[✔️] December 29, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*December 29, 2021*/

/[ Senator Warren awakens ]
/*Warren urges crackdown on Wall Street over global warming**
*28 December 2021 *
*US Senator Elizabeth Warren has blamed Wall Street for contributing to 
global warming, calling for action against major emitters.

“The volume of greenhouse gas emitted by the financial-services industry 
is outrageous,” she said in a tweet on Monday.
US Senator Elizabeth Warren has blamed Wall Street for contributing to 
global warming, calling for action against major emitters.

“The volume of greenhouse gas emitted by the financial-services industry 
is outrageous,” she said in a tweet on Monday.
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2021/12/28/673588/US-Senator-Warren-Wall-Street-global-warming/
/

/
/

/
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/[ small regional magazine lays it out]/
*Why Climate Change Denial Still Exists in the United States*
POSTED DEC 27, 2021 HUDSON VALLEY STYLE MAGAZINE

    At first glance, it’s hard to understand why climate change denial
    still exists in the United States despite solid scientific evidence
    showing that the phenomenon is both real and man-made. While many of
    us like to point the finger at politicians, special interest groups
    and big oil companies are also to blame for keeping citizens in the
    dark about climate change and its harmful effects on our
    environment. These three groups are often referred to as climate
    change deniers because they refuse to believe or agree with
    scientific facts, even when they have money on the line....

https://hudsonvalleystylemagazine.com/why-climate-change-denial-still-exists-in-the-united-states/*/
/*

/
/

/[   The Movie is still important ] /
*Watch the New Netflix movie "Don't Look Up" Because...*
  DEC 26, 2021
This movie is really about the coming climate change extinction event 
and how we are NOT managing it.
The New Netflix movie "Don't Look Up" has a host of big-name Hollywood 
stars in it. Every time they mention the comet-causing extinction event, 
they are really metaphorically talking about a climate change extinction 
event. (Leanardo DeCaprio is a prominent climate change educator.)

What You Can Do to Adapt to, Survive, and Slow Down the Coming Avoidable 
and Unavoidable Climate Change Extinction Emergency
There is a lot of bad news in the Don't Look Up movie for the future and 
in the 2022 climate predictions mentioned above, but we can still do 
many things to slow down this climate extinction emergency and live 
longer, more comfortable lives.
Watch the new Netflix movie "Don't Look Up" with a host of big Hollywood 
stars. It's not so secretly about climate change extinction and what you 
have just read...
https://www.joboneforhumanity.org/watch_the_new_netflix_movie


/[  Young,  wisecracking cynical //Brit//youtube video ]
/*Climate Change: Capitalism's Final Boss*/
/münecat
https://youtu.be/YbYpbXMUsYM



/[  Long transcript of 34 min  video from World Economic Forum -]/
*Stakeholder Capitalism*
Robin Pomeroy, Digital Editor, World Economic Forum
Stakeholder Capitalism is a series of videos and podcasts that looks at 
how economies can be transformed to serve people and the planet.
In this episode, we ask if a healthy planet can co-exist with the 
economic growth required to raise living standards, especially in 
developing countries.
The episode features insights from climate activist Risalat Khan, Lord 
Nicholas Stern from the London School of Economics and Mariana Mazzucato 
from University College London.
27 Dec 2021
Robin Pomeroy - Digital Editor, World Economic Forum
Since the first industrial revolution, economic development has been 
powered by fossil fuels. But for decades we have known that the 
greenhouse gases from these fuels are building up in the atmosphere, 
causing climate change.

The latest UN climate science report says there is no longer any doubt. 
To prevent climate catastrophe, we need to switch away from fossil fuels 
fast.

But what about those parts of the world that, while sharing the perils 
of climate change, have not enjoyed the increased wealth or living 
standards that come with economic development?...
- -
Planet versus profit: clips from transcript...
Natalie Pierce: So in summary, the same force that is lifting millions 
of people out of poverty is the one that is destroying the liveability 
of our planet for future generations.

Peter Vanham: It appears so because there is a long enduring correlation 
between economic development and CO2 emissions...
- -
Risalat Khan: I want to share a story that I actually think of very 
often. This comes from when I was visiting a village outside my home 
city of Dhaka with my father, who is an environmental activist that I 
drew a lot of guidance and inspiration from. As we were in that village 
I met an old farmer who was working in the field and I asked him about 
how he has seen the climate change as he has lived his life in that 
land. And he shared about how when he was a young man he had the bounty 
of multiple harvests. Bangladesh is a very fertile soil, so he had that. 
But now he shared really devastating stories of how now it would be 
lucky to have one good harvest in a year, and that is extremely 
challenging to provide for his family. And then he said something I 
probably will never forget. He said 'Allah has turned his back on us 
baba'. So I feel that that sense of powerlessness, that loss of agency. 
I find that one of the greatest injustices of the climate crisis. People 
are having to rebuild - they're being forced to - without having a real 
contribution to the problem.

