FIRST LOOK:

For the world to be on track to reach 1.5°C of planetary warming by 2040 requires an unprecedented scaling up of public and private finance to support both climate mitigation and adaptation. While the challenge is straightforward, the specific policies and strategies are not. On September 20th at 3:00 PM ET Project Syndicate is hosting  Building the Green Consensus as one of two feature events at the 2021 Climate Week coverage.

The Little Country That Could: The Gambia: The countries that contribute the least amount of planet-warming gases to the atmosphere are also the most susceptible to devastating consequences of climate change, including drought, extreme heat, and violent storms. These countries are also struggling to procure enough coronavirus vaccines and as a result, may be unable to attend the world’s most important climate conference in Glasgow next month. A report from the Climate Action Tracker, released yesterday, shows almost every nation is failing to meet the terms of the Paris Agreement. The exception is the small African nation of The Gambia, essentially paying a debt accrued by others. Even though The Gambia's carbon footprint is negligible, the country has nonetheless felt the effects of climate change, namely droughts. The report called efforts by the United States, the European Union, Germany, and Japan “insufficient” and more in line with global warming of 3°C (5.4°F) since the late 19th century. The consequence of these countries not being able to attend the COP26 has the potential to further stack the deck in favor of the countries that grew rich burning coal and oil. (AP, Bloomberg $, The Guardian, CNN, The Hill)

LA County Votes To End Drilling: Los Angeles County supervisors on Wednesday voted to ban drilling in unincorporated areas and to phase out oil and gas drilling. There are currently 1,046 active wells, 637 idle wells, and 2,731 abandoned wells in unincorporated areas of the nation's most populous county. according to a memo to the board dated June 3, 2021. County Supervisor Janice Hahn praised the plan as "a framework for how we transition from dirty fossil fuels to clean energy and make sure we bring our labor partners with us." The Board also voted to create a program to ensure that wells are properly closed and cleaned up, and to expand the county's task force focused on a just transition for fossil fuel workers and communities. (AP, LA Times, News City Service)

Historic Black Louisiana Town Forgotten After Being Devastated By Hurricane Ida: Just beyond Highway 23, a mere 30 miles south of New Orleans, lies the small town of Ironton, Louisiana. After Hurricane Ida pummeled the area, the town's approximately 52 Black families are trying to rebuild their lives. Again. The residents of Ironton have had to rebuild their lives in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, and in 2012, after Hurricane Issac. Most of the homes are completely unlivable, with no electricity or running water. Ida's 12-foot storm surge dislodged coffins and tombs, scattering them around the town. "I was born and raised here," Wilkie Declouet, a former law enforcement officer, and lifelong resident of Ironton, who posted photos of coffins and tombs on social media, told DeSmog. "This is in my blood. So I will give it one more try." The residents of Ironton want the federal government to prioritize a renewed levee system and assistance with rebuilding. (DeSmog; Climate Signals background: 2021 Atlantic hurricane season)

(ENVIRONMENTAL) RACISM: Baltimore is hooking up a Black megachurch with some serious solar battery power (Grist), Colorado river can’t be divvied up without Indigenous people at the table (Gizmodo), why civil rights and protecting the planet go hand-in-hand (Deutsche Welle), reporting on climate injustice in one of the hottest towns in America (ProPublica), an organizer and a physician on how climate change will worsen maternal health inequities (Stat), US minority groups are most vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change (Texas Public Radio), ‘drastic changes’: Sea ice levels affecting seal hunting (Indian Country Today)

(MENTAL) HEALTH: Younger generations are the most fatalistic about climate change (New Scientist), ‘no one is okay’ Is a Mantra on Social Media for Good Reason (Teen Vogue)

COP26: With many African climate activists unable to access vaccines, should Cop26 go ahead (The Guardian), China's hard climate stance with US imperils Glasgow talks (Thomson Reuters Foundation), climate ambition stalls ahead of COP 26 (E&E $), a wrinkle in Europe's climate policy debate (Axios), survey reveals public doubts about climate action before UN summit (Axios), why some activists want to postpone this year’s big climate summit (HuffPost)

DENIAL: They knew: how the US government helped cause the climate crisis (Yale Environment 360)

NICHOLAS: Nicholas is soaking New Orleans as new areas of tropical trouble emerge over the Atlantic (Washington Post $), after Ida hits, August industrial output gains slow to 0.4% (AP), Nicholas crawls into Louisiana from Texas, dumping rain (AP), Nicholas, now a tropical depression, still douses Gulf Coast (AP), Nicholas threatens to lash gulf coast with rain for days (Bloomberg $)

POP CULTURE: Late-night shows are teaming up to tackle climate change (New York Times $), late-night hosts join forces for first-ever 'Climate Night' (CNN)

