A movement to prosecute fossil fuel companies with homicide is currently being considered along with legislation to hold them guilty of “fraud, deceptive advertising, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, conspiracy, racketeering...” according to an article in the New Republic.
“Climate change is not a tragedy, it’s a crime.” This refrain, increasingly common among climate activists, encapsulates rising moral outrage at major fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP as more information has come to light about their knowledge and conduct regarding global warming. The essential fact pattern is this: Fossil fuel companies have long understood—with shocking accuracy—that their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate change. Instead of shifting their business model or at least alerting the public to this threat, the companies concealed what they knew and executed a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign to spread doubt about climate science.
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The crime that best captures the nature, scale, and gravity of their misconduct in most jurisdictions might be homicide. In criminal law, homicide means causing a death with a culpable mental state. If someone substantially contributes to or accelerates a death, that counts as “causing” it. If they did so intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly, that counts as “culpable mental state.” So the basic questions in a climate homicide trial are as follows: Did fossil fuel companies substantially contribute to or accelerate deaths, and did they do so at least recklessly, if not knowingly or intentionally? These questions would be presented to a jury. If you think the jury should say “yes,” you’re not alone.
“Meat and dairy should be suing oil and gas”
Big Meat is looking more like Big Oil every day. A new study published in the journal Climatic Change finds that, much like fossil fuel industry, the animal agriculture industry has been creating and funding academic research institutions that claim the world doesn’t need to consume less of their products; that it’s not necessary to preserve a safe and livable climate.
That is, to be clear, not what non-industry funded research says. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—whose findings are compiled by hundreds of climate scientists and signed off on by 195 countries—has warned that the industry-preferred strategy of “technical fixes only” is not moving fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe. “Despite significant technical potential” for reductions in animal agriculture emissions, the IPCC says, “there is evidence that little progress has been made in the implementation of mitigation measures at the global scale.” This is extremely important, because even if fossil fuels were eliminated immediately, emissions from agriculture would still push global warming past safe levels. And meat and dairy make up most of agriculture emissions.
Climate-Science Deniers, Right-Wing Think Tanks, and Fossil Fuel Shills Are Plotting Against the Clean Energy Transition
The Sierra Club magazine discusses the “coordinated campaign to undermine climate solutions.”
For fossil fuel ideologues, sowing misinformation about wind and solar power is proving to be an effective stall tactic. Public opinion surveys show that renewable energy remains popular with a bipartisan majority of Americans; in a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, seven out of 10 people said they'd be comfortable with a wind farm in their own community. But in New Jersey—where Morano's group has gone so far as to buy billboards reading "Save Whales Stop Windmills"—nearly half of all the state's residents now believe that such a connection probably exists, according to an August poll from Monmouth University.
"There is absolutely zero evidence that any of the offshore wind activity has been involved in any of those strandings," says Douglas Nowacek, a professor of marine conservation technology at Duke University. Claims that noise from offshore wind surveys are driving whales into harm's way don't hold water, according to Nowacek—and it bears noting that seismic surveys for oil and gas are far louder. Many of the dead whales have borne signs of ship strikes or entanglement in fishing gear.
Yet in lawsuits challenging offshore wind projects, opponents continue to routinely cite alleged threats to whales...
Newly elected leaders to be held to same climate obligations, says Cop29 chief
Incoming governments of whatever stripe would still have to cope with the reality of the climate crisis, he [president of Cop29, Mukhtar Babayev] said, and the Azerbaijan presidency would hold them to their committments . “I think all countries will follow their obligations, and we will move to this direction,” he said. “I’m optimistic. We will do everything and will do our best to [ensure] all countries move in this direction.”
Noting that elections were taking place in many countries, Babayev declined to single out any specific states but acknowledged that the US election was “a very interesting process”.
It’s Official: America Is Experiencing a Solar Power Explosion Unmatched in History
When reading about climate change, good news is hard to come by—hard but not impossible. Take, for example, this new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association, which states that renewables hit a milestone not seen since World War II this year. The U.S. added 32.4 gigawatts of solar capacity, which shatters the 2021 record of 23.6 gigawatts. That represents 52 percent of all added energy capacity in the U.S., with natural gas coming in a distant second with only 18 percent.
According to the environmental website Grist, California and Texas led the charge, with large utility-scale solar projects going online in 2023.
The Ukraine War Blew Up the World’s Energy Economy
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics unpacks the underlying drivers of inflation into three main categories: food, fuel, and everything else. Throughout the most recent U.S. spike in inflation in 2022, the energy category alone was responsible for around half of total inflation. And that’s just counting the direct effects. Indirectly, a good portion of the food price increases ever since are also due to higher energy costs. If the farmer pays more to harvest the crop, soon those commodity prices increase as well.
Higher temperatures force New England fishers off ice early: ‘Global warming is real’
On a recent Tuesday in late February, with midwinter temperatures pushing into the balmy 50s, fishers on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnepocket were scrambling to pull their bob-houses off the rapidly melting ice.
Johnny Cutter and Ethan O’Neil rushed to slide their ice shanties off the lake with winches and tractor-like all terrain vehicles, before it got warm enough for them to fall through the ice.
“Global warming is real,” said Cutter, wading through puddles in his ice cleats. “I never thought it was, but it is.”
Methane leaks are three times worse than the EPA's official estimate
… the United States is now the biggest producer of methane pollution from oil and gas extraction, thanks to the Permian fracking boom, with actual leakage rate triple the official numbers. A new survey finds mega-emitters responsible for the lion’s share of the pollution.
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