12/01/2018

A Future Without Coal-Fired Power Stations Is Inevitable

Fairfax - Peter Martin

Worried the electricity system won't keep up over summer? Worry about coal. Seriously.
One of the four giant units at Victoria's ageing Loy Yang A power station broke down on Tuesday night at 11.05, taking out 230 megawatts, and then at 1.10 on Wednesday morning after being partially restarted, taking out what by then was 161 megawatts.


Turnbull labels coal opponents 'delusional'
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has mounted a defence of coal-powered electricity, saying those who think the resource doesn't have a future are 'delusional'.

When demand soared during Sunday's heatwave, the Eraring plant on Lake Macquarie in NSW lost 275 megawatts. A few minutes later, Loy Yang A lost 264 megawatts.
On New Year's Day, unit 1 of Millmerran in Queensland stalled, taking out 156 megawatts. On December 28, unit 2 of Tarong in Queensland stalled, taking out 314 megawatts. On Boxing Day, unit 4 at Loy Yang stalled, taking out 528 megawatts. On Christmas Day, unit 1 at Gladstone stalled, taking out 230 megawatts, then unit 1 at Tallawarra in NSW, taking out 187 megawatts. And so on, back to the start of summer.
When unit 3 at Loy Yang shut down without warning on December 14 taking out 560 megawatts and imperilling the entire system, the new Tesla battery 1000 kilometres away in South Australia sprung into action ahead of the coal-fired power station that was contracted to restore stability. It proved to be "dispatchable" in a way coal-fired power stations are not.
Age, heat and the steady encroachment of renewables are destroying the only advantages coal-fired power stations ever had.
When Treasurer Scott Morrison stood up in Federal Parliament and waved around a lump of coal in a stunt unworthy of his office, he said coal was an important part of ensuring a "more certain" energy future.
But he was speaking about the past.
Illustration: Dionne Gain 
Coal-fired power stations didn't used to get critically hot as often as they do now. The February 2017 heatwave that took out 2438 megawatts in one day in NSW might have once been a once-in-500-year event. Now it's a once-in-50-year event and perhaps soon a once-in-five-year event. The calculations are by the Australia Institute's Mark Ogge and Hannah Aulby in a study of the risks to energy security entitled Can't Stand the Heat. Ogge is the person who has been keeping a record of power station outages.
When temperatures in control rooms get as high as 50 or 60 degrees the electronic control systems buckle and the boilers leak. Failures are inevitable, although unfortunately not predictable.
One of the four giant units at Victoria's ageing Loy Yang A power station broke down on Tuesday night and early on Wednesday morning. Photo: Bloomberg
Wind power and solar power are in large part predictable. Yes, they are intermittent, but it is usually possible to tell a day or two ahead of time when and where the wind will blow and the sun will shine. There's time to put batteries, hydro and gas on standby.
But in summer it's becoming impossible to know when and where coal-fired power stations will blow. They are becoming unpredictably intermittent, all the more so each year they age.
When Treasurer Scott Morrison stood up in Parliament and waved around a lump of coal in a stunt unworthy of his office, he said coal was an important part of ensuring a "more certain" energy future. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
And standby power is costly. Tony Wood of the Grattan Institute helped run Origin Energy for 14 years. He says the industry standard is to have as much back-up as the biggest independent unit, so that if it drops out it can be instantly replaced. But the biggest independent coal units are huge. They require big back-up.
The biggest wind and solar farms are much smaller. While they require storage and gas peaking plants to fill in overnight and when the wind's not blowing, they don't need anything like as much back-up for when mechanical problems knock them out of service.
Output of Loy Yang A Power Station, December 26, 2017 Photo: Australia Institute
There are caveats. Independent turbines can stop blowing at once, and sometimes unpredictably. That's because most are located together in South Australia and Victoria, where the wind systems are synchronised. It would be better to have more wind farms in NSW, where the weather cycle is different. At times cloud cover is also unpredictable.
A future without coal-fired power stations is inevitable, and entirely manageable. Wind accounts for 40 per cent of South Australia's electricity supply, 8.5 per cent of Victoria's supply, and 2.8 per cent of the NSW supply. One of the many reasons no new coal-fired power stations will be financed or built is they are not well-suited to filling in gaps.
Output of Tarong Power Station, December 28, 2017 Photo: Australia Institute
They are good at providing always-on baseload power, but that's not needed in the middle of the night when the wind is blowing a gale and providing all of a system's need for virtually nothing. They are not as good at turning on or ramping up quickly when the wind stops blowing. If they are used repeatedly to do that, they break down sooner.
The Turnbull government's proposed national energy guarantee would require retailers to ensure that a certain amount of the electricity they line up is dispatchable. Critics took this to be a code word for coal, but it can't be, not unless Turnbull wants to misuse the word. Battery storage, pumped hydro, molten salt solar plants that can fire up overnight, and gas peaking plants are far more dispatchable.
And they are more reliable. The more we move away from coal the more secure our power system becomes.

