[TheClimate.Vote] April 23, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Richard Pauli richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Apr 23 07:49:32 EDT 2020


/*April 23, 2020*/

[Earth Day video talk session]
*Climate Therapy: Facing the Climate Emergency (Margaret Klein Salamon, 
PhD, David Wallace-Wells, Mary Annaise Heglar).*
Apr 22, 2020
Future Coalition
Margaret Klein Salamon speaks with David Wallace Wells and Mary Annaise 
Heglar about the emotional side of the climate crisis for Earth Day Live.

Earth Day Live is a three-day livestream from April 22, the 50th 
anniversary of Earth Day, to April 24, where activists, performers, 
thought leaders, and artists are coming together for an empowering and 
communal three-day livestream mobilization dedicated to climate action.
[Start about 4 minutes in for the beginning of the conversation cued up 
https://youtu.be/f3mhv6Yyv-4?t=190]
Watch #EarthDayLive: https://watch.earthdaylive2020.org
Register to vote: https://www.earthdaylive2020.org/vote/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3mhv6Yyv-4


[BBC has read the report]
*Coronavirus: World risks 'biblical' famines due to pandemic - UN*
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52373888
- - -
[World Food Programme]
*2020 - Global Report on Food Crises*
Food security analysis (VAM)
https://docs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP-0000114546/download/
The 2020 edition of The Global Report on Food Crises describes the scale 
of acute hunger in the world. It provides an analysis of the drivers 
that are contributing to food crises across the globe, and examines how 
the COVID-19 pandemic might contribute to their perpetuation or 
deterioration. The report is produced by the Global Network against Food 
Crises, an international alliance working to address the root causes of 
extreme hunger.
https://www.wfp.org/publications/2020-global-report-food-crises


[with more succinct video versions]
[Excellent explainer video by Inequality Media on the importance of 
supply side/no new fossil fuels solutions to the climate crisis.]
Longer version (9+ minutes) on  YouTube
*The Solutions to the Climate Crisis No One is Talking About with Robert 
Reich*
Apr 22, 2020
Robert Reich
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explains why we must not go back 
to normal after this coronavirus crisis ends, and breaks down four key 
steps we must take to prevent total climate catastrophe.

First, create green jobs. Investing in renewable energy could create 
millions of family sustaining, union jobs and build the infrastructure 
we need for marginalized communities to access clean water and air.

Second, stop dirty energy. A massive investment in renewable energy jobs 
isn't enough to combat the climate crisis. If we are going to avoid the 
worst impacts of climate change, we must tackle the problem at its 
source: Stop digging up and burning more oil, gas, and coal.

Third, kick fossil fuel companies out of our politics. For decades, 
companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP have been polluting our 
democracy by pouring billions of dollars into our politics and 
bankrolling elected officials to enact policies that protect their 
profits. The oil and gas industry spent over $103 million on the 2016 
federal elections alone.

Fourth, require the fossil fuel companies that have profited from 
environmental injustice to compensate the communities they've harmed.
As if buying off our democracy wasn't enough, these corporations have 
also deliberately misled the public for years on the amount of damage 
their products have been causing.

If these solutions sound drastic to you, it's because they are. They 
have to be if we have any hope of keeping our planet habitable. The 
climate crisis is not a far-off apocalyptic nightmare — it is our 
present day.
Shorter 3 minute versions for Facebook 
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=648101715738799
and Twitter https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1253018300084191234?s=20
YouTube https://youtu.be/wuXURo0FUjM


[Activism]
*Wen Stephenson message*
https://medium.com/@wenstephenson/yes-is-not-enough-an-earthday-letter-to-the-climate-movement-8dcd324a8089?source=friends_link&sk=84184b83850e9857b863cfc6f39e5b47
Some of you might recall a certain Earth Day piece I wrote back in 2014: 
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/let-earth-day-be-last/


[avoid normal says Ted Glick]
***Pandemics, Climate Crisis and the Turbulent Future*
 From Arundhati Roy:

    "Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

    "Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past
    and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a
    portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

    "We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our
    prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas,
    our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through
    lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And
    ready to fight for it."

- - -
...quotes from science journalist and author Sonia Shah in The Nation:

    "Habitat destruction threatens vast numbers of wild species with
    extinction, including the medicinal plants and animals we've
    historically depended upon for our pharmacopeia. It also forces
    those wild species that hang on to cram into smaller fragments of
    remaining habitat, increasing the likelihood that they'll come into
    repeated, intimate contact with the human settlements expanding into
    their newly fragmented habitats. It's this kind of repeated,
    intimate contact that allows the microbes that live in their bodies
    to cross over into ours, transforming benign animal microbes into
    deadly human pathogens.

