SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
October, 09 2024, 03:18pm EDT
Contact:
Melanie Smith
us-comms@350.org, melanie.smith@350.org
350.org responds to Hurricane Milton as it approaches Florida
FLORIDA
This evening, Hurricane Milton will touch down in Florida. The hurricane has mutated on a horrifying, unprecedented scale, stunning meteorologists and scientists and demonstrating one of the fastest intensifications on record. It comes only one week after Hurricane Helene devastated the southeastern U.S., including Florida.
Candice Fortin, 350.org US Campaigns Manager, responds:
“I grew up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and I’ve had to fight the fossil fuel industry since I was a kid: BP’s offshore drilling wreaked havoc on our health and air. I watched their oil spill impacts for years. As I now wait to hear from friends in Hurricane Milton’s path and watch it stun even the scientists who have modeled the progression of climate change, I know that the fossil fuel executives and their government backers have even more blood on their hands. This is a climate emergency. Every time we repeat that, countless more lives have been lost or upended by the fossil fuel industry. How many more times will it take? We call on President Biden to use his executive power to declare a Climate Emergency so we can finally protect frontline communities like the one that raised me."
350 is building a future that's just, prosperous, equitable and safe from the effects of the climate crisis. We're an international movement of ordinary people working to end the age of fossil fuels and build a world of community-led renewable energy for all.
LATEST NEWS
'Laggards': Top 6 Wall Street Banks Failing on Net-Zero Climate Pledges
"Wall Street banks need to walk the walk, and their regulators, clients, and shareholders need to do more to hold them accountable."
Oct 09, 2024
Sierra Club on Wednesday issued a report showing that the United States' six largest banks lag behind in efforts to meet 2030 and 2050 climate emissions targets they've set, as they continue to pour billions of dollars into fossil fuel financing every year.
The 29-page report, Leaders or Laggards: Analyzing Major U.S. Banks' Net-Zero Commitments, assesses the progress of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley on efforts to meet 2030 targets, exclusion policies, and climate disclosure policies—the overall aim is to track their progress toward net-zero across their portfolios by 2050, which each has pledged to do.
"The role of major banks is critical for ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future," Ben Cushing, director of the Sierra Club's Fossil-Free Finance campaign, said in a statement.
"We cannot solve the climate crisis if they continue with business as usual," he added. "While the largest U.S. banks have committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, they are evidently not yet on track to make it happen."
"Wall Street banks need to walk the walk, and their regulators, clients, and shareholders need to do more to hold them accountable," he concluded.
Major US banks @Chase @BankofAmerica @Citi @WellsFargo @GoldmanSachs @MorganStanley could actually make progress toward net-zero by:
1️⃣ Improving 2030 targets
2️⃣ Strengthening exclusion policies
3️⃣ Enhancing transparencyhttps://t.co/CcZzTCrGKi pic.twitter.com/PpPDXTApfQ
— Sierra Club (@SierraClub) October 9, 2024
The report's titular question is answered in the concluding section. "In general, the targets and exclusion policies of the major U.S. banks fall far behind international best practices and what is required in order to achieve their own climate commitments," it says.
"[They] have serious improvements to make in order to ensure their 2030 targets and financing policies are truly aligned with the goal of reaching net-zero by 2050," it also says.
The report provides detailed standards that banks must uphold if they want their net-zero policies to be "robust," and lays out examples of how each bank is failing to meet them.
The six banks are "relatively equal" in terms of their progress toward net zero, but there are some differences between them, the report says.
For example, only Citigroup and Wells Fargo have committed to reduce absolute emissions in the oil and gas sector—a key standard. The other four banks have merely set "emissions intensity" targets. Wells Fargo is the only one of the six to declare that its carbon accounting for 2030 won't include offsets or removal.
Bank of America, for its part, has backtracked on earlier climate pledges. Previously, the bank promised not to directly fund oil and gas drilling in the Arctic, but in December it announced it would simply apply "enhanced due diligence" to such projects.
One key standard that banks should employ is separating their emissions bookkeeping for lending and underwriting, the report says. Underwriting accounts for roughly half of banks' fossil fuel financing but is harder for the public to track than lending.