AGENCIES: SEC takes a different route than Europe on climate disclosures (Bloomberg $), Fed, climate change collide in tussle over who becomes chair (Bloomberg $), USDA accepts more than 2.5 million acres in grassland conservation program (Modern Farmer)

EPA: Carlton Waterhouse is fighting for environmental justice at the EPA — and getting called a '“racist'” (Buzzfeed), Capito grills EPA nominee on '#ResistCapitalism' tweet (The Hill)

THE HILL: Congress is debating its biggest climate change bill ever (NPR), climate measures in budget bill could cut nearly 1 billion tons of emissions per year by 2030, analysis finds (CNN)(E&E $), Democrats prepare for next phase of budget fight as House readies package and Biden meets with Senate skeptics (Washington Post $), Democratic bill would force Fed to defund fossil fuels (The Hill), Democratic leaders vow climate action amid divide (The Hill), signs of life for carbon pricing in Democratic reconciliation package (Washington Examiner), Congress is debating its biggest climate change bill ever. here's what's at stake (NPR), progressive Democrats set out to defund the fossil fuel industry (The Nation), tax hikes to pay for Biden agenda approved by House panel (Bloomberg $)

WHITE HOUSE: Biden warns extreme weather is killing more Americans, costing billions each year (Democracy Now), Biden urges climate action: ‘we don’t have much more than 10 years’ (New York Times $), what can a president do about wildfires? (New York Times $), White House reviewing migratory bird protections' revival (E&E $), Biden, airlines strike deal to slash carbon emissions (E&E News), the precarious White House climate posture (Axios), Biden administration launches new effort to help communities with energy transition (The Hill)

POLITICS: Biden's lofty climate goals collide with political, economic reality (Reuters), major utility questions Biden's signature climate plan (E&E $)

CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: as climate talks near, pressure grows on Asia to cancel new coal projects (Thomson Reuters Foundation), EU pledges 4 billion euros more in climate funds for poorer countries (Reuters)(Climate Home), new climate plans fall far short of limiting global warming to 1.5°C (New Scientist), documenting the race to net zero (Energy Monitor), will the summer’s extreme weather change climate policy in Europe and the US (Energy Monitor), US, EU will announce global pledge to reduce planet-warming methane emissions on Friday (CNN), EU chief challenges US on climate and asserts Brussels' role in 'new international order' (CNN), US and EU seeking partners in joint pledge targeting 30% cut in methane emissions by 2030 (Washington Examiner)

CITIES AND STATES: Florida's largest water manager wants $140 million for first fix  (Palm Beach Post), Connecticut losing ground on building emissions despite efficiency programs (Energy News Network), ,most-populous Virginia county approves tax on plastic bags (The Hill), NY MTA CEO says climate change a ‘major priority’ for system (Bloomberg $), climate change means more subway floods; how cities are adapting (NPR), environmental improvement board prepares to hear ozone precursor pollutants rule (New Mexico Political Report), rooftops to railways: neighbourhoods race to hit net zero climate goals (Thomson Reuters Foundation), 

ILLINOIS: Illinois signs landmark clean energy law (Grist), sweeping Illinois clean energy bill also bails out nuclear power (Gizmodo), landmark Illinois climate bill resolves standoff over Exelon nuclear plants (Utility Dive), Pritzker: Illinois a 'force for good' by cutting carbon gas (Washington Post $)

CALIFORNIA: Newsom defeats recall attempt, citing EJ progress (E&E $), climate change has us on the brink of 'ecological bankruptcy.' But there is hope if we act soon. (Desert Sun)

IMPACTS: Are air pollution and climate change two sides of the same coin (Forbes), climate change could force 200 million people to leave their homes by 2050 (Insurance Journal)(Atmos), climate change continues to be an issue (Nature), climate change, logging collide -- and a forest shrinks (ABC), Mount Shasta is nearly snowless, a rare event that is helping melt the mountain’s glaciers (Washington Post $), more people see climate change as personal threat: survey (The Hill), climate change, logging collide -- and a forest shrinks (ABC), climate change will spare no one in the West if action is not taken (Las Vegas Sun), flash flood submerges southern french villages, fields (Bloomberg $) 

DROUGHT: ‘There’s just no water’: Low Lake Powell water level concerning for Page (Navajo Times)

WILDFIRES: KNP Complex fire threatening Sequoia National Park grows fivefold, forcing residents to flee (LA Times $)(Bloomberg $)(Axios)(The Hill), U.S. Forest Service to reopen all but 5 of California’s national forests (LA Times $), DNR lands east of Cascades to reopen Thursday (AP)

HURRICANES: How Storm Larry socked Greenland and unleashed an unusual blizzard (Washington Post $)

RENEWABLES: Houston company hopes to store renewable energy in salt domes (Houston Chronicle), Iberdrola warns of ‘protectionist’ risk to US offshore wind sector (FT $), US solar prices see first cross-segment rise since 2014, bucking downward trend, report finds (Utility Dive), Sunrun CEO steps in amid Blackouts, trade woes and rising prices (Bloomberg $)

COAL: Most plans for new coal plants scrapped since Paris agreement (The Guardian), when Wall Street came to coal country: how a big-money gamble scarred Appalachia (The Guardian), new coal power stations cut off from funding by firstrand (Bloomberg $)

HYDROGEN: Germany's hydrogen dream needs gas for transition, industry says (Reuters), Japan, Australia firms look to build large-scale green liquefied hydrogen supply chain (Reuters)

UTILITIES: What a clean electricity payment plan means for gas (E&E $)

GRID: Climate change is creating unrelenting challenges for the country's power grid (NPR)

EVs: Money and range: experts note roadblocks to EV adoption (Utility Dive), CEO of a major autos retailer on the reasons behind electric vehicle hesitancy (CNBC)

ACTIVISM: These climate stars are among the world’s most ‘influential’ people (The Verge), Friederike Otto and Geert Jan Van Oldenborgh: 100 most influential people  (TIME) The Climate Museum is the first of its kind in the U.S. — and its founder is on a mission (Washington Post $)

AGRICULTURE: Animal agriculture responsible for 57% of greenhouse gas emissions from food production, study finds (EcoWatch), cow pee is an environmental problem. But now scientists say calves can be potty-trained. (Washington Post $), largest US. biofuels producer pledges carbon neutrality by 2050 (Reuters)(The Hill)

BUSINESS: Climate change calls for backup power, and one company cashes in (New York Times $), Chevron triples low-carbon investment, but avoids 2050 net-zero goals (Reuters), PepsiCo to slash plastic use in sustainability push (Reuters), investor group sets tough climate blueprint for big oil (Reuters), women’s climatetech career moves in venture capital, energy storage and beyond (Canary Media), clean energy startup Arcadia raises $100 million (Axios), PepsiCo plans reduction in use of virgin plastic (The Hill), Chevron's low-carbon push still puts it behind the curve (CNN), JPMorgan downgrades Chevron, citing ramp-up in clean energy spending (CNBC), incoming BP executive urges dialogue to speed up clean energy transition (FT $)

FINANCE: Some oil majors back investor standard for ‘net zero’ plans (Wall Street Journal $), Marlon says wind power is falling short (Bloomberg $)

HEALTH: Where there’s smoke, there’s fungus? (Grist), new front in climate fight: hospital operating rooms (E&E $)

WILDLIFE: A bigger role for baby eels in preserving the Chesapeake Bay (Washington Post $), slaughter of nearly 1,500 dolphins sparks outcry over traditional hunt in Faroe Islands (Washington Post $), don't count on resurrected woolly mammoths to combat climate change (The Verge)

INTERNATIONAL: How inaction on climate change can worsen the crisis in Afghanistan (Vox), why is the UK still in thrall to dirty energy (The Guardian), experts condemn plan to install thousands of gas boilers across UK (The Guardian),a fire in a power cable from France sends British electricity prices soaring. (New York Times $)(The Guardian), facing stronger storms and drought, Haiti's farmers live on 'knife edge' (Thomson Reuters Foundation), ‘cake’ mentioned 10 times more than ‘climate change’ on UK TV – report (The Guardian), clean energy fund manager Glennmont launches new power company (Reuters), EBRD invested $1.5 bln each in 2020, 2021 in Western Balkan countries (Reuters), Coal India plans to increase prices 'slowly' (Reuters), activist Bluebell urges Solvay's board to oust CEO over sea discharge (Reuters), China tests oil clout, battles inflation with first oil reserve auction (Reuters), Indonesia's August exports hit record high on resources boom (Reuters), Engie narrows Equans suitors list to five - sources (Reuters), Brazil's banks to incorporate climate change risks into stress tests (Reuters), minigrids could bring power to half a billion people in Africa and Asia (Canary Media), what’s behind Europe’s skyrocketing power prices (Bloomberg $), Uruguay eyes bumper power exports on Brazil energy crisis (Bloomberg $), Europe girds for the price of climate action - bloomberg (Bloomberg $), Australia to get nuclear-powered subs in pact with US, UK(Bloomberg $), Norway's 'climate election' showed voters want change but are they ready to give up oil (TIME), wildfires in Australia caused an explosion of sea life thousands of miles away (Vox), how inaction on climate change can worsen the crisis in Afghanistan (Vox)

