[✔️] November 28, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*November 28, 2021*/

/[  Opinion in NYTimes ] /
*Bankers Took Over the Climate Change Summit. That’s Bad For Democracy.*
Nov. 25, 2021..
- - [essay concludes]
“We can’t get to net zero by flipping a green switch,” Mr. Carney 
announced late last month. “We need to rewire our entire economies.” 
That is a euphemistic way of describing the sought-after “energy 
transition,” which would inevitably mean enormous expense, widespread 
disruption and a reassignment of many property claims. The question is 
whether financiers — as opposed to, say, scientists or voters — ought to 
be trusted to do the rewiring. The alliance seems to want to resolve 
that question before the wider public even realizes that it has been asked.
- -
A banker, too, is someone to whom you have yielded a part of your 
dreaming self. You have handed him control of your savings. And fighting 
climate change requires predicting the future — or at least making 
reasonable assumptions about it. That is just what you trust your 
investment adviser to do, at least with that narrow part of your future 
that is measured by the Dow Jones industrial average. What is more, if 
rewiring the world is really our goal, then it will take resources of 
the sort that only the financial system controls. “There’s no budget of 
any country that can do what we need to do,” said John Kerry, the Biden 
administration’s climate envoy, at an early meeting of Glasgow Financial 
Alliance in April.

But that is the problem. Governments lack the money to do these things 
because they lack the legitimacy. The money that Mr. Kerry proposes 
using for a climate-rescue program has not been levied in taxes for that 
purpose. It is people’s personal property, their private investments, 
their life savings. People might be willing to surrender it for the 
noble purpose of saving the planet, but in a democracy the government 
must first ask their permission. Until they assent, it is not the 
government’s money...
- -
In most cases, it is not the banks’ money either. Mr. Carney, for one, 
seems to have lost sight of that. “We have all the money needed,” he 
said at the summit. No. Bankers “have” the money in the sense of holding 
it, but not in the sense of being free to do what they will with it. A 
banker merely stands at one of the choke points through which other 
people’s money passes. In most cases he is permitted to stand there only 
so long as he is selfless. He is a “fiduciary.” He is bound by law and 
custom to protect only the interest of the people whose money he is 
holding. He cannot wield that money in his own interest — whether 
financial or ideological.

Bankers have always chafed at these traditions. Certain investment 
consultants in the alliance forthrightly declare that shilly-shallying 
while the world overheats is itself a violation of fiduciary 
responsibilities. The Biden administration shares this view. Earlier 
this fall, the Labor Department drafted a rules change in the Employee 
Retirement Income Security Act that would require fiduciaries to 
consider “environmental, social and governance” factors as well as the 
interest of the depositor.
- -
Banks have a hard time ignoring traditional fiduciary rules as long as 
they have competitors who obey them — because, in theory at least, 
depositors will flock to other banks that are focused more 
single-mindedly on returns. A project such as the Glasgow Financial 
Alliance therefore comes with the expectation of government protection, 
protection from competition. At the April meeting of the alliance, the 
Morgan Stanley managing director Thomas Nides said, “This is a time for 
financial institutions not to compete but to work together.” Deciding 
whether this is a good idea depends on whether you believe financial 
institutions, acting in concert, are more likely to promote 
decarbonization or protect their own prerogatives.

At Glasgow a few self-nominated representatives from a very rich 
industry laid claim to a special role in shaping the human future. In 
doing so, they opened a rift. Climate activists were skeptical, noting 
that many alliance members continue to be involved in financing oil 
extraction. The bankers of the alliance, on the other hand, seem to 
believe society is ready to follow their lead. Voters, not bankers, 
should be the judge of that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/25/opinion/cop26-gfanz-climate-change.html



/[  Facing the future, we should look to the past ] /
*What Can Ancient Cities Teach Us About Surviving Climate Change?*
BY MICHAEL E. SMITH -- NOV 26, 2021...
- -
Aztec Tenochtitlan began as a damp town in the middle of a swamp, but it 
managed to thrive across conquests, epidemics, droughts and floods to 
become one of the largest cities in the world today—Mexico City. When 
taking students to see the Aztec ruins next to the Zocalo, I used to 
wonder how places like Tenochtitlan, Beijing, or Rome (the “eternal 
city”) managed to thrive for centuries, while other cities failed.

