California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

It's a Once in 500 Year Flood Implies Things Are Going to Get Better When the Truth is Things Are Going to Get Worse.

by John Lawrence

Climate change and the changes in the weather that that implies are not going to ameliorate any time soon. Why? We are still dumping ever increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with each succeeding year. What that means is that next year's hurricanes will be even worse than this year's hurricanes, not that "biblical" devastation this year will be followed by 500 years of relative peace and calm. Peoples' mindsets and calculations are severely off if they think that, if they can only see their way clear to rebuilding, they can look forward to an era of peace and prosperity. Just the opposite is true. We have made only paltry efforts at getting climate change under control by eliminating the need for fossil fuels. And also many areas struck by hurricanes this year haven't recovered from last year's hurricanes. People need to make rational decisions about where to live. In light of increased flooding and fires. it makes sense not to live in forested areas or near creeks and rivers. Too many towns, villages and cities are located right on creeks and rivers. These are places to get away from. Also get away from living right on the coasts. Coasts are eroding and houses are falling into the oceans. One needs to consider where to live based on climate change. Certain areas are more vulnerable than others, and it makes no sense to automatically rebuild in vulnerable areas as if that was some gauge of American ingenuity and resolve.

As of 2023, the average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is around 419.3 parts per million (ppm), marking a new record high, with a consistent upward trend observed throughout recent years; this data is based on measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, where modern carbon dioxide records began in 1958. Each year the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases. In order to get climate change under control, this number should be coming down. According to recent data, approximately 36 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide are entering the atmosphere annually, with this number continuing to rise year after year due to human activities like burning fossil fuels. We are clearly losing the battle, and in fact politicians in the US have given up trying to limit fossil fuel production and use. There will be no limit on how much energy is consumed because this would limit GDP growth, that all important measure that trumps climate change. And the fact is that renewable energy is not coming online faster than the increase in energy demand. Even if all cars were to be converted to all electric vehicles tomorrow, it would increase the demand for electrical energy which only could be supplied by fossil fuels.

Cars could be considered as just another electrical appliance. There are government incentives to convert to all electric appliances whether it be heat pumps or induction stoves. The electrification of appliances will increase the demand for energy. This energy can't be supplied by renewables because there is just not enough renewable capacity. This is the fundamental dilemma in regard to the reduction of the use of fossil duels and consequently the reduction of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. In addition to the technical obstacles limiting our response to climate change, there are the political obstacles. No politician is willing to say that we must do with less in order to fight climate change as we were willing to do, for instance, to fight the Second World War. Telling people to reduce their consumption is a formula for losing political elections. The obvious result is that worsening weather debacles will continue and get worse. Insurance companies will not continue to insure properties located in zones that are subject to weather disasters. FEMA is running out of money. It just does not make any sense to automatically assume that after a disaster, one has to rebuild, that it would be unAmerican not to, a concession of defeat. In many cases it might make more sense to relocate to safer areas. The government could do us all a favor by locating safer living zones and red lining those ares that are prone to climate disasters.

Off the Top of My Head

Why Kamala Flip-Flopped on Fracking

by John Lawrence

Unfortunately, the increase in renewable energy is outpaced by the demand for energy so that under present conditions renewables will never be sufficient to replace fossil fuels. In fact production of fossil fuels will only increase as long as we, as a world, are committed to meeting the demand for energy. Therefore, Kamala, as well as Biden before her, realized that, unless they were going to preach austerity, fossil fuel production needed to be increased not decreased. Fracking produces natural gas which is considered a "cleaner" fossil fuel than coal. The problem is that the continued use of fossil fuels is devastating the environment. It is accelerating climate change. It is accelerating the devastating 1000 year floods which are occurring far more often than 1000 years. It is increasing shore line erosion. It is resulting in year around fire seasons. It is melting glaciers and increasing droughts.

So is there any way out of this dilemma? I think nuclear energy is the only possible way to meet the increasing needs for energy which the people of the earth seems to need and require. Bill Gates has invested in nuclear energy plants. He has broken ground on a novel nuclear power plant in Wyoming. The pilot Natrium nuclear power plant in Kemmerer will be the first of what TerraPower officials hope will be a worldwide fleet of new nuclear energy facilities.

“This reactor exists inside a virtual model, and it’s been working really well inside the computer,” Gates said light-heartedly, eliciting some laughter. “It’s a little bit harder to make it work out there. But that’s what we’re starting on today. This is a big step towards safe, abundant, zero-carbon energy.”

Technically, Gates and others marked the groundbreaking of a liquid sodium testing facility — a critical component of TerraPower’s Natrium nuclear power plant slated to begin operating here in 2030. The event marked what developers, which includes the U.S. Department of Energy, say is the “first advanced nuclear project in the Western Hemisphere to move from design to construction.”

Gates-backed TerraPower touts the Natrium design as part of the industry’s “next generation” strategy to deploy nuclear power throughout the nation and across the globe — a low-carbon alternative for stable electrical generation and a means to address planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions while meeting growing demand for electricity, according to the company.

Rather than the industry’s existing standard of massive nuclear power plants that consume a lot of water, Natrium is much smaller and will use liquid sodium to cool the reactor, which is designed to generate a consistent 345 megawatts of power — enough energy to power about 250,000 homes — with a capability of ramping up to 500 megawatts for short periods, according to the Bellevue, Washington-based TerraPower.

So what's the drawback? It takes money and time to build these nuclear plants. So far even one has barely got off the ground. It won't be operational till 2030!! It would take a massive commitment on a national, even a world wide, level to go this route to provide the energy needs of an increasingly demanding world. As the changing climate is already wreaking havoc all around the world, time is not on the side of human civilization.

AOC and Sanders aim to place public housing at center of Green New Deal

Proposal aims to decarbonize all of nation’s public housing units, with an investment of between $162bn and $234bn over next decade

Bernie Sanders speaks alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez outside the capitol in Washington DC on 21 March 2024. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

from The Guardian

With a sweeping legislative proposal, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders are attempting to place public housing at the center of the green energy transition, tackling the twin crises of global warming and soaring housing costs.

“Public housing should be the gold standard for affordable, environmentally friendly, and safe communities,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an email. “This bill is how we ensure that.”

The Green New Deal for Public Housing aims to decarbonize all of the nation’s public housing units – and build more of them – with an investment of between $162bn and $234bn over the next decade. In doing so, it would avert 5.7m tons of greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of removing 1.26m cars from US roads each year, while creating jobs and public health benefits.

The proposal is co-sponsored by a slew of other progressive lawmakers and supported by dozens of environmental groups, housing justice organizations and labor unions.

“We are going to provide decent-quality, affordable housing for millions of Americans, and at the same time, we’re going to create good-paying union jobs,” said Sanders at a Thursday press conference. “That is a win, win, win situation.”

It is not likely to pass, but supporters say it can help build support for the vision.

The bill’s reintroduction comes as the nation faces an unprecedented shortage of affordable housing. In 2022, a record half of US renters spent more than 30% of their incomes on rent, a January report from Harvard University found – and more than half of these “rent-burdened” Americans gave more than 50% of their earnings to the landlord.

Public housing remains an affordable option that 1.7 million Americans rely on. But amid a chronic lack of investment, it is often allowed to fall into disrepair, creating a maintenance backlog of $70bn.

In the absence of funds to mend these units, they are often demolished or privatized instead. As a result, the US public housing stock shrunk from 1.2m units to just over 900,000 between 2009 and 2022 – a 25% decline – according to an analysis from the progressive thinktank Climate and Community Project, which informed the policy proposal.

Instead of allowing the nation’s public housing stock to wither away, the bill seeks to transform it. Units would not only be repaired and freed of contaminants like lead and mold, but also made efficient and green.

Each would be insulated and weatherized to conserve energy, as well as outfitted with fossil fuel-free electric appliances. Renewable energy would be installed on-site. And developments would be made climate-resilient with increased green space and decreased paved areas, which can help absorb heat and soak up water during heavy rains.

In addition to slashing greenhouse gas pollution, the bill would come with “major health and comfort benefits”, said Kira McDonald, a researcher at Climate and Community Project who co-authored the report.

Removing fossil fuel-powered appliances would lower air pollution and therefore improve residents’ respiratory health. And insulation and heat pumps could cut energy bills, while making homes easier to keep at a comfortable temperature amid extreme weather.

The Green New Deal for Public Housing would not only improve the nation’s existing public units, but also “finally help build more”, said Ocasio-Cortez. Currently, the 1998 Faircloth Amendment in effect prevents the federal government from funding new public housing, but the proposal would immediately repeal that policy in order to erect more state-of-the-art, green units.

The policy would benefit the US’s most vulnerable residents. Public housing residents are disproportionately likely to be people of color, and 24% of public housing residents are living with a disability.

“The Green New Deal for Public Housing is going to change the game for those of us and our neighbors who are being hit hardest by the climate crisis,” said Saul Levin, legislative and political director of the progressive advocacy group Green New Deal Network.

The policy also would have knock-on effects for the entire nation, including by spurring the creation of about 280,000 jobs over a decade. The bill includes language to ensure those jobs are all unionized.

It could also help create a supply of efficient technologies for all residents. Last year, New York City’s public housing authority invited manufacturers to compete for a contract to create and install at least 10,000 induction stoves in New York City Housing Authority (Nycha) buildings, specifically calling for apartment-sized models that do not require electrical upgrades. The winning model will become available on the market for all US residents.

“Those models are available elsewhere, but not in the US because producers basically don’t see that there is a strong enough market,” said McDonald. “This can change that.”

Nycha has launched a similar program to bring small heat pumps on to the US market, and back in the 1990s put out a call for small, energy-efficient refrigerators that helped shape the green fridge market.

“There are gaps in green building technology and green appliance markets in the US,” said McDonald. “Public housing can help fill them … so this policy is also a form of green industrial policy.”
Public housing is the only form of US housing whose affordability does not rely “solely on the market and solely on billionaires”, Ocasio-Cortez said at Thursday’s press conference.
Jasmine Sanchez, a housing advocate who lives in a Nycha development, said many public housing residents face the “constant threat of privatization” and often feel left behind by the US government.
“Everyone deserves to be invested in and everyone deserves to live threat free,” she said.

Instead of allowing the nation’s public housing stock to wither away, the bill seeks to transform it. Units would not only be repaired and freed of contaminants like lead and mold, but also made efficient and green.

Each would be insulated and weatherized to conserve energy, as well as outfitted with fossil fuel-free electric appliances. Renewable energy would be installed on-site. And developments would be made climate-resilient with increased green space and decreased paved areas, which can help absorb heat and soak up water during heavy rains.

In addition to slashing greenhouse gas pollution, the bill would come with “major health and comfort benefits”, said Kira McDonald, a researcher at Climate and Community Project who co-authored the report.

Removing fossil fuel-powered appliances would lower air pollution and therefore improve residents’ respiratory health. And insulation and heat pumps could cut energy bills, while making homes easier to keep at a comfortable temperature amid extreme weather.

The Green New Deal for Public Housing would not only improve the nation’s existing public units, but also “finally help build more”, said Ocasio-Cortez. Currently, the 1998 Faircloth Amendment in effect prevents the federal government from funding new public housing, but the proposal would immediately repeal that policy in order to erect more state-of-the-art, green units.

The policy would benefit the US’s most vulnerable residents. Public housing residents are disproportionately likely to be people of color, and 24% of public housing residents are living with a disability.

“The Green New Deal for Public Housing is going to change the game for those of us and our neighbors who are being hit hardest by the climate crisis,” said Saul Levin, legislative and political director of the progressive advocacy group Green New Deal Network.

The policy also would have knock-on effects for the entire nation, including by spurring the creation of about 280,000 jobs over a decade. The bill includes language to ensure those jobs are all unionized.

It could also help create a supply of efficient technologies for all residents. Last year, New York City’s public housing authority invited manufacturers to compete for a contract to create and install at least 10,000 induction stoves in New York City Housing Authority (Nycha) buildings, specifically calling for apartment-sized models that do not require electrical upgrades. The winning model will become available on the market for all US residents.

“Those models are available elsewhere, but not in the US because producers basically don’t see that there is a strong enough market,” said McDonald. “This can change that.”

Nycha has launched a similar program to bring small heat pumps on to the US market, and back in the 1990s put out a call for small, energy-efficient refrigerators that helped shape the green fridge market.

“There are gaps in green building technology and green appliance markets in the US,” said McDonald. “Public housing can help fill them … so this policy is also a form of green industrial policy.”

Public housing is the only form of US housing whose affordability does not rely “solely on the market and solely on billionaires”, Ocasio-Cortez said at Thursday’s press conference.

Jasmine Sanchez, a housing advocate who lives in a Nycha development, said many public housing residents face the “constant threat of privatization” and often feel left behind by the US government.

“Everyone deserves to be invested in and everyone deserves to live threat free,” she said.

Though the bill is not expected to pass, Climate and Community Project says support to expand and improve public housing is growing. In 2021, the report notes, the House voted to repeal the Faircloth Amendment and most Democratic lawmakers supported including $60bn for public housing in the spending package that later became the Inflation Reduction Act, though both measures ultimately failed to pass.

“While just a couple of senators ultimately blocked these reforms, it was clear that there is already strong support for saving public housing that advocates can build on,” the report says.

The policy represents a “visionary future that will uplift everyone”, said Levin of Green New Deal Network.

“By lifting up the world we need,” he said, “we are building toward that vision”.

Off the Top of My Head

Competition Leads to the Proliferation of Redundant Commodities. Cooperation is Necessary to Deal with Global Warming

by John Lawrence

Private enterprise fueled by competition is a great mechanism for creating products which can be sold in the market place to consumers. This has worked wonders for economies both in the western world and in China where private enterprise brought 800 million people out of poverty in 40 years, the largest reduction in poverty in world history. This was accomplished by private enterprise at the local level not by communism at the national level. However, private enterprise, while good at creating products to be sold in the market place, is not good at global cooperation which is what is needed to solve the problem of climate change let along create world peace. The problem of cooperation on a multi state level has not been solved let alone hardly addressed with the result that human society is hastening down the path to its own destruction, meanwhile trying to proliferate the sale of gadgets and the making of money and the regaling of competition as the solution to the world's problems. It's not. Unless national societies can learn to cooperate, the destruction of the earth's ecosystems necessary for human and animal well being is assured. While giving lip service to reducing the effects of climate change, no politician anywhere in the world wants to contemplate the fact that national GDPs might actually have to be reduced in order to reorient human energy and natural resources to the most important job of saving the planetary environment so that humans can safely live in it. Last year, 2023, was the hottest year on record and the year in which the most carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere, just the opposite of the necessary conditions to save the planet for human habitation on a long term basis.

Meanwhile, advertising is supercharging the hawking of relatively worthless redundant products to individual consumers. Bolstered by the upcoming presidential election and attention-grabbing sporting events such as the Olympics, the U.S. will account for almost a third of the total ad spend, rising 2.2% to $303.6 billion in 2023 and 7.6% to $326.7 billion in 2024. Lingering macroeconomic concerns are not expected to hold back ad spending in 2024 amid a confluence of attention-grabbing events. Global ad spending is on track to top $1T for the first time, WARC (the World Advertising Research Center) says. Five companies — Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, ByteDance and Meta — will attract 50.7% of global spending in 2023 and 51.9% in 2024. Their ad revenues are expected to increase by 9.1% in 2023 and by 10.7% in 2024, while the rest of the industry remains stagnant. “High interest rates, spiralling inflation, military conflict and natural disasters have made for a bitter cocktail over the preceding 12 months, but the latest earnings season shows that the ad market has withstood this turbulence and has now turned a corner,” said James McDonald, director of data, intelligence and forecasting for WARC, in a release. “With the establishment of retail media as an effective advertising channel, the advent of connected TV as the next evolution of conventional video consumption, and the continued growth of social media and search, we are seeing once again the value advertisers place in leveraging first-party data to target the right message to the right person at the right time,” McDonald continued. WARC’s forecast suggests social media will account for $227.2 billion of ad spending in 2024, more than a fifth (21.8%) of the total spend. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp and controls almost two-thirds of the social media market, can expect to see more than $146 billion in ad revenue, followed by TikTok owner ByteDance, which will see just under $40 billion in ad revenue (equating to a 17.6% share). It is to be noted that Meta does not produce one product necessary for human survival.

The force feeding of products to individual consumers is reminiscent of the force feeding of ducks to produce foie gras. It's relentless. United States Private Consumption accounted for 67.5 % of its Nominal GDP in Sep 2023. In other words without private consumption of individual consumer oriented products, the US GDP would hardly exist. Yet for the world to get climate change under control, it must reduce private consumption and individual competion for sales to consumers and redirect these resources to combating climate change. Instead human beings prefer actual combat and competition among nations to the global cooperation and cooperation between nations and the national efforts required to get climate change under control. It's a different mindset than the mindset that competition to sell products in the market place in order to get rich engenders. 2023 was the hottest on record by a long shot. Europe’s top climate agency released data showing 2023 global temperatures averaged 1.48 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Record-high temperatures are expected to continue this year. The planet didn't just set a new global annual heat record. It shattered previous records.

Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are projected to reach a record 36.8 billion metric tons in 2023, an increase of 1.1% over 2022, according to an annual report by the Global Carbon Project. While emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) are declining in some regions including Europe and the United States, they continue to rise overall, the authors said, adding that global action to reduce fossil fuel consumption is not happening fast enough to prevent dangerous impacts from climate change. The steep reductions that are urgently needed to meet global climate targets have yet to emerge, said Professor Pierre Friedlingstein of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, who led the study. Atmospheric CO₂ in 2023 will likely reach 419.2 ppm, 51% above pre-industrial levels. Remember when countless scientists, climate experts, and governments officials agreed that 350 ppm was the “safe” level of carbon dioxide?

So the handwriting is on the wall. Far from an all hands on deck effort to prevent climate change so that future generations can live in peace and comfort on planet earth, global competition in both the commercial and military realms is the preferred and ongoing mode of human behavior, climate change and global warming be damned. Hey, humans seemingly say, we'll get around to preventing climate change just as soon as we win this war. Human greed and the competition among greedy individual participants is a far greater force than altruistic human cooperation to do what's right by future generations. Greed has outpaced morality in the competition for individual accumulation of economic and financial resources. The cooperation and sacrifice that the world saw in the 1930s and 40s to win the Second World War is nowhere to be found today. The US is still preoccupied with individual consumption and especially in entertainment venues which contribute nothing to the effort to make the world safe in terms of climate change. Instead of making the world safe for democracy we must change the paradigm to making the world safe and habitable for future generations by an all hands on deck effort to prevent global warming, an effort, objectively speaking, that seems doomed for failure unless our collective mindsets somehow find a way to change. By the way, U.S. oil production reached a record high of over 13 million barrels per day in September 2023, surpassing all other countries.

Off the Top of My Head

A Spokesman from the Department of Peace Was Interviewed by CNN

by John Lawrence

Hostilities in the world have died down significantly after the US established a Department of Peace. Now in addition to interviewing a military expert every time a war or a potential war threatens to break out, a spokesman from the Department of Peace, a so called peace expert is also interviewed. Recently peace expert Roshina Macerdinot responded to questions from CNN anchor Emily Sohodinat. Question: "How do you interact with the parties involved in a potential conflagration that threatens peace in the world?" Answer: "Well, first we don't take sides. We try to understand the issues from the points of view of both sides. We never denigrate either side or refer to one side as "the enemy." We try to work out a compromise that is acceptable to both sides, and we work hard with both parties to implement it given our substantial resources to do so. Fortunately, the Department of Peace now has a budget commensurate with the Defense Department which signifies our commitment to peace and not just to defending ourselves. We are proactive knowing that, if we can prevent war, we can save the destruction of life and real estate. In that sense we are pro life. One of our principles is to get the parties to understand that it is not productive to seek revenge no matter how outlandish was the behavior of one of the parties that instigated the conflict. Revenge just leads to a cycle of violence, sometimes never ending."

Sohodinat: "So you advocate just eliminating the Department of Defense? In other words you don't see the need to defend ourselves in a hostile world?

Macerdinot: "On the contrary. If all of our efforts at creating peace and resolving hostilities break down, our Defense Department stands ready to defend ourselves. It's just that we put an enormous amount of effort into creating peace and resolving hostility in the first place so that the resources of our Defense Department never have to be brought to bear hopefully. One of the ways we do that is to show respect to both parties. But if all else fails, we stand ready, with the largest military in the world to defend ourselves. However, our military budget is commensurate with out peace budget. We put as much effort into implementing peace as we do in creating and sustaining the weapons of war. A lot of our efforts are put into alleviating poverty in the world and mitigating the effects of climate change which affects the poorer countries more than it does the advanced countries although the advanced countries such as the US have been more responsible for putting most of the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."

Sohodinat: "Well that's all well and good, but it seems a little bit pollyanish. Wars have taken place since the dawn of recorded history and probably long before that. So now we have a Department of Peace, a Division of which is the Peacebuilders such as the Peace Corps and another Division is the Peacemakers which is an augmented and upgraded diplomatic corps. Still even with all these initiatives, do you think you can change what has been a universal and ubiquitous human behavior such as war?"

Macerdinot: "Certainly it's worth a humongous effort. We know we are succeeding when the Peace Corps, which is one of our Divisions, is being given the same ritualistic recognition and honors as is the military. In fact we have created a Peace Industrial Complex which rivals the Military Industrial Complex. We are partnering with China to build infrastructure all around the world. We know we are succeeding when CNN interviews representatives who are both Military Generals and Peace Generals. We know we are succeeding when the perks and incentives for entering the Peace Corps are substantially equal to the perks and incentives for entering the military. We know we are succeeding when the Peace Academies rival West Point and Annapolis. We are turning out graduates committed to the arts of peace as fast or faster than we are turning out graduates proficient in the arts of war."

Sohodinat: "So what is peace? Is it just cessation of hostility or is it more than that?"

Macerdinot: "It's actually much more than that. It's when every person in the world has a shot at what used to be called "the American Dream." It's when no child goes hungry anywhere in the world. It's when there is clean water, nutritious food, adequate health care, a good sewage system and all the elements of a civilized life are available to everyone wherever they might live. It goes without saying that a stable and clean environment with climate change under control must be brought to fruition. Everyone, no matter where they might live, should have the tools available to live a healthy life and live up to their potential."

Sohodinat: Well, we are running out of time for this interview, but as I understand it, the Department of Peace is now on a par with the Department of Defense in terms of its funding level and the proficiency of its personnel. You all are committed to understanding and interoperating with other countries offering them friendship and respect regardless of their internal problems and political systems different from our own rather than criticising or bullying them."

Macerdinot: "That's correct. Finally, the world has learned from the Ukraine and Israeli-Hamas wars that the human suffering and destruction of real estate that war entails is not worth it, and that maximum efforts need to be made to create and maintain peace and understanding before hostilities reach the breaking point. It's important that at least as much funding and effort goes into the creation of peace as goes into the preparation for war. Jesus said "Turn the other cheek" if someone strikes you. We advocate that as well, but not in a purely defenseless manner. It's never too late to resolve the situation peacefully even if you're struck, but if worse comes to worse we still have the ability to defend ourselves. Revenge never works because it leads to a cycle of violence"

Sohodinat: Thank you, Roshina.

Macerdinot: Thank you. Nice to be with you.

Off the Top of My Head

The Worldwide Need For Energy Grows as World Population Grows

by John Lawrence

One factor not taken into account as the world grapples with replacing fossil fuel energy with renewable energy is that the population, and, therefore, the need for energy is growing exponentially with a billion human beings being added to world population approximately every decade. This makes it less likely that we will hit our targets for fossil fuel emissions. One could quantify the number of gigatons of carbon dioxide emitted per year per person on the planet. Obviously, every person has needs that require either fossil fuel or renewable energy although people in more advanced countries are more responsible for the emission of greater quantities of CO² than others. Let's look at world population growth over the years. It took most of human history for our population to reach 1 billion—and just over 200 years to reach 8 billion. It is estimated that earth reached one billion in population for the first time in 1804; two billion in 1927, 123 years later; three billion in 1960, 33 years later; four billion in 1974, 14 years later; five billion in 1987, 13 years later; six billion in 1999, 12 years later; seven billion in 2011, 12 years later; and eight billion in 2022, 11 years later. Notice that 7/8 of the world's population have been added to the planet after the advent of the industrial revolution, after the advent of the widespread use of fossil fuels. If the world's population had not increased so rapidly, planet earth would probably not be facing the dire consequences of climate change at this point in time. Notice also that the addition of a billion people to planet earth is happening over shorter and shorter time spans, the last billion in just eleven years!

