In 2021, in response to growing concerns about the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate delay, The New York Times pledged to ban oil and gas companies from sponsoring “its climate newsletter, its climate summit or its podcast ‘The Daily.’”

But it appears there are limits to that pledge. Because last week, The Daily aired an ad from BP touting the petroleum giant’s climate credentials. 

Here’s what some of The Daily’s millions of listeners heard at the beginning of Wednesday’s episode:

BP added more than $70 billion to the US economy last year by making investments from coast to coast. Investments like acquiring America's largest biogas producer, Archaea Energy, and producing natural gas with fewer emissions in the Permian Basin.

It's ‘and,’ not ‘or’. See what doing both means for energy nationwide at bp.com/investinginAmerica.

That website leads to a page that touts BP’s green efforts in the U.S. “We are relentlessly working to reduce emissions, improve products and create new low-carbon businesses,” it says. 

“It's a pretty clear cut case of misleading advertising,” said Robert Brulle, a professor at Brown University who studies the fossil fuel industry’s influence on the media and government. “They're trying to create this veneer of being part of the solution [to climate change], not part of the problem.”

A close look at BP’s operations show its emissions reductions are minimal relative to its entire operation. The oil giant is electrifying its diesel generators and compressors in the Permian Basin, limiting its gas flaring, and installing methane monitors so it can catch leaks from its own gas pipelines. Meanwhile, BP says it will double its production of oil by 2030 and expand its liquefied natural gas production to 30 million tons per year. 

“All they're doing is reducing the leaks from their production process to bring us more fossil fuels,” said Brulle, who published a paper in the journal Climatic Change in 2020 about how fossil fuel companies try to influence public perception through well-respected media outlets. 

“It does sort of boggle my mind how The New York Times could allow that,” he added.

New York Times spokesperson Elizabeth MacAulay Young told HEATED that “We do not allow oil and gas companies to sponsor The Daily wholesale.” Young did not answer our questions about the difference between fossil fuel ads and fossil fuel sponsorship.

The Times also did not respond to questions about how the ad passed its advertising guidelines, which prohibit advertising that is “intentionally misleading, deceptive, or contains false information.” But in a statement in 2021, The Times revealed the reason it continues to run fossil fuel ads: “Advertising helps support our newsroom, which covers the issue and impacts of climate change more than any other in the U.S.”

Brulle said that doesn’t surprise him, given that oil and gas companies have been using The New York Times to boost their social license to operate since at least the 1940s. 

“The New York Times is trying to skate a fine line,” he said. “They want to continue to reap the benefits of fossil fuels company sponsorship, but not violate their policy of allowing intentionally misleading advertising.”

Greenwashing experts told HEATED that BP’s ad uses a common fossil fuel misinformation technique called paltering. Paltering is when companies tell a selective truth in order to mislead people into believing a lie. 

For example, BP's ad said it produced fewer emissions in one oil field, without specifying the type of emissions or what the measurement was in relation to. This selective truth obscures the whole truth—that BP made $13.8 billion last year, the vast majority of which came from oil and gas.

BP is well-known for its use of slick phrasing to mislead the public about climate change. In 2004, BP invented the term “carbon footprint” to put the onus of climate change on the individual, and away from the industry. “This is one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever,” Benjamin Franta, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, told Mashable when they broke the story.

But The New York Times should know better than to fall for BP’s deceptive marketing, because it has reported extensively on corporate greenwashing. A 2022 article titled “How greenwashing fools us” explained, “Greenwashing is everywhere. And, according to a recent study by a global consulting firm, it’s also very effective. Worst of all, it works especially well on those who say they are concerned about the environment.”

The Daily, which has yet to tackle  greenwashing in its 2,000 episodes, did not respond to our questions. But the fact that The Daily banned fossil fuel sponsorships in the first place is an acknowledgement that higher-ups are concerned. 

“Of course they understand what's going on,” Brulle said. “And they're hoping that they won't get called out.”

BP’s broken promise to stop “corporate reputation advertising”

Another reason BP’s greenwashing ad in The Daily is notable: It means the oil company has broken one of its major climate promises.

In February 2020, HEATED broke the news that BP pledged to stop "corporate reputation advertising" as part of the oil company’s much-publicized promise to reach net zero emissions by 2050. 

At the time, a BP spokesperson told HEATED that the company’s goals “include stopping corporate reputation advertising, like the Possibilities Everywhere campaign, and re-directing the money to promote net zero policies, ideas, actions, collaborations and our own net zero ambition.”

But eight months after HEATED’s story, BP issued a statement saying it would continue to run advertisements about climate change–just not ones that try to boost its own reputation. It read:

“When [BP CEO] Bernard Looney announced our net zero ambition in February, one of the aims was to stop investing in corporate reputation advertising. And that’s what we did. …

But Bernard didn’t say we would stop all advertising. In fact, to help the world reach net zero we said we would actively advocate for progressive climate policies, including through advertising.

In other words, BP claims its climate-related advertisements today are solely “promoting progressive climate policies,” not BP’s own green reputation. 

But that’s not what greenwashing experts say about BP’s ad in The Daily.

“They're trying to create the impression that they're reducing emissions,”  said Brulle.

BP did not respond to HEATED’s questions about whether the ad violates the company’s corporate advertising pledge. Instead, BP spokesperson Paul Takahashi repeated the claims from the ad. “The Permian Basin is a key part of bp’s strategy to produce natural gas with fewer emissions,” Takahashi wrote in an email. He added that the company’s strategy includes electrification and reducing methane leaks—not cutting back oil and gas production.

BP’s long history of climate misinformation 

BP’s 2020 promise to stop running greenwashing climate ads did not come solely from the goodness of its corporate heart. It came after a legal challenge that alleged the oil giant’s climate ads were misleading. 

In 2019, U.K.-based legal non-profit ClientEarth launched a complaint against BP over its global “Possibilities Everywhere” ad campaign, which touted the oil giant’s commitment to a “low carbon” future. The complaint alleged these advertisements were fundamentally misleading, and had thus “breached international guidelines governing corporate conduct,” the Guardian reported. 

BP has also faced legal challenges over its greenwashing advertising from the State of New York, which sued the oil company in 2021 for “allegedly ‘greenwashing’ their practices to make them seem more eco-friendly than they are,” CNN reported.

And in 2022, peer-reviewed research found that BP’s climate advertising likely did amount to greenwashing, as there was “ no evidence that [BP was] investing in clean energy at a scale that would allow them to shift away from fossil fuels,” NPR reported.

Still, it’s clear that BP still believes the benefits of greenwashing in outlets like The Daily outweigh the threat of legal liability for misleading consumers. 

That’s because the kind of people who can directly influence BP’s future—policymakers, shareholders, journalists, and academics—listen to The New York Times. 

“Basically what they're trying to do is influence elite opinion,” said Brulle. “That's what drives their cultural legitimacy and their perception by the government.” 

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More experts react to BP’s ad:

• “Now, did BP's acquisition of [Archaea] do anything to lower emissions?  Probably not much. Sure, maybe they can leverage their vast size to increase the amount of landfill gas produced by Archaea, but my hunch is that it is mainly a way to make BP look better.”—Thomas Lyon, sustainability professor at the University of Michigan

• “The reality is that natural gas is a fossil fuel and burning it produces carbon pollution. Moreover, the process of natural gas recovery leaks substantial methane—also a greenhouse gas—into the atmosphere, causing further warming. Investment in natural gas is displacing investment in true clean energy sources that don’t contribute to climate damage.”—Michael Mann, climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania
  

• “The damage done by climate change, measured now in dozens of billions of dollars from extreme weather disasters every year, far outweighs any nominal supposed economic benefits from fossil fuels.”—Michael Mann
  

• “From the International Gas Union's strategy documents, we know the gas industry considers climate change a ‘potentially existential’ threat to the business of the fossil gas value chain—those are its own words—and so it has devised strategies to ‘defend and enhance’ the role of gas.”—Faye Holder, program manager and misinformation expert at InfluenceMap

Catch of the day: We’re delighted to share one of our favorite bejeweled birds this week—an Allen’s hummingbird named Milo. This little guy visits readers Kirsten and Danté every day, where he hangs out on a swing they installed just for him.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about the Biden Administration’s decision on Friday to temporarily pause Department of Energy permit approvals for new liquified natural gas, or LNG, export terminals.

Most of this misinformation is coming from Republicans and the fossil fuel industry, but some Democrats and environmental groups are stretching the truth too. Republicans are fear-mongering about how awful Biden’s decision is for the economy and energy security, and Democrats are exaggerating how great it is for the climate.

The reason each group is overstating the importance of this move is because they want to fire up their respective voter bases. Democrats are trying to motivate progressives to vote for Biden in the upcoming president election, and Republicans want to rage-bait conservatives to vote against him.

It’s all to be expected, but it’s not really helping anyone understand what’s actually happening. So here’s how to understand Biden’s new LNG policy without the political spin.

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The reality of Biden’s LNG decision

First thing’s first: The Biden Administration did not block the export of LNG to other countries, nor did he pause the construction of new LNG export facilities.

No existing LNG facility in the U.S. is affected by this decision. The eight existing LNG export terminals around the country will continue to operate. The flow of fossil fuels overseas will continue.

Not only will the flow of U.S. LNG overseas continue—it will massively expand. None of the 10 new LNG export facilities that are already approved by the Department of Energy are affected by Biden’s decision. With these approved and under construction facilities, the volume of U.S. LNG exported to other countries is expected to double by 2028.

Here’s what the Biden Administration actually did: It put a temporary pause on granting Department of Energy approvals for proposed new LNG export facilities.

That’s a bit of a mouthful, which is one reason why you don’t see it in headlines and social media posts. Instead, you see things like, “Biden took action to stop LNG” or “White House makes historic move to block fossil fuels.”

It’s understandable, but those simplified framings can easily give the impression that the White House did more than it actually did. Because the only LNG facilities affected by this policy are the ones that fossil fuel companies have said they are planning to build, but have not yet obtained DOE permits for.

To be sure, this is still a good number of facilities. There are at least six major proposed LNG export terminals affected by the pause. If the Biden administration had not issued this pause, these facilities would have sailed through the normal DOE approval process, and ensured future greenhouse gas emissions equal to 317 coal plants, according to the Guardian.

That’s why climate activists are celebrating, and it’s a good reason. Because now, in response to their pressure, the White House has pledged to revamp the DOE’s permit-granting process to consider the latest and best-available science on climate, economic, and security impacts. That means fossil fuel companies may no longer get automatic, rubber-stamped approved to build new LNG infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico.

The key word in that last sentence, however, is may. Because the fact is, we still don’t know how long this pause will last, what this new DOE approval process will look like, or how many of the affected projects will be accepted or rejected. As Bloomberg aptly noted on Sunday: “If reelected, Biden might very well allow the process to move forward once safely back in office for another four years.”

For the climate-concerned readers here (which I assume is most of you), I want to emphasize: I’m not laying this out for the purpose of downplaying activists’ accomplishments. I’m laying it out to urge an accurate understanding of what’s happening, and to caution against politically-motivated messaging that implies this fight is over, or that these emissions are guaranteed to never reach the atmosphere.

Yes, a battle has been won—and it’s a battle that never would have seen the light of day under a Trump administration, or any Republican administration. Yes, it is evidence that under Biden, the needle can be moved. And yes, it is probably the most significant thing a U.S. president has ever done to stand up to the fossil fuel industry.

But it is not, as the White House asserted on Friday, an example of “act[ing] with the urgency [the climate crisis] demands to protect the future for generations to come.” That simply has not happened yet. Whether it does happens still remains to be seen. And unless the pressure remains high, it very well may not.

Debunking industry myths about the LNG pause

Now that we’re through all that, let’s debunk a few Republican- and fossil fuel industry-led talking points about Biden’s LNG decision.

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On Friday, the Biden Administration announced a temporary pause on Department of Energy permit approvals for new liquified methane gas, or LNG, export terminals.

I’ve been reporting a lot on that decision this week—specifically, trying to untangle some of the most prominent misinformation being spread about it from both Democrats and Republicans, to help you better understand what it really means for the climate, the economy, and energy security.

I’ll have a newsletter laying all that out for you on Thursday. But in the meantime, I wanted to share with you an interview I did with James Hiatt, a third-generation former oil worker from Louisiana who has been campaigning against the LNG build-out for the last two years, most recently at his non-profit, Better Bayou.

His personal story serves as a powerful debunking of fossil fuel industry narratives about the benefits of LNG in Louisiana. Here it is, told in his own words.

By James Hiatt, as told to Emily Atkin

My wife says I have oppositional defiant disorder. Because if I see injustice, it’s like a moth to a flame. 

I started working for the refinery when I was 24 years old, and I worked there for 12 years. First I was a ship agent taking care of cargo and customs paperwork, then I worked as an operator, then in the lab.

Even back then, I was trying to do my part. I drove a hybrid to work, and I was hyper-conscious of my consumerism. But I justified working at the refinery because I had bills. This is what everybody does: try to make the most money for the least amount of time.

I also justified it by the fact that we were fueling America, and we were. At the time, we were importing this heavy, sour crude that came from Venezuela, which you make diesel and jet fuel out of. I had this mindset that there was no alternative, and that the system was too big to fail. This is not the mindset I have today.

I didn’t retire. I stepped in it. I got fired for sticking up for someone they were being unjust with, and they didn’t like it. I’m not supposed to talk about it because there was a settlement involved. But they were wrong for firing me. They had to settle with the union.

I usually never name the actual refinery I worked for, because then it becomes a site-specific thing and I’d rather focus on the systemic problems. These companies use the same tactics all over the place. They’ll say “Safety First,” and tell you that if you don't feel safe, you have every right to stop work. But then every time you actually use your stop work authority, it’s a problem, because they don't want to stop work.

[Editor's note: HEATED chose not to include the name of the refinery for legal reasons]

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So I settled with the union, but I wasn’t looking to become an environmentalist. After I got fired, my wife told me, “You’ve always wanted to be a social worker. Why don’t you go do it?” I came to realize that we all have one life, and I wasn't being fulfilled trading time for a lot of money. So I did; I went back to school in January 2020, and then I graduated in December 2021. I was going to become a social worker and help heal people where they’re at.

But then one day when I was at church, somebody posted this job description for a campaign coordinator position fighting LNG. And the hair on my arms stood up. 

I thought to myself, “They just built all these plastic facilities here in 2018.” And I saw nobody standing up against that, no opposition to that. And now we're talking about LNG? 

At first I was convinced, the LNG must be cleaner. But then I came to learn that fracking, which is how they get most of the gas, is God-awful. Sure, the gas itself might be clean-burning, but the process to get the fuel out of the ground and to that point is just as bad as every other extractive way we've been taking carbon out. 

I also saw that the LNG boom in the area wasn’t really benefiting communities. Like, we already have three LNG terminals in Cameron Parish–one that started operating in 2018 and one that started in 2020–and it looks like the hurricane we had in 2020 hit yesterday. There's not even a church. The only people who live in the town are the fishermen who have seen the worst catch they've ever had. Come look at Cameron, and tell me if this looks like some prosperous economic development, and not extractive profits for somebody from elsewhere. These streets should be paved with gold. But they're not. 

The industry keeps saying LNG is good for jobs: jobs, jobs, jobs! But there are no jobs. There's construction jobs that last for 2 or 3 years, but the governor has to get visas for pipefitters and welders from Mexico to come and build them. Because we don't have enough workers locally. 