In my archaeological fieldwork, I have encountered far more failed urban 
sites than cities that survived for centuries. It is now time to examine 
these early cities to learn how some of them adapted successfully to 
stresses and shocks, while others did not. Perhaps this knowledge can 
inform current work on urban adaptations to climate change. Researchers 
have identified a “knowledge gap” between what we need to know about 
planning cities for the future and we do know. The cities of the past 
can help fill that gap...
- -
Groups of historians are starting to move beyond this infatuation with 
collapse to instead draw connections between past and present with 
titles such as “Lessons From the Past, Policies for the Future: 
Resilience and Sustainability in Past Crises.” These studies typically 
describe several case studies of short-term processes (for instance, the 
Black death or Roman conquest) and claim they provide lessons for us 
today. The cases are anecdotes; they are not formally compared, nor are 
they analyzed quantitatively. Yet economists have found that when they 
look at cities over a longer historical perspective, they are remarkably 
resilient to plagues, wars, and other short-term catastrophes. After an 
initial setback, cities almost always come back, economically, 
demographically, and culturally.. But, what happens if we look at 
changes over a really long interval, one lasting centuries or even 
millennia, what the great historian Fernand Braudel called the longue durée?

The principle strengths of archaeology are a record of change over 
centuries, even millennia, and a large enough sample of sites and 
regions to create a quantitative and rigorous science of past 
adaptations to shocks and change. Archaeologists now routinely apply 
quantitative, scientific methods to topics such as wealth inequality, 
city size, and trade patterns. It is time to extend these methods to 
urban adaptations to stresses and shocks, including both climatic 
changes and other natural and social forces.

I am part of a research group at Arizona State University that has begun 
to use archaeological data to address urban survival and adaptation over 
long periods. (Disclosure: ASU is a partner with Slate and New America 
in Future Tense.) In contrast to aspirational sustainability, we take a 
rather stark view of ancient urban sustainability: If a city or 
settlement managed to survive for many centuries, then it was 
sustainable. I recently returned to the results of an archaeological 
survey I directed in the Yautepec Valley of Mexico in the 1990s, to see 
if they might shed any light on climate-change adaptations and 
sustainability today. I think they do. My students and I walked across 
the landscape and located some 400 sites—places on the landscape where 
people once lived. Our chronology is rough, with time periods that last 
one or two centuries. Some sites were occupied for just a single period 
of time, while others were occupied for many millennia. What was the 
difference between those that survived and those that did not?...
- -
One finding that relates to urban issues today is the effects of city 
size on adaptation and sustainability. The median persistence of 
settlements in the Yautepec Valley was 370 years, a high rate of urban 
success by any measure. Looking more closely at the data, it is clear 
that larger settlements typically lasted longer than smaller ones. 
Several patterns stand out. The earliest urban centers in this area were 
founded adjacent to the best farmland, in the first century BCE. These 
large centers thrived for more than a millennium. Their superior 
locations undoubtedly contributed to their persistence and success. The 
conquest of the valley by the Teotihuacan empire (around 150 CE), 
however, showed that major political transformations can be more 
important than city size in explaining persistence. This event set off a 
flurry of urbanization as new administrative centers sprung up 
throughout the valley. These towns probably helped administer the 
cultivation of cotton for Teotihuacan. When Teotihuacan withdrew three 
centuries later, these towns were abandoned. Their size (larger than 
other settlements at the time) was no help when their administrative 
purpose came to an end. Does the more general role of size as a stimulus 
to sustainability extend to other early urban systems? If so, this may 
help scholars and planners work out the optimum size for cities in order 
to ensure sustainability into the future. Planners already associate 
higher urban population density with greater sustainability. If larger 
size is also more sustainable, then perhaps the current trend of 
shrinking cities in many regions needs immediate policy help. Economists 
have shown that larger cities generate more growth per capita than 
smaller cities, and this finding has been replicated for ancient cities. 
It would not be surprising if these city-size effects also created 
cities more able to withstand shocks and survive into the future.

