There is a chance we can prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis, but world leaders must hold businesses accountable and listen to Indigenous communities.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

11 min read

It would be an understatement to say that there is a lot riding on COP26, the international climate talks currently being held in Glasgow, Scotland. Officially, the gathering marks the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the third meeting of the parties to the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit the global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, preferably limiting the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Since 1995, the countries that have signed onto the UNFCCC have met every single year (except in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic), attempting to come up with an action plan to stem the climate crisis. But still, every year, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions keep going up. And for a fortnight that started on October 31, world leaders will try to come up with an action plan yet again. More than 100 heads of government and some 30,000 delegates are now gathered and deliberating in Glasgow in the most recent international attempt to implement the Paris agreement goals. CNBC called the summit “humanity’s last and best chance to secure a livable future amid dramatic climate change.”

“We face a stark choice: Either we stop it or it stops us,” said United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres in his opening remarks at the start of the World Leaders Summit of the COP26. “It’s time to say ‘enough.’ Enough of brutalizing biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves… We need maximum ambition from all countries on all fronts to make Glasgow a success.”

The summit comes just a few months after the August release of a grim report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found that climate change was “unequivocally” caused by human activity, and that within two decades, rising temperatures will cause the planet to reach a significant turning point in global warming. The report’s authors—a group of the world’s top climate scientists convened by the United Nations—predict that by 2040, average global temperatures will be warmer than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, causing more frequent and intense heat waves, droughts and extreme weather events. Guterres called the bleak findings a “code red for humanity.”

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is hosting the summit, likened the race to stop climate change to a spy thriller, warning that “a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation that will end human life as we know it.” He added, “The tragedy is this is not a movie, and the doomsday device is real.”

The dire assessment of the state of the planet’s climate was not lost on U.S. President Joe Biden, who called on world leaders to take aggressive action immediately to stave off the climate crisis in his remarks at the summit’s opening day. “There’s no more time to hang back or sit on the fence or argue amongst ourselves,” he said. “This is the challenge of our collective lifetimes, the existential threat to human existence as we know it. And every day we delay, the cost of inaction increases.”

But despite all the troubling data and dire warnings, the summit has had a fairly inauspicious start. On October 30, the day before COP26 opened, leaders of the G20 nations—19 countries and the European Union, which together are responsible for 80 percent of the world’s emissions—sought to bolster international leadership on climate change as they concluded their own meeting in Rome just before the summit in Glasgow. But their deliberations ended with a whimper: a mere reaffirmation of the Paris agreement goals. During the G20 summit, Johnson said that all the world leaders’ pledges without action were “starting to sound hollow,” and he criticized the commitments as “drops in a rapidly warming ocean.” Adding to the disappointment was the fact that the summit was not attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping, even as both Russia and China “are among the world’s biggest polluters”: Russia and China are respectively responsible for 5 percent and 28 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, respectively. Those two nations have pushed the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 ahead to 2060.

A failure in Glasgow could have grave, cascading consequences. On October 26, the UN Environment Program released a worrying report warning that with “climate change intensifying… humanity is running out of time” due to the climate promises that have been made but have not yet been delivered. Failure to stem the climate crisis “would mean less food, so probably a crisis in food security. It would leave a lot more people vulnerable to terrible situations, terrorist groups and violent groups,” said UNFCCC executive secretary Patricia Espinosa. “It would mean a lot of sources of instability… [t]he catastrophic scenario would indicate that we would have massive flows of displaced people.”

“We’re really talking about preserving the stability of countries, preserving the institutions that we have built over so many years, preserving the best goals that our countries have put together,” said Espinosa, who took on the UN climate role in 2016. A former minister of foreign affairs of Mexico, Espinosa shares responsibility for the talks with UK cabinet minister Alok Sharma, who serves as the COP26 president. “What we need to get at Glasgow are messages from leaders that they are determined to drive this transformation, to make these changes, to look at ways of increasing their ambition,” Espinosa said.

In a new study published in the journal Global Change Biology, a group of international scientists found that if the world continues “business-as-usual” emissions, the impacts of the climate crisis could triple across 45 different “life zones”—distinct regions representing broad ecosystem types—across the planet. “The likely future changes in the world’s life zones is likely to have a substantial impact on [people’s] livelihoods and biodiversity,” said Dr. Paul Elsen, a climate adaptation scientist at Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and lead author of the study. “Large areas of the world are getting hotter and drier and this is already impacting the earth’s life zones,” added Elsen. The researchers predict that more than 42 percent of the planet’s land area will ultimately be affected if emissions are not significantly reduced. Dr. Hedley Grantham, director of conservation planning at WCS and a co-author of the study, said, “COP26 is our best chance of countries committing to reducing emissions and putting us on a better future pathway for climate change and its impacts.”

There have, however, been a few bright spots in the early days of the summit. On November 2, world leaders announced new plans to reduce the emissions of methane, a powerful global warming gas that “has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere.” President Biden welcomed the methane agreement, calling it a “game-changing commitment,” while also announcing that for the first time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was going to enforce limits on the methane “released by existing oil and gas rigs across the United States.”

The Biden administration said that the government’s vast spending bill would mark the “largest effort to combat climate change in American history.” But with this critical climate legislation stalled on Capitol Hill, Biden’s aggressive target of reducing the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by about half of its 2005 levels by the end of this decade will likely have to be pursued through executive actions such as regulations.

And on November 2, more than 100 nations, which together are responsible for about 85 percent of the world’s forests, agreed to a landmark $19 billion plan to end and reverse deforestation by 2030. Prime Minister Johnson said that it is critical for the success of COP26 “that we act now and we end the role of humanity as nature’s conqueror, and instead become nature’s custodian,” adding that “[w]e have to stop the devastating loss of our forests, these great teeming ecosystems—three-trillion-pillared cathedrals of nature—that are the lungs of our planet.”

​​In other welcome news, 14 nations including the United States, working on the sidelines of COP26, backed a Denmark-led initiative to reduce global maritime emissions to zero by 2050. “With around 90 percent of world trade transported by sea, global shipping accounts for nearly 3 percent of global CO2 emissions,” according to Reuters.

Indeed, non-state actors, i.e., businesses, are key participants in the world’s climate goals. UN chief Guterres said that the private sector has a critical role to play in this fight—and the UN will judge the performance of businesses’ pledges to achieve net-zero emissions. “I will establish a group of experts to propose clear standards to measure and analyze net-zero commitments from non-state actors,” which will go beyond mechanisms that have been established by the Paris climate accord, he said.

In the U.S., businesses are trying to influence Biden’s massive spending plan. “Across industries, business groups successfully pushed lawmakers to make significant changes to key sections of the original $3.5 trillion bill. Their lobbying efforts revolved around Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who ultimately sided with the business community on several issues… The White House plan does not raise tax rates on corporations—keeping a central part of the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts intact—in a stunning win for business interests,” stated an article in the Hill.

“This growing call for action can’t be underestimated,” writes EFL contributor Patti Lynn, executive director of Corporate Accountability, a consumer advocacy group, in Truthout, referring to the surge in climate activism across the world in recent years. But she also offered a caveat: “We need great social and economic change to fully and justly solve the climate crisis, and no change on this scale happens without public engagement fueling the political will to create such changes. But we also must be clear-eyed about what stands in the way of achieving such transformative change.” She added that for the world to move “from visions to actual policies that are just and effective, we must address the largest obstacle that lies between today’s status quo and a livable future for all: the influence of the fossil fuel industry on climate policy.”

Rainforest Action Network, a nonprofit environmental group, also trained their sights on the private sector, tweeting, “World leaders… must meet the climate crisis by holding brands and banks accountable to end fossil fuel expansion and deforestation.” But the COP26 homepage suggests a different story: Unilever, Scottish Power, Sainsbury’s, National Grid, Microsoft, Hitachi and GSK are some of the many corporations that COP26 thanks as “principal partners.”

And while many private firms, including several of the COP26 partners, have made significant climate commitments, they are often met with criticisms of “greenwashing”—appearing that they are climate-friendly when in fact, the promises are often not regulated by governments and actually not making a dent. “Businesses are the big polluters,” said Kristian Ronn, CEO and co-founder of Normative, a Swedish startup that has launched a carbon emissions tracker that he says can help end corporate greenwashing. The private sector is “responsible for two-thirds of the total emissions,” he said. “So they need to account for the footprint and mitigate that footprint, because essentially what gets measured gets managed.” He added, “There are no mechanisms in place to ensure the completeness of the information.”

COP26 partner Microsoft, for example, has formed Transform to Net Zero, a new initiative with several other companies, including Nike and Starbucks, to help the private sector achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But as Emily Pontecorvo reports in Grist, “There’s one gaping hole that persists in Microsoft’s climate action, one that the company has been repeatedly criticized for: How can it expect to pull more carbon out of the air than it puts in if it’s actively helping fossil fuel companies find and pull more oil and gas out of the ground?”

As world leaders attempt to hammer out a path to achieve the Paris climate accord goals, they would do well to listen to the world’s Indigenous people, who have been successful caretakers of their ecosystems for many generations—including 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, though they represent just 5 percent of the global population—but who are suffering on the front lines of the climate fights, from deforestation to rising seas.

Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani tribe in the Ecuadorian Amazon, co-founder of the Indigenous-led nonprofit organization Ceibo Alliance, and an EFL contributor, wrote an open letter to world leaders in 2020 that is even more important today. “When you say that the oil companies have marvelous new technologies that can sip the oil from beneath our lands like hummingbirds sip nectar from a flower, we know that you are lying because we live downriver from the spills,” writes Nenquimo, who was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world. “When you say that the Amazon is not burning, we do not need satellite images to prove you wrong; we are choking on the smoke of the fruit orchards that our ancestors planted centuries ago. When you say that you are urgently looking for climate solutions, yet continue to build a world economy based on extraction and pollution, we know you are lying because we are the closest to the land.”

###

Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, Counterpunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.

Take action…

Amazon Frontlines to Ecuador’s Constitutional Court: “The Amazon rainforest is our home, and our home is keeping us all alive! And yet, your world is destroying it. What we are asking you for is very simple: For you to listen to us, to respect us and to recognize that we, Indigenous Peoples, have the right to decide what happens in our home. We have made our decision–we must defend our home, the Amazon. Will you protect our right to decide?”

Sign the petition urging Ecuador’s Constitutional Court to protect the Amazon rainforest and Indigenous rights from destructive mining and oil drilling.

