[TheClimate.Vote] March 17, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/*March 17, 2020*/

[BBC reports - confirmation or confrontation]
*Climate change: The rich are to blame, international study finds*
By Roger Harrabin
BBC environment analyst
The rich are primarily to blame for the global climate crisis, a study 
by the University of Leeds of 86 countries claims.

The wealthiest tenth of people consume about 20 times more energy 
overall than the bottom ten, wherever they live.

The gulf is greatest in transport, where the top tenth gobble 187 times 
more fuel than the poorest tenth, the research says.

That's because people on the lowest incomes can rarely afford to drive.

The researchers found that the richer people became, the more energy 
they typically use. And it was replicated across all countries.

And they warn that, unless there's a significant policy change, 
household energy consumption could double from 2011 levels by 2050. 
That's even if energy efficiency improves.
- -
The researchers combined European Union and World Bank data to calculate 
how different income groups spend their money. They say it's the first 
study of its kind.

It found that in transport the richest tenth of consumers use more than 
half the energy. This reflects previous research showing that 15% of UK 
travellers take 70% of all flights.

The ultra-rich fly by far furthest, while 57% of the UK population does 
not fly abroad at all.

The study, published in Nature Energy, showed that energy for cooking 
and heating is more equitably consumed.

But even then, the top 10% of consumers used roughly one third of the 
total, presumably reflecting the size of their homes.

*Solutions?*
Co-author Professor Julia Steinberger, leader of the project at Leeds, 
asked: "How can we change the vastly unequal distribution of energy to 
provide a decent life for everyone while protecting the climate and 
ecosystems?"

The authors say governments could reduce transport demand through better 
public transport, higher taxes on bigger vehicles and frequent flyer 
levies for people who take most holidays.

They say another alternative is to electrify vehicles more quickly, 
although previous studies suggest even then demand for driving must be 
reduced in order to reduce the strain on resource use and electricity 
production and distribution.

*Rich Brits*
The research also examined the relative energy consumption of one nation 
against another.

It shows that a fifth of UK citizens are in the top 5% of global energy 
consumers, along with 40% of German citizens, and Luxembourg's entire 
population.

Only 2% of Chinese people are in the top global 5% of users, and just 
0.02% of people in India.

Even the poorest fifth of Britons consumes over five times as much 
energy per person as the bottom billion in India.

The study is likely to ignite future UN climate negotiations, where the 
issue of equity is always bitterly contentious.

In the USA, libertarian politicians have typically portrayed climate 
change as a harbinger of global socialism.
*
**Normal lives?*
But Professor Kevin Anderson, from the Tyndall Centre in Manchester, who 
was not involved in the study, told BBC News: "This study tells 
relatively wealthy people like us what we don't want to hear.

"The climate issue is framed by us high emitters - the politicians, 
business people, journalists, academics. When we say there's no appetite 
for higher taxes on flying, we mean WE don't want to fly less

"The same is true about our cars and the size our homes. We have 
convinced ourselves that our lives are normal, yet the numbers tell a 
very different story," he said.

The study says transport energy alone could increase 31% by 2050. "If 
transport continues to rely on fossil fuels, this increase would be 
disastrous for the climate," the report says.

It suggests different remedies for different types of energy use. So, 
flying and driving big cars could face higher taxes, while energy from 
homes could be reduced by a housing retrofit.

The authors note that the recent Budget declined to increase fuel duty 
and promised 4,000 miles of new roads. It did not mention home insulation.

The Treasury was contacted to discuss the taxation issues raised in the 
research, but declined to comment.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51906530



[opinion - this is a climate calamity]
*Why don't we treat climate change like an infectious disease?*
By Shannon Osaka on Mar 16, 2020
Schools are closed. Entire regions are on lockdown. President Trump has 
declared a national emergency and is weighing stimulus measures to help 
companies weather the storm.

Countries around the world are beginning to react to the novel 
coronavirus with unprecedented speed in an attempt to curb its spread. 
There are already more than 135,000 cases worldwide and 5,000 deaths.

It's a worldwide, planetary crisis. So why haven't we seen this kind of 
sudden mobilization for human-caused climate change -- another global 
catastrophe that has likely already claimed thousands of lives?

It's common to bemoan a lack of action on curbing greenhouse gases, and 
wonder what the world would look like if governments treated the climate 
crisis like a pandemic, or even a war. But there are real reasons why 
climate change isn't emblazoned on every newspaper headline and, like 
COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, discussed in sprawling emails 
at work and in seemingly every grocery store aisle.

"We are certainly under-reacting to climate change," said Ed Maibach, a 
professor at George Mason University who studies climate change and 
public health, in an email. "Because it is a potentially catastrophic 
health threat that is likely to greatly harm human health and wellbeing 
for many generations to come."

Part of the reason people recognize the threat posed by COVID-19 is its 
novelty. According to Maibach, people have a tendency to react strongly 
-- or overreact -- to risks that seem new, uncertain, uncontrollable, 
and life-threatening. COVID-19 displays all of these qualities.

