July 2020 – Page 7 – This is Not Cool

Scientists Weigh in on Bogus “Environmentalist Apology”

I’ve had some inquiries about a new book being pushed by purported “Environmentalist” Michael Shellenberger, which he has promoted with an online piece titled “On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize for the Climate Scare”.

In the puff piece on Forbes last week, Shellenberger put forth a number of bogus talking points, aimed to get him maximal uptake from the climate denial and fossil fuel apologist community – which worked. He’s been all over the media, much the way Michael Moore’s recent dumpster fire of a movie made the leftist grifter a new hero to the white supremacist crowd.
The centerpiece of his argument so far is a list of assertions that, if you’re the average Sean Hannity viewer, sound like they falsify environmental media memes, but in fact are largely bogus straw men, distortions, or outright lies.
Here’s the list.

Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s
Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level
We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

Scientists who probably have a lot of better things to do spent the July 4th weekend going thru the list and clarifying.
The very long response thread is excerpted here, but I encourage anyone interested to go to the link, and bookmark it, if you think you’ll need it in some future post-Covid Thanksgiving dinner.

Climate Feedback:

The article by Michael Shellenberger was published in various media outlets, including Forbes, Zero Hedge, Breitbart, PJ Media, The Daily Wire, The Australian, and Quillette. The article has been shared more than 200,000 times on social media since it was published, according to Buzzsumo. Forbes unpublished the article on the same day it was published. In the article, Shellenberger, who is promoting a new book, outlines a series of claims about climate change. As the reviewers describe below, several of these claims are accurate or partially accurate. However, others are inaccurate and mislead readers by lacking context and cherry-picking data while overlooking other relevant scientific studies.
Specifically, Shellenberger claims that “climate change is not making natural disasters worse.” As the reviewers describe below, this claim is inaccurate and contradicts reports from the IPCC as well as numerous scientific studies linking anthropogenic climate change to temperature extremes, drought, precipitation patterns, and wildfires^[1-4].
Shellenberger also claims that “Humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction,’” which contradicts scientific evidence demonstrating that extinctions in animal species far exceed background extinction rates^[5-9]. As described in Ceballos et al. (2015), “conservatively almost 200 species of vertebrates have gone extinct in the last 100 years.” This result contrasts with the estimated background extinction rate, which would take approximately 10,000 years for 200 vertebrate species to go extinct.
Scientists who reviewed this article also noted several misleading claims about wildfires, including “fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003,” and “The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California.” Although global burned area declined ~25% from 1998-2015, this is driven in part by non-climatic factors, such as clearing land for agriculture^[10,11]. By conflating purposefully set fires and wildfires as well as climatic and non-climatic factors driving these fires, the claim relies on flawed reasoning to suggest that wildfires are not affected by climate change. These claims also contradict scientific studies showing that anthropogenic climate change has increased fire risk in the western U.S. and Canada^[12-14].

The reviewers who analyzed this article rated its overall credibility to be low. In their comments below, the scientists evaluate many of these claims and describe how they are inaccurate or mislead readers by contradicting available evidence or using scientific data out of context.

Pipeline Postponement Pads Pall over Petrol

And gas..

The Covid Crisis has become a critical moment for the oil and gas industry, as many observers, including moi, feel like we may have accelerated peak oil consumption, and created significant new barriers for the natural gas industry.

Bismark Tribune:

A federal judge has ordered the shutdown of the Dakota Access Pipeline while a lengthy environmental review is conducted of the project opposed by environmentalists and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
The move was requested earlier this year by Standing Rock and three other Sioux tribes in the Dakotas who fear environmental harm from the oil pipeline and sued over the project four years ago. North Dakota officials have said such a move would have “significant disruptive consequences” for the state, whose oil patch has been hit hard in recent months by falling demand for crude amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Standing Rock Chairman Mike Faith said the tribe is trying to prevent a potential environmental disaster should the line leak.
“For the tribe’s sake, it is good news,” he said of Monday’s ruling. “I think for downstream users, it’s good news also.”
The $3.8 billion pipeline built by developer Energy Transfer has been moving Bakken oil to a shipping point in Illinois for three years. But U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who is overseeing the lawsuit, in March ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to complete a full Environmental Impact Statement. The question of whether the pipeline would be shut down in the meantime had lingered since.

As big, maybe bigger news:

New York Times:

Two of the nation’s largest utility companies announced on Sunday that they had canceled the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would have carried natural gas across the Appalachian Trail, as delays and rising costs threatened the viability of the project.
Duke Energy and Dominion Energy said that lawsuits, mainly from environmentalists aimed at blocking the project, had increased costs to as much as $8 billion from about $4.5 billion to $5 billion when it was first announced in 2014. The utilities said they had begun developing the project “in response to a lack of energy supply and delivery diversification for millions of families, businesses, schools and national defense installations across North Carolina and Virginia.”

Biden’s Big Tent on Climate Change

https://twitter.com/VarshPrakash/status/1265725142908448770?s=20

Above, Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, recaps her participation in the Joe Biden Climate Coalition over recent months. She is “cautiously optimistic”.

