[TheClimate.Vote] December 29, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*December 29, 2020*/

[set for take-off]
*EPA finalizes first-ever airplane greenhouse gas regulations*
Nick Sobczyk, E&E News - December 28, 2020

EPA today finalized its first greenhouse gas emissions regulations for 
airplanes, a historic step after a decade of legal wrangling.

It marks the first time EPA has regulated planet-warming emissions from 
airplanes and a rare move in the waning days of an administration that 
has rolled back regulations across the board...
- -
A dozen Democratic attorneys general criticized EPA's proposal during 
the public comment period, pointing to an International Council on Clean 
Transportation study that found the ICAO standard "lags the existing 
efforts of manufacturers by more than 10 years" (Greenwire, Oct. 20).

The average new aircraft delivered in 2016, according to the report, was 
already in line with the 2028 standard.

Green groups have also been pushing for EPA to regulate aircraft 
emissions since 2010, when several groups sued the agency over alleged 
failures to address mobile sources of greenhouse gas emissions, kicking 
off years of additional legal back-and-forth.

The industry, however, supports the ICAO standard and EPA's moves to 
mirror it.

Aerospace Industries Association Vice President of Civil Aviation David 
Silver said in a statement today that the agency "has demonstrated 
America's commitment to global action against climate change and ensured 
U.S. aircraft will meet the same standards as our competitors across the 
world."

Boeing Co. similarly called the rule "vital for protecting the 
environment and supporting the sustainable growth of commercial aviation 
and the United States economy."

A company statement said, "The standard is one of the essential pillars 
of the industry's strategy to cut net global aviation emissions to half 
of what they were in 2005 by 2050."
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2020/12/28/full



[strong opinion in the NYTimes]
*Watching Earth Burn*
For 10 days in September, satellites in orbit sent tragic evidence of 
climate change’s destructive power.
By Michael Benson
Mr. Benson, an author and artist, has special interests in planetary 
imagery and climate change.

Dec. 28, 2020
I have a pastime, one that used to give me considerable pleasure, but 
lately it has morphed into a source of anxiety, even horror: earth-watching.

Let me explain.

The earth from space is an incomparably lovely sight. I mean the whole 
planet, pole to pole, waxing and waning and rotating in that 
time-generating way it has, and not the views from the International 
Space Station, which is in a low orbit about 200 miles up and gives us 
only part of the whole.

My earth-watching, made possible by NOAA and Colorado State University 
websites, originates in three geostationary weather satellites parked in 
exceedingly high orbits above the Equator. Despite their seemingly 
static positions, GOES-16 and 17, two American satellites, and 
Himawari-8, a Japanese one, are actually whizzing through space at 6,876 
miles per hour. They do so to remain suspended imperturbably over the 
Ecuadorean-Colombian border, the Eastern Pacific and the Western Pacific 
respectively. At 22,236 miles above sea level, they are in effect 
falling around earth at the exact pace it turns.
The views they provide are astonishing. The planet shines spectacularly 
in steady sunlight. It’s white and blue, green, ocher and tan, with 
complex coruscating swirls of cloud. An exquisitely thin aquamarine line 
defines its dayside limb, delineating its atmospheric perimeter and 
shading gradually to black at the migratory border between day and 
night. There’s something sacred to this sight. As the source of all 
life, as the birthplace of our species, it deserves veneration. It 
follows that any harm done to it — and we’re doing plenty — is a 
desecration.
It’s also a stage, the only one we’ve ever known. All the individuals 
who’ve strutted and fretted here for millenniums, or for that matter 
fled and trembled, producing what we call history, are merely players. 
But even by the standards of that problematic legacy, this latest period 
seems different. It’s more worrisome, more global, and with increasing 
frequency, more terrifying.

Last winter, for example, Australia experienced one of the worst 
brushfire seasons in its history. On the first Sunday of 2020 I decided 
to take a look. Himawari-8 revealed a vista as spectacular as it was 
unnerving. A giant furnace door had seemingly been pried open. A plume 
of smoke extended outward from the continent’s southeastern quarter, a 
region twice the size of Texas where flame vortexes had been spiraling 
200 feet into the air. Carrying the color of the land it came from, that 
noxious exhalation bore the residue of a billion or more incinerated 
animals and innumerable plants, baked into tinder from decades of 
ever-hotter summers.

As the week unfolded, I watched that plume waft eastward, passing New 
Zealand and stretching thousands of miles into the cobalt Pacific. There 
in plain sight was the result of a disaster so vast that it had already 
consumed 15 million acres — a figure that would rise to 46 million. 
Australia’s fires killed dozens of people, destroyed some 5,900 
buildings and quite likely rendered some of the country’s endangered 
species extinct. With shocking iconographic precision, that unfurling 
banner of smoke said: The war has started. We’re losing.
In the year’s third quarter, the scorching southern summer of 2019-2020 
migrated northward under an ever-denser mantle of gaseous 
fire-accelerant — the carbon dioxide and methane belched ceaselessly 
forth into earth’s apple-skin atmosphere from 1.4 billion exhaust pipes 
and hundreds of thousands of factory stacks.
By late summer, much of the United States’ Pacific Coast was ablaze, and 
I watched both North and South America with mingled disbelief and 
consternation. Seen via GOES 16 and 17 throughout late August and early 
September, the entire Western Hemisphere was wreathed in blue-gray smoke 
— an alarming sight in which large areas of both continents were visible 
only through thick fumes from burning vegetation.

By contrast with the West Coast, South America’s fires were the result 
of a willful slash-and-burn assault on the world’s largest remaining 
tropical forests and wetlands. Egged on by the rapacious policies of 
President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, predatory agricultural, logging and 
mining interests had set his country ablaze. By late September the 
already hellish 2019 escalation in deliberately set forest fires had 
been exceeded by 28 percent, with more than 44,000 outbreaks recorded in 
the Amazon and Pantanal this year.
Seen from space, the resulting haze spanned approximately six million 
square miles. It’s unnerving to witness such enveloping madness. The 
Amazon rainforest is home to some 200 Indigenous tribes. It’s a 
priceless reservoir of biodiversity — a kind of green ark preserving the 
results of 800 million years of terrestrial evolution. It is also the 
world’s largest remaining carbon sink, capable of mitigating global 
warming by absorbing vast quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But 
you can’t ask it to absorb the results of its own incineration.
Meanwhile, North America’s Pacific Coast was choking under successive 
waves of fume and ash. As with Australia, the forests, chaparral and 
grasslands of California, Oregon and Washington State had been rendered 
explosive by a chain of summers so searing that by mid-August this year, 
Death Valley’s temperature spiked to 130 degrees Fahrenheit — probably 
the hottest temperature ever recorded on earth.
Logging onto GOES-17 later that month, I contemplated the unfolding 
tragedy. As seen from over the Eastern Pacific, the continent was 
bracketed by imminent disaster. Thick smoke obscured most of California. 
Hemmed in by the Transverse Ranges, it funneled north, breaking free of 
the coast around Sacramento and billowing toward Canada. Two thousand 
miles southeast, a majestically frightening pinwheel of clouds was 
suspended over the Gulf Coast: Hurricane Laura. This pummeling 
manifestation of warming oceans would kill at least 77 people and cause 
an estimated $16 billion in damage.
By early September, large regions of Oregon and Washington were also 
engulfed in flames, and on Sept. 11, the resulting smoke extended 1,000 
miles out across the Northern Pacific — a banner mirroring Australia’s 
of eight months before.
At its source, soot, ash and dust made the air quality of the 
continent’s western quarter the worst in the world. The intensity of the 
flames pumped smoke to an altitude four miles higher than a cruising 
jumbo jet. As the prevailing winds shifted, tendrils as thick as the 
Mexican state of Baja California extended eastward in striking hues of 
burnt sienna, their smoggy undulations tracing 10-mile-high wave forms 
across the continent and revealing something rarely discernible from 
geostationary distances: vertical relief within earth’s atmosphere.
By September’s end, nearly six million acres had burned on the coast, 
directly killing more than two dozen people, not counting the strokes, 
asthma attacks and heart attacks triggered by the smoke. Stanford 
University researchers estimated those deaths at between 1,000 and 3,000.
So what are we to make of this yin-yang spectacle, with ourselves at 
nature’s throat in the south and nature at ours up north? Clearly a 
tremendous intercontinental drama is underway. Having sown the wind with 
greenhouse gases for centuries, we’re reaping the whirlwind, sometimes 
quite literally. Add pestilence to this picture of drought, fire and 
flood and you have a scene straight out of the Book of Revelation, with 
the coronavirus, as invisible to the naked eye as it is from space, 
playing the role of the fourth Horseman, sent by nature to counter our 
continuing assaults on the natural world.
If the war has started and we’re losing, what can we do about it? Or to 
put it another way, what would I like to see happen over the next year, 
even if I won’t yet be able to observe it directly from my Olympian 
perch among the satellites?
Actually, our response to the pandemic already suggests the way forward. 
Faced with an existential crisis of a scale not seen in living memory, 
we deployed the planet’s best minds, funded them well and turned them 
loose on the problem. They in turn were able to draw on a wealth of 
prior knowledge about how viruses infiltrate our bodies, and three 
decades of hard-won experience in learning about and finally creating 
RNA — purpose-built synthetic copies of a natural molecule integral to 
our genes — devised to prompt an immune response within our cells. This 
paid off spectacularly. And all this was accomplished in record time — 
months instead of the previous standard of a decade or more.

We need to follow this immediately with another sustained global effort. 
Imagine what human ingenuity could produce if unleashed in comparably 
coordinated, well-funded fashion on the climate crisis. The good news is 
that, as with the new RNA vaccines, we have significant prior research 
to draw on. It covers carbon-neutral power production, energy 
conservation strategies, carbon capture and sequestration, global 
reforestation and an intercontinental effort to build a high voltage, DC 
power network 40 percent more efficient than AC and thus able to 
compensate for the daily fluctuations in wind and solar power systems.

In short, we need an all-hands-on-deck fusion of the Manhattan Project 
and the Marshall Plan, only this time funded by all of the world’s major 
economies and led by the largest: the United States, the European Union 
and China.

It’s a hallmark of the more successful viruses that they eventually stop 
killing their hosts, adapt and live on in symbiosis. Otherwise they risk 
reaching an evolutionary dead end. For myself, I’m sick of watching our 
home world, the birthplace of all known life, in horror and disgust at 
what we’re doing to it. The earth turns in steady sunlight, its 
temperature rising inexorably. It’s on us to reverse that fever. After 
all, we produced it.

Michael Benson is an author and artist currently based in Ottawa. The 
films in this article were created by Mr. Benson and Chai Dingari of The 
New York Times, using individual satellite frames from NOAA images.
Image
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/opinion/climate-change-earth.html

- -
[A new movie resonates]
*The Midnight Sky | Final Trailer | George Clooney | Netflix*
Dec 10, 2020
Netflix
This post-apocalyptic tale follows Augustine (George Clooney), a lonely 
scientist in the Arctic, as he races to stop Sully (Felicity Jones) and 
her fellow astronauts from returning home to Earth, where a mysterious 
global catastrophe has taken place. Clooney directs the adaptation of 
Lily Brooks-Dalton’s acclaimed novel Good Morning, Midnight, co-starring 
David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir and Tiffany Boone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb8ZbP6qAzE


[text and audio]
*The Urgent Case for Shrinking the Economy*
Endless growth is destroying the planet. We know how to stop it.
https://newrepublic.com/article/160692/less-is-more-degrowth-climate-change-book-review


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - December 29,  2009*

December 29, 2009: Washington Post writer Ezra Klein excoriates members 
of the US Senate who have developed cold feet about addressing global 
warming:

    "Amidst all this, conservative Senate Democrats are waving off the
    idea of serious action in 2010. But not because they're opposed. Oh,
    heavens no! It's because of abstract concerns over the political
    difficulties the problem presents. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), for
    instance, avers that 'climate change in an election year has very
    poor prospects.' That's undoubtedly true, though it is odd to say
    that the American system of governance can only solve problems every
    other year. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) says that 'we need to deal with
    the phenomena of global warming,' but wants to wait until the
    economy is fixed.

    "Rather than commenting abstractly on the difficulty of doing this,
    Conrad and Bayh and others could make it easier by saying things
    like 'we simply have to do this, it's our moral obligation as
    legislators,' and trying to persuade reporters to write stories
    about how even moderates such as Conrad and Byah are determined to
    do this. They could schedule meetings with other senators begging
    them to take this seriously, leveraging the credibility and goodwill
    built over decades in the Senate. They could spend money on TV ads
    in their state, talking directly into the camera, explaining to
    their constituents that they don't like having to face this problem,
    but see no choice. That effort might fail -- probably will, in fact
    -- but it's got a better chance of success than not trying. And this
    is, well, pretty important."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/climate_change_is_bad_but_the.html 



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