Official Climate Change Thread
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- Start date
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
The Hill
28 mins ·
"Unprecedented flooding is quickly becoming a new normal. Despite that, Republicans are tripling down on fossil fuels w/no plan to transition off them," Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said tearing into the GOP as floods hit D.C.
About this website
THEHILL.COM
Ocasio-Cortez tears into GOP as DC floods: 'Republicans are tripling down on fossil fuels'
28 mins ·
"Unprecedented flooding is quickly becoming a new normal. Despite that, Republicans are tripling down on fossil fuels w/no plan to transition off them," Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said tearing into the GOP as floods hit D.C.
About this website
THEHILL.COM
Ocasio-Cortez tears into GOP as DC floods: 'Republicans are tripling down on fossil fuels'
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
The New York Times
Governors from across the country, including 2 Republicans and governors of 4 states that voted for Trump in 2016, are set to urge his administration to halt one of his biggest climate policy rollbacks: the weakening of clean car rules.
About this website
NYTIMES.COM
24 Governors Call on Trump to Halt Rollback on Rules for Clean Cars
Governors from across the country, including 2 Republicans and governors of 4 states that voted for Trump in 2016, are set to urge his administration to halt one of his biggest climate policy rollbacks: the weakening of clean car rules.
About this website
NYTIMES.COM
24 Governors Call on Trump to Halt Rollback on Rules for Clean Cars
One of Antarctica's biggest glaciers will soon reach a point of irreversible melting. That would cause sea levels to rise at least 1.6 feet.
Sections of the Thwaites Glacier are retreating by up to 2,625 feet per year, contributing to 4% of sea-level rise worldwide. That ice loss is part of a broader trend: The entire Antarctic ice sheet is melting nearly six times as fast as it did 40 years ago. In the 1980s, Antarctica lost 40 billion tons of ice annually. In the last decade, that number jumped to an average of 252 billion tons per year.
Now, authors of a new study report that over the last six years, the rate at which five Antarctic glaciers slough off ice has doubled. That makes the Thwaites Glacier a melting time bomb.
The scientists reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the glacier poses the greatest risk to future sea-level rise and is likely marching towards an irreversible melting point.
"After reaching the tipping point, Thwaites Glacier could lose all of its ice in a period of 150 years," Hélène Seroussi, an author of the study and a NASA scientist, said in a press release. "That would make for a sea-level rise of about half a meter (1.64 feet)."
Alex Robel, another study author, added that if the glacier were to cross that Rubicon, nothing could stop the ice melt - even if Earth's temperatures stopped rising.
"It will keep going by itself and that's the worry," he said.
Why the Thwaites glacier may reach a tipping point
The Thwaites Glacier is a large mass of ice born from snow that's been compressed over time. It's part of the Antarctic ice sheet - a large continental glacier that covers at least 20,000 square miles of land (about the surface area of the United States and Mexico combined).
Antarctica is ringed by a skirt of ice sheets and floating ice shelves that create a physical barrier between the ocean and the landlocked ice on the continent. These floating sheets "act like a dam," as Ross Virginia, director of Dartmouth College's Institute of Arctic Studies, previously told Business Insider. The barrier prevents continental ice from flowing into the ocean, where it would melt and cause global sea levels to rise.
But as ocean temperatures increase, warmer water at the base of these ice sheets is leading them to melt from underneath. That melting gives rise to cavities: A nearly Manhattan-sized gap was discovered under the Thwaites Glacier in February. That cavity was large enough to have held 14 billion tons of ice.
Read More: There's a cavity underneath Antarctica that's two thirds the size of Manhattan - a sign ice sheets are melting faster than we thought
Every year, the portion of the Thwaites Glacier's floating ice shelf that extends into the sea gets bigger as ocean water erodes its base. So scientists like Seroussi and Robel track Thwaites' grounding line: the spot where the continental ice lifts off the ground and starts to float on the water. (Think of a spit of land that extends past a cliff's edge into the air - it's the same concept with glaciers, except instead of air, the ice is over water.)
That grounding line moved almost 9 miles between 1992 and 2011, according to a 2014 study; the farther inland the spot moves, the more likely it is that the glacier will melt.
What a melting Thwaites glacier means for sea levels
Together with Greenland's ice sheet, Antarctica's ice sheet contains more than 99% of the world's fresh water.
