Feed aggregator

He played a key role in securing the Montreal Protocol, an international environmental pact to protect the ozone layer by reducing the use of certain chemicals.

Regulator faces accusation of acting unlawfully in its investigation of Global Warming Policy Foundation

The Charity Commission is facing a legal challenge by MPs over its failure to investigate campaigning by a thinktank that questions climate science.

Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, Labour’s Clive Lewis and Green MP Caroline Lucas, supported by the Good Law Project, have sent a legal letter to the regulator over an unresolved complaint they made in October 2022.

Continue reading...

Masses of ephemeral organisms known as ‘by-the-wind sailors’ wash up in a ‘blue tide’ on the west coast most years but warmer winter seas could be increasingly their numbers

From Oregon to California, blankets of alien-like blue creatures are washing up on rocky beaches. They are Velella velella, tiny colonies of organisms with a sombrero-esque fin sticking out the top and tentacles dangling down.

Millions have been spotted along the US west coast this spring, much to the surprise and delight of beachgoers who have gleefully posted footage on social media. Some call it a “blue tide” and it happens most springs – but not always to the same degree of abundance.

Continue reading...

In the state of La Guajira, ambitious plans to transition to renewables are beset by bureaucratic delays and anger from many local Indigenous people, who see it as ‘new colonialism’

• Photographs by Charlie Cordeiro

A few years ago, as age began to take its toll, Rosa Velásquez decided it was time to leave the restaurant she owned in the coastal town of Cabo de la Vela and move back home for a peaceful retirement.. However, when she returned to the tiny rural community of Jotomana, on the arid plains of Colombia’s northernmost tip, she found the place she and her ancestors had called home for generations littered with giant wind turbines.

Towering white turbines punctuate the horizon a few miles from Cabo de la Vela. The region, in the northern state of La Guajira, is home to all of Colombia’s windfarms and its largest Indigenous population, the Wayúu.

Continue reading...

A new technology is attempting to brighten clouds and bounce some of the sun’s rays back into space.

Big brands like Procter & Gamble and Nestlé say a new generation of plants will help them meet environmental goals, but the technology is struggling to deliver.

The term, which emerged in response to calls for "deglobalization," has been popping up more in trade and policy circles.

Un ensayo en California está probando una máquina diseñada para reflejar la luz solar en el espacio con la finalidad de disminuir temporalmente las temperaturas del planeta.

The surprising carbon footprint of an Amtrak trip across America.

Cómo mantenerse a salvo cuando cae la nieve.

The Italian energy giant Eni sees future profits from collecting carbon dioxide and pumping it into natural gas fields that have been exhausted.

An early forecast from one set of experts sees an above-average hurricane season that may rival the busiest years on record.

As ExxonMobil prepares for its annual general meeting (AGM) this spring, the corporation is facing calls to drop an unprecedented lawsuit against shareholders who are asking for deeper global warming emissions reductions. There has been comparatively less attention to the decision by climate scientist Dr. Susan Avery not to seek re-election to the ExxonMobil board of directors. Yet this shift in corporate leadership is significant, marking the end of a chapter in ExxonMobil’s long and ongoing history of climate deception and disinformation.

Here’s a primer on why a climate scientist was on ExxonMobil’s board, what Dr. Avery accomplished during her tenure, and how ExxonMobil has acted on climate science over the past seven years. I conclude with one plea to Dr. Avery in her final weeks on ExxonMobil’s board: to call on her colleagues in corporate leadership to stop the company from suing shareholders who are seeking to preserve a livable climate.

Why is a climate scientist on ExxonMobil’s board?

Because climate-conscious investors requested it. As evidence mounted of ExxonMobil’s role in concerted campaigns to deny climate science—through investigative journalism exposés and reports such as UCS’s Climate Deception Dossiers—shareholders called for the company to nominate an independent director with climate change expertise, believing that the presence of an expert would  lead to science-informed corporate decisions.

Dr. Susan Avery, a physicist and atmospheric scientist, is the former director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts. She’s also professor emeritus at University of Colorado at Boulder. At the time of her nomination, Dr. Avery was a respected climate scientist—although she had also sparked controversy with her decisions at WHOI to accept major funding from oil and gas corporations.

