It's Time for a World War against Climate Change

It’s too late for a carbon tax—it’s time for a world war against climate change. Adele Peters, Fast Company. Nov. 4, 2019.

“The reality is that we have zero years and we have to change all of our infrastructure.”

The world’s carbon budget—the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that humans can still pump into the atmosphere before we no longer have a chance of keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius—is almost used up.

In a landmark report last year, the UN’s climate body, the IPCC, said that we need to essentially halve emissions by 2030 to have a 50% chance of staying under 1.5 degrees. That deadline is now only about 10 years away. But the actual situation is even more urgent because of the problem of “committed emissions,” all of the cars and power plants and furnaces and other things that already exist now and have years or decades left of use.

“The very concerning reality is that these things that exist today are already going to emit all of the carbon we have [left in the budget] in that 10- or 11-year period, by virtue of the fact that there’s already a billion cars in the world with internal combustion engines and people aren’t going to stop driving tomorrow,” says Saul Griffith, an inventor and serial entrepreneur who is advising current presidential candidates on climate policy and who recently spoke about the need to go beyond the Green New Deal at Verge, a conference focused on the clean economy. “They’re going to emit a lot. And the existing coal plants and existing natural gas plants will emit a lot. The consequence of that is this 10-year headline gives us a false sense of security. The reality is that we have zero years and we have to change all of our infrastructure.”

That means that it’s too late, he says, to rely on something like a carbon tax to incentivize a gradual shift to lower-carbon products. “If you’ve got a carbon tax and you slowly raise the carbon tax, then it slowly modifies our behavior, but to hit the climate target that the children want and the scientists want, it simply is not a fast enough acting mechanism,” he says.

There also isn’t time to wait for the usual rates of market adoption for new technology. “Because of committed emissions, we can’t wait for natural adoption curves, like if 2% of people buy a Tesla next year and 4% the year after that,” Griffith says. “At this point, basically, to hit any reasonable climate target, you need 100% adoption at everyone’s next purchase.”

He says that companies shouldn’t just be thinking about how to be more efficient, but how to completely substitute zero-carbon technologies for current practices; entire industries should commit to transformation. In the U.S., Griffith argues that we need to go even further than a Green New Deal, deploying an Apollo project-scale transformation of the agriculture industry to move to practices that sequester carbon and a Manhattan Project-like research effort to create a “material economy that absorbs carbon rather than emits it.” He suggests the idea of a “World War Zero” against climate change that has as much urgency as the last World War.

“If we were serious, and we treated this historical moment like we treated Hitler in 1939, industry would be figuring out how to scale up manufacture of the things that will win the war,” he says. “And so we wouldn’t be niggling about what year we will have a 100% electric cars by. It would be a large-scale discussion with the government about what it could take to transform the whole car-making business on the shortest timeline to one that’s zero carbon. We would be drawing up emergency plans at the national level on how to decarbonize the grid and how to install new transmission lines. This is what the Green New Deal is sort of meant to be, but the plans are still mostly under-ambitious. And they’re not focusing enough on the timelines required.” A carbon tax may still be a small part of the mix—Griffith says that we need all possible solutions. But it can’t tackle the urgency of the situation.

Businesses, cities, and states can’t accomplish the work without the national government. “You should write off the coral reefs if Trump gets reelected,” he says. “We need a new idea that operates outside of normal economic rules. And that’s only ever happened from national governments declaring emergencies. I could write you a script where the Republicans realize that it’s in the best interest of American manufacturing to lead the world. Trump could wake up and have an epiphany tomorrow that his grandchildren are in trouble. There’s no reason it has to be a Democratic policy. We won World War II with largely a Republican approach to solving emergencies. Whether we do it or not is independent of the ideologies of left or right. But if Trump is elected and we do business as usual, we’ll get half a degree of warming in his tenure.”

As Griffith has advised some current presidential campaigns on climate policy, he says that the candidates still haven’t gone far enough—or recognized the full potential for the necessary transformation to spur the creation of new jobs, new wealth, and a better standard of living. “They fall short on the urgency, they fall short on the metaphors, and honestly, I don’t think they think we can do it,” he says. “The presidential candidates, they haven’t yet absorbed that it’s possible. And if we do it, that our lives will improve. I think they’re all playing defense on it and not offense. In reality, we could have this amazing American century driven by throwing technology and jobs at solving climate change and new economic models, and the American suburbs could bloom like they’ve never done before.”

