I mean, don’t you think we humans are kinda mad? And worse yet, at some deep level, we simply can’t seem to stop. All too often, we just can’t curb our urge to destroy.

Looking back, the desire to make war and obliterate our “enemies” is a deeply ingrained and repetitive pattern in our history. Each individual example can, of course, be explained (away) in its own fashion, but the overall pattern? Hmmm…

I mean, you can certainly “understand” the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Depending on your politics, you can explain it in terms of the threatening expansion of NATO or of a country run by an autocrat willing to see countless numbers of his people die (no, I’m not even thinking about the tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians) in order to take more territory — whether in parts of Georgia (no, not that Georgia!), Ukraine, or god knows where else — and make himself ever more impressively (or do I mean depressively?) imperial. Phew! That was a long one, but explanations about war-making tend to be that way.

And yes, if you want, you also can undoubtedly explain the ongoing nightmare in Gaza, beginning with Hamas’s horrific October 7th attack on Israel and followed by the outrageous urge of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his disturbingly right-wing compatriots to slaughter the population of that strip of land right down to the smallest child. In some grim fashion, given our history, such acts seem all too sadly human.

You could also undoubtedly offer explanations for the endless — yes, that’s a reasonable word to use here! — not to speak of disastrous wars my own country has stomped into since World War II ended, first as the leader of the “free world” and then as the leader of who knows what. Those conflicts ranged from Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s to Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places, in this century. And undoubtedly it’s even possible to explain (away) the nightmarish civil war still devastating Sudan that’s already displaced more than eight million people without being noticed by much of the rest of the world.

Something New in the Planetary Bloodstream

In a sense, war is human history. It’s been the rare moment when we’ve proven capable of not making war on ourselves somewhere on this planet. It seems to be in the bloodstream, so to speak (as in the endless streams, even rivers, of blood eternally being spilled). And in a sense, war, the urge to take someone else’s territory or simply kill endless numbers of… well, us… has certainly been in that very same bloodstream at least since the first great literary work of the Western world, The Iliad, was written. In some sense, you could say that, 3,000 years later, we’re all still in Troy.

Oh, wait, that’s both true and not, because there is indeed something new in the planetary bloodstream. And I’m not even thinking about our endless ability to find ever “better” and more devastating ways to kill one another — from the spear to the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle (reputedly now owned by one of every 20 Americans), the bow and arrow to the AI-driven drone, the hand grenade to atomic weaponry. (And don’t forget that Vladimir Putin is already threatening to use “tactical” nuclear weapons in Ukraine — never mind that some of them are significantly more powerful than the bombs that, in August 1945, obliterated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

No, what I have in mind is that other way we humans have found to potentially devastate our world: the burning of fossil fuels. Yes, it started with the massive consumption of coal during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it’s simply never ended. (China, in fact, now uses more coal than the rest of the world combined and continues to build coal power plants.) By now, with oil and natural gas added to the mix in staggering quantities, records are being set monthly as ever greater heat waves, increasingly violent storms, startling flooding, and devastating fires are becoming part of our everyday lives. Typical was Miami’s May heat index that recently hit an unheard-of 112 degrees Fahrenheit, 11 degrees higher than at any past date in May ever. That should hardly shock us, however, since, as that superb environmentalist Bill McKibben reports, “A new study out today shows that heat waves have tripled since the 1960s in this country, and that deaths from those hot spells are up 800%.” And, of course, far worse is predicted for the decades to come, as those burning fossil fuels continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at record rates.

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Forget what we officially call wars (anything but easy to do these days if you happen to be Gazan, Sudanese, or Ukrainian) and consider this the increasingly devastating new way we have of warring on ourselves and our planet. While there’s still a lot to learn about global warming, also known as climate change (terms far too mild for what’s actually happening), we already know far too much not to consider it the ultimate danger — other than nuclear war, of course. In fact, the difference between nuclear war and global warming could be that, since August 1945 (except for nuclear tests), such weaponry has never been used again, while the distinctly apocalyptic “weaponry” of climate change is still ratcheting up in a staggering fashion.

Image by Patou Ricard from Pixabay

A War Against the World as We’ve Known It

Climate change is certainly something Americans should know about. After all, only the other week, Donald (“drill, baby, drill“) Trump sat down with a group of fossil-fuel CEOs and reportedly suggested that, for a billion dollars in campaign financing, a bribe of the first order, he would toss out all of Joe Biden’s attempts to rein in the oil, natural gas, and coal industries and encourage them instead to make further fortunes by turning this planet into a cinder. (In truth, that wasn’t really much of an offer, since he had already made it clear that he was planning to do just that anyway, starting on “day one” of his next term in office.)

Of course, who needs Donald Trump when, as the New York Times reported recently, despite President Biden’s distinct attempts to limit the use of fossil fuels during his tenure in the White House, “oil and gas production have set records under the Biden administration and the United States is the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas. Even with the [administration’s] pause on permits for new [natural gas] export terminals, the United States is still on track to nearly double its export capacity by 2027 because of projects already permitted and under construction.” And mind you, we’re talking about the country that, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “produced more crude oil than any nation at any time… for the past six years in a row,” reaching — yes, indeed! — a new record in 2023.

And despite all of what I’ve just described, consider it an irony that the only true world war of the moment (think of it, in fact, as a slow-motion World War III) doesn’t normally get enough headlines (though there are, of course, exceptions) or the attention in the mainstream media that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine so regularly have. No matter that last year was the hottest in human history and that each of the last 11 months was the warmest of its kind on record. Still, if you want to follow what’s functionally our only true world war in the mainstream world, there’s one obvious place to go, the British Guardian, which regularly highlights reporting on the subject and even has an online “climate-crisis” section.

