The United Arab Emirates on Thursday named Sultan al-Jaber, the CEO of the UAE's state-run oil company, as president of COP28 which will be held in that country in November. "This appointment goes beyond putting the fox in charge of the hen-house," said Teresa Anderson, global lead on climate justice, ActionAid. The world's leading climate scientists have concluded, with “unequivocal” certainty, that the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels is the main cause of climate change. "COP28 must speed up the global phase-out of fossil fuels - we cannot have another COP where fossil fuel interests are allowed to sacrifice our futures to eke out another few years of profit," Ugandan climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate said. A UN IPCC report last April concluded the world must immediately cease all new fossil fuel infrastructure and phase out existing fossil fuel extraction and combustion — and said entrenched "status quo" actors are the main barriers to doing so. Backlash from those seeking to limit and halt the present and mounting impacts of climate change was swift and predictably forceful. "An oil company CEO cannot be the kind of President that COP28 needs," Catherine Abreu, founder and executive director of environmental nonprofit Destination Zero, told ABC News. "A person tasked with making the most profit possible from oil and gas extraction can’t be the same person tasked with landing the most ambitious outcome possible from a climate conference." (AP, Washington Post $, ABC, Context, Forbes, FT $, CNN, Reuters, BBC, The Hill, Climate Home, CNBC)
GOP Anti-ESG Laws Could Cost Taxpayers $700 Million: Taxpayers in six states could lose more than $700 million because of Republican officials' boycotts of firms that consider environmental, social, and (corporate) governance factors in their investment decisions, a new report from Econsult Solutions finds. The legislation enacted in Kentucky, Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Missouri spawned out of model legislation pushed by ALEC and a network of fossil fuel-funded dark money groups. "This report highlights the potential multi-million-dollar economic burden on both residential taxpayers and businesses in states that are taking or considering actions to limit climate and other ESG [environmental, social and governance] considerations within their municipal bond work," Steven Rothstein, a managing director at Ceres, said in a statement. (E&E $, Politico, Reuters, News from the States, ImpactAlpha $)
Exxon Knew … Really Accurately: ExxonMobil climate scientists predicted the climatic damage their product would cause with remarkable accuracy, all while the company spent huge sums of money denying and obfuscating the science of climate change, a study published Thursday in Science reveals. That "Exxon knew" its product was dangerously increasing global temperatures has been known for years, but the precision and accuracy of its predictions were "actually astonishing" Harvard science history and co-author of the study Naomi Oreskes told the AP. “ExxonMobil accurately foresaw the threat of human-caused global warming, both prior and parallel to orchestrating lobbying and propaganda campaigns to delay climate action,” the study's authors wrote. Researchers "dug into not just to the language, the rhetoric in these documents, but also the data. And I’d say in that sense, our analysis really seals the deal on ‘Exxon knew’,” Jeffrey Supan, an environmental science professor at the University of Miami and lead author of the study, told the AP. It “gives us airtight evidence that Exxon Mobil accurately predicted global warming years before, then turned around and attacked the science underlying it.” Multiple states and municipalities have filed lawsuits seeking to hold Exxon accountable, along with numerous other oil and gas firms and trade associations, for defrauding consumers about the damaging impacts of their products. (AP, Inside Climate News, LA Times $, New York Times $, Politico, Bloomberg $, Axios, Gizmodo, Grist, CNN, The Hill, The Guardian, CNBC, Exxon Knews)
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CALIFORNIA STORMS: [ ... ] MONTEREY ISLAND: Flooding threatens to turn Monterey Peninsula into an island (San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post $, LA Times $, CNN, NBC Bay Area, CBS)
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2022: Multiple agencies concur: ’22 was one of Earth’s hottest years (Washington Post $ [ ... ]), 2022 was the warmest La Niña year on record. Scientists say this year will be warmer (CNN)
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The full roundup of this morning's climate and energy news is available here.
Proposed methane rules would protect Texans (San Antonio Express-News, Sheila Serna. op-ed)
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The full roundup of this morning's climate and energy A&O is available here.
Birth Of A Disinfluencer: Latest Anti-Wind Spokesman Shows How Grassroots Becomes Astroturf
In the world of PR, grassroots activism describes community action for or against a project or policy. Astroturfing, by contrast, is when industry-backed PR professionals use actors to pose as local activists, because media outlets treat normal people protesting differently than corporate-sponsored spokespeople. This distinction is rarely so cut and dry, though.
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Read the full Denier Roundup here.
