[TheClimate.Vote] June 13, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*June 13, 2020*/

[checking the numbers]
*Climate worst-case scenarios may not go far enough, cloud data shows*
Modelling suggests climate is considerably more sensitive to carbon 
emissions than thought
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/13/climate-worst-case-scenarios-clouds-scientists-global-heating


[Yale Climate Connections suggests]
*Three essays about how to cope with an uncertain future*
The coronavirus pandemic offers an opportunity to reflect on the 
inevitability of change - and the opportunity to create stronger 
communities.
By SueEllen Campbell - Friday, June 5, 2020

As the coronavirus crisis stretches out, we may well find ourselves 
thinking about the longer-term future more vividly and personally than 
usual. Which big things about our lives will change? Which won't? Will 
our world grow better or worse? At least for the moment, it is 
especially clear that thinking about one disaster can help us think 
about others.

As Mark Lilla argues in a short New York Times piece, we need to begin 
by admitting that "No One Knows What's Going to Happen." 
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-prediction-future.html 
This is true both for the coronavirus, Lilla's topic, and for climate 
change.

Facing this fundamental uncertainty, we can then turn to Rebecca Solnit, 
a strong voice for measured and open-eyed optimism in the face of all we 
don't and can't know. Her words in this piece from The Guardian are 
clearly as relevant to climate change as to her immediate focus: "The 
Way We Get Through This Is Together: The Rise of Mutual Aid under 
Coronavirus." 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/mutual-aid-coronavirus-pandemic-rebecca-solnit

To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, interviewing Michelle Obama in the 
documentary "Becoming," and as Solnit would certainly agree, we are 
seeing with hope the possibility of change. You may find fuel for such 
hope in a very interesting piece that looks directly at the potential 
post-pandemic politics of climate change, by Rebecca Willis, again in 
The Guardian: "'I Don't Want to Be Seen as a Zealot': What MPs Really 
Think about the Climate Crisis." 
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/21/i-dont-want-to-be-seen-as-a-zealot-what-mps-really-think-about-the-climate-crisis

This series is curated and written by retired Colorado State University 
English professor and close climate change watcher SueEllen Campbell of 
Colorado. To flag works you think warrant attention, send an e-mail to 
her any time. ICYMI at yaleclimateconnections.org Let us hear from you.
https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/06/three-essays-about-how-to-cope-with-an-uncertain-future/



[bad times mean greater opportunity for significant change]
*A Green New Deal architect explains how the protests and climate crisis 
are connected*
The Roosevelt Institute's Rhiana Gunn-Wright says the events of 2020 
underscore the need for broader coalitions to push for sweeping 
economic, environmental and criminal justice reforms.
by James Temple - June 11, 2020
Rhiana Gunn-Wright - ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE
Demands for climate action have largely faded into the background as the 
covid-19 pandemic, the economic meltdown, and widespread protests over 
police brutality have seized the world's attention.

But for Rhiana Gunn-Wright, the director of climate policy at the 
Roosevelt Institute and one of the architects of the Green New Deal, the 
issues are inextricably intertwined. You can't appreciate the real toll 
of the fossil-fuel sector if you're not looking at it through the lenses 
of racial justice, economic inequality, and public health, she says in 
an interview with MIT Technology Review.

People of color are more likely to live near power plants and other 
polluting factories, and they suffer higher levels of asthma and greater 
risks of early death from air pollution. The coronavirus death rate 
among black Americans is more than twice that of whites. And global 
warming and factory farming practices will release more deadly pathogens 
and reshape the range of infectious diseases, Gunn-Wright argued in 
April in a New York Times op-ed  titled "Think This Pandemic Is Bad? We 
Have Another Crisis Coming."

"The people most likely to die from toxic fumes are the same people most 
likely to die from Covid-19," she wrote. "It's like we are watching a 
preview of the worst possible impacts of the climate crisis roll right 
before our eyes."

One critique of the Green New Deal was that it took on too much, 
multiplying the difficulty of making progress on any one of the deeply 
polarized issues it addressed. But Gunn-Wright argues that this was its 
strength: tying together these seemingly distinct causes into a sweeping 
policy package underscored the connections between them and helped build 
a broader coalition of supporters behind them.

