Maui

Countryartisten Kris Kristofferson har dött i sitt hem i Maui, Hawaii. Han blev 88 år gammal. ”Vår make, pappa och farfar somnade in fridfullt i sitt hem”, skriver familjen i ett uttalande till People.

Elbolaget Hawaii Electric ska betala runt två miljarder dollar i skadestånd efter fjolårets stora skogsbrand på Maui. Det motsvarar ungefär hälften av det totala belopp som myndigheter och företag ska betala till allmänheten.

De så kallade megabränderna, som får vanliga skogsbränder att blekna i jämförelse, har blivit allt vanligare på jorden. Bränderna har omedelbara ekologiska effekter – de dödar växter och djur som kanske hade överlevt mindre omfattande bränder. Men de får också mer långsiktiga konsekvenser. De jättelika bränderna kan utrota hela arter, förändra landskap och omforma hela ekosystem, skriver The New York Times. Bränderna har blivit så pass vanliga att forskare nyligen har döpt tiden vi lever i till pyrocen, eldens tidsålder. In our Pyrocene age, enormous wildfires aren’t merely damaging ecosystems but transforming them. By Emily Anthes October 15, 2023 On Aug. 15, a small wildfire was detected in the hills above West Kelowna, in British Columbia. The landscape was parched and the wind was fierce, and over the next few days the modest blaze exploded into a raging conflagration. It raced down into the valley and toward Okanagan Lake. Wind blew red-hot embers across the water, sparking new fires around the city of Kelowna. “I didn’t sleep much the night that the West Kelowna fires crossed the lake,” said Karen Hodges, who lives in Kelowna. “I could see the fires from my window. And so I was thinking about people I know in the valley and where their houses were.” Hodges, a conservation ecologist at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, also found herself worried about wildlife. She had been studying some Western screech owls that had been nesting in the heart of the fast-moving inferno. “That speed of fire would be difficult for animals to evacuate in front of,” she said. Had the owls escaped in time? And after Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, what would be left for the survivors? Fire is a natural phenomenon; some species actually benefit from its effects and even those that don’t can be remarkably resilient in the face of flames. But as fires intensify, they are beginning to outstrip nature’s ability to bounce back. “Not all fires have the same impact,” said Morgan Tingley, an ecologist at UCLA. “These megafires are not good for ecosystems.” Megafires, which dwarf typical wildfires in size, have an immediate ecological toll, killing individual plants and animals that might have survived more contained blazes. In the longer term, changing fire patterns could drive some species out of existence, transform landscapes and utterly remake ecosystems. This incendiary age, which some scientists have called the Pyrocene, could lead to “a wholesale conversion of what habitats are where on the planet,” Hodges said. “Right now, everybody is talking about fires and smoke and who dies, because of the immediacy of this fire year. But really, truly, the long-term consequences are much more severe and sustained.” Fire has been a planetary phenomenon for hundreds of millions of years, and plants and animals that evolved in fire-prone regions have adapted to periodic conflagrations. Some trees have roots that can re-sprout even if the trunk burns, while the mere smell of smoke will rouse some animals from torpor, a form of light hibernation. But in many regions and ecosystems, fires are becoming larger and more severe. In the United States, wildfires burn far more land today than they did three decades ago, especially in Western states. Globally, the risk of catastrophic fires could increase by more than 50% by the end of the century, the United Nations reported. Climate change is partly to blame, scientists said, but so are other factors, such as the expansion of highly flammable invasive grasses, which helped the deadly fires in Maui spread so quickly. More than a century of fire suppression has also left some forests thick with trees, giving flames more fuel. “When fires burn, they burn with so much intensity,” said Chris French, a deputy chief of the National Forest System in the United States. Even fire-savvy organisms may find themselves outmatched. In northern Australia, frilled lizards can survive low-severity fires by hiding in the tree canopy. But during severe fires, when flames leap higher, lizards that employ this strategy may perish. Fires are also spreading into ecosystems where flames are an unfamiliar threat. The megafires that erupted in Australia in 2019 and 2020 scorched the country’s rainforests, which contained many plants that cannot regenerate after burning. The animals in those ecosystems might be “fire naive,” said Dale Nimmo, an ecologist at Charles Sturt University in Australia. “They may not have been under any natural selection to detect the subtle cues of fire in the air, or through sound. And so they may not recognize the threat as it approaches.” The Algerian sand racer, a Mediterranean lizard, lives in a variety of habitats, only some of which experience frequent fires. In a 2021 study, researchers found that lizards collected from fire-prone sites reacted quickly to the smell of smoke, flicking their tongues and running around their terrariums. “In places where fire is not a common threat, lizards did nothing,” said Lola Álvarez-Ruiz, a biologist at the Desertification Research Center in Spain, who conducted the study. Fires that consume more fuel may also produce more smoke per unit of area burned, threatening animals far from the flames. “All air-breathing animals are going to be impacted by smoke exposure, because the chemicals in smoke are toxic,” said Olivia Sanderfoot, an ecologist at UCLA. Smoke inhalation can do more than cause respiratory problems. For months after severe peatland fires produced record air pollution in Indonesia in 2015, Bornean orangutans vocalized less frequently and their voices became harsher. The orangutans also moved less and ate more than they had before the smoke descended, but they still burned stored body fat, suggesting that their bodies were working overtime. That could be a sign of inflammation or stress, said Wendy Erb, an ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who conducted the research. The long-term consequences are unclear, but fires have become common on Borneo, which is the only home for the critically endangered apes. “We’re talking about all of the remaining living orangutans essentially being exposed to the smoke on a regular basis,” Erb said. Animals that survive the inferno must then find food, water and shelter on hot, dry, denuded landscapes where the risk of predation is high. (Surrounded by weakened prey, some predators thrive after fires.) Fortunately, fires tend to burn unevenly, ravaging some stands of trees while grazing or sparing others. These unburned islands can be a lifeline for fire-sensitive species such as caribou, which eat highly flammable lichen, as well as thin-barked fir trees. But some of today’s fires are leaving fewer of these oases. “You could walk half a mile, and you wouldn’t see a single living tree,” said Andrew Stillman, an ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Increasingly, these fires seem to create habitat conditions that are outside of the norms that these species are adapted to.” That may be true even for fire-loving animals, such as the black-backed woodpecker. The birds nest in scorched trees and feed on the beetle larvae that colonize the charred trunks. But they prefer patches of burned trees that are near stands of leafy, living ones, which protect their fledglings from being picked off by predators, Stillman and Tingley found. After the enormous Rim fire in California in 2013, scientists searched for the woodpeckers at nearly 500 sites across the expansive burn scar. They found just six birds. “Even though it had created all this great burned habitat, it wasn’t the right kind of burned habitat,” Tingley said. Fewer clusters of living trees can also reduce regrowth. “In many places, we’re not getting regeneration because the seed source is lost,” said French, of the National Forest System. “It honestly looks like someone went in and just set off a bomb.” Scorched, vegetation-less soil, which does not absorb rain well, can also hamper regeneration. Flash flooding after fires can wash ash and sediment into rivers and streams, polluting the water, killing fish and reshaping waterways. After the Rodeo-Chediski fire in Arizona in 2002, repeated flooding washed away fertile soils that had taken more than 8,000 years to develop. “That has cascading impacts on the kind of plants that can grow,” said Jonathan Long, an ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service, who conducted the research. In the Northwest Territories of Canada, repeated fires have utterly transformed some forests. At one site, towering jack pines have given way to grasses and a smattering of “scrubby, stunted” aspens, which have light seeds that can be carried on the wind, said Ellen Whitman, a forest fire research scientist at Natural Resources Canada. “It is a very different place,” she added. Change is not necessarily bad. Fires can prompt overdue regeneration in places where flames have been artificially suppressed, and forests are not inherently superior to other ecosystems. Old-growth grasslands, which are biodiversity hot spots, are also under threat; in some places, grasslands have turned into forests, partly because of fire suppression. “So maybe in some ways, a bit of a balance is being restored,” Whitman said. But it could take a long time for new grasslands to build up biodiversity, and landscape transformations have ripple effects. In the Amazon, forest plots subjected to frequent fires began to resemble savannas; at these sites, ants and butterflies that favored forests declined, while species preferring open habitats moved in, scientists found. In North America, the loss of large, old-growth trees could reduce the ranks of forest specialists, such as martens and fishers, members of the weasel family that den inside tree hollows. Although the idea remains speculative, changes in fire activity could ultimately produce ecological communities that are more homogeneous, dominated by “generalist” species, such as coyotes and deer mice, which are flexible in their diets and habitats, scientists said. Today, increased fire activity could push more than 1,000 threatened plant and animal species closer to extinction, scientists calculated. And many plants and animals are already facing multiple stressors. In Canada, Western screech owls are threatened by land clearing and the expansion of invasive barred owls. “Then you throw fire on top of that as an additional thing that kills some of them, stresses others and changes habitat out from under them — you know, suddenly you’ve got too much to handle,” Hodges said. The West Kelowna fire burned some of the owls’ nest trees, she said, and the outlook is grim for a young, GPS-tagged bird that one of her students was tracking. “Its last known location was right in the middle of the fire that blew up so quickly,” Hodges said. “And we haven’t detected the signal since.” © 2023 The New York Times Company. Read the original article at The New York Times.

