(UK) ‘We Are Seeing A Crisis In Values’ – An Exclusive Extract From Mark Carney’s Book

The Guardian - Mark Carney

The former head of the Bank of England looks at the danger of putting a price on everything

Mark Carney at the Bank of England. Photograph: Reuters

Author Mark Carney is a Canadian economist and banker. He is Vice Chairman and Head of Impact Investing at Brookfield Asset Management as of October 2020. Mark Carney served as the Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 until 2013 and the Governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.  Value(s): Building A Better World For All, by Mark Carney, is published by HarperCollins.

A few summers ago when a range of policymakers, business people, academics, labour leaders and charity workers gathered at the Vatican to discuss the future of the market system, Pope Francis surprised us by joining the lunch and sharing a parable. He observed that:

Our meal will be accompanied by wine. Now, wine is many things. It has a bouquet, colour and richness of taste that all complement the food. It has alcohol that can enliven the mind. Wine enriches all our senses.

At the end of our feast, we will have grappa. Grappa is one thing: alcohol. Grappa is wine distilled.

He continued:

Humanity is many things – passionate, curious, rational, altruistic, creative, self-interested. But the market is one thing: self-interest. The market is humanity distilled.

And then he challenged us:

Your job is to turn the grappa back into wine, to turn the market back into humanity. This isn’t theology. This is reality. This is the truth.

In my experience, the upheaval the world has been experiencing demonstrates that it is vital to rebalance the essential dynamism of capitalism with our broader social goals. This is not an abstract issue or a naive aspiration.

For over 12 years, I had the privilege and challenge of being a G7 governor, first in Canada and latterly in the UK.

During this time I saw kingdoms of gold rise and fall. I led global reforms to fix the faultlines that caused the financial crisis, worked to heal the malignant culture at the heart of financial capitalism and began to address both the fundamental challenges of the fourth industrial revolution and the existential risks from climate change.

I felt the collapse in public trust in elites, globalisation and technology. And I became convinced that these challenges reflect a common crisis in values and that radical changes are required to build an economy that works for all.

Whenever I could step back from what felt like daily crisis management, the same deeper issues loomed. Can the very act of valuation shape our values and constrain our choices? How do the valuations of markets affect the values of our society?

Mark Carney: ‘We are living Oscar Wilde’s aphorism – knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing – at incalculable costs to our society.’ Photograph: Toby Madden

As we move from a market economy to a market society, both value and values change.

Increasingly, the value of something, of some act or of someone is equated with their monetary value, a monetary value that is determined by the market.

The logic of buying and selling no longer applies only to material goods, but increasingly governs the whole of life from the allocation of healthcare to education, public safety and environmental protection.

Commodification, putting a good up for sale, can corrode the value of what is being priced.

As the political philosopher Michael Sandel argues, “When we decide that certain goods and services can be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use.”

Putting a price on every human activity erodes certain moral and civic goods. It is a moral question how far we should take mutually advantageous exchanges for efficiency gains. Should sex be up for sale? Should there be a market in the right to have children? Why not auction the right to opt out of military service?

There is extensive evidence that, when markets extend into human relationships and civic practices (from child-rearing to teaching), being in a market can change the character of the goods and the social practices they govern.

One of the best-known examples was documented by Richard Titmuss in his comparative study of blood-donation systems in the US and the UK, The Gift Relationship. Titmuss demonstrated that in economic and practical terms, the UK system of voluntary donations was superior to the US system, which paid for donations.

He added an ethical argument that turning blood into a commodity diminished the spirit of altruism and eroded people’s sense of obligation to donate blood to support others in their community.

These observations are familiar from the civic response to Covid. None of the voluntary groups that spontaneously formed were paid for the makeshift PPE and protective masks they created and donated. A call for volunteers to help those in the NHS was met with over a million people within days. No citizen drew on a government payment to help elderly neighbours or the homeless in their communities.

This underscores the moral error of many mainstream economists, which is to treat civic and social virtues as scarce commodities, despite there being extensive evidence that public-spiritedness increases with its practice.

