Amy Coney Barrett, Liar and Climate Denier, Disqualifies Herself for Any Position Involving Factual Evaluation

 

by Thomas Neuburger

It couldn't be more simple. When Notre Dame Law professor and Trump Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was asked at her Senate hearing about climate change (one of the few times senators questioned her on this subject), she had this to say:

“I don’t think I am competent to opine on what causes global warming or not.”

Every human on the planet is "competent to opine" on what causes global warming. Every human on the planet knows what causes global warming. We are causing global warming, and we will drive most of our children off of the planet and to their graves if we don't start addressing it in a meaningful and effective way. 

Here's her full quote, courtesy of this piece by David Sirota and Andrew Perez:

“I don’t think I am competent to opine on what causes global warming or not. I don’t think that my views on global warming or climate change are relevant to the job I would do as a judge, nor do I feel like I have views that are informed enough and I haven’t studied scientific data. I’m not really in a position to offer any kind of informed opinion on what I think causes global warming.”

All of this is disqualifying on its face — not just her denialism, but this as well:

I don’t think that my views on global warming or climate change are relevant to the job I would do as a judge.

If confirmed before the election, she could help decide a landmark case involving a fossil fuel firm, Shell Oil, for which her father worked as a long-time lawyer:

Less than two weeks before the confirmation hearings, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal by Royal Dutch Shell and other oil giants that are being sued by cities and states for the climate damage those companies created. Shell and the others are asking justices to allow the case to be heard in federal court.

In 2018, Inside Climate News reported that “internal company documents uncovered by a Dutch news organization show that the oil giant Shell had a deep understanding, dating at least to the 1980s, of the science and risks of global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions.” 

Barrett’s father, Michael, has written that “most of my legal career was spent as an attorney with Shell in New Orleans.”

Her "views on global warming" will be "relevant to the job" she does almost immediately, and hundreds of times more as well in the 40 years she could reasonably expect to serve.

Again, a liar, disqualified by her own testimony from any judicial position involving evaluation based on facts.

Laughing On the Way to the Gallows

Twitter had fun with her answer, though the consequences of it — a climate denier on the Court — will be no fun at all. Bill McKibben's quip is above. Here are a few others:

Sunrise Movement: "I have read things about gravity. I would not say I have firm views on it ... this answer is disqualifying."

Chris Andrea Robert: "Is the Earth flat or round? I've read things, I would not say I have firm views on it."

Gallows humor. Graveyard jests. Grinning on the way to the needle and the rope. 

As Eric Holthaus wrote, "It’s ... a sign of a complete failure of our democracy – to be confirming a climate denier to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court during a moment when urgent climate action is an existential priority."

Notre Dame Helps Trump Put a Climate Denier on the Court

And a complete failure of the University of Notre Dame as well, which appears, both institutionally and from its Law School, to fully support her nomination.  

Barrett certainly has the support of it president, Fr. John Jenkins (Barrett is "a person of the utmost integrity who, as a jurist, acts first and foremost in accord with the law"), and the Dean of its Law School (she's "an absolutely brilliant legal scholar and jurist [and] one of the most thoughtful, open-minded...people I have ever met"). 

In 2017, when she was nominated to the 7th District Court, she had 100% support of its Law School faculty. A 2020 letter signed by 88 faculty members requested that she "halt the nomination process until after Election Day," but no faculty members of the Law School signed on.

This tells you more about Fr. Jenkins, the makeup of its Law School, and, frankly, Notre Dame in general, than it does about Amy Coney Barrett, who doesn't have the guts to say word one about the greatest challenge facing our species — and her children — in the 40 years she'll sit permanently on the Court.

A Complete Failure of Democracy

Speaking as a graduate of the university in question myself, I'm beyond appalled — and appalled by the Democrats' lack of response at the hearing as well. 

Where are their cries that in 2020 a climate denier is unqualified to sit on any federal bench, much less the Supreme Court? And where is the first question from the Democrats about the pending Shell Oil case?

Holthaus is right: this is a failure of our democracy. The consequences will be great, and God help Amy Coney Barrett if her God is just.

 

If Saving the Climate Is the Question, Joe Biden Is Not the Answer

CO2 mitigation curves that allow us to keep global warming below 1.5°C, the only mark that keeps the planet reasonable livable. For discussion see "Poised on the Brink: A Tale of Hope and Change." It's rightly said that "the road to 2°C is steep; the road to 1.5°C is a cliff."

by Thomas Neuburger

The most important issue that humans have faced in their history is the impending catastrophic climate disaster. ... 'We have until 2030 to avoid catastrophe.'" — Noam Chomsky, in a new pro-Biden campaign ad, "#VoteTrumpOut"

In a new ad Noam Chomsky correctly says, "The most important issue that humans have faced in their history is the impending catastrophic climate disaster."

He's exactly right, the "impending catastrophic climate disaster" is an existential crisis, a crisis of our existence itself, and if we don't face it with the most radical of solutions between now and 2030, Americans and all of the rest of our species will scramble for cover and triage for most of the rest of this millennium. Scramble for survival, in other words, until the climate system stabilizes into a "hot new normal."

When will all this end? The planet will continue to heat until the day...

 • When humans stop emitting CO2, either by choice, by devolution to pre-manufacturing life, or by extinction; and

 • When all of the secondary effects of the carbon we've already burned have had their say. When loss of ice; loss of temperate zones; loss of wealth, habitat, and farmable arable land; loss of livestock and life-preserving species like bees; global and regional wars, famines and plagues; collapse of our economic systems; collapse of all social systems larger than tribes have each had their moment in the sun, then left the ravaged scene.

Only after these two conditions are met will the climate/life cycle system of the earth reach a new equilibrium and stop adjusting to the effects of human-emitted atmospheric CO2.

The "hot new normal" will not be as friendly as our comfortable old normal, the Holocene, the climate that gave birth to civilized man with all our wonders and delights, but it will at least be a stable and predictable environment for whoever is left to live in it, at least until the next great cataclysm  — a comet, a massive tectonic shift — forces its own rearrangement on our only home in the world.

So Chomsky is not exaggerating. The life of our species and our way of living that life is literally at stake. We could easily go from smart phones everywhere to homeless campfires set on rubbish heaps, a global assembly of disconnected pre-industrial and mostly non-farming societies in not too many generations.

With that as the opener of the ad, the statement of this great urgency, it's appropriate to say that Donald Trump is not the answer — is in fact the perfect inverse of the answer. "Another four years of Trump," Chomsky announces at the beginning, "may literally lead us to the stage where the survival of organized human society is deeply imperiled. ... Trump is the worst person in the world on this issue."

"Get rid of Trump, and then we have opportunities," he concludes. All true.

And yet I find myself wishing, if climate is the existential question, that Joe "Fossil Fuel" Biden was not the only answer on offer. Because I don't think Joe Biden, or whoever fleshes out his empty suit in the next four years, is capable of the radical change these radical times require.

After all, didn't Joe Biden, with the eager, happy help of the entire Democratic leadership, work to defeat the mildest "radical" of my whole life on earth, the rumpled FDR who ran against him?

Biden's own version of the Green New Deal, for example, "wouldn’t ban natural gas and oil fracking," says this glowing report. If Sanders was Biden's enemy, he of the actual Green New Deal, how on earth can Biden be our friend?