Climate change, on the other hand, has long been seen as an approaching 
risk, one that will only affect people sometime in the future. A little 
less than half of Americans believe that climate change is harming U.S. 
residents "right now" (though that's starting to change). Despite recent 
devastating wildfires in Australia and rapid ice melt at the poles, the 
framing of climate change as a long-term problem relegates it to 
back-of-mind for many. Sure, it's a problem, the thinking goes, but one 
we can deal with later.

Familiar problems often get pushed to the side in favor of new ones, 
said Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology at Wooster College in 
Ohio. "Visually, if you stare at the same thing for a long time, you 
literally stop seeing it because your visual receptors adapt," she said. 
That's akin to how people respond to climate change. "We think, 'Oh, 
climate change is bad. But I've been hearing about it for a long time. 
So I don't necessarily need to pay attention to the stories coming out 
today.'"

It's not just psychology preventing an all-hands-on-deck response. The 
climate crisis has been called a "super-wicked problem" -- an issue that 
defies simple solutions or silver bullets. Wicked problems require 
large-scale, permanent changes to the way our societies run; they're 
often exacerbated by other issues and sometimes require combatting 
powerful, entrenched interests. Poverty, for example, is a wicked 
problem: It has no simple fix.

As countries around the world take extreme measures to protect against 
COVID-19, there's an assumption that such precautions will only be 
needed for months, maybe a year (get used to homeschooling, folks).

Climate change, on the other hand, requires decades of action -- to 2050 
and beyond. Though there would be an enormous benefit from an all-out 
mobilization in the short term, humans will be wrestling with a warming 
planet for at least the next century. There's no vaccine for climate 
change, and, unlike the coronavirus, it won't simply burn out over time.

There are still lessons to be learned from the current pandemic. "Many 
of the systems that we're seeing are so crucial for addressing 
coronavirus are also greatly needed for addressing the health impacts of 
climate change," said Mona Sarfaty, director of a program on climate 
change and health at George Mason University. Heat waves, extreme 
weather events, and rising air pollution from wildfires can put pressure 
on medical infrastructure; those support systems will need to be 
strengthened to prepare for a hotter climate.

Moreover, the sheer amount of action provoked by the COVID-19 outbreak 
shows what's possible if governments and individuals could set aside 
short-term thinking. "There's a sense that when people recognize that 
something is an emergency, pretty extreme measures can be taken," 
Clayton said. Consider airplane flights, one of the most 
carbon-intensive actions an individual can take. "When it comes to 
something like this, people are not saying we can't stop flying because 
it will hurt the economy. They're just not flying."
https://grist.org/climate/why-dont-we-treat-climate-change-like-an-infectious-disease/



[modeling the future]
*What Could Warming Mean for Pathogens like Coronavirus?*
Scientists expect to see changes in the timing, location and severity of 
disease outbreaks as global temperatures rise

By Chelsea Harvey, E&E News on March 9, 2020
President Trump assured the American public that the onset of warmer 
weather could halt the spread of the coronavirus. But experts caution 
there's no evidence to support that idea.
-- -
But COVID-19, being a novel disease, still holds more questions than 
answers. Scientists aren't sure what kinds of patterns to expect as it 
spreads or how it might be affected by weather and climate.
- - -
As the Earth continues to warm, many scientists expect to see changes in 
the timing, geography and intensity of disease outbreaks around the 
world. And some experts believe climate change, along with other 
environmental disturbances, could help facilitate the rise of more 
brand-new diseases, like COVID-19.
- -
Studies suggest that vectors like mosquitoes and ticks may shift their 
ranges as the climate warms. This means that certain vector-borne 
diseases, such as malaria, dengue fever or Lyme disease, may move into 
new territories in the future.

But with directly transmitted diseases, like influenza or COVID-19, it's 
much harder to run experiments. Some viruses -- flu, for example -- can 
be tested in animals like guinea pigs. But that's not true for every 
viral illness. And animals don't provide a perfect analogy for the way 
diseases spread in human societies.

Much of what we know about climate and directly transmitted diseases 
comes from large-scale observations of the way these diseases behave in 
the world. In this way, scientists are slowly starting to gain insight 
into how climate affects some of the most common viral diseases.
- - -
NOVEL DISEASES
The rapid spread of the coronavirus is sparking challenging 
conversations about how to prepare for epidemics, especially new or 
little-known diseases. Climate change may make these conversations even 
more important.

For one thing, climate change may cause diseases that are common in some 
places to shift into new geographic locations. That's a particular risk 
with vector-borne diseases, as mosquitoes and ticks expand their ranges.

In that scenario, the disease itself isn't unknown to the world -- but 
it may be new to many of the places it affects in the future.

"It seems like what we expect from mosquito-borne diseases with climate 
change is that they're going to change in their distribution and affect 
new populations that are not used to being under that threat," said 
Christine Johnson, director of the EpiCenter for Disease Dynamics at the 
University of California, Davis' School of Veterinary Medicine. "And in 
some cases, very vulnerable populations that don't have a lot at the 
ready in terms of mosquito control."

