FIRST AND FOREMOST: 

Racial justice and climate justice are inextricably linked, just as the extractive colonialism, environmental racism, and climate denial that drive and are exacerbated by the climate crisis are fueled by white supremacy. 

Domestic Terrorist Inspired By GOP-Pushed Conspiracy Kills 10 In Buffalo, NY: A domestic terrorist shot and killed 10 people in Buffalo, New York, Saturday. The white gunman intentionally traveled to a predominantly Black neighborhood and sought to kill as many Black people as possible. Though he claimed to be acting alone, the terrorist's 180-page white supremacist screed focuses on the conspiracy that white people are being intentionally replaced. Elected Republicans — including House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik (NY) and Matt Gaetz (FL) among others — and Fox News stars (most notoriously, Tucker Carlson) have aggressively pushed the so-called "great replacement theory." In 2017, the president at the time praised neo-Nazis who  chanted "Jews will not replace us" as "very fine people." The racist conspiracy theory also inspired domestic terrorist attacks at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 and against Hispanic shoppers in an El Paso Walmart in 2019, as well as attacks in New Zealand in 2019. The conspiracy is not a fringe belief in the United States. An AP poll released earlier this month found one in three adults in the U.S. believe an effort is underway “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains." The terrorist was wearing military-style clothing and body armor, armed with a high-powered rifle, and was arrested by police, alive. (Attack: Buffalo News, AP, The Root, Black Wall Street Times, New York Times $, Rolling Stone, Salon, NPR, AP; Great Replacement Theory: Buffalo News, NPR, Washington Post $, Salon, Mother Jones, Newsweek, The Hill, NBC, Business Insider, NBC, HuffPost; GOP proponents: Washington Post $, New York Times $, Rolling Stone, The Guardian; Arrest: NewsOne, Buffalo News; Victims: Buffalo News, Buffalo News; Lone-wolf fallacy: The Atlantic; Response and condemnations: The Grio; Commentary: Buffalo News, Rod Watson op-ed, The Guardian, Jason Stanley op-ed, Daily Beast, Wajahat Ali op-ed, LA Times, Erika Smith column $, The Guardian, Jason Stanley op-ed, USA Today, Ben Jealous op-ed)

Deutsche Bank Won't Back EACOP — Report: Deutsche Bank will not provide financing for the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, Reuters reports. Germany's biggest lender follows several major (re)insurers in refusing to back the proposed 900-mile heated crude oil pipeline from Hoima, Uganda, to the Port of Tanga in Tanzania, cutting through agricultural land and threatening wetlands in the Lake Victoria Basin. Deutsche Bank has not commented publicly, amid increasing pressure ahead of its annual general meeting on Thursday. (Reuters)

Extreme Heat Drops Birds From Sky In South Asia: The oppressive heatwave blanketing India and Pakistan is, if anything, getting worse. Jacobabad, Pakistan, hit 122°F (50°C) on Friday. "It's like fire burning all around," Shafi Mohammad, who lives on the outskirts of the city, told AFP. Birds literally fell from the sky in India's western Gujarat state last week, as the extreme heat dries up water sources, increasing exhaustion and dehydration for avian and human beings alike. (Jacobabad: AFP, Al Jazeera; Birds: Reuters, Business Insider; Water shortages: Bloomberg $; Climate Signals background: Extreme heat and heatwaves; Commentary: The BMJ, Yogesh Jain and Rachna Jain commentary)

LNG Exports Driving Up Gas Prices: A gas industry official admitted gas exports are contributing to high energy prices for American families and businesses, Politico reports. “LNG exports are a factor contributing to today’s natural gas pricing,” American Gas Association VP of Energy Markets Richard Meyer told reporters, adding, they are “not necessarily the [only] factor.” Exports of liquified methane-based gas have increased dramatically in recent years, with domestic prices correlating much more closely to the international market than they had in the past. (Politico) 

FOSSIL FUELED WAR: The US pledged billions to fight climate change. Then came the Ukraine war (NPR), Does a crackdown on Russian gas help or hurt the climate? (E&E News), 21 federal agencies monitoring Ukraine war's environmental toll (Axios), Russian energy supplier cuts off electricity to Finland amid NATO bid (The Hill)

YOUR LUNCH BREAK: Utilities (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver)

COP26/27: ‘Cash, coal, cars and trees’: what progress has been made since COP26? (The Guardian), ‘This is about survival’: will COP27 bring action on Glasgow climate pact? (The Guardian), Egypt to be among first to issue new climate targets ahead of U.N. summit (Reuters)

