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Did BP really just pledge to become a net-zero company? It’s complicated.

by floystegall7 Posted on February 13, 2020

Net-zero promises from companies and governments are popping up as often as new Netflix shows, and just like those algorithmically driven hours of entertainment, not all clean energy commitments are created equal. The language used to describe these targets has become as meaningless as the “natural” label on your package of Perdue chicken: “Clean energy” and “net zero” can signify any number of things, and even “renewable” changes depending on who you ask.

The point is, when a fossil fuel major like BP announces its ambition to become a net-zero company by 2050, as it did on Wednesday, it’s important to read the fine print.

To start, “net-zero emissions” is different from plain old “zero emissions” in that it allows for things like carbon offsets, carbon capture technology, and natural solutions like tree-planting to make up for continued emissions. In this case, BP’s net-zero target does not mean it will stop exploring new reserves, extracting oil and gas, or selling it at the pump. Confusingly, it doesn’t even mean the emissions from all the oil and gas products BP sells will be net-zero in 2050.

But all of that aside, the company’s plan does contain significantly more aggressive goals than its peers.

“Depending on the details, it has the potential to be the most comprehensive climate strategy of any of the major oil companies,” said Andrew Logan, senior director of oil and gas at Ceres, a sustainable business nonprofit. But like Logan said, it depends on the details, because while BP’s dreams are big, the company has disclosed few details on how it will achieve them.

BP

One of BP’s targets is to reduce emissions from all of its company operations, which it says is about 55 million tons of CO2 equivalent, to net zero. That includes emissions from things like gas flaring at the wellhead, company cars, and the electricity it buys to keep the lights on. BP’s goal here is somewhat par for the course these days — most of the major oil and gas companies have some kind of emissions reduction target for their operations (though not all of them are net zero).

What’s noteworthy, said Kathy Mulvey, the fossil fuel accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, is that BP says it will measure and reduce its methane footprint at all of its oil and gas sites. “That points to the reality that BP doesn’t actually know exactly how much methane its operations are emitting,” she said.

Critics of these plans say that operational emissions are small potatoes, and that fossil fuel companies should be responsible for the emissions from the oil and gas products they produce and sell to customers, known as scope 3 emissions. This is where BP’s plan really stands out. The company aspires to zero-out the carbon emissions from the eventual combustion of all of the oil and gas it pulls out of the ground by 2050. Right now that amounts to about 360 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year.

BP

In a speech about the plan on Wednesday, new CEO Bernard Looney tried to anticipate questions about this. He said that yes, this does mean BP’s oil and gas production will probably decline over time. “Does that mean we’ll be producing and refining hydrocarbons” — that’s fossil fuel industry–speak for fossil fuels — “in 2050? Yes, very likely,” he said. “Does that mean we’ll be producing and refining less of them in 2050? Yes, almost certainly. And our aim is that any residual hydrocarbons will be decarbonized.”

To date, only one other fossil fuel company has made this kind of commitment, the small Spanish company Repsol. But unlike Repsol, which has set near-term goals to gradually reduce emissions over time, and hinted at some of the strategies it will use to get there, BP offered no benchmarks or blueprints. Looney said the company would share more information on the “how” of its transition in September.

But there’s one key caveat to BP’s scope 3 target. The oil and gas that the company extracts is only a portion of its business. During a Q&A session after his speech, Looney broke down how they are thinking about scope 3 on a whiteboard.

BP sells a lot more oil and gas than it digs out of the ground, he said, because it also buys these products from other companies. So while it plans to zero-out emissions from the products BP itself extracts, it’s aiming for a 50 percent reduction in carbon intensity from all the products it sells, including those it’s just a middleman for.

That leaves open the possibility for the total emissions from BP’s sold products to continue to rise, as long as the amount emitted per unit of energy decreases. In his speech, Looney estimated that right now, total emissions from all the products it sells are about 1 gigaton per year.

Ultimately, with a goal of reducing its footprint by 415 million tons of CO2 equivalent by 2050, BP’s new plan is worlds away from companies like Exxon and Chevron, which still claim they are not responsible for the emissions from customers using their products.

BP’s vision also includes a goal to increase the proportion of money it invests into non-oil and gas energy sources, like solar and wind, over time. Right now, that’s only about 3 percent of BP’s investments. But Looney declined to quantify the company’s target in this arena. “We don’t plan to commit to an arbitrary or preset number,” he said.

While critics have already leapt on the vagueness of the plan, Ed Clowes, a business journalist for the Telegraph, described BP’s dilemma aptly on Twitter. On the one hand, BP could stop selling oil and gas and self-destruct. But if it did, another company would step in to fill the gap, because right now, the world still (mostly) runs on oil. “BP has to be in the game to change it,” Clowes wrote.

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Did BP really just pledge to become a net-zero company? It’s complicated.

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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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Trump State of the Union’s brief environmental interlude: more oil, more trees

by LashundMuramats Posted on February 5, 2020

The reality TV president delivered a reality TV State of the Union Tuesday night. Over the course of 80 sometimes raucous minutes, he awarded a school voucher to a Philadelphia 4th grader, had the first lady present conservative shock jock Rush Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and reunited a military servicemember with his family.

Along the way, he ticked off a checklist of statistics, claims, and promises designed to galvanize his colleagues on the right side of the aisle. The most prominent parts of the speech touted the strong economy, celebrated the administration’s crackdown on immigration, and decried an alleged Democratic attempt to engineer a socialist takeover of healthcare.

One phrase that didn’t pass the president’s lips — to nobody’s surprise — was climate change.

Trump devoted just a few seconds of his address to energy and environmental issues: first by celebrating the massive oil and gas boom that has made the U.S. a net exporter of oil, and later by reiterating his commitment to joining an international initiative to plant one trillion trees worldwide.

The president took credit for the recent increase in domestic fossil fuel production, suggesting that it was his administration’s “bold regulatory reduction campaign” that made the U.S. the top producer of oil and natural gas in the world. But the U.S. actually reached that milestone under the Obama administration. Thanks to the explosion in fracking beginning in 2008, the U.S. became the top producer of natural gas in 2009 and of oil in 2013, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The president then went further, claiming that the boom has made the U.S. “energy independent” — ignoring the fact that the country is still subject to the global oil market, and that turbulence in the Middle East and elsewhere has the ability to affect gas prices in the U.S.

The dramatic increase in stateside oil and gas extraction has also generated environmental and public health consequences that went unacknowledged in Tuesday’s address. Though U.S. emissions likely fell by about two percent last year, those reductions are nowhere close to the cuts required to meet the targets set under the international Paris Agreement, which scientists say are essential to avoiding the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Research also suggests that increased pollution from the oil and gas boom could reverse that fragile progress.

Energy and environment have never been a point of emphasis in Trump’s State of the Union addresses. In 2018, the president devoted just two brief sentences to energy independence, focusing instead on immigration and tax cuts. Last year, too, energy and environmental policies were largely absent from his speech, save the passing mention of “an American energy revolution.”

The Trump administration’s decision to join the World Economic Forum’s initiative to plant one trillion trees worldwide is likely too little, too late. For one, if the U.S. is to compensate for all its 2019 emissions, it would need to plant trees on 371 million acres. That’s double the size of Texas.

Successful reforestation programs have also been hard to implement. Last year, Turkey planted 11 million trees, but according to reports from the country’s agriculture and forestry trade union, the vast majority of the saplings inspected died within just a few months. Trees also take decades to reach their full carbon-combating potential. Trees planted today may not reach full growth for 40 years or more — and that’s assuming they survive disease, wildfires, and droughts.

Then there’s the challenge of accurately monitoring and calculating the amount of carbon dioxide that the trees are pulling out of the air. Reporting by ProPublica and other research has found that many programs have grossly overestimated the emissions reductions from reforestation.

In fact, scientists have suggested that when it comes to climate change, conserving current trees is more helpful than planting new ones. Given that the Trump administration expanded logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest just a few months ago, one might be tempted to rip up Trump’s speech in frustration — if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had not already done precisely that at the end of the address.

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Trump State of the Union’s brief environmental interlude: more oil, more trees

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Touchdown! Car companies make electric cars look sexy at the Super Bowl

by dennishannell5 Posted on February 3, 2020

A recent analysis by Reuters found that automakers worldwide plan to invest $300 billion into electric vehicles. Now they just need people to start buying them: Last year, only 2 percent of cars sold in the U.S. were electric. So it’s heartening that, while the country was enjoying the last Super Bowl that Miami will likely be able to host before Hard Rock Stadium turns into an island, car companies threw major advertising dollars behind making their new electric vehicles look cool AF.

This year, companies forked over an average of $5.6 million for 30 seconds of airtime, not to mention the cost of producing the high-profile spots that featured celebrity cameos and complex narratives. The payoff is that the ads inevitably spark conversation and news articles in the days and weeks and potentially years after the event.

For last night’s game, GM enlisted LeBron James to introduce its new electric Hummer — a car that nobody asked for but hey, I’m not complaining.

Audi struck algorithmic gold with Game of Thrones fan favorite Maisie Williams singing Frozen’s “Let it Go” in an e-Tron Sportback.

Porsche kept it classic with a suspenseful heist set-up that led to flashy car chase through the streets of Stuttgart with its all-electric Taycan sports car.

Viewers in some regional markets saw a nostalgia-fueled ad by Ford for its new electric Mustang, featuring Idris Elba.

Will the ad blitz work? At the very least, it might help the average American realize that Tesla isn’t the only name in the EV game.

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Touchdown! Car companies make electric cars look sexy at the Super Bowl

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Airbnb wants to send you to the Bahamas for free ⁠— but there’s a catch

by HarleyHunger Posted on January 30, 2020

Airbnb — the online marketplace for travel lodging and touristy experiences — is searching for five people to drop everything and take a free two-month trip to the Bahamas.

The catch? You have to want to help save the environment. Selected applicants will assist researchers and local experts in preserving the Carribean’s natural and cultural resources by restoring coral reefs and learning about ethical fishing and agricultural practices. The sabbatical will help Bahamians create new eco-friendly experiences for future tourists to book through Airbnb when visiting the islands.

The Bahamas are at the frontlines of the climate crisis. Last September, Hurricane Dorian battered the northern islands with up to 220 mph winds for 40 hours straight, killing at least 70 people and causing more than $3.4 billion in damage. Like other recent powerful hurricanes, Dorian was fueled by high ocean temperatures caused by climate change, and Bahamanians can expect more severe storms in the future as the world warms.

This isn’t the first time Airbnb has offered a “sabbatical” opportunity to help the environment. Last month, the company sent five people to Chile and Antarctica to help study the effects of microplastics on the region. This latest sabbatical initiative — which was developed in partnership with the Bahamas National Trust, a nonprofit that manages the country’s parks and works to protect its natural habitat — will send people to the islands of Andros, Exumas, and Eleuthera, which were not badly affected by Hurricane Dorian.

In the first three weeks of the sabbatical, the chosen applicants will focus on coral reef restoration in the Andros Barrier Reef, the third-largest barrier reef on the planet. Over the years, coastal development and illegal and unsustainable fishing have threatened the Bahamian coral reefs — but climate change has been the biggest threat of them all. The selected applicants will build and care for coral nurseries to foster new growth on the reef.

The Bahamas is made up of more than 700 islands stretched over 750 miles, and its economy relies heavily on tourism. After Dorian hit, the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism urged tourists not to cancel their trips to the unravaged parts of the country.

Eric Carey, the executive director of the Bahamas National Trust, echoed that sentiment in a statement about the Airbnb initiative. “The Bahamas is open for business and while we work to restore parts of the archipelago devastated by Hurricane Dorian, the vast majority is ready for visitors,” he said.

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Airbnb wants to send you to the Bahamas for free ⁠— but there’s a catch

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Amazon told its workers not to criticize its climate policies. They didn’t listen.

by ShanelOrta Posted on January 27, 2020

Hundreds of Amazon employees are risking their jobs to speak out about climate change. “We are scared,” an activist employee group said in a tweet on Monday. “But we decided we couldn’t live with ourselves if we let a policy silence us in the face of an issue of such moral gravity like the climate crisis.” That message accompanied a video in which dozens of current Amazon employees looked into the camera while holding up signs saying “We won’t be silenced” and “We need to speak out.”

The showdown between the tech giant and its employees began last summer, when the employee group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), called on the company’s shareholders to adopt a climate change resolution that was ultimately backed by more than 8,700 Amazon workers. That resolution was swiftly voted down. In early September, AECJ members announced their intention to walk out of work on September 20 in solidarity with youth climate activists striking all over the world. The day after that announcement, Amazon updated its external communications policy to require employees to seek approval from management before speaking publicly about Amazon.

A couple of weeks later, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled a climate plan that aims for net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 — a decade ahead of the deadline laid out in the Paris climate agreement. Though AECJ takes credit for pressuring Amazon to put out a climate plan, members said it wasn’t nearly comprehensive enough. Amazon employees around the world walked out as planned on September 20, with thousands of employees joining the protest in front of Amazon headquarters in downtown Seattle.

A few weeks after that, Amazon put out a “manifesto” explaining many of its positions on topics ranging from minimum wage requirements to climate change. Two AECJ members, Jamie Kowalski and Maren Costa, publicly criticized the manifesto, telling the Washington Post that it “distracts from the fact that Amazon wants to profit in businesses that are directly contributing to climate catastrophe.” According to the Post, Kowalski and Costa were subsequently warned by Amazon HR that they had violated Amazon’s external communications policy by speaking negatively about the manifesto. An Amazon lawyer warned the employees that speaking out again could “result in formal corrective action, up to and including termination of your employment with Amazon.”

In response to the threat of firing, Amazon workers decided to speak out en masse. On Sunday, AECJ circulated unauthorized statements about climate change from 357 employees, including their first and last names and positions at the company.

“It is unconscionable for Amazon to continue helping the oil and gas industry extract fossil fuels while trying to silence employees who speak out,” Amelia Graham-McCann, a senior business analyst, wrote. “Amazon already knows we are nothing without our customers — let’s do all we can to ensure there will still be people around to be our customers in 10, 20, 50, and 100 years,” wrote Brian Colella, a copy editor. “Hell, if Microsoft can do it (go carbon negative), why can’t we?” Austin Dworaczyk Wiltshire, senior software development engineer, asked, referring to the ambitious climate plan recently unveiled by another tech giant.

AECJ has demanded that Amazon speed up its decarbonization timeline from net-zero by 2040 to net-zero by 2030. The group also wants the company to stop providing web services and machine learning technology to oil companies and to stop funding lobbying groups and politicians who deny climate change is real. In an internal email to employees on Martin Luther King Day, AECJ explained that protesting the company’s policy was about more than just climate change. “It’s also about our ability to speak up on other issues like racism and sexism in tech, treatment of warehouse workers, donations to anti-LGBTQ politicians, and complicity with ICE,” they wrote.

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Drew Herdener said employees are welcome to bring their concerns to company leadership internally, if they keep those conversations confidential. “While all employees are welcome to engage constructively with any of the many teams inside Amazon that work on sustainability and other topics, we do enforce our external communications policy and will not allow employees to publicly disparage or misrepresent the company or the hard work of their colleagues who are developing solutions to these hard problems,” Herdener said.

But, in an AECP press release, Paul Johnston, a former senior developer advocate at Amazon who parted ways with the company in no small part because of its climate policies, said bringing up the issue internally didn’t work. “When I raised climate change concerns while an employee, around AWS [Amazon Web Services] carbon footprint, I was met with very little support for change, and with the standard PR lines about how seriously Amazon was taking the issue,” he said. “Nothing changed until employees began speaking out.”

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Amazon told its workers not to criticize its climate policies. They didn’t listen.

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The Math of Life and Death – Kit Yates

by Myrna Posted on January 17, 2020

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Math of Life and Death

7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives

Kit Yates

Genre: Mathematics

Price: $13.99

Publish Date: January 7, 2020

Publisher: Scribner

Seller: SIMON AND SCHUSTER DIGITAL SALES INC


A brilliant and entertaining mathematician illuminates seven mathematical principles that shape our lives. “Kit Yates shows how our private and social lives are suffused by mathematics. Ignorance may bring tragedy or farce. This is an exquisitely interesting book. It’s a deeply serious one too and, for those like me who have little math, it’s delightfully readable.” —Ian McEwan, author of Atonement “Kit Yates is a natural storyteller. Through fascinating stories and examples, he shows how maths is the beating heart of so much of modern life. An exciting new voice in the world of science communication.” —Marcus du Sautoy, author of The Music of the Primes From birthdays to birth rates to how we perceive the passing of time, mathematical patterns shape our lives. But for those of us who left math behind in high school, the numbers and figures hurled at us as we go about our days can sometimes leave us scratching our heads and feeling as if we’re fumbling through a mathematical minefield. In this eye-opening and extraordinarily accessible book, mathemati­cian Kit Yates illuminates hidden principles that can help us understand and navigate the chaotic and often opaque surfaces of our world. In The Math of Life and Death , Yates takes us on a fascinating tour of everyday situations and grand-scale applications of mathematical concepts, including exponential growth and decay, optimization, statistics and probability, and number systems. Along the way he reveals the mathematical undersides of controversies over DNA testing, medical screening results, and historical events such as the Chernobyl disaster and the Amanda Knox trial. Readers will finish this book with an enlightened perspective on the news, the law, medicine, and history, and will be better equipped to make personal decisions and solve problems with math in mind, whether it’s choosing the shortest checkout line at the grocery store or halting the spread of a deadly disease.

