[✔️] May 31, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*May 31, 2022*/

/[ rough hurricane season ahead ] /
*Hurricane Agatha closing in on landfall in southern Mexico*
Agatha is predicted to be just the third landfalling Pacific hurricane 
in the month of May.
by JEFF MASTERS - - MAY 30, 2022
- -
Hurricanes are uncommon in May in the eastern Pacific, with 14 on record 
over the 51-year period 1971-2021. May landfalling hurricanes are very 
rare in the eastern Pacific. NOAA’s hurricane history database lists 
only two: a previous incarnation of Hurricane Agatha on May 24, 1971 (85 
mph winds at landfall), and Hurricane Barbara on May 29, 2013 (80 mph 
winds at landfall). Agatha has the potential to be the strongest 
landfalling Pacific hurricane on record so early in the year.
- -
If Agatha maintains a well-defined circulation and reform in the 
Atlantic, it would retain the name Agatha. However, it currently appears 
that a well-defined circulation will not survive crossing Mexico’s 
rugged terrain, so any storm that formed from Agatha’s remnants will 
likely be named Alex....
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/05/hurricane-agatha-closing-in-on-landfall-in-southern-mexico/


/[  discussions on the future of democracy ] /
*David Wallace-Wells on Climate Change | The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk*
645 views  May 7, 2022  Yascha Mounk and David Wallace-Wells discuss the 
worst, best, and most likely scenarios for the future of climate change.

David Wallace-Wells is one of the foremost journalists covering climate 
change. A writer at The New York Times and a columnist at The New York 
Times Magazine, Wallace-Wells is the author of the best-selling book The 
Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. His New York Magazine article 
of the same name was the most read in the magazine’s history.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Wallace-Wells 
discuss why the worst scenarios for the future of climate outcomes have 
become less likely over the course of the last years; how much damage 
climate change is nevertheless likely to wreak; and what political, 
economic, and technological solutions might help humanity deal with this 
urgent challenge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZdToiObyyw



/[  This is a constitutional question - a very big deal  - all 
presidents are attacking this lawsuit -- reported in Jacobin Magazine..] /
*Biden Is Aiming to Destroy a Historic Climate Change Lawsuit*
*/Juliana v. United States/***is a historic climate change lawsuit 
seeking to establish a constitutional right to a livable planet. But the 
Biden administration has indicated it will fight tooth and nail to 
prevent the lawsuit from ever getting a trial.
Any day now, a federal circuit court is expected to deliver a ruling 
that would allow a historic climate change lawsuit to proceed to trial.
BY JULIA ROCK  - - 05.26.2022
If and when the case moves forward, however, it faces a major obstacle: 
President Joe Biden’s Justice Department.

The lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, was brought by twenty-one young 
plaintiffs in 2015 and seeks to establish a federal, constitutional 
right to a livable planet. If the case is successful, any federal 
policies that enable more fossil fuel development could be challenged as 
unconstitutional.

But the Obama and Trump administrations both vehemently fought the 
lawsuit, and now those close to the case say that Biden’s Department of 
Justice (DOJ) has indicated it will also use every procedural tool at 
its disposal to prevent the lawsuit from ever getting a trial.

“I have asked [them] very directly, if we win this motion, and we can 
move forward with the case, do you intend to go to trial?” Julia Olson, 
the lead plaintiff’s lawyer, told us. “Their response has always been 
something along the lines of, ‘It is our position that the court doesn’t 
have jurisdiction and that this case should never go to trial.’”

Juliana v. United States was ambitious from the start. The plaintiffs 
are asking a federal court system, stacked with right-wing judges backed 
by the fossil fuel industry, to enshrine a constitutional right to a 
livable climate. But the plaintiffs point to what they’ve pulled off 
thus far as evidence it’s achievable.

For example, Oregon district court judge Ann Aiken wrote in a procedural 
ruling on the case in 2016, “I have no doubt that the right to a climate 
system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and 
ordered society.” That was the first time a federal US judge declared 
that such a constitutional right existed...
- -
The case has widespread support from public officials: last year, six 
state attorneys general filed an amicus brief in support of the case, 
and forty-eight congresspeople wrote to the Biden Justice Department in 
support of the plaintiffs. The matter is also beginning to capture 
public attention; the lawsuit is the subject of a newly released Netflix 
documentary, YOUTH v GOV.

