Agent Krasnov is Going to Russia?

 

Please don't embarrass him in front of his BOSS. He gets nervous and his tummy hurts. https://t.co/33XOFfMWb5

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) August 11, 2025

Trump was a little late to his big press conference announcing he was going to use the military to occupy Washington, DC in order to liberate it, but that's OK--he all know the occupation is about his preoccupation with the idea of big city crime (homeless, people, ethnic people, fascist stuff) and to divert attention from his connections to Jeffrey Epstein (which is NOT going away). What fascinated me, of course, was that Krasnov seemed to think that Alaska was Russia. 

It's the kind of mistake any senile reprobate with no basic idea of geography could make quite accidentally twice, I guess. After all, Trump s still patting himself on the back for putting out the LA fires (which were already contained by the time he took office) by turning a big beautiful spigot nowhere near them, wasting a lot of water and doing nothing, on the general principle that water flows downhill. Because north is at the top of the map, you see. South would be downhill--that just science!

What I'm getting at is, he's just really dumb, but also? He may very well think Alaska is part of Russia if Putin says so. After all, it's just like Crimea. Putin called "dibs."  That counts for something, right? 

Climate Sunday: Amateur Meteorology for Dummies

 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has previously commented on Jewish Space Lasers and may believe in the Deep State Weather Machine, has suggested a rare and curious cure for the wildfires in California--just seed the clouds! It's an existing technology! We have the tools!

Problem is: we don't have the clouds. There is no moisture. The only moisture is what is being scooped up and thrown at the fires by brave airborne firefighters--like these Canadian and Mexican firefighters are doing:

We can't count on some god-like intervention--it's all sweat and tears from here. 

Literal Pants on Fire

 

In the midst of the devastation and tragedy in southern California, there are some political animals who adhere to the maxim to let no good crisis go to waste. They're bringing DEI into it (I promise you, the Black person's water is just as wet as the White man's). They are lying about budgets, resources, pointing the finger of blame. Launching conspiracy theories. 

That many people cope with horrific events by just pulling narratives together to make sense of the seemingly senseless is a part of human nature, I guess--but that doesn't make it right. And when people appear to be deliberately lying because of a political agenda trying to capitalize on a tragedy for point-scoring purposes, that's something a bit harsher than opportunistic--it's predatory. It's precisely at times like these when people are least likely to engage their critical thinking mode and instead opt for the torches and pitchforks. 

When Russia Has Shown You Who They Are

 

All the videos of the Azerbaijan Airlines flight showing the damage show holes in the wreckage have entry holes on the port side and exit holes on the starboard side, likely with a slight angle from below. pic.twitter.com/z4NxEapLWd

— Oliver Alexander (@OAlexanderDK) December 25, 2024

Russia shot down that plane just like they shot down MH17 in 2014 and just like they shot down Korean flight 007 41 years ago. Soviet or Putin, we have a structure of murderousness and lying; and taking no responsibility for the loss of many human lives. 

Russia needs disinformation to exist, and this is why I deplore the idea that the structure for seeking out disinformation is being dismantled in the name of "free speech." Democracy can only exist with a well-informed public, yet US conservatives like the idea of a disinformed public softened up by foreign powers because they have so far benefitted from it. 

If I hadn't in the last 40 years of my political awareness seen a brilliant reason to not support the GOP ever--holy shit! Watergate, Iran/Contra and the yellow cake /WMD's lies are like tiddlers in comparison to any and every pretense that Russia is a reasonable honest nation we can do business with. We are absurdly weakened by such a stance. 

The Un-American Project 2025

 

Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court presidential immunity ruling: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be" https://t.co/ndMJlNlUKH

— Media Matters (@mmfa) July 3, 2024

Look at this Bond villain bullshit: "which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be." What he's saying right there is, will remain bloodless if the left lays back and lets it happen. Because I guess it's fun to threaten a whole Revolution. Tea Party people. I swear. They really want to see themselves proudly fighting to--

Install a monarchy? Undo the first American Revolution? Institute a lot of Christian nationalist and white supremacist rubbish that the majority of Americans don't want? 

Um--exactly. And there are a lot of former Trump Administration officials supporting this blueprint for chaos. 