SOUTH AFRICA FLOODS: Global warming made South Africa's recent floods twice as likely, study says (Reuters)(The Guardian)

CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: Harris discusses 'existential' climate threats with Asian leaders (E&E $), How debt cancellation could help poor countries prepare for climate change (Grist)

WILDFIRES EVERYWHERE: 1 in 6 Americans live in areas with significant wildfire risk (Washington Post $)(New York Times $)(Wall Street Journal $)

• CALIFORNIA: Mansions burn in California as coastal wildfire spreads (Gizmodo)
• COLORADO: 1 dies in fire that destroyed eight mobile homes in Colorado (AP), 
• MICHIGAN: Wildfire prompts northern Michigan hunting camp evacuation (AP)
• NEW MEXICO: Fire crews battling the massive New Mexico wildfire want a break from relentless wind (NPR)
• NEW HAMPSHIRE: Firefighters battle large forest fire in White Mountains (AP), Menaced by flames, nuclear lab peers into future of wildfire (AP)

CLIMATE LITIGATION: In the Philippines, a landmark finding moves fossil fuel companies’ climate liability into the realm of human rights (Inside Climate News), New climate frontier: Gender-based lawsuits (E&E News) 

FOSSIL VOLATILITY: Power prices jumped 51% in PJM, 85% in New England in Q1 due to rising gas prices (Utility Dive)

COOKING WITH INDUCTION!: The best stove for your health and the environment (TIME)

EPA: EPA advisory board pauses ozone standards review (E&E $), EPA sued over plan to lift hold on turbine emission limits (E&E $), 17 GOP attorneys general sue EPA over California vehicle emission standards (Axios)(E&E News)(The Hill)

DOE: IG examines fraud, problems with DOE weatherization grants (E&E $)

DOI: Biden calls off oil and gas leases in Alaska and gulf of Mexico — but not for the climate (Grist)(Gizmodo), Industry disputes Interior Department's rationale for canceling Alaska offshore lease sale (Washington Examiner)

• LOL, TBH: Zinke’s wife declaring primary residence in California as he runs in Montana (Politico Pro $)

WHITE HOUSE: Gina McCarthy is leaving. Who will take her place? (E&E News)

THE HILL: 4 takeaways as innovation, energy bill talks kick off (E&E News), A low-income energy-efficiency program gets $3.5b boost, but leaves out many in need (NPR), Congress, stakeholders find consensus around hydropower license reform (Utility Dive), GOP to Yellen: 'Green' assets riskier than climate change (E&E $)

• HOUSE: Hearing shows uphill fight for progressive mining reform (E&E News), House Oversight launches probe of USPS fleet deal (E&E $), Lawmakers say drought, permitting are stifling hydropower (E&E $), Lawmakers try to kick-start bills to prevent deforestation (E&E $)
• SENATE: Coal miners want more help from Manchin on black lung (E&E $), Lawmakers battle over Commerce tariff probe into solar panel parts (The Hill)

ELECTIONS: A climate progressive leads a crowded Democratic field for pittsburgh’s 12th congressional district seat (Inside Climate News), GOP primaries could help shape nascent conservative climate push (The Hill), In Pennsylvania’s primary election, little enthusiasm for the Northeast’s regional greenhouse gas initiative (Inside Climate News)

CITIES AND STATES AND DISTRICTS TAXED WITHOUT REPRESENTATION: Grants help Wisconsin nonprofits purchase electric vehicles (Yale Climate Connections), Hawaii sinks measure to promote climate education (E&E $), In new hell climate, Oregon adopts workplace safety rules for smoke and heat (Gizmodo), In new role, Massachusetts ex-mayor looks to spread his city’s climate successes (Energy News Network), Ohio residents fight to get radioactive oil and gas waste off their roads (Grist), Washington, D.C., is ‘ideally poised for electrification,’ Sierra Club finds. The city’s gas utility disagrees. (Utility Dive)

• CALIFORNIA: California just ran on 100% renewable energy, but fossil fuels aren't fading away yet (NPR), Newsom wants $1.4B to cover Californians' utility bills (E&E $), Wildfires eat up $1.9B of Calif. cap-and-trade revenue (E&E News)

FERC: FERC to consider 3 natural gas projects next week (Politico Pro $)

