[TheClimate.Vote] March 19, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*March 19, 2021*/

[New Yorker and Bill McKibben]
*H.R. 1 Is About Climate, Too*
The For the People Act says nothing about carbon emissions or solar 
panels, but it’s still the most important piece of climate legislation 
today.
By Bill McKibben - March 17, 2021
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/hr-1-is-about-climate-too


[Restoring trust in the Internet]
*Facts are back, and so is the EPA’s climate change website*
Trump erased it. Biden revived it.
https://grist.org/politics/biden-revives-epa-climate-change-site-trump-deleted/
- -
[Here it is]
*Climate Change An EPA Priority*
EPA is restoring the role of science in addressing the climate crisis. 
El sitio web de la EPA sobre el cambio climático en español.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-change



[Well known long ago - even by Congress]
*Oil firms knew decades ago fossil fuels posed grave health risks, files 
reveal*
Exclusive: documents seen by Guardian show companies fought clean-air 
rules despite being aware of harm caused by air pollution

The oil industry knew at least 50 years ago that air pollution from 
burning fossil fuels posed serious risks to human health, only to spend 
decades aggressively lobbying against clean air regulations, a trove of 
internal documents seen by the Guardian reveal.

The documents, which include internal memos and reports, show the 
industry was long aware that it created large amounts of air pollution, 
that pollutants could lodge deep in the lungs and be “real villains in 
health effects”, and even that its own workers may be experiencing birth 
defects among their children...
- -
“The response from fossil-fuel interests has been from the same playbook 
– first they know, then they scheme, then they deny and then they 
delay,” said Geoffrey Supran, a researcher at Harvard University who has 
studied the history of fossil-fuel companies and climate change. 
“They’ve fallen back on delay, subtle forms of propaganda and the 
undermining of regulation.”...
- -
By 1980, Imperial Oil had outlined plans to investigate incidences of 
cancers and “birth defects among industry worker offspring”. Esso 
experts, meanwhile, raised the “possibility for improved particulate 
control” in new vehicle designs to reduce the emission of harmful pollution.
Ten years later, an internal Exxon report stated: “We have become more 
aware of the potential impacts our operations might have on safety and 
health.” By this point, independent scientists in academia were amassing 
their own evidence of the influence of air pollution.

“The body is set up to keep particles out but these very small, fine 
particles are good at picking up toxins, bypassing your defenses and 
getting a free ride down into the lungs,” said George Thurston, an 
environmental health expert at New York University who co-authored a 
landmark 1987 study that found the smaller particles were far more 
deadly than larger fragments that could be coughed out.

Thurston and others have established fumes from car exhausts or power 
plants produce far more toxic particles than from other sources, such as 
wood burning or dust. “I don’t recommend breathing in wood smoke, but 
it’s far less toxic than fossil-fuel combustion particles, given the 
same concentrations,” Thurston said.
- -
Following a further major report in 1993, known as the Harvard “six 
cities” study, which found air pollution was spurring deaths from heart 
disease and lung cancer, pressure began to mount on the US Environmental 
Protection Agency to set pollution limits for the smallest particles, 
known as PM2.5 as they measure less than 2.5 micrometers across, or 
about a 30th of the diameter of a human hair.

Faced with the prospect of federal government regulation, the 
fossil-fuel industry swung into action. “The health issue is increasing 
in importance,” noted the minutes of a meeting of the Global Climate 
Coalition, which was a business lobby group, in 1997. “The GCC has got 
to be prepared to respond to the issue this year.”

A scientist commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API), a US 
oil and gas industry group, promptly told a congressional hearing in 
1997 the link between air pollution and mortality was “weak”, before 
Exxon pushed out its own study claiming “there is no substantive basis” 
for believing PM2.5 was causing more deaths.
This undermining of air-pollution science is likened by some researchers 
to efforts by tobacco companies to muddy the connection between 
cigarette smoking and cancer.

“The fossil-fuel industry was sowing uncertainty to maintain business as 
usual, and in all likelihood they were collaborating with other groups, 
such as the tobacco industry,” said Carroll Muffett, chief executive of 
the Center for International Environmental Law...
- -
In a major finding last month, a team of US and UK researchers 
calculated that nearly one in five of all deaths worldwide each year is 
due to particulate pollution, a stunning death toll that is greater than 
that caused by HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined. About 
350,000 of these deaths occur annually in America. While overall air 
pollution trends have improved in recent decades in the US, pockets of 
stubborn pollution remain, often concentrated in poorer communities, 
among people of color and those living in the rust belt...
- -
“There is now very consistent and solid evidence across many countries 
of the link between fine particulate matter and harm to health,” said 
Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics at Harvard. “There is 
also a ton of evidence that lots of people are dying in the US from 
exposures even below the current limits. This pollution is very harmful 
and stricter regulation is needed.”

