[✔️] January 11, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*January 11, 2022*/

/[  notice the money  ]/
*US hit by 20 separate billion-dollar climate disasters in 2021, NOAA 
report says*
Year was third-costliest extreme weather year on record with affected 
communities spread from coast to coast
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/11/us-hit-by-20-separate-billion-dollar-climate-disasters-in-2021-noaa-report-says

- -

/[ seems like money is talking ]/
*Rich nations could see ‘double climate dividend’ by switching to 
plant-based foods*
Adopting a more plant-based diet could give rich countries a “double 
climate dividend” of lower emissions and more land for capturing carbon, 
a new study says.

Animal-based foods have higher carbon and land footprints than their 
plant-based alternatives, and are most commonly consumed in high-income 
countries. The study, published in Nature Food, investigates how the 
global food system would change if 54 high-income countries were to 
shift to a more plant-based diet...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/rich-nations-could-see-double-climate-dividend-by-switching-to-plant-based-foods 



/
/

/[ Associated Press ] /
*Deadly extreme weather year for US as carbon emissions soar*
By SETH BORENSTEIN - Jan 10, 2022
The United States staggered through a steady onslaught of deadly 
billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in an extra hot 2021, while 
the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions last year jumped 6% because of 
surges in coal and long-haul trucking, putting America further behind 
its 2030 climate change cutting goal.

Three different reports released Monday, though not directly connected, 
paint a picture of a U.S. in 2021 struggling with global warming and its 
efforts to curb it.

A report from the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm, on Monday 
said that in 2021 America’s emissions of heat-trapping gas rebounded 
from the first year of the pandemic at a faster rate than the economy as 
a whole, making it harder to reach the country’s pledge to the world to 
cut emissions in half compared to 2005 by 2030. And last year was the 
deadliest weather year for the contiguous United States since 2011 with 
688 people dying in 20 different billion-dollar weather and climate 
disasters that combined cost at least $145 billion, the National Oceanic 
and Atmospheric Administration said Monday...
- -
While 2020 set the record for the most billion-dollar disasters, in 2021 
“the extremes seemed a bit more profound than in 2020,” Smith said.

Last year, billion dollar weather disasters were more than twice as 
deadly as in 2020, when those extremes killed 262 people. The last 
deadlier year was 2011. Hurricane Maria in 2017 killed nearly 3,000 
people in Puerto Rico, which isn’t part of the contiguous United States...
- -
The last five years have cost $742 billion in 86 separate billion-dollar 
weather disasters, an average of more than 17 a year, a new record. 
That’s nearly $100 billion more than the combined total of all the 
billion-dollar disasters from 1980 to 2004, adjusted for inflation and 
far more the three billion-dollar disasters a year that the nation 
averaged in the 1980s.

“That’s exactly what I’d expect with climate change because climate 
change is essentially supercharging many types of extreme weather, 
making heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, intense rainfall, flooding, and 
storms more severe, destructive and deadly,” said Jonathan Overpeck, 
dean of environmental studies at the University of Michigan, who wasn’t 
part of the reports...
- -
Over the long-run, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have been decreasing — 
even with 2021’s jump from the sudden 2020 plunge. However, last year’s 
emissions increases the difficulty in reaching the goal President Joe 
Biden set as part of the Paris and Glasgow climate agreements, Larsen 
said. She said to get to the 50% cut Biden pledged, the country needs to 
be reducing emissions 5% a year, not increasing.

“We are running out of time,” she said.

Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part 
of the reports, agreed.

“The radical changes in our economy that are required for reaching low 
climate goals have not been achieved,” Mahowald said. “Unfortunately, 
what we are seeing today is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what 
we will see unless substantial reductions in emissions are made and 
quickly.”
__
Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate.

https://apnews.com/article/climate-wildfires-science-business-health-61ed7fe7d3c52a70fe2b72c881b0d0cf



/[ undercounted money from bogus data ]/
*The Federal Government Is Still Undercounting Extreme Weather And 
Climate Deaths*
NOAA announced that at least 688 people died from extreme weather in 
2021, but BuzzFeed News has shown that the true toll is much higher.
Peter Aldhous,  Zahra Hirji
January 10, 2022
At least 688 people died in major weather and climate disasters in the 
continental US last year, making it the deadliest year for such events 
since 2011, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 
announced on Monday morning. But the true toll from last year’s 
devastating extreme weather is actually much higher.

NOAA’s count only encompasses events that caused more than a billion 
dollars in damage to buildings, other infrastructure, and assets, 
including crops, which means that some deadly events in 2021 are 
missing. Notably, it excludes the flash flooding that killed around 20 
people in central Tennessee in August.

But more importantly, excess deaths analyses run by BuzzFeed News have 
shown that NOAA’s numbers for fatalities in the two deadliest extreme 
weather events of 2021 reflect only a fraction of the death toll.

