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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>March 19, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[New Yorker and Bill McKibben]<br>
<b>H.R. 1 Is About Climate, Too</b><br>
The For the People Act says nothing about carbon emissions or solar
panels, but it’s still the most important piece of climate
legislation today.<br>
By Bill McKibben - March 17, 2021<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/hr-1-is-about-climate-too">https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/hr-1-is-about-climate-too</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Restoring trust in the Internet]<br>
<b>Facts are back, and so is the EPA’s climate change website</b><br>
Trump erased it. Biden revived it.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://grist.org/politics/biden-revives-epa-climate-change-site-trump-deleted/">https://grist.org/politics/biden-revives-epa-climate-change-site-trump-deleted/</a><br>
- -<br>
[Here it is]<br>
<b>Climate Change An EPA Priority</b><br>
EPA is restoring the role of science in addressing the climate
crisis. El sitio web de la EPA sobre el cambio climático en español.
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.epa.gov/climate-change">https://www.epa.gov/climate-change</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Well known long ago - even by Congress]<br>
<b>Oil firms knew decades ago fossil fuels posed grave health risks,
files reveal</b><br>
Exclusive: documents seen by Guardian show companies fought
clean-air rules despite being aware of harm caused by air pollution<br>
<br>
The oil industry knew at least 50 years ago that air pollution from
burning fossil fuels posed serious risks to human health, only to
spend decades aggressively lobbying against clean air regulations, a
trove of internal documents seen by the Guardian reveal.<br>
<br>
The documents, which include internal memos and reports, show the
industry was long aware that it created large amounts of air
pollution, that pollutants could lodge deep in the lungs and be
“real villains in health effects”, and even that its own workers may
be experiencing birth defects among their children...<br>
- -<br>
“The response from fossil-fuel interests has been from the same
playbook – first they know, then they scheme, then they deny and
then they delay,” said Geoffrey Supran, a researcher at Harvard
University who has studied the history of fossil-fuel companies and
climate change. “They’ve fallen back on delay, subtle forms of
propaganda and the undermining of regulation.”...<br>
- - <br>
By 1980, Imperial Oil had outlined plans to investigate incidences
of cancers and “birth defects among industry worker offspring”. Esso
experts, meanwhile, raised the “possibility for improved particulate
control” in new vehicle designs to reduce the emission of harmful
pollution.<br>
Ten years later, an internal Exxon report stated: “We have become
more aware of the potential impacts our operations might have on
safety and health.” By this point, independent scientists in
academia were amassing their own evidence of the influence of air
pollution.<br>
<br>
“The body is set up to keep particles out but these very small, fine
particles are good at picking up toxins, bypassing your defenses and
getting a free ride down into the lungs,” said George Thurston, an
environmental health expert at New York University who co-authored a
landmark 1987 study that found the smaller particles were far more
deadly than larger fragments that could be coughed out.<br>
<br>
Thurston and others have established fumes from car exhausts or
power plants produce far more toxic particles than from other
sources, such as wood burning or dust. “I don’t recommend breathing
in wood smoke, but it’s far less toxic than fossil-fuel combustion
particles, given the same concentrations,” Thurston said.<br>
- -<br>
Following a further major report in 1993, known as the Harvard “six
cities” study, which found air pollution was spurring deaths from
heart disease and lung cancer, pressure began to mount on the US
Environmental Protection Agency to set pollution limits for the
smallest particles, known as PM2.5 as they measure less than 2.5
micrometers across, or about a 30th of the diameter of a human hair.<br>
<br>
Faced with the prospect of federal government regulation, the
fossil-fuel industry swung into action. “The health issue is
increasing in importance,” noted the minutes of a meeting of the
Global Climate Coalition, which was a business lobby group, in 1997.
“The GCC has got to be prepared to respond to the issue this year.”<br>
<br>
A scientist commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API),
a US oil and gas industry group, promptly told a congressional
hearing in 1997 the link between air pollution and mortality was
“weak”, before Exxon pushed out its own study claiming “there is no
substantive basis” for believing PM2.5 was causing more deaths.<br>
This undermining of air-pollution science is likened by some
researchers to efforts by tobacco companies to muddy the connection
between cigarette smoking and cancer.<br>
<br>
“The fossil-fuel industry was sowing uncertainty to maintain
business as usual, and in all likelihood they were collaborating
with other groups, such as the tobacco industry,” said Carroll
Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International
Environmental Law...<br>
- -<br>
In a major finding last month, a team of US and UK researchers
calculated that nearly one in five of all deaths worldwide each year
is due to particulate pollution, a stunning death toll that is
greater than that caused by HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis
combined. About 350,000 of these deaths occur annually in America.
