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Javier E

Climate change: I work in the environmental movement. I don't care if you recycle. - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...ate-change-2019-green-new-deal

climate change activism

shared by Javier E on 11 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Sadly, I get this reaction a lot. One word about my five years at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or my work in the climate justice movement broadly, and I’m bombarded with pious admissions of environmental transgressions or nihilistic throwing up of hands. One extreme or the other.
  • underneath all that is a far more insidious force. It’s the narrative that has both driven and obstructed the climate change conversation for the past several decades. It tells us climate change could have been fixed if we had all just ordered less takeout, used fewer plastic bags, turned off some more lights, planted a few trees, or driven an electric car. It says that if those adjustments can’t do the trick, what’s the point?
  • It turns environmentalism into an individual choice defined as sin or virtue, convicting those who don’t or can’t uphold these ethics.
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  • All too often, our culture broadly equates “environmentalism” with personal consumerism
  • But that doesn’t mean we do nothing.
  • blame paves the road to apathy, which can really seal our doom.
  • this raises the price of admission to the climate movement to an exorbitant level, often pricing out people of color and other marginalized groups.
  • While we’re busy testing each other’s purity, we let the government and industries — the authors of said devastation — off the hook completely
  • Shame, on the other hand, tells us that we are bad people, that we are beyond redemption. It paralyzes us.
  • “I refuse to believe people should be shamed for living in the world we’ve built.”
  • Climate change is a huge problem, and to face it, we have to be willing to make personal sacrifices we can feel. It’s our responsibility not only to future generations but also to each other — right here, right now.
  • we have an ethical obligation to shrink our carbon footprints. The United States is the world’s second largest emitter, only recently having fallen from first place. And our historical contribution is even more appalling. The United States is responsible for more than a third of the carbon pollution that has warmed our planet today — more than any other single nation.
  • the more we focus on individual action and neglect systemic change, the more we’re just sweeping leaves on a windy day. So while personal actions can be meaningful starting points, they can also be dangerous stopping points.
  • e need to broaden our definition of personal action beyond what we buy or use. Start by changing your lightbulb, but don’t stop there. Taking part in a climate strike or showing up to a rally is a personal action. Organizing neighbors to sue a power plant that’s poisoning the community is a personal action.
  • Voting is a personal action. When choosing your candidate, investigate their environmental policies. If they aren’t strong enough, demand better. Once that person is in office, hold them accountable
  • We have 11 years — not to start but to finish saving the planet.
Javier E

How the Fed Should Fight Climate Change - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...595084

climate change monetary federal reserve banking financial politics history

shared by Javier E on 02 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Mark Carney, a former Goldman Sachs director who now leads the Bank of England, sounded a warning. Global warming, he said, could send the world economy spiraling into another 2008-like crisis
  • He called for central banks to act aggressively and immediately to reduce the risk of climate-related catastrophe
  • the U.S. Federal Reserve was the pivotal American institution in stopping a second Great Depression. Its actions were “historically unprecedented, spectacular in scale,” he writes, and widely understood by experts to be the “decisive innovation of the crisis.”
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  • “If the world is to cope with climate change, policymakers will need to pull every lever at their disposal,” he writes. “Faced with this threat, to indulge in the idea that central banks, as key agencies of the state, can limit themselves to worrying about financial stability … is its own form of denial.”
  • In England, by contrast, Carney has convened 33 central banks to investigate how to “green the financial system.” According to Axios, every powerful central bank is working with him—except for Banco do Brasil and the Fed.
  • Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, in 2015, in a speech which has subsequently received massive coverage—and he is a man, after all, absolutely of the global financial establishment—coined the idea of a climate Minsky moment. [Editor’s note: A Minsky moment is when an asset’s price suddenly collapses after a long period of growth.]
  • We would need [fossil-fuel assets] to be on the balance sheet of actors who were under huge pressure in a fire-sale situation and who couldn’t deal with a sudden revaluation. We would need an entire network of causation to be there, which is what produced the unique crisis of 2007 to 2008.
  • So imagine that we stay on our current path, and we’re headed toward 3 or 4 degrees’ [Celsius] temperature change. And then imagine some of the nonlinearities kick in, which the climate scientists tell us about, and we face a Fukushima-style event.
  • What happens next? You then get nervous democratic politicians—and not necessarily those who are known for their populism, but just nervous democratic politicians—suddenly deciding that we have to stop doing one or another part of our carbon-based economy. It has to stop, and it has to stop immediately. And then you get big shocks. Then you get sudden revaluations.
  • In other words, the success of the delaying tactics of the carbon lobby create a situation in which we’re then faced with the possibility of a sudden regulatory shock
  • “One-third of equity and fixed income assets issued in global financial markets can be classified as belonging to the natural resource and extraction sectors, as well as carbon-intensive power utilities, chemicals, construction, and industrial goods firms.”
  • Whether that will, in fact, ease the formation of majorities in Congress is another question. Because, after all, it does somehow have to get through the Senate, you know.
  • Germany is far, far more exposed. A huge slice of their economy is basically all about internal combustion engines, and so that number includes all of those stocks, for sure.
  • If we saw a huge shock to, say, European equity [exchange-traded funds], which were heavily in German automotive, that’s the sort of trigger that we might be looking at.
  • This is not simply a zero-sum game; this is a structural transformation that has many very attractive properties. There’s loads of excellent jobs that could be created in this kind of transition.There’s no reason why, even by conventional GDP-type metrics, it need even be associated with the kind of feel-bad factor of slow GDP growth. Then [you could] also link it to a revival of social democracy for the United States. From a progressive political point of view, that’s obviously extremely attractive.
  • there’s also a deeper view: that climate change is the situation within which all other politics will happen for the next several generations, at least.
  • ever since the 1990s that’s been the logjam on any serious American commitment.
  • When you look at a third of securities tied up in the carbon economy and the evidence for decoupling GDP growth from carbon emissions maybe not being as strong as we’d like, do you think the change that needs to happen is realistic?
  • Tooze: Realistic? No. I mean, depends what you mean by realism. The scale of the challenge requires a boldness of action for which there is no precedent. That’s the only good purpose that the war analogies serve
  • Meyer: In your piece, you write: “Those in the United States who call for a Green New Deal or a Green Marshall Plan are, if anything, understating the scale of what is needed.”
  • Do you think climate action needs to be larger than, say, the U.S. mobilization for World War II?
  • Tooze: Well, less large in absolute terms. Because even the U.S. was spending almost 40 percent of GDP on World War II. And if you’re the Soviet Union, you’re spending 55 to 60 percent in 1940. We don’t need to do anything like that. It needs to be much bigger than the New Deal, which in fiscal-policy terms was really quite trivial.
  • Crucially, what makes it totally unlike the war is that there’s no happy end. There’s no moment where you win and then everything goes back to the way it was before, but just better. That’s a misunderstanding
  • This isn’t crash dieting; this is a permanent change in lifestyle, and we need to love that and we need to live it and we need to own it and we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that this is for us and for all subsequent generations of humans.
  • It isn’t just the oil and gas majors, because they wouldn’t get you to 30 percent. Exxon isn’t big enough to get you to that kind of percentage. It’s Exxon, and [the major automakers] Daimler and BMW, and the entire carbon-exposed complex.
  • all the really hard choices need to be made by people like China and India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Indonesia
  • You don’t have that very much in Germany. There isn’t anyone in Germany saying, “Which bit of mid-20th-century history is this most like?,” mercifully. The one analogy that has popped up in Germany is reunification, which I actually think is quite a good one, because that’s still an ongoing problem
  • in the American case, it would be civil rights and Reconstruction, which isn’t a particularly optimistic comparison to draw. It’s an ongoing problem, it’s a deep historic problem, it only happened once, we still haven’t fixed it, and we’re not at peace.
  • Meyer: There’s a kind of shallow view of climate change: that it is something we need to avert or stop. And that’s somewhat true
  • furthermore—and much more fundamentally than any of those things—this isn’t really about America. I mean, America can be an obstacle and get in the way, but none of the really hard choices needs to be made by Americ
  • like Reconstruction or the civil-rights movement, it needs to be something that people take on like a moral commitment, in the same way they take on genocide prevention as a moral commitment
  • problems that we thought we’d fixed, like the Green Revolution and the feeding of the world population, for instance—totally not obvious that those fixes cope with the next 20 years of what’s ahead of us. The food problem that was such an oppressive issue globally in the 1970s may resurge in an absolutely dramatic way.
  • Meyer: Given all that, if Jerome Powell decided that he wanted to intervene on the side of climate action, what could he do? What could the Fed do?
  • Tooze: What I think the Fed should announce is that it enthusiastically supports the idea of a bipartisan infrastructure push focused on the American electrical network, first and foremost, so that we can actually hook up the renewable-generating capacity—which is now eminently, you know, realistic in economic terms. Setting a backstop to a a fiscal-side-led investment push is the obvious thing.
  • It is indeed a highly appropriate response to an environment of extremely low interest rates, and [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers & Co. would argue that it might help, as it were, to suck us out of the state of secular stagnation that we’re in.
  • another avenue to go down—for the Fed to take a role in helping develop a classification of green bonds, of green financing, with a view also to rolling out comprehensive demands for disclosure on the part of American firms, for climate risks to be fully declared on balance sheets, and for due recognition to be given to firms that are in the business of proactively preparing themselves for decarbonization.
  • You could, for instance, declare that the Fed views with disfavor the role of several large American banks in continuing to fund coal investment. Some of the carbon-tracking NGOs have done very good work showing and exposing the way in which some of the largest, the most reputable American banks are still in the business of lending to Big Coal. Banking regulation could be tweaked in a way that would produce a tilt against that.
  • the classic role of the Fed is to support government-issued debt. Insofar as the Green New Deal is a government-issued business, the Fed has just an absolutely historical warrant for supporting fiscal action.
  • with regards to the broader economy, the entire federal-government apparatus essentially stood behind the spread of home ownership in the United States and the promotion of suburbanization through the credit system. And kind of what we need is a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the energy transition.
  • if the question is, Is there historical warrant for the financial agencies of government in the United States biasing the property structure in the economy in a certain way?, the answer is emphatically yes—all the way down to the grotesque role of the New Deal financial apparatus in enshrining the racial segregation of the American urban space, with massive effects from the 1930s onward.
  • The idea of neutrality should not even be allowed in the room in this argument. It’s a question of where we want to be biased. If you look at QE, especially in the U.K. and the EU, it was effectively fossil-biased.
  • monetary policy is not neutral with regards to the environment. There’s no safe space here. The only question is whether you’re going to lead in the right way
  • Meyer: Last question. With any of this, is there a role for interested Americans to play if they are not particularly tied to the financial- or monetary-policy elite?
  • Tooze: Support your congressperson in doing exactly what AOC did in the hearings with Powell a couple of weeks ago
  • [Editor’s Note: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Powell whether inflation and unemployment are still closely connected, as the Fed has long argued.]
  • Applaud, follow with interest, raise questions. That’s exactly what needs to be happening. The politicization of monetary policy is a fact.
  • If we don’t raise these questions, the de facto politics is, more often than not, conservative and status quo–oriented. So this, like any other area, is one where citizens—whether they’re educated and informed or not—need to wise up, get involved, and follow the arguments and develop positions.
  • So applaud your congresspeople when they do exactly what AOC was doing in that situation. In many ways, I thought it was one of the most hopeful scenes I’ve seen in that kind of hearing in a long time.
Javier E

