On Trial: Peabody Energy's Bankrupt Climate Change Denial

If you’ve scanned the headlines for Peabody Energy, in the last few months, the story is that one of the largest companies comprising King Coal is now going through bankruptcy. But there is a curious development that I came close to overlooking, as it seems that the U.S. press is concentrating more on Paul Ryan and Donald Trump than it is on some of the legal and civil actions around climate change.

            In something of a Scopes Monkey Trial for the 21^st century, in which truth and science are put on trial against big money and anti-science, science and truth have won. The case was to determine if the state of Minnesota could continue to use its “social cost of carbon,” which is set quite low, or adopt the higher federal cost estimates.

            Peabody Energy was involved in the case because the social cost of carbon, an estimate of the costs to society because of the damage of carbon pollution, affects their bottom line.

            Peabody Energy relied on the tactics that are useful to sway portions of public opinion. But as this case showed, their reliance on obfuscation, setting unrealistic requirements of proof, and cherry picking data, falls apart under facile scrutiny.

            Peabody has just been in some hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission for not fully disclosing to their shareholders the risks that climate change poses to their business.
            We know that Peabody faces financial bankruptcy. With the coal giant are we seeing intellectual and moral bankruptcy as well?

Global Warming Brings Air Conditioning to San Diego Schools

Global warming is melting glaciers and raising the level of the oceans, phenomena that, unless you live in the mountains or along a coast, may be obscured to you. Well, as in this story, climate change is coming home, or at least to school, here in San Diego.

            Responding to the rising temperatures in their classrooms, the San Diego Unified School District announced that it is installing air conditioning in the district’s schools. Parents and teachers complained that at the beginning of this school year temperatures in the 90s afflicted classrooms for several days. Children struggled to learn in the oppressive heat, and some fainted or fell ill.

            San Diego natives and folks who have lived here a long time have bragged that the weather here is so pleasant that air conditioning is never needed, even during the months of July and August when much of the rest of the country is sweltering. I’ve lived here for decades and have never lived in a house with air conditioning or an air conditioner.

            The obvious irony here is that the air conditioning will use electricity, the production of which is one of the drivers of climate change. The proposed program includes the installation of solar panels and thus promises to be carbon neutral. But the fact remains that the now needed air conditioning will be using electricity from those solar panels that could have been used for something else had we not been raising the thermostat on the planet with all the CO2 we’re throwing up in the air.

            And to those who have complained that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will adversely affect our economy, installing all that air conditioning in all to all those schools in San Diego will cost $204 million. That is $204 million in taxes. And all of it to be taxed and spent on something that would not have been needed if we had started reducing emissions when we first knew of the connection between burning fossil fuels and a warmer planet.

            Are you a San Diego schoolteacher? A parent? Student? Have you suffered through sweltering classrooms? As a taxpayer, what do you think?

Are the Cato Institute and Other Right Wing "Think Tanks" Criminal?

The Weekly World News has been around for a while. Started simply as a way to use the old black and white press tossed aside when the National Enquirer went full color 36 years ago, the former supermarket tabloid (the publication is now online) has introduced us to celebrities walking the earth long after their deaths, relics found and proven to be from the Garden of Eden or Noah’s Ark, and the best of the best of tabloid entertainment, Bat Boy, the half-human/half-bat wunderkind.

 

Bat Boy, The Alfred E. Newman of The Weekly World New

Bat Boy and insane religious relics aside, the publication proudly proclaims itself as “The World’s Only Reliable News.” Still, and despite the publication of an occasional story that is based in reality, since 2004 the publication has printed the wink and a nod disclaimer that “the reader should suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoyment.”

            For most folks leafing through Weekly World News is a pleasure similar to reading The Onion. There are a few individuals who wind up believing what they read in the paper, but these folks would probably fall for some other far-fetched story of alien abduction or that President Obama has issued an executive order to have his likeness carved into Mount Rushmore. Overall the general consensus would be that The Weekly World News is idiotic but harmless.

 

From The Weekly World News: Obama to join Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore

The fictions that The Weekly World News publishes are harmless, but in other cases we recognize that publishing stories or claims that are false is wrong and sometimes criminal. The Federal Trade Commission enforces “Truth in Advertising” laws, protecting consumers from false claims in ads. If you tell folks that your doggie waste bags are compostable and they aren’t, the FTC is going to do something about it. You also can’t publish untrue things that can damage a person’s reputation. That is libel, and it is a serious crime.

            So what about organizations like the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who have taken money from companies like Exxon and other oil companies so that they can spread lies and misinformation about global warming? Climate change can affect the lives of millions whose food supply is threatened by drought or whose homes and cities are inundated by rising seas. Lying about climate change, is that not as serious as when the National Enquirer was forced to pay $1.6 million to Carol Burnett because they said that the comedienne was seen drunk in public? Is that not as serious as a company having to pay out $45 million to consumers who were hoodwinked into believing that their more expensive brand of yogurt was more nutritious when it actually was not?

            Exxon knowing of the hazards of global warming while paying groups to deny or obfuscate those harsh realities could prove to be a crime. So far, from what I’ve read in the LA Times and Inside Climate News, it was certainly unethical. So what about Exxon’s enablers? If Exxon committed a crime, aren’t Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, and a lot of other organizations that took money from oil giants and other big polluters just as culpable?

Individual Liberty, Free Markets, and Corporate Lies?

Possible Prosecution of Exxon and Possibly Falling Short

This is a great development. While the story was broken over a month ago, the headlines today tell us that Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general has launched an investigation into Exxon looking into allegations that the oil giant misled their shareholders and the public on the risks that global warming posed to the corporation’s business. Even the Wall Street Journal, which has ties to the global warming denial industry, printed the story.

            The corporate headquarters of Exxon in Irving, Texas acknowledged receiving the subpoena for internal documents, some of which go back 38 years, related to Exxon’s climate change research and business decisions.

            If Exxon actually knew of global warming and its dangers and paid off front groups to work at denying those hard facts, it may very well be the greatest wrong done to the world by a corporation. So it is a bit of an irony that the wrongdoing Exxon may wind up having to pay the piper for is that of their responsibility to their shareholders. Schneiderman is investigating Exxon under the Martin Act, a broad New York state law that allows for prosecution of companies for financial fraud, which includes the act of misleading stockholders.

            I don’t deny the importance of investors being properly informed of their financial risks when they put their money in a company like Exxon. After all, people rely on their investments to finance their children going to college or provide for a good retirement. But the people who are going to suffer the most from global warming are farmers whose lands may be hotter and drier and subject to more severe weather, coastal inhabitants who will have their beaches and bay fronts submerged under rising tides, and people who live on Pacific Islands, whose homelands may be lost to rising oceans.

            Isn’t there any law that can hold Exxon responsible for these people?

Exxon Trashes Planet and the Press Yawns

It has been almost a month since Inside Climate News and a partnership of the Los Angeles Times and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism began publishing their findings that, while Exxon’s scientists had determined decades ago that the burning fossil fuels caused global warming, the large company funded groups like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute who dealt in the business of casting doubt on the science of climate change.

This is possibly one of the greatest scandals of our time; so it is maddening to observe the lack of press coverage of this story. A Proquest search of Donald Trump, only one of the GOP presidential candidates, for the month of October brings up 2043 newspaper stories. A Proquest search of Exxon and climate change brought up 84 results.[1] That is Donald Trump receiving 2,332% more coverage than one of the world’s largest corporations knowing that they are propelling the whole planet into a climate crisis and covering it up. If you like pie charts, here’s a pie chart of the respective press coverage.

You say, OK, but that’s Donald Trump, a headline magnet. A similar search on Carly Fiorina brought up 185 results, still way more than Exxon and their cover-up. Why is there such silence from the press on this? Tell me what you think.

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[1] For the Donald Trump search, I searched on the term “Trump” and restricted the search to headlines in the last 30 days. For the Exxon search, I searched for both the term “Exxon” and “climate change” occurring anywhere in the news story.

Exxon: The World Is Filled With Hillbillies

For me, I remain hopeful. I’m still inspired by the pope’s encyclical of this year, in which he encourages Catholics, actually encourages everybody, to care for the place we live and encourages us to steer away from practices that make the earth a warmer world.

And at the same time it is maddening, as I’ve been mulling over the news that came out this month of Exxon’s duplicity. While employing its own scientists, who informed the multinational company as far back as the 1970s that the effects of man-made global warming were going to affect the company’s operations in the arctic, Exxon was paying front groups and organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute to run their PR campaigns to encourage people to doubt the science of global warming.

Paying scientists to investigate global warming and paying lawyers and PR executives to deny the existence of global warming. The mind is boggled.

The news investigation of Exxon is solid, coming from a yearlong collaboration between the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Los Angeles Times. Their work includes interviews with dozens of experts, including former Exxon employees, and reviewing Exxon related documents, many of them internal memoranda of Exxon, archived at the University of Texas and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta. A similar investigation by Inside Climate News reached the same conclusions.

Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben in an op-ed for The Guardian used the words “treachery” and “sheer, profound, unparalleled evil” to describe Exxon’s decision. He said, “[T]his company had the singular capacity to change the course of world history for the better and instead it changed that course for the infinitely worse. In its greed Exxon helped—more than any other institution—to kill our planet.”

I cannot disagree at all with what McKibben has said.

Democrats in the House (no GOP folks) have called on the Department of Justice to investigate the actions of Exxon as to whether the actions of Exxon are illegal. Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has called for the same.

There are also the usual folks you might expect who defend Exxon or who try to obfuscate the truth of the matter. There is this from Forbes, written by James Taylor, who has been employed by the Heartland Institute, as he repeats the trope of uncertainty of climate change. Reading this piece, the most glaring questions that Taylor, a lawyer and not a scientist, never addresses are: If Exxon had been truly skeptical about the research of global warming, why did they continue to fund it? If Exxon had that much doubt about their own scientists conclusions about global warming, why did they plan for its eventuality?

A subject repeated again and again in this blog is the absolute disregard that the coal companies have for the land and people of Appalachia Mountaintop removal has spread poverty, disease, and ecological destruction all across Appalachia. They do not care about the people who live in those hills. And the folks there have put up with the abuse, raising little protest when it comes to the ways of King Coal

And so here we have Exxon treating the whole world as though it were some impoverished holler in West Virginia. In the course of their pursuit of profit Exxon has said that it does not care about the coastal cities infringed upon by rising seas. They don’t care about greater storms bringing floods and destruction. They do not care about the water shortages exacerbated by longer and drier droughts. They do not care about the coral reefs dying from the oceans being 30 percent more acidic than they were 100 years ago. Exxon cared about dollars and the whole rest of the world is filled with ignorant hillbillies.

So far we have proven Exxon right. Except for Sanders and a few others, I hear no outcry. I don’t sense that folks are upset. I’ve heard of no boycotts. Maybe the whole world is a bunch of hillbillies.

A Brief Glance At Pope Francis' Encyclical

I’ve only had time to read about half of the Pope Francis’ Encyclical On Care For Our Common Home. Just a couple things to say from what I’ve read so far. The Encyclical is not only about climate change. It is about our entire global environmental crisis, of which global warming is only one aspect.

            I’ll have much more to say about this later, once I’ve read the whole thing and had time to digest what the Pontiff has to say. In the mean time I thought it might be good for you to take a look at what Francis says in part of the first chapter about superficial ecology, something that I run into much more than I want to. Francis says:

At the same time we can note the rise of a false or superficial ecology, which bolsters complacency and a cheerful recklessness. As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think that what is happening is not entirely clear. Superficially, apart from a few obvious signs of pollution and deterioration, things do not look that serious, and the planet could continue as it is for some time. Such evasiveness serves as a license to carrying on with our present lifestyles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them, delaying the important decisions and pretending that nothing will happen.

Pope Francis

Only Sane Presidents, Please

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Believe it or not that is what the Constitution requires of the person who shall be the president of our country. You just have to be born a citizen and be 35 years old.

Although the president is commander in chief of the military, military service is not a requirement. At the time of the drafting of the Constitution, most of the new states restricted enfranchisement to property owners, yet that requirement is not imposed on the president. The holder of the highest office in the land could be indigent for all practical purposes and still reside in the White House.

            We have amended the Constitution for various reasons, but we have not added any further requirements on the presidency in over 200 years of our history. Considering the track records of some of the poorer performing presidents, this is perhaps surprising.

            So maybe it’s time to enforce some requirements on the person who is the commander in chief and leader of the free world. I suggest the following to be the 28^th Amendment:

The President must be sane.

OK, pretty simply stated. As with any other law, there will be some working out of the details in subsequent laws and court rulings, but the general gist of the amendment is that you cannot be crazy or spout off crazy ideas. This would obviously exclude folks who get winnowed out in the elective process already, such as white supremacists and guys who still live in their parents’ basements at the age of 46.

            This amendment, if it were already adopted, would disqualify all the GOP candidates running forthe 2016 election. I’ve lost track of the number of them, but apparently all of them are crazy enough or seem to be crazy enough to think that global warming is a myth or something that we shouldn’t do anything about.

 

Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin and crazy photo from Wikipedia

You don’t think that the GOP candidates are crazy? OK, global warming is our greatest threat. The Grand Old Party candidates say it either doesn’t exist or we shouldn’t do anything about it. That’s crazy!

 

Carly Fiorina, ousted CEO of Hewlett-Packard and crazy photo from LifeNews.com

OK, they aren’t totally jump out of the boat crazy, a present threat to themselves or others. But if any one of these folks attains the highest office in the land, that person will pose a threat to millions of folks all over the world.

            Maybe we could fast track this amendment before the election. That doesn’t sound crazy, does it?

            

Rand Paul, Senator from Kentucky and crazy. He's also the one who says that mountaintop removal is "just missing a hill here or there," which is really crazy

House GOP: We Don't Like the Science, So We Will Stop the Scientists From Doing Science

Keeping this country from developing adequate climate change law and policy works on many fronts. I often blog about the global warming denial industry. This comprises mostly the “think tanks” like the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute who promulgate obfuscation and misinformation about climatology and the science that shows that we are warming up our world with our power stations and automobiles.

            And then there is politics and such as what just occurred in Washington. By a party line vote of 19 to 15—with all Democrats opposing and all GOP members supporting—the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology passed an authorization bill that seriously cuts NASA’s budget for studying climate change. The bill would slash NASA’s Earth Sciences budget by more than $300 million resulting in a reduction from one fifth to one third of the division’s budget.

            The only way to describe this is Big Crazy. I don’t know what else to say.