Letteratura scientifica selezionata sul tema "Louisiana Industrial Institute"

Louisiana’s energy companies are racing in a new direction chasing rich tax credits and hopes for blue fuels. An economy built on producing oil and gas and turning them into fuels and chemicals is now the leader, by far, in projects to capture and store carbon dioxide emitted by the massive petrochemical and refining facilities along the Mississippi River. Out of 28 applications for CO2 injection projects in the US, 15 are in Louisiana, said Steve Lee, director of the injection and mining division of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, during a recent presentation at the CO2 Conference in Midland, Texas. If all those permit requests lead to operating projects, they would increase the current number of sites globally by 50%, according to an annual survey by the Global Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Institute, which supports the growth of storage. The trigger for this uptick was the 2022 US Inflation Reduction Act that includes large increases in the tax credits—which can be paid in cash for up to 5 years to companies that reduce their emissions by capturing CO2 and then injecting it into subsurface storage. In Louisiana, the key number in the bill is the top rate paid for injecting CO2 into sites designed to store it permanently—$85 per metric ton for facilities that begin construction prior to 1 January 2033. For owners of chemical plants, this can go a long way toward paying the high cost of carbon-reducing projects required by investors and lenders, and it opens the door for them to get into the business of selling low-carbon blue fuels. Louisiana, with its vast supplies of CO2 that can be separated out at an affordable cost and vast stores of open pore space in the ground, is a test bed for this hydrocarbon-based energy transition. “Our geology is really good in Louisiana. Also, we have an extensive pipeline network and lots of CO2. Half of our CO2 is from industrial emissions, so it is good for capture,” Lee said. Connecting those resources to create a CO2 storage business also requires large numbers of skilled deal makers, engineers, lawyers, and politicians because what they are building is neither simple nor an easy sell. A recent deal, described in corporate releases, helps show the complexities and motivations required to capture, deliver, and store industrial CO2. It starts at the world’s biggest ammonia-producing facilities in Donaldson, Louisiana, owned by CF Industries. The company wants to rid itself of the title of the state’s largest CO2 emitter with a plan to invest $200 million in a unit that will pull CO2 out of its exhaust streams, remove the water, and compress the gas to its supercritical state for shipment.

Abstract The presence of legacy pollutants, on-going chemical manufacturing activities, and population shifts have introduced complex, cumulative exposure risks to residents of many highly industrialized communities. These “industrial corridors” present unique challenges to environmental health science professionals, public and private sector decision makers, and residents seeking to make their communities safer and healthier. Social-ecological resilience theory offers a useful framework for the design and implementation of community engagement efforts to help stakeholders take action to reduce their exposure risks. A resilience framework views the human community as a coupled social-ecological system, wherein disturbances to the equilibrium of the system – acute and/or chronic – are common rather than rare events. It recognizes three key capacities of more resilient communities. These are the abilities of community members to self-organize to address changing threat levels, to hold scientifically sound understandings of the risks, and to learn from past experiences and take action – individually or collectively – to adapt to or mitigate the hazards in their local environment. We apply this resilience theory framework to a case study from Camp Minden, Louisiana, conducted through the Louisiana State University (LSU) Superfund Research Center’s Community Engagement program and supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). The case illuminates a critical path by which resilience theory can be applied to guide bi-directional communication and information-gathering, and co-development of risk-reducing strategies at the community level. These are central elements of community engagement within a contentious, real-world setting. The three components of the resilience framework were supported by specific program mechanisms and activities. The capacity for self-organization among community stakeholders was furthered through the convening of a Dialogue Committee which brought together representatives of concerned residents, regulatory agencies, research scientists, and others. This collaborative problem-solving approach supported a more holistic and scientifically sound understanding of the problem through a series of interactive meetings in which members discussed site-remediation options with thermal-treatment experts and regulators, and shared how recent explosions and concerns about air quality affected them. The members co-developed selection criteria and reached consensus on two types of disposal methods that would best reduce the significant threats to public health and the local environment. We also include a brief summary of our recent randomized survey of over 550 residents of Louisiana’s industrialized communities to determine the influences on household-level adaptive behaviors to reduce acute and chronic environmental exposure risks. The results of the logistic regression analysis indicate that residents with more concern and knowledge about environmental hazards, along with confidence in their ability to implement risk-reduction measures – such as checking air-quality forecasts and then limiting outside activities – were much more likely to adopt the exposure-reducing behaviors, even when controlling for socioeconomic and demographic differences among respondents. These findings shed light on the conditions under which residents of these types of communities may be more likely to take action to reduce potential environmental exposure risks, and may help in the design of public education efforts. These “lessons learned” from Louisiana communities facing cumulative environmental exposure risks suggest that application of resilience theory to the design and implementation of community engagement programs may support the longer-term effectiveness of the efforts and enhance overall environmental health resilience. In addition, they provide practical insights about how to operationalize and apply these theoretical concepts to real-world environmental health challenges faced by residents of industrialized communities throughout the world.

