US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6988

The oil giant Shell issued a stark warning of the catastrophic risks of climate change more than a quarter of century ago in a prescient 1991 film that has been rediscovered.

However, since then the company has invested heavily in highly polluting oil reserves and helped lobby against climate action, leading to accusations that Shell knew the grave risks of global warming but did not act accordingly.

Shell’s 28-minute film, called Climate of Concern, was made for public viewing, particularly in schools and universities. It warned of extreme weather, floods, famines and climate refugees as fossil fuel burning warmed the world. The serious warning was “endorsed by a uniquely broad consensus of scientists in their report to the United Nations at the end of 1990”, the film noted.

“If the weather machine were to be wound up to such new levels of energy, no country would remain unaffected,” it says. “Global warming is not yet certain, but many think that to wait for final proof would be irresponsible. Action now is seen as the only safe insurance.”

A separate 1986 report, marked “confidential” and also seen by the Guardian, notes the large uncertainties in climate science at the time but nonetheless states: “The changes may be the greatest in recorded history.”

The predictions in the 1991 film for temperature and sea level rises and their impacts were remarkably accurate, according to scientists, and Shell was one of the first major oil companies to accept the reality and dangers of climate change.

But, despite this early and clear-eyed view of the risks of global warming, Shell invested many billions of dollars in highly polluting tar sand operations and on exploration in the Arctic. It also cited fracking as a “future opportunity” in 2016, despite its own 1998 data showing exploitation of unconventional oil and gas was incompatible with climate goals.

The film was obtained by the Correspondent, a Dutch online journalism platform, and shared with the Guardian, and lauds commercial-scale solar and wind power that already existed in 1991. Shell has recently lobbied successfully to undermine European renewable energy targets and is estimated to have spent $22m in 2015 lobbying against climate policies. The company’s investments in low-carbon energy have been minimal compared to its fossil fuel investments.

Shell has also been a member of industry lobby groups that have fought climate action, including the so-called Global Climate Coalition until 1998; the far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) until 2015; and remains a member of the Business Roundtable and the American Petroleum Institute today.

Another oil giant, Exxon Mobil, is under investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and state attorney generals for allegedly misleading investors about the risks climate change posed to its business. The company said they are confident they are compliant. In early 2016, a group of congressmen asked the Department of Justice to also “investigate whether Shell’s actions around climate change violated federal law”.

“They knew. Shell told the public the truth about climate change in 1991 and they clearly never got round to telling their own board of directors,” said Tom Burke at the green thinktank E3G, who was a member of Shell’s external review committee from 2012-14 and has also advised BP and the mining giant Rio Tinto. “Shell’s behaviour now is risky for the climate but it is also risky for their shareholders. It is very difficult to explain why they are continuing to explore and develop high-cost reserves.”

Bill McKibben, a leading US environmentalist, said: “The fact that Shell understood all this in 1991, and that a quarter-century later it was trying to open up the Arctic to oil-drilling, tells you all you’ll ever need to know about the corporate ethic of the fossil fuel industry. Shell made a big difference in the world – a difference for the worse.”

Prof Tom Wigley, the climate scientist who was head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia when it helped Shell with the 1991 film, said: “It’s one of the best little films that I have seen on climate change ever. One could show this today and almost all would still be relevant.” He said Shell’s actions since 1991 had “absolutely not” been consistent with the film’s warning.

A Shell spokeswoman said: “Our position on climate change is well known; recognising the climate challenge and the role energy has in enabling a decent quality of life. Shell continues to call for effective policy to support lower carbon business and consumer choices and opportunities such as government lead carbon pricing/trading schemes.

On February 28 2017 12:14 Plansix wrote:

The show down will be over the Supreme Court seat and the democrats who are in states Trump carried. If they are up for election in 2018, they might cave. But I doubt it. There is nothing to gain by working with the GOP right now. Stalling out the Supreme Court poisoned the senate so no one wants to flip.

On February 28 2017 13:07 Doodsmack wrote:
This is so incredibly amateur that the reasoning provided is so poor. Saying we shouldn't have an investigation because in the absence of an investigation, nothing has turned up. It's only one or the other - total incompetence or they've got something to hide.



Yahoo

Also saying it was entirely appropriate to ask the FBI to comment publicly on an investigation. Either total incompetence or something to hide.

Leaked court documents raise concerns that the murder of the Honduran environmentalist Berta Cáceres was an extrajudicial killing planned by military intelligence specialists linked to the country’s US–trained special forces, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

Cáceres was shot dead a year ago while supposedly under state protection after receiving death threats over her opposition to a hydroelectric dam.

The murder of Cáceres, winner of the prestigious Goldman environmental prize in 2015, prompted international outcry and calls for the US to revoke military aid to Honduras, a key ally in its war on drugs.

Eight men have been arrested in connection with the murder, including one serving and two retired military officers.

Officials have denied state involvement in the activist’s murder, and downplayed the arrest of the serving officer Maj Mariano Díaz, who was hurriedly discharged from the army.

But the detainees’ military records and court documents seen by the Guardian reveal that:

• Díaz, a decorated special forces veteran, was appointed chief of army intelligence in 2015, and at the time of the murder was on track for promotion to lieutenant colonel.
  
• Another suspect, Lt Douglas Giovanny Bustillo joined the military on the same day as Díaz; they served together and prosecutors say they remained in contact after Bustillo retired in 2008.
  
