CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: Inflation and war loom over EU votes on climate change policy (Reuters), Vulnerable nations demand funding for climate losses, fearing UN 'talk shop' (Thomson Reuters Foundation), EU lawmakers support effective ban for new fossil-fuel cars from 2035 (Reuters), EU lawmakers endorse ban on combustion-engine cars in 2035 (Bloomberg $), The EU’s new universal charger policy claims to tackle e-waste — will it? (The Verge)
ENERGY GEOPOLITICS: Climate change: Ukraine war prompts fossil fuel 'gold rush' - report (BBC)
DENIAL: Warned of ‘massive’ climate-led extinction, a US energy firm funded crisis denial ads (The Guardian), Doubt is their product: How Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and the Gun Lobby market ignorance (Fast Company), Southern company knew about climate change for decades while funding climate denial, report finds (Gizmodo), Warned of ‘massive’ climate-led extinction, Southern Company funded crisis denial ads (Energy News Network), Climate policy dragged into culture wars as a ‘delay’ tactic, finds study (The Guardian)
FOSSIL VOLATILITY: National gas price average nears $5 per gallon (The Hill)
LAWSUITS: Pipeline industry takes dispute over US gathering line rule to court (S&P Global Market Intelligence). UK is wasting huge amount of wind power at a record cost (Bloomberg $), UK sued over climate plans in first legal test of ‘net zero’ (Bloomberg Law $)
THE HILL: Democrats find that oil and gas industry is ‘failing’ to address methane leaks (The Hill), Oil and gas companies underreport methane leaks, House Democrats say (Washington Post $)
HOUSE: SENATE: Dems bullish on climate deal as they await Manchin, Schumer (E&E News)
WHITE HOUSE: Biden proposes making underwater canyon off New York a marine sanctuary (Washington Post $), Biden administration announces new oceans moves (The Hill), Biden proposes a new marine sanctuary off the northeastern US. (New York Times $), Hudson canyon, a giant underwater chasm, could be the newest national marine sanctuary (NPR), Biden’s climate goals rest on a 71-year-old defense law (The Atlantic), Why Joe Biden is invoking a war power to build heat pumps and solar panels (Vox), Biden's next energy crisis: How rising natural gas prices could hit voters just in time for midterms (Houston Chronicle)
TRIBES: Using Indigenous knowledge and western science to address climate change impacts (Phys.org)
CITIES AND STATES: As the great Salt Lake dries up, Utah faces an ‘environmental nuclear bomb’ (New York Times $), From the Middle East to east Baltimore, a Johns Hopkins professor works to make the city more climate-resilient (Inside Climate News), In Ohio, researchers find EPA data doesn’t tell the whole story on fracking pollution (Energy News Network), Massachusetts lawmakers consider ending retail electric choice for residential customers (Utility Dive), Colorado is the first state to ban PFAS in oil and gas extraction (Environmental Health News)
CALIFORNIA: These are the impacts of California's worst drought on record (NPR), California says methane-spotting flights are helping stop leaks (Reuters), California orders thousands of farms and cities, including San Francisco, to stop pumping water during drought (San Francisco Chronicle)
FERC: State utility regulators urge FERC to move up MISO’s proposed 2030 start date for aggregated DERs (Utility Dive), EPA to address rampant delays in toxic air pollutant reviews (E&E News)
IMPACTS: The world's 1.5°C climate goal is slipping out of reach - so now what? (New Scientist), Climate change is not your fault, but that doesn't mean you're off the hook (Arizona Republic), Train threatened by rising seas could be saved with a wall (E&E News), Another round of severe storms expected (Weather Channel)
HEAT: More than 22 million in Southwest brace for dangerous heat (New York Times $), Excessive heat: temperatures over 100 swelling from Texas to California (Washington Post $), US power grid will struggle to keep up with demand this summer, experts say (Weather Channel), Southwest heat wave brings triple-digit temperatures (Weather Channel), High temps in Phoenix could crack the 115-degree mark (AccuWeather), America is staring down a summer of disasters (Axios)
WILDFIRES: Town evacuating, 3 firefighters hurt in wildfire in Spain (AP)
HURRICANES: As gas prices soar, so does hesitancy toward hurricane evacuations (AccuWeather), New tropical threat being monitored in East Pacific (AccuWeather)
WATER: World Oceans Day 2022: How climate change and warming waters are affecting the health of the oceans (ABC)
TORNADOES: Tornado Flattens Ohio Warehouse (Weather Channel)
FLOODING: Drone reveals significant flooding in Alabama (Weather Channel), Climate-driven flooding poses well water contamination risks (AP)
RENEWABLES: Solar industry welcomes ‘breathing room’ from Biden’s tariff action (Washington Examiner)
EFFICIENCY: Puerto Ricans are powering their own rooftop solar boom (Canary Media/En Español Canary Media)
EMISSIONS: What if CO2 emissions stopped today? A study offers answers (E&E News)
OIL & GAS: American Petroleum Institute names new head of advocacy (E&E)
PLASTICS: Microplastics found in fresh Antarctic snow (Gizmodo)
UTILITIES: PG&E pledges net-zero emissions by 2040, will keep using gas (ABC), Terna Energy studies options amid takeover interest (Bloomberg $), 2 workers die after falling in power plant's drainage system (E&E)
CARBON REMOVAL: Carbon-removal industry draws billions to fight climate change (Wall Street Journal $)
CARS: DC to raise fees on truck and SUV owners (Washington Examiner)
FINANCE: Does crypto-mining have a future in New York? And what is crypto-mining? (New York Times $)
HEALTH: Stop telling kids that climate change will destroy their world (Vox)
INFRASTRUCTURE: Power grid at risk from Russian cyberattacks and energy blackouts (Washington Examiner)
PHILANTHROPY: Philanthropy can help protect against climate change (AP)
PUBLIC LANDS: US to phase out single-use plastic on public lands, national parks by 2032 (Reuters), National parks to phase out single-use plastics (E&E News), Debate reopens over lead ammo and fishing tackle in refuges (E&E News)