My experience in the private and public sectors accords with Pope Francis’s parable. Value in the market is increasingly determining the values of society. We are living Oscar Wilde’s aphorism – knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing – at incalculable costs to our society, to future generations and to our planet.

Once we recognise these dynamics, we can turn grappa back into wine, and channel the value of the market back into the service of the values of humanity.

Links

• Mark Carney's journey from money man to climate change crusader
• COVID-19 pandemic adds urgency to fight against climate change: Mark Carney
• Mark Carney: Investing in net-zero climate solutions creates value and rewards
• Mark Carney: Climate crisis deaths 'will be worse than Covid'
• Mark Carney says banks should link executive pay to Paris climate goals
• Mark Carney on how we get finance to act on climate
• Net zero goal ‘greatest commercial opportunity of our time,’ says Mark Carney

Without Changes To Mitigate Global Warming, Summer Could Last Nearly Six Months, Study Finds

Washington Post - Erin Blakemore

Filipino families flock to a makeshift beach in the polluted waters of Manila Bay to escape the summer heat on March 7 in Manila. (Jes Aznar/Getty Images)

If you’ve noticed summers getting hotter and longer, you’re not alone: Climate scientists have had their eyes on an uncomfortable warming trend for decades.

But how much have the seasons changed — and what could be ahead?

A new analysis by Chinese researchers has an unnerving prediction: If humans don’t make any effort to lessen climate change, summer could last nearly six months by 2100.

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, used temperature data to track seasonal changes in the Northern Hemisphere between 1952 and 2011. The researchers defined the start of winter as the onset of the coldest 25 percent of temperatures and summer as the onset of the hottest 25 percent.

On average, winter waned from 76 to 73 days, spring shrank from 124 to 115 days, and fall fell from 87 to 82 days.

People gather on Southern California’s Venice Beach in September 2020 as temperatures soar, sparking concerns that crowded beaches could allow for wider spread of the coronavirus. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

But summer ballooned over the 59-year period, growing from 78 days to a whopping 95.

Then the researchers used the data to project what might be to come in scenarios with different climate change curbs. The worst-case scenario model saw winter shrinking down to less than two months a year and summer lasting nearly a half-year.

That could wreak ecological havoc, disrupting agriculture, causing species’ life cycles and migrations to fall out of sync, and increasing the risk of drought and severe fires.

Humans would suffer, too: Warming summers are already projected to cause additional deaths due to heat stress, malnutrition and malaria, and longer growing seasons mean more seasonal allergies because of pollen. 
  

Changes in average start dates and lengths of the four seasons in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes for 1952, 2011 and 2100. Credit: Wang et al 2020/Geophysical Research Letters/AGU.

Fortunately, the worst-case projection isn’t inevitable. If humans continue to mitigate climate change and manage to curb carbon emissions, summer probably won’t get as long.

The data is sobering, however — and shows that the seasons have already shifted. “Even if the current warming rate does not accelerate, changes in seasons will still be exacerbated in the future,” the researchers write.

Human-caused climate change has already altered our world, pushing us closer to a seemingly endless summer.

Links

• Geophysical Research Letters: Changing Lengths of the Four Seasons by Global Warming
• Summers are growing longer due to climate change, while winters are dramatically shrinking
• Northern Hemisphere summers may last nearly half the year by 2100
• (AU) Climate Crisis Cutting Short Australia's Winters And Extending Summers
• NASA Map Of Earth's Seasons Over 20 Years Highlights Climate Change
• This Chart Shows How Global Temperatures Have Risen Since 1950
• Climate Crisis: 2020 Was Joint Hottest Year Ever Recorded
• The World’s Rich Need To Cut Their Carbon Footprint By A Factor Of 30 To Slow Climate Change, U.N. Warns
• Global Heating Warming Up 'Nights Faster Than Days'
• Why Clouds Are The Missing Piece In The Climate Change Puzzle

(AU) Disclosing Climate Change Risk In Bonds A Costly Challenge: RBA

AFR - Matthew Cranston

The Reserve Bank says the disclosure of climate change risks in the sale of government bonds would create significant challenges and costs for governments, but has welcomed the inclusion of any meaningful risks to better inform investors.

Activist investors have signalled that companies and governments face growing risks of litigation over their climate change disclosures and emissions-reduction policies.

