environment Politics: Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility economics fossil fuels Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 11: Nobody Here But Us Chickens
The St. Louis American reprints Eugene Robinson’s astute and blistering column from earlier this week, this time titled, “Obama Should Lead On Climate Change.” Good stuff:
The United States has never agreed to abide by the Kyoto Protocol, the binding 1997 treaty through which some countries agreed to limit emissions. Still, U.S. emissions have risen only slightly since then. The big increase has been in China and India, which are exempt from cuts under Kyoto.
Officials in Beijing and New Delhi understand that unchecked growth in emissions is not sustainable. But they also know that the United States and Europe are still responsible for far more carbon emissions per capita. And if a factory in, say, Guangzhou province produces iPhones for American consumers, who should be held responsible for those emissions?
Will these questions be answered in the Doha talks now under way? Not a chance. Not until the United States is fully involved.
And this is why President Obama should devote his next State of the Union address to climate change. He understands the science and knows the threat is real. Convincing the American people of this truth would be a great accomplishment – and perhaps the most important legacy of his second term.
Lots of luck with that. Sent December 6:
Environmentalists are justifiably disappointed in the Obama administration’s tepid participation in the Doha climate conference, and in our nation’s lackluster response to what is clearly the defining crisis of our times. And indeed there is plenty of cause for frustration, what with the steady drumbeat of bad climate news seemingly getting worse by the minute, while our diplomats dither and the United States routinely abdicates its position of leadership in the world community.
However, Mr. Obama’s timidity is not the real problem. If addressing an ongoing catastrophe responsibly means a reduced quarterly profit margin for Big Oil and Big Coal, it’s not going to happen. Our political paralysis in the face of a collapsing planetary ecosystem is caused by the all-pervasive influence of fossil fuels in our economy and fossil funds in our government. Presidential pusillanimity is a diagnostic indicator of how far, and how deeply, the disease has spread.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: consumerism economics sustainability
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 10: Have You Met Miss Jones?
The Virginian-Pilot has a good op-ed, titled, “Struggling to care about climate change”:
The world, with the exception of Europe, has done almost nothing to arrest global warming. Despite a treaty or two and decades of hand-wringing, the pull of prosperity has been simply too strong, especially in Asia and the Americas.
U.S. politicians have done a shameful nothing, too many pretending that settled science remains in doubt, too many grubbing money from coal and oil and electricity companies, which have it to give.
In the meantime, the Obama administration – as others have before – talks a better game than it delivers on climate change, arguing that meager progress amounts to moving mountains. It is no more persuasive from this White House than it was from its predecessors.
The problem grows worse. Developing nations are burning coal because it’s cheap and wood because it’s handy, so greenhouse gases continue to flow. With emerging nations eager for energy-hungry technologies, and wanting to replace bicycles and transit with cars – who can blame them? – the continued progress of planetary warming is no great surprise.
Still, surprises come.
According to a new study released at the largely ignored United Nations climate change talks in Qatar, the world’s seas are rising faster than projections. Temperatures are climbing, too.
All fine and good, but that phrase in the first paragraph sets my teeth on edge. Sent December 4:
Advocates for action on global warming need to avoid the misleading economic perspective setting “prosperity” and the environment at odds with one another. Americans’ reluctance to move forward with sensible policies on climate change is not just because we’re addicted to oil; it’s also because we’re addicted to shopping.
If we are to face the threats posed by the metastasizing greenhouse effect, we must transform our relationship to the things we buy, and to our notion of economic well-being. Ultimately, Earth’s resources are the foundation of all wealth; without air to breathe, water to drink, and food to eat, the gaudiest baubles of our consumer economy offer no solace. If the economy is the metabolism of our civilization, then the “prosperity” of unbridled consumerism is the equivalent of a junk-food diet — fast and habit-forming, but unhealthy and wasteful. Genuine prosperity, by contrast, is like a home-grown, home-cooked meal, eaten slowly with friends.
I know what I like. How about you?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: arctic methane assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 9: Like A Lizard On The Windowpane
The Columbus Dispatch reprints Eugene Robinson’s recent op-ed from the WaPo:
You might not have noticed that another round of U.N. climate talks is under way, this time in Doha, Qatar. You also might not have noticed that we’re barreling toward a “world … of unprecedented heat waves, severe drought and major floods in many regions.” Here in Washington, we’re too busy to pay attention to such trifles.
We’re too busy arguing about who gets credit or blame for teeny-weeny changes in the tax code. Meanwhile, evidence mounts that the legacy we pass along to future generations will be a parboiled planet.
That quote about heat, drought and flooding comes from a new World Bank report warning of the consequences of warming. The study, titled “Turn Down the Heat,” tries to assess what will happen if temperatures are allowed to rise by 4 degrees Celsius — about 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit — above pre-industrial levels, before humans began spewing massive amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The picture is beyond bleak.
This is some serious shit, people. December 3:
While Washington obsesses about the political brinkmanship around the misleadingly named “fiscal cliff,” the world races towards a far more dangerous line of demarcation. And just as conservatives reject any economic evidence contrary to their ideology, they deny the scientific evidence confirming the very real threat posed by an accelerating greenhouse effect.
While the “climate cliff” — the point when runaway global heating becomes unstoppable — may already be past, this doesn’t excuse political and media figures who deliberately exclude the facts of climate change from legislative deliberation and national discussion. Even more disturbing is the realization that the worst-case scenarios discussed in the recent World Bank report don’t include melting arctic methane, which raises the threat level from dangerous to outright catastrophic. In a planetary crisis of this magnitude, the willful ignorance of the American chattering classes is nothing less than a betrayal of our species’ future.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama economics media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 8: You Never Give Me Your Money…
USA Today has an op-ed from Dan Becker & James Gerstenzang, titled: “Column: Obama’s chance to change (political) climate.” Not bad, actually:
9:00AM EST December 2. 2012 – Hurricane Sandy and the 2012 drought drove home the need for President Obama to lead the fight against global warming. Freed from the political constraints of the re-election campaign, he holds three tools. Wielding them successfully, he will make bold action against the world’s most pressing environmental problem a legacy of his second term.
The president can sharply curtail power plants’ emissions of carbon dioxide, the largest global warming pollutant, by using existing law to require that utilities start converting from coal to cleanly extracted natural gas and introduce more renewable energy. To cut demand for electricity, he can set standards that increase the efficiency of power-gobbling appliances.
But scientists warn that far more will be necessary. The deadly hurricane, devastating drought and 332 consecutive months of above-average global temperatures are just the sort of conditions they say will accompany global warming.
So, taking a page from the nation’s first environmental president, Theodore Roosevelt, Obama can use his third tool — the bully pulpit — to change the political climate on climate. He must mobilize public pressure on Congress to adopt far-reaching measures that he cannot enact on his own, including steps that begin to end our addiction to oil.
Meanwhile, the country’s talking heads are talking about something totally different. Details at 11. Sent December 2:
While our news media have gone all out to cover the looming showdown over the “fiscal cliff,” the fact is that we’re facing another deadline with far more serious implications. The “climate cliff,” unlike its economic namesake, is based on hard scientific data and analysis, not political expediency and partisan gamesmanship. The consequences of a failure in climate policy reach far beyond the next election cycle or two and into the next millennium. Unless we can get the rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect under control, questions about a marginally higher tax rate on the wealthiest two percent of Americans will be quaintly irrelevant in the face of catastrophic weather extremes, devastated agriculture, and the geopolitical instabilities triggered by famine, drought, and rising sea levels.
President Obama needs to make climate change a central issue for all Americans. If there’s any issue that transcends the transient boundaries of ideology, this is it.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists Doha climate conference idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 7: If You Are Not A Reality, Whose Myth Are You?
The Washington Post reports on one of the first-ever climate protests in Qatar:
DOHA, Qatar — A few hundred people marched in a peaceful demonstration Saturday for “climate justice” in Doha, where negotiators from nearly 200 countries are debating about how to slow global warming and help protect the most vulnerable countries from rising seas and other impacts of climate change.
Waving banners saying “Stop climate change” and “Arabs reduce emissions,” the well-behaved crowd marched along the Qatari capital’s Corniche, a waterfront walkway lined by gleaming skyscrapers.
Khalid al-Mohannadi, one of the organizers, noted that “it’s not a protest, it’s a march for peace.”
The march was billed as the first environmental rally ever in the wealthy emirate, which is hosting the two-week U.N. talks aimed at forging a global deal to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.
This is a quick and dirty revision of yesterday’s letter, but I think it came out damn well, considering. December 1:
Hard on the heels of the World Meteorological Organization’s declaration that 2012 has seen record-breaking weather extremes everywhere on Earth, Christiana Figueres, the United Nations’ climate chief, tells us she doesn’t perceive much public pressure “for governments to take on more ambitious and more courageous decisions.” Indeed, it really seems that just as our global environment is heading to catastrophic imbalance, our political systems are essentially paralyzed.
There’s certainly no shortage of pressure, as this week’s demonstrations by environmentalists at the Doha conference show. For decades, millions of people have clamored for responsible climate policies, signing petitions, making phone calls, writing letters and marching. But the sad fact is that the innumerable voices of individual citizens are still too easily drowned out by the grotesquely amplified “speech” of the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists. The public pressure’s there, all right — but millions of dollars speak louder than millions of people.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility Doha climate conference fossil fuels
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 6: Please Don’t Wake Me, No Don’t Shake Me, Leave Me Where I Am, I’m Only Sleeping
The Detroit Free Press reports on the bad weather we’ve been having recently:
DOHA, Qatar — An area of Arctic sea ice bigger than the U.S. melted this year, according the United Nations weather agency, which said the dramatic decline illustrates that climate change is happening “before our eyes.”
In a report released at UN climate talks in the Qatari capital of Doha, the World Meteorological Organization said the Arctic ice melt was one of a myriad of extreme and record-breaking weather events to hit the planet in 2012. Droughts devastated nearly two-thirds of the U.S. as well as western Russia and southern Europe. Floods swamped west Africa and heat waves left much of the Northern Hemisphere sweltering.
But it was the ice melt that seemed to dominate the annual climate report, with the United Nations concluding that ice cover had reached “a new record low” in the area around the North Pole, and that the loss from March to September was 4.57 million square miles — an area bigger than the U.S.
Meanwhile, in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
DOHA, Qatar – The United Nations climate chief is urging people not to look solely to their governments to make tough decisions to slow global warming, and instead to consider their own role in solving the problem.
Approaching the half-way point of two-week climate talks in Doha, Christiana Figueres, the head of the U.N.’s climate change secretariat, said Friday that she didn’t see “much public interest, support, for governments to take on more ambitious and more courageous decisions.”
These two were referenced in a letter to the DFP, sent November 30:
It’s a sad irony that at a point in history where our planetary environment is becoming completely unhinged, our governing institutions have almost entirely lost the capacity for meaningful action. The same week that the World Meteorological Organization confirms that 2012 has been a year of record-breaking weather extremes all over the world, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres comments that she doesn’t perceive much public pressure “for governments to take on more ambitious and more courageous decisions.”
The problem is as simple as it is intractable. There’s no shortage of public pressure on the world’s governments. In the past four years, millions of people have signed petitions, made phone calls, written letters and marched on behalf of responsible climate change policies. But these citizens have less influence on our public sector than a single signature — on a massive campaign contribution from a fossil fuel lobbyist.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Doha climate conference media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 4: Don’t Just Do Something — Stand There!
The LA Times, on the Doha Climate Conference:
More than 17,000 people have converged on the Qatari capital for the latest U.N. climate talks, but the most influential presence may be Sandy.
The superstorm that ravaged the U.S. Northeast a month ago seared into the American consciousness an apocalyptic vision of what climate change could look like. On the heels of devastating wildfires, droughts and floods this year, Sandy’s destructive power snapped Americans to the reality that rising temperatures are a risk to their own well-being, not just a concern for distant lowlands.
Sandy’s fresh reminder of the potential consequences of global warming has been a dominant theme in the first days of the two-week meeting in Doha of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, delegates report.
Still, politicians and environmentalists at the gathering, which began Monday, maintain low expectations for the massive confab to spur swift or dramatic action to combat rising global temperatures. They predict that, at best, the unwieldy forum drawing together 195 countries and nongovernmental parties will bring agreement to formalize plans to negotiate new climate objectives that follow the aims of the 15-year-old Kyoto Protocol, ostensibly to be achieved by 2020. The next pact doesn’t need to be completed until 2015, so the international body is operating without the pressure of a looming deadline, participants said.
No urgency to this. Not at all. Sent November 28:
Superstorm Sandy’s pre-election visit did more than just allow a Republican governor and a Democratic president to work together. It also brought catastrophic climate change back to the national agenda, just in time for the Doha climate conference. While we can be grateful that this grave existential threat is once again on our radar, the fact that it takes a devastating storm to do so is an indictment of our perpetually distracted media and our all-too-distractable politicians.
The conclusions of climatology are as unambiguous as the law of gravity: climate change is real, it’s dangerous — and human industrial civilization is a root cause. What is needed is a sustained global effort to simultaneously reduce our carbon emissions drastically, develop solutions for excess atmospheric CO2, and prepare for the changes we cannot prevent. Will the Doha conference help make this happen? Not while science-denying conservatives remain powerful in our politics.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists positive feedback scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 5: A New Pair Of Glasses
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer notes that things are, predictably, worse than predicted:
Deniers of human-caused climate change found themselves burdened with more to deny on Wednesday, with disclosure of new evidence that polar ice caps are melting, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing and sea levels around the planet are rising.
The director of the World Meteorological Organization at the United Nations reported that the Arctic ice pack melted over an area larger than the United States during the summer of 2012. The polar ice pack shrank to a record low in September before slowly beginning its fall and winter growth.
“The alarming rate of its melt this year highlighted the far reaching changes taking place in Earth’s oceans and biosphere: Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records,” Michel Jarraud, director of the WMO, said in a statement.
Have a nice day! Thank you for shopping Walmart! Sent November 29:
Although current scientific studies of global climate change differ dramatically from one another, they share one absolutely predictable element: the recurring phrase, “worse than predicted.” Sea level rise; Arctic ice melt; storm intensity; drought severity; all these and many more are happening faster and harder than experts imagined. Why?
Climatology, like other areas of science, tends to focus narrowly. Individual researchers or teams concentrate on learning as much as possible about specific phenomena. Only recently have we learned that in a complex system like Earth’s climate, these factors interact, building positive feedback loops of terrifying speed and intensity — an environmental “arms race” with a destructive potential matching that of the Cold War’s escalating nuclear arsenals. While climate scientists are only beginning to understand these deadly synergies, unless global climate negotiations start taking them into account, our policy responses will always be a decade late and a trillion dollars short.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: atmospheric CO2 Doha climate conference
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 3: Red, White and Bullshit…
The Knoxville News-Sentinel (TN) runs an AP article about America’s attempt to greenwash our record at Doha.
DOHA, Qatar (AP) — Anticipating an onslaught of criticism from poor nations, the United States claimed “enormous” strides in reducing greenhouse emissions at the opening of U.N. climate talks Monday, despite failing to join other industrialized nations in committing to binding cuts.
The pre-emptive U.S. approach underscores one of the major showdowns expected at the two-week conference as China pushes developed countries to take an even greater role in tackling global warming.
Speaking for a coalition of developed nations known as the G77, China’s delegate, Su Wei, said rich nations should become party to an extended Kyoto Protocol — an emissions deal for some industrialized countries that the Americans long ago rejected — or at least make “comparable mitigation commitments.”
The United States rejected Kyoto because it didn’t impose any binding commitments on major developing countries such as India and China, which is now the world’s No. 1 carbon emitter.
American delegate Jonathan Pershing offered no new sweeteners to the poor countries, only reiterating what the United States has done to tackle global warming: investing heavily in clean energy, doubling fuel efficiency standards and reducing emissions from coal-fired power plants. Pershing also said the United States would not increase its earlier commitment of cutting emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. It is half way to that target.
Mendacity, mendacity, it makes the world go ’round. Sent November 27:
The United States’ attempt to defuse criticism of its profligate greenhouse emissions on the eve of the Doha climate conference is a fine demonstration of how truth and deception can be interwoven. It’s beyond dispute that America has made enormous strides in reducing future consumption of fossil fuels. Whether it’s stricter mileage standards for new cars, tougher EPA regulations, or increased investments in renewable energy, the Obama administration has done remarkably well — especially given the relentless opposition they’ve faced from Republican lawmakers who’ve done everything possible to derail environmentally responsible policy initiatives.
But these strides are only possible because our country’s approach to energy is astonishingly wasteful. Per capita, America’s CO2 emissions are far higher than those of India and China, whose carbon footprints are larger than ours only because of their far greater populations. For the USA to tout its record on climate change without taking these factors into account is grossly misleading — a poor stance for any nation, let alone one asserting a leadership role in the international community. When it comes to a robust and responsible approach to the planetary climate crisis, America (and Americans) will have to do far better than this.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists Ed Markey idiots Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 2: When You Care Enough To Send The Very Best
The Boston Globe reports on a recent Town Hall meeting held by Ed Markey (MA-07) on Boston’s vulnerability to a Sandy-like storm:
There could be enough water in Boston for boats to float through parts of the Back Bay and fish to swim across the Public Garden if a super storm were to hit Boston years from now. That was a worst-case prediction displayed on color-coded maps in Faneuil Hall today as part of a forum on the potential impact of climate change.
The maps detailing potential flooding, on stage as part of a “What If Sandy Happened Here?” forum, factored in rising sea levels and suggested that by 2050 a severe 100-year storm could also send floodwaters lapping into Central Square and Harvard Square in Cambridge.
“Sandy was a warning,” US Representative Edward Markey, a Malden Democrat long active in climate change legislation, said as about 150 people filled the Great Hall, where he led a town hall-style meeting on the costs Greater Boston could face if a super storm hits.
Cast as a gathering to contemplate the havoc climate change could cause, the meeting drew together speakers who focus on the issue and an audience that included many area activists.
“This reaffirms the need to put greater energy and greater effort into convincing others that this issue is significant,” James Kaufman, president and CEO of The Laboratory Safety Institute, a health, safety, and environmental affairs nonprofit in Natick, said after the hour-long meeting.
Maria Cooper, president of the environmental group Green Decade Newton, said the forum was “all the more inspiring because we can see that people are getting it. This is urgent stuff that we need to address in our everyday lives.”
Did I mention that I love my Congressman? Sent November 26:
Representative Markey deserves high praise for his relentless calls for action on global climate change, starting long before Superstorm Sandy returned the accelerating greenhouse effect to the national conversation. It’s particularly galling to compare the Congressman’s work on this issue with the anti-science positions of Republican members of the House of Representatives, who appear to be in a contest to see who can most enthusiastically advocate the most regressive ideas (such as Georgia’s Paul Broun, who recently described evolution, embryology, and cosmology as “lies from the pit of Hell.”).
Based on meticulous computer modeling and the careful analysis of massive amounts of data, climate science is as impartial as it gets. The GOP’s relentless politicizing of the by-now-completely-resolved debate on the causes and dangers of global warming is another symptom of their scientific illiteracy. Ed Markey’s research and advocacy on behalf of humanity’s future isn’t political strategizing, but reality-based humanitarianism.
Warren Senders