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Javier E

The Green New Deal isn't too big. It's not nearly big enough. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-big-its-not-nearly-big-enough

global warming international plan

shared by Javier E on 05 May 19 - No Cached
  • Every other rich country also needs to make similar cuts, immediately. The developed nations with large emissions (Saudi Arabia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Britain and others) can afford their own Green New Deals; perhaps they can be persuaded to do their parts, if we do.
  • developing nations — such as India, Pakistan, Ecuador and Malaysia — aren’t going to unilaterally constrain their own economies. If carbon-based energy sources help them compete in the global marketplace, that’s what they’ll use — unless, economists say, they get financial help to develop sustainably, with industrialization powered by renewable energy instead of oil, gas and coal. And there’s only one place they can get that help: from wealthy countries like ours. Giving them cash needs to be part of any Green New Deal.
  • In the poorest developing countries, where many people live without electricity or other basic necessities, it is unrealistic to expect emissions to drop from their already low rates in the next decade. Some of these countries, including India, Indonesia and the Philippines, are very populous, and their industrialization could cause emissions to skyrocket.
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  • The next president could go further and tell allies such as Germany, Japan and Canada that their status as major trading partners protected by the U.S. security umbrella is now contingent upon their making steep emissions cuts.
  • adaptation, which means preparing societies and their infrastructure for the effects of climate change, such as building flood walls to hold back higher sea levels or retrofitting buildings to withstand more severe heat waves.
  • Rich countries industrialized with fossil fuels, developing industries powered by coal, delivering fossil-fuel-based electricity and heat to homes, and building transportation systems that run on the internal-combustion engine. In following this path, these countries chewed through most of the planet’s “carbon budget” — the amount of greenhouse gas that could be spewed until global temperatures warmed by 2 degrees Celsius
  • The United States has contributed about 26 percent of the world’s cumulative emissions, and the 28 nations of the European Union are responsible for only slightly less.
  • if Americans had been restricted to emitting a proportional share of a global carbon budget that capped warming at 1.5 degrees, we would have blown through that limit in 1944.
  • Climate finance means foreign aid for three main purposes
  • mitigation: subsidies for renewable-energy deployment and storage, electrical-grid modernization, and other means of reducing emissions
  • In the Paris negotiations, developing nations were explicitly open to making more ambitious commitments if developed countries contributed to making them happen.
  • coverage for loss or damage: compensation for people whose homes become uninhabitable or whose livelihoods are destroyed by climate change.
  • “climate justice,” which also includes providing support to marginalized communities that are disproportionately affected by climate change in rich countries.
  • Last year, at a climate summit in Poland, India reiterated its openness to doing more if it were adequately subsidized, and an organization of the 47 least-developed nations echoed that plea.
  • Nobody knows how big the ultimate U.S. number will need to be; it depends on how many rich countries pitch in, and how much they give, and how much help poorer countries need to modernize in eco-friendly way
  • to stay below 2 degrees of warming, by 2030 the global economy needs to give a “green” makeover to the $5 trillion per year spent worldwide on sectors such as agriculture, energy, transportation, construction and heavy industry.
  • his may be toxic for American voters. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly accept the science of climate change, are increasingly worried about it and in theory support the notion that the government should address it — but they are more divided in their willingness to actually pay for climate action
  • only 23 percent said they’d pay at least $40 per month to fight climate change
  • The United States may have a narrow opportunity to pay down some of its historical debts, stem the tide of future climate refugees and manage the political instability that extreme warming would cause. The last chance came in 2009-2010, but the Senate failed, in part thanks to Obama’s bungling of the negotiations, to pass even domestic climate legislation
  • The leaders of developing nations aren’t suckers, and they know how dire the problem is. They have something rich countries want (emissions reductions), and they’d be fools to just give it away for free, even if they could. If we want them to succeed, it’s going to cost us, and we’ll need to move quickly. The science is clear: We do not have another decade to waste.
Javier E

Germany's Green Energy Policy Is A 'Disaster,' Says Man Who Helped Design It | The Dail... - 0 views

dailycaller.com/...-says-man-who-helped-design-it

germany energy policy disaster

shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • All of Germany’s subsidies and support for green energy have sharply increased power prices, with the average German paying 39 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. The average American only spends 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour by comparison.
  • Germany’s power grid almost collapsed in January due to poor performance from wind turbines and solar panels, according to data from a major trade union. Wind and solar power plants under-performed that month because of cloudy weather with little or no wind, setting the stage for massive blackouts. The country’s power grid was strained to the absolute limit and could have gone offline entirely, triggering a national blackout, if just one power plant had gone offline.
  • Due to the inherent unreliable performance of wind power and political opposition to nuclear power plants, Germany has been forced to return to coal to generate electricity. Coal now provides 44 percent of  Germany’s power,  This shift caused Germany’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to actually rise by 28 million tons each year following the policy shift.
Javier E