The 13th International Congress on Combustion By-Products and their Health Effects was held in New Orleans, Louisiana from May 15 to 18, 2013. The congress, sponsored by the Superfund Research Program, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and National Science Foundation, brought together international academic and government researchers, engineers, scientists, and policymakers. With industrial growth, increased power needs and generation and coal consumption and their concomitant emissions, pernicious health effects associated with exposures to these emissions are on the rise. This congress provides a unique platform for interdisciplinary exchange and discussion of these topics. The formation, conversion, control, and health effects of combustion by-products, including particulate matter and associated heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants, and environmentally persistent free radicals, were discussed during the congress. This review will summarize and discuss the implications of the data presented.

CCS projects “accelerated” in 2022 with the CO2 capture capacity of all CCS facilities under development growing 44% over the past 12 months, bringing the total capacity of those projects to 244 mtpa of CO2. In a report released in mid-October, the Global CCS Institute said 61 new facilities were added to the project pipeline in 2022 for a current tally of 30 projects in operation, 11 under construction, and 153 in development. The Americas, especially North America, lead the world in CCS deployment. Recent US and Canadian governmental incentives were cited by the Institute in a regional overview. The US Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 includes enhancements to Internal Revenue Service Section 45Q and $369 billion in funding for climate and energy. The legislation extends the start of construction timing to the end of 2032; lowers capture thresholds, including direct pay; and expands transferability. The US Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act includes more than $12 billion to be spent on CCS over the next 5 years. Canada’s 2022 federal budget includes an investment tax credit: the credit rate is 60% for direct air capture projects, 50% for all other carbon capture projects, and 37.5% for transportation, storage, and use from 2022 to 2030. From 2031 to 2040, the tax rates drop to 30%, 25%, and 18.75%.The boost in activity is reflected in recent CCS‑related updates reported in JPT: - ExxonMobil joined CF Industries and EnLink in a blue ammonia project in Louisiana that could capture and store 2 million metric tons of CO2 starting in 2025. - Technip Energies signed a letter of intent to design and build a large-scale floating storage and injection hub offshore Australia. It would be the world’s first, since to date, offshore carbon capture and storage projects use pipelines to transport CO2 to injection sites. - Equinor and Wintershall Dea have agreed to develop a comprehensive CCS supply chain system connecting Germany with CSS storage on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. - Texas and Louisiana are stepping up efforts to assume regulatory authority for an emerging wave of CCS projects.- In October, Canada released draft guidelines on how new oil and gas projects should demonstrate “best-in-class” greenhouse gas emissions performance. SPE’s CO2 Storage Resources Committee, under the SPE Carbon Dioxide Capture, Utilization, and Storage Technical Section, published Storage Resources Management System (SRMS) Guidelines to support the commercialization of CO2 storage. Released in September, the guidelines include suggestions for the application of the SRMS with the intent of including details of the processes of quantification, categorization, and classification of storable quantities so that the subjective nature of subsurface assessments can be consistent between storage resource assessors. The role of petroleum engineers in achieving technically sound results in energy transition projects of all kinds was highlighted during a presentation at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition by Josh Etkind, global upstream deepwater digital transformation manager for Shell, and Rita Esuru Okoroafor, assistant professor, Texas A&M University, Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering. In their presentation in the SPE Pavilion, “Transferable Skills: Petroleum Engineering and Geoscience Skills Are Shaping the Low-Emission Energy Transition,” they shared a chart showing the core oil and gas-related technical skill sets required for low-emission energy technologies. Etkind and Okoroafor emphasized the opportunities offered by the technologies shown in the chart below for upstream petroleum engineers and young engineers entering the industry. Looking only at CCS, the Global CCS Institute’s call for the growth of global CO2 storage to “billions of tons per year to meet climate targets” from the current 40 mtpa also points to a growing need for the relevant skills and technical knowledge.

