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Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal Omits Key Climate Policies, Markey Says More To Come: The bipartisan legislation currently under Senate consideration falls far short of President Biden's commitment to transforming the fossil-fueled underpinnings of the U.S. economy, the AP reports. [Additional coverage is below. — Ed.] The deal includes hundreds of billions in total to support climate resilience, electric grid updates, and harden infrastructure against cyberattacks and climate change — as well as more than half a trillion for new public works projects. It does not, however, establish a Clean Electricity Standard nor a Civilian Climate Corps and includes just $7.5 billion for EV charging stations. Environmental advocates slammed the bill. “It is clear that the deal does not meet the moment on climate or justice,″ said Tiernan Sittenfeld, a senior vice president of the League of Conservation Voters. Others, like Janet Redman of Greenpeace USA, were pithier. "This looks like the Exxon Infrastructure Bill," she said. Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey said the bill was "a good start," adding Democrats would pass a separate $3.5 trillion package without GOP support to "deal with the climate crisis in the magnitude, scope and scale that’s required." (AP)

Geothermal Sector Offers Greener Pasture For Oil And Gas Workers: While oil and gas executives take taxpayer bailouts and lay off workers, the geothermal sector is emerging as an opportunity for oil and gas workers to apply their skills with minimal retraining, Inside Climate News reports. Geothermal energy companies are using drilling technology and methods developed by the oil and gas industry to more effectively harness heat from deep underground, and are looking to grow. While some aspects of the solar and wind sectors lend themselves to oil and gas workers seeking (or forced) to move out of a declining sector responsible for enormous climate pollution, Jody Robins, a former oil drilling engineer who now works as a geothermal drilling engineer for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said oil and gas workers "naturally … gravitate towards geothermal" because it's a better fit for their skills. (InsideClimate News)

Chinese Flooding (Official) Death Toll Increased: The official death toll of flooding in China's Henan province last month rose sharply to over 300, officials there announced Monday. Dozens are still missing. Torrential rains dropped a year's worth of rain in just three days, setting off the flooding officials described as being at least a one-in-1,000 years event. Extreme precipitation and the flooding it can cause are both worsened by human-caused climate change. Some of the delayed accounting of the disaster's human toll was ascribed to slow reporting, including from smaller cities in the province, though the New York Times reports Chinese officials have also been slow or reluctant to release full death tolls of similar disasters. (New York Times $, Axios, Bloomberg $, Al Jazeera, AP; Climate Signals background: Extreme precipitation increase)

INFRASTRUCTURE BILL: Bipartisan infrastructure bill reveals Manchin's influence (Politico Pro $), climate in the infrastructure bill: $73 billion for the electric grid but less for electric vehicles and lead pipes. (New York Times $), $1 trillion infrastructure bill pours money into long-delayed needs (New York Times $, New York Times $), bipartisan deal attracts energy, environment amendments (E&E $), in the infrastructure bill: a substantial investment in resilience. (New York Times $), Senate pushes ahead with $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill (Reuters), Biden says bipartisan deal will solve the country’s lead problem. It won’t. (Politico), climate infrastructure deal would require study on job losses from Keystone's end (The Hill), Senate infrastructure bill offers billions for carbon capture, hydrogen projects (Politico Pro $), Senate poised to deliver infrastructure win for Biden agenda (Bloomberg $), infrastructure bill would boost Metro funding, reopen door to Baltimore’s Red Line project (Washington Post $), hydrogen plan isn’t very green under US infrastructure deal (Bloomberg $)

CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: With time ticking down, hope is waning for a climate deal (Bloomberg $)

LINE 3: A pipeline of abuse (Atmos)

SCIENCE: IPCC aims to elevate women’s voices in climate science (E&E $)

OILY $PON$OR$HIP: Shell sponsored a museum exhibit on climate solutions. There were strings attached. (Grist)

AGENCIES: Federal employees and the public express concern over reports of political interference in science (CNN), fossil fuel groups step up lobbying of SEC to dilute climate reporting rules (FT $)

EPA: Wanted: EPA carbon rule that can survive in court (E&E $)

EXECUTIVE BRANCH: SEC may require climate risk disclosures in expanded 10-Ks: Gensler (Utility Dive)

THE HILL: Congress goes on vacation to their homes as evictions start back up (NewsOne), Senate to release Energy-Water, other spending bills (E&E $)

WHITE HOUSE: Everything we know about Biden's mysterious CES (E&E $), Biden administration says infrastructure deal prioritizes the Black community (NewsOne)

