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The Most Important Thing Biden Can Learn From the Trump Economy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ump-economy-lessons-biden.html biden trump economy US
shared by zoegainer on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • During Mr. Trump’s time in office, it has become clear that the United States economy can surpass what technocrats once thought were its limits: Specifically, the jobless rate can fall lower and government budget deficits can run higher than was once widely believed without setting off an inflationary spiral.
  • Before the pandemic took hold, the jobless rate was below 4 percent, inflation was low, and wages were rising at a steady clip, especially for low and middle earners. The inflation-adjusted income of the median American household rose 9 percent from 2016 to 2019.
  • The higher interest rates from unfunded tax cuts that had been forecast did not materialize; the C.B.O. in spring 2018 had expected the 10-year Treasury bond yield to average 3.5 percent in 2019. In fact, it averaged a mere 2.1 percent, making federal borrowing more manageable.
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  • A widespread view among economic policy elites, after the runaway inflation in the 1970s and early 1980s, was that elevated unemployment was a necessary cost of keeping prices stable. Also, that the government can’t spend much more money than it takes in without crowding out private investment — leaving the economy weaker over time — and that policymakers should act pre-emptively to ward off these risks.
  • It may not have been the best economy ever, as he has repeatedly claimed, but it was easily the strongest since the late 1990s, and before that you have to go back to the late 1960s to find similar conditions.
  • And the Fed cut interest rates starting in 2019 despite a very low jobless rate, implicitly accepting the premise that it had moved too aggressively with rate increases to prevent inflation that never arrived.
  • Yet from spring of 2018 to the onset of the pandemic, the United States experienced a jobless rate of 4 percent or lower, with no obvious sign of inflation and many signs that less advantaged workers were able to find work.
  • A central question for Mr. Biden will be: To what degree is the Trump-era economic success a result of policies that liberals disagree with, to what degree is it a result of policies that Mr. Biden might embrace, and to what degree is it just luck?
  • Mr. Mulligan and other allies of the president emphasize the role of deregulating major industries and lowering taxes on business investment — microeconomic strategies — as crucial to the economy’s success.
  • The Biden administration and Democratic Congress will view more aggressive regulation as a core goal, aimed at preventing corporate misbehavior, protecting the environment, and more. Indeed, left-leaning economists would argue that the very policies Mr. Mulligan credits with the boom are the least durable parts of the Trump-era expansion.
  • If you believe Mr. Mulligan and other Trump allies, the macroeconomic lessons of the Trump years — those having to do with things like deficits, inflation and interest rates — won’t be enough for the Biden administration to recreate the 2019 economy. In this view, the microeconomic details of how the president has governed will be crucial, and the policies that Mr. Biden has advocated — in areas as varied as tighter restrictions on carbon emissions and more aggressive regulation of banks — will prove counterproductive to the cause.
  • If inflation were to remain persistently low, she said, “a more radical rethinking of the economy’s productive potential would surely be in order.”
  • She said that a high-pressure economy — one where unemployment is low and employers have to compete for workers — improves upward mobility
  • Mr. Powell, who will lead the Fed for roughly the first year of Mr. Biden’s term and then will be either reappointed or replaced in February 2022, has also become a vocal enthusiast for avoiding these mistakes of the past.In the strong pre-pandemic labor market, he said in an August speech on the Fed’s new policy framework, “many who had been left behind for too long were finding jobs, benefiting their families and communities, and increasing the productive capacity of our economy.”
  • President-elect Biden has embraced these lessons in shaping his agenda, as he made clear in a news conference Friday where he confirmed that his plans will add up to trillions of dollars when one includes both pandemic response money and longer-term plans.“With interest rates as low as they are,” Mr. Biden said, “every major economist thinks we should be investing in deficit spending to generate economic growth.”
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Biden's Climate Plan to Get a Boost From Democrat-Led Senate - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...emocrat-led-senate-11610981436 climate change biden
shared by mariedhorne on 19 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • When President-elect Joe Biden’s advisers wrote his climate plan, they often had one small audience in mind: the U.S. Senate.
  • The Democratic control is still narrow—both parties have 50 Senate seats and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris breaks ties—and that is likely to limit how far Mr. Biden and fellow Democrats can reach.
  • Mr. Biden, as a candidate, had called for $2 trillion in spending on projects to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions that most scientists implicate in climate change.
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  • The Biden team has also promised 500,000 new charging stations for electric vehicles, a further appeal to states hungry for federal highway money. It is also another boon to electric utilities eager to boost demand from electric vehicles.