Knowledge of the health impact of air pollutants was “relatively thin” 
in the 1970s and some skepticism over the link was understandable for a 
while, according to Arden Pope, an air pollution expert at Brigham Young 
University who said he got a “lot of pushback” from industry over his 
work, which includes the six cities study. “But the evidence has grown 
dramatically and, boy, it’s just hard to deny now,” he said. It’s 
overwhelming.”...
- -
Industry-funded consultants published studies disputing the link between 
emissions and deteriorating health or simply disparaged the work of 
other researchers. “Their goal is to undermine the scientific method, 
science itself,” said Thurston...
- -
Under Trump, Tony Cox, a researcher who received funding from API and 
allowed the lobby group to copy-edit his findings, was named as chairman 
of a key EPA clean air advisory board. Cox, whose previous work has 
questioned the harm caused by particulates, accused EPA experts of bad 
science and subjectivity when they found that particles can be deadly 
even in low concentrations.

Last year, in the midst of an historic pandemic of respiratory disease, 
Trump’s EPA decided to not strengthen standards around fine soot 
particles. A Harvard study found that air pollution was associated with 
worse outcomes for people with Covid-19. API said the Harvard paper 
merely included “preliminary findings” that had provoked “scare 
headlines and erroneous media reports”.

The attacks on the Harvard research were “very hard and very stressful”, 
according to Dominici, one of the paper’s authors. “If you’re breathing 
pollution for a long time and get Covid you will have worse 
consequences. This is very unsurprising,” said the researcher, who has 
since established there are now more than 60 studies from around the 
world that associate air pollution with poor Covid outcomes.

“I was surprised there was such a ferocious criticism. It’s really 
unfortunate that it’s easier to discredit science than produce good 
science. Gosh, that’s so frustrating.”

In a statement, Bethany Aronhalt, spokeswoman for API, said: “Our 
industry’s top priority is advancing public health and safety while 
delivering affordable, reliable and cleaner energy.

“Largely due to increased use of natural gas in the power sector and 
cleaner motor fuels, the US has seen significant environmental progress 
over the years – including improved air quality – with annual 
concentrations of PM2.5 declining 43% since 2000.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/18/oil-industry-fossil-fuels-air-pollution-documents




[Police in Minnesota and the Enbridge Pipeline]
*"I don't feel safe here"*
The Canadian oil giant Enbridge is "funding and incentivizing" Minnesota 
police to crack down on its (mostly female) opponents. Here's what it 
looks like.
Emily Atkin - March 17, 2021
PARK RAPIDS, Minnesota—Jane Fonda’s trip to Minnesota has not gone 
exactly as planned. She expected attention from the media. She did not 
expect attention from the police.

The actress and climate activist told HEATED on Tuesday that her 
much-publicized press conference to oppose the Line 3 tar sands pipeline 
was delayed because of an extended interaction with the Minnesota State 
Patrol. On her way to the event, the vehicle leading her caravan was 
pulled over for failure to signal more than 100 feet before a turn.

“We pulled over to wait for them, it took a long time to process their 
identification, and they ended up not being ticketed,” she said. “Then 
we drove 12 miles to the press conference and the police car followed us 
the whole way.” While being followed, they couldn’t tell what the speed 
limit was (unmarked roads, this is Northern Minnesota). So Fonda’s 
caravan drove at a glacial place to avoid getting stopped again, further 
delaying the press conference.

Fonda’s experience on its own was benign. Her colleagues were not 
arrested, hurt, or ticketed. If you watch the video of the stop, the 
police officer actually seemed super nice. Really, it’s the woman 
driving who seems kind of mean.

But Fonda does not see her experience in isolation. She views it as part 
of a coordinated effort between Minnesota law enforcement and the 
Canadian oil company Enbridge to harass, intimidate, and surveil 
opponents of the Line 3 pipeline. “This is a public police force that's 
been privatized by a foreign oil company, and every minute they spend 
harassing the water protectors—and assaulting the water protectors—they 
turn in an invoice and they get paid,” she said. “They're making a 
fortune off this.”
https://heated.world/p/i-dont-feel-safe-here
- -
[MSNBC - Enbridge #3 Jane Fonda's great rant ]
*Jane Fonda joins protests to stop pipeline replacement in Minnesota*
https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/jane-fonda-joins-protests-to-stop-pipeline-replacement-in-minnesota-107604037986



