[✔️] May 12 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Richard Pauli Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Thu May 12 08:09:13 EDT 2022 

/*May 12, 2022*/


/[ strong opinion from a sharp journalist at The Atlantic ] /
*The Democrats Really Are That Dense About Climate Change*
The party doesn’t even seem to realize that it’s blowing a 
once-in-a-decade chance to pass meaningful climate legislation.

By Robinson Meyer
MIAMI BEACH, Fla.—On Monday night, I saw one of the most 
despair-inducing performances about the hope of climate action that I’ve 
witnessed in years.

Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, took the stage here at the Aspen 
Ideas: Climate festival to discuss what congressional Democrats are 
doing on climate change. Her remarks were more effective as a litany of 
missed opportunities. Susan Goldberg, recently the editor in chief of 
National Geographic, now a dean at Arizona State University, asked the 
speaker point-blank whether Democrats were going to pass climate 
legislation, and Pelosi all but shrugged. The House has already passed a 
roughly $2 trillion bill containing President Joe Biden’s climate 
priorities, she said. Now it was in the Senate’s hands. If it happened 
to get a bill back to her, the House would pass it.

Missing was any sense that this legislation is a make-or-break moment 
for the broader Democratic caucus. Gone was any suggestion that if 
Democrats fail to pass a bill this term, then America’s climate 
commitment under the Paris Agreement will be out of reach, and worse 
heat waves, larger wildfires, and damaging famines across the country 
and around the world within the next decade and a half will be all but 
assured.

Pelosi did not seem to understand, really, why Congress needed to pass a 
climate law this session. (She seemed to blame the fossil-fuel industry 
for the current Congress’s inaction.) She repeatedly justified climate 
action by saying it was “for the children.” This became the rhetorical 
leitmotif of her remarks—Congress had to act “for the children.” 
Explaining why she wanted more women in Congress, she said that they had 
to learn to “throw a punch—for the children.” That line was how she closed.

Aside from the Helen Lovejoy–esque nature of this appeal, it is 
factually wrong. Climate action was “for the children” in the 1990s. 
“We’re not doing this for the children,” Kate Larsen, an energy analyst 
at the Rhodium Group, told me after the event. “We’re doing this for 
us!” Heat waves hot enough to cook human flesh are already happening 
this month; they will become more common over the coming decades, 
striking multiple times a year. Unbearable droughts, sea-level rise so 
high as to break levees, and unpredictable famines will characterize 
life. Most of the world’s coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef, 
will undergo bleaching every few years, meaning the water will be so hot 
that the coral will eject their symbiotic microorganisms into the water, 
starving themselves in the process.
The speech seemed to punctuate the collapse of climate politics over the 
past year. During the campaign, Biden described climate change as one of 
the country’s four major overlapping crises. Yet his administration 
seems to be sleepwalking toward inaction. Five months ago, Senator Joe 
Manchin, a Democrat of West Virginia, killed Biden’s Build Back Better 
bill after the White House repeatedly ignored his attempts to pare it 
down. Since then, Democrats have been stuck in limbo, with Manchin 
laying out some of his terms for a replacement bill, and Democrats 
neglecting to put together a new bill reflecting those terms. It now 
seems likely that Democrats will lose control of Congress with only a 
bipartisan infrastructure bill to show for their trouble.

Then they face overwhelming odds. Because of the geographic 
apportionment of their supporters, Democrats can win 51 percent of votes 
cast in the 2022 and 2024 elections and still lose eight Senate seats. I 
have heard estimates that the party must win eight points more than 
Republicans to pick up a Senate seat. Unless inflation abates, such an 
outcome will be so unlikely that it’s essentially impossible, consigning 
Democrats to minority status for years to come. Republicans, by 
contrast, have a plausible path to more than 60 seats, allowing them to 
pass legislation over that institution’s filibuster.

At the same time, the Biden administration could soon lose its ability 
to regulate climate change at all. The Supreme Court could restrict the 
Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases 
this term. It could also curtail Chevron deference, a legal doctrine 
that gives executive agencies more freedom to operate when the 
underlying law is unclear. In the past, both concepts have been central 
to Democratic climate-rule making. Both could be gone by 2023.
When reminded of this bleak outlook, climate progressives point to 
corporate action and the stock market, which both seemed to be moving in 
their direction. During the 2010s, most oil companies failed to turn a 
profit, validating activists’ demands that institutions should divest of 
fossil-fuel stock. But the markets have turned since the pandemic began. 
Oil-company stocks are some of the best performing of the past year. 
Funds that emphasize ESG, or “environmental, social, governance,” a 
vague category that covers such divergent topics as a company’s carbon 
footprint, how many women it has on its board, or how favorable it is to 
organized labor, have also underperformed in the recent market rout. At 
another conference here last month, the libertarian venture capitalist 
Peter Thiel attacked ESG as “a hate factory” and compared it to the 
“Chinese Communist Party.” This week, he backed a fund that would take 
intentionally anti-progressive stances.