Moving in to emergency mode

Moving into emergency mode on climate change. Margaret Klein Salamon, The Hill. June 21, 2019.

No one is planning for the collapse of civilization, for food shortages, epidemics and mass displacement, but that could happen as the result of a major climate disaster. The vast majority of Americans move ahead with their daily lives as normal. Few actually consider the national, global and personal implications of the breakdown of our climate.

This is not something most of us want to pay attention to. It’s scary and overwhelming, so we leave it to scientists and politicians and focus on our careers, our families, or recreational pursuits. But the climate emergency is no longer a future threat; it’s here, and we underestimate it at our own peril. It’s devastating the Midwest, our bread basket, with flooding and tornadoes. It’s causing wildfires and melting Arctic ice at an unprecedented rate. A recent paper by Australians David Spratt and Ian Dunlop demonstrates how warming could cause the collapse of civilization by 2050. 

This is not easy information to process. Feeling overwhelmed and helpless can paralyze us or force us into denial. I get that. As a former clinical psychologist, I know that many of us want to do something — anything — to stop the climate crisis, but don’t know how.

This week, The Climate Mobilization joined a number of climate justice, environmental groups, professors, activists and celebrities to call on Congress to declare #ClimateEmergency. We’ve launched a petition asking Congress to wake up and move into emergency mode.

We need to eliminate emissions as quickly as possible — in 10 years or less, as some experts including Harvard University Professor James Anderson, believe. Andersen’s research demonstrates that the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting four times faster than originally assumed, alone could raise sea levels by 23 feet. Anderson emphasizes that we need to eliminate — not reduce — emissions at emergency speed and draw down excess greenhouse gasses to restore a safe climate.

The only possible way we could achieve this is through a mobilization of national resources, of our top minds and industry on the scale of our mobilization during World War II. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has called for a mobilization on this scale as part of the Green New Deal, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently supported the Green New Deal with a call for a WWII-scale climate mobilization.

During WWII, we faced the existential threat of fascism and mobilized together, and we transformed our economy incredibly quickly in order to protect ourselves. All hands were on deck. Women flooded into factories, and millions of Americans moved to a new state to work a “war job.” Families including children were also mobilized — and 40 percent of vegetables were grown at home, in “victory gardens.” The government laid down strong regulations, such as a ban on the production of new consumer cars. More than 37 percent of our gross domestic product was spent on the war effort. 

If the United States rises to the challenge of confronting the climate emergency, we can still “cancel the apocalypse” and begin restoring a safe climate and healthy society. The first step is telling the truth. We need a national acknowledgement that we face a climate emergency.

Our petition launches ahead of the first Democratic National Committee (DNC) debates, in which we are asking candidates to acknowledge the emergency. Some already have, though their proposed policies don’t necessarily demonstrate that they have internalized the concept. Despite the incredible work done by groups such as Youth Climate Strike, the Sunrise Movement and others, the DNC has refused to hold a debate focused on climate change. They still don’t get it.

We don’t have time to dilute the truth, regardless of how harsh it may sound at times.

The Climate Mobilization is an organization based on telling the truth about the climate emergency and advocating for the only solution that could protect humanity and the living world: WWII-scale climate mobilization. We have been advocating for mobilization for five years, and pioneering and spreading #ClimateEmergency declarations for two years. We have ushered in ideas around zero emissions and a national mobilization to address the emergency that many have refused to take seriously.

Fortunately, some around the world are getting it.

Today, more than 600 cities in 13 countries have issued climate emergency declarations. In May, the United Kingdom as a whole declared a climate emergency, following an extended protest by our allies, Extinction Rebellion. Canada followed this week, though Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s subsequent approval of the Transmountain pipeline makes it clear that the Canadian government is not ready to act in accordance with recognizing the emergency situation.

