So on forward for ever to the end of cat-dom

PRESENTED BY JAM TOMORROW AND NEVER JAM TODAY

So, I make a big deal about how climate polluters insert their propaganda into climate politics newsletters. This week, Chevron is sponsoring both Ben Geman and Andrew Freedman’s Axios Generate newsletter (morning) and Arianna Skibell’s Politico Power Switch newsletter (evening). But Chevron’s marketeers have edited the company into something even more impressive this week: the AIDS Quilt.¹

Chevron, of course, is well known for its commitment to global health around the world. For obvious reasons, I’m not including as many Twitter embeds as I used to, but this one was worth it.

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ON THE HILL: Actor and activist Jane Fonda returns to the streets of Washington, D.C. this morning, for the first live Fire Drill Friday since the start of the pandemic. She will be joined in the rally to oppose Manchin’s “Dirty Deal” pipeline-permitting plan by Jerome Foster, the youngest member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, Roishetta Ozane, Organizing Director of Southwest Louisiana/Southeast Tecas for Healthy Gulf, Maria Lopez-Nunez, Deputy Director of Ironbound Community Corporation (ICC), as well as Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz). 

Rep. Grijalva is keeping busy—in a letter sent today to the Interior Department, he and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) describe evidence that Mike Ingram, a businessman with unique access to high-ranking Trump administration officials, may have unduly influenced former President Trump’s decision to pardon convicted public lands arsonists Dwight and Steven Hammond in exchange for a sizeable donation to a pro-Trump Super PAC.

The Washington Post is churning out big climate reporting these days.

• Now that there’s nearly $5 billion in federal money from the infrastructure bill to plug abandoned oil and gas wells, states have discovered at least 120,000 orphan wells, up 50 percent from last year, Maxine Joselow reports.

• The North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog contains the age, sex, sightings, physical features and family lineage of nearly every member of the species, with data dating back to 1935. If right whales vanish for good, Dino Grandoni writes, scientists would be able to watch them go extinct one by one, by name. “Climate change is already compounding the right whale’s woes. In the heavily trafficked North Atlantic, right whales are already scrawnier and reproduce less often than their cousins around Antarctica. Warming waters are now bringing zooplankton to unprotected waters, and the whales are following their prey faster than regulators or scientists can keep up.”

• Officials fear a “complete doomsday scenario” for the drought-stricken Colorado River, Joshua Partlow reports from Arizona.

• Working with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Chris Mooney,  Naema Ahmed and John Muyskens looked at the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century, with “low” overshoot. They could not find any “reasonable” scenario—only a few “challenging” scenarios with “dramatic carbon removal from the atmosphere” and a “total or a near total phaseout of fossil fuels.” The scenarios they examined do not model the possibility of civilizational collapse or nuclear winter.

WHAT, MORE NEWS?

Defending the environment can be a death sentence.

Underwater tsunamis created by glacier calving cause vigorous ocean mixing.

Germans have seen the future, and it’s a heat pump.

A new lawsuit from Puerto Rico municipalities argues that fossil fuel companies’ climate deception violates racketeering and fraud laws and that their products supercharged fatal hurricanes in 2017.

Arch Capital Group Ltd and AEGIS London have become the latest (re)insurance companies to commit not to provide any coverage to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline project.

California water agencies that serve 27 million people will get just 5% of what they requested from the state to start 2023.

Water thieves abound in dry California. Why are they so hard to catch?

Finally, via Corey Robin, some thoughts from John Maynard Keynes on how money ruins love and life’s pleasure. The person who thinks in money

Climate Action Today:

• 11 AM: Greenpeace
  Fire Drill Friday: Stop the Dirty Deal

• 3 PM: Environmental and Energy Study Institute

  Climate Summit Recap: Key Outcomes and What Comes Next

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. DMs are open—@climatebrad on Twitter or @[email protected]

1 The company appears to have first used this image in a 2020 marketing campaign.

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