1.5 overshoot warming 5
4/22
SEE AGW 4 12 24
merri ok
SEE CRYPTO COAL MUSK CRAFT
see dereg 5 trump zeldin SCOTUS
see ukraine watershed, vlad
SEE COP 30 BRAZIL 11 25
4 err field missing?
see ESA
see doom tip pt
see deforestation. amazon/ brazil/ bolsonaro
see ice loss
see wildfires
see ocean warm ACIDIFCATION CORAL
see SEA LEVEL RISE [new heat stats? 5 26]
SEE WEATHER CHAOS --> FAMINE
see global weirding --> INSURANCE COSTS --> INFLATION HOMELESS
see jrnl fail
see drought heAT death
bak 2 24
---
B3 ~ IRA solar and wind are no longer energy, more coal subsidies, end methane limits/fines?
BBB--> IRA passed but concession on fed land
---
bill gates bs artl 11 25
---
-=-=
1.5 KYOTO --> 1.8?! 9 26
-=-=
ref
With the U.S. midterm elections less than three weeks away, is it any surprise that corruption has emerged as voters’ top concern? “Corrupt” was the adjective most often chosen when registered voters were asked for a single word to describe President Donald Trump, according to a survey conducted in September by The Economist and the market research firm YouGov, with 53 percent of respondents calling Trump “corrupt” and only 23 percent saying he is “honest.” A Pew Research Center poll in early October found that nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) of Americans are “not confident” that Trump keeps his business interests separate from his presidential decisions.
Americans can thank diligent investigative reporting for alerting them to much of the self-dealing by Trump, his family, and aides. For example, The Washington Post has reported that Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, were investors in 15 companies that “collectively generated at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options.” On Tuesday, in a rare retreat, the White House asked Kimberly Guilfoyle to resign as U.S. ambassador to Greece after a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that Guilfoyle promised political favors to a Trump donor if he would quietly pay off her $100,000 American Express credit card bill.
Throughout the history of modern polling, voters have usually ranked the economy (or its proxies, such as “the cost of living”) as their top issue. Now, linking corruption with the cost of living, “Democrats Are Making Corruption Messaging a Pocketbook Issue,” a recent Politico headline declared. The Democrats’ claim, The New York Times reported, “is that rampant corruption in Congress and the administration is directly costing average citizens who are paying more for necessities like groceries, gas, and medicine.”
Both Democrats and the press, however, so far, are overlooking one of the most overt and consequential examples of Trump’s pay-to-play behavior. On May 24, 2024, Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow of The Washington Post published a blockbuster exposé, reporting that Trump privately told a group of oil company CEOs they should donate $1 billion to his 2024 presidential campaign. It would be a good “deal” for the industry, Trump reportedly said, because of the tax and regulation benefits they would receive if he returned to the Oval Office.
Specifically, Trump reportedly said he would reverse the Biden administration’s pause on new liquefied natural gas, or LNG, export permits, approve more drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, and roll back environmental regulations the industry didn’t like, including electric vehicle purchasing mandates and vehicle emissions limits. Dawsey and Joselow then published a follow-up, reporting that Trump also promised to soften Federal Trade Commission scrutiny of industry mergers and acquisitions.
Two and a half years later, his administration has delivered on each of these promises and then some. The Brennan Center has published a well-documented summary of Trump’s assault on climate policy—including his administration’s repeal of the “endangerment finding,” which granted the federal government the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions—that connects the dots between Trump’s actions and the many billions of dollars the oil industry has reaped as a result, including many millions of dollars benefiting oil executives as individuals.
What makes all this relevant to the midterm elections—beyond the fact that the leader of the Republican Party is directly implicated—is that many of Trump’s accomplishments were only possible because of rubber-stamp support from Republicans in Congress. Now those same Republicans must face the voters. How will they explain themselves?
To be clear, Democrats don’t get a pass here; corruption has been part of politics forever, and one of the press’s central obligations is to expose and hold its perpetrators to account, whoever they may be. That requires following the facts where they lead. But it also requires challenging the practice, still common among old-school newsrooms, of false equivalence—of portraying both sides as equally culpable for a given transgression for fear that an accurate portrayal would look like “taking sides.” If most of the facts point in one direction, our reporting should have the integrity and courage to say so.
Most voters don’t have access to directly question candidates seeking their votes. It’s our job as journalists to ask questions on their behalf so they can make informed decisions about their leaders.
Corruption is understandably a hot issue these days. Meanwhile, new scientific analysis from the nonprofit Climate Central shows that every congressional district in the country is hotter than it was in 1970, thanks to climate change. No surprise, then, that polling also shows that the vast majority of people want their government to take stronger climate action. Journalism that connects those dots—accurately and fairly, and without pulling any punches—is a true public service.
-=-=
-=-=
DK 9 26
NPRTrump's EPA repeals pollution limits on fossil fuel power plants
The Trump administration is repealing limits on greenhouse gas emissions emitted by the nation's fossil fuel-fired power plants. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency called it the largest deregulatory action of the U.S. power sector in history.
This action eliminates rules the EPA finalized during the Biden administration that required existing coal and new natural gas-fired power plants to significantly reduce their carbon dioxide pollution, starting in the 2030s. Carbon dioxide from human activity is the main driver of global warming.
Power plants are the second largest source of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S., behind transportation.
At a press conference on Monday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said that the actions to curtail planet-heating pollution under the Biden and Obama administrations led to higher energy prices and prevented the country from reaching its full energy potential.
"The days of Biden and Obama working to destroy natural gas and coal are over," said the EPA administrator.
Large solar and wind projects, however, provide more cost-competitive energy than natural gas and coal projects, according to financial services firm Lazard.
Zeldin made his remarks in Houston, where the U.S. is hosting the G20 Energy Summit. The administrator said that the EPA was also proposing to rescind all remaining greenhouse gas emissions standards for power plants. "All of them," he said.
Environmental groups say the move to repeal power plant rules will increase pollutants that harm human health. "These rules are really important, not just for our climate, but also to protect public health from the dangers of local air pollution," says Gudrun Thompson, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Trump has rejected the basic tenets of climate science and has called climate change a "con job." This is his latest effort to reverse former President Biden's climate agenda and make it more difficult for future administrations to limit the human-caused greenhouse gas pollution heating the planet. Environmental groups plan to challenge the decision in court.
Power plant regulations that never happened
The legal basis for rules to limit climate pollution from power plants started with the Supreme Court's 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision. It concluded that the EPA is required to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. That led to the EPA's 2009 endangerment finding that designated greenhouse gas pollution as a threat to human health.
In 2014, the Obama administration proposed the "Clean Power Plan" aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 32%, from 2005 levels, by 2030. That plan faced legal challenges and never went into effect. Still the country met that goal well before 2030, as coal-fired power plants were replaced by natural gas plants that emit less carbon dioxide and renewable energy projects began producing more electricity.
Five years later, Trump replaced the Obama-era Clean Power Plan with his Affordable Clean Energy rule, which allowed power plants to emit more climate pollution.
Then Biden came into office in 2021 with the most ambitious plan to address climate change of any major party candidate in U.S. history. The administration set a goal of eliminating climate pollution from the power sector by 2035.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in again and restricted the EPA's options for regulating power plant emissions. Justices said that without a specific law, the agency cannot force the entire power generation industry to move away from fossil fuels toward less-polluting energy sources.
So, instead, the EPA created regulations governing individual power plants. The agency and environmental groups believed that would allow the rules to survive scrutiny from a court dominated by conservative justices. But now the Trump administration is eliminating the limits altogether.
Last month was the hottest ever recorded month globally, because of human-caused climate change and a developing El Niño climate pattern.
The EPA's decision to repeal emission regulations on power plants comes at a time when the world needs to be limiting planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions, not allowing more emissions, says Michael Gerrard, law professor at Columbia University and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
" 2026 is shaping up to be the warmest year in recorded history," Gerrard says, "and we ain't seen nothing yet."
-=-=
Trump repeals emissions regulations of fossil-fuel power plants
- 2 days agoThe reversal of a Biden-era cap on emissions from the plants could have devastating effects in efforts to stop climate change
Oil & Gas Journal
---
omfg
Scientists warn Trump plan to axe US ocean monitoring system will leave world ‘flying blind’
Experts say dismantling the ocean observation system will ‘severely degrade’ the accuracy of weather predictions
Seascape: the state of our oceans is supported by
[
Fri 5 Jun 2026
The Trump administration’s plan to dismantle an ocean observation system vital to understanding the climate crisis and marine ecosystems would “severely degrade” the accuracy of weather predictions and El Niño forecasts, with economic consequences for the US, European and American scientists have warned.
Decommissioning the US system, which plays a major part in a global ocean observation network, would lead to a massive increase in error in the annual estimates of ocean heating rates, according to research published last month.
As a result, the forecasts and early warning systems for storms, tropical cyclones and El Niño would degrade, “sometimes dangerously so”, according to Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), run by the US National Science Foundation, is a vast network of seafloor systems, underwater gliders and moored surface platforms that feeds data to researchers, policymakers, educators and mariners worldwide. The initiative, which covers both US coastlines and extends into the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean, has been used to study marine heatwaves, harmful algal blooms, subduction zone earthquakes, ocean acidification and fisheries variability.
Dismantling it would remove a major component of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), a network of robotic floats, moored buoys and research vessels experts describe as the “eyes and ears” of the ocean. The warning systems based on the data, “save lives”, experts say.
Prescient research published in Nature Climate Change last month showed how data losses in GOOS, a UN-coordinated framework for ocean data for weather and climate collected by several countries, could degrade the ocean heat estimates that underpin weather prediction, El Niño forecasting and fisheries management. Losing US observations would be worse than randomly losing 80% of all ocean data worldwide, it found. US-funded platforms span every ocean basin, plugging critical gaps that no other nation currently fills.
Speich, a co-author of the research, said: “Ocean heat content is the most robust indicator of climate change we have – not just of what is happening in the ocean, but of the entire climate system”. Vertical temperature profiles that provide ocean heat content, are “amongst the simplest measurements we can make”, she said.
“Lose them, and you lose your ability to track not just ocean warming but the climate system as a whole – they are a proxy for variables that become unavailable the moment the observations stop.
“Forecasts would continue – but they would degrade, sometimes dangerously so. Atmospheric observations alone are not sufficient” said Speich. “Ocean data [is] fundamental to early warning systems for tropical storms, cyclones and El Niño. And the consequences would not stop at science: the economic costs would be felt within the United States itself, from agriculture to insurance to disaster response.”
The loss of US observations, in a year predicted to be an El Niño year, with “supercharged” weather extremes, could also “lose the ability to see it coming clearly to act in time”, she said.
“The stakes are concrete: farmers in the US and across South America use El Niño forecasts to decide what to plant and when – whether to expect drought or flooding shapes every agricultural decision months in advance.”
The most recent El Niño, which hit in 2023-2024, was one of the five strongest on record and contributed to 2024’s record-breaking increase in global temperature.
Removing US observations alone would produce a 163% increase in error for annual ocean heating rates, the research by Speich and her co-authors found.
On Thursday, the European Union said it would boost its own monitoring of the world’s oceans by investing in a €92m ($107m) initiative called OceanEye, more than half of which will go to GOOS. The announcement, by the European Commission, was long-planned, not a direct response to the US move.
John P Abraham, professor of engineering at the University of St Thomas, in Minnesota, and co-author of the research paper, described the US administration’s move to dismantle the $368m OOI system as “penny-wise, pound foolish”.
“The US government wants to save less than a billion in sensors, which are the eyes and ears of the ocean” said Abraham. “We have hundreds of billions in climate costs per year. The cost of the observation system is a fraction of the climate costs from hurricanes and storms that hit the US. ”
The US suffered more than 400 climate and weather disasters where damages exceeded or reached $1bn,between 1980 and 2024. In 2024 alone, the costs of such disasters amounted to $177bn. This “billion dollar climate and weather product”, managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer be updated due to “evolving priorities”, according to a note on its website.
The system, is, Abraham said is “quite an inexpensive way to reduce climate-related costs”.
“This is not about saving money, this is about killing climate science research,” Abraham said.
Samantha Burgess, the strategic climate lead at the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the European Union’s Earth observation system which integrates European space data with in-situ measurements to monitor changes and provide forecasts, said ocean observations are “irreplaceable” because “we can’t see the deep ocean from space.” They “save lives” by warning us of severe storms, she said.
Burgess said: “We need international cooperation to get the best available observations to mitigate risks in our changing world. Without ocean observations we are flying blind.”
A statement earlier this week by the National Science Foundation, which funds and oversees the OOI, said the program was not being cancelled entirely and described the plans as a “descope”, or reduction of elements, though it was not clear what data collection capacity would be left.
ref guk
The Trump administration plans to dismantle a $368m deep-sea observation system that has for more than a decade provided crucial data on ocean systems and climate change.
In a notice, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it had “initiated descoping of the Ocean Observatories Initiative” (OOI), a vast ocean observation network comprising more than 900 instruments that collect data on ocean health, including current patterns, climate variability and marine biodiversity.
The notice, issued on 21 May, came just days after Trump fired all members of the independent board that oversees the NSF.
A statement by NSF head of media affairs, Mike England, said the program was not being cancelled entirely and described the plans as a “descope”, or reduction of elements, though it was not clear what data collection capacity would be left.
The NSF’s notice described plans to remove “all in-water infrastructure” from observation sites off the coasts of North Carolina, Oregon, Washington and Alaska, as well as from the Irminger Sea, a marginal sea between Greenland and Iceland.
Some scientists expressed dismay at the plan, while Democratic lawmakers said they would fight it, including Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who called it a “shortsighted move” that would “end up costing American taxpayers more not less”, the New York Times reported.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, said on X: “Fossil fuel is heating our oceans by the zettajoule, so Trump’s corrupt fossil fuel stooges want to turn off the monitors.”
Following the announcement, the OOI’s principal investigator, Jim Edson, said the NSF’s plan involves a phased recovery and infrastructure removal process expected to take place over the next 15 months. “As infrastructure is recovered from each array, the associated real-time data streams and observing capabilities at those locations will come to an end,” Edson said.
The move will bring to an end more than a decade of continuous ocean monitoring after the system first became operational in June 2016.
Describing the network as having “delivered the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems”, Edson added: “We are profoundly grateful for the extraordinary efforts of the scientists, engineers, operators, educators, students and partners who made this facility possible and who continue to advance its legacy through the use of its data.”
The dismantling of the OOI marks another step in the Trump administration’s rollback of science and climate initiatives. It also follows Trump’s push to expand deep-sea mining and loosen fishing regulations, a policy that has alarmed ocean scientists and climate experts.
Hilary Palevsky, a professor focusing on marine biogeochemistry and oceanography at Boston College, pointed to the significance of the data that will be lost, particularly given the sophisticated engineering required to deploy and maintain the instruments.
“One of the real powers of this OOI and a lot of the collection of autonomous data is that scientists like me don’t have to have the expertise or the resources to be able to deploy this kind of infrastructure ourselves,” Palevsky said. “Being able to have instruments, both actually out in the atmosphere floating in the surface ocean, as well as surviving through the really deep mixing and waves in the subsurface.”
She said: “Over the more than 10 years that these things have been deployed, they’ve just gotten better and better at it. And so the data return has also gotten better and better over time … the scientific community was really just getting to the point of being able to capitalize on the data that had been collected so far … I’m really disappointed for the continuation of this important data set.”
Palevsky also warned that rebuilding such a network in the future would be difficult, saying: “If we want to put [the instruments] back out again, we need people who know how to do it and the team that knows how to do it is being dismantled along with the infrastructure program itself.
“We’re potentially at risk of having a gap in our ability to regain the expertise to do things that we had sort of just figured out how to pull off.”
For Palevsky and her students, OOI data has helped shed light on biological production in the ocean and its role in carbon sequestration – the process by which carbon dioxide is captured and stored – as well as deep-ocean processes, marine ecosystems and fisheries.
Data from the OOI has also contributed to research on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents that studies suggest may be more vulnerable to collapse than previously thought, with potentially severe consequences for the global climate.
“One of the important processes in the AMOC is what we call convection, this really deep mixing of surface waters into the deep ocean that happens in winter, basically driven by the surface ocean getting really cold because the atmosphere gets super cold in winter and big, windy storms blow across the surface ocean,” Palevsky said.
“We have gained some really important insights into both how that happens in the Irminger Sea in particular, and how the drivers of that process vary from year to year from the observations that have been gained at this site,” she added.
For scientists like Palevsky, the consequences of dismantling the OOI extend far beyond ocean researchers, particularly as climate change intensifies extreme weather events around the world.
“As we reduce the amount of data that we have, the observations, as well as the science more generally to understand what’s happening in the climate system, it makes it much harder for us as a society to understand what we’re facing and what we need to do to plan for and adapt to it,” she said.
In a statement to the Guardian, the NSF head of media affairs, Mike England, said the program was not being cancelled entirely: “The NSF is not cancelling the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The decision to descope aligns with NSF’s wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.”
---
---
The Simple Truth: Sea Levels are Rising
ocean heat content zetajules TIPPING PT
consent resol
13,993 views Apr 29, 2026
April 29 | Senator Whitehouse takes to the Senate Floor to ask if his colleagues can agree on this one, simple truth: sea levels are rising. The reality of climate change is made up of many, many simple truths. Today’s simple truth: sea levels are rising. Can we agree on that?
8
is a graph showing the increase in ocean
1:32
heat content.
1:35
It's measured in zeta jewels.
1:38
Zeta jewels is a very big number. Uh
1:42
zeta means it has 18 zeros.
1:45
It's a billion trillions or a trillion
1:47
billions depending on which way you want
1:49
to go about it. To put it at a more
1:54
practical scale, the entire production
1:58
of energy by the human species on all of
2:00
planet Earth adds up to 1/2 of a
2:04
zedigjle.
2:06
The price we pay for the fossil fuel
2:08
component of that half zedle of energy
2:12
is an ocean whose temperature is
2:15
increasing by around 15 zedles a year.
2:20
It's a 30 times magnifier
2:24
because of the effect of fossil fuel
2:28
emissions.
---
---
YIKES OMG DOH
WMO ADDS ENERGY IMBALANCE AFTER HANSEN, AGW ACCELERATING?! 4 26
ZELDEN, WRIGHT AND BURGUM KILL EPA REGS, ENDANGERMENT
DOH ESG KILLED BY TRUMPISM, ~ CLIMATE LAWSUITS
2023 was the busiest year in the anti-ESG (environmental, social, and governance investing) trend in the states, with 26 of the 48 total anti-ESG laws passed that year in 31 states. AFP, along with other heavily Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, led a state and federal crusade against “ESG” risk assessments in investing as a means of shielding the fossil fuel industry from accountability for the investment risks posed by climate change and pollution.
---
---
ggl 3 26
Climate Deniers Expected More Resistance to Trump’s Fossil Fuel Blitz - DeSmog
*published in partnership with The Guardian.
As Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America’s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the “silent” acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president’s aggressive pro-fossil fuel agenda.
“In my 26 years of being focused on climate, I’ve never seen anything like this. Trump is gutting everything they ever stood for,” Marc Morano, a long-time climate denier, said in January at the “World Prosperity Forum,” a five-day event in Zurich, Switzerland, billed as a right-wing alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The event’s sponsor was The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation for decades, and was also a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for President Trump’s second administration.
“Billionaires are silent. Democrats in Congress have been silent. Climate activists. There has been no push-back on this,” Morano said — and he may have a point, according to some experts who research the climate denial movement.
“The Trump administration just marched in and destroyed the crown jewel of climate science in the United States,” said Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and society at Brown University, referring to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the country’s premier climate research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in December.
“And nothing happened. There wasn’t even a whimper. I never thought I’d ever say this: Marc Morano is correct.”
Last month, the Trump administration repealed the 2009 “endangerment finding” establishing that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health. It was a determination that undergirded the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating pollution from automobiles and power plants.
Elimination of the endangerment finding had long been a core goal of the climate denial movement.
Its repeal is just the latest in a long line of President Trump’s climate-related destruction. Since taking office in January 2025, his administration has significantly curtailed the country’s weather forecasting organizations and climate science research facilities, published reports denying established climate science, and made deep cuts to funding for climate-related energy and community projects.
Under the leadership of Trump appointee Chris Wright, the Department of Energy last year all but banned its key renewable energy department from using terminology like “climate change,” “green,” and “sustainability.”
”Trump overturned Biden’s climate agenda at breakneck speed,” Morano said at the Heartland Institute’s Zurich forum.
Instead of pushing back on this blitz, many Democratic Party representatives have retreated from talking directly about climate change across social media, podcasts, speeches, and in Congress. The party is now embroiled in a debate about whether affordability is a better message than climate action, despite polling suggesting that 63 percent of the American public believes the president and Congress should prioritize clean energy.
This trend hasn’t gone without resistance in the party, however. “Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ — people who think Dems should stop talking about climate,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) posted on social media in January.
Genevieve Guenther, a climate communications expert and founding director of the advocacy group End Climate Silence, largely agrees. “The Democrats’ climate hushing is politically foolish,” she said in an email. “It only benefits the Trump regime’s agenda.”
At the Heartland Institute event, Morano expressed delighted “shock” over the “flips on climate” of tech moguls Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, the founders of Amazon and Microsoft respectively, whose companies have abandoned once-ambitious climate promises as they confront the skyrocketing energy demands of their AI businesses.
Gates, whose foundation has donated millions of dollars to a think tank run by climate crisis denier Bjorn Lomborg, published a controversial memo in October arguing that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and advocating for ending climate funding in favor of direct humanitarian aid.
Microsoft and Amazon, which have donated large sums to Trump, have both recently embraced fossil-fuel powered AI data centers alongside Trump energy officials and fossil fuel industry players.
In early February, Bezos, who is also the owner of the Washington Post, slashed at least 14 reporters from the venerated paper’s climate desk. Just weeks later, the Post published an editorial board opinion, “EPA is right to reverse Obama overreach,” praising Trump’s repeal of the endangerment finding.
Morano noted that overall, journalists have been reporting less aggressively about Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. “When you have Lee Zeldin, the EPA chief, calling climate a cult, a scam, religion, he doesn’t even get push-back from reporters,” Morano said.
During Trump’s first term, by contrast, environmental officials like Scott Pruitt, who led the Environmental Protection Agency from February 2017 to July 2018, “would have to be very careful on climate,” Morano said. Otherwise “they would be beaten and browed by the media.”
The growing “climate hush” is not limited to the U.S. — a hushed silence about climate change has expanded across the globe.
At Davos in January, world leaders across business and government talked noticeably less about addressing climate change than in previous years.
Why? “In today’s deeply polarizing U.S. political stance, climate discussion has come to feel so radioactive that many leaders would rather avoid it,” Anjali Chaudhry, a business sustainability researcher at Dominican University, wrote about the silence in Forbes.
Even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who once served as a United Nations Secretary-General Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, limited his mentions of climate change at Davos to a quiet reference to the COP climate summit and a simple “Canadians remain committed to sustainability.”
Despite all this quiet, the vast majority of people worldwide, 89 percent, support climate action, even if they underestimate how much others care — a misperception that has added fuel to a “spiral of science.”
What can be done to counteract the trend towards silence? “In this time of ‘climate hushing,’ having conversations about climate change is more important than ever,” Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and climate communications expert, advised in her influential blog.
For environmental sociologist Brulle, addressing the growing hush around climate must go beyond talking.
“I think the climate movement in the United States has failed. It has flat failed, and that means we need to rebuild this movement in a completely different manner,” he said.
Environmentalist Bill McKibben is more optimistic. “I think [the Trump administration] is whistling past the graveyard of their fossil-fueled dreams,” he said in an email. “The real story of the last year is how politicians, movements, entire nations are moving fast towards clean energy. They’re not all doing it in the name of ‘climate,’ but we’re making faster climate progress than we have at any point in the last 40 years.”
McKibben added a caveat: “Fast enough? Of course not. The deniers have delayed change and that continues. But it’s going far faster than they want it to — hence their resort to political gamesmanship.”
---
---
OMFG 2 26 12TH DN
UCS AND --- SUED TO SHUT DN BS COMM BUT STILL LOST ON EPA REGS
9:31
President Trump accepted the Washington
9:33
Coal Club's inaugural award on
9:36
Wednesday, declaring him the quote
9:38
undisputed champion of beautiful, clean
9:42
coal, unquote.
9:44
Trump accepted the award, a statue of a
9:47
coal miner from Peabody Energy President
9:49
and CEO Jim Gretch during a White House
9:52
event where Trump announced he directed
9:54
the Pentagon to purchase electricity
9:56
from coal fired plants and said he'd
9:59
asked the energy department to provide
10:01
$175 million in federal funds for
10:05
upgrades at several US coal plants.
10:09
I've saved 74 coal power plants from
10:13
crushing restrictions and closures that
10:16
would have been forced to shut down in
10:18
the very immediate future. And today,
10:20
I'm proud to announce that the Tennessee
10:22
Valley Authority is taking action to
10:24
save two major coal plants in Tennessee.
10:27
Tennessee Valley Authority. In response,
10:30
the Natural Resources Defense Council
10:33
wrote, quote, "While Americans are
10:35
demanding clean, affordable energy, the
10:38
Trump administration's using our tax
10:40
dollars to prop up the nation's
10:42
dirtiest, least efficient power plants.
10:45
It's no wonder fossil fuel lobbyists are
10:48
handing Trump an award today." unquote.
10:51
---
icn 1 26
New Climate Reports Show ‘Unprecedented Run of Global Heat’
BY BOB BERWYN
Data from multiple international agencies shows the reality of a rapidly warming world.
Hochul Wants More Nuclear Power in New York
BY LAUREN DALBAN
The governor’s State of the State address also focused on lowering utility rates. Discussion of the state’s Climate Act was notably absent.
Ocean Damage Nearly Doubles the Cost of Climate Change
BY JOHNNY STURGEON
Ignoring the blue economy has left a multi-trillion-dollar blind spot in climate finance, according to a study from Scripps Oceanography.
In Hurricane-Prone Florida, Legislators Reconsider New Growth and Development Law
BY AMY GREEN
Three bills have been introduced, as the annual legislative session begins this week, that would revise SB 180, last year’s controversial new law that blocked local resiliency efforts.
Iran’s Regime Has Survived War, Sanctions and Uprising. Environmental Crises May Bring It Down.
BY KATIE SURMA
Decades of water depletion, dam building and repression of scientists and environmentalists have driven Iran toward ecological crises that are fueling protests rocking the country.
ICN 1 26
Ocean Warming Breaks Record for Ninth Straight Year
BY JOHNNY STURGEON
Scientists warn the ocean’s accumulation of energy is fueling extreme weather patterns and destabilizing marine ecosystems.
---
---
simon clark 
mogera ACCESS TO GOOD INFO IS HU RIGHT
Prof Morgera's report: https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/ge...
28:15
argument for this has been made clear by now. Climate misinformation produces clear and demonstrable harms both to the
28:22
environment and to us and our human rights. But the obvious counterargument is, what about my freedom of speech? Why
28:29
can't I say what I want even though I know that something is inaccurate? I mean it is essential to protect
28:35
freedom of speech and in all my work I've always mention how important it is to have as open conversations as
28:42
possible. Now the question here is different if this is a conduct that's been repeated and that over time has led
28:49
to the protection of a vested interest which is uh intrinsically uh opposite to
28:55
the protection of a public good. I mean climate change has been recognized asstructural violence against children for instance by the UN committee on children's rights and incitation to
violence um is for instance one of the very few exceptions that has been recognized to freedom of expression. I
29:15
think there's two things to highlight here that Professor MorgeRa said. Firstly, this is not a law that is
29:21
criminalizing ignorance about climate change. Like just saying something wrong wouldn't break this hypothetical law.
29:27
We're talking about a law that's quite explicitly targeting the fossil fuel industry that has a long history of
29:35
acting against the public good. And secondly, by basing the argument for this law on human rights...
---
---
an 12 25
As the year comes to a close, 2025 looks like a turning point in the world’s fight against climate change. Most conspicuously, it was the year the U.S. abandoned the effort. The Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which unites virtually all the world’s countries in a voluntary commitment to halt climate change. And for the first time in the 30-year history of the U.N.’s international climate talks, the U.S. did not send a delegation to the annual conference, COP30, which took place in Belém, Brazil.
*This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.
The Trump administration’s assault on climate action has been far from symbolic. Over the summer, the president pressed his Republican majority in Congress to gut a Biden-era law that was projected to cut U.S. emissions by roughly a third compared to their peak, putting the country within reach of its Paris Agreement commitments. In the fall, Trump officials used hardball negotiating tactics to stall, if not outright derail, a relatively uncontroversial international plan to decarbonize the heavily polluting global shipping industry. And even though no other country has played a larger role in causing climate change, the U.S. under Trump has cut the vast majority of global climate aid funding, which is intended to help countries that are in the crosshairs of climate change despite doing virtually nothing to cause it.
It may come as no surprise, then, that other world leaders took barely veiled swipes at Trump at the COP30 climate talks last month. Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement and a longtime Costa Rican diplomat, summed up a common sentiment.
“Ciao, bambino! You want to leave, leave,” she said before a crowd of reporters, using an Italian phrase that translates “bye-bye, little boy.”
These stark shifts in the U.S. position on climate change, which President Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “con job,” are only the latest and most visible signs of a deeper shift underway. Historically, the U.S. and other wealthy, high-emitting nations have been cast as the primary drivers of climate action, both because of their outsize responsibility for the crisis and because of the greater resources at their disposal. Over the past decade, however, the hopes that developed countries will prioritize financing both the global energy transition and adaptation measures to protect the world’s most vulnerable countries have been dashed — in part by rightward lurches in domestic politics, external crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and revolts by wealthy-country voters over cost-of-living concerns.
The resulting message to developing countries has been unmistakable: Help is not on the way.
In the vacuum left behind, a different engine of global climate action has emerged, one not political or diplomatic but industrial. A growing marketplace of green technologies — primarily solar, wind, and batteries — has made the adoption of renewable energy far faster and more cost-effective than almost anyone predicted. The world has dramatically exceeded expectations for solar power generation in particular, producing roughly 8 times more last year than in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed.
China is largely responsible for the breakneck pace of clean energy growth. It now produces about 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines and 80 percent of solar panels. In the first half of 2025, the country added more than twice as much new solar capacity as the rest of the world combined. As a result of these Chinese-led global energy market changes and other countries’ Paris Agreement pledges, the world is now on a path to see 2.3 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.1 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, compared to preindustrial temperatures, far lower than the roughly 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) projections expected just 10 years ago.
These policies can be viewed as a symbol of global cooperation on climate change, but for Chinese leadership, the motivation is primarily economic. That, experts say, may be why they’re working. China’s policies are driving much of the rest of the world’s renewable energy growth. As the cost of solar panels and wind turbines drops year over year, it is enabling other countries, especially in the Global South, to choose cleaner sources of electricity over fossil fuels — and also to purchase some of the world’s cheapest mass-produced electric vehicles. Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia are all expected to see massive increases in solar deployment in the next few years, thanks to their partnerships with Chinese firms.
“China is going to, over time, create a new narrative and be a much more important driver for global climate action,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Shuo said that the politics-and-rhetoric-driven approach to solving climate change favored by wealthy countries has proved unreliable and largely failed. In its place, a Chinese-style approach that aligns countries’ economic agendas with decarbonization will prove to be more successful, he predicted.
Meanwhile, many countries have begun reorganizing their diplomatic and economic relationships in ways that no longer assume American leadership. That shift accelerated this year in part due to Trump’s decisions to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, to impose tariffs on U.S. allies, and more broadly, to slink away into self-imposed isolation. European countries facing punishing tariffs have looked to deepen trade relationships with China, Japan, and other Asian countries. The EU’s new carbon border tax, which applies levies to imports from outside the bloc, will take effect in January. The move was once expected to trigger conflict between the EU and U.S., but is now proceeding without outright support — or strong opposition — from the Trump administration.
African countries, too, are asserting leadership. The continent hosted its own climate summit earlier this year, pledging to raise $50 billion to promote at least 1,000 locally led solutions in energy, agriculture, water, transport, and resilience by 2030. “The continent has moved the conversation from crisis to opportunity, from aid to investment, and from external prescription to African-led,” said Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, chairperson of the African Union Commission. “We have embraced the powerful truth [that] Africa is not a passive recipient of climate solutions, but the actor and architect of these solutions.”
The U.S. void has also allowed China to throw more weight around in international climate negotiations. Although Chinese leadership remained cautious and reserved in the negotiation halls in Belém, the country pushed its agenda on one issue in particular: trade. Since China has invested heavily in renewable energy technology, tariffs on its products could hinder not only its own economic growth but also the world’s energy transition. As a result the final agreement at COP30, which like all other United Nations climate agreements is ultimately non-binding, included language stipulating that unilateral trade measures like tariffs “should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.”
Calling out tariffs on the first page of the final decision at COP30 would not have been possible if negotiators for the United States had been present, according to Shuo. “China was able to force this issue on the agenda,” he said.
But Shuo added that other countries are still feeling the gravitational pull of U.S. policies, even as the Trump administration sat out climate talks this year. In Belém last month, the United States’ opposition to the International Maritime Organization’s carbon framework influenced conversations about structuring rules for decarbonizing the shipping industry. And knowing that the U.S. wouldn’t contribute to aid funds shaped climate finance agreements.