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The Math of Life and Death – Kit Yates

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Judge writes blistering dissent as kids’ climate lawsuit gets tossed

by mackenziepsv Posted on January 17, 2020

Nowadays, it’s not unusual to see young folks publicly protesting climate change. But back in 2015, long before Greta Thunberg set up shop on the steps of the Swedish Parliament and inspired millions to take to the streets, 21 kids sued the United States to try to force the government to do something about climate change. They argued that the government’s inaction was putting their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at risk. That case, Juliana v. United States, paved the way for more climate-themed lawsuits to be filed against governments and oil companies around the world.

On Friday, after five long years of wins, setbacks, and procedural delay, the kids finally got their answer: No.

The 9th Circuit dismissed the case on the grounds that the courts don’t have the power to order the kind of emissions reduction plan sought by the plaintiffs, who were demanding that the government limit atmospheric warming to 1 degree C — a whole half-degree cooler than the target called for by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Any plan to reduce emissions, the panel of three judges wrote in a 32-page opinion, would require the executive and legislative branches to come up with a range of complicated policies and vote on them. As such, the decision reads, “the panel reluctantly concluded that the plaintiff’s case must be made to the political branches or to the electorate at large.” The issue here, of course, is that the leadership of one of the United States’ two major political parties denies the existence of climate change, and Congress’ most recent climate bill — the first one in a decade — just hit the dust in the Senate. Regardless, the case will not go to trial.

One judge wasn’t happy about that. In a searing dissent, District Judge Josephine Staton lacerated the U.S. government and said that the young people do have standing.

In these proceedings, the government accepts as fact that the United States has reached a tipping point crying out for a concerted response — yet presses ahead toward calamity. It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward the Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses. Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation.

The decision is a blow to the youth plaintiffs, many of whom have put their lives on hold for years in order to be available for depositions and testimonies. But winning the case wasn’t their only priority. When Grist interviewed one plaintiff, Aji Piper, in 2018, he said his reasons for suing the government are chiefly moral.

“It’s not about the winning,” he said. “It’s doing it because it’s the right thing to do.” At least the kids know they tried their best to protect Earth from the asteroid. And their legal counsel isn’t giving up yet. “We will be asking the full Ninth Circuit to review the determination that federal courts can do nothing to address an admitted constitutional violation,” Andrea Rodgers, the plaintiffs’ co-counsel, said in a statement.

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Judge writes blistering dissent as kids’ climate lawsuit gets tossed

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Exxon’s law firm tried to recruit Harvard students. Instead, they protested.

by HomerPeek5 Posted on January 16, 2020

On Wednesday night, more than 100 first-year Harvard law students gathered at a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a reception hosted by the corporate law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. The opulent affair, replete with lobsters for snacking, an ice sculpture, and an open bar, was one of many regular functions held by elite law firms to draw elite aspiring attorneys into the fold. But about 30 students put their job prospects at risk when they interrupted the event with a demonstration.

As Paul, Weiss attorney and partner Kannon Shanmugam got up to deliver a speech, a small group of students unfurled a banner that read #DropExxon and cut him off with a protest song. “Which side are you on?” they sang. “Does it weigh on you at all?”

The lyrics alluded to Paul, Weiss’ defense of ExxonMobil in several ongoing lawsuits over the oil giant’s role in climate change. The firm recently successfully defended Exxon in a case brought by the state of New York over the accusation that it misled investors about the costs of climate change to its business. Now, it’s defending the company again in a similar lawsuit in Massachusetts, just miles from the Harvard campus.