"Some banks limit their sectoral targets to cover lending, but exclude underwriting, creating a massive loophole through which billions of dollars can still be poured into heavily emitting sectors and projects," the report says.
In general, the report urges more standardization of climate accounting methods along with improved transparency and disclosure policies.
Four of the six banks are in fact in the top five on the list of global banks financing the fossil fuel industry since the Paris agreement was signed, according to the latest Banking on Climate Chaosreport, released in May. And when only financing for companies expanding oil and gas projects are considered, rather than just continuing to extract from existing reserves, the U.S. banks remain at the top.
"By far the most essential action that banks must take to reach their net-zero goals is to commit to ending support for expansion of fossil fuel production," the Sierra Club report says, citing Banking on Climate Chaos.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Big Oil's Reckless Conduct' Caused Milton—And Now They Should Pay, Say Advocates
"The failure by our political class to deal with this completely solvable issue is staggering and shameful," wrote one journalist.
Oct 09, 2024
As Hurricane Milton's 145 mile-per-hour winds began closing in on Southwest Florida on Wednesday and people crowded into makeshift shelters across the state, climate advocates and other observers said the life-threatening storm and massive disruption to millions of people's lives should make Americans "furious" at those who have helped make extreme weather more frequent and dangerous.
As Nathan J. Robinson wrote in Current Affairs, climate scientists and meteorologists have unequivocally told oil companies and policymakers that fossil fuel extraction is causing planetary heating, which has led to higher temperatures in oceans and bodies of water including the Gulf of Mexico, where the rapidly strengthening hurricane formed.
But despite the knowledge that fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil and Shell had decades ago that drilling for oil and gas would cause "violent weather" and "potentially catastrophic events," the industry's profits have only grown as the U.S. has continued to subsidize their pollution-causing activities.
"The failure by our political class to deal with this completely solvable issue is staggering and shameful," wrote Robinson. "Many of them have children and grandchildren. Presumably they would like their descendants to inherit a world worth living in. And they could make that happen. Unfortunately, it would require challenging the power and profits of some of America's most influential corporations."
In the Substack newsletter Heated, Arielle Samuelson explained on Wednesday how fossil fuel extraction and planetary heating "mutated" Hurricane Milton, which stunned weather experts this week as its wind speeds grew at a record-breaking pace, from 60 miles per hour to 180 miles per hour in just 36 hours.
It was the second time in recent weeks that a hurricane in the region has intensified quickly; areas that are expected to take a direct hit from Milton are still overwhelmed by the destruction left by Hurricane Helene.
Hot temperatures in the planets' oceans and gulfs fuels hurricanes, and as Samuelson noted, scientists say the "extremely hot" Gulf of Mexico "was made far more likely by heat-trapping pollutants from the fossil fuel, agriculture, chemical, and cement industries."
She continued:
In the past two weeks, ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were about 30-31° Celsius (86-88°F)—about 1 to 2° Celsius above average. The climate crisis made these extraordinarily high ocean temperatures at least 400 to 800 times more likely over the past two weeks, according to a rapid attribution study from Climate Central.
[...]
The science is also extremely clear that heat-trapping pollution causes sea-level rise and heavier rainfall, both of which make hurricanes more dangerous. Rainfall rates for tropical cyclones are expected to rise with the planet's temperature, causing deadly flash floods like those found in Asheville, North Carolina. Sea level rise also means that coastal communities, and communities further inland, are more likely to be flooded during a storm.
That's an objectively scary reality. But we know the primary source of greenhouse gas pollution, scientists note, so we also know how to slow the problem.
The lingering destruction of Helene and the impending landfall of Milton come, noted Fossil Fuel Media director Jamie Henn, weeks after three Democrats in Congress introduced legislation to require fossil fuel companies and oil refiners that do business in the U.S. to pay into a $1 trillion Polluters Pay Climate Fund, with their contributions based on a percentage of their global emissions.
The fund would be used to finance climate adaptation and other efforts to confront the impacts of the climate crisis.