Here, for instance, are just a few of the things you could have learned from that paper’s reporting in the last month or so and tell me they shouldn’t have been headline news everywhere. Take the Guardian‘s Oliver Milman recently writing that “the largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world’s atmosphere has just occurred… The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO₂ levels over a 12-month period.” Or the staggering heat waves that struck across Asia this spring “causing deaths, water shortages, crop losses and widespread school closures,” as Damian Carrington, that paper’s environment editor, reported. And mind you, such searing temperatures were “made 45 times more likely in India” by the climate crisis.

Do you even remember when not passing 1.5 degrees Centigrade was the goal of the countries that put together the 2015 Paris climate accord? Well, if you don’t, no problem, since, as Carrington also recently reported, thanks to an exclusive Guardian survey, “Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet.” And almost half of them expect it to hit 3C! Now, try to imagine that future planet of, well, I’m not sure you can say “ours” anymore, or better yet, check out another recent Carrington piece on the kinds of horrors — and they would be horrors of an unprecedented sort — such scientists now think a 3C world might hold for us.

Oh, and as Milman wrote recently, a new report suggests that “the economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought.” That’s already! And we’ve also already crept close to that 1.5C mark. But let me not go on. You get the idea. And each of those stories should have been a blazing headline across a planet that’s already feeling the heat in every sense imaginable, even if, in our normal reckoning, what’s happening doesn’t yet count as a world war (or at least a war on the world as we’ve known it).

Don’t you find all of that breathtaking (given the nature of heat)? And isn’t it amazing that, despite what it means for our future, it’s so often hardly considered headline-making news?

And mind you, there’s so much we don’t yet even know: Is the fierce tornado season that’s recently stretched from Texas through Iowa and beyond another climate-change-induced phenomenon? It’s certainly possible. Will the coming hurricane season set a series of records from hell, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is now warning us, thanks in part to the fact that the tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean have heated to all-time-record levels? Again, we’ll have to wait (but not for long) to see what happens. And is that record rise in U.S. billion-dollar — yes, billion-dollar! — weather disasters recorded by NOAA in 2023, another climate-change-induced horror? It certainly seems likely.

We are, in other words, already in a mad new world of “war” (as well as the mad old version of the same). And given how possible it is that Donald Trump will become President Fossil Fuel again, we may be left to face an all too literally mad future (along with staggering new profits for the big fossil-fuel companies) in what, until recently, still passed, despite endless disastrous wars, for the greatest power on the face of the Earth. And in retrospect, in climate terms, I suspect that even Joe Biden will seem distinctly lacking and congressional Republicans mad beyond words.

Take, for instance, President Biden’s actions in relation to this planet’s other greenhouse-gas burning monster, China. (While the U.S. has historically been the greatest greenhouse gas emitter, China now tops the list.) Unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden does indeed take climate change seriously, but he’s also supported Israel in a war from hell that’s throwing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and, when it comes to China, his urge hasn’t truly been to cooperate. Instead, his focus has been on expanding the U.S. military presence throughout Asia, including putting Green Berets on an island just 10 kilometers off China’s coast. (Imagine how this country would react if — and it would hardly be comparable — China were to assign its version of special forces troops to Cuba!)  In other words, he’s been at work creating the conditions for a new, if not hot, then certainly all-too-warm war between the two greatest greenhouse-gas polluters on this ever-warming planet. 

Brilliant! And the Chinese response? To pal it up with Vladimir Putin! (Equally brilliant!)

As mid-2024 approaches, the question remains: Can we humans stop making war on each other or preparing for yet more of the same and begin dealing with a planet heading to hell in a proverbial handbasket? Can we face the fact that the enemy is indeed us?

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

The conviction, however, underlines that American law and politics is still primarily about property rather than about the value of human life. Both Richard M. Nixon and Donald J. Trump went down over Lockean crimes. Nixon ordered a third rate burglary (twice!). Trump arranged for a pay-off to a porn star. Both committed their crimes in furtherance of their political careers. Nixon had the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Building in Washington, D.C. burgled. Trump had a catch and kill scheme implemented for Stormy Daniels’ memoirs. Ironically, likely neither needed to commit those crimes to win.

It is a little frustrating, however, that our priorities as a society are still so parochial and twentieth-century in character, and that we are not more outraged at the truly massive damage Trump did to our planet. He should have been tried and convicted of attempted planeticide.

1. Trump took the United States out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord in November, 2020, trashing all the pledges the country had made to reduce its massive carbon footprint. The US, with 4.2% of the world’s population, produces nearly 14% of the world’s carbon dioxide, putting out twice as much CO2 as the 27 nations of the European Union. By leaving the Paris agreement, Trump encouraged other countries to slack off on their climate commitments, endangering the whole world.

2. Trump scrapped President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his attempt to regulate CO2 emissions, and Trump’s rules would have put an extra half a billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over a decade. When we’re trying to cut CO2 to zero by 2050, that was a step in completely the wrong direction.

MSNBC: “‘Quid pro quo:’ Trump vowed to gut climate laws in exchange for $1B from oil bosses”

3. Trump also lowered auto emissions standards, helping the big car companies avoid going electric longer and adding another 450 million tons of CO2. Now that China has more advanced electric car technology than the US and can make EVs more cheaply for the world market, it becomes clear that Trump may have knee-capped the US preeminence in the global auto-manufacturing sector, for good. Since it is increasingly clear that auto emissions cause Alzheimers, Trump also damaged our brains to be more like his own.

4. Trump actively promoted the production of the very dangerous atmospheric heating agent, methane, a greenhouse gas that prevents the heat caused by the sun’s rays from radiating back out into space at the old eighteenth-century rate. He removed government regulations requiring Big Oil to limit methane emissions from drilling.

5. Trump put a 30% tariff on solar panels, vastly slowing the expansion of solar power in the US and costing the country some 62,000 jobs in the solar industry. Since solar replaces coal and fossil gas for electricity generation, this is another way Trump promoted carbon dioxide emissions.

6. Trump’s corrupt Interior Department subsidized coal and fossil gas, but raised the rents for wind turbines on federal lands. Trump, fuelled by an irrational hatred of wind turbines, such that he falsely asserts that they cause cancer, was a constant worry to the industry all the time he was in office.

7. The sum total of all Trump’s anti-climate regulations would have added 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere had they not largely been reversed by the subsequent Biden administration. This one man tried to engineer an extra tonnage of CO2 emissions equal to the annual output of all of Russia.

I have suggested that we could get a better sense of how disgusting carbon dioxide and methane emissions are if we called them farts instead of using a fancy word like “emissions.” How many tons of CO2 did America fart out last year?

Trump, who spent much of his trial farting and dozing, tried to have us fart out an extra 1.8 billion tons of CO2.

Some small percentage of all the damage human-made climate change will do to the United States in the coming years will have been caused by one man. And if he can get into office again he will try to doom the planet.

Now that is an indictment.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – The depths of depravity into which unvarnished capitalism can plunge mortal souls is incalculable. It should come as no surprise then that oil company executives and the officials of petrostates like Saudi Arabia have so assiduously lied to us about the catastrophic effects of climate change. After all, the executives of tobacco firms have been perfectly content to sell consumers a product long known and virtually guaranteed to cut their lives short, while lying about its harmful effects for decades. Likewise, the courts have now made the pharmaceutical industry’s responsibility for and grasp of the opioid crisis that killed half a million people all too clear.

In both instances, state attorneys-general played an important role in seeking redress. Now, Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, has filed a 135-page lawsuit against five major oil companies — ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP — which could prove an inflection point in the battle against human-caused climate change.

On announcing the lawsuit, Bonta said, “Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change — but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment. Enough is enough.” 

Born in the Philippines to an American father and a Filipina mother, Bonta spent his early years near Keene, California, where the United Farm Workers had established its headquarters. There, both his father Warren and his mother Cynthia helped organize Filipino-American and Mexican-American laborers. Bonta went on to get a Yale law degree and ultimately entered politics, being elected to the California State Assembly in 2012.

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His background clearly impressed upon him the special vulnerability of working-class groups to climate change. “We will meet the moment and fight tirelessly on behalf of all Californians,” he pledged, “in particular those who live in environmental justice communities.”  As he explained in a footnote in his brief for that lawsuit: “’Frontline communities’ are those that are and will continue to be disproportionately impacted by climate change. In many cases, the most harmed are the same communities that have historically experienced racial, social, health, and economic inequities.” 

The destructive impact of human-caused climate change on California has, in fact, unfolded before our eyes. Eleven of the 20 largest California wildfires have taken place since 2018. Unusually frequent, wide-ranging, and ever fiercer wildfires have even chased from their homes some of the Golden State’s most famous celebrities, leaving behind just glowing cinders. The now-seemingly annual rampages of those increasingly massive conflagrations can cause us to forget how remarkable the damage has been in these years.

In 2018, pop singer Miley Cyrus announced that the Malibu home she shared with her then-fiancé Chris Hemsworth had been devoured by flames, writing on social media, “Completely devastated by the fires affecting my community. I am one of the lucky ones. My animals and LOVE OF MY LIFE made it out safely & that’s all that matters right now. My house no longer stands but the memories shared with family & friends stand strong . . . I love you more than ever, Miley.”  That year, Orlando Bloom, Bella Hadid, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, and Gerard Butler suffered similar losses.

Well-heeled celebrities, however, have the resources to get through such crises. Farm laborers who must harvest crops while breathing soot-filled air risk adverse health effects, including respiratory and heart disease. Others have lost their jobs and incomes entirely when wildfires encroached on fields and orchards. Not getting paychecks thanks to raging fires at their worksites can, in turn, cause such workers to miss mortgage payments and lose their homes. And sometimes, of course, their own homes, like those of the stars, have been torched.

Connecting the Dots

In 2021, wildfires almost entirely razed the town of Paradise, California. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg visited the aftermath. On hearing one man’s devastating account of how he and his family barely escaped their fiery, collapsing home, she said, “We see all of these things repeating themselves over and over again. People die, and people suffer from it. But we completely fail to connect the dots.”

Her evident frustration at the time should be considered significantly more consequential than it might seem. A team of Norwegian researchers has found that, of all the emotions provoked by human-caused climate change, the one most associated with activism against it is anger. Anger at politicians or CEOs who have played key roles in enabling the phenomenon that causes such destruction animates many climate protesters. As they suggested, Thunberg’s vivid speeches are but one example of the righteous anger provoked by those who could have but haven’t moved to mitigate the effects of global warming.

For his part, Attorney General Bonta isn’t in any doubt about where to lay the blame. As he put it, “With our lawsuit, California becomes the largest geographic area and the largest economy to take these giant oil companies to court. From extreme heat to drought and water shortages, the climate crisis they have caused is undeniable. It is time they pay to abate the harm they have caused.” By focusing on five major oil companies, he and California Governor Gavin Newsom have given the state’s environmentalists a target for their anger.  

Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Rhode Island are already pursuing similar legal actions and small wonder why. When it comes to California, for instance, scientists have recorded a fivefold increase in the summer burned areas in forests stretching from the middle of the state north during the past two and a half decades. And that devastatingly large burn area is anything but just the result of cyclical droughts. In fact, researchers demonstrated this summer that almost all of it has been caused by the human production of carbon dioxide through the burning of gasoline, natural gas, and coal. Worse yet, their projections suggest that ever larger and more devastating burn areas will be part of our landscape in the decades to come as humanity pumps out yet more carbon pollution.

The heat and long-term drought that’s gone with it have transformed California’s northern forests into so much tinder.  After its wildfires of 2020, leading climate scientist Michael Mann observed, “These are known as compound drought and heat wave (CDHW) events and refer to situations wherein a region experiences both prolonged hot temperatures and a shortage of water.”  His team predicts that such events will more than double in number and in duration, while quadrupling in intensity, if carbon pollution continues to be produced at its current rate.

