(AU New Daily) The Stats Guy: The Generational Demographics Behind The Climate Change Conflict

New Daily - Simon Kuestenmacher

The generational lens can help us to speculate about the future direction of environmental politics in Australia. Image: TND

Let’s not worry about the physical details of climate change in this piece. There are scientists much better placed than me to explore this perspective.

Instead, let’s examine environmental concerns through the demographic lens.

The scientific community and all environmentalists, from moderates to extremists in the field, agree that as humans we impact our environment. It matters what and how much we take out of the ground and what and how much we pump into our atmosphere, soils and rivers. Our actions impact the planet we live on.

If virtually all relevant experts agree on the basics, why don’t all politicians and business leaders rally around the cause?

Even hardened environmentalists must accept that our country’s collective economic success matters. Environmental issues will only be at the top of the national agenda once Australians have their basic needs covered and feel financially secure.

In the last two decades the Australian middle class has been squeezed. The cost of living grew at a much faster rate than wages, home ownership is but a dream for many, households carry way more debt, and about one in twelve workers (close to a million people) holds more than one job.

If you can’t afford housing, are worried about your income and can’t pay for childcare, bigger picture environmental concerns will not be on the top of your agenda.

If the environmental movement isn’t taking the concerns of the struggling lower and middle class seriously, we will continue to see environmentalism be a politised issue at the edge of politics, rather than a central concern. Economic success is a prerequisite to politics focusing on the environment.

The Australian habit of viewing environmentalism as an issue of the political left is seriously slowing any meaningful climate action.

Norway’s fossil fuel reserves are happily exploited to fund renewable energies. Photo: Getty

Conservatism and environmentalism are viewed as opposing views in Australia. This is utter nonsense. Politicians on the left might even be hurting the environmental movement by equating environmentalism with left politics.

In Germany, it was a conservative government that decided to phase out nuclear and coal – a move unthinkable for conservative Australians as of now.

In Norway, the nation’s huge fossil fuel reserves are happily exploited, and its profits channelled into a sovereign wealth fund that invests in renewable energies – a move currently unthinkable for progressive Aussie leftists.

How to sell environmental policies?

Conservative Australians don’t react well to having scientific facts thrown in their direction with the smug undertone of intellectual superiority.

Climate change and sustainability must be communicated in a way that completely avoids language that is ridiculing, shaming or moralising. These three are sadly the go-to modes of communication.

The environmental movement in Australia might want to take inspiration from the success of the Norwegian model. Viewing Norway as a successful model requires the left to embrace a pro-business, dare I say capitalist world view. Not an easy ask, as this means the comfort of perceiving oneself as intellectually superior must be left behind.

The depoliticisation of something as crucial as the environment must take national (and personal!) priority. The political opposition is not the enemy.

There is an increasing generational element to the climate discussion. Naïve, poorly informed young folks want to save the planet and moralise and shame ignorant, profit-hungry, poorly informed old folks who don’t give a damn about the planet’s future as long as they have a nice retirement.

If only it was so simple. People are much more nuanced in their world views than these stereotypes suggest. Are there any generalisations that are at least a bit more helpful than the old greedy-righties vs young naïve-lefties narrative?

I think the generational lens can help us to speculate about the future direction of environmental politics in Australia.

The Baby Boomers (born 1946-’63) are slowly leaving the workforce and political leadership positions behind.

Over half of the generation is already of retirement age and political positions of power are being largely handed over to younger generations.

Their influence on policy directions is shrinking even though they remain a politically active group and continue to be a very wealthy generation with economic influence.

By now all but one state premier (Dominic Perrottet was born in 1982 and is technically a Millennial) and the Prime Minister are members of Gen X (born 1964-81).

Even though Xers are a small generation, we must not underestimate their influence. There is a level of seniority built into many leadership positions. You become prime minister at 52 – Scott Morrison was born in 1968 – and the average CEO in Australia is 54.

These top jobs are firmly Gen X’s territory during the whole of the 2020s. This means climate policies and business strategy aren’t set by Greta Thunberg’s Gen Z (born 2000-17) but her Xer parents.

To appeal to Gen X, messaging around the issue of climate change must be pragmatic and solution-focused. Moralising will not yield any positive results as neither Xers nor Boomers are likely swayed by it.

I suspect Australia, as led by Gen X, to be much more open to hyper-pragmatic climate change solutions like the Norwegian model. Pragmatic, fact-driven, and outcome-focused – that’s how Gen X operates.

Gen Z-ers like Greta Thunberg will need to appeal pragmatic Generation X to achieve effective climate change policy. Photo: Getty

The problem here is that Millennials (1982-’99), who are by far the biggest generation in Australia now, will need to curb their desire to make climate change a moral issue.

If climate change continues to be moralised, if it continues to look and feel like virtue signalling to older generations, the pragmatic Gen X leaders might be less inclined to act.With Gen X at the helm, now is the time for a pragmatic approach to climate change.

This might well include investing fossil fuel money into clean technologies, setting us up for a truly renewable technological future.

