FIRST LOOK:

Watch: 'This is Loss and Damage - Who Pays?' — Climate activist, Vanessa Nakate, and Loss and Damage experts, Professor Saleem Huq and Harjeet Singh, offer a compelling way out of the L&D finance stalemate: an international mechanism funded by the fossil fuel polluters who caused the crisis.

Manchin Seeks To Gut Key Climate Provision From Infrastructure Bill As West Virginia Hit By Worsening Floods: Climate change is driving increasing flooding in West Virginia, overwhelming aging infrastructure and dumping raw sewage into waterways, the New York Times reports, and West Virginians will suffer disproportionately as climate change continues to worsen. Meanwhile, their Senator, Democrat Joe Manchin has told the White House he strongly opposes a key, though relatively inexpensive, provision of the Build Back Better Act, according to reports from numerous outlets. The Clean Energy Performance Program, to which Manchin objects, incentivizes utilities to increase the amount of clean energy they supply to their customers. Manchin's opposition puts the inclusion of the CEPP in the final legislation into serious jeopardy, and the reports were met with harsh condemnation from climate advocates. “This is absolutely the most important climate policy in the package,” climate and energy policy expert Leah Stokes told the New York Times. “We fundamentally need it to meet our climate goals. That’s just the reality. And now we can’t. So this is pretty sad.” Manchin has expressed concern about the overall cost of the bill, which is paid for by closing tax loopholes and increasing rates on wealthy individuals and corporations, but the CEPP costs just $150 billion out of the initial $3.5 trillion proposal. Manchin, who once shot a bullet through climate legislation in a TV ad, pulled down more than $400,000 of his $1.6 million Q3 fundraising haul from the oil and gas industry. (WV Flooding: New York Times $; Manchin CEPP Opposition: New York Times $, CNN, The Guardian, Mother Jones, Gizmodo, NPR, Reuters; Response: The Hill; Legislative prospects: Washington Post $, E&E News, Wall Street Journal $, NPR, Wall Street Journal $, New York Times $, Wall Street Journal $, Axios, CBS, The Hill; Manchin fundraising: Bloomberg $; Climate Signals background: Flooding, Extreme precipitation increase)

Indigenous-Led Activists Call On Biden To Halt Fossil Projects: A total of 655 activists were arrested last week on Piscataway and Nacotchtank (Anacostan) land in what is now Washington D.C., organizers of the Indigenous-led “People vs. Fossil Fuels” demonstrations tallied. Marching under a banner declaring "We did not vote for fossil fuels," activists called on President Biden to halt his support for fossil fuel pipelines. Biden could prevent 1.6 billion metric tons of climate-heating pollution every year by way of regulatory authority over proposed oil and gas infrastructure projects, according to a new report from Oil Change International, and a group of House Democrats, including T&I Chair Peter DeFazio, called on Biden to end the Trump-era fast-tracking of oil and gas pipelines. In addition to the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline across what is now Minnesota, such pipelines also include the already over-budget and behind-schedule Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would scythe near and across Indigenous and Black communities, bringing dangerous man camps with it, if its "Southgate Extension" is approved, Grist reports. “It’s ridiculous. [Biden] promised, just like they’ve done in the past, ‘We’ll talk about it, we’ll bring it to the table.’ Where’s our seat?″ Isabelle Knife, 22, a member of the Yankton Sioux tribe of South Dakota, told the AP. “We haven’t had a seat. We haven’t been heard,″ Knife added. “It takes youth to be on the frontlines. It takes us to put our bodies on the line.” (Protests: AP, The Hill, Democracy Now, WBUR, InsideClimate News, E&E $, The Hill; OCI report: Grist; House Dems: E&E $; MVP: Grist)