So I applied to that job, which was for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and I got it. Then eventually, I started my own non-profit, For a Better Bayou, which is focused on raising awareness about protecting Louisiana's natural resources. Actually, tomorrow will be our one-year birthday. 

It is difficult doing this work here in Louisiana. I have friends that work at every one of these LNG facilities and most of these plants. Last night, I was at my friend's house for a campfire, and he’s an engineer at one of these petrochemical places. And he told me would love to go work at an LNG facility, because they pay better than the union jobs. But he also understands the work that I'm doing. He agrees, and many people do. Because they have taken and taken and taken from us.

But this is MAGA country. So it’s difficult. People do want to love their neighbor, but they don't understand who the neighbor is sometimes.

It’s hard to talk about climate change here, too, because people have bought into this idea that it's not it's not human-caused. And that’s because accepting climate change requires you to become uncomfortable with the way you're living. The system has made it so we can be comfortable, and any challenge to that system makes you uncomfortable. So now you just side with the system. 

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So a lot of these conversations I have are just listening, hearing where people are coming from. Like that friend I was talking about earlier, we grew up in the same neighborhood. His older brother was one of my best friends, and he has asthma. He moved to Hawaii maybe 10 or 12 years ago. And in Hawaii, he doesn't have asthma. He doesn't have to worry about his asthma pump. 

Was that because of this environment? Was it because of the humidity? Or was it because we have massive amounts of pollution being emitted into the atmosphere? I don't know, but I know that he lives in a humid place in Hawaii and doesn't have asthma. And when he comes home, he has to have his asthma pump with him. 

So I try to have these conversations about what might be better, because the system at large here does not allow us to have them. Even our local media is captured by industry, both the newspaper and the TV. Like the other night, all these flares were going off at one of the plastic refineries, and the whole sky was orange. So the local TV station aired a segment, and the end message was essentially: “This is our noisy neighbor that we just have to put up with.” They said it’s better that they flare than they explode. And it’s like, really? These are our only options? We flare and pollute, or we explode? 

This narrative has really taken hold here, the one that says we must accept the oil and gas industry, because without them we’ll have nothing. And it’s indicative of folks who have no hope. It’s tied back to our poverty of imagination of what could be. 

The reality is that, when the oil industry is done extracting and using and making profits off us, they will leave. And we will still have no jobs. So to have these conversations with my friends and family and people who still work with industry, it’s important to me. Because when people hear stories, it breaks through some of that. 

Like my mama, she passed away last year. And she had a green thumb that wouldn’t quit, especially for tomatoes. I don’t want a future where the coast is eroded to my doorstep, and all the tomatoes are wrapped up in plastic at the store. I want a future where we can still grow tomatoes on our fertile ground.

Catch of the Day: That Kitty and reader Tony are here today is here today is nothing short of a miracle.

During the Camp Fire in 2018—the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history—Tony went back into the town of Paradise to rescue his beloved cat. “We ended up being trapped in the fire for 4 hours and nearly died,” Tony writes. “But we made it out.”

You can read more about their harrowing escape here.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

This story is co-published with the Guardian.

Members of a propane industry lobbying group strategized to downplay the full climate impacts of propane and market it as renewable or “clean energy,” recordings by HEATED and the Guardian reveal.

The Propane Education & Research Council (PERC), a U.S. lobbying group, has spent nearly $30 million over the last two years on advertisements for the fossil fuel, according to data compiled by Drilled, a multimedia reporting project focused on climate accountability. The ads often promote propane, the vast majority of which is a byproduct of natural gas or crude oil refining, as a form of clean and renewable energy.

But in a public November 2022 meeting recorded by the Energy and Policy Institute, PERC board members acknowledged that that characterization was inaccurate.

“Twenty-five percent [of people consider] natural gas to be renewable, in this millennial and gen Z bucket,” an unidentified PERC board member said. “There’s a perception out there—not reality, but that’s perception. We can attach to that for propane.”

“You can’t say natural gas is renewable,” PERC board member Leslie Woodward cautioned.

“Perception,” the unidentified board member repeated.

Erin Hatcher, PERC’s senior vice president of communications and marketing, agreed that propane should be perceived as clean energy. “We don’t want to be in that coal bucket,” she is heard saying on the recording. “We want to be in that clean energy bucket.”

In a comment to HEATED and the Guardian, Hatcher said she “did not recall any kind of comment” about mistaking propane as renewable. “Our concern about perception is that all fuels are demonized.”

She added: “There’s no attempt to mislead whatsoever. It’s to educate, because the narrative that predominates the news is that there’s only one way to a clean future, and we don’t believe that.” Woodward did not respond to requests for comment, and Hatcher said she couldn’t identify the other board members who spoke at the meeting.

A 17-fold increase in ‘greenwashing’ advertising

To stabilize a safe climate, scientists say the world’s energy systems must reach net zero greenhouse emissions by the year 2050. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said achieving net zero by 2050 will require “a substantial reduction of overall fossil fuel use.”

Propane is a fossil gas, commonly liquefied for use in heating and cooking. Typically a by-product of natural gas or crude oil refining, propane can also be made from non-fossil sources like plant, seed and animal oils—though currently, only 0.04% of it is, according to estimates from the EPA and the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Most propane—even “renewable propane” made from plants or cooking oil—emits carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and other environmentally harmful fossil fumes. Propane made from fossil fuels emits less carbon than coal or diesel, but more than natural gas when burned as fuel, according to the EIA. In 2022, CO2 emissions from propane in the U.S. were a tiny fraction of the carbon emissions from other fossil fuels, but that’s because the U.S. consumes far less propane than gas and oil—not because propane is necessarily cleaner.

Still, PERC has invested millions in a multi-year strategy to rebrand propane from what it’s called a “dirty fossil fuel” to a so-called clean energy source. According to Drilled, PERC’s annual ad spending increased more than 17-fold from 2021 to 2022-23, from $1.7 million to nearly $30 million.

In 2022 and 2023, PERC bought ads touting the “clean energy” potential of propane across 450 media properties, according to Drilled’s data, including more than $9 million on YouTube channels, including YouTube Kids; $4.7 million on Fox News; $2.6 million on Southern Living; $1.5 million on NBC; $979,000 on USA Today; and $746,000 on ESPN.

A spokesperson for Google, which owns YouTube, said the company bans ads that deny climate change, or ads that claim human beings or greenhouse gases don’t contribute to global warming. “This policy does not prohibit other climate-related topics, including promotions of various energy sources,” the spokesperson said.

Fox News, Southern Living, NBC, USA Today, and ESPN did not respond to requests for comment.

The increased ad spending is concerning to clean energy and misinformation experts, who tell HEATED and the Guardian that PERC’s claims are misleading. Propane is not renewable and does not amount to clean energy, they say, nor is renewable propane a realistic or scalable climate solution.

“The fossil fuel industry has been a true trailblazer on one thing over the last few decades—how to greenwash,” said Wren Montgomery, an associate professor of sustainability at Western University. “Pitching propane as ‘clean energy’ seems to be just their latest greenwashing scheme.”

Energy and Policy Institute research manager Charlie Spatz, who attended PERC’s 2022 board meeting, said the fossil fuel industry has long tried to brand its products as renewable. “And so we’ve seen PERC, in some respects, catch up with the oil industry and natural gas industry to present their product as renewable, when in reality that product is not available in quantities that consumers can even access at this point.”

“Nothing is 100% clean,” said Hatcher of PERC. She said that every energy source has “some carbon involved, whether it’s in making a solar panel or a wind turbine or a dam”.

But Hatcher stopped short of calling propane “renewable” energy, even though PERC uses the term in its marketing. “Nobody here is trying to pretend that propane is not a fossil fuel-based fuel,” she said. “We’re not trying to pretend that it is renewable.”

When asked to clarify if propane is as climate-friendly as wind or solar power, Hatcher said: “At the actual operation? No.”

PERC on millennials: ‘We’re in trouble if we don’t win them over’

In July 2021, PERC circulated an internal video calling electrification efforts “an existential threat” and introducing talking points touting propane as “a clean energy solution for everyone”.

The purpose of the rebrand was to attract a new audience for propane: people who care about the climate crisis. In 2022, PERC presented market research revealing that a promising number of younger, climate-conscious millennials had positive opinions of the fuel.

“We started thinking, is it possible they don’t know the origins of propane?” Hatcher told the PERC’s board in its November 2022 annual meeting in Destin, Florida. She presented the results of a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults, which discovered that 97% didn’t consider propane a fossil fuel, even though most of it is. (When she spoke with HEATED and the Guardian, Hatcher disputed the 97% figure heard on the recording, but declined to provide the marketing survey she can be heard citing in her presentation.)

There was just one obstacle: despite overall positive views of propane, only 9% of PERC’s survey respondents thought propane was renewable energy, Hatcher said. So PERC board members discussed a strategy to market propane from renewable sources in addition to fossil fuel-derived propane.

“When they understand that propane is not only a low carbon fuel, in the conventional version, but renewable offers even greater benefits, environmental benefits, we can change their opinion of this energy,” said Hatcher.

A second unidentified PERC board member in the meeting pushed back on Hatcher. “When they Google propane, and they see it’s a fossil fuel, 99% of them [are] going to be immediately turned off propane, whether it is renewable propane or not,” he said.

“We’re in trouble if we don’t win them over, that’s the bottom line,” said Hatcher. “We’re really in trouble. So we need to get them on our side and kind of educate them about the benefits of propane.”

PERC’s position that propane has less of a climate impact than methane gas isn’t true, according to energy experts.

“It is not the lowest greenhouse gas fossil fuel. It’s somewhere between natural gas and diesel,” said Nikita Pavlenko, program lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation.

Even renewable propane is not zero carbon the way solar or wind energy is. It emits some carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, though in smaller amounts than propane made from oil or gas. Nor is renewable propane a “widely accessible” alternative, as PERC also claims. The amount of renewable propane produced in the U.S. is negligible—about 4.5 million gallons in 2022, according to the EPA. The U.S. propane supply derived from fossil fuel was about 12.7 billion gallons that same year, according to the EIA.

“It’s quite common to promise renewable natural gas, or something like renewable propane,” said Nikita Pavlenko, program lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation, because the people making those promises rarely have to produce it. “They often do very little to secure supply.”

The amount of renewable propane that’s currently made from the camelina plant—the low-carbon alternative featured in many PERC ads, including in The New York Times—is even smaller. “There’s a lot of promises being made about camelina as a feedstock for biofuel and there’s very little, if any, being processed right now,” Pavlenko said. “The camelina is largely theoretical at this point.” (The amount of camelina propane produced in the U.S. is so small, it’s lumped under “other” feedstocks by agencies that collect data on alternative fuels.)

When asked about these ads, a Times spokesperson said that the newspaper “prohibits advertising that is intentionally misleading, deceptive or contains false information”. PERC paid the Times more than $163,000 for ads between 2022 and 2023, according to media monitoring data compiled by Drilled and reviewed by HEATED and the Guardian. Hatcher characterizes these numbers as “estimates”.

Added together, experts say PERC’s claims that propane is “clean energy”, “environmentally friendly” and an important part of “the path to zero carbon emissions” amount to nothing more than greenwashing.

PERC’s plans to rebrand in 2024

Still, PERC is redoubling its efforts to rebrand propane as environmentally friendly in 2024.

Documents reviewed by HEATED and the Guardian show that PERC is increasing its self-reported advertising budget to $12.8m next year to reach new audiences, including “eco-inclined” homeowners. (PERC’s self-reported ad budget does not include a $6.4m category it calls “environmental campaigns” or $1.3m for “thought leadership”). The budget includes payments to at least 15 influencers, including stars of HGTV home improvement shows and celebrity chefs. PERC is also rolling out new marketing tactics, like advertising in AccuWeather severe weather alerts.

PERC isn’t just aiming this rhetoric at consumers. It’s also developing it for lawmakers who have the power to regulate, and ultimately phase out, fossil fuels. This tactic has been successfully used for years by the natural gas industry, said Faye Holder, program manager at InfluenceMap.

“All these talking points that you see about ‘clean gas’ and ‘gas is lower emissions’” are used in advertising, said Holder. “But they are also all used in the direct lobbying to policymakers [making] climate policies that would otherwise threaten the role and the business of gas.”

This advertising is “very misleading to consumers,” said Holder. “Calling fossil gas a green climate solution is disinformation because it’s just not true.”

Hatcher expressed frustration with people who don’t share PERC’s vision of a world where coal and diesel are replaced by propane, with the goal of combating the climate crisis. “We’re trying to be part of the solution,” she said several times in interviews.

But if the solution to climate change involves winding down fossil fuels entirely, which is the scientific consensus, Hatcher is less sure about the timeline. “Is there a world without propane? Possibly,” she said. “When? Who knows?”

Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify that all “renewable” propane emits carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.

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Catch of the day: This fluffy sir, General Tafferson, aka “Taffy”, isn’t flipping out over fossil fuel propaganda. He’s doing his part by sleeping on a bed made out of a repurposed shipping box. Reader Jayda says his other favorite activity is stealing bread and baked goods off the kitchen counter.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

In the coming weeks, U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to make one of the most consequential climate change decisions of his term.

Bloomberg News reports that the White House will soon decide whether to pause the permit approval process for more than a half dozen new liquified methane gas (LNG) export terminals, which would ship domestically produced fracked gas to countries overseas.

These proposed terminals are massive fossil fuel projects that, if given the green light by the Department of Energy, could add up to 317 coal plants worth of carbon emissions to the atmosphere over the coming decade, according to The Guardian.

Needless to say, adding 317 coal plants worth of carbon emissions to the atmosphere would effectively doom the U.S.’s climate goals—and certainly violate Biden’s recent pledge at COP28 “to transition away from the fossil fuels that jeopardize our planet and our people.”

But activists feel confident that this is a fight they can win—namely because, as Bloomberg reported on Friday, several influential Biden advisors have already come on board with a pause.

Officials who believe the Department of Energy must implement a stricter climate test for LNG project approvals include Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, senior clean energy advisor John Podesta, and National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi.

At the same time, however, Biden is also facing increased pressure from the methane gas industry to push these massive LNG projects through. And though most of that pressure is coming from outside methane gas groups and lobbyists, some of the calls are reportedly coming from inside the house.

The fossil fuel executive inside the White House

In its article detailing the internal White House debate over LNG export facilities on Friday, Bloomberg also listed a number of Biden advisors who are not on board with implementing a stricter climate test for the massive fossil fuel projects.

That list included Biden’s senior energy advisor Amos Hochstein—a particularly influential confidant to the president, who has reportedly “raised concerns” about the economic and geopolitical impacts of a pause.

Hochstein, according to a 2022 profile in The Washington Post, is known as Biden’s “energy whisperer.” Cited specifically by the president as someone he relies on, Hochstein has played “a key role in advising Biden on international energy policy, according to interviews with half a dozen people familiar with the matter, including senior administration officials, energy analysts, lobbyists and friends.”

But part of the reason Hochstein knows so much about the methane gas industry is that he himself is a former methane gas executive. Before joining the White House, Hochstein was a marketing VP for Tellurian, a Houston-based methane gas company that struggled to get its own planned LNG export “megaterminal” off the ground while Hochstein was at the firm.

If approved, Tellurian’s proposed $30 billion terminal in Lake Charles, Louisiana—called Driftwood LNG—would be capable of exporting up to 27.5 million tons of methane gas every year. That would make it “one of the largest polluters in the Gulf region,” according to the Sierra Club, which has filed two lawsuits to stop the project.