US is hotbed of climate change denial, major global survey finds | Environment | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ange-denial-international-poll

climate change denial survey environment us

shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • A total of 13% of Americans polled in a 23-country survey conducted by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project agreed with the statement that the climate is changing “but human activity is not responsible at all”. A further 5% said the climate was not changing.
  • despite these views, the great majority of US citizens do accept the science of climate change, with nearly four in 10 saying human activity was at least partly responsible, potentially with other factors, and a further third taking the stronger view that human activity is the dominant cause.
  • Americans also appear unusually prone to climate-related conspiracy theories, the YouGov data suggests. A total of 17% of those polled agreed that “the idea of manmade global warming is a hoax that was invented to deceive people”.
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  • Belief in this conspiracy theory, which was previously invoked by Donald Trump, who falsely claimed climate change was made up by China, increases with age and also conservative political ideology. A total of 52% of Americans who described themselves as “very rightwing” to YouGov insisted global warming was a hoax.
  • In Europe, fewer than one in 10 people across the major countries surveyed thought the climate was not changing or not changing owing to human activity, with only Poland showing a slightly higher number, with 12% taking one of these views
Javier E

Millionaires to reap 80% of benefit from tax change in US coronavirus stimulus | Corona... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-act-millionaires-billionaires

millionaires tax change stimulus rescue law US pandemic inequality crisis politics policy

shared by Javier E on 16 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Millionaires and billionaires are set to reap more than 80% of the benefits from a change to the tax law Republicans put in the coronavirus economic relief package, according to a non-partisan congressional committee.
  • The change – which alters what certain business owners are allowed to deduct from their taxes – will allow some of the nation’s wealthiest to avoid nearly $82bn of tax liability in 2020.
  • Nearly 82% of the benefits from the tax law change will go to people making $1m or more annually in 2020, according to an analysis by the joint committee on taxation (JCT). Overall, 95% of individuals who benefit from the change make $200,000 or more.
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  • Taxpayers will lose nearly $90bn from the change, which suspends a restriction introduced in the 2017 tax bill.
  • Because of the suspension, the JCT estimated 43,000 people making $1m or more would owe a total of $70.3bn less in taxes in 2020. Less than 3% of the benefits from the change will go to Americans earning less than $100,000 a year.
  • The JCT analysis was prompted by two Democratic senators seeking more information from Donald Trump’s administration about changes to the tax law included in the coronavirus relief package.
  • After the analysis was published, Whitehouse called for this provision to be repealed.
  • “It’s a scandal for Republicans to loot American taxpayers in the midst of an economic and human tragedy,” Whitehouse said in a statement. “This analysis shows that while Democrats fought for unemployment insurance and small business relief, a top priority of President Trump and his allies in Congress was another massive tax cut for the wealthy.
Javier E

The Coming Software Apocalypse - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...540393

