[TheClimate.Vote] March 25, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Mar 25 09:34:42 EDT 2021
/*March 25, 2021*/
[to protect the FEDERAL RESERVE]
*Fed sets up panels to examine risks that climate change poses to the
financial system*
PUBLISHED TUE, MAR 23 20212
Jeff Cox
KEY POINTS
-- The Fed has moved forward on the climate change issue, announcing
Tuesday two committees set up to deal with impacts.
-- Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard said climate poses “risks to
the stability of the broader financial system.”
-- At a House hearing Tuesday, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said the
central bank is “in the very early days” of dealing with the matter.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/23/fed-to-examine-risks-climate-change-poses-to-financial-system.html
- -
[Sensitive to change]
*A Hotter Planet Has Sweden Predicting a New Monetary Policy Era*
By Niclas Rolander - March 24, 2021,
Global warming may force central banks to keep interest rates low.
Sweden’s Riksbank, the world’s oldest central bank, warned on Wednesday
that rising temperatures mean monetary policy can’t ignore the fallout
of carbon emissions.
“If climate change increases the risk of catastrophe, makes economic
developments more uncertain and worsens growth prospects, it may lead to
a lower long-term real interest rate,” the Riksbank said in its annual
account of monetary policy. “One consequence of this could be that the
policy rate is more often at its lower bound and the monetary policy
room for maneuver is thus limited.”...
More at -
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-24/sweden-says-global-warming-could-alter-future-of-monetary-policy
[does this mean academic bias?]
Published: 24 March 2021
*Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate change*
Dagomar Degroot, Kevin Anchukaitis, Martin Bauch, Jakob Burnham, Fred
Carnegy, Jianxin Cui, Kathryn de Luna, Piotr Guzowski, George Hambrecht,
Heli Huhtamaa, Adam Izdebski, Katrin Kleemann, Emma Moesswilde, Naresh
Neupane, Timothy Newfield, Qing Pei, Elena Xoplaki & Natale Zappia
Nature volume 591
Abstract
A large scholarship currently holds that before the onset of
anthropogenic global warming, natural climatic changes long provoked
subsistence crises and, occasionally, civilizational collapses among
human societies. This scholarship, which we term the ‘history of
climate and society’ (HCS), is pursued by researchers from a wide
range of disciplines, including archaeologists, economists,
geneticists, geographers, historians, linguists and
palaeoclimatologists. We argue that, despite the wide interest in
HCS, the field suffers from numerous biases, and often does not
account for the local effects and spatiotemporal heterogeneity of
past climate changes or the challenges of interpreting historical
sources. Here we propose an interdisciplinary framework for
uncovering climate–society interactions that emphasizes the
mechanics by which climate change has influenced human history, and
the uncertainties inherent in discerning that influence across
different spatiotemporal scales. Although we acknowledge that
climate change has sometimes had destructive effects on past
societies, the application of our framework to numerous case studies
uncovers five pathways by which populations survived—and often
thrived—in the face of climatic pressures.
- -
Fig. 3: A process for undertaking research into past climate–society
dynamics.
From: Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate
change
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03190-2/figures/3
- -
*Better histories for better futures*
Model simulations provide consistent forecasts of the future
temperatures of the Earth under different emissions scenarios; however,
predictions of the societal consequences of future warming are less
certain.... Many researchers pursue HCS partly to gain insight into
these consequences. Studies in HCS unearth ‘fatal synergies’ between
cooling or drying, harvest failures, food shortages, epidemic outbreaks
and violence within or between polities that were vulnerable to
disruption8. Statistical studies, in particular, now inform many of the
most-concerning and influential forecasts of the future effects of
global warming on civilization...