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Penrith Swelters While Florida Freezes: Climate Disruption Is To Blame

Fairfax - Will Steffen*

On Sunday the temperature at Penrith hit 47.3 degrees Celsius, making it the hottest place on Earth during that 24-hour period. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, extreme cold and snow penetrated deep into the south-east United States. In normally sub-tropical Florida, frozen iguanas were falling out of trees from the extreme cold. "Give us a bit of that 'global warming'," President Trump thundered sarcastically.
Terms like "global warming" and the mental images they trigger can be misleading when people attempt to understand what is happening to the climate. A far better term is "climate disruption", which captures the real nature of the vast array of changes, many of them abrupt and unexpected, that are occurring.


In New Hampshire, boiling water turns to snow
Weather observers atop the Northeast's highest peak say the temperature has hit a record negative 34 degrees. Adam Gill of the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire says the previous record of negative 31 degrees was set in 1933.

"Climate disruption" was often used by Professor John Holdren, science adviser to former US president Barack Obama, to emphasise that a 1 or 2 degree increase in global average temperature does not simply translate into modest, uniform warming but rather triggers surprisingly sharp changes in extreme weather and disrupts longer-term weather and climate patterns.
The world's ecosystems and critical human systems, such as agriculture, are adapted to the relatively stable climatic conditions of the past 12,000 years. These include not only temperature, but also the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and the oceans that move heat and moisture around the planet and deliver the seasonal and geographical patterns of rainfall, heat and storms that we consider normal. These normal patterns are increasingly being disrupted by what is often termed "climate change".
The climate disruption we are increasingly experiencing is not natural. It is caused by the heat-trapping gases we humans are pouring into the atmosphere primarily by the burning of coal, oil and gas.
This enormous increase in energy in the atmosphere is disrupting normal circulation patterns. In the northern hemisphere, the exceptional heating around the north pole – twice the global average – is breaking down circumpolar air flows that normally keep the cold air around the north pole and more temperate air to the south. Now icy polar air is penetrating as far south as Florida while balmy conditions linger north of Finland.
Southern hemisphere circulation is also being disrupted, although not so dramatically yet. The cool-season frontal systems that normally bring rain to southern Australia are slipping southwards, leading to long-term drying trends in both the south-west and south-east of the country.
Many animals and natural ecosystems are being hammered by climate disruption. Florida's iguanas are not the only creatures dropping dead from trees. In Western Australia over 200 endangered Carnaby's black cockatoos were killed by extreme heat in 2010. More than 45,000 flying foxes were killed on one unusually hot day in south-east Queensland in 2014.
An iguana that froze lies near a pool after falling from a tree in Boca Raton, Florida, on Thursday. Photo: Frank Cerabino
Whole ecosystems are succumbing to climate disruption. In 2016 unusually dry and hot conditions triggered massive fires in Tasmania's World Heritage forests, while ocean circulation patterns have moved unprecedented underwater heatwaves around the world, driving the tragic coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef and the mass dieback of mangroves along the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Human systems are also at risk. The world's major agricultural zones have been developed around areas of good soils and predictable, stable climate patterns. These patterns are shifting as we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The north-east China food bowl is experiencing long-term drying while more erratic heat, rainfall/drought and storm patterns hit the central US.
A man cools off in the Nepean River in Penrith on Sunday. Photo: Brook Mitchell
Coastal cities have been built around stable sea levels and predictable storm patterns. These are both being disrupted. Global sea level is rising at an increasing rate, increasing the risk of coastal inundation. Intense tropical cyclone activity is projected to increase, a trend that has already been observed in the North Atlantic basin since the 1970s.
Climate disruption brings growing risks of large-scale migration and conflict as people, particularly the most vulnerable, are forced to deal with increasingly difficult conditions where they live. Some security analysts warn that climate disruption will dwarf terrorism and other conventional threats if present trends continue or worsen.
Fans were left high, dry and hot at the Sydney International as organisers ordered players off the court due to extreme heat.  Photo: AAP
Had enough of climate disruption? Then let's leave our 20th century thinking behind and get on with the job of rapidly building innovative, clever, carbon-neutral 21st century societies.

