07/10/2020

(US) The Political Theater Of Climate Change: A 62-Year History Of Inaction

Salon - Lee Van Der Voo

The US government has known very well what was coming for over half a century. Why didn’t they do anything?

 Mediterranean hurricane (Medicane) Ianos makes landfall in Greece. (Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2020)

Author
Lee van der Voo is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of "AS THE WORLD BURNS: The New Generation of Activists and the Landmark Legal Fight Against Climate Change."
Just to be clear: it was 1958 when the United States government established its first carbon dioxide monitoring station.

In other words, by 1958 the United States knew that the climate was changing, greenhouse gasses were the cause, and that these changes were disquieting enough that they warranted observation.

I am inclined to note the year because it had to be explained to me in 2018, seventy years later, after I was well into adulthood. And in this way, I'm like a lot of people—which is frightening.

I remember, of course, learning about global warming in the 1980s. I was twelve when a good friend of mine started classes at a private school, where it was taught that there were planetary consequences to unchecked pollution. I learned by osmosis.

Global warming trailed me into my adult life, in which I tried to be a good environmental citizen by making thoughtful choices, mostly at the cash register. I believed this kind of action would avert the worst consequences of a climate breakdown because that's also what I was taught.

Now, I know that only wholesale systemic change to things like energy and food systems are enough to halt carbon accumulation in the atmosphere, and draw it down to safe levels that will avert a planetary disaster. I know that if we marched forth with individual lifestyle changes alone, we'd actually only curb about 1 to 2 percent of carbon emissions.

The U.S. government knows that too. And what's especially frustrating – enraging, even – is for just how long our nation's leaders have been clear on this science and have failed — not only to act, but to teach us what they know.

If you go back a couple of decades before the nation's first carbon monitoring station in Hawaii, you arrive in 1938. That's the year that English engineer Guy Callendar confirmed that the greenhouse effect was real, and occurring.

Forty-eight years before that—in 1890—Svante Arrhenius had discovered it, warning that the world's industrial processes emitted carbon dioxide that caused the planet's atmosphere to warm. Hence, by 1958, the United States was concerned enough to fund a federal facility, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, to begin to take stock of the damage.

It didn't take long for the results of that monitoring, along with new science, to prompt concern. By the mid-sixties, Richard Nixon had commissioned agency reports, not just to study climate change, which was obvious by then, but to remedy it. The first such report was issued in 1967, making Nixon the first American president to preside over scientists who proffered a solution. He would not be the last.

Nixon's national Energy Future report recommended a national shift away from fossil fuels and toward a renewable energy system in 1973. A couple of years later, when Gerald Ford gave his State of the Union address, he called for a reduction of oil imports, for development of alternative energy, and the establishment of pollution standards for cars.

By 1977, the Government Accounting Office was warning that life on Earth would be harmed by 2 degrees Celsius of warming, and urged limits on atmospheric carbon emissions over the next 100 to 200 years. This came as Jimmy Carter spent an entire term trying to create climate policy, and commissioned more reports about climate change and how to solve it.

I know all of this because it was collected as evidence in the landmark lawsuit Juliana v. United States. The case was filed by 21 young litigants against the federal government for its role, not in ignoring climate change, but in perpetuating it. They argue the country's continued authorization, permitting, and subsidizing of a fossil fuel energy system despite this knowledge violates their Constitutional rights.

Indeed, while Reagan was president, the nation reversed its solutions course. While it is broadly known that burning fossil fuels – coal, natural gas and oil – accounts for 87 percent of all human-produced carbon dioxide emissions globally, Reagan was among several presidents to put increased focus on developing fossil fuels.

Although the EPA recommended an end to coal burning by 2000, a ban on oil shale, and a 300 percent carbon tax—and predicted the Earth could reach 2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2040—Reagan implemented a Department of Energy research program on…hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

In similar fashion, George W. Bush later appointed cabinet members with close ties to the fossil fuel industry, adopted disinformation as an official strategy, and called for oil exploration and thousands of new, coal-fired energy plants. Donald Trump now carries that torch, stumping for increased coal production and oil and gas extraction beyond what markets will even bear. He denies climate change all the while, but interestingly his administration does not.

