[✔️] November 21, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Credible danger. Capture gamble, Old Charis Hayes, 2015 more Chris Hayes

[Richard Pauli]

/*November *//*21, 2023*/

/[ "There is now no credible pathway to avoiding dangerous climate 
change." This is difficult to process ]/
*5 reasons why climate change may see more of us turn to alcohol and 
other drugs*
November 19, 2023
Climate change will affect every aspect of our health and wellbeing. But 
its potential harms go beyond the body’s ability to handle extreme heat, 
important as this is.

Extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, storms and wildfires, 
are becoming more frequent and severe. These affect our mental health in 
a multitude of ways.

Coping with climate change can be overwhelming. Sometimes, the best 
someone can do is to seek refuge in alcohol, tobacco, over-the-counter 
and prescription drugs, or other psychoactive substances. This is 
understandable, but dangerous, and can have serious consequences.

We outline five ways climate change could increase the risk of harmful 
substance use...

*1. Mental health is harmed*
Perhaps the most obvious way climate change can be linked to harmful 
substance use is by damaging mental health. This increases the risk of 
new or worsened substance use.

People with a mental disorder are at high risk of also having a 
substance-use disorder. This often precedes their mental health 
problems. Climate change-related increases in the number and nature of 
extreme events, in turn, are escalating risks to mental health.

For example, extreme heat is linked to increased distress across the 
whole population. In extreme heat, more people go to the emergency 
department for psychiatric problems, including for alcohol and substance 
use generally. This is even true for a single very hot day.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and other mental 
health problems are common at the time of extreme weather events and can 
persist for months, even years afterwards, especially if people are 
exposed to multiple events. This can increase the likelihood of using 
substances as a way to cope...

*2. Worry increases*
With increasing public awareness of how climate change is endangering 
wellbeing, people are increasingly worried about what will happen if it 
remains unchecked.

Worrying isn’t the same as meeting the criteria for a mental disorder. 
But surveys show climate change generates complex emotional responses, 
especially in children. As well as feelings of worry, there is anxiety, 
fear, guilt, anger, grief and helplessness.

Some emotional states, such as sadness, are linked with long-term 
tobacco use and also make substance use relapse more likely...

*3. Physical injuries hurt us in many ways*
Physical injuries caused by extreme weather events – such as smoke 
inhalation, burns and flood-related cuts and infections – increase the 
risk of harmful substance use. That’s partly because they increase the 
risk of psychological distress. If injuries cause long-term illness or 
disability, consequent feelings of hopelessness and depression can 
dispose some people to self-medicate with alcohol or other drugs.

Substance use itself can also generate long-term physiological harm, 
disabilities or other chronic health problems. These are linked with 
higher rates of harmful substance use...

*4. Our day-to-day lives change*
A single catastrophic event, such as a storm or flood, can devastate 
lives overnight and change the way we live. So, too, can the more subtle 
changes in climate and day-to-day weather. Both can disrupt behaviour 
and routines in ways that risk new or worsened substance use, for 
example, using stimulants to cope with fatigue.

Take, for example, hotter temperatures, which disrupt sleep, undermine 
academic performance, reduce physical activity, and promote hostile 
language and violent behaviour...

*5. It destabilises communities
*Finally, climate change is destabilising the socioeconomic, natural, 
built and geopolitical systems on which human wellbeing – indeed 
survival – depends.

Damaged infrastructure, agricultural losses, school closures, 
homelessness and displacement are significant sources of psychosocial 
distress that prompt acute (short-term) and chronic (long-term) stress 
responses.

Stress, in turn, can increase the risk of harmful substance use and make 
people more likely to relapse...

*Why are we so concerned?*
Substance-use disorders are economically and socially very costly. Risky 
substance use that doesn’t meet the criteria for a formal diagnosis can 
also harm.

Aside from its direct physical harm, harmful substance use disrupts 
education and employment. It increases the risk of accidents and crime, 
and it undermines social relationships, intimate partnerships and family 
functioning...