CBA’s Martin Whetton says green bonds do not come at the detriment of existing debt. Louie Douvis

Late last year, the government’s debt manager – the Australian Office of Financial Management – faced legal action from an investor who claimed it should have disclosed climate change as a risk in the value of bonds. The AOFM has pushed back on such a suggestion. A court hearing date has not been confirmed.

In response to questions on notice from Greens leader Adam Bandt about the need for such disclosures, the RBA has highlighted the burden issuers would face if they had to outline such risks.

“From the perspective of the issuing entity, there is some cost to gathering and presenting additional information,” the bank said. “This is a particularly challenging exercise for sovereign bonds.”

The Reserve Bank, like the AOFM, emphasised that no other country discloses climate change risks in its sovereign bonds.

“Disclosure of climate change risks relating to sovereign bonds is not currently common practice,” the RBA said in its response.

Sovereign bonds do not even outline interest rate risk, considered a far more tangible factor in calculating the risk for bond investments.

A matter of government policy

The RBA did suggest, however, that investors would benefit from the knowledge of “meaningful” and “material” risks from climate change.

“For the financial system as a whole, meaningful and useful disclosure of material climate change-related risks allows investors and institutions to assess and price climate-related risks and opportunities,” the RBA said.

However, the bank said the need to disclose such risks would be solely a matter of government policy.

By financial year 2023, the federal government is expected to have $1 trillion in total debt on issue.

Mr Bandt said the RBA’s comments might not have shown support for such disclosures, but they were an admission of sorts that more could be more done to assess the risks of climate change.

“Although the RBA thinks the Morrison government won’t be owning up to the climate risks of its spending anytime soon, it is keeping an open mind about whether that’s the right approach,” Mr Bandt said.

“The RBA is giving the government a gentle prod on climate action, leaving the door open to factor in the climate risk of government spending.”

Commonwealth Bank head of fixed income and FX strategy Martin Whetton said trying to incorporate the risks of climate change into disclosures would be difficult for existing bonds.

“It would be impossible to rewire $930 billion of debt with tenors stretching out for 30 years so that they are ESG compatible, as bond proceeds would have to be for specific purposes,” Mr Whetton said.

He said investors were not demanding such disclosures on existing bonds and that those more conscious of risks to do with environmental, social and governance (ESG) were investing in new green bonds, at no detriment to existing debt.

“Investors are not showing any concerns about ESG compatibility on existing debt,” he said.

“There is a whole new market going up in green bonds which does not affect the pricing of existing government bonds. In fact, what we have seen is that it lowers the overall cost of funding for government, for example as has been seen in Germany.

“What could be looked at is a program of ESG debt into future years. The UK has recently announced a program of green debt alongside its existing debt.”

Links

• Companies, directors, governments face wave of climate change lawfare
• Law student raises the stakes in case against government
• (AU) Financial System Faces 'Considerable' Risk If Climate Change Not Tackled: RBA
• (AU) Reserve Bank Warns Of 25% GDP Loss By 2100 Unless Action Taken On Climate Change
• (AU) Australia's Reserve Bank Fuels Call For Post-Pandemic Renewables Push
• AU) Corporate Climate Risk Disclosures Must Show More: IGCC
• (AU) Investors Are Trying To Shut Down Fossil Fuel Companies From The Inside — This Is What They're Doing
• (AU) Australian Banks ‘Undermining Paris Agreement’ With $7bn In Fossil Fuel Loans
• (AU) Why It Will Pay For Investors To Go Green
• (AU) 'Breakthrough Moment': Woodside Investors Revolt On Climate Change

(AU) Coal’s Retreat As Renewables Surge Is A Shock, But Not A Surprise

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

The coming period, Origin Energy boss Frank Calabria told shareholders last month in what looks today like sturdy understatement, was going to be “messy”.

Calabria was talking after Origin’s half-year profits had been slashed 98 per cent in large part due to power prices collapsing amid an accelerating influx of renewable energy into the grid.

EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn power station in the Latrobe Valley is to close early. Credit: Paul Jones

In this context Energy Australia’s announcement on Wednesday that it would bring forward the closure of the Yallourn Power Station by four years to 2028 was a shock, but hardly a surprise.

In January, Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that Australian industry and governments should co-operate as a matter of “absolute urgency” in developing a plan for the rapid retirement of coal, which she said was good for emissions but would prompt faster coal plant retirements.

Surprise coal plant closure fires Morrison government warning to industry

By then it was clear that the uptake of  rooftop solar and grid-scale renewable energy projects in Australia was in line with the Australian Energy Market Operator’s fastest modelling scenario, anticipating renewables will grow from 37 per cent of the energy mix in 2020 to 63 per cent by 2030 and 94 per cent by 2040.

Coal-fired power plants simply cannot compete with that much cheap renewable power, explains Frank Jotzo, director of Australian National University’s Centre for Climate Economics and Policy.

As a result the most vulnerable of them – the slowest, oldest and least reliable – are forced from the market, he says. In turn more renewables surge in to fill the void and the cycle repeats ever faster.

The problem is that the closure of a vast, old coal-fired power plant can shock the market, as the sudden abandonment of Hazelwood showed in 2017.

Yallourn Power Station produces about 22 per cent of Victoria’s electricity and 13 per cent of its greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn is 5 per cent of Australia’s national annual emission output.

Move to build grid-scale solar on industrial rooftops across Australia

Though EnergyAustralia has ameliorated the potential for price shock by giving long notice of the closure, the industry, energy users and some regulators are crying out for governments to co-operate on national energy policy.

“It’s now time for tough, united decisions. If we keep kicking this further down the road, it’s going to cost us all more for electricity in the future,” Schott said in January.

That hasn’t happened.

Even in the absence of a national policy, Jotzo believes that the speed with which energy storage technology is being developed and introduced – everything from batteries to new pumped hydro – is such that the vacuum created by shutting a station the size of Yallourn can be filled in time with renewables backed by storage.

But he says the pace at which coal plants retire will only increase, with each new closure creating another wave of uncertainty.

It needn’t be so messy.

Links

• (AU) Outcry At Australia's Coal Plant Closures Misses The Point: Change Is Coming
• (AU) Renewable Energy Boom Could Force Coal Power To Close Early, Says New Report
• (AU) Under Pressure: Coal-Fired Power Plants Feel The Heat From Renewables
• (AU) First Hydrogen Produced From Latrobe Valley Coal Generates Export Hopes, Emissions Fears
• (AU) PM’s Claim Australian Coal Produces Much Lower Emissions Is ‘Nonsense’
• (AU) Coal Sector Losses Near $1.5b
• 'Invisible Killer': Fossil Fuels Caused 8.7m Deaths Globally In 2018, Research Finds
• Surge In Global Action Highlights Australia’s Stance On Climate Change

(AU) First Hydrogen Produced From Latrobe Valley Coal Generates Export Hopes, Emissions Fears

 ABC Gippsland - Jarrod Whittaker

The consortium is celebrating the beginning of production. (ABC Gippsland: Jarrod Whittaker)

Key Points Hydrogen has been produced from coal in Victoria's Latrobe Valley A Japanese consortium wants to test whether it is possible to export the emerging fuel source But environmental groups are sceptical about the potential of hydrogen made using coal

A Japanese consortium hopes the production of hydrogen using coal from the Latrobe Valley in a world-first trial will prove it is possible to export the emerging fuel source.

The consortium has produced the first hydrogen at a plant at the Loy Yang mine, south-east of Traralgon, and plans to transport it to Japan from the Port of Hastings in a specially designed ship later this year.

The $500 million Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain (HESC) project involves creating hydrogen gas at the plant and refining it for transport.

Hydrogen is touted as a clean energy source with a range of uses including in fuel cells and powering vehicles.

The project is in its pilot phase, and because producing hydrogen using coal creates greenhouse gases, it will not commercialise it unless it is able to capture and store the emissions.

Announced in April 2018, then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull attended the launch of the project, which received $50 million each from the Victorian and federal governments.

Professor Alan Finkel led the development of Australia's national hydrogen strategy. (ABC Gippsland: Jarrod Whittaker)

Professor Alan Finkel, the Commonwealth's special adviser on low-emissions technology, said hydrogen was part of a "world-changing transition".

"Hydrogen is part of the future transition that around the world economies are going to go through towards zero emissions," he said.

"The world's going to need a lot of hydrogen, and so the more ways we can get that hydrogen the better."

'Very, very versatile'

A member of the consortium behind a project to export hydrogen made from brown coal says hydrogen exports have the potential to create large numbers.

Jeremy Stone from Japanese electricity provider J-Power said the pilot project had created about 400 jobs in Victoria and could create "thousands more" if it was commercialised.

"Hydrogen is a very, very versatile fuel so it can be used to make energy, electricity, but also can be used as storage, can be used as transportation, it can be used in industry," Mr Stone said.

"In full production, this project would save around about 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 per year, which is the equivalent of the emissions of around about 350,000 cars."

Jeremy Stone believes there is a lot of potential in the technology. (ABC Gippsland: Jarrod Whittaker) 

The consortium's plan is to use the Victorian government's carbon capture and storage project, Carbon Net, to store the emissions. Carbon Net is investigating the feasibility of storing greenhouse gas emissions in Bass Strait and last year drilled its first test well.

Mr Stone said there were 20 carbon capture and storage sites in operation across the world and more were in development.

"Carbon Net, which is very close by here and Gippsland, would be the perfect place to safely store that CO2 underground," he said. 
  
Hydrogen is being produced from brown coal, but is it green?

Environment groups sceptical

But there are doubts about whether carbon capture and storage is viable and whether hydrogen produced from coal has a long-term future.

Environment Victoria campaigns director Nick Aberle said the world wanted hydrogen which produced no emissions, and the best way to do that was to make it using renewables.

"The challenge that this [HESC] project has is trying to get rid of those greenhouse gases, because turning coal into hydrogen produces enormous amounts of greenhouse gases — as much as burning the coal, essentially," he said.

"Our understanding is that even your best-case scenario, this project at a commercial scale wouldn't be able to capture all of the greenhouse gases."

Dr Aberle said carbon capture and storage was a "mirage" which had "been 10 years away for decades".

Nick Aberle is sceptical hydrogen produced from coal has a long-term future. (Supplied: Nick Aberle)

Welcome jobs potential

The HESC project's launch came just days after Energy Australia announced it would close the Yallourn coal-fired power station in the Latrobe Valley in 2028, four years early

Yallourn's closure will result in the loss of 500 jobs and it will become the second Latrobe Valley plant to close after Hazelwood shut down in 2017.

Committee for Gippsland chief executive Jane Oakley said the hydrogen industry's potential offered hope to the region amid the job losses.

"It's encouraging and it will make us very buoyant in terms of the potential that it has to offer," Ms Oakley said.

"The export opportunities are pretty significant, and jobs [it creates] in turn will be really encouraging for the region to see this sort of industry evolve."

Links

• Money down for hydrogen hopes in Victoria's hottest and driest region
• World-first coal to hydrogen plant trialled in Victoria
• Victorian coal-to-hydrogen plant trial gets green light from EPA
• POWERPASTE, A High-Density, Safe, And Easily Transportable Hydrogen Energy Fuel
• (AU) World's First Domestic Hydrogen Battery Developed By Australian Firm
• (UK) New Site Will Turn Plastic Waste Into Hydrogen
• (AU) Carbon Targets On Agenda At World Leaders' Summit, But What Is Business Doing To Bring Emissions Down?
• (AU) How To Harness The Power Of Biosolids To Make Hydrogen
• Green Hydrogen: Could It Be Key To A Carbon-Free Economy?
• (AU) What Are The Key Technologies In The Coalition's Low Emissions Roadmap, And Can They Deliver?

(USA) Is There Anything Funny About The Climate Crisis?

New Yorker - Bill McKibben

Aminah Imani is one of the four comedians in “Ain’t Your Mama’s Heat Wave,” a standup special inspired by the environmental-justice situation in Norfolk, Virginia. Photograph courtesy Hip Hop Caucus

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.

Norfolk, Virginia, is one of seven cities in the region known as Hampton Roads, which is among the metropolitan areas most vulnerable to coastal flooding in the world. Like New Orleans, Norfolk sits extraordinarily low to the sea—just seven feet above it in some places—and Hampton Roads, where three big rivers converge and the Chesapeake Bay flows into the Atlantic, floods regularly. When a big storm hits, watch out. Also, Norfolk suffers from much the same patterns of racial inequity that made Hurricane Katrina such a disaster for the Crescent City. So you might be excused for predicting that a standup-comedy show about the impact of global warming on Norfolk’s African-American neighborhoods would bomb.

But no. As the theologian James Cone once insisted, “Anger and humor are like the left and right arm. They complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare their uncompromising opposition to oppression, and humor prevents them from being consumed by their fury.” A new standup-comedy special, “Ain’t Your Mama’s Heat Wave,” which premières next week at the (virtual) D.C. Environmental Film Festival, is an attempt to prove Cone’s point. 

Born of a collaboration between the Hip Hop Caucus (see my interview below with the executive producer, Antonique Smith) and American University’s Center for Media and Social Impact (C.M.S.I.), it features four standup comics from across the country: Clark Jones, Aminah Imani, Mamoudou N’Diaye, and Kristen Sivills. They studied the environmental-justice situation in Norfolk with local experts, wrote some jokes, then staged a show for the community and its elected leaders at the historic Attucks Theatre. (The theatre is named for Crispus Attucks, a man of African-American and Native American descent who was one of the first patriots to die in the Boston Massacre, two hundred and fifty-one years ago last week.) 

A report, produced jointly with C.M.S.I., documents the whole process. Charles (Batman) Brown, the Caucus’s Virginia leadership-committee coördinator, explained the logic: “The social-justice and community activists are really good at organizing in their sphere,” while entertainers can spread information easily via social media. “And, in the political world, you have to be invited into that world. It’s always best, I think, when those three worlds can come together and partner up. I think the problem is that doesn’t happen as much as it should.” Happily, the Norfolk experiment seems widely replicable—there are lots of comedians, and lots that need poking fun at.

Including, it must be said, the C.E.O.s of various oil companies and banks, who, with the advent of the Biden Administration, are lining up to make ever more earnest-sounding climate commitments. Within the past few days, Goldman Sachs joined the recent convert Citi in following Bank of America and Morgan Stanley in a promise to achieve “net-zero emissions” by 2050 with its financing, and Wells Fargo did the same, on Monday. (Chase, the biggest fossil-fuel lender of all, has promised to follow Paris guidelines.) 

It’s good to see the banks acknowledging the new Zeitgeist—that climate change is something we need to show we care deeply about—and good to see them ruling out some of the most egregious potential clients, but it’s hard to escape the idea that, in too many cases, the pledges are mostly a kind of performance. For one thing, no one is specifying how the emissions caused by the loans will be measured. It’s tricky math, at best—even the arguably most important leader in reforming climate finance, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, had to walk back his recent claim that the six-hundred-billion-dollar portfolio of the asset manager Brookfield, where he is a vice-chair, was carbon-neutral because it was investing enough in renewable energy to offset its holdings in the fossil-fuel industry.

Writing in the Guardian, the environmental campaigners Tzeporah Berman and Nathan Taft dismissed moves by various banks, because many banks and oil companies are using vague pledges as cover to increase their emissions in the next few years. Enbridge Corporation has announced plans to be a net-zero emitter, but that hasn’t stopped it from continuing construction on the Line 3 tar-sands pipeline in Minnesota—and, indeed, last week a consortium of banks announced that they would give the company an eight-hundred-million-dollar “sustainability loan,” angering Indigenous leaders, who called it classic greenwashing. 

Royal Dutch Shell said that it would go to net zero, too, but also announced plans to ramp up production of natural gas, while employing “nature-based offsets”—which translates to planting trees. Even ExxonMobil said last week that it was “supportive” of zero-emissions goals. American University is tracking the pledges from dozens of companies intent on following this route. But, as Bloomberg’s Kate Mackenzie points out, “the total volume of offsets they rely on will quickly exceed the ability of the planet to provide them”—there is only so much ground for planting trees.

These pledges seem to be a way of saying, to quote St. Augustine, “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.” Augustine feared Hell; if we’ve moved past that, we should at least worry about a future with a similar temperature. 

I don’t think that these banks and oil companies can keep this act up for five years, much less thirty, because the fires and floods that roll across the planet will make them not the butt of jokes but the focus of rage. (New data this week show that going beyond a 1.5-degree-Celsius global temperature increase may make much of the tropics uninhabitable.) 

The way to avoid that is to do, right now, what needs to be done: if you’re a bank, stop messing with complicated dodges about carbon offsets and cease lending to oil companies. No kidding.

Passing the Mic

Antonique Smith is, among other things, the singing voice of the climate movement. Since she covered Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” for the Hip Hop Caucus’s “Home” album, in 2014, she has performed at hundreds of rallies and events, and is an original host of the weekly climate podcast “Think 100%: The Coolest Show.” She has also earned Grammy nominations and plays Aretha Franklin’s young mother in the new “Genius” miniseries from National Geographic. 

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Bill McKibben and Antonique Smith in conversation. It has been edited for length.

Bill McKibben: Can you describe Norfolk—what its divisions are like and how they set the background for this film? Did people there care about the climate crisis, and did that change as the filming progressed?

Antonique Smith: While the entire region, including the world’s largest Navy base, is threatened by rising sea levels, the threat is not the same for every community. Black people and communities throughout the region are at greater risk for flooding, disaster, and toxic pollution. The city of Norfolk is about half Black, half white, but the St. Paul’s district, home to a predominantly Black public-housing community, is representative of the economic disparity that has fallen squarely on racial lines; racist urban policies and climate gentrification posed as redevelopment are hitting the Black community the hardest.

Getting to create “Ain’t Your Mama’s Heat Wave” has been such a powerful experience. Community leaders, organizations, and activists are working day in and day out on a bunch of issues. Flooding, from sea-level rise brought on by climate change, is one of them. What we’ve been able to do is to bring together local leaders and talk about the climate crisis in terms of racial justice, housing, transportation, and food security. It’s all about communicating and working on the climate crisis in ways relevant to people’s lives.

Bill McKibben: People might instinctively say, “There’s nothing funny about global warming.” But we make comedy about many of the most painful things in our lives. What can comedians bring to this fight? 

Antonique Smith: Certainly, there’s nothing funny about suffering, dying, and possible extinction, but I’m so grateful for comedians and for comedy in itself. What would life be like without joy and laughter? Science gives us the facts, but most people aren’t inspired, moved, or touched on an emotional level by science. Infuse that same information with comedy, and you have a magic combination of enjoyment and fun, while learning and being inspired to action. Another magical component of comedy is that it feels very personal and relevant. 

The best comedians tell stories in a way that makes you feel like they’re telling your story. You identify with it even if it hasn’t actually happened to you. Unfortunately, most people of color can identify with the issues surrounding climate and environmental injustices.

Bill McKibben: Though you’re very much of the moment, you’ve spent a lot of time in an earlier era, too: singing Marvin Gaye, helping portray the story of Aretha Franklin and the civil-rights movement. What lessons should we take from those days, and what new lessons have we learned since?

Antonique Smith: If you listen to the lyrics of Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me,” the things he’s saying are not only still happening—they’re worse. “Poison is the wind that blows,” “oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas, fish full of mercury,” et cetera. He wrote that more than forty years ago! I believe the lessons we can learn from the past is that the fight isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. People sacrificed their lives and suffered greatly for the progress that was made so that we can have the rightful freedom and liberties that we sometimes take for granted today. 

The sad lesson we have learned since that era is that we still have so far to go. Until the communities of people of color are no longer considered the sacrifice zones and a dumping ground for billion-dollar polluters; until we all have clean air, clean water, and access to fresh, healthy food; until the systems that allow for Black people to be murdered by police and the systems designed to keep people of color from gaining wealth are dismantled; until white supremacy is destroyed and all Black lives truly matter, then we have to keep on fighting. 

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Warming Up

Antonique Smith has a voice. Here it is, in four different moods: “Let It Be,” “And I Am Telling You,” “All We Really Have Is Now,” and “Hold Up Wait a Minute.”

Links

• Ain’t Your Mama’s Heat Wave (pdf)
• Using humor to talk about climate change makes it easier to take action
• Using humor to engage the public on climate change: the effect of exposure to one-sided vs. two-sided satire on message discounting, elaboration and counterarguing 
• No laughing matter, yet humor inspires climate change activism
• Jokes are a surprisingly effective way to talk about climate change
• Comedy can help us tackle the climate crisis – here’s how 
• Laughing in the Face of Climate Change? Satire as a Device for Engaging Audiences in Public Debate

(UK) How Grassroots Schemes Across UK Are Tackling Climate Crisis

The Guardian - Matthew Taylor

Thinktank calls for more support for local initiatives ranging from heating to flood schemes

Ambition Lawrence Weston’s solar farm. Photograph: Bristol Energy Cooperative/Youtube

Communities across the UK are tackling the climate crisis with hundreds of local schemes ranging from neighbourhood heating to food co-ops, community land ownership projects and flood defences, according to a report.

A study from the IPPR thinktank found that community projects, often set up with the primary aim of reducing poverty and improving people’s day-to-day lives, were also reducing emissions and restoring nature.

Luke Murphy, the lead author of the report, said: “Under the radar there are already flourishing and transformative community initiatives to pool resources and create shared low-carbon energy, housing and natural assets … These groups have shown that they can increase community wealth and create thriving places while addressing the climate crisis.”

The report identifies hundreds of initiatives, including:

• Social housing schemes such as the Goodwin development in Hull, which has renovated 60 abandoned houses to create affordable family eco homes that require little or no energy to heat or cool. The community has also brought a water recycling system into collective ownership, and the trust is developing 40 more social homes.
  
  
• Reclaiming derelict land such as the Malls Mire woods on the south side of Glasgow, which was plagued by litter and fly-tipping. It has now been transformed into a thriving woodland and community gardens to grow vegetables and fruit, and hosts school clubs and holiday programmes.
  
  
• Repair cafes that are popping up around the country. In Derbyshire alone there are 16 that offer a free meeting space, tools and materials to help people make repairs to clothes, furniture and electrical appliances, reducing their consumption of new products and therefore their emissions.
  
  
• Renewable energy projects such as the Ambition Lawrence Weston community group, based in an area of Bristol with high levels of fuel poverty. It is establishing community-owned renewable energy projects, with a solar farm and plans for a giant wind turbine that, once complete, will power 3,850 homes, saving 1,965 tonnes of CO₂ and return a profit to the community of between £50,000 and £400,000 a year.

Mark Pepper, the development manager of Ambition Lawrence Weston, said that although many people in the area would “not put climate change at the top of the list”, the group had realised it could meet the community’s needs “while simultaneously adding climate value through … energy-efficient new homes, sustainable public transport or setting up our own community-owned wind turbine”.

He said: “These are things our residents benefit from, while also ensuring a positive climate impact at the same time. Putting our community’s needs first empowers local people to engage and take action on climate change, rather than feeling like they’re being told what’s best for them.”

The report found that because many of these schemes were not being properly assessed and measured little was known about their collective environmental impact – which the authors say is likely to have been underestimated by policy makers for years.

IPPR is calling for widespread devolution to support and fund similar schemes, and says a third of new onshore green energy should be community-owned “to share benefits of net zero transition”.

It wants new legislation to make it easier for communities to set up, run, own and reap the benefits of these new “climate commons”, which should be supported through a new “thriving places” fund.

“These groups have shown that they can increase community wealth and create thriving places while addressing the climate crisis,” said Murphy. “Now the government needs to act to enable all communities to have meaningful control of how their area adapts and benefits from the transition to net zero.”

Links

• Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)
• Eco-homes become hot property in UK's zero-carbon ‘paradigm shift’ 
• Schemes boosting cycling and walking accelerate across the UK
• UK citizens' climate assembly to meet for first time
• COP25 climate summit: put children at heart of tackling crisis, says UN
• Tackling degraded oceans could mitigate climate crisis - report
• UK to host crucial global talks on tackling climate emergency
• Climate crisis seriously damaging human health, report finds