FIRST LOOK:

Join Energy Policy Institute at U. Chicago on June 30 for a conversation on the challenges facing the grid. Atlantic reporter Rob Meyer will moderate the discussion with FERC Chair Richard Glick & EPIC Non-Resident Scholar Steve Cicala.

Broken Texas Gas, Coal Plants Cause Electricity Shortfall Amid Massive Heatwave: Dangerously high temperatures are gripping the West with more to life- and grid-threatening heat expected in the coming days. Phoenix hit at least 113°F over the weekend and temperatures from the Southwest to Northern Rockies are forecast to be 15-25°F above average. Texas officials are already asking customers to conserve electricity as the extreme heat, combined with multiple gas and coal plants broken down and offline for repairs, have created an unusual early electricity shortfall just months after widespread blackouts lead to hundreds of deaths across the state. Climate change makes extreme heat and heat waves longer, more frequent, and more intense. Combined with the current climate-fueled megadrought, wildfire danger is also exceptionally high. Nearly 40 million people as far north as the Canadian Border could see triple-digit highs this week, and some parts of Arizona, including Phoenix, could see overnight lows in the 90s, which are often more dangerous because the human body is deprived of its nocturnal cool-down period and and cooling shelters for those without air-conditioners are closed. The heat will also be especially deadly for those who work outside like farmworkers and cannot escape the heat without risking loss of income. (Washington Post $, Earther, NBC, Axios; Tex. gas & coal breakdowns: Forbes, Bloomberg $; Climate Signals background: Extreme heat and heatwaves, Drought, Wildfires)

Virginians Seek To Leverage Environmental Justice Ruling To Block MVP: Community activists in Virginia are continuing their fight against a non-viral public health threat, E&E reports. The already behind-schedule and over-budget Mountain Valley Pipeline would transport gas 303 miles from West Virginia to southern Virginia and potentially an additional 75 miles into North Carolina. A compressor station for that "Southgate Extension" would be located less than half a mile from two other similar facilities and local advocates say the pipeline's developers have failed to prevent disproportionate harm from the compressor station on residents. Last year, a federal appeals court blocked a similar compressor station for the now-defunct Atlantic Coast Pipeline for failing to account for the harm that the compressor’s pollution would inflict on the nearby mostly-Black Union Hill community. Elizabeth Jones and her husband Anderson, who live on land home to generations of Anderson's Black and Native American ancestors and have already had a swath of their land seized for the Mountain Valley pipeline, hope to block it as well. "They have taken part of our century-old farmland," Elizabeth said. "This so-called project has been doing nothing but undermining our property values, our health," she added. "And we need to do something about it." (E&E $)

Court Rulings Relevant To Your Interests: A Minnesota state appeals court ruled in favor of the Line 3 pipeline on Monday, upholding key approvals by state regulators. The three-judge panel found Minnesota’s Public Utility Commission did not act improperly when it granted Enbridge permits concerning the route and "certificate of need" for its controversial tar sands oil pipeline expansion. Pipeline opponents are considering an appeal and are focusing primarily on pushing President Biden to halt the pipeline. Also Monday, the Supreme Court rejected oil companies' petition seeking to have lawsuits brought by San Francisco and Oakland heard in federal, instead of California state courts. Oil companies seeking to evade liability for their role in causing climate change and casting doubt on the science have repeatedly sought to have cases brought by states and municipalities heard in federal court where they believe they will receive a more favorable audience. The Supreme Court's denial of the oil companies' petition to hear the case comes after it ruled in Big Oil's favor on a related but narrow procedural question in BP v. Baltimore last month. (Line 3: AP, MPR, Indian Country Today, Star Tribune $, Minnesota Reformer, Duluth News-Tribune, MinnPost, WDIO, The Hill, Reuters, Bloomberg $, Seeking Alpha; Chevron: E&E $, Reuters, San Francisco Chronicle, Bloomberg $, OilPrice, Seeking Alpha)

(ENVIRONMENTAL) RACISM: Electric trucks alone won’t deliver environmental justice, say neighbors of Chicago warehouse site (Energy News Network)

