[✔️] April 8, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Fri Apr 8 08:48:53 EDT 2022
/*April 8, 2022*/
/[ innovation ! - yes, please hurry]
/*Solar panels that can generate electricity at night have been
developed at Stanford*/
/April 7, 2022/
//- -
/While standard solar panels can provide electricity during the day,
this device can serve as a "continuous renewable power source for both
day- and nighttime," according to the study published this week in the
journal Applied Physics Letters.
The device incorporates a thermoelectric generator, which can pull
electricity from the small difference in temperature between the ambient
air and the solar cell itself./
//https://www.npr.org/2022/04/07/1091320428/solar-panels-that-can-generate-electricity-at-night-have-been-developed-at-stanf
/
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/[ California heat wave now ]
/*Record high shattered amid SoCal heat wave, many more expected to fall*
by: Tony Kurzweil
Posted: Apr 7, 2022
Temperatures are expected to run 15 to 20 degrees above normal the next
couple of days, with many inland areas topping the 100-degree mark.
A heat advisory is in place until 6 p.m. Friday for all coastal plains
and coastal valleys, the Santa Clarita Valley, and the Santa Monica
Mountains, according to the National Weather Service.
https://ktla.com/weather/record-high-shattered-amid-socal-heat-wave-many-more-expected//
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/[ The answer is,... most likely ] /
*Is the world’s most important climate legislation about to die in US
Congress?*
Daniel Sherrell
Passage of the bill would probably spell the difference between the US
meeting its climate goals and blowing right past them
Thu 7 Apr 2022
- -
Tucked beneath the headlines on Covid and Ukraine, the most important
climate legislation in US history – and thus, arguably, in world history
– is still stuck in Congressional purgatory. You’d be forgiven if you
weren’t fully aware. It is not trending on Twitter. President Biden has
mostly stopped talking about it. The enormous moral stakes have been
brutally ablated by a broken, farcical, and, above all, extremely boring
legislative kludge known as budget reconciliation. The months-long saga
has turned Biden’s original “Build Back Better” plan into the juridical
equivalent of a Warhol soup can – a ubiquitous token evacuated of any
original meaning...
- -
That the public has largely failed to track the world-historical
implications of this process is an indictment of the way climate
information gets filtered down to ordinary people: in dollar figures no
one understands, in line graphs published by obscure wonks on Twitter,
in front page headlines that exhaust the emotive potential of
journalistic prose. Connecting any of this to, for example, insurance
premiums in Miami Beach, or the fate of the world’s remaining sea
turtles, or the prospect of your own grandchildren spending the bulk of
their crypto-wages on potable drinking water requires an almost mimetic
leap of imagination.
And yet, the stakes remain what they are. Passage of the bill’s
half-trillion dollars-worth of clean energy investments would likely
spell the difference between the world’s largest economy meeting its
climate goals and blowing right past them. It is not an exaggeration to
say that in that balance—between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius of warming,
between a government responsive to and avoidant of the greatest crisis
of the 21st century – hang millions of human lives. The potential impact
rivals that of nuclear war, except in this case the default is
catastrophe. The fossil fuel industry has already fired its ICBM at the
heart of our coastal cities. It’s up to the Democrats now to turn it around.
And turn it around they still might. Joe Manchin, of his own volition,
has returned to the bargaining table with a proposal that could retain
most of the original climate investments from Build Back Better and
potentially leave room for some investment in low-emission home and
health care work. Biden and Schumer must stop at nothing to hold him to
his word and land the deal. If they do, they could reverse the narrative
of Biden’s presidency overnight. Not only would Biden finally be able to
declare victory on his signature policy agenda, he would be offering a
direct rejoinder to the crisis in Ukraine, pointing global energy
markets toward wind and solar and undercutting fossil-fueled autocrats
like Vladimir Putin. For a war-time president, the combination of
crisis-response and long-term vision would earn him a place next to
Churchill in the history textbooks.
