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You’ve just lived through Earth’s hottest 12 months on record

The planet is closer than ever to a 1.5 degree-Celsius warming threshold that could trigger irreversible ecological damage, analysis finds

By Scott Dance

November 9, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST, from the Washington Post

A resident covers their face from the sun during high temperatures in Girona, Spain, on Aug. 23. (Angel Garcia/Bloomberg News)

The Earth just endured its hottest 12 months in the modern era, and probably the hottest in 125,000 years, according to an analysis published Thursday.

That means nearly 3 in 4 people experienced more than a month’s worth of heat so extreme, it would have been unusual in the past, but became at least three times more likely because of human-caused climate change, scientists at Climate Central found.

And it means that the planet is closer than ever to a global warming benchmark that scientists have predicted could irreversibly damage, if not destroy, entire ecosystems — 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial norms. Data shows a surge of warming this year has pushed average planetary temperatures 1.3 to 1.4 degrees Celsius above 19th-century levels.

In sharing the analysis, scientists professed hopes it would spur action and underscore its urgency as global leaders prepare to convene an annual United Nations climate change conference, COP 28, later this month.

“If we don’t phase out fossil fuels now and stop burning them imminently, this will be a very cool year soon,” said Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London.

Fans and mist sprays keep restaurant customers cool during extreme heat in Athens on July 14. (Yorgos Karahalis/Bloomberg News)

Billions have faced heat waves intensified by climate change

The Climate Central analysis looked at the influence of climate change on weather over the 12-month period from November 2022 through October 2023. The nonprofit climate science and news organization’s leaders acknowledged they chose that period in light of the schedule for COP 28, which begins Nov. 30.

That meant the analysis included relatively cooler months of late 2022 and early 2023, as well as the dramatic surge in planetary heat observed over the past several months. July, August, September and October each brought record-high average global temperatures, all but guaranteeing that 2023 will be Earth’s warmest calendar year on record.

Using what is known as attribution science, the analysis found that billions of people around the world have recently experienced extreme heat waves that likely would not have been as intense or as long-lasting if fossil fuel emissions had not warmed the planet so dramatically over the past century and a half.

It focused on temperatures so extreme, they are at least three times more likely today than they were before the Industrial Revolution. During the past year, 9 in 10 people experienced at least 10 days of such heat, the analysis found. Nearly 3 in 4 people endured it for 30 days or more.

 

People eat frozen treats at a park in suburban Tokyo on July 27 as temperatures reached 97 degrees, scorching the Japanese capital. (Richard A. Brooks/AFP/Getty Images)

Scientists linked the warming climate to calamitous disasters around the world: hospitals overwhelmed with heat-related illnesses, thousands dead and millions displaced from floods, and 23 million without secure food supplies in Africa alone because of drought.

“The past year was quite extraordinary,” said Joyce Kimutai, principal meteorologist at the Kenya Meteorological Department.

The analysis found that average temperatures over the past year have met or exceeded the 1.5 degree-Celsius warming threshold in nearly a dozen countries in Europe and northern Africa: Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Moldova, Morocco, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Montenegro, Algeria and Ukraine.

That heat was most intense across Europe and Africa in recent months, with temperatures in both Switzerland and South Sudan averaging 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial levels from May through October.

As extreme as those hot spots may seem, the observations are in line with past global warming observations and projections, said Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central.

“We should expect to set records because we live on a warming planet,” he said. “2023 is very consistent with that long-term trend.”

A surge of global warmth not expected to subside soon

A year-by-year chart of global temperature differences from average during October. (Copernicus Climate Service)

Separate data that European scientists published Wednesday underscored how dramatically the warming trend has accelerated just in recent months.

The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said that October brought record global warmth for a fourth consecutive month. Temperatures across the planet averaged 1.7 degrees Celsius above the norm for October during preindustrial decades, from 1850 to 1900.

And through the first 10 months of 2023, global temperatures are averaging 1.43 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, according to the Copernicus data. That is a tenth of a degree Celsius warmer than observed during the first 10 months of 2016, which holds the record as Earth’s hottest ever measured.

A person in Austin rests in the shade Sept. 4 while waiting for a bus during unusually hot weather. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

And scientists said they don’t expect the surge of warming to slow down.

When the planet surged to record warmth in 2016, it was on the tail end of an episode of El Niño, the global climate pattern known to release vast stores of Pacific Ocean heat into the atmosphere. Now, a strong El Niño is still building toward an expected peak this winter, meaning its influence could make for an even hotter 2024.

“El Niño is going to push these temperatures higher,” Pershing said. “We’re going to continue to set these records as we move on into next year.”

Five Decades and a Mountain of Evidence: Study Explores How Toxic Chemicals are ‘Stealing Children’s Future Potential’

Children of color and from low-income families are not only exposed to more dangerous substances but also experience disproportionate harm to their brain development, researchers report.

By Victoria St. Martin

October 23, 2023, from insideclimatenews

 

Steven James, 12, waits to hunt geese on St. Lawrence Island, in Alaska, sitting hidden behind a wood bar and a whale bone. Credit: Ann Johansson/Corbis via Getty Images.

For over 2,000 years, the Indigenous people known as the Yupik have occupied St. Lawrence Island, a sliver of Alaska that rests in the Bering Sea just below the Arctic Circle and where, on a clear day, it’s said that one can see the coastline of Russia about 40 miles away.

To this day, residents maintain a subsistence lifestyle centered around the region’s fish and wildlife. Growing up on the island, Pangunnaaq Vi Waghiyi absorbed a simple lesson that has been passed down across the generations: “Our elders call the ocean our farm,” she related fondly in a recent phone interview.

But what happens when the ocean, the soil, and the air itself become polluted? 

Drawing on her familial roots at the top of the world, Waghiyi has been working with the environmental justice group known as Alaska Community Action on Toxics to help researchers answer those questions.

Now, a newly released review of more than 200 studies has concluded that children from low-income families and families of color are exposed to more neurotoxic chemicals—and experience greater harm from them—than young people from higher-income and white families.

The article, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives and based on research by an alliance of scientists, medical professionals and environmental advocates, including Waghiyi’s group, focuses on a range of harmful chemicals, including lead, particulate matter, pesticides, and phthalates, or substances added to plastics to make them more flexible.

The review notes that those chemicals can affect brain development and cause developmental delays in children—problems that, researchers wrote, can be exacerbated by such factors as poverty, “racist and discriminatory policies and processes such as racial residential segregation, disproportionate citing of polluting sources in communities of color, and government-backed policies to dispossess Native Americans of their lands and cultures.”

The combined research demonstrates that such environmental injustices affect the health of all age groups, the authors write. Yet as noted by the science writer Harriet Washington, they add, “environmental assaults on the developing brain are particularly pernicious because the effects can have lifelong implications.”

“The whole issue is, children are not exposed to one neurotoxicant at a time—it’s many,” said Devon Payne-Sturges, a co-lead author of the article and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health. “And so, you know, policies that allow these exposures to continue are really just stealing children’s future potential. And we wanted to highlight this issue about cumulative exposures and cumulative effects.”

The authors examined 218 studies spanning five decades, most of which focused on exposure to combustion-related air pollution like car exhaust or industrial emissions, which increases the risk of respiratory ailments, heart disease and strokes, or to lead, which can cause developmental delays, neurological problems and behavioral challenges in children.

Beyond the high rates of lead exposure among Black and Hispanic children, the researchers noted that children of color have been exposed to higher levels of the pesticides widely used in agriculture. And Black and Hispanic mothers have been exposed to high levels of phthalates, which interfere with human hormones, they observe.

The authors also summarized how low socioeconomic status has amplified the adverse impact of lead exposure on children’s cognitive functioning to a greater degree than previously believed. And they examined studies in which air pollution exposures were associated with greater adverse effects in terms of lowering IQ scores among children who are from families with low socioeconomic status.

“We found that certain types of adversity or disadvantage really magnify the impact of a particular chemical,” said Tanya Khemet Taiwo, an assistant professor in the Department of Midwifery at Bastyr University in Kenmore, Washington, who was also a lead author of the study.

“That means that if you have equal levels of, say, lead exposure in two children and one comes from a family without any social disadvantage, the actual loss of IQ is greater in that child living in a home where they have some factors of social disadvantage,” Khemet Taiwo said. “And that was something we spent a lot of time struggling with and working on and really digging through.”

The article’s authors say they hope their work will help inspire targeted interventions, shape new policy, and encourage greater investment in efforts to eliminate those health disparities. Their findings also underline the need for a greater emphasis on the role of race when researchers are studying harmful environmental exposures, they add.

“The treatment of race and ethnicity in epidemiological studies deserves as much rigor as exposure and health outcome assessment,” the researchers wrote, adding, “Racial categories must be recognized as social constructions whose meanings are not static, and are the result of racism and racialization.” 

Such processes “allocate differential economic, political, social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines and are maintained to preserve status differences,” they noted.

The scientists also pointed to a “conspicuous” lack of studies involving Native American and Indigenous populations, one of the factors driving Waghiyi and her group to assist in such research efforts.

Waghiyi is 64 and a native of Savoonga, the most populous city on St. Lawrence Island with 835 people. She said her community has borne a disproportionate share of the effects of contamination because its diet is still primarily centered on whales, seals, walruses and reindeer.

“Because of where we live in the Arctic, we are some of the most highly contaminated population on the planet because of our reliance on our subsistence foods,” she said.

Ocean currents sweep pollutants up into the Arctic region, Waghiyi explained, and the island is home to an abandoned Cold War-era air base that has been shedding chemicals into the air, soil and water as it decays. The results have been devastating, she said. 

“We now know my people have four to 10 times higher PCBs”—polychlorinated biphenyls, chemicals that cause cancer in animals and have other adverse health effects—“than the average American in the Lower 48,” Waghiyi said. “Along with PCBs, we also found pesticides, heavy metals, solvents. Massive fuel spills. Asbestos. Lead. Mercury.”

The activist views the chemicals as “burdens we didn’t create and environmental violence, where we’re being contaminated without our consent.”

Waghiyi, who also serves as a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, said her group has helped lead community-based research on the harms of toxic chemicals on Sivungaq, the traditional name for St. Lawrence Island.

Now based in Anchorage, Waghiyi said the research is “my passion because it is so personal and we’re seeing health disparities never seen before in our people.” 

In the 1970s, she said, a Yupik elder named Annie Alowa who was working as a health aide began noticing a high incidence of cancer as well as low birth weights, miscarriages and stillbirths in the Northeast Cape, the part of St. Lawrence where Waghiyi grew up. “Early on, she tried to get help for our people for 20 years, and nobody would validate her concerns,” Waghiyi said.

Now Alaska Community Action on Toxics is investigating the legacy contaminants from the military base, persistent organic pollutants like the pesticide mirex and other worrisome substances. Waghiyi said the effects have been multigenerational and, for her, searingly personal.

“Where do I begin?” she said. “My father died of cancer. My mother had a stillborn child after me. She also had heart disease, diabetes, strokes, depression and cancer. We buried my brother of cancer a year ago. I’m a cancer survivor and I’ve had three miscarriages. 

“We’re seeing birth defects in our children. We have children being born with no brains. And these are all families associated with the Northeast Cape.”

Change will not come fast enough for her generation, Waghiyi said, but whatever the obstacles, her group will press on for the children. ”My community and leadership are committed to making meaningful change for our future generations,” she said.

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Victoria St. Martin

Health and Environmental Justice Reporter, Philadelphia

Victoria St. Martin covers health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. During a 20-year career in journalism, she has worked in a half dozen newsrooms, including The Washington Post where she served as a breaking news and general assignment reporter. Besides The Post, St. Martin has also worked at The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, The Trentonian, The South Bend Tribune and WNIT, the PBS-member station serving north central Indiana. In addition to her newsroom experience, St. Martin is also a journalism educator who spent four years as a distinguished visiting journalist with the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. She is a co-director of the Dow Jones News Fund summer internship training workshop at Temple University. St. Martin is a graduate of Rutgers University and holds a master’s degree from American University’s School of Communication. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 and has written extensively about the prevalence of breast cancer in young women. In her work, St. Martin is particularly interested in health care disparities affecting Black women.

• @VStMartin

[email protected]

The Time Is Now for a Just Transition From Factory Farming

 Image: Adobe

by Grace Hussein, Sentient Media, from Truthdig, October 17, 2023

A new report suggests reinventing the industrial food system to tackle climate change.

Ahead of COP28, global leaders are increasingly turning to food systems to tackle climate pollution. Now, experts from Stockholm Environment Institute have released a new policy report with recommendations for reinventing the food system. The common thread — a shift away from factory farms. 

The experts specifically call out the harms of industrial meat, as producing beef and dairy products along with other meats is one of the largest contributors to climate change, using vast amounts of water and land while belching a significant amount of greenhouse gasses. 

“…Even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately,” the authors write, “emissions from food systems alone, particularly from animal product production, would make it impossible to limit global warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to limit warming to 2°C.” 

Because food production doesn’t exist in a vacuum, eliminating meat — or even just reducing it — is no small task. In much of the world, animal products continue to play a key role in health and nutrition, the authors write, especially for “pregnant and lactating women, young children and people on low incomes with little access to alternatives.” 

Yet it’s precisely because animal products continue to play a pivotal cultural, social, economic and nutritional role that a just transition away from them is necessary in order to ensure the best outcomes for people, animals and the environment. 

Health and Justice Require Food System Change

The report argues for a “One Health” strategy for solving these problems — what the CDC defines as an approach that recognizes the ties between humans, animals and the planet. Instead of focusing on one of these issues — for example just animal welfare — One Health solutions also take into account the impacts to human health and the environment. 

Industrial agriculture’s high disease risk demonstrates how human, animal and environmental well-being are all interconnected, and, the researchers argue, how all three of these are intrinsically linked to food production. 

“…Even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately,” the authors write, “emissions from food systems alone, particularly from animal product production, would make it impossible to limit global warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to limit warming to 2°C.” 

Part of the problem is that raising animals on factory farms by the billions is driving the destruction of forests and an overreliance on antibiotics. In a worrying turn of events, the number of new pathogens discovered yearly has jumped from three to five in just one decade, a trend scientists believe is due in large part to deforestation. About 40 percent of deforestation is attributable solely to beef production. 

The authors also argue that social justice plays an equally important role in food systems transformation. Enter just transition. 

Originated by unions in the United States, just transition principles were created to protect the interests of workers and communities as emerging environmental regulations began to shift economies away from dependence on polluting industries. The framework has been employed heavily in the fields of energy and fuel, but has only recently made its way into discussions surrounding food systems transformation. 

What makes food systems change especially unique are the stakeholders— workers, communities, but also livestock, according to the research. Farm animals “are sentient beings,” the authors acknowledge, which means they too “will be directly affected by the policies that governments adopt to transform the meat sector.” Any and all solutions, they argue, should “reduce, rather than increase, suffering.” 

Just Transition Is More Than Financial

The researchers recommend a number of shifts, including phasing out subsidies and other government support for factory farms, while at the same time boosting support for alternatives such as plant-based and alternative proteins, as well as policies that support equitable access to food. 

Some of the measures they suggest phasing out are so-called “ag-gag laws,” which protect producers from undercover investigators and government-funded campaigns to increase meat consumption. 

Meanwhile, the researchers caution against blanket support for meat alternative products, to avoid perpetuating the same inequalities represented within industrial meat production. Instead, they also suggest support for policies and programs that encourage a deeper shift to eating whole-food, plant based products as a means for boosting public health. 

The experts also call on policymakers to ensure that the transition planning process is inclusive of all stakeholders, highlighting “truly inclusive, transparent processes that enable stakeholders to participate meaningfully.” 

Any and all solutions, they argue, should “reduce, rather than increase, suffering.” 

To do this, policymakers must take active steps to combat the underlying prejudices and socioeconomic inequalities fueling injustices within the food system. Racism and other forms of marginalization run deep. For example, within the U.S., only a small percentage of farmers are Black, a trend that originated with the country’s legacy of slavery and became entrenched after the decades of tenancy, rather than ownership, that followed.

Instead of fixing the problem, the U.S. Department of Agriculture made things worse by systematically denying Black farmers the support they offered white farmers. Addressing these injustices requires an understanding of this history, as well as exploring paths for more fair land ownership, according to the authors. 

The researchers also recommend that direct support be provided to the stakeholders most heavily impacted by the transition away from meat. Part of that includes “social safety nets and compensation for the disruptions caused,” but also  “addressing “the physical and mental impacts” of a changing food system. The authors note that ranching and pastoralism are core to identity in many communities, and a shift away from something so culturally entrenched requires addressing losses that are personal as well as financial.  

Ultimately, it’s not just meatpacking workers, the authors remind us. They recommend involving “stakeholders beyond the meat sector itself,” including seasonal farmworkers and small scale farmers, as well as workers and communities of color. While a just transition in the food sector presents challenges that are different from coal or energy communities, the authors urge “time is short and there is a great deal at stake,” as biodiversity and the health of the planet — along with its inhabitants — depend on it.

Off the Top of My Head

What do the Pope and Ted Kaczynski Have in Common?

by John Lawrence

Recently the Pope delivered a strong condemnation of the western lifestyle in Laudate Deum. In his writing, which was all about our failure to address climate change sufficiently, he decried our "technocratic paradigm" which basically is the worship of technology as a false god whose premise is that technology in and of itself will solve all the problems of the human race especially in terms of artificial intelligence (AI). The implication is that the new religion is technology. Kaczynski railed against "industrial-technological society" which he felt reduced the free exercise of human potential. The Pope decried spiritual poverty; Kacynski decried psychological poverty. In both cases the authors felt that humanity had lost its soul.

It's easy to see why. As the Pope observed, consumption equals fossil fuel emissions equals climate change. The more consumption, the more climate change. Kaczynski was also anti-consumption, but his gripe was more with the lifestyle required to live a life of consumption as opposed to getting by with less so one could opt out of "the system." The American way of life is surely one of high consumer values. Advertising to get people to consume more is relentless. People work to acquire things as opposed to just working enough to supply one's basic needs leaving the rest of your time free to pursue more life affirming pursuits. While Kaczynski focused almost exclusively on the negative psychological results, the Pope focuses on the long term effects that climate change can have on people especially poor people who are suffering and will suffer disproportionately although they are not the main perpetrators of fossil fuel emissions. One could also mention that many of the consumable products that rich nations favor also pollute the oceans and have negative health effects in general. All of creation including animals suffer as a result of the high consumption lifestyles of rich nations, rich nations that have been most responsible for inventing the technologies that are driving climate and ecological destruction.

What Kaczynski failed to do and what the Pope is doing is to relate the high consumption technology driven lifestyle to the destruction of the earth's resources and the environment. The Pope expressed this very well in his writing:

"This is a global social issue and one intimately related to the dignity of human life. The Bishops of the United States have expressed very well this social meaning of our concern about climate change, which goes beyond a merely ecological approach, because “our care for one another and our care for the earth are intimately bound together. Climate change is one of the principal challenges facing society and the global community. The effects of climate change are borne by the most vulnerable people, whether at home or around the world”. In a few words, the Bishops assembled for the Synod for Amazonia said the same thing: “Attacks on nature have consequences for people’s lives”. And to express bluntly that this is no longer a secondary or ideological question, but a drama that harms us all, the African bishops stated that climate change makes manifest “a tragic and striking example of structural sin”.

A spiritual life, a psychologically healthy life is very much at odds with the American high consumption lifestyle. A high consumption lifestyle driven by advertising is not only bad for us as individuals, it is bad for the planet as well.

'Truly Historic' Youth-Led Climate Case Arrives at European Human Rights Court

Young Portuguese citizens arrive at the European Court of Human Rights for a hearing in a climate change case involving themselves against 32 countries, in Strasbourg, France on September 27, 2023. (Photo: Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images)

Six Portuguese young people are suing the governments of 33 countries, arguing their human rights have been violated by a widespread failure to mitigate the climate crisis.