PROTEST CRACKDOWN: Flying a drone near a pipeline could soon cost you $4,000 in Louisiana (Earther)

MEDIA: Weather Channel’s new forecast: more viewers want climate change news (Variety)

AGENCIES: FEMA official to defend flood insurance changes (E&E $), EPA to revamp Trump-era farmworker protections (E&E $), Haaland wants to restore environmental safeguards for three national monuments (New York Times $)

THE HILL: Dems push tool to counter China: Climate diplomacy (E&E $), Haaland, Granholm to headline more budget hearings (E&E $), high-speed rail getting last minute push in Congress (The Hill)

HOUSE: ESG disclosure, resource bills on floor vote agenda (E&E $), [House Science Committee] sets vote on innovation bills to rival Senate's (E&E $)

SENATE: Collins calls EV users 'free riders' ahead of plan rollout (E&E $)

WHITE HOUSE: Will Biden be forced to give up what some say is his best shot at tackling climate change? (InsideClimate News), Gov. Jay Inslee: “I could not be more delighted” by Biden’s climate action...so far (MSNBC)

INFRASTRUCTURE NEGOTIATIONS: How Democrats are laying the groundwork now for a potential reconciliation bill (CNN), Pelosi confronts ticking clock as senators weigh Biden economic plan (Bloomberg $), infrastructure talks are a 'hot mess,' says Rep. Moore (Bloomberg $)

JOE MANCHIN: Hundreds protest Manchin’s opposition to voting law overhaul (AP), Manchin defends coal-fired plants, expresses concern over 'aggressive' Biden climate goals (Utility Dive)

NO CLIMATE NO DEAL: on infrastructure, the revenge of the climate hawks (Washington Monthly), Dems pan 'last century' climate ideas as talks drag (E&E $), 

ACTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE: Spotlight on underfunded infrastructure causing headaches across the US (NBC), how US infrastructure compares to the rest of the world (Today Show)

POLITICS: 'There is no Planet B': Sharpton and youth rally against climate change (MSNBC), inside the industry-enviro partnership that scored a big climate win on HFCs (Canary Media)

CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: The insidiousness of wiggle words (Earther), G7 offers ‘peanuts’ to developing world, putting climate ambition in doubt (Climate Home), NATO to tackle climate change for first time, summit communique to say (Reuters), rich countries urged to come up with detailed plans to cut emissions (The Guardian), top G7 development banks pledge $80 billion for African firms (Reuters)

CITIES AND STATES AND COUNTIES: Did lawmakers fix Texas’s electric grid? (Texas Monthly), Albany just blew it on climate, again (New York Focus), Colorado’s compromise climate bill demands emissions cuts for electricity, industry and oil and gas (Canary Media), Connecticut neighborhood pushes back against planned fuel cell power plant (Energy News Network), [Pennsylvania] Republicans aim again to block governor’s climate strategy (AP), school bus fleet to go electric in Montgomery County, Maryland (Yale Climate Connections)

CALIFORNIA: Fire risks, rooftop solar to hike power bills for a decade (E&E $), Scientists are trying to make California forests more fire resilient (Bloomberg $)

FERC: FERC commissioners spar over offshore wind 'trigger prices' (E&E $)

NOMINEES & CONFIRMATIONS: Biden land management pick [Tracy Stone-Manning] faces GOP scrutiny over decades-old tree spiking case (The Hill, E&E $), committee to question Biden EPA, Commerce picks (E&E $), Senate sets vote on D.C. Circuit pick, other nominees (E&E $)

IMPACTS: Remember snow days? Today’s kids get heat days. (Grist), what 50 years of data from a backyard weather station can teach us about climate change (Yale Climate Connections)

DROUGHT: Drought causes Farmington [New Mexico] to issue water shortage advisory (Navajo Times), first of many? Drought-stricken Utah town halts development (E&E $)

