Lethal Heating: 11/02/20

02/11/2020

(USA) Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Is The Climate Leader We Need

Outside - Bonnie Tsui

The marine biologist has become as a leading voice in the movement by deftly communicating what few people understand: that cleaning up the planet requires a commitment to social justice

It’s amazing that Ayana Elizabeth Johnson found the time to talk to me. To cite just some of the things the 40-year-old Brooklynite has been up to in the past year: running a conservation consulting firm, Ocean Collectiv; founding a coastal-cities think tank, Urban Ocean Lab; advising Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign on the Blue New Deal, an ocean-focused strategy for reducing carbon emissions and boosting the economy; taking over Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Instagram account to guide a dialogue on environmental justice; editing an anthology of essays by women climate leaders; and launching a podcast with industry heavyweight Alex Blumberg ambitiously titled How to Save a Planet.

So, yes, she’s been busy. And with good reason. With her expertise, personal story, and collaborative grassroots approach to problem solving, Johnson has emerged as a uniquely powerful voice in the environmental movement. She is one of a small number of scientists who operates at the nexus of climate change and racial justice, and the only one who has been able to connect the dots between those issues in a way that might actually get us somewhere.

Plus, she’s a natural entertainer. “Ayana is genuinely funny,” says Blumberg, the cofounder of podcasting juggernaut Gimlet Media, which sold to Spotify last year for a reported $230 million. As cohosts of How to Save a Planet, they examine achievable solutions to climate change. A common question they ask guests: How screwed are we? (Spoiler: It depends. We have a choice of possible futures.) “She’s an actual subject-matter expert who’s charismatic and can crack a joke and think on her feet. That’s rare.”

When I spoke to Johnson during a gap in her schedule, she described a life and career journey that began when she was on a family vacation in Florida at age five, sitting on the back of a glass-bottom boat with other kids throwing cheese popcorn to the fish. She is allergic to dairy and was covered in hives by the time her mom pulled her into the boat’s cabin to rinse off. There she found herself alone staring down through the glass at the life below. “I had a private view of this underwater magical world,” she says. That was all it took: she fell in love with coral reefs.

Johnson’s father was an architect, her mother a public-school teacher, and she was a brainy kid who spent hours digging up worms in their Brooklyn backyard. She studied environmental science and public policy at Harvard University, then earned her Ph.D. at the University of California at San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In 2007, she began her graduate field work, in Curaçao and Bonaire, by redesigning fish traps to reduce bycatch and getting local officials to require their use. Her low-tech solution cut the capture of ornamental fish by some 80 percent and also convinced her that she “didn’t want to just write research papers that nobody was going to read, that wouldn’t result in any action.”

In that spirit, her dissertation on sustainably managed coral reefs was informed by interviews with hundreds of Caribbean fishermen and divers. The core of what she asked them: “If you could write the rules to manage fishing in the ocean, what would they be?” Their responses showed her the importance of engaging communities in the creation of policies that would alter their lives. “The hours I spent interrupting dominoes games and hanging out at the docks really changed the way I see the world,” Johnson says. She later applied that collaborative model in her work with the Waitt Institute, a nonprofit focused on restoring fish populations, where she cofounded and directed an initiative that supported the citizens of Barbuda as they crafted their own marine regulations. The result was one of the most progressive and comprehensive ocean management policies in the region.

“My love of nature and humanity drive my work. It’s not some abstract interest in policy or science.”

In 2016, Johnson moved back to Brooklyn to seek a career that would enable her to have the biggest impact in ocean conservation and climate change. She took on a series of freelance gigs: working with XPrize on a contest for the best use of ocean data, aiding Greenpeace on a coral-reef initiative, and authoring a report for the World Wildlife Fund on waste in the seafood supply chain. She was getting so many offers she couldn’t handle it all alone—and she didn’t want to. So she called up “a dozen of the coolest people I knew” and in 2017 formed Ocean Collectiv with the goal of supporting conservation groups “that are trying to do something differently—and in a way that is always really careful about the justice implications of the work.”

Returning to New York gave Johnson a new appreciation for the city’s shoreline and eventually spurred her to cofound the think tank Urban Ocean Lab with entrepreneur and designer Marquise Stillwell and veteran congressional policy advisor Jean Flemma. Their hope is to cultivate policies that help America’s coastal cities adapt to the threats of rising sea levels and more powerful storms. Johnson points out that the role the oceans play in climate change is often overlooked: when congressional Democrats released the Green New Deal, the oceans were barely mentioned. This prompted her to coauthor an op-ed for the environmental outlet Grist calling out the “big blue gap” in the plan, and that led to her being tapped to work with Warren’s campaign.

Even after the COVID-19 pandemic began, Johnson was a swirl of activity. Then came George Floyd’s death and the country’s explosive response. Suddenly she wasn’t able to get anything done, a fact that she expressed in a passionate op-ed for The Washington Post that sharply identified the intersection of environmentalism and racism: “How can we expect Black Americans to focus on climate when we are so at risk on our streets, in our communities, and even within our own homes?”

“I wrote that out of fury and grief,” she told me. “To say, ‘White environmentalists, I know you just want to ignore racism because our environmental challenges are already massive. And I, too, wish we could ignore it, but I am proof that you can’t ignore it and still get this work done.’ ”

The piece elevated Johnson to a new level of intellectual leadership in the environmental movement. There was perhaps no one who better understood what needed to be explained—or who was more capable of doing the explaining. On that same family vacation where she gazed in wonder at a coral reef, her father taught her to swim in a hotel pool. It was a joyous trip, but decades later her parents let her know that it had been tainted by racism. “My dad’s Black and my mom’s white,” Johnson says. “When my dad showed up, none of the white people would get in the pool.”

For Johnson, the environmental and civil rights movements are linked by a shared moral clarity and a relentless effort to make things better. “When I was five, I wanted to be a marine biologist,” she says. “And then at ten I wanted to be the lawyer who got the next Martin Luther King out of jail.”

She’s bringing that same urgency to How to Save a Planet, which launched on August 20. She and Blumberg have an odd-couple-like dynamic, which may well help them in their bid to produce “the podcast about climate change that people actually want to listen to,” Johnson says with a laugh. The anthology she coedited, All We Can Save ($29; One World), offers another unexpected approach to climate activism. The contributors include scientists, lawyers, and think-tank policy experts, but also farmers, artists, designers, and poets.

“My love of nature and humanity drive my work,” Johnson says. “It’s not some abstract interest in policy or science—those are tools for understanding the world and shaping it into something that is verdant and fair.”

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Net-Zero Carbon Emissions Won’t Be Sustainable If Social Inequalities Aren’t Addressed

The Conversation - Simone Abram | Tom Pegram

Willy Barton/Shutterstock

Authors

Simone Abram is Professor, Department of Anthropology and Co-Director of Durham Energy Institute, Durham University

Tom Pegram is Associate Professor in Global Governance and Deputy Director of the Global Governance Institute, University College London

With COP26, the UN’s climate change conference, on the horizon next year in Glasgow, all eyes are on securing the decarbonisation of the global economy. What this will mean and how it will be achieved will be hotly debated before, during and after the conference.

Thanks to COVID-19, the world has experienced an extraordinary simulation of what abrupt decarbonisation might look like. At least in relation to transport, lockdown has revealed the enormous improvements in air quality and wildlife habitats, which result from curtailing fossil-fuelled transport.

But, at the same time, hastily implemented lockdown measures, including enforced confinement, have worsened inequalities that affect quality of life, access to food, education, work and mental health.

Growing public protests against pandemic restrictions, including road closures to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists, have also mirrored the febrile and often polarising public debate around carbon-mitigation policies.

While evidence indicates that some of these anti-lockdown protests are funded by shadowy conservative groups also pushing climate denial, other protests have been driven by legitimate grievances. Both highlight the importance of designing policies that are equitable and improve people’s lives – as well as explaining those policies to citizens.

Global and local inequalities

These recent events underscore how any transition to a net-zero society must take into account social conditions. Measures that worsen social inequalities and injustices are intolerable, causing serious harm, and are likely to provoke significant popular resistance – ultimately jeopardising any sustained climate action.

COP discussions have rightly focused on the difficult task of striking the right balance of duties between countries, especially between wealthy countries and emerging economies that did not benefit from the era of unrestricted industrialisation. But it is important to remember that the effects of climate change and mitigation are also unequal within countries. Intersecting differences, such as those related to gender, ethnicity, class, age, ability and more, affect the impact of policy interventions, as we have seen throughout the pandemic.

In the UK, research shows that those who lack access to affordable energy (living in poorly insulated housing, for example) are also more likely to live in areas with worse air pollution from traffic and industry.

In our COP26 briefing paper Just Transition: Pathways to Socially Inclusive Decarbonisation, we flag the important social justice concerns that a transition to a post-carbon economy must address.

