Month: September 2023

Above, Mitt Romney portrays climate change as insignificant compared to the problem of national debt, which he declares “almost immoral”. (wow, strong words, Mitt)

In 2012, Mitt Romney carried his party’s banner as Presidential Candidate. He lost to Barack Obama, but was elected to the Senate from utah in 2018.
Now he is retiring, and has some choice words describing the corrupt state of his Party and leading Senators, in interviews with journalist Mckay Coppins.

Turns out, many of those he paints as craven cowardly hypocrites, are also the Senate’s leading Climate deniers.
Weird, right?

Washington Post:

The headline Wednesday was that Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah is retiring — another Trump-critical GOP lawmaker heading for the exits in a party that is, relatedly, still dominated by Donald Trump.

What may be even bigger news is the abject portrait the departing senator is now painting of his fellow Republicans. More so than virtually any American politician in recent history, he casts his colleagues — seemingly the vast majority of them — as craven cowards.

The article’s portrait of Romney fills out the picture of a conservative movement increasingly bereft of scruples or morality in the age of Trump. It focuses on his Senate colleagues but also high-ranking former GOP leaders more broadly, often singling them out in ways that you rarely see from a fellow partisan, even in retirement.

Here are highlights:

• Romney reserved his harshest words for freshman Senate Republican J.D. Vance of Ohio, once a strong Trump critic like Romney who has refashioned himself as a MAGA warrior. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,” Romney said in 2022. Romney said he imagined confronting Vance and telling him: “It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?”

(A search for “JD Vance climate” yields nothing – which speaks volumes in itself.)

• Close behind are Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), whose furthering of 2020 stolen-election claims Romney seems to regard with particular disdain. “They know better!” he said. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” Romney said they made a “calculation” that “put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”

(Cruz and Hawley positions illustrated below.)

• Of former vice president Mike Pence, a man who like Romney wears his religiosity on his sleeve: No one has been “more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly than Mike Pence.”

Continue reading “Romney Portrays Fellow Republicans as “Craven Cowards”. Weirdly, They are Also Climate Deniers.”

Young Republicans pushing elders on Climate. Sort of.

Above, Alexander Diaz was interviewed in MSNBC, following his appearance at the recent Republican debate, where he asked a question, (significantly, queued up very early by the Fox News hosts) about climate.
He was pointedly ignored, dissed, and blown off by the candidates. (below)

Pathetically, some young activists called it a “win” that climate was even mentioned in a Republican forum.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking for GOP climate denial, and polls show a generation rising that is sharply divergent from the oil soaked past.
I’ll be meeting with a young Republican leader in my area soon, and I’ll show him this graph.

Continue reading “Young Republicans are Pushing Party on Climate. But, Really, Not Very Hard.”

CleanTechnica:

VinFast, a relatively new entry on the EV manufacturer scene out of Vietnam, collaborated recently with global market research firm The Harris Poll to conduct a survey exploring the attitudes, experiences, and behaviors of US drivers towards EVs. The takeaway is that more US drivers than ever before are ready to take the EV plunge — especially if manufacturers add in some fine additional options. Respondents cited vehicle safety, warranty, service, driving technology, and visual design as key areas of interest when considering their next purchase or lease.

What specific criteria did respondent drivers say they were needing to make the move to EVs?

• affordability (58%)
• convenient/easy to charge (54%)
• more availability of seating options (48%)
• more storage (47%)
• body styles (46%)
• safety (45%)
• warranty and service (35%)
• driving technology (23%)
• colors (17%)
• visual design (16%)

RMI:

There is a clear exponential growth pattern for EVs, as rising sales track along an S-curve. Led by Northern Europe and China, and driven by policy, it is taking around six years for EVs to go from 1% to 10% of new car sales. The next stage is quicker still: In leading countries, it is taking another six years to get to 80%.

The new driver of change is economics. Because battery costs enjoy learning curves, total cost of ownership price parity has been reached, and sticker price parity will be reached in every major car market and segment by the end of the decade. That will enable the revolution to widen across the Global South and deepen into other transport sectors.

By 2030, EVs will dominate global car sales. If we continue to solve the challenges and sales continue up the S-curves, then EVs will make up between 62% and 86% of global car sales by 2030, with China enjoying an EV market share of at least 90%. Meanwhile, consensus sales forecasts are lagging and get upgraded every year

Continue reading “More Drivers Than Ever Expect to Buy an EV”

NOAA:

• Asia, Africa, North America and South America each had their warmest August on record.
• Record-warm temperatures covered nearly 13% of the world’s surface this August, which was the highest August percentage since the start of records in 1951.
• August 2023 set a record for the highest monthly sea surface temperature anomaly (+1.85°F or +1.03°C) of any month in NOAA’s 174-year record.
• Antarctica saw its fourth consecutive month with the lowest sea ice extent on record, and global sea ice extent set a record low for August.
• Eight of the 19 named storms that occurred across the globe in August reached major tropical cyclone strength (≥111 mph), which tied August 2015 for the most on record for the month.

Globally, August 2023 was the warmest August in the 174-year NOAA record. The year-to-date (January–August) global surface temperature ranked as the second warmest such period on record. According to NCEI’s Global Annual Temperature Outlook and data through August, there is a 95% probability that 2023 will rank among the two warmest years on record.

