[TheClimate.Vote] Febuary 3, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/February 3, 2019/

[watch a great rant]
*New Rule: Climate Emergency - Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)*
Real Time with Bill Maher
Published on Feb 1, 2019
In his editorial New Rule, Bill argues that the national emergency we 
should be addressing isn't border security - it's the threat posed by 
climate change.
https://youtu.be/nWgSVk2slFk


[most recent Kevin Anderson lecture]
*Kevin Anderson: Climate's Holy Trinity*
Oxford Climate Society
Published on Jan 25, 2019
On January 24th 2019, Professor Kevin Anderson addressed the Oxford 
Climate Society on "climate's holy trinity: how cogency, tenacity & 
courage could yet deliver on our Paris 2C commitment".
*Talk abstract:*
It's twenty-eight years since the IPCC's first report and over a quarter 
of a century since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit - such heady days of 
international hope and optimism. Now, in 2019 and with the benefit of 
hindsight, we can look back and trace our voyage of abject failure - and 
with humility learn lessons for charting an alternative low-carbon course.

This lecture will begin by acknowledging our collective penchant for 
delusion on climate change. It will explore how academia has abdicated 
its responsibility to hold government to account, choosing instead to be 
complicit in maintaining a façade of mitigation. Revealing the growing 
gap between aspiration and action, it will argue that centuries of 
reductionist thinking and specialised disciplines leave us ill-equipped 
to understand system-level ('wicked') problems.

Building on a more candid foundation, the seminar will proceed to sketch 
out the unprecedented scale and timeframe of decarbonisation now 
necessary to deliver on our Paris 2C commitment. It will conclude by 
elaborating a system-level framing of the challenge, with equity at its 
core, and asking whether a Marshall-style policy prospectus could yet 
deliver on the Paris commitments.

About the speaker:
Kevin Anderson has just completed two years as the Zennstrom professor 
of climate change leadership at Uppsala University, and has now returned 
to his position as chair of energy and climate change at the School of 
Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering (MACE) at the University of 
Manchester. He has previously held the roles of deputy director and 
director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and he is a 
non-executive director of Greenstone Carbon Management. Kevin is 
research active with publications in Science, Nature and Nature Geosciences.

Kevin engages widely across all tiers of government (EU, UK and Sweden) 
on issues ranging from shale gas, aviation and shipping to the role of 
climate modeling (IAMs), carbon budgets and 'negative emission 
technologies'. His analysis previously contributed to the framing of the 
UK's Climate Change Act and the development of national carbon budgets.

Kevin has a decade's industrial experience, principally in the 
petrochemical industry. He is a chartered engineer and a fellow of the 
Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BZFvc-ZOa8 [better audio a half minute in]



[Something to think about]
*Climate Change's Hidden Victim: Your Mental Health*
A controversial new class argues that you can't begin to address the 
environmental impacts of global warming until you address the 
psychological ones
Ciara O'Rourke
December 2017, Jennifer Atkinson flew from Washington to Santa Barbara, 
California, where her family lives, to celebrate Christmas. The 
42-year-old is a senior lecturer in environmental humanities at the 
University of Washington Bothell, about an hour from Seattle, but she 
grew up in rural central California, outside the town of Templeton. She 
remembers cattle ranches and vineyards and fields of oak trees 
stretching toward the sun. She spent her summers playing in a creek with 
her dogs. Some nights, she'd sleep outside on lawn furniture and stare 
at the stars twinkling overhead.

On this trip, though, in the middle of winter, smoke darkened the 
skyline in Santa Barbara. By December 14, flames had scorched more than 
242,000 acres in Southern California, making it the state's 
fourth-largest wildfire to date and the only December-occurring wildfire 
on the list of California's 20 largest wildfires, according to a post on 
what was then the government's climate website.

During her visit, Atkinson watched her nieces and nephew hook masks over 
their ears before they could play outside after school. After pulling on 
dresses and nice shoes to attend a performance of the Nutcracker, they 
walked back to their cars wearing the masks to filter out the smoke. 
Atkinson had been getting evacuation alerts on her phone for nearby 
neighborhoods all evening, and the smoke had become so oppressive that 
she and her family decided to leave too. She was devastated by the 
destruction around them, the danger, the loss.

"The experience of being in or in the vicinity of a catastrophic 
wildfire is so pervasive," Atkinson says today. "You can't not see it. 
And to actually breathe in these toxins, to know they're going into your 
lungs and your body, there's just a sense of assault, or a kind of 
invasion, that is just deeply personal."

It felt traumatic, but that doesn't mean it was novel. Atkinson had been 
reckoning with those feelings when she pitched a new class to the 
university that was set to begin when she returned to work after the 
holiday. "Depressed about climate change?" read a flyer advertising the 
course. "Our seminar will examine not only the anxiety that is our own, 
but also the psychological toll of climate change on communities in 
different parts of the world." She called the three-credit undergraduate 
class "Environmental Grief and Anxiety: Building Hope in the Age of 
Climate Consequences." It was aimed in part at exploring the emotional 
and ethical issues of climate change, as well as helping students 
develop tools to endure the emotional effects of extinctions, 
deforestation, and more.

Atkinson created this seminar because "we can't afford to educate a 
generation of young people who aren't emotionally prepared for what's 
coming, what's already here."
It was just a pilot. Atkinson didn't know if students would be 
interested. But two dozen enrolled, and after the quarter started, the 
university ran a story about the class on its website. News coverage 
followed as the Seattle Times and other publications reported on this 
woman who was lecturing on coping with grief connected to global 
warming. Hundreds of messages filled Atkinson's inbox, most of them 
supportive -- thanking her or sharing a sense of solidarity. She heard 
from professors, religious leaders, and just people--from the community 
and across the country--who had read the newspaper article and felt 
validated. "Most said that just knowing this seminar existed made them 
feel less abnormal," Atkinson told me when we met in her office in 
November. "It was reassuring to know they're not some social misfit for 
feeling devastated about our climate crisis."

Atkinson assigned readings to her students, including poems by Chickasaw 
writer Linda Hogan, a commencement address by novelist Barbara 
Kingsolver called "How to Be Hopeful," and a 2017 report by the American 
Psychological Association titled "Climate Change's Toll on Mental 
Health." Though Atkinson had never heard of a college course like hers 
when she launched it, it turns out she was tapping into a burgeoning 
field that has increasingly gained traction as psychologists, 
therapists, and academics like her probe the psychological impact of 
climate change, arguing that unless we deal with the profound and, at 
times, paralyzing grief brought on by the destruction of our 
environment, we'll never fully be able to tackle the problem. "We can't 
afford to educate a generation of young people who aren't emotionally 
prepared for what's coming, what's already here," she says.

In 1992, Theodore Roszak, a historian and social critic, coined the term 
"ecopsychology" in his book The Voice of the Earth, a meditation on how 
the planet's health is tied to our mental health. Today, some 
ecopsychologists and climate psychologists use basic psychological 
research on infants and caregivers to try to understand the feelings of 
grief and depression that people experience when the land is damaged or 
destroyed without intervention.

"Mother Earth is also such a caregiver," says Per Espen Stoknes, a 
psychologist and professor at the Norwegian Business School who has 
studied the issue. "What climate psychology and ecopsychology do is draw 
certain lines between studies of humans and infants in relation to their 
caregivers and human grown-ups in relation to the land where we live," 
he says. When the environment is despoiled and that relationship is 
ruptured, our response can be similar to that following the loss of a 
caregiver, he says. Depression is a reaction to grief over which nothing 
can be done, Stoknes says, and it comes with a sense of 
helplessness -- that whatever you do, it's impossible to bring "that 
good relationship back." The feeling of helplessness, in turn, 
interferes with an ability to take action against climate change, which 
accelerates the cycle.

Others have been working on this problem. In 2011, the American 
Psychological Association published a paper in its journal on the 
psychological impacts of global warming. "The challenge of climate 
change calls for increased ecological literacy, a widened ethical 
responsibility, investigations into a range of psychological and social 
adaptations, and an allocation of resources and training to improve 
psychologists' competency in addressing climate change-related impacts," 
the authors wrote.

More recently, Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who studied how people 
coped during the Cold War, has pivoted to climate change. In the 1980s, 
he used the phrase "psychic numbing" to describe how people dealt with 
the nuclear threat by denying or dismissing it. Now, he argues, some 
people have become numb to the realities of global warming.

Leslie Davenport, a psychotherapist based in Tacoma, Washington, agrees. 
She says some of her clients grieve climate change, including people 
"who aren't aware that they're doing so," she says. "I get people in my 
office and sometimes there's kind of this ambient sense of distress, and 
they may not be able to name that the shifting climate is at least part 
of what is contributing to their distress."

As the consequences of climate change become more acute, people will 
need to remain responsive, Davenport says. A psychological concept 
called the "window of tolerance" gets at this. The idea is that the 
window stretches, expands, and contracts. If we're in the window, we can 
be responsive. If we're outside the window, we tend to lash out, 
withdraw, or isolate ourselves. "When we come to understand either 
what's happening in climate change or the predictions of what may come," 
she says, "it's so easy to want to turn away."

Atkinson seemed wary when I first reached out to her. Among the hundreds 
of emails that had filled her inbox were about two dozen missives from 
critics -- not to mention the sneering comments on the Seattle Times 
story calling her students snowflakes and her course absurd. One person 
commented, "Do the students roll out nap mats and curl up in the fetal 
position with their blankies and pacifiers while listening to her 
lectures?" Atkinson addressed the attack in an op-ed for High Country 
News. The headline: "Addressing climate grief makes you a badass, not a 
snowflake."

"Facing the hard truths of our climate crisis takes steady courage and a 
certain amount of grit," she wrote. "Today's students are reaching 
maturity at a moment when the scale of environmental disruption boggles 
the mind: increasing wildfires, rising seas and collapsing glaciers, 
vanishing forests, and displaced communities. And remember that much 
worse is on the way."

They need practical skills to avoid burning out, Atkinson told me. She 
thinks acknowledging their feelings -- pain, angst, anger, 
whatever -- is the first step toward managing it.

Rhissa Delfin, 24, was already anxious when she enrolled in Atkinson's 
class. Her first year of college had frayed her nerves. That heightened 
as Atkinson taught them about how the changing climate is affecting 
cultures around the world. They talked about environmental injustice, 
and inequality, and communities that are already grappling with severe 
impacts of climate change.

One person commented on Atkinson's class, "Do the students roll out nap 
mats and curl up in the fetal position with their blankies and pacifiers 
while listening to her lectures?"
"Science classes teach the physics and biology and ecology behind this 
crisis but don't give students the tools to manage the anxiety or 
depression or anger those issues can awaken," Atkinson says. "So, one of 
the most important aspects of the class is to simply acknowledge this 
phenomenon head-on." For Delfin, an environmental sciences major, parts 
of the curriculum were troubling, even overwhelming. But eventually the 
class talked about how to build resiliency so the challenges of climate 
change wouldn't feel debilitating. Resiliency, the lecturer says, 
develops over time, "through a complicated and social process" that she 
helps promote in part by leading exercises that develop critical 
thinking, creative writing, and reflection; in essence, confronting 
intense but amorphous feelings and putting them into words so those 
words can lead to something more productive than despair. The class also 
considered societal pressures for people who research and study climate 
change to remain objective and detached from their work, Delfin says. 
"This pressure doesn't do good things for the development of helping the 
climate situation. Being connected rather than detached from the natural 
world is far better."

Looking at what lies ahead, the students also brace for it. For their 
final project, they must create a "climate survival kit," complete with 
what Atkinson considers tools for building emotional resilience. That 
can mean poetry, practical steps to ground yourself during difficult 
times, excerpts from inspirational speeches, and letters to future 
generations. One student included pictures her daughter drew urging 
adults to take action on behalf the planet and her generation, awaiting 
what's to come.

Still, Atkinson says the larger goal of the seminar is to encourage the 
students to "move beyond self-indulgent forms of personal anguish and 
recognize structures of injustice and inequality taking the biggest toll 
on frontline communities across the U.S. and the world." Poor and 
vulnerable people are bearing the brunt of climate change, she told me, 
and she wants her class to think critically about the origins of this 
crisis and consider questions of inequity and injustice. For some of her 
students, these aren't new concepts. Several are first-generation 
college attendees from marginalized groups "where negative economic and 
health impacts of environmental disruption have long been a lived 
reality," Atkinson says.

Last summer, smoke again blanketed the sky, this time in the Seattle 
area as wildfires burned to the north in British Columbia. After nine or 
so months of dreary weather, people in Bothell and elsewhere in wet 
western Washington were again awaking to gray. Only now the sun burned a 
muted pink through the haze. The apocalyptic landscape raised the 
specter of more ruined summers and whole years where residents are 
shuttered indoors.

"It's absolutely changed the way that we experience summer," Atkinson 
says. Students who spent part of that August with her on a study-abroad 
seminar in Peru recalled to me the realization that wildfires were worse 
than when they were kids or the lack of snow in the Seattle area this 
season. "We haven't had any this winter," said Michael Groves, a senior. 
Mahleah Grant, a senior majoring in environmental studies who is taking 
Atkinson's class this semester, told me she's worried about megafauna. 
She wants to see a polar bear in the wild, or a lion. She has 
experienced what she would describe as grief about climate change.

But students shouldn't expect that Atkinson is going to be able to make 
everything better. "It's not my job to convince them of a happy ending 
to this story," Atkinson says. "Grief isn't something to be fixed, 
because it isn't unhealthy or dysfunctional… [U]sually, it's a normal 
response to loss and a crucial step in the process of recovery. It's 
also important for us to keep in mind that accepting and sitting with 
really difficult emotions isn't the same as surrendering to despair."

Atkinson admits that grief isn't pleasant. But, she says, it helps to 
recognize that it comes from connection. "And from that perspective," 
she adds, "you can find a lot of hope in the insights or actions that 
arise from environmental grief. Because every time we mourn the loss of 
something we love -- whether a person or place or species or 
habitat -- it puts into perspective what really matters in our lives."

Maybe, Atkinson says, ecological grief and anger and outrage could give 
us not just resiliency but also resolve. "To protect what we love," she 
says, "and prevent more loss going forward."

Note: Jennifer Atkinson contacted Medium after this story published 
because she wanted to recognize the work of Nelville Ellis and Ashlee 
Cunsolo in her comments of how ecological grief can put what we value 
into perspective.
https://medium.com/s/2069/the-emotional-damage-done-by-climate-change-2f8f9ad59155


[yes this is provocative]
*Climate Deniers in the 116th Congress*
By Sally Hardin and Claire Moser - Posted on January 28, 2019
The morning sun rises behind the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., March 
2014.
According to new analysis from the Center for American Progress Action 
Fund, there are 150 members of the 116th Congress--all Republicans--who 
do not believe in the scientific consensus that human activity is making 
the Earth's climate change. Notably, since the previous Congress, the 
number of climate deniers has decreased by 30 members, in part because 
47 former deniers retired, resigned, or were defeated in their 2018 
re-election contests. However, even while voters express their clear 
commitment to climate action, nearly 60 percent of Republican 
members--who make up 28 percent of the current Congress--still do not 
believe in climate change and the urgent threat that it poses.

That number does not line up with public opinion. A recent Monmouth 
University poll found that 78 percent of respondents believe that 
climate change is real and leading to severe weather impacts. This 
figure includes a majority--64 percent--of all Republicans surveyed, up 
15 percent from 2015.

The map below shows whether each state's representation in Congress 
denies accepted climate science. Click on each member's name to see 
their statement on climate change. To view a full-size version of the 
interactive, click here.

According to CAP Action's analysis of data from the Center for 
Responsive Politics, these 150 climate deniers have accepted a total of 
more than $68 million in direct contributions from the fossil fuel 
industry--a figure that includes all contributions above the Federal 
Election Commission's reporting threshold of $200 from CEOs, employees, 
and political action committees (PACs) in the coal, oil, and gas 
sectors. This is an average of $455,731 in lifetime contributions 
accepted by each climate denier in the 116th Congress. In addition to 
these direct donations from PACs, CEOs, and employees, fossil fuel 
interests often pursue other methods to influence elected officials and 
election results. For example, in the 2018 midterms, a campaign to 
defeat a carbon tax in Washington state vastly outspent its opponents 
after raising $31.5 million--nearly all of it from out-of-state oil 
companies--for advertising and public messaging. Coal magnate Bob 
Murray's spending during the 2016 elections provides yet another example 
of this underhanded influence; Murray gave President Donald Trump and 
affiliated groups millions of dollars, expecting--and receiving--policy 
favors in return, such as their help bailing out the failing coal industry.

