied to most other industries.

“The whole world eats the food provided by California farmworkers,” said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who introduced the bill, “yet we don’t guarantee fair overtime pay for the backbreaking manual labor they put in to keep us fed…We’re now one step closer to finally providing our hard-working farmworkers the dignity they deserve.” Supporters of the bill, which include Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, argued that farm workers should be granted the same protections as millions of other Californians.

Starting in 2019, the new law would gradually expand overtime pay for California’s estimated 825,000 farm workers. Currently, farmworkers who put in more than 10 hours a day receive overtime. (California is one of the few states that require overtime pay for farmworkers.) By 2022, anyone who works more than 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week would be eligible for overtime pay, bringing the agricultural industry in line with national standards.

California’s economy is fueled in large part by its agricultural output. More than a third of all vegetables and two-thirds of all fruit and nuts sold in the United States come from the state. Its agricultural industry raked in more than $50 billion in 2014. Nationally, farm workers earn an average of less than $18,000 a year, according to Farm Worker Justice. Numerous studies have found that many California farmworkers struggle to afford food for their families.

Industry representatives and their allies in the legislature argued that the added protections could backfire, saddling employers with added costs at a time when they are struggling with the state’s water crisis. Ultimately, they said, employers would simply hire more workers and cut their hours in order to avoid paying overtime. “Agriculture needs greater flexibility in scheduling work than do other industries,” argued Beatris Espericueta Sanders, executive director of the Kern County Farm Bureau, in the Bakersfield Californian. “Supporters of the legislation claim this is about ‘equality,’ but AB 1066 would actually hurt the employees it’s meant to help.”

According to the United Farm Workers, the largest union for farm workers and a key sponsor of the bill, the lack of overtime protection for agricultural laborers has its roots in the Jim Crow era, when most farmworkers were African-American. In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which laid out wage protections and overtime compensation requirements for employees across the nation. However, to appease white Southern lawmakers, an exemption was added for agricultural employers. “Today, 78 years later, when farm workers are mainly Latino, this shameful legacy of racism and discrimination still infects our society,” UFW said in a statement. “Excluding farm workers from overtime after eight hours was wrong in 1938. It’s wrong now.”

As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the 44-32 vote in favor of the overtime bill led to an outbreak of applause among farmworkers who took time off of work to witness its passage.

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California Lawmakers Vote to Expand Overtime Pay for Farmworkers

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Olympians Are Selling Sugar Water to Kids

Mother Jones

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Back in 2012, just ahead of the summer Olympics in London and the associated advertising blitz, the prestigious UK medical journal BMJ issued a scathing takedown of sports drinks, ably summarized for Mother Jones by health writer David Tuller. Takeaway: The colorful fluids are utterly unnecessary for restoring electrolytes after exercise, but do contain unhealthy jolts of sugar.

Four years later, beverage giants are once again using Olympians’ beauty and grit to market these supposed elixirs—this time, to children. Above, see tennis wizard Serena Williams, sprint champ Usain Bolt, and NBA star Paul George picturesquely working out with a charismatic kid in an Olympics-focused ad for Pepsi’s flagship sports drink Gatorade. And here‘s boxer Shakur Stevenson doing the same for Coca-Cola’s Powerade. Expect to see these ads and many more during the broadcast of this year’s Olympics, which open in Rio de Janeiro Friday.

And it’s easy to see why the industry is investing heavily in this massively watched sports spectacle. According to the industry tracker Beverage Marketing Corporation, US carbonated soda consumption fell 1.5 percent in 2015, the eleventh straight year of decline. But sports drink volumes raced ahead by a (relatively) Usain Bolt-like 5.5 percent. In short, people are turning away from sugary carbonated drinks because they know they’re unhealthy—and turning to sports drinks, which are associated with lean, athletic bodies, but are also quite sugary.

