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<i><font size="+1"><b>May 2, 2020</b></font></i><br>
<br>
[Business and climate risk]<br>
<b>Warren calls for SEC to require climate risk disclosures</b><br>
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is calling on the Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC) to require public companies to disclose
climate risks posed by their activities. <br>
<br>
She wrote a letter to SEC Chairman Jay Clayton as the agency is
proposing changes to financial disclosure requirements. The changes
wouldn't add any particular mandate to disclose climate risks. <br>
<br>
"The climate crisis will have a significant impact on our economy,
and without meaningful requirements for companies to disclose their
exposure to climate change risk, I am concerned that the proposed
rule would not give investors and the public the information needed
to make well-informed investment decisions," Warren wrote on
Tuesday...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/495336-warren-calls-for-sec-to-require-climate-risk-disclosures">https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/495336-warren-calls-for-sec-to-require-climate-risk-disclosures</a><br>
--<br>
[a single page act]<br>
<b>The Climate Risk Disclosure Act of 2019</b><br>
Investors lack access to basic information about the potential
impact of the climate crisis on American companies. This<br>
creates enormous environmental and financial risks.<br>
The Climate Risk Disclosure Act of 2019 would require public
companies to disclose more information about their exposure to
climate-related risks, which will help investors appropriately
assess those risks, accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to
cleaner and more sustainable energy sources and reduce the chances
of both environmental and financial catastrophe.<br>
<b>The Problem</b><br>
The climate crisis has the potential to affect companies in multiple
ways. First, climate change – through rising sea levels,<br>
more frequent extreme weather patterns, water shortages, increased
resource scarcity, and its many other effects – directly<br>
threatens valuable company assets. Freddie Mac has stated that
climate change appears "likely to destroy billions of<br>
dollars in property and to displace millions of people," which will
produce "economic losses and social disruption . . .<br>
likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing
crisis and Great Recession."<br>
Second, global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or
otherwise mitigate the effects of the climate crisis could<br>
dramatically affect the value of company assets. The Task Force on
Climate-related Financial Disclosures has written that<br>
the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions "coupled with rapidly
declining costs and increased deployment of clean and<br>
energy-efficient technologies could have significant, near-term
financial implications for organizations dependent on<br>
extracting, producing, and using coal, oil, and natural gas...<br>
In fact, climate-related risks and the expected transition to a
lower-carbon economy affect most economic sectors and industries." <br>
Former Vice President Al Gore has noted that by ignoring the risk of
a carbon bubble, investors "are exposing their portfolios to an
externality that should be integrated into the capital allocation
process."<br>
The effects on the fossil fuel industry are likely to be most
severe. To successfully limit an average global temperature rise<br>
to 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels – the
ultimate goal of the Paris Agreement – energy experts estimate<br>
that the global community must dramatically reduce fossil fuel
consumption over the next 30 years, with nearly 0% of<br>
electricity generated from coal and about 8% of electricity
generated from gas by 2050, while also using carbon dioxide<br>
removal activities.<br>
The market lacks information about companies' exposure to these
risks and it appears to dramatically undervalue the<br>
potential impacts of the climate crisis. While the Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued guidelines<br>
suggesting that companies consider the effects of the climate crisis
on company assets, it has not mandated any specific <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/File%20Number%20S7-01-20%20-%2004.28.2020%20Letter%20from%20Senator%20Warren%20to%20SEC%20Chairman%20Jay%20Clayton.pdf">https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/File%20Number%20S7-01-20%20-%2004.28.2020%20Letter%20from%20Senator%20Warren%20to%20SEC%20Chairman%20Jay%20Clayton.pdf</a><br>
<br>
<br>
[The movie controversy]<br>
<b>Review: Planet of the Humans</b><br>
By Richard Heinberg, originally published by Resilience.org<br>
April 27, 2020<br>
A few days ago, Emily Atkin posted a reaction to Michael Moore's
latest film, Planet of the Humans (directed and narrated by Jeff
Gibbs), in which she began by admitting that she hadn't seen the
film yet. When writers take that approach, you know there's already
blood in the water. (She has since watched the film and written an
actual review. Full disclosure: I'm in the film, included as one of
the "good guys." But I don't intend to let that fact distort my
comments in this review.)<br>
<br>
The film is controversial because it makes two big claims: first,
that renewable energy is a sham; second, that big environmental
organizations--by promoting solar and wind power--have sold their
souls to billionaire investors.<br>
<br>
I feel fairly confident commenting on the first of these claims,
regarding renewable energy, having spent a year working with David
Fridley of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to assess the
prospects for a complete transition to solar and wind power.<br>
<br>
We found that the transition to renewables is going far too slowly
to make much of a difference during the crucial next couple of
decades, and would be gobsmackingly expensive if we were to try
replacing all fossil fuel use with solar and wind. We also found, as
the film underscores again and again, that the intermittency of
sunshine and wind is a real problem--one that can only be solved
with energy storage (batteries, pumped hydro, or compressed air, all
of which are costly in money and energy terms); or with source
redundancy (building way more generation capacity than you're likely
to need at any one time, and connecting far-flung generators on a
super-grid); or demand management (which entails adapting our
behavior to using energy only when it's available). All three
strategies involve trade-offs. In the energy world, there is no free
lunch. Further, the ways we use energy today are mostly adapted to
the unique characteristics of fossil fuels, so a full transition to
renewables will require the replacement of an extraordinary amount
of infrastructure in our food system, manufacturing, building
heating, the construction industry, and on and on. Altogether, the
only realistic way to make the transition in industrial countries
like the US is to begin reducing overall energy usage substantially,
eventually running the economy on a quarter, a fifth, or maybe even
a tenth of current energy.<br>
<br>
Is it true that mainstream enviros have oversold renewables? Yes.
