[TheClimate.Vote] May 2, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*May 2, 2020*/

[Business and climate risk]
*Warren calls for SEC to require climate risk disclosures*
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is calling on the Securities and 
Exchange Commission (SEC) to require public companies to disclose 
climate risks posed by their activities.

She wrote a letter to SEC Chairman Jay Clayton as the agency is 
proposing changes to financial disclosure requirements. The changes 
wouldn't add any particular mandate to disclose climate risks.

"The climate crisis will have a significant impact on our economy, and 
without meaningful requirements for companies to disclose their exposure 
to climate change risk, I am concerned that the proposed rule would not 
give investors and the public the information needed to make 
well-informed investment decisions," Warren wrote on Tuesday...
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/495336-warren-calls-for-sec-to-require-climate-risk-disclosures
--
[a single page act]
*The Climate Risk Disclosure Act of 2019*
Investors lack access to basic information about the potential impact of 
the climate crisis on American companies. This
creates enormous environmental and financial risks.
The Climate Risk Disclosure Act of 2019 would require public companies 
to disclose more information about their exposure to climate-related 
risks, which will help investors appropriately assess those risks, 
accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to cleaner and more 
sustainable energy sources and reduce the chances of both environmental 
and financial catastrophe.
*The Problem*
The climate crisis has the potential to affect companies in multiple 
ways. First, climate change – through rising sea levels,
more frequent extreme weather patterns, water shortages, increased 
resource scarcity, and its many other effects – directly
threatens valuable company assets. Freddie Mac has stated that climate 
change appears "likely to destroy billions of
dollars in property and to displace millions of people," which will 
produce "economic losses and social disruption . . .
likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing 
crisis and Great Recession."
Second, global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or otherwise 
mitigate the effects of the climate crisis could
dramatically affect the value of company assets. The Task Force on 
Climate-related Financial Disclosures has written that
the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions "coupled with rapidly 
declining costs and increased deployment of clean and
energy-efficient technologies could have significant, near-term 
financial implications for organizations dependent on
extracting, producing, and using coal, oil, and natural gas...
In fact, climate-related risks and the expected transition to a 
lower-carbon economy affect most economic sectors and industries."
Former Vice President Al Gore has noted that by ignoring the risk of a 
carbon bubble, investors "are exposing their portfolios to an 
externality that should be integrated into the capital allocation process."
The effects on the fossil fuel industry are likely to be most severe. To 
successfully limit an average global temperature rise
to 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels – the ultimate 
goal of the Paris Agreement – energy experts estimate
that the global community must dramatically reduce fossil fuel 
consumption over the next 30 years, with nearly 0% of
electricity generated from coal and about 8% of electricity generated 
from gas by 2050, while also using carbon dioxide
removal activities.
The market lacks information about companies' exposure to these risks 
and it appears to dramatically undervalue the
potential impacts of the climate crisis. While the Securities and 
Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued guidelines
suggesting that companies consider the effects of the climate crisis on 
company assets, it has not mandated any specific
https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/File%20Number%20S7-01-20%20-%2004.28.2020%20Letter%20from%20Senator%20Warren%20to%20SEC%20Chairman%20Jay%20Clayton.pdf


[The movie controversy]
*Review: Planet of the Humans*
By Richard Heinberg, originally published by Resilience.org
April 27, 2020
A few days ago, Emily Atkin posted a reaction to Michael Moore's latest 
film, Planet of the Humans (directed and narrated by Jeff Gibbs), in 
which she began by admitting that she hadn't seen the film yet. When 
writers take that approach, you know there's already blood in the water. 
(She has since watched the film and written an actual review. Full 
disclosure: I'm in the film, included as one of the "good guys." But I 
don't intend to let that fact distort my comments in this review.)

The film is controversial because it makes two big claims: first, that 
renewable energy is a sham; second, that big environmental 
organizations--by promoting solar and wind power--have sold their souls 
to billionaire investors.

I feel fairly confident commenting on the first of these claims, 
regarding renewable energy, having spent a year working with David 
Fridley of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to assess the prospects 
for a complete transition to solar and wind power.

