Autopsy Shows Cops Shot 'Cop City' Protester 57 Times: Manuel Esteban Paez Terán did not shoot a gun before being shot 57 times by cops during a January 18 "clearing operation" of forest defenders opposed to the construction of the "Cop City" training facility outside Atlanta, a DeKalb County autopsy confirms. Terán, who went by "Tortuguita," did not have any gunpowder residue on their arms or hands, directly contradicting police claims that the 26-year-old activist shot at police officers before they pumped 57 shots into their body. None of the police were wearing body cameras. An earlier autopsy released by Terán's family showed they most likely were sitting with their hands up when the cops shot them but the DeKalb County autopsy was unable to determine the positioning of their body. (ABC, Axios, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, CBS)

Severe Heat Breaks Records Across Asia: At least one-third of people on Earth are currently experiencing record-breaking heat. The "worst April heat wave in Asian history," per climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera, spans more than 12 countries across Asia and has already broken hundreds of records across the continent. Thailand broke its all-time high temperature record, reaching nearly 114°F in Tak amid the country's New Year's celebrations and roads melted in Bangladesh where the capital city of Dhaka saw its highest temperature in 63 years last Sunday. The extreme heat is also forcing school closures in multiple Indian states. Climate change, mainly caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, amplifies the intensity, duration, and frequency of extreme heat and heat waves. The current heatwave comes just one year after a massive heatwave made 30 times more likely by global warming broiled South Asia. It also comes as research published Wednesday in PLOS Climate warns extreme heat in India is worse than government estimates and is hampering progress toward the country's health, poverty reduction, education, and other development goals. (Heatwave: The Verge, Washington Post $, Axios; India schools: The Guardian; India development goals: AP, Reuters)

One-Third Of Americans Suffering From Worst Air Pollution: People of color are far more likely to breathe heavily polluted air than white people, the American Lung Association’s 2023 State of the Air report shows. Almost 120 million people in the U.S. (more than one-third of the population) live in areas with failing grades for ozone and particulate pollution. Air pollution is largely caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, especially from vehicles and power plants. Centuries of systemic racism and decades of racist housing and environmental policies result in people of color making up 54% of the population of counties receiving failing grades for air quality — that means people of color are nearly four times more likely to live in a county with the highest air pollution levels than white people. Air pollution is also worse in the West due to pollution released and spread by wildfires. (SOTA report: CNN, The Guardian, Inside Climate News, Washington Post $, Axios, Wall Street Journal $, The Hill; Los Angeles: LA Times $; Fresno: Fresno Bee; California: KGET; Allegheny County, PA: Lancaster Farming; Lehigh Valley, PA: WFMZ; Pittsburgh, PA: WESA; Atlanta metro: Georgia Public Broadcasting; WV-OH-KY: WOWK, Jackson, MS: WJTV)

PROJECT CANARY: Gas billed as 'responsibly sourced' is the opposite — report (E&E $, The Hill)

CAPTAINS' LOGS: New England researchers use ‘treasure trove’ of historic whaling logbooks to study climate shifts (Boston Globe $)

FOSSIL FUELED ENERGY CRISIS: Hand over $1B of Russian ‘blood money,’ Ukraine tells Shell (Politico EU)

FOR THE PLANET!: It’s not just you: The planet wants a 4-day workweek, too (Grist)

THE KIDS ARE … RESPONDING REASONABLY?: Why teens smoke weed on a burning planet (Atmos), ‘They are despairing’: Climate crisis weighs heavy on mental health of young Australians (The Guardian)

CLIMATE LITIGATION: UN court gets request for advisory opinion on climate change (AP), Judge says Ontario’s weak climate plans increase risk of death for the young (The Guardian)

CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: In the wake of historic storms, Māori leaders call for disaster relief and rights. (Grist, Native News Online, and Indian Country Today), Indigenous leaders: Planetary health and Indigenous health are interdependent (High Country News), UN’s Green Climate Fund too scared of risk, finds official review (Climate Home)

DENIAL: The Dominion lawsuit revealed why Fox News peddles climate nonsense (Heatmap $)

JUDICIARY: Judge who blocked abortion pills eyes Biden climate agenda (E&E News)

AGENCIES: US plans new forest protections, issues old-growth inventory (AP), FEMA will run out of cash in July, seeks emergency funding (E&E $)