Can the defossil fuelization of planet earth proceed at a rapid enough pace to keep up with world population growth? That is a critical question. What is the average energy consumption per capita for planet earth? The U.S. average residential energy consumption per capita in 2021 was about 63 MMBtu. MMBtu is the abbreviation for one million British thermal units. It is the common unit used to measure heating content and the value of a fuel.The world average per capita consumption of primary energy in 2021 was about 76 MMBtu. Total world energy consumption then would be 8 billion times 76 MMBtu. So by 2032 or so add in another billion times 76 MMBtu. Will renewables be able to supply that much energy by 2032? Major changes have to take place in agriculture and building materials in addition to power generation and transportation. The manufacture of steel and cement contribute large amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. These building materials need to be replaced but by what? You can't have high rises built out of adobe. In agriculture we have to get away from eating farm animals. Cows burp and fart methane. Pigs contribute a lot of waste products which leech into rivers and streams. Problem is people don't want to give up eating cows and pigs. Consumers won't stand for a mandatory vegetarian diet. 

Consumers want their consumption habits not to change. This means that efforts to rid the planet of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide generation by building materials and agriculture are apt to fail. As the earth warms, humanity is going too slow in its efforts to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. Also the amount of dangerous chemicals going into the environment is threatening civilization. The need for cooperation and collaboration among nations to ameliorate climate change is also being held back by the incessant human penchant for war and violence. The profit motive seems to trump all efforts to build a healthier planet. Sellers want to sell things that are inherently destructive to the planet whether they be food products or other consumer items. If a food contains fat, salt or sugar, it is more palatable, and, therefore, there is a greater demand for it even though it contributes to ill health. There is also an insatiable demand for alcohol and drugs even though they are detrimental to human health. A paradigm change would be necessary to get the plant on the right track in terms of human health and a healthy environment devoid of carbon dioxide production.

Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says

‘Polluter elite’ are plundering the planet to point of destruction, says Oxfam after comprehensive study of climate inequality

• Introduction: the great carbon divide
• Twelve billionaires’ emissions equal to fuelling 2.1m homes

While the wealthiest 1% tend to live climate-insulated lives, their emissions are responsible for immense suffering. Illustration: Guardian Design

 

Jonathan Watts Global environment editor

 

@jonathanwatts

 

From the Guardian, Sun 19 Nov 2023 19.01 EST

 

The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, with dire consequences for vulnerable communities and global efforts to tackle the climate emergency, a report says.

The most comprehensive study of global climate inequality ever undertaken shows that this elite group, made up of 77 million people including billionaires, millionaires and those paid more than US$140,000 (£112,500) a year, accounted for 16% of all CO₂ emissions in 2019 – enough to cause more than a million excess deaths due to heat, according to the report.

For the past six months, the Guardian has worked with Oxfam, the Stockholm Environment Institute and other experts on an exclusive basis to produce a special investigation, The Great Carbon Divide. It explores the causes and consequences of carbon inequality and the disproportionate impact of super-rich individuals, who have been termed “the polluter elite”. Climate justice will be high on the agenda of this month’s UN Cop28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates.

The Oxfam report shows that while the wealthiest 1% tend to live climate-insulated, air-conditioned lives, their emissions – 5.9bn tonnes of CO2 in 2019 – are responsible for immense suffering.

Using a “mortality cost” formula – used by the US Environmental Protection Agency, among others – of 226 excess deaths worldwide for every million tonnes of carbon, the report calculates that the emissions from the 1% alone would be enough to cause the heat-related deaths of 1.3 million people over the coming decades.

Over the period from 1990 to 2019, the accumulated emissions of the 1% were equivalent to wiping out last year’s harvests of EU corn, US wheat, Bangladeshi rice and Chinese soya beans.

The suffering falls disproportionately upon people living in poverty, marginalised ethnic communities, migrants and women and girls, who live and work outside or in homes vulnerable to extreme weather, according to the research. These groups are less likely to have savings, insurance or social protection, which leaves them more economically, as well as physically, at risk from floods, drought, heatwaves and forest fires. The UN says developing countries account for 91% of deaths related to extreme weather.

The report finds that it would take about 1,500 years for someone in the bottom 99% to produce as much carbon as the richest billionaires do in a year.

“The super-rich are plundering and polluting the planet to the point of destruction and it is those who can least afford it who are paying the highest price,” said Chiara Liguori, Oxfam’s senior climate justice policy adviser. The twin crises of climate and inequality were “fuelling one another”, she said.

The wealth gap between nations only partly explains the disparity. The report shows that in 2019 – the most recent year for which there is comprehensive data – high-income countries (mostly in the global north) were responsible for 40% of global consumption-based CO₂ emissions, while the contribution from low-income countries (mostly in the global south) was a negligible 0.4%. Africa, which is home to about one in six of the world population, was responsible for just 4% of emissions.

A less discussed but faster-growing problem is inequality within countries. Billionaires are still overwhelmingly white, male and based in the US and Europe, but members of this influential class of super-rich can increasingly be found in other parts of the world. Millionaires are even more dispersed.

The report says this is bad news for the climate on multiple levels. The extravagant carbon footprint of the 0.1% – from superyachts, private jets and mansions to space flights and doomsday bunkers – is 77 times higher than the upper level needed for global warming to peak at 1.5C.

The corporate shares of many super-rich are highly polluting. This elite also wield enormous and growing political power by owning media organisations and social networks, hiring advertising and PR agencies and lobbyists, and mixing socially with senior politicians, who are also often members of the richest 1%, according to the report.

In the US, for example, one in four members of Congress reportedly own stocks in fossil fuel companies, worth a total of between $33m and $93m. The report says this helps to explain why global emissions continue to rise, and why governments in the global north provided $1.8tn to subsidise the fossil fuel industry in 2020, contrary to their international pledges to phase out carbon emissions.

Oxfam is calling for hefty wealth taxes on the super-rich and windfall taxes on fossil fuel companies to support the worst affected, reduce inequality and fund a transition to renewable energy. It says a 60% tax on the incomes of the wealthiest 1% would raise $6.4tn a year and could cut emissions by 695m tonnes, which is more than the 2019 footprint of the UK.

Oxfam International’s interim executive director, Amitabh Behar, said: “Not taxing wealth allows the richest to rob from us, ruin our planet and renege on democracy. Taxing extreme wealth transforms our chances to tackle both inequality and the climate crisis. These are trillions of dollars at stake to invest in dynamic 21st-century green governments, but also to re-inject into our democracies.”

Off the Top of My Head

It's Not Biden's Job to Reduce Inflation. That's Jerome Powell's Job.

by John Lawrence

Republicans are so stupid. They blame Joe Biden for not doing something that's not his job to do. Furthermore, the way Powell is going about his job requires him to create more unemployment, to reduce economic activity. That's the traditional way to reduce inflation. So getting rid of inflation requires more economic pain not less. Then if there is a recession, they'll blame Joe Biden, not Jerome Powell, for that. As far as house prices being out of sight for more and more people, how about blaming the hedge funds and other entities that are bidding up asset prices. Eventually houses will be unaffordable for the masses of people which will turn the American people into renters and basically debtors. Is that Joe Biden's fault or the fault of hedge finds and other cash flush investors who are entering this market? In fact they are in the process of cornering this market. Higher interest rates are also hurting would be home owners and car buyers. Is that Joe Biden's fault or Jerome Powell's fault for raising interest rates? Joe Biden has no control over interest rates. The American consumer is all about me, me, me not what is best for the country as a whole.

Biden has done more than any President since Lyndon Johnson to improve the economy with the Chips Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan and more. Nearly 11 million jobs have been created since President Biden took office – including 750,000 manufacturing jobs. It's the first time the US government has had an industrial policy. He kept the economy afloat during the COVID lock down. The US economy has been left to free enterprise for too long. With deregulation this has allowed corporate entities to pollute, to create dangerous products, to do nothing about carbon dioxide emissions.The government was just supposed to be hands off and let corporations run wild, all in the name of maximizing GDP. Well there are more important things than maximizing GDP like saving the planet from global warming. It is all ready too late to do that. It's only a question at this time of how bad it will get before some of the measures that are being taken today will kick in and save the planet, hopefully, from complete destruction. Each year heat waves and floods are getting more severe. Each year is hotter than the previous year. How important is it to maximize GDP under these conditions?

During World War II, the government made sure that the economy was completely focused on the war effort. Consumer consumption was kept low in order to support the war effort. Today with an even larger danger looming, the economy is going on its merry way with so many elements of it not focused on climate change. In fact I call it the Taylor Swiftization of the economy. Entertainment including professional athletics are very large components of GDP. Nero fiddling while Rome burned is nothing compared to what is happening today. Perhaps the energy going into these frivolous sectors should be refocused on climate change. But the American people don't even all agree that climate change is even a serious situation. They want more fossil fuels, more drilling, more pipelines, more gas production. Fortunately, some states like California are doing more like outlawing gas powered cars by 2035. However, 2035 is too late. Too little, too late is the story of the world's response to climate change. So major disasters will continue with the government's fiscal budget increasingly committed to bailing out these disasters. FEMA, by the way, is bankrupt, and insurance companies no longer want to insure.

A Record 15 Billion-Dollar Disasters Have Hit US So Far This Year: NOAA

The El Rico Pipe Yard remains submerged as Tulare Lake continues to expand in Corcoran, California on March 30, 2023. (Photo: Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The tally could rise with the Atlantic hurricane season set to pick up.

by Jessica Corbett, August 8, 2023, from Common Dreams

The United States has already endured 15 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters this year, underscoring the dangers of and need for humanity to combat the fossil fuel-driven planetary emergency. The record pace of pricey extreme weather was announced Tuesday as part of the findings in the latest monthly U.S. climate report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Since recordkeeping began in 1980, the U.S. has experienced 363 weather and climate disasters with damages hitting $1 billion, with a consumer price index (CPI) adjustment to 2023, according to NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The total cost of those events topped $2.59 trillion.

As of Tuesday, there have been 15 confirmed events with losses exceeding $1 billion including "one flooding event, 13 severe storm events, and one winter storm event," NCEI's related webpage explains. "Overall, these events resulted in the deaths of 113 people and had significant economic effects on the areas impacted. The 1980-2022 annual average is 8.1 events (CPI-adjusted); the annual average for the most recent five years (2018-2022) is 18 events (CPI-adjusted)."

 

While the total damage for the 15 events neared $40 billion, the costliest disasters were early March storms in the South and East ($6.1 billion), a tornado outbreak March 31-April 1 ($5.4 billion), and California flooding ($4.6 billion).

Jonathan Erdman, a senior meteorologist with The Weather Channel, noted Tuesday that "2017 is the full-year record. There were 22 billion-dollar disasters in 2017, responsible for an estimated $383.7 billion in damage, both the most of any year since 1980. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria were responsible for 86% of that damage tally in 2017."

While the Atlantic hurricane season officially begins in June, it tends to pick up in August—meaning this month could increase the billion-dollar disaster tally and put 2023 on track to break the 2017 record.

Florida Todayreported Monday that "there are now five tropical waves out there in the Atlantic the National Hurricane Center is keeping an eye on that are expected to bring some thunderstorms to the Lesser Antilles and the Caribbean this week, but no major tropical activity is expected over the next few days."

AccuWeather meteorologists in March forecast 11-15 named storms this season but last week updated that estimate to 13-17.

Erdman pointed out that "since 1980, America's costliest weather disasters have almost exclusively been hurricanes. For example, 2005's Hurricane Katrina's damage—adjusted for inflation to 2023—was $193.8 billion, almost five times the total of all 15 of 2023's disasters so far. Last year, Hurricane Ian inflicted an estimated $115.2 billion in damage."

In addition to the billion-dollar disasters, other key findings from NOAA's new report include that the year-to-date temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 53°F, or 1.7°F above average, with Florida seeing its warmest January-July period yet while Connecticut, Delaware, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, and New Jersey saw their second-warmest periods.

For just last month, the average temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 75.7°F, or 2.1°F above average, making it the 11th-hottest July in the 129 years recorded. Four states—Arizona, Florida, Maine, and New Mexico—saw their hottest Julys on record.

The recent extreme heat has fueled fresh demands for action from Congress and the White House, with campaigners and even some policymakers pressuring President Joe Biden to stop approving fossil fuel projects and declare a climate emergency.

"We are experiencing extreme weather events across the globe. Heatwaves. Wildfires. Drought. Flooding," Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said on social media Saturday. "President Biden must declare a climate emergency now!"

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

 

Jessica Corbett

Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

A Grim Climate Lesson From the Canadian Wildfires

Ibrahim Rayintakath

For all our plans to control emissions, humans are no longer fully in charge

By David Wallace-Wells Opinion Writer, New York Times, July 26, @023

You may have forgotten about the Canadian wildfires, once the smoke cleared from your American lungs and the orange disappeared from American skies. But the fires have not forgotten to burn.

In Quebec, more land was torched in the month of June than in the previous 20 years combined, with a single out-of-control “complex” there growing to 2.5 million acres — in a section of the province where, in recent years, the average total has been a tenth of that. Across the country as a whole, the total was more than 25 million acres, or about two and a half times as much land as had burned in any of the worst American seasons of the past 50 years, with most of Canada’s fire season still ahead — putting the country on track to produce more carbon emissions from the burning of boreal forest than all of its other human and industrial activities combined.

“This year is different — this year is really different,” the ecologist Merritt Turetsky says. The fire scientist John Abatzoglou calls it already “chart redefining.” The writer John Vaillant — whose new book, “Fire Weather,” looks back at the catastrophic Fort McMurray fire in 2016 and forward to an entirely new global fire regime — calls it an “apocalyptic” scenario. “I never imagined pan-Canadian fires,” he says. “We’ve compressed about 10 years of anticipated fire into one-half of a fire season.”

Believe it or not, this is somewhat by design. Nowadays, the goal of most forest management in North America is to manage fire rather than always rush to extinguish it, to focus suppression efforts around denser human settlement and elsewhere to find ways to allow some burning. In the 20th-century model, firefighters parachuted in to snuff out flames, ultimately contributing to a continental buildup of the dry forest, grassland and scrub that fire experts casually call “fuel.” Now, to reduce it, fire scientists and forest ecologists try to cultivate more of what they call “good fire.”

But whose responsibility is the carbon produced when forests burn? In the age of extreme weather and climate agreements, the world has learned to tabulate ecological guilt nation by nation — cutting responsibility for the current crisis into so many slices of pie. Wildfire emissions typically aren’t even recorded on the balance sheet of any particular country’s ledger, but according to some tabulations, in 2021 wildfires in North America and Eurasia contributed more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than any nation but China, the United States and India. And the toxic smoke exhaled from those fires increasingly travels elsewhere too, now regularly choking the air and blotting out the sun not just of cities built into nearby wildland but of major concrete megalopolises whole continents — or even oceans — away. Whose responsibility is that?

If the 20th century taught us the perversity of aggressive fire suppression, the 21st is already teaching us the limits of that lesson. A firefighting approach based on the principle that humans and human settlements should be protected but that otherwise forests should be allowed to burn is sensible if the aim is to reduce property damage and loss of life. But if the costs to human health of wildfire smoke are larger than from the fires themselves, should the goal be recalibrated? Could it be? If the aim is to manage the health of the planet by limiting the emission of carbon from wildfire, what kind of approach does that require? Is it even possible? In California, the record-setting fire season of 2020, which produced five of the state’s seven largest fires in modern history, also entirely erased its emissions gains over the previous 16 years — putting twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as had been saved by all of the state’s decarbonization policies from 2003 to 2019.

Canada has a gargantuan per-capita carbon footprint, in fact by some measures larger than that of the United States. But it is not itself singularly to blame for the changes unfurling in its own remote forests or capable of truly controlling the new megafires that result.

Partly this is a simple matter of scale: Canada is the world’s second-largest country, with a population roughly a quarter the size of Russia, which Americans often conceive as a vast expanse of uninhabited tundra. The 49th parallel is often thought of as Canada’s southern boundary, but half of Canadians live south of it, clustered just in the little outcropping wedge of Ontario and Quebec tucked between Michigan and Maine. All told, it’s estimated that 85 percent of Canadians live within 150 miles of the U.S. border — as though 284 million Americans all lived south of Los Angeles and Tampa, with the whole rest of the country untrammeled wilderness effectively left free to burn anytime lightning struck or a match was dropped or a power line fell.

But fire control is also growing harder because the fires themselves are changing. They produce such thick walls of smoke now that tanker planes sometimes can’t fly into them; they throw embers over what were once considered uncrossable fire breaks; they burn and smolder underground through winter; they get so hot that firefighters risk second-degree burns just approaching them. “The most powerful firefighting equipment that humans have — Canadair planes that cost roughly $35 million each and drop 30 bathtubs’ worth of water at a time — can extinguish fires with an intensity of up to 10,000 kilowatts per meter of fire line,” Henry Mance wrote recently in The Financial Times. “Today’s mega-fires are a different order of magnitude, sometimes exceeding 100,000 kilowatts per meter” — 10 times as intense. Water dumped from above can evaporate before it reaches the ground.

The megafires routinely produce whole new fire-weather systems, including what are called pyrocumulonimbus clouds, laced with lightning and whipped by tornadoes, which can shoot toxic aerosols all the way through the troposphere into the lower stratosphere. It was long believed that only volcanic eruptions were capable of doing this. It wasn’t until 1998 that scientists discovered pyrocumulonimbus clouds from megafires doing it too. So far this year in Canada, there have been 90 of them.

“They can’t stop these fires,” says the fire historian Steve Pyne. “I mean, they could have 50,000 firefighters there now and it’s not going to change it. We could have 200 more air tankers. Are they going to be able to stop these fires that are going? No.”

In “Under a White Sky,” the writer Elizabeth Kolbert memorably posed the paradox of climate adaptation, in which the disruption of the natural world seems to require further interventions, this way: “If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control.” But the specter of hundreds of new fires raging near the Canadian Arctic — or in Russian Siberia or the Australian bush — is a reminder that when it comes to rolling climate change, total control, at least, may be an illusion, although one on which we have intuitively erected our hopes for navigating a hotter future.

“Humans have always moved at a different pace than the natural world,” Vaillant says. “But suddenly there’s a syncing up, with the natural world now moving as fast or faster than we are — faster than humans, faster than technology, faster than history.” In the past, he says, “we’ve had a ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ attitude with nature — when it did things that we didn’t like, we suppressed them. Fire is now forcing us to negotiate.”

Negotiate with whom, though? In recent years, warming posed a number of thorny questions about responsibility and sovereignty in a time of planetary crisis: who might pay for climate damages punishing the global South but produced by emissions from the global North; how a net-zero world might respond to a rogue nation’s recklessly burning fossil fuels; what could prevent single nations from undertaking adaptations that might wreck the microclimate of their neighbors; what damage could be wrought by a single billionaire’s undertaking a global geoengineering scheme or a single terrorist cell torpedoing it.

These climate morality plays flatter our intuitive sense that humans, however irresponsible, remain in charge. But while emissions do control the planet’s thermometer, the natural world is already bushwhacking its own path through the hotter future. “We’re riding the tiger at this point,” Pyne says. “I think all of us are going to have to accept there’s going to be a lot more fire.”

We Underestimated the Speed and Scale of the Climate Crisis, Scientists Warn

A tree burns during a wildfire in the town of Palaiochori near Athens, Greece, on July 20, 2023.(Photo: Costas Baltas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

By Andy Rowell, July21, 2023

from Common Dreams

“We need to hold governments to start to act sensibly now and reduce emissions,” one expert said.

As leading climate scientists watch the devastating, breakneck speed of unfolding climate disasters unfolding across the globe—from record soaring temperatures to catastrophic flooding—many are aghast at how rapidly their worst predictions are being now being played out in real-time.

Some are also now admitting that they might well have underestimated the speed and scale of our impending climate crisis and how bad things could get.

This is deeply ironic because, for years, those scientists who sounded the alarm over climate change were attacked by the oil industry or their funded front groups for exaggerating or playing “chicken little.”

“The research community must be brutally honest. We are on a pathway to 2-3°C, and probably closer to the upper end of that range.”

But now some of the most senior climate scientists on the planet are speaking out about their concerns.

Speaking to the BBC Thursday morning, Sir Bob Watson, who is currently emeritus professor of the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said, “I am very concerned. None of the observed changes so far (at +1.2°C) are surprising. But they are more severe than we predicted. We probably underestimated the consequences.”

He added “The research community must be brutally honest. We are on a pathway to 2-3°C, and probably closer to the upper end of that range. We are likely to pass 1.5°C in the mid-2030’s and 2°C around 2060. Current pledges and the policies needed them are totally inadequate.”

As the BBC notes, although Watson’s “comments are candid on the state of action on climate change, many of his colleagues will agree with his conclusion that we are on course for a temperature rise of 2.5°C or more.”

And Watson’s colleagues do concur. Ellen Thomas, a Yale University scientist who studies climate change told TheGuardian “It’s not just the magnitude of change, it’s the rate of change that’s an issue.”

Thomas added: “We have highways and railroads that are set in place, our infrastructure can’t move. Almost all my colleagues have said that, in hindsight, we have underestimated the consequences. Things are moving faster than we thought, which is not good.”

Other leading scientists agree too:

Meanwhile, others are being candid that nothing will change until we reduce our use of fossil fuels. “I’ve been expecting this for 20 years,” Professor Camille Parmesan, from the National Center for Scientific Research and an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report author, told Bloomberg. “This is just going to keep happening given that we’re not reducing emissions.”

Speaking to TheGuardian, James Hansen, often seen as the Godfather of climate science, warned we are hurtling towards a superheated climate because “we are damned fools” for not acting sooner. “We have to taste it to believe it.”

He told TheGuardian: “There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts. These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality—we knew it was coming.”'

“The climate crisis is in the main a fossil fuel crisis.”

“This does not mean that the extreme heat at a particular place this year will recur and grow each year,” he continued. “Weather fluctuations move things around. But the global average temperature will go up and the climate dice will be more and more loaded, including more extreme events.”

In a so far unpeer-reviewed scientific paper, Hansen and colleagues said: “It seems that we are headed into a new frontier of global climate,” one not seen for millions of years.

They warn: “As long as more energy is coming in than going out, we must expect global warming to continue.”

Al Gore is another who is alarmed by what they are witnessing: “Everywhere you look in the world, the extremes have now seemingly reached a new level,” he told TheNew York Times in an interview. “The temperatures in the North Atlantic and the unprecedented decline of the Antarctic sea ice, both simultaneously. We see it in upstate New York, we see it in Vermont, we see it in southern Japan, we see it in India. We see it in the unprecedented drought in Uruguay and in Argentina.”

“The climate crisis is in the main a fossil fuel crisis,” Gore added. “If the world is not permitted to discuss the phasing down of fossil fuels because the fossil fuel companies don’t want the world to discuss it, that’s the sign of a very flawed process.”

But it’s not too late to act. As Watson said: “We need to hold governments to start to act sensibly now and reduce emissions.” And its not just governments. It’s the oil industry, too; as Gore points out, this is a fossil fuel crisis. Created by the fossil fuel industry. Because their decades-old public relations strategy of denying the evidence, spreading doubt, and delaying action is the reason our world is on fire right now.

 

© 2023 Oil Change International

 

 

Andy Rowell

Andy Rowell is a staff blogger for Oil Change International in addition to working as a freelance writer and investigative journalist who specializes in environmental, health and lobbying issues. He is a senior Research Fellow at the University of Bath and Director of the Tobacco Tactics team at the Tobacco Control Research Group, which is a partner in the global tobacco industry watchdog, STOP.

Full Bio >

Off the Top of My Head

Certain Places Are Already Becoming Unlivable

by John Lawrence

Today it's supposed to be 121 degrees in Palm Springs, 115 degrees in Phoenix, 108 degrees in Athens. If you don't have air conditioning in those places, you are at high risk of dying. Thousand year floods are becoming annual events. And yet last year the human race pumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than ever before. Is this nuts or what? The human race will not become obsolete due to Artificial Intelligence; there is another much more deadly and imminent scenario - global warming. The Washington Post reported in an article entitled Floods, fires and deadly heat are the alarm bells of a planet on the brink:

The world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing.

The warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont, where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India and Japan were deluged by extreme flooding.

They’re blaring from the scorching streets of Texas, Florida, Spain and China, with a severe heat wave also building in Phoenix and the Southwest in coming days.

They’re burbling up from the oceans, where temperatures have surged to levels considered “beyond extreme.”

And they’re showing up in unprecedented, still-burning wildfires in Canada that have sent plumes of dangerous smoke into the United States.

Scientists say there is no question that this cacophony was caused by climate change — or that it will continue to intensify as the planet warms. Research shows that human greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from burning fossil fuels, have raised Earth’s temperature by about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Unless humanity radically transforms the way people travel, generate energy and produce food, the global average temperature is on track to increase by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — unleashing catastrophes that will make this year’s disasters seem mild.

It's the problem of the frog in warm water. As the temperature of the water is increased, the frog doesn't jump out because the water warms so gradually. Eventually, the water gets so warm that the frog wants desperately to jump out but he can't. The water is too hot for him to move so, as the temperature keeps on increasing, he eventually boils to death. This is the exact metaphor for what is happening to the human race in its relatively short existence on planet Earth. As the human race developed and urbanized, towns and cities were built adjacent to water sources. This means that every babbling brook is potentially a source of catastrophic floods because such immense amounts of water are dumped out of clouds that the babbling brook infrastructure cannot contain it. As sea levels rise many great cities also will soon be under water as soon as the Antarctic glaciers melt.

Meanwhile, the human race is amusing itself to death. Instead of an all hands on deck effort as was seen in World War II, we are seeing increasing demands for tourism, entertainment and increased consumption in the developed world. That world will just crank up the air conditioning as the world warms until such time that the electric grid fails. Then those without a personal generator will be doomed. In the undeveloped world, they don't even have adequate potable water or a decent sewage system let alone any kind of air conditioning. They will be the first to succumb. Eventually the human race will run out of options even as those in more favorable locations continue to consume and amuse themselves. Then later only the rich will survive.

U.S. Truckmakers Reach Deal to Phase Out Polluting Diesel Big Rigs

California Pact Could Speed Transition to Electric Commercial Trucks in 2030s to Reduce Particulates and Other Pollution

By Timothy Puko

Washington Post, July 6, 2023

 

A truck engine is tested for pollution that leaves its exhaust pipe in California near the Mexican border in 2013. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

 

Some of the largest manufacturers of heavy trucks and engines in the country have agreed to accept a California plan to ban sales of new diesel big rigs by 2036 under a deal aimed in part at thwarting potential litigation and maintaining a single national standard for truck pollution rules.

The deal averts a costly court battle with the biggest industry players and eases the transition to clean electric commercial trucks in California, the largest market in the country, and potentially other states. The agreement covers manufacturers including industry giants such as Ford, General Motors, Daimler and Cummins, as well as the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association, an industry group. All are agreeing to implement the California plan regardless of how it may fare in the courts.

The coalition, known as the Clean Truck Partnership, was born out of more than three months of negotiations between the industry and the California Air Resources Board, which has been pushing new rules to lead the country on cleaning up heavy trucks. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) heralded the deal as a major step toward reducing air pollution and emissions that warm the planet.

“California has shown the world what real climate action looks like, and we are raising the bar yet again,” Newsom said in a statement. “Today, truck manufacturers join our urgent efforts to slash air pollution, showing the rest of the country that we can both cut dangerous pollution and build the economy of the future.”

Diesel-powered commercial trucks are a major source of air pollution nationwide, in particular affecting people living near ports, warehouses and other facilities involved in intensive shipments of goods. In California, heavy-duty trucks account for nearly a third of nitrogen oxide pollution and more than a quarter of fine particle pollution in the state, according to the California Air Resources Board.

Both of these pollutants are linked to asthma, other respiratory illnesses and premature death. Black and Latino people constitute a notable proportion of California residents living near the state’s ports — which are among the busiest in the country — and are vulnerable, state officials said. The deal could have broader implications. Several other states often follow the clean air rules of California, and because of its size, automakers often produce cars for sale nationwide to meet California standards. That has helped make California a trendsetter in reducing the air pollution emitted by cars and trucks for decades.

Eight states have adopted a precursor to the California plan, accounting for about 25 percent of the American truck market. The states that regularly adopt California regulations were briefed on the new deal at the end of the negotiations. The manufacturers said they are committed to switching to big rigs that produce no emissions, and they touted provisions to harmonize California rules with a recent proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency to limit nitrogen oxide emissions.

The industry for years has tried to make the rules set in Washington and Sacramento as near-identical as possible. That includes a 2019 deal the California Air Resources Board struck with several makers of passenger cars to meet stricter state rules, undercutting a Trump administration plan to relax federal gas-mileage standards.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Government Deficit Spending Is Not the Problem: Lack of Labor and Physical Resources Is

by John Lawrence

Since the US dollar is a sovereign fiat currency, the US can never run out of dollars. The debt ceiling is a totally artificial limit which results in the US hoisting itself on its own pitard. According to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as espoused in The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, the only limit on government spending is inflation, and inflation is concerned with the amount and nature of resources available to soak up the money injected into the economic system by the government. According to this theory it makes sense that a lack of labor resources could lead to inflation. Consider that right now there is a shortage of air traffic controllers, and this is leading to a cancellation of flights. If there were more air traffic controllers available, the number of flights could be increased, and more economic activity would ensue. The constraint on flights available because of the lack of air traffic controllers leads to inflation because the money charged for each available flight can be increased. Essentially there is a bidding war for the available flights. If any resource including natural resources like steel and cement is not sufficient for the demand for those resources, then the price of those resources will increase leading to inflation. Right now in the US labor is becoming a scarce resource especially labor of the type necessary in the essential economy, that is the economy of goods and services necessary for the continuation and enhancement of everyday life. As more labor is developed for essentially useless services like the entertainment and social media industries, plumbers, electricians and carpenters are not available for useful services, and, therefore, the cost of those services increases.

Which brings us to Biden's Inflation Reduction Act which allocates $370 billion to rebuild infrastructure and fight climate change. These are all necessary and vital goals, but the question should be asked are the resources for this amount of spending sufficient or will this spending be inflationary. To put it more succinctly is the blue collar labor sufficient for the job? If not, the price of labor will be bid up and the spending will be inflationary. More and more these days students are encouraged to go to college where they end up after graduation working for Wall Street or hedge funds or in the entertainment/social media industry. They are not encouraged to go to vocational technical schools to become carpenters, plumbers and electricians. So they go into industries which are not essential to the real economy. There are shortages of labor for the real economy everywhere we look. In order to overcome these shortages, it would be necessary to step up legal immigration since immigrants by and large fill the jobs Americans don't want to do, and by and large Americans don't want to perform any kind of the less glamorous and remunerative type of labor necessary for production in the real economy. Also outsourcing has made it unnecessary for Americans to perform labor in the real economy. We rely either on immigrants or foreign workers for that.

The next thing is that all this infrastructure rebuilding is going to contribute to global warming as well as reducing it. Rebuilding all the bridges of America will require large amounts of steel and cement. Steel and cement production produce large amounts of carbon dioxide which is emitted into the atmosphere. The International Energy Agency estimates that direct CO² emissions due to crude steel production is approximately 1.4 tons of CO² per ton of steel produced. The cement industry is responsible for about 8% of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions — far more than global carbon emissions from aviation. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, after the U.S. and China. So rebuilding America's infrastructure will contribute to global warming while at the same time attempting to reduce global warming. The fact is that alternatives to steel and cement which do not produce greenhouse gasses are not available. Research on these topics needs to be stepped up. But more research in areas like artificial intelligence, of the kind which has no use in the amelioration of global warming, takes place while productive research into materials to replace steel and cement languishes. Also while more electric vehicles are being produced, the electric energy to power these vehicles is coming from power plants that still use fossil fuels to produce it. One form of greenhouse gas production is being traded for another. Nothing is gained unless all energy generating power plants are using renewable and non carbon dioxide producing fuels.

The problem is that limited resources both in terms of labor and physical resources will hamper efforts both in repairing American infrastructure and building infrastructure which reduces the amount of greenhouse gas production. Stephanie Kelton writes: "That's why MMT recommends a different approach to the federal budgeting process, one that integrates inflation risk into the decision making process so that lawmakers are forced to stop and think about whether they have taken the necessary steps to guard against inflation risk before approving any new spending. MMT would make us safer in this respect because it recognizes that the best defense against inflation is a good offense. We don't want to allow excessive spending to cause inflation and then fight inflation after it happens. We want agencies like the CBO helping to evaluate new legislation for potential inflation risk before Congress commits to funding new programs so that the risks can be mitigated preemptively. At its core  MMT is about replacing an artificial (revenue) constraint with a real (inflation) restraint." The artificial revenue constraint is the debt ceiling!

In the above passage the words "inflation risk" could also be replaced with "greenhouse gas emission risk." The CBO should evaluate both kinds of risks. So as the economy becomes more electrified in terms of electric cars and buildings, we need to think about the fact that the electricity generated by these increased demands needs to come from non carbon dioxide emitting sources. Also substitutes must be found quickly - in other words research needs to be stepped up - to find substitutes for steel and cement. To boot, non polluting energy sources must be found for ships and planes. Both human and physical natural resources must be taken into account. Have all these things been thought through?

Off the Top of My Head

Elon's Folly Contributing to Rocket Fuel Greenhouse Gas Emissions

by John Lawrence

The Starship that exploded soon after launch recently had a methane based fuel. Methane is 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Whatever methane remained in the Starship after launch was fully released into the atmosphere after it exploded. Space tourism will cause even more greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere. At a time when we should have all hands on deck to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, NASA is going full steam ahead with its space exploration program. The astronauts should be repurposed to fight greenhouse gas emissions not to ramp them up. In an article by Mark Piesing for the BBC, titled The pollution caused by rocket launches we find:

In television, and film, spaceflight is usually represented as having little or no impact on the environment. Yet it should be obvious that rocket engines spew out pollution into the atmosphere, like any form of combustion-driven propulsion.

Perhaps the black carbon, or soot, and other emissions didn't matter when only around 70 commercial rocket launches a year took place. Now that number has doubled; it is expected to increase significantly more over the next two decades due to the growth in demand for services like satellite internet services and space tourism.

At least three scientific research papers have already been published this year [2022] on the impact of rocket emissions on the atmosphere, temperatures, and the ozone layer.

So at a time when planet earth is in peril of remaining a habitable planet for the human species, why are we continuing a quest to fire off rocket ships so we can some day put humans on Mars, an uninhabitable planet? It seems like pure folly. By the time they get humans on Mars, the earth will have become an uninhabitable planet also at the rate we're going. The US government should not be contributing to global warming with its space program at a time when it is professing to be curtailing global warming. If we are to save this planet, much more needs to be done than simply making all cars electric by 2050. Many more power plants will have to be built by then to generate the electricity to power all those electric cars. What kind of fuel will they use for all these new power plants? If they don't have enough renewables by then, it will have to be fossil fuels so what has been gained? Nothing.

People have totally compartmentalized the global warming syndrome. On the one hand they are for eliminating fossil fuels. On the other they go ahead with all sorts of activities that increase their use because alternative green forms of energy are not yet available. I guess it's OK to sacrifice a few neighborhoods to tornadoes here and there as long as we can keep the economy humming. We must not sacrifice the American way of life. Too many people might get upset and vote for the other party. Similarly, we can't restrict assault rifles because too many people would get upset and vote for the other party. So Joe Biden is the perfect President for our times. He understands that he can rub his belly and whistle Dixie at the same time. However, the pace of change in energy creation is much too slow even to counteract the population increases. More people on the planet means more demand for energy, and the fossil fuel industry is only too happy to provide it until renewables can totally take over some time in the future, some time that will be too late for a desperate human species.

Off the Top of My Head

Will Renewable Energy Be Sufficient to Stave Off Global Warming?

by John Lawrence

More than a third of the world's energy will come from renewables by 2025. The International Energy Agency says electricity demand is forecast to grow by 3% a year over the next three years compared to 2022. So in 10 years demand will be 30% higher than it was in 2022 Meanwhile, renewable energy generation is increasing about 10% a year. In 10 years renewables will be producing 100% of the energy demand as of today, but, since demand will be 30% higher than today, that leaves about 30% of demand still to be fulfilled by fossil fuels. But electricity generation is not the only source of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Steel and cement production also releases greenhouse gasses. Agriculture, especially cattle farming, releases large amounts of greenhouse gasses. Virtually every aspect of production and consumption releases greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. To reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses, the world's population needs to go to a plant based diet and get away from the demand for meat, especially beef. Substitutes in building materials need to be found for steel and cement. Otherwise the demand for fossil fuels will never go away. Airplanes and container ships release a lot of greenhouse gasses. Might we have nuclear powered container ships in the future? Will there be a substitute for jet fuel?

Meanwhile, the release of greenhouse gasses is increasing. NBC News reported on March 2, 2023:

"Communities around the world emitted more carbon dioxide in 2022 than in any other year on records dating to 1900, a result of air travel rebounding from the pandemic and more cities turning to coal as a low-cost source of power.

"Emissions of the climate-warming gas that were caused by energy production grew 0.9% to reach 36.8 gigatons in 2022, the International Energy Agency reported Thursday. (The mass of one gigaton is equivalent to about 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, according to NASA.)"

World society needs to make an all out immediate effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, something it's definitely not doing. Instead the human race is preoccupied with war and preparations for war. It is also business as usual for production and consumption especially in the western industrialized societies. There needs to be an immediate cessation of consumption at the level that western societies are used to consuming, but that would bring about an immediate recession in the US whose economy is based 70% on consumption. It seems problematic to suggest that building materials should henceforth be of the kind used in medieval Europe, namely stone which was used to build the great cathedrals. Also earth based materials like adobe would not contribute to greenhouse gas emissions at the same levels that concrete and steel buildings do, not even to mention concrete roads and freeways. It seems all modern methods of production and consumption are based either on fossil fuels or carbon dioxide emissions from steel and cement production. Plastics which are based on fossil fuels need to be immediately replaced with other materials like glass and paper products. Even the wind turbines that produce renewable energy are made almost entirely of steel which generates huge amounts of greenhouse gas. Why couldn't a wind turbine be made of stone except for the moving parts?

Suffice it to say that, when you look at the entire picture, it is not enough just to go to renewable sources for electricity production. For sure that's one component in terms of automobile travel and electricity usage for homes and businesses, but until the problems associated with airplane and ship travel are solved and the problems associated with steel and cement production are solved, we will never reduce the levels of greenhouse gasses being spewed into the atmosphere enough to prevent climate catastrophe. We are moving at a snail's pace when an all out immediate effort is needed.

World is on Brink of Catastrophic Warming, U.N. Climate Change Report Says

A dangerous climate threshold is near, but ‘it does not mean we are doomed’ if swift action is taken, scientists say

By Sarah Kaplan

Updated March 20, 2023 at 5:33 p.m. EDT|Published March 20, 2023 at 9:01 a.m. EDT, from the Washington Post

 

A Chinese state-owned coal-fired power plant under construction in 2017 in Huainan, Anhui province, China. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

The world is likely to pass a dangerous temperature threshold within the next 10 years, pushing the planet past the point of catastrophic warming — unless nations drastically transform their economies and immediately transition away from fossil fuels, according to one of the most definitive reports ever published about climate change.

The report released Monday by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the world is likely to surpass its most ambitious climate target — limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — by the early 2030s.

Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end.

Human activities have already transformed the planet at a pace and scale unmatched in recorded history, the IPCC said, causing irreversible damage to communities and ecosystems. Yet global emissions continue to rise, and current carbon-cutting efforts are wildly insufficient to ward off climate catastrophe.

Monday’s assessment synthesizes years of studies on the causes and consequences of rising temperatures, leading U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to demand that developed countries such as the United States eliminate carbon emissions by 2040 — a decade earlier than the rest of the world.

With few nations on track to fulfill their climate commitments and with the developing world already suffering disproportionately from climate disasters, he said, rich countries have a responsibility to act faster than their low-income counterparts.

The IPCC report shows humanity has reached a “critical moment in history,” IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said. The world has all the knowledge, tools and financial resources needed to achieve its climate goals, but after decades of disregarding scientific warnings and delaying climate efforts, the window for action is rapidly closing.

Calling the report a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb,” Guterres announced on Monday an “acceleration agenda” that would speed up global actions on climate.

Emerging economies including China and India — which plan to reach net zero in 2060 and 2070, respectively — must hasten their emissions-cutting efforts alongside developed nations, Guterres said.

Both the U.N. chief and the IPCC also called for the world to phase out coal, oil and gas, which are responsible for more than three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“This report offers hope, and it provides a warning,” Lee told reporters Monday. “The choices we make now and in the next few years will reverberate around the world for hundreds, even thousands, of years.”

A stark scientific outlook

Already, the IPCC’s synthesis report shows, humanity has fundamentally and irreversibly transformed the Earth system. Emissions from burning fossil fuels and other planet-warming activities have increased global average temperatures by at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the industrial era. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hasn’t been this high since archaic humans carved the first stone tools.

These changes have caused irrevocable damage to communities and ecosystems, evidence shows: Fish populations are dwindling, farms are less productive, infectious diseases have multiplied, and weather disasters are escalating to unheard-of extremes. The risks from this relatively low level of warming are turning out to be greater than scientists anticipated — not because of any flaw in their research, but because human-built infrastructure, social networks and economic systems have proved exceptionally vulnerable to even small amounts of climate change, the report said.

The suffering is worst in the world’s poorest countries and low-lying island nations, which are home to roughly 1 billion people yet account for less than 1 percent of humanity’s total planet-warming pollution, the report says. But as climate disruption increases with rising temperatures, not even the wealthiest and most well-protected places will be immune.

Homes in Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province were inundated in August. (Zahid Hussain/AP)

In 2018, the IPCC found that a 1.5C world would be overwhelmingly safer than one that is 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the preindustrial era. At the time, scientists said humanity would have to zero out carbon emissions by 2050 to meet the 1.5-degree target and by 2070 to avoid warming beyond 2 degrees.

Five years later, humanity isn’t anywhere close to reaching either goal. Unless nations adopt new environmental policies — and follow through on the ones already in place — global average temperatures could warm by 3.2 degrees Celsius (5.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, the synthesis report says. In that scenario, a child born today would live to see several feet of sea level rise, the extinction of hundreds of species and the migration of millions of people from places where they can no longer survive.

“We are not doing enough, and the poor and vulnerable are bearing the brunt of our collective failure to act,” said Madeleine Diouf Sarr, Senegal’s top climate official and the chair for a group of least-developed countries that negotiate together at the United Nations.

She pointed to the damage wrought by Cyclone Freddy, the longest-lasting and most energetic tropical storm on record, which has killed hundreds of people and displaced thousands more after bombarding southern Africa and Madagascar for more than a month. The report shows that higher temperatures make storms more powerful and sea level rise makes flooding from these storms more intense. Meanwhile, the report says, the death toll from these kinds of disasters is 15 times as high in vulnerable nations as it is in wealthier parts of the world.

If the world stays on its current warming track, the IPCC says, global flood damage will be as much as four times as high as it will be if people limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.

“The world cannot ignore the human cost of inaction,” Sarr said.

Off the Top of My Head

Let's All Go Plant Some Trees

by John Lawrence

"Let's Go Fly a Kite" is a song from the1964 film, Mary Poppins, sung by George Banks when he realizes his family is more important than his job. Now the planet earth's survivability trumps even that concern so "let's go plant some trees" should be our new motto. China designated March 12 as National Tree Planting Day in 1979. The National People's Congress, China's top legislature, launched a nationwide voluntary tree-planting campaign in 1981, stipulating that every able-bodied citizen above 11 should plant three to five trees each year. Why not join China in a good natured spirit of saving earth by planting more trees? God in heaven, should this even be controversial? The narrative is that China and the US are big rivals and the best we can do is "compete" with each other. No one in a position of power is suggesting, God forbid, that we should cooperate with each other not even to save the planet from the ravages of global warming that we're already starting to experience. It just goes to show the sickness and the sorriness of the human race when peoples and countries cannot cooperate not even to prevent Mutually Assured Destruction which is the outcome for the human species and many other species if we don't get a handle on global warming. Instead we have global warmongering.

At the World Economic Forum in May 2022:

During his speech at the Forum’s 2022 Annual Meeting in Davos, Xie Zhenhua said: ‘China's forest cover and forest stock volume have been growing in the last 30 years, and China accounts for more than 25% of the world's new green areas. China responds actively to contribute to the 1t.org initiative from the World Economic Forum, and I am announcing here that China aims to plant and conserve 70 billion trees within 10 years to green our planet, combat climate change, and increase forest carbon sinks.’

 

In support of this bold contribution, Chairman Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum said:

‘We appreciate China’s effort in supporting the 1t.org initiative of the World Economic Forum and relevant UN initiatives, we highly appreciate China’s practices upholding relative international commitment such as the Paris Agreement and Biodiversity target through Nature-Based Solutions.’

If the 1.4 billion people of China each plant 3 trees a year, that's 4.2 billion tree planted per year or 42 billion trees planted per decade. If the 332 million people of the US took the same pledge to each plant 3 trees a year, that's approximately another billion trees per year or 10 billion trees per decade. Trees are a carbon sink. They extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It is the natural way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, consequently, the harmful effects of global warming. So why isn't there an effort in the US to emulate China in this regard? Shouldn't there be a shared interest here? What if the entire 8 billion people populating planet Earth committed to planting 3 trees a year. A single mature tree can absorb 22 lbs. of carbon a year, and makes enough clean oxygen for 4 people to breathe fresh air. A previous special report by IPCC stated that tree-planting could sequester around 1.1–1.6 GT of CO2 per year. A GT is one billion tons. Approximately 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere every year. Clearly, a lot of trees need to be planted to balance carbon dioxide emissions and sequester 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, but every tree helps. We can reduce the tonnage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere one tree at a time.

So let's join China this March 12 and declare a worldwide national tree planting day or just a global tree planting day in the spirit of cooperation among nations to create peace and save our planet from Mutually Assured Destruction which is the path we are on.

Off the Top of My Head

A 500 Year Event, Gov. DeSantis, or a Once a Year Occurrence?

by John Lawrence

Gov. DeSantis has said repeatedly, "This is a 500 year event" as if once we get the damage cleaned up from Hurricane Ian, we can relax because this kind of devastation won't happen again for another 500 years. I've got news for you, Gov. Desantis. An event like Ian will probably happen again within 5 years, and it will be even worse as the Caribbean warms more making hurricanes even more ferocious. Floridians experienced the deadly, devastating consequences of back-to-back major hurricanes—Irma in 2017 and Michael in 2018—along with near-misses by Matthew in 2016 and Dorian in 2019. They don't sound like 500 year events to me. Let's be honest with each other, Gov. DeSantis. The wreckage from Ian won't even be fully cleaned up before the next major hurricane hits Florida. Thank God, DeSantis is not a climate change denier. However, he is not given high marks for taking action to mitigate the effects of climate change. “I am not in the pews of the church of the global warming leftists,” DeSantis told reporters at one 2018 campaign stop. “I am not a global warming person. I don’t want that label on me.” Forget about labels, Gov. DeSantis, you have a major problem on your hands. You better get down on your knees and start worshiping at the church of climate change.

Inside Climate News reports:

"Florida’s climate challenges are among the biggest in the country. Beyond those related to hurricanes intensified by climate change, they include sea level rise, extreme heat, drought and increasing health threats from mosquito-borne diseases. Florida is the most hurricane-prone state, and hurricanes are not only getting more powerful, they are bringing much more rainfall. 

Sunny day flooding is a regular occurrence in some communities because of sea level rise. Some face several feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. 

By its own numbers, the DeSantis administration predicts that with sea level rise, $26 billion in residential property statewide will be at risk of chronic flooding by 2045."

OK, Ian will probably result in more than $26 billion to clean up, and that's not "by 2045". That's this year - 2022. As insurance companies refuse to insure Florida residential property, Florida residents better hope that the Federal government takes up the slack. By the way that's the Federal government that this Republican state tells to stay out of its business. It's always about states' rights until there's some disaster. Then they come running to the Federal government for help. Private flood insurance will soon be a thing of the past. Nearly 80,000 Florida homeowners will have to find new insurance, after Southern Fidelity declared bankruptcy. The Tallahassee based company is the fourth insurer to declare insolvency recently.

The hardest hit by Ian, of course, were retirees and poor people living in mobile homes. Mobile homes should be outlawed in most parts of Florida. They cannot withstand the powerful hurricanes that are only going to get more powerful as climate change accelerates. Even structurally sound homes will still suffer from water damage and the loss of services like power, water, cell phone towers and more. There will be more water damage from storm surges and fresh water flooding as major storms drop 24 inches or more of water on neighborhoods. All utilities need to be undergrounded, or they will be on the ground more than they will be functional. It will be a full time job just getting water, power, sewer and communications back online, not to mention getting roads cleared of debris and rebuilding bridges and washed out roads. Massive climate disasters are only going to get worse, and we're still putting about 34 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. There's no way that we can survive without a full on effort by all countries of the world to get off fossil fuels ASAP. Yet countries of the world continue to fight, bicker and compete with each other instead of COOPERATING.

Off the Top of My Head

We Need a Department of Peace to Balance and Offset our War Department

by John Lawrence

Let's face it. the Department of Defense is a euphemism. It was called the Department of War until 1949. So let's call it what it really is. Don't get me wrong. There are times when war is necessary as occurred in WW II. However, we spend about $1 trillion on our War Department while spending little or nothing on peace. Is there really a Peace Corps? Yes, and its budget is about $400 million. That's about 4 ten thousandths of the War Department budget. My point is that we should be making at least the same effort towards peace as we're making towards war, and we should be putting our money where our mouth is. This doesn't mean we totally disarm ourselves. It means that we are making an effort towards creating peace in the world if at all possible and are willing to devote an equal amount of resources towards it. In our present state it's all about threatening war in order to to create a state of peace. It's Pax Americana similar to the Pax Romana which meant that you didn't mess with Rome or else you were threatened with violence. Instead of creating peace by means of a threat of war, we should be actively pursuing a peaceful world instead.

What would a Department of Peace actually do? Well, diplomacy would be under this department instead of the State Department for starters. Second, the American equivalent of China's Belt and Road initiative. Building infrastructure around the world just as China is doing. But what's most important at the present time is converting the world to green infrastructure. The middle class in India is growing. They want to live just like Americans. As more Indians enter the middle class they are consuming more fossil fuels to provide the energy to do so. This is contributing to the looming climate disaster. Just what we don't need is more carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere as a result of more people gentrifying into the middle class. Therefore, a Department of Peace, which should include the Peace Corps, would step up the efforts not only to change the fossil fuel habit in the US, but to actively change it around the world. About a half a trillion dollar budget would be about right while decreasing the War (Defense) budget which is 10 times the combined budgets of the rest of the world to half a trillion.

President Biden wants a Civilian Climate Corps reminiscent of the Civilian Conservation Corps which President Roosevelt established to build parks and plant trees during the Great Depression. An excellent idea in view of the fact that planting a trillion trees would suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Unless we do that there is already enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 410 ppm to melt both poles. Why not require participation in the Civilian Conservation Corps for people receiving welfare benefits who aren't otherwise employed or who are unemployable in the prevailing economy. I'm thinking about the homeless and others for whom this might be a first step to getting back on their feet in the so-called real world. I'm in favor of the government being the employer of last resort, and employment in a Civilian Climate Corps is the perfect solution both for them and for the environment.

Building the elements of peace around the world would entail looking out for the health care needs of people outside the US in our era of pandemics. This is also good sense in a selfish way since viruses can transmit world wide in a matter of days if not hours. They don't respect national boundaries. People to people cultural contacts with people of other nations brings about understanding and the realization that, no matter what the religious or ethnic differences seem to be, human beings are all essentially the same deep down and all have the same needs and aspirations. Helping others to realize their aspirations creates peace in the world. Cultural and educational exchanges are an important way to increase mutual understanding. There are many ways to create peace in the world. The US shouldn't be always taking the stance of trying to put down those peoples and countries who don't follow the US way of life. Others might have a different way of setting up their societies, but rather than taking this as a threat, we should engage diplomatically and peacefully if at all possible knowing that in the final analysis, if push came to shove, we also have the means to defend ourselves. A Department of Peace and a Department of War should go hand in hand. Today it is lopsided in favor of war.

Off the Top of My Head

"A Yearlong Wild Goose Chase That Produced Nothing as the Earth Warms to Dangerous Levels"

by John Lawrence

That's how the New York Times characterized the Biden administration's courting of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. He and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema are the 2 Democrats standing in the way of the significant Biden plan to do something about global warming. Of course no Republican Senator will do anything to help even though it's their planet too. Now the Supreme Court has chimed in to the effect that the EPA is not able to do anything either. Meanwhile earth is burning up. I regretted in another post that all the climate disasters so far have been one offs, and nothing would be done about climate change until one event affects at least half the country. Not enough people care if a tornado wipes out a whole city or a whole town burns in a wild fire. But when a climate event affects half the country, people sit up and take notice. In other words enough people have to have their own personal ox gored before anything significant will get done. Now we have that event. This summer's heat has seen temperatures above 100 degrees F affect more than half the country simultaneously. Despite the misery this is causing, I am cheering because this is not a one off affecting a relative minority of people. People will sit up and take notice.

The NY Times reported:

Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who took more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry than any other senator, and who became a millionaire from his family coal business, independently blew up the Democratic Party’s legislative plans to fight climate change. The swing Democratic vote in an evenly divided Senate, Mr. Manchin led his party through months of tortured negotiations that collapsed on Thursday night, a yearlong wild goose chase that produced nothing as the Earth warms to dangerous levels.

“It seems odd that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity,” said John Podesta, a former senior counselor to President Barack Obama and founder of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Privately, Senate Democratic staff members seethed and sobbed on Thursday night, after more than a year of working nights and weekends to scale back, water down, trim and tailor the climate legislation to Mr. Manchin’s exact specifications, only to have it rejected inches from the finish line.

But alas and alack, Mancin has seized on inflation as the perfect excuse to justify his torpedoing of Biden's climate plan. The war in Ukraine which resulted in raising gas prices hasn't helped either. Yet there are things that could be done which would not exacerbate inflation. To subdue inflation, money has to be extracted from the economy. One way to do this is to increase taxes on the rich, something that was part of Biden's plan. But rich man Manchin says No Sir to that aspect. He's not going to put the kibosh on the very industry that made him rich and that would be coal mining. So what would Biden's plan consist of? Giving tax incentives to get more electric vehicles on the road and transformations of key industries to rely more on renewable energy. Sounds pretty basic, doesn't it? The climate problem is like a ship taking on water. If you wait to start bailing long enough no amount of fast and furious bailing is going to save the ship from sinking.

The Washington Post reported that if we had stuck with Biden's plan and it had passed Congress, we might have just about reached our climate goal to slash U.S. emissions by 50 to 52 percent by the end of 2030 which would have maintained consistency with 2015’s Paris climate agreement, in which nations agreed to take significant measures to avoid the levels of global warming associated with severe climate impact. It would have kept total planetary warming to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. This level of warming would still have produced unimaginable levels of global distress. Anything beyond that would create hell on earth.

In the documentary Polar Extremes, it is pointed out that at 410 ppm of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, there is already enough to melt ice completely at both poles. If this happens sea levels would rise over 200 feet wiping out about 80 miles of US shoreline on the east coast as well as the entire state of Florida. So it is not enough to stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which of course we're still doing. A huge amount would have to be taken out to bring the atmospheric concentration down to about 300 ppm, the level at which polar ice can be maintained. Even at 350 ppm scientific data shows that in previous geological eras polar ice had entirely disappeared. Technological solutions to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere so far have entirely failed or been cost prohibitive. The only natural solution is to plant 1 to 3 trillion trees. This is entirely feasible if we would only collectively get off our asses and do it. But we dither and hesitate, and we're fiddling while earth burns.

One very intelligent observer of the climate scene is Fareed Zakaria. Fareed has some good ideas about what should be done to alleviate the worst consequences of climate disaster. He wrote in the Washington Post:

"“It was getting hotter.” So opens “The Ministry for the Future,” the disturbing novel by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The opening chapter, set in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, depicts a heat wave that kills millions across the subcontinent and galvanizes people to radical action.

"Such dire warnings may seem far-fetched today. But the heat waves we are now experiencing are going to get worse. That, of course, will have dire consequences. More likely than mass death is mass migration. As Bill Gates points out, the area around the equator could become too hot for people to work outdoors; that could mean a decline in farming, the most common occupation in low-income countries. Stressed by heat, lack of water and no jobs, millions of people could start moving from these areas to more temperate climates mostly in the north: Europe and the United States.

"Many climate activists are often focused on pledges to get to net zero emissions by some distant date or insist that every new energy source must be entirely green.

"But the reality is that we need to cut emissions now, not promise to do so by 2030. And the only way to do it now, and at scale, is to make some tough choices and trade-offs. We do not have green technology, like clean nuclear fusion and long-duration battery storage, that can fully replace fossil fuels today. We may get them — in 10 or 15 years, perhaps, if we are very lucky. ...

'Let me suggest a few practical ways to make progress in the next five years with technologies we already have.

"We could start by converting the most polluting coal-fired power plants to natural gas, which emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal when combusted. A study surveyed 29,000 power plants around the world and found that 5 percent generate 73 percent of all emissions in the electricity-generation sector. In other words, replacing around 1,500 coal-burning plants would make a huge dent in emissions, a giant cut on par with the boldest plans being discussed today.If the West wants to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, why not put together a coalition that would finance this effort across the planet?

"Then there is the problem of methane leakage from natural gas extraction, agriculture and landfills. This can be solved technically and just needs smart, tough regulations.

"We should extend the life of nuclear power plants and start building smaller and safer ones. Nuclear energy evokes grim images, but the facts speak for themselves. In the 21st century, just a handful of people have died from nuclear accidents around the world, while more than 1,500 people died in oil and gas extraction in the United States alone from 2008 to 2017. Far more people die each year from lung diseases caused by coal pollution, with some estimates running into the millions — and that’s without even factoring in the climate impacts. We should also keep working on developing new modular reactors that have much safer designs and are far less likely to have the same kind of meltdown problems that others have had in the past. And let me remind you, nuclear power plants produce nearly zero emissions.

"Plant 1 trillion trees. The science is simple: Trees absorb carbon dioxide. We are all impressed by Greta Thunberg, but what about Felix Finkbeiner? He’s a young German environmentalist who, at the age of 9, proposed that every country commit to planting 1 million trees and then, at 13, upped the ante and suggested at the United Nations that we target 1 trillion by 2050. Let’s start by curbing deforestation and planting as many trees as we can, as fast as we can."

It is something so simple and natural that it will probably be entirely ignored by the powers that be and the global citizenry. Plant 1 trillion trees or 2 trillion or 3 trillion. It would be a sad outcome for the human race if we neglected to do such a simple thing that would have saved the planet for future generations but instead sat around prognosticating about how to provide a high tech solution. Maybe Ted Kaczynski was right. "In his Manifesto he wrote: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." "He writes that technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling, and has caused widespread psychological suffering. Kaczynski argues that most people spend their time engaged in useless pursuits because of technological advances; he calls these "surrogate activities", wherein people strive toward artificial goals, including scientific work, consumption of entertainment, political activism and following sports teams." Yes, the Industrial Revolution has been a disaster for the human race, and Kaczynski did not even mention fossil fuels or global warming. Prescient!

Off the Top of My Head

The Problem With Climate and Gun Disasters: They're One Offs

by John Lawrence

Instead of attributing a climate disaster to global warming, victims will say, "I've never seen anything like this, and I've lived here all my life. Gun disaster victims will say, "I didn't think it could ever happen here." If they said instead, when interviewed, "I think guns should be gotten off the streets" or "Climate change destroyed my house and we're not doing enough to deal with it", then maybe there would be a general awareness growing among the population. There is not enough of a groundswell among the public to change anything because most of the public is not affected by any particular incident. If a particular climate or gun disaster raised the price of gas, then maybe something would be done of a preventative measure. The latest gun legislation is a total joke. It will do nothing to prevent mass shootings. One off climate disasters will do nothing to raise the national consciousness especially among conservatives who don't even believe in global warming. Instead they will call a flood a 500 year event, one that will only occur every 500 years. But then it occurs again tomorrow. Floods and fires are an almost daily occurrence somewhere in the world. If they happen outside the country, no attention at all is paid to the event although climate change is a problem for the whole world not just for any particular nation. It is not just restricted to national borders. Gun violence, on the other hand, is just restricted pretty much to the US. Every other country has sane gun laws.

Politicians, especially Republicans, are in it for the money and not necessarily to do any good for the general public which can't pay for lobbyists to bombard them with their point of view backed up with generous campaign contributions. The more a country is run by politicians profiting by virtue of their positions, the less democratic it is because they are representing their own interests which often means catering to the interests of lobbyists and not catering to the interests of the general public, not to mention the interests of nature or the environment. Many politicians, especially the Republican party as it's constituted today, are guided only by self interest in the same way as corporations are required by law to maximize profits for their shareholders singlemindedly without any other considerations like taking into account what is equitable ao far as society is concerned. The only way to defeat this pernicious aspect of democracy is to take the money out of politics and provide incentives in such a way that a politician finds it in his best interests to represent the interests of his or her constituents and not the interests of the entity which is lobbying him or her. Perhaps an advocate for the people should be paid for out of tax money.

Obviously, it's not in the interests of the victims of gum violence to have the proliferation of guns especially assault rifles on the streets. However, since those that have not been affected by gun violence don't see it as a problem, nothing major is being done. As far as they're concerned, it's a problem that only happens to other people. Unless they identify strongly with the victims of gun violence or start to think that it is something that very likely might happen to them, nothing will be done since it only affects a minority of people and democracies supposedly are run by the majority of the people. Since empathy is a relatively weak emotion compared to self-interest, especially in the US where people have been groomed to seek their self-interest regardless of the effect it has on others, seriously restricting the use and proliferation of guns goes out the window.

What is happening to the human race as a result of climate change is happening at such a slow pace that most people would rather maximize their profits now rather than setting aside some of them because they might benefit people in the future when they might not even be an inhabitant of the planet at that time. Again the manifestation of climate change so far has been one offs only affecting a small group in any one incidence of a natural disaster. When climate change gets to the point where sea level rise is affecting a large number of major cities in the world simultaneously, then something might be done only it will be too late. At that point the only thing will be to react defensively rather than having taken action in the past that would have forestalled the present event. People would rather eat their cake right now rather than saving it for the future when they might not even be around to eat it.

Off the Top of My Head

Sea Levels to Rise by 200 Feet if Poles Melt

by John Lawrence

Based on 410 ppm which is the concentration of carbon dioxide right now in the atmosphere, the ice on the poles will go completely away albeit at a glacial pace. Concentrations of carbon dioxide have varied between 100 ppm and 300 ppm for hundreds of millions of years, and earth has gone through hot periods in which there was no polar ice and at least one period where the entire earth was encased in ice. Reliable predictions by scientists show that 410 ppm will guarantee the disappearance of ice from the poles and a 200 foot sea level rise which will wipe out most of the east coast including a total disappearance of the state of Florida. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is continuing to increase. It will continue to increase way above the current 410 ppm. Humans are still pouring billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere year after year. There has been no diminution of this trend. In fact it is accelerating. The world emits about 43 billion tons of CO2 a year. So already there is enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to guarantee that the poles will melt, and the earth will become very hot. And we're still making it worse year after year.

As the oceans warm and the polar ice melts, we are seeing more extreme weather events due to increased water evaporation from the oceans. That increased amount of water in the atmosphere is released in the form of torrential downpours which cause flooding and weather events such as hurricanes. Higher temperatures are also causing droughts and forest fires. Although these events are tragedies for those directly affected, geological history has shown that life can adapt. One of the first major catastrophes the human race will be faced with is the loss of major cities situated close to oceans such as New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Miami and New Orleans. However, humans can adapt to this by just moving further back from the shore lines as sea levels rise wiping out most low lying areas. Of course this will increase anti-immigrant sentiment due to the the number or refugees in the world as humans crowd onto remaining habitable areas. At this stage we will still be better off than Venus which has a runaway greenhouse gas effect and a surface air temperature of 800 degrees F. Its atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide.

The lesson here is that it is to the advantage of the human race to stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as quickly as possible. This means major changes to our civilization which human beings are reluctant to make especially in democracies which are governed by the will of the people. While most will give lip service to preserving the planet for future generations, in fact they don't want to do anything that will change their lifestyles or inconvenience themselves in any way. Only when war and pestilence force humans to diminish their numbers on the planet will the human footprint get down to a certain size which, along with the adoption of renewable energy systems, will allow the planet to sustain enough habitable land mass for the furtherance of human life at least for some people. How fast we proceed with changing the human ecosystem in terms of greenhouse gas reduction will determine what kind of a planet future generations will be forced to live on. At the very least it will resemble a hot house earth, similar to conditions which existed millennia ago in which the polar regions were tropical swamps.

Off the Top of My Head

What Mass Shootings and Global Warming Have in Common

by John Lawrence

Even if sales of AK-15s were banned today, there would still be enough AK-15s on the streets for mass shootings to continue for decades. Even if no more carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere starting today, there is enough already there to provide weather disasters for decades. Meanwhile, gun sales and carbon dioxide generation are continuing apace. There will be no diminution of gun violence nor will there be any diminution of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. If there were zero gun sales tomorrow and zero carbon dioxide generation tomorrow, there might be a chance for recovery from both travesties, but, no, those travesties will continue along predictable lines. There will be even more mass shootings and assorted other gun violence while gas powered vehicles and power generating plants will continue to pump out carbon dioxide using the atmosphere as a waste dump. Plastic will continue to pollute the oceans. Chemical fertilizer and pest control chemicals will continue to pollute waterways. People pursuing the American Dream will continue consuming products to the point of commercial gluttony and beyond.

The production of steel and cement produces large amounts of carbon dioxide that goes directly into the atmosphere. It's a matter of sheer chemistry. Steelmaking is one of the most carbon emission intensive industries in the world. As of 2020, steelmaking is estimated to be responsible for 7 to 9 per cent of all direct fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions. In order to mitigate global warming, the industry will need to find reductions in emissions. In 2020, McKinsey identified a number of technologies for decarbonization including hydrogen usage, carbon capture and reuse, and maximizing use of electric arc furnaces powered by clean energy. A Swedish company has developed a way of making carbon dioxide emission free steel. The Guardian reported:

The world’s first customer delivery of “green steel” produced without using coal is taking place in Sweden, according to its manufacturer.

The Swedish venture Hybrit said it was delivering the steel to truck-maker Volvo AB as a trial run before full commercial production in 2026. Volvo has said it will start production in 2021 of prototype vehicles and components from the green steel.

Steel production using coal accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hybrit started test operations at its pilot plant for green steel in Lulea, northern Sweden, a year ago. It aims to replace coking coal, traditionally needed for ore-based steel making, with renewable electricity and hydrogen. Hydrogen is a key part of the EU’s plan to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

So the chemistry is being changed so that water H₂O is produced as a by product instead of carbon dioxide, CO².

CNBC reported:

Cars and electricity get a lot of attention in conversations about decarbonization, and they should. But building materials like cement and steel also need to be scrutinized.

The production of cement is responsible for about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions and 5.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.

On [April 28, 2022], Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates’ climate finance firm, and DCVC, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, announced they led a $55 million funding round in Brimstone Energy, a start-up aiming to commercialize carbon-negative cement.

“We need to recognize that cement is a massive problem for climate and that nobody has figured out how to address it at scale without dramatically increasing costs or moving away from the regulated materials that the construction industry knows and loves,” Breakthrough partner Carmichael Roberts told CNBC.

So it is not enough to get gas guzzlers off the roads. Gas prices going up is a good thing. It will guarantee that more new car purchases will be hybrid or all electric vehicles. But the world is not changing over to non-polluting forms of energy quick enough. Major climate related disasters are already occurring and will continue to occur. Since we are still adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, these disasters will only get worse as time goes by. Meanwhile, all kinds of other ecological disasters are taking place including the insane and greedy pursuit of insatiable profits in the gun production industry and the buildup of military hardware. In 2019, a report released by Durham and Lancaster University found the US military to be “one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than most countries”. In addition to climate pollution the military is responsible for the development of assault rifles like the AR-15 which was first developed for combat operations. Very conveniently, it is now a profit center for US gun corporations, and in addition to killing combatants on the field of battle, it has brought war time slaughter into children's schools, people's super markets and night clubs. We've come full circle. And in addition the production of steel weapons results in increased carbon emissions.

'Racing at Top Speed Towards Global Catastrophe': NOAA Says CO2 Levels Highest in Human History

Steam rises from the cooling towers of the Jänschwalde lignite-fired power plant of Lausitz Energie Bergbau AG on December 2, 2020 in Brandenburg, Germany. (Photo: Patrick Pleul/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

"We have known about this for half a century, and have failed to do anything meaningful about it," said one NOAA researcher. "What's it going to take for us to wake up?"

 

Brett Wilkins

June 3, 2022

There is more carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere than at any time in the past four million years, as the world's continued dependence on fossil fuels keeps humanity hurtling toward a "global catastrophe," officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned on Friday.

"It's depressing that we've lacked the collective willpower to slow the relentless rise in CO2."

NOAA reports its Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory in Hawaii measured CO2 levels averaging 420.99 parts per million (ppm) in May, an increase of 1.8 ppm over levels at this time last year, while scientists at the San Diego-based Scripps Institute of Oceanography, which also tracks atmospheric CO2, calculated a monthly average of 420.78 ppm.

"The science is irrefutable: humans are altering our climate in ways that our economy and our infrastructure must adapt to," NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a statement. "We can see the impacts of climate change around us every day."

"The relentless increase of carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa is a stark reminder that we need to take urgent, serious steps" toward climate resiliency and action, he added.

As NOAA explains:

CO2 pollution is generated by burning fossil fuels for transportation and electrical generation, by cement manufacturing, deforestation, agriculture, and many other practices. Along with other greenhouse gases, CO2 traps heat radiating from the planet's surface that would otherwise escape into space, causing the planet’s atmosphere to warm steadily, which unleashes a cascade of weather impacts, including episodes of extreme heat, drought and wildfire activity, as well as heavier precipitation, flooding and tropical storm activity.

Impacts to the world's oceans from greenhouse gas pollution include increasing sea surface temperatures, rising sea levels, and an increased absorption of carbon, which makes sea water more acidic, leads to ocean deoxygenation, and makes it more difficult for some marine organisms to survive.

Before the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels registered around 280 ppm for the entire history of human civilization, or about 6,000 years. Since then, it's estimated that human activity has released more than 1.5 trillion tons of the planet-heating greenhouse gas.

"CO2 levels are now comparable to the Pliocene Climatic Optimum, between 4.1 and 4.5 million years ago, when they were close to, or above 400 ppm," notes NOAA. "During that time, sea levels were between five and 25 meters higher than today, high enough to drown many of the world's largest modern cities. Temperatures then averaged 7°F higher than in pre-industrial times, and studies indicate that large forests occupied today's Arctic tundra."

Adequately reducing global CO2 emissions would require a dramatic shift in human activity—especially by the world's wealthiest 1%, who according to a September 2020 study by Oxfam emit more than twice as much CO₂ as the poorest 50% of humanity.

"It's depressing that we've lacked the collective willpower to slow the relentless rise in CO2," said Ralph Keeling, who runs Scripps' program at the mountaintop observatory. "Fossil fuel use may no longer be accelerating, but we are still racing at top speed towards a global catastrophe."

Pieter Tans, senior scientist at NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, said that "carbon dioxide is at levels our species has never experienced before—this is not new."

"We have known about this for half a century, and have failed to do anything meaningful about it," he added. "What's it going to take for us to wake up?" 

---

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Off the Top of My Head

Russia Stands to Profit From Global Warming

by John Lawrence

With half the Arctic coastline, Russia is in a position to dominate the Arctic region as sea ice disappears. Ships will soon be able to sail directly across the top of the world, bringing new commercial, political, and economic opportunities for the Arctic region, while substantially reducing transit times between Asia and Europe by up to a third compared with taking the Suez Canal. Also there is $1 trillion worth of precious metals and minerals under the ice, along with the biggest area of untapped petroleum deposits left on the planet. While the rest of the world suffers from global warming, Russia will profit from the opening of the Northern route across the Arctic region and a wealth of natural resources that it will be possible to extract. Siberia could become the world’s next breadbasket. Time magazine reports:

"The Russian government is already positioning itself as a net beneficiary of global warming, writing in its 2020 Arctic Strategy that “climate change contributes to the emergence of new economic opportunities.” With half the Arctic coastline under its control, it’s not hard to see why. Led by Rosatom, a state-owned nuclear technology and infrastructure enterprise, the country has invested approximately $10 billion to develop ports and other facilities along a 3,000 nautical-mile-long shipping lane that stretches from Murmansk, near the Finnish border, to the Bering Strait. The Northern Sea Route offers the shortest passage between Europe and Asia, shaving nearly two weeks off a journey around India, while saving fuel, limiting vessel wear and tear, and reducing emissions. The investments are already paying dividends. In 2010 international cargo shippers made only one full Northern Sea Route transit. In 2021 there were 71, according to Norway’s Nord University’s Centre for High North Logistics.

"Russia is building up its existing 40-strong icebreaking fleet by commissioning at least half a dozen nuclear-powered heavy icebreakers at a cost of $400 million each. When the first of the newest batch—the world’s biggest and most powerful, according to Russian officials—launched its maiden voyage in 2020, Russia hailed it as the start of a new era of Arctic dominance. In 2021, commercial tankers, equipped with special ice-hardened hulls, started transporting natural gas between Russia’s Arctic coast oil installations and Chinese ports in the middle of winter—a strategic advance that results in a timely lifeline for Moscow if European nations follow through on threats to cut off purchases of Russian gas because of the conflict in Ukraine. “The creation of a modern nuclear icebreaker fleet capable of ensuring regular year-round and safe navigation through the entire Northern Sea Route is a strategic task for our country,” said Vyacheslav Ruksha, head of Rosatom’s Northern Sea Route Directorate, in a statement."

The war in Ukraine may pale in significance compared to the climate change issues which Russia is in a position to exploit. While the rest of the world is trying to slow down climate change, Russia just may be trying to accelerate it. The more climate change the better according to them because it will make for an ice free Arctic, an ice free passage across the Arctic via the Northern Sea Route connecting Europe with Asia and the ability to extract trillions of dollars of natural resources. Part of the route goes very close to Nome, Alaska which could bring the US and Russia into direct military contact.

Because of the changes brought about by global warming, It makes it even more important to not make Russia a pariah nation but to bring it into the community of nations. The Northern Sea Route will bring Russia and China even closer together as China also profits from shorter shipping routes to Europe. Rather than helping to get the world off of fossil fuels, Russia will profit immensely from their continued use. They certainly will not look kindly on supplications to limit the exploitation of fossil fuels if the western world considers them to be a pariah nation. The lack of cooperation among major world powers or even major blocs of power would be enough to doom the earth to greenhouse gas oblivion which eventually would destroy Russia and China too although Russia would probably be the last nation to succumb.

Off the Top of My Head

Mega Drought Means No More Fruits and Nuts in Califonia

by John Lawrence

California's Central Valley produces 25% of the nation's food, including 40% of the nation's fruits, nuts, and other table foods. In 2010 Bill McKibben wrote, "The federal government says that thirty-six states face water shortages in the next five years, which is bad news for farming, since 70% of the water we use goes for irrigation, and irrigated fields supply as much as 40% of the world's food. ... In California in the spring of 2009, groups of farm workers, many wearing surgical masks against the blowing dust, marched for 4 days to demand the federal government somehow supply them with more water - the year's drought had already cost the state 23,700 jobs and $477 million in revenue. Farmers are already letting orchard trees die for lack of water to keep them alive; in the Central Valley unemployment grew 9.4% in a year through July 2009. "There's no water, so there's not much work," Kiki Torres told a reporter." That was 13 years ago and since then things have only gotten worse. The problem is not only in California but around the world. Since planet earth is warming, not enough snow is falling in the Sierra Nevada mountains which forms most of California's water supply. If precipitation falls as rain, it runs off. When it falls as snow, it forms a snowpack which acts as a reservoir, that gently releases its water in the spring as the snow pack melts. This is as true in the Himalayas and the Andes as it is in the Sierra Nevada. That is why agriculture is under threat world wide, and planet earth is facing a disastrous situation when it comes to the human race being able to feed itself.

Nobel laureate Steven Chu, after being named secretary of energy, told an audience in California, "I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen. If we don't dramatically slow global warming, the rapid melt of the Sierra snowpack means we're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California." Since that speech, not only have we not dramatically slowed global warming, we have accelerated it. In an article, "Megadrought in southwestern North America is region’s driest in at least 1,200 years," Anna Novoselov reported:

"Existing climate models have shown that the current drought would have been dry even without climate change, but not to the same extent. Human-caused climate change is responsible for about 42% of the soil moisture deficit since 2000, the paper found.

"One of the primary reasons climate change is causing more severe droughts is that warmer temperatures are increasing evaporation, which dries out soil and vegetation. From 2000 to 2021, temperatures in the region were 0.91 degrees Celsius (about 1.64 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average from 1950 to 1999.

“Without climate change, the past 22 years would have probably still been the driest period in 300 years,” Williams said. “But it wouldn’t be holding a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s or 1100s.”

"As of Feb. 10 [2022], according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 95% of the Western U.S. was experiencing drought conditions. And in summer 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, two of the largest reservoirs in North America — Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both on the Colorado River — reached their lowest recorded levels."

The dire predictions of Bill McKibben's 2010 book Eaarth, have only gotten worse since the human race has failed in its responsibility to protect the planet mainly due to a lust for profits. It's the modern day equivalent of the Noah's Ark scenario, only this time the human sins are a reluctance to set the profit motive aside and do what's necessary to make sure that the planet remains a habitable environment. Instead of flooding, the worst effects more likely will be drought and a dwindling food supply. Parched earth cannot produce food. Earth's food supply is dependent on snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada and glaciers in the Himalayas. The warming planet is producing more precipitation but in the form of rain which runs off causing floods in many instances. What we need now is the equivalent of a mega rain barrel to catch the rain, since water is not going to be stored much longer in the form of ice. Snowpacks and glaciers are going the way of the dodo bird which, in case you haven't heard, has gone extinct. In addition to that the parched earth is causing more and larger forest fires which are spewing even more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. But not to worry. In a capitalist economy only the poor will suffer. What little food remains will be bought up by the rich.

The parched earth is also causing more forest fires releasing even more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Forests act as a carbon sink. Forest fires release that carbon. Trees withdraw carbon from the atmosphere and store it. The less trees on earth, the less is the ability of the planet to withdraw greenhouse gasses with the result that global warming is sped up. The Washington Post reported in an article, Massive wildfires helped fuel global forest losses in 2021:

"Unprecedented wildfires raged across Russia in 2021, burning vast swaths of forest, sending smoke as far as the North Pole and unleashing astounding amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"Logging operations continued. Insect infestations wreaked havoc. The relentless expansion of agriculture, meanwhile, fueled the disappearance of critical tropical forests in Brazil and elsewhere at a rate of 10 soccer fields a minute.

"Around the globe, 2021 brought more devastating losses for the world’s forests, according to a satellite-based survey by the University of Maryland and Global Forest Watch. Earth saw more than 97,500 square miles of tree cover vanish last year, an area roughly the size of Oregon."

It's a feedback loop: less water, more parched earth, more forest fires, more greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere, more global warming, less water. The human race has not proved itself to be that concerned about future generations which might cause it to deny itself whatever pleasures are available to the current generation. Self sacrifice is not the norm. The result is that we are sacrificing future generations and condemning them to a hellish earth.

Off the Top of My Head

UN Secretary General: "There is no way a war can be acceptable in the 21st century"

by John Lawrence

Really, Mr. Guterres? Did you forget about the Iraq war that killed over a million Iraqis, approximately 100,000 of them civilian? In the 21st century? That war, by the way, was based on the lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction which the Bush administration knew he didn't have. And as far as a dictator goes, did George W Bush have a declaration of war from Congress? No, he did not. There was a resolution ginned up by the Bush administration that was used as an excuse for the invasion of Iraq. As far as war crimes, this war in Ukraine is getting all sorts of scrutiny by the media that the Iraq war didn't get. The fact is that in modern wars more civilians are being killed than military. That's an unfortunate fact of urban combat. It's not like the Napoleonic wars or even the US Civil War in which armies lined up on fields far away from cities and fought it out. The Battle of Gettysburg took place in a rural setting. Pickett's charge was across a hay field not an urban boulevard. The only difference in terms of time period between the Iraq war and the Ukraine war is that we are much more aware now that global warming is upon us destroying lives and livelihoods. So we don't need another war to do that. Probably much more real estate and many more lives will be destroyed this year by the effects of global warming than by the Russian military.

So the west wants to get off of Russian oil? Then why aren't they building green infrastructure and converting to non polluting energy as quickly as possible? The answer is that the fossil fuel corporations are lobbying hard to get us not do that. And they have billions of dollars to spend to get their way whereas the green protest movement has pennies to spend by comparison. The renegade Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, themsleves have profited by Big Oil's huge donations to their campaign funds. But for them we could have had a substantial effort to rebuild American infrastructure along non-polluting lines. But Joe Biden presented himself as not someone who wanted to go full steam ahead to get off of fossil fuels. No, he wanted to do it in a more moderate way, a way that did not inconvenience the American people in any way. They could still have all the toys and appurtenances they were used to. As opposed to the progressive wing of the Democratic party which wanted to go full steam ahead to green the economy. So the Big Oil executives are on the same page with the Russian government. Both could care less about global warming because both are profiting immensely from the sale of fossil fuels.

So why is there not a concerted western effort to get the poor and elderly civilians out of the war zone where they are sitting ducks? The young and the rich have already got out. Only the poor and elderly remain. There is plenty of money for weaponry that the US and other NATO nations are sending into Ukraine. No effort, diplomatic or otherwise, is being made to get the poor and elderly civilians out. There have been some humanitarian corridors, but the poor and elderly don't have the money to support themselves even if they got out. Someone else would have to pay for their transportation and for their support even if they got out. Why isn't that forthcoming? Does NATO want them still sitting there in the war zone as a deterrent to the Russian army? That's nonsense and suicidal. There needs to be direct talks between Ukraine, the west and Russia about getting those civilians out. Then the two armies can fight it out. Instead, western media bemoans the fact that civilians are being killed while doing nothing to get them out. I repeat only the rich and the young, those with the means to pay, and probably pay bribes, are getting out of Ukraine and are able to support themselves outside of Ukraine. Money should be forthcoming from NATO to get the rest of the civilians out of there. They are effectively being used as human shields. I have not heard Biden or anyone else speak of money being set aside for this purpose. Only more money for weapons.

How We Stand Up to Putin and Stop Climate Catastrophe

 

by Robert Reich

Sunday, April 24, 2022

How do we stand up to Putin and avert a climate catastrophe at the same time?

Quitting our addiction to fossil fuels. Here’s how we get there.

In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the West has snapped a series of sanctions into place.

Russia is the world’s second largest crude oil exporter and the primary source of global natural gas. Regardless of the short-term effects on our pocketbooks, over the longer term we need to transition to renewable energies if we have any hope of keeping the earth habitable, and freeing our economy from the influence of geopolitical foes.

This is where carbon dividends come in. 

It works like this. We put a hard cap on the amount of carbon we allow into the economy. Permits up to this cap would be issued, and energy companies could buy them in quarterly auctions. At every mine, refinery, and port of entry, these companies would have to use a permit for every ton of carbon dioxide that would be released into the atmosphere once that fuel is burned. 

When they run out of permits, they cannot extract or import any more carbon-polluting fuel. 

To keep the climate from rising 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels – the goal of the Paris Climate Accord – we need to slash emissions by roughly 90%. Accomplishing this by 2050 would demand reductions of 7.5% per year.
Currently we’re decreasing at a rate of 1.2% per year. 

With a carbon cap, in order to ensure we meet our goals, we could simply decrease the amount of permits issued by 7.5% every year. 

But how would we do that without Americans getting clobbered by higher prices at the gas pump? That’s where the carbon dividends come in. The revenue from selling the permits will be distributed back to the public as direct payments, no strings attached. 

For the majority of middle class and poorer Americans, the dividend will more than cover any increase in fuel prices, and they’ll come out ahead. The people who produce the most carbon emissions are by and large wealthy, and can afford the hike in prices. 

The earth’s capacity to absorb carbon is a natural resource, one we should share equally, instead of giving the wealthy and oil profiteers free reign.
Plus, everyone benefits from a cleaner planet. 

One study found that a quarter million premature deaths would be prevented over the next 20 years in the United States with a carbon fee and dividend program.

I know what you’re thinking right about now. Sounds nice, Bob. But it’ll never happen. Don’t be so sure! The idea is notably popular across the political spectrum. 

Carbon dividends were first proposed in 2009 in a bipartisan bill, and subsequent plans have come from both Republicans and Democrats. 

And there’s already precedent for parts of this program. Since 2009, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative has capped and sold carbon permits to power companies in 11 Northeastern states. It is boosting their economies and has proven politically resilient. 

And in Alaska, every resident receives between $1,000 and $2,000 annually from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests the state’s oil royalties. Over 80% of Alaskans say it improves their quality of life. 

We treat gas prices as something out of our control, giving dangerous amounts of power to petro-states like Russia – with alarming consequences. By weaning ourselves from gas dependence, we’d gain relief from dirty air that kills millions globally; relief from the constant hemorrhage of government subsidies for fossil fuels and from wars for oil; and, above all, relief from the ongoing destruction of the earth’s climate. 

None of this is impossible. 

The best way to contain Russia, and build a sustainable future, is with a carbon dividend.

Off the Top of My Head

How Are We Doing With Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

by John Lawrence

In 2009 President Obama pledged that the United States would cut carbon emissions “in the range of seventeen per cent by 2020". Let's see if the US succeeded. In 2009 the US produced 6772 million metric tons of greenhouse gas equivalents. In 2020 US totaled 5981 million metric tons of greenhouse gas equivalents. 17% of 6772 is 1151. So for Obama's pledge to be fulfilled greenhouse gas emissions for 2020 would have to have been about 5621 million metric tons. His pledge was almost but not quite fulfilled thanks to the fact that the pandemic decreased greenhouse gas emissions from 2019 to 2020 by 11%. In 2019 greenhouse gas emissions were 6571 million metric tons down only 3% from 2009! One might conclude that the pandemic was good for the environment, and also that Obama's pledge would not have been fulfilled except for the fact that so many cars were off the road due to the pandemic. More people worked remotely. This kept cars off the road. Going forward as many people who can work from home should continue to do so in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible. In addition conversion to electric vehicles needs to be done posthaste.

The Copenhagen climate conference of 2009 was widely considered a disaster since no country would commit to actual reductions of greenhouse gasses. The Guardian reported:

"The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement in Copenhagen tonight, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.

"After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord "recognises" the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but does not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.

"American officials spun the deal as a "meaningful agreement", but even Obama said: "This progress is not enough."

"We have come a long way, but we have much further to go," he added."

At this point in time it seems like a fool's errand to get all the countries of the world to cooperate to save planet earth from becoming uninhabitable for our species at least. With war raging in Ukraine and the world lining up on one side or the other, all hope of cooperation seems lost especially when Russia, the second largest producer of fossil fuels, is widely considered a pariah. Getting nations like Russia whose economy is dependent on the production of fuels which produce greenhouse gasses to cooperate seemed a stretch even before war broke out. Production of fossil fuels means money is at stake as long as there is a market for them, and that market doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. In fact the war has uped the ante for increased production. China and India need energy and they are dependent on the consumption of coal and Russian oil. They will not be cooperative with wealthy western nations to diminish dependency on fossil fuels especially if there is little trust between east and west. It would take Jesus Christ Himself to bring all parties together in a mutually beneficial agreement to save earth from global warming. But I think that God has left it up to humanity to figure this out without divine intervention, and if the human species can't figure it out, it's one more species that will go extinct.

Off the Top of My Head

Why We Must Go Nuclear Now

by John Lawrence

If we have a hope for combating climate change, we must convert electrical power generation to nuclear. Nuclear power generation does not release greenhouse gasses, is always on (in contrast to wind and solar) and has the potential capacity to fulfill most of our energy needs. The latest generation of nuclear reactors has solved most of the problems of previous generations involving safety and nuclear waste. Alan Boyle wrote:

BELLEVUE, Wash. — TerraPower, the Bellevue-based nuclear power venture co-founded by Bill Gates, has won an $8.55 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to work on safer methods to recover uranium from used nuclear fuel.

TerraPower’s recycling process is among 11 projects that will receive a total of $36 million in federal funding from the department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, or ARPA-E. The grants are aimed at supporting technologies that would limit the amount of waste produced by advanced nuclear reactors.

““Developing novel approaches to safely manage nuclear waste will enable us to power even more homes and businesses in America with carbon-free nuclear energy,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said today in a news release. “ARPA-E is doing just that by supporting companies and universities that are working on next-generation technologies to modernize advanced reactors and strengthen the nation’s clean energy enterprise.”   

TerraPower’s grant is the largest of the 11 announced today for ARPA-E’s ONWARDS program. The acronym stands for “Optimizing Nuclear Waste and Advanced Reactor Disposal Systems.”

TerraPower is working with GE-Hitachi on a demonstration nuclear reactor that’s due to be built in Wyoming and go into operation by 2028, producing up to 500 megawatts of power. The latest designs feature all digital technology which brings nuclear reactor design up to the current state of the art. France gets 70% of its power from nuclear. We need to take a page out of their book. Nuclear can co-exist and support renewable energy generation on the power grid. The most important thing is to replace fossil fuel power generation which now powers about 60% of US energy needs. The question is can this be done in the time frame that we have to work with before it's too late. We need to make huge strides before 2025. That's only 3 years away. Not enough time to prevent global warming to reach problematic levels. However, better late than never. If we proceed post haste, we can prevent the worst effects of climate change. But we have to start now, and consider this effort at the level of a world war which it literally is.

Off the Top of My Head

What Are the Implications of Russia's Pariahdom for Global Warming?

by John Lawrence

All western politicians and pundits (with the possible exception of Tucker Carlson) agree that Russia is and shall ever be a pariah state. Putin is a pariah who should be tried for war crimes. So how is the world and the community of nations going to combat our truly mortal enemy - global warming? As a major producer of fossil fuels, in order to get off the fossil fuel bandwagon, we would need Russia's cooperation. If Putin is to be a pariah, he could care less about global warming. He's probably thinking about all the resorts he could build in Siberia! Besides that, as the world warms, the tundra in Siberia is thawing releasing tons of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In recent years, climate scientists have warned thawing permafrost in Siberia may be a “methane time bomb”. But now a study by three geologists says that a heat wave in 2020 has revealed a surge in methane emissions “potentially in much higher amounts” from a different source: thawing rock formations in the Arctic permafrost. Russia and Putin could have the last laugh as the rest of the world goes up in flames and Russia adapts to a more moderate climate.

The Washington Post reported:

"The difference is that thawing wetlands releases “microbial” methane from the decay of soil and organic matter, while thawing limestone — or carbonate rock — releases hydrocarbons and gas hydrates from reservoirs both below and within the permafrost, making it “much more dangerous” than past studies have suggested.

"Nikolaus Froitzheim, who teaches at the Institute of Geosciences at the University of Bonn, said that he and two colleagues used satellite maps that measured intense methane concentrations over two “conspicuous elongated areas” of limestone — stripes that were several miles wide and up to 375 miles long — in the Taymyr Peninsula and the area around northern Siberia.

"The study was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Surface temperatures during the heat wave in 2020 soared to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1979-2000 norms. In the long stripes, there is hardly any soil, and vegetation is scarce, the study says. So the limestone crops out of the surface. As the rock formations warm up, cracks and pockets opened up, releasing methane that had been trapped inside."

Have the western politicos miscalculated or are they just playing into the Russian playbook in which the Russians are thinking 3 moves ahead on the chess board? The politicos and pundits all agree that Russia's financial lifeline is the sale of oil and gas and that the west must do everything it can do to shut off those sales starving Russia financially. But wait a minute. What they fail to understand is that Russia does not need the sale of gas or any other commodity to survive financially because the ruble is a fiat currency. The Russian central bank can print as many rubles as it likes with the only constraint being inflation. The US dollar is also a fiat currency and the US Federal Reserve can print as many dollars as it likes, the only restraints being political and again inflation which the US is now experiencing to a greater degree than Russia is. In fact the printing of Russian rubles will only tend to balance their economy and prevent it from going into recession. Meanwhile, the west, Germany in particular, struggles with replacing Russian gas and oil with gas and oil from other sources in a futile attempt to starve Russia financially. Ellen Brown has pointed out why sanctions may even be good for Russia because it forces Russia to develop sectors of its own economy rather than relying on imports from the west.

Besides Russia has a lot of friends in the world, some of them like Hungary who are even NATO members. Viktor Orban, Hungary's authoritarian leader and key Putin ally, calls Zelensky an 'opponent' after winning reelection. So while the US and Britain mainly fulminate over Russia's Putin being a pariah, not everyone in the non-western world agrees. Russia still has plenty of friends, just not in the US or Britain. Which brings is back to our original question, how can we solve the problem of global warming without Russia's cooperation even if we are not friends with them? Is it worth it to destroy the whole planet earth because of two countries engaging in a war no matter how brutal and ill founded? The west must eventually come to terms with Russia and with Putin if Putin is still the Russian leader when the war ends or watch while planet earth, not just Ukraine, goes up in flames.

Off the Top of My Head

Two Truths About War and One About Planet Earth

by John Lawrence

1) Truth is the first casualty of war. 2) War is hell. 3) Planet earth can't survive without the cooperation of all nations. Despite the outcome of the war in Ukraine, the whole planet will go up in flames unless all nations can cooperate to solve the problem of global warming. If peace among all nations on earth is not possible, then we can kiss planet earth good-bye as a habitable refuge for humans and other forms of life. The cockroaches may survive, but there is no guarantee even for them. While we humans are busy fighting wars, the planet is warming, and there is not a lot of time to fix this problem before it gets to the point of being unfixable. Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by 6% in 2021 to 36.3 billion tons, their highest ever, as the world economy rebounded strongly from the Covid-19 crisis and relied heavily on coal to power that growth, according to a new IEA analysis released this March 2022. So we're going in the wrong direction heading for a cliff full steam ahead. Not only are we not turning around this catastrophe, we're accelerating it.

"The increase in global CO2 emissions of over 2 billion tons was the largest in history in absolute terms, more than offsetting the previous year’s pandemic-induced decline, the IEA analysis shows. The recovery of energy demand in 2021 was compounded by adverse weather and energy market conditions – notably the spikes in natural gas prices – which led to more coal being burned despite renewable power generation registering its largest ever growth"

So now with the sanctions on Russian gas, there is a likelihood that even more coal will be burned as gas prices soar around the world. We are shooting ourselves in the foot! More natural gas usage, even Russian natural gas, should be encouraged because it produces less greenhouse gas emissions than does the burning of coal. So whoever loses the war in Ukraine, the biggest loser of all will be planet earth. Combined with the methane emissions estimates that the IEA published last month and estimates of nitrous oxide and flaring-related CO² emissions, the new analysis shows that overall greenhouse gas emissions from energy rose to their highest ever level in 2021.

The IEA report emphasized:

"The use of coal for electricity generation in 2021 was intensified by record high natural gas prices. The costs of operating existing coal power plants across the United States and many European power systems were considerably lower than those of gas power plants for the majority of 2021. Gas-to-coal switching pushed up global CO² emissions from electricity generation by well over 100 million tonnes, notably in the United States and Europe where competition between gas and coal power plants is tightest."

So now because of sanctions on Russian natural gas, even more power plants across the US and Europe will be switching to coal! We should be closing all coal powered plants and even those powered by natural gas replacing them all with renewables, geothermal and nuclear. There are alternatives available, but the human race would rather be all concerned about war fighting and not at all concerned about the fate of the planet and the fate of the human race. When it comes to war, there is an unlimited budget. When it comes to peace, there is hardly any money available. Why? Because war is profitable. Defense contractors will be making record profits in the United States and Europe and their stock prices will soar. Meanwhile, there is a paltry budget for switching to renewable energy.

Off the Top of My Head

Almost as Many Have Died During the Covid Pandemic as in All American Wars

by John Lawrence

Maybe we should have invested more in public health than we have in the military. Compared to the trillions spent on the military, only a pittance has been spent on public health, let alone on promoting peace in the world. 1.1 million have died in all American wars since the founding of the republic. About 927,000 and counting have died from the current pandemic even though a revolutionary mRNA vaccine is available. 675,000 died during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 sans vaccine. So many more people have died from pandemics in the US than have been killed in wars. Yet war and the preparations for war are pursued relentlessly while efforts for peace languish. This is not only dumb; it's sick. It goes to show that homo sapiens is one of the stupidest and least empathetic species that has ever evolved. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but the human race is right on course fiddling while the earth burns due to climate change. We will continue to fiddle and equivocate playing one upsmanship with each other as the earth deteriorates into an uninhabitable planet. No wonder the billionaires are making plans to get off.

Of course the power structure doesn't really care what happens on planet earth after they die. They will miss by virtue of their own natural deaths the worst of it. They will have lived the American Dream while bequeathing to their grandchildren the American Nightmare. As we continue to pour billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are more concerned about the economy that we are about human survival and what sacrifices that will mean. In November, researchers at the Global Carbon Project estimated that global carbon-dioxide emissions from energy and industry rose 4.9 percent in 2021, after a 5.4 percent decline in 2020. China, India and the European Union all had major increases, suggesting that any climate effect from the pandemic was fleeting. So not even a worldwide pandemic can significantly alter the relentless pursuit of economic growth which produces mega tons of carbon dioxide. Residents of planet earth refuse to change their lifestyles and their aspirations for what they conceive to be a "better life."

In the US consumerism is force fed through advertising just like in France ducks are forced fed to produce foie gras. Facebook makes billions of dollars not selling a product but selling advertising. Amazon at least provides products and the service of delivering those products. The advertising industry is the equivalent of the forced feeding of ducks only the ducks are American consumers who would rather not change their lifestyles of accumulation even if it means that their grandchildren will die a miserable death on a burned out planet. Meanwhile, nations exacerbate tensions among each other and foment wars, the preparations for which cost trillions of dollars which, therefore, are not spent on climate mitigation.

Lifestyles not only of the rich but of the middle class would have to change if the earth is to survive climate change. The production of steel and concrete by current methods produce tons of carbon dioxide. The generation of electricity by coal and gas produces tons of carbon dioxide. Agriculture, mainly cow farts, produces tons of methane. As the earth warms sea levels rise, the Arctic thaws and even more methane is released. It's so anthropogenic! We would be better off going back to the horse and buggy days. The American fetish for progress has produced an ecological disaster. The American lifestyle is an environmental disaster. Meanwhile, the power structure in the US and elsewhere seems bound and determined to accelerate the process of environmental destruction while extreme weather events are passed off as "seen nothing like it but vowing to rebuild." That's the American can-do spirit!

Off the Top of My Head

How to Solve the Homeless and Climate Change Crises in One Fell Swoop

by John Lawrence

It has been estimated that there were 6 trillion trees on earth before the industrial revolution. Today there are only half that number. Trees are the most natural and proficient way to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So part of the solution for global warming is to plant 3 trillion more trees. At the same time there are approximately half a million homeless Americans. It is estimated that 150 million people are homeless worldwide. Habitat for Humanity estimated in 2015 that 1.6 billion people around the world live in "inadequate shelter". These figures probably include the 80 million refugees worldwide. So why not pay this under utilized labor force to plant trees like the U.S. did in the 1930s when it created the Civilian Conservation Corps? What is needed is a worldwide Civilian Conservation Force. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a work relief program that gave millions of young men employment on environmental projects during the Great Depression.The CCC helped to shape the modern national and state park systems we enjoy today. People in the CCC were given adequate food and shelter in addition to a stipend to plant trees among other things to benefit the environment. Today addressing climate change is critical. At the same time most homeless people are contributing nothing of value to society although some of them do have jobs. But most are not only homeless but hopeless. Giving them a critical role in solving the global warming crisis would not only help to save planet earth, but would give the homeless an important mission.

Considered by many to be one of the most successful of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the CCC planted more than three billion trees and constructed trails and shelters in more than 800 parks nationwide during its nine years of existence. This is exactly what is needed today - PLANTING BILLIONS OF TREES! So why not do it, but on a world wide basis? Instead the US offers young non college bound people an incentive to join the military. Recruits with less than two years experience earn an annual salary of $19,660 plus a generous benefit package. Isn't saving the earth as a habitable place for future generations more important? So why not make the benefits for a renewed CCC at least equally generous?

This is something that has a precedent in US history, but saving earth as a habitable environment for future generations is evidently not as important as spending a trillion dollars a year to preserve the US military establishment so it can threaten to destroy other nations and peoples. In addition the role of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency and the fact that major world institutions are based on the US dollar allows the US to threaten other countries and individuals with sanctions. It's a one two punch that makes it less likely that anything of significance will be done to make the earth habitable for future generations. Instead the US military is a major source of carbon dioxide pollution in the atmosphere. The Cost of Wars Project found that US military pollution had accounted for 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which amount to 257 million passenger cars annually. They compared this astonishing output as higher than the emissions from whole countries like Sweden, Morocco, and Switzerland. Research shows the US military is one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than most countries.

At a time when cooperation among nations is paramount to the solution of the climate change crisis, the US is hell bent on military confrontation with other countries particularly Russia and China. Instead of creating peace in the world, the traditional preoccupation with solving problems by means of the military is still the order of the day. Therefore, it isn't likely that there will be a solution to the climate change crisis. Instead a bunch of wishful thinking and misplaced hopes will lead to a gradual diminution of habitability on planet earth.

Off the Top of My Head

Cooperation Among Virtual Enemies on Climate Change Next to Impossible

by John Lawrence

Can we stop fighting as the human race has been doing for millenia because we have a common problem that calls for cooperation: climate change? The human race and in particular nation states have never been able to cooperate on a world wide basis. What's more almost every aspect of contemporary society needs to be changed in order for planet earth to be rescued. For instance, the third largest greenhouse gas polluter after the US and China is cattle. Yes, cattle worldwide emit more carbon dioxide equivalents in the form of methane than any country on earth with the exception of the US and China. We should all stop eating beef immediately. How likely is that to happen? And then there's cooperation between the US and China, between the US and Russia. We can't chastise and sanction these countries and then expect them to cooperate with the western world when it comes to climate change.  Time magazine reported:

"From his first months as Secretary of State under Obama, Kerry set out to build a bridge to China on climate while tensions festered on other matters, putting the issue at the center of the relationship. In 2014, in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama, with Kerry by his side, announced agenda-setting plans to cut emissions, effectively inviting other countries to get on the same page. On the back of Kerry’s climate diplomacy, Obama and Xi feted each other a year later at a state dinner in Washington—perhaps the zenith of relations between the two countries in recent years. In the early days of the Biden Administration, longtime watchers of international climate politics speculated about whether Kerry would try to repeat that effort. Kerry told me that from the outset he knew that wouldn’t be possible—the Trump presidency had spoiled the well, and, while less vociferous, Biden hasn’t sought to placate China. “It’s a very, very different time now,” Kerry says. “It’s a very different set of political circumstances.”

"Instead, he sought a subtler form of rapprochement, traveling to China in April, becoming the first senior U.S. official to visit since the start of the pandemic. His message, he says, was to create a lane for climate collaboration amid the iciness. The reception was a sharp contrast from the jubilant atmosphere at the state dinner six years earlier. The two parties released a joint statement, agreeing to cooperate but not much more. Then in September, after making the 7,000-mile trip to Tianjin, Kerry encountered even more tense feelings. Despite the long journey, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi only met with him virtually, and said that climate collaboration could not be an “oasis” away from the other rifts in the relationship. “If the oasis is surrounded by desert, sooner or later the oasis will also become desert,” he said."

The crucial points are "Trump spoiled the well" and “If the oasis is surrounded by desert, sooner or later the oasis will also become desert”. Trump set the world back years when it comes to climate change. What will he do if elected President in 2024? The Chinese Foreign Minister's point is that you can't seek cooperation on climate change while at the same time fomenting a chilly relationship verging on a Cold War which the Pentagon is trying to do. For that matter how can we rely on China to produce the major amount of consumer goods for the US while trying to give China orders about how it is to conduct itself on the world stage. It just doesn't compute. You can't compartmentalize a relationship to that extent.

The other point is that how can the rest of the world believe what we say about the urgency of doing something about climate change which entails sacrifice while at the same time holding open the possibility that a climate change denier might be elected President in 2024?

Most plans for new coal plants scrapped since Paris agreement

Report by climate groups found more than three-quarters of projects were discarded after the deal was signed

A coal plant in Nantong in China, which is responsible for more than half of the world’s coal plant plans. Photograph: AP

 

Jillian Ambrose Energy correspondent from the Guardian

 

Tue 14 Sep 2021 01.01 EDT

Last modified on Tue 14 Sep 2021 04.37 EDT

The global pipeline of new coal power plants has collapsed since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, according to research that suggests the end of the polluting energy source is in sight.

The report found that more than three-quarters of the world’s planned plants have been scrapped since the climate deal was signed, meaning 44 countries no longer have any future coal power plans.

The climate groups behind the report – E3G, Global Energy Monitor and Ember – said those countries now have the opportunity to join the 40 countries that have already signed up to a “no new coal” commitment to help tackle global carbon emissions.

“Only five years ago, there were so many new coal power plants planned to be built, but most of these have now been either officially halted, or are paused and unlikely to ever be built,” said Dave Jones, from Ember.

“Multiple countries can add their voices to a snowball of public commitments to ‘no new coal’, collectively delivering a key milestone to sealing coal’s fate.”

The remaining coal power plants in the pipeline are spread across 31 countries, half of which have only one planned for the future.

Chris Littlecott, the associate director at E3G, said the economics of coal have become “increasingly uncompetitive in comparison to renewable energy, while the risk of stranded assets has increased”.

The report found that if China, which is responsible for more than half of the world’s coal plant plans, opted to scrap the projects, alongside India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Turkey and Bangladesh, then the number of coal power plants in the pipeline would shrink by almost 90%.

Christine Shearer, the programme director at Global Energy Monitor, and co-author of the report, said that the Cop26 climate talks to be held in Glasgow in November were “an opportune time for the world’s leaders to come together and commit to a world with no new coal plants”.

Alok Sharma, the UK’s Cop26 president, said that keeping global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrialised levels would be “extremely difficult” without a commitment from countries to phase out coal.

Coal is one of the biggest contributors to the carbon emissions responsible for the climate crisis, and the UN has said that the use of it must fall by 79% compared with 2019 levels by the end of the decade if the world hopes to meet the Paris climate agreement targets.

 

04:35

The climate science behind wildfires: why are they getting worse? – video explainer

Sharma’s warning came after ministers from more than 50 countries closed a two-day meeting in London this summer without full agreement on phasing out coal.

However, Leo Roberts, a researcher at E3G and the author of the report, said: “Those countries still considering new power plants should urgently recognise the inevitability of the global shift away from coal, and avoid the costly mistake of building new projects.”

Off the Top of My Head

Instead of Oil Pipelines We Need Water Pipelines

by John Lawrence

The east and midwest have too much water. The west has too little. As part of an infrastructure plan, we need to build one or more pipelines to transport water west. This might require more reservoirs in the east and midwest to collect the water. If we can transport oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast, we can transport water from east to west. It's a worthy infrastructure project. Another one: underground utilities so that storms don't knock out power and communications infrastructure. Besides it's more esthetically appealing when all the telephone and power poles are out of sight. There is so much work to be done with infrastructure not to mention all the green infrastructure that needs to be planned and built.

What's more building green infrastructure needs to be a global effort. If one country succeeds and others fail, planet earth will average out the totality. We share a cpmmon atmosphere with every country on earth. Just as the virus knows no limits and no bounds, the attempt to rein in global warming can know no limits and no bounds. Solving things in one country is not enough. There have to be global solutions and that means that rich developed countries have to help poor and undeveloped countries. Patriotism can't any longer be defined as allegiance to one country. Our allegiance has to be to planet earth if we want earth to be a habitable planet for our grandchildren and great grandchildren.

The planet Venus once had flowing water, but now is waterless as all the water has turned to vapor, a greenhouse gas, which compounds its runaway greenhouse effect. It's atmosphere is composed of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses. Earth could soon follow Venus and become an uninhabitable waterless planet. The sun is getting warmer which contributes to atmospheric temperature rises on earth as it did on Venus. As surface temperatures go up, more water evaporates changing from liquid to gaseous form. The more water evaporates the more greenhouse gasses are in the atmosphere and the more surface temperatures go up in a never ending positive feedback loop. This is what happened to Venus, and it will eventually happen to earth. Human beings are just hastening the day when earth emulates Venus and becomes engulfed in greenhouse gasses. When water disappears so does life. Some day, billions of years off, our sun will become a red giant. This means that planets near the sun will become uninhabitable. However, planets and moons in the outer atmosphere could become habitable as their frigid surface temperatures become more moderate. Titan is a planet size moon of Saturn which has flowing methane and methane lakes since surface temperatures are so cold right now that methane can exist in liquid form. As temperatures on Titan become warmer, some day water may be able to go from solid form to liquid form and Titan may be able to support life. At that point the methane will change from liquid to gaseous and water will change from solid to liquid. Flowing water is thought to be the hallmark of a habitable planet.

How Sweden Delivered The World’s First Fossil Fuel-Free Steel

Aug 19, from Forbes

David Vetter

Senior Contributor

This post has been updated.

A shipment of fossil fuel-free steel, produced by a joint venture between three Swedish firms, was ... [+] HYBRIT/Magnus Kryssare

Sweden has delivered the world’s first shipment of steel produced without the use of fossil fuels, a major milestone on the road towards cutting carbon emissions from industry.

A shipment of the steel was delivered to Swedish truck maker Volvo AB, but industrial quantities of the stuff won’t be available until 2026.

The news is significant in the context of efforts to limit climate change. While much emphasis has been placed on the role of fossil fuels in electricity generation, research published by Carbon Brief shows that just 553 conventional steel plants worldwide are responsible for 9% of all carbon dioxide emissions, owing to the large quantities of fossil fuels—in particular coking coal—used to produce the alloy. The IEA forecasts that steel production globally will grow by a third through to 2050.

Speaking at a press conference, the Swedish minister for business, industry and innovation Ibrahim Baylan said he was “happy to be minister for enterprise and energy in a country where industry is bubbling with energy for a [green] reset.”

Baylan further noted: “Industry and especially the steel industry create large emissions but are also an important part of the solution.”

The steel was created by a joint venture between Swedish steelmaker SSAB, energy company Vattenfall, and iron ore miner LKAB. A technology dubbed HYBRIT—a contraction of Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology—replaces fossil fuels both in the production of the iron pellets that are the key ingredient of steel, and in the removal of oxygen from the iron by replacing carbon and coke with green hydrogen. SSAB then uses that iron to produce steel slabs for delivery.

Baylan further noted: “Industry and especially the steel industry create large emissions but are also an important part of the solution.”

The steel was created by a joint venture between Swedish steelmaker SSAB, energy company Vattenfall, and iron ore miner LKAB. A technology dubbed HYBRIT—a contraction of Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology—replaces fossil fuels both in the production of the iron pellets that are the key ingredient of steel, and in the removal of oxygen from the iron by replacing carbon and coke with green hydrogen. SSAB then uses that iron to produce steel slabs for delivery.

Comparison of conventional fossil fuel-based steelmaking process versus the new approach from ... [+]

HYBRIT

The whole country of Sweden produced just over 45 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2020, but across all its operations SSAB was responsible for almost 9 million. HYBRIT claims that by eliminating fossil fuels from the steelmaking process, it could reduce Sweden’s total CO2 emissions by “at least” 10%.

 

Martin Lindqvist, CEO of SSAB, told media: “The first fossil-free steel in the world is not only a breakthrough for SSAB, it represents proof that it’s possible to make the transition and significantly reduce the global carbon footprint of the steel industry. We hope that this will inspire others to also want to speed up the green transition.”

Anna Borg, CEO of Vattenfall, which is also responsible for some of Europe’s largest wind farms, said HYBRIT “shows how partnerships and collaboration can contribute to reducing emissions and building competitiveness for industries.”

SSAB, LKAB and Vattenfall say they will begin full industrial production of the new steel in 2026. Earlier this year, Volvo announced that it would be the first manufacturer to produce vehicles from fossil-free steel.

While this project might be the first to deliver, it’s far from the only project working on the challenge to create “green steel.” Other Swedes are racing to be the first to create industrial quantities, with H2 Green Steel claiming it will be up and running by 2024.

Outside Europe, China’s Baowu, the world’s largest steelmaker, has committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and is beginning to develop hydrogen technologies as a way to cut fossil fuels out of production. India’s Tata steel has developed what it calls the HIsarna process, which still uses coal but claims to reduce emissions by 20%. Meanwhile, Japan’s COURSE 50 project uses a range of technologies to reduce emissions from the blast furnace.

Update 08/23/2021 BST0933: This post has been updated to clarify that the HYBRIT process covers the iron pelletizing and ironmaking stages of the process.

Nature’s Own Fuel Could Save Us From the Greenhouse Effect and Electric Grid Failure

Posted on July 30, 2021 by Ellen Brown, Web of Debt blog

Hemp fuel and other biofuels could reduce carbon emissions while saving the electric grid, but they’re often overlooked for more expensive, high-tech climate solutions.

On July 14, the European Union unveiled sweeping climate change and emissions targets that would, according to Gulf News, mean “the end of the internal combustion engine”:

The commission’s draft would reduce permitted emissions from new passenger cars and light commercial vehicles to zero from 2035 – effectively obliging the industry to move on to battery-electric models.

While biofuels are a less high-tech, cheaper and in many ways more effective solution to our dependence on petroleum, the United States and other countries are discussing similar plans to the EU’s and California is already on board. But in a recent article in the Los Angeles Times and related video, Evan Halper argues that we may be trading one environmental crisis for another:

The sprint to supply automakers with heavy-duty lithium batteries is propelled by climate-conscious countries like the United States that aspire to abandon gas-powered cars and SUVs. They are racing to secure the materials needed to go electric, and the Biden administration is under pressure to fast-track mammoth extraction projects that threaten to unleash their own environmental fallout.

Extraction proposals include vacuuming the ocean floor, disturbing marine ecosystems; and mining Native American ancestral sites and pristine federal lands. Proponents of these proposals argue that China controls most of the market for the raw material refining needed for the batteries, posing economic and security threats. But opponents say the negative environmental impact will be worse than the oil fracking that electric vehicles are projected to replace. 

Not just the batteries but the electricity needed to run electric vehicles (EVs) poses environmental concerns. Currently, generating electric fuel depends heavily on non-renewable sources. And  according to a March 2021 report from the Government Accountability Office, electric vehicles are making the electrical grid more vulnerable to cyber attacks, threatening the portions of the grid that deliver electricity to homes and businesses. If that is true at current use levels, the grid could clearly not sustain the load if all the cars on the road were EVs.

Not just tribal land residents but poor households everywhere will bear the cost if the proposed emissions targets and EV mandates are implemented. According to one European think tank, “average expenses of the poorest households could increase by 44 percent for transport and by 50 percent for residential heating.” As noted in Agence France-Presse, “The recent ‘yellow vest’ protests in France demonstrated the kind of populist fury that environmental controls on motoring can provoke.”

People who can barely make ends meet cannot afford new electric vehicles (EVs), and buying a used EV is risky. If the lithium battery fails, replacing it could cost as much as the car itself; and repairs must be done by pricey dealers. No more doing it yourself with instructions off the Internet, and even your friendly auto repair shop probably won’t have the tools. Except for the high-end Tesla, auto manufacturers themselves are largely losing money on EVs, due to the high cost of the batteries and low consumer demand. 

Off the Electric Grid with Clean Biofuel

Whether carbon dioxide emissions are the cause of climate change is still debated, but gasoline-fueled vehicles do pose environmental hazards. There is an alternative to gasoline that does not require sending all our combustion engine vehicles to the junkyard. This is alcohol fuel (bioethanol). Not only are greenhouse gas emissions from ethanol substantially lower than from gasoline, but as detailed in a biofuel “explainer” on the website of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

As we search for fuels that won’t contribute to the greenhouse effect and climate change, biofuels are a promising option because the carbon dioxide (CO2) they emit is recycled through the atmosphere. When the plants used to make biofuels grow, they absorb CO2 from the air, and it’s that same CO2 that goes back into the atmosphere when the fuels are burned. In theory, biofuels can be a “carbon neutral” or even “carbon negative” way to power cars, trucks and planes, meaning they take at least as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as they put back in.

A major promise of biofuels is that they can lower overall CO2 emissions without changing a lot of our infrastructure. They can work with existing vehicles, and they can be mass-produced from biomass in the same way as other biotechnology products, like chemicals and pharmaceuticals, which are already made on a large scale.… Most gasoline sold in the U.S. is mixed with 10% ethanol.

Biofuels can be created from any sort of organic commercial waste that is high in carbohydrates, which can be fermented into alcohol locally. Unlike the waste fryer oil and grease used to generate biodiesel, carbohydrates are supplied by plants in abundance. Methanol, the simplest form of alcohol, can be made from any biomass – anything that is or once was a plant (wood chips, agricultural waste of all kinds, animal waste, etc.). In the US, 160 million tons of trash ends up in landfills annually. Estimates are that this landfill waste could be converted to 15-16 million gallons of methanol. 

In the third in a series of national assessments calculating the potential supply of biomass in the United States, the US Energy Department concluded in 2016 that the country has the future potential to produce at least one billion dry tons of biomass resources annually without adversely affecting the environment. This amount of biomass could be used to produce enough biofuel, biopower, and will bioproducts to displace approximately 30% of 2005 U.S. petroleum consumption, said the report, without negatively affecting the production of food or other agricultural products. 

Energy Independence

A documentary film called Pump tells the tale of the monopolization of the auto fuel industry by the petroleum cartel, and how that monopoly can be ended with a choice of biofuels at the pump. 

Henry Ford’s first car, built in 1896, ran 100% on alcohol fuel, produced by farmers using using beets, apples, corn and other starchy crops in their own stills. He envisioned the family piling into the car and driving through the countryside, fueling up along the road at independent farms. But alcohol was burdened with a liquor tax, and John D. Rockefeller saw a use for the gasoline fuel that was being discarded as a toxic waste product of the kerosene market he had cornered. In 1908, Ford accommodated Rockefeller’s gasoline fuel by building America’s first “flex-fuel” car, the Model T or “Tin Lizzie.” It could be made to run on either gasoline or ethanol by adjusting the ignition timing and air fuel mixture. Rockefeller then blocked competition from Ford’s ethanol fuel by using his power and influence to help pass Prohibition, a Constitutional amendment banning the sale and transport of alcohol. 

The petroleum monopoly was first broken in Brazil, where most cars are adapted to run on bioethanol made from sugar cane. Existing combustion engines can be converted to use this “flex fuel” with simple, inexpensive kits. The Brazilian biofuel market dates back to the oil crisis of the 1970s, when gas had to be imported and was quite expensive. With the conversion to biofuels, Pres. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva achieved national energy independence, giving a major boost to the struggling Brazilian economy. 

The U.S. push for biofuels was begun in California in the 1980s, when Ford Motor Company was enlisted to design a flex fuel car to help reduce the state’s smog problem. But again the oil industry lobbied against it. They argued that bioethanol, which in the U.S. is chiefly made from corn, was competing for corn as a foodstuff at a time when food shortages were a major concern. 

David Blume  counters that it is not a question of “food or fuel” but “food and fuel.” Most U.S. corn is grown as livestock feed, and the “distillers grains” left after the alcohol is removed are more easily digested by cows than unprocessed grain. Distillers grains have another advantage over hay as a livestock feed: its easier digestion reduces the noxious cow emissions said to be a significant source of greenhouse gases. 

Fuel from a Weed: The Wide-ranging Virtues of Hemp

Opponents, however, continue to raise the “food versus fuel” objection, and they claim that biofuels from corn are not “carbon neutral” when the steps used to create them are factored in. Even the fertilizers needed to grow them may emit CO2 and other greenhouse gases.  But corn is not the only biofuel option. There are plants that can grow like weeds on poor soil without fertilizers. 

Industrial hemp – the non-intoxicating form of cannabis grown for fiber, cloth, oil, and many other purposes – is a prime candidate not just for fuel but to help save the environment. Hemp has been proven to absorb more CO2 per hectare than any forest or commercial crop, making it the ideal carbon sink. It can be grown on a wide scale on nutrient poor soils; it grows remarkably fast with almost no fertilizer or irrigation; and it returns around 70% of the nutrients used in the growth cycle back to the soil. Biofuels usually require substantially more water than fossil fuels, but hemp needs roughly half the amount needed for corn. Hemp can also be used for “bioremediation” – the restoration of soil from toxic pollution. It helps remove toxins and has been used by farmers to “cure” their fields, even from radioactive agents, metals, pesticides, crude oil, and toxins in landfills. 

An analysis published in the journal Science in 2019 concluded that a worldwide tree planting program could remove two-thirds of all the CO2 emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities. As reported in The Guardian in 2019, one trillion trees could be restored for as little as $300 billion – “by far the cheapest solution that has ever been proposed.” The chief drawback to that solution is that trees grow slowly, requiring 50 to 100 years to reach their full carbon sequestering potential. Hemp, on the other hand, is one of the fastest CO2-to-biomass conversion tools available, growing to 13 feet in 100 days. It also requires much less space per plant than trees, and it can be grown on nearly any type of soil without fertilizers. 

In a 2015 book titled “Cannabis Vs. Climate Change,” Paul von Hartmann notes that hemp is also one of the richest available sources of aromatic terpenes, which are known to slow climate change. When emitted by pine forests, terpenes help to cool the planet by bouncing energy from the sun back into space. In a mature hemp field, the temperature on a hot day can be 20 degrees cooler than in surrounding areas.   

Reviving an American Staple

Hemp has many uses besides fuel. Long an American staple, its cultivation was mandated in colonial America. It has been used for centuries in pharmaceuticals, clothing and textiles; it is an excellent construction material; its fiber can be used to make paper, saving the forests; and hemp seeds are , providing protein equivalent by weight to beef or lamb. 

The value of industrial hemp has long been known by the U.S. government, which produced an informational film in 1942 called “Hemp for Victory” to encourage farmers to grow it for the war effort. Besides its many industrial uses, including for cloth and cordage, the film detailed the history of the plant’s use and best growing practices. 

Henry Ford used hemp as a construction material for his Model T, and Porsche is now using hemp-based material in the body of its 718 Cayman GT4 Clubsport track car to reduce its weight while maintaining rigidity and safety. “Hempcrete” (concrete made from hemp mixed with lime) is a “green” building material used for construction and insulation, including for building “tiny homes.” 

Hemp can replace so many environmentally damaging industries that an April 2019 article in Forbes claimed that “Industrial Hemp Is the Answer to Petrochemical Dependency.” The authors wrote: 

[O]ur dependency on petrochemicals has proven hard to overcome, largely because these materials are as versatile as they are volatile. From fuel to plastics to textiles to paper to packaging to construction materials to cleaning supplies, petroleum-based products are critical to our industrial infrastructure and way of life.

… Interestingly, however, there is a naturally-occurring and increasingly-popular material that can be used to manufacture many of the same products we now make from petroleum-derived materials …. That material is hemp.  

… The crop can be used to make everything from biodegradable plastic to construction materials like flooring, siding, drywall and insulation to paper to clothing to soap to biofuels made from hemp seeds and stalks. 

The authors note that while hemp was widely grown until a century ago, the knowledge, facilities and equipment required to produce it efficiently are no longer commonly available, since hemp farming was banned for decades due to its association with the psychoactive version of the plant.      

Fueling a Rural Renaissance

In an effort to fill that vacuum, a recent initiative in California is exploring different hemp varieties and growing techniques, in the first extensive growing trials for hemp fiber and grain in the state since the 1990s. The project is a joint effort among the World Cannabis Foundation, hemp wholesaler Hemp Traders, and Oklahoma-based processor Western Fiber. The Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute, a nonprofit that supports research into organic farming, has also partnered on a USDA-supported research project on the use of hemp in the development of biochar (charcoal produced by firing biomass in the absence of oxygen). On July 31, the World Cannabis Foundation will host a field day and factory tour in Riverdale, California, where an old cotton gin has been converted to hemp textile manufacture. The event will also feature presentations by a panel of hemp experts. 

How to decarbonize 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually with hemp technology and regenerative farming will also be the focus of a COP26 “fringe festival” called “Beyond the Green,” to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November along with COP26, the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference.  

A 2018 article summarizing research from the University of Connecticut concluded that hemp farming could “set a great example of a self-sustainable mini ‘ecosystem’ with minimal environmental footprint.” Henry Ford’s vision was to decentralize industry, with “small [factory] plants … on every stream,” a rural renaissance fueled not with oil but with alcohol. Hemp fuel and other forms of bioethanol are renewable energy sources that can be produced anywhere, contributing to energy independence not just for families but for local communities and even for the country. And it doesn’t place the burden of addressing climate change on the middle or working classes.

Critical measures of global heating reaching tipping point, study finds

from The Guardian

Carbon emissions, ocean acidification, Amazon clearing all hurtling toward new records

Vast areas of the Amazon rainforest are being burned and cleared for grazing cattle — a double blow to global warming, as cattle produce methane and cleared forests release carbon into the atmosphere. Photograph: Florian Kopp/imageBROKER/REX/Shutterstock

 

Katharine Gammon

Tue 27 Jul 2021 20.00 EDT

Last modified on Tue 27 Jul 2021 20.22 EDT

 

A new study tracking the planet’s vital signs has found that many of the key indicators of the global climate crisis are getting worse and either approaching, or exceeding, key tipping points as the earth heats up.

Overall, the study found some 16 out of 31 tracked planetary vital signs, including greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat content and ice mass, set worrying new records.

“There is growing evidence we are getting close to or have already gone beyond tipping points associated with important parts of the Earth system,” said William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University who co-authored the new research, in a statement.

“The updated planetary vital signs we present largely reflect the consequences of unrelenting business as usual,” said Ripple, adding that “a major lesson from Covid-19 is that even colossally decreased transportation and consumption are not nearly enough and that, instead, transformational system changes are required.”

While the pandemic shut down economies and shifted the way people think about work, school and travel, it did little to reduce the overall global carbon emissions. Fossil fuel use dipped slightly in 2020, but the authors of a report published in the journal BioScience say that carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide “have all set new year-to-date records for atmospheric concentrations in both 2020 and 2021”.

In April 2021, carbon dioxide concentration reached 416 parts per million, the highest monthly global average concentration ever recorded. The five hottest years on record have all occurred since 2015, and 2020 was the second hottest year in history.

The study also found that ruminant livestock, a significant source of planet-warming gases, now number more than 4 billion, and their total mass is more than that of all humans and wild animals combined. The rate of forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon increased in both 2019 and 2020, reaching a 12-year high of 1.11 million hectares deforested in 2020.

Ocean acidification is near an all-time record, and when combined with warmer ocean temperatures, it threatens the coral reefs that more than half a billion people depend on for food, tourism dollars and storm surge protection.

However, there were a few bright spots in the study, including fossil fuel subsidies reaching a record low and fossil fuel divestment reaching a record high.

In order to change the course of the climate emergency, the authors write that profound alterations need to happen. They say the world needs to develop a global price for carbon that is linked to a socially just fund to finance climate mitigation and adaptation policies in the developing world.

The authors also highlight the need for a phase-out and eventual ban of fossil fuels, and the development of global strategic climate reserves to protect and restore natural carbon sinks and biodiversity. Climate education should also be part of school curricula around the globe, they say.

“Policies to alleviate the climate crisis or any of the other threatened planetary boundary transgressions should not be focused on symptom relief but on addressing their root cause: the overexploitation of the Earth,” the report says. Only by taking on this core issue, the authors write, will people be able to “ensure the long-term sustainability of human civilization and give future generations the opportunity to thrive”.

Human Induced Climate Change: Do We Have Time To Save Planet Earth?

Introduction

The upward trend of intensifying climate warming and future consequences of same are indeed startling! It’s a fight between humans and the physics of deadly climate change – which becomes irreversible unless CO2 (carbon dioxide)and CH4 (methane) emissions are drastically reduced globally. The resultant climate is efficiently melting the Arctic which contains huge quantities of CO2 and trillions of tons of CH4 below the permafrost. And CH4 is 72 times more toxic than CO2 in the first 20 years of its lifetime, thus creating a double heat-producing warfront. The process starts when CO2 and CH4 translate into heat-trapping gases; then into melting ice; then into rising fires, floods, and oceans; then into destruction of food supplies: then into inability of plant, animal and human life to survive.

CO2 is produced both naturally and by human activities. Naturally produced by forest fires. Droughts caused by a warming climate increase the frequency and intensity of wild fires, and extreme droughts have a significant effect on atmospheric CO2 levels because plants and animals need water as well as CO2 to grow (the respiration of plants and animals.)

A Layman and Scientific View of Uncontrollable CO2 Emissions

Human activities produce climate change by: the burning of fossil fuels for road and air transportation, power generation, heating and cooling of buildings; manufacturing and making cement; deforestation to support agriculture; forest clearing for housing; and by other land use changes or practices. Human activities and population growth are effectively moving carbon far more rapidly into the atmosphere than it is removed naturally. The result is that humans are adding ever growing amounts of extra CO2 into the atmosphere, in fact 51 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents a year including the other greenhouse gasses - methane, nitrous oxide and hydrofluorocarbons.

In layman terms, the atmosphere acts like a blanket which inhibits heat loss. Similarly, the warm human body loses heat to the cold air. The blanket inhibits and slows this body heat loss. Thus, you can stay warmer under a blanket.

The Earth loses heat to the cold universe. But, as noted, the atmosphere acts like a blanket which inhibits this heat loss. Therefore, the Earth’s surface remains warmer than it would be without the atmosphere. The surface loses heat to the atmosphere – but less than it would otherwise lose directly to space. Just as you lose less heat with the blanket than you would to the air without the blanket.

In scientific terms, in both the blanket and atmospheric cases, the heat always flows from warm to cold. That’s consistent with the 2^nd law of thermodynamics. But the processes of heat transfer are quite different. For the blanket effect, it is mainly heat conduction; for the atmospheric greenhouse effect it is radiation.

Sun energy arrives in the form of visible light and ultraviolet radiation. The Earth then emits some of this energy as infrared radiation. GHGs in the atmosphere “capture” some of this heat, then re-emit it in all directions – including back to the Earth’s surface. Through this process, CO2 and other GHGs (e.g., CH4) keep Earth’s energy cycle balance at a surface temperature of 33C (59.4 F) warmer than it otherwise would be without them.

However, more and more quantities of CO2 in the atmosphere from burning higher amounts of fossil fuels and the emergence of positive feedbacks increase the greenhouse “heat capture” warming effect – bringing the energy cycle balance way out of balance. More thermal energy is trapped by the atmosphere, making the planet become warmer than it would naturally. To repeat, GHGs absorb a wide range of energy – including infrared radiation energy (heat) emitted by the Earth – and then re-emit it. The net effect is that less total infrared radiation escapes out to space, thereby warming up the Earth’s air.

For one million years in preindustrial times up to 1750, CO2 atmospheric concentrations averaged 280 ppm annually. Since then, the concentration has increased to a HUGE 417 ppm today and is rising +2.2 ppm/year. An increase of 137 ppm (1750 vs. 2020), of which 109 ppm (80%) occurred in the Tiny, TINY geological timeframe of 60 years (1960- 2020). This CO2 explosion was intensified by a comparable explosion in world population from 2.4 billion in 1950 to 7.8 billion in 2020, also in a Tiny, Tiny period of 70 years.

That population explosion is the result of and a contributor to the enormous technological, economic, industrial advances since 1960 – leading to record-high CO2 emissions being trapped in the atmosphere the last 60 years at a level not seen on Mother Earth for one million years! Annual CO2 emissions are now around ±38 billion tons, rising to ±48 billion tons including other GHGs (e.g., methane).

We are trending towards an existential climate crisis of the Earth warming up 3C to 4C, to 5C (worst scenario) by 2050 or 2060. For all living species, that hard to-survive planet “heating-up” reality is menacingly on a path to irreversibility in the next 30 years. It’s truly an uphill global struggle NOT to exceed a 2C temperature rise in 2050. Biden’s team is aware what this challenge calls for.

The global average surface temperature across land and ocean has increased 1.19C since the pre-industrial era (1880-1900). That may seem small, but it means a significant increase in accumulated heat. In 2019, 85% of the Earth’s surface was much warmer than the average surface temperature during 1951-1980. Through November 2020, global warming ended up the hottest on record for the planet – that’s despite a recent La Nina that caused cooler than average sea surface temperatures across the tropical Pacific ocean slightly lowering the global average temperature for a short period.

The overall upward trend in the globally averaged land and ocean surface temperature shows that more areas are warming than cooling. The extra heat has been powerfully driving regional and seasonal temperature extremes and variations, causing massively destructive fires and tornadoes, intensifying rainfall, reducing snow cover and sea ice, changing habitat ranges for plants (e.g., food) and animals.

What Does All This Mean?

Research in 2020 has shown that global warming by far is not slowing down. It’s still growing. A critical task that ‘must’ be activated is a well-coordinated, rapid multi-faceted green energy transition to a 60% green energy norm by 2030, to an 85% green energy norm in 2050. This requires reducing current CO2 concentrations of +417 ppm to below 350 ppm in next 30 years. This in turn means bringing down the annual average CO2 increase of +2.2 ppm today to ZERO by 2050.

Sadly, the speed, scale, technical strength, innovation pace, and cooperation among nations are still far from being on track to meet a maximum surface warming of NOT more than 2C in 2050. To achieve that target, policy actions and technology for getting out of fossil fuels FAST must be accelerated. Some promising multi-faceted Bottom-Up and Top-Down actions, big and small, for dramatically replacing, removing, storing, reducing CO2 and CH4 gases from the air and production processes include:

• accelerating advanced development of effective carbon capture and storage systems, including, for example, CO2 recycling for covered food production systems

• addressing the low cost carbon-capture potential of a widespread cultivation of industrial hemp; it grows incredibly fast in all sorts of soil conditions making it a very powerful carbon sink superior to trees

• rapid development of an exciting new power cycle technology (the Allam Cycle) that can produce low cost, reliable, flexible power from natural gas – while also generating no atmospheric emissions and capturing all CO2 emissions

• developing renewable energy boosters that overcome the intermittency of wind and solar, wind-solar hybrid generation, offshore floating wind mills

• taking advantage of a valuable by-product of geothermal power, ‘lithium’ which is a critical component of large scale battery technologies used in battery energy storage systems and electric vehicles

• developing advanced fuel cells and ‘green hydrogen’ created by the process of electrolysis of water

• investing in very advanced, clean, safe nuclear fusion or preferably fission or thorium-based power plants or possibly geothermal plants

• expanding significantly the planting of trees and strictly limiting deforestation

• eating plant-based foods and lab-based meat; adopting a far more efficient lifestyle versus feeding plants to animals and then eating the animals; de-concentrating animals and huge animal waste on industrial farms

• expanding on a large scale bicycle pathways in towns and medium-sized cities

Undertaking an aggressive combination of these ‘going green’ actions for getting out of fossil fuels by stopping GHS emissions aggressively before the warming irreversibility sets in in 2050 or 2060. A way of accomplishing this comes from Imperial College (in London) climate scientist Joeri Rogelj, who has a key role writing the next key climate evaluation report for the International Panel on Climate Change: He says, “It is our best understanding that, if we bring CO2 down to net zero, the warming will level off. The climate will stabilize in a decade or two. There will be very little to no additional warming. Our best estimate is zero.” Prof. Rogelj’s words show just how serious the CO2 emissions problem is.

CONCLUSION: CO2 has a lifespan of a 100 years, to 1,000 years, up to 10,000 years before it exits the atmosphere. A reduction in emissions today will lower far into the future the heating-up of our planet, but will not yield the reduced, cooler temperatures needed in the next ±10 years This means that heat-trapping greenhouse gases released today from cars, trucks, buses, airplanes, industrial plant activities, power plants, agricultural animal wastes, etc. are determining the survival existence of future generations of all living species.

These CO2 emission forces have been dramatically intensified and reinforced by the massive rise in population since 1950. Here’s a staggering picture of the historical 1850–2020 and projected 2020–2050 world population growth.

• 1.2 billion in 1850, a 500 million 58% rise 1750-1850 (100 years)

• 2.4 billion in 1950, a 1.2 billion 100% rise 1850-1950 (100 years

• 7.8 billion in 2020, a 5.4 billion 225% rise 1950-2020 (70 years)

• 9.8 billion in 2050, a 2.0 billion 26% rise 2020-2050 (30 years)

Note: 2.4 billion in 1950, a 7.4 billion 308% rise 1950-2050 (100 years)

Little wonder, when one relates above to the simultaneous leap in economic and industrial growth 1950-2020

(vs. 1850-2050), CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere in record Earth time to super ultra-dangerous concentration levels. The inevitable result? A mounting excessive overheating of the planet’s atmosphere, land, and oceans. One climate expert sums up in Plain English this sunlight “heat radiation-in” and sunlight “heat radiation-out” Earth heating- up imbalance that’s worsening right before our very eyes:

“Simply by being present in the atmosphere, CO2 absorbs infrared light radiation emitted by the Earth. You can liken this to what happens when you put a “blanket” over yourself. The fibres of the blanket, and the air trapped between those fibres, absorb the heat from your body and trap it near you, preventing it from quickly escaping into the larger volume of air in the room.

So, by absorbing the infrared light radiation, CO2 keeps the heat in the atmosphere longer; and the more CO2 you add to the air, the “thicker” the “blanket” becomes. We KNOW that the planet’s CO2 “blanket’ is more than a third thicker than it was before the industrial revolution. We KNOW that we are the ones thickening it. We KNOW that CO2 traps infrared light radiation. And we KNOW that the atmosphere and the ocean global temperatures are rising.”

We are going to have to evolve – much quicker than we can fathom perhaps – to a fundamental way of being a civilization that first protects the planet’s health to insure our own sustainable future. To avoid a massive die-off or a complete collapse, a dramatic reconfiguration of human society over the next 30-40 years is an absolute necessity. This cries for prioritizing, integrating the fundamental energy and lifestyle changes scientists are recommending.

Time is not on our side. Planet Earth reacts unkindly to manipulators or moderates who play with or deny risks of a once in a million years planetary climate change threat – hitting Earth hard in a TINY geological time period.

---

SEE: “Global Warming: How Hot Exactly Is It Going To Get?” by Kate Marvel, May 12, 2019

A study just released last July 8, 2019 by MIT geophysics Professor Daniel Rothman shows that carbon levels today could be fast approaching a ‘tipping point’ threshold that may trigger extreme ocean acidification. A threshold similar to that built up over many centuries that ultimately contributed to the Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago where 90% of life on Earth died out. During extensive ocean model testing by Professor Rothman and his MIT team, carbon was continuously pumped into the oceans. The ocean model eventually reached a threshold that triggered what MIT called ‘a cascade’ of chemical feedbacks, or ‘excitation,’ causing extreme acidification, greatly worsening the warming effects of the originally added carbon.

Frank Thomas The Netherlands May 3, 2021

Attachment:

Below is a short Overview of where selected countries are today based on 2019 per data of total CO emissions and CO2 emissions per capita. (Source: European Commission – 2020 Report):

COUNTRY 2019            CO2 Total Emissions         2019 CO2 Tons Per Capita

% Share of World Emissions

United States                         5.1 billion tons = 13.43%                     16.1 tons

Canada                                  588 million tons = 1.54%                     15.7 tons

Europe-EU-27=UK               5.6 billion tons = 8.70%                       5.5 tons

UK                                         365 million tons = 0.96%                     5.5 tons

Germany                                703 million tons = 1.85%                     9.1 tons

France                                    324 million tons = 0.85%                     5.0 tons

Netherlands                            156 million tons = 0.41%                     9.1 tons

Belgium                                 104 million tons = 0.27%                     9.0 tons

Italy                                        332 million tons = 0.87%                     5.6 tons

Spain                                      259 million tons = 0.68%                     5.4 tons

Scandinavia                           32.5 million tons = 0.08%                     6.3 tons 

---

China                                     11.5 billion tons = 30.26%                     8.1 tons

South Korea                           652 million tons = 1.71%                     12.7 tons

Australia                                433 million tons = 1.14%                     17.3 tons

Japan                                     1.2 billion tons = 3.05%                         9.1 tons

India                                      2.6 billion tons = 6.83%                         1.9 tons

The World 38 billion tons = 100% 4.87 tons

Note: China is designing and building very FAST a whole new generation of coal plants to cover current and expected ±10 year Gap in their inability to convert to 100% renewables.

By: Frank Thomas, The Netherlands, May 3, 2012

 

Off the Top of My Head

Inflation Probably Not a Problem If Biden Programs Are Carefully Targeted

by John Lawrence, March 14, 2021

Critics have said, "Oh, My your children and grandchildren are going to have to pay back all these trillions of dollars that have been spent by both the Trump and Biden administrations on COVID relief and to get the economy going again." Not True! Modern Monetary Theory has shown that the Federal Reserve can just create the money and the Treasury Department can just spend it without ever worrying about paying it back. Finance is not the problem. The problem is potentially inflation which economist Larry Summers has sounded the alarm about. Most of Biden's relief bill is targeted at the poor which means that that money will be sucked up to pay past due rent and mortgage bills as well as providing a decent lifestyle which should not be inflationary except if you believe the nonsense of the neoliberal Phillips curve which supposedly proves that a certain segment of the population has to live in poverty and penury in order to fight inflation. That has also been debunked by Modern Monetary Theory although most politicians are still on the wavelength of neoliberal economics which has been shown to be fallacious in this and many other regards.

State and local governments likewise will just suck up the money in the relief bill to bail themselves out of debt and provide an adequate level of social services. This also is not inflationary because the money will not be just sloshing around in the economy with nowhere to go. What is inflationary is tax breaks for the rich, but this money can be sucked out of the economy by taxing the rich. What Larry Summers fails to take into account is that the US and much of the rest of the world has a two tier economy. The rich and upper middle class are doing very well, thank you, while the lower middle class and the poor are suffering. The COVID pandemic illustrated this in even starker terms with the so-called K-shaped recovery. The upper classes made money; the lower classes are on the verge of losing whatever financial gains they had made during the Trump economy. Inflation is caused by too much money sloshing around in the economic system. Most of that inflationary money is held by the rich in assets like stocks and real estate. Money injected into the economic system targeted at the poor is immediately sucked out of the system to pay debts and to provide basic necessities. There is enough physical and material capacity in the system to provide basic necessities so this money is not inflationary.

Inflation is caused when there is too much money chasing too few goods. As long as there is the material and human capacity, money directed at those sectors of the economy will not cause inflation. The real problem in future Biden administration bills involving infrastructure and the Green New Deal is that the materials to build out infrastructure, namely, steel, cement and plastics, require fossil fuels to manufacture and the manufacturing processes themselves are inherently carbon dioxide emitting. This comes about from basic chemistry which involves the carbon and oxygen atoms every step of the way. Most basic materials are composed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, and the chemistry involved in manufacturing releases large amounts of carbon dioxide. The manufacture of solar panels requires mining high quality quartz and combining it with coal. It's hard to get away from fossil fuels as the Michael Moore movie, Planet of the Humans, pointed out. For this reason spending large amounts of money on infrastructure involving cement, steel, plastics and other materials could actually produce more global warming rather than preventing it. The finances are available; the proper materials are not. The manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels require the release of large amounts of greenhouse gasses.

Because of these fundamental limitations regarding materials, it doesn't make sense to throw trillions of dollars at either infrastructure or global warming mitigation. That would be either inflationary or misguided in the sense that large projects in these areas could produce even more global warming. As Bill Gates has pointed out, money should be invested in promising startups and research that can solve these basic problems and into digital nuclear which is the only renewable energy source that won't result in a lot of greenhouse gasses being created in the first place. Advanced nuclear is the most promising source of clean energy. Gates has invested in a company TerraPower which does research on advanced nuclear reactors. Their mission statement reads:

"TerraPower was founded by Bill Gates and a group of like-minded visionaries that decided the private sector needed to take action in developing advanced nuclear energy to meet growing electricity needs, mitigate climate change and lift billions out of poverty. Advanced reactors and other isotopic applications are now possible with technology and enhanced computing capabilities that were unimaginable a few decades ago. At TerraPower, we are innovating in nuclear to improve the lives of people everywhere and to build the clean energy of tomorrow – today."

So when the Biden administration gets around to their initiatives on infrastructure and global warming, they need to heed Bill Gates' warning about traditional manufacturing methods involving cement, steel and plastic. Energy from solar and wind are inadequate to solve the problem for many reasons. Large scale demonstration and build out of nuclear energy reactors should be the order of the day, They are the only clean energy source that has the potential for diminishing the world's reliance on fossil fuels.

Off the Top of My Head

Green New Deal: We Have a Problem and Its Not Money

by John Lawrence, March 5, 2021

Modern Monetary Theory has shown that a nation with a sovereign currency such as the US dollar need never fear running out of money, and that Federal spending does not depend on tax receipts. However, it does depend on whether the human and material resources are available. Just pouring money on the problem will cause inflation unless it is soaked up by available resources. The problem is that the material resources are not available. As Bill Gates has pointed out in his book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, the problem cannot be solved by the renewable energy resources that are now available, namely wind and solar. Building wind turbines requires immense amounts of concrete for the bases and steel for the turbines, and the manufacture of those resources emits tons of greenhouse gasses. Manufacturing solar panels requires mining of quartz sand and coating with ethylene-vinyl acetate. This manufacturing requires energy—most often derived from the burning of fossil fuels, as the Michael Moore film, Planet of the Humans, has pointed out.

Solving the problem of global warming can't be undertaken by using the available resources of concrete, steel and plastic the manufacture of which emits huge amounts of greenhouse gasses. So even though the financial resources are available, the material resources are not. The human resources, however, are arguably available. Wray and Tcherneva  write in a paper How to Pay for the Green New Deal:

"In the neoliberal era, we chronically operate below full employment. That is obvious in Euroland, which is probably operating 25 percent or more below full capacity. Even the US today has substantial excess capacity, in spite of claims that we have achieved full employment. Over the past quarter century, we have had to readjust our estimate for the natural rate of unemployment—the rate below which inflation is supposed to pick up—in every recovery, because inflation never arrives as unemployment falls. Most recently, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, economists claimed that the natural rate of unemployment had increased to over 5 percent. Yet, the unemployment rate kept coming down, while inflation never materialized. We will not know precisely where the inflation barrier is until we ramp up aggregate demand."

So given that human resources are available, it is clear that the material resources are not. Bill Gates recommends spending the money on research to develop new non-greenhouse emitting substitutes for steel, concrete and plastic. That would require high level scientists who might be less available than low level workers. Assuming a full court press requiring large numbers of university and scientific human power, this project is probably feasible although it would not require trillions of dollars of financial resources at least in the initial phases. Later development would require more and finally building out renewable energy resources using these newly developed materials would require more money. So the problem is not that finance is not available. The problem is dispensing it in appropriate amounts over time. There is one promising energy source that would not require such a huge investment in research and development because that has largely been done and that is what we might call digital nuclear. Bill Gates has invested in a company called TerraPower which claims:

"With the growing demand for electricity, TerraPower entered the nuclear energy arena to lift billions out of poverty. Advanced reactors and other isotopic applications are possible with technology and enhanced computing capabilities that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. At TerraPower, we are ready to build the clean energy of tomorrow – today. TerraPower leads in advanced nuclear energy because it has spent the last decade investing in innovative technologies to solve some of the biggest challenges facing humanity."

Two things are clear. Much work has already been done on an advanced nuclear reactor that solves the problems of dangerous explosions such as Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima and also the problem of spent fuel radioactive storage. Using high level computing power and advanced digital technology which wasn't available to previous generations of nuclear reactors, Gates maintains that a safe design for nuclear power generation is close to being available. Considering the problems with solar, wind and biofuels which have a longer time horizon before being solved, it seems that nuclear is further along in its development phase and also has greater potential for being a carbon free source of energy. “Nuclear has actually been safer than any other source of [power] generation,” Gates told [CNBC's Andrew] Sorkin. “You know, coal plants, coal particulate, natural gas pipelines blowing up. The deaths per unit of power on these other approaches are — are far higher,” Gates said, a fact he also references in his new book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”

In their section, “COSTING” THE GREEN NEW DEAL," Wray and Tcherneva write:

"Milton Ezrati, writing for Forbes, offers his own estimates for the various components of the GND, citing different sources (Ezrati 2019). Here we only use his estimates for “greening” projects. Based on estimates by physicist Christopher Clark, the cost of expanding renewable energy to 100 percent would be $2 trillion over 10 years. The smart power grid would cost an additional $400 billion over 10 years (estimate from the Electric Power Institute).13 Upgrading and retrofitting buildings would cost between $2.5 trillion and $3.9 trillion ($3.2 trillion midpoint estimate) over 10 years. The total cost of greening projects comes to $5.6 trillion over 10 years ($560 billion per year, or 2.87 percent of 2017 GDP)."

This is only one of the costing estimates that Wray and Tcherneva provide, but these costing estimates need to be further examined in terms of how much fossil fuels are necessary to build them out and manufacture them. Materials that require large amounts of carbon dioxide emission for their manufacture must be rejected. In the final analysis the Job Guarantee (JG) that Wray and Tcherneva advocate is partially limited to "what Tcherneva calls “care for community” and “care for people” projects: service projects related to senior and youth care, teacher’s helpers, neighborhood and park cleanup, artistic projects, and so on. Thus, the JG program can provide resources needed for green projects in an amount equal to 1 percent of GDP (and resources equal to another 1 percent of GDP for other care services). These would largely be in upgrading buildings and homes to improve energy efficiency, although some could be used in nontechnical maintenance of energy projects (landscape maintenance, for example)." So the mix of high level workers like scientists could be combined with a significant number of low level workers to provide a comprehensive approach."

The bottom line is that we had better get cracking, financing a Green New Deal is no problem because as Modern Monetary Theory has shown, the money is available, but resources must be carefully allocated to avoid the pitfalls of inflation and making the problem worse by using large amounts of traditional materials like concrete, steel and plastics. Nuclear is probably the best bet for power generation and it must be deployed quickly especially in India and China where coal fired power generating plants are still being deployed at a rapid rate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwbDETx3zo0

 

Off the Top of My Head

Beyond Meat and Cow Farts

by John Lawrence, February 24, 2021

About 19% of the 51 billion tons of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) emitted into the atmosphere each year comes from agriculture. There are roughly a billion cattle in the world raised for both meat and dairy. The 2 billion tons of GHGs they burp and fart account for 4 percent of global emissions each year. Also pig poop accounts for half of all poop related emissions with cows making up the other half. Industrial cow and pig farms create ponds full of poop which then sometimes break through to streams and rivers. In an article, "A million tons of feces and an unbearable stench: life near industrial pig farms", we find the following:

"Fifty yards from Miller’s family graveyard is a massive open-air cesspool storing the pigs’ waste – a stagnant pool containing their feces, urine, blood and other bodily fluids – often referred to as a “lagoon”, one of about 3,300 lagoons across the state. When the cesspool reaches its capacity, its contents are liquefied and sprayed into a field across the street from Miller’s house via a large, sprinkler-like apparatus. The sprayer releases a mist of waste on to the field, which, according to court documents, is about 200ft from Miller’s home at its closest rotation."

In addition to the environmental, health and stench problems, pig shit lagoons are contributing major amounts of GHGs into the atmosphere. “Air pollutants from the routine operation of confinement houses, cesspools, and waste sprayers affect nearby neighborhoods where they cause disruption of activities of daily living, stress, anxiety, mucous membrane irritation, respiratory conditions, reduced lung function, and acute blood pressure elevation,” Wing and fellow UNC researcher Jill Johnston wrote in a 2014 study. They also found that the state’s industrial hog operations disproportionately affect African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans. That pattern, they concluded, “is generally recognized as environmental racism”.

The Guardian article continued: "North Carolina’s pork production industry has shifted dramatically since the mid-80s. Today’s industrial farms, often called concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, raise pigs and other livestock in confinement until they are ready for slaughter. The hogs generally live in cramped quarters; Michelle B Nowlin, supervising attorney of Duke’s Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, estimates they typically get seven or eight square feet of space each." Chickens and cattle suffer the same fate of having to spend their meager existence in CAFOs.

As more people world wide become middle class, they want to eat more meat. This is not only a problem for the animals who suffer the most, but it is a problem for the GHGs that animal agriculture causes that contribute to global warming. But the nutritional aspects of eating animals are equally inefficient. A pig eats 3 times as many calories as we get when we eat it. Cows require six calories of feed for every calorie of beef that we eat. In China and other developing countries meat eating is becoming much more popular because of a growing and more affluent middle class.

There are several alternatives already on the market: plant based hamburgers called Beyond Meat and Impossible Burgers. These burgers are a pretty good approximation of the real thing, but there are even more products being developed that don't only mimic the taste of meat. They actually are meat except they are created without having to pass calories through a cow and then slaughtering the cow. They use the same metabolic processes that a cow does to deposit meat on its bones. This meat though is created in a lab and is already on the market in Singapore according to The Guardian:

"Cultured meat, produced in bioreactors without the slaughter of an animal, has been approved for sale by a regulatory authority for the first time. The development has been hailed as a landmark moment across the meat industry.

"The “chicken bites”, produced by the US company Eat Just, have passed a safety review by the Singapore Food Agency and the approval could open the door to a future when all meat is produced without the killing of livestock, the company said.

"Dozens of firms are developing cultivated chicken, beef and pork, with a view to slashing the impact of industrial livestock production on the climate and nature crises, as well as providing cleaner, drug-free and cruelty-free meat. Currently, about 130 million chickens are slaughtered every day for meat, and 4 million pigs. By weight, 60% of the mammals on earth are livestock, 36% are humans and only 4% are wild."

If the world's consumption of meat can be converted to lab grown meat that looks, taste, and feels like the real thing, then we can eliminate the whole process of passing calories through a cow or pig or chicken first and still get the same end result. That alone will save about 10 billion tons of GHGs per year.

Off the Top of My Head

Why Should Blue Collar Workers Have to Pay Taxes to Bail Out White Collar Student Loan Debt?

by John Lawrence

Short answer: There is no need for the Federal government to tax in order to spend. That has been demonstrated by Modern Monetary Theory. However, taxation, if imposed in order to fight inflation, needs to be imposed primarily on the rich and upper middle class, not on the poor or lower middle class. The smart thing for the Biden administration to do would be to decrease taxes on the lower middle class ^i.e. blue collar workers before 2022 thus drawing them away from the Trump camp. In general the American people need to be educated that deficits don't matter except just as accounting entries on the Fed's balance sheet. Biden's COVID relief initiative of $1.9 billion will not raise taxes nor will his follow-on trillion dollar initiative for the build-out of green infrastructure.

The question, "Can We Afford to Pay for the Green New Deal?" is equivalent to the question "Can We Afford to Pay the Costs of Avoiding Annihilation?". In the past we have been able to afford a massive build-up to pay for the Second World War. The climate challenge is the moral equivalent of war. If we lose this war we lose not just our freedom. We lose the habitability of the entire planet. Various attempts have been made to cost out the components of a Green New Deal. Green power generation and transportation are not sufficient in themselves to get to net zero carbon emission, but they are a start. As Bill Gates has pointed out in his recent book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, major industrial processes also generate much greenhouse gas emission. For instance, every ton of cement that is produced contributes one ton of carbon dioxide which goes into the atmosphere. Every ton of steel produced results in 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, and every ton of plastics produced emits 1.3 tons of carbon dioxide. So it's not enough just to deal with green transportation (electric vehicles) and green power generation (solar and wind).

The cost of "greening" these industrial processes is pretty steep. Capturing carbon dioxide at the site of the manufacturing process is possible, but there is no cheap way to do it. Bill Gates is investing in promising start-ups and is counting on innovation to come up with new processes and materials which will not result in so much carbon dioxide being released into the air. Gates points out that we need to electrify every possible manufacturing process and make sure that all that electricity is generated cleanly. He advocates a new generation of nuclear power sources as wind and solar can not possible fill every energy need mainly because they are intermittent. Nuclear can fill the gap for consistent power generation when solar and/or wind are offline. Smart nuclear power which Bill Gates has been instrumental in developing would solve the problems encountered so far of explosion and what to do with nuclear waste. As a last resort Direct Air Capture of carbon dioxide from the air is possible but also costly.

What it all boils down to is this: we will need on the order of a trillion dollars a year for 10 years commitment to address climate change if we have a prayer for avoiding the worst consequences. What's more a lot of this commitment must be made in cooperation with China which is one of the worst polluters. Rivalry and even a Cold War must be set aside if the world is to avoid the worst outcome from global warming. India and China are building coal fired power generation plants at a rapid pace because coal fired power plants are so cheap comparatively and those countries are developing so quickly. It's not enough just to "green" the US. It has to be cooperation on a world wide basis. Competition has to be set aside and replaced by cooperation. The ownership of intellectual property is irrelevant when it comes to saving the planet.

A national budget for a Green New Deal shouldn't contribute to inflation since there are currently so many unemployed people available for work, and particularly because so many of the small businesses that were lost during the pandemic are not coming back. Also further robotizing of manufacturing processes will eliminate whatever blue collar workers are left working in those fields. In World War II there was some postponement of consumption in order to fight inflation. That may be necessary for the moral equivalent of war which the Green New Deal represents. If so, workers in certain nonessential industries may have to be repurposed and retrained for industries involved in combating climate change.

Off the Top of My Head

Despite All the Talk, Practically Nothing Has Been Done About Global Warming

by John Lawrence

Every year 51 billion tons of Greenhouse Gasses (GHGs) go into the atmosphere. There has been no decrease in that number despite the Paris Accords, despite more hybrid cars, despite the build up of solar and wind renewables. 197 countries adopted the Paris Agreement at the COP21 in Paris on 12 December 2015, over 5 years ago and yet there has been no improvement in the number of tons of GHGs dumped into the atmosphere per year. Well, a couple of tons less this year due to the pandemic. In general it is slightly increasing according to Bill Gates in his new book, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster." At the rate we are going, there is no way that the earth can escape the dire consequences of global warming. Should we just give up and enjoy the few remaining years of a habitable earth? I don't think so. What will it take to forestall catastrophe? Basically, it will take a Green New Deal or should we call it the Green Equivalent of World War II?

During World War II there was a huge amount of government deficit spending. Modern Monetary Theory has shown that this is no problem because a government such as the US which issues its own sovereign currency can never run out of money whether or not there are tax receipts to cover the spending. The problem is inflation which occurred in WW I despite more modest outlays. In the WW II years there were wage and price controls which effectively controlled inflation. There was also rationing. These measures made sure that all resources both human and material were devoted to the war effort. Everyone was on the same page. Is that possible for a Moral Equivalent of War (MEOW) today? Would people be willing to give up anything so that resources could be devoted to a MEOW as far as Global Warming is concerned? Many Americans are not even willing to wear a mask during a pandemic, and many also believe that global warming is a hoax. Would they sacrifice for a MEOW?

Bill Gates has invested his money in a variety of start-ups which have some promise of addressing the global warming issue. One of them is Direct Air Capture (DAC) in which carbon dioxide is removed directly out of the air. This is a feasible alternative which is already in use on a small scale. The problem is that it's the most expensive alternative out there. A combination of other methods to ameliorate GHGs in the atmosphere would not only be more feasible but cheaper. He estimates that removing 51 billion tons of GHGs per year would cost $5.1 trillion per year. This would be an upper bound on the cost of getting to zero GHG emissions. Actually this does not seem too unreasonable given the fact that between 2008 and 2015, the Fed’s balance sheet, its total assets, ballooned from $900 billion to $4.5 trillion. That means that the Fed "printed" $3.4 trillion with its Quantitative Easing (QE) program. The Fed has "printed" $3.5 trillion just in the year 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic to keep the economy from falling apart. This is the amount of money authorized by Congress in several spending bills. Add to that Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill and you get a total of $5.4 trillion. And yet there has been no inflation.

So there is a little hocus pocus going on in the relationship between the Fed and the Treasury. The Fed by law is not allowed to buy US debt directly from the Treasury department. How it works is Congress authorizes a spending bill. The Treasury issues a Treasury bond if there aren't enough taxes to cover it. That bond is sold to the "primary dealers" which are mainly big Wall Street banks, and then the Fed buys the bond on the "open market" which means it buys them from the primary dealers. So by a roundabout method, the Fed buys up US debt by means of "printing" money although it's actually by means of a few keystrokes on a computer crediting the Treasury's account at the Fed and the Fed takes the bonds onto its balance sheet from which theoretically it could sell them some day. One little distinction: this is not QE. QE was a term coined when the Fed "printed" money to bail out the big banks aka providing liquidity. The Fed took all the toxic junk of mortgage backed securities and other assets onto its balance sheet and gave the banks all the money they needed to cover bets on credit default obligations and interest rate swaps and other casino garbage. So while it amounts to the same thing - the Fed "printing" money and adding it into the economy - the money injected now is going into the real economy whereas the QE went into the Wall Street economy.

But I digress. So Bill Gates says it would require at most $5.1 trillion to get our GHGs down to zero on an annual basis. In other words keep the goddam fossil fuels, cow farts and Keystone pipeline and just get those DAC machines humming. Seems reasonable to me. The Fed can just print up that $5.1 trillion and we're home clear. J.D. Alt estimates that solving the global warming crisis will cost $60 trillion over 10 years which is about the same amount per year that Bill Gates estimates although supposedly we will reach some point at which renewables and other technologies will result in zero emissions so we will not have to go on spending that amount in perpetuity. So why don't we just go ahead and do it? The Fed could just print the money. No inflation is in sight. Modern Monetary Theory has shown that any country with a sovereign currency (such as the US dollar) can never run out of money and as long as the resources are available (both human and material) the financial resources will always be available. The only problem is the stupidity of most of the US Congress (mainly Republicans) whose only response to any Democratic initiative is just to Just Say No as well as their economic ignorance. So it is of paramount importance that next year after the pandemic is over and before Republicans take over (hope not) one of the branches of Congress in 2022, that Congress passes a $5 trillion per year Green New Deal or a $50 trillion GND spread over 10 years.

Off the Top of My Head

Republicans' New Definition of Socialism: Any Government Program That Would Help Black People

by John Lawrence, February 2, 2021

Republicans are worried that the US will become a socialist country. The public sector will come to dominate the private sector. Well, the private sector has been helpless at solving the big outstanding problems: global warming and the pandemic. If the private sector could solve these problems, well, that would be great, but they're not capable of doing it. Therefore, government is left by default to deal with global warming and the pandemic as well as a host of other systemic problems like health care, poverty, economic inequality and racism. So what does capitalism stand for at this point: fossil fuel dependency and business as usual which means more and more income and wealth inequality. With capitalism there is no "we" there, only an accumulation of "I"s.

What Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shown is that the Republican accusation of Democrats - "tax and spend" - is a discredited misnomer because US government spending does not depend on taxation. In fact a Green New Deal and Medicare for All could all be accomplished without increasing taxes on anyone. That's because the US central bank aka the Federal Reserve can just create money with a few keystrokes on a computer the way it did to save the banking industry during the Great Recession when it gave the Big Banks several trillion dollars without any consequences whatsoever for deficit spending or increased taxes to pay for it. This facility should be used responsibly, however, just like the use of alcohol. Used irresponsibly this money creation facility could increase inflation.

So what is the responsible use of government spending? Obviously, during a pandemic and incipient global warming, it would be responsible for the government to spend money to solve these huge worldwide problems which not only affect the US, but affect the whole world. One of the lessons of this situation is that, if we want to contribute to the solution of global warming, we must become friends with the world's biggest GHG emitter which is China. China and the US are the world's first and second largest GHG emitters and the first and second largest economies. We can't afford not to be partners in the solution of this problem. China and US continued rivalry even amounting to a Cold War will guarantee that the earth is destroyed as a habitable living place for humans. So we have no other choice. Either we can continue our petty squabbles with China or we can cooperate with them to solve problems. We are truly all in this together. Either we hang together or we hang as nations separately.

The second lesson of MMT is that Medicare for All (M4A) could be part of the solution for global warming. If M4A were to be implemented, the US could have a much better health care system with better outcomes health wise at a far cheaper price. This has been shown in study after study. What's more M4A would be deflationary in financial terms. Deflation as well as inflation is bad for the economy. The fight against global warming would be inflationary because of the huge expenditures that must be made so it could offset the deflation caused by M4A. In fact we find in How to Pay for the Green New Deal, working paper 931 by Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray:

"To be clear, we do recognize that implementation of the GND will shift spending from the private sector to the government sector. However, unless there is an a priori reason to believe this would—by itself—be inflationary, we take the position that in the general case it makes no difference in terms of inflation whether the dollar spent to hire resources comes from the government or from the private sector, which is also the method used by Keynes. As Stephanie Kelton says, cash registers do not discriminate. Indeed, as we report below, there is strong evidence that at least in the healthcare sector a dollar of government spending buys more care than a dollar of private spending—so shifting toward government as the single payer would produce disinflationary pressure."

So while the US government can create as much money as it needs for a GND by means of the Federal Reserve's money creation powers without increasing taxes, the need to forestall inflation could be offset by M4A which would in addition provide a health care system with better outcomes for Americans at a lower price. The only reason then to raise taxes would be to diminish economic inequality which could be ameliorated by only taxing the rich.

Off the Top of My Head

It's Almost Thanksgiving: Let's Talk Turkey

by John Lawrence, November 14, 2020

So what are Republicans saying about a Biden administration? That the progressive wing of the Democratic party will push him too far to the left. Well, what exact policies would be "too far to the left"? Defund the police? That's just a radical slogan that means about as much as "Lock her up." In other words it means nothing in terms of either Biden's agenda or progressives in the Democratic party. Reform the police - that would be more like where the Democratic party actually stands. As far as Medicare for All, Biden favors Medicare for All Who Want It. I guess there are those Republicans who so love their employer based health insurance that they are terrified by the possibility that it might be taken away from them and replaced with something better. So Biden's position is go ahead and keep it. He just wants to make it possible that those who do want it will be able to have it or a public option which amounts to the same thing.

So Republican concerns amount to whipping up a bunch of meaningless hysteria just like Trump has always done. It's his stock in trade. So what about the Green New Deal? Who could object to creating jobs to build infrastructure and combat global warming? Oh maybe it's that they fear their taxes will go up? There's actually no reason why anyone's taxes should go up based on the realities as they exist in the 21st century. The government has shown that any amount of money can be found and spent to bail out banks or to add to the debt to give people tax breaks. Trump's tax cuts added a trillion dollars to the debt. Quantitative easing and the money to bail out the big banks amounted to several trillion dollars and yet it has had no adverse effect on inflation or anything else. Modern Monetary Theory has shown that Deficits Don't Matter whether those deficits originate from bailing out the banks or a Green New Deal or Biden's Green Deal which is more or less the same. Expect Republicans to cry bloody murder any time government threatens to formulate a program to combat global warming or to create jobs for poor people or to raise wages for essential workers to $15. an hour.

Money spent constructively on infrastructure or other things will never cause inflation. What will cause inflation is money that is pissed away frivolously or unconstructively. Reorienting out priorities can and should be done even if deficit spending is required to do it. When the economy is rebalanced, it eventually will mean that the rich will have to pay their fair share of taxes in order to reduce inequality. That's the main thing that Republicans are afraid of - that eventually the rich will have to pay their fair share of taxes. In the meantime economic history since 2000 has demonstrated the fact that, if trillions of dollars were found to bail out the banks and give tax cuts to the rich, trillions of dollars can be found to repair and rebuild infrastructure and prevent the world from the disaster of global warming. Private enterprise has done nothing but accelerate global warming because private enterprise consists of the fossil fuel industry. Private enterprise profits from pollution that it doesn't have to compensate for. Therefore, it's up to government to balance out what private enterprise seems incapable of doing. That's not to say that private enterprise is unimportant. It does some things very well, some things that government does not do well. It's a matter of finding the correct balance between private enterprise and government enterprise.

Does any fossil fuel worker object to working in the renewable energy industry providing they are guaranteed a job in that industry? I don't think so. There's no one that loves fossil fuels per se or just because they are fossil fuels. They are not like Scrooge who just loves the look and feel of money. Are there people who so much like the look and feel of oil that they can't bear the thought of working in an industry that doesn't pollute the planet? There are new industries coming - a straw with the look and feel of a plastic straw that biodegrades and doesn't stay in the ocean for hundreds of years like the plastic straw does. These straws are being manufactured today. If government can assist in the ramping up of this private enterprise - Newlight Technologies - we will be all better off except for the plastic straw manufacturers which are using mainly robots to produce their straws so there are not that many jobs involved there.

Huntington Beach, California-based Newlight produces an ocean-degradable biopolymer called PHB using air and greenhouse gas. Newlight's methods are supported by more than a decade of research and development as well as an extensive patent portfolio. Newlight's Series F finance round coincides with the commissioning of a new commercial-scale production facility in California called Eagle 3 and the launch of branded products including a line of cutlery and drinking straws for the food-service industry. Newlight's foodware products deliver a unique level of material safety and certified sustainability, resulting in high-performance, ocean-degradable foodware that works for people and the planet. 

Government can provide an assist to private enterprise as long as that enterprise is headed in a new direction which doesn't pollute and which doesn't produce greenhouse gasses. Which is more important - hanging onto the familiar past or striking out in a new direction that saves the planet and makes it better for our grandchildren? Are we pioneers and adventurers like our ancestors or what?

Off the Top of My Head

US Consumed More Energy from Renewables Than Coal in 2019

by John Lawrence, September 24, 2020

In 2019, U.S. annual energy consumption from renewable sources exceeded coal consumption for the first time since before 1885, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Monthly Energy Review. Despite that global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were up .6% in 2019 over 2018. The world is still going the wrong way. In order to keep global temperatures to within a 2 degree C increase, we have to decrease GHGs between now and 2050 so that there are net zero GHGs emitted by 2050. This will be hard to do as developing countries are still installing coal fired electricity generating plants. However, they are just trying to catch up with the US which has contributed much more in terms of GHGs than any other nation over history starting with the industrial age.

GE has dropped its coal fired power business. GE was one of the largest manufacturers of coal fired power generating plants. Five years ago it bought Alstom's power business, which makes coal-fueled turbines, for $9.5 billion. Now that investment is a total loss. GE has laid off thousands of power workers, slashed its dividend to a penny, fired two CEOs and sharply written down the value of its power business. GE's exit from coal "highlights the billions of dollars of shareholder value destruction that is embodied with the failed Alstom acquisition," John Inch, senior analyst at Gordon Haskett Research Advisors, said. GE's jet engine business is also way off thanks to the pandemic and the decline of airline revenues. GE's stock has gone down since the announcement that it is getting out of the coal business.

China is still very much involved in the coal business despite its goal of reducing GHG emissions. China’s “economic miracle” has seen the country become the world’s second-largest economy and pulled nearly a billion people out of poverty. But this progress has been built on a boom in energy from coal, and China has also become the world’s largest carbon polluter by far. It's a trade off between economic growth based on cheap and plentiful coal or a desire to reduce GHGs. China’s CO² emissions increased again by around 2% in 2019, based on recently released official economic data, and 65% of the annual growth in energy consumption came from fossil fuels.

India also is building more coal fired plants in an attempt to grow and develop its economy. India, the third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, saw its annual coal demand rise 9.1% to nearly 1 billion tons in the year ended March 2019. Coal demand from utilities accounted for over three-quarters of total consumption. India expects coal-fired power capacity to grow 22% in 3 years. This is bad news for India's cities which are highly polluted at the present time and will only get worse. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambition to make India a $5 trillion economy by 2024 and turn the country into a manufacturing hub will require industries to have access to continuous and dependable power supplies. It is also bad news for the world which needs to decrease GHG emissions if a climate catastrophe is to be avoided. If GHGs keep being emitted into the atmosphere, the goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to 2 degrees C will not be met and the earth will become uninhabitable in many regions.

It's very important that the US cooperate with China, India and Russia which is number 4 in world GHG emissions. The world needs to pull together on this issue. Instead the US at the present time is going forward with its fossil fuel industry especially fracking and natural gas which is methane, an even more potent GHG than carbon dioxide. The US is also increasing tensions with China in particular under the Trump administration while a Democratic administration would probably be hostile against Russia. This is not helpful or constructive in terms of the cooperation needed to convert to non polluting renewable energy as quickly as possible and as universally as possible. Instead of harping on the shortcomings of these countries, it's of paramount importance that the whole world unite in an attempt to reduce GHG emissions. Intellectual property protection is just not important. Patents are not important because it is unthinkable that individuals or corporations would seek to profit off technologies invented to save the world from global warming. All those technologies and intellectual property should be widely shared with other countries in order to bring down GHG emissions. The alternative is that the world burns because nations refuse to give up their petty squabbles.