Daily News 10/04

Daily News 10/04

Climate Deception Deception Documents

‘Big Lies’: Big Oil companies have known for decades that burning fossil fuels could lead to “catastrophic” climate change. They lied to us. Instead of warning the public, Big Oil masterminded an ongoing campaign of denial, disinformation, and deception to delay climate action and protect their profits. Now, communities are footing the bill to adapt to and recover from the growing climate damages the fossil fuel industry knowingly caused. Explore our archives to uncover evidence showing how Big Oil knew their products would cause climate change — and are still lying about it. — Instead of warning the public, Big Oil masterminded an ongoing campaign of denial, disinformation, and deception to delay climate action and protect their profits. Now, communities are footing the bill to adapt to and recover from the growing Explore our archives to uncover evidence showing how Big Oil knew their products would cause climate change — and are still lying about it. — Climate DeceptionDeception Documents

But one thing that can be said with certainty is that Big Oil and the fossil fuel industry are absolutely terrified of facing cases like Boulder’s at trial, where state and local governments will be able to present evidence of Big Oil’s decades-long climate deception to a jury. Big Oil’s own lawyers have admitted that the companies face “massive monetary liability” from the dozens of climate deception cases against them, and that stopping communities from having their day in court is a “big priority… for the entire industry.”

Fossil Fuels Big Hoax: Their ‘Big Lie’ Campaign to Make Climate Change a Hoax!:

Big Energy/U.S. Capitalism Has Made a Conscious Decision to Commit Humanicide, Rather Than Lose Their Proing Enterprises: “The panelists examined the corporate genesis of the climate denial movement and the many methods of influence that have been utilized to stall effective climate change policy. Using documents and analysis found on Climate Files, Davies recounted how the largest oil majors, including Shell and Exxon, had extensive internal knowledge about climate change science and impacts decades before it became a topic of global concern. Rather than addressing the threat that their product posed to the world, the documents show that the fossil fuel industry engaged and funded a climate change countermovement to deny the urgency their own scientists knew to be true. The Climate Change Countermovement: Brown University Report and Panel”— (2019)

Video: America’s Climate Change Future – Session 4: Pushing against climate denial and defending science The Rhodes Center for International Economics, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, and the Office of the President are pleased to announce a one day conference on the economic and political consequences of climate change. The conference focuses on three key areas. First, the economics of rising sea levels for real coastal estate markets, which comprise a large portion of US housing market growth and hence personal wealth. The economics of ‘stranded carbon assets.’ That is, the raw materials and financial assets tied up in carbon release that have a high current value but whose values could decline precipitously in the future, especially if ambitious action is undertaken as scientific consensus suggests is needed. The third is the organized politics of climate denial: who are the agents and institutions behind scientific disinformation and how can such a politics best be countered? A lunchtime keynote speech will be given by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Lunch will be provided for participants.

Video: Session 4: Pushing against climate denial and defending scienceThe Rhodes Center for International Economics, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, and the Office of the President are pleased to announce a one day conference on the economic and political consequences of climate change. The conference focuses on three key areas. First, the economics of rising sea levels for real coastal estate markets, which comprise a large portion of US housing market growth and hence personal wealth. The economics of ‘stranded carbon assets.’ That is, the raw materials and financial assets tied up in carbon release that have a high current value but whose values could decline precipitously in the future, especially if ambitious action is undertaken as scientific consensus suggests is needed. The third is the organized politics of climate denial: who are the agents and institutions behind scientific disinformation and how can such a politics best be countered? A lunchtime keynote speech will be given by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Lunch will be provided for participants.

May heatwaves, deaths, ruined harvests: study of Europe’s summer paints grim picture for the futureEU Copernicus report shows surface air temperatures from June to August were 2.5C above decadal average

Video: America Just Entered A Dangerous Pacific Storm Pattern — And Forecasters Are WorriedThree storms are turning across the Pacific at the same time, while the ocean most Americans actually watch has gone strangely silent for the first time in over a century. One force is driving both sides of that split, and it has already reached American ground.

Audio: ‘Best Minds’? Hegseth Taps Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich to Lead ‘Future of Warfare’ Project“A board loaded with defense contractors and one draft-dodging war hawk will decide the future of the US military,” said one observer. “What could possibly go wrong?” “The defense secretary also announced the creation of an Autonomous Warfare Command—or Autowarcom—“a new four-star combatant command with service-like authorities built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force.”

The recent Supreme Court ruling allowing the Trump administration to expand the use of its citizenship-verification database is more than another dispute over how elections should be administered. By a 6–3 vote, the Court lifted a lower-court order blocking the Department of Homeland Security from using an expanded version of the SAVE database, now linked to Social Security records, to assist states in checking voter eligibility. The danger is hardly abstract. As Stephen Prager reports in Common Dreams, the database contains known errors, raising the possibility that “many eligible voters may be at risk of having their voter registration wrongfully cancelled just weeks before midterm” elections. — Nuremberg’s Warning: When Law Legitimates the Machinery of Authoritarianism

Bipartisan Policy: $Trillions for Warfare — Cuts For Welfare: The Pentagon’s Secret BudgetNews reports that next year’s U.S. military budget will top out at $1.5 trillion if President Donald Trump gets his way are misleading at best. The true total, if Trump’s proposal passes, could be at least $1 trillion higher. Long before Trump took office, U.S. taxpayers have spent far more on the Pentagon — and its wars — than most know. For decades, Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon have hidden the military’s true cost through little-known bureaucratic practices and budgeting tricks. Journalists, academics, and think tank experts have, with rare exceptions, perpetuated the problem by repeating “official” numbers that don’t come close to telling the full story.

Trump doesn’t rule out declaring state of emergency before midterm elections. President also dismissed low poll ratings as ‘fake numbers’ and deflected responsibility for Iran war in Time interview Donald Trump deflected responsibility for misleading Americans about the length of the Iran war, dismissed low poll ratings as “fake numbers” and refused to rule out the possibility of declaring a state of emergency before the midterms, in a wide-ranging interview with Time magazine. When confronted with questions about the length of the Iran war, the US president blamed the media for reporting his remarks in which he said the conflict was projected to last “four to five weeks”, in March.

We’re not in a new Gilded Age in America: inequality is now far worse Casey Michel Today’s wealth gap is much bigger, and the country’s richest have much more power than they once did. It’s an Age of Oligarchy

AI weapons systems are already here. Algorithms must not decide who lives and dies

‘Looks Like They’re Firing Whistleblowers’: Alarm as OpenAI Reportedly Ousts Safety Experts“Sam Altman says we need to slow down development to ensure the safety of humanity,” one campaigner said of OpenAI’s CEO. “Yet he is allegedly firing the very people hired to keep us safe.”

US sends third aircraft carrier to Middle East amid stalemate in Iran warDeployment underscores evolving complexity of Trump’s war against Iran as US midterm elections loom

Woman in alleged Cornell gang-rape case was ‘failed’ by system, New York governor saysKathy Hochul briefs journalists with state attorney general Letitia James, who will be taking over the entire case.