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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>December 29, 2020</b></font></i></p>
[set for take-off]<br>
<b>EPA finalizes first-ever airplane greenhouse gas regulations</b><br>
Nick Sobczyk, E&E News - December 28, 2020<br>
<br>
EPA today finalized its first greenhouse gas emissions regulations
for airplanes, a historic step after a decade of legal wrangling.<br>
<br>
It marks the first time EPA has regulated planet-warming emissions
from airplanes and a rare move in the waning days of an
administration that has rolled back regulations across the board...<br>
- -<br>
A dozen Democratic attorneys general criticized EPA's proposal
during the public comment period, pointing to an International
Council on Clean Transportation study that found the ICAO standard
"lags the existing efforts of manufacturers by more than 10 years"
(Greenwire, Oct. 20).<br>
<br>
The average new aircraft delivered in 2016, according to the report,
was already in line with the 2028 standard.<br>
<br>
Green groups have also been pushing for EPA to regulate aircraft
emissions since 2010, when several groups sued the agency over
alleged failures to address mobile sources of greenhouse gas
emissions, kicking off years of additional legal back-and-forth.<br>
<br>
The industry, however, supports the ICAO standard and EPA's moves to
mirror it.<br>
<br>
Aerospace Industries Association Vice President of Civil Aviation
David Silver said in a statement today that the agency "has
demonstrated America's commitment to global action against climate
change and ensured U.S. aircraft will meet the same standards as our
competitors across the world."<br>
<br>
Boeing Co. similarly called the rule "vital for protecting the
environment and supporting the sustainable growth of commercial
aviation and the United States economy."<br>
<br>
A company statement said, "The standard is one of the essential
pillars of the industry's strategy to cut net global aviation
emissions to half of what they were in 2005 by 2050."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2020/12/28/full">https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2020/12/28/full</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[strong opinion in the NYTimes]<br>
<b>Watching Earth Burn</b><br>
For 10 days in September, satellites in orbit sent tragic evidence
of climate change’s destructive power.<br>
By Michael Benson<br>
Mr. Benson, an author and artist, has special interests in planetary
imagery and climate change.<br>
<br>
Dec. 28, 2020<br>
I have a pastime, one that used to give me considerable pleasure,
but lately it has morphed into a source of anxiety, even horror:
earth-watching.<br>
<br>
Let me explain.<br>
<br>
The earth from space is an incomparably lovely sight. I mean the
whole planet, pole to pole, waxing and waning and rotating in that
time-generating way it has, and not the views from the International
Space Station, which is in a low orbit about 200 miles up and gives
us only part of the whole.<br>
<br>
My earth-watching, made possible by NOAA and Colorado State
University websites, originates in three geostationary weather
satellites parked in exceedingly high orbits above the Equator.
Despite their seemingly static positions, GOES-16 and 17, two
American satellites, and Himawari-8, a Japanese one, are actually
whizzing through space at 6,876 miles per hour. They do so to remain
suspended imperturbably over the Ecuadorean-Colombian border, the
Eastern Pacific and the Western Pacific respectively. At 22,236
miles above sea level, they are in effect falling around earth at
the exact pace it turns.<br>
The views they provide are astonishing. The planet shines
spectacularly in steady sunlight. It’s white and blue, green, ocher
and tan, with complex coruscating swirls of cloud. An exquisitely
thin aquamarine line defines its dayside limb, delineating its
atmospheric perimeter and shading gradually to black at the
migratory border between day and night. There’s something sacred to
this sight. As the source of all life, as the birthplace of our
species, it deserves veneration. It follows that any harm done to it
— and we’re doing plenty — is a desecration.<br>
It’s also a stage, the only one we’ve ever known. All the
individuals who’ve strutted and fretted here for millenniums, or for
that matter fled and trembled, producing what we call history, are
merely players. But even by the standards of that problematic
legacy, this latest period seems different. It’s more worrisome,
more global, and with increasing frequency, more terrifying.<br>
<br>
Last winter, for example, Australia experienced one of the worst
brushfire seasons in its history. On the first Sunday of 2020 I
decided to take a look. Himawari-8 revealed a vista as spectacular
as it was unnerving. A giant furnace door had seemingly been pried
open. A plume of smoke extended outward from the continent’s
southeastern quarter, a region twice the size of Texas where flame
vortexes had been spiraling 200 feet into the air. Carrying the
color of the land it came from, that noxious exhalation bore the
residue of a billion or more incinerated animals and innumerable
plants, baked into tinder from decades of ever-hotter summers.<br>
<br>
As the week unfolded, I watched that plume waft eastward, passing
New Zealand and stretching thousands of miles into the cobalt
Pacific. There in plain sight was the result of a disaster so vast
that it had already consumed 15 million acres — a figure that would
rise to 46 million. Australia’s fires killed dozens of people,
destroyed some 5,900 buildings and quite likely rendered some of the
country’s endangered species extinct. With shocking iconographic
precision, that unfurling banner of smoke said: The war has started.
We’re losing.<br>
In the year’s third quarter, the scorching southern summer of
2019-2020 migrated northward under an ever-denser mantle of gaseous
fire-accelerant — the carbon dioxide and methane belched ceaselessly
forth into earth’s apple-skin atmosphere from 1.4 billion exhaust
pipes and hundreds of thousands of factory stacks.<br>
By late summer, much of the United States’ Pacific Coast was ablaze,
and I watched both North and South America with mingled disbelief
and consternation. Seen via GOES 16 and 17 throughout late August
and early September, the entire Western Hemisphere was wreathed in
blue-gray smoke — an alarming sight in which large areas of both
continents were visible only through thick fumes from burning
vegetation.<br>
<br>
By contrast with the West Coast, South America’s fires were the
result of a willful slash-and-burn assault on the world’s largest
remaining tropical forests and wetlands. Egged on by the rapacious
policies of President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, predatory
agricultural, logging and mining interests had set his country
ablaze. By late September the already hellish 2019 escalation in
deliberately set forest fires had been exceeded by 28 percent, with
more than 44,000 outbreaks recorded in the Amazon and Pantanal this
year.<br>
Seen from space, the resulting haze spanned approximately six
million square miles. It’s unnerving to witness such enveloping
madness. The Amazon rainforest is home to some 200 Indigenous
tribes. It’s a priceless reservoir of biodiversity — a kind of green
ark preserving the results of 800 million years of terrestrial
evolution. It is also the world’s largest remaining carbon sink,
capable of mitigating global warming by absorbing vast quantities of
atmospheric carbon dioxide. But you can’t ask it to absorb the
results of its own incineration.<br>
Meanwhile, North America’s Pacific Coast was choking under
successive waves of fume and ash. As with Australia, the forests,
chaparral and grasslands of California, Oregon and Washington State
had been rendered explosive by a chain of summers so searing that by
mid-August this year, Death Valley’s temperature spiked to 130
degrees Fahrenheit — probably the hottest temperature ever recorded
on earth.<br>
Logging onto GOES-17 later that month, I contemplated the unfolding
tragedy. As seen from over the Eastern Pacific, the continent was
bracketed by imminent disaster. Thick smoke obscured most of
California. Hemmed in by the Transverse Ranges, it funneled north,
breaking free of the coast around Sacramento and billowing toward
Canada. Two thousand miles southeast, a majestically frightening
pinwheel of clouds was suspended over the Gulf Coast: Hurricane
Laura. This pummeling manifestation of warming oceans would kill at
least 77 people and cause an estimated $16 billion in damage.<br>
By early September, large regions of Oregon and Washington were also
engulfed in flames, and on Sept. 11, the resulting smoke extended
1,000 miles out across the Northern Pacific — a banner mirroring
Australia’s of eight months before.<br>
At its source, soot, ash and dust made the air quality of the
continent’s western quarter the worst in the world. The intensity of
the flames pumped smoke to an altitude four miles higher than a
cruising jumbo jet. As the prevailing winds shifted, tendrils as
thick as the Mexican state of Baja California extended eastward in
striking hues of burnt sienna, their smoggy undulations tracing
10-mile-high wave forms across the continent and revealing something
rarely discernible from geostationary distances: vertical relief
within earth’s atmosphere.<br>
By September’s end, nearly six million acres had burned on the
coast, directly killing more than two dozen people, not counting the
strokes, asthma attacks and heart attacks triggered by the smoke.
Stanford University researchers estimated those deaths at between
1,000 and 3,000.<br>
So what are we to make of this yin-yang spectacle, with ourselves at
nature’s throat in the south and nature at ours up north? Clearly a
tremendous intercontinental drama is underway. Having sown the wind
with greenhouse gases for centuries, we’re reaping the whirlwind,
sometimes quite literally. Add pestilence to this picture of
drought, fire and flood and you have a scene straight out of the
Book of Revelation, with the coronavirus, as invisible to the naked
eye as it is from space, playing the role of the fourth Horseman,
sent by nature to counter our continuing assaults on the natural
world.<br>
If the war has started and we’re losing, what can we do about it? Or
to put it another way, what would I like to see happen over the next
year, even if I won’t yet be able to observe it directly from my
Olympian perch among the satellites?<br>
Actually, our response to the pandemic already suggests the way
forward. Faced with an existential crisis of a scale not seen in
living memory, we deployed the planet’s best minds, funded them well
and turned them loose on the problem. They in turn were able to draw
on a wealth of prior knowledge about how viruses infiltrate our
bodies, and three decades of hard-won experience in learning about
and finally creating RNA — purpose-built synthetic copies of a
natural molecule integral to our genes — devised to prompt an immune
response within our cells. This paid off spectacularly. And all this
was accomplished in record time — months instead of the previous
standard of a decade or more.<br>
<br>
We need to follow this immediately with another sustained global
effort. Imagine what human ingenuity could produce if unleashed in
comparably coordinated, well-funded fashion on the climate crisis.
The good news is that, as with the new RNA vaccines, we have
significant prior research to draw on. It covers carbon-neutral
power production, energy conservation strategies, carbon capture and
sequestration, global reforestation and an intercontinental effort
to build a high voltage, DC power network 40 percent more efficient
than AC and thus able to compensate for the daily fluctuations in
wind and solar power systems.<br>
<br>
In short, we need an all-hands-on-deck fusion of the Manhattan
Project and the Marshall Plan, only this time funded by all of the
world’s major economies and led by the largest: the United States,
the European Union and China.<br>
<br>
It’s a hallmark of the more successful viruses that they eventually
stop killing their hosts, adapt and live on in symbiosis. Otherwise
they risk reaching an evolutionary dead end. For myself, I’m sick of
watching our home world, the birthplace of all known life, in horror
and disgust at what we’re doing to it. The earth turns in steady
sunlight, its temperature rising inexorably. It’s on us to reverse
that fever. After all, we produced it.<br>
<br>
Michael Benson is an author and artist currently based in Ottawa.
The films in this article were created by Mr. Benson and Chai
Dingari of The New York Times, using individual satellite frames
from NOAA images.<br>
Image<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/opinion/climate-change-earth.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/opinion/climate-change-earth.html</a><br>
<br>
- -<br>
[A new movie resonates]<br>
<b>The Midnight Sky | Final Trailer | George Clooney | Netflix</b><br>
Dec 10, 2020<br>
Netflix<br>
This post-apocalyptic tale follows Augustine (George Clooney), a
lonely scientist in the Arctic, as he races to stop Sully (Felicity
Jones) and her fellow astronauts from returning home to Earth, where
a mysterious global catastrophe has taken place. Clooney directs the
adaptation of Lily Brooks-Dalton’s acclaimed novel Good Morning,
Midnight, co-starring David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir
and Tiffany Boone<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb8ZbP6qAzE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb8ZbP6qAzE</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[text and audio]<br>
<b>The Urgent Case for Shrinking the Economy</b><br>
Endless growth is destroying the planet. We know how to stop it.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://newrepublic.com/article/160692/less-is-more-degrowth-climate-change-book-review">https://newrepublic.com/article/160692/less-is-more-degrowth-climate-change-book-review</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
December 29, 2009</b></font><br>
<br>
December 29, 2009: Washington Post writer Ezra Klein excoriates
members of the US Senate who have developed cold feet about
addressing global warming:<br>
<blockquote>"Amidst all this, conservative Senate Democrats are
waving off the idea of serious action in 2010. But not because
they're opposed. Oh, heavens no! It's because of abstract concerns
over the political difficulties the problem presents. Sen. Kent
Conrad (D-N.D.), for instance, avers that 'climate change in an
election year has very poor prospects.' That's undoubtedly true,
though it is odd to say that the American system of governance can
only solve problems every other year. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) says
that 'we need to deal with the phenomena of global warming,' but
wants to wait until the economy is fixed.<br>
<br>
"Rather than commenting abstractly on the difficulty of doing
this, Conrad and Bayh and others could make it easier by saying
things like 'we simply have to do this, it's our moral obligation
as legislators,' and trying to persuade reporters to write stories
about how even moderates such as Conrad and Byah are determined to
do this. They could schedule meetings with other senators begging
them to take this seriously, leveraging the credibility and
goodwill built over decades in the Senate. They could spend money
on TV ads in their state, talking directly into the camera,
explaining to their constituents that they don't like having to
face this problem, but see no choice. That effort might fail --
probably will, in fact -- but it's got a better chance of success
than not trying. And this is, well, pretty important."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/climate_change_is_bad_but_the.html">http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/climate_change_is_bad_but_the.html</a>
<br>
<br>
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