This Norwegian approach of leveraging profits of the Australian fossil fuel industry is probably going to be disliked by many Millennials who think any future extraction of fossil fuels to be immoral.

While Gen X is in the driver seat, Millennials are best to support the Norwegian approach during the 2020s.

In the 2030s, when Millennials will not only be the largest generation but will also be of leadership age, Australia might well see less compromise-driven climate policies.

Links

• Australian climate change observations
• Climate change in Australia - statistics & facts
• Australian climate change site networks - Bureau of Meteorology
• Climate change: the facts
• Climate of the Nation 2021 - The Australia Institute (pdf)
• Rebuilding our cities requires a long-term view

(Grist) Should The World Ban Solar Geoengineering? 60 Experts Say Yes.

Grist - Shannon Osaka

They say the technology poses an “unacceptable risk.”

Sina Schuldt / Picture Alliance via Getty Images

The island nation of Tonga has been covered in ash from an underwater volcanic eruption. It sent tsunami waves surging across the entire West Coast. And it also released a cloud of sulfur dioxide, a chemical that, in large enough quantities, reflects the sun’s rays and cools the planet.

Scientists quickly determined that, unlike Mount Pinatubo’s eruption in 1991 — which cooled the planet by around 1 degree Fahrenheit for several years — the Tonga volcano hadn’t released enough sulfur dioxide to alter global temperatures.

But the eruption illustrated a question that has been dogging scientific and climate experts for decades: If the world got unbearably hot, should scientists and governments opt to put sulfur dioxide or similar chemicals into the atmosphere to slow the rate of global warming? Is it ethical to even research such technologies?

In an open letter published in the journal WIREs Climate Change, more than 60 researchers from around the globe offered a resounding “no” to both questions.

They called for an “international non-use agreement” on so-called solar geoengineering technologies, which would cool the planet by releasing sun-reflecting chemicals into the atmosphere.

The authors want governments to ban outdoor experiments and deployment of solar geoengineering, prohibit national funding agencies from providing financial support, and refuse patents for such technologies.

The signatories included many prominent climate scientists, as well as the writer Amitav Ghosh and Sheila Jasanoff, an expert on science policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. 

Solar geoengineering technology, they say, poses an “unacceptable risk” to the planet’s environment, climate, and most vulnerable people.

“Governments and the United Nations need to take effective political control and restrict the development of solar geoengineering technologies before it is too late,” they wrote.

The prospect of dimming the sun to combat global warming has been in discussion for almost as long as climate change itself.

The first report on global warming that was handed to a U.S. president — Lyndon Johnson in 1965 — suggested it as a way to halt rising temperatures without stopping the use of fossil fuels. And in the past few years, attention to the concept has grown.

Last year, the U.S. National Academies of Science created a plan for a research program that would investigate the idea, and a Harvard project planned to test a solar geoengineering balloon in Kiruna, Sweden. (The test flight was halted after backlash from Swedish indigenous communities.)

Critics of the technology argue that it could create a moral hazard: that is, if solar geoengineering becomes an option, the world might not try so hard to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the actual underlying cause of global warming.

Companies heavily invested in fossil fuels could also use it as an excuse to avoid reducing the use of oil and gas. 

The writers of the open letter argue that solar geoengineering could cause uneven impacts around the globe — potentially affecting local weather patterns or food supply. What’s more, they suggest that the new technology is effectively “ungovernable.”

If one country decides to spray aerosols into the atmosphere, the repercussions will affect the entire globe, whether the residents of poor countries have agreed to it or not.

The deployment of solar geoengineering, they write, would require creating international organizations with “unprecedented enforcement powers” that don’t yet exist.

But other researchers have argued that solar geoengineering may be necessary to research — even if it is never deployed.

Some have critiqued the open letter as an attempt to stifle scientific progress, or have argued that further research could eventually be useful to countries who face the worst impacts of climate change — heat, extreme weather, and drought. 

Holly Jean Buck, a professor at the University of Buffalo and an expert in geoengineering, wrote on Twitter: “Can you not imagine someone in, say, 2050, who is suffering from extreme heat, wondering why their parents’ generation decided to forbid research on something that might be able to cool the climate and save them from a dangerous heat wave?” 

Links

• (WIRED) Think Climate Change Is Messy? Wait Until Geoengineering
• Geoengineering: 'Plan B' For The Planet
• Geoengineering: The Quick, And Potentially Catastrophic, Fix For Climate Change
• How Engineering Earth’s Climate Could Seriously Imperil Life
• What if it's too late to save our planet without geoengineering?
• What's the Least Bad Way to Cool the Planet?
• Geoengineering: A worst-case Plan B? Or a fuse not to be lit?

(UK The Conversation) Net Zero: UK Government Sued For Weak Strategy – So Here’s What Makes A Good Climate Change Plan.

The Conversation - Sam Fankhauser | Kaya Axelsson

Roserunn/Shutterstock

Authors Sam Fankhauser is Professor of Climate Economics and Policy, University of Oxford Kaya Axelsson is Net Zero Policy Engagement Fellow, University of Oxford

Two-thirds of countries have now committed to reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions at some point this century.