In the years to come, though, those pressures may very well fade. As the world pivots in response to a U.S. absence, it may find it has more to gain than expected.
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/international/2025-trump-climate-change-paris-agreement-china/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
---
GMAIL 11 25
Extreme heat events may be deadlier than previously projected, a new study finds. The study authors write that “while mitigating further global warming can reduce heat mortality, mass mortality events remain plausible at near-future temperatures despite current adaptations to heat.”
---
NO LNX
America elected a simpleton and the wreck he leaves behind could be permanent
U.S. President Donald Trump attends a ceremony marking the 24th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States at the Pentagon, in Washington D.C., U.S., September 11, 2025. REUTERS Evelyn Hockstein
Sabrina Haake, Raw StoryNovember 25, 2025
Since Donald Trump has been back in office, energy prices have increased at more than double the rate of inflation. The Consumer Price Index from the end of October reported an “all items price index” increase for food, shelter, and transportation of 3.0 percent over a 12-month period, while energy services for the same period rose by 6.4 percent.
After promising to slash energy prices, Trump has done the opposite. His energy policies reflect the same ethos driving everything else in his retribution playbook: reward donors and inflict pain on Democrats, even when the economic consequences are nationwide.
Lust for retribution
In early October, Trump announced the claw-back of billions of dollars in federal funding for utilities, money that had been appropriated to reinforce power grids and reduce electricity prices.
Targeting blue states exclusively, Budget Director Russ Vought announced the cancellation of “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda.” In all, 321 Congressionally set awards supporting 223 wind, solar, and transmission projects were trashed.
Trump’s aversion to clean energy isn’t the only factor driving costs. His refusal to upgrade the grid, his half-baked export and tariff initiatives, and his blind support for energy-sucking AI data centers are all contributing to surging energy prices with no relief in sight.
As Canary Media framed it, “Trump slapped tariffs on certain wind turbine materials and opened a sham “national security” probe to pave the way for even more. He halted construction on a nearly completed offshore wind farm and moved to revoke permits for two more. He canceled hundreds of millions in port funding critical to offshore wind development and imposed new directives to stifle renewable projects on federal lands.”
Trump’s dedication is showing: after only ten months of Trump 2.0, US household electric bills have increased by 10 percent, and are expected to continue climbing.
UN Climate Summit
Trump is doing more than reversing US climate successes, he’s also undermining progress in other parts of the world. Last month, when the International Maritime Organization agreed on the world’s first carbon tax on global shipping to encourage the transition to cleaner fuels, Trump released a childish Truth Social rant threatening to retaliate.
This month, he ignored the UN Climate Summit in Brazil. Thankfully, California Governor Gavin Newsom attended, representing the world’s fourth-largest economy. Newsom highlighted California's efforts to step up on climate where Trump has stepped out.
Facing down the embarrassment of an antiquated, know-nothing, pro-fossil fuel regime, Newsom didn’t hold back. When asked about the US retreat from global climate action, he called Trump “an invasive species … He’s a wrecking ball president trying to roll back progress of the last century … he’s doubling down on stupid.”
Newsom did more than talk. While he was at the summit, he signed new Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) with Brazil, Colombia, and Chile to advance clean energy, wildfire prevention, and other climate-related initiatives. He also expanded California’s existing partnerships with China and Mexico on clean energy development and zero-emission freight corridors.
Newsom managed to bolster California's profile as a stable international business and climate partner despite the optics of a US president ruled by ego and impulse.
Our loss, China’s gain
In September, addressing the UN, Trump called climate change a “con job” and urged other world leaders to abandon their climate efforts despite the Earth’s rising temperatures. Trump claimed falsely that China sells wind turbines to the world without using them at home, and told assembled leaders, “If you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail.”
The next day, China pledged the reverse. Xi Jinping announced China’s plan to increase electric vehicle sales and dramatically increase wind and solar power, targeting a 600 percent increase over 2020 levels.
Despite Trump’s claim, China has vastly expanded wind power developments at home, adding 46 gigawatts of new wind energy this year alone, enough to power than 30 million homes. Meanwhile, our Cro-Magnon regime froze permits for wind farms and issued stop work orders, ending tens of thousands of wind energy jobs in the process.
Critics agree that Trump’s withdrawal from climate efforts ceded valuable ground to China, which is now rapidly expanding its renewable and EV industries. China’s Ming Yang Smart Energy just unveiled OceanX, a two-headed offshore wind turbine. OceanX is expected to cut offshore energy costs to one-fifth of Europe’s costs while allowing wind farms to operate with fewer, more powerful turbines.
“China gets it,” Newsom said at the UN Climate Summit, “America is toast competitively, if we don’t wake up to what the hell they’re doing in this space, on supply chains, how they’re dominating manufacturing, how they’re flooding the zone.”
:{Newsom is right. Americans are suffering the tragedy of an uninformed and unstable president who rejects science, a president
---
---
The world is on track for 2.6 °C of heating*. That headline should terrify everybody the way it terrifies climate scientists. The latest comes from media coverage of the International Energy Agency’s 519-page World Energy Outlook 2025 report released Wednesday. The IEA also notes that the ongoing green transition — which has been an encouraging counterpoint to climate pessimism — is slowing down, thanks in large part to the Trump regime’s outright war on renewables.
But we’ve become numb to the numbers. Polls show repeatedly that despite what’s happening with the climate right this minute, and despite what scientists have warned us is yet to come, only a small fraction of Americans include climate as a top priority for action. As any activist can tell you, lots of people don’t want to talk about climate at all.
At one level, this is understandable given the dystopian horror show being visited on us by the regime and all its acolytes, including a big chunk of establishment media. There are plenty of immediate impacts to worry about: rising food and housing prices; crippling regulatory agencies; slashed budgets; killing programs and grants; erasing old — and refusing to gather new — data on a range of matters; kicking out immigrants who have lived here decades or all their lives; and mucking around with Medicaid, Medicare — and soon enough quite probably, Social Security. Under these circumstances, it’s not hard to understand why climate isn’t very high on most people’s roster of concerns.
Not so for Native peoples faced with sea-level rise on the Alaska and Louisiana coasts, or the families and businesses of a drought-ridden Southwest, or the workers in much of the country ever more affected by extreme heat, or the people on the Atlantic coast suffering “100-year floods” every 10 years.
Two-point-six degrees Celsius (4.7 °F) of warming is, for most, an abstract statistic. However it translates into the collapse of ice sheets, the drowning of coastlines, the eventual loss of millions of lives to heat, hunger, and floods. It means an Earth that would feel alien to the one our grandparents knew. And if the predictions of our current trajectory are right, it means we are failing, utterly, to act in time to deter this.
At the COP30 climate summit now conferencing in the Amazon city of Belém, Brazil, delegates are again pledging “ambition,” again vowing to “accelerate” the “transition.” But the IEA — whose reports have long been treated as the gold standard for energy forecasting — projects that global greenhouse-gas emissions will continue rising through 2050under current policies. In its so-called “Stated Policies Scenario,” which assumes governments actually follow through on their announced commitments, the agency notes that the aspirational limit of 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) is all but dead. And as we have repeatedly learned over the decade since the Paris Agreement was signed, only a few nations are on a trajectory to meet those commitments. It’s also clear that some nations — the United States aggressively among them — are not just missing their commitments, they’re retreating from them.
If this were a movie, it would be the scene where the alarm starts flashing red and the protagonist finally yanks the emergency brake. But in the real world, the train keeps accelerating.
The Mirage of “Peak Oil”
Just months ago, IEA reports were being heralded — especially by Western governments — as proof that fossil-fuel demand had peaked. “The age of oil is over,” policymakers reassured us, as if the market itself were solving the crisis. But the 2025 Outlook is a cold shower (unless you’re hip deep in shares of fossil-fuel companies).
The agency’s “Revived Policy Scenario” now shows no peak in oil or gas demand this decade. Instead, consumption will keep climbing for another quarter-century, it predicts. Fossil-fuel companies, far from winding down, are ramping up. New exploration projects are planned in the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and West Africa. U.S. liquefied-natural-gas exports are set to triple. According to IEA data, investments in oil and gas infrastructure remain double what would be compatible with a 1.5 °C pathway. The so-called “energy transition” is being built atop a mountain of oil, gas, and coal. The outcome? Renewable energy is expanding as an add-on instead of a substitute, grafted onto an unchanged fossil economy. A hybrid monster.
Said Rachel Cletus, senior policy director for the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists:
“The IEA’s latest report underscores the daunting challenge ahead for rapidly decarbonizing the world’s economy but also highlights the opportunity for tremendous wins for consumers’ pocketbooks, public health and addressing energy poverty that pathway provides.
“With the world on the brink of overshooting 1.5 degrees Celsius, it’s crucial to prioritize renewable energy, energy efficiency and a climate-resilient energy system. A fast fair phaseout of fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—is also essential, yet nations continue to recklessly expand these polluting sources of energy at odds with climate goals. All too many political leaders are beholden to entrenched fossil fuel interests who are profiting off perpetuating a fossil fuel-based economy.
“Contrary to the IEA’s framing, cooperation and collaboration among countries will be key to accelerating the manufacture and deployment of clean energy technologies globally.
“At COP30, we need world leaders to live up to the commitments they made in Dubai to advance a clean energy transition within this critical decade. Richer nations must also provide finance to lower-income countries to enable this transition.
“The choice for decision-makers should be clear: either they invest in a fast, fair transition to clean energy that brings overwhelming benefits, or they will force people to face the rapidly escalating harms and costs of unchecked climate change.”
The Math of Catastrophe
Every fraction of a degree of added warming magnifies disaster. At 1.5°C, hundreds of millions face extreme heat waves every five years. At 2°C, those heat waves come every year. At 2.6°C, vast regions of the tropics become uninhabitable for outdoor work. Crop yields collapse. Water crises multiply. Sea-level rise displaces tens of millions. Coral reefs vanish entirely. Arctic summer ice becomes a memory.
This isn’t “climate change” anymore; it’s climate disintegration. The “safe operating space” for humanity — what scientists call the planetary boundaries — is being breached on multiple fronts. And the world’s governments, knowing this, continue to approve new drilling leases and subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of $1.3 trillion annually. Even in Brazil, whose COP30 hosts have a good recent record on deforestation and talk smart about acting on climate, oil leases in the Amazon River delta are being pondered.
Unless you agree with Trump and crew that solar panels and wind turbines don’t actually work, our problem isn’t technological or scientific. It’s political and economic. As Glen Peters of the CICERO Center for International Climate Research put it, “a system that talks transition while investing in the opposite.” Oil and gas majors are planning 25 years of expansion, locking in infrastructure that will keep emissions rising through mid-century. These aren’t just business decisions—they are death sentences written in corporate shorthand.
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare told The Guardian, “A world at 2.6°C means global disaster,” adding that could mean passing tipping points including the death of coral reefs and the transformation of the Amazon rainforest into savanna. “[These and other changes mean] the end of agriculture in the UK and across Europe, drought and monsoon failure in Asia and Africa, lethal heat and humidity,” he explained. “This is not a good place to be. You want to stay away from that.”
What drives this madness is the logic of profit in a carbon-addicted capitalism. Fossil fuels remain the most lucrative commodities on Earth, and governments — especially those of the United States, Canada, and the Gulf monarchies — are structurally dependent on their revenues and geopolitics. Wall Street and the City of London bankroll extraction because for rank-and-file shareholders and CEOs alike, quarterly returns trump civilizational survival. As one climate advocate toldOlivia Rosane at Common Dreams, “The fossil fuel industry is still running the show, and the IEA is simply describing the theater of the absurd.”
:{:{
}:
Justice on Paper
At COP30, delegates from the Global South are demanding a “just transition” — a reordering of global energy and finance that puts justice, not profit, at the center. They are right to insist on it. The poorest nations, responsible for a fraction of historic emissions, are bearing the brunt of the damage. Yet even as the by now hoary term “just transition” makes its way into speeches and communiqués, the funding to make it real remains microscopic.
Loss-and-damage finance, promised at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, has trickled in at a rate that would barely cover the flood damages from a single hurricane season. Debt-burdened nations are told to invest in clean energy while paying interest to the very banks that financed the fossil boom. Climate justice becomes another diplomatic slogan.
A genuine just transition would mean massive wealth transfers: hundreds of billions annually in grants, not loans; cancellation of odious debts; technology sharing without patents; and democratic control of energy systems. It would mean planning, not markets, guiding the shift—an end to the illusion that private capital will decarbonize out of the goodness of its heart. But at COP30, as in every COP before it, it appears that the proposals that could make such transformation real are being politely ignored. However, the summit isn’t yet half over.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called the likely failure to stay below 1.5°C “a moral collapse.” He’s right. But the phrase doesn’t quite capture the scale of betrayal. The moral calculus is obscene: every new well, every gas terminal, every pipeline built in 2025 and beyond is a guarantee that somewhere, a village will drown or a harvest will fail.
This is the dark heart of what Naomi Klein has called disaster capitalism— a system that monetizes catastrophe and sells us the ashes as growth. It is, in Orwellian fashion, a politics of doublespeak —where “net zero by 2050” serves as a permission slip for more emissions today, and “carbon capture” is the alibi for endless extraction.
What Is To Be Done
The math is pitiless, but not hopeless. Every tenth of a degree avoided still saves lives. The world can still slam the brakes, but only if it abandons the too gradual incrementalism that has defined climate diplomacy for three decades. The steps are not mysterious; they are simply politically inconvenient:
- No new fossil-fuel development. Expanding is collective suicide.
- Redirect subsidies and finance. The $1.3 trillion annually propping up fossil fuels should be redirected to renewables, efficiency, and adaptation—especially in the Global South.
- Public ownership and democratic planning. Energy transitions cannot be left entirely to corporations whose fiduciary duty is profit. There are models for alternatives at home and abroad.
- Repair and redistribution. Wealthy nations owe a climate debt to the developmentally emerging ones. Paying it is not charity; it is restitution.
- Mobilize like it’s war—because it is.
If we do not confront the fossil-fuel titans, overhaul global finance, and reclaim democracy over energy,no future COP will rescue us. The fires, floods, and hunger we are already seeing will be mere appetizers. We need to get off this path before the main course arrives.
None of this can, obviously, be done with the current U.S. Congress and president. Changing both means a key aspect of climate activists’ work going forward has to be focused on electing candidates who take the crisis seriously and act on it.
Related:
- Once a global leader on climate action, the EU has given in to the right’s green-bashing
- Fossil fuel lobbyists outnumber all COP30 delegations except Brazil, report says
Int'l Energy Agency alters forecast: If we stick to the current climate trajectory we're gonna fry
---
*Crossposted from The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places
You can also catch me at meteorblades.bsky.social*
---
SIMON CLARK 
UP 3.5 CO2 TIPPT =?
This month has been really tough. Let's talk about why, and how we talk about climate in general. Oh, and how I've been staying sane. (?) My monthly newsletter: https://www.simonoxfphys.com/newsletterYou can support
the channel by becoming a patron at 
/ simonoxfphysREFERENCES 1. https://apnews.com/article/climate-ch...2. https://www.theguardian.com/environme...3. https://www.theguardian.com/environme...4. https://files.wri.org/d8/s3fs-public/...5. https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/0...6. https://www.reuters.com/sustainabilit...7. https://global-tipping-points.org/abo...8. https://livingplanet.panda.org/en-GB/9. https://www.thetimes.com/business-mon...---------- II ----------
---
AN GRIST 11 25
Consider your morning cup of coffee. Your kettle’s heating element — or flame on a stove — warms up water that you infuse with beans and pour into a mug. Maybe you get busy and the cup of joe sits there for a while, releasing its heat into the atmosphere of the room, until it reaches equilibrium with the indoor temperature. In other words: It got cold.
*This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here
Now consider that the expansive Southern Ocean, which wraps around Antarctica, could one day do much the same thing. Since the Industrial Revolution kicked off, humans have dialed up the kettle to its max, adding extraordinary amounts of heat into the atmosphere, more than 90 percent of which has been absorbed by the sea. (It’s also taken up a quarter of our CO2 emissions.) Under climate change, the Southern Ocean has been storing warmth which, like your morning jolt, can’t stay there forever, and will someday return to the atmosphere.
New modeling suggests that this “burp” of heat — the scientists called it that, by the way — could be abrupt. In a scenario where humanity eventually reduces its greenhouse gas emissions and then goes “net negative,” finding ways to remove those planet-warming pollutants from the atmosphere, global temperatures fall. But suddenly the Southern Ocean belches its accumulated heat, leading to a rate of planetary warming similar to what humanity is causing right now. And the thermal burping would continue for at least a century.
Put another way: According to this modeling, at least, humans figure out a way to reverse climate change, only to see the Southern Ocean essentially restart it. While there would be nothing our descendants could do to stop this — since the warming would be driven by already stored heat — the calculations are yet another urgent call to reduce that pollution as quickly and dramatically as possible.
This sudden eructation is not a sure thing, however — it’s the prediction of a model. But it’s a step toward understanding how the planet could respond as humans continue to manipulate the climate, both warming and cooling it. “The question is: How will the climate system, and specifically the ocean, react to scenarios where we remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and when we have a net global cooling effect?” said Svenja Frey, an oceanography PhD student at Germany’s GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and coauthor of the paper.
The Southern Ocean may encircle the frozen continent of Antarctica, but it’s very effective at storing heat: It alone holds around 80 percent of the warmth that’s taken up by all the oceans. Some of this comes from currents that transport relatively toasty waters south, but also lots of upwelling in the Southern Ocean brings cold water to the surface to be warmed up.
The skies above the Southern Ocean are also somewhat less reflective than elsewhere around the globe. Cargo ships and industries in the Northern Hemisphere spew air pollution in the form of aerosols, which themselves bounce solar energy back into the cosmos and help brighten clouds, which reflect still more. That cooling phenomenon has vied, in a sense, with the warming that’s come from the burning of fossil fuels. “That competition hasn’t been as prevalent over the Southern Hemisphere, because it’s this slightly more pristine atmosphere,” said Ric Williams, an ocean and climate scientist at the University of Liverpool, who studies the Southern Ocean but wasn’t involved in the paper.
In the scenario the researchers modeled, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 increases by 1 percent every year until the total amount is double what the planet had before the Industrial Revolution. Then negative emissions technologies reduce the carbon concentration by 0.1 percent annually. (The study didn’t look a specific techniques, but one option is direct air capture of CO2, though this remains expensive and limited in scale.) In response, the atmosphere, land, and oceans cool.
But something starts brewing in the Southern Ocean. Its surface becomes colder, but also saltier due to the formation of new sea ice: When sea water freezes, it rejects its salt, which is then absorbed into the surrounding waters and makes the surface layer heavier. “At the same time, we have these warm, deeper waters,” Frey said. “At some point, the water column becomes unstable, and that’s when we have the deep convection event.”
In other words, a burp. It’s just one way that our planet’s extraordinarily complex and intertwining systems might respond to rising and falling emissions in the centuries ahead. “There’s very large uncertainty in the Earth system response to net-negative emissions — we don’t understand that very well,” said Simon Fraser University climate scientist Kirsten Zickfeld, who studies these dynamics but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “We may well encounter surprises along the way, as this paper shows.”
To be clear, in this scenario, removing atmospheric carbon significantly reduces global temperatures, even factoring in the burp. And the faster we move away from fossil fuels, the less CO2 we’ll have to remove down the line. “Doing negative emissions and reducing our carbon load in the atmosphere is a good thing,” Williams said. “I would just add that, rather than do negative emissions, it’s better not to do the positive emissions in the first place.”
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/oceans/hey-so-one-day-the-ocean-might-burp-up-a-bunch-of-heat/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
---
We Just Crossed Our FIRST Tipping Point… And It’s NOT What You Think - YouTube
tip pt 13 min
Scientists just released the 2025 Global Tipping Points Report. And they say we’ve already crossed our first major tipping point, but it’s not what you think. From melting ice sheets to collapsing ocean currents, these sudden, irreversible changes could reshape the planet in ways we can’t undo. But what does it really mean to cross a tipping point? How do we know we’ve crossed one? And how close are we to triggering others? In this episode of Weathered, Maiya May talks with scientist Tim Lenton, who helped popularize the term “tipping point” in a landmark 2008 paper, to uncover which Earth systems are at risk, why they’re so hard to predict, and what crossing a tipping point means for our future. 2025 Global Tipping Points Report: https://global-tipping-points.org/
amoc --> monsoon belt shift south; ice 63 m rise?
permafrost closer tip
greenland anarctica
coral reef 1.2 70-90 per cent
pos tip solar batt subsidy 9x ff
china peak this yr co2 electrostate
---
gmail 7 25
UN calls to criminalize fossil fuel 'disinformation' - Rebel News
the UN's special rapporteur on human rights and climate change argued this week that wealthy nations are legally obligated to phase out oil, gas and coal by 2030 while compensating communities harmed by resource development — and called for the criminalization of those spreading so-called misinformation about climate change.
“These countries are responsible for not having prevented the widespread human rights harm arising from climate change and other planetary crises we are facing – biodiversity loss, plastic pollution and economic inequalities – caused by fossil fuels extraction, use and waste,” argued Elisa Morgera, who, in addition to her role with the UN, serves as a professor of global environmental law at the University of Strathclyde in the U.K.
A report from The Guardian focusing on Morgera's findings outlined the UN rapporteur's goal:
*States must ban fossil fuel ads and lobbying, criminalize greenwashing (misinformation and misrepresentation) by the fossil fuel industry, media and advertising firms, and enforce harsh penalties for attacks on climate advocates who are facing a rise in malicious lawsuits, online harassment and physical violence.
On Wednesday's episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra was joined by Climate Depot founder Marc Morano, who provided a less hyperbolic perspective on the situation.
“They first want to intimidate you into silence,” Marc said, noting how the term “climate denier” is used in the same manner as calling someone a “Holocaust denier.”
When this tactic fails, radical environmentalists then try to seize control of information by working with Big Tech firms like Google “to manipulate information flow.”
Demands to criminalize so-called climate misinformation are an attack on free speech the Climate Depot founder said, with environmentalists pushing to silence critics “because people might vote the wrong way.”
Ezra compared these censorship efforts to the attempts to stifle “alternative views” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It's very political what's going on here,” noted Ezra. “They're basically saying, 'we want to win the argument, but we want to stop the other side from even being allowed to argue'. That's really their confession.”
Marc was in agreement, suggesting the debates around COVID and climate follow “the same exact template.” Following President Trump's first electoral victory in 2015, “that's when all of the controls came down,” Marc explained.
“Not only the mainstream media, but all the social media. That's when we had the deep state and national security and intel agencies embedded in things like Twitter,” he said.
“Why are they saying all of this? Because the COP30 UN summit is coming up and is perhaps the most unanticipated dreaded UN summit by climate activists in the history of climate summits because, as of right now, not even two dozen countries out of 200 have even made pledges let alone kept pledges in line with the UN Paris Climate Agreement net-zero goals.”
ref guk
un-expert-urges-criminalizing-fossil-fuel-disinformation-banning-lobbying
a leading UN expert is calling for criminal penalties against those peddling disinformation about the climate crisisand a total ban on fossil fuel industry lobbying and advertising, as part of a radical shake-up to safeguard human rights and curtail planetary catastrophe.
Elisa Morgera, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change who presents her damning new report to the general assembly in Geneva on Monday, argues that the US, UK, Canada, Australia and other wealthy fossil fuel nations are legally obliged under international law to fully phase out oil, gas and coal by 2030 – and compensate communities for harms caused.
Fracking, oil sands and gas flaring should be banned, as should fossil fuelexploration, subsidies, investments and false tech solutions that will lock in future generations to polluting and increasingly costly oil, gas and coal.
“Despite overwhelming evidence of the interlinked, intergenerational, severe and widespread human rights impacts of the fossil fuel life cycle … these countries have and are still accruing enormous profits from fossil fuels, and are still not taking decisive action,” said Morgera, professor of global environmental law at the University of Strathclyde.
“These countries are responsible for not having prevented the widespread human rights harm arising from climate change and other planetary crises we are facing – biodiversity loss, plastic pollution and economic inequalities – caused by fossil fuels extraction, use and waste.”
Island nations, Indigenous and other vulnerable communities – who have benefited least from fossil fuels – now face the worst and compounding harms caused by the climate crisis and other environmental harms linked to their extraction, transport and use for energy, fuel, plastics and synthetic fertilizers.
The report points to a mountain of evidence on the severe, far-reaching and cumulative damage caused by the fossil fuel industry – oil, gas, coal, fertilizers and plastics – on almost every human right including the rights to life, self-determination, health, food, water, housing, education, information and livelihoods.
Morgera makes the case for the “defossilization” of our entire economies – in other words the eradication of fossil fuels from all sectors including politics, finance, food, media, tech and knowledge. The transition to clean energy is not enough to tackle the widespread and mounting harms caused by the fossil fuels, she argues.
In order to comply with existing international human rights law, states are obliged to inform their citizens about the widespread harms caused by fossil fuels and that phasing out oil, gas and coal is the most effective way to fight the climate crisis.
People also have the right to know how the industry – and its allies – has for 60 years systematically obstructed access to this knowledge and meaningful climate action by peddling disinformation and misinformation, attacks on climate scientists and activists, and by capturing democratic decision-making spaces including the annual UN climate negotiations.
“The fossil fuel playbook has undermined the protection of all human rights that are negatively impacted by climate change for over six decades,” said Morgera in the imperative of defossilizing our economies report.
States must ban fossil fuel ads and lobbying, criminalize greenwashing (misinformation and misrepresentation) by the fossil fuel industry, media and advertising firms, and enforce harsh penalties for attacks on climate advocates who are facing a rise in malicious lawsuits, online harassment and physical violence.
Communities across the world are facing growing threats from sea level rise, desertification, drought, melting glaciers, extreme heat, floods, and other climate-related impacts. This is on top of the deadly air pollution, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, and forced displacement of Indigenous and rural peoples associated with every stage of the fossil fuel lifecycle.
Meanwhile, fossil fuel and petrochemical companies have benefited from huge profits, taxpayer subsidies, tax avoidance schemes and undue protection under international investment law – without ever reducing energy poverty and economic inequalities. In 2023, oil and gas companies globally earned $2.4tn, while coal companies pocketed $2.5tn, according to the report.
Removing fossil fuel subsidies, estimated to have topped $1.4tn for OECD members and 48 other countries in 2023, would alone reduce emissions by up to 10% by 2030.
Redirecting these subsidies would help wealthy fossil fuel-producing states fulfill their legal obligations to aid developing countries to phase out fossil fuels – and provide financial and other remedies for the widespread human rights violations and environmental damage they have caused – and continue to cause.
The compensation could also be funded by enforcing penalties for damages caused by fossil fuel companies, and cracking down on tax evasion and avoidance by the industry, as well as introducing wealth and windfall taxes. States could – and should – require the industry to finance climate adaptation, mitigation and loss and damage through climate superfunds or other mechanisms that are directly accessible to affected communities.
[
World’s climate fight needs fundamental reform, UN expert says: ‘Some states are not acting in good faith’
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2025/jan/07/climate-change-reform-elisa-morgera)
Land unjustly appropriated for fossil fuel operations should be cleaned up, remediated and returned to Indigenous communities, people of African descent and peasants, if they want it back, or they should be fairly compensated, Morgera argues.
The report lays out the human rights case for decisive and transformative political action to limit the pain and suffering from the climate crisis. The recommendations offer a glimpse at a world in which the basic rights of all people are prioritized above the profits and benefits enjoyed by a few, but will probably be dismissed by some as radical and untenable.
“Paradoxically what may seem radical or unrealistic – a transition to a renewable energy-based economy – is now cheaper and safer for our economics and a healthier option for our societies,” Morgera told the Guardian.
“The transition can also lead to significant savings of taxpayers’ money that is currently going into responding to climate change impacts, saving health costs, and also recouping lost tax revenue from fossil fuel companies. This could be the single most impactful health contribution we could ever make. The transition seems radical and unrealistic because fossil fuel companies have been so good at making it seem so.”
---
---
senator kickass:
TY channel: 
XO thaT wind and solar are not energy
jb clark omb social cost carbon 86 memo 150 to epa 190 but only 4 harms [nit wildfire], not systemic economic risk cascade mortgage housing price collapse
700 billion subsidy
EPA carbon not pollut; us ff plants more than all but 6 cty
jerome powell fed shut dn our partic in int’l cEntrlal banks 180 members gp: 4 min in disband task for on climate risk others refused; 86 own climate risk gp at fed;
yergin orzag 5k word manifsto for aff energy pragmatism; never mentions risk cost
SYRIA CIVIL WAR CENT AM TRIANGLE ...
---
an 6 25
The 1973 dystopian sci-fi movie "Soylent Green "— which starred Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson and took place in 2022 — depicted a hellish world in which widespread pollution and global warming had led to severe food and water shortages as well as widespread hunger and desperation. Now, in 2025, a newly released study finds that severe weather is threatening crops in a major way — and that the production of some key crops in the United States could decrease by as much as 50 percent by the end of the 21st Century.
The study was published by Nature.com on Wednesday, June 19 and was, according to CNN's Laura Paddison, "eight years in the making." It was conducted by a group of scientists, including Solomon Hsiang of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and illustrates the link between food supply and climate change.
"Of the many impacts of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis," Paddison reports in an article published by CNN that day, "damage to the global food system is one of the most terrifying. But the overall impact of climate change on crops — and how much it can be offset by farmers' adaptations — has been hard to establish and hotly debated…. The scientists analyzed six crops — maize, soybeans, rice, wheat, cassava and sorghum — in more than 12,000 regions across 54 countries.Together, these crops provide more than two thirds of humanity's calories."
READ MORE:Trump's new greed deal the ultimate act of destruction the prophets have predicted
The CNN reporter continues, "They also measured how real-world farmers are adapting to climate change, from changing crop varieties to adjusting irrigation, to calculate the overall impact of global warming. Their findings are stark."
Paddison notes that according to the study, "every 1 degree Celsius the world warms above pre-industrial levels will drag down global food production by an average of 120 calories per person per day." Hsiang warns that this will increase food prices.
Hsiang told CNN, "If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that's basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast…. This is a major problem. It's incredibly expensive. As a species, we have never confronted anything like this."
Paddison reports, "Wheat, soy and maize — high value crops for a lot of the world — will be especially badly affected, the study found. If humans keep burning large amounts of fossil fuels, maize production could fall by 40 percent in the grain belt of the U.S., eastern China, central Asia, southern Africa and the Middle East; wheat production could fall by 40 percent in the U.S., China, Russia and Canada; and soybean yields could fall 50 percent in the U.S."
READ MORE:'Catastrophe': Trump uses 'phony energy emergency' to 'illegally' destroy state laws
The CNN journalist adds, "The only staple crop that might be able to avoid substantial losses is rice, which can benefit from warmer nighttime temperatures…. Global warming will be particularly devastating for the U.S., where it's projected to reduce yields by 40 percent to 50 percent for all staple crops except rice, Hsiang said."
READ MORE:How climate change could upend the American Dream
*Read the study at Nature.com and find CNN's coverage here.
---
---
AN 6 25
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere peaked above 430 parts per million in 2025—the highest it has been in millions of years—according to data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego on Thursday.
The news was overshadowed by the explosive feud between U.S. President Donald Trump and his erstwhile backer Elon Musk, but climate activist Bill McKibben argued that it was ultimately more consequential.
"In the long run, this is actually going to be the important news of the day—CO2 in the atmosphere passes another grim milestone," McKibben wrote on social media.
Carbon dioxide has been accumulating in the atmosphere due primarily to the human burning of fossil fuels, as well as by the clearing of forests and other natural carbon sinks. There, it acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat from the Earth, and is the primary gas responsible for the rise of global temperatures by approximately 1.1°C from the 1850 -1900 average. This warming has already had a host of dramatic impacts, from extreme weather events to sea-level rise to polar ice melt, and scientists warn these impacts will only accelerate under current energy policies, which put the world on track for around 3°C of warming by 2100.
The last time that atmospheric CO2 concentrations topped 430 ppm was most likely more than 30 million years ago, Ralph Keeling, who directs the Scripps CO2 Program, toldNBC News.
"It's changing so fast," he said. "If humans had evolved in such a high-CO2 world, there would probably be places where we wouldn't be living now. We probably could have adapted to such a world, but we built our society and a civilization around yesterday's climate."
"While largely symbolic, passing 430 ppm should be a wake-up call."
Scripps and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both measure carbon dioxide levels from NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, where Charles Keeling began taking measurements in 1958. As CO2 levels rise over time, they also follow a seasonal cycle—peaking in May before falling in the Northern Hemisphere summer and rising again in the fall.
This May, Scripps Oceanography calculated an average of 430.2 ppm for 2025, which is 3.5 ppm over the average for May 2024. NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, meanwhile, calculated a monthly average of 430.5 ppm, a 3.6 ppm jump from the year before and the second-steepest yearly climb since 1958.
"Another year, another record," Keeling said in a statement. "It's sad."
The news comes two months after Mauna Loa daily measurements surpassed 430 ppm for the first time in March, which Plymouth Marine Laboratory professor Helen Findlay called "extremely disappointing and worrying."
"While largely symbolic, passing 430 ppm should be a wake-up call, especially given the accelerated response we are seeing of glaciers and ice sheets to current warming," Dr. James Kirkham, chief scientist of the Ambition on Melting Ice coalition of governments, said at the time.
