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Two new studies about the fossil fuel industry were published this past week. The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) found that the G20 nations pumped $1.4 trillion into explicit subsidies for the industry in 2022. In its study the International Monetary Fund (IMF) put the explicit subsidy level at $1.3 trillion. But the IMF also calculated implicit fossil fuel subsidies. Those include failing to account for environmental and other social costs of fossil fuel burning. Though they are not easy to measure, social costs of extracting, refining, transporting, and burning fossil fuels are real, and when they are added in, total subsidies last year soared to $7 trillion, up by $2 trillion over 2020. All this as the oil giants rake in gobsmacking profits.
This comes as the bulk of the 197 countries that signed onto the 17 United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021 are failing to meet one the key goals—speeding up the phaseout of these “inefficient subsidies.” Just how environmentally impactful these subsidies are can be seen in the IMF’s calculation that dropping just the explicit ones and imposing taxes on environmental costs would, by 2030, cut global carbon dioxide emissions by 34% below 2019 levels.
Christopher Beaton, who researches sustainable energy consumption for IISD, told Leslie Kaufman at Bloomberg Green, “We are overflowing with government commitments to phase out support for fossil fuels, but there is a serious drought in implementation. During the last two years, at the international level, we have gone backwards.”
In June, there was a report from Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe—“The Dirty Dozen: The Climate Greenwashing of 12 European Oil Companies.” Its authors found that nearly 93% of the investments of six of the world’s largest oil companies are going into exploring for and producing more oil and gas, with just 7.3% going into “low-carbon solutions.”
Kuba Gogolewski, a finance campaigner at Greenpeace CEE, told Jake Johnson at Common Dreams that “as the world endures unprecedented heat waves, deadly floods, and escalating storms, Big Oil clings to its destructive business model and continues to fuel the climate crisis. Instead of providing desperately needed clean energy, they feed us greenwashing garbage. Big Oil’s unwillingness to implement real change is a crime against the climate and future generations. Governments need to stop enabling fossil fuel companies, heavily regulate them, and plan our fossil fuel phase-out now. They will never change on their own.”
The IISD authors note: “Helping households and businesses during an energy crisis is understandable and necessary, but there are better ways to do it than subsidizing fossil fuels, which keeps consumers locked into emissions-intensive, polluting, and price-volatile energy sources. Shifting support from fuels to people is fundamental for the sustainable implementation of G20 governments’ pledges to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.”
Sarah Schonhart at GreenWire reports:
“Environmental costs are just as real as supply costs,” [the IMF report] notes. They’re also projected to rise as energy demands grow in developing economies.
Removing direct fuel subsidies and implementing “corrective” measures, such as a carbon tax, could reduce global carbon dioxide emissions 43 percent by 2030, the IMF paper finds. That’s in line with what’s needed to stay within the temperature rise limits of the Paris climate agreement.
By not artificially bringing down the cost of polluting fuels, countries could also avoid around 1.6 million air pollution-related deaths each year by 2030, according to the paper.
Bad enough that the industry is determined to extract every drop of oil and every molecule of gas until it’s no longer technically feasible. But governments are putting up billions to help it happen. So expect more fracking and more offshore drilling, on private and public lands around the world, and continued greenhouse gas emissions until kingdom come. If those phaseout promises signed two years ago are ever going to be worth anything more than headline-grabbing BS, then governments need to aggressively show that their signatures on the pact actually mean something. They’ll have the chance to prove themselves during the COP28 climate conference, which begins in late November in Dubai, in the Global Stocktake, a two-year assessment of progress in addressing the climate crisis.
Said Gogolewski, “Fossil fuel companies like Shell, TotalEnergies, BP Equinor, and ENI have shown the public they are incapable of self-regulation after scaling back their climate ambitions, despite being heavily responsible for the climate crisis. That’s why Greenpeace is calling for European governments to strictly regulate the industry and begin its rapid economic and political downsizing.”
U.S.-based ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Marathon are no different, of course, and government here needs also to adopt strict regulation directed at downsizing the industry. The obvious trouble with that fantasy is a Congress brimful of science rejectors who will do everything they can to make the climate crisis worse, and a Biden administration that has yet to use its executive authority to put obstacles in the path of leasing more public lands for drilling.