When he worked for Tellurian from 2017 to 2020, Hochstein made more than $620,000 a year in salary, and between $100,000 to $1 million in limited stock options, according to documents acquired by the Revolving Door Project. Hochstein also collected $10,000 in speaking fees from Dorian LPG, a liquid petroleum shipper, and $75,000 in consulting fees from Dana Gas, a methane gas company based in the United Arab Emirates.

In addition to his work at Tellurian, Hochstein has also served on the supervisory board of Naftogaz, the Ukrainian state-owned oil and gas company, and has done a “small amount of lobbying for Marathon, the country’s largest oil refiner,” according to the Washington Post. 

So for activists working on the Stop LNG campaign, it’s no surprise that Hochstein is advising caution around a stricter climate test for LNG projects.

“It’s concerning to know that there’s someone with such deep ties to the industry whispering in the ear of the president,” said Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, which is supporting the Stop LNG campaign. “That’s exactly the type of revolving door that should raise red flags for anyone who cares about an ethical administration.”

But based on the progress they’ve achieved so far, activists still believe they have a good shot of overpowering the fossil fuel interests inside and outside the White House—so long as they keep the pressure high.

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The next step: A large-scale civil disobedience action

The fact that the Biden Administration is even considering a pause on the proposed LNG export facility expansion is a testament to the effectiveness of both local and national climate activism over the last few months.

National-level activists started ramping up pressure on the White House over LNG in the fall of 2023, following prolonged calls from frontline communities near the proposed export terminals. They argued that the Department of Energy approval process—which is supposed to determine whether a fossil fuel project is in the public’s interest—did not actually consider the true climate impact of LNG.

And it’s true: The DOE’s current approval process for LNG projects does not factor in up-to-date lifecycle emissions estimates for the fuel. Though proponents of LNG exports argue that it’s a lower-emissions replacement for coal overseas, recent data from Cornell University professor Robert Howarth asserts that “greenhouse gas emissions from LNG are larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 18 percent to 185 percent greater for the average cruise distance of an LNG tanker. (The data has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but is currently in review, according to Howarth.)

Howarth’s study also notes that the climate impact of liquified, exported methane gas is far greater than regular methane gas, because liquifying the gas is extremely energy intensive, and a good deal of methane escapes into the atmosphere during transportation.

Activists have done a good enough job communicating this data that the White House has become concerned, both about the climate and political consequences of allowing LNG approvals to move forward. Overall, Bloomberg reports that White House advisors are “broadly aligned on the need to make changes” of some kind to the LNG facility approval process. “The fault lines are over how aggressive to be.”

So activists are planning to increase the pressure in early February, with a multi-day civil disobedience action at the Department of Energy—and asking people to join.

“This is probably the largest decision that Biden is going to face before the election on fossil fuels,” Henn said.

We’ll leave you with a snippet from a letter about the action—which is sponsored by Fossil Free Media, Bill McKibben’s organization Third Act, and People Vs. Fossil Fuels:

We’re writing to ask you to do something hard but important: come to Washington DC in the middle of this winter, to join a demonstration and, if you can, risk arrest in a large-scale civil disobedience action. We know it’s a lot: we wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t both important, and potentially effective.

What’s at stake is the largest fossil fuel buildout in the world. As is so often the case, local frontline groups on the Gulf Coast have been warning about the massive buildout of liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure for years. They’ve seen the pollution, health impacts, and environmental injustice of these facilities first hand. Now we’re building as broad a coalition as we can.  …

So far, the DOE has refused to listen to thousands of letters and ignored petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of people. So we need to go to DC to drive home how serious this crisis is.

We will conduct a highly-civil civil disobedience action over three days in mid-February, peacefully blocking the entrance to the department.

We know this action isn’t for everyone, and we know that everyone can’t travel to DC—some of us will be joining instead in solidarity actions nearer our homes.

For those of who do head to Washington, we agree to keep this action peaceful in word, mood, and action; if your level of frustration is too high to insure that, please stay home and think of other ways to help. We are committed to calm, to dignity, and to giving the Biden administration every possible chance to prove that they are climate leaders on the dirty energy side of the climate crisis as well as the clean.

If you plan on coming, we hope you will sign up here, picking one of the three days to participate. You’ll need to undergo some online training, and then another session the night before you plan to risk arrest.

2023 saw the hottest weather on this planet in at least 125,000 years; we think it is an honor to rise in defense of the planet we love, and the places where we live. Thank you for considering joining in.

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Arielle Samuelson contributed reporting.

Catch of the day: Chilli, reader Sebastian’s 7-month-old labradoodle, loves water (in this case, the Baltic Sea).

She also loves running around with her friend Amigo, a black greyhound she never catches up with.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

In January 2022, only a few years after leaving the elected seat she held for six years, former Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota got a new job: convincing climate-concerned liberals to love the fossil fuel industry.

“It’s clear we have an existential threat to the planet,” said Heitkamp, in a December 2022 commercial for the methane gas lobbying group Natural Allies For a Clean Energy Future. “We should be doing everything that we can to help other countries do what we did, which is dramatically reduce our CO2 emissions by using natural gas.”

The ad—titled “Real Talk with Heidi Heitkamp”—was one of a handful of public relations jobs Heitkamp did that year for Natural Allies, some of which she did alongside former Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Together, the notoriously moderate Democrats wrote a sponsored article in Politico claiming that “natural gas is accelerating our clean-energy future,” and an op-ed in Newsweek declaring that methane gas can “actually achieve our shared global climate goals faster.” Landrieu also did her own “Real Talk” commercial in March 2022.

For these ads and op-eds, Heitkamp was paid $185,266 and Landrieu was paid $210,690 in 2022, according to IRS 990 tax documents obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute and seen by HEATED. The documents show payments made to Heidi Heitkamp Inc. and to Landrieu’s consulting firm VNF Solutions.

It’s unclear if these positions represented full-time jobs; both Heitkamp and Landrieu were hired as members of Natural Allies’ “Leadership Council” in early 2022. According to a press release about the hires, the Leadership Council seeks “to bring greater awareness to the foundational role natural gas must play in transitioning to a clean energy future.” Neither Heitkamp nor Landrieu responded to HEATED’s request for comment.

Whatever the case, the numbers are a rare glimpse into the lucrative business of greenwashing the fossil fuel industry. Natural Allies is run and funded entirely by fossil fuel companies, including Williams, TC Energy, Kinder Morgan, National Fuel Gas, Southern Company Gas, and Cheniere Energy.

“It's not every day we get to see the price tag of a former U.S. senator’s advocacy,” said Charlie Spatz, a senior researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute. 

Spatz said the numbers also highlight one of the reasons it may be so hard to pass truly effective climate policy in Congress.

“It's sending a message to current Senators that maybe you shouldn't be so harsh on the fossil fuel industry, if they're going to take care of you after you finish,” he said.

A six-figure salary to spread climate misinformation

With each passing year, the science on methane gas pollution and climate change becomes more damning. A recently revised analysis from Robert Warren Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell, found that greenhouse gas emissions from liquified methane gas “are larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 18% to 185% greater for the average cruise distance of an [liquified methane gas] tanker.”

At the same time, with each passing year, more and more former Democratic lawmakers are lining up to tout methane gas as “climate-friendly” in exchange for a paycheck from Natural Allies, which is currently running a seven-figure campaign to target young, liberal, and Black and Latino voters “as effectively as we have messaged to the right.”

In addition to Heitkamp and Landrieu, former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, former Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, and former Florida Congressman Kendrick Meek all accepted positions with Natural Allies in 2023.

Those former lawmakers’ salaries were not disclosed on Natural Allies’s 2022 tax forms, as they were not yet hired by the organization. And it’s unclear if they will be disclosed on future forms, as the IRS only requires that non-profits disclose the five contractors with the highest salaries over $100,000.

However much they are making, they are spreading messages about methane gas that climate scientists have roundly decried as misleading.

“Their claims are all either extremely vague or disproved with middle-school-level science,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Project Drawdown, who previously worked at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“Using natural gas warms the climate. Period, full stop,” said Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “There is no world in which natural gas is a long-term ‘solution’ to the climate problem.”

Natural Allies cites multiple “independent studies” to support its claim that methane gas is the best way to solve the climate crisis. But, as we reported last year, all of those studies were funded at least in part by fossil fuel interests, and none were published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Actual peer-reviewed science with no industry backing has shown the opposite of what Natural Allies claims. According to a 2021 systematic review of the scientific literature on methane gas, increasing investments in the fossil fuel carries a long-term risk of delaying the clean energy transition and worsening the climate crisis. That’s because investing in further natural gas development “could lock-out emerging renewable technologies for extended periods.”

Building new gas pipelines, LNG terminals, and gas-fired power plants “pose a particularly great risk for carbon lock-ins,” scientists wrote this year in the journal Nature Energy.

What Natural Allies is doing is called “solutions denial,” a common form of climate misinformation, as we previously reported:

“It's an absolute tried-and-tested argument within the disinformation playbook to constantly create more interim milestones before we achieve what a real necessary transition looks like,” said [Jennie] King, who works at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “So taxpayer money [goes] into creating new dependencies on [fossil fuels], which ultimately in the long term, make it much harder for us to achieve an actual clean energy transition.”

But former Democratic lawmakers and mainstream media are still more than willing to spread the misinformation coming from Natural Allies, so long as Natural Allies is willing to pay for it. Since 2020, Natural Allies has spent $10 million on a national PR campaign targeting Democratic voters, including more than $4 million to place ads in E&E News and Politico newsletters, Axios, Newsweek, Vox, the Wall Street Journal, and across cable news stations, according to reporting from the Guardian and Floodlight. 

These campaigns are effective, in part, because it is very difficult to tell who is behind them. Readers of these news outlets may not recognize, as we uncovered last year, that Natural Allies’ ads are a form of fossil fuel industry climate disinformation. And that is the real price of Heitkamp and Landrieu’s sell out: a deception not measured in dollars, but in the degrees threatening our livable climate.

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Further reading

• Politico and Axios defend running misleading natural gas ads. HEATED, February 2023.
  
  Key quote: “It is not up to us to decide what is factually accurate or what is not factually accurate,” Politico executive vice president Cally Stolbach Baute told HEATED. “We frankly respect our readers enough to be fully transparent with them on our advertising and encourage them to evaluate our journalism on its merit and its accuracy.” 

• How the gas industry aims to rebrand as ‘clean’ energy to appeal to Black and Latino voters. Floodlight and The Guardian, June 2022.
  
  Key quote: “Success for the natural gas industry will be rooted in whether we can message to the left and the Democratic base of Black and Latino and age 18-34 voters as effectively as we have messaged to the right,” read one early strategy document.
  

• The methane gas industry is trying to codify misinformation into law. HEATED, May 2023.
  
  Key quote: “The phenomenon started in Europe [in 2022], when the European Parliament voted to label certain uses of natural gas as “green.” That meant billions of dollars that were intended to fund climate-friendly projects could legally be used for methane power plants and terminals. Now, industry climate misinformation has also started making its way into U.S. state law—albeit in slightly different ways.”

Catch of the day: We have a very special guest today from the Atkin clan: Mason!

Reader Thomas (aka Emily’s dad) says Mason is Emily’s other brother.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

This week, the scientific agencies of the world announced that 2023 was, by far, the hottest year in human history–and that 2024 may be even worse. For Emily and I, the news served as a bleak reminder that climate accountability journalism has never been more important or necessary.

But one thing we’ve been thinking about lately is that there’s more to accountability journalism than exposing the bosses, brokers, and beneficiaries of climate delay. To truly arm readers with the information they need to fight the climate crisis, they also need to hear stories about how powerful interests can be defeated.

That’s why, for my first newsletter of the year, I’d like to highlight a few different ways that activists effectively fought climate obstruction around the world in 2023. The list is not intended to be a comprehensive collection of climate wins of last year, nor is it meant to be a look at the oft-described “best” ones. Rather, it’s simply meant to show you a handful of different routes through which actual progress was achieved, to give you a closer look at how it’s done.  

None of these examples focus on individuals acting alone. That wasn’t on purpose, but it is illustrative of how change happens. Yes, there can be extraordinary individuals who spark a movement. But climate change is a planetary-scale problem. It can only be solved by collective action.

The most important thing to remember is that each of the groups listed below are made up of ordinary people, all of whom took small steps that mattered to them. Eventually, over a period of years, they wound up making a big difference.

Here are some of the climate change-makers of 2023 – what they accomplished, who they were up against, and how they got it done.

The South American activists who knocked on doors to stop drilling in the Amazon  

Last August, Ecuadorians voted to ban oil drilling in the Amazon, a move that makes Ecuador one of the first countries in the world to democratically decide to curtail fossil fuels. The referendum will protect the Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and home to the Tagaeri and Taromenane people. It will also keep about 726 million barrels of oil in the ground, according to The Guardian.

What they were up against: The country’s national oil company, Petroecuador, which drills on the eastern edge of the Yasuní National Park. The oil project produces more than 57,000 barrels of oil a day, about 12 percent of Ecuador’s oil production. Petroecuador claims its oil wells in the Yasuní have generated $4.2 billion USD from 2014 to 2022. The ratings agency Fitch estimated Ecuador could lose $600 million a year without the oil exports.

How they won: Persistence, risk-taking, and good old fashioned door-knocking. Young environmental activists overcame the government’s reluctance to protect the rainforest by knocking on doors and gathering signatures. Yasunidos, a grassroots group formed after former president Rafael Correa reneged on his promise to protect the Amazon, recruited more than 1,400 volunteers to go door-to-door in 2013. The group gathered more than 750,000 signatures in 6 months, well over the amount necessary to trigger a referendum. But Correa’s administration voided half the signatures, prompting Yasunidos to fight in court. After a decade of legal battles, Ecuador’s highest court validated the referendum and it was put to the vote on August 20, 2023. The majority of Ecuadorians voted to ban oil drilling.

For Nemonte Nenquimo, an Indigenous Waorani leader and winner of the Goldman prize for the environment, the passage of the referendum was a personal victory. “As a Waorani woman and mother, I feel overjoyed with Ecuadorians’ resounding decision to stop oil drilling in my people’s sacred homeland,” Nenquimo told The Guardian. The government now has about a year and half to halt oil drilling and dismantle its infrastructure in the park.

Why this matters: Latin America is the most dangerous area in the world to be an activist, particularly for Indigenous activists. In 2022, 177 environmental activists were killed—88 percent of them in Latin America, according to Global Witness. Despite the risks, Latin American climate activists have made significant progress in the face of governments deeply invested in fossil fuels. This is an example that it’s possible to achieve victory even in the face of danger.

The U.K. activists who dove into bureaucracy to crack down on greenwashing 

In June, the United Kingdom’s advertising watchdog banned greenwashing fossil fuel ads from Shell, Spanish oil company Repsol, and Malaysian company Petronas, saying the ads were misleading consumers about climate change. The now-banned marketing campaign from Shell had claimed that a large portion of its business was low-carbon energy. But the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that the campaign was deceptive, because fossil fuels make up the “vast majority” of Shell’s business.

What they were up against: Decades of greenwashing by oil companies with deep pockets like Shell, which made a record $42 billion in 2022. Those billions fund a large team of lawyers, who wrote extensive rebuttals to the ASA complaint—which meant the process took a full year to resolve. 

How they won: Persistence, protest, and effective use of bureaucracy. The ASA’s decision was thanks to the activism of the Adfree Cities campaign group, a nonprofit made up of a network of local volunteer groups across the U.K. who campaign against corporate advertising. The group’s Bristol chapter first noticed Shell ads posted around their community claiming that "Bristol is ready for cleaner energy." The ads listed the number of homes in the South West of England which used renewable electricity. Adblock Bristol volunteers were skeptical, so they flagged the ads to Adfree Cities headquarters.

