Getting the Godfathers of Climate Chaos Off Our Screens
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres wants Big Oil out of the ad business.
In a speech marking World Climate Day (June 5) at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the world’s top diplomat called for a global ban on fossil fuel advertising.
“Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health, like tobacco,” he said. “I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil-fuel companies. And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil-fuel advertising.”
He also called on entities creating messages greenwashing the fossil fuel industry to drop their clients, comparing ad execs in those companies to the morality-bereft characters on “Mad Men.”
“Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet, they are toxic for your brands.,. We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell,” he said, adding: “The battle for 1.5 degrees will be won or lost in the 2020s.”
Now, before you dismiss this speech as another pie-in-the-sky broadside from a commie/pinko/globalist/tree-hugger, understand that this speech didn’t just come out of nowhere.
There are warnings coming from just about every climate focused organization that the planet is nearing a tipping point where a 1.5°C (2.7°F) global warming threshold will be exceeded over a multi-year period, leading to extreme and irreversible impacts.
According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the average global temperature for the 12-month period to the end of May was 1.63 degrees Celsius (2.9 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average – making it the warmest such period since record-keeping began in 1940.
Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels – the main cause of climate change – hit a record high last year despite global agreements designed to curb their release and a rapid expansion in renewable energy.
Recent readings from the CO2 program at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography were 427 parts per million — the highest ever recorded in the month of May, according to director Ralph Keeling.
Carbon dioxide does not directly provide heat, but the greenhouse gas — which comes from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels — increases the atmosphere’s ability to trap heat that otherwise would be released to space.
Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth used a post on the social media site X to warn “with five months of data already in the books, there is now a roughly 75% chance that 2024 will surpass 2023 as the planet’s hottest year on record. “
The Substack newsletter HEATED has been tracking fossil fuel public relations and advertising for years.
One of the fossil fuel industry’s greatest PR allies has been Edelman, which has taken tens of millions over the years to create slick campaigns for polluters. And they are far from alone: PR firms such as Glover Part, Cerrell, and Ogilvy—which created the concept of the “carbon footprint” to sell more BP petroleum—are all major players in climate denial and delay.
“They are enormous actors. And nobody really writes about it,” disinformation researcher Robert Brulle told HEATED in prior reporting.
On the news side, a report released last year by Drilled and DeSmog found that The New York Times takes the most fossil fuel ad money of any major publication.
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Meanwhile, Dirty Energy companies have turned to the Supreme Court to quash lawsuits brought by more than two dozen states and municipalities seeking to hold their industry liable for billions of dollars in costs related to climate change.
The argument being put forward today (June 6) is asking the justices to rule that climate change is a global phenomena and subject federal law and therefore not suited to many individual claims.
Via the Los Angeles Times:
The climate change lawsuits at issue are patterned after the successful mass lawsuits filed by states and others against the tobacco industry over cigarettes and the pharmaceutical industry over opioids.
Cigarettes and opioids were sold legally, but the suits alleged that industry officials conspired to deceive the public and hide the true dangers of their highly profitable products.
In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta sounded the same theme when they filed a lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court against five of the largest oil and gas companies — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP — and the American Petroleum Institute for what they described as a “decades-long campaign of deception” that caused climate-related harm to California.
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In an interview with “Fox & Friends” presidential candidate Donald J Trump dismissed President Joe Biden’s recent warnings about global warming, suggesting rising sea levels could actually have a silver lining: “a little more beachfront property.”
Here’s the quote, via MSNBC:
The single biggest threat — not global warming. When they say that the seas will rise over the next 400 years — one-eighth of an inch, you know. Which means, basically, you have a little more beachfront property, OK? Think of it. The seas are going to rise. Who knows? But this is the big threat.
I watched Biden the other night [say], ‘It’s the greatest existential’ — he loves that word, because it’s a big word and ... he doesn’t even know what the hell the word means. He goes, ‘It’s the greatest existential threat to our country.’ Global warming.
Meanwhile pollsters with Axios/Ipsos have been sampling public opinion on the topic of climate change.
Two-thirds of Americans see climate change as a threat to human health, and most are bracing for a summer of extreme weather they expect will be as bad as or worse than last year, according to the latest Axios-Ipsos American Health Index.
The big picture: There's a perception that the record heat, wildfires, floods and other extreme weather events that played out vividly across screens last summer is a new baseline, though sentiment varies by age and political affiliation.
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Thursday’s Noteworthy News Links
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“The G.O.P. Push for Post-Verdict Payback: ‘Fight Fire With Fire,’” by Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Charlie Savage at the New York Times
Speaker Mike Johnson went on Fox News and called on the Supreme Court to “step in” and overturn the Manhattan conviction, granting Mr. Trump immunity from prosecution. In the Senate, a group of Trump allies signed a letter declaring that they will oppose major legislation and Biden administration nominees, although they tend not to vote for Biden policies and nominees anyway.
But the more extreme calls for not just oversight scrutiny and political obstructionism but revenge prosecutions are coming from former senior Trump administration officials and people close to the former president who are expected to play even larger roles in a potential second term. Their message is often apocalyptic.
There is no longer any room, they argue, for weaklings who fetishize decency and restraint.
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White dad stops daughter from shaking Black superintendent’s hand - at school infamous for Nazi salute photo Via the Independent
A white dad rushed the stage and pushed the Black superintendent out of the way so he couldn’t shake his daughter’s hand during her high school graduation yelling ‘I don’t want her touching him.’
The shocking incident took place Friday at Baraboo High School in Wisconsin - the same school that drew national headlines in 2018 when a photo emerged depicting several current and former students doing the Nazi salute.
Graduation footage from last week shows the man, whose identity has not been reported to protect his daughter, coming onto the stage as his daughter shook school officials’ hands.
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A new discovery about carbon dioxide is challenging decades-old ventilation doctrine via StatNews
No sensor can monitor how many infectious aerosols are swirling around us in real time. But carbon dioxide, or CO2, can act as a convenient proxy. People exhale it when they breathe, and in spaces that aren’t well ventilated, the gas accumulates. High CO2 concentrations can provide a warning sign that a lot of the air you’re inhaling is coming out of other people’s respiratory tracts.
For decades, that’s how aerosol scientists and ventilation engineers have mostly thought about CO2 — as a sort of indicator for the health of indoor environments. But over the last three years, researchers in the U.K. working with next-generation bioaerosol technologies have discovered that CO2 is more than a useful bystander. In fact, it plays a critical role in determining how long viruses can stay alive in the air: The more CO2 there is, the more virus-friendly the air becomes.
It’s a revelation that is already transforming the way scientists study airborne pathogens. But on a planet where burning fossil fuels and other industrial activities inject 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, it could also have huge implications for human health.