There's no part of the world that is untouched by the climate crisis, 
and the whole world is having to adapt and very quickly. So there is a 
lot of sharing of knowledge that is needed. And that is possible because 
people and communities have been adapting to climate change for a long 
time. But at the same time, we are reaching very rocky seas and some are 
holding on to a piece of wood while some might have super yachts.
- -
Peter Vanham: Can you also share with us the story of economic 
development in Bangladesh today, because it's actually a booming 
economy, isn't it? So what does that look like in Bangladesh? Is it 
industrialisation as we've known it in many other countries, does it 
look different? What is the story of Bangladesh's booming economy?

Risalat Khan: Right now it is being seen, as you said, as a booming 
economy really providing a backbone of the global garments industry, the 
fashion industry, often based on models of exploitation, I might add. 
The country is definitely on a track towards economic development and 
doing well for itself. Human health indicators that Bangladesh has in 
many ways are examples in the region in terms of how far we have come in 
terms of human development on things like sanitation and water and so on.

Yet there are challenges, and I do consider climate as one of the 
biggest ones. And while we do have a responsibility to transition like 
everyone else, some of the things that will actually determine what will 
happen to the future of the country in terms of - some estimates of sea 
level rise suggest that up to a third or even a half of the country in 
future could go underwater. And when you have a country of more than 160 
million people, that means tens of millions displaced, mass migration 
over a period of a very short time. And that would be incredibly 
difficult for any government to manage, and it will result in really 
vast human crisis unless we act very quickly as a world on climate.

Peter Vanham: And of course, also the adverse effects of climate change 
are not just in the future in Bangladesh, they are also in the present. 
I think that Dhaka, the capital, is actually one of the worst polluted 
cities in the world, isn't it? Is that also a consequence of this 
industrialisation and economic development?

Risalat Khan: One of the reasons that Dhaka is one of the fastest 
growing cities in the world has to do with climate-induced migration. 
Every year, there are tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of 
thousands of people who are displaced due to various climate-induced 
impacts, such as river erosion and flooding. And what that results in is 
a lot of unplanned development. For example, low income communities, 
where people lack basic services, where you might have urban flooding, 
water logging, etc., which are challenging to manage. The Harvard study 
that just came out recently estimating that one in five global deaths 
are actually due to the burning of fossil fuels, that is quite stark and 
worth pausing on to also imagine how much benefits in terms of public 
health we will meet by making this transition rapidly.

Natalie Pierce: How do you think the global economic development model 
for Bangladesh or any other emerging economy needs to change?

Risalat Khan: We have introduced growth as a proxy for things that we 
want, but it's a highly imperfect proxy that does not say anything about 
the quality of life you want for your people. That does not say anything 
about the planet that we are literally pushing past the brink in order 
to strive for that growth. We have created societies where there is so 
much inequality and that level of inequality creates an extremely 
polarised society. And what we need to do that is to really renegotiate 
and update our social contract. To say that enough is enough, we need to 
create a more humane and just society and keep within the planetary 
boundaries and provide for people. And in many ways, the pandemic has 
really disrupted our sense of control, our illusion of control and our 
sense of invincibility - that we are not going to be affected. So will 
we learn the lessons from that is the main question.

Natalie Pierce: If you had one key takeaway, you hope our viewers take 
from this conversation, what would it be?

Risalat Khan: We have this window of really reimagining how things could 
look like, and so many different forces are converging such that the 
collective actions that we take as humanity in this decade in these next 
few years will really determine in very deep ways the future of human 
civilisation, as well as potentially life itself on our planet for 
thousands of years to come, maybe even more. And this history is being 
written before our eyes. Each of us have a choice, whether we will be 
bystanders or will we find the page of that history book or the 
sentence, the phrase, the word or even a comma in that book that is ours 
to write.
- -
Natalie Pierce: Up next, we are going to turn to our second expert 
guest. He is the chair of the Grantham Research Institute for Climate 
Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. He is Lord 
Nicholas Stern...
...
Natalie Pierce: In today's episode, we're particularly exploring the 
correlation between global development and CO2 emissions, and I was 
wondering if you can tell us more about your research in this area and 
even potentially the link to the environmental kuznets curve...
- -
Nicholas Stern: Well, the idea of the environmental kuznets curve, which 
is roughly 30 years or so old, is that as incomes go up, you can either 
afford to or your preferences are actually to do so, to cut the 
pollution that your activities are causing. If you plot pollution 
against income per capita, it first goes up and then goes down as you 
start to take actions and you can afford to take actions to cut it. To 
be honest, I don't think the econometrical, statistical foundations for 
it are that good because people can take choices at any level of income, 
and they do. But that's the idea of the environmental kuznets curve.

