Thursday, October 8, 2015

Norwegian Air CEO says $69 flights from U.S. to Europe around the corner | Reuters

 

Parked Boeing 737-800 aircrafts belonging to budget carrier Norwegian Air are pictured at Stockholm Arlanda Airport March 6, 2015.

Reuters/Johan Nilsson/TT News Agency

Bjorn Kjos, CEO of Norwegian Air Shuttle, answers questions during a press briefing in Oslo March 10, 2015.

Reuters/Terje Pedersen/NTB Scanpix

 

Parked Boeing 737-800 aircrafts belonging to budget carrier Norwegian Air are pictured at Stockholm Arlanda Airport March 6, 2015.

Reuters/Johan Nilsson/TT News Agency

EW YORK Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA (NWC.OL) hopes to sell one-way tickets to Europe for $69 as early as 2017 by flying from U.S. airports that have low fees, Chief Executive Officer Bjørn Kjos said in an interview Tuesday.

Europe's third-largest budget airline is considering flights to Edinburgh and Bergen, Norway from U.S. airports that have little to no international service today, such as New York's Westchester County Airport and Connecticut's Bradley International Airport, just north of Hartford, Kjos said.

Average prices on such routes are likely to be closer to $300 round trip, Kjos said, compared with many of Norwegian's fares that run more than $500 today because of higher fees levied by busier airports.

The potential plans are part of Norwegian's broader move to cut prices and take share from traditional flag carriers that dominate trans-Atlantic flying.

While airlines such as Deutsche Lufthansa AG (LHAG.DE) offer travelers hundreds of destinations via connections in airport hubs, Norwegian is aiming to make nonstop service to small cities that straddle the Atlantic more common, which keeps costs low.

"I think you will see a lot to that effect within five years' time," Kjos said. "What will happen to (Lufthansa) when everyone starts to fly direct?"

Norwegian has 100 737 MAX jets from Boeing Co (BA.N) on order and expects to receive five in 2017. These planes are equipped to traverse the Atlantic but are smaller than most jets that currently do so, making them a better size for international flights to cities such as Birmingham in Britain, Kjos said.

Regulators will have to agree to set up customs stations at U.S. regional airports to handle international traffic, although Kjos said he is confident this can be arranged.

Norwegian is not the only airline to market cheap fares across the Atlantic.

Iceland's Wow Air recently offered one-way fares between Boston and Paris for $99. Lufthansa's low-cost subsidiary Eurowings is also starting cheap long-haul flights.

Kjos downplayed the competitive threat of Eurowings, saying, "I don't believe in their being able to operate low cost with a Boeing 767," in part because the widebody planes save less fuel and have smaller range than planes such as Boeing Dreamliners in Norwegian's fleet.

Norwegian separately reported Tuesday that it filled 96 percent of long-haul plane seats in September, helping the airline post better-than-expected results.

Norwegian Air CEO says $69 flights from U.S. to Europe around the corner | Reuters

Superintendent (District 100) Search Community Forum experiences low community participation

 

By Michele Gruba

Reporter

BELVIDERE – On Thursday, Sept. 24, B.W.P and Associates hosted a community forum to allow stakeholders an opportunity to assist them in searching for School District 100’s new superintendent. Unfortunately, only ten members of the community were in attendance.

The consensus among attendees regarding the night’s dismal numbers seemed to be alack of communication and advertisement by District 100. Those who did participate indicated they became aware of the event via Facebook posts by PASS (Parents Advocating for Students and Staff), a local advocacy group or a Robocall by the school district.

Les Ried former District 100 school board member agreed with that assessment.

“Lack of publicity was a factor,” Reid said.

In an email response from Mark Friedman, B.W.P and Associates President, he indicated that low turnout is not unusual and should not hinder the selection process.

“The numbers were fairly typical of what we see in most districts and won’t have a negative impact. There was a great discussion, and we pulled some valuable information. The open forum is just a small part of the profile we are building, so we were not unhappy with the turnout,” Friedman        said.

Reid discussed why it is imperative to be actively engaged in the community and the importance of his participation in the superintendent selection process.

“Having been a member of the District 100 school board in the past and having been involved in the selection of two past superintendents it is critical to make the best selection possible. As a stakeholder in the community, I feel a responsibility to stay involved, and I wish more people would become involved in the community.”

B.W.P partner, Anne Noland, and consultant, Patricia Wernet, lead the discussion by explaining the areas where they would be collecting data. They wanted good qualities of the school district, areas of concern, traits that are important for a new superintendent, and open discussion regarding the future of the district.

Although the group of participants was small, there appeared to be a good cross-section of the Boone County population. Everyone was very enthusiastic while providing feedback and had a united desire for positive change within School District 100.

“The importance of selecting the right superintendent for this district has never been more apparent,” Reid said.

Reid’s thoughts were echoed during the discussion on areas of concerns. The majority cited long-standing communication deficits and lack of trust between District 100 and the community. The new superintendent will need to work on rebuilding confidence and foster meaningful communication with stakeholders to repair community relations.

“Establishing themselves quickly as a leader with vision in the District 100 community,” Reid said on the obstacles facing a new superintendent and as far his hopes for the future: “a renewed respect for parents and district employees.”

Positive aspects the District 100 community were also discussed, and again, the participants were in agreement: dedicated teachers, parent support, incredible kids, satisfaction with new additions to the school board and excellent facilities.

Mark Friedman conceded, explaining all of those attributes add value when attracting quality superintendent candidates.

“We are optimistic. In a tight market for superintendents, we will be very proactive in sharing with potential candidates what a good job the Belvidere Superintendent position is. Our day in the district confirmed Belvidere would be a great career move for the right person. The positives far outweighed any negatives,” Friedman said.

The most important information B.W.P collected over the course of the evening was the characteristics desired in a new superintendent: honesty, problem solver, good character, communicator, vision, and accountability.

Throughout the day, B.W.P and Associates held focus group around the district gathering information from district employees, school board members, and the community. They also used a survey that was available on the district 100 website until Oct. 1.

According to Friedman, all the information will be compiled, and the data will be used to help them bring quality candidates to the table.

“When we have all of this information we will prepare a formal Profile Report and then present it to the Board of Education.”

The next opportunity for the community to hear the status of B.W.P’s search for the next superintendent will be at the next regularly scheduled meeting of the board of education on Oct. 13, at 6 p.m. at the central office.

Superintendent Search Community Forum experiences low community participation

Election 2016: Koch Brothers Officially Back Carly Fiorina, Opening Door To Big Donations

 

It’s official: The influential Koch brothers have thrown their weight behind Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, CNN reported Wednesday. Fiorina will gain access to a large pool of funding from conservative groups with the endorsement.

The Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, an umbrella organization that funds many conservative groups backed by the industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch, announced that Fiorina will be one of five candidates it backs. The group had previously backed Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker before he dropped out of the race in September.

"Governor Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio are leading a thoughtful and substantive discussion on the issues and we look forward to hearing more about their vision for the country," said James Davis, a Freedom Partners spokesman, according to CNN.

Despite backing Fiorina in her unsuccessful 2010 California Senate race against incumbent Barbara Boxer, the Koch brothers waited with their endorsement in this race. Fiorina’s own campaign manager has previously worked for the Koch group.

Election 2016: Koch Brothers Officially Back Carly Fiorina, Opening Door To Big Donations

Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago

 

Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago

Top executives were warned of possible catastrophe from greenhouse effect, then led efforts to block solutions.

By Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer

Sep 21, 2015

Exxon Experiment

Exxon's Richard Werthamer (right) and Edward Garvey (left) are aboard the company's Esso Atlantic tanker working on a project to measure the carbon dioxide levels in the ocean and atmosphere. The project ran from 1979 to 1982. (Credit: Richard Werthamer)

[1]

At a meeting in Exxon Corporation's headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world's use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.

"In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black [2] told Exxon's Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.

It was July 1977 when Exxon's leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.

A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon's Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.  Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.

"Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed," Black said, in the written summary of his 1978 talk.

His presentations reflected uncertainty running through scientific circles about the details of climate change, such as the role the oceans played in absorbing emissions. Still, Black estimated quick action was needed. "Present thinking," he wrote in the 1978 summary, "holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical."

Exxon responded swiftly. Within months the company launched its own extraordinary research into carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and its impact on the earth. Exxon's ambitious program included both empirical CO2 sampling and rigorous climate modeling. It assembled a brain trust that would spend more than a decade deepening the company's understanding of an environmental problem that posed an existential threat to the oil business.

Then, toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon curtailed its carbon dioxide research. In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront of climate denial. It put its muscle behind efforts to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming its own scientists had once confirmed. It lobbied to block federal and international action to control greenhouse gas emissions. It helped to erect a vast edifice of misinformation that stands to this day.

This untold chapter in Exxon's history, when one of the world's largest energy companies worked to understand the damage caused by fossil fuels, stems from an eight-month investigation by InsideClimate News. ICN's reporters interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists, and federal officials, and consulted hundreds of pages of internal Exxon documents, many of them written between 1977 and 1986, during the heyday of Exxon's innovative climate research program. ICN combed through thousands of documents from archives including those held at the University of Texas-Austin, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The documents record budget requests, research priorities, and debates over findings, and reveal the arc of Exxon's internal attitudes and work on climate and how much attention the results received.

Of particular significance was a project launched in August 1979, when the company outfitted a supertanker with custom-made instruments. The project's mission was to sample carbon dioxide in the air and ocean along a route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf.

In 1980, Exxon assembled a team of climate modelers who investigated fundamental questions about the climate's sensitivity to the buildup  of carbon dioxide in the air. Working with university scientists and the U.S. Department of Energy, Exxon strove to be on the cutting edge of inquiry into what was then called the greenhouse effect.

Exxon's early determination to understand rising carbon dioxide levels grew out of a corporate culture of farsightedness, former employees said. They described a company that continuously examined risks to its bottom line, including environmental factors. In the 1970s, Exxon modeled its research division after Bell Labs, staffing it with highly accomplished scientists and engineers.

In written responses to questions about the history of its research, ExxonMobil spokesman Richard D. Keil said that "from the time that climate change first emerged as a topic for scientific study and analysis in the late 1970s, ExxonMobil has committed itself to scientific, fact-based analysis of this important issue."

"At all times," he said, "the opinions and conclusions of our scientists and researchers on this topic have been solidly within the mainstream of the consensus scientific opinion of the day and our work has been guided by an overarching principle to follow where the science leads. The risk of climate change is real and warrants action."

At the outset of its climate investigations almost four decades ago, many Exxon executives, middle managers and scientists armed themselves with a sense of urgency and mission.

One manager at Exxon Research, Harold N. Weinberg [3], shared his "grandiose thoughts" about Exxon's potential role in climate research in a March 1978 internal company memorandum that read: "This may be the kind of opportunity that we are looking for to have Exxon technology, management and leadership resources put into the context of a project aimed at benefitting mankind."

His sentiment was echoed by Henry Shaw [4], the scientist leading the company's nascent carbon dioxide research effort.

"Exxon must develop a credible scientific team that can critically evaluate the information generated on the subject and be able to carry bad news [5], if any, to the corporation," Shaw wrote to his boss Edward E. David [6], the president of Exxon Research and Engineering in 1978. "This team must be recognized for its excellence in the scientific community, the government, and internally by Exxon management."

Irreversible and Catastrophic

Exxon budgeted more than $1 million over three years for the tanker project to measure how quickly the oceans were taking in CO2. It was a small fraction of Exxon Research's annual $300 million budget, but the question the scientists tackled was one of the biggest uncertainties in climate science: how quickly could the deep oceans absorb atmospheric CO2? If Exxon could pinpoint the answer, it would know how long it had before CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere could force a transition away from fossil fuels.

Exxon also hired scientists and mathematicians to develop better climate models and publish research results in peer-reviewed journals. By 1982, the company's own scientists, collaborating with outside researchers, created rigorous climate models – computer programs that simulate the workings of the climate to assess the impact of emissions on global temperatures. They confirmed an emerging scientific consensus that warming could be even worse than Black had warned five years earlier.

Esso Atlantic

Between 1979 and 1982, Exxon researchers sampled carbon dioxide levels aboard the company's Esso Atlantic tanker (shown here).

Exxon's research laid the groundwork for a 1982 corporate primer [7] on carbon dioxide and climate change prepared by its environmental affairs office. Marked "not to be distributed externally," it contained information that "has been given wide circulation to Exxon management." In it, the company recognized, despite the many lingering unknowns, that heading off global warming "would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion."

Unless that happened, "there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered," the primer said, citing independent experts. "Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible."

The Certainty of Uncertainty

Like others in the scientific community, Exxon researchers acknowledged the uncertainties surrounding many aspects of climate science, especially in the area of forecasting models. But they saw those uncertainties as questions they wanted to address, not an excuse to dismiss what was increasingly understood.

"Models are controversial," Roger Cohen [8], head of theoretical sciences at Exxon Corporate Research Laboratories, and his colleague, Richard Werthamer, senior technology advisor at Exxon Corporation, wrote in a May 1980 status report on Exxon's climate modeling program. "Therefore, there are research opportunities for us."

When Exxon's researchers confirmed information the company might find troubling, they did not sweep it under the rug.

"Over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged," Cohen wrote in September 1982, reporting on Exxon's own analysis of climate models. It was that a doubling of the carbon dioxide blanket in the atmosphere would produce average global warming of 3 degrees Celsius, plus or minus 1.5 degrees C (equal to 5 degrees Fahrenheit plus or minus 1.7 degrees F).

"There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth's climate," he wrote, "including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere."

He warned that publication of the company's conclusions might attract media attention because of the "connection between Exxon's major business and the role of fossil fuel combustion in contributing to the increase of atmospheric CO2."

Nevertheless, he recommended publication.

Our "ethical responsibility is to permit the publication of our research in the scientific literature," Cohen wrote. "Indeed, to do otherwise would be a breach of Exxon's public position and ethical credo on honesty and integrity."

Exxon followed his advice. Between 1983 and 1984, its researchers published their results in at least three peer-reviewed papers in Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences and an American Geophysical Union monograph.

David, the head of Exxon Research, told a global warming conference [9] financed by Exxon in October 1982 that "few people doubt that the world has entered an energy transition away from dependence upon fossil fuels and toward some mix of renewable resources that will not pose problems of CO2 accumulation." The only question, he said, was how fast this would happen.

But the challenge did not daunt him. "I'm generally upbeat about the chances of coming through this most adventurous of all human experiments with the ecosystem," David said.

Exxon considered itself unique among corporations for its carbon dioxide and climate research.  The company boasted in a January 1981 report, "Scoping Study on CO2," that no other company appeared to be conducting similar in-house research into carbon dioxide, and it swiftly gained a reputation among outsiders for genuine expertise.

"We are very pleased with Exxon's research intentions related to the CO2 question. This represents very responsible action, which we hope will serve as a model for research contributions from the corporate sector," said David Slade, manager of the federal government's carbon dioxide research program at the Energy Department, in a May 1979 letter to Shaw. "This is truly a national and international service."

Business Imperatives

In the early 1980s Exxon researchers often repeated that unbiased science would give it legitimacy in helping shape climate-related laws that would affect its profitability.

Still, corporate executives remained cautious about what they told Exxon's shareholders about global warming and the role petroleum played in causing it, a review of federal filings shows. The company did not elaborate on the carbon problem in annual reports filed with securities regulators during the height of its CO2 research.

Nor did it mention in those filings that concern over CO2 was beginning to influence business decisions it was facing.

Throughout the 1980s, the company was worried about developing an enormous gas field off the coast of Indonesia because of the vast amount of CO2 the unusual reservoir would release.

Exxon was also concerned about reports that synthetic oil made from coal, tar sands and oil shales could significantly boost CO2 emissions. The company was banking on synfuels to meet growing demand for energy in the future, in a world it believed was running out of conventional oil. 

In the mid-1980s, after an unexpected oil glut caused prices to collapse, Exxon cut its staff deeply to save money, including many working on climate. But the climate change problem remained, and it was becoming a more prominent part of the political landscape.

"Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate," declared the headline of a June 1988 New York Times article describing the Congressional testimony of NASA's James Hansen, a leading climate expert. Hansen's statements compelled Sen. Tim Wirth (D-Colo.) to declare during the hearing that "Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend."

With alarm bells suddenly ringing, Exxon started financing efforts to amplify doubt about the state of climate science.

Exxon helped to found and lead the Global Climate Coalition, an alliance of some of the world's largest companies seeking to halt government efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions. Exxon used the American Petroleum Institute, right-wing think tanks, campaign contributions and its own lobbying to push a narrative that climate science was too uncertain to necessitate cuts in fossil fuel emissions.

As the international community moved in 1997 to take a first step in curbing emissions with the Kyoto Protocol, Exxon's chairman and CEO Lee Raymond [10] argued to stop it.

"Let's agree there's a lot we really don't know about how climate will change in the 21st century and beyond," Raymond said in his speech before the World Petroleum Congress in Beijing in October 1997.

"We need to understand the issue better, and fortunately, we have time," he said. "It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now."

Over the years, several Exxon scientists who had confirmed the climate consensus during its early research, including Cohen and David, took Raymond's side, publishing views that ran contrary to the scientific mainstream.

Paying the Price

Exxon's about-face on climate change earned the scorn of the scientific establishment it had once courted.

In 2006, the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's science academy, sent a harsh letter to Exxon accusing it of being "inaccurate and misleading" on the question of climate uncertainty. Bob Ward, the Academy's senior manager for policy communication, demanded that Exxon stop giving money to dozens of organizations he said were actively distorting the science.

In 2008, under mounting pressure from activist shareholders, the company announced it would end support for some prominent groups such as those Ward had identified.

Still, the millions of dollars Exxon had spent since the 1990s on climate change deniers had long surpassed what it had once invested in its path-breaking climate science aboard the Esso Atlantic.

"They spent so much money and they were the only company that did this kind of research as far as I know," Edward Garvey [11], who was a key researcher on Exxon's oil tanker project, said in a recent interview with InsideClimate News and Frontline. "That was an opportunity not just to get a place at the table, but to lead, in many respects, some of the discussion. And the fact that they chose not to do that into the future is a sad point."

Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, who has been a frequent target of climate deniers, said that inaction, just like actions, have consequences. When he recently spoke to InsideClimate News, he was unaware of this chapter in Exxon's history.

"All it would've taken is for one prominent fossil fuel CEO to know this was about more than just shareholder profits, and a question about our legacy," he said. "But now because of the cost of inaction—what I call the 'procrastination penalty'—we face a far more uphill battle."

Click here for Part II [12], an accounting of Exxon's early climate research; Part III [13], a review of Exxon's climate modeling efforts; Part IV [14], a dive into Exxon's Natuna gas field project; Part V [15], a look at Exxon's push for synfuels.

ICN staff members Zahra Hirji, Paul Horn, Naveena Sadasivam, Sabrina Shankman and Alexander Wood also contributed to this report.

Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago

OPINION: How Big Oil hijacked the climate-change debate with its lies - MarketWatch

 

Just as Big Tobacco did about smoking, ExxonMobil lied about what it knew about global warming

By

KelleLouaillier
BillMcKibben

Getty Images

ExxonMobil has known since the 1970s that burning fossil fuels contributed to climate change, but lied about what it knew and helped create a whole industry of global-warming denial.

BOSTON (Project Syndicate) — Over the last few years, a growing number of people have been taking a hard look at what is happening to our planet — historic droughts, rising sea levels, massive floods — and acknowledging, finally, that human activity is propelling rapid climate change. But guess what? Exxon (now ExxonMobil) XOM, +0.16%  had an inkling of this as early as 1978.

By the early 1980s, Exxon scientists had much more than an inkling. They not only understood the science behind climate change, but also recognized the company’s own outsize role in driving the phenomenon. Recognizing the potential effects as “catastrophic” for a significant portion of the population, they urged Exxon’s top executives to take action. Instead, the executives buried the truth.

Beyond suppressing its own findings, ExxonMobil (and its peers) funded and promoted junk science and attacked scientists who warned of the impending climate disaster.

There may be a silver lining to this infuriating story: the recent investigation that exposed Exxon’s deceit could end up catalyzing the action needed to address the looming climate crisis. After all, similar revelations about the tobacco industry — what the major cigarette companies knew and when they knew it — transformed the public-health landscape.

In 1996, a series of lawsuits forced tobacco companies to release millions of internal documents, which confirmed what public-health advocates and policy makers had long suspected: as early as the 1950s, the industry knew that nicotine was addictive and that cigarettes caused cancer.

But, to protect its own interests, Big Tobacco deliberately misled the public, doing everything possible to cast doubt on scientific findings that it knew to be accurate. Such tactics enabled the industry to delay, for more than 50 years, regulation that could have saved millions of lives annually.

After the revelations, however, it was clear that the tobacco industry was a malevolent force that did not belong in the policy-making process. With Big Tobacco out of the picture, and armed with evidence of the real effects of tobacco consumption, health advocates were finally able to compel their governments to act.

In 2003, world leaders agreed to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, negotiated under the auspices of the World Health Organization. Today, the treaty covers 90% of the world’s populationand has contributed to a significant decline in sales for global tobacco corporations. Over time, it will save hundreds of millions of lives (and save governments’ health-care budgets huge sums).

Big Oil, it is now clear, has been following Big Tobacco’s playbook. In 1997, almost two decades after it began studying climate change, it quashed its research, claiming that climate science was “far from clear” and thus that it did not “support mandated cuts in energy use.”

Beyond suppressing its own findings, ExxonMobil (and its peers) funded and promoted junk science and attacked scientists who warned of the impending climate disaster. The fossil-fuel companies’ approach was so effective that the media are only now beginning to recognize the leading role the industry played in creating — almost out of whole cloth — the so-called “climate debate.”

But perhaps Big Oil’s biggest success was diminishing the political will to implement appropriate regulation. Even after the international community adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, the fossil-fuel industry managed to block meaningful progress — to the point that, if serious action is not taken soon, the entire process could unravel.

In Europe, Royal Dutch Shell’s  lobbying so diluted the European Union’s effortsthat there are now no binding targets for renewables or energy efficiency for individual countries. The company RDSA, +1.12% RDSB, +0.91% even sent a letter to the European Commission’s president claiming that “gas is good for Europe.” Shell and other oil companies are now promising to work as “advisers” to national governments on how to deal with climate change.

Just as the tobacco files drove the tobacco industry out of policy-making processes, the Exxon investigation should compel world leaders to eliminate the fossil-fuel industry from efforts to solve the climate crisis. After all, no policy can succeed if those who shape it are betting on its failure.

The turning point for tobacco-related public-health policy came when the industry’s depravity became indisputable. Now, that moment has come for the climate movement. We cannot simply hope that the fossil-fuel industry will change its ways.

As an alliance of human-rights groups, environmental activists, and corporate-accountability advocates already is demanding, we must kick the industry out of the policy-making process altogether.

Exxon’s scientists were right: the effects of climate change on many communities are catastrophic. With so many lives at stake — and such clear evidence of the threat — Big Oil, like Big Tobacco before it, should be treated for what it is: Big Trouble.

This article has been published with the permission of Project Syndicate Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Lies.

Kelle Louaillier is president of Corporate Accountability International. Bill McKibben, a scholar in environmental sciences at Middlebury College and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a co­founder of 350.org.

Above is from:  How Big Oil hijacked the climate-change debate with its lies - MarketWatch

Rauner says 'big things' possible with compromise - Daily Southtown

 

Playing the role of appeaser in one breath and admonisher with the next, Gov. Bruce Rauner, speaking in Oak Lawn on Wednesday, said Republicans and Democrats have the opportunity of "transforming the state," yet Democratic leaders are content to "just double down on the status quo."

But even as the Republican governor said it was "simply inexcusable and unacceptable" for Illinois to be more than three months into the fiscal year and still lacking a budget, there were signs that a quick resolution to the gridlock won't be coming any time soon.

Addressing the annual meeting of the Chicago Southland Convention & Visitors Bureau, Rauner said "we're at a turning point in Illinois' history."

"Will we stay on the failed path of the status quo" or chart a course toward "fiscal responsibility and stronger economic growth?" he asked.

He said that legislators and his office are "capable of doing big things together, we're capable of transforming the state."

"We owe it to the people of Illinois to do that," Rauner said.

The governor said that "legislators who like the status quo are holding up the budget," and that failure to come to a quick consensus on a spending plan will only "cause more people in our state to be harmed." House Speaker Michael Madigan, however, laid the blame for that harm at the governor's feet, accusing him of pushing an agenda that will "devastate Illinois' middle class."

Rauner says 'big things' possible with compromise - Daily Southtown

Fiat Chrysler strikes deal with UAW that averts strike

 

DETROIT — Averting a possible midnight strike, the UAW and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles reached a new tentative agreement late Wednesday, with the union saying it won "significant gains" compared with an earlier deal members rejected last week.

The union told workers that it reached the new deal at 11:41 p.m. Eastern, according to a union message delivered to members. The union announced the deal to the outside world in a Facebook post at 12:03 am. Thursday.

"I'm relieved to know that I'll be able to return to work tomorrow and keep supporting my family," said Stephen Sowl, a worker at the company's casting plant in Kokomo, Ind. "But I'm also prepared to turn the contract down if it's not up to expectations."

 

The agreement will be discussed by the UAW National Chrysler Council which will meet in Detroit on Friday at 11 a.m., and they will vote on whether to recommend it as the first step to getting it to the members for a ratification vote.

"We heard from our members, and went back to FCA to strengthen their contract,” said UAW President Dennis Williams in a written statement. “We’ve reached a proposed tentative agreement that I believe addresses our members’ principal concerns about their jobs and their futures. We have made real gains and I look forward to a full discussion of the terms with our membership."

The union said it plans to make the details available after the Friday meeting, which would go a long way to preventing misinformation among members as to the terms, which was a factor in scuttling the first tentative agreement the union reached Sept. 15 which workers rejected.

 

"FCA US confirms that it has reached a new tentative agreement with the UAW," the company said in a statement. "Because the agreement is subject to UAW member ratification, the company cannot discuss the specifics of the agreement pending a vote by UAW members."

In the final minutes leading up to the Wednesday night deadline, 40,000 Fiat Chrysler workers had not received marching orders or news that their union leadership had reached the deal. But there were no reports of workers leaving the job as they awaited news.

The agreement comes a week after it decided to go back to the bargaining table after 65% of workers voted to reject an earlier proposal.

The UAW could have moved on to complete contract talks with either General Motors or Ford but decided instead to attempt to restructure the agreement.

Fiat Chrysler strikes deal with UAW that averts strike