Scientists are working on ways to improve their projections of where 
these types of diseases may crop up in the future, so communities can 
prepare to deal with them.

It's also possible that climate change may affect the emergence of 
entirely novel diseases, like COVID-19.

Exactly how is highly uncertain. But it's worth keeping in mind that 
most novel diseases originate in wildlife before they spread to humans, 
said Johnson. The COVID-19 virus, for instance, is thought to have 
originated in bats.

As the climate changes, many animal species are likely to change their 
behavior or migrate to new areas. It's possible that in some cases, this 
could increase their likelihood of coming into contact with humans.

Climate change isn't the only environmental disturbance to keep an eye 
on. Other human activities may also increase the likelihood of 
human-wildlife contact and the risk of emerging diseases.

Deforestation is one major potential factor. Wildlife markets are 
another, Johnson added.

That said, the effects of environmental disturbances on novel diseases 
remain highly uncertain.

"I think we can say that things are going to change, and that we expect 
the risk to increase," Johnson said. "But we can't say with any 
certainty which diseases, in which locations and at which time."

For now, some of the greatest lessons the world is learning from 
coronavirus may simply be the value of preparing for the unexpected. And 
that's a lesson the world is learning from climate change, as well.

"Something I hear a lot in this field is, we can't predict next year's 
flu season, so how could we possibly make predictions out to 2100 or 
2050 on what the flu season is going to look like with climate change?" 
Baker said. "I think there's a great analogy here with climate science 
itself. People make the same case: How do we know what climate change is 
going to look like in 50 or 100 years when we don't know what next 
week's snowfall is going to be?"

The key thing to remember in both cases, she said, is that short-term 
fluctuations may be hard to predict -- but observing long-term patterns 
over many years can give scientists great confidence in their 
predictions about what the future might hold. Keeping up these efforts 
in both climate science and infectious disease research is critical.

"I think the analogy there is an important one," Baker said.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-could-warming-mean-for-pathogens-like-coronavirus/



[requirements - LONG READ]
*To avoid climate catastrophe, it's going to take a revolution of the mind*
As we approach a turning point in our civilization's journey, author 
Naomi Klein has been sounding the alarm about how to shift the current 
paradigm and loosen our deadly chokehold on the living world.

BY ANNA LENZER -
Antarctica just hit 65 degrees, the highest temperature it's ever 
recorded, and a sea in Siberia is "boiling" with methane. Major parts of 
the U.S. drinking water supply are contaminated with "forever 
chemicals"--so called because they virtually never degrade--that are 
linked to cancers and liver damage, among other health problems. Climate 
models used to forecast warming are running red-hot and giving us far 
less time than we thought to turn things around. And last July was the 
hottest month in the 140 years that records have been kept, the 415th 
consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average.

There's a growing sense that we're approaching a turning point in our 
civilization's journey, in which the path diverges between two 
extremes--a re-flourishing garden planet and a bleak, burning wasteland 
of increasingly rationed resources. We're pushing on dominoes that could 
fall into a runaway series of irreversible tipping points and feedback 
loops that will leave us to do emergency triage and run rescue-salvage 
missions on a dying and incinerated planet for the rest of our days. 
Peak Life is in sight, possibly already behind us, and our current 
trajectory is about to fling us off the cliff.

The UN is raising the alarm that the mass extinction of plant and animal 
species--which has already decimated large swaths of the planet--risks 
collapsing into a catastrophic point of no return, and that halting this 
destruction of the web of life (along with our food and water security) 
requires an unprecedented transformation of civilization beginning 
immediately. A series of global summits through the end of this year is 
intended to kick off this paradigmatic shift and to loosen our deadly 
chokehold on the living world.

A few days before the UN's Climate Action Summit in New York last fall, 
author Naomi Klein launched her latest broadside against the forces of 
inertia with the now best-selling On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a 
Green New Deal, a book designed to inspire a blueprint for the United 
States' reemergence as a global climate leader. Klein has long been one 
of the most visible proponents of such a blueprint--Bill McKibben calls 
her the "intellectual godmother of the Green New Deal," and last year 
she produced the popular short film "A Message from the Future," 
narrated by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Since its publication in September, the cascading series of 
environmental crises (from the burning of Australia to the melting of 
Antarctica) have prompted Klein to sound the alarm even louder. She 
tells Fast Company:

Despite the inferno in Australia and so many other climate alarms going 
off, no government of a major economy is living up to its commitments 
under the Paris Agreement. In a way, this was all predictable since the 
agreement contains no penalties for failure and the U.S. under Trump and 
Brazil under Bolsonaro have made it clear that they will not live up to 
their predecessors' commitments. So would any other government up their 
ambition? Even Canada under Trudeau is currently bulldozing Indigenous 
blockades in order to push through new fossil fuel infrastructure. It's 
a pretty bleak picture, which is only slightly brightened by growing 
market jitters about the viability of fossil fuel stocks. The way I see 
it, the only possible game changer would be a new U.S. administration in 
January 2021, elected on a transformational Green New Deal platform, one 
that included significant enough international climate financing to 
catalyze action in the global south and to shame other governments to do 
more in a hurry.

*HOW TO LEVERAGE CRISIS INTO A CIVILIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION*
On Fire is a collection of Klein's essays on the climate crisis from the 
past decade, with a new 53-page introduction along with other previously 
unpublished material. Beginning with a piece on BP's 2010 Gulf oil 
catastrophe, "A Hole in the World," the essays examine the crisis 
through a series of topical lenses including capitalism, geoengineering, 
wildfires, migrant rights, and soaring inequality--showing how climate 
breakdown impacts every aspect of society and can only be addressed by 
focusing on many seemingly disconnected woes.

The epilogue, "The Capsule Case for a Green New Deal," condenses Klein's 
vision of how the jobs crisis, increased income inequality, and the 
climate emergency can be leveraged to transform the blueprint into 
active reality, "responses that weave seemingly disparate crises 
(economic, social, ecological, and democratic) into a common story of 
civilizational transformation."

But most fundamentally and centrally, On Fire is a call to revolution, 
in the form of this civilizational transformation that Klein repeatedly 
makes clear is necessary to the success of any Green New Deal-style 
legislative package, as far as the survival of the living planet is 
concerned. She calls out the "denial" of "a lot of professional 
environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming 
Armageddon and then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying 
"green" products and creating clever markets in pollution." The global 
destruction of almost everything nonhuman clearly "demands not just 
green products and market-based solutions, but a new civilizational 
paradigm," as she puts it.

In one essay, titled "When Science Says that Political Revolution Is Our 
Only Hope," Klein notes that "there are many people who are well aware 
of the revolutionary nature of climate science." The complete 
"civilizational transformation" that must sweep through not just society 
but our own moment-to-moment personal perceptions is the book's through 
line. "[I] firmly believe that we will not emerge from this crisis 
without a shift in worldview at every level," she concludes. At an event 
with Greta Thunberg and other young climate activists on September 9 
hosted by The Intercept, Klein said that "we need to embrace 
revolutionary levels of change immediately."

Klein spends much of her time in On Fire exploring the political and 
cultural and emotional barriers to this transformation, the deep-set 
forces that have prevented this revolution from catching fire--even as 
it becomes increasingly clear that life depends on it. She realizes that 
"the dominant theories about how we had landed on this knife 
edge"--those that blamed electoral cycles, that the crisis seemed too 
distant, the enormous expense of climate action, the lack of sufficient 
clean technologies--were "becoming less true over time," she writes. 
After all, clean tech is becoming much more affordable while trillions 
of dollars continue to be wasted on "endless wars, bank bailouts, and 
subsidies for fossil fuels." Klein realizes that "there had to be more 
to it," explaining that the book "tracks my own attempt to probe a 
different set of barriers - some economic, some ideological, but others 
related to the deep stories about the right of certain people to 
dominate land and the people living closest to it, stories that underpin 
Western culture."

*WHEN WE STARTED TO VIEW NATURE AS A MACHINE*
This refusal to reckon with and respond appropriately to the news of our 
collective mortality leads On Fire to read as a kind of ecological 
version of The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker's 1974 Pulitzer 
Prize-winning book about our inability to deal directly with our 
individual mortality, and how our lives (and hence society) consist of a 
series of defense mechanisms and diversionary projects into which we 
channel our fear of dying. And while we've struggled for millennia to 
deal with our individual mortality, we've only had 30 years to process 
the awareness of our self-inflicted and voluntary species-wide mortality 
(along with taking the rest of life down with us).

This awareness about our collective mortality was badly timed, dawning 
as it did in the late 1980s, at the end of that decade's fever dream of 
neoliberalism, deregulation, hyper-consumerism, and globalization of 
material goods that all combined to light an uncontained, planetary 
economic bonfire, notes Klein.

*WITH NATURE NOW CAST AS A MACHINE, DEVOID OF MYSTERY OR DIVINITY, ITS 
COMPONENT PARTS COULD BE DAMMED, EXTRACTED, AND REMADE WITH IMPUNITY."*
NAOMI KLEIN
But while that decade may have ignited our current virulent strain of 
global capitalism, Klein traces the fuse back to the 1600s, when "the 
notion that nature is a machine for us to reengineer at will" was born. 
Klein, citing environmental historian Carolyn Merchant, notes that until 
that point, "the earth was seen as alive," and that "Europeans, like 
indigenous people the world over, believed the planet to be a living 
organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers."