Even liberal administrations purportedly concerned about the outcome the Juliana plaintiffs deeply fear – a complete climate breakdown – have adopted what their lead attorney calls the "all-of-the-above" energy strategy.

Which means that while some proposed policies that countermand carbon emissions, they still catered to the industries that produce those emissions. Which says everything about how politics work in this country. And explains how Barack Obama spent $92 billion seeding an alternate energy system and slashed carbon from power plants at record rates, but still made the United States the number one producer of oil and gas in the world.

Now, the Earth is predicted to cross the 2 degree warming threshold a few years early in 2036. And the United States still has not accomplished many of the goals it laid out to avert that end over a half-century ago.

In fact, the United States enjoys the dubious distinction of having contributed 25 percent of historic global carbon accumulation to the atmosphere – a fact that the government admits in the Juliana case, though the political theater would convince us all otherwise. Meanwhile, the United States government has never taken a full accounting of the carbon that its economy emits, continuing to approve new fossil fuel energy projects while refusing to consider climate change as a reason not to.

What does it say about the entrenchment of corporate interests in our government when three million acres have just burned across the west, devastating storms have just landed in the Gulf, and our leadership is still approving energy projects that perpetuate these disasters, even as world markets turn away from fossil fuels?

And what does it say to the youth of America that our nation will take no action to spare theirs and future generations the catastrophic consequences of what they have wrought? These facts leave the young with radical solutions in place of those that, in the Nixon and Carter days, were once simply pragmatic.

Links
at No comments:

(AU) Our World Is Facing Irreversible Destruction – And Still There's No Urgency In Australian Climate Policy

The Guardian - 

The Guardian is prioritising the environment both in editorial and commercial decisions. We know the situation is dire but that the worst can yet be averted

‘We persist with the great pretence that we can continue to power industry and manufacturing with our abundant fossil fuels.’ Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

Author
Lenore Taylor is Guardian Australia's editor. She has won two Walkley awards and has twice won the Paul Lyneham award for excellence in press gallery journalism. Lenore Taylor co-authored a book, Shitstorm, on the Rudd government's response to the global economic crisis.
For Australians, the national trauma of fires burning through 18 million hectares of bushland earlier this year is raw and ongoing.

But since then the US west coast and Siberia have also burned.

China, Bangladesh, India and parts of Africa have suffered catastrophic flooding.

Death Valley recorded possibly the highest ever temperature on Earth, at 54.4C.

In February the Antarctic temperature rose above 20C for the first time.

In March the Great Barrier Reef suffered its third mass bleaching in five years. In June it was 38C inside the Arctic Circle.

None of these events can be attributed entirely to global heating, but scientists are clear that their frequency and ferocity are signs of impending climate catastrophe, of irreversible destruction. What they have warned of for decades is coming to pass.

But there’s still nothing urgent about Australia’s policies on climate and energy. We persist with the great pretence that we can continue to power industry and manufacturing with our abundant fossil fuels, ambling along with plans for a “transition” at some unspecified future time.

With business rationally resistant to the government’s urging that it invest in new coal-fired power, the government has now shifted its focus to gas as a “transition” fuel. Business isn’t rushing to invest in that either, so the prime minister is threatening to use taxpayers’ money to build a power station that will lock in gas use for 30 years.

He’s promising to push through the development of five huge new gas fields, including the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory, which alone contains gas reserves sufficient to power Australia for 200 years. Little wonder he is reluctant to put a date on when we might finally reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions.

Gas, the prime minister Scott Morrison insists, is a fuel that “chose itself”. But of course it didn’t. It was chosen by a manufacturing taskforce comprising executives with strong links to the gas industry.

These choices – a gas-fired recovery, a government picking technologies, no pricing mechanism to drive private sector investment – are not what most in the business community want. That these policies are not what anyone concerned about the environment wants goes without saying.

