23/02/2021

(USA) Texas Freeze Shows A Chilling Truth – How The Rich Use Climate Change To Divide Us

The Guardian - 

The Lone Star State is aptly named. If you’re not part of the Republican oil elite with Cruz and Abbott, you’re on your own

Ted Cruz sports a Texas flag face mask – at Cancún airport in Mexico. Photograph: Dan Christian Rojas/AP
Author
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now.
Texas has long represented a wild west individualism that elevates personal freedom – this week, the freedom to freeze – above all else.

The state’s prevailing social Darwinism was expressed most succinctly by the mayor of Colorado City, who accused his constituents – trapped in near sub-zero temperatures and complaining about lack of heat, electricity and drinkable water – of being the “lazy” products of a “socialist government”, adding “I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!” and predicting “only the strong will survive and the weak will perish”.

Texas has the third-highest number of billionaires in America, most of them oil tycoons.

Last week, the laissez-faire state energy market delivered a bonanza to oil and gas producers that managed to keep production going during the freeze. It was “like hitting the jackpot”, boasted the president of Comstock Resources on an earnings call. Jerry Jones, billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, holds a majority of Comstock’s shares.

But most other Texans were marooned. Some did perish.
The white working class has been seduced by conservative Republicans and Trump cultists, of which Texas has an abundance
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the flow of electric power, exempted affluent downtowns from outages, leaving thriving parts of Austin, Dallas and Houston brightly lit while pushing less affluent precincts into the dark and cold.

Like the poor across America and much of the world, poor Texans are getting hammered by climate change. Many inhabit substandard homes, lacking proper insulation. The very poor occupy trailers or tents, or camp out in their cars. Lower-income communities are located close to refineries and other industrial sites that release added pollutants when they shut or restart.

In Texas, for-profit energy companies have no incentive to prepare for extreme weather or maintain spare capacity. Even if they’re able to handle surges in demand, prices go through the roof and poorer households are hit hard. If they can’t pay, they’re cut off.

Rich Texans take spikes in energy prices in their stride. If the electric grid goes down, private generators kick in. In a pinch – as last week – they check into hotels or leave town.

On Wednesday night, as millions of his constituents remained without power and heat, Senator Ted Cruz flew to Cancún, Mexico for a family vacation. Their Houston home was “FREEZING” – as his wife put it.

Climate change, Covid-19 and jobs are together splitting Americans by class more profoundly than Americans are split by politics. The white working class is taking as much of a beating as most Black and Latino people.

Yet the white working class has been seduced by conservative Republicans and Trump cultists, of which Texas has an abundance, into believing that what’s good for Black and Latino people is bad for them, and that whites are, or should be, on the winning side of the social Darwinian contest.

White grievance helps keep Republicans in power, protecting their rich patrons from a majority that might otherwise join to demand what they need – such as heat, electricity, water and reliable sources of power.

Lower-income Texans, white as well as Black and Latino, are taking it on the chin in many other ways. Texas is one of the few states that hasn’t expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving the share of Texans without health insurance twice the national average, the largest uninsured population of any state.

Texas has double the national average of children in poverty and a higher rate of unemployment than the nation’s average.

And although Texans have suffered multiple natural disasters stemming from climate change, Texas Republicans are dead set against a Green New Deal that would help reduce the horrific impacts.

Last Wednesday, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, went on Fox News to proclaim, absurdly, that what happened to his state “shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States”. Abbott blamed the power failure on the fact that “wind and solar got shut down”.

Rubbish. The loss of power from frozen coal-fired and natural gas plants was six times larger than the dent caused by frozen wind turbines. Texans froze because deregulation and a profit-driven free market created an electric grid utterly unprepared for climate change.

In Texas, oil tycoons are the only winners from climate change. Everyone else is losing badly. Adapting to extreme weather is necessary but it’s no substitute for cutting emissions, which Texas is loath to do. Not even the Lone Star state should protect the freedom to freeze.

