Bloomberg news: ‘Could $200 Billion Tobacco-Type Settlement Be Coming Over ‘Climate Change?’
https://bol.bna.com/could-200-billion-tobacco-type-settlement-be-coming-over-climate-change/
At the Big Law Business Summit last week, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman ripped into Exxon Mobil for its stance on climate change.
Schneiderman accused Exxon of glossing over the risks that climate change poses to its core businesses in its public securities statements, and then couching its disclosure as first amendment protected.
“The first amendment doesn’t protect fraud – it doesn’t protect fraudulent speech,” he said.
This weekend, the Houston Chronicle published its investigation of the brewing legal threats that energy companies face as a result of their disclosures on climate change, comparing it to the situation tobacco companies faced in the late 1990s over their disclosures about the dangers of smoking.
In 1998, attorneys general from 46 states struck a $200 billion settlement with tobacco companies, ending years of litigation about whether they mislead smokers about the health risks of their products.
Now, there are 17 state attorneys general including Schneiderman investigating whether fossil fuel companies mislead investors in public disclosures about the risks associated with climate change.
Big law firms have been sending client alerts to energy companies, warning that a storm is brewing, according to the Chron, which quoted an email sent by lawyers at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman: “There is escalating effort to bring pressure to bear on companies with respect to their public securities statements on the effects of climate change.”…
‘The no-showering challenge’: ‘Why we should all take part’
James Hamblin, senior editor of the Atlantic, recently joined the unwashed masses. As part of his series If Our Bodies Could Talk, Hamblin, a relatively sane-looking man, took on a no-showering challenge to examine the effect of overcleansing the body. He reduced the number of showers he took and eliminated shampoo and soap when he did.
In doing so, he discovered what thousands of others have: the more we fervently try to clean ourselves with soaps, body washes, and those silly little body poufs, the harder our skin works to restore equilibrium, cueing us to begin the whole bewildering process again. Showering strips the skin of its own oil and bacteria – which, many would argue, is the whole point of showering – but apparently this sometimes works a little too well, especially when you add hot water and cleansing products to the mix.
You know that feeling after a shower when you feel like you’re stuck in a skin suit two sizes too small? That’s because much of your skin’s natural moisture has been washed down the drain. Additionally, our skin, much like our gut, plays host to millions of beneficial bacteria. Showering destroys these happy bacterial colonies; they’re completely wiped out by all of our frequent rubbing and scrubbing. And when the bacteria washed off by soap repopulate, they tend to favour microbes which produce an odor – yes, too-frequent showering may actually make you smell more. When you stop showering and using soap, however, your skin goes through an initial (likely gross) adjustment period, after which the skin typically restores balance, oil production slows, and healthy bacteria flourish.
After everything was said and done, Hamblin realised what other no-soap/no-shower devotees have known for years: that the human body, functioning on its own, is actually quite lovely.…
University Censures Science Prof For Fact-Checking Global Warming Claim
An Australian university recently censured marine scientist Paul Ridd for “failing to act in a collegial way and in the academic spirit of the institution,” because he questioned popular claims among environmentalists about coral reefs and global warming.…
Powerful Natural Oceanic Factor Confirmed ….Global Surface Temperatures Continue Their Fall
…How Obama is ‘Trump-proofing’ his UN climate pact
…Pershing is now trying to lock in the U.S. side of the accord, which requires all nations to develop public plans detailing how they would cut carbon emissions through at least 2025. Oddly enough, Trump’s own hand-picked new energy czar, Rep. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, agrees that his boss can do only so much damage. Cramer, in an interview with me in late May, was notably noncommittal when I asked him if Trump would simply renege on the Paris accord. He noted that Trump has said at a minimum that he’d “renegotiate” it, and he made the point that this is how Trump has approached past business negotiations, starting from an extreme position.
“I think you might see him pivot away” from his hard-line stance on scrapping the agreement altogether, Cramer told POLITICO.
Even Trump himself appears to be conceding some ground on the pact, saying at a minimum he will “rein it in as much as possible.” It all feels rather made-up-as-he-goes-along: Cramer, known as an energy hawk who wants to cut “punitive” fees on oil—but also wants to see more of a federal role for selling power across state lines—says he had spoken to Trump only twice before the campaign tapped him. One was on a radio talk show in early April, Cramer says, and then again a couple weeks later when Trump came to Washington to deliver a foreign policy speech.
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In an era in which denial of global warming is still the official platform of the GOP, and the party’s newly anointed leader has repeatedly called it a “hoax,” the fate of the Paris accord under a potential Republican president may well be crucial to the future of the earth’s climate. Formally speaking, Trump can’t just wave a wand and pull the United States out of the Paris treaty; to leave it officially would require the United States to first wait three years, and then give a one-year notice—effectively putting a withdrawal beyond the next presidential election. Nor could Trump hope to renegotiate the international climate accord, which was reached by more than 170 countries after nearly 25 years’ worth of backroom meetings and formal negotiations. A President Trump would not be able to herd all those diplomats back to the table.