However, the past does not reveal that societies and communities
inevitably succumbed when confronted with climate change and
variability. Our case studies suggest that a combination of continuity
and flexibility characterized many—perhaps most—social responses to
shifting climatic conditions. Previously overlooked examples of
resilience may aid present-day efforts at adaptation in the face of
unprecedented warming, and may provide nuance to popular accounts of the
future that draw uncritically from historical examples of crisis and
collapse. A new wave of research, deploying the framework we have
outlined in this Review, is needed to clarify the lessons from history
for the coming century.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03190-2
]Ooops [
*One of Earth’s giant carbon sinks may have been overestimated - study*
The potential of soils to slow climate change by soaking up carbon may
be less than previously thought
“We found that when rising CO2 increases plant growth, there is a
decrease in soil carbon storage. That’s a very important
conclusion,” said César Terrer, who led the research while at
Stanford University in the US. He said that if soils do absorb less
in future, “the speed of global warming could be higher”.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/24/soils-ability-to-absorb-carbon-emissions-may-be-overestimated-study
[Propaganda wars]
*Exclusive: Big Oil pushed school officials to make "dishonest" claims
on Biden climate policy*
State school chiefs wrote "unusual" and "absurd" letter to Biden,
clearly based on oil industry talking points
By IGOR DERYSH - MARCH 24, 2021
l and gas industry advocates were involved in an "unusual" effort by
five top state education officials to stoke economic fears about
President Joe Biden's climate policy, according to internal emails
reviewed by Salon.
The American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade organization
representing the oil and gas industry, and its allies have gone on the
offensive against Biden's early executive orders, which included a
temporary but indefinite moratorium on new gas and oil leases on federal
land. API has framed the order as a "ban," which is misleading at best,
since it applies only to new leases. New drilling permits are still
being awarded under existing leases, and the industry is sitting on
millions of acres of leased but unused land.
Internal emails show that the API's allies were involved in crafting a
self-described "unusual" letter signed by five Western state school
superintendents to Biden, which was later published as an op-ed. The
letter raised concerns that the moratorium would cost thousands of jobs
and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that could impact
education funding, relying heavily on misleading data from an API report
written before Biden was even elected.
The emails show that the North Dakota Petroleum Council, a former
division of API that has grown into a standalone organization, sent data
to one of the superintendents and later thanked her for the "fantastic"
op-ed. API later promoted the superintendents' talking points on social
media, though it did not mention that it supported the Trump
administration's cuts in oil royalties that had made up a much larger
share of industry revenue distributed to states that helps fund education.
The letter immediately set off alarm bells among industry experts.
"That letter was clearly drafted for them and they were just asked to
sign it," Mark Squillace, a former Interior Department official who is
now a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado
Law School, concluded in an interview with Salon. "I don't know what
they actually know about oil and gas revenues, but the idea that
hundreds of millions of dollars are going to be lost by the states is
just ridiculous. It's absurd."...
- -
The emails were obtained through a public records request by the
progressive government watchdog group Accountable.US and the Climate
Power Education Fund, which on Wednesday launched "Polluters Exposed," a
joint initiative aimed at holding API and its allies "accountable for
decades of spreading misinformation" about climate and pollution.
"Oil and gas executives love to talk about working with the Biden
administration to address climate change, but these documents show
behind closed doors they are actively working to undermine that very
effort," said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US. "Polluters
Exposed will shine a light on Big Oil and show the American people how
industry lines its pockets by spreading misinformation and corrupting
policymakers."
The groups accused the oil industry's top advocates of helping
"orchestrate a scheme to use public schools as a Trojan horse" to attack
the administration's climate policy.
"They have zero shame. API and their allies should stop using our
teachers and schools to halt progress on climate action. Our children
will pay the price for these lies," Lori Lodes, executive director of
Climate Power Education Fund, said in a statement. "The days of the
American Petroleum Institute and its allies lying with impunity are
over. Americans deserve the truth and we are going to give it to them."
An API spokesperson denied any involvement with the letter...
- -
"The superintendents are using the royalty numbers from oil and gas
wells on lands that are already leased and producing and translating
those numbers into job losses," she said in an email. "But the
moratorium on new leases does not order existing production to shut
down; the royalties that states are already receiving to fund schools
and other essential programs are not affected."
The letter falsely described Biden's temporary halt on new leases as
"actions taken to ban oil and gas leases."
"It is imperative that we bring to light the arbitrary and inequitable
move to shut down oil and gas production on federal lands in our states
that depend on revenues from various taxes, royalties, disbursements,
and lease payments to fund our schools, community infrastructure, and
public services," the letter said...
- -
Most of the money schools receive from public lands comes from royalties
on oil and gas production, though states also get revenue from rents,
bonuses and potential penalties, according to the Interior Department.