Germany's green energy shift is more fizzle than sizzle - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.eu/...ift-is-more-fizzle-than-sizzle

germany energy policy

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • High power prices, continued coal dependency and a “poor CO2 emissions record” mean Germany is falling behind other countries in shifting away from fossil fuels, according to McKinsey’s new global Energy Transition Index
  • In Europe, 11 countries including Sweden, Austria, Denmark, the U.K. and France do better in cutting coal dependency and greening their energy systems.
  • The European Commission’s latest country assessment, published earlier this month, found that Germany is at “considerable risk” of missing its national energy efficiency target of 20 percent by 2020. For now, it is still expected to meet its 2020 renewable energy target of 18 percent,
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  • enewable power last year surged to 36 percent of the country's electricity use, according to the Agora Energiewende think tank. But while renewables grew in the power sector, they didn't make major strides in transport or heating, so they account for just over 13 percent of energy use.
  • Germany is also set to fall short of its national climate target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020. The new coalition government effectively abandoned that goal, instead focusing on meeting its 2030 target of reducing emissions by 55 percent. Germany is also expected to miss its emissions reduction target for sectors such as transport and buildings.
  • For years Germany was one of the world's energy transformation leaders. It was German cash that helped finance the technology revolution that has turned solar and wind into viable technologies that now generate increasingly cheap power
  • An average four-person household has to pay more than double for power in 2017 compared to 2000,"
  • The powerful German business lobby BDI is also unhappy, saying in a recent report that high electricity costs, delays in boosting the energy efficiency of buildings, and a “lack of vision” on transport are "worrying German industry.”
  • Greenhouse gas emissions in Germany have stagnated for three years in a row, rather than falling. That's largely to do with rising pollution caused by transportation, as well as a failure to reduce emissions in the buildings sector as energy consumption went up thanks to the economic recovery.
  • Souring opinions on diesel engines further weigh on emissions. Diesel cars emit less greenhouse gases than those powered by gasoline, which is why the country's politicians and car industry saw diesel as a panacea to deal with global warming.
  • But the Dieselgate scandal hammered the reputation of diesel cars, and there is growing concern about the smog that diesel generates. As cities consider banning older diesel cars, sales have fallen off a cliff. The share of diesel-fueled passenger cars in Germany was 39 percent last year, down from about 46 percent in 2016, 
  • "Germany missed bringing electric cars on to roads,
  • "In order to have an energy transition, you have to build up renewable energies, but then you also have to reduce coal, step-by-step,” Kemfert said. "That happened too late in Germany.
  • A lot of Germany's renewable power, especially powerful offshore wind, is generated in the north of the country. The difficulty is getting that electricity to industrial regions in the south like Bavaria.
  • For years Germany annoyed neighbors like the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Poland by sending surges of electricity through their networks. They've now taken short-term measures to reduce the disruptions until the necessary transmission links are built.
  • domestic opposition is making it difficult for Germany to build its own north-south and other new interconnectors. The project has faced delays as people battle the idea of ugly high-voltage power lines besmirching pretty landscapes. Now much of the interconnector is due to run underground, ramping up costs.
  • Volkswagen's recent pledge to spend €20 billion on battery contracts and to begin making electric cars at 16 sites worldwide shows the car industry is taking steps to shift its business model — which could help secure a long-term drop in Germany's transport emissions.
  • Proponents of a swift coal exit, however, shouldn't hold their breath. Altmaier also said that ending coal power won't "happen suddenly and abruptly, but step-by-step over several decades."
Javier E

The anti-Greta: A conservative think tank takes on the global phenomenon - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gning-against-climate-alarmism

conservative opposition climate change germany politics culture

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Naomi, for her part, argues that these predictions of dire consequences are exaggerated. In a video posted on Heartland’s website, she gazes into the camera and says, “I don’t want you to panic. I want you to think.”
  • Graham Brookie directs the Digital Forensic Research Lab, an arm of the nonprofit Atlantic Council that works to identify and expose disinformation. While the campaign “is not outright disinformation,” Brookie said in an email, it “does bear resemblance to a model we use called the 4d’s — dismiss the message, distort the facts, distract the audience, and express dismay at the whole thing.”
  • she said that watching young people joining weekly “Fridays For Future” protests inspired by Greta helped spur her opposition to climate change activism.
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  • “I get chills when I see those young people, especially at Fridays for Future. They are screaming and shouting and they’re generally terrified,” she said in an interview. “They don’t want the world to end.”
  • Naomi said she does not dispute that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, but she argues that many scientists and activists have overstated their impact.AD“I don’t want to get people to stop believing in man-made climate change, not at all,” she said. “Are manmade CO2 emissions having that much impact on the climate? I think that’s ridiculous to believe.”
  • Naomi argues that other factors, such as solar energy, play a role — though the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth has actually declined since the 1970s, according to federal measurements
  • The German media have described her as sympathetic to the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), the biggest opposition party in parliament, whose leaders have spoken of fighting “an invasion of foreigners.” Naomi says she is not a member of AfD — she describes herself as libertarian — but acknowledges speaking at a recent AfD event.
  • Founded in 1984 and funded largely by anonymous donors, Heartland has increasingly focused on climate change over the past decade. Its staff and researchers enjoy ready access to the Trump administration, and one of its senior fellows, William Happer, served as a senior director on the White House National Security Council between September 2018 and 2019.
  • An emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, Happer has repeatedly argued that carbon emissions should be viewed as beneficial to society — not a pollutant that drives global warming. During his time with the Trump administration, he sought to enlist Heartland’s help in promoting his ideas and objected to a U.S. intelligence official’s finding that climate impacts could be “possibly catastrophic,”
  • Why would an American think tank want to get involved in German politics? Because it worries that Berlin’s strong stance on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions could be contagious, according to a recent investigation aired on German television.
  • For two decades, Germany has been a leader in pressing other nations to curb carbon output and shift to renewable energy. Though it is falling short of its ambitious goals, Germany has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions this year by 40 percent compared to 1990 — and by up to 95 percent by mid-century.
  • The proposal described Naomi as “the star” of a “Climate Reality Forum” organized by Heartland during the Madrid talks. With “over 100,000 people viewing her talk on climate realism,” the proposal said, Naomi was well-positioned to fight German climate policies.
  • Taylor said the tendency to associate Naomi with Greta is “kind of natural” — and benefits Heartland’s message.“To the extent that Naomi is pretty much the same, just with a different perspective, yeah, I think that it’s good that people will look at the two as similar in many ways,” he said.
andrespardo