Seven key messages

The transition to net-zero will not be sustainable or credible if it creates or worsens social inequalities. A social justice approach can facilitate the transition globally.
Costs and benefits of climate policies and the ability to shape such policy is not extended equally to those who suffer the greatest costs. Inclusion is vital to ensure that policy is socially equitable.
Job creation does not guarantee just outcomes. It must take into account what jobs are created, how secure they are, who has access to them and the skills and education required.
Just transitions will look very different in developing countries. They will need additional support to develop, plan and implement the necessary policies.
A backlash is likely if the transition is not perceived to be just. Policymakers need to encourage widespread public debate and involvement to ensure that everyone gets on board.
A range of policy tools exist to address just transition concerns. These include taking a holistic approach to policies; addressing social and environmental aspects of economic policy; making sure that interventions are adapted to local contexts and are responsive to change; building democratic engagement platforms, such as citizen assemblies; and open and transparent communication on the political and ethical choices involved in decarbonisation.
Governments should also incorporate just transition provisions into their nationally determined contributions (national targets to meeting the Paris Agreement goals) and include opportunities to review progress and learn from one another.

Key investors are now beginning to move out of fossil fuels, which sends an important message about reducing carbon emissions. Igor Hotinsky/Shutterstock

What needs to be done

Without a robust bedrock of public support, radical measures will prove difficult to implement. The early part of lockdown showed that collective responsibility is possible, and that solidarity can be generated as long as it is not undermined by those in charge.

Shoring up badly eroded trust in public authority at local, national and global levels is vital. Basic democratic principles suggest that including a range of voices in making policy means more diverse concerns are reflected.

Besides individuals making changes, it’s clear that business and investors have a key role to play in achieving net zero. Although painfully slow, there are signs that fossil fuel companies are changing their strategies. Key investors are beginning to move out of fossil fuels following a sea change among high-profile industry leaders such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Brunel pension fund, which both withdrew investments in fossil fuels.

There is a long way to go. But changes in the way that energy futures (financial instruments in which the underlying asset is based on energy products such as oil, natural gas, and electricity) are defined – according to speed of transformation to net zero rather than by rate of economic growth – show that major industrial narratives are changing.

It will also be vital that businesses account for their potential impact on social inclusion and inequalities, an agenda which is gaining ground in the influential voluntary environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards.

We know that only unprecedented levels of collective action will be enough to limit global warming to 2°C. Decarbonisation of the economy is daunting but essential. Emphasis on a fair transition to net-zero could rally public support for the dramatic changes to come, promote social solidarity and mobilise communities to take action.

As our COP briefing details, there already exists a broad set of policy tools and strategies to move us quickly in the direction of an integrated, whole-economy approach to an inclusive, just transition. Policymakers must prioritise measures that promote social and environmental justice, strengthening the political trust on which achieving our net-zero goal depends.

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On Climate Change, We’re Entirely Out Of Margin

The New Yorker - Bill McKibben

The U.S. government and the world have done far too little on climate change, and so now we must move far faster than is comfortable or convenient. Photograph by Manan Vatsyayana / AFP / Getty

Author

Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker's newsletter on the environment.

In 1959, when humans began measuring the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, there was still some margin.

That first instrument, set up on the side of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, showed that the air contained about three hundred and fifteen parts per million of CO₂, up from two hundred and eighty p.p.m. before the Industrial Revolution. Worrisome, but not yet critical.

In 1988, when the NASA scientist James Hansen first alerted the public to the climate crisis, that number had grown to three hundred and fifty p.p.m., which we’ve since learned is about the upper safe limit. Even then, though, we had a little margin, at least of time: the full effects of the heating had not yet begun to manifest in ways that altered our lives. If we’d acted swiftly, we could have limited the damage dramatically.

We didn’t, of course, and we have poured more carbon into the atmosphere since 1988 than in all the years before. The atmospheric concentration of CO₂ has topped four hundred and fifteen p.p.m.—that’s much too high, something that we know from a thousand indicators. Last week came the news that the Arctic is stubbornly refusing to refreeze at its normal rate as the long northern night descends. The second biggest fire in Colorado history has closed Rocky Mountain National Park. California is white-knuckling its way through yet another siege of high winds in a record fire season that refuses to end. Tropical Storm Zeta formed in the Gulf of Mexico—and the next big storm will take us deeper into the Greek alphabet than we’ve ever gone before. And that’s just in the one per cent of the planet’s surface that’s covered by the continental United States.

It’s a lot worse in a lot of other places, because they lack the money that keeps us fairly resilient. In Vietnam this week, rainfall described as “extraordinarily out of the normal”—so heavy that “it far exceeded the government’s midrange predictions of how climate change might increase precipitation in central Vietnam by the end of this century”—has left more than a hundred people dead. “Everywhere we look, homes, roads, and infrastructure have been submerged,” the head of Vietnam’s Red Cross said.