Bonuses, which are payments associated with winning bids on lease sales,
are the only revenue even theoretically impacted by Biden's pause. Most
revenue comes from royalties, which are calculated as a percentage of
the sales value of any oil produced by the drilling operations. Although
revenue from bonuses increased as the Trump administration awarded a
large number of new leases, royalties make up the vast majority of
revenue collected by states, according to the Congressional Research
Service.
The Trump administration last year drastically cut royalty rates, which
had provided states a total of $2.9 billion in revenue in 2019. In
Superintendent Dickson's state of Utah, the Bureau of Land Management
cut standard royalty rates of 12.5% to as low as 0.5%, according to E&E
News. BLM said the move was temporary, but House Natural Resources
Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., called for an investigation
into to determine how much the change would cost in revenue and whether
the cuts were necessary and properly handled...
- -
Accountable.US and the Climate Power Education Fund argued in a news
release that the oil industry's "feigned worry about school budgets is
hypocritical" given that the industry had enthusiastically supported the
Trump administration's move to slash oil and gas royalty rates, "costing
states and schools untold millions during the height of a pandemic when
they needed it most."...
- -
The Government Accountability Office concluded last October that BLM had
botched the royalty cut, failed to determine whether the policy — which
cost taxpayers around $4.5 million at the time — was actually necessary
and said it may have resulted in cuts for oil wells that did not need it.
Despite data showing the overwhelming share of revenue coming from oil
and gas operations is from royalties, Finnerty, the Wyoming
superintendent's spokesperson, argued that "royalties are only part of
the revenue realized from oil and gas."
"Leases, bonuses, and other forms of indirect revenue are also in play,"
she said. "The overall economic impact of oil and gas activity is very
significant."
Allen said in a statement that "a comparatively small number of
producing wells are subject to this lawful reduction, which, in this
time of the Covid pandemic, will assist in preserving jobs, supporting
families, communities and critical infrastructure, i.e. schools."
Grant Robinson, a spokesperson for Johnson, acknowledged in an email
that "bonuses from lease sales generate less revenue for the state than
royalties" but noted that Trump's policy was a temporary one — as is
Biden's new policy.
Baesler denied that Trump's policy posed a greater threat than Biden's
but acknowledged that most of the state's oil and gas revenues come from
royalties. Still, she said, "the Biden administration's anti-energy
policies pose a much greater threat to education funding than any action
taken by the Trump administration."
Squillace rejected that argument and said it was ironic that education
officials had not raised similar concerns when Trump reduced the royalty
rate.
It was "so absurd," he said, that states would complain about "this
silly little moratorium when they said nothing about the royalty relief
package Trump put into effect. I mean, it just boggles the mind."
https://www.salon.com/2021/03/24/exclusive-big-oil-pushed-school-officials-to-make-dishonest-claims-on-biden-climate-policy/
[Follow the money]
*Big banks’ trillion-dollar finance for fossil fuels ‘shocking’, says
report*
Coal, oil and gas firms have received $3.8tn in finance since the Paris
climate deal in 2015
Damian Carrington Environment editor
Wed 24 Mar 2021
The world’s biggest 60 banks have provided $3.8tn of financing for
fossil fuel companies since the Paris climate deal in 2015, according to
a report by a coalition of NGOs.
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic cutting energy use, overall funding
remains on an upward trend and the finance provided in 2020 was higher
than in 2016 or 2017, a fact the report’s authors and others described
as “shocking”.
Oil, gas and coal will need to be burned for some years to come. But it
has been known since at least 2015 that a significant proportion of
existing reserves must remain in the ground if global heating is to
remain below 2C, the main Paris target. Financing for new reserves is
therefore the “exact opposite” of what is required to tackle the climate
crisis, the report’s authors said.
US and Canadian banks make up 13 of the 60 banks analysed, but account
for almost half of global fossil fuel financing over the last five
years, the report found. JPMorgan Chase provided more finance than any
other bank. UK bank Barclays provided the most fossil fuel financing
among all European banks and French bank BNP Paribas was the biggest in
the EU...
- -
A commitment to be net zero by 2050 has been made by 17 of the 60 banks,
but the report describes the pledges as “dangerously weak, half-baked,
or vague”, arguing that action is needed today. Some banks have policies
that block finance for coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, but almost
two-thirds of funding is for oil and gas companies.
The report’s authors said targeting of banks by campaigners and activist
shareholders could help change bank policies but that action by
governments was also needed.
“When we look at the five years overall, the trend is still going in the
wrong direction, which is obviously the exact opposite of where we need
to be going to live up to the goals of the Paris Agreement,” said Alison
Kirsch, at Rainforest Action Network and an author of the report. “None
of these 60 banks have made, without loopholes, a plan to exit fossil
fuels.”
“We have seen progress in restricting financing for special places like
the Arctic or greenhouse-gas-intensive forms of oil, like tar sands, but
these are such a small piece of the pie,” she said...
“One bank after another is making solemn promises to become ‘net zero by
2050’,” said Johan Frijns, at BankTrack, part of the coalition behind
the report. “But there exists no pathway towards this laudable goal that
does not require dealing with bank finance for the fossil fuel industry
right here and now.”
“Banks provide the financial oxygen that allows the fossil fuel industry
to breathe,” said Mark Campanale, at financial thinktank Carbon Tracker,
which was not involved in the report. “It reveals the shocking fact that
lending has grown since the Paris Agreement, [which] should concern
everyone, not least policymakers and shareholders of the banks themselves.
“The cost of carbon in terms of extreme weather events, lost lives and
livelihoods will be borne by society and sadly not the banks, nor the
fossil fuel companies,” said Campanale. “Next time the banks come
looking to taxpayers for a bailout, they shouldn’t be surprised to find
backs are turned.”
The report was produced by six NGOs and is endorsed by over 300
organisations from 50 countries. It used Bloomberg data to analyse both
direct loans by banks to fossil fuel companies and funding from other
investors that the banks arrange via bond and debt sales...
- -
JPMorgan Chase launched a “Paris-aligned financing strategy” in October,
pledging to set intermediate emission targets for 2030 for its financing
portfolio. It declined to comment on the report. Barclays and Citi did
not respond to requests for comment.
A separate report last Thursday from the International Energy Agency and
Imperial College London found that investments in renewable energy have
seen a 367% greater return than fossil fuels since 2010.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/24/big-banks-trillion-dollar-finance-for-fossil-fuels-shocking-says-report
[clips from a philosophical essay]
MARCH 19, 2021
*Life in a Wounded and Wounding Land*
BY TOM ENGELHARDT
Here’s one of the things I now do every morning. I go to the online
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and check out the figures
there — global coronavirus cases and deaths, U.S. coronavirus cases and
deaths. And I do so the way that, not so long ago, I would have opened
the sports pages and checked out the latest scores of whatever New York
team I was rooting for...
- -
In other words, just to take the American version of climate change,
from raging wildfires to mega-droughts, increasing numbers of
ever-more-powerful hurricanes to greater flooding, rising sea levels
(and disappearing coastlines) to devastating heat waves (and even, as in
Texas recently, climate-influenced freezes), not to speak of future
migration surges guaranteed to make border crossing an even more fraught
political issue, ahead lies a world that could someday make our present
pandemic planet seem like a dreamscape. And here’s the problem: at least
with Covid-19, in a miracle of modern scientific research, vaccines
galore have been developed to deal with that devastating virus, but
sadly there will be no vaccines for climate change.
*The Wounding of Planet Earth*
Keep in mind as well that our country, the United States, is not only an
especially wounded one when it comes to the pandemic; it’s also a
wounding one, both at home and abroad. The sports pages of death could
easily be extended, for instance, to this country’s distant wars,
something Brown University’s Costs of War Project has long tried to do.
(That site is, in a sense, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center
for America’s grim, never-ending conflicts of the twenty-first century.)
Choose whatever post-9/11 figures you care to when it comes to our
forever wars and they’re all staggering: invasions and occupations of
distant lands; global drone assassination campaigns; or the release of
American air power across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa
(most recently, the strike President Biden ordered in Syria that killed
a mere “handful” of militia men — 22, claim some sources — a supposedly
“proportionate” number that did not include any women or children,
though it was a close call until the president cancelled a second
strike). And don’t forget Washington’s endless arming of, and support
for, countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates engaged in
their own orgies of death and destruction in Yemen. Pick whatever
figures you want, but the wounding of this planet in this century by
this country has been all too real and ongoing.
The numbers, in fact, remain staggering. As has been pointed out many
times at TomDispatch, the money this country puts into its “defense”
budget tops that of the next 10 countries (China, India, Russia, Saudi
Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil)
combined. And when it comes to selling weaponry of the most advanced and
destructive kind globally, the U.S. leaves every other country in the
dust. It’s the arms dealer of all arms dealers on Planet Earth.
And if you happen to be in the mood to count up U.S. military bases,
which are on every continent except Antarctica, this country garrisons
the planet in a way no previous power, not even imperial Britain, did.
It has an estimated 800 such bases, while, just for the sake of
comparison, China, that other fearsome rising power the U.S. military is
now so focused on, has… hmmm, at least one such base, in Djibouti,
Africa (remarkably close — you won’t be surprised to learn — to an
American military base there). None of this really has much of anything
to do with “national security,” but it certainly adds up to a global
geography of wounding in a rather literal fashion. In this sense, on
this planet in this century, the United States has truly — to use a word
American politicians have long loved to apply to this country — proven
“exceptional.”
*America Unmasked*
At home, too, until recently, American political leadership has been
wounding indeed. Keep in mind that this was in a country in which one
political party is now a vortex of conspiracy theories, bizarre beliefs,
wild convictions, and truths that are obvious lies, a party nearly a
third of whose members view the QAnon conspiracy theory favorably, 75%
of whose members believe that Joe Biden lost the 2020 election, and 49%
of whose male members have no intention of being vaccinated for Covid-19
(potentially denying the country “herd immunity”).
And just to put all this in perspective, not a single Republican
“statesman” offered a vote of support when Joe Biden’s congressional
radicals passed a (temporary) $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill, parts
of which were aimed at alleviating this country’s historic levels of
inequality. After all, in the pandemic moment, while so many Americans
found themselves jobless, homeless, and hungry, the country’s
billionaires made an extra 1.3 trillion dollars (a figure that should
certainly fit somewhere on the sports pages of death). Never, not even
in the Gilded Age, has inequality been quite so extreme or wounding in
the country that still passes for the greatest on the planet.
For the first time in its history, in 2017, a self-proclaimed
billionaire became president of the United States and, with the help of
a Republican Congress, passed a tax cut that left the rich and
corporations flooded with yet more money. Admittedly, he was a
billionaire who had repeatedly bankrupted his own businesses, always
jumping ship just in time with other people’s money in hand (exactly as
he would do after helping to pandemicize this country, once again with
oodles of his followers’ money in his pocket).
As for me, shocking as the assault on the Capitol was on January 6th, I
never thought that the Senate should have convicted Donald Trump for
that alone. My feeling was that the House should have impeached him and
the Senate convicted him for the far more serious and direct crime of
murder. After all, he was the one who played a crucial role in turning
the pandemic into our very own set of mask wars (even as he called on
his followers, long before January 6th, to “liberate” a state capital
building).
The half-baked, dismissive way he would deal with the coronavirus, its
importance, and what should be done to protect us from it — even before
he got a serious case of it, was hospitalized, and returned to the White
House, still infectious, to tear off his mask in full public view —
would functionally represent acts of murder. In effect, he unmasked
himself as the killer he was. (A study in the International Journal of
Health Services suggests that by July 2020 his personal decision to turn
masks into a political issue had already resulted in between 4,000 and
12,000 deaths.)...
- -
If you want to be further depressed, try this: on our planet, there are
now two great greenhouse gas emitters, the United States (historically
at the top of the charts) and China (number one at this moment). Given
what lies ahead, here’s a simple enough formula: if China and the United
States can’t cooperate in a truly meaningful way when it comes to
climate change, we’re in trouble deep. And yet the Biden administration,
like the Trump administration before it, remains remarkably focused on
hostility to China and a military response to that country, an approach
that someday is guaranteed to seem so out of touch as to be unbelievable.
Climate change will, over the coming decades, prove increasingly
devastating to our lives. It could, in a sense, prove to be the pandemic
of all the ages. And yet, here’s the sad and obvious thing: the world
doesn’t have to be this way. It’s true that there are no vaccinations
against climate change, but we humans already know perfectly well what
has to be done. We know that we need to create a genuinely green and
green-powered planet to bring this version of a pandemic under control
and we know as well that, over the next decades, it’s a perfectly doable
task if only humanity truly sets its mind to it.