Natalie Pierce: And what do you think about that specific link between 
emissions and global economic development?

Nicholas Stern: So there's the production side of it, that associates 
economic activity with energy and energy with carbon. But of course, you 
can change that. You can change the amount of energy you use, but often 
actually energy use will go up with output. But what you really can 
break is the relationship between energy and carbon, and that's a 
choice. Of course, there's the whole question of what we do with forests 
and our land use as well, and we can let economic activity encroach on 
our forests and the environment and our biodiversity, or we can act to 
control that. So there are those two forces at work: output, energy, 
carbon; and extra activity encroaching on our natural environment and 
undermining our natural capital. Those two forces at work are real 
forces, but of course they can be changed....

- -
Nicholas Stern: Yes, ... you can grow without increasing your emissions. 
In my own country, the UK, since 1990, we've probably grown by about 
70%, emissions cut by around 40%, just in very round numbers. So that's 
perfectly possible if you make those investments. And actually, you can 
get a stronger, more attractive, more inclusive, more resilient form of 
growth. So it's not simply a decoupling story if you take the right kind 
of policies to clean up your energy. I think it's actually becoming 
stronger than that - that the kinds of investments we need to make to 
change our energy, to invest in our natural capital, are actually 
investments with very powerful returns beyond simply the very important 
point of cutting carbon emissions. So I think it should give us hope and 
it should point to the developing countries new options now. They don't 
have to go through the dirty phase which we sadly went through as rich 
countries, because there are different ways of doing things.

Peter Vanham: That's a very positive message. We heard earlier from 
results Risalat who comes from Bangladesh and who's very concerned that 
as his country develops, which it is very rapidly doing right now, that 
in fact it is still leading to a lot more pollution. So do you see 
indeed that positive future ahead also for countries like Bangladesh, 
India and China?

Nicholas Stern: Oh, absolutely. The energy sector is the most important 
from the point of view of the emissions of greenhouse gases. Obviously, 
burning fossil fuels gives you CO2, and it is now possible to do things 
in different ways and we do not have to get our electricity from fossil 
fuels. It's as simple as that. It's actually cheaper to do it without 
the fossil fuels. Most, in this last year or two, auctions in the Indian 
power sector have seen round-the-clock solar beat out fossil fuels for 
the cheap supply of electricity. So that's the kind of activity which 
should give us hope. It means that the developing world can build its 
infrastructure in very different ways from the past. We're starting to 
see coal flatten in China. It has its bumps. It goes up and down. And I 
think we're going to see Chinese emissions start to fall within the next 
five or six years.

Natalie Pierce: What are the key changes that we need to see in our 
current economic model to put us on a better trajectory?

Nicholas Stern: That's absolutely the right question, Natalie. There are 
two sorts of investments that I would highlight: investments in physical 
capital and sustainable infrastructure; and investment in natural 
capital - restoring degraded land, expanding not contracting our forests 
and so on. And they are actions with wonderful returns - cities where 
you can move and breathe; more efficiency, greater productivity; 
ecosystems which are robust and fruitful; and reduced risk of climate 
change and more resilient economies. But we do have to make those 
investments.

So then the question is, well, what policy can draw through those 
investments? One important policy will be a price of carbon, but that's 
not the only one. We have to invest in R&D. We have to build our 
networks - good functioning grid systems mean that you can take in 
electricity from all sorts of different sources, at all sorts of 
different times, so you have to organise those systems well. Transport - 
we have to move quickly away from the internal combustion engine. One 
way of doing that, of course, price of carbon will help, but we can also 
regulate, saying that you cannot sell, as we will do in the UK after 
2030, you cannot sell internal combustion engine cars. You cannot take 
that kind of car into a city. And those regulations can be very 
powerful. So you need the right kind of prices, taxes, subsidies, you're 
going to need the right kind of regulation. And the rich world has to 
work with the poorer world to help with drawing through those kinds of 
investments. That includes sharing some knowhow, it includes some help 
with finance, lowering the cost of capital and increasing the flow of 
capital. So managing change is a complicated business, but the change 
itself is extremely attractive and it's urgent and it's perfectly feasible.

Peter Vanham: You've made the point of why it's so important to make 
these changes, and also that they are rather straightforward. They're 
not mysterious, you said. Why do you think we have failed to make these 
changes at a massive scale until just a few years ago? Why did it take 
so long?

Nicholas Stern: Since the Paris agreement of 2015, that international 
agreement, I think, provided a great deal of acceleration. That's only 
half a dozen years ago. I think over the last few years, particularly 
the last three years or so, we've started to see the new technologies 
come through still more quickly. The electric car now - all the major 
manufacturers are making electric cars, and actually most of them are 
saying we will not make combustion engines after a certain date in the 
future. You have seen the importance of the idea of net zero. And I 
think that has changed the way in which people think about it. We've had 
pressure from young people. They have been taught about climate change. 
It's clear for them also, they understand the technologies that are 
available. So if you put the international agreement, the technological 
change, the understanding of net zero pressures, particularly from young 
people, you start to see why things are accelerating, but still not fast 
enough.

Natalie Pierce: Thank you, Professor Stern, for sharing your insights 
with us...
- -
To demonstrate positive trends and potential solutions, we're joined 
next by Mariana Mazzucato.

Mariana Mazzucato: My thesis is that we have the wrong type of 
capitalism. There's varieties and we need to restructure it if we are 
going to take climate change seriously. The fact we have so many 
companies that continue to prefer just increasing their share prices and 
often the interrelationship between the government and the business 
sector is often what I would call a parasitic ecosystem, not a symbiotic 
one, all of those different problems need to be changed if we're going 
to take climate change seriously. But I don't think we can just keep 
looking at the symptoms. We have to go to the structural kind of 
foundations and change how we do policy, how we do business, and 
especially how we form better types of public-private partnerships.

Peter Vanham: You do believe, of course, that it is possible. You also 
write about this in your book - we can change the world. You give the 
example of how in 1960, nobody thought we could ever reach the Moon yet 
with the right policies in place we did achieve that by 1970. If we 
apply that now to the climate crisis, what do we need to do to get to a 
similar outcome, which in this case is net zero by 2050?

Mariana Mazzucato: Well, first of all, we need to treat it with the same 
level of urgency. With the Apollo mission that I write about in my book, 
Kennedy was really, really clear that it was going to require lots of 
experimentation. He said: We're going to do this because it's hard, not 
because it's easy. But also that it was going to be quite expensive and 
that there would be failures along the way. I think what this requires 
is an admission that it's going to be hard. But if we actually do it 
properly, in other words form healthy public-private partnerships base 
it around also a system of innovation that looks both at the kind of R&D 
that people like Bill Gates talk about, but also the demand side 
policies that are really crucial in terms of actually making sure that 
we fully deploy and diffuse these new technologies that are so central 
also for fighting global warming, that just requires a very different 
type of public policy, one that I call 'market creating and shaping' not 
just 'market fixing'. But also what I found so interesting when I was 
doing the research for the book is how NASA at the time really cared to 
actually redesign their policies. And in fact, that led to huge amounts 
of innovations across so many different sectors. This is really 
important with global warming. We need every sector to innovate. And 
what they also really cared about was that their own organisation, NASA, 
had to continue to invest within their own capabilities. They were aware 
that they needed that public-private partnership, but they wouldn't even 
know who to partner with or how to write the terms of reference if they 
didn't have their own kind of brains and capacity, what I call the 
'dynamic capabilities' of the public sector. And I think we've actually 
lost that. We have so many governments that have lost their capacity, 
their capabilities, because they have overly outsourced that capacity, 
whether it's to consulting companies or different types of project 
management companies inside the private sector. And one other thing I 
found fascinating in terms of the public-private partnership side is 
that NASA also had a clause or clauses inside their contracts that had 
to do with no excess profits. In other words, of course, companies 
should make profits - this is not about charity, it's not about 
philanthropy, But it's not about turning this into a gambling casino. 
The profits should be fair, given that it's an outcome of a collective 
value creation, and that means admitting that the public sector has 
taken risks is investing often in the early stage, much more difficult 
stage, of innovation. So the way I sometimes put it as a one-liner is 
that with the Green Deal, we don't just need the green bit to be thought 
about, but also the deal. What's the right contract with the right way 
to share the rewards and not just the risks?

There should be conditionality attached to any sort of government 
subsidy guarantee or investment. And what's interesting was that 
recently in Germany, for example, when the steel sector asked for a 
large loan from the government, they did something that many countries 
haven't done. The loan was conditional on steel reducing its material 
content. And they did it through repurpose, reuse, recycle technologies 
throughout the whole value chain. Today they have one of the most 
sustainable and innovative steel manufacturing processes. And so really 
what we need in order to get carbon-neutral manufacturing across all our 
different sectors, but also distribution, is to put this at the centre 
of the contracts in that way, with conditionality. But unless it's 
actually embedded as a mandatory change that has to happen, as opposed 
to relying on kind of voluntary actions, I just don't think we're going 
to get there on time.

Peter Vanham: We also saw how the challenge of getting to zero may be 
harder in emerging economies because they're still on a development path 
where they naturally would emit more CO2, more greenhouse gases. What 
are some of the solutions that you foresee in such economies and for 
such governments and companies?

Mariana Mazzucato: There's many different points that I would raise on 
that, but the first is that the developed world has to definitely take 
on the greatest burden, which doesn't mean that developing countries 
shouldn't change. Of course they must, but it has to be facilitated by 
those countries that have historically, in the last 200 years, led the 
problem.

What's interesting is for countries that are developing, sometimes this 
need to build infrastructure, for example, especially in countries with 
very weak infrastructure, that seems like that's the priority - let's do 
that first and then we can worry about global warming later. I think 
that's a mistake. I think in developing countries where there's both an 
urgency to develop and to build that infrastructure, having a green lens 
and a green design lens to building the infrastructure is absolutely 
crucial. So many cities globally are finding themselves fighting against 
climate change, but just haven't actually thought at the city level how 
to change the current way that we think about development. And so I 
think especially in countries that are on the developmental pathway and 
that have very urgent problems, using a green lens to fight those 
problems is not only very smart, but is a way to actually innovate with 
those public sector tools that I talked about before. So if you have a 
carbon neutral city agenda, for example, that should be informing the 
public procurement structure for a city or region or a nation. And I 
think that need to innovate with the tools, grants, loans, procurement 
or if you have a public bank, a development bank, as many developing 
countries have, it's really important to get out of the kind of 
mentality of just giving out money and handouts to different 
organisations, away from that and actually have a mission-oriented, 
outcomes-oriented goal, and using climate targets for those goals, and 
using that to then cause investment in innovation in the business 
sector, of which we often have too little in developing countries, by 
putting those conditionalities that I talked about earlier at the 
centre. This is, I think, a way to really catalyse investment in 
countries that actually have low business investment...
- -
Mariana Mazzucato: Yes. Well, we need to remember, as I said, there's 
different ways to do capitalism and we're doing it wrong and we have to 
stop sticking with the ideology of government or private sector. We need 
to change the governance models of both government and the private 
sector, but especially build that healthy partnership. And anyone who's 
interested in stakeholder value in the business community or talks about 
purpose-led change - iIt has to go not just within corporate governance, 
but in the relationship. Just like in a marriage - there can be healthy 
marriages and dysfunctional marriages. I really think we have a 
dysfunctional relationship right now between the public and private 
sector. And so that's my call for action, get symbiotic partnerships, 
and let's use that in order to bring purpose at the centre of the system.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/12/stakeholder-capitalism-profit-planet-nicholas-stern-risalat-khan/





/[ ] /



/[ ] /



/[The news archive - looking back at the early wisdom that has crumbled 
and decayed ]/
*On this day in the history of global warming December 29, 2009*

December 29, 2009: Washington Post writer Ezra Klein excoriates members 
of the US Senate who have developed cold feet about addressing global 
warming:

    "Amidst all this, conservative Senate Democrats are waving off the
    idea of serious action in 2010. But not because they're opposed. Oh,
    heavens no! It's because of abstract concerns over the political
    difficulties the problem presents. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), for
    instance, avers that 'climate change in an election year has very
    poor prospects.' That's undoubtedly true, though it is odd to say
    that the American system of governance can only solve problems every
    other year. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) says that 'we need to deal with
    the phenomena of global warming,' but wants to wait until the
    economy is fixed.

    "Rather than commenting abstractly on the difficulty of doing this,
    Conrad and Bayh and others could make it easier by saying things
    like 'we simply have to do this, it's our moral obligation as
    legislators,' and trying to persuade reporters to write stories
    about how even moderates such as Conrad and Byah are determined to
    do this. They could schedule meetings with other senators begging
    them to take this seriously, leveraging the credibility and goodwill
    built over decades in the Senate. They could spend money on TV ads
    in their state, talking directly into the camera, explaining to
    their constituents that they don't like having to face this problem,
    but see no choice. That effort might fail -- probably will, in fact
    -- but it's got a better chance of success than not trying. And this
    is, well, pretty important."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/climate_change_is_bad_but_the.html 







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


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