That belief was upended to some degree by the scientific revolution of 
the 1600s, when some of nature's mysteries were revealed. "With nature 
now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component 
parts could be dammed, extracted, and remade with impunity," Klein 
writes. This brute-mechanical mindset perceived the living world as a 
series of carbon-based widgets, a vast warehouse of disconnected spare 
parts. In another essay, Klein writes about how this mindset was woven 
into the founding myths of North America, when European settlers saw 
fresh "body-double nations" ripe for exploitation "at a time when their 
home nations had slammed into hard ecological limits," and that "it was 
in this context that the so-called New World was imagined as a sort of 
spare continent, to use for parts." This broken machine metaphor is 
clearly reflected in our lethal relationship with our human-made 
machines, which we haven't yet figured out how to make, use, or dispose 
of without killing the rest of the planet.

It's here, in pinpointing the centuries-old, still-dominant machine 
paradigm at the heart of our ecological crisis, that Klein makes her 
most central and revolutionary point, shining a light on an ancient 
blind spot within which our alternate, living future lies.

The story of our clockwork model of nature as passive, brute machinery 
and the living paradigm it came to dominate is told in stunning, 
revelatory detail by Jessica Riskin, Stanford professor of history of 
science, in her 2016 book, The Restless Clock--one of the most quietly 
revolutionary books of the past century. It's a story that developed, as 
Riskin writes, "in close conjunction with mechanical and industrial 
arrangements such as the automatic loom and the transformed world of 
production that accompanied it; with economic policies including the 
division of various kinds of labor; with taxonomies and rankings of 
human beings by sex, race, class, geographical origin, and temperament; 
and with projects of imperial conquest and governance." Riskin is likely 
the world's foremost expert on what she calls "a paradox at the heart of 
modern science," in which the clockwork model "banished from nature all 
purpose, sentience, and agency, leaving behind a brute mechanical world 
that was fully intelligible without reference to mysterious forces or 
agencies."

This paradigm of nature as mechanical clockwork, enshrined by the 
scientific revolution and made material by the industrial revolution 
built in its image, set our frenetic, accelerating pace of extractive 
capitalism at the heart of today's crisis into motion. This shift also 
radically altered our experience of time--both of our personal sense of 
time as well as of the rhythms of nature--which many scientists have 
pointed out is a crucial factor to be addressed in overturning the 
mechanical paradigm that underlies climate catastrophe. Our frantic pace 
of extraction and pollution has now far outpaced what nature can 
regenerate and absorb. Astrophysicist Adam Frank described the effect of 
the industrial revolution's quickening machine time in his 2011 book, 
About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang: "The 
complete reordering of people's experience of time began with work but 
soon extended to every aspect of cultural and individual life," he 
wrote, adding that "now our rapid exploitation of carbon-intensive 
petrochemical technologies makes the next step in our story 
climate-dependent once again. And there can be no doubt that whatever 
comes next will have to involve new inventions in time."

And while our civilization remains trapped in the mechanical amber of 
the 1600s, Riskin urges us to consider that "historical analysis, by 
revealing the now-hidden forces that shaped current scientific problems 
and principles, can reopen foreclosed ways of thinking," since "to 
identify this struggle is to recognize intellectual possibilities that 
have been hidden by the course of history."

*HOW TO SHIFT THE PARADIGM*
It's this centuries-old argument and the shifting meaning of the nature 
of "machines" and the "machinery" of nature--an argument integrally 
fused with the founding of modern science--that Klein hits upon when she 
says that our mechanical treatment of the living world lies at the core 
of our current planetary catastrophe. As it becomes increasingly obvious 
that this paradigm has reached its terminal endpoint and a revolutionary 
global shift from a mechanical-industrial to an ecological civilization 
is, in fact, our only hope, it's worth being clear about what a paradigm 
shift actually is, how they've happened collectively in the past, and 
what delays and accelerates their completion.

The classic 1962 book that introduced the phrase "paradigm shift" into 
mass consciousness, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas 
Kuhn--one of the most influential books in the history of 
science--itself provides a blueprint for our present moment and echoes 
as a companion book to On Fire. Kuhn outlined the anatomy of scientific 
revolutions, tectonic shifts in understanding and perception to a new 
level, sparked by a crisis that can't be resolved by the old paradigm. 
He transformed our understanding of the progression of science not as a 
gradual accumulation of knowledge over the centuries, but as a series of 
dominant paradigms punctuated by "revolutionary breaks" ("non-cumulative 
breaks") from the past, transformations that he likened to a "gestalt 
switch" and "conversion experience."

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions covers the biggest paradigm 
shifts in scientific history, from the Copernican revolution's shift 
from geocentrism to heliocentrism, to the fulcrum of the scientific 
revolution in 1687 with Isaac Newton's publication of his Principia, 
which mathematically formulated the laws of motion and universal 
gravitation, to Einstein's revolutionary theory of relativity, which 
shattered the classical Newtonian framework of absolute time and space.

One stunning takeaway from reading Kuhn alongside Klein is that in many 
ways they're writing about the same, still unfinished revolution--the 
revolutionary shift out of the centuries-old Newtonian passive 
mechanical paradigm that Einstein kicked off a century ago in physics, 
but has yet to be translated into our actual world (even as Einstein's 
relativity revolution was followed by the quantum revolution and other 
new frontiers in the mathematics and geometry of the universe that we're 
just beginning to grasp).

