[TheClimate.Vote] December 9, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/*December 9, 2019*/

[Associated Press]
*Nobel laureate: Face up to climate change, no escaping Earth*
By JIM HEINTZ and DAVID KEYTON
STOCKHOLM (AP) -- An astronomer who shares this year's Nobel physics 
prize for discovering a planet outside the Earth's solar system is 
taking issue with people who shrug off climate change on the grounds 
that humans will eventually leave for distant planets.

Didier Queloz was one of several Nobel laureates who spoke about climate 
change at a news conference Saturday in Stockholm.

"I think this is just irresponsible, because the stars are so far away I 
think we should not have any serious hope to escape the Earth," Queloz said.

"Also keep in mind that we are a species that has evolved and developed 
for this planet. We're not built to survive on any other planet than 
this one," he said. "We'd better spend our time and energy trying to fix 
it."...
- - -
Whittingham also told the AP that he believed the climate protests would 
produce results.

"Maybe some of the young folks don't realize how long it takes. But I go 
back to the Vietnam War era and the United States, where it was really 
the young people that pushed the politicians to get out and stop that 
nonsense," he said....
https://apnews.com/26706b2c60c69668edd1216c2c56700f


[BBC News]
*Climate change: UN negotiators 'playing politics' amid global crisis*
Inside the convention centre, the central question of increasing country 
pledges to cut their carbon has been pushed aside as negotiators resort 
to protecting national interests.

Back in 2015, everyone signed up to the Paris agreement and put new 
plans on the table that are due to run from 2020.

However the richer countries were supposed to undertake specific carbon 
cutting actions in the years between 2015 and 2020, which many haven't 
yet achieved.

Here in Madrid a group of countries including China, India and Saudi 
Arabia are pushing for these pre-2020 commitments be adhered to - even 
if it means achieving them post-2020.

Observers believe this is partly a negotiating tactic designed to put 
pressure on richer nations in any discussions about improving pledges in 
the period after 2020...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50706236



[Criminal court]
*Vulnerable Nations Call for Ecocide to Be Recognized As an 
International Crime*
By Isabella Kaminski
The Pacific island of Vanuatu has called for ecocide--wide-scale, 
long-term environmental damage--to be considered an international crime 
equivalent to genocide.

At a meeting of the International Criminal Court in the Hague on 
Tuesday, ambassador John Licht of Vanuatu said the court should consider 
an amendment to the Rome Statute, which sets the court's legal 
framework, that would "criminalize acts that amount to ecocide. We 
believe this radical idea merits serious discussion."

The International Criminal Court is currently responsible for 
prosecuting four internationally recognized crimes against peace: 
genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of 
aggression. A fifth could be included through an amendment to the Rome 
Statute.

The court's authority extends only to the 122 nations that have ratified 
the Rome Statute, a list that does not include the United States, China, 
India and Israel.

Vanuatu, which is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise, has been an 
advocate of climate justice at international forums for many years, but 
has been more vocal since 2015, when Cyclone Pam devastated the island, 
an example of a major storm whose impact was made significantly worse by 
climate change.

Vanuatu's statement is a major victory for the Stop Ecocide campaign, 
which was launched by British lawyer Polly Higgins two years ago. The 
organization wants any agreed-upon criminal definition of ecocide to 
include the impacts of climate change as well as other forms of 
environmental harm...
- - -
"This is an idea whose time has not only come, it's long overdue," said 
Mehta. "It's committed and courageous of Vanuatu to take the step of 
openly calling for consideration of a crime of ecocide, and it was clear 
from the response today that they will not be alone. The political 
climate is changing, in recognition of the changing climate.  This 
initiative is only going to grow – all we are doing is helping to 
accelerate a much-needed legal inevitability."

Pope Francis has lent his support to the idea of making ecocide a crime, 
proposing in November that 'sins against ecology' be added to the 
teachings of the Catholic Church.
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/12/06/ecocide-international-criminal-court-vanuatu/



[The Believer essay]
*UNDER THE WEATHER*
December 2nd, 2019 | Issue One Hundred Twenty-Eight]
AS PSYCHIATRISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS BEGIN TO DEFINE A PERVASIVE MENTAL 
HEALTH CRISIS TRIGGERED BY CLIMATE CHANGE, THEY ASK WHO IS REALLY SICK: 
THE INDIVIDUAL OR SOCIETY?
https://believermag.com/under-the-weather/



[Grist reviews the movie reaching kids]
*In 'Frozen II,' Anna and Elsa fight climate change instead of bad guys*
By Miyo McGinn on Dec 6, 2019

This post contains spoilers for Frozen II, a charming children's film 
that you'll probably be able to guess the ending of halfway through anyway.

