FIRST LOOK: 

The final installment of FRONTLINE's examination of the fossil fuel industry's history of casting doubt and delaying action on climate change airs tomorrow night on PBS.

Heat And Wildfires Fueled By Climate Change 8,500 Miles Apart: Extreme heat over 110°F in India and Pakistan continues to shatter records, threaten human health, cause landfills to combust, threaten power outages, and imperil Indian wheat crops struggling to make up for shortfalls caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. “Why is it exceptionally warm this year? The only reason is global warming,” Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, told Bloomberg. Meanwhile, from South Asia to the southwestern U.S., wildfires are ripping across drought-dried landscapes, especially in New Mexico. A million acres across the U.S. have burned already this year as, “Climate change is taking a situation that would be bad for us normally,” University of Arizona climatologist Gregg Garffin told The Guardian, “and turning the dial up.” (India/Pakistan: (Axios, Washington Post $, Bloomberg $, Reuters, Climate Home; Wheat crop and landfills: AP; Power outage worries: FT $; Southwest: The Guardian, The Hill, New York Times $; New Mexico: AP, Reuters, ABC, Reuters, New York Times $, Washington Post $; Climate Signals background: Extreme heat and heatwaves, Wildfires, Western US megadrought)

Drought Drives Desperate Increase In Child Marriages In Ethiopia: Worsening drought in parts of Ethiopia is leading to "dramatic" increases in child marriage, UNICEF warns. Desperate parents are resorting to wealthier families to provide for and protect their daughters, and are being forced to seek additional resources in the form of dowries, Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s executive director, told The Guardian. Ethiopia has emitted a negligible amount of the world's historic climate pollution, which is making droughts more frequent and severe, as failed rains three years in a row across Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, and Djibouti have pushed more than 600,000 children to drop out of school, a precursor to exploitation, and gender-based violence. The impact on girls forced into child marriages can be "debilitating," Russell added. “It really cuts off all of their opportunities … they’re young, so they’re not in a position to negotiate safe sex with their partners. It’s just one problem after another for these girls.” In 2016, before the drought, 40% of Ethiopian girls were married before 18, and 14% before they’re 15. While UNICEF recordied 672 cases of child marriage in the first half of 2021, that number ballooned to 2,282 between September 2021 to March of 2022. (The Guardian, The Independent; Climate Signals background: Drought)

Puerto Rico Power Provider Sued Over April Blackout: Four Puerto Rican corporations are suing the disenfranchised colonial territory's electricity provider over its failure to provide reliable electricity. The mainland U.S.-based companies that own chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Applebees are seeking $310 million in damages incurred when a fire at one power plant in early April plunged the entire island into darkness for days. More than a million Puerto Ricans had no electricity, and over a hundred thousand had no running water. (Gizmodo, NBC News)

Big Oil Posts Big Profits, Big Payouts For Shareholders: Years of fracking for oil and gas in the Permian Basin have put Texas on the verge of on pace to overtake California and Alaska as the most earthquake-ridden state, while Exxon and Chevron post huge profits from skyrocketing consumer prices due to the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Exxon reported $5.5 billion in Q1 profits, even after writing down $3.4 billion in its divestment from Russia, and Chevron reported netting $6.3 billion, quadrupling its Q1 2021 profits. Progressives on Capitol Hill have called for taxes on the windfall profits enjoyed by oil companies, who are using the high prices to significantly increase dividends and buybacks instead of increasing production or otherwise lowering prices for consumers. (Fracking earthquakes: Bloomberg $; Profits: New York Times $, Reuters, The Hill, Fox Business; Exxon: Houston Chronicle, CNBC, Wall Street Journal $, CNN; Chevron: CNBC; Shareholders: Wall Street Journal $: Skyrocketing prices: (Washington Post $, Gizmodo; Windfall taxes: The Hill; Commentary: FT $)

ENVIRONMENTAL (IN)JUSTICE: Understanding the link between racial justice and the fight against climate change (NPR), A Black woman [LaFanette Soles-Woods] fought for her community, and her life, amidst polluting landfills and vast ‘borrow pits’ mined for sand and clay (Inside Climate News)

FOSSIL FUELED WAR: Why the debate over Russian uranium worries U.S. tribal nations (New York Times $), Pandemic, war, politics hamper global push for climate action (Washington Post $), Companies count the cost of ditching Russia (Reuters Factbox), Green fix to replace Russian gas is stymied by Europe’s red tape (Bloomberg $)

