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2022 Monsoon Rains Kill Over 1,000 In Afghanistan And Pakistan: More than 1,000 people have been killed by flooding in Pakistan and Afghanistan this summer as heavy rains have pummeled the region. In Pakistan, at least 937 people have died, another 50,000 are now homeless, and a total of 33 million have been affected, the country's Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman told reporters Thursday. At least 182 Afghans have also been killed and residents of Logar province say the flooding is unprecedented. The monsoon season has dumped double the average year's rainfall on Pakistan so far in 2022, setting off “a humanitarian disaster driven by climate change,” Rehman said. (Pakistan: Wall Street Journal $, CNN, AP, Reuters, Al Jazeera, BBC, Bloomberg $, Axios, Reuters; Afghanistan: AP, Al Jazeera, CNN, Reuters, People; Both: CNN; Climate Signals Background: Extreme precipitation increase)

New Black-Focused Initiative Launches: The Black Hive, a new climate initiative focused on equitable climate solutions, launched Thursday. The initiative, launched by the Movement for Black Lives, aims to build upon the 2021 Red, Black, and Green New Deal. “The climate crisis is happening because of corporate greed, government negligence, the divestment of solutions and the investment into the harmful institutions like the fossil fuel industry, that are harming our people,” Valencia Gunder, national co-lead of The Black Hive, told the AP. “It’s time for America to address the anti-Black racism that happens here.” Structural racism, from the legacy of enslavement to redlining to present-day de facto segregation, makes Black communities far more likely to be harmed by climate change or located near polluting industries. The initiative's launch is especially timely, organizers say, in light of the Supreme Court's West Virginia v. EPA ruling and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which advocates have criticized over provisions supporting fossil fuel expansion. “There’s no solution if Black (communities) and Indigenous nations, especially the Gulf South, have to suffer in order to have Band-Aid solutions for the wider public," Alston-Toure′, a member of the Parable of the Sower Intentional Community Cooperative spanning several states, told the AP. "We want to be taken serious and know that our votes matter because this is a lynching of our communities, and we have to be heard.” (AP)

TALANX Is Latest Insurer Refusing To Back EACOP: TALANX, a German insurance firm, is the latest in a growing list of insurance and reinsurance companies refusing to underwrite the controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline. The decision raises questions about the viability of the EACOP, which, under Ugandan law, must secure international insurance coverage. Eleven (re)insurance companies, including the world's four largest, have already refused to underwrite the proposed 900-mile heated crude oil pipeline from Hoima, Uganda, to the Port of Tanga in Tanzania. (Reinsurance News, Commercial Risk)

Climate Change Will Make Dangerous Heat Indices Far More Common — Study: Dangerously hot days will occur at least three times more frequently as climate change drives up temperatures, a study published in Communications Earth & Environment finds. Earth's mid-latitudes will see a three- to ten-fold increase in days with a heat index of 103°F if global temperatures increase 2°C — the less ambitious goal set out in the Paris Agreement. The tropics could fare even worse, experiencing a heat index of 103°F “during most days of each typical year” by 2100. All of these probabilities mean Chicago, which hit a heat index of 103°F just four times between 1979 and 1998, would be hitting that dangerous threshold 11 times every year by the end of this century. “As the heat index rises, it becomes harder and harder to cool our bodies,” Dr. Renee Salas, a Harvard School of Public Health professor and emergency room physician not involved in the study, told the AP. “Heat stroke is a potentially deadly form of heat illness that occurs when body temperatures rise to dangerous levels.” Extreme heat indices are especially dangerous for postal and delivery workers. (Heat index study: AP, The Hill, The Guardian, Inside Climate News, The Conversation; Delivery workers: E&E News; Northern Australia: The Guardian; Climate Signals background: Extreme heat and heatwaves)

ENVIRONMENTAL (IN)JUSTICE: Gaza has access to less than 40% of the energy it needs. Locals hope solar power can fill the gap. (NBC), In Detroit, panel hears from permitting reform foes (E&E $), Why keeping girls in school is a good strategy to cope with climate change (NPR)

MOUNTAIN VALLEY PIPELINE: Trouble on pipeline’s path hits home for Manchin (E&E News)

