DL Open Thread: Sunday, February 4, 2024

Cause.  Effect.:

Cause:

“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.

Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.

Effect:

This week, a climate and health researcher published a commentary in the journal Nature Medicine that takes the McMichael standard to its logical conclusion. By the end of this year, Colin Carlson, a global change biologist and assistant professor at Georgetown University, wrote in the commentary provided exclusively to Grist, climate change will have killed roughly 4 million people globally since the turn of the century. That’s more than the population of Los Angeles or Berlin, “more than every other non-COVID public health emergency the World Health Organization has ever declared combined,” said Carlson, who also runs an institute focused on predicting and preventing pandemics.

And 4 million lives lost due to climate change, a breathtakingly high number, is still an underestimate—probably a big one. The McMichael standard doesn’t include deaths linked to climate-driven surges of the many non-malarial diseases spread by mosquitoes, like dengue and West Nile virus. It doesn’t incorporate deaths caused by deadly bacteria, fungal spores, ticks, and other diseases or carriers of disease that are shifting in range and breadth as the planet warms. It doesn’t examine the impacts of wildfires and wildfire smoke on longevity. It doesn’t look at the mental health consequences of extreme heat and extreme weather and the related increase in suicides that have been documented in recent years. “At the time we were doing it, we already knew it was conservative,” said Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, a coauthor of McMichael’s 2003 study who is now the head of the climate change and health unit at the World Health Organization.

The same descendants of these climate deniers have now targeted electric cars when, in fact, they should be made to pay to help reverse the disaster they knowingly brought into existence.

Did I mention denialism and disaster?:  BP.  ExxonMobil.:

BP:

BP is poised this week to reveal a set of financial results that the City believes will show a halving of profits compared with the year before – but this isn’t the oil company’s biggest problem.

BP has emerged from an embarrassing misconduct scandal with a new leadership team, but questions remain about its future strategy, and pressure is growing for the board to abandon its green commitments and increase production of fossil fuels.

Last week, it was revealed that a small London-based hedge fund, Bluebell Capital Partners, had written to the company to warn against locking itself into a future of falling fossil fuel production.

ExxonMobil:

ExxonMobil has quashed an attempt by a group of climate activists to seek a vote on the US oil company’s climate strategy at its annual shareholder meeting later this year.

A Dutch green activist investor group, Follow This, has dropped its petition for Exxon shareholders to vote on whether the company should set emissions reduction targets after Exxon took legal action against the plans.

In a surprise move, the company filed a complaint at a US district court in Texas (judge-shopping? I’d bet on it) last month, which sought to prevent the activists from putting new climate targets to a vote at the company’s shareholder meeting in May.

It was the first time Exxon had sought a legal route to block shareholder activists, and the move was understood to have been closely watched by US corporations and shareholders.

They’re not changing until they’re forced to change.

Sometimes the Open Thread writes itself, which is far better than having to write it myself.

What do you want to talk about?