Last week, Pope Francis, in a meeting with major fossil fuel corporations, declared a climate emergency and warned them that failure to move swiftly against global warming would represent “a brutal act of injustice toward the poor and future generations.”

Critics will say “declaring a climate emergency is just words. It doesn’t actually solve anything.” And this is true — declaring an emergency won’t, on its own, decarbonize anything. Governments need to not only “declare” a climate emergency, but to act with emergency speed and focus. It is troubling to see the United Kingdom and Canada make action commitments, along with their declarations, that are insufficient and dangerously slow.

But, we are just getting started. A few years ago, emergency climate mobilization was a marginal idea, and within five years’ time a vigorous climate mobilization movement exists. Words have the power to shift the paradigm, connect us, educate and provide momentum for the emergency response needed by Congress to reverse climate change and protect humanity. We urge everyone to join us.

Margaret Klein Salamon, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of The Climate Mobilization. Follow on Twitter @ClimatePsych and @MobilizeClimate

Climate Links 8/8/2017

Telling the Climate Truth. Gaius Publius, nakedcapitalism. July 21, 2017.

We need new Cassandras to warn us of new disasters, even though they’ll never be believed.
—Richard Clarke (paraphrased) 

We aren’t doomed — we are choosing to be doomed by failing to respond adequately to the emergency.
—Margaret Klein Salamon

excerpt from M.K. Salmon (also at Common Dreams): 

While I think both Mann and Holthaus are brilliant scientists who identified some factual problems in the article, I strongly disagree with their statements about the role of emotions — namely, fear — in climate communications and politics. I am also skeptical of whether climate scientists should be treated as national arbiters of psychological or political questions, in general. I would like to offer my thoughts as a clinical psychologist, and as the founder and director of The Climate Mobilization. 

Affect tolerance — the ability to tolerate a wide range of feelings in oneself and others — is a critical psychological skill. On the other hand, affect phobia — the fear of certain feelings in oneself or others — is a major psychological problem, as it causes people to rely heavily on psychological defenses. 

Much of the climate movement seems to suffer from affect phobia, which is probably not surprising given that scientific culture aspires to be purely rational, free of emotional influence. Further, the feelings involved in processing the climate crisis—fear, grief, anger, guilt, and helplessness — can be overwhelming. But that doesn’t mean we should try to avoid “making” people feel such things! Experiencing them is a normal, healthy, necessary part of coming to terms with the climate crisis. 

I agree with David Roberts that it is OK, indeed imperative, to tell the whole, frightening story. As I argue in The Transformative Power of Climate Truth, it’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings — not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings. 

Holthaus writes of people feeling deep anxiety, losing sleep, re-considering their lives due to the article… but this is actually a good thing. Those people are coming out of the trance of denial and starting to confront the reality of our existential emergency. I hope that every single American, every single human experiences such a crisis of conscience. It is the first step to taking substantial action. Our job is not to protect people from the truth or the feelings that accompany it — it’s to protect them from the climate crisis!
I know many of you have been losing sleep and reconsidering your lives in light of the climate crisis for years. We at The Climate Mobilization sure have. TCM exists to make it possible for people to turn that fear into intense dedication and focused action towards a restoring a safe climate.

...

Columnist Joe Romm noted that we aren’t doomed — we are choosing to be doomed by failing to respond adequately to the emergency, which would of course entail initiating a WWII-scale response to the climate emergency. Our Victory Plan lays out what policies would look like that, if implemented, would actually protect billions of people and millions of species from decimation. They include: 

1) An immediate ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure and a scheduled shut down of all fossil fuels in 10 years;
2) Massive government investment in renewables;
3) Overhauling our agricultural system to make it a huge carbon sink;
4) Fair-shares rationing to reduce demand;
5) A federally-financed job guarantee to eliminate unemployment;
6) A 100% marginal tax on income above $500,000.from

Gaius Publius: 

Why must we do this now? Because the climate crisis is starting now. Mass migration, in part due to climate change, is starting now. Deaths by weather extremes are increasing as we watch them. The three hottest years on record are the three immediately behind us. We’re so close to +2 degrees warming already, we can almost taste it. 

