[TheClimate.Vote] February 25, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/February 25, 2019/


[Feinstein is divisive - DailyKOS]
*Why is Sen. Feinstein offering a competing Climate Change proposal when 
GND polls at 81%?*
Senate Resolution 59 is the Green New Deal. It currently has 12 Senate 
co-sponsors (that's over 25% of the Democratic Senate Caucus). The 
co-sponsors include Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. 
Kamal Harris, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth 
Warren.

Every single senator running for President is co-sponsoring this 
resolution. More importantly, the measure is overwhelmingly popular 
among voters. And when I say overwhelmingly, I'm not kidding:

More than 80 percent of registered voters support the Green New Deal
proposal being pushed by progressional Democratic lawmakers, a new
poll found.
The survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Communication
and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change
Communication found that 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of
Republicans back the Green New Deal plan. --
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/421765-poll-majorities-of-both-parties-support-green-new-deal

Read that again, 92% of Democrats support the Green New Deal. 64% of 
Republicans support it. 88% of independents support it.

Survey respondents were given a brief synopsis of the GND and asked 
whether they supported it.

Some members of Congress are proposing a "Green New Deal" for the
U.S. They say that a Green New Deal will produce jobs and strengthen
America's economy by accelerating the transition from fossil fuels
to clean, renewable energy. The Deal would generate 100% of the
nation's electricity from clean, renewable sources within the next
10 years; upgrade the nation's energy grid, buildings, and
transportation infrastructure; increase energy efficiency; invest in
green technology research and development; and provide training for
jobs in the new green economy.  --
http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/the-green-new-deal-has-strong-bipartisan-support/

Which leads to the question, why is Sen. Diane Feinstein proposing 
legislation that is virtually guaranteed to divide Democrats when S.Res. 
59 comes up for a vote? Also, why is she offering a proposal universally 
considered weaker than the GND, when the GND has enormous public support?

RL Miller
@RL_Miller
Feb 22, 2019
Replying to @RL_Miller and 2 others
Here's what you need to know. Feinstein's reso is substantially weaker 
than the GND.  Instead of "get everything done by 2030" as the latest 
science tells us, it's "2050 is fine." #DiFiGND

RL Miller
@RL_Miller
the Feinstein resolution promotes a grab bag of some (not all) of 
Obama's executive orders: return to Paris, energy efficiency, more.
But look hard at what's missing. #DiFiGND

It's not even everything the Obama administration instituted via 
executive orders! It's kind of going backwards. It is really weaker than 
the GND, let me use one small example. Here's the GND:

(4) to achieve the Green New Deal goals and mobilization, a Green
New Deal will require the following goals and projects-- [...]

(M) obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous
peoples for all decisions that affect indigenous peoples and their
traditional territories, honoring all treaties and agreements with
indigenous peoples, and protecting and enforcing the sovereignty and
land rights of indigenous peoples --
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-resolution/59/text

here's Sen. Feinstein's proposal:

(3) The United States shall ensure a just and equitable transition
for all communities, including by: [...]
(D) respecting the needs and wisdom of local communities in planning
infrastructure changes, especially communities that have
historically been marginalized or oppressed, including indigenous
peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized
communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income
workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities,
and youth --
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-resolution/59/text

There's an enormous difference between "respect the needs and wisdom of" 
and "obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of". The first is a 
relatively content-free platitude, the second is a concrete requirement. 
There are several other examples. Sen. Feinstein's proposal does not 
talk about union labor, the GND does. The GND requires a full-scale 
mobilization effort over ten years. Sen Feinstein's proposal has softer 
targets over 30 years. The GND proposes a high speed rail network and 
public transit, to reduce reliance on air and car travel, Sen. 
Feinstein's proposal does not. Don't take my word for it, please read 
them side by side and ask yourself why anyone would want to squander the 
enormous political momentum GND activists have built (80% of voters 
support them!) by offering up a weaker version.

That twitter thread is worth reading in full (h/t MB). But here's the 
critical bit for the purpose of this discussion. Mitch McConnell intends 
to present S.Res. 59 up for a vote, in an attempt to divide Democrats.

RL Miller
@RL_Miller
Feb 22, 2019
Replying to @RL_Miller and 4 others
we know that Mitch McConnell intends to bring S. Res 59, the original 
#GreenNewDeal resolution, up for a vote so as to fracture Democrats. 
#DiFiGND


RL Miller
@RL_Miller
Some of us have been urging Senate Dems to not give in to McConnell; not 
promote a "Dems in Disarray" narrative; not be splintered. #DiFiGND

10:34 PM - Feb 22, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Forget the video for a bit. It was a remarkably effective piece of 
activism, but after four different rec listed diaries, the video it is 
not worth discussing further. Let's talk about policy and what actually 
needs to be done here.

Why does Sen. Feinstein think her proposal is better than S.Res.59?

Why does she think offering it up in the Senate is going to result in 
more tangible progress than throwing her back behind the resolution 
proposed by Sen. Markey in the Senate?

Perhaps  Sen. Feinstein has reached a secret deal with Mitch McConnell. 
Perhaps she has reason to believe her resolution will pass with strong 
Republican support. If so, that would be great progress under a 
Republican administration and Senate. I would welcome it.

If however, Sen. Feinstein does not have such an agreement, then as RL 
Miller notes, her alternative proposal merely serves to divide Senate 
Democrats on this issue. What then is the point of the proposal? Why 
offer a divisive proposal when the one on the table has 92% support 
among Democrats?

I'm genuinely curious as to what Sen. Feinstein is thinking with her 
alternate proposal.

-- @subirgrewal - Cross-posted to TheProgressiveWing
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/2/23/1837259/-Why-is-Sen-Feinstein-offering-a-competing-Climate-Change-proposal-when-GND-polls-at-81


[ClimateCrocks]
*The New Black? The Making of the "Green" Stereotype*
February 24, 2019
David Roberts on Twitter:
All right, I view the argument over personal carbon-cutting behavior as 
a toxic distraction, taking place almost entirely *within* the already 
insular climate community & mostly furnishing ways for ppl in that 
community to bash others in that community. And …

… the last few days reinforced that tenfold. So I want to share one last 
anecdote & then hopefully leave the subject behind. Pull up a chair.

Back around 2007, Al Gore's first movie came out & green was briefly 
"cool" in pop culture. Magazines had glossy "green issues."

"Green" popped up in commercials, movies, & sports events. And, most 
memorably for me personally, NBC instituted a "green week" during which 
all their programming would be, in some vague & poorly specified way, 
"green." It was a strange & heady time.

