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james hansen
The Big Bang, Horrifying LA Fires, and Our Self-Destructive Species
What you can now quite easily see from space is the failure humanity is achieving down here on the ground.
Jan 09, 2025
What’s happening right now in Los Angeles is almost too painful to write about. I’ve spent much of the day writing and calling back and forth with friends and colleagues. All report: horror. And since it’s playing out against the most familiar backdrop on earth, the scene of more movies and tv shows than any place on our planet, I think it will be as iconic as Pompeii in our collective imagination. If, you know, people in Pompeii had had smartphones.
So let me pull back a minute and tell a broader story. Though I’ve spent most of my life in the mountains of the East, my early boyhood was in California—my earliest recollections are of our house in Altadena, the neighborhood currently being consumed by the Eaton fire. And the sharpest memories of those are of climbing the fire road to the observatory at Mt. Wilson, which you could see from our backyard. I guess those must have been the first hikes in a lifetime of hikes, the first time to see the world spread out below.
I didn’t know it at the time—I was five—but the telescopes at the observatory at the top of the road were the place where humankind first really saw the universe spread out above. Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch Hooker telescope, then the largest in the world, made a series of pivotal discoveries in the 1920s. First he showed that the Andromeda nebula was outside our galaxy, taking the universe past the Milky Way. And then, a few years later with Milton Humason, he demonstrated that those distant galaxies were receding from ours—that the universe was expanding. This was the crucial groundwork for the Big Bang theory.
The last time I was up there, you could press a button on a display and the reassuring voice of Hugh Downs would explain that “Hubble’s discoveries were the last great step in the Copernican revolution of thought concerning man’s place in the cosmos. Hubble showed that our galaxy is not the center of the universe. There is no center.”
These discoveries were of a piece with the other great revelations of the 20th century—things like the invention of the solar cell at Bell Labs in 1954, or Jim Hansen’s pathbreaking climate science at NASA’s labs in the 1980s. They were the product of the human instinct for observation, nurtured in America’s unprecedented complex of university, government, and commercial labs. Scripps Oceanographic, MIT, Caltech, JPL, on and on. These were the kind of institutions that took us to the moon, and that indeed just last month shot a spacecraft closer to the sun than ever before.
And it’s this kind of science that lets us understand what’s happening in LA today; the descendants of Hubble and Hansen have continued the kind of painstaking research that make clear the result when a climate-induced drought (it’s only rained 0.16 inches in LA since May) and climate-induced heatwaves (the LA basin had some of its hottest stretches ever this past summer) and perhaps the climate-induced increase in the intensity of Santa Ana winds combine to created a firestorm unlike any other. It’s both simple and complicated: here’s a remarkable paper from Nature explaining how the melt of Arctic sea ice, by affecting the jetstream, is making West Coast fires worse.
In some ways, all this human intelligence is still being put to good use. Sammy Roth has written powerful recent accounts of Los Angeles’s push to build solar farms on all its margins, en route to becoming one of the world’s most renewably powered cities.
But in other ways that legacy of highly developed human intelligence is starting to disappear. It’s not just the polio vaccine (RFK Jr. told reporters yesterday, by the way, that he was “very worried” about his LA mansion). It’s the web of climate science targeted by Project 2025, which envisions an end to federal support even for the web of thermometers that measures our descent into something like hell. That’s because they understand (correctly) that this science is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” As Marc Morano, perhaps the country’s most inedfatigable climate denier, put it on Fox yesterday when asked about climate researchers
You have to cut the funding. You have to cut the program. You have to fire the employees, or at the very least, since it is hard to fire people, reassign them.
And yesterday the incoming president published a particularly memorable rant on his Truth Social platform
Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!