Cause for concern…

• Watch how the sea will drown major cities if the planet continues to warm (Ray White, Mashable)
• The green steel revolution is picking up steam (Molly Taft, Gizmodo)
• America’s food safety system failed to stop a salmonella epidemic (Bernice Yeung, Michael Grabell, Irena Hwang and Mollie Simon, ProPublica)
• Climate change is altering the very color of fall foliage (Marc Abrams, Fast Company)
• 43 out of 50 top U.S. fast-food chains lack vegan options, report finds (Paige Bennett, EcoWatch)

Round of applause…

“The BLM is committed to responsible development on public lands, including ensuring that our environmental reviews consider the climate impacts of energy development on lands and communities,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, director of the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. agency that oversees onshore oil and gas management.

• Biden administration to require new climate analysis before oil leasing (Heather Richards, E&E News)
• Climate change became the largest part of Biden spending bill (Coral Davenport, New York Times)
• G20 nations agree to new limits on coal-burning power plants (Somini Sengupta, Jason Horowitz and Jim Tankersley, New York Times)
• Veganism can offer multiple health benefits including mental health and well-being (Aman Puri, Financial Express)

ICYMI…

“In order for us to be free, wilderness—or the relative absence of human domination over nature—has to remain and be protected as a potential baseline against the imposition of human power. Without it, we will lose our point of orientation to know what it means to be free from others. Or as Senator Frank Church of Idaho said in helping to pass the Wilderness Act of 1964, that ‘without wilderness this country will become a cage.’ Consider this, and the uber-wealthy class: People like Elon Musk insert themselves between us and nature in order to overrun it and promote increased population growth to accelerate that process. They envision a future in which the world is one big market, or a place they can dominate as the alternative—or the free world of Thoreau—recedes into extinction.”

—EFL contributor Carter Dillard, “Groundbreaking Court Case Argues U.S. Climate Denial Policy Violates Americans’ Right to Be Free” (EcoWatch, January 7, 2021)

Parting thought…

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be burled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

—excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

ExxonMobil has spent more than $39 million to manufacture doubt about climate science.

By Elliott Negin, Independent Media Institute

11 min read

In a secret video recording made public in late June, a top ExxonMobil lobbyist—Keith McCoy, who was fired soon afterward—not only conceded that the oil giant’s support for a carbon tax is a sham, but he also admitted that the company quietly financed climate science denier groups to stave off government action and maximize its profits—a fact that my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others revealed more than a decade ago.

“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes,” McCoy, then ExxonMobil’s senior director of federal relations, said during the interview. “Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.”

For all his candor, McCoy got at least one thing wrong. ExxonMobil did “join”—in other words, pay—denier groups to spread disinformation to blunt initial government attempts to curb carbon emissions. But McCoy inaccurately used the past tense. In fact, the company continues to fund them.

That videotaped interview caused some major heartburn for McCoy’s boss, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, especially since the House Committee on Oversight and Reform has invited Woods—as well as top executives from the American Petroleum Institute, BP America, Chevron, Shell Oil and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—to testify at a hearing on October 28 on the “long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.”

ExxonMobil has been at the heart of that campaign. Since 1998, the company has paid a network of seemingly independent think tanks and advocacy groups more than $39 million to manufacture doubt about climate science and stymie government action. Only Charles Koch and his late brother David, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries, are known to have spent more.

In 2020, according to ExxonMobil’s most recent corporate grantmaking report, the company spent $490,000 on three grantees—the American Enterprise Institute ($100,000), the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University ($140,000), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($250,000). That amount is down from the $790,000 the company reported it spent on nine climate science denier groups in 2019 and a fraction of what it spent in the past, but there’s a catch.

True, the company lost more than $22 billion in 2020 and cut back its grants across the board. But another factor for this decline is that ExxonMobil changed how it reports grants. As first reported by Salon, the company only listed grants of $100,000 or more in its 2020 annual giving report. In previous years, it included grants of $5,000 or more. The change reduces transparency and ultimately means there is no way to tell how much the company spent in smaller donations to support climate disinformation in 2020 or compare the grants it made in 2020 with previous years.

Only three denier groups—the same three named in the 2020 grantmaking report—received $100,000 or more from ExxonMobil in 2019. That year, their grants collectively amounted to $625,000. The other six denier groups the company funded in 2019—the Center for American and International Law ($5,000), the Federalist Society ($10,000), the Hoover Institution ($15,000), the Manhattan Institute ($90,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000)—collectively received $165,000. None of those grants, even if ExxonMobil continued them, would wind up in the 2020 report, given the company’s new threshold.

Still, it’s worth taking a closer look at where the bulk of ExxonMobil’s self-reported climate disinformation budget did go in 2020.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Since 2014, ExxonMobil has given more than $5 million on top of its annual dues to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—a major player in blocking action on climate change for decades. A few years after becoming an ExxonMobil grantee, the Chamber gained some unwanted notoriety by financing a widely debunked report that then-President Trump cited as a primary rationale for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

In 2019, however, the Chamber appeared to flip 180 degrees, declaring on its website, “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” The assertion that human activity is merely contributing to climate change is inaccurate, given that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause, but the statement did represent a quantum leap from when the association spuriously maintained in comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 that “a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans.”

That said, the Chamber vowed in an August 24 press release to “do everything [it] can to prevent” the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill—which would slash carbon emissions from the electric power and transportation sectors—“from becoming law.” And in a section on its website addressing climate change, the Chamber calls for “the increased use of natural gas” to make “further progress.”

Increase the use of natural gas?! That runs counter to what climate science says about the need to swiftly decarbonize the energy sector, essentially trading one major carbon pollution source—coal—for another—methane, which is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet. Moreover, according to a December 2019 study in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the boom in natural gas use over the last decade alone have now surpassed the emissions avoided by closing coal-fired power plants.

The American Enterprise Institute

Economist Benjamin Zycher might be considered the climate science denier in residenceat theAmerican Enterprise Institute(AEI),which hasreceived $4.86 million from ExxonMobil since 1998. Zycher insists that a carbon tax would be “ineffective,” has called the Paris climate agreement an “absurdity,” and rejects the scientific consensus about the causes and seriousness of global warming.

Zycher published his most recent broadside against climate science in the Summer 2021 issue ofNational Affairs, a formerly independent conservative policy quarterly that AEI brought in-house in 2019. In his essay, “The Case for Climate-Change Realism,” he falsely argued that the “available science” does not support the notion that human activity is “the single most significant cause of climate change” and the “available data” undercut the assessment that extreme weather events are “evidence of an ongoing climate crisis.”

As he has in previous articles, Zycher cited roundly debunked hypotheses for the primary causes of climate change, including a shift in northern Pacific Ocean circulation patterns called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which scientists have determined is incapable of causing a long-term warming trend, and “changes in solar activity,” when, in fact, the sun’s energy has declined since the 1980s while average global temperatures have continued to climb.

This summer was not a fortuitous time to be peddling discredited theories. On August 9, less than two months after Zycher posted his essay, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark, nearly 4,000-page “code red for humanity” report warning that the climate crisis is close to spiraling out of control and human activity is “unequivocally” to blame.

Zycher’s main objective? To make a case, no matter how specious, for continued reliance on fossil fuels, which he falsely claimed are less expensive than renewables. Proposals to cut carbon emissions, including the Paris agreement, would have little real impact, he argued, and could “be accomplished only by substituting expensive energy for cheaper energy.” In fact, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg, it is “now cheaper to build and operate new large-scale wind or solar plants in nearly half the world than it would be to run an existing coal or [natural] gas-fired power plant.” To be sure, no one would confuse Zycher for a scientist or National Affairs for a peer-reviewed journal. But he serves ExxonMobil’s interests as a seemingly independent expert who continues to express doubt about climate science and the viability of renewable energy, thereby providing cover for climate science deniers in Congress.

George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center

The relatively unknown Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington (GW) University received $140,000 from ExxonMobil in 2020 and $1.2 million from the company since 2013. Director Susan Dudley founded the center in 2009 after serving as President George W. Bush’s “regulatory czar” at the Office of Management and Budget and, before that, running the Regulatory Studies Program at Koch-financed Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She currently serves in various capacities for other longtime climate science disinformation groups, including the Koch-founded Cato Institute, the Federalist Society, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Regulatory Studies Center portrays itself as an “objective, unbiased” policy shop, but—like the Mercatus Center—its primary raison d’être is to weaken and quash government regulations, according to a 2019 analysis by the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. The GW center’s main tools are reports and public comments it submits to Congress, and although it does not get much mainstream news media attention, it has found a receptive audience on Capitol Hill—and in the previous administration. Much of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda, Public Citizen found, echoed the center’s recommendations, including “dramatically reducing the cost that the government attributes to carbon emissions.”

But should the Regulatory Studies Center be lumped in with climate science disinformation groups? In response to the Public Citizen report, as well as criticism from UnKoch My Campus and GW student groups, the center issued a statement in February disputing the charge that it rejects climate science. “Contrary to unsubstantiated claims, no one in the Regulatory Studies Center questions climate science,” it said. “In fact, most of the Center’s scholars do not focus on environmental or energy issues at all. Those who have written on climate issues address economic and legal questions, not the science.”

Whether or not the center directly disputes climate science is beside the point. In the face of incontrovertible scientific evidence, most ExxonMobil-funded disinformation groups have revised their position on the reality of climate change. Instead of challenging the science, their efforts now tend to focus on denigrating renewable energy, overstating the costs of transitioning to a clean energy economy while ignoring the benefits, and preventing government action. That is exactly what the Regulatory Studies Center does. In recent years, for example, it has published papers and filed public comments opposing stronger efficiency standards for home appliances and vehicles that would dramatically reduce carbon emissions.

The center also has enlisted the help of unabashed climate science deniers. In the fall of 2018, for example, it tapped Julian Morris to file a public comment supporting the Trump administration’s proposed rollback of Obama-era standards for cars and light trucks designed to increase fuel economy and, for the first time, substantially reduce tailpipe carbon emissions. Morris, president and founder of the International Policy Network and vice president of research at the Reason Foundation—two libertarian, climate science denier organizations—falsely declared in a paper published in March 2018 that the “effects of climate change are unknown—but the benefits may well be greater than the costs for the foreseeable future.”

Millions More for Disinformation

The money ExxonMobil donated in 2020 to AEI, the GW Regulatory Studies Center and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents only a small percentage of the company’s recent outlays to sway public opinion and blunt government climate action. It is difficult to document all of the company’s related expenditures, but they include:

• More than $5 million on Facebook ads in 2020, which is more than half of the $9.6 million that the U.S. oil and gas industry spent on the ads, according to an analysis by the think tank InfluenceMap that reviewed more than 25,000 ads on Facebook’s U.S. platform. Many of the ads described natural gas as a “green” fuel source and argued that cutting carbon emissions would drive up energy costs.
  
