A weekly reckoning with our overheating planet—and the fight to save it
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Smokestacks at a petroleum processing plant Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Getty Images
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Sixty-two percent of likely voters think oil and gas companies "should be held legally accountable for their contributions to climate change," according to a new poll published this week. Not only do 84 percent of Democrats think that but also 59 percent of independents and even 40 percent of Republicans. These are striking numbers. As I wrote in this newsletter last month, all too often pollsters ask people vague questions about whether people support "steps" to address climate change, without specifying what those steps are. That didn’t happen with this poll, which was conducted by the progressive think tank Data for Progress and consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen. This was the exact question: "Do you think that oil and gas companies should be held legally accountable for their contributions to climate change, including their impacts on extreme weather events and public health?" In addition to the aforementioned political divides, women said "yes"
more often than men, young people more often than old people, and Black or Latino people more often than white people—but that still adds up to a striking degree of support for accountability for fossil fuel companies. Nor did the poll stop there. It also asked whether people supported not just civil lawsuits but criminal prosecutions for "reckless or negligent homicide." This is a relatively new idea, and a somewhat edgy one for a lot of people. But 49 percent of respondents said they supported this too, compared to only 39 percent who said they’d oppose.
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Online tickets still available
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Join us on June 8 for a high-profile event that will feature authors who are currently banned; fellow writers who have taken up the cause; and teachers, librarians, and students who have been directly impacted by the book bans that are sweeping America. Guests include: Lauren Groff, Ellen Hopkins, George M. Johnson, Jacqueline Woodson, and more.
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The New Republic has been covering legal approaches to climate accountability for years now: both the civil suits and more recent approaches. Public Citizen’s Aaron Regunberg and David Arkush made the case for criminal prosecutions, and specifically homicide charges, in March. "In criminal law, homicide means causing a death with a culpable mental state," they reasoned. "If someone substantially contributes to or accelerates a death, that counts as ‘causing’ it. If they did so intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly, that counts as ‘culpable mental state.’ So the basic questions in a climate homicide trial are as follows: Did fossil
fuel companies substantially contribute to or accelerate deaths, and did they do so at least recklessly, if not knowingly or intentionally?" Criminal charges can do things that civil lawsuits can’t. "In today’s thinking," Regunberg and Arkush wrote, "tort law—the law of civil wrongs—seeks economically efficient outcomes: The question is about whether one party should give another some money. Criminal law, by contrast, is concerned with society’s fundamental values—with morality." And that’s reflected in the effects of these types of law: "Where tort law prices misconduct, criminal law prohibits it." Regunberg and law professor Donald Braman subsequently proposed another novel legal approach: civil asset forfeiture. That’s a tool that’s typically used by cops to confiscate property they suspect of being used for committing crimes—a system that disproportionately penalizes poor people and minorities, and in which it’s often very hard to recover the seized assets even if no crime is ever proven. But it was originally intended, Regunberg and Braman wrote, to be used against "large-scale criminal enterprises." Since legal experts are now arguing that fossil fuel companies’ activities "could fall under the category of criminal violations such as reckless
endangerment, criminal mischief, conspiracy and racketeering, and homicide," Regunberg and Braman wrote, it stands to reason that the "pipelines, refining plants, and oil reserves" that are "recklessly endangering entire communities" could be confiscated by the police. And then there’s Kate Aronoff’s latest. Given that fossil fuel companies have manufactured and promoted plastics for decades—even misleading the public about plastics recycling—there really ought to be a way, she argued, to hold them accountable at the international level for microplastics, which have now been found not only in "food, water, blood, and placenta" but also in human testicles. "In a recent book," she wrote, "Spanish economist and environmental adviser David Lizoain makes the case for bringing fossil fuel executives in front of the International Criminal Court, and understanding rising temperatures—and the resulting mass deaths—as climate genocide." The international legal system is, on the whole, much more favorable to companies than it is to their potential victims, Kate argued. And that’s arguably true in the domestic arena as well. Which brings us back to the recent poll: If this many people favor legal accountability, perhaps that may be about to change.
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—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor
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Bill McKibben writes in The New Yorker about a photography exhibit he found particularly effective at communicating the urgency of the climate crisis. The Asia Society’s "Coal + Ice" exhibit contains "perhaps the single most powerful rendering of the climate crisis I’ve ever seen," he writes—specifically, photographer Gideon Mendel’s depiction of people all over the world standing in flood waters. "Mendel’s videos," McKibben continues, "invoke change
over physical space: the same foreign and scary thing is happening around the globe, simultaneously." (If that doesn’t sound like good news, recall that effective policy depends first upon awareness and communication.)
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Former Environmental Protection Agency employees with the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility have accused the EPA of incorrectly reporting the results of PFAS testing in pesticides, falsely telling the public that these long-lasting, potentially damaging chemicals had not been found in samples when, in fact, they had been.
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On average, people experienced 26 more excessively hot days in the past year than they would have without climate change. Read The New York Times’ report here.
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At least 24 people were killed last weekend in severe thunderstorms and tornadoes in multiple states. Tornado intensity and frequency are famously much, much harder to tie to climate change than hurricanes or atmospheric rivers are. But peak months seem to be shifting earlier in the season, and the pattern of touchdowns seems to be shifting eastward, the BBC’s Cinnamon Janzer reports.
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"We have way more people living in the mid-south and east of the Mississippi River than we do in the Great Plains," [meteorology professor Victor] Gensini says. The higher population densities of the states seeing an increase in storms means that they have the potential to do more damage. As tornado seasons and locations change, one thing remains the same—the importance of preparation.… Trudy Thompson Shumaker, a volunteer and national spokesperson for the American Red Cross, says that education is key to preparing for tornadoes. "Know what to do and how to stay safe," she says. This starts with identifying the safest room in your home—an interior, windowless space. Bathrooms sometimes meet these requirements, but a closet can also work, as can an emergency stairwell in larger buildings. She also suggests assembling an emergency kit that contains the supplies necessary for sheltering in place for two weeks. "You’ll need water because the water supply may be unsafe. You’ll need a battery-powered radio and phone chargers," says Thompson Shumaker. Before a tornado strikes, "go through your phone and write down the important numbers you’ll need if your phone goes dead."
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It can happen here. And if it does, here is what might become of the country.
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