WILDLIFE: Climate change puts a different spin on fly fishing for once skeptical anglers (USA Today), Humpback whales face a major setback from climate change (National Geographic), Moose population boom, linked to climate change, inspires some hunting changes (Alaska Public Media), Thousands of fish pumped into North Pole Lake (Weather Channel)
INTERNATIONAL: New Zealand farmers propose paying for emissions to tackle climate change (The Guardian), Sri Lanka power union announces strike, raising risk of blackouts (Reuters), New Zealand to price sheep and cow burps to cut greenhouse gases (Reuters), The mystery of the UK’s untapped tidal power (Energy Monitor), Bank of Montreal taps a Citibank climate expert as risk chief (Wall Street Journal $), Congo’s oil block sale threatens carbon sinks, forest pact (Bloomberg $) |
7 Steps To Start Saving The World (By Cleaning Up the Digital Climate Disinformation Holding Back Climate Action)
Climate change is an incredibly complex problem, but addressing it is no mystery. Social media remains a key vector for the spread of climate disinformation, and measures to slow it are failing miserably, where they even exist at all.
That's the topline finding of a comprehensive, 100+ page report "Deny, Deceive, Delay", published today by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the members of the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition (CAAD), the result of a massive monitoring effort around last year's COP26 climate negotiations. They found that Twitter actually carried a greater volume of false content than Facebook, with generally an order of magnitude more content engaged with on Twitter than any other platform. But Facebook hardly came away looking good — their algorithm drove more views to climate disinformation than it did to their own Climate Science Center, and their fact-checking programs remain pitifully unenforced.
Jennie King, Head of Climate Disinformation at ISD, said the "analysis has shown that climate disinformation has become more complex, evolving from outright denial into identifiable ‘Discourses of Delay’ to exploit the gap between buy-in and action."
But the report offers a guide for responding, and so, King continued, “governments and social media platforms must learn the new strategies at play and understand that disinformation in the climate realm has increasing crossover with other harms, including electoral integrity, public health, hate speech and conspiracy theories. We’ve proposed seven concrete measures they can take to thwart the prominence and impact of this content, in order to build public mandates based on credible science and good-faith debate.”
On the government side, the report details how media well known to this space like the Wall Street Journal routinely spread climate disinformation, and therefore shouldn't be exempted from pending EU legislation to address online disinfo.
For Big Tech though, there are six concrete asks, each thoroughly supported by examples from the COP26 monitoring effort. Some are technical, like improving labeling of old disinfo that gets re-shared, transparency and data access so that researchers can easily and effectively get a handle on large-scale disinformation trends, and making image-based searching better, so researchers can track the spread of images.
It calls on social media (and others) to adopt a definition of climate disinformation, particularly official science and political bodies like the UN and IPCC. That way social media companies have a reliable source to inform their policies. One such, another of the report's topline recommendations, is that media and social media companies simply stop letting the fossil fuel industry run misleading and greenwashing advertisements.
That's a big ask, as is the call for platforms to actually enforce rules against repeat offenders. The monitoring found that the bulk of the disinfo was coming from just a handful of users, most of whom were professional or politically motivated. You know the names (Bjorn Lomborg, Tony Heller and Michael Shellenberger).
“We will not be able to stop climate change if all conversations are flooded with disinformation,” said Michael Khoo, co-chair of the Climate Disinformation Coalition at Friends of the Earth US, who provided US expertise in partnership with CAAD. “Governments must require social media companies to be transparent and accountable about the harms their products create, as they do with every other industry from airlines to cars to food processing. We should not continue this endless game of climate denial whack-a-mole.”
And at least some governments may actually be paying attention! Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, member of European Parliament, both praised the report's "timely and important exploration of the state of play on climate disinformation" and as a member of the EU special committee on disinformation threats, added that "platforms are amplifying the voices of a small community of actors spreading climate disinformation....We must do more to address climate disinformation at the European level. If urgent steps are not taken to tackle climate disinformation head on, our collective work towards reaching the climate goals is at risk of being undermined."
Not exactly a risk of being undermined, but more of a reality.
As report contributor Philip Newell, Associate Director of Science Defense at Climate Nexus surmised, “this was the most robust effort to monitor climate disinformation that I've seen in my decade of tracking Big Oil's climate denial. While each industrial disinformation campaign is unique, the actors and their playbook remain the same, so if the lessons in this report are heeded by Big Tech and other policymakers, climate disinformation won't still be an obstacle to climate action another ten years from now.”
We can certainly hope so! Then again, there's something to be said for job security… |
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