It’s worth noting that the shareholder proposal requesting the nomination of a climate expert to ExxonMobil’s board received just over 20 percent support in 2016. Yet the corporation acted on it—giving the lie to claims that such shareholder advocacy is frivolous. In fact, shareholder resolutions can be an early-warning system to help corporations address issues of investor and public concern before they snowball into major problems.

What did Dr. Avery accomplish?

Cynically speaking, she raked in well over $2 million in compensation for carrying out her responsibilities as an ExxonMobil director.

As a member of ExxonMobil’s board of directors and chair of the Environment, Safety, and Public Policy (ESPP) committee of the Board, Dr. Avery was in a unique position with a critical responsibility to steer the corporation toward scientific integrity, transparency, and accountability. Shareholders and scientists had a legitimate expectation that she would use her leadership role to ensure that the company’s resources were not used to promote faulty science, climate disinformation, or greenwashing campaigns. Unfortunately, ExxonMobil’s decisions and actions over the course of her board tenure have dashed that expectation.

Back in the pre-pandemic days when ExxonMobil held in-person AGMs, I attended on the proxy of climate-conscious shareholders. Scientists from a range of disciplines and institutions joined me to ask questions of corporate decision-makers and speak in support of climate action. You can read their insights from their experiences—including being denied the opportunity to take the floor—and their efforts to engage with Dr. Avery in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

A turning point for shareholder advocacy

ExxonMobil’s appointment of Dr. Avery to its board was an acknowledgment of mounting pressure on the corporation to align its decisions and actions with climate science. And the pressure kept growing. At ExxonMobil’s 2017 AGM—when Dr. Avery was added to the board—a majority of shareholders for the first time approved a climate-related shareholder proposal.

A few months later, Dr. Geoffrey Supran and Dr. Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University published an important peer-reviewed study of ExxonMobil’s climate change communications, concluding that the corporation “contributed quietly to climate science and loudly to raising doubts about it.”

What followed was a stream of yearly corporate reports produced in response to investor demands that ExxonMobil disclose its plans for a world that meets the Paris climate agreement’s goal of limiting the global average temperature increase to well below two degrees Celsius (2°C) above pre-industrial levels, and striving to limit it to 1.5°C.

ExxonMobil wrapped itself in the mantle of “net zero”—conveniently omitting the emissions deriving from use of its oil and gas products, which account for about 85 percent of the total global warming emissions attributable to the corporation. The company used Dr. Avery’s image in promoting its bogus net-zero solutions.

The corporation faced an unprecedented shareholder rebellion in 2021, with upstart hedge fund investor Engine No. 1 capturing three seats on the board by successfully arguing that ExxonMobil was failing to adapt for the transition to clean energy. During Dr. Avery’s tenure, three climate-related shareholder proposals won majorities.

Not an information deficit

However, one climate expert on the board evidently could not change ExxonMobil’s business model. Numerous academic studies and internal corporate documents reveal that the problem was not a deficit of information. A single climate expert clearly failed to steer the corporation away from climate disinformation. Did her presence enable ExxonMobil to hone its climate disinformation and greenwashing for a new era when bald-faced climate denial no longer works?

The fossil fuel giant now claims to be “aligned” with the Paris climate agreement, all while it continues to massively expand oil and gas exploration and production and lobby against climate action. In sworn testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee in 2021, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods refused to ensure that corporate funds are not spent to spread disinformation and block climate action.

Not surprisingly, Big Oil’s disinformation campaign continues, as documented by the Congressional investigation and climate accountability lawsuits filed by dozens of cities, counties, and states across the United States and its territories.

Meanwhile, ExxonMobil also resists transparency, working through the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and other groups to oppose a strong Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule designed to mandate standardized and comparable corporate disclosures. Read this recent blog by my colleague Laura Peterson to learn how the SEC weakened its final climate disclosure rule in an (unsuccessful) attempt to placate foes.

Leading in the wrong direction

In the face of the climate crisis, every board member of every publicly held corporation must be climate competent—and every board member has a duty to limit corporate climate impacts, plan for the transition to clean renewable energy, and support science-based climate policy. Some experts warn that board members of corporations that do not adequately manage climate-related risks could even be held personally liable for breaching their legal obligations.