That this is all nonsense should by now be taken for granted. His reference is to some effort half a decade ago to allot yet more water to California’s big corporate farms; there is no river of water that the governor could somehow have diverted to Los Angeles to fight the fires. (And if you look at the videos it’s painfully absurd to imagine that a phalanx of firemen with hoses were going to beat down this maelstrom). Elsewhere on social media MAGA aficonados (and U.S. Senators) have taken turns blaming DEI initiatives, the war in Ukraine, and so on.
The great casualties in California today are people and animals and buildings—homes, synagogues, schools, libraries. The great casualty in the month’s ahead may be the insurance system of the world’s fifth biggest economy, which is going to buckle under the strain of these losses. But the steady loss of intelligence in our nation and our world worries me the most. Even as the stakes grow higher, we’re losing our hard-won ability to understand the world around us.
One of the mysteries of Hubble’s universe is why we haven’t found other intelligent species. One explanation is that most civilizations do themselves in before they can reach out into space.
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The Most Important Thing That Happened This Year Was the Heat
And yet you really wouldn’t know it from reading the wrap-ups of the year’s news now appearing on one website after another.
Dec 28, 2023
The world—its politics, its economy, and its journalism—has trouble coping with the scale of the climate crisis. We can’t quite wrap our collective head around it, which has never been clearer to me than in these waning days of 2023.
Because the most important thing that happened this year was the heat. By far. It was hotter than it has been in at least 125,000 years on this planet. Every month since May was the hottest ever recorded. Ocean temperatures set a new all-time mark, over 100°F. Canada burned, filling the air above our cities with smoke.
And yet you really wouldn’t know it from reading the wrap-ups of the year’s news now appearing on one website after another.
We’re programmed—by evolution, doubtless, and in the case of journalism by counting clicks—to look for novelty and for conflict. Climate change seems inexorable, which is the opposite of how we think about news.
Earlier today, for instance, The New York Times published an essay by investment banker and Obama consigliere Steven Rattner on “ten charts that mattered in 2023.” That’s the most establishment voice imaginable, in the most establishment spot. And the global temperature curve did make the list—at #10, well behind graphs about the fall in inflation, the president’s approval levels, the number of Trump indictments, the surge in immigrants, and the speed with with the GOP defenestrated Kevin McCarthy.
Indeed, yesterday the Times and The Washington Post both published fine stories about 2023’s record temperatures, but they were odd: In each case, they centered on whether the year was enough to show that the climate crisis was “accelerating.” It’s an interesting question, drawing mainly on a powerful new paper by James Hansen (one that readers of this newsletter found out about last winter), but the premise of the reporting, if you take a step back, is kind of wild. Because the climate crisis is already crashing down on us. It doesn’t require “acceleration” to be the biggest—by orders of magnitude—dilemma facing our species.
In a sense, though, that’s the problem. Those stories in the Times and Post were a way to search for a new angle to a story that doesn’t change quite fast enough to count as news. (In geological terms, we’re warming at hellish pace; but that’s not how the 24/7 news cycle works.) It’s been record-global-hot every day for months now: The first few of those days got some coverage, but at a certain point editors, and then readers, begin to tune out. We’re programmed—by evolution, doubtless, and in the case of journalism by counting clicks—to look for novelty and for conflict. Climate change seems inexorable, which is the opposite of how we think about news.
The war in Gaza, by contrast, fits our definitions perfectly. It is an extraordinary tragedy, it changes day by day, and it is the definition of conflict. And perhaps there’s something we can do about it (which is why many of us have been trying to build support for a cease-fire). So, rightly, it commands our attention. But in a sense, it is the very familiarity of the war that makes it easy for us to focus on it; “Mideast conflict,” like “inflation” or “presidential elections,” is an easily-accessed template in our minds. The images of the horror make us, as they should, feel uncomfortable—but it’s a familiar discomfort. The despair, and the resolve, we feel are familiar too; even the subparts of the story fit into familiar grooves (a New York Times reader would be forgiven for thinking the main front of the war is being played out in Harvard Yard, between free speech advocates and cancel culture warriors). Next year seems likely to be another orgy of familiarity: Joe Biden and Donald Trump, yet again.