Atmospheric Rivers

Worse yet, California now faces a double whammy — not just vastly increased wildfires and drought in some regions but major flooding in others. And in drought-stricken areas, sudden, massive rainfall simply runs off desiccated soil, adding to the risk of overflowing waters.

As it happens, human-made global warming hasn’t just heated up lands across the planet, but the oceans, too. In fact, this summer, ocean water temperatures broke all previous heat records and that also puts more moisture into the atmosphere. Worse yet, climate change has heated the atmosphere itself and warmer air holds more moisture. That change has, in turn, made the “atmospheric rivers” carrying moisture from the tropics to the temperate zone far more destructive.

Not surprisingly, then, on the last day of 2022, 5.5 inches of rain deluged downtown San Francisco, while putting all six lanes of Highway 101 to its south under water. A week later, Governor Newsom watched as sheets of rainfall, driven by 70-mile-an-hour winds, knocked out power to 345,000 people in the state capital, Sacramento.

This summer, the giant State Farm and Allstate insurance companies, ever more aware of the toll climate change was taking on their bottom lines in California, announced that they would no longer accept new customers there. As an explanation, State Farm cited “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.” Take a moment to let that sink in. The situation humanity has created is now so calamitous that insurance companies are no longer willing to take on the once-safe bet that most houses will continue standing unharmed for decades.

If California were an independent country, it would have the fifth-largest economy in the world. As Attorney General Bonta notes, it has the deep pockets to take on the oil companies. And significantly, that state’s government is already among the world’s most forward-looking in combating climate change. In 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order requiring that all cars sold in California by 2035 be battery-electric or hybrid vehicles. The plan has spurred similar actions by six other states.

In the past five years, electric vehicles as a percentage of new vehicle registrations in the Golden State have indeed skyrocketed from 2% to 22%. No less impressive, around 60% of the state’s electricity is now generated by low-carbon sources like wind and solar. To smooth out the transitions between solar and wind generation, California has put in 5 gigawatts of battery power, the most of any state, to forestall blackouts and avoid the necessity of using natural gas to fill the gap.

They Lied. They Deceived.

The attorney general’s filing against the oil companies asserts their culpability: “Oil and gas company executives have known for decades that reliance on fossil fuels would cause these catastrophic results, but they suppressed that information from the public and policymakers by actively pushing out disinformation on the topic.” This duplicity, the suit argues, was itself grounds for seeking redress.  “Their deception,” it continues, “caused a delayed societal response to global warming. And their misconduct has resulted in tremendous costs to people, property, and natural resources, which continue to unfold each day.” 

In an interview with KCAL television, Bonta pulled no punches: “They must pay for their own actions… They lied. They deceived. They falsely advertised. They undermined the science and made claims that were counter to the truth. We’re holding them accountable for that.” When challenged by the interviewer, who warned the attorney general that he would need a “smoking gun” showing that the corporations were deceitful, Bonta didn’t hesitate: “We have smoking guns. Multiple. We have one from the 1960s. We have others in the decades that have followed. It is a very clear trend.”

His complaint is, in fact, festooned with such damning pieces of internal evidence, including a 1982 memo by Exxon scientist Roger Cohen, which admitted “a clear scientific consensus” on the expected effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide on the climate and suggested that doubling greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere would result in roughly a 3° Celsius (5.4° Fahrenheit) average global temperature rise, bringing about “significant changes in the earth’s climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere.”  

In 1800, as the industrial revolution began, there were just 282 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Today, in part because of energy industry foot-dragging, there are about 420 ppm of CO2 and we’re speeding toward the 564 ppm that Cohen predicted would radically change our very biosphere. Climate scientist Michael Mann has pointed out in his new book Our Fragile Planet that, during the Pliocene era, 3.5 million years ago, that kind of ramp-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produced a tropical world with ocean waters 30 feet higher than they are now.

Despite the warnings of Cohen and others, in 1989, Exxon joined other oil companies in forming the Global Climate Coalition, which combated attempts to reduce fossil-fuel consumption, while assuring journalists and politicians that “the role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood.” Some of those companies like Exxon even funded climate denialism when they knew perfectly well that it was a lie. 

In the 1990s and thereafter, the oil companies, the California lawsuit alleges, went on to use organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council lobbying group to pressure Washington to do nothing about carbon pollution. At the same, they attempted to convince concerned Americans that climate change either wasn’t happening or, if it was, had nothing to do with burning fossil fuels.

In a distinctly overheating world, where heat records of all sorts are now regularly being broken, the denialism of Big Oil and its henchmen, including today most of the Republican Party, is already a crime of the first order.  The California suit is cleverly crafted.  If there is one thing you can’t do in societies like ours, where property rights are so central, it’s damage someone’s property knowingly and under the cover of deception.

The internal memos of scientists that have surfaced in such abundance from the very bowels of the petroleum corporations could be their biggest Achilles heel. They demonstrate that the injuries they have inflicted on the Earth are not simply an unforeseen side effect of their product but, at least in part, the result of a deliberate cover-up.

At last, Greta Thunberg’s hope that someone, especially someone with the power to do something, would finally get mad and connect the dots is being fulfilled. Let’s hope that California succeeds in both setting a meaningful precedent and making those companies pay in a big way, ending impunity for the most dangerous and deceitful assault on our environment in human history.

Copyright 2023 Juan Cole

Featured image: Photo by Ross Stone on Unsplash

Via Tomdispatch.com

He vows to make it easier for oil industry to drill, promises to replace references to “climate change” with “energy dominance”

 

Craig Pittman

 

( Florida Phoenix) – Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I was in high school, I was part of a singing group that traveled around to Panhandle churches and performed religious songs. No, really! I’m not making that up!

No one would have confused me with Andrae Crouch. You could accurately describe my singing style as “monotone baritone.” The director wisely gave me no solos.

Instead, I had a featured spot doing a spoken-word monologue as Judas Iscariot. I counted my 30 pieces of silver and slowly realized what a horrible betrayal I’d carried out. It was very dramatic. The audience usually looked relieved when it was over and the music started back up.

