environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism World Bank
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 5: We Just Got One Thing To Say To All Of You F**king Hippies…
The Wichita Eagle (KS) reprints the recent Op-Ed on major threats from Jim Yong Kim:
The world’s top priority must be to get finance flowing and get prices right on all aspects of energy costs to support low-carbon growth. Achieving a predictable price on carbon that accurately reflects real environmental costs is key to delivering emission reductions at scale. Correct energy pricing can also provide incentives for investments in energy efficiency and cleaner energy technologies.
A second immediate step is to end harmful fuel subsidies globally, which could lead to a 5 percent fall in emissions by 2020. Countries spend more than $500 billion annually in fossil-fuel subsidies and an additional $500 billion in other subsidies, often related to agriculture and water, that ultimately are environmentally harmful. That trillion dollars could be put to better use for the jobs of the future, social safety nets or vaccines.
A third focus is on cities. The largest 100 cities that contribute 67 percent of energy-related emissions are both the center of innovation for green growth and the most vulnerable to climate change. We have seen great leadership, for example, in New York and Rio de Janeiro on low-carbon growth and tackling practices that fuel climate change.
At the World Bank Group, through the $7 billion-plus Climate Investment Funds, we are managing forests, spreading solar energy and promoting green expansion for cities, all with a goal of stopping global warming. We also are in the midst of a major re-examination of our own practices and policies.
I rewrote the letter I sent to the WaPo a few days ago, and sent it on January 27:
Watching conservative lawmakers who no longer face elections reveals a great deal about our dysfunctional political process. When California Republican David Dreier retired recently, he took the opportunity to tell his colleagues that “climate change is a fact of life.” Fine words — especially from someone cast countless votes against meaningful environmental legislation during his career. While it’s no secret that America’s political system is well and thoroughly broken, when it comes to climate change, our systemic corruption and cowardice may well have catastrophic repercussions.
Now that he’s out of office, Mr. Dreier can agree that we need robust and immediate action on climate change, but as long as corporations continue to exert disproportionate influence on our political system, Senators and Representatives will attend to the needs of their paymasters before those of their constituents and their posterity. If they’re serious about fighting the threat of climate change, perhaps the best option for Jim Yong Kim and the World Bank would be to purchase the Republican Party. There’s no doubt it’s for sale.
Warren Senders
Warren Senders
environment Politics: American exceptionalism assholes denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 4: You’ll Never Get Me Up In One Of Those Things.
The Kansas City Star says, “The United States Should Lead On Climate Change.” Indeed:
President Barack Obama called on Americans last week to renew the battle against climate change.
This line from his inaugural address garnered deserved attention: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”
But pause the tape right there.
First, Obama in his four years as president already has taken several actions aimed at reducing carbon emissions, primarily through increased fuel efficiency rules for vehicles.
So the president hasn’t exactly been missing in action on this issue, although he did suffer a big failure in 2009 when Congress killed a loophole-filled bill designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But we won’t, because freedom. USA! USA! Love it or leave it! Sent January 27:
It’s funny how the noisy proponents of American exceptionalism fall silent when it comes to actually doing something exceptional. For the USA to claim a position of world leadership on global warming and the necessary transformation of our energy economy, we’d have to mobilize every iota of creativity, resourcefulness and entrepreneurship. We’d have to bring scientists and community leaders on board, and get people working on every aspect of climate change from the local to the planetary. The crisis is real, demanding nothing less than a total commitment — the kind of dedication in notoriously short supply among self-styled conservatives who are reluctant to act in any way that’s not of immediate personal benefit.
Nowhere else in the world are so many resources squandered, so much potential lost, so many opportunities for greatness neglected for such petty motives. In that respect, at least, America is first among nations.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes cowering before the apocalypse denialists evolutionary bottleneck extinction idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 3: Of Course. Why Do You Ask?
The San Antonio Express-News (TX) runs a rather grim op-ed from Carolyn Lochhead, who wonders if it’s too late already:
In his inaugural address last week, President Barack Obama made climate change a priority of his second term. It might be too late.
Within the lifetimes of today’s children, scientists say, the climate could reach a state unknown in civilization.
In that time, global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are on track to exceed the limits that scientists believe could prevent catastrophic warming. CO2 levels are higher than they have been in 15 million years.
The Arctic, melting rapidly and probably irreversibly, has reached a state that the Vikings would not recognize.
“We are poised right at the edge of some very major changes on Earth,” said Anthony Barnosky, a biology professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies the interaction of climate change with population growth and land use. “We really are a geological force that’s changing the planet.”