Does this mean Don't Vote for Biden? No, nor does it mean Don't Vote. It simply means if climate is your question, this election offers no answer.
  

On February 6 Antarctica Was Warmer Than Orlando, or Why I Support Only Sanders

Location of Esperanza Station on the northern tip of Antarctica

by Thomas Neuburger

The climate news out of Antarctica isn't good. As Vice News put it on February 7, "Good Morning. It's 65 Degrees in Antarctica. That's warmer than Orlando today."

Since then the news from the South Pole has gotten worse. From the World Meteorological Association on February 14 (emphasis added):

The Argentine research base, Esperanza, on the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, set a new record temperature of 18.3°C on 6 February, beating the former record of 17.5°C on 24 March 2015, according to Argentina’s national meteorological service (SMN).

A committee for WMO’s Weather and Climate Extremes Archive will now verify whether this indeed is a new record for the Antarctic continent, which is defined as the main continental landmass.

“Everything we have seen thus far indicates a likely legitimate record but we will of course begin a formal evaluation of the record once we have full data from SMN and on the meteorological conditions surrounding the event. The record appears to be likely associated (in the short term) with what we call a regional "foehn" event over the area:  a rapid warming of air coming down a slope/mountain,” according to WMO’s Weather and Climate Extremes rapporteur, Randall Cerveny. ...

WMO is seeking to obtain the actual temperature data for a montitoring station on Seymour Island, part of a chain of islands off the Antarctic peninsula. Media reports say that researchers logged a temperature of 20.75°C. Mr Cerveny cautioned that it is premature to say that Antarctica has exceeded 20°C for the first time.

Twenty degrees Celsius (68°F) is a marker for obvious reasons, an even number that's never before been crossed. It's been crossed now. You could wear shorts and a T-shirt on a 68° day, even on Seymour Island.

Building Rome in a Day

A personal note: As part of my "day job" I interact in many venues with people at the most progressive end of the Democratic Party infrastructure, and I keep being told by some of the smartest in these groups that we need to be practical (in the real sense, not the fake "I want to slow you down" sense) in our attempt to enact policies like Medicare For All and the Green New Deal. I keep being told that you can't build Rome in a day.

And those who say that are right in a sense; these things do take time. The Republican Party didn't destroy a third of the electorate and more than half of the federal government in one or two cycles — it took decades of evil, dedicated work and endless seduction of eager neoliberal Democrats to create the mess we're in now.

And yet, at the rate things are advancing — not just on the climate front but on the "rebellion against the pathological rich" front — we just don't have a decade to work with. The climate news says that. The election of Trump says that. We may not even have five years.

Which leads me to argue back: Look, even if we elect a better-than-Trump, half-measures candidate, we're still not better off. Our grandchildren will curse us all the same.

I don't think that sinks in, even to some of the better minds among them. Perhaps seeing a building that's about to fall, but hasn't, isn't enough. Perhaps the building has to start its descent before most in position to act will take the urgency of the crisis seriously. After all, the bricks haven't fallen on their grandchildren's bodies yet.

But they soon will, all too soon for all too many. It's not enough to act. We need to act in time enough to matter. I guess that's why I support Sanders and no one else, the only one who will even try to build Rome in a day.

A slow-handed, good-hearted captain of the Titanic is still a disaster just about to happen — a person blind to what hovers in the mist, a person who cannot feel its approaching breath.
  

Generating Electricity From the Cold Night Sky

A device that generates electricity from temperature differences, drawing heat from below and radiating it into the night sky (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

Large streams from little fountains flow,
Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.
— Folk proverb

In the race against time to mitigate the coming climate tsunami, people of this century often turn to the hope that the "miracle of science" will save us. Usually this takes the form of some flavor of geoengineering — seeding the sky with debris (technically, aerosols) in an attempt to emulate the global dimming caused by volcanic eruptions, such as Mount Pinatubo in 1991 — or that ultimate unicorn, artificial "carbon capture and storage" (CCS) techniques, which don't exist at any scale worth mentioning.

After all, this generation has seen greater advances in science than any generation ever born. Science has put a man on the moon, exploded the atom, put 75" television screens as thin as your hand in every American home that wants one, connected virtually all of the country to a small set of (billionaire-controlled) minds in the guise of "entertainment" and to each other in the guise of inescapable mobile device–based "social media."

If science could do all that, why couldn't it save us from something as simple as global warming. How hard could it be to re-cool the earth?

Sadly, this isn't going to happen. The earth will be recooled only in the way it always is — through natural processes.

What may happen, though, is a vast reduction in carbon-based energy usage via discoveries like the one below, through ways to generate power from renewable sources unimagined even yesterday. (To quit carbon, though, our billionaires would have to be made to want to, but that's a side note to this discussion.)

Heat From the Cold Night Sky

Consider this: A "solar" panel that draws heat from its lower side, moves that heat to its upper side and radiates it into the cool night sky, and from this simple transfer, generates electricity. That electricity powers the stations that warm your homes. Heat from the darkness of space.

From the study's Summary (emphasis mine):

A large fraction of the world’s population still lacks access to electricity, particularly at night when photovoltaic systems no longer operate. The ability to generate electricity at night could be a fundamentally enabling capability for a wide range of applications, including lighting and low-power sensors. Here, we demonstrate a low-cost strategy to harness the cold of space through radiative cooling to generate electricity with an off-the-shelf thermoelectric generator. Unlike traditional thermoelectric generators, our device couples the cold side of the thermoelectric module to a sky-facing surface that radiates heat to the cold of space and has its warm side heated by the surrounding air, enabling electricity generation at night. We experimentally demonstrate 25 mW/m 2 of power generation and validate a model that accurately captures the device’s performance. Further, we show that the device can directly power a light emitting diode, thereby generating light from the darkness of space itself.

As this write-up at OilPrice.com notes, the process works, but is still in the beginning stages with respect to scale. "The technology is still under development, and the researchers have already planned improvements including enhanced insulation around the top plate that could potentially raise the device’s energy production to 0.5 watts per square meter or more, but the potential outcomes are boundless. If this technology could eventually be refined to produce anywhere close to as much energy as a standard solar panel, it would completely transform the renewable energy sector, making it a far greater contender to take the place of fossil fuels."

It may take a while (though one hopes not), but this is well beyond the concept state. It's entirely new, yet entirely realistic. The whole of the airline industry, the vast and ho-hum world of global travel, started with a powered glidere flight at Kitty Hawk of just 120 feet.

From little acorns...
 

U.S. Military Worries the U.S. Military Could Collapse Under Extreme Climate Change

Image: U.S. Army/John Hall

by Thomas Neuburger

A note about one more aspect of the pending climate collapse: The U.S. military is concerned that the military itself could collapse under the stress of extreme climate change.

This comes via a report in Vice Motherboard by the valuable Nafeez Ahmed. Under Trump's head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, the Pentagon has commissioned and released a report showing just that. Ahmed writes (emphasis mine):

The report, titled Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army, was launched by the U.S. Army War College in partnership with NASA in May at the Wilson Center in Washington DC. The report was commissioned by Gen. Milley during his previous role as the Army’s Chief of Staff. It was made publicly available in August via the Center for Climate and Security, but didn't get a lot of attention at the time.

