Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #216 Trouble on Oiled Waters, Part III

Lis­ten:
MP3 Side 1 | Side 2

This pro­gram fur­ther devel­ops the sub­ject of the clan­des­tine pow­er pol­i­tics of the petro­le­um indus­try, begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of Otto Von Bolschwing, a key SS intel­li­gence offi­cer and (for a time) Adolf Eich­man­n’s supe­ri­or in the admin­is­tra­tion of Hitler’s pol­i­cy toward the Jews.

Von Bolschwing became a key CIA oper­a­tive after the war. One of Von Bolschwing’s pro­teges in the post-war peri­od was Helene Von Damm, who select­ed the list of per­son­nel from which Ronald Rea­gan’s cab­i­net appointees were select­ed

Von Bolschwing also over­saw a com­plex Nazi intel­li­gence gam­bit in the Mid­dle East. Uti­liz­ing rene­gade British intel­li­gence offi­cer Jack Phil­by, Von Bolschwing autho­rized appar­ent col­lab­o­ra­tion between Sau­di king Ibn Saud and the Zion­ists. This osten­si­ble col­lab­o­ra­tion entailed a plan to pro­mote Jew­ish emi­gra­tion from Europe to Pales­tine under the pro­tec­tion of the Saud­is. Like Ibn Saud (and of course Von Bolschwing and his Third Reich supe­ri­ors), Phil­by was a rabid anti-Semi­te and had no inten­tion of aid­ing the Jews. His “coop­er­a­tion” with the Zion­ists was a decep­tion, intend­ed to betray both the Jews and Great Britain.

After secur­ing British approval for the osten­si­ble Saudi/Zionist col­lab­o­ra­tion, Phil­by was instru­men­tal in leak­ing news of the oper­a­tion to the Arabs. The result was height­ened Arab out­rage at the British and con­se­quent sym­pa­thy for the Third Reich.

The sec­ond half of the pro­gram focus­es on a com­plex con­spir­a­cy between the Third Reich, the afore­men­tioned Jack Phil­by, Allen Dulles, Sau­di Ara­bia and major Amer­i­can and British oil com­pa­nies. A for­mer attor­ney for the pow­er­ful Wall Street law firm of Sul­li­van and Cromwell, Dulles worked for the OSS dur­ing World War II. (The OSS was Amer­i­ca’s World War II civil­ian intel­li­gence ser­vice.)

Dulles was a trai­tor to the Unit­ed States, com­plic­it in the financ­ing of Nazi indus­try and cen­tral­ly involved with wartime duplic­i­ty by the petro­le­um indus­try.

Sau­di Ara­bia col­lab­o­rat­ed with Nazi Ger­many, while black­mail­ing Great Britain and the Unit­ed States. Dulles and the major Amer­i­can and British oil com­pa­nies were instru­men­tal in arrang­ing this black­mail. Because the U.S. was able to “out­bid” the Unit­ed King­dom in pay­ing off the Saud­is, Amer­i­can petro­le­um inter­ests emerged dom­i­nant in the con­test for con­trol of Sau­di Ara­bi­an oil.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Tex­a­co’s piv­otal role in pro­vid­ing oil to the fas­cist forces of Fran­co dur­ing the Span­ish Civ­il War; Tex­a­co king­pin Tork­ild Rieber’s work as a Nazi Spy dur­ing the Sec­ond World War; the col­lab­o­ra­tion of Stan­dard Oil of New Jer­sey with Nazi Ger­many; the col­lab­o­ra­tion of Socal with the Third Reich; Dulles’ threat to cut off oil to the British war effort if they exposed the col­lab­o­ra­tion of “Big Oil” with the Nazis; a sim­i­lar threat to cut off oil to the Amer­i­can war effort if the petro­le­um indus­try’s Nazi links were exposed; Nazi chem­i­cal com­pa­ny I.G. Far­ben’s cap­i­tal par­tic­i­pa­tion in Stan­dard of New Jer­sey and Socal (it was the sec­ond largest stock hold­er in Stan­dard behind the Rock­e­feller fam­i­ly); the Bor­mann group’s inher­i­tance of the I.G.‘s Stan­dard stock; the Wahab­bi sect of Sau­di Ara­bia and its his­tor­i­cal links to inter­na­tion­al fas­cism and U.S. oil com­pa­nies.

Discussion

4 comments for “FTR #216 Trouble on Oiled Waters, Part III”

  1. Ooo...a mod­ern day David and Goliath sto­ry which, of course, means Goliath wins:

    The Wall Street Jour­nal
    Texas Pro­hibits Local Frack­ing Bans
    New­ly signed law is one of sev­er­al across the U.S. to cur­tail munic­i­pal gov­ern­ments’ pow­er

    By Rus­sell Gold
    Updat­ed May 18, 2015 4:51 p.m. ET

    AUSTIN, Texas—Last year, a city in North Texas banned frack­ing. State law­mak­ers want to make sure that nev­er hap­pens again.

    On Mon­day, Repub­li­can Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law that pro­hibits bans of hydraulic frac­tur­ing alto­geth­er and makes it much hard­er for munic­i­pal and coun­ty gov­ern­ments to con­trol where oil and gas wells can be drilled. Sim­i­lar efforts are crop­ping up in states includ­ing New Mex­i­co, Ohio, Col­orado and Okla­homa, where both cham­bers of the leg­is­la­ture have passed a bill that lim­its local gov­ern­ments to “rea­son­able” restric­tions on oil and gas activ­i­ties.

    This is all part of a broad­er leg­isla­tive and judi­cial effort, backed by the oil indus­try, to lim­it local gov­ern­ments’ abil­i­ty to reg­u­late drilling. Back­ers say that both the Okla­homa and Texas bills were pro­posed in response to a vot­er-approved ban on frack­ing in Den­ton, Texas, in Novem­ber.

    One of the authors of the Texas bill said his moti­va­tion was to pro­tect an eco­nom­i­cal­ly impor­tant indus­try. “Oil is a huge job dri­ver for the state of Texas,” said state Sen. Troy Fras­er, a Repub­li­can from the cen­tral part of the state.

    The new law elim­i­nates a “patch­work of local ordi­nances cre­at­ing more and more reg­u­la­tion, some of which is inten­tion­al­ly oner­ous and intend­ed to stop or lim­it oil and gas devel­op­ment,” said Ed Lon­ga­neck­er, pres­i­dent of the Texas Inde­pen­dent Pro­duc­ers and Roy­al­ty Own­ers Asso­ci­a­tion.

    The law has angered offi­cials in Den­ton, about 50 miles north­west of Dal­las, where res­i­dents approved the first ban in the state. Offi­cials there said they sup­port­ed it only after failed efforts to resolve qual­i­ty-of-life prob­lems includ­ing a well explo­sion and noisy drilling near homes and schools.

    “It’s a bad sit­u­a­tion when city lead­ers’ hands are tied,” said Coun­cil­man Kevin Roden. “There seems to be an atti­tude that big state gov­ern­ment knows bet­ter than the cit­i­zens of a city. I just think—conservative or liberal—that is some­thing you don’t do in Texas.”

    Oth­er crit­ics of the bill said the bal­ance of pow­er between cities and the ener­gy indus­try had been tilt­ed toward drillers.

    “The bill guts 100 years of tra­di­tion­al munic­i­pal author­i­ty to reg­u­late oil and gas oper­a­tions,” said A. Scott Ander­son, a senior pol­i­cy direc­tor for the Envi­ron­men­tal Defense Fund, which advo­cates robust­ly reg­u­lat­ing frack­ing. Oth­er envi­ron­men­tal groups say frack­ing, which involves inject­ing water and chem­i­cals deep into shale rock for­ma­tions, should be banned.

    In the past decade, new tech­nolo­gies launched an ener­gy boom in the U.S., send­ing oil and gas pro­duc­tion soar­ing. But intense drilling and frack­ing activ­i­ty trig­gered a back­lash in some com­mu­ni­ties, which by zon­ing and bal­lot ini­tia­tives have tried to keep the drilling rigs either out­side the city lim­its or far from hous­ing.

    Sup­port­ers of drilling say that local lim­its are dri­ven by envi­ron­men­tal ide­ol­o­gy, not prac­ti­cal prob­lems, and deprive landown­ers of their rights.

    Across the coun­try, the issue of the role of cities in decid­ing where drilling can occur “is still very much up in the air,” said Han­nah Wise­man, a law pro­fes­sor at Flori­da State Uni­ver­si­ty. “There is plen­ty of work for leg­is­la­tors and lawyers.”

    ...

    Just makes you want to shout “Freeeee­dom!”, does­n’t it?

    Also keep in mind that all of these moves in Texas and else­where to ban frack­ing bans isn’t just being brought to you by Big Oil. It’s brought to you by ALEC, which cer­tain­ly includes Big Oil, but should real­ly be seen as the Union of Cor­po­ratist Cor­po­ra­tions of Amer­i­ca:

    PR Watch
    ALEC and Big Oil Work to Over­turn Den­ton Frack­ing Ban

    Post­ed by Jes­si­ca Mason on Novem­ber 14, 2014

    The res­i­dents of Den­ton, Texas, had a remark­able vic­to­ry over Big Oil in the midterm elec­tions, becom­ing the first town in Texas to pass a ban on hydraulic frac­tur­ing, also known as frack­ing. But now state offi­cials with ties to ener­gy inter­ests and to the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil (ALEC), the pay-to-play cor­po­rate bill mill, are threat­en­ing to under­mine local democ­ra­cy by refus­ing to fol­low the ban.

    The chair of the Texas Rail­road Com­mis­sion, Christi Crad­dick, stat­ed that she would not abide by the ban at an event held by the Texas Tri­bune on Novem­ber 6. “It’s my job to give per­mits, not Denton’s. We’re going to con­tin­ue per­mit­ting up there because that’s my job,” Crad­dick said.

    Ener­gy inter­ests have made sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tions to Crad­dick, whose 2012 cam­paign received $15,000 from Atmos Ener­gy, $5,000 each from Chevron, Cono­coPhillips, Devon Ener­gy, Exxon, Occi­den­tal Petro­le­um, and Koch Indus­tries; and $25,000 from the Texas Oil and Gas Asso­ci­a­tion (TOGA) . TOGA has also filed a law­suit seek­ing to block enforce­ment of Den­ton’s frack­ing ban.

    In her com­ments, Crad­dick claimed that the ban passed only because vot­ers did not have “an edu­ca­tion process” about frack­ing and were exposed to “a lot of mis­in­for­ma­tion about frack­ing.”

    In fact, ener­gy com­pa­nies includ­ing Chevron, XTO Ener­gy, and Chesa­peake ener­gy fun­neled some $700,000 into the race through the mis­lead­ing­ly-named Den­ton Tax­pay­ers for a Strong Econ­o­my, near­ly ten times what was raised by Frack Free Den­ton, the grass­roots group that orga­nized sup­port for the ban. The ban won 59% of the vote, despite record spend­ing by oil inter­ests.

    ...

    With local com­mu­ni­ties fight­ing back, per­haps its no sur­prise that cor­po­rate inter­ests are eager to under­mine local democ­ra­cy. Some Texas leg­is­la­tors, includ­ing state Rep. Phil King (R‑Weatherford), are now promis­ing to push for­ward a law that would allow only the state-lev­el Texas Rail­road Com­mis­sion to issue reg­u­la­tions on oil and gas, an attack on local author­i­ty and deci­sion-mak­ing in an area that direct­ly impacts the qual­i­ty of life of those liv­ing near poten­tial frack­ing sites.

    Pre-emp­tion of local con­trol has been a key ALEC strat­e­gy for fight­ing pro­gres­sive gains at the local lev­el, such as city liv­ing wage laws and sick leave poli­cies.

    King sits on the exec­u­tive board of ALEC, where he has also served as a mem­ber of the Tax and Fis­cal Pol­i­cy Task Force. ALEC’s cor­po­rate mem­bers have giv­en tens of thou­sands to King’s polit­i­cal cam­paigns over the years.

    King and Crad­dick were also the sub­ject of a com­plaint alleg­ing that they col­lud­ed to con­ceal a $25,000 con­tri­bu­tion to Crad­dick­’s 2012 pri­ma­ry cam­paign. The con­tri­bu­tion was from Crad­dick­’s father, Rep. Tom Crad­dick, a for­mer Speak­er of the State House and a Chair­man Emer­i­tus of ALEC who took in near­ly $900,000 in cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions from ALEC cor­po­rate spon­sors between 2004 and 2011.

    Com­ing full cir­cle, Christi Crad­dick gave a pre­sen­ta­tion tout­ing frack­ing at an ALEC meet­ing just last year. And who funds ALEC? Cor­po­ra­tions — and Crad­dick cam­paign donors–like Atmos Ener­gy, Exxon­Mo­bil, Koch Indus­tries, and Occi­den­tal Petro­le­um (which may have final­ly sev­ered its ties to ALEC in Sep­tem­ber 2014, thanks to increas­ing pub­lic crit­i­cism).

    “Pre-emp­tion of local con­trol has been a key ALEC strat­e­gy for fight­ing pro­gres­sive gains at the local lev­el, such as city liv­ing wage laws and sick leave poli­cies.” Yep! And now ALEC has a very well-com­pen­sat­ed Texas Rail­road Com­mis­sion­er in Texas that’s more than enthu­si­as­tic about ensur­ing that ALEC’s fight for the free­dom to frack with­out local input con­tin­ues unim­ped­ed. Goliath win! Sur­prise!

    But also keep in mind that David just might get anoth­er chance to defeat Goliath. Or at least defeat Goliath’s proxy-humans. How so? Well, in Texas, being Rail­road Com­mis­sion­er isn’t some dead end job: Tex­as­’s oil queen is meant for high­er office:

    USA Today
    Christi Crad­dick: Texas oil queen

    Shan­non Sim, OZY 11:03 a.m. EDT March 10, 2015

    On a win­ter after­noon in Austin, Texas, a dark-haired woman — her chin bare­ly vis­i­ble over her desk — moves swift­ly through a per­mit to drill, a review of dis­pos­al, a license to frack and more than 500 oth­er requests. With­in just a few hours, she’s approved hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars’ worth of projects, all with the swipe of her pen. It’s just anoth­er Tues­day for Texas Rail­road Com­mis­sion Chair­man Christi Crad­dick.

    There’s a say­ing in Texas: “What starts here changes the world.” It seems like a stereo­typ­i­cal­ly over­size Tex­an atti­tude, but these days, it’s pret­ty true. The future of U.S. ener­gy and the dawn of its ener­gy inde­pen­dence is hap­pen­ing here, in a state whose econ­o­my — the sec­ond biggest in the coun­try — is run in large part by oil and gas. In Texas, oil is king. And Crad­dick — who helms Amer­i­ca’s largest state oil and gas reg­u­la­to­ry body and has a pen­chant for wear­ing Repub­li­can red and pearls — is its queen.

    This is a crit­i­cal moment for the tight­ly com­posed politi­cian, who tends to keep her hands clasped in front of her on the table, smil­ing through dif­fi­cult ques­tions then respond­ing with a crisp twang. Thanks in no small part to frack­ing, the U.S. is the world’s lead­ing oil pro­duc­er, and Texas is the top pro­duc­ing state. That’s quite a spot for the leader of an obscure local agency with a mis­lead­ing name (the Rail­road Com­mis­sion han­dles state oil and gas reg­u­la­tion, not rail­roads).

    But that’s the fun­ny thing about local gov­ern­ment: Some­times, a swirl of unpre­dictable events lands obscure fig­ures at the cross­roads of the coun­try’s future. Think of Robert Moses, the mid­cen­tu­ry urban plan­ner hired by New York City to plan a road or two, who end­ed up rework­ing the con­stel­la­tion of the city. Or Kather­ine Har­ris, the unknown Flori­da sec­re­tary of state who in 2000, in those tense days of chits and chads, effec­tive­ly chose the pres­i­dent. Today, a fluke of geol­o­gy places Crad­dick, a West Texas sin­gle mom, in the dri­ver’s seat of the coun­try’s new ener­gy era.

    Her jour­ney has been rough of late. The peo­ple of Den­ton, a col­lege town that’s out­side Dal­las and atop Bar­nett Shale, one of the coun­try’s best frack­ing spots, recent­ly vot­ed to ban the process. It’s one of the few issues that caus­es Crad­dick­’s veneer to crin­kle; she’s been rat­tled by the blow­back and believes “mis­in­for­ma­tion” led vot­ers to ban frack­ing. Still, the 44-year-old, who calls the Rail­road Com­mis­sion “busi­ness-friend­ly,” has since stepped in, argu­ing that her agency — not the city — deter­mines per­mit­ting. The Texas Gen­er­al Land Office and the Texas Oil and Gas Asso­ci­a­tion have gone a step fur­ther and filed suits against the city.

    It may seem heavy-hand­ed, but even envi­ron­men­tal lead­ers admit she’s prob­a­bly right on the law. Still, Tom Smith, direc­tor of the envi­ron­men­tal group Pub­lic Cit­i­zen, says Crad­dick runs at the plea­sure of the oil indus­try and is “in a race for envi­ron­men­tal ene­my No. 1, in terms of her abil­i­ty to wreak hav­oc.” (Crad­dick says her office will keep issu­ing per­mits in Den­ton and that, over­all, “I have no envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns about frack­ing.”)

    Indeed, she’s just get­ting start­ed. Her term ends in four years, and her posi­tion is often a “spring­board for high­er office,” says Cyrus Reed, con­ser­va­tion direc­tor of the Sier­ra Club’s Texas chap­ter. Pre­vi­ous lead­ers of the Rail­road Com­mis­sion have become leg­is­la­tors or even run for gov­er­nor. For now, though, Crad­dick is look­ing through her agen­cy’s win­dow toward the most active­ly drilled shale reserve in the coun­try — the Eagle Ford, which just hours before was grant­ed dozens of per­mits to frack — and she’s con­vinced it’s get­ting the bal­ance right: “Texas is a role mod­el for how ener­gy pol­i­cy should be run.”

    Crad­dick, who grew up in Mid­land sur­round­ed by oil rigs, was born for this job. Her father, Tom Crad­dick, is an oil­man turned leg­is­la­tor, and she accom­pa­nied him to state Repub­li­can con­ven­tions by age 12. After study­ing law at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas and intern­ing at the Rail­road Com­mis­sion, Crad­dick got pulled back into pol­i­tics while advis­ing dad, who’d become speak­er of the Texas House. Though Crad­dick thought she “was nev­er going to run,” vot­ers elect­ed her to the three-per­son Rail­road Com­mis­sion in 2012, and this win­ter she was made chair­man.

    Some crit­ics call Crad­dick “dad­dy’s girl” and sug­gest she got there through him. She admits her father has a great rep­u­ta­tion but says she made it through hard work, though signs of her father linger — like when she sets her ice water on a leather coast­er embla­zoned with his name. As a woman in the mas­cu­line world of oil and gas, Crad­dick has tight­ly refined her image to deter any dis­trac­tion from the busi­ness at hand. Indeed, she’s more at ease speak­ing about well­heads and methane than her home life, and she prefers the title “chair­man” to “chair­woman.”

    ...

    Yes, Crad­dick says her office will keep issu­ing per­mits in Den­ton and that, over­all, “I have no envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns about frack­ing.” And she’s just get­ting start­ed:

    ...

    “Indeed, she’s just get­ting start­ed. Her term ends in four years, and her posi­tion is often a “spring­board for high­er office,” says Cyrus Reed, con­ser­va­tion direc­tor of the Sier­ra Club’s Texas chap­ter. Pre­vi­ous lead­ers of the Rail­road Com­mis­sion have become leg­is­la­tors or even run for gov­er­nor”...

    Could Crad­dick­’s career in cor­po­rate ass-kiss­ing real­ly just be get­ting start­ed? We’ll see! But if Christi Crad­dick does decide to go for high­er office her cor­po­rate spon­sors are prob­a­bly going to be right there to return the favors. After all, as we just saw, Goliath needs an abun­dance of min­ions and he knows it. Goliath did­n’t become Goliath on his own.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 19, 2015, 1:56 pm
  2. It’s Earth Day. Yay Earth! Or rather, yay life on Earth!

    Now that we got that out of the way, here’s a reminder that if we ever want to get to the point where we don’t feel the need to cel­e­brate Earth Day every year, we’re prob­a­bly going to have to start effec­tive­ly cel­e­brat­ing Earth Day every day. At least for the fore­see­able future. After all, it’s hard to fore­see a future that does­n’t involve The Day After Earth Day Because We Destroyed It Day, every day, when the most pow­er­ful forces on the plan­et have busi­ness mod­els that more or less guar­an­tee the need for Earth Day are are will­ing to black­mail con­ti­nents in order to keep it that way:

    The Guardian

    EU dropped cli­mate poli­cies after BP threat of oil indus­try ‘exo­dus’

    Oil giant warned indus­try would pull out of EU if laws to cut pol­lu­tion and speed clean ener­gy take up were passed, let­ter obtained by the Guardian reveals

    Arthur Neslen

    Wednes­day 20 April 2016 07.42 EDT

    The EU aban­doned or weak­ened key pro­pos­als for new envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions after receiv­ing a let­ter from a top BP exec­u­tive which warned of an exo­dus of the oil indus­try from Europe if the pro­pos­als went ahead.

    In the 10-page let­ter, the com­pa­ny pre­dict­ed in 2013 that a mass indus­try flight would result if laws to reg­u­late tar sands, cut pow­er plant pol­lu­tion and accel­er­ate the uptake of renew­able ener­gy were passed, because of the extra costs and red tape they alleged­ly entailed.

    The mea­sures “threat­en to dri­ve ener­gy-inten­sive indus­tries, such as refin­ing and petro­chem­i­cals, to relo­cate out­side the EU with a cor­re­spond­ing­ly detri­men­tal impact on secu­ri­ty of sup­ply, jobs [and] growth,” said the let­ter, which was obtained by the Guardian under access to doc­u­ments laws.

    The mis­sive to the EU’s ener­gy com­mis­sion­er, Gün­ther Oet­tinger, was dat­ed 9 August 2013, part­ly hand-writ­ten, and signed by a senior BP rep­re­sen­ta­tive whose name has been redact­ed.

    It ref­er­ences a series of “inter­ac­tions” between the two men – and between BP and an unnamed third par­ty in Wash­ing­ton DC – and wel­comes oppor­tu­ni­ties to fur­ther dis­cuss ener­gy issues in an “infor­mal man­ner”.

    BP’s warn­ing of a fos­sil fuel pull-out from Europe was repeat­ed three times in the let­ter, most stri­dent­ly over plans to man­date new pol­lu­tion cuts and clean tech­nolo­gies, under the indus­tri­al emis­sions direc­tive.

    This reform “has the poten­tial to have a mas­sive­ly adverse eco­nom­ic impact on the costs and com­pet­i­tive­ness of Euro­pean refin­ing and petro­chem­i­cal indus­tries, and trig­ger a fur­ther exo­dus out­side the EU,” the let­ter said.

    The plant reg­u­la­tions even­tu­al­ly advanced by the com­mis­sion would leave Europe under a weak­er pol­lu­tion regime than China’s, accord­ing to research by Green­peace.

    BP said any clam­p­down would cost indus­try many bil­lions of euros and so pol­lu­tion curbs “should also be care­ful­ly accessed with close co-oper­a­tion with the indus­tri­al sec­tors”.

    Last year the EU’s envi­ron­ment depart­ment moved to lim­it the coal lobby’s influ­ence on pol­lu­tion stan­dards, after rev­e­la­tions by the Guardian and Green­peace about the scale of indus­try involve­ment.

    The com­mis­sion had pre­vi­ous­ly allowed hun­dreds of ener­gy indus­try lob­by­ists to aggres­sive­ly push for weak­er pol­lu­tion lim­its as part of the offi­cial nego­ti­at­ing teams of EU mem­ber states.

    The Green MEP Mol­ly Scott Cato said that the UK’s robust advo­ca­cy of BP’s posi­tions was a cause of deep shame, and illus­trat­ed how Brex­it would increase the pow­er of fos­sil fuel firms.

    She said: “It reveals how the arm-twist­ing tac­tics of big oil seek to under­mine the EU’s pro­gres­sive ener­gy and cli­mate poli­cies. BP’s covert lob­by­ing, com­bined with threats of an exo­dus of the petro­chem­i­cals indus­try from the EU, are noth­ing short of black­mail.

    “This doc­u­ment paints a dis­turb­ing pic­ture of the degree to which glob­al cor­po­ra­tions sub­vert the demo­c­ra­t­ic process, influ­ence the com­mis­sion and threat­en the vital tran­si­tion to a clean­er, green­er Europe.”

    ...

    Before the report’s pub­li­ca­tion, Oettinger’s team removed fig­ures from an ear­li­er draft which revealed that EU states spent €40bn (£32bn) a year on sub­si­dies for fos­sil fuels, com­pared to €35bn for nuclear ener­gy, and just €30bn for renew­ables. The commissioner’s office argues that the num­bers were incon­sis­tent and “not com­pa­ra­ble”

    Ear­ly in his tenure, Oet­tinger had been forced to back down on plans for a mora­to­ri­um on deep­wa­ter off­shore oil drills in the wake of the BP Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon dis­as­ter. With­in two years, he had become an indus­try cham­pi­on, argu­ing that Europe was com­pet­i­tive­ly dis­ad­van­taged by a reluc­tance to take off­shore drilling risks.

    Oet­tinger reg­u­lar­ly hosts alpine retreats for gov­ern­ment min­is­ters, bankers and cap­tains of indus­try. In 2013, these includ­ed exec­u­tives from Shell, Sta­toil, GDF Suez, EDF, Alstom, Enel and ENI, although not BP.

    ...

    Along with Shell, BP began lob­by­ing for an end to the EU’s renew­ables and ener­gy effi­cien­cy tar­gets in 2011, but the scope of its lob­by inter­ven­tion went fur­ther.

    In its let­ter, BP strong­ly opposed renew­able ener­gy sub­si­dies, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Ger­many, and a planned cap on cer­tain bio­fu­els which stud­ies have shown to be high­ly-pol­lut­ing.

    Over the year that fol­lowed, an EU state aid deci­sion on renew­ables went against Ger­many, while a cap on the amount of first gen­er­a­tion bio­fu­els that could be count­ed towards EU tar­gets was also weak­ened.

    Europe’s efforts to cut car­bon emis­sions should be built upon mar­ket-based tools such as its flag­ship emis­sions trad­ing scheme, BP said in its let­ter.

    But EU pro­pos­als to label tar sands oil as more pol­lut­ing than oth­er oil – which could lead to addi­tion­al tax­es – risked com­pa­nies “being penalised sub­jec­tive­ly on the basis of adverse per­cep­tions”, accord­ing to BP.

    The tar sands pro­pos­al was vehe­ment­ly opposed by the UK and the Nether­lands, and the plan was even­tu­al­ly dropped in 2014.

    Jos Dings, the direc­tor of the sus­tain­able trans­port think­tank Trans­port and Envi­ron­ment said: “In case any­one doubt­ed why Europe chose to treat all oil – reg­u­lar and high pol­lut­ing – the same, here’s the answer: Big Oil telling the com­mis­sion that real­ly its impos­si­ble to tell them apart.”

    ...

    BP recent­ly topped a sur­vey of the most obstruc­tive com­pa­ny on cli­mate change, and is increas­ing­ly a tar­get for fos­sil fuels divest­ment cam­paigns.

    The plant reg­u­la­tions even­tu­al­ly advanced by the com­mis­sion would leave Europe under a weak­er pol­lu­tion regime than China’s, accord­ing to research by Green­peace.”
    Well done, BP. We will be anx­ious­ly cel­e­brat­ing Earth Day for decades to come thanks to the dam­age inflict­ed on the bios­phere by the unyield­ing efforts by the deci­sion-mak­ers at BP to do what­ev­er it takes to ensure that human­i­ty does basi­cal­ly noth­ing to pre­vent the dis­as­trous impacts of cli­mate change.

    But BP obvi­ous­ly can’t take all the cred­it for ensur­ing Earth Day for the fore­see­able future. It’s had help. Some (the sane) might argue WAY too much help. For WAY too long:

    The Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can

    Exxon Knew about Cli­mate Change almost 40 years ago

    A new inves­ti­ga­tion shows the oil com­pa­ny under­stood the sci­ence before it became a pub­lic issue and spent mil­lions to pro­mote mis­in­for­ma­tion

    By Shan­non Hall on Octo­ber 26, 2015

    Exxon was aware of cli­mate change, as ear­ly as 1977, 11 years before it became a pub­lic issue, accord­ing to a recent inves­ti­ga­tion from Insid­e­Cli­mate News. This knowl­edge did not pre­vent the com­pa­ny (now Exxon­Mo­bil and the world’s largest oil and gas com­pa­ny) from spend­ing decades refus­ing to pub­licly acknowl­edge cli­mate change and even pro­mot­ing cli­mate mis­in­for­ma­tion—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobac­co indus­try regard­ing the health risks of smok­ing. Both indus­tries were con­scious that their prod­ucts wouldn’t stay prof­itable once the world under­stood the risks, so much so that they used the same con­sul­tants to devel­op strate­gies on how to com­mu­ni­cate with the pub­lic.

    Experts, how­ev­er, aren’t ter­ri­bly sur­prised. “It’s nev­er been remote­ly plau­si­ble that they did not under­stand the sci­ence,” says Nao­mi Oreskes, a his­to­ry of sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just under­stand the sci­ence, the com­pa­ny active­ly engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top sci­en­tists to look into the issue and launched its own ambi­tious research pro­gram that empir­i­cal­ly sam­pled car­bon diox­ide and built rig­or­ous cli­mate mod­els. Exxon even spent more than $1 mil­lion on a tanker project that would tack­le how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest sci­en­tif­ic ques­tions of the time, mean­ing that Exxon was tru­ly con­duct­ing unprece­dent­ed research.

    In their eight-month-long inves­ti­ga­tion, reporters at Insid­e­Cli­mate News inter­viewed for­mer Exxon employ­ees, sci­en­tists and fed­er­al offi­cials and ana­lyzed hun­dreds of pages of inter­nal doc­u­ments. They found that the company’s knowl­edge of cli­mate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior sci­en­tist James Black deliv­ered a sober­ing mes­sage on the top­ic. “In the first place, there is gen­er­al sci­en­tif­ic agree­ment that the most like­ly man­ner in which mankind is influ­enc­ing the glob­al cli­mate is through car­bon diox­ide release from the burn­ing of fos­sil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s man­age­ment com­mit­tee. A year lat­er he warned Exxon that dou­bling CO2 gas­es in the atmos­phere would increase aver­age glob­al tem­per­a­tures by two or three degrees—a num­ber that is con­sis­tent with the sci­en­tif­ic con­sen­sus today. He con­tin­ued to warn that “present think­ing holds that man has a time win­dow of five to 10 years before the need for hard deci­sions regard­ing changes in ener­gy strate­gies might become crit­i­cal.” In oth­er words, Exxon need­ed to act.

    But Exxon­Mo­bil dis­agrees that any of its ear­ly state­ments were so stark, let alone con­clu­sive at all. “We didn’t reach those con­clu­sions, nor did we try to bury it like they sug­gest,” Exxon­Mo­bil spokesper­son Allan Jef­fers tells Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can. “The thing that shocks me the most is that we’ve been say­ing this for years, that we have been involved in cli­mate research. These guys go down and pull some doc­u­ments that we made avail­able pub­licly in the archives and por­tray them as some kind of bomb­shell whis­tle-blow­er exposé because of the loaded lan­guage and the selec­tive use of mate­ri­als.”

    One thing is cer­tain: in June 1988, when NASA sci­en­tist James Hansen told a con­gres­sion­al hear­ing that the plan­et was already warm­ing, Exxon remained pub­licly con­vinced that the sci­ence was still con­tro­ver­sial. Fur­ther­more, experts agree that Exxon became a leader in cam­paigns of con­fu­sion. By 1989 the com­pa­ny had helped cre­ate the Glob­al Cli­mate Coali­tion (dis­band­ed in 2002) to ques­tion the sci­en­tif­ic basis for con­cern about cli­mate change. It also helped to pre­vent the U.S. from sign­ing the inter­na­tion­al treaty on cli­mate known as the Kyoto Pro­to­col in 1998 to con­trol green­house gas­es. Exxon’s tac­tic not only worked on the U.S. but also stopped oth­er coun­tries, such as Chi­na and India, from sign­ing the treaty. At that point, “a lot of things unrav­eled,” Oreskes says.

    But experts are still piec­ing togeth­er Exxon’s mis­con­cep­tion puz­zle. Last sum­mer the Union of Con­cerned Sci­en­tists released a com­ple­men­tary inves­ti­ga­tion to the one by Insid­e­Cli­mate News, known as the Cli­mate Decep­tion Dossiers (pdf). “We includ­ed a memo of a coali­tion of fos­sil-fuel com­pa­nies where they pledge basi­cal­ly to launch a big com­mu­ni­ca­tions effort to sow doubt,” says union pres­i­dent Ken­neth Kim­mel. “There’s even a quote in it that says some­thing like ‘Vic­to­ry will be achieved when the aver­age per­son is uncer­tain about cli­mate sci­ence.’ So it’s pret­ty stark.”

    Since then, Exxon has spent more than $30 mil­lion on think tanks that pro­mote cli­mate denial, accord­ing to Green­peace. Although experts will nev­er be able to quan­ti­fy the dam­age Exxon’s mis­in­for­ma­tion has caused, “one thing for cer­tain is we’ve lost a lot of ground,” Kim­mell says. Half of the green­house gas emis­sions in our atmos­phere were released after 1988. “I have to think if the fos­sil-fuel com­pa­nies had been upfront about this and had been part of the solu­tion instead of the prob­lem, we would have made a lot of progress [today] instead of dou­bling our green­house gas emis­sions.”

    Experts agree that the dam­age is huge, which is why they are liken­ing Exxon’s decep­tion to the lies spread by the tobac­co indus­try. “I think there are a lot of par­al­lels,” Kim­mell says. Both sowed doubt about the sci­ence for their own means, and both worked with the same con­sul­tants to help devel­op a com­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­e­gy. He notes, how­ev­er, that the two diverge in the type of harm done. Tobac­co com­pa­nies threat­ened human health, but the oil com­pa­nies threat­ened the planet’s health. “It’s a harm that is glob­al in its reach,” Kim­mel says.

    To prove this, Bob Ward—who on behalf of the U.K.’s Roy­al Acad­e­my sent a let­ter to Exxon in 2006 claim­ing its sci­ence was “inac­cu­rate and misleading”—thinks a thor­ough inves­ti­ga­tion is nec­es­sary. “Because frankly the episode with tobac­co was prob­a­bly the most dis­grace­ful episode one could ever imag­ine,” Ward says. Kim­mell agrees. These rea­sons “real­ly high­light the respon­si­bil­i­ty that these com­pa­nies have to come clean, acknowl­edge this, and work with every­one else to cut out emis­sions and pay for some of the cost we’re going to bear as soon as pos­si­ble,” Kim­mell says.

    ...

    “Experts agree that the dam­age is huge, which is why they are liken­ing Exxon’s decep­tion to the lies spread by the tobac­co indus­try. “I think there are a lot of par­al­lels,” Kim­mell says. Both sowed doubt about the sci­ence for their own means, and both worked with the same con­sul­tants to help devel­op a com­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­e­gy. He notes, how­ev­er, that the two diverge in the type of harm done. Tobac­co com­pa­nies threat­ened human health, but the oil com­pa­nies threat­ened the planet’s health. “It’s a harm that is glob­al in its reach,” Kim­mel says.
    Worse than the tobac­co indus­try. It isn’t easy cre­at­ing harm that is glob­al in its reach. If Exxon was a per­son it would mer­it some sort of life­time achieve­ment award. Or at least a very rig­or­ous golf clap. But Exxon isn’t a per­son who will even­tu­al­ly meet the grim reaper. It’s a cor­po­rate enti­ty that can con­tin­ue to grow in pow­er and influ­ence indef­i­nite­ly and use that pow­er and influ­ence to keep mak­ing the tobac­co indus­try look rel­a­tive­ly humane. Unless, of course, we col­lapse the bios­phere. That might be the end of Exxon. But until then, there’s going to be plen­ty of increas­ing­ly urgent Earth Days. Thanks Exxon.

    So as we cel­e­brate Earth Day by clean­ing trash and shut­ting off the lights, etc, per­haps part of Earth Day should a dis­cus­sion about how exact­ly we address what is increas­ing­ly look­ing like a col­lec­tive crime against life on Earth per­pet­u­at­ed by many of the most pow­er­ful forces on the plan­et. After all, pow­er­ful forces that com­mit egre­gious crimes aren’t like­ly to hold back on using that pow­er to con­tin­ue those crimes when the crimes are crit­i­cal to their pow­er. Com­pa­nies like BP and Exxon would have been amongst the best posi­tioned enti­ties on the plan­et to lead a green ener­gy rev­o­lu­tion and pre­vent mass cat­a­stro­phes. But they chose basi­cal­ly the oppo­site route, mak­ing vast for­tunes along the way that has left them with enough pow­er and clout to cor­rupt gov­ern­ments across the globe. And it’s not like those gov­ern­ment offi­cials put up much resis­tance. The efforts to ensure that what­ev­er we do about cli­mate change is too lit­tle, too late involved more than just the super-vil­lain behav­ior by Exxon and BP. It’s been a group effort.

    So how do we even begin address­ing what amounts to a de fac­to dic­ta­tor­ship of the pow­er­ful forces on the plan­et using that pow­er to per­pet­u­ate that pow­er even when it threat­ens to destroy us all? It seems like we should spend at least one day a year pon­der­ing such issues. If not on Earth Day, how about Offer We All Can’t Refuse Day. A day for brain­storm­ing offers that the glob­al rab­ble could make to the glob­al pow­er elite that involves tran­si­tion­ing away from the cur­rent sui­ci­dal klep­toc­ra­cy and towards some sort of sus­tain­able future where hap­pi­ness max­i­miza­tion and san­i­ty, as opposed to prof­it max­i­miza­tion, becomes the glob­al norm.

    What do we do when sav­ing the world involves end­ing the world from the per­spec­tive of the peo­ple who run the world? When human­i­ty’s col­lec­tive lead­er­ship is sort of of crime against human­i­ty, how does human­i­ty even begin to address a sit­u­a­tion like that? It’s a pret­ty impor­tant ques­tion, with­out obvi­ous answers.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 23, 2016, 4:35 pm
  3. With the threat of WWIII heat­ing up as the world waits to see if the peace talks between Rus­sia and Ukraine can achieve some sort of break­through, here’s a pair of arti­cles that are a reminder of one of the many long-term poten­tial con­se­quences of an extend­ed New Cold War, where coop­er­a­tion between Rus­sia and the West on issues of glob­al impor­tance grinds to a halt. That would be the long-term con­se­quences of the cli­mate if the vast stores of oil, coal, and gas stored under the Arc­tic end up get­ting tapped and dumped into the atmos­phere. Stores that are get­ting more and more acces­si­ble as the polar caps melt away:

    Sci­en­tists are record­ing tem­per­a­tures 50 degrees F above aver­age in the Arc­tic. At the same time they’re record­ing tem­per­a­tures 70 degrees above aver­age in the Antarc­tic. Yes, both the Arc­tic and Antarc­tic — which are sup­posed to have oppo­site sea­sons — are expe­ri­enc­ing freak­ish heat waves at the same time. Need­less to say, this should­n’t be hap­pen­ing. But it’s hap­pen­ing. And the world is going to have to deal with it togeth­er if it’s going to be addressed at all:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Hot poles: Antarc­ti­ca, Arc­tic 70 and 50 degrees above nor­mal

    By SETH BORENSTEIN
    Fri March 18, 2022 20:26:08 CST

    Earth’s poles are under­go­ing simul­ta­ne­ous freak­ish extreme heat with parts of Antarc­ti­ca more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Cel­sius) warmer than aver­age and areas of the Arc­tic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Cel­sius) warmer than aver­age.

    Weath­er sta­tions in Antarc­ti­ca shat­tered records Fri­day as the region neared autumn. The two-mile high (3,234 meters) Con­cor­dia sta­tion was at 10 degrees (-12.2 degrees Celsius),which is about 70 degrees warmer than aver­age, while the even high­er Vos­tok sta­tion hit a shade above 0 degrees (-17.7 degrees Cel­sius), beat­ing its all-time record by about 27 degrees (15 degrees Cel­sius), accord­ing to a tweet from extreme weath­er record track­er Max­i­m­il­iano Her­rera.

    The coastal Ter­ra Nova Base was far above freez­ing at 44.6 degrees (7 degrees Cel­sius).

    It caught offi­cials at the Nation­al Snow and Ice Data Cen­ter in Boul­der, Col­orado, by sur­prise because they were pay­ing atten­tion to the Arc­tic where it was 50 degrees warmer than aver­age and areas around the North Pole were near­ing or at the melt­ing point, which is real­ly unusu­al for mid-March, said cen­ter ice sci­en­tist Walt Meier.

    “They are oppo­site sea­sons. You don’t see the north and the south (poles) both melt­ing at the same time,” Meier told The Asso­ci­at­ed Press Fri­day evening. “It’s def­i­nite­ly an unusu­al occur­rence.”

    “It’s pret­ty stun­ning,” Meier added.

    “Wow. I have nev­er seen any­thing like this in the Antarc­tic,” said Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado ice sci­en­tist Ted Scam­bos, who returned recent­ly from an expe­di­tion to the con­ti­nent.

    “Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing hap­pen,” said Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin mete­o­rol­o­gist Matthew Laz­zara.

    Laz­zara mon­i­tors tem­per­a­tures at East Antarctica’s Dome C‑ii and logged 14 degrees (-10 degrees Cel­sius) Fri­day, where the nor­mal is ‑45 degrees (-43 degrees Cel­sius): “That’s a tem­per­a­ture that you should see in Jan­u­ary, not March. Jan­u­ary is sum­mer there. That’s dra­mat­ic.”

    Both Laz­zara and Meier said what hap­pened in Antarc­ti­ca is prob­a­bly just a ran­dom weath­er event and not a sign of cli­mate change. But if it hap­pens again or repeat­ed­ly then it might be some­thing to wor­ry about and part of glob­al warm­ing, they said.

    ...

    The Antarc­tic con­ti­nent as a whole on Fri­day was about 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Cel­sius) warmer than a base­line tem­per­a­ture between 1979 and 2000, accord­ing to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Maine’s Cli­mate Rean­a­lyz­er, based on U.S. Nation­al Ocean­ic Atmos­pher­ic Admin­is­tra­tion weath­er mod­els. That 8‑degree heat­ing over an already warmed-up aver­age is unusu­al, think of it as if the entire Unit­ed States was 8 degrees hot­ter than nor­mal, Meier said.

    At the same time, on Fri­day the Arc­tic as a whole was 6 degrees (3.3 degrees) warmer than the 1979 to 2000 aver­age.

    By com­par­i­son, the world as a whole was only 1.1 degrees (0.6 degrees Cel­sius) above the 1979 to 2000 aver­age. Glob­al­ly the 1979 to 2000 aver­age is about half a degree (.3 degrees Cel­sius) warmer than the 20th cen­tu­ry aver­age.

    What makes the Antarc­tic warm­ing real­ly weird is that the south­ern con­ti­nent — except for its vul­ner­a­ble penin­su­la which is warm­ing quick­ly and los­ing ice rapid­ly — has not been warm­ing much, espe­cial­ly when com­pared to the rest of the globe, Meier said.

    Antarc­ti­ca did set a record for the low­est sum­mer sea ice — records go back to 1979 — with it shrink­ing to 741,000 square miles (1.9 mil­lion square kilo­me­ters) in late Feb­ru­ary, the snow and ice data cen­ter report­ed.

    What like­ly hap­pened was “a big atmos­pher­ic riv­er” pumped in warm and moist air from the Pacif­ic south­ward, Meier said.

    And in the Arc­tic, which has been warm­ing two to three times faster than the rest of the globe and is con­sid­ered vul­ner­a­ble to cli­mate change, warm Atlantic air was com­ing north off the coast of Green­land.

    ————

    “Hot poles: Antarc­ti­ca, Arc­tic 70 and 50 degrees above nor­mal” by SETH BORENSTEIN; Asso­ci­at­ed Press; 03/18/2022

    ““They are oppo­site sea­sons. You don’t see the north and the south (poles) both melt­ing at the same time,” Meier told The Asso­ci­at­ed Press Fri­day evening. “It’s def­i­nite­ly an unusu­al occur­rence.””

    Wel­come to the future. It’s only get­ting warmer from here.

    And note how extra bizarre this simul­ta­ne­ous record warm­ing is: while we’re now used to alarm­ing sto­ries about the warm­ing Arc­tic, the Antarc­tic has actu­al­ly been warm­ing less than the rest of the globe. That’s part of the rea­son experts are quick to point out that this is event is like­ly due to ran­dom weath­er fluc­tu­a­tions. And yes, that’s absolute­ly true. By def­i­n­i­tion. Bro­ken weath­er records still aren’t cli­mate. Still, it’s the lat­est set of bro­ken records in the same direc­tion:

    ...
    Both Laz­zara and Meier said what hap­pened in Antarc­ti­ca is prob­a­bly just a ran­dom weath­er event and not a sign of cli­mate change. But if it hap­pens again or repeat­ed­ly then it might be some­thing to wor­ry about and part of glob­al warm­ing, they said.

    ...

    What makes the Antarc­tic warm­ing real­ly weird is that the south­ern con­ti­nent — except for its vul­ner­a­ble penin­su­la which is warm­ing quick­ly and los­ing ice rapid­ly — has not been warm­ing much, espe­cial­ly when com­pared to the rest of the globe, Meier said.

    Antarc­ti­ca did set a record for the low­est sum­mer sea ice — records go back to 1979 — with it shrink­ing to 741,000 square miles (1.9 mil­lion square kilo­me­ters) in late Feb­ru­ary, the snow and ice data cen­ter report­ed.

    What like­ly hap­pened was “a big atmos­pher­ic riv­er” pumped in warm and moist air from the Pacif­ic south­ward, Meier said.

    And in the Arc­tic, which has been warm­ing two to three times faster than the rest of the globe and is con­sid­ered vul­ner­a­ble to cli­mate change, warm Atlantic air was com­ing north off the coast of Green­land.
    ...

    What is the world going to do about this? Prob­a­bly not much more than it’s already doing. But as the fol­low­ing arti­cle from back in Octo­ber reminds us, all this melt­ing ice means access to all that Arc­tic gas is that much eas­i­er to tap. Which means if the world is plan­ning on keep­ing that Arc­tic gas under the ocean it’s going to need glob­al treaties. With Rus­sia being an obvi­ous major par­tic­i­pant in any of those nego­ti­a­tions. So it’s going to be worth keep­ing in mind that the longer Rus­sia spends divorced from the West, the less like­ly any such agree­ments will be arrived at:

    CNBC

    After the gas cri­sis, the Arc­tic could be Rus­sia and Europe’s next flash­point

    Hol­ly Elly­att
    Pub­lished Fri, Oct 15 2021 1:17 AM EDT
    Updat­ed Fri, Oct 15 2021 2:43 AM EDT

    * On Wednes­day, the Euro­pean Union put for­ward pro­pos­als that could see it try­ing to ban any tap­ping of new oil, coal and gas deposits in the Arc­tic.
    * The EU says it wants to pro­tect the region from fur­ther dis­rup­tive cli­mate change.
    * But coun­tries like Rus­sia derive eco­nom­ic wealth from the region’s hydro­car­bons and oth­er nat­ur­al resources.

    A new cold front could open up in the polit­i­cal ten­sion between the Euro­pean Union and Rus­sia over ener­gy. This time in the Arc­tic.

    On Wednes­day, the EU put for­ward pro­pos­als that could see it push­ing to ban the tap­ping of new oil, coal and gas deposits in the Arc­tic in an effort, it said, to pro­tect the region from fur­ther dis­rup­tive cli­mate change.

    Rus­sia, a major hold­er of Arc­tic ter­ri­to­ry where an abun­dance of its hydro­car­bon and fish stocks are found, is not too pleased with the pro­pos­als with Russia’s Deputy Prime Min­is­ter Alexan­der Novak telling CNBC Thurs­day that they were polit­i­cal­ly-moti­vat­ed and non­sen­si­cal.

    ” I was a bit sur­prised when I heard about this yes­ter­day. Why the Arc­tic, why not the Equa­tor? One could come up with a num­ber of places in the world where oil and gas pro­duc­tion must be banned,” he told CNBC’s Hadley Gam­ble at the Russ­ian Ener­gy Week con­fer­ence in Moscow, accord­ing to a trans­la­tion.

    “This pro­pos­al has no oth­er moti­va­tion than polit­i­cal,” he added. “What do these state­ments tell us — that we need to stop extract­ing the entire gas pro­duced at the moment? I think that the authors of these pro­pos­als have very lit­tle under­stand­ing of the real state of affairs,” he said.

    The EU pro­pos­als come at a time when ten­sions are already high between Rus­sia and the EU when it comes to ener­gy, and specif­i­cal­ly nat­ur­al gas. Prices have been soar­ing as Europe’s demand is squeezed by tighter-than-expect­ed sup­plies.

    Rus­sia has said it has ramped up gas sup­plies but crit­ics say it is using its gas exports to the region for polit­i­cal pur­pos­es, chiefly its bid to get Ger­many to cer­ti­fy the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Rus­sia denied it was exploit­ing Europe’s gas cri­sis, with Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin insist­ing to CNBC on Wednes­day that Moscow was not using gas a weapon.

    Arc­tic engage­ment

    Ten­sions in the Arc­tic have already been grow­ing between region­al play­ers for a num­ber of years, par­tic­u­lar­ly in light of Russia’s qui­et expan­sion of its polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic and mil­i­tary influ­ence there.

    Unlike Rus­sia, the EU is a com­par­a­tive­ly new play­er in the Arc­tic and the bloc, per se, is not a mem­ber of the Arc­tic Coun­cil, an inter­gov­ern­men­tal forum to pro­vide a means for pro­mot­ing coop­er­a­tion, coor­di­na­tion and inter­ac­tion among the Arc­tic States, although the Coun­cil includes the EU mem­ber states Den­mark, Fin­land and Swe­den.

    The EU appears to be look­ing to increase its role in the region, how­ev­er, and in a pro­pos­al moot­ed by the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion on Wednes­day, it not­ed that “the Arc­tic region is of major strate­gic impor­tance for the Euro­pean Union, with regard to cli­mate change, raw mate­ri­als as well as geostrate­gic influ­ence.”

    It said it would aim to “strength­en EU engage­ment” in the region through “con­tribut­ing to main­tain­ing peace­ful and con­struc­tive dia­logue and coop­er­a­tion in a chang­ing geopo­lit­i­cal land­scape, to keep the Arc­tic safe and sta­ble” as well as “push­ing for oil, coal and gas to stay in the ground, includ­ing in Arc­tic regions” and “sup­port­ing the inclu­sive and sus­tain­able devel­op­ment of the Arc­tic regions to the ben­e­fit of its inhab­i­tants and future gen­er­a­tions.”

    The Arc­tic is an inte­gral part of Russia’s econ­o­my and ter­ri­to­ry, its coast­line accounts for 53% of Arc­tic Ocean coast­line and the country’s pop­u­la­tion in the region totals rough­ly 2 mil­lion peo­ple — that’s around half of the peo­ple liv­ing in the Arc­tic world­wide, accord­ing to the Arc­tic Insti­tute, a cen­ter for cir­cum­po­lar secu­ri­ty stud­ies.

    Alex­ei Chekunkov, Russia’s min­is­ter for devel­op­ment of the Russ­ian Far East and Arc­tic, said in June that “the Arc­tic is the engine of eco­nom­ic growth. It accounts for 10% of our GDP and 20% of our exports” and Rus­sia is aware of sus­tain­abil­i­ty in the region; the theme for Russia’s chair­man­ship of the Arc­tic Coun­cil, a posi­tion it will hold until 2023, is “Respon­si­ble Gov­er­nance for a Sus­tain­able Arc­tic.

    Sus­tain­abil­i­ty is a big ques­tion for the region, which is being stark­ly affect­ed by cli­mate change: The Arc­tic is warm­ing about twice as fast as the glob­al aver­age, accord­ing to the Nor­we­gian Polar Insti­tute, which has warned that “sig­nif­i­cant region­al warm­ing leads to con­tin­ued loss of sea ice, melt­ing of glac­i­ers and of the Green­land ice cap” with dras­tic con­se­quences for humans and nature in the region, and the world.

    ...

    ———–

    “After the gas cri­sis, the Arc­tic could be Rus­sia and Europe’s next flash­point” by Hol­ly Elly­att; CNBC; 10/15/2021

    “On Wednes­day, the EU put for­ward pro­pos­als that could see it push­ing to ban the tap­ping of new oil, coal and gas deposits in the Arc­tic in an effort, it said, to pro­tect the region from fur­ther dis­rup­tive cli­mate change.”

    A ban on the top­ping of new oil, coal, and gas deposits in the Arc­tic. Good luck with that! For real. It would be great for the future if the EU’s ban on Arc­tic gas was imple­ment­ed. But Rus­sia clear­ly has a very dif­fer­ent view on any such Arc­tic bans, which isn’t very sur­pris­ing giv­en how much of Rus­sia tech­ni­cal falls in the Arc­tic. Plus, when it comes to coun­tries that might poten­tial­ly ben­e­fit from a warm­ing plan­et, Rus­sia has to be near the top of the list. Any chance of keep­ing those mas­sive Arc­tic deposits in the ground and out of the atmos­phere is going to require Rus­si­a’s coop­er­a­tion:

    ...
    Rus­sia, a major hold­er of Arc­tic ter­ri­to­ry where an abun­dance of its hydro­car­bon and fish stocks are found, is not too pleased with the pro­pos­als with Russia’s Deputy Prime Min­is­ter Alexan­der Novak telling CNBC Thurs­day that they were polit­i­cal­ly-moti­vat­ed and non­sen­si­cal.

    ” I was a bit sur­prised when I heard about this yes­ter­day. Why the Arc­tic, why not the Equa­tor? One could come up with a num­ber of places in the world where oil and gas pro­duc­tion must be banned,” he told CNBC’s Hadley Gam­ble at the Russ­ian Ener­gy Week con­fer­ence in Moscow, accord­ing to a trans­la­tion.

    “This pro­pos­al has no oth­er moti­va­tion than polit­i­cal,” he added. “What do these state­ments tell us — that we need to stop extract­ing the entire gas pro­duced at the moment? I think that the authors of these pro­pos­als have very lit­tle under­stand­ing of the real state of affairs,” he said.

    ...

    Unlike Rus­sia, the EU is a com­par­a­tive­ly new play­er in the Arc­tic and the bloc, per se, is not a mem­ber of the Arc­tic Coun­cil, an inter­gov­ern­men­tal forum to pro­vide a means for pro­mot­ing coop­er­a­tion, coor­di­na­tion and inter­ac­tion among the Arc­tic States, although the Coun­cil includes the EU mem­ber states Den­mark, Fin­land and Swe­den.

    The EU appears to be look­ing to increase its role in the region, how­ev­er, and in a pro­pos­al moot­ed by the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion on Wednes­day, it not­ed that “the Arc­tic region is of major strate­gic impor­tance for the Euro­pean Union, with regard to cli­mate change, raw mate­ri­als as well as geostrate­gic influ­ence.”

    ...

    The Arc­tic is an inte­gral part of Russia’s econ­o­my and ter­ri­to­ry, its coast­line accounts for 53% of Arc­tic Ocean coast­line and the country’s pop­u­la­tion in the region totals rough­ly 2 mil­lion peo­ple — that’s around half of the peo­ple liv­ing in the Arc­tic world­wide, accord­ing to the Arc­tic Insti­tute, a cen­ter for cir­cum­po­lar secu­ri­ty stud­ies.
    ...

    The New Cold War is going to heat up whether we like it or not. Sig­nif­i­cant cli­mate change is already in the cards even if civ­i­liza­tion imple­ment­ed the rad­i­cal changes experts warn are nec­es­sary to avoid cat­a­stroph­ic dis­rup­tions ecosys­tems and the col­lapse of the bios­phere. Lim­it­ing cli­mate change to a mod­er­ate cat­a­stro­phe, as opposed to an exis­ten­tial cat­a­stro­phe, is the best case sce­nario we’re look­ing at. A best case sce­nario that is look­ing increas­ing­ly unre­al­is­tic as the prospect for glob­al coop­er­a­tion con­tin­ue to fade.

    So as the West tries to decide whether or not to back peace talks between Rus­sia and Ukraine vs adopt­ing a strat­e­gy of long-term iso­la­tion in the hopes of foment­ing some sort of Russ­ian regime change, it’s going to be worth keep in mind the numer­ous issues of glob­al impor­tance that require Russ­ian coop­er­a­tion now. It’s just one exam­ple of the mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ty costs to the world that comes with an extend­ed peri­od of Russ­ian iso­la­tion.

    And on a grim side note, if any­one is hop­ing that the nuclear win­ter from a lim­it­ed nuclear exchange might be the sil­ver bul­let human­i­ty needs to off­set glob­al warm­ing, yes, a nuclear win­ter would indeed low­er tem­per­a­tures. But prob­a­bly only for a few decades, at which point it’s off to the races again. Don’t get your hopes up.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 19, 2022, 3:55 pm
  4. What did Big Oil know and when did it know it? It’s not just a grow­ing moral ques­tion as the process of cli­mate change con­tin­ues to play out. As the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, it’s a ques­tion at the heart of a legal strat­e­gy that just might suc­ceed in forc­ing Big Oil to at least pay some sort of price for the cat­a­stroph­ic dam­age wrought by cli­mate change. Cli­mate change that Big Oil was ful­ly aware was the inevitable result of ris­ing CO2 lev­els.

    So how is the ‘what did they know and when did they know it?’ ques­tion going to be resolved in the courts? It’s all thanks to a 1968 study pro­duced by the Stan­ford Research Insti­tute (SRI) com­mis­sioned on behalf of the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute (API). And that paper did­n’t just explic­it­ly lay out the dire glob­al con­se­quences of ris­ing CO2 lev­els, but it did so with star­tling­ly accu­ra­cy, pre­dict­ing CO2 lev­els of 370 parts per mil­lion by the year 2000. The mea­sured lev­els were in fact 369.71 at the begin­ning of that year.

    The fact that the 1968 SRI study was com­mis­sions by the API was­n’t an anom­aly. As the arti­cle describes, the SRI was inter­twined with the indus­try oil and gas indus­try from its begin­ning. In fact, indus­try stud­ies were often com­mis­sioned for the pur­pose of pro­vid­ing mate­ri­als that could be used to defend the indus­try from law­suits. That’s part what makes the now noto­ri­ous 1968 SRI so com­pelling: This was the indus­try warn­ing itself about its own the poten­tial impact on the future. Warn­ings that were obvi­ous­ly ignored with severe and grow­ing con­se­quences. Along with severe and ongo­ing prof­its.

    Will any of those indus­tries end up pay­ing any sort of price for those decades of dia­bol­i­cal prof­its? We’ll see, but that’s the hope of The Cen­ter for Inter­na­tion­al Envi­ron­men­tal Law, which first dis­cov­ered and pub­lished that 1968 SRI paper back in 2016, result­ing in a wave of over two dozen law­suits against the oil indus­try by states and local­i­ties. It’s that over­all dynam­ic — many dif­fer­ent law­suits that could even­tu­al­ly result in indus­try-wide pay­outs — that have advo­cates hope­ful that they final­ly have the legal path to forc­ing the most prof­itable indus­try on the plan­et to pay for its his­toric ongo­ing crimes. And it’s those same prospects for suc­cess that has the indus­try pres­sur­ing the Supreme Court to get all of these state and local law­suits thrown into the fed­er­al courts, great­ly reduc­ing the num­ber of poten­tial cas­es and odds of a vic­to­ry.

    Keep in mind that the SRI did­n’t for­mal­ly sep­a­rate from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty until 1970, so that 1968 paper was pub­lished as part of the Uni­ver­si­ty’s work. So with Stan­ford already fac­ing ques­tions about its ongo­ing hon­or­ing of Nazi war crim­i­nals like Alfried Krupp, it’s worth keep­ing in mind that there’s anoth­er ongo­ing crime against human­i­ty the uni­ver­si­ty helped cov­er up for decades. After all, it’s not like it was Stan­ford that noti­fied the world about this damn­ing study. Nor was the study locked away in pri­vate archives. It was just sit­ting there for decades, seem­ing­ly for­got­ten and ignored for years, even after its omi­nous­ly accu­rate year 2000 pre­dic­tion. Stan­ford and the SRI did­n’t share this with the world. It was the envi­ron­men­tal activists who dug the study up in 2016. It was­n’t locked away in a vault this whole time. That’s part of the sto­ry here too. Who else knew about this study? We don’t know, so let’s hope one of the dozens of ongo­ing law­suits cen­tered around this damn­ing 1968 SRI study helps us find out:

    Yale Envi­ron­ment 360

    How an Ear­ly Oil Indus­try Study Became Key in Cli­mate Law­suits

    For decades, 1960s research for the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute warn­ing of the risks of burn­ing fos­sil fuels had been for­got­ten. But two papers dis­cov­ered in libraries are now play­ing a key role in law­suits aimed at hold­ing oil com­pa­nies account­able for cli­mate change.

    By Beth Gar­diner • Novem­ber 30, 2022

    Car­roll Muf­fett began won­der­ing in 2008 when the world’s biggest oil com­pa­nies had first under­stood the sci­ence of cli­mate change and their product’s role in caus­ing it. A lawyer then work­ing as a con­sul­tant to envi­ron­men­tal groups, he start­ed research­ing the ques­tion at night and on week­ends, order­ing decades-old reports, books, and mag­a­zines off Ama­zon and eBay, or from aca­d­e­m­ic libraries.

    It became a years-long quest, and as he pressed on, Muf­fett noticed one report kept com­ing up in the foot­notes of the mem­os and papers he was por­ing through — a 1968 paper com­mis­sioned by the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute, the pow­er­ful fos­sil fuel trade group, and writ­ten by Elmer Robin­son and Bob Rob­bins, sci­en­tists at the Stan­ford Research Insti­tute, known as SRI. Muf­fett wasn’t sure what it said, but it was cit­ed so often he knew there must be some­thing big in it. Then part of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, SRI wasn’t an ordi­nary depart­ment, but a con­tract research out­fit that had been inter­twined from its found­ing with oil and gas inter­ests. The paper had been deliv­ered pri­vate­ly to the petro­le­um insti­tute, not pub­lished like typ­i­cal aca­d­e­m­ic work, and only a few copies had spilled into the pub­lic realm. Long since for­got­ten, they had been gath­er­ing dust in a hand­ful of uni­ver­si­ty libraries. Even­tu­al­ly, through an inter­li­brary loan, Muf­fett man­aged to get a hold of one.

    “Once I actu­al­ly opened it, it was imme­di­ate­ly clear how pro­found­ly impor­tant it was,” he remem­bers. “It was absolute­ly a jaw drop moment.” This was the ear­li­est, most detailed and most direct evi­dence Muf­fett had yet seen that the industry’s own experts had warned its largest trade orga­ni­za­tion, not just an indi­vid­ual com­pa­ny, “that the sci­ence around cli­mate change was clear, it was abun­dant, and that the best indi­ca­tions were that the risks were real­ly sub­stan­tial.” The paper’s deliv­ery date put it well before Exxon’s exten­sive 1970s research into cli­mate risks.

    In stark terms, the decades-old paper explained that the world’s use of fos­sil fuels was releas­ing car­bon that had been buried for mil­len­nia, and “it is like­ly that notice­able increas­es in tem­per­a­ture could occur,” if that burn­ing con­tin­ued. That would mean warm­ing oceans, melt­ing ice caps, and sea lev­els that could rise by as much as four feet per decade, the report pre­dict­ed. “There seems to be no doubt that the poten­tial dam­age to our envi­ron­ment could be severe,” the authors con­clud­ed. “The prospect for the future must be of seri­ous con­cern.”

    The Cen­ter for Inter­na­tion­al Envi­ron­men­tal Law, an advo­ca­cy group Muf­fett now runs, pub­lished excerpts in 2016. Now, the paper — along with a fol­low-up that Robin­son and Rob­bins pro­duced in 1969 — is play­ing a key role in a wave of law­suits seek­ing to hold oil com­pa­nies account­able for cli­mate change.

    Min­neso­ta, Delaware, Rhode Island, Bal­ti­more, and Hon­olu­lu are among about two dozen U.S. states and local­i­ties suing the indus­try. Some of the cas­es seek com­pen­sa­tion for the dam­age wrought by cli­mate-dri­ven dis­as­ters like floods, fires, and heat waves, plus the cost of prepar­ing for future impacts. Oth­ers allege vio­la­tions of state or local laws pro­hibit­ing fraud and oth­er deceit­ful busi­ness prac­tices, or requir­ing com­pa­nies to warn con­sumers of a product’s poten­tial dan­gers. The defen­dants, which vary from case to case, include the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute as well as major com­pa­nies such as Exxon­Mo­bil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and Cono­coPhillips.

    The suits’ com­mon thread is the charge that the indus­try has long under­stood emis­sions from oil and gas com­bus­tion would dri­ve warm­ing — and cre­ate a host of major glob­al risks — but car­ried out a decades-long mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign to con­fuse the pub­lic and pre­vent a shift to clean­er fuels. Most cite Robin­son and Rob­bins’ work. The pair’s reports have been prof­fered inter­na­tion­al­ly too, most notably in a Dutch case in which a court last year ordered Shell to slash its car­bon emis­sions by 45 per­cent by 2030; the com­pa­ny is appeal­ing. Euro­pean courts have been more favor­able for cas­es seek­ing to force such reduc­tions or push gov­ern­ments to strength­en cli­mate poli­cies, while U.S. suits gen­er­al­ly aim at extract­ing finan­cial penal­ties or com­pen­sa­tion from com­pa­nies.

    Last month, New Jer­sey became the most recent state to sue. “As a result of the fos­sil fuel industry’s lies and deceit, the State has paid bil­lions of dol­lars to clean up cli­mate change-induced dis­as­ters like Super­storm Sandy; to for­ti­fy the Jer­sey Shore from future storms; and to pro­tect its peo­ple, busi­ness­es, infra­struc­ture, and nat­ur­al resources from a myr­i­ad of oth­er cli­mate change haz­ards,” its com­plaint charged. “It is time to halt this decep­tive con­duct and place respon­si­bil­i­ty for rem­e­dy­ing its effects on Defen­dants, where it belongs, rather than the tax­pay­ers of New Jer­sey.”

    There’s plen­ty of evi­dence of fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies’ ear­ly aware­ness of cli­mate risks, some now even pre­dat­ing 1968 — indeed, the sci­ence was already a mat­ter of pub­lic dis­cus­sion in the mid-1960s — and the Robin­son and Rob­bins papers are just two of many doc­u­ments the court fil­ings mar­shal. Oth­ers include Inside Cli­mate News ’ and the Los Ange­les Times ’ 2015 reports on Exxon’s inter­nal cli­mate research and its use of that sci­ence to pre­pare its assets to with­stand dan­gers such as ris­ing seas and inten­si­fy­ing storms. Those inves­ti­ga­tions focused main­ly on the 1970s and lat­er — after the papers by Robin­son and Rob­bins were writ­ten.

    But those papers pack a unique punch that goes beyond just their ear­ly dates, said Richard Wiles, pres­i­dent of the Cen­ter for Cli­mate Integri­ty, an advo­ca­cy group that works with local­i­ties con­sid­er­ing cli­mate lit­i­ga­tion: The indus­try “can’t say they didn’t know when they com­mis­sioned the study.” That will be key if any of the pend­ing cas­es reach­es tri­al, said Patrick Par­enteau, emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor and senior cli­mate pol­i­cy fel­low at Ver­mont Law School. “There’s going to be a fero­cious fight over evi­dence, and the valid­i­ty, the admis­si­bil­i­ty, of these var­i­ous doc­u­ments,” accord­ing to Par­enteau, and the Robin­son and Rob­bins’ papers’ direct link to indus­try makes it more like­ly a judge would admit them.

    The involve­ment of the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute — whose mem­bers include near­ly all the biggest oil pro­duc­ers — also widens the scope of know­ing cul­pa­bil­i­ty well beyond Exxon­Mo­bil, the com­pa­ny for which the most detailed evi­dence of ear­ly knowl­edge of cli­mate sci­ence exists, said Wiles.

    ...

    While the idea of lit­i­gat­ing over a prob­lem as big as cli­mate change may seem like a leap, “this is clas­sic prod­uct lia­bil­i­ty law,” Par­enteau said. “The law’s not nov­el at all. The law is plain vanil­la. The con­se­quences are huge. The stakes are enor­mous — that’s what makes [the cas­es] dif­fer­ent.”

    *******

    It was World War II that start­ed Elmer Robin­son on his career in mete­o­rol­o­gy. He had been a math major at UCLA, but the coun­try need­ed nav­i­ga­tors for bomb­ing runs in the Pacif­ic, and he looked like a promis­ing can­di­date for the U.S. armed forces. So he soon found him­self study­ing the intri­ca­cies of weath­er pat­terns and the atmos­phere. The atom­ic bomb­ing of Japan end­ed the war just as he was prepar­ing to ship out, but the train­ing stuck. With­in a few years, Robin­son was a mete­o­rol­o­gy and atmos­pher­ic sci­ence spe­cial­ist at the Stan­ford Research Insti­tute.

    By the 1960s, he was head­ing SRI’s envi­ron­men­tal research depart­ment, work­ing from a run-down wood­en build­ing on the edge of cam­pus. Despite the title, he was no green cru­sad­er. SRI pro­vid­ed stud­ies for hire for com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ment agen­cies and would even­tu­al­ly spin off from the uni­ver­si­ty to become an inde­pen­dent, non­prof­it research group. “The prime respon­si­bil­i­ty of Stan­ford Research Insti­tute is to serve indus­try,” a book­let tout­ing its work declared.

    A pho­to­graph from the late ‘60s shows Robin­son, broad and husky, with a bushy goa­tee and tweedy jack­et, stand­ing beside Rob­bins, a slim­mer col­league with slicked-back hair who had exper­tise in chem­istry. The Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute hired the pair to exam­ine what ulti­mate­ly became of the pol­lu­tion that the burn­ing of fos­sil fuels cre­at­ed. Cor­po­rate clients often looked to the insti­tute for help under­stand­ing their envi­ron­men­tal impact — in part, says Don­ald Niel­son, author of A Her­itage of Inno­va­tion: SRI’s First Half Cen­tu­ry, so they would be ready if they ever had to defend them­selves in court.

    The report Robin­son and Rob­bins deliv­ered — its ungain­ly title was “Sources, Abun­dance, and Fate of Gaseous Atmos­pher­ic Pol­lu­tants“ — was thor­ough and detailed, 123 pages long. They sur­veyed six dif­fer­ent pol­lu­tants, five of which were harm­ful main­ly to those who breathed them, or to crops and oth­er plant life. The sixth, car­bon diox­ide, posed a dif­fer­ent prob­lem, Robin­son and Rob­bins explained. Many didn’t even think of it as a pol­lu­tant, they wrote, a per­spec­tive that was “per­haps for­tu­nate for our present mode of liv­ing, cen­tered as it is around car­bon com­bus­tion.” But the men believed it belonged in their review because it was “the only air pol­lu­tant which has proven to be of glob­al impor­tance.”

    It was iron­ic, they not­ed, that while much atten­tion had focused on pol­lu­tants whose dam­age was local and dis­crete, almost no one seemed con­cerned about car­bon dioxide’s poten­tial to wreak hav­oc on a far wider scale. That dynam­ic had shaped efforts to reduce pol­lu­tion, they not­ed, as bet­ter tech­nol­o­gy began clean­ing up the country’s air. “What is lack­ing,” Robin­son and Rob­bins wrote, was “work towards sys­tems in which CO2 emis­sions would be brought under con­trol.”

    Their sci­ence wasn’t ground-break­ing — what Robin­son and Rob­bins pro­vid­ed was sim­ply a clear-eyed dis­til­la­tion of an emerg­ing con­sen­sus. In 1965, in a mes­sage to Con­gress, Pres­i­dent Lyn­don John­son, whose sci­en­tif­ic advi­sors warned him about cli­mate change, had writ­ten that “this gen­er­a­tion has altered the com­po­si­tion of the atmos­phere on a glob­al scale” in part because of “a steady increase in car­bon diox­ide from the burn­ing of fos­sil fuels.”

    Read­ing that pres­i­den­tial let­ter was what had prompt­ed Car­roll Muf­fett to begin the dig­ging that led him to Robin­son and Rob­bins’ reports. When the White House is rais­ing con­cerns about your product’s impact on the plan­et, he remem­bers won­der­ing, “what respon­si­ble CEO or cor­po­rate exec­u­tive doesn’t know every­thing” about the issue in ques­tion?

    So he start­ed read­ing cor­po­rate his­to­ries, notes from con­fer­ences — any­thing that helped him under­stand how oil and gas com­pa­nies worked and what they cared about. “This stuff was pub­licly avail­able in the sense that it was not locked away in a vault,” he explains. But it was hard to find, tucked behind pay­walls in cor­po­rate and sci­en­tif­ic archives, or couched in obscure lan­guage that made search­ing dif­fi­cult. “There was a lot of infor­ma­tion hid­ing out there in plain sight.”

    When he final­ly got his hands on Robin­son and Rob­bins’ first report, he under­stood the legal con­se­quences imme­di­ate­ly. While even ear­li­er doc­u­men­ta­tion has since emerged, at the time the SRI paper was the ear­li­est — and most direct — evi­dence Muf­fett had seen that indus­try lead­ers were aware of the dan­gers con­tin­ued fos­sil fuel use could pose. With­in a few weeks of releas­ing details of the paper — Inside Cli­mate News also report­ed his find­ing — Muf­fett recalls, “I had a lawyer call­ing me say­ing, ‘Can you send me a copy?’”=

    And there was more. Muf­fett had been see­ing men­tions of a sup­ple­ment Robin­son and Rob­bins wrote in 1969, a year after their main report. It was even hard­er to track down than the orig­i­nal paper, but through a chain of inter-library loans, his team at the Cen­ter for Inter­na­tion­al Envi­ron­men­tal Law, which had joined him in the search, even­tu­al­ly man­aged to get their hands on “like, the one copy of this thing that we could find in the Unit­ed States.”

    It seemed the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute had asked for more, and this time, the sci­en­tists offered even greater detail. They cit­ed mod­els pre­dict­ing atmos­pher­ic car­bon diox­ide would reach 370 parts per mil­lion by 2000 — aston­ish­ing­ly close to the actu­al read­ing of 369.71 at millennium’s end. Such an increase, they said, would raise glob­al tem­per­a­tures by 0.5 degrees Cel­sius; that was on the mon­ey too. Polar ice cap melt­ing caused by fur­ther warm­ing, Robin­son and Rob­bins wrote, “would obvi­ous­ly result in inun­da­tion of coastal areas.”

    *************

    With the world now watch­ing the dan­gers Robin­son and Rob­bins antic­i­pat­ed play out, the U.S. law­suits cit­ing their work face an uncer­tain legal path. Indus­try has been push­ing to move them to fed­er­al court, where its lawyers argue the Clean Air Act is the only valid tool for reg­u­lat­ing green­house gas­es.

    “This glob­al chal­lenge does not lend itself to a patch­work of base­less law­suits in state courts pur­suant to state laws,” Chevron lawyer Theodore Boutrous said last month. Judges have so far ruled against the com­pa­nies on that impor­tant pro­ce­dur­al issue, repeat­ed­ly return­ing the suits to state courts, which are seen as more favor­able to plain­tiffs. Now the U.S. Supreme Court is weigh­ing com­pa­nies’ request that it inter­vene to move the cas­es to fed­er­al court. The jus­tices have asked the Jus­tice Depart­ment for its view before decid­ing.

    If the cas­es even­tu­al­ly get before state court juries, advo­cates for the lit­i­ga­tion strat­e­gy con­tend they could extract mas­sive dam­ages — or big set­tle­ments — from indus­try, as hap­pened in lit­i­ga­tion over tobac­co, opi­oids, and asbestos. Like the cli­mate suits, those cas­es alleged “cor­po­rate decep­tion lev­eled at the pub­lic for decades, result­ing in a huge cost to all soci­ety,” said Ben Fran­ta, senior cli­mate lit­i­ga­tion research fel­low at Oxford University’s Smith School of Enter­prise and the Envi­ron­ment, who has advised some cli­mate plain­tiffs. They “are good exam­ples that the legal sys­tem can take on big soci­etal harms that the oth­er branch­es of gov­ern­ment frankly are just not address­ing.”

    The law­suits could accel­er­ate a clean ener­gy tran­si­tion by scar­ing invest­ment away from oil and gas. If fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies are forced “to inter­nal­ize even a frac­tion of the dam­age that they cause to soci­ety through glob­al warm­ing,” Fran­ta said, “then that com­plete­ly changes the com­mer­cial attrac­tive­ness of these com­pa­nies as invest­ments. Their lit­i­ga­tion expo­sure could be enor­mous, ulti­mate­ly.”

    And win­ning dam­ages could make a big dif­fer­ence to munic­i­pal­i­ties strug­gling to find the resources to cope with cli­mate-fueled dis­as­ters and pre­pare for worse, Wiles said. For many, it boils down to ques­tions like “are we going to build a senior cen­ter, or are we going to build a sea wall,” he said. “It’s just a fair­ness issue. This is just ‘pol­luter pays.’”

    But the cas­es are like­ly to drag on for years, and the fight is sure to be bru­tal. “It’s like a horse race at this point” among the many law­suits, Par­enteau said. “Who will be able to go the dis­tance against the biggest com­pa­nies in the world, who are now big­ger and rich­er than they’ve ever been, and who have an open check­book” for fight­ing suits that could crip­ple them finan­cial­ly — and don’t hes­i­tate to hit back at those who sue them, he said. “The stars have real­ly got to align for these plain­tiffs to win a big tick­et ver­dict.”

    ...

    ———

    “How an Ear­ly Oil Indus­try Study Became Key in Cli­mate Law­suits” By Beth Gar­diner; Yale Envi­ron­ment 360; 11/30/2022

    If the cas­es even­tu­al­ly get before state court juries, advo­cates for the lit­i­ga­tion strat­e­gy con­tend they could extract mas­sive dam­ages — or big set­tle­ments — from indus­try, as hap­pened in lit­i­ga­tion over tobac­co, opi­oids, and asbestos. Like the cli­mate suits, those cas­es alleged “cor­po­rate decep­tion lev­eled at the pub­lic for decades, result­ing in a huge cost to all soci­ety,” said Ben Fran­ta, senior cli­mate lit­i­ga­tion research fel­low at Oxford University’s Smith School of Enter­prise and the Envi­ron­ment, who has advised some cli­mate plain­tiffs. They “are good exam­ples that the legal sys­tem can take on big soci­etal harms that the oth­er branch­es of gov­ern­ment frankly are just not address­ing.””

    The stakes almost could­n’t be high­er for Big Oil: If indi­vid­ual states start wag­ing class action law­suits over cli­mate change, it’s just a mat­ter of time before one of those states scores a big legal vic­to­ry. The kind of legal vic­to­ry that threat­ens the entire indus­try. That’s the poten­tial sig­nif­i­cance of the legal strat­e­gy cur­rent­ly being pur­sued by the Car­roll Muf­fett and The Cen­ter for Inter­na­tion­al Envi­ron­men­tal Law. A strat­e­gy cen­tered around a 1968 paper com­mis­sions by the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute and pro­duced by Elmer Robin­son and Bob Rob­bins at the Stan­ford Research Insti­tute. A paper that deliv­ered an unam­bigu­ous warn­ing about the glob­al con­se­quences of ris­ing CO2 lev­els, pro­duced for an indus­try trade group. It was­n’t just Exxon­Mo­bile. That paper was com­mis­sions for the entire US petro­le­um indus­try. And the SRI was­n’t just some inde­pen­dent aca­d­e­m­ic out­fit. It was basi­cal­ly work­ing on behalf of the oil and gas indus­try, even pro­vid­ing them with stud­ies they could use to defend them­selves from law­suits. That’s all part of what makes this 1968 paper such a big deal. It opens an invalu­able legal avenue for any­one pur­su­ing some sort of indus­try-wide com­pen­sa­tion for the incred­i­ble dam­age done:

    ...
    It became a years-long quest, and as he pressed on, Muf­fett noticed one report kept com­ing up in the foot­notes of the mem­os and papers he was por­ing through — a 1968 paper com­mis­sioned by the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute, the pow­er­ful fos­sil fuel trade group, and writ­ten by Elmer Robin­son and Bob Rob­bins, sci­en­tists at the Stan­ford Research Insti­tute, known as SRI. Muf­fett wasn’t sure what it said, but it was cit­ed so often he knew there must be some­thing big in it. Then part of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, SRI wasn’t an ordi­nary depart­ment, but a con­tract research out­fit that had been inter­twined from its found­ing with oil and gas inter­ests. The paper had been deliv­ered pri­vate­ly to the petro­le­um insti­tute, not pub­lished like typ­i­cal aca­d­e­m­ic work, and only a few copies had spilled into the pub­lic realm. Long since for­got­ten, they had been gath­er­ing dust in a hand­ful of uni­ver­si­ty libraries. Even­tu­al­ly, through an inter­li­brary loan, Muf­fett man­aged to get a hold of one.

    “Once I actu­al­ly opened it, it was imme­di­ate­ly clear how pro­found­ly impor­tant it was,” he remem­bers. “It was absolute­ly a jaw drop moment.” This was the ear­li­est, most detailed and most direct evi­dence Muf­fett had yet seen that the industry’s own experts had warned its largest trade orga­ni­za­tion, not just an indi­vid­ual com­pa­ny, “that the sci­ence around cli­mate change was clear, it was abun­dant, and that the best indi­ca­tions were that the risks were real­ly sub­stan­tial.” The paper’s deliv­ery date put it well before Exxon’s exten­sive 1970s research into cli­mate risks.

    In stark terms, the decades-old paper explained that the world’s use of fos­sil fuels was releas­ing car­bon that had been buried for mil­len­nia, and “it is like­ly that notice­able increas­es in tem­per­a­ture could occur,” if that burn­ing con­tin­ued. That would mean warm­ing oceans, melt­ing ice caps, and sea lev­els that could rise by as much as four feet per decade, the report pre­dict­ed. “There seems to be no doubt that the poten­tial dam­age to our envi­ron­ment could be severe,” the authors con­clud­ed. “The prospect for the future must be of seri­ous con­cern.”

    ...

    There’s plen­ty of evi­dence of fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies’ ear­ly aware­ness of cli­mate risks, some now even pre­dat­ing 1968 — indeed, the sci­ence was already a mat­ter of pub­lic dis­cus­sion in the mid-1960s — and the Robin­son and Rob­bins papers are just two of many doc­u­ments the court fil­ings mar­shal. Oth­ers include Inside Cli­mate News ’ and the Los Ange­les Times ’ 2015 reports on Exxon’s inter­nal cli­mate research and its use of that sci­ence to pre­pare its assets to with­stand dan­gers such as ris­ing seas and inten­si­fy­ing storms. Those inves­ti­ga­tions focused main­ly on the 1970s and lat­er — after the papers by Robin­son and Rob­bins were writ­ten.

    But those papers pack a unique punch that goes beyond just their ear­ly dates, said Richard Wiles, pres­i­dent of the Cen­ter for Cli­mate Integri­ty, an advo­ca­cy group that works with local­i­ties con­sid­er­ing cli­mate lit­i­ga­tion: The indus­try “can’t say they didn’t know when they com­mis­sioned the study.” That will be key if any of the pend­ing cas­es reach­es tri­al, said Patrick Par­enteau, emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor and senior cli­mate pol­i­cy fel­low at Ver­mont Law School. “There’s going to be a fero­cious fight over evi­dence, and the valid­i­ty, the admis­si­bil­i­ty, of these var­i­ous doc­u­ments,” accord­ing to Par­enteau, and the Robin­son and Rob­bins’ papers’ direct link to indus­try makes it more like­ly a judge would admit them.

    The involve­ment of the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute — whose mem­bers include near­ly all the biggest oil pro­duc­ers — also widens the scope of know­ing cul­pa­bil­i­ty well beyond Exxon­Mo­bil, the com­pa­ny for which the most detailed evi­dence of ear­ly knowl­edge of cli­mate sci­ence exists, said Wiles.
    ...

    As the arti­cle notes, even the SRI’s own mate­ri­als tout­ed the fact that “The prime respon­si­bil­i­ty of Stan­ford Research Insti­tute is to serve indus­try.” But a far more com­pelling detail is the fact that this 1968 paper was just sum­ma­riz­ing what was already the con­sen­sus sci­en­tif­ic opin­ion on the con­se­quences of ris­ing CO2 lev­els. Tak­en togeth­er, the indus­try’s pri­or aware­ness of the incred­i­ble envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion it was going to cause is just unde­ni­able:

    ...
    It was World War II that start­ed Elmer Robin­son on his career in mete­o­rol­o­gy. He had been a math major at UCLA, but the coun­try need­ed nav­i­ga­tors for bomb­ing runs in the Pacif­ic, and he looked like a promis­ing can­di­date for the U.S. armed forces. So he soon found him­self study­ing the intri­ca­cies of weath­er pat­terns and the atmos­phere. The atom­ic bomb­ing of Japan end­ed the war just as he was prepar­ing to ship out, but the train­ing stuck. With­in a few years, Robin­son was a mete­o­rol­o­gy and atmos­pher­ic sci­ence spe­cial­ist at the Stan­ford Research Insti­tute.

    By the 1960s, he was head­ing SRI’s envi­ron­men­tal research depart­ment, work­ing from a run-down wood­en build­ing on the edge of cam­pus. Despite the title, he was no green cru­sad­er. SRI pro­vid­ed stud­ies for hire for com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ment agen­cies and would even­tu­al­ly spin off from the uni­ver­si­ty to become an inde­pen­dent, non­prof­it research group. “The prime respon­si­bil­i­ty of Stan­ford Research Insti­tute is to serve indus­try,” a book­let tout­ing its work declared.

    A pho­to­graph from the late ‘60s shows Robin­son, broad and husky, with a bushy goa­tee and tweedy jack­et, stand­ing beside Rob­bins, a slim­mer col­league with slicked-back hair who had exper­tise in chem­istry. The Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute hired the pair to exam­ine what ulti­mate­ly became of the pol­lu­tion that the burn­ing of fos­sil fuels cre­at­ed. Cor­po­rate clients often looked to the insti­tute for help under­stand­ing their envi­ron­men­tal impact — in part, says Don­ald Niel­son, author of A Her­itage of Inno­va­tion: SRI’s First Half Cen­tu­ry, so they would be ready if they ever had to defend them­selves in court.

    The report Robin­son and Rob­bins deliv­ered — its ungain­ly title was “Sources, Abun­dance, and Fate of Gaseous Atmos­pher­ic Pol­lu­tants“ — was thor­ough and detailed, 123 pages long. They sur­veyed six dif­fer­ent pol­lu­tants, five of which were harm­ful main­ly to those who breathed them, or to crops and oth­er plant life. The sixth, car­bon diox­ide, posed a dif­fer­ent prob­lem, Robin­son and Rob­bins explained. Many didn’t even think of it as a pol­lu­tant, they wrote, a per­spec­tive that was “per­haps for­tu­nate for our present mode of liv­ing, cen­tered as it is around car­bon com­bus­tion.” But the men believed it belonged in their review because it was “the only air pol­lu­tant which has proven to be of glob­al impor­tance.”

    It was iron­ic, they not­ed, that while much atten­tion had focused on pol­lu­tants whose dam­age was local and dis­crete, almost no one seemed con­cerned about car­bon dioxide’s poten­tial to wreak hav­oc on a far wider scale. That dynam­ic had shaped efforts to reduce pol­lu­tion, they not­ed, as bet­ter tech­nol­o­gy began clean­ing up the country’s air. “What is lack­ing,” Robin­son and Rob­bins wrote, was “work towards sys­tems in which CO2 emis­sions would be brought under con­trol.”

    Their sci­ence wasn’t ground-break­ing — what Robin­son and Rob­bins pro­vid­ed was sim­ply a clear-eyed dis­til­la­tion of an emerg­ing con­sen­sus. In 1965, in a mes­sage to Con­gress, Pres­i­dent Lyn­don John­son, whose sci­en­tif­ic advi­sors warned him about cli­mate change, had writ­ten that “this gen­er­a­tion has altered the com­po­si­tion of the atmos­phere on a glob­al scale” in part because of “a steady increase in car­bon diox­ide from the burn­ing of fos­sil fuels.”
    ...

    And then there’s the fact that this 1968 paper was not only pre­scient but shock­ing­ly accu­rate in its pre­dic­tions. It just under­scores how this was­n’t high­ly spec­u­la­tive sci­ence in that 1968 paper. This was rea­son­ably under­stood sci­ence that proved itself over time. It’s the kind of remark­able accu­ra­cy that rais­es the ques­tion: so what respon­si­bil­i­ty did the SRI itself feel in 2000 to warn the pub­lic about the alarm­ing­ly accu­rate pre­dic­tions made by its own sci­en­tists 32 years ear­li­er. The SRI knew what was pre­dict­ed and, more impor­tant­ly, knew that the petro­le­um indus­try knew too. What is the SRI’s own moral respon­si­bil­i­ty while it was silent­ly sit­ting on these stud­ies for decades while Big Oil con­tin­ued to play dumb?

    ...
    And there was more. Muf­fett had been see­ing men­tions of a sup­ple­ment Robin­son and Rob­bins wrote in 1969, a year after their main report. It was even hard­er to track down than the orig­i­nal paper, but through a chain of inter-library loans, his team at the Cen­ter for Inter­na­tion­al Envi­ron­men­tal Law, which had joined him in the search, even­tu­al­ly man­aged to get their hands on “like, the one copy of this thing that we could find in the Unit­ed States.”

    It seemed the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute had asked for more, and this time, the sci­en­tists offered even greater detail. They cit­ed mod­els pre­dict­ing atmos­pher­ic car­bon diox­ide would reach 370 parts per mil­lion by 2000 — aston­ish­ing­ly close to the actu­al read­ing of 369.71 at millennium’s end. Such an increase, they said, would raise glob­al tem­per­a­tures by 0.5 degrees Cel­sius; that was on the mon­ey too. Polar ice cap melt­ing caused by fur­ther warm­ing, Robin­son and Rob­bins wrote, “would obvi­ous­ly result in inun­da­tion of coastal areas.”
    ...

    Final­ly, note the omi­nous pos­si­ble fate of this mul­ti-state legal strat­e­gy: If Big Oil can con­vince the con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty on the Supreme Court to move the whole issue to the fed­er­al courts, the odds of a big vic­to­ry plum­met:

    ...
    “This glob­al chal­lenge does not lend itself to a patch­work of base­less law­suits in state courts pur­suant to state laws,” Chevron lawyer Theodore Boutrous said last month. Judges have so far ruled against the com­pa­nies on that impor­tant pro­ce­dur­al issue, repeat­ed­ly return­ing the suits to state courts, which are seen as more favor­able to plain­tiffs. Now the U.S. Supreme Court is weigh­ing com­pa­nies’ request that it inter­vene to move the cas­es to fed­er­al court. The jus­tices have asked the Jus­tice Depart­ment for its view before decid­ing.
    ...

    It would be nice to assume that the petro­le­um inter­ests aren’t going to have suc­cess at the Supreme Court. But that’s obvi­ous­ly not an assump­tion we can real­is­ti­cal­ly make giv­en the cur­rent make­up of the court. So who knows, maybe the indus­try will man­age to wrig­gle out of cul­pa­bil­i­ty for its wild­ly prof­itable crimes against human­i­ty one more time. That’s more or less what we should expect at this point. Along with a lot more cli­mate cat­a­stro­phes. And more wild prof­its that keep this machine of doom hum­ming along for the fore­see­able future. A cat­a­stroph­ic future that was clear­ly fore­seen by the inter­ests mak­ing these wild prof­its more than 50 years ago.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 21, 2022, 5:08 pm

Post a comment