Lethal Heating: 09/12/16

12/09/2016

My Student Missed Class... To Sue The Government Over Climate Change

Charlotte Observer - Mallory McDuff*

Youths like Kelsey Juliana – who is part of a suit against the federal government – are fighting for climate action. Chris Polydoroff

At the small liberal arts college where I teach, it's hard for students to miss class with any degree of anonymity.
But last semester, one of my students, Kelsey Juliana, gave the most compelling excuse for missing class that I've heard in 16 years of teaching.
She was flying to Oregon to sue the federal government for failure to protect youth from climate change's impacts. As a teacher, writer, and mother, I call that an excused absence.
On April 8, 2016, the federal District Court in Eugene, Ore., decided in favor of 21 plaintiffs, ages 8-19 years old, and Dr. James Hansen, in their case brought against the federal government and the fossil fuel industry. The decision denied motions seeking to dismiss the climate change lawsuit, which claims failure of the U.S. to protect youth from greenhouse gas emissions is a violation of their constitutional rights.
This decision advanced the legal fight to require the federal government to implement a plan to limit carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to 350 ppm by 2100. Oral arguments for the federal climate lawsuit are scheduled for Tuesday in Eugene, Oregon.
Much is at stake in this case brought by 21 young people from across the country. For starters, the health of my own children is on the line.
And in this divisive political season, I want my children, my students and other parents to know that youth are taking legal action to protect their right to a healthy future.
An unusual element of the case includes the unlikely allies of the federal government and its agencies, along with fossil fuel interests of the American Petroleum Institute, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers.
Argued by attorney Julia Olson with Our Children's Trust, the complaint alleges the government violated the Fifth Amendment rights of the youth to due process and equal protection. The case also rests on the public trust doctrine, which asserts the government has a responsibility to protect natural systems for future generations.
Youth in other states have secured similar wins to advance science-based climate legislation, with lawsuits proceeding in Oregon and Colorado.
As a teacher, I have ferried students to climate rallies, participated in climate action trainings and designed climate justice tours across the state of North Carolina.
As a writer, I have interviewed faith leaders in congregations to document actions to protect the climate, such as installing solar panels on sanctuaries.
But as a mother, I often wonder if these shotgun actions will produce substantive changes to help my children mitigate the climate crisis. The climate movement needs diverse tactics and strategies at different scales, and I need to harness my own work to something larger than my local actions.
This federal lawsuit provides critical momentum for the work of my students and greater hope that my own children aren't powerless in the face of our systemic addictions to fossil fuels and virtual inaction by our legislators.
I'm not naïve enough to think one federal court case will tilt the momentum for climate action worldwide. But as a 50-year old parent, I'm old enough to know that legal decisions – harnessed with sustained grassroots action – can shift the scales, at a time when we need positive and united change to protect our children's futures.
The night after the April court case, my student e-mailed me with an update from Oregon: She had said goodbye to the other plaintiffs, who were heading home after having a sleepover together. Sitting at my desk late at night, with my two children asleep, I smiled at the image of youth suing the government - and then staying up late to savor each other's company, enjoying their fundamental right to a healthy life.

*Mallory McDuff, Ph.D. teaches at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC.

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Climate Change Policy Needs Market Mechanism

The Age - Editorial

The public brawl being played out in the Climate Change Authority is a fresh story, and yet a highly familiar one. It is not surprising people plucked from differing walks of life to advise the government on global warming would have sharply conflicting views.
A majority of board members, most appointed by the Coalition, have recommended the government build on current policy settings to meet existing greenhouse gas reduction targets. They have been challenged by two members, scientist David Karoly and academic and author Clive Hamilton, who believe the majority has failed by not stressing Australia needs to cut emissions much more rapidly if it is to play its part in limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees – a benchmark agreed under the Paris climate deal.

Could you people hurry up and get serious, please? Photo: Nick Cobbing/Greenpeace

The pair would like to see what would effectively be a reboot – scrapping the Direct Action emissions reduction fund and introducing the type of emissions trading scheme both major parties used to once support. They also want a dramatic scaling up for the renewable energy target. It is a battle over what is achievable and what is desirable.
Australia's political class has been having this sort of argument since 2007, when both the Howard government and the Rudd opposition went to an election supporting a market-based scheme.
In this case, the dissenting report is more clearly playing the role the authority was intended to – providing independent advice, and leaving the politics to the politicians. Under no calculation does an emissions cut of 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 – the maximum proposed by the Coalition – measure up to Australia playing its part. The majority report only acknowledges this discrepancy in passing. That is a mistake. More than 2 degrees of warming will be catastrophic for millions of people and countless species. Everything must be done to avoid it. If our lawmakers ever get properly serious about cutting emissions, they will find they can be brought down more rapidly and at lower cost than those who argue against taking action claim.
The country should adopt the targets the authority recommended last year, including a cut of at least 45 per cent by 2030 and net zero emissions by mid-century. The current approach is a pseudo climate policy, more about planting trees than cutting industrial emissions. Wise heads in both major parties know this, and want an end to the years of aggressively oppositional politics on climate change. They are also hearing the increasingly vocal call from interest groups – spanning business, unions, the welfare lobby and environmental organisations – for a meaningful bipartisan deal.
This could take a range of forms, and there are suggestions in both the majority and minority report worth considering. To be serious, they must include a market-based scheme that requires polluters to either reduce emissions or pay a significant cost for their greenhouse pollution.
With a pure cap-and-trade scheme unlikely to win support, this could be achieved by converting the existing "safeguard mechanism" into a baseline-and-credit scheme that required industrial players to pay for emissions above a set level. That level would be reduced year-on-year.
This – complemented by an extended clean energy target and a plan for orderly closure of coal-fired plants, including helping communities where jobs will be lost – would be a significant start towards Australia delivering on its international commitments.
The Age urges both parties to drop the political point-scoring and ideological frolics in the pursuit of this compromise. It is time to get started in earnest.

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Bioethicist: The Climate Crisis Calls For Fewer Children

The Conversation - Travis N. Rieder

Should a future parent consider the impact more people will have on the Earth? child via www.shutterstock.com

Earlier this summer, I found myself in the middle of a lively debate because of my work on climate change and the ethics of having children.
NPR correspondent Jennifer Ludden profiled some of my work in procreative ethics with an article entitled, "Should we be having kids in the age of climate change?," which summarized my published views that we ought to consider adopting a "small family ethic" and even pursuing fertility reduction efforts in response to the threat from climate change. Although environmentalists for decades have worried about overpopulation for many good reasons, I suggest the fast-upcoming thresholds in climate change provide uniquely powerful reasons to consider taking real action to slow population growth.
Clearly, this idea struck a nerve: I was overwhelmed by the response in my personal email inbox as well as op-eds in other media outlets and over 70,000 shares on Facebook. I am gratified that so many people took the time to read and reflect on the piece.
Having read and digested that discussion, I want to continue it by responding to some of the most vocal criticisms of my own work, which includes research on "population engineering" – the intentional manipulation of human population size and structure – I've done with my colleagues, Jake Earl and Colin Hickey.
In short, the varied arguments against my views – that I'm overreacting, that the economy will tank and others – haven't changed my conviction that we need to discuss the ethics of having children in this era of climate change.

How bad will things get?
Some comments – those claiming climate change is a hoax, devised by those who wish to control the world's resources – are not worth responding to. Since 97 percent of all relevant experts cannot convince climate change skeptics of the basic scientific facts, then nothing I say will change their minds.
Other concerns, however, do require a response. Many people reacted to my work on procreation ethics by saying climate change will not be so bad, and so curbing individual desires, such as having children, in its name is unnecessary fear-mongering.
In my work, I suggest that 1.5-2 degrees Celsius warming over preindustrial levels will be "dangerous" and "very bad," while 4 degrees C will be "catastrophic" and will leave large segments of the Earth "largely uninhabitable by humans." Here is a very brief survey of the evidence for those claims based on what I consider reputable sources.
At 1.5-2 degrees C, a World Bank report predicts an increase in extreme weather events, deadly heat waves and severe water stress. Food production will decrease, and changing disease vectors will create unpredictable infectious disease outbreaks. Sea levels will rise, combining with increased storm severity to place coastal cities at risk. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that from the years 2030-2050 – as we reach this level of warming – at least 250,000 people will die every year from just some of the climate-related harms.

It’s widely recognized that the global poor will disproportionately suffer the consequences of climate change. Here people displaced by flooding in Pakistan in 2010 line up for water. Asian Development Bank, CC BY-NC-ND

Perhaps many of us in rich countries (the "us" who might be reading this) will be largely protected from these early harms; but that doesn't make them less real to the vulnerable citizens of, say, Bangladesh, Kiribati or the Maldives. In fact, it escalates the injustice, as the global wealthy have benefited from and contributed to climate change the most, while the global poor will be hurt first and worst.
At 4 degrees C warming, the World Bank predicts that every summer month will be hotter than any current record heat wave, making the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean deadly during the summer months. Many coastal cities will be completely under water, and all low-lying island nations will likely have to be abandoned. Hundreds of millions, if not billions of people could become climate refugees, as their homelands become uninhabitable.
Based on these descriptions, I stand by my predictions.

No, environmentalists don't hate babies
Other critics have argued that advocating for a lower birth rate = hating babies or being "anti-life."
Obviously I don't hate babies! I'm pretty wild about my own kid, and small humans in general.
This anti-life charge is more interesting, but equally wrong. The premise seems to be that those who wish to lower fertility rates must be misanthropic, or fail to see the value of humans. But that gets things exactly backwards: A radical concern for climate change is precisely motivated by a concern for human life – in particular, the human lives that will be affected by climate disruptions.
A valuable philosophical contribution here is the distinction between "making people happy" and "making happy people." When I feed a hungry person, or prevent a harm from befalling someone, I improve a person's well-being. But when I create a person whom I will then feed and prevent from harm, I make a person who will predictably be well off. In the first case, I added happiness to the world by helping an existing person; whereas in the second case, I added happiness by creating a person who will be happy. See the difference?
I, like many philosophers, believe that it's morally better to make people happy than to make happy people. Those who exist already have needs and wants, and protecting and providing for them is motivated by respect for human life. It is not a harm to someone not to be created.
In fact, I would argue that it is more "anti-life" to prioritize creating new life over caring for, or even not harming, those who already exist.

Can the economy grow with lower population growth?
Another opposing argument: People are not only consumers – they are also producers, and so will make the world better.
Yes, humans are producers, and many wonderful things have come from human genius. But each person, whatever else they are (genius or dunce, producer or drag on the economy) is also a consumer. And this is the only claim needed in order to be worried about climate change.
The problem here is that we have a finite resource – the ability of the Earth's atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases without violently disrupting the climate – and each additional person contributes to the total amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. So although humans will hopefully save us (we do, in fact, desperately need brilliant people to develop scaleable technology to remove carbon from the air, for instance), the solution to this cannot be to have as many babies as possible, with the hope that this raises our probability of solving the problem. Because each baby is also an emitter, whether a genius or not.
Lastly, there's the view that lowering fertility rates will kill the economy.
Several commenters point to low-fertility countries like Japan, Italy and Germany, and argue that problems experienced by such countries are proof that the "real" population crisis is our dropping fertility rate. We need more babies to grow into healthy young producers to keep our economic engine humming.
The truth in this objection is the following: An economy that requires infinite growth to be healthy will be harmed in a world of finite resources. But if it's true that our economies can't survive slowing or even reversing population growth, then we're in some trouble no matter what.
Why? It's simple logic that we cannot grow our population forever. We can either reflect now on how to protect our economy while working toward a sustainable population, or we can ignore the problem until nature forces it on us, perhaps violently and unexpectedly.
I'll conclude with one, final thought: I don't enjoy arguing for a small family ethic, or a population engineering scheme. Despite snide accusations to the contrary, I get no research funds or any other incentive for making this case. I'm arguing these points because I'm genuinely worried about the future of our planet, and the people who will inherit it, and I believe difficult yet civil discussion is the crucial first step to making that future one we won't be condemned for creating.

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