It is critical to note that the fossil fuel industry contributions noted 
in this analysis merely represent direct, publicly disclosed 
contributions to candidates. The fossil fuel industry spends untold 
millions more lobbying members of Congress--only some of which is 
reported. This contributes to shadowy corporate coalitions and funds 
dark money groups that help to elect candidates without disclosing the 
identity of their contributors.

As climate change accelerates and its impacts diversify, so too have the 
efforts of the fossil fuel industry--one of the main contributors to 
climate change--to spread misinformation, through new and diverse 
messages. In light of this, CAP Action considered a number of different 
stances in its definition of "climate denier":

    - Believing that climate change is not real or is a hoax
    - Believing that the climate has always been changing and continues
    to do so, and saying that the Earth is just in a standard cycle of
    warming, despite more evidence of faster change than ever before
    - Thinking that the science around climate change is not settled, or
    claiming that since they are not scientists themselves, they cannot
    know for certain
    - Believing that humans are contributing to a changing climate but
    are not the main contributors--again, despite overwhelming evidence
    to the contrary

To determine which members of Congress still deny climate science, CAP 
Action reviewed public statements by all current members of Congress 
regarding climate change. For those whose statements were unclear or 
unavailable, CAP Action reached out to their offices requesting 
clarification and comment--which the map notes where relevant.

It's notable that the number of climate deniers in Congress is 
decreasing; this underscores the growing urgency with which the American 
public views the threat of climate change. Yet the number is still high 
enough to hamstring congressional efforts to tackle climate change 
through legislation in the 116th Congress--especially with the example 
of climate denier-in-chief, President Trump. These deniers must be held 
accountable and scrutinized for their unscientific beliefs, and the 
fossil fuel industry's outsized influence at the congressional level 
must be investigated.

Sally Hardin is a research analyst for the Energy and Environment War 
Room at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Claire Moser is 
the director of the Energy and Environment War Room at the Action Fund.

The authors would like to thank Alex Tausanovitch, Kristina Costa, Steve 
Bonitatibus, Meghan Miller, and Mat Brady for their contributions to 
this analysis.

*Authors' note: In addition to analyzing the climate change beliefs of 
each member of the 116th Congress, CAP Action also compared the climate 
denier makeup of this Congress with that of the 115th Congress. The 
authors used ThinkProgress' 2017 analysis of climate deniers in the 
115th Congress to help determine which former deniers had left and for 
what reasons. They found that, in total, 47 climate deniers from the 
115th Congress are no longer serving: 16 of these deniers retired; five 
deniers resigned; 22 deniers were defeated, either in their own 
primaries or in general 2018 midterm elections; and four deniers moved 
on--to governorships, the judicial branch, or appointments in the Trump 
administration.
https://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/green/news/2019/01/28/172944/climate-deniers-116th-congress/


[Solar power comes to Puerto Rico - explained in 8 minute video]
*Puerto Rico's solar energy insurrection*
Quartz
Published on Jan 25, 2019
At the end of the hurricane season in 2017, Hurricane Maria completely 
wiped out Puerto Rico's decaying energy grid.
But the destruction has provided the rare opportunity to radically 
transform the island's electrical system into one of the most advanced 
the world has ever seen: the power grid of the future.
Quartz explores Puerto Rico's investment in solar energy and alternative 
solutions to the conventional energy power grid as the country rebuilds 
and reinvents infrastructure.
https://youtu.be/7ekFQ0xOwDw


*This Day in Climate History - Febuary 3, 2016 - from D.R. Tucker*
February 3, 2016:
The Los Angeles Times reports:

    "Southern California Gas Co. on Tuesday was charged with failing to
    immediately notify state authorities about the natural gas leak in
    Aliso Canyon.
    "L.A. County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey filed four misdemeanor
    criminal charges against the gas company, accusing it of releasing
    air contaminants and neglecting to report the release of hazardous
    materials until three days after the leak began Oct. 23."

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-attorney-general-lawsuit-aliso-canyon-leak-20160202-story.html 

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