[TheClimate.Vote] February 22, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*February 22, 2021*/

[rise of Snow-people activism]
*Hundreds Of Snowmen Built At Utah State Capitol For Climate Change*
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — An unconventional protest was held at Utah’s 
State Capitol.

About 600 snowmen appeared on the grounds Sunday, holding signs and 
demanding that state lawmakers save their “endangered species” — the snow.

“The snowmen decided to assemble and do something about climate change, 
asking Utah legislators, and specifically Mitt Romney to put a price on 
carbon,” said a volunteer. “They see that as the fastest way to stop 
climate change and curb emissions.”

Some of the signs read, “mister mitt romnee, If u price carbon we wil 
vote 4 u 4ever. (We r verfid constitunts)” and “Mitt is Litt!”
Demonstrators said taxing carbon emissions can be a bi-partisan issue 
and would lead to less pollution and cleaner air.

So far, the group has not heard from Sen. Mitt Romney about their 
request to meet with him about climate change.

Snowmen all over the country can be seen carrying similar “Snwmen 4 
Carbn Pricng” messages on Twitter @pricecarbonplz.

A group of snowmen also appeared outside the office of Sen. Chuck 
Schumer, D-N.Y. last week, demanding climate action from the new Speaker 
of the Senate.

No organization has claimed responsibility for the displays.
https://ksltv.com/455951/hundreds-of-snowmen-built-at-utah-state-capitol-for-climate-change/



[Big investments from TIME]
*Sara Menker, CEO of Gro Intelligence, Believes Big Data Can Save Our 
Climate and Food Supply*
Even by startup standards, the mission of Gro Intelligence is lofty. 
Sara Menker, the company’s founder and CEO, says its goal is to provide 
tools to help confront “two of the biggest challenges we face as 
humanity: food security and climate change.”

Gro Intelligence uses AI and machine learning to provide thousands of 
clients, ranging from big food companies like Unilever and Yum! Brands 
to financial institutions including BNP Paribas and Wells Fargo, with a 
host of data and analysis on the global agricultural ecosystem. In all, 
Gro computers hoover up 650 trillion data points from more than 40,000 
data sets—crop forecasts, satellite images, topography, reports on 
precipitation, soil moisture, evapotranspiration—to provide insights 
into 15,000 different agricultural products. The company also works with 
governments around the world on food-security issues to help them 
adequately plan for food reserves...
https://time.com/5940733/climate-chane-gro-intelligence-ceo-sara-menker/



[Naomi Klein]
*Why Texas Republicans Fear the Green New Deal*
Small government is no match for a crisis born of the state’s twin 
addictions to market fixes and fossil fuels.

By Naomi Klein
Ms. Klein is a senior correspondent at The Intercept and the Gloria 
Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University. Her new book, “How to 
Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and 
Each Other.”

Feb. 21, 2021
Since the power went out in Texas, the state’s most prominent 
Republicans have tried to pin the blame for the crisis on, of all 
things, a sweeping progressive mobilization to fight poverty, inequality 
and climate change. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly 
deal,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Wednesday on Fox News. Pointing to 
snow-covered solar panels, Rick Perry, a former governor who was later 
an energy secretary for the Trump administration, declared in a tweet 
“that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going 
to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.”

The claims are outlandish. The Green New Deal is, among other things, a 
plan to tightly regulate and upgrade the energy system so the United 
States gets 100 percent of its electricity from renewables in a decade. 
Texas, of course, still gets the majority of its energy from gas and 
coal; much of that industry’s poorly insulated infrastructure froze up 
last week when it collided with wild weather that prompted a huge surge 
in demand. (Despite the claims of many conservatives, renewable energy 
was not to blame.) It was the very sort of freakish weather system now 
increasingly common, thanks to the unearthing and burning of fossil 
fuels like coal and gas. While the link between global warming and rare 
cold fronts like the one that just slammed Texas remains an area of 
active research, Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech 
University, says the increasing frequency of such events should be “a 
wake up call.”

But weather alone did not cause this crisis. Texans are living through 
the collapse of a 40-year experiment in free-market fundamentalism, one 
that has also stood in the way of effective climate action. Fortunately, 
there’s a way out — and that’s precisely what Republican politicians in 
the state most fear.

A fateful series of decisions were made in the late-’90s, when the 
now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push 
to radically deregulate Texas’s electricity sector. As a result, 
decisions about the generation and distribution of power were stripped 
from regulators and, in effect, handed over to private energy companies. 
Unsurprisingly, these companies prioritized short-term profit over 
costly investments to maintain the grid and build in redundancies for 
extreme weather.

Today, Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians who 
failed to require that energy companies plan for shocks or weatherize 
their infrastructure (renewables and fossil fuel alike). In a recent 
appearance on NBC’s “Today” show, Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, summed it 
up: “We have a deregulated power system in the state and it does not 
work, because it does not build in the incentives in order to protect 
people.”

This energy-market free-for-all means that as the snow finally melts, 
many Texans are discovering that they owe their private electricity 
providers thousands of dollars — a consequence of leaving pricing to the 
whims of the market. The $200,000 energy bills some people received, the 
photos of which went viral online, were, it seems, a mistake. But some 
bills approaching $10,000 are the result of simple supply and demand in 
a radically underregulated market. “The last thing an awful lot of 
people need right now is a higher electric bill,” said Matt Schulz, 
chief industry analyst with LendingTree. “And that’s unfortunately 
something a lot of people will get stuck with.” This is bad news for 
those customers, but great news for shale gas companies like Comstock 
Resources Inc. On an earnings call last Wednesday, its chief financial 
officer said, “This week is like hitting the jackpot with some of these 
incredible prices.”

Put bluntly, Texas is about as far from having a Green New Deal as any 
place on earth. So why have Republicans seized it as their scapegoat of 
choice?

A Shock to the System
Blame right-wing panic. For decades, the Republicans have met every 
disaster with a credo I have described as “the shock doctrine.” When 
disaster strikes, people are frightened and dislocated. They focus on 
handling the emergencies of daily life, like boiling snow for drinking 
water. They have less time to engage in politics and a reduced capacity 
to protect their rights. They often regress, deferring to strong and 
decisive leaders — think of New York’s ill-fated love affairs with 
then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the 9/11 attacks and Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 
the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Large-scale shocks — natural disasters, economic collapse, terrorist 
attacks — become ideal moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market 
policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else’s expense. 
Crucially, the shock doctrine is not about solving underlying drivers of 
crises: It’s about exploiting those crises to ram through your wish list 
even if it exacerbates the crisis.

To explain this phenomenon, I often quote a guru of the free market 
revolution, the late economist Milton Friedman. In 1982, he wrote about 
what he saw as the mission of right-wing economists like him: “Only a 
crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis 
occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying 
around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives 
to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the 
politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Republicans have effectively deployed this tactic even after crises like 
the 2008 market collapse, created by financial deregulation and made 
deadlier by decades of austerity. Democrats have, largely, been willing 
partners. This seems counterintuitive, but it all comes back to 
Friedman’s credo: The change doesn’t depend on the reasons for the 
crisis, only on who has the ideas “lying around” — a kind of 
intellectual disaster preparedness. And for a long time, it was only the 
right, bolstered by a network of free-market think tanks linked to both 
major parties, that had its ideas at the ready.

When Hurricane Katrina broke through New Orleans’s long-neglected levees 
in 2005, there was, briefly, some hope that the catastrophe might serve 
as a kind of wake-up call. Witnessing the abandonment of thousands of 
residents on their rooftops and in the Superdome, small-government 
fetishists suddenly lost their religion. “When a city is sinking into 
the sea and rioting runs rampant, government probably should saddle-up,” 
Jonah Goldberg, a prominent right-wing commentator, wrote at the time. 
In environmental circles, there was also discussion that the disaster 
could spur climate action. Some dared to predict that the collapsed 
levees would be for the small-government, free-market legacy of 
Reaganism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Soviet Communism.

