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

[Richard Pauli]

/September 25, 2019/

[Democracy Now report]
*"This Is Our Time. This Is Our Future." Voices from the Historic Youth 
Climate Strike in NYC*
Published on Sep 23, 2019
Democracy Now!
As many as 4 million people around the world took to the streets Friday 
in the largest day of action focused on the climate crisis. Students 
across the globe led climate strikes in hundreds of countries, inspired 
by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. The 
demonstration kicked off in Foley Square, where tens of thousands of 
people gathered before the march. Varshini Prakash, co-founder and 
executive director of the Sunrise Movement, and climate activist Vic 
Barrett were among the handful of activists who addressed the climate 
strikers in Foley Square.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb_vAYVgbeI


[Not smart to fool with Mother Nature]
*Climate Forum Reveals a Democratic Party Remarkably Aligned with 
Science on Zero Emissions*
Almost every Democrat running for president has now talked at length 
about climate policy. Details differ, but the goals are similar across 
the spectrum...
- -
The Democrats have united around the goal of driving carbon emissions 
from fossil energy to net zero by mid-century. That includes the 
moderates and low-polling candidates who had their first chance to 
detail their ideas on MSNBC's climate forum Thursday and Friday...
- - -
"The Republicans are dug in, saying this is about how we can't have 
steaks, we can't have airplanes," Weld said. "That's baloney. This is 
not a sacrifice. This is something we have to do. This is an investment 
in sustaining the future of the human race on this planet."
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23092019/election-2020-climate-change-forum-science-bullock-sanders-delaney-ryan-steyer



[academic paper on climate change denialism]
*Industrial/breadwinner masculinities*
Pule', Paul
Hultman, Martin
2019/06/11*
*

      ...This calls forth the need to expose climate change denial for
    what it is: a tactic of wealthy--mostly white Western--men
    (supported by a working- and middle-class base) to re-assert social,
    economic and political power and control over natural resource
    extraction and wealth distribution while wantonly disregarding the
    deleterious global, regional and local impacts of anthropogenic
    climate change on the current and future fecundity of society and
    Earth (Brulle 2014). Aligned with Greta Gaard (2015), we concur that
    'climate change may be described as white industrial capitalist
    hetero-male supremacy on steroids, boosted by widespread injustices
    of gender and race, sexuality and species', implicating climate
    change denial as obtuse expressions of the hyper-masculine
    socialisations that others have referred to as Western malestream
    norms (O'Brien 1981).

    Our examination of the intersection between climate change denial
    and white male effect considers the intersection of power and
    resource inequalities based on gender, class and race (along with
    ableness, sexual orientation, ethnicity and age). These variables
    have reasserted Global Northern white men's primacy through the ways
    that malestream norms persist and shape men's values and actions,
    further obfuscating the intrinsic value of non-human nature and
    those who are 'otherised' by a male-dominated world (Warren 2000).
    Recent considerations of violent extremism in the US corroborate
    these concerns (Kimmel 2017[2013], 7 Kimmel 2018...

SN  - 9780429424861
T1  - Industrial/breadwinner masculinities
DO  - 10.4324/9780429424861-5
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333818011_Industrialbreadwinner_masculinities


[jnterview with Caroline Hickman of Climate Psychology Alliance]
*Caroline Hickman for RT International*
Uploaded on Sep 19, 2019
RT Producers
3.85K subscribers
Caroline Hickman from Climate Psychology Alliance explains eco-anxiety 
phenomenon to RT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoNCJPszN9U&feature=youtu.be&t=84


[Yale lecture]
*Lecture 5: The Resurgent Right in the West*
Published on Sep 24, 2019
YaleCourses
751K subscribers
What are the sources and implications of the rise of right wing politics 
in the West in the late 20th century? Prof. Shapiro discusses how the 
collapse of communism was (maybe counterintuitively) beneficial to the 
right, two logics of distributive politics, the median voter theorem, 
and how interests, institutions and ideals influence individual's ideas 
of fairness in politics. He then discusses the implications of the rise 
of the right in two-party versus multiparty systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q53DF6ySOZg