After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case in 2020 
because it concluded the plaintiffs lacked standing, the Juliana 
plaintiffs revised their complaint. Now, parties are waiting on a ruling 
from Aiken about whether the revised complaint addresses the Ninth 
Circuit Court’s concerns — a ruling that the plaintiffs’ lawyers expect 
will be favorable, allowing the case to again proceed.

But these same lawyers say they expect the Biden administration to fight 
them every step of the way, just like his presidential predecessors.

“There was zero shift when Biden took office, zero shift from the Trump 
administration,” said Olson.

Developments like this have been eye-opening for the young plaintiffs 
involved — such as Nathan Baring of Fairbanks, Alaska, who joined the 
lawsuit when he was fifteen years old. Baring, now twenty-two and 
recently graduated from college in Minnesota, said his participation in 
the case “helped me grow up really quickly” — and not necessarily in a 
good way.

“I’ve realized climate change isn’t a partisan issue — I don’t mean that 
in a singsongy, ‘everyone is supporting it’ way,” he told us. “I mean 
the exact opposite.” Watching President Barack Obama, then President 
Donald Trump, and now Biden attempt to crush the lawsuit taught Baring a 
valuable lesson: “Just because a Democrat is in office doesn’t mean that 
we suddenly need to stop fighting,” he said. “I stopped putting a kind 
of blind faith in the party label.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
- -
The Supreme Court uses the shadow docket for supposed emergency actions, 
such as death penalty cases, so the matters can avoid the lengthy 
briefing and public hearing processes of typical Supreme Court cases. 
Opinions on shadow docket actions are not published, and the justices’ 
votes are usually not made public. Over the past few years, the court 
has also leaned on the shadow docket to quietly stop climate policy from 
taking effect — including Obama’s signature environmental legislation, 
the Clean Power Plan.

But the Juliana case stands out even among climate litigation: It has 
faced six rulings on the shadow docket — more than any other federal 
lawsuit. Those behind the lawsuit say this development illustrates the 
fossil fuel industry’s capture of American politics.

“The US solicitor general and US Department of Justice have together 
authorized what appears to be the most exceptional of legal tactics more 
often in Juliana v. US than in any other case in history,” said Olson. 
“They have authorized the filing of an apparently unprecedented six 
petitions for writ of mandamus in Juliana v. US, to keep the twenty-one 
youth plaintiffs’ evidence of our government’s unconstitutional 
complicity in causing the climate crisis from ever seeing the light of day.”

The Juliana plaintiffs hoped that with Trump out of the picture, the 
lawsuit might finally see the light of day. But instead, they found that 
during settlement negotiations last fall, the Biden administration was 
just as stubborn in its approach to the case.

“After months of good-faith efforts on the part of the youth plaintiffs 
to meet with representatives of the Biden administration authorized to 
reach a meaningful settlement, the plaintiffs saw no reason to continue 
to pursue settlement discussions until the decision-makers for the 
federal defendants come to the settlement table in good faith,” Olson’s 
cocounsel, Philip Gregory, told us.

Now they are awaiting a ruling from Aiken on their motion to proceed to 
trial.
- -
*What the Government Knew*
While there has been a substantial uptick in climate-related litigation 
over the past five years, the Juliana case is different from other US 
climate lawsuits in at least two substantial ways.

First, while most climate-related litigation targets the fossil fuel 
industry for misleading the public or causing irreversible harm, this 
case names the federal government as the perpetrator. (Of course, fossil 
fuel industry influence plays a key role — just four oil companies spent 
nearly $375 million lobbying the federal government in the past decade.)
In particular, according to the suit, the federal government has limited 
the due process rights of its citizens by subsidizing and passing 
regulations to enable fossil fuel expansion for decades, all while 
knowing about the potentially catastrophic consequences of that development.

Evidence of what the federal government has known about climate change 
for the past five decades is detailed in a legal brief written by Gus 
Speth, an environmental lawyer who cofounded the Natural Resources 
Defense Council and, before that, led the Council on Environmental 
Quality under President Jimmy Carter.