In formal complaints to the ASA,the group argued that Shell’s ads were deceptive because they left out the fossil fuel giant’s true environmental impact. In contrast to Shell’s vast network, Adfree Cities has only six employees, who spent hours responding to Shell’s rebuttals before the ASA ruled in their favor.

The group also utilized public pressure to move the needle and influence ad agencies that work with fossil fuel companies. They staged protests outside Shell’s London ad agencies, including Wunderman Thompson, in order to expose “the absurdity of expanding oil and gas extraction and rampant profiteering in the face of worsening climate impacts,” the group said.

Why this matters: “The reason [this] was such a big win is because it sets a precedent,” Veronica Wignall, co-director of Adfree Cities, told HEATED. “It's a chink in the ability of other fossil fuel majors to greenwash in the same way.” And if you’ve been reading HEATED for awhile, you know that greenwashing ads are everywhere, as fossil fuel giants try to purchase a social license to operate. 

But Adfree Cities has shown that even a small group of volunteers can have a big impact. That’s a big deal, because many other countries have false advertising standards that can be applied to fossil fuel ads. In the U.S., for example, the Federal Trade Commission is reviewing its “Green Guides”, the regulations for environmental claims in advertising. That leaves room for Americans who spot greenwashing ads, and groups like the U.S.-based Clean Creatives, to help ban bogus ads. “We hope that rulings like this do spark copycat moves in other countries to stop greenwashing,” Wignall said. “I don't think we should be tolerating fossil fuel advertising any more, full stop, greenwashing or not.”

The U.S. youth activists who used the justice system to topple unjust climate policy 

In August, U.S. District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled that the state of Montana violated 16 young Americans’ constitutional rights to a “clean and healthful environment” by passing an aggressive anti-climate law that barred the state from considering the climate impacts of potential fossil fuel projects. “I think this is the strongest decision on climate change ever issued by any court,” Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told HEATED about the case, Held v. Montana.

What they were up against: Fossil fuel interests are deeply entrenched in Montana, which is one of the largest oil and gas consumers, and the fifth-largest coal producer in the U.S. The fossil fuel industry has donated millions to state politicians, including about $537,000 to Representative Ryan Zinke and over $1 million to Senator Steve Daines. The state fought to keep the case from coming to trial multiple times, claiming that it was just an “airing of political grievances.” 

How they won: Persistence, courage, money, and luck. Over the past decade, the activist law firm Our Children’s Trust has filed lawsuits in all 50 states, seeking to hold governments accountable for failing to act on climate change. After many failures, Held v. Montana was their first victory–and they couldn’t have done it without the sixteen young activists who were courageous enough to attach their names and stories to the lawsuit. 

Of course, the ruling was almost certainly due in part to the state’s own incompetence; the trial featured multiple state officials who were unfamiliar with basic climate science and the world’s leading climate experts.

But still, years of work went into the case by the plaintiffs’ lawyers and the plaintiffs themselves. In fact, two of the plaintiffs—the Busse brothers—were also part of a failed 2011 petition filed by Our Children’s Trust asking the Montana Supreme Court to curb greenhouse gas emissions. And of course, no effort like this is possible without money: The nonprofit law firm’s work is supported by donors, and left-leaning grant organizations like the Rockefeller Brothers, Avaaz Foundation, and Libra Foundation.

Why this matters: The legal system is one of the most potentially powerful tools to hold the fossil fuel industry and governments accountable for the devastating consequences of unchecked climate change. This lawsuit is just one of many still working their way through the court system, and every win represents a potential path for another lawsuit to succeed. 

The Massachusetts community members who never gave up on offshore wind 

On the second day of 2024, a historic milestone for the climate quietly started spinning off the shores of Massachusetts. The nation’s first offshore wind project, Vineyard Wind, produced 5 megawatts of clean electricity for the New England grid in an early test on January 2. When complete, the 800-megawatt wind farm will generate power for 400,000 homes. It will also reduce carbon emissions by more than 1.6 million metric tons per year, equivalent to the emissions from 325,000 cars per year, according to the companies behind the project.

What they were up against: It’s hard to underestimate the extent of fossil-funded opposition to offshore wind in the U.S.; it’s a big reason why the U.S. lags so far behind countries like China and Europe in development of the clean energy technology.

But to try to put a number on it: A group of students at Brown University calculated that groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry have funneled $72 million into opposing offshore wind on the East Coast since 2017. 

The Vineyard Wind project was a major target of these groups; for example, as we reported in 2022, a fossil fuel-funded climate denial group filed lawsuits to stop the project because they claimed wind farms harm the environment.” That group also launched a social media effort to promote the lawsuit’s claims. 

How they won: Persistence, coalition-building, and money. This was a case of a local community successfully fundraising and building support over two decades to overpower fossil fuel-funded opposition to clean energy. 

The steps were small at first—local architect and renewable energy advocate Kate Warner founded the nonprofit Vineyard Energy Project in 2003, dedicated to educating Martha’s Vineyard about sustainability. That led to the creation of the local co-op Vineyard Power in 2009, which with only two employees planned to raise nearly $200 million in investments in wind power. Other local groups threw their support behind promoting renewable energy—the Vineyard Sustainable Energy Committee was formed in 2017, chaired by local Rob Hannemann, and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission created a climate action plan, spearheaded by local Liz Durkee. 

Individually, none of these groups could have ensured that Vineyard Wind got built—that required local, state, and federal cooperation. But without this community support, Vineyard Wind would never have happened. That’s clear to activists in the region, because the first offshore wind project proposed in Massachusetts in 2001, Cape Wind, was ultimately canceled after years of expensive legal battles and lack of community support. So this time around, Martha’s Vineyard activists made sure that Vineyard Wind benefited the community, starting with using union workers to construct the project. 

Rachel Patcher, the chief development officer of Vineyard Wind, told E&E News that the challenges facing the project were daunting—but ultimately, rewarding. “We waited for 20 years to see the alignment of the states and the feds on offshore wind,” she said, “and that’s what we have right now.”

Why this matters: With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, new large-scale renewable energy projects will be popping up all over the country, and they’ll be facing the same type of moneyed opposition from fossil fuel-connected groups. The Vineyard Wind project shows that it’s possible for committed members of local communities to work together to chip away at that opposition–and, ultimately, win. 

Got a story of climate change-making in 2023 you want to share that we missed? Let us know in the comments!

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Catch of the Day: Though we love all animals here at HEATED, we especially love animals who are named after other animals—like Birdie, our first-ever horse. 

Birdie is only a horse in the technical sense. Spiritually, according to reader Katharine, Birdie is a muffin. And what a dashing muffin he is. 

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

Climate policy obstructionists love to evangelize about the benefits of petrochemicals.

Last year, in commercials and Congressional hearings alike, the fossil fuel industry and its political allies upped their messaging around the chemical byproducts of oil and gas, calling petrochemicals “essential to life,” and warning it would be dangerous to phase them out or transition to greener alternatives.

What proponents consistently did not mention, however, was that petrochemicals were leaking, exploding, and catching fire all over the country last year, causing disastrous consequences multiple times per week.

There were at least 322 hazardous chemical incidents in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Chemical Incident Tracker, a database of media-reported accidental chemical releases compiled by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters. That’s around a 70 percent increase in media-reported chemical incidents since 2022, when the coalition recorded only 189 disasters.

Out of the 322 chemical incidents reported last year, 138 caused either injury, evacuation, a shelter-in-place order, or death, according to the database. Put another way, a chemical incident caused serious consequences in the U.S. about once every two-and-a-half days in 2023.

The majority of last year’s chemical incidents involved fossil fuels and fossil fuel-derived products. At least 47 incidents occurred directly at oil and gas extraction sites, while 83 incidents occurred at plastic and petrochemical manufacturing sites, according to the database. At least 48 chemical incidents occurred in transport, like the infamous East Palestine, Ohio train derailment, which spilled the petrochemical vinyl chloride. And at least 39 chemical incidents occurred at food and beverage storage facilities, most of which involved leakage of ammonia, a particularly toxic petrochemical that is responsible for about 1 to 2 percent of global carbon emissions.

Search the 2023 chemical disasters here

At least 18 people died last year in chemical incidents. Lives claimed by petrochemical disasters in 2023 include a 25-year-old Illinois wrestling coach who was killed by an asphalt tank explosion; an Illinois father and his two young children who were killed by ammonia exposure after a semitruck derailed; and a 55-year-old father who was “burned alive” after a “petrochemical event” at the Marathon Petroleum refinery he worked at, according to a lawsuit filed by his family.

The data is important, activists say, because the petrochemical and chemical industries regularly downplay the harm their products inflict on communities. “The chemical industry consistently claims that incidents at hazardous facilities are isolated events,” said Deidre Nelms, the communications manager at environmental justice nonprofit Coming Clean, which helps manage the database. “But our data show that fires, explosions and releases involving hazardous chemicals are happening on a near daily basis.”

Still, the number of chemical incidents recorded by the Chemical Incident Tracker is almost certainly an underestimate, as it contains only disasters reported by national and local media. The coalition tracks incidents this way because publicly-available government data of chemical incidents in the U.S. is “very delayed, limited, and hard to find,” Nelms said—in part because each state has different reporting systems and requirements.

It is possible, then, that the increased number of chemical incidents in 2023 also reflects increased media attention to the issue. That would make sense, given the massive virality of the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment story in early 2023. Perhaps, in light of that story, more news editors across the country began to see that chemical incidents aren’t just newsworthy on their own—they also drive clicks, ratings, and engagement.

Depressing as that incentive structure is, it does mean that climate policy obstructionists have less room to hide in 2024. The more attention media pays to hazardous petrochemical releases, the more tone-deaf those commercials about how petrochemicals keep us safe and healthy sound.

Activists also hope that the more attention is paid to chemical disasters, the more people will demand stronger chemical regulation in 2024. This year, the EPA is expected to finalize the Safer Communities by Chemical Accident Prevention rule, which would bulk up accident prevention requirements for chemical facilities—and a fight over the outcome is brewing. A group of Democratic lawmakers are calling on the EPA to strengthen the rule before its finalization, asking for more involvement from workers and more requirements to take climate disaster risk into account. And Republicans are calling for a weakening of the rule, citing “economic challenges and operational burdens” for manufacturers.

That rule is expected to be finalized early this year—by which time the U.S. will have experienced dozens of hazardous chemical incidents; at least if the 2023 rate continues apace.

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Further reading:

• How to protect yourself from a toxic chemical incident. A sobering but necessary article from The Texas Tribune about what to do if you live near a toxic chemical facility.
  
  Key quote: “The EPA maintains a database of industrial facilities that must report how they manage toxic chemicals. To see where such facilities are located near you, use the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, and search by your metropolitan area or community profile.”
  

• Yes, it’s possible to produce petrochemicals without fossil fuels. A webinar from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a non-partisan D.C. think tank, explores the possibilities of a petrochemical transition.
  
  Key quote: “Manufacturing of plastics and other petrochemicals is on track to become the leading market for fossil fuels in the next three decades and a major contributor to climate change. It’s possible to produce these valuable materials without fossil fuels—biological systems have been making complex chemicals from water and air at ambient temperatures for three billion years.”
  

• In ‘Cancer Alley’, US chemical giants mount campaign against grassroots organizers. Partnering with the Guardian, our friends at Floodlight News report that petrochemical manufacturers have created a group to counter activists advocating on behalf of residents in “Cancer Alley,” a petrochemical facility-laden area of Louisiana where cancer rates are so high that international human rights groups have expressed concern.
  
  Key quote: “The group consists of about 60 representatives, including from Chevron, Dow, Entergy, BASF and ExxonMobil, alongside leaders of parishes in Cancer Alley. …. The [group], according to documents shared with Floodlight, says the opposition comes from a ‘small universe of vocal industry opponents’ that have caught the media’s attention and are creating an echo chamber of misinformation. Asked to characterize the misinformation, Wolfe said, in general, the activist groups and the media focus ‘only on the negative, and not on the positive impacts of industry on jobs, or on improving environmental outcomes.’”

Catch of the Day: Reader Tom loves to take out books from the library—and his housemate Betty loves to destroy them. Oops!

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

*Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Diedre Nelms’s last name.

*Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the expected final date of the Chemical Accident Prevention Rule. It is early this year, not in August.

2023 has been a rocky year for climate journalism. Essential reporters on the beat were laid off; important climate publications permanently closed; and a once-critical tool for climate communication was transformed into a disinformation hellscape.

But thanks in large part to our reader community, HEATED’s independent, ad-free climate journalism thrived in 2023. In fact, we think Year 4 was our best year yet.

We’re not just saying that because the numbers look good, though they do. In 2023, HEATED’s original reporting and analysis reached more people than ever before.

• Our free subscriber community grew from 57,000 to 84,000, marking a 47 percent increase in dedicated readers.

• Our articles were viewed more than 5.7 million times, far more than any previous year. 

• Our Instagram posts with Future Earth were viewed nearly 1 million times, bringing new audiences to HEATED’s reporting.

• Our video partnership with NowThis News garnered more than 2 million views across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, expanding our reach even further. 

These increases in readers and views gave us a new and honorable position: the number one climate newsletter on Substack. We think that’s something to be really proud of.

But purely from a business perspective, the thing we’re actually most proud of this year is that we were able to achieve this growth sustainably. That’s something HEATED has never done before.

As long-time readers will remember well, HEATED was built on a completely unsustainable foundation. In Year One, Emily published 205 newsletters on her own, an average of four newsletters per week. In Year Two, she published 134 newsletters by herself—and said she was embarrassed about it.

That’s why, in Year Three, HEATED temporarily fell apart. “My brain feels in a constant state of fog and overwhelm,” Emily wrote in a post announcing HEATED’s indefinite hiatus. She then spent six months attempting to heal the damage of unrelenting self-extraction, and figuring out how to build a more resilient system of work.

This year, Year Four, was the first test of that new system. With the added muscle of Arielle, we sent out a total of 95 newsletters. That’s an average of 2 newsletters per week, with a few weeks taken off for holidays and breaks. A normal, reasonable schedule.

While we may have published less journalism in 2023, we published journalism we’re proud of. And we did it with juice remaining in our batteries—batteries we hope will power us for years to come.

Here’s a summary of some of HEATED’s best journalism in Year 4:

Arielle’s reporting revealed unique challenges.

This year, HEATED’s new reporter published several creative enterprise stories found nowhere else in climate media, including but not limited to:

• An investigation of taxpayer-funded “climate-friendly” beef, which led to similar stories in The New Republic and Vox. (May 2023)

• An exclusive analysis of climate disinformation among Instagram wellness influencers, a community that represents “new territory for climate deniers.” (November 2023) 

• A two-part investigation into the environmental cost of LAPD helicopters, which included exclusive emissions data and interviews with affected community members.  (April 2023)

• A deep dive into a climate scientist’s firing—after which Democratic Senator Ed Markey launched a probe into the incident. (January 2023)

Emily’s analysis sparked new conversations.

Emily also continued her tradition of publishing *spicy* climate arguments, including but not limited to:

• Joe Biden’s climate policies amount to “fuckboy behavior.” He said everything climate voters wanted to hear, but couldn’t deliver consistency. (March 2023)

• “Natural gas” is a misleading term, and should be replaced throughout the media with the more accurate term, “methane gas.” (May 2023)

• Gas stoves are the plastic straws of the climate movement–and that’s actually a good thing. (January 2023)

• When it comes to climate policy, the word “historic” is relatively meaningless, used as a PR mechanism to market bare minimum actions as monumental. (December 2023)

But for most newsletters this year, we worked as a team.

