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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>March 25, 2021</b></font></i> <br>
</p>
[to protect the FEDERAL RESERVE]<br>
<b>Fed sets up panels to examine risks that climate change poses to
the financial system</b><br>
PUBLISHED TUE, MAR 23 20212<br>
Jeff Cox<br>
KEY POINTS<br>
-- The Fed has moved forward on the climate change issue, announcing
Tuesday two committees set up to deal with impacts.<br>
-- Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard said climate poses “risks
to the stability of the broader financial system.”<br>
-- At a House hearing Tuesday, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said the
central bank is “in the very early days” of dealing with the matter.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/23/fed-to-examine-risks-climate-change-poses-to-financial-system.html">https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/23/fed-to-examine-risks-climate-change-poses-to-financial-system.html</a><br>
<p>- -</p>
[Sensitive to change]<br>
<b>A Hotter Planet Has Sweden Predicting a New Monetary Policy Era</b><br>
By Niclas Rolander - March 24, 2021,<br>
Global warming may force central banks to keep interest rates low.<br>
<br>
Sweden’s Riksbank, the world’s oldest central bank, warned on
Wednesday that rising temperatures mean monetary policy can’t ignore
the fallout of carbon emissions.<br>
“If climate change increases the risk of catastrophe, makes economic
developments more uncertain and worsens growth prospects, it may
lead to a lower long-term real interest rate,” the Riksbank said in
its annual account of monetary policy. “One consequence of this
could be that the policy rate is more often at its lower bound and
the monetary policy room for maneuver is thus limited.”...<br>
More at -
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-24/sweden-says-global-warming-could-alter-future-of-monetary-policy">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-24/sweden-says-global-warming-could-alter-future-of-monetary-policy</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[does this mean academic bias?]<br>
Published: 24 March 2021<br>
<b>Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate
change</b><br>
Dagomar Degroot, Kevin Anchukaitis, Martin Bauch, Jakob Burnham,
Fred Carnegy, Jianxin Cui, Kathryn de Luna, Piotr Guzowski, George
Hambrecht, Heli Huhtamaa, Adam Izdebski, Katrin Kleemann, Emma
Moesswilde, Naresh Neupane, Timothy Newfield, Qing Pei, Elena
Xoplaki & Natale Zappia <br>
Nature volume 591<br>
<blockquote>Abstract<br>
A large scholarship currently holds that before the onset of
anthropogenic global warming, natural climatic changes long
provoked subsistence crises and, occasionally, civilizational
collapses among human societies. This scholarship, which we term
the ‘history of climate and society’ (HCS), is pursued by
researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including
archaeologists, economists, geneticists, geographers, historians,
linguists and palaeoclimatologists. We argue that, despite the
wide interest in HCS, the field suffers from numerous biases, and
often does not account for the local effects and spatiotemporal
heterogeneity of past climate changes or the challenges of
interpreting historical sources. Here we propose an
interdisciplinary framework for uncovering climate–society
interactions that emphasizes the mechanics by which climate change
has influenced human history, and the uncertainties inherent in
discerning that influence across different spatiotemporal scales.