As a result, I have become something of a connoisseur of traitors, turncoats, and sellouts throughout history — Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling, and Robert Hanssen, to name a few. Heck, I even read “The Sellout” by Paul Beatty.

So trust my expertise on this traitorous topic when I tell you that our own governor, Ron “Why Is Trump Beating Me Like I’m a Cheap Rug?” DeSantis just betrayed every Floridian.

He traveled to Texas last week to stand in front of a couple of noisy oil wells and a friendly crowd of oil field workers who were unlikely to boo him like the people in Jacksonville did recently. He was there to issue a clarion call for coping with climate change by … burning more fossil fuels.

No, I am not making that up either.

He actually acknowledged “the climate has clearly changed,” which may mark a first for a politician who’s always insisted he’s “not a global warming person.”

But then he said the way we should deal with it is by burning more of the stuff that’s been making our climate change so radically.

Specifically, he called for power plants to place a greater reliance on natural gas, which burns cleaner than coal or oil but is still a source of bad stuff for the atmosphere.

“It’s … the most practical way to reduce global emissions,” he shouted over the racket of extractive machinery.

Endorsing natural gas as your prescription for climate change is like announcing that instead of driving off a cliff at 90 mph, you’re in favor of driving off that same cliff, but at 60 mph. Same destination, but we don’t get there quiiiite as fast.

This is, of course, contrary to what the climate scientists say.

“Gas is better than coal but we need to get off fossil fuels entirely,” said Harold Wanless, a scientist from the University of Miami who’s been sounding the alarm about sea level rise since 1981.

Natural gas is, at best, a stopgap measure as the world moves to cleaner fuels.

“Burning natural gas still does emit carbon dioxide,” said David Zierden, Florida’s state climatologist. “It’s not a permanent solution.”

But if you’ve watched DeSantis work, you know he pays little attention to what the people who know what they’re talking about might say.

It’s almost as if he believes he was chosen by God to buck the scientists. I keep waiting for him to tell the hurricane prediction folks that he knows more about where the next storm will make landfall than they do, because he’s done his own research.

Of course, by bucking the experts, he’s parroting exactly what the oil companies want him to say — instead of doing what’s best for Florida.

But wait, there’s more!

Maybe you’re thinking this was just a slip, like when another Florida-based presidential candidate said this week that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was president during the Iraq War.

Maybe you think that what DeSantis meant was “use natural gas for now and then move to renewable energy sources like solar and wind.”

I wish that were the case. Unfortunately, as they say in the infomercials: “But wait, there’s MORE!”

As  the Houston Chronicle reported, he promised that if he’s elected president, he would replace the words “climate change” in federal policy documents with the words “energy dominance.”

(Presumably he’d replace the verbs, too. Otherwise, the documents will call for us to try to stop or slow down “energy dominance,” which I think is the opposite of what he’s going for.)

The New York Times reported that our allegedly well-educated chief executive also vowed to “remove subsidies for electric vehicles, take the U.S. out of global climate agreements — including the Paris accords — and cancel net-zero emission promises.”

DeSantis was quick to remind his pro-drilling audience of how he’d pushed through a Florida law that says local and state agencies aren’t allowed to invest in funds that avoid businesses that fuel climate change.  (This in spite of the fact that responsible investing tends to bring higher financial returns over time.)

Ron DeSantis unveils his pro-fossil fuel energy policy in front of noisy oil equipment in Midland, Texas. Screen grab from the Ron DeSantis X account

So it’s clear he was completely serious about calling for more fossil fuel consumption as a way to battle climate change, despite how silly that sounds. It’s like saying you’ll fight a flood by pouring more water on it.

His argument is as paradoxical as the military regulation in “Catch-22.” The rules said the only way a World War II airman could prove he was mentally unfit to fly more bombing missions was to continue flying bombing missions.

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” one disgruntled bombardier admitted.

We’re No. 1!

The lectern in front of DeSantis bore a sign that referred to his craziest promise of all: $2 gas by 2025.

“We know that Joe Biden has waged war on domestic energy production,” DeSantis yelled at the oilfield crew. “As president, I will restore America’s energy independence.”

He promised to cut the regulations that are supposed to constrain the oil companies from dangerous drilling practices. You know, the tougher rules that were passed after the BP oil spill smeared nasty globs of oil on the white sandy beaches of the Panhandle. The ones that a certain Palm Beach club owner rolled back when he occupied the Oval Office, and the current occupant recently reinstated.

Yep, DeSantis wants to let oil drilling be sloppy and dangerous again, like it was in 2010. He wants to return to the days when giant international corporations could get a federal permit to drill in the Gulf of Mexico despite submitting paperwork full of erroneous information as a result of playing cut-and-paste with their Alaska permits.

Why would he do such a thing? Because, he says, making it easier to get a permit to drill will immediately lower the price of a gallon of gas to just $2.

There are a couple of problems with DeSantis’ two-buck plan which render it worth less than 2 cents.

One is that the main reason our gas prices are so high right now is because the Russians and Saudis cut the supply, not because of overly strict federal regulations.

The other is that the oil companies WANT the prices high. They’ve been posting record profits. They could charge less if they wanted to, but they don’t.

Remember how Trump rolled back those safety regulations while he was president? The day he left office (unwillingly, of course), the average cost of a gallon of gas was $2.93. That’s nearly a dollar more than DeSantis claims he could achieve using the exact same tactic.

The Chronicle reporter who covered DeSantis’ Texas appearance said in an interview that DeSantis was … oh, let’s be kind and say “misinformed” … about the state of the American oil industry. He depicted it in dire straits when its straits are anything but.

“The number of rigs that are active right now in Texas is almost double what it was when Joe Biden came into office,” Jeremy Wallace, formerly of the Tampa Bay Times, explained to the Texas Standard.  “And the number of jobs and the wages for oil workers in Texas are both up, according to the Texas Oil and Gas Association.”

