Climate Links - October 2019 #1

If you're keeping track, planet earth had the hottest June ever recorded, the hottest July, the 2nd-hottest August, and now the hottest September. Please join the fight for a livable future.

Bill McKibben. Twitter.

Global Climate Emergency: after COP24, climate science, urgency, and the threat to humanity. Barry Gills and Jamie Morgan, via TandFonline. Sep. 24, 2019.

We live in a time of Climate Emergency. Nevertheless, our collective actions do not yet approximate a real understanding nor fully appropriate actions. We are not yet acting as if we are facing an urgent and life threatening Emergency. What does ‘Climate Emergency’ actually mean? According to David Attenborough:

It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies.    (Attenborough, Our Planet)

History is written later, but the future is written now. Perhaps the central message of contemporary climate sciences consists in the realization that the entire planet is deeply interconnected. There are no isolated ecosystems. There are no ecosystems that are safe from the effects of climate change. All life on this planet is profoundly interrelated. What happens in one area of the globe has far reaching, but as yet insufficiently understood, effects upon and consequences for even far distant regions. . . .

In other words, the present Global Climate Emergency demands a profound historical transformation of our civilization. We have not only been pouring greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere; we have been collectively exceeding the regenerative capacity of the earth’s natural resources and ecological systems. Earth Overshoot Day, the day in the annual cycle when humanity’s demands for resources exceeds the capacity for regeneration of those resources, has advanced by two whole months over the past twenty years. This year Earth Overshoot Day took place on 29 July 2019. It now requires the equivalent of 1.75 planets to sustain us. Humanity is damaging the whole system upon which our lives, and that of all other species depends.

'I would like people to panic’ – Top scientist unveils equation showing world in climate emergency. Joanna Roberts, Horizon. Sep. 24, 2019.

A new equation showing that the world is ‘deep in a climate emergency’ was unveiled on 24 September by Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, one of the world’s leading authorities on climate change, who said that people still don’t want to see the truth about the state we’re in.

‘Based on sober scientific analysis, we are deeply within a climate emergency state but people are not aware of it,’ he told Horizon on the sidelines of the European Research and Innovation Days event in Brussels, Belgium. ‘We don’t want to see the truth. As Greta Thunberg would say, I would like people to panic and take action according to the state of emergency we are in.’

Interview: Vaclav Smil: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that’. Jonathan Watts, the Guardian. Sep 21, 2019.

The scientist and author on his latest book – an epic, multidisciplinary analysis of growth – and why humanity’s endless expansion must stop.


The Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth. Christopher Jones, The New Republic. Oct. 1, 2019.

How economists came to ignore the natural world.

 “Fairytales of eternal economic growth.” That’s how climate activist Greta Thunberg depicted the dominant mindset at the United Nations last week. “How dare you,” she said, admonishing them for “empty words” instead of concrete actions to preserve the planet.

She’s right. One of the reasons nations fail to address climate change is the belief that we can have infinite economic growth independent of ecosystem sustainability. Extreme weather events, melting arctic ice, and species extinction expose the lie that growth can forever be prioritized over planetary boundaries.

It wasn’t always this way. The fairytale of infinite growth—which so many today accept as unquestioned fact—is relatively recent. Economists have only begun to model never-ending growth over the last 75 years. Before that, they had ignored the topic for a century. And before that, they had believed in limits. If more people saw the idea of infinite growth as a departure from the history of economics rather than a timeless law of nature, perhaps they’d be readier to reimagine the links between the environment and the economy.

In 1950, the economics profession had surprisingly little to say about growth. That year, the American Economic Association (AEA) asked Moses Abramovitz to write a state-of-the-field essay on economic growth. He quickly discovered a problem: There was no field to review.

The founding fathers of economics shared a belief that growth was finite, and that the reason for limits lay in the natural world.

Yes, John Maynard Keynes had offered a theory of stagnation, demonstrating the need for government spending to stimulate an economy mired in recession, and Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter had studied creative destruction, highlighting the importance of entrepreneurs and innovation. Wesley Mitchell, founder of the National Bureau of Economic Research, had looked at business cycles and others had analyzed monetary forces. But no one had put it all together in a theory of growth. Modern work was “fragmentary” and had “remained on the periphery of economics,” Abramovitz explained to AEA members. Development economist W. Arthur Lewis agreed, noting in 1955 that “no comprehensive treatment of [economic growth] has been published for about a century.”

It was an interesting turn for a field originally quite interested in growth, but convinced it was bounded. The founding fathers of economics—luminaries including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill—shared a belief that growth was finite, and that the reason for limits lay in the natural world.

Why are economists letting down the world on climate change? Andrew Oswald and Nicholas Stern, voxeu. September 17, 2019.

Action on climate change is arguably the greatest challenge for public policy of our times. But despite economic forces being the major driver of the carbon dioxide problem, this column argues that economists have so far been too silent on the subject. For example, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the most-cited journal in economics, has never published an article on climate change. Good economics can and should play a fundamental role in guiding the policy framework that will influence investment decisions in the coming years, so it is important that the profession dramatically increases its work now.

Out of Time: Listening to the climate’s clock. Astra Taylor, Lapham's Quarterly.

Twelve years, or so the scientists told us in 2018, which means now we are down to eleven. That’s how long we have to pull back from the brink of climate catastrophe by constraining global warming to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Eleven years to prevent the annihilation of coral reefs, greater melting of the permafrost, and species apocalypse, along with the most dire consequences for human civilization as we know it. Food shortages, forest fires, droughts and monsoons, intensified war and conflict, billions of refugees—we have barely begun to conceive of the range of dystopian futures looming on the horizon. 

