[TheClimate.Vote] September 4, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*September 4, 2020*/

[forecast]
*Heat 'rarely ever seen' is forecast to roast West by the weekend, with 
wildfires still burning*
Fire danger predicted to spike with temperatures soaring in the L.A. 
area in particular, stressing power grid
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/09/02/california-heat-wave-wildfires/


[far away influence]
*What is California's wildfire smoke doing to our health? Scientists 
paint a bleak picture*
Research shows people, even those living hundreds of miles away, feeling 
the effects from wildfire smoke in the west...
Historic wildfires burning across California have sent a 
500-hundred-mile-long, gray blob of smoky air swirling above the western 
United States, and Stanford researcher Bibek Paudel is already seeing 
the health effects build up.

In the days after lightning sparked hundreds of fires across the north 
of the state, Paudel, who studies respiratory illness at Stanford's 
allergy and asthma research center, saw hospital admissions for asthma 
to the university's healthcare system rise by 10% and cerebrovascular 
incidents such as strokes jump by 23%. Based on the center's studies of 
recent fires, Paudel expects that the number of heart attacks, kidney 
problems and even mental health issues will also climb.

The research is part of a growing body of scientific evidence painting a 
dire picture of the effects of wildfire smoke on people, even those 
living hundreds of miles away. Many researchers worry that those 
debilitating effects will only intensify the risks of the Covid-19 
pandemic. "Wildfire smoke can affect the health almost immediately," 
said Dr Jiayun Angela Yao, an environmental health researcher in Canada...
- -
Earlier studies of young people, who were exposed to even distant 
wildfire smoke, showed dramatic changes.

"We found, even in teenagers, if we drew their blood after a wildfire, 
we saw a systematic increase in inflammatory markers," said Prunicki, 
who added that "a lot of chronic disease is related to inflammation".

With clouds of smoke from the fires floating around the country, people 
as far away as Idaho and Colorado are choking on California's smoke. "We 
had several days when we were just socked in," said Sally Hunter, an air 
specialist with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, who said 
smoke travelled north to spark health warnings in Boise, even though 
there were no fires nearby. "I got up to go get groceries and I couldn't 
see down to the end of my street. I got a headache and my sister in-law 
got itchy, watery eyes."

Since California's fires started months earlier than usual, experts 
worry that this will be an especially smoky year.

The worst year on record for California fire smoke was 2008 when 
lightning fires started in June and continued all summer, according to 
Lahm. Fires from 2017 and 2018 also unleashed huge amounts of smoke.

Paudel and the Stanford researchers found that, since 2011, the number 
of smoky days occurring each year has increased in California and in the 
entire western US. Unfortunately, some of the largest increases were in 
counties with the biggest population centers, such as those around Los 
Angeles or along California's central valley.

When a gray curtain of smoke descended on the Bay Area last week, 
76-year-old Berkeley resident Barbara Freeman, who suffers from 
pulmonary conditions, tried to follow all the advice. She regularly 
checked environmental air monitor readings, stayed inside, sealed her 
windows and turned on her two air cleaners.

Still Freeman lost her voice and found breathing painful. She worried, 
if she had to evacuate, she would have nowhere to turn to escape both 
the smoke and the danger of coronavirus. But one of the things she found 
the hardest was not being able to go outside to walk her dog.

"That was how I was maintaining what sanity I had left," she said.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/04/what-is-californias-wildfire-smoke-doing-to-our-health-scientists-paint-a-bleak-picture



[text and audio segments]
*Wildfires In California Will 'Continue To Get Worse,' Climate Change 
Experts Explore Why*
Ezra David Romero
Thursday, September 3, 2020...
[conclusion]...Reducing the risk of megafires, like the current LNU and 
SZU Lightning Complex fires and past blazes like the Rim Fire near 
Yosemite, isn't just about burning all the extra debris. Addressing the 
systemic challenge -- climate change -- could mean fewer extreme 
wildfires over the course of history, Gonzalez says.

"In order to avoid dangerous climate interferences, the entire world 
needs to substantially reduce our emissions and eventually go to an 
energy system that is completely renewable," he said.