• An estimated $10 million in annual dues to the American Petroleum Institute (API) (based on how much Shell Oil recently revealed it paid). The U.S. oil and gas industry’s oldest and largest trade association, API is working overtime to block stricter methane emissions standards. McCoy indirectly referenced API during the secretly taped interview when he said ExxonMobil relied on third parties to publicly represent its interests in Congress. “We don’t want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing,” he said. “It’s getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be, for the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of Congress.”
  
• At least $100,000 in annual dues to trade associations (based on what it reported it spent in 2019) that have a long track record of peddling climate disinformation, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
  
• Nearly $834,000 during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles to 118 of the 139 climate science deniers currently in Congress. Over that same time period, the company reportedly spent nearly $41 million to lobby in Washington, but neither McCoy nor ExxonMobil’s other in-house lobbyists have broached the topic of a carbon tax—the company’s avowed top priority—with legislators since 2018, according to its quarterly lobbying reports.
  

So while ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods and his colleagues proclaim that they fully understand the threat posed by climate change and are “committed to being part of the solution,” the evidence shows they continue to spend tens of millions of dollars every year to promote gridlock in Congress on the issue. The future of the planet as we know it hangs in the balance, but as McCoy acknowledged in his interview, ExxonMobil was—and still is—looking out for its investments and its shareholders’ short-term interests, regardless of the long-term consequences.

###

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.

Take action…

ExxonKnew “Recent reports have shown that Exxon knew about the threat of climate change decades ago. Yet over the course of nearly forty years, the company has contributed millions of dollars to think tanks and politicians that have done their best to spread doubt and misinformation—first on the existence of climate change, then the extent of the problem, and now its cause. If Exxon intentionally misled the public about climate change and fossil fuels, then they should be held accountable. We’re calling for an immediate investigation.”

Urge the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate ExxonMobil for lying to the public about fossil fuels’ threat to the climate.

Cause for concern…

“Rising temperatures have led to higher rates of heat illness, causing farmworkers to collapse in fields and elderly people to die in their apartments,” reports Sarah Kaplan for the Washington Post, while referring to a new analysis from more than 100 doctors and health experts. “Insects carrying tropical diseases have multiplied and spread toward the poles. The amount of plant pollen in the air is increasing, worsening asthma and other respiratory conditions. Extreme floods and catastrophic storms have boosted the risk of cholera and other waterborne diseases. Smoke from fires in California infiltrates the lungs and then the bloodstreams of people as far away as Texas, Ohio and New York. Droughts intensify, crops fail, hunger stalks millions of the world’s most vulnerable people.”

• Inaction on climate change imperils millions of lives, doctors say (Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post)
• Senator Joe Manchin has been fighting to keep billions in subsidies for fossil fuels (Alleen Brown, The Intercept)
• World currently faces unprecedented catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity (United Nations)
• Is the Amazon near a tipping point? Three real-world studies are ominous (Stephen Eisenhammer, Reuters)
• World landmarks that could disappear due to climate change (Love Exploring)

Round of applause…

• Environmentalists secure water rights for Great Salt Lake (Ben Winslow, Associated Press)
• Climate change: The environmental disasters we’ve almost fixed (Helen Briggs, BBC News)
• The humpback chub, a rare fish, has been brought back from the brink of extinction (James Anderson, Associated Press)
• Listen to these cheeky turkeys ‘laugh’ after one of them nips CNN’s Anna Stewart in the bum (Annie Reneau, Upworthy)
• Recipes using faux meat that will convert the carnivore in your life (Ben Mims, Los Angeles Times)

ICYMI…

“In truth, not only is meat consumption not necessary for humans to stay healthy, but it’s also potentially quite harmful. Consider meat’s links to heart disease, diabetes and certain cancers. Or the millions of people who fall sick from listeria, E. coli, and salmonella each year due to the consumption of contaminated meat. Or the more than 2.8 million Americans who contract antibiotic-resistant infections—which is a result of a nasty upshot of the rampant use of antibiotics on factory farms.”

—EFL contributor Jennifer Barckley, “The Myth That Meat Is Essential for Human Health Could Harm Us All” (Public Seminar, July 29, 2021)

Parting thought…

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

—excerpt from Ted Hughes’ “The Thought Fox,” from Collected Poems (Faber, 2003)

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Author Paul Watson has no problem with critics calling him and his marine-life-defending colleagues pirates—it’s far better than helplessly standing by and doing nothing in the face of the violence against animals they have witnessed.

By Captain Paul Watson

9 min read

This excerpt is from Death of a Whale, by Captain Paul Watson (GroundSwell Books, 2021). This web adaptation was produced by GroundSwell Books in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

In 1975, Robert Hunter and I were the first people to physically block a harpooner’s line of fire when we intercepted a Soviet whaling fleet and placed our bodies between the killers and eight fleeing, frightened sperm whales. We were in a small inflatable boat, speeding before the plunging steel prow of a Russian kill boat. As the whales fled for their lives before us, we could smell the fear in their misty exhalations. We thought we could make a difference with our Gandhi-inspired seagoing stand. Surely these men behind the harpoons would not risk killing a human being to satisfy their lust for whale oil and meat. We were wrong!

The whalers demonstrated their contempt for our nonviolent protests by firing an explosive harpoon over our heads. The harpoon line slashed into the water and we narrowly escaped death. One of the whales was not so lucky. With a dull thud followed by a muffled explosion, the entrails of a female whale were torn and ripped apart by hot steel shrapnel.

The large bull sperm whale in the midst of the pod abruptly rose and dove. Experts had told us that a bull whale in this situation would attack us. We were a smaller target than the whaling ship. Anxiously, we held our breath in anticipation of sixty tons of irate muscle and blood torpedoing from the depths below our frail craft.

The ocean erupted behind us. We turned toward the Soviet ship to see a living juggernaut hurl itself at the Russian bow. The harpooner was ready. He pulled the trigger and sent a second explosive missile into the massive head of the whale. A pitiful scream rang in my ears, a fountain of blood geysered into the air, and the deep blue of the ocean was rapidly befouled with dark red blood. The whale thrashed and convulsed violently.

Mortally wounded and crazed with pain, the whale rolled, and one great eye made contact with mine. The whale dove, and a trail of bloody bubbles moved laboriously toward us. Slowly, very slowly, a gargantuan head emerged from the water, and the whale rose at an angle over and above our tiny craft. Blood and brine cascaded from the gaping head wound and fell upon us in torrents.

We were helpless. We knew that we would be crushed within seconds as the whale fell upon us. There was little time for fear, only awe. We could not move.

The whale did not fall upon us. He wavered and towered motionless above us. I looked up past the daggered six-inch teeth and into the eye the size of my fist, an eye that reflected back intelligence and spoke wordlessly of compassion and communicated to me the understanding that this was a being that could discriminate and understood what we had tried to do. The mammoth body slowly slid back into the sea.

The massive head of this majestic sperm whale slowly fell back into the sea. He rolled and the water parted, revealing a solitary eye. The gaze of the whale seized control of my soul, and I saw my own image reflected back at me. I was overcome with pity, not for the whale but for ourselves. Waves of shame crashed down upon me and I wept. Overwhelmed with horror at this revelation of the cruel blasphemy of my species, I realized then and there that my allegiance lay with this dying child of the sea and his kind. On that day, I left the comfortable realm of human self-importance to forever embrace the soulful satisfaction of lifelong service to the citizens of the sea.

The gentle giant died with my face seared upon his retina. I will never forget that. It is a memory that haunts and torments me and leaves me with only one course to chart toward redemption for the collective sins of humanity. It is both my burden and my joy to pledge my allegiance to the most intelligent and profoundly sensitive species of beings to have ever inhabited the Earth––the great whales.

Reykjavik, Iceland, November 1986

Despite the criticisms, the name-calling, and the controversy that have arisen from our work since 1975, one indisputable fact emerged from a raid made by my crew (which included Rod Coronado of the U.S. and David Howitt of the UK) on two whaling ships in Reykjavik in 1986 in order to enforce an international moratorium on commercial whaling that had been established that year: it was successful.

The two whaling ships were razed, although their electronics and mechanical systems had been totally destroyed. Insurance did not cover the losses because the owners had stated that terrorists sank the ships, and apparently they were not insured for terrorism.

Most importantly, from that day of November 8, 1986, to sixteen years later in the year 2002, the Icelanders did not take another whale. What talk, compromise, negotiations, meetings, letters, petitions, and protests had not accomplished, we achieved with a little monkey-wrenching activity in the wee hours of the morning.

Were we terrorists? No, not even criminals, for we were never charged with a crime, even though we made ourselves available for prosecution. We had simply done our duty, and we put an end to an unlawful activity.

The only repercussion was that Iceland moved before the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1987 that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society be banned from holding observer status at the meetings of the IWC. After this passed, Iceland resigned from the IWC, leaving us with the distinction of being the only organization to enjoy the status of banishment from the IWC.

How ironic, I thought, to be the only organization banned from the IWC because we were the only organization to have ever enforced an IWC ruling.

It was not much of a punishment. I had never enjoyed listening to the delegates of the member nations barter whales like they were bushels of wheat or pork bellies. I also never had much use for the posturing of the nongovernmental organizations pretending that they were actually making a difference by attending this annual circus. All that we were interested in were the rulings of the IWC, and we fully intended to continue to enforce those rulings.

I have been asked many times why we consider the IWC rulings important. Why not just oppose all whaling everywhere? The answer is that we do oppose all whaling by everyone, everywhere. However, we only actively attack whaling operations that are in violation of international conservation law. The reason for this is simple: We do not presume to be the judges and jury. We simply execute the rulings of the IWC or the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) or any rulings from international conservation authorities, and we do so in accordance with the definition of intervention as defined by the 1982 United Nations World Charter for Nature, Part III (Implementation), Principle 21, Section (e): “States and, to the extent they are able, other public authorities, international organizations, individuals, groups and corporations shall… Safeguard and conserve nature in areas beyond national jurisdiction.”

As a seaman, I have a great and abiding respect for the traditions of the law of the sea. To attack without a vested authority would be piracy. Thus, the difference between a privateer like Sir Francis Drake and a pirate like Blackbeard was that the former was in possession of a letter of marque from a sovereign authority and the latter practiced the same trade solely upon his own authority.

