[✔️] January 5, 2023- Global Warming News Digest - storms, overshoot, time,

[Richard Pauli]

/*January 5, 2023*/

/[ California deluges ]/
*How Climate Change Is Shaping California’s Winter Storms*
So far, the downpours are largely in line with past storms, an official 
said. But their quick pace is testing the limits of the state’s 
infrastructure.
By Raymond Zhong
Published Jan. 3, 2023...
- -
Michael Anderson, California’s state climatologist. “This is where we’re 
getting hit this year: We’re seeing a lot of big storms fairly quickly.”
- -
Scientists are also studying whether global warming might be shifting 
the way winds carry moisture around the atmosphere, potentially 
influencing the number of atmospheric rivers that sweep through 
California each year and how long they last. They have not yet come to 
firm conclusions on these questions, though.
“The dominant thing that’s happening is just that, in a warmer 
atmosphere, there’s exponentially more potential for it to hold water 
vapor,” said Daniel L. Swain, a climate scientist at the University of 
California, Los Angeles. “And that exerts a really profound influence on 
things.”
- -
It is still unclear how global warming might be affecting the likelihood 
for atmospheric rivers to crash into California in rapid-fire clusters. 
Another study last year found that in nearly four out of five years 
between 1981 and 2019, half or more of all atmospheric rivers that 
affected the state were part of an atmospheric river “family,” or a 
rapid parade of storms...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/climate/california-flood-atmospheric-river.html


/
/

/[ time and political structures of our predicament ]/
*How our perception of time shapes our approach to climate change*
January 4, 2023
REBECCA HERSHER...

- -

Most people are focused on the present: today, tomorrow, maybe next 
year. Fixing your flat tire is more pressing than figuring out if you 
should use an electric car. Living by the beach is a lot more fun than 
figuring out when your house will be underwater because of sea level rise.

That basic human relationship with time makes climate change a tricky 
problem.

"I consider climate change the policy problem from hell because you 
almost couldn't design a worse fit for our underlying psychology, or our 
institutions of decision-making," says Anthony Leiserowitz, the director 
of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

*Our obsession with the present obscures the future*
Those institutions — including companies and governments that ultimately 
have the power to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions — can be 
even more obsessed with the present than individuals are.

For example, says Leiserowitz, many companies are focused on quarterly 
earnings and growth. That helps drive short-term behavior, such as 
leasing new land to drill for fossil fuels, that makes long-term climate 
change worse.
And there are also big incentives for political leaders to think 
short-term. "The President gets elected every four years. Members of the 
Senate get elected every six years. And members of the House get elected 
every two years," Leiserowitz points out, "so they tend to operate on a 
much shorter time cycle than this problem, climate change, which is 
unfolding over decades."
There are deadlines looming for those elected leaders. The Biden 
administration pledged to cut emissions in half by 2030. By 2050, humans 
need to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions entirely in order to avoid 
the most catastrophic effects of climate change later this century.

Fortunately, our collective focus on the present also offers hints, 
psychologists say, about how to harness that hyperfocus on the present 
to inspire action.

*To spur action, speed up the psychological rewards for addressing 
climate change now*
For example, there are ways to highlight the quick payoff for addressing 
climate change. In the political realm, that could mean that an elected 
official gets more votes because they support policies that reduce 
emissions. The promise of a benefit in the next election may be more 
galvanizing than the goal of protecting future generations, even if the 
latter has more moral weight.
"The benefits that we get today are more salient, and we want them more 
than benefits that may be larger, but will accrue in the future," 
explains Jennifer Jacquet, a researcher and associate professor of 
environmental studies at New York University who studies the psychology 
of collective action, including on climate change.
Jacquet says the huge spending bill passed last year by Congress, called 
the Inflation Reduction Act, is another example of using our focus on 
the present to drive climate-conscious behavior. The bill includes 
financial incentives for people who buy electric vehicles or install 
solar panels.

"They're trying to speed up the benefits," says Jacquet. "That's smart. 
That's good. That plays into how we think about things."