To be clear, I am profoundly angry that it’s all come to this. That not
a single one of the Republican cowards who claim concern over climate
change – Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham – is
even considering voting for the bill. That it’s fate will be determined
by a man who makes money hand over fist pumping carbon into the
atmosphere. That President Biden had to dispatch the head of the
National Economic Council to go zip-lining with Manchin in West Virginia
last weekend. That the fate of organized human civilization would at
least partially depend on two grown men donning intricate safety
harnesses and skimming across a river gorge (though I’ll admit that,
compared to your typical round of golf, there was something weird and
almost endearing about this particular political mating ritual).
All of which is to say: I won’t let my indignation die. I won’t succumb
to the Stockholm Syndrome of the Beltway pundit, who would tell my
generation that this is just how Washington works. The point is that
Washington doesn’t work. Washington is broken. This process is proof.
But to refuse cynicism is not to refuse strategy. That’s why, on April
23, thousands of people will be showing up in front of the White House –
and in key Senate swing states – to make one last play at redemption.
That’s why, at the risk of repeating myself, you really should join
them. Democrats still have a chance to deliver big on climate. If they
fail, we’ll lose far, far more than the midterms.
We cannot allow them to fail.
Daniel Sherrell is the author of Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our
World (Penguin Books)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/07/is-the-worlds-most-important-climate-legislation-about-to-die-in-us-congress
/[ New science on paleo-humans. human survival and disease. - 58 min
video ]/
*Past, Present and Future of the Anthropocene with Leslie Aiello &
Michael Purugganan - CARTA*
Apr 7, 2022
University of California Television (UCTV)
Speakers Leslie Aiello, Michael Purugganan and Vanessa Ezenwa discuss
humanity's part, present and future of the Anthropocene. Aiello speaks
on the human capacity to change the planet is not something new, but is
rooted in our deep evolutionary past. One of the hallmarks of humans is
our large brain size, which began to expand about 2 million years ago.
Purugganan discusses how domesticated species are an interesting group
of organisms that have co-evolved with Homo sapiens, and have begun
important in human survival and fitness. Ezenwa explores the idea that
interactions between climate change and infectious diseases can increase
disease prevalence in human and animal populations, but disease, in
turn, may exacerbate climate change. [4/2022] [Show ID: 37936]
00:00 Start
01:36 Leslie Aiello
23:09 Michael Purugganan
46:28 Vanessa Ezenwa
More from: CARTA: Human Origins and Humanity's Future: Past, Present,
and Future of the Anthropocene
(https://www.uctv.tv/carta-past-present-and-future/)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71ur9zZ7-Lo
/[ follow the money ... true cost accounting ]/
*True costs: How the oil industry cast climate policy as an economic burden*
For 30 years, the debate has largely ignored the soaring costs of inaction.
On February 22, 1989, Duane LeVine, Exxon’s manager of science and
strategy, gave a presentation to the company’s board of directions.
Governments around the world had banded together to save the ozone layer
by phasing out chemicals used in aerosol sprays and refrigerators,
LeVine said. And fossil fuels could be targeted next.
It was a pivotal moment: Seven months before, during an unusually hot
summer, James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, had warned Congress that the signs of global warming were
already upon us, making the issue front-page news across the country. By
the end of the year, politicians had introduced 32 climate bills in
Congress, and the United Nations had established the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists and policymakers intended
to put global climate policy in motion.
In light of these developments, LeVine advised Exxon to temper the
public’s growing concern for the planet with “rational responses” — not
only arguing that the science wasn’t settled, but also emphasizing the
“costs and political realities” of addressing rising emissions. In other
words, the main problem wasn’t fossil fuel emissions, but that doing
anything about them would cost too much.
This sentiment was echoed by John Sununu, then-President George H. W.
Bush’s chief of staff, who worked to stop the creation of a global
treaty to reduce carbon emissions soon after Hansen’s testimony. Sununu
started a feud with the EPA administrator at the time, William K.
