Exxon move to expand power to pollute; DJT lies gain traction

The Lever reports:

Exxon Declares War On Its Dissenters

The fossil fuel giant is suing investors to intimidate them from ever trying to influence corporate decisions.

ExxonMobil has launched an extraordinary lawsuit against two investment firms for the alleged offense of filing climate-focused shareholder proposals. The fossil fuel giant’s underlying goal: killing a federal regulatory effort that would make it easier for all U.S. shareholders to voice environmental and social concerns about the companies they own.

Critics say the company is also trying to intimidate shareholders from ever proposing such resolutions again in the future — under threat of being tied up in expensive litigation and incurring punitive financial penalties.

If successful, the Exxon lawsuit could set a legal precedent wrestling control away from regulators and cracking down on activist investors working to enact more climate-friendly policies.

And if DJT gets re-elected, we can rest assured that ExxonMobil will be free to pollute, cause the sea level to rise 50 feet, and make species go extinct as it wishes. 

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The WaPo reports about DJT's progress in converting lies into truths among his supporters:

Trump has made significant inroads in convincing Republicans that his lies are the truth. That applies to election integrity especially — the basis of Trump’s “big lie.”

Even more significant, Americans appear to have diverged on the meaning of honesty itself. Among Republicans, fewer now say that Trump regularly makes misleading statements. Slightly more view him as more honest than they did in 2018, despite an extraordinarily large amount of evidence that Trump often does not tell the truth. During Trump’s presidency, The Fact Checker documented more than 30,000 misleading or outright false claims, and since he began his second campaign for the White House against Joe Biden, he’s introduced new falsehoods to his catalogue: Inflation is “almost 50 percent” under President Biden; “nearly 1 million jobs held by native-born Americans” have been lost to immigrants. In a single December interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump made 24 false or misleading claims in five minutes — one every 12.5 seconds.

Six years ago, just about 1 in 4 Republicans (26 percent) agreed that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 election. Now, 38 percent of Republicans — and 47 percent of strong Trump supporters — believe that is the case. Among all Americans, belief in this false claim hardly changed because Democrats moved sharply in the opposite direction from Republicans. Trump often made this claim to justify his loss of the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, when the electoral college propelled him to the Oval Office.

Trump has convinced 70 percent of Republicans — and 81 percent of his strong supporters — that Biden won the 2020 election because of voter fraud, though not a single allegation has been proven. Slightly more than one-third of Americans overall believe this.

 

Voters who support DJT tend to be very low information voters and significantly deceived by years of DJT's lies. The power of those people to vote based on truth has been taken from them by deceit. Unfortunately, votes based on lies count just as much as votes based on truth. 

Puttin' your foot into it

 Man oh man, did I ever put my foot in my mouth yesterday (Germaine knows what I mean).

It got me thinking. How often we do it. How embarrassing when we do.

Makes me think of big time and important people when they do it. 

Trump does it a lot. But manages to shrug it off. Biden does it a lot. And we apologize for him.

Some is deliberate. Some is speaking without thinking. Some is reacting (as I did yesterday) without fully comprehending what we are reacting to.

Here is the irony.

It depends on who does it. We won't excuse it in someone but will excuse it in others. Again - thinking of important people. If a Republican says something - not asinine, just off the cuff and therefore silly, we have a different reaction than when a Democrat does the same. 

Human nature? Or just laziness? We should think twice before speaking or reacting? AND how should we feel when we get caught with our foot in our mouth?

Ok for you, but not for me? In short, I know Germaine has already forgiven me (I hope) but how quick are we to judge others who put their foot into it without realizing that we are prone to doing the same?

Whether online, in real life, or in politics - especially in politics. 

If you were asked to be on the jury at a Trump trial

 I don't need to rehash everything that has been said about how impossible it will be to find an impartial juror for any of Trump's trials. But since the NY hush money case is the first to be tried, and jury selection has begun, let's use that one as an example.

I also don't need to rehash all the worries that all it will take is for one pro-Trumper to answer all the questions put to him or her in a manner that makes them acceptable only to be the one that hangs a jury.\

I instead gave the following questions a lot of thought and was prompted to those thoughts by a radio program I was listening this morning hosted by Michael Smerconish.

Let me ask the questions straight up without the political slant.

1. Do you have strong feelings one way or another about the guilty or innocence of charges against Trump, before hearing the evidence or taking part in the trial?

2. Do you have strong personal feelings about Trump, whether for or against, that would disqualify you from being an impartial juror?

3. Regardless of your personal feelings about the charges or about Trump, whether for or against, could you nevertheless render a verdict SOLELY based on the evidence presented at trial and the instructions given to you by the judge?

4. Are you impartial towards the charges and Trump himself. Are you neither for or against the charges or Trump. Are you going into this trial with a  totally impartial view and so are not tainted by personal feelings about the charges or about Trump?

Here is how I would have answered - to the best of my ability.

1. I think the hush money charges are rather weak so I have an already preconceived notion. But I am nevertheless willing to listen to the evidence.

2. I detest the man, but do not believe my detestation would disqualify me. I feel I could put my personal dislike of the man aside.

