[TheClimate.Vote] April 20, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*April 20, 2020*/

[political action]
*Former Inslee staffers pitch climate plan to Biden, Congress*
Ex-campaign staffers for former presidential candidate Jay Inslee are 
reviving the Washington governor's ambitious climate plan by pitching an 
updated proposal to congressional Democrats and the Biden campaign.

The new plan is a condensed version of Inslee's 200-page climate 
manifesto but contains many of the same objectives: transitioning to 100 
percent clean electricity by 2035, slashing subsidies for the fossil 
fuel industry, creating a Climate Conservation Corps, and revitalizing 
the economy through investment in green technology and clean energy...
- -
"Essentially the concept was: How can we take the assets of a 
presidential campaign, including smart, thoughtful policy and 
communications and media and organizing capacity, but put it in service 
of policy and the movement rather than an individual?" said Bracken 
Hendricks, a former Inslee staffer who authored the plan alongside two 
other colleagues from the campaign...
- -
Biden's climate plan, which received a B+ from Greenpeace, lagged 
proposals from Inslee and former White House hopeful Sen. Bernie Sander 
(I-Vt.), who both called for spending trillions more to address climate 
change in plans that were described as the "gold standard" for tackling 
the issue.

Some environmental groups have said they'd like to see Biden call for 
100 percent clean energy sooner than his 2050 deadline, and commit to 
rejecting new permits for fossil fuel infrastructure such as pipelines.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/493436-former-inslee-staffers-pitch-climate-plan-to-biden-congress
-- 
[AOC too]
*AOC lays out progressive wish list for Biden*
The congresswoman also weighed in on the presumptive Democratic 
nominee's choice of running mate.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday called for Joe Biden, the 
presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to shift leftward on four 
key policy issues in a bid to earn the trust of his party's progressive 
wing.

"There are very real, tangible areas where Democrats even fell short 
perhaps during the Obama administration that I think I would like for us 
to have a plan to improve," the New York Democrat told POLITICO Playbook 
in a virtual interview -- citing federal treatment of Puerto Rico, 
immigration, health care and climate change...
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/15/aoc-joe-biden-progressive-wishlist-187678



[exuberant video podcast with Gavin Schmidt and Katharine Hayhoe]
*StarTalk Podcast: Coronavirus and Climate Change, with Neil deGrasse Tyson*
Apr 16, 2020
StarTalk
On this episode of StarTalk Radio, Neil deGrasse Tyson is investigating 
the link between coronavirus and climate change alongside comic co-host 
Chuck Nice and expert guests. How has coronavirus impacted climate 
change? Can methods used to track climate change be used to track the 
spread of coronavirus? We explore these topics and a lot more.

Our first guest is Gavin Schmidt, PhD, Director of the NASA Goddard 
Institute for Space Studies. To start, we get a little background on CO2 
emissions. How has the air quality changed over the current quarantined 
period? You'll learn how the decrease of car and air travel have 
impacted our climate. We explore how climate modeling is similar to 
modeling the spread of coronavirus. You'll also learn the benefits of 
"simple" vs "complex" modeling. Gavin tells us why models are 
fundamental to scientific enterprise.

Then we welcome our second guest, Katharine Hayhoe, PhD, director of the 
Climate Center at Texas Tech University. She also has her own YouTube 
channel called @Global Weirding with Katharine Hayhoe. Katharine 
explains how coronavirus made the jump from animals to humans (zoonosis) 
and why this is not the first, or last, time it will happen. You'll hear 
why the current pandemic is like a microcosm of climate change.

We investigate the role that government has played in this pandemic so 
far and what governments can learn from dealing with this situation. 
Katharine explains how this pandemic and climate change are similar in 
the fact that they both impact the poorest people the hardest.

We take a look at the spread of conspiracy theories during this pandemic 
and how they come from the same places that spread climate change 
conspiracies. Lastly, you'll also hear about climatefeedback.org, a 
website run by a network of scientists to bring you truthful climate 
change news. All that, plus, Katharine shares a hopeful message for the 
future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSjTsInyveE



[Unequal]
*Covid-19 and Climate Change Threats Compound in Minority Communities*
Port Arthur, Texas, is a case in point: disproportionately hit by 
hurricanes, fossil-fuel pollution and now, the coronavirus.
- - -
The heavy presence of industry--a common theme among poor and mostly 
black and brown communities across the country--may be one reason 
residents of Port Arthur, in a region once dubbed "the cancer belt," 
have higher rates of cancer, asthma and cardiovascular disease when 
compared to state averages, according to a 2016 report from Southeast 
Nonprofit Development Center. It's also why Kelley, who for decades has 
watched his family, friends and neighbors die from invisible culprits, 
is now sounding the alarm over coronavirus.

Jefferson County, which includes Port Arthur, has seen a spike in 
Covid-19 infections since mid-March, the number increasing from 1 to at 
least 100 by mid-April. But what worries Kelley most is that he and his 
neighbors, based on a recent study that links higher coronavirus death 
rates to past exposure to air pollution, are at particularly high risk 
to the virus...
- - -
In Michigan, black people make up 41 percent of the state's total 
Covid-19 deaths, despite making up just 14 percent of the state 
population. Illinois' black residents also make up 41 percent of the 
state's coronavirus deaths, when they account for just 14.6 percent of 
the total population. And in Louisiana, nearly 60 percent of the people 
who died of coronavirus in the state are black, while the group is just 
a third of the state's population.

These statistics come as no surprise to public health experts, many of 
whom have long pointed to persistent health and socioeconomic 
disparities in the country that continually put low-income communities 
and communities of color at greater risk of what they call "high 
fatality events," such as natural disasters.

A 2018 federal report concluded that low-income communities already have 
higher rates of myriad health conditions, are more exposed to 
environmental hazards and take longer to bounce back from natural 
disasters, such as hurricanes, flooding and wildfires.

It's now clear that the frontline communities most vulnerable to the 
effects of climate change are the same communities most at risk of 
contracting and dying from Covid-19, said Sabrina McCormick, a professor 
of environmental and occupational health at the George Washington 
University Milken Institute School of Public Health.

To McCormick, the pandemic has simply highlighted something public 
health officials have declared for decades: Directly or indirectly, 
burning fossil fuels is harmful to human health. Globally, "eight 
million people die annually because of air pollution-related diseases," 
she said. "Those are just the facts."...
- -
*Environmental Rollbacks 'A Death Sentence' to Some*
The Trump administration's move to suspend enforcement of U.S. 
environmental laws could also be playing a deadly role as vulnerable 
communities attempt to navigate the era of coronavirus.

By allowing polluting facilities to report their own emissions to the 
federal government and potentially exceed their emissions limits without 
recourse, the administration is putting many African American 
communities at higher risk of infection and death, said Adrienne Hollis, 
senior climate justice and health scientist for the Union of Concerned 
Scientists.

African Americans are three times more likely to die from asthma than 
white Americans, Hollis said, and they also have the highest rate of 
deaths from heart disease--all of which compounds the group's 
susceptibility to coronavirus.

"By him [Trump] relaxing these laws and regulations, it's a sure nail in 
the coffin for a lot of folks here in the Jefferson County area," said 
Port Arthur's Kelley. "It is a death sentence is what it is. We are 
already dying."

It's not the only recent action the administration has taken that is 
likely to harm communities most vulnerable to both Covid-19 and climate 
change. In 2018, the Trump administration proposed a rule that would 
place limits on the science used in decision-making by the Environmental 
Protection Agency, including studies that could hold clues to Covid-19.

And this week, the administration ignored the advice from government 
scientists to strengthen the national air quality standard for fine 
soot, despite recent research linking exposure to the particles with 
higher coronavirus death rates.

"In the last four years, the actions engineered by this administration 
to put profits over people have been especially detrimental to 
environmental justice communities, which include people of color, poor 
people and our indigenous brothers and sisters," Hollis said in a statement.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16042020/coronavirus-climate-environmental-justice-oil-refinery-hurricanes-port-arthur-texas 




[Report from Agence France-Presse]
*Ambitious 'Cloud Brightening' Experiment Was Just Carried Out Over 
Great Barrier Reef*
In an attempt to cool waters around the reef by making clouds reflect 
more sunlight, researchers said they used a boat-mounted fan similar to 
a snow cannon to shoot salt crystals into the air.