NOMINEES & CONFIRMATIONS: Committee to question 3 more EPA nominees this week (E&E $), committee to review DOE science office agenda, nominees (E&E $), hearing set on USDA natural resources nominee (E&E $)

CITIES AND STATES: Social cost of methane changes the equation for Colorado utility policy (Energy News Network), despite limited participation, advocates see potential for Northeast transportation cap-and-invest plan (Utility Dive)

CALIFORNIA: California May spend billions on permanent relief shelters as sweltering heat blankets the state (PBS NewsHour), California NIMBYs threaten Biden’s clean energy goals (Bloomberg $)

FERC: How FERC’s environmental justice push might backfire (E&E $)

IMPACTS: Their town wiped out by a mudslide, people of La Reina mourn (AP), what’s driving the huge blooms of brown seaweed piling up on Florida and Caribbean beaches? (The Conversation), what will the Earth be like in 500 years? (The Conversation), will these places survive a collapse? don’t bet on it, skeptics say (New York Times $)

HEAT: In heat emergency, southern Europe scrambles for resources (AP)

DROUGHT: Monsoon moisture brings drought relief, but New Mexico may see a dry winter (New Mexico Political Report), withering drought threatens Mexico's ability to borrow money (E&E $)

WILDFIRES: how years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western megafires of today (The Conversation), smoke from intense Siberian wildfires reaches North Pole (Axios)

WILDFIRES, TURKEY: Turkey battles wildfires for 6th day; 10,000 are evacuated (AP), as wildfires rage in Turkey and southern Europe, local officials plead for help (Washington Post $, The Guardian), wildfires blaze on in drought-hit Turkey as criticism grows (Thomson Reuters Foundation, Bloomberg $, AP)

HAWAII: Record wildfire burns amid drought on Hawaii’s Big Island (AP), Maui residents rail against spike in tourism during water shortage: ‘Stop coming’ to Hawaii (Washington Post $)

HURRICANES: New tropical storm joins hurricane over eastern Pacific (AP)

RENEWABLES: Report details blistering pace of renewables needed for net zero (E&E $), renewables grow at record pace. It's still too slow (E&E $), clean energy, climate spending means 260K rural jobs — report (E&E $), the solar industry has a supply problem (Canary Media), the US needs to build more, faster to reach net zero (Bloomberg $), two US companies seek extension of Trump-era solar tariffs (Reuters)

ELECTRIFICATION: A Florida city wanted to move away from fossil fuels. The state just made sure it couldn’t. (Grist and ADAPT Florida and Floodlight), towns trying to ban natural gas face resistance in their push for all-electric homes (Wall Street Journal $)

BUILDINGS: The fight to change US building codes (InsideClimate News)

EFFICIENCY: Why energy efficiency matters to climate change (Bloomberg $)

HYDROGEN: China's utilities face rising H2 coal bill as mine safety checks crimp supply (Reuters), India's top carmaker sees hydrogen as 'interesting alternative' (Reuters)

UTILITIES: As Indiana coal plants close, advocates say gas power should not replace them (Energy News Network), phaseout of natural gas may spike utility bills — report (E&E $), power shutoffs should be last resort, regulators warn (AP)

WATER: San Antonio built a pipeline to rural Central Texas to increase its water supply. Now local landowners say their wells are running dry. (Texas Tribune)

EVs: Revel launches all-electric, all-employee ride-sharing service in NY (Axios), recycled batteries and the search for a circular economy (FT $), Tesla works with suppliers to source alternative chips for EVs amid semiconductor shortage (Utility Dive), what if highways were electric? Germany is testing the idea. (New York Times $)

ZOOMING TO CLOSE THAT DEAL: Business travel might be going out of style (Axios)

RELIGION: United Church of Christ: prioritize the Green New Deal (E&E $)

FOOD: ‘Plants are our allies’: chef Rodrigo Pacheco on climate-proofing food (CNN), how climate change is steering the future of food (FT $)

AGRICULTURE: A mega-dairy is transforming Arizona’s aquifer and farming lifestyles (High Country News)

NATURAL ARCHITECTURE: The seas are rising. Could oysters help? (The New Yorker $)

E-WASTE: Can you recycle a hard drive? Google is quietly trying to find out (Grist)

SHIPPING: Maritime shipping causes more greenhouse gases than airlines (Yale Climate Connections)

CARBON PRICING: Taxing climate-harming imports is hard. Here's one approach (E&E $)

CARBON CAPTURE: Oil majors report profits, eye carbon capture growth (E&E $), Pipeline giant, companies plan industrial CCS projects (E&E $)

