Good news stories from Vietnam’s second wave – involving dragon fruit burgers and mask ATMs

by Ba-Linh Tran and Robyn Klingler-Vidra, The Conversation:  https://theconversation.com/good-news-stories-from-vietnams-second-wave-involving-dragon-fruit-burgers-and-mask-atms-145940

Image: The Conversation:

Vietnam was a clear success story of the COVID-19 pandemic by May, recording very low infection rates and being widely praised for locking down early to prevent serious outbreaks. But on July 25, the virus mysteriously resurfaced after 99 days of no infections.

The coastal city of Danang became the centre of the second wave, and in a few days of the first new case, the virus had spread as far as Hanoi and Saigon. On July 31, this resurgence broke Vietnam’s no-deaths streak. The death toll is now 35 countrywide, with 1,059 infections since the beginning of the pandemic.

But throughout the first and second waves, Vietnamese business people and ordinary citizens have been coming up with innovative ways to respond to the pandemic. For the past year, we have been working on a research project focused on Vietnamese inclusive innovation – meaning innovation that helps the community in some way, with a focus on sharing the benefits with a wide range of people from different socio-economic backgrounds. Through our research, we have observed how the pandemic has unfolded across the country.

Free masks have been a significant feature of Vietnam’s coronavirus response. They are distributed with various means, from simple boxes, as shown, to remotely operated dispensers. Luong Thai Linh/EPA

During both waves, we have been struck by how grassroots innovators and socially minded entrepreneurs have helped to soften the blow of the pandemic. Here, we want to share some of these good news stories, drawing on our research into how inclusive innovation has meant that society’s most vulnerable have had access to sustenance, testing, tracing and treatment throughout the crisis.

Prevention, identification and awareness

Some pandemic innovations have been aimed at preventing further infections. In the centre of the outbreak, Danang, local tech startup BusMap has worked with the authorities to create  an infection map to help locals avoid hotspots and to find the nearest medical facility.

Meanwhile, newly designed robots have been given the job of disinfecting hospitals and public spaces, with different models developed by a military hospital in Saigon, students at a  private university in Hanoi and students at a public university in Saigon.

BusMap uses government data to help people avoid COVID-19 hotspots in Danang. BusMap

Various automatic hand-sanitiser dispensers have been assembled by school students around the country, using commercially available parts. On being discharged from hospital, the country’s 687th coronavirus case even gathered his friends to produce disinfectant and sanitising booths, which he donated to hospitals, including the one that had treated him.

In the early days of the outbreak, the Ghen Co Vy, or Washing Hand Song, composed by local musicians in collaboration with the Ministry of Health went viral around the world for its quirky message and dedicated choreography. Since then, ordinary people have written their own COVID-19 songs, including one by an adorable father-child duo, titled Worry Not, Danang Will Overcome COVID. The lyrics are about the second wave in Danang and remind people to take precautionary measures.

Alleviating the negative social impact

While the above interventions were mainly dedicated to prevention and control, another group of innovators has focused on alleviating the negative social impact of COVID-19.

A famous baker in Saigon by the name of Kao Sieu Luc has used dragon fruit to make bread, sharing his recipe with the country. His intent is to help dragon fruit farmers who cannot export their crops due to Vietnam’s strict travel restrictions. The recipe has been taken up not only by ordinary people but also by other businesses, resulting in the creation of KFC dragon fruit burger. During the second wave, Kao is making  dragon fruit mooncakes as the annual autumn festival draws close.

In Hanoi, doctor Khuat Thi Hai Oanh has set up a charity called An Egg A Day to provide food, masks and essential goods for the homeless and extremely poor families throughout northern Vietnam. The charity also helps people in need to find work and accommodation, and it subsidises their rent.

Saigon businessman Hoang Tuan Anh has built a mask ATM  for his community during the second wave. The machine dispenses free, individually wrapped masks, with a remote operator to ensure fair distribution and to remind recipients to wash their hands before touching the dispenser. During the first wave, Hoang set up the first rice ATM in front of his office. The ATM provides free 1.5kg of rice and was reported to have dispensed 5 tonnes of rice in its first two days. Hoang’s rice and mask dispensers have been replicated by entrepreneurs and charities across the country.

Free rice for those who need it, thanks to a Vietnamese rice ATM. Luong Thai Linh/EPA

Finding humanity in a pandemic

When we started this research, we set out to conduct interviews and fieldwork to track how inclusive innovation is advancing productivity, and more broadly, striving to benefit society in Vietnam. Our fieldwork in 2019 revealed amazing examples of this happening around the country.

