[✔️] June 29, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | AirNow.gov, NYC smoke, US public wants change, Blame Bush-Cheney, Re-Thinking Sustainability, immanentize the eschaton, New Yorker Haze, 2011 Entercom lurches.

[Richard Pauli]

/*June*//*29, 2023*/

/[ Gov agency tells us where the clean air is //https://www.airnow.gov///]/
*Your first time on AirNow*
The first time you use AirNow, you’ll land on the entry page. Click the 
locator icon or use the search box to enter a zip code, city, or state. 
Zip code and city take you to the city nearest to you that has air 
quality data. If there is no city within 50 miles of your location that 
has air quality data, you’ll be taken to a “state” page that lists all 
the cities in that state that have air quality data. Enter any state 
name in the search box to go to that state page.
The next time you use AirNow, your browser may remember and take you 
directly to your city page.
https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/107264068-1687966329000-Screen_Shot_2023-06-28_at_112958_AM.png?v=1687982900&w=740&h=416&ffmt=webp&vtcrop=y
https://www.airnow.gov/about-airnow/
https://www.airnow.gov/



/[ NY catches up ] /
*Wildfire smoke hits New York again: ‘We are truly the first generation 
to feel the real effects of climate change,’ Gov. Hochul says*
UPDATED WED, JUN 28 2023
Catherine Clifford
KEY POINTS

    - - Smoke from the wildfires burning in Canada is blowing south and
    causing dangerous air quality in New York state for the second time
    in a month.
    - - “This is not something that we’re talking about future
    generations dealing with,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said. “We are
    truly the first generation to feel the real effects of climate change.”
    - - Steve Pyne, a historian with a special focus on fire, told CNBC
    that wildfires in Canada have been serious before but climate change
    is “a performance enhancer.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/28/canadian-wildfire-smoke-is-impacting-air-quality-in-new-york-again.html



/[  um, duh ]/
*US public wants climate change dealt with, but doesn’t like the options*
People want both action and to keep using fossil fuels.
JOHN TIMMER - 6/28/2023
- -
*And by we, I mean you*
Americans have mixed views of the renewable energy transition, expecting 
both benefits and costs.

All that said, there was a remarkable ambivalence about taking some 
actions to limit climate change, with the key determinant seemingly 
being how directly affected people would be by the policy. You can see a 
bit of that in the above; people were optimistic about abstractions like 
job opportunities in the energy sector but pessimistic about things that 
have a direct impact, like the price of everyday goods. Similarly, a 
majority supported many policies that put the burden on corporations but 
couldn't reach majority-level support for blocking newly constructed 
buildings from having gas lines, which could potentially affect them.

Along the same lines, a strong majority was against doing away with 
gasoline-powered vehicles, with 59 percent opposing that as policy. And 
opposition has risen by nearly eight points over the past two years.

In general, the survey showed a general lack of understanding about 
everything that would need to be done to get off fossil fuels. 
Majorities of those responding haven't even considered getting a heat 
pump or electric hot water heater. The only reason a majority hadn't 
thought about installing an electric stove is that they're common enough 
that nearly a third of those polled already had one.

A more general finding is that a full 35 percent of those polled—again, 
mostly Republicans—say the US should never move off fossil fuels. 
Although the question was somewhat confusing, in that those who said we 
should not transition away from fossil fuels were then given the option 
to agree with eliminating their use eventually. It's unclear how those 
two options differed or why nearly two-thirds of the US failed to 
recognize that the transition is already in progress.
- -
If there's some reason for optimism about the partisan gap, it's that 
younger Republicans appear to be far more willing to act on the climate. 
It may take them until the US hits net-zero to become the majority, but 
there's definitely a chance that opposition will slacken over time.

The second thing is that, while Republicans were less likely to report 
their community had experienced extreme weather or fires, most of those 
who did correctly associated those with climate change. The US is 
currently experiencing a severe heat wave focused on the South and 
wildfire smoke has been spreading across most of the Northeast and 
Midwest, another sign that these events are becoming increasingly 
difficult to ignore. Ultimately, that bit of reality might help break 
down at least some of the partisan differences.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/us-public-wants-climate-change-dealt-with-but-doesnt-like-the-options/



/[ Salon history blames Dick Cheney ]/
*Climate change denial hit its stride in the Bush-Cheney era, 
precipitating today's climate disaster*
Republicans didn't always deny the reality of climate change. Then, 
George W. Bush took office
By MATTHEW ROZSA
Once upon a time, the mainstream Republican Party did not deny the 
reality of climate science and even saw the environment as something to 
be valued and protected, not exploited...

