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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>August 19, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[follow the money]<br>
<b>As Disasters Mount, Central Banks Gird Against Threat of Climate
Change</b><br>
From the Bank of England to the People’s Bank of China, monetary
authorities of the world’s largest economies are gauging how climate
change could rock the financial system. Though long committed to
being “market neutral,” some are even starting to push greener
investments.<br>
BY FRED PEARCE - AUGUST 18, 2021<br>
Climate change is rattling the world’s central bankers. With
unprecedented heat and wildfires in the American West and southern
Europe, and record floods racing through German towns and Chinese
megacities in recent weeks, fears are growing among regulators of a
coming cascade of climate-induced economic blows potentially more
far-reaching and intractable than the financial crash just over a
decade ago.<br>
<br>
In the past two months, the central banks of the world’s five
largest economies — the United States, China, the European Union,
Japan, and the United Kingdom — have all raised the stakes in their
demands for the commercial banks they regulate to make public the
looming risks they face as wild weather takes hold.<br>
<br>
Their calls show that central bankers are already responding to
concerns about their past passivity on climate — concerns reflected
at a G7 meeting in June, where Western industrial leaders issued a
final communique that declared, “We emphasize the need to green the
global finance system … We support moving towards mandatory
climate-related financial disclosures.” That means requiring
commercial banks to reveal the risks to their balance sheets — and
those of their clients — of both a changing climate and any rapid
collapse of markets for fossil fuels as governments try to head off
disaster by weaning off fossil fuels.<br>
<br>
The world’s major central banks, which control the production and
distribution of money on behalf of national governments, have
traditionally sought to remain “market neutral” when carrying out
their responsibilities. That means they avoid favoring one part of
the economy over others. But now the biggest central banks appear to
be concluding that carbon neutrality is more important than market
neutrality.<br>
<br>
“Once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial
stability, it may already be too late.”<br>
- -<br>
It is now 14 years since the former chief economist at the World
Bank, Nicholas Stern, wrote an influential report for the British
government which concluded that, as he told the London Times,
climate change was “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure
ever seen.” Central bankers are still grappling with the
implications. But Dougherty believes change is coming. “In five
years, I would be very surprised if climate change wasn’t a major
consideration in all Fed regulation,” she said.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-disasters-mount-central-banks-gird-against-threat-of-climate-change">https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-disasters-mount-central-banks-gird-against-threat-of-climate-change</a><br>
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[US Senator Bernie Sanders says we're gonna need a bigger boat ]<br>
<b>The planet is in peril. We’re building Congress’s strongest-ever
climate bill</b><br>
Bernie Sanders<br>
More than any other legislation in US history it will transform our
energy system away from fossil fuels and into sustainable energy<br>
18 Aug 2021<br>
The latest International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is
clear and foreboding. If the United States, China and the rest of
the world do not act extremely aggressively to cut carbon emissions,
the planet will face enormous and irreversible damage. The world
that we will be leaving our children and future generations will be
increasingly unhealthy and uninhabitable.<br>
<br>
But we didn’t really need the IPCC to tell us that. Just take a look
at what’s happening right now: A huge fire in Siberia is casting
smoke for 3,000 miles. Greece: burning. California: burning. Oregon:
burning. Historic flooding in Germany and Belgium. Italy just
experienced the hottest European day ever. July 2021 was the hottest
month ever recorded. Drought and extreme weather disturbances are
cutting food production, increasing hunger and raising food prices
worldwide. Rising sea levels threaten Miami, New York, Charleston
and countless coastal cities around the world in the not-so-distant
future.<br>
In the past, these disasters might have seemed like an absurd plot
in some apocalypse movie. Unfortunately, this is now reality, and it
will only get much worse in years to come if we do not act boldly –
now.<br>
<br>
The good news is that the $3.5tn budget resolution that was recently
passed in the Senate lays the groundwork for a historic
reconciliation bill that will not only substantially improve the
lives of working people, elderly people, the sick and the poor, but
also, in an unprecedented way, address the existential threat of
climate change. More than any other legislation in American history
it will transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into
energy efficiency and sustainable energy.<br>
<br>
This legislation will be a long-overdue step forward in the fight
for economic, racial, social and environmental justice. It will also
create millions of well-paying jobs. As chair of the Senate budget
committee my hope is that the various committees will soon finish
their work and that the bill will be on the floor and adopted by
Congress in late September.<br>
<br>
Let me be honest in telling you that this reconciliation bill, the
final details of which are still being written, will not do
everything that needs to be done to combat climate change. But by
investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the reduction of carbon
emissions it will be a significant step forward and will set an
example for what other countries should be doing.<br>
<br>
Here are some of the proposals that are currently in the bill:<br>
<br>
Massive investments in retrofitting homes and buildings to save
energy.<br>
<br>
Massive investment in the production of wind, solar and other forms
of sustainable energy.<br>
<br>
A major move toward the electrification of transportation, including
generous rebates to enable working families to buy electric vehicles
and energy-efficient appliances.<br>
<br>
Major investments in greener agriculture.<br>
<br>
Major investments in climate resiliency and ecosystem recovery
projects.<br>
<br>
Major investments in water and environmental justice.<br>
<br>
Major investments in research and development for sustainable energy
and battery storage.<br>
<br>
Billions to address the warming and acidification of oceans and the
needs of coastal communities.<br>
<br>
The creation of a Civilian Climate Corps which will put hundreds of
thousands of young people to work transforming our energy system and
protecting our most vulnerable communities.<br>
<br>
The Budget Resolution that allows us to move forward on this
ambitious legislation was passed last Wednesday at 4am, by a vote of
50-49 after 14 hours of debate. No Republican supported it, and no
Republican will support the reconciliation bill. In fact,
Republicans have been shamefully absent from serious discussions
about the climate emergency.<br>
<br>
That means that we must demand that every Democrat supports a
reconciliation bill that is strong on solutions to the climate
crisis. No wavering. No watering down. This is the moment. Our
children and grandchildren are depending upon us. The future of the
planet is at stake.<br>
<br>
Bernie Sanders is a US senator and the chair of the Senate budget
committee<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/18/planet-peril-congress-reconciliation-climate-bill">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/18/planet-peril-congress-reconciliation-climate-bill</a><br>
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[Important words from a climate scientist]<br>
AUGUST 18, 2021<br>
<b>With climate change, seemingly small shifts have big consequences</b><br>
by Kevin Trenberth, The Conversation<br>
<br>
Outgoing radiation is decreasing, owing to increasing greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere, and leading to Earth’s energy imbalance of
460 terawatts. The percentage going into each domain is indicated.
Credit: Kevin Trenberth, CC BY-ND<br>
Climate change has been accumulating slowly but relentlessly for
decades. The changes might sound small when you hear about
them—another tenth of a degree warmer, another centimeter of sea
level rise—but seemingly small changes can have big effects on the
world around us, especially regionally.<br>
<br>
The problem is that while effects are small at any time, they
accumulate. Those effects have now accumulated to the point where
their influence is contributing to damaging heat waves, drought and
rainfall extremes that can't be ignored.<br>
<br>
The most recent report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change is more emphatic than ever: Climate change,
caused by human activities like burning fossil fuels, is having
damaging effects on the climate as we know it, and those effects are
rapidly getting worse.<br>
<br>
<b>Earth's energy imbalance</b><br>
<br>
An excellent example of how climate change accumulates is Earth's
energy imbalance. I am a climate scientist and have a new book on
this about to be published by Cambridge University Press.<br>
<br>
The Sun bombards Earth with a constant stream of about 173,600
terawatts (that is 12 zeros) of energy in the form of solar
radiation. About 30% of that energy is reflected back into space by
clouds and reflective surfaces, like ice and snow, leaving 122,100
terawatts to drive all the weather and climate systems around us,
including the water cycle. Almost all of that energy cycles back to
space—except for about 460 TW.<br>
<br>
That remaining 460 TW is the problem we're facing. That excess
energy, trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is heating up
the planet. That is the Earth's energy imbalance, or in other words,
global warming.<br>
<br>
In comparison with the natural flow of energy through the climate
system, 460 TW seems small—it's only a fraction of 1 percent.
Consequently, we cannot go outside and feel the extra energy. But
the heat accumulates, and it is now having consequences.<br>
<br>
To put that in perspective, the total amount of electricity
generated worldwide in 2018 was about 2.6 TW. If you look at all
energy used around the world, including for heat, industry and
vehicles, it's about 19.5 TW. <b>Earth's energy imbalance is huge
in comparison.</b><br>
<br>
Interfering with the natural flow of energy through the climate
system is where humans make their mark. By burning fossil fuels,
cutting down forests and releasing greenhouse gases in other ways,
humans are sending gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the
atmosphere that trap more of that incoming energy rather than
letting it radiate back out.<br>
<br>
The average global temperature change at different ocean depths, in
zetajoules, from 1958 to 2020. The top chart shows the upper 2,000
meters (6,561 feet) compared with the 1981-2010 average. The bottom
shows the increase at different depths. Reds are warmer than
average, blues are cooler. Credit: Cheng et al, 2021, CC BY-ND<br>
Before the first industries began burning large amounts of fossil
fuels in the 1800s, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
was estimated at around 280 parts per million of volume. In 1958,
when Dave Keeling began measuring atmospheric concentrations at
Mauna Loa in Hawaii, that level was 310 parts per million. Today,
those values have climbed to about 415 parts per million, a 48%
increase.<br>
<br>
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and increased amounts cause
heating. In this case, the human increment is not small.<br>
<br>
<b>Where does the extra energy go?</b><br>
<br>
Measurements over time show that over 90% of this extra energy is
going into the oceans, where it causes the water to expand and sea
level to rise.<br>
<br>
The upper layer of the oceans started warming around the 1970s. By
the early 1990s, heat was reaching 500 to 1,000 meters (1,640 to
3,280 feet) deep. By 2005, it was heating the ocean below 1,500
meters (nearly 5,000 feet).<br>
<br>
Global sea level, measured by flights and satellites, was rising at
a rate of about 3 millimeters per year from 1992 to 2012. Since
then, it been increasing at about 4 millimeters a year. In 29 years,
it has risen over 90 millimeters (3.5 inches).<br>
<br>
If 3.5 inches doesn't sound like much, talk to the coastal
communities that exist a few feet above sea level. In some regions,
these effects have led to chronic sunny day flooding during high
tides, like Miami, San Francisco and Venice, Italy. Coastal storm
surges are higher and much more destructive, especially from
hurricanes. It's an existential threat to some low-lying island
nations and a growing expense for U.S. coastal cities.<br>
<br>
Some of that extra energy, about 13 terawatts, goes into melting
ice. Arctic sea ice in summer has decreased by over 40% since 1979.
Some excess energy melts land ice, such as glaciers and permafrost
on Greenland, Antarctica, which puts more water into the ocean and
contributes to sea level rise.<br>
<br>
Some energy penetrates into land, about 14 TW. But as long as land
is wet, a lot of energy cycles into evapotranspiration—evaporation
and transpiration in plants—which moistens the atmosphere and fuels
weather systems. It is when there is a drought or during the dry
season that effects accumulate on land, through drying and wilting
of plants, raising temperatures and greatly increasing risk of heat
waves and wildfire.<br>
<br>
Cyclone Yasa heads for Fiji in December 2020. It was the fourth
most-intense tropical cyclone on record in the South Pacific.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory<br>
Consequences of more heat<br>
<br>
Over oceans, the extra heat provides a tremendous resource of
moisture for the atmosphere. That becomes latent heat in storms that
supersizes hurricanes and rainstorms, leading to flooding, as people
in many parts of the world have experienced in recent months.<br>
<br>
Air can contain about 4% more moisture for every 1 degree Fahrenheit
(0.55 Celsius) increase in temperature, and air above the oceans is
some 5% to 15% moister than it was prior to 1970. Hence, about a 10%
increase in heavy rain results as storms gather the excess moisture.<br>
<br>
Again, this may not sound like much, but that increase enlivens the
updrafts and the storms, and then the storm lasts longer, so
suddenly there is a 30% increase in the rainfall, as has been
documented in several cases of major flooding.<br>
<br>
In Mediterranean climates, characterized by long, dry summers, such
as in California, eastern Australia and around the Mediterranean,
the wildfire risk grows, and fires can be readily triggered by
natural sources, like dry lightning, or human causes.<br>
<br>
Extreme events in weather have always occurred, but human influences
are now pushing them outside their previous limits.<br>
<br>
<b>The straw that breaks the camel's back syndrome</b><b><br>
</b><br>
So, while all weather events are driven by natural influences, the
impacts are greatly magnified by human-induced climate change.
Hurricanes cross thresholds, levees break and floods run amok.
Elsewhere, fires burn out of control, things break and people die.<br>
<br>
I call it "The straw that breaks the camel's back syndrome." This is
extreme nonlinearity, meaning the risks aren't rising in a straight
line—they're rising much faster, and it confounds economists who
have greatly underestimated the costs of human-induced climate
change.<br>
<br>
The result has been far too little action both in slowing and
stopping the problems, and in planning for impacts and building
resilience—despite years of warnings from scientists. The lack of
adequate planning means we all suffer the consequences.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://phys.org/news/2021-08-climate-seemingly-small-shifts-big.html">https://phys.org/news/2021-08-climate-seemingly-small-shifts-big.html</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://theconversation.com/with-climate-change-seemingly-small-shifts-have-big-consequences-166139">https://theconversation.com/with-climate-change-seemingly-small-shifts-have-big-consequences-166139</a><br>
<br>
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[10 min video]<br>
<b>40 Million People Rely on the Colorado River, and Now It's Drying
Up</b><br>
Aug 14, 2021<br>
VICE News<br>
The first-ever official shortage on the Colorado River is expected
to be announced on Monday, Aug. 16. A shortage will mean mandatory
cutbacks to some user<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CADLfXOhkU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CADLfXOhkU</a><br>
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[Tipping points]<br>
<b>Economists have quantified the economic risks of climate "tipping
points." It's grim.</b><br>
We're likely underestimating the costs of carbon emissions by a
quarter, at least.<br>
Dave Roberts - Aug 18, 2021<br>
- -<br>
<b>Pulling tipping points into climate economics</b><br>
Just about everyone familiar with climate change has heard about
“tipping points.” Famed climate scientist Wallace Broecker first
raised the possibility way back in 1987, and ever since then,
they’ve loomed large in the climate discussion.<br>
<br>
The idea behind tipping points is fairly simple and familiar: as
heat accumulates in the atmosphere, Earth’s geophysical systems may
not simply adjust in linear fashion, alongside the incrementally
rising temperature; in some cases, they may “tip over” some
unpredictable threshold and enter a fundamentally new state,
sometimes called a “phase shift.” Think of ice that has slowly
cracked suddenly shattering, or “the straw that broke the camel’s
back.”<br>
- -<br>
Because the consequences of some oft-discussed tipping points are
rather apocalyptic, they have been used and misused for a long time
in climate communications. It has somewhat annoyed climate
scientists, because not only are these tipping points not a sure
thing, each one is, in its own right, relatively unlikely.<br>
<br>
Civilization-ending changes are not likely, but they’re not zero
probability either. Legendary Harvard economist Martin Weitzman
called these low-probability, high-impact possibilities “tail risks”
and was famous for warning that economists are not taking them into
account — and are thus underestimating the need for rapid
decarbonization...<br>
- -<br>
However, it leaves a key question unanswered: yes, the risk of
tipping points raises the value of mitigation, but how much? It has
never been quantified.<br>
<br>
Into that breach comes a new paper in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), from Wagner and a group of
colleagues: Simon Dietz and Thomas Stoerk of the Grantham Research
Institute on Climate Change, and James Rising of the University of
Delaware.<br>
<br>
“Economic impacts of tipping points in the climate system”
represents the first formal attempt to quantify the economic impacts
of tipping point risks. The results are startling: the economic
impact of carbon emissions is much higher than appreciated, as is
the value of reducing emissions...<br>
- -<br>
They included the eight that have been studied by the IPCC:<br>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>1 Thawing of permafrost leading to carbon feedback
resulting in additional carbon dioxide and methane emissions,
which flow back into the carbon dioxide and methane cycles.<br>
2 Dissociation of ocean methane hydrates resulting in additional
methane emissions, which flow back into the methane cycle.<br>
3 Arctic sea ice loss (also known as “the surface albedo
feedback”) resulting in changes in radiative forcing, which
directly affects warming.<br>
4 Dieback of the Amazon rainforest releasing carbon dioxide,
which flows back into the carbon dioxide cycle.<br>
5 Disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet increasing
sea-level rise.<br>
6 Disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet increasing
sea-level rise.<br>
7 Slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
modulating the relationship between global mean surface
temperature and national mean surface temperature.<br>
8 Variability of the Indian summer monsoon directly affecting
GDP per capita in India.<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
It’s important to note that these are not all possible tipping
points, just the ones that have been studied, so the PNAS study’s
results are, as the authors emphasize, a “probable underestimate,
given the literature we synthesize has yet to cover some tipping
points and misses possible impact channels and interactions even for
those it does cover.”<br>
- -<br>
<b>We are underestimating climate risks and overestimating the costs
of action</b><br>
As its principle metric, the study uses the “social cost of carbon”
(SCC), meant to capture the total social and environmental damage
done by the emission of a ton of carbon dioxide.<br>
<br>
For convenience, it uses the current US government SCC figure, which
is about $51. There’s a history behind this: Obama originally
convened the working group that put the figure at around $50 during
his administration. Under Trump, it dropped to about $1. Biden has
bumped it back up to $51.<br>
<br>
“They undid the Trump damage and went back to decade-old
assumptions,” says Wagner. Now, there is work underway to update the
US government SCC with better numbers. “If you go to the most modern
estimates and turn on the stuff that we think ought to be turned on
— we know that there are tipping points, we need risk aversion, we
need reasonable discount rates, and so on — you don't get to $50,”
he says, “you get $250.” (For the true climate modeling nerds:
that’s true even in DICE, William Nordhaus’s model.)<br>
<br>
I don’t know if the new number will be $250, but I’d be shocked if
it were under $150. Anyway, that’s a subject for another post,
because the PNAS study quantifies the relative increase in SCC when
tipping points are incorporated rather than ignored.<br>
<br>
The headline result: “When modelled separately and then summed
together, the individual tipping points increase the expected SCC by
24.5%.”<br>
- -<br>
<b>The policy implications of tipping points</b><br>
Let’s take a step back and review what we can learn from this study.<br>
<br>
First, economists have more or less been ignoring tipping points,
which means they have systematically been underestimating the SCC.
Best estimates put the amount of that underestimation around 25
percent.<br>
<br>
But that 25 percent is almost certainly a lower bound. The authors
have built a framework that can plug in new data and analysis of
tipping points as it comes along. It is almost certain that as more
tipping points are studied and the interactions among them are
better modeled, the estimate of their potential damages will rise.<br>
<br>
And again, remember that long tail. 25 percent is the median
estimate, but the average estimate is 43 percent, and there’s at
least a 10 percent chance of 100 percent — in other words, “there's
a one in 10 chance that doing the calculation doubles the SCC,” says
Wagner. “Holy shit, right?”<br>
- -<br>
This is the significance of tipping points: we are playing with
fire, pushing Earth systems to the point that there is a
small-but-real chance that some of them will break down entirely,
entering phase shifts and becoming something permanently less stable
and hospitable.<br>
<br>
If that happens, we will have consigned all future generations of
human beings to inexorably and irreversibly deteriorating
conditions. It is a crime worse than any genocide, worse than any
atrocity conceived or conceivable, and even if there is only a small
chance that we might stumble into committing it, we should be
hyper-cautious. We should spend a lot of money to reduce that risk,
to insure against it.<br>
<br>
You might notice that we are not, as a global community or within
the US, expending $50/ton worth of effort to reduce emissions, much
less $300/ton. In that sense, this study is just one more voice in
the chorus urging policymakers to go bigger and faster on
decarbonization.<br>
<br>
But it does put a fine point on the fact that there is effectively
no way for policymakers anywhere to do too much, or to go too fast,
on decarbonization. The risk of overdoing it is vanishingly small,
all but impossible.<br>
<br>
We are currently underdoing it. We will be underdoing it even when
we’re doing five times what we’re doing now. We will almost
certainly be underdoing it for the rest of the lives of everyone
reading this. That’s daunting, but it’s also clarifying.<br>
<br>
There’s only one direction to push: more and faster, forever and
ever, amen.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.volts.wtf/p/economists-have-quantified-the-economic">https://www.volts.wtf/p/economists-have-quantified-the-economic</a><br>
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<br>
[Opinion - Fiddling while we regain common sense ]<br>
AUGUST 17, 2021<br>
<b>Greed and Consumption: Why the World is Burning</b><br>
BY RAMZY BAROUD<br>
Rome is scorching hot. This beautiful city is becoming unbearable
for other reasons, too. Though every corner of the beaming
metropolis is a monument to historical grandeur, from the Colosseum
in Rione Monti to the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in San
Giovanni, it is now struggling under the weight of its own
contradictions.<br>
<br>
In Via Appia, bins are overflowing with garbage, often spilling over
into the streets. The smell, especially during Italy’s increasingly
sweltering summers, is suffocating.<br>
<br>
Meanwhile, many parts of the country are literally on fire. Since
June 15, firefighters have reportedly responded to 37,000
fire-related emergencies, 1,500 of them on July 18 alone. A week
later, I drove between Campania, in southern Italy, and Abruzzo, in
the center. Throughout the journey, I was accompanied by fire and
smoke. On that day, many towns were evacuated, and thousands of
acres of forests were destroyed. It will take months to assess the
cost of the ongoing destruction, but it will certainly be measured
in hundreds of millions of euros.<br>
<br>
Additionally, the entire southern Europe is ablaze, as the region is
experiencing its worst heat waves in many years. Greece, Spain,
Turkey, and the Balkans are fighting fires that continue to rage on.<br>
<br>
Across the Atlantic, the US and Canada, too, are desperately trying
to battle their own wildfires, mostly direct outcomes of
unprecedented heat waves that struck North America from Vancouver to
California, along with the whole of the American northwest region.
In June, Vancouver, Portland and Seattle all set new heat records,
118, 116 and 108 Fahrenheit, respectively.<br>
<br>
While it is true that not all fires are a direct result of global
warming – many in Italy, for example, are man-made – unprecedented
increases in temperature, coupled with changes in weather patterns,
are the main culprits of these unmitigated disasters.<br>
<br>
The solution is more complex than simply having the resources and
proper equipment to contain these fires. The impact of the crises
continues to be felt for years, even if temperatures somehow
stabilize. In California, for example, which is bracing for another
horrific season, the devastation of the previous years can still be
felt.<br>
<br>
“After two years of drought, the soil moisture is depleted, drying
out vegetation and making it more prone to combustion,” The New York
Times reported on July 16. The problem, then, is neither temporary
nor can be dealt with through easy fixes.<br>
<br>
As I sat with my large bottle of water outside Caffettiamo Cafe,
struggling with heat, humidity and the pungent smell of garbage, I
thought about who is truly responsible for what seems to be our new,
irreversible reality. Here in Italy, the conversation is often
streamlined through the same, predictable and polarized political
discourse. Each party points finger at the others, in the hope of
gaining some capital prior to the upcoming October municipal
elections.<br>
<br>
Again, Italy is not the exception. Political polarization in Europe
and the US constantly steers the conversation somewhere else
entirely. Rarely is the problem addressed at a macro-level,
independent from political calculations. The impact of global
warming cannot and must not be held hostage to the ambitions of
politicians. Millions of people are suffering, livelihoods are
destroyed, the fate of future generations is at risk. In the grand
scheme of things, whether the current mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi,
is elected for another term or not, is insignificant.<br>
<br>
Writing in the Columbia Climate School website, Renee Cho highlights
the obvious, the relationship between our insatiable appetite for
consumption and climate change. “Did you know that Americans produce
25 percent more waste than usual between Thanksgiving and New Year’s
Day, sending an additional one million tons a week to landfills?,”
Cho asks.<br>
<br>
This leads us to think about the existential relationship between
our insatiable consumption habits and the irreparable damage we have
inflicted upon mother earth.<br>
Here in Via Appia, the contradictions are unmistakable. This is the
summer sales season in Italy. Signs reading “Saldi” – or “Sale” –
are everywhere. For many shoppers, it is impossible to fight the
temptation. This unhinged consumerism – the backbone and the fault
line of capitalism – comes at a high price. People are encouraged to
consume more, as if such consumption has no repercussions for the
environment whatsoever. Indeed, Via Appia is the perfect microcosm
of this global schizophrenia: people complaining about the heat and
the garbage, while simultaneously consuming beyond their need, thus
creating yet more garbage and, eventually, worsening the plight of
the environment.<br>
Collective problems require collective solutions. Italy’s heat
cannot be pinned down on a few arsonists and California’s wildfires
are not simply the fault of an ineffectual mayor. Global warming is,
in large part, the outcome of a destructive pattern instigated and
sustained by capitalism. The latter can only survive through
unhindered consumption, inequality, greed and, when necessary, war.
If we continue to talk about global warming without confronting the
capitalist menace that generated much of the crisis in the first
place, the conversation will continue to amount to nil.<br>
<br>
In the final analysis, all the conferences, pledges and politicking
will not put out a single fire, neither in Italy nor anywhere else
in the world.<br>
<br>
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine
Chronicle.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/17/greed-and-consumption-why-the-world-is-burning/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/17/greed-and-consumption-why-the-world-is-burning/</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[water below]<br>
<b>THE WELL FIXER’S WARNING</b><br>
The lesson that California never learns<br>
By Mark Arax -- AUGUST 17, 2021<br>
- -<br>
From one end of the valley to the other, 500,000 acres of new almond
and pistachio trees have been added to the old trees over the past
10 years. This, in a period plagued by two of the worst droughts in
California history or, grimmer yet, one epic drought interrupted by
the record flood year of 2017. If the water-guzzling almonds demand
less irrigation than the water-guzzling crops that feed the
mega-dairies, the aggregate of their intensification is no less
alarming. In Madera County, during this same scorched decade, the
ground devoted to almonds has expanded by 60,000 acres. The trend
makes selfish sense. Almonds ring up far more profits than the wine
and raisin grapes they’re replacing. But it makes almost no communal
sense. Almonds consume far more of everyone’s water.<br>
Angell’s surveys of wells across the Madera sub-basin tell him that
the underground water table that sustains 348,000 acres of cropland,
cattle ground, and suburbia is bleeding out three feet of water from
one harvest to the next. This amounts to 1 million acre-feet of
overdraft each dry year. That’s water taken out of the earth and not
returned by rain or snowmelt. That’s mining. All the houses and
businesses of Los Angeles, by comparison, consume 580,000 acre-feet
of water each year.<br>
- -<br>
Whether it’s water, soil, climate, or crop, Californians believe
they can keep on flouting the bounds. But drought reveals the lie of
a place. The invention of the “Golden State” was an overreach from
the get-go. That it relied on the genocide of the biggest flowering
of Indigenous culture in North America should have been a first
clue. The continent’s edge that the settlers bit off and called one
state was 1,000 miles long with a dozen different states of nature
inside it. The rain fell 140 inches on one end. It fell 12 inches on
the other end. The other end happened to be where most of the people
wanted to live. Our conceit was to believe that if we built the
grandest water system ever, we could make that difference disappear.
California proceeded with the federal Central Valley Project in the
1930s and the State Water Project in the 1960s and erected dams,
canals, and a concrete river 444 miles long—we called it The
Aqueduct—to move the rain to farms and faucets. We had engineered
our way past drought and flood, if not earthquake and wildfire, or
so we believed...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/well-fixers-story-california-drought/619753/">https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/well-fixers-story-california-drought/619753/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
[The news archive - looking back]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming
August 19, 2015</b></font><br>
<br>
August 19, 2015: The New York Times reports:<br>
<br>
"A little-noted portion of the chain of pipelines and equipment
that brings natural gas from the field into power plants and homes
is responsible for a surprising amount of methane emissions,
according to a study on Tuesday.<br>
<br>
"Natural-gas gathering facilities, which collect from multiple
wells, lose about 100 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year,
about eight times as much as estimates used by the Environmental
Protection Agency, according to the study, which appeared in the
journal Environmental Science and Technology.<br>
<br>
"The newly discovered leaks, if counted in the E.P.A. inventory,
would increase its entire systemwide estimate by about 25 percent,
said the Environmental Defense Fund, which sponsored the research
as part of methane emissions studies it organized."<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/science/methane-leaks-in-natural-gas-supply-chain-far-exceed-estimates-study-says.html?mwrsm=Email">http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/science/methane-leaks-in-natural-gas-supply-chain-far-exceed-estimates-study-says.html?mwrsm=Email</a>
<br>
<br>
</p>
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