Most of that water is frozen in masses of ice and snow that can be up to 10,000 feet thick. But as human activity sends more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the oceans absorb 93% of the excess heat those gases trap. The warm air and water is what's causing ice sheets and glaciers to melt at unprecedented rates.
Seroussi said that Thwaites could reach its tipping point "in the next 200 to 600 years," after which it could lose all its ice. If the entire Thwaites Glacier melted, that would result in a worldwide sea-level rise of 1.64 feet, according to the recent study (though another study estimated the rise to be closer to 2 feet).
But Thwaites prevents its neighbor glaciers from flowing into the ocean, too. So some other scientists think that if the entire Thwaites glacier were to collapse, it could destabilize surrounding glaciers on the Antarctic ice sheet as well.
If one goes, they could all go - and that chain-reaction would raise sea levels by an additional 8 feet.
Read the original article on Business Insider Copyright 2019
- Aylin Woodward, Business Insider
- Jul 9, 2019,
- Antarctica's glaciers are melting at unprecedented rates. This rapid ice loss contributes to rising sea-levels.
- In a new study, scientists found that the Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica will likely hit a point of irreversible melting, after which it will lose all of its ice over a period of 150 years.
- If the entire Thwaites Glacier were to melt, it would raise sea levels by at least 1.5 feet.
- Some experts warn that the collapse of the Thwaites Glaciercould trigger a chain reaction of melting that would raise sea levels by another 8 feet.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Sections of the Thwaites Glacier are retreating by up to 2,625 feet per year, contributing to 4% of sea-level rise worldwide. That ice loss is part of a broader trend: The entire Antarctic ice sheet is melting nearly six times as fast as it did 40 years ago. In the 1980s, Antarctica lost 40 billion tons of ice annually. In the last decade, that number jumped to an average of 252 billion tons per year.
Now, authors of a new study report that over the last six years, the rate at which five Antarctic glaciers slough off ice has doubled. That makes the Thwaites Glacier a melting time bomb.
The scientists reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the glacier poses the greatest risk to future sea-level rise and is likely marching towards an irreversible melting point.
"After reaching the tipping point, Thwaites Glacier could lose all of its ice in a period of 150 years," Hélène Seroussi, an author of the study and a NASA scientist, said in a press release. "That would make for a sea-level rise of about half a meter (1.64 feet)."
Alex Robel, another study author, added that if the glacier were to cross that Rubicon, nothing could stop the ice melt - even if Earth's temperatures stopped rising.
"It will keep going by itself and that's the worry," he said.
Why the Thwaites glacier may reach a tipping point
The Thwaites Glacier is a large mass of ice born from snow that's been compressed over time. It's part of the Antarctic ice sheet - a large continental glacier that covers at least 20,000 square miles of land (about the surface area of the United States and Mexico combined).
Antarctica is ringed by a skirt of ice sheets and floating ice shelves that create a physical barrier between the ocean and the landlocked ice on the continent. These floating sheets "act like a dam," as Ross Virginia, director of Dartmouth College's Institute of Arctic Studies, previously told Business Insider. The barrier prevents continental ice from flowing into the ocean, where it would melt and cause global sea levels to rise.
But as ocean temperatures increase, warmer water at the base of these ice sheets is leading them to melt from underneath. That melting gives rise to cavities: A nearly Manhattan-sized gap was discovered under the Thwaites Glacier in February. That cavity was large enough to have held 14 billion tons of ice.
Read More: There's a cavity underneath Antarctica that's two thirds the size of Manhattan - a sign ice sheets are melting faster than we thought
Every year, the portion of the Thwaites Glacier's floating ice shelf that extends into the sea gets bigger as ocean water erodes its base. So scientists like Seroussi and Robel track Thwaites' grounding line: the spot where the continental ice lifts off the ground and starts to float on the water. (Think of a spit of land that extends past a cliff's edge into the air - it's the same concept with glaciers, except instead of air, the ice is over water.)
That grounding line moved almost 9 miles between 1992 and 2011, according to a 2014 study; the farther inland the spot moves, the more likely it is that the glacier will melt.
What a melting Thwaites glacier means for sea levels
Together with Greenland's ice sheet, Antarctica's ice sheet contains more than 99% of the world's fresh water.
Most of that water is frozen in masses of ice and snow that can be up to 10,000 feet thick. But as human activity sends more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the oceans absorb 93% of the excess heat those gases trap. The warm air and water is what's causing ice sheets and glaciers to melt at unprecedented rates.
Seroussi said that Thwaites could reach its tipping point "in the next 200 to 600 years," after which it could lose all its ice. If the entire Thwaites Glacier melted, that would result in a worldwide sea-level rise of 1.64 feet, according to the recent study (though another study estimated the rise to be closer to 2 feet).
But Thwaites prevents its neighbor glaciers from flowing into the ocean, too. So some other scientists think that if the entire Thwaites glacier were to collapse, it could destabilize surrounding glaciers on the Antarctic ice sheet as well.
If one goes, they could all go - and that chain-reaction would raise sea levels by an additional 8 feet.
Read the original article on Business Insider Copyright 2019
Very long read but it straight ethers the idea of having a green new deal and maintaining our current way of life
Between the Devil and the Green New Deal
JASPER BERNES
We cannot legislate and spend our way out of catastrophic global warming.
From space, the Bayan Obo mine in China, where 70 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals are extracted and refined, almost looks like a painting. The paisleys of the radioactive tailings ponds, miles long, concentrate the hidden colors of the earth: mineral aquamarines and ochres of the sort a painter might employ to flatter the rulers of a dying empire.
To meet the demands of the Green New Deal, which proposes to convert the US economy to zero emissions, renewable power by 2030, there will be a lot more of these mines gouged into the crust of the earth. That’s because nearly every renewable energy source depends upon non-renewable and frequently hard-to-access minerals: solar panels use indium, turbines use neodymium, batteries use lithium, and all require kilotons of steel, tin, silver, and copper. The renewable-energy supply chain is a complicated hopscotch around the periodic table and around the world. To make a high-capacity solar panel, one might need copper (atomic number 29) from Chile, indium (49) from Australia, gallium (31) from China, and selenium (34) from Germany. Many of the most efficient, direct-drive wind turbines require a couple pounds of the rare-earth metal neodymium, and there’s 140 pounds of lithium in each Tesla.
It’s not for nothing that coal miners were, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the very image of capitalist immiseration—it’s exhausting, dangerous, ugly work. Le Voreux, “the voracious one”—that’s what Émile Zola names the coal mine in Germinal, his novel of class struggle in a French company town. Capped with coal-burning smokestacks, the mine is both maze and minotaur all in one, “crouching like some evil beast at the bottom of its lair . . . puffing and panting in increasingly slow, deep bursts, as if it were struggling to digest its meal of human flesh.” Monsters are products of the earth in classical mythology, children of Gaia, born from the caves and hunted down by a cruel race of civilizing sky gods. But in capitalism, what’s monstrous is earth as animated by those civilizing energies. In exchange for these terrestrial treasures—used to power trains and ships and factories—a whole class of people is thrown into the pits. The warming earth teems with such monsters of our own making—monsters of drought and migration, famine and storm. Renewable energy is no refuge, really. The worst industrial accident in the history of the United States, the Hawk’s Nest Incident of 1930, was a renewable energy disaster. Drilling a three-mile-long inlet for a Union Carbide hydroelectric plant, five thousand workers were sickened when they hit a thick vein of silica, filling the tunnel with blinding white dust. Eight hundred eventually died of silicosis. Energy is never “clean,” as Muriel Rukeyser makes clear in the epic, documentary poem she wrote about Hawk’s Nest, “The Book of the Dead.” “Who runs through the electric wires?” she asks. “Who speaks down every road?” The infrastructure of the modern world is cast from molten grief.
Dotted with “death villages” where crops will not fruit, the region of Inner Mongolia where the Bayan Obo mine is located displays Chernobylesque cancer rates. But then again, the death villages are already here. More of them are coming if we don’t do something about climate change. What matter is a dozen death villages when half the earth may be rendered uninhabitable? What matter the gray skies over Inner Mongolia if the alternative is turning the sky an endless white with sulfuric aerosols, as last-ditch geoengineering scenarios imagine? Moralists, armchair philosophers, and lesser-evilists may try to convince you that these situations resolve into a sort of trolley-car problem: do nothing and the trolley speeds down the track toward mass death. Do something, and you switch the trolley onto a track where fewer people die, but where you are more actively responsible for their deaths. When the survival of millions or even billions hangs in the balance, as it surely does when it comes to climate change, a few dozen death villages might seem a particularly good deal, a green deal, a new deal. But climate change doesn’t resolve into a single trolley-car problem. Rather, it’s a planet-spanning tangle of switchyards, with mass death on every track.
It’s not clear we can even get enough of this stuff out of the ground, however, given the timeframe. Zero-emissions 2030 would mean mines producing now, not in five or ten years. The race to bring new supply online is likely to be ugly, in more ways than one, as slipshod producers scramble to cash in on the price bonanza, cutting every corner and setting up mines that are dangerous, unhealthy, and not particularly green. Mines require a massive outlay of investment up front, and they typically feature low return on investment, except during the sort of commodity boom we can expect a Green New Deal to produce. It can be a decade or more before the sources are developed, and another decade before they turn a profit.
“There is an infinity of worlds in which the GND fails—a million President Sanderses or, with more urgency, Ocasio-Cortezes presiding over the disaster.”
Nor is it clear how much the fruits of these mines will help us decarbonize, if energy use keeps climbing. Just because a United States encrusted in solar panels releases no greenhouse gases, that doesn’t mean its technologies are carbon neutral. It takes energy to get those minerals out of the ground, energy to shape them into batteries and photovoltaic solar panels and giant rotors for windmills, energy to dispose of them when they wear out. Mines are worked, primarily, by gas-burning vehicles. The container ships that cross the world’s seas bearing the good freight of renewables burn so much fuel they are responsible for 3 percent of planetary emissions. Electric, battery-driven motors for construction equipment and container ships are barely in the prototype stage. And what kind of massive battery would you need to get a container ship across the Pacific? Maybe a small nuclear reactor would be best?
Counting emissions within national boundaries, in other words, is like counting calories but only during breakfast and lunch. If going clean in the US makes other places dirtier, then you’ve got to add that to the ledger. The carbon sums are sure to be lower than they would be otherwise, but the reductions might not be as robust as thought, especially if producers desperate to cash in on the renewable jackpot do things as cheaply and quickly as possible, which for now means fossil fuels. On the other side, environmental remediation is costly in every way. Want to clean up those tailings ponds, bury the waste deep underground, keep the water table from being poisoned? You’re going to need motors and you’re probably going to burn oil.
Consolidating scientific opinion, the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projects that biofuels are going to be used in these cases—for construction, for industry, and for transport, wherever motors can’t be easily electrified. Biofuels put carbon into the air, but it’s carbon that was already absorbed by growing plants, so the net emissions are zero. The problem is that growing biofuels requires land otherwise devoted to crops, or carbon-absorbing wilderness. They are among the least dense of power sources. You would need a dozen acres to fill the tank of a single intercontinental jet. Emissions are only the most prominent aspect of a broader ecological crisis. Human habitation, pasture and industry, branching through the remaining wilderness in the most profligate and destructive manner, has sent shockwaves through the plant and animal kingdoms. The mass die-off of insects, with populations decreasing by four-fifths in some areas, is one part of this. The insect world is very poorly understood, but scientists suspect these die-offs and extinction events are only partially attributable to climate change, with human land use and pesticides a major culprit. Of the two billion tons of animal mass on the planet, insects account for half. Pull the pillars of the insect world away, and the food chains collapse.
To replace current US energy consumption with renewables, you’d need to devote at least 25–50 percent of the US landmass to solar, wind, and biofuels, according to the estimates made by Vaclav Smil, the grand doyen of energy studies. Is there room for that and expanding human habitation? For that and pasture for a massive meat and dairy industry? For that and the forest we’d need to take carbon out of the air? Not if capitalism keeps doing the thing which it can’t not keep doing—grow. The law of capitalism is the law of more—more energy, more stuff, more materials. It introduces efficiencies only to more effectively despoil the planet. There is no solution to the climate crisis which leaves capitalism’s compulsions to growth intact. And this is what the Green New Deal, a term coined by that oily neoliberal, Thomas Friedman, doesn’t address. It thinks you can keep capitalism, keep growth, but remove the deleterious consequences. The death villages are here to tell you that you can’t. No roses will bloom on that bush.
_____
Miners in Chile, China, and Zambia will be digging in the earth for more than just the makings of fifty million solar panels and windmills, however, since the Green New Deal also proposes to rebuild the power grid in a more efficient form, to upgrade all buildings to the highest environmental standards, and lastly, to develop a low-carbon transportation infrastructure, based on electric vehicles and high-speed rail. This would involve, needless to say, a monumental deployment of carbon-intensive materials like concrete and steel. Trillions of dollars of raw materials would need to flow into the United States to be shaped into train tracks and electric cars. Schools and hospitals, too, since alongside these green initiatives, the GND proposes universal health care and free education, not to mention a living-wage jobs guarantee.
Nothing new in politics is ever truly and completely new, and so it’s as unsurprising that the Green New Deal hearkens back to the 1930s as it is that France’s gilets jaunes revive the corpse of the French Revolution and make it dance a jig below the Arc de Triomphe. We understand the present and future through the past. As Marx notes in The Eighteenth Brumaire, people “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” In order to make new forms of class struggle intelligible, their partisans look to the past, “borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.” The “new” of the Green New Deal must therefore express itself in language decidedly old, appealing to great-grandpa’s vanished workerism and the graphic style of WPA posters.
This costume-play can be progressive rather than regressive, insofar as it consists of “glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again.”
Read the rest here - Between the Devil and the Green New Deal • Commune
Between the Devil and the Green New Deal
JASPER BERNES
We cannot legislate and spend our way out of catastrophic global warming.
From space, the Bayan Obo mine in China, where 70 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals are extracted and refined, almost looks like a painting. The paisleys of the radioactive tailings ponds, miles long, concentrate the hidden colors of the earth: mineral aquamarines and ochres of the sort a painter might employ to flatter the rulers of a dying empire.
To meet the demands of the Green New Deal, which proposes to convert the US economy to zero emissions, renewable power by 2030, there will be a lot more of these mines gouged into the crust of the earth. That’s because nearly every renewable energy source depends upon non-renewable and frequently hard-to-access minerals: solar panels use indium, turbines use neodymium, batteries use lithium, and all require kilotons of steel, tin, silver, and copper. The renewable-energy supply chain is a complicated hopscotch around the periodic table and around the world. To make a high-capacity solar panel, one might need copper (atomic number 29) from Chile, indium (49) from Australia, gallium (31) from China, and selenium (34) from Germany. Many of the most efficient, direct-drive wind turbines require a couple pounds of the rare-earth metal neodymium, and there’s 140 pounds of lithium in each Tesla.
It’s not for nothing that coal miners were, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the very image of capitalist immiseration—it’s exhausting, dangerous, ugly work. Le Voreux, “the voracious one”—that’s what Émile Zola names the coal mine in Germinal, his novel of class struggle in a French company town. Capped with coal-burning smokestacks, the mine is both maze and minotaur all in one, “crouching like some evil beast at the bottom of its lair . . . puffing and panting in increasingly slow, deep bursts, as if it were struggling to digest its meal of human flesh.” Monsters are products of the earth in classical mythology, children of Gaia, born from the caves and hunted down by a cruel race of civilizing sky gods. But in capitalism, what’s monstrous is earth as animated by those civilizing energies. In exchange for these terrestrial treasures—used to power trains and ships and factories—a whole class of people is thrown into the pits. The warming earth teems with such monsters of our own making—monsters of drought and migration, famine and storm. Renewable energy is no refuge, really. The worst industrial accident in the history of the United States, the Hawk’s Nest Incident of 1930, was a renewable energy disaster. Drilling a three-mile-long inlet for a Union Carbide hydroelectric plant, five thousand workers were sickened when they hit a thick vein of silica, filling the tunnel with blinding white dust. Eight hundred eventually died of silicosis. Energy is never “clean,” as Muriel Rukeyser makes clear in the epic, documentary poem she wrote about Hawk’s Nest, “The Book of the Dead.” “Who runs through the electric wires?” she asks. “Who speaks down every road?” The infrastructure of the modern world is cast from molten grief.
Dotted with “death villages” where crops will not fruit, the region of Inner Mongolia where the Bayan Obo mine is located displays Chernobylesque cancer rates. But then again, the death villages are already here. More of them are coming if we don’t do something about climate change. What matter is a dozen death villages when half the earth may be rendered uninhabitable? What matter the gray skies over Inner Mongolia if the alternative is turning the sky an endless white with sulfuric aerosols, as last-ditch geoengineering scenarios imagine? Moralists, armchair philosophers, and lesser-evilists may try to convince you that these situations resolve into a sort of trolley-car problem: do nothing and the trolley speeds down the track toward mass death. Do something, and you switch the trolley onto a track where fewer people die, but where you are more actively responsible for their deaths. When the survival of millions or even billions hangs in the balance, as it surely does when it comes to climate change, a few dozen death villages might seem a particularly good deal, a green deal, a new deal. But climate change doesn’t resolve into a single trolley-car problem. Rather, it’s a planet-spanning tangle of switchyards, with mass death on every track.
It’s not clear we can even get enough of this stuff out of the ground, however, given the timeframe. Zero-emissions 2030 would mean mines producing now, not in five or ten years. The race to bring new supply online is likely to be ugly, in more ways than one, as slipshod producers scramble to cash in on the price bonanza, cutting every corner and setting up mines that are dangerous, unhealthy, and not particularly green. Mines require a massive outlay of investment up front, and they typically feature low return on investment, except during the sort of commodity boom we can expect a Green New Deal to produce. It can be a decade or more before the sources are developed, and another decade before they turn a profit.
“There is an infinity of worlds in which the GND fails—a million President Sanderses or, with more urgency, Ocasio-Cortezes presiding over the disaster.”
Nor is it clear how much the fruits of these mines will help us decarbonize, if energy use keeps climbing. Just because a United States encrusted in solar panels releases no greenhouse gases, that doesn’t mean its technologies are carbon neutral. It takes energy to get those minerals out of the ground, energy to shape them into batteries and photovoltaic solar panels and giant rotors for windmills, energy to dispose of them when they wear out. Mines are worked, primarily, by gas-burning vehicles. The container ships that cross the world’s seas bearing the good freight of renewables burn so much fuel they are responsible for 3 percent of planetary emissions. Electric, battery-driven motors for construction equipment and container ships are barely in the prototype stage. And what kind of massive battery would you need to get a container ship across the Pacific? Maybe a small nuclear reactor would be best?
Counting emissions within national boundaries, in other words, is like counting calories but only during breakfast and lunch. If going clean in the US makes other places dirtier, then you’ve got to add that to the ledger. The carbon sums are sure to be lower than they would be otherwise, but the reductions might not be as robust as thought, especially if producers desperate to cash in on the renewable jackpot do things as cheaply and quickly as possible, which for now means fossil fuels. On the other side, environmental remediation is costly in every way. Want to clean up those tailings ponds, bury the waste deep underground, keep the water table from being poisoned? You’re going to need motors and you’re probably going to burn oil.
Consolidating scientific opinion, the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projects that biofuels are going to be used in these cases—for construction, for industry, and for transport, wherever motors can’t be easily electrified. Biofuels put carbon into the air, but it’s carbon that was already absorbed by growing plants, so the net emissions are zero. The problem is that growing biofuels requires land otherwise devoted to crops, or carbon-absorbing wilderness. They are among the least dense of power sources. You would need a dozen acres to fill the tank of a single intercontinental jet. Emissions are only the most prominent aspect of a broader ecological crisis. Human habitation, pasture and industry, branching through the remaining wilderness in the most profligate and destructive manner, has sent shockwaves through the plant and animal kingdoms. The mass die-off of insects, with populations decreasing by four-fifths in some areas, is one part of this. The insect world is very poorly understood, but scientists suspect these die-offs and extinction events are only partially attributable to climate change, with human land use and pesticides a major culprit. Of the two billion tons of animal mass on the planet, insects account for half. Pull the pillars of the insect world away, and the food chains collapse.
To replace current US energy consumption with renewables, you’d need to devote at least 25–50 percent of the US landmass to solar, wind, and biofuels, according to the estimates made by Vaclav Smil, the grand doyen of energy studies. Is there room for that and expanding human habitation? For that and pasture for a massive meat and dairy industry? For that and the forest we’d need to take carbon out of the air? Not if capitalism keeps doing the thing which it can’t not keep doing—grow. The law of capitalism is the law of more—more energy, more stuff, more materials. It introduces efficiencies only to more effectively despoil the planet. There is no solution to the climate crisis which leaves capitalism’s compulsions to growth intact. And this is what the Green New Deal, a term coined by that oily neoliberal, Thomas Friedman, doesn’t address. It thinks you can keep capitalism, keep growth, but remove the deleterious consequences. The death villages are here to tell you that you can’t. No roses will bloom on that bush.
_____
Miners in Chile, China, and Zambia will be digging in the earth for more than just the makings of fifty million solar panels and windmills, however, since the Green New Deal also proposes to rebuild the power grid in a more efficient form, to upgrade all buildings to the highest environmental standards, and lastly, to develop a low-carbon transportation infrastructure, based on electric vehicles and high-speed rail. This would involve, needless to say, a monumental deployment of carbon-intensive materials like concrete and steel. Trillions of dollars of raw materials would need to flow into the United States to be shaped into train tracks and electric cars. Schools and hospitals, too, since alongside these green initiatives, the GND proposes universal health care and free education, not to mention a living-wage jobs guarantee.
Nothing new in politics is ever truly and completely new, and so it’s as unsurprising that the Green New Deal hearkens back to the 1930s as it is that France’s gilets jaunes revive the corpse of the French Revolution and make it dance a jig below the Arc de Triomphe. We understand the present and future through the past. As Marx notes in The Eighteenth Brumaire, people “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” In order to make new forms of class struggle intelligible, their partisans look to the past, “borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.” The “new” of the Green New Deal must therefore express itself in language decidedly old, appealing to great-grandpa’s vanished workerism and the graphic style of WPA posters.
This costume-play can be progressive rather than regressive, insofar as it consists of “glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again.”
Read the rest here - Between the Devil and the Green New Deal • Commune
Last edited:
It’s the End of the World as They Know It
The distinct burden of being a climate scientist
STORY BY DAVID CORN; PHOTOS BY DEVIN YALKINJULY 8, 2019
Devin Yalkin
On election night 2016, Kim Cobb, a professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, was on Christmas Island, the world’s largest ring-shaped coral reef atoll, about 1,300 miles south of Hawaii. A climate scientist, she was collecting coral skeletons to produce estimates of past ocean temperatures. She had been taking these sorts of research trips for two decades, and over recent years she had witnessed about 85 percent of the island’s reef system perish due to rising ocean temperatures. “I was diving with tears in my eyes,” she recalls.
In a row house made of cinder blocks on the tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, she monitored the American election results, using a satellite uplink that took several minutes to load a page. When she saw Donald Trump’s victory, she felt shock and soon descended into severe depression. “I had the firm belief that Washington would act on climate change and would be acting soon,” the 44-year-old Cobb says. “When Trump was elected, it came crashing down.”
Read more here - What happens when you can see disaster unfolding, and nobody listens?
The distinct burden of being a climate scientist
STORY BY DAVID CORN; PHOTOS BY DEVIN YALKINJULY 8, 2019
Devin Yalkin
On election night 2016, Kim Cobb, a professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, was on Christmas Island, the world’s largest ring-shaped coral reef atoll, about 1,300 miles south of Hawaii. A climate scientist, she was collecting coral skeletons to produce estimates of past ocean temperatures. She had been taking these sorts of research trips for two decades, and over recent years she had witnessed about 85 percent of the island’s reef system perish due to rising ocean temperatures. “I was diving with tears in my eyes,” she recalls.
In a row house made of cinder blocks on the tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, she monitored the American election results, using a satellite uplink that took several minutes to load a page. When she saw Donald Trump’s victory, she felt shock and soon descended into severe depression. “I had the firm belief that Washington would act on climate change and would be acting soon,” the 44-year-old Cobb says. “When Trump was elected, it came crashing down.”
Read more here - What happens when you can see disaster unfolding, and nobody listens?
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NYTIMES.COM
It Looks Like a Lake Made for Instagram. It’s a Dump for Chemical Waste.
jfc
36 mins ·
The lake in Siberia has become a draw for people posting onInstagram. There is only one problem: The lake is a man-made waste site for a power plant.
About this website
NYTIMES.COM
It Looks Like a Lake Made for Instagram. It’s a Dump for Chemical Waste.
jfc
Paul Beckwith gives an in-depth overview of whats going in NOLA.
Part 1
Part 2
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Residents have been warned to stock up on drinking water and non-perishable food, as well as other emergency supplies.
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BBC.COM
Flooded New Orleans braces for possible hurricane
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Residents have been warned to stock up on drinking water and non-perishable food, as well as other emergency supplies.
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BBC.COM
Flooded New Orleans braces for possible hurricane
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
The New Yorker
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NEWYORKER.COM
The Case for Declaring a National Climate Emergency
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The warming that happens over the next few decades could kill all of the world’s coral reefs, lead to even more severe storms and wildfires, and set off tipping points like the irreversible dissolution of the Greenland ice sheet.
About this website
NEWYORKER.COM
The Case for Declaring a National Climate Emergency