FOSSIL FUELED ENERGY CRISIS: Canada to return 5 remaining Nord Stream turbines to Germany (Politico Pro $), Heat or eat? Winter protests loom as energy poverty sweeps Europe (Thomson Reuters Foundation), Can Russia pivot its energy market away from Europe and towards Asia? (Energy Monitor), Energy crisis may have bigger impact on households than 2008 crash (Bloomberg $), Russia's war against Ukraine continues to drive up US natural gas prices. Here's what we know. (Houston Chronicle), US envoy says Russian invasion speeds shift to clean energy (AP), Why Europe’s electricity prices are soaring (New York Times $), Winter is coming but Germany's Scholz leaves Canada with no promises for LNG (Reuters), Natural gas is soaring on Russian supply cuts. (Barron's), Russian plant ‘burning off £8m of gas a day’ as supply to Germany is limited (The Guardian), Britain to see 80% spike in energy bills as crisis deepens (AP)

COP27: EU to urge big polluters to toughen climate pledges by COP27 summit - draft (Reuters)

PUBLIC OPINION: Americans underestimate the popularity of climate change action among their peers (The Hill)

SOUTHEAST FLOODING: 5 million people under flood watch across Gulf Coast (NBC)

GOP vs ESG: BlackRock, UBS and 348 ESG funds "banned" in Texas (Axios), Texas penalizes BlackRock, other firms for climate advocacy (E&E $)

INFLATION REDUCTION ACT: How much money can you save under the new climate law? (Canary Media), EV, clean energy, environmental leaders convey Inflation Reduction Act concerns, shortfalls (Utility Dive), Inflation Reduction Act’s real climate impact is a decade away (Wall Street Journal $), US to spend more than $500 billion on climate over a decade under three laws, study says (Reuters)

FLY FISHING: Climate change alters life at Fed’s Jackson Hole conference (AP), Climate activists press Fed's Powell at Jackson Hole conference (Reuters)

SCOTUS: Big Oil urges Supreme Court to revive climate fight (E&E $)

EPA: EarthJustice is suing EPA over coal ash dumps, which leak toxins into groundwater (Inside Climate News, AP, Energy News Network), Gas ban battle heats up with EPA petition (E&E $)

DOI: Interior: Offshore oil crackdown would hike prices, imports (E&E $)

WHITE HOUSE: Amid permit fight, White House touts money to speed reviews (E&E News)

TRIBES: Colorado River Basin tribes work to protect their water rights (High Country News and Grist)

CITIES AND STATES: Portland again OKs limits on fossil fuel terminals (AP), Since Hurricane Katrina, only seven cities have adopted strong disaster preparedness plans (The Hill), VA to reconsider plans for largest US offshore wind farm (E&E $), Volunteers go door-to-door in Florida to help people save energy and water (Yale Climate Connections)

• CALIFORNIA: California to cover canal with solar panels in experiment to fight drought, climate change (Reuters), Largest US auto market is moving away from the internal combustion engine (NPR, AP, NBC, Gizmodo, Protocol, CBS)
• TEXAS: Texas grid avoids summer blackouts with $1 billion in extra spending (Reuters)

IMPACTS: Dallas is only the latest flood disaster: How cities can learn from today’s climate crises to prepare for tomorrow (The Conversation), Major gaps exist in global resilience to climate impacts (E&E $)

HEAT: Hotter summer nights affect everything from death rates to crop yields to firefighting (High Country News)

DROUGHT: As harvest time looms, China tells farmers to replant or switch crops (Reuters), Climate change led to dinosaurs' demise. Now, drought reveals more of their tracks (NPR), How climate change spurs megadroughts (Yale Climate Connections), How extreme droughts are fueling food inflation (Wall Street Journal $), Italy’s drought exposes ancient imperial bridge over Tiber (AP), Authorities identify remains found at Lake Mead (New York Times $)

WILDFIRES: Fires burning nearly twice as much forest as 20 years ago: study (The Hill), Australia fires damaged ozone layer, caused major warming, study says (Washington Post $, The Hill)

HURRICANES: August may pass without a single named tropical storm in the Atlantic (Washington Post $), Quiet in the Atlantic: Will we go 0-for-August? (Yale Climate Connections)