Bloomberg:

The heat has taxed power grids and agriculture the world over and led to deadly heat waves. Higher temperatures fueled extreme weather events, including a spate of hurricanes and typhoons that ravaged China and the US in recent weeks. Eight of the 19 storms that formed in August had winds that touched 111 miles (179 kilometers) per hour or more, matching 2015 for the most on record for the month.

This year’s heat is getting a boost from a growing El Niño in the Pacific, but the long-term trend has seen the last 44 years post temperatures higher than the 20th-century average.

“As long as emissions continue driving a steady march of background warming, we expect further records to be broken in years to come,” said Sarah Kapnick, one of NOAA’s chief scientists.

Bloomberg:

The luxury cruise ship that ran aground in a remote Arctic area of Greenland and had been stuck there since Monday is once again afloat. 

The Ocean Explorer was dragged free by a fishing research vessel owned by Greenland’s government, Denmark’s military’s Joint Arctic Command said in a brief Facebook statement on Thursday. 

“The ship came afloat again and they are now checking the hull for any damage and stability, and then awaiting further directives from the relevant authorities,” Frigg Jorgensen, an executive director at the Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators, said in an interview from Reykjavik.

“No damage has been reported and no pollution has been reported so far,” she said.

The Ocean Explorer became stuck around midday on Monday, and three attempts in as many days to free the vessel had failed. The ship has about 200 people on board, including passengers primarily from Australia. It was wedged on the muddy seabed in the Alpefjord, roughly 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) northeast of Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. 

The vessel’s plight underscored the hazards of tourism in Arctic areas, where distances are vast and help often days away. Still, the majestic scenery of icebergs and the chance to spot rare creatures, such as polar bears, has attracted a growing numbers of tourists.

New report from the Wall Street Journal, documents and emails from Exxon Mobil executives have come to light giving more details of the Oil giant’s war on science and democracy.

Reporters at the Journal reviewed summaries of documents produced in the State of New York’s lawsuit against Exxon, which began in 2015. Those included “emails, “emails between top executives, board meetings and Tillerson’s edits of speeches, among other things.”

Wall Street Journal:

Mobil issued its first public statement that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change in 2006, following years of denial. In public forums, the company argued that the risk of serious impact on the environment justified global action. 

Yet behind closed doors, Exxon took a very different tack: Its executives strategized over how to diminish concerns about warming temperatures, and they sought to muddle scientific findings that might hurt its oil-and-gas business, according to internal Exxon documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former executives.
–

Exxon is now a defendant in dozens of lawsuits around the U.S. that accuse it and other oil companies of deception over climate change and that aim to collect billions of dollars in damages. Prosecutors and attorneys involved in some of the cases are seeking some of the documents reviewed by the Journal, which were part of a previous investigation by New York’s attorney general but never made public. 

One of the lawsuits is from Hawaii’s Maui County, where wildfires killed more than 100 people in August. The lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleged the island faced increased climate-related risks, including more dangerous wildfires, caused by fossil-fuel companies. Some of the lawsuits may go to trial as soon as next year.

In the article, the journal focused on the activities of Rex Tillerson, who was CEO of Exxon between 2006 and 2016, when he left to become Donald Trump’s Secretary of State.

Continue reading “Bombshell: More Evidence of Exxon Sabotage of Climate Science”

The fabric of American society is under attack by extremists who are using a common playbook.

Above, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse accurately describes the makeup of unhinged crowds who have been showing up School Boards and School Libraries in recent years, demanding banning or burning of various books. The Senator notes they often include agitators who have no children in the school, and often live in another community, or even another state.

My experience in traveling across the midwest, attending local township board meetings, and interviewing farmers and landowners, has shown very similar tactics are being used to block clean energy development.
Farmers in Montcalm County, Michigan, told me about the uniformity of tactics, signs, and social media memes being used against clean energy across multiple states – with key leadership often influenced by fossil fuel funded “think tanks” from around the country.

Continue reading “Communities Under Attack by Extremist Outsiders, Leading Book Bans, Opposing Clean Energy”

Climate misinformation is not new, Fox News has been at it for decades.
Now, US enemies like China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia chiming in with AI and social media.
New battlefield for climate deniers/delayers.

New York Times:

When wildfires swept across Maui last month with destructive fury, China’s increasingly resourceful information warriors pounced.

The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret “weather weapon” being tested by the United States. To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign.

For China — which largely stood on the sidelines of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections while Russia ran hacking operations and disinformation campaigns — the effort to cast the wildfires as a deliberate act by American intelligence agencies and the military was a rapid change of tactics.

Until now, China’s influence campaigns have been focused on amplifying propaganda defending its policies on Taiwan and other subjects. The most recent effort, revealed by researchers from Microsoft and a range of other organizations, suggests that Beijing is making more direct attempts to sow discord in the United States.

The move also comes as the Biden administration and Congress are grappling with how to push back on China without tipping the two countries into open conflict, and with how to reduce the risk that A.I. is used to magnify disinformation.

The impact of the Chinese campaign — identified by researchers from Microsoft, Recorded Future, the RAND Corporation, NewsGuard and the University of Maryland — is difficult to measure, though early indications suggest that few social media users engaged with the most outlandish of the conspiracy theories.

Brad Smith, the vice chairman and president of Microsoft, whose researchers analyzed the covert campaign, sharply criticized China for exploiting a natural disaster for political gain.

Continue reading “China, Russia, Stoke Disinformation on Maui Fires”