IMPACTS: 2022 brings Earth’s 5th-warmest April (Yale Climate Connections), Endurance shipwreck threatened by global heating, says marine archaeologist (The Guardian), In Alaska, warmer days can bring catastrophic flooding as frozen rivers break up (NPR)

OCEAN(FRONT) PROPERTY: Beach houses on the outer banks are being swallowed by the sea (New York Times $), He bought the house 9 months ago. Then the ocean swept it away. (Washington Post $)

SPEAKING OF WHICH…: Readings on climate-change impacts and insurance (Yale Climate Connections)

HEAT: Texans asked to turn up thermostats after sweltering heat knocks six power plants offline (CNN)

EMISSIONS: EIA: US CO2 emissions rose 6 percent in 2021 (Politico Pro $)

DROUGHT: Lake Powell is vanishing with devastating consequences. But it's bringing a former canyon back to life. (CBS), Southwest 'megadrought' leads to wildfires and new homicide evidence (Axios), The Colorado River is in crisis, and it's getting worse every day (Washington Post $)

FLOODING: Hundreds escape flood waters in Queensland as state lashed by severe thunderstorms (The Guardian)

WATER: California is in a water crisis, yet usage is way up. Officials are focused on the wrong problem, advocates say (CNN)

SHRINKING PROBLEMS: Caesar’s favorite herb was the Viagra of ancient Rome. Until climate change killed it off (The Guardian)

TREES: Missing the emissions for the trees: biomass burning booms in East Asia (Mongabay), New restrictions could cut carbon offsets from major rainforests (Wall Street Journal $)

QUALITY OF LIFE: The world’s a mess. So they’ve stopped saving for tomorrow. (New York Times $)

RENEWABLES: Chart: US solar installations could fall 50% or more under new tariffs (Canary Media), Chinese wind-turbine companies seek global growth as western rivals struggle (Wall Street Journal $), US deal to shake up solar industry (E&E News)

BUILDINGS: The future of electrification, according to Google Trends (Protocol)

METHANE: Cat litter could be antidote for climate change, researchers say (Wall Street Journal $)

PIPELINES: Mountain Valley Pipeline costs, delays adding up for project backers (Charleston Gazette-Mail), How a major tar sands pipeline project threatens Indigenous land rights (HuffPost and Type Investigations)

OIL & GAS: Canceled lease sales raise new questions for offshore drilling (The Hill)

Big oil investors reject calls for stricter climate goals — so far (Washington Post $)(Reuters), Plains All American to settle class-action lawsuit over 2015 California oil pipeline spill (Wall Street Journal $)(AP), Chevron and ExxonMobil to explore lower carbon opportunities in Indonesia (Reuters), Saudi Aramco posts record quarterly profit on surging oil prices (Wall Street Journal $)

UTILITIES: Oregon gas utility wants to bill customers millions for executive bonuses and ‘misleading’ advertising (DeSmog), How utility stocks have kept their spark (Wall Street Journal $), 

GRID: Largest US grid operator outlines major renewables shift (E&E $)

EVs: How much CO2 do EVs cut? Size matters (E&E $), Why electric scooters in India keep going up in flames (Washington Post $)

GAME NIGHT: Using a board game to plan for a changing planet (Hakai Magazine)

BOOKS: That’s all, folks: a serious joke book about climate change (New York Times $)

BUSINESS: Climate-friendly cuppa? Carbon footprint labels aim to steer green buying (Thomson Reuters Foundation)

TRASH: What will Brazil do with illegally trafficked American garbage? (Mother Jones)

WILDLIFE: A decline in flying bugs sounds good for humans, but it's bad for the environment (NPR)

INTERNATIONAL: New Zealand to help pay for cleaner cars to reduce emissions (AP), South Africa's Eskom increases length of daily power cut for start of week (Reuters)(Reuters)

• AUSTRALIA: As Australia votes, indigenous people call for debate on rights (Reuters), There’s an election in Australia. Here's how climate fits in. (New York Times $), Fires, floods and food security: how climate change became a local issue this election (The Guardian)
• CHILE: Chile's climate scientist minister eyes tougher rules for top copper mining nation (Reuters), Chile's constitutional assembly rejects major mining overhaul (Reuters), 

EXCEPTIONALLY AMERICAN: ‘Failure of an American ideology’: why Covid has an outsized impact on the US (The Guardian)