*Extreme weather is starting to catch everyone's attention*
In some ways, our focus on the present is less and less of a problem as 
climate change makes itself more and more obvious today — in our daily 
lives. Everyone on Earth is experiencing the effects of a hotter planet. 
That makes it a problem of the present, not of the future.
That immediacy is already showing up in how Americans view climate 
change, according to Leiserowitz, who has been leading an annual poll on 
the topic for more than 15 years. As extreme weather is becoming more 
common, he says support for climate policies is also growing, especially 
at the local level.

For example, the vast majority of respondents in a September 2021 poll 
said they support local governments providing money to help make homes 
more energy efficient, to increase public transportation and to install 
bike lanes. And the majority of respondents supported investments in 
renewable energy.

*There's no time to waste*
Widespread public support for climate policies can help push politicians 
and corporate leaders to act quickly – which is important, because 
scientists warn that greenhouse gas emissions need to drop dramatically, 
and immediately, to avoid runaway warming later this century.
"We have big societal choices to make," says Leiserowitz, and those 
changes need to happen now. In the present. "People working together to 
demand action by their leaders is going to be an absolutely critical piece."
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/04/1139782291/time-perception-climate-change-risk



/[ NYTimes Magazine - a persistent climate conjecture  -- text and 
listen to the article ]/
*Has the Amazon Reached Its ‘Tipping Point’?*
Some Brazilian scientists fear that the Amazon may become a grassy 
savanna — with profound effects on the climate worldwide.
By Alex Cuadros
Jan. 4, 2023
- -
A growing number of scientists worry that one tipping point can trigger 
another. In some cases the influence is direct. If Greenland’s ice sheet 
disappears, the circulation of Atlantic seawaters could be drastically 
altered, which would, in turn, wreak havoc on weather patterns across 
the globe, making Scandinavia uninhabitably cold, warming the Southern 
Hemisphere, drying out forests. The impact of Amazon dieback would be to 
release tens of billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere — which 
is more diffuse, but no less dangerous. When Lenton and his colleague 
David Armstrong McKay recently compiled the latest evidence on an array 
of global climate thresholds, they found that even a very optimistic 1.5 
degrees of warming since preindustrial times may be enough to trigger 
the gradual but irreversible melting of ice sheets in Greenland and West 
Antarctica, and to thaw methane-trapping permafrost.

It is difficult to predict how all these shifts might interact, as most 
models assume, for example, that Atlantic seawaters will always 
circulate according to known patterns. But in a 2018 paper, Lenton and 
the American Earth system scientist Will Steffen warned that a 
dominolike “tipping cascade” could push the global climate itself beyond 
a critical threshold, into an alternate feedback loop called “hothouse 
Earth,” with hostile conditions not seen for millions of years. It can 
feel like doom-mongering to contemplate such a scenario. There is no way 
to put a number on it. Even if it is improbable, however, Lenton argues 
that the consequences would be so dire that it must be taken seriously. 
He sees it as a “profound risk-management problem”: If we focus only on 
the most likely outcomes, we will never predict anomalies like 2021’s 
unprecedented “heat dome” in the Pacific Northwest. Or last year’s 
winter heat wave in Antarctica, when temperatures jumped 70 degrees 
Fahrenheit above the average. Or, for that matter, the proliferation of 
wildfires in the world’s largest rainforest.

Berenguer wanted to show Gatti how the 2015 megafires had altered 
forests in the northeastern Amazon. So Xarope picked us up from the 
research base in the morning, and we got back onto the BR-163. Here and 
there along the highway, Berenguer pointed out “tree skeletons” — dead 
trees whose sun-bleached branches poked from the otherwise lush green 
canopy of the Tapajós. Fire did not always kill them right away. When 
Berenguer was back in Britain, her assistants would send her updates by 
WhatsApp. You know Tree 71? one message might say, referring to a 
centuries-old specimen in one of her plots. So, it just died. It could 
take a few years more for it to fall to the ground. Some of the carbon 
in Gatti’s air samples, then, could be a delayed consequence of past 
fires. But as we would see inside the living forest, something stranger 
was happening, too.