New York Times:

In recent weeks, supporters of Mr. Biden and of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, his chief rival in the Democratic presidential primary race, have met privately over Zoom, part of several joint task forces that the two contenders established to generate policy recommendations on core domestic priorities, and to facilitate party unity. After two months of those conversations, task force members representing both camps say they have finalized a set of ambitious, near-term climate targets that they hope Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, will incorporate in his platform.
“I do believe we were able to make meaningful progress,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, who headed the climate panel with former Secretary of State John Kerry, said in an interview last week. Representative Donald McEachin of Virginia, a Biden ally who was also on the task force, called it a “collaborative process” that developed wide-ranging policies.
–

Still, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who has previously clashed with Mr. Bidenover his approach to combating climate change, struck a note of caution.
“Now, what he does with those recommendations, ultimately, is up to him,” she said. “And we will see what that commitment looks like.”
–
Mr. Biden, the former vice president, last year proposed a $1.7 trillion plan aimed at achieving 100 percent clean energy and eliminating the country’s net carbon emissions by 2050.
But how he responds to the task force’s recommendations — and whether progressives in the group walk away feeling heard — will test his campaign’s ability to navigate an issue of great importance to ascendant forces in the Democratic Party.
“The work of the task forces has been collaborative and productive, and Vice President Biden looks forward to reviewing their full recommendations,” a campaign spokesman, Jamal Brown, said in a statement. As for Mr. Biden’s approach to the issue, Mr. Brown said, “As president, Biden will take immediate action to address the urgency of the climate emergency and create good-paying jobs that provide a chance to join a union, which is especially important now as tens of millions of Americans are out of work.”
In recent weeks Mr. Biden has made a number of overtures to climate activists. He has increasingly linked environmental issues to racial justice, and he said at a recent climate-focused fund-raiser that, if elected, in his first 100 days as president, he would send Congress “a transformational plan for a clean energy revolution.” Last week he announced the formation of an advisory council focused on mobilizing climate-focused voters.

Climate Denial, Covid Denial, Part of the Same Syndrome

Above, Representative Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) pursues a breathtakingly moronic line of questioning around climate science, with former Secretary of State John Kerry.
Today, Rep. Massie still pursuing an anti-science agenda, this time with Corona virus.

There is no authority in the Constitution that authorizes the government to stick a needle in you against your will, force you to wear a face mask, or track your daily movements.
🇺🇸
Can you imagine the signers of the Declaration of Independence submitting to any of these things?!
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) July 5, 2020

The anti-science movement is by its nature, also an anti-human movement, and is now killing Americans by the thousands.

For clarification, Attorney Teri Kanefield has the citations.

In case there was any doubt that states have the power to issue such regulations, here's an example ⤵️https://t.co/R9yoT1VxvH

(You all get A's in Constitutional Law class today)
— Teri Kanefield (@Teri_Kanefield) July 5, 2020

Dems Release Climate Plan, But is it Enough?

Inside Climate News:

House Democrats unveiled a sweeping plan for climate action Tuesday that embraces much of the ambition of the Green New Deal, while avoiding the use of the name and steering clear of calls for abrupt bans on fossil fuel development.
Instead, the package of more than 120 pieces of legislation seeks to drive a transition to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, achieved by reaching into every corner of the U.S. economy with new investments, standards and incentives favoring clean energy, jobs creation, lands protection and environmental justice.
The report drew criticism both from those who want to see a more rapid retreat from fossil fuels, and those who think the Democrats should have sought more common ground with the GOP. While the plan has no chance of coming to fruition in the current Congress, its endorsement by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and moderate Democrats sets a marker for what is possible if the Democrats gain control of the government next year.
“To the young people who have urged us to act fearlessly, we have heard you,” said U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), chair of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, who led development of the 500-page report by the panel’s Democrats. Castor and panel member Rep. A. Donald McEachen (D-Va.) are both members of a task force appointed by former vice president Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presumed presidential nominee, to advise him and party platform writers on climate policy this summer.
In an indication of how far the Democratic party’s center of gravity on climate has moved in two years, the report won some praise from the youth-led Sunrise Movement, which had been critical of Pelosi and skeptical that Castor’s committee would have sufficient power.
The plan is “a real sign that young people are changing politics in this country and the establishment is scrambling to catch up,” said Lauren Maunus, Sunrise’s legislative manager, in a prepared statement. “This plan is more ambitious than anything we have seen from Democratic leadership so far, but it still needs to go further to match the full scale of the crisis.”
Although Sunrise didn’t get into specifics, other groups on the left said they would have liked to see a ban on fracking, a ban on exports and imports of fossil fuels, and an immediate halt to new fossil fuel infrastructure such as pipelines.

Major nations including the United States and Russia are throwing a lifeline to fossil fuel companies during the coronavirus crisis, rather than seizing a historic chance to shift to cleaner energies, a study by 14 research groups is set to show.
Preliminary findings, shared exclusively with Climate Home News, showed that only China, India and four other nations in the Group of 20 leading economies were committing more public money to clean energy than to polluting sectors.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity… to use government funding, government subsidies, loans, to reshape our future,” said Ivetta Gerasimchuk, Sustainable Energy Supplies lead at the International Institute for Sustainable Development think-tank, one of the groups involved.
G20 nations are committing trillions of dollars to combat the economic slump induced by Covid-19.
But “the overall trend is that… there is more money going into fossil fuels than into clean energy,” she told a webcast organised by the Stockholm Environment Institute, another of the 14 research organisations.
“What we see is pretty much what countries did before the Covid crisis they keep doing. In this sense the crisis… has just exacerbated the trends we had before, unfortunately.”