Well, partly – yeah.
It was an audacious messaging campaign: White environmentalists are hurting black communities by pushing radical climate policies that would strip them of fossil fuel jobs.
The email to journalists, sent by a public affairs firm at the height of national protests over systemic racism earlier this month, accidentally contained the name of a high-profile client.
It was Chevron Corp.
The Virginia-based communications firm, named CRC Advisors, urged journalists to look at how green groups were “claiming solidarity” with black protesters while “backing policies which would hurt minority communities.”
“Despite this claimed solidarity, environmental organizations, composed of predominantly white members, are backing radical policies like the Green New Deal which would bring particular harm to minority communities,” wrote John Gage of CRC in an email sent to media outlets including E&E News.
The story pitch included an offer to connect journalists with black conservatives who oppose the Green New Deal, a sweeping government jobs program advanced by progressive lawmakers who champion environmental justice issues for communities of color.
The email ended with a revealing tagline.
“If you would rather not receive future communications from Chevron, let us know by clicking here.”
Chevron denied involvement in the messaging campaign, but the email’s accidental nod to the oil giant is renewing suspicions among activists and academics that Chevron’s public statements about climate change fail to match its lobbying activities. While Chevron has promised to do more to slow rising temperatures, observers view the email as a shadowy continuation of the fossil fuel industry’s past efforts to undercut legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“Chevron’s fingerprints appear to be on this,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard University history professor and the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a 2010 book about how scientists with ties to Big Oil worked to obscure the truth about global warming.
Oreskes described previous instances of oil and gas companies working with communications firms to advance industry talking points. But the CRC effort is remarkable, she said, for trying to leverage national unrest about systemic racism and police violence to promote an expansion of oil and gas drilling.
“There’s no socially acceptable language to describe how despicable this is,” she said. “It’s hard for me to contain my fury.”
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Continue reading “Black Lies Matter: Chevron Revealed Behind Racially Tinged Climate Denial Campaign”Many of those missing are believed to be workers at the dam. Police say that nine bodies have been recovered so far and that at least 140 people are missing. The chief minister of India’s Uttarakhand state, Trivendra Singh Rawat, told reporters that the figure could rise.
The disaster began around 10:45 a.m. local time when part of the Nanda Devi glacier broke off in an ecologically fragile area of Uttarakhand, an Indian state bordering Nepal and China, high in the Himalayas. Environmentalists have long cautionedagainst building dams and power plants there, because it’s so prone to landslides and flooding.
In 2013, record monsoon rainfall triggered floods that killed about 6,000 people in what was dubbed the “Himalayan tsunami” because it swept away homes, roads and bridges in Uttarakhand.
It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the glacier to break away early Sunday. While climate change has contributed to the shrinkage of Himalayan glaciers, February is still winter in Uttarakhand and not typically the time of year when its glaciers melt.
NEW DELHI — A piece of a glacier broke off high in the Himalayas on Sunday, causing a deadly flash flood that smashed through a hydroelectric power plant and destroyed homes in India. More than 125 people were reported missing.
India rushed disaster response teams to Uttarakhand, a mountainous northern state. Seven bodies have been recovered. Because of the rapid flow of the water, bodies were being recovered away from the disaster site, officials told local media.
Ashok Kumar, Uttarakhand’s police chief, said the avalanche occurred at 11 a.m. Authorities evacuated several villages downstream. “The picture will be clear tomorrow morning,” he said, referring to the rescue operations and those missing.
Television channels aired footage of water barreling down a narrow canyon and sweeping away the power plant at its base. A second state-run power plant nearby also suffered extensive damage.
Things that make you go “hmmm”.
What is this fixation with drilling virgin territory?
Ramping up fossil fuel production and shredding pollution rules, as the Trump administration did for four years, largely defies economic and scientific logic in an era of costly climate disasters. But Larry Kudlow, who was director of the National Economic Council for part of that time, may have indicated Wednesday that the administration saw its policies on fossil fuels through another lens: culture.
During an interview with Fox Business star Maria Bartiromo, Kudlow dismissed President Joe Biden as an ideologue whose approach to climate change threatens to “wreck the whole energy sector.”
“It turns out President Biden may be the most left-wing president we’ve ever seen,” Kudlow said. “His actions on spending and taxing and regulating, on immigration and fossil fuels and other cultural issues… he may be the most left-wing.”
It was only a split second, possibly even an unintentional slip of the tongue. But the idea of defining fossil fuels as a “cultural issue” gets at something that typically goes unacknowledged in policy debates over how to deal with the industry most responsible for destabilizing the planet’s ecosystems. For conservatives, fossil fuel fights are just another front in the U.S. culture war that’s been waged for decades over issues like same-sex marriage and abortion.
On the other hand, the economic logic of pumping and burning more oil, gas and coal is difficult to square.
Continue reading “Tiny, Oily, Little Hands Give Petrosexuals Away”In 2011, a study in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change found that white males were overrepresented among people who denied the reality of climate change. Researchers attributed the phenomenon to a desire to “protect their cultural identity.”
My next video (after the one that’s dropping any minute now) explores the links between climate denial and whatever craziness it is that makes people cling to Qanon craziness.
Dry announcement in Exxon’s fourth Quarter results:
Driven by the growing strength of ExxonMobil’s investment portfolio, less strategic assets were removed from the company’s Upstream development plan, including certain dry gas resources in the United States, western Canada and Argentina. Total non-cash, after-tax fourth quarter impairment charges were $19.3 billion.
ExxonMobil announced a $19.3 billion write-down on Tuesday, a big hit to a company reeling from depressed oil and gas prices and a rapidly changing global energy market.
The write-down reduces the value of the assets on Exxon’s books. The announcement comes as part of the company’s fourth quarter earnings for 2020.
The fossil fuel giant, however, may be understating the financial damage to its assets, according to a former ExxonMobil employee turned whistleblower, Franklin Bennett. The oil major has overvalued its assets for years, according to Bennett and a team of advisors, a practice he describes as “fraudulent and defiant behavior” in a January 31 supplement to a whistleblower complaint he filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Bennett and his team argue that instead, the company has been overvaluing its U.S. oil and gas assets by as much as $56 billion, as of year-end 2019.
At the root of the SEC complaint is ExxonMobil’s 2010 purchase of shale fracking company XTO Energy, which it acquired at the height of the natural gas boom for $46 billion. In the months and years following the acquisition, natural gas prices collapsed, and never returned to previous heights, rendering much of XTO’s assets uneconomic to produce.
more at link
Although prospects could be good if Australia chooses clean energy, the past is a piss-poor prologue.
Below, the situation down under is dire.
Continue reading “Australia’s Cringe-worthy Climate Cons”