Could Microsoft's climate crisis 'moonshot' plan really work? | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...t-climate-crisis-moonshot-plan

enviro change global warming crisis economics

shared by andrespardo on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Microsoft drew widespread praise in January this year after Brad Smith, the company’s president, announced their climate “moonshot”.
  • Much of its plans lean on nascent technology. Critics, meanwhile, see the move as a gamble aimed at justifying Microsoft’s ongoing deals with fossil fuel firms.
  • Microsoft releases less carbon a year than Amazon and Apple, but more than Google. The company has 150,000 employees across offices in more than 100 countries, and is still focused on developing the software and consumer electronics that made them a household name
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  • Meanwhile, increasing the scrutiny on Microsoft’s plan are its dealings with fossil fuel companies, which have been highlighted by some as evidence of hypocrisy as it makes climate pledges. In 2019 alone, the technology company had entered into long-term partnerships with three major oil companies, including ExxonMobil, that will be using Microsoft’s technology to expand oil production by as much as 50,000 barrels a day over the coming years. The staggering amount of carbon this would release into the atmosphere would not be included on Microsoft’s expanded carbon ledger.
  • To begin, Microsoft will focus on protecting forests and planting trees to capture carbon. This strategy has long been used to offset emissions, but Microsoft is hoping to improve their outcomes by using remote-sensing technology to accurately estimate the carbon storage potential of forests to ensure no major deforestation is occurring in their allotments. To achieve these goals, Microsoft will be partnering with Pachama, a Silicon Valley startup that will survey 60,000 hectares of rainforest in the Amazon, plus an additional 20,000 hectares across north-eastern states of the US for the company. According to Kesley
  • The carbon produced when burning the biomass is captured before it is released into the atmosphere and then injected at a very high pressure into rock formations deep underground. Not only does this remove carbon from the natural cycle, the biomass absorbs CO2 as it grows.
  • The second concern is that the transition from coal to biofuel would require setting aside vast tracts of arable land – some estimates say one to two times the size of India.
  • Perhaps the most futuristic of the technologies outlined in Microsoft’s carbon negative plan is direct air capture (DAC). This involves machines that essentially function like highly efficient artificial trees, drawing existing carbon out of the air and transforming it into non-harmful carbon-based solids or gasses.
  • Microsoft’s plan for intensive investment in this industry is exciting for those working in the field. Klaus Lackner, a theoretical physicist working on DAC, has been arguing since the 1990s that carbon removal is the only feasible way to stop significant temperature rises. “We’ve shown that this method is technologically feasible, but nobody has wanted them,” he said. “Microsoft have said ‘we get it’. It will cost them money, but it will allow the technologie
  • While the technologies that Microsoft are betting on are still in their nascent stages, in the past few years there has been some encouraging progress in the negative emissions industry. Lackner and Arizona State University recently signed a deal with Silicon Kingdom, an Irish-based company, to manufacture his carbon-suck machines. The plan is to install them on wind and solar farms, and then sell the captured carbon to beverage companies to make carbonated drinks. In the UK, Drax power plant, which was once among Europe’s most polluting, transitioned from coal to biofuel this year.
  • Given the not insignificant risk of failure, some propose that relying on nascent or future technology as a solution to the climate crisis represents a moral hazard – the promise of carbon removal functions as an incentive for governments and major polluters to not change their behavior now.
  • When asked about this concern by the Guardian, Microsoft’s Joppa responded that in the short term, the energy demands of a growing global population will probably still need a mix of renewable and traditional energy sources. By remaining in discourse with these industries, he said, Microsoft hopes to help them change and transition to a better model in the future. “It’s extremely hard to lead if there’s no one there to follow,” he added.
  • andrespardo on 23 Apr 20
     
    ""It's extremely hard to lead if there's no one there to follow," he added. As to whether the technology outlined in their plan will scale, he said there is inherent risk, but this is why they call it a "moonshot". "When it comes to our plan it's not like we've got it all figured out," he said. "We're just trying to do what the science says the whole world needs to do. There's really no other choice.""
cartergramiak

How Bad Was the Coronavirus Pandemic on Tourism in 2020? Look at the Numbers. - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tourism-2020-coronavirus.html

economics politics Culture pandemic

shared by cartergramiak on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • But numbers can help us comprehend the scale of certain losses — particularly in the travel industry, which in 2020 experienced a staggering collapse.
  • The following charts — which address changes in international arrivals, emissions, air travel, the cruise industry and car travel — offer a broad overview of the effects of the coronavirus pandemic within the travel industry and beyond.
  • The pandemic upended commercial aviation. One way to visualize the effect of lockdowns on air travel is to consider the number of passengers screened on a daily basis at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints.
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  • All told, CO2 emissions from fossil fuels dropped by 2.6 billion metric tons in 2020, a 7 percent reduction from 2019, driven in large part by transportation declines.
  • Third-quarter revenues for Carnival Corporation, the industry’s biggest player, showed a year-to-year decline of 99.5 percent — to $31 million in 2020, down from $6.5 billion in 2019.
cartergramiak

