[✔️] August 5, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Moral adjustment, Hagens on futures, Canada's wildfires. Economic collapse, 1996 science martyr

Sat Aug 5 07:40:09 EDT 2023

/*August 5*//*, 2023*/

/[ Over-exuberant leader makes a moral adjustment ]/
*Harvard environmental law professor resigns from ConocoPhillips after 
months of scrutiny*
Jody Freeman was a board member at the fossil fuel firm for over 10 
years and received more than $350,000 a year in salary and stocks

Dharna Noor
Fri 4 Aug 2023

Harvard environmental law professor resigns from ConocoPhillips after 
months of scrutiny
Jody Freeman was a board member at the fossil fuel firm for over 10 
years and received more than $350,000 a year in salary and stocks

Jody Freeman, a renowned environmental lawyer at Harvard University, has 
stepped down from a highly-paid role at the oil and gas giant 
ConocoPhillips, following months of public scrutiny and pressure from 
climate activists.

“I’ve stepped off the ConocoPhillips board to focus on my research at 
Harvard and make space for some new opportunities,” she wrote on her 
website on Thursday.

Freeman, founding director of Harvard’s environmental and energy law 
program and former advisor to President Obama’s administration, served 
as a board member at the fossil fuel company for more than a decade.

She received more than $350,000 annually in combined salary and stocks 
for the position at ConocoPhillips, a firm that has been in the 
spotlight this year over the Biden administration’s controversial 
approval of its massive $8bn drilling project in Alaska, known as the 
Willow project.

In April, reporting from the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative 
Journalism revealed that Freeman lobbied the US Securities and Exchange 
Commission (SEC) on behalf of the company, intensifying criticism from 
climate activists including Harvard students.

Emails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act indicate she helped 
set up a meeting between company top brass and an SEC director as the 
agency worked to write new regulations on companies’ emissions disclosure.

In correspondence with her then Harvard colleague John Coates, who was 
preparing to become acting director at the SEC, Freeman praised two 
high-level ConocoPhillips officials. “They are hugely knowledgeable, 
thoughtful, and interested in solving problems – I can promise that you 
will get high value from this engagement,” she said of the officials.

Freeman added: “ConocoPhillips is widely recognized as the oil and gas 
industry leader on climate related disclosure.” She did not state her 
affiliation with the agency in the email, in potential violation of 
Harvard policy. Freeman denied having initiated the meeting, insisting 
her role at the oil and gas company was “common knowledge” and that her 
actions were compliant with Harvard’s conflict-of-interests rules.

Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, a student-led activist group who provided 
the emails to the Guardian and Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 
welcomed Freeman’s resignation.

“Jody Freeman’s resignation from ConocoPhillips shows the power of 
well-informed public pressure,” said Phoebe Barr, an organizer with 
Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, noting that the organization has published 
research about industry links for years.

Freeman had previously come under scrutiny from climate and campus 
activists when a Harvard Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability 
awarded Freeman a major research grant, the Guardian reported in April. 
The institute had pledged to eschew funding from, or partnerships with, 
“any company that does not share the goal of moving our global economy 
away from fossil fuels”.

The move prompted widespread outrage on Harvard’s campus. A 
climate-focused group of professors sent a letter to Harvard’s 
president-elect and vice-provost for climate and sustainability 
questioning the decision, and students held a protest calling on Harvard 
to fire Freeman.

Regina LaRocque, a professor at Harvard Medical School who signed the 
faculty letter, applauded Freeman’s resignation.

“Kudos to her for doing the right thing,” she said.

A 2021 analysis by Carbon Tracker, an independent research group, found 
that ConocoPhillips’ climate plans were less robust than most other 
fossil fuel giants’. During Freeman’s board tenure, ConocoPhillips 
expanded its fossil fuel production, according to the Washington Post.
On her website, Freeman said leaving ConocoPhillips will allow her to 
prioritize her work on Harvard’s environmental law program. “I’m also 
excited about the prospect of writing a book on our environmental 
challenges and how we can make faster progress,” she wrote.

She said she did not regret her longterm board membership.

“I learned a lot from my decade-long board service, think I made a 
positive difference, and am glad I did it,” she wrote.

