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Climate Change - NASA
- https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ | Vital Signs
Climate Change - MIT
- https://climateprimer.mit.edu/ | Climate Science, a Primer
Climate Change - Metrics
- https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/climate-change-data-green/ | Bloomberg Green Climate Data-Dashboard Intel
Creating, curating, and developing the repository of climate data that underlies the U.S. National Climate Assessments: A Critical Task
We have to identify the problem, then act in many ways to solve the problem. Global warming is the threat of our times."
Mauna Loa, Hawaii - NOAA
2021
May 2021
Global heating pace risks ‘unstoppable’ sea level rise as Antarctic ice sheet melts
World faces ‘abrupt jump’ in pace of ice loss around 2060 unless emissions reduced to meet Paris agreement goals, (another) study warns
Findings
- The current pace of global heating risks unleashing “rapid and unstoppable” sea level rise from the melting of Antarctica’s vast ice sheet
- Unless planet-heating emissions are swiftly reduced to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, the world faces a situation where there is an “abrupt jump” in the pace of Antarctic ice loss around 2060
“Once you put enough heat into the climate system, you are going to lose those ice shelves, and once that is set in motion you can’t reverse it. The oceans would have to cool back down before the ice sheet could heal, which would take a very long time. On a societal timescale it would essentially be a permanent change... It’s really the next few decades that will determine the sea level rise from Antarctica. These ice shelves won’t be able to just grow back.” -- Robert DeConto, University of Massachusetts
Antarctic ‘doomsday glacier’ may be melting faster than was thought
The fate of Thwaites – nicknamed the doomsday glacier – and the massive west Antarctic ice sheet it supports are the biggest unknown factors in future global sea level rise.
Over the past few years, teams of scientists have been crisscrossing the remote and inaccessible region on Antarctica’s western edge to try to understand how fast the ice is melting and what the consequences for the rest of the world might be.
“What happens in west Antarctica is of great societal importance,” said Dr Robert Larter, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey and principal investigator with the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, the most ambitious research project ever carried out in Antarctica. “This is the biggest uncertainty in future sea level rise.”
🌎
April 2021
Solar Energy Price Revolution by Bill McKibben
April 29, 2021 / excerpted from The New Yorker
Earth Week has come and gone, leaving behind an ankle-deep and green-tinted drift of reports, press releases, and earnest promises from C.E.O.s and premiers alike that they are planning to become part of the solution. There were contingent signs of real possibility—if some of the heads of state whom John Kerry called on to make Zoom speeches appeared a little strained, at least they appeared. (Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister of Australia, the most carbon-emitting developed nation per capita, struggled to make his technology work.) But, if you want real hope, the best place to look may be a little noted report from the London-based think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative.
Titled “The Sky’s the Limit,” it begins by declaring that “solar and wind potential is far higher than that of fossil fuels and can meet global energy demand many times over.” Taken by itself, that’s not a very bold claim: scientists have long noted that the sun directs more energy to the Earth in an hour than humans use in a year. But, until very recently, it was too expensive to capture that power. That’s what has shifted—and so quickly and so dramatically that most of the world’s politicians are now living on a different planet than the one we actually inhabit. On the actual Earth, circa 2021, the report reads, “with current technology and in a subset of available locations we can capture at least 6,700 PWh p.a. [petawatt-hours per year] from solar and wind, which is more than 100 times global energy demand.” And this will not require covering the globe with solar arrays: “The land required for solar panels alone to provide all global energy is 450,000 km2, 0.3% of the global land area of 149 million km2. That is less than the land required for fossil fuels today, which in the US alone is 126,000 km2, 1.3% of the country.” These are the kinds of numbers that reshape your understanding of the future.
We haven’t yet fully grasped this potential because it’s happened so fast. In 2015, zero per cent of solar’s technical potential was economically viable—the small number of solar panels that existed at that time had to be heavily subsidized. But prices for solar energy have collapsed so fast over the past three years that sixty per cent of that potential is already economically viable. And, because costs continue to slide with every quarter, solar energy will be cheaper than fossil fuels almost everywhere on the planet by the decade’s end. (It’s a delicious historical irony that this evolution took place, entirely by coincidence, during the Administration of Donald Trump, even as he ranted about how solar wasn’t “strong enough” and was “very, very expensive.”) The Carbon Tracker report, co-written by Kingsmill Bond, is full of fascinating points, such as how renewable energy is the biggest gift of all for some of the poorest nations, including in Africa, where solar potential outweighs current energy use by a factor of more than a thousand. Only a few countries—Singapore, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and a handful of European countries—are “stretched” in their ability to rely on renewables, because they both use a lot of energy and have little unoccupied land. In these terms, Germany is in the third-worst position, and the fact that it is nonetheless one of the world’s leaders in renewable energy should be a powerful signal: “If the Germans can find solutions, then so can everyone else.”
The numbers in the report are overwhelming—even if the analysts are too optimistic by half, we’ll still be swimming in cheap solar energy. “We have established that technical and economic barriers have been crossed by falling costs. It follows that the main remaining barrier to change is the ability of incumbents to manipulate political forces to stop change,” the report reads. Indeed. And the problem is that we need that change to happen right now, because the curves of damage from the climate crisis are as steep as the curves of falling solar prices. Given three or four decades, economics will clearly take care of the problem—the low price of solar power will keep pushing us to replace liquid fuels with electricity generated from the sun, and, eventually, no one will have a gas boiler in the basement or an internal-combustion engine in the car. But, if the transition takes three or four decades, no one will have an ice cap in the Arctic, either, and everyone who lives near a coast will be figuring out where on earth to go.
Change is hard. The job of politicians is to make it easier for those affected, so that what must happen can happen—and within the time we’ve been allotted by physics. But that hard job is infinitely easier now that renewable energy is suddenly so cheap. The falling price puts the wind at our backs, as it were. It’s the greatest gift we could have been given as a civilization, and we dare not waste it.
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- Solar and wind potential is far higher than that of fossil fuels and can meet global energy demand many times over, unlocking huge benefits for society.
- With current technology and in a subset of available locations we can capture at least 6,700 PWh p.a. from solar and wind, which is more than 100 times global energy demand.
- The collapse in renewable costs in the last three years means that half of this solar and wind technical potential now has economic potential, and by the end of the decade it will be over 90%.
- The land required for solar panels alone to provide all global energy is 450,000 km2, 0.3% of the global land area of 149 million km2 – less than the current land footprint of fossil fuel infrastructure. This differs by country (see interactive global map at 'Sky's the Limit')
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Earth Day Summit
Coming This Week on Earth Day, April 22
Timelapse from Google Earth
Welcome to Timelapse!
Rebecca Moore, Director, Google Earth, Earth Engine & Outreach:
To explore Timelapse in Google Earth, go to g.co/Timelapse — choose any place on the planet where you want to see time in motion.
- Launch Date: April 15, 2021
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The Carbon Mapper Partnership
Welcome to the Carbon Mapper Program
- NASA’s Earth sciences mission --- focused on supporting a strong, data-driven response to the climate crisis.
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U.S. intelligence experts warn of unchecked climate change
SECURITY THREAT ASSESSMENT OF GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE (PDF)
National security and intelligence experts warn that climate change could become a “catastrophic” threat to security and recommended quick action to be taken to mitigate risks
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Mauna Loa Observatory CO2
April 2021 - New record high
"For the first time in recorded history, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, or CO2, was measured at more than 420 parts per million at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the Big Island of Hawaii."
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March 2021
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"Banking on Climate Chaos" (PDF)"
Introduction: This report analyzes fossil fuel financing from the world’s 60 largest commercial and investment banks — aggregating their leading roles in lending and underwriting of debt and equity issuances — and finds that these banks poured a total of $3.8 trillion into fossil fuels from 2016–2020.
- 1. Fossil fuel financing dropped 9% last year, parallel to the global drop in fossil fuel demand and production due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- 2. And yet 2020 levels remained higher than in 2016, the year immediately following the adoption of the Paris Agreement.
60 largest banks in the world invested $3.8 trillion in fossil fuels: Report
"Despite the economic recession induced by the coronavirus pandemic, more money went into the industry in 2020 than in 2016"
The world’s 60 biggest banks have financed the fossil fuel industry to the tune of nearly $4 trillion in the five years since the Paris climate agreement, according to a report released March 24th by a coalition of environmental organizations.
The report was authored by Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Oil Change International, Reclaim Finance, and Sierra Club, and is endorsed by over 300 organizations from 50 countries around the world.
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Endless Summer? Climate Crisis Could Lengthen Hottest Temperatures by Six Months
Coming episodes of high heat and high humidity — known as extreme wet-bulb (TW) temperature
TW temps that go beyond the limits of human survival
Above a wet-bulb temperature of 35 Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, the body cannot cool down, as sweat on the skin can no longer evaporate. Prolonged exposure to such conditions can be fatal, even for healthy people...
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Atlantic currents seem to have started fading last century
- Another predicted impact of climate change may be here
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—one of Earth’s major ocean circulation systems—redistributes heat on our planet and has a major impact on climate. Here, we compare a variety of published proxy records to reconstruct the evolution of the AMOC since about ad 400. A fairly consistent picture of the AMOC emerges: after a long and relatively stable period, there was an initial weakening starting in the nineteenth century, followed by a second, more rapid, decline in the mid-twentieth century, leading to the weakest state of the AMOC occurring in recent decades.
February 2021
From the Texas Monthly reporting on the state's energy crisis brought on by a surge of 'freezing Arctic weather'
Prepare now Texas, 'winterize' your power generation system -- the warming climate and melting Arctic are Texas problems... and shifts in the 'polar vortex' are sending you, the oil/gas/fossil fuel capitol of the US, a signal
Resilience and planning are needed, not a blame game targeting interstate cooperation and renewable energy sources as the enemy
- (Texas does) not have the legal authority to require power companies to winterize. That’s left up to the Texas Legislature and other state agencies. (In the days following the blackouts, Governor Greg Abbott called on the Legislature to consider approving a statewide winterization mandate.)
- While some legislators have pointed their fingers at ERCOT or have used the blackouts to blame wind and renewable energy, much of the responsibility actually lies with the lawmakers themselves, according to a prominent energy expert. “This is not a pin the tail on the donkey issue. This is a systematic failure,” he said. “It’s an abject failure of policy and planning, not of technology.”
- Carey King, the assistant director of the University of Texas’s Energy Institute, says Texas doesn’t need to change its market rules to ensure (that the Texas electrical) ERCOT grid is more reliable. “We need to make a change in policy to fix the situation,” King says. “The simplest way is probably to have a separate policy that mandates winterization and that has an independent verification process.” Yet even if lawmakers approve a winterization mandate this Legislative session, it will be cold comfort to the millions of Texans who went without power and heat for extended periods this week.
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Top of the News @GreenPolicy360
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Bill Gates: How the world can avoid a climate disaster
"Without innovation, we will not solve climate change. We won't even come close."
Watch on 60 Minutes
Via the Washington Post:
So what does the future look like? What can we expect on the climate?
Bill Gates: I still am optimistic. I think that if people see how broad the work has to be and how critical innovation is across all these many different areas, and apply the resources, I think we can get to zero by 2050. People who think it’s easy are almost as much of a problem as people who think it doesn’t matter. You know, first I have to convince people it’s hard, and then I have to say, “And, by the way, innovation, properly accelerated, is more magical than you think.” Particularly if we take five approaches for every problem and therefore, even if only one of the five works, we’ll be okay.
GreenPolicy360:
The time is now for a redefinition of security threats. Our GreenPolicy360 / Strategic Demands point of view is coming into a wider acceptance by more 'planet citizens', especially young people across the globe, in all nations.... a new 21st century vision is taking place right in front of us.
From the new U.S. Biden administration and throughout the governing leadership, with executive orders and follow-on legislative actions, a strong push to redefine real security is rolling out.
Here, Michael E. Mann begins to capture the moment in a USA Today opinion:
Now, Biden is gathering his council to assess the current and future dangers in this fight, including all 17 intelligence agencies; a general on the international front, John Kerry, who will also have a seat on the National Security Council and will direct our diplomatic efforts abroad; and another general on the domestic front, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy, who will coordinate climate action in the homeland.
🌎 January
G.M. Announcement Shakes Up U.S. Automakers’ Transition to Electric Cars
Every carmaker is trying to figure out how to make the leap before governments force it and Tesla and other start-ups lure away drivers
A new president took office this month determined to fight climate change. Wall Street investors think Tesla is worth more than General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen and Ford put together. And China, the world’s biggest car market, recently ordered that most new cars be powered by electricity in just 15 years.
Those large forces help explain the decision by G.M.’s chief executive, Mary T. Barra, that the company will aim to sell only zero-emission cars and trucks by 2035.
Her announcement, just a day after President Biden signed an executive order on climate change, blindsided rivals who usually seek to present a united message on emissions and other policy issues. But it was also years in the making. G.M. has had a love-hate relationship with electric cars going back decades, but under Ms. Barra, who took over in 2014, it has inched its way toward a full embrace of the technology...
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General Motors to Exclusively Offer Electric Vehicles by 2035
Automotive executives and analysts are bullish that EVs, led by stricter regulations to reduce carbon emissions, are the future for the automotive industry.
Dane Parker, GM chief sustainability officer, reiterated that the company plans to be profitable in its transition from vehicles with traditional internal combustion engines to EVs.
"We feel this is going to be the successful business model of the future," he said during a media briefing Thursday. "We know there are hurdles, we know there are technology challenges, but we're confident that with the resources we have and the expertise we have that we'll overcome those challenges and this will be a business model that we will be able to thrive in the future."
GM has already announced plans to shift three of its U.S. plants to produce electric vehicles. Parker said the company is "excited" about the transition at its other plants.
"We feel like this transition is one that will protect all of our futures and will help us create a future that will benefit not only the planet, but the people," he said.
GM plans to release 30 new EVs globally by 2025 under a $27 billion investment in electric and autonomous vehicles during that time frame. It also previously announced expectations for a majority, if not all, of its luxury Cadillac cars and SUVs sold globally to be EVs by 2030.
"This is the time for this technology; this is the time for this change," Parker said, citing reduction in pricing and advancements in technologies, among other factors. "The convergence of those things has made this an inflection point that we want to seize."
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President Biden rolls out an environmental protection and climate agenda
President Biden vows monumental action on climate change
Biden signing executive orders
Biden unveils climate change plan - CNN (Video)
Biden's energy policies get slammed in Louisiana
Presidential Executive Order Could Mean Big Changes To Colorado's Oil & Gas Industry (Video)
CBS This Morning - Biden administration focused on fighting against climate change (Video)
Environmental Justice and Climate
We need to do more / LA Times Editorial
- https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-01-27/biden-climate-congress-trump-carbon-motor-vehicles
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-IKIEdyZow (LA Times - Biden: 'Can't wait any longer' on climate crisis)
Fox News - Reps. Scalise, Herrell: Biden's reckless, job-killing energy executive orders must be reversed
Environmental Action Agenda - Out of the Starting Gate and Accelerating
Via Washington Post / Energy 202:
What's on the new administration's agenda today:
Oil and gas leasing: Perhaps biggest move is Biden's expected decision to halt new oil and gas leasing on federal lands. The drafted moratorium would not affect activity around existing leases, but would pause auctions for the right to drill on new parcels throughout much of the west as well as in the Gulf of Mexico. The order will also not restrict energy development on tribal lands.
Addressing environmental justice: The Biden administration will establish at least three different bodies meant to address the unequal impact of dirty air and water on poor and minority communities — an office of health and climate equity at the Health and Human Services Department, an environmental justice office at the Justice Department and a third interagency council at the White House. The White House will also establish another cross-government group to help communities transition away from fossil fuels.
Protecting nature: Biden also is planning to instruct the government to set aside nearly a third of the nation’s land and water by the end of the decade for conservation. Biden pledged during the campaign to pursue that “30 by 30" goal as means of blunting the buildup of greenhouse gases by sequestering carbon and preserving habitat for threatened plants and animals.
Tackling super pollutants: Biden will tell the State Department to send to the Senate the Kigali Amendment, an international agreement to slash the use of a group of human-made compounds that both contribute to climate change and deplete the ozone layer. The Trump administration never submitted the treaty to Congress despite the urging of both business groups and several congressional Republicans.
Kick-starting an “all-of-government” approach: Biden direct every agency to factor climate change into the decisions they make, including purchasing electric vehicles, getting power from carbon-free sources and bolstering the buildings and other federal facilities to the impacts of rising temperatures.
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New Definitions of National Security
Moving the Agenda, 'High Gear', Top Speed
The security of every nation and every person and community on Earth is at stake as we move into the 3rd decade of the 21st Century. Two immense existential threats -- climate change and nuclear weapons -- face humanity. We, at GreenPolicy360 and our associate Strategic Demands have continued our focused effort to bring understanding and action to confront these threats. Take a look:
Now we see the former U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry with Joe Biden's support, moving "high speed".
Systemic climate action and cooperation between nations are critical to solving the #ClimateCrisis and #NuclearWeaponsThreat.
GreenPolicy360 supports the change in U.S. policy from Trump administration climate denial and a new nuclear arms race to Biden administration climate action and nuclear arms control.
- Via the Associated Press / January 27, 2021
- Kerry’s diplomatic efforts match the fast pace of domestic climate directives by the week-old Biden administration, which created the job Kerry now holds. Those directives include a Biden order expected Wednesday spelling out how U.S. intelligence, defense and homeland security agencies should address the security threats posed by worsening droughts, floods and other natural disasters under global warming.
- At 77, Kerry is working to make a success out of the global climate accord that he helped negotiate in Paris as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state — and that he then saw rejected by President Donald Trump, who also spurned all other Obama-era legacy efforts to wean the U.S. and global economies off climate-damaging fossil fuels.
- Success for Kerry is hardly assured. At home, he faces pushback from the oil and gas industry and hears concerns that jobs will be lost. Internationally, there’s uncertainty about whether Biden’s climate commitments can survive the United States’ intensely divided politics, let alone the next presidential transition.
- Environmentalists are pushing him to be aggressive — even demonstrating outside his house on his first full day on the job.
- Underscoring the urgency, Kerry -- working from his home on Boston’s patrician Beacon Hill during the COVID-19 pandemic -- sat before a computer screen and started talking before sunup last Thursday, his first full day in his new job, to a global business forum in Europe...
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Greta responds to Ted
Turning around and reversing the Trump climate, energy & environmental rollbacks
The U.S. 'accepts' the Paris International Climate Agreement (again)
Biden, in a Burst of Climate Orders, Rejoins the Paris Agreement
The president also canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and ordered federal agencies to begin the process of reinstating environmental regulations reversed under the Trump administration.
Via the New York Times
Inauguration Day / January 20, 2021
WASHINGTON — President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday recommitted the United States to the Paris climate agreement, the international accord designed to avert catastrophic global warming, and ordered federal agencies to start reviewing and reinstating more than 100 environmental regulations that were weakened or rolled back by former President Donald J. Trump.
The moves represent a first step in healing one of the deepest rifts between the United States and the rest of the world after Mr. Trump defiantly rejected the Paris pact and seemed to relish his administration’s push to weaken or undo major domestic climate policies...
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The president needs to hit the ground running on climate
By Michael E. Mann, January 12, 2021
The sobering reality is that even if every country meets their currently stated commitments under the Paris Agreement (and many, including the United States and the European Union, are falling at least a bit short at this point), that gets us less than halfway to where we need to be—i.e., on a path to limiting average global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit. We need to keep warming below that level if we want to avoid some of the worst—and in some cases irreversible—impacts. Better yet, we should aim for the more stringent 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) that many are now calling for. While the Paris Agreement is a good starting point, we need to go well beyond existing Paris commitments now to achieve the reductions that are necessary: more than 7.5 percent per year globally for the next decade.
In the last four years, under Donald Trump, the power of the federal government to protect the public has been handed over to the very polluters these agencies were built to regulate. Scientific expertise has been trampled by political (in)correctness over things as silly as “Sharpiegate” and as serious as COVID-19. With hundreds of thousands dead from coronavirus, we’ve sadly seen just how deadly it can be when political leaders hide or distort the evidence for political and ideological reasons...
One mitigating factor is that over the last four years, many people and organizations found ways to work around a president who refused to lead, with state and other local governments stepping up to fill the void. Add all the action up, across all the ambitious states, cities, businesses, and others, and we can deliver up to a 37 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels by 2030. Already, a third of all Americans live in a jurisdiction that’s made a commitment to 100 percent clean energy.
And the good news is that there is much that President-Elect Biden can do almost immediately once in office. As former President Obama demonstrated, the president can use diplomacy to negotiate powerful international agreements such as the Paris Agreement, issue executive actions to insure higher vehicle fuel efficiency standards, tighten regulations on polluters, and block massive additional fossil fuel infrastructure—such as the Keystone XL pipeline).
Biden has a clear mandate generally (he is only the fourth challenger in 100 years to defeat an incumbent president seeking a second elected term) and on climate change specifically (which he made central to his campaign)...
Biden has put forward a bold climate plan with ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions and support for both regulatory and market-driven policy measures, as have Senate and House Democrats. There is real opportunity for meaningful climate legislation, but it will require some degree of compromise...
Given an even modestly favorable shift in political winds, one could envision [a bold climate bill] passing the House and moving on to the Senate with a half-dozen or more moderate conservatives crossing the aisle, joining with Senate Democrats to pass the bill within the next year or two…
The president, in short, will have to win over potential allies in the middle, yet remain unafraid to play hardball with the Congress people who are captured by the fossil fuel industry.
That, really, is what we need: A president who can unite us and who can lead us forward, together to tackle the great challenges we face. In the first 100 days he can help solve a crisis that would otherwise afflict us for the next 10,000 years.
More by Michael Mann
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A Late Burst of Climate Denial Extends the Era of Trump Disinformation
The climate crisis continued unabated in 2020, with the joint highest global temperatures on record, alarming heat and record wildfires in the Arctic, and a record 29 tropical storms in the Atlantic.
Top of the News @GreenPolicy360
2020
December
N.Y. Times Editorial / Joe Biden Takes Climate Change Seriously
○
The Weekly Planet
A new weekly newsletter from The Atlantic on the state of the Climate Crisis
The Big Stories on Climate from 2020
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Climate Crisis --- #TimeforAction: Global Nations Meet Up with Climate Action Plans
December 12, 2020... 76 heads of state present new expanded climate commitments at virtual UN summit
Hot, Hotter, the Big Picture: 2020 will go down as one of the three warmest years on record
The World Meteorological Organization reports this year is set to end about 2.2°F warmer than the last half of the 1800s. That's a half degree away from the limit set by the Paris climate accord, which could be exceeded by 2024, the WMO said today.
Among the dozens of extremes of 2020, from the WMO report:
Record 30 Atlantic named tropical storms and hurricanes.
Death Valley had the hottest temperature on Earth in the last 80 years.
Record wildfires in the western U.S. and record heat in Australia.
Record wildfires and a prolonged heat wave in the Arctic.
Record low Arctic sea ice was reported for April and August, and the yearly minimum, in September, was the second lowest on record.
Between the lines: It's projected to get worse before it gets better, judging by current fossil fuel production projections.
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Big Money & the Climate Crisis
Beyond 'urging' governments to act, Capital must act to solve the climate crisis
'Business-as-usual' will not 'get the job done', new vision, new approaches are demanded
Together we need 'speed of solutions' necessary to address the scope of the climate crisis
(2020)
Via Politico / U.S. Federal Reserve formally calls out climate change as stability risk
(2019)
The Global Investor Statement to Governments on Climate Change urges action that includes phasing out thermal coal power, ending subsidies for fossil fuels, and updating and strengthening nationally-determined contributions (NDCs) to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
- More than 630 investors who collectively manage over $37 trillion in assets are calling on governments across the world to step up action to address climate change and achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.
(2018)
Via Reuters / Investors managing $32 trillion in assets call for action on climate change
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- I Am Greta, the Documentary
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November 23, 2020
John Kerry Selected to Newly Created U.S. Climate Leadership Position
First-ever International Climate 'Envoy' to Join National Security Council with Presidential Cabinet-level Status
GreenPolicy360 & Strategic Demands applaud this historic, critically important shift in the U.S. policy and vision
For years GreenPolicy360 and StratDem have advocated Climate Policy become a U.S. National/Global Security priority
New Definitions of National & Global Security
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Biden prioritizes climate crisis, names John Kerry special envoy
(CNN) / 8:00 PM EST, November 23, 2020
Washington -- President-elect Joe Biden on Monday appointed John Kerry as his special presidential envoy for climate, underscoring his commitment to tackling the global crisis and offering a symbolic rebuke to President Donald Trump's lack of leadership on the issue.
Kerry, who was President Barack Obama's secretary of state, will be a Cabinet-level official in Biden's administration and will sit on the National Security Council.
"This marks the first time that the NSC will include an official dedicated to climate change, reflecting the president-elect's commitment to addressing climate change as an urgent national security issue," the Biden transition team said in a statement.
The elevation of the issue in Kerry's appointment previews a shift in policy and approach from the current President's repeated denial of the scientific reality of the crisis and systematic rollback of environmental policies.
"It'll be an honor to work with our allies and partners, alongside rising young leaders in the climate movement, to tackle the climate crisis with the seriousness and urgency it deserves," Kerry wrote in a tweet.
The energy around the issue of the climate crisis has escalated in a short period of time. When Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, during his first presidential campaign in 2016, called climate change the foremost national security crisis, he was pilloried as not being serious about foreign policy. Five years later, the White House will have a special envoy for climate with a seat at National Security Council meetings.
President-elect Joe Biden Picks John Kerry to Help Regain Global Leadership on Climate Change (Wall Street Journal)
Kerry is a former secretary of state who oversaw U.S. negotiations on Paris climate accord for Obama administration...
John Kerry Appointed as Biden's Special Presidential Envoy for Climate
Former Secretary of State will be a special presidential envoy for climate, a role that does not require Senate confirmation
Newly appointed “climate czar” and veteran diplomat John Kerry said the next US administration would treat climate change as a “national security emergency”
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Global Climate Agreements Through the Years, 1987-2020
November 18, 2020 | Re-Shared Courtesy of the Climate Reality Project
This week, the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – commonly known as COP 26 – was scheduled to kick off in Glasgow, UK. But amidst a raging pandemic that has made in-person gatherings unsafe, the conference was postponed a year, and will instead take place in November 2021.
For climate activists around the world, the decision to postpone may have come as a letdown, even if the rationale was understandable. Five years ago in Paris, the parties present at COP 21 set forth a historic agreement that brought nearly every nation in the world together on a vision to seriously combat the climate crisis. There was real hope that COP 26 could deliver another major step to strengthen the Paris Agreement.
Because while Paris was a major milestone, it was far from the first step the global community has taken on climate. Driven by activists and climate scientists around the world, the member states of the UNFCCC have been working for climate solutions for decades now.
- • 1987 – Montreal Protocol: In response to the deterioration of the ozone layer, member states of the United Nations come together to regulate nearly 100 chemicals known as ozone depleting substances. The Montreal Protocol was ratified by all 197 member states, making it the only UN treaty ever ratified by every member. While the agreement was focused on ozone restoration, it proved that the global community can unify around urgent environmental action, and deliver results.
- • 1992 – Earth Summit: The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, also called the Earth Summit, opened UNFCCC for signature. By year’s end, 158 nations had signed on to UNFCCC, paving the way for annual Conferences of the Parties (COP).
- • 1995 – COP 1: The first COP was held in Germany in 1995, and was overseen by Angela Merkel, then a minister in the German government responsible for environmental issues. COP 1 laid the foundation for future meetings and delivered the Berlin Mandate, which set forth a process for combatting the climate crisis in the new millennium.
- • 1997 – Kyoto Protocol: COP 3 produced the world’s first international treaty requiring the reduction of global warming pollution, with industrialized nations agreeing to cumulatively cut their greenhouse gas to 5 percent below 1990 levels within 10–15 years. Notably, India and China had yet to enter their economic booms, and thus were not considered industrialized nations for purposes of the protocol and are not subject to the requirements. And while 192 nations would eventually adopt the Kyoto Protocol, the United States does not, undermining the agreement.
- • 2001 – Marrakesh Accords: Representatives from 160 nations meet to further plan out implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, including differentiations between developed nations and transitioning nations.
- • 2005 – Kyoto Protocol goes into effect: After nearly a decade of work on its implementation, the Kyoto Protocol goes into effect. In the ensuing years, many nations – including the European Union – would meet their targets and cut emissions. That progress, however, was more than offset by countries like the US and China continuing to increase emissions.
- • 2009 – COP 15: When world leaders gathered in Copenhagen for COP 15, there were high hopes for a legally binding treaty to build off of the Kyoto Protocol. Instead, nations were unable to agree on firm targets and left instead with just a non-binding accord. Still, the conference did produce some progress on setting targets and implementation mechanisms, as well as establishing a goal of $100 billion per year in financing for developing nations to shift towards low-carbon development and build resilience.
- • 2011 – COP 17: Countries meeting in Durban agree to develop a “protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force” that would be “applicable to all Parties.” The agreement in Durban lays the foundation for a binding, universal agreement to come in the following years.
- • 2013 – Warsaw Mechanism for Loss and Damage: COP 19 saw the establishment of the first formalized international mechanism for dealing with loss and damage, a term broadly understood to mean the negative consequences of the climate crisis that cannot be avoided through mitigation and adaptation. Developing and vulnerable nations have long pushed for action on loss and damage and continue to call for further action.
- • 2015 – Paris Agreement: After years of struggling to achieve a broad agreement that could build upon the Kyoto Protocol, COP 21 delivered the Paris Agreement – the most ambitious global climate agreement the world has ever seen. The Paris Agreement set an overarching goal to keep warming “well below” 2 degrees Celsius while “pursuing efforts” to keep it under 1.5 degrees, and included each nation offering specific, challenging targets that they felt were achievable, even if they have so far been inadequate. With China, India, and the US on board at its signing, this historic accord gave the world both the framework to halt rising temperatures and the international muscle to do it. Unfortunately, there was a major setback when the Trump Administration refused to act on US commitments and then removed the country from the agreement earlier this month. But by design, the Paris Agreement offers an easy path for nations to re-enter the agreement – and President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to return the US to the accord on his first day in office.
- • 2019 – Climate Action Summit: Set against the backdrop of youth climate strikes around the globe, UN Secretary-General António Guterres convened a special summit to focus on the need for urgent action and encourage nations to enhance their pledges to cut carbon emissions. And 70 nations stepped up, committing to cut emissions by more than their Paris pledges. But those nations represented just 6.8 percent of global emissions – and with the US, China, and India offering few concrete promises, the summit did not deliver the hoped-for breakthrough.
- • 2020 – Postponement of COP 26: Recognizing that deeper emissions reductions would be required to meet the challenge, countries agreed at COP 21 to update or enhance their first Paris Agreement commitments by the end of 2020. But COP 26’s postponement has limited countries’ ability to pressure each other to do so. The United Kingdom hopes to encourage higher commitments on December 12, the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement adoption.
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President-elect Biden planning to move fast on climate
Election results: Joe Biden wins — here’s what that means for climate change policy and the Green New Deal
- Via Vox
Biden Could Roll Back Trump Agenda With Blitz of Executive Actions
- Via NY Times
Environmentalists say Biden's win was crucial for climate progress
Joe Biden could bring Paris climate goals 'within striking distance' | Climate change
- Via The Guardian
Five things Joe Biden can do to fight climate change — without Congress' help
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If Biden Is Elected President
Biden’s Bold Climate Plans Could Be Thwarted in GOP-Run Senate
November 4, 2020, 2:38 PM EST
Narrowly divided Senate seen as barrier to big climate push
Biden would tap federal agencies to pursue green vision
“An emboldened, moderate Senate is poised to stymie a progressive agenda at every turn,” observed Washington consultant Gloria Dittus. “A legislative Green New Deal has been derailed.”
Biden couldn’t count on help from a Republican-controlled Senate to realize his climate vision, which lays out epic changes in the U.S. energy mix, anchored by promises to install renewable energy infrastructure, get cleaner cars on the road and create zero-emission mass transit systems. Instead, Biden would have to court the chamber’s moderates...
Without allies to push his environmental agenda through Capitol Hill, Biden would be even more reliant on federal agencies to adapt decades-old laws to meet emerging challenges such as climate change. But creative agency regulations could face tough scrutiny in federal courts reshaped with the addition of more than 200 Trump-appointed judges.
“Given the fact that Biden’s probably not going to have a compliant Senate to work with don’t look for him getting policy done through a reconciliation bill or even an ambitious climate bill,” said Eric Washburn, an environmental policy consultant and former adviser to top Senate Democrats. “He’s going to have to do what he is going to do to promote his clean energy and climate agenda administratively, and that’s going to put a lot of pressure on EPA.”
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John Christy, More Than a Climate Science Contrarian
Inside Climate News takes a close, fair, and objective look at a controversial scientist, a political person of lasting consequence -- John Christy.
Your GreenPolicy360 siterunner points to the work of Mr. Christy and advises a close, careful reading of this look at a climate scientist near the center of the Trump administration's point of view. No matter the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election, and its outcome determining the direction of the work of critical government agencies such as the EPA, NOAA, USGS, DOE and beyond into the international and global work studying and dealing with a threatening climate crisis, the life and times of John Christy tell a tale with lasting importance.
Be objective, read the John Christy story and, as we say over and over at GreenPolicy360, study of the science...
A look at current USGS climate science changes planned by the Trump administration.
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The Day After the U.S. Election, the U.S. Leaves the International Climate Agreement
GreenPolicy360 Story of the Day
What are the consequences of a U.S. retreat from cooperative climate action?
Via the Associated Press / November 1, 2020
The day after the presidential election, the United States formally leaves the 2015 Paris agreement to fight climate change. A year ago, President Donald Trump’s administration notified the United Nations that America is exiting the climate agreement. And because of technicalities in the international pact, Nov. 4 is the earliest a country can withdraw...
If the U.S. remains out of the climate pact, today’s children are “going to see big changes that you and I don’t see for ice, coral and weather disasters,” said Stanford University’s Rob Jackson.
Because the two presidential candidates have starkly different positions on climate change policy, the election could have profound repercussions for the world’s approach to the problem, according to more than a dozen experts.
“That election could be a make or break point for international climate policy,” said Niklas Hohne, a climate scientist at Wageningen University in Germany.
In pulling out of the agreement, Trump has questioned climate science and has rolled back environmental initiatives that he called too restrictive in cutting future carbon pollution from power plants and cars.
American carbon emissions dropped by less than one percent a year from 2016 to 2019, until plunging probably temporarily during the pandemic slowdown, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. More than 60 countries cut emissions by higher percentages than the U.S. in that time period, according to international data.
Eleven years ago, the world was on pace to add about another 5 degrees (2.8 degrees Celsius) of warming. But with emission cut pledges from Paris and afterward, the world is facing only about another 2.2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) of warming if countries do what they promise...
“If Biden wins, the whole world is going to start reorienting toward stepping up its action,” said the Dean of the University of Michigan’s environment program.
If the U.S. remains out of Paris, countries trying to cut emissions drastically at potentially high costs to local industry may put “border adjustment” fees on climate laggards like America to even the playing field, said Nigel Purvis, a climate negotiator in the Clinton and second Bush administrations. The European Union is already talking about such fees...
Climate Action Tracker ran calculations comparing a continuation of the Trump administration’s current emission trends to what would happen if Biden worked toward net zero emissions... (they) found that in the next 10 years a Trump scenario, which includes a moderate economic bounce-back from the pandemic, would emit 6 billion tons (5.4 billion metric tons) more greenhouse gases than the Biden scenario — an 11% difference.
Other nations will do more to limit carbon pollution if the U.S. is doing so and less if America isn’t, said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald. “In terms of leadership, it will make an immense difference,” she said.
In Paris, the U.S. was crucial in getting the agreement finished. The rest of the world ended up pledging to reduce roughly five tons of carbon pollution for every ton the U.S. promised to cut.
Read the full AP story by science reporter Seth Borenstein
Follow Seth on Twitter @borenbears
Read more stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at -- https://www.apnews.com/Climate
🌎 October
Attempting to Setback Science & Environmental Protections
From The New York Times: The Trump Administration Is Reversing, or Attempting to Reverse, Nearly 100 Environmental Rules.
Here’s a List Tracking Trump Environmental Rollbacks. The White House has dismantled major climate and environmental policies focused on clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals. Here’s how it adds up (as of October 31, 2020).
More on Trump Administration environmental rollbacks/reversals/legislative and regulatory actions to end and/or limit environmental protections...
Environmental Deregulation, Climate Litigation
(from GreenPolicy360's Eco-Dashboard)
- https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2018/07/tracking-the-trackers/ | A List of Organizations Tracking US Environmental Rollbacks
- https://www.brookings.edu/interactives/tracking-deregulation-in-the-trump-era/ | Brookings - Deregulatory Tracker
- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Environmental_Laws | Category - Environmental Laws
- http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/climate-deregulation-tracker | Climate Deregulation Tracker
- http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/ | Columbia Law School - Climate Change Laws
- https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/regulatory-rollback-tracker | Harvard Law School - Envir Law Rollbacks
- http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker/ | 'Silencing Science' Tracker
US National Climate Assessment, NOAA and Politics: Profound changes announced as US 2020 election nears
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Joe Biden is calling climate change the ‘number one issue facing humanity’
Reprinted courtesy of CNBC / October 24, 2020
□ Joe Biden declares climate change the "number one issue facing humanity" and vows a national transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy he says will create millions of new jobs.
□ Biden's $2 trillion plan puts the U.S. on a path to zero carbon pollution from the electricity sector by 2035 and net-zero emissions by 2050.
□ Scientists say that Biden's transition plan is required to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.
□ Climate change has fueled record-setting wildfires in the U.S. West and one of the most active Atlantic hurricane seasons this year.
Joe Biden declared climate change the "number one issue facing humanity" and vowed a national transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy that could create millions of new jobs.
'"It's the number one issue facing humanity. And it's the number one issue for me," Biden said in an interview.
"Climate change is the existential threat to humanity. Unchecked, it is going to actually bake this planet. This is not hyperbole. It's real. And we have a moral obligation."
Scientists have repeatedly warned that climate-change fueled disasters will continue to get worse and parts of the world will become unlivable as global temperatures rise and governments fail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the burning of oil, gas and coal.
Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, has boasted a $2 trillion plan that invests significantly in clean energy in the transportation, electricity and building industry, cuts fossil fuel emissions and improves infrastructure.
Biden's plan also puts the U.S. on a path to zero carbon pollution from the electricity sector by 2035 and net-zero emissions by 2050. Coal and natural gas comprise more than 60% of the electricity sector, according to the Energy Information Association.
"It's going to create millions of jobs ... We can't be cavalier about the impact it's going to have on how we're going to transition to do all this," Biden said. "But I just think it's a gigantic opportunity, a gigantic opportunity to create really good jobs."
Scientists say that Biden's transition plan is required to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.
"No one is going to build another oil or gas-fired electric plant. They're going to build one that is fired by renewable energy," Biden said in the interview podcast. "We have to invest billions of dollars in making sure that we're able to transmit over our lines."
Biden's plan to transition from oil and natural gas could be politically popular but may potentially hurt him in major oil and gas states as the Nov. 3 election nears.
The issue is particularly important in Pennsylvania, a state that could be decisive on election day and has a strong fracking industry and Trump base in the southwestern part of the state. Biden, however, has said he would only ban fracking on federal lands. Most oil and gas does not come from federal lands.
But oil and gas executives have been aware of the global movement towards renewable energy and say the U.S. will still require fossil fuel production for decades to come even during a global transition.
Biden said he's gone to the major labor unions in the U.S. to convince them to sign onto his climate change plan, emphasizing that he won't "discount the concerns" of people who could lose work during a transition to renewables.
In Thursday's presidential debate, Biden emphasized that the transition away from climate-changing fossil fuels would occur "over time." After the debate, he said that fossil fuels would not be eliminated until 2050 as part of his plan.
President Trump, who has pulled the U.S. from the Paris climate accord and consistently expressed support for fracking, responded to Biden's remarks with a traditional appeal to voters in competitive oil and gas states.
"Basically what he is saying is he is going to destroy the oil industry," Trump said during Thursday's debate. "Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania? Oklahoma? Ohio?"
Trump has denied the science of climate change and reversed more than 70 major environmental regulations during his four years in office, with nearly 30 more in progress.
But climate change has been a top issue of the 2020 presidential election, especially among younger voters.
Nearly two-thirds of voters think the federal government is not doing enough to mitigate climate change, according to a Pew Research Center poll this year. Roughly 79% of Americans said the U.S. should make developing alternative sources of energy like wind and solar a priority.
Biden leads on climate change by an enormous margin, with 58% to 19% of registered voters saying the former vice president would address the problem better than President Trump, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
This year, climate-change fueled disasters including record-setting wildfires in the U.S. West and one of the most active Atlantic hurricane seasons ever have plagued the country.
September 2020 was the warmest month on record worldwide and this year is set to be one of the five hottest in recorded history.
Two-Thirds of Americans Think Government Should Do More on Climate
Jeff Berardelli (@WeatherProf):
What's up with the Colorado Fires? You may be surprised to hear how much the climate has changed.
Video: https://t.co/MW1uTg6cyo
Story: https://t.co/mWxGsgGZCB
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October 22, 2020
https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Pres_Debate_-_Oct_22_2020.jpg
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Climate change: watershed or endgame?
From the Publisher
In this compelling new book, Noam Chomsky, the world's leading public intellectual, and Robert Pollin, a renowned progressive economist, map out the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change--and present a realistic blueprint for change: the Global Green New Deal.
Together, Chomsky and Pollin show how the forecasts for a hotter planet strain the imagination: vast stretches of the Earth will become uninhabitable, plagued by extreme weather, drought, rising seas, and crop failure. Arguing against the misplaced fear of economic disaster and unemployment arising from the transition to a green economy, they show how this bogus concern encourages climate denialism.
Humanity must stop burning fossil fuels within the next thirty years and do so in a way that improves living standards and opportunities for working people. This is the goal of the Green New Deal and, as the authors make clear, it is entirely feasible. Climate change is an emergency that cannot be ignored. This book shows how it can be overcome both politically and economically.
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Conoco Buys Concho
Doubling down on the Permian Basin
Both companies have lost more than 40% of their value in 2020
Conoco is focusing on the West Texas/South New Mexico Permian Basin, the shale and fracking hotbed that made the United States the world's largest oil producer. Concho is viewed as one of the best Permian operators and brings along a large amount of expertise on the region.
The move will also make Conoco even more exposed to the same forces that have swiftly moved against fossil fuels.
"It is a bit of a contrarian move to double down on oil and gas at a time when it's unpopular in the investment community," said Pavel Molchanov, energy analyst at Raymond James Financial in Clearwater, Florida. "Many investors are turned off by the commodity volatility, regardless of what they think about climate," said Molchanov.
Europe is moving the opposite direction
The broader challenge to the deal is the climate crisis.
The mood is so glum in the oil industry that European oil majors are pivoting away from oil and gas in favor of renewables and low-carbon solutions.
BP revealed plans in August to slash its oil production by 40% and pour billions of dollars into clean energy as it attempts to deliver net-zero emission by 2050. The UK company also warned that world demand for oil may have peaked last year.
ExxonMobil, once the world's most valuable company, was recently surpassed in market capitalization by wind and solar company NextEra Energy.
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Top of the News @GreenPolicy360
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Hotter & Hotter
Via Associated Press / Seth Borenstein
Earth breaks September heat record, may reach warmest year
Boosted by human-caused climate change, global temperatures averaged 60.75 degrees (15.97 Celsius) last month, edging out 2015 and 2016 for the hottest September in 141 years of recordkeeping, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Wednesday. That’s 1.75 degrees (0.97 degrees Celsius) above the 20th century average.
This record was driven by high heat in Europe, Northern Asia, Russia and much of the Southern Hemisphere, said NOAA climatologist Ahira Sanchez-Lugo. California and Oregon had their hottest Septembers on record.
Earth has had 44 straight Septembers where it has been warmer than the 20th century average and 429 straight months without a cooler than normal month, according to NOAA.
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Scheduled for January 2021 Publication
The New Climate War
by Michael E. Mann
@MichaelEMann
PublicAffairs / Perseus
In The New Climate War, Mann argues that all is not lost. He draws the battle lines between the people and the polluters-fossil fuel companies, right-wing plutocrats, and petrostates. And he outlines a plan for forcing our governments and corporations to wake up and make real change, including:
- a common-sense, attainable approach to carbon pricing- and a revision of the well-intentioned but flawed currently proposed version of the Green New Deal;
- allowing renewable energy to compete fairly against fossil fuels;
- debunking the false narratives and arguments that have worked their way into the climate debate and driven a wedge between even those who support climate change solutions;
- combatting climate doomism and despair-mongering.
With immensely powerful vested interests aligned in defense of the fossil fuel status quo, the societal tipping point won’t happen without the active participation of citizens everywhere aiding in the collective push forward. This book will reach, inform, and enable citizens everywhere to join this battle for our planet.
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Copernicus Programme - Climate Change Service
Global-mean temperatures were substantially above average in September 2020. The month was:
- 0.63°C warmer than the 1981-2020 average for September
- the warmest September in this data record
- warmer by 0.05°C than September 2019, the previous warmest September
- warmer by 0.08°C than September 2016, the third warmest September.
Temperatures averaged over the twelve-month period from October 2019 to September 2020 were:
- most above the 1981-2010 average over a large part of Siberia, and the Arctic Ocean to the north of Siberia and Alaska
- above average over virtually all of Europe, more so in the east;
- above average over most other areas of land and ocean;
September 30, 2020
From the U.S. Presidential Campaign Debate
“We have the lowest carbon. Look at our numbers now. We are doing phenomenal.”
-- The U.S. President
GreenPolicy360.... the president's statement is far from the truth
Via NBC News / On the Climate Change Question Asked by Moderator Chris Wallace
President Trump: “We have the lowest carbon. Look at our numbers now. We are doing phenomenal.”
“That's the biggest lie he's told tonight, and there have been some biggies,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, tweeted after Trump’s assertion about having the “lowest” carbon emissions.
Biden, on the other hand, has made climate change a focus of his campaign. In July, he released a $2 trillion plan to build a clean energy economy that includes the ambitious goal of achieving a 100 percent clean electricity standard by 2035.
Though Biden’s climate plan is not as far-reaching as the proposed Green New Deal championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., it has been met with praise from climate scientists and environmental activists.
Trump attempted to sow divisions between Biden’s camp and the supporters of the Green New Deal, claiming that Biden’s failure to support the plan meant he “just lost the radical left.”
Ocasio-Cortez dismissed the notion, tweeting in response: “Our differences are exactly why I joined Biden’s Climate Unity Task Force — so we could set aside our differences & figure out an aggressive climate plan to address the planetary crisis at our feet. Trump doesn’t even believe climate change is real.”
In the debate, Biden also reiterated his plan to rejoin the Paris Agreement and work with global partners to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Trump announced plans in 2017 to quit the landmark climate accord, a move that has been widely criticized by climate researchers.
Yet for all the debate’s vitriol, experts said, it’s important that climate change was a featured topic. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March found that 60 percent of Americans say that climate change is a major threat to the U.S., up from 44 percent in 2009. The inclusion of climate issues in the presidential debate “reflects the heightened political and grassroots interest in the subject.”
More on the U.S. presidential debate at Strategic Demands
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Climate Change Critics Recruited by US President
Via E&E News
At least three prominent researchers who question the severity of climate change rebuffed the opportunity to take a senior position at NOAA.
The White House has been quietly working in recent weeks to reshape the leadership of NOAA with a goal of criticizing climate science...
According to Andrew Rosenberg, who served as a deputy director at NOAA in the Clinton administration, and now runs the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the political appointments could be a strategic way to get climate denialists "burrowed" in at NOAA. If the political appointees are offered career positions, they will be much harder to dismiss after Trump is gone because of protections for federal workers, Rosenberg said.
"They're packing these positions, and I'm worried they're going to get burrowed in into career positions in NOAA. First of all, getting appointed in the first place is sending a very strong signal that we are not interested in the overall scientific evidence of climate change; we're going to go with the view of the fringe. That's very distressing, not only to climate change, but everything NOAA does."
Climate Change Denialist Given Top Role
Update: On Thursday (Sept. 24), 85 House Democrats sent a letter to Jacobs and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross protesting the appointment of Legates, saying he would "clearly be in a position to seriously damage the agency's scientific integrity."
"While Legates promotes the fossil fuel industry's agenda and derides taxpayer dollars spent on mitigating the 'undetectable effects of climate change,' the staggering cost of failing to address climate change is terrifying to the rest of us working to save a livable future for our children and grandchildren," they wrote.
David Legates, wrong for NOAA, wrong for the climate crisis, wrong for the profound responsibility
David Legates at a Heartland Institute conference speaking on “Why CO2 Emissions Are Not Creating a Climate Crisis”:
DAVID LEGATES: We’ve all heard that carbon dioxide, of course, is a pollutant. It drives climate. It is the single most important factor that determines what the climate is going to be in the future and what the temperature is going to be and how much precipitation there’s going to be, so much so that we have to put a danger sign on carbon dioxide. But the question I really want to ask is: Is it really a benefit? Not just simply has it gotten a bad rap, but is it really something that we could do with a little bit more? … So, the answer to my question, “Is carbon dioxide a pollutant or a benefit?” it clearly isn’t a pollutant. It is definitely a benefit, and we can do with a little bit more of it.
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Wildfires Rage (but conditions... climate change, heat, drought, warming ocean temperatures... the connections driving extreme weather events go unreported)
As wildfires continue to rage across the western United States and hurricanes barrel towards the East Coast, a new report out Thursday says voters want the media to do a better job at covering the climate crisis and connecting the dots between extreme weather events and climate change.
"The media has a responsibility to inform viewers of the connections between climate change and the increasingly unstable world around them," write Dr. Genevieve Gunther, Danielle Deiseroth, and Marcela Mulholland in a summary of the research conducted by Data for Progress and End Climate Silence. "It's not just climate activists and policy wonks that want to see this kind of coverage; our polling shows that a broad-base of voters do too."
While plenty of coverage of extreme weather events such as hurricanes exists, what does not is the connection to the climate crisis in the same reporting, the authors report. For example, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 50 segments on Hurricane Laura, yet not one connected the storm to climate change.
"Media coverage is critical in determining how the public perceives climate change," they continued. "To give voters the information they need to make political decisions in an increasingly chaotic world, the media must cover the climate crisis with the accuracy and urgency it deserves."
GreenPolicy360:
Is it time for the Media to add a 'Take Action' option to their Climate Reporting?
Is it time for a public service offer, for example how about an app, or a link, or a button?
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Joe Biden Points at the Climate Policy Failures of Donald Trump
"Unending barrage of Tragedies"
Biden: "The science is clear, and deadly signs like these are unmistakable - climate change poses an imminent, existential threat to our way of life. President Trump can try to deny that reality, but the facts are undeniable. We absolutely must act now to avoid a future defined by an unending barrage of tragedies like the one American families are enduring across the West today."
"Left unchecked, wildfires and other extreme weather disasters will only continue to grow in frequency and intensity, endangering the lives of tens of millions of Americans, ravaging our lands and waterways, rendering the air unbreathable, and laying waste to our economic security," Biden added. "In the years ahead, there will be no challenge more consequential to our future than meeting and defeating the onrushing climate crisis."
The statement comes as record major wildfires ravage the Western U.S., California, Oregon, Washington state...
"The debate is over, around climate change," said California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). "This is a climate damn emergency. This is real and it's happening."
All Time Record Heat
Ron Merkord:
Sept. 6, 2020
2020 is on track to be the hottest year the Earth has seen in recorded history, 100+ years. Before that, 2019 was the hottest on record, etc etc. You get the idea.
Now here is the real kicker, something to really ponder in today's heat. 2020 will also be the COLDEST year in the next 100 years. This is the coldest year from now on that you, or your grandkids, will ever know.
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The U.S. president has no climate plan. We ask -- 'Why isn’t that headline news?'
Via Bill Moyers News / Covering Climate Now
Fire and Water: Land and Watershed Management in the Age of Climate Change
August 2020
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From the Democrat's Climate Crisis Committees
- Chair Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) / https://www.democrats.senate.gov/climate
- Chair Kathy Castor (D-Florida) / https://climatecrisis.house.gov/
Senate Democrats 200-page plan arguing that significant US climate action will require stripping the fossil fuel industry of its influence over the government and the public’s understanding of the crisis.
“It’s important for the public to understand that this is not a failure of American democracy that’s causing this,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a Senate Democrat from Rhode Island. “It is a very specific and successful attack on American democracy by an industry with truly massive financial motivation to corrupt democratic institutions.”
A 16-page chapter of the report titled Dark Money lays out how “giant fossil fuel corporations have spent billions – much of it anonymized through scores of front groups – during a decades-long campaign to attack climate science and obstruct climate action”.
Senator Whitehouse: “I don’t think Americans understand enough the extent to which the fossil fuel industry has weaponized a whole variety of systems and laws that now competes with the government itself for dominance.”
Big oil remembers 'friend' Trump with millions in campaign funds
Donations to support the president’s re-election have flooded in from a fossil fuel industry that has enjoyed three years of energy deregulation and tax cuts...
Climate, the Second Most Important Issue among US Voters
Polls tracking the issues in the 2020 campaign
NYT Climate (@nytclimate) tweeted at 0:28 PM on Mon, Aug 24, 2020
The number of Americans who feel passionately about climate change is rising sharply, and the issue appears likely to play a more important role in this year’s election than ever before...
The issue public around climate change has grown tremendously over time, the survey suggests. In 2015, the group was 13 percent of the population. By 2020, it had nearly doubled to 25 percent.
The survey was a joint project of Stanford, Resources for the Future, a Washington research group, and ReconMR, a survey research company.
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The Climate Crisis Is Still a Crisis
If the fate of American democracy is on the ballot in November, so too is the future of the planet
Op-Ed / The Atlantic / August 19, 2020
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Inside Joe Biden's Network of Climate Advisers
- Kamala Harris on Climate Policy
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Last decade was Earth's hottest on record as climate crisis accelerates
... and 2020 is hot, hot
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Coastal Flooding Could Hit 20% of Global GDP
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Murdoch Family that Controls Fox Media Empire Imploding
Climate, Politics, News -- Inside the Family
Rupert Murdoch's media empire
News Corp hugely influential across the world
Including The Sun, The Times, Sky Corp-Sky News, the New York Post, global satellite distribution, entertainment media and internet corporations...
Fox Corporation (distinct from the News Corp as of 2013) - Fox networks, Fox News, Fox Business, Fox Sports
James Murdoch was previously regarded as heir apparent to his father's right-wing media empire, with its deep political influence around the world. He has grown increasingly critical of the firm's news outlets for their "denial" of the climate crisis.
As quoted:
James and wife Kathryn grew increasingly vocal in expressing their progressive political views.
Following the deadly white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 James sent an open letter to company employees criticising US President Donald Trump's response. "I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis," he wrote. "Or Klansmen, or terrorists."
Last September he told The New Yorker: "There are views I really disagree with on Fox."
He made headlines again when he lashed out at the company's climate coverage during the summer bushfire crisis in Australia.
"Kathryn and James’ views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known,” a spokesperson for Murdoch and his wife told The Daily Beast website.
"They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary."
Earlier this month it was revealed that James and Kathryn had each donated US$615,000 to Joe Biden's campaign, making them among the Democratic nominee's biggest supporters.
Now, with just three months until the US presidential election, James is completely untethered from his family's empire - raising the possibility he will become more outspoken about his political views and his concerns about the Murdoch empire's editorial positions.
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July 2020
U.S. Abandonment of International Climate Agreement Has Lasting Ramifications
The divisions Trump’s stance has opened up within his own nation have also been starkly in evidence at the annual UN climate talks, where for the last three years, two different American groups have been showing up. One occupies a brightly lit central pavilion hosting prominent politicians, celebrities, business leaders and top investors, attracting big audiences for glitzy presentations on clean technology and green jobs. These are Congressional Democrats, state leaders and city mayors, commanding huge budgets and able to slash emissions and foster green schemes, but without the levers of federal power. The real US delegation – the one with the power to vote and veto at the UN – sits down in the hall, in a small drab office with only a diminutive Stars and Stripes and photocopied sign on the firmly shut door, denoting its presence...
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Global / Interactive, Feature Story
NY Times / July 23, 2020
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This App Could Be a Game Changer
This could be a very big deal
There’s an old truism in the business world: what gets measured gets managed. One of the challenges in managing the greenhouse gas emissions warming the atmosphere is that they aren’t measured very well.
“Currently, most countries do not know where most of their emissions come from,” says Kelly Sims Gallagher, a professor of energy and environmental policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. “Even in advanced economies like the United States, emissions are estimated for many sectors.” Without this information “you cannot devise smart and effective policies to mitigate emissions,” she says, and “you cannot track them to see if you are making progress against your goals.”
The ultimate solution to this problem — the killer app, as it were — would be real-time tracking of all global greenhouse gases, verified by objective third parties, and available for free to the public.
Now, a new alliance of climate research groups called the Climate TRACE (Tracking Real-Time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions) Coalition has launched an effort to make the vision a reality, and they’re aiming to have it ready for COP26, the climate meetings in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021 (postponed from November 2020). If they pull it off, it could completely change the tenor and direction of international climate talks.
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Methane rises to highest level on record
Livestock farming and fossil fuels are main causes of rise in gas, which is 28 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat
The data, the science, then comes the business of politics and choosing to act or not to act
Study report findings, published in Earth System Science Data and Environmental Research Letters, show that more than half of the methane in the atmosphere now comes from human sources.
Climate stabilization remains elusive, with increased greenhouse gas concentrations already increasing global average surface temperatures 1.1 °C above pre-industrial levels (World Meteorological Organization 2019). Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel use, deforestation, and other anthropogenic sources reached ~ 43 billion metric tonnes in 2019 (Friedlingstein et al 2019, Jackson et al 2019). Storms, floods, and other extreme weather events displaced a record 7 million people in the first half of 2019 (IDMC 2019). When global mean surface temperature four million years ago was 2 °C–3 °C warmer than today (a likely temperature increase before the end of the century), ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica melted and parts of East Antarctica's ice retreated, causing sea levels to rise 10–20 m (World Meteorological Organization 2019)...
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"Build Back Better": Biden Climate & Clean Energy Plan
Biden's climate initiative calls to chart the United States on "an irreversible path" to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
To do that, the plan would aim to achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035. It would also upgrade 4 million buildings and weatherize 2 million homes over four years to increase energy efficiency. And the proposal, Biden's campaign says, would seek to shift major cities toward public transportation and "create millions of good, union jobs rebuilding America's crumbling infrastructure." Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who made climate change the central focus of his failed 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, called Biden's plan "visionary."
"This is no status quo plan," Inslee told the New York Times. "It is comprehensive. This is not some sort of, 'Let me just throw a bone to those who care about climate change.'"
Need to 'Reframe' the Climate Debate
Major climate issues at play in the Nov. 3 election
Joe Biden has pledged to take action on climate change that would be "impossible" for a future president to reverse should he beat President Donald Trump in the November election.
The former vice president told renewable energy industry executives on a fundraising call Monday night (reported via Newsweek) that he would put down "such a marker" on climate change it would be "impossible for the next president to turn it around."
Speaking about his plan for tackling climate change, Biden said: "God willing I win and even if I serve eight years, I want to make sure we put down such a marker that it's impossible for the next president to turn it around."
He added that the climate crisis was the "most sweeping crisis of all," adding that it had an impact on other crises facing the U.S., including the coronavirus pandemic and the related economic downturn.
Over 100 environmental protection laws and regulations have been rolled back by the Trump administration. Trump has abandoned international agreements on climate and has moved the US to a position of pariah in global environmental security relations.
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Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW)
Another solution for dealing with CO2
Rock dust, not a 'magic bullet', but add it to the climate response arsenal
“ERW (enhanced rock weathering) is a straightforward, practical approach.” Prof Jim Hansen and one of the research team, said: “Much of this carbonate will eventually [wash into] the ocean, ending up as limestone on the ocean floor.
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Climate -- Facts & Falsehoods
Hard & Soft Lies in the Realm of Climate Politics
and... Sorting Out Fact from Fiction
Facebook's role in climate denial mis-info
Follow ClimateFeedback.org, searching for factual climate info
Tracking Climate Change Denial & Misinfo
GreenPolicy360 provides best-in-science climate news & reviews
- https://climatefeedback.org | ClimateFeedback.org
- https://climatecrocks.com/ | Climate -- Crocks, Denial, Facts & Vids
- http://www.desmogblog.com/ | Desmog Blog
- http://www.desmogblog.com/about | Desmog & Climate Change
- http://www.desmogblog.com/global-warming-denier-database | Denier Database
- http://www.desmogblog.com/slamming-the-climate-skeptic-scam | Desmog Perspective
- https://www.beforetheflood.com/explore/the-deniers/top-10-climate-deniers/ | Denier Favorites
- https://www.drillednews.com/post/fake-science-is-a-real-danger | Drilled - Corp Sponsored
- https://grist.org/series/skeptics/ | Grist on Skeptics
Re: Misinfo of 'Planet of the Humans' Documentary
- https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php | Skeptical Science Site
- https://skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm | Skeptical - Attacks on Climate Models
- https://www.snopes.com/collections/climate-change-denial-debunked/ | Snopes on Climate
Techniques of Science Denial (Graph)
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Twins... both advocates for #EarthScience from Space
Accelerating humanity's approaches to deal with the #ClimateCrisis
Photo by Astro Scott Kelly -- He sees the big picture... http://www.scottkelly.com/
Photo of Astro Mark Kelly -- He's now running to be Arizona's next Senator... http://www.markkelly.com/
Earth Science Research from Space
Twins double the data
June 2020
June 25, 2020
TV News' near silence on record-shattering temperatures in the Arctic is part of a disturbing trend in climate coverage
- NBC Today only program across US broadcast and cable TV networks to mention the record hot Arctic temperatures
- Broadcast and cable TV news has been nearly silent about the unfolding climate catastrophe in the Arctic
June 20, 2020
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Atmospheric CO2 levels rise sharply despite global economic impacts and Covid-19 lockdowns
Via The Guardian
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen strongly to a new peak this year in spite of the global effects of the coronavirus crisis
The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere reached 417.2 parts per million in May, 2.4ppm higher than the peak of 414.8ppm in 2019, according to readings from the Mauna Loa observatory in the US.
Carbon dioxide tends to peak each year in late May, when the impacts of the northern hemisphere spring have yet to take effect, so the month’s data is compared from year to year. Measurements have been taken continuously at the remote Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii since 1958, providing vital information for climate scientists.
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Keep an Eye on Sean Casten and the New Plan of the Democrat's Climate Crisis Committee
By Nick Sobczyk, E&E News reporter
Sean Casten is now a Democrat representing a quintessential swing district — Illinois' 6th — that was part of the party's 2018 House takeover strategy.
But unlike many newly elected Democratic moderates, Casten — an Irish-born clean energy entrepreneur — ran primarily on climate change.
"I'm quite certain that myself and [California Democratic Rep.] Mike Levin were the first two people to ever run for office on climate policy and win," Casten said during an extensive interview with E&E News shortly before COVID-19 turned the world on its head.
Both lawmakers now sit on the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. Casten is also working on flood insurance on the Financial Services Committee and other energy and environmental issues on the Science, Space and Technology Committee.
He's also one of four co-chairs of the New Democrat Coalition's Climate Change Task Force. It's part of a climate-tinged moderate flair that helped him win a district that had been in Republican hands for nearly 50 years.
"I spent 16 years building companies that had a mission to profitably reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Casten said. "That still is my top issue."
For Casten, climate policy is the family business... Casten's Father, Tom Casten
Tom Casten has developed a reputation as one of the world's top experts on energy recycling and efficiency, testifying before Congress and authoring various articles as well as a book, "Turning Off the Heat: Why America Must Double Energy Efficiency to Save Money and Reduce Global Warming."
But after graduating from Middlebury College with a degree in biology and biochemistry, Sean Casten, like most college students, didn't want to follow directly in his father's footsteps.
"I felt like, OK, I don't want to do the same thing my dad did, but his whole career has been around the power side, and it seems like transportation is something we've got to fix," Casten said.
'Why don't we start something together?'
So he went back to school for a graduate degree in biochemical engineering from Dartmouth College and promptly got a job with mammoth consultancy Arthur D. Little's chemical engineering group doing fuel chain analyses...
Then came Turbosteam and then Recycled Energy Development
The pair teamed up, and Casten moved to Illinois in 2007 to found Recycled Energy Development, a company focused on making steam systems more efficient by finding ways to use the excess to generate power.
The Castens sold off the company in 2016, before Sean ran for Congress, but he brings Recycled Energy Development's goal to Capitol Hill — to profitably slash greenhouse gas emissions.
The congressional expert
With that background close at hand, Casten swings from funny and engaging to eye-glazingly wonky, stringing together detailed answers about various aspects of climate policy that go far beyond the technical expertise of most lawmakers. It's the kind of stuff usually reserved for staffers.
"I got a real fetish for output-based emissions standards," Casten said, laughing as he chewed on a bagel during an early-morning interview in his Capitol Hill office. "Are you familiar with those?"
That's exactly the space he wants to occupy. Congress has plenty of doctors and public health experts to work on health care policy, and it has plenty of members, mostly Republicans, with backgrounds in extractive industries who are interested in energy. Few have the kind of specialty Casten has.
When Casten was heading up the U.S. Clean Heat and Power Association — the national trade group for his slice of the energy industry — he said they used to joke that the only members worth meeting with were the late Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the longtime House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, and Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.).
"And if you couldn't get a meeting with them, get a meeting with staff, because it just wasn't going to be worth your time," he said, referring back to the long-term members, who have since left Congress.
That's to say that Casten knew Capitol Hill before he was elected to serve there. As chairman of the trade group in 2007, he was even called in to testify on energy efficiency policy before the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Energy, Natural Resources and Infrastructure, then chaired by Bingaman.
Nowadays, in Casten's view, there still aren't enough lawmakers who understand "the overlap between climate policy, energy policy and energy markets."
GreenPolicy360: Soon the Democrats in Congress will be putting forward their new #ClimateCrisis committee plan and legislative package. It promises to be one of the most critically important initiatives for the nation, and world, in the upcoming third decade of the 21st century. We can fully expect Sean Casten (with his father Tom whispering advice) to be out in front of the plan's proposal. Keep an eye on Casten...
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Defend Our Future | #ClimateCrisis 🌎✊🏿✊🏽✊ (@DefendOurFuture) Tweeted:
If you are 35 years old or younger, you've never experienced a cooler-than-average month on Earth. #ActOnClimate #ClimateCrisis #FridaysForFuture
- https://t.co/nv0UQwqc9M (Washington Post)
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May 2020
Earlier this week in Siberia up to 86 degrees F. (30.1 C.)
Arctic is ... Freakishly Warm
The Arctic has been on one recently. Russia had its hottest winter ever recorded, driven largely by Siberian heat. That heat hasn’t let up as the calendar turns to spring. In fact, it’s intensified and spread across the Arctic. Last month was the hottest April on record for the globe, driven by high Arctic temperatures that averaged an astounding 9.4 degrees Celsius above normal, according to NASA data...
Large parts of Russia were anywhere from 6 to 8 degrees Celsius hotter than normal, according to data kept by Russia’s weather service. That smashes the previous record set in the winter of 2015-16 by 1.3 degrees Celsius. Amid the widespread heat were major records in places like Moscow, which barely got a winter at all this year.
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"Unpriceable Climate Change Stalks $31 Trillion Debt Market"
Across continents, bond investors are struggling to answer what Deutsche Bank AG strategists dubbed “the question of our age” -- how much societies are willing to sacrifice in economic growth to counter climate change, and what that spells for the world’s $31 trillion sovereign debt market.
“It’s frankly very difficult to answer,” said Shamik Dhar, London-based chief economist for BNY Mellon Investment Management. “Some of the worst aspects of climate change haven’t been priced.”
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Unsuitable for 'human life to flourish'
Up to 3B will live in extreme heat by 2070, study warns
Another chant, another warning chant from the chorus
(In Greek) What happens next? What happens next?
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Times They Are a Changing
National Center for Science Education (@NCSE)
A hotter planet changes relationships between infectious agents, hosts, and the human body's defense mechanisms.
New vectors, new viruses, new transnational threats are coming ...
Yes, a hotter planet is connected to pandemics
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Climate Models and Critiques of Climate Models
Refining the Models with Paleoclimate Data
CESM2 Models - Community Earth System Model, version 2 | Equilibium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) testing | CMIP5 and CMIP6 Coupled Models Intercomparison Project (CMIP)
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GreenPolicy360 Siterunner:
Good science requires good data, scientific reasoning, discernment.
At GreenPolicy we often cite an axiom 'you can manage only what you can measure', which NASA cites as a foundation for their earth science missions. We agree with the scientists at NASA. NASA programs such as OCO-2, satellite remote measurements and monitoring of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere provide essential data for effective policy decisions to limit harmful emissions.
As earth systems science progresses over the coming years years, we believe a constant dialogue and debate about good data and science is not only appropriate, but is necessary.
In the case of a recently released documentary on YouTube, 'Planet of the Humans', produced by Michael Moore and directed by Jeff Gibbs, hard questions dealing with climate change/global warming, scientific data and politics, threats and range of solutions, are appropriate to ask, no matter how challenging the questions.
At the same time, we need good science -- facts, data, 'running the numbers', measuring and monitoring over time, analysis, evaluation -- to choose appropriate technology and to make personal choices dealing with climate change and our common environment. The choices are ours to make or we face the consequences of indecision and business-as-usual. Human-caused problems are realities we can observe and measure. Human-advanced answers are needed and necessary.
The thoughts of Richard Heinberg from Post Carbon Institute should be considered. His years of work in the field of environmental science, climate, and energy are definitely worthy of respect. He and the Post Carbon Institute know about renwable energy, its ups and downs. Fossil fuels too. Richard also has a breadth of experience that few have that gives him an ability to 'get real' about this controversial documentary.
His initial conclusion? The Moore-Gibbs documentary is a "conversation starter". That it is. I agree. It can't be ignored. Questions of how best to deal with the facts of climate and environmental disruption, and strategic demands for new definitions of national/global security, are here and now.
These are questions GreenPolicy360 has raised since our founding. However one looks at the Moore-Gibbs argument, the Earth is in our hands.
As planet citizens we have to act, good or bad. We are a 'planet of the humans.' Our choice. Humanity's choice. It's time we choose how to act.
Planet of the Humans: A Personal, Thoughtful Review Published at the Post Carbon Institute by Richard Heinberg
Review: Planet of the Humans
Richard Heinberg
April 27, 2020
"It starts a conversation we need to have"
A few days ago, Emily Atkin posted a reaction to Michael Moore’s latest film, Planet of the Humans (directed and narrated by Jeff Gibbs), in which she began by admitting that she hadn’t seen the film yet. When writers take that approach, you know there’s already blood in the water. (She has since watched the film and written an actual review. Full disclosure: I’m in the film, included as one of the “good guys.” But I don’t intend to let that fact distort my comments in this review.)
The film is controversial because it makes two big claims: first, that renewable energy is a sham; second, that big environmental organizations—by promoting solar and wind power—have sold their souls to billionaire investors.
I feel fairly confident commenting on the first of these claims, regarding renewable energy, having spent a year working with David Fridley of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to assess the prospects for a complete transition to solar and wind power.
We found that the transition to renewables is going far too slowly to make much of a difference during the crucial next couple of decades, and would be gobsmackingly expensive if we were to try replacing all fossil fuel use with solar and wind. We also found, as the film underscores again and again, that the intermittency of sunshine and wind is a real problem—one that can only be solved with energy storage (batteries, pumped hydro, or compressed air, all of which are costly in money and energy terms); or with source redundancy (building way more generation capacity than you’re likely to need at any one time, and connecting far-flung generators on a super-grid); or demand management (which entails adapting our behavior to using energy only when it’s available). All three strategies involve trade-offs. In the energy world, there is no free lunch. Further, the ways we use energy today are mostly adapted to the unique characteristics of fossil fuels, so a full transition to renewables will require the replacement of an extraordinary amount of infrastructure in our food system, manufacturing, building heating, the construction industry, and on and on. Altogether, the only realistic way to make the transition in industrial countries like the US is to begin reducing overall energy usage substantially, eventually running the economy on a quarter, a fifth, or maybe even a tenth of current energy.
Is it true that mainstream enviros have oversold renewables? Yes. They have portrayed the transition away from fossil fuels as mostly a political problem; the implication in many of their communications is that, if we somehow come up with the money and the political will, we can replace oil with solar and continue living much as we do today, though with a clear climate conscience. That’s an illusion that deserves shattering. But the film does make some silly mistakes. Gibbs claims that a solar panel will generate less energy than it took to build the panel. That’s a misleading claim. Many teams of researchers have addressed the question of energy return on energy invested for solar power, and even the most pessimistic results (with which I mostly agree) say that the technology can yield a marginal energy gain. Much of that gain goes away if we have to “pay” for the energy investment entailed in providing batteries or redundant capacity. Wind power generally has a better energy payback than solar, but the location of turbines matters a great deal and ideal sites are limited in number. Assessing solar and wind power calls for complicated energy accounting, but the film reduces that complexity to a blanket, binary dismissal.
The film is low on nuance, but our global climate and energy dilemma is all shades of gray. Gibbs seems to say that renewables are a complete waste of time. I would say, they are best seen as a marginal transitional strategy for industrial societies. Given climate change and the fact that fossil fuels are depleting, finite resources, it appears that if we want to maintain any sort of electrical energy infrastructure in the future, it will have to be powered by renewables—hydro, wind, or solar. As many studies have confirmed, the nuclear power industry has little realistic prospect of revival. The future will be renewable; there simply isn’t any other option. What is very much in question, however, is the kind of society renewable energy can support.
The fact is that we’ve already bet our entire future on electricity and electronics. Communications and information processing and storage have all been digitized. That means that if the grid goes down, we’ve lost civilization altogether. I don’t think we can maintain global grids at current scale without fossil fuels, but I can envision the possibility of a process of triage whereby, as population and resource consumption shrink, the digital world does as well, until it’s small enough to be powered by renewable electricity that can be generated with minimal and acceptable environmental damage.
I agree with Gibbs, however, that renewables are realistically incapable of maintaining our current levels of energy usage, especially in rich countries like the US. Transitioning to electric cars may be a useful small-scale and short-term strategy for reducing oil consumption (I drive one myself), but limits to lithium and other raw materials used in building e-cars mean we really need to think about how to get rid of personal cars altogether.
Mainstream enviros will hate this movie because it exposes some of their real failings. By focusing on techno-fixes, they have sidelined nearly all discussion of overpopulation and overconsumption. Maybe that’s understandable as a marketing strategy, but it’s a mistake to let marketing consultants sort truth from fiction for us.
During recent decades, the big environmental orgs wearied of telling their followers to reduce, reuse, and recycle. They came to see that global problems like climate change require systemic solutions that, in turn, require massive investment and governmental planning and oversight. But the reality is, we need both high-level systemic change and widespread individual behavior change. That’s one of the lessons of the coronavirus pandemic: “flattening the curve” demands both central planning and leadership, and individual sacrifice.
Planet of the Humans paints environmental organizations and leaders with a broad and accusatory brush. One target is Jeremy Grantham, a billionaire investment analyst who created the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment in 1997. Grantham was already a mega-rich investor before he “got religion” on environmental issues. I’ve had several face-to-face meetings with him (full disclosure: the Grantham Foundation has provided modest funding to Post Carbon Institute, where I work) and it’s clear that he cares deeply about overpopulation and overconsumption, and he understands that economic growth is killing the planet. He’s scared for his children and grandchildren, and he genuinely wants to use whatever wealth and influence he has to change the world. To imply, as the film does, that he merely sees green tech as an investment strategy is a poorly aimed cheap shot. Bill McKibben, who is skewered even more savagely, also deserves better; he has replied to the film here.
Read Bill McKibben's Response to the Michael Moore Film
Finally, the film leaves viewers with no sense of hope for the future. I understand why Gibbs made that choice. Too often, “hopium” is simply a drug we use to numb ourselves to the horrific reality of our situation and its causes—in which we are all complicit.
Yet, however awful the circumstance, we need a sense of human agency. In the face of the pandemic, many of us are reduced to sitting at home sewing facemasks; it seems like a paltry response to a spreading sickness that’s taking tens of thousands of lives, but it’s better than sitting on our hands and saying “Woe is me.” The same goes for climate change: figuring out how to eat lower on the food chain, or how to get by without a car, or how to reduce home energy usage by half, or growing a garden might seem like trivial responses to such an overwhelming crisis, but they get us moving together in the right direction.
For all the reasons I’ve mentioned, Planet of the Humans is not the last word on our human predicament. Still, it starts a conversation we need to have, and it’s a film that deserves to be seen.
(Reprinted courtesy of Post Carbon Institute / Visit at https://www.postcarbon.org/)
More from GreenPolicy360:
Planet of the Humans, a documentary film
More Reviews of the Documentary:
Via Forbes by Robert Bryce
• Stanford Prof. and Others 'Can’t Muzzle Planet Of The Humans’
• SLAPP lawsuit ruling against Mark Jacobson recharges renewables debate
• Planet of the Humans has been viewed over 4.6 million times in first weeks of its release on YouTube
In the background the arguments, politics and legal actions continue
Via Vox - Planet of the Humans deceives viewers about clean energy and climate activists
Michael Moore produced a film about climate change that’s a gift to Big Oil
Via DeSmog - Climate Deniers Rush to Promote Michael Moore Film
An anti-renewables pile on by fossil fuel supporters
Via Inside Climate News - Things Michael Moore gets wrong in his film
The documentary's "facts" are deceptive and misleading, not to mention way out of date
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April 2020
There's social media 'Trending', then there's real-world Trending...
2020 on course to be hottest year since records began
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How Much Cleaner EVs Are, Really
OilPrice.com Reveals Reports & Data
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What legislative accomplishments did the first Earth Day movement push forward and enable?
Here's how we at GreenPolicy360 describe the first-generation environmental foundation of environmental protections that the Earth Day movement and pressure helped to build --
Rep. George E. Brown (D - California)
Drafter, First National Climate Act
First U.S. National Climate Act
• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:US_Public_Law_95-367.png
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Warmest Oceans on Record Could Set Off a Year of Extreme Weather
Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans have reached record highs
The world’s seas are simmering, with record high temperatures spurring worry among forecasters that the global warming effect may generate a chaotic year of extreme weather ahead. Parts of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans all hit the record books for warmth last month, according to the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information.
In the Gulf of Mexico, where offshore drilling accounts for about 17% of U.S. oil output, water temperatures were 76.3 degrees Fahrenheit (24.6 Celsius), 1.7 degrees above the long-term average, said Phil Klotzbach at Colorado State University. If Gulf waters stay warm, it could be the fuel that intensifies any storm that comes that way...
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As of April 2020, what is the gasoline-powered future? What is 'the market' saying?
Market valuations:
- Tesla: $134 billion
- Honda: $39 billion
- BMW: $35 billion
- Daimler: $32 billion
- GM: $31 billion
- Ferrari: $28 billion
- Ford: $20 billion
- Nissan: $15 billion
- Subaru: $14 billion
- Fiat Chrysler: $12 billion
- Kia: $10 billion
- Mazda: $3 billion
Meanwhile:
Bank/Lender Takeovers Shock the Shale/Oil Patch
U.S. Shale Bust Like No Other
Oil Price Collapse Puts Fracking Industry in the Crosshairs
“It’s a financial bloodbath,” said Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “With oil prices at the current level, there’s a real risk many of them will simply go bankrupt.”
Fracking now makes up 63% of U.S. oil production, the Energy Information Administration estimates. That figure was set to increase as oil/gas drilling grew faster in the U.S. than any other country, and 90% of that is dependent on fracking, according to a report by scientists at more than a dozen environmental groups.
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China: Hundreds of Coal-fired Power Stations to be Built?
Powerful stakeholders, such as the network operator State Grid and industry body the China Electricity Council, are lobbying for targets that would allow hundreds of new coal-fired power stations to be built.
... a recent update to the “traffic light system” for new coal-power construction signaled further relaxation of permitting.
This is all despite significant overcapacity in the sector, with more than half of coal-power firms already loss-making and with typical plants running at less than 50% of their capacity.
The push for more coal power also appears at odds with China’s climate goals, including a target to peak its CO2 emissions no later than 2030. To reach this goal, low-carbon sources will need to cover any increases in energy demand, meaning less need for additional electricity generation from coal.
As the country grapples with the coronavirus pandemic, however, controls on overcapacity may be vulnerable to the political priority of propping up economic growth. As a result, the restraints on another coal power boom are likely to be financial and economic, rather than regulatory.
Coal power
China’s “economic miracle” has seen the country become the world’s second-largest economy and pulled nearly a billion people out of poverty. But this progress has been built on a boom in energy from coal, meaning China has also become the world’s largest carbon polluter by far.
China’s CO2 emissions increased again by around 2% in 2019, based on recently released official economic data, and 65% of the annual growth in energy consumption came from fossil fuels.
Coal is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel and still accounted for 57.7% of China’s energy use in 2019, the data shows. Coal plants, which burn approximately 54% of all coal used in the country, provide 52% of generating capacity and 66% of electricity output – down from a peak of 81% in 2007.
China’s upcoming five year plan... will set national targets and priorities for the next five years. The energy targets that will be set by the plan mean it will be a crucial document for global efforts to tackle climate change.
China’s 14th FYP, five-year plan, setting out its national goals for 2021-2025, will arguably be one of the world’s most important documents for global efforts to tackle climate change.
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UN Climate Conference Postponed as World Grapples With Virus
United Nations climate talks scheduled for November in Scotland have been postponed as the coronavirus continues to spread
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Oil/Gas Stock Prices Continue to Plunge
Fossil Fuels Demand Continues Historic Fall
Up, Down
Gasoline Demand Drops Most Ever
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March 2020
Energy Lobby Op-Ed Says "People like cheap energy"
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The Madmen of Climate Denial
Drilled: A True Crime Podcast about Climate Change
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UN/WMO Report / State of the Global Climate
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Shell makes plans for the future: An invite draws in a climate scientist
A report from the frontlines of the decarbonization movement
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'Goks Uncertainty Language': Editing US Government Documents to Insert Climate Denial and Equivocation Language
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Andrew Wheeler, Administrator of the US EPA, 'spinning' the Administration's climate record
Congressional oversight committee pushes back
"Excluding climate from the budget, eliminating research and voluntary industry partnership programs, and weakening modest existing rules, which is happening, does not give me any indication that the agency is taking this environmental threat seriously," (Rep. Tonko) said.
Wheeler, however, sought to shift the blame for EPA's limited response to climate change onto lawmakers.
"We take climate change seriously. We are implementing the laws Congress has given us," the EPA chief said. "Congress has not passed any new additional laws to address climate change."
Early this Congress, Tonko spearheaded Energy and Commerce's passage of a measure, H.R. 9, to keep the United States in the Paris climate accord. He is now leading the House's effort to pass a more ambitious carbon-cutting measure (E&E Daily, Feb. 25). Neither bill is likely to pass in the Republican-controlled Senate.
"Mr. Administrator, with all due respect, I don't know how you could make a statement like that after the Administration's complete abandonment of federal climate action," Tonko responded. "Americans are watching; the world is watching. I don't think anyone is reassured."
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Another scientific study, another eye-opening result: Methane CH4 is more prevalent than thought
This result indicates that anthropogenic fossil CH4 emissions are underestimated by about 38 to 58 teragrams CH4 per year, or about 25 to 40 per cent of recent estimates. Our record highlights the human impact on the atmosphere and climate, provides a firm target for inventories of the global CH4 budget, and will help to inform strategies for targeted emission reductions.
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BP pledges to cut its emissions, to 'reimagine' a NetZero goal by 2050, as memories of the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster continue on...
BP "Reimagining Energy" ... Our purpose is reimagining energy for people and our planet. We want to help the world reach net zero and improve people’s lives.
- We will aim to dramatically reduce carbon in our operations and in our production, and grow new low carbon businesses, products and services.
- We will advocate for fundamental and rapid progress towards Paris and strive to be a leader in transparency.
- We know we don’t have all the answers and will listen and work with others.
- We want to be an energy company with purpose; one that is trusted by society, valued by shareholders and motivating for everyone who works at BP.
- We believe we have the experience and expertise, the relationships and the reach, the skill and the will, to do this.
This will mean tackling around 415 million tonnes of emissions – 55 million from our operations and 360 million tonnes from the carbon content of our upstream oil and gas production. Importantly these are absolute reductions, to net zero, which is what the world needs most of all. We are also aiming to cut the carbon intensity of the products we sell by 50% by 2050 or sooner.
The world’s carbon budget is finite and running out fast; we need a rapid transition to net zero. -- Bernard Looney, chief executive officer
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Questions of Scope: How to Define and Measure Emissions Reductions
More on Fossil Fuels
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Via the U.S. National Center for Science Education (@NCSE) and Carbon Brief:
Nine ‘tipping points’ that could be triggered by climate change
- 1. Shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
- 2. West Antarctic ice sheet disintegration
- 3. Amazon rainforest dieback
- 4. West African monsoon shift
- 5. Permafrost and methane hydrates
- 6. Coral reef die-off
- 7. Indian monsoon shift
- 8. Greenland ice sheet disintegration
- 9. Boreal forest shift
Tipping Points: 'Too close for comfort'
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Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation
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Real Money's Jim Cramer explains...
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- Extreme Projections (RCPs) at Issue
- Maybe a More Middling Projection Is Called For (or Not)
- Do You Feel Lucky?
- Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs)
- A new generation of scenarios, called the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), has a much more nuanced approach to baselines.
- RCPs to SSPs ... This means IPCC authors can highlight a broader range of climate change outcomes.
- IPCC reports draw on the many years of work by the scientific community investigating climate change.
- More than 830 coordinating lead authors, lead authors and review editors from over 80 countries and covering a range of scientific, technical and socio-economic views and expertise, produced the three working group contributions, supported by over 1000 contributing authors and drawing on the insights of over 2,000 expert reviewers in a process of repeated review and revision.
- The authors assessed more than 30,000 scientific papers to develop the Fifth Assessment Report. About 60 authors and editors drawn from the IPCC Bureau and from Working Group author teams have been involved in the writing of the Synthesis Report.
- ○
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Famous Money Advisor - Author - TV Personality, Jim Cramer, is down on fossil fuel companies
I'm done with fossil fuels. They're done... We're in the death-knell phase.
- (Video interview)
○
2020: Looking Out at the New Year
Hottest Decade on Record
(Via International wire services reporting)
The decade that just ended was by far the hottest ever measured on Earth, capped off by the second-warmest year on record, two US agencies NASA and NOAA reported. And scientists said they see no end to the way man-made climate change keeps shattering records.
“If you think you’ve heard this story before, you haven’t seen anything yet,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said at the close of a decade plagued by raging wildfires, melting ice and extreme weather that researchers have repeatedly tied to human activity.
Schmidt said Earth as a whole is probably the hottest it has been during the Holocene — the past 11,500 years or so — meaning this could be the warmest period since the dawn of civilization. But scientists’ estimates of ancient global temperatures, based on tree rings, ice cores and other telltale signs, are not precise enough to say that with certainty.
The 2010s averaged 58.4 degrees Fahrenheit (14.7 degrees Celsius) worldwide, or 1.4 degrees (0.8 C) higher than the 20th century average and more than one-third of a degree (one-fifth of a degree C) warmer than the previous decade, which had been the hottest on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The decade had eight of the 10 hottest years on record. The only other years in the top 10 were 2005 and 1998.
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Movers and shakers in the world of capital are shifting investments
More are disinvesting in short-term high risk fossil fuels
Climate impacts are factoring in to strategies
Chris Hohn, the front-of-market money manager with $30 billion in assets, is pushing portfolio companies to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and disclose their carbon footprint. If they don’t, he says he’ll oust their boards or dump their shares... (Read the story at Bloomberg)
From SJS / GreenPolicy360's siterunner:
U.S. CO2 Emissions Data/Graphs for 2019: Coal continues downward trend, Renewables continue up
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For Years he has claimed climate change and global warming are a 'Hoax'. Today he says 'no, it's a very serious subject', then he attacks the foundation law of environmental protection
National Environmental Policy Act
NEPA is often said to be the Magna Carta of the environmental movement...
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An Australian in the midst of the fires: Time to cast a harsh judgment and 'some blame' on 'the other side' reporting of climate denial
Murdoch Media -- Australia, U.K., U.S. & International 24/7/365, Concerted Campaign Against 'Greenies' Continues Day In, Day Out
Murdoch's News Corp
'Dangerous, misinformation'
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2019: GreenPolicy360 Featured Stories
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December 2019
Looking Back, Looking Forward
High points and low points from 2019
Katharine Hayhoe, PhD, of Texas Tech, looking beyond the U.S., is very encouraged by real-world, large-scale, system-wide actions that are being taken by countries around the world. For example:
Canada has a federal price on carbon and re-elected the party that introduced it (as compared to Australia where they were voted out and the carbon tax was flushed down the toilet).
The United Kingdom has (at least temporarily) imposed a moratorium on fracking.
Finland is phasing out coal and it will be banned by 2029.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is divesting from companies dedicated to oil and gas exploration.
Ireland became the first country in the world to divest from fossil fuels entirely.
New Zealand has committed to being carbon neutral by 2050, and Scotland by 2045. Additionally, nearly 70% of Scotland’s electricity is already green.
Hayhoe says she is encouraged by “the increasing awareness of the climate crisis and its coverage by the media,” and she pointed to youth protests, major IPCC and National Climate Assessment reports...
Emissions Up, Heat Up
2019 --- After Years of Warning Reports --- and Years of Rejections of the Reports, the Science and Data
A Decade Comes to an End, 2020 Begins as the #ClimateCrisis Accelerates
The Production Gap report, which revealed that the world was planning to produce about 50% more fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 2 C, and 120% more than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 C. Rather than reducing emissions as promised, the International Monetary Fund found countries have been stoking them by subsidizing fossil fuels to the tune of trillions of dollars a year.
Hard on the Production Gap report, a report by the World Meteorological Organization showed the concentration of climate-heating greenhouse gases had hit a new record high in 2018 with no sign of a slowdown.
This was followed by the U.N.’s Emissions Gap report, which warned that even if countries met all the pledges they had signed up to in 2015 (which is unlikely), we could expect a 3.2 C temperature rise by the end of the century. This would make much more of the world unlivable, with hotter, deadlier heatwaves, more frequent floods and droughts and lost harvests.
The year comes to an end amid extreme weather events, superstorms, heatwaves and wildfires...
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Bill McKibben at the Bioneers Conference
- "This is the 30th birthday of Bioneers..." Bill talks of climate change.....
- Video, Introduced by Kenny Ausubel of the Bioneers
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More Than Climate Plans Are Needed
Bill McKibben: Whoever gets the Dem nomination should hire whoever is writing @MikeBloomberg's climate plans.
Mike Bloomberg has a plan to clean up electricity and it doesn’t need Congress
Bloomberg would supercharge the EPA to get rid of coal and block new natural gas
Via Vox / By David Roberts / December 17, 2019
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Russia's President Putin Talks Climate
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Climate Summit in Madrid ends without action agenda. More promises to act, few commitments
Video with Dr. Peter Carter/ 'What about the science?'
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The Science and Policy of Climate Action
Former California Governor Jerry Brown:
“Scientists have to get the word to the politicians that the lifeblood of the future is new knowledge.”
It's up to scientists like you... To educate... To cut through the fog of politics...
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In Madrid, how did the first week of the 25th UN Climate Change Conference go?
UN: About the Conference, Things You Need to Know
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Europe’s Green Deal Aims For 2050 ‘Climate-Neutral Continent’
In Madrid at the 25th Annual International Climate Conference
The European Commission has unveiled the three-decade roadmap towards a sustainable economy. The Green Deal aims to achieve EU’s climate neutrality by mid-century and will cover all economic sectors, notably energy, agriculture, and transport.
“The European Green Deal is our new growth strategy,” said the new Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen on December 11. The former defense minister of Germany has promised to present the first European Climate Law within 100 days.
By next summer, the EU Executive will launch a plan to increase EU’s 2030 climate target from the current 40% to 50-55% in order to make possible the net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Among the actions to lead the global fight against climate change, the Commission proposes revisions on the renewable energy and energy efficiency directives. In this area, there is a particular focus on redesigning European buildings...
World leaders arrive at the 25th UN Climate Change Conference
#TiempoDeActuar! #TimeforAction !
"We inherited the planet from our parents, and we need to hand it over to future generations" - @KurtykaMichal formally opens the #ClimateChange gathering before handing over its Presidency to Carolina Schmidt @CarolaSchmidtZ.
Recently a majority of lawmakers in the European Parliament voted to declare "a climate and environmental emergency in Europe and globally." The European Parliament vote to declare a 'climate emergency' stands in stark contrast to the United States and its president.
Read about Fossil Fuels and Continuing Emissions Production
(CNN) It's a summit that could make or break the world's climate commitments.
Around 25,000 people from 200 countries are descending on Madrid this week to attend the COP25 climate change conference. They include dozens of heads of state and government, business leaders, scientists and, of course, activists -- including Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg.
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Sunday that the summit marks the "point of no return" in humanity's fight against climate change.
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GreenPolicy360 Arctic Watch
What happens in the North doesn't stay in the North
The North Polar Region has warmed almost as much in the last decade as the whole of the Earth in the last 137 years, according to a new study.
The research paper claims the Arctic has warmed by 1.35°F (0.75°C) in 10 years, while Earth as a whole has warmed by around 1.44°F (0.8°C) since the start of the 1880s.
The new research paper, written by 15 international experts, predicts the effects of a 3.6°F (2°C) average global temperature rise – a milestone anticipated in the Paris Agreement.
'Many of the changes over the past decade are so dramatic they make you wonder what the next decade of warming will bring,' said lead author Eric Post, a UC Davis professor of climate change ecology.
'If we haven't already entered a new Arctic, we are certainly on the threshold.'
Science Advances: Arctic Warming Fast & Faster
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November 2019
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UK-US Trade Agreement after Brexit: Climate Action Provisions?
Check out what US trade reps state can't be added into any agreement (climate policy banned)
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Central Banks and IMF Plan Climate Impact Economic 'Stress Tests'
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Climate Action Now
"We have to start working beyond targets," New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern tells Parliament. "We have to start working beyond aspiration. We have start moving beyond signs of hope and deliver signs of action. That is what this government is doing and proudly so."
With a goal of Net Zero Emissions
October 2019
Covering Climate Now
- https://twitter.com/hashtag/coveringclimatenow #coveringclimatenow
A global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time
More than 250 news outlets around the world have committed to Covering Climate Now. What is it? An initiative to provide focused coverage of the climate crisis in print, on air and online.
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On Thin Ice
The Arctic has been warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, with higher temperatures pushing sea ice into a loop of melting and thinning. Its extent is lower today than in the ‘80s and ‘90s in “every area, every month and every season”, according to a recent IPCC report, which points out the plunging sea ice levels of September are probably unseen in at least 1,000 years. The same report points out that the Arctic’s sea ice melt season has grown as ice melts earlier and waters freeze later in the year. “We'll have winter sea ice for a long time to come, but unless actions are quickly taken, the summer sea ice might be essentially gone only a few decades from now,” says Dr. Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
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Soaking Up CO2: Don't Forget the Role of the Fungi
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Slow Desertification, Buy Time to Fully Confront Global Warming
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Loss of Natural Vegetation Has Huge Impact on Climate
CO2 increases, observed to be correlated with more recent temperature trends according to NASA’s OCO-2 satellite observations, are a result of trends in the loss of natural vegetation, respiration and ability to uptake carbon...
~
A new NASA study provides space-based evidence that Earth’s tropical regions were the cause of the largest annual increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration seen in at least 2,000 years.
In 2015 and 2016, OCO-2 recorded atmospheric carbon dioxide increases that were 50 percent larger than the average increase seen in recent years preceding these observations. These measurements are consistent with those made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That increase was about 3 parts per million of carbon dioxide per year -- or 6.3 gigatons of carbon. In recent years, the average annual increase has been closer to 2 parts per million of carbon dioxide per year -- or 4 gigatons of carbon.
These record increases occurred even though emissions from human activities in 2015-16 are estimated to have remained roughly the same as they were prior to the El Nino, which is a cyclical warming pattern of ocean circulation in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean that can affect weather worldwide.
In eastern and southeastern tropical South America, including the Amazon rainforest, severe drought spurred by El Nino made 2015 the driest year in the past 30 years. Temperatures also were higher than normal. These drier and hotter conditions stressed vegetation and reduced photosynthesis, meaning trees and plants absorbed less carbon from the atmosphere. The effect was to increase the net amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.
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"Managed Retreat"
Los Angeles Times: The Climate Crisis Is Here, What Are You Doing About It?
September 2019
Carbon Budgeting as Financial Planning Budgeting
As #PlanetCitizens w/ GreenPolicy360, we turn to our friends at #GlobalCitizen for a deep discussion of a heating Earth, CO2 and a ticking clock
- SJS/GreenPolicy360 -- We/GreenPolicy360 recommend a new descriptor for carbon pricing -- Not a tax, let's call it... +EC... +Emissions Cost
One Year Later --- as Greta's Protest of One Grows Worldwide
- One becomes many, a ripple becomes waves
Climate Week / Climate Strike
• https://twitter.com/hashtag/ClimateAction
• https://twitter.com/hashtag/ClimateStrikes
• https://twitter.com/hashtag/ClimateCrisis
• https://twitter.com/hashtag/FridaysForFuture
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Scott Sawyer Planet Citizen lays it out -- Confronting Climate Change
Go Scott go! Climate Week is happening!!
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Climate Change Solutions: the Fight for Earth
• https://time.com/climate-change-solutions/
Dr. Marvel: Beyond Hope Is Courage
Time to #ActonClimate, Putting Science to Good Use
More from Dr. Kate Marvel
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"Clean Energy for America": Elizabeth Warren's Climate Plan
Warren Picks Up the Inslee Climate Plan
August 2019
Methane, a huge driver of climate change
Read More on Methane Production and the EPA
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Why the Democratic National Committee Must Change the Rules and Hold a Climate Debate
By Naomi Klein
NYT / Bernie Sanders’s ‘Green New Deal’: A $16 Trillion Climate Plan
Eight Dem Pres Candidates Prep for Climate Debate / Hosted by CNN, Sept. 4
Gov. Inslee Out, Calif Sen. Harris to Skip
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Tree Mortality
The Oldest Baobabs Are Ending Their Time on Earth
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Scientific American: 'Growing Number of Americans Are Alarmed about Global Warming'
The Jet Stream, the Gulf Stream, Greenland, Europe & Florida: All Connected
Climate change: how the jet stream is changing your weather
https://www.ft.com/content/591395fe-b761-11e9-96bd-8e884d3ea203
Northern Atlantic current is shifting course — with implications for crops and sea levels
A heatwave in Greenland is producing record highs across the ice sheet, including at East Grip, the second highest monitoring station. “If you start melting at the top of the ice sheet, we are going to lose [the] Greenland ice sheet long-term."
Via London's Financial Times
At the summit of the Greenland ice cap the temperature rarely rises above zero degrees centigrade — the elevation is 3,200m and the ice below is more than a mile thick.
But last Friday (Aug 2, 2019), as the sun beat down, a small weather station laden with sensors captured something highly unusual: the temperature crept past zero and up to 3.6C — the highest since records began three decades ago. As temperatures rose across the massive ice sheet, which blankets an area five times the size of Germany, around 60 per cent of the surface started to melt, one of the largest ever recorded.
Scientists know of only three prior occasions in the past 800 years when there has been melting at the very top of the Greenland ice cap, which is kept chilled by the large volume of ice beneath. But this seems to be getting more frequent — it is now the second time this decade it has happened.
“The last time we saw melting at the summit, in 2012, we thought it was the extreme of the extremes, and wouldn’t happen again so quickly,” says Konrad Steffen, a professor of climate and cryosphere at ETH Zurich, who operates a network of 18 monitoring stations across the ice sheet. “But now we are facing more of these extremes.”
The immediate trigger for the heatwave was a shift in atmospheric currents high above the earth’s surface: the North Atlantic Jet Stream... Scientists are racing to understand how this current of air is changing as the planet heats up...
As Gulf Stream cools and weakens, what’s in store for Florida?
Melting ice caps in Greenland are disrupting this marine circulatory system, which has reached its weakest point in 1,600 years, recent studies show
Via the South Florida Sun Sentinel
Visible from the air as a ribbon of cobalt blue water a few miles off the coast, the Gulf Stream forms part of a clockwise system of currents that transports warm water from the tropics up the east coast and across the Atlantic to northwestern Europe. In the frigid climate near Greenland, the water cools, sinks and flows south again, rolling through the deep ocean toward the tropics.
A weaker Gulf Stream would mean higher sea levels for Florida’s east coast. It could lead to colder winters in northern Europe (one reason many scientists prefer the term climate change to global warming). And it could mean that a lot of the heat that would have gone to Europe would stay along the U.S. east coast and in Florida.
“If you slow down the sinking of water in the North Atlantic, that means you have a pileup of waters along the eastern seaboard of the United States and the Gulf of Mexico,” said Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group. “That means that you have increased regional sea level rise just from that ocean circulation change. So that’s not good for New York City, Norfolk or along Florida.”
Unlike other climate change phenomena, such as sea level rise, the collapse of the current could happen suddenly if it reaches a tipping point.
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July 2019
Read the Interview between Paul Hawken and the Bioneers
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Climate Crisis, Atmospheric Disruption, the Global Horizon and 'Weight of the World'
Burdens of Being a Climate Scientist, Pressures of Everyday Work and Realizations
Green New Deal, Positions on the Issues, US 2020 Presidential Campaign
(as of July 2, 2019, updated weekly)
Comprehensive comparison on climate of U.S. Democratic Party 2020 presidential candidates on climate
GreenPolicy 360: Update: In the United States, as the world observes, a political crisis in in underway. The U.S. politics is roiled by dissension, anger, a president who is more than divisive with accusations and daily threats against people and countries.
Currently, in the U.S. Senate, the Republican party is wielding a majority vote as a result of an electoral system promolgated at the time of slavery as a compromise to bring into the federal union the slave-holding states of the South. The so-called 'red states' in today's U.S. politics the vestiges of the past have resulted in a Senate Majority leader from Kentucky, Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has hold the power in the Senate to allow or block any legislative initiative or legislative proposal. With the blocking mandate of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, there is no chance of passage of climate legislation. The filibuster and arcane parliamentary rules, backed by U.S. Supreme Court enabled political financing by deep pocket donors, added on top of the Senate's composition determined with a Constitutional representation of two Senators per state no matter the population of the state, ensures that no significant change will occur for years to come. The disproportionate power of small population, rural U.S. states is a fact. Blocking of visionary and necessary change, blocking of the nation's and global security is a fact. The withdrawal of the U.S. from the international climate agreement leaves the United States as the only country in the world to reject the 2015 Paris climate accord.
The question becomes 'what's next?'
As Democratic party candidates campaign for president in the 2020 election, the Democratic party continues to look at possibilities for substantive change in the nation's direction, beginning with a forward-looking energy policy and #ClimateSolutions to realistically, immediately advance national and global security.
The coming storm that is expanding on the horizon -- climate disruption and all its consequences -- is more than real. Science can issue the warnings of a #ClimateCrisis. It is up to the political leadership to act.
A Climate Debate by Democratic Presidential Candidates? Then What? What's Next?
Let's take a look at what one commentator, David Roberts, says about questions to be asked:
According to most polling, Democrats’ best hope in 2020 is a fairly narrow majority in the Senate. There is no chance of getting to 60 Senate votes on any Democratic bill. So as long as Mitch McConnell is willing to filibuster everything, no legislation, including climate legislation, can pass. If Democrats win a majority in the Senate, will you advocate for reforming or scrapping the filibuster?
In my experience, everyone, including candidates and average voters, is annoyed by this question. And it violates my premise above, since it’s not directly under the president’s power.
But I don’t see any way around it. I don’t see any point in talking about legislation of any kind as long as McConnell wields the filibuster. He will kill everything he has the ability to kill. He has made that very, very clear.
I would also accept, as a substitute here, any kind of democracy reform question — restoring voting rights, ending partisan gerrymandering, statehood for DC, what have you. I agree with South Bend mayor and candidate Pete Buttigieg: The system is so structurally stacked against progressives at this point that they have got to take the time to prioritize structural reform for once. Ambitious climate policy, or policy of any kind, has become prohibitively difficult.
Conservatives want to break Congress as a legislative body and simply use it to stack the federal bench with conservative judges. That’s largely what they’ve done under Trump. Democrats have got to make the system work again before any of the other stuff they talk about is possible.
○
June 2019
As the US Democratic party holds its first 2020 presidential candidates debate in Miami...
Out of four hours of televised debate, how much time involved climate and/or 'existential questions'?
15 Minutes Among Twenty Candidates. Two Nights, Eight Minutes+Seven Minutes
The first climate question arrives more than 80 minutes into the Dem presidential debate on both nights
Photo via Vox
Via the Washington Post / First Debate Night, Seven Minutes in Miami, Florida
"Tonight’s debate made it crystal clear that the media and the political establishment are out of touch with our generation," said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement. "Our survival is worth more time than vague, irrelevant, and trivial questions posed 80 minutes into the debate to a few minor candidates."
GreenPolicy360: In 2016, during all the US presidential debates, a
climate policy question was asked, what, once? Tonight (June 26th) the US Democratic Party starts their presidential campaign debate, in Miami, even as the current US pres denies the big picture, the climate/global/atmospheric threat, the existential challenges, the national/state and local #ClimateCrisis impacts.
For decades now the GreenPolicy team has warned of the gathering crisis and we have urged a New Vision, a strategic vision with New Definitions of National and Global Security. The time is now for the Democratic Party to step up and face the great challenge of our generation -- climate disruption, climate crisis.
In Florida, the consequences of sea level rise are vivid and VERY real.
Globally, this is an existantial crisis, climate disruption, that is, atmospheric disruption, what GreenPolicy360 calls the disruption of the "thin blue layer", earth's life protecting atmosphere.
Speaking of climate disruption, global security and protection/preservation of the atmosphere, watch this scientist talk of the clear and present dangers of nuclear war. We are "one mistake away" from nuclear war initiated by any of the nuclear weapons countries (the U.S., Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, France, the U.K., North Korea) leading to regional impacts spreading to global winter and collapse of civilization.
We need New Definitions of National and Global Security and concerted action now to protect our common security and prevent the fast escalating threats to life as we know it.
Via the Tampa Bay Times / Florida could face $76 billion in climate change costs by 2040
• https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/us/miami-democratic-debates.html
No question is of more critical importance to Florida’s future, or to the Democrats’ chance to take the state in next year’s presidential election. It is so important that some activists had hoped that climate change would be the sole focus when 20 Democrats take the debate stage for the first time in this campaign on Wednesday and Thursday in downtown Miami.
Climate change is now among the top three 2020 election issues cited by Florida Democrats, according to a new statewide survey. Some 71 percent of Florida voters, including 85 percent of Democrats, support government action to address climate change, according to the survey by Climate Nexus in partnership with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, which polled 1,558 registered Florida voters online this month.
All of Miami Beach is low-lying, but parts are just a foot or two above sea level, making it prone to flooding during storms and extreme high tides, according to Miami Beach City Manager Jimmy Morales. Add the estimated 9 inches that sea levels have risen in the region in the past 100 years, and you have a recipe for costly flooding.
Then there is the problem of the very ground on which Miami Beach and much of South Florida sits. Made from the remnants of ancient coral reefs, the porous limestone beneath the region is not unlike Swiss cheese, with natural underground "pipes" that allow water to bubble up to the surface...
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BlueGreen Alliance Letter to U.S. House of Representatives in Support of H.R. 9, the Climate Action Now Act
The BlueGreen Alliance urged the U.S. House of Representatives to pass H.R. 9, the Climate Action Now Act
Labor, Environmental Leaders Release Historic “Solidarity for Climate Action” Platform
June 24, 2019 / Groups Say Platform Will Create Good-Paying Jobs, Address Income Inequality and the Climate Crisis
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As the US President, Vice President and Republican party ranks deny climate science and the climate threat, the evidence and facts continue to 'pile on' -- national and global security is in critical peril:
Evidence, Facts, Science & Action
"Earth in Human Hands, Now Is the Time for Climate Action
GreenPolicy360 Like a Doctor Would Do, Monitor a Patient's 'Vital Signs'
Climate Change: NASA Asks the Question, How Do We Know about Climate Systems?
• https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
Trump Ends Clean Power Plan
• https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-epa-weaken-clean-power-20190619-story.html
• https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/climate/epa-coal-emissions.html
Trump EPA finalizes rollback of key Obama climate rule that targeted coal plants
The U.S. electricity sector needs to cut its emissions 74 percent over 2005 levels by 2030 to avoid hitting the 2-degree mark, according to the International Energy Agency.
Overall, the country must slash greenhouse gas emissions 48 percent by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency's Brent Wanner, with the deepest cuts coming from the power sector because cheap alternatives to coal are readily available.
Jason Bordoff, founding director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, in an interview said that his group had found that more aggressive action by U.S. officials such as a nationwide carbon tax of $50 per ton could cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent over the next decade.
“Market forces don’t do that by themselves,” Bordoff said. “You need regulations.”
A paper published this year by researchers at Harvard, Boston University and Syracuse University, as well as Resources for the Future, said that the agency’s new rule might increase efficiency at individual coal plants, but then they might end up operating more frequently and for a longer time.
The researchers found that as many as 28 percent of the plants affected could actually produce higher overall emissions in 2030...
The Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) proposed replacement of the Clean Power Plan (CPP), targets heat rate improvements (HRIs) at individual coal plants in the US. Due to greater plant efficiency, such HRIs could lead to increased generation and emissions, known as an emissions rebound effect... (the Trump EPA replacement, ACE) is expected to increase the number of operating coal plants and amount of coal-fired electricity generation...
(Associated Press) Obama EPA head Gina McCarthy said Trump officials had "made painfully clear that they are incapable of rising to the challenge and tackling this crisis. They have shown a callous disregard for EPA's mission, a pattern of climate science denial and an inexcusable indifference to the consequences of climate change."
Burning of fossil fuels for electricity, transportation and heat is the main human source of heat-trapping carbon emissions.
Trump has rejected scientific warnings on climate change, including a dire report this year from scientists at more than a dozen federal agencies noting that global warming from fossil fuels "presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life." Administration officials argue climate science is imperfect, and that it's not clear climate change would have as great an impact as forecast...
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the change as a "dirty power scam" and "a stunning giveaway to big polluters." She called climate change "the existential threat of our time" and said the administration was ignoring scientific studies and yielding to special interests.
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18 June 2019
Scientists’ warning to humanity: microorganisms and climate change
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-019-0222-5
In the Anthropocene, in which we now live, climate change is impacting most life on Earth. Microorganisms support the existence of all higher trophic life forms. To understand how humans and other life forms on Earth (including those we are yet to discover) can withstand anthropogenic climate change, it is vital to incorporate knowledge of the microbial ‘unseen majority’. We must learn not just how microorganisms affect climate change (including production and consumption of greenhouse gases) but also how they will be affected by climate change and other human activities. This Consensus Statement documents the central role and global importance of microorganisms in climate change biology. It also puts humanity on notice that the impact of climate change will depend heavily on responses of microorganisms, which are essential for achieving an environmentally sustainable future.
GreenPolicy360: In our EOS website, we speak of the 'tiny little ones', the unseen species, the essential building blocks of life, of soil and water, the foundations of the food chain, the critical connecting tissue of the more 'iconic' larger species ... take a look at our associated www.tinybluegreen.com site and explore the rarely seen or considered ocean/sea life that is being impacted greatly by climate change.
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Donald Trump tells the UK's Prince Charles that the US has 'clean climate'
President blames other countries for environmental crisis, in long talk with prince
GreenPolicy360: As human-caused climate change threatens our future well-being, the US president dismantles climate science programs. Donald Trump speaks to the UK of the clean climate in the US, that is, environmental action and successes of those leaders proceeding him, even as the US president dismantle with an 'aggressive schedule' most every significant US environmental protection federal program. The Trump administration continues this record, and escalates the risks and damage by abandoning international climate and environmental agreements, attacking climate science and its warnings, and blocking nearly every move in Congress and the U.S. courts to advance environmental protection. We are left to wonder what he means by a "good climate, as opposed to a disaster".
Trump: “He (Prince Charles) is really into climate change and I think that’s great. What he really wants and what he really feels warmly about is the future. He wants to make sure future generations have climate that is good climate, as opposed to a disaster, and I agree. Well, the United States right now has among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics. And it’s even getting better because I agree with that we want the best water, the cleanest water. It’s crystal clean, has to be crystal clean clear.”
Asked by Piers Morgan if he accepted the science on climate change, Trump said: “I believe there’s a change in weather, and I think it changes both ways. Don’t forget, it used to be called global warming, that wasn’t working, then it was called climate change. Now it’s actually called extreme weather, because with extreme weather you can’t miss.”
- Note: An Associated Press analysis (June 18) of federal air data showed U.S. progress on cleaning the air may be stagnating after decades of improvement. Despite Trump's repeated false claims that America's air is the cleanest it's ever been, there were 15% more days with unhealthful air both last year and the year before than on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when America had its fewest number of those days since at least 1980.
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84 Environmental Rules on the Way Out Under Trump
Via the NY Times / June 3, 2019
• https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks.html
• https://twitter.com/nytclimate/status/1136094068914774016
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Children and the Future: Rights to Health and Life
Social Media Toolkit for #AllEyesOnJuliana
• https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/climate/climate-lawsuit-juliana.html
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Trump administration escalates war on climate science
• https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/trump-climate-science.html
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Via Earth Institute / Columbia University
The Trump Administration is losing on climate in the courts. More than two and a half years into the Trump Administration, no climate change-related regulatory rollback brought before the courts has yet survived legal challenge. Nevertheless, climate change is one arena where the administration’s rollbacks have been both visible and real. In total, the Sabin Center’s U.S. Climate Deregulation Tracker identifies a total of 94 actions taken by the executive branch in 2017 and 2018 to undermine and reverse climate protections.
• https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2019/06/10/trump-climate-deregulation-tracker-2019/
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Jerry Brown launching a California-China climate change institute at UC Berkeley
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article231494868.html
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Via Vox / Jay Inslee is writing the climate plan the next president should adopt
Inslee’s campaign is systematically translating the GND’s lofty goals — to decarbonize the economy sector by sector, in a way that creates high-quality jobs and protects frontline communities — into policy proposals, focused on an immediate 10-year mobilization. This isn’t just a campaign play, it’s a document the next Democratic president is going to want in-hand when the time comes to get to work. (And if that president needs some kind of climate czar ...)
