Purple Smaze
The smoke is coming from inside the House!
PRESENTED BY FLUMES AND FULMARS
Climate activists are joining Appalachian landowners in front of the White House this afternoon at 2 PM to protest President Joe Biden’s recent approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, the latest colossal fossil-fuel project backed by the White House. If you join the protest, make sure to wear a tight-fitting N95 mask—the immediately hazardous DC air is at Code Purple, thanks to the smoke flowing down from Quebec’s fossil-fueled wildfires.
The dangerous fools running the U.S. House of Representatives have cancelled all floor votes for the rest of the week due to the Freedom Caucus revolt. “Some of these members, they don’t know what to ask for,” moaned Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). McCarthy also griped about the harm global warming is doing to the American people:1
“There are some problems with the smog out there and some airports. People are not gonna be able to get home."
New York’s LaGuardia airport in Queens grounded planes on Wednesday because visibility became so poor, and the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded flights at Philadelphia International Airport this morning, inconveniencing an untold number of fossil-fuel lobbyists attending Reuters Global Energy Transition 2023, Sponsored By Chevron, BP, and the Propane Education & Research Council.
“None of the existing monetized economic costs of climate change — like when we come up with the social cost of carbon or any of that stuff,” climate economist Marshall Burke notes, “wildfires are not in there at all.”
At 10 AM this morning, Senate Energy and Natural Resources chair Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) chaired a hearing on the federal response to escalating wildfires; he of course did not discuss how the rise in wildfires is caused by the surging pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. There was a broad consensus among the Democrats and Republicans alike at the hearing that the best response to the wildfires is to dramatically increase logging.
Here’s a fun game—can you guess how long it takes Prestigious East Coast Journalists to Explain that the wildfires choking our cities are caused by fossil-fuel pollution?
The Washington Post’s Dan Diamond, Joshua Partlow, Brady Dennis, and Emmanuel Felton got to that essential fact in their 19th paragraph of “Smoke brings a warning: There’s no escaping climate’s threat to health”:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of some of the planet’s foremost researchers, has said that unless humans drastically reduce the burning of fossil fuels, wildfire seasons are likely to grow longer and that more area will burn.”
This is an editorial-level problem, not a journalist-level problem: The Post accepts fossil-fuel advertising and collaborates with the fossil-fuel industry on propaganda campaigns.
The New York Times’s Somini Sengupta only took until the 10th paragraph of “Record Pollution and Heat Herald a Season of Climate Extremes”:
“The two countries experiencing these extremes, the United States and Canada, are major producers of oil and gas, which, when burned, produce the greenhouse gases that have significantly warmed the Earth’s atmosphere.”
Again, this is an editorial-level problem: The Times accepts fossil-fuel advertising and collaborates with the fossil-fuel industry on propaganda campaigns.
My dudes Jeff Bezos and AG Sulzberger, did you know? You can actually stop running fossil-fuel ads. It’s never too late.2
It’s World Oceans Day! The time has come to talk of why the sea is boiling hot—yup, it’s billions of tons of fossil-fuel pollution. Some of the oil and gas extracted is diverted into petrochemical production instead of being burned, giving us the millions of tons of plastic choking the oceans. Some other ocean news: The seas are taking back the beaches of Normandy. The summer Arctic Ocean will be ice-free “a decade earlier than previously thought,” so right on schedule. Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean is roasting, thanks to the record-hot Atlantic Ocean.
The orcas have begun to fight back—but they’re going to need a lot of help.
Speaking of oceans—Green New Dealer Aaron Regunberg is running for the Ocean State’s open Congressional seat. He’ll be at a fundraiser hosted by the Working Families Party this afternoon in downtown DC.
Greenpeace wants the fossil-fuel industry to pay into the global climate loss and damage fund. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to join the dots between growing climate loss and damage around the world and exorbitant fossil fuel company profits,” said campaigner Rebecca Newsom.
Grist found that companies have released some 1.1 billion pounds of pollution beyond their permit limits since 2002. “From petrochemical refineries on the Gulf Coast to oil and gas wells in West Texas, hundreds of polluting facilities routinely emit hundreds of millions more pounds of chemicals into the air than their permits stipulate,” write Naveena Sadasivam, Clayton Aldern, Jessie Blaeser, and Chad Small in a blockbuster work of journalism.
An army of fake Twitter accounts is defending the hosting of the next UN climate summit by the oil-rich United Arab Emirates.
FIFA misled fans by claiming the Qatar World Cup would be carbon neutral, a Swiss regulator has ruled.
In Memoriam: labor economist Bill Spriggs. Jared Bernstein, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, remembers Spriggs as a friend and mentor.
Finally, some good news: Pat Robertson, Televangelist Who Blamed Gay People for 9/11 and Hurricanes, Dies.
Hearings on the Hill:
10 AM: Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Federal Response to Escalating Wildfires and to Evaluate Reforms to Land Management and Wildland Firefighter Recruitment and Retention
Climate Action Today:
2 PM: People vs. Fossil Fuels
Mountain Valley Pipeline Protest6 PM: Working Families Party
We reported earlier this week that super climate journo Molly Taft left Earther—we’re pleased to note that she’s joined The New Republic as a deputy contributing editor for climate, which totally rocks.
Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. DMs are open—@climatebrad@mastodon.social and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky
Well, the American people who are Republican members of Congress.
One hopes.
I like your focus on the *cause* of climate change: oil, coal, and gas, or what I call "the flesh of the Dead God" .... a lot of "climate guys" focus a lot on atmospheric dynamics and weather, but don't really know anything specifically about the materials at fault. I see a lot of people who, without interrogating these beliefs, seem to believe both that transitioning to solar/wind is 1) impossible right now but 2) inevitable in the future.
Starting with 2, they seem to think that we will "run out" of fossil fuels, as if we're still operating under the peak-oil theory of the 90s. No, reserves are ample, more than enough to turn the earth into a copy of Venus before they run out.
On 1, they have a completely ahistorical and apolitical version of the inevitability of the rise of fossil fuels. They don't understand that the history of the 20th century was about covert and overt operations to make American oil companies ascendant on the world stage. They don't understand power the way that you do (when you explain that the fossil fuel companies advertise in papers). This is why I put so much effort into writing the history of petroleum. And since they don't understand that, they don't understand what the political effort to dethrone these petro-dictators would have to look like.
https://thespouter.substack.com/p/the-church-of-the-dead-god
https://apocalypse-confidential.com/2022/09/10/the-autonomous-chemical-weapon-how-sentient-oil-took-control-of-our-history-part-two/