[Opinion video 3 min]
*John Schwartz: Better Climate Communication is Not "Just the Facts"*
Mar 18, 2021
greenmanbucket
I interviewed John Schwartz, climate writer for the New York Times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pROdGi4LN70
- -
[media changes video 1:30 min]
*John Schwartz: Disinformation, the Internet, and the John Birch Society*
Mar 18, 2021
greenmanbucket
I interviewed John Schwartz of the New York Times on climate denial and 
it's relation to rampant conspiracy theories like Qanon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPBkB1ncYag



[TRN $ text and audio play 30 min ]

Ben Ehrenreich/March 18, 2021
*We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide*
Why we must do everything differently to ensure the planet’s survival

On January 13, one week before the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 
forty-sixth president of the United States and seven long days after the 
storming of the Capitol by an armed right-wing mob, it was easy enough 
to miss an article published in the journal Frontiers in Conservation 
Science, despite its eye-catching title: “Underestimating the Challenges 
of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.” The headline was itself a train wreck: 
six dully innocuous words piling up in front of a modifier more suitable 
to a 1950s horror comic than a sober, academic journal. But there it 
was: The 17 scientists who co-wrote the article, the experts who 
peer-reviewed it, and the journal’s editors did not consider the word 
“ghastly” too sensational, subjective, or value-laden to describe the 
future toward which our society is advancing with all the prudence and 
caution of a runaway locomotive. The article’s message was simple: 
Everything must change.

On its current track, the authors wrote, “humanity is causing a rapid 
loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth’s ability to support complex 
life.” As many as a million animal species—and 20 percent of all 
species—are facing near-term extinction. Humans have altered 70 percent 
of the planet’s land surface and “compromised” or otherwise despoiled 
two-thirds of its oceans, and the climate has only begun to warm. 
Humanity—or some of us, anyway—“is running an ecological Ponzi scheme in 
which society”—or some sectors of it—“robs nature and future generations 
to pay for boosting incomes in the short term.” Only a radical 
transformation of the systems that govern our relations to one another 
and to the myriad forms of life with which we share the planet, the 
authors concurred, could deliver any hope of a “less-ravaged future.”

One week later, Joe Biden took the oath of office and quickly signed 
sweeping executive orders declaring it the explicit policy of his 
administration “to listen to the science.” He didn’t use the word 
“ghastly,” but he did mention “a cry for survival … from the planet 
itself,” one that “can’t be any more desperate or any more clear.” This 
was strangely comforting to hear. He rejoined the Paris accord, revoked 
a slew of Trump-era executive orders, and restored, albeit temporarily, 
the moratorium on drilling in the Arctic that President Barack Obama had 
issued on his way out the door. However slow Biden had been to catch on 
to the true magnitude of the climate crisis during the primaries, he 
had, after months of sustained movement pressure, apparently begun to 
come around.

To his credit, in his first week in office, Biden went further than any 
of his predecessors ever had. He ordered a “pause” on all new permits 
and leases for oil and gas drilling offshore and on federal land and 
shut down the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which activists had been 
fighting for more than a decade. He ordered federal agencies to pursue a 
“carbon pollution–free electricity sector no later than 2035,” and the 
full conversion of all government fleets to zero-emissions vehicles.

Perhaps most significantly, Biden’s actions aimed to institutionalize 
the mitigation of climate change as a priority in the daily workings of 
the federal bureaucracy. He ordered the creation of an Office of 
Domestic Climate Policy, a national climate adviser, a special 
presidential envoy for climate, and, in an explicit echo of the New Deal 
program—though green only with a lowercase g—a Civilian Climate Corps. 
He directed federal agencies to “implement a Government-wide approach 
that reduces climate pollution in every sector of the economy,” to 
center climate in foreign policy decisions, to eliminate fossil fuel 
subsidies, and to “promote ending international financing” of fossil 
fuels. There was even, in the very first section of his first climate 
order, a mandate for environmental justice and the protection of 
communities of color that had been disproportionately harmed by 
polluters. Whether that would mean any real inclusion—“If you’re not at 
the table, you’re on the menu,” as one South Carolina environmental 
justice activist put it to me—remains an open question. But as a signal 
of his administration’s priorities and its sense of urgency, it was, all 
the climate activists I spoke to agreed, an extremely solid start.

