Marine biologist Anne Hoggett records bleached and dead coral around Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia on April 5. Credit: David Gray/AFP via Getty Images
Heat waves recently extended across nearly 30 percent of the world’s oceans, an expanse equivalent to the surface area of North America, Asia, Europe and Africa.
Over the past several years, the temperature of the Earth’s oceans have been spiking high enough to trigger numerous die-offs of marine species, killing millions of corals, fish, mammals, birds and plants. Those mass die-offs also have sent a wave of emotional trauma washing over some researchers watching their life’s work vanish before their eyes.
“We talk a lot about eco grief, that sense of being overwhelmed and feeling loss,” said Jennifer Lavers, who has been tracking how thousands of seabirds have starved to death during recent ocean heat waves off the coast of western Australia as coordinator of the nonprofit marine research Adrift Lab.
Right now the extreme ocean heat in her region is waning, but globally, marine heat wave conditions extend across nearly 30 percent of the planet’s oceans, a surface area equivalent to all of North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. The harms of long-term gradual ocean warming are well documented, but Lavers said the most recent studies show that increasingly frequent pulses of extreme heat are doing the most damage to marine ecosystems.
With even more mass die-offs of ocean species projected, “scientists are leaving in droves from the field,” she said. “Incredibly skilled, talented, qualified, very passionate people are leaving because no matter what they say, what they do, how many papers they publish … It doesn’t matter.”
The creatures many scientists hoped to help with their research are still in decline and often they are worse off than they were when they started their work, including the flesh-footed shearwaters that she studies, she said.
“That’s the case for me,” she said. “I have to literally say to people that my job is to describe the extinction of a species.”
Upwards of $100trn of global spending on the green transition is typically estimated as being required by 2050. Credit: Thaiview/Shutterstock.
The Climate Damages Tax proposes a fee per tonne of CO2 embedded within the domestic extraction of coal, oil and gas.
A new report has claimed that a tax on the extraction of fossil fuels could raise $720bn by the end of the decade for to support the green transition in the world’s poorest countries.
Led by Stamp Out Poverty and backed by the likes of Greenpeace, Climate Action Network and Christian Aid, the Climate Damages Tax report, published earlier this week, examines the proposal that OECD countries, in particular members of the G7, should “lead in introducing a fee per tonne of CO2 embedded (CO2e) within the domestic extraction of coal, oil and gas.”
The report outlines that, if introduced in OECD countries in 2024 at a low initial rate of $5 per tonne of CO2e increasing by $5 per tonne each year, the tax would raise a total of $900bn by 2030. This, it says could be split so that 80% ($720bn) went to the newly established Loss and Damage Fund for helping developing countries with in responses to climate losses and damages and 20% ($180bn) was retained by countries for use domestically.
Certainly, ways to ensure money finds its way to transition efforts are necessary, with upwards of $100trn of global spending typically estimated as being required by 2050 – and some estimates being closer to $300trn.
David Hillman, director of Stamp Out Poverty and co-author of the Climate Damages Tax report said of the proposed tax: “This is surely the fairest way to boost revenues for the Loss and Damage Fund to ensure that it is sufficiently financed as to be fit for purpose.”
Over 10% of potential voters lack photo ID in some areas of London
Controversial voter ID requirements introduced by the Tories will affect more people in London than previous polling has indicated, a new survey finds.
Latest analysis carried out by research organisation Survation found that 5% of registered voters in London lack a valid form of photo ID, with the figure rising up to 11% in the north-east London ward Becontree, where the highest number of voters lacked voter ID.
The data results, published at the end of April, showed more people in London are affected by the new Tory law than previous polling has indicated, according to Survation. As these figures reflect a percentage of those on the electoral register, rather than of all UK respondents.
New requirements make it compulsory to bring an approved form of identification when casting a vote at the polling station, affecting voters in the local elections today, Thursday 2 May. Polling by YouGov last September found that one-in-four London voters were unaware of the new requirements.
Former PM made the requirement to bring photo ID a stipulation of the Elections Act in 2022
Boris Johnson was turned away from his local polling station when trying to cast his vote in Thursday’s elections after forgetting to bring the required photo identity.
The former prime minister was initially told by polling station staff he would not be allowed to vote in the police and crime commissioner election in South Oxfordshire without proving his identity.
The misstep was embarrassing for Johnson because the requirement to bring photo ID is a stipulation of the Elections Act he introduced in 2022 while in Downing Street.
The Electoral Commission has warned that hundreds of thousands of people could be excluded from voting because of the law, which it said could have a disproportionate effect on some groups.
Oil and gas companies and their top trade groups were aware for decades that carbon emissions contribute to climate change, according to a scathing new report from congressional investigators. Moreover, industry giants knew that many of the technologies they presented publicly as solutions to the climate crisis – such as algae-based biofuels and carbon capture and storage (CCS) – were neither as green nor as feasible as they promised, the study reveals.
The Senate Budget Committee and Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability published the report and related documents on April 30, three years after launching a joint investigation of Shell, Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil, and two leading industry trade groups..
Fossil fuel obstructionism has evolved “from denial to duplicity,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), in a May 1 congressional hearing based on the report.
Both the hearing and the report capture what Whitehouse described as “climate denial lite,” in which the industry pivots “to pretending it is taking climate change seriously, while secretly undermining its own publicly stated goals.”