Note: Earth Matters will be on vacation Labor Day weekend
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
This issue has received much attention recently. The video offers a succinct and balanced look.
GREEN BRIEFS
TEXAS SCHOOL OFFICIALS shoot down PRAGERU’S CLAIM IT’S AN AUTHORIZED state VENDOR
On Monday, PragerU, the propaganda operation fronting as an educational institution, announced that it had become an authorized state vendor in Texas. In a video, PragerU CEO Marissa Streit said, “It’s such a huge honor for us to partner with the great state of Texas. We really hope that this initiative will help catapult Texas to No. 1” in education.
Just one problem, education board Chairman Kevin Ellis told reporter Keith Heath at the Austin American Statesman newspaper, “I have no knowledge of PragerU submitting any instructional material for approval to the SBOE in the past, and specifically I know that PragerU has not submitted any instructional materials to the SBOE under the new instructional material review process that was adopted by the Legislature this year.” Getting the state board’s okay includes a lengthy process for compliance with state standards, something PragerU has not even begun. The smackdown isn’t exactly a surprise given PragerU’s shaky relationship with the truth as pointed out here, here, and here at Daily Kos in the past month.
Climate science denial is just one of the many areas where this not-a-university-anymore-than-TrumpU demolishes the truth in the guise of “education.” And that’s no surprise given that the start-up money for PragerU came from the Wilks brothers, a pair of oil billionaires. One PragerU video meant for kids goes so far as to compare pushing back against climate science to the Warsaw ghetto Jews rising up against the Nazis in 1943.
And then there is PragerU’s various Kids Guides, including “The Kids’ Guide to the Truth About Climate Change.” About the only positive thing that can be said is that not every word in it is a lie. But the BS starts out in the guide’s third paragraph: “Well, what you may not know is that thousands of renowned scientists and weather experts worldwide have some very different opinions on climate change. They point to the powerful effects of the natural cycles of the sun and changes that happen in earth’s magnetic field. They also note the progress we’ve already made in improving our environment, and the increasing data on how the planet may already be recovering.”
The comprehensive debunking of nearly every statement in that paragraph has been going on for nearly two decades.
Under “Key Takeaway: Things Are Getting Better” on the last page, it’s noted that Greenland’s Jacobshavn Glacier “has been gaining ice for several years.” While true, scientists note that this isn’t things getting better, and the regional cooling of the ocean that has allowed the glacier to thicken in places is a temporary matter because Arctic ice in general has continued receding as oceans overall have warmed. The guide goes on to assert, “While some claim the change is temporary, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that global warming has slowed.” No. It stated that the rate of growth in carbon emissions has slowed. Not the same thing.
The guide also notes that China’s overall greenhouse gas emissions are more than twice as high as the U.S. This is true, but it’s notable that there’s no mention in the guide of per capita emissions. Measured that way, the U.S. is more than twice as high as China. Moreover, from 1750 until the end of 2018, China emitted about 210.2 billion metric tons of CO2, according to Our World in Data. The U.S. produced 404.77 billion tons in the same period. Also unmentioned is that China produced more than three times as much renewably sourced electricity as the U.S. in 2021.
As I’ve previously pointed out, half-truths also appear in the guide’s visuals. The chart below shows the vast fluctuations in carbon dioxide atmospheric levels back to 400,000 years ago.
It’s accurate as far as it goes. But it distorts the current situation by stopping concentration of CO2 at 280 parts per million. That is pretty close to the four most recent peaks in past concentrations in the past 400 millennia. But the “present day” average global CO2 concentration illustrated on the PragerU chart wasn’t 280 ppm, it was 417.06 ppm. Here’s a truthful chart:
Texas education officials have no excuse for including anything in its accepted educational materials that PragerU publishes other than as examples of how shillery works.