Over at The Washington Post, Casey Seidenberg notes that the sports drinks’ success is drawing new brands into the market. Honest Tea (also owned by Coca Cola) and upstart Greater Than have rolled out “healthier sports drinks that are lower in sugar and free of artificial food colorings.” While less sugary than Gatorade, etc, these products are equally unnecessary, Seidenberg writes; like adults, “kids and teens rarely, if ever, lose enough electrolytes during their athletic endeavors to require extra replenishment.” She adds: “Sodium is the most common electrolyte lost in sweat, yet most Americans get more than enough sodium from their diets.”

She subjected her sons and their friends to a blind taste test pitting Gatorade and Powerade against new-wave products from Honest Tea and Greater Than, as well as a glass of water and a piece of fruit, which, as she shows, provides just as much hydration as—and several times more potassium (a non-sodium electrolyte) than—most sports drinks, with zero added sugar.

“To my dismay (but not to my surprise), the kids blindly chose Powerade and Gatorade as their favorites,” she writes.” After all, these varieties are the sweetest and the most chemically engineered to cause consumers to come back for more.” As for water and fruit, she found that her experiment subjects “prefer a sports drink” but agree that the combination “satisfies when thirsty or hungry after a game.” If only influential athletes like basketball giant LeBron James would dump their sports-drink deals deal get behind that solution.

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Olympians Are Selling Sugar Water to Kids

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Obama still hasn’t banned Arctic drilling, but he just made it more annoying

polar attraction

Obama still hasn’t banned Arctic drilling, but he just made it more annoying

By on Jul 8, 2016Share

Environmental activists have been on a winning streak when it comes to keeping fossil fuels in the ground, from knocking down approval for the Keystone XL pipeline to stopping the Obama administration from opening Atlantic waters to drilling. They’ve been holding out for one more big win over Arctic drilling.

Activists were disappointed, then, on Thursday when the Department of Interior teased a “major” announcement only to leave the future of the Arctic open. Instead, Interior finalized regulations that will supposedly make it safer to drill in the difficult polar waters, while costing the industry around $2 billion over the next 10 years. The most prohibitive of the measures requires backup rigs in the case of a spill, and as well as planning for Arctic-specific conditions like limiting drilling during bad weather.

At the moment, Obama’s not really making environment or industry allies happy. “It may be the case that the rules require safer drilling practices, but the simple fact is that there’s no safe way to drill for oil in the Arctic with the climate crisis deepening all around us,” David Turnbull of Oil Change International told Grist.

Meanwhile, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) thought it sent mixed messages on the offshore industry’s future and was “dismayed by the regulatory onslaught” on energy production.

In any case, this is just the prelude to Obama’s big climate finale of his administration. The draft for the administration’s five-year offshore-drilling plan offered new leases for sale in the Arctic; the final plan is due out later this year, and will determine development all the way through 2022.

Obama has already protected more ocean than any other president before him, but his decision on Arctic leasing might be the legacy that sticks.

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Obama still hasn’t banned Arctic drilling, but he just made it more annoying

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Trump Asks Big Coal for Cash

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

What’s a candidate to do when he’s strapped for cash and still 139 days out from election day? If you’re Donald Trump, and you don’t want to entirely self-finance, the answer to that question might lie in a business whose product has been called “black gold.”

Trump pulled in just $3 million in individual contributions and reported having only $1.3 million in the bank at the end of last month, meaning he’s got less cash on hand than either of his former rivals Ted Cruz or Ben Carson. Clinton’s fundraising, meanwhile, dwarfs Trump’s by nearly 40 times.

But Trump’s got a plan. His first move after the abysmal fundraising report was to announce that he’s holding an invitation-only fundraiser in West Virginia coal country next Tuesday, hosted by mining magnate CEO Robert Murray. Murray, one of the largest independent coal operators in the United States, only endorsed Trump after his first-choice candidate Cruz dropped out. His ringing endorsement of Trump was to say he’s “all we’ve got.”

Despite his absolute lack of knowledge about the coal industry, Trump feels comfortable enough to turn to the coal industry after a barrage of bad press. The magnates are looking to boost Trump’s coffers, even though he can’t do much to stop the industry-wide free fall.

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Trump Asks Big Coal for Cash

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