FIRST LOOK:

Resources for the Future is hosting a webinar TODAY at 1:00 pm EST on the social cost of carbon scientific and policy considerations for the Biden administration.

Biden Facing Increasing Pressure To Shut Down DAPL: Under increasing pressure to shut down the Dakota Access oil pipeline, the Biden administration will get more time to assess the pipeline and ongoing litigation. On Tuesday, a federal judge granted a DOJ request for a two-month delay of a hearing set for today, so its lawyers can fully brief the administration on the case over the validity of the Army Corps of Engineers' environmental impact statement. The delay comes as Indigenous and environmental groups, their allies in Congress, and celebrities are increasing public pressure on the administration to shut down the controversial pipeline. On Tuesday, in -11° F cold, youth of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe began a 93-mile run from Timber Lake, South Dakota, to Oceti Sakowin Camp — the site of the 2016 Dakota Access pipeline protests. “We’re fighting for the next seven generations to ensure that they have clean water to drink from and to have a better climate for our people and the whole world,” said Maya Runnels, president of the Standing Rock Youth Council that organized the run. (Litigation delay: The Hill, Politico Pro $, AP; Pressure: Grand Forks Herald, The Hill, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter)

Texas Politicians Attack Biden Energy Moves Despite (Lack Of) Texas Impacts: Texas lawmakers, including some Democrats, are criticizing President Biden's early actions on energy and environmental protection despite the oil and gas industry's flagging employment in the state and the potential for renewable energy growth there. Oil, gas, mining, and quarrying jobs shrunk as a proportion of Texas employment from 2014 to the beginning of 2020 —before the coronavirus pandemic cratered oil demand, and well before Joe Biden was elected. Two of Biden's highest-profile energy actions, blocking the Keystone XL pipeline and pausing new drilling on federal lands, are likely to have minimal effects on Texas; the pipeline's construction jobs likely wouldn't have come from Texas and hardly any drilling in Texas is on public lands. Even before Biden took office, private companies headquartered or with major operations in Texas were transitioning away from fossil fuels. “These trends don’t start with or are caused by the Biden administration,” Tim Latimer, a former drilling engineer with BHP Billiton and CEO of Houston's Fervo Energy, a geothermal energy company that uses horizontal drilling to improve its products’ effectiveness, told the Texas Tribune. “It’s about what customers want, what young people want, what international corporations want. Everyone wants a new world that's focused on solving climate issues.” (Texas Tribune)

Chevron Refinery Dumps Oil Into San Francisco Bay: A Chevron oil refinery in Richmond, Cali. dumped an estimated 600 gallons of petroleum into San Francisco Bay yesterday. The leak was not detected until an oil sheen on the water near the refinery was noticed around 3 p.m. Many local residents complained of the fumes from the spill, which eventually washed up on shore. "It smelled like somebody spilled gasoline in front of my house. It smelled very very badly for [the] whole day," Margaret Berczynski, told ABC7-KGO. "I'm really devastated. I cannot take my kids to the water. … I'm really scared," she added. Officials warned the fumes could cause ear, nose, and throat irritation. Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia harshly criticized the refinery. “It is unacceptable to have this happen in our community,” he said. “It causes harm to people’s health. It causes harm to bird life, wildlife and marine life." The cause of the spill is still unknown. (ABC-7 KGO News, East Bay Times, KTU, SFGate, KCRA Sacramento , KPIX-CBS5, San Francisco Chronicle)

COP 26: COVID-19 pandemic creates a headache for U.N. climate summit logistics (Thomson Reuters Foundation), the dangers of turning high-stakes climate talks into a zoom call (Bloomberg $)

LINGUISTIC PARADIGMS: Capitalism is struggling with the language of climate change (Bloomberg $)

FOSSIL FUEL DEATHS: Fossil fuel air pollution linked to 1 in 5 deaths worldwide, new Harvard study finds (HuffPost, E&E $, The Hill)

EXTREMISM AND DENIAL: The scariest thing about climate change isn’t the weather—it’s us (Fast Company)

ACCOUNTABILITY: Greens press Senate: convict Trump for inciting Capital riot (E&E $)

AGENCIES: EPA yanks 'compromised' PFAS assessment (E&E $), Biden EPA pulls PFAS assessment over alleged political interference (Politico Pro $), Colo. leaders will lobby Haaland to keep BLM in state (E&E $)

THE HILL: Biden drilling ban forces Democratic-led New Mexico to reckon with oil dependence (Reuters), Carper promises fast action on infrastructure (Politico Pro $), Simpson takes on dam fight with new vision for the Pacific Northwest (Politico Pro $), Republicans want to plant 1 trillion trees — and then log them (Grist)

JOE MANCHIN: Manchin wants Biden to reconsider Keystone XL cancellation (E&E $, The Hill, AP, Politico Pro $)

