25/03/2021

Major Climate Polluters Accused Of Greenwashing With Sports Sponsorship

The Guardian -

Report reveals more than 250 deals between high-carbon industries and leading sports teams

The former Team Sky are now sponsored by the oil and gas company Ineos. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images

Polluting industries are pouring hundreds of millions of pounds into sports sponsorship in an attempt to “sports-wash” their role in the climate crisis, according to the authors of a report published on Monday.

The study reveals more than 250 advertising and sponsorship deals between some of the biggest corporate polluters and leading sports teams and organisation.

Andrew Simms, a co-director of the New Weather Institute and one of the report’s co-authors, said:“Sport is in the frontline of the climate emergency but floats on a sea of sponsorship deals with the major polluters. It makes the crisis worse by normalising high-carbon, polluting lifestyles and reducing the pressure for climate action.”

The report, by the New Weather Institute, the climate charity Possible and the Rapid Transition Alliance, identified advertising and sponsorship deals with major polluters across 13 different sports, including football, cricket and tennis.

Football was found to have the most deals, receiving 57 sponsorships from high-carbon industries ranging from oil and gas corporations to airlines.

Simms said: “We know about ‘greenwash’ – when polluters falsely present themselves as environmentally responsible. This is ‘sports-wash’ – when heavily polluting industries sponsor sport to appear as friends of healthy activity, when in fact they’re pumping lethal pollution into the very air that athletes have to breathe, and wrecking the climate that sport depends on.”

He said “major polluters” had replaced tobacco companies as big sports sponsors. “They should be stopped for the same reason tobacco sponsorship ended: for the health of people, sports and the planet.”

The study follows a high-profile campaign against UK arts institutions’ sponsorship deals with oil and gas giants. Several have now cut their ties to fossil fuel companies.

The authors of the report say sport will be the next battlefield in challenging the social licence of polluting industries.

“Sport has been a gamechanger in raising awareness and rapidly shifting opinions and policy on vital issues ranging from child poverty to racism,” said Simms. “Now it could be set to do the same for climate change.”

The report claims that the car industry is the most active high-carbon sector courting sports sponsorship, with 199 different deals across all sports.

Airlines come second with 63, followed by oil and gas companies such as Gazprom and Ineos, whose deals have previously been criticised by climate campaigns.

When Ineos was preparing to take over sponsorship of Team Sky cycling in 2019, a spokesperson for the chemicals company said it was committed to moving towards a circular economy.

The report reveals the carmaker Toyota as the largest sponsor with 31 deals, followed by the airline Emirates with 29 partnerships.

A spokesperson for Toyota said it could not comment in detail without seeing the full report, adding that the company had been “the world leader in low-emission electrified vehicles for 25 years” and had “amongst the lowest CO2 fleet averages of any major volume manufacturer and is committed to some of the most ambitious environmental goals of any mobility company”.

Emirates did not respond to requests for comment.

Campaigners argue that the findings in the report appear to undermine recent pledges made by many clubs and sports bodies to take action on climate breakdown.

Melissa Wilson, a member of the GB rowing team for the Tokyo Olympics, is one of the athletes supporting the campaign. “As athletes, we focus a lot on keeping sport ‘clean’ through prioritising anti-doping,” she said.

“Yet continuing to pollute in the face of the climate emergency is the Earth equivalent of doping or scoring own goals. By keeping polluting sponsors on board, sports detract from their opportunity to play a productive part in the race to zero carbon. It’s time for sports and athletes to change that.”

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(USA) White Nationalists’ Extreme Solution To The Coming Environmental Apocalypse

The Conversation - 

People take part in a memorial for the victims of a shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez

Author
is Professor of American Culture, History, and Women's Studies, University of Michigan
White nationalists around the world are appropriating the language of environmentalism.

The white nationalist who allegedly massacred 22 people in El Paso in early August posted a four-page screed on the chatroom 8chan. In it, the shooter blames his attack on the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and the impending “cultural and ethnic replacement” of whites in America.

The shooter also refers directly to the lengthy manifesto written by the man who allegedly murdered 52 in March in attacks motivated by Islamophobia on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Christchurch shooter called himself an “ecofascist” who believes there is no “nationalism without environmentalism.” The El Paso shooter titled his rant “An Inconvenient Truth,” apparently in reference to Al Gore’s 2006 documentary warning about the dangers of climate change. He also praised “The Lorax,” Dr. Seuss’ classic story about deforestation and corporate greed.