INTERNATIONAL: Caribbean's St. Lucia seeks climate cash to tackle storms, stinky seaweed (Thomson Reuters Foundation), Europe’s biggest private forest owner defends harvesting strategy (FT $), four key environmental battlegrounds on the agenda as Australia’s parliament resumes (The Guardian), UK pushes floating wind farms in drive to meet climate targets (FT $)

• To fight climate change, don't neglect agricultural R&D (The Hill, Caroline Grunewald op-ed)
• Unvaxxed, unmasked and putting our kids at risk (New York Times, Jessica Valenti op-ed $)
• Forest Service putting national forests in peril (The Hill, Jim Furnish op-ed)
• Business can be a force for change on climate (FT, John Browne op-ed $)
• Drought is putting Northern California water supply at risk (Mercury News and East Bay Times Editorial Boards)
• ‘Greenflation’ threatens to derail climate change action (FT, Ruchir Sharma op-ed $)

Greentrolling Highlights What Greenwashing Disguises, Which Is Why It’s A Climate Solution

Greenwashing isn’t new - it’s been a practice regularly used by corporations and businesses for decades to make sustainability claims to cover a questionable environmental record. Chevron has been one of the best. In the 1980s, Chevron commissioned an expensive PR campaign to convince the public of its environmental bonafides. Known as “People Do”, the campaign touted imagery of Chevron employees protecting bears, butterflies, sea turtles to keep consumers from thinking about their destructive practices. Of course, during this time, the company was also violating the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and spilling oil into wildlife refuges. 

These days, oil and natural gas companies have taken to social platforms to uplift their “woke” brands, trying to improve their reputation with The Youths by producing flashy YouTube videos and Instagram pics for their own channels, and recruiting social media influencers to peddle their goods in sponsored posts. The strategy relies on unsupported, exaggerated or misleading claims to paint corporate action as being greener than it is.

But not everyone is keen to engage with the oil industry’s propaganda, and the two-way street of social media interaction has created a hero to match greenwashing’s villainy: greentrolling. The unsubtle art of telling polluters to delete their accounts is having something of a moment lately, describes the Washington Post’s Taylor Telford in a recent story.

On Twitter, Shell and other companies' poorly conceived engagement-baiting social media tricks, like polling the Twitterverse to see what us measly individuals are planning to do to reduce emissions, have gotten not quite the response the company might have hoped for — but exactly what they should expect: A snarky pile-on from youth leaders like Greta Thunberg and Jamie Margolin, activist groups, scientists, and even AOC. The New York Representative told Shell she is “willing to hold you accountable for lying about climate change for 30 years when you secretly knew the entire time that fossil fuels emissions would destroy our planet. 

Mary Annaïse Heglar, podcaster and essayist, is “the self-proclaimed 'Godmother of Greentrolling' and co-host of the podcast 'Hot Take,'” started reporting Big Oil ads for promoting bodily harm, before commenting back on the asinine corporate PR content. As a sign of her impact, last summer, she got blocked by ExxonMobil on Twitter, and her heart “burst like the Grinch.” Now, she told Telford, it’s part of her routine, every day she “wake[s] up ad see if they said something stupid.” 

Oil companies are obviously more worried about demand dropping, and the pressure is on these companies to significantly cut their production, than they are about some snarky tweets. And of course trolling isn’t quite as effective as the potential outcomes in the latest lawsuit against Exxon, Shell, BP, and API.  And of course a Dutch court recently ordered Shell to cut its greenhouse gas emissions significantly faster than it had planned.

So greentrolling may just be a channel for yelling into the void, but with social media feeds packed with content about extreme weather and increased effects of climate change raging through much of the world, yelling at the very actors misleading the public and propping up a carbon-intensive and extractive economy is a cheap and easy way to make their ad spends less effective. 

It’s also a great way to do something with all that pent up climate anxiety and existential dread, journalism student Elia Griffen wrote in the New School Free Press, calling it a “release valve.” And, we might add, it’s a great way to talk about climate change online, in a humorous way that might attract new non-climate-concerned audiences within your own networks, while also building solidarity with the activists out there also fighting the good fight.

As Heglar tweeted last week, “If you’re upset about the fire in the ocean, the fires on the West Coast, the hurricane in the Atlantic, the floods in Detroit, the heatwave, or—ya know—the casual events of this week, remember that @Chevron @bp_plc @shell @conocophillips @APIenergy @exxonmobil are all on Twitter”.  

Happy trolling!

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