[play the audio and read text]
*The Blood-Dimmed Tide*
Climate change is poised to alter the face of global conflict.
By EMILY ATKIN
September 16, 2019
It's the year 2100. The nationalist ideology popularized by Donald 
Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Boris Johnson has not only retained its hold 
on industrialized nations, but also expanded amid conditions of climate 
upheaval. Many of the world's major powers have spent the last several 
decades focusing on themselves. Borders have closed. International 
investments in education and technology have declined. The divide 
between the developed and undeveloped world has widened.


No sane soul denies now that the world is warming, though some keep 
trying. Still others in the camp of nationalist reaction have taken to 
insisting the earth's wrath is God's punishment instead of humanity's 
folly. But the evidence is all too crushingly plain that the violent, 
convulsive new world order taking shape in this moment of climate 
reckoning is entirely the handiwork of a fatal set of preventable human 
system failures. It's been an excruciatingly slow-motion disaster, 
engineered by shortsighted, power-obsessed leaders hell-bent on denying 
scientific truths--and blocking the basic measures to mitigate carbon 
emissions and stave off drought, rising ocean tides, and mass migrations 
of climate-traumatized populations to higher ground in increasingly 
xenophobic and belligerent rich Western nations.

With all these catastrophic scenarios now daily facts of life, the 
specter of climate upheaval--long held forth as the urgent, and quite 
possibly final, imperative to overcome tribal political divisions and 
the human race's retrograde hoarding instincts--is acting as an 
accelerant of global conflict, plunging nationalist powers into a 
regressive rivalry to seize scarce resources and deny access to putative 
outsiders of all descriptions. The lineaments of a more equitable, 
sustainable, and cooperative world sketched out by advocates of a Green 
New Deal have given way, in stunningly short order, to a race to a new 
global bottom, equal parts Thomas Hobbes and Mad Max.


The endgame was distressingly rapid, and looks especially so in 
retrospect. Following Donald Trump's reelection to the presidency in 
2020, the United States failed to implement aggressive climate policies 
necessary to avoid the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold. America's continued 
abdication of any serious leadership role in the climate crisis touched 
off a series of other high-profile defections from regional and 
international climate accords that were already insufficient in their 
target goals. Plans to decarbonize developed economies ground to a halt 
in many countries. Developing countries, heeding the now-malign neglect 
of many leaders of industrialized nations, continued relying on 
traditional, resource-intensive forms of moneymaking: farming, mining, 
and fossil fuel burning. Their populations kept growing, too, since part 
of the global surge into nationalist reaction was a rollback of basic 
contraception and family planning services.


So the world kept getting hotter. The global community sailed past the 
1.5 degree Celsius "'safe' threshold of warming" mark around 2038, and 
summers of Saharan intensity became an annual norm in Europe--often in 
North America, too. These extreme bouts of heat--too routine now to be 
dubbed "heat waves"--claimed annual death tolls of thousands in many 
countries, while wildfires courted the specter of mass famine by burning 
up billions of dollars' worth of cropland. Around 80 percent of Earth's 
coral reefs died off, tanking fishing and tourism economies around the 
world. The ocean rose about 1.5 feet, exposing an additional 69 million 
people every year to regular extreme flooding. Residents of the tiny 
Pacific island nation of Kiribati, which sits an average of a little 
less than six feet above the precrisis sea level, began to flee to 
Australia and New Zealand en masse.


The world's population ballooned to 12.6 billion by the end of the 
century, and Earth's temperature rose by 4 degrees Celsius--twice the 
level that scientists had long earmarked as the threshold sure to 
produce vast displacement and suffering for hundreds of millions of 
people contending with the simple misfortune of living too far south, or 
not far enough inland, or in a drought-ridden, deforested 
desert-in-the-making. The sheer scale of environmental devastation 
associated with a temperature spike of 2 degrees Celsius was enough, 
according to those early–twenty-first-century scientists, to threaten 
modern civilization itself.