I have never considered it my place to judge the illegal activities of others. However, I feel that when there are laws and international treaties that it is the responsibility of individuals and nongovernmental organizations to strive toward the implementation of these rulings, especially in light of the fact that there is no international body empowered to police these international laws. Nation-states intervene when it is advantageous for them to do so, but little enforcement is carried out in the interests of the common good of all citizens of the planet.

It is worth noting that it was not the British or Spanish navies that brought the piracy of the Caribbean under control in the 17th century. There were too many conflicts of interest, too much corruption, and too little motivation for any real action to have been taken. The bureaucracies in the British admiralty and the Spanish court did nothing because the very nature of a bureaucracy is the maintenance of the status quo. The achievement of first shutting down piracy on the Spanish Main is attributed to one man––a pirate himself.

Henry Morgan did what two nations chose not to do: he drove the pirates to ground and ended their reign of terror. As a result, the “pirate” was made governor of Jamaica, although history would show that the man was far more effective as a pirate than as a politician. In fact, he was more of a pirate as a politician than he was as an actual pirate.

When Andrew Jackson failed to get the support of the merchants of New Orleans to back his attack on the British, it was a pirate who came to his service in the personage of Jean Lafitte. When the United States successfully endeavored to cast off the yoke of British rule, it was a pirate who achieved the most dramatic and successful naval victory at sea. That person was captain John Paul Jones. Consequently, it is a pirate who was the founder of what is today the world’s most powerful navy.

Today, with the pirates of corrupt industry aided by corrupt politicians plundering our oceans for the last of the fish, killing the last of the whales, and polluting the waters, we find that there is very little real resistance to their activities upon the high seas. Once again it is time for some good pirates to rise up in opposition to the bad pirates, and I believe that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is just such an organization of good pirates.

When our critics call us pirates, I have no problem with that. In fact, we have taken their criticisms and in an aikido-like manner; we have incorporated their accusations into our image. Our ships are sometimes painted a monochromatic black. We have designed our own version of the pretty red [a flag which, when translated to French, becomes “joli rouge” and is rumored to have inspired the “jolly roger” phrase applied to pirate flags], and our black-and-white flag flies from our mast during campaigns. We even carry cannons, with the difference being that our guns fire cream pies and not red-hot balls.

As good pirates, we have evolved to suit the time and culture in which we live, and this being a media-defined culture, our primary weapons are the camera, the video, and the internet. Like modern-day Robin Hoods, we take from the greedy and give back to the sea. We don’t profit materially, but we profit tremendously both spiritually and psychologically.

###

Captain Paul Watson is a Canadian-American marine conservation activist who founded the direct action group the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1977 and was more recently featured in Animal Planet’s popular television series “Whale Wars” and the documentary about his life, “Watson.” Sea Shepherd’s mission is to protect all ocean-dwelling marine life. Watson has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books, including Death of a Whale (2021), Urgent! (2021), Orcapedia (2020), Dealing with Climate Change and Stress (2020), The Haunted Mariner (2019), and Captain Paul Watson: Interview with a Pirate (2013).

Take action…

Ocean Research & Conservation Association of Ireland: “The annual mass slaughter of some of the most vulnerable yet important species for healthy ecosystem functioning is under threat due to hunts in Norway that officially begin in April and end in September every single year. Whaling… in Norway results in a dramatic chase to harpoon minke whales… unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of these minke whales have been shown to be pregnant when they’re killed. This year, Norway killed more whales than in the last 5 years, at 575 minke whales slaughtered. According to the International Whaling Commission, in 2019 the Norwegian whale quota for whale hunting was 1,278. This is a 28 percent increase from the previous year. The use of explosive Penthrite grenade harpoon is a method that has been used for years in the act of killing whales. This vicious way of killing can take up to 25 minutes for the whale to die—a slow and inhumane way of slaughter.”

Sign the petition to ban whale hunting in Norway. (Change.org)

Cause for concern…

“An adult manatee eats 100 to 200 pounds of seagrass per day to survive,” report Jim Waymer and Max Chesnes on Florida Today. “But up to 90 percent of the seagrass coverage in much of the sea cow’s most important habitat—the Indian River Lagoon—vanished after severe, successive algae blooms that began a decade ago. The blooms blocked the sunlight their staple seagrass diet needs to photosynthesize.”

• Florida’s record manatee die-off nears 1,000 victims (Jim Waymer and Max Chesnes, Florida Today)
• Key Biden climate plan likely to be cut because of Manchin opposition (Coral Davenport, New York Times)
• More than 120,000 U.S. sites feared to handle harmful PFAS ‘forever’ chemicals (Carey Gillam and Alvin Chang, Guardian)
• G-20 climate talks stall ahead of critical Rome summit (Bloomberg Law)
• U.S. heating bills sill jump as much as 54% this winter, says government (Stan Choe, Associated Press)

Round of applause…

“The Human Rights Council’s decisive action in recognizing the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is about protecting people and planet—the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. It is also about protecting the natural systems which are basic preconditions to the lives and livelihoods of all people, wherever they live,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet following the Council’s October 8 declaration that a healthy environment is a human right. “Having long called for such a step, I am gratified that the Council’s action today clearly recognizes environmental degradation and climate change as interconnected human rights crises.”

• Access to a healthy environment, declared a human right by UN rights council (United Nations)
• Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing (Matthew P. White, et. al., Scientific Reports)
• Biden administration moves to curtail pollution by PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ (Annie Snider, Politico)
• Dubai’s salty farming experiment could help tackle food security challenges (Kelly Clarke, The National)
• What a dairy-free diet can do for your sex life (Audrey Enjoli, LIVEKINDLY)

ICYMI…

“As we remove large semi-wild parklands and play areas from our communities, we restrict the opportunity for our children—and ourselves—to explore and develop a comfort level with these environs. When we are not comfortable with wild nature, we discourage our children from exploring it. And so, we have now created a positive feedback cycle.

“In many cities, children cannot name even one local bird. We do not protect what we cannot name. As we reduce the areas of wild nature in our cities because of development pressure, we increase our fear of it, and we reduce our children’s time in the remaining areas of wilderness. As we reduce our own and our children’s play time in wild nature, the benefit and use of these spaces diminishes, and the protection of these spaces is reduced, allowing their unopposed destruction and development as urban areas. Because of this strange and unhealthy positive feedback, we find ourselves valuing wild lands less, even as they become much scarcer.”

—Teresa Coady, “How the Built Environment Is Damaging Children’s Connection to Nature,” excerpted from Teresa Coady’s book Rebuilding Earth: Designing Ecoconscious Habitats for Humans; adapted by the Independent Media Institute for the web with permission from North Atlantic Books. (October 1, 2020)

Parting thought…

His beak could open a bottle, 
and his eyes — when he lifts their soft lids —
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder —
Blake, maybe, 
or the Book of Revelation.

Never mind that he eats only 
the black-smocked crickets, 
and the dragonflies if they happen
to be out late over the ponds, and of course
the occasional festal mouse.
Never mind that he is only a memo
from the offices of fear —

…

Somewhere in the universe, 
in the gallery of important things, 
the babyish owl, ruffled and rakish, 
sits on its pedestal.

—Mary Oliver, “Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard,” House of Light (Beacon Press, 2012)

Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, Counterpunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Despite claiming to endorse a carbon tax, ExxonMobil has funneled millions of dollars to lawmakers who oppose the idea.

By Elliott Negin, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

When then-ExxonMobil lobbyist Keith McCoy conceded in a secretly recorded video in May that the oil giant voiced support for a carbon tax only because it assumed it would never happen, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said the company was “shocked by these interviews” and stood by its “commitments to working on finding solutions to climate change.”

Wood’s reaction was reminiscent of Captain Louis Renault feigning surprise to discover gambling at Rick’s Café in the 1942 film “Casablanca.” After quietly pocketing his winnings, Renault justifies closing down the nightclub by exclaiming, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

Woods was shocked? Really? Just one look at his company’s financial records would show that despite claiming to endorse a carbon tax—initially in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade bill that was under consideration in 2009—ExxonMobil has funneled millions of dollars over the last decade to lawmakers who staunchly oppose the idea.

Backing Climate Science Deniers

One tried-and-true way corporations ensure access to Congress is by making campaign contributions. Although there may not be a verifiable quid pro quo, donations guarantee access, and access guarantees influence.

So, given ExxonMobil’s professed support for a carbon tax, one might reasonably assume that the company’s political action committee (PAC) and employees would back lawmakers who sponsor such legislation and, over time, withdraw their funding for senators and representatives who stand in the way.

In fact, the opposite is true.

During the video interview, McCoy—who at the time was ExxonMobil’s senior director of federal relations—compared lobbying Congress with fishing.

“When you have an opportunity to talk to a member of Congress,” he said, “I liken it to fishing, right? You know you have bait, you throw that bait out…. And… [then you start to] reel them in…. They’re a captive audience. They know they need you. And I need them.”

The goal, he explained, is to develop a close relationship with legislative staff. “You want to be able to go to the chief… and say, look, we’ve got this issue, we need Congressman So-and-So to be able to either introduce this bill, we need him to make a floor statement, we need him to send a letter,” he said. “You name it, we’ve asked for everything.”

Not quite everything. ExxonMobil apparently has not asked for a carbon tax, notwithstanding the fact that the company was one of the founding members of the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), a bipartisan, industry-supported group, which was formed in 2017 to promote a carbon tax, and a year later, the company pledged to give $1 million over a two-year period to Americans for Carbon Dividends (AFCD), the council’s lobbying arm. Over the last decade, members of both houses have voted on a handful of carbon tax-related amendments and nonbinding resolutions. In every case, a sizable majority who received donations from ExxonMobil’s PAC and employees rejected the idea. For example:

• In March 2015, the Senate voted 58 to 42 to pass a budget amendment prohibiting a carbon tax. Thirty of the 40 senators who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2010, including amendment sponsor Roy Blunt (R-MO), voted in favor of the prohibition.
• In June 2016, the House passed a resolution introduced by Steve Scalise (R-LA) stating that a carbon tax “would be detrimental to American families and businesses” by a 237 to 163 margin. Eighty-five percent of the House members who voted for the resolution had received ExxonMobil political donations since 2013. By contrast, only 26 of the representatives who voted against the resolution—16 percent—had received ExxonMobil money.
• In July 2018, the House passed another Scalise-sponsored resolution asserting that “a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy,” this time by a 229 to 180 vote. During the 2018 election cycle, 75 percent of the representatives who gave the resolution a thumbs up received ExxonMobil donations. Only 23 percent of the 180 who voted against it got ExxonMobil funding.

The disparity between ExxonMobil’s PAC donations to supporters of the July 2018 Scalise resolution and its opponents is even more telling, given that PACs—which can contribute as much as $10,000 to a candidate per two-year cycle—more accurately represent a company’s agenda than that of individual employees. The ExxonMobil PAC contributed more than $935,000 to 74 percent of the resolution’s supporters, but only $109,500 to opponents during the 2018 election cycle. Scalise, the resolution’s sponsor, and 37 of his 48 resolution cosponsors received ExxonMobil PAC contributions.

The most recent congressional carbon tax vote took place in the Senate in February during a round of votes on the pandemic relief bill. John Hoeven (R-ND) sponsored an amendment that would have prohibited such a tax. It was rejected on a strict party-line vote: All 50 Republican senators voted for the amendment; all 50 Democratic senators voted no.

ExxonMobil PAC donations to those senators are mostly party-line, too. Twenty-seven of the 50 Republicans collectively have received $233,000 during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles. Over that same time frame, the PAC contributed just $62,000 to 11 of the Democrats.

Snubbing Carbon Tax Proponents

In January 2018, ExxonMobil Vice President of Public and Government Affairs Suzanne McCarron reaffirmed the company’s support for a carbon tax, the Paris climate agreement and other related climate policies in a blog post on the company’s website. ExxonMobil, she maintained, is “committed to being part of the solution.”

Nevertheless, during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, ExxonMobil employees and its PAC donated nearly $834,000 to 28 of the 30 senators and 90 of the 109 representatives currently in Congress who, according to the Center for American Progress, still reject the scientific consensus that global temperatures are rising and that burning fossil fuels is largely to blame. The company’s PAC funded 16 of the climate science deniers in the Senate and 81 in the House.

Lawmakers sponsoring carbon tax legislation, meanwhile, have enjoyed considerably less support. Over the last two election cycles, climate science deniers in the 117th Congress received six and a half times more from ExxonMobil than carbon tax proponents.

Two carbon tax bills have been introduced in the Senate this session, both by Democrats: one sponsored by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, which has nine cosponsors, the other by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin. Three carbon tax bills have been introduced in the House: one sponsored by Pennsylvania’s Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick with one cosponsor, another by Connecticut’s Democratic Rep. John Larson with two cosponsors, and a third by Florida’s Democratic Rep. Theodore Deutch with 84 cosponsors.

Since 2017, ExxonMobil employees and the company PAC have donated only $127,692 to these carbon tax proponents: $35,486 to eight of the 11 sponsors and cosponsors in the Senate and $92,206 to 33 of the 90 sponsors and cosponsors in the House. The PAC contributed to only three of the senators and 12 of the representatives.

Despite this decidedly lopsided funding pattern, McCoy insisted during the interview that ExxonMobil wants to work with lawmakers on carbon tax legislation. “Put forth a bill and we’ll show you that we’ll support that bill, we’ll help you work on that bill,” he said. But, he added, “Nobody wants to do that because it’s not politically expedient to put forth a tax for people, it just isn’t.”

In fact, a number of lawmakers have “put forth a bill” to establish a carbon tax in successive congressional sessions, but the company has shown no support, and neither McCoy nor ExxonMobil’s other in-house lobbyists have broached the topic with members of Congress since 2018—the same year it announced its $1 million donation to the Climate Leadership Council’s lobbying arm, AFCD—according to ExxonMobil’s quarterly lobbying reports.

Staffers working for Rep. Larson and Sen. Whitehouse, who both have been sponsoring carbon tax legislation for years, recently verified that ExxonMobil has not expressed support for their respective proposals. Larson introduced a bill in 2009, the same year that ExxonMobil announced that it favored the policy, while Whitehouse first sponsored one in 2014 and has reintroduced a version of it in every session since.

Out of frustration, Whitehouse and his fellow bill sponsor, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, sent a letter to ExxonMobil in August 2016 criticizing the company for its indifference.

“Regarding ExxonMobil’s alleged seven years of support for a carbon fee, we’ve seen no meaningful evidence of that,” the senators wrote. “None of the top executives that make up ExxonMobil’s management team has expressed interest in meeting with any of us to discuss the Whitehouse-Schatz proposal or any carbon fee legislation.”

Five years later, nothing has changed on that front. A Whitehouse spokesperson says his office is not aware of ExxonMobil supporting any carbon pricing legislation, let alone the senator’s.

But McCoy’s revelations did have consequences: The Climate Leadership Council kicked ExxonMobil out of the organization in August; the Union of Concerned Scientists and other public interest groups cited McCoy’s comments in a “friend of the court” brief filed in Minnesota’s climate science deception lawsuit against ExxonMobil; and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform asked McCoy to testify about his company’s campaign to mislead the public “about the dangers of fossil fuels and their role in causing global climate change.”

As for McCoy’s job status, an ExxonMobil spokesperson told E&E News in late September that “McCoy no longer works for the company.”

If McCoy does wind up testifying before Congress, he would serve as the opening act for a hearing that the Oversight Committee plans to hold on October 28 featuring his former boss Darren Woods and top executives from other major oil and gas companies. Finally, under oath, Woods and his colleagues will have to answer questions about their decades-long effort to block government action on climate.

###

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Take action…

Change.org: Nathaniel Scott from East Lyme, Connecticut, wrote in 2019, when he was nine years old: “Arctic animals are dying every day because of more and more oil and gas expansions. We need to help them. The situation for Arctic species is already very bleak but will be even worse if more and more journeys to the north are happening, where the habitat for these animals is being disturbed. Also, more fossil fuel means more pollution and climate change, which means a smaller habitat for these creatures to call home. But together we can stop oil expansion in the Arctic. With your help, oil and gas expansion will hopefully be stopped in the far north so these beautiful creatures can live a good wholesome life in the wild. If the government and major oil companies take these issues [seriously] then hopefully more and more people will agree and try to save the Arctic. Killer whales, walruses, polar bears—the list goes on and on of species [that] will become more and more endangered unless we do something about it.”

Urge ExxonMobil, Shell and Gazprom to stop plans to expand oil and gas exploration in the Arctic.

Cause for concern…

“We have to make sure… (the COVID-19 stimulus measures) [are] strengthening biodiversity and not adding to the problem,” said David Cooper, deputy executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. “Globally, if you look around, the stimulus packages are making it worse rather than better.”

• United Nations warns that nations aren’t spending enough on species protection as new talks begin (David Stanway, Reuters)
• Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) wants to cut $100 billion in proposed climate funds, sources say (Coral Davenport, New York Times)
• In secret tapes, palm oil execs disclose corruption, brutality (Desmond Butler, Washington Post)
• As the climate bakes, Turkey faces a future without water (Paul Hockenos, Yale Environment 360)

Round of applause…

“Replacing dangerous HFCs [hydrofluorocarbons] in key products will bring us a smooth and rapid transition to climate-friendlier air conditioners, refrigerators, aerosols, insulation, and other products Americans use every day, saving money and energy for consumers, creating new jobs, and protecting our climate and our health,” said Christina Theodoridi, a climate and clean energy policy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit, following the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to grant 10 petitions to cut the use of HFCs, which are a potent greenhouse gas.

• EPA grants petitions to stem climate pollutants in future rules (Jennifer Hijazi, Bloomberg Law)
• DOE announces goal of 5 million homes powered by community solar (Zack Budryk, The Hill)
• Top United Nations panel votes to recognize human right to a clean environment (Katie Surma, Inside Climate News)
• End to deforestation sought at COP26 climate summit (Michael Taylor, Thomson Reuters Foundation)
• 30 percent of global consumers ‘likely’ to eat vegan eggs instead of conventional ones (Jemima Webber, Plant Based News)

ICYMI…

“[C]limate change isn’t the only issue exacerbated by methane: Public health also suffers, as methane emissions increase ground-level ozone, commonly known as smog, a cause of respiratory disease like asthma, as well as cardiovascular disease. In the COVID era, anything that negatively impacts lung function makes people more susceptible to the effects of coronavirus infection. Natural gas development also emits pollutants, including ultrafine particulate matter that can damage the heart, liver, kidneys and central nervous system. Fracking, the process of extracting natural gas, also uses more than 50 toxic chemicals that are known or suspected carcinogens. These health effects impact ‘frontline communities,’ communities of color and low-income, whose neighborhoods usually lack basic infrastructure to support them and protect them from pollution, many of them near oil and gas facilities.”

—EFL editor Reynard Loki, “Methane: The Forgotten Climate Change Driver That’s Poisoning Frontline Communities,” Independent Media Institute, January 5, 2021.

Parting thought…

“A bird comes to the window. It’s a mistake
to think of them
as birds, they are so often
messengers. That is why, once they
plummet to the sill, they sit
so perfectly still, to mock
patience, lifting their heads to sing
poor lady, poor lady, their three-note
warning, later flying
like a dark cloud from the sill to the olive grove.”

—Louise Glück, “Penelope’s Stubbornness,” from Meadowlands (1996)

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Smaller, more sustainable families would create massive long-term savings and catalyze sustainable development.

By Carter Dillard, Independent Media Institute

4 min read

Existential crises, from accelerating climate change to a pandemic that is mutating to overcome the defenses of our immune system, have prompted talk of the need for fundamental change. This talk rarely, if ever, touches on the one form of change that is the most fundamental: Altering the way we have kids or create future generations. It is a choice that would change who we as a society are—and who we are becoming.

This option is almost never discussed, despite the disproportionate long-term positive impact better family planning policies can have on the environmental, inequality, and public health crises we face, because it means making decisions that are not individualistic in nature, but are, instead, shaped by the need to ensure a better and a more sustainable future for everyone. Whatever happens in the world, for many, that sense of familial autonomy and privacy—the right to have as many kids as they want, when they want, irrespective of the needs of both their own families and the environment, the opportunities the children will or won’t have—gives them a feeling of power and freedom. Most people are at best unaware of and at worst uncaring about how their decisions impact the freedom of others—future generations’ freedom to a fair start in life, and freedom from the ravages of the climate and other ecological crises.

Much like the refusal to wear a mask during the peak of the pandemic, the assertion of autonomy relating to the questions of having kids is absurd and cruel in the current circumstances. It’s a power-grab masquerading as an assertion, rather than the praxis, of freedom. Unlike those who refuse to wear masks to protect others from the spread of COVID-19, however, people asserting the self-contradiction of procreative autonomy are buoyed up by the population growth culture pushed by governments and big business because baby-making grows the pyramid—which Nobel laureate Steven Chu decried—atop which these parties sit.