Otherwise, we’re going to find ourselves on an increasingly extreme
planet, while the sports pages of death will only grow. If we’re not
careful, human history could, in the end, turn out to be the ultimate
ghost story.
This column was distributed by TomDispatch.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold
War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute
and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/19/life-in-a-wounded-and-wounding-land/
[background briefing video - there is no upside to fossil fuels -
discusses lithium]
*Life Cycle Assessment. Optimising raw materials for renewables*
Mar 21, 2021
Just Have a Think
Life Cycle Assessment is becoming a vital component in the design and
planning stages of any new raw material acquisition project. Switching
to renewables is an important step towards a more sustainable future but
those technologies all still require vast resources to be dug out of our
earth. Optimising the efficiency of those mining and processing
operations can hugely reduce their impact.
Video Transcripts available at our website http://www.justhaveathink.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T7R1lIBMfA
[Trying to live green, Update: GE Appliances published a list of all
HFC-free refrigerators that it manufactures on March 12, the day after
this article was published. ]
*I Tried to Buy a Climate-Friendly Refrigerator. What I Got Was a Carbon
Bomb.*
Most refrigerators in the U.S. are still cooled by climate
“super-pollutants” called hydrofluorocarbons. I’d been promised my new
fridge wouldn’t be...
By Phil McKenna
March 11, 2021
As a climate reporter covering “super-pollutants”—greenhouse gases
thousands of times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide—I thought I
knew enough to avoid buying a refrigerator that would cook the planet.
Turns out, I was wrong.
Nearly all refrigerators in use in the United States today use chemical
refrigerants that are some of the most potent greenhouse gases on the
planet. Yet, a growing number of manufacturers now offer new models with
an alternative refrigerant that has little to no climate impact.
But none of the major appliance makers advertise which fridges are
climate-friendly, and which are carbon bombs. In some cases, it seems
they themselves don’t know which is which.
I found this out the hard way when I recently tried to replace my aging
refrigerator. I went first to Future Proof, a website offering product
reviews of consumer goods with a focus on sustainability. I quickly
found a page on the site touting “The Most Climate-Friendly
Refrigerators for 2020″ and read descriptions of several different
fridges, all of which were said to use isobutane, a benign refrigerant
with a climate impact similar to that of carbon dioxide...
- -
*They Sold Me One Thing and Delivered Another*
Within minutes I was on the phone with GE customer service. The
unfortunate person on the other end said she was surprised to hear that
the fridge I purchased used HFCs.
I told her that I would like GE to pay to have the fridge returned to
the big box store that it came from. She said she couldn’t do that, but
could have a service technician come and “look” at the appliance.
I told her I didn’t need a technician; the issue was plain as day. GE
had sold me one thing and delivered another. What I needed, I told the
representative, was some corporate responsibility.
I let my consumer rage cool over the weekend before putting my reporter
hat back on. The following week I spoke with Julie Wood, a spokeswoman
for GE Appliances. Wood apologized profusely and explained how it came
to be that the company’s customer service department provided the wrong
information....
- -
*Unfounded Fears, Stoked by the Chemical Industry, Led to Decades Long
Delay*
It didn’t have to be this way. In 1993, a German appliance manufacturer
started selling an HFC-free refrigerator whose very
name—“Greenfreeze”—touted its use of a climate-friendly refrigerant.
More than 1 billion HFC-free refrigerators have now been sold worldwide,
including units sold overseas by U.S. manufacturers, at a time when
climate-friendly refrigerators are just becoming available in the United
States.
A recent Inside Climate News investigation found the decades-long delay
in the use of climate-friendly refrigerants in America has been driven
largely by the U.S. chemical industry, which manufactures HFCs. HFCs are
multi-billion dollar products that would likely be replaced by less
expensive and more efficient climate-friendly alternatives if standards
put forth by Underwriters Laboratories didn’t until recently limit their
use, likely at the behest of chemical companies. Underwriters
Laboratories, now known as “UL,” is a private company that provides
independent safety certifications for thousands of consumer products...
- -
When I described the problem with the first fridge to the Home Depot
representative, I was fairly certain her eyes glazed over the moment I
began to speak. Then she put me on hold while she rang GE, asking if
they would cover the cost of the return.
