By Chris Garrard, Co-Director of Culture Unstained
Livelihoods lost and businesses closed overnight. A “slow, inadequate and incomplete”...
Monday, April 20, 2020 - 14:32 • Steve Horn
This story is a part of Covering Climate Now’s week of coverage focused on Climate Solutions, to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Covering Climate Now is a global journalism collaboration committed to strengthening coverage of the climate story.
The response among many American public officials and the public at large to the COVID-19 pandemic has, in many ways, paralleled the response to the climate crisis.
First came a denial that it was a problem at all, then a denial of its depth and gravity. Later came an acceptance of the problem but the stance that responding is too economically costly. And as with the climate crisis, this is no accident. The well-funded machinery that sowed doubt about climate is now sowing seeds of doubt over the economic and public health response to COVID-19.
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Wednesday, April 22, 2020 - 17:38 • Dana Drugmand
Read time: 5 mins
The Trump administration is eyeing new strategies to support a struggling oil and gas sector, which may include freeing up funds or facilitating access to lending programs under coronavirus economic relief efforts, even as millions of Americans remain unemployed and with coronavirus testing and personal protective equipment in short supply.
Wednesday, April 22, 2020 - 13:21 • Justin Mikulka
Read time: 12 mins
This story is a part of Covering Climate Now’s week of coverage focused on Climate Solutions, to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Covering Climate Now is a global journalism collaboration committed to strengthening coverage of the climate story.
Shell recently announced plans to “stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2050,” a move hailed by some as a major step towards addressing climate change. Around the same time, however, the oil and gas major confirmed it would go ahead with its investment in a joint $6.4 billion gas project in Australia.
This approach of saying one thing about addressing climate change while doing the opposite has been standard practice for the oil and gas industry for decades. Another popular strategy for the industry is to push certain climate “solutions” — often with slick advertising campaigns — that sound good in theory but are not viable in practice.
Tuesday, April 21, 2020 - 14:25 • Guest
Read time: 6 mins
By Bill McKibben. This story originally appeared in The Nation and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
Nineteen-seventy was a simpler time. (February was a simpler time too, but for a moment let’s think outside the pandemic bubble.)
Simpler because our environmental troubles could be easily seen. The air above our cities was filthy, and the water in our lakes and streams was gross. There was nothing subtle about it.
Monday, April 20, 2020 - 17:19 • Julie Dermansky
Read time: 9 mins
A decade after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, killing 11 and spewing 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, south Louisiana resident Kindra Arnesen told me that the community was never made whole again, despite BP’s ads promising it would.
Monday, April 20, 2020 - 10:26 • Guest
Read time: 6 mins
By Amy Westervelt, Drilled News. Originally published by Drilled News.
For a long time, the story went that the tobacco industry cooked up disinformation and then spread it to the fossil fuel guys, the chemical industry, pharma, you name it. But one thing that became incredibly clear when we began digging into PR firms and specific publicists was that this version of history was not quite right; if disinformation strategies were cooked up by any particular industry it was the public relations industry, which put these strategies to work on behalf of fossil fuels, tobacco, chemical manufacturers and more, often all at the same time.
Sunday, April 19, 2020 - 03:00 • Sophie Mbugua
Read time: 9 mins
This story is a part of Covering Climate Now’s week of coverage focused on Climate Solutions, to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Covering Climate Now is a global journalism collaboration committed to strengthening coverage of the climate story.
Around 2014, Somo Mohamed Somo, a 47-year old father of seven, accompanied a team of researchers conducting preliminary research ahead of a proposed coal power plant along the Indian Ocean in Lamu, a UNESCO World Heritage site on the northern Kenyan coast.
Sunday, April 19, 2020 - 00:01 • Ashley Braun
Read time: 9 mins
This story is a part of Covering Climate Now’s week of coverage focused on Climate Solutions, to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Covering Climate Now is a global journalism collaboration committed to strengthening coverage of the climate story.
While time feels distorted these days, it was only seven months and a lifetime ago that millions around the globe, led by school children, were marching in the streets, passionately demanding action and investment to match the scale of the climate crisis. Today, we’d instinctively recoil imagining those crowds, fearful of the potential to spread more than the idea that humans deserve a livable climate. But in both cases, pulling away from each other, at least in spirit, may be our collective undoing.
Simultaneously surviving climate disruption and this pandemic — because they cannot be separated — will require us to grapple with two major challenges.
Friday, April 17, 2020 - 18:05 • Dana Drugmand
Read time: 6 mins
Oil companies have long been aware that their products cause global warming and the impacts, including from rising seas, could be catastrophic. From a scientist who warned executives in 1959 that New York could be submerged, to a confidential 1988 Shell report that raised the possibility of abandoning inundated low-lying areas, the industry has shown clear internal acknowledgement of the potential consequences of unabated fossil fuel burning.
Those consequences are starting to play out, and studies continue to project alarming climatic trends for the future. One such study published April 16 in the journal Scientific Reports projects an exponential increase in the frequency of coastal flooding from rising seas. Extreme flooding will become an annual and eventually a practically daily hazard for many U.S. coastal cities, barring efforts to mitigate climate change and reduce sea level rise.
Friday, April 17, 2020 - 11:19 • Nick Cunningham
Read time: 6 mins
At a time of overlapping crises, putting fossil fuel assets into public ownership offers a way to slash carbon emissions and pave the way for a just transition for oil and gas workers who find themselves without a job, according to a new report.