There was of course also a good deal of typical Democratic 
half-stepping. Why a “pause” on drilling and not an outright ban? (And 
why had the administration quietly gone ahead and approved 31 new 
drilling permits anyway?) Why no mention of fracking? Why not just shut 
down all the oil and gas pipelines that “[disserve] the U.S. national 
interest,” as the executive order put it, in exactly the same ways that 
Keystone XL did? And why not immediately declare a climate emergency, 
which would have opened up executive powers that would enable him to 
evade many of the roadblocks erected by the 50 Republicans in the 
Senate? Even Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, no one’s idea of a 
radical, was urging Biden to do so. “If there ever was an emergency,” 
Schumer said, “the climate crisis is one.”

Still, with these and more caveats and endless sound reasons for 
mistrust, after four long years of Trump’s out-and-out denialist, 
kleptocratic mayhem, the sheer momentum of Biden’s actions did feel 
pretty good. At least it allowed us to contemplate the prospect ahead 
with something other than pure dread. But a couple of months into the 
Biden era, enough time has passed for it no longer to seem impolite to 
point out that we should not be reassured. The “ghastly future” that 
those 17 scientists were warning of will still arrive, right on schedule 
or perhaps a little early, so long as Biden stays within the frame of 
what now counts as pragmatic climate policy—which, it turns out, is not 
very pragmatic at all.

Those 17 scientists did not want you to despair. “Ours is not a call to 
surrender,” they wrote. It was meant as a kick in the ass—a reminder 
that our only chance is a thoroughgoing transformation. Specifically: 
“fundamental changes to global capitalism, education, and equality, 
which include inter alia the abolition of perpetual economic growth.” 
Radical as this call may seem, it was hardly an outlier demand from a 
few oddball pinko Ph.Ds. In 2019, 11,258 scientists from 153 countries 
signed a “Warning of a Climate Emergency” that called for “bold and 
drastic” changes to the economy, including a shift away “from GDP growth 
and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving 
human well-being.” Two years before that, the Alliance of World 
Scientists made a similar call in a “Warning to Humanity” that garnered 
15,364 signatures. We are supposed to listen to science now. This is 
what the scientists are saying: Everything must change.

A strange sort of faith lies at the core of mainstream climate 
advocacy—a largely unexamined belief that the very system that got us 
into this mess is the one that will get us out of it. For a community 
putatively committed to scientific empiricism, this is an extraordinary 
conviction. Despite reams of increasingly apocalyptic research, and 
despite 25 years of largely fruitless international climate 
negotiations, carbon emissions have continued to rise, and temperatures 
along with them. We are at nearly 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming 
already—more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit over preindustrial averages—and 
three-tenths of a degree away from blowing the Paris accord’s aspiration 
to limit warming to a still-calamitous 1.5 degrees Celsius. Scientists 
now expect us to hit that threshold in about 10 years, and large swaths 
of the Arctic have been in actual flames for two summers running, but 
most governments with the option to do so are still feeding the beast 
that got us here.

Even with the grim opportunity presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, which 
slowed the economy so much that growth in fossil fuel production dropped 
an almost unprecedented 7 percent last year, governments—ours very much 
included—have so far dumped much more stimulus spending into high-carbon 
industries than into renewable energy. It’s as if our economic system, 
and the politics it breeds, will not allow us to diverge from the 
straight path to self-obliteration.

The faith nonetheless persists: The market will provide. It has not done 
so yet, but renewables are perhaps finally cheap enough—cheaper at last 
than conventional energy sources—that the transition is now inevitable. 
So the credo goes. The change that is coming will be largely 
technological: a bold new era of “green growth.” Modern societies 
erected on dirty coal and oil can be jacked up and shifted to cleaner 
forms of energy like an old house in need of a new foundation. 
Government may have a larger role in this transition than neoliberal 
dogma has recently allowed, but its primary task will still be to 
encourage innovation and feed the markets by shepherding the resulting 
growth.

It is no coincidence that some version of this faith, so all-pervasive 
now that it does not register as a piety, has been reshaping the planet 
for almost precisely as long as fossil energy—first coal, then oil—has 
been altering the atmosphere. Capitalism is guided by a carbon creed, an 
ecstatic vision of a market that chugs along eternally, needing only new 
inputs—the earth itself, commodified as minerals, or water, housing, 
health care, or almost any living thing—to spew out wealth that can be 
shoveled back into the machine, converting more and more of the 
biosphere into zeros in a digital account: more fleshless, magical money 
that can be invested once again. If appetites are bottomless, and 
apparently they are, shouldn’t growth be endless too?

The market’s grip on the political imagination so effectively blinds us 
to alternatives that we are unable fully to grasp that this is the basic 
script that the new administration is following. Even the Green New Deal 
does not substantively diverge from it. The climate crisis, an 
existential threat to planetary life, must be sold to Wall Street and 
the public at large as a growth opportunity. On January 31, John Kerry, 
acting as Biden’s new climate envoy, enthused to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria 
about “literally millions of jobs” that would soon be created, about all 
the “new products coming online,” and about oil companies’ newfound 
passion for “carbon capture and storage and so forth.” The private 
sector, he said, “has already made the decision that there is money to 
be made here, that’s capitalism, and they are investing in that future.” 
If that makes you nervous, it shouldn’t, Kerry insisted. The changes 
ahead would be like the analog-to-digital shift of the 1990s, only 
better: “the important point, Fareed, for people to really focus on is 
it’s a very exciting economic transition.”

If Kerry struck a cheerier tone than that of the doomsaying consensus in 
the scientific community, it wasn’t just a question of polishing a turd. 
“Green growth” is mainstream climate discourse. A “green transition” 
that does not significantly alter existing economic structures—or their 
vast inequities—is still, for most climate advocates, the only 
imaginable way forward. Kerry was speaking a made-for-TV version of the 
sole language available to him—one that in its most basic assumptions 
excludes the possibility of fundamental social transformation, and of 
any heresy that casts doubt on the Great God Growth. The one thing all 
those thousands of scientists agree on is our only hope—that the 
economic structures that mediate our relation to the planet must be 
profoundly altered—is the one thing that Kerry and Biden are quite 
careful not to consider at all.

In climate policy jargon, the crucial concept is “decoupling.” The 
notion lies deep in the hidden heart of the “sustainable development 
goals” held dear by international bodies such as the United Nations and 
the World Bank: Economic growth can be safely divorced from the 
ecological damage that it has heretofore almost universally wreaked. If 
the train of capital appears to be hurtling us toward the abyss, we can 
cut the engine loose and cruise someplace more comfortable: same train, 
same speed, different destination. Like millions of clean-tech jobs and 
a crisis-induced transition magically unlocking unimaginable wealth, it 
is an attractive and reassuring idea. The only problem is that there is 
next to no evidence that anything analogous has ever occurred, or that 
it is likely to occur in the future.

Examples of successful decoupling tend to involve shifts in the location 
rather than the nature of industrial production: Rich countries green 
their economies by offshoring the manufacture of the goods they consume 
to China and countries in the global south, which they can then chastise 
for their lax emissions standards. But Earth’s atmosphere is not divided 
by national boundaries. Greenhouse gases cause the same degree of global 
warming no matter where they are produced, and to the extent that this 
kind of decoupling is a meaningful measure of anything, it is only of 
the colonial relations that still set the terms for the shell game of 
global capital.

What policy wonks call “absolute decoupling”—the only kind that would do 
the climate any good—turns out to be a fantasy akin to a perpetual 
motion machine, a chimera of growth unhindered by material constraints. 
One recent analysis of 835 peer-reviewed articles on the subject found 
that the kind of massive and speedy reductions in emissions that would 
be necessary to halt global warming “cannot be achieved through observed 
decoupling rates.” The mechanism on which mainstream climate policy is 
betting the future of the species, and on which the possibility of green 
growth rests, appears to be a fiction.

This fiction is nonetheless fundamental to the very math used by 
international climate institutions. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel 
on Climate Change’s benchmark Special Report on Global Warming of 
1.5oC—which announced in no uncertain terms that global emissions must 
be decreased by nearly half by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050 to avoid 
cataclysm at an almost unthinkable scale—set out a number of possible 
scenarios for policymakers to consider. It relied on algorithmic models 
linking greenhouse gas emissions and their climate impacts to various 
socioeconomic “pathways.” Whatever other variables they accounted for, 
though, all of the scenarios envisioned by the IPCC assumed the 
continuation of economic growth comparable to the past half-century’s. 
Even as they acknowledged levels of atmospheric carbon unseen in the 
last three million years, they were unable to conceive of an economy 
that does not perpetually expand. Fredric Jameson’s oft-cited dictum 
that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of 
capitalism was baked into the actual modeling.

At the same time, all but one of the ­IPCC’s scenarios that envision us 
successfully limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius rely on the use of 
technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere after the fact. (The one 
exception involves converting an area more than half the size of the 
United States to forest. None of the scenarios imagines that we can 
reach the 1.5 degrees Celsius target by cutting emissions alone.) But 
the technology in question is at this point largely speculative. “No 
proposed technology is close to deployment at scale,” the report’s 
authors concede, and “there is substantial uncertainty” about possible 
“adverse effects” on the environment. The international body, in other 
words, is more willing to gamble on potentially destructive technologies 
that do not currently exist than to even run the math on a more 
substantive economic transformation.