The investigation reveals that for ExxonMobil and other leading fossil fuel companies in the report, the perception of taking some sort of action on climate appears to have been as high a priority as actually taking action.
For example, for years, Exxon sought to associate its brand with algae-based biofuels. In a 2019 video, the company claimed these biofuels “would one day power planes, propel ships, and fuel trucks – and cut their emissions in half.”
Closeup of biofuel in a laboratory. Credit: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Between 2009 and 2023, Exxon spent some $175 million on algae-related marketing like this video – almost half as much as the company spent working on the technology. (Exxon and other industry leaders largely stopped funding for algae biofuel research by 2023.)
Even as the company publicly touted algae biofuels as a climate solution, the company knew the technology remained unproven – and, moreover, that Exxon was not investing nearly enough money if it were serious about developing algae as a viable technology.
In an email made public by the committee, an Exxon employee noted that one of the company’s executives had “made comments about us getting too far out there on the original algae ads.”
In an Exxon document released by House investigators with the header “Algae Biofuels Program Talking Points,” the company noted, “ExxonMobil’s analysis has concluded that final development and broad deployment of algae-based biofuels by the company would require future investments of billions of dollars” – orders of magnitude more than the $350 million that Exxon eventually spent.
Repeating Patterns
Congressional investigators identified a similar pattern in industry responses to a 2019 decision by Andrew Wheeler, then the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Donald Trump, to roll back a rule designed to reduce methane emissions.
Internally, BP agreed with Wheeler’s decision. In a 2019 email published by the committee, one executive noted that Wheeler’s “legal theory … for rolling back direct regulation of methane” was “aligned with our thinking.” The American Petroleum Institute (API), the leading trade association for the oil and gas industry, which counts BP as a dues-paying member, lobbied for the rollback.
In public, however, BP and other oil giants claimed to be disappointed by the Trump administration’s decision. David Lawler, then-chairman and president of BP America, said publicly that “direct federal regulation of methane emissions is essential.”
“Time and again, the biggest oil and gas corporations say one thing for the purposes of public consumption, but do something completely different to protect their profits,” Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee and one of the leaders of the investigation, said in his prepared testimony.
“Company officials will admit the terrifying reality of their business model behind closed doors, but say something entirely different, false, and soothing to the public,” Raskin said.
Yet, even as Raskin and Whitehouse were able to reveal damning new evidence of this corporate doublespeak, they pointed out that a complete public reckoning remained impossible, since the industry refused to fully engage with investigators.
Denying Reality
In a pattern that echoes the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long efforts to deny the reality of climate change and, more recently, to portray oil and gas companies as committed to solving the crisis, the four companies and two trade groups that received congressional subpoenas appear to have withheld meaningful information while simultaneously flooding the committees with “hundreds of thousands of generic and non-responsive documents,” Raskin said.
Many documents submitted by the API were almost entirely redacted. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce produced only 24 documents that congressional investigators considered within the scope of the subpoena, including an invitation to a virtual meeting about “the future of natural gas infrastructure.”
Fossil fuel interests “completely obstructed the committees’ investigation,” Raskin said in a video played at the hearing.
During the hearing, this disinformation effort was assisted by congressional Republicans.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) read into the record debunked right-wing claims that carbon dioxide is good for the climate because it is “plant food.”
This week, we’re shining a light on the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long campaign of deceit about climate change.
— Senate Budget Committee (@SenateBudget) April 29, 2024
Source: Senate Budget Committee on X
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) spent significant time alleging that Dr. Geoffrey Supran, a University of Miami climate disinformation expert who testified at the hearing, wrote tweets that Supran did not, in fact, write.
“These are not my tweets, these are retweets,” Supran attempted to explain when he was finally shown the tweets, as Kennedy continued to speak over him.
“I’d like to make very clear that this form of character assassination is characteristic of the propaganda techniques of fossil fuel interests,” Supran added.
Supran’s point, however, was mostly obscured by Kennedy’s ongoing hectoring from the committee dais.
In a more productive exchange, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) asked Raskin about the argument Exxon put forth that the investigators’ subpoena was “designed to intrude on ExxonMobil’s First Amendment activities, including its constitutionally protected right to petition the government.”
“That would obviously lead to the end of our civil and criminal discovery system, if the first amendment gave you the right not to turn over documents,” Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, replied.
“When an objection is made – if it is an extremely unpersuasive, novel, imaginative, unsupported objection – you can always tell, there’s something they really don’t want you to see,” Kaine noted. “I can only imagine the extent of the iceberg under the water that you were not allowed to see.”
The fossil fuel industry’s refusal to respond adequately to congressional subpoenas, while also flooding the committee with what Raskin’s testimony called a “paper blizzard” of some 125,000 “mass emails, newsletters, flyers, and otherwise meaningless fluff documents,” appeared designed to distract investigators and forestall potential legal action against companies and their executives.
“There is certainly an adequate legal foundation for litigation against this industry,” Sharon Eubanks, the former head of the tobacco litigation team at the Department of Justice, and leader of the U.S. government’s racketeering case against Big Tobacco, told members of the committee.
“Both industries lied to the public and regulators about what they knew about the harms of their products, and when they knew it.”