So what’s in the way? The answer is simple — we have ceded control of climate policy to the greedy and pathological, to climate sexagenarians and octogenarians like Charles and David Koch, who, through the politicians they control (looking at you, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump), are marching to their own graves in triumph, leaving a wrack behind.

'Dodgy' greenhouse gas data threatens Paris accord. Matt McGrath, BBC. Aug. 8, 2017.

Potent, climate-warming gases are being emitted into the atmosphere but are not being recorded in official inventories, a BBC investigation has found.

Air monitors in Switzerland have detected large quantities of one gas coming from a location in Italy.

However, the Italian submission to the UN records just a tiny amount of the substance being emitted.

Levels of some emissions from India and China are so uncertain that experts say their records are plus or minus 100%.

These flaws posed a bigger threat to the Paris climate agreement than US President Donald Trump's intention to withdraw, researchers told BBC Radio 4's Counting Carbon programme.

Bottom-up records

Among the key provisions of the Paris climate deal, signed by 195 countries in December 2015, is the requirement that every country, rich or poor, has to submit an inventory of its greenhouse-gas emissions every two years.

Under UN rules, most countries produce "bottom-up" records, based on how many car journeys are made or how much energy is used for heating homes and offices.

...

Another rare warming gas, carbon tetrachloride, once popular as a refrigerant and a solvent but very damaging to the ozone layer, has been banned in Europe since 2002.

But Dr Reimann told Counting Carbon: "We still see 10,000-20,000 tonnes coming out of China every year."

"That is something that shouldn't be there.

"There is actually no Chinese inventory for these gases, as they are banned and industry shouldn't be releasing them anymore."

China's approach to reporting its overall output of warming gases to the UN is also subject to constant and significant revisions.

Its last submission ran to about 30 pages - the UK's, by contrast, runs to several hundred.

Back in 2007, China simply refused to accept, in official documents, that it had become the largest emitter of CO2.

"I was working in China in 2007," said Dr Angel Hsu, from Yale University.

"I would include a citation and statistics that made this claim of China's position as the number one emitter - these were just stricken out, and I was told the Chinese government doesn't yet recognise this particular statistic so we are not going to include it."

A report in 2015 suggested one error in China's statistics amounted to 10% of global emissions in 2013.

The BBC investigation also discovered vast uncertainties in carbon emissions inventories, particularly in developing countries.

Methane, the second most abundant greenhouse gas after CO2, is produced by microbe activity in marshlands, in rice cultivation, from landfill, from agriculture and in the production of fossil fuels.

Global levels have been rising in recent years, and scientists are unsure why.

For a country such as India, home to 15% of the world's livestock, methane is a very important gas in their inventory - but the amount produced is subject to a high degree of uncertainty.

"What they note is that methane emissions are about 50% uncertain for categories like ruminants, so what this means is that the emissions they submit could be plus or minus 50% of what's been submitted," said Dr Anita Ganesan, from the University of Bristol, who has overseen air monitoring research in the country.

"For nitrous oxide, that's 100%."

There are similar uncertainties with methane emissions in Russia, of between 30-40%, according to scientists who work there.

"What we're worried about is what the planet experiences, never mind what the statistics are," said Prof Euan Nisbet, from Royal Holloway, University of London.

"In the air, we see methane going up. The warming impact from that methane is enough to derail Paris."

The rules covering how countries report their emissions are currently being negotiated.

But Prof Glen Peters, from the Centre for International Climate Research, in Oslo, said: "The core part of Paris [is] the global stock-takes which are going to happen every five years, and after the stock-takes countries are meant to raise their ambition, but if you can't track progress sufficiently, which is the whole point of these stock-takes, you basically can't do anything.

"So, without good data as a basis, Paris essentially collapses. It just becomes a talkfest without much progress."




Burning fossil fuels almost ended all life on Earth. Peter Brannen, Atlantic.com. July 11, 2017.

A road trip through the geological ruins of our planet's worst mass extinction.

Indonesian Borneo is Finished: They Also Sell Orangutans into Sex Slavery. Andre Vltchek, Counterpunch. June 2, 2017.

How destructive can man get, how ruthless, in his quest to secure maximum profit, even as he endangers the very survival of our planet? 