Anyway, when I saw that term, "bloodless", all I could think of was 1/6 and the testimony of a Capitol police officer that she was slipping in people's blood that day.  They thought they were re-creating 1776. What they were doing was insurrection. What the 'bloodless" Project 2025 document boasts is undoing the American experiment of a government of, for and by the people--unless those people are conservative activists.

SCOTUS and the Conclusions

 

It's really not hard to draw an obvious and unpleasant conclusion regarding the conservative justices' rulings regarding effectively legalizing bribery and privileging the opinions of courts over subject matter experts in government agencies with respects to regulatory matters, and to keep this blog post terribly brief, let me just sum it up this way:

The Republican-appointed justices have shown us what they are, and all that's left is billionaires haggling over the price. I'm sure putting it this way would offend Sam Alito and his missus, so to also keep this blog post brief, I will refrain from suggesting what else they can run up a flagpole if they don't like it.

I really shudder at conservative justices using their slapdash "textural" approach to the law as a "public service" to overrule agency decisions based on science. What this means for climate change, curbing pollution, food and drug regulation....

Climate Sunday: Fire, Water, and the Sacred Things

 

Saudi Health Minister Fahd bin Abdurrahman Al-Jalajel said that 83% of the 1,301 fatalities were unauthorized pilgrims who walked long distances in soaring temperatures to perform the Hajj rituals in and around the holy city of Mecca.https://t.co/ULoOMijRBI

— KATU News (@KATUNews) June 23, 2024

The Saudi Health minister can go ahead and blame the faithful for being "unauthorized" to come to do the Hajj, but this denial is hiding a very terrible story--the Hajj is becoming unsustainable. The pilgrimage to the site of the two holy places is too hot in the summer months for many people--the aged, the disabled. The faith of the pilgrims is great--the human ability to withstand the temperatures that are becoming more common is limited.

We've seen climate activists target several works of art, but most recently, the painting of Stonehenge got our attention:

This act disturbs ancient lichens that have protected the stones for one thing (ignore JK Rowling--she actually is Dolores Umbridge which is just the worst thing, and even worse, she is and probably knows it).  It's a weird act of vandalism that detracts from the message that we need to protect the things we love, for another. Also, just as a person with some ancestral connection to Blighty, there's some folk shit you need to leave alone. You fuck about with ancients liths and you are bound to get spirited off and knackered by rogue Morris dancers the next time you're exiting last call at the pub. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene is Just Dumb, You Guys

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene: “You’re going to tell me that back in the Ice Age, how much taxes did people pay, and how many changes did governments make to melt the ice?” (@acyn) pic.twitter.com/5m8770qY26

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) September 5, 2023

Um, no?

There weren't governments that melted the ice. The ice age and global warming are different things. One was a totally natural event and the other is understood to be "anthropogenic"--we are doing it. The global temperature noticeably jumped after the industrial age. We got the "gift of fire" to survive the ice age, but we turned it into coal-burning and oil-burning engines of CO2 production. The ice age ended on its own in the younger Dryas period. There are competing theories about what stimulated the interglacial period, but we don't have much to go on beyond polar core samples or whatever about stuff that long ago--

But about recent history of climate--we've got tons of data. What do you want--beyond, like, the hockey stick? 

Do you want to know what scientists were thinking 200 years ago? One hundred-fifty years ago?  A whole lot of scientists been knowing ago? 

So, just to cut up dumb Marge for posterity, she believes that GOD sent the rains to Burning Man, but they are also being brainwashed to believe it was global warming. So, God sent a weather portent to teach a lesson, but actually not teach people anything at all, because He should have known about the climate science fuckery ahead of time, bein' God and all.  He could have probably left shit alone in that case. Or maybe did science harder. I dunno. Not my circus and the simians in MTG's brain sure as heck ain't my monkeys. But what she's saying doesn't just make her look dumb, she's implying God is dumb, too.

But what I will note for posterity is: she does not make any sense at all. Maybe, and this isn't the first time I noticed it, she's just dumb as hell. She doesn't know shit and can't be taught. My word. Just uncapable to do congressional stuff at all. 

There Will Be No New Normal

 

At least five people have been found dead in Italy following violent storms in the north and wildfires in Sicily.

