[TheClimate.Vote] November 21, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Wed Nov 21 10:28:20 EST 2018
/November 21, 2018/
[important new phrase: *green new deal*]
*What's the 'Green New Deal' and why do environmentalists want it?
<https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/11/19/green-new-deal-omar-ocasio-cortez>*
Environment Cody Nelson - St. Paul - Nov 19, 2018
A growing contingent of congressional Democrats -- including Minnesota
Rep.-elect Ilhan Omar -- is pushing for a Green New Deal.
The proposal calls for a new House select committee to draft broad
legislation that would make the United States economy carbon-neutral and
remove greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and oceans.
- - - -
*Democrat Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York* is leading
the way in advocating for a Green New Deal. Her desire for more urgent
action on climate change has already had her butting heads with older
Democrats and protesting outside House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's
office.
- -
*What would the Green New Deal do exactly?
<https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/11/19/green-new-deal-omar-ocasio-cortez>*
Ocasio-Cortez's website outlines these seven goals that Green New Deal
legislation would accomplish within a decade of its enactment:
- 100 percent of national power generation from renewable sources;
- Building a national, energy-efficient, "smart" grid;
- Upgrading every residential and industrial building for
state-of-the-art energy efficiency, comfort and safety;
- Decarbonizing the manufacturing, agricultural and other industries;
- Decarbonizing, repairing and improving transportation and other
infrastructure;
- Funding massive investment in the drawdown and capture of greenhouse
gases;
- Making "green" technology, industry, expertise, products and services
a major export of the United States, with the aim of becoming the
undisputed international leader in helping other countries transition to
completely carbon neutral economies and bringing about a global Green
New Deal.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/11/19/green-new-deal-omar-ocasio-cortez
- - -
[Read the draft legislation]
*Select Committee on a Green New Deal
<https://ocasio2018.com/green-new-deal>*
DRAFT TEXT FOR PROPOSED ADDENDUM TO HOUSE RULES FOR 116TH CONGRESS OF
THE UNITED STATES <https://ocasio2018.com/green-new-deal>
https://ocasio2018.com/green-new-deal
- - -
*Can the Blue Wave Deliver a Green New Deal?
<https://www.thenation.com/article/can-the-blue-wave-deliver-a-green-new-deal/>*
The base is demanding a bold plan from the newly empowered
Democrats--and the planet is crying out for it.
https://www.thenation.com/article/can-the-blue-wave-deliver-a-green-new-deal/
- -
[brief video briefing 3 minutes]
*The Green New Deal: fixing climate and the economy?
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcQZtpbgVoY>*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcQZtpbgVoY
- - - -
Here are a few more resources, articles and efforts to be aware of:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/creating-a-road-map-for-a-green-new-deal
https://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-best-new-deal-is-a-green-new-deal/
https://www.dataforprogress.org/green-new-deal/
[audio, radio piece]
*Urban Historian Mike Davis Says Building In Malibu Will Never Be A Good
Idea
<https://www.npr.org/2018/11/20/669761164/urban-historian-mike-davis-says-building-in-malibu-will-never-be-a-good-idea>*
November 20, 2018
Heard on All Things Considered
The Woolsey Fire is not the first in Malibu, nor is it the first time
residents have planned to rebuild. Urban historian Mike Davis tells
NPR's Audie Cornish that maybe, it's better to let it burn.
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/20/669761164/urban-historian-mike-davis-says-building-in-malibu-will-never-be-a-good-idea
[serious impact to life support]
*Climate change: Worries over CO2 emissions from intensifying wildfires
<https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46212844>*
By Navin Singh Khadka - Environment correspondent, BBC World Service
15 November 2018
Rising numbers of extreme wildfires could result in a significant
increase in CO2 emissions, scientists warn.
That could mean attaining the Paris climate agreement's goal of keeping
global temperature rise well below 2C could become harder, they say.
Present emission-cut pledges by countries are projected to increase the
average global temperature rise by more than 3C by the end of the century.
That would lead to dangerous climate change impacts, experts say.
These include sea level rise, drought, wildfires, among other extreme
events.
"We can't neglect the emissions from wildfires," says Ramon Vallejo, a
scientist specialising on fire ecology with the University of Barcelona.
"Particularly now that we are seeing intense wildfires all around the
world."
- -
Some estimates suggest that the wildfire in northern California last
year emitted as much CO2 in a week as what all of the cars and trucks in
the state do in a year.
That is why some fire experts in that US state fear that its level of
CO2 emissions could endanger its progress toward meeting its greenhouse
gas reduction targets.
- -
*Other hotspots*
While California and Australia are most of the time in news for their
wildfires these days, other regions have also seen intensified wildfires
recently.
Earlier this year, Greece saw its most deadly wildfire season in Europe
since 1900 as it claimed 91 lives.
Last year, in Portugal and Spain nearly 70 people were killed by the
extreme event.
Wildfires in Sweden this year were another extreme case.
According to the World Meteorological Organization, the fires burned
30,000 hectares of Swedish forest and triggered EU emergency response
mechanisms.
In Indonesia, wildfires in September and October of 2015 released about
11.3 teragrams of CO2 per day, the UN's weather agency said.
"For comparison, the daily release of CO2 from fossil fuel burning in
the European Union is 8.9 teragrams."
A recent study found that the Earth's boreal forests are now burning at
a rate unseen in at least 10,000 years.
*'100% rise in wildfires'*
Another study published in Nature Communications has concluded that if
global temperatures rose by three degrees, Mediterranean Europe could
see a 100% rise in wildfires.
It added that a 1.5C rise could lead to a 40% increase in wildfires.
Climate models project a sharp increase in wildfires across the
Mediterranean
"We cannot extrapolate our findings to other forested regions of the
world," said Dr Marco Turco, lead author of the report.
"But the projection is that most places across the globe will see
similar intensified wildfires in a warming climate."
Scientists say warming causes more fires which, in turn, cause more warming.
*Fossil fuel emissions*
Some experts, however, say greenhouse emissions from wildfires are still
tiny compared to emissions from other human activities.
"The California wildfires are enormous," said Pieter Tans, from the US
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
"But I expect that the amount of CO2 emitted is at most a few percent of
what the US burns annually in making electricity, heating and cooling of
buildings, traffic, etc."
Thomas Smith, assistant professor in environmental geography at the
London School of Economics (LSE) has a similar view.
"These (California) fires are likely fairly insignificant in terms of
their global contribution to greenhouse gases," he said.
"At any one time, there are many fires of a similar size burning across
the planet; it's just that this one has been close to populated places."
*
**Some scientists say the really worry is burning of peatlands.*
Many of them believe the largest ever wildfire emissions in modern times
was the Indonesian peat fire in 1997-98.
Estimates vary, but the largest emission figure for it is 3.7 billion
metric ton CO2.
"The real wildcard is permafrost thaw due to climate change that can
make a large amount of northern peat susceptible to fire, which was
previously unavailable for burning," says Bill Degroot, a research
scientist with the Canadian Forest Service.
"Peatlands are a very large terrestrial [carbon] pool."
Scientists also say the issue of wildfires is even more challenging
compared to cutting down carbon emissions from burning of fossil fuels.
"If you want to, you can indeed cut down carbon emissions from fossil
fuel burning activities - that is something under your control," says
Professor Vallejo."But wildfires are not something controllable like
that. They will happen and will intensify in a warming world."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46212844
[Radical opinions from George Monbiot]*
**Hopeless Realism <https://www.monbiot.com/2018/11/19/hopeless-realism/>*
Posted: 19 Nov 2018
No effective means of stopping climate breakdown is deemed "politically
realistic". So we must change political realities.
By George Monbiot, the Guardian 14 November 2018
It was a moment of the kind that changes lives. At a press conference
held by Extinction Rebellion last week, two of us journalists pressed
the activists on whether their aims were realistic. They have called,
for example, for carbon emissions in the UK to be reduced to net zero by
2025 <https://rebellion.earth/>. Wouldn't it be better, we asked, to
pursue some intermediate aims
<https://peacenews.info/blog/9197/why-im-sceptical-about-extinction-rebellion-initiative-and-why-i-hope-im-wrong>?
A young woman called Lizia Woolf stepped forward. She hadn't spoken
before, and I hadn't really noticed her, but the passion, grief and fury
of her response was utterly compelling
<https://realmedia.press/bbc-extinction-response/>. "What is it that you
are asking me as a 20-year-old to face and to accept about my future and
my life? … this is an emergency - we are facing extinction. When you ask
questions like that, what is it you want me to feel?". We had no answer.
Softer aims might be politically realistic, but they are physically
unrealistic. Only shifts commensurate with the scale of our existential
crises have any prospect of averting them. Hopeless realism, tinkering
at the edges of the problem, got us into this mess. It will not get us out.
Public figures talk and act as if environmental change will be linear
and gradual. But the Earth's systems are highly complex, and complex
systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways. When these systems
interact (because the world's atmosphere, oceans, land surface and
lifeforms do not sit placidly within the boxes that make study more
convenient) their reactions to change become highly unpredictable. Small
perturbations can ramify wildly. Tipping points are likely to remain
invisible until we have passed them. We could see changes of state so
abrupt and profound that no continuity can be safely assumed.
Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend - soils,
aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators,
biological abundance and diversity - need fail for everything to slide.
For example, when Arctic sea ice melts beyond a certain point, the
positive feedbacks <https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09051> this
triggers (such as darker water absorbing more heat, melting permafrost
releasing methane, shifts in the polar vortex
<https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3241>) could render runaway
climate breakdown unstoppable. When the Younger Dryas period ended
11,600 years ago, Greenland ice cores reveal temperatures rising 10C
within a decade
<https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/The%20Younger%20Dryas>.
I don't believe that such a collapse is yet inevitable, or that a
commensurate response is either technically or economically impossible.
When the US joined the Second World War in 1941, it replaced a civilian
economy with a military economy within months. As Jack Doyle records in
his book /Taken for a Ride/
<https://www.questia.com/library/7860930/taken-for-a-ride-detroit-s-big-three-and-the-politics>,
"In one year, General Motors developed, tooled, and completely built
from scratch 1000 Avenger and 1000 Wildcat aircraft…Barely a year after
Pontiac received a Navy contract to build antishipping missiles, the
company began delivering the completed product to carrier squadrons
around the world." And this was before advanced information technology
made everything faster.
The problem is political. A fascinating analysis
<https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-09-25/the-ecological-crisis-is-a-political-crisis/>
by the social science professor Kevin Mackay contends that oligarchy has
been a more fundamental cause of the collapse of civilisations than
social complexity or energy demand. Oligarchic control, he argues,
thwarts rational decision-making, because the short-term interests of
the elite are radically different to the long-term interests of society.
This explains why past civilizations have collapsed "despite possessing
the cultural and technological know-how needed to resolve their crises."
Economic elites, that benefit from social dysfunction, block the
necessary solutions.
The oligarchic control of wealth, politics, media and public discourse
explains the comprehensive institutional failure now pushing us towards
disaster. Think of Trump and his cabinet of multi-millionaires
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2017/07/05/the-4-3-billion-cabinet-see-what-each-top-trump-advisor-is-worth/#1a19d2305dfc>,
the influence of the Koch brothers
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/215462/dark-money-by-jane-mayer/9780307947901/>,
the Murdoch empire and its massive contribution to climate science
denial
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/16/murdoch-owned-medias-radical-climate-denial-face-disaster>,
the oil and motor companies whose lobbying prevents a faster shift to
new technologies.
It is not just governments that have failed to respond, though they have
failed spectacularly. Public sector broadcasters have deliberately and
systematically shut down environmental coverage
<https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/nov/11/david-attenborough-television-and-environmental-destruction>,
while allowing the opaquely-funded lobbyists that masquerade as
thinktanks
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/11/the-guardian-view-on-thinktanks-come-clean-on-the-cash>
to shape public discourse and deny what we face. Academics, afraid to
upset their funders and colleagues
<http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf>, have bitten their lips.
Even the bodies that claim to be addressing our predicament remain
locked within destructive frameworks.