The tropical forests of Kalimantan (known as Borneo in Malaysia), the third largest island in the world, have almost totally disappeared. Coalmines are savagely scarring the hills; the rivers are polluted, and countless species are endangered or already extinct.

Feature Reference Articles #5

The 'Fat Tail' of Climate Change Risk. Michael E. Mann, HuffPost. Sep. 11, 2015.


A World at War. Bill McKibben, New Republic. Aug. 15, 2016.

We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII. 

There are powerful forces, of course, that stand in the way of a full-scale mobilization. If you add up every last coal mine and filling station in the world, governments and corporations have spent $20 trillion on fossil fuel infrastructure. “No country will walk away from such investments,” writes Vaclav Smil, a Canadian energy expert. As investigative journalists have shown over the past year, the oil giant Exxon knew all about global warming for decades—yet spent millions to spread climate-denial propaganda. The only way to overcome that concerted opposition—from the very same industrial forces that opposed America’s entry into World War II—is to adopt a wartime mentality, rewriting the old mindset that stands in the way of victory. “The first step is we have to win,” says Jonathan Koomey, an energy researcher at Stanford University. “That is, we have to have broad acceptance among the broader political community that we need urgent action, not just nibbling around the edges, which is what the D.C. crowd still thinks.”

Should We Respond to Climate Change Like We Did to WWII? Emma Foehringer Merchant, New Republic. May 12, 2016.

The controversial theory of "climate mobilization" says we should.

These proponents of climate mobilization call for the federal government to use its power to reduce carbon emissions to zero as soon as possible, an economic shift no less substantial and disruptive than during WWII. New coal-fired power plants would be banned, and many existing ones shut down; offshore drilling and fracking might also cease. Meat and livestock production would be drastically reduced. Cars and airplane factories would instead produce solar panels, wind turbines, and other renewable energy equipment. Americans who insisted on driving and flying would face steeper taxes.

... 

Despite these inroads, climate mobilization remains a fringe idea. Its supporters don’t entirely agree on the answers to key questions, such as: What will trigger this mobilization—a catastrophic event or global alliance? Who will lead this global effort? When will the mobilization start? And perhaps the greatest hurdle isn’t logistical or technical, but psychological: convincing enough people that climate change is a greater threat to our way of life than even the Axis powers were.

Climate Disruption: Are We Beyond the Worst Case Scenario? Michael Jennings, Wiley Online Library. Sep. 3, 2012.

Abstract 

The inability of world governments to agree on and implement effective mitigation response policy for anthropogenic climate change has resulted in the continuation of an exponential growth in greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) that averages 3.1 per cent per year since 1870. With the exception of 2009, world GHG emission levels surpassed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2000) worst case scenario every year since 2004. Because of increasing temperatures due to GHG emissions a suite of amplifying feedback mechanisms, such as massive methane leaks from the sub-sea Arctic Ocean, have engaged and are probably unstoppable. These processes, acting in concert with the biological and physical inertia of the Earth system in responding to atmospheric loading of GHGs, along with economic, political and social barriers to emission reduction, currently place Earth’s climate trajectory well within the IPCC’s A1FI future climate change scenario. There is a rapidly diminishing chance of altering this trajectory as time goes on. There is also now a very real risk of sudden climate change. The pace of this quickly advancing situation, along with our scientific understanding of it, has substantially outstripped policy discussion. This article examines current primary science literature and data on today’s climate condition in a policy relevant context. 

Policy Implications 

• An all out shift to a broad range of adaptive response policies is urgently needed. Climate change will force reevaluations of present day governance agreements on trade, finance, food supply, security, development, environment, and similar sectors.
• Easy to understand scientific data driven visualizations and culturally appropriate interpretations of probable future conditions are needed to facilitate realistic adaptive policy responses from all levels of governance.
• Multilateral policies for an international crop seed cooperative could significantly lessen the impacts of crop failures and low yields, reducing the risk of famine and economic effects of unstable food prices. There is a need to store a large enough volume of crop seed varieties to allow for quick switching of varieties one year to the next based on dynamic forecasts of seasonal climates.
• Harmonization of international, national, subnational, and local policies for the orderly resettlement of coastal populations should begin now. This will become a chronic condition involving very large numbers of people. Improved and coordinated policies are needed for refugee services and related issues of migration and integration as well as planning for land use change and infrastructure development.