MACHINE LEARNING E PROCESSAMENTO DIGITAL DE IMAGENS UAV: UMA ABORDAGEM PARA ESTIMAR DISTRIBUIÇÃO LONGITUDINAL DE PLANTAS DE SOJA* FLÁVIA LUIZE PEREIRA DE SOUZA1, JOÃO RICARDO FAVAN2, JOSÉ RAIMUNDO DE SOUZA PASSOS3, MAURÍCIO ACCONCIA DIAS4, SÉRGIO CAMPOS5 * Artigo extraído da dissertação do primeiro autor. 1 Louisiana State University – LSU, School of Plant, Environmental, and Soil Sciences, 104 MB Sturgis Hall, LSU Campus, 70801, Baton Rouge, LA, Estados Unidos, Doutoranda Universidade Estadual Paulista - UNESP, Faculdade de Ciências Agronômicas, Departamento de Engenharia Rural, Av. Universitária, 3780, Altos do Paraíso, 18610-034, Botucatu, SP, Brasil, e-mail: flavia.luize@unesp.br 2 Faculdade de Tecnologia de Pompéia - Shunji Nishimura - Fatec, Av. Shunji Nishimura, Departamento de Big Data no Agronegócio, 605, Distrito Industrial, 17580-000, Pompéia, SP, Brasil, e-mail: joao.favan@fatecpompeia.edu.br 3 Universidade Estadual Paulista – UNESP, Instituto de Biociências, Departamento de Biodiversidade e Bioestatistica, R. Prof. Dr. Antônio Celso Wagner Zanin, 250, Distrito de Rubião Junior, 18618-689, Botucatu, SP, Brasil, e-mail: jr.passos@unesp.br 4 Fundação Hermínio Ometto - FHO, Departamento de Engenharia, Av. Dr. Maximiliano Baruto, 500, Jardim Universitário, 13607-339, Araras, SP, Brasil, e-mail: macdias@fho.edu.br 5 Universidade Estadual Paulista - UNESP, Faculdade de Ciências Agronômicas, Departamento de Engenharia Rural, Av. Universitária, 3780, Altos do Paraíso, 18610-034, Botucatu, SP, Brasil, e-mail: sergio.campos@unesp.br RESUMO: É possível alcançar altas produtividades na lavoura de soja, por meio da semeadura com distribuição espacial adequada e uniforme das sementes. Com isso se faz importante o uso de tecnologias, como a aplicação do Processamento Digital de Imagens, que permite tratar as imagens coletadas e aperfeiçoá-las para a interpretação humana e, em seguida, a análise automática pelo computador, a partir da classificação do reconhecimento de padrões. O objetivo desta pesquisa foi testar métodos de Machine Learning para estimar a distribuição das plantas na linha de plantio da lavoura de soja. O modelo Random Forest apresentou melhor resultado com acurácia em torno de 65% em média, porém o algoritmo não obteve um resultado considerado satisfatório. É possível concluir que a dificuldade de classificação das distâncias entre plantas de soja com o modelo utilizado pode estar associada às variáveis qualidade de imagem, sobreposição das plantas de soja e a precisão do modelo. Palavras-chave: Aeronave remotamente pilotada; Agricultura de precisão; Inteligência Artificial; Visão Computacional. MACHINE LEARNING AND DIGITAL UAV IMAGE PROCESSING: AN APPROACH TO ESTIMATE THE LONGITUDINAL DISTRIBUTION OF SOYBEAN PLANTS ABSTRACT: It is possible to achieve high productivity in soybean crops, by sowing with adequate and uniform local distribution of the seeds. To attain this, the use of technologies is important - for example the application of Digital Image Processing that allows treatment of collected images and improvement for human interpretation, and then the automatic analysis by the computer, based on pattern recognition classification. The objective of this research was to test Machine Learning methods to estimate the distribution of plants in the soybean planting line. The Random Forest model showed the best result, where the resulting accuracy was 65% on average, but the algorithm did not obtain a good result. It is possible to conclude that the difficulty of classifying the distances between soybean plants with the model used may be associated with the variables of image quality, overlapping of soybean plants and the precision of the model. Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Computer vision; Precision agriculture; Remotely piloted aircraft.