Shalanda Baker Confirmation Held Up By GOP Senator: The Sierra Club demanded Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) end his block on the quick confirmation of Shalanda Baker to serve as the assistant secretary for the Office of Economic Impact and Diversity in the Department of Energy, E&E reports. Baker, a Black woman, already serves as a senior advisor at DOE helping to implement President Biden's directive to direct 40% of climate investments to historically excluded communities. Lee, a white man, who has previously stated "the solution to climate change … is to fall in love, get married and have some kids," previously accused Baker of "denigrating the very concept of the competitive markets." Lee's hold on Baker's confirmation could necessitate lengthy parliamentary procedures even though her confirmation hearing generated little controversy. (E&E $)

(ENVIRONMENTAL) RACISM: The biomass industry expands across the South, thanks in part to UK subsidies. Critics say it’s not ‘carbon neutral’ (InsideClimate News), Michigan in the middle of water crisis (ABC), Biden call for work at polluted port riles EJ activists (E&E News)

COP26: Boris Johnson’s climate credibility at stake in run-up to COP26 summit (The Guardian), China, coal and COP26: can the world’s biggest emitter give up its dirty habit? (The Guardian), COP26: China's Xi Jinping unlikely to attend, UK PM told (BBC, Reuters), definition of success at UN Climate Summit is in flux (Axios), Obama to attend Glasgow climate summit, meet with youth activists (Reuters, The Hill, Democracy Now)

SO, ABOUT THAT…: Banks promised to cut funding for arctic oil drilling. Money flowed anyway. (Wall Street Journal $)

CLIMATE LITIGATION: Australia fights court ruling of a climate duty of care (AP)

CLIMATE RETALIATION: A US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him (The Guardian)

AGRICULTURE: As masses of plaintiffs pursue Roundup cancer compensation, migrant farmworkers are left out (Environmental Health News), Mid-Atlantic farms find ways to survive and thrive amid climate change and extreme weather (Washington Post $), on the edge of the Amazon, Manoki people grow soy and fight for land rights (Climate Home)

FOSSIL VOLATILITY: Gas crisis prompts fresh proposals from EU (Wall Street Journal $), India's electricity demand picks up in October as coal shortage lingers (Reuters), behind the energy crisis: fossil fuel investment drops, and renewables aren’t ready (Wall Street Journal $)

ACTIVISM: Gen Z on how to save the world: young climate activists speak out (The Guardian), ‘the world is burning’: how Australia’s longest-serving fire chief became a climate champion (The Guardian), ‘for all families and gender identities’: WNBA union denounces Texas abortion ban in New York Times ad (The 19th* News), ‘we all have a role’: more than 260 Australian rules footballers sign up to climate campaign (The Guardian), climate activist confronts Shell CEO: “you are directly responsible for climate deaths” (Democracy Now, Teen Vogue), inside Insulate Britain: on the road with the disruptive climate protesters (The Guardian)

INFRASTRUCTURE BILL(S): Biden’s plans raise questions about what U.S. can afford not to do (New York Times $), what’s in Democrats’ budget reconciliation plan—from social programs to climate measures to taxes (Wall Street Journal $)

AGENCIES: Biden forges plan to tackle climate-driven financial perils (E&E $), NASA is prepping for the ravages of climate change (Mother Jones), U.S. overhauls flood insurance to meet rising climate change risks (Thomson Reuters Foundation)

EPA: EPA unveils plan to address tribal water woes (E&E News)

DOT: Buttigieg warns Manchin of resistance to Biden’s climate plan: ‘It will cost lives’ (The Guardian), Buttigieg: climate change legislation 'a maintenance issue for the planet' (NBC)

HOUSE: Republicans bash bill to change offensive landmark names (E&E News)

SENATE: U.S. Senator Manchin slams Bernie Sanders in battle over Biden spending plan (Reuters), as budget bill hangs in limbo, Kyrsten Sinema heads to Europe (New York Times $, The Guardian, The Hill), Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema received the legal maximum of donations from several known GOP donors, new FEC filings show (Business Insider, Mother Jones), Kyrsten Sinema's campaign just spent $1,180 at a winery. The committee called it 'meeting expenses,' but the winery offered different details. (Business Insider)

