[✔️] March 14, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*March 14, 2022*/

/[ OK, now this is really serious ]
/*Climate Change Leads to Higher Prices for Chocolate*/
/March 13, 2022

Chocolate makers are expected to raise prices this year because of 
higher costs of cocoa from exporters like Ivory Coast. The West African 
country is the world's largest cocoa producer.

Hershey is the largest producer of chocolate products in the United 
States. It said last month it plans to raise prices on all of its 
products because of the rising cost of ingredients. Ingredients are the 
things used to make a food or product...
- -
Harvard University researchers estimate that by 2030 parts of West 
Africa will be too hot and dry to produce much cocoa. The West African 
countries of Ghana and Ivory Coast together produce 70 percent of 
worldwide cocoa supply.

Cocoa farmer Raphael Konan Kouassi recently took VOA to his farm. Huge 
green and yellow cocoa pods hung from trees. He said his trees are 
producing less because of rising temperatures and less rainfall than usual.

"Almost all of the young plants die in the high season. If you have not 
been able to get water to them, you have no cocoa," Kouassi said...
- -
"What we're seeing is that the onset of both dry and wet season can 
change. It's less reliable. During the season, there may be breaks in 
terms of rain during the dry season, or there's a dry spell during the 
wet season," Bunn said.

The data show it may be better for farmers to stop producing cocoa and 
instead grow a variety of different crops, he said.

But the chief of one Ivorian company that supplies The Hershey Company 
said higher prices for cocoa could be welcomed by farmers. Olga Yenou 
said, "My opinion is that these farmers should have better prices, 
should earn more, because they work hard. Most are poor," Yenou said.

Her wish appears to be coming true. As climate change continues to have 
effects on production, prices continue to rise.

I’m Ashley Thompson.
Henry Wilkins reported this story for VOA News./
/https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/climate-change-leads-to-higher-prices-for-chocolate/6477115.html 



//

/
/

/[  " Apres Moi, Le Deluge "  ] /
*Adam McKay’s ‘Don’t Look Up’ Inspires Climate Change Activists in France*
By Elsa Keslassy -- Mar 13, 2022
- -
More than 80,000 people protested peacefully in multiple cities in 
France on Saturday, including 32,000 people in Paris. Many of whom were 
holding “Look Up” signs, according to France 24 news website, which 
attributed the participation figures to organizers.

The annual protest for the climate was indeed named the “Look Up Day” by 
the non-profit org Alternatiba in reference to Adam McKay’s allegorical 
movie which stars two earnest astronomers (Leonardo DiCaprio and 
Jennifer Lawrence) on a mission to warn a narcissistic U.S. president 
(Meryl Streep) and her son (Jonah Hill), as well as a pair of jaded news 
anchors (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry) that the Earth is about to get 
shattered by a comet.
https://variety.com/2022/film/global/adam-mckay-dont-look-up-climate-change-protest-1235203313/


/[ Looking into the future - Kim Stanley Robinson] /
*Weather Reports: The Climate of the Future*
Mar 13, 2022
Harvard Divinity School
This conversation is part of a ten-week series of online 
conversations with poets, writers, public servants, theologians, 
biologists, scholars, and activists who are engaged in the spiritual 
reckoning and awakening surrounding climate collapse, sacred land 
protection, and planetary health.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s thriller "The Ministry for the Future" (2020) is 
science fiction that reads as hard-edged journalism. With short chapters 
and a myriad of characters, Robinson creates a kaleidoscope of 
perspectives on a global climate collapse coming in 2025. Bill McKibben 
writes “In Kim Stanley Robinson’s anti-dystopian novel, climate change 
is the crisis that finally forces mankind to deal with global 
inequality.” At heart an optimist, Robinson lays out a possible path to 
move forward with faith in what we can create together in a 
post-capitalist world.

