[✔️] June 6, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | 424 ppm, Israel heatwave, Awareness not enough, Climate causes conflict - threat multiplier,
Richard Pauli
Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Tue Jun 6 04:40:59 EDT 2023
/*June*//*6, 2023*/
/[ higher faster 424 ]/
*Broken record: Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels jump again*
Annual increase in Keeling Curve peak is one of the largest on record
June 5, 2023
Carbon dioxide levels measured at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline
Observatory peaked at 424 parts per million in May, continuing a steady
climb further into territory not seen for millions of years, scientists
from NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanographyoffsite link at the
University of California San Diego announced today.
Measurements of carbon dioxide (CO2) obtained by NOAA’s Global
Monitoring Laboratory averaged 424.0 parts per million (ppm) in May, the
month when CO2 peaks in the Northern Hemisphere. That is an increase of
3.0 ppm over May 2022, and represents the fourth-largest annual
increases in the peak of the Keeling Curve in NOAA’s record. Scientists
at Scripps, which maintains an independent record, calculated a May
monthly average of 423.78 ppm , also a 3.0 ppm increase over their May
2022 average.
Carbon dioxide levels are now more than 50% higher than they were before
the onset of the industrial era...
- -
“Every year we see carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere increase as a
direct result of human activity,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad,
Ph.D. “Every year, we see the impacts of climate change in the heat
waves, droughts, flooding, wildfires and storms happening all around us.
While we will have to adapt to the climate impacts we cannot avoid, we
must expend every effort to slash carbon pollution and safeguard this
planet and the life that calls it home.” ...
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/broken-record-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-levels-jump-again
/[ Times of Israel to face science ]/
*Recent heatwave’s power cuts underline failure to properly prepare for
climate change*
Malfunctions and poor planning led to outages for 300,000 Israelis in
temperatures of over 40°C, as inefficiency and red tape hinder
expansion, optimization of power grid
By SUE SURKES
5 June 2023
Hundreds of thousands of people were left without electricity Friday
afternoon as a powerful heatwave Friday sent temperatures soaring to
over 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in many parts of the
country, sparking massive demand for electricity as homes and businesses
attempted to crank up the air conditioning.
Those responsible for producing and distributing Israel’s electricity
predictably blamed one another.
Energy Minister Israel Katz castigated the previous government for
failing to approve additional gas-fired power stations, two of which
were greenlighted by the current government last week...
- --
*Too many cooks in the kitchen?*
There are a plethora of bodies responsible for electricity in Israel.
The Energy Ministry determines supply targets and must ensure that they
are reached.
The Electricity Authority, a body within that ministry, takes care of
regulations and financial incentives, which the Finance Ministry is in
charge of deciding whether to fund and to what extent.
- -
*Red tape*
Israel is crawling towards establishing two new power stations fired by
fossil fuel gas, while progress on renewable energy is laughably small.
The state has promised the United Nations that by 2030, 30 percent of
its electricity will be generated by renewable sources — primarily the
sun. However, it is going nowhere near the pace needed to meet this
target...
- -
Last week, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
issued a blistering review of Israel’s environmental performance over
the past decade, calling for a climate law that has legally binding
emissions reductions and renewable energy production targets.
Such binding targets are, however, opposed by both the finance and
energy ministries, holding up efforts to pass a climate law, including a
current one by Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/recent-heatwaves-power-cuts-underline-failure-to-adequately-ready-for-climate-change/
/[ From Jacobin magazine ]/
*“Awareness” Will Not Save Us From Climate Disaster*
BY MATT HUBER
Spreading knowledge and awareness of the climate crisis isn’t enough.
There’s no hope for the planet without climate policies that address the
material interests of workers.
05.12.2022
Excerpted from *Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a
Warming Planet***(Verso Books, May 2022)
In the mid-2000s, there was a real sense of momentum in climate
politics. In 2006, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was heralded as
the Silent Spring of our generation; sure to mobilize millions to the
climate fight. In the same year, economist Nicholas Stern alarmed the
policy world with his Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a
seven-hundred-page report predicting that the costs of climate change
could amount to between 5 and 20 percent of GDP. In 2007, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its fourth
assessment report, laying out the dire science and the rapid changes needed.
All of this seemed to be building toward the 2009 international meeting
in Copenhagen where many expected the world — and, hopefully, the United
States — would finally come together to solve the problem.
The earth itself was also calling for action. In the summer of 2007, the
areal extent of Arctic sea ice reached a record low of 4.13 million
square miles, 38 percent below the average and shattering the previous
record, set in 2005, by 24 percent. The following spring, James Hansen
and a team of scientists submitted a paper — “Target Atmospheric CO2:
Where Should Humanity Aim?” — that declared, “If humanity wishes to
preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to
which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing
climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current
385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”
Given all the momentum and sense of urgency, climate activist Bill
McKibben and “a group of university friends” founded the activist
organization 350.org, which took Hansen’s target of 350 parts per
million of CO2 as a rallying cry for change. McKibben wrote several
pieces claiming it was “the most important number on the planet” and
organized a massive worldwide day of action for October 24, 2009, to
force states to abide by this objective, scientific target.
In 2012, his viral article in Rolling Stone, “Global Warming’s
Terrifying New Math,” focused again on a set of numbers (2° Celsius, 565
gigatons) and set the stage for his “Do the Math Tour,” which “sold out
shows in every corner of the country.” McKibben used these numbers to
lay out the necessary political prescription: the fossil fuel industry
will burn every last gigaton of carbon it can access — and it must be
stopped.
Yet the reliance on numbers and appeals to scientific objectivity means
McKibben and others are always trying to stake out what is not political
in the climate struggle.
In an appearance on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, McKibben repeated
one of his major talking points: “Science isn’t like politics. Chemistry
and physics don’t bargain that way.” Several years later, he described
the climate struggle as a battle against physics. “This negotiation is
between people and physics. And therefore it’s not really a negotiation.
Because physics doesn’t negotiate. Physics just does.”
McKibben’s 350.org and others chose to strategically focus on climate
politics as a struggle over questions of science and knowledge; for
them, it was about what scientists assert are the causes of and
solutions to climate change. But in the end, it seems that the critical
question at the heart of climate politics is always one of belief or
denial in the science.
There are obvious and good reasons for this. We only understand climate
change through scientific measurements of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere and increasingly sophisticated models predicting our climate
future. That the science has discovered the problem of climate change
means it will always be at the heart of climate politics...
- -
Yet after the seeming momentum of 2007–8, it all went sideways. The
global capitalist economy collapsed, the United States reassumed its
role as delayer in Copenhagen — and to this day, the climate movement
still has not ignited the kind of transformative change needed. In fact,
McKibben consistently and correctly points out that we are losing the
climate fight, and badly.
What are the limits of making climate politics about knowledge? This
kind of politics of knowledge appeals to a specific class position: the
professional class. I define the professional class broadly as those who
marshal degrees, licenses, and other credentials in the market for labor
power. Like McKibben and his “group of university friends,” the
professional class still remains at the core of the climate movement —
scientists, journalists, and college students.
The professional class is a product of the historically shifting
geographies of capital accumulation where knowledge became an entryway
to a secure livelihood amid deindustrialization and declining
working-class power. Underpinning the knowledge economy is the
centrality of education and credentials in defining one’s qualifications
for particular kinds of occupations. Yet beyond the labor market, the
professional class is also reproduced through a sociocultural milieu
that valorizes knowledge in general — keeping up with news, doing your
research, and getting the facts straight.
Climate politics is also shaped by a professional world of “policy.” As
Naomi Klein points out, it was a case of “bad timing” when scientists
came to a consensus about the severity of climate change at precisely
the same moment when political power shifted toward a free market
ideology of deregulation and austerity in the 1980s. Still, for much of
this period, professionals in the nonprofit and policy worlds clung to a
belief that climate change could be solved through a series of
technocratic and market-based solutions. Centrist economist Brad DeLong
describes this as a project that aims “to use market means to social
democratic ends.”
For this brand of policy technocrat, the climate struggle is not a power
struggle over material production, but a struggle over ideas and logical
policy designs. Those in the climate policy community understood that
the Right had won power and thought they could outsmart them with
elegant market-based policies inciting large-scale climate mitigation.
They were very wrong.
*
**The Politics of the Professional Class**
*Much of the discussion of the professional class today is indebted to
the concept of the “professional-managerial class” (PMC) coined by
Barbara and John Ehrenreich. The Ehrenreichs’ impetus for theorizing the
PMC came from its centrality in shaping the New Left movements of the
1960s and ’70s. As they put it: “The rebirth of PMC radicalism in the
sixties came at a time when the material position of the class was
advancing rapidly. Employment in PMC occupations soared, and salaries
rose with them.”
They describe how the best parts of the New Left certainly contested
capitalist control of the economy but combined this with “moralistic
contempt of the working class.” The Ehrenreichs cite the famous Port
Huron Statement issued by Students for a Democratic Society: “Any new
left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual
skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working
tools.”...
- -
Politics, from a professional-class perspective, is a largely cultural
terrain over knowledge and a coming-to-consensus on ideas. The
professional class elevates “intellectual autonomy and public service”
alongside credentials and expertise above all else.
Moreover, if the university is, in the Ehrenreichs’ words, “the
historical reproductive apparatus of the PMC,” it also became an
epicenter of two kinds of engagement with politics. First, there was an
explosion of academic technocrats and other highly educated policy
experts who espoused the professional-class commitment to expertise in
solving social and environmental problems. Second, the university became
a bastion of a new mode of radical political theory, which centered
culture over old class lines of struggle.
Yet, as the Ehrenreichs explain, the class antagonisms between the PMC
and the working class were never resolved, and by the end of the ’70s,
the New Left collapsed into “more [of] a subculture than a ‘movement.’”
As Jean-Christophe Agnew suggests, the professional class’s abandonment
of old class questions seems even starker as political power continued
to shift rightward to capital: “Considering its relative inattention to
issues of production, equity, exploitation, cultural politics may seem a
singularly inappropriate politics for a time marked by the blatant
transfer of wealth between classes.”
In other words, the capitalist class organized to amass wealth and
political power on class terms. Meanwhile, the Left, imbued by
professional-class values, became convinced that class politics were
outmoded, orthodox, and ill-equipped for a new “postindustrial”
knowledge economy.
There is perhaps no better example of the ways in which the professional
class shaped new forms of politics than the environmental movement.
*A Typology of Professional Class Climate Politics*
From its beginnings, science was central in shaping environmental
movement consciousness and demands. Indeed, it was Rachel Carson, a
professional marine biologist, who sparked the movement with her book
Silent Spring in 1962. The ecology movement placed scientific
credentials at the center of ecological politics. In 1972, the Ecologist
ran a cover story called “A Blueprint for Survival,” which claimed a
specific politics of authority: “This document has been drawn up by a
small team of people, all of whom, in different capacities, are
professionally involved in the study of global environmental problems.”
The Club of Rome’s more famous 1972 report on overpopulation, “The
Limits to Growth,” enacted the same vision of politics — a struggle over
a future adjudicated through scientific models and expertise.
It is not only “intellectual autonomy” but also commitment to “public
service” that often characterizes professional-class values. This
commitment is rooted in the idea that professionals can deploy knowledge
toward making the world better.
I offer a very schematic sketch of different types of professionals in
the climate political scene who seek to combine expertise and
environmental “public service.”...
- -
First, there are the science communicators who are either natural
scientists themselves like Rachel Carson or James Hansen, or otherwise
deeply invested in knowing what the science has discovered, such as
science or environmental journalists. These types of people believe that
the primary problem in environmental politics is a lack of awareness or
an outright denial of scientific knowledge. It argues that if the masses
truly understood the science, action would follow.
Second, there are the policy technocrats whose professional expertise is
more likely to be based in law or policy studies and work in think
tanks, academia, or professionalized nonprofits. Alongside universities,
it is worth highlighting the rise of NGOs — as opposed to unions and
parties — as critical centers of activism and politics in the same era
where environmental politics arose. These types seek to design “smart”
policy solutions to environmental problems. They believe they can use
logic and rational policy design to sway politicians and the public
toward these policies.
Finally, there are the anti-system radicals, whose own exposure to the
science of ecological collapse leads to a kind of political
radicalization. A lot of this radicalization is rooted in guilt over
their own complicity in practices of consumption central to professional
class norms. This kind of climate activist is more likely to understand
that the cause of environmental problems is systemically rooted in
capitalism, but their political response is to look inward through
moralistic invocations to consume less, reject industrial society, and
advocate micro-alternatives at the local scale. This kind of person
might find the only outlet for such radical ideas in academia, or they
might eschew a profession entirely in favor of more niche knowledge
systems like DIY off-the-grid living or studying “permaculture”
agricultural techniques.
What connects these three highly schematic “types” is the centrality of
knowledge systems in shaping their political engagements with
environmental problems. My aim is not to discount the importance of
knowledge and science in informing politics, but rather to point out the
ways this politics both evades material conflict and class struggle, and
appeals only to the minority of society that possesses these educational
credentials.
Above all, professional class climate politics mostly appeals to
professionals themselves. But they are a minority of the population. If
we want to build a democratic majoritarian climate coalition, we need a
politics that appeals beyond the credentialed classes. In other words,
we need a working-class climate politics centered not on knowledge and
smart policy, but rather more everyday materials struggle over access to
energy, food, housing, and transportation — the very sectors we need to
decarbonize.
While professional class sensibilities tend to assume solving climate
change requires making these things cost more to “internalize” the costs
of emissions, socialists can counter with a decarbonization program that
guarantees access to these basic needs of working-class life. The
2018–20 explosion of Green New Deal proposals espousing this vision have
sputtered lately, but we cannot lose sight of this basic insight that we
should reorient climate policies toward direct improvements to workers’
lives who have suffered decades of neoliberal austerity and assault from
the capitalist class war.
/This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation./
Matt Huber is a professor of geography at Syracuse University. His new
book, */C/**/limate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming
Planet/*, is out from Verso Books in 2022.
https://jacobin.com/2022/05/awareness-climate-change-disaster-working-class-professionalism-policy-green-new-deal
/[ Stanford Study ]/
*Does climate cause conflict?*
Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
“Every year we see carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere increase as a
direct result of human activity,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad,
Ph.D. “Every year, we see the impacts of climate change in the heat
waves, droughts, flooding, wildfires and storms happening all around us.
While we will have to adapt to the climate impacts we cannot avoid, we
must expend every effort to slash carbon pollution and safeguard this
planet and the life that calls it home.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oplS87scw50
- -
/[ threat multiplier ]/
*How Climate Change drives Conflict | feat. @zentouro*
ClimateAdam
Apr 7, 2022 #CreatorsForChange #ClimateChange
Climate change is a threat multiplier. It makes all those other things
we care about worse. And in 2022 one of the things at the front of our
minds - thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine - is war. Could
climate change really trigger conflict? What is the latest we understand
about how global warming and global wars could feed off each other?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9CHCbBoaGM
/[The news archive - looking back at moments of great certainty in 2001 ]/
/*June 6, 2001*/
June 6, 2001: The AP reports:
"In a study commissioned by the White House, the National Academy of
Sciences said Wednesday that global warming 'is real and
particularly strong within the past 20 years' and said a leading
cause is emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.
"The report was requested to help prepare Bush for his trip to
Europe next week, but the academy was not asked for policy
recommendations and it made none.
"In Europe Bush has meetings on global warming scheduled with
various officials. Many Europeans protested vigorously after Bush,
citing looming energy shortages, in March reversed a campaign
promise to limit CO2 emissions from power plants.
"The 24-page National Academy of Sciences report, an assessment
based on previous studies about the phenomenon, says, 'The primary
source, fossil fuel burning, has released roughly twice as much
carbon dioxide as would be required to account for the observed
increase' in temperature.
"The report also blames global warming on other greenhouse gases
directly affected by human activity: methane, ozone, nitrous oxide
and chlorofluorocarbons."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010606/aponline204019_000.htm
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=3711&method=full
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