In a press briefing on Wednesday, President Joe Biden noted how the damage done by Helene and the rapidly evolving news about Milton has left overwhelmed Americans vulnerable to misinformation, with some urging them to direct their anger at the White House or the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made baseless claims that FEMA funds were spent on funding for immigrant shelters, while U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote on social media that an unnamed "they" can control the weather and suggested the federal government is deliberately keeping emergency aid from people in states controlled by Republicans.
As fossil fuel firms and political leaders march "us toward the tipping points," wrote Robinson, "many people won't understand what is happening to them."
"In a chaotic information environment filled with endless falsehoods, they'll conclude that the president is manipulating the weather, or FEMA is trying to kill people," he wrote. "The real story, however, is straightforward: We have a political class that is vastly more committed to sending weapons to war criminals than funding emergency management, and which will not acknowledge the basic facts of the problem (and the known solutions) because some large economic actors benefit in the short run from the destruction of the planet."
"Truly, it's revolting," he added. "What an absolute disgrace our failure to deal with climate change is."
Candice Fortin, U.S. campaigns manager for 350.org, said that fossil fuel executives and the politicians that support them have "blood on their hands" and called on Biden to unequivocally stand on the side of hurricane victims by declaring a climate emergency.
"This is a climate emergency," said Fortin. "Every time we repeat that, countless more lives have been lost or upended by the fossil fuel industry. How many more times will it take? We call on President Biden to use his executive power to declare a climate emergency so we can finally protect frontline communities."
At Newsweek, organizer and attorney Aaron Regunberg wrote that oil companies' contributions to the climate emergency have been compounded by their vast efforts to spread misinformation and hide their knowledge that fossil fuel extraction was heating the planet.
Exxon CEO Darren Woods, he wrote, pushed for a surge in the company's extractive activities while "overseeing a substantial portion of the company's climate deception efforts," and received $198.9 million for his "climate crimes" from 2015-23, as well as owning Exxon shares worth $371.1 million.
"Regular people are paying the ultimate price for this sociopathic greed," wrote Regunberg. "The families made homeless, the wives and husbands and parents and children who lost loved ones to Helene—these victims deserve justice no less than victims of street-level crimes, and the companies and corporate executives responsible for their pain and suffering deserve criminal punishment at least as much as, if not far more than, the average street-level offender."
"Climate victims have paid so much for Big Oil's reckless conduct," he added. "It's time to make the polluters pay."
Keep ReadingShow Less
FCC Chair Rebukes DeSantis-Run Florida for Threatening TV Station Over Abortion Ad
Another critic said that "this is the latest proof that there is no limit to how low DeSantis will stoop to censor free speech and punish dissent."
Oct 09, 2024
Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel on Tuesday called out a Florida agency for threatening a Tampa NBC affiliate with prosecution for airing an advertisement in support of a state abortion rights proposal on the November ballot.
"The right of broadcasters to speak freely is rooted in the First Amendment," Rosenworcel said in a statement. "Threats against broadcast stations for airing content that conflicts with the government's views are dangerous and undermine the fundamental principle of free speech."
Floridians Protecting Freedom's ad is designed to build support for Amendment 4, which if approved by voters next month would alter the Florida Constitution to outlaw pre-viability prohibitions on abortion care, including Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' six-week ban, which took effect earlier this year and has already been shown to harm patients.
The 30-second ad features a Tampa resident who was diagnosed with brain cancer while pregnant. Caroline, who already had one child at the time, says that "the doctors knew if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom."
"Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine," explains Caroline, who received abortion care in 2020, before the U.S. Supreme Court reversedRoe v. Wade and enabled bans like the one signed by DeSantis. "Amendment 4 is gonna protect women like me. We have to vote yes."
Florida journalist Jason Garcia revealed Monday that last week, John Wilson, general counsel at the state Department of Health (DOH), wrote to WFLA-TV vice president and general manager Mark Higgins, claiming that the ad contains information that is "categorically false" and constitutes a "sanitary nuisance," which could lead to criminal proceedings if it is not removed.