  • Democratic control also puts the Congressional Review Act in play. It allows Congress, with a simple majority, to overturn regulations finalized by the executive branch in the previous 60 legislative days, putting into jeopardy several Trump administration rules that eased environmental standards.
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Opinion | Even for Bargain Hunters, Green Cars Make Sense - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ctric-cars-climate-change.html economics Politics US crisis history policy
shared by cartergramiak on 25 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • NASHVILLE — In this family, we are not new-car people. My husband and I buy used vehicles, and we keep them until the cost of patching them up far exceeds their value, a time-honored practice known as driving a car into the ground. We don’t drive a lot, either: My husband works a mile and a half from our house, and I work from a home office. I kept thinking about electric cars anyway.
  • Meanwhile, evidence of the growing climate calamity was becoming clearer and grimmer with every new study — and with every wildfire, every drought, every hurricane — even as the Trump administration kept rolling back environmental protections at a breathtaking rate. I felt a rising desperation to do everything possible to reduce my own carbon footprint, to foster as much biodiversity as I could on my own little half-acre plot of ground.
  • But the single greatest change we can make is to change the way we get around. “Transportation is the largest source of planet-warming greenhouse gases in the United States today, and the bulk of those emissions come from driving in our cities and suburbs,”
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  • The cost of an electric car can be prohibitive, it’s true, or at least it can appear to be from a glance at the window sticker. But we chose a Nissan Leaf, a vehicle made by our neighbors down in Smyrna, Tenn., and the model we bought qualified for the highest possible federal tax credit. So the actual cost of our car was $7,500 less than the price we paid for it, even if it didn’t seem that way when we signed the papers.
  • Even without the tax credit, many upcoming models are projected to cost no more than their carbon-spewing counterparts. The number of purchase options is about to explode, too, so you don’t have to give your money to Elon Musk if you want to drive an electric vehicle.
  • But none of these potential liabilities should be deal breakers. I love our little red Leaf, and I have never had a single moment of buyer’s remorse since we brought it home. It’s quiet, it’s comfortable, and it’s amazingly fun to drive.
  • All I can hope is that by the time we need to replace it, all our options will be electric. Because if they aren’t, the planet will pay a terrible price.
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Opinion | We Want a 'New Normal.' It's Not in the Forecast. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rmal-climate-catastrophes.html Culture US trump Politics history crisis
shared by cartergramiak on 25 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Now it’s a ghostly quiet. Social distancing rules mean that even at max capacity, it still only has a tiny fraction of its usual clientele. Standing in that empty pub, haunted by the sense of what we were missing, I felt an ache for “normal” as acute as any homesickness I ever felt — even when I served in the Army in Iraq. I still feel the twinge every time I put on my mask. I want our normal lives back.
  • More alarming, recent observed increases in atmospheric methane, a greenhouse gas more than 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over the short term, are so large that if they continue they could effectively overwhelm the pledged emissions reductions in the Paris Agreement, even if those reductions were actually happening. Which they’re not.
  • I remember last March, in the first throes of the pandemic, when normal was upended. Everything shut down. We hoarded toilet paper and pasta. Fear gripped the nation.
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  • Now, as a new administration takes office and we look ahead to life after both Covid and Donald Trump, we need to face the fact that the world we live in is changing into something else, and that coping with the consequences of global warming demands immediate, widespread, radical action.
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How Biden's Climate Ambitions Could Shift America's Global Footprint - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...limate-change-biden-kerry.html biden climate
shared by martinelligi on 27 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • President Joseph R. Biden on Wednesday said climate change should be regarded as “an essential element of U.S. foreign policy and national security.” That is likely to bring big changes for America’s role in the world.
  • On his first day in office, Mr. Biden began the process of rejoining the Paris Agreement. Now comes the hard part: The United States, which is responsible for the single largest chunk of greenhouse gases that have warmed the planet since the industrial age, needs to set specific targets to reduce its own emissions by 2030 — and to put in place domestic policies to achieve them.
  • Climate may be one of the few areas of cooperation in an increasingly tense relationship between Washington and Beijing. The two countries are the world’s largest emitters and the world’s largest economies, and without ambitious steps from both, there is no way the world can slow down warming
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  • For the United States to be seen as a country that’s helping vulnerable countries to become resilient and enabling low carbon development, actually fostering low carbon development, would earn us a lot of good will,” said Dr. Gallagher, now a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “It would be a major turnaround.”
  • The geopolitics of energy had already been changing. The United States had steadily become less dependent on oil from the Middle East, thanks to the shale boom at home. A climate-focused White House stands to accelerate the change
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Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price | Climate c... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...crimes-oil-and-gas-environment oil gas fraud climate denialism corporate history politics
shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • even more strikingly, the nearly two dozen lawsuits are underpinned by accusations that the industry severely aggravated the environmental crisis with a decades-long campaign of lies and deceit to suppress warnings from their own scientists about the impact of fossil fuels on the climate and dupe the American public
  • for the first time in decades, the lawsuits chart a path toward public accountability that climate activists say has the potential to rival big tobacco’s downfall after it concealed the real dangers of smoking.
  • “Things have to get worse for the oil companies,” he added. “Even if they’ve got a pretty good chance of winning the litigation in places, the discovery of pretty clearcut wrong doing – that they knew their product was bad and they were lying to the public – really weakens the industry’s ability to resist legislation and settlements.”
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  • or decades, the country’s leading oil and gas companies have understood the science of climate change and the dangers posed by fossil fuels. Year after year, top executives heard it from their own scientists whose warnings were explicit and often dire.
  • In 1979, an Exxon study said that burning fossil fuels “will cause dramatic environmental effects” in the coming decades.“The potential problem is great and urgent,” it concluded.
  • o investigate the lengths of the oil and gas industry’s deceptions – and the disastrous consequences for communities across the country – the Guardian is launching a year-long series tracking the unprecedented efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry to account.
  • the legal reasoning behind foreign court judgments are unlikely to carry much weight in the US and domestic law is largely untested. In 2018, a federal court knocked back New York City’s initial attempt to force big oil to cover the costs of the climate crisis by saying that its global nature requires a political, not legal, remedy.
  • Among them is a 1988 Exxon memo laying out a strategy to push for a “balanced scientific approach”, which meant giving equal weight to hard evidence and climate change denialism. That move bore fruit in parts of the media into the 2000s as the oil industry repositioned global heating as theory, not fact, contributing to the most deep-rooted climate denialism in any developed country.
  • Other climate lawsuits, including one filed in Minnesota, allege the oil firms’ campaigns of deception and denial about the climate crisis amount to fraud. Minnesota is suing Exxon, Koch Industries and an industry trade group for breaches of state law for deceptive trade practices, false advertising and consumer fraud over what the lawsuit characterises as distortions and lies about climate science.
  • Farber said cases rooted in claims that the petroleum industry lied have the most promising chance of success.“To the extent the plaintiffs can point to misconduct, like telling everybody there’s no such thing as climate change when your scientists have told you the opposite, that might give the courts a greater feeling of comfort that they’re not trying to take over the US energy system,” he said.
  • Year after year, Exxon scientists recorded the evidence about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. In 1978, its science adviser, James Black, warned that there was a “window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategy might become critical”.
  • Exxon set up equipment on a supertanker, the Esso Atlantic, to monitor carbon dioxide in seawater and the air. In 1982, the company’s scientists drew up a graph accurately plotting an increase in the globe’s temperature to date.
  • “The 1980s revealed an established consensus among scientists,” the Minnesota lawsuit against Exxon says. “A 1982 internal Exxon document … explicitly declares that the science was ‘unanimous’ and that climate change would ‘bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate’.”Then the monitoring on the Esso Atlantic was suddenly called off and other research downgraded.
  • The public nuisance claim, also pursued by Honolulu, San Francisco and Rhode Island, follows a legal strategy with a record of success in other types of litigation. In 2019, Oklahoma’s attorney general won compensation of nearly half a billion dollars against the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson over its false marketing of powerful prescription painkillers on the grounds it created a public nuisance by contributing to the opioid epidemic in the state.
  • newspapers to sow doubt. One in the New York Times in 2000, under the headline “Unsettled Science”, compared climate data to changing weather forecasts. It claimed scientists were divided, when an overwhelming consensus already backed the evidence of a growing climate crisis, and said that the supposed doubts meant it was too soon to act.
  • Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, Lee Raymond, told industry executives in 1996 that “scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate”.“It’s a long and dangerous leap to conclude that we should, therefore, cut fossil fuel use,” he said.Documents show that his company’s scientists were telling Exxon’s management that the real danger lay in the failure to do exactly that.
  • In 2019, Martin Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University, told a congressional hearing that as a consultant to Exxon on climate modelling in the 1980s, he worked on eight scientific papers for the company that showed fossil fuel burning was “increasingly having a perceptible influence on Earth’s climate”.
  • Exxon worked alongside Chevron, Shell, BP and smaller oil firms to shift attention away from the growing climate crisis. They funded the industry’s trade body, API, as it drew up a multimillion-dollar plan to ensure that “climate change becomes a non- issue” through disinformation. The plan said “victory will be achieved” when “recognition of uncertainties become part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”.
