[TheClimate.Vote] December 15, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*December 15, 2020*/

[in the Guardian]
*US to hold world climate summit early next year and seek to rejoin 
Paris accord*
Action points for first 100 days of Joe Biden presidency seen as boost 
to international action currently falling behind
The US will hold a climate summit of the world’s major economies early 
next year, within 100 days of Joe Biden taking office, and seek to 
rejoin the Paris agreement on the first day of his presidency, in a 
boost to international climate action.

Leaders from 75 countries met without the US in a virtual Climate 
Ambition Summit co-hosted by the UN, the UK and France at the weekend, 
marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris accord. The absence of the US 
underlined the need for more countries, including other major economies 
such as Brazil, Russia and Indonesia, to make fresh commitments on 
tackling the climate crisis.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/14/us-to-hold-world-climate-summit-early-next-year-and-seek-to-rejoin-paris-accord


[Notice the money flow]
*Oil giant Exxon Mobil pushes new climate change plan as activist 
investors circle*
MON, DEC 14 2020
-- Exxon Mobil announced a new five-year plan to reduce greenhouse gas 
emissions, including from methane flaring and upstream operations, which 
it said were in line with the Paris Agreement reduction targets.
-- The new 2025 targets come a week after multiple activist investor 
groups targeted Exxon Mobil for slipping financial performance as well 
as a failure to address long-term energy transition needs.
-- Exxon said in the announcement that shareholders were consulted, but 
the changes won’t likely go far enough to address the concerns of 
investors hoping for a broad rethink of oil giant’s business model.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/14/exxon-mobil-begins-to-mount-defense-of-itself-and-a-bigas-activists-circle.html



[Dec 14th DemocracyNow video]
*Greta Thunberg: 5 Years After Paris Agreement, World Is “Speeding in 
the Wrong Direction” on Climate*
Dec 14, 2020
Democracy Now!
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who launched the global Fridays for 
Future youth climate movement, issued a stark warning on the fifth 
anniversary of the Paris Climate Agreement that the world is not doing 
enough to keep global heating below 2 degrees Celsius — the target set 
in the landmark 2015 deal. “The gap between what we need to do and what 
is actually being done is widening by the minute. We are still speeding 
in the wrong direction,” Thunberg said in a video message posted on 
social media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBqEcF8nmw



[Opinion Dec 12 the Economist]
*Britain excels at announcing climate targets*
But it must do more to meet them
Britain is in danger of securing a reputation for too much style and too 
little substance when it comes to climate change. The government has 
spent the past few months issuing target after goal after grandiose 
statement, all intended to portray the birthplace of the Industrial 
Revolution as a leader on the path to global decarbonisation. But 
policies and funding to make the targets reality are lacking.

On December 3rd Boris Johnson announced that the country’s 
greenhouse-gas emissions would, in the coming decade, drop to 68% below 
where they stood in 1990—a considerable decrease on the previous goal of 
a 57% drop by 2030. The pledge will form part of Britain’s formal 
amped-up contribution to the un Paris agreement. Under the terms of the 
agreement, all countries are due to submit fresh commitments by the end 
of 2020. Scores of new pledges are thus expected at a virtual summit on 
December 12th, held to mark five years since the agreement was made on 
the outskirts of France’s capital...
more at - 
https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/12/12/britain-excels-at-announcing-climate-targets


[Books Reviewed in the Guardian]
*Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency; What Would Nature Do? *– review
A bromide-laden view of the threats to the planet, by Ruth DeFries, is 
less convincing than Andreas Malm’s call for an urgent reform of capitalism
Ben Ehrenreich
Sun 13 Dec 2020
Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First 
Century is published by Verso (£10.99).
What Would Nature Do? A Guide for Our Uncertain Times is published by 
Columbia (£22);
Do you remember April? It seems like decades ago, but I remember, amid 
the dread and claustrophobia of lockdown, an unexpected thrum of hope. 
Traffic had stopped. No aeroplanes crossed the sky and no pollution 
clogged it. Where I live we heard ambulances carrying off our neighbours 
almost daily but we heard birdsong too, louder than ever before. A tiny 
spiky ball of glycoproteins and ribonucleic acid had done what a century 
of dedicated revolutionaries had been unable to. It had slowed the world 
economy to a crawl...
- -
Four years ago, the Swedish scholar Andreas Malm offered one of the 
sharpest diagnoses yet of the root disease we suffer from. In a book 
called Fossil Capital he traced the history of the coal-powered steam 
engine in 19th-century England. Coal, he argued, was not cheaper or more 
efficient than water power, but had the unique virtue of weakening those 
who laboured in mills to the advantage of the men who owned them. The 
fossil economy, as Malm called it, has from the beginning been 
inseparable from the exploitation of both humans and nature. Along the 
way it created the illusion of self-sustaining growth that remains 
fundamental to the current system, this machine that can never be 
allowed to stop, even as it destroys everything around us.

Malm’s latest book,*Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency,* adds the 
pandemic to the picture, “a global sickening to match the global 
heating”. More than 300 new infectious diseases have arisen since 1940: 
think HIV, Zika, Ebola, Sars, Mers, innumerable new strains of flu. 
There is little debate about their immediate origins. Previously 
unencountered microbes leap to human hosts from other animals in an 
ongoing “zoonotic spillover”. The causes are no mystery: habitat 
destruction – mainly deforestation – and industrialised agriculture put 
large numbers of humans in increasing contact with highly stressed 
animal populations.

The real virus, Malm suggests, is capitalism, the fossil economy that 
subsists “solely by expanding”, gobbling up the planet as it does. 
Capital’s only mandate is to reproduce itself, to eternally seek out 
opportunities for “growth”. The Earth becomes a collection of 
commodities. What is not commodity is waste. In an “ecologically unequal 
exchange” by which the wealthy populations of the global north enjoy 
consumer lifestyles dependent on “scorched-earth extractivism” in poor 
countries out of sight, virgin forest falls to make way for palm oil 
plantations, cobalt mines, cattle pasture, soy. Wild lands are bulldozed 
to feed commodity markets continents away. Fresh consumer hungers are 
manufactured to keep the machine humming.

The result is devastation, the entire biosphere in need of an ICU. In 
1700, before the birth of industrial capitalism, Malm writes, “95% of 
the planet’s ice-free land was either wild” or “used so lightly as to be 
categorised as ‘semi-natural’”. By 2000 only 5% was left. The problem is 
not the wet markets of Wuhan or the high-end trade in exotic animals, 
but a system that sucks all of nature into globalised circuits of 
capital. In doing so it cannot help but summon up fresh plagues, as it 
heats the atmosphere and poisons the air and the oceans...
- -
*What Would Nature Do?* is written for those who feel certain that their 
own children will not be among the refugees. Poor, abused nature, having 
surrendered so many of her riches, is here mined mercilessly for 
bromides. DeFries looks for life lessons in plate tectonics, entomology, 
the stock market. Her range is broad and her anecdotes often 
entertaining, but the truths she wrings from them are the banal stuff of 
Silicon Valley corporatese: strategic redundancy can avert disaster; 
flexible networks absorb shocks better than rigid hierarchies.
- -
So here we are again, in a situation that years of extinctions and 
climate crisis have already made familiar: watching a real-time 
catastrophe unfold, knowing exactly what needs to be done to stop it but 
knowing also that we can’t because the very structures underpinning our 
societies are the ones pushing the disasters onward. Perhaps, if we 
survive the winter ahead and are not lulled into somnolence by the 
arrival of a vaccine – big pharma on a wheezing white horse – we will 
remember precisely who told us not to worry and who told us that our 
lives matter less than their dividends do. And perhaps in our anger and 
our grief we will find the strength to build something new. “The way 
out,” writes the evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, on whose work much 
of Malm’s analysis rests, “is nothing short of birthing a world.” It 
won’t be easy, but neither are the alternatives.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/13/what-would-nature-do-by-ruth-defries-review-



[interview audio, video]
*Kathleen Dean Moore | What Could Possibly Go Right?*
Dec 15, 2020
postcarboninstitute
Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://link.chtbl.com/wcpgr

Kathleen Dean Moore, Ph.D., is a Author, Moral Philosopher, 
Environmental Advocate. She served as Distinguished Professor of 
Environmental Philosophy at Oregon State University, where she wrote 
award-winning books about our cultural and moral relations to the wet, 
wild world and to one another. But her increasing concern about the 
climate and extinction crises led her to leave the university, so she 
could write and speak full-time about the moral urgency of climate action.

Kathleen shares thoughts on What Could Possibly Go Right? including:

- That “sometimes it feels like the whole world is burning to its 
foundations, but the foundations are still there, and they're holding a 
space for the future.”
- That “almost every major change in US history has been the result of a 
rising wave of moral affirmation,” of the “conscience of the streets”.
- That we need to remember our shared moral foundations, of the “human 
decency deep in the earth” and the ideals our nation aspires to.
- Using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to call out the oil, 
gas and fracking industries for violations of human rights through 
contributing to climate change.
- The Blue River Declaration by an assembled group of philosophers, 
which asks “three fundamental questions... What is the world? What are 
human beings? And therefore, how shall we live?”
- That as human beings with imagination and understanding, “we have a 
responsibility to be the meaning makers of the universe.”

Resources
- Permanent Peoples' Tribunal http://permanentpeoplestribunal.org/?lang=en
- Blue River Declaration
- Book: Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril by Kathleen 
Dean Moore
- Book: Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of 
Planetary Change by Kathleen Dean Moore

Learn more and listen to all episodes: https://bit.ly/pci-wcpgrseries
Connect with Kathleen Website: riverwalking.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY3DRRuZsqM


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - December 15, 2008 *

December 15, 2008: President-elect Obama announces his energy and 
environment team: Dr. Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy, Lisa Jackson as 
EPA Administrator, Nancy Sutley as Chair of the White House Council of 
Environmental Quality, Carol Browner as Assistant to the President for 
Energy and Climate Change, and Heather Zichal as Deputy Assistant to the 
President for Energy and Climate Change.

http://youtu.be/ERNWRPaZ22A


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