• OPEC is ignoring its mission statement — has it lost its way? (The Hill, Jim Krane and Mark Finley op-ed)
• We can’t drill our way to energy security (New York Times, Jesse Jenkins op-ed $)
• We need optimism – but Disneyfied climate predictions are just dangerous (The Guardian, George Monbiot op-ed)
• The steal of the last century and a half (Environmental Health News, Peter Dykstra column)
• America’s neglect of nuclear energy has weakened our global influence (The Hill, Ted Nordhaus and Valerie Shen op-ed)
• States are leveraging nuclear energy for bipartisan climate progress (The Hill, Carol Browner and Tom Graves op-ed)
• Closing the gap on rural EV ‘charging deserts’ (Utility Dive, William Policastro op-ed)
• ‘Fun in the sun’ photos are a dangerous distraction from the reality of climate breakdown (The Guardian, Saffron O’Neill op-ed)
• There's nothing godly about the 'only Christian' in the Texas Railroad Commission runoff (Houston Chronicle, Chris Tomlinson column)

‘Freedom of Movement’ The Latest 'Intellectual Product' Point From Koch Tool Embedded At Kansas University

Buried in last August's bipartisan infrastructure bill is a clause stipulating that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration needs to start figuring out the best way for cars to use technology capable of preventing drunk driving, and make it standard equipment in new cars. This technology is already around, cars are already collecting all sorts of data as you drive, the intent here is to standardize the system to try to do something about the ten thousand people killed by drunk drivers every year.  

It went unnoticed, until Georgia Republican Bob Barr wrote an op-ed in the Daily disinfo Caller at the end of November that the bipartisan legislation "will mandate that automobile manufacturers build into every car what amounts to a 'vehicle kill switch.'" Barr goes on a paranoid rant raising all sorts of questions about how things could go wrong, concluding that it is "a violation of our constitutional rights" and if not removed somehow after being signed into law, "the freedom of the open road that individual car ownership brought to the American Dream, will be but another vague memory of an era no longer to be enjoyed by future generations." 

And indeed, who doesn't long for the days of leisurely drunk drives in cars with no seat belts? 

From there, some car blogs picked up the narrative from Barr, and in the months that followed, the "kill switch" claim bounced around social media and went viral enough in early March that both the AP and LeadStories fact checked the claim, and found it "false" and "misinterpreted." 

Johns Hopkins researcher Jeffrey Michael, who actually works on the technology, told the AP the law has “nothing to do with giving law enforcement access to a kill switch," while Jake McCook of the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety program told LeadStories that the actual agreement between government and industry directly stipulates that they "establish operating procedures and physical security measures designed to protect these Data from inadvertent release or disclosure to unauthorized third parties," meaning they are charged quite explicitly with keeping the data privately protected.  

Two months after those fact checkers thoroughly debunked Barr's apparent fears that his car will snitch on him for driving drunk, the Daily Caller's fact checker hasn't touched it (shocker!) but the claim is back in the Koch network's new beau, RealClearEnergy. 

"Joe Biden is threatening our freedom of movement" cries the headline of an op-ed by Levi Russell, bylined as "an assistant teaching professor at the University of Kansas's Brandmeyer Center for Applied Economics," which sounds like a real academic gig. But why would an assistant teaching professor put his name to claims that have already been soundly debunked? 

Because Levi Russell is more accurately described as a Koch spokesperson given a job at one of dozens of Koch-sponsored university centers in order to continue promoting Koch propaganda (like this "freedom of movement" piece attacking electric cars) with the sheen of academic credibility. 

When we googled his name+Koch, for example, what jumped up was a story from 2014, when Russell was a spokesperson form Koch's Americans for Prosperity tea party front group, and had to apologize for their attack ad's use of an image of President Obama visiting parents of people killed in the 2012 Aurora, Colorado mass shooting. 

'Apologized for inadvertently exploiting mass murder to smear Obamacare on behalf of my billionaire-funded politically lobby shop' is definitely not a normal part of any real professor's CV, but is perfect for a Koch university front group like the Brandmeyer Center, which is helmed by another former Koch crony, Art Hall. According to documents brought into the public domain by UnKochMyCampus, Hall's funding from the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation was for creating "intellectual products" for use "as a tool in economic policy debates."  

Russell's misuse of the UN-recognized phrase Freedom of Movement, meaning countries allowing citizens to come and go as they please, more or less, as a rallying cry for pro-drunk-driving, anti-EV propaganda isn't just ridiculous clickbait bombast. 

It's apparently the best "intellectual product" they can come up with to use "as a tool" to fight for what Koch profits demand: less EVs, more fossil fuels.

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