Two obstacles must be overcome before scientists and planners can use 
insights from ancient history and archaeology. First, my colleagues and 
I need to reanalyze our data with respect to persistence over time. Just 
what conditions (city size, infrastructure, institutions) promoted urban 
persistence in the past? Can such results be translated for urban 
adaptations today? This is not a trivial task. Just reconfiguring the 
Yautepec data to look at the persistence of settlements through time 
required dedicated labor by a postdoc and graduate student. Second, 
urban adaptation scholars and archaeologists need to come together to 
establish specific useful connections between the patterns and processes 
identifiable for ancient cities, and the factors promoting or hindering 
the adaptations of cities to climate change today. Archaeologists can 
analyze many attributes of cities and settlement systems beyond their 
size and persistence; we welcome suggestions on what to do next.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State 
University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/11/ancient-cities-climate-change-urban-resilience-adaptation.html

- -

[ Academic source ]
Published: 24 May 2020
*Lessons from the past, policies for the future: resilience and 
sustainability in past crises*
John Haldon, Merle Eisenberg, Lee Mordechai, Adam Izdebski & Sam White
Abstract

    This article surveys some examples of the ways past societies have
    responded to environmental stressors such as famine, war, and
    pandemic. We show that people in the past did think about system
    recovery, but only on a sectoral scale. They did perceive challenges
    and respond appropriately, but within cultural constraints and
    resource limitations. Risk mitigation was generally limited in
    scope, localized, and again determined by cultural logic that may
    not necessarily have been aware of more than symptoms, rather than
    actual causes. We also show that risk-managing and risk-mitigating
    arrangements often favored the vested interests of elites rather
    than the population more widely, an issue policy makers today still
    face.

Introduction
Effective risk management and assessment require knowledge of past 
events to generate comparative risk scenarios. Yet understanding the 
impacts of environmental stress on historical societies is an 
underdeveloped and fragmented field of study, with substantial 
disagreement among specialists. As a result, we cannot say with 
precision what constitutes an existential risk to a given historical 
society, i.e., a risk that could trigger the collapse of a political or 
cultural system. Past human societies as a whole have been 
extraordinarily resilient in the face of severe challenges, but the 
configuration of social and political structures was always impacted in 
a number of ways, with substantial implications for development pathways 
(e.g., the different medium-term outcomes of the Black Death in England 
and France) (Borsch 2005, pp. 55–66; Herlihy 1997). Historical case 
studies, therefore, can offer valuable guidance on present day issues in 
designing risk management strategies and sustainable policies (Haldon 
and Rosen 2018; Rosen 2007). Detailed research into what, if any, role 
environmental challenges have played in the transformation of previous 
societies, including in conflict, migration, critical systems failure, 
and politics, is an essential requirement, along with grounded inquiry 
into socio-economic feedback loops...
- -
How societies in the past responded to stress depends on three key sets 
of conditions: their complexity (the degree of interdependency across 
social relationships and structures), their institutional and 
ideological flexibility, and their systemic redundancy, all of which 
together determine the resilience of the system. These three conditions 
do not exist in isolation, but combine and recombine in innumerable 
historical configurations. Historians must reduce this to ideal–typical 
models, since it is practically impossible to analyze them all. 
Moreover, we must research particular historical case studies to 
illustrate these general patterns and to show how each case is subtly 
different from the next.

‘Resilience’ is invoked in different ways within different disciplines. 
In historical research, it has largely played a role in work on collapse 
and adaptation, where societies are understood as complex adaptive 
systems and in which ecological models have been influential. Since the 
basic structural dynamics of a societal system contribute to the types 
of collapse to which it may be subject, approaches to collapse, and 
resilience that unites structure and process are the best way forward in 
applying historical examples to contemporary planning initiatives with 
respect to environmental problems. This is a helpful approach, 
especially when allowances are made for individual human agency and 
belief systems (Cumming and Petersen 2017; Haldon 2020, building on 
ecological theory and formal resilience theory; also Anderies 2006; 
Berkes and Ross 2016; Gunderson and Holling 2002).

Resilience and the potential for a society to maintain cohesion and 
cultural continuity through periods of system-challenging stress has 
costs. The question of how to distribute the costs of resilience, and 
the degree to which this might be built into any system, varies across 
time and cultural milieu. In the following, we examine several cases in 
past societies where we can observe (1) both top-down and bottom-up 
responses to significant environmental challenges, how different sectors 
of society responded or reacted, and where we can detect positive as 
well as negative outcomes; (2) the differential costs of resilience when 
states are faced with substantial economic and political challenges; and 
(3) state- and society-level responses to pandemics and both planned and 
unintended consequences...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-020-09778-9



/[  a serious oversight -- clips from the NYTimes] /
*Interior Dept. Report on Drilling Is Mostly Silent on Climate Change*
The department recommended higher fees for oil and gas leases, but there 
was no sign the government planned to take global warming into account 
when weighing new applications.

WASHINGTON — The Interior Department on Friday recommended that the 
federal government raise the fees that oil and gas companies pay to 
drill on public lands — the first increase in those rent and royalty 
rates since 1920.

The long-awaited report recommended an overhaul of the rents and royalty 
fees charged for drilling both on land and offshore, noting one estimate 
that the government lost up to $12.4 billion in revenue from drilling on 
federal lands from 2010 through 2019 because royalty rates have been 
frozen for a century.

The Interior Department said its goal is to “better restore balance and 
transparency to public land and ocean management and deliver a fair and 
equitable return to American taxpayers.”

But the report was nearly silent about the climate impacts from the 
public drilling program. The United States Geological Survey estimates 
that drilling on public land and in federal waters is responsible for 
almost a quarter of the greenhouse gases generated by the United States 
that are warming the planet...
- -
Oil and gas industry representatives warned Friday that raising fees 
would cause prices to skyrocket and undermine energy security.

“You know there’s something wrong with a policy when it’s released on a 
Friday and even more so when it’s a holiday weekend,” said Kathleen 
Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, which represents oil 
and gas companies...
- -
Frank Macchiarola, a senior vice president at the American Petroleum 
Institute, a trade group, said in a statement the Biden administration 
is sending mixed signals by releasing emergency oil reserves and then 
proposing to raise costs for the industry. It suggests the 
administration has “no clear roadmap for the future of federal leasing,” 
he said.

Meanwhile, environmentalists said they were concerned that the Biden 
administration was backtracking on a central climate pledge.

Brett Hartl, director of government affairs for the non-profit Center 
for Biological Diversity, called the 18-page report a “massive betrayal” 
of the president on climate change.

Mr. Hartl said environmental groups had expected the agency to review 
the fossil fuel leasing program, taking into account the environmental 
harms of drilling at the local level as well its contribution to the 
global climate crisis. He said the report, which barely mentioned 
climate change, “isn’t worth the paper it was written on.”

As a candidate, Mr. Biden promised to stop issuing new leases for 
drilling on public lands. “And by the way, no more drilling on federal 
lands, period. Period, period, period,” Mr. Biden told voters in New 
Hampshire in February 2020.

This month, he appeared at a global climate summit meeting in Glasgow to 
urge other world leaders to take bold action to cut emissions from oil, 
gas and coal. Mr. Biden has pledged to cut United States greenhouse gas 
emissions by 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this 
decade. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is a former environmental 
activist and former member of Congress who had a campaign website that 
included this quote from her: “We need to act fast to counteract climate 
change and keep fossil fuels in the ground.”

But last week, the Biden administration offered up to 80 million acres 
in the Gulf of Mexico for drilling leases — the largest sale since 2017. 
The administration was legally obligated to hold the lease sales after 
Republican attorneys general from 13 states successfully overturned a 
suspension on sales that Mr. Biden had tried to impose. Shell, BP, 
Chevron and Exxon Mobil offered $192 million for the rights to drill in 
the area offered by the government...
- -
Multiple studies from government and fiscal watchdog groups have 
concluded that the federal government underestimates the value of the 
oil and gas resources on public lands, and undercharges companies for 
extracting the fuels.

In addition to raising rents and royalties, the report recommended an 
increase the current minimum level for bonds. Companies have abandoned 
thousands of wells on public lands, which frequently leak methane and 
pose other hazards. But the current bond level is not enough to cap and 
clean them, leaving taxpayers to foot the costs.

The Interior Department could enact some of the proposed changes through 
regulation, but most of the recommendations in the report would require 
congressional action.