EPA: EPA lays out $27 billion green lending program (Politico Pro $), EPA panel reviews environmental justice tool (E&E $), EPA proposes tighter standards for cancer-causing ethylene oxide (Prism Reports), Unfunded mandate? States sue over EPA water cybersecurity rule (E&E $)

DOE: US invests in alternative solar tech, more solar for renters (AP), DOE drafting regulations to implement 15-year-old requirement for fossil-free federal buildings (WBUR)

WHITE HOUSE: Podesta: US heat pump production poised to rise (E&E $), Biden to pledge $500 million to stop deforestation in Brazil (New York Times $)

THE HILL: Lawmakers look for tough implementation of forced labor law targeting China (Wall Street Journal $), Rep. Pressley and Sen. Markey push bill to end qualified immunity (The Root)

HOUSE: House Republicans slam Haaland in tense hearing (E&E News), House Republicans target climate law in debt limit bid (E&E News), Republicans pummel SEC’s Gary Gensler over crypto crackdown (Wall Street Journal $), House committee rekindles solar tariff fight (Politico Pro $), House Democrats rally around proposed SEC climate rule (E&E $), House fails to override Biden's veto of WOTUS resolution (E&E $), House GOP fail to stop Biden's new water rule – but the courts might (Washington Post $), House hearing highlights rising bipartisan support for nuclear energy amid wave of policy actions (Utility Dive), House tax panel chair probes Ford EV deal with China (E&E $), House Ways and Means votes to repeal Biden two-year solar tariff pause (Politico Pro $), US House committee votes to repeal Biden solar panel policy (Reuters)

SENATE: Manchin aligns with GOP in opposing Biden tailpipe rules (E&E $), Senate strikes deal on fire bill; Feinstein swap-out fails (E&E $), Senators revive bipartisan recycling, composting bills (E&E $), This year or bust? Senators stress urgency in permitting talks. (E&E $)

POLITICS: Washington’s biggest clean energy lobbying group pushes natural gas-friendly policy (Inside Climate News)

PUBLIC OPINION: Climate overshadows abortion in poll of Democratic core issues (E&E $)

ELECTIONS: Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launches 2024 presidential bid (CNN), GOP drops $1M on Manchin as Justice preps run (Politico, E&E $), How Pence is using energy politics against Trump (E&E $), Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin fail to attract small donors for potential re-election campaigns (Wall Street Journal $)

TRIBES: Back to the future? Sharp cuts proposed for Indian Health Service (Indian Country Today)

CITIES AND STATES: The little city that could (Mother Jones), Bill limiting oil drilling without landowners’ consent faces headwinds at Colorado legislature (Capital and Main), Texas drag performers push back against ‘drag bounty hunter’ bill (Prism Reports), Tennessee moves to shield gun firms after school shooting (AP), Ex-Tampa judge ousted after abortion ruling is Florida Supreme Court contender (Tampa Bay Times), Judge who denied girl abortion over grades shortlisted for Florida’s top court (The Guardian)

IMPACTS: ‘In every breath we take’: How climate change impacts pollen allergies (Yale Climate Connections), Climate change thaws world’s northernmost research station (Reuters), Colorado River labeled as most endangered in US, and climate change is to blame (WBUR), Heavy turbulence on flights is likely to get worse (Wall Street Journal $), It’s been a punishing pollen season in DC. It could be the new normal. (Washington Post $), At least 2 dead as tornadoes strike Oklahoma (New York Times $, Washington Post $), ‘Devastating’ melt of Greenland, Antarctic ice sheets found (AP)

FLOODING: Rapid snowmelt causing significant flooding across northern plains (Washington Post $), Minnesota prepares for major flooding after snowy winter (AP), Mississippi River spills its banks in Champlin: "This is the highest level that I've ever seen it" (CBS), Epic snow from all those atmospheric rivers in the West is starting to melt, and the flood danger is rising (The Conversation)

HEAT: Heat stress rises for Dhaka's poor as green spaces shrink (Context), Study: Climate change causing more ‘heat stress’ in Europe (AP)

WILDFIRES: Fire danger in the high mountains is intensifying: That’s bad news for humans, treacherous for the environment (The Conversation)

DROUGHT: Epic drought in Taiwan pits farmers against high-tech factories for water (NPR)