WILDFIRES: 2 homes destroyed in Southern California brush fire (AP), ongoing Arizona wildfire leads to new evacuation order (AP), Arizona Legislature to hold special wildfire funding session (AP), Rocky Mountain forests burning more now than any time in the past 2,000 years (The Conversation)

HURRICANES: Tropical Storm Bill gaining strength; Claudette could soon form in Gulf (Broward Sun-Sentinel, Washington Post $, Broward Sun-Sentinel, New York Times $)

FRENCH WINE: Costly frost in France attributed to climate change (AP)

DESPERATE TIMES...: How to save the Salton Sea: proposal to import seawater across California desert is biggest since Hoover Dam (USA Today)

RENEWABLES: GOP support for renewables plunges (E&E $), Biden’s offshore wind bonanza is coming to New York and New Jersey (Grist), Erthos eliminates trackers in utility-scale solar, mounts PV panels on the ground (Canary Media)

BATTERIES: A power plant in Maryland ditches coal for batteries, a first for the US (Canary Media)

STORAGE: Storage providers face bankability challenge as customers prefer Tesla, other tier 1 battery suppliers (Utility Dive)

OIL & GAS: LNG proponents say exports could reduce emissions, but critics call it a bridge to nowhere (New Mexico Political Report), oil price hits pandemic high as investors bet on green energy (Wall Street Journal $), Shell mulls sale of U.S.’s largest oil field during climate push (Bloomberg $)

PLASTICS: A drone army is rising against ocean plastics (Bloomberg $)

PIPELINES: Keystone XL is history. What about the other pipelines? (Grist)

COAL (COUNTRY): Coal plants rush to flush under Trump EPA rule (E&E $), how team EU-US can get the world to kick coal (Energy Monitor), Midwest coal plant in crosshairs of Illinois energy bill (E&E $), a fading coal county bets on schools, but there’s one big hitch (New York Times $)

UTILITIES: Utilities to DOE: more information, not new regulations, needed to secure the grid (Utility Dive)

EVs: Study shows where EVs do — and don't — slash CO2 (E&E $)

CHILL OUT: Your Netflix habit has a carbon footprint, but not a big one (Bloomberg $)

AVIATION: GE, Safran developing cleaner energy aircraft engines that could work with hybrid technology, hydrogen (CNBC, Bloomberg $)

AGRICULTURE: New powder could cut cow burp emissions. Will FDA say OK? (E&E $)

BUSINESS: Home appliance manufacturers can help address the climate crisis (Grist)

FINANCE: ECB's Schnabel wants bond-buying green tilt (Reuters), Google, Facebook, Amazon and more urge SEC to mandate regular climate reports (CNBC, Axios), where companies and politicians stand on the SEC climate risk disclosure (CNBC)

BITCOIN: Bitcoin tops $40,000 after Musk says Tesla could use it again (Reuters, The Guardian)

INTERNATIONAL: Not just another net-zero idea, IEA plan grips world (E&E $), trees or tourists? Jamaica's COVID recovery push threatens green aims (Thomson Reuters Foundation)

• Fighting Line 3 from a queer, Indigenous perspective (Atmos, Big Wind interview)
• Water-poor Valley communities have rare chance to get their broken systems fixed (Fresno Bee, Carolina Garcia and Sandra Chavez op-ed)
• The real solar-panel price crisis hasn’t begun yet (Bloomberg, David Fickling column $)
• How the health sector can lead on climate, health, and equity (The Hill, Gary Cohen op-ed)
• How are our cities going to look in a rapidly heating world? It won’t be long and 50C will be normal (The Guardian, James Bradley op-ed)
• Orsted chief warns on seabed leasing drought for wind farms (FT, Mads Nipper interview $)
• With Trump gone, NATO wages war on climate threat (Reuters, Sabine Siebold and Robin Emmott analysis)
• The rush to ‘go electric’ comes with a hidden cost: destructive lithium mining (The Guardian, Thea Riofrancos op-ed)
• A game-changer? G7 climate pledge could shift Asia's coal policy (Thomson Reuters Foundation, Beh Lih Yi & Michael Taylor analysis)

Deniers Claim To Want Debate, Threaten Lawsuits When They Get It

Last week, while talking about how often climate deniers are also fantastically gullible when it comes to conspiracies about coronavirus and other issues, we mentioned that Tony Heller was one such example of how “contrarians are often just habitually wrong and jumping from one fashionable issue to the next in their quest to make themselves feel smarter than someone.”