Eventually we exited the highway for an unmarked dirt track that ended 
in a wall of vegetation. Machete in hand, Berenguer led us onto a tight 
path. Just a few days earlier, she and her assistants spent hours 
clearing the way for us, but new vines were already reclaiming the 
space. “You can see it’s a mess,” Berenguer said. An impassable thicket 
of reedy bamboo hemmed us in on either side; the canopy was low above 
our heads. To me it looked normal enough, as far as jungle goes. In 
reality, though, a healthy rainforest should be easy to walk through, 
because the largest trees consume so much light and water that the 
understory lacks the resources to grow very dense.

We walked over fallen trunks. Unlike in the southeastern Amazon, 
Berenguer still saw no evidence of savannalike vegetation moving in. But 
the balance of native species was now out of whack, as opportunistic 
“pioneers” occupied the spaces left by dead giants. In some areas, 
fast-growing embaúba trees stood so uniformly that they resembled the 
stems of a wood-pulp plantation. In others, hundreds of newborn lianas 
formed a kind of snake nest. (Berenguer’s team had to measure each one 
individually, a hellish task.) She pointed to a tall, proud tree that 
had somehow survived the blaze. Because all of the other nearby 
individuals of its species had been killed, it was unlikely to 
reproduce; Berenguer called it a “zombie.”

A University of Birmingham researcher named Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert 
has found similar changes across the Amazon. Even in the absence of 
actual “savannization,” trees that can withstand drier conditions are 
proliferating, while those that need more water are dying in greater 
numbers. The dominance of embaúba is particularly worrisome because the 
trees are hollow, storing far less carbon than a slower-growing species 
like mahogany. Their life cycle is also relatively short, leaving more 
frequent gaps in the canopy. The end result of this transformation is 
unclear, but Gatti’s numbers have only continued to get worse. According 
to her latest five-year averages, the Brazilian Amazon is already giving 
off 50 percent more carbon than it was in the first five years of her 
project — and even the historically healthier western forests are 
sometimes emitting more than they absorb.

Eventually we came into a clearing. I began to sweat. The sun was 
searing hot; Berenguer said that unshaded ground can reach 176 degrees 
Fahrenheit here. Clearings are a natural part of the Amazonian cycle, as 
large trees inevitably die and other species gradually take their place. 
But even logging could not match the power of fire to turn the forest 
into “Swiss cheese.” Berenguer never used to need sunscreen because the 
canopy was so thick; now she gets sunburned here. And the profusion of 
holes sets off a vicious cycle. The sun dries out the vegetation; trees 
shed leaves to preserve water; the litter becomes fuel for the next 
fire. The gaps also create a “wind corridor,” allowing strong drafts to 
penetrate deep into the forest during storms. Perversely, with their 
heavy trunks, the largest, oldest trees are especially vulnerable to 
being knocked over...
- -
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/magazine/amazon-tipping-point.html?unlocked_article_code=XrpG1MMfJ4f3xb-CBKskYr-b-8wQqxURNMzJTAdJG8P3k8tj0qHoo7b8ewRnQe4qdDqL2AUMu4-kX4UdE6Jk38IlvMT2cRf-rmh8u0RiGk1YR4lSK9S92SqpkWgTmYDOkKM_JlJpGjVlaIvpQByzOvELUQRM6TW49jevHvrejrpjGajoMfi2RVFrWdJAIio2xoYPJ2qRHz5aWr5ZQseRzH2yyp_mOg32RvfsVbWm0lJQmbKmdBTUQ6NM9QtGLgtwu4mlpBDGAPvHNnxHwXCCa53sqfvlN_9-wAfr46b9q9kRcITDRznDz4giV9E9rEIX0yppIbHJq9_DHYJh-8Ei&smid=share-url