While overall air pollution trends have improved in recent decades
in the US, pockets of stubborn pollution remain, often concentrated
in poorer communities, among people of color and those living in the
rust belt...<br>
- -<br>
“There is now very consistent and solid evidence across many
countries of the link between fine particulate matter and harm to
health,” said Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics at
Harvard. “There is also a ton of evidence that lots of people are
dying in the US from exposures even below the current limits. This
pollution is very harmful and stricter regulation is needed.”<br>
<br>
Knowledge of the health impact of air pollutants was “relatively
thin” in the 1970s and some skepticism over the link was
understandable for a while, according to Arden Pope, an air
pollution expert at Brigham Young University who said he got a “lot
of pushback” from industry over his work, which includes the six
cities study. “But the evidence has grown dramatically and, boy,
it’s just hard to deny now,” he said. It’s overwhelming.”...<br>
- -<br>
Industry-funded consultants published studies disputing the link
between emissions and deteriorating health or simply disparaged the
work of other researchers. “Their goal is to undermine the
scientific method, science itself,” said Thurston...<br>
- - <br>
Under Trump, Tony Cox, a researcher who received funding from API
and allowed the lobby group to copy-edit his findings, was named as
chairman of a key EPA clean air advisory board. Cox, whose previous
work has questioned the harm caused by particulates, accused EPA
experts of bad science and subjectivity when they found that
particles can be deadly even in low concentrations.<br>
<br>
Last year, in the midst of an historic pandemic of respiratory
disease, Trump’s EPA decided to not strengthen standards around fine
soot particles. A Harvard study found that air pollution was
associated with worse outcomes for people with Covid-19. API said
the Harvard paper merely included “preliminary findings” that had
provoked “scare headlines and erroneous media reports”.<br>
<br>
The attacks on the Harvard research were “very hard and very
stressful”, according to Dominici, one of the paper’s authors. “If
you’re breathing pollution for a long time and get Covid you will
have worse consequences. This is very unsurprising,” said the
researcher, who has since established there are now more than 60
studies from around the world that associate air pollution with poor
Covid outcomes.<br>
<br>
“I was surprised there was such a ferocious criticism. It’s really
unfortunate that it’s easier to discredit science than produce good
science. Gosh, that’s so frustrating.”<br>
<br>
In a statement, Bethany Aronhalt, spokeswoman for API, said: “Our
industry’s top priority is advancing public health and safety while
delivering affordable, reliable and cleaner energy.<br>
<br>
“Largely due to increased use of natural gas in the power sector and
cleaner motor fuels, the US has seen significant environmental
progress over the years – including improved air quality – with
annual concentrations of PM2.5 declining 43% since 2000.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/18/oil-industry-fossil-fuels-air-pollution-documents">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/18/oil-industry-fossil-fuels-air-pollution-documents</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Police in Minnesota and the Enbridge Pipeline]<br>
<b>"I don't feel safe here"</b><br>
The Canadian oil giant Enbridge is "funding and incentivizing"
Minnesota police to crack down on its (mostly female) opponents.
Here's what it looks like. <br>
Emily Atkin - March 17, 2021<br>
PARK RAPIDS, Minnesota—Jane Fonda’s trip to Minnesota has not gone
exactly as planned. She expected attention from the media. She did
not expect attention from the police.<br>
<br>
The actress and climate activist told HEATED on Tuesday that her
much-publicized press conference to oppose the Line 3 tar sands
pipeline was delayed because of an extended interaction with the
Minnesota State Patrol. On her way to the event, the vehicle leading
her caravan was pulled over for failure to signal more than 100 feet
before a turn.<br>
<br>
“We pulled over to wait for them, it took a long time to process
their identification, and they ended up not being ticketed,” she
said. “Then we drove 12 miles to the press conference and the police
car followed us the whole way.” While being followed, they couldn’t
tell what the speed limit was (unmarked roads, this is Northern
Minnesota). So Fonda’s caravan drove at a glacial place to avoid
getting stopped again, further delaying the press conference.<br>
<br>
Fonda’s experience on its own was benign. Her colleagues were not
arrested, hurt, or ticketed. If you watch the video of the stop, the
police officer actually seemed super nice. Really, it’s the woman
driving who seems kind of mean.<br>
<br>
But Fonda does not see her experience in isolation. She views it as
part of a coordinated effort between Minnesota law enforcement and
the Canadian oil company Enbridge to harass, intimidate, and surveil
opponents of the Line 3 pipeline. “This is a public police force
that's been privatized by a foreign oil company, and every minute
they spend harassing the water protectors—and assaulting the water
protectors—they turn in an invoice and they get paid,” she said.
