Ben Franta
@BenFranta
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Associate Professor of Climate Litigation @TheOxfordSLP @TheSmithSchool | Lawyer, historian, physicist, dreamer & doer
Oxford, England
Joined April 2014
Want to know more about the historical evidence underlying California's major lawsuit against Big Oil? For the first time, my doctoral dissertation on Big Carbon's history of climate deception is available to the public. Read, share, and take action: https://t.co/aZsqzKhbJA
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🌟 Last chance to join us in Oxford this September for our executive education course on the legal risks and opportunities around climate change! Including 50% discount for early career lawyers and professionals... Apply here: https://t.co/2Uc6GDVYh2
smithschool.ox.ac.uk
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Excited to announce the public launch of CLARA -- the Climate Accountability Research Assistant: https://t.co/cuA59VbyPe CLARA is an advanced research agent powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). It autonomously formulates multi-step research plans to tackle complex climate
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Let's use AI for corporate accountability and a cleaner, healthier, more just world:
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You don't need to be an historian to use CLARA. Ask it any question, and CLARA will answer with detailed, cited answers and links to the original source documents. CLARA makes archival research accessible to anyone. And, it's free to use.
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The result is a leap forward in archival research for scholarship, journalism, and legal evidence.
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CLARA, created by Meghana Patakota and Jake Rutherford at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme's Climate Litigation Lab, uses AI techniques to read thousands of pages of historical, internal fossil fuel industry documents hosted at the UC San Francisco Industry Documents Library.
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Excited to announce the public launch of CLARA -- the Climate Accountability Research Assistant:
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This week's readings ... 1. @BenFranta 's Weaponizing Economics https://t.co/SYMtyEiyth 2. @ProfSteveKeen 's Appallingly Bad https://t.co/mLzkZ9NYCc 3. Koeberle et al's Cost of Climate mitigation revisited https://t.co/UFnygQ5Cvl ... and my students are not best pleased.🤣
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Big Oil lined its pockets, leaving the consequences to others.
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This CO2 induced summer dryness results not only from the earlier ending of the snowmelt season, but also from the earlier occurrence of the spring to summer reduction in rainfall rate." (Page 19 here: https://t.co/ncVOMTJUEb)
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"Recently, Manabe et al., using GCMs [general circulation models] calculated that the zonal mean value of soil moisture in summer declines significantly in two separate zones of middle and high latitudes in response to an increase in the CO2 concentration of air. ...
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And even earlier, in 1982, an internal memo at Exxon mentioned studies predicting increased drought from fossil fuels:
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"In scenario A [business as usual use of fossil fuels] drought conditions continue to increase rapidly, to about 25% in the 2020s and 45% in the 2050s." (Page 98 here: https://t.co/DmgArGzeEM)
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"By the 2020s there is no mistaking the great intensification of drought at almost all middle latitude and low latitude land areas. ... Drought conditions, which occur 5% of the time in the control run, have increased to 10% in the 1990s. ...
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In 1988, scientists from NASA and NOAA warned of drought from global warming at the Second North American Conference on Preparing for Climate Change, which was co-sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, Texaco (now part of Chevron), and other fossil fuel interests:
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As fire continues to rage in Los Angeles, remember that Big Carbon has known for decades that its fossil fuel products would cause droughts to become much more common. 🧵
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Litigation can help ensure a more *just* transition away from fossil fuels. Dr. Juliana Velez Echeverri of @TheOxfordSLP summarizes the state of just transition litigation: https://t.co/Os5Q7TlNoH
lse.ac.uk
Tiffanie Chan and Juliana Vélez Echeverri explore the multilateral climate negotiation rooms and national courts to examine how justice is contemplated in the transition to low-carbon and resilient...
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"Major oil companies, including Shell and precursors to energy giants Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, were alerted about the planet-warming effects of fossil fuels as early as 1954" writes @dharnanoor reporting on documents via @DeSmog
https://t.co/L8SlEmj5yC
theguardian.com
Newly unearthed documents contain warning from head of Air Pollution Foundation, founded in 1953 by oil interests
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Once Upon A Time In LA ... Big Oil Told 70 Years Ago That Fossil Fuel Emission Could Impact 'Civilization' NEW Archival sources reveal story of early front group that went 'rogue' before being pressured back into line by California's oilmen latest ⬇️ https://t.co/MnKAnBcom0
desmog.com
New documents show how a deceptive PR strategy pioneered in 1950s California first exposed the risk of climate change and then helped the industry deny it.
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Incredible new archival finds by @rebecca_John1: Big Oil was warned by its *own* front group about global warming in 1955, then told the group to shut up and buried the research. https://t.co/12abvPUQ9i
desmog.com
New documents show how a deceptive PR strategy pioneered in 1950s California first exposed the risk of climate change and then helped the industry deny it.
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