21/01/2021

(USA) Fighting Climate Change Could Define Kamala Harris’ Vice Presidency. Watch Our Interview With Her.

Mother Jones - 

In an exclusive 2019 chat with Climate Desk, Harris laid out her plans.

MSNBC, Zuma

Kamala Harris represents a series of historic firsts—she will be the first woman vice president, the first Black vice president, and the first Asian American vice president.

She’ll also be the first-ever vice president who has devised a comprehensive plan to address climate change—and as the tie-breaking vote in the evenly split Senate, she’ll have plenty of opportunity to fight for the environment. 

Harris’ home state of California has been hammered by longer wildfire seasons, blackouts from extreme heat, and drought.

Harris doesn’t shy away from connecting these events to manmade climate change. When I sat down with her in Dubuque, Iowa, a year before she joined the presidential ticket, she was still in the midst of her own presidential campaign.

“For me this issue of the climate crisis relates to every aspect of what we do,” she said.

Her remarks to me in October 2019 captured some of the themes that are starting to define the Biden administration’s all-hands-on-deck approach to the climate crisis: It’s not something the Environmental Protection Agency can address alone. “Every branch has a role in this responsibility.” 

Harris’ climate plan didn’t get much attention during her presidential run, but it was impressive: Her vision of the Green New Deal included a staggering economic investment in clean energy and infrastructure.

She spoke about the importance of including low-income and communities of color in the fight against pollution and climate change; her Climate Equity Act, introduced first in 2019 with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in 2019, requires that any environmental legislation receive an equity score to assess its impact on frontline communities.

Another theme from my interview with Harris was her insistence that the Department of Justice should investigate and rein in manipulative oil and gas industry practices.

Her actual record on that is more mixed: As California attorney general, Harris led an investigation into whether ExxonMobil misled consumers about climate change, but she did not go as far as to issue subpoenas.

And although she has at times embellished her history of suing and winning against Big Oil, she has spoken forcefully about holding polluters accountable.

“Let’s get them not only in the pocket book, but let’s make sure there are serious penalties for their behaviors,” she said.

That means taking aim at the “whole apparatus built around them” that’s built to protect the dominance of fossil fuels. And, she emphasized, that may not just mean the major oil companies, but other players, like gas-reliant utilities.

“I think everyone who is part of misinforming the public, misleading the public and false advertising should be held accountable,” she said.


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(AU) Lessons From The Past

Cosmos - 

Could Indigenous wisdom help us create a “good Anthropocene”?

Warlpiri people burning spinifex to promote new growth; Tanami Desert, Northern Territory, Australia. Credit: Auscape/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Author
Natalie Parletta is a freelance science writer based in Adelaide and an adjunct senior research fellow with the University of South Australia.
The Anthropocene marks relentless and increasingly grave environmental degradation as the Earth faces tipping points for climate change, biodiversity and survival. To address these ills, scientists say we can learn valuable lessons from the past.

“As our planet emerges into a new epoch in which humans dominate the Earth system, it is imperative that societies initiate a new phase of responsible environmental stewardship,” researchers write in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“Maintenance of the Earth’s current ecological trajectory threatens not only countless other species but also critical ecosystem services that support human societies.

“Here we argue that information from the past has a valuable role to play in enhancing the sustainability and resilience of our societies.”

As well as learning from past mistakes, Nicole Boivin and Alison Crowther, both affiliated with Germany’s Max Planck Institute and the University of Queensland, stress how historical success stories can be integrated with contemporary solutions.

In doing this, they say that archaeology, history and palaeoecology offer a vast resource that we should tap into to build on efforts to create a better future and a “good Anthropocene”.

“We have at our fingertips a huge amount of information about how humans in the past have tried to solve many of the same problems we face today,” says Crowther. “Many of these solutions have been tried and tested over millennia; we know which ones worked and which ones failed, and why.”

The review explores how historical data can be mined to improve biodiversity, conservation, fire management, carbon sequestration, soil sustainability, food security and agricultural sustainability, as well as mitigating pollution, building more sustainable cities and boosting resilience to climate change.

For conservation, archaeology and palaeoecology offer insights into ecological baselines to understand how change occurred naturally before humans plundered onto the scene. 

“Work in restoration ecology requires understanding of the degree of change that has occurred from baseline conditions, the natural, climate-driven shape of ecosystems prior to human intervention,” write Boivin and Crowther.

In some instances, they note, past human activity added value to the planet, such as Canada’s Garry oak ecosystem, the formation of which has been attributed to indigenous peoples’ burning regime.

“Accordingly, conservationists are increasingly embracing novel ecosystems and recognising that ecosystems created via long-term human management are equally valid targets for conservation.”

Archaeology also tells us about past removal of species and successes or failures of efforts to reintroduce them, which can help us understand those species’ ranges and endemic status.

In Australia and elsewhere, Indigenous and prehistoric fire-management practices are increasingly recognised by forest and land managers as effective ways to create fire-resilient communities and ecosystems – a burning issue with looming threats of longer, hotter dry spells and more intense fires.

Agricultural practices also pose a major problem as “humans today control a vast and disproportionate share of the planet’s resources,” contributing to climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss and groundwater depletion.

Modern agriculture destroys forests and ecosystems and humans’ unbridled population growth threatens food security. For this we can again turn to indigenous cultures for insights.

Some of their practices include sustainable irrigation, terracing and systems such as raised-field agriculture. The latter, once used across South and Central America before the Spanish came along, has been attributed to better drainage, soil aeration, moisture retention and fertility.

Already, people have tried to rehabilitate prehistoric agricultural methods, for example in the Peruvian Andes where pre-Hispanic terraces have been reintroduced. Many lessons can be learned from these efforts, note Boivin and Crowther, such as the importance of engaging local communities and observing markets.