*Will Steffen is a Climate Council of Australia councillor.

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11/01/2018

New York City Plans To Divest $5bn From Fossil Fuels And Sue Oil Companies

The Guardian - 

Mayor Bill de Blasio: ‘It’s up to the fossil fuel companies whose greed put us in this position to shoulder the cost of making New York safer and more resilient’
Lower Manhattan was hit by a power cut during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Photograph: Afton Almaraz/Getty Images
New York City is seeking to lead the assault on both climate change and the Trump administration with a plan to divest $5bn from fossil fuels and sue the world’s most powerful oil companies over their contribution to dangerous global warming.
City officials have set a goal of divesting New York’s $189bn pension funds from fossil fuel companies within five years in what they say would be “among the most significant divestment efforts in the world to date”. Currently, New York City’s five pension funds have about $5bn in fossil fuel investments. New York state has already announced it is exploring how to divest from fossil fuels.
“New York City is standing up for future generations by becoming the first major US city to divest our pension funds from fossil fuels,” said Bill de Blasio, New York’s mayor.
“At the same time, we’re bringing the fight against climate change straight to the fossil fuel companies that knew about its effects and intentionally misled the public to protect their profits. As climate change continues to worsen, it’s up to the fossil fuel companies whose greed put us in this position to shoulder the cost of making New York safer and more resilient.”
De Blasio said that the city is taking the five fossil fuel firms – BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell – to federal court due to their contribution to climate change.
Court documents state that New York has suffered from flooding and erosion due to climate change and because of looming future threats it is seeking to “shift the costs of protecting the city from climate change impacts back on to the companies that have done nearly all they could to create this existential threat”.
The court filing claims that just 100 fossil fuel producers are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial revolution, with the five targeted companies the largest contributors.
The case will also point to evidence that firms such as Exxon knew of the impact of climate change for decades, only to downplay and even deny this in public. New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is investigating Exxon over this alleged deception.
New York was badly rattled by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and faces costs escalating into the tens of billions of dollars in order to protect low-lying areas such as lower Manhattan and the area around JFK airport from being inundated by further severe storms fueled by rising sea levels and atmospheric warming. De Blasio’s office said climate change is “perhaps the toughest challenge New York City will face in the coming decades”.
New York’s lawsuit echoes a similar effort on the west coast, where two California counties and a city are suing 37 fossil fuel companies for knowingly emitting dangerous levels of greenhouse gases. One of those firms, Exxon, has complained that it has been targeted by a “collection of special interests and opportunistic politicians” as part of a “conspiracy” to force the company to comply with various political objectives.
The legal action and the divestment draw perhaps the starkest dividing line yet between New York and the Trump administration on climate change. Under Trump, the federal government has attempted the withdraw the US from the Paris climate accords, tear up Barack Obama’s signature climate policies and open up vast areas of America’s land and waters to coal, oil and gas interests.
De Blasio and the city comptroller, Scott Stringer, have come under pressure for several years from activists to rid New York’s pension funds of any link to fossil fuels, with some environmentalists claiming the city has been too slow to use its clout to tackle climate change.
Stringer admitted the divestment will be “complex” and will take some time but said the city’s pension funds could promote sustainability while also protecting the retirement of teachers, police officers and other city workers.
“New York City today becomes a capital of the fight against climate change on this planet,” said Bill McKibben, co-founder of climate group 350.org.
“With its communities exceptionally vulnerable to a rising sea, the city is showing the spirit for which it’s famous – it’s not pretending that working with the fossil fuel companies will somehow save the day, but instead standing up to them, in the financial markets and in court.”
Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief and architect of the Paris climate agreement, added: “The exponential transition toward a fossil-fuel-free economy is unstoppable and local governments have a critical role to play. There is no time to lose.
“It’s therefore extremely encouraging to see NYC step up today to safeguard their city and exercise their role as investors to protect their beneficiaries from climate-risk.”
New York joins cities such as Washington DC and Cape Town in divesting, along with universities such as Stanford in California and Oxford in the UK. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, notable for its links to the past oil wealth of John D Rockefeller, has also sought to divest.

