[TheClimate.Vote] August 19, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Mon Aug 19 10:04:32 EDT 2019

/August 19, 2019/

[Opinion from Scientific American]
*A Growing Number of Americans Are Alarmed about Global Warming*
But many more should be
When it comes to concern about global warming, the good news is that a 
growing number of Americans are alarmed. The bad news is that most still 
are not alarmed, though they should be given what we already know, how 
much worse things seem the more we discover and how much we don't even 
know we don't know.
A recent survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and 
the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication 
indicates that roughly 60 percent of Americans are either "alarmed" or 
"concerned" about global warming and that the percentage who are alarmed 
doubled from 2013 to 2018. The percentage of conservative Republicans 
who are "very" or "somewhat" worried about global warming more than 
doubled in the same five-year period, growing from 14 to 32 percent 
(compared with 80 percent of moderate to conservative Democrats and 95 
percent of liberal Democrats as of December 2018)...
- - -
What we already know underscores the need for urgent action. The IPCC 
report indicates the need to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 
approximately 45 percent by 2030, relative to 2010 levels. Debra 
Roberts, cochair of an IPCC working group, said of the report, "It's a 
line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the 
moment and we must act now."...
- - -
This month, scientists in Iceland will commemorate that country's first 
lost glacier with a plaque containing "a letter to the future" on which 
is written, "This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is 
happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it."

Hopefully more of us will become alarmed enough to do what needs to be 
done and to earn the gratitude rather than the scorn of future generations.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/a-growing-number-of-americans-are-alarmed-about-global-warming/

[Wildfire on an island]
*Canary Islands authorities evacuate 4,000 as wildfire spreads*
TEJEDA, Spain (Reuters) - A wildfire sweeping across Gran Canaria in the 
Canary Islands led to the evacuation of 4,000 people on Sunday and 
officials warned tackling the blaze was being complicated by a 
combination of high temperatures, strong winds and low humidity...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spain-wildfires/canary-islands-authorities-evacuate-4000-as-wildfire-spreads-idUSKCN1V80HK

[more Buddhism in a video talk 25 minutes]
*Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi - The Four Noble Truths of the Climate Crisis*
Culture of Peace
Published on Jun 5, 2015
Description for the US Buddhist Leaders Conference at George Washington 
and the White House, Washington, DC on May 14 2015
Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi is the President of the Buddhist Association of 
America (BAUS) and the founder and director of Buddhist Global Relief
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7FViHm1xdU

[Opinion from The Guardian - leading news source for global warming news]*
*[neoliberalism is a modified form of liberalism tending to favor 
free-market capitalism.]
*Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals*
Martin Lukacs
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 breathe. 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%. 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 40 years, against the possibility 
of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to 
reverse it.

The political project of neoliberalism, brought to ascendence by 
Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The first has 
been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private 
power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any 
democratic public will.

Its trademark policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and free 
trade deals: these have liberated corporations to accumulate enormous 
profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our 
ability, through the instrument of the state, to plan for our collective 
welfare.

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.

At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented 
collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which 
is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to 
overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and 
energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase 
out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in 
climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy -- so that solar 
panels can go on everyone's rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.

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."

Studies show that people who have grown up under this era have indeed 
become more individualistic and consumerist. Steeped in a culture 
telling us to think of ourselves as consumers instead of citizens, as 
self-reliant instead of interdependent, is it any wonder we deal with a 
systemic issue by turning in droves to ineffectual, individual efforts? 
We are all Thatcher's children.

Even before the advent of neoliberalism, the capitalist economy had 
thrived on people believing that being afflicted by the structural 
problems of an exploitative system - poverty, joblessness, poor health, 
lack of fulfillment - was in fact a personal deficiency.

Neoliberalism has taken this internalized self-blame and turbocharged 
it. It tells you that you should not merely feel guilt and shame if you 
can't secure a good job, are deep in debt, and are too stressed or 
overworked for time with friends. You are now also responsible for 
bearing the burden of potential ecological collapse.

Of course we need people to consume less and innovate low-carbon 
alternatives - build sustainable farms, invent battery storages, spread 
zero-waste methods. But individual choices will most count when the 
economic system can provide viable, environmental options for 
everyone--not just an affluent or intrepid few.

If affordable mass transit isn't available, people will commute with 
cars. If local organic food is too expensive, they won't opt out of 
fossil fuel-intensive super-market chains. If cheap mass produced goods 
flow endlessly, they will buy and buy and buy. This is the con-job of 
neoliberalism: to persuade us to address climate change through our 
pocket-books, rather than through power and politics.

Eco-consumerism may expiate your guilt. But it's only mass movements 
that have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis. This 
requires of us first a resolute mental break from the spell cast by 
neoliberalism: to stop thinking like individuals.

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. 
The notion that the rich should pay their fair share to fund this 
transformation was considered laughable by the political and media 
class. Millions disagreed. Society, long said to be departed, is now 
back with a vengeance.

So grow some carrots and jump on a bike: it will make you happier and 
healthier. 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?CMP=share_btn_link

[another Opinion comment in the NYTimes]
*What Happens in a Recession?*
By Neil Irwin
Trump loses, Uber evaporates, the social crisis gets worse.
- - -
What comes next? In Washington, the centrists get a surprising 
opportunity. Blamed and written off by left and right alike, a Trump 
defeat would give the capital's dwindling band of dealmakers and 
moderates another chance to govern -- because even if it's Elizabeth 
Warren or Bernie Sanders in the White House, it's still going to be 
red-state Democrats and blue-state Republicans holding the balance of 
power in the Senate...
- -
So a recessionary America would find the center-left enjoying some kind 
of power but probably struggling to govern, a right tearing itself apart 
in civil war, our downscale social crisis worsening, Silicon Valley 
delivering substantially less than promised, and the institutions that 
are supposed to inform and educate struggling or in decline.
Having guaranteed Trump's removal from office, in other words, the 
recession would also set the stage for Trumpism's eventual return.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/opinion/sunday/what-happens-in-a-recession.html
- - -
{Reader comment}
Susan Anderson - Times Pick

    To be honest, although I expect a collapse of Trump's stupid
    overheated economy, based on debt and welfare for millionaires and
    billionaires, along with a whole lot of juice for hatred and victim
    blaming, I am fearful we will not survive.

    There is no Obama in the wings. Though Elizabeth Warren could take a
    shot at fixing things, she wouldn't have the support O received from
    Bush and McCain, and she would get sniping from the left if she
    chose to be practical.

    She's our only hope for the economy; all else is bluster and my way
    or the highway.

    Meanwhile, climate change/global warming is making things worse
    everywhere, and we are not taking it seriously. That in itself is
    likely to trim the human population by billions, especially as
    people choose to blame and exclude rather than to work together.

    We're too addicted to waste, passive entertainment and valueless
    goods, This morning I used a sponge instead of a paper towel to
    clean things up. When was the last time anyone heeded reduce, reuse,
    recycle instead of the latest marketing promo of miracle toxic
    cleaning products, etc. etc.?

    We humans are not wise, and we've stopped cultivated wisdom and
    understanding. Bad dangerous stuff!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/opinion/sunday/what-happens-in-a-recession.html#commentsContainer&permid=102070369

[Green concrete]
*LafargeHolcim is selling CO2-sucking cement for precast, reduces 
emissions by 70 percent*
https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/lafargeholcim-selling-co2-sucking-cement-precast-reduces-emissions-70-percent.html
- - -
*[From 2017]
**The material that built the modern world is also destroying it. Here's 
a fix*
- - -
Unlike Portland cement, Solidia's mixture doesn't harden simply after 
adding water; it requires the absorption of climate-killing CO2.  The 
concrete blocks resulting from the process capture about 240 kg of 
carbon dioxide for every 1,000 kg of cement used in the mixture. That's 
on top of fewer emissions producing during the manufacture of Solidia's 
cement. Over its lifecycle--from limestone to cement to 
concrete--Solidia produces up to 70% fewer emissions, compared to 
Portland cement. So if 1,000 kg of Portland cement releases 1,000 kg 
over its lifecycle, then Solidia cement releases only 300 kg...
What's more is the concrete produced using Solidia's cement exceeds 
building standards, and takes less than 24 hours, to cure, compared to 
weeks for curing Portland cement. These claims have been verified by the 
US Department of Energy, which has provided some funding to the startup.

On my tour, DeCristofaro gave an example of just how much carbon dioxide 
is trapped by Solidia's cement. He placed a concrete brick (about 12 in 
x 5 in x 5 in) on a table. "This block," he said, "has captured as much 
carbon dioxide as you can find in the air in this whole room." (The room 
was a mid-sized office, 15 ft x 15 ft x 10 ft.)...
- - -
In addition, there's the color. Construction companies will pay extra 
for colorful concrete blocks, which are used for ornamental purposes, on 
pavements or exterior walls, for example. It's hard to color typical 
concrete blocks, which are light- or ash-grey. Solidia cement can 
produce white concrete, which is easy to color, allowing manufacturers 
to save on expensive pigment.
https://qz.com/1123875/the-material-that-built-the-modern-world-is-also-destroying-it-heres-a-fix/

[Opinion on investing]
*How To Start With Sustainable Investing*
I will preface this article by noting that I'm a novice investor, and 
neither my team nor I can offer professional financial advice. You need 
to do your own research and evaluate any investments before throwing 
your money at them, etc., etc.

The first thing to note: I'm on the fence about this whole capitalism 
thing. As I think about investment and savings, I'm always wondering if 
70-year old Andrea will have the opportunity to reap the rewards of my 
decades of investment, or will the white supremacist, fossil fuel 
evildoers have their way and kill everything livable and beautiful on 
our planet? On most days I believe the former, and I invest as such. So 
here's the story about how I am building my sustainable investment and 
retirement portfolio...[more at]
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/08/17/how-to-start-with-sustainable-investing/

[Uh oh. fleas. Uh oh.]
*Plague-infected prairie dogs prompt continued shutdowns wildlife 
refuges in Colorado*
Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, a 15,000 acre nature 
area northeast of Denver, was able to partially reopen on Sunday. The 
refuge is home many species, including bison and bald eagles, and where 
the plague concerns first developed in the black-tailed prairie dog.

Plague-infected fleas were biting the prairie dogs, and officials began 
closing affected areas "as a precautionary measure to prioritize visitor 
health and safety, while also allowing staff to protect wildlife 
health," according to a statement from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Certain areas remain closed because of the risk posed by hiking through 
them
- -
Bubonic plague is responsible for 80 percent of plague cases in the 
United States every year, according to the CDC. A boy in Idaho 
contracted bubonic plague last year. In 2017, Arizona officials warned 
residents after discovering plague bacteria fleas. And sadly, in 2015, a 
star high school athlete died from plague in Colorado.

Plague continues to afflict some communities around the world. In 2017, 
an outbreak of pneumonic plague in Madagascar killed 202, according to 
reports by the World Health Organization.

Health officials in Colorado have been coating prairie dog holes with an 
insecticide powder. As the prairie dogs enter their holes and brush up 
against the powder, Cazier said, it kills the fleas on them and prevents 
the spread to other animals.

Some parts of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge and 
nearby areas will remain closed through Labor Day Weekend, officials 
announced Friday. The areas include parts of the wildlife refuge and 
other open spaces in Commerce City, a suburb outside of Denver. 
Officials did clarify that Dick's Sporting Goods Park, an event venue 
nearby would continue to host all events, but that parking was 
restricted to asphalt parking only, since nearby grassy areas had 
prairie dog populations. That's good news for those headed to the Phish 
show there on August 30.
ww.sfgate.com/news/article/Plague-infected-prairie-dogs-prompt-continued-14341626.php

[Bill Nye is the Science Guy]
*Bill Nye Slams Trump's Climate Failures: 'The U.S. Has Become A Pariah'*
"Everybody, we have a chance to do this right, to save the world for 
humans," the famed TV "science guy" said.
- - -
Nye went on to condemn the president's "bluster" on the matter, which he 
called "very troubling" and said makes it difficult for scientists to 
ensure their work is taken seriously by the public.

"Instead of being the world leader technologically in addressing climate 
change, the United States has become a pariah," Nye said. "My colleagues 
on other continents are very concerned about the United States' lack of 
initiative."...
- - -
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-nye-climate-change-us-pariah_n_5d5843dde4b0eb875f24ab95

*This Day in Climate History - August 19, - from D.R. Tucker*
August 19, 2015: The New York Times reports:

    "A little-noted portion of the chain of pipelines and equipment that
    brings natural gas from the field into power plants and homes is
    responsible for a surprising amount of methane emissions, according
    to a study on Tuesday.

    "Natural-gas gathering facilities, which collect from multiple
    wells, lose about 100 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year,
    about eight times as much as estimates used by the Environmental
    Protection Agency, according to the study, which appeared in the
    journal Environmental Science and Technology.

    "The newly discovered leaks, if counted in the E.P.A. inventory,
    would increase its entire systemwide estimate by about 25 percent,
    said the Environmental Defense Fund, which sponsored the research as
    part of methane emissions studies it organized."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/science/methane-leaks-in-natural-gas-supply-chain-far-exceed-estimates-study-says.html?mwrsm=Email 

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