/
/

/[ A 6 year old video that explains transformation - 5 mins video ]/
*The Climate Crisis with Naomi Oreskes and Nicholas Stern*
World Economic Forum
Mar 9, 2016
The Climate Crisis
Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University, USA
Nicholas Stern, The British Academy, UK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOyZYK4xGyA



/[ Taking actions now to make impacts forever ]/
*5 doable resolutions for US climate policy in 2023*
The US can tackle methane emissions and deliver on global financing.
By Rebecca Leber at rebleberrebecca.leber@vox.com
Dec 30, 2022
- -
There’s much more that can be done in 2023, and the US has a particular 
role to play. Historically the world’s biggest polluter, the US is 
finally gearing up for its biggest realignment yet on climate change. 
The country has a chance to slash its climate pollution and protect the 
population from the effects of extreme weather. And there are also 
actionable steps people can take in their own lives and communities to 
make a difference.

Here are five things the US could resolve to do in 2023:

*1) Slash methane emissions from the oil and gas sector*
Next year has the opportunity to be a turning point in the 
second-biggest contributor to climate change, methane. Methane is 
responsible for only 30 percent of climate change, a smaller share than 
carbon dioxide, but it is also much more capable of trapping heat...
The EPA would require companies to regularly monitor pollution coming 
from their oil and gas wells, as well as limit companies from burning 
off the excess gas. And the Bureau of Land Management rule specifically 
targets public and tribal lands by setting monthly limits on burning off 
excess gas and having operators submit a waste minimization plan with 
any permit application...
- -
*2. Mainstream heat pumps, induction stoves, and electric vehicles with 
the Inflation Reduction Act*
The Inflation Reduction Act passed by Democrats in Congress this summer 
includes $369 billion to push American consumers and industry away from 
relying on fossil fuels. The utility payments in the law will ensure 
that renewables will be cheaper than building new coal and gas power 
plants. And the tax credits and rebates aim at helping consumers make 
the leap to renewable and energy-efficient technologies. Some of these 
technologies are familiar, like rooftop solar and insulation, but some 
will be newer to Americans, including heat pumps, induction stoves, and 
plug-in electric vehicles...
- -
*3. Take extreme heat as seriously as the cold*
We learned some important lessons about the power grid this year. After 
repeated close calls around the country this year during high demand 
times, California and Texas narrowly averted mass power outages only 
when consumers helped to reduce the load on the grid, through small 
actions like changing the thermostat.

These events averted mass blackouts during unusual heat waves. If the 
power did go out, millions could have been exposed to potentially 
dangerous temperatures. Everyone has different tolerances to heat, and 
in a heat wave, the elderly tend to be the most vulnerable well before 
the thermostat hits triple digits...
- -
*4. Deliver on global climate financing*
The US still hasn’t delivered on its original Paris climate agreement 
pledge in 2015 to deliver $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund. The fund 
is meant to help with clean energy financing in developing countries, in 
recognition of rich countries’ lopsided blame for causing climate 
change. While Biden secured $1 billion from Congress this year, it’s 
unclear where the remaining $2 billion will come from, especially given 
Republican control of the House next year...

The US has other obligations on top of the Green Climate Fund. Biden 
also pledged $11 billion to developing countries. That’s on top of the 
White House’s announcements of joint energy partnerships with South 
Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the EU. Some of this funding can come 
from agencies’ discretionary budget, but Biden will need to depend on 
Congress for the rest.

The US also has a new kind of climate commitment to deliver on. At the 
recent international climate conference in Egypt, the world committed 
for the first time to recognizing the loss and damages suffered by 
developing countries for a crisis they played a negligible role in creating.

The US has long been wary of agreeing to pay for any losses and damages, 
worried it will open up a flood of lawsuits and claims against the 
world’s historically biggest polluter, but did agree to a basic 
framework in Egypt. It’s not clear yet what that will translate to in 
dollars...

*5. Get personal and political*
In 2023, Americans will have more personal control over the kind of 
carbon footprint they have than ever before. They’ll be able to take 
control over the “mini fossil fuel plants” people run in their homes 
every day for their heating, cooking, and driving...