In the interview that follows, she says everything that's happened in 
2020 has only deepened those convictions.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

*How are you feeling about 2020?*
That's such a big question, because the way I feel about how 2020 is 
going depends on the day. In a lot of ways, I'm more scared than I've 
been in a long time, just because of the scale of the crises.

We're facing a recession that could be a bad recession or worse than the 
Great Depression. And then we also have a public health crisis. And then 
obviously we have an ongoing crisis around white supremacy and racial 
injustice that is coming to the fore. And of course we're also facing 
the climate crisis.

But then I'm also more hopeful than I have been, with the uprising and 
the protests that have happened, because I feel like it's a reminder 
that actually everyone in government serves at our pleasure.

*How have the protests, or the reactions to the protests, changed your 
thinking specifically around how to tackle climate and environmental 
justice issues?*
Mostly it made me realize that we were right. When the Green New Deal 
came out, I did a fair amount of press, and it felt like I spent six 
months answering the same set of questions. What role does equity have 
in this? Why attach it to a climate proposal? Won't this actually make 
it harder?

People were nervous that attaching climate change and climate policy to 
calls for racial justice or economic justice was too much, that we were 
actually going to make it harder to make progress on climate--as if they 
aren't all connected, which they are.

We were essentially saying that climate change is not just a technical 
problem. It's not just an issue of emissions. It's an issue of the 
systems that have allowed an industry that essentially poisons people to 
continue, and to do so even as it further and further imperils our 
survival, both as a nation and as a globe. It comes down to issues of 
race and class and place.

And so this moment actually makes me glad that we did that work before. 
Because it has meant that some groups that are seen solely as climate, 
like the Sunrise Movement, have invested in this set of uprisings. 
They're working with the Movement for Black Lives to get their members 
out to protest, to connect them to actions, to help them understand how 
climate is connected to this.

The Green New Deal helped push the conversations around climate away 
from a purely technocratic space. The increasingly popular stance on 
it--at least among climate experts, wonks, activists in the climate 
space--is about the nexus of jobs, justice and environment. And I think 
all of that actually makes it a lot easier for climate change to 
continue to be talked about in this moment and not be shoved aside.

*Last week, you tweeted: "climate twitter seems real silent these 
days…." You were just saying that in some ways, you've seen a broadening 
of support across groups. Did you mean there that you're still not 
seeing the climate community doing enough to stand up for racial justice 
issues and policing reforms?*
Yeah, I can say I'm not seeing enough for sure. I'm saying it was from 
nothing to, you know, something. And I have noticed before that when 
other big things happened--not quite this big--there will always be a 
silence. But then I would watch people have, like, three-day-long 
conversations about utility tariffs.

So I do think that there's still that divide. There's still a fair 
amount of people who think of climate as something that's outside of our 
social systems.

I think part of it is the discipline silo. People have fought back 
against climate change in the public sphere by questioning if it was 
really happening. So it has become a really technical and scientific 
space, because one way to fight back against that is to continually 
produce more data, and new ways to prove what's going on.

A downside is, sometimes it can feel like if it's not scientific, you 
shouldn't talk about it. Unless you have reams of data to support it, 
you shouldn't introduce it. Which is a problem, because data doesn't 
tell us what's true; data tells us what we decided to measure.

And especially when you're talking about race, and racial justice, there 
are a lot of lived experiences that haven't been quantified.

*What role should climate have in any upcoming economic recovery packages?*
There's a growing consensus that for an economic recovery from covid to 
be robust, decarbonization has to be a significant part of it. In my 
estimation, it should be centered around decarbonization.

It's not, like, a nice thing to have. It makes economic sense. 
Investments in clean energy have better multipliers, right? They give 
you more bang for your buck. They create more jobs. They catalyze more 
innovation.

And most of all, they help stabilize the climate, which is crucial 
economically speaking, particularly given the levels of temperature 
increases we're looking at by the end of the century. Fixing that is an 
incredibly stabilizing force.

We're going to be left with an economy where you have to generate huge 
numbers of jobs, and where you have to offset a really significant drop 
in demand. And decarbonization is one of the only spaces that can do 
that. It's one of the only spaces where we can generate that many jobs, 
where they'll also create new industries, and where you have the chance 
to spark new innovations that essentially help continue to grow the 
economy even after the initial investment is made.

And so you have all those arguments stacking up for a green stimulus. It 
by far makes the most economic sense. Really, the only reasons to not do 
it are political reasons.

