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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>February 22, 2021</b></font></i><br>
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[rise of Snow-people activism]<br>
<b>Hundreds Of Snowmen Built At Utah State Capitol For Climate
Change</b><br>
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — An unconventional protest was held at Utah’s
State Capitol.<br>
<br>
About 600 snowmen appeared on the grounds Sunday, holding signs and
demanding that state lawmakers save their “endangered species” — the
snow.<br>
<br>
“The snowmen decided to assemble and do something about climate
change, asking Utah legislators, and specifically Mitt Romney to put
a price on carbon,” said a volunteer. “They see that as the fastest
way to stop climate change and curb emissions.”<br>
<br>
Some of the signs read, “mister mitt romnee, If u price carbon we
wil vote 4 u 4ever. (We r verfid constitunts)” and “Mitt is Litt!”<br>
Demonstrators said taxing carbon emissions can be a bi-partisan
issue and would lead to less pollution and cleaner air.<br>
<br>
So far, the group has not heard from Sen. Mitt Romney about their
request to meet with him about climate change.<br>
<br>
Snowmen all over the country can be seen carrying similar “Snwmen 4
Carbn Pricng” messages on Twitter @pricecarbonplz.<br>
<br>
A group of snowmen also appeared outside the office of Sen. Chuck
Schumer, D-N.Y. last week, demanding climate action from the new
Speaker of the Senate.<br>
<br>
No organization has claimed responsibility for the displays.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://ksltv.com/455951/hundreds-of-snowmen-built-at-utah-state-capitol-for-climate-change/">https://ksltv.com/455951/hundreds-of-snowmen-built-at-utah-state-capitol-for-climate-change/</a><br>
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</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Big investments from TIME]<br>
<b>Sara Menker, CEO of Gro Intelligence, Believes Big Data Can Save
Our Climate and Food Supply</b><br>
Even by startup standards, the mission of Gro Intelligence is lofty.
Sara Menker, the company’s founder and CEO, says its goal is to
provide tools to help confront “two of the biggest challenges we
face as humanity: food security and climate change.”<br>
<br>
Gro Intelligence uses AI and machine learning to provide thousands
of clients, ranging from big food companies like Unilever and Yum!
Brands to financial institutions including BNP Paribas and Wells
Fargo, with a host of data and analysis on the global agricultural
ecosystem. In all, Gro computers hoover up 650 trillion data points
from more than 40,000 data sets—crop forecasts, satellite images,
topography, reports on precipitation, soil moisture,
evapotranspiration—to provide insights into 15,000 different
agricultural products. The company also works with governments
around the world on food-security issues to help them adequately
plan for food reserves...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://time.com/5940733/climate-chane-gro-intelligence-ceo-sara-menker/">https://time.com/5940733/climate-chane-gro-intelligence-ceo-sara-menker/</a><br>
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<p><br>
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[Naomi Klein]<br>
<b>Why Texas Republicans Fear the Green New Deal</b><br>
Small government is no match for a crisis born of the state’s twin
addictions to market fixes and fossil fuels.<br>
<br>
By Naomi Klein<br>
Ms. Klein is a senior correspondent at The Intercept and the Gloria
Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University. Her new book, “How to
Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet
and Each Other.”<br>
<br>
Feb. 21, 2021<br>
Since the power went out in Texas, the state’s most prominent
Republicans have tried to pin the blame for the crisis on, of all
things, a sweeping progressive mobilization to fight poverty,
inequality and climate change. “This shows how the Green New Deal
would be a deadly deal,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Wednesday on
Fox News. Pointing to snow-covered solar panels, Rick Perry, a
former governor who was later an energy secretary for the Trump
administration, declared in a tweet “that if we humans want to keep
surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning
natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.”<br>
<br>
The claims are outlandish. The Green New Deal is, among other
things, a plan to tightly regulate and upgrade the energy system so
the United States gets 100 percent of its electricity from
renewables in a decade. Texas, of course, still gets the majority of
its energy from gas and coal; much of that industry’s poorly
insulated infrastructure froze up last week when it collided with
wild weather that prompted a huge surge in demand. (Despite the
claims of many conservatives, renewable energy was not to blame.) It
was the very sort of freakish weather system now increasingly
common, thanks to the unearthing and burning of fossil fuels like
coal and gas. While the link between global warming and rare cold
fronts like the one that just slammed Texas remains an area of
active research, Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech
University, says the increasing frequency of such events should be
“a wake up call.”<br>
<br>
But weather alone did not cause this crisis. Texans are living
through the collapse of a 40-year experiment in free-market
fundamentalism, one that has also stood in the way of effective
climate action. Fortunately, there’s a way out — and that’s
precisely what Republican politicians in the state most fear.<br>
<br>
A fateful series of decisions were made in the late-’90s, when the
now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful
push to radically deregulate Texas’s electricity sector. As a
result, decisions about the generation and distribution of power
were stripped from regulators and, in effect, handed over to private
energy companies. Unsurprisingly, these companies prioritized
short-term profit over costly investments to maintain the grid and
build in redundancies for extreme weather.<br>
<br>
Today, Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians
who failed to require that energy companies plan for shocks or
weatherize their infrastructure (renewables and fossil fuel alike).