  • The fossil fuel industry also used its considerable resources to pour billions of dollars into political lobbying to block unfavourable laws and to fund front organisations with neutral and scientific-sounding names, such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). In 2001, the US state department told the GCC that President George W Bush rejected the Kyoto protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “in part, based on input from you”.
  • “Big oil was engaged in exactly the same type of behaviour that the tobacco companies engaged in and were found liable for fraud on a massive scale,” said Eubanks. “The cover-up, the denial of the problem, the funding of scientists to question the science. The same pattern. And some of the same lawyers represent both tobacco and big oil.”
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Climate Crisis Weekly: Fossil fuel giants' smoking gun, more - Electrek - 0 views

electrek.co/...fuel-companies-bees-jane-fonda climate crisis fossil fuel trump policy
shared by blairca on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • called on health professionals to engage in non-violent social protest against the climate crisis. He called it “the most existential crisis facing the human species.”
  • air pollution as a result of fossil fuels kills more people than smoking.
  • The UK is currently consulting on whether all new homes with parking spaces should have mandatory electric car charge points. The country wants to ban the sale of fossil-fueled cars after 2040.
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  • The British government will issue green (literally, the color green) license plates to EVs. This is to encourage drivers to buy zero-emissions cars in order to combat the climate crisis.
  • European parliament has vetoed legislation that would weaken the protection of bee colonies from harmful pesticides.
  • A new report from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University asserts that 9,700 additional premature deaths occurred in the US between 2016 and 2018 as a result of pollution.
  • PM2.5 comes from human industry such as coal, oil, and gas, and construction dust. It also comes from forest fires.
  • PM2.5 kills people by causing respiratory and cardiac problems.
  • the election of climate-change denier Donald Trump in 2016 coincides with this unfortunate turnaround after years of declining particulate matter during the Obama administration from 2009-2016.
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Opinion | Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-change-costs.html climate change economic costs risks assessment reader comments
shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Red O. GreeneNew Mexico11h ago"Economists—the secular priests of the current age—have developed an elaborate theology in which perpetual growth is necessary, good, and inevitable, and those who acknowledge limits to growth are deemed pessimists who oppose human progress. They justify the rejection of limits by appeal to a view of human nature as greedy and insatiable, and to a definition of freedom that (unlike Kant’s) limits the use of reason to the instrumental pursuit of arbitrary ends, rather than seeing the recognition and pursuit of higher ends as key to real freedom. They have developed a metaphysics in which everything which is 'not us' has value exclusively as a resource for us." - Prof. Philip Cafaro, Colorado State University
  • BobTaos, NM9h agoThe Green New Deal proposed by Axlexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders has two things that recommend it -- 1) it is the first policy proposal or more accurately set of proposals that appreciates the URGENCY of the climate crisis, and 2) it recognizes the SCOPE of the climate crisis. We have to act NOW and we must review and revamp EVERYTHING -- energy generation and transmission, agriculture, industry, transportation, buildings and their power use. Switching to emission free energy sources and electrifying everything could halt the buildup of greeenhouse gased in the atmosphere. Reforming agriculture holds out the promise of sequestering CO2 in the soil and bringing atmospheric levels back toward 350. But, as AOC and Bernie say it must be done now and on a massive scale. To be fair, there are literally millions of people including most leading scientists, engineers and business people like Elon Musk, and nobodies like me who have been saying this for decades. Now for the first time it is politically feasible. This is truly the test for the generation of humans who are currently alive.
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Paris Agreement: Trump confirms US will leave climate accord - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-50165596 trump politics us crisis obama
shared by brookegoodman on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The US will definitely withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, President Trump has confirmed.
  • He described the accord as a bad deal and said his pro fossil fuel policies had made the US an energy superpower.
  • It committed the US to cutting greenhouse gases up to 28% by 2025 based on 2005 levels.
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  • Mr Trump promised that he’d turn the US into an energy superpower, and he’s attempting to sweep away a raft of pollution legislation to reduce the cost of producing gas, oil and coal.He categorised former US President Barack Obama’s environmental clean-up plans as a war on American energy.
  • The Beijing government is having difficulty persuading provincial leaders to abandon coal plants for which they have taken heavy loans.
  • Campaigners say these now represent nearly 70% of US GDP and nearly 65% of the US population.
  • China - the current top emitter - and India still have relatively low per capita emissions, but Mr Trump said they shouldn’t be allowed to phase out fossil fuels more slowly than the US.
  • Environmentalists say Mr Obama would have acted quickly to press Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro to tackle forest fires in the Amazon
  • As extreme weather events alarm the world’s scientists, diplomats will meet in a few weeks in Chile to figure out the path ahead.
  • the formal withdrawal would make it difficult for the US to be part of the global conversation.
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Secret Deal Helped Housing Industry Stop Tougher Rules on Climate Change - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uilding-codes-secret-deal.html crisis policy housing climate climate change
shared by blairca on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • block changes to building codes that would require new houses to better address climate change,
  • Homes accounted for nearly one-fifth of all energy-related carbon dioxide emissions nationwide last year.
  • While four seats is a minority on the two committees, which focus on residential building codes, the bloc of votes makes it tougher to pass revisions that the industry opposes.
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  • consider the proposed changes to energy-efficiency building codes, which get updated every three years. This round, the homebuilders have opposed changes that include requiring better insulation in attics and air ducts, as well as a proposal requiring new houses to be equipped with the circuitry required to install a plug for an electric vehicle — potentially making it easier for homeowners to switch to electric cars in the future.
  • The homebuilding industry says it opposes proposals that would make houses more expensive, pricing people out of the market.
  • Advocates for tougher building codes say the effects of decisions like these will be felt for generations as global warming leads to more powerful storms and higher risk of damage to property.
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Francis Rooney is the rare Republican open to impeaching Trump - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html trump
shared by katherineharron on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Rooney, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the center of the inquiry, said Friday that he had not yet come to a conclusion on whether the President committed a crime that compels his removal from office, a striking view among House Republicans defensive of Trump.
  • Rooney is not a typical rank-and-file House Republican. Before winning his first election in 2016, the 65-year-old wealthy businessman's company oversaw construction projects including not only the presidential libraries for both George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, and the stadiums for the Texas Rangers, Dallas Cowboys and Houston Texans, but the Capitol Visitor's Center, where the witnesses of the investigation dash to enter a secure facility and give their testimonies. He is on now at least his third career, after serving as the US ambassador to the Holy See under the last GOP president.
  • Rooney did acknowledge that some Republicans might be afraid of being rebuked by the party if they expressed skepticism about the President, saying "it might be the end of things for me...depending on how things go."
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  • "I didn't take this job to keep it," he said.
  • After receiving a government whistleblower's complaint last month, Democrats have alleged Trump used his public office for personal gain, holding up $391 million in military aid to Ukraine and then pressuring its leader on a July 25 phone call to investigate both a political rival and a conspiracy theory related to the 2016 election.
  • They've been particularly focused on the first ask, an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, whose owner had been probed by the former Ukrainian general prosecutor. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden.
  • "It's painful to me to see this kind of amateur diplomacy, riding roughshod over our State Department apparatus," Rooney said. "I've got great respect for the professional diplomats that protect America around the world."
  • But so far, few Republicans have joined Democrats in even considering that the President committed a crime. Many GOP congressmen say there was no quid pro quo between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky on that now-famous July call, while others say Trump's conduct was inappropriate but not impeachable.
  • He's in the minority of the House, and neither a rabble-rouser nor a part of the leadership team. When asked by a reporter if he had any anecdotes to share about Rooney, Rep. Charlie Crist, a Democrat of Florida, asked whether the article would be for the local newspaper.Rooney has carved out a reputation for not being shy in breaking from the party, particularly on environmental issues. He's one of the few House Republicans devoted to combating climate change. He supports a tax on carbon emissions and is a critic of the state's sugar industry. And he is one of about a dozen House Republicans to vote against Trump's emergency declaration diverting billions of dollars away from military construction projects towards the wall.
  • Rooney is free from much political pressure due in part to his vast personal wealth, driven by his success as the CEO of the investment company Rooney Holdings, the majority owner of Manhattan Construction Company. But the transition from business to elected official has not been entirely pleasant."This is kind of a frustrating job for me," Rooney said. "I come from a world of action, decisions, putting your money down and seeing what happens. This is a world of talk. It's very difficult for me to just stand up and talk."
  • The congressman's experience as a former ambassador in the George W. Bush administration has given him an appreciation for the witnesses who come before him. He said he's eager to hear from acting ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor next week, whom he called "a very well respected career diplomat."
  • "I'm not considering anything right now other than getting all the facts and learning more about it," Rooney said. "I'm a business guy, okay? I'm used to being open to all points of view -- and making the best decision I can. But there's a lot of water still to flow down under the bridge on this thing."
  • Rooney has also taken issue with Mulvaney's defense of the President's actions. The acting White House chief of staff said on Thursday that the Trump administration "held up the money" for Ukraine because the President wanted to investigate "corruption" related to a conspiracy theory involving the whereabouts of the Democratic National Committee's computer server hacked by Russians during the last presidential campaign.
  • Democrats have argued that even if no favors were exchanged, Trump committed an impeachable offense in asking a foreign country to interfere in a US election. But Mulvaney's comments undermined a key GOP stance that the President's actions were not impeachable, asserting that there was no quid pro quo and the aid eventually went through to Ukraine. Hours after the news conference on Thursday, Mulvaney released a statement reversing his prior comments.
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The Climate Crisis | The Sanders Institute - 0 views

www.sandersinstitute.com/...the-climate-crisis climate crisis
shared by blairca on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • There is ample evidence that climate change is happening. 97% of scientists believe not only that climate change is happening, but that humans are causing climate change.
  • Snow and ice cover has decreased in most areas with the most drastic reductions at the poles. In fact, minimum arctic sea ice (usually during September) has decreased by more than 40%. NCA states that “This decline is unprecedented in the historical record, and the reduction of ice volume and thickness is even greater.” Sea level is increasing because as water warms it expands and melting ice and icecaps adds water to the oceans. Atmospheric water vapor is increasing because warmer air can hold more water.
  • While it is true that the climate has changed in the past due to natural factors, natural factors alone cannot explain the speed of temperature increase and global changes that we are experiencing now
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  • “Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, humans have been increasingly affecting global climate, to the point where we are now the primary cause of recent and projected future change. The majority of the warming at the global scale over the past 50 years can only be explained by the effects of human influences, especially the emissions from burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) and from deforestation.”
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Paris Agreement: Trump confirms US will leave climate accord - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-50165596 trump crisis culture policy
shared by anniina03 on 24 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The US will definitely withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, President Trump has confirmed.
  • He described the accord as a bad deal and said his pro fossil fuel policies had made the US an energy superpower.
  • The pull-out will take effect a year later - the day after the 2020 US presidential election – assuming that Mr Trump is re-elected. The Paris agreement brought together 195 nations in the battle to combat climate change.
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  • President Trump said if he couldn’t improve that deal he’d pull out, but diplomatic sources said there’s been no major effort at renegotiation.
  • Mr Trump promised that he’d turn the US into an energy superpower, and he’s attempting to sweep away a raft of pollution legislation to reduce the cost of producing gas, oil and coal.He categorised former US President Barack Obama’s environmental clean-up plans as a war on American energy.
  • Campaigners say these now represent nearly 70% of US GDP and nearly 65% of the US population. If they were a country, this group would be the world’s second largest economy.The rebels are led by California, which is locked in a battle with the president over his plans to repeal their powers to impose clean air standards.
  • So far the biggest negative effect of Mr Trump’s stance has arguably been to relax pressure on countries like Brazil and Saudi Arabia to take action of their own.Environmentalists say Mr Obama would have acted quickly to press Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro to tackle forest fires in the Amazon, for instance. Mr Obama agreed in Paris that the US should take a lead on climate change because it’s contributed far more than any other nation to the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.
  • China - the current top emitter - and India still have relatively low per capita emissions, but Mr Trump said they shouldn’t be allowed to phase out fossil fuels more slowly than the US.
  • His opponents warn the president is weakening US global leadership on the clean economy
  • The Beijing government is having difficulty persuading provincial leaders to abandon coal plants for which they have taken heavy loans.
  • As extreme weather events alarm the world’s scientists, diplomats will meet in a few weeks in Chile to figure out the path ahead.
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'What could I have done?' The scientist who predicted the bushfire emergency four decad... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ire-emergency-four-decades-ago australia climate change wildfire scientist history crisis politics economics
shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Despite the fact that Pearman gave more than 500 presentations on climate change between 2000 and 2010, he still asks himself if he could have done more. “What could I have done? What did I do wrong?” he asks. “There are times when you look and think, there’s something we did wrong in trying to communicate this.
  • he reserves his rhetorical fire for the fossil fuel industry. “Those investing in the fossil fuel industry worked diligently to try to stop action on the reduction of emissions,” he says. “As a scientist you think many years ahead and out to the turn of the century and beyond.
  • “But in a business with investment in a coal mine, their interest is in what happens in the next five years. Those industries have been very effective.
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Craig Kelly interview: Piers Morgan calls MP 'disgraceful' for denying climate link to ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ying-climate-link-to-bushfires australia wildfire climate change interview politics
shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Morgan savaged Kelly for his remarks, saying he was taking a “nothing to see here, nothing to worry about” approach as “your entire country is eviscerated by fires”
  • “You are facing now one of the greatest crises you have ever faced, and there is you Mr Kelly, with respect, a senior politician who still doesn’t think this has anything to do with a heating-up planet,” Morgan said.
  • Tobin accused Kelly of denying the science which showed that 2019 was Australia’s hottest and driest year on record.
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  • “You have the second highest carbon emissions per person on Earth and you are burying your head in the sand. You aren’t a climate sceptic, you are a climate denier,” she said.
  • Cutting off the interview, Morgan said: “I’ve got to say: wake up. Wake up. Climate change and global warming are real and Australia right now is showing the entire world just how devastating it is.
  • “And for senior politicians in Australia to still pretend there’s no connection is absolutely disgraceful.”
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Climate change: How rich people could help save the planet - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by delgadool on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Rich people don't just have bigger bank balances and more lavish lifestyles than the rest of us -- they also have bigger carbon footprints.
  • Oxfam has estimated that the average carbon footprint of someone in the world's richest 1% could be 175 times that of someone in the poorest 10%. Studies also show that the poor suffer the most from climate change.
  • Rich people also have more flexibility to make changes.
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  • Oxfam estimates that the number of billionaires on the Forbes list with business interests in the fossil fuel sector rose from 54 in 2010 to 88 in 2015, and the size of their fortunes expanded from over $200 billion to more than $300 billion.
  • with divestment, a little can go a long way. "We did some simulations that shows that with the divestment movement you don't need everyone to divest," said Otto. "If the minority of investors divest, the other investors will not invest in those fossil fuel assets because they will be afraid of losing money ... even if they have no environmental concerns."
  • Otto argued that rich people could use their political power to instigate positive changes to climate policy.
  • The wealthy can also support climate research. In 2015, Microsoft founder Bill Gates committed $2 billion of his fortune to fund research and development into clean energy.
  • The super-rich might also have an influence on other people's carbon emissions.
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Oceans are warming at the same rate as if five Hiroshima bombs were dropped in every se... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
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  • The world's oceans are now heating at the same rate as if five Hiroshima atomic bombs were dropped into the water every second, scientists have said.
  • "The upward trend is relentless, and so we can say with confidence that most of the warming is man-made climate change," said Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
  • "There are no reasonable alternatives aside from the human emissions of heat trapping gases to explain this heating," Cheng said, adding that to reach this temperature, the ocean would have taken in 228,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 -- or 228 sextillion -- joules of heat.
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  • Oceans serve as a good indicator of the real impact of climate change. Covering almost three quarters of Earth's surface, they absorb the vast majority of the world's heat. Since 1970, more than 90% of the planet's excess heat went into the oceans, while less than 4% was absorbed by the atmosphere and the land, the study said.
  • Rising temperatures also mean ocean waters have less oxygen and are becoming more acidic, which has a major impact on nutrients that feed marine wildlife. For example, when an ocean heat wave struck the waters of Western Australia in 2011, scientists noticed there were fewer dolphin births and the animal's survival rate dropped.
  • "If the leaders of the world changed course, a revolution could take place over about 15 years ... this requires the leaders of China, and the US in particular, along with Europe, to take a strong leadership role and set the stage for the rest of the world to follow," he said.
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Trump has savaged the environment. The planet cannot afford a second term | Ross Barkan... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...onment-epa-climate-second-term culture US Policy trump
shared by cartergramiak on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The president just launched one of his most grievous attacks on the environment yet. Democrats must recognize the stakes
  • hat are the consequences of a second term of Donald Trump? To even consider the question sends the left-leaning mind into a paroxysm. Everything from nuclear war to the utter collapse of American democracy looms large in the imaginations of otherwise sober-minded people.
  • It is, without question, one of the most grievous blows Trump has inflicted since taking office three years ago. It follows more than 100 environmental rollbacks, including relaxing rules limiting emissions from coal plants and weakening protections for endangered species.
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  • Fossil fuel projects like the Keystone XL oil pipeline would have free rein, undaunted by court challenges that ruled the Trump administration didn’t properly consider climate change when analyzing the pipeline’s impact.
  • It’s important to understand that the shredding of environmental regulations is not something that would have been unique to a Trump presidency, unlike his Twitter inanities or nonstop campaign rallies.
  • Four years of damage can be undone. Eight is far more difficult.
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Right fire for right future: how cultural burning can protect Australia from catastroph... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ralia-from-catastrophic-blazes Crisis
shared by brookegoodman on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Indigenous fire practitioners have warned that Australia’s bush will regenerate as a “time bomb” prone to catastrophic blazes, and issued a plea to put to use traditional knowledge which is already working across the top end to reduce bushfires and greenhouse gas emissions.
  • “A lot of areas will end up regenerating really strongly, but they’ll return in the wrong way. We’ll end up with the wrong species compositions and balance.
  • As Australia comes to terms with this season’s catastrophic fires, Indigenous practitioners like Costello are advocating a return to “cultural burning”.
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  • Different species relate to fire in different ways, Costello explains. Wombats, for example, dig burrows to escape, while koalas climb into the canopy.
  • “When you do that, you get more productive landscapes, you get healthier plants and animals, you get regeneration, you discourage invasive elements, which are sometimes native species that might belong in the system next door.
  • Dr David Bowman is a professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania. Bowman describes Indigenous fire management as “little fires tending the earth affectionately”.
  • In northern Australia, Indigenous land ownership is widespread. Caring for country and ranger programs in protected areas has delivered a degree of autonomy to traditional owners to walk the country, burning according to seasonal need and cultural knowledge.
  • Professor Bowman says it is possible to “blend Aboriginal with European and modern scientific approaches to create an opportunity for all land users and land owners”.
  • “These ‘right way’ fire days are getting fewer and fire behaviour is changing along the same lines as over east. Late season conditions are also driving more fires in unusual ways due to the climatic conditions we are currently facing.”
  • In the Kimberley, the Land council holds community fire planning meetings throughout the early dry season to ensure the correct people are burning their country.
  • “It was pretty bad before that happened,” Edwards says. “It was just fires running wild across huge tracts of north Australia that nobody was doing anything about.”
  • “If we want to manage our natural environment properly, we need to be doing prescribed burning. There’s so much cultural knowledge out there still, and it’s being totally ignored. There’s hundreds of Indigenous rangers out there now doing this work.”
  • The Coag national bushfire management policy includes a commitment to “promote Indigenous Australians’ use of fire”, but Indigenous fire groups like Firesticks Alliance say they need more resources to build capacity.
  • The Darwin centre for bushfire research at Charles Darwin University maps bushfires weekly. Since traditional burning was reintroduced on a large scale, the centre has collected enough data to show that the area of land destroyed by wildfires has more than halved, from 26.5m hectares in 2000, to just 11.5m hectares in 2019.
  • “Because in the end there’s two things which are important to [remember]: all humans have come from a fire management background in their cultures, it’s just that some cultures ended up obliterating that knowledge because of industrialisation.
  • “We need to encourage and promote the philosophy of Aboriginal fire practice because that’s going to be a really important pathway for sustainable fire management and also for healing because so many communities have been traumatised and shocked by the scale of the burning.”
  • “There’s all this canopy that’s been burnt away. We’ve got knowledge and techniques that can help heal that country in the future. It’s going to take some time. We’ve got probably two or three years before we can really be effective in some of that country because it needs to recover. But if we don’t get in there after that, then we miss our chance.”
  • You’ve read 5 articles in the last four months. More people than ever before are reading and supporting our journalism, in more than 180 countries around the world. And this is only possible because we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.
  • None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
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One Thing You Can Do: Vote - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-elections.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The United States is the world’s second-largest emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gasses and the presidential election next week will have a big impact on the extent to which those emissions are curbed
  • Troy Moon, the director of sustainability for Portland, Maine, described local government as “where the rubber meets the road” on decisions about schools, health services and, yes, sustainability policies.
  • Every city’s government operates differently, but by-and-large, elected officials and their appointees are responsible for a wide range of important environmental decisions: How to manage local flooding, building-efficiency targets and whether or not residents have access to recycling and curbside composting, to list just a few.
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  • Before you vote, take a few minutes to research the environmental positions of the candidates running for local offices. Use reputable sources to avoid falling for fake voting guides,
  • For the first three and a half years of Donald Trump’s presidency, a period defined by near-constant attacks on climate policy across the federal government, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration remained mostly unscathed — a bastion of objective climate research, carrying out its mission largely without fear or favor toward the ideological preferences of the White House.
  • a series of changes have sparked growing concern within the agency. First, in August, political staff at the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA, issued instructions that any communication, internal or external, must first be cleared from above. Suddenly, the agency’s leaders couldn’t even send an all-hands message to their own employees without getting it approved outside NOAA.
  • Then, last month, a set of new political hires installed by the White House began arriving at NOAA, their roles unclear and their backgrounds surprising, i
  • There have been threats to NOAA’s independence before — most famously last year, when Mr. Trump, angry that the agency’s meteorologists had contradicted his statement that Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama, told his top aide to have the agency “clarify” its position. NOAA’s then-acting administrator, Neil Jacob
  • believing his job was on the line, publicly rebuked his own staff. (
  • The objective, according to people with ties to the administration, is to undermine the National Climate Assessment, the country’s premier contribution to knowledge about climate risks — and the foundation for federal regulations to combat global warming.
  • That strategy depends on Mr. Trump winning a second term next week. If he loses, Joseph R. Biden Jr. could reverse those changes.
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