If you want to learn how your favorite movies and shows are secretly 
about climate change, there's a pretty good chance we've got it covered. 
Getting from any topic to climate change in the fewest possible steps is 
kind of a hobby of mine, so when I heard that Frozen II had some serious 
climate overtones, I went to the movie theater looking for signs of them.

The film offered plenty of clues that it's a parable for our planetary 
crisis. Arctic ice caps re-form over a choppy sea, Queen Elsa visits a 
glacier (!!!) to learn the secrets of the past, and, uh, Disney said so. 
Songwriter Kristen Anderson-Lopez told the L.A. Times that the 
filmmakers were thinking about our rapidly heating planet when they 
developed the storyline.

But walking out of the theater after the movie ended, I overheard a 
little boy posing a question that pointed to an important parallel I'd 
missed. "Mommy, who was the bad guy?" the blond preschooler asked. His 
mom was stumped. Because Frozen II is, more or less, a Disney movie 
without a villain. In the end, everyone was facing the same threat: 
environmental disasters from a world thrown out of whack.

The sequel begins about where the original film left off: with the first 
movie's small-time villain, Hans, vanquished, Anna and Kristoff happily 
together, and Elsa queen of the bustling little kingdom of Arendelle. 
But this peaceful scene doesn't last long. A series of intense natural 
disasters strike Arendelle one night, and people flee the town to escape 
the buffeting winds and shifting earth. The four elemental spirits of 
earth, air, fire, and water are upset, so the princesses must journey 
north to the enchanted forest and restore harmony between humans and the 
environment.

The cause of this disharmony, we learn, is a dam that Elsa and Anna's 
grandfather built many years ago, supposedly as a "gift" for the tribe 
of indigenous people upriver of Arendelle. Elsa and Anna learn the 
truth: Their grandfather's motives may not have been so pure, and their 
entire society was made possible by screwing over the original 
inhabitants of the land. And taking down the dam is the only way to set 
things right and save their kingdom. But that means making some 
sacrifices, like accepting that their own city, which was built on a 
floodplain at the mouth of a river, might not make it.

Frozen II isn't the first Disney movie to make climate change an 
important plot point. Moana, for example, rescues her island home from 
threats inspired by Pacific Islanders' struggle against climate change. 
But Frozen II considers more of the complexities of an overheating 
planet than any other Disney film -- or any fictional movie I can think 
of, to be totally honest. It even portrays some of the ethical and 
emotional challenges of living through the Anthropocene.

Anna, for instance, grapples with grief and despair when she thinks her 
sister will be unable to return from her journey, and deals with it 
through (what else) a dramatic song, The Next Right Thing. "It's clear 
that everything will never be the same again," Anna sings, imagining 
life without her sister. (And perhaps referencing how human activity has 
set in motion irreversible changes?) "I won't look too far ahead," Anna 
decides. Instead, she follows some advice she received earlier on: "When 
you see no future, all you can do is the next right thing."

And Olaf, the magical, animated snowman, is more than just comic relief; 
he articulates some of the confusion and anger that young people today 
might feel as the world heats up due to events beyond their control. 
"This will all make sense when I am older," Olaf sings, as he observes 
the natural world changing in ways that strike him as deeply wrong but 
don't seem to bother anyone else. "This is fine," he says, stepping 
around a hole that suddenly opened in the ground in front of him. And 
then finally, realizing that the people he trusted had told him 
everything was OK when it actually wasn't, he tells Anna, "I sense some 
rising anger." Sound like any young climate activists you know?

At the end of the day, Frozen II was made for children, and the film 
ties everything up in a neat bow. Sure, it doesn't lay out how to build 
popular support and political will for climate action or replace fossil 
fuel infrastructure… ut it's a kids' movie. If you want to talk to your 
kids about some of the thornier elements of the climate crisis, like how 
it's overwhelmingly scary or rooted in historical exploitation -- and 
don't mind sitting through 103 minutes of singing cartoon characters and 
dancing reindeer first -- this could be just the movie for you.
https://grist.org/climate/in-frozen-ii-anna-and-elsa-fight-climate-change-instead-of-bad-guys/



[American Lands and Waters Climate Solution Act]
*Chair Grijalva, Committee Democrats to Introduce Landmark Climate 
Change Legislation Slashing Emissions *From Public Lands and Waters
Washington D.C. – Chair Raul M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and several members 
of the Natural Resources Committee will lead a press conference at 12:00 
p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, Dec. 10, to unveil their flagship 
legislation to fight the climate crisis. Members will discuss the 
legislation's importance and describe the path it provides to end our 
public lands' and waters' contribution to climate change by 2040.