Gonzalez applauds California's action in the climate fight, such as laws 
that require becoming carbon neutral by 2045, and plans for emissions 
reductions from trucks, cars and ports. But he says even all the work 
the state has done is just a first step.

"Fundamentally, the main solution to a lot of the fire problems that we 
have [is] taking action on climate change," he said. "To be carbon-free 
is the ultimate end goal, and the sooner we reach that, the better it 
will be for nature and for people."
https://www.capradio.org/articles/2020/09/03/wildfires-in-california-will-continue-to-get-worse-climate-change-experts-explore-why/



[activism, "use purpose-led trauma"]
*Extinction Rebellion Cofounder Gail Bradbrook | It's Time For Autumn 
Rebellion*
Nick Breeze
Sept 2, 2020
In this episode of Shaping The Future, I am speaking with Gail 
Bradbrook, environmental activist and co-founder of Extinction 
Rebellion, as the Autumn rebellion gains momentum in major cities across 
the UK.

Gail talks about the XR demands for this rebellion and the power of 
activism for the individual and how that can lead to systemic change at 
the societal level.

We finish discussing the potential for a global citizens assembly to be 
held in parallel during next years UN climate conference, COP26, that 
will be hosted in November in the UK.

Thanks for listening, this podcast is available on all major podcasting 
channels and on Youtube. All the links are on climateseries.com.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq0QQTRQ-Ls

- -

[less than 2 minute video]
*Extinction Rebellion: 92-year-old among dozens arrested in London 
climate protests*
Sep 1, 2020
Guardian News
Thousands of Extinction Rebellion protesters have descended on 
Parliament Square in London, leading to at least 90 arrests, as the 
group kicked off 10 days of civil disobedience to demand government 
action on the climate crisis.
https://youtu.be/qKmIc966z_c



[follow the money - clips from NYT]
*Wildfires Hasten Another Climate Crisis: Homeowners Who Can't Get 
Insurance*
Insurers, facing huge losses, have been pulling back from fire-prone 
areas across California. "The marketplace has largely collapsed," an 
advocate for counties in the state said.
Sept. 2, 2020

As wildfires burn homes across California, the state is also grappling 
with a different kind of climate predicament: How to stop insurers from 
abandoning fire-prone areas, leaving countless homeowners at risk.

Years of megafires have caused huge losses for insurance companies, a 
problem so severe that, last year, California temporarily banned 
insurers from canceling policies on some 800,000 homes in or near risky 
parts of the state. However, that ban is about expire and can't be 
renewed, and a recent plan to deal with the problem fell apart in a 
clash between insurers and consumer advocates.

Insurers are widely expected to continue their retreat, potentially 
devastating the housing market if homes become essentially uninsurable.

"The marketplace has largely collapsed" in those high-risk areas, said 
Graham Knaus, executive director of the California State Association of 
Counties, which has pushed state officials to address the problem. "It's 
a very large geographic area of the state that is facing this."...

The insurance crisis is making California a test case for the financial 
dangers of climate change nationwide, as wildfires, floods and other 
disasters create economic shocks well beyond the physical damage of the 
disasters themselves. Those changes have already started to affect home 
prices, the mortgage industry and the bond market.

In California, the wildfires of the past few weeks have made the problem 
more urgent. The state has battled more than 875 fires since mid-August, 
which have burned almost 1.5 million acres and destroyed more than 2,800 
structures, according to Cal Fire, the state fire agency. As of Monday, 
almost 40,000 people remained unable to go back to their homes.

As a result, insurers now face the prospect of another brutal year of 
losses.
Around the world, climate change has made storms more powerful and 
frequent, increased the intensity of droughts and contributed to more 
extreme wildfires, and, as a result, many insurance companies say their 
premiums are now set too low to cover the growing losses. But raising 
premiums, which are often closely regulated, can create a headache for 
officials. California and other states have the authority to reject or 
reduce rate increases, and they often face pressure from voters to do so.
The result is a dilemma for governments. Either let rates rise, 
squeezing homeowners, or take the chance that more insurers will pull 
back from vulnerable areas, as many across the West are doing already. 
Without insurance, banks won't issue mortgages, making homes harder to 
buy or sell.

The challenges are especially pronounced in California, where 
regulations lean toward consumer protection. The state forbids insurance 
companies from setting rates based on what they expect in future 
damages. Insurers are allowed to set rates only based on prior losses.

