[✔️] November 1 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*November 1, 2021*/

/[ Heard on NPR ]/
*Should I have kids? Move? Recycle? Your climate questions answered*
IT'S BEEN A MINUTE WITH SAM SANDERS
October 29, 2021 - 24-Minute Listen or Download
Ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Glasgow this weekend, Sam chats with 
climate experts Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist and writer, 
and Kendra Pierre-Louis, senior climate reporter with the podcast 'How 
to Save a Planet.' Together, they answer listener questions about 
everything from how to talk to your kids about global warming... to how 
to deal with all of this existential dread.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/25/1049110553/should-i-have-kids-move-recycle-your-climate-questions-answered



/[ Track money in every decision to consider the impact on climate  ] /
*Mark Carney: the world of finance will be judged on the $100tn climate 
challenge | Financial Times*
The writer is the UN’s special envoy on climate action and finance and 
was the governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. Finance is a 
service, a means to an end...
https://www.ft.com/content/d9e4ebb9-f212-406a-90d5-73b4276539e6

- -

/[ United Nations ]/
*Biggest financial players back net zero*
Over 160 firms with $70 trillion in assets have joined forces behind a 
common goal: steer the global economy towards net-zero emissions and 
deliver the Paris Agreement goals.

The new Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), chaired by Mark 
Carney, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, brings together 
leading net-zero initiatives from across the financial system to 
accelerate the transition to net-zero emissions by 2050 at the latest.

Members include major asset owners and managers as well as banks with 
the power to mobilize trillions of dollars behind the transition to net 
zero. By working together, alliance members can catalyse strategic and 
technical coordination on steps firms need to take to align with a 
net-zero future.

All members will set science-aligned interim and long-term goals to 
reach net zero no later than 2050 in line with the criteria of the UN 
Race to Zero campaign. Member-determined short-term targets and action 
plans will supplement these goals...
- -
U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said: “The 
largest financial players in the world recognize energy transition 
represents a vast commercial opportunity as well as a planetary 
imperative. As countries around the world move to decarbonize, the large 
sums these institutions are dedicating to climate finance also reflect a 
growing understanding of how critical a low-carbon global economy is to 
their business models. Ultimately, their commitment of capital and 
assets, as well as adherence to high standards and reporting, will 
accelerate the transition to this new economy, create a massive number 
of new jobs, and increase our collective ability to tackle the climate 
crisis...
- -
Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance and Prime 
Minister Johnson’s Climate Finance Advisor for COP26, said: “This is the 
breakthrough in mainstreaming climate finance the world needs. I welcome 
the leadership of the Financial Services Task Force and other global 
banks for their new commitments to net zero and for joining forces with 
GFANZ, the gold standard for net zero commitments in the financial 
sector. Most fundamentally, GFANZ will act as the strategic forum to 
ensure the financial system works together to broaden, deepen, and 
accelerate the transition to a net zero economy.”
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/biggest-financial-players-back-net-zero

- -

/[ Green Biz -- defining net zero is problematic ]/
*The net-zero backlash has arrived*
The problem? "Net zero," for all of its compelling simplicity, turns out 
to be anything but. Indeed, it is fraught with problems, and companies — 
the leaders and the wannabes alike — are finding themselves encountering 
a crescendo of criticism...
- -
Given the lack of policy or standardized guidance driving net-zero 
commitments, not to mention the loopholes through which many companies 
seem to be leaping, there’s pretty much a net-zero chance that they 
will, collectively, meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement — at 
least, not without some significant changes...
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/net-zero-backlash-has-arrived

- -

/[ how to skirt the issue. ]/
*The Big Con: How Big Polluters are advancing a “net zero” climate 
agenda to delay, deceive, and deny*
As the impacts of the climate crisis become ever more apparent, people 
around the world, led by Indigenous Peoples, women, youth, and frontline 
communities, are demanding action. In response, Big Polluters and the 
governments that do their bidding have begun to tout commitments to 
achieve “net zero” emissions as solutions to the crisis they have caused.