Other insights come from the eastern Amazon up to 4500 years ago, such as complex agroforest practices – rather than modern unsustainable monocrops – that grew multiple crops while creating edible forests.

Archaeology can also help explore ancient resilient crops such as millet, a heat-tolerant cereal that colonists replaced with thirsty, labour-intensive maize. 

“By reviving local crops and other forms of local agriculture we can better address the food crises that we face globally with population growth and climate change,” says Crowther.

All of this relies on healthy soil, she and Boivin note. “Soil lies at the base of all human subsistence systems,” they write, “and soil retention and improvement were key foci of human activity in many regions of the world for thousands of years.”

Historically, humans created soils that were rich in organic matter, had better capacity to hold nutrients and moisture and were “remarkable” at sequestering carbon. Soil enrichment methods included adding algae to Maya gardens in Mesoamerica, and seaweed to topsoils surrounding the Baltic Sea, in Europe. African savannah soils were unintentionally enriched by prehistoric animal droppings.

We can also learn from past patterns of air pollution, a major health hazard that confronts us and reportedly impacted historical populations; how levels are estimated and how it accumulates and breaks down, for instance.

Ancient tropical cities in places such as Mesoamerica, Southeast Asia and the Amazon offer insights for sustainable cities. In Maya culture, for instance, households and domestic gardens were interspersed with agriculture in the city itself. 

“These proximate food staple sources probably contributed to the longevity of many Maya cities,” write Boivin and Crowther.

Another example of urban agriculture they note is Byzantine Constantinople, which sustained people even during prolonged sieges.

“These early dispersed agrarian cities offer more sustainable, food-secure models of urbanism that are less dependent on fossil fuel and more resilient to food-supply shocks resulting from, for example, pandemics, conflict or climate change.”

Such cities also featured cultivation by smallholders, empowering local communities to control their activities and foster food security. Importantly, they included impressive water-conservation technologies.

Last but certainly not least, the researchers say we can learn from the past to build greater climate-change resilience, a topic that has long captivated archaeologists who seek to understand past human responses to climate changes. Peruvian archaeology, for instance, offers a window into El Niño patterns.

The authors urge that archaeology, in particular, be embraced by and take part in multi-disciplinary efforts to address modern challenges, as well as engaging with policy makers, Indigenous peoples and other stakeholders such as farmers, conservationists, rangers and local communities.

“We must work towards solutions that bring together the best of the past, present and future, integrating traditional and modern approaches to find the best way forward.”

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The New Climate War Review: Reasons To Be Optimistic About The Future

New Scientist - Richard Schiffman

The forces fighting climate science have not been defeated, just changed tactics. But Michael Mann, a key figure in the fightback, argues for hope in his new book

A wind, solar and fishing base in Dongtai, Jiangsu province in China. Alex Plavevski/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

MOST people accept that climate change is happening, but that doesn’t mean the war against climate science is over. The denialists have just changed their tactics, argues Michael Mann in his book The New Climate War.

Mann should know. A climatologist at Penn State University, he has been a target since his “hockey stick” graph was published in 1999. The graph shows the rapid rise in temperature globally since industrialisation caused heat-trapping carbon dioxide to spew into the atmosphere.

This dramatic visual, featured in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, earned Mann decades of harassment and death threats. This was part of a war against climate research that has been waged since the 1970s, first to cover up and then to contest the growing evidence that shows our planet is warming.

However, as data about rising sea levels, higher temperatures and megafires mounted, the climate sceptics shifted to “a kinder, gentler form of denialism”, says Mann. They now mostly concede that, yes, there is some warming and human activity plays some role, but it’s not nearly as bad as those “alarmist” scientists say.

This new effort (bankrolled by the same polluting interests that funded the old one) no longer disputes climate change, but tries to block the action needed to move towards a low-carbon future. It is being fought by the successors to climate change denialists, who Mann calls the “inactivists”. They lobby against effective carbon pricing programmes and subsidies for renewable energy that would imperil big energy’s bottom lines.

According to Mann, central to this strategy is a campaign to shift culpability for climate change from the corporations selling fossil fuels to those who use them. Fossil fuel companies aren’t to blame, “it’s the way people are living their lives”, Chevron argued in court in 2018.

“Doomism and the loss of hope can lead people down the very same path of inaction as outright denial”

Some environmentalists have bought into this argument. While Mann agrees it is good to eat less meat, travel less and recycle more, such actions alone aren’t enough. We need to decarbonise the economy, he says. Focusing on personal responsibility takes our eyes off that prize.

Another thing inactivists do, Mann says, is to support divisive films like Michael Moore’s recent documentary Planet of the Humans that purported to show that renewable energy is ineffective and polluting.

The film was condemned by environmental activists and climate scientists. But the pro-fossil fuel American Energy Alliance spent thousands to promote a film it hoped would take the wind out of the sails of the push for clean energy.

“Doomism and the loss of hope,” writes Mann “can lead people down the very same path of inaction as outright denial. And Michael Moore plays right into it.” Despair is counterproductive.

Fossil fuel interests also cynically push “non-solution solutions” like natural gas, carbon capture and geoengineering, whose inadequacies Mann details. Again, the effort is to distract from the real task of weaning the world off fossil fuels.

But in the end, Mann says he is optimistic, heartened by the upswell of youth activism and the rapid development of green technologies. Even investors are beginning to flee from fossil fuels. Moreover, botched responses to covid-19 underline the peril of ignoring science and failing to act.

With the major COP26 UN climate summit due to be held later this year in Glasgow, UK, Mann’s call to get serious about climate change couldn’t be more timely. Let’s hope he is right that the tide is finally about to turn.

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