[TheClimate.Vote] July 18, 2017 - Daily Global Warming News
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Tue Jul 18 09:36:29 EDT 2017
/July 18, 2017/
*Republicans Cracking on Climate?
<https://climatecrocks.com/2017/07/17/republicans-cracking-on-climate/>*
by greenman3610
We watched over 8 years as Republicans railed against the Affordable
Care Act, promising that they had a ready alternative, if only the bad
people would let them enact it. Well, now we see the sham that was.
Could something similar be going on in the climate change arena? To
appease rabidly anti-science donors the...
https://climatecrocks.com/2017/07/17/republicans-cracking-on-climate/
*Marin, San Mateo County sue big oil over climate change
<http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Marin-San-Mateo-County-sue-big-oil-over-climate-11294549.php>*
By Kurtis Alexander Updated 4:04 pm, Monday, July 17, 2017
Two Bay Area counties and a Southern California city concerned about
rising sea levels sued 37 of the world's biggest oil and coal companies
Monday, claiming the fossil fuel giants should pay for damages wrought
by climate change - a first-of-its-kind challenge that some liken to the
high-stakes litigation of the tobacco industry in the 1990s....
The lawyers make the case that the oil companies knew about the damage
their actions were causing, denied it and instead sought to discredit
scientific findings that greenhouse gas emissions were heating the
earth's atmosphere.
The suits are are the latest in a small but growing effort to hold
Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and other major energy companies
accountable for the effects of climate change. Legal experts say the
challenge is far more comprehensive than previous endeavors and has the
advantage of containing the most up-to-date science.
"This is a long-anticipated move in climate litigation,... You can
expect there will be a great deal of interest in how this litigation
proceeds."
Representatives of several of the energy companies named in the suit
declined comment or did not respond to calls from The Chronicle....
"Without defendants' fossil fuel-related greenhouse gas pollution,
current sea level rise would have been far less than the observed sea
level rise to date," the lawsuits say. "Similarly, committed sea level
rise that will occur in the future would also be far less."
Lawyers for Marin, San Mateo County and Imperial Beach are seeking to
show that the energy companies have created a public nuisance - legally,
something that causes widespread harm. It's the same doctrine that state
attorneys general used in the late 1990s to win a $206 billion
settlement from the tobacco industry over the health costs of cigarettes.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Marin-San-Mateo-County-sue-big-oil-over-climate-11294549.php
-more at:
*PRESS RELEASE: California Communities Confronting Rising Sea Levels
Fight Back <https://www.sheredling.com/press-room/>*
Here's a link to the three complaints
<https://www.sheredling.com/press-room/> and that press release
<https://www.sheredling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Media-SLR-release-FINAL-PDF-071717.pdf>
along with some other background information:
https://www.sheredling.com/press-room/ There is a six-page timeline at
the back end of the Complaints that describes what the industry knew,
when they knew it, and what they didn't do about it
https://www.sheredling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2017-07-17-SMCO-Complaint-5bFINAL-ENDORSED5d.pdf
https://www.sheredling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2017-07-17-MARIN-CO-Sea-Level-Rise-Complaint-5bFINAL-ENDORSED5d.pdf
https://www.sheredling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2017-07-17-IB-Sea-Level-Rise-Complaint-5bFINAL-ENDORSED5d.pdf
Much more to follow. #SeaLevelRiseCA
https://www.sheredling.com/press-room/
more at:
*Timeline Truth or CO2nsequences (pdf)*
<https://www.sheredling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SMC-Endorsed7_2017-07-17-SMCO-Complaint-5bFINAL-ENDORSED5d.pdf>
This timeline highlights information, alleged in the Complaints filed by
San Mateo County, Marin County, and Imperial Beach, that comes from key
industry documents and other sources. It illustrates what the industry
knew, when they knew it, and what they didn't do to prevent the impacts
that are now imposing real costs on people and communities around the
country.
https://www.sheredling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SMC-Endorsed7_2017-07-17-SMCO-Complaint-5bFINAL-ENDORSED5d.pdf
*Small Change in Average, Big Change in Extremes (graphic animation)
<http://wxshift.com/news/graphics/small-change-in-average-big-change-in-extremes>*
Jun 14, 2017 By Climate Central
Climate change is driving up summer temperatures across the country. We
often talk about warming in terms average temperatures, which can be
perceived as small to the public, but any rise in the average
temperature leads to a rise in the the number of days that are extremely
hot.
Interactive graphs at
http://wxshift.com/climate-change/climate-indicators/extreme-heat
To understand what's happening, we need to get a little geeky and take
you back to Stats class. The classic bell curve represents the
distribution of all temperatures at a location. The bulk of temperatures
- those close to average - sit near the middle of the curve. Record
temperatures, which are rare, sit on the fringes, with hot on right and
cold on the left. As the world warms from the increase in greenhouse
gases, the whole curve shifts to the warmer side, the right.
<http://wxshift.com/climate-change/climate-indicators/extreme-heat> This
shift results in a large jump in the number of extremely hot days and a
drop in the number of extremely cool days. It also means heat records
are more likely to be set than cold records. And it is these extremes
that impact our lives.
That's what we are seeing across much of the country. Average summer
temperature have risen a few degrees across the West and Southern
Plains, leading to more days above 100°F in Austin, Dallas and El Paso
all the way up to Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, and Boise. It's worth
noting that this trend has been recorded across the entire Northern
Hemisphere, as shown in this WXshift animation
<http://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/maps/summers-are-getting-hotter>.
http://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/maps/summers-are-getting-hotter
http://wxshift.com/news/graphics/small-change-in-average-big-change-in-extremes
*The Planet Is Warming. And It's Okay to Be Afraid
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/07/17/planet-warming-and-its-okay-be-afraid>*
*Why being fearful can be part of a healthy, heroic response to the
climate crisis*
by Margaret Klein Salamon
Last Week, David Wallace-Wells wrote a cover story for of /New York
Magazine/, "/The Uninhabitable Earth
<https://links3.mixmaxusercontent.com/mCvHnWZxvdrG62LyP/l/KRhM8uKjiVEkIhNGF?messageId=knd1D1gz7EpVAM2Qa&rn=&re=gInJ3buMXbhVmck52bt12bjBkcvRXakVmI>/,"
on some of the worst-case scenarios that the climate crisis could cause
by the end of this century. It describes killer heat waves, crippling
agricultural failures, devastated economies, plagues, resource wars, and
more. It has been read more than two million times.
The article has caused a major controversy in the climate community, in
part because of some factual errors in the piece
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/07/10/fear-wont-save-us-putting-check-climate-doom>—though
by and large the piece is an accurate portrayal of worst-case climate
catastrophe scenarios. But by far the most significant criticism the
piece received was that it was too frightening
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/07/10/fear-wont-save-us-putting-check-climate-doom>.
"Importantly, fear does not motivate, and appealing to it is often
counter-productive as it tends to distance people from the problem,
leading them to disengage, doubt and even dismiss it," wrote
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/doomsday-scenarios-are-as-harmful-as-climate-change-denial/2017/07/12/880ed002-6714-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html>
Michael Mann, Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles at the /Washington Post/.
Erich Holthaus tweeted
<https://twitter.com/EricHolthaus/status/885521501725876224> about the
consequences of the piece:
"A widely-read piece like this that is not suitably grounded in fact
may provoke unnecessary panic and anxiety among readers."
"And that has real-world consequences. My twitter feed has been
filled w people who, after reading DWW's piece, have felt deep
anxiety."
"There are people who say they are now considering not having kids,
partly because of this. People are losing sleep, reevaluating their
lives."
While I think both Mann and Holthaus are brilliant scientists who
identified some factual problems in the article, I strongly disagree
with their statements about the role of emotions—namely, fear—in climate
communications and politics. I am also skeptical of whether climate
scientists should be treated as national arbiters of psychological or
political questions, in general. I would like to offer my thoughts as a
clinical psychologist, and as the founder and director of The Climate
Mobilization.
<https://links8.mixmaxusercontent.com/mCvHnWZxvdrG62LyP/l/CG4EsyLEmSFWZ7cfF?messageId=knd1D1gz7EpVAM2Qa&rn=&re=gInJ3buMXbhVmck52bt12bjBkcvRXakVmI>"Our
job is not to protect people from the truth or the feelings that
accompany it—it’s to protect them from the climate crisis."
/Affect tolerance/—the ability to tolerate a wide range of feelings in
oneself and others—is a critical psychological skill. On the other hand,
/affect phobia/—the fear of certain feelings in oneself or others—is a
major psychological problem, as it causes people to rely heavily on
psychological defenses.