A version of this same wager animates the Biden climate plan, which, as 
Canada, the European Union, the U.K., and South Korea all have, commits 
to “net-zero emissions no later than 2050.” (China plans to reach the 
same goal by 2060.) This sounds like great news, and is without doubt 
worlds better than the status quo ante of no ambitions at all. But “net 
zero” is a slippery notion. It does not mean zero at all. To avoid 
exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, emissions need to fall 7.6 
percent every year for the next 10 years. Even with the pandemic-induced 
slowdown, global emissions shrank only 6.4 percent in 2020. Since, as 
Biden reassured a nervous oil industry during the campaign, “We’re not 
getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time,” net-zero calculations 
assume some degree of “overshoot”—i.e., they stipulate that we’re not 
going to be able to cut emissions fast enough, and that we’ll therefore 
have to rely on those same untested carbon removal technologies to 
eventually bring us to zero.

But a planet is not a balance sheet. The climate has tipping points—the 
collapse of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and the Himalayan 
glaciers, the deterioration of Atlantic Ocean currents, the melting of 
the permafrost, the transition of the Amazon from rain forest to 
savannah. We are perilously close to hitting some of them already: In 
February, 31 people were killed and 165 went missing when a chunk of a 
Himalayan glacier broke off, releasing an explosive burst of meltwater 
and debris. In the most nightmarish scenario, which could be tripped 
with less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, 
those tipping points could begin to trigger one another and cascade, 
locking us in, as one widely cited study put it, to “conditions that 
would be inhospitable to current human societies and to many other 
contemporary species.” Without major emissions cuts, we may reach 2 
degrees Celsius of warming before 2050.

That’s a heavy risk to bet against, but there it is, pulsing away inside 
the net-zero promises that not only politicians but corporate boards 
have been proudly rolling out. Over the last two years, more and more 
corporations in fossil fuel–intensive industries—BP, Shell, Maersk, GM, 
Ford, Volkswagen, at least a dozen major airlines—have made similar 
pledges. Shell’s plan alone would require tree planting over an area 
nearly the size of Brazil. By the estimate of the NGO ActionAid, “there 
is simply not enough available land on the planet to accommodate all of 
the combined corporate and government ‘net zero’ plans” for offsets and 
carbon-sinking tree plantations. To save this planet, it appears we’ll 
need another one. This is what currently counts as pragmatism.

“If there is any one thing that global warming has made perfectly 
clear,” Amitav Ghosh wrote in 2016, “it is that to think about the world 
as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide.” Five years later, 
the pandemic has drilled the point painfully home. The societies most 
geared toward individual profit, and most worshipful of economic 
expansion, have proved least capable of saving themselves. Decades of 
almost unbroken GDP growth have piled up riches in a few gated compounds 
while leaving the vast majority of Americans poorer and more vulnerable 
to illness, imprisonment, homelessness, and the ghastly futures that we 
know all too well await us. That vulnerability is far from uniform. 
Covid has charted a precise map of its variegated terrain, of who gets 
to live and who gets pushed out to die. The same map applies to the 
climate crisis, too.

It is at this point a truism that the responsibility for global warming 
is not the common property of humanity but lies overwhelmingly with the 
few wealthy countries, the United States above all others, that profited 
most from early industrialization. The corollary truism is that the poor 
countries that disproportionately suffer the impacts of climate change 
contributed next to nothing to the problem. We have since learned that 
what is true in global macrocosm applies at the societal level as well. 
The wealthy consume far more resources and emit far more carbon than the 
rest of us. According to a recent Oxfam report, the richest one percent 
produce 100 times more emissions than the poorest half of the planet’s 
population, and the richest 5 percent were responsible for more than a 
third of all emissions growth between 1990 and 2015. Leveling this gross 
inequity is a question of survival.

As transcendent as the notion is made to sound, the “economy” is not a 
god or a temple. It is the order that maintains these inequalities: a 
highly contingent network of relations among human beings and between 
humans and the rest of the planet. Like everything we might ever hope to 
make, it is transitory and eminently changeable. Homo sapiens have 
walked the earth for at least 300,000 years, but coal-fueled industrial 
capitalism is less than 200 years old. Its latest, fully globalized 
stage has been around for just a few decades, even if its roots lie in 
colonial dynamics that date back a few centuries. Our specific modern 
exaltation of “growth” dates only to the years that followed World War 
II. It is younger than Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and 
Donald Trump. Like them, it cannot survive much longer.

Last year, GDP growth in the United States fell 3.5 percent. Emissions 
tumbled, too. The only other time in the last three decades that they 
have dropped significantly was, not coincidentally, also the last time 
the economy contracted. But if it’s guided with intent, the cessation of 
endless growth does not have to mean impoverishment. The most recent 
“Emissions Gap Report” from the United Nations Environment Program 
(UNEP) projects that warming could be successfully limited to 1.5 
degrees Celsius if the richest one percent reduced “their current 
emissions by at least a factor of 30,” which would allow the poorest 50 
percent of the planet’s population to increase their per capita 
emissions “by around three times their current levels.” For the latter, 
a threefold jump in consumption is the difference between constant want 
and a life of basic dignity. Billionaires who drop to 1/30th of their 
fortunes are still multimillionaires.

As innocuous as it may sound, “growth” should be understood to describe 
the frenzied ruination of nearly every ecosystem on the planet so that 
its richest human inhabitants can hold on to their privileges for 
another generation or two. Rejecting the idolatry of growth means 
tilting the organization of our societies toward other social 
goods—health, for instance, and the freedom to exist on a planet that is 
not on fire. This should not be unimaginable. There are infinite other 
ways to organize a society, and the fact that we are not widely and 
urgently discussing them is at this point nothing short of criminal. 
There are voluminous literatures on degrowth, on circular economies, on 
mutual aid, and, yes, on socialism, too. There is the 99.999 percent of 
human history during which we managed to not significantly alter the 
atmosphere or wipe out such an enormous portion of the species with whom 
we share the planet. There is the living experience of every indigenous 
community in the United States, and of others around the globe that have 
been forced to invent ways to resist and survive a system determined to 
erase them.

Everything must change. The energy system that is heating the atmosphere 
was poisoning Black and brown communities in America long before climate 
change emerged as an issue. The industrial food chain that produces 
roughly half of all global greenhouse gas emissions is also leaving more 
than a quarter of U.S. families with children without secure access to 
food and millions more with a uniquely American combination of obesity 
and undernourishment. The globalized supply chains that fuel 
international shipping and aviation—which, per the UNEP, “are projected 
to consume between 60 and 220 percent of allowable CO2 emissions by 
2050”—were deadly to local economies as well as to breathing individuals 
long before the pandemic revealed their extraordinary fragility.

Transportation, health care, housing, education, everything that the 
Covid-19 outbreak has revealed to be so murderously broken, every aspect 
of our lives currently controlled by shareholder profits—does that even 
leave anything out?—must be rethought and rebuilt in the context of 
terrestrial survival. The white supremacy that threatens to tear the 
country down while strangling the rest of the globe has proved 
inseparable from an ecocidal urge to dominate all forms of planetary 
life. (W.E.B. Du Bois saw it clearly 100 years ago: “whiteness is the 
ownership of the earth forever and ever.”) It must be confronted head 
on. A foreign policy constructed to at all costs preserve a hegemony 
that for most of the last century has hinged on control of the planet’s 
oil reserves must be radically reconfigured.

It is of course foolish to the point of derangement to imagine that Joe 
Biden would consent to any such transformation, much less lead the 
country toward one. Given the current political geography, it would be 
equally whimsical to suppose that any American politician or movement 
could ride to power on the message that this planet does not belong to 
us, that we share it with the dead and the still-to-be-born and with 
species we have not bothered to notice, and that we must learn to live 
among them with generosity, humility, and the sort of wisdom that does 
not come to human beings cheaply. However, it would be just as naïve to 
believe that current political configurations are any more stable or 
permanent than the climate, or any less vulnerable to concerted human 
action. If we do actually listen to the science, then we understand what 
ghastly futures await us and we know how bold we must be to avoid them. 
Any politics that presumes to be anything other than suicidal must take 
that knowledge as its starting point.

Ben Ehrenreich @BenEhrenreich
Ben Ehrenreich is the author of Desert Notebooks: A Roadmap for the End 
of Time, which was published by Counterpoint Press.

https://newrepublic.com/article/161575/climate-change-effects-hurtling-toward-global-suicide

- -

[It is an important paper]
*Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future*
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419/full



[Princeton video discussion - real solutions]
*Out with the Old, In with The New: How to Build a Net-Zero America 
While Ensuring A Just Transition*
Mar 16, 2021
Center on Global Energy Policy
In order to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, the United States has to 
both build massive amounts of wind, solar, and battery capacity, and 
simultaneously retire and retrofit significant fossil fuel assets. 
Understanding the impacts of this transition on communities across the 
country will be key to ensuring a just, equitable, and successful 
transition to zero-carbon energy resources.