software programming failure design

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Our standard framework for thinking about engineering failures—reflected, for instance, in regulations for medical devices—was developed shortly after World War II, before the advent of software, for electromechanical systems. The idea was that you make something reliable by making its parts reliable (say, you build your engine to withstand 40,000 takeoff-and-landing cycles) and by planning for the breakdown of those parts (you have two engines). But software doesn’t break. Intrado’s faulty threshold is not like the faulty rivet that leads to the crash of an airliner. The software did exactly what it was told to do. In fact it did it perfectly. The reason it failed is that it was told to do the wrong thing.
  • Software failures are failures of understanding, and of imagination. Intrado actually had a backup router, which, had it been switched to automatically, would have restored 911 service almost immediately. But, as described in a report to the FCC, “the situation occurred at a point in the application logic that was not designed to perform any automated corrective actions.”
  • This is the trouble with making things out of code, as opposed to something physical. “The complexity,” as Leveson puts it, “is invisible to the eye.”
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  • Code is too hard to think about. Before trying to understand the attempts themselves, then, it’s worth understanding why this might be: what it is about code that makes it so foreign to the mind, and so unlike anything that came before it.
  • Technological progress used to change the way the world looked—you could watch the roads getting paved; you could see the skylines rise. Today you can hardly tell when something is remade, because so often it is remade by code.
  • Software has enabled us to make the most intricate machines that have ever existed. And yet we have hardly noticed, because all of that complexity is packed into tiny silicon chips as millions and millions of lines of cod
  • The programmer, the renowned Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra wrote in 1988, “has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before.” Dijkstra meant this as a warning.
  • “The serious problems that have happened with software have to do with requirements, not coding errors.” When you’re writing code that controls a car’s throttle, for instance, what’s important is the rules about when and how and by how much to open it. But these systems have become so complicated that hardly anyone can keep them straight in their head. “There’s 100 million lines of code in cars now,” Leveson says. “You just cannot anticipate all these things.”
  • What made programming so difficult was that it required you to think like a computer.
  • The introduction of programming languages like Fortran and C, which resemble English, and tools, known as “integrated development environments,” or IDEs, that help correct simple mistakes (like Microsoft Word’s grammar checker but for code), obscured, though did little to actually change, this basic alienation—the fact that the programmer didn’t work on a problem directly, but rather spent their days writing out instructions for a machine.
  • “The problem is that software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to,” says Leveson, the MIT software-safety expert. The reason is that they’re too wrapped up in getting their code to work.
  • As programmers eagerly poured software into critical systems, they became, more and more, the linchpins of the built world—and Dijkstra thought they had perhaps overestimated themselves.
  • a nearly decade-long investigation into claims of so-called unintended acceleration in Toyota cars. Toyota blamed the incidents on poorly designed floor mats, “sticky” pedals, and driver error, but outsiders suspected that faulty software might be responsible
  • software experts spend 18 months with the Toyota code, picking up where NASA left off. Barr described what they found as “spaghetti code,” programmer lingo for software that has become a tangled mess. Code turns to spaghetti when it accretes over many years, with feature after feature piling on top of, and being woven around
  • Using the same model as the Camry involved in the accident, Barr’s team demonstrated that there were actually more than 10 million ways for the onboard computer to cause unintended acceleration. They showed that as little as a single bit flip—a one in the computer’s memory becoming a zero or vice versa—could make a car run out of control. The fail-safe code that Toyota had put in place wasn’t enough to stop it
  • . In all, Toyota recalled more than 9 million cars, and paid nearly $3 billion in settlements and fines related to unintended acceleration.
  • The problem is that programmers are having a hard time keeping up with their own creations. Since the 1980s, the way programmers work and the tools they use have changed remarkably little.
  • “Visual Studio is one of the single largest pieces of software in the world,” he said. “It’s over 55 million lines of code. And one of the things that I found out in this study is more than 98 percent of it is completely irrelevant. All this work had been put into this thing, but it missed the fundamental problems that people faced. And the biggest one that I took away from it was that basically people are playing computer inside their head.” Programmers were like chess players trying to play with a blindfold on—so much of their mental energy is spent just trying to picture where the pieces are that there’s hardly any left over to think about the game itself.
  • The fact that the two of them were thinking about the same problem in the same terms, at the same time, was not a coincidence. They had both just seen the same remarkable talk, given to a group of software-engineering students in a Montreal hotel by a computer researcher named Bret Victor. The talk, which went viral when it was posted online in February 2012, seemed to be making two bold claims. The first was that the way we make software is fundamentally broken. The second was that Victor knew how to fix it.
  • Though he runs a lab that studies the future of computing, he seems less interested in technology per se than in the minds of the people who use it. Like any good toolmaker, he has a way of looking at the world that is equal parts technical and humane. He graduated top of his class at the California Institute of Technology for electrical engineering,
  • WYSIWYG (pronounced “wizzywig”) came along. It stood for “What You See Is What You Get.”
  • “Our current conception of what a computer program is,” he said, is “derived straight from Fortran and ALGOL in the late ’50s. Those languages were designed for punch cards.”
  • in early 2012, Victor had finally landed upon the principle that seemed to thread through all of his work. (He actually called the talk “Inventing on Principle.”) The principle was this: “Creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating.” The problem with programming was that it violated the principle. That’s why software systems were so hard to think about, and so rife with bugs: The programmer, staring at a page of text, was abstracted from whatever it was they were actually making.
  • Victor’s point was that programming itself should be like that. For him, the idea that people were doing important work, like designing adaptive cruise-control systems or trying to understand cancer, by staring at a text editor, was appalling.
  • With the right interface, it was almost as if you weren’t working with code at all; you were manipulating the game’s behavior directly.
  • When the audience first saw this in action, they literally gasped. They knew they weren’t looking at a kid’s game, but rather the future of their industry. Most software involved behavior that unfolded, in complex ways, over time, and Victor had shown that if you were imaginative enough, you could develop ways to see that behavior and change it, as if playing with it in your hands. One programmer who saw the talk wrote later: “Suddenly all of my tools feel obsolete.”
  • hen John Resig saw the “Inventing on Principle” talk, he scrapped his plans for the Khan Academy programming curriculum. He wanted the site’s programming exercises to work just like Victor’s demos. On the left-hand side you’d have the code, and on the right, the running program: a picture or game or simulation. If you changed the code, it’d instantly change the picture. “In an environment that is truly responsive,” Resig wrote about the approach, “you can completely change the model of how a student learns ... [They] can now immediately see the result and intuit how underlying systems inherently work without ever following an explicit explanation.” Khan Academy has become perhaps the largest computer-programming class in the world, with a million students, on average, actively using the program each month.
  • . In traditional programming, your task is to take complex rules and translate them into code; most of your energy is spent doing the translating, rather than thinking about the rules themselves. In the model-based approach, all you have is the rules. So that’s what you spend your time thinking about. It’s a way of focusing less on the machine and more on the problem you’re trying to get it to solve.
  • “Everyone thought I was interested in programming environments,” he said. Really he was interested in how people see and understand systems—as he puts it, in the “visual representation of dynamic behavior.” Although code had increasingly become the tool of choice for creating dynamic behavior, it remained one of the worst tools for understanding it. The point of “Inventing on Principle” was to show that you could mitigate that problem by making the connection between a system’s behavior and its code immediate.
  • In a pair of later talks, “Stop Drawing Dead Fish” and “Drawing Dynamic Visualizations,” Victor went one further. He demoed two programs he’d built—the first for animators, the second for scientists trying to visualize their data—each of which took a process that used to involve writing lots of custom code and reduced it to playing around in a WYSIWYG interface.
  • Victor suggested that the same trick could be pulled for nearly every problem where code was being written today. “I’m not sure that programming has to exist at all,” he told me. “Or at least software developers.” In his mind, a software developer’s proper role was to create tools that removed the need for software developers. Only then would people with the most urgent computational problems be able to grasp those problems directly, without the intermediate muck of code.
  • Victor implored professional software developers to stop pouring their talent into tools for building apps like Snapchat and Uber. “The inconveniences of daily life are not the significant problems,” he wrote. Instead, they should focus on scientists and engineers—as he put it to me, “these people that are doing work that actually matters, and critically matters, and using really, really bad tools.”
  • “people are not so easily transitioning to model-based software development: They perceive it as another opportunity to lose control, even more than they have already.”
  • In a model-based design tool, you’d represent this rule with a small diagram, as though drawing the logic out on a whiteboard, made of boxes that represent different states—like “door open,” “moving,” and “door closed”—and lines that define how you can get from one state to the other. The diagrams make the system’s rules obvious: Just by looking, you can see that the only way to get the elevator moving is to close the door, or that the only way to get the door open is to stop.
  • Bantegnie’s company is one of the pioneers in the industrial use of model-based design, in which you no longer write code directly. Instead, you create a kind of flowchart that describes the rules your program should follow (the “model”), and the computer generates code for you based on those rules
  • “Typically the main problem with software coding—and I’m a coder myself,” Bantegnie says, “is not the skills of the coders. The people know how to code. The problem is what to code. Because most of the requirements are kind of natural language, ambiguous, and a requirement is never extremely precise, it’s often understood differently by the guy who’s supposed to code.”
  • On this view, software becomes unruly because the media for describing what software should do—conversations, prose descriptions, drawings on a sheet of paper—are too different from the media describing what software does do, namely, code itself.
  • for this approach to succeed, much of the work has to be done well before the project even begins. Someone first has to build a tool for developing models that are natural for people—that feel just like the notes and drawings they’d make on their own—while still being unambiguous enough for a computer to understand. They have to make a program that turns these models into real code. And finally they have to prove that the generated code will always do what it’s supposed to.
  • tice brings order and accountability to large codebases. But, Shivappa says, “it’s a very labor-intensive process.” He estimates that before they used model-based design, on a two-year-long project only two to three months was spent writing code—the rest was spent working on the documentation.
  • uch of the benefit of the model-based approach comes from being able to add requirements on the fly while still ensuring that existing ones are met; with every change, the computer can verify that your program still works. You’re free to tweak your blueprint without fear of introducing new bugs. Your code is, in FAA parlance, “correct by construction.”
  • The ideas spread. The notion of liveness, of being able to see data flowing through your program instantly, made its way into flagship programming tools offered by Google and Apple. The default language for making new iPhone and Mac apps, called Swift, was developed by Apple from the ground up to support an environment, called Playgrounds, that was directly inspired by Light Table.
  • The bias against model-based design, sometimes known as model-driven engineering, or MDE, is in fact so ingrained that according to a recent paper, “Some even argue that there is a stronger need to investigate people’s perception of MDE than to research new MDE technologies.”
  • “Human intuition is poor at estimating the true probability of supposedly ‘extremely rare’ combinations of events in systems operating at a scale of millions of requests per second,” he wrote in a paper. “That human fallibility means that some of the more subtle, dangerous bugs turn out to be errors in design; the code faithfully implements the intended design, but the design fails to correctly handle a particular ‘rare’ scenario.”
  • Newcombe was convinced that the algorithms behind truly critical systems—systems storing a significant portion of the web’s data, for instance—ought to be not just good, but perfect. A single subtle bug could be catastrophic. But he knew how hard bugs were to find, especially as an algorithm grew more complex. You could do all the testing you wanted and you’d never find them all.
  • An algorithm written in TLA+ could in principle be proven correct. In practice, it allowed you to create a realistic model of your problem and test it not just thoroughly, but exhaustively. This was exactly what he’d been looking for: a language for writing perfect algorithms.
  • TLA+, which stands for “Temporal Logic of Actions,” is similar in spirit to model-based design: It’s a language for writing down the requirements—TLA+ calls them “specifications”—of computer programs. These specifications can then be completely verified by a computer. That is, before you write any code, you write a concise outline of your program’s logic, along with the constraints you need it to satisfy
  • Programmers are drawn to the nitty-gritty of coding because code is what makes programs go; spending time on anything else can seem like a distraction. And there is a patient joy, a meditative kind of satisfaction, to be had from puzzling out the micro-mechanics of code. But code, Lamport argues, was never meant to be a medium for thought. “It really does constrain your ability to think when you’re thinking in terms of a programming language,”
  • Code makes you miss the forest for the trees: It draws your attention to the working of individual pieces, rather than to the bigger picture of how your program fits together, or what it’s supposed to do—and whether it actually does what you think. This is why Lamport created TLA+. As with model-based design, TLA+ draws your focus to the high-level structure of a system, its essential logic, rather than to the code that implements it.
  • But TLA+ occupies just a small, far corner of the mainstream, if it can be said to take up any space there at all. Even to a seasoned engineer like Newcombe, the language read at first as bizarre and esoteric—a zoo of symbols.
  • this is a failure of education. Though programming was born in mathematics, it has since largely been divorced from it. Most programmers aren’t very fluent in the kind of math—logic and set theory, mostly—that you need to work with TLA+. “Very few programmers—and including very few teachers of programming—understand the very basic concepts and how they’re applied in practice. And they seem to think that all they need is code,” Lamport says. “The idea that there’s some higher level than the code in which you need to be able to think precisely, and that mathematics actually allows you to think precisely about it, is just completely foreign. Because they never learned it.”
  • “In the 15th century,” he said, “people used to build cathedrals without knowing calculus, and nowadays I don’t think you’d allow anyone to build a cathedral without knowing calculus. And I would hope that after some suitably long period of time, people won’t be allowed to write programs if they don’t understand these simple things.”
  • Programmers, as a species, are relentlessly pragmatic. Tools like TLA+ reek of the ivory tower. When programmers encounter “formal methods” (so called because they involve mathematical, “formally” precise descriptions of programs), their deep-seated instinct is to recoil.
  • Formal methods had an image problem. And the way to fix it wasn’t to implore programmers to change—it was to change yourself. Newcombe realized that to bring tools like TLA+ to the programming mainstream, you had to start speaking their language.
  • he presented TLA+ as a new kind of “pseudocode,” a stepping-stone to real code that allowed you to exhaustively test your algorithms—and that got you thinking precisely early on in the design process. “Engineers think in terms of debugging rather than ‘verification,’” he wrote, so he titled his internal talk on the subject to fellow Amazon engineers “Debugging Designs.” Rather than bemoan the fact that programmers see the world in code, Newcombe embraced it. He knew he’d lose them otherwise. “I’ve had a bunch of people say, ‘Now I get it,’” Newcombe says.
  • In the world of the self-driving car, software can’t be an afterthought. It can’t be built like today’s airline-reservation systems or 911 systems or stock-trading systems. Code will be put in charge of hundreds of millions of lives on the road and it has to work. That is no small task.
Javier E