Stifling heat spells misery in schools with no air conditioning
In 2018, researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research published “Heat and Learning,” a paper detailing their finding that, in schools without air conditioning, learning over a school year is reduced by 1% for every 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature. Unfortunately, with some children, teachers, and staff already back in school for the fall term and others preparing to start after Labor Day, 2023 is another year when it‘s typical for the bulk of the nation’s mostly underfunded schools to have inadequate heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in their classrooms. This, with late summer heatwaves ever worsening, promises trouble.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest school district, policy calls for HVAC in every classroom. But the picture still isn’t rosy. There is no requirement to have AC in every building on campus. Thus, as of last year at this time, in more than half of the district’s kitchens—455 of them—workers just had to sweat it out. And on 599 of the district’s 676 campuses, the HVAC system that does exist is “at the end of its life or beyond. It is operating but regularly fails and requires repairs to continue working.”
It’s typically worse elsewhere in California and in most other states. At ClimateWire, Daniel Cusick quotes Joseph Allen, the director of the Harvard Healthy Buildings Program, who says, “The climate crisis is here right now, and our school buildings are not up to the task. I think what’s going to happen is that the schools that don’t get on this now are gonna be in real trouble soon. Without some kind of cooling, it’s going to be impossible to have kids and teachers in a classroom in June.”
The Government Accountability Office reported three years ago that some 36,000 buildings in 41% of all public school districts “are in immediate need of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) upgrades.” The report found a school in Rhode Island “had components of their operating HVAC systems that were nearly 100 years old,”
The major reason for inaction? Money. The cost of installing HVAC can be enormous and the budgets of many school districts are at best raggedy. The good news is that the Biden administration has set aside half-billion dollars in grants from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for dealing with the funding shortage. Cusick writes:
“Some [schools] are adding venting and cooling systems for the first time and are just in desperate need,” Sarah Zaleski, schools and nonprofit program manager at the Department of Energy, said in an interview this month. “Some have relied on more passive systems like opening windows. That just doesn’t cut it anymore.”
In June, DOE awarded the first tranche of grants through its Renew America’s Schools program to help schools prepare for a warming climate through energy retrofits and upgrades, including for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC).
The department intended to cap first-round funding at $80 million, officials said. But when more than 1,000 letters of interest seeking $5.5 billion in funding poured into the program office, officials increased the allocation to $178 million, enough for 24 energy infrastructure projects in schools from Texas to Alaska. Nearly 90 percent of districts asked for assistance for HVAC upgrades, according to program officials.
As with getting lead out of the nation’s water pipes, when a Democratic majority takes up the next infrastructure act or renews the Inflation Reduction Act (with a better name), more federal money needs to go into HVAC fixes.
And projects like those promoted by Green Schoolyards America should be included. From the organization’s mission statement, “Green Schoolyards America inspires and supports systems change to transform asphalt-covered school grounds into living schoolyards that improve children’s well-being, learning, and play, while strengthening their communities’ ecological health and climate resilience.” Such an approach is not only a great learning experience but the shade provided can cool both the outdoor areas around schools and help keep it cooler inside.
RESOURCES & ACTION
“Investing in solar, wind, and electric vehicles does not equal climate action when fossil fuels are not addressed. The United States is already the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, without end in sight. While so many of us have suffered through record breaking temperatures, wildfires, and floods in recent months, Black, Indigenous, low income and working-class communities are hit the hardest, with deadly consequences.
“We simply cannot afford a world with fossil fuels. President Biden, whose upcoming election may lie in the hands of climate voters, must step up and lead: President Biden has the power to stop fossil fuel expansion and phase out fossil fuels choking our planet. As president, Biden has the executive authority to take transformative action to stop the expansion of and phase out fossil fuels—which is essential to protect public health, boost our economy, protect democracy, and tackle the climate emergency head-on.