During 2021, the share of large companies with net zero commitments jumped from one in five to one in three.

Sadly, few of these net zero targets were accompanied by measures necessary to achieve them. This discrepancy is increasingly the subject of legal challenges.

The governments of the Netherlands and Germany, as well as oil major Shell, are among defendants who have been ordered by courts to cut emissions faster.

Judges found that tepid climate strategies violated human rights laws by infringing on the rights of young people. Globally, the number of climate-related court cases has doubled since 2015.

The UK is the latest country whose government environmental groups have sued for failing to take sufficient action on climate change. While the country’s net zero strategy deserves praise for some aspects – like setting a deadline to phase out new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 – even the government’s climate change advisor thinks it won’t be enough to meet statutory carbon targets.

So what does a good net zero strategy look like? In a new perspective paper we set out how to get net zero right. We argue that net zero strategies can be measured against three principles: the urgent pursuit of emission cuts, the cautious use of carbon offsets and carbon removal, and alignment with broader objectives for sustainable development.

Urgency

Because global temperature change is determined by cumulative emissions, the pace at which we reduce emissions is important. The longer we wait, the sooner the remaining carbon space in the atmosphere is used up.

Net zero strategies must contain measures to start cutting emissions immediately. These are often lacking or vague. The UK strategy, for example, proposes replacing gas boilers with heat pumps, but the support programme it offers is available to only a small proportion of buildings and households.

Gas boilers urgently need low-carbon replacements. Skimin0k/Shutterstock

Emissions cuts must also be comprehensive and include the most difficult sectors to decarbonise, such as heavy industry, aviation and agriculture.

 Tackling them will require consumers to make difficult choices, for example, on how much they travel and what they eat. Most net zero strategies shy away from spelling these out.

Integrity

The net zero strategies of many companies and governments rely heavily on carbon offsets. That is, rather than reducing their own emissions, they pay third parties to reduce theirs, for example, by funding renewable energy projects or planting trees.

This raises a number of problems. It is difficult to prove whether offsets actually reduce emissions. Many projects funded via offsets would have happened anyway. The offset market needs much more rigorous regulation.

More importantly, net zero requires all emissions to come down. Offsets shouldn’t be used to allow pollution to continue unabated. They are a last resort.

If a strategy does include using offsets, those offsets should remove carbon from the atmosphere, rather than reduce emissions elsewhere. This is the meaning of net zero – a balance between emissions and removal.

Most options for removing carbon are biological, such as tree planting. Technological solutions, such as capturing carbon directly from the air and storing it underground, are still at the pilot stage, and there are concerns about their cost and ability to safely store CO₂.

Tree planting isn’t a get out of jail free card. Farid Suhaimi/Shutterstock

Most modelled pathways for meeting the Paris Agreement’s goal of averting dangerous climate change involve scaling up carbon removal.

The world needs more investment in these techniques, but also stronger legal frameworks to ensure their risks are managed properly, and an honest public debate to make sure people are on board with it.

Sustainability

Net zero strategies don’t work in isolation. They must be aligned with broader environmental, social and economic objectives.

Net zero strategies will fail unless they proactively manage the impact of decarbonisation policies on workers, communities and households. Thankfully, labour market interventions like re-skilling programmes can help workers transition into low-carbon employment and social welfare payments can shield households in poverty from energy price rises. Both must form an integral part of net zero strategies.

Climate action can have multiple additional benefits, for biodiversity, public health, and food security. But this is not guaranteed. Interventions can have unintended consequences. For example, commercial plantations of exotic tree species in naturally treeless habitats may claim to store carbon, but they could crowd out native species, rob local people of traditional livelihoods or succumb to pests and diseases.

There are economic opportunities which net zero strategies should aim to capture. Low-carbon technologies like electric vehicles may unleash a virtuous cycle of innovation, investment and growth as information technology did two decades ago.

More immediately, investment in, for example, home energy efficiency and renewable energy could help the economy recover from the pandemic in a sustainable way. Unfortunately, only a fraction of economic recovery packages offered by governments have been genuinely green.

The necessity of reaching net zero emissions is a scientific reality. The growth in net zero targets suggests that political and business leaders know this to be true. They are still struggling to make social, economic and political sense of net zero, as the emergence of court challenges shows.

But we are starting to understand how to get net zero right. If interpreted and governed well, net zero could be the best hope we have for climate action.

Links

• The meaning of net zero and how to get it right
• Global trends in climate change litigation: 2021 snapshot (pdf)
• Outdated carbon credits from old wind and solar farms are threatening climate change efforts
• Why zero-carbon homes must lead the green recovery from COVID-19
• Five ways to kickstart a green recovery 
• Will COVID-19 fiscal recovery packages accelerate or retard progress on climate change?
• When tree planting actually damages ecosystems

(AU RMIT ABC Fact Check) Angus Taylor Says The Carbon Tax Destroyed One In Eight Manufacturing Jobs. Is He Correct?