Even at their current levels, the royalties are still a major source of 
revenue: the federal government has so far collected $9.6 billion this 
year from drilling on public land and in federal waters, up from $8 
billion last year.
- -
Environmental advocates said they supported raising those fees and 
royalties, but added that the increase would not slow drilling or 
climate change.

“That’s the stuff that needs to happen,” said Joel Clement, who resigned 
from the Interior Department in protest during the Trump administration, 
and now serves as a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. “But 
it’s a first-base hit, not a double or a home run. And at this point, we 
have to have a home run on leasing on public lands. It’s one of the 
immediate climate levers that can bring real change. The leasing program 
must account for climate emissions. That’s how you get to a lasting 
moratorium on drilling.”

Mr. Clement and other climate policy experts said the Interior 
Department should incorporate the potential climate impacts of leasing 
oil and gas drilling into the assessments required by the 1970 National 
Environmental Policy Act, which says the government must consider 
ecological damage when deciding whether to permit drilling and 
construction projects.

If all assessments of the impacts of drilling on public lands were 
required to include the potential warming impact of burning the fuels 
within the leases, experts said, that would create the legal groundwork 
for the government to stop issuing new drilling leases.

But moving forward with such a policy would quite likely face political 
blowback from Republicans, the oil industry and Democrats in oil and gas 
states. That could also complicate the administration’s efforts to steer 
its broader spending bill through a razor-thin Democratic majority in 
Congress.

“The political tightrope is vexing, but the bottom line is that we have 
to end oil and gas leasing on public lands,” Mr. Clement said. “It’s not 
an exaggeration to say that doing so would change the global 
conversation on the energy transition.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/climate/climate-change-drilling-public-lands.html



/[The news archive - looking back - Krugman analysis ]/
*On this day in the history of global warming November 28, 2014*
November 28, 2014:
  In the New York Times, Paul Krugman observes:
"Of course, polluters will defend their right to pollute, but why can 
they count on Republican support? When and why did the Republican Party 
become the party of pollution?

"For it wasn’t always thus. The Clean Air Act of 1970, the legal basis 
for the Obama administration’s environmental actions, passed the Senate 
on a bipartisan vote of 73 to 0, and was signed into law by Richard 
Nixon. (I’ve heard veterans of the E.P.A. describe the Nixon years as a 
golden age.) A major amendment of the law, which among other things made 
possible the cap-and-trade system that limits acid rain, was signed in 
1990 by former President George H.W. Bush.

"But that was then. Today’s Republican Party is putting a conspiracy 
theorist who views climate science as a 'gigantic hoax' in charge of the 
Senate’s environment committee. And this isn’t an isolated case. 
Pollution has become a deeply divisive partisan issue.

"And the reason pollution has become partisan is that Republicans have 
moved right. A generation ago, it turns out, environment wasn’t a 
partisan issue: according to Pew Research, in 1992 an overwhelming 
majority in both parties favored stricter laws and regulation. Since 
then, Democratic views haven’t changed, but Republican support for 
environmental protection has collapsed.

"So what explains this anti-environmental shift?

"You might be tempted simply to blame money in politics, and there’s no 
question that gushers of cash from polluters fuel the anti-environmental 
movement at all levels. But this doesn’t explain why money from the most 
environmentally damaging industries, which used to flow to both parties, 
now goes overwhelmingly in one direction. Take, for example, coal 
mining. In the early 1990s, according to the Center for Responsive 
Politics, the industry favored Republicans by a modest margin, giving 
around 40 percent of its money to Democrats. Today that number is just 5 
percent. Political spending by the oil and gas industry has followed a 
similar trajectory. Again, what changed?

"One answer could be ideology. Textbook economics isn’t 
anti-environment; it says that pollution should be limited, albeit in 
market-friendly ways when possible. But the modern conservative movement 
insists that government is always the problem, never the solution, which 
creates the will to believe that environmental problems are fake and 
environmental policy will tank the economy.

"My guess, however, is that ideology is only part of the story — or, 
more accurately, it’s a symptom of the underlying cause of the divide: 
rising inequality."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/28/opinion/paul-krugman-pollution-and-politics.html?ref=opinion&_r=0


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