NOAA counted 229 deaths from the extreme heat wave that hit the Pacific 
Northwest in late June, and 226 from the blast of Arctic air that 
enveloped much of the nation in mid-February — at least 210 of those in 
Texas, where the winter storm caused widespread power outages. That left 
millions of people in the freezing cold, many of them for several days. 
(Texas has since increased its count of the deaths in the disaster to 
246, also a major undercount.)

Our analyses of spikes in total deaths — revealed in state records 
compiled by the CDC — show that around 670 people were likely killed by 
excessive heat in Washington and Oregon in a single week at the height 
of the heat wave, while more than 750 people likely perished in Texas as 
a result of the winter storm and power outages. Many of these deaths 
were missed in the official counts because they were attributed on death 
certificates to underlying health conditions, especially cardiovascular 
disease, that can be exacerbated by extremes of hot and cold...
- -
In reality, as BuzzFeed News reported last month, problems with 
cause-of-death reporting and the difficulty accounting for the lethal 
indirect effects of severe weather mean that no official sources are 
capturing the full death toll caused by weather extremes. It’s a big 
data gap that is hampering the nation’s ability to mitigate the effects 
of climate change...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/weather-extremes-climate-crisis-death-toll-2021



/[ Fire risk to western cities  - on point radio show ]/
*How cities in the West can prepare for the Western wildfire threat*
January 10, 2022
Jess Yarmosky - - Meghna Chakrabarti
he Marshall Fire burned down entire neighborhoods in Superior and 
Louisville Colorado.

"There are a lot of houses that are obviously missing from the 
landscape," says Steve Sarin, a resident of the town.

WBUR is a nonprofit news organization and our coverage relies on your 
financial support. Please give today.

Subdivisions in Denver and Boulder aren't the only densely populated 
areas at risk in the West.

Now you have all these people, who live in these high-risk wildfire 
regions, and we don’t have the capacity to fight fires in the way that 
we have for the last hundred years," professor Erica Fischer says. "So 
that's like kind of the paradox that we’re in."

Today, On Point: Wildfires and the city. How suburban and urban American 
districts need to retrofit homes, development plans and regulations 
right now as fire dangers grow...
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2022/01/10/colorado-the-wildfire-threat-of-the-west



/[ This could be for your first solar project - video ]/
*$642 24V Beginner Friendly DIY Solar System: Perfect for #vanlife*
DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_OKib30Ubo



/[ Letter from Siberia -- New Yorkers ]/
*The Great Siberian Thaw*
Permafrost contains microbes, mammoths, and twice as much carbon as 
Earth’s atmosphere. What happens when it starts to melt?
By Joshua Yaffa
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/the-great-siberian-thaw



/[  part of the great resignation, or is it burn-out  ]/
*Biden’s top environmental justice official just left the White House. 
What now?*
Cecilia Martinez was the "heart, soul, and mind" of Biden's ambitious 
environmental justice plans.
On Friday, President Joe Biden’s top environmental justice official left 
the administration less than one full year into his presidency.

Cecilia Martinez, a 2020 Time Magazine 100 Most Influential People 
recipient, told the Associated Press that she’s leaving the White House 
to “rest and be with her family,” joining millions in the “Great 
Resignation” spurred by the coronavirus pandemic. Martinez, who is 
leaving her post as the senior director for environmental justice at the 
Council on Environmental Quality, has largely been credited with shaping 
much of Biden’s environmental justice aspirations. In 2020, she helped 
develop then-candidate Joe Biden’s environmental goals and since his 
election, she has helped push the administration to center disadvantaged 
communities in its priorities.

“Cecilia has been the heart, soul, and mind of the most ambitious 
environmental justice agenda ever adopted by a President,” Council on 
Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory wrote in a statement Thursday. ..
--
Recent environmental moves by the administration that have caused an 
uproar include the decision to hold the largest-ever auction of oil and 
gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico’s history and letting oil flow 
through the Line3 and Dakota Access pipelines...
https://grist.org/climate/head-of-bidens-environmental-justice-programs-to-leave-adminstration/



/[ innovation in New York state ]/
*From off-shore turbines to electric school buses: New York talks big on 
climate*
Governor Hochul announced major climate ambitions in first state address.
https://grist.org/article/from-off-shore-turbines-to-electric-school-buses-new-york-talks-big-on-climate/



/[  shocking to see responsible action by courts ] /
*Development of ultra-luxury Northern California resort stopped due to 
wildfire risk*
SFGATE -  Jan. 7, 2022
A judge stopped the development of a massive ultra-luxury resort in 
Northern California on Tuesday because developers failed to consider 
what would unfold if a wildfire exploded and thousands of guests had to 
escape raging flames.
- -
The ruling overrides the approval from the county board of supervisors 
who saw the development as an economic opportunity for the region.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Lake-County-Guenoc-Valley-resort-wildfire-risk-16756752.php
- -
[read the 15 page court ruling ]
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/urban/pdfs/Guenoc-Valley-ruling.pdf