But in the US, that's not what's happening so far. A lot of our recovery 
money is going to oil and gas industries, and renewables are losing 
ground. There's no targeted support for them in the CARES Act [the 
economic relief bill passed in late March].

*What can the climate community do to be more inclusive and more 
responsive to other social justice issues?*
One is hire people of color. And particularly people of color who don't 
have the same educational background as I think is common in climate or 
policy work in general.

If we want to actually be serious about supporting other movements that 
are aligned around justice, we have to make sure that the inside of our 
organizations actually looks like that. And that means not just hiring 
people of color, but also not just hiring people of color from the Ivy 
League. Hire people who have been activists for a long time and have 
learned about a topic from being in it.

Even if people are deep in this discipline, it's important to not silo 
ourselves off intellectually. It's always important for us, particularly 
if we're not activists out in the street, to remember that the ways that 
we theorize around or think of a problem is not actually necessarily the 
way it's happening.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/11/1003162/a-green-new-deal-architect-explains-how-the-protests-and-climate-crisis-are-connected/



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - June 13, 1993 *
The Baltimore Sun reports on the well-financed effort by libertarian 
activists and fossil-fuel industry lobbyists to stop the BTU tax.

    *Industry lobby, largely unanswered by White House, poured water on
    Btu tax*
    Karen Hosler - June 13, 1993
    THE BALTIMORE SUN

    WASHINGTON -- Day after day, radio ads in the Louisiana bayous
    warned Cajuns of a Washington plot to tax them every time they
    turned on the air conditioners, televisions or even took "a cold one
    out of the fridge."

    In South Dakota, thousands of fliers were distributed that
    threatened higher prices on all goods from food to fertilizer and a
    loss of 600,000 American jobs if President Clinton's Btu tax on
    energy was enacted. The fliers included postage-paid protest notes
    to be sent to the state's U.S. senators.

    Anti-Btu rallies were held in Bismarck, N.D., Billings, Mont.,
    Phoenix, Ariz., and Omaha, Neb. Local television stations in as many
    as a dozen states were saturated with advertisements; phone banks
    targeted calls to a select list of opinion makers; glossy brochures
    full of industry-paid studies on the dire effects of the tax were
    sent to local journalists who got follow-up calls from public
    relations agencies offering interviews.

    These efforts were part of a sophisticated industry-financed
    campaign that went largely unanswered by the White House and
    succeeded last week in scaring both Mr. Clinton and the Senate away
    from the centerpiece of his deficit-reduction program -- a
    broad-based tax on the heat content of fuel as measured in tTC
    British thermal units. As a result, the Senate Finance Committee is
    struggling to craft an alternative energy tax -- one that is likely
    to come under the same kind of organized attack as the Btu.

    'Astroturf'

    "Astroturf," is what critics like Oklahoma Rep. Mike Synar called
    the $2 million state-of-the art lobby effort designed to look like a
    grass-roots uprising against the Btu tax. The campaign was largely
    the work of two groups, a powerful coalition of energy producers,
    manufacturers and agriculture and another Republican-led consumer
    group founded by an oil company executive.

    "It was very effective," said Sen. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat
    who was one of those targeted by the lobbying. "I think we
    overreacted. There's always going to be some group that is
    vociferously opposed to a tax. Our job is to see through the fog and
    the guff. We abandoned the Btu too quickly."

    The anti-Btu campaign started almost as soon President Clinton
    unveiled the tax in February as a way to raise $72 billion over five
    years, encourage energy conservation and promote the use of
    cleaner-burning fuels.

    The administration touted it as a fairer levy than a gasoline tax,
    hitting everyone a little bit. The working poor would be spared any
    impact because of an offsetting income tax credit for families
    earning less than $30,000, the White House promised.

    But opponents argued that the tax would raise the cost of
    practically everything while costing thousands of jobs in
    energy-related industries, manufacturing and agriculture. And they
    quickly dominated the debate.

    There were newspaper ads, anti-Btu buttons, and radio ads.

    Many people weren't sure what the Btu tax was even after they were
    exposed to a negative barrage about its impact, much of it based on
    statistics from industry-financed studies that are disputed by the
    Clinton administration.