The Black Summer of 2019/2020 saw the forests of southeast Australia go up in flames. The fire season started early, in September 2019, and by March 2020 fires had burned over 12.6 million hectares (Werner and Lyons). The scale and severity of the fires was quickly confirmed by scientists to be “unprecedented globally” (Boer et al.) and attributable to climate change (Nolan et al.).The fires were also a media spectacle, generating months of apocalyptic front-page images and harrowing broadcast footage. Media coverage was particularly preoccupied by the cause of the fires. Media framing of disasters often seeks to attribute blame (Anderson et al.; Ewart and McLean) and, over the course of the fire period, blame for the fires was attributed to climate change in much media coverage. However, as the disaster unfolded, denialist discourses in some media outlets sought to veil this revelation by providing alternative explanations for the fires. Misinformation originating from social media also contributed to this obscuration.In this article, we investigate the extent to which media coverage of the 2019/2020 bushfires functioned both to precipitate a climate change epiphany and also to support refutation of the connection between catastrophic fires and the climate crisis.Environmental Communication and RevelationIn its biblical sense, revelation is both an ending and an opening: it is the apocalyptic end-time and also the “revealing” of this time through stories and images. Environmental communication has always been revelatory, in these dual senses of the word – it is a mode of communication that is tightly bound to crisis; that has long grappled with obfuscation and misinformation; and that disrupts power structures and notions of the status quo as it seeks to reveal what is hidden. Climate change in particular is associated in the popular imagination with apocalypse, and is also a reality that is constantly being “revealed”. Indeed, the narrative of climate change has been “animated by the revelations of science” (McNeish 1045) and presented to the public through “key moments of disclosure and revelation”, or “signal moments”, such as scientist James Hansen’s 1988 US Senate testimony on global warming (Hamblyn 224).Journalism is “at the frontline of environmental communication” (Parham 96) and environmental news, too, is often revelatory in nature – it exposes the problems inherent in the human relationship with the natural world, and it reveals the scientific evidence behind contentious issues such as climate change. Like other environmental communicators, environmental journalists seek to “break through the perceptual paralysis” (Nisbet 44) surrounding climate change, with the dual aim of better informing the public and instigating policy change. Yet leading environmental commentators continually call for “better media coverage” of the planetary crisis (Suzuki), as climate change is repeatedly bumped off the news agenda by stories and events deemed more newsworthy.News coverage of climate-related disasters is often revelatory both in tone and in cultural function. The disasters themselves and the news narratives which communicate them become processes that make visible what is hidden. Because environmental news is “event driven” (Hansen 95), disasters receive far more news coverage than ongoing problems and trends such as climate change itself, or more quietly devastating issues such as species extinction or climate migration. Disasters are also highly visual in nature. Trumbo (269) describes climate change as an issue that is urgent, global in scale, and yet “practically invisible”; in this sense, climate-related disasters become a means of visualising and realising what is otherwise a complex, difficult, abstract, and un-seeable concept.Unsurprisingly, natural disasters are often presented to the public through a film of apocalyptic rhetoric and imagery. Yet natural disasters can be also “revelatory” moments: instances of awakening in which suppressed truths come spectacularly and devastatingly to the surface. Matthewman (9–10) argues that “disasters afford us insights into social reality that ordinarily pass unnoticed. As such, they can be read as modes of disclosure, forms of communication”. Disasters, he continues, can reveal both “our new normal” and “our general existential condition”, bringing “the underbelly of progress into sharp relief”. Similarly, Lukes (1) states that disasters “lift veils”, revealing “what is hidden from view in normal times”. Yet for Lukes, “the revelation tells us nothing new, nothing that we did not already know”, and is instead a forced confronting of that which is known yet difficult to engage with. Lukes’ concern is the “revealing” of poverty and inequality in New Orleans following the impact of Hurricane Katrina, yet climate-related disasters can