Regulators also forbid insurers from passing along the costs of buying 
their own insurance, which they do to soften the blow of unexpectedly 
big losses. As wildfires get worse, those costs for insurers are going 
up as well.

Both rules were designed to guard against higher rates. But in the age 
of climate change, insurers say those rules have prevented them from 
keeping up with wildfire damage...

"From homeowners' point of view, this is scary," said Char Miller, a 
professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College near 
Los Angeles. But for insurance companies, he said, not covering 
high-risk homes reflects a straightforward logic: "Why am I insuring 
something that I know is going to be destroyed?"

The problem has become so bad that the state's insurance commissioner, 
Ricardo Lara, last December banned companies from dropping people in or 
near ZIP codes struck by recent wildfires, calling the situation a 
"crisis." The move, which covered at least 800,000 homes around the 
state, marked the first time his office had used that authority.
The ban was never meant to be a permanent fix. It lasts just 12 months 
and can't be extended.
And data suggests that insurers have continued to drop customers. The 
number of households buying coverage from California's high-risk 
insurance program, a costly and bare-bones alternative for people who 
can't get private coverage, has increased by more than 50 percent 
between the start of 2019 and June 2020, to almost 200,000 households.

That program, called the FAIR Plan, covers fewer types of damage than 
private insurance policies and caps policies at $3 million. Yet even 
that plan is getting more expensive: It has asked the state for 
permission to raise its rates by 15.6 percent, after initially seeking 
an increase more than double that amount.

Still, officials have struggled to find a solution that both insurers 
and consumer advocates will accept.
- -
The state's insurance commissioner said his focus now was working with 
high-risk communities to reduce their wildfire risk enough that insurers 
will keep offering coverage without big rate increases. "I will continue 
to move quickly to tackle the costs and availability of wildfire 
insurance affecting our state," Mr. Lara said. "If Californians do our 
part to protect homes from wildfire," the industry should respond by 
agreeing to insure those homes, he said.

But reducing the human and economic toll of wildfires will require 
deeper reform than just tweaking building codes or encouraging better 
landscaping, others said. It may also require addressing the shortage of 
new housing in Californian cities, which has helped push development 
further into areas at risk of burning, a trend that has continued 
despite years of severe wildfires.

David Shew, a former staff chief at Cal Fire, said that the spread of 
houses into fire country used to seem like a reasonable trade-off. 
"There are great needs to build housing in more affordable areas, which 
kind of, by default, tend to be these more exposed, fire-prone 
landscapes, because land is cheaper there," Mr. Shew said. "There was a 
feeling that, well, it was worth the risk."

But as climate change makes wildfires more devastating, that logic seems 
less obvious, he said. Short of more onerous restrictions on 
construction in high-risk areas, worsening the statewide housing crisis, 
there are physical and political limits to how much governments can do 
to reduce that risk, which means insurance will become more expensive.

"We will never, ever, have enough fire engines to park in every 
driveway," Mr. Shew said. "It's only going to get worse."
Christopher Flavelle focuses on how people, governments and industries 
try to cope with the effects of global warming. He received a 2018 
National Press Foundation award for coverage of the federal government's 
struggles to deal with flooding. @cflav
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/climate/wildfires-insurance.html



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - September 4, 2001 *
Published on Tuesday, September 4, 2001 in the Boston Globe
*An Ecological Betrayal*
by Theodore Roosevelt IV

    ''THERE'S BEEN an oil spill in Alaska; it looks like a big one.''
    That was John Sununu, the White House chief of staff during the
    administration of George Bush Sr., speaking to the EPA
    administrator, Bill Reilly, after the spill of the Exxon Valdez.
    Twelve years later, more than half the affected species have not
    recovered.
    The Alaska National Wildlife Refuge is the biological heart of one
    of the last great wilderness areas in North America, considered by
    many the American Serengeti.

    Despite the stalwart opposition of most Democrats and moderate
    Republicans, despite the overwhelming objections of the American
    people, the House of Representatives recently passed an energy bill
    that would open these ecologically valuable and sensitive lands to
    oil drilling. The bill goes to the Senate this fall.