"This upward trajectory is a direct result of continued fossil fuel use, likely exacerbated by emissions from extreme wildfires last year, methane leaks from fossil fuel extraction and possibly greater permafrost emissions, alongside decreased ability of very warm oceans to absorb CO2," Kirkham said.
The monthly record also comes a little more than a week after a United Nations report warned that there was a small chance global temperatures could surpass 2°C in at least 1 of the next 5 years, only a decade after world leaders pledged in the Paris agreement to keep global temperatures "well-below" that level.
"Carbon emissions are still rising, and the atmosphere is going to keep heating further until greenhouse gas concentrations stabilize," Matt Kean, who chairs Australia's Climate Change Authority, wrote in response to the Scripps and NOAA figures. "What sort of climate do we want to leave our children and those who come after them?"
---
omfg
no lnx
Home | Breathing is now a political act — thanks to the GOP
Thom Hartmann April 24, 2025
Breathing is no longer a basic human right in America: it’s now a political battleground.
Over 156 million Americans are inhaling toxic air today, not because we don’t know how to fix it, but because the Republican Party has decided that clean air is something only Democrats care about.
While children gasp through inhalers and wildfires choke entire cities, Trump and his fossil-fueled allies are dismantling environmental protections with surgical cruelty. This isn’t ignorance — it’s policy. It’s profit. It’s war on your lungs, your family, and your future.
The American Lung Association just released a new report documenting how over 156 million Americans are breathing poisonous air. Trump and the Republicans don’t give a damn; if anything, they’re enthusiastic about it.
Fossil fuel billionaires and the industry that made them rich have been major patrons of Republican politicians ever since Ronald Reagan floated into the White House in 1980 on a tsunami of oil and coal money. Donald Trump is no different.
Claiming that climate science research “promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth,” the Trump regime last week cut millions from a Nobel Prize winning scientist’s program’s collaboration between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Princeton University.
Last month they also attacked the Renew America’s Schools program that provides funding for more than 3,400 schools across the country to install heat pumps, insulation, electric school busses, and other efforts to reduce their carbon footprints.
Lost in the news of Trump’s latest stock market pump-and-dump scheme for insiders and his kidnapping legal US citizens for foreign rendition, they also announced last Friday that they were zeroing out funding for the nation’s premiere annual climate change analysis, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and the 13 agencies that collaborate on the National Climate Assessment. The report is mandated by Congress, but Trump is ignoring the law.
This follows by a few weeks EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s announcement that the official position of the US government’s warning of climate change will soon be reversed. As Politico reported on March 12th:
“President Donald Trump’s environmental chief announced Wednesday that he will seek to overturn the federal government’s core scientific finding about the dangers of greenhouse gases — along with 30 other key regulatory actions stretching back years or decades.”
The report added that that Zeldin will also be gutting CO2 limits for coal-fired power plants, tailpipe emissions, methane leaks, and ending a program requiring major industries to report their CO2 emissions. In other words, “To hell with the health of our children and our climate; there’s money to be made and campaign contributions to be solicited!”
Tuesday of last week, Trump signed an executive order declaring war on individual state initiatives to dial back carbon emissions, ordering the Department of Justice to “stop the enforcement” of such state laws. The EO specifically attacked “climate Superfund” programs in Vermont and New York that would have required fossil fuel companies to reimburse those states for damages caused by climate change-fueled storms, as well as going after California’s cap-and-trade carbon credit auctions.
Fossil fuel oligarchs are, no doubt, breaking out the champagne. And the dark money for attack ads against Democrats in 2026 and 2028.
This widespread and wholesale destruction of programs intended to research and fight climate change will directly damage the future of young people in America, but Trump and the GOP frankly don’t give a damn. There are, after all, big bucks to be made and campaign contributions to be collected.
This insanity began in its modern form when five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court ruled in their 1978 Bellotti decision (written by Lewis Powell) that money was the same thing as “free speech,” protected by the First Amendment, and that corporations are “persons,” protected by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. That floated Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of oligarch money, as I noted in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.
Five corrupt Republicans on the Court doubled down on that in 2010 with Citizens United, which led to an absolute explosion of billionaire money in politics. As a result, in 2024 just 150 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion to elect candidates, money that went to the GOP on a more than 2:1 basis.
And now, in a manner demonstrative of a fully corrupt banana republic mindset, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are giving the fossil fuel industry everything they could want. In addition to the outrages listed above, in just the first three months of this regime, they have further gifted the industry by:
— Exempting Coal Plants from Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS): The Trump administration granted two-year exemptions to 47 coal-fired power plants, allowing them to bypass MATS regulations. This decision increases the risk of mercury pollution, which can cause neurological damage (particularly in children) and respiratory illnesses.
— Declaring a National Energy Emergency: Trump declared a national energy emergency to accelerate fossil fuel development, weakening environmental reviews and potentially increasing pollution.
— Rolling Back Vehicle Emissions Standards: The administration overturned emissions standards for vehicles, leading to increased air pollution and associated health risks.
— Reducing EPA Enforcement: Under Trump, the EPA brought fewer cases against polluters and sought lower penalties, diminishing deterrents against environmental violations. Now Musk and his Doge teenagers are further gutting the EPA itself.
— Weakening Methane Emission Regulations: The administration rolled back rules limiting methane emissions from oil and gas operations, contributing to climate change and air quality issues.
— Providing Direct Channels for Pollution Exemptions: Fossil fuel companies were given a direct email line to request exemptions from air pollution regulations, undermining public health protections.
— Eliminating Climate and Environmental Justice Webpages: The removal of federal climate and environmental justice webpages hindered public access to crucial information for addressing pollution and climate impacts and served to hide or cover up Trump’s naked corruption.
— Reversing the Clean Power Plan: The administration replaced the Clean Power Plan with the Affordable Clean Energy rule, which could lead to thousands of additional premature deaths annually due to increased air pollution.
— Cutting Funding for Environmental Protections: Significant budget cuts to the EPA and other environmental programs reduced the capacity to monitor and enforce pollution controls.
— Reducing Public Land Protections: The administration reduced the size of national monuments and opened protected lands to fossil fuel extraction, threatening ecosystems and biodiversity.
— Rolling Back Clean Water Protections: By narrowing the definition of “protected waters,” the administration allowed more pollutants to enter waterways, affecting drinking water and aquatic life.
— Undermining Scientific Research: Policies were enacted to limit the use of scientific studies in policy-making, particularly those related to environmental and public health research.
— Reversing the Paris Climate Agreement Commitment: The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under Trump signaled a retreat from global efforts to combat climate change.
— Promoting Fossil Fuel Exports: The administration lifted restrictions on fossil fuel exports, encouraging increased production and consumption globally, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.
— Reducing Air Quality Monitoring: Cuts to air pollution monitoring programs made it more difficult to detect and address harmful emissions, posing risks to public health but increasing the profits and impunity of the fossil fuel industry.
Trump and Republican cronies in his administration and Congress are committed to trading millions of cases of asthma, childhood cancers, and environmental damage — not to mention the thousands who are dying every year from climate-change-related violent weather, floods, and fires — in exchange for blood-money cash.
Republicans refuse to do town halls, refuse to answer questions about this, and hide behind a timid media that’s afraid to even ask serious questions about this criminal corruption of the protective role of government.
Which leaves it up to us.
— Get out in the streets as often as possible.
— Call your representatives, particularly if they’re Republicans (only 4 or 5 Republicans in the House and Senate could change the course of history).
— Make your voice heard on social media, letters to the editor, calling into to talk radio, and sharing messages like these with friends and family.
— Contribute, if you can, to politicians who are taking brave stands against the oligarchy.
This is not just politics — it’s a slow-motion slaughter disguised as deregulation.
Republicans won’t answer for it, won’t debate it, and won’t hold town halls to face the people they’re sacrificing. The media tiptoes. The billionaires cheer. And Trump signs away your children’s futures with a grin and a pen.
But here’s the truth they don’t want us to grasp: If we want our children to grow up with lungs that work, we better start working and voting like our lives — and theirs — depend on it.
This isn’t just about air. It’s about whether democracy itself can breathe.
Tag—you’re it.
===
---
AN 2 25
According to the Washington Post, as many as 200,000 federal workers may be fired because of efforts by the Trump Administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to greatly downsize the United States' federal government. And the criticism of their efforts is coming not only from Democrats, but also, from voices on the right.
Former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pennsylvania), during a February 17 appearance on MSNBC, slammed Trump and DOGE for carrying out mass government layoffs in a "haphazard" way. And the next morning, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough (a Never Trump conservative and ex-GOP congressman) argued that while government "waste" needs to be reduced and the U.S. needs to balance its federal budget, the Trump Administration and DOGE are recklessly jeopardizing "food safety" and "air safety."
The Guardian's George Monbiot also fears that Trump's second term could trigger some type of major crisis.
READ MORE:George Conway: Trump’s 'pathological narcissism' is fueling 'full-scale' DOJ 'revolt'
In a February 18 opinion column, Monbiot lays out a variety of frightening scenarios and offers some tips for surviving a worst-case scenario.
"Though we might find it hard to imagine," Monbiot warns, "we cannot now rule it out: the possibility of systemic collapse in the United States. The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could trigger a series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure…. A financial crisis in the U.S. would immediately become a global crisis."
Monbiot continues, "But the hazards extend much further. Musk, calling for a 'wholesale removal of regulations,' sends his child soldiers to attack government departments stabilizing the entire U.S. system. Regulations, though endlessly maligned by corporate and oligarchic propaganda, are all that protect us from multiple disasters. In its initial impacts, deregulation is class war, hitting the poorest and the middle classes at the behest of the rich. As the effects proliferate, it becomes an assault on everyone's wellbeing."
The columnist warns that undermining regulatory government agencies could make everything from a pandemic to "future climate disasters" worse.
READ MORE:'Brutal': Ex-federal prosecutor reveals why Trump DOJ’s 'illegal order' was 'so corrupt'
"As Trump rips down environmental protections and trashes federal responsiveness," Monbiot explains, "the impacts will spiral. They could include non-linear shocks to either the insurance sector or homeowners, escalating into U.S.-wide economic and social crisis. If, or when, another pandemic strikes, which could involve a pathogen more transmissible and even more deadly than COVID-19 — which has so far killed 1.2 million people in the U.S. — it will hit a nation whose defenses have been stood down."
Monbiot urges Americans — as well as residents of the U.K., where The Guardian is published — by doing a lot of networking.
"So, though there is no substitute for effective government, we must seek to create our own backup systems," the Guardian columnist advises. "Start with this principle: don't face your fears alone. Make friends, meet your neighbors, set up support networks, help those who are struggling. Since the dawn of humankind, those with robust social networks have been more resilient than those without. Yes, we also — and urgently — need national and global action, brokered by governments. But it's beginning to look as if no one has our backs. Prepare for the worst."
READ MORE:John Roberts is to blame for Trump challenge of federal courts: analysis
*George Monbiot's full Guardian column is available at this link.
---
---
mojo 12 24
The Senate’s New Farm Bill Would Prioritize Climate. Too Bad It’s Doomed.
[Frida Garza]
---
10 24 neglect of several bad flipbd artls
ca meas 4 pass
---
1.5C is dead. The climate fight isn’t.
Trump’s re-election is “the final nail in the coffin” for the Paris Agreement's North Star goal, nine experts told HEATED. But we can still limit the damage.
Now that Trump has been re-elected, the goal of preventing global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is dead, nine climate scientists and policy experts told me this week.
“There’s virtually no hope” for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “Certainly if there was a smidgeon of hope, yesterday afternoon that was gone.”
1.5 degrees is generally communicated the critical threshold past which the planet will experience significantly more extreme climate impacts like raging wildfires, droughts, deadly heat, mass coral reef die-offs, sea level rise, and more. However, scientists note that it's just an estimate; the tipping points could be more or less than 1.5 degrees.
Either way, Trump’s re-election can be seen as “the final nail in the coffin” for the 1.5 degree goal, said Rachel Cleetus, a policy director and economist at the Union for Concerned Scientists.
But that doesn’t mean the fight to preserve a livable climate is over, according to every scientist and policy expert I spoke to post-election. In fact, each one affirmed that every fraction of a degree past 1.5 makes climate disasters more damaging, especially for the most vulnerable countries and communities.
Frontline communities “have continually had to fight for justice, regardless of whatever presidential administration is in power,” said Michael Méndez, an assistant professor of environmental policy at the University of California, Irvine. “We really rely on organizing communities at the local, regional, and state level to have climate action that is achievable."
"Every fraction of a degree matters,” Cleetus said. “Globally, we have to do everything we can.”
With an incoming presidential administration committed to climate inaction and misinformation, action-focused climate information is important than ever. Subscribe today.
The existential threat of Trump’s second term
It’s important to note that even before Trump’s re-election, the 1.5 degree Celsius target was hanging by a thread. According to a United Nations emissions report published last month, the majority of countries are cutting emissions far too slowly to stabilize warming at safe levels. And 2024 is likely to be the hottest year in the history of human civilization, surpassing 1.5 Celsius.
Indeed, most of the people I spoke with were skeptical that any president, including Kamala Harris, could have put the U.S. back on track to meet its climate goals.
But all nine experts are deeply concerned that Trump, who falsely calls climate change a “hoax,” will make planetary heating far worse than it would have overwise been. Just how much worse depends “on the extent to which Trump unravels Biden's climate legacy,” said Simon Evans, deputy editor of Carbon Brief and co-author of a study on how much Trump’s presidency could impact emissions.
Evans estimated that a Trump administration could add 4 billion tons of carbon emissions to the atmosphere by the end of the decade, the equivalent of $900 billion in global climate damages. That analysis—which is based on neither the best nor worst case scenario—assumes that Trump will roll back all of Biden’s climate policies, including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
If Trump follows through on his other campaign promises, he could gut environmental agencies, increase fossil fuels, block renewables, and roll back scores of environmental regulations. Then there’s the proposals found in Project 2025, the unofficial blueprint for Trump’s second term published by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 calls for more extreme measures like the privatization of the National Weather Service, eliminating environmental justice programs, defunding renewable energy, and erasing even the mention of “climate change”.
The ripple effects of Trump’s election will also likely be felt internationally. Trump will almost certainly pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement again, and may even withdraw the U.S. from all climate diplomacy efforts. That would be a hefty blow to global climate goals, especially since the U.S. is one of the biggest polluters in the world.
But even with all this, it’s still possible the world can limit the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, Dessler told me. It all depends on the actions of state governments, local governments, other countries, and regular people.
“I still think 2 degrees is reasonable,” he said. “Because again, whatever the U.S. does, the rest of the world is moving on.”
 |
The red line and area are projected emissions under Carbon Brief’s Trump scenario where Biden’s key climate policies are eliminated. The yellow line is the U.S. climate target trajectory pledged by the Biden administration (50-52% by 2030).
2C is still “reasonable”
Because the U.S. is the world’s largest historical climate polluter, its cooperation in reducing emissions is critical to preserving a livable planet in the long term. But the U.S. may not be that necessary over the next four years, experts told me—if other countries are able to fill in the gaps.
Large emitters like China, the European Union, India, and Brazil need to drastically reduce emissions to prevent dangerous levels of warming. “I think inevitably, leadership and contributions will need to come from the rest of the world,” said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
China in particular could step into the gap. China’s massive investment in clean technology already threatens to leave the U.S. behind, a gap that could widen over the next four years. The country has also rapidly electrified and expanded renewable energy and storage. Last year, China’s solar and wind capacity reached a record 1,200 gigawatts—as much power as 600 Hoover Dams.
While the rest of the world may carry on the momentum, the U.S. still plays a large role in moving other countries towards more ambitious climate targets. “We have seen that in the past that U.S. diplomatic engagement under a climate-friendly administration has made a difference in China’s level of ambition,” said Shuo. “And now with the Trump administration, a bilateral climate agreement between Washington and Beijing will be shelved.”
The balance of power will be tested next week at the United Nations annual climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan. During negotiations, Biden administration officials will make new pledges—pledges that Trump is unlikely to honor. “I am still confident about the near-term,” said Shuo. “But I am very worried about the long term.”
There is still a possibility for effective action in the U.S., though. For example: Trump may not be able to dismantle some of Biden’s landmark renewable energy investments—if he receives significant enough pressure to back off. The IRA is popular among Republican lawmakers for bringing more money into their districts via clean energy tax credits.
And states and local climate laws continue to have power even without federal safeguards—for example, Washington voted this week to preserve a state law that generates billions to fight climate change.
Renewable energy will also likely continue to replace more expensive coal power, as it did during the first Trump administration. “At some point the US will realize that fossil fuels are just not competitive,” Dessler said. “Staying on fossil fuels is not the way to run a competitive economy. It just costs too much."
Even with the fallout of Trump’s anti-climate policies—policies that multiple experts told me amount to climate injustice—the climate community is strapping in for a years-long fight.
“It’s hard to know what the future is going to hold, but those who work on this issue are in it for the long term,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute. “We’ve already been through this once.”
“We have a window—not a big window—of time,” said Gregory Jenkins, a climate scientist and professor at Penn State University. “And climate change is one of those problems where you have to work on it now.”
---
11 24
Over the weekend, HEATED reported on one of the stranger bedfellowships of the 2024 election: Elon Musk, clean tech billionaire, and Joe Craft, coal billionaire.
ICYMI: Craft is one of the largest donors to Elon Musk’s America PAC. The coal baron made a one-time $1 million donation in June, marking his single-largest-ever campaign contribution.
That Craft would fork over $1 million to a pro-Trump effort is not surprising. What’s surprising is that the money would go to Musk, who once helped South Australia quit coal, and whose business plan for Tesla literally proposes to “eliminate fossil fuels.”
So why would Craft throw his weight behind Musk, of all people? My theory is that it has less to do with Musk’s vision for the future of energy, and more so his vision for the future of cryptocurrency.
Because Craft, like Musk, is a certified crypto bro.And if cryptocurrency soars in the near-term future, then Craft is betting that coal will, too.
The coal company mining Bitcoin
Cryptocurrency mining requires an enormous amount of electricity—so much that in 2020, a coal plant slated for retirement was revived because of Bitcoin mining. This has been great news for Craft’s coal company, Alliance Resource Partners.
In an April earnings call, Craft said that cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence is “driving significant growth in anticipated electricity demand over the next several years.” This increase in demand has “given us some more optimism that our coal operations will continue longer than when we started looking at some of this diversification,” Craft said.
And Craft isn’t just waiting for Bitcoin miners to create demand for coal. He’s creating the demand himself. Over the last four years, Alliance Resource Partners has mined a whopping $30 million worth of Bitcoin, Alliance CFO Cary Marshall said on the April earnings call. “We're not actually out there buying Bitcoin or anything of that nature,” Marshall said. “We're mining the Bitcoin associated with these miners that we have.
Craft went on to explain that Alliance has "effectively built” a data center for Bitcoin mining, and is using the excess electricity from its coal facilities to power the energy-intensive Bitcoin mining process.
In addition, Craft said Alliance is renting its excess data processing capacity to other Bitcoin miners, “to take advantage of the low energy costs we have.”
The extra income from Alliance’s Bitcoin mining operations are helping the coal company remain financially stable, Marshall added. “We're mining the Bitcoin, and we're selling generally on a monthly basis to cover our operating costs,” he said. He added that the company currently owns about 425 Bitcoin and expects to mine between 175 to 190 more this year.
Meanwhile, Forbes has called Musk “one of the biggest Bitcoin and crypto price influencers”—which could extend to the government level if Trump is re-elected. If re-elected, Trump has promised to appoint Musk the head of a new department to oversee and mitigate government spending: The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—a reference to Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. (Trump has also pledged to create a bitcoin strategic reserve if elected, as well as form a crypto advisory council).
Musk, for what it’s worth, used to be concerned about the potential negative impacts of cryptocurrency on climate change, particularly with regard to coal. In 2021, just weeks after Tesla announced it hadinvested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, Musk announced that Tesla would no longer accept car purchases via Bitcoin. "We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel," he said. "Cryptocurrency is a good idea... but this cannot come at great cost to the environment."
But like all things related to climate change, Musk seems to have abandoned that concern. Today, Tesla is the third-largest Bitcoin holder among public companies, Yahoo reported, and SpaceX “is said to be holding around 8,285 coins.”
Anyway, just thought that was interesting. What do y’all think?
---
---
an the conv 10 24
as TVs across Florida broadcast the all-too-familiar images of a powerful hurricane headed for the coast in early October 2024, people whose homes had been damaged less than two weeks earlier by Hurricane Helene watched anxiously. Hurricane Milton was rapidly intensifying into a dangerous storm, fueled by the Gulf of Mexico’s record-breaking temperatures.
Many residents scrambled to evacuate, clogging roads away from the region. Officials urged those near the coast who ignored evacuation warnings to scrawl their names on their arms with indelible ink so their corpses could be identified.
The two hurricanes were among the most destructive in recent memory. They are also stark reminders of the increasingly extreme weather events that scientists have long warned would be the consequence of human-driven climate change.
Still, many people deny that climate change is a worsening threat, or that it exists at all. As its impacts grow more visible and destructive, how is this possible?
Views of Hurricane Milton’s damage across Florida.
One answer lies in a unique facet of human psychology – specifically, in how people manage the fear aroused by existential threats. For many people, denying the existence of a climate crisis is not only convenient, but may feel psychologically necessary.
Terror management theory
The Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Ernest Becker put it this way: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else … to overcome it by denying it in some way is the final destiny for man.”
In plain terms, he was saying that most people struggle to accept their mortality and take pains to distort their perception of reality to avoid confronting it.
In the 1980s, social psychologists developed “terror management theory,” showing the lengths people go to deny death. Hundreds of experiments have tested its implications. In a common method, participants reflect on their own death, while control groups consider less threatening topics, like dental pain. The key question: What does death awareness do to people?
After writing about death, people tend to quickly move on, pushing thoughts of it from consciousness with distractions, rationalizations and other tactics. Health care professionals see this every day. For example, people often dodge screenings and diagnostic tests to avoid the frightening possibility of discovering cancer.
Skidmore College psychologist Sheldon Solomon discusses Ernest Becker’s ‘The Denial of Death’ and terror management theory in the context of humanity’s history of brutal behavior.
But here’s the rub: Terror management theory suggests that when people are not thinking about death, it nevertheless holds influence. The unconscious mind lingers on the problem even after people have used strategies to quiet the fear by pushing it from awareness.
Social psychology experiments show that people often cope with the specter of death by attaching themselves to cultural ideologies, such as religious, political or even sports fandom. These worldviews imbue life with meaning, values and purpose. And that can ease the terror of mortality by connecting people to an enduring and comforting web of ideas and beliefs that transcend one’s own existence.
When people are made aware of death, those systems of meaning become even more critical to their psychological functioning. Existential threats make us cling even tighter to the meaning systems that sustain us.
Climate denial as a defense mechanism
Much like a terror management lab experiment – or the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic – natural disasters like hurricanes Helene and Milton trigger death anxiety.
Rising sea levels, warming oceans and intensifying storms – all tied to global warming fueled by human actions – represent an existential threat.
From our perspective, it is not surprising that climate-related disasters disappear from the public consciousness almost as soon as they have passed. Google Trends data exemplifies this: Incoming storms instigated an uptick in searches for “climate change” and “global warming” in the days before Hurricane Helene made landfall on Sept. 26, 2024, and Hurricane Milton on Oct. 9, 2024. Then those searches quickly declined as people shifted their focus away from the threat.
Unfortunately, climate change isn’t going away, no matter how hard anyone tries to deny it.
While climate denial allows people to protect themselves from feelings of distress, terror management theory suggests that denying death is just the tip of the iceberg. For some people, accepting the reality of climate change would necessitate reevaluating their ideologies.
Terror management theory predicts that individuals whose ideologies conflict with environmental concerns may ironically double down on those beliefs to psychologically manage the existential threat posed by climate-related disasters. It’s similar to how mortality reminders can lead people to engage in risky behavior, such as smoking or tanning. Hurricanes may reinforce denial and commitment to a worldview that rejects climate change.
A path forward: Building new worldviews
Although denial may be a natural psychological response to existential threats, the U.S. may be getting to a point where even deniers can’t ignore the existential threat associated with climate change.
Again and again, Americans are gobsmacked by the devastation – from hurricanes to severe flooding, wildfires and more.
A terror management analysis suggests that overcoming this crisis requires weaving a solutions-focused narrative into the ideologies that people rely on for comfort. As psychologists who work on terror management, we believe the fight against climate change should be framed not as an apocalyptic battle that humanity is destined to lose, but as a moral and practical challenge that humanity can collectively overcome.
[vid] Tampa, Florida, meteorologist had the right idea as the two hurricanes headed for his community: His fact-based social media updates eschew partisan critique, encourage neighbors to support one another and emphasize preparedness and resilience in the face of incoming storms.
As Milton approached, Phillips told residents to remember his Rule #7: Don’t freak out. That doesn’t mean do nothing – it means evaluate risks without letting emotion interfere, and take action.
Shifting the narrative from helplessness to collective empowerment and action can help people confront climate change without triggering the existential anxieties that lead to denial – offering a vision for a future that is both secure and personally meaningful.
Jamie Goldenberg, Professor of Psychology and Area Director, Cognitive, Neuroscience and Social Psychology, University of South Florida; Emily P. Courtney, Assistant Professor of Instruction, University of South Florida, and Joshua Hart, Professor of Psychology, *Union College
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
===
===
568,287 views
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl6VhCAeEfQ
We're nearly halfway through the 2020s, dubbed the most decisive decade for action on climate change. Where exactly do things stand? Climate impact scholar Johan Rockström offers the most up-to-date scientific assessment of the state of the planet and explains what must be done to preserve Earth's resilience to human pressure.
...e Earth system scientists and climate scientists
0:10
are getting seriously nervous.
0:12
The planet is changing faster than we have expected.
0:16
We are, despite years of raising the alarm,
0:20
now seeing that the planet is actually in a situation
0:23
where we underestimated risks.
0:25
Abrupt changes are occurring in a way
0:28
that is way beyond the realistic expectations in science.
---
Car insurance has skyrocketed due to increased climate-fueled disasters
Special ProgramsClimate & Energy
Written by Allison Fisher
Published 08/28/24 mma
During the August 28 edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, Fox Business correspondent Max Gordon reported on the skyrocketing cost of car insurance, another one of the “big issues coming up in the campaign” according to anchor Dana Perino. Gordon went on to connect this pocketbook issue to climate change, noting that the, “Increase in severe weather events has been one of the main drivers behind these increasing premiums. Climate events that cause a billion dollars or more in damage have been steadily on the rise, impacting how insurers set rates.”
Notably, the climate crisis is creating a housing insurance crisis as well. Climate change is making storms and wildfires more destructive. Last year, the U.S. experienced a record 28 disasters that cost more than a billion dollars each in damage. In response, some private insurers are raising premiums in areas frequently hit by extreme weather or pulling out of high-risk areas altogether, leaving homeowners uninsured.
Rising insurance costs are not the only economic impact of climate change. A study released early this year found that climate change is among the factors driving inflation which is “driving up the prices of food and other goods worldwide.” As Axios reported: “This is not the first study to note the economic toll of climate change, or even the inflationary pressures of increasing temperatures and extreme weather events.”
Video
CitationFrom the August 28, 2024, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom
DANA PERINO (ANCHOR): We've been talking about all these big issues coming up in the campaign. Housing is one. Here is another one: The cost of car insurance is crushing drivers. Rates have spiked since President Biden took office, and they’re projected to surge even more this year. Fox Business' Max Gordon is live from Los Angeles with an explanation as to what is going on.
:{MAX GORDON (FOX BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT): Hey there Dana. Well, here in California, car insurance rates are expected to jump by more than 50% by the end of the year. It’s one of three states who are going to be seeing that. That’s also happening in Missouri and Minnesota.:{ The big reason for this — well, it's natural disasters. Severe weather}:. That's all according to a study from Insurify. That’s a company that provides information about the insurance market.
The average cost of full coverage in the U.S. rose by 15% in the first half of this year. And that number is expected to hit 22% by the end of this year. The report says that increase in severe weather events has been one of the main drivers behind these increasing premiums. Climate events that cause a billion dollars or more in damage have been steadily on the rise, impacting how insurers set rates. Hail-related claims were up to 11.8% of all comprehensive claims in 2023, according to the report, a 2.8% increase since 2020. Vehicle maintenance and repair costs have also increased by around 38% over the past five years, according to federal figures. These higher repair costs have led to more expensive claims, with insurance companies passing the cost to consumers in the way of higher premiums.}:
---
aha note insurance drives home price thus inflation
mma 8 24
strategy to control the narrative as the fossil fuel industry faces mounting scrutiny.
mma 8 24
aha note drives home cost
Permian Proud ignores climate crisis as Texas faces escalating climate disasters and environmental injustice
Texas recently endured a record-breaking heat wave, with temperatures soaring above 110 F in multiple cities. The Washington Post reported that Abilene shattered its all-time high at 113 F, while other cities set new August records. This extreme heat isn't just uncomfortable, it's potentially deadly — and it’s straining the state's power grid to its limits.
This recent crisis is just the latest example of Texas’ extreme vulnerability to climate change. A stark analysis from Public Citizen reveals that between 1980 and 2022, a staggering 44% of all billion-dollar climate and weather disasters in the country affected Texas. The state faces an onslaught of heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires that are increasing in both frequency and intensity.
The climate crisis is also creating significant financial impacts for Texas residents. Erin Douglas of The Texas Tribune reported that insurance rates in Texas have skyrocketed by 22% in 2023, twice the average national increase. Even more troubling, “many areas of the state are likely underpriced relative to their climate risk, according to a model created by the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit group of academics and experts that quantifies climate risks,” suggesting that the financial strain on homeowners is only set to worsen.
Notably, the fossil fuel industry operating in Texas bears outsized responsibility for climate change, amplifying the risks facing communities across the state:
Texas emits more greenhouse gas emissions than any other state, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. It accounts for 14% of the nation’s climate-warming emissions, and produces more than twice the total emissions of California, the next largest greenhouse gas emitter. Texas is also the nation’s largest oil and gas producing state, accounting for more than 40% of the nation’s oil production.
Beyond the climate impacts of the fossil fuel industry, Texas also faces severe environmental justice challenges. Low-income communities and communities of color bear a disproportionate burden of industrial pollution — in Port Arthur and Houston, the concentration of petrochemical facilities and other polluting industries near residential areas is a direct result of historical segregation and discriminatory land-use practices. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality's permitting decisions, particularly for facilities like concrete batch plants in Harris County, have further entrenched these disparities, leading to ongoing health risks for vulnerable populations.
The fossil fuel industry deploys multifaceted deception campaigns like Permian Proud to delay climate action
===
an 8 24
a Democrat-backed 2022 climate law is "drawing growing GOP support," causing friction among Republican lawmakers, according to a Sunday, August 25 Politico report.
While the Inflation Reduction Act "is undeniably bringing federal money, private investments and jobs into communities around the country overwhelmingly represented by Republicans," Politico notes thatno GOP lawmakers voted for the bill in 2022, "and conservatives consistently charge that its hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for electric vehicles, wind, solar and other technologies will drive up prices, distort the markets and benefit China."
Per the report, earlier this month, 18 House Republicans signed onto a letter asking Speaker Mike Johnson to spare the energy tax credits from efforts to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, with many of them seeing the incentives as both good for the planet and extremely beneficial for local economic development."
READ MORE:**GOP commits 'stolen valor' by taking credit for bills 'passed by Democrats': columnist**
However, some far-right Republicans, like Rep. Chip Roy (TX), are calling some colleagues who signed the letter hypocritical.
Noting that the "18 Republicans voted last year to repeal the IRA climate subsidies," Roy claimed via X, "Now, [they] want to preserve so-called ‘green’ handouts to Democrats’ corporate cronies."
Politico reports that Nick Loris, vice president of public policy at the Republican-aligned firm C3 Solutions, predicts GOP members will "treat the tax credits as something of a buffet, with Republicans picking and choosing what they like and what they don’t."
He emphasized, "There’s going to be some division for sure, but it’s not going to be black and white, either."
READ MORE:[Conservative admits Trump’s policies 'would result in price spikes' for most Americans
The possible party showdown, Politico adds, is "all part of an intensifying debate within the Republican Party about how to respond to climate change, a rising priority for many young voters. And while more GOP lawmakers say they want to be active on the issue, many conservatives — including Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump — still don’t buy the reality of human-caused global warming and the impact of fossil fuels."
*Politico's full report is available here.
---
gmail 7 24 not sure how morano fits here
speed of human-induced global warming has never been higher - MSN
MSN
... a 'nonstarter': Marc Morano. 03:12. Idea of transitioning energy to solar and wind is a 'nonstarter': Marc Morano. Fox Business. 53.
for or the second consecutive year, an international consortium of fifty researchers, mainly involving scientists from CEA, CNRS, Mercator Océan international, and Météo-France in France, has updated the key indicators of global climate change. Their findings are alarming: the results show that global warming due to human activities is advancing at a rate of 0.26°C per decade, the highest pace since records began.
As 2023 ranks as the hottest year on record, a group of 50 international scientists including Valérie Masson-Delmotte, Sophie Szopa, Aurélien Ribes, Karina von Schuckmann, and Pierre Friedlingstein, from several French organizations (CEA, CNRS, Mercator Océan international, Météo-France, IPSL-ENS, Paris Saclay) have published their second annual report on global climate change indicators in the scientific journal Earth System Science Data.