The government is considering declaring a state of emergency in the hardest-hit regionshttps://t.co/5JRVjmA9jv pic.twitter.com/sWzTqYBRHV

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) July 26, 2023

I've been to Sicily a couple of times and it is fiercely beautiful. I am heartbroken for what is happening. The temperature in Palermo a couple of days ago was 47°C, which is astonishing not only because it is a local record, but because it is a record likely to be demolished soon. 

(Giorgia Meloni has said fine things about environmentalism that she certainly doesn't believe because the fascisti attitude is ne me frego.)

Algeria is facing wildfires and temperatures of about 120° F. The heat index at the Persian Gulf airport in Iran reached 152° F. These are conditions that suggest an unlivable future. 

Scientists are saying that there is no "new normal"--the term is a lie. We won't really have time to acclimate to anything we are seeing because it will just change faster than we can get used to it. I've been staring at this idea unable to strike another mode than elegiac. Or at least poetic. I don't want to succumb to "doomerism". The problem is that I understand enough of biology to know that if ocean temps are over 100° F this is very bad for cold-blooded things. And then, warm-blooded things. It's like feeling a mass disturbance in the Force. 

But back to the presentiment of doom--I don't know how we walk back tipping points we might have already crossed. The idea that the Gulf Stream collapses during my lifetime is not something I have words for. Poetic or otherwise.

Those things are hard to fathom (though we need to figure out how to), but in the meantime, if we value eating, if we value culture, if we value any of the standard of living we associate with civilization, we need to reckon with the idea that some sacrifices must be made now to prevent the losses of things beyond price. Not for the sake of our great-grandchildren. I'm talking about the intolerable conditions we will spend what we have of our old age in. 

I see Stupid People, But They Don't Know They're Stupid

 

Musk doubles down on his claims that there's no evidence the Allen, Texas mall shooter had white supremacist beliefs, and that @bellingcat "does psy-ops" professionally. pic.twitter.com/60yvbbspYZ

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) May 16, 2023

Do the big fucking Nazi tattoos confuse Elon, here? Because to the extent we have a potential motive, it looks like this shithead was fucked up about Asians. Also, Musk wants to pretend his weird Twitter obsession is somehow like Inigo Montoya but I don't think Elon's father got killed by the woke mind virus or he's doing anything especially brave by being a shitposter. An actually shit, shitposter. 

Climate Sunday 2: Stop Electing Ron Johnson!

 

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) says climate change will be good for the U.S. because it will be less cold: "Global warming will actually be beneficial ... Why wouldn't we take comfort in that? ... Y'know, concerned if you're in the hot region of Africa ... but we're in good shape." pic.twitter.com/gJifCUhFnT

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) April 26, 2023

I explained my problem with no-nothing babble-on dipshits just a few nights ago, but the rationale still holds: this man has not the least idea what he's talking about, nor the wit or imagination to appreciate the human misery that follows-through from any of the things that climate change portends. On one hand, less people will freeze to death but counterpoint: people will die in heat waves. There will be forest fires. There will be desertification of formerly arable land. There will be water shortages. There is a limit to the benefit of CO2 increase on plant growth. Crops can easily be wiped out by flooding, hail, mudslides. Whole cities can be devastated by increased cyclonic activity. Changes in the jet stream broadly affect planting schedules in a way we can't yet anticipate, and climate changes affect where planting crops is most effective. 

And the result of these changes will be mass human migration and local conflicts over water rights and international conflicts over human rights-- like who gets to eat. Like who can live in the zones that remain livable, when areas formerly safe are no longer capable of supporting life. 

This dumb, dumb man represents too many people who cannot appreciate the knock-on effects of the changes in our atmosphere and the weather it produces already occurring. Johnson is exactly the kind of dumb-dumb we need to stop having because this! My figurative god in a literal existential conundrum--WTF is this kind of happy-ass thinking?  And is he really saying, yeah well, if it's really hot in Africa, the right sort of people will get it? Because that's sort of how I'm hearing it.

He doesn't realize a town in Canada got incinerated because of a heat bubble not two years ago? Climate disasters aren't far away and other folk. It's all of us, and why in the hell aren't African folks also your concern, supposed Christian? 

All of what he says is too dumb and out of touch. I don't understand how someone like this got so recently re-elected, when he is obviously paint chip-eating dumb. 

Climate Sunday: We Need To Stop Electing Stupid People

 

From the staggering intellect that brought us "Jewish Space Lasers", we now have the super-genius observation that climate change is a hoax because the planet is spinning. No climate change scientist in the history of ever knew about that, Marge. Thanks for your Nobel Prize-level contribution to the fucking dialog. We'll be sending you a participation trophy tout suite for that fucking revelation that no one ever knew before. The Earth spins and revolves around the sun. 

Wow. The tides go in and the tides go out. How does that fucking work? 

Now you know, and I know, this is "speaking jive."  She doesn't know how climate change works or even care. She just wants to fill up the empty space in her and her followers' heads with words that sort of make climate change not seem real. In the meanwhile, she doesn't realize that climate change is happening all around her and threating national security and food security and so much else. 

Now, it might feel like I'm picking on Rep. Greene, and I totally am! She is a dumbass who does not know what she does not know, and also says disgraceful and disgusting things because she really doesn't care what is or is not true. But she isn't alone in being a climate dumbass who never should have been elected to office because she doesn't know her ass from an adding machine. These dipshits are everywhere. 

If we want to save the planet, we need to stop electing stupid people. By we, I mean the people who elect the stupids. And I also get that stupid people are probably elected by people way more ignorant than they ought to be. And I am sick of the way we act like this choice is anything to be proud about, and yes, ignorance is a choice. (Yeah, I'm bagging on the astroturf freedom-mommies again because once again, no one called them on being a bunch of self-satisfied and dark money funded weirdo busybodies who are executing the freedom to parent other folks' children.)  Anyone who wants to deny alternative POV's and restrict the capacity for critical thinking is no one's friend. 

Voters--educate yourselves against the babble-ons. People like MTG should be figuratively pilloried for this level of shameless nonsense-peddling. And also too, should not be allowed to stay in office--should be recognized before getting into office and be just all the hell stopped ideally--but wow. When they are this dumb, how do they stay? 

Climate Sunday: Water Everywhere, Except Where We Want it

 

The UN convened a global conference on water--which is something absolutely basic to life on earth. I shouldn't actually have to say something as dull as "Water is important to life" but apparently, this kind of true thing isn't obvious to everyone. I have it top of mind at the moment because thousands of gallons of latex-related chemicals just got dumped into the Delaware Rive late Friday and we are finding out now that we probably want to drink bottled water here in Philadelphia. 

Water is necessary to the entire food chain, and we threaten to tip weird chemicals into it all the time. Even from fracking and oil spills and whatnot. And that's a real problem, Because we're already overtaxing our aquifers, and have been for a while. And we really can't afford to fuck up our drinking water.

So says the CSO of PepsiCo. They bottle a lot of water and soft drinks and looking at a timeline of TWO THE FUCK YEARS! for half the world to be in scarcity for drinking water is very uncomfortable. It's their business, and they are looking at the logistics of transporting water to where it isn't. 

This isn't just about thirst-quenching, though--it's about agriculture. Right now, Argentina is having an insane drought. Just a total loss on all major crops, with devastating effects for feeding livestock (this is a glimpse from last year). Some can say there's no obvious relationship to global climate change, but some areas have gotten wetter--like the floods of Pakistan, and the barrage of atmospheric rivers that have buffeted California. And it is devastating. In California, crops are wiped out by flooding and a whole lake appears where once was farmland.  So while we lose a Lake Mead in one place, and a Lake Tulare comes back--but no one can plan for that happening in a whole minute!

It's really no joke--the Great Salt Lake is not so much, and the Great Lakes themselves are becoming Meh Lakes. And the solutions to this problem aren't going to be easy at all.

Combine this with the realization that increased CO2 isn't actually going to be the monster bonus to global greening, and you have a potential agricultural nightmare. Some crops never start, some drown. And don't get me started on what is happening to our pollinators, because if I start thinking about the problems of the birds and the bees, I won't sleep tonight. 

Anyway--we should probably ship chemicals very carefully, use fossil fuels less, conserve water religiously and not be greedy arseholes as a society. It's literally life and death. Like, literally.  Because you can't drink oil and you can't eat coal. 

While We Wait for Trump's Arrest, The IPCC Report is Dire

 

I never wanted to spend my senior years on a dying planet, but that's what it looks like to me. The supposed leadership of the most industrialized countries are doing the very least to curb global warming, and have even decided, it seems, to promote the short-term benefits of fossil fuel usage for their electoral cycle (yes, I'm criticizing Biden over the Willow project). 