• New Jersey and Puerto Rico are joined in the fight against unsafe natural gas terminals (Philadelphia Inquirer, Marcus Sibley and Fermin Morales op-ed)
• Is a place you love being altered by climate change?. (New York Times, Shannon Busta op-ed $)
• A national clean electricity performance program needs to support clean-tech innovation (Utility Dive, Stefan Koester op-ed)
• Climate change will force people to move. We need to find out where they’ll go (Bloomberg, Peter Orszag op-ed $)
• Climate conversations neglect an essential component of a healthy planet: the ocean (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Mark Haver commentary)
• Solar is the jet fuel of the future (Washington Post, Daniel Casey Adkins $)
• Time to change how we fight wildfires (The Hill, Toddi Steelman op-ed)
• Clean energy wins and woes in Biden's budget (The Hill,Jakob Puckett op-ed)
• Congress must help keep the climate crisis from boiling over (The Hill, Manish Bapna op-ed)
• Europe’s climate lesson for America (Wall Street Journal, Editorial Board $)
• Hurricane Ida isn’t the whole story on climate (Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg op-ed $)
• Climate change isn't the only factor in recent disasters — governance and security risk (The Hill, Erin Sikorsky)

GatewayPundit Showcases What Disorganized Climate Denial Looks Like With Biden Misrepresentations

When it comes to climate disinformation, there are two basic flavors. One is organized denial, spread by people who work on behalf of the fossil fuel industry (directly or indirectly) through one of the vast web of non-profit organizations, academic institutions, and media outlets that are the beneficiaries of the industry’s so-called philanthropy. The other kind is what can be considered a disorganized denial, referring to content coming from sources that aren’t necessarily “on-script” with the industry’s talking points, but still oppose climate action for other reasons (usually to “own the libs”))  

In the (fake) news space, the influence of Koch funding is becoming increasingly clear, as the Daily Caller, once a regular vessel for its fellow Koch-funded groups to place quotes and stories, is still reliably rightwing and conspiratorial (particularly from general assignment reporter Varun Kukeri). After losing its main Koch connection, Mike Bastasch in 2019 (who’s now writing for Laura Ingraham), and given the drops in Koch funding and supposed animosity between Daily Caller founder Tucker Carlson and the Koch empire, it now occasionally looks like a normal outlet. 

Take a look at a piece covering President Biden’s recent speech on climate change and the Build Back Better agenda, in which Daily Caller’s Shelby Talcott didn’t quote a single Koch-group denier, or otherwise try to inject any (false) balance into the story! 

So while we haven’t seen the latest 990 forms from the Daily Caller, our guess is that they are no longer running on Koch cash like they were a few short years ago (but instead apparently running their own shady self-dealing tax scheme). It’s no longer particularly plugged into the “organized” denial, and so it remains reliably conservative but lacks the talking-points-as-news qualities it once had. 

Not to worry though, those Koch pieces are still finding a home online. RealClear Energy appears to have thoroughly usurped the Daily Caller, and is constantly running pieces from people who pump out disinformation professionally for the organized climate denial industry.  

But that’s not to say that disorganized denial outlets aren’t also covering climate poorly! 

Take the Gateway Pundit, a far-right fake news site famous for stoking school shooting conspiracies, as well as the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Its coverage of Biden was every bit as bad as the Daily Caller’s used to be, with a pair of stories by Cristina Laila that very plainly misrepresented the very footage embedded in them. 

The first headline was ‘“Watch Your Foot!’ - Joe Biden loses his footing while shaking a giant windmill blade in Colorado,” so you might expect to see the President tripping and falling down. 

“At one point during his visit, a maskless Joe Biden shuffled over to a giant windmill blade outside the lab,” Laila writes, and “A lab worker shook the giant windmill blade back and forth to demonstrate its technology and flexibility. Idiot Biden thought it would be a great idea to shake the blade too. ‘Watch your foot!’ an official said as Biden lost his footing and almost got hit in the head with the windmill blade.” 

Being suckers for slapstick comedy, we will admit to being intrigued and clicked through to the video tweet embedded from The Hill of Biden’s tour of the National Renewable Energy Lab. Oddly, neither it nor any of the comments made any mention of the supposedly embarrassing episode of Biden falling down on the job that Gateway Pundit deemed headline-worthy. 

Alas, dear reader, if you blink, you’d miss it as Biden takes what amounts to an extra-large step when the headline-generating “watch your foot!” exclamation was made. 

So why the deception? Probably because Gateway Pundit is firmly entrenched in Trumpism, and because Trump actually did seem to have trouble with, and a fear, of stairs, they’re sensitive about the issue.

The second Biden piece Laila did also requires one to remember the Trump presidency, with the headline as “Biden’s Communist Green New Deal Pitch: Windmills don’t cause cancer.” But again, the video tweet embeded from The Hill the story is based on makes it clear that it was obviously a joke at Trump’s expense that Biden made as an aside after going on at length about the climate and health benefits of wind.

As you can see, while organized denial is focused on lawsuits and lobbying, there’s still plenty of disorganized denial deceiving itself and readers. 

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