    Yet again, on an environmental issue of grave concern to the
    American people, the more conservative elements in the Republican
    Party, my party, choose to turn from its own proud conservation
    heritage and from its own rank and file. Instead, it bows to myopic
    partisan pressures.

    The American people rightfully expect protecting our environment to
    be a bipartisan undertaking. Unfortunately, they no longer even
    associate the Republican Party with conservation. They have
    forgotten, just as our party's leadership has forgotten, that it was
    President Eisenhower who gave us the Alaskan National Wildlife
    Refuge; President Nixon who gave us the Clean Air Act, the
    Endangered Species Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency; and
    Teddy Roosevelt who gave us the first national wildlife refuges,
    national monuments, and millions of acres of public land.

    Today, another Republican, John Sununu, the New Hampshire
    congressman, has given us a disingenuous amendment to the House
    energy bill. The amendment is an attempt to disguise as conservative
    a willful and aggressive intrusion on the pristine wilderness of the
    Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. It claims to limit the drilling to
    2,000 acres, but this includes only the land where drilling pads and
    supports actually touch the ground. This is like measuring the New
    Jersey Turnpike by the acreage occupied by its tollbooths, in which
    case the turnpike would be situated on 2.77 square miles.

    We are facing a potential energy crisis, but it has nothing to do
    with lack of supply. There is no shortage of fossil fuels in the
    world pantry. The problem is that America contains only 4 percent of
    the world's oil reserves. The administration claims that draining
    our small oil stocks will feed America's undisciplined appetite for
    energy and give us greater independence from foreign powers. Only
    Christ could perform the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.

    Earlier this year I gave a speech to Asian business leaders on
    globalization and the financial markets. To the surprise of some of
    my colleagues, I included a section on the global environment. To
    their amazement, all the follow-up questions were on the
    environment. Those Asian business leaders are strategizing for the
    future, and they get the big picture.

    While the economic forces unleashed by globalization are responsible
    for breaching the Berlin Wall, while those forces break through
    trade barriers and challenge national and ideological borders, the
    one wall with which we are heading for a collision is the carrying
    capacity of the global environment and the world's depleted stock of
    renewable resources.

    Efficiency and technological innovation will continue to fuel the
    global economy, but those values must be tempered by decency.
    Restraint and discipline are no longer optional.

    The American people also get the picture. When the administration
    talks about ''balancing'' environmental and energy needs, the
    American people recognize the problem: Those needs are not currently
    in balance. Our environmental accounts are in the red; we are
    running on credit, and we are running out of it.

    As James Gustave Speth of Yale University's School of Forestry
    states, ''We are entering the endgame in our relationship with the
    natural world. Whatever slack nature previously cut us is gone.''

    We Americans are heading into a carbon-constrained, ecologically
    fragile future for which we are ill prepared. Under the present
    leadership we are dragging our feet, willing to sacrifice vital
    natural resources instead of making real investments in current
    efficiency and future energy technologies. This is hardly a
    conservative agenda.

    Moderate Republicans, and I am one, are distressed that an
    administration that strenuously claims to be conservative is instead
    intent on maintaining undisciplined and wasteful consumption. This
    is unsustainable public policy, and I doubt that it will go far in
    achieving victory in the midterm elections. Bad public policy and
    bad politics are a lethal combination.

    Our country is about more than the success of our economic
    enterprise, and it is that more that keeps us strong: our moral
    vigor, determination, and grit, our openness and generosity. The
    vastness of these lands has harbored the vastness of the American
    spirit, and our people will not part with either easily. And they
    shouldn't.

    The Alaska National Wildlife Refuge is this nation's Rubicon; it is
    the place where we will learn if we possess the restraint, reason,
    and decency to respect the values preserved there. It is the place
    where we will learn whether our nation will rise honorably to the
    challenges of this new century or capitulate to them.


Theodore Roosevelt IV is a member of Republicans for Environmental 
Protection and the great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt.
http://web.archive.org/web/20020619223452/http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0904-01.htm

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

/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 mailing is text-only.  It does not carry 
images or attachments which may originate from remote servers.  A 
text-only message can 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. 
Messages have no tracking software.
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.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20200904/ac72dc0f/attachment.html>