👀 JOURNALISTS  👀

Shell Carbon Capture Plant Produces More Pollution Than It Captures: A massive Shell-owned capture facility in the Alberta tar sands releases more greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere than it pulls from it, a new report from Global Witness shows. Shell says its Quest hydrogen production facility pulled 5 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere between 2015 and 2019, but the report found it released 7.5 million tons of GHG pollution, including ultra-heat-trapping methane, over that same timeframe. In response to the report, Shell said the facility "has met or exceeded our expectations." The report shows, its author told Vice, that "blue hydrogen" produced from methane-based gas is not the "climate-friendly" solution the oil and gas industry claims it to be. (Vice)

GOP, Manchin, Sinema Stymie Voting Rights: Every Senate Republican and two Democrats rejected changes to the filibuster and in doing so blocked legislation to protect and expand voting rights Thursday. Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) voted to protect the parliamentary rule infamous for its use by racists to stymie civil rights. Voting rights have become threshold questions for advocacy groups focused on other issues, including the League of Conservation Voters, in recognition of the integral role of voting rights in the furtherance of their mission. Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnel (R-Ky.), who once happily posed in front of a Confederate flag, suggested African Americans were not "Americans" and that the voting rights legislation was unnecessary because they vote at similar rates. Voting rights advocates vowed to fight on. “We have set extraordinary groundwork for change and the country will not let this fight end,” Martin Luther King III said. “Ending the filibuster is part of the national conversation in a way it’s never been before — people now know the filibuster is not etched in the Constitution, but rather a tool of suppression, and the voting rights secured by my father are under attack.” (Senate vote: The Guardian, Reuters, New York Times $, CNN, USA Today; McConnell: NewsOne, Business Insider, USA Today, The Guardian, Axios, CNN; Continued fight: NewsOne)

House Oversight Calls Big Oil Board Members To Testify: Congress is broadening its investigation of the oil and gas industry's efforts to deceive the public about climate change. After hearing testimony from company and trade group executives in proceedings that drew parallels to tobacco industry proceedings in the 1990s, and subsequently issuing subpoenas for additional documents last October, the House Oversight Committee called board members from ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell to testify about those firms' pledges to slow climate change. Climate change is unequivocally driven by humans' extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, including oil and gas. Among the board members called to testify is Alexander Karsner who was elected to Exxon's board last June by investors concerned about the firm's contribution and exposure to global warming. (Reuters, Washington Post $, CNN, Al Jazeera)

BANKS: Citigroup sets rare hard target to reduce energy-sector emissions (Reuters, E&E $, MarketWatch), Citigroup says dropping clients is ‘last resort’ in climate push (Bloomberg $)

BUSINESS: Bill Gates, John Kerry stress ‘urgent’ need for businesses to join climate fight (CNBC)

(ENVIRONMENTAL) RACISM: Bronx building blaze sparks national conversation about fire safety racial disparities (The Grio), study finds bias against Black patients written into medical charts (Axios)

TEXAS-SIZED MESS: The Texas electric grid failure was a warm-up (Texas Monthly), a winter storm will hit Texas — bringing back memories of last year’s power grid failure (Washington Post $, CBS), freezing weather returns to the Permian in renewed risk to gas production, prices (S&P Global), Texas hunkers down for the cold (Earther)

• MAYBE WORK THIS OUT?: 400,000 Texas homes and businesses could lose power over financial dispute between energy companies (Texas Tribune), Texas pipeline company walks back threat to cut off gas to power plants (Texas Tribune)
• EVERYTHING IS FINE: Texas went big on oil. Earthquakes followed. (Vox)

(CLIMATE) DIPLOMACY: How much does Germany need Russian gas? (Reuters Factbox), Mexico power bill in US sights as Granholm makes case for renewables (Reuters)

CLIMATE LITIGATION: How Exxon is leveraging Texas courts to silence its climate critics (Drilled)

DIESEL DEATHS: Mapping tool reveals 'staggering' number of diesel-related deaths (E&E $)

