RECAPS & PREVIEWS: What happened at COP26 – day nine at a glance (The Guardian), can climate talk turn into climate action? (NPR), 'a mountain to climb' - what they are saying at UN climate talks (Reuters), more net than zero: do carbon-cutting promises add up for the climate? (Thomson Reuters Foundation)
(INEQUITABLE) ACCESS: Frustrations over voices unrepresented in formal COP26 talks (Yale Climate Connections), indigenous activists say the legacy of colonialism has limited their access to COP26 (NPR)
CLIMATE SEXISM: ‘World designed by men has destroyed many things,’ COP26 warned (The Guardian), COP26: five takeaways as the 'sexism' of climate change is discussed (EuroNews),
CAT 2.4 REPORT: World heading for 2.4°C of warming after latest climate pledges -analysts (Reuters, AP, Washington Post $, The Guardian, CNN, S&P Global, BBC, The Guardian, FT $, Bloomberg $, Forbes, Politico Pro $, The Guardian, Axios), dead or alive? COP26 climate talks strive to save 1.5C warming goal (Thomson Reuters Foundation), COP26 is creating false hope for a 1.5C rise – the stark reality is very different (The Guardian, Bill Hare and Niklas Höhne op-ed)
US: Regan touts Biden admin's climate efforts at COP26 (E&E $), US sets goal of net-zero aviation emissions by 2050 (Reuters), Kerry calls on private sector to help in climate fight (Bloomberg $), war helps fuel the climate crisis as US military carbon emissions exceed 140+ nations (Democracy Now), let’s emerge from Glasgow still in the fight (Boston Globe, Susan Joy Hassol and Michael E. Mann op-ed $)
FINANCE: Zoom in at COP26: commercial giants pledge lower carbon emissions (Axios), developing countries put a number on post-2025 climate finance needs: $1.3 trillion a year (Climate Home), EU pledges 100 million euros to climate adaptation fund (Reuters), Turkish central bank to set up climate office to gauge risks (Bloomberg $), expand competitive power markets, not regulations and subsidies, to address global climate change (Utility Dive, Wayne Winegarden op-ed), the climate fight isn’t about morality. It's about cold, hard cash. (New York Times, Jeffrey Ball op-ed $), there’s an $80 billion hole in India’s climate pledge (Bloomberg, Andy Mukherjee op-ed $)
TRANSPARENCY: How satellites could help hold countries to emissions promises made at COP26 summit (Washington Post $), reporter's notebook: from the climate front lines to COP26, the gap is wide between talk and reality (CNN), COP26 leaders blame individuals, while supporting a far more destructive system (The Guardian, Stephen Reicher op-ed), trust is hard to find at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow (The New Yorker, Bill McKibben column $)
WHAT IS A COUNTRY?: Tuvalu minister films climate speech standing in ocean (AFP, NBC, The Guardian, Reuters), Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged (Reuters)
MISINFORMATION: Tubiana leads call for crackdown on climate misinformation in Glasgow pact (Climate Home), climate change conspiracies are spreading rapidly during UN's COP26 event (CBS)
NUCLEAR: Macron says France will build more nuclear energy reactors (Reuters)
TRANSPORTATION: Bikes took a back seat at COP26. Advocates urge Canada to make them a priority in its climate plan (CBC)
DEFORESTATION: COP26 presented forests as a climate solution, but may not be able to keep them standing (InsideClimate News)
ADAPTATION: Changes in behaviour needed to tackle climate crisis, says UK chief scientist (The Guardian), Natura chairman urges Brazil to be more ambitious on climate (Reuters), climate change is happening. We’ve got to pay more to adapt. (Bloomberg, Clara Ferreira Marques op-ed $)
CLIMATE & HEALTH: Climate-linked health risks to rise, COP26 panelists warn (Reuters)
LOSS & DAMAGE: How climate damage could break the Glasgow talks (E&E News)
CARBON MARKETS: Carbon copy? COP26 confronts familiar roadblocks on market rules (Reuters), John Kerry expects deal on carbon-trading rules at COP (Bloomberg $)
HUMAN RIGHTS: COP26: 'Little Amal' takes centre stage on Gender Day – video (The Guardian), from Gaziantep to Glasgow, Little Amal delivers seeds of hope to COP26 (Reuters), climate change risks 'runaway' humanitarian crisis, aid system collapse, UN warns (Thomson Reuters Foundation), fashion industry’s material sourcing under spotlight at COP26 as UN Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action scales its commitments (Forbes)
INDIGENOUS RIGHTS: Indigenous activists are united in a cause and are making themselves heard at COP26 (NPR), youth, indigenous people bring climate frontlines to the forefront at COP26 (National Catholic Reporter)
AUSTRALIA: Australia ranked last of 60 countries for policy response to climate crisis (The Guardian)
FOSSILS IN GLASGOW: Climate activists blast COP26 draft statement for failing to phase out fossil fuels (Democracy Now), experience a COP26 protest over a proposed UK oil field in 360 video (Washington Post $), US ‘won’t have coal’ by 2030, John Kerry predicts in Glasgow (Bloomberg $), fossil fuel lobbyists at climate talks: what are they trying to achieve? (Yale Environment 360)
OUTSIDE THE CENTER: COP26: Extinction Rebellion starts 24-hour vigil outside JP Morgan- day eight live (The Guardian), vegan haggises of Glasgow, ranked (Gizmodo)
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(ENVIRONMENTAL) RACISM: DOJ announces environmental justice probe in Alabama county (AP, E&E News)
CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: Biden administration stresses shared interests in talks with Egypt (Wall Street Journal $)
CLIMATE LITIGATION: Greenpeace Germany sues Volkswagen over carbon emissions targets (Reuters), New Zealand students sue energy minister over oil and gas permits decision (The Guardian)
DENIAL & DISINFORMATION: Fossil fuel advertising in sport ‘the new cigarette sponsorship’, ex-Wallabies captain David Pocock says (The Guardian)
CARBON MARKETS: Are carbon markets the new gaming for tribes? (Indian Country Today)
AGENCIES: NOAA moves toward designating new national marine sanctuary off central California (The Hill)
EPA: EPA rules may spark legal war over social cost of methane (E&E News)
DOE: Federal watchdog: Trump DOE chief violated Hatch Act (E&E News), how the Energy Department views rising gas prices (Axios)
DOI: ‘Faulty’ science used by Trump appointees to cut owl habitat (AP, E&E News), USGS proposal yanks uranium from critical minerals list (E&E News)
DOT: Feds issue rule blocking Trump LNG plan, citing safety risks (E&E $)
HOUSE: Republican congressman (whose family hates him) tweets anime video of him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (The Root, AP, NPR, Washington Post $, HuffPost, Gizmodo, CNN, Salon, The Hill), ‘a collection of wet toothpicks’: AOC unloads on Rep. Paul Gosar for disgusting anime video (Rolling Stone, Daily Beast, Business Insider), AOC says Republican who posted sword attack video ‘cheered on’ by party (The Guardian), Twitter refuses to take down Gosar anime that sees him assassinate AOC (The Independent, NBC)
SENATE: Manchin sees his power grow (The Hill)
WHITE HOUSE: White House sows confusion with comments on Line 5 pipeline shutdown (E&E $, Washington Examiner)
INFRASTRUCTURE BILL(S): Climate advocates skeptical of bipartisan infrastructure bill amid Biden victory lap (The Hill), Power lines are infrastructure bill’s big climate win (E&E News)
POLITICS: Biden faces a political risk in rising gas[oline] prices, with few options to respond (Bloomberg $), Florida oil drilling reemerges as 2022 issue for Democrats (Politico Pro $)
CITIES AND STATES: Minnesota lets public weigh in on adequacy of mining rules (AP), Virginia GOP targets clean energy law, but options for rollback are limited (Energy News Network), what a commute in a car-free city might be like (Wall Street Journal $)
FERC: Fight over FERC grid order could scramble electricity mix (E&E News), report maps FERC grid fix to unlock renewables (E&E $)
IMPACTS: ‘The weather keeps playing tricks’: living on the frontline of global heating (The Guardian), how climate change threatens pregnant women and their fetuses (CBS), 2021 was a bad year for glaciers in western North America — and it’s about to get much worse (The Conversation), ‘it’s alarming’: intense rainfall and extreme weather become the norm in northern China (The Guardian), India's environmental issues have been made worse by global warming (NPR), more than just Cape Cod: climate change comes to Mass. (E&E $), nonprofit grid alternatives trains women for careers in solar (Yale Climate Connections), people are changing the atmosphere's shape (E&E $), Rising water likely to drown Virginia island town by 2053 — study (E&E $), storm to march from Pacific to East Coast, unleashing rain, wind, snow and cold air (Washington Post $), have you felt the effects of global heating? (The Guardian), loss of glaciers will hurt tourism, power supplies and more (AP)
HEAT: One billion people to face deadly heat stress if world warms 2°C (Bloomberg $), how scientists know that climate change juices heat waves (Bloomberg $), exposure to extreme urban heat has tripled worldwide since the 1980s, study finds (Washington Post $)
WILDFIRES: ‘We dread summers’: dangerous ‘fire weather’ days are on the rise in northern California (The Guardian)
CAFFEINE: Coffee as we know it is in danger. Can we breed a better cup? (Vox)
RENEWABLES: Where to put solar panels? How about on the water? (Wall Street Journal $), world’s largest hydro-floating solar farm goes live in Thailand (Bloomberg $, Bloomberg VIDEO), enter the dragonscale: Google looks to jumpstart a new market for rooftop solar (Grist), Iberdrola calls for ‘national interest’ approvals for green energy projects (FT $), US faces climate dilemma over China solar bans, says SolarEdge (Bloomberg $)
BATTERIES: Sodium batteries may power your new electric car (Wired)
OIL & GAS: US should have enough gas to avert an energy crisis like Europe’s this winter (Bloomberg $, Reuters)
NUKES: Nuclear fusion attracts startups—and skeptics (Wall Street Journal $), Rolls-Royce plans to build small nuclear power plants in Britain. (New York Times $)
PLASTICS: Study: over 25,000 tons of COVID-related plastic waste pollutes oceans (Axios, Washington Post $)
HYDROGEN: Shell and Norsk Hydro team up for green hydrogen (Reuters)
UTILITIES: Dominion pushes ahead with shift from non-regulated assets, echoing Exelon, DTE and other utilities (Utility Dive), AEP remains on path to get half its power from renewable sources by 2030 (Columbus Dispatch)
(ALLEGED) UTILITY CORRUPTION: Ohio utilities FirstEnergy and AEP still spending big on lobbying (Energy News Network)
EVs: Rivian prices its I.P.O., valuing the electric-vehicle maker at nearly $70 billion. (New York Times $, Yahoo), Tesla stock punishes wary fund managers (Wall Street Journal $), the electric-truck battle to come: batteries versus hydrogen fuel cells (Wall Street Journal $)
BUSINESS: GE is splitting into three companies: what to know about general electric breaking up (Wall Street Journal $, Reuters, Wall Street Journal $)
CARBON PRICING: Carbon border tax set to be line with WTO rules, says deputy director (Politico Pro $)
CARBON REMOVAL: How Iceland is fighting climate change with carbon dioxide (Good Morning America)
FOOD: Food systems emissions rose 17% over past three decades, UN says (FT $), counting your carbon footprint one meal at a time (TIME), turning heat to cooling, Kenyan inventor cuts food waste - and adds jobs and income (Thomson Reuters Foundation)
GOOD FOR MORE THAN SCOTCH: Serious about climate change? Get serious about peat. (Washington Post $)
FINANCE: Billionaire Hohn urges central bankers to turn up climate heat on lenders (Reuters)
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Conservatives Claim Climate Concern While Opposing Climate Solutions And Attacking Actual Climate Champs
Were you born yesterday? Did you only recently, in the past few hours, gain sentience and become conscious? If so, the party of fossil fuel campaign contributions and climate denial has a new message for you: Conservatives take climate change seriously, and it’s actually climate activists who are anti-science!
Now, if you didn’t wake up from a cryogenic slumber this morning with no recollection of the past 50 years of conservative service to polluters and disdain for environmental protections, you may not need to be told that the Republicans at COP26 are not there in good faith to try and advance climate solutions, and that their two-day sideshow is only slightly less embarrassing than the deniers at CFACT staging what they call a “stunt,” a 2-man, 1-Nessie “parade.”
But for the sake of those who have landed here on Planet Earth only moments ago, and have no way to know whether or not these conservative self-appointed climate champions are serious, we’ll address Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s comments at COP26 that it’s really the left who are “anti-science” on climate change.
We found his comments to the Washington Post thanks to a tweet by Steve Milloy, whose “JunkScience” website and handle are a throw-back to his days attacking the science connecting smoking to cancer. After failing to protect the tobacco industry from regulations protecting children et al. from second-hand smoke, Milloy pivoted to protecting the fossil fuel industry from regulations, finding much more success there. He’s basically the poster child of the “it’s a hoax” brand of denial the GOP is now pretending to eschew, and his take on Crenshaw’s comments were that it was bad that he acknowledged sea level rise is happening, but good that he questioned climate policy on economic grounds.
The reporter asked Crenshaw about former President Obama’s comments calling Republicans anti-science, and he responded with a reflexive 'I know you are but what am I?' saying it's Obama and the Dems who are actually anti-science. When asked how, he, like all the conservatives supposedly on the other side of the climate fight now, deliberately misrepresented Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s quote paraphrasing youth activists not having patience with the right's "but what will it cost?" excuses for inaction as though she were speaking literally about the world ending in 12 years.
What’d he do next? Pivot to the exact "but what will it cost?" excuse AOC was saying people aren't putting up with any more!
Aside from that, Crenshaw doesn't actually answer the question of who’s really anti-science, but he does effectively use it as an excuse to attack the congresswoman his fellow House Republican is posting about killing. Because, you know, conservatives are serious about solving climate change!
But, again, to be fair to the point of hopeless gullibility, it turns out that even making the most optimistic assumption, their plan fails to even meet their own goals, which are actually even weaker than some oil companies'!
Republicans countered Democrat’s climate policies with a goal of reducing global emissions by 40% by 2050, far short of the net zero by 2050 timeline the science dictates to avoid dangerous levels of warming beyond the Paris Agreement’s 2°C.
The GOP’s plan is to sell natural gas, build new nuclear, and rely on carbon capture and sequestration to reduce emissions. But even IF carbon capture actually worked (the only pilot project in the US failed) their plan would still only reduce emission by 14%, according to analysis by Climate Interactive.
The conservative plan would lead to 3.1°C of warming, twice the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C aspiration to keep island nations from being sunk by rising seas, and well beyond the 2°C goal that new research finds would lead to 1 billion people being exposed to lethal heat conditions for at least 10 days a year. At 4°C, the UK’s Met Office estimates 3.5 billion people will face additional potentially lethal heat, so apparently the GOP is willing to let a couple billion extra people die in the heat rather than actually reduce fossil fuel emissions. Which, to their credit, is pretty on brand with their response to the coronavirus pandemic.
And make no mistake, it’s not like they’re ready to compromise. As Corbin Hair at E&E pointed out in a recent story about the GOP’s pretend conversion, the congressional conservatives who pretended to support the climate policy immediately turned against it when it’s time to vote.
Like Crenshaw’s comments at COP, Rep Garret Graves suddenly got worried about the cost of climate action when the policy he had, only months earlier, expressed support for became real. (Surely this has nothing to do with the fact that his biggest campaign donor industry is oil and gas.)
And it’s not like inaction is cheap! As a great piece from Buzzfeed reports, the cost of NOT taking action on climate change is already well into the billions. In fact, when Hurricane Harvey hit Crenshaw’s home state of Texas, climate change caused an additional $13 billion in damages.
Someone who still believes he’s serious about climate should tell Crenshaw, who was the top recipient of the petro-adjacent chemical industry campaign contributions in the 2021-22 cycle so far, and maybe he’ll return the $663,434 he’s gotten from the Oil and Gas industry, and get to work on a plan to protect his constituents in Texas from the impacts of burning fossil fuels.
Or maybe he’ll just say he will, while actually making sure the polluters who fund him don’t face any regulations that may dampen their profits. That seems to be the plan so far, anyway. |
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