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

[Richard Pauli]

/March 19, 2019/


[We knew in 72]
*U.S. Government Knew Climate Risks in 1970s, Energy Advisory Group 
Documents Show*
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/03/18/national-petroleum-council-climate-change/

*
*

[Catastrophic flooding]
*'THE PERFECT STORM': HOW CLIMATE CHANGE MADE THE 'HISTORIC' FLOODING IN 
NEBRASKA, IOWA WORSE*
Climate change could be the reason flooding in the Midwest has risen to 
historic levels, as states such as Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin have 
declared states of emergency. If ocean warming continues, these types of 
floods and storms will likely get worse.

Professor Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science 
Center, told Newsweek that the kind of storm seen in the Midwest is 
providing a lot of moisture and energy from the Gulf of Mexico. As the 
oceans, which continue to grow warmer, and the cold air from the Arctic 
combine, Mann said that is how you get the "perfect storm."

"This latest storm system, like classic Nor'easters, derives its energy 
in part from the warm moist air off the ocean. In this case, we're 
talking about very warm Gulf of Mexico sea-surface temperatures, 
providing the storm with lots of moisture and lots of energy. As the 
oceans continue to warm, we expect larger contrasts between cold Arctic 
air masses and warm oceans that they meet, and temperature contrasts are 
part of what drives a typical midlatitude storm," Mann told Newsweek. 
"Add to that the extra energy from the Gulf moisture and you have all of 
the makings of--if you'll forgive the expression--a perfect storm, with 
large amounts of precipitation and the potential for extreme flooding 
from a combination of rainfall and rapid snowmelt."

Mann said these kinds of storms will continue to impact the U.S. and 
cause severe flooding.

"There is evidence that climate change is increasing these underlying 
factors, supporting the development of more intense 'bomb cyclones' and 
nor'easters, packing tropical storm–scale winds and dumping huge amounts 
of precipitation," Mann said. "So we expect even more extreme events of 
this sort if we continue to warm the planet by increasing the 
concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from fossil-fuel 
burning and other human activities."

"This really is the most devastating flooding we've probably ever had in 
our state's history, from the standpoint of how widespread it is," 
Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts told CNN in a statement on Monday.

Three people died from the storm, including an 80-year-old woman from 
Columbus, Nebraska, who was trapped in her home during the flooding, the 
Omaha-World Herald reported. As of Monday, the National Weather Service 
said there was still significant flooding.

"Historic flooding continues across the Plains and Midwest this week 
with many rivers at 'major flood' stage. Many roads are closed due to 
flooding in the region and they're closed for good reason. 50 of all 
flood deaths are vehicle related. Turn around, don't drown!" the 
National Weather Service tweeted Monday.
https://www.newsweek.com/expert-severe-flooding-nebraska-iowa-climate-change-storms-1366734 



[10 minute PRI radio report Central American migration]
*Climate change is the overlooked driver of Central American migration*
Living on Earth February 06, 2019 - Writer Adam Wernick
As people from Guatemala and Honduras continue to seek sanctuary in the 
US for a variety of reasons, including violence and poverty, another 
factor driving their migration has gotten much less attention: climate 
disruption.

Many members of the migrant "caravans" that made headlines during the 
2018 US midterm elections are fleeing a massive drought that has lasted 
for five years.

The drought has hit harder in some places than in others, says John 
Sutter, senior investigative reporter for CNN, who went to rural 
Honduras to report on climate change and immigration. In the area of 
Central America known as the "dry corridor," for example, drought is not 
uncommon. But, Sutter says, some of the climate scientists he spoke with 
say they are seeing unprecedented effects.
- -
"In particular, spring rains, which are incredibly important for corn 
crops -- a staple in this region -- just haven't been coming," Sutter 
reports. "They're almost completely missing when you look at the average 
rainfall by the month. It's partly that rains have decreased; it's 
partly that they've shifted and are no longer falling in the seasons 
when they have been so useful to farmers in the past. But it's been very 
troubling and created a lot of hardship."
- -
Many people who live in the dry corridor of Central America are 
subsistence farmers, completely reliant on what they grow for their 
survival. Unlike in the US and parts of Europe, there is no crop 
insurance or other programs to tide farmers over in bad years. Often, 
there are no irrigation systems, either. So, if the rains don't fall, 
crops simply don't grow.
- -
"If you have one bad year and the rains don't fall, that creates a 
certain stress," Sutter says. "If you have year after year after year -- 
and, at this point, essentially five years of very bad drought 
conditions -- then that's when conditions can lead to hunger and 
starvation."

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says 2 million people in the 
region are at risk for hunger, Sutter points out.

"I think that's [something] people underestimate about the caravan, or 
any migration story, really, when you hear about it: It has to be really 
bad for you to want to flee a problem," Sutter says. "There's an 
incredible attachment to a sense of home and place, especially among 
people who are farmers, who are attached to the land. It's a big deal to 
think about leaving. That gives you a hint at how intense the situation 
is for many farmers."

While President Donald Trump claims that caravans of migrants heading 
from Central America to the US are an "invasion" of "gang members and 
very bad people," his own commissioner of the US Customs and Border 
Protection says that crop failure is one of the main drivers of migration...
- - -
Migration stories are always complex," Sutter says. "It's not untrue 
that violence is driving people out; it's not untrue that poverty is 
driving people out. But it is also true that climate change and severe 
drought are causing people to move from Central America, and from other 
[regions]. And I think that we have to look at that in a clear-eyed way 
and think about what that means."

He adds: "I wish the administration, or really anyone in Washington, 
would talk about this issue of migration in terms of climate change, 
because the projections for how many climate migrants or climate 
refugees there will be in the world are uncertain, and we're not 
preparing for that."

If anything, Sutter says, the United States and some European countries 
are doing the opposite. They are putting up walls and barriers and 
trying to slow the movement of people -- fully knowing that climate 
change is going to push people out their homes.

The United States has done more than any other country to cause global 
warming, while many of the people suffering from the worst effects of 
this warming have done little, if anything, to cause it, Sutter points out.

"I think it's a really important moral question we need to ask 
ourselves: We're causing this hardship in parts of the world many of us 
may never travel through or see, but it's real and it's causing 
repercussions, one of which is that people are on the move to try to 
make ends meet, to try to make a livelihood," Sutter says. "It doesn't 
invalidate the other stories that we've heard about the caravan, but it 
certainly complicates them."

Many climate experts believe the big, industrialized countries -- the 
US, Europe, China -- owe it to these people to tell this part of the 
story to the world.

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Living on 
Earth with Steve Curwood.
https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-02-06/climate-change-overlooked-driver-central-american-migration



[Not while the people who have the most to lose remain in charge]
*Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the 
stomach for it?*
Phil McDuff
Policy tweaks won't do it, we need to throw the kitchen sink at this 
with a total rethink of our relationship to ownership, work and capital
Climate change activism is increasingly the domain of the young, such as 
16-year-old Greta Thunberg, the unlikely face of the school strike for 
climate movement, which has seen many thousands of children walk out of 
school to demand that their parents' generation takes responsibility for 
leaving them a planet to live on. In comparison, the existing political 
establishment looks more and more like an impediment to change. The 
consequences of global warming have moved from the merely theoretical 
and predicted to observable reality over the past few years, but this 
has not been matched by an uptick in urgency. The need to keep the 
wheels of capitalism well-oiled takes precedence even against a backdrop 
of fires, floods and hurricanes.

Today's children, as they become more politically aware, will be much 
more radical than their parents, simply because there will be no other 
choice for them. This emergent radicalism is already taking people by 
surprise. The Green New Deal (GND), a term presently most associated 
with 29-year-old US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has 
provoked a wildly unhinged backlash from the "pro free market" wing, who 
argue that it's a Trojan horse, nothing more than an attempt to 
piggyback Marxism onto the back of climate legislation.

The criticism feels ridiculous. Partly because the GND is far from truly 
radical and already represents a compromise solution, but mainly because 
the radical economics isn't a hidden clause, but a headline feature. 
Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial 
system. GND-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes 
with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required 
to keep us at a temperature anywhere below "absolutely catastrophic" is 
fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo.

Right now we can, with a massive investment of effort by 2030, just 
about keep the warming level below 1.5C. This is "bad, but manageable" 
territory. Failing to put that effort in sees the world crossing more 
severe temperature barriers that would lead to outcomes like ecosystem 
collapse, ocean acidification, mass desertification, and coastal cities 
being flooded into inhabitability.

We will simply have to throw the kitchen sink at this. Policy tweaks 
such as a carbon tax won't do it. We need to fundamentally re-evaluate 
our relationship to ownership, work and capital. The impact of a 
dramatic reconfiguration of the industrial economy require similarly 
large changes to the welfare state. Basic incomes, large-scale public 
works programmes, everything has to be on the table to ensure that the 
oncoming system shocks do not leave vast swathes of the global 
population starving and destitute. Perhaps even more fundamentally, we 
cannot continue to treat the welfare system as a tool for disciplining 
the supposedly idle underclasses. Our system must be reformed with a 
more humane view of worklessness, poverty and migration than we have now.

Unfortunately for our children, the people they have to convince of all 
this are the people who have done very well out of this system, and are 
powerfully incentivised to deny that it is all that bad. Already, Joke 
Schauvliege, a Belgian environment minister, has been forced to resign 
after falsely claiming that she had been told by Belgian state security 
services that "ghosts" behind the scenes were behind demonstrations in 
Belgium.

This conspiracism of the elite, these claims that genuine mass movement 
can't possibly really exist and must be in some way being guided by 
agents provocateurs, is just one of the ways in which those currently 
running things have resorted to a kind of political gaslighting in an 
attempt to maintain their grip on power...
Gaslighting is a term I don't use lightly, because it describes a 
genuine form of emotional abuse, where an abuser will deny reality in an 
attempt to get their victim to literally doubt their own sanity, and 
this should not be diluted by overuse. Yet I struggle to think of 
another word that adequately sums up the way in which "sensible" adults 
are doubling down on their tactic of manufacturing a political reality 
which bears no relationship to the world we see around us. It's the 
Marxism of Groucho rather than Karl: "Who are you going to believe? The 
serious political professionals or your own lying eyes?"

US Senator Dianne Feinstein's meeting with schoolchildren petitioning 
her to take action over the issue went viral because of the way she 
condescended to them for, basically, asking her to leave them a planet 
behind to live on. "I've been doing this for 30 years," she said, "I 
know what I'm doing." The obvious response is, of course, that messing 
something up for 30 years is quite long enough, thanks. Long tenure 
without results is not the same thing as expertise.

This is a tough and bitter pill to swallow for the political 
professionals whose feet are firmly under the table. It is increasingly 
obvious that all their tactics have done almost nothing except run down 
the clock, but still they insist that it's the young who just don't get 
it and that things aren't that simple. They're the living embodiment of 
the famous New Yorker cartoon, with a suited man sat in a 
post-apocalyptic landscape telling his young audience "Yes, the planet 
got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of 
value for shareholders."...
This is reality v the vested interests of the powerful. Any meaningful 
policy has to upset the established power base and the political donor 
class. Any policy that doesn't upset these people will be useless. To 
pretend that we can compromise our way through this while we wait for a 
magical, technological bullet that will keep temperatures down without 
costing us anything is beyond wilful ignorance now. It is a question of 
basic morality.

Many of today's climate strikers won't even be 30 by the time the 1.5C 
deadline comes around in 2030. They are asking us to consider a simple 
question: is their future worth more than preserving our reputations? 
What will our response to them be?
Phil McDuff writes on economics and social policy
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/ending-climate-change-end-capitalism


[video CBS news on the student strike]
*Marching for a Cause, Marching for Change*
*Thousands of students skip school to demand action on climate change*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG4SYJimY30
- - -
[video from Australian Broadcast Corporatio]
*Students strike to demand climate action - ABC News*
ABC News (Australia)
Published on Mar 15, 2019
On Friday March 16, Tens of thousands of Australian students walked out 
of school to march in support of action on climate change.
Sydney organisers Jean Hinchliffe and Ambrose Hayes joins ABC News 
Breakfast to explain why marched, and why they marched on a school day.
Read more here: https://ab.co/2FgUaGy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tgGoxCg4nM
- - -
[more tv coverage from FSTV]
*Student Climate Strike Aims to End Global Warming Before It's Too Late*
Student Climate Strike saw children across the globe march out of 
Classrooms to fight Global Warming. Inspired by Greta Thunberg, a 16 
year old political activist demanding urgent action from lawmakers to 
tackle the causes of global climate change. Julia Olsen from Our 
Children's Trust joins the Thom Hartmann Program to discuss how children 
are leading the fight against climate change by skipping class and 
taking to the streets. Can the children successfully take on the 
industries that are polluting our planet and convince lawmakers that 
climate change is an existential threat to the planet?
https://freespeech.org/stories/student-climate-strike-aims-to-end-global-warming-before-its-too-late/
https://youtu.be/wiOc3lx8BII


[A classic essay]*
****Deep adaptation, post-sustainability and the possibility of societal 
collapse*
By Kurt Cobb, originally published by Resource Insights
March 17, 2019
I write this piece primarily to get you to read an academic paper that 
has attracted relatively widespread attention. It is entitled "Deep 
Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy."

It is remarkable in a number of aspects. First, it was written by a 
professor of sustainability leadership who has been heavily involved for 
a long time in helping organizations including governments, nonprofits 
and corporations to become more sustainable. Second, the author, Jem 
Bendall, has now concluded the following after an exhaustive review of 
the most up-to-date findings about climate change:  "inevitable 
collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction." Third, his 
paper was rejected for publication not because it contained any errors 
of fact, but largely because it was too negative and thought to breed 
hopelessness.

It is important to understand what Bendall means by "collapse" in this 
context. He does not necessarily mean an event taking place in a 
relatively short period of time all over the world all at once. Rather, 
he means severe disruptions of our lives and societies to a degree than 
renders our current institutional arrangements largely irrelevant. He 
believes we won't be able to respond to the scope of suffering and 
change by doing things the way we are doing them now with only a few 
reformist tweaks.

That this idea doesn't go down well in sustainability circles should be 
no surprise. That's because our current arrangements, even if "reformed" 
to take environmental imperatives into account, are in no way equal to 
the task ahead. Our existing institutions are structurally incapable of 
responding to what is coming and so consulting about how to reform them 
is largely a fool's errand--not the way sustainability experts and 
consultants want to be thought of.

Instead, Bendall proposes a "post-sustainability" ethic. We must give up 
on the hope that our society can proceed largely on its current 
trajectory--with proper allowances, of course, for carbon emission 
reduction and climate change adaptation--and embrace what he calls "deep 
adaptation." That agenda calls for resilience, relinquishment and 
restoration. The words themselves, especially "relinquishment," convey 
something of the radical approach Bendall believes is now necessary. For 
details I implore you to read the paper.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this paper is its detailed 
discussion of what Bendall calls "collapse denial." Understanding the 
psychology behind the denial of collapse as a possibility and the 
opprobrium visited on those who speak of it openly is essential for 
grasping the current discourse on climate change (and many other 
existential environmental topics).

Hope, it turns out, can be an opiate. It can keep you from thinking 
about what you might have to do if the worst happens. Whether you agree 
with Bendall or not about the inevitability of collapse, reading him 
will likely disrupt your usual ways of thinking about responses to our 
environmental challenges and likely increase the scope of responses you 
are willing to consider.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-03-17/deep-adaptation-post-sustainability-and-the-possibility-of-societal-collapse/
- - -
[The essay is a PDF file]
*"Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy."*

    Since records began in 1850, seventeen of the eighteen hottest years
    have
    occurred since 2000. Important steps on climate mitigation and
    adaptation
    have been taken over the past decade. However, these steps could now be
    regarded as equivalent to walking up a landslide. If the landslide
    had not
    already begun, then quicker and bigger steps would get us to the top of
    where we want to be. Sadly, the latest climate data, emissions data and
    data on the spread of carbon-intensive lifestyles show that the
    landslide has
    already begun. As the point of no return can't be fully known until
    after the
    event, ambitious work on reducing carbon emissions and extracting more
    from the air (naturally and synthetically) is more critical than
    ever. That
    must involve a new front of action on methane.

http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf


[book review interview from the NewYorker]
*How Governments React to Climate Change: An Interview with the 
Political Theorists Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann*
By Isaac Chotiner
January 14, 2019
In "*Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future*," 
Joel Wainwright, a professor of geography at Ohio State University, and 
Geoff Mann, the director of the Center for Global Political Economy at 
Simon Fraser University, consider how to approach a problem of such 
international dimensions. They look at several different political 
futures for our warming planet, and argue that a more forceful 
international order, or "Climate Leviathan," is emerging, but unlikely 
to mitigate catastrophic warming.

I recently spoke by phone with Wainwright and Mann. An edited and 
condensed version of the conversation follows.
*Does global warming fundamentally change how you evaluate international 
politics and sovereignty and the idea of the nation-state, or is it more 
evidence of a crisis that already existed?*

Wainwright: One of the arguments in our book is that, under pressure 
from the looming challenges of climate change, we can expect changes in 
the organization of political sovereignty. It's going to be the first 
major change that humans have lived through in a while, since the 
emergence of what we sometimes think of as the modern period of 
sovereignty, as theorized by Thomas Hobbes, among others. We should 
expect that after, more than likely, a period of extended conflict and 
real problems for the existing global order, we'll see the emergence of 
something that we describe as planetary sovereignty.

So, in that scenario, we could look at the current period with the 
crisis of liberal democracies all around the planet and the emergence of 
figures like Bolsonaro and Trump and [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] 
Modi as symptoms of a more general crisis, which is simultaneously 
ecological, political, and economic. Maybe this is quibbling with your 
question, of trying to disaggregate the causal variable. Which comes 
first--is it the ecological or the political and economic?--is a little 
bit difficult because it's all entangled.

Mann: I think we're going to witness and are already witnessing, in its 
emergent form, lots of changes to what we think of as the sovereign 
nation-state. Some of that change right now is super-reactionary--some 
groups are trying to make it stronger and more impervious than it's been 
in a long time. Then, other kinds of forces are driving it to 
disintegrate, both in ways we might think of as pretty negative, like 
some of the things that are happening in the E.U., but also in other 
ways that we might think of as positive, in the sense of international 
coöperation. There's some discussion about what to do about climate 
migration, at least.

I think one of the interesting things that's happening right now is that 
we have so few political, institutional tools, and, I would say, 
conceptual tools to handle the kinds of changes that are required. 
Everyone knows climate change is happening and it's getting worse and 
worse, and everyone's trying to fight off the worst parts of it, but 
we're not really getting together as everyone thinks that we need to.
I think that the nation-state is one of the few tools that people feel 
like they have and so they're wielding it in crazy ways. Some people are 
trying to build walls. Other people are trying to use their powers to 
convince others to go along with their plans. I think we have so few 
tools to deal with this problem that the nation-state is kind of being 
swung around like a dead cat, with the hope that it'll hit something and 
help.

*One of the most depressing and scary parts of this is that global 
warming is exacerbating economic problems, and migration and 
refugee-related problems, that are actually making the political 
dynamics within these countries worse and opening up a window for people 
like Trump.**
*
Wainwright: I think your hypothesis, of a cyclical undermining of the 
global liberal order, is potentially valid. In fairness, it's not 
exactly what Geoff and I are saying in the book. You may be right and 
you may be wrong. If you wanted to strengthen that hypothesis, you'd 
have to clarify in exactly what way the authoritarian, neoliberal, 
climate-denialist position that we see represented by those diverse 
figures--again Modi, Bolsonaro, Trump, et cetera--represents the 
opposite of something else.

Part of the reason we wrote the book is because--I think Geoff and I 
would both say--there's a lot of talk right now in places like Canada 
and the United States about what we have and what we need, that when it 
comes to climate change is pretty vague, on the political, philosophical 
fundamentals. What exactly do Trump and Modi represent? Where does it 
come from, and why is it so clearly connected to climate denialism, and 
in what way is that crazy ensemble--or what appears to us as crazy and 
new--connected to the liberal dream of a rational response to climate 
change that's organized on a planetary basis?

*This gets to some of the scenarios you lay out in the book, and why you 
are so pessimistic about the current order. What are those scenarios?*

Mann: In the book, we lay out what we think of as possible futures. 
They're really, really broad, and there's lots of room for maneuvers in 
them and they could blur a bit.

One of them, which we think is quite likely, is what we call Climate 
Leviathan. Another one is Climate Mao--that would be a sovereign, but it 
would operate more on the principles of what we might think of as a 
Maoist tradition, a quasi-authoritarian attempt to fix climate change by 
getting everyone in line. Then there's the Behemoth [their term for a 
reactionary order]. We, at the time we started to work on the book, had 
in our heads the caricature of Sarah Palin, because that was the moment 
of "Drill, baby, drill."
The last thing we call Climate X, and that's the hopeful scenario. That 
is the sense we both have that the way to address climate change is 
definitely not international meetings that achieve nothing over and over 
again, in big cities all over the world. The attempts by liberal 
capitalist states like Canada or the U.S. to regulate tiny bits here and 
there, implement tiny little carbon taxes, to try to get people to buy 
solar panels. This is not anywhere near enough, nor coordinated in any 
meaningful way to actually get us out of this problem.

I think Joel and I really feel strongly that Climate X describes a whole 
array of stuff that isn't attached to this completely failing set of 
institutions. So, with Climate X, we're going to see activity happening 
at local levels, bridges across boundaries that you don't think about 
now, institutions refuting the state entirely, like so many indigenous 
people from Canada going ahead and doing things on their own, building 
new alliances, discovering ways of managing the collapsing ecosystems 
and political institutions around in creative ways. We don't see a map 
to this and the attempts to map it thus far have been a total and 
complete failure. Our hope is that we reinforce what is already 
happening in so many communities.

*Climate change has caused me to think not just about what kinds of 
action are needed but also about whether our whole moral framework 
should change. I don't want people in Bangladesh to start blowing up 
Chinese coal plants, but I also wonder whether we need to start thinking 
about what is and is not O.K. differently because this is so dire.*

Wainwright: We agree with you completely. What's notable is the 
disjuncture between what any clear-eyed observer will see really needs 
to happen fast and the depth of the seeming incapacity in the world's 
political and economic arrangements to move beyond even the first basic 
steps. So, the masses as well as many élites are realigning in all these 
strange combinations and producing figures like Trump and Bolsonaro.

As far as refugees go, the world has a large number of people who are 
sometimes called climate refugees today. There is still no international 
definition of a climate refugee that is generally accepted. If we take a 
reasonably capacious definition of a climate refugee, it's someone who 
has been displaced, at least in part, because of climate change. There 
are probably already tens of millions of climate refugees in the world 
today, including a pretty significant number of people from places like 
Honduras and Guatemala and Mexico, who have come to the United States, 
although we don't tend to talk about them that way.

Some estimates are as high as two hundred million climate refugees by 
2050 or so, although that's really speculation because no one really 
knows. It could easily creep into [several] hundreds of millions if the 
expectations of flooding in places like Bangladesh and the Caribbean and 
Indonesia come to pass.

In the face of all that, the present liberal-capitalist international 
order has utterly failed, as we've all said, and we can't expect people 
to just do nothing. They're going to look elsewhere for answers to their 
problems. To make a huge generalization, they're not turning toward the 
mainstream ideological resources of liberal modernity. They're turning 
to variations on religious metaphysics and often, unfortunately, forms 
of ethnic and religious exclusion. So, hence the desperate need for us 
to develop a new political theory of this moment and new utopian ideas.

*I don't think that's entirely wrong, but, at least in the United 
States, people say they don't believe in climate change because there's 
been a systematic campaign to lie to them. Exxon documents are coming 
out in lawsuits all the time. It is one thing to say, "Well, this is a 
failing of the liberal order," and people looking for alternatives, 
which I think is true, but it's also true that people are being taken 
advantage of and lied to, and maybe the critique of capitalism is that 
it allows people like Rupert Murdoch to shape the perceptions of large 
chunks of the country.*

Mann: You're right, there's tons of media flying around, there's all 
sorts of efforts to hide the truth, to hide the science, to twist things 
to get people to naïvely take up positions that are not only against 
everyone's interests but against their own as well, and in the interests 
of the most powerful.

It's also the case that these are generally characterized, and 
accurately so, as class issues. One aspect of the critique of capitalism 
that you mentioned is the way in which capitalism produces and 
reinforces class divides that lead to a situation in which, to some 
extent, we're seeing different fations of the élite struggle over the 
support of the masses. So, in many ways, the problem can be attributed 
to the fact that so many voters don't believe in climate change, but in 
actual fact, I would say that the problem really is a failure of the 
liberal order that can produce a situation in which, for one thing, that 
can occur, but secondly, in which the élites who control the state water 
down all its attempts to confront climate change.

Even here in Canada, where of course the problems are bad, but not as 
bad as they are in the U.S., we have a state that says it's fully 
committed to addressing climate change, but it actually is doing no more 
than Trump. So we're in a situation where it's hard to believe that it's 
only conspiracy theory that has prevented us achieving anything. I 
really do think it's much more systematic than that.

*How do you want people to think and respond to something like what 
Bolsonaro is proposing with the rain forest?*

Mann: I think both Joel and I would say that the most effective 
mechanisms are supporting those in Brazil who oppose Bolsonaro, and 
there are millions and millions. We sometimes forget that a lot of 
leaders are in power with the support of far less than half their 
population, just because of the way that the elections work. So it's not 
like there's not an enormous part of Brazil that is terrified of 
Bolsonaro and doing everything they can to stop him. I think that our 
reaction from far away, of course, should take into account the fact 
that we can't restart imperialism in the interest of climate change, but 
we can figure out ways to support those who are doing their best to stop 
this from happening.

Some of that, of course, could be something as simple as a consumer 
boycott, but I think that, fundamentally, it's going to require 
alliances and support that reach much further down in the political, 
economic strata of Brazil. Figuring out how to get in there and help 
those people, that's a challenge in and of itself.

*We've heard a lot about how Western countries industrialized at a time 
when we didn't really know climate change was happening, and we here in 
the West got really rich. Now countries in the rest of the world want to 
go through the same process to raise the standard of living for their 
people, but at the same time we know that climate change is happening. 
I'm curious how you, as leftists, think about a situation where rich 
countries start telling poor ones what they can and can't do and 
enforcing that in some way, even if it's in the service of an end that 
we all think is beneficial to the planet.*

Mann: That scenario you just described is a pretty big part of what Joel 
and I call Climate Leviathan. That's not what we're hoping for, but we 
think it's very likely.

Wainwright: I would say that, right now, the core powerful capitalist 
societies are in fact telling developing and poor countries what to do 
about all kinds of things. But their general encouragement--whether it's 
through financial policy or trade policy or military bases or what have 
you--tends to be in the direction of locking in fossil-fuel extraction 
and consumption. There is no way around the fact that the U.S. 
government has played a major role in building, reinforcing, and 
protecting the global oil industry--Saudi Arabia is just the best-known 
illustration. What Geoff and I would point to instead, as an alternative 
to imperialism, is a lot more old-fashioned transnational solidarity on 
behalf of ordinary people all over the world, in the name of climate 
justice. That's what we desperately need.

On this point about transnational, trans-class solidarity and climate 
justice, it might be worth taking a look at Pope Francis's encyclical 
Laudato Si, which has probably been, to my mind, the most important book 
on these questions in my lifetime. In a series of statements that Pope 
Francis makes in that text, he reconfigures Catholic theology as a 
process of forging a planetary solidarity for humanity, in a world still 
to come. O.K., we're not Catholics. Geoff and I aren't directly quoting 
Francis and saying, "You see, the Pope has it all figured out," but 
we're basically stretching and pointing in the same direction.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-governments-react-to-climate-change-an-interview-with-the-political-theorists-joel-wainwright-and-geoff-mann



[Exxon trouble]
*D.C. Could Be Next to Investigate Exxon for Climate Fraud*
By Karen Savage
The District of Columbia could be the next community in line to file a 
climate change-related lawsuit against oil giant ExxonMobil.

Washington D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine posted a link to a 
solicitation seeking outside legal counsel in support of an 
investigation and potential litigation against Exxon for potential fraud.

In the solicitation, which he posted on Twitter on Friday, Racine said 
that Exxon has known since the 1970s that its products contributed 
significantly to climate change, which would accelerate and harm the 
environment.

"However, despite this knowledge, in connection with selling gasoline to 
D.C. consumers and others, Exxon has failed to inform consumers about 
the effects of its fossil fuel products on climate change. Exxon has 
also engaged or funded efforts to mislead D.C. consumers and others on 
the impacts of climate change," Racine said in the document, adding that 
Exxon's conduct may have violated local law, including the Consumer 
Protection Procedures Act, which prohibits "deceptive and 
unconscionable" business practices.

The proposed legal work would be done on a contingency fee basis and the 
attorneys would not be compensated unless their work leads to a monetary 
award. If an award is granted, the contracted firm could be reimbursed 
up to $1 million. The D.C. attorney general's office said it would 
retain sole authority in the direction of the investigation. 
Municipalities commonly hire outside counsel to assist with complex 
litigation.

Exxon is facing a mounting number of climate change-related lawsuits and 
investigations by attorneys general.

https://oag.dc.gov/sites/default/files/2019-03/OAG-RFP-DCCB-2019-R-0011-Outside-Counsel-for-Climate-Change-Litigation-Issued-2-28-19_1.pdf

The Rhode Island attorney general filed suit against the company, along 
with four other oil giants, last July for knowingly contributed to 
climate change and failing to adequately warn Rhode Island citizens 
about the risks posed by their products. New York filed suit in October 
after a lengthy investigation found the company had allegedly deceived 
investors for years by deliberately downplaying the climate risks to its 
business and long-term financial health...
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is investigating whether 
Exxon deceived Massachusetts shareholders by failing to divulge 
potential climate change-related risks to their investments.

Exxon did not immediately respond to a request for comment...
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/03/18/washington-dc-exxon-climate-fraud/ 



*This Day in Climate History - March 19, 2006 - from D.R. Tucker*
March 19, 2006: The CBS News program "60 Minutes" reports on the Bush 
administration's aggressive censorship of climate science, featuring 
interviews with NASA scientist James Hansen and White House 
whistleblower Rick Piltz. The program is seen by over 15 million viewers.
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2006/03/21/60-minutes-global-warming-story-rewriting-the-science/
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

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