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China, Moving To Cut Emissions, Halts Production Of 500 Car Models

New York Times - Hiroko Tabuchi

Smog on a main thoroughfare in Harbin, China, in November. Officials are under intense pressure to rein in dangerous air pollution. Tao Zhang/Getty Images
China is suspending the production of more than 500 car models and model versions that do not meet its fuel economy standards, several automakers confirmed Tuesday, the latest move by Beijing to reduce emissions in the world’s largest auto market and take the lead in battling climate change.
The government-affiliated China Vehicle Technology Service Center said that the suspension, effective Jan. 1, would affect both domestic carmakers and foreign joint ventures.
The move was expected to affect a small share of car manufacturing in China, where 28 million vehicles were produced in 2016. China has dozens of small-scale automakers — some producing just a few hundred cars a year — and the central government has tried to consolidate its auto industry, a factor that most likely also played a role in the suspension. Model versions — for example, different combinations of an engine and transmission — are constantly being deregistered.
Cui Dongshu, the secretary general of the China Passenger Car Association, said that the ban would affect at most 1 percent of the Chinese market. But the government’s decision to cite fuel economy in the deregistration of so many versions at the same time is nonetheless a signal of the government’s commitment to fuel economy.
The country, which for years prioritized economic growth over environmental protection and now produces more than a quarter of the world’s human-caused greenhouse gases, has emerged as an unlikely bastion of climate action after President Trump’s rejection of the Paris climate agreement.
Chinese leaders are under intense pressure to rein in dangerous air pollution, a hot-button issue in China, where thick smog has at times forced schools and businesses to temporarily shut down. Late last month, China said it was going ahead with plans to create the world’s largest carbon market, giving Chinese power companies a financial incentive to operate more cleanly.
“They’re sending a signal to everybody — that this is for real,” said Michael Dunne, president of Dunne Automotive, a Hong Kong-based consultancy on China’s clean car market. “This shows their emissions standards have teeth.”
The Chinese government has already become the world’s biggest supporter of electric cars, offering automakers numerous incentives for producing so-called new energy vehicles. Those incentives are set to decrease by 2020, to be replaced by quotas for the number of clean cars automakers must sell. That has spurred global automakers to pick up the pace in their shift toward battery-powered cars.
An assembly line at the FAW-Volkswagen plant in Chengdu, China. The country produced 28 million vehicles in 2016. Goh Chai Hin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By contrast, the United States is considering relaxing tailpipe emissions standards and very nearly killed off a tax credit for electric vehicles during its latest tax overhaul.
The fact that Chinese automakers like the state-run giant Dongfeng Motor Corporation did not appear to be spared “shows that the government is not playing favorites in trying to meet their goals,” said Bruce M. Belzowski, managing director of the Automotive Futures group at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.
The Chinese government had long held back from aggressive emissions standards to allow its own automakers to catch up with the latest clean car technology. But that is changing, with the government setting increasingly stringent tailpipe rules.
The latest development “is a testimony to how quickly their own automakers have evolved,” Mr. Dunne said. “They’re saying: We’re ready to play this game.”
Foreign automakers were still tallying the effect of the suspension on Tuesday. Volkswagen, General Motors, Honda and other foreign automakers in China referred queries on specific numbers to their Asia offices. Rebecca Kiehne of BMW, which runs the BMW Brilliance joint venture in China, said the company was not yet prepared to comment.
Han Tjan, a spokesman for Daimler, said production would not be affected at its Beijing Benz joint venture with the Chinese car manufacturer BAIC Motor Corporation. The only car covered by the suspension was a high-end E-Class model the venture has not manufactured since 2016, he said.
The United States regulates cars by model years, and also approves various versions of each model. Each version may no longer be sold in the new car market if it was built to meet a previous model year’s regulations and the regulations are different for the new model year.
By contrast, China relies on a system of assigning a number to each version of a model. When an automaker tweaks a car’s design to improve its appeal or improve its regulatory compliance, whether annually or at some other interval, the new version receives a new number. China deregistered 553 of these numbers effective Dec. 31.
Global automakers will have no choice but to meet the increasingly stringent government policies in China, said Michelle Krebs, an analyst at the AutoTrader Group.
“The simple fact that China is the biggest market means automakers will be accommodating,” she said.