RMIT ABC Fact Check - Principal researcher: David Campbell

Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor says one in eight manufacturing jobs were destroyed when the carbon tax was introduced. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)

The claim

As climate change shapes up as an election battleground, the Coalition has accused Labor of trashing the economy when last in government with its 2012 climate policy, the carbon tax.

Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor has led the charge, claiming that the policy wiped out roughly 12 per cent of Australia's manufacturing workforce.

"When the carbon tax went into place in this country, one in eight manufacturing jobs was destroyed," Mr Taylor said during an October 2021 interview.

Is that correct? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

The verdict

Mr Taylor is wrong.

When the carbon tax went into place, manufacturing employed 947,500 people. 

By the time of its repeal two years later, that number had shrunk by 32,300 (3.4 per cent), with one in 29 workers affected.

Manufacturing job losses also continued in the years after the carbon tax was scrapped, though not on the scale claimed by Mr Taylor.

Manufacturing jobs were declining in Australia long before Labor came to government. (ABC News: Caroline Winter)

By contrast, roughly one in eight (127,000) jobs were lost across roughly six years of Labor government — a period that includes nearly five years before the carbon tax was introduced. Importantly, experts told Fact Check that these job losses could not be solely attributed to Labor or the carbon tax. 

For one thing, they said, manufacturing as a share of total employment had been falling for decades.

Moreover, the downward trend would have been exacerbated during Labor's term by both declining investment in the sector and the global financial crisis.

Cause and effect?

The Coalition has several times linked the carbon tax to the destruction of manufacturing jobs.

Fact Check: Greenhouse gas emissions

Angus Taylor's claim on what has happened with greenhouse gas emissions under the Coalition is problematic for a number of reasons. Read more

Referring to Labor, Mr Taylor told parliament in November 2021 that "one thing we can be sure of is that they're always going to love a carbon tax that destroys jobs".

"[W]hen those opposite were in power: one in eight manufacturing workers lost their jobs", he said.

"That was 128,000 Australians who lost their livelihoods. And, of that 128,000, 110,000 were apprentices. One in five apprentices lost their jobs, and that was a result that followed on from those opposite putting in place a carbon tax."

Similarly, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg claimed in December that the "last time [Labor] had a go at climate policy … we lost one in eight manufacturing jobs and Australians got the carbon tax".

What was the 'carbon tax'?

The "carbon tax" was Labor's short-lived carbon pricing mechanism, which reduced Australia's carbon footprint by forcing the nation's largest emitters to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions.

Introduced on July 1, 2012 under prime minister Julia Gillard, the scheme lasted just two years before it was abolished under Tony Abbott's new Coalition government. It ceased on June 30, 2014.

When the Coalition came to power in September 2013, Labor had been in government for nearly six years and the carbon tax in operation for 14 months. 

The available jobs data

Employment data from the ABS is a net figure which does not specify how many jobs were destroyed compared to how many were offset by job creation. (ABC News: Marco Catalano)

The Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes employment data by industry each quarter, with figures available for February, May, August and November.

As these dates do not align with the July 1 introduction of the carbon tax, and because November 2012 reflects the first full quarter of ABS data, Fact Check has taken August 2012 as the starting point. (Taking May 2012 as the starting point does not alter the outcome.)

Generally speaking, Fact Check prefers trend data published by the ABS and has used the most recent available.

However, as the bureau stopped publishing its trend series in February 2020, this analysis also refers to seasonally adjusted data. The most recent available when Mr Taylor made his claim covers the period to August 2021.

It’s worth noting that the data provides a snapshot of net employment. It does not show whether manufacturing jobs lost were offset by others that were created, or vice versa.

So, what happened to manufacturing jobs?

According to the trend data, manufacturing employed 947,500 people in August 2012.

Mr Taylor claimed the carbon tax cost one in eight of them their jobs (12.5 per cent).

Are more Australians in jobs
than before COVID-19?

Fact Check looks into the claim of Treasurer Josh Frydenberg that Australia has "seen employment go above its pre-pandemic levels". Read more

The data shows that by August 2014, when the carbon tax was repealed, the industry had lost 32,300 people, or one in 29 workers (3.4 per cent).

The decline continued after the scheme was scrapped, with the industry shedding a further 29,500 workers by November 2015 and taking the total fall to 6.5 per cent.

Employment has since risen and fallen several times. At no point in the trend series did manufacturing fall to more than 7.3 per cent from its level when the carbon tax went into place.

Equivalent to roughly one in 14 workers, that lowest point came in May 2019, five years after the pricing scheme was repealed.

And while the seasonally adjusted series shows larger falls, none took employment to 12.5 per cent below August 2012 levels, as Mr Taylor claimed.

Rather, the lowest point was in November 2020, when manufacturing jobs were 11.1 per cent below August 2012 levels.



Fact Check contacted Mr Taylor's office for the source of the claim but did not receive a response.

However, the trend data reveals that manufacturing jobs declined by 127,000 (12.1 per cent) across Labor's entire term, from just over one million in November 2007 to 922,000 in August 2013. 

This suggests Mr Taylor may have attributed every job lost across roughly six years of Labor to the carbon tax.

What the experts say

So, is Mr Taylor justified in attributing the net loss of manufacturing jobs to the carbon tax alone?

Jeff Borland, a labour economist at the University of Melbourne, said it was "a ridiculous statement" to say that all 128,000 jobs lost under Labor were due to the carbon tax.

Not only were many of these jobs lost before the pricing scheme was introduced, he said, but also manufacturing employment had been falling well before Labor was in government, with the industry's share of total employment declining steadily since the mid 1970s.

This was a long-run trend "driven by completely separate factors" such as automation and globalisation, Professor Borland explained.



On top of that, Labor's term straddled the global financial crisis, which would have hit manufacturing particularly hard.

"[I]f you actually look at the data on numbers of people employed, recessions or downturns are always a period when the destruction of manufacturing jobs seems to be concentrated", Professor Borland said.

Alan Duncan, director of Curtin University's Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, told Fact Check that Mr Taylor's statement "doesn't pass scrutiny".

He supplied analysis showing that roughly 30,000 jobs were lost during the two years of the carbon tax, noting that "manufacturing jobs had been falling well before the carbon tax was introduced, with the initial decline driven by the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009" and that investment in the industry had also fallen by nearly 40 per cent from the end of 2011 to mid 2014.

"The GFC and declining manufacturing investment are likely to have had a much larger effect on jobs in the manufacturing sector than the carbon tax," Professor Duncan said.



In an email to Fact Check, Frank Jotzo, director of the Australian National University's Centre for Climate and Energy Policy, said there was "no basis to ascribe any significant change in employment to the existence of the carbon price".

Moreover, he said it was "nonsensical to ascribe the entirety of employment changes during [2008 to 2013] to the carbon pricing mechanism that existed during [2012 to 2014]".

Links

• Angus Taylor, Hansard, November 23, 2021
• Angus Taylor, Doorstop interview, October 27, 2021
• Angus Taylor, Interview with 2HD, October 27, 2021
• Josh Frydenberg, Interview with Insiders, December 5, 2021
• Fact Check, Energy Minister Angus Taylor said greenhouse gas emissions have turned around by 1.1 billion tonnes under the Coalition, April 11, 2019
• Clean Energy Regulator, About the carbon pricing scheme, August 23, 2021
• ABS, Labour force, detailed, February 2020
• ABS, Labour force, detailed, August 2021
• Fact Check: Have greenhouse gas emissions turned around under the Coalition?

(USA NYT) Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll

New York Times - Amanda Hess

From “Don’t Look Up” to Greta Thunberg videos to doomsaying memes, we are awash in warnings that we are almost out of time. But the climate crisis is outpacing our emotional capacity to describe it.

Doomscrolling through social media can be seductive when it comes to the climate crisis: It signals that we care about big problems even as we chase distractions. Credit...Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland for The New York Times

Author Amanda Hess is a critic at large for the New York Times. She writes about internet and pop culture for the Arts section and contributes regularly to The New York Times Magazine.

I can’t say precisely when the end began, just that in the past several years, “the end of the world” stopped referring to a future cataclysmic event and started to describe our present situation.

Across the ironized hellscape of the internet, we began “tweeting through the apocalypse” and blogging the Golden Globes ceremony “during the end times” and streaming “Emily in Paris” “at the end of the world.”

 Often the features of our dystopia are itemized, as if we are briskly touring the concentric circles of hell — rising inequality, declining democracy, unending pandemic, the financial system optimistically described as “late” capitalism — until we have reached the inferno’s toasty center, which is the destruction of the Earth through man-made global warming.

This style is native to Twitter, but it has migrated to earnest slice-of-life Facebook pages, to Netflix, to books. Lauren Oyler’s coolly funny novel “Fake Accounts” begins in this mode (“Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon”) and Bo Burnham’s depressed drama-kid Netflix special “Inside” ends in it, as Burnham shrugs off the rising oceans and sings, “You say the world is ending, honey, it already did.”

And it is darkly inverted on the Instagram account @afffirmations, where new-age positive thinking buckles under the weight of generational despair, and serene stock photography collides with mantras like “I am not climate change psychosis” and “Humanity is not doomed.”

Ours is a banal sort of apocalypse. Even as it is described as frightfully close, it is held at a cynical distance. That is not to say that the rhetoric signals a lack of concern about climate change. But global warming represents the collapse of such complex systems at such an extreme scale that it overrides our emotional capacity.

This creates its own perverse flavor of climate denial: We acknowledge the science but do not truly accept it, at least not enough to urgently act. This paralysis itself is almost too horrible to contemplate. As global warming cooks the Earth, it melts our brains, fries our nerves and explodes the narratives that we like to tell about humankind — even the apocalyptic ones.

This “end of the world” does not resemble the ends of religious prophecies or disaster films, in which the human experiment culminates in dramatic final spectacles. Instead we persist in an oxymoronic state, inhabiting an end that has already begun but may never actually end.

Faced with this inexorable decline, the fire-and-brimstone fantasies grow ever more appealing. The apocalyptic drumbeat of social media gestures at the hopelessness of our situation while supplying a kind of narcotic comfort for it. Some plead: Just hit us with the comet already.


Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland for The New York Times

That brings us to the premise of “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s end-of-the-world comedy that he has said is an allegory for inaction on global warming. In it, an American astronomer (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a Ph.D candidate (Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet hurtling toward Earth.

More chilling than this cosmic snowball is the fact that no one seems particularly concerned by its approach. Comet denialists hold rallies instructing people to “don’t look up,” but even those who accept the situation only gesture lazily at trying to stop it.

 A pop star (Ariana Grande) stages a grotesque benefit concert; a daytime television host (Tyler Perry) jokes that he hopes the comet takes out his ex-wife; his co-host (Cate Blanchett) is more interested in bedding the astronomer than heeding him. As she paws at him in a hotel corridor, her subconscious death drive becomes manifest, as she purrs: “Tell me we’re all gonna die!”

“Don’t Look Up” fails as a climate change allegory, because climate change resists metaphor. Even though I count among the film’s villains (all its journalists are bad), I do not feel as implicated as I should. For one thing, humans didn’t make the comet. Global warming is not approaching from space but oozing all around.

My attention is diverted not only by shiny pop stars but also by taxing responsibilities and traumas, many of which are themselves related to ecological collapse. I am terrified of how global warming will affect my son’s generation, but when I learned we would need to travel regularly to a hospital as Covid spiked in New York City, I bought a car.

But the greatest liberty “Don’t Look Up” takes with its source material comes at the end: The comet hits Earth at its appointed time, at which point nearly everybody dies. It is final, dramatic, easy to understand. So, nothing like our present situation.

Global warming is what the ecophilosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject, a concept that is too large to be adequately comprehended by human beings. (McKay’s production company is called Hyperobject Industries.) Its scale is not just world-historical but geological, and though it is already very bad, it will only fulfill its catastrophic potential many lifetimes from now. Its effects are distributed unequally; what I experience as an ambient stressor may cause strangers to suffer or die.

Global warming suggests that humans are powerful enough to destroy the world but too weak to stop it. Though we are driven toward world-changing innovation, we are inflexible, fearful of abandoning the destructive comforts we once saw as progress — our cars, our meats, our free next-day deliveries.

Knowing all this, isn’t it about time we do something? Hmmm. “Don’t Look Up” turns on one of the most vexing aspects of the crisis: Stating the data, shouting it even, often fails to move people, though the film is largely incurious about why. One of the stories we tell ourselves about global warming is that we need only “listen to the science.”

When this does not work, we are supplied with more science — more glacier drone shots, more projections of soaring temperatures, more scary stories about dead bees. In the book “Being Ecological,” Morton calls this “ecological information dump mode,” in which an expert commences “shaking your lapels while yelling disturbing facts.” But even this seemingly rational approach stokes an irrational fantasy: that we have a certain amount of time “left” to stop global warming — just as soon as we get our heads around what’s going on.

The word “apocalypse” is derived from the Latin for “revelation,” and our current predicament draws out the irony of that double meaning, as we mistake obsessing about the “end of the world” for acting on it. Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s 2020 cli-fi novel “Weather,” is an information person: a Brooklyn librarian who assists the host of a cult-hit global warming podcast called “Hell or High Water.”

The podcast is “soothing to me even though she talks only of the invisible horsemen galloping toward us,” Lizzie says. The more Lizzie doomscrolls about climate change, the more she turns away from the outside world, lurking on survivalist forums and planning her family doomstead.

“Weather” sketches a scene of intellectual preppers, hoarding information about global warming as if cramming for a cosmic test. But the more information they find, the more they are able to tailor it to satisfy their own egos. In “Weather,” a podcast listener waves off talk of melting glaciers and asks: “But what’s going to happen to the American weather?”

A parable unfolds along these lines in the final season of “Search Party”: The show’s crew of millennial narcissists found a Brooklyn start-up called Lyte, which manufactures an “enlightenment” pill with the unfortunate side-effect of turning people into zombies.

As the group’s craven pursuit of consumerist illumination inadvertently hastens the apocalypse, the egomaniacal imp Dory (Alia Shawkat) tries to explain that she just wanted to help people, but all that comes out is this: “I just wanted …”

Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we must abandon to address global warming is the anesthetizing stream of global warming content itself. Credit...Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland for The New York Times

We may not fully comprehend global warming, but we can feel it, and not just in the weather. A whole lexicon has arisen to attempt to describe its psychological impact: climate nihilism, climate grief, climate melancholia, eco-anxiety, pre-traumatic stress.

A global survey of young people, released last year, found that more than half of respondents between the ages of 16 and 25 “felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty” about it, and believed “humanity is doomed.”

In the 2020 Hulu documentary “I Am Greta,” the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg explains how knowledge of global warming nearly killed her. After watching a film in school featuring “starving polar bears, flooding, hurricanes and droughts,” she says, she became depressed and anxious, stopped speaking, and “almost starved to death.”

We are getting accustomed to the idea that global warming feels bad, and this provides its own sense of comfort, as if our psychological distress proves that we are taking the problem seriously. “Civilians love to panic,” says an epidemiologist in Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “To Paradise,” which is partially set in an unbearably hot, totalitarian future Manhattan ruled by blinkered scientists.

“Survival allows for hope — it is, indeed, predicated on hope — but it does not allow for pleasure, and as a topic, it is dull.” In our response to global warming, we resemble the frog who does not hop from the heating water until it’s too late. Except we are aware that the water is boiling; we just can’t imagine leaving our tumultuous little pot.

Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we must abandon to address global warming is the anesthetizing stream of global warming content itself. As David Wallace-Wells writes in his 2019 book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” climate-themed disaster films do not necessarily represent progress, as “we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by restaging them in theaters of our own design and control.” Even YouTube videos of climate conferences can slip into this role.

As we frame an activist like Thunberg as a kind of celebrity oracle, we transfer our own responsibilities onto a teenager with a preternatural command of dismal statistics. We once said that we would stop climate change for the benefit of our children, but now we can tell ourselves that our children will take care of it for us.

The internet is often criticized for feeding us useless information, and for spreading disinformation, but it can enable a destructive relationship with serious information, too. If you’re a person who accepts the science, how much more do you really need to hear? The casual doomsaying of social media is so seductive: It helps us signal that we care about big problems even as we chase distractions, and it gives us a silly little tone for voicing our despair.

Most of all, it displaces us in time. We are always mentally skipping between a nostalgic landscape, where we have plenty of energy to waste on the internet, and an apocalyptic one, where it’s too late to do anything. It’s the center, where we live, that we can’t bear to envision. After all, denial is the first stage of grief.

Links - New York Times Climate Change Articles

• The Way We Talk About Climate Change Matters, Bill Nye Says
• Court Revokes Oil and Gas Leases, Citing Climate Change
• John Kerry, U.S. Climate Envoy, Tells Top Polluters ‘We Must All Move Faster’
• ‘Build Back Better’ Hit a Wall, but Climate Action Could Move Forward
• Here’s How Climate Change and Covid Are Transforming Skiing
• Tracking Climate Change in 193 Countries
• How Spiking Energy Prices Complicate the Fight Against Global Warming
• Judges Increasingly Demand Climate Analysis in Drilling Decisions
• How One Ski Town Rallied in a Warming World

(The Guardian) ‘Carbon Footprint Gap’ Between Rich And Poor Expanding, Study Finds

The Guardian - Helena Horton

Researchers say cutting carbon footprint of world’s wealthiest may be fastest way to reach net zero

The least wealthy half of the UK’s population accounts for less than 20% of final energy demand. Photograph: Stéphane Mahé/Reuters

Wealthy people have disproportionately large carbon footprints and the percentage of the world’s emissions they are responsible for is growing, a study has found. In 2010, the most affluent 10% of households emitted 34% of global CO₂, while the 50% of the global population in lower income brackets accounted for just 15%. By 2015, the richest 10% were responsible for 49% of emissions against 7% produced by the poorest half of the world’s population.

The wealthiest 10% of people are responsible
for nearly half the world's CO2 emissions

Guardian graphic. Source: Emissions-inequality.org

Aimee Ambrose, a professor of energy policy at Sheffield Hallam University and author of the study published in the journal Science Direct, says cutting the carbon footprint of the wealthiest might be the fastest way to reach net zero.

In terms of energy demand in the UK, the least wealthy half of the population accounts for less than 20% of final demand, less than the top 5% consumes. While their homes may be more energy-efficient, high consumers are likely to have more space to heat. They also own and use more luxury items and gadgets.

Ambrose said the cost of living crisis was likely to make those on middle to low incomes reduce their carbon consumption by holidaying in the UK, if at all, and by using less fuel. However, those who consume the most are unlikely to have to make such changes.

“It is much easier for richer consumers to absorb these increases in costs without changing their behaviour,” said Ambrose. “Unlike the less wealthy, the thermostat won’t be turned down and the idea of not jetting off on a long-haul flight to find some sun is out of the question.

In most countries, before Covid-19, less than half of people reported flying at least once a year while more than half of emissions from passenger aviation were linked to the 1% of people who fly most often.

“In many ways, the rich are being largely insulated from the spike in energy costs,” said Ambrose. “But addressing excessive personal consumption is something that isn’t on the agenda for the government and policymakers. This is bad news for the planet and our prospects of reaching net zero.”

She said the resulting policy neglect of high consumers was a “missed opportunity” to address inequality and opportunities for carbon reduction.

“Price mechanisms may force low-income households to cut back consumption to dangerous levels,” Ambrose added. “Moreover, high consumption and large carbon footprints are spatially concentrated in high-income cities and suburbs – while their negative effects, such as air pollution, typically spill over into less affluent areas.”

Links

• Rising temperatures threaten future of Winter Olympics, say experts
• Climate crisis could wipe 1% a year off UK economy by 2045, say ministers
• Global heating linked to early birth and damage to babies’ health, scientists find
• Plants at risk of extinction as climate crisis disrupts animal migration
• ‘The ducklings might not survive’: readers’ concerns over early spring
• Fury as EU moves ahead with plans to label gas and nuclear as ‘green’
• 2021: a year of climate crisis in review
• Asad Rehman on climate justice: ‘Now we are seeing these arguments cut through’

(USA CBS News) Earth Is Likely Just A Decade A Way From Hitting 1.5°C Of Global Warming — And Scientists Say It Will Be "Catastrophic" For Coral Reefs

CBS News - Li Cohen


Study: Climate Change "catastrophic" for coral reefs

The United Nations has warned the continued use of fossil fuels is hurtling the planet to 1.5°C of global warming, relative to 1850-1900 levels, a threshold that will result in "unprecedented" extreme weather events.

According to new research, climate change will also result in coral bleaching that will be "catastrophic" for reefs, and potentially, the marine life that live around them.

Bleaching can occur from a change in ocean temperature, pollution, overexposure to sunlight and low tides. Any of these influences can stress coral and causes it to release the algae that live in its tissues.

The loss of algae, corals' primary food source, causes the coral to turn white and makes it more susceptible to disease.

Reefs are "among the most biologically diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth," serving as a vital resource for an estimated 25% of all marine life, which depend on reefs for their life cycles, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Roughly half a billion people also depend on reefs for food, coastal protection, tourism and fisheries' income.

But as climate change continues to negatively impact the planet, it will "overwhelm" those reefs, researchers said, and almost none of them will be able to escape a grave scenario.

The latest study, published in PLOS Climate on Tuesday, focused on thermal refugia, areas of coral reefs that can maintain the temperatures that coral reefs need to survive, even as nearby ocean temperatures increase.

Presently, about 84% of reefs are thermal refugia and have had enough time to recover between heat waves that bleach, and kill, coral reefs.

Once the planet hits 1.5°C of warming, researchers said, just 0.2% of Earth's thermal refugia will have enough time to recover between extreme heat events, and more than 90% of those reefs will suffer "an intolerable level of thermal stress."

At 2°C, researchers found, no thermal refugia will remain, and all coral reefs will be exposed and vulnerable.

This study was published the same day that other researchers concluded that marine heat is the "new normal" for oceans.

The only areas researchers believe might be able to survive the 1.5° threshold are small regions in Polynesia and the Coral Triangle where lower rates of warming are anticipated. But even those regions would no longer be suitable if Earth hits 2°C of warming.

"Our finding reinforces the stark reality that there is no safe limit of global warming for coral reefs," lead author of the study Adele Dixon said in a statement.

And the world may just be years away from watching this unfold.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in August that the world is likely to hit the 1.5°C of warming threshold in the early 2030s. As the IPCC explained, global warming of 1.5°C will result in more frequent and more intense extreme heat events.

It usually takes coral reefs about a decade to grow back and be fully functional again after a severe coral bleaching event, but under the predicted climate scenarios, they will not have enough time to recover.

Humans' excessive rates of deforestation and overuse and burning of fossil fuels, which greatly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and heat within Earth's atmosphere, are the primary driver for the anticipated outcome of global warming.

The researchers proposed some measures that can be put into place to help the ailing reefs, including removing stressors such as fishing and tourism, and helping coral migrate to more suitable environments.

But they added that such measures may only be beneficial in the short term, and that the true culprit — global warming — must be addressed, and quickly.

Scott Heron, a physics professor at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Australia, said that the study confirms that people must urgently take "significant action" on greenhouse gas emissions.

The Paris Climate Agreement has the majority of nations committed to staying below the 1.5°C level, but researchers of this study said that limiting global warming to that change "will not be enough to save most coral reefs."

"Coral reefs are important for the marine creatures that live on them and for over half a billion people whose livelihoods and food security rely on coral reefs," research supervisor Maria Beger said.

"We need to not only deliver on Paris goals - we need to exceed them, whilst also mitigating additional local stressors, if we want children born today to experience reef habitats."

Links - CBS News Climate Change Articles

• MoneyWatch: Gas stoves impact climate, health
• Climate change could be "catastrophic" for coral reefs
• Dozens of elephant seals recruited to be oceanographers
• Extreme marine heat is the "new normal" for oceans, study finds
• Growing call to divest from fossil fuels
• Gas stoves worse for climate than previously thought, study shows
• Federal judge blocks big Gulf of Mexico oil lease sale
• Congress is giving billions to carbon-capture technology. Will it work?
• "Mega" iceberg releases 152 billion tons of water into ocean
• Nonprofit links farmers with surplus produce with those in need
• Massive coral reef found in Tahiti "twilight zone"