Here are some of our favorite results of that teamwork.

Our reporting on fossil fuel propaganda.

In an effort to inoculate our readers against disinformation, we reported on lots of polluter-funded B.S., including: 

• The gas industry ads in Politico, E&E, and Axios that claim that "natural" gas is a climate solution. (February 2023)

• How to recognize Big Oil’s favorite way to lie—by telling a teeny-tiny part of the truth. (April 2023)

• The fossil fuel industry ads during the Super Bowl that claimed football can't exist without oil. (February 2023)

• The fossil fuel groups sponsoring research at Stanford University, and the students fighting for stricter rules over funding. (October 2023)

Our debunking of right-wing climate nonsense. 

We also had to combat disinformation from polluters’ power-seeking media mouthpieces. So, no,

• New York City is not banning pizza ovens. (June 2023)

• The Israel-Hamas war is not happening because Biden is too focused on climate change. (October 2023)

• Renewable energy did not cause Texas power outages during the heat waves. (June 2023)

• Pride month did not distract from the Canadian wildfire response. (June 2023)

Our efforts to hold mainstream media accountable.

Though not as egregious as right-wing outlets, mainstream outlets had some slip-ups we had to call out this year, including:

• Framing the Willow project as a political battle, rather than a planetary one. (March 2023)

• Falling for the right-wing falsehood that NYC planned to ban pizza ovens. (June 2023)

• Incorrectly reporting that climate change couldn’t be blamed for the Maui wildfires. (This one is just about ABC News). (August 2023)

• Publishing more than 60 beef recipes despite pledging to ban beef recipes. (This one is just about Epicurious). (July 2023)

Our exposes of climate villains.

Our 2023 newsletters also highlighted many corporations, politicians, and billionaires promoting and profiting from climate delay, including:

• The oil and gas companies that made enough money in one quarter to end world hunger for nearly one year. (May 2023)

• The utilities using customer payments to fund anti-climate lobbying. This story inspired an activism campaign in California. (August 2023)

• The major insurance companies refusing to pay for climate coverage while continuing to underwrite fossil fuel projects. (September 2023)

• The ultra-wealthy whose climate-polluting jets are subsidized by taxpayers. (May 2023)

   

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Our stories of activists fighting injustice.

In addition to exposing the villains, we tried to highlight people fighting for progress, including:

• Kaniela Ing, a seventh-generation indigenous Hawaiian who took us through the colonial history of wildfire-plagued Lahaina. (August 2023)

• Hoàng Thi Minh Hồng, a Vietnamese environmental activist imprisoned by her government on bogus tax evasion charges. (July 2023)

• Ndindi Kitonga, Kris Rehl, and others who helped unhoused populations in L.A. get through climate-fueled record rainfall during tropical storm Hilary. (August 2023)

• Mika Tosca, the first trans scientist to lead a plenary session at AGU, who told us about the importance of solutions-forward activism. (January 2023)

Our transformations of pop culture stories into climate stories.

It is our mission to continually prove that anything can be a climate story, including:

• Barbie (August 2023) 

• Drag queens (June 2023)

• Taylor Swift (November 2023)

• Screenwriter and actor strikes (July 2023) 

• Nipple bras (November 2023)

Our newsletters this year moved readers to action.

It can be hard for us as reporters to measure the impact of our journalism. But luckily many readers shared how HEATED’s journalism has helped move the needle for them this year. Here are some of our favorite comments this year:

• “There was an article a while back about if we all do a little, it adds up. So I helped campaign for the first windmill in our area, we won on the second vote.”—David Lopez
  

• “I attribute a lot of my climate literacy to HEATED, especially surrounding the intersections of climate justice. The newsletter contributed to my ability to transition careers and I now work in the solar industry!”—Kelsey Applegate
  

• “I specially liked the discussion on … ‘Debunking the UAE's B.S.’ I assigned it to my Global Environmental Politics class when we were discussing the problems with the "technological fixes" approach to tackling climate change.” —Belén Fernández M.
  

• “HEATED has made me want to do some civil disobedience—but only if I could get some 70-80-year-old friends to do it with me.”—Paula Claycomb
  

Everything we accomplished was made possible by readers.

Our accomplishments this year don’t just belong to us. They also belong to our paid subscriber community.

Without this small but powerful group of readers, HEATED wouldn’t exist. The fact is, we rely on readers to fund our journalism so we can stay completely independent and free of corporate influence.

Right now, only five percent of HEATED readers choose to pay for this product. The more people who make that choice, the more resources we have to continue this project in 2024.

Help us thrive in Year 5

Catch of the Day: To wrap up Year 4, we have the O.G. catch himself—Fish!

Special thanks to Lara Hein, Fish’s forever companion and official bestie-of-the-newsletter, for creating this photo out of recycled party supplies from her mom’s house. What a good friend—and what a good boy!

And thanks to everyone who shared their companions with us in 2023. Your dogs, cats, birds, and even turtles brought us joy all year long.

See you next year!

As we approach the end of the year, we have a lot to be thankful for. But primarily we’re thankful for you, the readers who make our climate journalism possible.

So, as a token of our appreciation to our subscribers, we’re running a raffle to win one of our limited edition HEATED hats—the first pieces of merchandise HEATED has created in over four years of existence.

As a climate publication, we’ve always been a bit wary about selling merchandise, given that unhinged consumerism is a major driver of the climate crisis.

But this year was a banner year for our publication, and we wanted to celebrate our success. So we ordered 12 hats for our family and friends—and now we have three left over for you.

The hats come from Custom Ink, and are emblazoned with an embroidered version of the HEATED flame mascot, Oswald. They’re mostly made of cotton, but do have some plastic in the mesh and adjustable clasp.

To win one, all you have to do is comment on this post and answer ONE of the following questions:

1. What was your favorite HEATED article this year, and why?

2. If a HEATED article inspired you to take some form of action this year, what was the action, and which article inspired you?

Leave a comment

Comments will be open until Wednesday, January 3, 2024 at 11:59 p.m EST. After that, we’ll choose three lucky winners via a randomized generator, who will be notified via email.

If you’re chosen, you’ll have 72 hours to respond with your shipping information before we go back into the comment pool and pick another winner.

The responses to these questions will do more than help three readers win a hat. They’ll also help us put together our end-of-year post, where we wrap up and reflect on everything HEATED has accomplished in Year 4.

If you’d like to help out with our end-of-year post but don’t particularly need or want a trucker hat, just say in your comment: “I don’t want a hat.”

As always, comments are limited to paid subscribers—which means this raffle, too, is paid subscribers only. But if you’re a free subscriber, you too can enter by upgrading to paid today.

Subscribe now

By subscribing, you’re not only helping yourself potentially win a hat. You’re also helping us make our primary product: independent climate journalism. Just like our hats, that’s a pretty rare thing.

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Catch of the Day: Keji, the extremely cool space dog, may be blind and deaf in one ear. But reader Jennifer says even he can see that it would be really stupid to destroy the planet.

When not saving the world, Keji likes to dance, herd the cat, and enjoys trips to the beach. He’d also like us to know that every single one us is valuable and worthy.

Thank you Keji 💚

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

It is important for leaders of high-polluting nations to put a positive spin on the outcomes of global climate talks. An easy way to achieve said spin in to market the outcome as “historic.”

This is what leaders like U.S. President Joe Biden and COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber are doing in the wake of COP28. Following the final deal, each called the outcome “historic”—a word that’s since graced the headlines of numerous major news outlets’ stories about the deal, alongside words like “unprecedented” and “landmark.”

These quotes and headlines are not inaccurate. The final deal at COP28 is technically historic, in that it is the first deal that specifically calls on all nations to “transition away” from fossil fuels.

The problem with these quotes and headlines is that they convey almost zero meaning. Because when you leave a massive problem like climate change unaddressed for decades, almost anything you do represents “historic” progress.

This has long been one of my frustrations with media narratives about government- and corporate-led climate change action. Too often, they adopt the preferred spin of polluters who are attempting to frame the bare minimum as monumental.

It’s like watching a massive corporation get praised for giving healthcare to 10 percent of its employees, all of whom are at the executive level. Sure, it’s nice they’re finally giving healthcare to someone, and technically it’s historic. But that is probably not what I’d lead with.

Again, it’s not wrong to call the COP28 outcome historic. But I worry when I see a mass of headlines with the term that people might skim them and walk away misled about the true state of progress toward a safe climate future, thus leading to more dangerous climate delay.

So I urge anyone reading climate news, both today and in the future, to keep this in mind: Just because a country or corporation did something “historic” and “unprecedented” to slow climate change, does not mean they did something laudable, effective, or in line with their responsibility. It merely means they did more than they ever did—which, in most cases, is very little.

Oh, and about that “historic” outcome…

Though the final deal reached by 200 countries at COP28 does call for nations to “transition away” from fossil fuels, it also contains a few key loopholes for the fossil fuel industry to continue its path toward dangerous, irreversible warming.

Chief among these loopholes is language that specifically endorses the use of “transitional fuels”—aka, methane gas and liquified methane gas—to achieve decarbonization.

Specifically, the final agreement “recognizes that transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.”

“So while ostensibly encouraging some sort of transition, the agreement explicitly endorses a continued dependence on methane—a great majority of it sourced through hazardous fracking—for decades to come,” Seth Gladstone, media director at Food and Water Watch, told HEATED.

He added: “This means we’ll see increased drilling, more fracking, more pipelines and more export infrastructure—despite the fact that in order to maintain a chance of avoiding the worst of climate chaos in the future, science dictates that we start rapidly reducing fossil fuel extraction and burning now.”

“COP isn’t the game; it’s just the scoreboard.”

Though it is our primary job at HEATED to shine light on polluters’ attempts to lull you into complacency, we felt bad leaving you with solely frustrating COP28 news.

So to end this week, we thought we’d leave you with this quote that friend-of-the-newsletter Bill McKibben gave in an interview with Vox’s Paige Vega published on Monday, emphasis ours:

The good news is that COP isn’t the game; it’s just the scoreboard. The U.N. climate summit is where we add up how much pressure people successfully built up in the last year.

What we got from COP28 was clarity about where we are. The status quo is clearly trying to transition away from fossil fuels as slowly as possible, even though science tells us we need to move as fast as possible.

This year’s extraordinary heat meant that there was enough pressure to produce something—in this case, an agreement to begin a transition around the world. That doesn’t mean countries are going to live up to it. It’s going to take extraordinary pressure to hold them to their word here. …

What happened in Dubai by itself is not important. But if it becomes the lever by which we halt further development of fossil fuels, that’s something. Today, we’ve got one more arrow in the quiver. And our job is to make use of it. If we thought someone was going to go to Dubai and solve the problem for us, it’s not going to happen because the oil industry is incredibly strong and in a lot of ways controls these processes. But this one sentence is a concession. Let’s make that concession hurt.

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Catch of the Day: To fight the battle for a livable future, reader Lisa has enlisted Hugo, who likes to post a Fridays For Future sign every now and again on Instagram at @this_old_dog_hugo.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

The United Arab Emirates has severely restricted protest activity at this year’s U.N. climate summit, placing harsh limits on what activists are allowed to say, as well as where and when demonstrations can occur.

But on Monday, one activist managed to slip past the COP28 host country’s gaze, and pull off a truly unsanctioned and uncensored disruption: 12-year-old Licypriya Kangujam, or Licy for short.

Video of the protest posted on X shows Licy quietly walking past delegates before breaking into a sprint and rushing onstage, holding a sign above her head reading “END FOSSIL FUEL. SAVE OUR PLANET AND OUR FUTURE.”

The child then began to yell:

“End fossil fuels now! Act now! Our governments must work together to phase out coal, oil and gas, the top cause of today’s climate crisis. My generation is already a victim of the climate crisis, and I don’t want future generation to face the same consequences again.”

When a large man in a suited approached Licy, she sat down on the stage. The man bent down to whisper something in her ear, and she cried out, got up and tried to get away.

She continued her call to action:

Act now! Millions of children like me are losing their lives, losing their parents and their homes due to climate disasters. Act now! We want permanent solutions!

Two more men—these dressed in tactical police gear—then walked onstage, and Licy started to move offstage. As her protest ended, the audience applauded, and then laughed as COP28 Director-General Ambassador Majid Al Suwaidi interjected: “We’re very proud of the enthusiasm of the young people who have joined us at COP28.”

Majid Al Suwaidi urged the crowd to give the child one more round of applause. Shortly after, Licy’s mother Kangujam Ongbi Bidyarani Devi posted on X that she was detained for 30 minutes and kicked out of the summit.

“They have taken her badge and threatened with many strong words to the 12 years old kid,” she wrote. “This is unacceptable.”

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How does a child become a climate disruptor?

Watching Licy’s protest, I found myself emotional. I felt deep sadness that a child felt she needed to risk arrest in a notoriously anti-protest country simply to beg for stronger action on climate change, and deep anger that sustained and willful inaction from governments and corporations forced her into this position.

I also wanted to know: How does a little kid get to this point?

Fortunately, there have been dozens of in-depth profiles about Licy from major news outlets published over the last few years, and they all tell a similar story. It starts when Licy was born in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur in 2011—the year scientists started to become confident that global heating was tangibly worsening weather disasters, a fact that would soon become relevant in Licy’s life.

In 2016, Licy and her family moved to New Delhi, where they discovered the difficult reality of living in the city’s high air pollution levels. “Partly because of Delhi's poor air,” DW reported, Licy’s family decided to move to the city of Bhubaneswar in the eastern state of Odisha—where “their home was hit by Cyclone Titli in 2018, and Cyclone Fani the following year—two of the most extreme weather events to strike eastern India in recent years.”

Also in 2018, Licy told the BBC that her father took her to a U.N. disaster conference in Mongolia, a “life-changing event” that she said inspired her activism. “I got lots of inspiration and new knowledge from the people giving speeches,” she said.

She then founded the Child Movement, a climate advocacy group through which she “spreads knowledge to other children.” And in 2019, her family moved back to New Delhi to organize weekly protests in front of the parliament in India's capital, an idea inspired by Greta Thunberg's weekly school strikes. Licy reportedly dropped out of school to do this, according to a Vice profile.

These experiences have led Licy to become a major presence at U.N. climate summits. At her first summit, COP25 in Madrid in 2019, the then-nine-year-old gave a speech urging world leaders to act faster. At last year’s COP27 in Egypt, Reuters reported that Licy’s “questioning of Britain's climate minister Zac Goldsmith about the fate of climate activists detained in his country was one of the most striking moments in the COP27 global warming talks so far.”

At this year’s COP28, Licy gave a sanctioned speech, urging polluting nations to take responsibility for the climate disruption they’ve caused to vulnerable countries. She said the adoption of a Loss and Damage fund “is a historic one… a good start but it is still not enough. What we want is not millions, but tens of billions and this shouldn’t be in the form of loan or debt trap to the developing nations.”

It is for these reasons that many in the media have referred to Licy as “India’s Greta Thunberg.” But Licy herself does not like the title, she told the BBC in 2020. “If you call me Greta of India, you are not telling my story,” she said. "I have my own identity, story."

Licy’s story will undoubtedly continue to be told after her COP28 disruption, which has been covered by dozens of media outlets around the world. And many will undoubtedly consider it inspiring.

But as a person raised in the age of the internet, I recognize a fake feel-good story when I see one. The way I see it, “Small Child Becomes Leading Voice Of Climate Movement” is a story that falls into the same trap as “Office Workers Donate Vacation Days To Pregnant Colleague So She Can Have Maternity Leave.” They are each valiant acts of altruism, and in Licy’s case, courage. But they are also acts that are only made necessary by a total systemic failure to protect children. They are not inspirational. They are horrifying.

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Meanwhile, the adults in the room at COP28….

• Are still fighting about whether they should phase out fossil fuels. “The COP28 climate talks went into overtime on Tuesday as countries engaged in shuttle diplomacy to bridge deep international divisions over how to deal with fossil fuels in the summit's final text,” Reuters reported. This seems like a good time to remind everyone that there are only 5 years remaining in the world’s carbon budget before the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold is breached, if emissions continue at current levels. (Carbon Brief)

• Are trying to re-write history about fossil fuel influence at the summit. Kendall Dilling, who runs a trade group for tar sands producers in Canada, told the CBC that he’s proud of the progress the industry has made to slow climate change at COP28 but “wishes the industry had been at these summits a decade ago.“ The reality is the the industry has had a huge role in every single COP since they began: fossil fuel lobbyists have been given at least 7,200 passes to attend COPs over the last 20 years, according to research published by Kick Big Polluters Out.

• Are making strong statements in support of a fossil fuel phase-out. "We will not go silently to our watery graves," said John Silk, minister for natural resources from the Marshall Islands, according to Sky News. And Agnes Pannier, the French Minister of Energy, called for “ambitious and clear language on fossil fuels,” according to Oil Price. “Abatement cannot be used to delay action. We need to phase out fossil fuel production and consumption.”

  

• Are threatening to leave if fossil fuels are not included in the final draft text. “Ireland’s environment minister Eamon Ryan, who is a lead European Union negotiator on climate finance, has said the first draft text from the Cop28 Presidency is unacceptable and that the EU could walk away from the talks if it is not improved,” the Shropshire Star reported.

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Catch of the Day: Via reader Sarah, this is Neeko, envisioning a food forest on this old crop land.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

Will world leaders agree to phase out fossil fuels at COP28, this year’s U.N. climate summit in Dubai?

It depends, in part, on whether they believe it is wise, prudent, and scientifically necessary to do so.

This is why the fossil fuel industry needs to convince the public that phasing out fossil fuels is not wise, not prudent, and not scientifically necessary. And it’s why Sultan Al Jaber, the president of COP28 and CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, recently said this:

“There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.”

In his remarks revealed earlier this week by The Guardian, Al Jaber not only attempted to discredit the idea that preserving a livable climate requires phasing out fossil fuels—he attempted to paint the idea as extremist.

He said he expected a “sober and mature conversation,” not an “alarmist” one, when former Ireland president Mary Robinson asked him during a panel discussion whether he would support a global effort to phase out fossil fuels. He appeared offended she even asked.

Al Jaber has attempted to walk back these comments amid uproar this week, claiming he believes “the phase down and the phaseout of fossil fuel is inevitable.” Even U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry has shrugged off the comments, saying they probably “came out the wrong way.”

But whether he personally believes them or not, Al Jaber’s remarks represent a common tactic among fossil fuel industry representatives, one that we will continue to see at this COP and long after it.

So we thought it would be useful to try and put the question to rest once and for all, by asking five of the leading climatologists in the field: Is there really “no science” to support a phaseout of fossil fuels? Is calling for this truly “alarmist?”

Here’s what they said. Unlike Al Jaber, they provided receipts.

1. Don Wuebbles, University of Illinois

An emeritus professor of atmospheric science at the University of Illinois, Don Wuebbles has published more than 500 scientific papers related to climate change, air quality, and the stratospheric ozone layer.

Asked to respond to Al Jaber’s claim that “no science” supports a fossil fuel phaseout to achieve 1.5°C, Wuebbles replied: “Of course the statement is not true. There is extended discussion in variety of places that show we need to have rapid decreases in emissions from fossil fuels to achieve 1.5 degrees."

As evidence, Wuebbles cited the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, which was authored by 234 authors across 66 countries and includes more than 14,000 scientific references.

That report makes it clear that fossil fuels must go. It states, among many other things:

• “Net zero CO2 energy systems entail: a substantial reduction in overall fossil fuel use, minimal use of unabated fossil fuels, and use of carbon capture and storage in the remaining fossil fuel systems; electricity systems that emit no net CO2; widespread electrification; alternative energy carriers in applications less amenable to electrification; energy conservation and efficiency; and greater integration across the energy system (high confidence).

Wuebbles also cited the IPCC’s 1.5C report, which contains more than 6,000 scientific references and was authored by 91 authors from 40 countries.

That report states, among other things, that all pathways to 1.5°C include decreases in fossil fuel energy from 2020 to 2050—but that the amount fossil fuels decrease depends on how much carbon removal is in place.

The report later adds: ”[Carbon dioxide removal] deployed at scale is unproven, and reliance on such technology is a major risk in the ability to limit warming to 1.5°C.”

Al Jaber has been heavily promoting carbon capture as a solution.

2. Andrew Dessler, Texas A&M University

Andrew Dessler has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and three academic textbooks on climate change and atmospheric physics, including the “Introduction to Modern Climate Change."

In comments to HEATED, Dessler took issue with Al Jaber’s claim that “no science” supports a fossil fuel phaseout.

“I would phrase it differently,” he said. “There is no scenario to limit warming to 1.5°C that does not include the rapid phase out of fossil fuels.”

In fact, Dessler added, achieving the 1.5°C target would require much more than phasing out fossil fuels; it would also require some sort of geoengineering, which includes the controversial practice of carbon dioxide removal.

“Phasing out fossil fuels won't do it by itself, because we have dithered too long,” he said. “But in combination with geoengineering, it could be achievable.”

3. Kate Marvel, Project Drawdown

Currently a senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown, Kate Marvel is a former research scientist at NASA and Columbia University, with 90 published peer-reviewed papers focused primarily on climate modeling.

In an e-mail, Marvel said Al Jaber’s claim that there is “no science” to support a fossil fuel phaseout was “balderdash.” She wrote:

This is balderdash. Here’s the paper on scenarios to limit radiative forcing to 1,9 W m-2 and hopefully warming to 1.5C:

Under all SSPs, 1.9 W m−2 scenarios show a clear shift away from unabated fossil fuels (that is, without CCS, Fig. 2c), and a phaseout of all fossil fuels. The marker implementations exhibit rapidly declining contributions of coal until 2040 (less than about 20% of its 2010 contribution in 2040), followed by a phaseout of oil until 2060 (Supplementary Figs. 14, 15).

I encourage him to read the paper, it’s very good!

Marvel added that Al Jaber’s comments can be difficult to directly debunk because science rarely “calls” for certain policy actions; more often, it lays out the sources of emissions, and the consequences. That science is then used to support political calls for action.

“Physical, biological, and social science establishes that fossil fuels are the primary source of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, generating pollution that kills millions, require much more resource extraction than even the most pessimistic clean energy scenarios, contribute to high energy costs and inflation, and help repressive regimes gain and stay in power,” she said.

“The question of whether these things are bad is not one that can be answered by science,” she added. “The choice to phase out fossil fuels is a moral one, not a scientific one. That doesn’t make the right answer any less clear.”

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4. Kristina Dahl, Union of Concerned Scientists

With a PhD in paleoclimate from MIT, Kristina Dahl has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers on climate change, sea level rise and extreme heat, among other topics. Her work at the Union of Concerned Scientists focuses on communicating climate science to general audiences.

Dahl told HEATED that Al Jaber’s remarks aren’t in line with the best available science, which supports the need for a fossil fuel phaseout.

“The science is unequivocal,” she said. “A fast, fair, and funded phaseout of all fossil fuels is critical to limiting climate harms, preventing further damage to people’s health and the environment, and ensuring the health and safety of current and future generations around the world.

Like Wuebbles, she also cited the IPCC’s AR6 report—specifically, figure 3.5, which “finds that carbon emissions over the lifetime of existing and currently planned fossil fuel infrastructure alone would push warming above the 1.5 degrees Celsius mark.”

She also pointed to figure SPM.8 in the IPCC report, which shows “enormous benefits” for sustainable development if governments phase out fossil fuels.

5. Michael Mann, University of Pennsylvania

A climatologist and geophysicist, Michael Mann has helped author nearly 500 peer-reviewed papers, and has written five books on the climate crisis. He wrote to HEATED:

There is rigorous science supporting the need for a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels to keep global temperatures below the 1.5C level of dangerous interference with the climate system. In fact, I just published on it a couple weeks ago.

It's a recent peer-reviewed review by me that summarizes the latest body of work on the “zero emissions commitment”, discussing precisely what sorts of emissions reductions are necessary to limit warming below 1.5C.

The emissions reductions necessary are primarily from fossil fuels.

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Catch of the Day: It’s not often our request for non-furry friends is honored, so today is a pretty special day.

Meet Carlin.

Carlin often accompanies reader Devra on public speaking events, serving as official spokesturtle for pesticide-free lawn care and native plants.

Carlin has a shell deformation that prevents him from righting himself should he accidentally become rolled over on his back. Fortunately, Devra is always there to help.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

The number of fossil fuel lobbyists at this year’s U.N. climate summit is nearly four times higher than it’s ever been, revealing an extraordinary amount of influence from the biggest climate polluters on Earth.

Specifically, there are 2,456 fossil fuel representatives at this year’s United Nations Climate Change conference in the United Arab Emirates, according to an analysis of summit attendees published today by the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition.

There were only 636 fossil fuel lobbyists at last year’s COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, making the fossil fuel presence at this year’s summit “unprecedented,” the coalition said.

“The sheer number of fossil fuel lobbyists at climate talks that could determine our future is beyond justification,” said Joseph Sikulu, the Pacific managing director of environmental group 350.org, in a statement. “We come here to fight for our survival, and what chance do we have if our voices are suffocated by the influence of Big Polluters?”

The analysis defines a fossil fuel lobbyist as anyone with ties to a fossil fuel company, fossil fuel foundation, or an organization with fossil fuel interests. The researchers also counted attendees from oil and gas industry trade associations, the majority of which came from the Global North.

The fossil fuel attendees at COP28 include representatives from some of the largest and wealthiest oil companies in the world, including Shell CEO Wael Sawan and Exxon CEO Darren Woods, who recently said that climate solutions “have been too focused on reducing supply.”

Several countries also brought oil and gas companies as part of their official country delegations; for example, the European Union brought employees of BP, Exxon, and Italian energy company ENI, while France brought employees from TotalEnergies and British energy group EDF.

For context, the number of disclosed fossil fuel delegates at COP28 is:

• More than any single country delegation, with the exception Brazil (which is expected to host COP30) and the UAE

• More than all the delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable countries combined, including Somalia, Chad, and Liberia

• Seven times larger than the number of official Indigenous representatives

• Four and a half times the number of lawmakers in the U.S. Congress

• Nearly 14 times the number of representatives to the United Nations

The ballooning fossil fuel presence at the conference coincides with stricter regulations on the industry, including new restrictions on methane emissions and pledges to triple the world’s renewable energy—but not a phase out of fossil fuels.

The record number of lobbyists this year will undoubtedly add fuel to the fire from lawmakers and environmental groups who are calling for greater restrictions on oil and gas representatives, who they say have too much power at COP.

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A plethora of oily influence

One reason there are more fossil fuel lobbyists this year is because there are more total attendees than ever before, more than 100,000 participants. But there’s another reason their number has nearly quadrupled—previous years underestimated the number of lobbyists, many of whom hid their company affiliations.

This is the first year that the U.N. has required participants to disclose who they work for, after years of pressure from advocacy groups.

But even without that transparency, research shows that a staggering number of people from the industry have shown up to the climate talks. Fossil fuel lobbyists have been given at least 7,200 passes to attend COPs over the last 20 years, according to research published last week by Kick Big Polluters Out. 

The nonprofit found that employees of the world’s biggest polluters have observed negotiations at least 945 times, while fossil fuel lobby groups have attended at least 6,581 times. Last year, there were more lobbyists than the total number of delegates from the ten countries most impacted by climate change, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Mozambique.

“Their influence is very, very insidious,” said Patrick Galey, a senior investigator at Global Witness, who led the COP28 analysis. “And they are not pulling in the same direction as people who want to implement the Paris Agreement.”

How fossil fuel lobbyists influence negotiations—and why

Officially, only countries can negotiate the international climate agreements. But some lobbyists attend as party delegates, which means they are at the table when the world’s leaders are negotiating our climate future. Fossil fuel groups can also observe, and influence, the state actors at the table.

This influence may be subtle, or very obvious—at COP24, a Shell executive claimed credit for changing the 2015 Paris Agreement to include carbon offsets as a legitimate form of emissions reductions.  

Carbon offset credits allow polluters like oil and gas companies to buy credits to “offset” their emissions—instead of simply emitting less. A growing body of scientific research has found that the unregulated carbon credit market has no environmental value and does nothing to curb climate change.

That’s another reason why fossil fuel lobbyists are showing up in record numbers this year: countries at COP28 will negotiate international trading for carbon offset credits. Fossil fuel companies try and influence these negotiations because, in a perfect world, they wouldn’t have to stop extracting and burning fossil fuels—they could use their enormous profits to buy their way out of the climate goals imposed on them.

That’s the same logic that makes oil giants eager to push technology like carbon capture and storage, which in a perfect world would capture all carbon emissions from fossil fuels. But if oil and gas consumption continues as projected, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius “would require an entirely inconceivable 32 billion tonnes of carbon captured for utilization or storage by 2050,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, in a statement. The amount of electricity needed to power that carbon capture technology—which isn’t yet built—would be greater than the entire world’s electricity demand today.

These solutions skirt the real problem—fossil fuels. And that’s the real reason there are so many fossil fuel lobbyists at this year’s COP, because they’ve never had more to lose. Experts say that fossil fuel use has to fall by a quarter by 2030, and by more than 75 percent by 2050. Any delay will endanger the path toward a liveable future, according to the world’s foremost scientists.

That path, however, significantly threatens the fossil fuel industry’s profits. So at COP28, “They will put forward any solution to the climate crisis apart from the one that we know will work, which is an equitable and rapid phase out of fossil fuels,” said Galey. 

The case for change

This year, the fossil fuel industry isn’t just attending the climate conference—it’s hosting it. Not only is COP28 in a petrostate, but it’s being led by Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. 

Unsurprisingly, Al Jaber said in the lead-up to the conference that the fossil fuel industry should have a bigger seat at the table.

But asking the industry that spent billions on climate denial and delay is like asking the people who started the fire to help the firefighters, says Galey. 

“Industry groups always say they need to be in the room because they are the technical experts that are going to implement these policy decisions,” said Galey. “We would say that we're here because of what they've done and we don't trust them to clean up the mess they've made.”

And there’s plenty of evidence that the fossil fuel industry isn’t changing. In 2022, the oil and gas industry only invested an estimated $20 billion in clean energy—or about 2.5 percent of its total capital spending, according to a new report from the IEA. 

A separate report found that the same countries at COP28—including the U.S. and UAE—are planning to literally double down on fossil fuel production. Emissions from those fossil fuels will push the planet past a 2°C warming limit. That’s the point at which scientists say the climate becomes hostile to humans and other life.

“The uncomfortable truth that the industry needs to come to terms with is that successful clean energy transitions require much lower demand for oil and gas, which means scaling back oil and gas operations,” said Birol, in a statement released by the IEA before COP28. “There is no way around this."

But with trillions of dollars on the table, the oil and gas industry is not willing to get comfortable with the truth. At an event leading up to the conference, COP28 president Al Jaber said that there is “no science” that says that “the phase out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5°C.” Two weeks ago, Exxon CEO Darren Woods—who is at COP28—said that making Big Oil into “villains” would slow the path to net zero. On Monday, OPEC secretary general Haitham Al Ghais—also at COP28—said the IEA’s report “unjustly vilifies the industry as being behind the climate crisis.” 

But the fossil fuel industry is objectively, factually, the main cause of the climate crisis—and the real injustice is inflicted upon developing nations on the front lines. As Emily wrote last week, those nations can’t afford to wait for a perfect climate conference.

Some climate advocates, like Al Gore, have proposed limiting attendance to fossil fuel companies that have a real net zero plan, spend their profits on the energy transition, and stop greenwashing and anti-climate lobbying. A letter signed by members of the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament recommends that any attendee with a conflict of interest should not be allowed to present, or participate in any COP activity.

But others, like Galey, say that the U.N. has to ban fossil fuel lobbyists altogether to make any meaningful progress on climate mitigation.

“Whatever equation you make, fossil fuels can't be part of it. And these guys know that,” said Galey. “They're just trying to keep the party going as long as possible.”

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More news from COP28

• Cop28 president says there is ‘no science’ behind demands for phase-out of fossil fuels. The Guardian, Dec. 3, 2023.

Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”.

The comments were “incredibly concerning” and “verging on climate denial”, scientists said, and they were at odds with the position of the UN secretary general, António Guterres.

• Disinformation Is One of Climate Summit’s Biggest Challenges. The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2023.

The unfounded claims, the coalition warned in its report, have increased conspiracy theories, social divisions and harassment. The report noted an “alarming mobilization to violence” against those associated with climate change work, including Spanish meteorologists who reported on extreme spring weather and then faced ominous threats and accusations that they were “murderers.”

• COP28 Climate Summit Takes Aim At Powerful Methane Emissions. The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 2, 2023.

From Texas to Turkmenistan, global leaders at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai are taking a big swing at cutting methane, a potent greenhouse gas produced by oil and gas drilling, livestock and rotting vegetation. They are using financial incentives combined with strict new regulations to get countries and energy firms on board.

Catch of the day: Let’s get cozy and curl up with Helena, who may be dreaming of a climate conference that comes up with real solutions for global warming.

When she’s not snoozing, Helena likes to hang with her pup pals Luna and Happy, says reader María.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

It’s day two of the 28th Conference of the Parties, known as COP28, the world’s most important climate conference—and organizers have released a massive excel spreadsheet containing all the names and workplaces of in-person attendees.

HEATED spent yesterday going through that spreadsheet, and found hundreds of fossil fuel industry representatives who are actively working to delay climate policy at home. More like Conference of the Worst Party Ever!

Alongside highly publicized attendees like King Charles III and Bill Gates, here are just a few of the fossil fuel lobbyists at COP28 who purport to be helping save the world from climate change:

• A team of 18 people from ExxonMobil, which lied about climate change for decades, including chairman and CEO Darren Woods, who said this month that climate solutions “have been too focused on reducing supply.”

• A team of 14 people from Shell, including CEO Wael Sawan, who said this summer that the world still "desperately needs oil and gas.” The team also includes chief climate change adviser David Hone, who has notoriously bragged that Shell’s influence at previous COPs was responsible for changing the 2015 Paris Agreement to include carbon credits as a legitimate emissions reduction strategy.

• A group of six representatives of the Edison Electric Institute, which is currently waging a U.S. lobbying campaign to oppose climate regulations on power plants. That group includes Rebecca Kujawa, the CEO of NextEra Energy, the company behind the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

• A team of 12 people from TotalEnergies, including chairman and CEO Patrick Pouyanné, who said this summer that “our society requires oil and gas.”

• A team of 11 people from BP, which walked back its promised emissions cuts after making more than $27 billion last year, including interim CEO Murray Auchincloss. 

• A team of seven from Chevron, whose CEO Mike Wirth recently said that building a new energy system without oil and gas companies is “just not a realistic way to see things.”

• A team of 16 people from Gazprom, Russia’s national oil company, which has said that natural gas is compatible with limiting global warming.

• A team of 18 people from the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), not including CEO Sultan Al Jaber, who is also the president of COP28.

• A whopping 112 people from the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), a group founded by polluters like Exxon and Chevron, which has been given at least 2769 passes to attend the climate talks since 2003.

• A group of 11 people from OPEC, an international oil co-op that includes the UAE, including secretary general Haitham Al Ghais, who said this week that the industry was being “unjustly vilified” for “being behind the climate crisis.”

• A team of four people from the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s most powerful lobbying group, which has spent over $127 million on lobbying since 1998.

• Over 200 official country delegates who are actually from nationalized fossil fuel companies, including the Kuwait National Petroleum Company and the Gabon National Oil Company.

The only reason HEATED was able to find these representatives is because of new transparency rules which require COP attendees to disclose who they work for. Pushed heavily by watchdog groups, these new rules close a loophole that’s been in place since 1995 that allowed fossil fuel lobbyists to participate in U.N. climate summits without disclosing their corporate ties.

But even with these rules, it’s still difficult to piece together a comprehensive picture of the fossil fuel representatives at COP28. The spreadsheet contains more than 97,000 attendees, and fossil fuel companies are not clearly marked, so they must be found manually, making it impossible to get through every one in just one day.

So the names above are just the tip of the iceberg. We’ll be able to provide more accurate numbers next week, but our very rough and vastly underestimated calculations show at least 600 fossil fuel lobbyists at this year’s conference.

And experts like Patrick Galey, who has helped put together tallies of fossil fuel lobbyists at previous COPs as a senior investigator for Kick Big Polluters Out, say they predict that this year will have the most fossil fuel lobbyists ever seen at a COP.

“We believe that they will be coming there in record numbers with a view to trying to take up as much bandwidth as they possibly can,” said Galey. “[They’ll be pushing] any sort of policy suggestion that they can come up with that doesn't result in the world using fewer of their products.” 

This is the fundamental conflict of the world’s most important climate conference: the leaders coming together to find solutions to the climate crisis include the same people profiting from the fossil fuels causing it.

More on this next week. In the meantime…

News from the first two days of COP28

• Vulnerable nations win concrete pledges from polluting nations for loss and damage funding.

  Met with a standing ovation in Dubai, the agreement means wealthy states and major polluters will put millions of dollars towards a fund that will in turn distribute funds to poor states harmed by climate change. The fund will be administered by the World Bank. Initial commitments amount to $430 million.

• Kamala Harris announces she will attend COP28 after criticism over Joe Biden’s absense.

  During the summit, officials said, Ms. Harris will announce several U.S. initiatives related to bolstering climate resilience in other countries and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They said she would also discuss the passage of clean energy legislation during the first two years of the administration.

• Marshall Islands representative resigns over COP28 host’s secret fossil fuel dealmaking

  Hilda Heine, former president of the low-lying, climate vulnerable Marshall Islands, said reports that the UAE planned to discuss possible natural gas and other commercial deals ahead of U.N. climate talks were "deeply disappointing" and threatened to undermine the credibility of the multilateral negotiation process.

• Narendra Modi, India’s leader, rebukes developed countries

  “We do not have much times to correct the mistakes of the last century,” he said. “Over the past century, a small section of humanity has indiscriminately exploited nature. However, entire humanity is paying the price for this, especially people living in the global south.”

  (Our take: good message, interesting messenger.)

• Britain's PM says no one cares that he scaled back the U.K.’s climate plan

  Asked whether any leaders had raised concerns about his decision to delay a ban on sales of new petrol cars, ease the transition to heat pumps and to grant new North Sea drilling licences, [Prime Minister Rishi Sunak] replied: "Hand on heart, 100% no." "Not a single leader that I've spoken to today has spoken about that. Do you know why? Because most of their targets are less ambitious than the UK's," he said.

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  ---

Catch of the Day: Reader Daniel’s email signature contains a quote from Albert Einstein: “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

Simone and Rigby are enjoying the ride.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

I can understand why one might want to tune out COP28, the United Nations climate change summit set to begin tomorrow in the United Arab Emirates.

There’s the fact it’s being run by a literal fossil fuel baron: Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the head of the state-run Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), which also happens to have one of the biggest oil and gas expansion plans in the world.

There’s the fact that Al Jaber’s self-proclaimed “game-changing plan” to achieve progress at COP28 is to give oil and gas companies more influence over the climate change summit, despite warnings from the U.N.’s former climate chief that the approach is “dangerous” and “a direct threat to the survival of vulnerable nations.”

There’s the fact that, because of Al Jaber’s role, Adnoc has been able to access and read e-mails to and from the COP28 climate summit office—a revelation that French MEP Manon Aubry called “an absolute scandal … like having a tobacco multinational overseeing the internal work of the World Health Organization.”

And then there is the newest, most damning scandal: On Monday, the Centre for Climate Reporting published leaked documents showing that Al Jaber has been using his position as head of COP28 to lobby foreign governments to buy Adnoc oil and gas. In other words, the documents indicate that the leader of the U.N. summit to decrease global carbon emissions has been secretly using the position to increase global carbon emissions for the financial benefit of his company and country.

This year’s COP is also plagued by disappointing engagement from the world’s biggest polluters. While more than 160 heads of states are expected to attend COP28 and its various events—including a two-day summit on Friday and Saturday specifically for world leaders—the New York Times reported on Sunday that U.S. President Joe Biden will be skipping the summit, citing anonymous aides who say he is “consumed by other global crises.”

This follows reports that Chinese President Xi Jinping will not attend COP28, nor will Russian President Vladimir Putin. That means the three largest historical contributors to the climate crisis—having emitted a cumulative 51 percent of all the CO2 that’s been released into the atmosphere since 1850, according to Carbon Brief—do not consider it a priority to have their leaders present at this year’s global climate talks.

(Biden has made no public comment about his absence—but his schedule for the first few days of the summit includes the White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony and the Kennedy Center Honors, featuring scores of celebrities.)

So I can understand why some may feel the temptation to say “screw it” when it comes to COP28—because that’s, admittedly, how I’ve been feeling. In fact, when I first learned of Biden’s absence on Monday and of Al Jaber’s plans to use the summit to sell oil on Tuesday, I decided that “screw COP28” would be the subject of this newsletter. I punched in a headline reading “COP28 is a farce,” and started writing paragraphs about Al Jaber’s corruption, and the polluting nations who couldn’t send their leaders to climate negotiations during the hottest year on Earth because they were preoccupied with louder forms of death.

But writing has a way of making things clear, and while my feelings were strong, my conclusion quickly revealed itself as both logically and morally weak. Because while choosing to ignore COP28 may feel morally righteous in the moment, it’s effectively a middle finger to the Global South, which is depending on successful outcomes at this summit to achieve crucial funding from the Global North for adaptation, mitigation and reparation.

The countries and populations most vulnerable to climate change do not have the privilege of tuning out a COP, not matter how corrupt its leaders are. If global CO2 emissions continue at current levels, the world has less than five years before the world’s remaining carbon budget runs out and the dangerous and irreversible 1.5 degree Celsius threshold is breached, according to Carbon Brief. For the nations most threatened by that future, negotiations over how to structure a Loss and Damage fund to compensate for damages, as well as negotiations over how to mend previously broken climate finance pledges by the Global North, are too consequential to be ignored.

The somber reality of the world’s rapidly diminishing carbon budget means every opportunity to make climate progress must be taken seriously, whether the people in power are doing so or not. But taking opportunities like COP28 seriously also means doing everything possible to call out actors who are wasting those opportunities, or using them as a mask to advance their own interests. As Bill McKibben wrote in his newsletter this week, “The only hope for this COP—and really for this planet—is that our revulsion at revelations like these somehow spurs the movements necessary to break the power of Big Oil.”

The fossil fuel interests attempting to corrupt COP28 would love nothing more than for us to look away. So we will continue to pay attention, not in spite of the bullshit, but because of it.

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Here are some resources to learn more about the summit:

• COP 28 Is a Crunch Point for Countries on the Front Lines of Climate Change
  ”For COP 28 to be successful, outcomes must ensure that the needs of vulnerable developing countries and communities are prioritized, including fast-tracked and uncomplicated access to finance. For the Global South, these issues are fundamentally linked to global accountability, justice, trust and survival.” -Scientific American, November 29, 2023.
  

• COP28: key issues at stake and indicators of success
  ”COP28 represents an important opportunity for the Global North to gain back some of the credibility lost in the Global South over several years, during the pandemic and the energy crisis. Serious steps towards ensuring proper climate finance, loss and damage and adaptation will be key.”

  Bruegel, November 23, 2023.
  

• The future of the planet hinges on understanding these 5 key phrases

  “To help clarify the most important debates that underscore our current moment, there are five concepts to keep in mind. Together they help make sense of what needs to be done about supercharged heat waves, hurricanes, and other troubling thresholds on the horizon. Ongoing efforts in the climate movement hinge on these concepts, but they will also take center stage in Dubai at COP28, the 28th United Nations climate conference, which begins this week.”

  Vox, November 27, 2023.
  

• Cop28 president denies on eve of summit he abused his position to sign oil deals
  ”Speaking to a small group of journalists in Dubai on the eve of the conference on Wednesday, Al Jaber said: “These allegations are false. Not true, incorrect, not accurate. It’s an attempt to undermine the work of the Cop28 presidency … Never ever did I see these talking points or ever used such talking points in my discussions.”
  The Guardian, November 29, 2023.

Catch of the Day: You know who is not ignoring COP28? Emma! Here she is pictured outside a year-round greenhouse, photographed by reader Nell, resting by her protest signs for a 350.org rally.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

It’s been widely reported that the day 23-year-old Ana Clara Benevides collapsed and died at a sold-out sweltering Taylor Swift concert in Rio de Janeiro was a historic and dangerously hot day for Brazil, with the local heat index exceeding 120 degrees Fahrenheit (48ºC).

What has been less discussed, at least thus far, is the fact that the day Benevides died was also a historic and dangerously hot day for the whole world.

On Friday, November 17, scientists saw Earth’s average surface temperature momentarily rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first time since humans began keeping temperature records, marking a brief entry into a deadly phase of climate change that scientists have been frantically warning about for decades.

That following day, the heat index in Brazil reached up to 138 degrees Fahrenheit (58ºC). This time, Swift announced she would postpone the second night of her Eras tour in Brazil. "The safety and well-being of my fans, fellow performers and crew has to and will always come first,” she wrote.

And on that same day—Saturday, November 18—scientists announced that Earth’s average surface temperature had once again crossed the 2 degree Celsius warming threshold, now for the second time in modern recorded history.

It’s not a coincidence that these news events happened simultaneously. The climate crisis made Brazil’s extreme temperatures five times more likely to occur, according to Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index.

And though the two stories may be treated separately by the news media, extreme heat experts say Taylor Swift’s deadly concert and the Earth’s grim temperature milestone are in fact part of the same narrative: They each illustrate the consequences of ignoring scientists’ warnings about the deadly risks of climate change.

“This summer, whether in the U.S. or Brazil, is likely one of the coolest summers of the rest of our lives,” said Bharat Venkat, an associate professor at UCLA and director of the UCLA Heat Lab. “It's not even that what we're experiencing now is the new normal; it’s probably the best it's going to be.”

So if megastars like Taylor Swift want to keep touring the ever-warming planet to bring tens of thousands of people in close outdoor quarters together, without deadly consequences, experts say they not only have to take more seriously the dangers of extreme heat—they have to be more vocal about the reason it’s so hot in the first place.

“I of course understand that for someone like [Taylor], the climate crisis is a political quagmire,” said Jeff Goodell, author of The New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First, in an email. “But fuck, she has the power to wake up millions of people to the risks of the climate crisis. Why doesn’t she use it?”

The unharnessed climate potential of Taylor Swift

As a journalist who’s spent years reporting on deadly extreme heat, Goodell has a lot of thoughts about what went wrong at Swift’s Brazil concert on Friday, and what could be done by venues and entertainment companies to better protect fans.

But as a bonafide Swiftie, who’s been to three of Taylor’s tours—Red, Reputation and 1989—Goodell also believes the superstar has not only a responsibility, but a unique opportunity to protect her fans by speaking up about the climate crisis.

First and foremost, though, Goodell said that people in charge of large events like stadium shows must start taking the threat of extreme heat far more seriously. “It’s outrageous the show went forward at all,” he said.

Not only did organizers know the heat was coming, Goodell said, they should have known how deadly extreme heat can be at events like these. After all, during the 2022 World Cup, 400 to 500 workers died while building the stadium in Qatar’s extreme summer heat. And over the past 25 years, 68 American football players have died from heat stroke, which is also one of the leading causes of sudden death in sports overall.

“To me, what this demonstrates is just how stupid and/or unserious people are about the risks of extreme heat,” Goodell said. “Concerts and other outdoor events are routinely cancelled because of hurricane or tropical storm threats, or even reports [of] lightning in the vicinity. But heat gets little or no consideration. Why?”

His concerns echo those of Madeleine Orr, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto, who said that most venues’ weather cancellation policies do not mention extreme heat, and that this must change in the era of climate change. She also noted that, at Swift’s Friday show in Rio, the venue didn’t allow concertgoers to bring in water or water bottles, which led to reportedly thousands of people being treated for dehydration by emergency services, and Swift herself stopping the show to urge fans to get water. In the aftermath of the concert, Brazil’s Justice Minister Flávio Dino tweeted that water bottles would be allowed at concerts and festivals, and that venues must provide free drinking water.

“So far, the strategy around managing heat at big sport events and big festivals is to make sure the medical team is ready to hand out water,” Orr said.

But even if the venue adequately supplied water, Goodell noted, it may not have been enough. “All water does is allow you to sweat. It doesn’t actually cool you off,” he said. “In my book, I cite lots of research and evidence that people can die of heat stroke even though they have plenty of water.”

This is why he goes back to the untapped potential of Swift herself: Because the main problem he sees right now is not with a lack of ideas of how to protect people from climate change and extreme heat. It’s a lack of collective will to implement those ideas, which Swift has the unique power to create.

Swift has said she was left “devastated” by Benevides’ death; at her Sunday show in Brazil, she performed a deep album cut about grief, “Bigger Than the Whole Sky,” which fans speculated was in honor of Benevides.

But as time goes on, Goodell hopes Swift will say more on the deadly threat of extreme heat, which her fans will only face more frequently as the climate crisis worsens.

“She doesn’t have to trash-talk ExxonMobil,” Goodell said. “Just acknowledge in some very Taylor way that our world is heating up and we need to pay attention and get smart about the risks we face.“

“She obviously has a deep emotional connection with her fans,” he added. “And when one of her fans dies at her concert because we’re cooking the planet with fossil fuels, doesn’t she have some responsibility to acknowledge that, or at least talk about it?”

Goodell also said he hopes that, given Swift’s immense power and privilege, she would feel some responsibility to speak out—just as he feels a responsibility to do the same.

“I think Taylor is an incredible performer, and she seems like a morally astute human being,” he said. “But at some point, if she wants to be a force for good in the world, she needs to use her voice at moments like this.”

(FYI: We sent Goodell’s full comments to Swift’s press team and asked if they would like to respond, but we haven’t heard back as of press time. We’ll update if we hear anything back).

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Catch of the Day: Eight-year-old white German Shepherd Brody hates extreme heat, but he really hates thunderstorms. According to reader Julie, even the slightest rumble sends him in search of somewhere safe—even if his big, 100-pound body doesn’t quite fit.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

When Cecile Simmons, a part-time yoga instructor, scrolled through her Instagram feed earlier this year, she noticed something peculiar happening among the health and wellness influencers she followed: some had started posting climate change conspiracies.

A post from the New Age spirituality account @aguidetoawakening, for example, had told its 10,900 followers that the “The accelerating ‘climate change’ is not due to human activities,” but due to the “organic phenomenon of Asciention Mechanics.”

Another post from @drmercola, a homeopath with 500,000 followers, claimed that “Biden wants to block out the sun to save the planet.” That post garnered 8,470 likes and 1,405 comments.

drmercola

A post shared by @drmercola

Alarmed, Simmons—who also happens to be a full-time misinformation researcher—decided to look into the phenomenon further. And on Thursday, the results of her research, published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, found that a small group of self-styled health and lifestyle gurus are helping climate denial find traction with new audiences. 

Simmons compiled 154 Instagram wellness influencer accounts that regularly post about conspiracy theories and New-Age spirituality—an area academics refer to as “conspirituality”—and found that these accounts, with more than 9.5 million followers total, had created 140 posts mentioning climate change or the environment over the course of a year.

The top themes of these posts, according to the report, included “outright rejection” of climate science; skepticism about the impact of climate change on natural disasters, false claims about the climate impact of animal agriculture, and claims that climate change is a result of “geoengineering” and government control. 

One post this summer by fitness influencer @iansmithfitness, who has more than 414,000 followers, said, “The wildfires will continue until you submit to climate change regulations.”

iansmithfitness

A post shared by @iansmithfitness

Another post from @carnivoreaurelius, an alternative health account with more than 700,000 followers, said going vegan is “one of the greatest scams we were ever told,” in part because “animal based agriculture” produces less greenhouse gases than “plant-based”. None of that is true, but the post has more than 60,500 likes, and 1,955 comments.

“These are people who you would expect to be invested in climate and the environment,” said Simmons. “What they're actually doing is promoting this kind of hyper-individualistic pursuit of health. That's how you get to these rightwing anti-climate narratives.”

It’s not surprising climate misinformation is rife on Instagram; the platform, now owned by Facebook parent company Meta, has been rife with conspiracy theories for years. But the wellness community is new territory for climate denial, which is more likely to be spread via conservative news or right-wing accounts—not via aesthetically pleasing posts from natural parenting advocates and nutritionists.

“Wellness influences have been key in promoting self-optimization and self-actualization,” said Simmons. “So there is a risk that when faced with the fear of climate change, people will focus on self-optimization as opposed to embracing collective action.”

taniatheherbalist

A post shared by @taniatheherbalist

These Instagram micro-celebrities have more than a long reach: they also have a unique relationship with their followers. Yoga instructors, athletic trainers, nutritionists, and even astologists are reframing climate denial as a way to self-guard your health, and climate misinformation as empowerment.

"There's something quite powerful about the trust that these people kind of have among their audiences,” said Simmons.

This isn’t the first time the wellness community has made extremist views mainstream. During the early years of the pandemic, misinformation researchers started noticing that among the yoga poses and fitspiration posts, wellness gurus were prolifically posting about QAnon, the conspiracy theory that former President Trump saved the world from pedophiles (among other things). 

The QAnon posts were aesthetically pleasing and Instagram-ready, leading one researcher to dub it “Pastel QAnon.” The rebranding helped spread QAnon to younger, and more female, audiences. 

The same spaces were also susceptible to anti-vaccine misinformation, which was spread rapidly during the pandemic by yogis and other alternative health accounts, according to misinformation researchers like Stephanie Alice Baker, a sociology professor at City, University of London. 

Baker says the pandemic turbocharged conspiracy theories in the wellness space. Wellness influencers may “combine nutritional advice and exercise tips with self-development and new age spirituality,” said Baker, but they have become an effective way to promote extreme far-right, even fascist, ideals. 

“There is this overarching concern in the wellness space, and the New Age space in particular, with purity and this idea about right moral action,” she said. That made wellness advocates more susceptible to extreme rightwing ideals “because purity is one of the values that is so sacrosanct to a conservative moral outlook.”

aguidetoawakening2.0

A post shared by @aguidetoawakening2.0

But they’d never shared climate conspiracies until relatively recently, according to the report.

Many of the climate misinformation posts in the study date to last summer, when record heatwaves and wildfires made the climate crisis the top story for months on end. The timing is not a coincidence—after capitalizing on people’s fear of lockdown, pandemic safety restrictions, and vaccines, influencers looked for their next boogeyman.

“People saw that freedom of movement, that freedom of choice can genuinely shift overnight,” said Jennie King, the head of climate research and policy at ISD. “So for those who had already been trying to spread the belief that the climate agenda was a precursor to tyranny, it was a very convenient community that they could infiltrate.”

So far, Meta has left most of these posts untouched, despite a climate misinformation policy that says the company works with “90 independent fact-checking organizations” to review climate-related content. When fact-checkers rate content as false, they add a warning label and reduces its visibility on the platform, according to the company’s policy. 

Meta also says it “takes action” against accounts that post repeatedly share false claims. But an analysis last year by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Meta failed to flag about half of Facebook posts containing climate misinformation—and something similar appears to be happening on Instagram. Without transparency from Meta, it’s impossible to know the true extent of the wellness community’s climate misinformation problem, the researchers found.

“We take climate change seriously, which is why we take steps to make sure people have access to reliable information while reducing misinformation,” a Meta spokesperson wrote in an email, which repeated talking points from climate misinformation policy. The spokesperson declined to answer specific questions on the record.

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A post shared by @starseed_777

Still, King believes the solution is not to remove wellness conspiracy theorists from social media—because even though the conspiracies aren’t real, their audience’s fear of the future is.

“It's not helpful to other these groups by saying they're ridiculous and they shouldn't be taken seriously,” said King. “Because they do have tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people that to some extent engage with those belief systems.”

Instead, King said, “We have to ask ourselves collectively: what is it providing that isn’t being delivered by the mainstream?”

In the end, it may be the sense of comfort and understanding people get from their spiritualists and wellness gurus–a warmth they may not necessarily feel with the scientific community. 

“I think that you need to view people at that stage as being at a crossroads,” King said. “Just because something has become a more prevalent concern, doesn't necessarily mean it's a foregone conclusion that they'll be pushed towards credible science.”

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Catch of the day: Eleanor the Labrador and her sister from another mister, Chloe, left their home in South California to start a new adventure with in La Costa Del Sol, Spain. Even with sea levels rising, the pups and their dog dads Tony and Matt are happy to enjoy their new life along the shores of the Mediterranean.

Cheers to living life in dog years as a way to cope with climate change!

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

We’re just two weeks out from COP28, the annual high-stakes U.N. summit where world leaders hash out their plans to stave off global ecological and economic catastrophe from climate change.

This year, the summit will be held in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates and led by UAE oil baron Sultan Al Jaber, who has what he calls a “game-changing plan” to achieve unprecedented progress: Allow oil and gas companies to have more influence over the negotiations.1

If you understand one thing about this plan, let it be this: There is nothing “game-changing” about giving fossil fuel companies more influence at global climate talks. The strategy is merely a repackaging of a decades-long status quo that has resulted in ever-increasing global emissions.

Related reading: How fossil fuel interests choked last year’s climate talks

Since the annual COPs began in the 1990s, polluting interests have been deeply involved in negotiations, sending hundreds of lobbyists each year. At last year’s summit, close to 400 people connected to fossil fuel industries were in attendance—”a grouping that was larger than all but two of the national delegations sent by countries,” according to an Associated Press analysis released this week.2

While it’s difficult to quantify the fossil fuel industry’s influence at these summits because so much of the negotiations happen behind closed doors, two things can be said definitively:

1. Fossil fuel interests have a consistent, decades-long track record of using their political influence to delay climate action.345

2. In three decades, the COP talks have yet to produce any agreement to phase out, or even phase down fossil fuels, the leading cause of climate change.

While climate scientists say it’s absolutely necessary to phase down fossil fuels to preserve a livable climate, fossil fuel-producing countries like the UAE argue that such an agreement is not necessary. Instead, the country’s environment minister has said that what’s needed is an agreement to phase down fossil fuel “emissions”—meaning you keep burning fossil fuels, but prevent the emissions from entering the atmosphere with carbon capture technology, while ramping up production of renewable energy. 6

But here’s what’s wrong with that strategy: the world is already doing it, and it’s still far from enough to preserve a safe and stable climate.78

In the last year, global investment in carbon capture has doubled to $6.4 billion, and by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, “there are set to be almost 10 times as many electric cars on the road, with renewables nearing half of the global power mix.” And yet even with all that, the IEA adds that if fossil fuel demand keeps apace, global warming would still rise to 2.4°C this century.

This is a level of warming that scientists have categorized as “catastrophic,” leading to “very high-temperature heat waves, crop failure, extreme drought … and in the long term, multi-meter sea level rise.” And it’s far from the 1.5°C goal that the U.N. negotiations are supposed to be attempting to reach.9

The fossil fuel industry’s only answer to this is that they will, essentially, perform a technological miracle. They promise they will improve carbon capture capacity and efficacy so much that we can have our fossil fuels and burn them too.10

But this is a promise that, if broken, will have almost unthinkable, irreparable consequences for the ecosystems we all depend on for survival. And it is a promise being made by actors who have, for decades, continually shown a willingness to put short-term profit over the planet’s long-term condition.

So should we trust it this time, as we head into COP28? U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, while he has “serious questions,” appears to be taking it on good faith. At this year’s summit, he told the Associated Press in an interview, he’ll be pushing for an agreement to phase out “unabated” fossil fuels—a term that refers to not to all fossil fuels, but fossil fuels that don’t have a plan attached for their emissions to be eventually captured. Last month, the European Union also announced that its 27-country bloc will advocate for the phasing out of “unabated” fossil fuels at this year’s COP, instead of just fossil fuels in general. 11 12

There are those who argue that this language is important; that in truth, “unabated” fossil fuels are what the world needs to stave off climate catastrophe. I understand that. And in a technical sense, I agree.13

But I don’t believe the UAE—nor the U.S. or EU, for that matter—is pushing for the “unabated” language because that is what the world “technically” needs. I believe they are pushing for the “unabated” language because it is the only thing that a summit perpetually choked by fossil fuel influence will allow. The word “unabated,” vague and undefined, will provide enough of a window for countries to continue expanding fossil fuel production and increasing their emissions, while claiming to be doing what’s best for the planet. I believe this for no reason other than a decades-long track record of B.S. from these summits, coupled with ever-rising emissions thanks to oil industry lobbyists.

I would love nothing more, however, than to be proven wrong. So I’ll be following along, and I’ll keep you posted. Maybe this time oil companies really will save the world.

Further reading:

• An "Unabated" Disaster. Drilled, September 2, 2023.

• The UAE holds a major oil and gas conference just ahead of hosting UN climate talks in Dubai. Associated Press, October 2, 2023.

• Exclusive: COP28 host UAE to extract nearly 40 billion barrels of oil and gas over 70 years. Energy Monitor, November 13, 2023.

Catch of the Day: Alright everyone, it’s time to cool off with Cooper, a beautiful Bluetick Coonhound who was rescued by dear reader Matt.

Cooper is very lazy, and likes to sleep most of the day, but wakes up for two things: food and squirrels. He's terrified of thunderstorms and fireworks.

Want to see your furry (or non-furry!) friend in HEATED? It might take a little while, but we WILL get to yours eventually! Just send a picture and some words to catchoftheday@heated.world.

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8

Carbon Capture Investment Hits Record High of $6.4 Billion. BNEF, February 2023.