    This report makes clear that Big Polluters’ idea of “net zero” is
    part of their continued plan to protect deeply unjust global
    systems, distract from taking the real action needed, and to evade
    responsibility for the climate crisis and to continue to pollute.
    The idea behind big polluters' use of "net zero" is that an entity
    can continue to pollute as usual — or even increase its emissions —
    and seek to compensate for those emissions in a number of ways.
    Emissions are nothing more than a math equation in these plans; they
    can be added [to] one place and subtracted from another place.

    This equation is simple in theory but deeply flawed in reality.
    These schemes are being used to mask inaction, foist the burden of
    emissions cuts and pollution avoidance on historically exploited
    communities, and bet our collective future through ensuring
    long-term, destructive impact on land and forests, oceans and
    through advancing geoengineering technologies. These technologies
    are hugely risky, do not exist at the scale supposedly needed and
    are likely to cause enormous, and likely irreversible, damage.

https://www.corporateaccountability.org/resources/the-big-con-net-zero/

- -

/[ press release from April ]/
EXTERNAL PRESS RELEASE / 21 APR, 2021
*New Financial Alliance for Net Zero Emissions Launches*
https://unfccc.int/news/new-financial-alliance-for-net-zero-emissions-launches



/[ Silence is worse than denial  - empty words are useless ] /
*Fox Weather Doesn’t Deny Climate Change. It Just Ignores It.*
Eleanor Cummins - October 27, 2021
On its debut day, the new streaming service treated climate as a 
separate issue, instead of acknowledging the way global warming drives 
the severe weather it covers.
On Sunday night, two meteorological phenomena known as a bomb cyclone 
and an atmospheric river joined forces to rattle the West Coast, 
knocking out power to hundreds of thousands in Washington State, 
inundating California with record rainfall, and setting up Fox Weather, 
the Murdoch family’s newest platform, for an energetic debut. At 6 a.m. 
Eastern on Monday, the countdown clock on the free, ad-supported app 
gave way to a livestream of the caffeinated meteorologists inside 
America’s Weather Station. Within minutes, morning hosts Jason Frazer 
and Britta Merwin were spinning viewers around in circles, transporting 
them from construction on Sacramento’s aging levee to hurricane recovery 
in the Gulf, all in the turn of a camera.

Journalists, media critics, and spectators have fretted over the launch 
of Fox Weather for months—and with good reason, given its parent network 
has been a major source of misinformation about anthropogenic climate 
change for more than a decade. Of 247 Fox News segments touching on the 
topic in 2019, for example, 212 were “dismissive,” cast doubt, “or 
employed fear mongering when discussing climate solutions,” according to 
an analysis by the consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen. “The 
danger of [Fox] running a weather channel,” Geoffrey Supran, a research 
fellow in the history of science at Harvard University, told The 
Guardian in July, “is that if they pervert news about the weather 
anything like how they’ve perverted news about climate change and energy 
politics, millions of Americans will be further misled about this 
crisis.”...
- -
But if the launch of the 24/7 broadcast is any indication of the 
service’s overall approach, Fox Weather seems likely to treat climate 
change as a real but standalone story, not the engine driving every 
wildfire and bomb cyclone. In emphasizing the symptoms of global warming 
but ignoring the underlying disease, it ensures viewers consume a dozen 
weather updates without realizing that climate change is, in fact, 
already infecting every aspect of our lives. In the first six hours of 
the show, I saw storm-front reports, turbulence reports, school-day 
forecasts, a power outage tracker, expert advice on filing for 
homeowner’s insurance, viewer-created videos under the #FoxWeather 
hashtag, and plenty of Monday night sports banter—all slickly produced 
and often genuinely informative. What I didn’t hear was mention of the 
scientific consensus that climate change is well underway...
- -
As climate reporter Geoff Dembicki told NPR last week, what may seem 
like a contradiction between Fox News’s climate denial and Fox Weather’s 
core purpose actually makes perfect business sense: The “simple, 
coherent strategy behind all of this,” he said, is that Fox “seems to do 
whatever will make it the most money in a given situation.” Climate 
denial works for the news channel. Going carbon neutral, which the 
Murdochs did back in 2011, well before any of their industry peers, 
works for the parent company, which has saved tens of millions of 
dollars. And Fox Weather presents an opportunity to play it straight 
while profiting off climate change, which drives extreme weather, which 
drives ratings—a brilliant, and dystopian, strategy.

