Good Climate News! Advocates celebrated Monday after a Boulder, Colorado judge rejected attempts by ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy subsidiaries to dismiss a landmark lawsuit that seeks damages for the harms the fossil fuel companies have inflicted on the climate and local communities.
We're pleased to offer a teaching guide for Youth v Gov, the documentary about the Juliana v. United States lawsuit, in which 21 young people are similarly suing the US Federal government over climate change. These resources are great classroom tools for putting climate litigation news into context.
About ten years ago a friend told me #ClimateCrisis activists were going about it all wrong. Stop talking about saving the environment, the environment will be just fine after we are dead and gone. What we are trying to save are humans. Human survival. Nobody cares about the environment. Asking people to draw that conclusion themselves is too much.
There has been a shift to talk about human survival lately but it keeps focusing on how poor people are disproportionately affected by #ClimateBreakdown as if the existence of capitalism itself isn't proof enough that the rich don't care how many poor people die.
We need to focus on the rich nations dying. The news sort of ignores it though. China getting flooded didn't really get in my radar much... But then it's those people, not real people... Just like how we thought covid affected those people up into Italy got hit.
Every instance of rich countries getting hit by #ClimateChange needs to be amplified out the wazoo on every social media platform we can. Then we need to talk to every RW crazy uncle, aunt, grandpa and if we can't convince them to vote for a good guy, discourage them from voting at all. Just shit talk about how everyone is bad and they should stay home. Do whatever you need to do. All is fair in love and war and this is a war on all our lives.
We need different strategies and we need to be all in this together. Let's stop attacking each other over minor differences while the oligarchs kill us.
A newly identified tipping point for the loss of ice sheets in Antarctica and elsewhere could mean future sea level rise is significantly higher than current projections.
Professor Costa Samaras is a leading voice on Climate Change.
Costa navigates its complexities alongside energy, emerging tech, and policy. Serving as Director of the Carnegie Mellon University Institute for Energy Innovation and leveraging their past role as former Biden White House OSTP Chief Advisor for the Clean Energy Transition, Costa provides a wealth of knowledge.
Follow them at: @costasamaras.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy
"The aim is to have some 82,500 tons of grain in storage by the end of the decade "so that we then have enough grain for three months’ consumption by #Norway’s population in a crisis situation that may arise,” Pollestad told Norwegian broadcaster NRK."
#GOESU, which will be renamed #GOES19 once it reaches orbit, will capture these same critical #weather observations as its predecessors, eventually replacing an existing weather #satellite overseeing the #AtlanticOcean, Central, South & North #America.
A wax sculpture of Abraham Lincoln in Northwest DC has melted due to the heat....🥵
Quote from the artist Sandy Williams to the Intelligencer:
"I previously had joked that when our climate gets bad enough to where we are living in an environment where the ambient heat melts these sculptures, that’s when this work becomes an environmental artwork. I didn’t know that was going to be this summer."
Around 50 years ago, our rulers chose to begin a massive project, essentially conducting a unique scientific experiment, one with potentially foreseen but possibly unpredictable outcomes.
They decided to go all out in (1) extracting fuels buried deep in the Earth, energy from the sun stored via photosynthesis and animal metabolism over a span of 500 million years as coal, oil, and gas, and then (2) burning all of this they could find in the brief period of a few decades.
Our rulers were warned by scientists that their project involved serious risk, but they figured the power they could gain and the money they could make was worth any cost. They didn't care about the negative consequences, and/or foolishly believed that future technologies (still a fantasy in the year 2024) would somehow be able to fix whatever problems their actions caused.
And now, guess what — we're seeing signs that this experiment might be out of control. Feedback loops are kicking in, causing "natural" emissions which could trigger cascading effects, breaking down the ecosystem. It also appears that Earth's climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than first believed. Yet our rulers still continue to recklessly burn fossil fuels, always drilling and fracking for more, hungry for power and compelled by greed.
"The frequency and magnitude of #ExtremeWildfires around the globe has doubled in the past two decades due to #ClimateChange, according to a study released Monday.
Extreme wildfires have severe ecological and societal impacts, leading to deaths and biomass loss while emitting high levels of carbon."
I acquired this lovely field a couple of weeks ago - although not the cattle currently living there. I'm planning to turn it into new woodland, but I need to jump through many hoops first to secure some grant funding. For now, you'll just have to imagine the trees 🌳.
More clear evidence on why if you are not supporting Joe Biden now during this election that you are helping the fossil fuel industry to burn up our planet:
The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider reviving a critical approval for a railroad project that would carry crude oil and boost fossil fuel production in rural eastern Utah.
Proponents include oil businesses and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah & Ouray Reservation who are fine if the planet burns as long as they get richer.
@GreenFire Find your bribable targets, be they tribal, corporate, agencies or on the bench, too.
"Transportation costs force producers to mainly sell their barrels to the five Salt Lake City-area refineries for significantly less than they could get bigger markets in Gulf states like Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi."
@GreenFire 1,300 heat deaths in the Saudi Arabian desert are just an appetizer for what's gonna come, if we don't say fuck off to all combustion of fossil fuels by tomorrow.
The military designated #ClimateChange a #NationalSecurityThreat not only yesterday, and they did it for a reason: They know the scenarios & the devastation that are gonna come, if we don't counter the threat already in our homes.
Have a great week! Here's your Monday ice update - #Arctic sea ice extent is currently the 10th lowest on record (JAXA data)...
• about 80,000 km² above the 2010s mean
• about 590,000 km² below the 2000s mean
• about 1,180,000 km² below the 1990s mean
• about 1,750,000 km² below the 1980s mean
The frequency & magnitude of extreme #wildfires has DOUBLED in the last 20 yrs due to #ClimateChange, acc/to a study released Mon.
The analysis focused on massive blazes that release vast amts of energy from the organic matter burned. Researchers pointed to the #Australia#fires of 2019 & 2020 as blazes that were “unprecedented in their scale & intensity.”
Here's a reminder of where we are now compared to where we need to be.
As mentioned in my previous post (https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/112671714655278802), fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions are at record highs. Yet scientists have repeatedly warned that we must rapidly reduce emissions or face climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse.
Look at the second graph below. We should have taken action years ago. By 2030, our emissions need to be 48% lower than in 2019. But instead, they keep going up, year after year. We're already halfway to 2030 and have made zero progress.