WHITE HOUSE: White House unveils climate finance road map, highlights lending and budget pledges (Reuters, The Hill), Kerry says legislation not essential to climate goals (E&E News), obstacles Biden could face in changing approach to climate cost-benefit analysis (Yale Climate Connections), Biden honors fallen officers as infrastructure negotiations continue (Today Show), Harris to discuss drought, climate change at Lake Mead (AP)

POLITICS: Hispanic organizations call for Latino climate justice in reconciliation (The Hill), as energy prices climb, Biden's climate plans become a tougher sell (Houston Chronicle), pressure grows for breakthrough in Biden agenda talks (The Hill), crunch time: Biden faces critical next 2 weeks for agenda (AP)

ELECTIONS: Virginia race looms as dark cloud over Biden's agenda (The Hill)

CITIES AND STATES: New Orleans' Black communities seek more green investment (E&E $), environmental groups don’t like North Carolina’s new energy law, despite its emission-cutting goals (InsideClimate News)

CALIFORNIA: California scrambles to find electricity to offset plant closures (Wall Street Journal $)

FERC: FERC weighs grid plan that could revolutionize clean energy (E&E News), Southern, Duke SEEM proposal takes effect as FERC deadlocks on market plan (Utility Dive)

IMPACTS: ‘Ghost forests’ are an eerie sign of sea-level rise (Yale Climate Connections), at Alaska’s most popular national park, climate change threatens the only road in and out (Washington Post $), how the Amazon rainforest is faring under climate change (NPR), massive rift detected in Arctic’s ‘last refuge of ice’ (Earther), Lake Superior is among the fastest-warming lakes on the planet. Climate change may be the culprit behind its algae blooms, too. (Chicago Tribune)

FLOODING: Flood insurance rates are spiking for many, to account for climate risk (NPR), is your flooded basement tax deductible? Congress will decide (Wall Street Journal $)

DROUGHT: California residents getting deliveries, drilling deeper wells to get water (NBC), despite a punishing drought, San Diego has water. It wasn't easy. (New York Times $), more rain expected for Hawaii, but drought may persist (AP), why you should pray for the droughts to end (The Daily Show with Trevor Noah)

WILDFIRES: California’s Alisal Fire signals that fall wildfire season is underway (Grist)

HURRICANES: 2 dead in Texas flash flood from Hurricane Pamela remnants (AP)

CAFFEINE: Eco-friendly, lab-grown coffee is on the way, but it comes with a catch (The Guardian)

RENEWABLES: Big Oil wants to be Big Wind. Can drillers be trusted? (E&E News), advocates cheer Gulf wind proposal but say we shouldn't forget the birds and whales (Houston Chronicle), solar’s breathtaking price plunge and dizzying generation growth (Canary Media), Empire Wind pushes opening of New York's first offshore wind farm to 2026 (Utility Dive), how to build an offshore wind farm — in 4 steps (E&E $), Maryland offshore wind plans expose fight over renewable credits (E&E $), new report: private sector investment in U.S. offshore wind will soar to $109 billion by 2030 (Clean Technica, Recharge News, offshoreWIND.biz), secret trade war stirs fears of ‘high and rising’ threat to solar (E&E News)

"RENEWABLES": Under guise of climate benefit, manure is more valuable than milk at California dairies (Fresno Bee)

BATTERIES: Why EV fast-charging stations are going big on batteries (Canary Media)

BUILDINGS: The building blocks of net-zero homes (Energy Monitor)

LNG: China looks to lock in U.S. liquefied natural gas in energy crunch (Reuters)

OIL & GAS: Oil companies begin setting environmental goals amid scrutiny over climate change (Houston Chronicle), shutting down old oil rigs is harder—and more expensive—than it sounds (TIME)

SOCAL OIL SPILL: After oil spill, advocates call for new California marine sanctuary (E&E News)

ORPHANED WELLS: Abandoned wells are a huge climate problem (Washington Post $)

PLASTICS: Nearly 20,000 pounds of trash removed from one of the biggest accumulations of ocean plastic in the world (CBS)

PIPELINES: Supreme Court rebuffs request from St. Louis gas pipeline company (The Hill)