How Bad Was the Coronavirus Pandemic on Tourism in 2020? Look at the Numbers. - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tourism-2020-coronavirus.html

politics US pandemic history Culture crisis policy

shared by cartergramiak on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Numbers alone cannot capture the scope of the losses that have mounted in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Data sets are crude tools for plumbing the depth of human suffering, or the immensity of our collective grief.
  • The following charts — which address changes in international arrivals, emissions, air travel, the cruise industry and car travel — offer a broad overview of the effects of the coronavirus pandemic within the travel industry and beyond.
  • Before the pandemic, tourism accounted for one out of every 10 jobs around the world. In many places, though, travel plays an even greater role in the local economy.
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  • All told, CO2 emissions from fossil fuels dropped by 2.6 billion metric tons in 2020, a 7 percent reduction from 2019, driven in large part by transportation declines.
  • The figures tell the story of a rebound that’s slightly stronger than that of air travel: a sharp drop in March and April, as state and local restrictions fell into place, followed by a gradual rise to around 80 percent of 2019 levels.
  • Some national parks located near cities served as convenient recreational escapes throughout the pandemic. At Cuyahoga Valley National Park, 2020 numbers exceeded 2019 numbers from March through December. At Great Smoky Mountains National Park, numbers surged after a 46-day closure in the spring and partial closures through August; between June and December, the park saw one million additional visits compared to the same time period in 2019.
aniyahbarnett

Climate change: Biden to pledge 50% cut in US greenhouse gas emissions - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...7307038002

climate climate change biden

shared by aniyahbarnett on 22 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • President Joe Biden pledged to cut U.S. greenhouse gas pollution in half by 2030 at a virtual climate summit Thursday
  • "These steps will set America on a path of a net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050,
  • "Scientists tell us that this is the decisive decade, this is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of a climate crisis,
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  • Biden has pledged to make the U.S. power sector 100% carbon-pollution free by 2035.
  • Thursday's summit did not detail how the White House plans to achieve the 50% reduction in emissions.
  • is nearly double the target set by Obama administration in 2015.
  • A second administration official said the White House expects other world leaders to follow Biden's announcement
  • But Biden's climate change agenda faces obstacles at home and abroad.
  • "The U.S. chose to come and go as it likes with regard to the Paris Agreement,"
  • "how it plans to make up for the lost four years."
  • The United States is the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2), producing about 5.41 billion metric tons in 2018.
  • China emits nearly twice that amount.
  • Experts say the world's major economies need to dramatically scale back their carbon emissions to limit the rise of average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsiu
  • Biden has pledged to be the most aggressive president on climate chang
  • "The Biden-Harris administration will do more than any in history to meet our climate crisis,"
  • But Biden's steps so far, and his promise to do more, have already unleashed a torrent of criticism from Republicans who argue that his climate policies will hurt American businesse
  • "It’s difficult to imagine the United States winning the long-term strategic competition with China if we cannot lead the renewable energy revolution
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.
  • Year after year, Exxon scientists recorded the evidence about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. In 1978, its science adviser, James Black, warned that there was a “window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategy might become critical”.
  • Exxon set up equipment on a supertanker, the Esso Atlantic, to monitor carbon dioxide in seawater and the air. In 1982, the company’s scientists drew up a graph accurately plotting an increase in the globe’s temperature to date.
  • “The 1980s revealed an established consensus among scientists,” the Minnesota lawsuit against Exxon says. “A 1982 internal Exxon document … explicitly declares that the science was ‘unanimous’ and that climate change would ‘bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate’.”Then the monitoring on the Esso Atlantic was suddenly called off and other research downgraded.
  • The public nuisance claim, also pursued by Honolulu, San Francisco and Rhode Island, follows a legal strategy with a record of success in other types of litigation. In 2019, Oklahoma’s attorney general won compensation of nearly half a billion dollars against the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson over its false marketing of powerful prescription painkillers on the grounds it created a public nuisance by contributing to the opioid epidemic in the state.
  • newspapers to sow doubt. One in the New York Times in 2000, under the headline “Unsettled Science”, compared climate data to changing weather forecasts. It claimed scientists were divided, when an overwhelming consensus already backed the evidence of a growing climate crisis, and said that the supposed doubts meant it was too soon to act.
  • Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, Lee Raymond, told industry executives in 1996 that “scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate”.“It’s a long and dangerous leap to conclude that we should, therefore, cut fossil fuel use,” he said.Documents show that his company’s scientists were telling Exxon’s management that the real danger lay in the failure to do exactly that.
  • In 2019, Martin Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University, told a congressional hearing that as a consultant to Exxon on climate modelling in the 1980s, he worked on eight scientific papers for the company that showed fossil fuel burning was “increasingly having a perceptible influence on Earth’s climate”.
  • Exxon worked alongside Chevron, Shell, BP and smaller oil firms to shift attention away from the growing climate crisis. They funded the industry’s trade body, API, as it drew up a multimillion-dollar plan to ensure that “climate change becomes a non- issue” through disinformation. The plan said “victory will be achieved” when “recognition of uncertainties become part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”.
  • The fossil fuel industry also used its considerable resources to pour billions of dollars into political lobbying to block unfavourable laws and to fund front organisations with neutral and scientific-sounding names, such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). In 2001, the US state department told the GCC that President George W Bush rejected the Kyoto protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “in part, based on input from you”.
  • “Big oil was engaged in exactly the same type of behaviour that the tobacco companies engaged in and were found liable for fraud on a massive scale,” said Eubanks. “The cover-up, the denial of the problem, the funding of scientists to question the science. The same pattern. And some of the same lawyers represent both tobacco and big oil.”
anniina03