Since February 2020, our interviews have become virtual (usually conducted over Skype), and the focus of the innovators and social entrepreneurs we interview has shifted to stop the spread of the virus or to alleviate the social impact of lockdowns.

Over the past seven months, we’ve been struck by the range and speed of innovations, and awestruck by the people and companies who are working for the greater good. This pandemic is harrowing for all of us, and it’s important to stay up to date on daily figures on infections and deaths. But each interview we have conducted in Vietnam has also reminded us of humanity’s virtues. These heartening examples of solidarity can help us all get through this crisis.

How efforts to save Hawaii’s forests are preventing a ‘freshwater crisis’: Landowners, volunteers and an army of local hunters are helping the state fight an uphill battle to protect Hawaii’s forests — and its drinking water

by Claire Caulfield, Honolulu Civil Beat: https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/09/how-efforts-to-save-hawaiis-forests-are-preventing-a-freshwater-crisis/

When Serene Smalley hikes into the Koolau mountains, her goal is to kill as many plants as possible. Armed with a machete and syringes full of herbicide earlier this summer, her sights were set on the mule’s foot fern: a giant Jurassic-looking plant.

Smalley pulled out her cellphone, scrolling through a map app with hundreds of white pins. Each GPS marker pins the suspected location of a mule’s foot fern. A local conservationist spent weeks during the pandemic combing through satellite images and identifying the GPS coordinates of mule’s foot ferns on the mountain range.

Serene Smalley uses a machete to fell branches of the fern before injecting a small amount of pesticide into the base of the plant.

Kuʻu Kauanoe/Civil Beat

To the untrained eye, a mule’s foot fern can look like a native plant, the hapuu fern. “The hapuu is very lacy and pretty,” she said, while the fond of the invasive fern is pointed. “Which reminds me of a snake.”

Some of the offending ferns are right off the Poamoho Ridge Trail near Wahiawa, but to reach others she will have to scale steep slopes in the rain. Smalley invested $60 in specialized shoes that look like hooves and have metal spikes embedded in the soles for traction. They were designed for fishermen and she uses duct tape to stabilize her ankles for the long hike ahead.

For six years Smalley has been scaling mountains, camping on remote peaks and navigating mudslides to kill thousands of non-native plants. She’s one of only about a dozen elite volunteers trusted by the state Department of Land and Natural Resources to assist in the dangerous task of eradicating invasive plants from the nearly 2.2 million acres of protected forests across the state.

“I can definitely see progress,” Smalley said. “It’s very, very rewarding.”

Watersheds provide clean drinking water, carbon sequestration and help prevent floods and droughts. A University of Hawaii study estimated the Koolau Range provides between $7.4 billion and $14 billion in value to the state.

Kuʻu Kauanoe/Civil Beat

These volunteers, along with hundreds of state employees, dozens of environmental groups and an army of local hunters are fighting an uphill battle to protect Hawaii’s forests — and Hawaii’s drinking water.

The efforts involve coordinating a diverse group of stakeholders that don’t always see eye-to-eye, expensive land acquisitions, millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded fencing and excursions to some of the most remote areas of the island to remove invasive plants.

All this work is amid a backdrop of climate change, which the Honolulu Board of Water supply says is a top threat to drinking water security on the island.

More than 90% of Hawaii’s drinking water comes from aquifers: underground reservoirs of freshwater. Rising sea levels will make some freshwater aquifers turn brackish.

Hawaii’s population has almost doubled since statehood, and pre-pandemic the state was seeing a record number of visitors. But rainfall patterns have taken the opposite trajectory: decreasing at least 18% in the past 30 years, said state sustainability coordinator Danielle Bass.

Healthy forests could provide a one-two punch to the effects of climate change in Hawaii: sequestering carbon and allowing freshwater aquifers to recharge with rainfall.

“Without the necessary coordination and action, we risk a potential freshwater crisis for Hawaii’s future,” Bass said.

Use the search tool to find the watersheds where you live, work and play on Oahu. Yoohyun Jung/Civil Beat

Competition, Not Harmony

This is where Hawaii’s native trees come in. Tall koa trees on the highest ridges absorb water from passing clouds and can trigger rainfall. Droplets land on shorter ohia trees, whose contours and thick bark are excellent at collecting water and injecting it into the ground.