Today, at 4 degrees, there is still civilization. But there is no 
Kiribati, given that sea levels have risen three feet since the 
beginning of the century. Most of the nation's 110,000 people have fled 
to Australia and New Zealand--both of which are struggling with 
climate-driven scarcity in their own economies, and reverting to uglier 
forms of discrimination from their shared colonialist past. Australia 
has continued its practice of housing migrants in inhumane offshore 
detention centers in Papua New Guinea--except now, drought has dried up 
the rainwater tanks that supplied New Guinea's drinking water, and salt 
water from the rising sea has leached into the soil, further decimating 
agricultural production on the island.


And Kiribati is but one snapshot of the new global normal. Mass 
migrations are pushing populations into overstrained, and often 
inhospitable, new host nations as sea levels rise, and extreme weather 
intensifies, while less visible side effects, such as saltwater 
intrusion, undermine more and more of the world's agricultural carrying 
capacity. More than 23 million people in China alone have been forced to 
move, as their land has been reclaimed by the rising ocean tide. So have 
2.8 million people in Indonesia; 2.1 million people in Bangladesh; and 
ten million people in Vietnam. In the United States, meanwhile, 13 
million people have left their water-adjacent homes in search of higher 
ground, or at least drier pastures.


People are being uprooted by other climate shifts as well. Heat stress, 
drought, and resulting declines in agricultural yields have helped push 
six million people in Mexico to pack their things and move north. Nearly 
twelve million people in sub-Saharan Africa, and millions across the 
Middle East, have done the same. No matter where they go, though, it's 
unlikely they'll escape the heat. Seventy-five percent of the world's 
population now faces the threat of dying from hot weather.


It's been an excruciatingly slow-motion disaster, engineered by 
shortsighted, power-obsessed leaders hell-bent on denying scientific 
truths.

These demographic shifts, combined with the resource-based national 
rivalries unloosed by climate change, have made these mass migrations a 
key flashpoint of global conflict. Borders are not only closed; they're 
militarized. The ethno-nationalist backlash in most industrial Western 
powers has spurred the rise of an eco-fascist ideology--the same one 
cited in the online manifesto by the gunman in the mass shooting of 2019 
in El Paso, Texas. This "greening of hate" keys into long-standing 
Malthusian panics about scarcity and overpopulation as the great threats 
to civilization and global order. In this bleak worldview--which now 
governs most of the former bastions of Enlightenment-age democracy--the 
only way to maintain life is to let it end in those regions not 
preselected for social Darwinian survival. Its apostles see the 
catastrophic impact of climate change as a historic opportunity to 
revert to the comforting, delusive tribal vision of racial purity in a 
world given over to chaos and all but permanent geopolitical turmoil. 
After all, it's not the white-majority countries that people are fleeing.


Of course, not everyone is leaving the Southern Hemisphere. Indeed, even 
in the face of alarming climactic shifts, most people have chosen to 
stay where they are. Acute natural disasters such as floods and typhoons 
have shattered villages in Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal. But many 
ultimately rebuild, and in sub-Saharan Africa, the population has spiked 
from just over 800 million people at the beginning of the century to 3.7 
billion at the end. And as the population has risen, so has the risk for 
armed, violent conflict--often over food and water scarcity. Worldwide, 
such risk has increased by 26 percent.


As people facing the accelerating, overlapping threats of global warming 
start to feel vulnerable, they seek reassurance in new leadership--and 
reactionary authoritarians see opportunity. These crises, they say, can 
be easily solved, and nations can thrive--if only populations 
temporarily give up their democratic rights. As famine, drought, and 
refugee crises widen, strongmen increasingly exploit the mounting global 
mood of desperation to build power.


Meanwhile, 5.5 billion people are living in water-stressed areas. 
Two-thirds of the mountain glaciers that have historically supplied most 
of the water for Pakistan and India, together with much of the rest of 
the South Asian subcontinent, are gone, and China is holding the rest 
hostage through its control of the "Third Pole"--the massive water 
source in the once-frozen Himalayas. Chinese leaders have erected dams 
near the water's origins, keeping it from draining into India and 
Bangladesh. Water access is emerging as a lead cause of regional 
conflict, especially as scarce water falls under the control of rogue 
black markets.


War has also broken out in the now-iceless Arctic between the United 
States and Russia over access to the region's rich stores of 
ever-shrinking resources: fish, gas, oil, and minerals. 


This dystopian vision of a new era of climate-driven geopolitical 
conflict and ideological regression has been lurching into the 
foreground of global politics for at least the past generation. No one 
in power today can credibly say they weren't warned. They can, perhaps, 
claim they didn't know how rapidly the threats were multiplying; they 
can even say they didn't accept or believe them. But no one can 
plausibly say they did everything they could. Few can say they even tried.


Even those who have long sounded the alarm on climate chaos say today 
they have regrets; that they should have done more, or approached things 
differently. "It took me 10 or 15 years to realize I should be 
organizing, not writing books," said Bill McKibben, who has written 17 
books--mostly about the climate crisis. "I spent those years thinking we 
were in an argument, and that my job was to provide the weight of 
evidence that would eventually cause us to win the argument. It's now 
utterly clear that we were never engaged in an argument. It was a fight."


And like other major inflection points in the world system, the failure 
to join the climate fight in anything like a timely fashion is rooted in 
distressingly familiar and mundane defects in our political culture. 
Just as the assassination of an Austrian noble in Sarajevo touched off 
World War I in the early twentieth century, it's likely that future 
historians will look back at the bleak landscape of resource rivalry and 
mass climate migration in the twenty-second century, and marvel at how 
long, and how extensively, world leaders were briefed on the specter of 
climate chaos, only to shirk their basic responsibilities to provide and 
govern for posterity over an entire political generation.


In retrospect, the fight over doing something about climate change has 
never been about science, data, or reason. If it were, George H.W. Bush 
would have at least tried to fulfill his 1988 campaign promise to "do 
something" about global climate change; to fight the "greenhouse effect" 
with the "White House effect." He would have listened to his deputy 
assistant secretary of state, Richard J. Smith, who wrote in a 1989 
memo, "If the climate change within the range of current predictions 
actually occurs, the consequences for every nation and every aspect of 
human activity will be profound." If that had happened, policies to 
reduce greenhouse gas emissions would have been implemented with at 
least some time to work out the kinks. Likewise, if the Obama White 
House had managed to get a cap-and-trade plan through a Democratic 
Congress in 2009, a basic framework to address the crisis would have at 
least been in place. Instead, the climate-conscious administrators in 
the Obama administration fell back on a series of executive orders and 
regulatory shifts, all promptly undone in the early days of the Trump 
White House.


"They understood that if they could make people doubt whether climate 
change was a problem, they would sap the energy necessary to take it on."

No; in retrospect, the fight over doing something about climate change 
has been about money and power--assets that the fossil fuel industry, 
the chief beneficiary of a laissez-faire-mal approach to global warming, 
has always possessed in great abundance. Even as the first George Bush 
administration paid some lip service to the specter of climate crisis 
back in the early 1990s, oil interests had marshaled a complex of PR 
outlets and dubiously credentialed authorities to push a denialist line 
on global warming, and to keep the terms of debate in Washington mired 
in a state of fretful paralysis. "They understood that if they could 
make people doubt whether climate change was a problem, they would sap 
the energy necessary to take it on," McKibben said. "They set out to 
waste everyone's time, on purpose, and they did."


