[✔️] July 24, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sat Jul 24 09:51:55 EDT 2021
/*July 24, 2021*/
[water rationing to start in August]
*California moves to cut off water to thousands of farmers, as drought
dries up rivers*
BY DALE KASLER - JULY 23, 2021
The State Water Resources Control Board on Friday released an “emergency
curtailment” order that would cut thousands off from rivers and streams
in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river watersheds. The five-person
board still has to vote on the order Aug. 3, and it would take effect
about two weeks later.
Eileen Sobeck, the board’s executive director, said the proposed order
shows the dire conditions of California’s water supply. There “is just
not enough to meet all of the legitimate demands,” she said...
- -
“We don’t take this action lightly; we know that it’s going to impose
hardships on folks,” she said. Exceptions will be made for drinking
water and other human needs...
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/water-and-drought/article252986953.html
[BC Wildfires]
*Wildfire triples in size in BC's Okanagan; Health concerns over smoky
skies*
Jul 23, 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QjlnwMg7hs
- -
[Daily wildfire video report]
*Holt Hanley Weather*
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGjtp7iaeVmoVx-K7EGiYKA
- -
[Tipping point is not a place in China]
*Climate 'mysteries' still puzzle scientists, despite progress*
by Amélie Bottollier-Depois - - JULY 23, 2021
Heatwaves—and particularly the tendency of current models to
underestimate the intensity of these bursts of deadly, searing temperature.
This is one of the "major mysteries" science still has to unravel,
climatologist Robert Vautard told AFP, even as researchers are able to
pinpoint with increasing accuracy exactly how human fossil fuel
pollution is warming the planet and altering the climate.
"Today we have better climate projection models, and longer observations
with a much clearer signal of climate change," said Vautard, one of the
authors of an upcoming assessment by the United Nations' panel of
climate experts...
- -
*'Phenomenal' heat*
Scientists now have a greater understanding of the mechanisms behind
"extreme phenomena, which now occur almost every week around the world",
said Vautard, adding that this helps better quantify how these events
will play out in the future.
In almost real time, researchers can pinpoint the role of climate change
in a given disaster, something they were unable to do at all until very
recently.
Now, so-called "attribution" science means we can say how probable an
extreme weather event would have been had the climate not been changing
at all...
- -
*Tipping points*
Even on a global scale, some fundamental questions remain.
Perhaps one of the most ominous climate concepts to have become better
understood in recent years is that of "tipping points".
These could be triggered for example by the melting of the ice caps or
the decline of the Amazon rainforest, potentially swinging the climate
system into dramatic and irreversible changes.
There are still "a lot of uncertainties and mysteries" about tipping
points, Vautard said, including what level of temperature rise might set
them off.
Currently, they are seen as low probability events, but he said that it
is still crucial to know more about them given the "irreversible
consequences on the scale of millennia" that they could cause.
Another crucial uncertainty is the state of the world's forests and
oceans, which absorb about half of the CO2 emitted by humans.
"Will this carbon sink function continue to be effective or not?"
Vautard said.
If they stop absorbing carbon—as has been found in areas of the Amazon,
for example—then more C02 will accumulate in the atmosphere, raising
temperatures even further.
"It is a concern," said Vautard.
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-climate-mysteries-puzzle-scientists.html
[different politician]
*Why Mitt Romney says doing nothing about global warming would be seen
as ‘extraordinary lapse’*
By Dennis Romboy -- Jul 21, 2021
Failure to take steps to prevent global warming because of politics will
be seen as an “extraordinary lapse” in America’s judgment decades from
now, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said Wednesday.
Romney, a Republican, said at a Senate hearing that it’s time for the
country to come together and to find solutions that will actually help
protect the planet for future generations.
When people look back on the current generation 50 years from now, they
will be most critical of “our failure to act to prevent the warming of
the planet and the climate change associated with that warming, and that
the political winds that prevented us from acting will be seen as an
extraordinary lapse in America’s judgment,” he said.