DEFORESTATION: ‘Don’t fool yourself’: billions more needed to protect tropical forests, warns new report (The Guardian), Brazil battles for Amazon tribe known as guardian of the rainforest (Wall Street Journal $), EU lawmakers back ban on goods linked to deforestation (Reuters)

GEOENGINEERING: Cloud seeding catching on amid Rocky Mountain drought (AP)

BOOZE: Spanish startup on ‘mission to save planet’s beer’ from climate crisis (The Guardian)

RENEWABLES: Dutch landscape shifts with North Sea wind farms, onshore hubs (Reuters), Florida-based Sunergy Renewables to go public via $475 million SPAC deal (Reuters), Snapshots from a clean energy future (Mother Jones), What if Walmart turned its parking lots into solar farms? (Mother Jones)

ELECTRIFICATION: What 'electrify everything' actually looks like (Mother Jones), What Berkeley’s overturned gas ban means for electrifying everything (Heatmap $)

BATTERIES: What if your Tesla could run on sodium? (Wall Street Journal $)

BUILDINGS & HOUSING: Think globally, build like hell locally (Mother Jones)

STORAGE: Giant underground pools of water are batteries of the future (Gizmodo)

HYDROGEN: Chemours, TC Energy to partner on clean hydrogen facilities (Reuters)

UTILITIES: Big utilities are 'diabolical, man!' (Mother Jones)

GRID: EPRI launches 3-year initiative to address grid constraints, develop tools to serve coming EV loads (Utility Dive)

EVs: Foreign automakers’ agonizing wait for the EV tax credit (E&E News), Indian taxi startup BluSmart picks EV fight with Uber (Reuters), Tesla’s profit dropped sharply in first quarter as it cut prices (New York Times $)

BOOKS: In 'The New Earth,' a family's pain echoes America's suffering (NPR)

VOLCANIC MICROBES: Volcanic microbe eats CO2 ‘astonishingly quickly’, say scientists (The Guardian)

INDIVIDUAL ACTION: How do you tackle microplastics? Start with your washing machine. (Grist)

FINANCE: Congruent raises new $300M climatetech fund despite market slowdown (Canary Media, Axios), Private equity to play growing role in renewable energy, storage and other cleantech: S&P Global (Utility Dive)

WEIRD WAY TO SPELL 'SERENA'S HUSBAND': Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian turns his focus to climate solutions (CBS)

INTERNATIONAL: German cabinet approves bill to phase out oil and gas heating systems (Reuters), Germany tries to reassure homeowners on heating overhaul (AP), What will the victory of the Dutch farmers’ party mean for the Netherlands’ energy transition? (Energy Monitor), With no minister since October 2022, Nepal's environmental issues hang in limbo (Mongabay)

• Yes in our backyards (Mother Jones, Bill McKibben essay)
• There is plastic in our flesh (New York Times, Mark O’Connell op-ed $)
• New York’s plan for transforming its electricity generation will reduce reliability at extreme cost (Utility Dive, Arnold Wallenstein)
• I dare you to stop proliferating fossil fuels (Hakai Magazine, Jude Isabella essay)
• Labor’s electric vehicle policy drives Australia forward – but not far (The Guardian, Adam Morton op-ed)
• Germany goes all in on energy transition with nuclear shutdowns (Reuters, Gavin Maguire column)
• America’s heinous regression on child labor exploits vulnerable migrants (The Hill, Lyndon Haviland op-ed)
• Why elephants, otters and whales are nature’s secret weapons against climate breakdown (The Guardian, Matthew Gould op-ed)
• SCOTUS needs a moral compass (The Hill, William Becker op-ed)
• Biden and the media are electric-vehicle grifters (Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins, Jr. op-ed $)

GOP Greenwashers Buy Press After Running Out Of Real Reporters To Fool

It seems that legitimate journalists may finally be wising up to the campaign to make Republicans look appealing to voters on climate despite the fact that the GOP is actually using the new talking points as cover to, in their own words, "double down" on the unpopular, fossil-fueled MAGA energy agenda. A year ago the GOP greenwashers tricked a Bloomberg reporter, and last fall they got into the Houston Chronicle. More recently, however, they've only been landing in disinfo outlets like the Washington Examiner with the argument that to lock in young voters, Republicans should describe fossil fuels as a climate solution, even though that's entirely false. 