We found that the transition to renewables is going far too slowly to 
make much of a difference during the crucial next couple of decades, and 
would be gobsmackingly expensive if we were to try replacing all fossil 
fuel use with solar and wind. We also found, as the film underscores 
again and again, that the intermittency of sunshine and wind is a real 
problem--one that can only be solved with energy storage (batteries, 
pumped hydro, or compressed air, all of which are costly in money and 
energy terms); or with source redundancy (building way more generation 
capacity than you're likely to need at any one time, and connecting 
far-flung generators on a super-grid); or demand management (which 
entails adapting our behavior to using energy only when it's available). 
All three strategies involve trade-offs. In the energy world, there is 
no free lunch. Further, the ways we use energy today are mostly adapted 
to the unique characteristics of fossil fuels, so a full transition to 
renewables will require the replacement of an extraordinary amount of 
infrastructure in our food system, manufacturing, building heating, the 
construction industry, and on and on. Altogether, the only realistic way 
to make the transition in industrial countries like the US is to begin 
reducing overall energy usage substantially, eventually running the 
economy on a quarter, a fifth, or maybe even a tenth of current energy.

Is it true that mainstream enviros have oversold renewables? Yes. They 
have portrayed the transition away from fossil fuels as mostly a 
political problem; the implication in many of their communications is 
that, if we somehow come up with the money and the political will, we 
can replace oil with solar and continue living much as we do today, 
though with a clear climate conscience. That's an illusion that deserves 
shattering.

But the film does make some silly mistakes. Gibbs claims that a solar 
panel will generate less energy than it took to build the panel. That's 
a misleading claim. Many teams of researchers have addressed the 
question of energy return on energy invested for solar power, and even 
the most pessimistic results (with which I mostly agree) say that the 
technology can yield a marginal energy gain. Much of that gain goes away 
if we have to "pay" for the energy investment entailed in providing 
batteries or redundant capacity. Wind power generally has a better 
energy payback than solar, but the location of turbines matters a great 
deal and ideal sites are limited in number. Assessing solar and wind 
power calls for complicated energy accounting, but the film reduces that 
complexity to a blanket, binary dismissal.

The film is low on nuance, but our global climate and energy dilemma is 
all shades of gray. Gibbs seems to say that renewables are a complete 
waste of time. I would say, they are best seen as a marginal 
transitional strategy for industrial societies. Given climate change and 
the fact that fossil fuels are depleting, finite resources, it appears 
that if we want to maintain any sort of electrical energy infrastructure 
in the future, it will have to be powered by renewables--hydro, wind, or 
solar. As many studies have confirmed, the nuclear power industry has 
little realistic prospect of revival. The future will be renewable; 
there simply isn't any other option. What is very much in question, 
however, is the kind of society renewable energy can support.
The fact is that we've already bet our entire future on electricity and 
electronics. Communications and information processing and storage have 
all been digitized. That means that if the grid goes down, we've lost 
civilization altogether. I don't think we can maintain global grids at 
current scale without fossil fuels, but I can envision the possibility 
of a process of triage whereby, as population and resource consumption 
shrink, the digital world does as well, until it's small enough to be 
powered by renewable electricity that can be generated with minimal and 
acceptable environmental damage.

I agree with Gibbs, however, that renewables are realistically incapable 
of maintaining our current levels of energy usage, especially in rich 
countries like the US. Transitioning to electric cars may be a useful 
small-scale and short-term strategy for reducing oil consumption (I 
drive one myself), but limits to lithium and other raw materials used in 
building e-cars mean we really need to think about how to get rid of 
personal cars altogether.

Mainstream enviros will hate this movie because it exposes some of their 
real failings. By focusing on techno-fixes, they have sidelined nearly 
all discussion of overpopulation and overconsumption. Maybe that's 
understandable as a marketing strategy, but it's a mistake to let 
marketing consultants sort truth from fiction for us.

During recent decades, the big environmental orgs wearied of telling 
their followers to reduce, reuse, and recycle. They came to see that 
global problems like climate change require systemic solutions that, in 
turn, require massive investment and governmental planning and oversight.

But the reality is, we need both high-level systemic change and 
widespread individual behavior change. That's one of the lessons of the 
coronavirus pandemic: "flattening the curve" demands both central 
planning and leadership, and individual sacrifice.

Planet of the Humans paints environmental organizations and leaders with 
a broad and accusatory brush. One target is Jeremy Grantham, a 
billionaire investment analyst who created the Grantham Foundation for 
the Protection of the Environment in 1997. Grantham was already a 
mega-rich investor before he "got religion" on environmental issues. 
I've had several face-to-face meetings with him (full disclosure: the 
Grantham Foundation has provided modest funding to Post Carbon 
Institute, where I work) and it's clear that he cares deeply about 
overpopulation and overconsumption, and he understands that economic 
growth is killing the planet. He's scared for his children and 
grandchildren, and he genuinely wants to use whatever wealth and 
influence he has to change the world. To imply, as the film does, that 
he merely sees green tech as an investment strategy is a poorly aimed 
cheap shot. Bill McKibben, who is skewered even more savagely, also 
deserves better; he has replied to the film here.