In my experience—having spent over a decade wrestling with leadership in civil society and social justice to stop treating the right to have kids as an unlimited right, instead of something more nuanced like free speech—I have found that the dilemma boils down simply to being a collective action problem. Most people would plan for and have children more sustainably and equitably if they could be assured others would too. But there is a lack of trust that whoever goes first will see others follow suit. Such problems are nothing new. That is why we have a social contract and government, which can help us act collectively, and perhaps lead us to a more child-centered thinking of working together to give every child a fair start in life.

What would that look like?

In the United States, Black families typically have one-tenth the wealth of white families. The impacts of this wealth disparity are especially hard on kids, and can ripple forward into future generations. President Biden’s child care and tax credit proposal is a step in the right direction, but it could be better. All benefits to wealthy families who don’t need the funding could be cut. Those savings could then be used as cash incentives to power up family planning and early childhood investment systems in the United States to target child abuse by amending the federal child abuse law, incentivizing having kids only when parents are really ready, and promoting smaller and more sustainable families, as well as fostering and adoption. These changes can have 20 times the impact on climate emissions, as compared to short-term fixes, and when they are made as part of recognizing our sacred constitutional right to nature, they will create massive long-term savings and catalyze sustainable development.

Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) has already proposed a vehicle called “baby bonds,” which would “create a new American birthright—giving every child a fair chance at economic opportunity and mobility,” and if these changes are made progressively, they can accomplish significant sustainable changes.

This change can help combat climate change and widen the opportunities for children, all while achieving goals that go beyond U.S. partisan values. It specifically prioritizes children and social equity over big business (as leftists seek to do) and improves the possibility of personal autonomy without the interference of so-called big government (thus satisfying the interests of the right wing).

This is not a loss of control—when we take into account future generations, it’s a net gain, where future generations have control over their lives that a fair start would provide, control over systems of governance, and control over the environment that can help us deal with the climate change crisis in an effective manner.

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Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and served with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.

Take action…

India is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, after China and the United States. From 1990 to 2018, the nation’s emissions skyrocketed a staggering 335 percent. Aman Sharma, a student in India, has launched a public petition—already signed by more than 374,000 people around the world—urging the Indian government to declare climate change a national emergency. “Record-breaking heat waves have become a regular occurrence in India, killing thousands of people,” he writes. “Melting snowcaps are slowly increasing the sea level. Rainfall patterns in India are changing, and this has had a devastating effect on farmers’ harvests and affecting the migration patterns of different birds and animals.”

Urge India’s environment minister to declare climate change a national emergency.

Cause for concern…

• Crews race to limit damage from major California oil spill (Amy Taxin and Christopher Weber, Associated Press)
• Deportations of Haitians spark concerns over environmental refugees (Rachel Frazin and Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill)
• Arizona drought ignites tensions and threatens traditions among the Hopi (Simon Romero, New York Times)
• North Carolina civil rights groups say hog waste ‘biogas’ harms communities of color (Aman Azhar, Inside Climate News)
• The high price of living near the shore is about to go through the roof (Darryl Fears and Lori Rozsa, Washington Post)

Round of applause…

• Biden administration resumes enforcement of unlawful bird deaths by industry, reversing Trump (Matthew Brown, Associated Press)
• These giant floating islands could keep cities warm, without burning fossil fuels (Nate Berg, Fast Company)
• South Korea considers ban on eating of dog meat as pet ownership grows in the country (Grace Moon and Andrew Jeong, Washington Post)
• 3 simple ways to help save the planet, according to the women behind ‘Plastic-Free Fridays’ (Stacey Leasca, Travel + Leisure)
• I interviewed animals with a tiny mic again (Maya Higa, YouTube)

ICYMI…

“In addition to its role in human rights abuses, the palm oil industry is also a primary driver of deforestation, which not only exacerbates climate change by releasing into the atmosphere carbon that was previously safely stored in trees cut down to make room for plantations, but threatens wildlife and biodiversity… Made from the oil palm plant, palm oil is the world’s most widely traded vegetable oil. It is found in about half of all consumer goods, including common foods like bread, cookies, crackers, doughnuts, peanut butter and breakfast cereal, as well as everyday household products like soap and laundry detergent. Palm oil is also found in a host of cosmetics and beauty products like lipstick, mascara, body lotion, bubble bath and anti-wrinkle creams. The list goes on.”

—EFL editor Reynard Loki, “Palm Oil: The Ingredient Behind Human Rights Abuses and Eco-Destruction That’s Probably in Your Home Right Now” (Independent Media Institute, December 22, 2020)​​​​​​​

Parting thought…

“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.” —George Bernard Shaw

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Time-proven acequia irrigation systems already in use in New Mexico make it possible for people to thrive in arid regions.

By Erika Schelby, , Independent Media Institute

9 min read

Here in the Southwest, we are trapped between the extremes of a decades-long megadrought and sudden violent flooding. In New Mexico, the feverish heat started far too early: on June 14, 2021, Albuquerque broke a heat record with a temperature of 103 degrees Fahrenheit. Fortunately, the monsoons arrived, but they didn’t bring much relief; the earth was already scorched, baked hard by the sun and high temperatures. In this region, July and August are usually the wettest months of the year. But the desperately needed rains hit a soil that was extensively compacted and no longer permeable. Much of the water ran off in forceful flash floods. On July 21, it swept three people away in the state’s largest city. They were relaxing on the side of a man-made urban arroyo (channel to contain rushing water) in Albuquerque when the deluge after a sudden storm seized them. They drowned. The population has long been warned to avoid arroyos.

In the midst of unsettling weather events like these, it is good to look at something that works in the Southwest: the homegrown water management acequias. The ancient acequia irrigation system—a “community-controlled irrigation system”—has proven to be a lifeline for small-scale farmers in the Southwest. The new Spanish arrivals introduced this system to the Americas. Now, this time-tested, ecologically sound, and culturally significant water democracy of the acequias and the small-scale farmers who depend on this irrigation system for their survival in the arid regions of the Southwest are both under assault in the face of modern development in the region.

Acequia irrigation systems are an ancient invention, going back to at least the 1st century B.C. They make it possible for people to survive and thrive in the arid regions of the world, and even in deserts. This irrigation system can be found in India, China, Central and Southeast Asia, and North Africa. The Muslims “who invaded Spain in the 8th century” introduced their water management knowledge to the country, and centuries later the new Spanish arrivals introduced this irrigation system to the Americas, where they encountered various irrigation techniques, including the techniques used by Native Americans north of the Rio Grande. The name acequia is derived from the Arabic word for irrigation canal: al-Sāqiyah.

The acequia method appears to be simple, but it is, in fact, quite sophisticated. A superb engineering feat, it works with the help of “gravity-fed ditches” that utilize the lay of the land and depend on various other factors such as season changes and the melting of the snow. The flow and the allocation of the water to individual fields have to be just right to be beneficial; otherwise, they can lead to danger and potential pitfalls: water stagnation, accumulation of salts and pollutants, silt deposits, and more. However, the acequia system is adaptive and beneficial for the environment. The earthen ditches enhance water seepage into the soil, refill the aquifer, create lush narrow wetlands, and boost biodiversity. Data collected in a study of acequias by Sam Fernald, a professor of watershed management and director of the Water Resources Research Institute at New Mexico State University (NMSU), and his fellow researchers found that “only 7 percent of the water diverted from the Rio Grande into a north-central New Mexico acequia irrigation system [was] lost to evapotranspiration,” according to Farm Progress. By intricate interactions, this system allows for the rest of the precious water to return to the river and/or the aquifer.

The associations that manage acequia make great stewards of the land thanks to what they have learned from their long experience about how to get by during recurring droughts. There are rules that need to be followed in times of scarcity. Acequias tend to cooperate with nature and have evolved with time after being tweaked and tinkered with over many generations. And what’s more, the Spanish arrivals who built this canal network also created a stable social institution for the entire community: They established the first self-organized local democracy developed by European newcomers in North America. Then, in 1848, after the Southwest became part of the United States, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American war, led to acceptance of the former legal status that Mexicans had under Spain and granted them individual water rights as constitutional rights.

On December 21, 2020, NMSU presented the results of a 10-year study of acequia systems titled “Acequia Water Systems Linking Culture and Nature: Integrated Analysis of Community Resilience to Climate and Land Use Changes.” Sam Fernald was the principal investigator of the interdisciplinary project, which involved 10 different fields ranging from hydrology to agricultural economics to global culture and society. It was funded by a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation and studied the many facets of acequia systems. Scientists from the Sandia National Laboratories worked on putting all the data of the research together in models that will support ongoing investigations.

In New Mexico, the inhabitants of a village or settlement with membership to an acequia association are known as parciantes. They know in their bones that el agua es la vida (water is life), and they value every drop. They hold the use rights, but do not own the water itself—apparently one cannot own nature. With one farmer, one vote, they elect a mayordomo (or ditch boss) who is in charge of acequia management and governance. Each spring, all able-bodied men perform the essential hard work of cleaning and fixing the unlined channels of the water distribution network. The entire concept is based on mutual aid, shared labor, collective cooperation, and sacrifice in times of scarcity (drought), when water allocations are reduced for all members.

The New Mexico Acequia Commission estimates that currently there are about 700 acequias in the state with additional systems operating in southern Colorado. Most are small-scale acequias. Conflict about water was and still remains intense and complex in the entire region. Growing populations, urban sprawl, aggressive development, and extractive industries want more water. Small-scale farmers and the acequia systems are under assault. The political and legal maneuvers employed to obtain water use rights are extremely complicated. One example of this is the big-gun strategies that were used to get access to the water supply and get all the legal and environmental approvals required for building a brand-new city called Santolina, which is meant to accommodate 100,000 people in the middle of the waterless desert west of Albuquerque. The project lingers on. The Guardian published a story in 2015 with the headline, “Why does Barclays want to build a city in the middle of the New Mexico desert?” Why indeed. Yet the British bank Barclays bought the acreage, part of the Atrisco Land Grant, in a foreclosure transaction from the former failed developer SunCal to build a “38,000-home mega-development.”

When economic growth and progress are on the menu, how can the centuries-old oasis culture of the Southwest, with its small agricultural producers, prevail? Are acequia systems old-fashioned? Are they no longer relevant? Is the wish to preserve them impractical nostalgia?