“They're making a fortune off this.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://heated.world/p/i-dont-feel-safe-here">https://heated.world/p/i-dont-feel-safe-here</a><br>
- -<br>
[MSNBC - Enbridge #3 Jane Fonda's great rant ]<br>
<b>Jane Fonda joins protests to stop pipeline replacement in
Minnesota</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/jane-fonda-joins-protests-to-stop-pipeline-replacement-in-minnesota-107604037986">https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/jane-fonda-joins-protests-to-stop-pipeline-replacement-in-minnesota-107604037986</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Opinion video 3 min]<br>
<b>John Schwartz: Better Climate Communication is Not "Just the
Facts"</b><br>
Mar 18, 2021<br>
greenmanbucket<br>
I interviewed John Schwartz, climate writer for the New York Times.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pROdGi4LN70">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pROdGi4LN70</a><br>
- -<br>
[media changes video 1:30 min]<br>
<b>John Schwartz: Disinformation, the Internet, and the John Birch
Society</b><br>
Mar 18, 2021<br>
greenmanbucket<br>
I interviewed John Schwartz of the New York Times on climate denial
and it's relation to rampant conspiracy theories like Qanon.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPBkB1ncYag">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPBkB1ncYag</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>[TRN $ text and audio play 30 min ]<br>
</p>
<p>Ben Ehrenreich/March 18, 2021<br>
<b>We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide</b><br>
Why we must do everything differently to ensure the planet’s
survival<br>
</p>
<p>On January 13, one week before the inauguration of Joe Biden as
the forty-sixth president of the United States and seven long days
after the storming of the Capitol by an armed right-wing mob, it
was easy enough to miss an article published in the journal
Frontiers in Conservation Science, despite its eye-catching title:
“Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.” The
headline was itself a train wreck: six dully innocuous words
piling up in front of a modifier more suitable to a 1950s horror
comic than a sober, academic journal. But there it was: The 17
scientists who co-wrote the article, the experts who peer-reviewed
it, and the journal’s editors did not consider the word “ghastly”
too sensational, subjective, or value-laden to describe the future
toward which our society is advancing with all the prudence and
caution of a runaway locomotive. The article’s message was simple:
Everything must change.<br>
<br>
On its current track, the authors wrote, “humanity is causing a
rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth’s ability to
support complex life.” As many as a million animal species—and 20
percent of all species—are facing near-term extinction. Humans
have altered 70 percent of the planet’s land surface and
“compromised” or otherwise despoiled two-thirds of its oceans, and
the climate has only begun to warm. Humanity—or some of us,
anyway—“is running an ecological Ponzi scheme in which society”—or
some sectors of it—“robs nature and future generations to pay for
boosting incomes in the short term.” Only a radical transformation
of the systems that govern our relations to one another and to the
myriad forms of life with which we share the planet, the authors
concurred, could deliver any hope of a “less-ravaged future.”<br>
<br>
One week later, Joe Biden took the oath of office and quickly
signed sweeping executive orders declaring it the explicit policy
of his administration “to listen to the science.” He didn’t use
the word “ghastly,” but he did mention “a cry for survival … from
the planet itself,” one that “can’t be any more desperate or any
more clear.” This was strangely comforting to hear. He rejoined
the Paris accord, revoked a slew of Trump-era executive orders,
and restored, albeit temporarily, the moratorium on drilling in
the Arctic that President Barack Obama had issued on his way out
the door. However slow Biden had been to catch on to the true
magnitude of the climate crisis during the primaries, he had,
after months of sustained movement pressure, apparently begun to
come around.<br>
<br>
To his credit, in his first week in office, Biden went further
than any of his predecessors ever had. He ordered a “pause” on all
new permits and leases for oil and gas drilling offshore and on
federal land and shut down the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which
activists had been fighting for more than a decade. He ordered
federal agencies to pursue a “carbon pollution–free electricity
sector no later than 2035,” and the full conversion of all
government fleets to zero-emissions vehicles.<br>
<br>
Perhaps most significantly, Biden’s actions aimed to
institutionalize the mitigation of climate change as a priority in
the daily workings of the federal bureaucracy. He ordered the
creation of an Office of Domestic Climate Policy, a national
climate adviser, a special presidential envoy for climate, and, in
an explicit echo of the New Deal program—though green only with a
lowercase g—a Civilian Climate Corps. He directed federal agencies
to “implement a Government-wide approach that reduces climate
pollution in every sector of the economy,” to center climate in
foreign policy decisions, to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, and
to “promote ending international financing” of fossil fuels. There
was even, in the very first section of his first climate order, a
mandate for environmental justice and the protection of
communities of color that had been disproportionately harmed by
polluters. Whether that would mean any real inclusion—“If you’re
not at the table, you’re on the menu,” as one South Carolina
environmental justice activist put it to me—remains an open
question. But as a signal of his administration’s priorities and
its sense of urgency, it was, all the climate activists I spoke to
agreed, an extremely solid start.<br>
<br>
There was of course also a good deal of typical Democratic
half-stepping. Why a “pause” on drilling and not an outright ban?
