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Climate Misinformation Researchers Throw Support Behind California Communities Suing Fossil Fuel Companies

February 3, 2019

Climate Misinformation Researchers Throw Support Behind California Communities Suing Fossil Fuel Companies

Stand up for Science rally

Just in case fossil fuel companies had forgotten when and how much they knew about the impacts their products have had on the climate, a reminder came at them in court this week.

On January 29, six researchers studying climate misinformation filed one of eight friend-of-the-court briefs in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals supporting the California communities suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages.

The dozens of companies, which include a variety of oil, gas, and coal producers and refiners, such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Peabody, are trying to get the cases moved from state to federal court, where similar climate liability lawsuits from San Francisco, Oakland, and New York City have not fared so well. The Court of Appeals is lumping together six suits from California counties and cities while deciding where they should be tried.

Some of the top academics examining fossil fuel companies’ actions and communications around climate change were involved in filing the brief, which rather concisely summarizes the major take-aways from their research in its table of contents.

To sum up even more, fossil fuel companies:

  • knew the risks of burning their products on the climate.
  • worked proactively to cover up that knowledge and discredit climate science.
  • tried to protect their own assets from climate impacts by using the very same science they sought to undermine in public.

The researchers filing the brief include Naomi Oreskes (co-author of Merchants of Doubt) and Geoffrey Supran of Harvard University, Robert Brulle of Brown University, Justin Farrell of Yale University, Benjamin Franta of Stanford University, and Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol, UK. They’re joined in this brief by the Center for Climate Integrity, an initiative that provides legal, scientific, and policy support for affected communities seeking climate damages from polluters.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

News Not to Miss: Oil Train Spill, China Petrochemical Deal, Methane Leaks

June 30, 2018

News Not to Miss: Oil Train Spill, China Petrochemical Deal, Methane Leaks

It’s hard to keep up with the flood of news these days. Here’s your weekly round-up of news not to miss from DeSmog.

Justin Mikulka has been on the oil train beat for years. He’s documented how the oil boom and pipeline bottleneck in the Bakken Shale has led to more, longer, and heavier trains shuttling oil across North America and how various factors also have led to another type of boom: the literal “boom” of exploding oil trains. (In fact, train operators have given them the nickname “bomb trains.”)

This week, Mikulka writes about the latest oil train incident, this time involving a BNSF train carrying tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, across northwestern Iowa.

While it fortunately resulted in no fire or explosion, the June 22 derailment did release an estimated 230,000 gallons of oil into a flooded Iowa river.

Of particular note is the fact that the Iowa oil train crash is the first one involving the new, safer DOT-117R rail tank cars, which were supposed to improve the safety of oil trains.

China and West Virginia: A Fracking-to-Plastics Dream in Appalachia

The shale oil and gas industry, fueled by fracking, is helping pump record volumes of production in the U.S. But with all those fossil fuels flooding the market, they have to go somewhere.

That’s why the state of West Virginia is spearheading an effort to build out a massive petrochemical storage and production hub in the Ohio River Valley. In fact, last November the state signed an $83 billion deal with Chinese investors to make this fracking-to-plastics dream a reality. (For context, West Virginia’s total gross domestic product was only $76.8 billion last year.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nations Won’t Reach Paris Climate Goal Without Protecting Wildlife and Nature, Warns Report

March 28, 2018

Nations Won’t Reach Paris Climate Goal Without Protecting Wildlife and Nature, Warns Report

Sierpe river mangrove forest in Costa Rica

The Paris Climate Agreement and several other United Nations (UN) pacts “all depend on the health and vitality of our natural environment in all its diversity and complexity,” said Dr. Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of the UN-backed organization behind the report. “Acting to protect and promote biodiversity is at least as important to achieving these commitments and to human well-being as is the fight against global climate change.”

The report comes from the efforts of more than 550 scientists in over 100 nations, corralled by an organization often dubbed “the IPCC for biodiversity.”

Much like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assesses the state of research on global warming and its impacts, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) reviews the best-available science on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to human well-being.

Climate Change not so Great for Wildlife

Three years in the making, the study concluded humans are causing the planet to lose species at such a rapid clip that the resulting risks are on par with those presented by climate change. On top of being unfortunate for those species that no longer exist, these losses also endanger people’s access to food, clean water, and energy, according to the report.

“We must act to halt and reverse the unsustainable use of nature or risk not only the future we want but even the lives we currently lead,” Robert Watson, current IPBES chair and former IPCC chair, told The Guardian.

In addition, by 2050, the report found that under a “business as usual” scenario for greenhouse gas emissions, climate change could jump ahead of other threats, such as habitat loss and change in land use, as the primary cause of extinctions in North and South America.