The prominence of environmental themes in these manifestos is not an oddity. Instead, it signals the rise of ecofascism as a core ideology of contemporary white nationalism, a trend I uncovered when conducting research for my recent book, “Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination.”

The roots of ecofascism

Ecofascists combine anxieties about the demographic changes they characterize as “white extinction” with fantasies of pristine lands free of nonwhites and free of pollution.

Ecofascism’s roots trace back to early 1900s when romantic notions of communion with the land took hold in Germany. These ideas found expression in the concept of “lebensraum” or living spaces, and in attempts to create an exclusive Aryan fatherhood in which “blood and soil” racial nationalism reigned supreme. The concept of lebensraum was integral to the expansionist and genocidal policies of the Third Reich.

There is a long thread that ties xenophobia to right-wing environmentalism. In the U.S., strains of ecofascism appeared in the incipient environmental movement, espoused by racialists like Madison Grant, who in the 1920s championed the preservation of native flora including California’s redwood trees, while demonizing nonwhite immigrants.

After World War II, in the name of protecting forests and rivers, nativist organizations opposed to arrivals from non-European countries stoked fears of overpopulation and rampant immigration.

A meme popular online among the far-right and ecofascists is “save trees, not refugees.” Often ecofascist memes take the form of emojis like the popular Norse rune known as Algiz, or the “life” rune. This rune, favored by Heinrich Himmler and the SS, is one of many alternative symbols to swastikas that circulate online to dog whistle neo-Nazism allegiances.

Deep ecology

Many ecofascists today gravitate toward “deep ecology,” the philosophy developed by the Norwegian Arne Naess in the early 1970s. Naess wanted to distinguish “deep ecology,” which he characterized as reverence for all living things, from what he viewed as faddish “shallow ecology.”

Jettisoning Naess’ belief in the value of biological diversity, far-right thinkers have perverted deep ecology, imagining that the world is intrinsically unequal and that racial and gender hierarchies are part of nature’s design.

Deep ecology celebrates a quasi-spiritual connection to the land. As I show in my book, in its white nationalist version only men – white or European men – can truly commune with nature in a meaningful, transcendent way. This cosmic quest fuels their desire to preserve, by force if necessary, pure lands for white people.

White nationalists today look to the Finnish ecofascist Pentti Linkola, who advocates for stringent immigration restriction, “the reversion to pre-industrial life ways, and authoritarian measures to keep human life within strict limits.”

Reflecting on Linkola’s ideas, the white nationalist webzine Counter-Currents impels white men to take ecofascist action, saying that it is their duty to “safeguard the sanctity of the Earth.”

Antonio Basco, whose wife Margie Reckard was murdered during a shooting at a Walmart store, touches a white wooden cross bearing the name of his late wife, at a memorial for the victims of the shooting in El Paso, Texas. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez
Why partisan labels don’t apply

This background helps to explain why the Christchurch shooter called himself an “ecofascist” and discussed environmental issues in his rambling screed.

The El Paso shooter offered more specific examples. In addition to mentioning the “The Lorax,” he criticized Americans for failing to recycle and for wanton waste of single-use plastics.

Their crusade to save white people from erasure through multiculturalism and immigration mirrors their crusade to preserve nature from environmental destruction and overpopulation.

The conventional wisdom in the public is that environmentalism is the province of liberals, if not of the left, with its commitments to environmental justice and carbon neutrality.

Yet the ubiquity of environmental concerns among white nationalists shows that distinctions between liberal and conservative are not necessarily germane when assessing the ideologies of the far-right today.

If current trends continue, the future will be one of intensified global warming and extreme weather patterns. There will be an increase in climate refugees, often seeking respite in the global north. In this context, I think that white nationalists will be primed to merge the prospect of climate calamities with their anxieties about white extinction.

Census projections indicate that around 2050 the U.S. will become a majority nonwhite country. For white nationalists, this demographic clock ticks more loudly each day. Both the Christchurch and the El Paso shooters invoke the “Great Replacement” theory, or the distorted idea that whites are being demographically outnumbered, to the point of extinction, by immigrants and racial others.

Given the patterns I see emerging, I believe that the public needs to recognize ecofascism as a dangerous cloud gathering on the horizon. 

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(AU) Catastrophic Fires And Devastating Floods Are Part Of Australia's Harsh New Climate Reality

The Guardian - 

Climate change is making wet seasons wetter and dry seasons drier. Australia must do its part to lower carbon emissions

‘Australians can’t seem to catch a break. But it’s not too late to forestall a dystopian future that alternates between Mad Max and Waterworld.’ Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

Author
Michael E Mann is distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet.
A year ago I lived through the Black Summer.