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More Than Half Of New Norway Car Sales Now Electric Or Hybrid

Reuters - Alister Doyle | Camilla Knudsen

An electric car is charged at a parking lot in Oslo, Norway, June 1, 2017. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins

Summary
  • Norway tops global sales of electric cars
  • Electric, hybrid cars make up 52 pct of 2017 sales
  • Big subsidies have aided shift from fossil fuel cars
OSLO - Sales of electric and hybrid cars exceeded half of new registrations in Norway in 2017, a record aided by generous subsidies that extended the Nordic nation’s lead in a shift from fossil-fuel engines, data showed on Wednesday.
Pure electric cars and hybrids, which have both battery power and a diesel or petrol motor, accounted for 52 percent of all new car sales in 2017 in Norway against 40 percent in 2016, the independent Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said.
“No one else is close” in terms of a national share of electric cars, OFV chief Oeyvind Solberg Thorsen said. “For the first time we have a fossil fuel market share below 50 percent.”
Norway exempts new electric cars from many taxes and road tolls and owners often get free parking and charging. Norway also generates almost all its electricity from hydropower, so the shift helps to reduce air pollution and climate change.
Last year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said Norway was far ahead of other nations such as the Netherlands, Sweden, China, France and Britain in electric car sales.



By the IEA yardstick, which excludes hybrid cars which only have a small electric motor that cannot be plugged in, electric car sales in Norway rose to 39 percent in 2017 from 29 in 2016, when the Netherlands was in second on 6.4 percent.
“The shift has gone faster than we’d thought, and the big car makers say they’re going all in to produce non-fossil cars,” Thorsen told Reuters. Norway’s electric car policies contrast with its big offshore oil and gas production.
Christina Bu, head of the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association which represents owners, said it was too early to reduce incentives for electric cars, noting that parliament has set a goal of phasing out sales of fossil fuel vehicles by 2025.
“It’s an ambitious goal only seven years away,” she told Reuters.
A plan last year by the right-wing government to trim electric car incentives in the nation of 5.3 million people, dubbed a “Tesla Tax”, was dropped in negotiations on the 2018 budget.
Norwegian car sales in 2017 were topped by the Volkswagen Golf, BMWi3, Toyota Rav4 and Tesla Model X. The Tesla is pure electric and others have electric or hybrid versions.
Overall, sales of pure electric cars in Norway rose in 2017 to 21 percent from 16 in 2016.
Sales of diesel cars fell most in 2017, to 23 percent from 31 in 2016. Some regions in Norway have started to charge higher road tolls for diesel cars than for petrol-driven vehicles.

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10/01/2018

BOM Annual Climate Statement Shows 2017 Was Australia's Third-Warmest Year On Record“

ABC News - Kate Doyle

A wet beginning and end of the year bookended a warm, dry winter in 2017. (ABC Open contributor FrancesJones)
 Key Points
  • Third warmest year on record despite no El Nino
  • Seven of the 10 hottest years have occurred since 2005
  • Rainfall 8 per cent above the 1961 to 1990 average, but dry over winter
The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has confirmed 2017 was Australia's third-warmest year on record, with temperatures almost a degree above the 1961 to 1990 average.
With a rundown of the year's temperatures, rainfall, climate drivers, major weather events and enough maps to make an atlas, the Annual Climate Statement is a late Christmas present for weather lovers.
In 2017 the main climate drivers, the Indian Ocean Dipole and the El Nino Southern Oscillation, were in neutral for much of the year.
But despite there being no El Nino, usually associated with warm temperatures, 2017 was still the third-warmest national mean temperature on record, at 0.95 degrees above the 1961 to 1990 average.
Karl Braganza, BOM's head of climate monitoring, said the figures showed how much Australia had warmed.
The average daily maximums over 2017 were above the 1961 to 1990 average for most of Australia, especially in south-west Queensland and north-west New South Wales. (Supplied: Bureau of Meteorology)
"We have seen that warming across the land surface temperatures and in the ocean surrounding Australia, so they have both warmed by a similar amount and that's consistent with global warming as well," he said.
Seven of the 10 warmest years on record have been recorded since 2005 and only one year was below the 1961 to 1990 average in the past decade.
"Odds [now] favour warmer-than-average temperatures more often than in the past," Dr Braganza said.


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Exxon Prepares To Sue California Cities, Says They Contradict Themselves On Climate Change

