[TheClimate.Vote] February 5, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Mon Feb 5 08:44:46 EST 2018
/February 5, 2018/
[Climate Vote]
*Portland could see global warming-related sales tax on fall ballot
<http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2018/02/portland_could_see_global_warm.html>*
OregonLive.com-Feb 2, 2018
Portland voters could get the chance this fall to weigh in on a proposed
tax on sales at powerhouse national retailers operating inside city
limits. The surcharge is intended to fund initiatives to put a dent in
global climate change. The city attorney released an official ballot
title for a proposed measure Friday....
The petition would amend city code to apply a 1 percent tax to all
Portland sales by large corporations except medicine, health care and
certain groceries. Companies would be affected if they have at least $1
billion in annual sales and sales of $500,000 within Portland city
limits. It's not clear how much money the surcharge would raise.
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2018/02/portland_could_see_global_warm.html
[Tennis match 104 degrees F]
*Australian Open slammed for heat rule farce
<http://www.news.com.au/sport/tennis/australian-open-slammed-for-heat-rule-farce/news-story/3671e6e2ce83b956e4c0ffa3672c2ef5>*
(104 degrees F)
AUSTRALIAN Open organisers have been slammed for an unthinkable
dereliction of duty that put players' lives at risk as temperatures
soared yesterday.
The torturous conditions were having a serious effect on both players,
but particularly Monfils. The Frenchman was pushed to breaking point as
he tried to find shade at every opportunity and take longer breaks
between points, telling the chair umpire he needed more than the
allotted 25 seconds.
He received medical attention and at one stage left the court, such was
his distress.
"I'm sick to the stomach," Monfils said. "I'm tired and dizzy.
"I'm going to collapse."
But he was forced to play on under the blazing sun as the roof remained
open on Rod Laver Arena....
Dr Kathryn Bowen, a senior research fellow at the Australian National
University (ANU) specialising in climate and health, was watching the
match and said common sense should have prevailed, at least closing the
roof to shield the players somewhat from the heat.
"When you can see the impacts (of the weather) on a person are as acute
as they are that's when you need to look at this more subjectively and
respond in a humane fashion," Dr Bowen told news.com.au.
"We don't need to bring out our thermometers. It's clear they're both
suffering.
"It becomes a perverse game if it doesn't respond to their stress.
They're under significant heat stress now and the officials really need
to be able to make these calls quickly and with full autonomy."..
The Australian Open's official Twitter account said the match was not
halted because play "needed to be consistent with the outside courts so
some don't get an unfair advantage".
http://www.news.com.au/sport/tennis/australian-open-slammed-for-heat-rule-farce/news-story/3671e6e2ce83b956e4c0ffa3672c2ef5
[Lecturer:]
*Policymakers must be pushed to address climate change
<http://www.heraldtribune.com/news/20180204/lecturer-policymakers-must-be-pushed-to-address-climate-change>*
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
As have others spreading the word about climate change, Musil contends
that, if their constituents demand action, elected policymakers at all
levels will have to respond. "The bottom line is we need to get engaged
as citizens,"...
Starting with the 2018 election cycle, Musil hopes more voters will
chose mayors, governors and legislators who express commitments to
promote renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions (which scientists
cite as the cause of global warming) — despite Trump's withdrawing the
United States from the Paris Agreement to reduce the use of fossil fuels.
He believes the United States is not devoting enough money and resources
to the study of climate change. Meanwhile, many of this nation's climate
scientists have gone to Europe, especially France, where they can find
support for their research.
He acknowledges many skeptics and naysayers regard what research has
been done to be flawed. Yet he thinks they tend to listen to "paid
hacks" whose studies can be "connected to fossil fuel corporations."
When Carson wrote about the dangers of DDT, the pesticide industry
fought back with claims that "we'd live like savages" without it being
sprayed in neighborhoods, Musil said.
If Americans will become more active in expressing their concerns about
climate change and insist on voting accordingly, the politicians will be
willing to do the same, Musil said.
"An aroused citizenry can make a difference."
http://www.heraldtribune.com/news/20180204/lecturer-policymakers-must-be-pushed-to-address-climate-change
[Politics]
*Democrats Lack A Bold National Climate Change Plan In The Trump Era,
And It Shows
<https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/democrats-climate-change_us_5a738c19e4b0905433b2834d>*
The party's rebuttal this week to the president's State of the Union
address ignored what should be a progressive core issue for the party.
By Alexander C. Kaufman
If you think the partisan divide over health care is intense, it's even
worse when it comes to climate change... Yet Democrats, at least on a
national level, remain scattered, without a strategy to deal with what
they regularly call the most pressing issue of a lifetime.
At no point was this more clear than on Tuesday. In the first of two
back-to-back snubs, Democrats on the Senate Committee on Environment and
Public Works spent comparatively little time grilling Environmental
Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt on climate change during
his first appearance before the panel since his confirmation nearly a
year ago. They chose instead to focus on local pollution issues.