Romney, the ranking member of the Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific
and International Cybersecurity Policy, made the statements at a hearing
on combating climate change in East Asia and the Pacific...
- -
The first-term senator said that the only effective way to deal with
climate change is through advances in technology because it is effective
in reducing emissions and less expensive than some of the carbon-based
alternatives.
“I know that sometimes we’re tempted to politically get behind
initiatives that sound good. Doing things here, that people here feel
like, ‘boy, we’re doing green things here isn’t that wonderful?’ But the
reality is that those things won’t make a hill of beans worth of
difference to reducing global emissions,” Romney said...
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2021/7/21/22587651/why-mitt-romney-says-not-doing-anything-global-warming-extraordinary-lapse-climate-change
[odd or perplexing?]
*California's carbon mitigation efforts may be thwarted by climate
change itself*
by University of California, Irvine
JULY 22, 2021
To meet an ambitious goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, California's
policymakers are relying in part on forests and shrublands to remove CO2
from the atmosphere, but researchers at the University of California,
Irvine warn that future climate change may limit the ecosystem's ability
to perform this service.
In a paper published today in the American Geophysical Union journal AGU
Advances, the UCI Earth system scientists stressed that rising
temperatures and uncertain precipitation will cause a decrease in
California's natural carbon storage capacity of as much as 16 percent
under an extreme climate projection and of nearly 9 percent under a more
moderate scenario.
"This work highlights the conundrum that climate change poses to the
state of California," said lead author Shane Coffield, a UCI Ph.D.
candidate in Earth system science. "We need our forests and other
plant-covered areas to provide a 'natural climate solution' of removing
carbon dioxide from the air, but heat and drought caused by the very
problem we're trying to solve could make it more difficult to achieve
our objectives."
Trees and plants draw CO2 from the atmosphere when they photosynthesize,
and some of the carbon ends up stored in their biomass or the soil.
California's climate strategy depends in part on enhanced carbon storage
to offset some of the emissions from transportation, power generation
and other sources. The combination of this natural carbon sequestration
system and measures to promote green energy is hoped to help the state
reach its target of not contributing net carbon to the environment by 2045.
But the UCI scientists suggest that an even more aggressive approach to
curtailing emissions may be necessary.
"The emissions scenario that we follow will have a large effect on the
carbon storage potential of our forests," said co-author James
Randerson, who holds the Ralph J. & Carol M. Cicerone Chair in Earth
System Science at UCI. "A more moderate emissions scenario in which we
convert to more renewable energy sources leads to about half of the
ecosystem carbon [sequestration] loss compared to a more extreme
emissions scenario."
Coffield said that current climate models are not in agreement about
California's future precipitation, but it's probable that the northern
part of the state will get wetter and the southern part drier. He also
said that coastal areas of Central and Northern California and low- and
mid-elevation mountain areas—sites of large offset projects—are the most
likely to lose some of their carbon sequestration powers over the next
several decades.
In addition, the researchers were able to estimate the effects of
climate change on specific tree species. They project that coast
redwoods will be constrained to the far northern part of their range by
the end of the century and that hotter, drier conditions will favor oak
trees at the expense of conifers.
While the study used statistical modeling to peer into the future of the
state's ecosystems, the research also highlights the importance of
present-day drought and wildfire as key mechanistic drivers of carbon
sequestration losses. Other studies have estimated that the 2012-2015
drought killed more than 40 percent of ponderosa pines in the Sierra
Nevada range. Another issue the researchers describe is the loss of
trees from California's worsening wildfire situation.
"We hope that this work will inform land management and climate policies
so that steps can be taken to protect existing carbon stocks and tree
species in the most climate-vulnerable locations," Randerson said.
"Effective management of fire risk is essential for limiting carbon
[sequestration] losses throughout much of the state."