When she resumed our call, much to my surprise, she said it was no
problem, GE would pay for the return. I asked her if she had told them
everything, how I was sold an HFC-free fridge and instead got one with HFCs.
“No,” she said. “I [simply] told them it was not cooling properly; it
was not cooling the way that it should.”
To me, that was the best, most truthful explanation anyone could give...
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032021/climate-change-refrigerator-hfc-super-pollutant/
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - March 25, 2005 *
In a Boston Globe column later republished in the New York Times,
Derrick Z. Jackson notes, "Every time the world calls for action on
climate change, the United States emits more White House gases."
DERRICK Z. JACKSON
Hot air and global warming
By Derrick Z. Jackson | March 25, 2005
EVERY TIME the world calls for action on climate change, the
United States emits more White House gases. The latest puff came
from James Connaughton, the director of environmental quality,
during last week's conference of 20 nations that met in London
to attempt once again to make global warming a global priority.
At the conference, British economic minister Gordon Brown said,
''Climate change is a consequence of the build-up of greenhouse
gases over the past 200 years in the atmosphere and virtually
all these emissions came from the rich countries. Indeed, we
became rich through those emissions." Connaughton's response, in
an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, was,
''We're still working on the issue of causation."
Brown said, ''We now have sufficient evidence that human-made
climate change is the most far-reaching and almost certainly the
most threatening of all the environmental challenges facing us."
Connaughton's response as to what he referred as ''the extent to
which humans are a factor," was, ''They may be."
Brown said, ''The industrialized countries must take
responsibility first in reducing their emissions of greenhouse
gases." Connaughton complained instead that the target in the
Kyoto treaty for the United States to reduce emissions ''was so
unreasonable in our ability to meet it that the only we could
have met it was to shift energy-intensive manufacturing to other
countries."
Two days after dismissing coalition building, the United States
went back to emissions building. The Senate, by a vote of 51-49,
finally approved oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge. On efforts to stop global warming, Connaughton
said, ''We are trying now to find a portfolio in which three
words are important: technology, technology, and technology."
He meant drilling, drilling, drilling. Two years ago the
National Academies of Science said that even with improved
technologies, drilling on the north slope of Alaska has degraded
the tundra, altered wildlife patterns, and has resulted in
social problems that blunt claims of unqualified economic
progress. Many scientists have said that the oil in the refuge
is so relatively minuscule that we would be better off if we
simply made our cars more fuel efficient.
Although Connaughton claimed we are ''trying to find"
technology, we refuse to use it. The National Academies has for
years said the technology exists for more fuel efficient cars.
But Congress and the White House, imprisoned by the oil and auto
lobby, refuse to raise them.
The vote to drill in Alaska was parallel to another Senate vote
to deny an additional $1 billion for Amtrak when studies show
that well-developed rail systems can slash traffic and thus
global-warming pollution. The United States consumes a quarter
of the world's oil and produces a quarter of the planet's
greenhouse gases despite being 4 percent of the population. Yet
when Brown said that the industrialized countries must take
responsibility first, we become the most immature adolescent on
Earth, doing precisely the opposite of what we need to do.
Earlier in the month, the former chief scientific adviser to the
British government, Lord May of Oxford, bluntly compared Bush to
a modern-day Nero. Last fall, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
said, ''If what the science tells about climate change is
correct, then unabated it will result in catastrophic
consequences for our world. The science almost certainly is
correct."
At the recent London conference, Brown said, ''Environmental
issues including climate change have traditionally been placed
in a category separate from the economy and from economic
policy. But this is no longer tenable. Across a range of
environmental issues, from soil erosion to the depletion of
marine stocks, from water scarcity to air pollution, it is clear
now not just that economic activity is their cause, but that
these problems in themselves threaten future economic activity
and growth."
Nero and his fiddlers would hear none of that. Asked last month
what the science was on global warming, Connaughton said on
CNBC, ''There are many different views."
The science ceased to have many views years ago. The very first
sentence in the executive summary of the 2001 National Academies
of Science report on climate change begins with, ''Greenhouse
gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of
human activities . . . " The report further said, ''Global
warming could well have serious adverse societal and ecological
impacts by the end of this century." The science continues to
choke under the White House effect.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson at globe.com.
http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/03/25/hot_air_and_global_warming/
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