For example, last Wednesday I attended a meeting about environmental
breakdown at the Institute for Public Policy Research. Many of the
people in the room seemed to understand that continued economic growth
is incompatible with sustaining the Earth's systems. As the author Jason
Hickel points out
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/why-growth-cant-be-green/>, a
decoupling of rising GDP from global resource use has not happened and
will not happen. While 50 billion tonnes of resources used per year is
roughly the limit <https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9276/4/1/25> the Earth's
systems can tolerate, the world is already consuming 70 billion tonnes.
Business as usual, at current rates of economic growth, will ensure that
this rises to 180 billion tonnes by 2050
<https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/201207_green_economies_around_the_world.pdf>.
Maximum resource efficiency, coupled with massive carbon taxes and some
pretty optimistic assumptions, would reduce this to 95 billion tonnes
<http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/92268/13/Owen%20Journal%20of%20Cleaner%20Production%202015%20AAM.pdf>:
still way beyond environmental limits. A study taking account of the
rebound effect
<https://esrc.ukri.org/about-us/50-years-of-esrc/50-achievements/the-rebound-effect/>
(efficiency leads to further resource use) raises the estimate
<http://www.resourcepanel.org/sites/default/files/documents/document/media/resource_efficiency_report_march_2017_web_res.pdf>
to 132 billion tonnes. Green growth, as members of the Institute appear
to accept, is physically impossible.
On the same day, the same Institute announced a major new economics
prize <https://www.ippr.org/economics-prize/about-the-prize/> for
"ambitious proposals to achieve a step-change improvement in the growth
rate." It wants ideas that will enable economic growth rates in the UK
at least to double. The announcement was accompanied by the usual blah
about sustainability, but none of the judges of the prize
<https://www.ippr.org/economics-prize/the-panel/> has a discernible
record of environmental interest.
Those to whom we look for solutions trundle on as if nothing has
changed. They continue to behave as if the accumulating evidence has no
purchase on their minds. Decades of institutional failure ensures that
only "unrealistic" proposals - the repurposing of economic life, with
immediate effect - now have a realistic chance of stopping the planetary
death spiral. And only those who stand outside the failed institutions
can lead this effort.
Two tasks need to be performed simultaneously: throwing ourselves at the
possibility of averting collapse, as Extinction Rebellion is doing
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-46172661>, slight though this
possibility may appear. And preparing ourselves for the likely failure
of these efforts, terrifying as this prospect is. Both tasks require a
complete revision of our relationship with the living planet. Because we
cannot save ourselves without contesting oligarchic control, the fight
for democracy and justice and the fight against environmental breakdown
are one and the same
<https://www.versobooks.com/books/2732-out-of-the-wreckage>. Do not
allow those who have caused this crisis to define the limits of
political action. Do not allow those whose magical thinking got us into
this mess to tell us what can and cannot be done.
www.monbiot.com
https://www.monbiot.com/2018/11/19/hopeless-realism/
*
*
*This Day in Climate History - November 21, 2015- from D.R. Tucker*
November 21, 2015: In a New York Times op-ed, Jeff Biggers observes:
"Negotiators en route to the United Nations conference on climate
change in Paris, scheduled to begin later this month, should take a
detour on rural roads here in Johnson County. A new climate
narrative is emerging among farmers in the American heartland that
transcends a lot of the old story lines of denial and cynicism, and
offers an updated tale of climate hope.
"Recent polls show that 60 percent of Iowans, now facing flooding
and erosion, believe global warming is happening. From Winneshiek
County to Washington County, you can count more solar panels on
barns than on urban roofs or in suburban parking lots. The state’s
first major solar farm is not in an urban area like Des Moines or
Iowa City, but in rural Frytown, initiated by the Farmers Electric
Cooperative.
"In the meantime, any lingering traces of cynicism will vanish in
the town of Crawfordsville, where children in the Waco school
district will eventually turn on computers and study under lights
powered 90 percent by solar energy. Inspired by local farmers, who
now use solar energy to help power some of their operations, the
district’s move to solar energy will not only cut carbon emissions
but also result in enough savings to keep open the town’s once
financially threatened school doors."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/opinion/iowas-climate-change-wisdom.html?ref=opinion
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