Once again this year, the study's conclusions reveal that warming due to human activities continues to increase, reaching 1.19°C over the last decade (2014-2023) compared to the pre-industrial period, surpassing the 1.14°C estimated between 2013 and 2022 (as indicated in last year's report).
The analysis also shows that the residual carbon budget, i.e., the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted before causing global warming of 1.5°C, is now only about 200 billion tonnes (approximately 220 billion tons), equivalent to five years of current emissions. In 2023 alone, human-induced warming reached 1.3°C.
This figure is lower than the overall warming observed during the same year (1.43°C), demonstrating that natural climate variability, particularly the El Niño phenomenon, also played a role in the record temperature of 2023.
gfx]
Key planetary climate indicators 2023 © CEA, CNRM, Météo France, CNRS.
This report also presents new information on the effects of reducing sulfur emissions, particularly those from the global maritime transport industry. These emissions have a cooling effect on the climate by directly reflecting sunlight back into space and promoting the formation of more reflective clouds. The continued decrease in these emissions has reduced this effect. Although this phenomenon was offset last year by particle emissions due to wildfires in Canada, the cooling induced by particle emissions will continue to decline in the long term, the report's authors highlight.
"A rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, 70% of which are caused by fossil fuel combustion (oil, natural gas, and coal), will limit the level of global warming we will eventually experience. At the same time, we need to build more resilient societies. The devastation caused by wildfires, drought, floods, and heatwaves that the world experienced in 2023 must not become a new norm," says Professor Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds (UK) and coordinator of the study.
Another key finding: high levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions also affect Earth's energy balance: ocean buoys and satellites are tracking unprecedented heat fluxes in the oceans, ice sheets, soils, and Earth's atmosphere. This heat flux is 50% higher than its long-term average.
"This second annual update after the 6th IPCC report highlights the intensification of human influence on the climate, with an even faster rate of heat accumulation due to human activities, and breaks down how temporary modulation by natural climate variability (particularly El Niño), in addition to human-induced warming, led to the record planetary temperature observed in 2023. The severity of the effects observed this year (which are not addressed in our article), related to extreme heat on land and at sea, extreme precipitation, drought, and wildfires, on ecosystems, populations, infrastructures, and the economy, sadly shows clearly why every increment of additional warming matters." declares Valérie Masson-Delmottte, climatologist at CEA.
The conclusions of this report should inform and guide the strengthening of climate action plans that all countries around the world have committed to present to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by 2025, in order to reduce emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change.
---
an common dr
as the Midwestern and Eastern U.S. braced for what could be the longest heatwave in decades for some locations, a wildfire near Los Angeles forced more than 1,000 people to evacuate over Father's Day weekend.
The climate crisis caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels is making both heatwaves and wildfires more frequent and extreme, and politicians and environmental advocates pointed out the role that state and national policy can play in fueling extreme weather.
"Each of the last 12 months have been the hottest on record," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on social media on Sunday. "This week, cities across the country will see record-high temperatures. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to surrender the fight against the devastation of climate change. We cannot let that happen."
"Politicians making bad policy decisions (like killing congestion pricing) is the number one cause of climate change, which makes heatwaves like this one worse."
Former U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly told oil and gas executives this spring that donating $1 billion to his campaign would be a "deal" for them because he would dismantle the Biden administration's climate regulations.
Sanders' remarks came as the National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Prediction Center forecast that "record-breaking heat" would "expand from the Midwest and Great Lakes to the Northeast this week, potentially lingering through early next week."
NWS said the heatwave would be the "first significant" heatwave of the season and could break daily temperature records and some monthly June temperature records for the portion of the country stretching from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast between Monday and next Saturday.
"The longevity of dangerous heat forecasted for some locations has not been experienced in decades," NWS said.
The heat index could come close to 105°F in many places, and nighttime temperatures of around 75°F mean that those without cooling infrastructure will see "little to no relief."
The high temperatures could impact millions of people from Michigan to Maine. As of Saturday, 22.6 million people were under extreme heat warnings, watches, or advisories, according toThe New York Times.
University of California, Los Angeles, climate scientist Daniel Swain told the Timesthat the heat would "affect a bunch of highly populated areas where there hasn't been quite as many stories about extreme heat recently," adding, "Now, it's New England's turn."
The NWS warned, "With the intense heat and high humidity it is important to take precautions to protect one's health, particularly those without effective cooling and/or adequate hydration."
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a warning on social media on Saturday, pointing out that extreme heat is the leading weather-related cause of death in the U.S.
However, climate advocates criticized Hochul for exacerbating the root cause of more extreme heatwaves with her last-minute cancellation of a New York City congestion pricing plan earlier this month.
"Politicians making bad policy decisions (like killing congestion pricing) is the number one cause of climate change, which makes heatwaves like this one worse," the Sunrise Movement wrote in response to Hochul's post.
Long-time climate advocate and author Bill McKibben said: "This governor just blocked congestion pricing, one of the most important climate policy advances possible. She's redefining trolling."
Climate Central noted that, "while heatwaves are common in summer, this early season excessive, likely record-breaking heat is made as much as two times to five times MORE likely to occur in mid-June due to human-caused climate change (particularly overnight warmth)."
Meanwhile, on the West Coast, the Post Fire ignited at around 1:45 pm on Saturday local time in Los Angeles County, California, about 65 miles from downtown Los Angeles, The Washington Postreported.
As of Sunday afternoon, it had spread 12,265 acres and was 2% contained, according to California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). Fire officials said the blaze was fanned by heat, low humidity, and wind and had damaged two structures.
"Currently crews are working to construct perimeter fire lines around the flakes of the fire. Aircraft are working to stop forward progress but have limited visibility," Cal Fire wrote on Sunday, adding that "the fire is pushing up into Hungry Valley Park. California State Park Services have evacuated 1,200 people from Hungry Valley Park. Pyramid Lake is closed because of the threat of the Post Fire."
One of those evacuated was 33-year-old Oscar Flores, who was visiting Hungry Valley Park with his 12-year-old son on Saturday.
"It looked like it was the last day of the world," Flores told the Los Angeles Times. "People were loading quickly and merging out, driving fast. The ranger said you have 10 minutes [to get] whatever you can pack."
===
mma 6 24
The recent extreme heat event that swept across the U.S. Southwest in early June — the first major heat wave of the year, which was made three times more likely because of climate change — served as a stark reminder of the escalating climate crisis. It also demonstrated the urgent need for national TV news coverage that consistently connects extreme weather to human-caused climate change.
Yet corporate broadcast and cable news shows largely ignored the climate connection in their coverage, and they missed other crucial opportunities as well: to connect the heat wave to recent climate attribution studies, to spotlight extreme heat’s impact on vulnerable populations, and to inform viewers about the climate implications of the 2024 election.
- ## Topline findings
- A Media Matters review of national TV news coverage of the extreme heat wave from June 4-9 found:
- National TV news networks covered the extreme heat event for 167 minutes across 97 segments. Climate change was mentioned in only 12% (12) segments.
- Cable news networks — CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC — aired a combined 114 minutes across 54 segments about the extreme heat event. Climate change was mentioned in 5 segments.
- Corporate broadcast TV networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — aired a combined 54 minutes across 43 segments about the extreme heat event. Climate change was mentioned in 7 segments.
- CBS performed the best among all networks, airing as many segments that connected the heat to climate change as the three cable news networks combined. Nearly half of its total segments (12) included a mention of climate change (5).
- Only 4 climate segments also included a mention of how the extreme heat event could impact a socially marginalized population.
===
6 24 howler monkeys fall dead from trees mex
i can’t look
===
an 224 spate
Antarctic tipping point that occurred 8,000 years ago 'could happen again' - Alternet.org
thom 3 wisc winter hurric
Category 6? Scientists highlight 'growing inadequacy' of current hurricane scale - Alternet.org
---
Rare ‘flesh-eating’ bacterium spreads north as oceans warm - Alternet.org
---
---
yahoo mail 10 23 THOM
Sometime in the past year, this tiny planet we live on in an obscure corner of our Milky Way galaxy went through some sort of tipping point, a “state change” of sorts, and now things are different from how they’ve been at any other time in the 300,000 year history of the human race.
Nobody knows for sure what that change or tipping point is.
— One theory is that variations in dust concentrations in the Northern Hemisphere’s atmosphere — a function of the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean allowing more or less fine dirt to be picked up and carried aloft from northern Africa — are changing the reflectivity of the atmosphere and trapping more of the sun’s heat.
— Another theory follows the January, 2022 eruption of the volcano at Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai, which injected so much water vapor (146 million tons) and sulfur dioxide (420,000 tons) into the stratosphere that scientists were predicting soon after it happened that there would be a year or two of unusual heat signatures across the planet.
— Some scientists argue it was caused by a change in worldwide regulations mandating ships at sea burn cleaner diesel fuel, reducing the soot-type particles they’re emitting that previously formed heat-reflective clouds.
— And, of course, the current El Niño ocean pattern appears to be drawing heat from the ocean up to the surface where it’s transferred to the atmosphere in unprecedented amounts.
But regardless of the why/how,somethinghas definitely happened in the past year or so that has pushed our atmosphere’s state of equilibrium out of an older, stable range and into a newer, warmer, and apparently far less stable state.’
nice grAph ]Graphic from: “The 2023 State of the Climate Report: Entering Uncharted Territory.” BioScience24 Oct 2023. Red line is 2023; gray lines are previous years.}:
It’s so dramatic and so shocking that scientists — typically not prone to hyperbole — publishing in the peer-reviewed journal BioScience about this anomaly open their article with:
“Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory.
“For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
“Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.”
Looking at 35 different “vital signs” that signal the health of our planet and its atmosphere, 20 of which have deviated from their norms so badly as to alarm researchers, the scientists who wrote for BioScience warn us all:
“We are venturing into uncharted climate territory.”
In just the past 24 hours, a tropical storm that nobody thought was a threat blew up into a full-on Category 5 hurricane and is, as you’re reading these words, devastating Acapulco. Not one weather agency predicted it: this is how unpredictable and violent our weather has become because we’re still burning fossil fuels.[yemen?]
While wind and solar power grew 17 percent worldwide between 2021 and 2022, and both are now cheaper that any unsubsidized fossil fuels, humanity is still using fossil fuels at a 15:1 ratio against renewables. Life on earth won’t be safe until those numbers are reversed.
Our forests worldwide are not only under assault from loggers and poachers; climate change has now altered their environment enough that hundreds of millions of acres of trees are suffering from beetle infestations, drought, dieback, and forest fires.[FEEDBACK] While the world needs to reverse the trend toward deforestation by 2030 (we’re currently losing around 22 million hectares of forest and jungle a year), we’re still a long way away from that goal.
All over the planet glaciers are in retreat, as are the ice shelves and glaciers covering Greenland and Antarctica. Coral reefs are bleaching and dying, and fish and marine mammal species are undergoing radical shifts in their habitat and range as waters warm, driving most ambulatory animals toward the north and south poles.
Deadly storms, derechos, flash flooding, bomb cyclones, rapidly-forming hurricanes, severe/damaging hail, tornadoes in areas that had never before seen them: all these are creating vast swaths of human misery and costing hundreds of billions worldwide.
Given that the cost of the damages inflicted by climate change are so much higher than the profits the worldwide fossil fuel industry is making selling us their destructive products it’s surprising that more governments haven’t ended hydrocarbon subsidies and begun to directly bill these corporations for the climate change destruction their products are causing.
There’s a huge issue of economic and social justice associated with the climate crisis. The top 10 percent of the world, wealth-wise, produce fully 48 percent of the world’s emissions. The bottom half of humanity, wealth-wise, produces a mere 12 percent.
Yelling at poor people that they need to turn lights off (if they even have lights) and insulate their houses (when they have houses) will never have even a fragment of the impact that could be achieved by imposing a carbon tax on private jets, yachts, and mega-mansions.
Along those same lines, economists need to come up with new ways to model the health and success of societies and their economies that don’t rely only or even primarily on growth (as most do now). Instead, indices of sustainability and quality-of-life should be pushed front-and-center as alternatives to growth are developed and publicized.
Last year over 700 million people experienced chronic — regular, long-lasting — hunger, an uptick of over 100 million people over the previous two years. Driving this are climate extremes that are wiping out crops, failing soil exhausted by factory farming, and armed conflicts.
Producing a single pound of beef takes 1,700 gallons of water (compared with 39 gallons for a pound of vegetables): if everybody in America were to simply adopt “Meatless Mondays,” it would save the nation 70 million gallons of gas every year (“enough to fill up every car in Canada and Mexico and then some”) and free up an amount of land twice the size of Delaware.
It would also measurably reduce the rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and obesity. Cutting meat down to once a week or once a month — well within what human diets require — we’d have enough food left over to end world hunger while taking a bite out of climate change as well.
The fossil fuel industry would prefer we focus on talking about recycling, turning off lights, keeping our homes cool, and yelling at friends who fly for vacation. But the real power to change the future is in Congress and state houses across the country.
Making fossil fuels and meat more expensive (while subsidizing public transportation and healthy food for low-income people) is something that can only be done by government bodies, and will have a far greater impact than any amount of complaining or accusing people around their individual actions.
And there’s never been a better or more important time than now to join climate actions and lobby your elected representatives for large scale, long-term solutions to our fossil fuel addiction.
While nobody is exactly sure why we’ve hit this year of sudden anomalies, scientists are certain it’s a blinking red neon warning that we must change our course or suffer an unimaginable catastrophe. And we still have the tools to solve this crisis of our own making: we just have to use them before it’s too late.
---
---
no lnx $ ****
Worldwide fascism is being accelerated by the one thing few people want to talk about
Thom Hartmann
August 22, 2023
This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers.
The government of the Netherlands fell this summer. The issue that tipped it over the edge was immigration driven by climate change. If Putin wanted to destroy democracy in Europe (and he does), back in 2015 he couldn’t have picked a better strategy. Odds are, though, he was just trying to protect his deepwater ports; it wasn’t until the crisis developed that he realized how he could exploit it to overthrow liberal democracies in the EU. The way it’s played out gives us a glimpse into our future — and the future of democratic republics all across the world — as the global climate emergency and the refugee crisis associated with it grows more severe over the next few years.
The current rise-of-rightwing-fascism crisis building in Europe began in 2010 and started with global climate change.
:{:{}:
}:
The fall of that year sawunusually severe rainfall across the wheat-growing parts of Canada, cutting that nation’s wheat harvest, along with drought across Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and China. A La Nina caused crop failures in Argentina and Peru. Worldwide prices of staple foods, particularly wheat, exploded.
:{:{}:
}:
On December 17 of that year a street vendor inTunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the high cost of the wheat he needed to make the foods he and his peers sold, and the harassment of police against their protests. It sparked what we referred to then as the Arab Spring, that lasted through most of 2011.
The steady warming and drought in that area, though, never let up and the desert in North Africa relentlessly continued to eat up millions of acres of food-producing land, particularly across Syria. By 2015 it had pushed over a million Syrian subsistence farmers off their land — that had desertified — and into Syria’s cities, particularly Damascus and Aleppo.
Northern Africa became the world’s number one food importer, and the prices kept rising relentlessly.
Newly homeless, hungry, and destitute, these Syrian farmers began demonstrations in the streets demanding food, shelter, and employment or “welfare” payments from the Syrian government.
Bashar Assad, being a psychopathic dictator, ordered his troops to fire live ammunition into the crowds in 2012 and 2013, and soon a full-blown revolt was on: “rebels” seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, in early 2013.
Syria was also the base for Russia’s Mediterranean fleet, with multiple deep-water ports that Putin believed were critical to his nation’s military defense. By 2015 he had a dozen battleships there, along with submarines and other warships.
He had to prevent the Assad government from falling or risk an “Arab Spring democracy” emerging — as happened for a short while in Tunisia and Egypt [ALSO DROUGHT]— that might align itself with the West and kick Russia out.
Making a long story short, Putin bombed the crap out of Syria on Assad’s behalf, virtually leveling the city of Aleppo, killing hundreds of civilians.
It was one of the worst war crimes of this century, almost as deadly as George W. Bush’s brutal and criminal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Millions of climate and war refugees fled the country, joining Bush’s wars’ fugitives making their way into Europe by any means possible.
:{:{}:
}:
Thus began Europe’s refugee crisis, which just helped bring down Holland’s government. In two weeks, it may well cause the rightwing fascist-aligned anti-immigrant People’s Party to come to power in the Spanish elections on July 23.
As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted in a 2021 report:
“By the end of 2016, nearly5.2 million refugees and migrants reached European shores,undertaking treacherous journeys from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries torn apart by war and persecution.”
This flood of brown-skinned Muslims fleeing African and Middle Eastern climate change and wars into Europe over the past decade is why Italy and Sweden now have rightwing leaders; why Viktor Orbán was able to gain and hold power in Hungary with his promise to “build a wall” along Hungary’s southern border (a promise he kept); and why rightwing parties are today growing so rapidly in Germany, Greece, Norway, Austria, Belgium and France.
The legacy of five centuries of racist imperialism across four continents has been that wealth and safety from the ravages of climate change are concentrated in mostly White-run nations, while vulnerability to desertification and poverty are concentrated in mostly Brown- and Black-run nations.
When Russia intervened in British politics to tear apart the EU, their trolls’ main Facebook pitch for Brexit was that “those [Brown and Black] people” the EU had let in were now making their way to the UK.
While every country in the world can accept refugees in small numbers without crisis, when “other people” begin showing up in large numbers the response by every nation in history typically tends toward rightwing nationalism and xenophobia, an obsession with borders, and demands for racial, cultural, and religious “purity.”
Here in North America we’re seeing a similar dynamic. Reagan so severely destabilized Central America and Venezuela with his sanctions, illegal Iran-Contra program, and support for rightwing death squads that those nations never recovered. In the years since, climate change has bit these weakened governments deep, forcing millions of subsistence farmers — just like in Syria but here mostly from hard-hit Guatemala — off land that once grew crops but is now, just a few years later, scrub desert.
Exploiting the climate refugee crisis on America’s southern border, Republican politicians have spent the years since Obama’s election in 2008 falsely claiming that Democrats had thrown the border “open,” producing thousands of news stories that have been used by coyotes — human traffickers — to draw even more refugees toward the United States.
Compounding that, Trump launched his 2016 campaign on keeping Brown people out of the United States, and today racism and xenophobia form the foundation of most Republican political campaigns (when they aren’t hating on queer people or women).
The result of these trends has been a worldwide shift to the right. As Freedom House noted in a 2022 report, over 60 countries experienced “declines” in democracy the previous year; only about 20 percent of people worldwide now live in “free” nations:
“Global freedom faces a dire threat. … Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same. …
“The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.”
So far, the western world’s refugee crisis has been mostly driven by massive policy errors and outright war crimes: Russia’s response to the Syrian farmers, the US invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and American meddling in Central America and Venezuela.
But all have been either triggered or exacerbated by the worldwide climate emergency. And, as we can see from this summer’s weather worldwide, that emergency is building at a rate far more rapid than even alarmist climate scientists were predicting just a decade ago.
Recent projections show that within just the next two decades as many as three billion people could be fleeing areas that will soon only marginally support human life.
As equatorial regions become uninhabitable, the mostly darker-skinned people living there will be migrating north and south into areas controlled by lighter-skinned people in numbers that will make today’s Syrian, Iraq, and Afghan refugee crisis look like a statistical blip.
It will put worldwide white supremacist and Nazi movements into hyperdrive.
In addition to acting immediately to mitigate climate change and green the world’s economy, the free nations of the world must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence- and hate-based racist political movements.
That will also require radically reducing the Supreme Court-gifted political power of big money here in America — particularly from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it has created — and returning that power and wealth to the hard-hit majority. The Democratic Party in America is increasingly committed to this, but Republicans and the dozens of billionaires in their camp are prepared to spend heretofore unimaginable sums to keep climate deniers and race-baiters in office.
We also must help those nations most hard-hit by the warming — caused largely by our carbon pollution — to deal with their own refugees internally, lest they irrecoverably destabilize first their own governments and then ours.
To paraphrase JFK, we are not helpless before this task.
But it will require western and American media and political systems to take on these three crises — climate change, the refugees it produces, and politicians who demagogue the issue while blocking forward progress — now.
We are quite literally out of time.
From Your Site Articles
'Fascistic': Mary Trump warns a Republican admin will let 'everything burn to the ground' — 'literally' ›
How capitalism is leading us to instability, inequality, and fascism ›
Noam Chomsky: 'Proto-fascism' and 'white nationalism are prime ingredients of the GOP’s slow-motion coup ›
Eco-fascism: White nationalists' extreme solution to the coming environmental apocalypse ›
Related Articles Around the Web
The dangers of eco-fascism and why it's a 'veneer for racist beliefs ... ›
What's Worse Than Climate Catastrophe? Climate Catastrophe Plus ... ›
The far-right and environmentalism overlap is bigger than you think ... ›
---
---
no lnx $ ****
Worldwide fascism is being accelerated by the one thing few people want to talk about
Thom Hartmann
August 22, 2023
This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers.
The government of the Netherlands fell this summer. The issue that tipped it over the edge was immigration driven by climate change. If Putin wanted to destroy democracy in Europe (and he does), back in 2015 he couldn’t have picked a better strategy. Odds are, though, he was just trying to protect his deepwater ports; it wasn’t until the crisis developed that he realized how he could exploit it to overthrow liberal democracies in the EU. The way it’s played out gives us a glimpse into our future — and the future of democratic republics all across the world — as the global climate emergency and the refugee crisis associated with it grows more severe over the next few years.
The current rise-of-rightwing-fascism crisis building in Europe began in 2010 and started with global climate change.
:{:{}:
}:
The fall of that year saw unusually severe rainfall across the wheat-growing parts of Canada, cutting that nation’s wheat harvest, along with drought across Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and China. A La Nina caused crop failures in Argentina and Peru. Worldwide prices of staple foods, particularly wheat, exploded.
:{:{}:
}:
On December 17 of that year a street vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the high cost of the wheat he needed to make the foods he and his peers sold, and the harassment of police against their protests. It sparked what we referred to then as the Arab Spring, that lasted through most of 2011.
The steady warming and drought in that area, though, never let up and the desert in North Africa relentlessly continued to eat up millions of acres of food-producing land, particularly across Syria. By 2015 it had pushed over a million Syrian subsistence farmers off their land — that had desertified — and into Syria’s cities, particularly Damascus and Aleppo.
Northern Africa became the world’s number one food importer, and the prices kept rising relentlessly.
Newly homeless, hungry, and destitute, these Syrian farmers began demonstrations in the streets demanding food, shelter, and employment or “welfare” payments from the Syrian government.
Bashar Assad, being a psychopathic dictator, ordered his troops to fire live ammunition into the crowds in 2012 and 2013, and soon a full-blown revolt was on: “rebels” seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, in early 2013.
Syria was also the base for Russia’s Mediterranean fleet, with multiple deep-water ports that Putin believed were critical to his nation’s military defense. By 2015 he had a dozen battleships there, along with submarines and other warships.
He had to prevent the Assad government from falling or risk an “Arab Spring democracy” emerging — as happened for a short while in Tunisia and Egypt — that might align itself with the West and kick Russia out.
Making a long story short, Putin bombed the crap out of Syria on Assad’s behalf, virtually leveling the city of Aleppo, killing hundreds of civilians.
It was one of the worst war crimes of this century, almost as deadly as George W. Bush’s brutal and criminal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Millions of climate and war refugees fled the country, joining Bush’s wars’ fugitives making their way into Europe by any means possible.
:{:{}:
}:
Thus began Europe’s refugee crisis, which just helped bring down Holland’s government. In two weeks, it may well cause the rightwing fascist-aligned anti-immigrant People’s Party to come to power in the Spanish elections on July 23.
As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted in a 2021 report:
“By the end of 2016, nearly5.2 million refugees and migrants reached European shores,undertaking treacherous journeys from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries torn apart by war and persecution.”
This flood of brown-skinned Muslims fleeing African and Middle Eastern climate change and wars into Europe over the past decade is why Italy and Sweden now have rightwing leaders; why Viktor Orbán was able to gain and hold power in Hungary with his promise to “build a wall” along Hungary’s southern border (a promise he kept); and why rightwing parties are today growing so rapidly in Germany, Greece, Norway, Austria, Belgium and France.
The legacy of five centuries of racist imperialism across four continents has been that wealth and safety from the ravages of climate change are concentrated in mostly White-run nations, while vulnerability to desertification and poverty are concentrated in mostly Brown- and Black-run nations.
When Russia intervened in British politics to tear apart the EU, their trolls’ main Facebook pitch for Brexit was that “those [Brown and Black] people” the EU had let in were now making their way to the UK.
While every country in the world can accept refugees in small numbers without crisis, when “other people” begin showing up in large numbers the response by every nation in history typically tends toward rightwing nationalism and xenophobia, an obsession with borders, and demands for racial, cultural, and religious “purity.”
Here in North America we’re seeing a similar dynamic. Reagan so severely destabilized Central America and Venezuela with his sanctions, illegal Iran-Contra program, and support for rightwing death squads that those nations never recovered. In the years since, climate change has bit these weakened governments deep, forcing millions of subsistence farmers — just like in Syria but here mostly from hard-hit Guatemala — off land that once grew crops but is now, just a few years later, scrub desert.
Exploiting the climate refugee crisis on America’s southern border, Republican politicians have spent the years since Obama’s election in 2008 falsely claiming that Democrats had thrown the border “open,” producing thousands of news stories that have been used by coyotes — human traffickers — to draw even more refugees toward the United States.
Compounding that, Trump launched his 2016 campaign on keeping Brown people out of the United States, and today racism and xenophobia form the foundation of most Republican political campaigns (when they aren’t hating on queer people or women).
The result of these trends has been a worldwide shift to the right. As Freedom House noted in a 2022 report, over 60 countries experienced “declines” in democracy the previous year; only about 20 percent of people worldwide now live in “free” nations:
“Global freedom faces a dire threat. … Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same. …
“The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.”
So far, the western world’s refugee crisis has been mostly driven by massive policy errors and outright war crimes: Russia’s response to the Syrian farmers, the US invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and American meddling in Central America and Venezuela.
But all have been either triggered or exacerbated by the worldwide climate emergency. And, as we can see from this summer’s weather worldwide, that emergency is building at a rate far more rapid than even alarmist climate scientists were predicting just a decade ago.
Recent projections show that within just the next two decades as many as three billion people could be fleeing areas that will soon only marginally support human life.
As equatorial regions become uninhabitable, the mostly darker-skinned people living there will be migrating north and south into areas controlled by lighter-skinned people in numbers that will make today’s Syrian, Iraq, and Afghan refugee crisis look like a statistical blip.
It will put worldwide white supremacist and Nazi movements into hyperdrive.
In addition to acting immediately to mitigate climate change and green the world’s economy, the free nations of the world must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence- and hate-based racist political movements.
That will also require radically reducing the Supreme Court-gifted political power of big money here in America — particularly from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it has created — and returning that power and wealth to the hard-hit majority. The Democratic Party in America is increasingly committed to this, but Republicans and the dozens of billionaires in their camp are prepared to spend heretofore unimaginable sums to keep climate deniers and race-baiters in office.
We also must help those nations most hard-hit by the warming — caused largely by our carbon pollution — to deal with their own refugees internally, lest they irrecoverably destabilize first their own governments and then ours.
To paraphrase JFK, we are not helpless before this task.
But it will require western and American media and political systems to take on these three crises — climate change, the refugees it produces, and politicians who demagogue the issue while blocking forward progress — now.
We are quite literally out of time.
From Your Site Articles
'Fascistic': Mary Trump warns a Republican admin will let 'everything burn to the ground' — 'literally' ›
How capitalism is leading us to instability, inequality, and fascism ›
Noam Chomsky: 'Proto-fascism' and 'white nationalism are prime ingredients of the GOP’s slow-motion coup ›
Eco-fascism: White nationalists' extreme solution to the coming environmental apocalypse ›
Related Articles Around the Web
The dangers of eco-fascism and why it's a 'veneer for racist beliefs ... ›
What's Worse Than Climate Catastrophe? Climate Catastrophe Plus ... ›
The far-right and environmentalism overlap is bigger than you think ... ›
---
---
an 8 23
David Stanway
SINGAPORE (Reuters) -Human-induced climate change has played an "absolutely overwhelming" role in the extreme heatwaves that have swept across North America, Europe and China this month, according to an assessment by scientists published on Tuesday.
Throughout July, extreme weather has caused havoc across the planet, with temperatures breaking records in China, the United States and southern Europe, sparking forest fires, water shortages and a rise in heat-related hospital admissions.
Over the weekend, thousands of tourists were evacuated from the Greek island of Rhodes to escape wildfires caused by a record-breaking heatwave.
Without human-induced climate change, the events this month would have been "extremely rare", according to a study by World Weather Attribution, a global team of scientists that examines the role played by climate change in extreme weather.
"European and North American temperatures would have been virtually impossible without the effects of climate change," said Izidine Pinto of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, one of the study's authors, during a briefing with journalists."In China it was around 50 times more likely to happen compared to the past."
The World Weather Attribution team estimated that risinggreenhouse gas concentrations made the European heatwave 2.5 Celsius (4.5 Fahrenheit) hotter than it would otherwise have been. They also drove up the North American heatwave by 2C and the one in China by 1C.
As well as directly impacting human health, the heat has caused large-scale crop damage and livestock losses, the scientists said, with U.S. corn and soybean crops, Mexican cattle, southern European olives as well as Chinese cotton all severely affected.
El Nino probably contributed to the additional heat in some regions, but rising greenhouse gases were the major factor, the scientists said, and heatwaves will become increasingly likely if emissions are not slashed.
They estimated that prolonged periods of extreme heat were likely to hit every two to five years if average global temperatures rise 2C above pre-industrial levels. Average temperatures are currently estimated to have risen more than 1.1C.
"The events we have looked at are not rare in today's climate," said Friederike Otto, a scientist with the Grantham Institute for Climate Change in London, speaking at the briefing. "It's not surprising from a climatological point of view, that these events are happening at the same time."
"As long as we keep burning fossil fuels we will see more and more of these extremes," she said. "I don't think there's any stronger evidence that any science has ever presented for a scientific question."
---
context,
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/7/28/global_heat_climate_crisis_july_2023
new climate data show July is on track to become the hottest month in human history, with global temperatures rising to about 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels. On Thursday, the head of the World Meteorological Organization said, “Climate action is not a luxury but a must,” while U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres scolded world leaders over inaction on the climate.
Secretary-General António Guterres: “Climate change is here, it is terrifying, and it is just the beginning. The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived. The air is unbreathable, the heat is unbearable, and the level of fossil fuel profits and climate inaction is unacceptable.”
The U.N.’s warning came as hundreds of wildfires fueled by record heat continued to burn out of control around the Mediterranean — in Algeria, Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia and Turkey.
In China, Typhoon Doksuri made landfall today in the southeastern Fujian province, sparking fires, downing power lines and shuttering schools and businesses. On Thursday, the storm lashed southern Taiwan after battering the northern Philippines, where it killed at least 39 people.
---
In more climate news, the Supreme Court has cleared the way for construction of the contested Mountain Valley Pipeline to resume. The court on Thursday lifted a halt on a section of the project that had been issued by a lower court earlier this month after a challenge by environmental groups.
---
---
more heat dome, greece US midwest
jeff goodell bk kpfa 7/26/23 upfront
---
https://www.alternet.org/ocean-temps/
100 degree fla, coral bleach
https://www.alternet.org/weve-fallen-off-a-cliff/
no lnx twt an 7 23
'We’ve fallen off a cliff': Scientists warn Atlantic currents could collapse as early as 2025
Brett Wilkinsand Common DreamsJuly 26, 2023
"It is very plausible that we've fallen off a cliff already and don't know it," said one researcher.
The system of Atlantic Ocean currents that drive warm water from the tropics toward Europe is at risk of collapsing in the coming decades, an analysis of 150 years of temperature data published Tuesday concluded.
"The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, is a major tipping element in the climate system and a future collapse would have severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region," states the study, which was published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
Although the analysis notes that "assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) model simulations suggest that a full collapse is unlikely within the 21st century," the study's authors "estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions."
"We show that a transition of the AMOC is most likely to occur around 2025-2095," the paper states with "95% confidence."
University of Copenhagen professor Peter Ditlevsen, who led the study, told The Guardian: "I think we should be very worried. This would be a very, very large change. The AMOC has not been shut off for 12,000 years."
Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate action group 350.org, tweeted that "Gulf Stream collapse used to be viewed as a far-off and remote possibility... Less so now."
Meteorologist and climate journalist Eric Holthaus called the study's findings "incredibly worrying."
The Washington Post reports:
The new study adds to a growing body of evidence that this crucial ocean system is in peril. Since 2004, observations from a network of ocean buoys [have shown] the AMOC getting weaker—though the limited time frame of that data set makes it hard to establish a trend. Scientists have also analyzed multiple "proxy" indicators of the current's strength, including microscopic organisms and tiny sediments from the seafloor, to show the system is in its weakest state in more than 1,000 years.
For thousands of years, the Gulf Stream has carried warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico northward along the eastern North American seaboard and across the Atlantic to Europe. As human-caused global heating melts the Greenland ice sheet, massive quantities of fresh water are released into the North Atlantic, cooling the AMOC—which delivers the bulk of the Gulf Stream's heat—toward a "tipping point" that could stop the current in its tracks.