By Julia Conley, September 27, 2023, from Common Dreams

Lawyers for six Portuguese children and young adults on Wednesday expressed hope that their unprecedented climate case, brought to the European Court of Human Rights three years after it was first filed, will ultimately be a "game-changer" that forces governments in Europe and across the globe to take decisive action to address the climate emergency.

Ranging in age from 11 to 24, the six plaintiffs sat on Wednesday before nearly two dozen human rights judges and attorneys representing nearly three dozen nations, determined to prove to the court that countries across Europe have violated their fundamental rights by allowing greenhouse gas emissions to continue heating the planet despite warnings from energy experts and scientists.

In Duarte Agostinho v. Portugal and 32 Others, the plaintiffs are seeking not financial relief but a ruling from the court that would compel the governments of the 27 E.U. member-nations as well as Russia, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, and Turkey to speed up their efforts to keep planetary heating below 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.

Because the human rights court's rulings are legally binding for E.U. members, a decision in favor of the young plaintiffs "would act like a binding treaty imposed by the court on the respondents, requiring them to rapidly accelerate their climate mitigation efforts," Gerry Liston of the U.K.-based Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), told the Associated Press.

"In legal terms, it would be a game-changer," Liston told the outlet.

Four of the plaintiffs live in central Portugal, where wildfires killed at least 66 people in 2017. The country faced more blazes this summer—the hottest on record—as well as a record-breaking heatwave which saw the temperature in the central region of the country rise to 46.4°C (115.5°F), which at least one plaintiff said had interfered with schoolwork, and which climate scientists said would not have happened without planetary heating and fossil fuel extraction.

"Without urgent action to cut emissions, [the place] where I live will soon become an unbearable furnace," 20-year-old Martim Agostinho, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement.

Lawyers for the defendants claimed the group should have litigated the case in the domestic court system, with Belgian legal expert Isabelle Niedlispacher arguing before the court that the plaintiffs did not make an attempt "to invoke, let alone exhaust domestic remedies."

But GLAN, which says it "pursues innovative legal actions across borders," dismissed the claims, noting that the fossil-fueled climate emergency and the extreme weather it's causing have no respect for countries' boundaries and are placing the entire planet at risk.

"It cannot be within a state's discretion whether or not to act to prevent catastrophic climate destruction," said Alison MacDonald, another attorney representing the young people.

Sébastien Duyck, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, called the case "truly historic" because the governments of dozens of countries have been compelled to respond.

"These governments are forced to lay out a legal defense justifying the gap between their climate policies and what science says is needed to avoid climate breakdown," said Duyck. "In the broader context of global litigation, this case wields remarkable influence, given that the European Court of Human Rights holds a prominent role in setting legal precedents within Europe and beyond."

The case was brought to the court a month after a state judge in Montana sided with 16 young residents who argued that the state had violated their rights by promoting fossil fuel extraction. The United Nations Environment Program released a report in July showing that climate litigation has emerged as an important driver of far-reaching, concrete action by governments to reduce emissions.

Gearoid O'Cuinn, another lawyer for GLAN, said defendants resorted to "climate denialism" when they argued, as Greece did, that the "effects of climate change, as recorded so far, do not seem to directly affect human life or human health."

Greece has faced both deadly wildfires and flooding in recent weeks.

"European governments' climate policies are consistent with a catastrophic 3° of global heating this century," said Liston. "For the brave youth-applicants, that is a life sentence of heat extremes which are unimaginable even by today's rapidly deteriorating standards."

"The European Court of Human Rights was set up following the horrors of World War II to hold European governments to account for failing to protect human rights," Liston added. "Never has there been as urgent a need for the court to do so than in this case."

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

 

 

Julia Conley

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Summer of Deadly Climate Breakdown Spurs Mass Protests Worldwide

Children hold placards as they march with their parents during a climate protest in Jakarta, Indonesia on September 17, 2023.

(Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images)

by Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, September 17, 2023

"We deserve a world free from fossil fuels."

Climate activists are closing out the hottest summer on record with hundreds of demonstrations worldwide, all blaring a unified message: "End fossil fuels."

From Indonesia to Uganda to the United Kingdom to the United States, climate campaigners young and elderly, scientists, human rights advocates, and other defenders of the planet have taken to the streets this weekend or are planning to do so on Sunday, a mass mobilization that comes ahead of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres' Climate Ambition Summit in New York City on Wednesday.

On Sunday afternoon, the city is set to see the largest climate protest in the U.S. in years, with tens of thousands expected to join a march calling on President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and do everything in his power to phase out fossil fuel extraction.

"We deserve a world free from fossil fuels," organizers declared before Sunday's march, which is set to kick off at 1:00 pm ET. "This is our chance, and Biden's opportunity, to break free from fossil fuels and build a just and safe future."

The United States is the world's largest historical emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gases, and a recent report identified the country as " planet-wrecker-in-chief" over its continued support for fossil fuel expansion at home and abroad. The nation has been hit by a record 23 billion-dollar extreme weather events so far this year.

Biden, who has come under fire for approving massive drilling projects in Alaska and elsewhere, is expected to skip Wednesday's Climate Ambition Summit.

 

(Photo: Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images)

The New York City march will cap off a weekend of global climate action held at the tail-end of a summer marred by catastrophic extreme weather, from devastating wildfires in Hawaii and Greece to massive flooding in Libya and China.

Thousands of people have been killed across the globe by extreme weather this year.

"We've experienced a summer of painful evidence that we are living in the midst of a climate crisis," organizer Eric Weltman told a local New York media outlet on Saturday.

In the face of intensifying climate breakdown and government inaction, activists around the world have ramped up their protests and civil disobedience outside of government buildings and corporate offices in recent days.

"In Quezon City in the Philippines [on Friday], activists lay in front of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in protest and held signs demanding fossil fuels—from coal to natural gas—be phased out," The Guardianreported. "In Sweden, climate activists gathered in front of Parliament, just next to the Royal Palace where Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf was celebrating his 50th anniversary on the throne. Their chants about 'climate justice' could be heard in the palace courtyard as the king watched the changing of the guard during the golden jubilee celebrations."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated that more than a third of Earth's population currently lives in areas "highly vulnerable" to climate chaos, a fact that was magnified this year as much of the globe faced weather disasters made far more likely by the continued burning of fossil fuels.

A comprehensive U.N. report published earlier this month found that world governments are nowhere close to holding emissions to levels necessary to keep warming within limits set by the Paris climate accord nearly a decade ago.

Agnès Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International, warned that "this generation faces a worsening climate catastrophe, with devastating consequences for human rights, but too many leaders in positions of power today are doing too little to avert this disaster, and even reneging on existing promises."

"We call on governments and corporations to act now to safeguard everyone's right to a healthy environment by bringing a rapid end to the current era of fossil fuel dependency, swiftly and fairly transitioning to renewable energy sources, and ending energy poverty," said Callamard.

 

(Photo: Loredana Sangiuliano/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Fossil fuel giants, meanwhile, are thriving—and ditching their previous vows to curb emissions, barreling ahead with more planet-wrecking oil and gas production.

While profits have dipped this year amid falling global gas prices, the world's leading fossil fuel companies raked in a combined $219 billion last year, spurring growing calls for legal action against the destructive industry.

On Friday, California became the largest economy in the world to file suit against major oil and gas companies.

"Against the backdrop of a harrowing year, with millions of people experiencing devastating climate impacts, the painful reality of the climate crisis is clear," said Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "It's well past time to stop putting the profits of fossil fuel companies ahead of the wellbeing of people and the planet."

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

 

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Jake Johnson

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Off the Top of My Head

Should the President Be Popularly Elected by Direct Vote of the People?

by John Lawrence

In the US the President is popularly elected by the people after having been filtered through the archaic electoral college. In a parliamentary democracy the head of government equivalent to the US President is indirectly elected by the parliament not by a direct vote of the people. In China the president is also elected by a majority vote of the National People's Congress, the highest legislative body very similarly to how the heads of government are elected in parliamentary democracies. In Russia the President is nominally elected by a popular vote of the people similarly to the US although the system has been manipulated in such a way as to keep Putin in power. So what are the drawbacks of a popularly elected President by a vote of the people? The main drawback IMHO is that in the US an incompetent but popular boob like Donald Trump can be elected to the most powerful office in the land and arguably in the whole world. The election for President of the US is a popularity contest, and there is no requirement of experience or competency. In parliamentary democracies as well as China, supposedly the indirect election of President or its equivalent, "head of state," is an election by a meritocratic body of lawmakers. Therefore, it is more likely that a competent President or head of government will be elected.

In recent history in the US, the least competent but most popular person has been elected President based more on their personality and charisma than on their competency or knowledge of the job. It is more likely that a guy who "you would like to have a beer with" is elected President than someone who is more experienced and/or intelligent. Adlai Stevenson was branded as an "egghead" which effectively ended his political career. The leading Democratic figure of the 1950s, Stevenson was known for his wit, intellectual speeches, and liberal political convictions. For many Americans in the mid-twentieth century, he symbolized conscience in politics. Stevenson lost the Presidential election twice to Dwight Eisenhower, the World War II war hero. In 2000 Al Gore lost the election to George W Bush who promptly lied the US into war with Iraq. Gore, who was a staunch advocate for climate change mitigation, presumably would have employed government resources in that direction rather than fighting a fruitless war. Gore actually won the popular vote but was defeated by a combination of the Electoral College and the Supreme Court.

Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House that were then taken down by Ronald Reagan. So much for science taking precedence over popular ignorance and prejudice. Reagan also ran up the national debt substantially as did George W Bush and Donald Trump. Then when Democrats are elected President, Republicans cry bloody murder over the national debt while doing their best to prevent Democrats from spending any government money to actually help people. Fortunately, Joe Biden has been very successful in getting legislation passed to mitigate climate change among other accomplishments. But, his popularity as a candidate in 2024 in on the line as a majority of the American people don't want him to run again. Trump, despite 91 criminal indictments, is running neck and neck with Biden, one of the most accomplished Presidents in American history. One wonders whether the sclerotic American electoral system can withstand the challenges brought by popular but unscrupulous candidates for the Presidency by those you'd "like to have a beer with." Finally, the electoral College has all the disadvantages of indirect elections and none of the advantages.

Climate Report Card Says Countries Are Trying, but Urgently Need Improvement

The global assessment, two years in the making, is the first official gauge of progress under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

by Brad Plumer, September 8, 2023, from the New York Times

 

 

While many of the worst outcomes feared in the 2010s appear less likely today, the report said, current efforts are still not enough to avoid calamity.Credit...Sascha Steinbach/EPA, via Shutterstock

Eight years after world leaders approved a landmark agreement in Paris to fight climate change, countries have made only limited progress in staving off the most dangerous effects of global warming, according to the first official report card on the global climate treaty.

Many of the worst-case climate change scenarios that were much feared in the early 2010s look far less likely today, the report said. The authors partly credit the 2015 Paris Agreement, under which, for the first time, almost every country agreed to submit a voluntary plan to curb its own planet-warming emissions. Since then, the rise in global greenhouse gases has notably slowed.

Yet those efforts still aren’t enough to avoid calamity, according to the report, which was written by representatives from the United States and South Africa and based on contributions from hundreds of governments, scientists and civil society groups from around the world.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries vowed to limit the rise in average global temperatures to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels and make a good-faith effort to stay at 1.5 degrees Celsius. Past that level, the dangers from intense flooding, wildfires, drought, heat waves and species extinction could become unmanageable, scientists have said. Earth has already heated up roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times.

Countries are far from meeting those goals. Current climate pledges would put the world on track for a significantly more hazardous 2.5 degrees Celsius or so of warming by 2100, assuming nations followed through on their plans. In order to keep global warming at safer levels, global emissions would need to plunge roughly 60 percent by 2035, which would most likely require a much faster expansion of energy sources like wind, solar or nuclear power and a sharp decrease in pollution from fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas.

The window for keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report said, is “rapidly narrowing.”

The new report is part of what’s known as the global stocktake. When countries approved the Paris Agreement, they agreed to meet every five years, starting in 2023, to officially assess how the fight against climate change was going and see whether they should ratchet up their efforts.

The report, nearly two years in the making, is meant to serve as the foundation for the next round of United Nations climate negotiations, known as COP28, that will start in late November in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. There, countries will discuss how to respond to the global stocktake and what more they can do.

“I urge governments to carefully study the findings of the report and ultimately understand what it means for them and the ambitious action they must take next,” said Simon Stiell, the United Nations climate head. “The global stocktake is a critical moment for greater ambition and accelerating action.”

The report avoids singling out any individual countries for success or failure, underscoring one of the thorniest dynamics in global climate talks. Everyone agrees that the world as a whole should cut emissions faster, but nations sharply disagree over who, exactly, should do more. Developing countries like India say that wealthy emitters like the United States and Europe should curtail their fossil fuel use more rapidly. U.S. officials, in turn, often point out that China needs to do much more now that it has become the world’s largest emitter by far.

The man overseeing this year’s negotiations, Sultan al-Jaber, is the head of both the Emirates’ biggest renewable energy company and its national oil company, a dual role that has provoked criticism from many environmentalists, who say he is unlikely to be an impartial mediator.

 

Sultan Al-Jaber, president of the COP28 climate meeting in November, in Nairobi this week.Credit...Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. al-Jaber has said he wants countries to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. He also wants nations to agree, for the first time, on a long-term goal of phasing out “unabated” fossil fuels. That phrasing would allow for the continued use of oil, coal or gas if companies can capture and bury the emissions those fuels produce — a technology that has struggled to gain traction because of high costs.

The new global stocktake report says those measures, and many others, are “urgently” needed.

“The United Nations’ polite prose glosses over what is a truly damning report card for global climate efforts,” said Ani Dasgupta, president of the World Resources Institute. “Carbon emissions? Still climbing. Rich countries’ finance commitments? Delinquent. Adaptation support? Lagging woefully behind.”

One perennial sticking point in global climate talks is that developing nations say they can’t afford to shift rapidly away from fossil fuels and adapt to fiercer heat waves and storms without outside help.

Under the Paris deal, wealthy emitters like the United States and Europe vowed to provide $100 billion per year from public and private sources by 2020 for this purpose. But they have yet to fulfill that promise. In 2020, industrialized countries provided $83.3 billion in climate finance. And only a small fraction of that money goes toward adaptation, such as building sea walls or helping farmers cope with drought, which is often the most pressing need.

The report notes that developing countries will ultimately need trillions of dollars to prepare for climate change and calls for wider systemic reforms, such as reforming lending practices at multilateral banks or aiding countries that are saddled with large debt burdens.

“There’s been so much focus on holding developed countries accountable for their $100 billion promise, which is absolutely important,” said Charlene Watson, a senior research associate at the Overseas Development Institute. “But the reality is we’ll need so much more.”

Countries have made some progress in adapting to climate threats by, for instance, building flood barriers or installing early-warning systems for tropical cyclones. But those efforts are often “incremental” and unequally distributed, the report warned. Preparing for future threats, like dwindling freshwater supplies or irreversible ecosystem damage, will require “transformational” changes in climate adaptation.

One obstacle, the report noted, is that many adaptation efforts “are failing to keep pace with increasing climate impacts and risks.”

“It’s a lot harder to track progress on adaptation than it is to track progress on finance or cutting emissions,” said Richard Klein of the Stockholm Environment Institute, who added that coming up with measurable global goals for adaptation would be a key challenge for future climate talks.

Some experts faulted the report for being too vague in many of its recommendations. “The opportunity was missed to make clear proposals on what countries could concretely implement, how much financial support should be provided and on what it should be spent,” said Niklas Höhne, a German climate scientist and founding partner of NewClimate Institute. “On these issues, the report often remains on the surface.”

The big question now is how countries will respond to the global stocktake.

“We’ve had lots of reports about lack of progress over the years, but what’s different about this one is that it isn’t a group of scientists or a single U.N. agency saying this,” said Rachel Kyte, a veteran climate diplomat and former dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “This is something that all the countries have had a say in.”

“This is like sitting down with your doctor and agreeing that your liver could be better, you really need to be in better shape,” Ms. Kyte added. “Now are you going to get off the couch and do something about it, or just sit there and ignore it?”

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Brad Plumer is a climate reporter specializing in policy and technology efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions. At The Times, he has also covered international climate talks and the changing energy landscape in the United States. More about Brad Plumer

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 9, 2023, Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Climate Report Card Says Countries Are Trying, but Progress Is Still Slow. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Fossil Fuel Kills, Asians in particular

New data that shocked even me

Bill McKibben

Sep 5, 2023

 

 

Cooling off in the rivers of Peshawar, Pakistan, during one of this summer’s brutal heatwaves.

When we talk about “humanity,” we are, statistically, mostly talking about Asia—just under 60% of our sisters and brothers live there. But they don’t live anywhere near as long as they should.

New data last week from University of Chicago researchers showed that across South Asia, air pollution—mostly from burning fossil fuels—is robbing people of five years of life on average. Five years! If you live in Delhi, the most polluted big city on the planet, that number is an unimaginable 11.9 years. If you would have lived to 70, you died at 58. Thank about that. Across the region, “particulate pollution levels are currently more than 50 percent higher than at the start of the century and now overshadow” other health risks. Every breath that people take is killing them, every hour of every day.

But those other health risks are also rising fast, spurred on by the climate disasters that also come with burning fossil fuel. A remarkable report in today’s Washington Post (which has been doing a lot of remarkable climate coverage lately) was headlined Climate-linked ills threaten humanity, and for a while was the lead story in the paper. It looked at Pakistan, home to last year’s record-breaking flood and a series of devastating heatwaves, and found almost unimaginable levels of misery. Here’s the big picture:

Pakistan is the epicenter of a new global wave of disease and death linked to climate change, according to a Washington Post analysis of climate data, leading scientific studies, interviews with experts and reporting from some of the places bearing the brunt of Earth’s heating. This examination of climate-fueled illnesses — tied to hotter temperatures, and swifter passage of pathogens and toxins — shows how countries across the globe are ill-prepared for the insidious, intensifying risks to almost every facet of human health.

And here’s what it looks like on the ground:

On a recent 109-degree day, babies wailed and adults vomited into buckets in the crowded heat stroke ward of Syed Abdullah Shah Institute of Medical Sciences, a 350-bed government medical center in central Sindh. With just seven beds for heat stroke victims, patients’ parents and relatives crowded together on the mattresses. Nurses in green scrubs attached bags of intravenous hydration fluids to the arms of even the tiniest patients as fans whirled and two air conditioners dripped and chugged.

The number of heat stroke patients coming to the hospital in summer has increased around 20 percent a year in the last five years, according to M. Moinuddin Siddiqui, the hospital’s medical director, at a time when Pakistan experienced three of its five hottest years on record.

So, bottom line: when you burn fossil fuel you produce particulates which lodge in lungs and kill you (one death in five on the planet comes from breathing the byproducts of fossil fuel combustion), and when you burn fossil fuel you produce carbon, which lodges in the atmosphere, driving heatwaves and floods that kill you.

If fossil fuel was the only way we had to power our lives, I suppose you could tot up its advantages and decide that, on balance, it was still worth burning. Or not. But fossil fuel is not the only way we have to power our lives. India has 300 clear and sunny days a year on average, enough to produce 5,000 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year. Which is, um, more than they need—solar farms on a small percentage of “low-conflcit wastelands” in the country could provide four times its power requirements. According to a recent World Bank study, utilizing just 0.071 percent of Pakistan'’s area for solar PV would meet the country’s current electricity demand. No, none of this comes for free—you have to mine lithium and cobalt. But the damage from those activities doesn’t begin to compare in scale to the toll that fossil fuel is exacting every hour from billions of human bodies.

By any measurable moral calculation, focusing the planet’s efforts and finances on rapidly converting Asia (and Africa and South America) to renewable energy would provide the largest imaginable payoff, both in the short-term and the long, and for both the people who live there, and for the smallish percentage of humans who don’t. But that would mean standing up to the fossil fuel industry—including in America, where that industry is eager to export more, not less, fossil fuel to Asia.