Essex lorry deaths: The Vietnamese risking it all to get to the UK - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-50190199

crisis politics

shared by anniina03 on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • An hour's drive inland from the French coast, a dozen Vietnamese men nurse tea over a smoking campfire, as they wait for a phone call from the man they call "the boss". An Afghan man, they say, who opens trailers in the lorry-park nearby and shuts them inside.
  • Duc paid €30,000 ($33,200; £25,000) for a prepaid journey from Vietnam to London - via Russia, Poland, Germany and France. It was organised, he says, by a Vietnamese contact back home.
  • We were told there is a two-tier system in operation here; that those who pay more for their passage to Britain don't have to chance their luck in the lorries outside, but use this base as a transit camp before being escorted on the final leg of their journey.
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  • A Vietnamese smuggler, interviewed by a French paper several years ago, reportedly described three levels of package. The top level allowed migrants to ride in the lorry cab and sleep in hotels. The lowest level was nicknamed "air", or more cynically "CO2" - a reference to the lack of air in some trailers.
  • A local volunteer in the camp told us that they'd seen Vietnamese and British men visiting migrants here in a Mercedes. And that once migrants arrived in the UK, some went to work in cannabis farms, after which all communication stopped.
  • No one here had heard about the 39 people found dead this week.This journey is about freedom, one said.
Javier E

Opinion | Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think - The New York Times - 0 views

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

climate change economic costs risks assessment reader comments

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

Opinion | The Chinese Population Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...chinese-population-crisis.html

population Crisis demographics birthrate fertility

shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • even after years of growth, Chinese per capita G.D.P. is still about one-third or one-fourth the size of neighboring countries like South Korea and Japan. And yet its birthrate has converged with the rich world much more quickly and completely — which has two interrelated implications, both of them grim.
  • First, China will have to pay for the care of a vast elderly population without the resources available to richer societies facing the same challenge.
  • a real problem: Having kids, inevitably one of the harder things that human beings do, feels harder still in a society where children are invisible, siblings absent, and large families rare, where there aren’t ready exemplars or forms of solidarity for people contemplating parenthood.
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  • Second, China’s future growth prospects will dim with every year of below-replacement birthrates, because low fertility creates a self-reinforcing cycle — in which a less youthful society loses dynamism and growth, which reduces economic support for would-be parents, which reduces birthrates, which reduces growth …
  • Yes, in an age of stagnation, CO2 levels won’t grow as fast, delaying some of climate change’s effects — but at the same time a stagnant society will struggle to innovate enough to escape the climate crisis permanently.
  • in the worst-case, to cite a recent paper by the Stanford economist Charles Jones, it risks “an Empty Planet result: knowledge and living standards stagnate for a population that gradually vanishes.”
  • the human race is increasingly facing a “global fertility crisis,” not just a European or American or Japanese baby bust. It’s a crisis that threatens ever-slower growth in the best case
  • the Chinese case is also distinctive, because cruel policy choices made its demographic problems worse.
  • by targeting minority and religious populations, Beijing is attacking the country’s more fecund groups, in what amounts to a statement that if Han birthrates have fallen, minority birthrates must be cut to match.
  • there is Western guilt as well, because the one-child policy was linked to a project hatched by Western technocrats, funded by Western institutions, and egged on by Western intellectuals — a classist, sexist, racist, anti-religious program that sought to defuse a “population bomb” that, we know now, would have defused itself
  • The Western effort died away as the population bomb fizzled, and while its Malthusianism endures around the edges of environmentalism and in European anxieties about African migration, mostly the population control crusade is recalled as a mistaken extrapolation, a well-meaning mistake.
  • As we contemplate the demographic challenge of the future, we should reserve particular opprobrium for those who chose, in the arrogance of their supposed humanitarianism, to use coercive and foul means to make the great problem of the 21st century worse.
Javier E

Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate crisis they are fuelling... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...crisis-consumption-environment