    But there is no doubt of the effectiveness of the campaign or the
    likelihood that it might work just as well in combating whatever tax
    the Senate comes up with as an alternative.

    Already, airlines, trucking companies and railroads are gearing up
    to attack a proposed transportation fuels tax. Meanwhile, the huge
    American Association of Retired Persons is activating its 34 million
    members to fight potentially deeper cuts in Medicare, the health
    care program for the elderly, to make up for the money lost by
    killing the Btu tax.

    Turnaround by Boren

    In Oklahoma, a prime section of the oil patch that was the top
    target of the anti-Btu crowd, Sen. David G. Boren started out as an
    enthusiastic admirer of Mr. Clinton's "bold plan" for deficit
    reduction. But after an intense pounding by lobbyists, he became a
    die-hard Btu opponent and was probably most responsible for the
    administration's decision to abandon the tax last week.

    By then, at least three other Democratic members of the Senate
    Finance Committee, whose states were also targeted by the lobbying
    campaign, were insisting on major changes in the legislation as a
    price for their support.

    Convinced it had little chance of salvaging the tax in the Senate,
    the administration threw in the towel Tuesday less than two weeks
    after the proposal had passed the House.

    House Speaker Thomas S. Foley argues almost daily that what Mr.
    Clinton is trying to do in cutting spending and raising taxes by a
    total of $500 billion over five years is extremely difficult, a
    tougher task than any president in memory has tackled.

    Yet spokesmen for the American Petroleum Institute, the National
    Association of Manufacturers, the Farm Bureau and others who were
    involved in the anti-Btu lobbying campaign said they were
    inadvertently aided by a White House that started strong but just
    didn't follow through.

    "They were awfully slow to react," said Jeff Nesbit, a spokesman for
    Citizens for a Sound Economy, which spent nearly $1 million in the
    anti-Btu campaign. Mr. Nesbit is one of several former aides to
    former Republican Vice President Dan Quayle who has found a home
    with the group, which was founded and funded by Koch Industries, one
    of the nation's largest oil companies.

    The Treasury Department cranked up some numbers to combat the
    industry-paid studies predicting great job loss from the Clinton
    program. But they left something to be desired in the salesmanship
    department.

    For example, Alicia Munnell, assistant Treasury Secretary for
    Economic Policy, said her main complaint with industry claims that
    the Btu tax would cost the average family $500 more a year was that
    they didn't take into consideration the benefits of lowering the
    deficit. By 1997, she said, lower interest rates and greater
    investment, combined with other programs in the bill would mean that
    poor states like Louisiana would reap more than they contribute in
    taxes.

    Long-range gains are a tough sell for people threatened immediately
    with higher taxes and potential job loss. With the exception of a
    few presidential town meetings, the administration didn't try.

    Further, the administration substantially weakened its case by
    granting a series of exemptions to the Btu tax -- beginning with a
    break for home heating oil that was demanded by, among others,
    Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell of Maine and Sen. Daniel
    P. Moynihan of New York, the two Democrats now trying to put the tax
    bill back together again. Even Mr. Foley wanted an exemption for
    aluminum manufacturing, a big employer in his home state of Washington.

    "There are so many exemptions the Btu could end up being an aid
    program," quipped Sen. John B. Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat, who was
    working to create an exemption of his own for petro-chemical
    exports. He said enforcement of the tax would require "Btu police."

    At work since February

    Mr. Nesbit's group started organizing in February, shortly after
    President Clinton unveiled his tax proposal. Its efforts were aimed
    exclusively at four potential swing votes on the Senate Finance
    committee, including Mr. Boren, Mr. Baucus, Mr. Breaux and North
    Dakota Democrat Kent Conrad.

    Now that the Btu tax has been dropped, Mr. Nesbit said his group's
    effort has branched out to include six additional states where
    Democratic senators are up for re-election next year. It is already
    fighting against the transportation fuels tax suggested by Mr.
    Breaux as an alternative to the Btu.

    Not all the citizens exposed to the anti-Btu tax campaign were
    sympathetic to it, however.

    Vernon Myer, an engineer from Lake Charles, La., pleaded with
    Senator Breaux last week not to let the energy industry off the hook.

    "When I see oil companies spend million of dollars on advertising,"
    he said, "I know there's a snow job going on."

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-06-13/news/1993164025_1_btu-tax-energy-tax-gasoline-tax 


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