HYDROGEN: Hydrogen heating & cooking would cost homeowners $100,000+ extra over 15 years (Clean Technica)

UTILITIES: Midwest's largest utility [Commonwealth Edison] names new CEO [Gil Quiniones] (E&E $), Rocky Mountain Power's distributed battery grid management system puts Utah 'years ahead' of California (Utility Dive), Southern California Edison eyes building electrification filing later this year (Utility Dive)

GRID: Amazon, DOE, PJM urge FERC to support proactive transmission planning for an evolving grid (Utility Dive)

EVs: Toyota, Stellantis to build EV-battery factories in the US (Wall Street Journal $)

CARBON REMOVAL: Company announces massive Louisiana hydrogen, CCS project (E&E $)

ROYALTY: Costa Rica, Milan among winners of Prince William's Earthshot environmental prize (Reuters, AP, New York Times $), fine, the monarchy is good (just this one time) (Earther)

INSURRECTION, AIDING AND ABETTING: Prosecutors: Capitol cop told Jan. 6 rioter to hide evidence (AP)

SHIPPING: Green investing looks to clean up the maritime industry (Wall Street Journal $)

BITCOIN: Bitcoin miners tap hydropower as environmental criticism grows (Wall Street Journal $), Bitcoin-mining power plant raises ire of environmentalists (AP)

IN MEMORIAM: Pioneer of attribution science Geert Jan van Oldenborgh dies, aged 59 (Climate Home, Bloomberg $, AP)

WILDLIFE: Sea otters are adorable stewards of underwater sea grass meadows (HuffPost), to improve wildfire resistance, researchers look to beavers (NPR)

INTERNATIONAL: Eight years, 20 policies: how Australia’s leaders have fumbled and dithered on climate (The Guardian), German Greens agree to start formal talks on new government (AP), Saudi Arabia is building a tourism resort based on an oil rig to try to make destroying the planet cool (Earther)

• How Big Oil killed our political imagination (Earther, ABCs of Big Oil podcast)
• Big Tobacco got caught in a lie by Congress. Now it’s the oil industry’s turn (The Guardian, Mark Hertsgaard commentary)
• Why the world’s rich nations must pay for climate damage (Yale Environment 360, Bill McKibben commentary)
• The oil spill in California lends urgency to demand for Indigenous land stewards (Truthout, Charles Sepulveda & Angela Mooney D’Arcy op-ed)
• Tomlinson: There's no energy crisis that higher fossil fuel prices will not fix (Houston Chronicle, Chris Tomlinson column)
• Growing BIPOC youth-led climate movement is the force Occupy could have been (Truthout, Dany Sigwalt op-ed)
• Biden suddenly loves frackers (Wall Street Journal, Editorial Board $)
• Entergy failures threaten New Orleans' future (Utility Dive, Jesse George op-ed)
• After Hurricane Ida, Louisianians offer bold visions for climate resilience (Truthout, Jessica Dandridge interview)
• Pramila Jayapal won’t let the Biden presidency fail (New York Times, Michelle Goldberg column $)
• The host of COP26 needs to be a master of diplomacy. Unfortunately, it’s Boris Johnson (The Guardian, Andrew Rawnsley op-ed)
• Defining diversity: why it’s necessary to distinguish between segregation and integration (NewsOne, Nicholas Ensley Mitchell op-ed)
• The climate mob is coming for LNG exports (Washington Examiner, Paul Tice op-ed)
• The other destructive Columbus (Environmental Health News, Peter Dykstra column)
• Biden cannot declare victory on climate without one of these policies (The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer analysis)
• Biden’s power over energy (Wall Street Journal, Tristan Abbey op-ed $)
• There’s nothing green about dams. The federal infrastructure bill should tear them down (The Colorado Sun, Yvon Chouinard op-ed)
• Don’t let the austerity hacks get their hooks in the climate debate (New Republic, Jason Linkins op-ed)
• Regulators can no longer rubber-stamp expansion of the oil and gas industry (The Hill, Dana Johnson and Jean Su op-ed)
• Finally understand Kyrsten Sinema in 360 easy steps (Washington Post, Alexandra Petri column $)
• This is not Kyrsten Sinema just pissing off the left (Daily Beast, New Abnormal podcast)