Results from the trial were "really, really encouraging", the project's 
lead scientist Daniel Harrison from Southern Cross University said on 
Friday.

"All the research is theoretical... so this an absolute world first to 
go out and actually try and take seawater and turn it into these cloud 
condensation nuclei," he told AFP.
- - -
"If it works as well as we hope then maybe we could reduce the bleaching 
stress by about 70 per cent... potentially nearly all of the mortality."

He also said the effectiveness of the cloud-brightening technique would 
drop significantly as the ocean warms further.

That means the process would be similar to putting the reef on 
life-support while the underlying challenge of climate change was addressed.

"If we keep going on business-as-usual-type emission scenarios, then at 
most this technology can just buy a couple of extra decades before we 
see the complete loss of the reef," he warned.
https://www.sciencealert.com/cloud-brightening-is-the-newest-experiment-to-protect-the-great-barrier-reef-from-warming



[MIT follows the money]
*Can financial disclosure of climate risk accelerate climate action?*
Online panel discussion hosted by MIT explores best practices for 
mitigating climate-related risk.
The Covid-19 pandemic could be a dry run for future impacts of climate 
change, with challenging and unprecedented situations requiring rapid 
and aggressive responses worldwide. A proactive approach to climate 
change aimed at minimizing such impacts will inevitably involve 
significant cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and investment in 
more resilient infrastructure. Although current global mitigation and 
adaptation efforts are proceeding slowly, one emerging strategy could 
serve as an accelerant: the financial disclosure of climate risk by 
companies. Such disclosure, if practiced more widely and consistently, 
could lower the risks of climate change by redirecting investments away 
from GHG-emitting activities and pinpointing infrastructure that needs 
to be made more resilient...
- -
Toward that end, the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of 
Global Change engaged dozens of decision-makers in the financial sector 
and industry in a two-hour panel discussion on climate-related financial 
risk. Held as a Zoom meeting on March 26 and facilitated by joint 
program Co-Director Ronald Prinn, the discussion featured six finance 
and economics experts from the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, 
HSBC, BP, and MIT. Panelists described how their organization has been 
affected by climate-related financial risk and the steps it's taking to 
address it, how climate and economic scenarios could be useful in better 
understanding climate-related financial risks, and potential research 
that an institution like MIT could pursue to advance the state of 
knowledge in this area...
- -
"Generally, what we're finding is that there's a tradeoff between 
physical and transition risks depending on the pathway you look at," 
said Craig Johnston, senior economist at the Bank of Canada. "If we do 
nothing [to reduce emissions], we see very limited transition risks, but 
the highest level of physical risks. On the other side of things, a 
rapid transformation toward a low-carbon economy has the highest 
transition risks, but it does mitigate physical risks to some degree."...
more at - 
http://news.mit.edu/2020/can-financial-disclosure-climate-risk-accelerate-climate-action-0416



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  - April 20, 2002*
The Guardian reports:

"The head of the international scientific panel on climate change,
which has called for urgent action to curb global warming, was deposed
yesterday after a campaign by the Bush administration, Exxon-Mobil and
other energy companies to get him replaced.

"At a plenary session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) in Geneva, Robert Watson, a British-born US atmospheric
scientist who has been its chairman since 1996, was replaced by an
Indian railway engineer and environmentalist, R K Pachauri.

"Dr Pachauri received 76 votes to Dr. Watson's 49 after a
behind-the-scenes diplomatic campaign by the US to persuade developing
countries to vote against Dr Watson, according to diplomats. The
British delegation argued for Dr Watson and Dr Pachauri to share the
chairmanship.

"The US campaign came to light after the disclosure of a confidential
memorandum from the world's biggest oil company, Exxon-Mobil, to the
White House, proposing a strategy for his removal."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/20/internationaleducationnews.climatechange

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