In a recent appearance on NBC’s “Today” show, Austin’s mayor, Steve
Adler, summed it up: “We have a deregulated power system in the
state and it does not work, because it does not build in the
incentives in order to protect people.”<br>
<br>
This energy-market free-for-all means that as the snow finally
melts, many Texans are discovering that they owe their private
electricity providers thousands of dollars — a consequence of
leaving pricing to the whims of the market. The $200,000 energy
bills some people received, the photos of which went viral online,
were, it seems, a mistake. But some bills approaching $10,000 are
the result of simple supply and demand in a radically underregulated
market. “The last thing an awful lot of people need right now is a
higher electric bill,” said Matt Schulz, chief industry analyst with
LendingTree. “And that’s unfortunately something a lot of people
will get stuck with.” This is bad news for those customers, but
great news for shale gas companies like Comstock Resources Inc. On
an earnings call last Wednesday, its chief financial officer said,
“This week is like hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible
prices.”<br>
<br>
Put bluntly, Texas is about as far from having a Green New Deal as
any place on earth. So why have Republicans seized it as their
scapegoat of choice?<br>
<br>
A Shock to the System<br>
Blame right-wing panic. For decades, the Republicans have met every
disaster with a credo I have described as “the shock doctrine.” When
disaster strikes, people are frightened and dislocated. They focus
on handling the emergencies of daily life, like boiling snow for
drinking water. They have less time to engage in politics and a
reduced capacity to protect their rights. They often regress,
deferring to strong and decisive leaders — think of New York’s
ill-fated love affairs with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the 9/11
attacks and Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the early months of the Covid-19
pandemic.<br>
<br>
Large-scale shocks — natural disasters, economic collapse, terrorist
attacks — become ideal moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market
policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else’s expense.
Crucially, the shock doctrine is not about solving underlying
drivers of crises: It’s about exploiting those crises to ram through
your wish list even if it exacerbates the crisis.<br>
<br>
To explain this phenomenon, I often quote a guru of the free market
revolution, the late economist Milton Friedman. In 1982, he wrote
about what he saw as the mission of right-wing economists like him:
“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When
that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas
that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to
develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and
available until the politically impossible becomes politically
inevitable.”<br>
<br>
Republicans have effectively deployed this tactic even after crises
like the 2008 market collapse, created by financial deregulation and
made deadlier by decades of austerity. Democrats have, largely, been
willing partners. This seems counterintuitive, but it all comes back
to Friedman’s credo: The change doesn’t depend on the reasons for
the crisis, only on who has the ideas “lying around” — a kind of
intellectual disaster preparedness. And for a long time, it was only
the right, bolstered by a network of free-market think tanks linked
to both major parties, that had its ideas at the ready.<br>
<br>
When Hurricane Katrina broke through New Orleans’s long-neglected
levees in 2005, there was, briefly, some hope that the catastrophe
might serve as a kind of wake-up call. Witnessing the abandonment of
thousands of residents on their rooftops and in the Superdome,
small-government fetishists suddenly lost their religion. “When a
city is sinking into the sea and rioting runs rampant, government
probably should saddle-up,” Jonah Goldberg, a prominent right-wing
commentator, wrote at the time. In environmental circles, there was
also discussion that the disaster could spur climate action. Some
dared to predict that the collapsed levees would be for the
small-government, free-market legacy of Reaganism what the fall of
the Berlin Wall was for Soviet Communism.<br>
<br>
None of it happened. Instead, New Orleans became a laboratory for
the shock doctrine. Public schools were shut down en masse, replaced
by charter schools. Public housing was demolished, and costly
townhouses sprang up, preventing thousands of the city’s poorest
residents, the majority of them Black, from ever returning. The
reconstruction of the city became a feeding ground for private
contractors. Republicans used the cover of crisis to call for
expanded oil and gas exploration and new refinery capacity, much as
Mr. Perry is doing right now in Texas with his calls for doubling