According to The Guardian:
A collapse of AMOC would have disastrous consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America, and West Africa. It would increase storms and drop temperatures in Europe, and lead to a rising sea level on the eastern coast of North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.
"It is very plausible that we've fallen off a cliff already and don't know it," Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, toldThe New York Times. "I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it's way too late to act."
Other studies—including one published in March and another in 2021—have also concluded that the AMOC is at risk of collapsing this century.
Meanwhile in the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctic currents that enrich 40% of Earth's deep oceans with oxygen and nutrients essential for marine life have slowed dangerously in recent decades and could also collapse by mid-century, an Australian study released in May showed.
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
New evidence that an extraterrestrial collision 12,800 years ago triggered an abrupt climate change for Earth ›
What was the 'catastrophic implosion' of the Titan submersible? An expert explains ›
Atlantic Salmon Is Basically Extinct: You’re Eating a Genetically Eroded Version ›
RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
A major Atlantic current is at a critical transition point | NOVA | PBS ›
Is Atlantic Ocean current near collapse? Could be sooner than ... ›
A Stagnant Jet Stream Is Fueling Intense Heat Worldwide. Could ... ›
---
mex tex heat dome spreads, canada burns
https://www.alternet.org/hottest-day-ever-recorded-earth/
---
6 23 faster than we thot
https://www.alternet.org/Bank/himalayan-glaciers/
---
---
an 7 23 $
The danger of worldwide fascism is being accelerated by the one thing few people want to talk about
Thom Hartmann
and Raw Story
July 12, 2023
The government of the Netherlands fell last week. The issue that tipped it over the edge was immigration driven by climate change. If Putin wanted to destroy democracy in Europe (and he does), back in 2015 he couldn’t have picked a better strategy. Odds are, though, he was just trying to protect his deepwater ports; it wasn’t until the crisis developed that he realized how he could exploit it to overthrow liberal democracies in the EU. The way it’s played out gives us a glimpse into our future — and the future of democratic republics all across the world — as the global climate emergency and the refugee crisis associated with it grows more severe over the next few years.
The current rise-of-rightwing-fascism crisis building in Europe began in 2010 and started with global climate change.
The fall of that year saw unusually severe rainfall across the wheat-growing parts of Canada, cutting that nation’s wheat harvest, along with drought across Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and China. A La Nina caused crop failures in Argentina and Peru. Worldwide prices of staple foods, particularly wheat, exploded.
On December 17 of that year a street vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the high cost of the wheat he needed to make the foods he and his peers sold, and the harassment of police against their protests. It sparked what we referred to then as the Arab Spring, that lasted through most of 2011.
The steady warming and drought in that area, though, never let up and the desert in North Africa relentlessly continued to eat up millions of acres of food-producing land, particularly across Syria. By 2015 it had pushed over a million Syrian subsistence farmers off their land — that had desertified — and into Syria’s cities, particularly Damascus and Aleppo.
Northern Africa became the world’s number one food importer, and the prices kept rising relentlessly.
Newly homeless, hungry, and destitute, these Syrian farmers began demonstrations in the streets demanding food, shelter, and employment or “welfare” payments from the Syrian government.
Bashar Assad, being a psychopathic dictator, ordered his troops to fire live ammunition into the crowds in 2012 and 2013, and soon a full-blown revolt was on: “rebels” seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, in early 2013.
Syria was also the base for Russia’s Mediterranean fleet, with multiple deep-water ports that Putin believed were critical to his nation’s military defense. By 2015 he had a dozen battleships there, along with submarines and other warships.
He had to prevent the Assad government from falling or risk an “Arab Spring democracy” emerging — as happened for a short while in Tunisia and Egypt — that might align itself with the West and kick Russia out.
Making a long story short, Putin bombed the crap out of Syria on Assad’s behalf, virtually leveling the city of Aleppo, killing hundreds of civilians.
It was one of the worst war crimes of this century, almost as deadly as George W. Bush’s brutal and criminal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Millions of climate and war refugees fled the country, joining Bush’s wars’ fugitives making their way into Europe by any means possible.
Thus began Europe’s refugee crisis, which just helped bring down Holland’s government.In two weeks, it may well cause the rightwing fascist-aligned anti-immigrant People’s Party to come to power in the Spanish elections on July 23.
As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted in a 2021 report:
“By the end of 2016, nearly 5.2 million refugees and migrants reached European shores, undertaking treacherous journeys from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries torn apart by war and persecution.”
This flood of brown-skinned Muslims fleeing African and Middle Eastern climate change and wars into Europe over the past decade is why Italy and Sweden now have rightwing leaders; why Viktor Orbán was able to gain and hold power in Hungary with his promise to “build a wall” along Hungary’s southern border (a promise he kept); and why rightwing parties are today growing so rapidly in Germany, Greece, Norway, Austria, Belgium and France.
The legacy of five centuries of racist imperialism across four continents has been that wealth and safety from the ravages of climate change are concentrated in mostly White-run nations, while vulnerability to desertification and poverty are concentrated in mostly Brown- and Black-run nations.
When Russia intervened in British politics to tear apart the EU, their trolls’ mainFacebook pitch for Brexitwas that “those [Brown and Black] people” the EU had let in were now making their way to the UK.
While every country in the world can accept refugees in small numbers without crisis, when “other people” begin showing up in large numbers the response by every nation in history typically tends toward rightwing nationalism and xenophobia, an obsession with borders, and demands for racial, cultural, and religious “purity.”
Here in North America we’re seeing a similar dynamic. Reagan so severely destabilized Central America and Venezuela with his sanctions, illegal Iran-Contra program, and support for rightwing death squads that those nations never recovered. In the years since, climate change has bit these weakened governments deep, forcing millions of subsistence farmers — just like in Syria but here mostly from hard-hit Guatemala — off land that once grew crops but is now, just a few years later, scrub desert.
Exploiting the climate refugee crisis on America’s southern border, Republican politicians have spent the years since Obama’s election in 2008 falsely claiming that Democrats had thrown the border “open,” producing thousands of news stories that have been used by coyotes — human traffickers — to draw even more refugees toward the United States.
Compounding that, Trump launched his 2016 campaign on keeping Brown people out of the United States, and today racism and xenophobia form the foundation of most Republican political campaigns (when they aren’t hating on queer people or women).
:{:{}:
}:
The result of these trends has been a worldwide shift to the right. As Freedom House noted in a 2022 report, over 60 countries experienced “declines” in democracy the previous year; only about 20 percent of people worldwide now live in “free” nations:
“Global freedom faces a dire threat. … Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same. …
“The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.”
So far, the western world’s refugee crisis has been mostly driven by massive policy errors and outright war crimes: Russia’s response to the Syrian farmers, the US invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and American meddling in Central America and Venezuela.
:{:{}:
}:
But all have been either triggered or exacerbated by the worldwide climate emergency. And, as we can see from this summer’s weather worldwide, that emergency is building at a rate far more rapid than even alarmist climate scientists were predicting just a decade ago.
Recent projections show that within just the next two decades as many as three billion people could be fleeing areas that will soon only marginally support human life.
As equatorial regions become uninhabitable, the mostly darker-skinned people living there will be migrating north and south into areas controlled by lighter-skinned people in numbers that will make today’s Syrian, Iraq, and Afghan refugee crisis look like a statistical blip.
It will put worldwide white supremacist and Nazi movements into hyperdrive.
In addition to acting immediately to mitigate climate change and green the world’s economy, the free nations of the world must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence- and hate-based racist political movements.
That will alsorequire radically reducing the Supreme Court-gifted political power of big money here in America— particularly from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it has created — and returning that power and wealth to the hard-hit majority. The Democratic Party in America is increasingly committed to this, but Republicans and the dozens of billionaires in their camp are prepared to spend heretofore unimaginable sums to keep climate deniers and race-baiters in office.
We also must help those nations most hard-hit by the warming — caused largely by our carbon pollution — to deal with their own refugees internally, lest they irrecoverably destabilize first their own governments and then ours.
To paraphrase JFK, we are not helpless before this task.
But it will require western and American media and political systems to take on these three crises — climate change, the refugees it produces, and politicians who demagogue the issue while blocking forward progress — now.
We are quite literally out of time.
From Your Site Articles
How capitalism is leading us to instability, inequality, and fascism ›
Noam Chomsky: 'Proto-fascism' and 'white nationalism are prime ingredients of the GOP’s slow-motion coup ›
Eco-fascism: White nationalists' extreme solution to the coming environmental apocalypse ›
Related Articles Around the Web
The dangers of eco-fascism and why it's a 'veneer for racist beliefs ... ›
What's Worse Than Climate Catastrophe? Climate Catastrophe Plus ... ›
The far-right and environmentalism overlap is bigger than you think ... ›
---
---
7 23 badash an
florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis says if elected president his plan to address climate change will be to throw out President Joe Biden’s Green New Deal.
Last week on Monday planet Earth suffered the hottest day on record, a record that it broke on Tuesday.
Fox News Business’ Stuart Varney, who has attacked climate change activists as “juvenile” and declared it is “ridiculous” that “the western world is obsessed with climate change,” on Monday asked DeSantis if he has a plan to address the climate crisis.
“The headlines are just full of stories about wildfires smoke, extraordinary temperatures in the southwest and the Southeast to some degree. Do you have a climate plan?” Varney asked.
“It’s going to be to rip up Joe Biden’s Green New Deal,” DeSantis bragged. “I think at the end of the day, we need to embrace American domestic energy. This could be a huge source of national security, economic vitality can build our industrial base in Florida.”
DeSantis’ claim echoes Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy‘s, who last Thursday said God has blessed America with largenatural gas resources, and the United States should use them to make two of the world’s largest countries and largest economies, China and India, “dependent on American natural gas.” He suggested doing so would “make us economically stronger but geopolitically the world safer,” while falsely claiming it would make the world “environmentally sound.”
The Florida governor bragged to Varney about Florida’s reduction in emissions, which happened, he admitted, through “market forces."
"We’ve actually had a huge reduction in emissions but it was done through innovation,” DeSantis said. “It was done through market forces, not command and control. So we’ll go about that in a much different direction than, than Joe Biden, I think ultimately, Biden’s policies andBidenomics is really about making the average person poor and reducing their standard of living. That is not the way you go about it.”
READ MORE: ‘Keeps on Chugging’: Unemployment Down and Wages Up in ‘Strong’ and Record-Setting June Jobs Report
Last year, a Tampa Bay Times opinion piece noted, “2018, the last year for which [emissions] data is available, Florida utilities had decreased emissions by 19%, the research shows, while tailpipe emissions grew 12%.”
DeSantis was sworn into office in 2019.
Also last year, the Miami Herald warned Florida was not addressing the causes of climate change.
“The last time the Legislature addressed the root cause of climate change — greenhouse gas emissions — it was in a law that effectively blocked cities from cutting emissions,” the paper reported.
Watch DeSantis below or at this link.
---
---
6 23 1/3 uninhabitable
https://www.alternet.org/climate-crisis-2661365786/
---
glacier swiss new law
https://www.rawstory.com/amid-melting-glaciers-swiss-to-vote-on-new-climate-law/
---
As NYC is inundated with wildfire smoke, Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ calmly shows link to climate crisis, while Murdoch's Fox News mocks it
WRITTEN BY JOHN WHITEHOUSE
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM SAGE HODIL
PUBLISHED 06/07/23
New York City is currently inundated with a hazardous level of wildfire smoke, making the skies appear yellowish-orange.
The smoke is from wildfires in Canada, which scientists say are “becoming bigger and more frequent” due to climate change, as reliably explained by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal:
Wildfires like those ravaging Canada are becoming bigger and more frequent as forests around the world increasingly dry out amid the warming climate, many scientists say.
Some of the biggest fires are breaking out in the boreal forests of the Northern Hemisphere such as most of the ones in Canada. That is because the Arctic region has warmed nearly four times faster than the rest of the world, said Carly Phillips, a Boston-based research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
In the boreal areas—mostly conifer forests with long winters and short summers—of Canada and Alaska, she said the annual area burned has nearly doubled in the past 60 years, along with an increase in the frequency of large fires. Russia’s vast Siberian forests have been consumed by giant fires too. Phillips said this year’s outbreak, while unprecedented in size, is just following the trend.
“I don’t know if it’s a tipping point, but what this underscores is that the climate crisis is here and now,” Phillips said.
The link is so obvious and uncontroversial that Journal staff members have no problems tweeting it.
And yet, over at Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, this is just another reason for hosts to punch left, this time at frequent target Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who dared to point out that the country has work to do to adapt to the climate crisis.
Video file
Video CitationFrom the June 7, 2023, edition of of Fox News' Outnumbered
None of this is novel. Fox News (and the Journal’s right-wing editorial board) have for years pushed climate denial on the body politic. Now that the effects of the climate crisis are impossible to miss, the network is still refusing to recalibrate.
Like the Dominion case shows, it’s not clear if Fox’s audience — or whatever is left of it — will allow the network to speak the truth.
Either way, I’d recommend that people working at Fox News headquarters in Manhattan buy some high-quality masks. They might even still have some sitting around.
THE LATEST
Linda Yaccarino just started as Twitter’s new CEO, but Elon Musk already destroyed the platform for advertisers
06/08/23 9:27 AM EDT
200+ things that Fox News has labeled “woke”
06/08/23 8:58 AM EDT
Newsmax's Greg Kelly praises the smoke from Canadian wildfires: “It's a beautiful, interesting aura”
06/08/23 8:45 AM EDT
Sean Hannity mocks New Yorkers for wearing masks to protect themselves from wildfire smoke
06/07/23 9:58 PM EDT
Fox News' Jesse Watters attacks government officials for suggesting masking to protect against wildfire smoke
06/07/23 The Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal
Climate deniers
climate deniersMORE
Related
Sean Hannity mocks New Yorkers for wearing masks to protect themselves from wildfire smoke
06/07/23 9:58 PM EDT
Fox News' Jesse Watters attacks government officials for suggesting masking to protect against wildfire smoke
06/07/23 7:59 PM EDT
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/got-to-be-kidding-me/
amp fungus msnbc
---
https://www.alternet.org/things-arent-moving-fast-enough/
synthesis report ahead of dubai; 50% cut in 7 yrs
---
yikes pandemic permafrost
https://www.alternet.org/zombie-virus/
---
---
record low sea ice
https://www.alternet.org/no-time-to-waste-antarctica/
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/big-oil-outspent-green-groups/ no lnx grfx vid
Big oil spent 27 times more than green groups to keep fossil fuels flowing
Charles Downie , Robert Brulle and The Conversation February 13, 2023
You’ve probably seen ads promoting gas and oil companies as the solutions to climate change. They’re meant to be inspiring and hopeful, with scenes of a green, clean future.
But shiny ads are not all these companies do to protect their commercial interests in the face of a rapidly heating world. Most also provide financial support to industry groups that are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on political activities, often to thwart polices designed to slow climate change.
For example, The New York Times recently reported on the Propane Education and Research Council’s attempts to derail efforts to electrify homes and buildings in New York, in part by committing nearly US$900,000 to the New York Propane Gas Association, which flooded social media with misleading information about energy-efficient heat pumps.
The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, which represents oil refiners and petrochemical firms, has spent millions on public relations campaigns, such as promoting a rollback of federal fuel efficiency standards.
These practices have been going on for decades, and evidence shows that industry groups have played key roles in blocking state and federal climate policies. This matters not just because of the enormous sums the groups are spending, but also because they often act as a command center for political campaigns to kill pro-climate policies.
We study the political activities of industry groups. In a recent research paper, we dug through tax filings to follow the money trail of trade associations engaged on climate change issues and track the billions they have spent to shape federal policy.
What we found
After NASA scientist James Hansen sounded the alarm on climate change in 1988, three trade associations – the National Association of Manufacturers, the Edison Electric Institute and the American Petroleum Institute – banded together with a couple of electrical utilities to form the Global Climate Coalition, or GCC.
The GCC systematically opposed any international regulation of climate-warming emissions, and successfully prevented the U.S. from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
This was the first example of trade associations working together to stall government action on climate change. Similar efforts continue today.
So, how much do trade associations spend on political activities, such as public relations? As not-for-profit organizations under the Internal Revenue Code, trade associations have to report their revenue and spending.
We found that trade associations historically opposed to climate policies spent $2 billion in the decade from 2008 to 2018 on political activities, such as advertising, lobbying and political contributions. Together, they outspent climate-supporting industry groups 27 to 1.
The oil and gas sector was the largest, spending $1.3 billion. Across the 89 trade associations we examined in nine different sectors of the U.S. economy between 2008 and 2018, no other group of trade associations came close.
No. 1 expense: Advertising and promotion
What came as more of a surprise as we were tallying up the data was how much trade associations are spending on advertising and promotion. This can include everything from mainstream media ads promoting the industry to hiring public relations firms to target particular issues before Congress.
For example, until they parted ways last year, Edelman, the world’s largest public relations firm, received close to $30 million from American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers to promote fossil fuels, reporters at the online news site Heated found.
Our study found that trade associations engaged on climate change issues spent a total of $2.2 billion on advertising and promotion between 2008 and 2018, compared with $729 million on lobbying. As 2022 lobbying data shows, their spending continues. While not all of this spending is directly targeting climate policy, climate change is one of the top political issues for many industries in the energy sector.
Media buys are expensive, but these numbers also reflect the specific role trade associations play in protecting the reputation of the firms they represent.
[Oil: Power Past Impossible
youtu.be]
One reason that groups like the American Petroleum Institute have historically taken the lead running negative public relations campaigns is so that their members, such as BP and Shell, are not tarred [heh] with the same brush, as our interviews with industry insiders confirmed.
However, many firms are now coming under pressure to leave trade associations that oppose climate policies. In one example, the oil giant Total quit API in 2021, citing disagreements over climate positions.
Spending on social media in the weeks ahead of theU.S. midterm elections and during the U.N. Climate Conference in November 2022offers another window into these groups’ operations.
:{:{}:
}:
A review by the advocacy groupClimate Action Against Disinformationfound that 87 fossil-fuel-linked groups spent roughly $3 million to $4 million on more than 3,700 ads through Facebook’s parent company alone in the 12 weeks before and during the conference.
Revealed: Facebook received millions for ads promoting fossil fuel
youtu.be]
The largest share came from a public relations group representing the American Petroleum Institute and focused heavily on advocating for natural gas and oil and discussing energy security. America’s Plastic Makers spent about $1.1 million on climate-related advertising during the two weeks of the U.N. conference.
Funneling money to think tanks and local groups
:{:{}:
}:
Trade associations also spent $394 million on grants to other organizations during the decade we reviewed. For example, they gave money to think tanks, universities, charitable foundations and political organizations like associations of mayors and governors.
While some of these grants may be philanthropic in nature, among the trade associations we spoke to, most have a political purpose in mind. Grants channeled to local community groups, as one example, can help boost an industry’s reputation among key constituent groups, and as a result their social license to operate.
What this means for climate policy
Fossil fuel companies, which reported record profits in 2022, still spend more on political activities than their trade associations do.
But industry groups historically opposed to climate policies are also big spenders, as our research shows. They outspent those that support actions to slow climate change, such as the solar and wind industries, by a whopping $2 billion to $74.5 million over the 10 years we reviewed.
:{:{}:
}:
This likely helps to explain why it took Congress almost 35 years after Hansen first warned representatives about the dangers of climate change to pass a major climate bill, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/irreparable-downright-shameful-environmental-destruction/
anwr
oil leases
https://www.alternet.org/spectacular-failure-of-climate-leadership/
---
---
1 23 another big glacier broke off?
---
---
oil leases
https://www.alternet.org/spectacular-failure-of-climate-leadership/
---
==
yikes
https://www.alternet.org/doomsday-clock-90-seconds-midnight/
an 1 23
We are living in a time of unprecedented danger, and the Doomsday Clock time reflects that reality."
That's what Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists president and CEO Rachel Bronson said in a statement Tuesday about the historic symbol being set at 90 seconds to midnight, or global catastrophe, after three years at 100 seconds to midnight.
As the bulletin's annual statement explains, the clock—created in 1947—has reached its current position due to "an exceedingly dangerous nuclear situation," largely from Russia's war on Ukraine;inadequate global action to tackle the climate emergency; a "daunting array" of biological threats, exemplified by the Covid-19 pandemic; and "disruptive" technologies enabling the spread of disinformation.
"90 seconds to midnight is the closest the clock has ever been set to midnight, and it's a decision our experts do not take lightly," Bronson noted. "The U.S. government, its NATO allies, and Ukraine have a multitude of channels for dialogue; we urge leaders to explore all of them to their fullest ability to turn back the clock."
Watch the full announcement:
2023 Doomsday Clock Announcement 
While the nearly yearlong Russian invasion—with fighting over a nuclear power plant and thinly veiled threats of using weapons of mass destruction—is a primary reason humanity is now closer than ever to apocalypse, experts from across the globe emphasized that it's far from the only threat.
The Elders chair Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, stressed that "the Doomsday Clock is sounding an alarm for the whole of humanity. We are on the brink of a precipice. But our leaders are not acting at sufficient speed or scale to secure a peaceful and liveable planet."
"From cutting carbon emissions to strengthening arms control treaties and investing in pandemic preparedness, we know what needs to be done," she said. "The science is clear, but the political will is lacking. This must change in 2023 if we are to avert catastrophe. We are facing multiple, existential crises. Leaders need a crisis mindset."
---
we underestimated warming 8% b/c winds 1 23 flipbd
---
good big pix update 1 23
https://www.alternet.org/climate-change-pentagon/
klare tom d
...Historically speaking, the United States and the European Union (EU) countries have been the largest GHG emitters, responsible for 25% and 22% of cumulative CO2 emissions, respectively. But those countries, and other advanced industrial nations like Canada and Japan, have been taking significant steps to reduce their emissions, including phasing out the use of coal in electricity generation and providing incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles. As a result, their net CO2 emissions have diminished in recent years and are expected to decline further in the decades to come (though they will need to do yet more to keep us below that 1.5-degree warming limit).
China, a relative latecomer to the industrial era, is historically responsible for “only” 13% of cumulative global CO2 emissions. However, in its drive to accelerate its economic growth in recent decades, it has vastly increased its reliance on coal to generate electricity, resulting in ever-greater CO2 emissions. China now accounts for an astonishing 56% of total world coal consumption, which, in turn, largely explains its current dominance among the major carbon emitters. According to the 2022 edition of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, the PRC was responsible for 33% of global CO2 emissions in 2021, compared with 15% for the U.S. and 11% for the EU.
Like most other countries, China has pledged to abide by the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 and undertake the decarbonization of its economy as part of a worldwide drive to keep global warming within some bounds. As part of that agreement, however, China identified itself as a “developing” country with the option of increasing its fossil-fuel use for 15 years or so before achieving a peak in CO2 emissions in 2030. Barring some surprising set of developments then, the PRC will undoubtedly remain the world’s leading source of CO2 emissions for years to come, suffusing the atmosphere with colossal amounts of carbon dioxide and undergirding a continuing rise in global temperatures.
Yes, the United States, Japan, and the EU countries should indeed do more to reduce their emissions, but they’re already on a downward trajectory and an even more rapid decline will not be enough to offset China’s colossal CO2 output. Put differently, those Chinese emissions — estimated by the IEA at 12 billion metric tons annually — represent at least as great a threat to U.S. security as the multitude of tanks, planes, ships, and missiles enumerated in the Pentagon’s 2022 report on security developments in the PRC. That means they will require the close attention of American policymakers if we are to escape the most severe impacts of climate change.
China’s Vulnerability to Climate Change
Along with detailed information on China’s outsized contribution to the greenhouse effect, any thorough report on security developments involving the PRC should have included an assessment of that country’s vulnerability to climate change. It should have laid out just how global warming might, in the future, affect its ability to marshal resources for a demanding, high-cost military competition with the United States.
In the coming decades, like the U.S. and other continental-scale countries, China will suffer severely from the multiple impacts of rising world temperatures, including extreme storm damage, prolonged droughts and heatwaves, catastrophic flooding, and rising seas. Worse yet, the PRC has several distinctive features that will leave it especially vulnerable to global warming, including a heavily-populated eastern seaboard exposed to rising sea levels and increasingly powerful typhoons; a vast interior, parts of which, already significantly dry, will be prone to full-scale desertification; and a vital river system that relies on unpredictable rainfall and increasingly imperiled glacial runoff. As warming advances and China experiences an ever-increasing climate assault, its social, economic, and political institutions, including the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), will be severely tested.
According to a recent study from the Center for Climate and Security, “China’s Climate Security Vulnerabilities,” the threats to its vital institutions will take two major forms: hits to its critical infrastructure like port facilities, military bases, transportation hubs, and low-lying urban centers along China’s heavily populated coastline; and the danger of growing internal instability arising from ever-increasing economic dislocation, food scarcity, and governmental incapacitation.
China’s coastline already suffers heavy flooding during severe storms and significant parts of it could be entirely underwater by the second half of this century, requiring the possible relocation of hundreds of millions of people and the reconstruction of billions of dollars’ worth of vital facilities.Such tasks will surely require the full attention of Chinese authorities as well as the extensive homebound commitment of military resources, leaving little capacity for foreign adventures. Why, you might wonder, is there not a single sentence about this in the Pentagon’s assessment of future Chinese capabilities?
Even more worrisome, from Beijing’s perspective, is the possible effect of climate change on the country’s internal stability. “Climate change impacts are likely to threaten China’s economic growth, its food and water security, and its efforts at poverty eradication,” the climate center’s study suggests (but the Pentagon report doesn’t mention). Such developments will, in turn, “likely increase the country’s vulnerability to political instability, as climate change undermines the government’s ability to meet its citizens’ demands.”
Of particular concern, the report suggests, is global warming’s dire threat to food security. China, it notes, must feed approximately 20% of the world’s population while occupying only 12% of its arable land, much of which is vulnerable to drought, flooding, extreme heat, and other disastrous climate impacts. As food and water supplies dwindle, Beijing could face popular unrest, even revolt, in food-scarce areas of the country, especially if the government fails to respond adequately. This, no doubt, will compel the CCP to deploy its armed forces nationwide to maintain order, leaving ever fewer of them available for other military purposes — another possibility absent from the Pentagon’s assessment.
Of course, in the years to come, the U.S., too, will feel the ever more severe impacts of climate change and may itself no longer be in a position to fight wars in distant lands — a consideration also completely absent from the Pentagon report.
The Prospects for Climate Cooperation
Along with gauging China’s military capabilities, that annual report is required by law to consider “United States-China engagement and cooperation on security matters… including through United States-China military-to-military contacts.” And indeed, the 2022 version does note that Washington interprets such “engagement” as involving joint efforts to avert accidental or inadvertent conflict by participating in high-level Pentagon-PLA crisis-management arrangements, including what’s known as the Crisis Communications Working Group. “Recurring exchanges [like these],” the report affirms, “serve as regularized mechanisms for dialogue to advance priorities related to crisis prevention and management.”
Any effort aimed at preventing conflict between the two countries is certainly a worthy endeavor. But the report also assumes that such military friction is now inevitable and the most that can be hoped for is to prevent World War III from being ignited. However, given all we’ve already learned about the climate threat to both China and the United States, isn’t it time to move beyond mere conflict avoidance to more collaborative efforts, military and otherwise, aimed at reducing our mutual climate vulnerabilities?
At the moment, sadly enough, such relations sound far-fetched indeed. But it shouldn’t be so. After all, the Department of Defense has already designated climate change a vital threat to national security and has indeed called for cooperative efforts between American forces and those of other countries in overcoming climate-related dangers. “We will elevate climate as a national security priority,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in March 2021, “integrating climate considerations into the Department’s policies, strategies, and partner engagements.”
The Pentagon provided further information on such “partner engagements” in a 2021 report on the military’s vulnerabilities to climate change. “There are many ways for the Department to integrate climate considerations into international partner engagements,” that report affirmed, “including supporting interagency diplomacy and development initiatives in partner nations [and] sharing best practices.” One such effort, it noted, is the Pacific Environmental Security Partnership, a network of climate specialists from that region who meet annually at the Pentagon-sponsored Pacific Environmental Security Forum.
At present, China is not among the nations involved in that or other Pentagon-sponsored climate initiatives. Yet, as both countries experience increasingly severe impacts from rising global temperatures and their militaries are forced to devote ever more time and resources to disaster relief, information-sharing on climate-response “best practices” will make so much more sense than girding for war over Taiwan or small uninhabited islands in the East and South China Seas (some of which will be completely underwater by century’s end). Indeed, the Pentagon and the PLA are more alike in facing the climate challenge than most of the world’s military forces and so it should be in both countries’ mutual interests to promote cooperation in the ultimate critical area for any country in this era of ours.
[quite long]
---
an 1222
Extinction fears soar amid 'perfect storm of unsustainable human activity decimating marine life'
Image via Creative Commons.
Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams December 11, 2022
During the United Nations biodiversity summit in Montreal, an international conservation group on Friday highlighted how humanity is dangerously failing marine life with illegal and unsustainable fishing, pollution from agricultural and industrial runoff, and activities that drive up global temperatures.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species now features 150,388 species, 42,108 of which face possible extinction. Of the 17,903 marine animals and plants on the list, more than 1,550 are at risk.
"Today's IUCN Red List update reveals a perfect storm of unsustainable human activity decimating marine life around the globe. As the world looks to the ongoing U.N. Biodiversity Conference to set the course for nature recovery, we simply cannot afford to fail," Bruno Oberle, the group's director general, warned Friday. "We urgently need to address the linked climate and biodiversity crises, with profound changes to our economic systems, or we risk losing the crucial benefits the oceans provide us with."
The primary aim of the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)—which is hosted by China but kicked off earlier in Canada this week due to Covid-19 restrictions—is the development of post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF).
A top priority for many parties to the treaty—along with the United States, which has failed to ratify the CBD over the past three decades but is still participating in the summit—is to protect 30% of lands and waters by 2030. However, as activists and Indigenous leaders from around the world have noted, there are serious human rights concerns regarding implementation of the 30x30 goal.
COP15 comes after the fifth round of discussions about establishing a U.N. treaty for the high seas, or the two-thirds of oceans outside territorial waters. Those August talks failed to produce an agreement—which, as Laura Meller of Greenpeace's Protect the Oceans campaign warned at the time, "jeopardizes the livelihoods and food security of billions of people around the world."
"While progress has been made, particularly on ocean sanctuaries, members of the High Ambition Coalition and countries like the USA have moved too slowly to find compromises, despite their commitments," Meller continued. "Time has run out. Further delay means ocean destruction. We are sad and disappointed. While countries continue to talk, the oceans and all those who rely on them will suffer."
Similarly urgent warnings came with the update Friday. Ashleigh McGovern, vice president of the Center for Oceans at Conservation International, said that "with this devastating IUCN Red List update on the status of marine species, it is clear that business as usual is no longer an option."
"Human activity has had devastating effects on marine ecosystems and biodiversity, but it can also be harnessed to drive action as a matter of survival, equity, and climate justice," she added. "If we are to secure a new future for the world's oceans and the essential biodiversity they harbor, we must act now."
Jon Paul Rodríguez, chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC), pointed out that "most of the Earth's biosphere, 99% of all livable space on our planet, is underwater."
"Humanity acts as if oceans were inexhaustible, capable of sustaining infinite harvest of algae, animals, and plants for food and other products, able to transform vast quantities of sewage and other pollutants that we pour in coastal areas, and absorb the CO2 generated by land-use change and burning fossil fuel," he said. "This Red List update brings to light new evidence of the multiple interacting threats to declining life in the sea."
According to the IUCN Red List, 20 of the 54 abalone species—some of the world's most expensive seafood—are threatened with extinction.
"Abalones reflect humanity's disastrous guardianship of our oceans in microcosm: overfishing, pollution, disease, habitat loss, algal blooms, warming, and acidification, to name but a few threats. They really are the canary in the coal mine," said Howard Peters, a member of the IUCN SSC Mollusc Specialist Group and research associate at the U.K.'s University of York who led the abalone assessment.
"The most immediate action people can take is to eat only farmed or sustainably sourced abalones. Enforcing fishery quotas and anti-poaching measures is also critical," Peters noted. "However, we need to halt the changes to ocean chemistry and temperature to preserve marine life including abalone species over the long term."
The update also raised the alarm about dugongs, particularly in East Africa and New Caledonia. Populations of the large herbivorous marine mammals are threatened by fishing gear, oil and gas exploration and production, chemical pollution, and the destruction of seagrasses they rely on for food.
"Strengthening community-led fisheries governance and expanding work opportunities beyond fishing are key in East Africa, where marine ecosystems are fundamental to people's food security and livelihoods," said Evan Trotzuk, who led the region's assessment.
Another focus of the list is the pillar coral in the Caribbean, given that its population has shrunk by more than 80% across most of its range over the past three decades.
Noting that it is just one of 26 corals now listed as critically endangered in the Atlantic Ocean, Arizona State University associate professor Beth Polidoro, Red List coordinator for the IUCN SSC Coral Specialist Group, said that "these alarming results emphasize the urgency of global cooperation and action to address climate change impacts on ocean ecosystems."
Amanda Vincent, chair of the IUCN SSC Marine Conservation Committee, declared that "the awful status of these species should shock us and engage us for urgent action."