This can be difficult to believe, much as it is hard to imagine that 
environmentalist presidents like Theodore Roosevelt (who conserved over 
230 million acres of wilderness, at least for white people) and Richard 
Nixon (who originated the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA) 
actually identified as Republicans. As recently as the early 1990s, a 
Republican president (George H. W. Bush) was willing to sign landmark 
environmental legislation to clean up acid rain and amend the Clean Air 
Act...
Yet today more than three out of four Republicans deny that climate 
change is a major threat to America's well-being. When Donald Trump was 
president, he gutted the EPA at every turn and yanked America out of the 
Paris climate accord. Although Joe Biden reversed some, but not all of 
Trump's policies after taking office, it is clear today that one of 
America's two major political parties denies objective reality when it 
comes to basic scientific fact.

According to many experts, it all traces back to the early 2000s — and 
the regime of America's most powerful Vice President, Dick Cheney.

"In terms of like the party's official stance being the rejection of 
environmental science — climate science, ozone depletion, what have you 
— that really hit its stride during the George W. Bush years," Dr. 
Michael E. Mann, a professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the 
University of Pennsylvania and author of "The New Climate War," told 
Salon. "That is the transition when Dick Cheney and the energy industry 
took over energy and environmental policy for the George W. Bush 
presidency. That's where they really veered sharply in the direction" of 
outright denialism...
Even at the time that this was happening, astute observers picked up on 
it. American science journalist Chris Mooney wrote the classic warning 
"The Republican War on Science" in 2005, smack dab in the middle of the 
Bush era, and dedicated his tome to exposing the deliberate efforts to 
conceal scientific facts from the public.

Notably, it was not limited to climate change: Fundamentalist Christian 
organizations opposed the scientific consensus on issues like evolution 
and bioethics, while private businesses opposed a wide range of 
environmental protection measures. Working together with the Republican 
Party — and particularly under the watchful, highly involved leadership 
of Vice President Cheney – the White House worked with Congress and the 
legislature to erode public trust in scientific research.

Years later, it has been confirmed that one of the chief policies of 
Bush's entire administration — that the United States needed to conquer 
Iraq because dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — 
was, in fact, also a lie. In a sense, the entire notion that one can 
replace reality with "alternative facts" began during this time...
"It was a harbinger of things to come because, of course, after this the 
bad faith attack by Republicans on climate science has now metastasized 
to our entire body politic and to the very notion of fact-based 
discourse," Mann told Salon.

A cottage industry has since emerged, best profiled by Naomi Oreskes and 
Erik M. Conway in their book "Merchants of Doubt," in which right-wing, 
free-market foundations and institutions pay scientists to undermine 
confidence in scientific fact. The strategy is simple and effective: 
With enough money pumped into talking heads who will say whatever 
special interests want the public to believe, you can make necessary 
reforms difficult, if not impossible. In addition to convincing millions 
that pseudoscience is the real deal, these interest groups confuse the 
issue for millions of other well-intentioned but scientifically 
illiterate Americans...
"The industry had realized you could create the impression of 
controversy simply by asking questions," Oreskes and Conway explain at 
one point. On another occasion, they point out that the American 
public's tendency to want to "look at both sides" creates a logical trap 
that conservatives can exploit: "While the idea of equal time for 
opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does 
not work for science, because science is not about opinion," they write. 
"It is about evidence."

The evidence strongly indicates that global heating and climate change 
are real and are principally caused by humans. Since the late 19th 
century, the average global temperature has risen by 2 degrees 
Fahrenheit (1 degrees Celsius). Glaciers are retreating all over the 
world and the ice sheets on Greenland and the Antarctic are shrinking. 
All over the planet sea levels have risen by roughly 8 inches (20 
centimeters) over the last 100 years — and that rate has picked up pace 
in the past two decades, which was nearly double that of previous last 
century and continues to accelerate.

If these trends are not stopped and reversed, conditions will become 
apocalyptic — a trend that is becoming more apparent across the globe. 
As sea levels continue to inch upward, hundreds of millions of people 
will be displaced from coastal regions, especially cities. There will be 
regular occurrences of extreme weather events like wildfires, droughts 
and heatwaves, as well as more hurricanes and thunderstorms. Cities like 
Phoenix will become uninhabitable as their water disappears while much 
of New York City will be underwater.
And it all kicked into overdrive when Cheney decided to take over White 
House environmental policy. (Cheney was the former chairman and CEO of 
Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000, a fossil fuel corporation that 
was handed numerous billion-dollar contracts during the Iraq Invasion.) 
If there was a single transformative moment, it occurred 20 years ago, 
after the fossil fuel industry had had enough of Bush's first pick for 
EPA administration, Christine Todd Whitman. They were particularly 
displeased when she declared that CO2 should be regulated as a pollutant 
under the Clean Air Act — a move that may have helped save the planet, 
had it been implemented.

"Midway through that first term, when the fossil fuel industry didn't 
like what was going on, they worked with front groups like the 
Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is a bad faith fossil fuel 
industry front group, and with Dick Cheney, who had close ties to the 
energy industry, and other energy companies — and they staged a coup," 
Mann recalled. "They literally came in, got rid of Christine Todd 
Whitman, and Dick Cheney took over energy policy in that administration. 
They basically shoved her aside. And the fox was now guarding the hen 
house from that point forward. Energy and environmental policy, and the 
Republican Party, was controlled by polluters and they would not look 
back. That has remained true ever since."

Nor has this legacy been limited to the environment: Mann noted that as 
recently as the COVID pandemic, the same network of right-wing groups 
acted in concert to discredit science when they worried that Trump's 
failure to effectively address it would hurt his reelection chances. It 
can even be seen outside the realm of science, such as in how Trump has 
convinced millions of Americans to believe a Big Lie that solely serves 
his narcissistic pride — namely, the idea that he didn't actually lose 
the 2020 presidential election.

While it would be a stretch to say that any single event caused all of 
this, certainly climate change is one of the most serious existential 
threats to humanity. Being able to trick a critical mass of the 
population into not recognizing that fact is, undeniably, a major feat 
of political manipulation — and consequently a milestone in human 
history, even if reams of other lies later were born from the same process.

"You probably saw the review that I wrote of 'Vice,'" Mann told Salon, 
referring to the 2018 biopic about Cheney. He referenced the 
"unmistakable montage at the end of that film. It probably goes over the 
heads of just about every viewer, but you and I and those of us who 
follow this closely could clearly recognize what the message was at the 
end of the film. This disaster that we have now is because of what 
transpired at that time."...
"Specifically because of the actions of a Wyoming opportunist named Dick 
Cheney?" Salon asked Mann for clarification.

"Exactly!" Mann exclaimed. "I couldn't say it better myself."

https://www.salon.com/2023/06/19/climate-change-denial-hit-its-stride-in-the-bush-cheney-era-precipitating-todays-climate-disaster/



/[ video lecture ]/
*Re-Thinking Sustainability and the Green Transition*
Just Collapse
Apr 27, 2023
Associate Professor of geometallurgy, Simon Michaux of the Geological 
Survey of Finland, gets real about our predicament and challenges 
preconceptions around the viability of a "green" transition. Hosted by 
associate professor Kate Booth, and the University of Tasmania.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULNEB1fkQDU



/[ the older I get, the less I understand ]/
*Immanentize the eschaton*
In political theory and theology, to immanentize the eschaton is a 
generally pejorative term referring to attempts to bring about utopian 
conditions in the world, and to effectively create heaven on earth. 
Theologically, the belief is akin to postmillennialism as reflected in 
the Social Gospel of the 1880–1930 era, as well as Protestant reform 
movements during the Second Great Awakening in the 1830s and 1840s such 
as abolitionism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanentize_the_eschaton



/[ a clip from the NewYorker - //An awareness that the air around you 
isn’t fit to breathe can be a uniquely alarming sensation. It is also 
likely to become more common.]/
By Dhruv Khullar
June 25, 2023
*The Hazy Days of Summer*

    When it comes to our health, wildfire smoke may be the most
    injurious form of air pollution; according to one study, it can be
    ten times as toxic as other forms of pollution, including car
    exhaust. Wildfires release enormous amounts of fine particulate
    matter known as PM2.5—toxins up to 2.5 microns in size, or roughly
    one-twentieth the diameter of a human hair. These particles travel
    long distances and are readily inhaled into the lungs; from there,
    they can slip into the bloodstream, lodge in organs, and even enter
    the brain. Their effects may be especially damaging to children,
    whose bodies are rapidly developing and whose immune defenses
    haven’t fully matured...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/03/the-hazy-days-of-summer?



/[The news archive - looking back at disinformation battles ]/
/*June 29, 2011*/
June 29, 2011: Entercom Communications, the radio conglomerate perhaps 
best known for running right-wing talk radio stations whose hosts 
regularly promote climate-change denial, announces that it will run a 
350.org PSA featuring actor Ellen Page on its stations.

http://350.org/about/blogs/ellen-page-records-psa-350org


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