Renewable Revolution

 
Make Nexus Hot News part of your morning: click here to subscribe.

November 1, 2018


The fossil-fuel-funded campaign to defeat the carbon tax ballot measure in Washington State is attracting enormous sums of money as well as charges of dubious outreach efforts towards minority communities. A review of state data by Reuters shows that the oil industry has spent more than $30 billion dollars to fight the measure--double the amount of money spent by pro-initiative groups, and the most money ever spent to defeat a ballot measure in Washington. And as the Stranger reports, some of that staggering sum is going towards misleading campaigns directed at Spanish-speaking voters: several Latino business owners say that a mailer sent by the opposition campaign listing their businesses as opposed to the ballot is misleading and that they did not agree to appear on the mailer. "Most campaigns don’t even bother reaching out to Latino voters," Peter Bloch Garcia of the Latino Community Fund told the Stranger. "But because we’ve been organizing for years, front and center, and taking a strong position in support of 1631 they are explicitly targeting us. I have never in my life in Washington seen a targeted mailer like this that has exploited our community."

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/10/30/34766340/big-oil-is-exploiting-latinos-in-washington-state-with-misleading-advertising




The world's oceans may have absorbed much more heat in recent years than previously thought, a new study says, with worrying implications for how fast climate change may increase in the future. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, finds that oceans may have warmed 60 percent more between 1991 and 2016 compared to current IPCC estimates. "We thought that we got away with not a lot of warming in both the ocean and the atmosphere for the amount of CO2 that we emitted," lead author Laure Resplandy told the Washington Post. "But we were wrong. The planet warmed more than we thought. It was hidden from us just because we didn’t sample it right. But it was there. It was in the ocean already."

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46046067




Climate change is seriously threatening the health of outdoor workers in Florida's booming agriculture industry, new research shows. A report released this week from Public Citizen and the Farmworker Association of Florida and Emory University finds that farmworkers working outside in all of Florida's 67 counties faced dangerous levels of heat this summer. The report also analyzes data collected from 250 farmworkers during an Emory University study, which showed that four out of five workers exceeded a body temperature of 100.4°F on at least one day during the study. "You talk to farmworkers and they know it’s getting hotter. They feel it and they’re worried," the Farmworker Association of Florida's Jeannie Economos told reporters on a press call.

https://thinkprogress.org/florida-farmworkers-climate-change-report-2e04cf75fce3/





New research from Cornell, published in PNAS this week, finds that the public vastly underestimates how concerned minority and low-income Americans are about climate change, likely due to the widespread stereotype of environmental concerns being something for wealthy white people who don’t have more pressing problems.

But extreme events like Hurricanes Harvey and Maria have increasingly made it clear that those underserved communities are hit hardest by climate change, and their high level of concern reflects that reality. Importantly, the study found that when subjects were shown a mock-up photo of a diverse (hypothetical) green group, the perception gap between how much they thought people cared and how much people actually do care shrunk, offering yet more evidence that diversity is important to climate action.

Moving from the lab to field work, Alex Harris at the Miami Herald reported Tuesday on Public Citizen’s new report, coproduced with an Emory University researcher and the Farmworker Association of Florida, showing that rising temperatures are putting more and more of Florida’s farm workers in danger. They documented that outdoor workers regularly faced dangerously hot conditions this past summer, with those doing very heavy labor working in dangerous conditions 76% of the time.

Since heavy agriculture work in the US largely relies on undocumented immigrants, it’s likely that dangerous conditions and impacts go underreported. 

For those not in denial, the fact that the people working to feed us are doing so in dangerous conditions should be both upsetting and motivating. For those in denial, any connection of climate change and immigration issues is an unwelcome thought that must be rationalized away or flatly rejected.

For example, in response to a piece in the Guardian detailing how climate change is one of the drivers of the migrant caravan, Anthony Watts 🦖 goes full FoxNews 😈 Grandpa. He described the story, which documents how repeated (climate amplified) droughts that cause crop failures are sending farmers in search of a better way to feed their family, as “journalistic bullhockey.”

He then said the “‘climate driver’ idea is just as stupid as the idea that these people are making the trek of over 2000 miles on their own, walking the entire way, without assistance, timing the arrival to coincide with just before the U.S. elections, so they can be front page news, and used to elicit sympathy for one party while being used to attack the other.”

Yes, according to Watts, poor, starving immigrants have uprooted their entire lives and begun walking thousands of miles in order influence the US midterms. Because everything, everywhere, around the world, is always about how those pesky liberals are pulling the strings to make conservatives look bad.  

This, to deniers 🦕, is a sensible sentiment. And even the relatively sane ones are apparently finding the climate connection hard to believe. “As best I can tell,” Ryan Maue tweeted, the caravan-climate angle is “completely made up” and “#FakeNews is everywhere especially in weather & climate.” (Yes, the “relatively” in “relatively sane” is doing a lot of work...)

But the climate-carvan-connection news is certainly not fake. As Alex Kaufman at HuffPo writes this week, how we respond to these immigration issues is going to matter a whole lot as the climate continues to change. Deniers clearly aren’t going to see that this obvious climate impact is causing what they consider to be a major problem (aka people who aren’t Norwegian White coming to America) and aren’t going to respond by addressing a root cause: fossil fuel emissions.

Instead, they’ll do what authoritarians do, and send in the troops to use military force to enforce the (white) nationalist status quo.


Sad as Watts’s and Maue’s mental contortions are, they’re hardly the only climate deniers with conspiratorial mindsets. As Scott Waldman at E&E reported on Tuesday, a raft of climate-change-denying conservative pundits have spent the last week as “bomb deniers,” casting doubt on the reality of and perpetrator behind the string of mail bomb terrorist attacks. They doubted whether the bombs were real at all, or whether they were actually sent by “some progressive psycho” in the words of Steve Milloy.

Whether you want to deny the reality of climate change, or how it can be a trigger or driver of immigration, or that your President’s constant attacks on the press and politicians found fertile ground in a fevered mind, the playbook is the same.

Call the problem a hoax and blame it on a shadowy elite using “fake news” to achieve their own nefarious goals at the expense of an unwitting public. Whether the cabal is communist climate scientists, progressives mailing themselves bombs or wealthy Jewish liberals supposedly funding migrant caravans, it doesn’t matter how crazy it sounds so long as it gives aggrieved and entitled white men a scapegoat to attack.