Ohia trees have long held a special place in Native Hawaiian culture because they’re the first tree to grow on lava flows, their connection to the rain and the fabled love story of Ohia and Lehua.

Approximately half of all native trees on Hawaii’s six main islands are ohias.

Kuʻu Kauanoe/Civil Beat

But this sacred tree is being killed by a fast-moving fungus, aptly titled rapid ohia death.

“The big concern with rapid ohia death is that it could wipe out the building blocks of our watersheds,” said Katie Ersbak, a watershed partnerships planner with the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.

The two strains of fungi that cause the disease spread through the air and choke a tree’s ability to absorb water. When researchers identify a tree infected with the fungus, they chop it down and quarantine the area with plastic tarps to keep spores from spreading.

Hikers in Hawaii are being asked to do their part by scrubbing mud from their shoes and spraying gear with alcohol before and after excursions. Ersbak even has separate boots, clothing, camping gear and backpacks for every island to avoid spreading the fungi, which is now found on the Big Island, Maui, Kauai and Oahu.

And when an ohia tree dies, invasive species like strawberry guava are fast to move in.

“I don’t like to say that certain plants are bad, but we just want plants to be where they’re supposed to be,” Ersbak said.

Katie Ersback uses the naupaka flower to explain the importance of a healthy watershed from mauka to makai. The naupaka grows high in the mountains and along the shoreline. Its petals form a half-circle. When you put the two flowers together they form a complete circle.

Kuʻu Kauanoe/Civil Beat

Each layer in a Native Hawaiian forest is specially evolved to coexist and sustain the ecosystem. Compared to the thick, rugged bark of the ohia, the invasive strawberry guava has very shiny, smooth bark. Water runs right off strawberry guava trees and onto the ground, not giving nearby plants enough time to absorb water and leading to erosion.

Strawberry guava is also fast-growing and monopolizes water to spur its growth. It’s a similar story with the mule’s foot fern Smalley has been working to eradicate. The fern is excellent at blocking light from small plants and mosses on the forest floor: eliminating an important element of the forest.

“These plants didn’t evolve for cooperation with the Hawaiian ecosystem,” Ersbak said. “They’re in competition, not harmony.”

On Oahu, more than 80% of the native forest has been eradicated. Now only the tallest peaks on the island are majority-native, but invasive species inch higher up the peaks every year.

Tasty Trespassers

Non-native plants are aided by cattle, goats, deer and pigs that roam through the forests.

Centuries ago Polynesians brought pigs to Hawaii, enriching diets and making pork an important part of Hawaiian culture and cuisine. But as more hooved animals like cows, goats and deer were introduced over the centuries, native animals and plants began to suffer. These hooved animals are excellent climbers and spread the seeds of non-native plants and weeds easily.

Hawaiian plants and animals evolved in isolation for millions of years and aren’t equipped with defenses against these grazers, but it wasn’t until the animals began threatening the economy that the government took action.

In the late 1800s, sugar plantation owners began noticing a decrease in water supply, and the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association lobbied for the creation of an agency to protect agricultural lands and forests. The territorial government created such an agency in 1903 and began building fences to keep grazers away from forests.

The government is still building fences 117 years later.

“It’s the best defense we have,” Ersbak said.

Building fences in remote sections of the forest is expensive. A recent 1,400-acre fence cost over a million dollars.

Kuʻu Kauanoe/Civil Beat

Since 2013, DLNR has built 132 miles of fence, and now more than 140,000 acres of forests have steel wire zig-zagging through steep, muddy peaks.

But this plan is alienating a group of people integral to the protection of native forests: hunters.

“Fencing is definitely the biggest concern and discussion point among the hunters,” said Josiah Jury, a longtime hunter on Oahu and former watershed manager.

As a member of the Pig Hunters Association of Oahu, Jury spends a lot of time talking with hunters who he said feel left out of conversations about land management.

“They say these wild boars are such a big problem but there’s pushback to opening more areas to hunting,” he said.

Jury said some hunters may cut through a fence if it’s blocking access to an area they’ve hunted in for generations or if other areas are too crowded with hikers or other hunters.

“I’m not saying it’s right but we do have a lot of people who want to hunt and we’re providing a free service,” he said. “Hunting made me the man I am today and our next generation deserves the opportunity to have these powerful experiences.”

Tensions on state lands have led many hunters to start courting private landowners, and are part of the reason why the Pig Hunters of Oahu exists as a group: as a resource for landowners struggling with pig invasions. This helps the entire watershed because conservation doesn’t stop at a property line.

Bridging Property Lines

Watersheds aren’t just forests, they’re the entire area mauka to makai. It’s why many watershed lines run along ahupuaa boundaries. These traditional systems of land management were used by Native Hawaiians for centuries to balance the ecosystem and economy. Residents living in each ahupuaa would be directly impacted by land management decisions made upstream, and the entire community would suffer or thrive along with the ecosystem.

In 2020, groups managing forests, farmland, urban development, coastal resources and marine ecosystems each have their own priorities and processes.

“It takes an immense amount of coordination and cooperation between agencies and groups,” Erbank said. “We know that these plants and animals don’t care about property lines, we have to manage the entire landscape for effectiveness.”

To coordinate efforts and share resources, stakeholders have formed watershed management partnerships. The group overseeing the Koolau Mountain range has over 19 members.

Participation is voluntary and private landowners can either manage their watersheds themselves — consulting with other members for advice — or they can allow state employees and volunteers to build fences and remove invasive species while inviting hunters onto their land to manage feral pig populations.

Over 2 million acres of Hawaiian forests are managed by watershed partnerships, compromised of state agencies, conservation groups and private landowners. Yoohyun Jung/Civil Beat

Kamehameha Schools, the largest private landowner in the partnership, outsources the vast majority of its management while Kualoa Ranch has pivoted to actively restoring its land in recent years.

“Anything we do upstream affects everything below,” said Taylor Kellerman, the director of diversified agriculture and land stewardship at Kualoa Ranch in Kaneohe.

Taylor Kellerman’s next goal is to start growing sandalwood on the ranch.

Kuʻu Kauanoe/Civil Beat

On a Monday morning Kellerman drove his truck over dips in the dirt roads that zig-zag across the three watersheds owned by Kualoa Ranch. The thousands of visitors to the ranch in Kaneohe may think that the gullies in the dirt road are for added excitement as their ATVs and tour jeeps bounce along, but they’re actually strategically placed to limit erosion, and the negative effects loose sediment can have on ocean ecosystems.

“We’re our own neighbors,” Kellerman said.

While Kualoa Ranch’s main economic driver is tourism, they are still a working ranch, raising cattle and pigs in the valley while farming oysters, shrimp and tilapia along the shoreline.

“Revenue from the visitors is used so we don’t have to succumb to financial pressure to develop the land,” he said.

In the five years Kellerman has worked at the ranch, the focus on restoring the forest has intensified, with the creation of an on-site conservation crew of 12 full-time employees and lots of experimenting.

Early efforts to restore native forests on the ranch were unsuccessful, because workers cleared an entire section down to the dirt and planted native trees. Invasive plants moved in and choked out the natives.

“Koa is like the gateway drug for reforestation.” – Taylor Kellerman, Kualoa Ranch

“We’re always learning,” he said. Now the ranch is trying to selectively remove invasive trees and immediately replant koa.

Driving around the Hakipuu watershed at Kualoa Ranch you’ll see dozens of round cages made of chicken wire. Kellerman calls them donuts, and uses the wire to protect koa saplings from cattle and feral pigs that roam the hills.

Taylor Kellerman’s conservation budget is tied to the ranch’s profits from agriculture, ranching and aquaculture.

Kuʻu Kauanoe/Civil Beat

Kellerman’s friend and fellow watershed manager at Haleakala Ranch on Maui uses a similar design, and during a recent visit the two swapped “war stories” about cattle and pigs destroying their protection efforts. Both independently settled on the donut design to protect the koa saplings.

“Koa is like the gateway drug for reforestation, because it’s easy to obtain seed and they tend to do pretty well,” he said. “Ohia is the next one and they get a little harder as you go.”

Regrowth

For state lands and watersheds without a dedicated in-house conservation team, people like Ersbak with the Department of Land and Natural Resources must determine where to spend valuable resources.

In 2011 the state started designating priority watersheds for conservation. Some of the most threatened forests made the list, but so did forests that were in pretty good shape and could realistically be restored.

Completely native forests are only found in the most remote areas of the island. Most hiking trails lead through a mix of native and invasive plants.