POLITICS: Groups launch campaigns for 100% clean energy (E&E $), how redistricting could affect energy, environment policy (E&E $), Biden climate change strategy draws farm belt support, concern (Wall Street Journal $), US Chamber of Commerce names its first new leader in 24 years (New York Times $)

NOMINEES & CONFIRMATIONS: Senate panel advances EPA nominee; GOP slams Interior pick (AP), [Senate EPW] gives Michael Regan bipartisan approval for EPA post (E&E $, Washington Examiner, The Hill), inside the Haaland-Grijalva partnership (E&E $), GOP opposition to Haaland as interior secretary grows (Washington Post $), Cruz blocks Commerce pick as GOP slow walks nominees (E&E $)

AGENDA: Biden won't revive Obama's Clean Power Plan. So now what? (E&E $), Biden's clean energy plan: Job creator or killer? (E&E $), Kerry, Yellen meet to chart course on climate finance (E&E $)

TRANSITION, PERSONNEL: Meet [Cecilia Martinez] Biden's environmental justice champion (E&E $), CEQ adds staffers with agency, Hill and academic chops (E&E $), Ex-EPA, Hill staffer tapped to lead pipeline agency (E&E $), White House fills out staff at Council on Environmental Quality (Politico Pro $)

CITIES AND STATES: Virginia House passes bill that would let customers shop for renewable power (Energy News Network), Joe Biden wants 100% clean energy. Will California show that it’s possible? (LA Times $)

IMPACTS: Climate change worsening allergy seasons — study (E&E $), rising heat and snow-bare peaks chill Nepal's mountain economy (Thomson Reuters Foundation), sea-level rise could threaten coastal nuclear waste facilities (Yale Climate Connections), study: climate change exacerbating pollen season (The Hill), Tropical Cyclone Faraji is first category 5 storm of 2021 (Yale Climate Connections)

INDIA GLACIER DISASTER: Fatal Himalayan glacial lake outburst highlights destabilising effect of warming (Climate Home)

WILDFIRES: California’s rainy season now starts nearly a month later, increasing wildfire risks (Washington Post $)

RENEWABLES: Renewables could be dominant power source in less than 10 years (Houston Chronicle), Canada plans hydropower push as Biden looks to clean up U.S. grid (Reuters)

TRANSITIONS: Four huge new energy deals show the future of decarbonization (Quartz)

STORAGE: DOE lab aims to answer the 'big questions' about storage and help dramatically increase deployment (Utility Dive)

OIL & GAS: 3 [state] oil and gas battles to watch (E&E $), Bahamian offshore drilling hopes 'shattered' (E&E $), Big Oil's future could be smaller than its past (Houston Chronicle), state-owned fossil fuel firms' plan to invest $1.9tn could destroy climate hopes (The Guardian)

TOTAL: The french oil giant Total reports a big loss, but analysts are pleased (New York Times $), Total beats earnings estimates, boosts renewables investment (Bloomberg $, Wall Street Journal $, Axios), Total lines up green rebrand but sticks with target to grow oil, gas output (S&P Global $)

TRANSMISSION: Construction starts on disputed $1B electricity corridor (AP)

GEOTHERMAL: Ohio geologists study potential for geothermal in abandoned coal mines (Energy News Network) 

PIPELINES: The Keystone XL pipeline is dead. Now what? (National Geographic)

COAL: ‘This land feeds our souls’: the battle to save the Rockies from big coal (The Guardian), another Powder River Basin coal mine will close down (Casper Star-Tribune), Arch unveils plan to close major Wyoming mine (E&E $)

HYDROGEN: Germany set to agree [on] phased introduction of hydrogen transport (Reuters), hydrogen truck player Hyzon is going public at $2.7 billion valuation (Axios)

(ELECTRIC) VEHICLES: Electric vehicles are improving so fast, data on using them may be obsolete (Earther), alternative vehicles charge into public markets (Axios), how a trade dispute between 2 Korean firms could jam Biden’s electric car plans (HuffPost), Ford bets $29B on leading the 'electric vehicle revolution' (Utility Dive)

RICH PEOPLE: Bill gates-led fund backs tech to use natural gas without the carbon impact (Bloomberg $)(E&E $)

GEOENGINEERING: Electrified rivers and other attempts to save the environment (New York Times $)

BITCOIN: Bitcoin: Friend or foe of the clean energy transition? (Energy Monitor), Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, will accept as payment soon (AP)

BOOKS: Teen Vogue’s book ‘No Planet B’ offers a guide to the climate crisis (Teen Vogue)

WILDLIFE: Conservationists open new front in fight over soot rule (E&E $)

INTERNATIONAL: Indigenous people 'under threat' from Asia clean energy push (Thomson Reuters Foundation), India to be biggest driver of global energy demand growth in next two decades - IEA (Reuters, Axios)