• Díaz and Bustillo both received military training in the US.
  
• A third suspect, Sergeant Henry Javier Hernández, was a former special forces sniper, who had worked under the direct command of Díaz. Prosecutors believe he may also have worked as an informant for military intelligence after leaving the army in 2013.
  
• Court documents also include the records of mobile phone messages which prosecutors believe contain coded references to the murder.
  

Bustillo and Hernández visited the town of La Esperanza, where Cáceres lived, several times in the weeks before her death, according to phone records and Hernández’s testimony.

A legal source close to the investigation told the Guardian: “The murder of Berta Cáceres has all the characteristics of a well-planned operation designed by military intelligence, where it is absolutely normal to contract civilians as assassins.

On February 28 2017 22:09 Ayaz2810 wrote:
Has anyone taken a look at www.sutori.com? This seems pretty exhaustive. If this is what a handful of people have put together, the intelligence community must be sitting on a gold mine. The more pushback I hear from Nunes, Spicer, Priebus, etc, the more I realize that we actually might be in legitimately big trouble.

As a Stern listener, I liked this gem (from 2001 on air)

Trump: I assume A.J.’s clean. I hope he’s clean.

Benza: Meanwhile, he bangs Russian people…

Stern: Russian people?

Trump: Who are you talking about, Russian people, A.J.? I don’t know anything.

Benza: He used to call me when I was a columnist and say, “I was just in Russia, the girls have no morals, you gotta get out there.” [Trump’s] out of his mind.

But there are no tapes right?

 Before her murder on March 3, Berta Cáceres, a Honduran indigenous rights and environmental activist, named Hillary Clinton, holding her responsible for legitimating the 2009 coup. “We warned that this would be very dangerous,” she said, referring to Clinton’s effort to impose elections that would consolidate the power of murderers.

 In a video interview, given in Buenos Aires in 2014, Cáceres says it was Clinton who helped legitimate and institutionalize the coup. In response to a question about the exhaustion of the opposition movement (to restore democracy), Cáceres says (around 6:10): “The same Hillary Clinton, in her book Hard Choices, practically said what was going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the bad legacy of North American influence in our country.

 Clinton, in her position as secretary of state, pressured (as her emails show) other countries to agree to sideline the demands of Cáceres and others that Zelaya be returned to power. Instead, Clinton pushed for the election of what she calls in Hard Choices a “unity government.” But Cáceres says: “We warned that this would be very dangerous.… The elections took place under intense militarism, and enormous fraud.”

 The Clinton-brokered election did indeed install and legitimate a militarized regime based on repression. In the interview, Cáceres says that Clinton’s coup-government, under pressure from Washington, passed terrorist and intelligence laws that criminalized political protest.

 Interestingly, Hillary Clinton removed the most damning sentences regarding her role in legitimating the Honduran coup from the paperback edition of Hard Choices.

Californians are in shock that after five years of too little water, the problem now is too much.

All eyes in California have been on Oroville Dam, where a broken spillway forced major evacuations. But the damage from winter storms has gone beyond the dam in the northern part of the state. Downstream, rivers are running high and levees have been breaching.

Some are calling this a wake-up call for California as climate change could bring similar damage.

In the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, about 60 feet of levee is just gone, having been eaten away. A huge crane is dumping rocks in that gash to try and stop the river from breaking through.

Steve Mello, a farmer on Tyler Island in the delta, about two hours from San Francisco, watches every rock load, anxiously gnawing on his cigar.

"Every hour we work, we're safer," he says. "We're not out of the woods yet by a long shot."

The farms and homes nearby would be underwater without this levee. Mello watched it crumble in only 15 minutes.

The winter storms have stressed thousands of miles of rivers and levees. At one moment, the crew suddenly stops working and runs to check out another problem.

But this shouldn't be a surprise, says Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University.

"It's actually exactly what has been predicted by scientists for at least 30 years," he says.

He says California is likely to see more extreme flooding with climate change. And the reason is pretty simple. If it's warmer, storms produce more rain instead of snow.

But that's not what California's water system was built to do when it was designed a century ago.

It was built, in large part, around the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada.

The state's flood system can handle that slow melt, but not a huge amount of rain all at once, Diffenbaugh says.

"Our water system was really built in an old climate," he says. "It's a climate that is no longer the climate of California."

So what can California do about this?

Some are calling for more dams to be built. But Jay Lund, who directs the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California-Davis, says even if the dams are big enough to handle flood events, the channels downstream may not be able to.

"This flood here has really tested us," he says. "We've found that we have quite a bit of levees to work on still."

And, he says, dams aren't the only place to store all that runoff.

"The biggest source of water storage in California is groundwater, and it always will be," he says.

California is experimenting with spreading floodwater onto fields where it can seep into the groundwater. The groundwater needs recharging after being heavily used during the drought.

But if the state is going to catch up to the climate it has now, there's still a long way to go.

On February 28 2017 23:26 LightSpectra wrote:
Elimination of the EC is a worthy cause but it's never going to happen. There's too many people who think it'll turn the USA into California's colony.

I think eliminating FPTP is a more feasible goal, since you could sell it to both left-wingers and right-wingers that it means you could vote in more left-wing/more right-wing candidates than the scum you're getting right now.