[TheClimate.Vote] November 27, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Richard Pauli richard at theclimate.vote
Wed Nov 27 10:25:28 EST 2019 

/November 27, 2019/

[Population knows Climate and Environment]
*Americans increasingly see climate change as a crisis, poll shows*
A growing number of Americans describe climate change as a crisis, and 
two-thirds say President Trump is doing too little to tackle the problem.
The results, from a poll conducted by The Washington Post and the Kaiser 
Family Foundation (KFF), point to a growing disconnect between Americans 
worried about the warming planet and Trump administration officials, who 
have aggressively scaled back Obama-era environmental regulations and 
relinquished the nation's role as a global leader in pushing for climate 
action.
The poll finds that a strong majority of Americans -- about 8 in 10 -- 
say that human activity is fueling climate change, and roughly half 
believe action is urgently needed within the next decade if humanity is 
to avert its worst effects. Nearly 4 in 10 now say climate change is a 
"crisis," up from less than a quarter five years ago...
- - -
The Post-KFF poll also reveals a mixture of optimism about innovation 
and high levels of anxiety about climate change. Popular literature and 
films often portray a dystopian future, and many young people wonder 
whether they should bring children into the warming world. Yet 7 in 10 
say it is very likely or somewhat likely that technological advances 
will stave off most of the negative effects of climate change -- even 
though no large-scale breakthrough is on the horizon.
That belief in innovation is not firmly held; barely 2 in 10 think it 
very likely that technology will save the day. At the same time, 6 in 10 
think they will have to make only minor individual sacrifices -- if any 
-- to help combat climate change...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/americans-increasingly-see-climate-change-as-a-crisis-poll-shows/2019/09/12/74234db0-cd2a-11e9-87fa-8501a456c003_story.html



[Data rules]
*Power Up: Climate catastrophe alert: Emissions spiked under Trump and 
the world is taking notice*
**https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/powerup/2019/11/26/powerup-climate-catastrophe-alert-emission-spiked-under-trump-and-the-world-is-taking-notice/5ddca94388e0fa652bbbda38/



[from Quartz]
*Young Republicans think GOP boomers are on the wrong side of the 
climate debate*
**By Michael J. Coren - November 26, 2019
Establishment Republicans will probably never authorize sweeping action 
on climate change. The Fox News crowd is twice as likely as other 
Republicans to say climate change isn't caused by humans--the scientific 
consensus confirmed by decades upon decades (pdf) of studies (as well as 
the laws of physics).

But that's not true for young Republicans (as well as most of the GOP 
under the age of 38). Pew Research Center recently polled 3,627 US 
adults to gauge their opinion on climate change, and the results show a 
generational divide in the GOP getting wider with every generation...
While only 31% of boomers (1946-64) say the federal government does too 
little to reduce the effects of climate change, 52% of millennials (born 
after 1980) say the same thing. Overall, two-thirds of US adults (67%) 
agree the US government does too little...
Don't expect change anytime soon. The average age of the 115th Congress 
(pdf) is among the highest in American history: 57.8 years old for House 
members, and 61.8 for senators. But a changing of the guard is inevitable.

While it's unlikely enough GOP incumbents (or older conservative voters) 
will change their mind on climate to break a congressional stalemate, 
movement is unlikely to depend on convincing opponents of climate policy.

As German physicist Max Planck once said about progress in science, it 
advances one funeral (or retirement) at a time. "A new scientific truth 
does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the 
light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new 
generation grows up that is familiar with it," he wrote in his 1968 
autobiography. When it comes the politics of climate change, the axiom 
may apply to Congress as well.
https://qz.com/1755832/young-republicans-want-federal-action-on-climate-change/



[WAPO article]
*In bleak report, U.N. says drastic action is only way to avoid worst 
effects of climate change*
"We need to catch up on the years in which we procrastinated," a top 
official says.
- - -
On Monday, the intergovernmental World Meteorological Organization 
reported that levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had hit a 
record high and that the trend "means that future generations will be 
confronted with increasingly severe impacts of climate change."
With climate change, these Canadian islands are crumbling into the sea
"There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, in greenhouse 
gases concentration in the atmosphere despite all the commitments under 
the Paris Agreement," WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas said in an 
announcement, noting that the last time the Earth experienced comparable 
CO2 concentrations, "sea level was 10 to 20 meters higher than now."
- - -
Niklas Hohne, a German climatologist and founding partner of NewClimate 
Institute, which created the Climate Action Tracker, a tool that tracks 
whether nations are meeting their goals, said Tuesday's report 
demonstrates in painful detail how past inaction has made the urgency 
around climate change more dire.
"We are not a little bit off, we are far off from where we should be," 
Hohne said in an email. "The longer action is delayed, the higher cuts 
will be required. We cannot wait another 10 years."
- - -
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/11/26/bleak-report-un-says-drastic-action-is-only-way-avoid-worst-impacts-climate-change/

- - -

[NYTimes agrees]
*'Bleak' U.N. Report Finds World Heading to Climate Catastrophes*
Four years after countries struck a landmark deal in Paris to rein in 
greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to avert the worst effects of 
global warming, humanity is headed toward those very climate 
catastrophes, according to a United Nations report issued Tuesday, with 
China and the United States, the two biggest polluters, having expanded 
their carbon footprints last year.

"The summary findings are bleak," the report said, because countries 
have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions even after 
repeated warnings from scientists. The result, the authors added, is 
that "deeper and faster cuts are now required."

The world's 20 richest countries, responsible for more than 
three-fourths of emissions, must take the biggest, swiftest steps to 
move away from fossil fuels, the report emphasized. The richest country 
of all, the United States, however, has formally begun to pull out of 
the Paris accord altogether...
- - -
Those who have followed the diplomatic negotiations say they are 
confronted by something of a cognitive dissonance when they think about 
this moment. The world's biggest polluters are nowhere near where they 
should be to draw down their emissions at a time when the human toll of 
climate change is near impossible to ignore.

And yet, renewable energy is spreading faster than could have been 
anticipated even a few years ago; electric buses and cars are 
proliferating and young people are protesting by the millions in rich 
and poor countries alike. Even in the United States, with its persistent 
denialist movement, how to deal with climate change is a resonant issue 
in the presidential campaign.

"There's a bit of a best of times, worst of times about this," said 
David Waskow, director of the international climate initiative at the 
World Resources Institute, a research and advocacy group.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/climate/greenhouse-gas-emissions-carbon.html



[to the wordsmith, everything is poetry]
*Poets for the Planet* is a community of kindred poets, performers, 
artists and creative activists raising their voices to engage with 
climate and ecological emergency through poetry in all its forms.

Our planet is poetry.
In the movement of molecules; in the swirl of clouds over seas; in the 
silences between words and notes of music; in the dance of bees.

And our planet is in crisis. Global climate emergency and ecological 
disaster can no longer be sidelined or ignored. Poets for the Planet 
insists on the care, conservation and regeneration of our environment 
and resources.

Inspired by protest round the world, we believe that the poetry 
community has an important role to play in calling on a range of voices, 
experiences and passions to respond to this crucial moment of challenge.

    We curate and create poetry events, activities and publications to
    inspire, disturb, provoke, empower and mobilise.

    We collaborate with protest, environmental and other movements to
    shake up, alert and alarm from the grass roots to government.

    We encourage individual, local and community projects to bring
    together poetry and activism with thoughtfulness, humour, humanity
    and mischief.

    We learn from others and collate resources to support creative
    engagement in environmental issues through poetry.

    We are inclusive, intersectional, multi-faith, multi-lingual and
    multi-generational.

    We are driven by words: focused on action. No action is too small to
    count, no idea too trivial to entertain.

Now, more than ever, the power of poetry is necessary to raise 
awareness, reconnect us with the planet and promote individual and 
collective responsibility for change.
https://poetsfortheplanet.org



[Philosophy]
*Planet Earth: Crumbling Metaphysical Illusion*
by  Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D.
*What can help us face up to the horrors with which climate change 
threatens us?*
- - -
Heidegger claims in this essay that the fundamental character of the 
human kind of being (existence) is dwelling. Such dwelling requires a 
space, a location, a home, and that home is the earth. In this vision, 
the earth provides grounding for the human kind of being. For humans, to 
be is to dwell on earth, and to dwell requires that they safeguard and 
preserve the earth that grounds them. Characteristically, such 
protectedness is sought in metaphysical illusion - the transformation of 
this vulnerable planet into an invincible everlasting entity. This 
age-old metaphysical illusion is not faring well in the face of the 
perils of climate change.
- - -
The human way of being cannot survive the impending homelessness with 
which climate change threatens us, a prospect so horrifying that people 
turn away from it altogether, thereby evading the threat and abandoning 
the search for solutions. (Such apocalyptic homelessness is foreshadowed 
concretely in the destruction of individual homes and other buildings by 
massive storms, floods, wildfires and other manifestations of global 
warming.)
What can help us face up to the horrors with which climate change 
threatens us? I suggest a form of dwelling with one another that I call 
emotional dwelling (Stolorow & Atwood, 2018), an active, engaged, 
participatory comportment that I have recommended for the therapeutic 
approach to emotional trauma. In dwelling, one leans into the other's 
emotional pain and participates in it. The language that one uses to 
address another's experience of trauma meets the trauma head-on, 
articulating the unbearable and the unendurable, saying the unsayable, 
unmitigated by any efforts to soothe, comfort, encourage or reassure - 
such efforts invariably being experienced by the other as a turning away 
from the experience of trauma. In order to tackle the overwhelming 
perils of climate change we must include in our dwelling on earth an 
emotional dwelling with one another that renders shared apocalyptic 
anxiety more tolerable.

I am grateful to George Atwood, Susanne Claxton, and Julia Schwartz for 
their encouraging comments and valuable suggestions.
https://iapsp.org/eforum/19_stolorow_01.php



*This Day in Climate History - November 27, 2014- from D.R. Tucker*
November 27, 2014:

    "President Obama could leave office with the most aggressive,
    far-reaching environmental legacy of any occupant of the White
    House. Yet it is very possible that not a single major environmental
    law will have passed during his two terms in Washington.

    "Instead, Mr. Obama has turned to the vast reach of the Clean Air
    Act of 1970, which some legal experts call the most powerful
    environmental law in the world. Faced with a Congress that has shut
    down his attempts to push through an environmental agenda, Mr. Obama
    is using the authority of the act passed at the birth of the
    environmental movement to issue a series of landmark regulations on
    air pollution, from soot to smog, to mercury and planet-warming
    carbon dioxide."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/us/without-passing-a-single-law-obama-crafts-bold-enviornmental-policy.html?hpw&rref=politics&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well
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