Short answer: yes. Long answer: below. Sent January 27:
If what we’re aiming for is the preservation of the status quo, an Earthly condition in which a largely benign climate supports the continued growth and prosperity of our species, then yes, we’re definitely too late to arrest the consequences of global climate change. It’s barely possible that had we heeded the calls of environmentally conscious leaders like Jimmy Carter back in the 1970s, we would not be facing such a crisis today — but just barely possible. The power and complexity of a planetary fossil-fuel economy is beyond our comprehension, and it’s been growing unchecked for well over a century.
The question is not whether we’re too late to avert catastrophe; we’re not, and it is ironic that our inability to understand the crisis was facilitated by “conservatives” whose fear of social and economic change prevented them from acting in time to avert a tragedy of planetary scope. Humanity’s best hopes now rest with science and communication: in expanding our ability to understand a rapidly transforming climate, and bypassing our wholly-owned politicians to apply these insights to species-wide action.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama denialists economics idiots Keystone XL Senate Republicans Tar Sands
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 2: Block That Kick!
The Washington Post runs an AP story on John Kerry’s stance on climate change and the Keystone XL pipeline:
In his opening statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry said that American foreign policy “is defined by life-threatening issues like climate change,” along with political unrest in Africa and human trafficking across the globe. Kerry, the panel’s outgoing chairman, has made the issue of global warming central to his career in public service. The Massachusetts Democrat has traveled repeatedly to international climate negotiations and pushed in the Senate — unsuccessfully — for a limit on national greenhouse gas emissions.
Later this year, the State Department must decide whether to grant TransCanada a presidential permit to build the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline extension, which would carry heavy crude oil from Canada’s oil sands to America’s Gulf Coast refineries. Climate activists warn that the project would be devastating to the planet, while proponents say it would boost the nation’s energy security and generate short-term construction jobs.
We’ll see about that. Sent January 26:
Given his record of respect for evidence and expertise, John Kerry’s acceptance of the scientific consensus on climate change is unsurprising. Conservatives arguing that action on global warming is too expensive operate from a stance of multiple denial: they reject the climate science substantiating the greenhouse effect’s dangerous consequences, they reject the economic evidence that investment in clean energy and sound environmental practices are net positives for job creation, and they reject the fact that a significant majority of Americans recognize that climate change is a problem with huge repercussions for our nation and the world. It’s no accident that these same fact-rejecting politicians are the ones advocating strongly for the Keystone XL pipeline, a project whose likely contribution to climate change could well tip the balance from disastrous to catastrophic.
As Secretary of State and as a member of the “reality-based community,” Mr. Kerry must block the pipeline project.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism World Bank
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 1: Another Country Heard From
Perhaps as atonement for publishing thousands and thousands of words from George Will, the Washington Post runs an op-ed from Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank.
The weather in Washington has been like a roller coaster this January. Yes, there has been a deep freeze this week, but it was the sudden warmth earlier in the month that was truly alarming. Flocks of birds — robins, wrens, cardinals and even blue jays – swarmed bushes with berries, eating as much as they could. Runners and bikers wore shorts and T-shirts. People worked in their gardens as if it were spring.
The signs of global warming are becoming more obvious and more frequent. A glut of extreme weather conditions is appearing globally. And the average temperature in the United States last year was the highest ever recorded.
As economic leaders gathered in Davos this week for the World Economic Forum, much of the conversation was about finances. But climate change should also be at the top of our agendas, because global warming imperils all of the development gains we have made.
If there is no action soon, the future will become bleak. The World Bank Group released a reportin November that concluded that the world could warm by 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) by the end of this century if concerted action is not taken now.
Just another hippie, ya know. Slackers. Sent January 25:
As reports, assessments, and analyses on the clear and present danger presented by a runaway greenhouse effect appear in the national spotlight, Republicans (and a few Democrats) have to work harder than ever to stay ignorant. Interestingly, once lawmakers no longer face electoral battles for their conservative constituencies, they’re sometimes willing to admit the grim realities, as witness retiring California Republican David Dreier’s statement to his erstwhile colleagues that “climate change is a fact of life.”
The arguments for robust and immediate action on climate change are overwhelming, but the sad truth of the matter is that massive amounts of corporate cash control our political system, ensuring that it will continue to respond poorly (at best) to genuine dangers. If Jim Yong Kim and the World Bank really want to fight climate change, perhaps they should simply purchase the Republican Party, lock, stock, and barrel. After all, it’s for sale.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: economics Keystone XL Tar Sands
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 31: Don’t Mention The War!
The Toronto Star reflects on the Keystone XL:
Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, joined by 10 U.S. governors, released a letter recently urging President Barack Obama to swiftly approve the Keystone XL pipeline project.
As always, the argument is simple, and narrowly framed: 1. Canada has a lot of oil and the U.S. needs oil. 2. We don’t have enough pipeline capacity to handle our ambition for unconstrained growth in oilsands production. 3. Building the pipeline will create jobs.
What could be simpler? Nothing — as long as you pretend climate change doesn’t exist and don’t make it part of the conversation.
Post-Hurricane Sandy and scorching heat waves in the mid-west, that’s becoming a less tenable argument, at least in the U.S. In his second inaugural address, Obama called attention to the need for action on climate change, calling for America to lead the transition to sustainable energy sources. It’s an important reminder that we need to look at the issue through a different frame, one that pipeline project proponents and many in government are trying hard to avoid.
Scientists are telling us that, to avoid the worst effects of climate change, greenhouse gas emissions need to peak by 2017 and drop drastically by 2050. The International Energy Agency (IEA) — a leading voice on energy research and analysis of which Canada is a member — recently reported that unless we change course, by 2017 the energy infrastructure will be in place to produce the emissions that will take us across the 2°C warming threshold. The U.S. and Canada (under our current federal government), along with many other countries, have agreed to work to avoid crossing this threshold, the point at which our climate may become seriously destabilized. Furthermore, the IEA tells us that, to stay under 2°C warming, two-thirds of all known fossil fuel reserves will have to stay in the ground.
Never mention the CC word. Ever. Sent January 24:
The economic arguments for exploiting the tar sands — oil is cheap; society needs that energy to continue economic growth — are analogous to the self-serving rationalizations of addicts everywhere.
Oil’s always been expensive; we’ve just left its significant costs for our descendants to pay. Neither post-extraction cleanup or public health impacts are usually included in our calculations — and, of course, the catastrophic consequences of accelerating climate change must never be mentioned or considered.
The economic growth argument is a failure both on intellectual (we live on a finite planet) and moral (recall Edward Abbey’s statement that growth for its own sake is “the ideology of the cancer cell”) grounds.
The Keystone pipeline’s not just a single disaster in the making, but multiple disasters on different scales of size and time. For the sake of our posterity, the Tar Sands oil must stay in the ground.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama geopolitical strategy media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 30: Look! Look! A Mouse!
The headline reads “Speech Gives Climate Goals Center Stage.” The New York Times (which recently shut down its Environment desk entirely):
WASHINGTON — President Obama made addressing climate change the most prominent policy vow of his second Inaugural Address, setting in motion what Democrats say will be a deliberately paced but aggressive campaign built around the use of his executive powers to sidestep Congressional opposition.“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said on Monday at the start of eight sentences on the subject, more than he devoted to any other specific area. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”
The central place he gave to the subject seemed to answer the question of whether he considered it a realistic second-term priority. He devoted scant attention to it in the campaign and has delivered a mixed message about its importance since the election.
I’m a literary dude, I guess. Sent January 23:
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! / You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout.”
Climate change may have taken center stage in the President’s second inaugural address, but its primus inter pares position in Mr. Obama’s rhetoric is nothing compared with the scene-stealing we can expect from the accelerating greenhouse effect over the next four years. With profound and far-reaching geopolitical, humanitarian, economic, and environmental implications, our transforming climate will become the single most influential player in world affairs. Well before the end of this century, the human costs of extreme weather, droughts, heat waves, and rising sea levels will dwarf that of all planetary armed conflicts combined; include the impact on the rest of Earth’s biota, and it’s uncomfortably likely that “ingrateful man’s” fossil-fueled madness may well presage the final act of a Lear-like tragedy, leaving only a few survivors on a planet ravaged by “sulphurous and thought-executing fires.”Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama denialists idiots National Climate Assessment scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 29: What He Was Doing In My Pajamas, I’ll Never Understand.
The Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot runs an op-ed:
In the four years since a 2009 federal report detailed global warming in America, the evidence has become harder to ignore.
It’s not just the freaky, violent weather of 2012, the warmest year on record. It’s also temperatures over the past decade, the highest on record.
“Americans are noticing changes all around them,” concluded the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee in a draft report released last week.
The report, mandated by Congress, was last compiled in 2009. Since then, the panel says, the case for global warming has grown more widespread:
“Residents of some coastal cities see their streets flood more regularly during storms and high tides. Inland cities near large rivers also experience more flooding, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Hotter and drier weather and earlier snow melt mean that wildfires in the West start earlier in the year, last later into the fall, threaten more homes, cause more evacuations, and burn more acreage. In Alaska, the summer sea ice that once protected the coasts has receded, and fall storms now cause more erosion and damage that is severe enough that some communities are already facing relocation.”
All well and good. The Second Inaugural should be a help. Sent January 22:
To anyone who’s been paying attention, the recently released National Climate Assessment is hardly breaking news. After all, 2012 was marked by devastating droughts, all sorts of extreme weather, and heat waves strong and sustained enough to make the year the hottest yet recorded in human history. Still, as Groucho Marx once asked, “Who are you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?” A significant number of Americans still reject the evidence when it comes to climate change.
That’s why President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address was a big deal. By making a firm commitment to address the threat, the President came down on the side of science, delivering a strong rebuke to those still locked in the denialist mindset. Presidential follow-through must include the rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline project, and initiatives to promote the work of climate scientists, so that the American public can understand the threat posed to our nation and our posterity.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: analogies apocalypse scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 28: The Autograph Of The Beast
Thomas Lovejoy tells us in the NY Times just how f**ked we are, in a column entitled “The Climate Change Endgame”:
WHETHER in Davos or almost anywhere else that leaders are discussing the world’s problems, they are missing by far the biggest issue: the rapidly deteriorating global environment and its ability to support civilization.
The situation is pretty much an endgame. Unless pressing issues of the biology of the planet and of climate change generated by greenhouse gas emissions are addressed with immediacy and at appropriate scale, the matters that occupy Davos discussions will be seen in retrospect as largely irrelevant.
This week, in Bonn, out of sight and out of mind, international negotiators will design the biodiversity and ecosystem equivalent to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A full eight years have passed since President Jacques Chirac of France acted as host at a meeting in Paris to create this “Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.”
Progress has been painfully slow. Only now is the “platform” and its work program — to assess status, trends and possible solutions — being designed. In the meantime, rates of extinction and endangerment of species have soared. Ecosystem destruction is massive and accelerating. Institutional responsiveness seems lethargic to a reptilian degree.
I hate these sports terms. Sent January 21:
If we are to overcome our culture’s systemic aversion to addressing the ever-more-urgent climate crisis, we should stop using the lexicon of sports and entertainment. When Thomas Lovejoy refers to the ongoing and accelerating environmental collapse as an “endgame,” or James Hansen opines that carbon release from the Canadian tar sands would be “game over” for the climate, the terms carry with them the suggestion of another round, a second chance. This framing is also consistent with the notion, derived from Abrahamic religious tradition, that our life on Earth is but a prelude to another phase of existence, an afterlife of bliss and rectitude.
Well, for all the times that afterlife’s been invoked, it’s never been verified, and the “game over” awaiting our children on a drastically warmed planet will be more like a catastrophic football riot writ large than the anodyne mulligan the phrase implies. Earth has no “reset” button.
Warren Senders
Education environment: automobiles trains transportation World Bank
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 27: Long As I Keep Drivin’, I’ll Keep Surviving…?
McClatchy’s Erika Bolstad writes on the World Bank’s move towards supporting more mass transportation infrastructure:
WASHINGTON — There’s an unexpected method governments can use to reduce poverty, improve public health and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, top world leaders said Friday.
Their idea: Make transportation in the world’s megacities more available and sustainable to reduce congestion and benefit populations – and economies – that are projected to boom in the coming decades.
Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, said Friday at a global transportation conference that working on sustainable transportation is part of the bank’s moral responsibility and will be a major focus of its lending in the coming years. Lifting people out of poverty is the bank’s chief mission, Kim said. But climate change caused by global warming threatens that mission, he said, particularly for future generations.
The bank recently issued a report that outlines what the world could be like if temperatures rise by 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2060. It’s sometimes difficult for people to understand that, Kim said, but he offered the example of his own 3-year-old-son.
“To put it very bluntly . . . when he’s my age, he’ll be living in a world where the oceans will be 150 percent more acidic, the coral reefs will have all been melted away, the fisheries would have been completely disturbed, and probably every single day, there will be food fights and water fights all over the world,” he said. “The world that I’m literally handing over to him as an adult will be one that does not exist today. For me it’s very real.”
Time to put Kerouac to bed. It wouldn’t be the same if he’d written it about riding a bus, I suppose. Sent January 20:
There are few aspects of modern civilization more baffling than our continued reliance on automobiles for every aspect of our transportation. An intelligent alien watching humanity would no doubt wonder why we spend so much time sitting in heavy metal boxes many times our own weight, often moving no faster than a slow strolling pace — and why those metal boxes seem trigger frequent episodes of rage, competition and conspicuous wastefulness.
Once, the automobile represented the most tangible aspects of the American Dream: the freedom to travel, the siren call of the open road. Now, the full impact of our consumption of fossil fuels is making an environmental nightmare, and it’s clear that we must put the brakes on the accelerating greenhouse effect before careening, Thelma-and-Louise style, over the climate cliff. It’s time for a massive national investment in public transportation, for we cannot drive recklessly into the twenty-first century.
Warren Senders