The Geography of Trumpism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-geography-of-trumpism.html

crisis culture politics US demagogue economics social class demographics

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached
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  • We examined what factors predict a high level of Trump support relative to the total number of registered voters.The analysis shows that Trump counties are places where white identity mixes with long-simmering economic dysfunctions.
  • What they have in common is that they have largely missed the generation-long transition of the United States away from manufacturing and into a diverse, information-driven economy deeply intertwined with the rest of the world.
  • “It’s a nonurban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not people who have moved around a lot, and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.”
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • in the places where support for Mr. Trump runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that didn’t finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.
  • Trump counties include places that have voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and the strongest predictors of Trump support include how a county responded to two very different third-party candidates: Trump territory showed stronger support for the segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 election than the rest of the country, and substantially weaker support for the centrist former Republican John B. Anderson in 1980.
  • the economic problems that line up with strong Trump support have long been in the making, and defy simple fixes.
  • have any of the individuals commenting ever met or talked to the uneducated trailer dwellers referred to in this article. I think not. This poor pitiful underclass that we must now fix as true liberals has been making poor decisions for decades. Serial children withe serial mothers and resulting large child support payments. Job hopping and laying around the house all winter when laid off while waiting for the Wife to get home from work and make dinner. Gun purchases for thousands of dollars and 45,000 dollar trucks on an annual income of 35,000. Cashing in 401ks. To buy the latest 4 Wheeler. Oh and don't forget the biannual trips to Disney world or to hunt out west on credit cards. I sprang from uneducated people of another generation and the men by and large did not engage in self destructive behavior like this. sorry you make your bed and don't expect me to cry about it.
  • I think at least half of the American political class, the republican half, wants Americans to be ignorant. The ignorant are easily duped and manipulated. The GOP establishment clearly knows that, but they never expected someone like Trump to beat them at their own game. That explains why the GOP is generally unwilling to adequately fund public education and is content to punish the non-rich who seek higher education by burying them in debt.
  • Until now I had deceived myself into believing that I am a college educated hard working East coast Caucasian with moderate views and a penchant for reading a multi-faceted world class newspaper. However, the continued biased reports concerning Mr. Trump and his campaign are quite distasteful and have completely lost objectivity.Now, the journalistic attacks have moved toward his supporters and potential voters. Well, as with many of my fellow unintelligent white trash friends this only cements my unwavering support for the Trump campaign.
  • I have seen technology take jobs from people more than immigrants. It is a terrible feeling. Most of my peers and I are now working freelance jobs. Sometimes its voluntary but often times it is because we can't find full time jobs with benefits. For those of us over 60 it is the only work available. If you have never been independent you are in for a shock at how hard it can be to run a small sole proprietor business from scratch.
  • Enormous advances in technology have made the trans-oceanic distances disappear. Foreign-based administrative jobs are now transparent, meaning that "back-room" corporate jobs such as payroll, accounting and corporate management can be off-shored. Jobs in this category also include computer software development and computer system help-line support. The concept of the "virtual corporation", which maintains low levels of "project managers" can scale up or down, and only a small "corporate core" needs to be physically in the USA.
  • Trump has said that he hires people from other countries over American citizens and thinks Americans are already overpaid. So, why is he so popular with the angry voters who are living from paycheck to paycheck or were forced to retire? Trump is part of the problem, not the solution. The working class voters need wage insurance or a living wage solution and they need the government to step in and help them. Remember the WPA programs from the 30s? My guess is that Trump's supporters don't want to be the takers after years of thinking they were above that and were the makers. Surprise, we are all in the same boat.
  • there is a much bigger issue than creating jobs for these people. It is figuring out why so many are incapable of learning at a college level and beyond. I refuse to believe that it is nature dictating such a limitation. My money is on nurture; therefore, my money is on being able to solve that problem too.
  • Until we as a country stop treating intelligence as a disease and take steps to improve education across the board, this is what the fall-out will be. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out they could get to the White House by courting the angry white people vote.
  • among high school or less, 40% some college, but 33% among college graduates, and 19% among the post-graduates. In no election did Trump get the vote of the majority of college graduates or postgraduates. The education gap is consistent and steady. The gender gap is equally consistent.
  • The jobs engine the drove the US to its post war boom was the manufacturing sector. That has been gutted - by US consumer decisions.FDR did not practice racial identity politics.
  • Racism lurks - always - near the surface for ALL human beings. Don't believe me? Go take Harvard's Project Implicit tests (free) and learn about your own racist proclivities!By nature, all human beings tend toward tribalism; we are *wired* to notice and react to "difference". Civilization is the mass awareness of that proclivity towards shunning or rejecting "the other" and creating laws to stop it from becoming reality.When people become stressed, the veneer of civilization starts to break down - our more primitive, wired behaviors take over. That's what is happening now.We also have a huge propensity - as a species - towards cooperation. We have to somehow keep pursuing that "Better Angel of Our Nature" to keep the tide from turning permanently ugly.
  • As I read this article I began to confront an uncomfortable reality. We, as a society are to blame for Mr. Trump's support. Apparently we have ignored or overlooked the tragic plight faced by a sizable minority. Imagine the unemployed coal minor in West Virgina. His financial life is probably a shambles and he has no realistic prospect of recovering. He feels hopeless and abandoned. He sees publicized efforts to address problems of ethnic minorities and immigrants, yet he sits cold and jobless without anyone clamoring to address his situation. He starts getting angry and frustrated.Then, out of nowhere someone comes who appears to want to fight for him. Finally, someone who might champion his cause. Bring back jobs. Stop cheap labor from coming in.
  • Nationally, 23 percent of the 25-to-54-year-old population was not working in March, up from 18 percent in 2000. The areas where Trump is most popular appear to be at the forefront of that trend.
  • Don't people realize that technology, computers, automation and especially robots have replaced more manufacturing and more factories than all the illegal immigrants ever have? On many factory floors you hardly see any human beings at all. Every product is whisked along conveyor belts and assembled (or cooked), and then inspected, labeled, packaged and shipped with a minimum of human intervention. That's today's world. What are we to do? Protest against computers and robots.Also, American corporations have zero loyalty to the USA. Their loyalty is to their bottom line. They take advantage of every tax loophole they can; and if their product is labor intensive they would much rather pay 5000 workers a dollar a day with no benefits rather than stay in America and have to pay someone $18 an hour will vacation time, holiday time off, Soc Sec taxes and Medicare taxes.
  • This is the Party of Stupid the Republican carefully constructed through painstaking racism, defunding of public education, defunding of infrastructure, hate radio, Fox-Henhouse News and trickle-down poverty.Donald Trump's supporters are the direct result of the Republican's decades-long efforts at dumbing down a large swath of Americans.The Republican Party needs to take a giant proud bow as their electorate walks down the runway of nationally-assisted-suicide.
  • The irony of all this is that, yes, the world is shifting out from under the feet of the less-educated poor, but none of us face a really BIG or YUGE problem like slavery, Civil War, total war, a Great Depression, or even a gold/silver conflict. Yet Ken Lay and others can seriously muse over the possibility of secession from the union.The goals that so many of T's supporters are crying for are already in the process of being achieved -- the debt is too high but the national deficit has been cut in half under Obama. Millions now have health care that they didn't have before. "Taxed Enough Already" couldn't be more of an inept slogan.I wonder sometimes if the collapse of the USSR was such a good thing. Having a common enemy provided a kind of glue that held us together. Now some of us seem -- recklessly., hysterically, feverishly -- anxious to find an equally powerful enemy in our own ranks.
  • I can't count the number of my husband's uneducated white southern relations who have taken extensive advantage, repeatedly, of both state and federal programs, including unemployment, food stamps, occasional welfare, and (sometimes specious) "disability." (My husband's mother was one of 11 born to poor sharecroppers, and the only one to leave her subculture
  • Oh, and about the "myth" that opposition to Islam is only is by simplistic Islamophobes. Let me suggest for those who didn't get to it, this article about about the premier public intellectual of France: "Once Hopeful for Harmony, a Philosopher Voices Discord in France" It said that he has concluded that Islam is not comparable with 'Western enlightenment values."
  • It's obvious that the changing economy has structurally disadvantaged many less educated people across America. But, it is also true that economically distressed whites enjoy access to exactly the same programs that assist minorities. They just don't "feel" like this is true.
  • Truth be told, Trump is supported by numerous highly educated people who choose not to support known liars and/or socialists. These same people are tired of candidates who are bought and paid for by secret and evil Super PACs-- Trump is not controlled by these groups. Rubio, Kasich, Cruz and C;inton are.
  • The counties where Trump is most popular also have the lowest employment participation rates. Ordinarily, those folks would be expected to vote Democratic, which is more likely to continue the government spending that sustains them. Trump followers are willing to support him even though it is probably against their economic interest.So how to explain this? The strong correlation to previous support for George Wallace suggests it's about identity. A certain segment of the population does not accept diversity and change. They cling to white supremacy. The irony, as the article notes, is that these are the same folks who self-identify their heritage as "American," rather than, say "English" or "German." However, to me, they seem very un-American.
  • If policy hadn't been influenced by campaign funding, perhaps we would be in a better situation. Maybe congress would have paid more attention to improving the education system. It's a shame that most people don't understand that their only true weapon is voting for someone that isn't in debt to an industry. If we don't change our campaign finance system, nothing will change. Our voices will never be heard, our needs will never be met and policy will continue to favor profit, not people.
  • You are misinterpreting the analysis. This is a correlation analysis and what it says is that there is a moderately strong positive correlation between the % of people in a county that are white and have no high school and the % of people that support Trump. The 61 number is the correlation coefficient. The analysis does NOT show that folks in mobile homes vote for Trump.
  • There is only one interesting question regarding Trump: can he win Ohio and Florida in the national elections? Otherwise his campaign will turn into a footnote in American history like the campaign of many other unsuccessful candidates (Dukakis someone?). His voters, then, will be forgotten, as they usually are, until the next elections. That's the only time America's, winner takes it all culture, remembers those people exist.
  • However crude his message, on trade Trump has a legitimate point, which is that the US (not US companies, which don't care about international boundaries, but US workers) has got the short end of trade deals for decades. Whatever benefits the US has gleaned from these deals, they are minuscule compared to their utterly transformative effects on India, Mexico and especially China, which begs the question of why we couldn't have negotiated a better deal, one less devastating to old-line manufacturing. It often seems US negotiators are driven more by a religious belief in and devotion to free-trade principles, than by national self-interest. Trump may be unfit to be president, but I don't doubt he would have driven a harder bargain and come out with a better deal, if only because, unlike US negotiators, he'd be fully prepared to walk away from a deal he didn't like.
  • It's high time we re-engage in our communities with love and empathy. We need less talk of the theoretical economics underpinning trade deals and the credibility of climate science. It's not because these things are unimportant or irrelevant to governing in a complex world, but because our neighbors are afraid we've forgotten them in all our sophistication. They need to hear and see that we care about them. Our ideas about common efforts to improve their lives need to be less about class and more about community. We need to be clear that even the least among us are important to our common future
  • So many of the comments on this piece seem to fall into the category of subliminal rationales for long held prejudices that many of us have but don't understand.
  • this analysis didn’t show a particularly powerful relationship between the racial breakdown of a county and its likelihood of voting for Trump. There are Trump-supporting counties where very high proportions of the population are African-American and others where it was very low, for example.
  • There's a very powerful stigma associated with being poor in this country. Frankly, it makes it nearly impossible for an elite institution like the Times to write about poor populations without those same people perceiving a condescending tone. At the first mention of trailer parks--even if that is an apt descriptor for a type of housing--the words begin to cut and defenses rise. When spoken by a rich person, those words demean, even if they're not meant to by the speaker
  • The problem is that "Thug Trump," just so happens to touch on some truths, and existing bi-partisan defects that we ignore. Funny, as different as they are, Ralph Nader made the same point, that the major defects of our country are supported by both parties and thus untouchable. I guess the nature of a revolutionary is part misfit but also sensing the time is ripe for a drastic change. It may be better to look less at the person, and more that the endemic defects that he promises to change. From Huey Long to Norman Thomas, outsiders have had positive effects.
  • These relatives, who are very pleasant to talk to on a one-to-one basis, are the same people who send us rabid chain emails about how Obama hates America, how we need to "take back our country," etc. "The blacks" are "parasites and takers" and the real reason they invariably vote Republican. They see no relationship between their own "taking" and the "taking" by blacks and Hispanics.
  • Whether Trump can appeal to enough independent or even blue collar Democrats is problematic absent some sensational catastrophe in the economy or in government. But you never know. Recall the charge of "Rum, Romanism, and rebellion" late in the 1884 election. It changed history
  • I bought into that "it's the fault of freeloaders" shtick for years, until i was laid off at age 50. Suddenly, I was one of those "freeloaders" with a 30 year impeccable work history and it changed my mind drastically. I've run into people like me from all walks of life; people with degrees and skills who lost jobs and are cut out of returning to the world of employment. I found something eventually, but at half the pay with no benefits. I don't support Trump but he's tapped into the lives of people like me. Globalization has showed us that for those at the very top, the elites, our country and it's workers don't matter much as long as the money keeps flowing. Unfortunately, I can't see that Trump would do much to change that
  • racism in the US is complicated. Some people who say the right things do the worst things, and vice versa. What gets you in trouble is saying blue-collar stuff like "nappy-headed ho's" White liberals are the most politically correct and the most critical of crude speech. But white liberals often have less contact with blacks than any other whites. Bigotry is not easily identified.
  • One of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants — and, as their answers on their ancestry reveal, they very much wear Americanness on their sleeve.
  • The point is that now, the entire middle class and working class have been fleeced by the Repubs AND the Dems, elected representatives who have shirked their duties and spent their time helping their billionaire puppetmasters.
  • Bernie supporters and Trump supporters have something big in common: their basic grievance, which is that the economy is rigged for the 1%. It's helpful to understand our differences, but then we should be finding common ground, not calling each other names. We're all people; we all deserve dignity and respect.
  • We are in the early throes of another revolution now, and this one will even more dramatically favor those with superior cognitive abilities and education over those with average or below average cognitive abilities and education. Yet all people at all levels need to eat, have shelter, and pursue lives of dignity and meaning. It remains unclear what kind of society will emerge from the current disruptions, but it is increasingly obvious that the transition will not be pretty.
Javier E