Forbes - John O'Brien

ExxonMobil is apparently planning to sue the California cities and counties that have sued it over climate change, alleging they must be lying in their lawsuits or misleading potential investors in bond offerings. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown)
Some government officials in California are hypocrites pushing a political agenda that involves using private lawyers to sue and demonize ExxonMobil, the company is now arguing in a Texas state court.
On Jan. 8, Exxon took the first step towards suing those who orchestrated climate change lawsuits in California by asking the Tarrant County District Court to allow it to question an assortment of government officials and a Hagens Berman lawyer. The company says those local officials are talking out of both sides of their mouths – blaming Exxon for an impending flooding disaster while not disclosing that alleged threat to possible investors in their bond offerings.
In 2017, the counties of Marin, Santa Cruz and San Mateo and the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz and Imperial Beach filed suit against dozens of energy companies, including Exxon and 17 other Texas-based businesses, over climate change. The company has previously been targeted by the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York.
“It is reasonable to infer that the municipalities brought these lawsuits not because of a bona fide belief in any tortious conduct by the defendants or actual damage to their jurisdictions, but instead to coerce ExxonMobil and others operating in the Texas energy sector to adopt policies aligned with those favored by local politicians in California,” attorneys for the company wrote.
In doing so, they must have lied to potential investors in their respective bond offerings, the company claims.
Statements made to potential investors contradict allegations made by the municipalities when they sued the energy industry, the filing says. For example:
  • San Mateo County’s complaint says it is “particularly vulnerable to sea level rise” and that there is a 93% chance the county experiences a “devastating” flood before 2050. However, bond offerings in 2014 and 2016 noted that the county “is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur.”
  • Imperial Beach alleged a similar danger from sea level rise, claiming coastal flooding will cause more than $38 million in damages and its economic vulnerability is valued at more than $106 million. However, Exxon says, the city has never warned investors that such disasters await.
  • Marin County alleges a 99% risk it will experience a devastating flood before 2050 in its lawsuit but has not disclosed that to investors in bond offerings, Exxon says.
The company makes similar claims about the lawsuits filed by San Francisco, Santa Cruz city and county and Oakland.
“In 2014 and 2017, San Francisco circulated bond offerings for its Municipal Transportation Agency that do not even contain the words ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change,’” Exxon’s petition says.
“The word ‘flood’ appears only once in these bond offerings – to disclose the absence of ‘insurance policies covering earthquake, flood, environmental pollution or other, similar risks.’”
Exxon goes on to call the municipalities “eager consumers of energy” that emit substantial amounts of greenhouse gases.