The Australian Climate Roundtable, comprising peak business groups such as the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group, as well as farming organisations, unions and environmentalists, has begged the government to commit to the net zero target now adopted by more than 100 countries around the world. They’ve pleaded with governments to use the Covid-19 recovery to speed up change, and warned that inaction will lead to unprecedented economic, as well as environmental, damage.

But federal policy appears more concerned with the impact of short term electricity price rises on a small number of highly energy-intensive manufacturers, businesses the Grattan Institute calculated between them employ about 1,000 people.

As energy analyst Tristan Edis wrote in Guardian Australia recently, this government used to argue against a carbon price because renewable technologies were too expensive. Now that solar and wind are clearly the cheapest means of new electricity generation, they say we don’t need a price because renewables are too cheap. Instead they insist we need government-funded research into other technologies, ones that might reduce the emissions from continued use of fossil fuels, to some extent, some day.

Meanwhile we try to disguise our inaction with accounting tricks to claim we are meeting our 2020 greenhouse gas emission targets and are on track to meet the patently inadequate goals we have set ourselves for 2030, hoping this might disguise our failure to make the actual economic changes those goals are supposed to drive.

Once we were told an Australia carbon price was tantamount to “exporting jobs” to China, which was allowed to increase its emissions under international agreements, albeit at a decreasing rate. Now we are balking at a commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050 while China claims to be aiming for net zero emissions by 2060.

Our laggard transition might be less internationally disastrous if President Trump is re-elected in November and makes good his intention of withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate pact, but it’s unlikely to sit well if Joe Biden becomes president, with his promise of a “clean energy revolution”.

These issues are complex and some in the media are content to report on them as a “he said, she said” story, to make no connection between climate science and climate policies, or to go along with the political game of asking whether a party is “for” or “against” coal, or gas, rather than whether they have a plan for affordable and reliable power with net zero emissions.

Guardian Australia has prioritised climate journalism since its launch in 2013. We analyse and scrutinise what is being done. We write about how things might be. We hold policy-makers to account. When the government suggested the bushfires were nothing out of the ordinary, we fact-checked the claims and found them false. When conservative politicians suggested the fires were due to “green” opposition to backburning, we fact-checked that too.

We’ve documented how global heating is changing the lives of Australians from every walk of life in our Frontline series. We’ve explored what could be done in a series on the Green Recovery.

Now, the Guardian is renewing a pledge made to all our readers around the globe, promising to prioritise the environment, not just in our editorial decisions but in our commercial decisions too.

Guardian Australia is proud of these commitments. We seek to reflect them in our reporting every day. We understand the situation is urgent. We know the worst consequences might yet be averted.

Links
at No comments:

Three Scenarios For The Future Of Climate Change

The New Yorker - Elizabeth Kolbert

The events of the next several millennia hinge on actions that will be taken by the time today’s toddlers reach adulthood.

Photograph by Raphael Neal / Agence VU / Redux

Author
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999.
She is the author of “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2015.
"Three Scenarios for the Future of Climate Change" was drawn from the afterword of “The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change”.
Like millions of other Americans, I first learned about climate change in the summer of 1988. For its day, it was a scorcher: Yellowstone National Park burst into flames; the Mississippi River ran so low that almost four thousand barges got backed up at Memphis; and, for the first time in its history, Harvard University shut down owing to heat.

It was on an afternoon when the mercury in Washington, D.C., hit ninety-eight degrees that James Hansen, then the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a Senate committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.” Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Hansen went a step further: “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

Hansen’s warning was certainly not the first. A report to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 noted that the effect of burning fossil fuels was likely to be “deleterious from the point of view of human beings.” Another report, prepared for the Department of Energy in 1979, predicted that even a relatively small increase in temperature could lead to the ultimate “disintegration” of the West Antarctic ice sheet, a process that would raise global sea levels by sixteen feet. A third report, also from 1979, found that, as carbon accumulated in the atmosphere, there was no doubt that the climate would change and “no reason to believe” that the change “will be negligible.”

But, for some reason, when Hansen spoke up, on that sweltering afternoon in June, the story of climate change shifted. The Times ran its article at the top of page 1, under a three-column headline: “GLOBAL WARMING HAS BEGUN, EXPERT TELLS SENATE.” The following year, Bill McKibben published “The End of Nature,” first as a New Yorker piece under the rubric “Reflections,” and then, in longer form, as a book.

Had the words of either man been heeded in the intervening three decades, the world today would be a very different place—incalculably better off in innumerable ways. Instead, during that interval, some two hundred billion metric tons of carbon have been spewed into the atmosphere. (This is roughly as much CO2 as had been emitted from the start of the Industrial Revolution to that point.)

Meanwhile, trillions of dollars have been sunk into coal-burning power plants, oil pipelines, gas pipelines, liquid-natural-gas export terminals, and a host of other fossil-fuel projects that, in a saner world, would never have been constructed. And global temperatures, as everyone can by now attest—though some still refuse to acknowledge—have continued to rise, to the point where the sweltering summer of 1988 no longer stands out as particularly hot. The nineteen-nineties were, on average, warmer than the eighties, the aughts hotter than the nineties, and the past decade hotter still. Each of the past five years has ranked among the warmest on record.

The New Yorker has run dozens of pieces on climate change. All might be described as “reflections” on this fundamental disconnect. Even as the consequences—rising seas, fiercer droughts, longer wildfire seasons, more devastating storms—have become daily news, global carbon emissions have continued to increase. In 2019, they reached a new record of ten billion metric tons. Emissions in India rose by almost two per cent, and in China by more than two per cent. In the United States, they actually dropped, by about 1.5 per cent.

On November 4, 2019, the Trump Administration formally notified the United Nations that it planned to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, negotiated by the Obama Administration back in 2015. The very next day, a group called the Alliance of World Scientists released a statement, signed by eleven thousand researchers, warning that “the climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected.”

“Especially worrisome,” the statement continued, were “irreversible climate tipping points,” the crossing of which “could lead to a catastrophic ‘hothouse Earth,’ well beyond the control of humans.”

What will the Earth look like thirty years from now? To a discomfiting extent, the future has already been written. There’s a great deal of inertia in the climate system; as a result, we’ve yet to experience the full effects of the CO2 that’s been emitted to date. No matter what happens during the next few decades, it’s pretty much guaranteed that glaciers and ice sheets will continue to melt, as temperatures and sea levels continue to rise.

But to an extent that, depending on your perspective, is either heartening or horrifying, the future—and not just of the next several decades but of the next several millennia—hinges on actions that will be taken by the time today’s toddlers reach adulthood. What’s technically referred to as “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” and colloquially known as “catastrophe” is warming so dramatic that it’s apt to obliterate whole nations (such as the Marshall Islands and the Maldives) and destroy entire ecosystems (such as coral reefs).

A host of scientific studies suggest that a temperature increase of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or more would qualify. A great many studies suggest that warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) would be enough to do the trick. At current emissions rates, the 1.5-degree threshold will be crossed in about a decade. As Drew Shindell, an atmospheric scientist at Duke University, told Science, “No longer can we say the window for action will close soon—we’re here now.”

So how hot—which is to say, how bad—will things get? One of the difficulties of making such predictions is that there are so many forms of uncertainty, from the geopolitical to the geophysical. (No one, for example, knows exactly where various “climate tipping points” lie.) That being said, I’ll offer three scenarios.

In one scenario—let’s call this “blue skies”—the world will finally decide to “stop waffling” and start to bring emissions down more or less immediately. In the U.S., proponents of the Green New Deal have proposed a “ten-year national mobilization” in order to meet a hundred per cent of the country’s power demand “through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”

Such a timetable is obviously fantastically ambitious, but not for this reason infeasible. According to a report by the International Energy Agency, using technologies now available, offshore wind turbines could provide the country with twice as much electricity as it currently uses, and, according to some estimates, weaning the U.S. off fossil fuels would create tens of millions of jobs.

Bending the emissions curve globally is an even more formidable challenge. Leaders of many developing nations point out the injustice in asking their countries to forgo carbon-based fuels just because richer nations have already blown through the world’s carbon budget. India, which will soon overtake China as the world’s most populous country, gets three-quarters of its electricity from coal, and that proportion has, at least until recently, been growing.

Still, it’s possible to imagine that global emissions could peak in the next decade or so. (At the U.N. last month, China’s President, Xi Jinping, pledged that his country’s emissions would crest by 2030.) Owing to the pandemic, emissions worldwide are expected to drop by about five per cent this year, compared with 2019. This would be the largest year-to-year drop since the Second World War, and it could mark an inflection point. Were it to be sustained, the increase in global temperatures could be held to less than two degrees Celsius.

The world in 2050 would still be hotter than it is now, but it would also be less polluted, less given over to vast concentrations of oil wealth, and, in all likelihood, more just. As Narasimha Rao, a professor at Yale’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, put it in the Times, it’s hard to see how serious global-emissions cuts could take place without “increased attention to equity.”

Alternatively, global emissions could continue to grow through the middle of the century and, along with them, global inequality. In this scenario, by 2050 a temperature increase of two degrees Celsius would, for all intents and purposes, be locked in. Developed nations would have constructed storm-surge barriers to keep out the sea and erected border walls to keep out refugees. They would also have started to air-condition the outdoors.

Developing nations, meanwhile, would have been left to fend for themselves. To a certain extent, all of this is already happening. A study published in 2019 by Noah Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke, both of Stanford University, found that in the past fifty years warming had slowed economic growth in those parts of the world which have emitted the least carbon, perhaps by as much as twenty-five per cent. “Not only have poor countries not shared in the full benefits of energy consumption, but many have already been made poorer (in relative terms) by the energy consumption of wealthy countries,” the two wrote. Qatar, one of the world’s hottest countries and also one of the richest, already cools its soccer stadiums and its outdoor malls.

In a third scenario, global warming could by 2050 produce global conflict that draws in poor nations and rich ones alike. This, too, already seems, to a certain extent, to be taking place. A significant body of research suggests that the Syrian civil war was caused, at least in part, by a drought that pushed more than a million people out of their villages. The war, which has claimed some four hundred thousand lives, has, in the course of nearly a decade of bloodshed, involved the U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. Future droughts in the Middle East are apt to be even more severe and prolonged, as are droughts in other volatile regions, like the Horn of Africa.

It doesn’t seem that it would take too many more Syrian-scale conflicts to destabilize large swaths of the globe. At the very least, climate change “will endanger the stability of the international political order and the global trading networks upon which American prosperity rests,” Michael Klare, an expert on resource competition and a professor at Hampshire College, has written. “As conditions deteriorate, the United States could face an even more perilous outcome: conflict among the great powers themselves.”

If all these scenarios appear to be either too unrealistic or too unpleasant, I invite readers to write their own. Here’s the one stipulation: it must involve drastic change. At this point, there’s simply no possible future that averts dislocation. The horrific fires this fall in California and Oregon, which were, in a manner of speaking, stoked by climate change, serve as a preview of the world to come.

As Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A. & M. University, recently put it, “If you don’t like all of the climate disasters happening in 2020, I have some bad news for you about the rest of your life.” Billions of people will have to dramatically change the way they live or the world will change dramatically or some combination of the two. My experience reporting on climate change, which now spans almost twenty years, has convinced me that the most extreme outcomes are, unfortunately, among the most likely.

As the warnings have grown more dire and the consequences of warming more obvious, emissions have only increased that much faster. Until the coronavirus hit, they were tracking the highest of the so-called pathways studied by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If this continues, the I.P.C.C. projects that, by the end of this century, global temperatures will have risen by almost eight degrees Fahrenheit. Let’s just say that at that point no amount of outdoor air-conditioning will be sufficient.

A few years ago, I interviewed James Hansen for a video project that I was working on. Hansen retired from NASA in 2013, but he has continued to speak out about climate change—and to get arrested protesting projects like the Keystone XL pipeline.

He was blunt about the world’s failure. When I asked him if he had a message for young people, he said, “The simple thing is I’m sorry we’re leaving such a fucking mess.”

Links
at No comments: