Good Morning.

First up, in Ethiopia this morning Prime Minister Abiy has given Tigrayan regional forces 72 hours to surrender before a full-on attack on the region’s capital city. 

On Sunday, military spokesman Colonel Dejene Tsegaye warned the city’s inhabitants: “We want to send a message to the public in Mekelle to save yourselves from any artillery attacks and free yourselves from the junta … After that, there will be no mercy,” he told the 500,000 inhabitants of the city.

PM Abiy won a Nobel peace prize for ending the war with Eritrea. However, rights groups say his government has carried out mass arrests after outbreaks of violence and detained journalists this year.

The rebels say his government has marginalised Tigrayans since taking office two years ago, removing them from senior roles in government and the military and detaining many on rights abuse and corruption charges. Abiy also postponed elections due in June citing the pandemic, the BBC reports.

This is not – of course – a “climate conflict”, they don’t really work that way. But millions of people in Tigray were already suffering as a result of this year’s desert locust outbreak, widespread flooding and other impacts of climate change, and—since March—the COVID-19 pandemic – the IRC reports. These intersecting crises have caused millions to struggle for access to food. At least 30,000 are reported to have fled into Sudan, Reuters notes. 

I’m reading about… A new focus on the PR industry 

“If money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns, then PR campaigns and snappy catchphrases are the kindling,” writes Bill McKibben in the New Yorker as he opens up a new front in the corporate battle to stop industries knowingly fuelling the climate crisis.  

PR and marketing firms no longer – for the most part – focus on climate denial. Instead, they are negligently complicit in campaigns which allow companies to massively over-sell their marginal action on climate change and so avoid pressure to change their destructive core businesses. 

Case in point: Algae biofuel. It’s not a thing. It’s not economically viable; it would require epic amounts of land and Exxon – it’s biggest proponent – has put only a tiny fraction of the money it’s put into finding new oil into developing it. Because, after all, they aren’t idiots.

But that’s not the impression you’d get from the campaigns dreamt up by their blue-chip PR and marketing firms such as BBDO and print ad agencies such as Universal McCann which produce the products that dominate Exxon’s climate-friendly comms.

This algae biofuel, one video claims, could power “entire fleets of ships tomorrow.” In fact, the ad contends, algae could fuel “the trucks, ships and planes of tomorrow.” It concludes, “This is big.” Nope. 

A starter would be transparency. The PR sector isn’t like banking. You can’t check out who works with who on the Bloomberg terminal – through national lobbying registers – where they exist – provide some insight to at least some of the actors. 

This year, McKibbon notes, more than twenty small agencies signed a pledge to disclose work with the fossil-fuel industry as a first step toward divesting from those clients.

Solitaire Townsend, the founder of the Futerra agency, which organised the pledge, said, in an interview, that three hundred firms have now promised to produce “climate disclosure reports,” detailing how much of their business comes from oil and gas firms. “Most of the big agencies are pushing back, hard.”

Monday morning reading club

An opinion piece by the former directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Environmental Health in Scientific American makes a case for a new National Institute for Climate Change and Health. Not only are we not prepared for the huge health impacts climate change will bring – they argue – we’ve not even done the research to know what they are and current spending is, in their words, “budget dust”. 

In the UK’s Times Ben Macintyre takes us on a trip round the green new world of Britain in 2050 arguing that “with less car and plane travel, cleaner air and wilder countryside, our future may look more like our past than the present.”

And, the Guardian speaks to the “common people”, the women of England’s new forest following an ancient tradition of farming on common land. 

Three things you need to know

UK Tree planting falls despite green pledge for millions more: About 1.3 million trees covering a total of 763 hectares were planted with government support in England in the six months from April to September, down from 1.8 million on 1,045 hectares in the same period last year, according to Forestry Commission data.

Abu Dhabi boosts oil reserves with 22bn-barrel find: “The production potential ranks alongside the most prolific North American shale oil plays,” it said. Not amazing news from a climate point of view. 

Kellogg’s and Britvic attack plan to ban junk food ads online: Under government plans firms would not be able to promote foods high in fat, salt or sugar in Facebook ads, paid search results on Google, text promotions and posts on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. But in a letter to the prime minister, bosses of firms including Britvic, Kellogg’s and Mars said they supported government efforts to tackle obesity.