Exxon believes 16 individuals possess evidence that would allow it to file a lawsuit that would likely contain a claim for civil conspiracy.
Notable among the group is Matt Pawa, a Hagens Berman attorney instrumental in creating a “playbook” discussed at a conference in La Jolla, CA, and carried out by the AGs of New York and Massachusetts and the California local governments, Exxon says. He represents San Francisco and Oakland in their lawsuits.
Exxon has also been locked in a dispute with New York AG Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts AG Maura Healey. Those AGs have issued subpoenas to the company as they investigate whether it misled investors about its impact on climate change.
A recent Times Union article showed that Schneiderman invested between $50,000 to $75,000 in Vanguard Energy ETF. That fund’s biggest holding is Exxon.
“A collection of special interests and opportunistic politicians are abusing law enforcement authority and legal process to impose their viewpoint on climate change,” Exxon says.
“This conspiracy emerged out of frustration in New York, Massachusetts and California with voters in other parts of the country and with the federal government for failing to adopt their preferred policies on climate change.
“But rather than focusing their efforts in the marketplace of ideas and adopting a strategy of persuasion, the members of this conspiracy chose to advance their political objectives by imposing unlawful burdens on perceived political opponents.”
Exxon filed suit in Texas federal court in response to the subpoenas issued by Schneiderman and Healey. It has since been transferred to New York and remains pending.
“The Court is uncertain if it is common practice for attorneys general to begin to investigate a company after reading an article that accuses a company of possibly committing wrongdoing decades ago,” U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade wrote when he sent the suit to New York because that’s where Schneiderman held a press conference to announce his investigation.
“What the Court does know is that Exxon has publicly acknowledged since 2006 the possible significant risks to society and ecosystems from rising greenhouse gas emissions, yet the attorneys general have only recently felt compelled to look further into Exxon’s documents from the last 40 years to see if Exxon knew more than it shared with the public and investors about climate change.”
In addition to Pawa, Exxon seeks to depose: John Beiers, San Mateo County Counsel; John Maltbie, San Mateo County Manager; Jennifer Lyon, city attorney for Imperial Beach; Andy Hall, city manager of Imperial Beach; Serge Dedina, mayor of Imperial Beach; Brian Washington, county counsel of Marin County; Matthew Hymel, county administrator of Marin County; Barbara Parker, city attorney of Oakland; Sabrina Landreth, city administrator of Oakland; Dennis Herrera, city attorney of San Francisco; Edward Reiskin, director of transportation of San Francisco’s MTA; Dana McRae, county counsel for Santa Cruz; Carlos Palacios, assistant county administrative officer of Santa Cruz; Anthony Condotti, city attorney for Santa Cruz; and Martin Bernal, city manager of Santa Cruz.

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative