[TheClimate.Vote] February 18, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*February 18, 2020*/

[Big changes - video]*
**BlackRock CEO warns that climate risks to investors are growing*
Feb 17, 2020
YaleClimateConnections
Calls for decarbonization are now coming from the boardrooms and 
executive suites of the world's largest corporations and investment 
funds, in a fast-moving change that could reshape the global energy 
system and economy.
Visit us at https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfULrQtr32Y


[Richest man in USA 'commits']
*Jeff Bezos commits $10 billion to fight climate change*
The Bezos Earth Fund will begin issuing grants this summer
Today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he would be committing $10 
billion to fight climate change through a new fund called the Bezos 
Earth Fund.

He announced new fund in a post on Instagram. Amazon confirmed the 
existence of the fund to The Verge: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8rWKFnnQ5c/
Bezos said that the money will be used to help scientists, activists, 
NGOs, and "any effort that offers a real possibility" to help preserve 
the earth from the impact of climate change. A person close to the fund 
told The Verge that it would not engage in private sector investment, 
but focus entirely on charitable giving.

The fund plans to begin issuing grants this summer, but right now, there 
are few hard details besides what Bezos shared on Instagram, so it's 
unclear exactly how or when applications for grants will be accepted.

Bezos is worth about $130 billion, so committing $10 billion to 
philanthropy isn't taking a huge chunk out of Bezos' net worth. Bezos 
hasn't been quite as vocal as other tech billionaires about his 
philanthropy, though in 2018, he did launch announce a network of free 
nonprofit preschools to be built in low-income communities. And in 2017, 
he polled Twitter for philanthropy ideas that could assist people in 
need in the near-term.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/17/21141132/jeff-bezos-earth-fund-ten-billion-climate-change



[Why is it called fiction?]
*The Hottest New Literary Genre Is 'Doomer Lit'*
Stories about climate disaster have entertained us for years. Now, 
they're getting more unforgiving and dire.

Last year, novelist, bird lover, and wind-turbine hater Jonathan Franzen 
wrote a curious essay about climate change. In it, he argued that 
humanity will fail to divert global disaster. Radical collective action 
is needed to save the planet, he said, but human nature is incompatible 
with making the necessary changes. The essay--titled "What If We Stopped 
Pretending?"--vexed a wide-ranging coalition of climate scientists, 
activists, energy researchers, and environmental reporters. (Perhaps 
it's easier to unite people behind a common cause than Franzen suspects.)

As someone who disdains internet culture, Franzen may not be familiar 
with the term "doomer," an archetype born in online forums, but his 
outlook overlaps with the doomer perspective. Not nihilistic, exactly, 
but melancholic, resigned, and sometimes susceptible to reactionary 
politics.
Doomers are not a happy lot. An image posted to 4chan of a depressive 
dude smoking a cigarette highlights prototypical traits. "Cares … but 
knows there's nothing he can do," one of the captions surrounding the 
image reads. Another: "High Risk for Opioid Addiction." If doomers were 
to write a manifesto, they could crib from Franzen's essay.
They wouldn't find much inspiration in his books, though--Franzen's 
doomerism does not extend to his novels. While the author's crabby 
tendencies do seep into his work occasionally--Walter's rants in Freedom 
often feel like the writer using his character as a pulpit--the overall 
affect of his fiction is tender, bordering on hopeful. Maybe Franzen's 
next book will be Corrections 2: The Great Midwestern Drought, and he'll 
go all-in on havoc. If so, it'll join a growing body of work that could 
be called "doomer lit"--writing that takes seriously the idea that 
catastrophe is our fate, and despondency a rational response.

Sure enough, a doomer perspective seems most at home in so-called 
climate fiction (cli-fi for short). The genre, which imagines stories 
and worlds shaped by climate change, is sometimes considered a cousin of 
science fiction. For the most part, cli-fi titles traffic in danger but 
contain optimistic codas, allowing their characters to triumph or at 
least survive. But there is a growing offshoot of more downbeat fare. 
Andrew Milner, a literary critic and the author of the forthcoming 
Science Fiction and Climate Change, has tracked the trend. Along with 
his co-author, J. R. Burgmann, he calls pessimistic fatalism one of the 
major "paradigmatic responses to climate change in recent fiction."

An early example of this grim subgenre, Milner says, is Jeanette 
Winterson's 2007 novel The Stone Gods. Set on an Earth-like planet 
called Orbus, The Stone Gods observes its characters preparing to 
colonize a new world known only as Planet Blue. As the plot circles back 
on itself, it becomes clear this is not the first time humans have tried 
to start fresh. "It's so depressing if we keep making the same mistakes 
again and again," Billie, the narrator, says. She then makes the same 
mistakes again and again. The Stone Gods is a lively, funny novel, given 
to whimsical flourishes. (There are far more robot-related sex jokes 
than one might expect.) But Billie's story is about reckoning with 
annihilation. Doomer lit doesn't have to be dour--it is distinguished by 
its core fatalism rather than its tone. (The 90s television show 
Dinosaurs is, oddly enough, both a comedy for children and a candidate 
for an even earlier instance of doomer art. It ends with the titular 
dinosaurs dying because their industrial projects triggered a global 
environmental collapse.)

More recently, Claire Vaye Watkins' 2015 Gold Fame Citrus personalizes 
the crisis. Set in a near-future American West reduced to a dune-covered 
wasteland, it follows a young couple--melancholic former model Luz and 
kind drifter Ray--as they search for refuge and find even more mayhem in 
a desert cult. Things do not go well, freedom is found only in death, 
hope is a mirage, etc. There are moments where it seems as though the 
characters might pluck beauty from the devastation they endure, as when 
Luz reads the "Neo-Fauna of the Amargosa Dune Sea," a taxonomy of 
creatures the cult leader Levi has compiled as proof that the dunes hold 
life. (Entries include the land eel, the Mojave ghost crab, and the 
ouroboros rattler.) But Luz is unable to move forward in this ruined 
world, and Watkins' story is, in the end, hard-edged and brutal.

Historically, most art about climate change and ecological and health 
crises has turned away from whole-cloth negativism. The 2004 film The 
Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich's big-budget "what if climate change 
but blockbuster" movie, somehow imagines a world where a weather 
apocalypse happens … and somehow fixes the environment in the end. Even 
dirge-like apocalyptic works like Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Alfonso 
Cuaron's film Children of Men have endings that temper the misery of 
their worlds with a sense of possibility. Bong Joon-ho's 2013 film 
Snowpiercer portrays class war among the few survivors of a global cold 
snap in which almost everyone in the world has perished and most of the 
remaining people left are fed cockroach sludge and made to toil in 
abject conditions--but ends with a moment of triumph. Well, maybe: It's 
unclear whether those two kids can survive the frozen tundra.

It's fun to cheer when the heroes prevail against all odds, but there's 
a reason appetites for tragedy persist across cultures and time periods. 
Sometimes audiences just want to see tears. Jenny Offill's latest novel, 
Weather, resists a happy ending, preferring instead to linger in 
despair. It might be the most meditative and emblematic entry into the 
new doomer canon, a book whose protagonist essentially has Franzen's 
essay running on a loop in her head. Offill's narrator, a Brooklynite 
librarian named Lizzie, frets endlessly over impending chaos. "My #1 
fear is the acceleration of days," Lizzie says. "No such thing 
supposedly, but I swear I can feel it."

Lizzie devotes herself to catastrophic thinking, and her panic is 
limitless, coloring even her stray thoughts. She knows how to make a 
candle from a can of tuna, how to start a fire with a battery and gum 
wrapper. She recites survivalist techniques as emotional ballast against 
her sense of imminent oblivion. In addition to her work at the library, 
she answers letters for her former academic mentor, a woman who runs a 
podcast called Hell or High Water. Sample question: How will the last 
generation know it is the last generation? She struggles to respond to 
these inquiries without sounding nihilistic. As her husband puts it, 
"Lizzie's become a crazy doomer."

Like Franzen, Offill's register is domestic realism, and Weather takes 
place in the near-past and present. "We've started to see many more 
books addressing the issue of climate change that don't feel like 
science fiction at all," Amy Brady, whose Chicago Review of Books column 
"Burning Worlds" catalogs climate change fiction, says. "They're set in 
the present day and addressing climate change as we experience it in the 
here and now." Lizzie's fears of the end of the world are not resolved 
by the end of the novel because her world is contemporary, still on the 
precipice of crisis as it concludes.

Hope, though, is not lost. After the story ends, Weather offers readers 
a URL: www.obligatorynoteofhope.com. The webpage is an extratextual 
consolation-slash-call to action for readers, with a galley of 
inspirational people and lists of organizations to volunteer with or 
give money. It's a strange asterisk, as the most distinguishing element 
of Weather is how committed it is to capturing anomie. Perhaps it was 
meant to shield Weather from some of the criticism that Franzen's essay 
received. Some of Franzen's detractors worried that internalizing his 
message could discourage efforts to halt or reverse environmental 
damage, that his gloom could be catching. What they seemed to miss is 
that most people are already plenty apathetic, and that representing 
such apathy so plainly might force audiences to reckon with the fact of 
their giving up.

Weather is the most high-profile literary novel to take climate change 
anxiety as its overarching theme to date, but it has a companion piece 
in Paul Shrader's 2017 film First Reformed. Ethan Hawke plays a priest 
who agonizes over environmental degradation, to the detriment of his 
mental health and physical wellbeing. The fatalism in First Reformed 
isn't petrifying, it's bracing. It treats its tortured oddball and his 
radical congregants' concerns as valid, while a happier movie might 
minimize or dismiss them. This is the gift of doomer art–it's an outlet 
for angst, not its cause.
https://www.wired.com/story/doomer-lit-climate-fiction/


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  - February 18, 2004 *

Sixty scientists, including several Nobel laureates, issue a joint 
statement denouncing the George W. Bush administration for distorting, 
downplaying and disregarding scientific findings on such issues as 
human-caused climate change.

http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/scientists-sign-on-statement.html 


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