• GLOBAL ENERGY MARKETS: Russian threats redraw the global energy map (Washington Post $), Why Americans became more vulnerable to oil price spikes (New York Times $), Gazprom’s gas exports drop as buyers turn to spot volumes (Bloomberg $)
• GAS & LNG: While Texas Froze Part 3: The increasing global demand for LNG (The Austin Bulldog), US gas producers under pressure as Russia cuts off supplies in Europe (Wall Street Journal $), Russia’s weaponization of natural gas could backfire by destroying demand for it (The Conversation)
• EUROPE: EU to propose phasing out Russian oil by the end of the year (Bloomberg $), EU power agency defends market model even as prices soar (Bloomberg $), Analysts nudge EU carbon price forecasts higher but warn on Ukraine risks (Reuters), New gas pipeline boosts Europe’s bid to ease Russian supply (AP), EU energy ministers meet to discuss Russian gas, sanctions (AP)
• FOOD: The Ukraine food price crisis is just a preview of what could happen as climate change worsens (TIME)

FINANCE: Indigenous women call for financial institutions to stop investing in extraction (Grist), Global regulators call for external checks on bank climate data (Reuters)

• PROXY SEASON: Credit Suisse shareholders reject a proposal for more climate disclosure (Bloomberg $), The hedge fund that beat Exxon isn’t ready for a climate coup at banks (Quartz), The long-shot campaign to get big banks out of fossil fuels (Vox), Wall Street climate semantics skew fossil-fuel financing votes (Bloomberg $)

COMMUNITY HEALTH: Climate action is critical for health equity. Community health clinics are key - and need more support. (USA Today)

CATTLE, RED MEAT, AND METHANE: Cattle burp methane emissions measured from space for first time (Bloomberg $, New Scientist, CNN, Reuters, Business Insider); 

• IF THE AMAZON IS TO DIE, IT WILL BE BEEF THAT KILLS IT: Devouring the rainforest (Washington Post $)
• SO… HELPFUL?: The tick that makes people allergic to red meat is in DC (Washington Post $)

ZOONOTIC SPILLOVER: Climate change may have one more side effect — another pandemic (NPR)

10 SOCCER FIELDS PER MINUTE: Despite COP26 pledges, the world is losing way too many trees (Grist)

IT'S NOT YOUR (TOASTER'S) FAULT: Impact of energy-draining ‘vampire devices’ overstated, says tech expert (The Guardian)

DAM HARD DECISIONS: Lake Powell officials face an impossible choice in the West's megadrought: Water or electricity (CNN), Vegas water intake now visible at drought-stricken Lake Mead (AP, Yahoo)

TRANSPORTATION: Legalizing Bangladesh 'easy bike' taxis could drive safer, greener industry (Thomson Reuters Foundation)

KEEP WINTER COLD: Winter Olympians use medals to open doors, spark climate discussion on Capitol Hill (USA Today)

AGENCIES: Biden’s Energy and Interior chiefs hit the hill. Here's what to know. (Washington Post $)

EPA: EPA moves to keep Obama-era smog standards despite review (The Hill), EPA waives restrictions on ethanol gasoline in bid to lower prices (Washington Examiner)

DOE: Energy chief ‘optimistic’ Congress will act on clean energy before November (The Hill)

USPS: 16 states sue Postal Service over gas-powered mail trucks (Axios)

WHITE HOUSE: John Kerry's chief of staff leaving climate team (Axios)

THE HILL: Dems grimace at Manchin’s bipartisan energy detour (Politico)

ELECTIONS: As living costs surge, climate change takes a backseat in elections (Thomson Reuters Foundation), Vulnerable Democrats press Pelosi to reverse rejection of gas tax holiday (The Hill)

CITIES AND STATES AND COUNTIES: Washington state moves to electrify new buildings by requiring heat pumps (Canary Media), Connecticut lawmakers set 2040 goal for carbon-free grid (AP), Minnesota legislators clash over climate change, environmental spending (Star Tribune), Prince George’s schools are going green with new climate action plan (Washington Post $)

• CALIFORNIA: California attorney general investigates the oil and gas industry’s role in plastic pollution, subpoenas Exxon (Inside Climate News), California opens investigation into ‘decades-long plastics deception campaign’ (Grist), California takes on Big Plastic over recycling myths (The Verge), California to investigate fossil fuel companies over deceptive plastic recycling myths (HuffPost), California promised to close its last nuclear plant. Now Newsom is reconsidering (LA Times $, Bloomberg $, AP, CNBC, Reuters, Washington Examiner)