Although we acknowledge that climate change has sometimes had
destructive effects on past societies, the application of our
framework to numerous case studies uncovers five pathways by which
populations survived—and often thrived—in the face of climatic
pressures.<br>
</blockquote>
- -<br>
Fig. 3: A process for undertaking research into past climate–society
dynamics.<br>
From: Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to
climate change<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03190-2/figures/3">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03190-2/figures/3</a><br>
- -<br>
<b>Better histories for better futures</b><br>
Model simulations provide consistent forecasts of the future
temperatures of the Earth under different emissions scenarios;
however, predictions of the societal consequences of future warming
are less certain.... Many researchers pursue HCS partly to gain
insight into these consequences. Studies in HCS unearth ‘fatal
synergies’ between cooling or drying, harvest failures, food
shortages, epidemic outbreaks and violence within or between
polities that were vulnerable to disruption8. Statistical studies,
in particular, now inform many of the most-concerning and
influential forecasts of the future effects of global warming on
civilization...<br>
<br>
However, the past does not reveal that societies and communities
inevitably succumbed when confronted with climate change and
variability. Our case studies suggest that a combination of
continuity and flexibility characterized many—perhaps most—social
responses to shifting climatic conditions. Previously overlooked
examples of resilience may aid present-day efforts at adaptation in
the face of unprecedented warming, and may provide nuance to popular
accounts of the future that draw uncritically from historical
examples of crisis and collapse. A new wave of research, deploying
the framework we have outlined in this Review, is needed to clarify
the lessons from history for the coming century.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03190-2">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03190-2</a><br>
<p><br>
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<p><br>
</p>
]Ooops [<br>
<b>One of Earth’s giant carbon sinks may have been overestimated -
study</b><br>
The potential of soils to slow climate change by soaking up carbon
may be less than previously thought<br>
<blockquote>“We found that when rising CO2 increases plant growth,
there is a decrease in soil carbon storage. That’s a very
important conclusion,” said César Terrer, who led the research
while at Stanford University in the US. He said that if soils do
absorb less in future, “the speed of global warming could be
higher”.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/24/soils-ability-to-absorb-carbon-emissions-may-be-overestimated-study">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/24/soils-ability-to-absorb-carbon-emissions-may-be-overestimated-study</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Propaganda wars]<br>
<b>Exclusive: Big Oil pushed school officials to make "dishonest"
claims on Biden climate policy</b><br>
State school chiefs wrote "unusual" and "absurd" letter to Biden,
clearly based on oil industry talking points<br>
By IGOR DERYSH - MARCH 24, 2021<br>
l and gas industry advocates were involved in an "unusual" effort by
five top state education officials to stoke economic fears about
President Joe Biden's climate policy, according to internal emails
reviewed by Salon.<br>
<br>
The American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade organization
representing the oil and gas industry, and its allies have gone on
the offensive against Biden's early executive orders, which included
a temporary but indefinite moratorium on new gas and oil leases on
federal land. API has framed the order as a "ban," which is
misleading at best, since it applies only to new leases. New
drilling permits are still being awarded under existing leases, and
the industry is sitting on millions of acres of leased but unused
land.<br>
<br>
Internal emails show that the API's allies were involved in crafting
a self-described "unusual" letter signed by five Western state
school superintendents to Biden, which was later published as an
op-ed. The letter raised concerns that the moratorium would cost
thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue
that could impact education funding, relying heavily on misleading
data from an API report written before Biden was even elected.<br>
<br>
The emails show that the North Dakota Petroleum Council, a former
division of API that has grown into a standalone organization, sent
data to one of the superintendents and later thanked her for the
"fantastic" op-ed. API later promoted the superintendents' talking
points on social media, though it did not mention that it supported
the Trump administration's cuts in oil royalties that had made up a
much larger share of industry revenue distributed to states that
helps fund education.<br>
<br>
The letter immediately set off alarm bells among industry experts.<br>
<br>
"That letter was clearly drafted for them and they were just asked
to sign it," Mark Squillace, a former Interior Department official
who is now a professor of natural resources law at the University of
Colorado Law School, concluded in an interview with Salon. "I don't
know what they actually know about oil and gas revenues, but the
idea that hundreds of millions of dollars are going to be lost by
the states is just ridiculous. It's absurd."...<br>
- -<br>
The emails were obtained through a public records request by the
progressive government watchdog group Accountable.US and the Climate
Power Education Fund, which on Wednesday launched "Polluters
Exposed," a joint initiative aimed at holding API and its allies
"accountable for decades of spreading misinformation" about climate
and pollution.<br>
<br>
"Oil and gas executives love to talk about working with the Biden
administration to address climate change, but these documents show
behind closed doors they are actively working to undermine that very
effort," said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US. "Polluters
Exposed will shine a light on Big Oil and show the American people
how industry lines its pockets by spreading misinformation and
corrupting policymakers."<br>
<br>
The groups accused the oil industry's top advocates of helping
"orchestrate a scheme to use public schools as a Trojan horse" to
attack the administration's climate policy.<br>
<br>
"They have zero shame. API and their allies should stop using our
teachers and schools to halt progress on climate action. Our
children will pay the price for these lies," Lori Lodes, executive
director of Climate Power Education Fund, said in a statement. "The
days of the American Petroleum Institute and its allies lying with
impunity are over. Americans deserve the truth and we are going to
give it to them."<br>
<br>
An API spokesperson denied any involvement with the letter...<br>
- -<br>
"The superintendents are using the royalty numbers from oil and gas
wells on lands that are already leased and producing and translating
those numbers into job losses," she said in an email. "But the
moratorium on new leases does not order existing production to shut
down; the royalties that states are already receiving to fund
schools and other essential programs are not affected."<br>
<br>
The letter falsely described Biden's temporary halt on new leases as
"actions taken to ban oil and gas leases."<br>
<br>
"It is imperative that we bring to light the arbitrary and
inequitable move to shut down oil and gas production on federal
lands in our states that depend on revenues from various taxes,
royalties, disbursements, and lease payments to fund our schools,
community infrastructure, and public services," the letter said...<br>
- - <br>
Most of the money schools receive from public lands comes from
royalties on oil and gas production, though states also get revenue
from rents, bonuses and potential penalties, according to the
Interior Department. Bonuses, which are payments associated with
winning bids on lease sales, are the only revenue even theoretically
impacted by Biden's pause. Most revenue comes from royalties, which
are calculated as a percentage of the sales value of any oil
produced by the drilling operations. Although revenue from bonuses
increased as the Trump administration awarded a large number of new
leases, royalties make up the vast majority of revenue collected by
states, according to the Congressional Research Service.<br>
<br>
The Trump administration last year drastically cut royalty rates,
which had provided states a total of $2.9 billion in revenue in
2019. In Superintendent Dickson's state of Utah, the Bureau of Land
Management cut standard royalty rates of 12.5% to as low as 0.5%,
according to E&E News. BLM said the move was temporary, but
House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz.,
called for an investigation into to determine how much the change
would cost in revenue and whether the cuts were necessary and
properly handled...<br>
- -<br>
Accountable.US and the Climate Power Education Fund argued in a news
release that the oil industry's "feigned worry about school budgets
is hypocritical" given that the industry had enthusiastically
supported the Trump administration's move to slash oil and gas
royalty rates, "costing states and schools untold millions during
the height of a pandemic when they needed it most."...<br>
- -<br>
The Government Accountability Office concluded last October that BLM
had botched the royalty cut, failed to determine whether the policy
— which cost taxpayers around $4.5 million at the time — was
actually necessary and said it may have resulted in cuts for oil
wells that did not need it.<br>
<br>
Despite data showing the overwhelming share of revenue coming from
oil and gas operations is from royalties, Finnerty, the Wyoming
superintendent's spokesperson, argued that "royalties are only part
of the revenue realized from oil and gas."<br>
<br>
"Leases, bonuses, and other forms of indirect revenue are also in
play," she said. "The overall economic impact of oil and gas
activity is very significant."<br>
<br>
Allen said in a statement that "a comparatively small number of
producing wells are subject to this lawful reduction, which, in this
time of the Covid pandemic, will assist in preserving jobs,
supporting families, communities and critical infrastructure, i.e.
