[TheClimate.Vote] November 9, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*November 9, 2020*/

[Dave Roberts audio interview with transcript]
*THE 2020 ELECTION: ANXIETY AND INCREMENTALISM (part 1 of 3)*
November 6th, 2020

    *PROGRAM PART 1 - DAVID ROBERTS*
    *David Roberts:*  Well, I think the climate community doesn't
    necessarily like hearing this but I just don't think climate was a
    particularly salient factor in the elections this year.  There's too
    much else going on.  There's too much chaos. And I think what we
    learned is what we keep learning over and over and over again what I
    personally keep learning over and over again.  Every time I think
    I've learned it I learned that I have not learned it hard enough
    which is just that polarization is the strongest force in U.S.
    public life now, nothing is stronger than it.  And we have sort of
    like this almost sort of like ludicrous case study like what if a
    president came in and allowed a quarter million people to die like
    what if there was the greatest mass casualty event in U.S. history
    on a visibly, you know, sort of incompetent president's watch.  It
    didn't move the poll numbers at all like the Biden-Trump poll
    numbers were not dented at all by these catastrophic historical
    events.  And I think that's just what you see up-and-down the ticket
    is just that with just sort of very, very, very tiny moves along
    some margins basically the sides are set and it appears that
    literally nothing can break through that.

    *Greg Dalton: * And you've written about this how people sort of
    process information and make decisions whether it's election or what
    information to accept based on tribal motivations, queues from
    social elites.  So, does not just makes sense that people, a quarter
    million people died, but my family, my tribe, my people have this
    narrative about that that it's not his fault that it came from
    China.  And that just, you know, we, we're not rational beings we're
    tribal animals.

    *David Roberts: *I just think that something like, and especially
    people of the liberal temperament.  Let's say the sort of your
    standard highly educated, highly verbal, liberal arts trained
    liberal wants to believe even though I think liberals have come to
    acknowledge the sort of basic irrationality and this basic sort of
    like social determinism in the U.S., I think they still want to
    believe on some level that it has limits, that there is some edge,
    some limit to it something that could happen that could break
    through it people really want to believe.  And I feel like now like
    if a pandemic that kills a quarter million people and is very
    clearly one party's responsibility.  If that can't do it then I
    think we have to acknowledge that literally nothing can.  There's
    nothing climate could do could break through that.

    I mean these people, they are also the ones dying, their communities
    are dying. It's worse in rural areas right now, the virus, than it
    was, you know, a few months before the election. And it just didn't
    change anything.  It's just hard to imagine what could change
    anything.  So I think the conclusion for the left has to be at least
    for the time being, you're not going to, you know, like there's
    stuff you can do to change numbers along the margins, but the big
    problem is just the structural features of U.S. government
    exaggerate the power and the voice of Republican constituencies. 
    And so even though they have a minority, even though there are more
    Democrats you know like everyone knows Joe Biden's gonna win the
    popular vote by a pretty big margin, it's just common knowledge now,
    there are more Democrats.  It's just the system is set up so that
    the minority of Republican constituents have a lock on the
    structures of the U.S. government.  As long as that's in place I
    think we're just in for spinning our wheels like this for forever.

    *Greg Dalton:*  During the election there was some discussion of
    energy.  There was the talk about Joe Biden's comment during one of
    the debates about transitioning away from fossil fuels.  That
    created quite a stir.  Even though polls show that American support
    that, Americans support moving towards clean energy, etc. until you
    put a price tag on it or there's a personal impact.  So, tell us
    your thoughts on that on how the debate around climate change energy
    in the election and how that played out.

    *David Roberts:*  Yeah, I think if being honest I think most of that
    was a bored national media wanting for there to be something to say
    or write about.  Because I mean one of these things about
    partisanship being so frozen and the respective candidates' numbers
    being so steady and frozen no matter what happens is it gets very
    boring as a political journalist.  I mean the question is like will
    this gaffe or this incident or this little thing affect the race. 
    The answer is just always no it won't.