• NEW YORK: State Assembly approves two-year pause on fossil fuel-powered crypto mining (Crains New York), How New York’s potential ban could cripple crypto miners (Barron's), What is next for New York’s crypto mining moratorium bill? (The Block)

• TEXAS: Texas plans to punish companies that move away from fossil fuels (Gizmodo), Texas stumbles in its effort to punish green financial firms (NPR)

FERC: Danly calls FERC transmission proposal coercive and discriminatory, highlights roadblocks (Utility Dive)

IMPACTS: Adriatic ecosystems withstand major climate shifts but wither under human impact, study shows (Newsweek) 

FUTURE REALITY: Augmented reality exhibit in New York looks at impact of climate change (Reuters)

DROUGHT: How California is frantically trying to protect endangered salmon from extinction in drought (Sacramento Bee $)

HURRICANES: Ida retired from hurricane names after ravaging Louisiana, Northeast (Washington Post $, Axios)

WATER: To survive drought, parts of SoCal must cut water use by 35%. The new limit: 80 gallons a day (LA Times $)

BOOZE: Desperate for water, wine country grape growers build expensive pipelines to cities’ recycled sewage (San Francisco Chronicle)

SILVER LININGS: Experts: Climate transformative, but causes for optimism (Yale Climate Connections)

RENEWABLES: For the first time, US renewable energy output exceeds nuclear generation, EIA finds (Utility Dive), Vast reaches of Utah’s West Desert could be leased for geothermal power (Casper Star-Tribune)

• SOLAR: China solar firms shift strategy as US scrutiny hits results (Bloomberg $), Solar industry ‘frozen’ as Biden administration investigates China (New York Times $, Axios, Wall Street Journal $), The largest US grid operator puts 1,200 mostly solar projects on hold for two years (Inside Climate News), An international solar power tariff dispute is slowing Maine's efforts to ramp up the sector (Maine Public Radio), Tariff-hungry solar manufacturers try to capitalize on rising anti-China sentiment (Washington Examiner), Largest solar power plant in US secures $1.3 billion in financing (Canary Media)

MINERALS: World lacks time, not minerals for climate-saving technology (Bloomberg $)

OIL & GAS: Offshore oil industry returns to Houston for its 'Super Bowl,' OTC, while facing existential crisis (Houston Chronicle), Shell to buy Indian renewable power platform for $1.55 billion (Reuters, Bloomberg $)

COAL: China state planner sets out irregular price-pushing behaviors for coal (Reuters), India’s coal crisis may spur shift to clean energy, renew says (Bloomberg $)

HYDROGEN: Concord blue plans hydrogen plants in germany amid gas crisis (Bloomberg $)

UTILITIES: AEP’s renewable buildout has flexibility to handle uncertainty in the solar market: CEO Akins (Utility Dive), Arizona Public Service asks court to reverse ACC cost recovery, ROE decisions (Utility Dive), Electric utilities spending millions to lower wildfire risk (AP), MISO prepares for ‘worst-case scenarios,’ heads into summer with insufficient firm generation (Utility Dive)

GRID: Big US energy transmission projects inch closer to approval (AP)

EVs: Tata Motors maps out long-range EVs for India and beyond (Reuters)

CRYPTO: How bitcoin mining contributes to climate change (Yahoo)

WYNN BRUCE: Man who died outside Supreme Court raises complicated questions, calls attention to 'climate grief' (USA Today), The truth behind the man who set himself on fire at the Supreme Court (The Independent)

ACTIVISM: Just Stop Oil’s ‘spring uprising’ protests funded by US philanthropists (The Guardian)

AGRICULTURE: Record fertilizer prices drive investors, farmers to microbes (Wall Street Journal $)

BOOKS: New book says Indigenous knowledge is key to fighting climate change (Yale Climate Connections), Storms, bombs, contagions, pandemics and pandemonium (New York Times $)

CARS: Gas-guzzling German carmakers face uphill struggle to go green (Reuters)

INTERNATIONAL: Europe's electricity market not in need of redesign, regulators say (Reuters)

• Climate change threatens my Salton Sea community and others. California needs to prepare (Desert Sun, Patricia Leal-Gutierrez column)
• Ban fossil fuels in new construction, N.Y. (New York Daily News, Alex Beauchamp op-ed)
• Everyday Texans may be footing the bill (again) if big electric consultants have their way with grid (Houston Chronicle, Chris Tomlinson column)
• Warmer oceans threaten another California forest, this one underwater (New York Times, David Helvarg op-ed $)
• Texas plans a Texas-sized response to rising seas (Bloomberg, Francis Wilkinson op-ed $)
• Oil and gas industry waste opens door for methane mitigation (The Hill, Isaac Brown op-ed)
• We’ve opened the door too wide for oil and gas companies (New York Times, Kate Aronoff op-ed $)