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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”.
  • 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.”
Javier E

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-climate-science.html

trump climate change science attack

shared by Javier E on 28 May 19 - No Cached
  • President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.
  • Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.
  • In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.
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  • in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.
  • As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.
  • the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.
  • Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.
  • The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.
  • “What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”
  • also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.
  • “The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” said the physicist
  • Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.
  • For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.
  • His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.
  • The president’s advisers amplify his disregard. At the meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the rapidly warming region as a land of “opportunity and abundance” because of its untapped reserves of oil, gas, uranium, gold, fish and rare-earth minerals. The melting sea ice, he said, was opening up new shipping routes.
  • At the National Security Council, under Mr. Bolton, officials said they had been instructed to strip references to global warming from speeches and other formal statements. But such political edicts pale in significance to the changes in the methodology of scientific reports.
  • A key change, he said, would be to emphasize historic temperatures rather than models of future atmospheric temperatures, and to eliminate the “worst-case scenarios” of the effect of increased carbon dioxide pollution — sometimes referred to as “business as usual” scenarios because they imply no efforts to curb emissions.
  • Scientists said that eliminating the worst-case scenario would give a falsely optimistic picture. “Nobody in the world does climate science like that,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton. “It would be like designing cars without seatbelts or airbags.”
  • “It is very unfortunate and potentially even quite damaging that the Trump administration behaves this way,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “There is this arrogance and disrespect for scientific advancement — this very demoralizing lack of respect for your own experts and agencies.”
blairca

Citing Climate Change, BlackRock Will Start Moving Away from Fossil Fuels | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-moving-away-from-fossil-fuels

climate change fossil fuels Crisis

shared by blairca on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • So when BlackRock’s C.E.O., Larry Fink, devoted his annual letter to investors to explaining that climate change has now put us “on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” it marked a watershed moment in climate history.
  • For one, fossil-fuel stocks have begun to drag down portfolios. As the Times observed, “Had Mr. Fink moved a decade ago to pull BlackRock’s funds out of companies that contribute to climate change, his clients would have been well served.
  • Activist campaigns have been working to make the financial industry start to pay attention.
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  • BlackRock’s actual policy changes are modest compared with Fink’s rhetoric. At least at first, the main change will be to rid the firm’s actively managed portfolio (about $1.8 trillion in value) of coal stocks; but coal, though still a major contributor to climate change, is already on the wane, except in Asia.
  • So an investor swearing off coal is a bit like cutting cake out of your diet but clinging to a slice of pie and a box of doughnuts.
  • the science shows that fracking for natural gas releases large amounts of methane, the second-most significant contributor to climate change.
  • “As trillions of dollars shift to millennials over the next few decades, as they become C.E.O.s and C.I.O.s, as they become the policymakers and heads of state, they will further reshape the world’s approach to sustainability.”
Javier E

G.O.P. Coronavirus Message: Economic Crisis Is a Green New Deal Preview - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...epublicans-climate-change.html

message gop climate change policy denial strategies

shared by Javier E on 16 May 20 - No Cached
  • As President Trump struggles for a political response, Republicans and their allies have seized on an answer: attacking climate change policies.
  • “If You Like the Pandemic Lockdown, You’re Going to Love the Green New Deal,” the conservative Washington Examiner said in the headline of a recent editorial
  • Elizabeth Harrington, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, wrote in an opinion article in The Hill that Democrats “think a pandemic is the perfect opportunity to kill millions more jobs” with carbon-cutting plans.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Mercedes Schlapp, a senior campaign adviser to President Trump, said on Fox Business that Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, supports “rainbow and unicorn deals like the Green New Deal” that would raise energy prices and harm an already-ailing economy.
  • with exploding unemployment, epic lines at food banks and rising poverty, Republicans would have their own ready response: Look at the price.
  • “This is what a carbon-constrained world looks like,” Michael McKenna, who served as Mr. Trump’s deputy assistant on energy and environment issues.
  • “I wouldn’t talk about the present crisis as though it has a silver lining.” Doing so, he said, “plays into the hands of people who argue that action on climate means the destruction of the economy.”
  • The ominous warnings of a clean-air economic catastrophe may appeal to Mr. Trump’s base, which overwhelmingly supports the president’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, elimination of regulations on fossil fuel industries and general antagonism toward the established science of man-made global warming.
  • “The Republicans’ line of attack is going to be that the Democrats are trying to create a massive Green New Deal that’s going to create a lot of spending at a time when we just can’t afford that,”
  • Focusing on the economic pain that voters would encounter under Democratic energy policies, Mr. Bonjean said, is “the sweet spot” for Republican campaigns.
  • Over the past two months, Republican lawmakers, the Trump campaign and conservative outlets have hammered the themes that Democrats are more interested in climate change than reviving the economy, that Mr. Biden and environmental groups are seeking to exploit the pandemic to push a “radical” green agenda, and that the economic fallout of Covid-19 is a preview of life under ambitious climate change policies.
  • They have also labeled virtually every climate change effort as part of the Green New Deal
  • The most explicit attack so far has come from the Heartland Institute, a climate denialist group with ties to the Trump administration, which held a recent online conference asking, “Is the Coronavirus Lockdown the Future Environmentalists Want?”
  • “What is the Green New Deal if you think about it? It’s just one giant national recession.”
  • “I think what the coronavirus has done is opened the door, opened the window, opened the whole house to the possibilities of a real conversation now, because people have learned the hard way what happens when you don’t listen to the scientists,” Mr. Kerry said
  • Stef Feldman, policy director for Mr. Biden, said in a statement that Mr. Trump was “presenting a false choice” on climate change. Mr. Biden’s plan, she said, “will set a clear path to a stronger, more inclusive middle class and create a competitive U.S. economy that rebuilds our infrastructure, makes us the world’s exporter of green technology and stops the worst impacts of climate change that would devastate agriculture, manufacturing and other industries across the country.”
  • Republicans said they saw political opportunity as progressives worked to persuade Mr. Biden to accept more ambitious climate change policies.
  • “I think the Democrats have to be careful,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist. “The No. 1 issue coming out of this pandemic is going to be the economy, and people don’t have a whole lot of patience for climate stuff if you don’t have a job.”
  • “There are people inside the administration and people inside the campaign who believed that some part of the mix of success was going to be embracing some of this ridiculousness. The economic catastrophe upon us has sheared all of that away,” Mr. McKenna said. “Everyone is going back to first principles, and first principles is, you don’t make anything more expensive in an economic downturn.”
Javier E

The Center Cannot Hold | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...center-cannot-hold

China US rivalry competition cooperation climate change pandemic europe

shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • the debate over whether great-power competition or transnational threats pose the greater danger to the United States is a false one. Look back at strategic assessments from ten years ago on China and Russia, on the one hand, and those on pandemics and climate change, on the other, and it is clear that Washington is experiencing near-worst-case scenarios on both. Great-power rivalry has not yet sparked a hot war but appears to be on the brink of sparking a cold one. Meanwhile, the worst pandemic in a century is not yet over, and the climate crisis is only accelerating. 
  • What COVID-19 has made powerfully clear is that this is an age of transnational threats and great-power competition—one in which the two phenomena exacerbate each other.
  • By the same token, ramping up competition with China without a plan to rally the world to deal with transnational threats (which can themselves fuel rivalry between great powers) would only guarantee future disasters. 
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • Attempting to ease tensions with China to make cooperation on global public health possible won’t work, partly because Beijing cannot credibly commit to being more transparent and cooperative in the future.
  • For China’s leaders, the pandemic revealed the inexorable decline of the West, confirmed Beijing’s power and capabilities, and created more latitude for the CCP to do as it wished.
  • But in case cooperation fails, it must have a backup plan to rally allies and partners to provide a much greater share of global public goods, even if that means shouldering more of the costs.
  • as a number of U.S. embassy officials told the foreign policy analyst Colin Kahl and me for our book Aftershocks, this team’s cooperation with the Chinese government became more challenging as U.S.-Chinese rivalry intensified, largely because of China’s actions.
  • When COVID-19 hit, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintained near-absolute secrecy. All channels of communication between Beijing and Washington went silent, as they did between Beijing and other governments. Chinese leaders sought to conceal vital information about the emerging epidemic in China from the rest of the world, even attempting to prevent Chinese scientists from sharing the genetic sequence of the virus with scientists in other countries.
  • It is impossible to say for certain why the Chinese government behaved the way it did, but secrecy and control make sense in light of what the vast majority of China experts believe to be Xi’s top priority: regime survival.
  • Xi did not want to facilitate an international response to COVID-19 that could have attributed blame to China or isolated it through travel restrictions, either of which might have damaged the regime’s domestic legitimacy. Instead, Xi leveraged the pandemic to his advantage: China’s suppression of the virus became a matter of national pride, held up by Beijing in sharp contrast to the experience of the United States.
  • according to the UN, the pandemic could force a total of 490 million people into poverty—defined as the loss of access to clean water, adequate food, or shelter—pushing the global poverty rate to around seven percent by 2030, compared with the pre-pandemic target of three percent. 
  • Contrary to popular belief, some senior Trump administration officials grasped the national security threat posed by the virus faster than their European counterparts did. Top officials in the National Security Council began focusing on the pandemic in early January, just days after news of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, became public.
  • ven though Pottinger and other NSC officials were wise to the danger, they ultimately failed to persuade Trump to make the necessary preparations to deal with the pandemic when it inevitably reached the United States. 
  • As the administration began to formulate its response, those who favored a more comprehensive public health approach both at home and abroad were excluded or marginalized at crucial moments. The result was that the Trump administration focused more on holding China responsible for the outbreak and reducing U.S. reliance on Beijing than on the minutiae of global public health policy or the hard work of rallying the world to tackle the pandemic.
  • the pandemic and China’s response to it helped unify the administration behind a more comprehensive strategy to push back against Beijing. Between March 2020 and the end of the year, the senior official said, the United States put in place more containment measures than it had in the previous three years, including restrictions on Chinese technology firms, sanctions on Chinese officials, looser regulations on diplomatic contacts with Taiwan, and recognition of the repression in Xinjiang as a genocide. In this sense, the pandemic was a pivotal moment in the U.S.-Chinese rivalry. 
  • Competition between the two countries overwhelmed everything else, including U.S. cooperation with allies on the pandemic, leaving a global leadership vacuum that no one could fill.
  • The EU tried to step up by increasing funding for the WHO and for COVAX, the global initiative to share vaccines, but it never came close to organizing a global response. China’s assertive foreign policy, and its attempts to use pandemic assistance to advance its interests, aggravated European leaders and convinced them to harden their positions toward China throughout the course of 2020. 
  • During this period, there was hardly any international cooperation on vaccine development or distribution, no coordination on travel restrictions or the distribution of medical supplies, and limited cooperation on achieving a cessation of hostilities in conflict zones
  • The United States needs a strategy to address transnational threats under the conditions of great-power competition. It must aim to cooperate with rivals, especially China, to prepare for future pandemics and to tackle climate change
  • The economic disruption caused by COVID-19 devastated low-income countries, which received little in the way of international assistance. Especially hard hit were countries, such as Bangladesh, that had made significant development gains in the last two decades and were propelling themselves into the lower tier of middle-income economies.
  • Pandemics are not the only transnational threat that promises to intensify great-power rivalry and diminish the prospects for much-needed cooperation. Climate change could do the same.
  • the real challenge is determining what to do when cooperation with China and other rivals falls short of what is required. The United States needs a backup plan to tackle shared challenges through coalitions of the willing.
  • Countries that aggressively decarbonize could place sanctions and other trade restrictions on countries that do not, leading to counterresponses and new trade wars.
  • the impediments to cooperation between Europe and China on climate change “are becoming higher” and warn that “decision-makers must not underestimate the highly competitive aspects of how China is changing its energy production and consumption.” 
  • The United States and Europe will both compete with China for access to raw materials and in developing the technology needed to make their economies carbon neutral: magnets, batteries, high-performance ceramics, and light-emitting diodes, among other things
  • even if the U.S. government remains broadly aligned with Europe on climate policy, the Europeans could still become disaffected if Congress blocks meaningful climate action, such as commitments to cut carbon emissions or invest in clean technology. This, in turn, could diminish Europe’s willingness to help uphold the U.S.-led international order.
  • If, on the one hand, they mean softening U.S. rhetoric without conceding much of substance to China, they would do well to look to Europe, where governments were much more inclined than the Trump administration to cooperate with China, but China did not take them up on the offer.
  • If, on the other hand, they mean unilaterally making major geopolitical concessions to China—on its territorial acquisitions in the South China Sea, for instance, or the status of Taiwan—the United States would not only pay an extremely high price but also likely embolden Beijing further without actually securing cooperation on pandemics or climate change beyond what Beijing has already offered.
  • There is no getting around strategic competition with Beijing: it is deeply embedded in the international order, mainly because China seeks to expand its sphere of influence in Asia at the expense of the United States and its allies, which are in turn committed to thwarting Beijing’s plans.
  • The United States and China are also engaged in what Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, recently called “a competition of models.” China is seeking to make the world safe for the CCP and to demonstrate the effectiveness of its system. This entails pushing back against what it sees as pressure from liberal democratic countries that could thwart its objectives. For its part, the United States worries about the negative externalities of Chinese authoritarianism, such as censorship of international criticism of Beijing or the export of its tools of repression to other countries.
  • The United States also worries about what would happen to the military balance of power if China secured an enduring advantage in key technologies.
  • Even in diplomacy, friction will be endemic to the U.S.-Chinese relationship and will affect the broader international order for the foreseeable future. Outright confrontation can be avoided—but competition cannot. 
  • This competition places real limits on cooperation. Take the arena of global public health: many studies on how to improve pandemic preparedness call on world leaders to dramatically strengthen the WHO, including by giving it the same power to enforce international health regulations as the International Atomic Energy Agency enjoys with nuclear nonproliferation rules
  • The problem is getting every government to agree to a universally applicable mechanism for sanctions or some other enforcement mechanism. China will not agree to any reform that would involve intrusive inspections of its scientific research facilities.
  • The need for cooperation on transnational threats must change how the United States competes with China—not whether it competes.
  • U.S. officials should not give up on China entirely; instead, they should make a good-faith effort to work with Beijing, both bilaterally and in multilateral settings. Recognizing that there are strict limits on U.S.-Chinese cooperation is not the same as saying that no cooperation is possible.
  • Rather than unite the world around a common purpose, climate change is likely to deepen competition between major powers, especially as the transition away from fossil fuels creates economic winners and losers.
  • When it comes to pandemic preparedness, this means fully supporting the WHO (including by pressing for needed reforms) but also forging a coalition of like-minded states: a global alliance for pandemic preparedness that would regularly convene at the head-of-state level and work alongside nongovernmental organizations and the private sector.
  • Crucially, whenever the WHO declared an international public health emergency, alliance members would coordinate on travel and trade restrictions, as well as on public messaging and financial penalties and sanctions. Those penalties and sanctions would be aimed at those states that failed to provide sufficient access to or fully cooperate with the WHO. The alliance would support, not supplant, the WHO.
  • Sustained, managed competition with China could potentially help the United States build bipartisan support for investments in clean technology that would prevent Beijing from gaining an enduring advantage in this area.
  • ut the United States and the European Union will also need to build coalitions of the willing to deal with the international security consequences of accelerated climate change, such as extreme weather events that threaten large numbers of people, and to address the foreign policy dimensions of climate action, including managing the risk that a shift away from fossil fuels could destabilize countries and regions that are dependent on oil exports.
  • Cooperation across this divide should always be the first choice in times of shared crisis, but as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, the U.S.-led constellation must always have a backup plan. It did not have one in 2020. It needs one for the next crisis
Javier E

Ocean Currents in the Atlantic Could Slow by Century's End, Research Shows - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...antic-ocean-tipping-point.html

atlantic ocean turning point environment crisis tipping point

shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.
  • That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.
  • A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.
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  • Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.
  • the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said.
  • As humans warm the atmosphere, however, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is adding large amounts of fresh water to the North Atlantic, which could be disrupting the balance of heat and salinity that keeps the overturning moving. A patch of the Atlantic south of Greenland has cooled conspicuously in recent years, creating a “cold blob” that some scientists see as a sign that the system is slowing.
  • Abrupt thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Loss of the Amazon rain forest. Collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Once the world warms past a certain point, these and other events could be set into swift motion, scientists warn, though the exact thresholds at which this would occur are still highly uncertain.
  • In the Atlantic, researchers have been searching for harbingers of tipping-point-like change in a tangle of ocean currents that goes by an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”).
  • These currents carry warm waters from the tropics through the Gulf Stream, past the southeastern United States, before bending toward northern Europe. When this water releases its heat into the air farther north, it becomes colder and denser, causing it to sink to the deep ocean and move back toward the Equator. This sinking effect, or “overturning,” allows the currents to transfer enormous amounts of heat around the planet, making them hugely influential for the climate around the Atlantic and beyond.
  • adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how humankind’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to-reverse changes in the environment.
  • Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.
  • Scientists’ uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it, said Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
  • scientists’ most advanced computer models of the global climate have produced a wide range of predictions for how the currents might behave in the coming decades, in part because the mix of factors that shape them is so complex.
  • Dr. Ditlevsen’s new analysis focused on a simple metric, based on sea-surface temperatures, that is similar to ones other scientists have used as proxies for the strength of the Atlantic circulation. She conducted the analysis with Peter Ditlevsen, her brother, who is a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. They used data on their proxy measure from 1870 to 2020 to calculate statistical indicators that presage changes in the overturning.
  • “Not only do we see an increase in these indicators,” Peter Ditlevsen said, “but we see an increase which is consistent with this approaching a tipping point.”
  • They then used the mathematical properties of a tipping-point-like system to extrapolate from these trends. That led them to predict that the Atlantic circulation could collapse around midcentury, though it could potentially occur as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095.
  • Their analysis included no specific assumptions about how much greenhouse-gas emissions will rise in this century. It assumed only that the forces bringing about an AMOC collapse would continue at an unchanging pace — essentially, that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would keep rising as they have since the Industrial Revolution.
  • they voiced reservations about some of its methods, and said more work was still needed to nail down the timing with greater certainty.
  • Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Georgia Tech, said sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic near Greenland weren’t necessarily influenced by changes in the overturning alone, making them a questionable proxy for inferring those changes. She pointed to a study published last year showing that much of the cold blob’s development could be explained by shifts in wind and atmospheric patterns.
  • Scientists are now using sensors slung across the Atlantic to directly measure the overturning. Dr. Lozier is involved in one of these measurement efforts. The aim is to better understand what’s driving the changes beneath the waves, and to improve projections of future changes.
  • Still, the new study sent an urgent message about the need to keep collecting data on the changing ocean currents,
  • Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude.
  • “It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”
Javier E

Climate activism in the US | Pew Research Center - 0 views

www.pewresearch.org/...climate-activism

activism climate research pew

shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • The survey finds that the share of Americans who say they have participated in one of four forms of climate activism has declined slightly since two years ago.
  • there’s limited belief among the public generally that climate activism changes minds or drives elected officials to act.
  • Overall, 21% of Americans say they have participated in at least one of these activities in the last year, down slightly from 24% in 2021.
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  • Democrats and independents who lean to the Democratic Party are about three times more likely than Republicans and Republican-leaning independents to say they have participated in at least one of these activities to address climate change in the past year (32% vs. 10%).
  • 30% of adults ages 18 to 29 say they have participated in at least one of four activities in the past year, compared with 17% of those ages 65 and older.
  • Those who say they personally care a great deal about climate change are much more likely than those who say they care some to have participated in at least one of four climate-related activities in the last year (36% vs. 14%).
  • A relatively small share of the public (28%) believes that climate activism, such as protests and rallies, makes people more likely to support action on climate change.
  • About half of Americans (49%) say climate activism does not really affect people’s levels of support, and 21% believe it has the opposite of its intended effect and makes people less likely to support action on climate change.
  • Just 11% of Americans say climate activism is extremely or very effective in getting elected officials to act on climate change; 33% say it is somewhat effective
  • A narrow majority of Americans (54%) say that climate activism is not too or not at all effective in getting elected official to act on climate change.
  • However, a majority of Democrats believe climate activism is at least somewhat effective at motivating action from elected officials. By contrast, 69% of Republicans believe it is not too or not at all effective.
  • Overall, 53% of U.S. adults say they have talked about the need for action on global climate change in the past few weeks. By comparison, 46% say they have not talked about the need to address climate change recently.
  • Democrats (72%) are far more likely than Republicans (35%) to say they have talked about the need for action on climate change within the last week.
silveiragu

Nations Approve Landmark Climate Accord in Paris - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...imate-change-accord-paris.html

climate_change accord politics policy

shared by silveiragu on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • suddenly, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France asked for opposition to the deal and, hearing none, gaveled the session closed.
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 12 Dec 15
       
      Interesting to evaluate this statement after the Congress of Vienna simulation.
  • The new accord changes that dynamic by requiring action in some form from every country, rich or poor. The echoes of those divides persisted during the negotiations, however.
  • Mr. Fabius, who has presided over the assembly, made an emotional appeal.
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  • “Our text is the best possible balance,” he said, “a balance which is powerful yet delicate, which will enable each delegation, each group of countries, with his head held high, having achieved something important.
  • negotiators from countries representing a self-described “high-ambition coalition” walked into the United Nations plenary session shortly before noon, they were swarmed by cheering
  • Mr. Ban has said there is “no Plan B” if this deal falls apart
  • But it is not yet certain that the draft accord will receive the unanimous support required for it to become legally binding.
  • But it is not yet certain that the draft accord will receive the unanimous support required for it to become legally binding.
  • A more likely course of events, Ms. Morgan and others said
  • They would then engage in sideline talks, while Mr. Fabius and his envoys negotiate to win their support.
  • Poorer countries had pushed for a legally binding provision requiring that rich countries appropriate a minimum of $100 billion a year to help them mitigate and adapt to the ravages of climate change. In the final deal, that $100 billion figure appears only in a preamble, not in what would be the legally binding portion of the agreement.
  • The stated goal of the agreement is to begin to level off the rise in fossil fuel emissions enough to stave off an increase in atmospheric temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)
  • More recent scientific reports have concluded that even staving off that amount of warming will not save the planet from many of the worst effects of climate change, particularly rising sea levels. Thus, the text was expected to include a reference to reducing emissions enough to stave off a warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
  • Vulnerable low-lying island states have pushed for the inclusion of the more stringent target,
  • At the core of the agreement are a set of individual plan
  • n their own, those plans will lower greenhouse gas emissions only about half as much as is necessary
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 12 Dec 15
       
      Which is slightly humorous in a sad way, because the plans BY THEMSELVES will accomplish nothing; plans only are as good as how they are enacted.
  • The accord also requires “stock-taking” meetings every five year
  • It also sets forth language requiring countries to monitor, verify and publicly report their levels of emissions.
  • In the end, the final draft requires all countries to use the same system to report their emissions, but it allows developing nations to report fewer details until they build the ability to better count their carbon emissions
  • Some elements of the accord would be voluntary, while others would be legally binding. That hybrid structure was specifically intended to ensure the support of the United States
  • Such a proposal would be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate, where many lawmakers question the established science of climate change, and where even more hope to thwart President Obama’s climate change agenda.
  • As a result, all language in the accord relating to the reduction of carbon emissions is essentially voluntary
  • “This agreement is highly unlikely to trigger any legitimate grounds for compelling Senate ratification,” said Paul Bledsoe, a climate change official in the Clinton administration.
  • Representatives of 195 countries reached a landmark climate accord on Saturday that will, for the first time, commit nearly every country to lowering planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions to help stave off the most drastic effects of climate change.
  • final deal did not achieve all that environmentalists, scientists and some countries had hoped for
Javier E

Central American Farmers Head to the U.S., Fleeing Climate Change - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...-climate-change-migration.html

climate change central america agriculture

shared by Javier E on 15 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • farmers, agricultural scientists and industry officials say a new threat has been ruining harvests, upending lives and adding to the surge of families migrating to the United States: climate change.
  • Gradually rising temperatures, more extreme weather events and increasingly unpredictable patterns — like rain not falling when it should, or pouring when it shouldn’t — have disrupted growing cycles and promoted the relentless spread of pests.
  • Central America is among the regions most vulnerable to climate change, scientists say. And because agriculture employs much of the labor force — about 28 percent in Honduras alone, according to the World Bank — the livelihoods of millions of people are at stake.
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  • Last year, the bank reported that climate change could lead at least 1.4 million people to flee their homes in Mexico and Central America and migrate during the next three decades.
  • “If Donald Trump withdraws all the funds for Honduras, it’s going to generate more unemployment, and that’s going to generate more migration
  • The number of coffee producers in the area where Mr. Vicen lives has dropped by a quarter in the past decade — to about 9,000 from about 12,000
  • That has forced some farmers to search for land at higher altitudes, switch to other crops, change professions — or migrate.
  • Average temperatures have risen by about two degrees Fahrenheit in Central America over the past several decades, making the cultivation of coffee difficult, if not untenable, at lower altitudes that were once suitable.
  • By some predictions, the amount of land suitable for growing coffee in Central America could drop by more than 40 percent by 2050.
  • “It’s becoming so unusual, it’s almost certainly climate change,”
  • When he was younger, harvest time “was like a party,” he recalled. Now, “there are only losses, no profits.”
  • Fifteen producers from the Vicens’ coffee cooperative — more than 10 percent of its members — have migrated to the United States in the past year
  • t government statistics on apprehension of migrants at the southwest border of the United States in recent years reflect a sharp increase in people from western Honduras.
  • After large caravans of migrants arrived last fall in Tijuana, Mexico, a United Nations survey found that 72 percent of those surveyed were from Honduras — and 28 percent of the respondents had worked in the agricultural sector.
Javier E

Opinion | More Republicans Than You Think Support Action on Climate Change - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cans-climate-change-polls.html

climate change gop crisis

shared by Javier E on 29 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication polled 1,067 registered voters on climate change. The study found that while they disagree on the cause, majorities in both parties agree that the world is experiencing global warming and call for government action to address it.
  • The poll asked whether the United States should “set strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants to reduce global warming and improve public heath,” even if “the cost of electricity to consumers and companies would likely increase.” Eighty-seven percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans said yes.
  • Should the United States require fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax and use the money to reduce other taxes (such as income tax) by an equal amount? Eighty-four percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans said yes.
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  • Asked, “When there’s a conflict between environmental protection and economic growth, which do you think is more important?” 85 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans said that environmental protection should come first.
  • A majority of Democrats and Republicans believe the United States should participate in the Paris climate accord and reduce greenhouse gas emissions regardless of what other countries do.
  • A study conducted in June by Stanford, ABC News and Resources for the Future uncovered a similar trend. It found that 66 percent of Republicans believe the increase in temperature is “mostly or partly caused by humans.” Another poll, released last month by Monmouth University in New Jersey, found that most Republicans now support action on climate change.
  • An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll recently asked people if they believed climate change is “serious” and requires “immediate action.” Only around 15 percent of Republicans said yes compared with 71 percent of Democrats. It’s notable that the poll did not ask, as the Yale study did, for views on specific remedies — which is where the two parties seem to find more common ground.
Javier E