Psychology and Disaster: Why We Do Not See Looming Disasters and How Our Way of Thinking Causes Them. Andreas Glöckner, Global Policy Journal and Wiley Online Library. May 2016.

Abstract 

To be able to decide and act quickly and efficiently in a complex world, individuals rely on mechanisms that reduce information in a meaningful way. Instead of holding a set of partially contradicting cognitions, individuals construct coherent interpretations or stories to make sense of the available information using interactive activation. Interactive activation describes cognitive processing as bidirectional propagation of activation among simple processing units, which allows individuals to integrate large amounts of information quickly and with little cognitive effort. However, interactive activation also has important downsides that can prevent individuals from detecting looming disasters and can even contribute to their emergence. I describe the functioning of interactive activation and how it can be modeled using connectionist networks. Later I explain how interactive activation causes a set of biases (e.g. coherence effects, overconfidence, hindsight bias and status-quo bias) that make it hard to detect looming disasters and how these biases lead to discontinuities in understanding of problems and rapid behavioral switches that can contribute to the emergence of disasters. 

Policy Implications 

• Individuals construct coherent interpretations (narratives, stories) to make sense of the available information using interactive activation.
• Interactive activation causes a set of biases that make it hard to detect looming disasters.
• Interactive activation leads to discontinuities in perception and rapid behavioral switches that can contribute to the emergence of disasters.
• Standard rational models for individual behavior should be replaced by descriptively more adequate interactive activation models.
• This would allow us to derive qualitatively different and more efficient policy measures to support individuals in detecting and avoiding looming disaster.

The Tragedy of the Uncommons: On the Politics of Apocalypse. Jonathan B. Wiener. Global Policy Journal and Wiley Online Library. May 2016.

Abstract 

The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a classic type of problem, involving multiple actors who face individual incentives to deplete shared resources and thereby impose harms on others. Such tragedies can be overcome if societies learn through experience to mobilize collective action. This article formulates a distinct type of problem: ‘the tragedy of the uncommons’, involving the misperception and mismanagement of rare catastrophic risks. Although the problem of rare and global catastrophic risk has been much discussed, its sources and solutions need to be better understood. Descriptively, this article identifies psychological heuristics and political forces that underlie neglect of rare catastrophic ‘uncommons’ risks, notably the unavailability heuristic, mass numbing, and underdeterrence. Normatively, the article argues that, for rare catastrophic risks, it is the inability to learn from experience, rather than uncertainty, that offers the best case for anticipatory precaution. The article suggests a twist on conventional debates: in contrast to salient experienced risks spurring greater public concern than expert concern, rare uncommons risks exhibit greater expert concern than public concern. Further, optimal precaution against uncommons risks requires careful analysis to avoid misplaced priorities and potentially catastrophic risk–risk trade-offs. The article offers new perspectives on expert vs public perceptions of risk; impact assessment and policy analysis; and precaution, policy learning and foresight. 

Policy Implications

• As societies succeed in overcoming ‘tragedies of the commons’, they can and should pay increasing attention to ‘tragedies of the uncommons’.
• Public perceptions may neglect routine familiar risks, and may overreact to unusual experienced risks (especially crises affecting identified individuals). But a third type – ultra-rare catastrophic risks – may be neglected due to factors such as psychological unavailability, mass numbing, and underdeterrence. Expert assessment is needed to overcome public neglect of such uncommons risks.
• Much risk regulation is spurred by policy learning from experience and experimentation. But rare one-time threats to the existence of life or civilization will not offer such opportunities for learning. This absence of adaptive learning offers a stronger rationale for precaution than mere uncertainty. Foresight and anticipation are essential to preventing such rare catastrophic risks.
• Overcoming neglect of rare catastrophic risks is necessary but not sufficient to choose optimal policy responses. Policies to prevent rare catastrophic risks may also misplace priorities, or induce catastrophic risk–risk trade-offs. Optimal precaution against tragedies of the uncommons must be based on careful foresight, impact assessment and policy analysis.