"These magical marine species are treasured wildlife, from the wonderful abalone to the charismatic dugong and the glorious pillar coral, and we should safeguard them accordingly," she added. "It is vital that we manage fisheries properly, constrain climate change, and reverse habitat degradation."
Nodding to the conference, Jane Smart, director of IUCN's Science and Data Center, said the update reinforces her group's "urgent call for a post-2020 global biodiversity framework that will be ambitious enough to cease destruction of our life support system and catalyze the necessary action and change to secure life on this planet."
---
---
an 12 22 sorta //
The day before nearly two weeks of negotiations kick off at the United Nations summit on biodiversity, campaigners warned Tuesday that the talks taking place this month in Montreal may offer humanity its last chance to mitigate the planet's crisis of rampant species loss, and called on policymakers to adopt an ambitious framework to protect wildlife.
More than 190 nations will be represented at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15), where negotiators will discuss a draft agreement aimed at conservation, slashing levels of toxic pollutants, and mitigating the climate crisis.
With about one million species—out of about 8.7 million known species—expected to become extinct in the coming decades, advocates said that policymakers must reverse more than a decade of failure to meet the targets set in 2010 at COP10 in Aichi, Japan, including protecting 17% of terrestrial and inland water areas and conserving coral reefs.
"Now is the time for the world to set bold new goals to protect every last species," said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. "We're undermining our own survival by taking nature for granted, decimating wild places and jeopardizing vulnerable communities."
Advocates are pushing the 196 member nations of the convention to adopt 21 targets named in the draft set to be presented at the meeting, including:
- Protections for at least 30% of lands and waters by 2030;
- Policies to prevent or reduce invasive species by 50%;
- The elimination of plastic waste;
- The reduction of pesticides in the environment by at least two-thirds;
- The recognition of Indigenous peoples' rights and central role in protecting biodiversity; and
- At least $100 billion in annual funding for developing countries to protect wildlife, provided by wealthy governments.
"If delegates at the Convention on Biological Diversity can't agree that we should end extinction, it's a tragic reflection on our values," said Curry. "We've put nature in the basement of our heart, but it needs to be in the penthouse."
Greenpeace International called the meeting "the make-or-break moment for global biodiversity" while Greenpeace East Asia senior policy adviser Li Shuo called it "a chance for reinvention."
"It is unacceptable for this process to continue to pump out promises and never deliver," he said. "Negotiations over the next two weeks need to generate targets that will actually be implemented and supported."
In his opening remarks on Tuesday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterrescalled on negotiators to adopt a framework "that addresses the root causes of this destruction."
"Deforestation and desertification are creating wastelands of once-thriving ecosystems," he said. "Our land, water, and air are poisoned by chemicals and pesticides, and choked with plastics. Our addiction to fossil fuels has thrown our climate into chaos—from heatwaves and forest fires, to communities parched by heat and drought, or inundated and destroyed by terrifying floods."
"The deluded dreams of billionaires aside, there is no Planet B," Guterres added. "We must fix the world we have. We must cherish this wonderous gift. We must make peace with nature."
Biologist Alexandre Antonelli, the director of science of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the U.K., called the conference "one of the most important meetings humanity has ever had."
"We have a very narrow window of opportunity to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2030 and reverse its decline by 2050," Antonelli toldThe New Statesman on Monday. "We may never have that chance again."
---
---
yikes
https://www.eenews.net/articles/coal-emissions-on-pace-for-record-setting-2022/
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/stupidest-act-in-human-history/
long analysis war AGW
---
---
an 11 22
Computer scientist, composer, artist, and author Jaron Lanier has for years been outspoken about his total avoidance of social media platforms because of the harm that they inflict on their users and the detrimental impacts that they have on societies. In a 2018 conversation with Vox producer Eric Johnson, Lanier decried people who refuse to delete their accounts even though they can.
"You have even more of a responsibility to see if you can get out of it than someone who genuinely is dependent on it. So, I think that that argument has a situation exactly backwards. I mean, I and you and the people we tend to know are privileged. We’re wealthier than ever. We have more options. That puts a moral onus on us to make some decisions that do what little we can to help those who are less fortunate, and this is one of those things," he said.
"If you are actually in a position to quit and you don’t, you’re making yourself part of the problem. You’re not doing anything to free those who are more trapped. You’re only enslaving them more by entrenching the system. As an affluent or valuable person to the system, you’re the one that the whole system is being funded by," he added, later comparing online platforms to "gambling addiction."
READ MORE: By destroying Twitter, Elon Musk reveals contempt for democracy
On Sunday, Lanier warned in an interview with The Guardian GUK that the takeovers of tech giants like Twitter pose a fatal danger to the future existence of the human race.
“People survive by passing information between themselves,” Lanier explained to reporter Edward Helmore. “We’re putting that fundamental quality of humanness through a process with an inherent incentive for corruption and degradation. The fundamental drama of this period is whether we can figure out how to survive properly with those elements or not.”
Lanier believes that powerful digital arenas such as Twitter, whose owners allow misinformation, conspiracy theories, and hate speech to flourish, are exacerbating the threat that humanity faces.
“There are all kind of intermediaries. They might be the people who own a platform, recently Elon Musk, or third parties who are good at sneaking in influence. The interveners can be varied. Some are official, some are revealed, others hidden. Some are competent, some incompetent. Some are random, like an algorithm that someone made but didn’t understand," Lanier said. “I still think extinction is on the table as an outcome. Not necessarily, but it’s a fundamental drama.If we can coordinate ourselves to solve the climate crisis it’s a fundamental sign we haven’t become completely dysfunctional."
READ MORE: Half of Twitter’s top advertisers flee as Elon Musk welcomes Trump back
---
---
no lnx no grfx
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21112022/who-were-the-worst-climate-polluters-in-the-us-in-2021
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions climbed by 4.1 percent from major industrial sources in 2021, according to new data recently released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The increase is the largest year-on-year rise in emissions tallied across more than a decade of reporting and comes at a time when global climate pollution must quickly be curtailed to limit further warming.
The emissions, 2.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, were self-reported to the agency by more than 8,100 of the nation’s largest climate polluters under the agency’s mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. The emissions represent about half of all U.S. climate pollution and the annual update provides the most comprehensive, site-by-site assessment of the nation’s largest polluters.
The increase in emissions came amid a rise in economic activity and industrial production following the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. While emissions from large polluters—generally defined as facilities that emit more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year—shot up in 2021, they were 5.25 percent lower than their pre-pandemic level in 2019.
Evan Gillespie, a partner with Industrious Labs, a recently formed environmental organization focused on decarbonizing heavy industry, said such swings in pollution have to cease in order to hit emission reduction targets under the Paris Climate agreement.
“We cannot have emissions linked to production,” Gillespie said. “We have a lot of work to do over the next eight years to get industrial emissions on track.”
The Worst of the Worst
Andy Knott, director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign for the nation’s central region, said he is seeing a lot of progress in the shutdown of large coal-fired power plants from many, but not all, electric utilities.
“When I look at the largest carbon polluters, many of them, the utilities that own them, don’t have plans to retire them anytime at all,” Knott said. “We need to retire all coal by 2030 and all fossil fuels in the electric sector by 2035.”
Carbon dioxide is the primary driver of climate change and CO2 emissions from coal and natural gas fired power plants were the largest source of emissions. However, other pollutants including methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated greenhouse gases, such as hydrofluorocarbons used in refrigerators and air conditioners, were also significant sources of emissions. These “non-CO2” greenhouse gases are far more potent than carbon dioxide on a pound-for-pound basis and in many cases remain in the atmosphere for a relatively short time compared to CO2. Curbing their emissions is increasingly seen as a key to stopping near term warming.
The following is a listof the country’s top polluters for each of the leading greenhouse gases tracked by the EPA. Also included are some of the highest emitters for different sectors of the economy.
Carbon Dioxide: The James H. Miller Jr. power plant in Quinton, Alabama was the largest coal fired power plant in the U.S in terms of power generation in 2021 and was also the nation’s biggest emitter of CO2.The plant, owned by The Southern Company, emitted 20,834,019 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2021. Company executives announced plans last year to shut down nearly 80 percent of its coal power capacity by 2028 on the way to having net-zero emissions by 2050. The planned shutdowns do not include the James H. Miller plant.
Methane: The Bailey Mine, a coal mine owned by Consol Energy in southwestern Pennsylvaniais the largest single source of methane in the U.S. with 90,743 tons of methane emissions in 2021. The near-term climate impact of the emissions are equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 1.6 million automobiles, according to the EPA. Consol Energy does capture and destroy some additional methane emissions from the mine as part of a methane destruction pilot program.
Nitrous Oxide: Ascend Performance Materials’ nylon plant in Cantonment, Floridareleased 24,657 metric tons of nitrous oxide in 2021, four times more nitrous oxide than any other industrial facility in the country, though the figure is still pending final EPA verification. The plant makes adipic acid, a main ingredient in nylon 6,6, a strong, durable plastic used in everything from stockings to carpeting, seat belts and air bags, and also emits large amounts of nitrous oxide, an unwanted byproduct.
Nitrous oxide is 273 times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide on a pound for pound basis. Assuming the currently reported emissions are correct, emissions from the facility in 2021 equaled the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 1.5 million automobiles, according to the EPA. Other adipic acid plants in the U.S and Europe installed abatement technology to destroy virtually all of their nitrous oxide emissions in the late 1990s.
Company officials told Inside Climate News in early 2020 that they would reduce nitrous oxide emissions from the production of adipic acid by 50 percent by mid-2020 and by more than 95 percent by February of 2022. However, nitrous oxide emissions from adipic acid production at the plant climbed by 38 percent from 2019 to 2021 according to emissions data the company reported to EPA. Ascend Performance Materials’ spokeswoman, Alison Jahn, did not respond directly to questions about the increase but said that Ascend has set a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from all of its facilities by 80 percent by 2030.
Hydrofluorocarbons: Hydrofluorocarbon-23 (HFC-23) is 14,600 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide on a pound for pound basis, making it one of the worst climate pollutants ever identified by the scientists with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2021, chemical manufacturer Chemours vented 180 metric tons of HFC-23, a synthetic gas and unwanted byproduct, from its Louisville, Kentucky plant. The emissions, which can be destroyed through incineration, are equal to the annual emissions of 566,000 automobiles. However, HFC-23 emissions from the Louisville plant could soon be a thing of the past.
In October, 2021, EPA required Chemours to use or destroy 99.9 percent of the HFC-23 it produces by this October. Chemours missed the deadline to complete the installation “due in part to supply chain issues” according to the EPA, which granted the company’s request for a 6-month extension. The company has installed and is now operating the pollution controls but is continuing to validate and optimize the system, Chemours spokeswoman Cassie Olszewski, said.
Sulfur Hexafluoride: Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is 25,200 times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide,making it the most potent greenhouse gas ever assessed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Once released, SF6 remains in the atmosphere, warming the planet, for 3,200 years. The synthetic gas is used in high-voltage circuit breakers to quickly interrupt electric current. In 2021, American Electric Power (AEP) released 18 tons of SF6 from electric utility substations across 10 states, emissions equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 99,000 automobiles. While AEP had the highest total emissions, Duke Energy Carolinas had the highest SF6 leak rate—6 percent of all the SF6 it used in 2021—a rate more than twice that of AEP.
Eighty-eight U.S. utilities are part of a voluntary program that the EPA started in 1999 to help utilities slash their SF6 emissions. Duke Energy, the largest electric power corporation in the U.S. based on revenue, is not a part of the program.
“We are certainly working to learn more about the group [and] are reconsidering our involvement,” Duke Energy spokesman Jeff Brooks said.
Methane from Gas Storage:The Petal Gas Storage Compressor Station vented 2,517 tons of methane from leaky compressors at an underground natural gas storage facility in Petal, Mississippi in 2021. Emissions from the facility declined by 49 percent from the prior year. However, Petal’s emissions remain nearly twice that of any other gas storage site in the country despite being a relatively small gas storage repository.
“We are continuing our methane emissions reduction efforts at Petal and across our system,” Jillian Kirkconnell, a spokeswoman for Boardwalk Pipeline Partners, said.
Boardwalk owns the Petal gas storage facility as well as the Gulf South Pipeline – Bistineau Station gas storage facility, the second-highest emitting gas storage facility in the country, which leaked 1,301 tons of methane in 2021.
Methane from Landfills: Sampson County Disposal, a privately owned landfill in Roseboro, North Carolina emitted an estimated 32,983 tons of methane, more than any other municipal or industrial landfill in 2021, according to company data reported to the EPA. The near-term climate impact of the emissions are equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 575,000 automobiles according to the EPA.
Joy Grahek, executive vice president of strategic initiatives with GFL Environmental, the landfill’s owner, said the company has taken measures to reduce emissions and that the models used by the EPA to estimate emissions are incorrect.
“We have implemented a number of different operational and engineered strategies to minimize fugitive methane generation at the landfill, including the use of impermeable cover materials, an extensive gas collection system to capture landfill gas, and flaring of the captured gas,” Grahek said. “The models are widely recognized as containing significant uncertainty and using the EPA Reports as a basis for ranking the relative performance of landfills in controlling fugitive emissions is inaccurate.”
Emissions estimates for landfills vary widely depending on which method operators use to calculate their emissions and may underestimate actual emissions by as much as “a factor of two.”
The EPA recently proposed changes on how to better calculate methane emissions from landfills.
Phil McKenna
==
---
TIPPING PT?!
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/despite-fox-news-claims-contrary-voters-are-concerned-about-climate-change
no lnx many no vid
Despite Fox News' claims to the contrary, voters are concerned about climate change
Special PROGRAMS
CLIMATE & ENERGY
WRITTEN BY EVLONDO COOPER
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALLISON FISHER & ILANA BERGER
PUBLISHED 11/17/22
Despite Fox News’ claims to the contrary, climate change was among top voter concerns during the recent 2022 midterm elections.
:{:{}:
}:
The issue of climate change took center stage during the general election for the first time in 2020. Since then, poll after poll has found that climate change is top of mind for many voters, and exit polls found that it was a key issue for 2022 midterm voters. Even Fox had to briefly acknowledge this reality, though it won’t likely have any material impact on the network’s climate coverage.
:{:{}:
}:
CNN’s exit poll found that 71% of voters stated that climate change is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem, while 61% of voters in Fox News’ voter analysis survey were “very/somewhat concerned” about climate change. Regarding whether climate has become a viable election issue, InsideClimateNews suggested that “the political dynamics around climate in the 2022 midterms could stand out as a milestone.” Or as The New Republic summarized:
This year, more “climate voters,” people whose top issue is the climate crisis, showed up to cast ballots than in any other election in U.S. history. Exit polls show that, contrary to conventional Democratic consultant-class wisdom, climate was the top issue for 8 percent of voters, a share surpassed only by “inflation/economy,” immigration, and abortion (the latter two are tied at second place). You’d never guess it from media coverage, but climate and crime were tied for third place. The percentage of voters prioritizing climate had jumped by four points from 2020, the first year that voters were even asked at the polls about “climate” as opposed to “environment.” There are probably several factors behind this impressive showing.
Climate could play an important role in the Georgia Senate runoff election, especially among socially marginalized communities that have been bearing the brunt of climate-driven extreme weather events and environmental pollution. In addition to grassroots organizing efforts, Climate Monitor noted that “LCV [League of Conservation Voters] has already launched a new video ad supporting Sen. Raphael Warnock in his runoff election on December 6th. Environmental Voter Project is also already spending in Georgia’s Senate runoff.”
This belies Fox News’ attempts to downplay climate change as a concern for voters. This summer, the network, among other right-wing media outlets, cherry-picked data from a Siena College and New York Times pollto claim that Americans did not care about climate change. For example, the July 20 episode of America's Newsroom featured Kellyanne Conway, former White House counselor under President Donald Trump, claiming that President Joe Biden is focusing on climate and the poll shows voters “don't think that he's connected to them in a way that he is listening to them and hearing their concerns.”
Video file
Video CitationFrom the July 20, 2022, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom
During the July 24 episode of Fox & Friends Weekend, co-host Pete Hegseth claimed, “They're using the blue checkmark woke brigade to attempt to cudgel the White House to declare a crisis based on 1% of Americans who believe it’s their religion, which could change all of our lives, and change it rapidly, if he caves to groups like this.”
VideoCitationFrom the July 24, 2022, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends Weekend
In the months and weeks leading up to the November 8 midterm elections, Fox News continued to downplay voter concerns about climate change. For example, during the September 14 episode of The Story With Martha MacCallum, Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich led off a segment that attacked the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act by using a Gallup poll to claim that “voters are far more concerned with the economy than they are with climate.” Fox News hosted commentator Angela Morabito on the September 27 episode of Fox News at Night, where she claimed that climate change was a “luxury problem” above a chyron that read “Midterm Motivators.”
VideoCitationFrom the September 27, 2022, episode of Fox News at Night
During the September 30 episode of Hannity, Fox News host Sean Hannity claimed that if the midterms are a “referendum onJoe Biden, the failed climate cult, and their failed policies, and how they’ve wrecked all the progress that we made in the four years under Donald Trump,then they lose.”
Video Citation From the September 30, 2022, episode of Fox News' Hannity
After rattling off key provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, Fox News host Sandra Smith asked her guests during the October 6 episode of America Reports if “Democrats may live to regret the day they pushed clean energy so hard in this moment when we’re not ready for the transition.”
Video Citation From the October 6, 2022, episode of Fox News' America Reports
However, after the midterm elections, Fox News had to acknowledge that climate was an important issue for voters. During the November 9 episode of America Reports, Smith briefly bowed to reality when confronted with the results of Fox News’ own survey: “When asked how concerned about climate change voters were, 61% said very or somewhat concerned, 39% not too concerned or not at all concerned,” she said. “Climate change was up there, and it was on the mind of voters when they head to the ballot box. So, is this a missed opportunity for Republicans to have some sort of messaging there for voters who care about this issue?”
Video CitationFrom the November 9, 2022, episode of Fox News' America Reports
Despite years of climate science denial and obfuscation, Fox News had to face the fact that voters care about climate change. The network will likely continue running interference for the fossil fuel industry, denying or downplaying how climate is driving extreme weather, and undermining the Biden administration's climate and energy policies, because it is less a news outlet and more a key cog in the fossil fuel industry’sdisinformation network. Even though the veil of reality may slip on Fox News occasionally, it never stays down for long.
---
---
11 22 mil exempt from report ghg?
https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/world-burns/
---
---
hayes uninhab earth wallace- middle bad scenario?
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/last-eight-years-hottest-ever/
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/past-point-of-incremental-changes/
US heat faster?!
---
---
not BP?
an comm dr 11 22
Despite repeated warnings that new fossil fuel projects are incompatible with averting climate disaster, oil and gas corporations "are on a massive expansion course" to increase dirty energy production in the coming years, according to an analysis released Thursday at the United Nations COP27 meeting in Egypt.
The new report by the German nonprofit Urgewald and 50 NGO partners, which denounces "an industry willing to sacrifice a livable planet," found that the vast majority of the world's oil and gas companies intend to scale up the extraction of fossil fuels in the years ahead, having collectively dumped $160 billion into exploration since 2020.
None of this investment is consistent with the International Energy Agency's (IEA) blueprint for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, a key component of meeting the Paris agreement's goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels—beyond which impacts will grow increasingly deadly for millions of people, particularly those residing in poor nations that have done the least to cause the crisis.
The IEA made clear in its May 2021 report that no new oil and gas fields can be exploited if the world is to avoid climate catastrophe. But according to Urgewald, 96% of upstream fossil fuel companies (655 out of 685) are planning to expand their operations, and short-term expansion plans have increased by 20% since last year.
According to Urgewald, 512 of these companies are currently "taking active steps to bring 230 billion barrels of oil equivalent (bboe) of untapped resources into production before 2030."
If these fossil fuels are removed from the ground and burned, an additional 115 billion tonnes of heat-trapping carbon dioxide equivalent will be pumped into the atmosphere by the end of the decade. That's 30 times more greenhouse gas pollution than Europe generates each year.
Urgewald's report comes one day after Climate Trace revealed in a separate analysis that global emissions from oil and gas production are up to three times higher than reported.
"The outcome of our calculations is truly frightening," Fiona Hauke, senior oil and gas researcher at Urgewald, said in a statement. "Oil and gas companies' short-term expansion plans are not in line with the net-zero emissions course put forward by the IEA. Keeping these oil and gas resources in the ground is the bare minimum of what is needed to keep 1.5°C attainable."
As the report points out, even "if the oil and gas industry simply maintained its 2021 production level of 56.3 bboe, it alone would exhaust our remaining carbon budget within 15.5 years."
Just over a dozen corporations—including Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Chevron, and Shell—are responsible for more than half of the industry's short-term expansion efforts, Urgewald found.
But "oil and gas companies are not only planning rapid development in the short term," the report notes. "Their massive build-up of new fossil fuel infrastructure is threatening to lock the world into a high-emissions pathway" at a time when the window to slash greenhouse gas pollution and avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis is rapidly closing.
Fossil fuel giants, especially those in the U.S., have been "happy to take advantage" of global energy market chaos unleashed by Russia's late-February invasion of Ukraine, the report continues, channeling their record-breaking profits into boosting fracking and LNG export capacity.
"Current midstream expansion plans will more than double liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity globally, and new mega-pipeline projects like the Trans-Saharan pipeline would stretch across entire continents and beyond," says the report. "Such oil and gas infrastructure is expensive to build, and its intended operational lifetime spans decades—a time horizon we simply do not have."
Nearly 20% of LNG import terminals under development are located in Europe, which has been hit especially hard by soaring energy prices, but liquefied gas is "a false solution," warned Lucie Pinson from Reclaim Finance.
"The newly planned projects will come too late to solve Europe's energy crisis," said Pinson. "But what they will do is lock us into a high-carbon future and pose severe stranded assets risks. Private financial institutions must acknowledge the responsibility they hold and withdraw their support from new fossil infrastructure projects."
Urgewald and its partners identified 289 companies that are constructing new oil and gas pipelines or LNG terminals.
"As of 2022, new import and export LNG terminals with a total capacity of 1,391.5 Mtpa (million tons per annum) are planned or under development," states the report. "The increase in LNG export capacity would, if fully used, release almost twice as much greenhouse gas per year as all operating coal-fired power plants in North America, South America, Europe, and Africa together."
Urgewald's findings are based on its "Global Oil & Gas Exit List" (GOGEL), a company-level database that covers 901 firms responsible for 95% of global oil and gas production. Earlier this year, GOGEL data was used to expose dozens of "carbon bomb" oil and gas projects that fossil fuel giants are planning to build at the expense of humanity.
The newly updated GOGEL data was presented at COP27, where delegates have been informed yet again that, in the words of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, "we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator."
Two weeks ago, the U.N. published a series of reports warning that there is "no credible path to 1.5°C in place" and that only "urgent system-wide transformation" can achieve the 50% drop in global emissions required by 2030 to prevent locking in cataclysmictemperature rise approaching 3°C by century's end.
As the new Urgewald analysis makes clear, the opportunity costs of the fossil fuel industry's continued investment in oil and gas production are immense.
"If global exploration expenditure since 2020 had been directed towards the energy transition, it could have almost doubled the U.S.'s 2019 onshore wind capacity," the report points out. "Egypt, the host country of COP27, is the perfect example of the complete disconnect between the action needed and the reality on the ground. Fifty-five companies are exploring for new oil and gas resources across Egypt while the world's governments come together in Sharm El-Sheikh to address the climate crisis."
Earlier this week, Guterres slammed the duplicitous nature of many corporate climate promises, arguing that "so-called 'net zero pledges' that exclude core products [coal, oil, gas] are poisoning our planet. Using bogus 'net zero' pledges to cover up massive fossil fuel expansion is reprehensible. This toxic cover-up could push our world over the climate cliff."
According to Urgewald fossil fuel finance campaigner Katrin Ganswindt, "Over 20 European banks, insurers, and investors have published promising oil and gas policies" since GOGEL was launched, with eight of them publicly referring to the database. "But hundreds of financial institutions have yet to adopt strict, science-based exclusion criteria for oil and gas companies whose expansion plans are not in line with 1.5°C."
These "oil and gas companies are betting against our collective future," said Ganswindt. "Their behavior also creates a high economic risk, for their financial backers and for themselves. A financial institution that takes its net-zero commitments seriously cannot provide financing to companies that are recklessly busting our climate budget."
Last week, progressives urged U.S. President Joe Biden's Treasury Department to intervene after an investigation of the financial sector's net-zero commitments showed that the six biggest U.S. banks' climate targets and policies fall far short of what's needed to preserve a habitable planet. On Wednesday, another analysis found that major U.S. banks are responsible for one-third of oil and gas expansion projects currently underway.
As Urgewald's new report observes, "All over the world, from Uganda to the Philippines, local communities and activists are calling out oil and gas companies for their reckless expansion plans."
Omar Elmawi, executive director of Muslims for Human Rights and coordinator of the campaign to stop the EACOP pipeline, said that "the irresponsible, greed-addled expansion plans of oil and gas companies destroy local communities and whole ecosystems."
"They lead to persecution, displacement, and all manner of environmental and social harm," he continued. "African people do not want any of this. We demand the energy access and the just transition renewable energies can deliver. And we vehemently reject the prospect of another colonialist plunder of our home's natural resources at the hands of avaricious oil and gas corporations that corrupt governments and throw whole countries into chaos."
"Africa deserves better," Elmawi added. "Our planet deserves better."
---
---
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-09/world-s-co2-hotspots-pinpointed-by-al-gore-backed-climate-project
no lnx few
orld’s CO2 Hotspots Pinpointed by Al Gore-Backed Climate Project
With maps and data on 72,000 power plants, oil refineries, airports and more, the new website Climate Trace aims to offer “radical climate transparency.”
Al Gore at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, on Nov. 7.
Al Gore at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, on Nov. 7.Photographer: Islam Safwat/Bloomberg
ByEric Roston
November 8, 2022 at 9:00 PM PST
Share this article
Follow the authors
@eroston
- Get alerts forEric Roston
In this article
CL1
WTI Crude
85.63USD/bbl.-3.28-3.69%
0321382Z
WORLD RESOURCES INSTITUTE
Private Company
GOOGL
ALPHABET INC-A
87.76USD-1.15-1.29%
XW1
Generic 1st 'XW' Future
300.15USD/MT-23.35-7.22%
0201940D
BENIFICUS FOUNDATION/THE
Private Company
Open
Green Data Dash
52,000
Million metric tons of greenhouse emissions, most recent annual data
$69.9B
Renewable power investment worldwide in Q2 2020
-9.04%
Today's arctic ice area vs. historic average
Vereeniging, South Africa
Most polluted air today, in sensor range
0
65432
0
32109
0
09876
.
0
65432
0
98765
0
98765
0
65432
0
65432
0
76543
Parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere
92%
Carbon-free net power in Brazil, most recent data
+0.88° C
Sep. 2022 increase in global temperature vs. 1900s average
0
43210
0
43210
0
09876
Soccer pitches of forest lost this hour, most recent data
Open
A consortium of dozens of research nonprofits on Wednesday launched a free online platform that details greenhouse gas emissions around the world across 20 economic sectors. Climate Trace, which can be viewed on a web browser, includes a zoomable world map that displays and ranks the dirtiest 72,000 power plants, oil refineries, airports, ships and more. The group used satellite imagery and machine learning as well as more conventional techniques to build what it says is the largest available source of greenhouse gas emissions data.
“The sources of emissions data that are available now are not granular enough, or comprehensive enough, to use as the basis for decisions,” Former US Vice President Al Gore said in an interview. “And so what we are finding is that there is a ravenous hunger for accurate data.” Gore, who has fundraised for the group, is expected to introduce the platform on Wednesday at COP27, the UN climate talks in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
U.S. Refiners Could Be Forced To Slow Production As Gasoline Profits Drag
A gas flare burns in the Permian Basin in Texas.Photographer: Angus Mordant/Bloomberg
Each economic sector on the platform is tracked using its own methodology, managed by team leads and checked by other experts not involved in creating the technique. Several of these individual methodologies have already been peer-reviewed, and the team expects to put more and more of its work through that rigorous process.
“I like to think of it as Wikipedia with more sensors,” said Gavin McCormick, executive director of the research nonprofit WattTime and a Climate Trace co-founder.
The site lets users compare any major pollution source in the world, no matter the scale, with any other. For instance: According to the site’s data, China’s five largest power plants release more carbon dioxide in a year than the entire country of Colombia.
More from
Bloomberg
Green
South Africa’s Eskom Seeks Balance Between Clean Air and Power Generation
Tropical Storm Nicole Is Getting a Boost From Climate Change
Germany Risks Missing Hydrogen Targets on Muddled EU Strategy
Tropical Storm Nicole Slams Into Bahamas as Florida Braces for Wind and Floods]
The goal of the project is to provide decision-makers with information to determine where to cut carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, and the other pollutants. But the takeaways are not always intuitive. Saudi Arabia’s oil production, for example, is responsible for less CO₂ per barrel than the equivalent from Canada or Venezuela. In a world that still needs oil, some “might prefer to see a world where people are scaling up Saudi Arabian oil production and scaling down oil production elsewhere,” McCormick said. “So it’s a good example of how the data cut both ways.”
Climate Trace itself is made up of hundreds of researchers who have been scouring the world — tapping 300 satellites and 11,100 sensors, in addition to corporate and government data and the internet at large — for three years to assemble as complete a view of the human sources of greenhouse gas pollution as they think is currently possible.
The data they compiled suggests that oil and gas sector emissions are much higher than what some countries or facilities report. Recent scientific research into methane flaring and leaks is built into one of the platform’s models, leading to the conclusion that many facilities are dramatically under-reporting their emissions. Countries that disclose to the UN their emissions related to oil and gas production may have actual emissions up to three times that amount, according to Climate Trace.
“We know that transparency drives accountability,” said Andrew Zolli, chief impact officer at satellite company Planet Labs, a Climate Trace partner. “We are headed for an era of radical climate transparency.”
Their findings also show that in virtually every corner of the global economy, a small number of polluters make up the bulk of emissions. It's true at the largest scale: The biggest 500 emitters make up less than 1% of all those in the group's database, but were responsible for 14% of total emissions in 2021. Oil and gas production accounts for 26 of the 50 dirtiest sources. Sixty percent of the dirtiest 500 sources are power plants.
“We’re finding those patterns everywhere,” said McCormick. “Everywhere you look, in every sector, a relatively small number of assets makes up a much larger share of total global emissions than we expected.”
With the world’s climate diplomats and advocates in Sharm El-Sheik for COP27, the ability to independently check any country’s emissions estimates — or provide them where they’re absent — may be the most important potential use of Climate Trace this week and next.
But there are potentially many others. The mapping tool allows users to zoom in on any territory to see where specific facilities sit relative to surrounding cities or natural areas. A scroll along the bottom of the screen adjusts to show the biggest polluters at every zoom level.
Corporate supply chain managers might use the platform to gauge the carbon footprints of potential partners. International energy developers could scan a country or a continent for places where fossil-fuel generators are prevalent and clean power can make large CO₂ gains in a short period of time. Cities strapped to measure their CO₂ responsibility could use the tool to get a sense of how they’re doing, or to check their own math.
The purpose of Climate Trace is to spur collaboration, not to point fingers or “name and shame,” said Deborah Gordon, senior principal for climate intelligence at RMI, an energy think tank, and the lead for Climate Trace’s work on oil and gas production.
“Climate Trace doesn’t exist to be the climate police,” she said.
The project’s origins go back to 2018, when the UK research nonprofit Carbon Tracker published a pilot study that applied machine learning to satellite imagery of coal plants in countries where there’s often little data about them. The researchers studied images of plumes released from flue stacks and cooling towers and became confident in their ability to infer from that how much the plants were being used, their productivity and even their profitability.
McCormick and Matt Gray, who led the Carbon Tracker study and is now chief executive officer of the UK company Transition Zero, applied for and received funding from Google.org’s Google AI Impact Challenge to expand on the work, partnering also with the World Resources Institute. They announced in May 2019 their goal to track in real time pollution from every power plant in the world. Gore read an article about it, contacted them to see how many other sectors might be included, and Climate Trace was born.
The project grew as it became clear how much data it could suck in. Scientists contributed data that had never left their own servers for little reason other than data incompatibility. Some 50 software engineers work on Climate Trace directly, in some cases just to make existing data usable.
In addition to convenor, Gore worked as a fundraiser for the group, attracting support from Google.org, Schmidt Futures, Benificus Foundation and his partners at Generation Investment Management. Fossil fuel backers were ruled out on principle and the team avoided companies too, to prevent them from potentially using any support of the effort to greenwash themselves, Gore said.
In September 2021 Climate Trace released national greenhouse gas inventories covering 2020, which until today was the group’s major output.
The group came in for some tough love in a “fast-track” National Academy of Sciences report published in early October, which evaluated ways to improve greenhouse gas monitoring. The report dinged the enterprise in several areas, including data transparency, whole-project peer review and inclusivity of air-pollution agencies or citizen science efforts.
---
tom b raw an 11 22
When Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020’s presidential election, many world leaders were quick to congratulate him — from French President Emmanuel Macron to then-U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson. But Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies in the Kremlin were clearly disappointed in that election’s outcome, and according to Daily Beast reporter Julia Davis, Russian officials are closely observing the United States’ 2022 midterms and hoping for a major red wave.
“Russian state media is following the midterm elections in the United States with great interest, but the mood in Moscow’s studios had noticeably soured in comparison to the fun-filled episodes of the years preceding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Davis observes in an article published on November 8. “While the experts and the hosts are still rooting for the Republicans, they stop short of promising the audience total salvation even with the GOP back in charge. Even the most seasoned propagandists can’t hide the fact that Russia’s war against Ukraine — and the global fallout that followed — is only going from bad to worse.”
Davis reports that Sergei Luzyanin, a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations under the Russian Foreign Ministry, is hoping that Republicans will win big on Election Night — and that there will be considerable animosity between the Biden Administration and a GOP-controlled Congress in 2023.
READ MORE: Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russia ending war is necessary 'to save ourselves from the climate disaster
On the state-operated Russian show “60 Minutes” (not to be confused with the CBS News program in the U.S.), Luzyanin commented, “A potential victory of the Republicans in the Congress and perhaps in theSenate will mark the beginning of a political Halloween…. After the midterm elections, we’ll see a glass jar full of poisonous American spiders tearing each other up. Go ahead and eat one another! It will be a frightening political process... It may also lead to tactical or strategic changes in their foreign policy…. Get lots of popcorn, and let’s watch.”
As some Russian media pundits see it, a GOP-controlled Congress will be better for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than a Congress that remains in Democratic hands.
Olga Skabeeva, a Russian media host, commented that she hopes Democrats and Republicans tear each other to pieces but wasn’t sure it will happen as much as she would like. And while Skabeeva prefers Republicans over Democrats, she isn’t counting on any direct military help from the GOP.
Skabeeva told viewers, “We keep hoping it happens, but they’re yet to destroy each other…. The situation won’t change for the better, and we have to rely solely upon ourselves, on the Russian Army. Republicans can’t help us to hold on to Kherson.”
One clip that has been played on Russian TV, according to Davis, is a clip of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene promising that “not another penny will go to Ukraine.” Skabeeva obviously likes what the Georgia congresswoman had to say.
Skabeeva commented, “There aren’t many chances that the magnitude of the funding (for Ukraine) will change, but an everyday Russian keeps on hoping and believing. They’ve never followed the midterm elections so closely.... We trust and believe in the Republicans. Do we even have any other allies?”
---
---
nice ~ to elite eco-hyp BS
With the United Nations Climate Change Conference underway in Egypt, Oxfam on Monday released a report highlighting how billionaires' investments produce massive amounts of planet-heating emissions that must be reined in to ensure a habitable planet.
The group's analysis—Carbon Billionaires: The Investment Emissions of the World's Richest People—reveals that the investments of 125 billionaires emit 393 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) each year, or the same as the entirety of France.
Putting that figure into an individual context, the report explains that the annual average tops 3.1 million tonnes of CO2e per billionaire—or over a million times higher than the 2.76 tonnes that is the average for people worldwide who are in the bottom 90%.
"These few billionaires together have 'investment emissions' that equal the carbon footprints of entire countries like France, Egypt, or Argentina," said Nafkote Dabi, climate change lead at Oxfam, in a statement. "The major and growing responsibility of wealthy people for overall emissions is rarely discussed or considered in climate policymaking. This has to change."
Dabi declared that "these billionaire investors at the top of the corporate pyramid have huge responsibility for driving climate breakdown. They have escaped accountability for too long."
"Emissions from billionaire lifestyles, their private jets, and yachts are thousands of times the average person, which is already completely unacceptable," she noted. "But if we look at emissions from their investments, then their carbon emissions are over a million times higher."
The report similarly stresses that "by looking at how the richest behave as investors, we can demonstrate not just their role as consumers of carbon but also their role as wealth holders who own, control, shape and financially profit from production processes that release greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere."
"Ordinary citizens often do not have a lot of control over their energy choices, particularly those in low- or middle-income groups. Poor public transport options can mean that people are forced to drive to work, for example," the document points out. "In contrast, investors can choose where they put their money."
"They can choose to put it into fossil fuel industries or other highly polluting activities, or into the activities of other corporate actors that are clearly failing to do enough to reduce their carbon emissions," the report continues. "The decisions that investors make now can potentially determine our emissions for decades to come—for instance, bad decisions on infrastructure investments can commit us to high levels of GHGs far into the future.[twt]
according to Oxfam: "24% of billionaire investments in our sample are in the consumer discretionary sector, with 18% in consumer staples and 11% in financials. In terms of high-polluting industries, 7% of investments are in energy and 7% in materials. By comparison, energy corporates make up 4.7% of the S&P 500 and materials make up 2.5%."
The document further notes that "there is one renewable energy company in our sample."
Climate scientists along with energy, health, and policy experts continue to stress the need for governments across the globe to swiftly and dramatically strengthen plans to cut GHG emissions, especially if there is any hope of meeting the 1.5°C Paris agreement target.
Speaking from the COP27 summit in Sharm El-Sheikh on Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that "we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator" and advocated for "greater urgency, stronger action, and effective accountability."
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/third-of-worlds-glaciers-2050/
yosemite
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/throwing-cups-water-raging-inferno/
---
yikes
https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/animal-populations-69-percent-decline/
---
---
no lnx
'Florida has largely disappeared': The looming climate cataclysms if humanity continues 'business as usual'
Brandon Gage October 10, 2022
The World Economic Forum has released a new video warning of the cataclysmic consequences that anthropomorphic climate change will trigger over the next century if humanity's addiction to fossil fuels is not severed.
The two-minute spot navigates the extensive impacts that unchecked global warming will have on various regions of the planet through the coming decades as well as how drastically terrestrial life will be affected.
The sobering forecasts, while not exhaustive, have been extrapolated from cited accredited research.
READ MORE: 'One of the biggest arsonists': World Bank blasted for 'investing' $15 billion into planet-scorching fossil fuels
The 2030s:
Ice caps and crucial ice sheets continued to melt, swelling sea levels by 20 centimeters [7.87 inches]
90 percent of coral reefs are threatened by human activity, while around 60 percent are highly endangered
Dwindling crop yields have pushed more than 100 million more people into extreme poverty
Climate change-related illnesses are killing an extra 250,000 people each year
The 2040s:
The world has already shot past its 1.5-degree Celsius [2.7-degree Fahrenheit] Paris Agreement temperature rise limit
Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Thailand are threatened by annual floods, sparking mass migration
Eight percent of the global population has seen a severe reduction in water availability
The Arctic is now ice-free in summer
Sea levels have risen 20 centimeters [two feet] in the Gulf of Mexico, where hurricanes now deliver devastating storm surges
The 2050s:
Two billion people now face 60-degree Celsius [140 degrees Fahrenheight] temperatures for more than a 10th of the year
In much of the world, masks are needed daily – not for disease prevention, but to protect your lungs from smog
The Northeast United States now sees 25 major floods a year, up from one in 2020
140 million people are displaced by food and water insecurity or extreme weather events
From 2100 and beyond:
The average global temperature has soared more than four degrees Celsius [7.2 degrees Fahrenheit] – and even more in northern latitudes
Rising sea levels have rendered coastlines unrecognizable, and Florida has largely disappeared
Coral reefs have largely vanished, taking with them a quarter of the world's fish habitats
Insects have also been consigned to history, causing massive crop failures due to the lack of pollinators
Severe drought now affects more than 40 percent of the planet
An area the size of Massachusetts burns in the US every year
Southern Spain and Portugal have become a desert, tipping millions into food and water insecurity
READ MORE: How Florida's need to 'adapt to climate change' has ignited debate over whether to rebuild high-risk areas
The ad concludes with a reminder that these bleak outcomes are preventable:
Today, 'business as usual' is making our planet unlivable. But by making the transition to a nature-positive economy, we could generate 395 million jobs – one-fifth of the predicted labor force increase.
It also encourages viewers to consider what they can do to contribute toward a prosperous future for all of Earth's inhabitants.
Watch below or at this link.
READ MORE: Climate activists are parading a Ron Johnson 'scatue' around Milwaukee: report
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/new-report-warns-that-americas-fastest-growing-cities-face-the-biggest-climate-risks/
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/global-warming-antarctica-sleeping-giant/
---
several refs/art's to this
https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/**climate-endgame/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2108146119
https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/climate-endgame-risk-human-extinction-scientists-global-heating-catastrophe
no lnx twt
The worst-case outcomes of an unmitigated climate emergency—civilizational collapse or even human extinction—are "dangerously underexplored" scenarios requiring further study, an analysis published Monday asserted.
In a perspective published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, climate scientists Luke Kemp, Chi Xu, Joanna Depledge, and Timothy M. Lenton argue that humanity must prepare for what they call the "climate endgame."
"It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change," the researchers write.
Although climate scientists say such catastrophic consequences are unlikely, the paper's authors caution that "facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naïve risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst."
"There is ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic. We could enter such 'endgames' at even modest levels of warming," they warn. "Understanding extreme risks is important for robust decision-making, from preparation to consideration of emergency responses."
"This requires exploring not just higher temperature scenarios but also the potential for climate change impacts to contribute to systemic risk and other cascades," the authors add. "We suggest that it is time to seriously scrutinize the best way to expand our research horizons to cover this field."
:{:{}:
}:
The scientists propose a research agenda that seeks to answer four main questions:
:{:{}:
}:
What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events?
What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity?
What are human societies' vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk?
How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an "integrated catastrophe assessment?"
"Knowing the worst cases can compel action, as the idea of 'nuclear winter' in 1983 galvanized public concern and nuclear disarmament efforts," the analysis states. "Exploring severe risks and higher-temperature scenarios could cement a recommitment to the 1.5 °C to 2 °C guardrail" that the Paris climate agreement says is imperative to avoid an irreversible climate catastrophe.
"I think it's sane risk management to think about the plausible worst-case scenarios and we do it when it comes to every other situation, we should definitely do when it comes to the fate of the planet and species," study lead author Luke Kemp, a researcher at the University of Cambridge in England, told the BBC.
In a separate interview with The Guardian, Kemp said that "paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict, and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities."
Study co-author Xu of Nanjing University in China told the BBC that "average annual temperatures of 29°C currently affect around 30 million people in the Sahara and Gulf Coast."
"By 2070, these temperatures and the social and political consequences will directly affect two nuclear powers, and seven maximum containment laboratories housing the most dangerous pathogens," he added. "There is serious potential for disastrous knock-on effects."
---
ref guk
no lnx
Climate endgame: risk of human extinction ‘dangerously underexplored’
Scientists say there are ample reasons to suspect global heating could lead to catastrophe
@dpcarrington
Mon 1 Aug 2022
The risk of global societal collapse or human extinction has been “dangerously underexplored”, climate scientists have warned in an analysis.
They call such a catastrophe the “climate endgame”. Though it had a small chance of occurring, given the uncertainties in future emissions and the climate system, cataclysmic scenarios could not be ruled out, they said.
“Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst,” the scientists said, adding that there were “ample reasons” to suspect global heating could result in an apocalyptic disaster.
The international team of experts argue the world needs to start preparing for the possibility of the climate endgame. “Analysing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanise action, improve resilience, and inform policy,” they said.
Explorations in the 1980s of the nuclear winter that would follow a nuclear war spurred public concern and disarmament efforts, the researchers said. The analysis proposes a research agenda, including what they call the “four horsemen” of the climate endgame: famine, extreme weather, war and disease.
They also called for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce a special report on the issue. The IPCC report on the impacts of just 1.5C of heating drove a “groundswell of public concern”, they said.
“There are plenty of reasons to believe climate change could become catastrophic, even at modest levels of warming,” said Dr Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis. “Climate change has played a role in every mass extinction event. It has helped fell empires and shaped history.
“Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.”
The analysis is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was reviewed by a dozen scientists. It argues that the consequences of global heating beyond 3C have been underexamined, with few quantitative estimates of the total impacts. “We know least about the scenarios that matter most,” Kemp said.
A thorough risk assessment would consider how risks spread, interacted and amplified, but had not been attempted, the scientists said. “Yet this is how risk unfolds in the real world,” they said. “For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heatwave.” The Covid pandemic underlined the need to examine rare but high-impact global risks, they added.
Particularly concerning are tipping points, where a small rise in global temperature results in a big change in the climate, such as huge carbon emissions from an Amazon rainforest suffering major droughts and fires. Tipping points could trigger others in a cascade and some remained little studied, they said, such as the abrupt loss of stratocumulus cloud decks that could cause an additional 8C of global warming.
The researchers warn that climate breakdown could exacerbate or trigger other catastrophic risks, such as international wars or infectious disease pandemics, and worsen existing vulnerabilities such as poverty, crop failures and lack of water. The analysis suggests superpowers may one day fight over geoengineering plans to reflect sunlight or the right to emit carbon.
“There is a striking overlap between currently vulnerable states and future areas of extreme warming,” the scientists said. “If current political fragility does not improve significantly in the coming decades, then a belt of instability with potentially serious ramifications could occur.”
There were further good reasons to be concerned about the potential of a global climate catastrophe, the scientists said: “There are warnings from history. Climate change has played a role in the collapse or transformation of numerous previous societies and in each of the five mass extinction events in Earth’s history.”
[Domino-effect of climate events could move Earth into a ‘hothouse’ state
Read more]
New modelling in the analysis shows that extreme heat – defined as an annual average temperature of more than 29C – could affect 2 billion people by 2070 if carbon emissions continue.
“Such temperatures currently affect around 30 million people in the Sahara and Gulf Coast,” said Chi Xu, at Nanjing University in China, who was part of the team. “By 2070, these temperatures and the social and political consequences will directly affect two nuclear powers, and seven maximum containment laboratories housing the most dangerous pathogens. There is serious potential for disastrous knock-on effects.”
The current trend of greenhouse gas emissions would cause a rise of 2.1-3.9C by 2100. But if existing pledges of action are fully implemented, the range would be 1.9-3C. Achieving all long-term targets set to date would mean 1.7-2.6C of warming.
“Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories,” the scientists said. Temperatures more than 2C above pre-industrial levels had not been sustained on Earth for more than 2.6m years, they said, far before the rise of human civilisation, which had risen in a “narrow climatic envelope” over the past 10,000 years.
“The more we learn about how our planet functions, the greater the reason for concern,” said Prof Johan Rockström, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “We increasingly understand that our planet is a more sophisticated and fragile organism.We must do the maths of disasterin order to avoid it.”
refs
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0310-1.epdf
possible climate transitions from breakup of stratocumulus decks under greenhouse warmingTapioSchneider1,2*, ColleenM.Kaul1 and KyleG.Pressel1Stratocumulus clouds cover 20% of the low-latitude oceans and are especially prevalent in the subtropics. They cool the Earth by shading large portions of its surface from sunlight. However, as their dynamical scales are too small to be resolvable in global climate models, predictions of their response to greenhouse warming have remained uncertain. Here we report how stratocumulus decks respond to greenhouse warming in large-eddy simulations that explicitly resolve cloud dynamics in a representative subtropical region. In the simulations, stratocumulus decks become unstable and break up into scattered clouds when CO2 levels rise above 1,200 ppm. In addition to the warming from rising CO2 levels, this instability triggers a surface warming of about 8 K globally and 10 K in the subtropics. Once the stratocumulus decks have broken up, they only re-form once CO2 concentrations drop substantially below the level at which the instability first occurred. Climate transitions that arise from this instability may have contributed importantly to hothouse climates and abrupt climate changes in the geological past. Such transitions to a much warmer climate may also occur in the future if CO2 levels continue to rise.
prev civs: https://www.academia.edu/44322625/The_IPCC_A_Primer_for_Archaeologists
IPCC: A Primer for Archaeologists
American Antiquity, 2020
Rediscovering lessons of adaptation from the past
---
---
an 8 22
cAHOKIA MOUNDS, Illinois: I am standing atop a 100-foot-high temple mound, the largest known earthwork in the Americas built by prehistoric peoples. The temperatures, in the high 80s, along with the oppressive humidity, have emptied the park of all but a handful of visitors. My shirt is matted with sweat.
I look out from the structure—known as Monks Mound — at the flatlands below, with smaller mounds dotting the distance. These earthen mounds, built at a confluence of the Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri rivers, are all that remain of one of the largest pre-Columbian settlements north of Mexico, occupied from around 800 to 1,400 AD by perhaps as many as 20,000 people.
This
, perhaps the greatest in North America, rose, flourished, fell into decline and was ultimately abandoned. Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible. They engage in futile and self-defeating wars. And then the rot sets in. The great urban centers die first, falling into irreversible decay. Central authority unravels. Artistic expression and intellectual inquiry are replaced by a new dark age, the triumph of tawdry spectacle and the celebration of crowd-pleasing imbecility.
“Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum,” anthropologist
writes in The Collapse of Complex Societies. “Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration.”
Several centuries ago, the rulers of this vast city complex, which covered some 4,000 acres, including a 40-acre central plaza, stood where I stood. They no doubt saw below in the teeming settlements an unassailable power, with at least 120 temple mounds used as residences, sacred ceremonial sites, tombs, meeting centers and ball courts. Cahokia warriors dominated a vast territory from which they exacted tribute to enrich the ruling class of this highly stratified society. Reading the heavens, these mound builders constructed several circular astronomical observatories — wooden versions of Stonehenge.
The city’s hereditary rulers were venerated in life and death. A half mile from Monks Mound is the seven-foot-high Mound 72, in which archeologists found the remains of a man on a platform covered with 20,000 conch-shell disc beads from the Gulf of Mexico. The beads were arranged in the shape of a falcon, with the falcon’s head beneath and beside the man’s head. Its wings and tail were placed underneath the man’s arms and legs. Below this layer of shells was the body of another man, buried face downward. Around these two men were six more human remains, possibly retainers, who may have been put to death to accompany the entombed man in the afterlife. Nearby were buried the remains of 53 girls and women ranging in age from 15 to 30, laid out in rows in two layers separated by matting. They appeared to have been strangled to death.
The poet Paul Valéry noted, “a civilization has the same fragility as a life.”
Across the Mississippi River from Monks Mound, the city skyline of St. Louis is visible. It is hard not to see our own collapse in that of Cahokia. In 1950, St. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 856,796. Today, that number has fallen to below 300,000, a drop of some 65 percent. Major employers — Anheuser-Busch, McDonnell-Douglas, TWA, Southwestern Bell and Ralston Purina —have dramatically reduced their presence or left altogether. St. Louis is consistently ranked one of the most dangerous cities in the country. One in five people live in poverty. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has the highest rate of police killings per capita, of the 100 largest police departments in the nation, according to a 2021 report. Prisoners in the city’s squalid jails, where 47 people died in custody between 2009 and 2019, complain of water being shut off from their cells for hours and guards routinely pepper spraying inmates, including those on suicide watch. The city’s crumbling infrastructure, hundreds of gutted and abandoned buildings, empty factories, vacant warehouses and impoverished neighborhoods replicate the ruins of other post-industrial American cities, the classic signposts of a civilization interminal decline.
“Just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing,”
argues in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. “When people are desperate, undernourished and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.”
Pre-industrial civilizations were dependent on the limits of solar energy and constrained by roads and waterways, impediments that were obliterated when fossil fuel became an energy source. As industrial empires became global, their increase in size meant an increase in complexity. Ironically, this complexity makes us morevulnerable to catastrophic collapse, not less. Soaring temperatures (Iraq is enduring 120 degree heat that has fried the country’s electrical grid), the depletion of natural resources, flooding, droughts, (the worst drought in 500 years is devastating Western, Central and Southern Europe and is expected to see a declinein crop yields of 8 or 9 percent), power outages, wars, pandemics, a rise in zoonotic diseases and breakdowns in supply chains combine to shake the foundations of industrial society. The Arctic has been heating up four times faster than the global average, resulting in an accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and freakish weather patterns. The Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia are warming up to seven times faster. Climate scientists did not expect this extreme weather until 2050.
“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up,” the anthropologist Ronald Wrightwarns, calling industrial society “a suicide machine.”
In A Short History of Progress,
:
Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn’t easily moved. This human inability to foresee — or to watch out for — long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.
Wright also reflects upon what will be left behind:
The archaeologists who dig us up will need to wear hazmat suits. Humankind will leave a telltale layer in the fossil record composed of everything we produce, from mounds of chicken bones, wet-wipes, tires, mattresses and other household waste to metals, concrete, plastics, industrial chemicals, and the nuclear residue of power plants and weaponry. We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder and possibility of the pristine Earth.
:{:{Calculations of humanity’s footprint suggest we have been in ‘ecological deficit,’ taking more than Earth’s biological systems can withstand, for at least 30 years. Topsoil is being lost far faster than nature can replenish it; 30 percent of arable land has been exhausted since the mid-20th century.}:
We have financed this monstrous debt by colonizing both past and future, drawing energy, chemical fertilizer and pesticides from the planet’s fossil carbon, and throwing the consequences onto coming generations of our species and all others. Some of those species have already been bankrupted: they are extinct. Others will follow.}:
As Cahokia declined, violence dramatically increased. Surrounding towns were burned to the ground. Groups, numbering in the hundreds, were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. At the end, “the enemy killed all people indiscriminately. The intent was not merely prestige, but an early form of ethnic cleansing” writes anthropologist Timothy R. Pauketat, in *Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians*. He notes that, in one fifteenth-century cemetery in central Illinois, one-third of all adults had been killed by blows to the head, arrow wounds or scalping. Many showed evidence of fractures on their arms from vain attempts to fight off their attackers.
Such
internecine violence is compounded by a weakened and discredited central authority. In the later stages of Cahokia, the ruling class surrounded themselves with fortified wooden stockades, including a two-mile-long wall that enclosed Monks Mound. Similar fortifications dotted the vast territory the Cahokia controlled, segregating gated communities where the wealthy and powerful, protected by armed guards, sought safety from the increasing lawlessness and hoarded dwindling food supplies and resources.
Overcrowding inside these stockades saw the spread of tuberculosis and blastomycosis, caused by a soil-borne fungus, along with iron deficiency anemia. Infant mortality rates rose, and life spans declined, a result of social disintegration, poor diet and disease.
By the 1400s Cahokia had beenabandoned. In 1541, when Hernando de Soto’s invading army descended on what is today Missouri, looking for gold, nothing but the great mounds remained, relics of a forgotten past.
This time the
will be global. It will not be possible, as in ancient societies, to migrate to new ecosystems rich in natural resources. The steady rise in heat will devastate crop yields and make much of the planet uninhabitable. Climate scientists warn that once temperatures rise by 4℃, the earth, at best, will be able to sustain a billion people.
The more insurmountable the crisis becomes, the more we, like our prehistoric ancestors, will retreat into
violence, magical thinking and
.
The historian Arnold Toynbee, who singled out unchecked militarism as the fatal blow to past empires, argued that civilizations are not murdered, but commit suicide. They fail to adapt to a crisis, ensuring their own obliteration. Our civilization’s collapse will be unique in size, magnified by the destructive force of our fossil fuel-driven industrial society. But it will replicate the familiar patterns of collapse that toppled civilizations of the past. The difference will be in scale, and this time there will be no exit.
---
---
biden put up $ sez emergency 4x? but will not declare; XO
Europe is experiencing a major heatwave with more than 1000 deaths reported throughout Spain, Portugal and England. According to AccuWeather, Europe is expected to see afternoon record-shattering temperatures in excess of 100F on Tuesday, July 19. The Galicia region of Northwestern Spain, for example, is suffering devastating wildfires.
Extreme weather events serve as reminders of the imminent threat that climate change poses. In an opinion column published by the New York Times on July 18, journalist David Leonhardt explains that the U.S. government needs to be addressing more the crisis much more aggressively.
“In France, Greece, Spain and other parts of Europe,” Leonhardt observes, “the same heat wave has sparked dozens of wildfires. In the U.S., parts of the Southwest and the Central Plains are bracing for temperatures that could reach 110 degrees this week. Already, the city of Tulsa has experienced more days above 100 degrees this summer than it historically has in an entire summer on average.”
READ MORE: Climate change is robbing France of its Dijon mustard
To make matters worse, Leonhardt notes, the U.S. Supreme Court recently “restricted the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to reduce pollution at power plants.”
The federal government, Leonhardt laments, is “seeming to withdraw from the fight.” But Leonhardt points out that some individual states have taken steps to combat climate change, including California. And he is hoping that others will follow their example.
“California is on the verge of requiring that all new cars sold there be electric or zero-emission by 2035,” Leonhardt writes. “Colorado and New York have sharply cut their electricity emissions in recent years. About 20 other states have also taken aggressive steps to slow global warming, as have some local governments and companies.”
READ MORE:Extreme flooding inundates Sydney, Australia as climate change rages on
---
don't look up IRL; heat waves, rec temp UK wildfires 100 kia
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/british-meteorologist-giggling-news-anchor/
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/joe-manchin-kills-climate-provisions/
jake j cmn dr
Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia informed Democratic leaders Thursday that he will not support any new climate spending or tax increases targeting the wealthy and large corporations, sinking his party's revived push for renewable energy investments and further undercutting the country's ability to rein in carbon emissions.
While Manchin's refusal to endorse green energy funding may have been entirely foreseeable given his close ties to the fossil fuel industry and his role in tanking the Build Back Better package just months earlier, climate advocates nevertheless voiced dismay at the power one individual has been able to exert over a process with implications for billions of people across the planet.
"This is nothing short of a death sentence," warned Varshini Prakash, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement. "Our democracy is broken when one man who profits from the fossil fuel industry can defy the 81 million Americans who voted for Democrats to stop the climate crisis. It's clear appealing to corporate obstructionists doesn't work, and it will cost us a generation of voters."
Manchin's position, which he reportedly laid out during a closed-door meeting with the Democratic leadership on Thursday, marks a huge setback for the majority party's last-ditch attempt to assemble a far more limited reconciliation bill ahead of the pivotal midterm elections, in which Democrats' slim majorities in the House and Senate are at risk.
The Washington Post, the first outlet to report on the West Virginia Democrat's stance,noted that party leaders had already "agreed to surrender their most prized spending proposals, from offering paid family and medical leave to providing child care, free prekindergarten, and tax benefits to low-income Americans" in a bid to win Manchin's support, which is necessary to get a reconciliation package through the Senate.
"In more recent talks," the Post added, "[Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer and his colleagues set about trying to woo the longtime holdout over a scaled-back approach—including tax credits to spur clean energy, incentives to encourage the purchase of electric vehicles, and limited penalties on the producers of harmful methane gas."
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, told the newspaper that the collapse of climate talks is a devastating failure.
"I'm not going to sugarcoat my disappointment here, especially since nearly all issues in the climate and energy space had been resolved," said Wyden. "This is our last chance to prevent the most catastrophic—and costly—effects of climate change. We can't come back in another decade and forestall hundreds of billions—if not trillions—in economic damage and undo the inevitable human toll."
With new climate and tax provisions off the table, Manchin reportedly told top Democrats that he's open to letting Medicare negotiate the prices of a small number of prescription drugs and extending Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to lapse in the coming months, which would mean surging premiums for millions of people.
The removal of climate provisions from the nascent legislative package is disastrous for U.S. efforts to bring carbon emissions into line with international targets and transition the country away from fossil fuels, the primary driver of the climate crisis.
But it's a major victory for the powerful and deep-pocketed oil and gas industry, which has been lobbying aggressively against renewable energy spending.
"Manchin has taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in D.C.," noted Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org. "And the return on that investment has been enormous. Big Oil got its money's worth a thousand times over."
Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires—a group that advocates for higher taxes on the wealthy—said Thursday that "Manchin just handed victory in America's class war to the billionaires."
"He's shown he doesn't care about the American people, he only cares about the tiny wealthy minority of Americans who are opposed to rich people (like his family and friends who own the coal mining industry) paying taxes," Pearl added. "Some may be ignorant, some may be corrupt, all are just sad pawns in the oligarchs' takeover of America."
The closure, for now, of legislative paths toward climate action spurred fresh calls for President Joe Biden to do everything he can through executive action.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) tweeted late Thursday that "it’s now time for executive Beast Mode" from the president, who has thus far resisted pressure to declare a climate emergency and take other steps to mobilize federal resources to combat a crisis whose deadly consequences are becoming more evident by the day.
"Do it all and start it now," Whitehouse demanded.
In a press release, the Sunrise Movement outlined a list of actions Biden could take without needing congressional approval:
- End the practice of leasing public lands and waters for fossil fuel production;
- Stop the issue of permits for any new fossil fuel infrastructure, including pipelines, petrochemical plants, and export terminals, especially Line 3, Line 5, and the Mountain Valley Pipeline;
- Declare a climate emergency;
- Update and strengthen outdated standards limiting particulate matter, ozone, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, mercury, coal ash, and tailpipe emissions, as well as lead and copper rules preventing contamination of drinking water;
- Finalize new methane standards for new and existing oil and gas operations, and make these standards strong enough to cut methane pollution at least 65 percent below 2012 levels by 2025; and
- Direct the EPA to designate greenhouse pollutants as criteria air pollutants and set a science-based national pollution cap under the Clean Air Act.
"We won't stop fighting," said Prakash. "Biden must declare a climate emergency, and do everything in his executive power to stop the climate crisis immediately. That's the only way he can salvage his presidency and save our generation. And we must uproot this broken system and rebuild it to work for us."
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/supreme-court-climate-change-apocalypse/
krugman west va v epa
---
war vs agw $?
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/two-trillion-versus-100-billion/
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/record-deforestation-amazon-tipping-point/
jake j cmn dr
the Brazilian government published data Friday showing that more than 2,500 fire hotspots were recorded in the Amazon rainforest last month, the highest number for June since 2007—one of the worst years ever for the critical ecosystem.
The latest report from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research showed that the Brazilian Amazon has lost 1,450 square miles of jungle since the start of 2022.
Greenpeace Brazil said in response to the alarming figures that the far-right Bolsonaro government's systematic rampage against basic environmental protections is responsible for the surge in rainforest fires and overall deforestation, which have helped transform parts of the Amazon—long known as a key carbon "sink"—into sources of planet-warming greenhouse gas.
"Agribusiness is hitting new records for forest destruction as the dry season arrives in the Amazon," said Cristiane Mazzetti, a spokesperson for Greenpeace Brazil. "Illegal burnings and deforestation have accelerated over the last three years as a direct result of the Brazilian government's anti-environmental agenda that encourages the destruction of the forest."
"If this trend does not change," Mazzetti added, "we will approach the tipping point of no return in which the Amazon could fail as a rainforest."
Brazilian academics have warned in recent months that a Bolsonaro victory in the October presidential election would mean total demise for the Brazilian Amazon. Recent polling shows that Bolsonaro is trailing leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has vowed to pursue "net-zero deforestation" if elected.
"If Bolsonaro remains in the power of presidency, it's hopeless in terms of the environment," Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the São Paulo-based Climate Observatory, told HuffPost in April, a record-shattering month for Amazon deforestation.
"There will be more deforestation," said Astrini. "The Amazon will fast forward to its collapse point."
Environmental groups have voiced dismay at the Biden administration's failure to confront Bolsonaro on the international stage over his government's assault on the Amazon. The U.S. is Brazil's second-largest trading partner.
Last month, during the U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, President Joe Biden went as far as to praise Bolsonaro for trying to "protect the Amazon."
"In addition to being divorced from reality, Biden's statement is remarkably tone-deaf," Maria Laura Canineu and Luciana Téllez Chávez of Human Rights Watch wrote on the final day of the summit, where the two leaders met for the first time. "Biden has shamefully squandered the opportunity to leverage his meeting with Bolsonaro to support the courageous defenders of the Amazon."
"These defenders are putting their lives on the line to protect the world's largest rainforest and a vital bulwark against climate change," they continued. "Biden should correct this mistake and press Bolsonaro to reverse his damaging policies, urging Bolsonaro to get Brazil back on track in fighting deforestation and protecting forest defenders from violence."
Diana Ruiz, the head of forests at Greenpeace USA, said in a statement Friday that "up to now, the Biden administration has only legitimized the Brazilian government's anti-Indigenous and anti-environmental agenda."
"The U.S. has a responsibility to act and stop making deals with President Bolsonaro, who continues to wage an assault against Indigenous Peoples and environmental defenders," Ruiz added.
---
---
sidney aus flood 4x in 16mos?!
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/pain-climate-change-too-great/
---
https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-june-22-2022/ nordhaus fraction of % gdp 2100 now 14%/yr much earlier, he got nobel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qkpBizCFYo apr 2022 commonwealth
Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present
https://www.harvard.com/book/fire_and_flood/
Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.
Starting with the 1980s, Linden tells the story, decade by decade, by looking at four clocks that move at different speeds: the reality of climate change itself; the scientific consensus about it, which always lags reality; public opinion and political will, which lag further still; and, perhaps most important, business and finance. Reality marches on at its own pace, but the public will and even the science are downstream from the money, and Fire and Flood shows how devilishly effective moneyed climate-change deniers have been at slowing and even reversing the progress of our collective awakening. When a threat means certain but future disaster, but addressing it means losing present-tense profit, capitalism’s response has been sadly predictable.
Now, however, the seasons of fire and flood have crossed the threshold into plain view. Linden focuses on the insurance industry as one loud canary in the coal mine: fire and flood zones in Florida and California, among other regions, are now seeing what many call “climate redlining.” The whole system is teetering on the brink, and the odds of another housing collapse, for starters, are much higher than most people understand. There is a path back from the cliff, but we must pick up the pace. Fire and Flood shows us why, and how.
---
2022 6 22 an
international delegates left Germany Friday following the Bonn Climate Change Conference, climate campaigners called the talks, which lasted 10 days this month, an "utter failure" for neglecting to establish plans to support the Global South in adapting to the planetary crisis—months after developing countries demanded aid at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Scotland.
"It is unconscionable that developed countries continue to kick the issue of financing for loss and damage down the road—first COP26, now Bonn," saidJeni Miller, executive director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, referring to the impacts of the climate crisis which developing nations have already suffered and demanding that the issue get badly-needed attention at upcoming talks.
"Such financing would enable countries to deal with the impacts on their people’s lives and livelihoods, homes and health systems, and must be a core component of the COP27 agenda," Miller added.
deepening campaigners' anger was the fact that European countries present at the Bonn conference are currently boosting fossil fuel imports to replace the gas shipments they previously received from Russia, which were largely discontinued after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine earlier this year.
"The E.U. completely misses the point of what it is to be a climate leader," said Chiara Martinelli, director of Climate Action Network Europe. "European countries also urgently need to massively ramp up their climate and energy targets, rather than displace oil and gas from Russia with those from developing countries, further locking them into fossil fuels. That's what climate leaders should do."
Focusing on sourcing new fossil fuels from overseas while "consistently" blocking discussions about loss and damage financing in Bonn "exposed [the E.U.'s] hypocritical stance," saidHarjeet Singh, the group's senior climate impacts advisor.
Patricia Espinosa, the outgoing executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), claimed the talks in Bonn took steps "in several technical areas" including a "global stocktake" mechanism, which will allow officials to assess international progress toward the target of limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
That view,said Aurore Mathieu, international policy coordinator for Climate Action Network France, highlights "the huge disconnect between the urgency of the climate crisis and the inability to progress on concrete outcomes to respond to it."
"Climate impacts are worsening throughout the world, hitting the most marginalized communities, and rich countries are still refusing to acknowledge their climate debt by providing finance for loss and damage," said Mathieu.
Wealthy countries, added Sara Shaw of Friends of the Earth International, are "sleepwalking us all into catastrophe," noting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that the world only has three years at most to reach peak carbon emissions before they must begin reducing them.
"The disconnect between the accelerating climate crisisoutside the conference halls and the lack of concrete action inside is palpable," saidShaw. "Developed countries refuse to even discuss long owed and vital loss and damage finance. Instead of taking action, rich countries are trying to shift responsibility for action to developing countries, while expanding their own plans to extract fossil fuels and chasing unproven technofixes."
"We know the solution is a rapid and equitable phase out of fossil fuels and a shift to people-centered renewables," she added.
The climate talks took place as Delhi, India faced a severe heatwavein which meteorologists have recorded temperatures of 107°F and above for 25 days since the summer began.
Indian delegates were among those who demanded in Bonn that wealthy countries help provide "massive funding so the government can prepare for extreme weather events by building early warning systems."
The climate emergency has also pushed Madagascar toward the planet's first climate-fueled famine and is expected by 2050 to internally displace 86 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, 40 million in South Asia, 19 million in North Africa, and 17 million in Latin America.
"One out of five people in Africa are suffering from hunger, and this is just one of countless ways the climate crisis is spurring devastation that is ripping through our communities," said Hellen Neima, Africa climate director for Corporate Accountability International. "We have had enough of rich, polluting countries silencing those trying to fight for justice."
"We have had enough of you offering crumbs with one hand while you starve the world with the other," Neima added. "We have had enough of our lives being valued as less worthy than Big Polluters' profits... Your empty words cannot fill our stomachs or protect our homelands. People in Africa are rising up and will continue to rise up, until the justice that is owed is delivered at COP27."
---
---
6 22
https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/antarctica-melting-faster-5500-years/
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/scientists-spooked-south-pole-stability/
---
---
5 22 icn
Today’s Indicator
421.68 parts per million
That’s the level of daily carbon dioxide concentration that was recently detected at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, marking the highest level of atmospheric CO2 researchers have ever observed at the lab since measurements began in 1956.
---
5 22 an
climate change is the result of a deadly calculus: human lives are worth risking and even losing over the profits of global corporations.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) recently dropped a bombshell announcement that should have garnered news headlines in the major global and U.S. media, but did not. New WMO research concludes that “[t]here is a 50:50 chance of the annual average global temperature temporarily reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level for at least one of the next five years.”
WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas explained, “The 1.5 degree Celsius figure is not some random statistic. It is rather an indicator of the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and indeed the entire planet.”
In 2015, the likelihood of reaching that threshold within five years was nearly zero. In 2017 it was 10 percent, and today it is 50 percent. As we continue to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in dizzying amounts, that percentage spikes with every passing year and will soon reach 100 percent certainty.
When average global temperatures hit the tipping point of 1.5 degrees Celsius, climate scientists predict that most of the Earth’s coral reefs will die off. At 2 degrees Celsius, all will die off. This is the reason why United Nations members coalesced around staving off an average global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius at the last global climate gathering in 2021.
The planet has already heated up by 1.1 degrees Celsius, and the consequences are dire across the globe.
India is experiencing its worst heat wave in 122 years, and neighboring Pakistan has broken a 61-year-old record for high temperatures. Dozens of people have already died as a result of the extreme heat.
In France, farmers “can see the earth cracking every day,” as a record-breaking drought has thrown the country’s agricultural industry into crisis mode.
Here in the United States, across the central and northeastern parts of the country, there is a heat wave so large and so severe that people from Texas to Maine experienced triple-digit temperatures in May.
Even the wealthy enclave of Laguna Niguel in Orange County, Southern California, is on fire, and dozens of homes have been destroyed. Although moneyed elites have far more resources to remain protected from the deadly impacts of climate change compared to the rest of us, occasionally even their homes are in the path of destruction, indicating that nowhere on Earth will be safe on a catastrophically warming planet.
Ironically, as extreme heat waves become more likely with global warming, humans will burn more fossil fuels to power the air conditioning they need to cool off and survive, thereby fueling the very phenomenon that leads to more extreme heat waves.
In such a scenario, it is a massive no-brainer for the world to quickly and without delay transition to renewable energy sources. Instead, President Joe Biden in April announced the sale of new leases for oil and gas companies to drill on public lands, reneging on his campaign platform’s climate pledges.
Biden did so apparently in order to increase domestic fuel supplies and thereby lower gas prices. He also raised the percentage of royalties that companies pay the federal government from 12.5 percent to 18.75 percent. But no amount of dollars saved by consumers or earned in royalties by the federal government can halt the laws of physics and protect the climate.
The New York Times’s Lisa Friedman explained, “The burning of fossil fuels extracted from public land and in federal waters accounts for 25 percent of the greenhouse gases generated by theUnited States, which is the planet’s second biggest polluter, behind China.” Here is one area where the federal executive branch has control, and yet financial considerations have been dictating responses rather than existential ones.
After climate activists vocally denounced the move, Biden did finally cancel the drilling leases for Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. The Interior Department cited a “lack of industry interest” and “conflicting court rulings,” rather than pressure from activists, as the reason for the cancellation. Regardless, it is a small measure of relief for a planet that is on its way to burning to a crisp.
While Biden (and other lawmakers) claim they are driven by rising inflation and the impact of high gas prices on voters’ pocket books, it turns out the public doesn’t actually want a glut of oil and gas to help lower costs.
A new poll by the National Surveys on Energy and the Environment found that there is no longer skepticism among the public that the effects of climate change are real, as 76 percent of respondents—the highest on record since the poll started—“believe there is solid evidence that temperatures on the planet have risen over the last four decades.”
The poll also notably concluded that “Americans continue to favor reducing greenhouse gas emissions as their preferred approach for staving off the worst impacts of climate change,” and that they “remain skeptical of any pivot from mitigation toward climate policy that prioritizes adaptation, use of geoengineering or subterranean carbon storage.”
So, rather than invest in mitigating climate change or adapting to it—which is what market-driven economies favor—people, sensibly, want to stop the planet from warming in the first place.
Still, there is growing concern among climate scientists that it may already be too late for a transition to renewables. In spite of energy sources like solar and wind becoming rapidly cheaper and more accessible, overall energy consumption is increasing about as fast, as per one recent study. Mark Diesendorf, the author of the study, explained, “it is simply impossible for renewable energy to overtake that retreating target. And that’s no fault of renewable energy. It’s the fault of the growth in consumption and the fact that action has been left too late.”
Because corporate profit-based considerations have constantly dictated our energy use and climate policies, we have effectively decided that major sacrifices of lives—most likely poor people of color—will be worth the pain of relying on fossil fuels for energy.
There is an analogy to be found in the COVID-19 pandemic. For months, scientists sounded the alarm over prevention, endorsing lockdowns, masks, and vaccines to stop the spread of the deadly virus, just as climate scientists issued warnings against global warming for decades. Both science-based campaigns faced uphill battles, each with its own challenges in recommending the most rational guidelines to maximize public safety in spite of financial sacrifices (closing down most businesses and restaurants and canceling major sporting and entertainment events, in the case of COVID-19; promoting solar power subsidies, switching to wind energy, and manufacturing hybrid and electric vehicles, in the case of the climate crisis). All the while, corporate interests and right-wing political opportunists successfully pushed their own agenda in the halls of power, insisting that economic growth was the most important consideration.
Today, even as COVID-19 infection rates are skyrocketing, with cases having risen by 58 percent in the last two weeks alone, mask mandates are being dropped all over the country and COVID-19-related restrictions are ending. This is not because the virus is under control—it is clearly not—but because it’s no longer financially viable for corporate America to sacrifice profits for lives. So, it will sacrifice lives for profit—just as is the case with the climate crisis.
It is worth spelling out this equation so that we know where we are headed.
As the climate changes, we begin to see where the bodies are buried—literally. Water levels in Nevada’s Lake Mead have fallen so dramatically that the remains of at least two human bodies were recently discovered. What other disturbing discoveries are in store for us?
Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute.
---
---
40% loss but we can save 70% of that?
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/ocean/
---
// kpfa pandemocene mammals move and mix
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/humanity-degraded-40-percent-earth/
A new United Nations report released Wednesday shows farming, mining, and logging has marred more than half of the planet. In a portrait of land degradation across the globe, the report describes entire forests razed for timber or pasture; sensitive grasslands and wetlands lost to sprawling cities; and over-exploited lands that have dried up into desert.
People have altered 70 percent of Earth’s lands from their natural state and degraded up to 40 percent. This threatens “many species on Earth, including our own,” the report warns. If these trends continue, experts expect growing disruptions to human health, food supplies, migration, and biodiversity loss driven by climate change, in what the authors calls a “confluence of unprecedented crises.”
“The human-environment relationship must drastically change to avoid catastrophic tipping points whereby the human power of exploitation is overwhelmed by the power of nature,” the report says, noting that half of humanity already feels the effects of degraded land.
The report, called the Global Land Outlook 2, comes from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and follows a landmark UN report earlier this month that called for “rapid and deep” emissions cuts to avoid the worst effects of global warming. The authors stressed that combating the erosion of the world’s lands actually makes a lot of economic sense: More than half of the global economy — about $44 trillion a year — relies on the natural world. At the same time, restoring lands and protecting forests could stem the rippling effects of poverty, hunger, conflict, and disease. And that, in turn, could contribute more than a third of the efforts needed to sequester carbon and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
More than anything, industrial agriculture has played an outsized role. The cultivation of cattle, palm oil, and soybeans in particular has led to depleted freshwater, widespread deforestation, and rampant extinctions, all of it underwritten by $700 billion in government subsidies each year that support unsustainable, polluting practices. In turn, this has unleashed tons and tons of greenhouse gasses each year.
In a press briefing on Wednesday, Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the U.N. organization, said that for too long, people have mined the earth, used its resources, and thoughtlessly discarded the rest. He pointed to his suit jacket: “This is fiber, this is cotton, this is land, this is water, this is carbon.” Thiaw said humanity must abandon this approach and adopt a more sustainable mindset of management.
The report warns that if nothing changes, by 2050, we can expect significant hits to crop yields, the degradation of an additional expanse of land the size of South America, and the loss of carbon locked up in poor soils and threatened peatlands. On the other hand, committing to conservation and restoring about a third of the world’s lands would not only improve yields and lock in carbon, but also prevent a third of expected extinctions.
The authors used “restoration” to refer to sustainable management of land and water. That includes practices like “rewilding” natural areas, protecting wetlands and waterways, prioritizing ecosystems in agriculture, and building green spaces in cities. They pointed to a number of success stories, such as efforts to rewild Argentina’s Iberá wetlands and preparefor dust storms in Kuwait.
“It’s not complicated,” Thiaw said. “It is actually low-tech, and it is accessible and achievable.” That is, if humanity can muster up the political will.
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/global-warming-under-2c-study/ grist
In the early 2010s, climate scientists were painting a grim picture of the future: If humans didn’t curb carbon dioxide emissions, the world was headed toward 4 degrees Celsius(7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the end of the century.
A decade later, the planet is on a different path. Scientists now estimate that current emissions trajectories make a 4-degree scenario highly implausible, even as total carbon emissions continue to rise. In fact, a new study estimates that if countries fulfill the climate pledges they made at the United Nations climate change conference known as COP26 last year, warming could be limited to just below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.
That’s a more optimistic outlook than those found in the assessments released in the months leading up to COP26. Based on the pledges that countries had made prior to the conference, those studies found that there was a less than 50 percent chance of keeping warming to below 2 degrees C, the goal set by the world’s countries in the 2016 Paris Agreement. Indeed, the commitments prior to COP26 put the world on track for a global temperature rise of 2.7 degrees.
“Our results provide a reason to be optimistic,” the researchers noted in the new study, which was published in the scientific journal Nature this week. “Warming could be limited to 2 C or just below, if the pledges on the table are implemented in full and on time.”
It’s a big “if.” The study assessed 154 pledges submitted by countries at the end of COP26. All 154 commitments included targets to cut emissions by 2030, and 76 included long-term targets stretching out to 2050 and beyond. In modeling temperature increases, the researchers assumed full implementation of countries’ pledges and took into account both short-term and long-term commitments. For countries that only pledged short-term reductions through 2030, the researchers extrapolated a similar trajectory to the end of the century. (The study also noted that a handful of countries — including Pakistan, Turkey, and Vietnam — had set unusually high emissions targets that would be reachable without any new policy initiatives and do little to reduce warming.)
There are already some indications that countries are not on target to meet their pledges. Last year, a United Nations report found that G20 countries, the world’s 20 largest economies, are likely to collectively fall short of their initial climate pledges by 1.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year — roughly 3 percent of their total annual emissions. Of the nine G20 countries that the report examined in detail, all had promised to eventually reach net-zero emissions, but none of them had reduction benchmarks that would actually put them on the path to net-zero.
In an analysis accompanying the new Nature study, climate scientists Zeke Hausfather and Frances Moore said that long-term targets should be “treated with skepticism” if they’re not backed by strong short-term commitments that drastically cut emissions as soon as possible. “It is easy to set ambitious climate targets for 30, 40 or even 50 years in the future — but it is much harder to enact policies today that shift energy systems towards a more sustainable future,” they wrote.
The new study also adds to the growing consensus that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C — the target that became a global rallying cry following the advocacy of vulnerable island nations during the 2015 U.N. climate negotiations — is basically out of reach, even under the most ambitious policy scenario modeled by the researchers.
The difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming is the difference between life and death for many of the world’s most vulnerable people — and the difference between survival and extinction for some entire countries subject to sea level rise. The prime minister of Barbados, for instance, called 2 degrees of warming a “death sentence.”
While the 1.5-degree target is increasingly unlikely, it’s not yet entirely impossible, according to the researchers.
“Strong action will leave us with peak warming around 1.5 °C, whereas weak action will see temperature continue to rise to 1.7, 1.8, 2.0 °C or higher,” they noted. “Any delay in reversing the upward trend of emissions, phasing out the unabated use of fossil fuels and developing sustainable, additional and permanent negative-emissions options will put this target out of reach.”
---
---
Dozens arrested as scientists worldwide mobilize to demand 'climate revolution'
Jake Johnson and Common Dreams April 07, 2022
More than 1,000 scientists across the globe chained themselves to the doors of oil-friendly banks, blocked bridges, and occupied the steps of government buildings on Wednesday to send an urgent message to the international community: The ecological crisis is accelerating, and only a "climate revolution" will be enough to avert catastrophe.
What organizers described as "the world's largest-ever scientist-led civil disobedience campaign" kicked off just days after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report detailing the grim state of efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C by century's end, a target set by the Paris accord.
As one of the report's authors put it during a press call earlier this week, "Unless there are immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, 1.5°C is beyond reach."
Warning that the IPCC report's language was watered down at the behest of governments unwilling to rapidly phase out fossil fuels, scientists and their allies took that message further during their direct actions on Wednesday, operating under the slogan "1.5°C is dead, climate revolution now!"
"I'm taking action because I feel desperate," said U.S. climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who along with several others locked himself to the front door of a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles. A recent report found that the financial giant is the biggest private funder of oil and gas initiatives in the world.
"It's the 11th hour in terms of Earth breakdown, and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity," Kalmus continued. "World leaders are still expanding the fossil fuel industry as fast as they can, but this is insane. The science clearly indicates that everything we hold dear is at risk, including even civilization itself and the wonderful, beautiful, cosmically precious life on this planet. I actually don't get how any scientist who understands this could possibly stay on the sidelines at this point."
The Los Angeles demonstration was accompanied by other protests across the U.S., the largest historical emitter of planet-warming carbon dioxide and home to some of the most powerful fossil fuel companies in the world.
In Washington, D.C., climate scientists chained themselves to the White House fence and were ultimately arrested as theydemanded that U.S. President Joe Biden declare a "climate emergency," a step that would unlock a range of tools needed to combat global warming.
"We have not made the changes necessary to limit warming to 1.5°C, rendering this goal effectively impossible," said Dr. Rose Abramoff, one of the scientists arrested at the White House. "We need to both understand the consequences of our inaction as well as limit fossil fuel emissions as much and as quickly as possible."
"I'm taking action to urge governments and society to stop ignoring the collective findings of decades of research," Abramoff added. "Let's make this crisis impossible to ignore."
Similar acts of civil disobedience were held across the globe as scientists took to the streets to demand that governments ramp up their transitions to renewable energy as the climate crisis intensifies extreme weather, endangers critical ecosystems, and takes lives worldwide.
In Madrid, Spain, scientists splashed red paint on the walls and steps of the Congress of Deputies to decry lawmakers' inaction in the face of the existential climate threat. More than 50 scientists were arrested during the demonstration, according to organizers.
Scientists also mobilized in Germany, blocking a bridge near the country's parliament building.
In an op-ed published in The Guardian on Wednesday, Kalmus warned that "Earth breakdown is much worse than most people realize."
"The science indicates that as fossil fuels continue to heat our planet,everything we love is at risk,"he wrote. "For me, one of the most horrific aspects of all this is the juxtaposition of present-day and near-future climate disasters with the 'business as usual' occurring all around me. It's so surreal that I often find myself reviewing the science to make sure it's really happening, a sort of scientific nightmare arm-pinch. Yes, it's really happening."
"If everyone could see what I see coming," Kalmus added, "society would switch into climate emergency mode and end fossil fuels in just a few years."
---
---
ref report
despite 'Splashy' Net-Zero Vows, Big Banks Dumping Trillions Into Fossil Fuels
"With Wall Street banks leading the charge, these financial institutions are directly complicit in undermining a climate-stable future for us all."
March 30, 2022
Flouting their public vows to put themselves and their clients on a path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, the world's 60 largest private banks have provided a total of $4.6 trillion in financing for the fossil fuel industry since the Paris Agreement entered into force in 2016.
That's according to the latest edition of Banking on Climate Chaos, an annual report that tracks the banking industry's funding of oil and gas initiatives that are threatening global hopes of reining in carbon pollution and averting climate disaster.
In 2021 alone, the report finds, the world's biggest private-sector banks financed oil and gas to the tune of $742 billion. That year, the 60 banks featured in the new analysis poured $185.5 billion into the 100 companies doing the most to expand the fossil-fuel sector worldwide through offshore drilling, fracking, coal mining, liquefied natural gas infrastructure, and more. Authored by Oil Change International, the Rainforest Action Network, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and other groups and endorsed by hundreds of organizations from around the world, the report published Wednesday spotlights the marked contrast between banks' public commitments to net-zero emissions targets and their actions, which reflect a continued stake in fossil fuel development.
The worst offenders in the banking industry, according to the report, are the U.S. financial behemoths JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America,which together accounted for 25% of all fossil fuel financing identified over the past six years.
The report highlights a number of specific projects, including the Mountain Valley Pipeline (funded by JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America), drilling in offshore Guyana (funded by JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Bank of America), and the Line 3 Pipeline (funded by TD, Scotiabank, and the Bank of Montreal), efforts that have drawn fierce resistance from Indigenous communities.
"Indigenous peoples have long been leading the fight for the sacredness of the land, water, and Earth," Mea Johnson, divestment campaign coordinator with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said in a statement Wednesday. "Mother Earth has always given us what we need to thrive. We will not back down until our natural balance is restored and anyone helping fund the extractive destruction of our communities will be held accountable."
Alison Kirsch, research and policy manager at the Rainforest Action Network, added that "any further expansion of fossil fuels risks locking humanity into generations of climate catastrophe, yet the top fossil clients of the world's largest banks are still being showered with tens of billions of dollars even as they actively expand drilling, mining, fracking, and other fossil fuel development unabated."
"With Wall Street banks leading the charge," Kirsch added, "these financial institutions are directly complicit in undermining a climate-stable future for us all and must immediately end their support of any further fossil fuel infrastructure expansion."
The banks' financing decisions fly in the face of their own pledges to bring their policies into line with critical climate goals, such as achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a benchmark that 44 of the 60 banks profiled in the new report have backed.
"But global banks have massively supported the companies doing the most to open new oil and gas fields," notes the new report. "Banks with net-zero commitments last year... financed the top 20 upstream oil and gas expansion companies, potentially helping to lock the planet into decades of climate-warming emissions." According to the International Energy Agency, reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 would mean ensuring "no new oil and gas fields."
Adele Shraiman, a representative for theSierra Club's Fossil-Free Finance campaign, said Wednesday that the analysis "makes it clear that banks must clean up their act and stop funding the expansion of dirty fossil fuel projects like fracked gas exports, tar sands pipelines, and offshore drilling in order to align with what the science demands and what their own commitments require."
"Despite their splashy climate pledges, big banks have largely continued with business-as-usual and actually increased their overall fossil fuel financing since the Paris Agreement," said Shraiman. "As we look ahead to shareholder season, we'll be keeping up the pressure on the banks and their investors to take these critical reforms seriously and stop bankrolling the fossil fuel industry's reckless expansion plans."
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/humanity-overshoot-climate-change-goals/
no lnx
Humanity is going to 'overshoot' its climate change goals. Then what?
Emily Pontecorvo and Grist.org March 30, 2022
In February, on the eve of the release of a major new report on the effects of climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, several of its authors met with reporters virtually to present their findings. Ecologist Camille Parmesan, a professor at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, was the first to speak.
Scientists are documenting changes that are “much more widespread” and “much more negative,” she said, than anticipated for the 1.09 degrees Celsius of global warming that has occurred to date. “This has opened up a whole new realm of understanding of what the impacts of overshoot might entail.”
It was a critical message that was easy to miss. “Overshoot” is jargon that has not yet made the jump from scientific journals into the public vernacular. It didn’t make it into many headlines.
But just days earlier, the topic generated extensive debate when Parmesan and her coauthors went over their findings with government representatives from around the world. And next week, after the IPCC releases another big report on climate solutions, you may just start hearing about it more and more.
“Remember this word: overshoot,” Janos Pasztor, the executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative and the former United Nations assistant secretary-general on climate change, wrote in an op-ed published in January. “It will gain increasing importance as the herculean difficulty of reducing emissions to net zero and removing vast stores of carbon from the atmosphere become clearer.”
The topic of overshoot has actually been lingering beneath the surface of public discussion about climate change for years, often implied but rarely mentioned directly. In the broadest sense, overshoot is a future where the world does not cut carbon quickly enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — a limit often described as a threshold of dangerous climate change — but then is able to bring the temperature back down later on. A sort of climate boomerang.
Here’s how: After blowing past 1.5 degrees, nations eventually achieve net-zero emissions. This requires not only reducing emissions, but also canceling out any remaining emissions with actions to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, commonly called carbon removal. At that point, the temperature may have only risen to 1.6 degrees C, or it could have shot past 2 degrees, or 3, or 4 — depending on how long it takes to get to net-zero.
[Direct air capture plant in IcelandA carbon removal facility in Iceland that came online in 2021. It captures carbon dioxide directly from the air and pumps it underground. Climeworks]
The global temperature will begin to stabilize, but it will not decline. So next, nations will aim to scale up carbon removal even further. This will lower the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and bring the temperature on earth back down below 2 degrees C, if not to 1.5, or even lower, by the end of this century.
This possibility of overshoot was first conceived by scientific models that map out potential pathways for climate policy. And in the realm of a computer model, overshoot is a success story. We may fail to meet global climate targets in the next few decades, but hey, we can always turn things around and achieve them by 2100. But Parmesan and other scientists are warning that overshoot should not be considered lightly. While the rise in temperature is theoretically reversible, many of the consequences of a temporarily hotter planet will not be.
In a sense, we are on the pathway to overshoot right now. Warming is already dangerously close to 1.5 degrees, emissions are not going down, and existing policies put the world on track to warm 3 degrees by the end of the century. Policymakers are also beginning to seriously invest in carbon removal research and development, however, these solutions are still nowhere near being able to turn temperature rise around.
When I reached out to Parmesan to ask about her statement in the press conference, she was eager to talk about overshoot. “It’s so important, and really being downplayed by policymakers,” she wrote. “I think there’s very much an increased awareness of the need for action,” she told me when we got on the phone. “But then they fool themselves into thinking oh, but if we go over for a few decades, it’ll be okay.”
The effects of overshoot could undermine climate solutions
The February report was part of the sixth major assessment of climate science by the IPCC, a body of hundreds of scientists convened by the U.N. The assessment is published in three volumes that look at the physical science of climate change, the effects of a warming planet on ecosystems and people and how to adapt to them, and the options for cutting emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere. That third volume will be released next week.
Parmesan said the IPCC’s recent impacts report shed light on two key risks of a future period of overshoot that she felt people were not paying enough attention to. The first is that some impacts will be irreversible, like the loss of coral reefs and species extinctions. “Global warming coming back down is not going to bring you that species back,” she said.
Though Parmesan did note that for many threatened species, “the shorter the overshoot, the lower the overshoot, the less likely they are to actually go extinct.”
Sea-level rise is also irreversible — the heat collecting in ice sheets and the ocean will continue to drive sea-level rise long after the temperature is stabilized or even lowered. Not to mention the possibility of losing entire nations and cultures to the sea, or the mass loss of human life from a world with more dangerous heat waves and storms.
But the second risk throws the whole possibility of eventually reversing global warming into question. This is the part that stirred up confusion and controversy prior to the IPCC report’s release, when scientists were going over their findings with government delegates.
It has to do with climate feedbacks — changes to natural systems caused by climate change that then exacerbate climate change. The report documents countless examples that scientists are already observing. Insect outbreaks and wildfires are killing trees, causing huge releases of greenhouse gases from forests. Heat and drought are causing some parts of the Amazon rainforest to release more carbon than they suck up — even in intact, old-growth areas that have not been disturbed by agriculture or development. Arctic permafrost — frozen, carbon-rich soil — is thawing and beginning to release the carbon stored within. Scientists estimate that there is five times as much carbon stored in permafrost than has ever been emitted by humans.
Scientists say it is still possible to stop or even reverse these feedbacks with aggressive cuts to fossil fuel emissions and by actively restoring ecosystems. Walt Oeschel, a biologist atSan Diego State University who first discovered that Arctic permafrost was becoming a net source of emissions in the 1980s, said that in northern Alaska, the permafrost is more than 1,000 feet thick, and for the most part, it’s just the surface layer that’s melting and releasing carbon. “But it’s going to get harder and harder to ameliorate or to reverse the longer we wait,” he said.
This is the crux of Parmesan’s second warning. Once some of these processes get chugging along, they may reach a point where it becomes impossible to stop them. “Humans can control human actions, but humans cannot control the biosphere’s responses to climate change,” she said. “And we’re witnessing responses that are going to make it harder and harder and harder for humans to get global warming down.”
If permafrost and rainforests begin pumping carbon into the atmosphere, the possibility of achieving net-zero, or even net-negative emissions would become a much bigger uphill battle. Even if we develop significant carbon removal capacity, these feedback emissions could make trying to remove carbon from the atmosphere feel like trying to shovel the walkway in the middle of a blizzard.
Scientists cannot pinpoint a specific temperature, or how long of an overshoot period may lead to unstoppable emissions from these systems. “But we can tell you these processes have already started,” said Parmesan. “And the longer they go on, the higher the warming, the longer the warming, the harder it’s going to be to reverse.”
Wolfgang Cramer, a co-author on the IPCC impacts report, said that when they explained this to government delegates, the discussion grew thorny. Some felt that talking about this would discredit the idea that we can aggressively cut carbon later in the century and reverse global warming. “It was seen as a way to be policy prescriptive,” Cramer said. “As if we wanted to tell them that if you don’t get it now then there’s no point in trying later.”
But to him that missed the point. “We’re just telling you that you may find it harder to come back later in the century than you think,” he said. “We were just making a case against delaying action.”
From models to policy
A future with overshoot is not some niche idea. Parmesan said the impression she gets from global climate talks like COP26 is that this is what some policymakers are planning for. “They have been talking about it as though okay, this isn’t great, but, you know, this is probably what’s going to happen,” she told Grist.
It’s unclear whether that was the case when world leaders signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, promising to limit warming to “well below 2 degrees” and “pursue efforts” to stay below 1.5 degrees. David Morrow, the director of research for the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University, said it struck him at the time that 1.5 was an aspirational target, something that people took less seriously then than they do now.
John Kerry signing the Paris Agreement in 2016 while holding his granddaughterThen-Secretary of State John Kerry holds his two-year-old granddaughter while signing the Paris Agreement in 2016.]
“I think it was what climate ethicist Steve Gardner calls ‘bearing witness’ to our collective failure in climate policy,” he said. “It was small island states pointing out, 2 degrees is a death sentence for us. We are not willing to accept that and so we want you to acknowledge this 1.5 degree target.”
Keywan Riahi, director of the energy program at the Austrian research institute IIASA and a prominent climate modeler, speculated that 1.5 degrees would not have been on the table in Paris if it wasn’t for climate models that showed pathways to bring temperatures back down after a peak.
Overshoot scenarios dominate the climate modeling literature. In a 2018 IPCC report, researchers analyzed more than 200 modeled climate action pathways that would keep warming under 2 degrees by the end of the century. Only nine of them avoided going beyond 1.5 degrees. For those nine, it wasn’t even a sure bet — the likelihood of staying below that threshold throughout the 21st century was only 50 to 66 percent.
There are a few reasons for this. One is time. Morrow said modelers build in an assumption that climate action will ramp up gradually, rather than accelerate dramatically in the near term and then level out. We’re already dangerously close to 1.5 degrees, so that gradual process doesn’t do us any favors. And because the goal of these models is to achieve a specific temperature far away in 2100, they can make up for the slow start by ratcheting up climate policies, as well as negative emissions, later in the century.
Riahi said another reason was cost. The models are designed to find the most cost-effective way to achieve temperature targets. “The quicker we reduce emissions, the higher the cost will be,” Riahi explained, “because we have a lot of long-lived fossil-based infrastructure which would need to be prematurely phased out if we really try to accelerate and achieve zero emissions early.”
But now, modelers are beginning to try a new approach where instead of studying how to achieve end-of-the-century outcomes, they are looking at how to cap global warming at a specific maximum level. Last year, Riahi published a paper in Nature exploring the costs and feasibility of achieving temperature targets with no or limited overshoot. Contrary to the argument that gradual climate action is more cost effective, he found that the upfront investments needed to limit overshoot would bring long-term economic gains.
But these models, which are underpinned by climate science, still do not take into account the climate feedbacks that Parmesan and her co-authors are warning about. She said there’s still not enough data to plug those observations in.
That’s important to keep in mind next week, when the IPCC releases its next report on the topic of climate change mitigation. The report will evaluate our options for achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, with and without overshoot. It will also wrestle with the risks of presuming that we will be able to remove significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and evaluate the promise of various options for doing so.
Scientists say sea level rise is one of the irreversible impacts of an overshoot scenario. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Parmesan felt that the government delegates started out thinking she and her co-authors were exaggerating, but after two weeks of discussion, they started to get it. “They actually started realizing, Oh, we’ve seriously underestimated the risk of overshoot. And it’s like, yes, you have. That’s the whole point.”
It might not seem like a very challenging idea that climate change will bring irreversible impacts. Of course there are irreparable consequences of a future with more drought, heat, floods, and fires.
Cramer laughed when I put this to him. “You’re right,” he said. “It is actually not very complicated. You’re probably right that most people will understand it as soon as you talk to them about it. I think where there’s a sense in talking about it is to make people aware that the current engagement for reducing emissions is insufficient. We actually need to get emissions down now. Every 10th of a degree counts.”
==