Kuʻu Kauanoe/Civil Beat

It’s why Smalley ignores strawberry guava along the lower section of the Poamoho Ridge Trail. There are too many strawberry guava trees to ever fully eradicate the species on Oahu, while conservationists still have an edge on the mule’s foot fern in the higher reaches of the mountain.

“It really is hard to know that you won’t be able to get them all,” Smalley said. “It is so time and effort-intensive it’s great to know that where I’m putting that effort in really counts.”

But if the sole goal of the watershed partnership is to recharge aquifers, then focusing resources solely on native plants may not be the most efficient route, said Victoria Keener, a climate researcher and member of the Honolulu Climate Change Commission.

“For years the saying was: if we build up native forests, the rain will follow. But that was really done without a lot of science to back it up,” she said. “And so when everyone started doing the science to back it up, the picture became a lot more complicated.”

In 2011 then-Governor Neil Abercrombie launched “The Rain Follows the Forest,” a massive conservation effort named after a traditional Hawaiian proverb. The goal was to double the amount of protected watershed area in 10 years.

Five years in, a report to the Legislature showed the project had removed invasive species and built fences to protect about 133,000 acres of priority watershed across the state. That initiative was replaced in 2015 by Gov. David Ige’s goal to protect 30% of the state’s priority watersheds, about 253,000 acres, by the year 2030. With 10 years left to meet the goal, 55% of the earmarked watersheds are under high-level protection.

An ongoing research project at the University of Hawaii is now working to determine how specific plants affect aquifer recharge. Preliminary findings indicate that some native grasses consume more water than other non-native grasses and have different impacts on sediment runoff.

“It gets really complicated,” Keener said. “We need science to direct these decisions.”

When large-scale forest conservation first began in Hawaii at the turn of the 20th century, well-meaning residents were planting fast-growing trees like eucalyptus to stop erosion. At the peak of reforestation in the 1930s, nearly 2 million trees were planted a year in Hawaii, and scientists are just beginning to fully understand the detrimental impacts these new species had on the entire ecosystem.

“We really need to work carefully and deliberately and it’s not lost on me that decisions we make can have really big impacts,” Ersbak said. “Conservation is a game of managing unexpected consequences.”

Mauka to Makai

Drag your cursor around the 360° video to see how forests impact shorelines.

This story is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

Why do we still have climate crisis denial?

by Nick Huisman, European Wilderness Society: https://wilderness-society.org/why-do-we-still-have-climate-crisis-denial/

Image: European Wilderness Society

If there is one thing that we recognised from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is the unwillingness of people to accept reality. Several months into the situation, there are still large groups of people who live in denial that the virus is a threat to our health and lives. The denial is visible on the streets, as people refuse to wear masks when told to do so, or large groups of people gather for anti-corona demonstrations. How come that these people cannot accept reality? And what can we learn from this in a far more important crisis that is unfolding while we look the other way?

Handling your own truth with denial and rationalism

CNN recently published an article on the psychological reasoning of people in Covid-19 denial. An interview with two psychologists addresses the issue of denial, and why people develop such a viewpoint. As the psychologists state, denial is a way for people to deal with constructs of reality. It is simply a defence mechanism of our mind to avoid anxiety. In uncertain periods, people perceive anxiety and pressure. In order to reduce that, the body develops a way to feel more secure and safe. One of these ways is by simply denying the existence of the threat. This leads to statements such as: “…this pandemic is a hoax.” Others accept that the threat exists, but convince themselves that the severity of the threat can be neglected. This form of rationalisation can lead to statements like: “…the corona virus is just another flu.”

A crisis beyond our understanding

This form of denial is also recognisable when we talk about a crisis much worse than corona, the climate crisis. The current trends of climate change are clearly indicating that the earth’s temperature is rising. In itself not a bad thing, some might say. Rationalised arguments could be that it’s warmer in summer indeed, but also colder in winter in other places. Yet, the fact that our overheating climate results in these extreme weather conditions is not accepted as reality by some. And the situation is not becoming easier, when conflicting research is showing opposite results. Its is therefore very understandable that people cannot begin to image the impact climate change will have on our future, let alone our daily lives. But by simply denying or rationalising climate change, we create a dangerous situation for ourselves.

How can we turn the tides?

A question with a double meaning, as our sea levels continue to rise. As the psychologists explain to CNN, it is important to provide people in denial fact-based information that contradict their viewpoint. Bit by bit, starting with information that is not immediately threatening people. Important is to also provide information on what to do about it. This will help the people to learn about the reality and to accept it.