The Center on Global Energy Policy hosted a webinar on how the United 
States can decarbonize its energy sector justly and equitably. Dr. Jesse 
Jenkins and Dr. Erin Mayfield provided an overview of Princeton's 
Net-Zero America Project, which maps pathways for the United States to 
reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Key questions in this 
discussion included: What will it take for the United States to build a 
net-zero emissions energy system? Why is a 100% carbon-free electricity 
system pivotal to this challenge? What role do technologies like wind, 
solar, batteries, nuclear, and carbon capture play in this future?

While decarbonization will require vast investment in new 
infrastructure, it will also require the retirement of carbon-intensive 
power plants. Understanding the timeframes, social implications, and 
costs of retiring these assets will be essential to a just transition. 
To help understand some of these issues, Dr. Emily Grubert spoke about 
her recent work on the implications of a 2035 net-zero emissions target 
on retirements of fossil fuel power plants in the US.

Moderator:
-- Jason Bordoff, Founding Director, Center on Global Energy Policy and 
Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs, 
Columbia University

Panelists:
-- Dr. Emily Grubert, Assistant Professor, Georgia Tech
-- Dr. Jesse Jenkins, Assistant Professor, Princeton University
-- Dr. Erin Mayfield, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton University
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbbFY_-yFw8

- -

[See the Princeton web site]
*NET-ZERO AMERICA: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure, and Impacts*

The Net-Zero America research quantifies five distinct technological 
pathways, all using technologies known today, by which the United States 
could decarbonize its entire economy. With multiple plausible and 
affordable pathways available, the societal conversation can now turn 
from “if” to “how” and focus on the choices the nation and its myriad 
stakeholders wish to make to shape the energy transition.

This website presents the pathways in an interactive context to enable 
policy makers and other stakeholders to extract specific results that 
are most useful to them. The site should be used in conjunction with the 
Net-Zero America report to fully understand the data contained herein.
https://netzeroamerica.princeton.edu/?explorer=year&state=national&table=2020&limit=200

- -


[Dr Jennifer Atkinson podcast]
*Episode 5: Is Hope Overrated? *
Many consider hope to be essential to maintaining social movements where 
change is slow, setbacks are frequent, and the odds aren't good.  As 
Rebecca Solnit once wrote, "To hope is to give yourself to the future  - 
and that commitment to the future is what makes the present  
inhabitable.” But when it comes to the existential threats of climate  
change and mass extinction, what if hope is part of the problem? What 
if  it obscures the enormity of our crisis, or makes us complacent,  
allowing the public to defer responsibility onto other people or the  
future?

When you look at the scale of our climate  emergency and the inadequacy 
of society's response, hope can feel like a  throwaway term, a cheap 
neon sign we dutifully switch on at the end of climate rallies. But 
those reservations about hope are not the whole  story. Research shows 
that environmental discourse has long fueled  public hopelessness by 
perpetuating apocalyptic narratives and the sense  that it's already 
"too late" to act. That hopelessness becomes a  self-fulfilling prophecy 
as those who believe we're already doomed -- or  that solutions don't 
exist -- chose *not* to act, thus ensuring the  very outcome they 
imagined. Episode 5 explores the complicated role of  hope in the fight 
for a livable planet, and the different forms it takes  in environmental 
debates: hope as complacency or "cruel optimism" (an  ideology to keep 
the public in line) as well as more subversive versions  like active 
hope, intrinsic hope, and critical hope.

“Hope  is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, 
feeling  lucky. Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency."

- Rebecca Solnit
https://www.drjenniferatkinson.com/facing-it



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - March 19, 1989 *

March 19, 1989: Senator Al Gore (D-TN), writing in the New York Times, 
observes, "In 1987, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere began to 
surge with record annual increases. Global temperatures are also 
climbing: 1987 was the second hottest year on record; 1988 was the 
hottest. Scientists now predict our current course will raise world 
temperatures five degrees Celsius in our lifetimes. The last time there 
was such a shift, it was five degrees colder; New York City was under 
one kilometer of ice. If five degrees colder over thousands of years 
produces an ice age, what could five degrees warmer produce in a 
lifetime? In a classic experiment, a frog dropped in boiling water jumps 
out. The same frog, put in the water before it is slowly boiled, remains 
in the pot. Our environment is at the boiling point. Will we react?"

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/19/opinion/an-ecological-kristallnacht-listen.html

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