White House blocked intelligence agency's written testimony saying human-caused climate... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...could-be-possibly-catastrophic

climate change intelligence agency trump

shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • “I believe that there’s a change in weather, and I think it changes both ways,” he said. “Don’t forget, it used to be called global warming. That wasn’t working. Then it was called climate change. Now it’s actually called extreme weather, because with extreme weather, you can’t miss.
  • During the interview he blamed China, India and Russia for polluting the environment and insisted the United States has “among the cleanest climates,” and noted that the United States had suffered extreme weather in the past. “Forty years ago, we had the worst tornado binge we’ve ever had. In the 1890s, we had our worst hurricanes."
  • “The president questions our change in jargon from warming to climate change to extremes as uncertainty on our side, but in reality we have come to learn that the impacts of greenhouse gases are much broader than we originally thought. By increasing atmospheric temperature, greenhouse gases can also cause drought and heat waves, ripening conditions for wildfires. In humid places, heat causes constant soil water evaporation leading to extreme precipitation, which falls on saturated soils and thus you commonly also get floods.”
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  • “The Earth’s climate is unequivocally undergoing a long-term warming trend, as established by decades of scientific measurements and multiple, independent lines of evidence,”
  • “Climate change effects could undermine important international systems on which the U.S. is critically dependent, such as trade routes, food and energy supplies, the global economy and domestic stability abroad.”
Javier E

I was wrong on climate change. Why can't other conservatives admit it, too? - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html

climate change conservatives conservatism denial crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • I used to be a climate-change skeptic. I was one of those conservatives who thought that the science was inconclusive, that fears of global warming were as overblown as fears of a new ice age in the 1970s, that climate change was natural and cyclical, and that there was no need to incur any economic costs to deal with this speculative threat.
  • I no longer think any of that, because the scientific consensus is so clear and convincing.
  • “Observations collected around the world provide significant, clear, and compelling evidence that global average temperature is much higher, and is rising more rapidly, than anything modern civilization has experienced, with widespread and growing impacts.”
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  • “annual average temperatures have increased by 1.8°F across the contiguous United States since the beginning of the 20th century” and that “annual median sea level along the U.S. coast . . . has increased by about 9 inches since the early 20th century as oceans have warmed and land ice has melted.”
  • he National Climate Assessment warns that global warming could cause a 10 percent decline in gross domestic product and that the “potential for losses in some sectors could reach hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of this century.” Iowa and other farm states will be particularly hard hit as crops wilt and livestock die.
  • Compared with the crushing costs of climate change, the action needed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions is modest and manageabl
  • a carbon tax would increase average electricity rates from 17 cents to 18 cents per kilowatt-hour. The average household, he writes, would see spending on energy rise “only about $35 per month.” That’s not nothing — but it’s better than allowing climate change to continue unabated
  • I’ve owned up to the danger. Why haven’t other conservatives? They are captives, first and foremost, of the fossil fuel industry, which outspent green groups 10 to 1 in lobbying on climate change from 2000 to 2016. But they are also captives of their own rigid ideology
mimiterranova

U.S. Officially Rejoins Paris Agreement On Climate Change : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...is-agreement-on-climate-change

climate change paris agreement Politics US

shared by mimiterranova on 19 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The United States on Friday officially rejoined the Paris Agreement on climate change designed to limit global warming and avoid its potentially catastrophic impacts.
  • "The Paris Agreement is an unprecedented framework for global action. We know because we helped design it and make it a reality," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement. "Its purpose is both simple and expansive: to help us all avoid catastrophic planetary warming and to build resilience around the world to the impacts from climate change we already see."
  • The U.S. left the Paris Agreement in November after a yearlong waiting period had ended. Former President Donald Trump originally announced his intention to withdraw from the treaty in 2017 and formally notified the United Nations in 2019.
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  • Under the terms of the agreement, the U.S. promised to reduce its emissions by about 25% by 2025 compared with 2005 levels. But according to analysts, the country is only on track to achieve about a 17% reduction.
  • In 2020, there have already been 16 climate-driven disasters that cost at least $1 billion each, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
  • mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21
     
    U.S. Officially Rejoins Paris Agreement On Climate Change
  • mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21
     
    The United States on Friday officially rejoined the Paris Agreement on climate change designed to limit global warming and avoid its potentially catastrophic impacts. '"The Paris Agreement is an unprecedented framework for global action. We know because we helped design it and make it a reality," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement. "Its purpose is both simple and expansive: to help us all avoid catastrophic planetary warming and to build resilience around the world to the impacts from climate change we already see." The U.S. left the Paris Agreement in November after a yearlong waiting period had ended. Former President Donald Trump originally announced his intention to withdraw from the treaty in 2017 and formally notified the United Nations in 2019. Under the terms of the agreement, the U.S. promised to reduce its emissions by about 25% by 2025 compared with 2005 levels. But according to analysts, the country is only on track to achieve about a 17% reduction. In 2020, there have already been 16 climate-driven disasters that cost at least $1 billion each, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Javier E

Protect biodiversity to fight climate change - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...earth-day-biodiversity

biodiversity climate change climate

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Giant kelp is among the best organisms on the planet for taking planet-warming gases out of the atmosphere. Buoyed by small, gas-filled bulbs called “bladders,” these huge algae grow toward the ocean surface at a pace of up to two feet per day. Their flexible stems and leafy blades form a dense underwater canopy that can store 20 times as much carbon as an equivalent expanse of terrestrial trees.
  • Yet this powerful force for planetary protection is under siege. Warming waters and worsening storms caused by climate change have weakened the kelp forests.
  • Most significantly, the demise of important predators such as otters and sea stars has led to an explosion in the population of sea urchins, which eat kelp.
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  • The Earth itself is our greatest ally in this effort. Ecosystems like California’s kelp forests absorb about half of the greenhouse gases humans emit, studies show. Without them, warming would be even worse. Nature shields us from the worst consequences of our own actions, forgiving the sins we refuse to repent.
  • If we hope to solve climate change, humanity must also address this biodiversity crisis — restoring ecosystems and the creatures that inhabit them.
  • One way to revitalize ecosystems: protect the ground they grow from.Think of the soft, spongy soil of an old-growth woodland. Here, a towering oak tree draws up water and nutrients via threadlike fungi attached to its roots. In exchange, the fungi take sugar from the oak, funneling carbon from the air into the ground.Now imagine a leaf from that oak drifting slowly to the forest floor. Perhaps it becomes food for an earthworm. Then microbes attack the earthworm’s droppings, breaking down the residue further still.Eventually, the carbon that was once a leaf can become trapped in clods of earth. Other atoms may form strong chemical bonds with minerals like iron, which prevents them from reacting with oxygen and returning to the air. Under the right conditions, carbon might stay locked away in dense, dark earth for centuries. Soils contain more carbon than the entire atmosphere and all the world’s plants combined.
  • This makes soil both a ticking time bomb and an overlooked climate solution
  • “And because soil is such an important reservoir,” Berhe said, “a small change in the release of that carbon can lead to a big change in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
  • A 2020 analysis in the journal Nature Sustainability found that better soil stewardship could reduce emissions by at least 5.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide each year — about 15 percent of current annual emissions.
  • “Once that happens,” Berhe said, “it’s not just the carbon status of the soil that’s improved. The soil literally becomes softer. It holds more water and nutrients. It’s easier for plants to grow in … and serve as a home for the most abundant and diverse group of organisms that we know of.
  • Enhancing carbon in soils is just the beginning. In 2017, an international team of scientists set out to determine how much carbon the planet could pull out of the atmosphere, if humans would only give it a chance. In a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they concluded natural climate systems are capable of storing almost 24 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year — roughly two thirds of what people emit.
  • About half of that sequestration would be cost-effective, meaning enacting the necessary protections would cost less than the consequences of keeping that carbon in the air.
  • Of the climate solutions they studied, few delivered more carbon bang per buck than mangroves — lush systems of salt-tolerant shrubs and trees that thrive where freshwater rivers spill into the sea. Though these forests occupy just 0.5 percent of the Earth’s shorelines, they account for 10 percent of the coast’s carbon storage capacity.
  • But the unique ecosystems are too often dismissed as unproductive swamps, good for no one but the mosquitoes. In the past half-century, more than a quarter of the world’s mangroves have been destroyed — drained for development, converted for shrimp farms, poisoned by fertilizer and drowned by dammed-up streams.
  • Yet the Earth cannot compensate for all of humanity’s pollution, said William Schlesinger, former dean of Duke University’s School of the Environment and a co-author on the 2017 PNAS study. Unless people also reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we emit, no amount of ecological restoration will save us.
  • “The bottom line is we’ve got to get off of using fossil fuels in transportation and heating and lighting and everything else,”
  • In public talks, he puts it this way: “It’s easier to patch a hole in a bag than to pick up the marbles that fall out.”
  • Since the end of the last ice age, the frozen expanse at the top of the world has acted as a protective shield. During the summer, when the sun shines 24 hours a day, Arctic sea ice reflects about two-thirds of the light that hits it back into space. By contrast, the dark open ocean absorbs the majority of the sun’s heat.
  • If the Arctic loses its perpetual ice cover, it would add half a degree Celsius of warming to the global average temperature, studies suggest. The world is hurtling toward that milestone. Since 1979, the volume of ice left at the end of the summer has shrunk about 75 percent.
  • There is just one way to save it, she said: by stopping global warming. Only by ending the use of fossil fuels and eliminating greenhouse gas emissions can people prevent the Arctic from heating further and give the ice a chance to recover.
  • If we do nothing, models indicate, it will be a matter of decades before the summertime Arctic is ice-free for the first time in human history. Sea levels will surge, coastal communities will be deluged, and we will no longer have the planet’s air conditioning unit to help us cool our world down.
  • Our species evolved and our civilization was built under fairly stable climate conditions. When things changed, they changed slowly, giving us time to adapt.
  • The rapid transformation of our planet doesn’t just endanger ecosystems; humanity will suffer. People have never lived on a planet without mangroves, or peatlands, or summertime ice. We’ve never had to go without the benefits the Earth provides.
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