Reilly, because he thought legislation to take on global warming would
hinder economic growth. When Hansen was preparing to give Congress an
update on the “greenhouse effect” in 1989, he was surprised by some
strange edits on his draft testimony from the White House’s Office of
Management and Budget, run by an ally of Sununu. They wanted Hansen to
say his own science was unreliable and to encourage Congress to pass
legislation only if it would immediately help the economy, “independent
of concerns about an increasing greenhouse effect.”
- -
Others want to get away from the big-numbers approach altogether and
focus on specific, local needs. Shalini Vajjhala, a former Obama
administration official who now helps cities prepare for the threats
brought on by climate change, says that generalities aren’t helping.
“Nobody needs to hear that we need trillions of dollars for adaptation,”
she said. To drive more money toward climate projects, people need to
hear what it needs to be spent on, where it could go, and who,
specifically, would benefit. What will prevent a wildfire from burning
down the neighborhood? How can we stop homes from flooding in the next
hurricane?
Steering conversations toward something concrete and vivid — and away
from polarizing topics like climate change and far-off future scenarios
— can speed up action, Vajjhala said. “When people are debating about
doing something, I will ask, you know, ‘Are you aware of how much money
you’re losing if you don’t do this?’”
Take transit agencies as an example. Extreme heat melted streetcar
cables in Portland last summer. Hot temperatures can warp steel tracks
and overheat engines and have caused long delays for trains in the Bay
Area and speed restrictions on Amtrak trains on the East Coast in recent
years. So during heat waves, transit agencies have been sending out
fewer trains and running them more slowly, Vajjhala said. That means
older adults and transit-dependent workers are stuck outside waiting for
the train on the hottest days of the year, and in the meantime, transit
agencies are also “hemorrhaging money,” she said. Pointing this out
changes the direction of a conversation: It’s no longer about “if” or
“when,” but simply “how” to fix it.
As for economists, they’re getting better at quantifying why avoiding
catastrophic climate change is worth so much. Franta says there’s a new
generation of economists looking at the costs of flooding, storms,
droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and other disasters, quantifying the
damages and how much can be attributed to climate change. “I think
society needs them to step up and do that full analysis, you know?”
Franta said. “Not just do part of the picture, not just look at the cost
of a policy because that’s what they are hired to do, but use it to
serve society and look at the entire problem with the entire picture.”
Economics is a necessary part of policy discussions, but it has come to
dominate them to the point that people have started to see other
perspectives as irrational and unreasonable, Berman said. The moral
arguments that once brought the Clean Air Act into being have ceded
ground to approaches that tinker with the market. Relying on clean
energy tax credits, as Build Back Better does, is a lot less ambitious,
and harder for normal people to understand, than declaring that you’re
going to try to completely phase out fossil fuel production.
“Applying economics in a political context isn’t necessarily going to
get us to where we want to go in political terms, right?” Berman said.
“There’s a gap between abstract models of how things should work and
what it actually takes to create change in the world.”
https://grist.org/economics/climate-legislation-costs-economics-oil-industry/
/[ video https://youtu.be/OvhgRR5ZbA8 ] /
*Bill McKibben: Latest IPCC Climate Report Underscores “Fossil Fuel Is
at the Root of Our Problems”*
Apr 7, 2022
Democracy Now!
A new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change warns the opportunity to mitigate the worst effects of global
warming by maintaining global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius is
quickly closing and that humanity has less than three years to slash
greenhouse gas emissions. “Fossil fuel is at the root of our problems.
It is at the root of the despotisms we see in Russia or in Saudi Arabia
or indeed the Koch brothers’ efforts to deform our own democracy,” says
Bill McKibben, environmentalist and founder of 350.org. It is time to
demand world leaders sign a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty, says
Ukrainian climate activist Svitlana Romanko. Romanko is also with the
Laudato Si’ Movement, which exists to implement the second encyclical of
Pope Francis about “care for our common home” and recognizes the war in
Ukraine has been funded by fossil fuels. Pope Francis says he plans to
visit Ukraine, and Romanko says his “leadership may create a difference
in this war.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvhgRR5ZbA8
/[ Follow the money, Mr Science Guy - but for consumers, "buy NO
PLASTIC at all" especially for sugar waters ]
/*Bill Nye, the Sellout Guy*
In a new video, TV's favorite scientist parrots hackneyed lines about
"the good people at Coca-Cola" and their near-useless recycling efforts.