Jake Lowe, director of Fossil Free Research, an advocacy group focused 
on eliminating oil and gas company funding for academic endeavors, said 
the news shows that “organizing works”.

“Jody Freeman’s resignation from the ConocoPhillips board is a testament 
to the tireless efforts of student organizers to expose and dismantle 
big oil’s toxic influence on Harvard,” he said.

Hannah Story Brown, senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project, 
said student activists “deserve major credit” for pushing Freeman to 
leave her lucrative role, but noted that many other high-profile 
academics, including at Harvard, have similar corporate roles which 
raise questions about conflicts of interests.

“She’s a symptom of a larger issue,” Brown said.

Student activists are intent on taking on the problem at large, said Barr.

“We will continue our work to expose and dismantle the ties Harvard 
retains to the fossil fuel industry, through individual conflicts of 
interest, research funding policies, career recruitment and more,” she 
said. “Our organizing won’t stop until Harvard is truly fossil free.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/04/harvard-professor-resigns-conocophillips-board

/[  lectures video -- 28 min the 4 options - Green growth, Mordor, Great 
simplification and Mad Max. This is an important presentation ] /
*Just Stop Oil !? Part 3 - 10 Pathways to Post-Growth | Frankly #40*
Nate HagensAug 4, 2023  #natehagens #thegreatsimplification
In Part 3 of this Frankly Series, Nate (just after watching the movie 
Oppenheimer!) breaks down the logic of how we COULD arrive at a 
post-growth future. Our global situation is complex and not static - IF 
we somehow are able to shrink the global economic output (which would 
imply significantly less oil use) we first have to navigate ‘the 4 
Horsemen of the 2020s’. Nate outlines 10 possible avenues for how this 
could happen, not as a prescription but as a description of various 
possible scenarios. The implications of the complexity of our global 
systems means a path to a world without our current dependence on growth 
will not be an easy one. Yet understanding these hurdles between our 
current situation and an eventual post-growth future is essential to 
shifting the initial conditions of such a global transformation towards 
‘better-than-the-default’ outcomes. How do impending and converging 
risks narrow our options for ways to move towards a different global 
system - and can we manage to protect the things that make life worth 
living?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhOhfRrvYI0

/[ If wildfire was a country, it would be the 4th largest emitter of 
carbon ]/
*Fighting Canada’s Unending Fires*
New York Times Podcasts
Aug 4, 2023  The Daily
The wildfires sweeping Canada have become the largest in its modern 
history. Across the country, 30 million acres of forest have burned — 
three times as much land as in the worst American fire in the past 50 years.

The scale has forced an international response and a re-evaluation of 
how the world handles wildfires.

Firefighters on the front lines discuss the challenges they face, and 
David Wallace-Wells, a climate columnist for The Times, explores how 
climate change has shifted thinking about wildfires.

Guest: David Wallace-Wells

For more information on today’s episode, visit 
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/podcasts/canada-wildfires-climate-change.html?rref=vanity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOwILlYwcQ4
- -
[  duplicate   ]
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/podcasts/canada-wildfires-climate-change.html?rref=vanity 

/[ M//ainstream //economists have not even begun to understand the 
implications of ecological systems collapse. ]/
*The economics of systems collapse*
James Meadway
Ecologist - EPC July-Sept 23
We may be seriously underestimating the possibility of “ecosystem 
collapse” over the next few decades, according to some new research 
published recently in the scientific journal Nature Sustainability.

This article is a transcript from Dr Meadway's Macrodose podcast.    
Listen to the episode online 
https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-33-and-86220286

Read the paper in Nature Sustainability. - 
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01157-x

The world’s ecosystems are already changing rapidly. Rainforests are 
being turned into savanna. Savanna is turning into desert. Tundra is 
thawing out and of course the polar ice-caps are melting.

What the research indicates, using computer models of global and some 
major regional ecosystems, is that this combination of multiple existing 
ecological stresses are all working together to make the collapse of 
ecosystems far more likely and at dates much closer to us than has been 
previously predicted.
*
**Irreversible*
It’s the combination of factors that make the difference – we often 
reduce the ecological crisis to only climate change, but the threat to 
systems is also coming from damaging biodiversity losses, resource 
overuse, and all the other anthropogenic pollutants.