Historically, progressives haven’t been too fond of ESG either, seeing 
it as a form of Wall Street greenwashing (or worse). But on climate, 
specifically, it has worked in their favor, allowing managers to take a 
less-than-direct approach to shareholder value and push forward 
loss-leading initiatives to reduce carbon pollution.

What all of this means is that, the next time a climate-skeptical 
president takes office, advocates will have fewer tools to constrain 
their behavior than last time. And they will have no future to point to: 
If Democrats couldn’t pass a climate bill in 2009 or 2022, why should 
anyone have any hope that they’ll try to do it again, or be able to?

Since 2017, a surge of global concern—much of it triggered by revulsion 
at President Donald Trump and by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change’s 1.5 Celsius report—signaled a new era of climate action. That 
tide is ebbing. American climate advocates may have almost nothing to 
show for it.

Robinson Meyer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the 
newsletter The Weekly Planet.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/05/nancy-pelosi-democrats-climate-change-bill/629822/

- -

/[ big whup from Congress ]/
*Dozens of lawmakers sign letter supporting an increase in pay for 
federal firefighters**
*
A letter signed by a bipartisan group of 28 lawmakers urged that steps 
be taken to avert critical staffing shortages in the wildland 
firefighting workforce. The document was sent May 10 to the Director of 
the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Secretaries of the 
Departments of  Agriculture and the Interior.*
*
https://wildfiretoday.com/2022/05/11/dozens-of-lawmakers-sign-letter-supporting-an-increase-in-pay-for-federal-firefighters/




/[  What else is there to say? ] /
*Chomsky: To Tackle Climate, Our Morality Must Catch Up With Our 
Intelligence*
- -
One response that has been seriously proposed, and cannot be dismissed, 
is that higher intelligence has developed innumerable times, but has 
proven to be lethal: It discovered the means for self-annihilation but 
did not develop the moral capacity to prevent it. Perhaps that is even 
an inherent feature of what we call “higher intelligence.”...
- -
https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-to-tackle-climate-our-morality-must-catch-up-with-our-intelligence/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=0193bfb3-6ac6-4949-b286-c55b1ee2914b


/[  Carbon Bombs ]/
*US fracking boom could tip world to edge of climate disaster*
140bn metric tons of planet-heating gases could be unleashed if fossil 
fuel extraction plans get green light, analysis shows

by Nina Lakhani in Colorado and Oliver Milman in New York
May 11, 2022
The fate of the vast quantities of oil and gas lodged under the shale, 
mud and sandstone of American drilling fields will in large part 
determine whether the world retains a liveable climate. And the US, the 
world’s largest extractor of oil, is poised to unleash these fossil 
fuels in spectacular volumes.

Planned drilling projects across US land and waters will release 140bn 
metric tons of planet-heating gases if fully realised, an analysis 
shared with the Guardian has found.

The study, to be published in the Energy Policy journal this month, 
found emissions from these oil and gas “carbon bomb” projects were four 
times larger than all of the planet-heating gases expelled globally each 
year, placing the world on track for disastrous climate change.

The plans include conventional drilling and fracking spanning the deep 
waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the foothills of the Front Range in 
Colorado and the mountainous Appalachian region. But the heart is the 
Permian basin, a geological formation 250 miles wide that sits under the 
mostly flat terrain of west Texas and New Mexico.

One lobe of this formation, known as the Delaware basin, is predicted to 
emit 27.8bn metric tons of carbon during the lifetime of planned 
drilling, while another, known as the Midland basin, will potentially 
unleash 16.6bn tons of emissions.
It means the US, the centre of the world’s addiction to oil and gas, 
will play an outsized role in the heatwaves, droughts and floods that 
will impact people around the planet...
- -
Venegas said: “I worry about dying from climate disasters like fires and 
floods and get anxiety attacks if I think about what the wells are doing 
to my kids, it’s too scary.”

Around the most heavily drilled areas, the fear and anxiety about the 
unknown dangers coupled with a sense of impotence have led to high 
levels of stress and reported mental health problems including depression.

“The uncertainty and powerlessness people feel has a corrosive impact,” 
said Stephanie Malin, an associate professor of sociology at Colorado 
State University. “Plans to continue with fossil fuel extraction hangs 
on the industry’s pivot from climate denialism to the individual 
responsibility narrative that makes people feel hopeless and disempowered.”

A doctors’ group revealed this year how the industry had hidden the use 
of PFAS – a class of toxins also known as forever chemicals – in more 
than 12,000 wells by claiming them as trade secrets.

After years of campaigning by grassroots activists, regulations have 
gradually been tightened, and in March the Colorado Oil and Gas 
Conservation Commission made history by denying its first permit – 
temporarily halting the state’s largest producer’s proposal to build 33 
wells close to 62 homes...
- -
The state’s much maligned roadmap to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 
allows for oil and gas drilling to increase substantially by 2030.

And there are signs the state’s ties to oil and gas will continue long 
into the future: the Wattenberg field in Weld is the fourth-largest US 
oilfield and ninth-largest gas field based on proved reserves. There are 
about 3,000 unused fracking permits and operators keep applying – and 
getting – more, as evolving technology allows companies to access shale 
oil and gas that were previously inaccessible, according to Kate 
Christensen from the nonprofit 350 Colorado...

- -
The US’s goliath output of oil is partly a consequence of the global oil 
shocks of the 1970s, when the country vowed to become more 
self-dependent for its fossil fuel supply.

The US is now a net exporter of oil, although this production has come 
at a huge cost to the climate – not only from the oil burned but also 
the enormous amount of greenhouse gases vented directly by wells. The 
explosion in drilling in the Permian has even triggered a spate of 
earthquakes in Texas.

Todd Staples, the president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, said 
the intensity of methane emissions from the Permian basin had fallen 
even as production ramped up, and that oil from the region was extracted 
in a cleaner way than in other countries.

“No one in the world produces the oil and natural gas needed to power 
modern life in a more environmentally responsible way than American oil 
and natural gas producers,” he said. “Now is the time for America to 
develop a forward-looking energy plan that recognises the importance of 
a strong domestic oil and natural gas industry that can provide the 
energy and security America and our allies need while advancing climate 
progress.”
- -
There is significant political pressure to increase domestic drilling in 
response to the Russia-Ukraine war, which has caused global oil prices 
to soar and the US to ban Russian oil imports. Large oil companies are 
considering an expansion in drilling should the high oil price linger.

“We are wholly dependent upon oil and the crisis in Ukraine shows us 
that dependency is freighted with many costs, including national 
security,” Ori said. “We can’t drill our way out of this problem. It’s 
been a good reminder that we are the world’s top oil producer and that 
still has not insulated us from this crisis.

“We have an oil-based system, so to change that we need to reduce the 
demand for oil. Europe is moving forward with targets on clean energy, 
and hopefully this crisis will give a big push to that in the US too.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/11/us-fracking-climate-fossil-fuel-gases

- -

/[  call it a s//hort-sighted crazy business venture  ] /
*Revealed: the ‘carbon bombs’ set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown*
Exclusive: Oil and gas majors are planning scores of vast projects that 
threaten to shatter the 1.5C climate goal. If governments do not act, 
these firms will continue to cash in as the world burns
by Damian Carrington and Matthew Taylor
- -
The world’s biggest fossil fuel firms are quietly planning scores of 
“carbon bomb” oil and gas projects that would drive the climate past 
internationally agreed temperature limits with catastrophic global 
impacts, a Guardian investigation shows.

The exclusive data shows these firms are in effect placing 
multibillion-dollar bets against humanity halting global heating. Their 
huge investments in new fossil fuel production could pay off only if 
countries fail to rapidly slash carbon emissions, which scientists say 
is vital.

The oil and gas industry is extremely volatile but extraordinarily 
profitable, particularly when prices are high, as they are at present. 
ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron have made almost $2tn in profits in 
the past three decades, while recent price rises led BP’s boss to 
describe the company as a “cash machine”.

The lure of colossal payouts in the years to come appears to be 
irresistible to the oil companies, despite the world’s climate 
scientists stating in February that further delay in cutting fossil fuel 
use would mean missing our last chance “to secure a liveable and 
sustainable future for all”. As the UN secretary general, António 
Guterres, warned world leaders in April: “Our addiction to fossil fuels 
is killing us.”

Details of the projects being planned are not easily accessible but an 
investigation published in the Guardian shows:

    -- The fossil fuel industry’s short-term expansion plans involve the
    start of oil and gas projects that will produce greenhouse gases
    equivalent to a decade of CO2 emissions from China, the world’s
    biggest polluter.

    -- These plans include 195 carbon bombs, gigantic oil and gas
    projects that would each result in at least a billion tonnes of CO2
    emissions over their lifetimes, in total equivalent to about 18
    years of current global CO2 emissions. About 60% of these have
    already started pumping.

    - - The dozen biggest oil companies are on track to spend $103m a
    day for the rest of the decade exploiting new fields of oil and gas
    that cannot be burned if global heating is to be limited to well
    under 2C.

    - - The Middle East and Russia often attract the most attention in
    relation to future oil and gas production but the US, Canada and
    Australia are among the countries with the biggest expansion plans
    and the highest number of carbon bombs. The US, Canada and Australia
    also give some of the world’s biggest subsidies for fossil fuels per
    capita.

The dozen biggest oil companies are on track to spend every day for the 
rest of the decade
- -
The shift from burning oil and gas cannot happen overnight, and a 
declining amount will still need to be burned during the transition to a 
net zero emissions global economy in 2050. The question is whether 
companies and governments are moving fast enough...
- -
Would strong, immediate action lead to a financial crash, as billions of 
dollars are wiped off the value of some of the world’s biggest 
companies? Or will more steady but concerted action wean us off fossil 
fuels rapidly, close the oil companies’ cash machine and lead us into a 
clean energy future with a liveable climate? Only time will tell. But, 
unlike oil and gas, time is in very short supply.

“The world is in a race against time,” said Guterres. “It is time to end 
fossil fuel subsidies and stop the expansion of oil and gas exploration.”
- -
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2022/may/11/fossil-fuel-carbon-bombs-climate-breakdown-oil-gas




/[ Swept away today - dramatic and tragic] /
*Another Outer Banks house collapses; sea level rise due to climate 
change likely to make problems worse*
May 10, 2022
NAGS HEAD, N.C. — As the Outer Banks experiences beach erosion, rip 
currents and overwash, which closed a segment of N.C. Highway 12 on 
Tuesday, another seaside house has collapsed.

The Cape Hatteras National Seashore said an unoccupied house collapsed 
at 24235 Ocean Drive in Rodanthe, prompting officials to close that 
segment of the beach to protect people from the large debris.

Earlier Tuesday morning, the state Department of Transportation made the 
announcement that N.C. 12 between Oregon Inlet and Rodanthewould be 
closed through the day after high tide caused the main Outer Banks 
thoroughfare to became covered in sand and water.
- -
NAGS HEAD, N.C. — As the Outer Banks experiences beach erosion, rip 
currents and overwash, which closed a segment of N.C. Highway 12 on 
Tuesday, another seaside house has collapsed.

The Cape Hatteras National Seashore said an unoccupied house collapsed 
at 24235 Ocean Drive in Rodanthe, prompting officials to close that 
segment of the beach to protect people from the large debris.

Earlier Tuesday morning, the state Department of Transportation made the 
announcement that N.C. 12 between Oregon Inlet and Rodanthewould be 
closed through the day after high tide caused the main Outer Banks 
thoroughfare to became covered in sand and water.
- -
A house nearby collapsed earlier this year, in February. Volunteers and 
crews worked for weeks to clean up debris that floated or blew 7 miles 
down the beach, but remnants of the home are still being found months later.

The Cape Hatteras National Seashore warned more homes could collapse 
this week as a coastal low impacts N.C. beaches.

"It's a combination of climate change (rising seas) and the strong 
coastal low," said WRAL meteorologist Aimee Wilmoth. "The coastal low is 
bringing in onshore winds and causing the high tides to be even higher."...
https://www.wral.com/another-outer-banks-house-collapses-sea-level-rise-due-to-climate-change-likely-to-make-problems-worse/20274805/


/[  FEWS Net - //Food Assistance Outlook Brief //-- data ] /
*Food Assistance Outlook Brief, May 2022*
May 2022
This brief summarizes FEWS NET’s most forward-looking analysis of 
projected emergency food assistance needs in FEWS NET coverage 
countries. The projected size of each country’s acutely food insecure 
population is compared to last year and the recent five-year average. 
Countries where external emergency food assistance needs are anticipated 
are identified. Projected lean season months highlighted in red indicate 
either an early start or an extension to the typical lean season. 
Additional information is provided for countries with large food 
insecure populations, an expectation of high severity, or where other 
key issues warrant additional discussion.
https://fews.net/sites/default/files/documents/reports/May%202022_FAOB_Public.pdf
https://fews.net/global/food-assistance-outlook-brief/may-2022



/[The news archive of the peak ethical moment of Sen John McCain - 
preserved in video ]/
/*May 12, 2008*/

GOP presidential candidate John McCain lays out his plans to address 
climate change in Portland, Oregon. The speech receives a tepid 
reaction, as McCain is widely faulted for adopting an energy plan that 
would not reduce carbon emissions enough to avoid the worst impacts of 
climate change.

http://youtu.be/JZsmQzOT1oo

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2008/05/12/172199/mccain-climate-speech/


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