Speth’s brief is littered with examples of government and independent 
scientific reports, dating back from before the Carter administration, 
detailing the evidence that burning fossil fuels was contributing to 
global warming and, if not stopped, would have catastrophic consequences.
For example, President Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency 
(EPA) issued two reports on global warming caused by burning fossil 
fuels. One of the reports — titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?” 
— predicted “an increase in temperatures of 2 degrees celsius by 2040, a 
temperature increase that, in EPA’s assessment, was guaranteed to 
produce substantial climatic consequences, including disastrous 
flooding,” according to Speth’s brief. That report attributed most of 
the warming to burning fossil fuels and suggested ending coal use by the 
year 2000.

Reagan, of course, didn’t make much of this warning. His administration 
worked to dismantle the federal government’s regulatory authority over 
such matters, including slashing and burning environmental laws and 
cutting funding for Carter’s solar energy program. But it wasn’t just 
Reaganites who ignored the warnings of scientists and continued to 
exacerbate the problem.

“Until Biden, every Democratic administration — not to mention the 
Republican ones — was enthusiastic about fossil fuels,” Speth told us. 
“We should never think that during those forty years, from 1980 to 2020, 
that the Democrats were on the right track in terms of getting out of 
the fossil fuel business.”

Speth pointed out that Carter had a renewable energy goal and spoke 
about the need for the United States to transition away from fossil 
fuels to achieve energy independence amid the 1979 oil crisis. Now, more 
than forty years later, observers are saying the same thing in the wake 
of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has similarly caused a massive 
spike in energy prices.
*In the Public Trust*
The second way the Juliana case stands out is that the plaintiffs are 
arguing that the federal government’s refusal to address global warming 
is in violation of the US Constitution. Most climate cases instead argue 
that environmental threats violate particular legal statutes, such as 
the Clean Air Act or Endangered Species Act.

The plaintiffs’ unique approach is based on the idea that the government 
has a more general duty to protect natural resources — a concept that 
rests on legal principles developed by Mary Wood, a professor at the 
University of Oregon law school.

Wood has argued that the government has an obligation to ensure a 
livable planet because of the “public trust doctrine,” a common-law 
principle that the US Supreme Court declared exists at the state level 
in a seminal 1892 case involving the Illinois Central Railroad company. 
The public trust doctrine stipulates that the government is the steward 
of the nation’s natural resources, upon which life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness depend.

Invoking the public trust doctrine in this case is a reflection of the 
gravity of the climate disaster, said Wood.

“There’s no way statutory law alone can solve this climate crisis,” Wood 
told us. “They’re too narrow. They could do something if they were 
enforced, but the administration has not enforced them well over time.”

Instead, according to Wood, enshrining the public trust doctrine in 
environmental case law could form a constitutional basis for requiring 
the government to rapidly reduce carbon emissions.

As Wood noted in a journal article on the matter, “In this framework, 
survival resources remain quintessential public property belonging to 
posterity, and government’s clear responsibility is to manage such 
ecological wealth strictly for the endurance of society itself, for the 
benefit of both present and future citizens — not for the advantage of 
private parties or profiteers who may seek to despoil the trust and 
appropriate it for their own purposes.”

Baring, the young plaintiff from Fairbanks, is already seeing the 
impacts of his government violating that public trust. He explained that 
the Chinook winds, which carry warm air from the mainland United States 
up north through Canada and Alaska, have become more destructive due to 
climate change and are increasingly wreaking havoc on his hometown. This 
winter, the winds caused such dramatic temperature swings in Alaska that 
the state Department of Transportation referred to the event as 
“Icemageddon.”

“The temperature can go from below zero to above freezing in a day, and 
then it will rain, and refreeze overnight,” he said. “There will usually 
be wind accompanying it, and when the trees are already weighed down by 
snow, all it needs is a forty-mile-per-hour wind and then trees fall on 
power lines and roads are impassable. Roofs cave in because of the weight.”

When asked about the future — the “posterity” that Wood deploys in her 
legal arguments — Baring shifted the conversation back to the present. 
He graduated from college earlier this month and is returning to Alaska 
to continue the climate fight.

“There’s so much dualism, especially in my generation, because we don’t 
have very much power and we are watching everything be gambled away,” he 
said. “But I always come back to this moment and think, ‘Well, what’s my 
obligation to change the trajectory, right now?’ This is our 
generation’s work to do.”
https://jacobinmag.com/2022/05/biden-climate-change-juliana-case-lawsuit-doj 




/[  disinformation analysis - looking at a subtle propaganda message -- 
this is a radical video rant ]/
*No, Kurzgesagt, We WON'T Fix Climate Change - The Danger of Fake Optimism*
25,394 views  May 29, 2022  A rebuttal to Kurzgesagt's misleading video 
about 'staying hopeful' on climate change.
We WILL Fix Climate Change! By Kurzgesagt: https://youtu.be/LxgMdjyw8uw
Support me on Patreon: https://patreon.com/BadEmpanada
Twitch stream: https://twitch.tv/BadEmpanada
Follow my Instagram: https://instagram.com/BadEmpanada
Become a member on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/BadEmpanada/join
One-time donations: https://ko-fi.com/BadEmpanada
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KQYNtPl7V4/
/

/
/


/[  Pre-Market innovation - (the seed of a market)  paying for CO2 
removal - new and voluntary //carbon dioxide removal (CDR) - audio 
interview //] /
*Volts podcast: Nan Ransohoff on how (and why) Stripe is kick-starting 
the carbon-removal market*
Nearly a billion dollars available to anyone who can take tons out of 
circulation.
David Roberts
In 2019, the payments company Stripe announced that it would spend at 
least $1 million a year on verified, permanent carbon dioxide removal 
(CDR). The response was intense, not only from those working on CDR, but 
from customers, organizations, and companies that wanted to follow suit.

There’s a lot of money and good will floating around these days that 
isn’t quite sure how to have the biggest climate impact. Stripe had 
assembled a group of experts to scrutinize CDR technologies and 
companies. Why not just let Stripe invest the money?

Fast-forward a few years: Stripe has now unveiled a nearly 
billion-dollar pot of CDR money ($925 million, to be exact). A new 
Stripe-owned company called Frontier will pool money from Stripe, 
partners like Alphabet, Meta, and Shopify, and thousands of Stripe 
customers who donate a small portion of their transaction costs and make 
it available to CDR contenders.

Frontier is offering what’s called an “advance market commitment,” a 
guarantee that if companies can figure out ways to verifiably and 
permanently draw down carbon, no matter the initial price, there will be 
buyers. This enables companies to get financing and start deploying 
projects...

        Nan Ransohoff
        @nanransohoff
        Today, I’m excited to launch Frontier—an advance market
        commitment (AMC) that will buy $925M+ of permanent carbon
        removal by 2030. Build and we will buy:
        frontierclimate.com

        Stripe at stripe
        Introducing Frontier—a $925M advance market commitment (AMC) to
        accelerate carbon removal. https://t.co/DbXBC7AEVb It’s funded
        by Stripe, @Google, @Shopify, @Meta, @McKinsey, and the
        thousands of businesses using Stripe Climate.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-nan-ransohoff-on-how?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNjgzNTA5LCJwb3N0X2lkIjo1Mjg1OTQ3NywiXyI6IlpzaHhnIiwiaWF0IjoxNjUxMjUzNDY5LCJleHAiOjE2NTEyNTcwNjksImlzcyI6InB1Yi0xOTMwMjQiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.LlgKNbccAAdgdZTMo9hPzkC4nVNpmlYKbIyhjt0kDag&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&s=r#play



/[  Audio opinion -- //new book, The Intersectional Environmentalist -- 
56 mins ]/
*DISMANTLING WHITE SUPREMACY TO ADDRESS THE CLIMATE CRISIS*
April 29th, 2022
We know that the climate crisis doesn’t affect everyone equally. A 
fundamental injustice of the climate crisis is that those who have 
contributed to it least are being impacted the most. This inequality 
will only be exacerbated as humanity continues to cause global 
temperatures to rise.

Hop Hopkins, director of organizational transformation at The Sierra 
Club, doesn’t mince words when discussing the roots of white supremacy 
in the climate crisis:

    “Climate change is caused by white supremacy… We’re in this global
    mess because we have declared parts of our planet to be disposable,
    right. And for such a long time that disposability and extraction
    was happening in places that weren’t majority white that folks could
    escape from. And so, the cumulative impact of that disregard for
    those environments and those peoples meant that now the whole planet
    is a wasteland so no one is going to escape the detrimental impacts
    of climate change. And so, as we head deep into the climate crisis
    what we need to understand is that there are those among us who
    might promote fear and anger and who will seek to divide people
    based on their identities. And a lot of suffering is gonna take
    place in the US, as well as elsewhere. And when people suffer, they
    often look to find someone to blame for that suffering. Usually
    those are marginalized people based on their race or their
    immigration status.”

In her new book, The Intersectional Environmentalist, Leah Thomas 
presents a new model for working together to solve interconnected 
crises, tracing the origins of the ecofeminism, environmental justice 
and other movements to guide a new kind of work that centers the voices 
and experiences of Black, Indigenous and people of color.

This is how Thomas defines intersectional environmentalism:

    “I think intersectional environmentalism is more of a lens to think
    about environmental issues and the goal is to be environmental
    justice, land back, those sorts of things, etc. So, I would say
    thinking about environmentalism through a lens of diversity and
    inclusion will naturally kind of pivot you to understanding and
    learning about movements like land back. Learning about the history
    of the environmental justice movement. Because when you’re thinking
    about the protection of both people and planet and the most
    vulnerable people then it’ll naturally kind of guide you to those
    sorts of other movements.”

When thinking about how she came to intersectional work, Thomas 
reminisces, “I bought the environmentalist dream through and through. I 
was a park ranger in the middle of Kansas and like, you know, I was a 
conservation girl. So, I was frustrated at times because I made a lot of 
great friends along the way and it made me question those friendships 
because I would go to protest with them and the reason I mentioned 
salmon so much is actually because I was one of the last environmental 
protest I went to was a protest to save salmon. And I went with like 
hundreds of coworkers and local activists that I knew and then when it 
came to racial justice movements they weren’t there. Many of them were 
not there. And when I would talk to them about it they would say, you 
know, this is more of a racial issue; I’m an environmentalist. And for 
years I kept hearing some sort of iteration of that, you know, I'm an 
environmentalist, the people thing, the social thing, the human rights 
thing, that's not really my thing. So, I think that was the frustration 
of just it has to be your thing how can you care about the earth and not 
the people on the earth? That sounds silly. So, I had a bit of a moment 
and never stopped talking.”
https://www.climateone.org/audio/dismantling-white-supremacy-address-climate-crisis 




/[  A nice, simple video talks about the biggest issue of all  ] /
*Why it's hard to care about climate change*
Mar 18, 2022  Bringing up climate change is one tried and true way to 
ruin a dinner party — and leave people feeling helpless and apathetic. 
But it doesn't have to be that way, if we change how we communicate. So 
let's talk, about how we talk, about climate change.

Reporter: Amanda Coulson-Drasner
Camera: Chris Caurla
Cutter: Amanda Coulson-Drasner
Graphics: Frederik Willmann
Supervising editors: Kiyo Dörrer, Joanna Gottschalk, Malte Rohwer-Kahlman

We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't 
need to be this way. Our channel explores the shift towards an 
eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with 
climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do 
and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly 
global look at how to get us out of this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK7g6pgaC7I



/[The news archive - looking back at the famous journalist ]/
/*May 31, 1992*/
The Boston Globe's Ross Gelbspan reports:
"Many researchers believe that the most pressing global environmental 
problem is also the hardest to document and the most controversial -- 
the potential for a catastrophic increase in the planet's temperature. 
Such scientists as Stephen H. Schneider of the National Center for 
Atmospheric Research predict that average temperatures, driven up by an 
exponential buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in 
the upper atmosphere, will rise by 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 
2050. By comparison, temperatures were only 4 degrees lower at the end 
of the great Ice Age 10,000 years ago.

"While this 'greenhouse effect' is mostly due to the burning of oil and 
coal in power plants, factories and automobiles, its effects are 
multiplied by the dizzying rate at which carbon-dioxide-absorbing trees 
are being cut down in the tropical rain forests of Brazil, Borneo and 
Indonesia, as well as in dry forests in temperate latitudes. In Brazil 
alone, an area of rain forest as large as the state of Maine is leveled 
each year to make way for farming or economic development.

"As a result, some researchers now expect that the amount of 
heat-trapping carbon dioxide, which has held steady at about 300 parts 
per million throughout most of human history, will double in the next 50 
years.

"That prospect has scientists depicting a range of dire scenarios 
occurring within the lifetime of today's children."

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/boston/doc/294658433.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=May+31%2C+1992&author=Ross+Gelbspan%2C+Globe+Staff&pub=Boston+Globe+%28pre-1997+Fulltext%29&edition=&startpage=&desc=Racing+to+an+environmental+precipice+Fear+of+future+on+deteriorating+planet+sets+agenda+for+Rio+de+Janeiro+summit



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