Once these additional factors are accounted for, the ecosystem models go 
haywire. Systems that were previously expected to collapse in the 2090s 
from a single factor, like rising temperatures, will, in the worst case 
scenario, fall apart as early as the 2030s.

This is the importance of taking a holistic view of these changes - 
understanding each of these stresses together, rather than as individual 
issues.

As the authors of this new report say, these collapses are essentially 
irreversible events. Pushing an ecosystem beyond the tipping point is 
not something that can be patched up – once it’s gone, it’s gone.

And once you have multiple collapses happening, the interactions between 
them also start to pull the wider system into chaos. This will be a 
point of no return for the planet, and for all of us who have to live 
here – an irreversible breach in human and natural history.

*Negative*
If all of this wasn’t pleasant enough - there’s a growing case for 
saying some of these tipping points have already been breached. We have 
already passed into a new period in the Earth’s history as a result of 
human activity, which geologists refer to as the “Anthropocene”.

Rapid climate change is the best-known element in this new geological 
period, but massive biodiversity loss in what is likely to be the 
world’s sixth known mass extinction event is a major element. Worsening 
chaos and instability are not some passing crisis, but a fundamental 
reality for all of us from this point onwards.

Pushing an ecosystem beyond the tipping point is not something that can 
be patched up – once it’s gone, it’s gone.
It’s an extremely bleak picture. But it’s not one that conventional 
economic thinking takes much account of – or even is able to take much 
account of. The conventional economic models of climate change, the 
“Integrated Assessment Models”, are built around the fundamental idea 
that everything is reversible in some sense – or, at the very least, 
some sum of money could be paid to compensate for loss.

That is combined with a doctrinal belief in the power of technological 
progress. The process of invention and technological change will 
eventually come up with radically better ways of securing economic growth.

You can see this most obviously in the main IPCC forecasting models for 
Net Zero, which include an incredibly efficient “negative emissions 
technology” that can magically remove carbon from the atmosphere - such 
a technology or technologies doesn’t yet exist.

*Instability*
Dealing with climate change in this worldview - in the worldview of 
mainstream economics - becomes an issue only of trade-offs: how much 
expense and growth do we sacrifice today, given our forecasts of damage 
from climate change tomorrow?

But if tipping points are real – and they seem to be – and ecological 
damage is irreversible, the basis for this form of economic thinking is 
destroyed. There is no “trade-off” possible when something has been 
irreversibly lost – you can’t trade off an extinct species or a 
collapsed ecosystem. They’re gone.

Instead of thinking about essentially marginal changes to the system, 
you need to think about big, fundamental shifts in how the economy is 
organised – and not only to reduce future harm as far as possible, to 
build a world where the very real costs and misery of future ecosystem 
collapse and ecological instability is fairly managed, protecting people 
as far as possible.

*Fiscal*
At present, we are sort-of doing the first, with various agreements on 
reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally, but we are barely scratching 
the surface of the second. The real and serious crisis of adaptation is 
not being mentioned in the mainstream discussions of the economic crisis.

To pick just the British example, the Bank of England here continues to 
jam up interest rates when confronted with ecological shock inflation, 
pushing the costs onto everyday people instead of facing up to the real 
issues and the new economic and ecological reality.

The British Labour Party is another illustration of the problem. 
Labour’s original plans for ecological investment were for a world of 
low interest rates and inflation – if they want to get serious about 
climate change now, they need to talk about redistribution and 
adaptation. We need massive investments, and substantial tax reform to 
equip or at least partially insulate our economies from the worst 
impacts of ecosystem collapse.

But as Labour seemingly won’t do that, they’re steadily working their 
way through abandoning every commitment they’ve made thus far, big or 
small, - under the auspices of the infamous fiscal rules - and are 
unable to adapt their thinking to these new realities.

*Huggers*
We are left with institutions that were drawn up in a world where 
climate change was not a direct and pressing global issue. It was a 
threat for the future, only making its presence felt at the edges – 
harsh on small island states, but for the developed world, something 
that could be largely ignored.

Now, the ecological collapse is here - and getting worse with every 
passing day. And existing strategies built around state investment and 
technology-lead decarbonisation are already under strain.

This is a new world. If our institutions don’t catch up soon, it will be 
the rest of us that are left to suffer in permanently higher inflation 
and the doom loop of higher interest rates as the accompaniment to wider 
ecological collapse.

Prime minister Keir Starmer, if that’s where we’re headed, might find he 
has more than tree huggers to worry about if Labour doesn’t get its act 
together.

*This Author*
Dr James Meadway is an economist and former political advisor. This 
article is a transcript from his Macrodose podcast 
https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-33-and-86220286
https://theecologist.org/2023/aug/02/economics-systems-collapse

/[The news archive - looking back at an early climate science martyr ]/
/*August 5, 1996*/
August 5, 1996: The New York Times profiles climate scientist Ben 
Santer, who had just become the target of a lavishly-financed defamation 
campaign by the fossil fuel industry.

    *Believer Finds Himself At Center of Hot Debate*
    By WILLIAM K. STEVENS
    LIVERMORE, CALIF. -- Dr. Benjamin D. Santer, a shy, even-spoken,
    41-year-old American climatologist who climbs mountains, runs
    marathons and enjoys a reputation for careful and scrupulous work,
    is the chief author of what may be the most important finding of the
    decade in atmospheric science: that human activity is probably
    causing some measure of global climate change, as environmentalists
    have long assumed and skeptics have long denied.

    The finding, issued for the first time in December 1995 by a panel
    of scientists meeting under United Nations sponsorship in Madrid,
    left open the question of just how large the human impact on climate
    is. The question is perhaps the hottest and most urgent in
    climatology today.

    Dr. Santer is in the forefront of a rapidly unfolding effort to
    answer it..

    Dr. Santer graduated with top honors in 1976 from the University of
    East Anglia in Britain with a degree in environmental sciences.

    To his dismay, his British education availed him little in the job
    market when he returned to his parents' home, then in the Baltimore
    area. He bounced around for the next few years, working at various
    times as a soccer teacher, a German teacher for Berlitz and an
    assembler in a zipper factory, at which point, he says, he found
    himself "down and out in Seattle." He made two stabs at a doctorate
    at East Anglia, abandoning both.

    He soon made a third attempt to earn a doctorate at East Anglia,
    which boasts one of the world's top climatology departments, and
    this time he succeeded.

    "I found it fascinating," he said, "the idea that humans could have
    a potentially large impact on climate." In his dissertation, Dr.
    Santer used statistical techniques to investigate the accuracy with
    which computerized models of the climate system simulated regional
    climates.

    He soon moved to another leading climatological laboratory, the Max
    Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, where he worked for the
    first time on the problem of detecting the signal of human-caused
    climate change, especially global warming -- the "greenhouse
    fingerprint." He also met his wife, Heike, in Hamburg, and they now
    have a 3-year-old son, Nicholas.

    Since moving to Livermore in 1992, Dr. Santer has grappled with the
    related problems of testing the validity of climate models and
    searching for the greenhouse fingerprint. His strategy is to examine
    observed patterns of temperature change to see whether they matched
    the unique patterns expected to result from the combination of
    growing industrial emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon
    dioxide, on one hand, and sulfate aerosols that cool some parts of
    the planet, on the other. According to this reasoning, the pattern
    produced by the combination of greenhouse gases and aerosols would
    be markedly different from that produced by any natural cause.

    Climate models have been widely criticized for, among other things,
    failing to adequately represent natural variability. One critic, Dr.
    Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
    says the models are so flawed as to be no more reliable than a Ouija
    board.

    "I think that's garbage," said Dr. Santer, part of whose job is to
    assess how good the models are. "I think models are credible tools
    and the only tools we have to define what sort of greenhouse signal
    to look for. It's clear that the ability of models to simulate
    important features of present-day climate has improved enormously."
    He says that if the models are right -- still a big if -- the human
    imprint on the climate should emerge more clearly in the next few
    years. All in all, he says, he expects "very rapid" progress in the
    search for the greenhouse fingerprint.

    When might it become clear enough to be widely convincing?

    "Even if New York were under six feet of water, there would be
    people who would still say, 'Well, this is a natural event,' " he said.

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/120197believe.html

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