also make visible what McNeish terms “the dark side effects of industrial civilisation” (1047). The Australian bushfires of 2019/2020 can be read in these terms, primarily because they unveiled the connection between climate change and extreme events. Scorching millions of hectares, with a devastating impact on human and non-human communities, the fires revealed climate change as a physical reality, and—for Australians—as a local issue as well as a global one. As media coverage of the fires unfolded and smoke settled on half the country, the impact of climate change on individual lives, communities, landscapes, native animal and plant species, and well-established cultural practices (such as the summer camping holiday) could be fully and dramatically realised. Even for those Australians not immediately impacted, the effects were lived and felt: in our lungs, and on our skin, a physical revelation that the impacts of climate change are not limited to geographically distant people or as-yet-unborn future generations. For many of us, the summer of fire was a realisation that climate change can no longer be held at arm’s length.“Revelation” also involves a temporal collapse whereby the future is dragged into the present. A revelatory streak of this nature has always existed at the heart of environmental communication and can be traced back at least as far as the environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring revealed a bleak, apocalyptic future devoid of wildlife and birdsong. In other words, environmental communication can inspire action for change by exposing the ways in which the comforts and securities of the present are built upon a refusal to engage with the future. This temporal rupture where the future meets the present is particularly characteristic of climate change narratives. It is not surprising, then, that media coverage of the 2019/2020 bushfires addressed not just the immediate loss and devastation but also dread of the future, and the understanding that summer will increasingly hold such threats. Bushfires, Climate Change and the MediaThe link between bushfire risk and climate change generated a flurry of coverage in the Australian media well before the fires started in the spring of 2019. In April that year, a coalition of 23 former fire and emergency services leaders warned that Australia was “unprepared for an escalating climate threat” (Cox). They requested a meeting with the new government, to be elected in May, and better funding for firefighting to face the coming bushfire season. When that meeting was granted, at the end of Australia’s hottest and driest year on record (Doyle) in November 2019, bushfires had already been burning for two months. As the fires burned, the emergency leaders expressed frustration that their warnings had been ignored, claiming they had been “gagged” because “you are not allowed to talk about climate change”. They cited climate change as the key reason why the fire season was lengthening and fires were harder to fight. "If it's not time now to speak about climate and what's driving these events”, they asked, “– when?" (McCubbing).The mediatised uncovering of a bushfire/climate change connection was not strictly a revelation. Recent fires in California, Russia, the Amazon, Greece, and Sweden have all been reported in the media as having been exacerbated by climate change. Australia, however, has long regarded itself as a “fire continent”: a place adapted to fire, whose landscapes invite fire and can recover from it. Bushfires had therefore been considered part of the Australian “normal”. But in the Australian spring of 2019, with fires having started earlier than ever and charring rainforests that did not usually burn, the fire chiefs’ warning of a climate change-induced catastrophic bushfire season seemed prescient. As the fires spread and merged, taking homes, lives, landscapes, and driving people towards the water, revelatory images emerged in the media. Pictures of fire refugees fleeing under dystopian crimson skies, masked against the smoke, were accompanied by headlines like “Apocalypse Now” (Fife-Yeomans) and “Escaping Hell” (The Independent). Reports used words like “terror”, “nightmare” (Smee), “mayhem”, and “Armageddon” (Davidson).In the Australian media, the fire/climate change connection quickly became politicised. The Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack interviewed by the ABC, responding to a comment by Greens leader Adam Bandt, said connecting bushfire and climate while the fires raged was “disgraceful” and “disgusting”. People needed help, he said, not “the ravings of some pure enlightened and woke capital city greenies” (Goloubeva and Haydar). Gladys Berejiklian the NSW Premier also described it as “inappropriate” (Baker) and “disappointing” (Fox and Higgins) to talk about climate change at this time. However Carol Sparks, Mayor of bushfire-ravaged Glen Innes in rural NSW, contradicted this stance, telling the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) “Michael McCormack needs to read the science”. Climate change, she said, was “not a political thing” but “scientific fact” (Goloubeva and Haydar).As the fires merged and intensified, so did the media firestorm. Key Australian media became a sparring ground for issue definition, with media predictably split down ideological lines. Public broadcasters the ABC and SBS (Special Broadcasting Service), along with The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian Australia, predominantly framed the catastrophe as wrought by climate change. The Guardian, in an in-depth investigation of climate science and bushfire risk, stated that “despite the political smokescreen” the connection between the fires and global warming was “unequivocal” (Redfearn). The ABC characterised the fires as “a glimpse of the horrors of climate change’s crescendoing impact” (Rose). News outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia, however, actively sought to play down the fires’ seriousness. On 2 January, as front pages of newspapers across the world revealed horrifying fiery images, Murdoch’s Australian ran an upbeat shot of New Year’s Day picnic races as its lead, relegating discussion of the fires to page 4 (Meade). More than simply obscuring the fires’ significance, News Corp media actively sought to convince readers that the fires were not out of the ordinary. For example, as the fires’ magnitude was becoming clear on the last day of 2019, The Australian ran a piece comparing the fires with previous conflagrations, claiming such conditions were “not unprecedented” and the fires were “nothing new” (Johnstone). News Corp’s Sky News also used this frame: “climate alarmists”, “catastrophise”, and “don’t want to look at history”, it stated in a segment comparing the event to past major bushfires (Kenny).As the fires continued into January and February 2020, the refutation of the climate change frame solidified around several themes. Conservative media continued to insist the fires were “normal” for Australia and attributed their severity to a lack of hazard reduction burning, which they blamed on “Greens policies” (Brown and Caisley). They also promoted the argument, espoused by Energy Minister Angus Taylor, that with only “1.3% of global emissions” Australia “could not have meaningful impact” on global warming through emissions reductions, and that top-down climate mitigation pressure from the UN was “doomed to fail” (Lloyd). Foreign media saw the fires in quite different terms. From the outside looking in, the Australian fires were clearly revealed as fuelled by global heating and exacerbated by the Australian government’s climate denialism. Australia was framed as a “notorious climate offender” (Shield) that was—as The New York Times put it—“committing climate suicide” (Flanagan) with its lack of coherent climate policy and its predilection for mining coal. Ouest-France ran a headline reading “High on carbon, rich Australia denies global warming” in which it called Scott Morrison’s position on climate change “incomprehensible” (Guibert). The LA Times called the Australian fires “a climate change warning to its leaders—and ours”, noting how “fossil fuel friendly Morrison” had “gleefully wielded a fist-sized chunk of coal on the floor of parliament in 2017” (Karlik). In the UK, the Independent online ran a front page spread of the fires’ vast smoke plume, with the headline “This is what a climate crisis looks like” (Independent Online), while Australian MP Craig Kelly was called “disgraceful” by an interviewer on Good Morning Britain for denying the fires’ link to climate change (Good Morning Britain).Both in