ECO-QUOTE
“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed … We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”—Wallace Stegner
ECOPINION
Plantation disaster capitalism: Native Hawaiians organize to stop land and water grab after Maui fire, an interview conducted by Amy Goodman at Democracy Now with Hawaiian law professor Kapuaʻala Sproat regarding the conditions that made the Maui wildfires more destructive and what’s yet to come for residents looking to rebuild their lives. Decades of neocolonialism in Hawaii have redirected precious water resources toward golf courses, resorts and other corporate ventures, turning many areas into tinderboxes and leaving little water to fight back against the flames. Now many Hawaiians say there is a power grab underway as real estate interests and other wealthy outsiders look to buy up land and water rights on the cheap as people are still reeling from the loss of their family members, livelihoods, and communities. “Plantation disaster capitalism is, unfortunately, the perfect term for what’s going on,” says Sproat, who just published a piece in The Guardian with Naomi Klein. She is professor of law at Ka Huli Ao Native Hawaiian Law Center and co-director of the Native Hawaiian Rights Clinic at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa School of Law. “The plantations, the large landed interests that have had control over not just the land, but really much of Hawaii’s and Maui Komohana’s resources for the last several centuries, are using this opportunity, are using this time of tremendous trauma for the people of Maui, to swoop in and to get past the law.”
“I just get so incensed” by Brad Johnson at Hill Heat substack. Even before the fossil-fueled wildfire that destroyed Lahaina—the deadliest U.S. fire in more than 100 years—Maui had filed suit against Big Oil. In a 2020 lawsuit, the county sued Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell and other fossil fuel companies in 2020 for a “coordinated, multi-front effort to conceal and deny their own knowledge” of the dangers of burning fossil fuels. Emily Sanders has more at ExxonKnews. On Democracy Now, the Green New Deal Network’s Kaniela Ing explained why he was “incensed” by President Joe Biden’s claim last week that he had “practically” (but not actually) declared a climate emergency:
I’ve just been frantically trying to make sure that my loved ones are okay. But I also work on climate. This is my job. And as soon as I start thinking about that statement from President Biden, I just get so incensed. This is a climate emergency. There’s no practical — “practically” he declared it. You either believe it or not. And I think as bad as Republicans have been by denying climate, Democrats are just as culpable by not doing enough. Scientists say that we need to be investing at least $1 trillion a year in the clean energy transition. We need to end and phase out, deny all new fossil fuel permits, and really empower the communities that build back ourselves democratically. That’s the solution for it.
And President Biden announced his second term, but he hasn’t told us how he’s going to finish the job. He needs to lay out that vision, what we’ve been demanding from a Green New Deal, if he wants communities that got him elected to come out, that base of climate voters, that happen to be predominantly Black, Indigenous and low-income people. But we need something forward-looking to come out, because right now, like, I’m not even thinking about voting, right?
As Biden Revives Offshore Safety Rules, Advocates Say Drilling Must End to Prevent Disaster by Julia Conley at Common Dreams. Environmental advocates on Tuesday said the Biden administration’s decision to reinstate offshore drilling safety rules would help undo damage caused by former Republican President Donald Trump’s repeal of the regulations, but were clear that the rules would not change the fact that fossil fuel extraction is imperiling ecosystems and the planet. U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced that the rules have once again been finalized and will go into effect in October, governing the use of safety equipment on offshore oil rigs. […] But Jackie Savitz, chief policy officer for the ocean conservation group Oceana, said new safety regulations for drilling operations are no replacement for halting offshore drilling altogether. […] “It is an inherently risky business and it’s not a matter of if, but when we will have another [oil spill],” she said. “So a big part of prevention has to be to stop selling new leases.”
The first GOP debate reveals a disturbing level of climate change denial by Rebecca Leber at Vox. Americans increasingly care about climate change, unless you’re asking the Republican voter base. The GOP’s obsession that liberal elites want to worsen the average person’s way of life through climate action has chipped away at their voters’ support for solutions and belief that the planet is warming. Party leaders and presidential candidates have insisted, wrongly, that Democrats’ climate solutions will mean bans on laundry machines, hamburgers, and gas stoves and that unabated “wokeism” has infiltrated the corporate world. It’s a useful scare tactic, employed to delay action. Supran, who has conducted research on historical oil industry ads, found those in the 1990s “trotting out the same rhetoric, with different wording: ‘No more SUVs, no more driving around freely,’” to stave off new energy efficiency standards.
The Climate Culprits Hiding Their Role In California’s Extreme Weather by Rebecca Burns at The Lever. One of the nation’s most important climate fights is currently playing out under the radar in California, where state residents are weathering an unprecedented tropical storm. Oil and industry lobbying groups are spending millions in a last-ditch attempt to block first-of-its-kind legislation that would require thousands of large companies doing business in the state to fully disclose their carbon emissions, a move that would effectively set national policy. In the final weeks of California’s legislative session, which ends in mid-September, Assembly members are expected to vote on the climate transparency bill. With a federal version of the measure still delayed — and nearly certain to face lengthy legal challenges from industry — California’s legislation could expedite a public reckoning over corporations’ true contributions to climate change. The bill has already passed the state Senate, and if it survives a secretive appropriations hearing later this month, it will go before the full Assembly — where a previous version failed by just four votes last year following a fierce opposition campaign.
Big Tech’s Waste “Solutions” Are a Scam by Matthew King at The New Republic. Rather than face hard truths about reorganizing our system to stop waste, the world is falling victim to empty and inefficient cleanup promises from the tech industry. A half-century after the birth of modern environmentalism, cleaning up all of our trash remains an elusive proposition. Despite the seemingly everyday disasters on the news, we’re rarely aware of the mass totality of all of our waste—of the colossal amounts of damaging stuff we’ve created and foisted on the planet. A steady flow of evidence points to the second-order impacts and long-term consequences of pollution, from increased cancer rates and organ damage to endocrine disruption and low fertility.
It Is No Longer Possible to Escape What We Have Done to Ourselves by Serge Schmemann at The New York Times. In northern Canada, drought and heat primed the fuel and sent more hot air into the upper atmosphere to generate ever more lightning storms, which ignited the dry forest and the peat beneath it to release more carbon and more smoke to further intensify climate change around the world. And it’s going to get much worse, according to Michael Flannigan, a professor at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, who has been studying the interaction of fire and climate for over 35 years. “There will be more droughts, more floods, more extreme weather, more records broken.” And there will be consequences that we cannot yet imagine: If a forest burns too often, for example, trees cease being able to propagate and eventually give way to grasses, which could lead to a fundamental change of the Canadian north and its wildlife. In its latest report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that fire-inducing temperatures in southern Europe will increase by 14% if the planet heats by 2.5 degrees Celsius [4.5 degrees Fahrenheit], a temperature rise toward which the Earth is headed.
ECO-TWXXT
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ
The United Auto Workers Meet Electrification by Jared Facundo at The American Prospect. Strikes at the Big Three are not uncommon; nearly 50,000 GM workers walked out for 40 days back in 2019. But UAW President Shawn Fain is looking to unravel the tiered system that younger members like Taylor and Thomas live under now, just as he seeks to prevent the introduction of an even lower standard for the workers of the future. Looming over the contentious negotiations is the automotive industry’s electrification, supercharged by hundreds of billions of dollars provided by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). “There’s a way for the [EV transition] to work for everybody,” Fain told me over the phone last week. “The shameful part is that the government, our tax dollars, are helping fund this transition. I have no issue with the government helping these companies transition … but it can’t be a one-sided affair. Labor has to have a seat in this too. Worker conditions need to be taken into account.”
Extreme Texas Heat Linked to Giant Planet-Warming Methane Releases by Zachary Mider and Aaron Clark. As record-breaking heat buckled pavement and hospitalized hundreds across Texas at the start of summer, another disruption occurred unseen: Operators in the largest U.S. energy basin released hundreds of tons of natural gas into the air as crucial equipment was forced to shut down. That unleashed a geyser of planet-warming methane, the main component of natural gas, into the atmosphere. The spurt of emissions wasn’t unprecedented; extremes of both hot and cold have wreaked havoc in the Permian Basin in the past. But this time there was a new witness. A new telescope orbiting the Earth captured an unprecedented picture of the climate damage.
How Centuries of Extractive Agriculture Helped Set the Stage for the Maui Fires by Kate Rodriguez at Civil Eats. The catastrophic fire that just ravaged more than 2,000 acres and at least 2,000 homes on Maui, and claimed 114 lives and counting is inextricably linked to the island’s agricultural history. Lahaina, the former capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, was once a thriving, ecologically diverse landscape full of fish ponds and diverse crops that included sweet potatoes, kalo (taro), and ‘ulu (breadfruit). But colonization, and the extractive agricultural systems that came with it, had a devastating impact on reshaping the landscape ecologically, culturally, and economically—not only depleting soils of fertility but making much of the island more fire-prone. As these maps of historic sugarcane lands and pineapple lands illustrate, the two crops covered vast portions of West Maui. The sugarcane and pineapple industries reigned for nearly two centuries, with monocropping farming methods made exceptionally profitable with indentured servitude. This process transformed natural ecosystems, as the companies diverted water from wet areas of the island to irrigate the fields in the drier parts.
Forests managed by Indigenous nations face a $100 million funding gap by Lyric Aquino at Grist. Forests managed by Indigenous nations are severely underfunded. According to a new report from the Intertribal Timber Council, a nonprofit consortium consisting primarily of tribes and Alaska Native Corporations. To reach per-acre parity with forests managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, the researchers concluded that the federal government would need to increase funding by nearly $96 million every year. In 2019, the base year for the study, tribal forests represented nearly 19 million acres in the United States, including some 10.2 million acres of commercial forests and woodlands. A total of 345 tribal forests are managed across the nation, with 316 of those forests being held in federal trust. “It seems like a fairly straightforward answer that when we look at the disparity in funding between other federal agencies and tribes, that [Congress] would just increase appropriations,” said Cody Desautel, President of the Intertribal Timber Council and member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. “But that hasn’t been the case.”
Elephants invade as habitat loss soars in Nigerian forest reserve by Orji Sunday at Mongabay. Elephants straying out of Afi River Forest Reserve in the Nigerian state of Cross River are reportedly damaging surrounding farms. This uptick in human-wildlife conflict comes as satellite data show continuing and increasing deforestation in the Afi River reserve and other protected areas.. The habitat in Afi River Forest Reserve provides a crucial corridor that connects critically endangered Cross River gorilla populations in adjacent protected areas. As in other Nigerian forest reserves, agriculture, poverty and a lack of monitoring and enforcement resources are driving deforestation in the Afi River reserve. “These elephants have been invading farms. These are personal farms. So the people are really suffering,” Leonard Akam told Mongabay over the phone. Akam is the head of Boje, one of the largest communities near the reserve. “The destruction an elephant can cause in a day is more than the job of three people. It is just like a bulldozer paving a path.”
‘It’s a beast’: landmark US climate law is too complex, environmental groups say by Yessenia Funes at The Guardian. A year after the Inflation Reduction Act passed, many of the small, community-based organizations that would benefit from funding the most are facing hurdles to competing for these investments. Together, their experiences tell a story that echoes other environmental justice experts’ concerns about the IRA—that the monumental spending package won’t assist the communities that need the money the most. Various grant deadlines for funding have already come and gone, representing key opportunities many groups may have missed. Applying for funding opportunities—which is no guarantee of success—requires local community groups that are often run by volunteers to prepare an enormous amount of documentation. Lakiesha Lloyd, an organizer who lives and works in Charleston, West Virginia, is still educating herself on how the application process works. She sees the historic climate bill as a lifeline for her predominantly Black community on the West Side where concrete highways crisscross the neighborhood and poor air quality reigns.
GREEN LINKS
Historic victory for Indigenous communities against oil drilling in the Amazon • As Biden Revives Offshore Safety Rules, Advocates Say Drilling Must End to Prevent Disaster • Looking for a US ‘climate haven’ away from heat and disaster risks? Good luck finding one • Appalachia’s fracking counties are shedding jobs and residents: Study • Coastal areas will face record ‘sunny day’ flooding in 2024 — NOAA • Appalachian Economy Sees Few Gains From Natural Gas Development, Report Says • Wealthiest 10 Percent of Americans Responsible for 40 Percent of U.S. Emissions
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