population panic climate change crisis

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Next week the BirthStrike movement – founded by women who, by announcing their decision not to have children, seek to focus our minds on the horror of environmental collapse – will dissolve itself, because its cause has been hijacked so virulently and persistently by population obsessives. The founders explain that they had “underestimated the power of ‘overpopulation’ as a growing form of climate breakdown denial”.
  • It is true that, in some parts of the world, population growth is a major driver of particular kinds of ecological damage, such as the expansion of small-scale agriculture into rainforests, the bushmeat trade and local pressure on water and land for housing. But its global impact is much smaller than many people claim.
  • The formula for calculating people’s environmental footprint is simple, but widely misunderstood: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology (I = PAT).
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  • The global rate of consumption growth, before the pandemic, was 3% a year. Population growth is 1%. Some people assume this means that the rise in population bears one-third of the responsibility for increased consumption
  • But population growth is overwhelmingly concentrated among the world’s poorest people, who have scarcely any A or T to multiply their P. The extra resource use and greenhouse gas emissions caused by a rising human population are a tiny fraction of the impact of consumption growth.
  • Yet it is widely used as a blanket explanation of environmental breakdown.
  • Panic about population growth enables the people most responsible for the impacts of rising consumption (the affluent) to blame those who are least responsible.
  • At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, who is a patron of the charity Population Matters, told the assembled pollutocrats, some of whom have ecological footprints thousands of times greater than the global average: “All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.”
  • If we had the global population of 500 years ago (around 500 million), and if it were composed of average UK plane passengers, our environmental impact would probably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion alive today.
  • he proposed no mechanism by which her dream might come true. This could be the attraction. The very impotence of her call is reassuring to those who don’t want change. If the answer to environmental crisis is to wish other people away, we might as well give up and carry on consuming.
  • how do we distinguish proportionate concerns about these harms from deflection and racism? Well, we know that the strongest determinant of falling birth rates is female emancipation and education. The major obstacle to female empowerment is extreme poverty. Its effect is felt disproportionately by women.
  • Winston Churchill blamed the Bengal famine of 1943, that he helped to cause through the mass export of India’s rice, on the Indians “breeding like rabbits”. In 2013 Sir David Attenborough, also a patron of Population Matters, wrongly blamed famines in Ethiopia on “too many people for too little land”, and suggested that sending food aid was counter-productive.
  • Malthusianism slides easily into racism.
  • Most of the world’s population growth is happening in the poorest countries, where most people are black or brown. The colonial powers justified their atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about “barbaric”, “degenerate” people “outbreeding” the “superior races”
  • These claims have been revived today by the far right, who promote conspiracy theories about “white replacement” and “white genocide”. When affluent white people wrongly transfer the blame for their environmental impacts on to the birthrate of much poorer brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces these narratives. It is inherently racist.
  • The far right now uses the population argument to contest immigration into the US and the UK
  • Since the clergymen Joseph Townsend and Thomas Malthus wrote their tracts in the 18th century, poverty and hunger have been blamed not on starvation wages, war, misrule and wealth extraction by the rich, but on the reproduction rates of the poor.
  • So a good way of deciding whether someone’s population concerns are genuine is to look at their record of campaigning against structural poverty.
  • Have they contested the impossible debts poor nations are required to pay? Have they argued against corporate tax avoidance, or extractive industries that drain wealth from poorer countries, leaving almost nothing behind
  • Or have they simply sat and watched as people remain locked in poverty, then complained about their fertility?
  • Before long, this reproductive panic will disappear. Nations will soon be fighting over immigrants: not to exclude them, but to attract them, as the demographic transition leaves their ageing populations with a shrinking tax base and a dearth of key workers.
Javier E

Is democracy getting in the way of saving the planet? | Kate Aronoff | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-the-way-of-saving-the-planet

democracy climate change politics response technocracy authoritarian

shared by Javier E on 25 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • he Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report confirmed this month is that the stable climate many of us grew up with is gone and has been replaced by a fundamentally unstable one.
  • Amid a drumbeat of depressing news and decades of inaction, there’s a sort of folk wisdom emerging that liberal democracy might just be too slow to tackle a problem as urgent and massive as the climate crisis
  • With a punishingly tiny budget of just 400 gigatonnes of CO2 left to make a decent shot of staying below 1.5C of warming, is it time to give something less democratic a try?
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  • If a less democratic world is needed to deal with the climate, who are the people who’d like to bring a less democratic world into being?
  • The aim is not to reach net zero faster – neither party has laid out workable plans to do so – but to endear climate-conscious voters to an ethno-nationalist cause.
  • It’s not just the right, however, that has considered a turn away from democracy for the planet’s sake.
  • As much as US and UK liberals have talked up the promise of spreading democracy throughout the world this century, though, many centrists – as the Progressive International’s David Adler wrote in 2018 – are pretty down on democracy itself. Analysing the World Values and the European Values surveys, Adler found that centrists in wealthy countries were less supportive of democracy than their counterparts on either the left or the far right. Less than half of centrists in the US thought elections were essential; only 25% saw civil rights as a critical feature of democracy.
  • Actually existing centrist politicians, meanwhile, such as Emmanuel Macron in France, haven’t shown any willingness to address the climate crisis at the speed or scale it demands.
  • Openly authoritarian governments hardly fare better. China has rolled out an impressive array of green technologies over the last decade with massive industrial policy. Yet still it continues to prioritise fossil-fuelled growth, with its 14th five-year plan pledging to reduce “emissions intensity” by just 18% through 2025, and the planned opening of 43 new coal-fuelled power stations
  • But India, like China, has missed the deadline to update its emissions reduction plan in advance of UN climate talks in Glasgow this November.
  • There is simply no class of enlightened technocrats in powerful governments waiting in the wings to save the day.
  • A proposal for curbing emissions from the developed world so that the billion individuals who live without electricity can enjoy its benefits would probably pass in a landslide in a world referendum,” the writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor has argued, “but it would likely fail if the vote were limited to people in the wealthiest countries.”
  • In the less upbeat SSP3, “resurgent nationalism” and “concerns about competitiveness and security” start to emerge as countries go their own way in trying to adapt to and (more rarely) mitigate rising temperatures.
  • A best-case scenario detailed in their report by IPCC scientists, Shared Socioeconomic Economic Pathway 1, involves “more inclusive development” and unprecedented collaboration among the world’s governments to manage the global commons
  • The best hope in the short term is for a popular front to browbeat the middling centrists who claim to “believe science” into actually acting on it, and beating back the illiberal right accordingly.
Javier E

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Says Big Risks Loom for the U.S. Economy - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...or-the-u-s-economy-11649045322

energy response economics politics ukraine lng risk

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said the U.S. economy is facing unprecedented risks that have him preparing for dramatic upheavals.
  • Consumers and businesses are flush with cash, wages are rising and the economy is growing rapidly after its pandemic slowdown. While consumer confidence has declined, Mr. Dimon says the more important gauge is booming spending.
  • Yet Mr. Dimon warned that the war in Ukraine could collide with rising inflation to slow the pandemic recovery and alter global alliances for decades to come.
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  • “While it is possible, and hopeful, that all of these events will have peaceful resolutions, we should prepare for the potential negative outcomes.”
  • Last April, as the world emerged from the pandemic, he saw a chance for an economic “Goldilocks moment”—fast, sustained growth alongside inflation and interest rates that drift slowly upward. Instead, growth was accompanied by inflation that well outpaced expectations.
  • “In hindsight, the medicine…was probably too much and lasted too long,” Mr. Dimon wrote in Monday’s letter, referring to pandemic-era stimulus measures that kept consumers afloat and borrowing costs low. 
  • Russia’s war against Ukraine and Western sanctions meant to stop it will “at a minimum” slow the global economy, Mr. Dimon said. Oil, commodity and agriculture markets are already reeling, he said. The prospect of additional sanctions, which he supports, could “dramatically, and unpredictably, increase their effect.”
  • “Along with the unpredictability of war itself and the uncertainty surrounding global commodity supply chains, this makes for a potentially explosive situation,”
  • Energy investments, he said, are especially needed to wean the world off Russian oil and gas. He specifically called for the U.S. to issue permits for oil and gas projects and increased shipping of liquefied natural gas to Europe.
  • ensuring current energy needs are met doesn’t have to come at the expense of investments in green energy and broader efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
  • “We need to secure proper energy supplies immediately for the next few years, which can be done while reducing CO2 emissions,” Mr. Dimon wrote.
Javier E

What Does Sustainable Living Look Like? Maybe Like Uruguay - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uruguay-renewable-energy.html