Australia and internationally, deliberate misinformation spread by social media additionally shaped media discourse on the fires. The false revelation that the fires had predominantly been started by arson spread on Twitter under the hashtag #ArsonEmergency. While research has been quick to show that this hashtag was artificially promoted by bots (Weber et al.), this and misinformation like it was also shared and amplified by real Twitter users, and quickly spread into mainstream media in Australia—including Murdoch’s Australian (Ross and Reid)—and internationally. Such misinformation was used to shore up denialist discourses about the fires, and to obscure revelation of the fire/climate change connection. Blame Framing, Public Opinion and the Extent of the Climate Change RevelationAs studies of media coverage of environmental disasters show us, media seek to apportion blame. This blame framing is “accountability work”, undertaken to explain how and why a disaster occurred, with the aim of “scrutinizing the actions of crisis actors, and holding responsible authorities to account” (Anderson et al. 930). In moments of disaster and in their aftermath, “framing contests” (Benford and Snow) can emerge in which some actors, regarding the crisis as an opportunity for change, highlight the systemic issues that have led to the crisis. Other actors, experiencing the crisis as a threat to the status quo, try to attribute the blame to others, and deny the need for policy change. As the Black Summer unfolded, just such a contest took place in Australian media discourse. While Murdoch’s dominant News Corp media sought to protect the status quo, promote conservative politicians’ views, and divert attention from the climate crisis, other Australian and overseas media outlets revealed the fires’ link to climate change and intransigent emissions policy. However, cracks did begin to show in the News Corp stance on climate change during the fires: an internal whistleblower publicly resigned over the media company’s fires coverage, calling it a “misinformation campaign”, and James Murdoch also spoke out about being “disappointed with the ongoing denial of the role of climate change” in reporting the fires (ABC/Reuters).Although media reporting on the environment has long been at the forefront of shaping social understanding of environmental issues, and news maintains a central role in both revealing environmental threats and shaping environmental politics (Lester), during Australia’s Black Summer people were also learning about the fires from lived experience. Polls show that the fires affected 57% of Australians. Even those distant from the catastrophe were, for some time, breathing the most toxic air in the world. This personal experience of disaster revealed a bushfire season that was far outside the normal, and public opinion reflected this. A YouGov Australia Institute poll in January 2020 found that 79% of Australians were concerned about climate change—an increase of 5% from July 2019—and 67% believed climate change was making the bushfires worse (Australia Institute). However, a January 2020 Ipsos poll also found that polarisation along political lines on whether climate change was indeed occurring had increased since 2018, and was at its highest levels since 2014 (Crowe). This may reflect the kind of polarised media landscape that was evident during the fires. A thorough dissection in public discourse of Australia’s unprecedented fire season has been largely eclipsed by the vast coverage of the coronavirus pandemic that so quickly followed it. In May 2020, however, the fires were back in the media, when the Bushfires Royal Commission found that the Black Summer “played out exactly as scientists predicted it would” and that more seasons like it were now “locked in” because of carbon emissions (Hitch). It now remains to be seen whether the revelatory extent of the climate change blame frame that played out in media discourse on the fires will be sufficient to garner meaningful action and policy change—or whether denialist discourses will again obscure climate change revelation and seek to maintain the status quo. References Anderson, Deb, et al. "Fanning the Blame: Media Accountability, Climate and Crisis on the Australian ‘Fire Continent’." 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