[TheClimate.Vote] January 3, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*January 3, 2021*/

[Senator Whitehouse visits Georgia]
*Where Georgia Senate runoff candidates stand on climate issues -- and 
one Senator's big concern*
Mary Landers - Savannah Morning News

Over the weeks leading up to the two Senate runoffs on Jan. 5, the 
Georgia coast has been the focus of one U.S. Senator's interest and 
activity.

That Senator is not from the Peach State.

He's Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island. Whitehouse has been a 
champion of climate change awareness and action, addressing the issue 
close to 300 times in speeches on the Senate floor.

The Democrat toured the Georgia coast in 2014 and came back in November 
and December to meet with coastal residents and nonprofits working on 
the issue ahead of the Senate runoff on Tuesday.

"Rhode Island and Georgia have a very important, common threat, which is 
rising seas, driven by fossil fuel emissions," he said Monday in an 
interview at the Tybee Island Marine Science Center. "And worsening 
storms coming across those rising seas, also driven by fossil fuel 
emissions. And those two dangers are creating significant new risks for 
all of our coasts. But in order to protect Rhode Island coasts, I need 
allies who will protect their own coasts. So that's why I have come to 
Georgia."
Honoring a Senate convention of keeping private conversations private, 
Whitehouse declined to say what he's heard directly from Sen. Kelly 
Loeffler or Sen. David Perdue about climate action.

"Let's just say if I had gotten much interest or positive feedback or 
had seen any effort I wouldn't be here," he said.
Like Georgia, Rhode Island has about 100 miles of coastline. Unlike 
Georgia, however, Rhode Island's tiny overall size means residents are 
never more than about an hour's drive from the ocean. With Georgia's 
population center more like four hours from the beach, climate change 
and sea level rise remain backburner issues at best for many Georgia 
politicians, even though Georgia has seen 10 inches of sea level rise 
since 1935 and scientists predict another 1 to 6 feet of it before 2100.
"Here we are in Tybee Island. And everybody knows that the road floods," 
Whitehouse said. "You drive by a sign on the highway at the Georgia 
Department of Transportation put up that says road may flood, that the 
road may be underwater at high tide. So people along the coasts 
understand the problem. What is different I think, is that Rhode Island 
at the government level, the state government level and at the federal 
delegation level, has taken this on as a real priority. And voices of 
coastal Georgians don't seem to be affecting much behavior at the state 
or federal level."
*
**Perdue v. Ossoff*
Climate and sea level rise haven't been a major focus of either runoff race.

Even though Perdue owns a $1.3 million home not far from the water on 
exclusive Sea Island, the sitting senator's campaign website doesn't 
mention climate change. He earned a lifetime score of 3% from the League 
of Conservation Voters based on his voting record.

When the issue of climate came up in the Atlanta Press Club debate with 
Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff on Oct. 12 Perdue said, "we can all 
agree the climate is changing." He didn't offer solutions but criticized 
Ossoff and linked him to the Green New Deal.

Perdue's campaign reiterated that criticism in a written statement sent 
to the Savannah Morning News on Thursday.
"Having grown up working on a farm in Middle Georgia, Senator Perdue 
knows the value of being a good steward of our earth and resources. 
Senator Perdue knows the importance of Georgia's coastal communities in 
protecting our environment, he was proud to cosponsor legislation like 
the Save our Seas 2.0 Act for that purpose," Communications Director 
John Burke wrote.

"He believes that we must continue President Trump's work to make 
America a leader in all clean energy technologies from wind and solar, 
to nuclear, to clean fossil fuels. This means we must use a free market 
approach with more innovation and less regulation. This does not mean we 
should impose socialist schemes like the Green New Deal, which the 
Senator's opponent Jon Ossoff supports, that would cost thousands of 
jobs, raise taxes, and do nothing to accomplish its purported goal of 
helping our environment."
Ossoff affirmed Thursday he does not support the Green New Deal. In a 
phone interview Ossoff said he sees climate change as a "direct threat 
to prosperity and health on Georgia's coast."

"And it's not just a looming threat, it's already taking a toll. We're 
already seeing impacts on aquaculture and fisheries and the shrimping 
industry," Ossoff said. "We're already seeing damage to Georgia's 
barrier islands and erosion of coastal features, damage to marshlands. 
We're already seeing coastal cities, towns and settlements having to 
invest in mitigation as storm surge and high wind events become more 
frequent and severe.

"The warming of the oceans is already causing tropical storms to become 
more frequent and more severe, and that means more flooding, more wind 
damage, and it means more damage to inland agriculture as well."

He said he would address climate change at its root, with energy production.
"The solution is to transition to energy production that does not emit 
carbon pollution," Ossoff said. "And the path to that future is massive 
investment in clean energy research and development and clean energy 
generation. And I want Georgia to be the number one producer of clean 
energy in the American South and for the United States to be the number 
one producer of clean energy in the world.

"And this is a great economic opportunity for our state. We have 
abundant sunshine. We can create tens of thousands of good paying jobs 
with benefits in the clean energy sector."
*Loeffler v. Warnock*
The Rev. Raphael Warnock, running against Loeffler, has also not 
endorsed the Green New Deal, but sees a need to act on climate change 
issues, especially in coastal cities like Savannah, where he grew up.

"Unlike his opponent, Reverend Warnock has acknowledged the climate 
crisis and the urgent need for action," Ralph Jones, strategic 
communications director for the campaign said in a telephone interview 
Thursday. "He actually speaks at length on this, about climate change as 
a moral issue that he believes that we can act on with good policy. It's 
notable that that policy consensus already exists among Americans."

A Pew Research Center study from April reported that a majority of 
Americans think the federal government is doing too little to reduce the 
effects of global climate change.

"In Georgia, this means protecting Georgia's coastline from rising sea 
levels, investing in climate science and provide resources for frontline 
communities most affected by climate change," Jones said.
At a campaign stop at a south side parking lot in Savannah on Wednesday, 
Loeffler cited her support of the Great American Outdoors Act as 
evidence of action she's taken on climate change. The bill, which passed 
with bipartisan support that included every Democratic senator, is 
considered a victory for the environment, mainly for the funding it 
provides to restore and maintain national parks and other federal land.

The Natural Resources Defense Fund indicated that funding would assist 
in several climate goals like keeping forests intact to sequester carbon 
preserve wetlands which can buffer communities from the more intense 
storms expected as the climate changes.

Like President Donald Trump, Loeffler pivots to "clean" air and water 
and to the economy when asked about climate change.
"Look, I grew up on a farm, I know the importance of clean air and clean 
water, and we have to protect our environment," she said. "But we can't 
do it at the expense of hardworking Georgians. We can't solve the 
problems that China creates with hardworking Georgians' funds. We know 
that would cost every Georgia family $75,000 to fund the Green New Deal. 
And so we have to strike that balance with being responsible. And one of 
the things that I learned in the private sector is they are working hard 
to solve problems in in our economy, including environmental issues."
Loeffler said the efforts to attain clean air and water are multi-faceted.

"Look, clean has many metrics, and we have to look at any number of 
metrics," she said. "Clean water, clean air, those are fundamental, and 
certainly initiatives, you know, that's being solved in the private 
sector, too. So we have to look at the entire spectrum of options here 
to help protect our environment but also to protect our economy and jobs."

A win for both Democrats would allow their party to set the agenda on 
climate in the Senate, Whitehouse said.

"And that means that we can have a conversation and with any luck, some 
action on the underlying problem that is causing this whole mess, which 
is the emissions from our fossil fuel burning," Whitehouse said. "And 
once we can force the question, we can then explore what the bipartisan 
solutions are. But if Mitch McConnell remains, as has been his practice, 
as a human blockade against any serious climate legislation coming to 
the floor, then we're stuck."

Mary Landers is the environment and health reporter at the Savannah 
Morning News. Contact her at 912-655-8295. Twitter: @MaryLandersSMN
https://www.savannahnow.com/story/news/2021/01/01/what-georgia-senate-candidates-say-coastal-georgia-sea-level-rise/4080717001/



[important book review]
*A resolution for 2021: Be a better ancestor*
By Kate Yoder on Dec 30, 2020
Who needs the arrow of time, anyway? Roman Krznaric, an author and 
philosopher, is in search of unconventional ways of thinking about time, 
ones that aren’t tied directly to the clocks ticking all around us. In 
one exercise, he imagines his young daughter as a 90-year-old, cradling 
her first great-granddaughter in her arms.

“I look at her face, her old face, and I walk over to the window and 
look at the world outside, and see what kind of world that is,” he said. 
“I think of my daughter, or her great-grandchild, living well into the 
22nd century — a time which is not science fiction, but an intimate 
family fact.”

It’s a sobering experiment for Krznaric, who, like a lot of us, has a 
“pretty dark” vision of the future. But most people don’t lose sleep 
over the fate of people who aren’t alive yet. More pressing concerns — 
the global pandemic, for example — have lodged themselves into our 
anxious brainspaces. The people of the future are merely hazy 
abstractions. But billions of real people will likely be born in the 
coming centuries, and depending on what we do next, they might be very 
disappointed with us. “Empathising with future generations may be one of 
the greatest of all moral challenges,” Krznaric writes in his recent 
book,*The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking.*

A broad, loose movement offering a new way of thinking about time has 
emerged in the last decade or so. Its goal is to preserve the Earth for 
its future inhabitants. Krznaric calls this a “time rebellion” in The 
Good Ancestor. These “time rebels” include the plaintiffs of youth 
climate lawsuits, who demand legal rights to a stable climate; the 
global climate strike movement founded by Swedish activist Greta 
Thunberg, which inspired millions of young people to skip class to call 
for climate action in the streets; and various artists, economists, and 
entrepreneurs who embrace “deep time” — the concept of expanding our 
temporal imagination to encompass geologic and cosmic timescales, from 
the fossil fuel record to the unfathomable expanse of the distant future.

Deep time is an antidote to the shortsightedness that has made 
governments so reluctant to act boldly to address the climate crisis. 
After all, the worst effects of our overheating planet will occur in the 
future, not the present. In his book, Krznaric looks to indigenous 
traditions, artistic projects, and new philosophies that seek to 
overcome this empathy barrier and fold the future into present concerns. 
One way to do this is by prompting people to think about the legacies 
they will leave, as Krznaric did when he imagined his daughter as a 
nonagenarian.

“What I’ve found is that the language of legacy seems to motivate people 
across different social realms with different backgrounds,” he said. (A 
small study from 2015 found that prompting people to think about how 
they’ll be remembered made them more likely to support personal and 
political action to cut carbon emissions.)

Krznaric has been interested in these questions for more than a decade. 
In a 2008 report, he argued that empathy is the most powerful tool we 
have to motivate people to take action on the climate crisis, an idea 
echoed in his 2014 book Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It.

As Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford, writes in The War 
on Kindness, empathy is not a fixed trait: It’s a muscle that can be 
stretched and strengthened. With the new year just days away, it’s a 
good time to reflect on your legacy and how to be kinder to Earth’s 
inhabitants-to-be. If you want to try to be a better ancestor in 2021, 
here are a few ideas from Krznaric’s new book. “The path of the good 
ancestor lies before us,” he writes. “It is our choice whether or not to 
take it.”
*
**Think about the seventh generation*
Imagine if every time a politician made a decision, they considered what 
it would mean for the well-being of people who will live 200 years from 
now, rather than worrying about what it’ll take to win the next 
election. It’s contrary to a lot of decision-making in the United 
States, but this kind of long-term thinking is a tradition in many 
indigenous cultures around the world, Krznaric writes. The Māori — the 
indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand — have a concept called 
whakapapa (akin to “genealogy”), an expression describing a long, 
unbroken chain of humanity that connects the deceased, the living, and 
the yet-to-be-born.

Native cultures are full of cautionary tales about the long-term 
consequences of taking too much, writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, a biologist 
and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, in the book Braiding 
Sweetgrass. These principles — called the Honorable Harvest — “govern 
our taking, shape our relationships with the natural world, and rein in 
our tendency to consume — that the world might be as rich for the 
seventh generation as it is for our own,” Kimmerer writes.

In the last couple of decades, “seventh-generation thinking” has been 
adopted in sustainability circles. One of the goals of the global youth 
organization Earth Guardians is to “protect our planet and its people 
for the next seven generations.” In a 2008 speech, the Nobel 
Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom raised the question of how to 
preserve resources for the future, saying, “I think we should all 
reinstate in our mind the seven-generation rule.” You might have even 
seen a nod to this idea in the dish soap aisle: The Vermont-based 
cleaning product company Seventh Generation was founded on this same 
principle.

*Pretend you’re living in 2060*
The idea of the seventh generation also inspired a Japanese political 
movement called “Future Design.” From small towns like Yahaba to major 
cities like Kyoto, Japanese cities have instituted an unusual type of 
city-planning meeting. One group of citizens at the meeting advocates 
for current residents, while another group dons special ceremonial robes 
and conceives itself as “future residents” from 2060. Studies have shown 
that these future residents advocate for more transformative changes in 
urban planning, especially around health and environmental action.

Ultimately, Krznaric writes, the movement wants to establish a “Ministry 
of the Future” for the central government in addition to local ones. 
It’s a growing trend: Over the past 30 years, Finland, Hungary, Malta, 
Tunisia, Sweden, Wales, and the United Arab Emirates have all created 
positions, committees, councils, or commissions that advocate for future 
generations’ interests.

*Give a gift to future generations*
Six years ago, Scottish artist Katie Paterson created the Future 
Library, a century-long art project. Each year, a famous writer (the 
first two were Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell) donates a new work to 
the project — one that no one else has ever read. At the end of the 
project, in 2114, the 100 books will be printed on paper from a forest 
outside Oslo that’s been planted for this express purpose, to be enjoyed 
by the readers of the 22nd century.

Another project, the website DearTomorrow, allows you to write a letter 
to someone of your choosing — your child, perhaps, or your future self — 
to be delivered in the year 2050. The project was started by Kubit and 
Trisha Shrum, two alums of the Grist 50. The founders say that 
DearTomorrow is meant to close the gap between the far-off years 
referenced in climate reports (2050 is a common one) and make a personal 
connection to the future.

Krznaric says that an “intergenerational Golden Rule” drives these kinds 
of projects: a “basic empathic principle” that we should treat others as 
we’d want to be treated, including people who might be distant from us 
in space and time.

“When you think about the legacies we’ve inherited from the past, some 
of those are very positive legacies,” Krznaric said. “We are the 
beneficiaries of the people who planted the first seeds in Mesopotamia 
10,000 years ago, who built the cities we live in, and who made the 
medical discoveries we benefit from. But we also are the inheritors of 
colonialism, slavery, and racism…. So do we want to pass on that stuff 
as well? No! Let’s pass on a different legacy to the next generation.”
https://grist.org/climate/a-resolution-for-2021-be-a-better-ancestor/

- -

[buy or ask your library]
*The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking*
Hardcover – November 3, 2020
by Roman Krznaric  (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Ancestor-Think-Long-Term-Short-Term/dp/1615197303/ref=sr_1_1



[because we're ready to change]
*Why 2021 could be turning point for tackling climate change*
By Justin Rowlatt - Chief environment correspondent
Countries only have only a limited time in which to act if the world is 
to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Here are five reasons 
why 2021 could be a crucial year in the fight against global warming.

Covid-19 was the big issue of 2020, there is no question about that.