*…IN BOTH POLITICAL AND SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT THE SENSE OF MALFUNCTION 
THAT CAN LEAD TO CRISIS IS PREREQUISITE TO REVOLUTION."*
THOMAS KUHN
Kuhn even wrote about the applicability of his study of scientific 
revolutions to political ones: Just like the transformative scientific 
revolutions he tracked, "political revolutions are inaugurated by a 
growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, 
that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems 
posed by an environment that they have in part created," adding that "in 
both political and scientific development the sense of malfunction that 
can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution."

Just as Klein explains that she has been "framing our project as one of 
transformation, not incrementalism" (the Canadian movement for a Green 
New Deal-style transformation, of which she was a core founder, is also 
officially called "The Leap"), Kuhn wrote that "the transition between 
competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and 
neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once 
(though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all."

"The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion 
experience that cannot be forced," Kuhn explained, using a religious 
metaphor echoed by Klein more than 50 years later in her essay on Pope 
Francis's climate change encyclical and her related invitation to the 
Vatican. "People of faith, particularly missionary faiths, believe 
deeply in something that a lot of secular people aren't so sure about: 
that all human beings are capable of profound change," and that "that, 
after all, is the essence of conversion," Klein writes. But as Kuhn 
explained, scientific paradigm shifts are very much conversion 
experiences too: "The conversion experience that I have likened to a 
gestalt switch remains, therefore, at the heart of the revolutionary 
process," he wrote. (The similarity between a religious and ecological 
conversion was articulated in 2018 by Pulitzer Prize-winning author 
Richard Powers, who described the process of researching and writing his 
ecological novel The Overstory as a "religious conversion," in the sense 
of "being bound back into a system of meaning that doesn't begin and end 
with humans.")

The person "who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing 
inverting lenses," who, "confronting the same constellation of objects 
as before and knowing that he does so, he nevertheless finds them 
transformed through and through in many of their details," Kuhn wrote, 
using a metaphor that offers a profound insight into our fatally 
maladjusted perception of the natural world.

We are about to take off--or have ripped off by reality--these 
antiquated lenses, and may experience a wicked headache for a while as 
we readjust to seeing the world as it really is. But when our vision 
clears again, we'll no longer have to tolerate, as Klein describes it, 
"the debilitating cognitive dissonance that living in a culture that is 
denying the reality of so profound a crisis requires."

*MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT IN OUR CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE*
Revolutionary possibilities begin to open when "nature itself must first 
undermine professional security by making prior achievements seem 
problematic," as Kuhn put it. The motion toward a new paradigm begins 
"only after persistent failure to solve a noteworthy puzzle has given 
rise to crisis," he wrote. A crisis within the old paradigm was the 
"usual prelude" to revolution, which serves as "a self-correcting 
mechanism" that is "terminated, not by deliberation and interpretation, 
but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt 
switch." While Kuhn's past crises revolved around scientific matters 
such as the motion of celestial bodies or questions involving the speed 
of light, our ecological crisis now revolves around the collapse of the 
web of life on earth, the ultimate crisis point through which nature 
could not be making our "prior achievements" seem any more 
"problematic." Our "Clockwork Universe" model of the living world has a 
built-in alarm clock of natural limits, now blaring for us to wake up 
and reset everything before we die in our sleep.

To transform our civilization before its ecological death will mean 
putting ourselves through the transformational fires first, if we hope 
for it to catch. "We have to find our own fire, we have to be that 
fire," as Klein put it at The Intercept's September event featuring 
young climate activists. Unlike the fires now ravaging the planet, for 
Klein, "we're talking about the fires of creation."

In other words, it's time to steal fire from the gods--to remake our 
world and ourselves in the reflection of life, rather than the opposite.

There was a French Jesuit priest and paleontologist named Pierre 
Teilhard de Chardin, born in 1881, who is still popular today for his 
visionary ideas, such as those about the development of collective 
consciousness. Pope Francis even cited him in his climate change 
encyclical. In a message that seems posted to this very moment, he made 
the ultimate human prediction: "The day will come when, after harnessing 
the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God 
the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the 
history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

No machine can predict what will happen next.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90475368/to-avoid-climate-catastrophe-its-going-to-take-a-revolution-of-the-mind


[chilling video talk]
*Antarctica : What happens if the 'Doomsday' Glacier collapses?*
Mar 15, 2020
Just Have a Think
Antarctica is home to some of the world's largest ice sheets and 
glaciers. They existed in a stable equilibrium of ebb and flow for 
millions of years until global warming started to melt them faster than 
the snow falls could replenish their ice. Now a new US / UK research 
collaboration has discovered that the rate of melt is even worse than 
scientists feared. What's driving this latest acceleration, and can we 
slow it down?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hax7EPFysqY



[Continuing coal crash]
*4 astonishing signs of coal's declining economic viability*
Coal is now a loser around the world.

By David Roberts at drvoxdavid@vox.com Mar 14, 2020
There has been no more dramatic story in the world of energy over the 
last 20 years than the rise and fall of coal.

In the early 2000s, coal fueled China's rapid growth. From 2000 to 2013, 
coal consumption in the country grew at a ludicrous pace of 12 percent a 
year on average, from 1.36 billion tons annually to 4.24 billion. For a 
while, China was burning over half of global coal output. Coal producers 
across the world flourished and many believed the "economic miracle" 
would go on forever.

It didn't. In the early 2010s, China's manufacturing-driven boom began 
slowing, cheap fracked gas took off the in the US, the world woke up to 
climate change, and renewable energy began its unstoppable march down 
the cost curve.

The result has been an extraordinary reversal of fortunes for coal at a 
time when it's clearer than ever that we must stop using fossil fuels as 
soon as possible.

Coal left Appalachia devastated. Now it's doing the same to Wyoming.
Just how bad has it gotten? For that, we turn to the Carbon Tracker 
Initiative, a research nonprofit. It maintains the Global Coal Power 
Economics Model, or GCPEM, "a proprietary techno-economic simulation 
model which tracks ~95 percent of operating, under-construction, and 
planned coal capacity at boiler-level." (The raw coal plant data is 
gathered and maintained by Global Energy Monitor.)

Basically, Carbon Tracker monitors the finances of all the world's 
operating and planned coal plants. It has just released a comprehensive 
report on the health of the global coal power market...
- -
The results reveal that in the US and across the world, coal power is 
dying. By 2030, it will be uneconomic to run existing coal plants. That 
means all the dozens of coal plants on the drawing board today are 
doomed to become stranded assets.

But while coal has lost its economic advantage, it still retains 
considerable social and political power. Let's dive in.

*Two key metrics to understand the results*
First, two key metrics and two key thresholds to keep in mind.

The first metric is the long-run marginal cost (LRMC) of energy from a 
power plant, which is the value of the energy it produces minus the 
ongoing costs of running the plant, i.e., fuel costs, variable operating 
and management (O&M) costs, fixed O&M costs, and any carbon costs that 
might be imposed by policy.

The second metric is the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) from a power 
plant, which is the value of the energy it produces minus the costs of 
running it (LRMC) and the capital cost of building it.

If you're thinking about whether to continue running a power plant you 
already own, you're thinking about LRMC. If you're thinking about 
whether to build a new power plant, you're thinking about LCOE.

With that in mind, the first key threshold is the point at which the 
LCOE of a new renewable energy power plant (solar or wind) falls below 
the LCOE of a new coal plant -- in other words, when it becomes cheaper 
to build new renewable energy than it is to build new coal.

The second key threshold is the point at which the LCOE of a new 
renewable energy power plant falls below the LRMC of a coal plant -- in 
other words, when it becomes cheaper to build new renewable energy than 
to run existing coal.

These thresholds will arrive at different times for different 
renewable-energy technologies in different markets, of course. Carbon 
Tracker's analysis charts out the numbers for each region.

*4 remarkable facts about coal's declining health*
So let's walk through the four big findings.

1. It is already cheaper to build new renewables than to build new coal 
plants, in all major markets.

Just two years ago, in 2018, Carbon Tracker did a similar analysis and 
concluded that new renewable energy would undercut new coal in all major 
markets by 2025. "Using updated data from publicly available sources," 
it concludes in this year's report, "we now believe these conclusions 
are too conservative."

In fact, they say, new renewables are cheaper than new coal plants in 
all major markets ... today...
- -
2. Over half the existing global coal fleet is more expensive to run 
than building new renewables.

The second threshold, Carbon Tracker finds, has been crossed by about 60 
percent of the global coal fleet, which now has a higher LRMC than the 
LCOE of new renewable energy.

"This trend is most pronounced in the EU, which has a strong carbon 
price and has benefited from years of investment in renewable energy," 
the report says. "The US, China, and India are not far behind the EU due 
to excellent renewable energy resources, low capital costs, and 
least-cost policymaking."

In markets where this threshold has not been crossed, like Turkey and 
Japan, the blame generally falls on unsupportive policy and unreliable 
markets.

*renewables vs existing coal*
- -
3. By 2030, it will be cheaper to build new renewables than to run 
existing coal -- everywhere.

This is the real mind-blower: even in laggard markets, Carbon Tracker 
projects that coal power will cross the second threshold by 2030 at the 
latest.

In other words, within ten years, virtually every coal plant in the 
world will be uneconomic, producing power more expensive than what could 
be generated by new renewables. (And Carbon Tracker doesn't even take 
into account the enormous costs of decommissioning and cleaning up after 
dead coal plants.)

*coal plant economics*
Carbon Tracker
4. Investors stand to lose over $600 billion on doomed coal plants.

Coal plants are long-term investments, built to last 40 or 50 years. 
There are coal plants running in the US that are over a century old. 
Investors' capital recovery is typically 15 to 20 years.

According to Carbon Tracker, 499 gigawatts worth of coal-power capacity 
is "announced, permitted, pre-permitted, and under-construction 
throughout the world." (By way of comparison, the current global coal 
fleet is about 2,000 GW.) That adds up to about $638 billion worth of 
investment.

If Carbon Tracker's analysis is correct, all of those plants will be 
uneconomic either upon being built or shortly thereafter. They will 
become stranded assets -- and $638 billion is a lot of stranded assets.

*coal investment risk*
Carbon Tracker
It is not economics propping coal up
All of this raises the question: if more than half of current coal 
plants are uneconomic, and virtually all future coal plants will be, why 
are people still investing in them? How is coal defying market gravity, 
staying up despite the economic forces dragging it down?

Because most energy markets aren't particularly market-like. They tend 
to be centrally planned and highly regulated, though they do range in 
the degree of regulation. The most competitive markets -- "deregulated" 
markets where there is something akin to open competition among energy 
resources -- are generally found in the EU. In the US, there is a mix of 
semi-regulated markets (with some competition) and fully regulated 
markets, wherein the entire electricity supply chain is controlled by 
monopoly utilities. The situation is similar in Asian countries, a mix 
with even more barriers to markets...
- -
What's notable is that, across the world, coal's fortunes vary inversely 
with the degree of market competition. Where there is more competition, 
there is less coal. Where there is more corporate welfare, more 
monopolistic utilities, more lobbying of lawmakers and capture of 
regulators, more socioeconomic resistance from areas dependent on fossil 
fuel plants for local revenue, there is more coal.

Coal is kept alive by path dependence, political influence, and 
distorted markets. Killing it off for good is the capitalist thing to do.

4 ways policymakers can avoid a coal disaster
Carbon Tracker concludes with four recommendations.

The first it directs to China, though it could equally well be directed 
to any country. COVID-19 has dealt a serious blow to China's economy and 
will deal more serious blows to other economies across the world before 
it is done. In doing so, it has slowed economic activity and reduced 
greenhouse gas emissions.

Hard-hit countries are certain to turn to economic stimulus to get their 
economies going again. It is important for climate change that such 
stimulus not trigger a corresponding spike in emissions.

According to Carbon Tracker, "around 70% of China's operating coal fleet 
costs more to run than building new onshore wind or utility-scale solar PV."

*wind vs coal in china*
Carbon Tracker
"Despite this," the report says, "China has 99.7 GW of coal-fired 
capacity under-construction and another 106.1 GW of capacity in various 
stages of the planning process."

It is vital that China not go forward with ill-advised coal investments 
in order to stimulate the economy. It should divert those investments to 
clean energy, kickstarting its new economy instead of its old one. 
(Similarly, it is important for the US to avoid the oil and gas bailout 
Trump is said to be contemplating.)

Second, governments need to take the risk of stranded coal assets 
seriously and stop incentivizing and underwriting new coal projects. It 
sends an irresponsible signal to markets. Governments and investors 
should "urgently reconsider these coal projects in light of prevailing 
economics," Carbon Tracker says.

Third, policymakers should move toward more lightly regulated, 
competitive energy markets, with more "price discovery" through regular 
interaction of buyers and sellers. In regulated and semi-regulated 
markets, investment decisions are often based on long-term power 
purchase agreements (PPAs) influenced by backroom lobbying and other 
sociopolitical pressures. More competitive markets would allow 
renewables to translate their superior economics into superior market 
performance, driving coal out.

Finally, policymakers should devise a phase-out schedule for existing 
coal plants. Leaving uneconomic plants on the market suppresses power 
prices and investment in new renewable capacity, slowing the 
clean-energy transition. Shutting down uneconomic coal plants removes 
slack from the system and makes markets more competitive, driving more 
innovation and (clean) investment.

In the US and across the world, coal power is a dead man walking. It 
stumbles on because, though it has completely lost its economic 
advantage, it still retains considerable social and political power. It 
survives on sheer momentum, market distortions, long-established 
political relationships.

The tidal force of economics will erode those advantages eventually, but 
policymakers would be smart to use the current downturn, and the need 
for stimulus, as an occasion to hasten that transition.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/3/14/21177941/climate-change-coal-renewable-energy 


[But can this happen fast enough?  Best deadline is 5 PM today, not 2030]



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  - March 17, 2014 *
The New York Times reports:
"Across the parched American West, the long drought has set off a series 
of fierce legal and political battles over who controls an increasingly 
dear treasure -- water."...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/us/wests-drought-and-growth-intensify-conflict-over-water-rights.html

/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

/Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote

/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
to news digest./

*** Privacy and Security:*This is a text-only mailing that carries no 
images which may originate from remote servers. Text-only messages 
provide greater privacy to the receiver and sender.
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for democratic 
and election purposes and cannot be used for commercial purposes.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote 
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, 
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at 
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for 
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct 
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List 
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to 
this mailing list.