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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>November 29, 2020</b></font></i></p>
[looking up]<br>
<b>Biden's Appointment of John Kerry as Climate Envoy Sends a
'Signal to the World,' Advocates Say</b><br>
The former senator, secretary of state and presidential candidate
helped forge the Paris climate accord and now is expected to usher
the U.S. back into the pact...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23112020/biden-kerry-climate-envoy-cabinet-picks-paris-agreement">https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23112020/biden-kerry-climate-envoy-cabinet-picks-paris-agreement</a><br>
<p> - -</p>
[more] <br>
<b>As Special Envoy for Climate, John Kerry Will Be No Stranger to
International Climate Negotiations</b><br>
The Kigali Amendment is a little-known climate accord meant to phase
out the use of super-polluting hydroflourocarbons. Kerry helped make
it happen.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24112020/Kerry-Kigali-Amendment-Biden-special-envoy-climate">https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24112020/Kerry-Kigali-Amendment-Biden-special-envoy-climate</a><br>
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[not surprising]<br>
<b>'Republicans Remain Opposed to Any Policies That Would Reduce
Fossil-Fuel Use'<br>
</b>By Jonathan Chait<br>
- -<br>
For more than a decade, the GOP has stood alone among major
right-of-center parties in industrialized democracies worldwide in
its refusal to endorse climate science. But during the Trump era,
the party's rhetorical emphasis shifted. The major Republican point
of agreement is now to insist on fossil-fuel use as an inherent
good...<br>
- - <br>
But what kind of innovation do Republicans want? Halfway through the
Examiner story, we arrive at the bottom line: "Republicans remain
opposed to any policies that would reduce fossil-fuel use."<br>
<br>
Well, then, that would rule out any policy. Innovation in this case
actually means keeping all the incumbent energy technologies in
place permanently. In other words, their actual priority is the
opposite of innovation...<br>
- -<br>
Republicans can backfill any rationale they want. Their bottom-line
position will be an opposition to any measures that reduce
greenhouse-gas emissions. Every factor bearing on their energy
position will push in the same direction: the politics of propping
up jobs and profits in the fossil-fuel sector; the ideology of
opposing new taxes, spending, or regulation to push for
decarbonization; and the partisan imperative of demonizing any
agenda Joe Biden settles on.<br>
<br>
A conservative party capable of participating constructively in a
democratic system might be able to work out some bargain on climate
policy. The Republican party Biden will face is going to
hysterically oppose anything he comes up with.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/republicans-climate-change-biden-science-greenhouse-gas.html">https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/republicans-climate-change-biden-science-greenhouse-gas.html</a><br>
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<p><br>
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[Top 5]<br>
<b>Newsom's Top Five Candidates for Kamala Harris's Senate Seat All
Have Climate in Their Bios</b><br>
The list includes California's attorney general and secretary of
state, two congresswomen and the mayor of Long Beach.<br>
<blockquote><b>1. Xavier Becerra, 62, </b>California Attorney
General, served 12 terms (1993-2017) in Congress representing
downtown Los Angeles, before accepting former Gov. Jerry Brown's
offer to fill Harris's state Attorney General position in Jan.
2017, when she joined the Senate. As attorney general, Becerra has
been a ferocious attack dog against President Donald Trump, suing
the administration 105 times, with more than half the suits
challenging its rollbacks of environmental rules and enforcement.
His office has won 60 suits, with many still pending. In 2018,
Becerra's office launched an environmental justice division with
four attorneys devoted to challenging the federal government's
rollbacks of environmental protections, reducing environmental
toxins and prosecuting industries polluting the air, water and
land in vulnerable communities. As the son of Mexican immigrants
in a state where Latinos make up about 40 percent of the
population, Becerra's appointment would boost Newsom's standing
with a major constituency, but he is on another short list:
President-elect Joe Biden's list for U.S. attorney general.<br>
<br>
<b>2. Alex Padilla, 47,</b> California Secretary of State, has a
long political resume. He started as an intern for Sen. Dianne
Feinstein and became the youngest president of the Los Angeles
City Council at age 26. Before winning his election to be
secretary of state in 2014, Padilla served as a state senator for
two terms. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a leading climate research
institution, and heavily promoted a ballot measure in 2015 to ban
plastic bags to curb pollution and climate change. He is close to
Newsom personally and politically, and political wisdom has it he
would be a motivated ally and partner as Newsom tries to push bold
climate policies before his 2022 re-election. <br>
<b><br>
</b><b>3. Karen Bass, 67</b>, chair of the Congressional Black
Caucus, is starting her sixth term in the House of
Representatives, where she chairs the Subcommittee on Africa,
Global Health, Global Human Rights and International
Organizations. She spent six years in the California Assembly, the
last two as speaker. Her fights for social and environmental
justice go back to her days as a community organizer in Los
Angeles in the 1980s. Her claim to fame in Congress is her
leadership on police reform measures. but she lists climate
change as one of her major issues and has been a consistent vote
against Trump's environmental rollbacks. In 2018, after the United
Nations issued a dire warning about the global climate crisis,
Bass issued a petition calling on the Trump Administration to
commit to reducing carbon emissions and incentivizing the use of
clean energy, a symbolic gesture given the Trump administration
climate denials and push for fossil fuel development. Biden is
considering her for several positions in his incoming
administration. <br>
<br>
<b>4. Barbara Lee, 74</b>, vice-chair and founding member of the
LGBT Caucus, has served in Congress since 1998 (and in the state
assembly for six years, from 1990 to 1996). Her history in
Washington goes back to 1975, when she joined the office of Rep.
Ron Dellums, where she rose from intern to become his chief of
staff. She gained fame after the 9/11 attacks for being the only
member of Congress to vote against the Iraq War and has been a
leader in anti-war legislation. In 2018, she introduced the Women
and Climate Change Act, which aims to create a Federal Interagency
Working Group on Women and Climate Change. The bill, she said in a
statement, was prompted by the reality that "as climate change
worsens, provoking historic droughts, rising sea levels and
violent storms, women and girls will bear the brunt of this global
crisis." Lee is also being considered for a Biden administration
post.<br>
<br>
<b>5. Robert Garcia, 42</b>, mayor of Long Beach, would seem like
an outlier. A Peruvian-American whose family emigrated to
California when he was five, Garcia, who holds a doctorate in
education from California State University at Long Beach, is the
only mayor on the short list. But he has become a prominent voice
on several issues, most notably the coronavirus, and, especially,
the environment. In 2015, during his inaugural address, Garcia
declared his intention to make Long Beach a national climate
leader. He commissioned an assessment of the city's vulnerability
and potential responses from the Aquarium of the Pacific, a
trusted source for scientific information in the greater Los
Angeles area. The responses have included a citizen's guide to
building a climate resilient Long Beach, published in 2017,
workshops for different communities to discuss climate hazards and
possible solutions, programs for Cal State, Long Beach students to
engage communities vulnerable to sea rise and coastal flooding, a
lecture series and other actions. Garcia may not be known outside
of southern California, but voters given brief bios of prospective
Senate appointments for the USC Schwarzenegger California Issues
Poll chose Garcia above all other short-listers, followed by Bass,
Padilla and Lee. And although voters also said they were not
interested in having a "historic first" in the Senate, Garcia
would be California's first openly gay senator as well as its
first Latino.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20112020/gavin-newsom-kamala-harris-senate-seat">https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20112020/gavin-newsom-kamala-harris-senate-seat</a><br>
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<br>
[sharp, focused commentary on auto adjusting color]<br>
<b>Photography Has Gotten Climate Change Wrong from the Start</b><br>
Smoggy-looking daguerreotypes in 19th-century London foreshadowed
today's muted smartphone photos of California fires.<br>
NOVEMBER 27, 2020<br>
Kim Beil - Associate director of ITALIC program at Stanford
University<br>
<br>
I knew something was wrong the minute I woke up. On September 9, the
sky was still dark at 7:15 a.m. Eventually it revealed a deep-orange
light, darker and dustier than any sunset. After a dry lightning
storm in late August had sparked more than 900 fires around
California, high-altitude smoke hung over the San Francisco Bay
Area. I took a photo out the window with my iPhone. It wasn't right.
I tried again, tapping the screen and dragging the exposure slider
down. Still, the tawny orange of the sky didn't register.<br>
<br>
The iPhone rendered it a pale yellow, the foreboding automatically
corrected by the camera's built-in software. Manually fiddling with
the controls, I darkened a few images and increased the warmth. Then
I watched as my Instagram and Twitter feeds filled up with nearly
identical views from all around the Bay Area, many accompanied by
captions describing the difficulty of taking the picture. No
software engineer had predicted this apocalyptic
scenography--created by an unusually active fire season that kept
consuming forests deep into November. So phone cameras had busily
corrected the unnatural view, making it seem more like a pretty
picture rather than what it was: a terrifying and true example of
the effects of human-generated climate change.<br>
News articles portrayed smartphone photographers' dilemma as
something of a novelty. The San Francisco Chronicle quickly
published an explainer online: "Why your phone camera can't capture
Northern California's orange sky." Yet anthropogenic forces
reshaping the environment have flummoxed photographers before. Many
improvements in photographic technology aim to enhance what we see,
offering up the world as we imagine it or want it to be. Sometimes
we struggle to understand the gulf between the representation and
the gross reality before our eyes. Sometimes photos help us
understand a changing climate; sometimes they obscure it.<br>
<br>
In the mid-19th century, England's infamous industrial smog was
blamed for the poor quality of early photographs made there.
Daguerreotypes, the first publicly available photographic process,
can possess exceptional detail and luminosity, but critics at the
time found English daguerreotypes dark and ill-defined. At the first
World's Fair, held at London's Crystal Palace in 1851, American
photographers won three of the five medals awarded to
daguerreotypes. One correspondent from the United States wrote of
the exhibition: "The excellence of American pictures is evident,
which is to be accounted for by several reasons. In the first place,
American skies are freer from fog and clouds--from bituminous coal
not being much used, the atmosphere of our cities is free from
smoke."<br>
<br>
The smoke and industrial "fog" of London (the catchall term used for
fog and smog in the 19th century) appeared frequently in
descriptions of the city. Charles Dickens wrote in Bleak House of
the "smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black
drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown
snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of
the sun." Oscar Wilde cited "the yellow fog" in his poem
"Impressions du Matin."<br>
<br>
Despite the foul-smelling evil gloom of the fog, Claude Monet
relished its effect on the light. He wrote in a letter: "I can't
begin to describe a day as wonderful as this. One marvel after
another, each lasting less than five minutes, it was enough to drive
one mad. No country could be more extraordinary for a painter."<br>
<br>
Critics of English daguerreotypes blamed the smoggy skies for
shadowy pictures, even those made indoors, such as portraits.
However, American photographers who set up shop in London didn't
have the same problem. John Jabez Edwin Mayall, a successful
Philadelphia photographer, relocated his studio to London in 1846,
where he became known for the quality of his large-scale portraits.
One photographic journalist wrote in 1853: "Mayall is known as the
'American Daguerreotypist,' and is considered about the best in
London. His specimens are certainly proof that the fogs of London
are not the cause of Daguerreotypists failing in procuring clear
pictures; for many of his are equal to the best ever taken."<br>
<br>
... Daguerreotypes also looked uncannily like the dark clouds
witnessed in London. Only a dozen years after the first public
announcement of photography, people already believed that the medium
should represent the world as they saw it.<br>
<br>
This summer and fall, amateur photographers in California looked for
technological tips to make their smartphone photos more accurately
represent the smoke-obscured skies. Smartphones and other
consumer-grade cameras offer a series of preset color temperatures:
deep shade, open shade, bright sun, and fluorescent and tungsten
lighting. Will your next phone include a setting for "wildfire sky"
as it becomes a new reality, at least in the western United States?
Seven of California's 10 largest fires in recorded history have
occurred within the past three years, five of them since August of
this year.<br>
<br>
In the 19th century, critics were so alert to the presence of air
pollution that they erroneously thought it was affecting their
photographs. But today, our cameras seem to deny that such
anthropogenic weather even exists. A simple software fix could
rectify that. Alongside all the other white-balance icons--pictures
of the sun, a building in shade, and a lightbulb--wildfire sky could
be represented by the burning of fossil fuels: smokestacks,
airplanes, exhaust pipes, just so there's no mistaking this tragic
sight for an extraordinary one, as Monet did.<br>
<br>
A smartphone camera is an aide-memoire. Not only do we use it to
record major events and milestones, but we snap thousands of
pictures of What's for dinner?, There's my dog, Here are my feet,
and reminders, such as Buy this brand of shampoo for me, please.
Several months from now, when California is green and gorgeous
again, the dusty-orange photos from this fall will show up in
residents' otherwise banal photo libraries.<br>
In contrast, disappearance was almost a natural part of the
19th-century photograph's life cycle, so we have few surviving
examples of bad British daguerreotypes, which looked so smoggy to
critics. These historic pictures may have vanished because of poor
chemical fixing, or perhaps they were discarded because they just
weren't good enough to keep. In the 21st century, our trillions of
photographs--good and bad, true and false representations--just
might outlast us all.<br>
<br>
Adding a wildfire-sky white-balance setting may feel too much like
giving up, like accepting our fate. But these devastating weather
events will most certainly continue. Climate-related catastrophes
will also worsen, unless we accept responsibility for them and
change behavior on a global scale. For that, we need to remember
their terrible impact on our daily lives; we need to see the orange
glow casting a pall over all the other memories in its midst.<br>
<br>
KIM BEIL is the associate director of ITALIC, an interdisciplinary
arts program at Stanford University. She is the author of Good
Pictures: A History of Popular Photography.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/photography-has-never-known-how-handle-climate-change/617224/">https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/photography-has-never-known-how-handle-climate-change/617224/</a><br>
<p><br>
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[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
November 29, 2015 </b></font><br>
The New York Times reports:<br>
<blockquote>"After two decades of talks that failed to slow the
relentless pace of global warming, negotiators from almost 200
countries are widely expected to sign a deal in the next two weeks
to take concrete steps to cut emissions.<br>
<br>
"The prospect of progress, any progress, has elicited cheers in
many quarters. The pledges that have already been announced
'represent a clear and determined down payment on a new era of
climate ambition from the global community of nations,' said
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change, in a statement a month
ago.<br>
<br>
"Yet the negotiators gathering in Paris will not be discussing any
plan that comes close to meeting their own stated goal of limiting
the increase of global temperatures to a reasonably safe level.<br>
<br>
"They have pointedly declined to take up a recommendation from
scientists, made several years ago, that they set a cap on total
greenhouse gases as a way to achieve that goal, and then figure
out how to allocate the emissions fairly. The pledges countries
are making are voluntary, and were established in most nations as
a compromise between the desire to be ambitious and the perceived
cost and political difficulty of emissions cutbacks.<br>
<br>
"In effect, the countries are vowing to make changes that
collectively still fall far short of the necessary goal, much like
a patient who, upon hearing from his doctor that he must lose 50
pounds to avoid life-threatening health risks, takes pride in
cutting out fries but not cake and ice cream.<br>
<br>
"The scientists argue that there is only so much carbon -- in the
form of exhaust from coal-burning power plants, automobile
tailpipes, forest fires and the like -- that the atmosphere can
absorb before the planet suffers profound damage, with swaths of
it potentially becoming uninhabitable."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/science/earth/paris-climate-talks-avoid-scientists-goal-of-carbon-budget.html?_r=0">http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/science/earth/paris-climate-talks-avoid-scientists-goal-of-carbon-budget.html?_r=0</a><br>
<br>
In a New York Times op-ed, Curt Stager observes:<br>
<blockquote>"A switch from finite fossil energy to cleaner,
renewable energy sources is inevitable: We are only deciding how
and when to do it. That is what world leaders and policy makers
will be grappling with at the United Nations Conference on Climate
Change that begins Monday in Paris. Much of the environmental harm
that we have already done was unintentional, but now that science
has exposed our role in it a new moral dimension has been added to
our actions. Pope Francis' recent encyclical on the environment
makes it clear that to continue taking a profligate carbon path is
to sin against future generations and our own human dignity."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/opinion/sunday/tales-of-a-warmer-planet.html?ref=opinion">http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/opinion/sunday/tales-of-a-warmer-planet.html?ref=opinion</a><br>
<br>
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