What Trump could do, however, is obstruct compliance at home by holding up key appointments, squeezing key agencies’ budgets or taking other
NEW CLOUD STUDIES ARE ANOTHER BLOW TO CLIMATE EXTREMISM
…Climate science is in its infancy, and just about every proposition is controversial. The idea that climate science is in any non-trivial sense settled is ridiculous.
One area where this is obvious is clouds. Clouds play a huge role in the Earth’s climate, but the dynamics surrounding the various types of clouds are simply not understood. When climate scientists developed the models on which all global warming alarmism is based, they knew that the role they assigned to CO2 as the principal driver of the Earth’s temperature could not be sustained by a review of the Earth’s climate history. Therefore, they used clouds as a plug factor, programming their models to believe that the human influence on clouds significantly moderates the otherwise extreme influence of added CO2 on the climate. This is one of many ways in which climate “science” is not scientific.
UN weather agency warns of more ‘global warming’ in May
The U.N. weather agency is warning of “fundamental change” afoot in the global climate and continued warming, accompanied recently by unusually high rainfall in parts of the US and Europe.
The World Meteorological Organization was pointing Tuesday to data released by NASA a day earlier showing that this May was the hottest on record, and the Northern Hemisphere spring has been the hottest spring ever.
WMO global climate director Dr. David Carlson said the new data showed 370 straight months of warm or warmer-than-average temperatures worldwide. WMO said the recentEl Nino was only partly to blame for the recent temperature rise.
The agency noted that heat has been particularly high in the Arctic, and has caused an early onset of the annual melting of Arctic sea ice.…
Warmists desperate: ‘In order for us to start acting on climate change then, maybe we need to tell a few lies’
First they renamed global warming “climate change”. Now, when the majority of voters could not care less, a Huffington Post columnist thinks that replacing climate change with “massive worldwide death machine” or “crazy killer weather” will do the trick.
And if this does not scare people enough, the writer thinks that “maybe we need to tell a few lies”:
In order to avoid catastrophic climate change it’s essential that we act now, but that small fact hasn’t stopped it slipping down and off the list of what’s important to the majority of voters.
The problem can’t be with the issue’s importance. The evidence is all there, and it’s terrifying. Climate change is without a doubt the single biggest threat the human race has faced since the last ice age.Maybe the real issue is with the wording, because ‘climate change’ just doesn’t sound that bad.Every night I go to sleep, and every morning I wake up and the climate has changed. It’s called the weather.Now if a corporation is having trouble selling a product, do they give up? Maybe they do eventually, but they try almost everything before that and step one is to rebrand.Which involves altering very little apart from a product’s appearance, and hoping that’s enough.It’s why Kentucky Fried Chicken is now ‘KFC’, British Petroleum is ‘BP’ and Justin Timberlake left NSYNC and got a haircut. You need to check out some of the old photos – he looked like a sheep.So instead of ‘climate change’ what about we call it ‘extreme disasters happening right now’, ‘massive worldwide death machine’ or ‘crazy killer weather’?You might not care about stopping ‘climate change’, but I’m sure most of us want to stop ‘crazy killer weather’.These new titles also have the added benefit of being exactly what will happen if we continue to do so little.Another problem is that most of us only care about what’s happening day to day, and not at all about anything that hasn’t happened yet on a big enough scale to really effect us, no matter certain it seems.In order for us to start acting on climate change then, maybe we need to tell a few lies.
Dem Congressmen: First Amendment Doesn’t Protect Global Warming Skeptics
California congressmen wrote a letter to state attorney general Kamala Harris claiming the freedom of speech “is not designed to protect fraud and deceit” of the likes being spread by oil company ExxonMobil about global warming.
Nineteen Democratic lawmakers told Harris her “investigation as to whether ExxonMobil lied about the truth of climate change and misled investors does not constitute an effort to silence speech or scientific research.
“The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it does not protect companies from defrauding the American people or improperly disclosing information to their shareholders,” lawmakers, including California Reps. Maxine Waters and Ted Lieu, wrote to Harris.
Harris joined attorneys general from New York, Massachusetts and the U.S. Virgin Islands in investigating Exxon’s global warming stance based on reporting by liberal journalists.
Lieu, Waters and the other Democrats writing to Harris sent their letter in response to an inquiry from Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith. Smith, the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, requested documents from state AGs and environmentalists working against Exxon.
“We are supportive of your investigation and believe the Science Committee’s baseless allegations against you are nothing more than part of his continued agenda to assault climate science,” the Democrats wrote. “As you know, recent evidence suggests that leading oil companies, such as ExxonMobil and Shell, confirmed the science of climate change decades ago and even changed their business decisions to adapt to a warming planet.”