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: UN chief: World worse now due to COVID, climate, conflict (AP), ‘stuck in perilous moment’: Doomsday Clock holds at 100 seconds to midnight (The Guardian, Washington Post $, National Geographic, CNN, The Hill, MarketWatch), it's time to nuke the doomsday clock (Earther)

VOLCANO: Peru: 21 beaches polluted by spill linked to Tonga eruption (AP), how the volcanic eruption in Tonga could cause temporary cooling of Earth (NBC)

DENIAL: Inured to climate change in North Queensland (New York Times $)

AGENCIES: ‘The treeline is out of control’: how the climate crisis is turning the Arctic green (The Guardian), HUD urged to track racial disparities in disaster aid (E&E $)

EPA: Advocates ask EPA for civil rights probe in 'Cancer Alley' (E&E $), renewed EPA, WHO pact prioritizes environmental justice (E&E $)

DOE: Court orders DOE to 'remedy' boiler efficiency rule (E&E $)

DOI: Interior’s 2022 energy strategy: 3 things to watch (E&E News)

DOT: Sec. Buttigieg: We’re focused on making infrastructure jobs more workers of color, women (MSNBC)

EXECUTIVE BRANCH: 'It's really a mess': Army Corps guidance on water protections sparks confusion (Politico Pro $)

BUILD BACK BETTER ACT: Biden supports removing climate provisions from stalled BBB (E&E News, Washington Post $), Pelosi: Build Back Better may need to be 'more limited,' renamed (The Hill), splitting up Biden's Build Back Better package could save Dems' climate agenda (Axios), with broad safety net bill stalled, Democrats weigh what to salvage (New York Times $)

THE HILL: Bipartisan lawmakers announce climate adaptation bill (The Hill), Bipartisan senators urge Biden to end solar tariffs (E&E News), Congress weighs cleaning up cryptocurrency mining in the US (The Verge)

HOUSE: [House] committee OKs wildlife bill, but partisan divisions remain (E&E News), DeFazio blasts Haaland over gray wolf protections (E&E News), Three takeaways from the House Bitcoin mining hearing (Politico Pro $, Politico Pro $), Republicans burn Dem pipeline bill, focus on attacking Biden (E&E $), Science Committee approves abandoned well, energy bills (E&E $)

SENATE: Eight senators ask Biden to reverse course on Trump-era solar tariffs (The Hill), dueling Senate alliances emerge ahead of Biden solar tariffs decision (Politico Pro $)

WHITE HOUSE: Greens to Biden: Use executive power to retire oil program (E&E $)

• YEAR ONE: Has Biden delivered on climate promises? Analyzing his first year in office (PBS NewsHour), Biden’s first year in office left roadblocks for BIPOC progress (Prism Reports), Biden’s first year: the goals he hit and the ones he missed (Wall Street Journal $), the ups and downs of Biden’s climate agenda in year one (NBC)

POLITICS: Will climate action happen now? (New York Times $)

ELECTIONS: Maura Healey launches campaign for governor, promising to ‘continue with what’s working and fix what’s not’ (Boston Globe $, MassLive, New York Times $, CNN), five key things to know about Maura Healey as she starts her campaign for governor (WGBH), she took on Trump, Juul and the Sacklers. Now she wants to run Massachusetts. (Politico), Texas GOP gubernatorial candidate says he won’t fire staffer tied to white nationalist movement (Texas Tribune)

NOMINEES & CONFIRMATIONS: Senate advances judicial nominees, sets action on more picks (E&E News), Senate panel approves Export-Import Bank, Commerce picks (E&E $)

CITIES AND STATES: N.C. governor’s climate order marks a turning point on transportation (Energy News Network), New Virginia AG pulls out of Supreme Court climate case (E&E News, The Hill)

• CALIFORNIA: California solar group files ballot initiatives ahead of major agency vote (Politico Pro $), California water districts will get more supply than planned (AP)
• MICHIGAN: Whitmer signs executive order on climate change, aims for carbon-neutral state by 2050 (Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News, Bridge Michigan, Holland Sentinel, AP, The Hill)

FERC: FERC majority calls for closer environmental justice scrutiny despite upholding gas certificate (Politico Pro $), FERC takes initial step to address internal network threats through cyber standards (S&P Global), how FERC, courts may change pipeline industry in 2022 (E&E News), Republicans, industry resist FERC oversight of pipeline reliability, security as Glick cites grid threats (Utility Dive)

IMPACTS: Greenland could melt for millennia if warming stopped today (E&E $), in the aftermath of climate disasters, America’s vulnerable students struggle to recover (Grist)

HEAT: Incomes dip for South Asia's women home workers as heat rises (Thomson Reuters Foundation)

RENEWABLES: Biden’s offshore wind plan is also a jobs plan (Vox), Scotland’s offshore wind sector gets $951 million boost as parts of seabed leased out (CNBC), we should turn big box stores into solar farms (Earther), wind and solar costs have risen. How long should we expect this trend to last? (InsideClimate News)

BATTERIES: The world is hungry for lithium. Geothermal energy could transform how it’s sourced (CNBC), Serbia scraps planned Rio Tinto lithium mine after protests (AP), Tesla looks to northern Minn. for nickel (E&E News)

BUILDINGS: How to get New York City’s biggest buildings to zero carbon (Canary Media)

OIL & GAS: Global oil supplies could experience 'massive' rise in 2022, IEA says (Politico Pro $), Permian Basin: high oil price breathes new life into US shale (FT $)

PIPELINES: Court may back Mountain Valley pipeline, despite NEPA fight (E&E News)

HYDROGEN: World's first hydrogen tanker to ship test cargo from Australia to Japan (Reuters)

UTILITIES: Judge blasts PG&E as ‘continuing menace’ over wildfires as utility’s probation ends (CNBC), Tri-State ramps up GHG reduction goals in Colorado filing (Utility Dive)

EVs: Electric vehicle 'tsunami' expected as new models hit market (Axios), EU trade chief warns US counterpart over electric vehicle tax (Politico Pro $), solar cars are coming. So why aren't all EVs solar? (Wall Street Journal $)

FOSSIL HANGOVER: Global energy transition to cause short-term economic pain -report (Reuters)

AVIATION: Lead EU lawmaker wants airlines to pay for their CO2 emissions sooner (Reuters)

AGRICULTURE: From fertilizer to fuel: can ‘green’ ammonia be a climate fix? (Yale Environment 360)

CARBON REMOVAL: An Indiana carbon storage project wants the state to help protect it from lawsuits (Energy News Network)

BITCOIN: EU should ban energy-intensive mode of crypto mining, regulator says (FT $)

WILDLIFE: ‘Like a work of art’: rare stretch of pristine coral reef discovered off Tahiti (The Guardian), scientists work to better understand how ocean acidification will affect marine life (Yale Climate Connections), developers pleaded to buy his island for years. He said no, and in a final rebuff, he gave it to a conservancy. (Washington Post $)

INTERNATIONAL: More than 30,000 jobs at risk if insulation levy cut from fuel bills (The Guardian), paybacks from UK renewables could cut £27 from bills by end of winter (The Guardian), scientists say CCUS credit betrays Canada’s climate goals (Politico Pro $), Sweden's Summa raises $2.6 billion in latest 'impact' fund (Reuters), UK energy industry urges ministers to stick with net zero plan (The Guardian)

• What’s Indigenous Science? (Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, Dr. Jessica Hernandez interview)
• We are all complicit in climate change — so we should all pay to fix it (FT, Dieter Helm op-ed $)
• Fed needs a tougher stance on regulation (FT, Editorial Board $)
• Gina McCarthy: Why I'm more optimistic than ever on tackling the climate crisis (The Hill, Gina McCarthy op-ed)
• Biden’s Black Report Card: A year into the job, he still doesn’t understand the assignment (The Grio, Jason Johnson column)
• The Biden administration's first year: Slow and steady does not win this race (The Hill, Lauren Kurtz and Romany Webb op-ed)
• This bill could help to end energy poverty in the US (CNN, Mark Wolfe op-ed)
• Kids across the country are protesting COVID conditions in schools. Are you listening to them? (The Root, Murjani Rawls op-ed)
• The time for Senate talk is over. We need to vote (CNN, Sen. Bernie Sanders op-ed)
• One year on, a critical role needs to be filled by the administration (The Hill, Susan Dudley and Sally Katzen op-ed)
• Mitch McConnell’s plan is working (Washington Post, Greg Sargent analysis $)
• Americans should pay more for gas, not less (Wall Street Journal, Jinjoo Lee column $)
• Biden as a new FDR? Try LBJ. (New York Times, Nate Cohn analysis $)

Climate Change Is A Front in the Culture Wars, Like It Or Not

Recently sworn-in Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin rarely mentioned environmental issues during his campaign, and as folks have pointed out, while Youngkin may have tried to present himself as a moderate Republican and kept his distance from Trump, the moment he took power, he acted just like the six-times-bankrupt, failed insurrection leader, social media exile, and one-term former president. 

Youngkin is (illegally) trying to go around the state’s legislature to force Virginia to leave a regional climate agreement, and chose Trump’s former EPA administrator and former coal lobbyist (though those two titles are kind of redundant) Andrew Wheeler to be in charge of the state’s natural resources. Though Youngkin presented himself as simple (millionaire) businessman fed up with divisive political bickering, he surfed to victory on a wave of general vote-against-the-president’s-party backlash and discontent around school closures due to covid, all while exploiting transphobia and a good helping of anti-anti-racism (also known as "racism"). 

Which is just to say that we’re more surprised anyone bought his faux-moderate-ism than we are that he immediately did his best impression of Trump, who he had held at arm’s length during the campaign while also playing footsie with him under the table.

Though it was never exactly subtle, the convergence of climate denial with conservative culture war disinformation writ large is only ramping up. 

Take Wednesday’s National Post op-ed by Jordan Peterson, for example. In his announcement that he’s resigning from his tenured position as a clinical psychology professor at the University of Toronto, Peterson mostly complains about how Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts (that he oh-so-cleverly reorders to use the acronym “DIE”) have made it all but impossible for him to do his job. This is ironic, as the DEI worldview he decries, and its humane treatment of drug addiction as a medical issue and not a failure of personal integrity, is likely the only reason he wasn’t already fired for having a drug addiction so intense it required Peterson travel to Russia to be put in a medically-induced coma. 

So it’s precisely because of progressive policy that Peterson has the privilege to blame his reputation as a virulent bigot for his resignation, instead of being fired over his addiction to drugs. 

That, and, he writes, because BIPOC hires are creating “a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job.” Since apparently only white men can be qualified candidates, he’s quitting his job teaching. Before a bunch of paragraphs favorably quoting Vladimir Putin’s condemnation of woke-ness, Peterson mentions that “if you think DIE is bad” (because actively undoing the harms of discrimination is upsetting) “wait until you get a load of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores.” 

These measures, meant to guide investor decisions by offering transparency on how a company’s decision-making process works, and the extent to which it does or doesn’t pollute the environment, and cause social harm, both of which are major risks for long-term profits. 

But to Peterson, who "rose" to prominence for refusing to respect his students’ pronouns, ESG is even worse than “DIE,” though he apparently couldn’t figure out a way to reorder the acronym to disparage it. (Or, our GES is he tried and nothing was SEG-sy enough to meet his standard of EGScellence…) 

Anyway, though it’s not exactly new, Peterson has been increasingly incorporating climate disinformation into his grift, taking advantage of the right’s pseudo-media ecosystem that was built on Koch and other billionaire funding and building on its well-established petromasculinity in order to cultivate an audience of rabid anti-environmentalists. 

To do so, they’ve been funding anti-anti-racists and whipping up state-level trans panics, making it clear that whether or not straight, white climate activists think they have common cause with the LGBTQ+ community, worry about showing solidarity with Black Lives Matter movement is politically shrewd, the opposition certainly isn’t scared to be intersectional. 

Even, ironically, as they attack it or co-opt it.

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up to receive Hot News every morning!

Send updates or feedback to nkauffman@climatenexus.org
Submit events and other items for consideration for a First Look using this form
Some articles require logins or subscriptions ($)