The two most prominent scenarios in the report focus on the risk of a collapse of the power grid within “the next 20 years,” and the danger of disease epidemics. Both could be triggered by climate change in the near-term, it notes.

The report also warns that the US military should prepare for new foreign interventions in Syria-style conflicts, triggered due to climate-related impacts. Bangladesh in particular is highlighted as the most vulnerable country to climate collapse in the world.

“The permanent displacement of a large portion of the population of Bangladesh would be a regional catastrophe with the potential to increase global instability,” the report warns. “This is a potential result of climate change complications in just one country. Globally, over 600 million people live at sea level.”

Sea level rise, which could go higher than 2 meters by 2100 according to one recent study, “will displace tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people, creating massive, enduring instability,” the report adds.

The US should therefore be ready to act not only in Bangladesh, but in many other regions, like the rapidly melting Arctic—where the report recommends the US military should take advantage of its hydrocarbon resources and new transit routes to repel Russian encroachment.

But without urgent reforms, the report warns that the US military itself could end up effectively collapsing as it tries to respond to climate collapse. It could lose capacity to contain threats in the US and could wilt into “mission failure” abroad due to inadequate water supplies.

The report is here (pdf), and it's sobering reading. It's also rich in detail, very well done, and a great place to start if one is interested in where and how each of our physical, political and social systems — from sea level rise to water availability to power availability; from market challenges to mass migration — is vulnerable.

There's even a section on fixing "the environmentally oblivious culture of the Army." As I said, the report is very well done.

Here's a summary of its recommendations (again, emphasis mine):

Summary of Recommendations

In light of these findings, the military must consider changes in doctrine, organization, equipping, and training to anticipate changing environmental requirements. Greater inter-governmental and inter-organizational cooperation, mandated through formal framework agreements, will allow the DoD to anticipate those areas where future conflict is more likely to occur and to implement a campaign-plan-like approach to proactively prepare for likely conflict and mitigate the impacts of mass migration. Focused research and early funding of anticipated future equipment and requirements will spread the cost of adaptation across multiple budget cycles, diminish the “sticker shock” and impacts to overall spending.

Finally, the DoD must begin now to promulgate a culture of environmental stewardship across the force. Lagging behind public and political demands for energy efficiency and minimal environmental footprint will significantly hamstring the Department’s efforts to face national security challenges. The Department will struggle to maintain its positive public image and that will impact the military’s ability to receive the required funding to face the growing number of security challenges.

Forget Trump and his administration — I can't think of a single past Democratic administration that would mandate that the Pentagon "promulgate a culture of environmental stewardship across the force" in any but a cosmetic way.

Would a future Sanders administration do this? Yes. Would a Warren administration? According to her "green military proposal," perhaps.

Would any of the viable others in any meaningful way? I think not a chance in hell.
 

Axios: What's the Actual Cost of Not Addressing Climate Change?

The amount of carbon tax — a neoliberal solution — required to achieve just a modest reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 (source). Bernie Sanders wants to reach 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization no later than 2050. One of those two ideas just might solve the problem, and the other has not a prayer of working.

by Thomas Neuburger

Every report on the release of Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal plan contains at least one quote in which someone is shocked, dismayed or dismissive about the cost — $16 trillion in total — even though the plan will, as the proposal itself says, "pay for itself" in a number of ways:

• This plan will pay for itself over 15 years. Experts have scored the plan and its economic effects. We will pay for the massive investment we need to reverse the climate crisis by:
• Making the fossil fuel industry pay for their pollution, through litigation, fees, and taxes, and eliminating federal fossil fuel subsidies.
• Generating revenue from the wholesale of energy produced by the regional Power Marketing Authorities. Revenues will be collected from 2023-2035, and after 2035 electricity will be virtually free, aside from operations and maintenance costs.
• Scaling back military spending on maintaining global oil dependence.
• Collecting new income tax revenue from the 20 million new jobs created by the plan.
• Reduced need for federal and state safety net spending due to the creation of millions of good-paying, unionized jobs.
• Making the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share.

The proposal goes on to note (emphasis mine):

The cost of inaction is unacceptable. Economists estimate that if we do not take action, we will lose $34.5 trillion in economic activity by the end of the century. And the benefits are enormous: by taking bold and decisive action, we will save $2.9 trillion over 10 years, $21 trillion over 30 years, and $70.4 trillion over 80 years.

When it comes to numbers this big, the mind shuts down. Spending $16 to save $34 is easily understood. Spending $16,000 to save $34,000 is not beyond most imaginations.

But spending $16 trillion to save $34 trillion? Those are scary numbers, no matter which side of the cost-benefit equation they're on. The mind shuts down contemplating them and Sanders' opponents are hoping voters will be so frightened of either one, they won't begin to consider the importance of the moon-shot-type project he's proposing.

The problem is, $34 trillion isn't the actual number, the actual cost of not addressing the climate crisis. Try ten times as much. The real cost of inaction is above $500 trillion.

The Real Cost of Climate Change

Consider this, from that famously alarmist, extremely hard-left news source Axios, in a piece entitled "The cost of climate change." They begin with an obvious fact — the amount of wealth that exists on the planet today:

There's $500 trillion of wealth on planet Earth, give or take: Maybe $230 trillion in land and property, $200 trillion in debt and $70 trillion in equity.

And then the obvious conclusion: All of it is at risk if the climate goes south while we go north (or vice versa). Actually, more than all of it if future wealth is considered.

Axios again:

The big picture: All of that wealth comes, ultimately, from the planet, and the climate. Specifically, it has come from a stable climate. William Nordhaus points out in his 2013 book "The Climate Casino" that “the last 7,000 years have been the most stable climatic period in more than 100,000 years.” The last 7,000 years have also seen the rise of civilization and the creation of that $500 trillion in wealth. This is not a coincidence.

• Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize this week, in an announcement that coincided with the release of a hugely important UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on what will happen to the world when it gets 1.5°C, or 2.7°F, warmer than preindustrial levels.

The report puts the cost of a 1.5°C increase at $54 trillion, in today's money.

• You think $54 trillion is a lot? That number comes from research that also says that a 2.0°C increase will cause $69 trillion of damage, and a 3.7°C increase will cause a stunning $551 trillion in damage.
• $551 trillion is more than all the wealth currently existing in the world, which gives an indication of just how much richer humanity could become if we don't first destroy our planet.
• We'll be environmentally richer, too. While it's hard to put a dollar value on that, the value of environmental benefits has been rising steadily over time and will continue to do so. Already, we regret environmental destruction in the past and would happily give up a small fraction of our current wealth to undo it.

The bottom line for Axios: "Human civilization has reached the very end of reaping the dividends from a stable climate. Compared to recent decades, the world in 2100 will have a 13% reduction in crop yields (and those crops will also be less nutritious); it will also have 2.8 billion more people at risk from drought in any given month."

The Axios solutions all come from the neoliberal playbook — encourage the market to address the problem via carbon taxes, and so on — with not a word about more forceful responses like ending carbon subsidies, getting carbon-fueled cars and truck off the road, and mandating the conversion power sources to alternative energy, as the Sanders plan contemplates.

Still, the good neoliberal folks at Axios get it. More than $500 trillion in wealth will disappear if we fail to address the coming climate crisis.

Now all they need to get is the need to force the solution, and not just encourage it.
  

It's Raining Plastic, From the Pyrenees to the Rockies to the Arctic

Rainwater samples collected across Colorado and analyzed under a microscope contained a rainbow of plastic fibers. Photograph: USGS (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

I often worry whether we aren't one of those species that self-eliminates, that commits "ecological suicide" as many bacteria do when they turn their environment too acid to live in. It's certain we're polluting the air with CO2 in a way that will change the climate from habitable to very inhospitable.

But we're doing this in other ways as well — according to the latest news, surprisingly, with plastic. To be more exact, the microplastic that results from the breakdown of our trash, which as you likely know if you look at your garbage, is filled with plastic.

Microplastics are fibers that can be seen only with a microscope. The latest reports show that microplastic is not only present in abundance in the ocean, where much of our bulk plastic resides, but also in the air and, via the same settling effect that drops soot and dust to the surface of the earth, on the ground we walk across.

Day after day, year after year, minute after minute, a film of microplastic particles is raining on the earth. The more we produce it, the more we will live in it. If in a thousand years we revert as a species to Stone Age life, reduced in numbers and struggling to survive, we'll find the ground, not rich in minerals as it was when our ancestors first walked on it, but rich in the indestructible garbage our descendants' ancestors — us — cast off on the way to their own self-caused demise.

One report from April of this year in Science reveals the amount of plastic descending on the Pyrenees in France:

Prior studies have shown that microplastics, which can be ingested and inhaled by humans—and which may lead to reproductive issues in some marine mollusks—can rise up into the atmosphere and drop back to solid ground in the cities they come from. But scientists thought these plastics couldn’t travel very far from their urban sources.

To find out just how far they can go, the researchers collected particles falling from the sky in dust, rain, and snow for 5 months at the Bernadouze meteorological station in the Pyrenees mountains in southwestern France—100 kilometers from the nearest city.

To their horror, the authors found plastics, predominantly the kind from the single-use packaging used in shipping. From their sample, they determined that each day, an average of 365 plastic particles sifted down from above into the square meter surface of the collection device. If comparable quantities of airborne microplastic fall across the rest of the country, the researchers estimate roughly 2000 tons of plastic blanket France each year, they report today in Nature Geoscience.

Another report in the Guardian says this about plastic falling on the Rockies:

Plastic was the furthest thing from Gregory Wetherbee’s mind when he began analyzing rainwater samples collected from the Rocky Mountains. “I guess I expected to see mostly soil and mineral particles,” said the US Geological Survey researcher. Instead, he found multicolored microscopic plastic fibers.

The discovery, published in a recent study (pdf) titled “It is raining plastic”, raises new questions about the amount of plastic waste permeating the air, water, and soil virtually everywhere on Earth. ...

Rainwater samples collected across Colorado and analyzed under a microscope contained a rainbow of plastic fibers, as well as beads and shards. The findings shocked Wetherbee, who had been collecting the samples in order to study nitrogen pollution.

There's even plastic landing on the ice floes of the Arctic. According to the UPI in April: "New research published on Wednesday in Science Advances shows that even the remote ice floes of the Arctic have measurable amounts of microplastics and microfibers gracing their surfaces."

We eat it, we drink it, we breathe it. Does it hurt us? Hard to imagine it doesn't, though the subject is just now coming under scrutiny, as this study published in Science Direct notes:

Microplastics have recently been detected in atmospheric fallout in Greater Paris. Due to their small size, they can be inhaled and may induce lesions in the respiratory system dependent on individual susceptibility and particle properties. Even though airborne microplastics are a new topic, several observational studies have reported the inhalation of plastic fibers and particles, especially in exposed workers, often coursing with dyspnea caused by airway and interstitial inflammatory responses.

While the authors notes that inhaled microplastic can cause respiratory lesions, dispnea (shortness of breath) and inflammation, they don't mention the relationship of chronic inflammation with cancer.

I'm frankly not sure we can address the problem of plastic, for the same reason we can't address the problem of fossil fuel as a source of atmospheric CO2. Both are too embedded in the way our species lives.

As a result, both will be embedded in the way we die as well.
 

Report: Just Ten Percent of Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Would Completely Pay For a Global "Green Transition"

Stephanie Kelton explaining what Ben Bernanke meant in 2009 when he said the Fed doesn't "spend tax money" when it transfers money to banks, but simply changes numbers in a computer. "To lend to a bank, we simply use a computer to mark up the size of the account they have with the Fed." Kelton: "It's exactly like putting points on the screen at a baseball game," and a scorekeeper can "never run out of points."

by Thomas Neuburger

I'm not a fan of the "how are you going to pay for it?" scam, since it's obvious the government never pays for anything it really wants in the sense of raising new revenue. It just spends the money. For proof, just look at the Iraq War, or any recent war, or any Republican tax cut plan. (See the video above for a slightly longer explanation of why governments that control their own currency never have to tax to spend.)

The fact is, a government that issues its own currency and whose economy is not ravaged by inflation can always write checks to buy anything it wants — and the idea that it "pays for" what it wants by selling bonds is a fiction, since every bond sale is a trade of an asset for an asset, not a loan. The Treasury market also gives rich people something safe to invest in. Neither of these goals is related to financing government spending.

But for those who do fetishize "paying for it," here's one for the books.

Everyone knows that at some point, the burning of fossil fuels will have to stop completely. In fact, it will stop completely; the only question is whether will be stopped voluntary, because we chose to stop — or involuntary, because there are so few of us left that it won't change atmospheric CO2 no matter what the survivors burn.

As a consequence, everyone also knows that in order to end fossil fuel use, global governments will have stop paying companies like Exxon to dig up more carbon to burn. In other words, global fossil fuel subsidies will have to go to zero.

Turns out that if fossil fuels subsidies did go to zero, enough money will be freed up to "pay for" a complete "green transition" — perhaps as many as ten of them.

Damian Carrington, writing at the Guardian, explains:

Just 10% of fossil fuel subsidy cash 'could pay for green transition'

Redirecting small portion of subsidies would unleash clean energy revolution, says report 

Switching just some of the huge subsidies supporting fossil fuels to renewables would unleash a runaway clean energy revolution, according to a new report, significantly cutting the carbon emissions that are driving the climate crisis.

Coal, oil and gas get more than $370bn (£305bn) a year in support, compared with $100bn for renewables, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) report found. Just 10-30% of the fossil fuel subsidies would pay for a global transition to clean energy, the IISD said.

Ending fossil fuel subsidies has long been seen as vital to tackling the climate emergency, with the G20 nations pledging in 2009 to phase them out, but progress has been limited. In May, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, attacked subsidies, saying: “What we are doing is using taxpayers’ money – which means our money – to boost hurricanes, to spread droughts, to melt glaciers, to bleach corals. In one word: to destroy the world.”

As Richard Bridle, IISD Senior Policy Advisor, put it in the IISD press release, "Public money is far better spent delivering the clean energy transition than propping up the fossil fuel industry." He's careful to point out that the "reform of subsidies alone is not enough to meet global emissions targets," but we knew that. Ending fossil fuel subsidies isn't the same as ending fossil fuel emissions, but it's a necessary first step.

I'll go one further than Bridle. Any U.S. presidential candidate who does not favor ending carbon fuel subsidies at the fastest possible rate is not serious about climate change, independent of any other words that emerge from her mouth.

In fact, any U.S. presidential candidate who does not run on ending carbon fuel subsidies is the enemy of everyone else on the planet.

In the long run, meaning in the lives of our grandchildren, will it matter if that candidate is marginally less bad than Trump? Our grandchildren, as they're cooking what they've killed over a fire in a neo-paleolithic cave, will still ask, "Who's Trump? I don't think he's the one who did this to us."
 

Are New Fungal Superbugs Emerging Thanks to Climate Change?

Candida auris fungus (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

Normally humans are not much troubled by fungal infections (as opposed to bacterial and viral diseases, which are far more common). There are several reasons for this — a healthy human's immune system being one — but another is that the temperature of the human body is simply too high to support most fungal life.

That seems to be changing, however, and the cause seems to be climate change — that increased global temperatures are forcing certain strains of fungi to adapt to warmer environments than they would normally find tolerable, thus making persistent fungal life in human and animal hosts much more possible.

An added wrinkle is that at least one of these fungi, Candida auris, is highly drug-resistant.

The layperson's version of the story comes from CNN ("Climate crisis might be behind the rise of mysterious superbug C. auris, study suggests"), but let's turn instead to this press release from the American Society for Microbiology, published at EurekAlert (emphasis added):

Washington, DC - July 23, 2019 - Global warming may have played a pivotal role in the emergence of Candida auris, according to a new study published in mBio, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. C. auris, which is often multi-drug resistant and is a serious public health threat, may be the first example of a new fungal disease emerging from climate change.

"The argument that we are making based on comparison to other close relative fungi is that as the climate has gotten warmer, some of these organisms, including Candida auris, have adapted to the higher temperature, and as they adapt, they break through human's protective temperatures," said Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, Chair, Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland. "Global warming may lead to new fungal diseases that we don't even know about right now."

C. auris emerged independently on three continents simultaneously, with each clade being genetically distinct. "What is unusual about Candida auris is that it appeared in three different continents at the same time, and the isolates from India, South Africa, and South America are not related. Something happened to allow this organism to bubble up and cause disease. We began to look into the possibility that it could be climate change," said Dr. Casadevall. "The reasons that fungal infections are so rare in humans is that most of the fungi in the environment cannot grow at the temperatures or our body." Mammalian resistance to invasive fungal diseases results from a combination of high basal temperatures that create a thermal restriction zone and advanced host defense mechanisms in the form of adaptive and innate immunity.

Dr. Casadevall concludes, "What this study suggests is this is the beginning of fungi adapting to higher temperatures, and we are going to have more and more problems as the century goes on. Global warming will lead to selection of fungal lineages that are more thermally tolerant, such that they can breach the mammalian thermal restriction zone."

The underlying study is here — "On the Emergence of Candida auris: Climate Change, Azoles, Swamps, and Birds" — and it's worth reading, especially the Abstract, introduction and conclusion.

The study's dry language, when parsed for its actual meaning, is frightening: "Widening of the geographic range of innately thermotolerant pathogenic fungi and the acquisition of virulence traits in thermotolerant nonpathogenic environmental fungi may shape the 21st century as an era of expanding fungal disease for both the fauna and flora of the planet."

Could a multidrug-resistant, hitherto unknown group of deadly superfungi reshape the 21st century? Hard to imagine it wouldn't.

Even those who expect to escape, via their great wealth and mobility, the climate crisis they have created may have a hard time escaping the pathogens their own pathology has spawned.

There's a kind of awful, symmetrical irony in that.
  

A World Without Ice

by Thomas Neuburger

In a new book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, author Dahr Jamail writes about the coming world without any standing glacial ice anywhere on earth. He capsulizes his thoughts in this interview with Dharna Noor at the Real News Network:

DHARNA NOOR: These indicators of the climate crisis are often presented as just statistics— sometimes ones that have implications maybe for the ecosystems around ice melting, rarely ones that are wreaking havoc on all life on Earth. But in this book, in The End of Ice, you write, “The reporting in this book has turned out to be far more difficult to deal with than the years I spent reporting from war torn Iraq.” And later you even say that, “we’re setting ourselves up for our own extinction.”

Talk about the extent of the earth’s ice loss, and how seeing it up close impacted you, and what it means for life around the planet?

DAHR JAMAIL: ... In four years’ time, [the Antarctic has] lost 34 times the amount of ice as was lost in the Antarctic over the same period. And so, what this essentially means is an area of sea ice in the Antarctic, larger than the size of Mexico, vanished in a four-year time frame. It went from a record high to a record low of sea ice extent. This is how fast things are happening in front of our eyes, coupled with the loss of terrestrial ice like in the Himalaya and in the lower 48 United States.

We have other reports show that we could have no ice whatsoever, no glacial ice whatsoever, in the lower 48 by the year 2100.

A life with no glacial ice anywhere in the continental U.S. is almost unimaginable. Extrapolating that thought throughout the globe is beyond what most people can even begin to picture.

Yet the consequences are easy to detail. Jamail continues: 

DAHR JAMAIL: And so, if you think about the human impacts of this, right now as we speak, almost a quarter of a billion people around the world rely on glacial ice just for their drinking water alone. If we look at agricultural impacts, you mentioned the Himalaya, the loss of ice in the Himalaya, some studies showing we could see almost the entirety of glacial ice in the Himalaya gone by 2100.

Well, in the Hindu Kush region, that’s the source of seven major river systems in Asia. 1.5 billion people rely on that water for drinking and for agricultural purposes, so if all of that ice is gone by 2100, where do those 1.5 billion people go? Because you can’t live somewhere where there’s no water, and then what happens in those areas where they go?

So you start to think about the cascading effects, just the human impact. I’m not even talking about the ecological impact, which is equally devastating. But if you start looking at these cascading impacts, then you start to get an idea of really the severity of the crisis that we’re in.

The Hindu Kush is a mountain range and surrounding area that stretches from central Afghanistan into Pakistan and China. 1.5 billion people is 20% of earth's population. This is not the most politically stable region of the world. A water-and-agriculture crisis involving 20% of earth's population won't be small — or fixable.

Now consider the same problem with global cascading effects — war, famine, disease and drought; sea level rise, ocean warming and acidification; arid farm land and ruined national economies; disruption of the food chain at both top and bottom.

The first permanent glaciers began to appear just 35 million years ago, a small fraction of a fossil record that extends back 240 million years, long before the dinosaurs, to the start of the Cambrian period. Humans have never lived in a world without ice.

Can we survive if, by our own action — or rather, the action of the pathological few to whom we've ceded control — the world returns to an ice-free state? Yes; perhaps.

But how many humans will an ice-free world support? Probably not seven and a half billion. Perhaps not a tenth of that number. Even a tenth of that tenth may be ten times too optimistic.
 

Documenting the Train Wreck: Atmospheric CO2 Is Now Higher Than Ever in Human History, and Rising

Atmospheric CO2 levels have now reached 415 ppm. The last time humans experienced levels this high was... never. Human didn't exist.#climatecrisis #climatechange pic.twitter.com/xtRSF2ScGC

— Peter Gleick (@PeterGleick) May 13, 2019

by Thomas Neuburger

The Kochs and their carbon-lobby friends have essentially won.
     –Wen Stephenson (source)

Our betters chose another path for us, and the rest, I'm afraid, will merely be consequences, the train wreck mentioned above, easily foreseen.
     –Yours truly (source)

I wrote the sentence above in January 2018 as part of a backward look at 2017, the first of the years of consequences to follow the crossroads year 2016 — the year when Bernie Sanders was not elected president, was not even allowed to be a choice.

One of the train wrecks I foresaw is a consequence of our already-started revolt against the super-rich who rule us. The other is the coming climate catastrophe.

About the latter, the planet has recently passed a milestone back to which it may not return in our lifetime, or even in the lifetime of our species. For the first time since humans walked the earth — and perhaps since Australopithecus, our earliest post-chimpanzee ancestors, did as well — daily atmospheric CO2 crossed above 415 ppm to 415.26 as measured at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii. (As you can see from the chart at the top, CO2 for the previous 800,000 years stayed within a tight range, between about 180 and 300 ppm. It's now well above that range and rising fast.)

Not only that, but every daily reading at Mauna Loa from May 11 through May 18 was above 415 ppm:

Hourly and daily averages for atmospheric CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory for the week ending May 18, 2019 (click to enlarge)

Small dots are hourly averages; large dots are daily averages. Note that the chart's hourly peak, just before noon on May 15, crossed above 417 ppm.

May is usually the peak month for atmospheric CO2 — there's a yearly rise and fall — but each yearly peak is inexorably higher than the last one. It appears that humans, as ruled by its fossil fuel–financed politicians, won't stop burning carbon until they can't — until they're pre-Industrial at best, functionally extinct at worst. The train wreck.

Exxon Predicted This in 1982

Back when Exxon Corporation was studying climate change seriously, its scientists produced papers predicting atmospheric CO2 and global warming under a number of scenarios, including a "high case" scenario in which fossil fuel burning would increase and previously unavailable carbon resources, from shale for example, would become extractable.

Here's a chart from one of those papers (pdf). It projects both projected atmospheric CO2 and global temperature increase from a 1980 baseline:

Chart from this Exxon paper. Annotation by Brian Kahn at Earther (source)

The Exxon prediction was startlingly accurate, at least so far. It put atmospheric CO2 (upper line) just below 420 ppm in 2019 and global warming (lower line) above 1.2°C after we add in the amount of global warming, 0.4°C, that occurred between the pre-Industrial low and 1980 [Hansen, 2018] — about where we are today, in other words.

Fossil fuel CEOs, including and especially those at Exxon, the global moneyed class in general, and their bought politicians — meaning almost all of them — are the reason we're in this mess. They're also the reason we may not get out of it, since I don't see the revolt against death by fossil fuel, even at this late date, happening any time soon.

Which leaves us where we are today. Barring miracles, which do occur, we already know what's coming. The Kochs and their carbon-lobby friends have essentially won. The train is approaching. All that's left is to document the wreck.
  

The Climate Fight Has Clear Villains. It's Long Past Time to Name Them

Herman Goering on trial in Nuremberg, 1946 (source)

Slobodan Milošević on trial in The Hague, 1999 (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

"Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced."
—France et. al. v. Goering et. al., 22 IMT 411, 466 (Int'l Mil. Trib. 1946), aka the Nuremberg Trials

"Let's call this what it is: an atmosphere of impunity for atrocity."
—Kate Aronoff (source)

Encore un cri de coeur. Contrary to frightened and popular belief, there are actually a number of avenues to success in the battle to repair an increasingly unfriendly climate — or relative success, given that much of the damage that will be done is irreversible.

All of those avenues, however, require the use of force.

What counts as force? Legal action against fossil fuel companies counts as force. Financial attacks on their assets count as force. But most importantly, criminalizing and punishing the behavior of fossil fuel executives — the individuals themselves — counts as force.

The last option is the most promising.  As was aptly and correctly stated at the Nuremberg Trials, "Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced."

If Rex Tillerson's ex-company, Exxon, is punished and stripped of its assets, wealth and business, and yet its executives go free, the fight will be a long one; those executives will fight until they die, or we do, or both.

But let one fossil fuel CEO sit where Slobodan Milošević sat, a criminal in the Hague on trial for his life — an act that splits the criminal from the enterprise, separates the interests of the CEO from the interests of the destructive operation — and we will suddenly see company after company sacrificed to save the lives of those that run them.

The good news is that the first part of this effort — criminalizing CEO-suite behavior — has already been done. Their actions are already and clearly criminal by the standards of the International Criminal Court. The only thing left to do is to deliver the trials and the punishment.

Less Than 1000 Humans Are Personally Killing Our Climate

Kate Aronoff has considered all this. Near the beginning of her seminal essay "It’s Time to Try Fossil-Fuel Executives for Crimes Against Humanity," this appears:

Just one hundred fossil fuel producers — including privately held and state-owned companies — have been responsible for 71 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions released since 1988, emissions that have already killed at least tens of thousands of people through climate-fueled disasters worldwide.

When one first reads this sentence, what's most striking is this part: "Just one hundred fossil fuel producers ... have been responsible for 71 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions released since 1988". A stunning statistic.

Yet Aronoff's sentence also can be reduced to this: "Just one hundred fossil fuel producers ... have already killed at least tens of thousands of people through climate-fueled disasters worldwide." Nothing short of mass murder.

To see the extent of our climate problem — not our problem with the climate, but our problem with the climate problem — one must look at both of the ideas above and note both of those facts.

First, just one hundred fossil fuel–producing companies — captained by perhaps five key people at each — have filled our air with 71% of all greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, a year in which most of us were alive. This is not ancient history, going back centuries or even a few generations. This is historically yesterday, a year alive in living people's memories. This was done as we watched.

Second, it's inescapably true that these 500 people, the "individuals at the helm of fossil-fuel companies" are, as Aronoff puts it, murderers. As she makes clear, these executives are guilty of a specific and heinous crime under international law — not genocide, as one might expect, but "crimes against humanity" as defined by Article 7 of the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court.

Aronoff writes that "the fossil industry’s behavior constitutes a Crime Against Humanity in the classical sense: 'a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack,' including murder and extermination. Unlike genocide, the UN clarifies, in the case of crimes against humanity, 'it is not necessary to prove that there is an overall specific intent. It suffices for there to be a simple intent to commit any of the acts listed…The perpetrator must also act with knowledge of the attack against the civilian population and that his/her action is part of that attack.'"

Here's what a prosecution would look like in the case of Shell, which is headquartered, ironically, in The Hague:

[W]hat might trying fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity actually look like? Royal Dutch Shell, for instance, is based in the Netherlands — in the Hague, in fact — and is a party to the Rome Statute. In order for their executives to be tried for crimes against humanity, the ICC prosecutor would need to open an investigation to determine whether domestic courts in the Netherlands had not done enough to hold the offending parties accountable. The prosecutor could then use their proprio motu power to bring an indictment before the ICC, which would then hear the case.

Alternately, the Dutch government could refer the case to the court itself. Plenty of countries have crimes against humanity statutes, however, so a trial wouldn’t necessarily have to happen under the auspices of the ICC. And because companies like Exxon have operations all over the world, they could theoretically be tried in any country that has such statutes on the books, or that is a party to the Rome Statute. Options abound.

Aronoff's piece is rich in detail. I'll leave you to discover that for yourself.

The "Ask" Is Not to Ask, But to Tell

Let's close with this. The people of the world, all seven billion of us, have put our fate in the hands of perhaps 500 of our wealthiest and most pathological contemporaries. If that fate is not already sealed, it shortly will be, especially if any Republican — or any but the climate-fiercest Democrat — is elected in 2020.

But that does not leave us helpless. We are seven billion; they are less than a thousand. The world is already starting its descent into chaos, just barely perhaps, but noticeably enough that even right-wing voters fear what's ahead. The people are now awake.

That humans will end fossil fuel emissions is inevitable. In less than 100 years, humans will no longer produce enough fossil fuels to add to the damage already done. The only questions left are these:

1. Will the end of human-produced emissions be managed or chaotic?

2. Will the end of human-produced emissions occur in time to matter?

If the process of de-industrialization is chaotic — via collapse of our culture and our numbers — it will continue to its natural end. That is, it will stop when (a) not enough humans are left alive to add appreciably more carbon to the air than their predecessor have already done, or (b) those humans who are left, in whatever numbers, are mainly pre-industrial.

The path to this end, the chaotic one, leads through war and disease; invasion and mass migration; extreme nationalism and tribal self-defense; decadal droughts and famines; brutality, retribution, bloodshed and despair; to extinction. 

If the process is managed, however, especially if it is managed by the wise and determined among us — in the U.S. that means finding and empowering our next FDR, our latter-day Lincoln — the end of fossil fuel burning can preserve as much life and culture as it can, not serve to destroy it totally.

All that stands in our way ... as always ... is the pathology of the very very rich, and the power we allow them over our lives.

Remember though: It is not their organizations that stand in our way; organizations are merely force extenders for mere people. It's the people who use that force. It's long past time to remove those people from the power to destroy us.

Asking them to change won't do the job; nor will deploying logic or science. We're tried those paths since the 1970s, and they've shown us in every way possible that they will not walk away from the power to destroy. The ask must now be a tell — they must be made, with sufficient force, to leave, or the fire that fed our species through all of our past will consume our future entirely as we watch.

Using the International Criminal Court to send this generation's mass murders to their reward — before they send us to ours — counts as sufficient force.  

Encore un cri de coeur. 
 

The Debate Over Tactics In the Modern Left: Radical Opposition or Strategic Inclusive Engagement?

World CO2 emissions are growing, not falling. What will the children say? (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

Modern America is a tense place these days. By that I mean, there are a number of tensions in American social and political life that are, this year, coming to a frothy head.

First, consider the tension in center and leftish circles around class war and the 2020 election. Many argue that the right way for to Democrats to win this election is by embracing "identity politics" — that racial justice, justice for women, for gay, lesbian and trans individuals, for indigenous peoples and all other victimized groups must come first, must be placed front and center. And not just for presentation and marketing purposes (though many do argue that vote-getting starts with making the identity case), but because fighting the old white patriarchy is a necessary precursor to fighting the class war — that if the old white patriarchy is in place, the class war can't be won.

Adolph Reed Jr. has written much about this tension on the left (his latest is here), and proponents of the Sanders candidacy stand almost alone in believing the solution lies in winning the class struggle.

So that's one tension. Another is the tension around radical, oppositional action versus a more considered, careful, inclusive approach. Visitors to DWT recently read about Rep. Pramila Jayapal and her "balancing act" — her attempt to keep real progressives, not-so-real progressives and Party leaders all aligned with genuinely progressive legislation like Medicare for All. Time will determine if that strategy succeeds; everyone I know hope it does.

Radical opposition, however, has its proponents, and no subject inspires them more than the coming climate catastrophe, which the world is doing less than nothing to head off (see graph at top).

Will the politics of accommodation work in this sphere, or will radical action be required? Must the current system be broken and rebuilt before a climate solution can be enacted?

As writer David Atkins explains it in the following twitter thread, the choices left to us are really one choice. First, the Right will not let — is not letting — the current system survive in any case; they're breaking norms with everything they touch. Second, the current system cannot provide a climate solution. Thus breaking that system the way the Left wants to break it provides the only hope "for those of us who want to live to 2050."

Radical thoughts for a radical time. Here's that thread. See what you think after you read it.

Short thread here on climate change, the norms of democracy, and the battle between the right, center left and progressive left. Ready? Here goes... /1

The Right has always depended for its success on the implicit or explicit threat that it would be willing to subvert all the norms of democracy to achieve its goals, whether it be "2nd amendment remedies" or the Federalist Society's changing all the rules in the courts.../2

This is how the Right works the refs: they let everyone know that they're willing to pull out ALL the stops if white male patriarchy and racism don't stay centered in society, and if rich people don't get to keep all the loot. /3

The center left has long depended on being the "responsible" party. The cogent ones, the level headed ones. The perpetual Real Mothers in the Justice of Solomon [story] willing to sacrifice almost anything to salvage the system. /4

The problem is that this dynamic between right and center left is codependent and convenient to the status quo. The far right gets to keep the angry old racists happy, the center left keeps the concerned vaguely cosmopolitan educated crowd happy. And the donors always win. /5

The progressive left [is] saying "enough of this game. We, too, are willing to break the norms of American democracy because these issues are life and death emergencies." We're not going to play the responsible straight man to the GOP's destructive clown. /6

Yes, we KNOW the Green New Deal can't pass through the Senate under the current system. We're not stupid. We're [putting] down the marker that if this system won't let the GND pass, we will change the system until it does--eliminate the filibuster, add states, pack courts, etc. /7

So when the center left says "but I can pass this weaker version", the answer is twofold:
1) no, you can't. The GOP is a destructive clown that won't give you the time of day, either. But also,
2) we don't care what you think [you] can pass. We're telling you what we need. /8

And if that means changing the system? So be it. If it means breaking the system? So be it. The norms of 20th century American democracy are worthless compared to the threat of climate change. Also, radical inequality. Also, the declining middle class. /9

The right has been very effective playing this game. They are signaling loud and clear they would rather have a Putin-backed dictatorship under a corrupt idiot than give up old white male privilege or [plutocratic] control. What is the left willing to do? How far will we go? /10

The center left's answer? Nowhere. We'll do whatever we can with the system we have, and whatever happens happens...as long as nobody's stock portfolio takes a hit. That is completely, totally unacceptable to those of us who want to live to 2050. Or have [kids] who do. /11

If the system won't budge with us, we'll budge the system. We are dealing with catastrophic threats, and econ/tech challenges well beyond the capacity of our current politics. Your experience within the system means nothing now. Your commitment to the goal is everything. /12

In short, the current system WILL NOT SURVIVE. The right sees an existential threat from a browning, more progressive population. They cannot afford for democracy to survive, and they will kill it if given half the chance. /13

But the current system also won't let us deal with our environmental, technological and economic challenges in anything like the timeframe we need to solve them. Which means the defenders of that system are just as dangerous in their own way as the right wing is. /14

The future belongs to the side that changes the system to accomplish their goals. Will it be young progressives? Or will it rich old racists? There is no middle ground. There is no responsible defense of the status quo. It's going to be one side or the other. /fin

His conclusion is striking, but not surprising. We've heard it from others as well. As Atkins says:

• The defenders of the present system are as dangerous in their way as the right wing is.
• The future belongs to the side that changes the system to accomplish their goals. 

The terms of this debate apply to a number of policy fields, and we'll be hearing some form of this discussion, of this tension, throughout the 2020 campaign. For example, the Medicare For All debate has already been characterized (accurately in my view) as a battle to replace capitalism (see Ed Walker's "The Green New Deal Challenges the Domination of Capital").

But the argument above applies no more directly than it does in the climate debate, where the clock is running, the end (if it comes) is near and total, and there's no turning back to anything that went before, no matter how much we wish it were not so.
 

How Much Will It Cost to Address Climate Change? Pennies Compared to the Alternative

Economic growth and global warming, Figure 1 from a paper studying "Global non­linear effect of temperature on economic production" (link below). "Non-linear" in this case means "at what warming point do economies tend to 'fall off a cliff'"? It's not the same point for all economies, but the non-linearity is obvious. (For conversion in charts a, b, and c, 20°C = 68°F, and 30°C = 86°F. Click to enlarge.)

by Thomas Neuburger

The cost of addressing climate change is much in the news these days, thanks to the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal (GND) proposal. Everyone seems to want to know how much it will cost. Too much, according to the editors at Forbes. "The Green New Deal Would Cost a Lot of Green," they warn us, and the editors at Bloomberg want us to know that "The Green New Deal Is Unaffordable."

These headlines tell you they measure cost in terms of lost profit, not lost wages, since no one at Forbes or Bloomberg wants to see wages rise. Nor do they consider lost lives.

Green New Deal advocates assure us that indeed we can pay for it, partly because of increased productivity (it will put a lot of people to work, FDR-style) and partly because the economy can simply absorb the influx of new money without the need for high "pay for it" taxes, just as the economy is absorbing the multi-trillion cost of the Iraq War and President Trump's tax cuts. When elites and the wealth they serve want something expensive, they get it, and no one bothers to make them "pay for it" later. 

See this Huffington Post article, "We Can Pay For A Green New Deal," by Stephanie Kelton, Andres Bernal and Greg Carlock for the gist of the "yes, it's affordable" argument.

Both statements are true, of course. Any attempt to really mitigate climate change — make the damage less, as opposed to merely adapting to the crisis — will cost "a lot of green." And yes, the economy can absorb the additional spending, allowing taxes to be used only as an economic cooling device (if and as needed), not as a prohibitory "pay for it" device.

Measuring the Wrong Variable

But few are focusing on the real measurable — not what it will cost economically to address the problem, but what it will cost economically to not address the problem. "Cost economically" here means exactly and only what the people at Forbes and Bloomberg think it means — How does economic activity slow when atmospheric temperature rises? How are profits and wealth affected? This analysis looks at no other factors affecting the economy, such as the cost of recovery from super-storms.

One of those who did address the economic cost of not dealing with climate change is Solomon Hsiang, professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and coauthor of a little-noticed 2015 paper, "Global non­linear effect of temperature on economic production." A link to the Nature abstract is here; a link to the paper itself is here (pdf).

The abstract begins this way (notes are linked in the original):

Growing evidence demonstrates that climatic conditions can have a profound impact on the functioning of modern human societies (1,2), but effects on economic activity appear inconsistent. Fundamental productive elements of modern economies, such as workers and crops, exhibit highly non-linear [jerky or stepwise] responses to local temperature even in wealthy countries (3,4). In contrast, aggregate macroeconomic productivity of entire wealthy countries [aggregate economic activity of whole nations] is reported not to respond to temperature (5), while poor countries respond only linearly (5,6). Resolving this conflict between micro [i.e. labor] and macro [nationwide] observations is critical to understanding the role of wealth in coupled human–natural systems (7,8) and to anticipating the global impact of climate change (9,10).

The language of the abstract is a little confusing for a lay reader, so let me explain. In essence, the question they're studying is this: Are macroeconomies (economies of whole nations) affected by atmospheric warming, contrary to what is reported? If so, are those effects linear (gradual and along a straight line) or non-linear (sudden and precipitous at certain thresholds)?

In other words, do national economies "drop off a cliff" at certain levels of increased atmospheric heating? The graph at the top, taken from the paper, shows the answer is yes.

The authors conclude (my emphasis):

We show that overall economic productivity is non-linear in temperature for all countries, with productivity peaking at an annual average temperature of 13 °C [56°F] and declining strongly at higher temperatures. The relationship is globally generalizable, unchanged since 1960, and apparent for agricultural and non-agricultural activity in both rich and poor countries.

Note that this is a study of the past, not the future. In other words, the study looked at real-world consequences of warming that has already occurred, not projected consequences using economic models only. Thus this forward-looking conclusion: "If future adaptation mimics past adaptation, unmitigated warming is expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23% by 2100 and widening global income inequality, relative to scenarios without climate change."

Widening global wealth inequality means that some nations will do better than others — at first. An article covering a subsequent talk by Dr. Hsiang put it this way:

That decrease in economic output will hit the poorest 60 percent of the population disproportionately hard, said Hsiang. In doing so, it will surely exacerbate inequality, as many rich regions of the world that have lower average annual temperatures, such as northern Europe, benefit from the changes. Hotter areas around the tropics, including large parts of south Asia and Africa, already tend to be poorer and will suffer.

A graph printed with the article indicates the eastern seaboard of the United States and northern Europe, among other places, will have improved economies (click through to see it).

But the conclusion that the East Coast and northern Europe will thrive economically is deceptive, since the study was limited to the economic effects of warming. What about the physical effects? For example, the population of the East Coast of the U.S. will at some point suffer numerous super-storms, sea level rise and the shoreline erosion that always accompanies it.

Put simply, at some point cities on both coasts will have to be moved inland as the land they sit on erodes into the ocean. How far inland? I wouldn't want to be the planner that has to figure that out, since you only want to have to do it once.

The East Coast is home to about 120 million people. The total U.S. population is between 300–350 million people. More than a third of all U.S. citizens will be forced to relocate away from the Atlantic shore. What's the cost of that?

As to northern Europe, if the thermohaline current (the Gulf Stream) is drastically altered by fresh water melt from Greenland, northern Europe — England, for example — will freeze like Canada in the winter, whose latitude it shares. Will England thrive economically in that scenario?

How Much Will It Cost Not to Mitigate Climate Change? $17 Trillion Per Year in Economic Loss Alone

So what's the economic cost of not responding to global warming? According to the paper, the bottom line is this. Global GDP (called Global World Product, or GWP) was estimated between $70 and $80 trillion about five years ago. Thus, by this paper's (highly conservative) estimates, the economic loss that results from willfully ignoring climate change will be roughly $17 trillion per year by 2100, a sum that doesn't include the additional cost of wars, famines, droughts, plagues, epidemics, and "national emergencies" of various flavors and stripes.

Can we afford, economically, not to address climate change now? The answer, of course, is no.

Yet once more the pathological among us have us asking the wrong questions. All they want to know is, will their own wealth be affected? Will they still keep their billions? Will they die poorer than they are today?

The question we should be asking is, will the rest of us die poorer — and sooner — if our first priority is protecting the wealth of the wealthy?

The answer, of course, is yes.