The Week in Climate Change
Nov. 6 — Nov. 12, 2017
COP 23
“It is important for the world to know, the American government may have pulled out of the Paris agreement, but the American people are committed to its goals, and there is nothing Washington can do to stop us,” former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a climate conference in Bonn, Germany, according to The Associated Press.
According to a new report from America’s Pledge, a group led by Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Brown, if the institutions working to meet the Obama targets were a separate country, they would be the third-largest economy in the world after the United States and China.
A group of Californians and other delegates to COP23 from the United States — many involved in climate justice organizations — stood up as Brown started speaking, giving short testimonies about Brown’s close relationship to the fossil fuel industry, a major force in California’s economy. After protesters chanted “Keep It In The Ground,” in opposition to fossil fuel extraction, Brown replied, “Let’s put you in the ground so we can get on with the show here.”
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“Being here as a Californian and seeing Jerry Brown elevated and honored as a climate hero is really frustrating, because the voices of the thousands of Californians who have been begging Jerry Brown to be a real climate leader are going unheard in this space,” says Malis, who grew up in Valencia, Calif., not far from the site of the massive Aliso Canyon methane leak.
[N]o major industrialized country is currently on track to fulfill its pledge, according to new data from the Climate Action Tracker. Not the European Union. Not Canada. Not Japan. And not the United States, which under President Trump is still planning to leave the Paris agreement by 2020.
JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank by assets, holds nearly $113 million in combined debt and equity investments in South American oil and gas giant GeoPark, Canadian firm Frontera Energy Corporation and Chinese-owned Andes Petroleum, according to a 16-page report by Amazon Watch, a California-based conservation nonprofit. BlackRock, the investment behemoth, owns $567 million in stocks and bonds in GeoPark, Frontera and the two parent companies of Andes Petroleum.
Science/Effects
Some of the microbes lurking in the permafrost may be familiar: adversaries that humanity already knows and believes it has defeated. The World Health Organization brags that it has eradicated smallpox, for instance — other than the stores in the United States and Russia — but Claverie warns that it could well have survived in the tundra.
Even more worrisome are the microbes we don’t know. “No one really understands why Neanderthals went extinct,” Claverie said. Sometimes, he catches himself when talking about these possible permafrost-locked diseases — they may have threatened humans or human relatives in the past, he’ll say. Then, he’ll change tense, emphasizing that they could do so again.
Politics
Water drains naturally in this stretch of Texas, or at least it used to. At more than 600 square miles, Houston has grown to be as big as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia combined, a giant spread of asphalt smothering many of the floodplains that once shuttled water from the prairies to the sea. When finished, the newest road to ring the city and propel its expansion, called the Grand Parkway, will encircle an area equivalent to all of Rhode Island.
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“The worst flood has not yet occurred,” Mr. Blackburn noted. A hurricane that pushes a massive storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico into Galveston Bay, up the ship channel, could overwhelm refineries and unleash a toxic tsunami, killing many and rattling the national economy.
The judge and mayor are among those talking about a so-called Ike Dike, named after Hurricane Ike in 2008, which killed dozens in Texas. It would be a massive sea-gate that could block a surge. The scale and engineering would be Texas-size. The cost would be, too.
“I don’t think the scale of what we need to do has sunk in,” said David W. Titley, a retired rear admiral and former chief oceanographer of the Navy who heads a climate center at Pennsylvania State University. “We’re not talking about elevating a few structures by a foot. We’re talking about elaborate flood defenses and relocation efforts that could cost billions — or trillions.”
“I think it’s much more of a 1984-ish thought control motivation,” said David Doniger, director of climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They don’t want the EPA website to pop up when middle school and high school kids are doing their research on climate change.”
But it may be time to face the fact that there is no magic message, no persuasive strategy, that can get us out of this mess. There’s no persuading the conservative base without conservative elites and there’s no persuading conservative elites as long as their material interests point the wrong direction.
It may just be that we’re not all going to get along — that the only way to move forward on this is to fight it out.
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Reality still matters. What we have in the US is not a “difference of opinion” about climate change, it’s conservatives being mistaken about some very basic facts. They’re mistaken because they’ve been lied to and misled by leaders and influencers within their own tribe.
“Climate change is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and is impacting stability in areas of the world both where the United States Armed Forces are operating today, and where strategic implications for future conflict exist,” the final version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) says.
The bill requires the secretary of Defense to submit to Congress “a report on the vulnerability to military installations and combatant commander requirements resulting from climate change over the next 20 years.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is in Bonn, said the timing of the Heartland conference was meant to confuse the public on the issue of climate change during the U.N. conference.
“Trump is a dream come true for the climate denial operation, which has always craved legitimacy,” Whitehouse said. “Trump being willing to send government officials to one of these phony-baloney things is really regrettable because there’s no science behind it.”
Energy
The severity of the pollution has led city chiefs to implement a total ban on trucks entering the capital, as well as temporarily suspend all civil construction projects. On Wednesday, they took the highly unusual step of closing all schools.
Air quality readings in India’s capital have soared since Tuesday, with one monitor showing levels in the city were 969 — the World Health Organization considers anything above 25 to be unsafe.
Books
If you’re willing to connect the dots, you can see how drought leads to a lack of food resources, which leads to hunger, which leads to political action, which can lead to war and instability. But if you don’t connect the dots, it’s easy to only see riots in the streets, and refugees, and wars, and not any of the root causes. A part of the problem is how the media works today. It’s driven by instant news, about what’s happening in a particular place at a particular moment, and not about looking at the causes of these conflicts. — Jeff Goodell