• A bridge fuel to nowhere (Register-Guard, Laura Allen op-ed)
• Essential farmworkers deserve pesticide protections (Environmental Health News, Iris Figueroa and Amy K. Liebman)
• Three reasons why Biden shouldn't reopen California's desert energy plan (The Hill, Jim Kenna op-ed)
• How Biden should meet his promise to cut fossil fuel emissions (FT, Lauren Pagel op-ed $)
• Life is 'better in the Bahamas'? Not with an oil rig offshore (The Hill, Patrick Griffin and William Danvers op-ed)
• Capacity as a commodity: A new (but familiar) way of rethinking capacity markets for a clean energy future (Utility Dive, Steve Shparber and Michael Borgatti op-ed)
• Should we dim the sun? Will we even have a choice? (New York Times, Elizabeth Kolbert interview $)
• The Wall Street tax New York needs now (LA Daily News, Michael Kink and Becky Saletan op-ed)

Is It Fair To Say That ExxonMobil Has Murdered Millions Of People With Its Product’s Air Pollution? 

For decades, polluters and their apologists have conducted a concerted campaign to discredit and destroy science they knew showed how burning fossil fuels is a public health threat. (There's even a pithy hashtag!) Then, in the 1990s, when the EPA considered regulating second-hand smoke, the tobacco industry devised a plan to substantially restrict the science EPA could consider when evaluating the public health damage done by pollution — but their plan didn't really gain significant traction within the federal government until the election of Donald Trump. 

Cue the 2016 election: Former tobacco lawyer turned fossil fuel defender Steve Milloy was on an EPA transition team, and laid out his long-smoldering plan to censor science showing that soot kills people. For example, the recently repealed science "transparency" rule (a.k.a. the secret science rule, a.k.a. censoring science) was designed to prohibit the EPA from basing regulations on the results of Havard's Six Cities study, which showed the severe negative health impacts of PM2.5 pollution (super-fine soot from smoke) way back in the '90s, kicking off decades of research and pushback from the industry.

Now there's a new study from Harvard that looks specifically at PM2.5 from fossil fuels, which found that in 2018, fossil fuel pollution caused more than 8 million early deaths — approximately one in five deaths that year. And that’s actually after the number fell from 2012 levels, when the study suggests there were 10.2 million excess deaths from PM2.5 pollution emitted by burning fossil fuels. 

Milloy's already tweeted about how this is fraud and to buy his book to learn more, but the odds are good that the organized denial machinery behind the now-defunct censoring science rule is going to spring into action and attempt to discredit this new study in a slightly more sophisticated way than Milloy’s flat-out denial. 

Because it’s not going to be long before people start to internalize the, quite frankly mind-blowing, fact that fossil fuel pollution was associated with 10 million deaths in a single year, and that there are not that many companies that sold those fossil fuels in the first place. 

In fact, the Carbon Majors report in 2017 found that 71% of fossil fuel pollution comes from just 100 companies, and more than half of the emissions since 1988 came from just 25 fossil fuel producers. ExxonMobil, for example, was the 5th biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions between 1988 and 2015, responsible for 1.98% of total global emissions in that time period. 

That may not sound huge, but what’s 2% of 10 million? Obviously this is just a rough estimate, but 200,000 lives cut short by a single company’s product in a single year is pretty startling. 

So you can be pretty sure ExxonMobil is going to do everything in its formidable power to make sure people aren’t combining these notions and getting the crazy idea that the company’s pollution killed 200,000 people in 2012 alone. After all, if people felt that the company’s profits for that year ($44.9 billion in 2012, just shy of breaking its own world record for highest corporate profit) required the sacrifice of 200,000 lives, some people, especially folks who lost a loved one to a respiratory illness that year, might feel entitled to some sort of restitution for that loss. Not to mention the people who didn't die but were still buried under a mountain of medical debt. Many people might start saying those things. 

Now, to be clear, the new Harvard study is about PM2.5 pollution, and the Carbon Majors report is about greenhouse gas emissions generally from fossil fuels, not PM2.5 specifically. But the Harvard study specifically distinguishes between other sources of PM2.5, and those from fossil fuels — that’s part of what makes it unique. 

Of course, it would probably take considerably more rigorous math than the calculator-app demonstration above to establish any of this with any real certainty or seriousness. And of course, we're not alleging that ExxonMobil murders hundreds of thousands of people every year, and that its billions of dollars in profits have put millions of people into an early grave. And of course, we definitely can't imagine a multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit that drags hypothetical fossil fuel companies through years of discovery about what they knew or didn't know about the impacts of their products.

This is all purely a hypothetical thought exercise. Nobody should ever take legal advice, nor construe any implication of the existence or profer thereof, from the Denier Roundup.

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