/[ try to imagine a different movie - discussion  in the NYTimes ] /
*We Need a Second Cut of ‘Don’t Look Up’*
Jan. 8, 2022
By Ross Douthat - Opinion Columnist

The new movie “Don’t Look Up,” about a collision between a 
planet-killing comet and a frivolous America, is something of a critical 
failure — its score on RottenTomatoes.com is currently only 55 percent 
fresh — but a clear cultural success. In a world where it’s hard for 
non-superhero movies to hardly make a ripple, it has broken a Netflix 
viewing record and launched an array of movie-critic arguments and 
pundit takes — some of them politically unpredictable, including both 
left-leaning critiques and right-leaning admiration.

Officially the movie is an allegory about climate change, a conceit that 
its director, Adam McKay, has emphasized in online sparring with its 
critics. “If you don’t have at least a small ember of anxiety about the 
climate collapsing (or the U.S. teetering),” McKay tweeted recently, 
“I’m not sure ‘Don’t Look Up’ makes any sense. It’s like a robot viewing 
a love story. ‘WHy ArE thEir FacEs so cLoSe ToGether?’”

Art, though, has a way of escaping the intentions of its creators. 
McKay’s tweets notwithstanding, his comet scenario is a lousy allegory 
for the climate challenge, for reasons painstakingly elaborated by New 
York Magazine’s Eric Levitz in one of the best responses to the movie as 
a would-be policy intervention. But the pandemic that arrived before 
production started turned out to be a better fit for the allegory — a 
fast-moving and unexpected threat rather than a grinding long-term 
challenge. And ultimately “Don’t Look Up” is most effective when it’s 
just a movie about that parenthetical in McKay’s tweet — the idea of a 
“teetering” America, with the specific existential threat almost 
incidental to the portrait of systemic failure.

This is the biggest reason, I suspect, that the movie is a commercial 
hit and conversation fodder even for people who dislike it: Because it 
opens one of the widest lenses on American decadence since the years 
when “The Wire” and “The Sopranos” were both on HBO.

Yet I’m still one of the critics who thought the movie failed in the 
end, because its impulse to indict everyone, from TV news to social 
media, is in tension with its desire to deliver a pious message about 
Listening to Science. The latter impulse ensures that its satire is 
gentlest when it takes on the expert class, the academic-industrial 
complex. And its plot ultimately turns on a single terrible decision by 
a populist president, the systemic critique sacrificed to ideological 
point-scoring.

But since the movie is almost the comprehensive portrait of decadence we 
need, I’m going to offer some script doctoring, and give you the cut of 
“Don’t Look Up” that might have been, had somebody hired me to consult. 
Here goes:

Act 1: The comet is discovered by amateur astronomy geeks who comb 
telescope footage the government collects but doesn’t bother to examine. 
Their findings are hyped by a mix of doomsday preppers and tech bros, 
while academic authorities dismiss the claims as misinformation and 
Twitter censors users who insist the comet is going to hit Earth.

Act 2: A group of Harvard astronomers confirm the comet’s dire 
trajectory, and suddenly the media turns on a dime and begins hyping the 
threat. But the president, a right-wing populist aiming for re-election, 
prefers to postpone dealing with it, so she hypes an obscure 
Bible-college astronomer who thinks the chance of impact is under 10 
percent.

Act 3: After protests roil the country, the president reverses course 
and announces a massive nuclear strike. However, the head of NASA, a 
media darling, insists that blowing up the comet will rain down 
fragments and kill too many people, and you need a more limited strike — 
the subject of his own dissertation, as it happens — that knocks it off 
course. Fox News vilifies him, but the mainstream media insists his 
strategy is simply Science and no serious person could oppose it. So the 
United States tries his plan — and it fails completely, because his 
dissertation was actually based on fraudulent experiments that never 
replicated outside his lab.

Act 4: Now the president orders the full blow-it-up strike, but it fails 
as well — because most of the nukes don’t work, the military having 
failed to inspect its arsenal because that part of the budget was spent 
hiring TikTok influencers to do a new recruitment pitch for Gen Z. In 
desperation, the government turns to an Elon Musk-style tech wizard, 
whose Great Bore drill promises to deliver a warhead into the heart of 
the comet. Unfortunately he supervises the mission himself, and it goes 
fatally awry when he gets distracted by a Twitter flamewar.

Act 5: Out of options, part of America pretends the comet isn’t coming, 
while another part joins a cult that holds mass repentance ceremonies 
for white patriarchy’s sins. At the last minute, a collection of Chinese 
drones ascend to meet the comet and dismember it, letting its pieces 
fall into the Pacific to be mined by Chinese deep-sea robots — but a 
shower “accidentally” hits the continental United States, knocking out 
our infrastructure and leaving the world’s former superpower in the dark.

Roll credits, in Chinese. I’ll see you all at the Oscars.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/08/opinion/dont-look-up-decadence.html


/[ opinion seems fundamental  ]/
*We can’t solve the climate crisis with a broken democracy*
Mark Hertsgaard
Defusing the climate emergency requires defusing threats to American 
democracy
10 Jan 2022
Ayear ago last Thursday, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy were fleeing 
for their lives as a violent mob swarmed the halls of the US Capitol. 
With their personal safety at risk, the two most powerful Republicans on 
Capitol Hill at last stood up to Donald Trump. In a heated phone call, 
McCarthy, the House minority leader, fruitlessly implored the president 
to call off the mob. Senate majority leader McConnell later called the 
rioters “terrorists” and said Trump was “morally responsible” for the 
violence.

But McConnell and McCarthy soon slunk back to enabling Trump’s assaults 
on democracy. They were quiet while Trump insisted the 2020 election was 
stolen and that anyone who disagreed must be purged from public office. 
They stayed mute as Trump supporters threatened violence against 
election officials and Republican-dominated state legislatures rewrote 
laws and procedures to prevent fair voting...
- -
McConnell and McCarthy want the world to forget that a year ago Trump’s 
mob was hunting them down, leading each man to stand up, briefly, for 
democracy. But the world must not forget. The press in particular must 
not allow McConnell, McCarthy and most other Republicans to obscure that 
they are enabling the gravest threat to American democracy since the 
civil war – and, by so doing, encouraging a hellish climate future.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/10/democracy-big-lie-climate-crisis



/[ Opinion, is probably a yes ]/
//*Is the US uniquely bad at tackling climate change?*
After decades of failed climate bills, America seems to have a problem.
- -
According to the Climate Change Performance Index, the U.S. is 55th in 
the world when it comes to climate policy; another analysis by Yale 
University and Columbia University ranked the country 24th for 
environmental performance. Now, as Democrats struggle to regroup after 
current West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s refusal to support President 
Joe Biden’s landmark climate and social welfare bill, it seems to be 
happening again. The U.S. is within reach of passing climate policy, but 
perilously close to falling short.
- -
The U.S. electoral system doesn’t help much either. The United States 
has a presidential system, rather than a parliamentary system — meaning 
that the president, or head of state, does not necessarily belong to the 
same party as the majority of Congress. That means two branches of 
government are often pulling in different directions, dooming bills to a 
no man’s land of inaction. Studies have shown that parliamentary systems 
are generally quicker to establish climate-friendly policies: Many 
parliamentary democracies like the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany 
have already managed to establish carbon prices or similar 
carbon-cutting measures, but there are exceptions, like the climate 
policy-averse Australia.
- -
Karapin says the makeup of Congress tilts the country toward fossil fuel 
interests: Two senators per state means that states dependent on oil and 
gas or coal have disproportionate weight while less populous states gain 
outsized representation in Congress. Several of those less populous 
states — Wyoming, Alaska, the Dakotas — also have substantial fossil 
fuel reserves.

Combine those barriers with an extremely polarized political system and 
a powerful fossil fuel industry that can use cash to influence 
politicians, and the United States’ idea of democracy doesn’t look like 
a great place to enact positive climate policies.

But veto points and double representation are not inexorable. In the 
right hands, they can even look like benefits. Separation of powers 
means a struggle to pass national climate laws, but it can also allow 
certain states, like California or Washington, to create climate 
policies without federal support. The Supreme Court can shut down 
executive actions to clean up the electricity sector, or can give the 
president increasing powers to curb greenhouse gas emission, as in 
Massachusetts v. EPA. ..
- -
All of that is to say that a U.S. failure on climate change isn’t 
guaranteed. Today, global warming garners more attention than it has at 
any point in the last three decades. In the last few years, climate 
advocates have figured out how to bypass the filibuster and build a 
large activist network for change. Mildenberger argues that — if 
everything goes right — the U.S. also has opportunities to do much more 
on climate than many other countries. Everything just has to line up for 
one instant, for one vote. “There’s a capacity for transformative change 
that there may not be in other countries,” he said. “It’s just hard to 
get that recipe right.”
https://grist.org/politics/is-american-democracy-uniquely-bad-at-tackling-climate-change/



/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming January 11, 2013*

January 11, 2013:
Media Matters notes: "After ignoring reports that 2012 was the hottest 
year on record in the U.S., Rush Limbaugh and Fox Business host Stuart 
Varney tried to push back against well-established evidence of climate 
change by citing instances of cold weather."

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/01/11/conservatives-once-again-cite-extreme-cold-to-d/192202 



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