Facebook and Other Social Media Sites Challenged to Reign in Climate Disinfo, Like Lomborg’s Electric Car Lies

On Friday a coalition of environmental and tech accountability organizations sent an open letter to leadership of Facebook, Twitter, and other major social media platforms, calling on them to protect their users from the fossil fuel industry’s false advertising climate disinformation. 

“As we approach November’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26),” the letter reads, “it’s never been more clear that we are running out of time to avoid the catastrophic impacts of climate change.” And because “research has outlined that it is far more efficient to prevent the spread of disinformation than to try to correct it afterward,” and “analysis shows the mass of paid and organic disinformation comes from a few bad actors that are well-connected to the oil and gas industry,” the groups are “calling on all big tech platforms to take concrete, transparent steps to eliminate climate disinformation.”

They demand that social media companies adopt policies to “eliminate climate disinformation”, and apply “consistent standards to rapidly deplatform professional climate denial influencers and repeat offenders” while also creating fact-checking policies (that are “protected from politicization by company staff”) and “a ban on paid ads from serial climate deniers, like fossil fuel companies that have systematically lobbied against climate action.”

While any such ad ban might’ve been considered inconceivable by some until recently, Google and Youtube’s recent move to demonetize climate denial and ban denial ads is exactly the sort of thing that’s needed, and of course already has deniers howling. At the Murdoch-owned New York Post, Koched-up and self-ashamed lobbyist Daniel Turner attempted to high-road the issue with quotes from “British philosopher Wittgenstein” that essentially questioned “what is a climate denier?” 

Turner then provides exactly the answer in his various claims downplaying the climate crisis, as is his job. 

And it’s not like it’s hard to figure out climate denial, either. Take the recent Bjorn Lomborg Faecbook post with 1k reactions, that describes a Nature comment as a study, and more importantly, claims it says electric cars are "net-bad everywhere." Click through to the Nature link he calls a “study,” though, and find out that the comment he cites says "some countries with lots of clean electricity sources, such as Norway, are already at a point at which electrifying a truck has more climate benefits than safety costs.” Oh. So not only is it not a study, it also contradicts his claim that EVs are worse everywhere!

He gets to this twisted point by extrapolating that if EVs are heavier than traditional cars (because of the batteries) then the extra deaths from those EVs hitting and killing people outweigh any climate gains. 

(And even though it's not directly relevant here, we'll spin your brain one more time by reminding you that climate deniers supported the previous administration's lowering of fuel efficiency standards because, they said, lighter cars would lead to more deaths.)

Lomborg's claim that EVs are always bad is sophisticated sophistry, while social media is also full of more base denial, like this image post, also over the 1k mark, making fun of liberals for "coal fired electric cars." But obviously grids aren’t all coal these days, and both types of climate denial are refuted by a major report showing that even in coal-heavy grids, a life-cycle assessment shows that EVs are better than traditional gasoline-powered cars, a finding in line with other peer-reviewed studies. (And as of 2020, clean energy surpassed coal power globally, making the argument increasingly less true as the transition continues!) 

But by focusing on the fact that EVs are a bit heavier than their traditional competition, Lomborg conveniently ignores the fact that it’s pickups and SUVs that have supersized the definitely-not-compensating-for-anything bigger-is-better auto arms race. If vehicle weight and related safety issues are a concern, the millions of giant SUVs would be a more sensible target than the emerging electric vehicle market. After all, public transit is both safer and cleaner than private cars, so if Lomborg were really all that concerned about any of this, promoting public funding for public transit — not to mention pedestrian and bike-friendly infrastructure — would be his priority.

But those aren't his priority, because his priority is attacking climate solutions. And that's exactly why he's the sort of climate disinformation professional who should be kicked off social media.

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