Molly Taft/-- /April 7, 2022
Bad news for everyone who loved watching Bill Nye the Science Guy during
middle school science class: your fave is problematic. This week,
Coca-Cola, one of the world’s biggest plastic polluters, teamed up with
TV’s favorite scientist for a campaign to create a “world without
waste,” a joke of a corporate greenwashing campaign.
In a video innocuously titled “The Coca-Cola Company and Bill Nye
Demystify Recycling,” an animated version of Nye—with a head made out of
a plastic bottle and his signature bow tie fashioned from a Coke
label—walks viewers through the ways “the good people at the Coca-Cola
company are dedicating themselves to addressing our global plastic waste
problem.” Coke, Nye explains, wants to use predominantly recycled
materials to create bottles for its beverages; he then describes the
process of recycling a plastic bottle, from a user throwing it into a
recycling bin to being sorted and shredded into new material...
- - https://youtu.be/1HRadzzvQNY The Coca-Cola Company and Bill Nye
Demystify Recycling
Most of those plastics can only be reused once or twice before ending up
in a landfill. Nye, for all his talk of science on TV, should know this.
Over recycling’s 60-year history, less than 10% of plastic that has been
produced has ever been recycled. And while in theory, PET—the type of
plastic that makes bottles—can be recycled more times than other types
of plastic, that’s not usually what happens. Virgin plastic is, simply
put, cheaper to make into things like bottles than recycled plastic.
Less than 30% of plastic bottles are recycled in the U.S., and a lot of
that stock is turned not into other bottles, but “downcycled” into other
things, like filler and fabric. These products, in turn, can’t be
recycled again. The plastic ends up in landfills. Even with effective
recycling mechanisms, research has shown that stuff like bottles can’t
be in use for long and will eventually be delegated to landfills. From
there, the Coke bottles that Shill Nye so cheerily shows off in the
video will last for so long that their lifecycle lasts beyond human
frameworks for time.
https://gizmodo.com/bill-nye-sells-out-shills-for-coca-cola-on-plastic-bot-1848763404
/[The news archive - looking back]/
*April 8, 2003*
In the New York Times, climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer declares:
"The threat of global warming, first raised in 1896, has outlived many
foreign policy crises. Our failure to deal with it is starting to bear a
bitter harvest not only in rising seas and intensified rainstorms, but
also in disruption of long-standing alliances, and interference with
other foreign policy objectives. It is well past time for U.S. leaders
to put the climate problem at the center of America's domestic and
international agendas."
Opinion
*After Iraq : Declare war on global warming*
By Michael Oppenheimer, International Herald Tribune
April 8, 2003
With his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change in 2001,
President George W. Bush inadvertently caused an upheaval in
international relations. Environmental issues had been long regarded
as the poor stepchild of the foreign policy arena. But as recent
remarks by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and the United
Nations arms inspector Hans Blix made clear, the global warming
issue, and particularly America's handling of it, has become a
central geopolitical concern.
Speaking at a delicate moment in the Iraq crisis, Blair contrasted
the current situation with "issues that affect us over time. They
are just as devastating in their potential impact" as weapons of
mass destruction and terrorism, "some more so, but they require
reflection and strategy geared to the long-term, often straddling
many years and many governments. Within this category are the issues
of global poverty, relations between the Muslim world and the West,
environmental degradation, most particularly climate change."
Challenging U.S. claims that the Kyoto Protocol is too costly, Blair
declared that "it is clear Kyoto is not radical enough" and
committed Britain to cutting its emissions of global warming gases
by 60 percent by 2050. This goes far beyond the Kyoto Protocol's 5
percent reduction mandated for developed countries by 2012.