As HuffPostreported Tuesday:
It's unclear if the agency only sent the letter to the NBC affiliate, or to others as well. Either way, a threat like this could have a chilling effect on publicly advocating for the pro-choice measure, just weeks away from when it will be in front of voters. Florida's Department of Health did not respond to HuffPost's request for comment.
The sanitary nuisance law is meant to curb conditions that can threaten or impair Floridians' health. It normally pertains to issues like overflowing septic tanks and problematic garbage disposals.
Attorneys for Floridians Protecting Freedom swiftly sent a letter to WFLA leaders, arguing that the DOH interjection "raises serious First Amendment concerns—indeed, it reflects an unconstitutional attempt to coerce the station into censoring protected speech," and "the advertisement is true."
The DOH letter "vaguely outlines the limited instances where abortions are allowed in Florida but fails to provide any evidence showing that Caroline's statements are false," the lawyers wrote. "Caroline was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer when she was 20 weeks pregnant; the diagnosis was terminal."
Florida's ban has limited exceptions for abortions after six weeks—before many people even know they are pregnant. In cases of rape and incest, patients can receive care up to 15 weeks, if they can manage the burdensome paperwork. Abortions to protect the health or life of a pregnant person require two physicians to assert in writing that such care is necessary.
"The only instances where the Agency for Health Care Administration has provided guidance that abortions are permitted after six-weeks' gestation are when there is an immediate threat to the pregnant person's life," the lawyers noted. "Caroline's diagnosis was terminal. Practically, that means that an abortion would not have saved her life, only extended it. Florida law would not allow an abortion in this instance."
The group of attorneys is far from alone in criticizing the Florida DOH's attempt to get the ad off the air. Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), toldPopular Information that the department's letter stretches "the meaning of sanitary nuisance beyond recognition."
"Terr told Popular Information that even if the ad was false and violated Florida's sanitary nuisance law, the enforcement of the law against a political ad would be unconstitutional," the outlet added. "Terr notes that the First Amendment contains 'no general exception for false speech or misinformation, and that's because of the danger of the government having a general power to dictate what is true or false, especially when it comes to political speech.'"
As Slate's Mark Joseph Stern reported Monday:
Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School and a First Amendment specialist, told me that the DeSantis administration's threat is "about as blatant a violation of the First Amendment as you'll see."
Jennifer Safstrom, director of the First Amendment Clinic at Vanderbilt Law School, condemned the administration's letter as an unconstitutional "weaponization of state law to suppress speech" that's "designed to have a chilling effect on advocates during a time critical to voter outreach." Alexander Tsesis, a professor at the Florida State University College of Law, said it seemed "absurd to threaten prosecution," and pointed out that stations' own "editorial decisions" are protected by the First Amendment. Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a professor at Stetson Law, called the incident yet another episode in DeSantis' "long recent history of violating the First Amendment with abandon."
Seth Stern, director of advocacy of Freedom of the Press Foundation, similarly said in a Wednesday statement that "this is the latest proof that there is no limit to how low DeSantis will stoop to censor free speech and punish dissent."
"It comes on the heels of his efforts to rewrite defamation law to make it easier for the rich and powerful to bankrupt their critics, his Stop WOKE Act stunt, and other similarly unconstitutional nonsense," Stern noted. "A governor who is confident in his policies and secure in his leadership would welcome debate and correct statements he believes are misleading rather than trying to weaponize trash disposal laws against the free press."
"But DeSantis is not that governor. His administration's conduct would be silly if it weren't such a transparent bully tactic," he added. "Floridians care about the First Amendment, which is why DeSantis' outrageous censorship campaigns keep failing. We hope the news outlets he targets will not only ignore him but loudly shame him."
The governor has come under fire for various actions throughout the fight for Amendment 4. As Garcia highlighted on social media, while targeting Caroline's ad, "the DeSantis administration is running taxpayer-funded television commercials attacking Amendment 4 on ESPN, CNN, Fox News, The Weather Channel, and more."
The ads are part of what the ACLU of Florida has called an "unconstitutional misinformation campaign," which also includes a government website. Additionally, as Common Dreamsreported last month, multiple state residents have had law enforcement come to their homes to confirm that they signed the petition to get Amendment 4 on the ballot.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular