environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialism idiots media irresponsibility sociopaths
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 1: Tyrannosaurus Rex
Breaking News: Rex Tillerson is still an asshole. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer:
It was the second time in 13 months that Tillerson articulated Exxon’s new acceptance that climate change appears to be a reality.
And it was the second time that Tillerson suggested the problem may not solvable. Previously Exxon did not acknowledge the possibility of climate changes, let alone how it might be dealt with.
“There are some things we know and understand about it,” Tillerson said of the forces behind the changes in average global temperatures. “There are a lot of things about it that we don’t know and don’t understand. “We’re not sure how this is going to turn out.”
If industrialized society is in fact changing the world’s climate, then steps can be taken to “mitigate” the risk, Tillerson said.
Exxon strongly supports energy efficiency, he said, referring to the tough automotive mileage standards the Obama administration issued a year ago as an example of mitigation. Those rules require automakers to achieve an average of 541/2 miles per gallon in 2025.
Better auto fuel economy and the decisions of electric companies to switch power plants from coal to natural gas are ways to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, while not crippling the economy, Tillerson said.
“But what am I going to do if it turns out that none of my mitigation steps make any difference?” he asked the crowd packed into the City Club. “What if it turns out that this is happening for a lot of reasons that I don’t understand? What’s Plan B?
“Plan B means you had better start thinking about what kind of adaptation measures are going to be necessary if the consequences that people are concerned about present themselves.”
Despite that sobering assessment, Tillerson said he does not support a “carbon tax,” referring to proposals advocated for years by environmentalists to have Uncle Sam tax the use of fossil fuels, basing the charges on the amount of carbon dioxide produced.
“We still have a lot of gains to be made through technology and other less intrusive policies on the economy,” Tillerson said. “And it is a global problem. We are not going to set the carbon tax policy for China.”
One upside to our imminent extinction-level evolutionary bottleneck is that our successors won’t have any fossil fuels left to extract. June 15:
Rex Tillerson may be breaking new ground for fossil fuel executives in his repeated admissions that climate change not only exists, but has the potential to cause profound damage to our civilization. But his pronouncements have the slightly desperate feeling of a man and an industry finally overtaken by inconvenient facts; the man is plainly grasping at straws.
Let’s review: for decades Exxon and the rest of the world’s oil industries denied the reality of global warming, co-opted our political system to their own ends, poured millions of dollars into pseudo-scientific attempts to rebut the overwhelming climatological consensus, and helped make the national discussion of a clear and present danger into a hotbed of conspiracy theories and anti-science nonsense. Just because Exxon’s CEO has reversed course on climate change’s existence doesn’t mean that the rest of his statements automatically gain credibility.
It’s like listening to a tobacco executive saying that even though his product is harmful, quitting is hard, so we’ll be fine if we just learn to live with emphysema, heart disease and lung cancer. When Mr. Tillerson speaks of people “adapting” to climate change, we must recognize that it’s a disingenuous euphemism for another, less reassuring word. Dying.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 6, Day 28: The Thrubble With Thribbles
The Washington Post, mouthpiece of the Very Serious People, lacks a sense of irony. Witness Dominic Basulto’s piece, “Global warming is a mess. It’s high time we innovate our way out of it.” Ooooooh! Well spotted!
So, how is it, seven years after Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” woke people up to the dangers of global warming, we’re seemingly back to square one?
One problem, quite simply, is that many of the renewable technologies that we hoped would eventually save us are turning out to be, at best, long-term solutions—longer terms than we can currently afford. According to the IEA, even the most promising renewable energy technologies – solar, nuclear, wind – have done little or nothing to dent our carbon use on a global scale. In Japan, for example, long-term efforts to shift into nuclear power from carbon power were undone in the wake of the Fukushima accident. In fact, most of the gains in reducing carbon emissions, according to the IEA, have simply come from shifting away from dirty coal into energy sources such as shale gas. We’re essentially replacing one form of carbon power with a slightly cleaner (or not, depending on how you look at it) form of carbon power.
So, now what’s the plan?
One of the more radical ideas out there involves a plan to capture all the carbon dioxide that we’re spewing into the atmosphere and either store it underground or transform it into another substance such as sulfuric acid before it becomes a greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technologies are still incredibly expensive. But they represent one way we may (emphasis on the “may”) be able to reduce our global carbon footprint without completely dismantling our existing energy infrastructure. In some cases, the captured carbon dioxide could be sold to oil producers immediately, who can use it for other oil extraction processes, rather than storing it underground.
While the concept for carbon dioxide capture and storage has picked up some strong supporters at the U.S. Department of Energy, which sees it as a potential way to transform the Department into a “center of innovation”, one of the early full-scale carbon capture and storage projects is actually going into action in Saskatchewan, Canada. If successful, it could create momentum for other carbon capture projects around the world.
Another idea to win the war on carbon is to place a tax on carbon.
Where there’s a Will, there’s no way. June 12:
To assert that we need to “innovate” our way out of the planetary climate crisis is to make a rhetorical virtue out of stating the obvious. Our old patterns of consumption are what brought the problem on in the first place, and it is old patterns of thinking that are blocking forward motion towards solutions. What most people really mean when they talk about technological innovation as a pathway to sustainability is that they don’t wish to give up the conveniences and privileges they experience as wealthy participants in a consumer economy. Fair enough; who would?
But we cannot maintain the luxury of ignorance. New inventions and near-miraculous energy sources won’t mean a thing if our media don’t report on climate change accurately and carefully. Journalistic “innovations” like false equivalence and willful distortions of science have helped stall meaningful action on climate for decades. Let’s begin by telling the truth.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility extreme weather media irresponsibility superstorms timescale
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 18: Just Enough For The City
The Westerly Sun (CT) discusses post-Sandy reconstruction and its connection to climate change:
WESTERLY — On a cold, blustery day in April, Janet Freedman and Nate Vinhatiero stand gazing at Misquamicut beach. There is so much sand in the air, it’s like being in a desert during a windstorm. Freedman, a coastal geologist with the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council, assesses the progress made since Superstorm Sandy hammered the area at the end of October 2012.
“I’m really impressed that they screened it all,” Freedman says, looking at the newly created dunes made from sand that had washed onto Atlantic Avenue. “If you’re doing dune restoration, you need to have all the debris out.”
Vinhatiero, an oceanographer who works for Applied Science Associates, an environmental consulting firm in Wakefield, explains that he and Freedman are primarily concerned with one major effect of climate change.
“We’re focusing on sea level rise, because for the south shore, that’s the most critical aspect of climate change,” he said.
As Freedman and Vinhatiero observe and record the lingering storm damage — and the scores of workers repairing and restoring the beach, homes and businesses — they and other scientists worry that all this work could be for nothing.
Not-so-clever apes, all of us. May 5:
There are several reasons that climate change is all too often excluded from discussions of post-storm reconstruction, despite its obvious relevance. First is that we humans are notoriously poor at thinking about the long term; in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane, people simply want their lives restored to normal as rapidly as possible. While our climate is indeed transforming with exceptional rapidity, most of its effects will be felt by our descendants, and most of us don’t give more than lip service to the lives of people a century or more from now.
Second is that Earth’s climate is a complex dynamic system to which simple rules of causality don’t apply. This means that the greenhouse effect will have different impacts in different parts of the planet, and that we can’t describe single events like Superstorm Sandy as definite consequences of increased atmospheric CO2.
Finally is the inconvenient fact that fossil fuel corporations wish to avoid a hugely expensive responsibility, so they’ve spent extraordinary amounts to influence our politicians and media away from any reasonable, fact-based discussion of climate change — because such discussion would inevitably turn to the central role of oil and coal in creating the climate crisis.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes conspiracy theories denialists false equivalency idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 17: It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over
Radical economist Winona LaDuke, in the Duluth News-Tribune:
The problems facing our nation can’t be solved in Washington, D.C., said Winona LaDuke, economist, author and two-time vice presidential candidate for the Green Party. The solution starts at home.
“You’re either at the table or on the menu,” LaDuke, a member of the White Earth band of Ojibwe, said in a speech Thursday at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.
She focused on three main issues: climate change, extreme energy addiction and the rising cost to transport food.
“I’d really like to get people to hang around another thousand years,” LaDuke said. “And so the question is how are we going to do that?”
People today have two paths in front of them, one well-worn and scorched, the other green and less traveled.
“We’re the ones who can keep them from putting a mine in … our watershed, which is the wrong thing to do,” she said. “We’re the ones that can keep them from combusting the planet to oblivion. We’re the ones that can keep them from changing the direction of any more rivers or blowing off the top of mountains, yeah. Or genetically engineering the world’s food chain … what a great spiritual opportunity that is, to be those people, to do the right thing.”
I like Winona LaDuke; I think she’d probably agree with the gist of this letter. May 4:
It’s indisputable that the struggle to address global heating and its devastating consequences must be waged on the home front, and Winona LaDuke is correct in her assertion that for the most part, useful approaches to the climate crisis will probably not emerge from Washington, DC. But this simplistic formulation ignores the role that our notoriously dysfunctional Congress plays in making it exponentially more difficult for individual, local, and regional solutions to develop and flourish.
When Republican Representatives and Senators demonize science and block even the most eminently sensible legislation for patently political motivations, this sets them in opposition to the American people’s natural impulse to action and innovation. When conservative media downplay the danger of climate change and instead assert bizarre conspiracy theories, they corrupt the national conversation and make it harder for ordinary citizens to stay well-informed about the grave threat posed by a runaway greenhouse effect.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes idiots ignorance media irresponsibility statistics
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 28: Liars Figure
US News and World Report acknowledges that we’ve made some progress. But:
There’s a lot of angst or worry that we’re not doing anything,” says David Nelson, of the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative and author of the report. “But quite clearly what we’re doing has managed to stop the growth of emissions in a number of sectors.”
Over the past seven years, carbon emissions have fallen by 13 percent in the United States.
Nelson says the gains haven’t been because of a concerted effort to fight climate change. The issue is still highly partisan—just 69 percent of Americans believe Earth is warming, according to a recent PEW poll.
Instead, a series of policy reforms focused on improving the economy, creating jobs and making the country less dependent on foreign oil have led to less carbon emissions overall. Tax credits for alternative energy sources, local antipollution laws, federal automobile fuel efficiency standards and new, more efficient energy technologies have led to a net overall positive.
Statistical criticism? April 16:
To describe climate change as a “highly partisan” issue is true enough; there is no doubt that one significant ideological bloc in the United States is dead-set against acknowledging either the existence or the danger of anthropogenic global warming. But to bolster this assertion by commenting that a recent Pew poll shows that “just” 69 percent of Americans accepted global climate change is an utterly bizarre interpretation of the data. A president elected with that margin would have won in a landslide; if “just” 69 percent of Americans supported marriage equality it would rightly be called an overwhelming mandate.
Interestingly enough, a 2010 Dartmouth survey found that “just” 69 percent of Americans believed President Obama was born in Hawaii, while 31 percent was still demanding to see his “real” birth certificate. The real story is that a slowly-shrinking percentage of conservative zealots will believe anything that supports their preconceptions, evidence and rationality be damned.
Warren Senders
Education environment: false equivalency media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 19: Turn On Your Lovelight
The Missoulian reports on Steven Bunning’s recent speech:
Montanans need to look no farther than their own state to see the effects of global warming, a University of Montana professor said Thursday.
Steven Running is the Regents professor of ecology at UM and was on a United Nations climate change panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.
For the past 30 years at UM, Running has used satellites to study the global environment and measure its health.
Running spoke to students and faculty members at Rocky Mountain College on Thursday and will make similar climate change presentations at Montana State University Billings on Friday.
Not only is climate change real and mostly caused by human activity, global warming also hits close to home, he said.
Global mean temperatures are rising at an accelerating rate, and the earth no longer has cooling cycles as it once did.
Signs of that trend are everywhere, but none is more dramatic than the fact that the polar ice cap around the North Pole has receded more than 40 percent since 1979.
That melt is expected to continue and “by 2040 or 2050, the Arctic Ocean may be open water,” Running said.
Closer to home, all glaciers in Glacier National Park could be gone by 2020 if current trends continue.
Al Gore is fat. Also. April 5:
At this late date, a newspaper headline announcing that climate change is real forms excellent evidence of the corporate corruption of our public discourse.
Of course climate change is real. The scientific evidence is overwhelming; climatologists’ predictions have been confirmed with ever-increasing precision, and by now the consequences of runaway global warming are showing up all around us: more fires, more droughts, more extreme precipitation, more weird weather everywhere.
An article on outer space no longer needs to acknowledge those who believe the Earth is flat; an article on medicine would be irresponsible if it referenced the medieval theory of humors. On no other subject has the hard and irrefutable evidence of science been subjected to so much unwarranted obloquy; climate scientists routinely find themselves subject to legal harassment along with death threats and public campaigns of intimidation. Why? Their research has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt the reality of the greenhouse effect, of increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2, and of the likely consequences to human civilization of allowing this state of affairs to continue.
The simple answer is that fossil fuel corporations cannot stand hindrance or interruption in their continued pursuit of record profits, and a few impressive-sounding “think tanks” and heavily-degreed spokespersons are a good investment if they can help delay the robust policies needed to address the crisis.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies denialists heroes media irresponsibility NASA scientific method
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 15: Hardly A Man Is Now Alive
Mind you, this is the same paper that recently shut down its Environment reporting entirely:
James E. Hansen, the climate scientist who issued the clearest warning of the 20th century about the dangers of global warming, will retire from NASA this week, giving himself more freedom to pursue political and legal efforts to limit greenhouse gases.
His departure, after a 46-year career at the space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, will deprive federally sponsored climate research of its best-known public figure.
At the same time, retirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted from tar sands.
“As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,” he said in an interview.
A hero. Resurrecting the Paul Revere meme for James Hansen. April 2:
Two hundred and thirty eight years ago, courageous patriots sounded a call; a midnight ride alerted the Minutemen to the arrival of the Redcoats — and the consequences are both an indelible part of our nation’s history and an irrefutable testament to the value of an early-warning system.
The modern equivalents are the world’s climate scientists, who have been trying to wake up a complacent citizenry for decades.
Dr. James Hansen’s resignation from NASA in order to devote himself to alerting America and the world to the climate crisis is a measure of the trouble we’re in. Dr. Hansen and his colleagues have received opprobrium and insult simply for doing their jobs responsibly. If Paul Revere had faced an analogous situation in April 1775, he’d have to persuade “every Middlesex village and farm” not only that the British existed, but that King George’s army posed a danger to their lives and liberty.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists hurricane media irresponsibility Storms
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 8: Thar She Blows!
Newsweek revisits the New Jersey coastline months after Sandy’s landfall:
Months after Hurricane Sandy, the Jersey Shore is full of talk of rebuilding, but still struggles to accept the march of global warming’s angry waters. Will we be able to keep living where nature doesn’t want us?
The sand was the thing we noticed first. Mostly because it hadn’t been there yesterday, or any day before yesterday, and now it was absolutely everywhere.
For the first 23 hours after the storm, we hadn’t been able to see much of anything at all. On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy had made landfall just south of Long Beach Island, New Jersey, the narrow strip of coastline where I spent my childhood summers and where my parents have lived, full time, for the past eight years. Now a day had passed, and information was hard to come by. My parents were fine; they had evacuated earlier that week to friend’s place 45 miles inland. But the power was out, and the 18-mile-long barrier island, which is home to 20,000 year-round residents, was basically abandoned, so we still didn’t know how much damage our house in North Beach had sustained, or if there were even any houses left in North Beach to sustain damage. Also, the rumors were starting to spread. The Ferris wheel at Fantasy Island has collapsed. A shark is swimming around Surf City. The waves breached the dunes. The ocean met the bay. Whole towns have been washed out. The rumors were not helping.
And still they deny it. March 26:
“Will we be able to keep living where nature doesn’t want us?” Actually, it seems all too evident that nature has a point. Human industrial civilization has introduced hundreds of millions of years’ worth of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere in a geological instant, essentially breaking the Arctic and triggering consequences that are going to reverberate for centuries to come.
A post climate-change future will bring extreme environmental unpredictability. Optimistic forecasts include the destruction of billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure and the likelihood of increased geopolitical instability (a polite euphemism for wars). The damage inflicted by Hurricane Sandy is just a preview of coming attractions. The pessimistic forecasts suggest that our carelessness has condemned our descendants to a losing battle against implacable environmental forces.
If we are to secure happiness and prosperity for our posterity, we can no longer afford to irresponsibly ignore the frightening factuality of climate change.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 1: A Fool
The Otago Daily Times (NZ) notes the arrival of noted upper-class twit Lord Monckton…only they refer to him as a “skeptic,” which is a leftover bit of stupid that’s grown enough mold to solve mazes on its own.
A leading global warming skeptic, Lord Christopher Monckton, will speak in Dunedin next month. His visit is part of a national ”Climate Freedom Tour” and will include a lunch and an evening function on April 23.
Lord Monckton is a British politician, public speaker, hereditary peer and former newspaper editor.
Formerly a member of the Conservative Party, he worked for Margaret Thatcher’s Number 10 Policy Unit during the 1980s.
In recent years, he has received publicity for holding sceptical views about man-made climate change and has authored more than 100 papers on the climate issue. Dunedin organiser Jock Allison, of the New Zealand Science Coalition, said Lord Monckton was an entertaining speaker with different views from the mainstream on climate change.
Entertaining. March 20:
Lord Christopher Monckton is many things, as evidenced by his description in your recent article as “British politician, public speaker, hereditary peer and former newspaper editor” — but one thing he is not is a climate scientist. None of those four identifying phrases give his opinions on the phenomena of global climate change any credibility whatsoever. While his abilities as an “entertaining speaker” offer a feeble rationale for inviting him to speak under the auspices of the New Zealand Science Coalition, from the perspective of anyone who is sensitive to questions of scientific truth, his presence is an affront to genuine scientists and genuine science.
Would a proponent of the medieval theory of “humours” be asked to speak to a medical association, and described as an “infection skeptic”? Would a flat-Earther get an invitation to address a geological society and be billed as a “spherical skeptic”? Mr. Monckton’s assertions about global climate change have been repeatedly debunked; put simply, he’s an unscientific fraud, and describing him as a “skeptic” is doing a disservice to skeptics everywhere.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists drought idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 7: You Get No Bread With One Meat Ball
WICHITA, Kan. — Years of drought are reshaping the U.S. beef industry with feedlots and a major meatpacking plant closing because there are too few cattle left in the United States to support them.
Some feedlots in the nation’s major cattle-producing states have already been dismantled, and others are sitting empty. Operators say they don’t expect a recovery anytime soon, with high feed prices, much of the country still in drought and a long time needed to rebuild herds.
The closures are the latest ripple in the shockwave the drought sent through rural communities. Most cattle in the U.S. are sent to feedlots for final fattening before slaughter. The dwindling number of animals also is hurting meatpackers, with their much larger workforces. For consumers, the impact will be felt in grocery and restaurant bills as a smaller meat supply means higher prices.
Cattle numbers have been falling for years as the price of corn used to feed animals in feedlots skyrocketed. The drought accelerated the process, but many feedlots were able to survive at first because ranchers whose pastures dried up weaned calves early and sent breeding cows to be fattened for slaughter.
Yum. Sent February 25:
Even as the drought hammering the world’s most productive farmland goes into its second year, the anti-science conservatives in American politics and media are still stuck in full-denial mode: there is no drought, and if there is, it’s not caused by climate change, which isn’t happening; even if the climate is changing, it’s not caused by humans, and even if it is, it’s too expensive to do anything about it anyway. Does your head hurt? Mine does.
It’s not just farm states that are waking up to the consequences of an accelerating greenhouse effect. Everywhere across the nation and the world people are realizing that a transformed climate is going to wreak havoc on our food supply, with ripple effects that will radically alter the lives of everyone on the planet.
Eventually, of course, the denialists will have to eat their words. There won’t be anything else left to eat.
Warren Senders