If the Fox Weather team accepts the reality of climate change but 
focuses on a decontextualized vision of “weather” whenever possible, 
well, it will have plenty of company. In the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, 
for example, Media Matters, a watchdog group, found that ABC, CBS, CNN, 
Fox, NBC, and MSNBC ran 774 stories about the storm between August 27 
and 30, but only 34 stories—or 4 percent of the total coverage—ever 
mentioned climate change. While newscasters of a different persuasion 
may balk at the comparison, they, like Fox, are participating in a 
coverage strategy that allows viewers to draw the erroneous conclusion 
that climate change is still temporally and geographically distant. If 
their basement floods, or a tree topples onto their new car, the 
implicit logic goes, it’s not the fault of a few greedy companies whose 
fossil fuel products and misinformation campaigns have made these events 
vastly more likely—it’s just the awesome, uncontrollable power of Mother 
Nature.

Janice Dean, the meteorologist and Fox & Friends co-host, 
unintentionally articulated this common belief undergirding this 
approach when she visited the Fox Weather set to celebrate the streaming 
debut on Monday. “I have friends at the other channels,” she said. “It’s 
something about the weather that, you know, there’s no politics 
involved—we all love each other.”
- -
But for TV news consumers, climate change takes up just a cumulative 112 
minutes a year, according to a 2020 Media Matters analysis of nightly 
news and Sunday morning political programming on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. 
While Fox Weather may yet prove its commitment to climate coverage, 
everything from the Sunrise Movement’s momentous hunger strike currently 
underway outside the White House down to the most basic linkage between 
the West Coast bomb cyclone and the anthropogenic climate change fueling 
it was available for coverage on launch day. These stories are the real 
eye of the storm.
Eleanor Cummins @elliepses
https://newrepublic.com/article/164166/fox-weather-doesnt-deny-climate-change-just-ignore-it



/[video classic - //23 min //documentary - /
*The End of Oil, Explained | FULL EPISODE | Vox + Netflix*
Sep 30, 2021
Vox
Oil led to huge advancements — and vast inequities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pafA-RU3q7U



/[ SCOTUS wants to rule on 62% of all the smoke ]/
*Supreme Court to consider limiting EPA authority on greenhouse gas 
emissions*
Shawna Chen - Oct 29, 2021

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to weigh in on the Environmental 
Protection Agency's (EPA) authority when it comes to regulating 
greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Why it matters: It's the most significant climate case to reach the 
Supreme Court since 2007 and could impact the Biden administration's 
clean power plans, according to E&E News.

Details: Coal companies and GOP-led states had asked the Supreme Court 
to review the case, arguing that a federal appeals court gave the EPA 
"unbridled power" to issue standards that would be "impossible for coal 
and natural gas power plants to meet."

President Biden's EPA is currently crafting new clean air regulations.
Our thought bubble, via Axios' Andrew Freedman: The case puts even more 
pressure on reconciliation to address climate change legislatively in 
case executive authority is trimmed back further.

The big picture: The electricity sector generates the second-largest 
share of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., per the EPA.

Roughly 62% of U.S. electricity is sourced from burning fossil fuels, 
mostly coal and natural gas.
https://wwwaxios.com/supreme-court-epa-greenhouse-gas-b2949429-a13b-4bfd-8815-288233603626.html


/[  Liar, liar, pants on fire ]
/*Shell and Exxon's secret 1980s climate change warnings*
Newly found documents from the 1980s show that fossil fuel companies 
privately predicted the global damage that would be caused by their 
products.
- -
The documents make for frightening reading. And the effect is all the 
more chilling in view of the oil giants’ refusal to warn the public 
about the damage that their own researchers predicted. Shell’s report, 
marked “confidential,” was first disclosed by a Dutch news organization 
earlier this year. Exxon’s study was not intended for external 
distribution, either; it was leaked in 2015.

Nor did the companies ever take responsibility for their products. In 
Shell’s study, the firm argued that the “main burden” of addressing 
climate change rests not with the energy industry, but with governments 
and consumers. That argument might have made sense if oil executives, 
including those from Exxon and Shell, had not later lied about climate 
change and actively prevented governments from enacting clean-energy 
policies...
- -
As the world warms, the building blocks of our planet – its ice sheets, 
forests, and atmospheric and ocean currents – are being altered beyond 
repair. Who has the right to foresee such damage and then choose to 
fulfill the prophecy? Although war planners and fossil-fuel companies 
had the arrogance to decide what level of devastation was appropriate 
for humanity, only Big Oil had the temerity to follow through. That, of 
course, is one time too many.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/19/shell-and-exxons-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings

/
/

/[ Sometimes a great positive notion ]/
*The Climate Fight Will Seem Impossible—Until Its Sudden Victory*
Only persistence can bring sweeping change. But that sweeping change 
sometimes comes sooner than you expect.
Liza Featherstone/October 29, 2021
A coal baron from West Virginia is blocking world-saving climate 
legislation that most congressional Democrats support. President Biden 
will head to the United Nations 2021 Climate Change Conference, or 
COP26, in Glasgow without a passed and signed climate deal to boast 
about. The United States is closer than it’s ever been to enacting 
serious climate change policy—the latest draft of the spending bill 
includes $555 billion for climate priorities. But the Clean Energy 
Payment Program, which was the most direct emissions-reducing policy, 
has been removed. And given that studies suggest $1 trillion will be 
needed annually to meet Paris Agreement targets, near-progress feels 
more like impending tragedy.

It’s an urgent moment for the climate movement. Some activists have been 
on hunger strike for more than a week in Washington, D.C., to demand the 
White House and Congress work together to pass climate provisions in the 
budget reconciliation plan. Others blocked traffic in Manhattan this 
week. Even the sober policy nerds at Vox recently interviewed an 
activist who wrote a book called How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Their 
headline? “The Case for a More Radical Climate Movement.”

Are these the right tactics? What is to be done? Anything that might 
help seems justified: Scientists don’t think we have much time to avoid 
the worst-case scenarios of mass death and irrevocable planetary damage. 
Yet even as we stare into a worrisome future, there’s much to learn from 
social movements of the recent past.

History’s first lesson? Don’t give up. As Angela Davis has pointed out, 
imagine being an abolitionist in 1850, the year of the Fugitive Slave 
Act, which mobilized the entire federal and state apparatus to capture 
enslaved people attempting to escape. Anti-slavery activists faced this 
staggering political defeat that year, yet most of them would then live 
to see the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery in 
the United States, in 1865. Similarly, said Jeanne Theoharis, a Brooklyn 
College professor and author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, 
in the 1950s, when Rosa Parks was actively organizing, there was “no 
sign that she was going to see change in her lifetime.” In 1955, just 
months before Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery 
bus, the men responsible for the death of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a 
child brutally murdered for supposedly flirting with a white woman, were 
acquitted. Parks and others worked for years to challenge the unjust 
conviction of Jeremiah Reeves, a Black teenager sentenced to death for 
the alleged rape of a white woman (he said the relationship was 
consensual), but Reeves was executed in 1957. Years later, Parks said of 
that time, “Sometimes it was very difficult to keep going when all of 
our work seemed to be in vain.” She could not have anticipated that her 
own organizing would, within the decade, help end Jim Crow and pass the 
Voting Rights and Fair Housing Acts. “This moment looks bleak,” said 
Theoharis, “but we could be on the cusp of change.”