Dr. Avery, for her part, gave a ringing endorsement of ExxonMobil’s 2023 “Advancing Climate Solutions” report—a masterclass in paltering (using selected truthful statements to mislead) and greenwashing (deceptive marketing to suggest companies or products are environmentally friendly).

“As chair of our ESPP Committee, I’m proud to work on key issues related to climate risk at ExxonMobil. With my experience as an atmospheric scientist and a leader at a global research organization, I am committed to helping to advise the Board on public issues of significance… The members of the ESPP Committee are united in our commitment to position ExxonMobil as an industry leader in pursuing sustainable solutions that improve quality of life and meet society’s evolving needs.”

As Dr. Avery nears the end of seven years on the board, here’s a snapshot of “key issues related to climate risk at ExxonMobil”:

• ExxonMobil presents misleading science and refuses to acknowledge its responsibility for reducing emissions from the use of its oil and gas products. In its 2024 “Advancing Climate Solutions” report, ExxonMobil continues to deny any responsibility for Scope 3 emissions from use of the oil and gas products that it markets and sells—which constitute roughly 85 percent of the heat-trapping emissions attributable to ExxonMobil. My climate scientist colleague Dr. Carly Phillips does a great job explaining how the charts presented in this report are not scientifically rigorous and even appear intentionally vague and misleading, which reduces transparency around ExxonMobil’s climate impacts and mitigation efforts.  
• The corporation’s “low carbon” roadmap relies heavily on unproven and unscaled technologies. ExxonMobil focuses on net-zero technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen, calling into question the corporate commitment to reducing emissions in the critical period between now and 2030.
• ExxonMobil’s advertising campaigns mislead consumers, overstate its current and planned clean energy endeavors, and increase its own liability. Given the centrality of polluting fossil fuels to its business, ExxonMobil’s recent marketing campaigns have been criticized as greenwashing for falsely representing ExxonMobil as a clean energy leader, making overblown claims about the environmental benefits of its products, and touting unproven technologies. In addition to misleading the public about key scientific and environmental issues, these campaigns increase corporate liability. The company is now being sued by states and municipalities across the United States and its territories for consumer fraud, deceptive trade practices, and racketeering, threatening the financial security of shareholders such as public pension funds.
• ExxonMobil continues to fund organizations that spread climate disinformation and seek to block climate action. Despite the company’s public claims of “advancing climate solutions”, ExxonMobil retains leadership roles in several trade associations—including  the American Petroleum Institute, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, and National Association of Manufacturers—that engage in climate obstructionist lobbying. ExxonMobil also continues to bankroll organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce that have a long and ongoing history of distorting science and downplaying the grave nature of the climate crisis.

Ultimately, ExxonMobil’s “Global Outlook” projects higher oil, gas, and coal consumption in 2050 than today, utterly failing to align with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and International Energy Agency (IEA) scenarios that fossil fuel use must fall to limit the most dangerous impacts of climate change.

Stop suing climate-conscious shareholders

Perhaps nothing shows that ExxonMobil is determined to maintain its climate-destroying business model better than the company’s current lawsuit against its own shareholders. In January, the corporation sued two shareholders that had filed a resolution requesting medium-term targets for reducing emissions from corporate operations and from the use of its oil and gas products. ExxonMobil is pressing ahead with its lawsuit even after the shareholders withdrew their proposal.

The SEC has long recognized climate change is a significant issue that shareholders have an interest in discussing; the agency has allowed many climate-related shareholder resolutions to proceed to a vote in recent years, and none has provoked such a legal backlash. As the climate crisis worsens, investors have a right to understand and address the financial risks posed by delays in climate action, particularly by fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil that are contributing disproportionately to the problem while failing to evolve for the clean energy transition.

ExxonMobil should not attempt to repress its shareholders’ ability to consider and provide strategic guidance to corporate leadership about one of the most pressing issues of our time. This lawsuit against shareholders calling for more ambitious climate action, along with ExxonMobil’s aggressive expansion of oil and gas production, demonstrate to investors and the world that the corporation continues to act in bad faith. Investors including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS)—the largest US pension fund—are calling on ExxonMobil to drop the lawsuit and weighing whether to keep their investments in light of these tactics.