3. I believe I COULD render the verdict SOLELY based on the evidence and the judge's instructions. Even if it means that my verdict is in conflict with my personal feelings. I believe I could follow the evidence and the law. 

4. I am not impartial. I have strong feelings that may or may not guide how I react to the trial. So my answer here is NO, I am not impartial but hope I can perform my duty as juror as explained in my answer #3.

I suspect on those answers I would be disqualified but I would look at those answers and consider the person giving those answers as at least being honest and I would be tempted to accept them as a juror.

AND NO, I am not saying that to toot my own horn, but to raise the question: How would YOU answer those questions, and what answers would YOU find acceptable in accepting a juror?

Global warming updates: Reconductoring the grid; Financial fizzle

A NYT article reports about the need to update the electrical grid (not paywalled off for 30 days):

A rarely used technique to upgrade old power lines could play a big role in fixing one of the largest obstacles facing clean energy, two reports found.

Replacing existing power lines with cables made from state-of-the-art materials could roughly double the capacity of the electric grid in many parts of the country, making room for much more wind and solar power.

This technique, known as “advanced reconductoring,” is widely used in other countries. But many U.S. utilities have been slow to embrace it because of their unfamiliarity with the technology as well as regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles, researchers found.

“We were pretty astonished by how big of an increase in capacity you can get by reconductoring,” said Amol Phadke, a senior scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who contributed to one of the reports released Tuesday. Working with GridLab, a consulting firm, researchers from Berkeley looked at what would happen if advanced reconductoring were broadly adopted. 

Today, most power lines consist of steel cores surrounded by strands of aluminum, a design that’s been around for a century. In the 2000s, several companies developed cables that used smaller, lighter cores such as carbon fiber and that could hold more aluminum. These advanced cables can carry up to twice as much current as older models.

Experts broadly agree that the sluggish build-out of the electric grid is the Achilles’ heel of the transition to cleaner energy. The Energy Department estimates that the nation’s network of transmission lines may need to expand by two-thirds or more by 2035 to meet President Biden’s goals to power the country with clean energy.

But building transmission lines has become a brutal slog, and it can take a decade or more for developers to site a new line through multiple counties, receive permission from a patchwork of different agencies and address lawsuits about spoiled views or damage to ecosystems. Last year, the United States added just 251 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, a number that has been declining for a decade.  

Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have been widely deploying advanced conductors in order to integrate more wind and solar power, said Emilia Chojkiewicz, one of the authors of the Berkeley report.

“We talked with the transmission system planners over there and they all said this is a no-brainer,” Ms. Chojkiewicz said. “It’s often difficult to get new rights of way for lines, and reconductoring is much faster.”

One can rationally consider this to be (1) another major failure of American governments to act, and (2) how the private sector does things. We leave most everything to brass knuckles capitalist markets running wild, free, butt naked and unaccountable. Meanwhile, neutered governments dither, blither and slither their way under rocks for protection from accountability. Everyone with power is asleep at the switch.

Another NYT article reports about how banks are not doing much to deal with global warming despite pledges to do something in 2021 (not paywalled):

Banks Made Big Climate Promises. A New Study Doubts They Work.

Using European Central Bank lending data, researchers said there was not evidence that voluntary commitments were effective in reducing emissions.

Hundreds of banks, insurers and asset managers vowed to plow $130 trillion in capital into reducing carbon emissions and financing the energy transition as they introduced the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. But a recent study, published by the European Central Bank, disputed the effectiveness of those promises.

“Our results cast doubt on the efficacy of voluntary climate commitments for reducing financed emissions, whether through divestment or engagement,” wrote economists from the central bank, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia Business School who analyzed lending by European banks that had signed on to the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, the banking group of the Glasgow initiative.

The researchers found that since 2018 the banks had reduced lending 20 percent to sectors they had targeted in their climate goals, such as oil and gas and transport. That seems like progress, but the researchers argued it was not sufficient because the decline was the same for banks that had not made the same commitment.

“It’s not OK for the net-zero bank to act exactly like the non-net-zero bank, because we need that to scale up financing,” said Parinitha Sastry, an assistant professor of finance at Columbia Business School and one of the paper’s authors. “We want there to be a behavioral change.”

Expectations for banks from policymakers and climate activists are high. Every year trillions of dollars need to be invested in clean energy if the world is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. Most of that cost will need to be financed privately, and banks are the key facilitators in those deals.

Many banks clamored to make net-zero pledges around the summit in Glasgow, known as COP26. But as pressure builds to lower emissions, climate activists are concerned about waning commitments from banks because of mounting political pressure, demand for cheap energy and shifting geopolitical alliances.  

GLS, a German bank, pulled out as a founding member of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance last year after a report by European nonprofit groups said the largest banks in the alliance had funneled $270 billion into fossil fuel expansions since they joined.

“What sense does it make to be in an alliance like that?” said Antje Tönnis, a spokeswoman for GLS. “Plus, it is a fair bit of work. Reporting is involved but doesn’t have any consequences.”

Climate science deniers deny the science