Much of the climate movement seems to suffer from affect phobia, which
is probably not surprising given that scientific culture aspires to be
purely rational, free of emotional influence. Further, the feelings
involved in processing the climate crisis—fear, grief, anger, guilt, and
helplessness—can be overwhelming. But that doesn’t mean we should try to
avoid "making" people feel such things. Experiencing them is a normal,
healthy, necessary part of coming to terms with the climate crisis. I
agree with David Roberts
<https://links7.mixmaxusercontent.com/mCvHnWZxvdrG62LyP/l/8X7E8R0dO4Q1Kz9bE?messageId=knd1D1gz7EpVAM2Qa&rn=&re=gInJ3buMXbhVmck52bt12bjBkcvRXakVmI>
that it is OK, indeed imperative, to tell the whole, frightening story.
As I argued in a 2015 essay,/The Transformative Power of Climate Truth
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/04/27/transformative-power-climate-truth>/,
it's the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a
safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people
process and channel their own feelings—not to preemptively try to manage
and constrain those feelings.
Holthaus writes of people feeling deep anxiety, losing sleep,
re-considering their lives due to the article… /but this is actually a
good thing/. Those people are coming out of the trance of denial and
starting to confront the reality of our existential emergency. I hope
that every single American, every single human experiences such a crisis
of conscience. It is the first step to taking substantial action. Our
job is not to protect people from the truth or the feelings that
accompany it—it’s to protect them from the climate crisis.
I know many of you have been losing sleep and reconsidering your lives
in light of the climate crisis for years. We at The Climate Mobilization
sure have. TCM exists to make it possible for people to turn that fear
into intense dedication and focused action towards a restoring a safe
climate.
In my paper, /Leading the Public into Emergency Mode—a New Strategy for
the Climate Movement
<https://links9.mixmaxusercontent.com/mCvHnWZxvdrG62LyP/l/vytEzJBH71qL6kAsC?messageId=knd1D1gz7EpVAM2Qa&rn=&re=gInJ3buMXbhVmck52bt12bjBkcvRXakVmI>/,
I argue that intense, but not paralyzing, fear combined with maximum
hope can actually lead people and groups into a state of peak
performance. We can rise to the challenge of our time and dedicate
ourselves to become heroic messengers and change-makers.
I do agree with the critique, made by Alex Steffen among others, that
dire discussions of the climate crisis should be accompanied with a
discussion of solutions. But these solutions have to be up to the task
of saving civilization and the natural world. As we know, the only
solution that offers effective protection is a maximal intensity effort,
grounded in justice, that brings the United States to carbon negative in
10 years or less and begins to remove all the excess carbon from the
atmosphere. That's the magic combination for motivating people: telling
the truth about the scale of the crisis and the solution.
In Los Angeles
<https://links7.mixmaxusercontent.com/mCvHnWZxvdrG62LyP/l/ljYRJulA5xB7r5n3X?messageId=knd1D1gz7EpVAM2Qa&rn=&re=gInJ3buMXbhVmck52bt12bjBkcvRXakVmI>,
our ally City Councilmember Paul Koretz is advocating a WWII-scale
mobilization of Los Angeles to make it carbon neutral by 2025. He
understands and talks about the horrific dangers of the climate crisis
and is calling for heroic action to counter them. Local activists and
community groups are inspired by his challenge.
Columnist Joe Romm noted
<https://links10.mixmaxusercontent.com/mCvHnWZxvdrG62LyP/l/Y7iDyq55lGkkwEJGT?messageId=knd1D1gz7EpVAM2Qa&rn=&re=gInJ3buMXbhVmck52bt12bjBkcvRXakVmI>,
we aren't doomed—we are choosing to be doomed by failing to respond
adequately to the emergency, which would of course entail initiating a
WWII-scale response to the climate emergency. Our Victory Plan
<https://links3.mixmaxusercontent.com/mCvHnWZxvdrG62LyP/l/nS10dWprT0yJTS41Z?messageId=knd1D1gz7EpVAM2Qa&rn=&re=gInJ3buMXbhVmck52bt12bjBkcvRXakVmI>
lays out what policies would look like that, if implemented, would
actually protect billions of people and millions of species from
decimation. They include: 1) An immediate ban on new fossil fuel
infrastructure and a scheduled shut down of all fossil fuels in 10
years; 2) massive government investment in renewables; 3) overhauling
our agricultural system to make it a huge carbon sink; 4) fair-shares
rationing to reduce demand; 5) A federally-financed job guarantee to
eliminate unemployment 6) a 100% marginal tax on income above $500,000.
Gradualist half measures, such as a gradually phased-in carbon tax or
cap-and-trade system, that seem "politically realistic" but have no hope
of actually restoring a safe climate, are not adequate to channel
people's fear into productive action.
We know what is physically and morally necessary. It's our job—as
members of the climate emergency movement—to make that politically
possible. This will not be easy, emotionally or otherwise. It will take
heroic levels of dedication from ordinary people. We hope youjoin us.
<https://links9.mixmaxusercontent.com/mCvHnWZxvdrG62LyP/l/SWd6AKVvfDIBDgFso?messageId=knd1D1gz7EpVAM2Qa&rn=&re=gInJ3buMXbhVmck52bt12bjBkcvRXakVmI>
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
3.0 License
Margaret Klein Salamon, Phd is co-founder and director of Climate
Mobilization. Klein earned her doctorate in clinical psychology from
Adelphi University and also holds a BA in Social Anthropology from
Harvard. Though she loved being a therapist, Margaret felt called to
apply her psychological and anthropological knowledge to solving climate
change. Follow her and Climate Mobilization on Twitter: @ClimatePsych /
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/07/17/planet-warming-and-its-okay-be-afraid
*Trump administration pulled top climate expert from Zuckerberg's
national park visit
<https://mic.com/articles/182356/exclusive-trump-administration-pulled-top-climate-expert-from-mark-zuckerbergs-national-park-visit#.U8O7fKeYx>*
A climate change expert at the United States Geological Survey was set
to join Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg in Montana last weekend to discuss
the impact of global warming at Glacier National Park, but two sources
with knowledge of the matter say the scientist was pulled from the visit
by the U.S. Department of Interior just days before the event.
The decision has provoked suspicion from inside the USGS that the
scientist's appearance was canceled to minimize attention to the issue
of climate change, according to one source.
"The impact of climate change is very clear at Glacier," Zuckerberg
wrote on Facebook. "In the last hundred years, the average global
temperature has risen 1.5 degrees. But in the high elevations of Montana
where Glacier is the temperature is warming at three times the global
average - enough to melt glaciers."
https://mic.com/articles/182356/exclusive-trump-administration-pulled-top-climate-expert-from-mark-zuckerbergs-national-park-visit#.U8O7fKeYx
*Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals>*
Martin Lukacs for The Guardian
Stop obsessing with how personally green you live – and start
collectively taking on corporate power
Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a
flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change
could scarcely be more out of sync with the nature of the crisis.
The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions to green my
office space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light colours, stop
using the elevator.
Back at home, done huffing stairs, I could get on with other options:
change my lightbulbs, buy local veggies, purchase eco-appliances, put a
solar panel on my roof.
And a study released on Thursday claimed it had figured out the single
best way to fight climate change: I could swear off ever having a child.
These pervasive exhortations to individual action - in corporate ads,
school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups,
especially in the west - seem as natural as the air we breath. But we
could hardly be worse-served.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel
corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of
carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible
for an astonishing 71 percent. You tinker with those pens or that panel;
they go on torching the planet.
The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a
feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an
ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the
possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not
too late to reverse it.
Anything resembling a collective check on corporate power has become a
target of the elite: lobbying and corporate donations, hollowing out
democracies, have obstructed green policies and kept fossil fuel
subsidies flowing; and the rights of associations like unions, the most
effective means for workers to wield power together, have been undercut
whenever possible.
Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically
unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable. Its
celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its
stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective
bonds. It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret
Thatcher preached: "there is no such thing as society."
The good news is that the impulse of humans to come together is
inextinguishable – and the collective imagination is already making a
political come-back. The climate justice movement is blocking pipelines,
forcing the divestment of trillions of dollars, and winning support for
100% clean energy economies in cities and states across the world. New
ties are being drawn to Black Lives Matter, immigrant and Indigenous
rights, and fights for better wages. On the heels of such movements,
political parties seem finally ready to defy neoliberal dogma.
None more so than Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Manifesto spelled out a
redistributive project to address climate change: by publicly retooling
the economy, and insisting that corporate oligarchs no longer run amok
But it is time to stop obsessing with how personally green we live – and
start collectively taking on corporate power.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals
*This Day in Climate History July 18, 2002
<http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/science/climate/2002-07-18-states-climate.htm>
- from D.R. Tucker*
July 18, 2002: USA Today reports:
"Democratic attorneys general from 11 states accused the Bush
administration Wednesday of ignoring global warming and favoring energy
policies that will boost greenhouse gas emissions.
"White House spokesman Scott McClellan responded by saying the president
was working on a 'bipartisan, commonsense approach to address climate
change.'
"In their letter to Bush, the attorneys general denounced the
administration's climate change policy, arguing that states have been
left to address a global problem with a patchwork of inconsistent
regulations. They said Bush has failed to create a national plan to curb
carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles and power plants."
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/science/climate/2002-07-18-states-climate.htm
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