Some will worry about the political optics of tactics like blocking 
traffic or blowing up pipelines, but such specifics may be beside the 
point. Theoharis, also the author of A More Beautiful and Terrible 
History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, notes that some 
myths about the civil rights movement muddle our understanding of that 
time, in turn warping our analysis of contemporary activism. One of 
these myths, she says, is “the idea that there’s a right way” to 
protest. In recent years, centrists and conservatives have often held up 
the nonviolence of Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. as the “correct” 
persuasive strategy, in contrast to #BlackLivesMatter protesters, who 
have sometimes been criticized for confrontations with the police. Yet 
that elides the more complex history of the civil rights movement. A 
related myth, Theoharis told me, is that “if you shine a light on 
injustice in the United States it will be remedied, and that’s just not 
true.” These narratives, Theoharis explained, “distort how change 
happens and why it happens.”

The grade-school understanding of history mistakenly elevates discrete 
tactics and flash points. The history of a successful movement is 
messier—and perhaps more boring and repetitive—than common narrative 
suggests. “We don’t tell it as a story of perseverance,” said Theoharis, 
and we should. Parks didn’t succeed because of her quiet dignity in 
refusing to get off the bus that one day in 1955 but because Claudette 
Colwin and many other Black Montgomery activists had protested before 
her, and because Parks herself had been organizing for years.

Change comes because people keep trying. The idea that a sign of 
insanity is doing the same thing over and over, Theoharis laughed, is a 
“stupid cliché.” In fact, the history of organizing shows that what 
works is “having the fortitude to keep doing it.” It wasn’t that Rosa 
Parks just happened to engage in the right protest on that one day. 
“Parks’s genius,” Theoharis emphasized, was “her ability to act, and act 
again.”

The history of South Africa’s fight against apartheid in the 1980s is 
also relevant to our moment. What brought down that system, said Sean 
Jacobs, a scholar of South African politics who teaches at the New 
School, was coalition-building and solidarity. The South African 
anti-apartheid movement drew on the language, tradition, and lessons of 
that country’s radical history. In this period, Jacobs, who grew up in 
South Africa and came of age in the 1980s, told me, unionism evolved 
beyond the narrow concerns of the shop floor into a labor movement that 
could make connections between apartheid and the conditions of workers. 
These activists didn’t always focus on big ideas like “white supremacy”; 
rather, they linked ending apartheid to what Jacobs calls “regular 
things for regular people,” like housing and clean water.

While the ruling white elites had effectively used race and racism to 
divide people in the 1970s, anti-apartheid campaigners and unionists in 
the 1980s drew on a radical left-wing language of class struggle, for 
example, going back to the South African Congress Alliance’s Freedom 
Charter of 1955, which not only demanded equal rights for Black South 
Africans but also went bigger, envisioning a far more democratic and 
egalitarian society, one in which “South Africa belongs to all who live 
in it, black and white,” “The People Shall Govern,” “The People Shall 
Share in the Country’s Wealth!” and “The Land Shall Be Shared By Those 
Who Work It!”—to quote a few principles from that document.

“They focused on the things that bound people together,” Jacobs, 
founding editor of politics and culture website Africa Is a Country, 
observed. Some moderate Democrats and Republicans bristle when climate 
measures are tied to so many big-ticket social provisions, as they are 
in the current budget reconciliation package in Congress, or in the 
Green New Deal, but this recent South African history shows how powerful 
it is to frame demands for transformation in a context of a broader 
vision of shared prosperity and well-being.

Speaking with these scholars, I realized that the successful activists 
of the past had something in common: They studied—and learned 
from—history. Climate change, both in its possible solutions and in its 
dystopian worst-case scenarios, still feels futuristic, so it’s almost 
counterintuitive for the climate movement to look backward. But the past 
can help us move forward.

Liza Featherstone @lfeatherz
https://newrepublic.com/article/164215/climate-fight-will-seem-impossibleuntil-sudden-victory



/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming November 1, 2012*
November 1, 2012:
At a campaign rally in Virginia, Republican presidential contender Mitt 
Romney is interrupted by a protester who faults him for not addressing 
climate change. The right-wing audience boos the protester.
http://youtu.be/SGxSnaC1qcU


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