None of it happened. Instead, New Orleans became a laboratory for the 
shock doctrine. Public schools were shut down en masse, replaced by 
charter schools. Public housing was demolished, and costly townhouses 
sprang up, preventing thousands of the city’s poorest residents, the 
majority of them Black, from ever returning. The reconstruction of the 
city became a feeding ground for private contractors. Republicans used 
the cover of crisis to call for expanded oil and gas exploration and new 
refinery capacity, much as Mr. Perry is doing right now in Texas with 
his calls for doubling down on gas.

Many tried to stop them. Teachers’ unions, despite having their members 
scattered throughout the country, did their best to fight the 
privatizations. Residents of public housing and their supporters faced 
tear gas to try to stop the demolition of their homes. But there were no 
readily available, alternate ideas lying around for how New Orleans 
could be rebuilt to make it both greener and fairer for all of its 
residents.

Even if there had been, there was no political muscle to turn such ideas 
into reality. Though the environmental justice movement has deep roots 
in Louisiana’s “cancer alley,” the climate justice movement was only 
just emerging at the time Katrina struck. There was no Sunrise Movement, 
the youth-led organization that occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office after the 
2018 midterms to demand “good jobs, and a livable planet.” There was no 
“squad,” the ad hoc alliance of congressional progressives whose most 
visible member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, sent shock waves through 
Washington by joining the Sunrisers in their occupation. There had not 
yet been two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns to show Americans how 
popular these ideas really are. And there was certainly no national 
movement for a Green New Deal.

Lying in Ruin
The difference between then and now goes a very long way toward 
explaining why Mr. Abbott is railing against a policy plan that, as of 
now, exists primarily on paper. In a crisis, ideas matter — he knows 
this. He also knows that the Green New Deal, which promises to create 
millions of union jobs building out shock-resilient green energy 
infrastructure, transit and affordable housing, is extremely appealing. 
This is especially true now, as so many Texans suffer under the 
overlapping crises of unemployment, houselessness, racial injustice, 
crumbling public services and extreme weather.

All that Texas’s Republicans have to offer, in contrast, is continued 
oil and gas dependence — driving more climate disruption — alongside 
more privatizations and cuts to public services to pay for their state’s 
mess, which we can expect them to push in the weeks and months ahead.

Will it work? Unlike when the Republican Party began deploying the shock 
doctrine, its free-market playbook is no longer novel. It has been tried 
and repeatedly tested: by the pandemic, by spiraling hunger and 
joblessness, by extreme weather. And it is failing all of those tests — 
so much so that even the most ardent cheerleaders of deregulation now 
point to Texas’s energy grid as a cautionary tale. A recent article in 
the Wall Street Journal, for instance, called the deregulation of 
Texas’s energy system “a fundamental flaw.”

In short, Republican ideas are no longer lying around — they are lying 
in ruin. Small government is simply no match for this era of big, 
interlocking problems. Moreover, for the first time since Margaret 
Thatcher, Britain’s former prime minister, declared that “there is no 
alternative” to leaving our fates to the market, progressives are ready 
with a host of problem-solving plans. The big question is whether the 
Democrats who hold power in Washington will have the courage to 
implement them.

The horrors currently unfolding in Texas expose both the reality of the 
climate crisis and the extreme vulnerability of fossil fuel 
infrastructure in the face of that crisis. So of course the Green New 
Deal finds itself under fierce attack. Because for the first time in a 
long time, Republicans face the very thing that they claim to revere but 
never actually wanted: competition — in the battle of ideas.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/opinion/green-new-deal-texas-blackout.html



[2020 Report]*
****Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change*
Tracking the connections between public health and climate change
The Lancet Countdown works to ensure that health is at the centre of how 
governments understand and respond to climate change. Our work ranges 
from ensuring policymakers have access to high-quality evidence-based 
guidance, through to providing the health profession with the tools they 
need to improve public health.
Video https://youtu.be/Bp6avcskCcg  The Lancet Countdown on Health and 
Climate Change: 2020 report
https://www.lancetcountdown.org/



[From the Siberian Times]
*Scientists call for urgent increase in monitoring potentially-explosive 
permafrost 'heave mounds’*
By Anna Liesowska, Svetlana Skarbo - 29 January 2021
More than 7,000 pepper the Yamal peninsula, world’s biggest natural gas 
reserve, and many may be ticking time bombs.
A call for a lot more attention to the ‘world gas pantry’ comes from a 
team of Russian scientists from the Oil and Gas Research Institute of 
the Russian Academy of Science (OGRI RAS), who have spent years studying 
Yamal’s permafrost so-called heave, or heaving mounds after the first 
major explosion of one of them was recorded in autumn 2013.