But I'm hoping that, by the end of 2021, the vaccines will have kicked 
in and we'll be talking more about climate than the coronavirus.

2021 will certainly be a crunch year for tackling climate change.

Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, told me he thinks it is a 
"make or break" moment for the issue.

So, in the spirit of New Year's optimism, here's why I believe 2021 
could confound the doomsters and see a breakthrough in global ambition 
on climate.

Have countries kept their climate change promises?
Snowy UK winters could become thing of the past
How hot could it get where you live?
*1. The crucial climate conference*
In November 2021, world leaders will be gathering in Glasgow for the 
successor to the landmark Paris meeting of 2015.

Paris was important because it was the first time virtually all the 
nations of the world came together to agree they all needed to help 
tackle the issue....
- -
*2. Countries are already signing up to deep carbon cuts*
And there has already been progress.

The most important announcement on climate change last year came 
completely out of the blue.

At the UN General Assembly in September, the Chinese President, Xi 
Jinping, announced that China aimed to go carbon neutral by 2060...
- -
*3. Renewables are now the cheapest energy ever*
There is a good reason why so many countries are now saying they plan to 
go net zero: the collapsing cost of renewables is completely changing 
the calculus of decarbonisation.

In October 2020, the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental 
organisation, concluded that the best solar power schemes now offer "the 
cheapest source of electricity in history".

Renewables are already often cheaper than fossil fuel power in much of 
the world when it comes to building new power stations...
- -
*4. Covid changes everything*
The coronavirus pandemic has shaken our sense of invulnerability and 
reminded us that it is possible for our world to be upended in ways we 
cannot control.

It has also delivered the most significant economic shock since the 
Great Depression.

In response, governments are stepping forward with stimulus packages 
designed to reboot their economies...
- -
*5. Business is going green too*
The falling cost of renewable and the growing public pressure for action 
on climate is also transforming attitudes in business.

There are sound financial reasons for this. Why invest in new oil wells 
or coal power stations that will become obsolete before they can repay 
themselves over their 20-30-year life?

Indeed, why carry carbon risk in their portfolios at all?...
- -
The truth is lots of countries have expressed lofty ambitions for 
cutting carbon but few have yet got strategies in place to meet those goals.

The challenge for Glasgow will be getting the nations of the world to 
sign up to policies that will start reducing emissions now. The UN says 
it wants to see coal phased out completely, an end to all fossil fuel 
subsidies and a global coalition to reach net zero by 2050.

That remains a very tall order, even if global sentiments on tackling 
global warming are beginning to change.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55498657



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - January 3, 2011 *

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly notes that
Republican presidential candidates who now try to deny the existence
of human-caused climate change will have to figure out a way to
rewrite history:

    "Yes, in Republican circles in 2011, those who don't reject the
    scientific consensus on the climate crisis will be rejected out of
    hand. Those who've been even somewhat reasonable on the issue in
    recent years should expect to grovel shamelessly -- a trait that's
    always attractive in presidential candidates.

    "The number of likely GOP candidates who've actually said out loud
    that the planet is warming and that human activity is responsible is,
    oddly enough, larger than the number of consistent climate deniers.
    Sarah Palin has said pollution contributes to global warming and
    'we've got to do something about it.' Romney has said he believes the
    planet is warming and at least used to support cap-and-trade. Huckabee
    and Pawlenty have backed cap-and-trade -- which was, originally, a
    Republican idea, by the way -- in recent years. Even Newt Gingrich
    used to demand 'action to address climate change,' and participated
    briefly with Al Gore's Repower America campaign.

    "This wasn't a problem up until very recently. John McCain's 2008
    presidential platform not only acknowledged climate change, it
    included a call for a cap-and-trade plan -- and he won the nomination
    fairly easily. As recently as 2006, rank-and-file Republican voters,
    by and large, believed what the mainstream believed when it came to
    climate science: global warming is real, it's a problem, and it
    requires attention.

    "But that was before the GOP fell off the right-wing cliff."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_01/027356.php

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