Carbon dioxide molecules are invisible, and particulates are too small to be seen with the naked eye. But they will break our bodies, and our civilizations, unless we break the power of the fossil fuel industry. That is the choice.

America set us on the hydrocarbon path. Asia, with help from the whole world, could be the place that got us off.

In other energy and climate news:

+It’s not just Asia, of course. The Washington Post also has a crackerjack piece of data reporting on how the ever-higher temperatures are affecting life in the Mediterranean.

“The number of days of high or extreme fire danger in southern Europe is already at levels we thought we wouldn’t see until 2050,” said Jesus San Miguel, a senior researcher at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. “Because of climate change, we are going much faster than we thought.”

Wildfires — some record size — have been turning virgin forests into preternatural moonscapes and trigging mass evacuations of developed areas. Fires are threatening cultural heritage, too, in a part of the world known as much for the ruins of ancient civilization as the joys of the modern vacation.

+Native Hawaiian Keolu Fox has an essay in Science magazine insisting that the horrible fires in Lahaina, Maui could be the springboard for reimagining the politics and economy of the islands

About 70% of Hawai‘i’s economy has come to rely on mass tourism. Restructuring this industry alone will require a strong vision. Visiting Hawai‘i should be an experience that deepens one’s understanding of the delicate balance of island ecosystems and the role people play in safeguarding them. An ecotourism approach directed at educating visitors about conservation and the natural environment of the islands would help build respect for nature and its vulnerabilities. This kind of tourism can be seen in highly threatened locales, including Bhutan and the Galápagos.

+Joshua Partlow has a fine account of this summer’s flooding in Juneau; it centers on the way that glacial melt can accumulate in lakes, which eventually—and catastrophically—overflow. These kinds of tragedies are happening in glacial areas around the world, but having one in the middle of the capital of an American state focused attention:

Some 15 million people worldwide live under the threat of sudden flooding from glaciers, according to a study published this year in the journal Nature Communications. As the climate warms, glaciers everywhere are retreating and meltwater lakes have grown in size and number, intensifying this threat.

Since the Mendenhall Glacier began shrinking in the mid-1700s, it has retreated more than three miles, including some 800 feet between August 2021 and August 2022. The rate of retreat depends on various factors, but scientists say the rapid loss is due in part to human-caused global warming in recent decades.

+The state of California officially endorsed the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty, good news for the ongoing effort. Here’s how Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, responded:

"This decision of the State of California is a commitment to take down the single biggest contributor to the climate crisis: the fossil fuel industry. California joins the millions of voices across Turtle Island and Mother Earth calling on Biden to follow in the footsteps of our Pacific Island brothers and sisters from the small Island states and negotiate a mandate for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. As the state with the highest population of Indigenous Peoples in the country, it is important to pass legislation that would put a halt to the devastation and destruction of the compounding effects of climate change caused by fossil fuels."

Meanwhile in California, as Grist points out, a single legislator has managed to hold up fossil fuel divestment plans for the world’s fifth largest economy for another year. (An oil and gas PAC spent more than a hundred thousand dollars on her last campaign…)_

+ The ongoing fight to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline—the object of Joe Manchin’s extortion earlier this year—may hinge in part on how much the pipe itself has deteriorated, according to Bill Kitchen.

+America was blessed with huge amounts of groundwater—and like many of our blessings, we’ve decided to use it up fast. Here’s a canny account from the Times.

Groundwater loss is hurting breadbasket states like Kansas, where the major aquifer beneath 2.6 million acres of land can no longer support industrial-scale agriculture. Corn yields have plummeted. If that decline were to spread, it could threaten America’s status as a food superpower.

Fifteen hundred miles to the east, in New York State, overpumping is threatening drinking-water wells on Long Island, birthplace of the modern American suburb and home to working class towns as well as the Hamptons and their beachfront mansions.

Around Phoenix, one of America’s fastest growing cities, the crisis is severe enough that the state has said there’s not enough groundwater in parts of the county to build new houses that rely on aquifers.

In other areas, including parts of Utah, California and Texas, so much water is being pumped up that it is causing roads to buckle, foundations to crack and fissures to open in the earth. And around the country, rivers that relied on groundwater have become streams or trickles or memories.

“There is no way to get that back,” Don Cline, the associate director for water resources at the United States Geological Survey, said of disappearing groundwater. “There’s almost no way to convey how important it is.”

UN Affirms Climate Crisis Threatens Children's Rights, Potentially Bolstering Youth-Led Lawsuits

Youth protesters put up their fists as they participate in a rally on the west steps of the Colorado Capitol Building on February 20, 2017 in Denver, Colorado.

(Photo: Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

"States should take positive measures to ensure that children are protected from foreseeable premature or unnatural death and threats to their lives," reads the updated document

by Julia Conley, Common Dreams, August 28, 2023

A group of children in Portugal who are expected to present arguments in a climate case at the European Court of Human Rights next month may have a stronger legal standing following a formal opinion issued Monday by a United Nations committee, which affirms that the climate, biodiversity, and pollution crises present "an urgent and systemic threat to children's rights globally."

After consulting with more than 16,000 children in more than 120 countries, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child updated the 1989 Convention on children's rights to say that there is an urgent need to address the "triple planetary crisis" and to explain "how children's rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child apply to environmental protection, and confirms that children have a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment."

"The right to life is threatened by environmental degradation, including climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, which are closely linked to other fundamental challenges impeding the realization of this right, including poverty, inequality, and conflict," reads the document, which was updated after a two-year period of gathering input from children around the world. "States should take positive measures to ensure that children are protected from foreseeable premature or unnatural death and threats to their lives that may be caused by acts and omissions, as well as the activities of business actors, and enjoy their right to life with dignity."

The formal opinion—called General Comment No. 26—and updated document were released four weeks before the Portuguese case is set to go to court, where six children are preparing to argue that the 33 member-states of the European Union have failed to fight the climate crisis and to seek a legally binding decision requiring the countries to make immediate, deeper cuts to their fossil fuel emissions.

At least 19 other cases filed by youths in countries including Brazil, the United States, and Indonesia make similar arguments, and legal analysts said Monday that the updated treaty may help the young people in court.

"This could definitely strengthen their hand because now there's a fully articulated set of guidance that pulls everything together in one place," lawyer Ann Skelton, who chairs the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, told Reuters.

Noam Peleg, a law professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, wrote at The Conversation that the changes offer "a practical guide to help children" fight their government's continued support of planet-heating fossil fuels and clarifies that governments have an obligation to protect children from the climate emergency as part of their duty to defend human rights.

"The general comment also identifies children as agents in their own lives," said Peleg. "By extension, this means children have a right to participate in the drafting of environmental policies or laws that will affect them."

As Common Dreamsreported last month, climate litigation has emerged in recent years as a key driver of climate justice.

The committee's changes were announced two weeks after a state judge in Montana ruled that the state violated the constitutional rights of 16 young residents by promoting fossil fuel extraction.

"Children worldwide have been leading the fight against climate change; calling on their governments and corporations to take action to protect the planet and their future," said David Boyd, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and the environment. "With its General Comment No. 26, the Committee on the Rights of the Child not only echoes and amplifies children's voices, but also clearly defines the rights of children in relation to the environment that state parties should respect, protect and fulfill collectively and urgently."

Some young people and advocates who were consulted by the committee had pushed the panel to put the world's children in an even stronger legal position by calling on countries to take action beyond that which is demanded by the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which calls for emissions cuts that would limit planetary heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures.

Kelly Matheson, deputy director of global climate litigation at Our Children's Trust—which represented the children in the Montana case—toldReuters that the new document represents "such a missed opportunity."

"It's an exercise in incrementalism instead of taking quantum leap forward," Matheson said.

Committee member Philip Jaffé toldReuters that climate leader Greta Thunberg, who at 15 began a protest outside the Swedish Parliament that grew into the global school strike demanding climate action, had called on the panel "to be more vigorous and somewhat bolder."

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

 

 

Julia Conley

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Home Insurers Cut Natural Disasters From Policies as Climate Risks Grow

Some of the largest U.S. insurance companies say extreme weather has led them to end certain coverages, exclude natural disaster protections and raise premiums

By Jacob Bogage

September 3, 2023 at 7:30 a.m. EDT

Hurricane Idalia caused flood and wind damage in Steinhatchee, Fla. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)

In the aftermath of extreme weather events, major insurers are increasingly no longer offering coverage that homeowners in areas vulnerable to those disasters need most.

At least five large U.S. property insurers — including Allstate, American Family, Nationwide, Erie Insurance Group and Berkshire Hathaway — have told regulators that extreme weather patterns caused by climate change have led them to stop writing coverages in some regions, exclude protections from various weather events and raise monthly premiums and deductibles.

Major insurers say they will cut out damage caused by hurricanes, wind and hail from policies underwriting property along coastlines and in wildfire country, according to a voluntary survey conducted by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a group of state officials who regulate rates and policy forms.

Insurance providers are also more willing to drop existing policies in some locales as they become more vulnerable to natural disasters. Most home insurance coverages are annual terms, so providers are not bound to them for more than one year.

That means individuals and families in places once considered safe from natural catastrophes could lose crucial insurance protections while their natural disaster exposure expands or intensifies as global temperatures rise.

“The same risks that are making insurance more important are making it harder to get,” Carolyn Kousky, associate vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund and nonresident scholar at the Insurance Information Institute, told The Washington Post.

The companies mentioned those policy changes as part of previously unreported responses to the regulatory group’s survey. The survey was distributed in 2022 by 15 states and received responses — some sent as recently as last month — from companies covering 80 percent of the U.S. insurance market.

Allstate said its climate risk mitigation strategy would include “limiting new [auto and property] business … in areas most exposed to hurricanes” and “implementing tropical cyclone and/or wind/hail deductibles or exclusions where appropriate.”

Nationwide has already pulled back in certain areas. The company said that in 2020, it “reduced exposure levels in some of the highest hazard wildland urban interface areas in California.”

In its response to the regulators’ survey, Nationwide said it no longer underwrites coverage for “properties within a certain distance to the coastline” because of hurricane potential.

Other changes will come. “More targeted hurricane risk mitigation actions are being finalized and will start by year-end 2023,” Nationwide told regulators.

Berkshire Hathaway, which also offers reinsurance — insurance policies for insurance providers — wrote that increased climate disasters mean “it is possible that policy terms and conditions could be updated or revised to reflect changes in such risk.”

U.S. homeowners have faced unprecedented disasters in recent weeks that have underscored the new challenges facing insurance markets.

Hurricane Idalia brought severe flooding to Georgia and the Carolinas, and tore through parts of Florida that had never experienced direct hits from a major storm. Tropical Storm Hilary caused $600 million in damage on the West Coast, according to Karen Clark & Co., a leading catastrophe modeling firm. The fires on the Hawaiian island of Maui, whose cause is still under investigation, led to $3.2 billion in property damage, the firm said.

Those catastrophes, insurance industry insiders said, show just how quickly claims costs are escalating in the face of climate change.

U.S. insurers have disbursed $295.8 billion in natural disaster claims over the past three years, according to international risk management firm Aon. That’s a record for a three-year period, according to the American Property Casualty Insurance Association.

Natural catastrophes in the first six months of 2023 year in the United States caused $40 billion in insured losses, the third costliest first-half on record, Aon found.

“There’s no place to hide from these severe natural disasters,” said David Sampson, president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association. “They’re happening all over the country and so insurers are having to relook at their risk concentration.”

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.

Off the Top of My Head

Ted Kaczynski and His Protest Against Technology

by John Lawrence

Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unibomber, wanted a revolution in which all technology would be removed from civilization and we would basically go back to the days of hunter gatherers, which he considered to be our natural state. If he were protesting only the harm that technology has done, he might have had a better case. In particular the chemical industry which has given us plastics which are polluting the oceans, PFAS chemicals, aka 'forever chemicals', weed killers such as Monsanto's Roundup and other chemicals likely causing cancer, Kaczynski might have had a better case. But his case was based on his perception that technology was psychologically inhibiting human freedom. In particular participation in a technological society was enslaving the human spirit. In many respects his protest was against wage slavery which in the early days of the American republic some writers considered almost as pernicious as chattel slavery. Michael Sandel writes in Democracy's Discontents:

"Labor leaders dramatized their case against wage labor by equating it with Southern slavery - "wage slavery," as they called it. Working for wages was tantamount to slavery not only in the sense that it left workers impoverished but also in the sense that it denied them the economic and political independence essential to republican citizenship.

"Wages is a cunning device of the devil for the benefit of tender consciences who would retain all the advantages of the slave system without the expense, trouble and odium of being slaveholders," wrote Orestes Brownson. The wage laborer suffered more than the southern slave and, given the unlikelihood of rising to own his own productive property, was scarcely more free. The only way to make wage labor compatible with freedom, Brownson argued, would be to make it a temporary condition on the way to independence: "There must be no class of our fellow men doomed to toil through life as mere workmen at wages. If wages are tolerated it must be, in the case of the individual operative, only under such conditions that, by the time he is at a proper age to settle in life, he shall have accumulated enough to be an independent laborer on his own capital, on his own farm or in his own shop."

Kaczynski's problem with the system included the slavery of the university system in which one must struggle for years at no or little pay for the privilege of going to work as a more highly paid wage slave and what this does to the human spirit that longs for freedom from this technological system. By going off and leading a barely self sufficient life in a cabin in the mountains, Kaczynski was escaping from the system which had enslaved his mind psychologically for years. What he didn't realize was that he could have achieved this by dropping out of that system and pursuing an independent life based on some form of independent labor. In other words, he could have left the system for self-employment and so can anyone else. The really destructive thing about the technological society is not what it did to the human spirit but what it did to the environment, and that was something that Kaczynski was not very much concerned about. Some people evidently have no problem with participating in the "system." However, the destruction of the environment brought about by the chemical industry and fossil fuels is actually destroying the planet. Kaczynski missed his calling. He could have made his life a protest against climate change and environmental destruction caused largely by the chemical industry, and he could have figured out a different way to get his manifesto published without killing and maiming people. Self publishing, perhaps?

The US and China must unite to fight the climate crisis, not each other

Cooperation is not only in the best interests of all countries, but is absolutely necessary for the survival of the planet

 

from the Guardian, Mon 21 Aug 2023 06.11 EDT, Last modified on Mon 21 Aug 2023 12.45 EDT

 

by Bernie Sanders

 

‘US and China should come to an agreement to mutually cut their military budgets …’ Photograph: Leah Mi

Climate change is a global crisis and cannot be solved by any one country alone. If the United States, China and other industrialized countries do not come together to dramatically decrease greenhouse gas emissions, the world we leave our children and future generations will become increasingly unhealthy and uninhabitable. Tragically, the cooperation required to address this existential threat is being undermined by hawks in both the United States and China who are moving us toward a disastrous cold war.

Now is the time for a radical rethinking of geopolitics to reflect the reality that international cooperation is not only in the best interests of all countries, but is absolutely necessary for the survival of the planet.

Here’s the reality. The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record. This year is on track to be the hottest year in recorded history, and this past July was the hottest month on record. Across the United States, July broke more than 3,200 daily temperature records and dozens of American cities broke or tied their previous daily temperature records three or more times. Phoenix experienced 31 days in a row at or above 110F (43.3C), 13 days longer than the previous record. El Paso, Miami, Austin and many other places also suffered under record-breaking stretches of extreme heat.

Smoke from unprecedented wildfires in Canada enveloped US cities and drifted halfway around the world, causing dangerously unhealthy air quality. Vermont, my home state, experienced floods that damaged 4,000 homes and 800 businesses, the state’s worst natural disaster since 1927. In Maui, Hawaii, rapidly moving fires destroyed 2,700 structures in historic Lahaina and took more than 100 lives, making it the deadliest wildfire in the US in more than a century.

But it’s not just the US that is dealing with record-breaking heatwaves and enormous climate-caused devastation. China experienced record-high temperatures last month, including the country’s all-time temperature record of 126F (52.2C), and recent flooding has killed about 100 people, destroyed nearly 200,000 homes, displaced some 1.5 million people and caused more than $13bn in damage.

From Tokyo to Rome to Tunis to Tirana, cities across Asia, Europe and north Africa experienced their hottest days on record. In Iran, the heat index hit 158F (70C), testing the limits of human survival. In our own hemisphere, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador all saw temperature records fall. It’s winter right now in South America, but that hasn’t stopped temperatures from exceeding 100F (37.7C) in some places, a heating event a climate historian labeled “one of the extreme events the world has ever seen”.

And it’s not just that temperatures have been soaring on land. Our oceans have never been warmer. Right now, 44% of the world’s oceans are experiencing a marine heatwave. The Mediterranean Sea is experiencing its hottest temperatures on record, more than 9F hotter than average in some places. Off the coast of Newfoundland, waters are as much as 18F above normal. South of Miami, waters reached 101F (38.3C). You’re supposed to find temperatures like that in a hot tub, not the ocean. This warming could further devastate coral reefs, fisheries and marine ecosystems around the world.

In the midst of this global crisis, there is both good news and bad news. The good news is that recent years have seen long-overdue steps to transition the global economy away from fossil fuels into more efficient and renewable energy sources. In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act included an unprecedented $300bn in investments in clean energy and energy efficiency, which could help increase US solar energy by 500% and more than double wind energy by 2035, reducing carbon emissions by roughly 40%.

Other countries have also made major investments. China spent $546bn on clean energy last year and continues to manufacture and deploy more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. By 2030, China may deploy enough renewable energy to essentially power the entire US electrical grid three times over. The European Union has laid out a plan to invest more than $1tn over the next decade in renewables and energy efficiency, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% compared with 1990.

Importantly, large sections of the corporate world have turned away from investments in fossil fuels and are now spending hundreds of billions on sustainable energy. Altogether, the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects the global community to invest $1.6tn in wind, solar power, electric vehicles, batteries, and electric grids this year, compared with just $1tn in fossil fuels. This progress has led the IEA to forecast that renewables will surpass coal to become the largest source of global electricity generation by early 2025, much faster than previously predicted.

The bad news is that we are still falling well short of the kinds of investments needed to deal with this crisis. We are still not moving fast enough to save our planet. The latest report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that without more urgent action, the world will pass the key 1.5C (2.7F) threshold by the early 2030s, risking a far deadlier future for our children and future generations. The science is clear: if the US, China, and the rest of the planet do not act with greater urgency to dramatically cut carbon emissions, our planet will face enormous and irreversible damage.

Let’s be clear: since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the US has put more carbon into the atmosphere, by far, than any other country. While the new technologies sustained by fossil fuels improved our standard of living, we laid the groundwork for the climate calamity the planet is now experiencing.

In recent years, the rapidly growing Chinese economy has eclipsed the US as the world’s major carbon emitter. Right now, China is building six times as many coal-fired power plants as the rest of the world combined – the equivalent of two new coal plants every week. Last year, they quadrupled the number of new coal plants approved compared with 2021. Current plans will see China add as much new coal to its grid as used in all of India, the second largest coal user, and five times more coal capacity as the US.

It is no great secret the Chinese government is undertaking many policies that we and the international community should oppose. They are cruelly repressing and interning the Uyghurs, threatening Taiwan and stifling freedom of expression in Tibet and Hong Kong. China has bullied its neighbors, abused the global trading system, stolen technology and is building out a dystopian surveillance state.

The US is rightly organizing its allies to press Beijing on these and other issues. But organizing most of our national effort around a zero-sum global confrontation with China is unlikely to change Chinese behavior and will alienate allies and partners.

Most importantly, it could doom our planet by making climate cooperation impossible between the world’s two largest greenhouse emitters. We need to move in a bold new direction. Recent history provides some instructive examples.

In 1962, when the US and the Soviet Union stood on the verge of nuclear war, President John F Kennedy and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, came together to prevent mutual destruction. Just a few months later, with the nuclear crisis as the background, President Kennedy proposed to the Soviet Union an arms reductions plan which would change the confrontational dynamic that had brought the world to the brink. Even arch anti-communists like Nixon and Reagan made bold gambits to reduce tensions, fearful of global annihilation. We face a similar dynamic today, facing collective catastrophe if we do not change course.

Here is the insane dynamic that must be changed. In recent years, both the US and China have greatly increased their military budgets. The US now spends some $900bn on the Pentagon, more than the next 10 nations combined. China, with the world’s second largest military budget, spends almost $300bn. Despite spending these huge amounts on “defense”, both countries are losing the war against the climate ccrisis. The US has experienced massive floods, fires, drought and extreme weather disturbances, which have cost us hundreds of billions. The recent flooding in China alone will cost that government tens of billions. Into the future, scientists tell us that great cities like Shanghai and New York will be underwater if we do not act effectively against the climate crisis.

So here’s a “radical” idea. Instead of spending enormous amounts of money planning for a war against each other, the US and China should come to an agreement to mutually cut their military budgets and use the savings to move aggressively to improve energy efficiency, move toward sustainable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels. They should also provide increased support for developing countries who are suffering from the climate crisis through no fault of their own.

Now, I know that establishment politicians in both countries will tell me how naive and unsophisticated I am to offer such a suggestion and they will provide a million reasons as to why it can’t be done. My response is this: go talk to the people in Vermont who have lost their homes because of unprecedented flooding and the families in Hawaii who lost loved ones in the recent fires. Go talk to the more than 1 million people in China who have been displaced by catastrophic floods. Go talk to the people in southern Africa who are starving because of the terrible drought and floods they are experiencing or farmers around the world who can no longer grow their crops because of water shortages.

Perhaps most importantly, go talk to the hundreds of millions of young people in every country on earth who are losing hope, wondering whether they should even have children of their own, given the enormous challenges the climate crisis poses for a normal life.

Nelson Mandela famously remarked; “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” If we are to save the planet, now is the time for bold action. Let’s do it.

• Bernie Sanders is a US Senator and chairman of the health, education, labor and pensions committee

'This Is Huge': Judge Sides With Montana Youths in Historic Climate Ruling

Youth plaintiffs await the start of the nation's first youth climate change trial at Montana's First Judicial District Court on June 12, 2023 in Helena, Montana. (Photo by William Campbell/Getty Images)

"As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today's ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation's efforts to save the planet," said one attorney representing 16 young plaintiffs.

by Julia Conley, August 14, 2023, from Common Dreams

Climate advocates on Monday expressed hope that an unprecedented ruling by a state judge in Montana, siding with 16 young residents who argued the state violated their constitutional rights by promoting fossil fuel extraction, will mark a sea change in the outcomes of climate lawsuits.

In Held v. State of Montana, District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled that rights of the plaintiffs—who range in age from 5 to 22— have been violated by the Montana Environmental Policy Act because the law has prevented the state from assessing the climate impacts of mining projects.

Fossil fuel emissions including Montana's "have been proven to be a substantial factor" in heating the planet and causing pollution, Seeley said in the nation's first ruling on a constitutional, youth-led lawsuit regarding the climate.

Because the Montana Constitution guarantees residents a "clean and healthful environment," the state's environmental policy law violates the document, said Seeley.

"This is HUGE," said meteorologist Eric Holthaus.

"This is a landmark decision establishing enforceable principles of intergenerational justice."

Julia Olson, founder of Our Children's Trust, the non-profit law firm that helped represent the plaintiffs, called the victory a "sweeping win" that could have reverberating effects on the hundreds of lawsuits that have been filed in the U.S. arguing against the continued extraction of fossil fuels.

"As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today's ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation's efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos," said Olson in a statement.

In their defense, state attorneys argued that Montana's fossil fuel emissions are insignificant compared to global emissions, but Seeley said in her ruling that the state's per capita emissions are "disproportionately large" and rank in the top six per capita emissions in the United States.

The state also ultimately rested its case on the argument that the state legislature should take up the issue of the environmental law rather than the judiciary—an admission, said Michael Gerrard of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, that the climate science underpinning the plaintiffs' case was indisputable.

"Everyone expected them to put on a more vigorous defense," Gerrard toldThe Washington Post Monday. "And they may have concluded that the underlying science of climate change was so strong that they didn't want to contest it."

During the trial, the plaintiffs testified about their own suffering due to pollution and extreme weather, while climate experts explained the connection between the state's fossil fuel activities and planetary heating, the wildfires and scorching heat that have overwhelmed parts of the West, and other extreme weather.

"Judge Seeley's decision comes at a time when we're seeing the impacts of climate change accelerate—from low streamflows and lake levels to unprecedented heat waves, floods, and wildfires," said Melissa Hornbein, senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, which along with McGarvey Law also represented the plaintiffs. "These are the climate realities the youth plaintiffs and expert witnesses told us about on the stand, while the state disclaimed any responsibility and dismissed them."

"We're relieved that the court recognized that these youth plaintiffs are already feeling the impacts of the climate crisis, as well as the dangers threatening their future if the state doesn't take meaningful action to address it," Hornbein added. "We're also delighted that Judge Seeley recognized Montana's significant role as an emitter on the global stage, as well as its ability—constrained only by a resistant government—to rectify its disproportionate contribution to the climate crisis."

The Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate action organization, said the ruling is "proof that our generation is unstoppable—we have the power to bring down the fossil fuel industry and win a Green New Deal."

As Common Dreams reported last month, lawsuits around the world have emerged as a key driver of climate action as a wide range of plaintiffs—from children in the U.S. to senior citizens in Switzerland—have argued that their human rights have been violated by the companies and lawmakers that have promoted fossil fuel production despite scientific evidence of the danger it poses.

Out of approximately 2,200 worldwide climate cases, about three-quarters have been filed in the United States, according to the United Nations Environment Program and the Sabin Center, and the number of legal challenges has more than doubled since 2017.

The outcome of the Montana case could "open up the floodgates for more climate lawsuits," said Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said that the next plaintiff to file a case against the fossil fuel industry should be the federal government, to hold companies accountable "for their role in the climate crisis."

"This is a landmark decision establishing enforceable principles of intergenerational justice," said Roger Sullivan, an attorney at McGarvey Law. "Simply stated, the government elected by this generation must abide its obligation to pass on a stable climate system to future generations."

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Julia Conley

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Judge Rules in Favor of Montana Youths in Landmark Climate Case

The court found that young people have a constitutional right to a healthful environment and that regulators must be allowed to consider climate impact.

Youth plaintiffs in Held v. State of Montana gathered in June at Pioneer Park in Helena, Mont.Credit...Janie Osborne for The New York Times

 

By Mike Baker

Aug. 14, 2023, 1:48 p.m. ET, from the New York Times

 

A judge in Montana ruled on Monday that young people in the state have a constitutional right to a healthful environment, finding in a landmark case that the state’s failure to consider climate change when evaluating new projects was causing harm.

The case, brought by a group of young Montana residents ranging in age from 5 to 22, is the first of its kind to go to trial in the United States. While the state has contended that Montana’s emissions are minuscule when considered against the rest of the globe’s, the plaintiffs argued that the state must do more to consider how emissions are contributing to droughts, wildfires and other growing risks to a state that cherishes a pristine outdoors.

In her ruling, Kathy Seeley, a district court judge, found that the state’s emissions “have been proven to be a substantial factor” in affecting the climate. Laws that limited the ability of regulators to consider climate effects were unconstitutional, she ruled.

“This is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy and for our climate,” said Julia Olson, the executive director of Our Children’s Trust, which brought the case.

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!"

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Jessica Corbett

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

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U.N. Chief Warns of ‘Catastrophe’ With Continued Use of Fossil Fuels

António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said instead of replacing Russian oil, gas and coal, nations must pivot to clean energy.

António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, at the organization’s headquarters in New York City this month.Credit...Andrew Kelly/Reuters

By Lisa Friedman

March 21, 2022, from the New York Times

WASHINGTON — Countries are “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe” if they continue to rely on fossil fuels, and nations racing to replace Russian oil, gas and coal with their own dirty energy are making matters worse, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres warned on Monday.

The ambitious promises world leaders made last year at a climate summit in Glasgow were “naïve optimism,” Mr. Guterres said. Nations are nowhere near the goal of limiting the average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic impacts increases significantly. The planet has already warmed an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius.

And the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet is continuing to increase. Global emissions are set to rise by 14 percent in the 2020s, and emissions from coal continue to surge, he said.

“The 1.5 degree goal is on life support. It is in intensive care,” Mr. Guterres said in remarks delivered to a summit The Economist is hosting on sustainability via video address.

“We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe,” he said. “If we continue with more of the same, we can kiss 1.5 goodbye. Even 2 degrees may be out of reach. And that would be catastrophe.”

Mr. Guterres’s speech comes as the European Union is trying to find ways to reduce its dependence on Russian oil and gas, and countries like the United States are scrambling to increase fossil fuel production to stabilize energy markets. President Biden and European leaders have said that the short-term needs will not upend their longer-term vision of shifting to wind, solar and other renewable sources that do not produce dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.

But the U.N. secretary general said he fears that strategy endangers the goal of rapid reduction of fossil fuel burning. Keeping the planet at safe levels means slashing emissions worldwide 45 percent by 2050, scientists have said.

In Glasgow in November world leaders promised to stave off climate change and, for the first time, planned to “phase down” coal — the dirtiest fossil fuel. Leaders from 100 countries also pledged to stop deforestation by 2030, a move considered vital since trees absorb carbon dioxide. The United States, Europe and about 100 other nations also said they would cut methane emissions 30 percent by 2030. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas produced from oil and gas operations.

But there has been almost no progress, Mr. Guterres said. In addition, rich countries most responsible for polluting the planet have not met their obligation to help the poorest countries — already “slammed” by high inflation, rising interest rates and debt — to develop clean energy, he said.

At the same time, he warned, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is upending global energy markets, further undermining climate goals.

“As major economies pursue an ‘all-of-the-above’ strategy to replace Russian fossil fuels, short-term measures might create long-term fossil fuel dependence and close the window to 1.5 degrees,” Mr. Guterres said.

He cautioned countries could become so focused on the immediate need to fill the oil, gas and coal gap “that they neglect or kneecap policies to cut fossil fuel use.”

“This is madness,” he said. “Addiction to fossil fuels is mutually assured destruction.”

Last week the International Energy Agency warned that the world faced its first global energy crisis, and recommended that major economies conserve energy by implementing 10 strategies, from carpooling to traveling by train instead of airplane.

In his speech, Mr. Guterres said wealthy nations should be dismantling coal infrastructure to phase it out completely by 2030, with other nations doing so by 2040. He called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies and a halt to new oil and gas exploration. Mr. Guterres also said private sector financing for coal must end.

“Their support for coal not only could cost the world its climate goals,” he said. “It’s a stupid investment — leading to billions in stranded assets.”

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas companies, said in a statement that the industry “can responsibly develop America’s vast resources while at the same time reducing emissions to address climate change.”

President Biden has promised a rapid clean energy transition in the United States but it has not started yet. Legislation he has championed to hasten the shift to renewable energy, the Build Back Better Act, is stalled in Congress. Meanwhile, his plans to stop new oil and gas leasing have faced challenges in the courts.

---

Lisa Friedman reports on federal climate and environmental policy from Washington. She has broken multiple stories about the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal climate change regulations and limit the use of science in policymaking. More about Lisa Friedman

Gazing into the future should really make us sweat

 

Ibrahim Rayintakath

 

By David Wallace-Wells Opinion Writer, New York Times, August 2, 2023

On the last day of July, Phoenix finally registered a temperature high below 110 degrees Fahrenheit — the first time that had happened in 31 days. The temperature of pavement in the city measured up to 180 degrees, and local burn units are full of patients who simply fell to the ground and were burned, as though Maricopa County’s whole surface were a skillet on the stove. The I.C.U.s are filling up, too, and the region’s iconic saguaro cactuses are crumpling and collapsing in the heat. On the same day last week that President Biden offered only a few meek remarks about extreme heat and just a few million dollars in new funding for heat forecasting, the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, leaned into a typically vehement formulation. “The era of global warming has ended,” he said. “The era of global boiling has arrived.”

It was, worldwide, the hottest month on record. June was the hottest June on record. August appears poised to be the hottest August. Every single day for four straight weeks, as Canada burned and Sicily burned and Algeria burned, global temperatures surpassed the daily record set in 2016 and matched last summer, when 61,000 Europeans are estimated to have died as a result of the heat.

But what else do you expect as greenhouse gas emissions continue? On opposite ends of the planet, temperatures recorded in the North Atlantic and sea ice measured near the South Pole, tracked so far from recent trends that you might embarrass yourself simply stating the size of the anomaly — a four sigma event in the temperatures of the North Atlantic, meaning that, given a stable climate and a normal distribution of chance, it should be expected about once every few hundred years and perhaps a six sigma event for Antarctic sea ice, meaning we should expect to see it, at least according to the simplified math, only once every 7.5 million years.

At a certain point, that math just gets silly, telling you perhaps more about the improper way you might have structured the comparison than about the size of the anomaly itself. But you can measure the anomalies in other ways, such as by noting the hot-tub ocean temperatures off the Florida Keys, a year’s worth of rain falling in 36 hours in parts of Beijing or 100-degree temperatures in the mountains of Chile or that there is an Argentina-size gap between this year’s Antarctic sea ice and the typical extent. And the fact that we are seeing these gob-smacking anomalies at all is a sign that the historical framework implied by terms like “seven sigma” and “500-year storm,” imperfect in the best of times, no longer applies to the world we live in now.

The environmental journalist Juliet Eilperin called the ocean temperatures “beyond belief”; The Washington Post reported that they had “baffled scientists.” Contemplating the trajectory of Arctic sea ice, the atmospheric scientist Zack Labe wrote memorably about how often he finds himself answering questions about the state of the science these days by saying, “I don’t know.” And for all the uncertainty, many of those watching the changes unfold have a queasy intuition that we may be entering a new climatic regime — and perhaps inching closer to some quite concerning tipping points.

“Shocking but not really surprising,” is how NASA’s Gavin Schmidt put it. “Even the things that are unprecedented are not surprising.” That is where we are all living now, in a climate that is both shocking and unsurprising. For several decades, those anxious about global warming have lived in fear of climate prophecies. We are beginning to simply live within them, a process that looks from some vantages like a horror story and from others surprisingly normal.

There are different ways to measure the changes, some less hair-raising than others. In a report published July 25, the World Weather Attribution network examined recent heat waves in the United States, Europe and China, finding that all but the Chinese event would have been impossible without climate change. In a stable, prewarming climate, the heat wave that baked China would have happened once every 250 years; now, the network said, it should be expected every five years. The episodes in Europe and North America, once impossible, should be expected once every 10 to 15 years. I’d bet on these frequencies being underestimates. Last summer there were 100 million Americans under heat advisories, and heat across Europe was called record-breaking then, as well. (On British television, a broadcaster complained that her meteorologist guest was being too gloomy about the heat; “I want us to be happy about the weather,” she said. In the weeks that followed, several thousand Britons died in the heat.)

But the World Weather Attribution report also characterized the heat waves in another way, incorporating a critique made by Patrick Brown of the Breakthrough Institute last summer to measure the simple size of the temperature anomaly attributable to climate change, too. By this metric, the network found, warming had added just one degree Celsius to the temperatures in China, two degrees to the heat waves in North America and two and a half degrees to southern Europe’s.

The coolheaded climate scientist Zeke Hausfather tried to quickly contextualize the recent string of anomalies to show that, in fact, they were, while alarming, nevertheless within the range of expected outcomes, given the present level of global warming. Well, at least two of the three anomalies he examined — the Antarctic sea ice was still quite off the charts. (About those, one scientist told The Guardian that “something weird is going on”; another said that the abrupt changes were “very much outside our understanding of this system.”)

But even if, in most cases, the science is vindicated by this summer’s extremes, that isn’t ultimately all that reassuring. Forecasts for warming have long scared many of those who really looked at them, and so it’s not exactly comfortable to know that we are merely coasting along the high end of those forecasts today. As the climate stalwart Bill McKibben put it to me recently, when it comes to global warming, “‘I told you so’ are the four least satisfying words in the language.”

“The speed of us passing limits is mind-bending,” wrote the Texas A&M atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler, with whom Hausfather shares a Substack, in a short reflection on why climate impacts seemed to be escalating so quickly. “When the Earth warms the next 0.1 degrees Celsius, an entirely new group of thresholds will be passed, bringing great harms to entirely different groups of people,” he wrote. “Many of them will not expect it, having been lulled into complacency by the fact that they hadn’t been negatively impacted by warming up to then. Is that you?”

As the extreme events have piled up this summer, I keep returning to a conversation I had last fall with the Texas Tech atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a lead author of several U.S. National Climate Assessments and the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy.

“The good news is we have implemented policies that are significantly bringing down the projected global average temperature change,” she said, describing a suite of projections now showing expected temperature rise this century of two to three degrees Celsius rather than four to five. But the bad news was that we had been “systematically underestimating the rate and magnitude of extremes.” Even if temperature rise is limited to two degrees, she said, “the extremes might be what you would have projected for four to five.”

In a long essay I published soon after that conversation, I emphasized that good news — that thanks to the technological and economic miracle of renewables, a global political awakening and an understanding that some earlier assumptions about future energy use were too pessimistic, we had about cut in half our expectations of warming in less than a decade.

This summer, I’ve been thinking more about her bad news — that even accounting for rapid global decarbonization and a drastic cut in expected global temperature rise, we may still end up in a world defined by impacts long called catastrophic. For now, it seems scary enough to say, we don’t really know.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Toxic Masculinity

by John Lawrence

Traditional masculine traits are dominance, aggression, emotional repression, violence. These traits have been historically mostly expressed in terms of the military. In the First World War, many of the participants were more than eager to cover themselves in glory by proving their manhood in combat. Instead many of them ended up dying miserable deaths in muddy trenches or hung from barbed wire. The persistence of war in the human experience can be laid squarely at the feet of men and their interpretation of what is manly in my opinion. In fact peace or even world peace is seen as a feminine idea. Most traditional men would not consider peace in the form of world wide understanding and compassion even possible because it would be based on feminine values. The only peace even possible in the traditional male mind is "peace through strength." Traditional male values prevent even an acknowledgment of what peace would really consist of because it would consist of emotional values that are traditionally feminine. The predominant attitude is that joining the military will "make a man out of you." A real man is only supposed to express a limited and actually stunted set of emotions and certainly is not supposed to express any vulnerabilities. Physical force or the threat of force is acceptable in a man's world. Understanding, cooperation and diplomacy are not.

Traditional male activities are beer drinking (a man can hold his liquor), fast car racing or pickup driving (showing dominance by means of a powerful machine), participation in or spectating at competitive sports, participation in or admiration of the military. Dominance, competitiveness, the use or threat of violence, pugnaciousness, toughness, looking down on men who don't conform to this stereotype - these are all traditional male traits. None of these traits are physically or mentally healthy. For instance, holding your liquor can lead to cirrhosis of the liver. Emotional repressiveness can lead to an inability to relate to women even though some women are attracted to the traditional male type. In fact it can be argued that Trump's popularity is a result of his expression of traditional male values. In an article in FiveThirtyEight entitled With His Version of Masculinity, we find this:

But the quest to seem masculine is particularly complicated in this year’s GOP primary because Trump has been so successful at projecting a macho image that Republican voters have responded to. This masculine identity isn’t about demonstrations of physical prowess — nobody talks about how far Trump can run or whether he can bench-press a certain weight. His version of manliness is fueled by other kinds of behavior — including his belittling of other candidates, aggression toward women, “tell it like it is and don’t apologize” affect — that are associated with traditional ideas about how a man should behave. The other GOP candidates largely aren’t trying to imitate those aspects of Trump’s macho identity — but experts told us that without Trump’s signature belligerence, his version of masculinity might not resonate as much. And that means his rivals may have an especially difficult time convincing the GOP primary electorate that they’re as strong a leader as Trump.

“In this view of masculinity, men are supposed to be dominant, powerful, aggressive,” said Theresa Vescio, a professor of psychology at Penn State University who studies masculinity. “And the more that people — both men and women — think that good men should be high in power, status, dominance and toughness, the more they say that’s what a man is, the more they support Trump.”

It might seem strange to some that a man who is not particularly physically fit or athletic, never served in the military and eats junk food is an exemplary manifestation of manhood. It seems ridiculous that Trump's penchant for belittling his opponents is seen by some as "manly." That his getting away with stiffing contractors, creditors and not paying taxes are manly traits. But somehow Trump's unwillingness to apologize about anything or ever admit he did anything wrong is seen by some Republicans as the counter to "liberal values" like having compassion and respect for people who disagree with you. Instead Trump calls his detractors and competitors names, assails them as weaklings and asserts his macho masculinity while he hides behind a bevy of lawyers and uses his money to shield himself from any negative consequences. His seeming ability to get away with stuff is seen as quintessentially masculine. The article continues:

These are the voters who are especially likely to find Trump’s version of masculinity appealing. Trump is particularly effective at drawing on his supporters’ fears about threats to traditional masculinity, while simultaneously building himself up as a paragon of that version of manliness, according to the experts we spoke with. His image as president was aggressively militant, threatening other world leaders and avoiding compromise. And his refusal to apologize for a well-documented track record of sexual harassment and assault makes him seem authentically masculine and powerful to some voters, according to Dan Cassino, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University who studies male gender identity. “It’s as much about tearing others down as it is about building others up,” Cassino says. “The insults, the misogynistic behavior — these are very negative masculine traits but he’s willing to assert them in a way others aren’t, and that means nobody thinks he’s lying about who he is.”

By projecting an image of himself as a powerful, strong, dominant man who’s willing to shrug away modern conventions around how men and women should behave, Trump has reached people who support traditional gender hierarchies. “There are a lot of conservatives — men but some women too — in this country who increasingly feel like they’re on the outside looking in, while liberals run things,” said Paul Elliott Johnson, a professor of communication at the University of Pittsburgh who studies gender and politics. “Trump invites those people to feel victimized and then says, ‘I will fix the problem.’”

As detrimental to society in general as these toxic traditional masculine values are, they will even probably contribute to the annihilation of the human race altogether either through war or the ignoring of climate change. There is not even any talk of world peace any more. It's not even on anyone's radar. The militarization of the American psyche is complete. The Peace Corps is never even mentioned in the media. Most people would not even know that it exists. The Peace Corps represents the feminine values of help and caring for those less fortunate. The traditional male simply looks upon them as losers in the game of life, probably because of their inferiority to white males. As traditional white males, they believe that they have simply outcompeted those who come from as Trump has termed them, "shithole countries."  Let people with feminine values agonize over them and their claims that rich white men should help them out with their situations due to climate change. Macho men would scoff at their suggestions that the rich nations should bear the cost of ameliorating the effects of global warming or as U.N. chief António Guterres declared, "global boiling." As Trump and other macho men might say, "suck it up." There will probably never be world peace until women run the world. And where would that leave the traditional man and his toxic values? Healthy manhood, in my humble opinion, should be nothing more nor less than loving, supporting and cherishing the girls and women in our lives whether they be girlfriends, lovers, wives, daughters, mothers or grandmothers. All the rest of the positive values a man can manifest are simply personhood values which can be exemplified by both sexes.

Climate Crisis ‘Out of Control’ as Global Temperature Breaks Record for 3rd Time in 4 Days

A woman shelters under a bag during a heatwave in Beijing on July 7, 2023. (Photo: Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

Thursday's record came after the revelation that the seven-day stretch ending Wednesday was also the hottest week in at least 44 years.

by Olivia Rosane, July 7, 2023, from Common Dreams

For the third time in just four days, the Earth sweated through its unofficial hottest day on record Thursday.

The average global temperature reached 17.23°C, or 63°F, on July 6, up from the record set Monday, surpassed Tuesday, and matched Wednesday, according to data from the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer. Thursday's record came after the revelation that the seven-day stretch ending Wednesday was also the hottest week in at least 44 years.

"Climate change is out of control," United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in response to Monday's and Tuesday's records, as The Associated Press reported. "If we persist in delaying key measures that are needed, I think we are moving into a catastrophic situation."

Scientists attribute the high temperatures to a combination of global heating caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels and an El Niño event officially declared by the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization Tuesday.

"Such records are the predictable consequence of a short-term El Niño temperature boost coming on top of the long-term global warming trend due to mankind's greenhouse gas emissions."

Earth's temperature reached 17.01°C, or 62.62°F, Monday and then 17.18°C, or 62.9°F, Tuesday, according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). While these temperatures are the hottest since record-keeping began in 1979, The Washington Post explained, data from ice cores and tree rings indicate that they haven't been experienced on Earth since the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago, when sea levels were around 18 feet higher. The week ending Wednesday was also 0.08°F, or 0.04°C, warmer than any in the record books, according to AP.

"Such records are the predictable consequence of a short-term El Niño temperature boost coming on top of the long-term global warming trend due to mankind's greenhouse gas emissions," lead Berkeley Earth scientist Robert Rohde tweeted in response to Thursday's new record.

The University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer uses both temperature readings from the surface, air balloons, and satellites, along with NCEP forecast data, to provide daily average two-meter air temperatures, according to The Guardian.

The records it reports are considered "unofficial" by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) because they rely partly on computer models, AP explained, but the agency did not deny the impact of the climate emergency and El Niño on recent extremes.

"Although NOAA cannot validate the methodology or conclusion of the University of Maine analysis, we recognize that we are in a warm period due to climate change," NOAA said in a statement reported by AP.

There are also other indicators speaking to spiking temperatures: The European Union's Copernicus ECMWF ERA5 dataset put Monday's mean temperature at a record 16.88°C and Tuesday's at a new record temperature of 17.03°C.

June was also the warmest June on record, according to a report from the E.U.'s Copernicus Climate Change Service released Thursday, with temperatures more than 0.5°C above the 1991-2020 average. Sea surface temperatures also broke monthly records for both May and June, and Antarctic sea ice dwindled to 17% below average for a record low for June.

"We are in uncharted territory and we can expect more records to fall as El Niño develops further and these impacts will extend into 2024," Chris Hewitt, WMO Director of Climate Services, said in a statement responding to the report. "This is worrying news for the planet."

Scientists predict that the record breaking will continue into July, which is usually the warmest month of the year.

"Chances are that the month of July will be the warmest ever, and with it the hottest month ever," Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University, told The Guardian, clarifying that "ever" meant in the last 120,000 years.

"I've never seen anything like it. I've been having heart palpitations because of the heat. I'm starting to think seriously that I'm going to leave Timbuktu."

The records aren't just numbers. They have been felt in extreme heatwaves around the globe from Texas to China. Cities in China are opening air raid shelters to help people hide from heat that has already turned deadly, APreported Friday, and temperatures in Beijing surpassed 35°C for more than nine days in a row for the first time since 1961.

Temperatures were also high in Timbuktu, Mali.

"Usually, at night it's a bit cool even during the hot season. But this year, even at night, it's been hot—I've never seen anything like it," 50-year-old Fatoumata Arby toldAP. "I've been having heart palpitations because of the heat. I'm starting to think seriously that I'm going to leave Timbuktu."

Beyond high temperatures, the impacts of the climate emergency continue to be felt in other ways. In an update Thursday, Canadian officials said the country's record-breaking wildfire season—which has sent toxic smoke pouring across the border in recent weeks—continues, with nearly 5,000 people forced from their homes and more than 8.8 million hectares of forest burned, CBC News reported. That's nearly 11 times the average hectares burned in the last decade.

"This number is literally off the charts," Michael Norton, director of the Northern Forestry Centre with the Canadian Forest Service at NRCan, said during a press conference reported by Politico, "with at least three more months left in the active wildfire season."

Officials say the climate emergency is playing a major role in the unprecedented season.

"This summer, we are witnessing the effects of climate change first-hand as Canada continues to experience more intense and frequent severe weather events," Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam said in a briefing reported by CBC News.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, heavy monsoon rains have killed at least 50 people in two weeks, Al Jazeera reported Friday. The deluge comes a year after devastating flooding in Pakistan swallowed a third of the country and claimed more than 1,700 lives. Pakistan contributes less than 1% to global greenhouse gas emissions, but it is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, and scientists said that rising temperatures made last year's disaster more likely.

"Only when we bring carbon emissions to zero does the warming stop."

In response to news of broken records and weather extremes, University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann said people should not be paralyzed with fear.

"Rather than being 'terrified' by this expected consequence of human-caused warming, we should be motivated to act—in particular, holding politicians accountable at the ballot box," he tweeted. "Only when we bring carbon emissions to zero does the warming stop."

There's a chance that living through this summer of extremes could help with that motivation.

"The issue of climate change doesn't often get its 15 minutes of fame. When it does, it's usually tied to something abstract like a scientific report or a meeting of politicians that most people can't relate to," George Mason University climate communications professor Ed Maibach told AP.

"Feeling the heat—and breathing the wildfire smoke, as so many of us in the Eastern U.S. and Canada have been doing for the past month—is a tangible shared public experience that can be used to focus the public conversation," he said.

 

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

 

 

Olivia Rosane

Olivia Rosane is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Off the Top of My Head

Barbie and Taylor Swift Prop Up US Economy

by John Lawrence

The Federal Reserve has credited Barbie and Taylor Swift with propping up the US economy. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia announced this month that Taylor Swift's tour helped boost travel and tourism in the region, a claim also made by several other U.S. cities regarding the musician's widely popular concerts. The US consumer is amusing itself to death. Meanwhile, the earth is burning up or in fact boiling. One would think that, if the climate situation were so dire, there would be an 'all hands on deck' effort to fight the war on climate change. But, nope, Americans are propping up the economy and in so doing are contributing even more fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere thus hastening rather than retarding climate change. Even as some American cities - namely Phoenix, Las Vegas and Palm Springs - are sweltering under temperatures greater than 110 degrees Fahrenheit, even with the handwriting on the wall, Americans are dealing with this crisis by going to the movies and to Taylor Swift concerts. Taylor had better beware that she may get a container of coke thrown at her or even chicken nuggets while she struts about the stage. Cardi B got so mad when a "fan" threw her drink at her that she threw her microphone at the fan.

Newsflash: Americans attending Taylor Swift concerts aren't the same Americans who fought World War II. The era of Americans foregoing consumer delights in order to commit themselves to a long hard slog in the name of world peace, freedom and democracy is over. In fact, politically speaking, a major portion of Americans, not a majority hopefully, would rather be entertained by a clown like Trump than to have to ask themselves what they can do for their country as John F. Kennedy suggested. "Ask not what your country can do for you," Kennedy intoned. Well, that question has been answered. What this country can do for Americans is to provide them with entertainment like Barbie and Taylor Swift. And "what you can do for America" is to go to the movies and attend concerts spending your money in order to keep the economy afloat.

The U.N. chief issued a stark warning on climate change this week: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” António Guterres declared in a news briefing, as scientists confirmed that July is set to become Earth’s hottest month on record. But, boiling or not, most Americans just want to be entertained and to consume all the merchandise that goes with it. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have been moving markets, quite literally. The Federal Reserve has tracked the striking effect of Taylor Swift's tour on host cities. One analysis estimates it could generate almost $5 billion in global revenue. When Beyoncé comes to town, hotels, hair stylists and bartenders all get a boost, according to Yelp. "Despite the slowing recovery in tourism in the region overall, one contact highlighted that May was the strongest month for hotel revenue in Philadelphia since the onset of the pandemic, in large part due to an influx of guests for the Taylor Swift concerts in the city," the [Federal] reserve wrote in the Beige Book, which is published by the regional banks to share information about the state of the economy.

Have Americans degenerated to the point that when given a choice between letting the earth boil and become unfit for human habitation and entertaining themselves, they would choose to entertain themselves. This is literally "amusing ourselves to death." Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. Postman sees television's entertainment value as a present-day "soma", the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World, by means of which the citizens' rights are exchanged for consumers' entertainment. Postman was on to something. In the current scenario, though, citizens' responsibilities are being exchanged for consumers' entertainment. In America, as we have been promised, our only responsibility is to enjoy our freedom even if that means that we succumb to the future of a boiling earth.

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 >

US west braces for fiercest temperatures yet as ‘supercharged’ heatwave arrives

Hottest weather of the year just beginning, warns National Weather Service, as authorities prepare to protect most vulnerable

Guardian staff and agencies

Fri 14 Jul 2023 21.09 EDT

Last modified on Mon 17 Jul 2023 07.26 EDT

 

People walk under water misters in Palm Springs, California. Photograph: Caroline Brehman/EPA

After days of unrelenting temperatures across much of the region, the American west is bracing for even more intense heat this weekend with more than a third of Americans under extreme heat alerts.

California is facing a powerful heat dome, bringing sweltering conditions expected to build on Friday and through the weekend, in central and southern parts of the state. The National Weather Service warned many residents they should prepare for the hottest weather of the year as desert area highs could exceed 120F (48.8C).

Death Valley national park was expected to equal or surpass its heat record of 130F (54.4C). Las Vegas could see three consecutive days with a high of 115F (46C), which has happened just once before, the NWS reported. Phoenix, which has endured a two-week stretch of temperatures above 110F (43C) with little relief in the evening hours, is expecting its hottest weekend of the year.

“We’ve been talking about this building heatwave for a week now, and now the most intense period is beginning,” the National Weather Service wrote on Friday.

The brutal heat comes as the US grapples with extreme weather across the country from the unforgiving temperatures of the west to tornadoes in Chicago and historic flooding in Vermont. Joe Biden has pledged to help communities prepare as Americans experience “the devastating impacts of the climate crisis”.

The heat could carry on into next week as a high pressure dome moves west from Texas. Forecasters warned that the long heatwave is extremely dangerous, particularly for older people, unhoused residents and other vulnerable populations. Officials across the west have repurposed public libraries, senior centers and police department lobbies as cooling centers, especially in desert areas.

“This weekend there will be some of the most serious and hot conditions we’ve ever seen,” said David Hondula, Phoenix’s chief heat officer. “I think that it’s a time for maximum community vigilance.”

The heatwave is already sending people to the hospital in Las Vegas – emergency room doctors reported treating dehydrated construction workers and passed-out elderly residents.

“This heatwave is not typical desert heat due to its long duration, extreme daytime temperatures and warm nights. Everyone needs to take this heat seriously, including those who live in the desert,” the National Weather Service in Las Vegas said.

This weekend there will be some of the most serious and hot conditions we’ve ever seen

David Hondula

In Palm Springs, where temperatures could climb to 120F (48.8C) this weekend, many homeless people in the desert city were left to contend with the heat on their own, with just 20 indoor beds at the lone overnight shelter.

John Summers, a homeless resident, climbed through a dry riverbed Thursday to seek shade at an encampment: “I basically just use water as much as I can. And hit shade. And, you know, the mall, wherever they’ll let you in,” he said.

Roman Ruiz, the city’s homeless services coordinator, said homeless residents struggle daily just to find a place with enough shade.

“I don’t know how anyone can do it really,” he said. “I feel so bad and yet there’s not much I can do.”

Meanwhile in northern California, cooling centers in and around Sacramento planned to offer some extended evening hours. In the small Central Valley city of Galt, about 25 miles south of the state capital, the police department planned to open its air-conditioned lobby through the warmest hours of the weekend.

Pet owners were urged to keep their animals mostly inside. “Dogs are more susceptible to heat stroke and can literally die within minutes. Please leave them at home in the air conditioning,” David Szymanski, park superintendent for Santa Monica mountains national recreation area, said in a statement.

Meanwhile the wildfire season is ramping up amid the hot, dry conditions with a series of blazes erupting across the state this week, Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the Natural Resources Agency, said at a media briefing this week.

The climate emergency is “supercharging” heat waves, Crowfoot added. California has instituted a $400m extreme heat action plan to protect workers, help vulnerable communities and assist local communities in opening cooling centers.

People looking to cool down in California’s many rivers should be wary, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said, noting that waterways swollen from the epic Sierra Nevada snowpack remain dangerous as there is still snow left to melt.

“Be aware that the water will still be icy cold despite how hot the air will be and could be flowing very fast, much faster than usual for mid-July,” he said.

Off the Top of My Head

"Everyone's Crying Peace on Earth Just as Soon as We Win This War" - Mose Allison

by John Lawrence

Note from the future: One of the last humans evacuating planet earth, Elon Musk, writing the last chapter of the human race from his space hut on the moon: "Well, I guess it's up to me to write the last chapter of human history. I personally was able to escape planet earth as temperatures soared into the 150s. People had been forced into caves deep in earth to escape the heat. However, the war in Ukraine still raged on. Each side was intent on winning that war. More and more resources were poured into weapons. The US defense budget soared into the trillions of dollars. Some of us more enlightened ones said, 'Wait, wouldn't it be more important to take that money and put it toward fighting climate change, our common enemy. Climate change is the enemy of both NATO and Russia. No, the power structure said, it's more important to win this war. As the fighters in that war were dying of heat exhaustion rather than enemy bullets, they were some of the last humans to hold out on the surface of earth. Air temperatures were buckling roads and railroads. Even tanks and drones were melting in front of their eyes. It came down to hand to hand combat as guns were useless in the severe heat. Soldiers got second degree burns just from touching anything metal. But the war raged on. Ukraine was promised a path to NATO membership at the end of the war, but the brush along that path was burning furiously. It's doubtful if Ukraine would have made it all the way along that path to NATO without burning up first."

Musk continued: "You know the human saga reminds me of the fairy tale about the frogs in a pan of water. The water temperature was gradually increasing, but frog A insisted on staying in the water until his frog army was able to defeat Frog B's army. He reassured baby frog that as soon as his side won, they would all jump out of the water and be safe. But first they had to win this war. But baby frog said, 'Aren't you devoting all your time and energy to winning the war when, if both sides cooperated instead, you could devote your resources to lowering the temperature of the water.' No, said Frog A. Frog B is despicable We want all this land. We're not going to cede any of it to Frog B's tribe. But baby frog insisted, 'Who cares who owns what land if the whole pan of water which is our collective habitat burns up while you guys are still fighting? Your budget for cooling the water is miniscule compared to your defense (offense?) budget. If you just got along with other frogs you wouldn't need such a large defense budget. You could devote that money to global water cooling. This is the only pan of water we've got!.' I assure you, Frog A said, that as soon as we win this war, we will devote all our resources to cooling this pan of water."

Musk continued, "Well the moral of the story is that the human race was not able to get its act together even when they faced a common enemy. Each year even after global temperatures reached 140 degrees in some parts of the world for 100 days at a time, neither side in the Ukraine war would stop fighting. In fact that war would have gone on for the next hundred years, but, unfortunately, earth would not have been inhabitable by humans for another hundred years. It was not more than a decade later when temperatures reached 150 degrees for days at a time in most parts of the world. All the glaciers had melted in Antarctica so sea levels had risen more than 10 feet inundating Miami, London, New York City, Tokyo and New Orleans not to mention many other less noteworthy cities. No one could get property insurance any more; the insurance companies all went bankrupt. FEMA had run out of money. Flash floods left hundreds of thousands homeless. Those who had bought those old missile silos in Montana were lucky. They were safely ensconced underground where the temperatures were cooler. People crowded into Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico and Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. After these caves reached capacity a detachment of former marines stationed at the entrance shot anyone trying to gain entrance. Survivalist skills were highly in demand."

"As the last fighter on the battlefield in Ukraine died of heat stroke, NATO and Russia declared the war was over. It was undetermined who actually won. The path to membership in NATO for Ukraine was littered with dead bodies, many of whom had died from heat exhaustion. Ukraine itself was littered with tanks and other metallic weapons of war which seared the flesh of anyone foolish enough to touch them."

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.

When Climate Change Hits Home

Flooding in Stony Point, New York

By David Gelles

New York Times, July 11, 2023

Seth Harrison/USA Today Network/via Reuters

Even if you’ve been paying attention to climate change, it can sometimes feel very far away, distant in both space and time. But on Sunday night, as I was writing my first edition of this newsletter, it came roaring into my kitchen.

I was with my family at our 100-year-old cabin in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City. It had been pouring for fourteen hours, and our ceiling started leaking. Then, around midnight, a wall of water flooded the house.

Many of my neighbors fared even worse. One woman died and dozens had to be rescued as a slow-moving storm system produced widespread flooding in New York State and New England.

We know that man-made climate change is making extreme weather like this more severe. Warmer temperatures enable air to hold more moisture, which leads to more intense rainfall and flooding.

On Monday, the New York governor said such climate-fueled disasters were “the new normal.” In general, the United States is nowhere close to ready for the threat of catastrophic flooding, especially in areas far from rivers and coastlines.

On the other side of the country, much of the Southwest is baking under a heat dome. Major cities have been choking on smoke from Canadian wildfires for a month now. Off the coast of Florida, ocean temperatures are reaching into the mid-90s Fahrenheit.

June heat in Phoenix. Temperatures are expected to be above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (or above 43 degrees Celsius) again this week.  Caitlin O'Hara/Getty Images

This is not just about millions of Americans, of course, but billions of people around the globe. Over the weekend, Delhi recorded its wettest July day in 40 years, Beijing residents flocked to underground air raid shelters to escape the heat, and floods carried away cars in Spain.

The planet is entering a multiyear period of exceptional warmth, scientists say. Greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, have already heated the Earth by an average of 1.2 degrees Celsius (or 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels. Now a powerful El Niño system in the Pacific Ocean is releasing a torrent of heat into the atmosphere. The warmest days in modern history occurred this month. That all sets the stage for more damaging heat waves, floods, droughts, wildfires and hurricanes.

Yesterday, as I spoke with climate scientists for a story about the storm that walloped my house, they all sounded the alarm about what was coming in the months ahead.

“We are going to see stuff happen this year around Earth that we have not seen in modern history,” one meteorologist told me. “It will be astonishing.”

Abnormal as the ‘new normal’

Each of these anomalies creates new risks, threatening human health and biodiversity. Yet with disasters piling up and headlines blurring together, there is another profoundly dangerous risk: apathy.

As temperature records break and extreme weather becomes commonplace, the abnormal can begin to seem ordinary. That’s an all-too human reaction to adversity. We’re masters of adaptation, and can learn to endure even the most uncomfortable situations.

But in this case, indifference would be the biggest disaster of them all. Growing inured to the signs of a planet on fire would do more than blind us to the damage we’ve already done. It would also delay critical action at a crucial juncture.

Because as bad as things are, there are still real causes for optimism.

After decades of inaction, a monumental effort is finally underway to confront climate change. Wind turbines and solar panels are rapidly displacing fossil fuels. Sales of electric vehicles, heat pumps and induction stoves are soaring. Across government, business and civil society, there is a concerted, coordinated push to reduce emissions, protect nature and help humans adapt to a hotter planet.

The grand project to decarbonize the world economy can be seen as the biggest collective action in human history. On the agenda is nothing less than the remaking of the world’s entire energy and transportation systems, not to mention vast overhauls of the building blocks of modern life. And it all needs to happen with a pants-on-fire urgency as the planet heats up.

That may seem daunting, and it is. Progress is not happening nearly fast enough, and many obstacles remain. But it’s also the opportunity of a lifetime. Should we succeed, we’ll be creating a world with better air quality, more green space, healthier ecosystems and less waste.

It’s a head-spinning moment, one that requires us to honor two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time.

Yes, the fragile ecosystem that sustains human life is in trouble.

And also yes, we have many of the tools needed to get ourselves out of this mess.

Your part of the story

It’s this tension — between hope and despair, between urgency and inertia, between a world remade and a stubborn status quo — that will animate this newsletter in the months and years ahead.

I won’t be doing it alone. Manuela Andreoni, my co-pilot for this newsletter, is based in Brazil and brings us an essential international perspective and a voracious curiosity about climate and the environment. You’ll also be hearing from the Times’ new weather team as well as other reporters from around the newsroom.

My colleague Somini Sengupta has been shepherding this newsletter, sharing her keen insights twice a week. From here on out, we’ll be arriving in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and chiming in with additional rapid-fire analysis when news breaks.

And we want to hear from you. You can email the Climate Forward team and tell us what’s got you worried, what’s giving you hope and where we should be looking for the next big story.

A push to wean China from coal

President Joe Biden is trying to repair relations with China after months of increased tensions, and climate is among the top issues on the agenda. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen both discussed climate issues in recent visits to Beijing. And climate envoy John Kerry is scheduled to arrive on Sunday.

The diplomatic push reflects an inescapable truth: The United States and China are the world’s industrial superpowers. And any chance at staving off the worst effects of climate change will require both of them moving in the same direction.

“The U.S. and China together make up about 40 percent of emissions,” said my colleague Lisa Friedman, who is following Kerry to Beijing. “They are also the two biggest investors in clean energy.”

China has more solar energy capacity than the rest of the world combined and is the biggest manufacturer and user of wind turbines — a major reason why clean energy has become so affordable for all countries in recent years.

But fossil fuels still make up the majority of China’s energy sources. It consumes over half of the world’s coal, and continues to approve new coal plants at a rapid pace. The Chinese government’s goal is to continue growing the economy while avoiding problems like the power failures the country faced during a heat wave last year that disrupted several supply chains.

China’s investments in renewable energy appear to be sufficient to enable it to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030, as it has pledged. But there are concerns about how high emissions will go before they start to decline.

U.S. officials are urging China to accelerate that energy transition and phase out coal. And after the Biden administration secured hundreds of billions of dollars to accelerate America’s transition to clean energy, they may finally have some leverage.

“What many analysts are saying is that the U.S. just did a big move on climate change,” Lisa said. “Now, it’s China’s turn.” — -Manuela Andreoni

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

Bidenomics: The US Finally Gets an Industrial Policy

by John Lawrence

The Republican policy that the government should be hands off regarding the economy is out the window. Trickle down is a failed policy. Bidenomics gets the government involved in crucial areas of the economy. The export of jobs to parts of the world where labor is cheapest is replaced with a policy of creating jobs within the US. Deregulation is replaced with regulations to protect the environment and combat climate change. The traditional Democratic alliance with unions is back in vogue. Bidenomics is all about building the economy from the middle out and the bottom up instead of from the top down. Bidenomics is about shaping the economy in a way that is propitious for the middle class and the environment. Infrastructure building is more important than accelerating the consumer economy. Putting our house in order is more important than giving away fattening goodies to consumers. People are being put to work doing jobs which actually make US society a better place instead of encouraging jobs in frivolous pursuits. This is not necessarily what the American consumer wants.The American consumer wants more money in their pockets so they can buy more gadgets and aspire to making millions as a pro athlete or an entertainer. They don't actually want to work at the good jobs Biden is creating building infrastructure or making semiconductors. CNN reported:

Trickle-down economics, which was at the heart of President Ronald Reagan’s policies and continues to be the guiding light of Republican lawmakers, typically revolves around tax cuts for the wealthy and large companies. Supporters say the benefits flow down to middle-class and working Americans, boosting economic growth more broadly. But many experts dispute the effectiveness of this practice at lifting all boats.

Biden argues that supply-side, trickle-down economics has cost jobs and hollowed out the middle class. He has long focused on that group of Americans, serving as chair of the Middle Class Task Force when he was vice president in the Obama administration.

“Folks, let me say it as clearly as I can: (The) trickle-down approach failed the middle class and failed America,” said Biden.

To fund Bidenomics, the president once again calls for ensuring the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

The problem is that now that the American people have had  a good taste of Democratic programs, they want more: Republican tax cuts. They want their cake and eat it too. They know that Republicans will have no problem with the national deficits and debts as long as they come in the form of tax cuts. So from the American consumer's point of view they have got about all they can expect to get out of Bidenomics. Now they want a tax break to boot.

The Biden administration has focused on infrastructure, clean energy and semiconductors, Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, said. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS Act each include direct funding and tax incentives for public and private manufacturing construction. Biden outlined how states will receive more than $42 billion in federal funding for high-speed internet service, which was part of the 2021 infrastructure law. It is aimed at bringing connectivity to more Americans and closing the digital divide. The administration is comparing it to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act, which brought electricity to homes throughout the country. And 35,000 new projects – including roads, bridges and ports – have received funding through the bipartisan infrastructure law, the White House said.

E.J. Dionne Jr. said in the Washington Post:

Bidenomics has also gone global. One indicator is the exceptional and ongoing debate Sullivan’s speech provoked in proposing a “new consensus” to replace “a set of ideas that championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action and trade liberalization as an end in itself.” The old formulas, Sullivan argued, not only failed to address new problems; they didn’t work on their own terms.

“In the name of oversimplified market efficiency,” he said, “entire supply chains of strategic goods, along with the industries and jobs that made them, moved overseas.” The idea that freer trade “would help America export goods, not jobs and capacity, was a promise made but not kept.” He stressed the need for “a modern American industrial strategy” and the benefits of “moving beyond traditional trade deals to innovative new international economic partnerships.”

Can the dumbed down and self seeking American people even understand much less appreciate the great things that Bidenomics has brought forth? Biden has changed the narrative on taxes by repeating ad nauseum that he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. Big idea: raising taxes doesn't mean raising taxes on everyone and a tax break does nor mean lowering taxes on everyone. The meme about raising taxes which Republicans have endeavored to attribute to Democrats ("tax and spend") and tax breaks which Republicans have endeavored to attribute to themselves has been change by Biden. "Tax the rich" has become the Democrats' motto thanks to Bernie Sanders and AOC.The immense inequality that Reaganomics has resulted in is being addressed by Bidenomics. The American people say "Ho Hum". They are more interested in spectator sports which is exemplified by the fact that news programs on TV are routinely bounced in favor of sports events. In short the American people don't appreciate Biden because they don't take the time to understand Bidenomics.

Biden has done much good for America and Americans. He is the least appreciated great President in American history. It's a reflection on the American people themselves that all they're interested in is their own personal situation. If they are well off, they could care less about social programs that help the poor. If they have a good job, they could care less about the unemployed. American have been taught to be totally selfish and not to care about the wider world or about the improvement of society in general. Corporations by law are only supposed to consider the financial well being of their share holders and nothing else. These attitudes in and of themselves preclude the concerns of minorities, whether racial or economic, because the US is a majoritarian society. In politics the majority rules. Concern about the welfare of minorities and of the world in general and in particular the environment is not a consideration. Meanwhile, global warming is taking out individual families who are victims of tornadoes or other particular manifestations of global warming on a daily basis. It has yet to sink in that perhaps concerns for larger interests than just ourselves might be a paradigm change we might have to make.

For the American people, it's not abut how much Biden has done, it's about how much have you done for me lately, Mr Biden, and, more importantly, how much more are you going to do? If there are many more carrots, then maybe I'll vote for you. Otherwise, I'll take the tax break Republicans are offering. The American national character is selfishness personified. Ayn Rand would be proud.

Off the Top of My Head

Biden: The Least Appreciated Great President in American History

by John Lawrence

President Biden has gotten more real work done for the American people than any President with the exception of Franklin D. Roosevelt. So why is his job approval rating so low - just 39%? Chalk it up to the fickleness of the American people. They don't know a great President when they see one. Biden has been able to do so much with much narrower margins in Congress than FDR had in all his terms as President. In fact Roosevelt had Democratic majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate from 1933 until his death in 1945, and in those days the filibuster was a speaking filibuster that delayed but didn't terminate legislation and so was of little consequence compared to the fact that today 60 Senators are required to pass any bill.

So what are some of Biden's accomplishments? The Inflation Reduction Act is a historic legislative achievement that lowers costs for families, combats the climate crisis, reduces the deficit, and finally makes the largest corporations pay their fair share. For the first time, Medicare is able to negotiate the price of certain high-cost drugs, a month’s supply of insulin for seniors is capped at $35, Medicare beneficiaries pay $0 out of pocket for recommended adult vaccines, and seniors’ out of pocket expenses at the pharmacy will be capped at $2,000 a year. Historically low unemployment at 3.5%. A manufacturing boom is occurring. Companies have announced nearly $300 billion in manufacturing investments in the United States. These investments are ensuring the technologies of the future are made in America, and bringing back supply chains from overseas. And they are creating good-paying jobs, including union jobs and jobs that don’t require a four-year degree. As part of the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, the Department of Commerce is overseeing $50 billion to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor industry, including $39 billion in semiconductor incentives. The first funding opportunity seeks applications for projects to construct, expand, or modernize commercial facilities for the production of leading-edge, current-generation, and mature-node semiconductors. This includes both front-end wafer fabrication and back-end packaging. The Department will also be releasing a funding opportunity for semiconductor materials and equipment facilities in the late spring, and one for research and development facilities in the fall.

President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan to change the course of the pandemic and jump start our economic recovery. The American Rescue Plan funded our successful vaccination campaign, safely re-opened schools for in-person learning, helped 200,000 child care providers keep their doors open, and delivered relief to American families. Biden forged a consensus and got the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed – a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure. We are rebuilding our roads, bridges, ports, and airports, upgrading public transit and rail systems, replacing lead pipes to provide clean water, cleaning up pollution, providing affordable high-speed internet to every family in America, delivering cheaper and cleaner energy to households and businesses, and creating good-paying jobs – including union jobs, and jobs that don’t require a four-year degree.

President Biden signed into law the PACT Act – the most significant expansion of benefits and services for toxic exposed veterans in more than 30 years. This law also enables the Department of Veterans Affairs to move more quickly in the future to determine if illnesses are related to military service, and it offers critical support to survivors who were harmed by exposures. And, the law authorized 31 new clinical sites and provides VA several tools and resources to ensure effective implementation of the law. The Biden Administration announced debt relief of up to $20,000 for Americans earning less than $125,000 per year who had Pell Grants in college, and up to $10,000 for all other borrowers below that income threshold. More than 40 million borrowers stand to benefit from this action, and about 20 million would see their debt entirely wiped out - and nearly 90% of this relief will go to borrowers earning less than $75,000 per year. In early 2023, the Biden-Harris Administration announced a plan to provide millions of borrowers with more affordable monthly student loan payments through changes to income-driven repayment plans.

The U.S. is positioned to achieve our ambitious climate goals of cutting our emissions in half by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. The President has taken executive action and signed legislation to develop clean energy at home, accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles, and reduce pollution that endangers overburdened communities. And, the President is lowering energy costs for families, creating good paying jobs, and ensuring America leads the global clean energy economy. The President also protected more lands and waters in his first year than any President since John F. Kennedy. President Biden took action to lower the cost of health care for millions of Americans. Right now, four out of five people who sign up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act can find health care coverage for $10 a month or less and millions of Americans on Obamacare are saving an average of $800 a year. Since he took office, there has been a combined 50 percent increase in enrollment in states that use HealthCare.gov and the nation’s uninsured rate is historically low at 8 percent. Over 16 million Americans signed up for quality, affordable health coverage, the highest number ever produced in an open enrollment period.

So what are Biden's most significant achievements? In my opinion infrastructure and climate action lead the way. These areas have been neglected too long, and the Biden initiatives will just barely make amends. In and of themselves, they are probably insufficient, but they are a good start, a start that has been delayed too long. Changing the narrative on taxation, I think, is a major accomplishment. Making it clear that a tax bill does not have to apply to everyone. By not raising taxes on anyone making less than $400,000, an oft repeated phrase, the narrative has been changed from "tax and spend" to "tax the rich and spend on helping the poor and middle class". Deficit reduction doesn't mean necessarily to stop spending on social programs as it means getting more money into government coffers by taxing the rich. Inequality is out of control; taxing the rich ameliorates this situation. What Biden did to get us through the COVID crisis is remarkable. It could have been an economic disaster for everyone; it wasn't. Student debt relief was a great achievement although it is still not clear how that will play out in the courts.

The American people by and large don't appreciate all that Biden has done compared to what any Republican administration would have done. Clearly, Democrats are on the side of rationality and helping the American people. Republicans are on the side of winning at all costs and helping the rich. They don't give a damn about helping the American people especially the middle class and the poor. The Republican mantra of reducing the deficit and the debt would have you believe that it can only be done in one way, that is by reducing spending. No, it can also be done by taxing the rich which would also reduce inequality. But this is all the Republicans have, that and the discredited policy of tax breaks for the rich that have done little to "trickle down" and have greatly contributed to the national debt. Enhancement of Obama's landmark health care legislation is another major achievement although Obama deserves much of the credit. It's a testimony of what the Democratic party is able to achieve for the country. The fact that Biden accomplished so much in a bipartisan way is something few other politicians could have hoped to accomplish especially in the political environment that exists today.

My criticism of Biden has to do with the Ukraine war. On the one hand he has prevented it from becoming a world war as of yet. However, in the negotiations preceding the war, I believe more could have been done to prevent the war in the first place. By not acknowledging or being sensitive to Russia's concerns about the encroachment of NATO on its borders which started during the Clinton administration and was hastened by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Biden and other diplomats missed an opportunity to defuse the crisis. Their policy was a de facto attempt to bully Russia into accepting the fact that Ukraine would also become part of NATO. Now the US is entrenched in a policy of Ukraine "winning" and Russia "losing" instead of a policy of a negotiated settlement to end the war, a negotiated settlement which could have been had before the war even started IMHO, for instance, by delaying Ukraine's admission to NATO for a period of time during which Russia's security concerns might have been addressed. In effect Ukraine has become a vassal state of the US instead of its historic situation of being a vassal state of Russia.

Off the Top of My Head

The Solution to the Debt Crisis: Tax the Rich

by John Lawrence

Republicans want Biden to cut back spending. Democrats should want to increase taxation on the rich. The debt can be ameliorated either by reducing spending or increasing taxation. The debt is a result both of overspending and undertaxing. For all those who care about the size of the debt, they should be as concerned about undertaxing to the same extent they are concerned about overspending. Since the three wealthiest people in the United States — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett —now own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 160 million people or 63 million households, the obvious culprit here is not overspending, it's under taxation of the rich. In addition to taxing the incomes of the rich, there needs to be instituted a wealth tax. Whoa, you say, this would discourage entrepreneurs who are responsible for inventing the next big thing which is what contributes the most to the American economy. We don't need another gadget; we need all hands on deck to fight global warming. This is being done by Joe Biden's infrastructure bill which is a government, not a private, solution. Private entrepreneurship is less important in a period of global warming than large scale government solutions. Therefore, discouraging entrepreneurship, except that which supports a solution to global warming, is actually a positive development.

America’s top 25 billionaires — a group the size of a major league baseball team’s active roster —together hold $1 trillion in wealth. These 25 have as much wealth as 56 percent of the population, a total 178 million people or 70 million households. The solution to government debt is to go where the money is and tap that. When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton simply replied, “Because that's where the money is.” By the same token, the solution to the national debt is for the government to go where the money is: billionaires and Forbes 400 corporations. Americans don't need any new gadgets to spend their money on. In the World War II era consumption was both voluntarily and manditorily reduced in order to put more resources into the war effort. The war on global warming is even more important than World War II because, if we lose this war, the survival of the whole human species is at risk. Put simply we need to reduce consumption of the gadgets and entertainment provided by the private sector and increase expenditures on large scale projects which can ameliorate global warming. Of necessity those projects and that spending has to be initiated by government in cooperation with the private sector, but government has to lead the way and provide the money.

Income inequality is a major problem of American society. This problem can be resolved and the resources to prevent global warming provided for by taxing the rich. The problem is to reduce American consumption which is 70% of the US economy and increase government spending as long as that increased spending is spent on the solutions to global warming. At the same time the national debt can be reduced. The national debt in and of itself is not a problem, but interest on the national debt is. There are other solutions to decreasing the interest such as having the Fed create the money by quantitative easing. Instead of the Fed's depositing this money in the accounts of the big banks, it would deposit the money in the Treasury's account. "The whole idea of Modern Monetary Theory is that since a sovereign entity can borrow in its own currency, it can print more money when it needs to pay off all its debt. The central bank just needs to keep interest rates low," says Robert R. Johnson, professor of finance at the Heider College of Business at Creighton University. But there's the rub. As the Fed raises interest rates to control inflation, interest on the national debt also increases. That's why a mechanism needs to be found by which the Fed creates the money to run the government instead of the Treasury borrowing the money.

So in the meantime taxing the rich seems to be the best policy in order to bring the national debt down, to reduce economic inequality and to provide the money for government programs to combat global warming.

New York passes first-in-nation law to ban natural gas and other fossil fuels

The state ban on gas in new buildings could face legal challenges, but it marks a milestone in the energy transition sought by climate activists

By Anna Phillips

May 3, 2023 at 8:57 a.m. EDT from the Washington Post

New York state has passed a law requiring most new buildings to be zero-emissions starting in 2026, with larger buildings to come into compliance in 2029. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

 

New York has become the first state in the nation to pass a law banning natural gas and other fossil fuels in most new buildings, a move that could inspire other states and further erode the residential future of the gas industry.

Late Tuesday night, the New York legislature approved a $229 billion state budget that included a prohibition on gas in most new homes and other construction. It was a major victory for climate activists but is likely to face a court challenge from fossil fuel interests.

The law effectively requires all-electric heating and cooking in new buildings shorter than seven stories by 2026, and in 2029 for taller buildings. And although it allows exemptions for manufacturing facilities, restaurants, hospitals and even carwashes, the measure does not do what some climate activists had feared: give cities and counties license to override the ban.

Since the beginning of this year, when a federal official suggested, and then quickly retracted, the idea that the national government might ban gas stoves, debate over the future of natural gas has flared. So it may seem surprising that as New York lawmakers headed into the final stretch of their budget talks this week, their plans to pass a statewide gas ban were essentially a foregone conclusion.

But Democrats, who control the New York Senate and Assembly, have faced pressure from environmentalists for several years to follow through on the state’s climate commitments. And, in the end, it was not negotiations over gas stoves that stirred controversy but a drawn-out fight over bail reform and housing policy that delayed approval of the budget by a month.

The law’s passage, and the approval of a measure that would require the state to build renewable energy when the private sector falls short, have fueled supporters’ hopes for New York to become a national model.

“I hear from local government and state folks frequently that they’re thinking of this sort of policy, and so I’m certain, as other policymakers look to a state that’s found a politically and technically feasible way to go about electrification, that others will be paying attention,” said Amy Turner, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

In Massachusetts, a law adopted last year has allowed 10 cities and towns to participate in a pilot program banning gas-burning stoves and furnaces from new construction. Environmentalists are eager to see the state go further, using a new building code written to discourage the use of fossil fuels. Advocates are also eyeing Chicago, where the heavily blue city recently elected a liberal mayor.

But the gas industry and its Republican supporters have raised doubts about whether New York’s gas ban can survive legal challenges. Some climate advocates worry that a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that struck down the California city of Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation gas ban could have a chilling effect on other cities and counties.

A fight brewing in Oregon could decide how we heat our homes and cook

Although the court’s decision is not legally binding in most of the United States, hesitation to adopt local gas bans could ripple outward, said Matt Vespa, a senior attorney with the nonprofit organization Earthjustice who noted that restrictions on gas use in buildings typically begin at the local level, then go statewide. In California and Washington state, major cities including San Francisco and Seattle banned gas hookups before the states enacted measures encouraging electrification through their building codes.

There are other routes to all-electric buildings besides the one Berkeley used, Vespa said, but “if you take away the local piece, that does chill upwards momentum, and people have to recalibrate.”

Opponents derided the New York bill’s passage as governmental overreach. Republican Robert Ortt, the minority leader of the New York Senate, issued a statement criticizing the law as a “first-in-the-nation, unconstitutional ban” that “will drive up utility bills and increase housing costs.”

New York’s law does not affect existing buildings, and it specifically exempts renovations. But, over time, it could chip away at the gas industry’s dominance in the state, where 3 in 5 households rely on natural gas for heating, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Only about 1 in 7 households heat with electricity.

The ban also extends to heating oil and propane, raising questions about the future of these fuels in New York state’s more rural communities.

Critics of the law have argued that it limits consumer choice and will increase utility bills by shifting more households to electricity, which is more expensive than gas in much of the state. Supporters counter that because the law affects only new construction, the transition will happen gradually and in tandem with the state’s plans to shift more of its electricity production to greener, and cheaper, sources.

Today, gas fuels 46 percent of New York’s electricity generation, but a landmark climate law passed in 2019 calls for a transition to renewable, emissions-free sources such as solar, wind and hydro power. It requires the state to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

Here's How the 'Jet-Owning Oligarchy' Harms Both Planet and Workers

A Cessna Citation jet aircraft is seen at Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport in this aerial photo taken near Healdsburg, California on June 1, 2021.

(Photo: George Rose/Getty Images)

 

by Kenny Stancil, May 1, 2023 from Common Dreams

A new analysis catalogs alarming facts about the destructive private jet industry, which is emblematic of runaway economic and carbon inequality.

Research published Monday details how the working class is paying the price, in more ways than one, for the "jet-owning oligarchy" to hop around the globe in their personal luxury planes.

It's well-established that private jet travel by the super-rich is worsening the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis. Adding insult to injury, this conspicuously carbon-intensive consumption is being subsidized by ordinary taxpayers, as the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Patriotic Millionaires make clear in their new analysis.

Entitled High Flyers 2023: How Ultra-Rich Private Jet Travel Costs the Rest of Us and Burns Up Our Planet, the report catalogs alarming facts about the private jet industry and makes recommendations about how to rein in this potent symbol and manifestation of escalating inequality.

To begin with, "private jets emit at least 10 times more pollutants than commercial planes per passenger," the report notes. "Unsurprisingly, approximately 1% of people are believed to be responsible for about half of all aviation carbon emissions."

Amid a surge in wealth inequality since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, "private jet use has increased by about a fifth, and private jet emissions have increased more than 23%," the report points out. "The private jet sector set industry records with regards to transaction and dollar volume in 2021 and 2022."

While a coronavirus-era boom is evident, the industry has been growing steadily alongside wealth inequality since the turn of the century. As the report states: "The size of the global fleet has increased 133% in the last two decades from 9,895 in 2000 to 23,133 in mid-2022. This bonanza was accompanied by an unprecedented number of business jet operations, 5.3 million in 2022."

"If we can't ban private jets, we should at least tax them and require them to pay to offset their environmental damage and subsidies."

According to the report, "The median net worth of a full and fractional private jet owner is $190 million and $140 million respectively." A minuscule 0.0008% of the global population belongs to the jet-owning class, which consists mostly of financial and real estate tycoons.

Last year, billionaire Elon Musk, "the most active high flyer in the United States," bought a new jet and took 171 private flights, or about one every other day, the report notes.

In so doing, he single-handedly "contributed to the consumption of 837,934 liters of jet fuel," states the report, and he "was responsible for 2,112 tons of carbon emissions"—132 times more than the entire carbon footprint of an average person in the United States.

In a statement, report co-author Kalena Thomhave, a researcher with the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at IPS, called private jets "a microcosm of our system of wealth inequality even beyond their image of extravagance."

"Private flyers pay just 2% of the taxes that primarily fund the Federal Aviation Administration, yet nearly 17% of flights handled by the FAA are private," said Thomhave. "Meanwhile, private jets contribute disproportionately to carbon emissions while often representing significant tax savings for their wealthy owners."

As the report observes: "Thousands of municipal airports in the U.S. are funded by the public, but many primarily serve private and corporate jets. These airports may not offer scheduled passenger service, but they still offer airport runways subsidized by taxes."

Such regressive taxation is the product of industry lobbying, the report explains:

The largest player in the private jet lobby, the National Business Aviation Association, has spent an average $2.4 million each year since 2008 lobbying the federal government, primarily for tax giveaways. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the industry specifically lobbied for Covid relief, particularly "medium to long-term liquidity assistance and relief from air transportation excise taxes," even though industry demand was quickly climbing.

As wealth inequality soars, so too does the value of the private jet market, which grew from $32.3 billion in 2021 to $34.1 billion in 2022, the report notes. With wealth being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and little to no downward redistribution on the horizon, the private jet industry is projected to expand further in the coming years.

Report co-author Omar Ocampo, a researcher with the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at IPS, said that the private jet industry's expected growth this decade "provides us with a great opportunity to levy a luxury transfer tax on private jet sales." He added that "the revenue raised from this tax can be invested towards developing a green transportation system."

According to the report, "A 10% and 5% transfer fee on pre-owned and new private aircraft would have raised $2.4 billion in 2021 and $2.6 billion in 2022."

In addition to imposing a transfer tax on all private jet sales, IPS and Patriotic Millionaires recommend the following steps be taken:

• Levy a private jet fuel tax;
• Institute a "short hop" surcharge;
• Resist efforts to increase passenger facility charges until private jet owners pay their fair share;
• Create a sustainable transportation equity trust fund;
• Increase TSA security oversight of private jets; and
• Pass the Aircraft Ownership Transparency Act.

According to the report, Musk would have paid nearly $4 million in additional taxes last year if a transfer fee and jet fuel tax had been in place.

"Private jet travel by billionaires and the ultra-wealthy imposes a tremendous cost on the rest of us," said Chuck Collins, another co-author of the report.

"Not only do ordinary travelers and taxpayers subsidize the air space for private jets, but the high flyers also contribute considerably more pollution than other passengers," said Collins. "If we can't ban private jets, we should at least tax them and require them to pay to offset their environmental damage and subsidies."

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

The World Needs the Cooperation of Russia to Forestall Global Warming

by John Lawrence

Ultimately, geography will determine which countries win and which countries lose as global warming and sea level rise progress. Landlocked countries with little or no exposure to the oceans will win as countries with large shoreline exposures and major coastal cities go underwater. Russia has no major cities that are exposed to sea level rise. Its only ocean exposure is in the far north to the Arctic ocean and a little bit to the northern Pacific ocean. In addition Russia has an abundance of fossil fuels which it is eager to sell to the rest of the world. It has an incentive to increase global warming rather than to mitigate it.

As the Arctic region warms, Russia profits from its northernmost regions becoming more inhabitable. In addition sea routes in the Arctic become more navigable. So Russia is in a position to profit from global warming and to profit financially from hastening global warming by selling fossil fuels. Russia has no disincentive to curtail the sale of fossil fuels which are its major natural resource and source of income. It can undercut and undersell renewables if it wants to. Sanctions have had little or no effect on Russia's internal economy. The departure of Starbucks and McDonald's accomplished nothing. Russia reopened these chains under Russian control with the profits staying in Russia instead of returning to the US. Starbucks became Starubles and McDonald's became Inanov's presumably.

On the other hand consider the world's major cities that are located right on the oceans and are subject to being submerged by global warming. Such cities as New York City, Miami, London, Amsterdam, New Orleans, Venice, Savannah, GA, Tokyo, Shanghai, Mumbai, Kolkata, Osaka, Dhaka, San Francisco, Sydney, Boston, Lisbon, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, Dublin, Honolulu, Lagos, Charleston, Long Beach, Key West and many others in China, Africa, Vietnam, Bangladesh and east Asia. The US and its partners in Europe have major exposure to oceans for many major cities. Billions of dollars in real estate are at stake, not to mention that major trading routes will be disrupted and infrastructure destroyed. Particularly, the US east coast is exposed not only to sea level rise, but to increasingly virulent hurricanes and tornadoes.

So considering the fact that the US has relatively the most to lose from global warming and Russia has relatively the most to win, does it make any sense to make a pariah out of Russia? Regardless of the war in Ukraine, worsening relations with Russia only hasten the day when geography will determine the outcome of the war on climate change. China also has a long shoreline and plenty of major cities that are exposed to the ocean. It would be in China's interest to partner with the US to combat global warming. Yet the US is in the business of making a pariah out of Russia and starting a Cold War with China. So even if  the US wins its wars with Russia and China, it can still lose the war with respect to global warming. In the final analysis Russia and Mother Nature will win. It's all about geography.

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

While Earthlings Argue Over Abortion, Planet Earth Is in the Process of Aborting the Whole Human Race

by John Lawrence

While we spend major amounts of energy going back and forth over abortion, books in libraries and who can use which bathrooms, the planet is warming beyond what humans as a species can endure. Floridians carefully labeled the recent flood in Fort Lauderdale a "1000 year flood" instead of a "global warming flood". People talk about rebuilding instead of getting the hell out of low lying regions. Disaster areas are declared right and left with the Federal government expected to send them billions of dollars. How stupid we earthlings are or put another way what tangled webs we weave. The Arctic permafrost is melting with the result that methane, a more potent greenouse gas than carbon dioxide, is bubbling up and going into the atmosphere. As the Arctic warms, methane that has been locked in permafrost for thousands of years escapes and can explode. Released methane that finds its way to the surface contributes to the greenhouse effect of climate change with even more heat retention capacity than carbon dioxide. Even igniting it doesn’t solve the problem, since that produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct. Tulare Lake reforms in California turning what once was productive farmland into a massive lake which will only get much bigger as snow in the Sierras melts. The Washington Post reports:

California’s historic snowpack has started to melt following its warmest days of the year so far, with the communities and valleys below the mountains bracing for the impact of any flooding as all that water makes its way downhill. The severity of any floods will depend on how quickly the snow melts, but as officials share the latest outlook, it’s clear the highest risk stems from the record snowpack in the southern Sierra Nevada.

An enormous volume of water is expected to flow into rivers and streams through the spring and summer. The epicenter of flood concerns lies in the San Joaquin Valley and the Tulare Basin to the west of the southern Sierra, as well as the valleys to the east of the mountain range.

Two rivers in the Tulare Lake region — the Tule and the Kern — are forecast to exceed 400 percent of their average runoff between April and July. The majority of the watersheds are forecast to reach peak water flow in May, though they’ll reach their highest flows at different times. A few rivers, including the San Joaquin River, will see sustained high flows through at least June because of prolonged snowmelt — much later than typical peak-flow timing of April or May for southern watersheds.

So, California, get ready for historic flooding as the snowpack in the Sierras exceeds 200% above normal. Just last year it was zip. People were praying for more snowpack in the Sierras which, if melting gradually, could fill California reservoirs and provide much needed water throughout the year. However, if it melts too fast, the result will be not more water for drinking and agriculture but historic flooding, and that's the more likely result as higher than normal temperatures start the snowpack melting sooner and faster. The year 2022 was the sixth warmest year since global records began in 1880 at 0.86°C (1.55°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F). This value is 0.13°C (0.23°F) less than the record set in 2016 and it is only 0.02°C (0.04°F) higher than the last year's (2021) value, which now ranks as the seventh highest. The 10 warmest years in the 143-year record have all occurred since 2010, with the last nine years (2014–2022) ranking as the nine warmest years on record. Of note, the year 2005, which was the first year to set a new global temperature record in the 21st century, currently ties with 2013 as the 11th-warmest year on record. The year 2010, which had surpassed 2005 at the time, now ranks as the 10th-warmest year on record.

So while Americans turn democracy into a travesty of itself with district judges setting national policies, and billionaires pollute the atmosphere with their mega yachts and private jets, the real problems affecting planet earth and human civilization are largely ignored at least partly in the pursuit of profits and a reluctance to give up any perceived privileges that have been established. Despite the large investments in climate change that the Biden administration was lucky enough to get through - not without a lot of resistance by certain segments, I might add - it is just not enough. Airplanes both civilian and military are adding immense quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, as are container ships, without a solution in sight, and, rather than working on a solution, we are pursuing a world war contained within one country at least for now. The human race can not get along even in the face of certain destruction unless an all out effort is made by all nations to get rid of those processes which are releasing gigatons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

Green Tinted Glasses

The Green Growth Delusion Advocates of “Green Growth” promise a painless transition to a post-carbon future. But what if the limits of renewable energy require sacrificing consumption as a way of life?

by Christopher Ketchum, Truthdig

A tree is surrounded by solar panels in Los Arcos, Spain, on Feb. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos, File)

In the annals of industrial civilization, the Green New Deal counts as one of the more ambitious projects. Its scale is vast, promising to reform every aspect of how we power our machines, light our homes and fuel our cars. At this late hour of ecological and climate crisis, the Green New Deal is also an act of desperation. Our energy-ravenous culture cannot continue producing carbon without destroying the systems that are the basis of any advanced civilization, not to mention life itself. Something must be done, and quickly, to moderate the pressure on the atmospheric sink while powering the economic machine.

The consensus on the need for scaling up renewable energy is rarely disturbed by a disquieting possibility: What if techno-industrial society as currently conceived — based on ever-increasing GDP, global trade and travel, and complex global production and distribution chains designed to satisfy the rich world’s unquenchable appetite for bigger, faster, more of everything — what if that simply cannot function without energy-dense fossil fuels? What if, despite the promises of Green New Deal boosters, it is impossible to make sustainable the current system that provides billions of people sustenance, shelter, goods?

This possibility is not mentioned thanks to the dominance of “green growth.” This is the idea that the organizing principle of our civilization — endless growth of economies and populations — can be decarbonized swiftly in a way that will involve no material disruption.  Green Growth holds out the promise of transitioning from fossil fuels directly into something like an earth-friendly utopia without a hitch and without meaningful sacrifice. This is the sales pitch offered by Green New Deal proselytes such as Ezra Klein, The New York Times columnist and podcaster who brings a relentless optimism to the belief — the faith — that renewables can underwrite business-as-usual.

Wind turbines at the Saint-Nazaire offshore wind farm, off the coast of France, on Sept. 22, 2022. (Stephane Mahe/Pool photo via AP, File)

In a 2019 episode of his podcast titled “How to solve climate change and make life more awesome,” Klein laments that “conversations about climate change are pretty depressing [but] decarbonizing doesn’t mean accepting a future of less — it can mean a more awesome, humane, technologically rich, and socially inspiring future for us all.” His guest, Saul Griffith, inventor and clean-energy advocate, agreed that “[o]ur cars could be just as big, only electric. The American Dream could be better than ever.”

Undergirding this vision of a bigger, greened American Dream is the work of a Stanford professor of civil engineering named Mark Z. Jacobson. In a series of major journal articles and studies, Jacobson has sought to demonstrate that the current world economy can be made to run entirely on a combination of wind, water, solar and geothermal energy. He has received plaudits and rousing applause from, among others, Democratic New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, co-sponsor of the 2019 Green New Deal resolution in Congress, who has anchored her proposals with Jacobson’s “roadmaps“ to a zero emissions society. New York state senators, meanwhile, have proffered a bill for renewables transition that explicitly “builds upon the Jacobson wind, water and solar study.” In 2016, climate action guru Bill McKibben said, “I’m convinced by the careful work of Mark Jacobson and others that [100% renewables] is possible.” More recently, in a March 2023 issue of The New Yorker, McKibben enthused about the ongoing “good news” from Jacobson and like-minded green-tech experts. “We have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels,” promised McKibben.

Less likely to appear in the pages of leading magazines are those with a more skeptical view of Jacobson’s assurances about building carbon free societies within a few decades. But these are far from marginal voices. When a group of scientists writing for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took a close look at Jacobson’s wind-water-solar plan in 2017, they found it was based on “errors, inappropriate methods, and implausible assumptions.” 

Curious as to whether renewables could “power the future,” professors in design and mechanical and aerospace engineering at Monash University in Australia concluded in a 2016 study that estimates for the technical potential of renewable energy were all over the map. The academics, Patrick Moriarty and Damon Honnery, argued that “values at the lower end of the range [of technical potential] must be seriously considered… future [renewable energy] output could be far below present energy use.”

Moriarty and Honnery revisited the subject of renewable energy potential in a 2020 report published in the journal Energies, reiterating that “a future world entirely fueled” by renewables could end up being “a lower-energy one.” Moriarty then teamed up with seven co-authors — climate scientists, sustainability experts and engineers — to look at “energy descent as a post-carbon transition scenario.” The team concluded that “[d]eep uncertainties remain about whether renewables can maintain, let alone grow, the range and scale of energy services presently provided by fossil fuels.” As Moriarty and Honnery put it in their 2016 paper, the “prudent course” in a renewables-only future “would involve major energy reductions…we will likely [need] to re-evaluate all energy-consuming tasks, discarding those that are less important.”  

How much demand would we have to shed in a post-carbon energy descent where renewables power civilization?  “At a rough guess,” Moriarty told me in an email, “I would say 50% or more.” He approached the issue with the practical mindset instilled from decades as a civil engineer. If half of current energy use must be cut to reach true sustainability, Moriarty suggests a good start is ending global transport and trade as we know it. In other words, he said, “globalization will have to end.”

Ted Trainer, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales and founder of The Simplicity Institute, has reached a similar conclusion. “The limits to renewable energy have been almost totally ignored as a topic of study,” he writes. Elsewhere, Trainer notes that this topic is ignored with special fervor among the “technically sophisticated…participants in green and left energy camps.” The Ezra Kleins of the world adhere to what Trainer calls the “tech-fix faith,” which is marked by the assumption that there’s “no need to shift from…present energy and resource intensive lifestyles and systems, or from an economy driven by market forces, the profit motive and growth.”

Then there is the legendary energy and systems theorist Vaclav Smil. An emeritus at the University of Manitoba and author of more than 40 books on energy, environment and industry, Smil has declared the “rapid-speed transformation narratives” in the renewables field to be so full of “magic prescriptions” that they are “the academic equivalents of science fiction.” 

“Heavy doses of wishful thinking are commingled with a few solid facts,” Smil writes in his 2022 book “How the World Really Works.” 

To understand this mismatch, it is necessary to look closely at how we use our prodigious amounts of energy. The picture is very different from the one found in Green New Deal presentations full of high-speed rail projects and windmills. 

 

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

Should we Have a Second Pentagon ... Devoted to Peace?

by John Lawrence

So we have a Pentagon of War. We should have an equally funded Pentagon of Peace, a huge 5-sided building where all they do is plan and seek to implement various peace scenarios. Unimaginable? That's because the human race has so little imagination, and the result is ... continuous warfare since the dawn of civilization and before including the wiping out of another species, the Neanderthals, by our species, homo sapiens. The history of the human race is one of war with some technological progress in the interstices. Let's face it. Human beings especially of the masculine variety get off on war. Most warmongers are completely bored by peace. They can't wait to get back into action and cover themselves in glory on the battlefield, to prove their mettle, to prove their masculinity. Right now the US spends close to a trillion dollars a year on war, the weapons of war and planning for war. We spend a pittance on peace, the implementation of peace and planning for peace. As a result the human race has been heading for some time to Mutually Assured Destruction. We will probably get there whether or not it happens by means of a nuclear holocaust or whether it happens by neglect of the things that need to be done to forestall climate change.

The war in Ukraine and the looming Cold (and maybe even Hot) War between the two sides that are lining up represents at least a dithering while the planet heats up and eventually burns becoming a Venus like uninhabitable hellscape. So we have the US and Europe on one side and Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea on the other. Of the not quite aligned nations, most of Africa is siding with the Chinese. Why? Because the Chinese have put great energy into developing African infrastructure with their Belt and Road initiative. The US on the other hand has put great energy into building military bases all around the world. "There are roughly 750 US foreign military bases; they are spread across 80 nations! After the U.S is the UK, but they only have 145 bases. Russia has about 3 dozen bases, and China just five. This implies that the U.S has three times as many bases as all other countries combined." So this goes to show the relative priorities of the various countries. The priorities of peace vs the priorities of war. Helping improve the economies of other people directly is something that the Pentagon of Peace should be about. Sad to say China did that first, but there's always hope. As my Dad used to say, you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Sure China's goal was to make friends and influence people with its Belt and Road initiative. What's the US doing in the meantime ... building military bases.

The Peace Pentagon should have a budget equal to the War Pentagon's budget - roughly a trillion dollars. I'm not saying do away with the Department of War and become defenseless. No, keep a robust defense but counterbalance it with a robust Department of Peace. So if possible peace initiatives will carry the day, but, if worse comes to worse, well there's always the fantastic array of weapons of war that the US already possesses. The war capabilities are enormous. The peace capabilities are meager. There's a difference between pursuing our interests by becoming friends with other people and pursuing our interests by guarding ourselves from other people. One of the ways to avoid war is to recognize the legitimate interests of other countries as stated by them. The war in Ukraine could have been avoided if NATO and the US had acknowledged Russia's stated security interest in Ukraine's not becoming a member of NATO. But that interest was totally discarded by the West - not even put on the table, not even some sort of compromise which would have recognized that stated interest. I'm not saying if that interest was legitimate or not - only that that was the stated interest on the Russian side that was completely ignored and never even negotiated. The result of that non-negotiation and non-compromise was the mess in Ukraine right now - a grinding war of attrition in which only Ukraine civilian lives and only Ukraine real estate are being destroyed. Ukraine would like nothing better than to have advanced weapons such as F-16 fighter jets which would allow them to spread the war into Russian territory, and then you have World War III. That seems to be where we are heading.

Off the Top of My Head

The Glory of War

by John Lawrence

Throughout history men have gone to war to cover themselves in glory and prove their masculinity. In World War I, many young British men were gung ho for going to war. They intended to cover themselves in glory and be home before Christmas. Instead many of them died face down in muddy trenches or were impaled on barbed wire. According to historycrunch.com: "...one of the main reasons for the excitement of the war was that many viewed it as an adventure. They read stories about soldiers bravely marching into battle and dying heroically on the battlefields for their countries. For many of these young soldiers, they viewed the Great War as their opportunity to play a role in the ‘glory of war’ and follow in the path of earlier soldiers in earlier European conflicts. To them, war seemed adventurous and a show of bravery that many claimed they ‘did not want to miss’." It was forever so but in general only the victors were able to cover themselves in glory.

War, I would contend, is primarily a masculine pursuit. It represents an attempt by men to prove their manhood. Even some American Indian tribes cultivated a warrior tradition. Their women would have nothing to do with men until they had proved themselves in war. According to Wikipedia: "What evolved among the Plains Native Americans from the 17th to the late 19th century was warfare as both a means of livelihood and a sport. Young men gained both prestige and plunder by fighting as warriors, and this individualistic style of warfare ensured that success in individual combat and capturing trophies of war were highly esteemed." Not for nothing were they called Braves. Martina Sprague in her book The Glory of War: The Way to Historical Immortality writes:  "What motivates men to go to war? The answer is the desire for recognition and the opportunity to gain eternal fame. War is perhaps the most common way in which a man can become a hero. We tend to romanticize war. War is portrayed as a daring adventure for a sacred cause, where the soldier will ultimately reach the highest level of self-actualization. As demonstrated by the great military figures in history, the promise of honor and heroism can help a man conquer the world."

Covering oneself in glory, proving one's masculinity, becoming a hero, these are ultimately traps which cause the perpetuation of war. Some men become addicted to war, the excitement of war. If one war ends, they will seek out the next one. Life is never so dull as life without war. It is the ultimate football game because the stakes - life or death - are so high. Witness the volunteers from other countries who are putting their lives on the line in Ukraine. The problem is that the pursuit of peace is never as exciting as the pursuit of war. Until peacemaking becomes as noble and glorious a pursuit as war, there is no hope for the human race to live peaceably and cooperatively side by side with each other. Until they give out as many medals and honors for peace heroes as they do for war heroes, the human race will go down fighting and ultimately extinguish each other.

I'm afraid that the war in Ukraine is only the latest example of people preoccupied with the excitement of war. Sure it was a clumsy and ignoble thing for Russia to do to so overtly invade Ukraine. They should have taken a page out of the CIA's book and been more subtle and covert about it. For example, the CIA undermined the democratically elected regime of Salvador Allende in Chile because he was a socialist and a Marxist ushering in the regime of Augusto Pinochet and his reign of terror. "According to the Chilean government, the number of executions and forced disappearances was at least 3,095 [under Pinochet]. Operation Condor, a U.S.-supported terror operation focusing on South America, was founded at the behest of the Pinochet regime in late November 1975, his 60th birthday." I'm afraid that Zelensky is following the same playbook of promoting the war based on 'glory for Ukraine' and his David and Goliath symbolism. His insatiable lust for American artillery shells and other advanced weaponry is duly granted by President Biden and the European allies with the goal of "winning the war." No one except the Chinese seem the least interested in creating a peaceful solution to the war. Instead the war will only be escalated when Ukraine gets F-15 fighter jets. Then they will be able to hit Russian targets in Russia escalating the war even further. Until now tragically it's only Ukrainian civilian lives and property that are being destroyed.

It seems like revenge, hatred for Russia and glory for Ukraine are the ultimate factors at work here not a search for compromise which both sides can live with. Does Russia have any legitimate national security interests in Ukraine's not becoming a member of NATO? Did the US have any legitimate national security interests in Chile nor becoming a socialist and Marxist state? There are always many reasons for war, but few for peace. Meanwhile, a lack of cooperation among the world's nations is hastening the day in which global warming will put an end to human civilization unless we can wake up and see that peace and cooperation are more glorious than war.

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.

World Could Lose Half of Glaciers This Century Even If Warming Is Kept to 1.5°C

"The rapidly increasing glacier mass losses as global temperature increases beyond 1.5°C stresses the urgency of establishing more ambitious climate pledges," reads a new study.

Julia Conley

Jan 06, 2023

 

from Common Dreams

 

In a study that scientists say gathered "an unprecedented amount of data" to determine the fate of the world's ice sheets with more precision than ever before, researchers revealed Thursday that even if humans manage to limit planetary heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures, half of the planet's glaciers are expected to melt by 2100.

 

Under the current trajectory, the planet is expected to grow 2.7°C warmer this century, which the paper, published in Science and led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Alaska, warns will lead to the disappearance of 68% of glaciers.

In that scenario, the U.S., western Canada, and central Europe would lose almost all their glaciers by the end of the century.

"In Spain, the disappearance of the Sierra Nevada glaciers means an almost complete reduction in water availability there from that time onwards, and the same applies to the glaciers in the Pyrenees."

The scientists, led by David Rounce in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon, examined two decades of satellite data to include all of the world's roughly 200,000 glaciers in the study. Previous research has focused on specific ice sheets and then extrapolated the data to reach conclusions about all glaciers.

The extensive use of data showed that "the scale and impacts of glacial loss are greater than previously thought," according toThe Guardian.

The study authors emphasized that policymakers can take action to preserve as many glaciers as possible.

"The rapidly increasing glacier mass losses as global temperature increases beyond 1.5°C stresses the urgency of establishing more ambitious climate pledges to preserve the glaciers in these mountainous regions," reads the paper.

Even under the best-case scenario outlined by the researchers, average sea levels would increase by 3.5 inches from 2015 to 2100. If the planet warms by 2.7°C, 4.5 inches of sea-level rise is expected—23% more than previous models estimated, The Guardian reported.

"The study makes much of the earlier partial data more concrete," professor Antonio Ruiz de Elvira of the University of Alcalá in Spain, who was not involved in the research, told The Guardian.

The loss of two-thirds of the world's glaciers would worsen the risk of flooding in coastal areas across the globe and threaten water supplies for up to two billion people.

"In California, the water needed to sustain agriculture comes from glaciers directly from the end of July," said Ruiz de Elvira. "In Spain, the disappearance of the Sierra Nevada glaciers means an almost complete reduction in water availability there from that time onwards, and the same applies to the glaciers in the Pyrenees. In India and China, they depend crucially on the Himalayan glaciers."

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

 

 

Julia Conley

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

Off the Top of My Head

The Government Should Buy Out Parts of Florida Rather Than providing Money to Rebuild

by John Lawrence

Owners of real estate on Florida's barrier islands should be bought out. Climate change will continue to provide hurricanes that will wipe out homes and businesses in these vulnerable areas. It doesn't make sense to rebuild there. Rebuilding there represents throwing good money after bad. If owners' investments in real estate can be made whole, then they can rebuild or buy in some other area which isn't prone to climate change induced disasters. 7 News reported:

"SANIBEL ISLAND, Fla. (AP) — When Hurricane Ian struck Florida’s Gulf Coast, it washed out the bottom level of David Muench’s home on the barrier island of Sanibel along with several cars, a Harley-Davidson and a boat.

His parents’ house was among those destroyed by the storm that killed at least two people there, and the lone bridge to the crescent-shaped island collapsed, cutting off access by car to the mainland for its 6,300 residents.

Hurricane Ian underscores the vulnerability of the nation’s barrier islands and the increasing costs of people living on the thin strips of land that parallel the coast. As hurricanes become more destructive, experts question whether such exposed communities can keep rebuilding in the face of climate change.

“This is a Hurricane Katrina-scale event, where you’re having to rebuild everything, including the infrastructure,” said Jesse M. Keenan, a real estate professor at Tulane University’s School of Architecture. “We can’t build back everything to what it was — we can’t afford that.”"

Actually, it would be cheaper to buy out this real estate rather than to rebuild it along with all the associated infrastructure. Buying or rebuilding in safer areas where the infrastructure is already present eliminates the costs of debris removal and infrastructure rebuilding. Insurance companies will either go bankrupt or be devastated along with the other natural devastation. FEMA's budget will be used up trying to compensate for all the billion dollar weather disasters that are surely coming. These are no "500 year storms." That is pure fiction. These are once or more a year storms.Much of Florida will be underwater eventually as oceans continue to rise. The only thing that makes sense is to move away from the coasts in the most expeditious and least costly manner. Government can expedite this process so that home and business owners aren't forced back onto vulnerable properties and will have somewhere else to go to without losing their real estate investments.

Off the Top of My Head

Republicans Hate Socialism ... Except When They Need Help Themselves

by John Lawrence

When Superstorm Sandy hit, then Congressman DeSantis voted against giving help to New York state. Now after the Hurricane Ian disaster, Governor DeSantis is asking the Federal government for every dollar he can possibly get. This is typical Republican behavior. After all socialism is about helping people. Republicans want every ounce of help they can get for themselves while denying it to others. All of a sudden DeSantis is Joe Biden's best friend. Joe wants to help people, but he should think twice about helping DeSantis. First of all a hard look should be given to rebuilding on hurricane prone barrier islands. DeSantis, of course, wants the increased economic activity that rebuilding will entail for construction companies especially if the Federal government pays for it. Building Back Better in hurricane prone areas is not good economic sense. And it will cost a fortune in an inflationary era while only adding to inflation as the Federal government injects more money into the economy.

Robert Reich wrote in a recent email:

"No Republican governor has been more vocal in his opposition to what he describes as “socialism” than Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis. “I stand against socialism,” DeSantis thundered in Florida’s 2018 gubernatorial election. “Socialist policies have failed time and time again.” In June, DeSantis signed an education bill directing Florida’s Department of Education to develop a curriculum educating students on the evils of socialism (as well as communism)."

But now, when his state needs the money, DeSantis is either a full on socialist or a full on opportunist who, once he gets his, will be against anyone else getting theirs. In 2013 DeSantis said: "I sympathize with the victims of Hurricane Sandy and believe that those who purchased flood insurance should have their claims paid. At the same time, allowing the program to increase its debt by another $9.7 billion with no plan to offset the spending with cuts elsewhere is not fiscally responsible." So now after Hurricane Ian, which will run into the tens of billions, is giving the state of Florida the money DeSantis is requesting from the Federal government "fiscally responsible"? Reich poses the question: "So, would DeSantis call any form of government assistance to those in need “socialism?” Obviously, not when it's his ox that's being gored. DeSantis' hypocrisy is immense here, but it will probably work for him. He will take credit for "getting Florida and Floridians back to normal" as he enters the 2024 Presidential contest. Before Biden gives DeSantis all the money he wants, DeSantis should do a mea culpa, stating that he was wrong to vote against disaster relief for New York state after Superstorm Sandy.

DeSantis website headlines: "Governor Ron DeSantis Requests President Biden Approve Major Disaster Declaration and 100 Percent Federal Cost Share for 60 Days for Hurricane Ian" This isn't the first time that DeSantis has used Federal cash to tout his own agenda. Just prior to the fatal hurricane, DeSantis held a press conference in Jacksonville where he gave $1,000 checks to individual firefighters and law-enforcement officers that were being made available through this year’s state budget. Of course he didn't mention that this was cash the state of Florida got from the American Rescue Plan, Federal money which provided more than $8.8 billion to the state of Florida.DeSantis will likely continue to bash President Joe Biden and the Democrats for pushing policies that he says have caused inflation — which includes the massive spending included in the American Rescue Plan. I've got news for Gov. DeSantis: if he cared about inflation, he would take the money to recover from Hurricane Ian out of state taxes instead of letting the American taxpayer foot the bill while all the time giving Joe Biden no credit. He will take all that for himself.

 

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

The Immigration Debacle

by John Lawrence

The number of people seeking admission to the US and Europe is only going to increase due to a number of factors - climate change will be the main one as time goes on. The international laws on asylum seeking need to be revised. Right now anyone who presents themselves at the border of the US or a European country and requests asylum can legally enter that country and have their asylum request considered although it may or may not be granted. The problem is that the law as written expects that applicants are individuals with a specific request. The situation now, however, is that huge throngs of people are migrating due to war, crime, economic conditions and increasingly climate change. The reality is that it's not an individual phenomenon any more. Although any country is required to accept asylum seekers regardless if they had anything to do with creating the conditions that led to the people requesting asylum, the immensity of the problem makes the current law inadequate and insufficient.

The solution to this seemingly intractable problem is multifaceted. 1) The law that says that anyone setting foot on American soil is entitled to asylum and a hearing needs to be invalidated. 2) Defenses at the border need to be increased so that illegal asylum seekers (those who don't apply for asylum at a port of entry) can't cross the border illegally. 3) The US needs to intervene in countries where the conditions contribute to migration and to the extent possible ameliorate those conditions so that people can stay in their own country and not be in danger of being killed or intimidated by criminals or gangs. In other words so that they can have security in their own countries. In addition the US should assist to the extent possible in creating the economic conditions such that people would want to stay in their own countries since more and more refugees and asylum seekers are economic refugees. 4) The US needs to encourage people to apply for asylum in their own countries by making it impossible to gain entry to the US legally or  illegally by coming to the border and making it propitious to apply for asylum or refugee status in their home countries. This could mean even offering cash to those who apply at home rather than coming to the border. In other words both a carrot and a stick approach. We should give them incentives to stay where they are.

The general approach would be to make it futile for migrants to approach the US border and to encourage them to apply for asylum in their home countries even using incentives for that and disincentives for coming to the border. Right now migrants have every incentive to come to the US border because once they have planted even one foot on US soil, it is required by law to give them an asylum hearing, and, meanwhile, they are in the US at least temporarily and need to be given humane treatment which costs money. To boot they may never even show up for their asylum hearing! This is a ridiculous situation. The US has exploited Central and South American countries economically for centuries. It needs to make up for it now by decreasing poverty in those countries and incentivizing people financially to stay in their own countries. To the extent people feel unsafe due to criminal and gang activities, these gangs need to be rooted out with or without the cooperation of the authorities in those countries.

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!