    I don't think I honestly don't think energy play that huge of a role
    in the election or in the election results.  I don't think any
    substantive policy related discussion did.  We're in a level way
    deeper than that now.  We're like identity, gut identity level,
    basic values level.  Like policy is just sort of the least of
    everybody's worries at this point.  So, you know, and on the larger
    point of like how the public thinks about energy is just I tried to
    get at this in a post the other day is just the general public by
    and large, and this something political scientist know but like
    can't seem to persuade everybody else to take seriously is that the
    general public doesn't know anything.  They have lives, jobs,
    worries like sports and TV shows to watch like they just don't have
    time to keep up with politics.  And so, they just don't have
    substantive views on issues as such.  Their views on issues are very
    shallow and often self-contradictory and often just pull together
    scraps of information that have managed to make it to them.  And so,
    they're very malleable so you can push them easily either one way or
    the other.

    So, if you talk about energy in terms of cleanness and lack of
    pollution in like the future and innovation, they'll give you
    positive poll responses.  And if you emphasize, oh, a cost, a
    penalty, some sort of restraint on your life or lifestyle you'll get
    a negative poll result.  But there's no deep conclusion to draw from
    either of those.

    *Greg Dalton: *In this program we're exploring election and climate,
    anxiety, grief and hope.  Some experts, including psychologists
    Renee Lertzman in our next segment say that after divisive elections
    people on both sides should like inward and someone compassion for
    voters who see things differently rather than ridiculing them to
    listen and seek to understand.  Your Twitter feed is full of strong
    statements about people who don't see climate the way you do.  How
    often do you reflect on your own tone and seek to understand people
    who are not as concerned about climate as you are?

    *David Roberts:*  You know, maybe it's just the mood I'm in today,
    which as you can probably tell is not a good one.  But to me there's
    something so characteristically left about losing and then spending
    the period after losing telling one another that losing isn't really
    so bad after all and let's be nice and let's feel compassion for the
    people who just destroyed us and want to destroy everything we care
    about and want to roll the country back centuries.  And want to do
    nothing about climate change and want to put refugee kids in cages
    and want to, you know, bring in federal troops and beat protesters. 
    Yeah, if we compassioned them a little harder, you know what that
    would do, it would make us feel good.  And it would make us look
    good to one another, but the alleged targets of the compassion don't
    give a damn. They just want us dead and they never pretended otherwise.

    *Greg Dalton:*  Several years ago, Trump announced his intention to
    withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord and the day
    after the election that officially happened. U.S. had already
    stopped pursuing Paris pledges and today the country is roughly
    halfway to the Obama era reductions in carbon pollution.  Europe has
    stepped up with more ambitious goals. But how big a deal is this
    that U.S. is now out of Paris?

    *David Roberts:* The U.S. will get back in Paris if Biden wins as it
    sorts of mostly looks like he's going to.  That's the one, I mean
    the one clear I think good outcome of this that people can hang
    their hat on, is the president has a lot of power and latitude in
    foreign policy, more so than on domestic policy.  So, there's a lot
    Joe Biden can do on foreign-policy to get us back in Paris, he can
    start you know, drawing together small groups of nations that are
    willing to move faster.  He can pressure Brazil to stop burning its
    rain forest, things like that.

    So, on foreign-policy there is, you know it's good but ultimately
    the U.S. can't lead on this if the U.S. isn't acting on this,
    right.  I mean there's only so much you can do with words and plus
    now all our international partners like well whatever you say Biden,
    for all we know in 2024 you're gonna flail back the other direction
    and the next president will undo all this.  The international
    community can trust U.S. intentions and steadiness less and less and
    less, which is just bad.  I think unequivocally bad for the global
    climate effort.  As much as people criticize the U.S. and US foreign
    policy.  The U.S. is about as good as it gets in terms of who can
    play a leadership role in this international effort who has sort of
    the power and the money and the influence, the soft influence and
    the hard influence, to lead these things in the right direction.  I
    don't think the E.U. is gonna be able to do it and I don't think
    we're gonna much like the way it looks when China is leading the
    effort.  But at least on foreign-policy there's a chance now to sort
    of send a different message to the international community, but
    ultimately like things are moving in the right direction too slowly.

    This is the big story of climate change, right.  I mean everything
    is moving in the right direction.  Clean energies rising public
    opinion is changing very slowly policy is changing across the world
    it's changing in cities, companies are coming around big companies
    like things are moving in the right direction just much, much too
    slowly.  And what this election was, was a chance to speed them up
    substantially.  And now I think that chance is lost and as you know,
    slow, slow action leads to 3 to 4 degrees of warming which is
    extremely not good.

http://www.climateone.org/audio/2020-election-anxiety-and-incrementalism


[NYTimes report]
*Where Does Joe Biden Stand on Major Policies?*
Here's an overview on President-elect Biden's positions on coronavirus, 
health care, the economy, taxes and climate change.
By Sydney Ember
Nov. 8, 2020

Progressives think President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s policies do not 
go far enough. President Trump and his administration have called Mr. 
Biden a Trojan horse for the radical left.

Since the primary, Mr. Biden has shifted leftward on issues including 
health care, climate change and education. But even then, he has hardly 
embraced the bold agenda of progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders of 
Vermont.
Here is where Mr. Biden actually stands on...
- -
*Climate Change*
Mr. Biden laid out a plan over the summer to spend $2 trillion to 
develop clean energy and eliminate emissions from the power sector by 
2035. In addition to the coronavirus pandemic, the resulting economic 
crisis and racial injustice, he has referred to climate change as one of 
four "historic crises" that the United States is facing.

But notably, he has declined to support the Green New Deal, a sweeping 
climate plan embraced by progressive groups and criticized by 
Republicans, though his website calls it a "crucial framework."

And while Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Biden of wanting to "ban fracking," 
Mr. Biden has repeatedly said he will not do so. Instead, he has 
proposed ending the permitting of new fracking on federal lands, but he 
is not proposing a national ban.

During the last presidential debate, Mr. Biden also said he would push 
the country to "transition away from the oil industry" and end federal 
subsidies. He later tried to clarify his remarks saying, "We're getting 
rid of the subsidies for fossil fuels, but we're not getting rid of 
fossil fuels for a long time."

Sydney Ember is a political reporter based in New York. She was 
previously a business reporter covering print and digital media. 
@melbournecoal
https://www.nytimes.com/article/joe-biden-policies.html



[finally, inhale and relax - I have not tested this]
*Earth Power: Hemp Batteries Better Than Lithium And Graphene*
Science & Medical
17th September 2019
By Barnaby De Hoedt

Henry Ford's Model T was famously made partly from hemp bioplastic and 
powered by hemp biofuel. Now, with battery-powered vehicles starting to 
replace those that use combustion engines, it has been found that hemp 
batteries perform eight times better than lithium-ion. Is there anything 
that this criminally-underused plant can't do?

The comparison has only been proven on a very small scale. (You weren't 
expecting a Silicon Valley conglomerate to do something genuinely 
groundbreaking were you? They mainly just commercialise stuff that's 
been invented or at least funded by the state.) But the results are 
extremely promising.

The experiment was conducted by Robert Murray Smith - who has built up 
quite a following on his YouTube channel - of FWG Ltd in Kent. He 
observed a Volts by Amps curve of both the hemp and lithium batteries 
and found that the power underneath the hemp cell was a value of 31 
while that of the lithium cell had a value of just 4. Although he does 
not claim to have proven anything, he said that the results of his 
experiment showed that the performance of the hemp cell is 
"significantly better" than the lithium cell.

It comes as no real surprise, which is presumably why he conducted the 
experiment. In 2014, scientists in the US found that waste fibres - 
'shiv' - from hemp crops can be transformed into "ultrafast" 
supercapacitors that are "better than graphene". Graphene is a synthetic 
carbon material lighter than foil yet bulletproof, but it is 
prohibitively expensive to make. The hemp version isn't just better, it 
costs one-thousandth of the price...
https://ukcsc.co.uk/earth-power-hemp-batteries-better-than-lithium-and-graphene/



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - November 9, 2011 *

The Guardian reports:
"The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, 
energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five 
years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe 
levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will 
be 'lost for ever,' according to the most thorough analysis yet of world 
energy infrastructure."

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel-infrastructure-climate-change

may be here 
https://web.archive.org/web/20110819012259/http://www.iea.org/w/bookshop/b.aspx?new=10


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