They have portrayed the transition away from fossil fuels as mostly
a political problem; the implication in many of their communications
is that, if we somehow come up with the money and the political
will, we can replace oil with solar and continue living much as we
do today, though with a clear climate conscience. That's an illusion
that deserves shattering.<br>
<br>
But the film does make some silly mistakes. Gibbs claims that a
solar panel will generate less energy than it took to build the
panel. That's a misleading claim. Many teams of researchers have
addressed the question of energy return on energy invested for solar
power, and even the most pessimistic results (with which I mostly
agree) say that the technology can yield a marginal energy gain.
Much of that gain goes away if we have to "pay" for the energy
investment entailed in providing batteries or redundant capacity.
Wind power generally has a better energy payback than solar, but the
location of turbines matters a great deal and ideal sites are
limited in number. Assessing solar and wind power calls for
complicated energy accounting, but the film reduces that complexity
to a blanket, binary dismissal.<br>
<br>
The film is low on nuance, but our global climate and energy dilemma
is all shades of gray. Gibbs seems to say that renewables are a
complete waste of time. I would say, they are best seen as a
marginal transitional strategy for industrial societies. Given
climate change and the fact that fossil fuels are depleting, finite
resources, it appears that if we want to maintain any sort of
electrical energy infrastructure in the future, it will have to be
powered by renewables--hydro, wind, or solar. As many studies have
confirmed, the nuclear power industry has little realistic prospect
of revival. The future will be renewable; there simply isn't any
other option. What is very much in question, however, is the kind of
society renewable energy can support.<br>
The fact is that we've already bet our entire future on electricity
and electronics. Communications and information processing and
storage have all been digitized. That means that if the grid goes
down, we've lost civilization altogether. I don't think we can
maintain global grids at current scale without fossil fuels, but I
can envision the possibility of a process of triage whereby, as
population and resource consumption shrink, the digital world does
as well, until it's small enough to be powered by renewable
electricity that can be generated with minimal and acceptable
environmental damage.<br>
<br>
I agree with Gibbs, however, that renewables are realistically
incapable of maintaining our current levels of energy usage,
especially in rich countries like the US. Transitioning to electric
cars may be a useful small-scale and short-term strategy for
reducing oil consumption (I drive one myself), but limits to lithium
and other raw materials used in building e-cars mean we really need
to think about how to get rid of personal cars altogether.<br>
<br>
Mainstream enviros will hate this movie because it exposes some of
their real failings. By focusing on techno-fixes, they have
sidelined nearly all discussion of overpopulation and
overconsumption. Maybe that's understandable as a marketing
strategy, but it's a mistake to let marketing consultants sort truth
from fiction for us.<br>
<br>
During recent decades, the big environmental orgs wearied of telling
their followers to reduce, reuse, and recycle. They came to see that
global problems like climate change require systemic solutions that,
in turn, require massive investment and governmental planning and
oversight.<br>
<br>
But the reality is, we need both high-level systemic change and
widespread individual behavior change. That's one of the lessons of
the coronavirus pandemic: "flattening the curve" demands both
central planning and leadership, and individual sacrifice.<br>
<br>
Planet of the Humans paints environmental organizations and leaders
with a broad and accusatory brush. One target is Jeremy Grantham, a
billionaire investment analyst who created the Grantham Foundation
for the Protection of the Environment in 1997. Grantham was already
a mega-rich investor before he "got religion" on environmental
issues. I've had several face-to-face meetings with him (full
disclosure: the Grantham Foundation has provided modest funding to
Post Carbon Institute, where I work) and it's clear that he cares
deeply about overpopulation and overconsumption, and he understands
that economic growth is killing the planet. He's scared for his
children and grandchildren, and he genuinely wants to use whatever
wealth and influence he has to change the world. To imply, as the
film does, that he merely sees green tech as an investment strategy
is a poorly aimed cheap shot. Bill McKibben, who is skewered even
more savagely, also deserves better; he has replied to the film
here.<br>
<br>
Finally, the film leaves viewers with no sense of hope for the
future. I understand why Gibbs made that choice. Too often, "hopium"
is simply a drug we use to numb ourselves to the horrific reality of
our situation and its causes--in which we are all complicit.<br>
<br>
Yet, however awful the circumstance, we need a sense of human
agency. In the face of the pandemic, many of us are reduced to
sitting at home sewing facemasks; it seems like a paltry response to
a spreading sickness that's taking tens of thousands of lives, but
it's better than sitting on our hands and saying "Woe is me." The
same goes for climate change: figuring out how to eat lower on the
food chain, or how to get by without a car, or how to reduce home
energy usage by half, or growing a garden might seem like trivial
responses to such an overwhelming crisis, but they get us moving
together in the right direction.<br>
<br>
For all the reasons I've mentioned, Planet of the Humans is not the
last word on our human predicament. Still, it starts a conversation
we need to have, and it's a film that deserves to be seen.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-04-27/review-planet-of-the-humans/">https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-04-27/review-planet-of-the-humans/</a><br>
- - -<br>
[McKibben responds in RollingStone]<br>
<b>'A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement': Michael Moore
Damages Our Most Important Goal</b><br>
It hurts to be personally attacked in a movie. It hurts more to see
a movement divided<br>
By BILL MCKIBBEN<br>
- - <br>
Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking
renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental
movement is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off
green energy. "One of the most dangerous things right now is the
illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are
somehow different from fossil fuels," Ozzie Zehner, one of the
film's producers, tells the camera. When visiting a solar facility,
he insists: "You use more fossil fuels to do this than you're
getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning
the fossil fuels."<br>
<br>
That's not true, not in the least -- the time it takes for a solar
panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four
years. Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the
power it produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of
the power from burning fossil fuels. It turns out that pretty much
everything else about the movie was wrong -- there have been at
least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous; as one
scientist wrote in a particularly scathing takedown, "Planet of the
Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else."... <br>
- -<br>
I think that one thing that defines those movements is their
adversaries -- in this case the fossil fuel industry above all. And
I think the thing that weakens those movements is when they start
trying to identify adversaries within their ranks. Much has been
made over the years about the way that progressives eat their own,
about circular firing squads and the like. I think there's truth to
it: there's a collection of showmen like Moore who enjoy attracting
attention to themselves by endlessly picking fights. They're
generally not people who actually try to organize, to build power,
to bring people together. That's the real, and difficult, work --
not purity tests or calling people out, but calling them in. At
least, that's how it seems to me: The battle to slow down global
warming in the short time that physics allots us requires ever
bigger movements.<br>
<br>
It's been a great privilege to get to help build those movements.
And if I worry that my effectiveness has been compromised, it's not
a huge worry, precisely because there are now so many others doing
this work -- generations and generations of people who have grown up
in this fight. I think, more or less, we're all headed in the right
direction, that people are getting the basic message right: conserve
energy; replace coal and gas and oil with wind and sun; break the
political power of the fossil fuel industry; demand just transitions
for workers; build a world that reduces ruinous inequality; and
protect natural systems, both because they're glorious and so they
can continue to soak up carbon. I don't know if we're going to get
this done in time -- sometimes I kick myself for taking too long to
figure out we needed to start building movements. But I know our
chances are much improved if we do it together.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/bill-mckibben-climate-movement-michael-moore-993073/">https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/bill-mckibben-climate-movement-michael-moore-993073/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
[video offers some useful, basic history 25 mins - spot on]<br>
<b>Climate Policy | The Complete Moderate's Guide</b><br>
Apr 28, 2020<br>
Knowing Better<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52rDpeC6JL0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52rDpeC6JL0</a><br>
<br>
<br>
[Media and politicians]<br>
<b>Australia listened to the experts on coronavirus. It's time we
heard them on climate change</b><br>
Lenore Taylor - Fri 1 May 2020 <br>
- -<br>
Imagine if we took just two lessons from the way Australian
governments responded to the coronavirus: that good decisions are
made when they consider the evidence and the best available expert
advice; and that policy-making can accommodate reasonable
differences of opinion, without becoming a "war".<br>
<br>
Think, as Laura Tingle did in a piece for the ABC's 7.30 this week,
of the difference it would make if interviewers and commentators
allowed room for discussion of complex and competing ideas, before
demanding that politicians rule them "in" or "out", or before
finding a backbencher who will say they might cross the floor on a
policy that conflicts with their ideological prejudice – even if
that policy hasn't yet been outlined...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2020/may/02/australia-listened-to-the-experts-on-coronavirus-its-time-we-heard-them-on-climate-change">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2020/may/02/australia-listened-to-the-experts-on-coronavirus-its-time-we-heard-them-on-climate-change</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
May 2, 2008 </b></font><br>
On MSNBC's "Countdown," Keith Olbermann and guest Rachel<br>
Maddow react to GOP presidential candidate John McCain's remarks<br>
earlier in the day linking the Iraq War to US energy policy.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvY9e_ZxxyA">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvY9e_ZxxyA</a><br>
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