    "Similarly, the expansion of suburbs into the Northeastern forest
    increases the risk of tick-borne disease by driving out creatures
    like opossums, which help control tick populations, while improving
    conditions for species like white-footed mice and deer, which don't.
    Tick-borne Lyme disease first emerged in the United States in 1975;
    in the past 20 years, seven new tick-borne pathogens have followed.

    "But many more [animals] are reared in factory farms, where hundreds
    of thousands of individuals await slaughter, packed closely
    together, providing microbes lush opportunities to turn into deadly
    pathogens. Avian influenza viruses, for example, which originate in
    the bodies of wild waterfowl, rampage in factory farms packed with
    captive chickens, mutating and becoming more virulent, a process so
    reliable it can be replicated in the laboratory. One strain called
    H5N1, which can infect humans, kills more than half of those
    infected. Containing another strain, which reached North America in
    2014, required the slaughter of tens of millions of poultry.

    "The avalanche of excreta produced by our livestock introduces yet
    more opportunities for animal microbes to spill over into human
    populations. Because animal waste is far more voluminous than
    croplands can possibly absorb as fertilizer, it is collected in many
    places in unlined cesspools called manure lagoons. Shiga
    toxin-producing Escherichia coli, which lives harmlessly inside the
    guts of over half of all cattle on American feedlots, lurks in that
    waste. In humans, it causes bloody diarrhea and fever and can lead
    to acute kidney failure. Because cattle waste so frequently sloshes
    into our food and water, 90,000 Americans are infected every year."...

So what does all of this mean? What should we be anticipating and doing 
given our current reality of economic recession/depression piled on top 
of a worldwide pandemic piled on top of accelerating climate change 
piled on massive inequality and the systemic injustice and devastation 
caused by the world-dominant, capitalist economic system?
- -
Regarding climate change, it's important to know that coal, oil and gas 
are all in very big trouble, and renewables are surging, despite many 
Democrats still supporting fracking and Trump Republicans trying to turn 
the clock back 50 years. The economics of shifting to renewables and the 
politics of a massive and determined climate justice movement are having 
a very decided impact that needs to rapidly accelerate.
More here: 
https://tedglick.com/future-hope-columns/pandemics-climate-crisis-and-the-turbulent-future/


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  - April 23, 2007 *
In a speech on climate change and energy at the Center for Strategic and 
International Studies in Washington, D.C., Senator John McCain (R-AZ) notes:

    "The burning of oil and other fossil fuels is contributing to the
    dangerous accumulation of greenhouse gases in the earth's
    atmosphere, altering our climate with the potential for major
    social, economic and political upheaval. The world is already
    feeling the powerful effects of global warming, and far more dire
    consequences are predicted if we let the growing deluge of
    greenhouse gas emissions continue, and wreak havoc with God's
    creation. A group of senior retired military officers recently
    warned about the potential upheaval caused by conflicts over water,
    arable land and other natural resources under strain from a warming
    planet. The problem isn't a Hollywood invention nor is doing
    something about it a vanity of Cassandra like hysterics. It is a
    serious and urgent economic, environmental and national security
    challenge.

    "National security depends on energy security, which we cannot
    achieve if we remain dependent on imported oil from Middle Eastern
    governments who support or foment by their own inattention and
    inequities the rise of terrorists or on swaggering demagogues and
    would be dictators in our hemisphere.

    "There's no doubt it's an enormous challenge. But is it too big a
    challenge for America to tackle; this great country that has never
    before confronted a problem it couldn't solve? No, it is not. No
    people have ever been better innovators and problem solvers than
    Americans. It is in our national DNA to see challenges as
    opportunities; to conquer problems beyond the expectation of an
    admiring world. America, relying as always on the industry and
    imagination of a free people, and the power and innovation of free
    markets, is capable of overcoming any challenge from within and
    without our borders. Our enemies believe we're too weak to overcome
    our dependence on foreign oil. Even some of our allies think we're
    no longer the world's most visionary, most capable country or
    committed to the advancement of mankind. I think we know better than
    that. I think we know who we are and what we can do. Now, let's
    remind the world."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca-82G-mEvs
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=77106
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/23/AR2007042301763.html

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