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East Antarctica Ice Shelf Collapse Amid Heatwave A Harbinger Of Things To Come: An ice shelf holding back two glaciers in East Australia (nearest to Australia) collapsed catastrophically between March 14 and 16 as an extreme heat wave drove temperatures in parts of Antarctica 70°F (40°C) above normal. “The Glenzer Conger ice shelf presumably had been there for thousands of years and it’s not ever going to be there again,” Peter Nerff, an ice scientist at the University of Minnesota, told the AP. Climate change, mainly caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, is driving up temperatures around the world, but that heating is even greater at the Earth's poles. More than the 460 square miles of ice, however, scientists are especially worried by the unprecedented collapse of the Glenzer Conger ice shelf (which held back the Glenzer and Conger glaciers from warmer waters) because it calls into question long-held understandings of the stability of the region's ice and it's resilience to global warming. The Glenzer Conger ice shelf collapse “is one of the most significant collapse events anywhere in Antarctica since the early 2000s when the Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated,” Catherine Colello Walker, an earth and planetary scientist at NASA and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told the Guardian. “It won’t have huge effects, most likely, but it’s a sign of what might be coming.” (AP, The Guardian, Gizmodo, Washington Post $, Axios, New York Times $, The Hill, Reuters, Al Jazeera, NPR, CNN, Newsweek, CNET, Clean Technica, UPI, The Independent, BBC, Bloomberg $, Daily Beast; Climate Signals background: Arctic amplification, Extreme heat and heatwaves)

CARB Strengthens Harbor Craft Air Pollution Limits: The California Air Resources Board updated limits on air pollution from harbor craft last week. The measure requires short-run ferries to achieve zero emissions by 2025 and establishes engine emissions requirements on certain vessels over 400 feet for the first time. The changes are expected to save more than 530 lives and reduce cancer risks for 22 million Californians, according to CARB. Harbor craft air pollution disproportionately harms historically excluded communities near ports. Neighborhoods near the Port of Oakland, for example, suffer from higher rates of respiratory and cardiovascular disease, as well as cancer risks nearly three times higher than other communities in the Bay Area farther away from the port, according to West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. (KPIX, Maritime Executive, SF Bay, Bloomberg Law $)  

Permian Methane Pollution Far Higher Than Estimates – Study: Far more methane is leaking from oil and gas operations in the New Mexican Permian Basin than was previously known, new research shows. The study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, used data collected by pollution sensors on airplanes flying over the major oil and gas region and found methane pollution from the region at levels six times higher than the latest EPA estimates. Methane, the main ingredient in so-called "natural gas," traps 81 times more heat than CO2 over a 20-year period. The U.S. has made well-publicized moves to lead international efforts to cut methane pollution, which could be undermined by its recent pledge to increase liquified methane gas exports to Europe. (New York Times $, Axios, AP)

(ENVIRONMENTAL) RACISM: Black Tesla employees describe a culture of racism: ‘I was at my breaking point’ (LA Times $)

BACK TO FRIDAYS FOR FUTURE: Fridays for Future school climate strikes resume across the world (The Guardian), Activists stage global climate protest, slam Ukraine war (AP, Deutsche Welle), Teens don't care about climate change in Fridays for Future PSA (AdAge)

FOSSIL FUELED WAR: How Western oil companies paid for Putin's war (Gizmodo), Europe can lead the way through an energy crisis without more fossil fuels (Vox), What LNG can and can’t do to replace Europe’s imports of Russian gas (Bloomberg $), Russia signals redefined goals in Ukraine war as its advances stall (New York Times $), Germany aims to be nearly free of Russian oil and coal by year’s end (Politico Pro $), War shakes Europe path to energy independence, climate goals (AP), Will war in Ukraine hasten the end of fossil fuels? (The Conversation)

• OIL & GAS MARKETS: Europe’s energy woes are rerouting global gas flows (Wall Street Journal $), Oil prices stay high as Russian crude shortage hits market (Wall Street Journal $), Zelensky calls on energy-rich countries to increase output (The Hill, Axios, AP), Europe battles to secure specialised ships to boost LNG imports (FT $)
• NON-FOSSILS: Ukraine war drives up cost of wind, solar power (Wall Street Journal $), Will the Ukraine war change Europe’s thinking on nuclear? (Energy Monitor)
• GAS DEAL: Biden officials walk political tightrope on gas exports, climate action (Washington Post $, Axios), The problem with shipping gas to Europe (New York Times $), US, EU strike LNG deal to help wean Europe off Russian gas (Reuters, Factbox, E&E News, Washington Post $, New York Times $, Mother Jones, CBS, Reuters, Fortune, The Guardian), With Biden in Europe promising to expedite US LNG exports, environmentalists on the gulf coast say, not so fast (Inside Climate News), Biden eyes long-term hydrogen breakthrough in plan to send gas to EU (Bloomberg $), Biden’s commitment for US LNG to supply Europe faces strong headwinds (Forbes), US to boost gas deliveries to Europe amid scramble for new supplies (Wall Street Journal $), These stocks should benefit from the US’s deal to send natural gas to Europe (Barron's)
• US IMPACTS: What to expect in Louisiana following Biden’s move to boost LNG exports (The Advocate), US indicts elite Russian hackers for energy blitz (E&E News)
• SCIENCE: Without Russia, science going solo on world’s woes, dreams (AP), Russia’s war on Ukraine upends arctic climate-change research (Wall Street Journal $)
• EXTREMELY NBD: Ukraine officials afraid Chernobyl’s forest fires will spread radiation (Daily Beast)

FREQUENT FLIER MILES?: Juxtaposition: Opulent resort hosts climate summit in Dubai (AP)

DENIAL & GREENWASHING: Banks' lobbying contradicts climate goals — report (E&E $), Sir Chris Hohn urges shareholders to vote against ‘greenwashing’ bank directors (The Guardian)

EDUCATION: Should fossil fuel companies get to teach kids about climate change? (The Tyee), Climate change roils colleges that train drillers and miners (E&E News), Saudi Aramco joins Rice University’s Carbon Hub with $10M sponsorship (Houston Chronicle)

HEROES RIDE CARGO BIKES: Meet the bike man who brought the trucker convoy to a crawl (Washington Post $)

HELLUVA BUSINESS MODEL: How Joe Manchin aided coal, and earned millions (New York Times $)

EXPLAINS A LOT, TBQH: Tiny particles of plastic have been detected in human blood for the very first time. They can’t be filtered out (Fortune, The Independent, The Guardian, Salon, Business Insider, Bloomberg $, USA Today, The Hill, AFP)

SCOTUS: Jackson testimony hints at energy implications of court pick (E&E $), Ketanji Brown Jackson is the most popular Supreme Court nominee in years (CNN), Full Booker: Ketanji Brown Jackson questioning was 'just sad, frankly' (NBC, CNN, Politico), Black law students react to judge jackson navigating GOP senators questions (NPR), As Ketanji Brown Jackson testified, Black women saw themselves reflected (The 19th* News, New York Times $), Ted Cruz questioning of Ketanji Brown Jackson was ‘absurd’, his former Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz says (The Independent), Manchin a Yes on Jackson for Supreme Court (E&E News, Daily Beast, CNN, Reuters, CNBC), Republicans weigh endgame on Supreme Court nominee (E&E News)

EPA: Judges grapple with Obama-era EPA rule targeting pollution limit exemptions (Politico Pro $), Fiery emails show EPA turmoil over pet collars tied to deaths (E&E News)

DOI: Biden administration announces first wind power lease off Carolinas (The Hill, E&E $, Politico Pro $, Reuters), BLM could open 27.5M more acres to Alaska Native veterans (E&E News)

DOT: NHTSA applies CAFE penalty hike for cars through model year 2019 (Politico Pro $)

USPS: Amid backlash, USPS orders more EVs — but will still mostly run on gas (Canary Media, E&E $)

WHITE HOUSE: Biden to propose minimum tax on billionaires as part of 2023 budget (Reuters), Will Biden use the Defense Production Act to boost mining? (E&E News)

THE HILL: Warren, Khanna introduce bill to prevent water trading (E&E $)

• SENATE: Manchin engaging with Biden administration on new climate and economic bill but timeline unclear (CNN, The Hill, Wall Street Journal $), Joe Manchin has some thoughts on green energy (The Intercept, Deconstructed podcast), Senate deal on Russian sanctions, energy ban collapses (E&E $), Why the Senate hasn’t made a climate deal yet (Grist)
• TRUE PATRIOTISM: Republican won’t say whether Capitol attack panel will question Ginni Thomas (The Guardian)

ELECTIONS: Possible Pruitt Senate run trashed by ex-Inhofe, Trump aides (E&E News), Sunrise Movement looks to bolster progressives in Pennsylvania, North Carolina (The Hill)

CITIES AND STATES: Soaring oil prices bring fiscal windfall to Alaska (Wall Street Journal $), Befriending trees to lower a city’s temperature (New York Times $), Turning cities into sponges to save lives and property (New York Times $)

• CALIFORNIA: California's plan for $400 gas rebate criticized for undermining climate goals (Bloomberg $)
• TEXAS: CenterPoint ratepayers could see bills increase, regardless of how much natural gas they use (Houston Chronicle)

FERC: Biden's most effective climate warrior faces potential doom in the Senate (Politico), FERC retreats on gas policies as chair pursues clarity (E&E News, The Hill, Utility Dive), I think we have a wake-up call right now' — FERC's Phillips touts transmission's reliability benefits (Utility Dive)

IMPACTS: Great Barrier Reef authority confirms unprecedented sixth mass coral bleaching event (The Guardian, Axios, NPR, Washington Post $, New York Times $), Chile’s archaeologists fight to save the world’s oldest mummies from climate change (The Guardian), Complex models now gauge the impact of climate change on global food production. The results are ‘alarming’ (Inside Climate News)

SMASHING THE METEOROLOGICAL PATRIARCHY: More women are becoming storm chasers, defying convention and breaking barriers (Washington Post $)

DROUGHT: Amid drought, ‘it’s really a miracle that California exists,’ says AP reporter (KCRW, Adam Beam interview)

WILDFIRES: Large fires becoming even larger, more widespread (Washington Post $), Western heat wave sets records, fuels fire near Boulder, Colo. (Washington Post $), NCAR fire prompts evacuation of 19,000 people in south Boulder, Eldorado Springs (Denver Post, AP, CBS, New York Times $), All evacuations lifted as firefighters slow Boulder’s NCAR fire (Denver Post)

NOLA TORNADOES: New Orleans multivortex tornado was strongest on record to hit city (Washington Post $)

FORESTS: Forests benefit the climate beyond storing carbon — study (E&E $)

RENEWABLES: Grid-scale storage installations tripled to a record 3 GW in 2021: report (Utility Dive), A simple way cities can make it easier for people to go solar (Yale Climate Connections), Solar industry’s hopes and fears on tariffs, reconciliation (E&E News)

"RENEWABLES": Cow power: Indian coal state seeks greener energy from dung (Thomson Reuters Foundation)

BUILDINGS: Climate change is spurring a movement to build stormproof homes (Washington Post $), Check out these heat pumps that look like George Clooney (Canary Media), The home of the future may generate its own electricity (Axios)

OIL & GAS: Natural-gas industry gets boost as Biden shifts stance (Wall Street Journal $)

LANDBACK: US oil boom towns risk ghost town future (Bloomberg $)

COAL: Regulators back plan to close last N.J. coal plants (E&E $)

EVs: Electric car chargepoints to overtake fuel pumps (BBC), Gas prices got you wanting an electric or hybrid car? Well, good luck finding one (NPR), Sold out: why Australia doesn’t have enough electric vehicles to go around (The Guardian)

HOUSING INJUSTICE: Investors are buying mobile home parks. Residents are paying a price. (New York Times $)

AVIATION: Major airlines are getting serious about hydrogen-powered planes (Canary Media)

AGRICULTURE: Chart: Which foods are worst for the climate? (Canary Media), Gates Foundation, Qatar to spend $200 million on climate-adaptive agriculture (Reuters)

BOOKS: How to game the dystopian future (New York Times $)

FINANCE: Europe moves closer to enforcing ESG rules on foreign firms (E&E $), War in Ukraine reveals flaws in sustainable investing (Wall Street Journal $)

BITCOIN: Exxon is mining Bitcoin in North Dakota as part of its plan to slash emissions (CNBC)

PFAS: Major fast food companies pledge to phase out "forever chemicals" (Axios)

WILDLIFE: Many bird species nesting and laying eggs nearly a month early, study says (The Guardian, Reuters)

INTERNATIONAL: London pollution worse than Beijing as mayor extends alert (Bloomberg $)

• Energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins: ‘It’s the largest, cheapest, safest, cleanest way to address the crisis’ (The Guardian, interview)
• Producing and exporting more US gas helps Putin (The Hill, Rep. Sean Casten op-ed)
• The boring bill in Tennessee that everyone should be watching (New York Times, Margaret Renkl column $)
• US independence will never be secure while we rely on oil (Houston Chronicle, Chris Tomlinson column)
• The Guardian view on record-breaking Arctic temperatures: do look up (The Guardian, Editorial Board)
• Insurers could have been climate heroes. Instead, they have risked a crisis to dwarf 2008 (The Guardian, Eugene Linden op-ed)
• Margaret Atwood on stories, deception and the bible (New York Times, Ezra Klein show, interview $)
• ‘Morning Joe’ shock over Ginni Thomas points to a hidden Jan. 6 truth (Washington Post, Greg Sargent column $)
• Climate action has been ‘a calamity’, says Senate Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse (The Guardian, interview)
• On climate, SEC can dictate but market will decide (Reuters, John Foley op-ed)
• SEC proposed disclosure: Worsening climate change is no longer an acceptable business model (The Hill, Jorge Daniel Taillant, Gabrielle Dreyfus, and Durwood Zaelke op-ed)
• William and Kate’s colonial Caribbean tour was cringeworthy (Washington Post, Karen Attiah op-ed $)
• Wonking out: to shale and back, redux (New York Times, Paul Krugman column $)
• Geo-political tensions threaten global commitment to decarbonization (The Hill, Paula VanLaningham op-ed)
• Don’t demonise decarbonisation (Energy Monitor, Seb Kennedy column)
• Disparities persist in treatment of some African refugees who left Ukraine despite claims of misinformation (NewsOne, Shireen Mitchell op-ed)
• Conserve oil — a little sacrifice won't kill us (The Hill, William Becker op-ed)
• Our governments have chosen capitalism over preparing for next COVID surge (Truthout, William Rivers Pitt op-ed)
• Biden’s great energy and climate contradiction (Wall Street Journal, Editorial Board $)

BLACK EXCELLENCE & RACIST TEMPER TANTRUMS

• How are we still debating interracial marriage in 2022? (New York Times, Jamelle Bouie column $)
• A person learns a lot while growing locs like Judge Jackson’s (LA Times, LZ Granderson op-ed $)
• Ketanji Brown Jackson is proof all judges should be Black women (Philadelphia Tribune, Michael Coard op-ed)
• This isn’t the US Senate. It's more like day care. (Washington Post, Kathleen Parker column $)
• For every Ketanji Brown Jackson, be a Cory Booker (Newsweek, Kesha Ram Hinsdale op-ed)
• Republicans won’t be satisfied with overturning Roe (Washington Post, Melissa Murray op-ed $)
• Forget advise and consent. This is smear and degrade. (Washington Post, Ruth Marcus column $)
• The Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings showed the power of Black sisterhood (Washington Post, SaraEllen Strongman op-ed $)

Dirty Energy Industry Debunks Its Own Biden-Blaming Disinfo, Scientists Debunk Charlatans, And Students Debunk Fake Experts

Last week, we talked about the $50 million the Koch and the billionaire polluter network has put into climate denial organizations in the recent past and the nearly $500 million Koch, specifically, has given to set up University centers to underpin climate disinformation. 

Even still, there’s yet another way Koch buys denial, through contracts with people like John Stossel, whose production company was a top contractor for Koch, and whose recent climate disinfo piece attacking renewables was posted at Reason, which happened to get $1.2 million from the Charles Koch Institute in 2020. Stossel’s video features and appears to be largely based on Alex Epstein’s oily disinfo, which was debunked by both anonymous climate scientist “The Disproof” on Twitter, and climate scientist Andy Dessler in person and online. In a tweet thread after a debate, Dessler points out that Epstein’s data-free rhetoric is wrong about renewables increasing energy prices, disproving the “energy poverty” propaganda.  

The other popular propaganda approach right now is for fossil fools to blame the Biden administration’s climate agenda for the high price of methane gas, gasoline, and oil. But that’s not true either, and dirty energy CEOs know it. In a recent survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, hardly a green energy lobby, of 141 oil and methane gas companies in Texas, New Mexico and Louisiana (hardly climate alarmists), a majority of respondents (59%) said investors are the reason they’re not ramping up production. 

The fossil fuel industry isn’t increasing production to bring down prices because high prices mean high profits. It’s not complicated! 

As Avi Salzman wrote in coverage for Marketwatch, “the Fed asked producers what price of West Texas Intermediate oil it would take for them to get back into ‘growth mode.’ For 41%, they said they needed prices to be $80 to $99 a barrel, a level that WTI has already surpassed. But the second-most respondents (29%) said the price didn’t matter. That implies that they are sticking to their production plans no matter what, a departure from past oil booms.” 

Only 6% said government regulations were holding them back, which is interesting because that's the message driving the public relations response delivered by the GOP on Fox News. That 6%, of course, showed up loudly in the comment section of the report, leading to phrases like “this administration’s war on hydrocarbons” and “anticarbon extraction policies” sandwiched between less mind-poisoned takes one would expect in a world reckoning with a pandemic and a Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Labor and equipment shortages” came up a few times, and of course many echoed one quote that “the Russian-Ukraine ware is going to continue to wreak havoc on markets.”   

And you don’t have to be an energy executive or scientist to debunk disinfo! Though ClimateFeedback’s fact check of a recent CO2 Coalition post shows that it helps, even undergraduate students are plenty well-equipped to dismantle climate denial. 

Take one Brandon Daly, an Oregon State climate student, who took it upon himself to expertly debunk Patrick Moore and the CO2 Coalition’s webpage, after Patrick Moore asked for “a few examples of ‘disinformation’ from the CO2 Coalition,” and boy did Daly deliver! He looked at the CO2 Coalition’s “Get the Facts” page and pointed out how they, for example, use a single temperature station from England instead of the global record “and compare it to carbon emissions instead of CO2 concentration. At least put in more effort if you plan on lying to people.” 

The next 18 or so tweets burn through CO2’s disinfo and ends with an eerie warning: CO2 Coalition is apparently building a “Kids Zone.” 

Moore, despite having issued the ask for disinfo in a tweet dozens to hundreds of replies long, a thread having originated in Dec. 2020, and despite finding the time to jump in elsewhere, did not address the many, many examples of disinformation. 

Surely that was just an oversight, and perhaps if you’d like to bring that information to his attention, you could consider joining the CO2 Coalition as an associate or an intern! 

Someone’s got to build that “Kids Zone,” after all!

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