Jun 20, 2021 Hot Take

Going in Circles

Hey Hot Cakes!

Welp, the West Coast is boiling, the Gulf Coast is dealing with another hurricane, and global leaders have once again failed to come to any sort of agreement on how to act on climate. All that, plus how the right-wing backlash against Critical Race Theory intersects with climate denial, and of course the weekly digest.

Enjoy!

Mary & Amy

Going in Circles

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

This weekend, the third named storm of the 2021 hurricane season, Tropical Storm Claudette, made a soggy landfall on the Gulf Coast. After last year’s hurricane season that took us deep into the Greek alphabet (seriously, I didn’t even know there were that many Greek letters!), I imagine every state with a coastline is going to be holding its breath all the way til November.

But even at the height of the hurricanes last year, we barely heard about them in the national media. My best guess as to why? Because they were pummeling the Gulf Coast and not the East Coast, where the mainstream media lives. If that bodes poorly for places like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, let’s spare a thought for what it means for places even further away. For one thing, the hurricanes that battered the Gulf Coast last year usually wreaked havoc in the Caribbean and Latin America first—places where resilience has already been woefully worn down.

Then, consider India, which has already seen two cyclones this year: Yaas (very severe) and Tauktae (extremely severe). The latter was actually the strongest storm to ever hit western India, which is alarming since that Arabian Sea used to be much calmer than the Bay of Bengal on the eastern coast of India. In fact, Tauktae developed into a severe cyclonic storm in two days. It usually takes at least five days for a storm to reach that threshold. It’s recorded to have killed 174 people and displaced a still unknown number. And this in the middle of a pandemic.

Once upon a time, these events would have been headline-dominating world tragedies. And those headlines would have generated compassion, which would have turned into much-needed donations. But that’s not the world we live in anymore. I fear that we’ve skipped quickly from climate acceptance to climate apathy. That’s not the world I want to live in.

If you want to help cyclone victims, you can donate here, here, and here.

BP <3 Shell

By Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt

So, in our last podcast episode, we had a nice little cackle about Shell getting absolutely owned at the Hague (of all places). They got held to account for all their emissions—rooter to tooter—and had their whole “but the government isn’t making us do it” excuse shot down. It was glorious. But in that episode, we wondered both what Shell was going to actually do in this moment and...what’s going on over there at BP? In a week where all their top competitors were getting their asses kicked, they had to be feeling either smug or vulnerable, right?

Well, this week, we got that answer when Shell’s CEO got super emo over on LinkedIn about how unfair it all is, and then BP’s CEO Bernard Looney came in with a little pat on a back. Earther’s Molly Taft has a way more informed and nuanced take on the whole thing, so we don’t need to do that here. Instead, we’re just gonna do what we do best: be two petty ass work wives. Here’s a loose transcript of our text messages when we saw this screenshot (because neither of us is on LinkedIn).

Mary: You see this shit?

Amy: bahahaha

Mary: LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Amy: Holy shit

Mary: I’m legit crying

Amy: WTFFFFFFFF

Mary: LOL

Amy: I mean….they really?

Mary: just like a lil bitch

Amy: bwahahaha

Mary: GIRL

Amy: [cackles indistinguishably]

If Biden Wants the World to Act on Climate, He Needs to Start at Home

By Amy Westervelt

President Biden made tackling climate and Covid his two big agenda items as he headed to the G7 Summit earlier this month. Now the summit has closed and G7 leaders have agreed to chip in on vaccines for all, which is great. But there was no agreement on collective climate action. Which is perhaps unsurprising, given that the country most responsible for climate change is utterly failing to tackle it at home. Please save your "well actually" on China and India emissions.The U.S. is by far the largest historical emitter. And besides, when I say "most responsible," I am not just talking about our emissions. America literally started the oil industry, gave rise to the companies that blocked global climate action, and American companies still provide much of the world's oil and gas, while continuing to block climate policy wherever they can. So yeah, we're "most responsible" for the global climate crisis.

No surprise then, that when Uncle Joe comes asking for climate kumbaya, people tell him to clean up his own house first. The G7 Summit coincided with the news that White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy was saying that measures like "a clean electricity standard may not end [up] in the final version" of the infrastructure deal Biden's been trying to secure for months. That's mostly due to GOP blocks in the Senate, but Biden and his administration, as predicted, seem a little too enamored of bipartisanship in the face of a crisis.

Meanwhile, Biden has been stalling on giving the country and the world a clear position on liquefied natural gas. As he dithers, more and more LNG terminals are being built—these are export terminals, intended to supply the world with American LNG. If Biden wants to be taken seriously in any sort of international climate discussion, he can't just send John Kerry around the world to lecture other countries about their fossil fuel use. Maybe I'm just grumpy because I'm melting in the intense West Coast heat wave, but perhaps what we need instead of a globe-trotting "climate czar" is a domestic accountability czar. Someone who doesn't give a shit about what fossil fuel companies will allow, or what's most appealing politically, but will just spend all of their time figuring out how to wind down fossil fuel development, period.

Surprise! Critical Race Theory and Climate Action Have the Same Haters

By Amy Westervelt

The debate over teaching critical race theory in American schools absolutely dovetails with climate change in both obvious and hidden ways. If you need an explainer on what critical race theory is, here's a great piece that ran in The Economist recently. In a nutshell, it's the acknowledgement of structural racism in the U.S., and the study of how it plays out in myriad ways. It's been around since the 1970s, but suddenly Republican governors are enraged that aspects of it might be taught in schools and they're pushing through legislation to ban it—so far that's happened in Texas, Idaho, and Tennessee, with several other states batting around the idea.

None of this should be surprising, especially when you remember that Brown vs. Board of Education is the policy that drew the Kochs into politics in the first place., but the backlash against CRT is a slightly new, libertarian flavor that was crystallized in the 1980s when the civil rights division of Reagan's Department of Justice decided that the most important civil rights battle was really reverse discrimination. Against white people. Folks, I wish I was making this up. It came to a head in the 1990s around efforts to modernize the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

What does all this have to do with climate change, you ask? The same people and foundations that have, for decades, funded opposition to civil rights, affirmative action and, now, Critical Race Theory, are the ones who have funded climate denial. The Koch brothers and the many organizations they fund (including Donors Trust, State Policy Network, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute); the Bradley Foundation—which manages to be less well-known, despite spending even more than the Kochs on the right-wing agenda; the Searle Freedom Trust; the Scaife Family Foundations. And the legal arm of it all, the Republican Attorney Generals Association. Scratch the surface of any campaign against Critical Race Theory and you'll find one or more of these folks funding it. Scratch the surface of any campaign against climate action? Same folks. The re-open rallies around Covid? Same. The Capitol Riots? Same, girl, same.

This is why I always find it so infuriating when I hear progressives say, as many did when the Green New Deal was first announced, that we can't address systemic racism and climate change at the same time, that it's too much to ask people to walk and chew gum. The right wing does it all the time! The literal same people and foundations are behind the right's push to declare that both systemic racism and climate change don't exist. Why shouldn't the countermovement combine the two?