Turns out that Heller is hungry for any sign that someone outside his echochamber is listening, and produced an eight-minute video in response to the four sentences we wrote. He doubles down on his denial, but then cranks it up a notch — with “crank” being the operative word.

Apparently the fact that we didn’t reach out to get Heller’s side before writing (as though we’re not responding directly to his “side” of the story in the first place) he says, without a hint of sarcasm or hyperbole, is just like when a white mob lynched George Atwood in 1933.

Clearly Heller is a very well-balanced and serious individual who deserves to have his conspiracies (about a global cabal of climate scientists secretly tampering with data in a way that’s also somehow totally transparent for anyone like Heller to see) given all the respect they deserve. (None.) 

That said, we have addressed the substance of his conspiratorial claims about the temperature record and whinings about censorship, starting nearly seven years ago and repeatedly since. So it’s not like his position is unassailable. In fact, even his fellow travelers don’t give it much credence — it was debunked at Judith Curry’s blog back in 2014, which was years after Anthony Watts booted him off of Watts Up With That.  

If even deniers can see that engaging seriously with unserious people like Heller is a waste of time, it’s a pretty obvious lesson. But still, it’s always helpful for new audiences to see just how repeatedly wrong deniers are. For example, The Tyee recently published Sean Holman’s incredibly detailed fact-checking of Patrick Moore’s recent climate denial book. It clocks in at nearly 7,000 words, and tackles each of the eight “Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom” that give Moore’s book its title. 

Moore’s guilty of all the standard disinfo tactics, for example Holman reveals how Moore’s book cherry-picks out of date graphs, misrepresents sources so that a graph becomes a “reverse” image of real rates of extinction, for example, and makes claims that one expert described as easily “disproved with about 30 seconds of Googling.” 

While many experts were willing to spend their time helping Holman trace Moore’s lies, others were a bit more blunt. “It would be an endless waste of time,” one told him, adding, “I would have to write a book to debunk” everything in Moore’s book. 

Throughout his fact-check, Holman gives space to Moore to offer his “side” of the story, and for the most part Moore doesn’t engage with the critiques like a scientific skeptic might if it were a justifiable claim. Instead he just doubles down on his denial. 

Which is a standard tactic for deniers who actually get a taste of the debate they so passionately claim to want, because really all they’re after is an opportunity to spread disinformation by saying the same wrong things over and over again. 

And when that fails, threaten a lawsuit! That’s the standard response of (not-Lord) Christopher Monckton, longtime sender-of-threatening-letters and perhaps the only man in the world to have claimed to have found a cure for both the common cold and AIDS. (Unclear why, then, those things still exist.) 

The latest target is Independent Australia’s Steve Bishop, who recently wrote a column calling him Lord of the Lies on climate change. Monckton, who falsely claimed to be a member of the UK House of Lords until they had to send him a letter demanding he stop, responded with a detailed letter alleging libel, and demanding the piece be removed and his own published. 

And we can see why! Bishop not only makes clear that 20 of Monckton’s talking points are lies, labeling them as such, but he also shows how incoherent Monckton’s claims are, like that temperatures are only rising a little, but also that they’re cooling. Even more devastating is that Bishop points out that while Monckton’s schtick is to claim he was an advisor to Margaret Thatcher, others had a slightly different perception of his time in government. Thatcher herself thanked someone else for being her science advisor, while a minister in the Thatcher government said Monckton was more “a bag carrier in Mrs. Thatcher’s office.” 

Ouch!

But we can see here that while deniers claim that deplatforming liars is censorship, they refuse to engage in good faith, and it’s their fellow deniers who are literally threatening libel lawsuits.

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