In fact, the top crude oil producer in the world is us — by which I mean, the United States.  We hit the top spot in 2018 and haven’t fallen from it yet. That’s a string of successes not even Taylor Swift can match. If we wanted to run around the United Nations building in New York chanting “We’re No. 1!” we totally could.

Sounds like we’ve already hit that “energy dominance” goal that DeSantis was promising to achieve in 2025, doesn’t it?

But DeSantis ignores all these facts to push a phony narrative that the poor, beleaguered oil and gas industry is in trouble from Big Bad Biden. That’s why we need hundreds of new wells to pump out a lot more petroleum to “help” us with our carbon emissions.

It’s almost as if he wants to force the climate to change even faster: “C’mon, you darn climate!  Crank up the temperature! We can take it! We’re just that tough! We drink sweat like it’s a fine French wine!”

Except, of course, we don’t.

Soaking in irony

This is why I say DeSantis has betrayed his native state: Florida has been leading the nation in suffering the immediate effects of our alteration of the climate. We need real relief, not this phony baloney that DeSantis has been peddling.

Instead of talking only to oil industry executives and Fox News hosts, he should be talking with scientists like Wanless and Zierden. Then he’d know the sad and scary truth.

We just recorded the hottest January to July ever, followed by the hottest August in our state’s history.

How hot was it? “This year, July was our hottest month ever,” Zierden told me. “The previous record was in June 1998 when we had all those wildfires. Then August came along and crushed the July record.”

The heat’s been hardest on people who work outside — farmworkers, commercial fisherfolk, construction workers, roofers, those kids at Chick-Fil-A who take your order. And it’s been tough on all the poor people who can’t afford air conditioning. I’m assuming DeSantis merely cranked the mansion thermostat down a couple of notches.

But the bad news is where a lot of that heat wound up.

“Ninety percent of the heat is transferred to the oceans, which is what’s causing sea level rise,” Wanless told me, pointing out that heat makes water expand. Within the next two decades, “it’s going to be pretty dramatic. Miami’s already had a foot of sea level rise.”

Our peninsula is so flat that these rising seas lead to greater storm surge and sunny-day flooding. Meanwhile, the hot oceans are fueling more intense hurricanes even as they’re cooking our coral reefs.

Warmer air holds more moisture, leading to “rain-bombs” that inundate cities. Those stinky toxic algae blooms we’ve seen are stoked by warmer temperatures. And mosquito-borne diseases spread by the hordes of skeeters born in all the standing water are becoming more widespread.

In Florida, irony is always around us like the humidity. It’s like you’re soaking in it. Here’s an irony about DeSantis’ promise to lower gas prices: One reason the prices are so high right now is the extreme heat.

“Extreme temperatures along the Gulf Coast have kept refineries from operating at full capacity,” a spokesman for the American Automobile Association told WTVT-TV last month

“Refineries already generate incredible heat while operating,” the station’s report explained. “When outside temperatures exceed 100 degrees, that can cause breakdowns and equipment failures.”

Wow, if only we had a chief executive who cared about Florida more than he cared about racking up an unlikely victory in the Iowa caucuses. Maybe then we’d see some progress toward weaning our state off these atmosphere-damaging fossil fuels.

At one point, in the late 2000s, we did have a governor like that. Charlie Crist, a Republican at the time, signed executive orders requiring more energy-efficient building codes and setting a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2025.

He even persuaded the Legislature to pass a law setting up a cap-and-trade system to limit emissions from power companies and other polluters. It also created a marketplace through which they could buy or trade credits to go over the limit.

Then, in 2011, Rick “I Wear My Navy Hat to Remind You How I Sunk This State” Scott took office as governor. He junked all those far-sighted climate initiatives.

Scott made it clear he didn’t want to hear the words “climate change,” much less do anything about it. For 12 years, we’ve been stuck in this same mode, even as the feds and other states try to fix the problem.

And now all our inaction has caught up to us.

Thirty pieces

Look, let’s be real for a second here.  Right now, DeSantis has as much chance of being elected our next president as I do of winning the next season of “The Voice.”

He’s spent the past five years sucking up to the donors who could finance his dreams of winning reelection and then the White House. That’s what he was really doing when he went to Texas. He was meeting with the money men who could hand over a few dollars to keep his presidential campaign chugging along a little while longer.

As a result, he’s spent all this time repeatedly parroting exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants to hear.

Maybe those pro-drilling talking points have been drilled into him so much that it’s become something he repeats even when he’s alone. Maybe he mutters about fossil fuels like Nick Nolte at the end of “The Prince of Tides” murmuring “Lowenstein, Lowenstein … .”

But in a few months, when he finally pulls the plug on his presidential campaign, he’ll have to return to our hot, sweaty, mosquito-infested state full of flooded streets and toxic algae blooms. He’ll have to face up to his betrayal of the people who looked to him for leadership.

I hope he realizes then that those 30 pieces of silver he collected in Texas for his campaign were far too cheap a price for his integrity.

 

 

 

Craig Pittman

Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He is the author of six books. In 2020 the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend. Craig is co-host of the “Welcome to Florida” podcast. He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and children.

 

 

Republished under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. 

Via Florida Phoenix

It would take a multi-volume book to detail all the horrible and catastrophic things Murdoch has done to the world. In Informed Comment, which is a sort of sprawling Great American Blog, Murdoch has appeared again and again as a villain, as Ernst Stavro Blofeld repeatedly showed up in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.

Observers have been puzzled over why climate denialism has been particularly virulent in English-speaking countries. Murdoch’s media organizations are a part of the answer. In Australia, where Murdoch has a virtual monopoly on the news industry, he has backed climate denialists for elective office and swayed voters to consider human-made climate change a hoax. Only from about 2021 have the Murdoch outlets backed off complete denialism, choosing instead to encourage a “go-slow” approach (which can be just as bad as denialism). By influencing elites in the UK, Canada, Australia, the US and New Zealand to combat efforts to reduce carbon pollution for the past three decades, Murdoch has helped spew nearly a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is now coming back to haunt us in the form of megastorms, mega-floods, and mega-droughts that do billions of dollars of damage a year. In that regard alone Murdoch is one of the most significant mass murderers in human history.

Murdoch’s response to the dangers of sea level rise, which could amount to six feet in this century? “We should all move a little inland.” (Reported in Informed Comment 2014.) Some 240 million to 400 million people now living along sea coasts will be displaced over the next 80 years, and Murdoch made a little joke of it. You can almost hear him say, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”

Murdoch’s billions have been used not just to push climate denialism but to push reality denialism in general. He backed the Iraq War and that backing may help explain why Tony Blair joined in Bush’s quixotic misadventure in Mesopotamia. Murdoch told an Australian outlet as the Iraq War was building, “Bush is acting very morally, very correctly… The greatest thing to come of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.” He observed at a business conference, like the sociopath he is, ”There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now than spread it over months.”

The war Bush launched against Iraq in 2003 was not really over until at least 2018, and it went on creating collateral damage all that time, i.e., hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed. As for petroleum prices, they were about $36 a barrel when Murdoch made his prediction and they went on up to $140 a barrel in 2008, fluctuating after that.

Hat tip Trading Economics

What brought oil prices down was the 2008 financial crash (to $40 a barrel) and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when they really did briefly hit $20 a barrel. Two years later, and despite Iraq’s production of 4.23 million barrels a day, prices were back up to $112 a barrel, and they’re hovering around $90 now.

Murdoch, despite his undeniably mastery of dirty tricks and sharp practices, whereby he has built semi-monopolies, seems actually to know very little about how the world works, being blind to the dangers of climate change and over-estimating the role one country like Iraq could play in a world that produces about 100 million barrels of oil a day globally and in which countries of the global south are increasingly adopting automobile transportation in the place of bicycles and donkey carts.

So maybe Iraq’s oil wasn’t worth all that collateral damage after all.

I pointed in 2011 to News Corp’s involvement in illegally tapping into people’s phone messages and wondered whether Rupert’s media conglomerate is a cult, working by blackmail and intimidation.

I don’t have space to go into Fox’s promotion of white grievance and its racism toward minorities, including Muslims, or its promotion of toxic masculinity and its backlash against gains in women’s rights. I once observed of Roger Ailes’s molestation of his bevy of blonde anchors that they appear to have been not so much hired as trafficked.

Nor can I treat at length here the way Murdoch held his nose and built up Trump, or how his organization is partly to blame for the big lie and the insurrection of January 6. I wish a special counsel would look into that.

The only sliver of good news is that Murdoch’s Fox News has largely discredited itself with anyone under about 70 years old, and its brand has become so toxic that one wonders if it can survive.

News Corp owns Dow Jones & Company, the latter’s Wall Street Journal, News UK (publisher of the Times of London and a raft of scurrilous tabloids), News Corp Australia, Realtor.com and publisher HarperCollins. Most of Murdoch’s film and television properties were spun off in 2013 and purchased by Disney in 2019. The exception was the television news channel, owned by Fox News, of which Murdoch retained control. His plan to merge News Corp and Fox News was foiled by the opposition of News Corp executives who viewed Fox News as a toxic brand that would sully their name.

That’s right, when Murdoch’s media empire was broken up into three in 2013, one of the three successor companies was the skunk at the party. Fox Cable News had become known as a dirty rotten liar of a television channel, with which even Murdoch’s own colleagues feared to be associated.

Their good judgment was borne out last April, when Fox News agreed to pay nearly $800 million to Dominion Voting Systems to avoid a damaging public libel trial. The anchors of Fox Cable News, which is owned by Fox News and ultimately by Murdoch, had repeatedly alleged that Dominion voting machines delivered inaccurate ballot counts, allowing Joe Biden to claim the presidency even though Donald J. Trump had actually won. This rank falsehood did plausible damage to Dominion’s business, and it seems likely that the company would have won at trial and been awarded even greater damages. Smartmatic, another voting machine manufacturer, has launched a similar suit, and Fox turned over thousands of pages of discovery in April.

Murdoch allegedly believed that he could plead the First Amendment, which attests to a dismal level of knowledge about US law. The First Amendment protects individuals from the US government, it doesn’t give people carte blanche to destroy the reputations of others with malicious lies. And while courts seek a high bar for libel cases in the US because of the First Amendment pledge of free speech, unlike in the UK, they haven’t set them aside entirely, and there have been recent landmark libel cases. I’m only hoping that Dominion opened a floodgate, and that further suits against Fox are forthcoming. It is a cancer in the body politic, of deliberate lies, hatemongering and warmongering on behalf of big capital, and we desperately need to be cured of it as a nation.

To quote Bond, “Welcome to hell, Blofeld.”

Reuters says 3 officials told it that there was also a proposal to cut carbon dioxide pollution by 60% by 2035, but that it was shot down by Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and India. These are among the four dirtiest countries in the world with regard to carbon pollution, and two of them, Russia and Saudi Arabia, depend on hydrocarbons for much of their gross domestic product.

General goals such as cutting back on coal are useless without specifics.

China, the world’s largest user of coal, says it won’t even stop building new coal plants until 2030 and it isn’t trying to become carbon neutral until 2060. Some 55% of all the coal consumed in the world is consumed by China. The only good thing you can say is that coal use has somewhat leveled off since 2010, as gigawatts of solar and wind were added to the Chinese grid:

H/t Statista.

India’s coal use was up 4% in 2022 over 2021, and its use tripled from 1998 to 2022. That’s not really what you would call, like, cutting back. But if coal use grew more slowly in 2022 than some previous years, that would be enough to let India say it was cutting back.

So the summit statement is meaningless.

As for tripling renewables, that is a low bar for some of these countries. Saudi Arabia appears only to have about 2 gigawatts of renewable energy, though its goal was 25 gigs by 2023. It has done almost nothing compared to a poor country like Morocco, which now gets some 40% of its electricity from renewables. So having 6 gigawatts of renewables by 2030 would be relatively easy for the Kingdom to accomplish, though it isn’t clear that they will do even that.

Russia likewise has almost no renewable energy and only hopes that wind and solar make up 10% of its grid by 2040. So it is easy for Moscow to pledge to do more, since it has done so little, as with Riyadh.

In contrast, China seems on track to produce 1,200 gigawatts of wind and solar by 2025, a year and a half from now, and it will likely reach this milestone 5 years early, since that was the original goal for 2030. Already this year, renewable sources of energy are supplying 50.9% of the country’s electricity, i.e. more than half. It clearly doesn’t need to build any new coal plants at all, but seems dedicated to drawing out coal use as long as possible. It has been suggested to me that President Xi Jinping is afraid of the workers in the coal industry — some 3 million of them.

India is another coal disaster, with some 66 percent of its electricity now being generated that way. It could cut back to “only” 65% and still meet the terms of the vague summit communique. Still, India has increased its non-fossil fuel power capacity by 400% in the past 8 years (counting big hydro and nuclear) and in some recent years (not this one) they have provided over 40% of the country’s electricity. I suppose it isn’t impossible that India could triple its non-fossil fuel power by a factor of 3 in the rest of this decade, given what it did the past 8 years. I mean, if India has a lot of anything, it is sunshine and wind.

So this is why the G20 shouldn’t be a thing. What could be more arbitrary than for countries to claim global influence based merely on their gross domestic product? It should be the United Nations taking these decisions, not the countries in thrall to or identical with Big Oil and Big Coal.

Tampa Democrat Kathy Castor calls the governor ‘a disaster’ on clean energy

( Florida Phoenix ) – Tampa Bay area Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Castor remains livid that Gov. Ron DeSantis turned down $354 million for energy-efficient measures provided through federal legislation signed into law by President Joe Biden.

Among the $511 million in projects that DeSantis vetoed at the end of June was a $5 million line-item provided through the Inflation Reduction Act that would have allowed the state to train staff to administer federal funds totaling $354 million to address energy efficiency in the Sunshine State.

The effect, Castor says, was to deprive Florida of that $354 million.

“I call it a pickpocket,” she said in an interview on WMNF Radio in Tampa on Friday. “Pickpocketing Floridians, making the cost of living more expensive. We’re already paying higher property insurance than anywhere else in the country, higher electric bills. He has been a disaster for clean energy and environment in Florida.”

Environmentalists and climate change activists hailed the Biden administration after the passage of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, specifically for the $369 billion designated for all 50 states to deal with the climate crisis by expanding tax credits for clean energy and electric vehicles, boosting energy efficiency, and reducing air pollution at ports, among its many provisions.

Castor, who from 2019 to earlier this year chaired the first U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, said “the beauty” in the federal legislation was that it provided significant cost savings for consumers and local communities through rebates on purchasing electric appliances, weatherizing their homes, and providing tax credits for people to use rooftop solar.

According to Castor, DeSantis rejected funding that would have allocated $174 million in rebates for energy-efficiency, $173 million for rebates to purchase energy-efficient home appliances, and $7 million for a training program for electrical contractors.

Image by Mircea Ploscar from Pixabay

But those funds won’t be coming to Florida now. Or ever.

“He has been the most dangerous and destructive governor when it comes to clean energy,” she said. The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Teddy Roosevelt

DeSantis campaigned as a “Teddy Roosevelt-style Republican” in his bid for the governor’s mansion in 2018, but environmentalists have said that he has not come close to living up to that standard.

The governor has dismissed the danger of climate change even while investing in efforts to address flooding and sea-level rise. Last month he announced $300 million in state funding from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for 71 new resilience and adaptation projects. And he allocated $640 million in last year’s budget for local governments to deal with sea-level rise, storms, and flooding.

On another energy-related front, Castor announced this week that she is co-sponsoring federal legislation to prohibit utility companies from using ratepayer dollars to fund political activities. The bill comes a year after the Tampa Democrat called on the Department of Justice to investigate Florida Power & Light (FPL), the state’s largest utility, over its use of “dark money” in an attempt to sway elections in Florida.

The Orlando Sentinel reported in 2022 that FPL had given more than $10 million to a consulting firm that paid for ads promoting independent “ghost candidates” in three political races in 2020 to help Republicans win those races. One was in Miami-Dade County, where then-Democratic incumbent Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez lost his reelection bid to Republican Ileana Garcia by just 34 votes. The ballot included an independent candidate with the same last name – Alex Rodriguez – who was previously registered as a Republican.

“It was such dirty politics here in Florida for FPL to take money to fund ghost candidates,” Castor said Friday, referring to what happened to Javier Rodriguez. “His flaw, according to FPL, was promoting clean energy and to try to tackle the climate crisis, so they funded a candidate with a similar name to go on the ballot who siphoned off enough votes to defeat JJR,” she said, referring to the former Democrat’s nickname.

The Phoenix reached out to Florida Power & Light for comment but did not get an immediate response.

Similar proposals have been having success at the state level. In June, the Maine Legislature passed a bill prohibiting utilities from recovering contributions or gifts to political candidates, political parties, political or legislative committees, or any committee or organization working to influence referendum petitions or elections. Colorado and Connecticut have passed similar bills this year, according to the Energy and Policy Institute.

Castor has represented most of Hillsborough County in the House of Representatives for the past 17 years. She won her last election by 14 points over Republican James Judge. After redistricting last year, her district now includes much of St. Petersburg in Pinellas County as well.

 

Mitch Perry

Mitch Perry has covered politics and government in Florida for more than two decades. Most recently he is the former politics reporter for Bay News 9. He has also worked at Florida Politics, Creative Loafing and WMNF Radio in Tampa. He was also part of the original staff when the Florida Phoenix was created in 2018.

 

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Florida Phoenix