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Thought for the Day: A Man Named Grantham, Q & A, Beacon Hill, Boston
• https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/11/magazine/climate-change-exxon-renewable-energy.html
Jeremy Grantham’s fund is going long on lithium and copper, which he believes will form the vascular system of future renewable-powered supergrids. His confidence derives from an odd and specific conviction that “sooner or later, there will be a carbon tax,” and much of the market capitalization of the leading oil and gas companies will be erased. “You have a certainty,” he said. “It will happen. Or we’ll be on our way to a failed civilization.”
It took me a moment to process what this meant. Grantham was saying that a bet on a future carbon tax was a sure thing because the absence of a carbon tax meant civilizational catastrophe. If he were right, he could make billions. If he were wrong, it wouldn’t matter, because the world would be on fire. “Perfectly fine logic,” Grantham said, as the old radiators gurgled around him...
In the last few years, Grantham has committed all but 2 percent of his personal fortune to funding projects — energy storage, pesticides, lightweight cars — that might help save us in the event of two degrees of warming. In June 2018, he gave a keynote address at an investment conference in Chicago.
The two speeches before Grantham’s were called “Take a Balanced Approach to Sourcing Cash Flows” and “Making Sense of the Multitude of Multifactor ETFs.” Grantham called his speech “The Race of Our Lives.”
“You could call this presentation the story of carbon dioxide and Homo sapiens,” he began. Then he spoke for nearly an hour about glacial runoff, food scarcity and lithium batteries. He explained how a turbine’s efficiency increased exponentially with the length of its blades. He said that offshore wind farms in the churning North Sea could soon provide the cheapest power on the planet. He rose to a techno-utopian pitch, speaking about our obligations to our grandchildren, decency over profit.
Even as he spoke lucidly about climate change, Grantham represented a tangled and confusing paradox. Perched as he was at the pinnacle of the market, he was developing an acute sense of the market’s failure to address the problem that most obsessed him. Yet he continued to help oversee a $70 billion firm, which was the main source of his wealth.
If anyone was living inside the tortured contradictions between the market and the climate — between our modern economy and its ultimate external cost — Grantham, I thought, was the person.
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EU plans first satellite fleet to monitor CO2 in every country
OCO-3 News Coverage Should Have Been of a Globally Important Event
OCO-3 arrives at the International Space Station to begin its earth science-space mission. There's little to find in Media coverage on its real-world importance whether on Google News, Bing Search, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go, pick your international news sources...
Yet, in fact and substance, the science of OCO-3 is critically important. Earth Science. Measuring CO2. JPL-Caltech/NASA, scientific inquiry at its best. Essential data and baseline information critical for informed policy and decision-making (yet President Donald Trump tried to kill the launch of OCO-3 and related US FY2018 missions to measure and monitor CO2).
A global security story... National security... Existential threats ...
OCO-3 Arrives at the International Space Station
(Interview at JPL courtesy of the LA Times)
OCO-3 was built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge for less than $100 million, using parts left over from its predecessor, OCO-2. Once the carbon observatory gets to the ISS, a robotic arm will mount it on the underside of the space station so it can keep a close eye on the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere.
That will help scientists answer questions about how and why levels of the greenhouse gas fluctuate over days, months and years.
“Our goal is to get really good data so we can make informed decisions about how to manage carbon and carbon emissions in the future,” said Annmarie Eldering, the mission’s project scientist at JPL.
Carbon dioxide makes up a tiny fraction of the molecules in our atmosphere — roughly 400 parts per million. But seemingly small changes in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have an outsized effect on the planet’s temperature.
“Carbon is really effective at trapping heat,” Eldering said. “Even changing the ratio from 300 parts per million to 400 parts per million makes a big difference.”
OCO-3 is so sensitive that it can detect changes as small as 1 part per million. So if CO2 levels go from 406 ppm one day to 407 ppm the next, the space-based observatory will record the increase.
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Climate Change News: Ireland Declares Climate Emergency
Via Climate Change News / Merkel pledges to make Germany carbon neutral by 2050
Addressing climate ministers from around the world at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin on May 14, German Chancellor Angela Merkel signaled plans to increase Germany’s climate response ambitions.
“It’s about climate neutrality. This means that we should not ensure there are absolutely no CO2 emissions but that if there are still CO2 emissions, we must find alternative mechanisms to store this CO2 or offset it,” Merkel said.
“I therefore propose that we have a discussion in the climate cabinet about how we could reach the goal of being CO2 neutral by 2050 and the discussion should not be about whether we can reach that goal but about how we will reach it.”
A net-zero emissions strategy would bring Germany in line with eight EU member states calling on the bloc to strengthen its mid-century climate targets.
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It's Way Overdue, It's Time for Action -- #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency
The Climate Mobilization - https://www.theclimatemobilization.org
• https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/victory-plan
• https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/implementation-plans
The Climate Reality Project - https://www.climaterealityproject.org
The Action Network - https://actionnetwork.org
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• https://betoorourke.com/climate-change
• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-29/beto-orourke-climate-change-plan
O'Rourke's climate change plan would "set a first-ever, net-zero emissions by 2030 carbon budget for federal lands, stopping new fossil fuel leases, changing royalties to reflect climate costs, and accelerating renewables development and forestation."
A four-part framework for addressing climate change:
- Start Cutting Pollution on Day One and Taking Executive Actions to Lead on Climate
- Mobilize $5 Trillion for Climate Change with Investment in Infrastructure, Innovation, and Our People and Communities
- Guarantee our Net-Zero Emissions Ambition by 2050
- Defend our Communities That Are Preparing for and Fighting Against Extreme Weather
O’Rourke’s website has the full rollout of the plan, which aims to re-enter the Paris agreement and seek a “more ambitious global plan for 2030 and beyond.” It also brings up a $5 trillion figure, and hints at how he plans on paying for it:
The first bill he sends to Congress will launch a 10-year mobilization of $5 trillion directly leveraged by a fully paid-for $1.5 trillion investment — the world’s largest-ever climate change investment in infrastructure, innovation, and in our people and communities.
The bill will be funded with the revenues generated by structural changes to the tax code that ensure corporations and the wealthiest among us pay their fair share and that we finally end the tens of billions of dollars of tax breaks currently given to fossil fuel companies.
O’Rourke’s website goes on to say “we need a guarantee that we will, in fact, achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and get halfway there by 2030.” The site notes these ambitions are in line with those of the Green New Deal.
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London (CNN) What's low-tech, sustainable and possibly the most effective thing we can do to fight climate change? Planting trees. A trillion of them. Tom Crowther is a climate change ecologist at Swiss university ETH Zurich. Four years ago he found there are about 3 trillion trees already on earth -- much higher than NASA's previous estimate of 400 billion. Now, his team of researchers has calculated there is enough room on the planet for an additional 1.2 trillion -- and that planting them would have huge benefits in terms of absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change.
"The amount of carbon that we can restore if we plant 1.2 trillion trees, or at least allow those trees to grow, would be way higher than the next best climate change solution," Crowther told CNN.
Because his research is currently under review for publication in the journal Science, he says he can't share exact figures of how much extra CO2 could be stored by those trees. But he points to numbers from Project Drawdown -- a non-profit that ranks climate solutions by the amount of CO2 they could remove from the atmosphere. Its number one ranked solution -- managing the release of HFC greenhouse gases from fridges and air conditioners -- could reduce atmospheric CO2 by 90 billion tons. Crowther says planting 1.2 trillion trees would give a reduction "way above" that figure... #afforestation #reforestation #rewild
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/13/worlds-lost-forests-returning-trees
• https://www.nationalforests.org/who-we-are/press-news/plant-50-million-trees
• https://www.greenbeltmovement.org
• https://www.nyrp.org/blog/nyc-just-planted-1-million-trees-heres-how-we-did-it
• https://www.arborday.org/enterprise/projects
• https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/plant-a-billion
• https://twitter.com/PozProgress/status/1120331413428031488
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Ways to combat climate change according to young activists
1. Learn as much as you can about climate change
2. Understand the government's role in climate change
3. Make politicians listen
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Kerry, Moniz challenge Trump on Climate Change / Via the LA Times
Developing new international initiatives to hold politicians accountable for undermining the fight against climate...
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House Democrats’ New Climate Legislation Would Ensure U.S. Honors Paris Agreement Commitments
Climate Bill introduced by Speaker Pelosi, Select Committee on Climate Chair Castor, Democratic colleagues
Washington, D.C.
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives have introduced legislation this past week to keep the United States in the Paris Climate Agreement.
With an announced goal of honoring US commitments to tackle climate change alongside the other nearly 200 nations that signed the agreement, Democratic leadership is moving from President Trump's previously announcement of his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement.
The House legislation is sponsored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis Chairwoman Kathy Castor (D-FL), House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ), House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS), House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), and House Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX).
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Global energy demand at highest growth in a decade, emissions reach record high in 2018
International Energy Agency: Global Energy & CO2 Status Report
Global energy consumption in 2018 increased at nearly twice the average rate of growth since 2010, driven by a robust global economy and higher heating and cooling needs in some parts of the world. Demand for all fuels increased, led by natural gas, even as solar and wind posted double digit growth. Higher electricity demand was responsible for over half of the growth in energy needs. Energy efficiency saw lacklustre improvement. As a result of higher energy consumption, CO2 emissions rose 1.7% last year and hit a new record.
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March 2019
"Now everyone's talking about climate change," U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said at one of three separate news conferences Wednesday, March 27th, on the issue of the Green New Deal.
SJS / GreenPolicy360 siterunner / former presidential campaign adv for Jerry Brown: "Set the agenda, draft a platform of policies to go for, step up and get out in front"
Florida, the site of the first Democrat presidential debate (in Miami), begins to focus in on critical issues of the 2020 campaign. Miami is most at risk for sea-level rise, followed closely by much of the Florida coastline and bay/estuarine regions like Tampa/St. Petersburg/Clearwater -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Sea-Level_Rise
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Via the Guardian / Top oil firms spending millions lobbying to block climate change policies
The largest five stock market listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m (£153m) a year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change... Increasingly they are using social media to successfully push their agenda to weaken and oppose any meaningful legislation to tackle global warming...
More #MoneyinPolitics / #PolitioPay at InfluenceMap.org
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Students Worldwide Are Striking to Demand Climate Action Change
Going Global: Student #ClimateStrike, March 15, 2019
• #ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency #GlobalWarming
• #ActOnClimate #SchoolsStrike4Climate #GretaThunberg
• #YouthForClimate #FridaysForFuture #GlobalStrikeforFuture
• #Klimaatstaking #ClimateJustice #SchoolStrike4Climate
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The Current US Environmental Protection Chief Speaks
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler touted the benefits of fossil fuel sources like coal while calling those who support urgent climate action “oblivious” during remarks to energy industry officials on Monday.
“What the United States offers the world in terms of energy is that our fossil fuels are extracted and produced in a more environmentally conscious manner than anywhere else in the world,” Wheeler said. “If other countries want to purchase coal on the open market, we mine our coal in a safer and more environmentally friendly manner than other nations.”
“The truth is that those who oppose U.S. fossil fuel production are actually taking the most environmentally preferable energy source off the table for the rest of the world. This is a disservice to human health and the environment,” the former coal lobbyist continued.
Wheeler claimed at the CERAWeek conference in Houston, Texas that “supporters of the Green New Deal – or plans like it – are not only oblivious to how far we’ve come, but also where we are headed.”
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March 12, 2019
Kathy Castor, Congressional chair of the new Select Committee on the Climate Crisis identifies climate failures of the Trump budget proposal
“The Trump administration’s budget proposal ignores the climate crisis. Climate science is clear: To help avert climate catastrophe, the United States needs to transition to a clean energy economy as fast as possible. The climate crisis must be addressed through virtually all areas of American life and, as a result, virtually all areas of the President’s budget should reflect this.
“The president’s budget fails to respond to the administration’s own warnings contained in the National Climate Assessment or propose any means to tackle the crisis. For example, moving to the clean energy economy means deploying technology we have now but also investing in new research to accelerate the development of breakthrough technologies and create new jobs. The Trump administration’s budget eliminates ARPA-E and all-but shutters the Department of Energy office dedicated to incubating groundbreaking research into clean transportation, renewable energy, and energy efficiency—thereby eliminating the hope for our workforce and our planet they bring. The scope of the climate challenge requires an all-hands-on-deck government investment in so many areas but certainly in advanced energy technologies...”
“America needs a budget that reflects the urgency of the climate crisis. The president’s budget lacks the insight and investment needed to get America moving and underscores that the cost of doing nothing is too high.”
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Rejectionist Climate Council?
Fifty-eight former officials organized by the American Security Project and the Center for Climate and Security write to President Trump to express concerns about the new climate council, which includes members who question the science behind global warming.
"It is dangerous to have national security analysis conform to politics," their letter states. "Our officials’ job is to ensure that we are prepared for current threats and future contingencies. We cannot do that if the scientific studies that inform our threat assessments are undermined."
"Climate change is a threat to US national security. Climate change is real, it is happening now, it is driven by humans, and it is accelerating. The overwhelming majority of scientists agree: less than 0.2% of peer-reviewed climate science papers dispute these facts."
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Observing CO2 Levels
Highest weekly average CO2 ever measured at Mauna Loa: 412.4 ppm, almost 4 ppm above same time last year.
February seems on its way to end as highest month too, most probably for the last 2 million years.
2018's max monthly Mauna Loa CO2 concentration was 411.3 ppm in May. The @Keeling_curve mean for February so far is 411.8 ppm. Looks like the previous year's record is being breached early this year.
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February 13, 2019
February 12, 2019
Glimpse the future climate in your US city via the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
The interactive mapping uses 12 different measures to describe climate, including minimum and maximum temperature and total precipitation for winter, spring, summer and fall. Two emissions scenarios are considered – one that assumes high current emissions continue and one that assumes emissions peak mid-century and then decline. Numerous future climate forecasts are considered as generated by 27 different climate models.
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Green New Deal Starts Up
Resolution Launches the Legislative Process
Explore the origins and Follow the progress of the Green New Deal @GreenPolicy360
There’s now an official Green New Deal
Here is what’s in it, here are the fights it picks, and the fights it avoids
The resolution consists of a preamble, five goals, 14 projects, and 15 requirements.
Legislative path forward -- https://thinkprogress.org/experts-green-new-deal-resolution-ocasio-cortez-infrastructure-85ff057dd235/
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New U.S. Science Advisor John Christy
Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler appoints Christy to agency’s Science Advisory Board, in position to take an active role in guiding agency policies and regulations. (Climate skeptic/denier with a record)
- Summer in Antarctica: Satellites Tell a Story of Melting Ice
- "For global sea-level change in the next century, this Thwaites glacier is almost the entire story."
January 29, 2019
- Kamala Harris, U.S. presidential candidate -- https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1090091453341155328
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Antarctica, drilling ice cores, asking the big questions by investigating atmospheric history
“It’s literally the only place on the planet where we can get large amounts of clean air that have not been compromised by this carbon-14 aspect that we are looking for... We’ve got absolutely everything we wanted to get done. The samples "have all been absolutely perfect and cleaner than we thought”.
“Science agencies began flagging climate change as a threat in the 1980s well before the warming signal became clear above the background noise of natural variation... Now the signals are everywhere."
"Here we are dealing with a $1 trillion question - whether we let the atmosphere go, business as usual and don’t care, or we reel in emissions and try to manage the planet.”
“We are trying to manage that question with million-dollar science - it’s not a bad payback.”
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Project Drawdown (podcast) -- Paul Hawken and Ralph Nader
Paul Hawken makes the case that global warming is reversible in his book “Drawdown.”
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Valuing the Future, Valuing the Present
Via the NY Times / It's the Economy, Stupid ! ... 'Climate Change in the Decades to Come'
It’s clear that climate change poses environmental risks beyond anything seen in the modern age. But we’re only starting to come to grips with the potential economic effects.
January 17, 2019
Andrew Wheeler, Trump's EPA pick says climate change 'not the greatest crisis'. The former coal lobbyist took over the EPA when his predecessor Scott Pruitt resigned after months of controversy. Wheeler says, in confirmation hearings (reported by few media outlets), that "he is carrying out the president’s “regulatory reform agenda” and that the US is the “gold standard for environmental progress”.
The environment could become a top issue in the 2020 presidential race. Asked if he agreed with the president’s past statements that climate change is a Chinese “hoax”, Wheeler said he would “not use the hoax word, myself”. The latest major Trump resignations and firings. But Wheeler said he would “not call it the greatest crisis”.
“I consider it a huge issue that has to be addressed globally.”
Wheeler also told the New Jersey senator Cory Booker, a likely presidential contender, that he is “still examining” a November report from US government scientists showing the country will suffer from heat-related deaths, coastal flooding and infrastructure damage.
Booker said Wheeler’s regulatory changes “fly in the face” of that science, and the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey called it “unacceptable” that Wheeler would seek confirmation without being familiar with the report.
Wheeler was a lobbyist at Faegre Baker Daniels, where he represented coal company Murray Energy until August 2017. Murray Energy wrote the administration a list of rule changes that would help the industry, and they are largely under way.
January 13, 2019
Economically feasible CO2 reduction of fossil fuel emissions?
'Powder' to capture carbon pollution from power plants
Ion-activated carbon nanospheres for CO2 capture
The powder can be used without needing to install additional equipment. And the raw materials — sugar, molasses, rice husk, straws or agar (from red algae) — are renewable, abundant and cheap, especially when compared to existing technologies.
“It can be employed by developed and developing nations alike. Since cost is not a barrier to taking action, we have the ability to see significant change in a very short time. There are not a lot of other solutions out there we can say that about.”
January 11, 2019
Rep. Kathy Castor is the Tampa Bay Florida Democrat that US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has chosen to chair the new Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.
"We are in a race against time," Castor, 52, told USA TODAY.
Castor spoke of her committee and the challenges it faces:
Q: Much of the information on climate change is out there. So what do you hope to accomplish with this new committee?
Castor: We're going to press for dramatic carbon pollution reduction. We want to win the clean energy future to defend the American way of life and avoid catastrophic and costly weather events that have dire impacts.
Q: What are some of the issues you want to pursue and how will you work with the standing congressional committee to achieve them?
Castor: Right off the bat, we will tackle fuel economy standards, make sure the Commerce Committee and the (Transportation and Infrastructure Committee) are focused on that. The Financial Services Committee has to do a flood insurance reform bill. We will be involved in that as well.
Q: You mentioned flood insurance. Representing a coastal district, you know what flooding and storms can do. Should we rebuild along the shore?
Castor: We shouldn't be insuring at taxpayer expense homes and businesses that have been destroyed repeatedly on the shore. Folks know full well that they're in hurricane's path or flood's path and they do that on their own. I'm concerned the (flood) maps are not up-to-date, that states and local communities are not acting fast enough to adopt policies to revise maps.
Q: Is there a concern you may getting in the way of standing committees who are already charged with environmental protection and climate change issues?
Castor: No, we're going to be complimentary. This is a collaborative effort. It's just being elevated because the threat to our way of life is at stake. It's all hands on deck... I do see our jurisdiction as being very broad. We're talking about the planet.
We don't have time to wait. Whatever we can press to accomplish as soon as possible, we will do that.
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Via Phys.org / Act, make a difference... 8 steps you can take to help thwart climate change
Via David Suzuki / 10 things you can do about climate change
SJS / GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: Perhaps, to be provide additional perspective, we should say four decades after a Congressman from East LA, a leader in the new environmental movement drafted and pushed through the first US climate study program... With great appreciation to George E. Brown, his vision and advocacy of science over decades of leadership.
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1977, the First Climate Report
Energy and Climate Report, 1977, National Academy of Sciences / 175 pp. / PDF via GreenPolicy360
1978, the First Climate Act
National Climate Program Act, Public Law 95-367
National Climate Program Act, September 1978
1988, a History-making Senate Hearing
James Hansen's Warning to Congress in 1988:
- Ten years after the National Climate Program Act was drafted by Representative Brown and the Climate Act's passage in 1978 began the federal government's study of climate change, impacts and risks, Professor Hansen strongly warns the US Senate of the rising danger of climate change.
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December 30, 2018
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December 16
Another International Climate Conference Concludes
Promises to take action adding up, but needed actions are not
International Climate (INDC) Progress
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Global carbon emissions reached record high in 2018
When it comes to promises to begin cutting the emissions that fuel climate change, the world remains well off target.
Page One / December 5, 2018
By Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney / Washington Post
Global emissions of carbon dioxide have reached the highest levels on record, scientists projected Wednesday, in the latest evidence of the chasm between international goals for combating climate change and what countries are actually doing.
Between 2014 and 2016, emissions remained largely flat, leading to hopes that the world was beginning to turn a corner. Those hopes have been dashed. In 2017, global emissions grew 1.6 percent. The rise in 2018 is projected to be 2.7 percent.
The expected increase, which would bring fossil fuel and industrial emissions to a record high of 37.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, is being driven by nearly 5 percent emissions growth in China and more than 6 percent in India, researchers estimated, along with growth in many other nations throughout the world. Emissions by the United States grew 2.5 percent, while emissions by the European Union declined by just under 1 percent.
As nations are gathered for climate talks in Poland, the message of Wednesday’s report was unambiguous: When it comes to promises to begin cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change, the world remains well off target.
“We are in trouble. We are in deep trouble with climate change,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said this week at the opening of the 24th annual U.N. climate conference, where countries will wrestle with the ambitious goals they need to meet to sharply reduce carbon emissions in coming years.
“It is hard to overstate the urgency of our situation,” he added. “Even as we witness devastating climate impacts causing havoc across the world, we are still not doing enough, nor moving fast enough, to prevent irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption...”
Never Give Up, Never Ever Give Up
RCPs & the U.S. National Climate Assessment/Report
2018 / U.S. National Climate Assessment/Report (Overview/PDFs/Docs)
U.S National Climate Assessment: A Bleak Report, a Bleak Government Response
The New Abnormal / E&E News: Not Good, Bad, Very Bad, Soon to be Worse
Via Axios / New climate report warns of increasingly dire risks to U.S.
Via CNN / Climate change will shrink US economy and kill thousands
Via The Guardian / Climate change 'will inflict substantial damages on US lives'
- US National Climate Assessment details climate change impact
- Current response to crisis is insufficient
- Scientists are more certain than ever that climate change is already affecting the United States — and that it is going to be very expensive.
Via CNN / Donald Trump buried a climate change report he doesn't believe
- President Donald Trump's views on climate change are very, very well established.
- Just over eight years ago, he tweeted this: "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." In 2014, he penned this tweet: "It's late in July and it is really cold outside in New York. Where the hell is GLOBAL WARMING??? We need some fast! It's now CLIMATE CHANGE."
- And then, this from last Wednesday: "Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?"
- The report concludes not only that the world's temperature is rising and but also that the preponderance of evidence suggests human actions play a role in it. The report's authors conclude that the changing climate "is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us." And that, unless we change our practices and policies, there will be "substantial damages to the US economy, environment, and human health and well-being over the coming decades."
- It's, candidly, a terrifying read. Unless we start making some major changes -- and soon -- we face the very real potential of crossing the point of no return when it comes to the planet's warming, and the consequences that result from it.
- Important to note: This is not a partisan document. It was... produced by 13 agencies within the Trump administration -- the result of Congress, in the 1980s (after the first climate study and program approved by Congress in 1978,) mandating that this sort of report be submitted every four years as a sort of reference point for lawmakers and legislators.
Clean Energy Solutions
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Via NBC / Democrats: Time to Get Serious, a Green New Deal
California is on fire and Democrats control the House — it's time to get serious about climate change.
A Green New Deal would tie solutions to the climate crisis to the promise of a stronger economy, upending the false jobs-vs.-environment dichotomy.
Logic 101: It's cold outside. Ergo, WHAT GLOBAL WARMING?
California on fire, US President & Secretary of Interior blame environmentalists
Stanford Earth System Science Professor: Atmospheric conditions for California wildfires are expected to worsen in the future because of the effects of climate change in California. "What we're seeing over the last few years in terms of the wildfire season in California [is] very consistent with the historical trends in terms of increasing temperatures, increasing dryness, and increasing wildfire risk". Other experts agree that global warming has a role in California's drought and extreme weather conditions...
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Profound Environmental Oversight Change in U.S. House of Representatives
Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D–TX) is the presumed new chair of the House science committee, succeeding the retiring Representative Lamar Smith (R). In a statement released, Johnson said she would have three priorities “If I am fortunate enough to be elected chair.” One is ensuring “that the United States remains the global leader in innovation, which will require attention to a wide range of activities,” including supporting “a robust federally funded R&D enterprise,” and “defending the scientific enterprise from political and ideological attacks.” A second is addressing the “challenge of climate change, starting with acknowledging it is real.” The third is restoring “the credibility of the science committee as a place where science is respected and recognized as a crucial input to good policymaking.” It is not yet clear whether the new Democratic leadership of the House will allow the science panel chair to retain the power to unilaterally issue investigative subpoenas, which outgoing chair Smith used to demand information from climate scientists and others. If so, observers expect the panel to use that power to aggressively investigate a range of actions taken by President Donald Trump’s administration on climate, energy, and environmental policy.
(Via Science Magazine)
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Foreign Policy Magazine
The Nobel Prize for Climate Catastrophe
The economist William Nordhaus will receive his profession’s highest honor for research on global warming that’s been hugely influential — and entirely misguided.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. After all, this isn’t just a matter of abstract academic debate; the future of human civilization hangs in the balance.
In the 1990s, Nordhaus invented the first integrated assessment models to explore how economic growth affects carbon emissions, and how climate change in turn affects economic growth. The basic mechanisms that Nordhaus described continue to inform the models that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses today. No one disputes that this qualifies as a significant contribution to the field. The question, rather, has to do with how Nordhaus has used his models to argue for a particular policy agenda.
The models showed that if we were to rapidly reduce carbon emissions in line with what scientists say is necessary to avoid climate breakdown – by putting a high tax on carbon, for instance – it would significantly slow down the rate of economic growth. As far as scientists are concerned, that’s not a problem; we should obviously do whatever it takes to avoid climate catastrophe. But for economists like Nordhaus, this is not acceptable. After all, the whole point of neoclassical economics is to do whatever it takes to grow economic output.
So, Nordhaus’ career has been devoted to finding what he calls a “balance” between climate mitigation and GDP growth. In a famous 1991 paper titled “To slow or not to slow,” he argued firmly for the latter option: Let’s not be too eager to slow down global warming, because we don’t want to jeopardize growth.
To justify this conclusion, Nordhaus manipulates what is known as the “discount rate,” which is how economists value the costs of climate breakdown in the present as compared to the future. It might sound arcane, but it’s really quite straightforward. A discount rate of zero means that future generations are valued equally to the present; a high discount rate means that future generations are valued less, or “discounted,” compared with nearer generations.
Nordhaus prefers a high discount rate—very high. Discounting the future allows him to argue that we shouldn’t reduce emissions too quickly, because the economic cost to people today will be higher than the benefit of protecting people in the future. Instead, we should do the opposite: Focus on GDP growth now even if it means locking in future climate catastrophe. This is justifiable, he says, because future generations will then be much richer than we are and therefore better able to manage the problem.
Using this logic, Nordhaus long claimed that from the standpoint of “economic rationality” it is “optimal” to keep warming the planet to about 3.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels—vastly in excess of the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold that the IPCC insists on.
It sounds morally problematic and flies in the face of scientists’ warnings, but economists and policymakers have lined up behind Nordhaus’s argument. They like it because it gives them license to carry on with the status quo and delay difficult decisions. President Trump, for instance, has been aggressive in his preference for growth over climate action. This is in large part what explains the fact that nearly 30 years after the first IPCC report was published, global emissions are still going up. It also helps explain why even with the Paris climate agreement in place, and with all of the plans promised by the world’s governments, we’re still headed for about 3.3 degrees Celsius of warming. It’s all eerily similar to the Nordhaus trajectory.
So how do economists get away with believing that these extreme temperatures are somehow okay? Because the Nordhaus model tells us that even the worst catastrophes will not really hurt the global economy all that much. Maybe a percentage point or two at the most, by the end of the century—much less than the cost of immediate action.
Read more at FP - https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/06/the-nobel-prize-for-climate-catastrophe/
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Earth's oceans absorbing more heat than previously thought
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Climate scientists are struggling to find the right words for very bad news
- Alarming report from the U.N.'s top climate science panel ... enormous gap between where we are and where we need to be
Intergovernmental (IPCC) Report / Global Warming of 1.5 ºC
October 2018
- https://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf (Summary Report)
Via Brookings / We’re almost out of time: The alarming IPCC climate report and what to do next
Via Earthday /What You Need to Know About the New IPCC Climate Report
Special International Report Released / October 8, 2018
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change / IPCC
(The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme.)
The numbers behind the #IPCC Special Report on Global Warming
Thousands of scientists gathered to bring together the last five years of advances in climate science to answer key questions for policymakers.
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The Climate Group Gathers in New York
New climate pledges announced by global leaders at the 10th Climate Week
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After the Global Climate Action Summit
September 18, 2018
A Strong Wave of Hope in a Sea of Fear
The Role of the Private Sector in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
UN / Another reminder by @NASA that #ClimateChange is real and accelerating. #StepUp2018
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Current Global Warming Index
- Current to date / http://www.globalwarmingindex.org/
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Texas Feels the Impacts: Asks for Fed Help
PORT ARTHUR, Texas (AP) — As the nation plans new defenses against the more powerful storms and higher tides expected from climate change, one project stands out: an ambitious proposal to build a nearly 60-mile “spine” of concrete seawalls, earthen barriers, floating gates and steel levees on the Texas Gulf Coast.
Big oil, which is blamed for contributing to global warming, now wants the federal government to build safeguards against the consequences of it.
The plan is focused on a stretch of coastline that runs from the Louisiana border to industrial enclaves south of Houston that are home to one of the world’s largest concentrations of petrochemical facilities, including most of Texas’ 30 refineries, which represent 30 percent of the nation’s refining capacity.
Texas is seeking at least $12 billion for the full coastal spine, with nearly all of it coming from public funds. Last month, the government fast-tracked an initial $3.9 billion for three separate, smaller storm barrier projects that would specifically protect oil facilities...
Protecting a wide expanse will be expensive. After Hurricane Harvey, a special Texas commission prepared a report seeking $61 billion from Congress to “future proof” the state against such natural disasters, without mentioning climate change, which scientists say will cause heavier rains and stronger storms.
Via the Associated Press / August 22, 2018
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Conference attracted climate science deniers and fossil fuel evangelists
Via Inside Climate News / August 8, 2018
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The wrap on this customized Tesla is inspired by Professor Ed Hawkin’s ‘Warming Stripes’ graphic.
The graphic shows each year’s average global temperature, between 1850-2017, as a color, blue for cooler than average, red for warmer. The deeper the color, the further from the average. Check out the Climate Lab Book at www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk.
July 2018
CO2 vs. Magnesite. Mineralization. Mitigation. Gesundheit.
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Via E&E News
'Brave new world' as team Inhofe takes over
Robin Bravender, E&E News reporter
Greenwire: Friday, July 6, 2018
It's official: Alumni of the best-known climate skeptic in Congress are leading EPA.
Former aides to Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) have helped shape President Trump's energy policy agenda since even before he was elected. Many of them quickly landed top spots at EPA and in the White House, and Inhofe alumnus Ryan Jackson helped shepherd Scott Pruitt through the confirmation process before becoming his chief of staff at the agency last year.
But now an ex-Inhofe staffer is taking the reins as Pruitt leaves under a cloud of controversies.
Andrew Wheeler, who steps in as EPA's chief on Monday, was staff director and chief counsel to Inhofe on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee for much of the George W. Bush administration.
Jackson, a longtime friend of Wheeler, is expected to remain as EPA's chief of staff after Pruitt's exit. Jackson — a native Oklahoman — was an Inhofe aide who worked as EPW staff director and Inhofe's chief of staff.
Brittany Bolen became the acting head of EPA's policy shop after Samantha Dravis left earlier this year. Bolen was Republican counsel to Inhofe on the EPW Committee. Daisy Letendre, a communications adviser in the policy office, was Inhofe's communications director. And former Inhofe counsel Mandy Gunasekara is now principal deputy assistant administrator in EPA's air office...
"With these Inhofe staff, you get all of the Pruitt policy and none of the Pruitt baggage," said an energy lobbyist and former congressional staffer.
It makes sense that ex-Inhofe aides would populate EPA under a Republican administration, the lobbyist said, given Inhofe's long tenure as the top Republican on the Senate committee charged with overseeing the agency...
They also share an appreciation for process, said Matt Dempsey, Inhofe's former communications director...
Under Wheeler, "the whole tone is going to be different," the energy lobbyist said. "People are going to perceive that Andy is going to spend his time on policy and not thinking about whether he's the next senator from Oklahoma."
But as Republicans and many in industry are celebrating the rise of the Inhofe crowd at EPA, some on the left are furious that disciples of the Senate's most vocal climate change skeptic — famous for throwing a snowball on the Senate floor to try to disprove global warming — are leading the agency tasked with protecting the environment.
"It is a brave new world of pro-fossil-fuel ideologues who seem not to care about anything but industry profits, the rest of the country be damned," said Bill Snape, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. "We're all getting hit in the head by the snowball at this point. It's obviously disturbing."
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a new Democratic Party green leader who's out in front
From Ocasio-Cortez's platform:
Climate change is the single biggest national security threat for the United States and the single biggest threat to worldwide industrialized civilization, and the effects of warming can be hard to predict and self-reinforcing.
Alexandria strongly supports transitioning the United States to a carbon-free, 100% renewable energy system and a fully modernized electrical grid by 2035. She believes renewable fuels must be produced in a way that achieves our environmental and energy security goals, so we can move beyond oil responsibly in the fight against climate change. By encouraging the electrification of vehicles, sustainable home heating, distributed rooftop solar generation, and the conversion of the power grid to zero-emissions energy sources, Alexandria believes we can be 100% free of fossil fuels by 2035.
Furthermore, Alex believes in recognizing the relationship between economic stability and environmental sustainability. It’s time to shift course and implement a Green New Deal – a transformation that implements structural changes to our political and financial systems in order to alter the trajectory of our environment.
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James Hansen’s groundbreaking testimony on global climate change
June 23rd, 2018 is thirty years to a day after Dr. Hansen's testimony in 1988
A retrospective look... "A Prophet of Doom Was Right About the Climate"
On June 23, 1988, in the sweltering heat, Hansen told a U.S. Senate committee he was 99 percent certain that the year’s record temperatures were not the result of natural variation. It was the first time a lead scientist drew a connection between human activities, the growing concentration of atmospheric pollutants, and a warming climate.
James Hansen testifies in 1988: Ten Years after the Establishment of the National Climate Program Act
“It’s time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here,” Hansen told reporters.
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File:James Hansen - NY Times Opinion - June 23, 2018.pdf
https://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/James_Hansen_-_NY_Times_Opinion_-_June_23%2C_2018.pdf
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Global Warming: A Warning Thirty Years Ago, and Now
It's been 30 years since much of the world learned that global warming had arrived. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress, explaining that heat-trapping gases spewed by the burning of fossil fuels were pushing temperatures higher.
But it turns out climate isn't the only thing that's changing: Nature itself is, too. That's the picture painted by interviews with more than 50 scientists and an Associated Press analysis of data on plants, animals, pollen, ice, sea level and more.
You don't need a thermometer or a rain gauge to notice climate change, and you don't need to be a scientist to see it...
On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, James Hansen told Congress and the world that global warming wasn't approaching — it had already arrived. The testimony of the top NASA scientist, said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, was "the opening salvo of the age of climate change."
Thirty years later, it's clear that Hansen and other doomsayers were right. But the change has been so sweeping that it is easy to lose sight of effects large and small — some obvious, others less conspicuous.
Earth is noticeably hotter, the weather stormier and more extreme. Polar regions have lost billions of tons of ice; sea levels have been raised by trillions of gallons of water. Far more wildfires rage.
Over 30 years — the time period climate scientists often use in their studies in order to minimize natural weather variations — the world's annual temperature has warmed nearly 1 degree (0.54 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration / NOAA. And the temperature in the United States has gone up even more — nearly 1.6 degrees.
"The biggest change over the last 30 years, which is most of my life, is that we're no longer thinking just about the future," said Kathie Dello, a climate scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. "Climate change is here, it's now and it's hitting us hard from all sides."
Warming hasn't been just global, it's been all too local. According to an Associated Press statistical analysis of 30 years of weather, ice, fire, ocean, biological and other data, every single one of the 344 climate divisions in the Lower 48 states — NOAA groupings of counties with similar weather — has warmed significantly, as has each of 188 cities examined.
James Hansen wishes he was wrong. He wasn't.
NASA's top climate scientist in 1988, Hansen warned the world on a record hot June day 30 years ago that global warming was here and worsening. In a scientific study that came out a couple months later, he even forecast how warm it would get, depending on emissions of heat-trapping gases.
The hotter world that Hansen envisioned in 1988 has pretty much come true so far, more or less. Three decades later, most climate scientists interviewed rave about the accuracy of Hansen's predictions given the technology of the time.
Hansen won't say, "I told you so."
"I don't want to be right in that sense," Hansen told The Associated Press, in an interview is his New York penthouse apartment. That's because being right means the world is warming at an unprecedented pace and ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are melting.
Hansen said what he really wishes happened is "that the warning be heeded and actions be taken."
They weren't. Hansen, now 77, regrets not being "able to make this story clear enough for the public..."
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Priority: Climate Data, Climate Facts, Climate Policy
June 24, 2018 Via the NY Times and Washington Post
The Trump administration appears to be planning to shift the mission of one of the most important federal science agencies that works on climate change — away from climate change.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is part of the Department of Commerce, operates a constellation of earth-observing satellites. Because of its work on climate science data collection and analysis, it has become one of the most important U.S. agencies for making sense of the warming planet. But that focus may shift, according to a slide presentation at a Department of Commerce meeting by Tim Gallaudet, the acting head of the agency.
A recent presentation by the acting head of the United States' top weather and oceans agency suggested removing the study of "climate" from its official mission statement, focusing the agency's work instead on economic goals and "homeland and national security."
Critics say this would upend the mission of the $5.9 billion National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
NOAA's mission, the agency currently says, is "to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coasts, to share that knowledge and information with others, and to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources."
In a presentation at a Department of Commerce "Vision Setting Summit" earlier this month, Rear Adm. Timothy Gallaudet, the agency's acting administrator, suggested a change to that mission statement, as well as a new emphasis on tripling the size of the U.S. aquaculture industry within a decade and moving to "reduce the seafood trade deficit."
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Earth Science / Environmental Security - Global Security
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Over the Amazon forest canopies
Climate Change and Impacts in the Amazon
Flying over the Brazilian Amazon with an instrument firing 300,000 laser pulses per second, NASA scientists have made the first 3D measurements of forest canopies in the region.
"Climate projections for the Amazon basin suggest warmer and drier conditions in coming decades," said Earth system scientist Doug Morton at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author on the research recently published in New Phytologist. "Drought events give us a preview of how tropical forests may react to a warmer world.”
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Judge Orders EPA to Produce Science
Via E&E News-Scientific American
June 5, 2018 / Freedom of Information Request To Be Acted Upon
EPA must produce the opposing body of science Administrator Scott Pruitt has relied upon to claim that humans are not the primary drivers of global warming, a federal judge has ruled.
The EPA boss has so far resisted attempts to show the science backing up his claims.
Not long after he took over as EPA administrator, Pruitt appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” where he was asked about carbon dioxide and climate change. He said, “I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”
The next day, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the studies Pruitt used to make his claims. Specifically, the group requested “EPA documents that support the conclusion that human activity is not the largest factor driving global climate change.”
On Friday, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Beryl Howell, ordered the agency to comply.
“Particularly troubling is the apparent premise of this agency challenge to the FOIA request, namely: that the evidentiary basis for a policy or factual statement by an agency head, including about the scientific factors contributing to climate change, is inherently unknowable.”
If the case proceeds, it could mean that Pruitt would have to produce such research in the coming months or next year.
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Before and After: The Oklahoma Congressman Shifts from Climate Change Denial
Trump’s new NASA Chief seem to have changed his position
"I fully believe and know the climate is changing"
- “I also know that we human beings are contributing to it in a major way”
Jim Bridenstine: “As far as my position on climate change and how it’s evolved, I’ll be very open...” the new administrator of NASA said at a town hall Thursday (May 17) at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“I don’t deny that consensus that the climate is changing,” he said. “In fact, I fully believe and know that the climate is changing. I also know that we humans beings are contributing to it in a major way. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. We’re putting it into the atmosphere in volumes that we haven’t seen, and that greenhouse gas is warming the planet. That is absolutely happening, and we are responsible for it.”
... whether Bridenstine’s views on climate change have changed or not, the views of his bosses haven’t, and this remains a point of concern for Bridentine’s critics. The Trump White House has proposed cutting or canceling many of nasa’s earth-science missions. So far, they’ve been spared. Republicans don’t have enough seats in the Senate to pass their dream budgets, so they’ve had to negotiate bipartisan budget legislation with Democrats. This setup has preserved most of nasa’s climate funding, but not all. The latest budget deal didn’t specifically mention nasa’s Carbon Monitoring System, a $10-million program to track greenhouse-gas emissions around the world. The Trump administration took that as an opportunity to terminate the program.
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What EPA Climate Website?
It has been more than a year since the EPA took down its climate website
Washington Post
The news came on a Friday evening in April 2017 : The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had removed an informational website about climate change, taking down a page that had been up, in some form, for nearly two decades and under three presidents.
Before its removal, the page had plainly stated a position on climate change: It is caused by humans, and there’s no significant doubt about that. But that position contradicted statements by the new EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, who had expressed doubts about human activity being the dominant driver of climate change.
EPA said at the time that the site had been taken down for review and that it had been archived and was still available as part of a “snapshot” of the state of the site on Jan. 19, 2017, just as the new administration took command.
But a year later, the agency’s climate page is still down.
Would-be visitors are redirected to a notice saying that “this page is being updated.”
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Can the world kick its fossil-fuel addiction fast enough?
Clean energy is growing quickly. But time is running out to rein in carbon emissions
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U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Update:
Congressional calls for investigation into Pruitt
The more we learn about Pruitt, the clearer it is he needs to go
‘A factory of bad ideas’: How Scott Pruitt undermined his mission at EPA
Editorial / Newspaper / Media political cartoons across the U.S. on Scott Pruitt
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- Methane, We're Watching
- Detecting methane from space
- "There has been quite a buzz around this unique advancement in space, and the valuable data it will provide on methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for a quarter of the warming our planet is experiencing today. Curbing anthropogenic methane emissions is one of the most efficient and economical options available to slow the rate of warming over the next few decades, while efforts continue to reduce CO2 emissions worldwide."
- The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is planning to be the first environmental group to send its own satellite into space.
- “We need good solid data so that we really can support global action on climate change, and we’ve got to do it fast,” says Steven Hamburg, the EDF’s chief scientist.
- The most detailed measurements currently available of atmospheric methane concentrations currently come from a sensor aboard the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P spacecraft, which launched in October 2017. The Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument provides global coverage at a resolution of nearly 50 square kilometres, but those measurements do not capture the dispersed sources of emissions from oil and gas fields.
- Commercial firms have developed high-resolution sensors that can be placed aboard 10-centimetre-sided CubeSats to measure emissions from individual wells or other facilities. Those data are proprietary, however, and the measurements cannot be scaled up to the level of an entire oil and gas field.
- The Environmental Defense Fund team is designing MethaneSAT to provide more-precise measurements, at a resolution of 1 square kilometre, with global coverage at least once a week.
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Paleoclimate: Digging into the Past to Chart our Future: Richard Alley & Gavin Schmidt
As human activities drive Earth’s rapidly changing climate, there is an urgent need to build better models that help us predict and prepare for our future. These models need robust data that stretch far back in time. Enter: the fossil record—a storehouse of climate evidence that paleontologists are getting better and better at deciphering. Join us for an evening with two renowned researchers—Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences and an Associate of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State, and Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies...
Understanding Climate Change (Video) / Presentation starts at 10:10
March 2018
Via CarbonBrief:
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Global Energy & CO2 Status Report
Latest trends in energy and emissions
The IEA’s first Global Energy and CO2 Status Report – released in March 2018 – provides a snapshot of recent global trends and developments across fuels, renewable sources, and energy efficiency and carbon emissions, in 2017.
Overview
Global energy demand grew by 2.1% in 2017, according to IEA preliminary estimates, more than twice the growth rate in 2016. Global energy demand in 2017 reached an estimated 14 050 million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe), compared with 10 035 Mtoe in 2000.
Fossil fuels met over 70% of the growth in energy demand around the world. Natural gas demand increased the most, reaching a record share of 22% in total energy demand. Renewables also grew strongly, making up around a quarter of global energy demand growth, while nuclear use accounted for the remainder of the growth. The overall share of fossil fuels in global energy demand in 2017 remained at 81%, a level that has remained stable for more than three decades despite strong growth in renewables.
Improvements in global energy efficiency slowed down. The rate of decline in global energy intensity, defined as the energy consumed per unit of economic output, slowed to only 1.7%* in 2017, much lower than the 2.0% improvement seen in 2016.
The growth in global energy demand was concentrated in Asia, with China and India together representing more than 40% of the increase. Energy demand in all advanced economies contributed more than 20% of global energy demand growth, although their share in total energy use continued to fall. Notable growth was also registered in Southeast Asia (which accounted for 8% of global energy demand growth) and Africa (6%), although per capita energy use in these regions still remains well below the global average.
Carbon dioxide (CO2)
Global energy-related CO2 emissions grew by 1.4% in 2017, reaching a historic high of 32.5 gigatonnes (Gt), a resumption of growth after three years of global emissions remaining flat. The increase in CO2 emissions, however, was not universal. While most major economies saw a rise, some others experienced declines, including the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico and Japan. The biggest decline came from the United States, mainly because of higher deployment of renewables.
Oil
World oil demand rose by 1.6% (or 1.5 million barrels a day) in 2017, a rate that was more than twice the annual average seen over the last decade. An increasing share of sport utility vehicles and light trucks in major economies and demand from the petrochemicals sector bolstered this growth.
Natural gas
Global natural gas demand grew by 3%, thanks in large part to abundant and relatively low-cost supplies. China alone accounted for almost 30% of global growth. In the past decade, half of global gas demand growth came from the power sector; last year, however, over 80% of the rise came from industry and buildings.
Coal
Global coal demand rose about 1% in 2017, reversing the declining trend seen over the last two years. This growth was mainly due to demand in Asia, almost entirely driven by an increase in coal-fired electricity generation.
Renewables
Renewables saw the highest growth rate of any energy source in 2017, meeting a quarter of global energy demand growth. China and the United States led this unprecedented growth, contributing around 50% of the increase in renewables-based electricity generation, followed by the European Union, India and Japan. Wind power accounted for 36% of the growth in renewables-based power output.
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143 Million People May Soon Become Climate Migrants
Climate change will drive human migration more than other events, a new report warns. But the worst impacts can be avoided.
National Geographic / World Bank / March 2018
Climate change will transform more than 143 million people into “climate migrants” (#ClimateMigration) escaping crop failure, water scarcity, and sea-level rise, a new World Bank report concludes.
Most of this population shift will take place in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America—three “hot spots” that represent 55 percent of the developing world’s populations.
The report, Groundswell—Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, also shifts the focus from cross-border migration, which has drawn global attention as refugees and migrants flee war, poverty and oppression, to in-country migration, which involves many more millions of people on the move in search of viable places to live.
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US Climate Politics: Red Team v. Blue Team Climate Debate Cancelled
March 9, 2018 / NYT
The idea of publicly critiquing climate change on the national stage has been a notable theme for Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the E.P.A. For nearly a year he has championed the notion of holding military-style exercises known as red team, blue team debates, possibly to be broadcast live, to question the validity of climate change.
Mr. Pruitt has spoken personally with Mr. Trump about the idea, and the president expressed enthusiasm for it, according to people familiar with the conversations.
But the plan encountered widespread resistance within the administration from Mr. Kelly and other top officials, who regarded it as ill-conceived and politically risky, and when Mr. Pruitt sought to announce it last fall, they weighed in to stop him...
The tension between the White House and the E.P.A. over the red team, blue team idea reflects a broader rift within the administration over whether and how directly to attack climate change science itself. While the words “climate change” have been removed from many federal websites, and Mr. Trump has mocked global warming in tweets, the administration has stopped short of using the power of the federal government to attack the science.
(GreenPolicy editor: The Trump administration has demonstrably not "stopped short of using the power of the federal government to attack the science" of climate change. The GreenPolicy360 Climate News page and related pages such as Earth Science and Earth Research from Space examine the facts of this administration's concerted actions against climate and environmental science and policy. The record of actions taken will be discussed for years as the issue of damage to national and environmental security increases as vital national security interest.)
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World Bank announces it will no longer finance oil/gas projects after 2019
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Exxon is abandoning Russian projects
Hopes of drilling in Moscow's Arctic ocean oil fields end
Via the Wall Street Journal -- https://www.wsj.com/articles/exxon-abandons-russian-projects-brokered-by-tillerson-1519897033
Withdrawal from joint venture brokered by Tillerson for now marks end of energy giant’s hopes of drilling in Arctic ocean oil fields
The Texas oil giant said in a regulatory filing late Wednesday that it would walk away from the joint venture with state-controlled PAO Rosneft to seek oil in the ice-choked waters of the Kara Sea, a hard-fought deal signed in 2012 by the company’s former chief executive, Rex Tillerson, now U.S. secretary of state.
Mr. Tillerson touted the agreement as a breakthrough giving Exxon access to one of the world’s great unexplored oil and gas basins. The company reportedly spent about $700 million to drill the first well, likely making it the most expensive ever. It struck oil, according to Rosneft...
Exxon declined to comment on the reasons for its decision. The company said it would formally begin to withdraw from the Rosneft joint ventures this year, taking a $200 million loss after taxes.
Rosneft said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies that it would support the return of Exxon to the projects in the future if it were legally possible.
More re: Arctic warming, via GreenPolicy360 -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Arctic
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February 2018
The story behind the satellite that Trump wants dead
It’s difficult to describe all the ways this is stupid
- The Orbiting Carbon Observatory's primary job is to see what's happening to the carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere
There were plenty of striking things about February 12th's budget news, given that it contained lots of draconian cuts that were simultaneously restored because Congress had boosted spending the week before. But perhaps the most striking among them was an item in the proposed budget for NASA: Trump wants to block the follow on to a highly successful NASA mission.
To truly appreciate just how awful this is, you have to understand the history of that satellite and what it means to the scientific community as a whole. So let's step back and take a look at why the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (or OCO) exists in the first place. It turns out it was built specifically to handle some outstanding questions of the sort that people in the administration say are important, and killing its successor would mean the existing mission never lives up to its full potential.
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A new NASA study provides space-based evidence that Earth’s tropical regions were the cause of the largest annual increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration seen in at least 2,000 years...
The findings are published in the journal Science Friday as part of a collection of five research papers based on OCO-2 data.
Carbon Dioxide and OCO-2 Data: Earth Science that Counts
- NASA OCO-2, critical measurements, critical mission -- https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12478
- NASA CO2 Video
- Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important greenhouse gas released to the atmosphere through human activities...
- (NASA Media / "Following Carbon Dioxide Through the Atmosphere") | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syU1rRCp7E8
- The OCO-2 mission greatly expands the ability to observe atmospheric carbon dioxide. OCO-2 collects high-precision, total column measurements of carbon dioxide (from the sensor to Earth’s surface) during daylight conditions.
- Scientists can use model results to understand and predict where carbon dioxide is being emitted and removed from the atmosphere and how much is from natural processes and human activities.
- OCO-2's unprecedented science is "a step toward answering critical questions about carbon dioxide and Earth's climate future."
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Scott Pruitt's Opinion
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Full Costs of Fossil Fuels & Global Impact Set Aside
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US Environmental Nominee Goes Down in Controversy
WASHINGTON / Via NY Times / February 4, 2018 — The Trump administration plans to withdraw its nomination of Kathleen Hartnett White, a climate change skeptic, to lead the Council on Environmental Quality...
Mrs. White has "called renewable energy “unreliable and parasitic,” described global warming as “a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science,” and asserted that science does not dictate policy in democracies."
President Trump in October appointed Ms. White, a former Texas environmental regulator who has said that carbon dioxide should be considered the “gas of life” rather than a pollutant, to be the White House senior environmental adviser.
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Scrubbed: Penultimate Politics
- National/Global Security Failure in Strategy Doctrine
"The Pentagon scrubbed its latest National Defense Strategy of all references to climate change..."
A summary document released January 19, 2018, makes no mention of “climate,” “warming,” “planet,” “sea levels” or even “temperature.” All 22 uses of the word “environment” refer to the strategic or security landscape. The 11-page memo, signed by Defense Secretary James Mattis, is the first update to the policy in a decade.
It’s unlikely the Department of Defense will release a full National Defense Strategy report; instead, the document is expected to remain classified. The Pentagon did not immediately return a call requesting comment.
The move comes a month after the White House dropped climate change from the list of threats in its National Security Strategy. (Via HuffPost)
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National Academy of Sciences Report: Top Science Priorities for Space-Based Earth Observation Over Next Decade
We live on a dynamic Earth shaped by both natural processes and the impacts of humans on their environment. It is in our collective interest to observe and understand our planet, and to predict future behavior to the extent possible, in order to effectively manage resources, successfully respond to threats from natural and human-induced environmental change, and capitalize on the opportunities – social, economic, security, and more – that such knowledge can bring.
Earth Science Research from Space
By continuously monitoring and exploring Earth, developing a deep understanding of its evolving behavior, and characterizing the processes that shape and reshape the environment in which we live, we not only advance knowledge and basic discovery about our planet, but we further develop the foundation upon which benefits to society are built. Thriving on Our Changing Planet presents prioritized science, applications, and observations, along with related strategic and programmatic guidance, to support the U.S. civil space Earth observation program over the coming decade.
Climate Science @ Reddit: Time to to Look Again to the Future
November 2017
Global Climate Action @ the United Nations Climate Change Conference
- International Cooperation (and US Non-Cooperation)
- Framework Convention on Climate Change
California Gov. Jerry Brown delivers a blunt climate change message in Germany
Brown has been hailed in German media as the “anti-Trump” for his efforts to keep the United States engaged in the 2015 Paris agreement’s commitments to cut greenhouse emissions...
“It’s hard to get your mind around something so extensive,” said Brown, who was appointed by Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, the U.N. conference president, to serve as a special advisor for states and regions...
“Let’s lead the whole world to realize this is not your normal political challenge,” he added. “This is much bigger. This is life itself. It requires courage and imagination.”
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Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere Surges
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- To highlight the global collaboration happening across the world -- http://www.climate-kic.org/
- Climate-KIC, from the European Union
- The EU’s main climate innovation initiative - http://www.climate-kic.org/
- Climate-KIC, from the European Union
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Now Only One Country Refusing to Support the International Climate Agreement
- November 7, 2017
Only Two Countries Outside the International Climate Agreement
- October 24
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In the U.S., Trump Administration Acts to Repeal President Obama's Climate Plan
Via Vox
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announces actions to repeal the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants.
This begins a legal and regulatory process that will grind on for many years, likely longer than Trump’s first term.
While there is public support for fighting climate change (about 61 percent of Americans, in one recent poll) and specifically for regulating carbon emissions (even a majority of Trump voters, in one poll), the Clean Power Plan does not rest on voter expectations, but on a legal expectation.
In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled, in Massachusetts v. EPA, that carbon dioxide qualifies as an air pollutant under the Clean Air Act. If the EPA determines that carbon is a danger to public health, the court said, it must regulate carbon to reduce that danger.
In 2009, the EPA issued its Endangerment Finding, demonstrating (based on intensive research and documentation) that greenhouse gases are in fact a danger to public health.
The Supreme Court ruling plus the Endangerment Finding mean that the EPA is legally obligated to regulate carbon in such a way as to meliorate the danger it poses to public health.
The only way EPA can escape that core legal obligation is to overturn the Endangerment Finding. Some conservative denialist groups, recognizing that fact, are pressuring Pruitt to attempt just that. Doing so, however, would likely prove impossible. It would have to pass legal review, and the simple fact is that the science overwhelmingly supports the EPA’s case.
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Oil Change International Statement on Clean Power Plan Repeal
WASHINGTON - Today, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to repeal the Clean Power Plan. In response, Janet Redman, U.S. Policy Director at Oil Change International issued the following statement:
“Pruitt’s move to repeal the Clean Power Plan shouldn’t come as any surprise. He’s repeatedly partnered with fossil fuel companies to sue the EPA for regulating the industry’s air, water, and climate pollution. This kind of cronyism is exactly what happens when government agencies are captured by the corporations they’re supposed to oversee.
“According to Pruitt, this is just another way to even the playing field for coal, oil, and gas - but he knows as well as anyone that fossil fuels already get massive government giveaways. In fact, permanent tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry are seven times higher than those for renewable energy.
“The fight to curb the worst abuses of the fossil fuel energy industry won’t stop here. Federal legislation, the courts, and millions of voters have made it clear that the federal government is obligated to protect American workers and families from the deadly impacts of dirty energy, not hand polluters taxpayer dollars.
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Visit the NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory OCO-2
#ClimateAction Is a Race Against Time
• https://twitter.com/UNFCCC/status/910376712030052357
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Earth Science Deep Budget Cuts at NASA
- Threat to the NASA Mission and Environmental Security
The current array of American earth science satellites, comprising dozens of NOAA and NASA missions, is the product of some 40 years of experimentation and investment on the part of the federal government.
The satellites go by acronyms like GOES-13, Modis, SMAP and OCO-2... We are in a "golden age" of earth science research from space.
Multiple programs and missions are now being placed in danger by a 'deconstruction' agenda by some in the US Congress, in particular by several Congressmen from oil/gas states like Texas and Oklahoma. House science and environment chair Lamar Smith and environment committee chair Senator Jim Inhofe have taken positions to severely cut earth science programs. It is not a move, as GreenPolicy has argued, that advances the nation's security nor does it build a vital position of the US within the global community of nations.
President Trump’s budget plan proposes to cut OCO-3, a follow-up mission that would continue essential OCO-2 earth science, CO2 monitoring work.
The political debate continues, but the physics and data, the science, the facts have their own momentum that if denied or hidden, if databases are scrubbed with data lost as a result ("data gaps") of precipitous actions, this will deliver serious costs to future generations. The conclusions of most all current climate scientists are, without doubt, serious science at work and if the science and scientists warnings are ignored it will be at the peril of today's generations and those of the future.
Much is at stake. Many speak of existential questions that are now in human hands. Humanity is entering a new era, an Anthropocene Era where new challenges and new responsibilities are coming into view. Our challenges are local, national and global. It is for us to rise to the challenge.
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Climate Science Denier to Head Up NASA?
US President to Nominate a Political Voice from Inhofe's Oklahoma...
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NASA's Mission to Study Planet Earth in Jeopardy
September 2, 2017 Report by Joe Romm
• https://thinkprogress.org/trump-names-climate-science-denier-to-run-nasa-c9a46a6f4a52/
More from Joe Romm at GreenPolicy "Stories of the Day"
- Dr. Joseph Romm, creator of climateprogress.org -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6ag3b1WCYc -- http://www.climateprogress.org
More on Jim Bridenstine from Think Progress/Climate
Bridenstine is a politician without any scientific credentials, unlike previous NASA chiefs ... NASA scientists have led the way in documenting the scientific reality of climate change. But in 2013, Bridenstine not only gave a speech on the House floor filled with standard denier talking points, he actually ended his remarks with a demand that President Obama apologize for funding research into climate science.
The truth is that while “planetary warming does not care about the election,” humanity very much cares that the Trump Administration is doing everything it can to undermine climate science and climate action. Bridenstine’s nomination deserves widespread opposition.
A Quick Look Back at Bridenstein in the US Congress
Just as extreme weather season kicks off, freshman Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) demanded that President Obama apologize to Oklahoma for allocating funding to climate change research. Bridenstine, a climate denier who serves on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, plans to introduce a bill that defunds climate change research.
Tracking an Anti-Science Faction in the US Congress
The nomination of Jim Bridenstine brings a new level of threat to US national security ...
GreenPolicy360 re-visits our associate Strategic Demands' Op-Ed in July 2016 -- Republicans in Congress, A Vote to Block National Security?
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Texas, Louisiana, Florida -- and the National Flood Insurance Program
Read more at Sea-Level Rise -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Sea-Level_Rise
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Hurricane Harvey Devastates Texas
Extreme Weather: Costs and Risks
https://assets.rbl.ms/10607706/980x.jpg
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Monitoring the Global Climate Accord
Donald Trump ends IPCC funding and 'abandons global science leadership'
The US has ended its funding to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change despite the serious national security implications for the country ... and security impacts internationally.
This is a remarkable departure considering the previous high regard for the IPCC, including the fact it was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
More on IPCC from GreenPolicy360
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NYT / Scott Pruitt Is Carrying Out His E.P.A. Agenda in Secret
(A)s he works to roll back regulations, close offices and eliminate staff at the agency charged with protecting the nation’s environment and public health, Mr. Pruitt is taking extraordinary measures to conceal his actions, according to interviews with more than 20 current and former agency employees.
WASHINGTON — When career employees of the Environmental Protection Agency are summoned to a meeting with the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, at agency headquarters, they no longer can count on easy access to the floor where his office is, according to interviews with employees of the federal agency.
Doors to the floor are now frequently locked, and employees have to have an escort to gain entrance.
Some employees say they are also told to leave behind their cellphones when they meet with Mr. Pruitt, and are sometimes told not to take notes.
Mr. Pruitt, according to the employees, who requested anonymity out of fear of losing their jobs, often makes important phone calls from other offices rather than use the phone in his office, and he is accompanied, even at E.P.A. headquarters, by armed guards, the first head of the agency to ever request round-the-clock security.
A former Oklahoma attorney general who built his career suing the E.P.A., and whose LinkedIn profile still describes him as “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda,” Mr. Pruitt has made it clear that he sees his mission to be dismantling the agency’s policies — and even portions of the institution itself.
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Climate Science, Special Report / Key Findings
- The 673 page report represents a massive body of the latest scientific findings on climate change.
The report carries with it a monumental scientific gravitas. A level of credibility that Trump, even in his wildest fantasies, couldn’t hope to achieve. It includes a culmination of research coming from thousands of peer-reviewed studies resulting in the accumulated work of tens of thousands of scientists. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) served as the lead government agency conducting the report. Representatives from three other federal agencies joined with NOAA along with a team of 54 scientist authors and reviewers drawing from both public and private sector institutional knowledge in compiling the report.
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Via Politico / Pruitt climate science challenge splits conservative allies
There is concern the GOP and its policies will suffer if the EPA chief reopens a losing argument about whether global warming is real
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Via China News Xinhua / 'Official' US Notice of Withdrawal from International Climate Agreement
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"I have no illusions about the possibility of changing Donald Trump's mind," Gore says. "I think he has made it abundantly clear that he's throwing his lot in with the climate deniers."
Gore spoke with the president multiple times prior to Trump's announcement about the Paris accord. Gore is now focused on building a bipartisan consensus to address the climate crisis.
Part of creating that consensus is spreading awareness of an issue that Gore has been following for decades. His 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which was basically an adaption of his Power Point presentation about the effects of global warming, was a surprise box office success. Now he has a new documentary, called An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.
Interview Highlights
On conversations he's had with Trump about climate change
I have taken the old-school view that conversations with a president should be kept confidential, but I will tell you that my simple focus was to convince him to stay in the Paris Agreement, and I had reason to believe that there was a real chance that he might. Previously, before his presidential campaign, he had signed a full page newspaper ad demanding that President Obama take bolder action to solve the climate crisis, so I felt there might be something to work with, and there are some people in his inner circle who certainly do believe that we have to solve the climate crisis. But he has surrounded himself with a rogues' gallery of climate deniers, coming out of the fossil fuel industry, and I think it's rather obvious that they've gained control of his thought process on this issue.
On why he believes Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement
I think he felt it was another way to throw a bone to his hardcore base. He's adopted the strategy of ignoring any effort to reach out to those who did not support him or to build broader coalitions across party and ideological lines, and seems to be counting on the fervor and passion of his shrinking base to keep him and his presidency afloat. I think that a part of his base has been particularly passionate in trying to deny the existence of a climate crisis.
On the "distracting quality" of the Trump presidency
One of the many problems he's posing for our country is the endless series of distractions — the new round of tweets, the new absurdities every day. When there's a new outrage I feel as if I have to download some existing outrage onto a hard drive so I can make room for the new outrage. The distracting quality of what he says and does is very harmful to our country's ability to sustain our focus on the most important challenges we have. ...
I have no interest in access to the Trump White House. I have no interest in any further dialogue with him. I wouldn't rule it out, because who knows what circumstances could develop, but I have no reservation about withholding criticism of him on those grounds. I just don't want to contribute to the constant distraction that takes us away from what we ought to be focused on.
On how big money is playing more of a role in the denial of climate change
[The fossil fuel industry] financed a major cottage industry of climate denial with pseudo scientists who crank out these phony pseudo-scientific reports. Their principal product is doubt. They know they don't have to win the argument, they just have to create enough doubt to lead people to lose any sense of urgency about solving this crisis. They have made some headway. But again, because Mother Nature has a more persuasive voice than any of us, they're losing this battle. The Paris Agreement was truly a historic breakthrough, illustrating that all around the world opinions are getting stronger and stronger in favor of solving the climate crisis. We're the only country with a major conservative party wedded to provable idiocy on climate science.
On how technological advancements can help combat climate change
Electricity from the sun and the wind is now in many regions much cheaper than electricity from dirty fossil fuels. Electric cars are becoming affordable. Batteries are coming down very quickly in cost, and coupled with renewable energy will utterly transform the world's energy systems, along with sustainable agriculture and forestry, we now have a chance to use these tools to really solve the climate crisis in time to avoid the catastrophic consequences that would otherwise fall upon us.
On if he ever imagined a reality TV star could be president
I did envision that someone with the skills of an actor on the screen might become president, and it was not long thereafter that Ronald Reagan was elected. I think it's not coincidental that someone like Donald Trump with not only the skill set of a reality TV star and the social media skills of what he has become, the tweeter in chief, was successful in today's media environment.
I do think that we need to reclaim the integrity and functionality of our constitutional system, and I hope that we'll see continued progress in moving the forms and patterns of democracy onto the Internet — which, with all of its many problems, the echo chambers and all the rest, nevertheless [restores] the ability of individuals with command of the facts and the ability to express themselves clearly to attract those who agree with their point of view and use knowledge as a form of power that substitutes for great wealth or force of arms.
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July / June 2017
Head of the US House Committee on Science: Climate Change is "Beneficial"
Lamar Smith Returns from Greenland
Don't Believe Lamar's Line
WASHINGTON — Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) — who has spent his career cozying up to fossil fuel interests, dismissing the threat of climate change and harassing federal climate scientists — is now arguing that pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide is “beneficial” to global trade, crop production and the lushness of the planet.
Rather than buying into “hysteria,” Americans should be celebrating the plus sides of a changing climate, Smith argues in an op-ed published July 24th in The Daily Signal, a news website published by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
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How California Plans to Go Far Beyond Any Other State on Climate
NYT / Just How Far Can California Possibly Go on Climate?
GreenPolicy360 / California out in front in a Green future
Over the past decade, California has passed a sweeping set of climate laws to test a contentious theory: that it’s possible to cut greenhouse gas emissions far beyond what any other state has done and still enjoy robust economic growth.
If California prevails, it could provide a model for other policy makers, even as President Trump scales back the federal government’s efforts on climate change. The state may also develop new technologies that the rest of the world can use to cut emissions.
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Voice of the People, via Vox
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News from the UK and Europe
UK banning all new petrol and diesel cars by 2040
- UK Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s pledge to ban new petrol and diesel cars in 23 years is not enough to tackle health crisis now, say campaigners
- Plans follow French commitment to take polluting vehicles off the road by 2040 owing to effect of poor air quality on people’s health
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Environmental progress on common quality of life issues, building on the precedents of the US Clean Air Act of 1963 and the 1967 Air Quality Act to confront air pollution problems.
- Air Pollution, emissions/externalities, measuring the costs to health and environmental security, acting to mitigate the threat, the consequences, local and global...
• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Pollution
• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Air_Quality
• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Environmental_full-cost_accounting
• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Externalities
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What Is the Cost of One Meter of Sea-Level Rise?
At the G-20 Meeting in Germany: The US Equation, 19+1
Attempting to Find "a text that can be tolerated" - by James Robbins, BBC Diplomatic Correspondent
For many hours, draft versions of the summit conclusions were causing deep concern to most G20 members. On climate change, it was effectively a G19 plus the United States.
Part of the final text will apparently recognise Donald Trump's rejection of the global Paris agreement to limit rising temperatures. But language the US was insisting on, which seemed to endorse the use of coal and oil long into the future, has now apparently reached a form others can tolerate, because they are not directly associated with it.
While this deadlock has apparently been resolved, it reflects a very divisive summit in which the rest of the world has been struggling to come to terms with the US president's "America first" policy: his suspicion or rejection of the whole concept of worldwide agreements designed to encourage free trade as well as collective action against global warming.
'World Aligns Against Trump' ... G-20_19+1
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World Leaders Move Forward on Climate, Without U.S.
At the G-20 summit meeting, 19 other members broke decisively with President Trump by signing a policy blueprint for meeting their goals in the Paris accord...
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Continuing News / Scroll
The US President Attempts to Squelch the Science
White House Science Office Shut Down
EPA’s Scott Pruitt is Trump’s most adept and dangerous hatchet man
Pruitt launching program to 'critique' #climatechange science
- U.S. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is leading a formal initiative to challenge mainstream climate science ... The disclosure follows the administration's suggestions over several days that it supports reviewing climate science outside the normal peer-review process used by scientists ... The source said Energy Secretary Rick Perry also favors the review. Executives in the coal industry interpret the move as a step toward challenging the endangerment finding, the agency's legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and other sources ... If Pruitt somehow succeeded in rolling back the finding — an outcome that many Republicans say is far-fetched — the federal government would no longer be required to restrict greenhouse gas emissions.
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What About the Facts, the Science, the Future, the Common Good?
DJT: You want facts? Fact is, I'm PRESIDENT. What don't you understand, I am the PRESIDENT, I know the facts. I decide your future.
(Insert tagline Make America Great Again in all CAPS here)
What "Common Good"? There is no "global community".
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The data, atmospheric and earth science continue...
Update via NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
NEWS | May 15, 2017 | April 2017 was second-warmest April on record
AP FACT CHECK: A blast of hot air with Trump's climate move
• https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/6/2/15727984/deceptions-trump-paris-speech
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The consequences start now / June 1
The US will be judged, this day will be long remembered.
National Security & Global Security are interrelated. He doesn't know this. There's so much he doesn't know & so much he doesn't know that he doesn't know.
Trump just betrayed the world. Now the world will fight back
Brown: The Rest of the World Is Against Trump / Governor Brown Statement on White House Paris Climate Agreement Announcement
- “This current departure from reality in Washington will be very short-lived, that I promise you,” Brown told POLITICO in an interview. “I’ve spoken with Republicans here in the Legislature, and they’re beginning to get very serious about climate action, so the momentum is all the other way. And I think Trump, paradoxically, is giving climate denial such a bad name that he’s actually building the very movement that he is [purporting] to undermine...”
Eurasian response strategy rolls out, aka US acts to turn the world against the US -- http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/335901-european-chinese-leaders-unite-after-reports-trump-may-withdraw-from
- Premier Li Keqiang of China said on Thursday that his country remained committed to the fight against climate change and to participating in international efforts for a greener world.
- “China will continue to uphold its commitments to the Paris climate agreement,” Mr. Li said, confirming a position his country agreed to alongside the United States in 2014, in what proved to be a watershed moment for the ultimate passage of the landmark accord the following year.
- “Step by step, and very arduously, together with other countries, we will work toward the goals set” by global leaders in 2015, Mr. Li said, standing beside Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in Berlin.
- Ms. Merkel, who welcomed the Chinese commitment as “encouraging,” has been a leader in the global push for climate action since 1992, when she played a crucial international role in passage of the world’s first climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol.
US business leaders point at downside -- http://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/big-business-urges-trump-stick-paris-climate-accord-n766641 --
http://lowcarbonusa.org/business
“If you have to go to a board of directors and say, ‘I have to make a multibillion-dollar investment that is multi-year,’ are you going to base it on two or four years in the political cycle or … on long-term economic, technological, and consumer trends?” -- Melissa Lavinson / The Atlantic
The GOP must own the consequences.
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The Future of Humanity, or Crime Against / May 31
- Forward or back? -- https://www.axios.com/scoop-trump-is-pulling-u-s-out-of-paris-climate-deal-2427773025.html
- Backwards looking -- "The 22" -- https://www.axios.com/scoop-top-republican-senators-urge-trump-to-exit-paris-climate-deal-2421530161.html
- A policy direction from the US president that will live up to the challenges or deliver economic, environmental disasters.
- “I’ve always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.” -- DJ Trump, Quoted 05/23/16 - MSNBC
- The Trump administration: A bump on the road.
- Remember that a future president can rejoin the Paris global climate agreement with a 'flick of a pen'.
- Musk Says He'll Leave Trump's Business Councils If U.S. Exits Paris Deal. June 1: Musk departs ...
- "The noose tightens," Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Climatic Change, told The Independent. The US withdrawing from the Paris Agreement would only aggravate the climate change problem and make it much more difficult to prevent the crossing of a global temperature to a dangerous threshold. Three billion tonnes of additional carbon dioxide could be released into the air every year...
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- "America’s Little Big Man -- http://billmoyers.com/story/little-big-man/
- Trump is teaching us how deeply disturbed our American world actually is"
- "America’s Little Big Man -- http://billmoyers.com/story/little-big-man/
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GreenPolicy360
Revisiting the International Climate Change Summit
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Change the EPA Regulations? Public Comment a LOUD NO
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency put out a call for comments about what regulations are in need of repeal, replacement or modification. The effort stemmed from an executive order issued by President Trump earlier this year instructing agencies to reexamine regulations that “eliminate jobs, or inhibit job creation” and/or “impose costs that exceed benefits.”
More than 55,100 responses rolled in by the time the comment period closed on Monday — but they were full of Americans sharing their experiences of growing up with dirty air and water, and with pleas for the agency not to undo safeguards that could return the country to more a more polluted era.
“Know your history or you’ll be doomed to repeat it,” one person wrote. “Environmental regulations came about for a reason.
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Conservative Group Led By EPA Chief Pruitt Received Dark Money To Battle Environmental Regulations
June 2017 / Via MapLight-Fast Company
- Donors include group affiliated with the Koch brothers, whose companies are now lobbying the EPA and the Trump administration
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Fighting Back
Trump's Rollback of Environmental Regulations
Opposition Begins in the Courts
(Via Forbes - April 15, 2017)
No matter who's in office, every major EPA rule ends up in court. It's inevitable. Industry groups and many Republican-run states fought every major EPA rule under President Obama, and Democrat-led states and green groups will do the same with President Trump. This type of partisan litigation has been commonplace since the EPA was created almost fifty years ago.
This time around, however, the environmental groups will have to rely even more heavily on litigation than in the past. That's because, of the three branches of the federal government, the Democrats now only hold a majority of one portion of one branch: the lower courts. The federal district and appellate courts are packed with Clinton and Obama appointees. Although the balance on the U.S. Supreme Court is now likely 5-4 in favor of conservatives, there are 13 intermediate appeals courts; according to Russell Wheeler, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, nine of these appeals courts have a majority of Democratic appointees. The lower federal district courts are also filled with Democratic appointees.
The green groups will almost certainly look to exploit these majorities over the next two years. As David Doniger, Director of the Climate and Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council said recently: “Scott Pruitt has to tear down our climate and clean air regulations the same way they were built up, following all the steps required by law. We’ll fight at every step, and we’ll see them in court.”
What’s more, virtually every major environmental statute (like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act) includes a citizen suit provision. These provisions allow citizens (including environmental groups) to sue the EPA, state agencies, and companies that fail to comply with environmental mandates. Courts can order offenders to comply and even impose hefty penalties. In addition to challenging rules that are made (or more likely, repealed) under a Pruitt-led EPA, expect to see environmental groups filing more citizen suits than usual over the next few years.
- It is far from clear how the Trump administration could actually “exit” the Paris agreement, assuming that the Pruitt line wins and the administration determines that it wants to. Now that the agreement has entered into force, it takes three years under its terms for a party to withdraw, followed by a one-year waiting period — a length roughly equal to Trump’s first term in office.
- "There’s a strong antiscience attitude within this administration. I have heard nothing that suggests support for a scientific agenda."
CO2 / 400 PPM, Science Facts and Global Risks
Latest CO2 Data Reports from Mauna Loa
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/carbon-clock/BLOOMBERG-CARBON-CLOCK-TECHNICAL-WORKING-PAPER.pdf
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From GreenPolicy friend Andrew Revkin: "The following ProPublica article just scrapes the surface on why there's no easy answer in deciding how much to invest now to limit downside risk to future generations ... there’s probably no more consequential and contentious a target for the incoming administration than an arcane metric called the “social cost of carbon."
Will Trump’s Climate Team Accept Any ‘Social Cost of Carbon’?
The nation’s top science panel has just sketched a clearer way to set a fair price today for cutting tomorrow’s climate risks. Some of Trump’s advisers say the price should be zero.
Currently set at $36 per ton of carbon dioxide, the metric is produced using a complex, and contentious, set of models estimating a host of future costs to society related to rising temperatures and seas, then using a longstanding economic tool, a discount rate, to gauge how much it is worth today to limit those harms generations hence. (For context, the United States emitted about 5.1 billion tons of CO2 in 2015, out of a global total of 36 billion.)
... the social cost of carbon underpins justifications for policies dealing with everything from power plants to car mileage to refrigerator efficiency. The carbon valuation has already helped shape 79 regulations.
The strongest sign of a coming challenge to the social cost calculation came in a post-election memorandum from Thomas Pyle, who was then president of the industry-funded American Energy Alliance and Institute for Energy Research and who now leads the Trump transition team for the Department of Energy. In the memo, he predicted policies resulting in “ending the use of the social cost of carbon in federal rule makings.”
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March 30, 2017
March 29, 2017
Chair of House Science Committee Says the Journal ‘Science’ Is Not Objective
March 28, 2017
Trump signs order sweeping away Obama-era climate policies
5:23 PM ET - CNN / Trump dramatically changes US approach to climate change
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Trump to hire major coal lobbyist to be deputy administrator at EPA
Trump's reported pick, Andrew Wheeler, to help lead the EPA is a former senior staffer of climate change denier Sen. James Inhofe
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Environmental Legal Actions Are Just the Beginning
Youth Climate Lawsuit Shifts Focus to Trump
"What's likely the highest-stakes climate lawsuit on the planet?"
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Climate lawsuit to stop Trump administration 'destruction of documents'
- Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, the plaintiffs submitted a request that the Department of Justice preserve all documents that could be relevant to the lawsuit, including information on climate change, energy and emissions, and cease any destruction of such documents that may otherwise occur during the presidential transition. The request came just days after reports began to surface of climate information disappearing from White House and certain federal agency websites.
- “We are concerned with the new administration’s immediate maneuver to remove important climate change information from the public domain and, based on recent media reports, we are concerned about how deep the scrubbing effort will go,”Julia Olson, chief legal counsel for the plaintiffs and executive director of the advocacy group Our Children’s Trust, said in a statement at the time. “Destroying evidence is illegal and we just put these new U.S. Defendants and the Industry Defendants on notice that they are barred from doing so.”
- The Trump administration is combating this request in its motion to stay litigation, along with its motion to appeal. The administration charges that the United States could be “irreparably harmed” if the case’s proceedings are not halted pending consideration of its appeal, claiming that “the extraordinary scope of this litigation and the concomitant scope of discovery that Plaintiffs appear to be seeking set this case apart.”
- “One of the things that the government argues is that the preservation of documents itself represents a burden on the government,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. “What they’re arguing is that they’ll be irreparably injured by having to go through discovery here.”
- This, he added, “sends kind of the wrong signal, or at least a very dangerous signal, in terms of what the government’s priorities are or what it’s thinking of doing. It shouldn’t be any kind of burden for the government to preserve documents that are already in existence.”
- But given the broad implications of the case for U.S. climate action, especially if the plaintiffs prevail, “it’s not surprising that the Trump administration would want to quash it,” said Gallagher, the Sierra Club legal director.
- If the case were successful, the federal government would be obligated to take meaningful action against climate change, probably through a planned reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. This type of order would run counter to the current administration’s priorities. On Thursday, Scott Pruitt, the EPA chief, rejected the underlying science of climate change, and the administration has indicated its intent to cancel a number of Obama-era climate and environmental regulations, including the Clean Power Plan, and withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.
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Environmental Protection Agency's New Chief Rejects Core Mission of the EPA
E.P.A. Head Stacks Agency With Climate Change Skeptics
Who needs “science” in an EPA Office of Science and Technology mission statement anyway?
- "It’s not about Pruitt, it’s about the Republican Party.
- "The GOP’s goal is to block or reverse any policy that would negatively affect its donors and supporters, who are drawn disproportionately from carbon-intensive industries and regions... That means, effectively, blocking any efficacious climate policy (which, almost by definition, will diminish fossil fuels).
- "Alone among major parties in the developed world, the GOP rejects the need to act on climate change. That’s the outrage. Pruitt is an epiphenomenon."
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New US Secretary of State Tillerson and Climate Change
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Via Katharine Hayhoe
When you try to replicate climate contrarian papers
Katharine Hayhoe, Professor, Texas Tech, videos
January 2017
Environmental Security, National Security
'Trump is at war with science and knowledge'
-- Via the Los Angeles Times
Nearly every day brings a new report of a federal agency told to shut down communications with the public or even members of Congress; tweets about important topics such as climate change removed from the public record; bans on talking to the press...
Researchers in government and elsewhere are concerned that shutting down outside communications is merely the first step in a campaign to undermine the credibility of established science. As Alex Parker, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., observed in a tweet this week: “Barring public communication from science agencies reduces their visibility, which masks their value, which makes them easier to dismantle.”
Former Chief of ExxonMobil Testifies Before US Congress
- President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, said he believes the risks of climate change "could be serious enough that action should be taken,” but he did not elaborate on what that action should be.
Tillerson testified that he formed his views “over about 20 years as an engineer and a scientist, understanding the evolution of the science.” Ultimately, he said, he concluded that increasing greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere are having an effect on the earth’s climate. But he added, “Our ability to predict that effect is very limited,” and precisely what actions nations should take “seems to be the largest area of debate existing in the public discourse.”
Former General in Charge of US Central Command Appears Before Congress
General Mattis' pre-hearing written remarks line up with the ex Exxon chief executive, Rex Tillerson, nominee for Secretary of State. We agree that international alliances must be stressed as strategic goals, but alliances have to be mutual with core values that go beyond theaters of war and continued conflict. The geopolitics of today extend far beyond the interests of the new US administration preparing to take office in opposition to critical international alliances. The recently achieved climate accord is a key element in national/global security. Although the US Department of Defense has instituted policies that acknowledge and take into account the 'threat multiplier' of global climate change, the new administration and allies in Congress have announced efforts to pushback climate cooperation internationally and rollback renewable energy goals.
The realpolilitik of a multilateral world with energy and climate policies that the new administration opposes is about to play out politically and, in the case of General Mattis, militarily. He will soon face challenges from many of the industrial democracies in opposition to the Trumpian view of the world.
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A New Year Arrives as New Challenges Arise
Trump and the Climate: His Hot Air on Warming Is Far From the Greatest Threat
- (From Andy Revkin, his second article on his new Beat at ProPublica)
- Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, has frightened many with his embrace of fossil fuels.
- What’s truly scary, scientists and others say, is how much larger the problem is than one American president.
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December 14th, 2016
Governor Jerry Brown Calls On Scientists to Deliver "Truth Telling"
- The American Geophysical Union meet up in California is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world
- The AGU promotes discovery in Earth and space science for the benefit of humanity
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On the Election of Donald Trump as US President
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'The List', aka, beginnings of a purge
Trump transition team for Energy Department seeks names of employees involved in climate meetings
Trump Team Memo Hints at Big Shake-Up of U.S. Energy Policy
Trump team letter sparks 'witch hunt' fears at Energy Department
Trump team wants 'lists' of Energy Department climate researchers
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Trump to scrap NASA climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’
- NASA’s Earth Science division is set to be stripped of funding... Via The Guardian
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GreenPolicy360 addresses the upcoming Earth Science debate and decisions to be determined in Congress and by the incoming President.
The consequences -- and legacy -- of this generation's actions, the president-elect's actions, the US Congress actions and its votes, the corporate interests and lobbying will be felt -- and judged -- for decades going forward.
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Continuing Post-election News
- Trump elected, Trump administration plans to dismantle environmental policy and protection...
- • http://www.eenews.net/
- • https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-picks-top-climate-skeptic-to-lead-epa-transition/
- • http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/09/trump-left-just-lost-war-climate-change/
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Standing Rock, Water, Oil and Taking a Stand
https://steemit.com/dapl/@thirdeye/the-great-bison-spirit-and-the-dakota-access-pipeline
- Standing Rock Arrival of Wild Buffalo
Remember and Respect Indigenous Rights
• http://www.yesmagazine.org/how-to-talk-about-standing-rock-20161028
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CANNON BALL, ND - The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has released a statement regarding law enforcement escalation today at Dakota Access Pipeline protest sites.
The statement below is from Dave Archambault II, Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe:
"Militarized law enforcement agencies moved in on water protectors with tanks and riot gear today. We continue to pray for peace. We call on the state of North Dakota to oversee the actions of local law enforcement to, first and foremost, ensure everyone’s safety. The Department of Justice must send overseers immediately to ensure the protection of First Amendment rights and the safety of thousands here at Standing Rock. DOJ can no longer ignore our requests. If harm comes to any who come here to stand in solidarity with us, it is on their watch. They must step in and hold the state of North Dakota and Morton County accountable for their acts of violence against innocent, prayerful people.
The Obama administration has asked DAPL to voluntarily halt construction until the review process has been completed, but DAPL has ignored these repeated requests. By deploying law enforcement to support DAPL construction, the State of North Dakota is collaborating with Energy Transfer Partners and escalating tensions. We need our state and federal governments to bring justice and peace to our lands, not the force of armored vehicles.
We have repeatedly seen a disproportionate response from law enforcement to water protectors’ nonviolent exercise of their constitutional rights. Today we have witnessed people praying in peace, yet attacked with pepper spray, rubber bullets, sound and concussion cannons. We urge state and federal government agencies to give this tense situation their immediate and close attention.
We also call on the thousands of water protectors who stand in solidarity with us against DAPL to remain in peace and prayer. Any act of violence hurts our cause and is not welcome here. We invite all supporters to join us in prayer that, ultimately, the right decision—the moral decision—is made to protect our people, our sacred places, our land and our resources. We won't step down from this fight. As peoples of this earth, we all need water. This is about our water, our rights, and our dignity as human beings."
Earth Science 360°
Countries Climate Action/INDC Plans
- October 4, 2016: EU votes to affirm the #ParisAgreement
- The most comprehensive international agreement ever to combat man-made climate change will take effect next month, less than a year after negotiators from more than 190 countries reached international accord.
- October 5, 2016 / The European Parliament yesterday approved ratification of the Paris climate accord by the European Union (EU).
- United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: "There are two requirements for the Paris Agreement to enter into force. Fifty-five parties to the Agreement, and fifty-five percent of greenhouse gas emissions accounted for... With the action taken by the EU Parliament, we will achieve both thresholds."
GreenPolicy continues listing and updating climate plans and climate plan actions from countries across the globe...
Earth Day / April 22, 2016 / Signing Climate Action Plans
As of January 1, 2016, GreenPolicy has updated 189 country climate plans
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First Cruise Ship Crossing Ice-Free Arctic Passage
Arrival in New York City - September 16, 2016
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"A Hoax", Human-Caused Climate Change is a Hoax claims a US Candidate for President, while International Climate Agreements Make History
Donald Trump and the Climate-Change Countdown
September 29 -- Elizabeth Kolbert: Donald Trump, who has very publicly called climate change a “hoax” (despite very publicly denying having done so, in Monday’s debate), has said that he will “rescind” the Clean Power Plan. Hillary Clinton, in contrast, has said that she will carry it out. Whoever is elected will, it seems, have the chance to nominate the deciding Justice to the Supreme Court. This could be seen as yet another reason to be terrified of a Trump victory. Or it could be seen as the reason to be terrified of a Trump victory.
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September 2 -- There they go again, a follow-up monumental agreement between China and the US, although Republican candidate Trump calls climate change a "Chinese hoax". Sure Donald, whatever...
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U.S. and China ratify sweeping climate deal and urge other nations to follow their lead
The swift action is likely to spur other nations to move with more dispatch, both to formalize the deal and to cut emissions, said Jake Schmidt, director of international programs for the NRDC - Natural Resources Defense Council.
“It creates a momentum,” Schmidt said. “If you want to be a good global citizen, you need to act on climate change, and you need to do it now.”
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FYI GreenPolicy readers, no, your Siterunner Steven Schmidt isn't related to Jake Schmidt of NRDC or, for that matter, related to NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, but ...
"Brother Gavin" from NASA Goddard is on message again here as he reports the data ...
NASA: Earth is warming at a pace 'unprecedented in 1,000 years'
August 30, 2016
The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it “very unlikely” that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa’s top climate scientist.
This year has already seen scorching heat around the world, with the average global temperature peaking at 1.38C above levels experienced in the 19th century, perilously close to the 1.5C limit agreed in the landmark Paris climate accord. July was the warmest month since modern record keeping began in 1880, with each month since October 2015 setting a new high mark for heat.
Nasa said that records of temperature that go back far further, taken via analysis of ice cores and sediments, suggest that the warming of recent decades is out of step with any period over the past millennium.
“In the last 30 years we’ve really moved into exceptional territory,” Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said. “It’s unprecedented in 1,000 years. There’s no period that has the trend seen in the 20th century in terms of the inclination (of temperatures).”
“Maintaining temperatures below the 1.5C guardrail requires significant and very rapid cuts in carbon dioxide emissions or co-ordinated geo-engineering. That is very unlikely. We are not even yet making emissions cuts commensurate with keeping warming below 2C.”
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US House Science Committee Acts to Defend ExxonMobile Against Attorneys General
US House Committee Grills EPA
Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH) notably called the EPA rules “un-American” during a July 6th hearing of the Energy and Power subcommittee held to review the EPA’s regulations, especially regarding coal-generated power.
“I think it’s absurd, I think it’s irresponsible. Quite frankly, Ms. McCabe, I think it’s un-American.”
“It's like a dad-gum permission slip to do business in America... doesn't produce a product, doesn't pay a salary, it doesn't go to any company's bottom line. It's like going to the movie theater and buying a ticket but you don't get the popcorn or the diet Coke, you gotta pay extra to get that stuff, and the projector doesn't work. It's a ripoff!”
Just Another Hot Air Day
June 2016
Republicans in US Congress Vote to Block National & Global Security
- Attempt to Defund and Block Defense Dept. Studies and Work Related to Impacts of Climate Change
Thirty-One Top Scientific Societies Speak with One Voice on Global Climate Change
May 26 / Trump v the World of Science: US Republican Presidential Candidate Announces His Energy Policy
- 'Presumptive Nominee' Says Cancel the Paris agreement, More fossil fuels, Less Clean/Renewable Energy
U.S. Presidential Campaign: Environmental Threats
Trump v the World: Announces his Energy policy
- Republican presidential candidate -- Cancel the Paris agreement, More fossil fuels, Less Clean/Renewable Energy
- In a speech laying out his energy agenda for the United States, Trump promised to undo essentially every major policy developed in last decade intended to slow human-caused global warming.
Trump declares he doesn't believe the science, says he believes climate change a hoax and that climate change is "BS"
- Trump tweet: This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. 'Environmentalists are the problem', acc to the Republican candidate for president
- Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice
May 31, Stephen Hawking interviewed by ITV on science, global threats and... the US presidential election:
Stephen Hawking / ITV: The world-famous theorist has made no secret of his disdain for the likely Republican Party presidential nominee. But asked if his knowledge of the universe meant he could explain the popular appeal of the billionaire tycoon, he told ITV's Good Morning Britain: "I can't. He is a demagogue, who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator". In the same interview, Hawking also said he didn’t believe Trump was the greatest threat facing America, or even the world. The greatest threat, he said, is human-caused climate change.
“A more immediate danger is runaway climate change,” Hawking said. "Runaway climate change... A rise in ocean temperature would melt the ice-caps, and cause a release of large amounts of carbon dioxide from the ocean floor." "We are changing our climate for the worse. That would have catastrophic effects."
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May 20, Another scholar speaks out, Noam Chomsky addresses the US presidential election: ... "(W)e haven’t even talked about the worst problems: the economic problems are bad enough, as are the social problems, but far worse than these are the major threats to the survival of the human species – the threat of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. Here, if you look at the US primaries, you have to be impressed and appalled by the utter irrationality of the species. Here are two enormous problems that have to be faced right now, and they are almost absent from the primaries." And Trump? "(T)here are some pretty stable elements of his ideology, if you can even grant him that concept. One of them is: “Climate change is not taking place.” As he puts it: “Forget it.” And that’s almost a death knell for the species – not tomorrow, but the decisions we take now are going to affect things in a couple of decades, and in a couple of generations it could be catastrophic."
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Anthropogenic Global Warming #AGW / http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
- Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming #CAGW / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change
“Another month, another record. The extraordinary heat that was recorded in 2015 pales by comparison to 2016.”
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Youth Climate Advocates Secure Victory in Massachusetts Climate Change Lawsuit
- Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts rules that state must impose comprehensive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions
- Must comply with the 'Global Warming Solutions Act'
- Youth Climate Lawsuit Moves Forward in Massachusetts Climate Change Lawsuit.
See Related Lawsuit Update: March 2017
Youth Climate Lawsuit Shifts Focus to Trump
It's Donald Trump vs. 21 young people armed with global consensus on climate change
What's likely the highest-stakes climate lawsuit on the planet
Earlier this month, not long after the plaintiffs' lawyers replaced President Obama with Trump in the suit, the administration filed a request for interlocutory appeal – a rare request since appeals are usually filed after a trial judgment, not before. Trump's lawyers also objected to a letter sent to federal agencies demanding that they preserve climate data and emails between the administration and the fossil-fuel industry that might prove the government has known since the 1960s about the dangers to public health posed by fossil fuels.
Lawyers for Trump are responding quickly and aggressively to a case that will embarrass and interfere with the administration's efforts to roll back environmental regulations and kneecap the EPA...
Global Warming:Higher Global Temperatures
April 22 -- Earth Day: Countries Signing the Paris Agreement at the UN
The R's on the Science Com't act -- by surveilling scientists
- 130 countries have committed to sign the Paris climate change deal during a kickoff ceremony on April 22, Earth Day
April 2016
Fracking etc, one day in the life of the US energy mix 'n mash
March 2016
- Great Barrier Reef bleaching may be 'last wake-up call', marine scientists say
Coral as a canary, a sentinel species
Underwater Heat Wave Devastates Great Barrier Reef
Hardest-hit area includes some of Australia’s most remote and pristine coral
- March 29, 2016
CANBERRA, Australia — An underwater heat wave is devastating huge swaths of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, marine researchers have found.
A Nightmare is Unfolding in the Great Barrier Reef
Extensive bleaching has been caused by higher ocean temperatures
To prevent further damage, governments should commit to lowering emissions, an Australian team says
"This has been the saddest research trip of my life," James Cook University professor Terry Hughes, the convener of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce, said in a press release after the team aerially surveyed almost 2,500 miles of the northern Australia reefs.
Coral bleaching is a modern phenomenon, marine scientists say; Over the past 400 years, there's no evidence of bleaching events until the late 20th century. Changing environmental factors like rising sea temperatures can cause the coral to expel their photosynthetic algae, called zooxanthellae, making many turn stark white. Others remain vivid, but have lost the green and brown hues that signal health. Without the symbiotic algae to process sunlight into oxygen and other nutrients, the coral dies.
Sydney, Australia - The Worst Bleaching Event
"What we're seeing now is unequivocally to do with climate change," Prof Justin Martin Univ of Queensland tells the ABC
Visit Latest Ocean Science at www.TinyBlueGreen.com
Australia's Great Barrier Reef hit by severe bleaching - Video
March 2016
Anthropogenic Climate Disruption: The Debate, Updates, and the Money Behind Much of the Debate
"Apparently, impending catastrophe doesn't mean much to some of the United States' wealthiest people. Once again a report has arisen documenting how fossil fuel millionaires pumped more than $100 million into Republican presidential super PACs last year. That means that $1 out of every $3 donated to Republican candidates coming from hyper-rich individuals came from people who made their fortunes from fossil fuels. In boosting GOP politicians, these funders were simply acting to protect their cash cows from those of us who happen to give a damn about the planet.
"A recent report by the Center for American Progress Action Fund shows that more than six out of every 10 Americans are represented by someone in Congress who denies the reality of ACD. According to the report, 59 percent of the Republican House caucus and an amazing 70 percent of the Republicans in the Senate deny ACD is real. The report also reveals that, according to the US Census, 202,803,591 Americans are represented by an ACD denier."
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Threat Environment
ExxonMobil Under Investigation
- Money-in-Politics: Giants of the oil and gas industry spend millions in 2015 to manipulate lawmakers and public discourse on climate change
Oil Change International ... "Exposing the true costs of fossil fuels"
ExxonMobil predicts "long-term demand growth" and profits in investor report
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Bloomberg: Big Oil's Climate Obstruction Efforts
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Wall Street Journal Editorial Board Meltsdown with Bizarre Accusation: Like Cromwell Did Catholics?
- U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island Democrat who is the Senate's leading voice on climate change, is locked in a bitter brawl with the Wall Street Journal editorial page over his proposal to sue fossil fuel companies for fraud
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The Presidential campaign comes to the 'Sunshine State'
Sunshine state pol updates -- Some environmental Carl Hiaasen riffing on Florida's Gov Scott, and an e-bit of Clinton & Sanders from today's Miami Herald & TampaBay Times.
Clinton "mocked the Scott administration's directive to state employees not to use the words "climate change" and pledged to support renewable energy in Florida."
"Of Scott's order to state employees, she said: "I found this one hard to believe. I mean, you've just got to shake your head at that."
"When Republicans say they can't talk about climate change because they're not scientists, Clinston said, there's a cure for that: "Go talk to a scientist."
Sanders "also criticized Republicans for their obstinance on climate change, which he said is holding Florida back from becoming a leader in renewable energy."
"The state of Florida has an extraordinary natural resource: its called sunlight," Sanders said, "and this state should be a leader in the world in producing solar energy."
And from Florida, an Editorial re: political moves in the 'Sunshine State'... misnaming a constitutional amendment that would, in effect, *prevent sunshine/solar energy* from competing w/ the fossil fuel industry. The issue is now before the Court. Ivan Penn formerly w/ the St Pete Times, now w/ the LA Times, wrote extensively about energy issues in Florida. What a long-running story it is. Today's Tampa Bay Times Editorial speaks of the latest chapter of public good v energy industry-lobbying power...
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Energy Innovation:
Shift Away from Fossil Fuels to Renewables
Our Generational Challenge: Transformative Eco-nomics
NextGen Batteries, Grid-Scale Storage, Metering & Efficiencies
- Elon's thinking, a planet citizen's thinking:
- From GrnPolicy: Elon Musk spoke of how the iconic whole earth "Blue Marble" photo of Earth had inspired him to dream and to move his technology plans toward a space & earth connection...
- Elon speaks of the danger to Earth's atmosphere, our planet's 'thin blue layer': "We’re running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.”
- "The greater the change to the chemical composition of the physical, chemical makeup of the oceans and atmosphere [due to increased carbon emissions], the greater the long-term effect will be... [W]hy would you run this crazy experiment to see how bad it'll be? We know it's at least some bad, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it'll be 'really bad'."
- "As far as Earth is concerned, I think the biggest problem that humanity faces is one of sustainable energy. If we don’t solve that problem this century, independent of any environmental concerns, we will face economic collapse… This is obvious."
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Obvious security threats that go un-acknowledged...
None of the Republican Candidates for US President Support Action Against Climate Change
What Problems, We See No Problems
- Environmental Scorecard: Cruz and Rubio voted against every green bill,
- and opposed every pro-environment, anti-pollution piece of legislation
Trump has taken things further, even as he declares his concern over nuclear weapons
- Trump tweet: This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop.
- Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice
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Florida's Senator, Marco Rubio, campaigns for president denying human activity's connection to climate change. Yet his home state feels the impacts even as the Senator and most of Republican leadership in the State looks away: “Florida is ground zero for sea level effects in the United States, and the debate here still seems to be whether this is happening – not what to do to prepare for it,” said Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Given our current rates of rise, we can expect some rather severe consequences, and I’m not sure we’re ready to deal with the consequences of what’s going on.”
Read more about Florida and climate change here
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February 2016
Breaking News/Feb. 14: The sudden death of US Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia sets up "an evenly divided bench", as commentators report on Feb. 13th on the news of the Justice's death in Texas. This change in the Court has wide-ranging consequence, including the Court's critically important vote on President Obama’s most ambitious effort to fight climate change, the Clean Power Plan. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit now has to finish hearing the case and rule before the Supreme Court takes up the climate plan again. The Court now will be divided and visibly a "deadlocked" judiciary until a new Supreme Court justice is appointed and confirmed.
The Supreme Court's Feb. 9th Stay Order to halt implementation of the President's Clean Power Plan, a large part of the US climate plan put forward at the international climate summit in Paris in December, came on what was described as an "unprecedented" decision by the Court on a 5-4 vote. Without Scalia's vote on environmental issues, the Court's reach will be limited to block Presidential powers addressing environmental and climate issues. The balance of power has shifted. On climate and energy policy, and many upcoming important and historic cases before the Court, the future decisions of the Court are more than ever in question. The presidential campaign has much more at stake now impacting the future of the country -- and planet. The next Supreme Court justice will, no doubt, be a swing vote with real power.
- Supreme Court’s Action Threatens Vital Climate Policies
- The US Supreme Court order blocking President Obama’s plan to cut emissions from coal-burning power plants is an unprecedented step and one of the most environmentally harmful decisions ever made by the nation’s highest court
US Supreme Court Deals Blow to Obama’s Efforts to Regulate Coal Emissions
WASHINGTON — NYT/Feb 9, 2016 — In a major setback for President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants.
A stunning development,” Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor and former environmental legal counsel to the Obama administration, said in an email. She added that “the order certainly indicates a high degree of initial judicial skepticism from five justices on the court,” and that the ruling would raise serious questions from nations that signed on to the landmark Paris climate change pact in December."
Related Coverage of Supreme Court Climate Vote
'Washington DC and World Around DC'
January 2016 Was the Most Abnormally Warm Month Ever Recorded, NASA Says
- NASA's analysis found this was the largest monthly warm temperature anomaly in their database dating to 1880
It's Hot: Is It Deniable? Ask the US Congress
- Man-made heat put in oceans has doubled since 1997, study finds
- The Oceans: This is where 90% of global warming is going
- Ocean heat study @ Nature Climate Change Journal
- Hot and hotter, earth science data reports
Predictions: Climate change to speed up
- Climate scientists say human impacts are adding up faster than reported...
- Business-as-usual forces argue "not to worry", that the consensus of science is wrong...
- Looking back & looking forward... what if's / NASA Asks: "Is a Sleeping Giant Stirring in the Arctic?"
"Watch 25 years of Arctic Sea Ice disappear"
Action Agenda
Via Climate Reality Project
SWEDEN / COSTA RICA / NICARAGUA / SCOTLAND / GERMANY / URUGUAY / DENMARK / CHINA (Wondering how the world's largest carbon emitter can also be a leader in renewable energy? It may seem counter-intuitive, but in 2014 China had the most installed wind energy capacity – by a longshot – and the second-highest installed solar PV capacity) / MOROCCO / UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (In the US, a new solar energy system was installed every two minutes and 30 seconds in 2014, earning the US fifth place on the installed solar PV capacity global rankings. America also has the second-highest installed wind energy capacity in the world (after China). Unfortunately, the energy demand in the States far outpaces the renewable capacity) / KENYA (geo-thermal)
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Snapshot — January 2016
The sands of time shift and the hydrocarbon era begins to fade
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2016: Reddit AMA: Science-Sea Level Rise
Update: Jason-3 in Orbit - http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/jason-3-launches-to-monitor-global-sea-level-rise
https://blogs.nasa.gov/Jason-3/
Jason-3 Mission -- Jason-3 to launch Jan 17, 2016
Earth science/measurements provide critical information about ocean circulation patterns and about both global and regional changes in sea level and the climate implications of a warming world
For over 20 years, the Jason series of satellites (and their predecessor TOPEX/Poseidon), have helped to track global sea level rise, one of the main symptoms of climate change, and other climate phenomena such as El Niño. Data from Jason-3 will be added to this record and will be vital in helping to improve climate prediction models
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US Congress attempts to deny the security threat
Looking back at 2015, Green Progress and GOP Buffoonery
- Washington Post editorial, January 3, 2016
15 Ridiculous Things Far Out Media Said About Climate Change In 2015
- Media Matters, End of Year wrap up
US House Science Com't Chair Climate/Security Disaster
Obama Vetoes GOP Attempt to Kill Climate Rules
Going Global Renewables Is the Challenge
The Adoption of the Paris Agreement; the final draft
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said the talks were the most complicated and difficult negotiations he had ever been involved in.
“I have been attending many difficult multilateral negotiations, but by any standard, this negotiation is most complicated, most difficult, but most important for humanity...”
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"Let's Get to Work": President Obama's Climate Speech in Paris
Visit GreenPolicy's International List of National Climate Plans
Update of INDC plans by GreenPolicy360 as of Jan 1, 2016
Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)
INDC portal -- http://unfccc.int/focus/indc_portal/items/8766.php
Quoted re: the Paris Climate Summit
- Union of Concerned Scientists: "It's very important that we not lock into place the initial offers (INDCs) that countries have put on the table... We need to have, by the end of this decade, an initial review of where we are at and what more can be done to lift ambition... and countries need to be prepared to review and revise upward their initial offers."
- ''NY Times Editorial Board: "So far, more than 170 countries, accounting for over 90 percent of global greenhouse emissions, have submitted pledges, and more may emerge in Paris. Will these pledges be enough to ward off the worst consequences of global warming? No."
December 2015
*NASA Earth Sciences 2016 Budget No Longer Cut $500 Million
Final budget bill provides $1.92 billion for Earth Science research
The final budget bill provides $1.92 billion for Earth Science research, just $20 million less than the President's original budget request. The cut is slight compared to initial GOP budget cuts proposed in the House and Senate which had slashed as much as $500 million from the President's request.
NASA administrator Charles Bolden argued before Congress this summer and fall that it was critical to increase the size of NASA's Earth Science programs.
Under the newly passed Fiscal Year 2016 NASA Budget, virtually all of the agency’s programs benefit with either full or added funding. -- http://www.universetoday.com/123937/nasa-receives-significant-budget-boost-fiscal-year-2016
Congress Committee Cuts Earth Science research
Committee Chair Smith/R-TX After Hearing on NASA/NOAA Budget
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U.S. Congress/Science Committee News (Not Good News)
Via Vox -- U.S. House Science Committee Talks Conspiracy and Subpoenas
- From a bully pulpit, Ted Cruz offers his take on climate change / Dec 9
- Cruz 'cherry-picks' from the climate record; Texas oil Senator's debate strategy
- Cruz: I learned to debate in college and I'm right
- Letter to Science Committee re: integrity / Nov 24
- More from American science organizations
- Science Orgs respond to attacks by Science Committee
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Opposition Clips
December
Via New Republic/Dec 15 -- What Climate Agreement? GOP Candidates Ignore the International Agreement
Via NY Times/Dec 4 -- Republicans' Climate Change Denial Denial
- Krugman: Future historians will almost surely say that the most important thing happening in the world during December 2015 was the climate talks in Paris. True, nothing agreed to in Paris will be enough, by itself, to solve the problem of global warming. But the talks could mark a turning point, the beginning of the kind of international action needed to avert catastrophe....
- I’d urge everyone outside the climate-denial bubble to frankly acknowledge the awesome, terrifying reality. We’re looking at a [Republican] party that has turned its back on science at a time when doing so puts the very future of civilization at risk. That’s the truth, and it needs to be faced head-on.
GreenPolicy360: Time to Pressure Congress: Environmental Security Delivers National Security
Via New Yorker/Dec 4 -- Congress Moves to Sabotage the Paris Climate Summit
Via Mother Jones/Dec 4 -- Chris Christie: "Hell No," America Shouldn't Lead on Climate Change
Via CommonDreams-PR Watch/Dec 3 -- Corporate Lobby Group ALEC Works to Scuttle Global Climate Agreement
Via Bloomberg Politics/Dec 2 -- Obama's Climate Plans to Survive Republican Foes
Via Think Progress/Dec 2 -- House votes to kill clean power plan
Via Bloomberg Business/Dec 1 -- "Unearthing America's Deep Network of Climate Change Deniers":
- "New study attempts the first tally of those driving the peculiarly American strain of climate change denial"
November
Via Climate Progress -- U.S. Senate Republicans Say 'No' to Paris Climate Accord
Via The Atlantic -- Republican Attempt to Derail the Paris Climate Talks
Via Politico -- "Republicans seek to strangle Paris climate pact"
Via Washington Post -- "Amid record global temperatures, Senate votes to block Obama’s Clean Power Plan"
Important: Legal forms for Paris climate agreement
March and demonstrations in Paris will go on
Paris Climate Mtgs, Opening Nov 30 - Information Hub
U.S. Congress/Science Committee News (Not Good News)
On Point
What critics of the Keystone campaign misunderstand / Vox
Nov 6, 2015
"Win for Greens" / "No to Keystone, Yes to the Planet"
Goodbye Keystone XL: President Obama/US State Dept Reject Pipeline
It's Your Breathing Planet
Join In, Act, Follow, Be Out in Front
UN / Climate Plans "Synthesis Report"
Christiana Figueres @CFigueres
- Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
- Figueres - REDDIT AMA -- Oct 28
UN Climate Action @UNFCCC
- Oct. 19, 2015
- Opening plenary of the latest @UN climate negotiations kicks off today in Bonn
- http://bit.ly/1OObz76 #ADP2
Christiana Figueres (@CFigueres)
- Opening plenary of resumed #ADP2 session starts. Last few steps toward Paris. Focus!
- pic.twitter.com/A63Cyfds2N
Climate Plans/INDCs in Preparation for December UNFCCC Conference in Paris
Intended Nationally Determined Contributions
Progress Reports on Climate Action Plans (INDCs) as Submitted to the UN
#INDC / INDCs defined at Wikipedia
Conference of Parties 21, UN Climate Change Conference
Pope pushes world leaders at UN to protect environment
Pope Francis called on world leaders gathered at the United Nations in New York on Sept. 25th to take firm action on the environment, blaming a "selfish and boundless thirst for power and material" for its destruction.
"We human beings are part of the environment," Francis said. "We live in communion with it, since the environment itself entails ethical limits which human activity must acknowledge and respect. ... Any harm done to the environment, therefore, is harm done to humanity."
Pope Francis again made history a day after his address to a joint session of Congress, delivering a speech before the largest-ever gathering of world leaders at the United Nations. In his address to the General Assembly, the popular "people’s pope" critiqued the current “culture of waste” and urged government leaders to do more to combat poverty and address environmental abuses. Climate change, he reiterated, could “threaten the very existence of the human species.”
I am OCO-2 -- reporting home Climate deniers blame global warming on nature. This NASA data begs to differ
More from OCO-2 -- https://youtu.be/8YsoVWxR9-w
- NASA Missions / Earth Right Now
https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/ --- https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/projects-supported
The Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC) at NASA Langley Research Center responsible for processing, archiving, and distribution of NASA Earth science data
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Eurasian futures... https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Eurasia
News Highlights --- 2015
California out in front modeling and sharing green best practices
http://www.bioneers.org/bioneers-e-book-california-climate-leadership/
Time for a Global Apollo Initiative
Global Apollo Program, a 10 year project to make renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels through internationally coordinated and publicly funded research into renewable energy technology...
Watching Game-Changing Players Like Elon Musk
- TED2013 - The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity...
- SpaceX Joins NASA Earth Science Launch Program
- New Space, Earth Science
Jason-2 and Jason-3
Update January 2016:
Jason-3 Mission -- Jason-3 -- Launched Jan 17, 2016
Ocean circulation patterns, global and regional changes in sea level, and climate implications of a warming world
What's up with sea level rise?
In a series of media opportunities through Aug. 28, NASA experts present up-to-date global outlook on current conditions and future projections of sea level rise
Why NASA’s worried that Greenland’s melting could speed up
@EarthVitalSigns #EarthRightNow InsideClimate News (TW)
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- Planet Citizens
- Earth360°, the 'Big Picture
- Our Life-Supporting Earth Atmosphere
- Environmental Security ↔ National Security
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- Earth Science from Space, Politics
Earth and Space, Politics 2015
Environmental Security, the Challenge and the Missions
Earth Observing Science, NASA Space Fleet, as of 2015
Earth Observing NASA Space Fleet, as of 2014
- Carbon Brief's Infographic of Earth Climate Science Satellites
Satellites in operation (2016) adding to scientists’ understanding of climate change
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References - Climate News
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CD2X2UsUUAANuYf.jpg
Climate Change News / @ GreenLinks
350.org Dispatches & Climate Science News
E&E ClimateWire / Climate Digest
Revkin List / Green Blog Voices
The Conversation / Climate-Environment
United Nations/UNFCCC Climate Change Negotiations and Related News
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- Follow GreenPolicy's Climate Science/News
- Daily/Weekly / Install Feedly as a News Aggregator
- Earth Right Now
- February 2015 - http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4487
- Over the past 12 months NASA has added five missions to its orbiting Earth-observing fleet
- - the biggest one-year increase in more than a decade....
- Over the past 12 months NASA has added five missions to its orbiting Earth-observing fleet
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Green Policy Archive: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Earth Observations/Climate News Archive
Back to the Beginnings of the Modern Era of Science on Global Warming/Climate Change
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Ethics and Climate Change
- Climate Action: An Ethical Responsibility
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