WATER: As Colorado River dries, the US teeters on the brink of larger water crisis (ProPublica), Arid West starts dreaming about piping in water from afar (E&E News), Kim Kardashian, Kevin Hart and Sylvester Stallone are accused of massive water waste (NPR, Buzzfeed), There’s a water crisis. Why do we still have lawns? (Washington Post $)

DEFORESTATION: Oil not charcoal the biggest threat to Congo rainforest, FAO study set to warn (Climate Home)

BOOZE: Hot, dry summer forces early start to Champagne harvest in France (Reuters), Drought forces earliest harvest ever in French wine country (AP)

RENEWABLES: Central Texas landowners pick up wind turbine deals as politicians rail against renewable energy (Houston Chronicle), Dutch build out North Sea wind farms, test floating solar panels (Reuters), Gulf shrimpers brace for offshore wind (E&E News), New wind additions plummet in Q2, declining 77% from a year ago: S&P (Utility Dive), Solar farm plans refused at highest rate for five years in Great Britain (The Guardian), The idea of 100 percent renewable energy is once again having a moment (Inside Climate News)

LNG: Eni nearing first LNG exports from Coral-Sul project in Mozambique (Natural Gas Intel), Rystad Energy, Enverus see booms in LNG and CCUS investment coming (Forbes)

OIL & GAS: Denbury’s buried carbon charm (Wall Street Journal $), Oxy’s DAC project to lasso CO2 from Texas Permian oilfields (Natural Gas Intel), With prices soaring, natural gas faces uncertain future (E&E $)

ORPHANED WELLS: Biden admin deploys $560M to clean up orphaned oil wells (E&E News)

COAL: China’s record drought is drying rivers and feeding its coal habit (New York Times $)

UTILITIES: Dominion threatens to abandon 2.6-GW offshore wind farm over performance guarantee (Utility Dive), How the deadliest wildfire in California history led to a guilty plea from PG&E (Wall Street Journal $), Missouri PSC lets Algonquin Power utility securitize $290M in coal retirement, Winter Storm Uri costs (Utility Dive)

GRID: Midwest grid faces challenges to meet 2030 climate goals (E&E $)

EVs: Is the era of the gas-powered car over? (Washington Post $), After Ford job cuts, GOP assails EV transition (E&E $), Coming soon to US roads: Hundreds of zero-emission buses (E&E $)

CRYPTO: In the Finger Lakes, a cryptocurrency mining plant billed as ‘green’ has a dirty coal ash problem (Energy News Network)

FILM REVIEWS: In ‘On Sacred Ground,’ the sound of white guilt drowns out the drama of Standing Rock (Grist)

AVIATION: Google accused of airbrushing carbon emissions in flight search results (The Guardian, Protocol)

SHOW BIZ: Can a start-up help the film and TV industry reduce their carbon footprint? (New York Times $)

BIG COMPUTERS: Here are the most and least carbon-intensive places to operate a data center (Protocol)

WILDLIFE: Truck, plane, backpack: inside the extreme effort to save Mexican wolves (Washington Post $)

INTERNATIONAL: ‘Grandmothers are our weather app’: New maps and local knowledge power Chad’s climate fightback (The Guardian), As France swelters, private jets come under attack (New York Times $, Wall Street Journal $), A new minister is appointed every six days in Castillo’s Peru (Bloomberg $), Australia needs massive renewable energy expansion to hit net zero by 2050 -study (Reuters), Germany promotes Baltic Sea’s ‘enormous’ energy potential (AP)

• It costs nothing to leave our trees as they are (New York Times, Carole King op-ed $)
• Australian and Indonesian thermal coal tread contrasting price paths: Russell (Reuters, Clyde Russell column)
• How much longer can we tolerate this price-gouging racket of an energy sector? (The Guardian, Damian Carrington op-ed)
• Climate crisis is killing off key insects and spreading insect-borne diseases (Truthout, Dave Goulson op-ed)
• To protect health, EPA must regulate methane emissions (The Hill, Deborah P. Brown and Dr. Anne Mellinger-Birdsong op-ed)
• Big oil wants to refreeze Alaska permafrost — so it can keep drilling there (Truthout, Finis Dunaway op-ed)
• No, the IRA is not a carbon tax — but it would be cheaper if it were (The Hill, Gary Yohe op-ed)
• 60 seconds on Earth with Xiye Bastida (Atmos, interview)
• Russia’s gas threat is a bluff (Wall Street Journal, Paul Roderick Gregory and Ramanan Krishnamoorti op-ed $)
• Roe and the midterms: How anger over abortion rights is motivating activists and voters (Teen Vogue, Caroline Choi op-ed)
• Is net zero really to blame for soaring energy bills in Great Britain? (The Guardian, Simon Evans analysis)

YouTube Fails To Demonetize Climate Disinfo Videos: Stossel, Glenn Beck, Alex Epstein and Naomi Sebit Videos All Still Making Money

Last October, Google/YouTube updated their advertising policy to "prohibit ads for, and monetization of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change. This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change." 

After a few months, researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate followed up to see how effective the policy was and found it lacking: "the company ran ads on at least 50 posts undermining climate science," reported Cat Zakrzweksi. Also, in December of 2021, Bastien Carniel examined a small sample of climate disinfo content on YouTube and found, "about 50% of the videos that contain misinformation according to Climate Feedback are still monetized on YouTube." 

Now, perhaps two months wasn't enough time for Google to figure out how to catch climate disinfo and remove it from YouTube and its ad placement business. Sure, one could argue that Big Tech companies should figure out how to implement rules before announcing them, but what can we say, we just love giving multi-billion dollar corporations the benefit of the doubt that they’re merely incompetent and not actively deceiving the public about their policies regarding those who use their platforms to actively deceive the public. 

So imagine our surprise when ten months after their announcement, we're still seeing lots of monetized climate disinformation on YouTube! And not because we're looking closely at YouTube and searching for it, but just in the course of monitoring disinfo generally, it's obvious!

And it's not subtle stuff or accidentally misleading content from well-meaning posters. Instead, it's content from professional propagandists like Glenn Beck, who you may recall was one of the chief spreaders of conspiracy theories about President Obama (calling him a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people") and once even trying to auction an Obama figurine in a jar full of urine (actually beer, even that was a lie). 

Beck later apologized for his conspiracies and hatemongering, and then recanted on that apology and is thoroughly, as the kids might say, back on his bullshit. 

And it's evident in his YouTube videos on climate change, calling it a pretense for the "Great Reset" in a recent video YouTube is allowing him to sell ads on. And it's not a one-off; a video with Vivek Ramaswamy, the Alex Jones of Investing, is also monetized, selling ads that profit both Beck and YouTube. 

Nor is Beck the only professional disinfo spreader who YouTube's helping out. John Stossel, who got $1.5 million in Koch cash between 2017 and 2019, is also running ads on his YouTube videos, including one called "The Paris Climate Fraud" from 2018, and a more recent one where he attacks climate science, among other things. According to his guest Andrew Follett, formerly of the Koch-funded Daily Caller, "new fields like fat studies, African studies, Latinx studies, queer studies, are essentially entirely fake."

Even beyond climate change, does Google want to defend this claim, that the study of Africa is "essentially entirely fake?" 

Speaking of not-so-subtle racism, there's also Alex Epstein, fossil fuel lover of 'I'm not racist, I just think white culture is superior' fame. He's been on multiple YouTube channels presenting his pro-fossil-fuels disinformation, and again and again and again and again they're monetized. 

Saving the "best" for last, though, our favorite has to be The Crigler Show's interview with Naomi Seibt. It's a nearly two hour conversation with Seibt, who was being built up by the tobacco and fossil fuel frontrgoup Heartland as an "Anti-Greta", until they found out she's affiliated with Germany's faaaar-right party, liked marching with Neo-Nazis, and considers a white nationalist an inspiration.  

The best (worst) part? YouTube has already banned Seibt for violating their Community Guidelines! And it doesn't take a lot of sleuthing to figure that out- Crigler included a link to Seibt's defunct YouTube channel in the description! 

Now, we're not a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds (thousands?) of the world's best and brightest computer coders at our disposal, but if we can so easily find examples of Google failing to enforce its policies, why can't they?

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