The young generation is asking more questions than ever before, and information is available when one looks. It has become cool to want to know where our clothes are made, where our food comes from, and potentially who or what has been damaged in the development process. Because of the complicated state of affairs, we’re simply forced to ask questions.

Another thing that will help in this process is optimism. We often have a tendency to present climate change as an inevitable, dark future that lies ahead of us, which we cannot escape. If we manage to rephrase this into positive messages  that encourage people to take action to mitigate climate change, it will become much easier to overcome the climate crisis denial phase. So let us share the positive news and help others to understand the need to act against climate change. Let us have a thirst for knowledge, and an interest to understand the world as it truly is. This is the only way to bring positive change for the sake of us and all the future generations.

When politics fails, call the lawyers: It was legal teams—not politicians—that ultimately held the tobacco industry to account. Their next target? Perpetrators of climate change

by Mitch Anderson, Reasons to be Cheerful:  https://reasonstobecheerful.world/mitch-climate-litigation-headline/

Lawyers are one of America’s most distrusted professions, bringing up the rear behind even bankers and local politicians. But what if lawyers end up saving the world?

Scientists have been warning for years that mounting carbon emissions are dangerously destabilizing our climate. Efforts to tackle this urgent challenge through the political process have so far come up far short of the action needed to avoid some very bad outcomes.

Can litigation succeed where politics has so far failed?

We’ve actually been here before. Several decades ago it also seemed the tobacco industry was an invincible foe to public health. Over the course of decades, however, a series of long-shot lawsuits finally enfeebled this previously unassailable political lobby. Civil litigation against cigarette manufacturers began in the 1950s, but did not bear fruit until 40 years later in a series of court victories that culminated in the $206 billion  Master Settlement Agreement with 46 U.S. states.

Terms of this judgment included halting advertising smoking to children, funding anti-smoking campaigns with industry money and dissolving three of the biggest tobacco industry organizations. Phillip Morris and other major cigarette companies were later convicted on racketeering and conspiracy charges for their decades-long conspiracy to deceive the public on the dangers of smoking. Lawyers went where no lawmaker had dared to go before.

Similar to the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry enjoys many powerful friends among American politicians. For example, Senator Jim Inhofe, the former Chair of the U.S. Senate Environment Committee, once published a book called  The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. The Trump Administration withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement and scrapped Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Scores of international climate gatherings seemingly accomplish little more than burning jet fuel.

But new evidence suggests that perhaps lawyers can succeed where policy makers have so far failed.

The tobacco and fossil fuel industries have a lot in common. They both enjoyed decades of power and influence. They have both engaged in highly effective campaigns in order to delay costly regulation of their dangerous product. In the case of cigarette manufacturers, exposed public deceptions eventually became their undoing when turned against them in a court of law.

“Doubt is our product” in the 1969 B&W MIS Smoking and Health Proposal. Via UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents

A notorious internal tobacco lobby document stated, “doubt is our product,” outlining how company-funded scientists and doctors are used “as a means to generate controversy” regarding the well-known link between smoking and cancer. These efforts might have bought them some time in avoiding regulation, but ultimately were their undoing when individuals and governments successfully sued companies for health care expenses and personal damages. As settlement costs mounted, the political power of Big Tobacco drained away.

Fast forward several decades and Big Oil is finally beginning to stew in the same pot. Court cases, even if unsuccessful at first, are one of the best ways to compel the production of potentially incriminating documents and evidence. Parties to a lawsuit are required to provide the other side a baseline of discovery information by either opening their file cabinets or through sworn deposition of key witnesses outside of court.

As such, a growing trove of damning evidence against the oil industry is being unearthed in a series of lawsuits and other  investigations—much of which runs afoul of requirements that companies inform regulators and the public if they know their product is dangerous. The bigger the danger, the larger the obligation. 

From the 1998 American Petroleum Institute Global Climate Science Communications Team Action Plan, via Climate Files

The fact that these documents are being unearthed is a huge win for the future of climate litigation—it is the first critical step in building the case against the industry that knowingly helped light the planet on fire. There are few dangers more pressing than our destabilized climate. Billions of dollars in potential damages are predicted by not only the scientific community, but by the oil industry’s own scientists. Adding to the tort lawyer allure is the fact that nobody has deeper pockets than Big Oil. We are still a long way from a legal feeding frenzy, but there is already some blood in the water based on what industry knew long before they said they didn’t.