The oil industry spent millions to elect and reelect George W. Bush, 
who, once he took office, promptly scuttled all campaign talk of 
mitigating global warming. Bush expanded on his father's legacy, not 
only censoring climate scientists and skirting the topic in public, but 
hiring fossil fuel cronies to shape policy decisions across his 
administrations. Those same cronies then spent millions to elect Donald 
Trump, who is now following the same playbook of denial, disinformation, 
and deflection on climate change. As a result of all the well-funded, 
bad-faith temporizing on the climate crisis, we are now just eleven 
years away from being locked into 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 
mid-century, according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change--the point where irreversible catastrophe begins.


Barack Obama's presidency was the opportunity to set the disastrously 
skewed climate debate on a course of responsible and reasoned 
planning--the baseline correction needed to avert global calamity. With 
outsize Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, Obama 
dedicated his first term to reforming health care, not the climate--or 
as McKibben puts it, "They set out to deal with the last problem of the 
20th century, and not the first problem of the 21st."


The Democrats could have pursued another climate bill after Congress's 
first cap-and-trade effort died in the Senate, but they didn't. 
According to Obama White House insiders, then-chief of staff Rahm 
Emanuel was so angry about how the process had gone down on the first 
attempt that he swore off trying again. Emanuel reportedly told 
congressional leaders that large-scale climate legislation was off the 
table. It was, in essence, "You tried; you failed; we're moving on."


It was an almost laughably ridiculous position, given the stakes of the 
climate crisis as we know it. Judith Enck, who served as the 
Environmental Protection Agency's Region 2 administrator during the 
Obama administration, confirms the drastic gap between the unassailable 
research on the climate crisis and the failing political consensus on 
the most urgent existential issue of our time. "We knew a lot," she 
said. "The science was definitely robust. But the federal government and 
the general public didn't appreciate how serious it was."


That excuse was pitifully inadequate in the first two years of the Obama 
administration; ten years on, it's a recipe for civilizational collapse. 
Our opening dystopian portrait of the climate-ravaged global order of 
the next century is only partly a work of speculation. It's based, in 
broad outline, on what the climate science community calls the "regional 
rivalry" scenario. In the suite of now-imaginable climate projections 
before us, it is known as Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 3 (SSP3). It's 
one of five carefully crafted pathways that climate scientists employ to 
game out what global society, economics, policy, and demographics might 
look like under longer-term pressures of climate change. Scientific 
forecasters use these political and economic pathways in climate models 
to inform their understanding of how greenhouse gas emissions and global 
temperatures will shift amid shifting new geopolitical alliances and 
confrontations.


SSP3 is the worst possible pathway for the global climate and conflict, 
according to Bas van Ruijven, the co-chair of the International 
Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios, and a 
key analyst for the SSP narratives. "It is a world that breaks down on 
many dimensions," he said. "Countries have their own interests first, 
with a narrow definition of what their 'interests' are." Van Ruijven is 
understandably wary about handicapping the likelihood of SSP3--or any 
speculative future scenario--coming true, but he very much wants global 
leaders to have them firmly in mind. The whole idea, he said, is to get 
policymakers to understand that "if you keep going in a certain 
direction, [this is] where you end up."


Some signs already strongly suggest we're about to head down the SSP3 
pathway. After all, the American Republican Party is far from the only 
political force presiding over the toxic fusion of climate denialism and 
hyper-nationalism: Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil, Narendra Modi's India, and 
Viktor Orbán's Hungary are all countries now led by dismal Trumpian 
comrades in arms. Parties with right-wing authoritarian tendencies now 
govern or share power in seven European Union nations; such parties have 
achieved double-digit results in the most recent elections in Finland, 
Sweden, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Denmark, 
the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom, in addition to numerous 
former Eastern bloc countries.


The global ethnonationalist surge is significantly escalating the risk 
of a conflict-ridden climate scenario, said Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, 
the head of climate science at the policy nonprofit Climate Analytics. 
"In order to prevent these things from happening, you need to have an 
international community that's willing and able to respond [to] and 
support affected countries," he said. "In a world that is thinking about 
one country first, your willingness or ability to provide that support 
suffers, and the external mechanisms we have historically relied on may 
not be available."


What's more, it's not as if the old world order's mechanisms to deter 
and contain conflict are anywhere near adequate to address the scale of 
the potential climate wars to come. To take just one example, global 
emergency response efforts from the United Nations and Red Cross are 
today almost exclusively focused on catastrophic flooding and hurricane 
events--they largely ignore events of major heat stress, drought, and 
desertification that are poised to emerge as key factors of societal 
collapse in a warming world. The U.S. federal budget also devotes a 
minuscule percentage to aid for developing countries to adapt to and 
mitigate the effects of global warming. "It sounds basic, but it's 
absolutely key" to avoiding a conflict-ridden future, said Francesco 
Femia, co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security.


It's true that U.S. military reports, intelligence strategies, and 
training exercises have for decades featured warnings that climate 
change could exacerbate tensions worldwide. But actually prioritizing 
climate as a threat multiplier "doesn't mean just putting it in a 
defense strategy document," Femia said. "Nuclear proliferation, 
international terrorism--we don't just say those are priorities. We put 
billions of dollars into them and expend significant political will to 
prevent them, and it changes what the world looks like." After 9/11, 
Femia noted, the United States created the Department of Homeland 
Security to prevent another attack--and "no one at the time thought that 
was an unreasonable response." If we really consider how seriously 
disruptive and catastrophic climate change could be in the future, 
shouldn't we be creating institutions and devoting resources to reflect 
the assessment of this threat to our security?


Such a strategic overhaul would help the United States "manage the 
unavoidable," to borrow a phrase from a paper Femia co-wrote with 
Caitlin E. Werrell. It's imperative to start planning for the 
resource-driven brand of conflict that will arise in the case of 
catastrophic warming--together with the warming-related conflicts that 
are already taking shape. (Russia, for example, currently has nearly 50 
icebreakers to navigate the melting Arctic, and the United States only 
has two.) But the United States also has to "avoid the unmanageable," 
Femia maintains--that is, actually prevent such conditions for conflict 
from happening in the first place. And the only way to ensure that is to 
rapidly decarbonize the global economy. It's not an either/or choice; 
both have to be done. It is basic contingency planning.


The good news is that such an approach has the potential to generate 
positive results beyond the mandate of skirting immediate catastrophe. 
Research has shown that when two countries cooperate over the shared 
problem of decreased water access, the partnered countries are then more 
likely to resolve other, unrelated conflicts. "When you have a common 
threat, it is natural for nations to ally against that threat," Femia 
said. "If we see climate that way, it's an opportunity for conflict 
resolution all over the world."


It's doable--but it has to happen soon. Femia said the time line could 
be as little as two years, in an obvious nod to the dire implications of 
the 2020 presidential election. And though climate change has hardly 
taken center stage in the campaign news cycle so far, there are signs 
that this could be the year things start to click. Polling shows the 
issue rising in importance among Democratic voters. Nearly every viable 
Democratic candidate has a comprehensive climate change plan. Even 
though the Democratic National Committee has declined to sponsor a 
climate debate, two major television networks are holding 
climate-focused policy forums for the Democratic candidates. And that's 
not happening because politicians are finally becoming conscientious 
citizens of the world--rather, it's because the effects of climate 
change and the demands of activists have finally started to drown out 
the fossil fuel industry's chorus of denial.


But if McKibben has learned one thing in 30 years of climate advocacy, 
it's that the voices demanding change have to be louder--not in the 
pages of books or magazines, but on the streets and at the polls. "This 
may be the last moment that comes in time for us to do any good," he 
said. "We better make the most of it."

Emily Atkin is a contributing editor to The New Republic and the author 
of the climate newsletter Heated.
https://newrepublic.com/article/154953/climate-change-future-global-conflict-nationalism


*This Day in Climate History - September 25, 2005 - from D.R. Tucker*
September 25, 2005: TIME Magazine releases the October 3, 2005 
cover-dated issue, with the cover story: "Are We Making Hurricanes Worse?"
http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20051003,00.html
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1109318,00.html
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