schools."<br>
<br>
Grant Robinson, a spokesperson for Johnson, acknowledged in an email
that "bonuses from lease sales generate less revenue for the state
than royalties" but noted that Trump's policy was a temporary one —
as is Biden's new policy.<br>
<br>
Baesler denied that Trump's policy posed a greater threat than
Biden's but acknowledged that most of the state's oil and gas
revenues come from royalties. Still, she said, "the Biden
administration's anti-energy policies pose a much greater threat to
education funding than any action taken by the Trump
administration."<br>
<br>
Squillace rejected that argument and said it was ironic that
education officials had not raised similar concerns when Trump
reduced the royalty rate.<br>
<br>
It was "so absurd," he said, that states would complain about "this
silly little moratorium when they said nothing about the royalty
relief package Trump put into effect. I mean, it just boggles the
mind." <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.salon.com/2021/03/24/exclusive-big-oil-pushed-school-officials-to-make-dishonest-claims-on-biden-climate-policy/">https://www.salon.com/2021/03/24/exclusive-big-oil-pushed-school-officials-to-make-dishonest-claims-on-biden-climate-policy/</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Follow the money]<br>
<b>Big banks’ trillion-dollar finance for fossil fuels ‘shocking’,
says report</b><br>
Coal, oil and gas firms have received $3.8tn in finance since the
Paris climate deal in 2015<br>
Damian Carrington Environment editor<br>
Wed 24 Mar 2021<br>
The world’s biggest 60 banks have provided $3.8tn of financing for
fossil fuel companies since the Paris climate deal in 2015,
according to a report by a coalition of NGOs.<br>
<br>
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic cutting energy use, overall funding
remains on an upward trend and the finance provided in 2020 was
higher than in 2016 or 2017, a fact the report’s authors and others
described as “shocking”.<br>
<br>
Oil, gas and coal will need to be burned for some years to come. But
it has been known since at least 2015 that a significant proportion
of existing reserves must remain in the ground if global heating is
to remain below 2C, the main Paris target. Financing for new
reserves is therefore the “exact opposite” of what is required to
tackle the climate crisis, the report’s authors said.<br>
<br>
US and Canadian banks make up 13 of the 60 banks analysed, but
account for almost half of global fossil fuel financing over the
last five years, the report found. JPMorgan Chase provided more
finance than any other bank. UK bank Barclays provided the most
fossil fuel financing among all European banks and French bank BNP
Paribas was the biggest in the EU...<br>
- - <br>
A commitment to be net zero by 2050 has been made by 17 of the 60
banks, but the report describes the pledges as “dangerously weak,
half-baked, or vague”, arguing that action is needed today. Some
banks have policies that block finance for coal, the dirtiest fossil
fuel, but almost two-thirds of funding is for oil and gas companies.<br>
<br>
The report’s authors said targeting of banks by campaigners and
activist shareholders could help change bank policies but that
action by governments was also needed.<br>
<br>
“When we look at the five years overall, the trend is still going in
the wrong direction, which is obviously the exact opposite of where
we need to be going to live up to the goals of the Paris Agreement,”
said Alison Kirsch, at Rainforest Action Network and an author of
the report. “None of these 60 banks have made, without loopholes, a
plan to exit fossil fuels.”<br>
<br>
“We have seen progress in restricting financing for special places
like the Arctic or greenhouse-gas-intensive forms of oil, like tar
sands, but these are such a small piece of the pie,” she said...<br>
“One bank after another is making solemn promises to become ‘net
zero by 2050’,” said Johan Frijns, at BankTrack, part of the
coalition behind the report. “But there exists no pathway towards
this laudable goal that does not require dealing with bank finance
for the fossil fuel industry right here and now.”<br>
<br>
“Banks provide the financial oxygen that allows the fossil fuel
industry to breathe,” said Mark Campanale, at financial thinktank
Carbon Tracker, which was not involved in the report. “It reveals
the shocking fact that lending has grown since the Paris Agreement,
[which] should concern everyone, not least policymakers and
shareholders of the banks themselves.<br>
<br>
“The cost of carbon in terms of extreme weather events, lost lives
and livelihoods will be borne by society and sadly not the banks,
nor the fossil fuel companies,” said Campanale. “Next time the banks
come looking to taxpayers for a bailout, they shouldn’t be surprised
to find backs are turned.”<br>
<br>
The report was produced by six NGOs and is endorsed by over 300
organisations from 50 countries. It used Bloomberg data to analyse
both direct loans by banks to fossil fuel companies and funding from
other investors that the banks arrange via bond and debt sales...<br>
- - <br>
JPMorgan Chase launched a “Paris-aligned financing strategy” in
October, pledging to set intermediate emission targets for 2030 for
its financing portfolio. It declined to comment on the report.
Barclays and Citi did not respond to requests for comment.<br>
<br>
A separate report last Thursday from the International Energy Agency
and Imperial College London found that investments in renewable
energy have seen a 367% greater return than fossil fuels since 2010.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/24/big-banks-trillion-dollar-finance-for-fossil-fuels-shocking-says-report">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/24/big-banks-trillion-dollar-finance-for-fossil-fuels-shocking-says-report</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[clips from a philosophical essay]<br>
MARCH 19, 2021<br>
<b>Life in a Wounded and Wounding Land</b><br>
BY TOM ENGELHARDT<br>
Here’s one of the things I now do every morning. I go to the online
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and check out the figures
there — global coronavirus cases and deaths, U.S. coronavirus cases
and deaths. And I do so the way that, not so long ago, I would have
opened the sports pages and checked out the latest scores of
whatever New York team I was rooting for...<br>
- -<br>
In other words, just to take the American version of climate change,
from raging wildfires to mega-droughts, increasing numbers of
ever-more-powerful hurricanes to greater flooding, rising sea levels
(and disappearing coastlines) to devastating heat waves (and even,
as in Texas recently, climate-influenced freezes), not to speak of
future migration surges guaranteed to make border crossing an even
more fraught political issue, ahead lies a world that could someday
make our present pandemic planet seem like a dreamscape. And here’s
the problem: at least with Covid-19, in a miracle of modern
scientific research, vaccines galore have been developed to deal
with that devastating virus, but sadly there will be no vaccines for
climate change.<br>
<br>
<b>The Wounding of Planet Earth</b><br>
Keep in mind as well that our country, the United States, is not
only an especially wounded one when it comes to the pandemic; it’s
also a wounding one, both at home and abroad. The sports pages of
death could easily be extended, for instance, to this country’s
distant wars, something Brown University’s Costs of War Project has
long tried to do. (That site is, in a sense, the Johns Hopkins
Coronavirus Resource Center for America’s grim, never-ending
conflicts of the twenty-first century.)<br>
<br>
Choose whatever post-9/11 figures you care to when it comes to our
forever wars and they’re all staggering: invasions and occupations
of distant lands; global drone assassination campaigns; or the
release of American air power across the Greater Middle East and
parts of Africa (most recently, the strike President Biden ordered
in Syria that killed a mere “handful” of militia men — 22, claim
some sources — a supposedly “proportionate” number that did not
include any women or children, though it was a close call until the
president cancelled a second strike). And don’t forget Washington’s
endless arming of, and support for, countries like Saudi Arabia and
the United Arab Emirates engaged in their own orgies of death and
destruction in Yemen. Pick whatever figures you want, but the
wounding of this planet in this century by this country has been all
too real and ongoing.<br>
<br>
The numbers, in fact, remain staggering. As has been pointed out
many times at TomDispatch, the money this country puts into its
“defense” budget tops that of the next 10 countries (China, India,
Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South
Korea, and Brazil) combined. And when it comes to selling weaponry
of the most advanced and destructive kind globally, the U.S. leaves
every other country in the dust. It’s the arms dealer of all arms
dealers on Planet Earth.<br>
<br>
And if you happen to be in the mood to count up U.S. military bases,
which are on every continent except Antarctica, this country
garrisons the planet in a way no previous power, not even imperial
Britain, did. It has an estimated 800 such bases, while, just for
the sake of comparison, China, that other fearsome rising power the
U.S. military is now so focused on, has… hmmm, at least one such
base, in Djibouti, Africa (remarkably close — you won’t be surprised
to learn — to an American military base there). None of this really
has much of anything to do with “national security,” but it
certainly adds up to a global geography of wounding in a rather
literal fashion. In this sense, on this planet in this century, the
United States has truly — to use a word American politicians have
long loved to apply to this country — proven “exceptional.”<br>
<br>
<b>America Unmasked</b><br>
At home, too, until recently, American political leadership has been
wounding indeed. Keep in mind that this was in a country in which
one political party is now a vortex of conspiracy theories, bizarre
beliefs, wild convictions, and truths that are obvious lies, a party
nearly a third of whose members view the QAnon conspiracy theory
favorably, 75% of whose members believe that Joe Biden lost the 2020
election, and 49% of whose male members have no intention of being
vaccinated for Covid-19 (potentially denying the country “herd
immunity”).<br>
<br>
And just to put all this in perspective, not a single Republican
“statesman” offered a vote of support when Joe Biden’s congressional
radicals passed a (temporary) $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill,
parts of which were aimed at alleviating this country’s historic
levels of inequality. After all, in the pandemic moment, while so
many Americans found themselves jobless, homeless, and hungry, the
country’s billionaires made an extra 1.3 trillion dollars (a figure
that should certainly fit somewhere on the sports pages of death).
Never, not even in the Gilded Age, has inequality been quite so
extreme or wounding in the country that still passes for the
greatest on the planet.<br>
<br>
For the first time in its history, in 2017, a self-proclaimed
billionaire became president of the United States and, with the help
of a Republican Congress, passed a tax cut that left the rich and
corporations flooded with yet more money. Admittedly, he was a
billionaire who had repeatedly bankrupted his own businesses, always
jumping ship just in time with other people’s money in hand (exactly
as he would do after helping to pandemicize this country, once again
with oodles of his followers’ money in his pocket).<br>
<br>
As for me, shocking as the assault on the Capitol was on January
6th, I never thought that the Senate should have convicted Donald
Trump for that alone. My feeling was that the House should have
impeached him and the Senate convicted him for the far more serious
and direct crime of murder. After all, he was the one who played a
crucial role in turning the pandemic into our very own set of mask
wars (even as he called on his followers, long before January 6th,
to “liberate” a state capital building).<br>
<br>
The half-baked, dismissive way he would deal with the coronavirus,
its importance, and what should be done to protect us from it — even
before he got a serious case of it, was hospitalized, and returned
to the White House, still infectious, to tear off his mask in full
public view — would functionally represent acts of murder. In
effect, he unmasked himself as the killer he was. (A study in the
International Journal of Health Services suggests that by July 2020
his personal decision to turn masks into a political issue had
already resulted in between 4,000 and 12,000 deaths.)...<br>
- -<br>
If you want to be further depressed, try this: on our planet, there
are now two great greenhouse gas emitters, the United States
(historically at the top of the charts) and China (number one at
this moment). Given what lies ahead, here’s a simple enough formula:
if China and the United States can’t cooperate in a truly meaningful
way when it comes to climate change, we’re in trouble deep. And yet
the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it,
remains remarkably focused on hostility to China and a military
response to that country, an approach that someday is guaranteed to
seem so out of touch as to be unbelievable.<br>
<br>
Climate change will, over the coming decades, prove increasingly
devastating to our lives. It could, in a sense, prove to be the
pandemic of all the ages. And yet, here’s the sad and obvious thing:
the world doesn’t have to be this way. It’s true that there are no
vaccinations against climate change, but we humans already know
perfectly well what has to be done. We know that we need to create a
genuinely green and green-powered planet to bring this version of a
pandemic under control and we know as well that, over the next
decades, it’s a perfectly doable task if only humanity truly sets
its mind to it.<br>
<br>
Otherwise, we’re going to find ourselves on an increasingly extreme
planet, while the sports pages of death will only grow. If we’re not
careful, human history could, in the end, turn out to be the
ultimate ghost story.<br>
<br>
This column was distributed by TomDispatch.<br>
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and
the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the
Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation
Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow
Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State
in a Single-Superpower World.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/19/life-in-a-wounded-and-wounding-land/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/19/life-in-a-wounded-and-wounding-land/</a><br>
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<p><br>
</p>
[background briefing video - there is no upside to fossil fuels -
discusses lithium]<br>
<b>Life Cycle Assessment. Optimising raw materials for renewables</b><br>
Mar 21, 2021<br>
Just Have a Think<br>
Life Cycle Assessment is becoming a vital component in the design
and planning stages of any new raw material acquisition project.
Switching to renewables is an important step towards a more
sustainable future but those technologies all still require vast
resources to be dug out of our earth. Optimising the efficiency of
those mining and processing operations can hugely reduce their
impact.<br>
Video Transcripts available at our website
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.justhaveathink.com">http://www.justhaveathink.com</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T7R1lIBMfA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T7R1lIBMfA</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Trying to live green, Update: GE Appliances published a list of all
HFC-free refrigerators that it manufactures on March 12, the day
after this article was published. ]<br>
<b>I Tried to Buy a Climate-Friendly Refrigerator. What I Got Was a
Carbon Bomb.</b><br>
Most refrigerators in the U.S. are still cooled by climate
“super-pollutants” called hydrofluorocarbons. I’d been promised my
new fridge wouldn’t be...<br>
<br>
By Phil McKenna<br>
March 11, 2021<br>
As a climate reporter covering “super-pollutants”—greenhouse gases
thousands of times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide—I
thought I knew enough to avoid buying a refrigerator that would cook
the planet. Turns out, I was wrong.<br>
<br>
Nearly all refrigerators in use in the United States today use
chemical refrigerants that are some of the most potent greenhouse
gases on the planet. Yet, a growing number of manufacturers now
offer new models with an alternative refrigerant that has little to
no climate impact.<br>
<br>
But none of the major appliance makers advertise which fridges are
climate-friendly, and which are carbon bombs. In some cases, it
seems they themselves don’t know which is which.<br>
<br>
I found this out the hard way when I recently tried to replace my
aging refrigerator. I went first to Future Proof, a website
offering product reviews of consumer goods with a focus on
sustainability. I quickly found a page on the site touting “The Most
Climate-Friendly Refrigerators for 2020″ and read descriptions of
several different fridges, all of which were said to use isobutane,
a benign refrigerant with a climate impact similar to that of carbon
dioxide...<br>
- -<br>
<b>They Sold Me One Thing and Delivered Another</b><br>
Within minutes I was on the phone with GE customer service. The
unfortunate person on the other end said she was surprised to hear
that the fridge I purchased used HFCs.<br>
<br>
I told her that I would like GE to pay to have the fridge returned
to the big box store that it came from. She said she couldn’t do
that, but could have a service technician come and “look” at the
appliance.<br>
<br>
I told her I didn’t need a technician; the issue was plain as day.
GE had sold me one thing and delivered another. What I needed, I
told the representative, was some corporate responsibility.<br>
<br>
I let my consumer rage cool over the weekend before putting my
reporter hat back on. The following week I spoke with Julie Wood, a
spokeswoman for GE Appliances. Wood apologized profusely and
explained how it came to be that the company’s customer service
department provided the wrong information....<br>
- -<br>
<b>Unfounded Fears, Stoked by the Chemical Industry, Led to Decades
Long Delay</b><br>
It didn’t have to be this way. In 1993, a German appliance
manufacturer started selling an HFC-free refrigerator whose very
name—“Greenfreeze”—touted its use of a climate-friendly refrigerant.
More than 1 billion HFC-free refrigerators have now been sold
worldwide, including units sold overseas by U.S. manufacturers, at a
time when climate-friendly refrigerators are just becoming available
in the United States.<br>
<br>
A recent Inside Climate News investigation found the decades-long
delay in the use of climate-friendly refrigerants in America has
been driven largely by the U.S. chemical industry, which
manufactures HFCs. HFCs are multi-billion dollar products that would
likely be replaced by less expensive and more efficient
climate-friendly alternatives if standards put forth by Underwriters
Laboratories didn’t until recently limit their use, likely at the
behest of chemical companies. Underwriters Laboratories, now known
as “UL,” is a private company that provides independent safety
certifications for thousands of consumer products...<br>
- -<br>
When I described the problem with the first fridge to the Home Depot
representative, I was fairly certain her eyes glazed over the moment
I began to speak. Then she put me on hold while she rang GE, asking
if they would cover the cost of the return.<br>
<br>
When she resumed our call, much to my surprise, she said it was no
problem, GE would pay for the return. I asked her if she had told
them everything, how I was sold an HFC-free fridge and instead got
one with HFCs.<br>
<br>
“No,” she said. “I [simply] told them it was not cooling properly;
it was not cooling the way that it should.”<br>
<br>
To me, that was the best, most truthful explanation anyone could
give...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032021/climate-change-refrigerator-hfc-super-pollutant/">https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032021/climate-change-refrigerator-hfc-super-pollutant/</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 -
March 25, 2005 </b></font><br>
In a Boston Globe column later republished in the New York Times,
Derrick Z. Jackson notes, "Every time the world calls for action on
climate change, the United States emits more White House gases."<br>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>DERRICK Z. JACKSON<br>
Hot air and global warming<br>
By Derrick Z. Jackson | March 25, 2005<br>
<br>
EVERY TIME the world calls for action on climate change, the
United States emits more White House gases. The latest puff came
from James Connaughton, the director of environmental quality,
during last week's conference of 20 nations that met in London
to attempt once again to make global warming a global priority.<br>
<br>
At the conference, British economic minister Gordon Brown said,
''Climate change is a consequence of the build-up of greenhouse
gases over the past 200 years in the atmosphere and virtually
all these emissions came from the rich countries. Indeed, we
became rich through those emissions." Connaughton's response, in
an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, was,
''We're still working on the issue of causation."<br>
<br>
Brown said, ''We now have sufficient evidence that human-made
climate change is the most far-reaching and almost certainly the
most threatening of all the environmental challenges facing us."
Connaughton's response as to what he referred as ''the extent to
which humans are a factor," was, ''They may be."<br>
<br>
Brown said, ''The industrialized countries must take
responsibility first in reducing their emissions of greenhouse
gases." Connaughton complained instead that the target in the
Kyoto treaty for the United States to reduce emissions ''was so
unreasonable in our ability to meet it that the only we could
have met it was to shift energy-intensive manufacturing to other
countries."<br>
<br>
Two days after dismissing coalition building, the United States
went back to emissions building. The Senate, by a vote of 51-49,
finally approved oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge. On efforts to stop global warming, Connaughton
said, ''We are trying now to find a portfolio in which three
words are important: technology, technology, and technology."<br>
<br>
He meant drilling, drilling, drilling. Two years ago the
National Academies of Science said that even with improved
technologies, drilling on the north slope of Alaska has degraded
the tundra, altered wildlife patterns, and has resulted in
social problems that blunt claims of unqualified economic
progress. Many scientists have said that the oil in the refuge
is so relatively minuscule that we would be better off if we
simply made our cars more fuel efficient.<br>
<br>
Although Connaughton claimed we are ''trying to find"
technology, we refuse to use it. The National Academies has for
years said the technology exists for more fuel efficient cars.
But Congress and the White House, imprisoned by the oil and auto
lobby, refuse to raise them.<br>
<br>
The vote to drill in Alaska was parallel to another Senate vote
to deny an additional $1 billion for Amtrak when studies show
that well-developed rail systems can slash traffic and thus
global-warming pollution. The United States consumes a quarter
of the world's oil and produces a quarter of the planet's
greenhouse gases despite being 4 percent of the population. Yet
when Brown said that the industrialized countries must take
responsibility first, we become the most immature adolescent on
Earth, doing precisely the opposite of what we need to do.<br>
<br>
Earlier in the month, the former chief scientific adviser to the
British government, Lord May of Oxford, bluntly compared Bush to
a modern-day Nero. Last fall, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
said, ''If what the science tells about climate change is
correct, then unabated it will result in catastrophic
consequences for our world. The science almost certainly is
correct."<br>
<br>
At the recent London conference, Brown said, ''Environmental
issues including climate change have traditionally been placed
in a category separate from the economy and from economic
policy. But this is no longer tenable. Across a range of
environmental issues, from soil erosion to the depletion of
marine stocks, from water scarcity to air pollution, it is clear
now not just that economic activity is their cause, but that
these problems in themselves threaten future economic activity
and growth."<br>
<br>
Nero and his fiddlers would hear none of that. Asked last month
what the science was on global warming, Connaughton said on
CNBC, ''There are many different views."<br>
<br>
The science ceased to have many views years ago. The very first
sentence in the executive summary of the 2001 National Academies
of Science report on climate change begins with, ''Greenhouse
gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of
human activities . . . " The report further said, ''Global
warming could well have serious adverse societal and ecological
impacts by the end of this century." The science continues to
choke under the White House effect.<br>
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:jackson@globe.com">jackson@globe.com</a>.<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/03/25/hot_air_and_global_warming/">http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/03/25/hot_air_and_global_warming/</a>
<br>
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