Of course, the promoters of growth and development also depend on water. They want more and more when there is less and less. Some decades ago, manipulated photos of Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city, showed that it was sitting on an underground lake, nicknamed Lake Superior. But this aquifer was an illusion: wishful thinking. There was far less water underground, it was pumped out too fast, and users depleted it rapidly.

Thankfully, the city came to its senses. From 1994 to 2018, the Albuquerque metro area reduced water use per capita from 252 gallons per day to 125 gallons. The consumption was down to 121 gallons per capita per day in 2019 (although it crept up again during the pandemic in 2020). To achieve the 2019 decrease in water use, residents reduced consumption of water to maintain their lawns and xeriscaped their gardens, among other adaptations. Albuquerque has earned its reputation as “one of the best water conservation cities in the West.”

That’s admirable, but there is more that can be done. Scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and elsewhere fear that the Western United States is advancing toward a “megadrought” situation as severe as anything known since prehistory. Our climate is warming, and the mountain snowpacks that feed and replenish our rivers are decreasing every year.

Considering this, the water democracy of the acequias makes a lot of sense. The system works. It has shown staying power and sustainability for centuries. The farmers who participate may have just a few acres of land, and by some measurements, they could be classified as poor; but in rich countries, this is called “relative poverty.” An acequia farmer in Albuquerque’s still semi-rural South Valley may hold a job in the city and also take care of his or her small farm. These farmers are likely to own their own homes, as do 80 percent of the long-established Hispanics who live there. Perhaps the farmers don’t have much, but they have autonomy, dignity, and self-sufficiency.

And these farmers can trace back historic roots to this place, as their family might have farmed the same modest parcel of terra firma since the 1600s. But developments like Santolina would cover this land with concrete and make these farmers homeless. The trends are in favor of the acequias. During the pandemic, the global food supply chains were shaken and disrupted. Shoppers in North America, 65 percent of those surveyed in the U.S. and 82 percent in Canada, said they would be more likely to purchase locally produced food. For instance, it makes very little sense to grow lettuce or spinach on the West Coast and ship it for consumption to the East Coast, thousands of miles away. This not only leaves a big carbon footprint but also raises questions about the freshness of these vegetables despite the cooling systems installed in the trucks transporting them.

To bypass Big Ag, it is crucial for small-scale farmers to grow value-added crops that are better-tasting, more nutritious, environmentally sound, and income-friendly for the producer: the emphasis should be on quality, not quantity. All over the world, there is much ongoing imaginative innovation, scientific research, and technical know-how that can be studied and perhaps adapted. What is the Netherlands or Singapore doing with regard to small-scale urban farming? How are growers in the Sonoran Desert able to sustain their agricultural needs? The big tasks required to repair and preserve our planet can overpower the mind. So perhaps setting our own local house in order is a good starting point. In this context, the Southwest is fortunate to already have a model for water democracy in the acequias. Something so viable deserves respect and support.

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Erika Schelby is the author of Looking for Humboldt and Searching for German Footprints in New Mexico and Beyond (Lava Gate Press, 2017) and Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future? (Lava Gate Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the International Essay Prize Contest by the Berlin-based cultural magazine Lettre International. Schelby lives in New Mexico.

Take action…

Consumer Reports: “Consumer Reports’ members helped test drinking water throughout the country, and the results are disturbing: Nearly every sample had measurable levels of PFAS, a group of compounds known as ‘forever chemicals’ because they don’t break down easily in the body or the environment. Despite mounting evidence of widespread PFAS contamination and potential health risks—including cancer, learning delays in children, and interference with vaccine efficacy—the EPA has failed to set an enforceable standard for PFAS in our water.”

Urge the Biden administration to protect our health and set tap water standards now that protect kids and vulnerable people from PFAS contamination.

Cause for concern…

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “the world is on a catastrophic pathway,” following the release of a worrisome new country-by-country analysis of emission reduction pledges revealing that the commitments made under the Paris climate accord are not enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

• UN warns of ‘catastrophic pathway’ with current climate pledges (Somini Sengupta, New York Times)
• Drought tests centuries-old water traditions in New Mexico (Susan Montoya Bryan, Associated Press)
• Shark and ray populations have dropped 70% and are nearing ‘point of no return,’ study warns (Jessie Yeung, CNN)
• Those who flew in 2020 had twice the environmental impact of those in 2019 (Michael Sivak, Green Car Congress)
• Your office air is making you stupider (Mark Wilson, Fast Company)

Round of applause…

“U.S. Democratic lawmakers on Thursday asked the chiefs of four major fossil fuel companies and two lobbying groups to testify next month on whether the industry led an effort to mislead the public and prevent action to fight climate change,” reports Timothy Gardner for Reuters.

• U.S. House panel to probe oil companies over climate disinformation (Timothy Gardner, Reuters)
• Los Angeles County votes to phase out oil and gas drilling (Drew Costley, Associated Press)
• ​​​​​​Faroe Islands to review annual dolphin hunt following global outcry (Jennifer Hassan, Washington Post)
• Can birds tip us off to natural disasters? (Jason Gregg, Hakai Magazine)
• One in three Brits now drink plant-based milk as dairy falls out of fashion (Tanyel Mustafa, Metro)

ICYMI…

“Pets and the pet industry are not only replacing the role of nature in our human experience, they’re devastating wildlife directly. In myriad ways, pets pose a clear threat to the wonderful, wild splendor of the rest of life on earth: cats and dogs stalk wildlife as human-subsidized killers; jungles are robbed of animals to satisfy the pet trade; diseases deadly to wild creatures are spread by globe-trotting pets; released pets in nonnative habitats (such as pythons in the Everglades) eat every wild animal in sight or squeeze them out as indomitable competitors; and the pet food business, with its insatiable demand, drains our oceans of vital forage fish. The impacts are considerable. Over the past five centuries, pets have been among the leading culprits in clobbering literally hundreds of species of threatened and extinct birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians around the globe. Domestic cats alone have helped obliterate more than 60 species in that period—including the Stephens Island wren of New Zealand and the Hawaiian crow—creatures lost forever from the rich variety of our living planet. Dogs have been linked to the extinction of 11. Other pets, and the pet industry that supports them, have been linked to other dwindling wildlife populations around the world.”

—Peter Christie, “Pets Are Contributing to the Greatest Environmental Crisis Facing Global Ecosystems,” Independent Media Institute, November 19, 2020

Parting thought…

“The question is not ‘Can you make a difference?’ You already do make a difference. It’s just a matter of what kind of difference you want to make during your life on this planet.” —Julia Butterfly Hill

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Econo-diversity makes cities resilient in times of crisis.

By Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros

6 min read

Editor’s note: Using a unique blend of place-based storytelling and clear explanations of both climate science and climate policy, Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros, in their new bookThe Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis(2021, The New Press), look at the likely impacts of the climate crisis—extreme weather, melting sea ice, flooded coastlines, and species extinction in 20 of the most at-risk communities around the globe, from New York, Shanghai and the Cook Islands, to Bangladesh, Kenya and Vietnam.

© 2021 Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros. This excerpt, adapted for the web, originally appeared in The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.

The 2020s were lean years in New York, as elsewhere. But the city’s 2022 lawsuit against the Big Five—Chevron, BP, Shell, Exxon, and ConocoPhillips—picked up where their 2018 lawsuit had failed, seeking to defray the skyrocketing costs of climate adaptation. Dozens of other cities, counties, and states had also taken legal action, chipping away at the oil companies’ deniability defense until it was clear the oil giants had known for decades they were deceiving the public about their direct responsibility for global warming. Investor unease forced them to ask the State Department to facilitate a grand settlement. By 2026, the Greenhouse Gas Settlement’s trust fund received its opening payments of $100 billion, a sum to be paid annually for as long as each company earned revenue through fossil fuel extraction. This sudden disincentive to produce catalyzed the U.S. energy industry’s first real commitment to renewables, far behind their Asian and OPEC counterparts.

New York used its share of the settlement to channelize the streets in Lower Manhattan, making them concave rather than convex—a Danish idea that successfully drained most water away from subway entrances. The city levied a graduated carbon tax that allowed developers and billionaires to pick up most of the tab for improved sea defenses along with tax credits to those who included more than 50 percent affordable housing on land higher than three meters (ten feet) above the 2020 sea level. Mostly, citizens and leaders carried on as they always had, aware of the need for action but not willing to give up the familiar contours of their city.

But the Valentine’s Day Flood of 2033 changed the public’s understanding of just how dangerous a storm could be. Rather than a sea surge like Sandy, this unseasonably warm nor’easter blew in heavy rains from upstate, sending more than 6 centimeters (2.5 inches) of water per hour down rivers, streets, and subway tunnels every hour. February’s full moon brought the highest tides of the year into New York Harbor, sending water deep into Bronx and Queens neighborhoods that had never seen flooding before. Many who were out for the night did not receive the text alerts, and nearly 20,000 people drowned as roads became rivers.

The rain came down for four days and nights. Much of the region’s transportation system was shut down for months. Half a million people fled upstate and out of state and thousands without the means to relocate moved into makeshift shelters to wait for the cleanup. The lesson of Sandy—that far-sighted relocation planning could prevent much suffering—hadn’t been learned. The city had no comprehensive flood response plan in place, and many flood barriers had failed, so slow recovery response heaped layers of trauma onto a city that had already been through so much.

But some communities on Staten Island, which had a lot of experience with flooding, had been prepared. They had held community meetings since Sandy, where they discussed and debated different approaches to coping with the Big One they all knew was coming. When it did, they felt clear-eyed, informed, and self-empowered. Their block-by-block safety teams helped the elderly and disabled evacuate to agreed safe houses, and the rest headed for the well-appointed shelter they had campaigned for a decade earlier, built on the high ground of the former Fresh Kills landfill. The borough had the lowest death toll in the city, even though it was largely a former swamp.

New Jersey and Connecticut were also devastated, with many smaller rivers breaching their banks and washing away small towns. The three governors crossed political lines to finally implement a plan that had first been proposed back in 2017, creating a Regional Coastal Commission and vesting it with the regulatory powers to relocate low-lying communities and add protection to higher, densely populated places. After two years of thoughtful development, the commission released the New Mannahatta Plan, a vision that more closely realigned the metropolitan landscape with its original 17th-century topography. In Manhattan, Canal Street was reverted to an actual canal, and Water Street became the shoreline and a floodable park. In Staten Island and Queens, whole neighborhoods were rebuilt further inland, the buildings torn down and converted into storm berms along the +2-meter shoreline. All along the tri-state coast, the RCC established floating communities, added ferries and water taxis, converted the most undefendable sites to open space, and built even denser urban hubs on high ground.