Back in the 1970s Exxon wanted to be a leading research voice in the emerging field of climate change. They hired some of the best scientific minds of the day with generous funding and access to Exxon’s vast resources around the world. One team was using supertanker-based instruments to sample how much CO2 was being absorbed by the world’s oceans.

Their research was published in leading scientific journals. Former Exxon scientist James Black also warned senior management in a 1977 internal memo that doubling atmospheric CO2 would heat the planet by up to three degrees Celsius—similar to what scientists believe today. “Present thinking 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,” he wrote.

But management had other ideas than getting out of the fossil fuel business. By the early 1980s, internal research teams were fired and Exxon instead began investing in public relations. In 1989, Exxon helped fund the Global Climate Coalition and a constellation of other industry front groups in one of the most spectacularly successful misinformation campaigns in the long history of spin doctoring.

Similar to the strategies used by Big Tobacco, a 1998 internal  memo from the American Petroleum Institute stated, “Victory will be achieved when average citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science” and when “recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’”

And it worked. By 2014, more Americans believed that climate change is due to natural causes than more than a decade earlier in 2001. Those who describe themselves as understanding global warming “very well” are also the demographic most likely to say it is not due to human activity.

A poster depicting Rhea Suh, president of the National Resources Defense Council, which employs 600 scientists, lawyers, and policy advocates across the globe to fight for the environment. Poster part of Amplifier’s #MyClimateHero campaign

Meanwhile, oil companies were quietly spending vast amounts of money upgrading drilling platforms and other infrastructure to withstand extreme climate and rising sea levels. If industry was certain enough about planet heating to invest in preparing for it, how does that square with what they told the public, the media and regulators for decades? Or their legal obligation to warn people if their product is dangerous? All of that could be a problem to explain to the jury.

So why is this good news? After all, whether or not the lawyers of the world ultimately succeed in holding the fossil fuel industry to account in the same way as cigarette manufacturers remains, to a certain extent, to be seen. It will be a long road no doubt with many setbacks. But on top of the mountains of documentation being unearthed in current court cases, slowly building the case against Big Oil, there is also already evidence that companies are taking note and altering their behavior.

Chevron became the first major oil company to disclose to shareholders their legal climate risk, warning investors of “increased possibility of governmental investigations and, potentially, private litigation against the company.” Royal Dutch Shell recently invested $2 billion in renewable energy technologies, the first stage of which was announced only days  before the first US climate lawsuit was filed against the company. Exxon also joined a growing list of companies cutting ties with the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council over the organization’s climate denial efforts. 

Politics remains an overarching danger to successful litigation against large companies. Seeing what had happened to the tobacco industry, gun manufacturers realized that they could crippled by civil lawsuits for the use of their own (obviously) dangerous products. Instead they successfully lobbied lawmakers to pass a bill granting them indemnity from litigation. If fossil fuel companies succeed in the same outcome, suing for climate damages will be essentially impossible in the U.S.

“21 Kids vs. Government” – a depiction of the plantiffs in Juliana v. U.S in 2015 which asserted that, “through the government’s affirmative actions that cause climate change, it has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources.” Poster part of Amplifier’s #MyClimateHero campaign

In spite of these challenges, it would be a game changer if the world’s lawyers begin winning against the fossil fuel industry. After decades of terrorizing politicians, the tobacco lobby  withered under massive legal bills and RICO charges for defrauding the American people on the dangers of smoking.

Legal judgments can also be more than about money. When Volkswagen was caught including illegal emission-evading devices into their diesel cars in the U.S., they were hit with $15.3 billion in civil damages. Interestingly, they were also ordered to spend $2 billion installing electric vehicle charging stations across America and prohibited from disputing the facts of the case anywhere in the world, lest they get sued some more. Imagine if oil and coal companies were likewise ordered in a settlement to tell the truth about their decades of misdeeds? Or, more importantly, to spend some of their billions mitigating climate change? Cases demanding this kind of action are already underway. 

The law can be a blunt instrument, but also a heavy hammer. For some very smart lawyers, the oil industry is starting to look like a nail, and that’s a very hopeful thing.  

This story is part of a collection called Sue the Bastards: Stories about hauling climate change scoundrels into court and suing their pants off. Read more here. Also in this series from Mitch Anderson, an interactive timeline of the most hopeful moments  in climate litigation history … and present.