uruguay sustainability sustainable history culture thrift

shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • your carbon bill is world-historically anomalous but normal among your neighbors: 17 tons for transportation, 14 tons for housing, eight tons for food, six tons for services, five tons for goods.
  • That household total, 50 tons, represents a carbon footprint of about 25 tons per person. It’s a figure that eclipses the global median by a factor of five and is nowhere close to where it needs to be if you — we — want to stave off the worst of warming’s effects: around two tons per person.
  • This is the problem with any climate policy, big or small: It requires an imaginative leap. While the math of decarbonization and electric mobilization is clear, the future lifestyle it implies isn’t always
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  • This isn’t an American crisis alone. All around the world, developed nations have locked themselves into unsustainable, energy-intensive lifestyles.
  • Among those with the largest footprints are wealthy oil-producing microstates with small populations, like Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago, where the per-capita footprint pushes 60 tons
  • In the next tier, with the United States, are other sprawling, continent-size countries that use a lot of heating or cooling and where people tend to drive long distances, such as Canada and Australia (around 20 tons)
  • By dint of their density and reliance on mass transit, nations in Western Europe (as well as Japan and South Korea) make up most of the next tier, which cleaves roughly into two groups: places like Germany, Norway and the Netherlands that rely more on fossil fuels (around 15 tons),
  • places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and France that use a higher percentage of nuclear and renewable power. Though it’s half the size of an American’s, the footprint of someone in the typical French household still remains unsustainably high: around nine tons.
  • This is the paradox at the heart of climate change: We’ve burned far too many fossil fuels to go on living as we have, but we’ve also never learned to live well without them
  • the problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. N
  • The greatest crisis in human history may require imagining ways of living — not just of energy production but of daily habit — that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?
  • With a carbon footprint hovering around the global median of 4.5 tons per capita, it falls within a narrow tier of nearly developed countries within sight of two tons per capita — the estimated amount needed to limit the world to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.
  • There are countries more prosperous, and countries with a smaller carbon footprint, but perhaps in none do the overlapping possibilities of living well and living without ruin show as much promise as in Uruguay.
  • Mujica harbored another deeper belief too. For years, he had been arguing that the “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption” was the real cause of the linked energy and ecological crises.
  • In speeches, he pushed his people to reject materialism and embrace Uruguay’s traditions of simplicity and humility. “The culture of the West is a lie,” he told me. “The engine is accumulation. But we can’t pretend that the whole world can embrace it. We would need two or three more planets.”
  • He shared his own experience in solitary confinement, and how years without books or conversation drew him closer to the fundamentals of being: nature, love, family. “I learned to give value to little things in life. I kept some frogs as pets in prison and bathed them with my drinking water,”
  • “The true revolution is a different culture: learning to live with less waste and more time to enjoy freedom.”
  • By 2016, an array of biomass, solar and some 50 wind parks had replaced the grid’s use of oil, helping slash more than half a billion dollars from the country’s annual budget. Today, Uruguay boasts one of the world’s greenest grids, powered by 98 percent renewable energy.
  • prevailing economic conditions and something in Uruguay’s character had afforded the transition more receptivity than anyone predicted. This was one way in which a career in theoretical physics prepared Méndez for the world of policymaking, he said: “You have to be open to the solutions being very narrow and technical, or very wide and human.”
  • as the energy sector shifted, the mind-set in the country began to shift with it, Méndez said, sometimes in surprising ways. Some bought air-conditioning units, but many kept to their formerly low-consumption habits, continuing to hang their laundry and take the bus, dozens of which in Montevideo were now electric. Others bought plug-in timers to automate their laundries to run at night or installed solar water heaters on their roof
  • for Méndez, the biggest shift was among leaders. In cabinet and business meetings the problems of the future — like how to eliminate industrial waste and phase out gas entirely — began to feel like just that, he said: problems, not crises.
  • there appeared to be fundamental tension in how to bring Uruguayans along in the energy transition. On the one hand, the infrastructure shift needed to happen in the background, so the public never lost confidence in the grid — that part had been surprisingly smooth. But on the other hand, it was important to keep people engaged so they would support the necessary changes to come
  • Emaldi and her colleagues focused their efforts on electrifying transportation and growing the green-energy sector. The government eliminated duties and taxes on electric cars and rebranded a tax on gas as a CO2 tax, with a portion funding green initiatives.
  • “What comes in the near future will change more lives,” Minister Paganini told me. “You have to get into sectors or areas that are much more difficult than just changing the generation of electricity.” You need to change human behavior.
  • fossil fuels gave humanity the ability to choose our food, to transform a rainforest or windblown desert into something fertile and constant, a biotic vending machine from which eaters can select whatever they want whenever they want it. This choice now drives about a third of all global emissions. Most of them stem from the growing process itself — clearing land, fertilizing crops — with the bulk of the rest coming indirectly from the vast web of manufacturing and delivery systems that bring it to us: packaging crackers, refrigerating drumsticks, airlifting avocados.
  • One reason the global cattle industry had become so damaging, Baethgen said, was that too many grasslands had been razed or degraded. In the short term, feedlots produced more food, often with lower emissions, since cows got fatter faster and burped less frequently, but over the long term, without the grasslands to recycle carbon, net emissions built up. From Baethgen’s perspective, every damaged field thus represented a huge opportunity: By restoring grasslands, he could not only pull more greenhouse gases into the ground, but also grow more beef. And since the 1990s, Uruguay has managed a remarkable feat: increasing its annual production of beef without any increase in greenhouse gases — and doing all of this on natural pasturelands.
  • He believed too much climate science relied on big-picture modeling to drive engagement. “Those science-fiction scenarios were great to increase awareness,” he said. “But if you give a minister of agriculture information for the year 2080, that doesn’t do anything.” He waved a hand over the landscape. “You’re providing information, far in the future, with no resolution and no certainty. That’s the best combination to ensure paralysis. Nobody does anything.”
  • In his 2016 book, “The Great Derangement,” the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh says it’s unwise to reduce climate denial to “only a function of money and manipulation.” The sheer level of paralysis, he writes, “suggests that the climate crisis threatens to unravel something deeper, without which large numbers of the people would be at a loss to find meaning.” Ghosh wonders if the modern consumer mind-set can ever change, collectively or otherwise: “In a world where the rewards of a carbon-intensive economy are regarded as wealth, this must be reckoned as a very significant material sacrifice.”
  • Esponda described his family as middle to upper middle class. Both he and Laroca were economists for the city and together made about $30,000 a year. “Everybody in Uruguay is middle class,” he said. I thought I knew what he meant. Unlike in the United States, I found it difficult in Uruguay to discern class differences. Conspicuous displays of wealth seemed rare, as were the tiers of consumer goods that otherwise revealed someone’s spending. “There’s not the American consumerist mentality of ‘We need to get the next new thing,’”
  • On trips to New Orleans and Chicago, he had been transfixed by the selection of junk food in convenience stores, the undamaged furniture left on the street. “You guys throw away your whole home,” he told me. “Here, most of this stuff wouldn’t be trash.”
  • Esponda pointed to his couch, a sagging green camelback. It was given to them by his parents, he said, and barely fit his growing family anymore. But he couldn’t find a reason to replace it, even with a dual income that allowed them to save each month. “Why would I?” he said. It was a mentality apparent throughout the couple’s apartment. In stark contrast to most American homes with two kids, their apartment wasn’t overflowing with toys. Two bikes leaned against the wall by a plastic slide. “Our choices don’t really have anything to do with the environment,” he said. “It’s about saving money, yes, but also being careful with what we buy.”
  • Several people described frugality to me as a core tenet of the Uruguayan political project, though globalization had played a role, too.
  • something a man in the asentamientos said to me: “Nobody has confronted the real problem: How will the country grow?”
  • I thought of a single dad I met in Montevideo who said I shouldn’t think of his country as a model or example. It was too small, its progress too troubled. It was more like a laboratory for the rest of the world, he said.
  • We often picture the future as a kind of growth, a set of possibilities to expand and realize, but maybe it could also be the opposite, a present to reconcile and safeguard.
  • Part of the reason America has become so paralyzed by climate change is precisely that we’ve failed to acknowledge the limits it imposes — on where we can live, the things we can have, the household we can envision. This is a particularly difficult idea to sell to a country perched atop decades of accrued wealth, which was itself amassed by generations imagining further comfort and choice.
  • In the coming months, gas prices spiked, inflation climbed and the price of energy began to strangle Europe. No future seemed as certain as a less abundant one.
  • A former bank analyst at Bear Stearns, Estrada had decided to take a 75 percent pay cut to return home and eventually took a job with a local energy firm. “I read studies about how there’s a diminishing return on happiness above a certain income, and I experienced that,” he told me of living in New York. “I had more money than I had things I wanted to buy.” He said that contracting his life had allowed him to be more mindful of its details. It reminded him of the household his parents ran in the 1980s, when things were so precarious. No one left lights on or wasted water. They were mindful of the things they bought.
  • “We learn to live with less here,” he said. “And it’s made my life better.”
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