Räntorna stiger, inflationen biter sig fast, hushållens besparingar krymper och arbetsmarknaden kyls av. Ändå shoppar amerikanerna som om det inte fanns någon morgondag, skriver Wall Street Journal. I augusti spenderade de 5,8 procent mer än samma månad förra året, en bra bit över inflationen som kom in strax under 4 procent. Flyg- och evenemangsindustrin har haft en rekordsommar. Banker som erbjuder sina kunder att sätta upp sparmål noterar att upplevelsemål är 1,5 gånger så vanliga som långsiktiga mål. Pandemin och klimatkrisen verkar ha medfört att allt fler vill leva här och nu, innan det är för sent, i stället för att spara till en osäker framtid. Concerts, trips and designer handbags are taking priority over saving for a home or rainy day. By Rachel Wolfe

The Wall Street Journal, 1 October 2023 Consumers should be spending less by now. Interest rates are up. Inflation remains high. Pandemic savings have shrunk. And the labor market is cooling. Yet household spending, the primary driver of the nation’s economic growth, remains robust. Americans spent 5.8% more in August than a year earlier, well outstripping less than 4% inflation. And the experience economy boomed this summer, with Delta Air Lines reporting record revenue in the second quarter and Ticketmaster selling over 295 million event tickets in the first six months of 2023, up nearly 18% year-over-year. Economists and financial advisers say consumers putting short-term needs and goals above long-term ones is normal. Still, this moment is different, they say. A tough housing market has more consumers writing off something they’d historically save for, while the pandemic showed the instability of any long-term plans related to health, work or day-to-day life. So, they are spending on once-in-a-lifetime experiences because they worry they may not be able to do them later. “It’s not a regret-filled, spur-of-the-moment decision,” says Michael Liersch, who oversees a team of advisers as head of advice at Wells Fargo. “It’s the opposite of that, where I would regret not having done it.” Liersch cautions that it’s too soon to say whether the spate of spending is a fleeting moment or a new normal. And consumers remain frustrated about inflation as the price of many goods remains significantly higher than a few years ago. Ibby Hussain, who works in marketing for a financial communications firm, says the Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment he and his fiancée rent for $3,000 a month would cost a million dollars to buy. At current rates, that means around $5,000 a month after a $200,000 down payment, not including property taxes. “And it’s not even that nice of an apartment.” So, instead of saving for a down payment like he expected to after turning 30 and getting engaged in the past year, he splurged. First, he bought a $1,600 Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket and then he spent $3,500 on a bachelor party trip to Ibiza, Spain. “I might as well just enjoy what I have now,” he says. Ally Bank, whose online platform started allowing customers to create savings buckets for different goals in 2020, says users create about one-and-a-half times more experience-oriented buckets such as travel and “fun funds” versus those associated with longer-term planning. Lindsey and Darrell Bradshaw went into credit-card debt to finance a vacation to Maui this past spring. The couple booked the trip only a few weeks after Lindsey, 37, quit her job to be a full-time caregiver to their 8-year-old son, who has special needs. “We did not have the money and we were like, ‘Let’s just do this anyway,’ ” says Darrell Bradshaw, a 39-year-old general contractor in Seattle. The trip cost about $10,000, including three, $1,000 last-minute plane tickets, 10 nights at a $385-a-night 4-star resort and several elaborate meals. Even though the family decided to cancel subscriptions and cut back on dining out to help offset the bill, they say they have no regrets—especially since they got to see Lahaina just a few months before it was decimated by deadly wildfires. Fears about a changing climate are driving some people to try to see places before they’re gone. In a monthly Deloitte survey of 19,000 global consumers, climate change was the only topic among 19 different concerns that respondents reported feeling significantly more worried about over the past year. Josh Richner says he greatly lowered his retirement contribution to afford a cross-country trip that included a $7,000 Alaskan cruise so his family could see the ice caps, which have been melting at a rapid clip. “I’ve never spent that much on a trip before,” says the 35-year-old, who says the splurge was also motivated by the pandemic and a health scare. About six months ago, Richner and his wife decided to sell their Columbus, Ohio, home to travel the country with their two young children. Working for National Legal Center, a law firm that helps consumers resolve debt, he knows the potential consequences of living in a way that gives priority to the present. But he isn’t worried. “I just hit a point where the thing that we had been talking about maybe hopefully doing some day, we’re going to do it now,” he says. “I’m not going to worry about money anymore. I don’t have it in me.” Consumers might not be able to keep splurging forever. Labor strikes and student loan repayments could both lead people to pull back. Rising gas prices could also deter travel. For those who study spending, however, the robustness up to this point has been a surprise. In the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s August SCE Household Spending Survey, households reported spending 5.5% more than last year. The share of households that said they made at least one large purchase in the previous four months increased to 64% from 57%, its highest reading since August 2015. “Normally at a time when you have higher inflation, but also higher interest rates, you don’t expect spending to hold up so well,” says Wilbert van der Klaauw, an economic research adviser on household and public policy at the Fed. Rather than funnel all their spare change into a house or retirement account, Candice and Jasmine Kelly started a bucket-list fund after attending back-to-back funerals a few months ago. The couple adds a few hundred dollars from their paychecks each month into the fund, which they have used to try fancy restaurant tasting menus and buy Jasmine her dream designer handbag. Instead of waiting to have fun when they retire, Candice, a 26-year-old management analyst in Charlotte, N.C., says the couple is trying to do the opposite. They want to enjoy their money while they’re young—even if it means working longer. “All the rules that exist around money and lifestyle are just things people made up, so we’re playing a different game, and honestly I think we’re having more fun,” says Candice.

Exxon Mobil drev länge en strategi för att spela ner klimatförändringar och bolagets påverkan och ansvar. Det visar läckta dokument som The Wall Street Journal har kommit över. Strategin bedrevs dessutom medan bolaget hade en helt annan kommunikation utåt. Nu står företagen inför dussintals rättsprocesser över hela USA, där det anklagas för att ha vilselett sina intressenter och allmänheten. En av stämningarna kommer från styret på den brandhärjade Maui-ön på Hawaii där bränder dödade över hundra personer i augusti. Redan 2020 anklagade ön Exxon och andra oljeföretag för att utsätta platser som Maui för klimatrisker – bland annat för allt farligare skogsbränder. Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately By Christopher M Matthews and Collin Eaton

The Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2023 Exxon Mobil issued its first public statement that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change in 2006, following years of denial. In public forums, the company argued that the risk of serious impact on the environment justified global action. Yet behind closed doors, Exxon took a very different tack: Its executives strategized over how to diminish concerns about warming temperatures, and they sought to muddle scientific findings that might hurt its oil-and-gas business, according to internal Exxon documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former executives. Exxon’s public acceptance in 2006 of the risks posed by climate change was an early act of Rex Tillerson , an Exxon lifer who became CEO that year. Some viewed him as a moderating force who brought Exxon in line with the scientific consensus. The documents reviewed by the Journal, which haven’t been previously reported, cast Tillerson’s decadelong tenure in a different light. They show that Tillerson, as well as some of Exxon’s board directors and other top executives, sought to cast doubt on the severity of climate change’s impacts. Exxon scientists supported research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science, even after the company said it would stop funding think tanks and others that promoted climate-change denial. Exxon is now a defendant in dozens of lawsuits around the U.S. that accuse it and other oil companies of deception over climate change and that aim to collect billions of dollars in damages. Prosecutors and attorneys involved in some of the cases are seeking some of the documents reviewed by the Journal, which were part of a previous investigation by New York’s attorney general but never made public. One of the lawsuits is from Hawaii’s Maui County, where wildfires killed more than 100 people in August. The lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleged the island faced increased climate-related risks, including more dangerous wildfires, caused by fossil-fuel companies. Some of the lawsuits may go to trial as soon as next year. “I know how this information looks—when taken out of context, it seems bad,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in response to the Journal’s inquiry about the documents. “But having worked with some of these colleagues earlier in my career, I have the benefit of knowing they are people of good intent. None of these old emails and notes matter though. All that does is that we’re building an entire business dedicated to reducing emissions—both our own and others—and spending billions of dollars on solutions that have a real, sustainable impact.” Under Woods, who became CEO in 2017, Exxon has committed to spend $17 billion over five years on emissions-reducing technologies. Exxon didn’t address detailed questions sent by the Journal. Tillerson declined to comment through a representative. Exxon turned millions of pages of documents over to the New York attorney general during that office’s yearslong investigation, announced in 2015, into whether the company misled investors about the impact of climate regulation on its business. The Journal reviewed summaries of the documents that Exxon’s lawyers had determined were the most significant. After the attorney general narrowed the focus of the case, the documents weren’t made public. The documents summarize emails between top executives, board meetings and Tillerson’s edits of speeches, among other things. After a nearly three-week trial in 2019, Justice Barry Ostrager of the New York State Supreme Court ruled the New York attorney general failed to prove its case. “Nothing in this opinion is intended to absolve Exxon Mobil from responsibility for contributing to climate change,” Ostrager wrote. Throughout Tillerson’s tenure between 2006 and 2016, Exxon executives in their internal communications attempted to push back against the notion that humans needed to curtail oil and gas use to help the planet—despite the company’s public statements that action was needed. In 2012, after the pre-eminent scientific authority on climate change warned of global calamity if carbon emissions continued unabated, Tillerson disagreed and directed Exxon researchers to “influence” the group. As pressure mounted to stop drilling in the Arctic due to rapid glacial melting and other environmental impacts, Exxon fretted about a key project in Russia’s far north and worked to “de-couple climate change and the Arctic.” “The general perception is that Tillerson was softer and stopped funding the bad guys” that were espousing climate change denial, said Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a charity that partly focuses on environmental issues. “This is the first X-ray into Tillerson’s head and shows he wanted to throw climate mitigation off the rails. It’s obituary-changing.” The fund has issued grants financing litigation and other support for around two dozen cases against Exxon, whose predecessor, Standard Oil, was founded by family patriarch John D. Rockefeller . The fund has invested millions of dollars in a broader campaign against big oil companies. A study published earlier this year in the journal Science determined Exxon’s climate modelers had predicted warming temperatures with precision since the 1970s, in line with the scientific consensus. The study was funded, in part, by a grant from the Rockefeller Family Fund. In the summer of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen issued what’s now seen as a seminal warning on climate change when he testified before Congress that Earth was warming dangerously and humans were causing it. Frank Sprow , then Exxon’s head of corporate research, sent a memo to colleagues a few months later articulating what would become a central pillar of Exxon’s strategy. “If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur,” wrote Sprow. “Any additional R&D efforts within Corporate Research on Greenhouse should have two primary purposes: 1. Protect the value of our resources (oil, gas, coal). 2. Preserve Exxon’s business options.” Sprow’s memo was adopted by Exxon as policy, he said in a recent interview. Exxon stopped most internal climate research, instead funding it through university and research organizations, Sprow said. Exxon’s corporate research division was redirected from broader scientific study to focus on “science to support our business.” Sprow said he and former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond acknowledged the climate was changing but questioned to what extent human activity was causing it and how serious and rapid the impacts would be. The January study in Science said that Exxon’s climate modelers mostly attributed the changes to humans. Martin Hoffert, who worked as a consultant to Exxon on climate science in the 1980s, said Sprow’s memo sent another message: “It’s an oblique way of saying we’re in the oil business and we’re not going to get out of the oil business, and we’ll do everything we can to make money on the oil business.” By the time Tillerson became CEO in 2006, Exxon’s positions on climate change had become a public-relations nightmare, according to Sprow, who retired from the company in 2005. Exxon’s public shift on climate change came after the Royal Society, a British scientific academy, criticized the company for spreading “inaccurate and misleading” views on climate science in 2006. Exxon responded in a letter that it recognized “the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere poses risks that may prove significant for society and ecosystems.” An Eagle Scout and a civil engineer by training, Tillerson spent his entire career at Exxon before becoming CEO in 2006. He left in 2017 to become then-President Trump’s Secretary of State. His views on climate change were influenced by the previous generation of Exxon executives, said former company executives who worked with him. During his tenure, Tillerson took little action to curb the company’s emissions and instead believed the onus was on governments to push companies to address climate change, they said. In 2011, scientists working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, convened by the United Nations, warned of global calamity if carbon emissions caused temperatures to rise more than 4 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2100, its worst-case scenario. Tillerson told a top Exxon climate researcher the scenario was “not credible,” the documents show. Tillerson was “dissatisfied with media coverage,” the researcher, Haroon Kheshgi, told colleagues in a 2012 email about the findings. Further, Tillerson wanted to engage with IPCC “to influence [the group], in addition to gathering info.” Chris Field was the co-chair of an IPCC working group during Tillerson’s tenure at Exxon. He rejected Tillerson’s criticism that the worst-case scenario laid out by the group wasn’t credible. Though emissions reductions are preventing the worst case, Field said, the science has held up over time. “I’m honestly flattered that he thought IPCC was consequential enough to want to influence it,” said Field, who is now director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He added that the IPCC process is structured to prevent undue influence from individual businesses or other entities and that the Exxon scientists he’d dealt with were professional. While Tillerson and others played down the risks posed by climate change, Exxon’s scientists were themselves modeling alarming increases in carbon emissions without dramatic reductions in fossil-fuel consumption. “It’s almost reluctantly that we address C02 emissions,” Scott Nauman, a corporate planning manager, wrote in a January 2009 email as the company was preparing its annual energy outlook. “It is not a positive story. Global emissions continue to rise throughout the outlook timeframe – that’s clearly a cause for concern.” Exxon routinely pushed back against the idea that dramatic curtailment of fossil-fuel consumption was necessary. Instead, it suggested that technological solutions, including making cars and other machines more efficient, were the most effective measure to halt global warming. Fossil fuels are responsible for more than 75% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the IPCC. Before giving a speech at an event hosted by Stanford University’s Global Climate & Energy Project in February 2009, Tillerson appeared to make edits to avoid embracing positions that would hurt Exxon’s business. In one part of the draft speech he crossed out “oil, natural gas and coal will not meet all of the world’s needs to the year 2030.” Later, he added, “the most cost effective steps we can take to address this energy and environmental challenge is to extend our energy efficiency gains.” Weeks earlier, Nauman had concluded in his January email that emissions would increase through 2030 despite such gains. “We would like them to be lower, but given the state of technology, given the need for energy, given the practical choices for energy, emissions rise despite aggressive efficiency gains,” Nauman wrote. In 2008, Exxon announced it would stop funding think tanks and other groups that questioned climate science, saying their positions “could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.” Exxon researchers continued to support scientific research that cast doubt on climate science and its impacts, documents show. Later in 2008, Gene Tunison, a manager of global regulatory affairs and research planning, said Exxon should direct a scientist to help the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s influential lobbying group, write a paper about climate science uncertainty.’ “I support [Exxon] co-authoring a paper on uncertainty in measuring GHGs,” Tunison wrote in an email. Tillerson also pushed back against some of the dire consequences of rising temperatures predicted by climate scientists. After a 2011 meeting, Tillerson’s chief of staff, William Colton, emailed colleagues about the CEO’s feedback on a draft disclosure about carbon emissions. Tillerson wanted the words “weather extremes and storms” deleted. “His view was that even mentioning a possible connection between climate change and weather was possibly giving the notion more credibility than he would like,” Colton wrote. During a 2012 board meeting about “Developments in Climate Science and Policy,” Exxon board member Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said there was “still uncertainty in predicting future climate changes and impacts.” “Money and effort spent on climate change is misplaced,” said Brabeck-Letmathe, the former CEO of Nestlé. In December 2015, Exxon publicly stated its support of the just-signed Paris climate agreement, a nonbinding United Nations treaty that commits countries to work to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Climate scientists have warned that if Earth warms more than 2 degrees it could cross irreversible climate tipping points. During his Senate confirmation hearing to become Secretary of State in 2017, Tillerson said he supported staying in the agreement. Months before the treaty was signed, Tillerson had expressed skepticism about its aims. Following a presentation on climate science to Exxon’s board of directors in April 2015, Tillerson called the 2 degrees target “something magical,” according to a summary of the meeting. “Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough,” said Tillerson, noting that it was “very expensive” to cut the emissions needed to meet such a target. “When people like Tillerson argue that 2 degrees is magical, it’s in the context of how you try,” said Field, the former IPCC co-chair. “Two degrees can be affordable with the right costs and benefits globally, even if it is not the right costs and benefits for Exxon.” Last week, the United Nations warned countries are far from meeting the Paris agreement’s goals. Exxon said in August that the world isn’t currently on track to reach the targets of the agreement, which it continues to support publicly. Shortly after replacing Tillerson in 2017, Darren Woods spread the word that he was in search of transformative new ideas. A plan to invest in offshore wind projects made its way to the most senior levels of the company, according to people familiar with the proposal. Karen Hughes, a former top official in the George W. Bush administration and an adviser to Exxon, said she counseled that investing in renewable energy would be good for the environment and improve the company’s reputation. To date, Woods hasn’t invested in renewable energy, arguing it’s a low-return business outside Exxon’s skill set. Instead the company has vowed to spend about $3.4 billion a year on average through 2027 curbing its emissions and helping other companies do the same, and investing in areas including carbon capture, biofuels and lithium mining. It also recently struck a deal to buy Denbury , which operates a large network of pipelines that move carbon dioxide, for about $5 billion. Exxon currently plans to spend as much as $25 billion a year in capital expenditures through 2027, mostly on oil and gas.

▸ Myndigheter på Maui har justerat ned dödstalet i samband med skogsbränderna på ön i augusti från minst 115 omkomna…

Myndigheter på Maui har justerat ned dödstalet i samband med skogsbränderna på ön i augusti från minst 115 omkomna personer till minst 97.

De kraftiga bränderna på Hawaii uppstod inte naturligt, var budskapet i en kinesisk desinformationskampanj. Förklaringen skulle istället ligga i att USA höll på att testa ett hemligt ”vädervapen”. För att öka trovärdigheten användes bilder som tycks vara AI-genererade i inläggen, skriver The New York Times som intervjuat forskare på bland annat Microsoft som undersökt kampanjen. Den visar på en snabb utveckling av Pekings taktik. Även fokuset är nytt, forskarna menar att Kina nu tydligare riktar in sig på att skapa splittring i USA snarare än att försvara sin egen politik. Beijing’s influence campaign using artificial intelligence is a rapid change in tactics, researchers from Microsoft and other organizations say. By David E. Sanger and Steven Lee Myers 11 September, 2023 When wildfires swept across Maui, Hawaii, last month with destructive fury, China’s increasingly resourceful information warriors pounced. The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret “weather weapon” being tested by the United States. To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign. For China — which largely stood on the sidelines of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections while Russia ran hacking operations and disinformation campaigns — the effort to cast the wildfires as a deliberate act by American intelligence agencies and the military was a rapid change of tactics. The move also comes as the Biden administration and Congress are grappling with how to push back on China without tipping the two countries into open conflict, and with how to reduce the risk that A.I. is used to magnify disinformation. The impact of the Chinese campaign — identified by researchers from Microsoft, Recorded Future, the RAND Corporation, NewsGuard and the University of Maryland — is difficult to measure, though early indications suggest that few social media users engaged with the most outlandish of the conspiracy theories. Brad Smith, the vice chairman and president of Microsoft, whose researchers analyzed the covert campaign, sharply criticized China for exploiting a natural disaster for political gain. “I just don’t think that’s worthy of any country, much less any country that aspires to be a great country,” Mr. Smith said in an interview on Monday. China was not the only country to make political use of the Maui fires. Russia did as well, spreading posts that emphasized how much money the United States was spending on the war in Ukraine and that suggested the cash would be better spent at home for disaster relief. The researchers suggested that China was building a network of accounts that could be put to use in future information operations, including the next U.S. presidential election. That is the pattern that Russia set in the year or so leading up to the 2016 election. “This is going into a new direction, which is sort of amplifying conspiracy theories that are not directly related to some of their interests, like Taiwan,” said Brian Liston, a researcher at Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company based in Massachusetts. If China does engage in influence operations for the election next year, U.S. intelligence officials have assessed in recent months, it is likely to try to diminish President Biden and raise the profile of former President Donald J. Trump. While that may seem counterintuitive to Americans who remember Mr. Trump’s effort to blame Beijing for what he called the “China virus,” the intelligence officials have concluded that Chinese leaders prefer Mr. Trump. He has called for pulling Americans out of Japan, South Korea and other parts