[TheClimate.Vote] June 22, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Fri Jun 22 11:37:55 EDT 2018
/June 22, 2018/
*Fish wars loom as climate change pushes lobster, cod, and other species
north
<https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/fish-wars-loom-as-climate-change-pushes-lobster-cod-and-other-species-north/ar-AAyYYmh>*
Over the past 50 years, as Atlantic waters have warmed, fish populations
have headed north in search of colder temperatures. Lobsters have
migrated 170 miles and the iconic cod about 65 miles, while mid-Atlantic
species such as black sea bass have surged about 250 miles north,
federal surveys show.
But fishing limits and other rules, by and large, haven’t shifted with them.
The rapid movement of fisheries, in New England and around the world,
has outpaced regulations and exacerbated tensions between fishermen in
competing regions and countries, threatening to spark conflicts that
specialists fear could lead to overfishing.
"This is a global problem that's going to be getting worse," said Malin
Pinsky, an assistant professor of ecology at Rutgers University, who led
a recently released study on the movement of fisheries in the journal
Science...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/fish-wars-loom-as-climate-change-pushes-lobster-cod-and-other-species-north/ar-AAyYYmh
[Audio interview with Bill McKibben]*
Catastrophic Climate Change Is Not an 'Environmental' Issue: Bill
McKibben
<https://www.thenation.com/article/catastrophic-climate-change-not-environmental-issue-bill-mckibben/>*
It's the most crucial security question that humans have ever faced:
catastrophic climate change. Bill McKibben says it's too late to halt
global warming, but we still have a chance to curb it in ways that
ultimately avoid "civilizational destruction."
https://www.thenation.com/article/catastrophic-climate-change-not-environmental-issue-bill-mckibben/
[A book review looks into the future - by The Nation]
JULY 16-23, 2018, ISSUE
States of Emergency
*Imagining a politics for an age of accelerated climate change.
<https://www.thenation.com/article/political-theory-for-an-age-of-climate-change/>*
By Alyssa Battistoni
REVIEWED
*CLIMATE LEVIATHAN: A POLITICAL THEORY OF OUR PLANETARY FUTURE*
By Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright
Now that capitalism is again on the table as a political issue, it also
gets its share of blame. The political problem, it's now said, isn't
democracy alone, but rather that democracy is held hostage by oil money
and the politicians purchased by it. Even some capitalists are starting
to acknowledge that the system could use some tweaks. (Others, like Elon
Musk, are planning to decamp to Mars: the Great Derangement indeed.)
Swapping corporations for democracy as the root of the problem is a
welcome development. Yet serious political thinking about climate change
remains in short supply. Most people are now worried about it, but few
are putting climate change at the heart of their political thought and
practice.
In this context, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright's new work of political
theory, Climate Leviathan, is a welcome addition to the small but
growing body of climate writing on the left. It's a book explicitly
aimed at understanding the political dimensions of climate change
instead of relegating them to a paragraph or two in the concluding
section. It also takes a different tack than most works on climate
politics. The authors are not interested in why we aren't acting to curb
carbon emissions; instead, they're interested in the kinds of political
scenarios that are likely to emerge in response to the approaching
ecological crises...
- - - -
Climate change, though a novel and previously unimaginable problem, does
not actually require a radical departure from traditional left struggles
for freedom, equality, and justice; it simply poses new versions of
familiar dilemmas. Our political thought doesn't need to address climate
change directly to offer insights into the role that the left can play
in responding to it, but we will need to develop old ideas in new
directions if we are to navigate a world that is now changing radically.
Toward this end, Climate Leviathan engages a wide range of political
thought, from Gramsci to Hegel, Kant to Naomi Klein. But as the title
suggests, at the heart of the book is Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan
remains the fundamental work on the sovereign power that underpins
modern states. Hobbes looked at a nation torn asunder by the English
Civil War and reckoned that it was better to relinquish one's freedom to
the authority of an all-powerful sovereign than to live through such
nastiness and brutality. Such a sovereign power did not yet exist in
Hobbes's time, but in describing it, Hobbes sought to understand a
political form that he thought might soon come into being.
Mann and Wainwright argue that we are in another such moment, a time
when political forms are in flux and one can begin to see the shape of
the growing leviathan. They therefore follow Hobbes into a speculative
mode, describing the forms of power they think are likely to emerge in
the future while recognizing that none have done so yet.
Their other key resource in thinking about this leviathan is the German
political theorist and Nazi sympathizer Carl Schmitt, who draws on
Hobbes in constructing his own theory of sovereignty. Everyday
decision-making is governed by law, Schmitt argues, but sovereignty is
to be found in the moments when emergency demands extralegal action. For
Schmitt, it was crucial that the sovereign be able to take action
against a community's enemies as it deemed necessary. Sovereignty here
consists of the political power that allows a state to override the law
in defense of its friends...
- -- - - -
Climate Leviathan imagines how ecological disruption will create the
conditions for a new sovereign authority to "seize command, declare an
emergency, and bring order to Earth, all in the name of saving life" -
and this time on a planetary instead of national scale.
Yet this sovereignty is still nascent, and other political forms might
yet challenge it. At the core of Climate Leviathan are four types of
political formation that the authors believe are likely to emerge in
response to climate change.
*"Climate Leviathan"* would be a system of global capitalism
governed by a planetary sovereign - not necessarily the individual
ruler Hobbes imagined, but nevertheless a hegemonic power capable of
taking drastic action;
*"Climate Mao,"* an anti-capitalist system governed by sovereign
power at the level of the nation-state or the planet;
*"Climate Behemoth,"* a capitalist system within the autarchic
confines of the nation-state; and
*"Climate X,"* which rejects both capitalism and sovereignty for
something yet to be determined.
These four possible futures, Mann and Wainwright admit, are thus far
inchoate. But as we blow past our carbon targets and the impacts of
climate change become increasingly destructive, one of these is likely
to emerge as the dominant mode of politics.
The most likely victor, the authors think, is Climate Leviathan: It is,
after all, already in the ascendancy, epitomized by international pacts
like the Paris Agreement and global institutions like the UN Conference
of the Parties (COP). These institutions are not currently sovereign in
the Hobbesian sense; to the contrary, they are explicitly international,
working to coordinate action between sovereign nation-states. But Mann
and Wainwright think they nevertheless point the way toward a form of
sovereignty that has been anticipated for centuries: one encompassing
the world. Thinkers from Kant to Einstein have typically imagined a
world state in response to the threat of war; Climate Leviathan would be
just such a world state in an age of ecological disaster.
Rising temperatures will produce new emergencies, from tsunamis and
hurricanes to famines and refugee crises, and with them new
opportunities for powerful states to expand their reach by declaring a
state of exception. A major climate disaster could prompt northern
capitalist states to take action - up to and including geoengineering -
via the United Nations or a European Union-like supranational authority.
By calling for agreements at the annual COPs, many climate activists
have legitimized Climate Leviathan rather than challenging it. But what
these institutions cannot do, Mann and Wainwright argue, is solve the
climate crisis: They were created to manage capitalism, and will
continue to do so even in the face of catastrophic warming.
Yet while global capitalist institutions have been the primary site of
climate politics for the past two decades, Climate Leviathan has a
rival: Climate Behemoth represents a "reactionary populism" that turns
away from the global elitism of planetary forums on climate change and
toward a nationalist capitalism - a dynamic perfectly encapsulated by
Donald Trump's claim that he was "elected to represent the citizens of
Pittsburgh, not Paris."
Visible in Trump's America, Narendra Modi's India, and the surge of
right-wing Euroskeptic parties across Europe, the backers of Climate
Behemoth are a mix of fossil-fuel capitalists, petit-bourgeois
reactionaries, and disillusioned working-class people who want to stick
it to the cosmopolitan elites and the political establishment. Its
contradictory but potent mix of ethno-nationalism, religion,
masculinity, and scientific denial make it a powerful but ultimately
unstable form; it is likely, Mann and Wainwright argue, to burn out -
but in the meantime, it could do plenty of damage.
The revolutionary possibilities represented by Climate Mao and Climate
X, meanwhile, are less immediately proximate, visible at present only in
fragments. Climate Mao describes a revolutionary transformation led by a
noncapitalist state acting quickly to address climate breakdown. In Mann
and Wainwright's account, it follows its namesake but also Robespierre
and Lenin in suggesting "the necessity of a just terror in the interests
of the future of the collective": It pits the power of the planetary
sovereign against that of capital. Climate Mao, that is, portends a
renewal of "authoritarian state socialisms" that act to reduce carbon
emissions and address climate emergencies, eventually on the level of
the planet.
China's unilateral restrictions on corporations and citizens alike show
a glimpse of this future, though one not operating at full strength.
Indeed, Mann and Wainwright take pains to argue that China isn't
currently on a path toward Climate Mao. The Communist Party can close
steel mills in a matter of months to minimize emissions, but China is no
longer plausibly described as communist; to the contrary, it has
committed to working with the Western capitalist powers to build the
international system that characterizes Climate Leviathan (think, for
example, of Barack Obama's much-lauded negotiations with Xi Jinping).
Nevertheless, Mann and Wainwright insist that in the near future,
Climate Mao is only likely to emerge in Asia: Latin America may have a
more robust legacy of radical ecological politics, but only Asia has the
necessary combination of powerful states and major economies paired with
vast numbers of peasants, proletarians, and surplus populations whose
expectations are likely to be frustrated by the disruptive effects of
climate change. Only in Asia, in other words, is it possible to imagine
popular movements seizing state and economic power in a way that would
meaningfully affect the world's use of resources...
- - - - - - - -
When Marx scorned the project of writing "recipes for the cook-shops of
the future," he called instead for a "critical analysis of actual
facts." The actual facts are not auspicious - yet we have no choice but
to face them. The threat posed by climate change demands that we imagine
a very different world, one that does not exist now and never has; and
one, moreover, that is not oriented toward our current ideas of progress
and the future. As each of these authors observes, the threat posed by
climate change requires political action of a different order and
magnitude than anything currently on offer: Business as usual will not
suffice. It is worrying that thinkers so astute about the dynamics of
capitalism and nature appear stymied by how we can escape them. But they
are undoubtedly correct that climate change will shape politics for the
foreseeable future, which shrinks by the day.
So while Mann and Wainwright and other supporters of a possible Climate
X need not draw blueprints, some hard questions demand answering. How is
the massive global fossil-fuel industry to be dismantled without state
coercion? How would an anti-sovereignty and anti-capitalist movement
prevent the enormously wealthy from decamping to some reasonably stable
patch of the world? How are massive boycotts and strikes to be not just
imagined but organized? What's to prevent private coercion from
replacing the public kind?
Certainly, many on the left are too blithe about the state, presumably
on the grounds that you seize it first and ask questions later. Those
who tend to think that state power is necessary to undertake the kinds
of projects needed to address climate change should say more, too: How
do we think the "good state" of welfare and public schools can be
detached from the "bad state" of war and prisons? How do we imagine
actually winning enough state power to usefully wield it? And how can we
then transform it rather than finding ourselves transformed by it?
These are real questions, not rhetorical ones, and they have urgent
implications. Climate Leviathan helps us understand what they mean and
why they matter, and offers rich conceptual resources with which to
think them through. These questions will ultimately have to be answered
in practice more than in theory, but they deserve our attention - and soon.
Alyssa BattistoniAlyssa Battistoni is a PhD candidate in political
theory at Yale University. Her writing has appeared in Dissent, n+1, and
Jacobin, where she is on the editorial board.
https://www.thenation.com/article/political-theory-for-an-age-of-climate-change/
[USAID Webinar June 28]
Please join us for this month's USAID Adaptation Community Meeting,
*"Managing for climate risk: Approaches and perspectives from the World
Bank, USAID, International Finance Corporation and Inter-American
Development Bank" <https://adaptation.adobeconnect.com/june2018/>*
The event will be held at Chemonics International located at 1717 H
Street Northwest Washington, DC 20006 from 4:00 - 5:30 pm on Thursday
June 28.
A live webinar of the event will also be available here:
https://adaptation.adobeconnect.com/june2018/
Description:
A changing and more variable climate, bringing with it increasingly
frequent, longer and more severe droughts, heat waves, floods and
extreme weather events, is putting the most vulnerable populations
at higher risk of disease, displacement, and loss of livelihoods.
Climate change also threatens to undermine development interventions
aimed at improving the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable
populations. To improve resilience to both current and future
climate, as well as safeguard development gains, several leading
organizations within the international development community have
implemented processes to manage climate risk at various levels from
high-level country strategies to specific project activities.
At the June Adaptation Community Meeting, the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID), the World Bank, the International
Finance Corporation, and the Inter-American Development Bank will come
together to discuss each organization's current and emerging approaches
to climate risk management. The discussion will highlight each
organization's approach, initiatives to track and assess the
effectiveness of climate risk management, lessons learned, and ideas for
the future.
Speakers
Becky Chacko, Senior Climate Change Integration Specialist, USAID
Ana Bucher, Senior Climate Change Specialist, World Bank
David Gibson, Senior Environmental and Social Risk Management
Specialist, International Finance Corporation
Maricarmen Esquivel Gallegos, Climate Change Specialist, InterAmerican
Development Bank
Register for the event here -
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/managing-for-climate-risk-approaches-and-perspectives-from-the-world-bank-usaid-international-tickets-47115658202
https://adaptation.adobeconnect.com/june2018/
[22 minute video from 2016]
*Pakistan's City with No Water | Unreported World
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWraEBec0Vg>*
Unreported World
Published on Jun 10, 2018
The City with no water: Imagine having to spend half your salary or more
buying water, sometimes only available illegally from criminals. Or if
water taps in your area only ran once a fortnight in the middle of the
night for less than two hours. That was the situation for millions in
the city of Karachi, Pakistan back in 2016, where climate change and
mismanagement saw the supply of water drastically reduced. Ordinary
families were the hardest hit as Fazeelat Aslam reported.
This episode first aired on 01/04/2016.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWraEBec0Vg
[Classic video documentary conveys deep understanding]
*Climate Documentary: The Cross of the Moment
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UuSxiCJ0co>*
Climate State
Published on Sep 18, 2016
The Cross of the Moment attempts to connect the dots between Fermi's
Paradox, climate change, capitalism, and collapse. Interviews with top
scientists and public intellectuals are woven together into a narrative
that is challenging, exhausting, and often depressing as it refuses to
accept the easy answers posited by other overly-simplistic climate
change documentaries.
Directed by Jacob Freydont-Attie
The Cross of the Moment on facebook
https://www.facebook.com/crossofthemoment/
Official website http://www.crossofthemoment.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UuSxiCJ0co
- -- - -
[appropos, poetic quote]
"We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die."
- W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety
[You mean it isn't now?]
*Starbucks' Throwaway Cups - there is no "away"
<https://www.asyousow.org/newsletters/summer2018/starbucks-throwaway-cups-there-is-no-away>*
Coffee giant Starbucks uses between 8 and 10 million single-use
throwaway cups every day.
But there is no "away" - there's only landfill, litter, incineration,
ocean trash - or recycling. Ten years ago, Starbucks promised that by
2015, 100% of its cups would be reusable or recyclable, 25% of beverages
would be served in reusable containers, and they'd have recycling
capability in every store. It's 2018 and the company's nowhere close.
So this year shareholders spoke up, using a shareholder resolution to
demand that Starbucks accelerate and live up to its recycling goals.
Nearly 30% of Starbucks shares - worth $54 billion - voted in favor. At
the same time, grassroots activists presented the CEO with a petition
from nearly 1 million citizens asking the company to act.
The combined power of shareholder pressure and grassroots activism led
the company to announce a $10 million effort to design a recyclable and
compostable cup - a good start.
This powerful vote result means Starbucks knows it can't rest on its
mediocre performance. Because there is no "away," and the ocean can't wait.
https://www.asyousow.org/newsletters/summer2018/starbucks-throwaway-cups-there-is-no-away
- - - - -
[nudge by shares]
/*EMPOWERING SHAREHOLDERS TO CHANGE CORPORATIONS FOR GOOD
<https://www.asyousow.org/>*
As You Sow/is the nation's non-profit leader in shareholder advocacy.
Founded in 1992, we harness shareholder power to create lasting change
that benefits people, planet, and profit.
https://www.asyousow.org/
[Classic lecture on paleoclimatology]
*AGU FM11 - Paleoclimate record points toward potential rapid climate
changes <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTTlAAiwgwM>*
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Published on Dec 6, 2011
Press Conference from 2011 AGU Fall Meeting - Tue. 11 a.m. PST
Even if we are able to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius above
pre-industrial times, Earth could likely see drastic and rapid climate
change this century, new research by NASA's Jim Hansen suggests.
Paleoclimate data paints a different picture than models about the
sensitivity of the climate system. Detailed analysis of the Earth's
paleoclimate history of recent interglacial periods reveals we are less
than a degree Celsius away from equaling a time when sea level was
several meters higher than it is today.
Participants:
James Hansen - Director, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New
York, New York, USA;
Ken Caldeira - Senior Scientist, Department of Global Ecology Carnegie
Institute of Washington, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA;
Eelco Rohling - Professor of Ocean and Climate Change, Southampton
University, Southampton, United Kingdom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTTlAAiwgwM
- - - -
*Some Paleoclimate Perspectives: Dr Alex Thomas
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl08NSgQ5nc>*
Understanding Climate Change
Published on Jun 7, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl08NSgQ5nc
- - - - -
[Rapid tipping of climate events - video talk]
*Early Warning of Climate Tipping Points: Prof Tim Lenton (September
2016) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yTJZzQzdYI>*
Understanding Climate Change
Published on Oct 31, 2017
Because the slides in the video are not very clear you can find most of
them on the following link if you want to see them more clearly.
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/3487lenton.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yTJZzQzdYI
*This Day in Climate History - June 22, 2006
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/science/22cnd-climate.html?_r=0> -
from D.R. Tucker*
June 22, 2006:
The New York Times report on the National Academy of Sciences'
affirmation of Michael Mann's 1999 "hockey stick" paper.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/science/22cnd-climate.html?_r=0
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/the-world-is-heating-up/
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