The incentives available under the Inflation Reduction Act will finally 
make it more financially affordable to go electric. There’s money for 
rooftop solar; electric vehicles, clothes dryers, stoves, and ovens; 
heat pumps for heating, cooling, and hot water; electric panels and 
wiring. The law also includes programs that cover the costs of 
insulation and weatherization to cut a building’s energy usage.
It’s also important to get outside the mindset that the only impact you 
can have on climate change is in the ways you consume, eat, and live. 
There’s more you can do. Action can mean thinking about your identities, 
your workplace, your networks, and your privileges, but also, a little 
more abstractly, understanding what sorts of action lead to policy 
change. All this will help you identify the appropriate community to 
link up with. In other words: You can always do more by not acting alone.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23511257/how-us-fight-climate-change-2023


/
/

/[ intensifying climates means Increasing need for mental health - 24 
min video presentation ]/
*Gary Belkin - The Social Crisis in the Climate Crisis*
The International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) is a 
unique international collaborative that focuses on mental health and 
addictions. IIMHL is a collaboration of seven countries: Australia, 
England, Canada, New Zealand, Republic of Ireland, Scotland and USA. 
IIMHL organizes structured staff exchanges, systems for international 
networking, innovation sharing and problem solving across countries and 
agencies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kua-pE9kH8

//

/
/

/
/

/[  maybe the real predicament is population overshoot ]/
*Welcome to a new year on a warming planet, now with 8 billion people*
Joan Meiners
Arizona Republic
Jan 4, 2023
We start 2023 sharing the planet with 8 billion other people.

The United Nations' global population counter clicked passed this 
estimated milestone in mid-November. In the context of climate change, 
what that means is that roughly 8 billion humans now aspire to own a 
smart phone, a tablet, a television, an automobile, a house connected to 
power and more. Approximately 27,000 first-time internet users come 
online every hour, according to a 2016 analysis by Our World in Data. 
And the number of global airline flights, a major contributor to the 
release of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, is on 
track to surpass pre-pandemic levels this year.

Meanwhile, manufacturing of screens and the transition to renewable 
energy sources is limited by processes in minerals mining, the grid is 
not yet outfitted to fully support electric utilities or transportation 
and concern about fossil fuel reliance grows each day. With this 
backdrop, the idea of more and more people seeking to increase their 
quality of life, as we all do, by tapping into a fixed set of global 
resources may feel overwhelming.

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2023/01/02/PPHX/b8e36233-db8a-44e2-92d8-9d4b7567c128-Annual-World-Population-since-10-thousand-BCE.png?width=1320&height=930&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp

This topic seems to have already been on your minds. Looking over emails 
from readers regarding our weekly climate series, a theme emerged: 
Despite 2022's political, technological and social progress to address 
warming trends and the challenges in those areas that remain, what many 
of you are thinking most about is overpopulation.

This concern is so common that, halfway through writing this story, I 
noticed that environmental writer Jonathan Thompson recently wrote a 
similar response to his readers in High Country News highlighting key 
stats on how the crisis is largely created by rich people specifically. 
Overpopulation also got airtime on the first "60 Minutes" broadcast of 
2023, with famed Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, who was one of the 
first to raise the alarm about climate change and is also credited with 
"inciting a worldwide fear of population," talking about how an 
unsustainable number of humans is driving the ongoing extinction crisis 
(a major problem since we can't survive on a planet of only humans).

One Republic reader was so distressed that he took the time to print and 
mail graphs to our newsroom meant to illuminate the similarities between 
curves charting both the rising concentration of greenhouse gases in the 
atmosphere and the global population over time. Both show the classic 
"hockey stick" shape that tracks slow, steady, mostly-horizontal 
increases across early human history (the straight, longer part of the 
hockey stick the player holds), followed by rapid, exponential, 
nearly-vertical increases in recent decades (the sharp bend leading to 
the part of the hockey stick that delivers the devastating puck 
acceleration).

