
By Andy Rowell
The ultimate corporate greenwashing experience starts in Washington, DC Monday, when some of America's dirtiest polluters participate in what is being billed the "National Clean Energy Week." In the current political "post-factual" era, it would be easy to be fooled.
The promotional material sounds great. What is there not to like?
According to a website set up to promote the week:
"Across America, clean and readily abundant forms of energy are powering more than homes and businesses. Taken together, our capacity for safe and reliable energy generation is driving a clean energy renaissance that is creating jobs, strengthening America's national security, and preserving our environment."
Tomorrow is the star event when there is a Symposium & Demonstration Fair on Capitol Hill, where speakers will include some of the top officials in the Trump Administration, including Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke and Energy Sec. Rick Perry.
By now your alarm bells should be ringing, because there is no way you could call these two clean energy advocates.
Let's dig deeper. Who are the companies and trade organizations who are promising to preserve our environment? A quick look at the steering committee members also raises some serious red flags. There are lobbyists for the "Nuclear Energy Institute," the "American Gas Association" and "Center for Liquefied Natural Gas." None of these are clean or green. They are dangerous and dirty.
Both the nuclear and gas industries have tried to re-package themselves as clean and green on both sides of the Atlantic for years. For example, the trade body for the nuclear industry in the UK, the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA), for years ran this banner headline on its website: "Nuclear: climate friendly energy."
One of the key nuclear spin doctors in the UK, Philip Dewhurst, who was the chair of the NIA, said the nuclear industry was spreading its messages "via third-party opinion because the public would be suspicious if we started ramming pro-nuclear messages down their throats."
And that is exactly what "National Clean Energy Week" is all about. You don't see the dirty nuclear industry, with its intricate links to nuclear weapons, its never ending issues around waste and its long term safety issues. You think instead of a clean, sustainable future. It's greenwashing in its purest form.
Moreover, there is nothing clean about fracking, with an increasingly large amount of scientific evidence linking the industry to water and air pollution and climate change.
But they are not alone. The Steering committee also includes a lobbyist for biomass burning, which has been highly criticized as a false solution to climate change.
It also gets worse. If you look at the "Participating organizations," they include the American Petroleum Institute, the leading lobbyists for the oil and gas industry, which has been at the forefront of trying to undermine environmental protection, deny climate change and open up the U.S. to oil and gas drilling for years.
Other companies involved include carbon capture and storage (CCS) and waste incinerator companies. None of these are remotely clean or green, either. Let's not forget the whole life-cycle of dirty coal, from mountaintop removal to sulphur emissions. Coal companies are trying to argue that CCS is the answer to our climate change problems, but capturing carbon takes a huge amount of energy.
So who is the real driving force behind the coalition? If you try to find out who is behind the website—you will find that it was set up by proxy and the client name has been prohibited. For a coalition promising to secure America's energy future, this secrecy is worrying.
This is just one of the deeply concerning issues that this initiative raises along with why some of America's wind and solar companies are jumping into bed with dirty energy lobbyists. It can only harm their reputation.
Indeed, a letter has been written to members of Congress by numerous environmental organizations, including 350.org, Friends of the Earth and Oil Change International, arguing that the sponsors of National Clean Energy Week "include some of the dirtiest actors in the energy industry … Dirty energy lobbyists prefer to work in a "post-fact" environment, but greenhouse gases, air pollution, and toxic wastes from these technologies demonstrably impact our health, our environment, and our changing climate."
They are urging members of Congress to support investments in truly clean energy, like energy efficiency and solar, wind, and geothermal power. Taxpayer dollars should not support dangerous and dirty technologies masquerading as "clean energy."
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By Peter Giger
The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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