With Earth Day coming, there’s no doubt they tried to place their GOP greenwashing into a legitimate outlet to reach normal Americans who haven't already seen their op-eds in conservative media. 

Instead, it looks like they had to resort to paying The Washington Times to run their op-eds as a huge sponsored content advertising section, which is a beefed up version of the 'op-ads' disinformation tactic Exxon used for decades. The American Conservation Coalition (Jay Faison's neo-nazi dog whistling fake youth-aimed coalition), assembled a quadruple-bylined piece making the "all-of-the-above" energy pitch that they apparently have to pay people to believe is a change from GOP precedent and not keeping with the party's 2016 platform, or the Koch network in 2015, the GOP in 2011, or the GOP in 2009, or both Presidential candidates in 2008, or or basically every president since 1973. But hey, who needs history when you have a slogan to push, and the money to buy an advertising supplement! 

And keeping with the GOP tradition they pretend to cast off, the article is packed full of disinformation. "Realistic environmentalists know that fossil fuels aren’t going away tomorrow," they write, creating a strawman to knock down, as though anyone anywhere were literally calling for an immediate eradication of fossil fuels. But apparently fossil fuels are needed "to fuel economic vibrancy," a made-up phrase with no meaning, "and a better quality of life," which is simply false. As explained in Amy Westervelt's debunking of pro-fossil fuel propaganda, IPCC lead author Dr. Julia Steinberger has said plainly, "We do not rely on fossil fuels for improvements in our living standards.”

As part of the same promotional package, Heather Reams of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions gave the same exact pitch for conservatives to pretend to take climate action, with a sponsored op-ed also touting an "all-of-the-above energy portfolio" that pays lip service to renewables while actually propping up the fossil fuel industry. 

But wait, there's more! Completing the Faison-funded trifecta, a ClearPath op-ad makes…basically all the same points. Why bother funding different groups to all say the same thing, if not to give the illusion of a broad network of independent support? 

Then there's the industry voices in the sponsored section, which confirms that these groups claiming to want to stop climate change are actively working with the industry profiting off of continuing to cause climate change, and have spent decades spreading disinformation to hide that fact. Anne Bradbury, CEO of the American Exploration and Production Council, an oil and methane gas industry lobby group, ALSO promotes H.R. 1, like Reams and the ACC kids. She endorses the permitting reform effort, which guts environmental safeguards in exactly the way an op-ad from API's Mike Sommers asks for in HIS op-ad entry, and also uses the "all-of-the-above" catchphrase. Unlike the other two articles, though, Bradbury also mentions hydrogen and carbon capture, two climate action delay strategies the industry loves. 

And sure enough, a fourth sponsored op-ed to run on Tuesday, by Newton Jones, president of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, also touts hydrogen and carbon capture, use, and storage, which are necessary for the fossil fuel industry's "license to continue to operate;" polluting now while claiming they'll clean up the carbon pollution later. And having a union president deliver the message is an obvious giveaway that this coordinated campaign is really trying to reach moderate/Democratic audiences (and failing to do so, since it had to pay The Washington Times to run these pieces.) 

Most importantly, what are elected Republicans actually doing about climate change? Well, they’re hiding behind China as an excuse not to regulate the industry that funds their political careers. That was the throughline across three more op-eds that The Washington Times also ran on Tuesday, bylined by Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA, who has received $2.3m from the energy and natural resources industry), John Barrasso (R-WO, who has raked in $2.7mil from that same industry), and Marco Rubio (R-FL, who has also gotten $2.7mil from the energy and natural resources industry).

We could go on, as the special (false) advertisement section does, with a laundry list of interchangeable op-ads we might believe were written by AI, and not another senator, or the staffers for an impressively dull and redundant dozen op-ads by various House Republicans touting H.R. 1, their fossil-fuel-booster bill that's dead on arrival in the Senate. All this is to support a bill with no chance of becoming law — a totally symbolic exercise in propaganda-as-policy. 

So, while we certainly appreciate the idea of making climate concern acceptable in conservative circles, if it's just greenwashing Republican commitment to the fossil fuels causing climate change, then it's not actually helping. In fact, it just makes the problem worse by giving cover to those funded by the industry to prevent meaningful regulations of their products. 

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