down on gas.<br>
<br>
Many tried to stop them. Teachers’ unions, despite having their
members scattered throughout the country, did their best to fight
the privatizations. Residents of public housing and their supporters
faced tear gas to try to stop the demolition of their homes. But
there were no readily available, alternate ideas lying around for
how New Orleans could be rebuilt to make it both greener and fairer
for all of its residents.<br>
<br>
Even if there had been, there was no political muscle to turn such
ideas into reality. Though the environmental justice movement has
deep roots in Louisiana’s “cancer alley,” the climate justice
movement was only just emerging at the time Katrina struck. There
was no Sunrise Movement, the youth-led organization that occupied
Nancy Pelosi’s office after the 2018 midterms to demand “good jobs,
and a livable planet.” There was no “squad,” the ad hoc alliance of
congressional progressives whose most visible member, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, sent shock waves through Washington by joining the
Sunrisers in their occupation. There had not yet been two Bernie
Sanders presidential campaigns to show Americans how popular these
ideas really are. And there was certainly no national movement for a
Green New Deal.<br>
<br>
Lying in Ruin<br>
The difference between then and now goes a very long way toward
explaining why Mr. Abbott is railing against a policy plan that, as
of now, exists primarily on paper. In a crisis, ideas matter — he
knows this. He also knows that the Green New Deal, which promises to
create millions of union jobs building out shock-resilient green
energy infrastructure, transit and affordable housing, is extremely
appealing. This is especially true now, as so many Texans suffer
under the overlapping crises of unemployment, houselessness, racial
injustice, crumbling public services and extreme weather.<br>
<br>
All that Texas’s Republicans have to offer, in contrast, is
continued oil and gas dependence — driving more climate disruption —
alongside more privatizations and cuts to public services to pay for
their state’s mess, which we can expect them to push in the weeks
and months ahead.<br>
<br>
Will it work? Unlike when the Republican Party began deploying the
shock doctrine, its free-market playbook is no longer novel. It has
been tried and repeatedly tested: by the pandemic, by spiraling
hunger and joblessness, by extreme weather. And it is failing all of
those tests — so much so that even the most ardent cheerleaders of
deregulation now point to Texas’s energy grid as a cautionary tale.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, for instance, called
the deregulation of Texas’s energy system “a fundamental flaw.”<br>
<br>
In short, Republican ideas are no longer lying around — they are
lying in ruin. Small government is simply no match for this era of
big, interlocking problems. Moreover, for the first time since
Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s former prime minister, declared that
“there is no alternative” to leaving our fates to the market,
progressives are ready with a host of problem-solving plans. The big
question is whether the Democrats who hold power in Washington will
have the courage to implement them.<br>
<br>
The horrors currently unfolding in Texas expose both the reality of
the climate crisis and the extreme vulnerability of fossil fuel
infrastructure in the face of that crisis. So of course the Green
New Deal finds itself under fierce attack. Because for the first
time in a long time, Republicans face the very thing that they claim
to revere but never actually wanted: competition — in the battle of
ideas.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/opinion/green-new-deal-texas-blackout.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/opinion/green-new-deal-texas-blackout.html</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[2020 Report]<b><br>
</b><b> </b><b>Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and
Climate Change</b><br>
Tracking the connections between public health and climate change<br>
The Lancet Countdown works to ensure that health is at the centre of
how governments understand and respond to climate change. Our work
ranges from ensuring policymakers have access to high-quality
evidence-based guidance, through to providing the health profession
with the tools they need to improve public health.<br>
Video <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://youtu.be/Bp6avcskCcg">https://youtu.be/Bp6avcskCcg</a> The Lancet Countdown on Health
and Climate Change: 2020 report<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.lancetcountdown.org/">https://www.lancetcountdown.org/</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[From the Siberian Times]<br>
<b>Scientists call for urgent increase in monitoring
potentially-explosive permafrost 'heave mounds’</b><br>
By Anna Liesowska, Svetlana Skarbo - 29 January 2021<br>
More than 7,000 pepper the Yamal peninsula, world’s biggest natural
gas reserve, and many may be ticking time bombs.<br>
A call for a lot more attention to the ‘world gas pantry’ comes from
a team of Russian scientists from the Oil and Gas Research Institute
of the Russian Academy of Science (OGRI RAS), who have spent years
studying Yamal’s permafrost so-called heave, or heaving mounds after
the first major explosion of one of them was recorded in autumn
2013. <br>
<br>
A total of 20 have erupted since on the Yamal and the nearby Gydan
peninsula, with the latest explosion in summer 2020 leaving a 32-35
metres (131ft) deep crater.<br>
<br>
Chunks of soil and ice were flung dozens of metres from the
epicentre. <br>
<br>
These explosions, recorded both on the ground and under water in
lakes and rivers of the Yamal peninsula are believed to be caused by
the build up of methane gas in pockets of thawing permafrost
including the ground ice under the surface. The swollen pingo-like
formations erupt with gas blowing off thick caps of soil, shooting
out chunks of ground ice and soil as large as 100-150 cubic metres,
as happened in 2017 when the Seyakha PMH exploded.<br>
<br>
Another huge explosion followed a year later in 2019, when reindeer
herders who happened to be close to lake Otkrytie witnessed a mighty
eruption with large pieces of ice flying in the air...<br>
- -<br>
A database has been created of 7,185 so-called permafrost heave
mounds (PMH) on the Yamal and Gydan peninsula, with many in areas of
major gas extracting and processing projects such as the gigantic
Yamal LNG, the Bovanenkovo, the Novoportovskoye and the South-Tambey
oil and gas condensate fields. <br>
<br>
‘We think approximately that not more then five to ten per cent of
these 7,185 mounds are really dangerous’, said Professor Vasily
Bogoyavlensky, who with the team of colleagues from OGRI RAS has
been using satellite images, digital surface models, seismic
sensors, drone and ground surveillance to gather the up-to-date map.<br>
<br>
What is currently missing is the map of the mounds that will
definitely explode, which is one of the reason of why Professor
Bogoyavlensky is calling to use all available methods to create a
24/7 monitoring system, given how dangerous it would be to have one
of the mounds blowing up by or under currently existing
infrastructure. <br>
<br>
To explain the maps (above), Professor Bogoyavlensky said: ‘Now we
have the full understanding of the nature of these gas heave mounds,
we understand which types of them are potentially dangerous, but we
can’t yet predict which of them will explode based on remote
sensing. <br>
<br>
‘A combination of methods is needed. So far we revealed and mapped
7,185 permafrost heave mounds, over 1800 zones of active gas
emission from craters in Yamal thermokarst lakes and marked
potentially dangerous areas with settlements and infrastructure
sites on them.’...<br>
- -<br>
‘For the first time in the world we proved that underwater explosive
power was the same as on land. During the 2018 Lake Otkrytie
explosion, its 1.5 metre thick ice cover was broken, with the pieces
of ice scattered as far as 50 metres’, he said. <br>
<br>
Four critical zones with the highest risk of gas explosions were
revealed: the Seyakha zone with an epicentre in 28 kilometres from
Seya-Kha village; North-Tambey zone, in the South Tambey field, with
the epicentre 17 kilometres from the village of Sabetta, Russia’s
major LNG exporting port, and the West Seyakya field zone. <br>
<br>
All four dangerous zones are linked to gas fields, namely to the
Bovanenkovo, Novoportovskoye and South-Tambey oil and gas condensate
fields, unique in terms of the complexity of construction and
operation, and the world's northernmost plant for liquefaction of
natural gas 'Yamal LNG' costing $27 billion at Sabetta. <br>
<br>
One of Yamal peninsula's permafrost heave (or heaving) mounds before
and after explosion. Pictures and video: Vesti Yamal, Vasily
Bogoyavlensky<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/scientists-call-for-urgent-increase-in-monitoring-potentially-explosive-permafrost-heave-mounds/">https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/scientists-call-for-urgent-increase-in-monitoring-potentially-explosive-permafrost-heave-mounds/</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
February 22, 2010 </b></font><br>
<p>The Economist calls out the Daily Mail for promoting the notion
that climate change "stopped" in 1995.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/climategate_distortions">http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/climategate_distortions</a><br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://youtu.be/cp-iB6jwjUc">http://youtu.be/cp-iB6jwjUc</a><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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