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Psychology Today: The Causes Of Climate Change

Psychology Today - Ilan Kelman

Human-caused climate change is not our main challenge: It is certain values. 

Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. More sustainable transport on water and land, with many advantages beyond tackling climate change. Photo: Ilan Kelman

Author
Ilan Kelman, Ph.D., is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England and a Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway.
We are told that 2030 is a significant year for global sustainability targets.

What could we really achieve comprehensively from now until then, especially with climate change dominating so many discussions and proposals?

Several United Nations agreements use 2030 for their timeframe, including the Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Paris Agreement for tackling human-caused climate change, and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development.

Aside from the oddity of having separate agreements with separate approaches from separate agencies to achieve similar goals, climate change is often explicitly separated as a topic. Yet it brings little that is new to the overall and fundamental challenges causing our sustainability troubles.

Consider what would happen if tomorrow we magically reached exactly zero greenhouse gas emissions. Overfishing would continue unabated through what is termed illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, often in protected areas such as Antarctic waters. Demands from faraway markets would still devastate nearshore marine habitats and undermine local practices serving local needs.

Deforestation would also continue. Examples are illegal logging in protected areas of Borneo and slashing-and-burning through the Amazon’s rainforest, often to plant products for supermarket shelves appealing to affluent populations. Environmental exploitation and ruination did not begin with, and is not confined to, climate change.

A similar ethos persists for human exploitation. No matter how awful the harm, human trafficking, organ harvesting, child marriage, child labour, female genital mutilation, and arms deals would not end with greenhouse gas emissions.

If we solved human-caused climate change, then humanity—or, more to the point, certain sectors of humanity—would nonetheless display horrible results in wrecking people and ecosystems. It comes from a value favouring immediate exploitation of any resource without worrying about long-term costs. It sits alongside the value of choosing to live out of balance with the natural environment from local to global scales.

These are exactly the same values causing the climate to change quickly and substantively due to human activity. In effect, it is about using fossil fuels as a resource as rapidly as possible, irrespective of the negative social and environmental consequences.

Changing these values represents the fundamental challenge. Doing so ties together all the international efforts and agreements.

The natural environment, though, does not exist in isolation from us. Human beings have never been separate from nature, even when we try our best to divorce society from the natural environments around us. Our problematic values are epitomised by seeing nature as being at our service, different or apart from humanity.

Human-caused climate change is one symptom among many of such unsustainable and destructive values. Referring to the "climate crisis" or "climate emergency" is misguided since similar crises and emergencies manifest for similar reasons, including overfishing, deforestation, human exploitation, and an industry selling killing devices.

The real crisis and the real emergency are certain values. These values lead to behaviour and actions which are the antithesis of what the entire 2030 agenda aims to achieve. We do a disservice to ourselves and our place in the environment by focusing on a single symptom, such as human-caused climate change.

Revisiting our values entails seeking fundaments for what we seek for 2030—and, more importantly, beyond. One of our biggest losses is in caring: caring for ourselves and for people and environments. Dominant values promote inward-looking, short-term thinking for action yielding immediate, superficial, and short-lived gains.

We ought to pivot sectors with these values toward caring about the long-term future, caring for people, caring for nature, and especially caring for ourselves—all of us—within and connected to nature. A caring pathway to 2030 is helpful, although we also need an agenda mapping out a millennium (and more) beyond this arbitrary year.

Rather than using "social capital" and "natural capital" to define people and the environment, and rather than treating our skills and efforts as commodities, our values must reflect humanity, caring, integration with nature, and many other underpinning aspects.

When we fail to do so, human-caused climate change demonstrates what manifests, but it is only a single example from many. Placing climate change on a pedestal as the dominant or most important topic distracts from the depth and breadth required to identify problematic values and then morph them into constructive ones.

Focusing on the values that cause climate change and all the other ills is a baseline for reaching and maintaining sustainability. Then, we would not only solve human-caused climate change and achieve the 2030 agenda, but we would also address so much more for so much longer.

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(AU) Procrasti-nation: How Australia’s Government Is Filibustering The Climate Emergency

Crikey - 

By using a whole lot of words to avoid taking action, the government is slyly putting off doing anything meaningful about the climate emergency.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

Author
Christopher Warren is an Australian journalist and writer. He was federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance until April 2015, and is a past president of the International Federation of Journalists.
When it comes to global warming, the Australian media has, once again, fallen into the role of Charlie Brown to Scott Morrison’s Lucy at football practice.

 You know the popular gag: “Trust me,” says Lucy, before pulling the ball away at the last moment.

This time, Morrison’s Lucy schtick came with his tippy-toes sideways shuffle of the Paris-mandated zero net emissions goal from “some time this century” to “preferably by 2050” — a U-turn of historic proportions apparently, right up until all meaning was pulled away in the face of backbench resistance.

Within a week, the moment was lost as the government leapt at the opportunity to huff over national sovereignty in response to threats of carbon tariffs on Australian exports. (Australia is “dead against” them, according to Energy Minister Angus Taylor, as though that matters to the world. Well done, Angus.)

It’s a trap the media seems willing to fall into — because the alternative is so much worse. News Corp’s resident denialists aside, journalists are not blind to the threat of climate change. Aligning with a journalistic sense of objectivity, they “accept the science” and the policy demands to “do something” that flow from that acceptance.

The thought that Australia’s leaders, from the prime minister down, may not grasp that imperative (or, worse, just may not care) is existentially terrifying. The more journalists understand about the issue (and the best of them understand a lot) the more terrifying it becomes.

Reporting about global warming policy becomes a continuous head-jerking from excitement to disillusion (tracked over a quarter century through Marion Wilkinson’s The Carbon Club).

It makes the idea of #scottyfrommarketing work in Morrison’s favour. After all, if he’s all marketing all the time, surely he’ll pivot sooner or later to the eminently marketable action on climate change?

Yet maybe the media would be better applying the Maya Angelou heuristic: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

When was Morrison’s first time? Perhaps when as treasurer in 2017 he shocked public debate by waving a lump of coal around the parliament declaring: “This is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared.”

(“What fresh idiocy is this?” asked The Guardian’s Katherine Murphy at the time when the gallery was still excitedly expecting prime minister Malcolm Turnbull to pivot back to his 2009 climate activist persona.)

There have been plenty of “first times” to see how Morrison understands global warming: from the electric vehicles that would destroy the weekend in 2019, to his bushfire response last summer, or his gas-led recovery this past spring. It’s the shrugging nihilism of “I don’t hold a hose, mate” brought to managing this generational transition.

Morrison understands global warming as a political opportunity to be exploited as a spectre haunting regional Australia — the spectre of transition. That exploitation relies on shifting from Abbott-era denialism of the science to the Morrison-era focus on the costs of transition.

Where any action can imply cost (and any cost can be inferred as “tax”), it’s a focus that mandates doing precisely nothing.

The action-cost-tax construction is funnelled through News Corp’s denialist media and, through their domination of media, it structures public debate.

 (In recent days, it was applied to attack Labor’s reforms to the rights of gig workers from a Christian Porter press conference through the pages of The Australian and on to Sunday’s Insiders.)

Public concerns about global warming demand a certain occasional pretence (like this month’s “preferably by 2050”) that the government ”will do something” — a pretence that usually comes with a sly winking to the denialist base that “something”, in this context, means “nothing much”, largely messaged far from the gallery through social media (hello, Craig Kelly!).

The pretence needs more than rhetoric. As a result, Morrison has brought in “technology” to suggest a pain-free transition — where “technology” plays the role of underpants in the get-rich scheme of the South Park gnomes (phase one: collect underpants. Phase two: ????. Phase three: Get rich.)

The media’s frisson about Morrison’s 2050 pivot has, again, quickly given way to disillusion in light of the government’s fossil-fuel-accommodating plan for electric vehicles and its response to threatened carbon tariffs.

Until the next time Morrison holds out a global warming football for the media to kick.

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