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<i><font size="+1"><b>December 15, 2020</b></font></i> <br>
<br>
[in the Guardian]<br>
<b>US to hold world climate summit early next year and seek to
rejoin Paris accord</b><br>
Action points for first 100 days of Joe Biden presidency seen as
boost to international action currently falling behind<br>
The US will hold a climate summit of the world’s major economies
early next year, within 100 days of Joe Biden taking office, and
seek to rejoin the Paris agreement on the first day of his
presidency, in a boost to international climate action.<br>
<br>
Leaders from 75 countries met without the US in a virtual Climate
Ambition Summit co-hosted by the UN, the UK and France at the
weekend, marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris accord. The
absence of the US underlined the need for more countries, including
other major economies such as Brazil, Russia and Indonesia, to make
fresh commitments on tackling the climate crisis.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/14/us-to-hold-world-climate-summit-early-next-year-and-seek-to-rejoin-paris-accord">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/14/us-to-hold-world-climate-summit-early-next-year-and-seek-to-rejoin-paris-accord</a><br>
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<p>[Notice the money flow]<br>
<b>Oil giant Exxon Mobil pushes new climate change plan as
activist investors circle</b><br>
MON, DEC 14 2020<br>
-- Exxon Mobil announced a new five-year plan to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions, including from methane flaring and upstream
operations, which it said were in line with the Paris Agreement
reduction targets.<br>
-- The new 2025 targets come a week after multiple activist
investor groups targeted Exxon Mobil for slipping financial
performance as well as a failure to address long-term energy
transition needs.<br>
-- Exxon said in the announcement that shareholders were
consulted, but the changes won’t likely go far enough to address
the concerns of investors hoping for a broad rethink of oil
giant’s business model.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/14/exxon-mobil-begins-to-mount-defense-of-itself-and-a-bigas-activists-circle.html">https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/14/exxon-mobil-begins-to-mount-defense-of-itself-and-a-bigas-activists-circle.html</a><br>
</p>
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[Dec 14th DemocracyNow video]<br>
<b>Greta Thunberg: 5 Years After Paris Agreement, World Is “Speeding
in the Wrong Direction” on Climate</b><br>
Dec 14, 2020<br>
Democracy Now!<br>
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who launched the global Fridays for
Future youth climate movement, issued a stark warning on the fifth
anniversary of the Paris Climate Agreement that the world is not
doing enough to keep global heating below 2 degrees Celsius — the
target set in the landmark 2015 deal. “The gap between what we need
to do and what is actually being done is widening by the minute. We
are still speeding in the wrong direction,” Thunberg said in a video
message posted on social media.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBqEcF8nmw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBqEcF8nmw</a><br>
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<p><br>
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[Opinion Dec 12 the Economist]<br>
<b>Britain excels at announcing climate targets</b><br>
But it must do more to meet them<br>
Britain is in danger of securing a reputation for too much style and
too little substance when it comes to climate change. The government
has spent the past few months issuing target after goal after
grandiose statement, all intended to portray the birthplace of the
Industrial Revolution as a leader on the path to global
decarbonisation. But policies and funding to make the targets
reality are lacking.<br>
<br>
On December 3rd Boris Johnson announced that the country’s
greenhouse-gas emissions would, in the coming decade, drop to 68%
below where they stood in 1990—a considerable decrease on the
previous goal of a 57% drop by 2030. The pledge will form part of
Britain’s formal amped-up contribution to the un Paris agreement.
Under the terms of the agreement, all countries are due to submit
fresh commitments by the end of 2020. Scores of new pledges are thus
expected at a virtual summit on December 12th, held to mark five
years since the agreement was made on the outskirts of France’s
capital...<br>
more at -
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/12/12/britain-excels-at-announcing-climate-targets">https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/12/12/britain-excels-at-announcing-climate-targets</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Books Reviewed in the Guardian]<br>
<b>Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency; What Would Nature Do? </b>–
review<br>
A bromide-laden view of the threats to the planet, by Ruth DeFries,
is less convincing than Andreas Malm’s call for an urgent reform of
capitalism<br>
Ben Ehrenreich<br>
Sun 13 Dec 2020<br>
Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the
Twenty-First Century is published by Verso (£10.99). <br>
What Would Nature Do? A Guide for Our Uncertain Times is published
by Columbia (£22); <br>
Do you remember April? It seems like decades ago, but I remember,
amid the dread and claustrophobia of lockdown, an unexpected thrum
of hope. Traffic had stopped. No aeroplanes crossed the sky and no
pollution clogged it. Where I live we heard ambulances carrying off
our neighbours almost daily but we heard birdsong too, louder than
ever before. A tiny spiky ball of glycoproteins and ribonucleic acid
had done what a century of dedicated revolutionaries had been unable
to. It had slowed the world economy to a crawl...<br>
- -<br>
Four years ago, the Swedish scholar Andreas Malm offered one of the
sharpest diagnoses yet of the root disease we suffer from. In a book
called Fossil Capital he traced the history of the coal-powered
steam engine in 19th-century England. Coal, he argued, was not
cheaper or more efficient than water power, but had the unique
virtue of weakening those who laboured in mills to the advantage of
the men who owned them. The fossil economy, as Malm called it, has
from the beginning been inseparable from the exploitation of both
humans and nature. Along the way it created the illusion of
self-sustaining growth that remains fundamental to the current
system, this machine that can never be allowed to stop, even as it
destroys everything around us.<br>
<br>
Malm’s latest book,<b> Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency,</b> adds
the pandemic to the picture, “a global sickening to match the global
heating”. More than 300 new infectious diseases have arisen since
1940: think HIV, Zika, Ebola, Sars, Mers, innumerable new strains of
flu. There is little debate about their immediate origins.
Previously unencountered microbes leap to human hosts from other
animals in an ongoing “zoonotic spillover”. The causes are no
mystery: habitat destruction – mainly deforestation – and
industrialised agriculture put large numbers of humans in increasing
contact with highly stressed animal populations.<br>
<br>
The real virus, Malm suggests, is capitalism, the fossil economy
that subsists “solely by expanding”, gobbling up the planet as it
does. Capital’s only mandate is to reproduce itself, to eternally
seek out opportunities for “growth”. The Earth becomes a collection
of commodities. What is not commodity is waste. In an “ecologically
unequal exchange” by which the wealthy populations of the global
north enjoy consumer lifestyles dependent on “scorched-earth
extractivism” in poor countries out of sight, virgin forest falls to
make way for palm oil plantations, cobalt mines, cattle pasture,
soy. Wild lands are bulldozed to feed commodity markets continents
away. Fresh consumer hungers are manufactured to keep the machine
humming.<br>
<br>
The result is devastation, the entire biosphere in need of an ICU.
In 1700, before the birth of industrial capitalism, Malm writes,
“95% of the planet’s ice-free land was either wild” or “used so
lightly as to be categorised as ‘semi-natural’”. By 2000 only 5% was
left. The problem is not the wet markets of Wuhan or the high-end
trade in exotic animals, but a system that sucks all of nature into
globalised circuits of capital. In doing so it cannot help but
summon up fresh plagues, as it heats the atmosphere and poisons the
air and the oceans...<br>
- - <br>
<b>What Would Nature Do?</b> is written for those who feel certain
that their own children will not be among the refugees. Poor, abused
nature, having surrendered so many of her riches, is here mined
mercilessly for bromides. DeFries looks for life lessons in plate
tectonics, entomology, the stock market. Her range is broad and her
anecdotes often entertaining, but the truths she wrings from them
are the banal stuff of Silicon Valley corporatese: strategic
redundancy can avert disaster; flexible networks absorb shocks
better than rigid hierarchies.<br>
- - <br>
So here we are again, in a situation that years of extinctions and
climate crisis have already made familiar: watching a real-time
catastrophe unfold, knowing exactly what needs to be done to stop it
but knowing also that we can’t because the very structures
underpinning our societies are the ones pushing the disasters
onward. Perhaps, if we survive the winter ahead and are not lulled
into somnolence by the arrival of a vaccine – big pharma on a
wheezing white horse – we will remember precisely who told us not to
worry and who told us that our lives matter less than their
dividends do. And perhaps in our anger and our grief we will find
the strength to build something new. “The way out,” writes the
evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, on whose work much of Malm’s
analysis rests, “is nothing short of birthing a world.” It won’t be
easy, but neither are the alternatives.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/13/what-would-nature-do-by-ruth-defries-review">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/13/what-would-nature-do-by-ruth-defries-review</a>-<br>
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<br>
[interview audio, video]<br>
<b>Kathleen Dean Moore | What Could Possibly Go Right?</b><br>
Dec 15, 2020<br>
postcarboninstitute<br>
Listen on your favorite podcast app: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://link.chtbl.com/wcpgr">https://link.chtbl.com/wcpgr</a> <br>
<br>
Kathleen Dean Moore, Ph.D., is a Author, Moral Philosopher,
Environmental Advocate. She served as Distinguished Professor of
Environmental Philosophy at Oregon State University, where she wrote
award-winning books about our cultural and moral relations to the
wet, wild world and to one another. But her increasing concern about
the climate and extinction crises led her to leave the university,
so she could write and speak full-time about the moral urgency of
climate action. <br>
<br>
Kathleen shares thoughts on What Could Possibly Go Right? including:<br>
<br>
- That “sometimes it feels like the whole world is burning to its
foundations, but the foundations are still there, and they're
holding a space for the future.”<br>
- That “almost every major change in US history has been the result
of a rising wave of moral affirmation,” of the “conscience of the
streets”.<br>
- That we need to remember our shared moral foundations, of the
“human decency deep in the earth” and the ideals our nation aspires
to.<br>
- Using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to call out the
oil, gas and fracking industries for violations of human rights
through contributing to climate change.<br>
- The Blue River Declaration by an assembled group of philosophers,
which asks “three fundamental questions... What is the world? What
are human beings? And therefore, how shall we live?” <br>
- That as human beings with imagination and understanding, “we have
a responsibility to be the meaning makers of the universe.” <br>
<br>
Resources<br>
- Permanent Peoples' Tribunal
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://permanentpeoplestribunal.org/?lang=en">http://permanentpeoplestribunal.org/?lang=en</a><br>
- Blue River Declaration <br>
- Book: Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril by
Kathleen Dean Moore<br>
- Book: Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a
Time of Planetary Change by Kathleen Dean Moore<br>
<br>
Learn more and listen to all episodes:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://bit.ly/pci-wcpgrseries">https://bit.ly/pci-wcpgrseries</a> <br>
Connect with Kathleen Website: riverwalking.com<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY3DRRuZsqM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY3DRRuZsqM</a><br>
<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 -
December 15, 2008 </b></font><br>
<p>December 15, 2008: President-elect Obama announces his energy and
environment team: Dr. Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy, Lisa
Jackson as EPA Administrator, Nancy Sutley as Chair of the White
House Council of Environmental Quality, Carol Browner as Assistant
to the President for Energy and Climate Change, and Heather Zichal
as Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate
Change.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://youtu.be/ERNWRPaZ22A">http://youtu.be/ERNWRPaZ22A</a> <br>
</p>
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