The landmark bill – authored by Grijalva and cosponsored by a team of 
Committee members – is the culmination of a year of hearings, 
roundtables, public forums and other public outreach efforts to learn 
more about how best to tackle climate change. Since taking the House 
majority, Natural Resources Committee Democrats have spent much of the 
past year tackling climate change from every angle.
- - -
The bill is endorsed by multiple stakeholders and public interest 
advocacy groups, who will provide remarks at the press conference.
Event details: When: 12 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, Dec. 10
https://naturalresources.house.gov/media/press-releases/chair-grijalva-committee-democrats-to-introduce-landmark-climate-change-legislation-slashing-emissions-from-public-lands-and-waters_
- - -
[Purportedly the act puts a 12 month pause on any new fossil fuel leases 
on federal lands and waters, while the Interior Department and Forest 
Service analysis examines how new permits will meet increasingly 
stringent emissions reduction targets. If DOI and USFS can't publish a 
plan for reaching net zero, then no new leases.]


[Prediction Opinion]
*RIP Capitalism: The Snake Has Swallowed Its Tail*
By Tom Lewis | December 6, 2019 | Apocalypse When?
I don't care how tough things are, do not eat that.

There are so many powerful forces arrayed against the survival of 
industrial economies that people often find it comforting to focus on 
only one -- global climate change, for example -- brandish a sword at it 
and vow to fight to the death. But to act as if there were only one 
existential threat to our current way of life is as uninformed and 
irresponsible as pretending there are no threats at all.

Consider just some of the accumulating catastrophes of the modern world 
in addition to global warming:

The end of cheap energy. It has become almost impossible to extract 
fossil fuels profitably. The amount of energy gained for the energy 
invested in drilling and mining has declined steadily, and for some 
operations -- fracking and tar sands, for example --  is approaching 
parity. When it gets there, the Industrial Age is over.

Exhaustion of food sources. Industrial agriculture has depleted and 
polluted its water supply, exhausted its soil and poisoned its 
surroundings to the point where there is no reasonable expectation that 
it can continue to feed the world's already-swollen population.
Explosion of debt. The great majority of people, companies and 
governments are being slowly strangled by great pythons of debt coiling 
around them, restricting their activities and constricting their 
futures. In many cases, the size of the debt is greater than can 
possibly be repaid, and the ever-rising interest payments have become 
more than the entities can afford.
Paralysis of government. Since the 1980s in this country, since Saint 
Ronald Reagan delivered the gospel of "government is not the solution, 
government is the problem," government at every level has failed to 
repair infrastructure, to regulate powerful economic forces, to protect 
its citizens from harm, in short to do just about anything it was 
invented to do. Industrial democracies around the world are reeling in 
the face of bizarre election results (see Trump, Donald), crippling 
strikes and massive, often violent demonstrations by people who cannot 
endure more exploitation.
There is no way out of this. We can only go through it and see whether a 
greatly reduced and severely traumatized few of us can figure out a way 
to organize ourselves in a less suicidal manner. I would hope those 
people would have in hand or at least in memory a truly remarkable essay 
by Craig Collins, recently published by Counterpunch.  Titled 
"Catabolism: Capitalism's Frightening Future," the essay is a kind of 
unified field theory of everything that is falling apart.

Its central concept is of catabolism, a word borrowed from biology to 
describe the last stages of capitalism during which the system's 
relentless dedication to the pursuit of profit -- to the exclusion of 
every other value -- causes it, when all other sources of profit have 
been hollowed out, to begin consuming itself.

One example of this is the common practice of wealth managers who take 
over a company -- Sears and ToysRUs are recent examples -- sell off its 
most valuable assets, reduce its workforce, cheapen its products, borrow 
massively against its remaining assets (the wealth managers taking 
exorbitant fees for every step) and then bankrupt the company or sell 
off whatever it has left as scrap. The company and it employees are 
destroyed, the wealth managers are more wealthy.

This is capitalism consuming itself at a profit. Any rational, moral 
person can readily see that this process is destructive, even immoral, 
but to understand that, you have to be able to grasp that there are 
reasons to do things, and not do things, other than monetary profit, and 
such a statement makes a true capitalist look at you blankly and say, 
"What?"

Capitalists, like sharks, have no morality when it comes to eating, 
because eating is all they do and all they can do. So eating themselves 
makes as much sense as anything else. Capitalists will not -- indeed 
they cannot -- cease trashing the planet so long as it's profitable.

The snake has swallowed its tail. It will be fine, for a very short while.
http://www.dailyimpact.net/2019/12/06/rip-capitalism-the-snake-has-swallowed-its-tail/


*This Day in Climate History - December 9, 2009 - from D.R. Tucker*

On MSNBC's "Countdown," Chris Hayes strongly criticizes the Washington 
Post for running an article by Sarah Palin peddling climate-denial 
conspiracy theories.

http://youtu.be/R8rZ7YXHHfk

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