Finally, the film leaves viewers with no sense of hope for the future. I 
understand why Gibbs made that choice. Too often, "hopium" is simply a 
drug we use to numb ourselves to the horrific reality of our situation 
and its causes--in which we are all complicit.

Yet, however awful the circumstance, we need a sense of human agency. In 
the face of the pandemic, many of us are reduced to sitting at home 
sewing facemasks; it seems like a paltry response to a spreading 
sickness that's taking tens of thousands of lives, but it's better than 
sitting on our hands and saying "Woe is me." The same goes for climate 
change: figuring out how to eat lower on the food chain, or how to get 
by without a car, or how to reduce home energy usage by half, or growing 
a garden might seem like trivial responses to such an overwhelming 
crisis, but they get us moving together in the right direction.

For all the reasons I've mentioned, Planet of the Humans is not the last 
word on our human predicament. Still, it starts a conversation we need 
to have, and it's a film that deserves to be seen.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-04-27/review-planet-of-the-humans/
- - -
[McKibben responds in RollingStone]
*'A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement': Michael Moore Damages 
Our Most Important Goal*
It hurts to be personally attacked in a movie. It hurts more to see a 
movement divided
By BILL MCKIBBEN
- -
Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking renewable 
energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement is just a 
tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy. "One of the 
most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative 
technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different from fossil 
fuels," Ozzie Zehner, one of the film's producers, tells the camera. 
When visiting a solar facility, he insists: "You use more fossil fuels 
to do this than you're getting benefit from it. You would have been 
better off just burning the fossil fuels."

That's not true, not in the least -- the time it takes for a solar panel 
to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years. Since 
it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it produces is 
pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from burning 
fossil fuels. It turns out that pretty much everything else about the 
movie was wrong -- there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them 
painfully rigorous; as one scientist wrote in a particularly scathing 
takedown, "Planet of the Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else."...
- -
I think that one thing that defines those movements is their adversaries 
-- in this case the fossil fuel industry above all. And I think the 
thing that weakens those movements is when they start trying to identify 
adversaries within their ranks. Much has been made over the years about 
the way that progressives eat their own, about circular firing squads 
and the like. I think there's truth to it: there's a collection of 
showmen like Moore who enjoy attracting attention to themselves by 
endlessly picking fights. They're generally not people who actually try 
to organize, to build power, to bring people together. That's the real, 
and difficult, work -- not purity tests or calling people out, but 
calling them in. At least, that's how it seems to me: The battle to slow 
down global warming in the short time that physics allots us requires 
ever bigger movements.

It's been a great privilege to get to help build those movements. And if 
I worry that my effectiveness has been compromised, it's not a huge 
worry, precisely because there are now so many others doing this work -- 
generations and generations of people who have grown up in this fight. I 
think, more or less, we're all headed in the right direction, that 
people are getting the basic message right: conserve energy; replace 
coal and gas and oil with wind and sun; break the political power of the 
fossil fuel industry; demand just transitions for workers; build a world 
that reduces ruinous inequality; and protect natural systems, both 
because they're glorious and so they can continue to soak up carbon. I 
don't know if we're going to get this done in time -- sometimes I kick 
myself for taking too long to figure out we needed to start building 
movements. But I know our chances are much improved if we do it together.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/bill-mckibben-climate-movement-michael-moore-993073/


[video offers some useful, basic history 25 mins - spot on]
*Climate Policy | The Complete Moderate's Guide*
Apr 28, 2020
Knowing Better
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52rDpeC6JL0


[Media and politicians]
*Australia listened to the experts on coronavirus. It's time we heard 
them on climate change*
Lenore Taylor - Fri 1 May 2020
- -
Imagine if we took just two lessons from the way Australian governments 
responded to the coronavirus: that good decisions are made when they 
consider the evidence and the best available expert advice; and that 
policy-making can accommodate reasonable differences of opinion, without 
becoming a "war".

Think, as Laura Tingle did in a piece for the ABC's 7.30 this week, of 
the difference it would make if interviewers and commentators allowed 
room for discussion of complex and competing ideas, before demanding 
that politicians rule them "in" or "out", or before finding a 
backbencher who will say they might cross the floor on a policy that 
conflicts with their ideological prejudice – even if that policy hasn't 
yet been outlined...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2020/may/02/australia-listened-to-the-experts-on-coronavirus-its-time-we-heard-them-on-climate-change



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - May 2, 2008 *
On MSNBC's "Countdown," Keith Olbermann and guest Rachel
Maddow react to GOP presidential candidate John McCain's remarks
earlier in the day linking the Iraq War to US energy policy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvY9e_ZxxyA

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