Later that night, the official response to President Donald Trump's
first State of the Union address ignored climate change...only aghast
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) inveighed: "How can a president of the
United States give a State of the Union speech and not mention climate
change?"
Voters are overwhelmingly in favor of climate action. Fifty-eight
percent of voters agreed that the federal government should regulate
business to protect the environment and believed that efforts to do so
would create jobs, according to 2016 results from American National
Election Studies. Twenty percent were neutral on the question, and just
22 percent said they believed regulation would not do much to help the
environment and would cost jobs...
"There's a desire among Democrats to describe their positions in a way
that gets 80 percent approval, unobjectionable and something people
won't criticize," said Jeff Hauser, a veteran progressive Democratic
operative. "But you'd be better off with 60-40 percent, where your 60
percent is more passionate and you're tricking the other side into
arguing it."
"That is part of the argument for why you discuss climate and the
environment in a more provocative and detailed way," he added. "That
forces the conversation onto terms that get the other side to engage in
an issue you ultimately win and create an actual mandate to act upon
your findings."..
Yet, despite ranking low on surveys of voter priorities, climate and
environmental issues poll exceptionally high among many registered
voters who don't regularly show up at the polls, especially Latinos and
young people whom the Democrats could easily target. To Nathaniel
Stinnett, a campaign operative who now runs the Environmental Voter
Project, a group seeking to increase turnout among "environmental super
voters," this offers the possibility of a new, winning bloc...
"These are the people who need a little extra nudge to get off the
sidelines," Stinnett said. "Having a candidate clearly differentiate
herself or himself from the crowd and talk about an issue not a lot of
people are talking about, they could drag new voters into the
electorate. That's going to be enormously important in 2018."
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/democrats-climate-change_us_5a738c19e4b0905433b2834d
[CO2 Hubris]
*How Bill Gates aims to clean up the planet
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/04/carbon-emissions-negative-emissions-technologies-capture-storage-bill-gates>*
It's nothing much to look at, but the tangle of pipes, pumps, tanks,
reactors, chimneys and ducts on a messy industrial estate outside the
logging town of Squamish in western Canada could just provide the fix to
stop the world tipping into runaway climate change and substitute
dwindling supplies of conventional fuel.
It could also make Harvard superstar physicist David Keith, Microsoft
co-founder Bill Gates and oil sands magnate Norman Murray Edwards more
money than they could ever dream of.
The idea is grandiose yet simple: decarbonise the global economy by
extracting global-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) straight from the air,
using arrays of giant fans and patented chemical whizzery; and then use
the gas to make clean, carbon-neutral synthetic diesel and petrol to
drive the world's ships, planes and trucks.
The hope is that the combination of direct air capture (DAC), water
electrolysis and fuels synthesis used to produce liquid hydrocarbon
fuels can be made to work at a global scale, for little more than it
costs to extract and sell fossil fuel today. This would revolutionise
the world's transport industry, which emits nearly one-third of total
climate-changing emissions. It would be the equivalent of mechanising
photosynthesis.
The individual technologies may not be new, but their combination at an
industrial scale would be groundbreaking. Carbon Engineering, the
company set up in 2009 by leading geoengineer Keith, with money from
Gates and Murray, has constructed a prototype plant, installed large
fans, and has been extracting around one tonne of pure CO2 every day for
a year. At present it is released back into the air...
But that will not be enough. To avoid runaway climate change, emissions
must then become "net negative", with more carbon being removed than
emitted....
The achilles heel of all negative emission technologies is cost.
Government policy units assume that they will become economically
viable, but the best hope of Carbon Engineering and other direct air
extraction companies is to get the price down to $100 a tonne from the
current $600. Even then, to remove just 1% of global emissions would
cost around $400bn a year, and would need to be continued for ever.
Storing the CO2 permanently would cost extra.
Critics say that these technologies are unfeasible. Not using the fossil
fuel and not producing the emissions in the first place would be much
cleverer than having to find end-of-pipe solutions, say Professor Kevin
Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change
Research, and Glen Peters, research director at the Centre for
International Climate Research (Cicero) in Norway...
In a recent article in the journal Science, the two climate scientists
said they were not opposed to research on negative emission
technologies, but thought the world should proceed on the premise that
they will not work at scale. Not to do so, they said, would be a "moral
hazard par excellence".
Instead, governments are relying on these technologies to remove
hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. "It is
breathtaking," says Anderson. "By the middle of the century, many of the
models assume as much removal of CO2 from the atmosphere by negative
emission technologies as is absorbed naturally today by all of the
world's oceans and plants combined. They are not an insurance policy;
they are a high-risk gamble with tomorrow's generations, particularly
those living in poor and climatically vulnerable communities, set to pay
the price if our high-stakes bet fails to deliver as promised."
According to Anderson, "The beguiling appeal of relying on future
negative emission technologies is that they delay the need for stringent
and politically challenging policies today - they pass the buck for
reducing carbon on to future generations. But if these Dr Strangelove
technologies fail to deliver at the planetary scale envisaged, our own
children will be forced to endure the consequences of rapidly rising
temperatures and a highly unstable climate."
Kris Milkowski, business development manager at the UKCCSRC, says:
"Negative emissions technology is unavoidable and here to stay. We are
simply not moving [to cut emissions] fast enough. If we had an endless
pile of money, we could potentially go totally renewable energy. But
that transition cannot happen overnight. This, I fear, is the only
large-scale solution."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/04/carbon-emissions-negative-emissions-technologies-capture-storage-bill-gates
[Future Risk]
*Exxon Studies Climate Policies and Sees 'Little Risk' to Bottom Line
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/climate/exxon-global-warming.html>*
...the report underscored how the company is grappling with the
transition to stricter policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions, a
shift various analysts and climate advocates say will pose a mortal
threat to the fossil fuels industry. A paper published in Nature in 2015
estimated that, for the world to have a 50-50 shot at staying below 2
degrees Celsius of warming, the world would have to avoid burning most
of the coal reserves currently beneath the ground, half the natural gas,
and about one-third of the oil.
Exxon laid out a more optimistic view. Oil and natural gas, the
company's mainstays, will "continue to play a critical role in meeting
the world's energy demand," the company said in its report...
Exxon's vast fossil fuel reserves "face little risk" of being left in
the ground, the company said. Less than 5 percent of its reserves would
be affected under a 2-degree scenario, the company estimated. Under that
scenario, Exxon sees the world's oil consumption dropping only slowly in
the next two decades or so, and sees demand for natural gas rising slightly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/climate/exxon-global-warming.html
[Beetles shrinking]
*Global warming is shrinking insects: Study reveals the four largest
beetle species in Canada have shrunk 20% in the last 45 years in an
attempt to survive hotter temperatures
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5329093/Global-warming-shrinking-insects.html#ixzz569yZG3rU>*
- Global warming is causing animals to shrink their body size in order
to survive
- Most of the evidence for organisms shrinking has come from laboratory work
- However, the latest study looks at how creature's are shrinking the
real-world
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5329093/Global-warming-shrinking-insects.html#ixzz569yZG3rU
[Annual Review of Political Science]
*Social Movement Theory and the Prospects for Climate Change Activism in
the United States
<http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052615-025801?journalCode=polisci>*
Vol. 20:189-208 (Volume publication date May 2017)
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052615-025801
*Abstract*
The issue of climate change poses something of a puzzle. For all the
attention accorded the issue, climate change/global warming has spawned
surprisingly little grassroots activism in the contemporary United
States. Drawing on social movement theory, the author seeks to explain
this puzzle. The prevailing consensus among movement scholars is that
the prospect for movement emergence is facilitated by the confluence of
three factors: the expansion of political opportunities, the
availability of mobilizing structures, and cognitive and affective
mobilization through framing processes. The author then applies each of
these factors to the case of climate change, arguing that (a) awareness
of the issue developed during an especially inopportune period in
American politics, (b) the organizations that arose to address the issue
were ill suited to the kind of grassroots mobilization characteristic of
successful movements, and (c) the amorphous nature of the issue played
havoc with efforts at strategic framing.
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052615-025801?journalCode=polisci
*This Day in Climate History February 5, 1990
<http://web.archive.org/web/20100811144431/http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=1514&year=1990&month=all>
- from D.R. Tucker*
February 5, 1990: Addressing a special IPCC gathering in Washington,
D.C., President George H. W. Bush acknowledges the reality of
human-caused climate change, but says that solutions to the problem of
a warming planet must not inhibit worldwide economic growth.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100811144431/http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=1514&year=1990&month=all
http://c-spanvideo.org/program/PresidentialAddress28
http://articles.latimes.com/1990-02-05/news/mn-275_1_global-warming
/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//Archive of Daily Global Warming News
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html>
//
/https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote//
///
Send email to subscribe <a%20href=%22mailto:contact at theClimate.Vote%22>
to news clippings. /
*** Privacy and Security: * This is a text-only mailing that
carries no images which may originate from remote servers.
Text-only messages provide greater privacy to the receiver and
sender.
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for
democratic and election purposes and cannot be used for
commercial purposes.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote with subject:
subscribe, To Unsubscribe, subject: unsubscribe
Also youmay subscribe/unsubscribe at
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Paulifor
http://TheClimate.Vote delivering succinct information for
citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously
restricted to this mailing list.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20180205/b555685d/attachment.html>
More information about the TheClimate.Vote
mailing list