of Asia, while Mr. Biden has cut off China’s access to the most advanced chips and the equipment made to produce them. China’s promotion of a conspiracy theory about the fires comes after Mr. Biden vented in Bali last fall to Xi Jinping, China’s president, about Beijing’s role in the spread of such disinformation. According to administration officials, Mr. Biden angrily criticized Mr. Xi for the spread of false accusations that the United States operated biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine. There is no indication that Russia and China are working together on information operations, according to the researchers and administration officials, but they often echo each other’s messages, particularly when it comes to criticizing U.S. policies. Their combined efforts suggest a new phase of the disinformation wars is about to begin, one bolstered by the use of A.I. tools. “We don’t have direct evidence of coordination between China and Russia in these campaigns, but we’re certainly finding alignment and a sort of synchronization,” said William Marcellino, a researcher at RAND and an author of a new report warning that artificial intelligence will enable a “critical jump forward” in global influence operations. The wildfires in Hawaii — like many natural disasters these days — spawned numerous rumors, false reports and conspiracy theories almost from the start. Caroline Amy Orr Bueno, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security, reported that a coordinated Russian campaign began on Twitter, the social media platform now known as X, on Aug. 9, a day after the fires started. It spread the phrase, “Hawaii, not Ukraine,” from one obscure account with few followers through a series of conservative or right-wing accounts like Breitbart and ultimately Russian state media, reaching thousands of users with a message intended to undercut U.S. military assistance to Ukraine. China’s state media apparatus often echoes Russian themes, especially animosity toward the United States. But in this case, it also pursued a distinct disinformation campaign. Recorded Future first reported that the Chinese government mounted a covert campaign to blame a “weather weapon” for the fires, identifying numerous posts in mid-August falsely claiming that MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, had revealed “the amazing truth behind the wildfire.” Posts with the exact language appeared on social media sites across the internet, including Pinterest, Tumblr, Medium and Pixiv, a Japanese site used by artists. Other inauthentic accounts spread similar content, often accompanied with mislabeled videos, including one from a popular TikTok account, The Paranormal Chic, that showed a transformer explosion in Chile. According to Recorded Future, the Chinese content often echoed — and amplified — posts by conspiracy theorists and extremists in the United States, including white supremacists. The Chinese campaign operated across many of the major social media platforms — and in many languages, suggesting it was aimed at reaching a global audience. Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center identified inauthentic posts in 31 languages, including French, German and Italian, but also in less prominent ones like Igbo, Odia and Guarani. The artificially generated images of the Hawaii wildfires identified by Microsoft’s researchers appeared on multiple platforms, including a Reddit post in Dutch. “These specific A.I.-generated images appear to be exclusively used” by Chinese accounts used in this campaign, Microsoft said in a report. “They do not appear to be present elsewhere online.” Clint Watts, the general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, said that China appeared to have adopted Russia’s playbook for influence operations, laying the groundwork to influence politics in the United States and other countries. “This would be Russia in 2015,” he said, referring to the bots and inauthentic accounts Russia created before its extensive online influence operation during the 2016 election. “If we look at how other actors have done this, they are building capacity. Now they’re building accounts that are covert.” Natural disasters have often been the focus of disinformation campaigns, allowing bad actors to exploit emotions to accuse governments of shortcomings, either in preparation or in response. The goal can be to undermine trust in specific policies, like U.S. support for Ukraine, or more generally to sow internal discord. By suggesting the United States was testing or using secret weapons against its own citizens, China’s effort also seemed intended to depict the country as a reckless, militaristic power. “We’ve always been able to come together in the wake of humanitarian disasters and provide relief in the wake of earthquakes or hurricanes or fires,” said Mr. Smith, who is presenting some of Microsoft’s findings to Congress on Tuesday. “And to see this kind of pursuit instead is both, I think deeply disturbing and something that the global community should draw a red line around and put off-limits.” © 2023 The New York Times Company. Read the original article at The New York Times.

Antalet saknade i de omfattande bränder som för en månad sedan drabbade staden Lahaina på Maui skrivs ned till 66 personer, enligt Hawaiis guvernör Josh Green.