• Warmer oceans threaten another California forest, this one underwater (New York Times, David Helvarg op-ed $)

• If you’re anxious about the climate, try this (New York Times, Margaret Klein Salamon op-ed $)
• America needs Elon Musk — to sell electric cars (Bloomberg, Matthew Yglesias op-ed $)
• Psychological strategies for the long haul of climate action (Newsweek, Thomas S. Bateman and Michael E. Mann op-ed)
• Is this man talking California into nuclear power? (Wall Street Journal, James Freeman op-ed $)

Daily Caller Has A Facebook-Approved Fact Checker, But Is Now Run By Koch-Trained Career Disinformer Michael Bastasch. 

The Daily Caller has a fact checking project called Check Your Fact, that Facebook considers legitimate and both it and Daily Caller look like a legitimate news organization. They're not. The Daily Caller is once again a Koch propaganda machine, as the new Managing Editor for the Daily Caller’s News Foundation is Michael Bastasch, whose entire career, save for a stint at Fox News, has been Koch-dependent. We noted his new position in early April, and a month later can confirm Bastasch is back at publishing climate disinformation through the Daily Caller. 

If you need a reminder, Bastasch has zero real journalism experience or training. Instead, as we noted back in 2016 before he deleted his LinkedIn profile, he’s got a degree in politics, followed by internships at the Charles Koch Institute and various other Koch propaganda appendages, including a journalism training fellowship at the Daily Caller and something called the American Journalism Institute, which sounds legit, but more on that momentarily.  

Now, to be fair, Bastasch hasn’t been 100% addicted to Koch, nor has Daily Caller. From 2019 to 2022, he was a writer for Fox News, which might be considered journalism experience, except he was at the opinion program Ingraham Angle, which is … not news so much as school shooting conspiracies, mask/covid disinfo, climate denial, and violent political propaganda. 

So that’s who’s steering the ship now over at the “oops we kept hiring white nationalists” Daily Caller News Foundation, where “all complaints about a story’s accuracy or fairness must be taken seriously,” according to its About page, where they say they’re “committed to giving everybody a fair hearing if they believe a story is unfair or incorrect.” 

Oh really? Yes, “complaints about a story should be emailed to MichaelBastasch@DailyCallerNewsFoundation.org. If a correction is warranted it will be published as soon as possible. Serious errors will be highlighted at the top of a story.” 

Now that’s particularly rich, because Bastasch has embraced a stinging criticism of his work as a point of pride on his Twitter bio, which reads “Critics used to say this of my reporting: ‘You can't prove it false’,” characteristically cherry-picking a quote out of context. 

The context for that snippet? Susan Joy Hassol described how “you can really mislead people without outright lying, and in a way that’s more dangerous. You can't prove it false; you can't say what they've said is inaccurate, that it's a lie; you can't say any of that. Then somebody would have to say it's true — well, it's not true because it's not the whole truth." 

So the criticism that what the Daily Caller is doing is worse than simply lying, because they’re selectively presenting facts to create a false argument (known as “paltering”) in a way that can’t be innocent or unintentional, and in fact is a deliberate lie. 

And that’s exactly what Bastasch embraces. It’s how he was taught to do “journalism,” during his fellowship at the Daily Caller with the American Journalism Institute, which has its curriculum online. In “It’s Not Easy Being Green” class, the propagandists-in-training will be treated to “a look at environmental regulations and the well-funded network of environmentalists who champion them. This will include an examination of the Republican-created Environmental Protection Agency, the burgeoning taxpayer-funded green jobs industry, and the consequences of European attempts to “‘green’ their economies.” 

You know, just like in real journalism school!

Since his return to lead the Daily Caller, the climate content has taken a turn towards explicit climate disinformation. Gone are the lazy rewrites of AP and other news outlets’ coverage of climate and energy events, and back are the Bastasch-era dressing-ups of Republican and Koch propaganda and industry talking points, like tobacco lawyer/climate denier Steve Milloy’s prebunked disinfo-op-ed calling Biden “the ultimate energy wrecking ball.” 

Someone should send them an email, surely as a very real journalist at an outlet dedicated to serious and ethical reporting, Bastasch will honor their commitment to accuracy and retract it, before the Daily Caller’s very objective fact checkers have to debunk it! 

How embarrassing would that be? You know, if any of them were actually journalists or capable of feeling shame!

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