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2023/01/02/PPHX/fc094972-4669-4588-afe4-b7308c942595-climate-change.png?width=1320&height=932&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp

But while the two curves are undeniably similar, the problem is arguably 
more of a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. Did greenhouse gas emissions rise 
to dangerous levels strictly because we allowed global population to get 
out of control, in some kind of equation where more people inexorably 
equals more energy? Or, amid population growth typical of a flourishing 
species, have we increasingly indulged in excessively energy-rich ways 
of life?
As far as the exact human causes of the ways we're seeing nature respond 
to warming temperatures and how best to respond to ensure our own 
survival, in this case, there are some other ideas.

Manfred Laubichler is a professor of Theoretical Biology and the History 
of Biology as well as the director of the School of Complex Adaptive 
Systems and the Global Biosocial Complexity Initiative at Arizona State 
University. Those titles are a mouthful, but his work boils down to 
thinking about the what the evolutionary history of both nature and 
knowledge might teach us about possible life hacks moving forward. In 
even simpler terms, he studies our biological past for tips on how to 
live our best future.

The Arizona Republic reached him in Berlin, where he spent time between 
semesters working with collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for the 
History of Science, to discuss his views on how population is not the 
problem and might even be a solution to the climate crisis, with more 
brains giving rise to more ideas on how to adapt. The conversation, 
including some controversial concepts he explained in more depth than we 
could include, has been necessarily edited for length and clarity.

https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1160925986868858880?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1160925986868858880%7Ctwgr%5E8da0429560c4155ad04c70b8edc7d6b4e83f99a4%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.azcentral.com%2Fstory%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Farizona-environment%2F2023%2F01%2F04%2Fis-climate-change-fueled-by-overpopulation-what-is-the-solution%2F69765023007%2F

*I’ve been getting emails from people telling me that whatever I'm 
writing regarding climate change doesn't matter because the real problem 
is overpopulation. And while I recognize that overpopulation is 
certainly a parameter here, it's not something that can just be fixed in 
any kind of ethical way. So, I thought it might be interesting for my 
readers to hear from you about what else overpopulation might mean for 
us as a global society coping with a dangerously warming climate.*

*M.L.: *As you said, yes, population is a major contributing factor (to 
climate change). It is not one that can be solved overnight. And the 
absolute numbers are actually only a very small part of the story. What 
we did in our work is to try to take that deep history approach and say, 
“When did this dynamic that we are currently experiencing really start?”

You have to go back several thousand years, to the early Neolithic. We 
had enough people that had enough experience about their environment 
that they extracted the knowledge necessary to start agriculture. Once 
that happened, then we see what we call the "Anthropocene engine" 
beginning to run. And that is basically a positive feedback loop between 
population size, knowledge generation and energy use. So it’s when 
enough people produce more and more knowledge that allows them to 
extract more energy which supports more people, and you see how this is 
going and going and going.

This is more or less an inevitable process if our species behaves like 
any other biological species, using whatever it’s got to increase its 
numbers. For a long time, we were limited in our growth potential 
because we experienced regulatory feedback from the environment. But our 
species is unique because we extracted knowledge that allowed us to 
basically emancipate ourselves from a lot of those regulatory controls 
as part of what you can call the process of civilization. And now we 
have created a mess.

*Human limits of modern agriculture: *Climate change could push produce 
prices higher, slowing the fight for food justice

At the same time, we have enough knowledge that we actually know what to 
do. What we have not figured out is how to implement that knowledge as a 
society because, in many ways, what we have to do is create regulatory 
structures as a civilization, meaning rules for a different type of 
economic system or application of technologies that are more circular 
and non-extractive.

So that's where the target is. And at ASU, that is exactly the focus of 
the Global Futures Laboratory: to understand and then implement 
solutions for “how do we actually shape the world of societies to do 
something differently?”

*What would that look like, to evolve as an intelligent civilization to 
live smarter instead of just bigger?*

Ten thousand years ago, every human on this planet had an average daily 
energy use of about 90 watts. Today, everyone uses about 11,000 watts. 
That's a more than 104-fold increase. So we are no longer just a 
biological species. We are this socio-technological species. The 
biological part of what we need to survive is a very small part of our 
daily energy use...

Even if we would reduce our numbers, our infrastructure won't go away. A 
lot of our energy use actually goes to maintaining and expanding our 
technological infrastructure in a way that makes the relationship 
between population size and environmental footprint more complicated. So 
controlling populations right now doesn't really help us. Because what 
you're saying is you want to go back and use less energy, which nobody 
wants to do.

We need to redesign and transform our infrastructure to make it less of 
a burden on the environment. Right now we have a linear extractive mode 
of production: We mine something, then we turn it into some products and 
then we throw them away. If you would close those material flows, we 
would eliminate a lot of the negative footprint on the environment. It's 
a question of applying a different set of behaviors.

*For sure. If we could recycle more, use less, be more efficient, that 
would be great. But those redesigns cost money. And, under capitalism, 
people tend to think that we should let economics dictate our decisions. 
So I know you're not a behavioral scientist, but how do we bridge that gap?*

The solution is not about challenging the existence of markets and 
competition. It is about having real markets and real competition, 
because our current system operates under the assumption that the 
profits get privatized and the costs get basically externalized to the 
society at large...
If companies can produce whatever they want but are responsible for the 
lifecycle of their products, that's a simple regulation that would 
change the economics and make modes of production that incorporate a 
circular system much more competitive. And I would say many people 
actually are very willing to support that, if they would be given the 
option. But that only gets us so far, because they do not really have 
fair alternatives to purchase products that (align with these) values 
because those are currently not competitive in this marketplace that 
does not reflect the true (environmental) costs of products.

The global fossil fuel industry is corrupt and subsidized, to a degree 
that is more costly than what it would take to transition to renewable 
energy sources. But this is not something that individual consumers or 
citizens can easily influence. What we really would need to have is some 
global regulation that allows everybody to benefit from what those 
companies have to offer without being exploited and subjugated to 
whatever else they're doing.

This is something that I see can happen. But (with the slow pace of 
progress at COP meetings, for example) I don't know on what timescale it 
can happen, or what it would take for those necessary transformations to 
actually materialize. And the problem is time is what we don't have. We 
are running out of time.

*Ok so if capitalism can work within environmental bounds as long as 
companies are responsible for the lifecycle of their products, do we do 
that on the front end by pricing items according to their true 
environmental cost and improving how we factor cleanup expenses into 
permitting? Or is the idea to expand company operations where if Apple 
wants to make new iPhones that only last two years, for example, then 
they need to be responsible for retrieving all the old iPhones and 
recycling those materials back into circulation?*

Well, I think what we need is both. There's a saying in evolutionary 
biology that you cannot put up a sign "Closed for reconstruction." Every 
step in an evolutionary transformation has to work and I think the same 
applies to our economy. We can't shut everything down and start from 
scratch because we need to continue to function on a day-to-day basis. 
So we have to find strategies of transition that actually work.The 
question is, what are the right kind of incentives? If you try to 
prescribe all of that upfront, that might not work. But if the framework 
is that companies (gradually) adapt to whatever the rules are, then the 
ones that are successful will be the ones that survive. Others that 
can't adapt will go out of business. That will be the transition phase. 
But we need fair playing fields for the market to work, and values that 
impose almost a Hippocratic oath in business: Your products are not 
allowed to do harm and if you sell a product that ruins the environment, 
you get sued...

*I think you'd get a lot of people who would say that anything made from 
plastic, for example, is harmful, which could create a different kind of 
harm if it limits production of things like medical devices. How do we 
navigate those kinds of considerations?*

That's a good point but, as I said, we don't lack knowledge. Certain 
types of plastics are clearly necessary. In other areas, plastic is just 
convenient, for packaging and things. We do know that there are 
alternatives which are currently not cost effective, including some new 
innovations where you have versions of plastic that are biodegradable.

If you imposed regulations that say that anything that ends up in a 
landfill or pollutes the environment must fulfill certain beneficial 
functions and the impacts are priced into your product, but you have to 
use materials that are biodegradable for everything else, you can close 
that cycle. So we don't have to over-regulate, we just need the right 
kind of smart regulations, because for many of the downstream 
consequences, I think market mechanisms are quite effective. They have 
been effective in building up our current society and our current range 
of products. And they can be effective if we change the regulatory 
parameters.

*It'll be an interesting year of complex considerations ahead. To end 
our conversation back on the idea of overpopulation, is there a number 
you think really is unsustainable, if 8 billion isn't it?*

We know that we are currently in what's called the Great Acceleration of 
the Anthropocene, where everything is growing exponentially, and that is 
clearly not sustainable. The models of population growth are such that 
we will plateau at between 9 and 10 billion people globally over the 
next few decades.

The question is the following: how can we influence the shape of this 
curve? We know exactly what we have to do to bend that population curve 
down faster. And that is very simple: Educate women globally, to slow 
reproduction.

Joan Meiners is the Climate News and Storytelling Reporter at The 
Arizona Republic and azcentral. Before becoming a journalist, she 
completed a doctorate in Ecology. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles 
or email her at joan.meiners at arizonarepublic.com.

Support climate coverage and local journalism by subscribing to 
azcentral.com at this link.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2023/01/04/is-climate-change-fueled-by-overpopulation-what-is-the-solution/69765023007/



/[The news archive - looking back ]/
/*January 5, 2000*/
January 5, 2000: During a Democratic Presidential debate with former New 
Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, Vice President Al Gore notes that as a 
Congressman, "...I decided to take on the issue of global warming and 
make it a national issue, when everybody was saying 'You know, you're 
going to run a lot of risk there. People are going to think that that's 
kind of off the edge there.' Well, now more and more people say, 'Yes, 
it is real,' and the next president has to be willing to take it on."

(29:28-29-50)

https://c-spanvideo.org/program/DemocraticCandidatesDebate10
/[ this link does not work to play the video - check other sources ]/

=======================================
*Mass media is lacking, many daily summariesdeliver global warming news 
- a few are email delivered*

=========================================================
**Inside Climate News*
Newsletters
We deliver climate news to your inbox like nobody else. Every day or 
once a week, our original stories and digest of the web’s top headlines 
deliver the full story, for free.
https://insideclimatenews.org/
---------------------------------------
**Climate Nexus* https://climatenexus.org/hot-news/*
Delivered straight to your inbox every morning, Hot News summarizes the 
most important climate and energy news of the day, delivering an 
unmatched aggregation of timely, relevant reporting. It also provides 
original reporting and commentary on climate denial and pro-polluter 
activity that would otherwise remain largely unexposed.    5 weekday
=================================
*Carbon Brief Daily https://www.carbonbrief.org/newsletter-sign-up*
Every weekday morning, in time for your morning coffee, Carbon Brief 
sends out a free email known as the “Daily Briefing” to thousands of 
subscribers around the world. The email is a digest of the past 24 hours 
of media coverage related to climate change and energy, as well as our 
pick of the key studies published in the peer-reviewed journals.
more at https://www.getrevue.co/publisher/carbon-brief
==================================
*T*he Daily Climate *Subscribe https://ehsciences.activehosted.com/f/61*
Get The Daily Climate in your inbox - FREE! Top news on climate impacts, 
solutions, politics, drivers. Delivered week days. Better than coffee.
Other newsletters  at https://www.dailyclimate.org/originals/

/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/ 

/Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/


/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
to news digest./

Privacy and Security:*This mailing is text-only.  It does not carry 
images or attachments which may originate from remote servers.  A 
text-only message can provide greater privacy to the receiver and 
sender. This is a personal hobby production curated by Richard Pauli
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain cannot be used for commercial 
purposes. Messages have no tracking software.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote 
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, 
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at 
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for 
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct 
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List 
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to 
this mailing list.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20230105/e8530f5d/attachment.htm>