Recently, Blix chimed in by commenting, "I'm more worried about
global warming than I am about any major military conflict."
Blair's speech served the obvious need to buttress his standing with
a British public that is disturbed over his unwavering support of
America's Iraq policy. By opposing the United States and laying
claim to leadership of the dozens of countries that are working to
bring the Kyoto Protocol into force, Blair clearly intended to
counteract the charge that he is subservient to Bush. That an
environmental issue could be deployed in this way is itself notable.
Blair's remarks serve a broader purpose, however. They are a
reminder of how severely the U.S. rejection of the Kyoto Protocol
and other accords has distorted its relations with erstwhile allies,
preparing the ground for rancor over Iraq by depleting a decades-old
stock of trans-Atlantic goodwill.
Blair's statement that "the world is in danger of polarizing around
two different agendas" serves as a warning to Bush that his emphasis
on near-term security concerns attends to just half the equation of
human well-being. Global stability depends equally on the United
States stepping up to the plate on global warming and other
long-term issues.
For environmentalists who have pressed the foreign policy
establishment for 20 years to take their concerns seriously, this
welcome juxtaposition of global environment and international
security brings along a touch of irony. In 1989, Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher of Britain underwent a conversion experience on
the environment, and called for an international treaty on climate
change. Three years later, her leadership was an important factor in
convincing a reluctant President George H.W. Bush to sign the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change, the parent document of the
Kyoto Protocol. The U.S. Senate ratified that agreement a few months
later.
The Cold War had ended, and the environment seemed about to get its
turn on the international agenda because matters considered
weightier by the foreign policy establishment had been cleared off
the table. To some, it was the "end of history" but unfortunately,
not the beginning of continuing attention to global warming and
related issues by high-level officials in the United States.
One reason the Kyoto Protocol fell afoul of the U.S. government, and
one reason the Bush administration fell afoul of Europe in its
hamhanded rejection of the protocol, was a failure in Washington to
understand the emerging importance of the climate issue to
international relations now, as well as to global stability in the
future.
The situation could worsen. The Kyoto Protocol appears likely to
come into force this year if, as expected, Russia ratifies it. As
Europe, Japan and others implement cuts in emissions, the question
of how to treat the United States, should it continue to abstain,
could point in nasty directions, such as trade sanctions on products
like cars, airplanes and computers whose manufacture causes
emissions of global warming gases. Earlier, sanctions would have
been out of the question. If the current trans-Atlantic alienation
persists, one cannot exclude the possibility that Europe eventually
will turn to such an approach.
The threat of global warming, first raised in 1896, has outlived
many foreign policy crises. Our failure to deal with it is starting
to bear a bitter harvest not only in rising seas and intensified
rainstorms, but also in disruption of long-standing alliances, and
interference with other foreign policy objectives. It is well past
time for U.S. leaders to put the climate problem at the center of
America's domestic and international agendas.
The writer is a professor of geosciences and international affairs
at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs,
Princeton University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/opinion/08iht-edoppen_ed3_.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/opinion/IHT-after-iraq-declare-war-on-global-warming.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iela3DJDm4SiOMNAo6B_EGKRIpfItI9wzmBAd5bOaZqSPF5yuZFMglyQhPtpZ3Bl5ACKSwx7J26RGY32Z2LXaw99XWiSFiFH9pF5e_1uQOaYn_3COeZiSd_cBBmppY2JV2ujGgNwafGDuJ00oFh1fwnBYR9QGgLYXGAu_joWRRuKZ7ROEGnnwo8UutaXzjSlcfNqO5TNVUPVi-VCS938m0-69hDOd4IPaiZLxQoe8P2g715GXU_Zc7yRMV3H96I4u0s5b3dqhWMy960w-E0EshXvrDEs2W7NDU_WSpphn9a9Pv009DBvTgW0BA&smid=em-share
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