We're looking at the results of climate change in the eye all the time--take the weird winter of California's discontent: that isn't some freak global cooling, but a predictable weirding of the weather because patterns are disrupted. But we are still stuck with the effects of warming in the usually cooler places. We can see the devastation of our ecosystems in the deaths of fish due to heat waves in Australia. The southern hemisphere has been through it this past season. 

Climate change isn't predicting the future, but describing our present, now. And we are still jaded and in denial. Lives will be lost if action is not taken, but a look around social media indicates that loads of people still believe climate science is some kind of hoax. A conspiracy theory. 

I'm just a D-list blogger--I don't expect what I say to gain any traction and actually, my climate-related posts aren't even the ones that do any numbers. But what I do know is, changing people's POV via messaging and "flooding the zone" can be done--because the denialists have been doing it all this time. Solutions exist and funding them (like actually just fully comping changeover to solar energy or heat pumps) are within the reach of government actions. (Programs totally exist and are inadequate for many homeowners.) 

We can do more, and more aggressively. The political will has to be there, and the idea that the fossil fuel industry and the denialist-propagandist complex (like Fox News, who are known liars) needs to be called out for being the problem that they are. 

I think we still have the opportunity to make a better future. But that opportunity can't be pissed away--it must be vigorously and intelligently seized. 

Climate Sunday: Rough Winds do Shake the Early Buds of...February?

 

At some point this past week, I exited my car for the half-block walk from the parking lot to my office building without a jacket at all, because it was well and truly warm enough. I even ran the fan in my car on my commute home because it got warm in the parking lot sun. And there have been a few days like this--in February. This isn't usual--my early remembrances of February here in the upper Mid-Atlantic is it snows and gets really freaking cold.

It did not do that here. Well, not yet, but as we mosey into March and advance into April, while I know we've had bad storms in these months, I feel like the ghost of winter starts to vanish--and maybe it isn't a good augur for those of us aware of climate change. Spring has been springing early for a while--as if some areas aren't getting the winter we've been used to. 

Now, California--they are having a winter! That's also not a great sign.

Both of these scenarios feed into the denialist vortex in that they create possible "debunking" narratives: either mild winters in the NE aren't so bad, or blizzards in California prove there's no climate change at all. I guess the question is: when does weird weather get weird enough for the jaded and denialist mind to see it? 

And how do changing weather patterns affect wildlife? When crops and flowers start to habitually bloom too early, and the actual wild of winter bullshit starts a bit too late? 

The rhythm we expected from nature is thrown off, and the dancers can't pick up the pace when it too rapidly changes. This will affect crops we eat and animals like wild fish we rely upon for food. We will notice higher prices for foods--at first, because most people don't understand the relationship between nature and what's at the end of their fork. Then we will be scared. 

I don't want to wait until we are scared about where our food is coming from to get concerned about climate change. It's bad enough we tolerate the growing threat of disease and violence. We should not be so stupid we forget that we need to eat. 

The Denialism Vortex

 

Just to refrain from linking to any of the stupid Twitter comments that got me to thinking about the denialism problem, I'm just going to link to Josh Marshall on the latest dumb thing the MAGA folks are doing: denying that the Ukraine war...is real.  Like somehow, Ukraine has snowed us all into thinking there's a war, and Russia is even playing along with this, and all of Europe and the US, etc. are somehow just pretending there's a war?

As if Wag the Dog were a documentary? It just doesn't seem plausible to me that this is being posited by anyone in good faith, but I don't think denialism is about that--although some people will buy it. It's about the debate. Exhausting, proof-pulling, stupid debate.

Think about how from stupid little acorns of bad faith, mighty conspiracist oaks grow--like with Andrew Wakefield's bad science that grew into the anti-vaxx movement that has since spawned actual terrorism threats.  Or people who can't accept any demonstration that the voter fraud that has them so furious never existed. Or think about climate science denialism and how people want to believe it's all a hoax started by people who want you to sit in a freezing room and eat bugs. (No, that's Brexit, dear....) And this "fake Ukraine War" canard seems like an outcropping of Russiagate--the denialism that Putin is a really bad guy who fucks with elections and has imperialist aims.

Climate Sunday: The Riskiest?

The riskiest places aren't always obvious, but some of them have already demonstrated vulnerability in the face of storms they have already experienced. And fire and drought also matter. You would not understand how the places most subject to experiencing climate change are also the places most likely to vote against politicians who would not do  anything for climate change unless you understood the saturation of political propaganda. 

Investing in fossil fuels is jobs and money and success and capitalism and why would you not want these things, you Commie? 

But it's dumb. We sometimes use the idea of a frog in boiling water. The frog doesn't know how fucked he is because it's slow and steady--and the damage climate change is doing is mostly slow and steady. 

Climate Sunday: The Last of Us

 

My spouse has given me an identity crisis: I am his farfalla, his ucchellina, his angelina, but he called me his "little mushroom" tonight, and since we just saw The Last of Us second episode, I was not really feeling that sobriquet.  Do you want me to consider you a fun guy? I demanded. 

Alas, he thinks this is amusing. Me? It isn't. The problem with climate change is that simpler genomes are going to rise up to the climatic challenges fairly quickly because of their lifespan and the nature of their generativity, and we, plodding long-lived things, have to use our biggie ol' brains to adapt. And I've been watching us deal with race and gender and sexuality issues and have discovered we are as a species only selectively capable of adapting to rapid change. and the people who cope worst, try to enforce failure to adapt. Which is to say, in case of epidemic, you get antivaxxers and antimaskers and the lot we've already been dealing with, who don't only reject precautions for themselves, but want to enforce that for others. 

The folks who are likely to do survival things are held back by asshats who don't understand how anything under the sun works. And are also improbably bad communicators, for the most part. 

I'd like to say Greta is a better communicator than most, actually:

View also:

But it would be better if people generally understood that the changes in the climate are just a world they have never seen before. Any number of diseases will be worse than they were before.  We will see food insecurity.  But also people sickened because food supplies will be more likely to be rotted, fungused, not acceptable to eat. We could forestall some of these changes, if we accepted the science. 

We failed to do the right thing about COVID 19, and we think we can soldier on with the other crises, the climate crisis, to come? It's abominably stupid. We need to take all Covid -19 lessons as our pre-view of disaster.

But another disaster is coming. And another.

Climate Sunday: The Die-Off Horror Show

 

We have a problem in the sea with our crustaceans.  It isn't a local thing--it is happening elsewhere as well.  I've long worried that the worst of the current extinction event would focus on the sea, because land-based humans don't understand the seriousness of the nautical ecosystem to their existence. 

But it is real, and necessary. And parts of our necessary aquaculture are dying. 

A lot of this is about dumping waste into the ecosystem. And this is something we could easily stop doing. But we are in an extinction event currently we didn"t even plan to be in,  and have only so many ways to sort ourselves out of. I am 50 years old and know that half the world's species have stopped being viable in my lifetime. 

We need to become more mindful custodians of the planet we live on. I don't think we can survive any other way. 

Murder Built into the Margin

 

For years, Exxon sowed doubt about climate change. But its scientists were projecting warming with remarkable accuracy. https://t.co/EXegkcp1kp

— NYT Science (@NYTScience) January 14, 2023

I've been aware that Exxon knew about climate change and covered it up for some time (they weren't alone in this--they just fought admitting it harder) but every time I think about the missed opportunity, something tightens in my stomach: 

They could have invested in renewable energy early on and cornered valuable tech markets, putting themselves in a position to not just continue profiting from fossil fuels while the environment suffered, but to capitalize on saving it. Instead, they went on as if they weren't contributing to disasters, extinctions, death. And they lied about it.

It was as if they could not consider the possibility of making money without throwing anyone under the bus. As if the idea of using the foresight they were granted to do the right thing was unthinkable. Knowing, and doing nothing differently, feels like more than depraved indifference. It feels like the allowance of death and devastation were built into the business model. 

I try to be cynical and I'm not getting any younger, but if it doesn't still knock the wind out of me a bit when I consider it.

They absolutely knew climate change was happening, and threw their money into denial, not into trying to ameliorate it. Like knowing one might be selling poisonous candy to babies and just changing one's marketing to make the candy more desireable--shouldn't there be a penalty?