They opened Meadowlands National Park as a restored wetlands, to great fanfare. As the subway faltered and failed after repeated inundations, the city re-elevated its trains, running them up the dry spine of Manhattan from the Bowery to Broadway and Central Park. Transformational adaptation had finally reached the shores of the Hudson.

It took more than two decades to fully implement, but as the city enters the second half of the century, it has squarely faced its challenging geography. Now, New York is indeed the “dramatically reshaped city” that Daniel Zarrilli, former chief climate policy adviser to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, predicted decades ago, though its resilience is tinged with notes of sadness, healing, and regret.

Key Term: Economy

Economy once referred to the administration of a single home or community resources, with an emphasis on frugality. The contemporary understanding of “the economy” as a unifying national discourse only dates to the Great Depression, when countries were together by hardship. In recent generations, most nations have accepted the maxim that economic growth is the goal of a successful society. But climate instability is already creating economic instability as disasters mount, and diverse economic models are needed to see us through. Environmental economics is favored by some because it seeks to value the air, water, and land in the current system as costs and benefits are calculated. More radically, steady-state economics, first proposed by John Stuart Mill and developed more recently by Herman Daly as “ecological economics,” imagines an economy that neither grows nor shrinks, but lives within the carrying capacity of its environment, with well-distributed wealth and improving standards of living through innovation.

How we understand the purpose and goals of our economy can help us learn how to manage the finite resources of a single planet. In the United States, neighborhood barter economies, sharing economies, and local currencies all expanded in response to “shelter in place” orders that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. Such econo-diversity (like bio-diversity) can help communities be more resilient in times of crisis.

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Christina Conklin is an environmental artist, writer, and researcher. She is the co-author of The Atlas of Disappearing Places.

Marina Psaros is a sustainability expert and has led climate action programs across public, private, and nonprofit organizations for over a decade. She is one of the creators of the King Tides Project, an international community science and education initiative. She is the co-author of The Atlas of Disappearing Places.

Take action…

Center for Biological Diversity: “A groundbreaking report from the Center finds that 233 threatened and endangered species in 23 coastal states are at risk from sea-level rise. This means that, left unchecked, rising seas threaten the survival of 17 percent—one out of six—of our nation’s federally protected species. The report highlights five at-risk species living in different parts of our coasts: the Hawaiian monk seal, Key deer, loggerhead sea turtle, Delmarva peninsula fox squirrel, and western snowy plover. The report provides a roadmap of the priority actions needed to protect wildlife from sea-level rise impacts—foremost among them deep and rapid cuts in greenhouse gas pollution, protecting natural coastal buffers, and making room for wildlife to move inland as the oceans rise.”

Urge Congress to pass the Extinction Prevention Act to provide crucial funding for the most critically endangered species.

Cause for concern…

• New oilfield in African wilderness threatens lives of 130,000 elephants (Matthew Taylor, Guardian)
• More than a third of shark species are now threatened with extinction (Ben Panko, Smithsonian Magazine)
• Climate change could see 200 million move by 2050 (Renata Brito, Associated Press)
• Tree planting isn’t replacing burned U.S. forests—not even close (Adria Malcolm, Andrew Hay and Andrea Januta, Reuters)

Round of applause…

• Oil drilling bans advance in House with climate change assault (Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Bloomberg)
• Harvard University to end investment in fossil fuels (Ross Kerber, Reuters)
• This wildly reinvented wind turbine generates five times more energy than its competitors (Elissaveta M. Brandon, Fast Company)
• Enviros call for prompt restoration of national monuments shrunk by Trump (Zack Budryk, The Hill)
• This vegan cashew cheese is so tasty that it meets even my dairy-purist standards (Julia Pugachevsky, Business Insider)

ICYMI…

“In addition to sequestering carbon and protecting the Earth’s climate, forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services, from supplying food, fuel, timber and fiber, to purifying the air, filtering water supplies, maintaining wildlife habitats, controlling floods and preventing soil erosion. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear to the public something that scientists have been warning for decades: Deforestation is linked to the spread of zoonotic diseases. But those services are threatened when forests are cleared for wood products and land-use changes, like making space for climate-destructive industries like the meat industry.”

—EFL editor Reynard Loki, “Forests Are Crucial to Combating Climate Change—Will Biden Rise to the Challenge?” (CounterPunch, June 11, 2021)

Parting thought…

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” —Gary Snyder

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

It makes no sense to continue wasting both tax dollars and animals’ lives.

By Stephen R. Kaufman, Independent Media Institute

3 min read

When I went to medical school in the 1980s, it was standard practice to have students cut apart live dogs and other animals as part of the curriculum to teach them medical skills and concepts. Since then, these crude and cruel animal labs have been abandoned in medical schools and advanced surgical courses in favor of realistic human simulators that are more humane, cost-efficient and effective.

Apparently, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) didn’t get the memo about this.

According to federal contracts uncovered by taxpayer watchdog White Coat Waste Project (WCW), for which I serve as a volunteer medical adviser, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (both under the DOJ) have still been conducting “live tissue training” (LTT) courses. LTT is a euphemism for inflicting traumatic, life-threatening injuries on live animals to teach certain emergency medical procedures.

As DOJ funding panel Chairman Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-PA) and House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) astutely wrote in a letter to the DOJ in 2019, “LTT involves intentionally wounding live animals—usually stabbing, burning and shooting pigs and goats, and sometimes even dogs—and then having trainees crudely attempt to repair the damage… The use of animals for this training is expensive, obsolete, unnecessary and opposed by most Americans.”

Many of the animals die from these traumatic injuries during the courses, and even those who survive are killed at the end.

The federal government’s own studies show that human simulators like the Cut Suit, TraumaMan and TOMManikin that mimic human anatomy—even replicating bleeding and breathing—are more effective and economical than these outdated animal labs. Unlike the animals who are purchased, transported, dismembered, killed and thrown away after every LTT course, each simulator can train many students and can be reused time and again.

Even the U.S. Defense Department states in a 2016 report that LTT is “outdated and cost-prohibitive” and a 2017 report from the Pentagon says that “live tissue training options are not anatomically accurate.” An Army-funded study at Yale concluded in 2015, “it is clear that simulated training costs less than live tissue training.” And a 2020 U.S. military-funded study concluded that human simulation is an effective replacement for LTT. 

Nearly every civilian trauma training program in the country now teaches lifesaving skills using simulation, too.

Adding insult to injury, the DOJ has already spent taxpayers’ money to purchase high-tech trauma simulators, but has continued to waste $131,793 on recent, completely unnecessary LTT courses anyway. The DOJ can’t defend this waste and abuse, so instead it tried to keep the details a secret, and it took a federal lawsuit by White Coat Waste Project to pry away relevant documents from the agency.

A majority of Americans on both sides of the aisle want change and support doing away with this outdated practice. A June 2020 national survey of 1,000 taxpayers by Lincoln Park Strategies found that 63 percent of them—which included 66 percent of Republicans surveyed and 65 percent of Democrats surveyed—backed the effort to ask the DOJ to defund LTT.

As a physician, medical educator and animal advocate, I oppose this senseless waste of tax dollars and animals’ lives. There needs to be political support from leaders like members of Congress and Attorney General Merrick Garland to take swift and decisive action to cut live tissue training from the curriculum.

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Stephen R. Kaufman, MD, is a board-certified ophthalmologist and assistant professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He is also a volunteer medical adviser for the nonprofit White Coat Waste Project, which works to end taxpayer-funded animal experiments.

Take action…

White Coat Waste Project: “The Department of Justice (DOJ) wastes American taxpayer money to fund cruel and wasteful live tissue training on pigs, goats, and possibly dogs. The DOJ sent $131,793 of your tax money to the FBI and U.S. Marshals service for animal abuse that would land an individual in jail. During live tissue training, pigs, goats, and sometimes even dogs are shot, stabbed, burned alive, and blown up. […] Many of the victims die from botched surgeries, and those who survive are killed anyways. What’s worse? The DOJ doesn’t need to butcher live animals for training. They already own more effective and more cost-efficient human patient simulators. Even the Defense Department has criticized live tissue training as ‘outdated and cost-prohibitive.’ There’s simply no excuse for these atrocities.”
 
Urge Congress to defund DOJ live tissue training.

Cause for concern…

“Hurricanes are heat engines, feasting off warm, tropical waters,” reports Andrew Freedman for Axios. “The vast majority of extra heat going into the climate system from burning fossil fuels is being absorbed by the oceans, and the seas are warming as a result… A recent scientific assessment found that the planet’s oceans have warmed faster during the past 100 years than at any point in the past 11,000 years.”

• Climate change lurks behind Hurricane Ida’s unnerving intensification rate (Andrew Freedman, Axios)
• Many measures of Earth’s health are at worst levels on record, NOAA finds (Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post)
• 91 percent of Pennsylvania schools that tested water found lead, but only 9 percent removed it (Kristina Marusic, Environmental Health News)
• LED streetlights decimating moth numbers in England (Damian Carrington, Guardian)

Round of applause…

“Three common neonicotinoid insecticides were ruled ‘likely to adversely affect’ thousands of endangered species and critical habitats, according to draft biological evaluations released by EPA,” reports Emily Unglesbee for Progressive Farmer. “Now EPA will work with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to decide if additional changes need to be made to these insecticides’ labels or registrations to protect any of the affected species.”

• EPA may regulate neonicotinoid insecticides after finding negative impact on endangered species (Emily Unglesbee, Progressive Farmer)
• Environmental group outbids rancher for Idaho grazing lease (Keith Ridler, Associated Press)
• Cuttlefish are capable of surprising cognitive feats (Veronique Greenwood, New York Times)
• Kind scuba divers try to convince a tiny octopus to trade its plastic cup for a shell (Annie Reneau, Upworthy)

ICYMI…

“You would really have to try hard to find anything more depraved than a wildlife killing contest, which targets coyotes, foxes, bobcats, squirrels, raccoons, crows and even wolves and cougars in some states, for the sake of a prize that could range from cash to hunting equipment. These contests are responsible for the mindless killing of an inconceivable number of animals, all under the guise of sport. Contests like these should be relegated to history books; instead, these events still take place in nearly all of the 42 states where wildlife killing contests are legal and result in the killing of thousands of animals every year.”

—EFL contributor Katie Stennes, “Undercover Investigations Expose Wildlife Killing Contest Brutality,” CounterPunch, July 21, 2021

Parting thought…

“I would like to paint the way a bird sings.” —Claude Monet

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

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