After the song, a chorus of students joined lead organizer Aaron Regunberg in a call and response speech, announcing that they refuse to work for a firm that helps corporate polluters block climate action. As long as Paul, Weiss worked for Exxon, they wouldn’t work for Paul, Weiss.

“What is the most critical tool these corporations use to get away with climate murder? It’s this right here,” they chanted. “Exxon knew about climate change 35 years ago, yet continued to wreck the planet and fund climate denial that led us to this crisis. That’s what this firm is enabling, and the tactics they are using are extreme and unethical.”

Regunberg told Grist that it’s highly unusual to see this kind of confrontation in the legal profession, and that many of the students who participated had never been involved in a direct action before. “For the longest time, this is an issue that hasn’t even been questioned,” he said. “We’ve shown that our generation of aspiring lawyers understands that business as usual is a recipe for an unlivable future.”

Climate activism in the Ivy League is heating up. A parallel movement of students demanding that their schools divest from fossil fuel companies made national news in November when hundreds of protestors stormed the field at the annual Harvard-Yale football field.

The law school organizers plan to continue their campaign to get Paul, Weiss to drop Exxon and hope to spread the movement to other law schools. Students from Boston University and Yale University law schools have already expressed support. Regunberg said another goal is to start a conversation with Harvard about the way its culture, curriculum, student debt creation, and career service programming create a pipeline to corporate law firms. Many students who come into the school hoping to pursue public interest law end up in corporate interest law, he said. “That’s a systemic problem, and a profound factor in the creation of a legal system that in so many ways shields the wealthy and powerful at the expense of all of us — or, in the case of ExxonMobil, at the expense of human civilization as we know it.”

Harvard Law School and Paul, Weiss had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.

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Exxon’s law firm tried to recruit Harvard students. Instead, they protested.

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Another legacy of redlining: Unequal exposure to heat waves

by HeikeM764257 Posted on January 15, 2020

Severe heat kills more people in the United States than any other hazardous weather-related event. As climate change accelerates, the sweltering heat will become much more extreme, and the associated mortality rate will rise.

Like so many aspects of the climate crisis, heat doesn’t affect all people equally. Marginalized low-income communities of color, especially those in larger cities such as New York and Los Angeles, bear the brunt of heat waves. These concrete jungles with barely any green space to cool them down are drastically hotter than their surrounding suburbs and rural areas — a phenomenon known as the “urban heat island effect.”

And that’s not an accident. It’s the result of decades-old policy choices that are still reverberating today. A new study published in the journal Climate found that the historical practice of “redlining” is a strong predictor of which neighborhoods are disproportionately exposed to extreme heat.

“Our zip codes are also one of the major predictors of our health,” said Vivek Shandas, one of the authors of the study and a professor of climate adaptation at Portland State University. “By separating housing policy from climate change, we’re doing a disservice to our ability to create safe spaces, particularly among those communities who don’t have a choice about where to live.”

Historically, redlining was an effort to segregate communities of color by refusing to give them housing loans and insurance. The federal government, faced with affordable housing shortages in the early 1930s, designed a housing plan that helped middle- and lower-class white families afford homes but left communities of color — particularly African-American communities — out of new suburban housing developments.

Although the practice of redlining was banned in the late 1960s, remnants of the discriminatory practice are still evident till this day — and are now being linked to the biggest existential threat of our time. The analysis examined 108 urban areas across the country, and found that 94 percent of historically redlined neighborhoods are consistently hotter than the rest of the neighborhoods in their cities, underscoring a major environmental justice issue. Portland, Oregon, showed one of the largest heat disparities between redlined and non-redlined communities — up to 12.6 degrees F.

Ongoing policy decisions make the disparities worse. For instance, the study points out that many vulnerable communities lack green spaces, which cool surface temperatures and provide significant health benefits to residents. Instead, city officials tend to invest in safe green parks built in wealthier neighborhoods. And without a social safety net, vulnerable communities may face financial burdens due to high energy consumption from air conditioner use and medical bills from conditions caused or exacerbated by heat.

Shandas hopes that his and his colleagues’ study will help policymakers understand the intersectionality of both housing and climate issues and help them create more equitable housing policies.

“The impacts of climate change are largely mediated by the way we build our cities and the places we call home,” Shandas said. “By ignoring the question of housing in climate change, we’re unable to understand who faces some of the greatest impacts.”

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Another legacy of redlining: Unequal exposure to heat waves

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