"Green week" perfectly captured what went so horribly wrong with all 
this. The thing is, though Gore made climate "trend," as we say these 
days, the vast, vast majority of people, including the people making pop 
culture, didn't understand it.

Most people had no frame of reference whatsoever other than the simple 
fact that this was "environmental" -- the latest thing environmentalists 
were going on about, some new kind of pollution, some new set of 
threatened critters, something something.

Lacking any guidance from NBC, or any user-friendly resources to learn 
more, the creatives behind NBC shows, forced to incorporate "green," 
simply fell back on their pre-existing impressions & associations & 
stereotypes. And what were those? Funny you should ask.

I can't claim to have watched all the programming on Green Week, but I 
watched a lot of it, and in every single case, the manifestation of 
"green" was the same: into the show was introduced a preachy, hectoring, 
morally superior enviro obsessing over every little daily thing.

Nagging other characters about their plastic straw, where their clothes 
were manufactured, what they eat, etc etc. A few things were common in 
all these characterizations. First, the enviros were never characterized 
as *wrong*. The virtue of their ultimate goals …

… was always grudgingly accepted. It's just that they were *annoying*. 
Second, the changes the enviros advocated were inevitably cast as 
irksome sacrifices that made life more difficult & less fun. Living 
green was very clearly presented as a drag. And third …

… the episode ended w/ the annoying enviro either going away, or the 
character who had briefly been gripped by environmental sanctimony 
"getting over it." (That's what happened in How I Met Your Mother: Ted 
got super preachy & annoying, then returned to "normal.")

There's a lot to say about this chapter. It was obviously disastrous for 
NBC to force "green" into their programming without any guidance. But at 
the same time, it was a stark & disturbing revelation of exactly what 
cultural associations currently cling to "green."

To put it bluntly: in US popular culture, greens are seen as humorless, 
sanctimonious, uptight moralists who find fault in every little thing, 
who are incapable of relaxing & enjoying things, and who, however noble 
their goals, are insufferable to be around.

You can argue whether the caricature is fair or deserved. You can argue 
about whose fault it is. But, unless you've lived entirely inside the 
green bubble from college forward, you can't deny it's out there. It's 
pretty obvious.

It seems pretty self-evidently true to me that the ubiquity of this 
social stereotype is bad for environmentalism & environmental causes. It 
makes environmentalism seem like a full-fledged Identity, or a religion, 
a whole package of behaviors & signifiers & commitments.
That raises the barrier to entry. If I want clean water, am I going to 
speak up about pollution? Not if, in order to do so, I have to adopt a 
certain style of dress, listen to certain types of music, accept certain 
associations, *be a certain kind of person*. It's too much.

In US environmentalism, writ large, concerns about public & ecosystem 
health, about public policy, come packaged with a lifestyle & a bunch of 
behavioral & cultural commitments. Personal virtue & progressive policy 
have gotten hopelessly tangled.

This seems disastrous to me. And -- the whole point of all this -- I 
really, really don't want to see the same thing happen on climate. I do 
not want climate subsumed into "environmental," taking on all the same 
cultural baggage & associations. It'll just be another niche.

I want for there to be space for people to engage with climate change as 
a policy matter *without* being forced to also sign onto a lifestyle or 
identity. This is why I came up with the term "climate hawk" -- to help 
create that space.

Which brings us to the present dispute. People are saying that those who 
advocate for smart climate policy are obliged to engage in showy green 
lifestyle choices -- take vacations on trains, buy an electric car, put 
up solar panels.

Putting aside the class implications -- these lifestyle choices are 
largely available to, & chosen by, the affluent, who nonetheless remain 
the highest emitters -- it just seems to me to replicate exactly the 
mistakes that have so diminished environmentalism.
https://climatecrocks.com/2019/02/24/the-new-black-the-making-of-the-green-stereotype/#more-55134



[Only three?]
*The 3 Big Things That People Misunderstand About Climate Change*
David Wallace-Wells, author of the new book The Uninhabitable Earth, 
describes why climate change might alter our sense of time.
ROBINSON MEYER
FEB 22, 2019
The year is 2100. The United States has been devastated by climate 
change. Super-powerful hurricanes regularly ravage coastal cities. 
Wildfires have overrun Los Angeles several times over. And it is 
dangerous to go outside on some summer days--children and the elderly 
risk being broiled alive.

In such a world as that one, will we give up on the idea of historical 
progress? Should we even believe in it now? In his new book, The 
Uninhabitable Earth, the writer David Wallace-Wells considers how global 
warming will change not only the experience of human life but also our 
ideas and philosophies about it. It's possible, he told me recently, 
that climate change will make us believe that history is "something that 
takes us backward rather than forward."

"The 21st century will be dominated by climate change in the same way 
that … the 19th century in the West was dominated by modernity or 
industry," he said. "There won't be an area of human life that is 
untouched by it."

I recently talked to Wallace-Wells about his new book, the difficulty of 
writing stories about climate change, and which science-fiction prophecy 
he believes came true. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and 
brevity.

Robinson Meyer: You had the big cover story in New York, and then you 
wrote a book. What did you learn writing the book that maybe wasn't as 
clear when you were writing the first story?

David Wallace-Wells: I'd written a previous cover story about bee death, 
but I hadn't done a ton of straight-ahead climate writing. And in a sort 
of perverse way, I think that was one of the qualifying things about my 
background for that story and this book. I was coming at it fresh. I had 
a different perspective than people who had devoted their lives to 
it--which is that I don't actually, like, intuitively care all that much 
about nature per se. And so [in the story] I wasn't writing about the 
plight of the animals or the tragedy of the rainforest. I was focused on 
people.

In that first piece, I also really focused on worst-case scenarios. I 
looked at scenarios north of 4 degrees [Celsius of global warming], 5 
degrees, 6 degrees, even 8 degrees--and I thought it was very important 
to introduce those scenarios to the broader public because they were so 
far from what even the general, engaged, liberal understanding of 
climate change was.

It made me think that there were all of these other downstream effects 
of climate change that even academics hadn't begun to contemplate. We 
have this idea over the last few centuries that history may be erratic, 
it may punish some people here and there, but generally over time, as 
time marches forward, we see progress, we see lives getting more 
prosperous and safer and healthier.

While I don't think it's safe to say that climate will completely undo 
that, I think it's quite likely that it does transform that perspective 
in some way. It's certainly within the realm of conceivability that 
damages accumulate so significantly that we totally drop that idea about 
history as an arrow of progress and start thinking of it as something 
that is much less reliable, even something that takes us backward rather 
than forward.