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-california-carbon-mitigation-efforts-thwarted.html
- -
[Source material may help with understanding]
*Climate-Driven Limits to Future Carbon Storage in California's Wildland
Ecosystems*
Shane R. Coffield, Kyle S. Hemes, Charles D. Koven, Michael L. Goulden,
James T. Randerson
First published: 22 July 2021 https://doi.org/10.1029/2021AV000384
This article is a companion to Anderegg (2021),
https://doi.org/10.1029/2021AV000490.
*Abstract*
Enhanced ecosystem carbon storage is a key component of many climate
mitigation pathways. The State of California has set an ambitious
goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, relying in part on enhanced
carbon sequestration in natural and working lands. We used
statistical modeling, including random forest and climate analog
approaches, to explore the climate-driven challenges and
uncertainties associated with the goal of long-term carbon
sequestration in forests and shrublands. We found that seasonal
patterns of temperature and precipitation are strong controllers of
the spatial distribution of aboveground live carbon. RCP8.5
projections of temperature and precipitation are estimated to drive
decreases of 16.1% ± 7.5% in aboveground live carbon by the end of
the century, with coastal areas of central and northern California
and low/mid-elevation mountain areas being most vulnerable. With
RCP4.5 projections, declines are less severe, with 8.8% ± 5.3%
carbon loss. In either scenario, increases in temperature
systematically cause biomass declines, and the spread of projected
precipitation across 32 CMIP5 models contributes to substantial
uncertainty in the magnitude of that decline. Projected changes in
the environmental niche for the 20 most biomass-dominant tree
species revealed widespread replacement of conifers by oak species
in low elevation regions of central and northern California, with a
corresponding decline in carbon storage depending on expected
migration rates. The spatial patterns of vulnerability we identify
may allow policymakers to assess where carbon sequestration in
aboveground biomass is an appropriate part of a climate mitigation
portfolio, and where future climate-driven carbon losses may be a
liability.
*Plain Language Summary*
Many climate mitigation policies, including those of California,
rely in part on increased carbon uptake by forests and shrublands.
However, these natural ecosystems are also being impacted by climate
change, likely making the goal of increasing biomass carbon more
difficult to achieve. In this study, we used a variety of
statistical models to estimate the impact of rising temperature and
changing precipitation on California ecosystems' carbon storage. We
found that in either moderate or severe warming scenarios,
aboveground live carbon will decrease substantially. Decreases are
driven by the rising temperature, while uncertainty in future
precipitation leads to substantial uncertainty in the exact
magnitude of those decreases. We also modeled several different tree
species separately, finding that climate change will likely favor
oak species at the expense of conifers. Lastly, some areas of
California appear more vulnerable to carbon loss than others—in
particular, the northern and central coasts, low/mid-elevation
mountain areas, and places where there are currently forest carbon
offset projects. The spatially explicit projections we provide may
help with the design of land management and climate policies to
anticipate the impacts of climate change, and focus carbon offsets
and conservation efforts where they will be most effective.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021AV000384
[2 minute rant from a radical anthropologist]
*Our Relationship To The Planet | Wade Davis*
Jul 23, 2021
Long Now Foundation
Anthropologist Wade Davis asks us all to reexamine our relationship to
the natural world.
What is the role and purpose of Anthropology today?
Wade Davis looks back at the pioneering work of Franz Boas in the early
20th century that upended long-held Western assumptions on race &
gender, along with definitions of "social progress". Boas and his
students used comparative ethnography to advance “cultural relativism”--
the idea that every culture is as “correct” as every other culture. Boas
showed that our differences can be completely explained by social
conditioning, not inherent genetic makeup, upending a deep history of
scientific racism.
This fundamental change in understanding laid the intellectual
foundations for the political movements for racial, gender, and cultural
equality in the 20th century. But over the last few decades, the field
of Anthropology has turned inward, and seems increasingly unable to
address global challenges like linguistic loss, cultural erasure,
environmental destruction, and economic injustice. Davis offers ideas on
how the field could change direction and reclaim global activism as part
of its core once again.
Wade Davis is a cultural anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author,
filmmaker and photographer. An Explorer-in-Residence at the National
Geographic Society from 01999 to 02013, Davis is currently Professor of
Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at
Risk at the University of British Columbia. He has published 22 books
including "The Serpent And the Rainbow", "The Wayfinders" and most
recently, "Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia".
"Activist Anthropology" was given on June 29, 02021 as part of Long
Now's Seminar series. The series was started in 02003 to build a
compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the
world's leading thinkers. The Seminars take place in San Francisco and
are curated and hosted by Stewart Brand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoaW2bvnEPw
- -
[more Wade Davis - ( bring back the Potlatch!) - 35 min video]
*Activist Anthropology | Wade Davis*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkp6bVZsGDE
[ a contrarian insight]
*The Worst Answer to Climate Anxiety: Wellness*
Americans have become adept at prioritizing self-care over solidarity.
Eleanor Cummins - -July 29, 2020
The coronavirus turned the world inside out. Essential workers continued
to report to duty, often at great personal risk. The rest of the United
States was stuck indoors, with only the internet to occupy them—if they
were lucky and 80 percent of their time wasn’t taken up with regaining
employment or worrying about the next month’s rent.
Confinement has been a challenge for everyone. But where World War II
demanded that those on the home front ration for the greater good, the
coronavirus has asked that we isolate, swapping community for mail-order
consumption. In many ways, Americans have never been more prepared for
this particular kind of crisis.
Thanks to more than a decade of “wellness” culture—a lifestyle aimed at
optimizing the body and mind, a global industry worth $4.2 trillion, a
miasma seeping from every Instagram page and Sephora shop—millions of
Americans are fluent in the language of self-maintenance and versed in
the virtues of the interior world. In lieu of a functioning health care
system for all, individuals with cash to burn have long since stocked up
on jade eggs and facial rollers. Faced with a burning world, we’ve
created comforting regimens out of face creams and moisturizing serums.
As trash has accumulated on land and in oceans, some throw out
belongings in a new spirit of minimalism. With each new crisis,
consumers have proven that, at its core, wellness culture offers an
individualistic, capitalism-approved response to insecurity in one’s
surroundings.
When the coronavirus struck, those who could afford it quickly doubled
down on self-care and self-isolation. In March, as stay-at-home orders
spread across the country, streaming increased 85 percent, driven in
part by boredom and in part by the entitlement to excess at the core of
commodified wellness, which tells us that whatever feels good is good.
But more active forms of self-care have driven consumer spending, too.
The “sourdough class”—remote workers with the time, space, and resources
to take up bread baking as a quarantine hobby—rose on Twitter.
Kettlebells, newly prized for their compactness in the era of isolation
exercise, quickly sold out. So too did the Nintendo Switch, as gaming
consoles became the last portals to another world. And for those
actually exposed to the virus, elite lifestyle blogs promised improbable
cures: Wellness influencer Cristina Cuomo, sister-in-law of the New York
governor, detailed her own coronavirus recovery “protocol,” which
included bleach baths and kidney-cleansing asparagus.
Quarantining itself was clearly prudent; the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention has made clear the only way to suppress the spread of the
coronavirus is for individuals to retreat into their inner worlds. But
the lived experience of the pandemic has clarified some long-running
tensions: not just our systemic racism, fragmented, for-profit health
care system, and unchecked wealth inequality, but also the limits of
personal maintenance as a response to a collective crisis. While some
degree of individual responsibility and care is essential in order to
live, the wellness industrial complex has ensured self-improvement
remains an automatic response to each new crisis, big and small.
This peculiar kind of rose-quartz neoliberalism has been quietly
crystallizing for decades. Wellness in the 1650s simply meant the
opposite of illness. Now, it encompasses both legitimate and sham
medical treatments, workplace interventions, and luxury goods. It’s
pervasive in real estate marketing (Deepak Chopra bought a condo in the
“health-centric” Delos building in Manhattan) and tourism (New Mexico is
no longer a hippie paradise—it’s a state-sized spa). Since 2010,
interest in the word “wellness” has roughly doubled, according to Google
Trends. Numerous forces drive this linguistic metastasis: In an unstable
economy with little social safety net, maintaining a healthy body is a
capitalistic necessity. The visible erosion of social norms under the
Trump administration has pushed people to develop private routines,
however arbitrary, to satisfy their cravings for control. And otherwise
essential conversations about mental health, disability, and chronic
conditions, when paired with frustratingly little scientific insight,
have given rise to a questionable culture of cure-seekers. But wellness
culture has also grown in recent years alongside more global anxiety:
climate change.