A total of 20 have erupted since on the Yamal and the nearby Gydan 
peninsula, with the latest explosion in summer 2020 leaving a 32-35 
metres (131ft) deep crater.

Chunks of soil and ice were flung dozens of metres from the epicentre.

These explosions, recorded both on the ground and under water in lakes 
and rivers of the Yamal peninsula are believed to be caused by the build 
up of methane gas in pockets of thawing permafrost including the ground 
ice under the surface. The swollen pingo-like formations erupt with gas 
blowing off thick caps of soil, shooting out chunks of ground ice and 
soil as large as 100-150 cubic metres, as happened in 2017 when the 
Seyakha PMH exploded.

Another huge explosion followed a year later in 2019, when reindeer 
herders who happened to be close to lake Otkrytie witnessed a mighty 
eruption with large pieces of ice flying in the air...
- -
A database has been created of 7,185 so-called permafrost heave mounds 
(PMH) on the Yamal and Gydan peninsula, with many in areas of major gas 
extracting and processing projects such as the gigantic Yamal LNG, the 
Bovanenkovo, the Novoportovskoye and the South-Tambey oil and gas 
condensate fields.

‘We think approximately that not more then five to ten per cent of these 
7,185 mounds are really dangerous’, said Professor Vasily Bogoyavlensky, 
who with the team of colleagues from OGRI RAS has been using satellite 
images, digital surface models, seismic sensors, drone and ground 
surveillance to gather the up-to-date map.

What is currently missing is the map of the mounds that will definitely 
explode, which is one of the reason of why Professor Bogoyavlensky is 
calling to use all available methods to create a 24/7 monitoring system, 
given how dangerous it would be to have one of the mounds blowing up by 
or under currently existing infrastructure.

To explain the maps (above), Professor Bogoyavlensky said: ‘Now we have 
the full understanding of the nature of these gas heave mounds, we 
understand which types of them are potentially dangerous, but we can’t 
yet predict which of them will explode based on remote sensing.

‘A combination of methods is needed. So far we revealed and mapped 7,185 
permafrost heave mounds, over 1800 zones of active gas emission from 
craters in Yamal thermokarst lakes and marked potentially dangerous 
areas with settlements and infrastructure sites on them.’...
- -
‘For the first time in the world we proved that underwater explosive 
power was the same as on land. During the 2018 Lake Otkrytie explosion, 
its 1.5 metre thick ice cover was broken, with the pieces of ice 
scattered as far as 50 metres’, he said.

Four critical zones with the highest risk of gas explosions were 
revealed: the Seyakha zone with an epicentre in 28 kilometres from 
Seya-Kha village; North-Tambey zone, in the South Tambey field, with the 
epicentre 17 kilometres from the village of Sabetta, Russia’s major LNG 
exporting port, and the West Seyakya field zone.

All four dangerous zones are linked to gas fields, namely to the 
Bovanenkovo, Novoportovskoye and South-Tambey oil and gas condensate 
fields, unique in terms of the complexity of construction and operation, 
and the world's northernmost plant for liquefaction of natural gas 
'Yamal LNG' costing $27 billion at Sabetta.

One of Yamal peninsula's permafrost heave (or heaving) mounds before and 
after explosion. Pictures and video: Vesti Yamal, Vasily Bogoyavlensky
https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/scientists-call-for-urgent-increase-in-monitoring-potentially-explosive-permafrost-heave-mounds/ 




[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - February 22, 2010 *

The Economist calls out the Daily Mail for promoting the notion that 
climate change "stopped" in 1995.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/climategate_distortions

http://youtu.be/cp-iB6jwjUc


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