Over the past seven years, Dr. Avery has frustrated shareholders, scientists, and the public by failing to steer the corporation toward transparency and accountability—and away from climate disinformation and greenwashing. While she cannot erase that legacy, in her final days on the ExxonMobil board Dr. Avery could do a significant service to climate science by persuading her colleagues in corporate leadership to drop this frivolous and hypocritical lawsuit. She still has time to act before her term expires at the corporation’s AGM in late May.

A new dataset released by InfluenceMap provides information on heat-trapping emissions traced to the 122 largest investor and state-owned fossil fuel companies in the world. Fossil fuels are the main driver of climate change and the terrifying effects of it that we see happening across the world. That makes this dataset a powerful tool for understanding how each of these entity’s heat-trapping emissions have contributed to climate change.

I have been working with this new InfluenceMap dataset in my own research, and here I’ll share how I’m using it and offer a look at heat-trapping emissions from five major investor-owned fossil fuel companies: ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips. These companies have been polluting our planet for decades with impunity and they are planning to continue their harmful fossil fuel extraction despite global efforts to tackle climate change. As I show below, their cumulative emissions have continued to rise over the decades even as international efforts to confront climate change have been enacted through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.

To learn more about the history of this dataset, ways researchers have used a previous version of it, and applications for new research and climate litigation, check out this blog post written by my colleague Carly Phillips.

Using data for litigation-relevant research

Since fall of 2022, I have been the Hitz Fellow for Litigation Relevant Research here at the Union of Concerned Scientists. My fellowship is based on using data that trace heat-trapping emissions to major fossil fuel producers in order to understand how they have affected the climate, particularly global sea levels, and to aid efforts to hold these producers accountable. Scientists tend to be more comfortable using our research to inform policy than to inform litigation so the phrase ‘litigation-relevant research’ may not be familiar to some readers. But this is a rapidly growing way to apply our skills as climate litigation begins to pick up steam around the world and researchers look for ways to help out. Last year my colleague Sarah Goodspeed put together a toolkit called Research on the Record, to help explain litigation relevant research to the broader research community. Check it out to learn more.

I am using this new dataset from InfluenceMap to work on two different research projects. One of them looks at how past emissions from fossil fuel companies will continue affecting sea levels for centuries to come. The other project uses the data to understand how fossil fuel production in specific countries relates to global efforts under the Paris Agreement to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C. I’m not going to share the results of those studies here since I need to preserve the scientific process and wait for my research to go through peer review, but I do want to share some things I’ve learned along the way as I’ve been working with this data. Let’s dig into it!

Exploring this new dataset

ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips have made headlines in recent years for the enormous profits they are raking in—more than $100 billion in 2023 alone. Meanwhile, climate impacts such as wildfires, floods, and severe storms continue to worsen, heat-trapping emissions continue to rise, and people around the world suffer immense harm from climate-fueled disasters. Fossil fuel companies’ billions of dollars in profits are coming from sales of their harmful products. In Figure 1 we can see the cumulative heat-trapping emissions from their fossil fuel production have increased significantly over the past 140 years.

Figure 1: Cumulative emissions from five major investor-owned fossil fuel companies (Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, and ConocoPhillips) over the past 140 years.  

The InfluenceMap dataset includes company-by-company data on emissions of carbon dioxide–the heat-trapping gas responsible for the largest contribution to climate change–and methane, a very potent heat-trapping gas that lasts a shorter time in the atmosphere. The unit used in the graph above, CO2e, is short for carbon dioxide equivalent–a unit that combines carbon dioxide and methane to tell us the equivalent heat-trapping emissions over a 100-year time scale. The main takeaway from this plot is that emissions from these companies’ products have increased over time by quite a lot!

Fossil fuel producers’ cumulative emissions increase

Climate science has evolved significantly over the past 140 years, and we know more now about how the climate system works than ever before. But scientists have known the basics of climate change since the late 1800s, and we certainly knew enough half a century ago to start sounding the alarm bells that heat-trapping emissions were becoming a growing problem for the planet. The fossil fuel industry knew that too. Uncovered documents have shown that several companies were even conducting their own internal research on climate change. ExxonMobil’s research has even proven to be accurate as we have seen global temperatures rise at approximately the levels projected in their research. Yet despite the company’s internal knowledge and the strong science that was publicly available, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies did not realign their business models in favor of a livable future. Instead, they focused efforts on denying the science, deceiving the public, greenwashing their images, and lobbying against regulations. Let’s look at their cumulative emissions since the 1950s in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Cumulative emissions of five major investor-owned fossil fuel companies, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, and ConocoPhillips, since 1950. Vertical dotted lines mark 1992, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was established, and 2016, when the Paris Agreement was ratified.  Rising emissions flout climate science

Even as the science advanced and people and policymakers around the world became increasingly concerned about climate change, heat-trapping emissions from the world’s largest fossil fuel producers continued to grow. By the early 1990s, countries around the world came together and established the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Following that important development, annual international negotiations began to figure out how to achieve the goals of the UNFCCC.

After decades of these negotiations, the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015 and ratified in 2016 (to read more about this history check out my peer-reviewed research here). I’ve marked these important years with dotted lines in Figure 2. As we can see, throughout these recent decades—despite the international efforts to address climate change and the scientific consensus showing that fossil fuels are the leading cause of climate change—the cumulative emissions from these major fossil fuel producers have continued to rise. They are taking us in the wrong direction, and we desperately need a change.

In this blog I have shown cumulative heat-trapping emissions from each of these companies. This is because cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are key for understanding global temperature rise. To quote the Summary for Policymakers from the Working Group 1 section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report: “From a physical science perspective, limiting human-induced global warming to a specific level requires limiting cumulative CO2 emissions …. This Report reaffirms with high confidence the AR5 finding that there is a near-linear relationship between cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions and the global warming they cause.” The plots here show CO2e, but most of each company’s emissions are CO2 so these cumulative emissions plots give us a good idea of how each of these companies has continued to drive rising global temperatures over time. In a follow up blog I will break down each company’s annual heat-trapping emissions to compare what we can learn from that.

Sharply reducing emissions requires phasing out fossil fuels

The most recent IPCC report and United Nations Production Gap report show that fossil fuel producers must decrease their production, yet that isn’t what they have been doing in recent decades—and it isn’t what they are planning to do in the critical period between now and 2030. Climate justice activists and their supporters around the world have called for a fast and fair fossil fuel phaseout. The year 2023 was the hottest year on record (so far!); calls for accountability continue to grow louder.

This new dataset from InfluenceMap provides a powerful tool for researchers like me to understand where heat-trapping emissions are coming. That information can help as we work together to reverse these dangerous trends and build a better future based on clean renewable energy.

Lending to meat, dairy and feed corporations led to ‘significant proportion’ of banks’ emissions, Friends of the Earth found

American banks are “sabotaging” their own climate commitments by financing meat, dairy and feed corporations, according to a report.

The report analysed funding from 58 US banks to animal protein and feed companies in the form of loans and underwriting, such as share and bond issuance guarantees.

Continue reading...

The E.P.A. said the fund will spur a clean energy transition in overlooked communities. Republicans called it a “greendoggle.”

Artificial intelligence is peering into restaurant garbage pails and crunching grocery-store data to try to figure out how to send less uneaten food into dumpsters.

As forests succumb to ever-fiercer wildfires, the federal government and some adventurous private companies are trying to resuscitate an industry.

Despite major progress in Brazil and Colombia, deforestation led by farming still cleared an area nearly equal to Switzerland

The destruction of the world’s most pristine rainforests continued at a relentless rate in 2023, despite dramatic falls in forest loss in the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon, new figures show.

An area nearly the size of Switzerland was cleared from previously undisturbed rainforests last year, totalling 37,000 sq km (14,200 sq miles), according to figures compiled by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the University of Maryland. This is a rate of 10 football pitches a minute, often driven by more land being brought under agricultural cultivation around the world.

Continue reading...

Wildfires and agricultural expansion offset big gains in protecting tropical forests last year.