We are out of space in the atmosphere, and we are out of time on the clock. The U.S. government, and the world, have done far too little on climate change, and so now we must move far faster than is comfortable or convenient. Plenty of pundits treated it as a “gaffe” when, in the last Presidential debate, Joe Biden said that we would need to “transition” away from oil. But that’s not a gaffe; it’s just the mildest sort of truth-telling. Because we’ve wasted so much time, that transition has to be sharp, and it has to be global. We are capable of doing it—the rapid fall in the price of renewable energy means that, if we wanted to go all out, we could make rapid progress. But this is not an offer that will last forever; indeed, it won’t last four more years.

In the famous story of the king who offered a reward to one of his advisers, the man asked for a single grain of wheat on the first square of a chessboard, and two on the next square, and four on the next, and, by the last doubling, he was due more wheat than would ever be grown on the planet. The climate is not changing exponentially—the accelerating linear growth in heating is bad enough—but the principle is the same. Long before you expect it, you run out of room.

The entire climate debate has unfurled in real, living time—I was born the year after that first monitor went up on Mauna Loa. We think we always have time and space to change, but in this case we do not. If November 3rd doesn’t mark the start of a mighty effort at transformation, subsequent November Tuesdays will be less important, not more—our leverage will shrink, our chance at really affecting the outcome will diminish. This is it. Climate change “is the No. 1 issue facing humanity, and it’s the No. 1 issue for me,” Biden said in an interview on Saturday. With luck, we’ll get a chance to find out if the second half of that statement is true. The first half is already clear.

Passing the Mic

Moira Birss, with whom I’ve worked on many fights (and who just wrote a fascinating piece about one of her relatives, the Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett), is the climate and finance director at the N.G.O. Amazon Watch. She has dedicated her career to human-rights and climate-justice advocacy, with a focus on supporting social movements in Latin America.

We see satellite pictures of smoke over the Amazon. What’s actually going on down on the ground to set these fires in motion?

The Amazon burning season has, unfortunately, become an annual phenomenon now greatly exacerbated by the policies of the current Brazilian President. Loggers and land grabbers work in tandem to plunder ancient trees; then they torch vast forests for the benefit of a handful of powerful agribusiness interests. The number of Amazon fires set in 2020 has already exceeded those set last year, and, while 2019’s notorious blazes mostly burned previously deforested areas, 2020’s fires are encroaching on primary forests.

The flames threatening the Amazon are as political and financial as they are physical. Since taking power, the Bolsonaro regime has worked to erase a generation of socio-environmental protections by slashing budgets, gutting institutions, and openly targeting communities that defend the rain forest. Violence, land invasions, arson, and illegal logging and mining have spiked on indigenous lands and other protected forests, driven by mafias whose actions are explicitly encouraged by Bolsonaro.

The rationale that underpins this behavior is that global consumers and investors will buy the Amazon’s conflict commodities no matter what.

How are corporations like Cargill, or asset managers like BlackRock, tied in to Amazon destruction?

Typically, cattle ranches operate for a few years after the forest is cleared by fire, then soy producers move in. Sometimes soy is the first product grown; a Brazilian study showed that soy-silo facilities of major U.S.-based commodity traders Cargill and Bunge overlapped with the epicenters of the 2019 fires.

Amazon destruction is not just an issue of forest loss but is inextricably linked to indigenous-rights abuses. Our new report documents how Cargill appears to have purchased soy from producers occupying a traditional indigenous territory in the Brazilian Amazon for which the indigenous community has tried to secure a land title.

BlackRock is the world’s largest money manager and, as such, holds shares in almost every publicly traded company in the world, including agribusiness companies operating in the Amazon. Despite paying lip service to the importance of environmental sustainability, BlackRock continues to be a major financier of climate-destroying industries around the world; the Amazon is no exception. Recent reports from Amazon Watch show it’s a top investor in companies linked to deforestation, fossil-fuel production, and indigenous-rights abuses in the Amazon rain forest.

Do their execs know what’s happening? Can they be shamed into stopping?

At Amazon Watch, we’re making sure the execs know what’s happening, both by communicating directly with leadership at these firms and by collaborating with other organizations and alliances to hold them accountable.

And it’s beginning to work! Already, we’ve seen dozens of financial firms (albeit not yet behemoths like BlackRock) threaten to withdraw investments from agribusiness companies if deforestation continues, and companies like the beef producer J.B.S. make new (albeit not strong enough) commitments to clean up supply chains.

We’ve also seen the behemoths start to shift, though still in insufficient ways. That’s why Amazon Watch and our partners in the BlackRock’s Big Problem campaign and the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition have been turning up the heat on BlackRock all year, and we’re starting to see results. In mid-October, BlackRock reversed a decade-long pattern of voting against climate-friendly shareholder resolutions by insisting that Procter & Gamble step up transparency efforts to address deforestation and forest degradation in its supply chains. This comes after sustained public pressure from activists across the world, and shows that we can shame them into stopping.

Climate School

For academics: a big new drive is under way to convince the pension giant T.I.A.A. to divest from fossil fuels. Why would one fund one’s retirement by investing in companies that guarantee that there won’t be a planet worth retiring on?

I know that I’ve recommended more podcasts than one person can actually listen to, but: Debra Rienstra, a creative-writing and English professor at Michigan’s Calvin College, hosts “Refugia,” which explores the overlaps between Christianity and traditions ranging from indigenous spirituality to conservation biology—and looks for quiet spots where creatures, people included, might find some peace of mind.

Few members of the U.S. Senate have been more forthright in addressing the climate crisis than Oregon’s Jeff Merkley. Last week, he introduced two new bills that would stop banks from investing in new fossil-fuel infrastructure and that would use America’s powerful position in international financial institutions, such as the I.M.F., to insure that they did likewise. “Fossil-fuel investments play a key role in accelerating climate chaos,” Merkley said, in a statement. “It’s time to prioritize the interests of the American people and the planet above the wishes of fossil-fuel C.E.O.s who want to hold our economy hostage.”

Speaking of senators, the writer Kate Aronoff asks a very straightforward question: Why does Amazon set up a huge climate fund and then donate lots of money to the very politicians who will do what they can to make sure progress never happens?

An important piece in the Boston Globe, by the Oxford physics professor Raymond Pierrehumbert, explains why “geoengineering” the planet to reduce its heat—probably by pumping yet more chemicals into the atmosphere—is a lousy idea. “The real showstopper is that the carbon dioxide released by fossil fuel burning—the chief cause of the climate crisis—persists in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” he writes. “In contrast, the particles created by solar climate interventions fall out of the sky after just a year or so.”

The Trump campaign is not alone in figuring out how to use Facebook as a tool for spreading disinformation. Christine MacDonald, writing in In These Times, shows that ExxonMobil has “spent more than any other major corporation on ‘social issues, elections, or politics’ Facebook ads.” She details a particularly repugnant campaign to keep oil drilling alive in Santa Barbara, California, the site of the nineteen-sixties oil spill that helped inspire the first Earth Day.

From Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, one of the country’s leading Muslim environmental activists, a five-point plan for fighting climate change. Point 3: “save what’s left in the natural world.” Along those lines, Team Biden last week reiterated plans to conserve thirty per cent of America’s lands and waters by 2030, and Daniel Munczek Edelman, of Next100, explored the possibility for a climate equivalent of the thirties-era Civilian Conservation Corps.

It would feature “a one- to two-year commitment, meaning that a Corps would be best positioned to deliver on short-term projects that don’t require significant upfront training. These might include native grassland and coastal ecosystem restoration; removal of invasive species and restoration of native species; improving wildlife corridors; building hiking trails and other recreational wilderness amenities; irrigation system repair; disaster preparedness work.”

Noam Chomsky, at the age of ninety-one, is reminding people to vote, and not for third parties. He points out that even a Trump Administration environmental assessment says that the world is heading for a four-degree Celsius rise in temperature. “What is that? Total cataclysm. No one can even estimate the effects. Organized human life as we know it will be over.”

Check out these entries for the Royal Meteorological Society’s 2020 weather photograph of the year. A gorgeous planet, now in violent flux.

Scoreboard

Everything’s relative. The usual response to plans like the Green New Deal is “too expensive,” but a new paper in Science shows that the amount of money that nations have spent to deal with this year’s crisis—COVID-19—dwarfs the amount they’d have to spend to start dealing with this millennium’s crisis of global heating.

A new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis makes clear that financial institutions are accelerating their exit from fossil fuels: banks that were only willing to speak out against coal a few years ago are now taking pledges on tar sands and Arctic oil.

Warming Up

Youth Vs. Apocalypse is a Bay Area group of young climate activists who, among many other things, were momentarily the target of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s ire in 2019, when she told them, “You didn’t vote for me.” They’ve now released a truly bumping music video that will get you up on your feet, at which point you should, before sitting down, make sure that you’ve voted.

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