Meyer: I want to talk about that more, but first I want to follow up on 
this idea of the "general, engaged understanding" of climate change. I 
think about that a lot. What do you think the general understanding of 
the issue is?

Wallace-Wells: It's actually changing quite quickly. I think that my 
article played a small role in that, but the [Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change] report was a way bigger deal. It really does seem to 
have awakened a huge amount of alarmism and panic, and it also sort of 
invited scientists to speak more openly about the issue. But when I 
first started writing, I was motivated by the divergence between what I 
saw coming out of academic research and how those stories were being 
told in most mainstream publications. And that was along three points.

*The first point is about the speed of change*. The emphasis was always 
about how slow climate change was, and how it was hard to deal with 
because there was no urgency to it. But the animating fact to me is that 
more than half of all the emissions ever produced from the burning of 
fossil fuels have been produced in just the last three decades. That 
transformed my perspective--I realized that this is something that we're 
doing very much in real time.

*The second thing that we sort of misunderstood was the scope of it.* So 
much of the storytelling is focused on sea-level rise and the melting of 
ice in the Arctic and Antarctic. Obviously that's a huge part of the 
climate story. But it also gives this false sense that it's a problem 
that has local impacts--like if you stay off the shoreline, you're 
likely to be safe.

*The third problem was the severity.* Scientists had often talked about 
this 2-degree [Celsius of global temperature rise] threshold as a kind 
of meaningful mark of climate horror, and I think that most readers 
understood that to mean that that was about as bad as it could get. But 
we can now see that 2 degrees of warming is functionally a floor for 
where we'll be, and not a ceiling.

Meyer: You process a lot of scholarly or humanistic writing about 
climate change in your book. Whose work has stuck with you?

Wallace-Wells: The people who've written about the politics of 
climate--especially the relationship of climate and capitalism. Naomi 
Klein is to me sort of like the North Star. Jed Purdy's work--he is more 
sort of earnestly theoretical, but he is valuable in placing the 
challenge of climate in the long tradition of political philosophy.

Honestly, the person whose work most flicked this light on for me was 
Amitav Ghosh and his book The Great Derangement, which is about 
narrative. I found a lot to disagree with in his interpretation, mostly 
because I come from kind of a literary background. I used to work at The 
Paris Review, and I studied all this stuff in college, and I had a 
slightly different idea of what the basic function of novel writing is. 
Therefore I had a different interpretation of why we don't have good 
novels written about climate change.

Meyer: He argues that climate change is uniquely hard to write stories 
about, right? Where did you disagree with him?

Wallace-Wells: Ghosh's basic argument is that the novel is a form about 
the inner life of an individual. And the problem of climate change is a 
very different category of problem for him. You can place the stories of 
individuals within it, but you end up with something like The Day After 
Tomorrow, where it's like, Oh, here's a person who's dealing with a 
struggle, but the story is also about climate change. And the disconnect 
feels almost corny and staged.

I tended to think about it more in terms of responsibility and villainy. 
I think that we have a very hard time processing our own complicity as 
Westerners reading novels and wondering about climate change. We really 
prefer to see ourselves as truly innocent, and therefore want our 
climate storytelling to reassure us about our own culpability, and tell 
us in fact that it's someone else's problem in our culture, outside of 
narrative.

I think this often takes the form of vilifying oil companies. I don't 
want to come off as someone who thinks oil companies are forces for 
good. But I also realized that when I buy a flight to take a vacation, 
I'm not doing that as a tool of the oil companies. When I eat a 
hamburger, I'm not doing that as a tool of the oil companies. Everything 
about the way that we all live in the modern world [has] a carbon 
footprint, and therefore we all share in responsibility for this damage.

I hope that that sort of revelation will inspire people to some kind of 
collective action. Lifestyle choices are ultimately so small that 
anything other than political action and organizing seems to me 
effectively a diversion. But I also am not approaching the subject 
really as an advocate, but as a truth teller and storyteller.

Meyer: Do you think there's a way to write that kind of narrative that 
doesn't wind up feeling like The Jungle? Which ends with a giant 
Socialist rally, and the narrator being absorbed into the fervor of the 
crowd. Or, I really enjoyed [the 2018 film] Sorry to Bother You, but it 
has a very similar kind of arc in which the politics save the main 
character.

Wallace-Wells: I guess it depends on whether what you're looking for in 
a narrative is polemic or humanity. I actually think that one of the 
features of my writing on this subject is that it--I hope this doesn't 
sound too grand to say--but it demonstrates that if you handle them 
right, the simple accumulation of facts can take on an enormous 
narrative force. And I don't really think that that's something that 
many other writers about climate have done before.

We are still in the infant stage of figuring out how to tell stories 
about this issue. Going forward, I suspect that the more interesting 
narrative forms are likely to background climate change and make it 
appear like the theater in which human dramas are unfolding. Think 
about, for instance, a climate refugee camp, where the story is 
effectively some rivalry between two quasi-criminal-like figures in the 
camp. Or a honeymoon where people are going snorkeling through Miami Beach.

There are whole imaginative theaters for storytelling about climate that 
we haven't yet begun to explore. But if all that is considered 
"responsible" is optimistic hopeful storytelling about how we can solve 
the problem, then that's just--from a narrative perspective, it's kind 
of corny. The best climate storytelling is likely to be written by 
people like J. G. Ballard, or William Gibson, or Margaret Atwood, who 
are really thinking about all the weird ways that these forces could 
transform our lives.

Meyer: Gibson's really recent novel, The Peripheral, seems like one of 
the better presentations of how you're talking about history now--about 
how day-to-day, lived existence would feel like in a world where 
progress has gone wrong, where there are cataclysms in the past from 
which people really haven't recovered.

Wallace-Wells: I know [Gibson] a little bit because I did the Paris 
Review interview with him. We were emailing a few weeks ago and I was 
like, Oh, I'm just adding a couple sentences to the book, last minute, 
about how science-fiction writers are likely to be understood even more 
as prophets because of climate change, and he wrote back and he was 
like, You know what, every time people say that to me, I always say "We 
haven't successfully predicted anything! We got all of our predictions 
wrong. The only thing we've gotten right is the mood." And I wrote back 
and I was like, No, the mood is a prediction! It's a really important 
prediction, and actually you guys got it extremely right.

Meyer: What's the meaning of climate change to you? What's its larger 
import? Is it the stuff about history or is it something else?

Wallace-Wells: My short-form answer is that I think that the 21st 
century will be dominated by climate change in the same way that, say, 
the end of the 20th century was dominated by financial capitalism, or 
the 19th century in the West was dominated by modernity or 
industry--that this will be the meta-narrative of the coming decades, 
and there won't be an area of human life that is untouched by it. Often 
people talk about climate change as a global problem, which it obviously 
is, but I don't think we've really started to think about what that 
means all the way down to the level of individual life.

My basic perspective is that everything about human life on this planet 
will be transformed by this force. Even if we end up at a kind of 
best-case outcome, I think the world will be dominated by these forces 
in the coming decades in ways that it's hard to imagine and we really 
haven't started to think hard enough about.

I am a child of the 1990s. I'm American. I grew up in New York. And in 
that way I am, you know, the product of the end of history. I felt that 
there were all these forces unfolding in the world around me--and that 
while I had my skepticism about them, while I had my critiques about 
them, I did believe that they were carrying us forward into a better, 
more prosperous, more just world. I knew that that would not be an easy 
path, and I knew that we'd have to fight to make sure that, for 
instance, market forces and globalization benefited more people rather 
than fewer. I knew that there were political fights to be had there. But 
in general I just intuited in a deep emotional way--that I might not 
have even been willing to admit publicly, because I would have found it 
embarrassing--that history did move forward and therefore my life was 
going to be an experience of witnessing progress. I feel very profoundly 
not that way anymore.

ROBINSON MEYER is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers 
climate change and technology.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/02/david-wallace-wells-climate-change-interview/583360/



[Joe Romm opinion]
*The 20-year-old playbook that explains Republicans' attacks on the 
Green New Deal*
Republicans' meaningless words on climate action come from 2002 Bush and 
Luntz playbook
JOE ROMM - FEB 15, 2019, 8:11 AM
Republicans are gearing up to attack the Green New Deal -- the latest 
effort by Democrats to address the growing climate crisis with a big 
push to deploy clean energy.

But because the public has long been supportive of both climate action 
and clean energy -- and the momentum behind calls for action only 
continues to grow -- the GOP has to pretend that they have a plan of 
their own.

So that means you can expect many conservatives critical of the plan to 
start using talking points from a playbook developed two decades ago by 
Republican word-meister and messaging expert Frank Luntz -- a plan built 
around repeating the poll-tested words "technology" and "innovation" 
over and over and over.

In fact, some leading House Republicans have already started doing this. 
Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), and Rep. John Shimkus 
(R-IL) published an a op-ed this week on the conservative website Real 
Clear Policy that argues "Republicans Have Better Solutions to Climate 
Change."

You'd be forgiven for thinking this was a parody, as it starts out quite 
unexpectedly. The opening line reads: "Climate change is real, and as 
Republican Leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, we are 
focused on solutions."

House energy leader praises fracking, warns against supporting renewables
In the real world, Walden, Upton, and Shimkus have all repeatedly voted 
against amendments recognizing that climate change is real and have 
taken money from the leading funders of climate denial, the 
petrochemical and fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers.

In 2011, for instance, Upton said of global warming, "I do not say that 
it is man-made." Shimkus has said cutting CO2 emissions is "Taking away 
plant food from the atmosphere" and said global warming won't destroy 
the earth because "The earth will end only when God declares its time to 
be over. Man will not destroy this earth." And in 2017, Walden actually 
warned against supporting renewables.

So how do hardcore opponents of climate science and climate action 
pretend they have solutions? It's all about "innovation," as the op-ed 
makes clear:

We must address climate change in ways that focus on American prosperity 
and technological capabilities while maintaining America's leadership in 
clean and renewable energy innovation. By doubling down on innovation, 
we can supply the world with new tools to combat emissions.

We should continue to encourage innovation and renewable energy development.

Walden and the others don't support the actual solution to global 
warming -- which is deploying clean energy. But, beyond that, they don't 
even support developing renewable energy. Instead, they want to 
"encourage it."

If you are wondering why they repeat the word "innovation" three times 
in three sentences -- and six times in the entire short op-ed -- it's 
because they are likely following the script laid out by Luntz in an 
infamous 2002 memo to conservatives and the George W. Bush White House.

In the memo, Luntz explained that the best way to pretend you care about 
the climate and the environment -- while opposing regulations that might 
actually do something to reduce pollution -- was to talk about 
"technology and innovation." Indeed these words are a cornerstone of 
Luntz's poll-tested euphemisms for "we want to sound like we care about 
the climate, we just don't want to do anything about it."

In the memo's key paragraph, Luntz also repeats the word "innovation" 
three times (emphasis in original).

    [here is the classic, archived, original document
    (Leaked) Luntz Republican Playbook
    https://www.scribd.com/document/70467439/Leaked-Luntz-Republican-Playbook
    ]

Technology and innovation are the key in arguments on both sides. Global 
warming alarmists use American superiority in technology and innovation 
quite effectively in responding to accusations that international 
agreements such as the Kyoto accord could cost the United States 
billions. Rather than condemning corporate America the way most 
environmentalists have done in the past, they attack us for lacking 
faith in our collective ability to meet any economic challenges 
presented by environmental changes we make. This should be our argument. 
We need to emphasize how voluntary innovation and experimentation are 
preferable to bureaucratic or international intervention and regulation.

Yes, progressives do like to argue that; because of successful American 
innovation and technology development efforts -- much of it backed by 
the federal government -- it is now super-cheap to slash carbon pollution.

Of course, progressives like to argue this point because that's what all 
of the major independent scientific and economic analyses show, and so 
that's what every single major government in the world agrees is 
actually true.

Indeed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reviewed the 
entire literature on the subject and concluded back in 2014 that the 
annual loss to global economic growth from preserving a livable climate 
would be a mere 0.06 percent -- and that's against a benefit of saving 
billions of people from needless suffering for decades if not centuries.

And that was five years ago -- renewable energy and other core clean 
technologies like batteries -- have dropped sharply in price since then.

That's why the key point for Luntz is that it is "voluntary innovation 
and experimentation." Republican leaders don't actually want to require 
people to replace dirty energy with clean energy. They just want to keep 
experimenting.

Tragically, however, because we've ignored the science for a quarter 
century, "technology and innovation" are not magic wands that can 
preserve a livable climate without strong government programs to spur 
deployment  --  such as a price on carbon or carbon pollution standards, 
which these three politicians have long opposed.

Scientists say Ocasio-Cortez's dire climate warning is spot on
And so in the end, the three Republican politicians falsely claim "the 
Green New Deal is a policy of regulation, taxation, and ultimately, 
economic stagnation."

But in fact, it is the opposite. It is a policy to finally take 
advantage of the remarkable innovation and technological development led 
by America to solve the gravest problem facing the country.

But true action like this is something these three Republicans could 
never endorse, and so they conclude with more Luntz-inspired pablum free 
from specifics and substance.

Americans deserve better. That's why we back sensible, realistic, and 
effective policies to tackle climate change. Let's encourage American 
industry to do its part through innovation. Let's focus on community 
preparedness. Let's harness our great American ingenuity to develop new 
tools that we can market to the world, as we've done before.

Republicans don't have a solution but they are really good at staying on 
message. As ThinkProgress reported back in 2007, the "technology trap" 
is where the hypothetical promise of future innovation in carbon-free 
technology is used as an excuse to reject immediate action on climate 
change with the carbon-free technology we already have.

Luntz himself reiterated this advice in an early 2005 strategy document 
entitled "An Energy Policy for the 21st Century." In it he wrote 
"Innovation and 21st-century technology should be at the core of your 
energy policy." Luntz repeated the word "technology" thirty times in 
that document.

Then, in an April 2005 speech describing his proposed energy policy, 
Bush repeated the word 'technology' more than forty times. Business Week 
at the time pointed out that Bush was following Luntz's script and noted 
"what's most striking about Bush's Apr. 27 speech is how closely it 
follows the script written by Luntz earlier this year." The article, 
titled "Bush Is Blowing Smoke on Energy," also pointed out "the 
president's failure to propose any meaningful solutions."

The Luntz script seems to have worked to stall real action for a long 
time. It remains to be seen if it will keep working now.
https://thinkprogress.org/republican-opposition-green-new-deal-conservative-luntz-innovation-technology-playbook-f6506e98e69f/


[Serious adaptation plans]
*Marshall Islands consider radical measures to survive rising sea levels*
February 23, 2019
Plans are underway for national talks on which of the 1,156 islands can 
be elevated in a dramatic intervention
The far-flung Marshall Islands needs to raise its islands if it is to 
avoid being drowned by rising sea levels, President Hilda Heine has warned.
- - -
To lay the foundations of the city--which is expected to accommodate 
130,000 people when completed in 2023--sand is being pumped onto reefs 
from surrounding atolls and it is being fortified with walls three 
metres above sea level, which will make it higher than the tallest 
natural island in the Maldives.

"Whatever approach is selected, it will involve selecting islands to 
raise, add to, or build upon" Heine said.

"All Marshallese stakeholders, but especially traditional landowners, 
need to be at the forefront of this discussion if we are ever going to 
move the conversation forward."

The Marshall Islands also aims to increase engagement with the three 
other all-atoll nations--Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Maldives--on climate 
issues.

"As a group, the atoll nations need to come together to formulate their 
unique concerns and develop their positions and plans and identify 
financial needs related to climate impacts," said Heine, who chairs the 
Coalition of Atoll Nations Against Climate Change.
Read more at: 
https://phys.org/news/2019-02-marshall-islands-radical-survive-sea.html#jCp


[VOX]
*Pay attention to the growing wave of climate change lawsuits*
Kids, farmers, fishermen, cities, and states are suing the fossil fuel 
industry and governments. Could they win?
By Umair Irfan  Feb 22, 2019

In 1998, 46 states and the District of Columbia signed on to the largest 
civil litigation settlement in US history, the tobacco Master Settlement 
Agreement. Stunning in its scope and scale, the agreement forced the 
four largest tobacco companies to stop advertising to youth, limit 
lobbying, restrict product placement in media, and fund anti-smoking 
campaigns. It also required them to pay out more than $206 billion over 
25 years.

Tobacco companies had in previous decades successfully swatted down 
hundreds of private lawsuits. But states found an opening by suing 
companies for the harm they caused to public health. "This lawsuit is 
premised on a simple notion: You caused the health crisis, you pay for 
it," said then-Mississippi Attorney General Michael Moore in 1994.

Now another wave of lawsuits is trying to hold powerful institutions 
accountable for an even bigger crisis, by making them pay and change 
their ways. At least eight US cities, five counties, and one state are 
suing some of the world's largest fossil fuel companies for selling 
products that contribute to global warming while misleading the public 
about their harms. In parallel, 21 young people are trying to suspend 
fossil fuel development as part of their high-profile climate rights 
case, Juliana v. United States, against the government. (The case is 
currently awaiting a hearing at the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals.)

And with several new Democratic attorneys general elected in the 2018 
midterm elections, even more litigation may be on the horizon.

"It feels like there is a lot of climate change litigation right now," 
said Paul Sabin, a professor of environmental history at Yale. "But this 
is only the beginning."

The momentum is building in other countries too. In Canada, the 
Netherlands, and Ireland, citizens are taking their governments to court 
to demand more ambitious policies to fight climate change.

At stake in these cases are billions of dollars in liability and legal 
precedents that will last generations. For the plaintiffs -- children, 
farmers, fishermen, and cities vulnerable to drought and sea level rise 
-- weak federal climate policy and dire warnings from scientists about 
the future are driving a sense of urgency. And litigation offers 
something missing from every other climate change mitigation strategy, 
whether it's the Green New Deal or a carbon tax: a villain.

"Big oil knew for decades that greenhouse gas pollution from their 
operations and their products were having a significant and detrimental 
impact on the earth's climate," Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. 
Kilmartin said last year from atop a seawall, announcing his state's 
suit against companies like Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, and Royal Dutch 
Shell. "Instead of working to reduce that harm, these companies chose to 
conceal the dangers, undermine public support for greenhouse gas 
regulation, and engage in massive campaigns to promote the 
ever-increasing use of their products and ever-increasing revenues in 
their pockets."

With so many lawsuits filed across so many jurisdictions, the likelihood 
of a climate case getting to a trial is growing. Outside the courtroom, 
public opinion is starting to shift, with a majority of Americans 
wanting the government to address climate change, according to several 
recent polls. The hope among the plaintiffs is that one of the suits 
could lead to comprehensive action on climate change that the political 
process has failed to provide.

However, the plaintiffs are in uncharted legal territory, and opponents 
say these cases hinge on radical, unprecedented expansions of existing 
laws. The litigation also circumvents the legislative process, which is 
arguably where climate change policies should be implemented in the 
first place.

As federal appeals courts weigh whether some of these lawsuits should be 
allowed to go to trial, it's helpful to understand the background of 
environmental litigation, the arguments being made, and what they could 
mean for the fight against climate change. Here's what you need to know.

Environmental lawsuits have a long history, but climate liability and 
climate rights are a new frontier
"Litigation has been a crucial strategy for environmental activism since 
the '60s and the '70s," said Sabin, the Yale professor. In fact, we've 
already seen a successful lawsuit centering on climate change. The 
Environmental Protection Agency was forced to regulate carbon dioxide to 
fight climate change as the result of a 2007 Supreme Court decision in a 
lawsuit, Massachusetts v. EPA. It's the most significant example of a 
climate change mitigation policy established through the courts.

One of the earliest cases to invoke harm caused by greenhouse gases 
dates back to 1986. In the City of Los Angeles v. National Highway 
Traffic Safety Administration lawsuit, the city and environmental 
organizations challenged NHTSA's rollback of a vehicle emissions law. An 
appeals court ruled in favor of the federal government.

But the current wave of litigation is bringing up new legal questions in 
the context of climate change for the first time. For local governments 
suing fossil fuel companies, the fight is over who's on the hook for 
paying for the damages stemming from rising average temperatures. In the 
youth lawsuits, the key issue is whether a stable climate is a civil right.

Another interesting factor in these cases is that climate science itself 
isn't up for debate. The lawsuits center on some fundamental 
interpretations of law, but in nearly all cases, the parties agree on 
these facts: Greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are heating up 
the planet, which in turn is fueling sea level rise, more extreme 
weather, and changes in the overall climate.

In San Francisco and Oakland's lawsuits against oil companies, for 
example, the presiding federal judge even asked for a climate change 
tutorial from the plaintiffs and the defendants. Both sides largely 
agreed on the fundamentals.

"Chevron accepts the consensus in the scientific communities on climate 
change," said Theodore Boutrous, an attorney who presented a climate 
tutorial on behalf of Chevron last year and agreed with the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's conclusions that human 
activity is warming the planet. "There's no debate about climate science."

The dispute, then, is over how to apply existing laws. Since the legal 
principles these lawsuits invoke have never been applied to climate 
change, the outcomes stand to set huge legal precedents. Depending on 
how they're decided, these lawsuits could open the floodgates to new 
litigation. At the same time, judges are uncertain about how to proceed 
and have reached widely differing conclusions on similar lawsuits. Which 
is why the tension and drama around these suits is so high, compared to 
a fight over, say, a carbon tax.

The plaintiffs in the suits against the government and against fossil 
fuel producers all say that their objective is to see the cases through 
to the end, but they stand to accomplish a lot well before the cases 
come to fruition.

"I think that litigation serves multiple goals," Sabin said. Beyond 
winning the case, forcing powerful businesses and institutions to 
publicly grapple with their impact on the planet is an end unto itself. 
The discovery process where parties have to reveal some of their inner 
workings could also be enlightening. "Those [goals] include framing an 
issue in a public setting, drawing attention an issue. They include 
uncovering documents and revealing what's been going on."

Local governments are suing fossil fuel companies for posing a public 
nuisance with their products
So far, 14 US cities, counties, and one state have sued fossil fuel 
companies. Most of these cases are still undergoing pretrial legal 
motions. The lawsuits brought by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland 
were dismissed but are being appealed.

In these cases, the local governments are claiming fossil fuel producers 
have created a public nuisance. This refers to an activity that impairs 
the use of a public good through damage, creating hazards, and reducing 
comfort. It's a principle that's long been used to litigate 
environmental issues from protecting drinking water to controlling air 
pollution.

The argument in these cases is that fossil fuel companies have known for 
years that their products release greenhouse gases that warm the planet, 
which in turn harms the public interest: Rising seas are encroaching on 
shoreline properties, and drier weather is increasing wildfire risks for 
homes.

At the same time, the plaintiffs say, coal miners and oil drillers 
obfuscated their products' impact on the environment despite their own 
internal research showing that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels 
is warming the planet. "The bottom line story is: 'You made this 
product. You knew while making this product that it was going to cause 
these horrific problems. And you did not tell anyone,'" said David 
Bookbinder, chief counsel at the Niskanen Center.

The state of Rhode Island, for instance, filed suit in 
Providence/Bristol County Superior Court against 14 oil and gas 
companies last year. The complaint notes that the state has more than 
400 miles of coastline threatened by sea level rise as warmer 
temperatures melt polar ice. That in turn is fueling larger storm 
surges, saltwater intrusion, erosion, and nuisance flooding. More carbon 
dioxide in the atmosphere is also making the ocean more acidic, 
threatening shellfish in the Narragansett Bay.

The complaint alleges that many of these fossil fuel companies knew 
about how their products caused climate change decades ago but hid that 
information, even as they started protecting their own facilities from 
consequences like rising oceans and melting polar ice. More recently, 
oil companies have even asked for government funding to build sea walls 
to protect coastal refineries from these climate change impacts.

"By 1988, Defendants had amassed a compelling body of knowledge, 
unavailable to the general public and the broader scientific community, 
about the role of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and specifically those 
emitted from the normal use of Defendants' fossil fuel product, in 
causing global warming," according to Rhode Island's complaint. 
"Defendants took affirmative steps to conceal, from the State and the 
general public, the foreseeable impacts of the use of their fossil fuel 
products on the Earth's climate and associated harms to people and 
communities."

As recourse, Rhode Island wants oil companies to pay for sea walls and 
other infrastructure to protect human safety and property as well as 
punitive damages.

Fossil fuel companies say that climate change is too big a problem for 
the courtroom
The obvious counterargument is that humanity has also benefited 
immensely from fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and natural gas have provided 
lifesaving, economy-boosting heat and electricity to billions. The 
companies extracting these fuels say they would be out of business if 
people weren't buying what they're selling.

And it's not just the SUVs that run on gasoline or the power plants that 
burn coal that are driving climate change; it's the way we build our 
roads to accommodate cars rather than public transit, design our cities 
for sprawl rather than density, and orient our diets around meat and 
dairy instead of vegetables, fruits, and grains.

According to fossil fuel producers, putting companies on trial before a 
judge and jury doesn't come anywhere near close enough to solving the 
problem, nor does it achieve justice.

Joshua Lipshutz, an attorney at the Gibson Dunn law firm who served as 
legal counsel for Chevron, has argued that climate change is a 
fundamentally different animal compared to past applications of public 
nuisance torts. Usually, such rules are applied to a specific instance 
of pollution, like a leaking gas pipe. This problem has a defined scope 
(the amount of gas released), it was something that wasn't supposed to 
happen, and there's a specific solution (fixing the pipe, and if 
negligence is found, making the polluter pay a fine).

However, with climate change, the plaintiffs are seeking damages for 
future harms, things that have not occurred yet. They're also blaming a 
form of pollution, greenhouse gases, that can't be attributed to any one 
entity. Cars, airplanes, furnaces, and power plants all emit carbon 
dioxide. The US isn't the only country spewing carbon dioxide, and none 
of the plaintiffs are seeking an injunction against producing even more 
fossil fuels.

Another complicating factor is that every tier of government has pursued 
policies that have encouraged the use of fossil fuels, from building 
highways to subsidizing airports to constructing greenhouse gas-emitting 
power plants. So if an oil and gas company can be held liable for carbon 
dioxide emissions, so too perhaps can city governments, power companies, 
and automakers.

"The plaintiff's theory, if you take it to its natural conclusion, you 
can bring this lawsuit against anyone," Lipshutz said. "This really is 
sort of an unprecedented type of lawsuit where you're seeking to 
[punish] an important part of our economy that's perfectly lawful ... 
and for companies to pay for future damage that has not yet occurred."

But as specious as oil companies may think these suits are, they are 
taking them extremely seriously. Exxon Mobil, the world's largest 
investor-owned oil company, launched a million-dollar push last year for 
carbon tax legislation that includes immunity from climate 
change-related lawsuits. Exxon is also facing lawsuits for allegedly 
misleading investors about the risks of climate change to its business 
as well as the risks of future climate regulations. (Exxon did not 
respond to requests for comment.)

Fighting these cases also costs these companies, in time, money, and 
unwanted attention in the spotlight, so there's pressure to end these 
lawsuits quickly. "The longer the cases against oil companies drag on, 
the less happy investors will be," said Daniel Farber of the Center for 
Law, Energy, and the Environment at the University of California Berkeley.

As for the courts, judges can't even agree on who has jurisdiction over 
these kinds of lawsuits. At the US District Court for the Northern 
District of California, one judge, William Alsup, decided to move 
lawsuit from San Francisco and the City of Oakland against oil companies 
to federal court. He later dismissed the claim on the merits.

Another federal judge at the same court, Vince Chhabria, sent climate 
lawsuits filed by Marin and San Mateo counties as well as the city of 
Imperial Beach against 37 fossil fuel companies to California state court.

Both sets of decisions are being appealed at the Ninth Circuit Court of 
Appeals.

In these public nuisance lawsuits, the plaintiffs believe they have a 
better shot of winning their cases in state courts. The defendants think 
their case is stronger in federal courts and have pushed for federal 
courts to hear these cases when they've been filed in lower courts. "The 
reality is, we think that ultimately it shouldn't matter whether the 
cases should be heard in state court or federal court," Lipshutz said. 
"They are not viable legal claims."

Fossil fuel companies also say that long-shot lawsuits, especially when 
they come from states, counties, and cities, are a waste of the public's 
money and time that would be better devoted to adapting to climate 
change and directly mitigating emissions.

"Focusing resources on a novel, never-accepted theory just isn't the way 
to have a productive chance at really addressing global warming," 
Chevron's Boutrous told Vox last year. "No tort theory has ever been 
developed that comes close to covering these issues."

But even if these climate lawsuits aren't decided in favor of cities or 
states, the discovery process, where the defendants may be required to 
turn over internal documents to the court, could create new lines of 
attack. Already, we've seen leaked internal documents from oil companies 
spur lawsuits, so further revelations could lead to even more 
litigation. That's why the fossil fuel companies named in these suits 
are rushing to have these suits thrown out before they actually begin.

The children's climate change lawsuit against the federal government is 
facing a make-or-break ruling this year
In 2015, 21 plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 
the United States District Court in Oregon. The plaintiffs, now between 
the ages of 11 and 22, include Sophie Kivlehan, 20, the granddaughter of 
the famed climate scientist James Hansen, and Kelsey Cascadia Rose 
Juliana, 22, the namesake of the case Juliana v. US. The case is backed 
by the nonprofit Our Children's Trust, which has also backed similar 
suits in eight other states.

The suit argues that the US government undertook policies that 
contributed to climate change. This includes leasing public lands for 
mining, drilling, and fracking to extract fossil fuel. The complaint 
notes that the federal government has long known about the consequences 
of burning fossil fuels, namely climate change.

By pursuing these policies, the federal government is denying young 
people the constitutional right to a public resource, a safe climate.

"That's the brilliance of having children as the plaintiffs," said Ann 
Carlson, a professor of environmental law at the University of 
California Los Angeles. "They're arguing about the future of the planet."

For the plaintiffs, the goalposts are clear. "The issue here is climate 
change and the only measure of success is when this federal government 
starts recognizing its lengthy responsibility in action in causing 
climate change and a plan is implemented to cease emissions," said 
Philip Gregory, one of the lead attorneys representing the children in 
the suit. That would mean a suite of aggressive policies to limit global 
warming.

In a surprising move, the Supreme Court stepped in to pause Juliana v. 
US last year just days before the trial was set to begin. Then suddenly 
the high court allowed it to go ahead. Then in November, the Ninth 
Circuit paused the case to hear an appeal from the federal government. 
That appeals process is still underway.

The key argument from the children is that the federal government 
violated the civil rights of the plaintiffs. Gregory drew an analogy to 
racial discrimination:

Let's say the federal government develops a parking lot, and it leases a 
restaurant in the parking lot, and that restaurant even though it's 
privately owned, engages in segregation. Let's just say that. Well 
that's a constitutional violation that the government is leasing 
property that is causing harm. That harm being segregation. So now let's 
change the words. The federal government has federal lands that it's 
leasing to companies to remove coal that the federal government knows 
will be burned and cause fossil fuel emissions which will harm children 
and future generations. The federal government knows that.

It's this knowledge of resulting harm -- harm that the government has 
studied for decades -- that makes the federal government liable for the 
fossil fuel emissions resulting from its policies, Gregory argues. And 
not only did the government know about the harms of fossil fuels, it has 
had a growing suite of alternatives at its disposal. "What we're saying 
here is the evidence is uncontradicted that we have viable alternatives 
to a fossil fuel energy system," Gregory said.

This is a new, untested argument, and it could set a precedent. "It's 
clear that federal courts in the United States have not previously 
recognized a constitutional right to a clean environment or to a stable 
climate system," said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin 
Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. "In my view there 
is a compelling legal argument for it."

Asked for comment, the Justice Department referred Vox to an 82-page 
brief filed in its appeal of the suit before the Ninth Circuit. The 
brief, presented by acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert 
Clark, outlines a number of counterarguments.

The first is that the plaintiffs don't have standing and cannot 
demonstrate a particular injury since climate change is something that 
affects the whole world in complicated ways. The Justice Department 
argues that the plaintiffs didn't go through the proper regulatory 
channels outlined under the Administrative Procedure Act and that the 
Constitution doesn't hold any right to a stable climate system.

"Plaintiffs' alleged fundamental right to a 'livable climate' finds no 
basis in this Nation's history or tradition and is not even close to any 
other fundamental right recognized by the Supreme Court," Clark's filing 
states.

The Justice Department is also arguing that existing laws such as the 
Clean Air Act already cover climate change.

The question now is how the federal appeals court will weigh these 
arguments later this spring.

Fishermen and farmers are also suing for damages caused by climate change
There are numerous other climate change liability lawsuits pending in 
the US and around the world, but the circumstances around them are more 
unique.

A group of Oregon and California fishermen, represented by the largest 
commercial fishing industry trade group on the West Coast, filed a 
lawsuit in California Superior Court against 30 fossil fuel companies. 
Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are causing the ocean to 
warm and to acidify, and fishermen's yields of valuable catches like 
Dungeness crab are declining, the group noted. The Pacific Coast has 
already seen blooms of toxic algae spurred by warmer oceans. That algae 
has in turn made it unsafe to eat many of the fish and other animals in 
the water.

Unlike the lawsuits filed by the cities, the fishermen can point to 
direct monetary harm that has already occurred from warming. Several 
heat waves have struck the Pacific Ocean since 2014. The crab fishing 
season in 2015 was delayed due to the presence of an algae neurotoxin in 
shellfish. The delay forced some fishing operations ashore for good 
while harming the finances of others.

These damages may give the case stronger legal footing, but it's still 
too early to tell how the lawsuit will proceed.

Meanwhile, citizens in the Netherlands, Ireland, and Pakistan have sued 
their governments for failing to address climate change. The government 
of the Philippines is currently conducting a human rights inquiry into 
fossil fuel producers and weighing whether to enter litigation against 
these companies.

Saul Luciano Lliuya, a farmer in Peru, is suing the German energy giant 
RWE. The glaciers in the Andes mountains have lost half of their ice in 
the past 40 years, and he was worried that this would brings risks of 
landslides and flooding to his hometown of Huaraz, home to 120,000 people.

In 2015, he filed suit against RWE, a company with about $50 billion in 
annual revenue, for $20,000, the estimated cost to build a dam to 
control flooding around his city. RWE produces about 73 percent of its 
electricity from fossil fuels. It's also headquartered in Essen, 6,500 
miles away from Huaraz.

Yet surprisingly, a German court ruled in 2017 that the case has merit 
and is now collecting evidence for the proceedings.

For activists, climate lawsuits are a high-stakes, high-reward gambit
"These cases are sort of on the cutting edge," said Farber, of the 
Berkeley law center. "I think it's kind of a long shot that they're 
actually going to succeed in the end, although maybe a long shot worth 
taking just because the payoff would be so great."...
Climate change lawsuits could lead to multibillion-dollar payouts, and 
force an unwilling government to make cutting greenhouse gases a central 
priority. Both types of cases could set precedents that would last for 
decades. But litigation takes years of effort and can cost millions. If 
a court or a jury rules against the plaintiffs, they could end up worse 
off than when they started.

Given recent history, many of the nuisance lawsuits against fossil fuel 
companies will likely be tossed out. But it only takes one successful 
case to set an industry-rocking precedent.

And a successful lawsuit still might not address the underlying problem 
of greenhouse gas emissions, which are still rising in the US and still 
need a comprehensive policy solution.

"These cases are one moment in time in something that's going to be 
going on for 100 years," Yale's Sabin said. "So whether they win or not, 
they're part of that longer process and if they win, they'll reshape the 
conversation."
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/2/22/17140166/climate-change-lawsuit-exxon-juliana-liability-kids


[PETM = 56 million years ago ]
*Carbon Emissions Are Now 10x Higher Than When The Arctic Had Crocodiles 
And Palm Trees*
https://www.sciencealert.com/carbon-emissions-today-are-vastly-worse-than-earth-s-last-warming-event
--- -
[AGU Journal]
Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology
Research Article  Free Access
*Temporal Scaling of Carbon Emission and Accumulation Rates: Modern 
Anthropogenic Emissions Compared to Estimates of PETM‐Onset Accumulation*

*Abstract*
The Paleocene‐Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) was caused by a massive
release of carbon to the atmosphere. This is a benchmark global
greenhouse warming event that raised temperatures to their warmest
since extinction of the dinosaurs. Rates of carbon emission today
can be compared to those during onset of the PETM in two ways: (1)
projection of long‐term PETM rates for comparison on an annual time
scale; and (2) projection of short‐term modern rates for comparison
on a PETM time scale. Both require temporal scaling and
extrapolation for comparison on the same time scale. PETM rates are
few and projection to a short time scale is poorly constrained.
Modern rates are many and projection to a longer PETM time scale is
tightly constrained -- modern rates are some 9–10 times higher than
those during onset of the PETM. If the present trend of
anthropogenic emissions continues, we can expect to reach a
PETM‐scale accumulation of atmospheric carbon in as few as 140 to
259 years (about 5 to 10 human generations).

*Plain Language Summary*
The Paleocene‐Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) is a global greenhouse
warming event that happened 56 million years ago, causing extinction
in the world's oceans and accelerated evolution on the continents.
It was caused by release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases to the atmosphere. When we compare the rate of release of
greenhouse gases today to the rate of accumulation during the PETM
we must compare the rates on a common time scale. Projection of
modern rates to a PETM time scale is tightly constrained and shows
that we are now emitting carbon some 9‐10 times faster than during
the PETM. If the present trend of increasing carbon emissions
continues, we may see PETM‐magnitude extinction and accelerated
evolution in as few as 140 years or about five human generations.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018PA003379


*This Day in Climate History - February 25, 2005 - from D.R. Tucker*
  In a piece on state-level efforts to address carbon pollution, the 
Boston Phoenix's Deirdre Fulton notes:

"Though the United States accounts for almost 25 percent -- more
than any other single country -- of the world's global-warming
emissions, advocates say there's been little federal action on this
issue since at least 2001. That's when George W. Bush, echoing
concerns that had also been voiced by his predecessor Bill Clinton,
opted out of Kyoto, citing national economic concerns and calling on
developing nations to commit to greater sacrifices than they do
under the current agreement. No wonder China, India, Mexico, and
Brazil signed on, say US and Australian leaders. They have much less
to lose as more stringent emissions regulations go into effect for
other nations worldwide.

"The US position may or may not be fair, but we do know this much:
it doesn't move us very far toward addressing the looming problem of
global warming. And that makes regional and state-level efforts all
the more important."

http://web.archive.org/web/20050315235150/http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi_3/documents/04495072.asp
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

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