One person who looks squarely and prophetically at the potential ramifications of climate change and insists on a response is Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish environmentalist who launched a global wave of youth climate strikes. In April 2019 she gave a tour de force address in the British Parliament, invoking not just her peers who were regularly missing class to protest government inaction but those yet to be born. “I speak on behalf of future generations,” Thunberg said. “Many of you appear concerned that we are wasting valuable lesson time, but I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future.” 

Thunberg accepts what many influential adults seem unable to face: the inevitability of change. Change is coming, either in the form of adaptation or annihilation; we can respond proactively or reactively to this discomfiting fact. Perhaps she can accept this because she is so young. Eleven years, a little over a decade, is the time for a human infant to become a preteen and for a preteen to become a young adult. For Thunberg, eleven years is more than two-thirds of her life, a veritable expanse that, projected forward, will involve crossing the threshold from adolescence to the first stage of maturity. Yet for a relatively contented middle-aged or elderly adult, eleven years isn’t as substantial—not quite the blink of an eye but a continuation of the present, a deeper dive into one’s golden years. At a certain point, stasis is the goal, to ward off decline. But decline awaits us all—as the economist John Maynard Keynes bluntly put it, “In the long run we are all dead.” Everyone’s time on earth must come to an end. The question is, What do we do with such knowledge?

Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Ronald Wright, TheTyee.ca. Sep. 20, 2019.
Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.


Waiting for the Next Panic. John Michael Greer, Ecosophia. Oct. 2, 2019.

... Those of us who expected the shale oil boom to turn into a bubble and then a bust were wrong. We were wrong because we forgot the first law of petroleum: when it comes to oil, politics always trumps economics. Access to petroleum is so crucial for industrial nations, and especially for extremely wasteful industrial nations such as the United States and Canada, that all other factors get to sit in the waiting room when decisions about petroleum are made. That’s why Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, for all his environmental rhetoric, has backed a petroleum pipeline meant to get Canadian crude from the tar sands to the Pacific coast. He knows perfectly well that when push comes to shove, Canadian voters love to give the environment lip service but don’t want environmental protections to affect their lifestyles, which is why Canada is one of the only countries on Earth that uses more energy per capita than the United States.

That’s also why shale oil producers have continued to drill and pump away in blithe disregard for the fact that in terms of strict economics, their activities don’t make enough money to keep them from going broke. It doesn’t matter, because the US government sees to it that a steady stream of cheap credit makes up the difference.  Having another seven million more barrels of oil per day is important enough to the US economy that gimmicking the money system to cover it is a small price to pay, and so an unspoken bipartisan consensus supports the necessary gimmicks. That was the point that we missed back in the day, and I missed it as much as anyone.

Unpacking Extinction Rebellion — Part III: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Kim Hill, Damn The Matrix. Sept. 26, 2019.

Part I of this series investigated the corporate interests and fossil fuel companies behind the rebellion’s goal for net-zero emissions. In Part II we looked at XR’s goals, tactics and proposed solutions to the climate crisis, which are all serving capital at the expense of the natural world. In Part III, we dive in to the history of the climate movement, the tactics being used by the elites to co-opt activist movements into supporting corporate agendas, and what those agendas entail. 

This article is largely a synthesis of the extensive research of Cory Morningstar into the manipulations of the climate movement by corporations and nonprofits, which is well worth reading, at Wrong Kind of Green, to get a deeper understanding of the actors involved and their elaborate marketing strategies

The Global Climate Strikes: No, This Was Not Co-Optation. This Was and Is PR. A Brief Timeline. Cory Morningstar, Wrong Kind of Green. Oct. 6, 2019.

TAKE AWAY POINTS

We dance to the tune of our oppressors

“The ruling class exists, it’s not a conspiracy theory. They operate as a class, too. They share the same values, the same sensibility and in Europe and North America they are white. They act in accordance with their interests, which are very largely identical. The failure to understand this is the single greatest problem and defect in left discourse today.”
— John Steppling

• Climate change is real – but capitalism is the crisis.
• The structure of the system is working exactly as it is designed to. The NPIC exists to insulate the current power structures and capital itself.
• Economic growth is sacrosanct – to those in power, and those it serves. Economic growth trumps all priorities including life itself.
• The Thunberg campaign belongs to the ruling class, not to the people.
• A decade of social engineering (“together”) has effectively erased class analysis, which is a massive blow, and even a betrayal, to the working class and peasantry.
• The West is under the rule of a corporatocracy, therefore voting is a massive distraction and spectacle that will never solve or mitigate our ecological crisis.
• The same system that created the crisis will not and cannot now rectify the crises. The same people that protected and defended this system will do anything and exploit anyone to keep it intact.
• The NGOs comprising the NPIC must be isolated, shamed and abandoned. The exact methods they use against radical activists and radical grassroots groups. Without the support of the people, they lose all power and influence (and then funding).
• A litmus test must be placed on all organizations that claim to fight for ecological and social justice: They must be united in opposition to imperialism/colonialism, militarism, white supremacy and patriarchy – all leading drivers of climate change and ecological devastation.
• Capitalism will destroy everything in its path. Either we kill capitalism, or capitalism will kill us.

315 billion-tonne iceberg breaks off Antarctica. Jonathan Amos, BBC. Sep. 30, 2019.

The Amery Ice Shelf in Antarctica has just produced its biggest iceberg in more than 50 years. The calved block covers 1,636 sq km in area

but, not to worry:

The Scripps researcher stressed that there was no link between this event and climate change. Satellite data since the 1990s has shown that Amery is roughly in balance with its surroundings, despite experiencing strong surface melt in summer. 

"While there is much to be concerned about in Antarctica, there is no cause for alarm yet for this particular ice shelf," Prof Fricker added.