(And why had the administration quietly gone ahead and approved 31
new drilling permits anyway?) Why no mention of fracking? Why not
just shut down all the oil and gas pipelines that “[disserve] the
U.S. national interest,” as the executive order put it, in exactly
the same ways that Keystone XL did? And why not immediately
declare a climate emergency, which would have opened up executive
powers that would enable him to evade many of the roadblocks
erected by the 50 Republicans in the Senate? Even Senate Majority
Leader Chuck Schumer, no one’s idea of a radical, was urging Biden
to do so. “If there ever was an emergency,” Schumer said, “the
climate crisis is one.”<br>
<br>
Still, with these and more caveats and endless sound reasons for
mistrust, after four long years of Trump’s out-and-out denialist,
kleptocratic mayhem, the sheer momentum of Biden’s actions did
feel pretty good. At least it allowed us to contemplate the
prospect ahead with something other than pure dread. But a couple
of months into the Biden era, enough time has passed for it no
longer to seem impolite to point out that we should not be
reassured. The “ghastly future” that those 17 scientists were
warning of will still arrive, right on schedule or perhaps a
little early, so long as Biden stays within the frame of what now
counts as pragmatic climate policy—which, it turns out, is not
very pragmatic at all.<br>
<br>
Those 17 scientists did not want you to despair. “Ours is not a
call to surrender,” they wrote. It was meant as a kick in the
ass—a reminder that our only chance is a thoroughgoing
transformation. Specifically: “fundamental changes to global
capitalism, education, and equality, which include inter alia the
abolition of perpetual economic growth.” Radical as this call may
seem, it was hardly an outlier demand from a few oddball pinko
Ph.Ds. In 2019, 11,258 scientists from 153 countries signed a
“Warning of a Climate Emergency” that called for “bold and
drastic” changes to the economy, including a shift away “from GDP
growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems
and improving human well-being.” Two years before that, the
Alliance of World Scientists made a similar call in a “Warning to
Humanity” that garnered 15,364 signatures. We are supposed to
listen to science now. This is what the scientists are saying:
Everything must change.<br>
<br>
A strange sort of faith lies at the core of mainstream climate
advocacy—a largely unexamined belief that the very system that got
us into this mess is the one that will get us out of it. For a
community putatively committed to scientific empiricism, this is
an extraordinary conviction. Despite reams of increasingly
apocalyptic research, and despite 25 years of largely fruitless
international climate negotiations, carbon emissions have
continued to rise, and temperatures along with them. We are at
nearly 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming already—more than 2 degrees
Fahrenheit over preindustrial averages—and three-tenths of a
degree away from blowing the Paris accord’s aspiration to limit
warming to a still-calamitous 1.5 degrees Celsius. Scientists now
expect us to hit that threshold in about 10 years, and large
swaths of the Arctic have been in actual flames for two summers
running, but most governments with the option to do so are still
feeding the beast that got us here.<br>
<br>
Even with the grim opportunity presented by the Covid-19 pandemic,
which slowed the economy so much that growth in fossil fuel
production dropped an almost unprecedented 7 percent last year,
governments—ours very much included—have so far dumped much more
stimulus spending into high-carbon industries than into renewable
energy. It’s as if our economic system, and the politics it
breeds, will not allow us to diverge from the straight path to
self-obliteration.<br>
<br>
The faith nonetheless persists: The market will provide. It has
not done so yet, but renewables are perhaps finally cheap
enough—cheaper at last than conventional energy sources—that the
transition is now inevitable. So the credo goes. The change that
is coming will be largely technological: a bold new era of “green
growth.” Modern societies erected on dirty coal and oil can be
jacked up and shifted to cleaner forms of energy like an old house
in need of a new foundation. Government may have a larger role in
this transition than neoliberal dogma has recently allowed, but
its primary task will still be to encourage innovation and feed
the markets by shepherding the resulting growth.<br>
<br>
It is no coincidence that some version of this faith, so
all-pervasive now that it does not register as a piety, has been
reshaping the planet for almost precisely as long as fossil
energy—first coal, then oil—has been altering the atmosphere.
Capitalism is guided by a carbon creed, an ecstatic vision of a
market that chugs along eternally, needing only new inputs—the
earth itself, commodified as minerals, or water, housing, health
care, or almost any living thing—to spew out wealth that can be
shoveled back into the machine, converting more and more of the
biosphere into zeros in a digital account: more fleshless, magical
money that can be invested once again. If appetites are
bottomless, and apparently they are, shouldn’t growth be endless
too?<br>
<br>
The market’s grip on the political imagination so effectively
blinds us to alternatives that we are unable fully to grasp that
this is the basic script that the new administration is following.
Even the Green New Deal does not substantively diverge from it.
The climate crisis, an existential threat to planetary life, must
be sold to Wall Street and the public at large as a growth
opportunity. On January 31, John Kerry, acting as Biden’s new
climate envoy, enthused to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria about “literally
millions of jobs” that would soon be created, about all the “new
products coming online,” and about oil companies’ newfound passion
for “carbon capture and storage and so forth.” The private sector,
he said, “has already made the decision that there is money to be
made here, that’s capitalism, and they are investing in that
future.” If that makes you nervous, it shouldn’t, Kerry insisted.
The changes ahead would be like the analog-to-digital shift of the
1990s, only better: “the important point, Fareed, for people to
really focus on is it’s a very exciting economic transition.”<br>
<br>
If Kerry struck a cheerier tone than that of the doomsaying
consensus in the scientific community, it wasn’t just a question
of polishing a turd. “Green growth” is mainstream climate
discourse. A “green transition” that does not significantly alter
existing economic structures—or their vast inequities—is still,
for most climate advocates, the only imaginable way forward. Kerry
was speaking a made-for-TV version of the sole language available
to him—one that in its most basic assumptions excludes the
possibility of fundamental social transformation, and of any
heresy that casts doubt on the Great God Growth. The one thing all
those thousands of scientists agree on is our only hope—that the
economic structures that mediate our relation to the planet must
be profoundly altered—is the one thing that Kerry and Biden are
quite careful not to consider at all.<br>
</p>
<p>In climate policy jargon, the crucial concept is “decoupling.”
The notion lies deep in the hidden heart of the “sustainable
development goals” held dear by international bodies such as the
United Nations and the World Bank: Economic growth can be safely
divorced from the ecological damage that it has heretofore almost
universally wreaked. If the train of capital appears to be
hurtling us toward the abyss, we can cut the engine loose and
cruise someplace more comfortable: same train, same speed,
different destination. Like millions of clean-tech jobs and a
crisis-induced transition magically unlocking unimaginable wealth,
it is an attractive and reassuring idea. The only problem is that
there is next to no evidence that anything analogous has ever
occurred, or that it is likely to occur in the future.<br>
<br>
Examples of successful decoupling tend to involve shifts in the
location rather than the nature of industrial production: Rich
countries green their economies by offshoring the manufacture of
the goods they consume to China and countries in the global south,
which they can then chastise for their lax emissions standards.
But Earth’s atmosphere is not divided by national boundaries.
Greenhouse gases cause the same degree of global warming no matter
where they are produced, and to the extent that this kind of
decoupling is a meaningful measure of anything, it is only of the
colonial relations that still set the terms for the shell game of
global capital.<br>
<br>
What policy wonks call “absolute decoupling”—the only kind that
would do the climate any good—turns out to be a fantasy akin to a
perpetual motion machine, a chimera of growth unhindered by
material constraints. One recent analysis of 835 peer-reviewed
articles on the subject found that the kind of massive and speedy
reductions in emissions that would be necessary to halt global
warming “cannot be achieved through observed decoupling rates.”
The mechanism on which mainstream climate policy is betting the
future of the species, and on which the possibility of green
growth rests, appears to be a fiction.<br>
<br>
This fiction is nonetheless fundamental to the very math used by
international climate institutions. In 2018, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change’s benchmark Special Report on Global
Warming of 1.5oC—which announced in no uncertain terms that global
emissions must be decreased by nearly half by 2030 and reach net
zero by 2050 to avoid cataclysm at an almost unthinkable scale—set
out a number of possible scenarios for policymakers to consider.
It relied on algorithmic models linking greenhouse gas emissions
and their climate impacts to various socioeconomic “pathways.”
Whatever other variables they accounted for, though, all of the
scenarios envisioned by the IPCC assumed the continuation of
economic growth comparable to the past half-century’s. Even as
they acknowledged levels of atmospheric carbon unseen in the last
three million years, they were unable to conceive of an economy
that does not perpetually expand. Fredric Jameson’s oft-cited
dictum that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the
end of capitalism was baked into the actual modeling.<br>
<br>
At the same time, all but one of the IPCC’s scenarios that
envision us successfully limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius
rely on the use of technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere
after the fact. (The one exception involves converting an area
more than half the size of the United States to forest. None of
the scenarios imagines that we can reach the 1.5 degrees Celsius
target by cutting emissions alone.) But the technology in question
is at this point largely speculative. “No proposed technology is
close to deployment at scale,” the report’s authors concede, and
“there is substantial uncertainty” about possible “adverse
effects” on the environment. The international body, in other
words, is more willing to gamble on potentially destructive
technologies that do not currently exist than to even run the math
on a more substantive economic transformation.<br>
<br>
A version of this same wager animates the Biden climate plan,
which, as Canada, the European Union, the U.K., and South Korea
all have, commits to “net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
(China plans to reach the same goal by 2060.) This sounds like
great news, and is without doubt worlds better than the status quo
ante of no ambitions at all. But “net zero” is a slippery notion.
It does not mean zero at all. To avoid exceeding 1.5 degrees
Celsius of warming, emissions need to fall 7.6 percent every year
for the next 10 years. Even with the pandemic-induced slowdown,
global emissions shrank only 6.4 percent in 2020. Since, as Biden
reassured a nervous oil industry during the campaign, “We’re not
getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time,” net-zero
calculations assume some degree of “overshoot”—i.e., they
stipulate that we’re not going to be able to cut emissions fast
enough, and that we’ll therefore have to rely on those same
untested carbon removal technologies to eventually bring us to
zero.<br>
<br>
But a planet is not a balance sheet. The climate has tipping
points—the collapse of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and
the Himalayan glaciers, the deterioration of Atlantic Ocean
currents, the melting of the permafrost, the transition of the
Amazon from rain forest to savannah. We are perilously close to
hitting some of them already: In February, 31 people were killed
and 165 went missing when a chunk of a Himalayan glacier broke
off, releasing an explosive burst of meltwater and debris. In the
most nightmarish scenario, which could be tripped with less than 2
degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, those tipping
points could begin to trigger one another and cascade, locking us
in, as one widely cited study put it, to “conditions that would be
inhospitable to current human societies and to many other
contemporary species.” Without major emissions cuts, we may reach
2 degrees Celsius of warming before 2050.<br>
<br>
That’s a heavy risk to bet against, but there it is, pulsing away
inside the net-zero promises that not only politicians but
corporate boards have been proudly rolling out. Over the last two
years, more and more corporations in fossil fuel–intensive
industries—BP, Shell, Maersk, GM, Ford, Volkswagen, at least a
dozen major airlines—have made similar pledges. Shell’s plan alone
would require tree planting over an area nearly the size of
Brazil. By the estimate of the NGO ActionAid, “there is simply not
enough available land on the planet to accommodate all of the
combined corporate and government ‘net zero’ plans” for offsets
and carbon-sinking tree plantations. To save this planet, it
appears we’ll need another one. This is what currently counts as
pragmatism.<br>
<br>
“If there is any one thing that global warming has made perfectly
clear,” Amitav Ghosh wrote in 2016, “it is that to think about the
world as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide.” Five
years later, the pandemic has drilled the point painfully home.
The societies most geared toward individual profit, and most
worshipful of economic expansion, have proved least capable of
saving themselves. Decades of almost unbroken GDP growth have
piled up riches in a few gated compounds while leaving the vast
majority of Americans poorer and more vulnerable to illness,
imprisonment, homelessness, and the ghastly futures that we know
all too well await us. That vulnerability is far from uniform.
Covid has charted a precise map of its variegated terrain, of who
gets to live and who gets pushed out to die. The same map applies
to the climate crisis, too.<br>
<br>
It is at this point a truism that the responsibility for global
warming is not the common property of humanity but lies
overwhelmingly with the few wealthy countries, the United States
above all others, that profited most from early industrialization.
The corollary truism is that the poor countries that
disproportionately suffer the impacts of climate change
contributed next to nothing to the problem. We have since learned
that what is true in global macrocosm applies at the societal
level as well. The wealthy consume far more resources and emit far
more carbon than the rest of us. According to a recent Oxfam
report, the richest one percent produce 100 times more emissions
than the poorest half of the planet’s population, and the richest
5 percent were responsible for more than a third of all emissions
growth between 1990 and 2015. Leveling this gross inequity is a
question of survival.<br>
<br>
As transcendent as the notion is made to sound, the “economy” is
not a god or a temple. It is the order that maintains these
inequalities: a highly contingent network of relations among human
beings and between humans and the rest of the planet. Like
everything we might ever hope to make, it is transitory and
eminently changeable. Homo sapiens have walked the earth for at
least 300,000 years, but coal-fueled industrial capitalism is less
than 200 years old. Its latest, fully globalized stage has been
around for just a few decades, even if its roots lie in colonial
dynamics that date back a few centuries. Our specific modern
exaltation of “growth” dates only to the years that followed World
War II. It is younger than Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Nancy
Pelosi, and Donald Trump. Like them, it cannot survive much
longer.<br>
<br>
Last year, GDP growth in the United States fell 3.5 percent.
Emissions tumbled, too. The only other time in the last three
decades that they have dropped significantly was, not
coincidentally, also the last time the economy contracted. But if
it’s guided with intent, the cessation of endless growth does not
have to mean impoverishment. The most recent “Emissions Gap
Report” from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)
projects that warming could be successfully limited to 1.5 degrees
Celsius if the richest one percent reduced “their current
emissions by at least a factor of 30,” which would allow the
poorest 50 percent of the planet’s population to increase their
per capita emissions “by around three times their current levels.”
For the latter, a threefold jump in consumption is the difference
between constant want and a life of basic dignity. Billionaires
who drop to 1/30th of their fortunes are still multimillionaires.<br>
<br>
As innocuous as it may sound, “growth” should be understood to
describe the frenzied ruination of nearly every ecosystem on the
planet so that its richest human inhabitants can hold on to their
privileges for another generation or two. Rejecting the idolatry
of growth means tilting the organization of our societies toward
other social goods—health, for instance, and the freedom to exist
on a planet that is not on fire. This should not be unimaginable.
There are infinite other ways to organize a society, and the fact
that we are not widely and urgently discussing them is at this
point nothing short of criminal. There are voluminous literatures
on degrowth, on circular economies, on mutual aid, and, yes, on
socialism, too. There is the 99.999 percent of human history
during which we managed to not significantly alter the atmosphere
or wipe out such an enormous portion of the species with whom we
share the planet. There is the living experience of every
indigenous community in the United States, and of others around
the globe that have been forced to invent ways to resist and
survive a system determined to erase them.<br>
<br>
Everything must change. The energy system that is heating the
atmosphere was poisoning Black and brown communities in America
long before climate change emerged as an issue. The industrial
food chain that produces roughly half of all global greenhouse gas
emissions is also leaving more than a quarter of U.S. families
with children without secure access to food and millions more with
a uniquely American combination of obesity and undernourishment.
The globalized supply chains that fuel international shipping and
aviation—which, per the UNEP, “are projected to consume between 60
and 220 percent of allowable CO2 emissions by 2050”—were deadly to
local economies as well as to breathing individuals long before
the pandemic revealed their extraordinary fragility.<br>
<br>
Transportation, health care, housing, education, everything that
the Covid-19 outbreak has revealed to be so murderously broken,
every aspect of our lives currently controlled by shareholder
profits—does that even leave anything out?—must be rethought and
rebuilt in the context of terrestrial survival. The white
supremacy that threatens to tear the country down while strangling
the rest of the globe has proved inseparable from an ecocidal urge
to dominate all forms of planetary life. (W.E.B. Du Bois saw it
clearly 100 years ago: “whiteness is the ownership of the earth
forever and ever.”) It must be confronted head on. A foreign
policy constructed to at all costs preserve a hegemony that for
most of the last century has hinged on control of the planet’s oil
reserves must be radically reconfigured.<br>
<br>
It is of course foolish to the point of derangement to imagine
that Joe Biden would consent to any such transformation, much less
lead the country toward one. Given the current political
geography, it would be equally whimsical to suppose that any
American politician or movement could ride to power on the message
that this planet does not belong to us, that we share it with the
dead and the still-to-be-born and with species we have not
bothered to notice, and that we must learn to live among them with
generosity, humility, and the sort of wisdom that does not come to
human beings cheaply. However, it would be just as naïve to
believe that current political configurations are any more stable
or permanent than the climate, or any less vulnerable to concerted
human action. If we do actually listen to the science, then we
understand what ghastly futures await us and we know how bold we
must be to avoid them. Any politics that presumes to be anything
other than suicidal must take that knowledge as its starting
point.<br>
<br>
Ben Ehrenreich @BenEhrenreich<br>
Ben Ehrenreich is the author of Desert Notebooks: A Roadmap for
the End of Time, which was published by Counterpoint Press.<br>
</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://newrepublic.com/article/161575/climate-change-effects-hurtling-toward-global-suicide">https://newrepublic.com/article/161575/climate-change-effects-hurtling-toward-global-suicide</a><br>
</p>
<p>- -</p>
[It is an important paper]<br>
<b>Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419/full">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419/full</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Princeton video discussion - real solutions]<br>
<b>Out with the Old, In with The New: How to Build a Net-Zero
America While Ensuring A Just Transition</b><br>
Mar 16, 2021<br>
Center on Global Energy Policy<br>
In order to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, the United States
has to both build massive amounts of wind, solar, and battery
capacity, and simultaneously retire and retrofit significant fossil
fuel assets. Understanding the impacts of this transition on
communities across the country will be key to ensuring a just,
equitable, and successful transition to zero-carbon energy
resources.<br>
<br>
The Center on Global Energy Policy hosted a webinar on how the
United States can decarbonize its energy sector justly and
equitably. Dr. Jesse Jenkins and Dr. Erin Mayfield provided an
overview of Princeton's Net-Zero America Project, which maps
pathways for the United States to reach net-zero greenhouse gas
emissions by 2050. Key questions in this discussion included: What
will it take for the United States to build a net-zero emissions
energy system? Why is a 100% carbon-free electricity system pivotal
to this challenge? What role do technologies like wind, solar,
batteries, nuclear, and carbon capture play in this future?<br>
<br>
While decarbonization will require vast investment in new
infrastructure, it will also require the retirement of
carbon-intensive power plants. Understanding the timeframes, social
implications, and costs of retiring these assets will be essential
to a just transition. To help understand some of these issues, Dr.
Emily Grubert spoke about her recent work on the implications of a
2035 net-zero emissions target on retirements of fossil fuel power
plants in the US.<br>
<br>
Moderator:<br>
-- Jason Bordoff, Founding Director, Center on Global Energy Policy
and Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public
Affairs, Columbia University<br>
<br>
Panelists:<br>
-- Dr. Emily Grubert, Assistant Professor, Georgia Tech<br>
-- Dr. Jesse Jenkins, Assistant Professor, Princeton University<br>
-- Dr. Erin Mayfield, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton
University<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbbFY_-yFw8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbbFY_-yFw8</a><br>
<p>- -</p>
[See the Princeton web site]<br>
<b>NET-ZERO AMERICA: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure, and Impacts</b><br>
<br>
The Net-Zero America research quantifies five distinct technological
pathways, all using technologies known today, by which the United
States could decarbonize its entire economy. With multiple plausible
and affordable pathways available, the societal conversation can now
turn from “if” to “how” and focus on the choices the nation and its
myriad stakeholders wish to make to shape the energy transition.<br>
<br>
This website presents the pathways in an interactive context to
enable policy makers and other stakeholders to extract specific
results that are most useful to them. The site should be used in
conjunction with the Net-Zero America report to fully understand the
data contained herein.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://netzeroamerica.princeton.edu/?explorer=year&state=national&table=2020&limit=200">https://netzeroamerica.princeton.edu/?explorer=year&state=national&table=2020&limit=200</a><br>
<p>- -</p>
<p> </p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Dr Jennifer Atkinson podcast]<br>
<b>Episode 5: Is Hope Overrated? </b><br>
Many consider hope to be essential to maintaining social movements
where change is slow, setbacks are frequent, and the odds aren't
good. As Rebecca Solnit once wrote, "To hope is to give yourself to
the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the
present inhabitable.” But when it comes to the existential threats
of climate change and mass extinction, what if hope is part of the
problem? What if it obscures the enormity of our crisis, or makes
us complacent, allowing the public to defer responsibility onto
other people or the future?<br>
<br>
When you look at the scale of our climate emergency and the
inadequacy of society's response, hope can feel like a throwaway
term, a cheap neon sign we dutifully switch on at the end of
climate rallies. But those reservations about hope are not the
whole story. Research shows that environmental discourse has long
fueled public hopelessness by perpetuating apocalyptic narratives
and the sense that it's already "too late" to act. That
hopelessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as those who
believe we're already doomed -- or that solutions don't exist --
chose *not* to act, thus ensuring the very outcome they imagined.
Episode 5 explores the complicated role of hope in the fight for a
livable planet, and the different forms it takes in environmental
debates: hope as complacency or "cruel optimism" (an ideology to
keep the public in line) as well as more subversive versions like
active hope, intrinsic hope, and critical hope.<br>
<br>
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch,
feeling lucky. Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an
emergency." <br>
<br>
- Rebecca Solnit<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.drjenniferatkinson.com/facing-it">https://www.drjenniferatkinson.com/facing-it</a><br>
<p> </p>
<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 -
March 19, 1989 </b></font><br>
<p>March 19, 1989: Senator Al Gore (D-TN), writing in the New York
Times, observes, "In 1987, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere
began to surge with record annual increases. Global temperatures
are also climbing: 1987 was the second hottest year on record;
1988 was the hottest. Scientists now predict our current course
will raise world temperatures five degrees Celsius in our
lifetimes. The last time there was such a shift, it was five
degrees colder; New York City was under one kilometer of ice. If
five degrees colder over thousands of years produces an ice age,
what could five degrees warmer produce in a lifetime? In a classic
experiment, a frog dropped in boiling water jumps out. The same
frog, put in the water before it is slowly boiled, remains in the
pot. Our environment is at the boiling point. Will we react?"<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/19/opinion/an-ecological-kristallnacht-listen.html">http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/19/opinion/an-ecological-kristallnacht-listen.html</a><br>
</p>
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