Respondent: Sarah Dimick, Assistant Professor of English, Harvard University
This event took place on November 22, 2021.
Sponsored by: Harvard Divinity School, The Constellation Project, The 
Center for the Study of World Religions, Religion and Public Life at 
HDS, Theasophie Teas, and the Planetary Health Alliance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR-acapT5yk



/[  Economics is a discipline, not a science -- talks about global 
warming  -- audio ] /
*The Economics of Climate Change | Steve Keen*
Oct 20, 2021
Planet: Critical
Support this channel: https://www.patreon.com/planetcritical

Professor Steve Keen was one of the few economists to realise that a 
serious economic crisis was imminent in 2005. He publicly warned the 
world, and helped his native Australia navigate the 2008 crash without 
the major repercussions that crippled markets everywhere else.

He is now working on a new model of economics for a post-crash world. He 
joined me today to discuss why and how capitalism needs to be 
constrained, the economics of climate change and what mainstream 
economists and academics are getting wrong—to the detriment of us all.

This is the episode that inspired Platform Enterprise to rebrand as 
Planet: Critical, a podcast for a world in crisis.

🌎Support the project: https://www.patreon.com/planetcritical
🌎 Website: https://www.planetcritical.com/
🌎 Twitter: https://twitter.com/Planet_Critical
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK12oB90zeQ

- -

/[ follow up interview recommended  audio ]/
*The Climate Crisis and The Climate Crash | Simon Michaux*
Oct 20, 2021
Planet: Critical
Did you know wind turbines aren’t recyclable? What happens when 
globalisation fails and post-industrial states like Europe and the US 
are left to mine their own materials? How can we mitigate climate change 
without plunging billions into poverty?

Simon Michaux is  an associate professor in the circular economy 
solution unit at the Geological Survey of Finland. He models the mining 
and energy industries to figure out what we can do sustainably—and what 
is nothing more than greenwashing—and drops more than a few bombshells 
throughout this episode concerning energy use and politics.

Support this channel: https://www.patreon.com/planetcritical
🌎 Website: https://www.planetcritical.com/
🌎 Twitter: https://twitter.com/Planet_Critical
🌎 Rachel's Twitter: https://twitter.com/DeBeaudoir

© Rachel Donald
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MskRocubx08



/[  Book report discussion ] /
*Richard Heinberg - Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival with 
Host Michael Lerner*
Oct 15, 2021
NewSchoolCommonweal - ~Co-presented with OMEGA Network~

Join TNS Host Michael Lerner with Richard Heinberg for a conversation 
about his new book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. You 
can hear other conversations between Michael Lerner and Richard Heinberg 
on our website: https://tns.commonweal.org

Richard Heinberg is the author of thirteen previous books, including 
some of the seminal works on society’s current energy and environmental 
sustainability crisis. He is senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute 
and is regarded as one of the world’s foremost advocates for a shift 
away from our current reliance on fossil fuels. He has authored scores 
of essays and articles that have appeared in such journals as Nature, 
Reuters, Wall Street Journal, The American Prospect, Public Policy 
Research, Quarterly Review, Yes!, and The Sun; and has appeared in many 
film and television documentaries, including Leonardo DiCaprio’s 11th 
Hour. He is also the author and narrator of Post Carbon Institute’s 
22-video Think Resilience online course.

Michael Lerner is president and co-founder of Commonweal in Bolinas, 
California. He co-founded Commonweal in 1976. His projects include the 
Commonweal Cancer Help Program, Healing Circles, Beyond Conventional 
Cancer Therapies, The New School at Commonweal and The Resilience 
Project. A Harvard graduate, he received a PhD and taught at Yale in the 
early 1970s before moving to Bolinas, California in 1976. He received a 
MacArthur fellowship for contributions to public health in 1984.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAICx9DBOfk



/[  wars use lots of oil ] /
*Whatever His Motives, Putin’s War in Ukraine Is Fueled by Oil and Gas*
The U.S. oil industry is hoping to fill the immediate void with 
increased oil and gas exports, while the EU moves in the longer term to 
replace Russian gas with renewable energy.