I had arrived in Sydney in mid-December 2019 to collaborate with Australian researchers studying the impacts of climate change on extreme weather events.

Instead of studying those events, however, I ended up experiencing them.

Even in the confines of my apartment in Coogee, looking out over the Pacific, I could smell the smoke from the massive bushfires blazing across New South Wales.

As I flew to Canberra to participate in a special “bushfires” episode of the ABC show Q+A, I witnessed mountains ablaze with fire. One man I met during my stay lost most of his 180-year-old family farm in the fires that ravaged south-east NSW near Milton.

My experiences indelibly coloured the book I was writing on the climate crisis at the time called The New Climate War.

I returned home to the US last March, my sabbatical stay cut short by coronavirus. But just a year later, with memories of the hellish inferno that was the Black Summer still fresh in my mind, I must painfully watch from afar now as my Aussie mates endure further climate-wrought devastation.

This time it’s not fires. It’s floods.

Is NSW flooding a year after bushfires yet more evidence of climate change?    Read more
I lectured earlier this week at the Pennsylvania State University, where I’m teaching a course on climate change communication.

I started class, as I always do, with a glance at the latest climate-themed stories appearing in my news feed.

We watched a video – in stunned disbelief – of a house floating down a river. Let me repeat that. There was a house floating down a river.

Australians are of course familiar with the scene of which I speak. It’s the dwelling that was observed floating down the Manning River in NSW, a few hundred kilometres north of Sydney, as the State suffered massive floods. Emergency responders rescued hundreds of stranded people after record rainfall caused the rivers to swell.

In fact, more than 18,000 people had to be evacuated in Sydney and the mid-north coast, thanks to what amounted to a “100-year flood”. For the unwashed, that’s a deluge so Noachian in character that it shouldn’t, on average, happen more often than once in a hundred years.

But those sorts of statistics are misleading. The statistician in me notes that they make the very tenuous assumption of a “stationary” climate, that is to say, a climate that isn’t changing. But the climate is changing, thanks to human carbon pollution, making episodes that might have once been “100-year events” now more like “10-year events”.

Tragically, many of the same towns that were devastated by the massive bushfires a little more than a year ago found themselves under siege from these historic floods.

A climate contrarian would cry foul: “you climate scientists can’t make up your mind. Is climate change making it wetter or drier?” But in fact, that’s a false choice: It’s both.

We know that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so during the wet season when you get rainfall, you get more of it, in larger downpours and bursts. But hotter temperatures also mean drier soils and worsened droughts in the dry season, conditions conducive to bigger, hotter-burning, faster-spreading bushfires.

In a scientific study I co-authored a year ago, we demonstrated that climate change is causing the wet season to get wetter and the dry season to get drier in many parts of the world.

NSW is one of those regions, and we’ve seen the consequence in the whiplash of fires and floods that have plagued the region over the past 14 months.

Australia's floods: what the disaster tells us about a climate crisis future.    Read more
Australians can’t seem to catch a break. But it’s not too late to forestall a dystopian future that alternates between Mad Max and Waterworld.

Adapting to the harsh new reality Australia now faces will be hard, but it will be possible with sufficient government funding and infrastructure to support climate resilience.

If, however, we allow the planet to continue to heat up, many heavily-occupied parts of Australia will simply become inhabitable.

There is still a narrow window of opportunity left. If we can lower carbon emissions by a factor of two over the next decade, we can still prevent a catastrophic 1.5C warming of the planet. If that is to happen, Australia, one of the largest exporters of fossil fuels on the planet, will need to do its part.

Thus far conservative prime minister Scott Morrison and the Coalition government have shown little appetite for making good on these obligations, however. They have instead engaged in the sort of soft denial I describe in The New Climate War that has come to replace the no-longer credible outright denial of the reality of the climate crisis.

Morrison and his allies use soothing but hollow words like “resilience”, “adaptation” and “innovation” to make it sound like they’re actually doing something when they’re not.

And they suggest they’re moving towards net zero carbon emissions by mid-century, while meanwhile promoting a “gas-led” economic recovery and shunning policies, such as carbon pricing and subsidies for clean energy, that could actually help decarbonise the economy.

Morrison’s record on climate is so atrocious, in fact, that the UK’s own conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson, disinvited him from last year’s global climate summit.

If Morrison and the Coalition government refuse to act now, then perhaps the Australian people need to disinvite him from serving another term.

The future is still in your hands, mates!

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