Wildlife and ecosystems across the world are threatened by the impacts of a warming climate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nations Won’t Reach Paris Climate Goal Without Protecting Wildlife and Nature, Warns Report

March 24, 2018

Nations Won’t Reach Paris Climate Goal Without Protecting Wildlife and Nature, Warns Report

Sierpe river mangrove forest in Costa Rica

The Paris Climate Agreement and several other United Nations (UN) pacts “all depend on the health and vitality of our natural environment in all its diversity and complexity,” said Dr. Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of the UN-backed organization behind the report. “Acting to protect and promote biodiversity is at least as important to achieving these commitments and to human well-being as is the fight against global climate change.”

The report comes from the efforts of more than 550 scientists in over 100 nations, corralled by an organization often dubbed “the IPCC for biodiversity.”

Much like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assesses the state of research on global warming and its impacts, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) reviews the best-available science on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to human well-being.

Climate Change not so Great for Wildlife

Three years in the making, the study concluded humans are causing the planet to lose species at such a rapid clip that the resulting risks are on par with those presented by climate change. On top of being unfortunate for those species that no longer exist, these losses also endanger people’s access to food, clean water, and energy, according to the report.

“We must act to halt and reverse the unsustainable use of nature or risk not only the future we want but even the lives we currently lead,” Robert Watson, current IPBES chair and former IPCC chair, told The Guardian.

In addition, by 2050, the report found that under a “business as usual” scenario for greenhouse gas emissions, climate change could jump ahead of other threats, such as habitat loss and change in land use, as the primary cause of extinctions in North and South America.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Meeting Paris Goals Means Dealing with Climate Impacts of Eating Meat

September 3, 2017

Meeting Paris Goals Means Dealing with Climate Impacts of Eating Meat

beef cattle in feedlot

Environmental groups place a lot of attention on trying to stop new oil, gas, and coal development since current fossil fuel projects would likely already blow us past the less-than 2°C upper limit for warming laid out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. In fact, there’s a whole movement, known as “Keep It in the Ground,” predicated on this idea.

But when faced with a resurgence of support for fossil fuels from the White House, perhaps just as important is talking about how to “Keep It in the Cow,” according to some reports. Right now, experts predict agriculture is set to eat up half the greenhouse gas emissions the world can release by 2050 and still stay below 2°C (3.6°F) of warming.

That is, unless the world takes a big bite out of its meat consumption, especially from cattle and other livestock that chew their cud, say researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Raising these ruminants produces a lot of methane, a much more potent but shorter-lived greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

While “Meatless Mondays” is one approach to this problem, their studies show that it’s not necessarily how much meat people eat that’s linked to the climate impacts of their diet. Instead, it’s the amount of beef, lamb, and dairy.

A 2017 Chalmers study concluded that: “A switch from diets rich in ruminant meat to diets with meat from monogastric animals (pork, chicken) reduces [methane] emissions by almost the same amount as a switch to an entirely vegan diet.” Researchers at the University of Oxford in 2016 found similar benefits, concluding that shifting to a vegetarian diet could lessen greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds.

(If you want to eat vegan, of course, that’s also an option. In addition, eggs and dairy each have about half the climate impact of eating chicken and beef.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

As Nations Embrace Paris Agreement, World’s Existing Fossil Fuels Set to Exceed its Goals

September 23, 2016

As Nations Embrace Paris Agreement, World’s Existing Fossil Fuels Set to Exceed its Goals

Anti-coal protests in the Philippines.

But, practically speaking, what did the now 60 countries actually agree to when they said they would limit warming to “well below 2°C” and strive for 1.5°C?

A new report from Oil Change International calculates that, in order to accomplish those goals, governments need to stop permitting and building all new fossil fuel projects and retire early some existing oil and gas fields and coal mines.

Entitled “The Sky’s Limit: Why the Paris Climate Goals Require a Managed Decline of Fossil Fuel Production,” the report says that just burning fossil fuels from projects presently in operation will produce enough greenhouse gas emissions to push the world well past 2°C of warming this century. Limiting warming to 1.5°C calls for even larger closures of existing operations.

“If the world is serious about achieving the goals agreed in Paris, governments have to stop the expansion of the fossil fuel industry,” Stephen Kretzmann, Executive Director of Oil Change International, said in a statement. “The industry has enough carbon in the pipeline — today — to break through the sky’s limit.”

The report’s findings call attention to the uncomfortable contradiction between the global climate goals set through the United Nations process and the reality of fossil fuel reserves that are being exploited.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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