By Marianne Lavelle - March 6, 2022

“Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same 
roots, fossil fuels, and our dependence on them,” said Svitlana 
Krakovska of the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute, as the IPCC 
unveiled its report on climate impacts.

Certainly, fossil fuels are not the direct cause of a war clearly driven 
by the singular will of President Vladimir Putin. The world has 
struggled to comprehend his motives, which analysts have suggested 
include expansionism, grievance toward the neighboring Soviet state and 
a desire to reassemble what he has described as “historical Russia.”

But on a deeper level, Krakovska is right, say those who have studied 
fossil fuel-dependent states and aggression: Whatever is driving Putin, 
his war machine is fueled by oil and gas.
“Putin is able to use the oil money to get rid of any domestic political 
constraints and to build a military and a war chest to allow these kinds 
of foreign policy adventures,” said Jeff Colgan, director of the Climate 
Solutions Lab at Brown University. “In that way, Putin’s Russia falls 
into a category of states that would include Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and 
Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya.”
In his book “Petro-Aggression,” Colgan lays out his research showing 
that “petrostates,” countries with economies and federal budgets reliant 
on oil and gas exports, are about 50 percent more conflict-prone than 
non-petrostates.

The oil and gas industry makes up as much as one-fifth of Russia’s Gross 
Domestic Product, which is relatively small, less than half the size of 
the GDP of the United Kingdom, even though it has more than double the 
population. Oil and gas accounts for 60 percent of the nation’s exports 
and 30 percent of federal budget revenue, giving Putin a large pot of 
money for which he is not accountable to citizen taxpayers.

“Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country,” the late U.S. Sen. 
John McCain once said.

It’s not surprising that Russia, the world’s third-largest historic 
contributor to greenhouse gas pollution behind the United States and 
China, has resisted global action on climate change.

But Putin has undermined the foundations of his petrostate with his 
violence in Ukraine. European Union energy policy makers last week 
announced a 10-part plan to end the continent’s deep dependence on 
Russian natural gas and accelerate its transition away from fossil fuels.

Even though the United States and its NATO allies carefully designed 
their first rounds of economic sanctions against Russia to avoid its oil 
and gas sector, the private sector is retreating en masse from doing 
business with Putin’s regime. Oil majors BP, Shell and ExxonMobil 
withdrew from ventures in Russia, commodities traders stopped buying 
Russian barrels and in the United States there were bipartisan calls to 
cut off Russian oil imports.

“Nothing is off the table,” President Joe Biden said when asked if he 
would go along with such a move. Economists said Putin will still be 
able to sell oil in Asia, but at deeply discounted prices.

No one knows how instability in the Russian petrostate will play out, 
but it surely will have implications for climate change. U.S. oil and 
gas producers have seized the moment as an opportunity to push for the 
expansion of their export infrastructure as an investment in energy 
security. If they succeed in pushing through these multi-billion dollar 
projects, it will lock in future business—and carbon emissions—for years 
to come. At the same time, environmental activists see an opportunity to 
rally support for redoubling efforts on clean energy...
- -
“There’s this sense in which oil prices in petrostates affect the 
risk-reward calculations,” Hendrix said. “If oil prices were to crash 
into the $20 a barrel range, it would be very difficult for Putin to do 
what he’s doing, because he would be facing a variety of crises on the 
domestic front. On the other hand, when the central coffers are flush, 
and Putin knows that at least in the short term, an invasion is actually 
going to send prices even higher, that might imbue that leader with a 
temporary sort of irrational exuberance.”

The behavior of petrostates is shaped not just by the sheer quantity of 
money that oil and gas brings them, but the way that the cash pours in 
from outside national borders, Colgan said.

When a federal budget is funded by the nation’s own taxpayers, they feel 
empowered to decry misuse of funds, forcing accountability on leaders, 
Colgan argues. So in the United States, a nation born out of a 
revolution sparked in part by outrage over taxation without 
representation, power over federal spending belongs not to the President 
but to Congress, in a process that is—if not smooth—replete with checks 
and balances.

“People have a sense when they’re paying taxes that they own the 
government,” Colgan said. “But when you rely on oil export revenue, that 
relationship flips, where the government starts to feel that it owns the 
people, or can push around the people. And that creates a political 
problem.”

Colgan’s research shows that not all petrostates are aggressive states, 
but they tend to become so if petro-power becomes personalized, or 
concentrated in the hands of a single leader.

“Every Russian can’t help but worry” over the power that oil gives 
Putin, says Mikhail Khordokovsky, the former Russian oil oligarch exiled 
in London.

Khordokovsky knows much about the flow of oil money in Russia; as CEO of 
the now-defunct Yukos oil company, he was once believed to be the 
richest man in Russia. But after he became a Kremlin critic, Putin 
jailed him for a decade. After his release in 2013, Khordokovsky left 
the country and founded the pro-democracy group Open Russia.

In one of the “Explaining Russia” videos he has posted to his website, 
Khordokovsky said Russia oil and gas revenue funds the lavish lifestyles 
of Putin and his allies and supports the apparatus that cracks down on 
dissent.

“Take away the oil revenues,” he said, “and the number of special 
services and police personnel will be reduced to a normal, European 
level. It will be impossible for voters to be spat on, where we see how 
everyday voters are met by force.”

As Putin’s troops gained ground against fierce resistance in Ukraine 
last week, and thousands of anti-war protesters were arrested across 
Russia, Khordokovsky predicted the “decomposition” of Putin’s regime in 
an interview with French television.

Putin “cannot win in Ukraine, even by taking Kyiv and Kharkiv,” 
Khordokovsky said. He predicted that Putin will not be able to contain 
the internal dissent once Russian soldiers return in coffins and the 
population begins to suffer the effects of economic sanctions and 
international isolation.

*De Facto Oil Sanctions*
After Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, the United States and 
other NATO allies avoided striking directly at the oil and gas sector, 
even though they knew that it was the way to do the most damage to 
Putin. They sought to avoid collateral damage to European countries that 
were dependent on Russian gas imports. And they feared shocking the 
global economy with an abrupt cutoff of one of its biggest oil suppliers.

Even while lauding the bravery of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky 
as he rallied his citizens from undisclosed locations in the besieged 
capital of Kyiv, Western leaders declined to heed his call to cut Russia 
off entirely from international financial transactions. The 
trans-Atlantic coalition allowed continued purchases of natural gas by 
Germany, Italy and other nations connected to Russia’s pipelines.

But BP quickly announced it would abandon its 20 percent stake in 
Russia’s giant oil company Rosneft, taking as much as a $25 billion 
write-down, and withdrawing finance and expertise from a giant Arctic 
project that was to be the nation’s largest oil investment since the 
fall of the Soviet Union. Shell announced it would exit its longstanding 
partnership with the Russian gas giant Gazprom, with CEO Ben van Beurden 
calling the Ukraine invasion a “senseless act of aggression.” ExxonMobil 
soon followed, announcing it would leave behind $4 billion in oil and 
gas investments in Russia.

The departures were likely driven not only by concerns about the risks 
of holding investments in the country but also about the reputational 
damage that would have come from maintaining them. The blow was most 
significant for BP—its stake in Rosneft accounted for about half of its 
oil and gas reserves and one-third of its production. Exxon said it 
would “carefully manage” its exit and declined to say how long that 
would take, but its Russian project was not a core part of the company’s 
future plans. For Russia’s oil and gas production, the impacts are not 
clear, but analysts with Raymond James said in a note that any effects 
would be felt over the course of years.

Meanwhile, in the commodities markets where oil and gas futures are 
sold, traders backed away from purchases of oil and petroleum products 
from Russia. “The enablers of oil exports—the banks, insurance 
companies, tanker companies and even multinational oil companies—have 
enacted what amounts to a de facto ban,” Tom Kloza, global head of 
energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service, told The New York 
Times. Perhaps driven more by fear of running afoul of sanctions than by 
moral outrage, the are moves likely to ripple through the commodities 
markets for weeks.

Crude oil, which was selling for less than $80 per barrel at the end of 
2021, jumped to more than $115 per barrel on the world market last week. 
JPMorgan estimated the price could be $185 per barrel by the end of the 
year.

Such soaring prices, ironically, would be a boon to Russia, and would 
help offset the losses it suffers on the global market, where analysts 
predict it will only be able to sell its barrels at deeply discounted 
prices—likely in Asia.

But the impact of the war is complex and still evolving; in the end, the 
upheaval in the markets may not work to Russia’s benefit. The 
consultancy Rystad Energy last week said a prolonged war could cut 
demand for oil by as much as 1 million barrels per day in the Ukraine 
and Russia as economic sanctions and violence constrain economic 
activity and damage infrastructure.
Meanwhile, European Union officials developed a 10-point plan for 
cutting Russian natural gas imports by a third within the coming year, 
and eventually phasing them out altogether. “For decades and decades, 
the European gas supply has been dominated by Russia,” said Fatih Birol, 
executive director of the International Energy Agency, the organization 
that Western nations established after the oil shocks of the 1970s to 
enhance energy security. “What we are experiencing today is Russia using 
its natural gas resources as an economic and political weapon, and this 
is clear to everyone in the world.”
Pundits predicted there would be division in Europe on how to respond to 
Russia, since some countries—notably Germany and Italy—are more 
dependent on Putin for their natural gas supplies than others. But 
Germany immediately announced that it would withdraw approvals for the 
new Nord Stream 2 pipeline, turning the conduit that was to expand 
Russian imports into Europe into a literal $11 billion sunk cost at the 
bottom of the Baltic Sea...
- -
“More than ever, ending our dependency on Russian fossil fuels, and 
fossil fuels in general, is essential,” said Barbara Pompili, France’s 
minister for the ecological transition, who helped develop the proposal. 
“What is at stake is both the need to accelerate our fight against 
climate change and the energy security and independence of the European 
continent.”
*Increased U.S. Energy Exports Won’t Be Good for the Climate *
In the United States, politicians of both parties called for a ban on 
U.S. imports of Russian oil and oil products, which have been growing in 
the past decade and made up about 9 percent of U.S. imports last year. 
But the oil industry may be ahead of Washington in acting. Kelly 
Russell, a Chevron spokeswoman, said the company had halted imports of 
Russian oil and had no plans to resume them “in the foreseeable future.”

But in the United States, much of the political push to lock Putin out 
of the energy markets is coupled with a call to ease the pathway for 
U.S. producers to pick up Russia’s customers, particularly the lucrative 
European market. Fracking has helped the United States surpass Russia as 
the world’s largest natural gas producer, but to export more, the 
industry needs more pipelines and more of the expensive facilities that 
turn gas into super-cooled liquefied natural gas (LNG) so it can be 
shipped overseas.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Energy Committee and 
the key Democrat who has been blocking Biden’s big climate spending 
package, last week announced his proposal for getting the package back 
on track while addressing Russian aggression.

Manchin wants a revamped “Build Back Better” bill to ban U.S. oil 
imports from Russia as well as ramp up all oil, gas and coal production 
as well as provide support for clean energy. He also chaired a hearing 
designed to air concerns he has raised over a new federal policy that 
might constrain new gas pipelines because of their impact on climate 
change. His remarks dovetailed with those of the American Petroleum 
Institute, which last week pushed for an easing up of regulatory 
restraints as an energy security imperative.

In a call with reporters on Thursday, Frank Macchiarola, the institute’s 
senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs, said 
the invasion had brought into focus “many of the points we’ve been 
making for years,” namely that the federal government should remove 
barriers to producing and exporting domestic oil and gas as part of an 
effort to improve security. “The only long-term solution is growing 
America’s energy leadership,” he said.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06032022/putin-russia-ukraine-oil-gas-petrostate/



/[The news archive - looking back on broadcast news/
*March 14, 2012*
"NBC Nightly News" reports on the risk of rising sea levels.
http://youtu.be/DSy2UCNwchM

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