Dear Concerned Citizens, September 13, 2018

North Carolina is my home —— Hurricane Florence is at our doorstep. And I am furious.

If you’re in the path of the storm, stop reading and get yourself and your family to safety. But if you’re outside the impacted region, it’s time to get to work.

A million and a half people here and along the Southeast coast have just been ordered to evacuate their homes because a climate change-fueled superstorm is hurtling their way, and our elected leaders were too deep in the fossil fuel industry’s pockets to do anything to stop it.

With climate disasters like Florence putting millions of lives at risk, we can’t afford more deadly denial — we need real climate leaders, now. Pledge to vote for climate champions in this critical year.

Instead of heeding warnings of our state’s vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, big polluter-backed Republican legislators here in North Carolina have spent the last several years ignoring and even outlawing the use of climate science to prepare us for moments exactly like this one.

In South Carolina, state legislators are still refusing to evacuate a prison squarely in Florence’s path, putting more than 650 incarcerated people’s lives at risk. And in both states, runoff from coal ash and hog waste poses a major riskto the mostly low-income communities and people of color living nearby.

The ugly message these politicians are sending couldn’t be clearer: corporate polluters’ profits are more important than their most vulnerable constituents’ lives.

It’s time to elect people who will stand up for our communities instead of fossil fuel billionaires. Can you sign up here to commit to vote for the climate leaders we need in 2018?

And climate injustice doesn’t stop at the doors of the White House: Trump just deliberately took $10 million of public funding away from FEMA disaster recovery and gave it to ICE — the agency that is unjustly detaining and deporting immigrants, taking thousands of children from their parents at the border, and putting refugees in jail.

Like I said, I’m furious. But here’s what’s giving me hope alongside my anger: There are hundreds of candidates running for office up and down the ballot — from Public Utilities Commissions to the Senate — who are ready to stand up to big polluter billionaires and fight for visionary policies like a Green New Deal that will help us and our planet thrive. Now, it’s up to you to help elect those leaders.

Pledge to vote this November for progressive leaders who will take the action required to slow the climate crisis. We’ll follow up soon with ways you can take your pledge to the streets and the ballot box.

I know talking politics while a storm is surging can feel impolite, but we can’t afford not to call out climate denial when climate disasters hit. Politeness, thoughts and prayers don’t bring justice in the face of disaster. But we’ve got our voices, our votes and our vision, and we’re going to use them all to turn our anger into action.

Onward, Jenny Marienau – 350 Action

PS: Communities in Florence’s path will need support preparing for the storm and recovering from its impacts. There’s a list of organizations on the ground that would benefit from your donations here — please give what you can.

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Sources and more information:

>>> “North Carolina politicians have decried the climate-change science that makes Hurricane Florence so deadly”
>>> Vox: “South Carolina won’t evacuate a prison in Hurricane Florence’s path”
>>> CBS: “Hurricane Florence could flood hog manure pits, coal ash dumps in North Carolina”
>>> NPR: “Trump Administration Transferred $9.8 Million from FEMA to ICE”
>>> 350 Action: 2018 Endorsements

### — This message has been authorized by 350 Action, 20 Jay St, Suite 732, Brooklyn, NY 11201, May Boeve, Executive Director.

We Now Know the Facts

Seems Like a Faceoff of ExxonMobil Vs. The World

Commentary by Marcelo Gleiser, Blog: 13.7 Cosmos & Culture (NPR), November 30, 2016

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman, the president and the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF), respectively, explain why the organization decided to divest its holdings on fossil fuel companies.

Although the divesting decision is broad-ranging, they single out ExxonMobil for its “morally reprehensible conduct.”

“For over a quarter-century the company tried to deceive policymakers and the public about the realities of climate change, protecting its profits at the cost of immense damage to life on this planet,” they write, condemning ExxonMobil for not only covering up its cutting-edge research findings on how fossil-fuel burning affects the global climate, but also for willfully promoting an agenda of deception, aiming at confusing and influencing public opinion by turning a scientific issue into a political one.

Could this be true? Could a trusted American company, with revenues larger than the gross domestic products of countries like Austria and Thailand, plot to deceive the public?

That’s what the RFF determined, after funding a team of independent investigative reporters from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism to research what ExxonMobil and other U.S. oil companies actually know about climate change.

In a nutshell, the team of journalists found that ExxonMobil has known for decades that the burning of fossil fuels is the dominant cause of global warming.

As early as 1965, Lyndon Johnson told Congress: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through … a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” Not surprisingly, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil scientists understood quite well the mechanisms of climate change and its broad implications for the oil business.

A 1979 Exxon memo reported:

“Models predict that the present trend of fossil fuel use will lead to dramatic climatic changes within the next 75 years …. Should it be deemed necessary to maintain atmospheric CO2 levels to prevent significant climatic changes, dramatic changes in patterns of energy use would be required.”

This memo was circulated within the company, and sent to a number of the company’s leading scientists, who are supposed to report to the company’s leadership.

The investigative report from the RFF is quite clear in its findings. Yet, few people know about this. Shouldn’t the public be outraged at this? Shouldn’t people boycott ExxonMobil, stop buying its products? Shouldn’t all large investors (and smaller ones) divest their holdings from this company?

Divesting a company is a direct form of action based largely on a moral argument, aiming at both proving a point and at exerting pressure. It becomes the currency of those who want to make a difference without waiting for governmental regulations — which depend on slow-moving, fluctuating partisan political decisions — to take place.

The leaders of ExxonMobil and other oil companies want to maximize profit. This is not surprising, given that this is what any company wants to do. The more profitable a company, the more valuable it is and the more assets it has. This is the so-called bottom line, which, put simply, is the balance sheet of the company: The more it makes, the more its shareholders make.

There’s nothing wrong with a company wanting to maximize its profits. What is objectionable is how far it’s willing to go in order to do so. Where do you draw the line between healthy ambition and immoral greed?

Cigarette companies have done similar things, as reported in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. Tobacco companies knew as early as 1953 that cigarette smoking can kill. Through a large-scale effort of deception, including undermining the credibility of serious scientific studies on the deleterious effects of smoking, the tobacco companies managed to stall public awareness for decades. Oil companies are using similar tactics, focusing on their short and midterm gains, caring nothing for what comes a few decades down the line — even if our global future, including the health and social stability of this and the next generation, is largely dependent on it.

We live in an era of rising corporate ethics, where many companies understand the importance of aligning with sound science to guarantee their long-term profitability. To declare war on scientific findings and public awareness is to declare war on our joint shared future. Divesting a company, be it at the individual or at the foundation portfolio level, packs a meaningful punch: It tells the company that it is acting against its main interest, in a process that can only be described as self-destructive — it is compromising the very resources that keep it alive. If people stop buying from a company at a large enough scale, the company folds.

The campaign against public awareness of climate change is a desperate decoy; like the scared octopus that jets out a cloud of black ink to hide itself from predators, the oil companies are trying to hide their findings to protect their morally questionable intentions. The tragedy here is that what the oil companies consider to be a “predator” is the climate science they once led.

The octopus doesn’t have any other choice. But the oil companies do. They could invest a fraction of their huge profits to reinvent themselves, becoming true leaders in the search for alternative renewable fuels, while retraining their work force into the emerging new technologies. This way, instead of holding back the planet and millions of workers in a decadent economics model, they would become the companies of the future, working to ensure, and not to destroy, our collective well-being.