*Implicit in many of our most desirable commercial goods, and in extreme
cases explicit, is the promise that whatever happens to the Earth, its
most optimized inhabitants can continue to thrive.*
The American obsession with inner stasis offers a perfect foil to the
country’s increasingly wild CO2 emissions. In 2019, David Wallace-Wells
became one of the more prominent climate writers to note the problematic
trend. Wellness, he wrote in his book The Uninhabitable Earth, arises
from “perception of worldly sickness uncomplemented by political
commitment.” Wellness “gives a clear name and shape to a growing
perception even, or especially, among those wealthy enough to be
insulated from the early assaults of climate change: that the
contemporary world is toxic, and that to endure or thrive within it
requires extraordinary measures of self-regulation and self-purification.”
To some 2019 readers this may have seemed a stretch. But the past few
months of Etsy mask orders and a nationwide home-buying frenzy have only
exacerbated these tendencies: Stripped of political solutions to the
degradation of the environment and the existential peril of climate
change, Americans have joined a cult of personal empowerment through
consumption. Implicit in many of our most desirable commercial goods,
and in extreme cases explicit, is the promise that whatever happens to
the Earth, its most optimized inhabitants can continue to thrive.
Gwyneth Paltrow did not invent the pursuit of purification. Rather, Goop
is the most recent incarnation of a tradition that extends at least back
to Galen. For millennia, most people subscribed to the miasmic theory of
disease, which understood that illness was caused by “foul vapors”
wafting up from fetid marshes, decaying organic matter, and general
rot—best fought with distance. Just as the richest Romans spent malaria
season in their mountain villas far from town, the 0.1 percent today
retreated from Covid-ravaged cities to the seaside pastures of the Hamptons.
Disaster—or the threat of it—has always exacerbated the human desire for
cleansing, although what “clean” means has changed with time. In
medieval Europe, a sect of Catholic radicals began publicly whipping
themselves as a form of penance, the blood on their back washing their
sins away. The flagellants’ practice peaked during the Black Death, as
growing numbers tried to drive the plague away. By the late twentieth
century, cleanliness focused on the absence of more mundane
elements—namely, chemicals: The advent of atomic weapons, the
well-publicized use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War, and the
rising awareness of damaging insecticides like DDT contributed to
widespread chemophobia, driving a preference for “natural” alternatives.
Today, many people also live with the persistent dread of a changing
climate and an equally devastating sense of inaction. But by combining
two separate civic religions—purification and consumerism—wellness has
allowed people to purchase spiritual indulgences without modifying their
behavior. Philosophy, the bath and body company, bottles “Hope” and
“Purity.” A boxed set costs just $40.
As the locus of our fear shifted from divine wrath to industrial
engineering, so have our solutions. Both earlier cleansing rituals and
our contemporary obsession with the natural “allow their subscribers to
maintain a sense of control over their own health by pursuing personal
purity,” according to Eula Biss in her 2014 bestselling book On
Immunity. Nineteenth-century Londoners might have resorted to “heavy
curtains and shutters” to “seal out the smell of the poor and their
problems. Our version of this shuttering is now achieved through the
purchase of purified water, air purifiers, and food produced with the
promise of purity.”
For an example of how this plays out today, look to Flint, Michigan.
Following news reports of lead in the majority-Black community’s water
supply, a majority of Americans reported they were concerned about the
contamination of their tap water. But as ever, it was the wealthy, who
are least likely to affected by these problems, that were the most able
to take private safety measures, like in-home filtration. The rest of
the country—unable to filter out generations of racist, classist
policies with a 10-cup-capacity Brita—has continued to suffer.
Wellness companies refer frequently to this fractured relationship
between humans and the land, water, and air that sustain us. “For the
most part, people are finding more and more that everyone they know is
kind of sick,” Elise Loehnen, chief content officer at Goop, said in a
2017 interview with The Cut. “There are concerns about our food supply,
about the rampant use of glycosate. Food used to grow in many feet of
loamy soil! I think we’re just depleted. I think there’s a vitamin D
deficiency because we don’t go outside, and when we do, we’re always
wearing sunscreen. We’re out of touch with the Earth in general, and I
just don’t think this is the way we were intended to live.” But Loehnen
and her competitors will sell you a sleek, 400-thread-count escape
chute: You can practice “earthing” (walking around barefoot) to realign
yourself with the planet’s electrical energy, buy “grounding crystals”
like tourmaline to balance your “root chakra,” or “sound bathe” on a
desert retreat to deepen your relaxation.
Skincare, perhaps the most accessible form of wellness today, excels at
such dubious eco-promises. Even the most casual Sephora shopper knows
that gels and balms are considered essential protection against the
ravages of the outside world. But products formally marketed as
“anti-pollution” are now on the rise, according to industry trend data.
Despite no scientific research assessing their claims, dermatologists
gladly offer their advice on how to protect your skin from smog. In a
2019 piece in Glamour, doctors recommended readers apply antioxidant
creams before they leave the house, “limit exposure” by walking down
less trafficked roads, and use acids and exfoliants at the end of the
day to strip any accumulated grime. If this sounds like too much work, a
$145 bottle of Sturm Anti-Pollution Drops promises to protect “against
daily pollution and blue light generated by computers and phones to help
fight environmental aggressors that cause aging” all on its own. While
air pollution has been a concern of the beauty industry for at least 150
years, the careful corporate-speak of “environmental aggressors” seems
to gesture beyond the tiny particles that clog our pores and into a new,
diffuse realm of dangers, where some of the biggest threats we face are,
like carbon, totally invisible.
Wellness culture isn’t limited to the body. Its logic also presents in
physical environments, from storefronts to private homes. As our
illusion of control over the natural world has withered, we’ve invested
in naturalistic design, a clean, minimalist, artificially atmospheric
style exemplified by South Korean beauty brand Innisfree’s storefronts
with ivy walls and LED-equipped artificial clouds. These brands promise
better, healthier materials in their products—and better, healthier
lives for their customers.
*The primary problem with air pollution, carbon emissions, and other
environmental hazards is not wrinkles: It’s death—on a potentially
massive scale.*
The illusion grows on our windowsills, too. From the safety of their
climate-controlled homes, people care for species like baseball
succulents, African violets, and the omnipresent Pilea peperomioides,
all of which are wildly popular among plant moms but endangered or
threatened in their native habitats. Most recently, online shoppers
began panic-buying seeds in quarantine. Houseplants, sales of which have
increased 50 percent since 2016, are often explicitly recommended as an
investment in wellness because they’re shown to lower stress and boost
mood and, in office spaces, productivity—a capitalist win-win. “[I]f the
spread of coronavirus shows us anything, it’s how therapeutic plant care
can be in a time of high anxiety,” Summer Rayne Oakes, a model and
environmental activist, recently wrote on her blog. But they also allow
us to lord over a landscape all our own, no matter what’s going on outside.
Regular exercise, healthy eating, and work-life balance seem to be
unimpeachable goals. But, as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her 2018
polemic Natural Causes, a runner’s high can mask a more fundamental
existential power grab: “I may not be able to do much about grievous
injustice in the world, at least not by myself or in very short order,
but I can decide to increase the weight on the leg press machine by
twenty pounds and achieve that within a few weeks,” she writes. “The
gym, which once looked so alien and forbidding to me, became one of the
few sites where I could reliably exert control.”
The same unsettling logic is at work when people turn to air purifiers
and skincare products to address air pollution, instead of demanding
better regulations that curb the pollution in the first place. The focus
suggests magical thinking at best, and myopic selfishness at worst:
personal solutions for public crises. Climate activists have recently
begun to acknowledge the limits of individual action when it comes to
curbing CO2 emissions, but the belief persists almost everywhere else,
especially when it comes to health. This bootstrap approach is
predicated on a misunderstanding—or a denial—of the severity of the
problems we face, as well as a persistent belief that some of us can
escape with the right creams and meditation mantras. The truth is that
the primary problem with air pollution, carbon emissions, and other
environmental hazards is not wrinkles: It’s death—on a potentially
massive scale.
“Self-care,” ironically, started as a radical political act aimed at
asserting and protecting one’s humanity in the face of oppression. In
the 1960s, feminist health clinics decided to take gynecology back from
the academy and educate women on their own anatomy. In the 1970s, the
Black Panther Party began building its own clinics to provide care to
marginalized people. In this original incarnation, the “self” in
self-care extended, however narrowly, beyond the boundaries of an
individual. It was women protecting their own bodies, and those of other
women. It was Black people protecting their own health, and that of
other Black people. “It had nothing to do with massages or manicures,”
Amy Larocca observed this spring in The Cut as Covid-era interest in
wellness soared. “It was about looking out for your community when no
one else would do it for you.”
Today, “wellness” seems like an exercise in self-isolation. But perhaps
more people are finally waking up to the reality that while wellness can
provide a temporary psychological buffer from climate change and other
social ills, it will never be a real or lasting one.
In the midst of the pandemic, many people have joined mutual aid
networks for the first time. These grassroots organizations seek to
redress systemic wrongs like incarceration, but they’re also good at
making sure everyone on the block gets groceries. At rallies organized
in the response to the murder of George Floyd, a common chant is “We
protect us”—a rebuke of the police state, but also the cult of the
individual. While digital distractions abound, Black Lives Matter
co-founder Opal Tometi told The New Yorker that our time inside may yet
prove productive: “I believe [Americans] are just thoroughly fed up and
thoroughly beside themselves with grief and concern and despair because
the government does not seem to have a plan of action that is dignified
and comprehensive and seeks to address the core concerns that the
average American has.”
Whether these experiences will lead to substantive change remains to be
seen. But despite the risks of going out to protest, half a million
Americans went anyway. Many more began supporting the effort from home
by calling their representatives and donating to abolition efforts. No
matter how insignificant these Venmo receipts may seem, it’s a profound
shift to spending cash on the collective, not the individual—and on
changing the system, rather than mitigating its worst by-products. For
racial justice advocates and emissions watchers alike, it’s a hint of
what might happen were the affluent to put that imported Korean
sunscreen to good use—by taking to the streets.
Eleanor Cummins is a freelance science journalist based in New York.
https://newrepublic.com/article/158621/worst-answer-climate-anxiety-wellness
[Disinformation warfare - report from 2017 - audio]
*Corporate Media Perpetuates Climate Science Denial – Gabriel Byrne on
RAI Pt 4/4*
July 22, 2021
On Reality Asserts Itself, Gabriel Byrne says that mutant capitalism
seeks only profit and corporate media’s agenda avoids the climate
crisis; Byrne says its up to us, no superhero will save us – with host
Paul Jay. This is an episode of Reality Asserts Itself, produced
November 27, 2017.
https://blubrry.com/theanalysisnews/79439408/corporate-media-perpetuates-climate-science-denial-gabriel-byrne-on-rai-pt-44/
[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming July 24, 2000*
BP launches its controversial "Beyond Petroleum" advertising campaign.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010525195935/http://www.commondreams.org/news2001/0508-09.htm
http://youtu.be/GVsPT6ePKPw
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/
/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. This is a hobby production curated by Richard Pauli
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain 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/20210724/95273b1e/attachment.htm>
More information about the TheClimate.Vote
mailing list