*Politicians take note*
As we head towards the COP28 global climate talks in Dubai, climate 
change is set to hit the headlines once more. Politicians know climate 
change is undermining human health and wellbeing. It’s well past time to 
insist they act.

As we have seen for populations as a whole, there are multiple possible 
ways for climate change to cause a rise in harmful substance use. This 
means multidimensional prevention strategies are needed. As well as 
addressing climate change more broadly, we need strategies including:

    supporting vulnerable individuals, especially young people, and
    marginalised commmunities, who are hit hardest by extreme
    weather-related events

    focusing health-related policies more on broadscale health
    promotion, for example, healthier eating, active transport and
    community-led mental health support

    investing in climate-resilient infrastructure, such as heat-proofing
    buildings and greening cities, to prevent more of the destabilising
    effects and stress we know contributes to mental health problems and
    harmful substance use.

There is now no credible pathway to avoiding dangerous climate change. 
However, if increasing rates of climate protests are anything to go by, 
the world may finally be ready for radical change – and perhaps for 
reduced harmful substance use.
https://theconversation.com/5-reasons-why-climate-change-may-see-more-of-us-turn-to-alcohol-and-other-drugs-217894



/[  So the optimal Titanic life boat must be just as big as the Titanic 
itself?  ]/
*Why the Belief That Carbon Capture Technologies Can Work at 
Gigaton-Scale Is a Gigantic Gamble*
Despite CCS’s track record of failure and glaring feasibility issues, 
petrostates are expected to use it as cover to dismiss fossil fuel 
phaseout at COP28.
ANALYSIS
By Dana Drugmandon
Nov 17, 2023
With the start of the 28th annual United Nations climate summit, COP28, 
just two weeks away, a battle is brewing over the role of fossil fuels 
as nations try to stem the tide of climate change.

A “high ambition” coalition of nations such as France, Tuvalu, Ethiopia, 
and Ireland backed by climate scientists, climate and civil society 
organizations, and the UN Secretary General, are calling for commitments 
to phase out coal, oil, and gas. On the other hand, many oil and gas 
producing countries, supported by the politically potent fossil fuel 
lobby, are urging an approach that allows continued fossil fuel 
extraction – and even expansion – under the assumption that emissions 
mitigation technologies can largely eliminate the climate pollution of 
business-as-usual, emissions-intensive activities.

Now, a new report shows that fossil fuel production by 2030 is set to 
exceed the level that would be compatible with limiting warming to 1.5°C 
by more than 110 percent. A second just-released report reveals that to 
mitigate that growth, the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and 
carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies would have to reach gigaton 
scale in less than 10 years, which might not be possible.

“That idea that we can build more fossil fuels but it’s ok because we 
can mitigate the emissions, or we’ll be able to pull carbon out of the 
air or out of the smokestacks, I think is incredibly dangerous,” Collin 
Rees, U.S. program manager at Oil Change International, said during a 
November 14 media briefing sponsored by a coalition called Gas Exports 
Today, which was convened by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and held in 
advance of COP28.

  In remarks delivered at the UN Climate Ambition Summit in September, 
COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber said that a “phase down,” not a “phase 
out,” of fossil fuels is what’s needed to combat climate change. He also 
referenced building “an energy system free of all unabated fossil 
fuels.” The term “unabated” has become a major reference in the climate 
diplomacy conversation in recent years, starting with COP26 in Glasgow 
where governments agreed to accelerate efforts “towards the phasedown of 
unabated coal power.” This language serves as a qualifier to suggest 
that fossil fuels can be rendered ‘clean’ through carbon capture and 
storage and engineered carbon dioxide removal, collectively termed 
“carbon management.”

While these technologies may seem promising in theory, in practice they 
face substantial constraints and challenges. The two new reports further 
underscore these limitations.
Governments around the world are planning to produce more than double 
the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than is consistent with limiting 
warming to 1.5 °C, which is the more stringent objective of the Paris 
Agreement, according to the new Production Gap Report (PGR) 2023, 
produced by the UN Environment Program and the Stockholm Environment 
Institute, along with several other climate think tanks.

“There is overwhelming scientific evidence that we need to phase out all 
fossil fuels as rapidly as possible,” Ploy Achakulwisut, research fellow 
at the Stockholm Environment Institute and co-author of the Production 
Gap Report, said during the report’s virtual launch event on November 8. 
The report takes into account the significant risks and uncertainties 
around CCS and CDR, warning that the potential failure of these 
technologies to reach a climate-relevant scale necessitates an even more 
urgent phaseout of all fossil fuels. Given the feasibility concerns 
around scaling up carbon management technologies, the report urges 
governments to strive to phase out coal by 2040 and slash oil and gas 
production and use by three-quarters (from 2020 levels) by 2050 at a 
minimum.

Achakulwisut noted that even though the majority of modeled climate 
mitigation scenarios from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change (IPCC) report assume that large amounts of CCS and CDR facilities 
can be deployed successfully, there is little evidence to back this 
assumption. In fact, annual capacity from operating CCS projects 
resulting in dedicated storage currently amounts to less than 0.1 
percent of global annual CO2 emissions, Achakulwisut said. When it comes 
to reducing overall global carbon emissions, she noted, CCS is not 
making a dent.

This is likely to be the case in 2030 too, with CCS deployment at that 
point expected to still not move the needle on lowering emissions. “Even 
if all CCS facilities planned and under development worldwide become 
operational,” the Production Gap report explains, “only around 0.25 
[gigatons] of CO2 would be captured in 2030, less than 1% of 2022 global 
CO2 emissions.” The report refers to an International Energy Agency 
dataset which projects, as of March 2023, less than 350 million metric 
tons of CO2 capture capacity from all of the global CCS projects 
planned, under construction, and operational in 2030.

The International Energy Agency’s updated Net Zero roadmap report 
released in September references a slightly higher figure, saying that 
around 400 million metric tons of CO2 could be captured by 2030 if all 
planned CCS projects get built, which, the agency said, is still only 40 
percent of the 1 gigaton-per-year capture capacity needed by 2030 in its 
net zero emissions scenario.

“There’s a huge range of evidence which is very clear that CCS and CDR 
will not be able to scale fast enough to make a meaningful contribution 
to cutting emissions this decade,” Neil Grant, climate and energy 
analyst at Climate Analytics, said during the report’s launch event. 
“And that means in this decade, the solution has to be reducing fossil 
fuel production and use.”

Carbon dioxide removal technologies, he added, “are very nascent.” Most 
existing direct air capture (DAC) operations are small-scale pilot 
projects. The world’s first commercial-scale DAC plant, called Orca and 
based in Iceland, has a capacity to capture up to 4,000 tons of CO2 per 
year – equivalent to the annual emissions of about 800 cars worldwide, 
or approximately three seconds worth of global CO2 emissions.

*Is DAC Feasible?*
Yet, significant government subsidies and investment are flowing into 
direct air capture, and plans to develop at least 130 DAC facilities are 
now underway. But according to a new briefing paper from the Center for 
International Environmental Law, even if all the planned DAC projects in 
the world get built and operate at full capacity, they would be capable 
of removing just 4.7 million metric tons of CO2 in 2030, equivalent to a 
mere 0.01 percent of current global energy sector emissions. Even 
assuming that DAC could eventually reach a massive scale, the enormous 
quantities of chemicals and energy inputs required to operate the 
machinery raises further feasibility and sustainability questions.

Essentially, the math just doesn’t add up in terms of the projected 
scale up of the carbon management sector in what experts say is the 
critical decade to curb planet-warming emissions by at least 50 percent. 
Experts say CCS and CDR would have to reach gigaton scale in less than 
10 years, and there is no assurance that it will get there in time.

A new report from the Global CCS Institute, a pro-CCS think tank and 
advocacy group, actually affirms this. Although there has been momentum 
in policies, financing, and proposed projects in the carbon management 
sector, there is still a big, glaring question as to whether scaling up 
to the gigaton level by 2030 is even feasible, according to the 
Institute’s Global Status of CCS 2023 report released last week.

“The math also indicates that this past year’s impressive step-up still 
has us near the bottom of the staircase, so to speak, and that CCS must 
reach gigatonne per annum (Gtpa) scale in order to reach our emission 
goals,” Global CCS Institute CEO Jarad Daniels said in a media release 
accompanying the report.

Only a few dozen CCS facilities are currently operational at the global 
level, 14 of which are in the U.S., with a total capacity to capture and 
store 49 million metric tons of CO2, the report states. However, the 
total capacity is not the same as the amount actually captured and 
sequestered, as CCS facilities often do not operate at their maximum 
potential. When considering the additional energy required to power CCS 
operations, and given that the vast majority of existing projects use 
the captured CO2 to extract more oil and gas – a process called enhanced 
oil recovery – the net result is generally more, not less, greenhouse 
gas emissions.

As far as CCS projects that are proposed or “in the pipeline” as the 
report calls it, that number is 392 as of July this year. But as Daniels 
noted in the Institute’s report launch event on November 9, most of the 
facilities in development would be aiming to begin operating starting in 
2030, at the earliest. There are many hurdles, such as permitting and 
securing financing, that projects have to overcome before they start 
capturing any carbon molecules. The lag time between when projects are 
announced and when they become operational is typically around seven 
years or more, the report says, acknowledging that “relatively few [new 
CCS projects] have yet advanced to operation.”

These delays have in the past been due, at least in part, to local 
opposition and unsuccessful community engagement, which have resulted in 
some project cancellations, according to the report. “Lack of community 
support, coupled with permitting challenges, has become a barrier for 
some early development stage CCS projects in the U.S.,” the report states.
Community opposition and public pushback to CCS projects, as DeSmog 
recently reported, appears to be growing across the U.S., and it 
demonstrates that “meaningful” community engagement rhetoric from CCS 
proponents does not often match the reality on the ground. One major 
proposed CCS infrastructure project in the U.S. – a 1,300-mile-long CO2 
pipeline traversing five Midwestern states that was planned by a 
developer called Navigator CO2 Ventures – was canceled last month in the 
face of overwhelming grassroots opposition along with permitting challenges.

*“Unmet Expectations” *
The barriers and significant questions around the feasibility of CCS 
technologies to even scale up at any climate-relevant level are on top 
of an existing track record that, at best, is not very promising and at 
worst could be viewed as largely a failure. Analyses from DeSmog and 
from IEEFA, among others, show that most large-scale CCS projects 
underperform or fail to meet their capture targets. As the new 
Production Gap Report points out, “the track record for CCS has been 
very poor to date, with around 80% of pilot projects over the last 30 
years ending in failure.”

“The U.S. has been publicly subsidizing carbon capture projects since 
the early 1980s,” Rees of Oil Change International said during the 
November 14 Gas Exports Today media briefing. “We have over 40 years of 
evidence that it doesn’t work.”

The IEA and IPCC both recognize that carbon capture technologies have 
underperformed or made slower-than-expected progress. In its updated Net 
Zero roadmap report for example, the IEA states that “the history of 
[carbon capture] has largely been one of unmet expectations.” And in its 
Working Group III report on climate mitigation issued last year as part 
of the Sixth Assessment cycle, the IPCC cautions that CCS “currently 
faces technological, economic, institutional, ecological-environmental, 
and socio-cultural barriers” and notes that global deployment rates are 
“far below those in modeled pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C or 
2°C.”

Given this context, it is reasonable to doubt the promises made by 
carbon capture proponents. The numbers make it clear, as Climate 
Analytics’ Grant explained during the Production Gap Report launch 
event, that CCS and CDR technologies “are not going to be the solutions 
for cutting emissions in this critical decade.”

A new Global Witness analysis further substantiates this point. The 
organization calculated, based on petroleum production data from Rystad, 
that it would take the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) 340 years 
to capture the carbon it had produced from the company’s planned ramp up 
of oil and gas extraction between now and 2030. ADNOC is headed by Al 
Jaber, the controversial COP28 president, and new data shows the oil 
major’s planned output would result in the largest overshoot of the 1.5° 
C goal out of any fossil fuel company in the world. The Global Witness 
analysis also finds that even if ADNOC reaches the 10 million metric 
tons per year of CO2 capture by 2030, as it promises, that would result 
in mitigation of just two percent of the company’s projected 492 million 
metric tons of carbon emissions in 2030.

“If Al Jaber is serious – if we are serious – we must immediately reject 
the CCS false solution and tackle the existential oil and gas problem 
head on,” Global Witness’s Jonathan Noronha Gant said in a statement.
*
“CCS Is Not the Answer”*
CCS critics also point to environmental, health, and safety risks that 
the technologies pose to communities where projects are targeted, which 
are often communities already overburdened by industrial pollution. 
Residents from these areas, such as the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast, 
are voicing their opposition to the buildout of carbon capture in their 
communities.

“CCS is not the answer,” Roishetta Ozane, founder of the Vessel Project 
and resident of southwest Louisiana, said at the November 14 briefing. 
“We don’t need any more false solutions. We need real solutions with 
community voices and community input.”

Ozane will be taking this message to COP28 in Dubai, where she will join 
other advocates on the frontlines of the fossil fuel and petrochemical 
industries’ expansion in calling for an end to this buildout and a phase 
out of fossil fuels. Competing with this call, however, is the narrative 
that emissions – not fossil fuels themselves – are the problem, and that 
it can be fixed through so-called “abatement” technologies – which 
provides cover for the continued production of coal, oil, and gas that 
is so clearly at odds with the rules of physics that govern the climate 
system.

During the Production Gap Report launch event, Grant emphasized that 
carbon capture technologies “do not replace the need for rapid and 
permanent reduction of fossil fuels.”

“And they therefore really can’t be used as a justification for 
continued expansion of fossil fuel extraction,” he added, “which is a 
narrative we’re seeing being pushed around the world, particularly as we 
come towards COP28.”
https://www.desmog.com/2023/11/17/carbon-capture-storage-cop28-al-jaber-global-ccs-institute-global-witness/



/[ really?  Did we forget this much in 7 years? ]/
*Will we begin to fear the ocean?*
Miami, Florida is already feeling the impacts of climate change - how 
will a city deal with the rising seas?
June 30, 2016
https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/-we-as-a-people-will-become-afraid-of-the-ocean-716414531989
- -
/[ video from 8 years ago, that back in the 1970's Exxon knew. MSNBC 
removed comments]/
*On MSNBC's "All In with Chris Hayes,"* Democratic presidential 
candidate Bernie Sanders discusses ExxonMobil's reckless disregard of 
the consequences of human-caused climate change.
Sanders calls for federal probe into ExxonMobil
The presidential candidate wrote a letter to Attorney General Loretta 
Lynch asking her to form a task force to examine whether Exxon lied to 
the public about its role in climate change.
http://on.msnbc.com/1LGi4oj


/[The news archive -  not that long ago. Just 8 years ]/
/*November 21, 2015 */
October 21, 2015: On MSNBC's "All In with Chris Hayes," Democratic 
presidential candidate Bernie Sanders discusses ExxonMobil's reckless 
disregard of the consequences of human-caused climate change.
http://on.msnbc.com/1LGi4oj
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/10/20/3714390/bernie-sanders-investigate-exxon-climate-denial/


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