Climate change has its own familiar grooves—above all the fight with the fossil fuel industry, which played out again at COP28 in Dubai. But so much of the story is actually brand new: As this year showed, we’re literally in uncharted territory, dealing with temperatures no human society has ever dealt with before. And to head off the worst, we are going to require an industrial transition on a scale we’ve never seen before: There were signs this year that that transition has begun (by midsummer we were installing a gigawatt worth of solar panels a day), but it will have to go much much faster.
These changes—the physical ones, and the political and economic ones—are almost inconceivable to us. That’s my point; they don’t fit our easy templates.
And the point of my newsletter, now and in the years to come, is to try and explain the speed of our crisis, and explain what it dictates about the speed of our response. It’s a story I’ve been trying to put into perspective for 35 years now (The End of Nature was published in 1989, the first book about this crisis), and I’ll keep looking for new ways in. As the climate scientist Andrew Dessler put it in one year-end account, "The only really important question is, 'How many more years like this we have to have before the reality of how bad climate change is breaks into the public's consciousness?'"
Thank you for being part of this ongoing effort to break into that consciouness, and—well, happy new year. It’s coming at us, we might as well make it count.
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We Underestimated the Speed and Scale of the Climate Crisis, Scientists Warn
“We need to hold governments to start to act sensibly now and reduce emissions,” one expert said.
Jul 21, 2023
As leading climate scientists watch the devastating, breakneck speed of unfolding climate disasters unfolding across the globe—from record soaring temperatures to catastrophic flooding—many are aghast at how rapidly their worst predictions are being now being played out in real-time.
Some are also now admitting that they might well have underestimated the speed and scale of our impending climate crisis and how bad things could get.
This is deeply ironic because, for years, those scientists who sounded the alarm over climate change were attacked by the oil industry or their funded front groups for exaggerating or playing “chicken little.”
“The research community must be brutally honest. We are on a pathway to 2-3°C, and probably closer to the upper end of that range.”
But now some of the most senior climate scientists on the planet are speaking out about their concerns.
Speaking to the BBC Thursday morning, Sir Bob Watson, who is currently emeritus professor of the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said, “I am very concerned. None of the observed changes so far (at +1.2°C) are surprising. But they are more severe than we predicted. We probably underestimated the consequences.”
He added “The research community must be brutally honest. We are on a pathway to 2-3°C, and probably closer to the upper end of that range. We are likely to pass 1.5°C in the mid-2030’s and 2°C around 2060. Current pledges and the policies needed them are totally inadequate.”
As the BBC notes, although Watson’s “comments are candid on the state of action on climate change, many of his colleagues will agree with his conclusion that we are on course for a temperature rise of 2.5°C or more.”
And Watson’s colleagues do concur. Ellen Thomas, a Yale University scientist who studies climate change told TheGuardian “It’s not just the magnitude of change, it’s the rate of change that’s an issue.”
Thomas added: “We have highways and railroads that are set in place, our infrastructure can’t move. Almost all my colleagues have said that, in hindsight, we have underestimated the consequences. Things are moving faster than we thought, which is not good.”
Other leading scientists agree too:
Meanwhile, others are being candid that nothing will change until we reduce our use of fossil fuels. “I’ve been expecting this for 20 years,” Professor Camille Parmesan, from the National Center for Scientific Research and an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report author, told Bloomberg. “This is just going to keep happening given that we’re not reducing emissions.”
Speaking to The Guardian, James Hansen, often seen as the Godfather of climate science, warned we are hurtling towards a superheated climate because “we are damned fools” for not acting sooner. “We have to taste it to believe it.”
He told The Guardian: “There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts. These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality—we knew it was coming.”'
“The climate crisis is in the main a fossil fuel crisis.”
“This does not mean that the extreme heat at a particular place this year will recur and grow each year,” he continued. “Weather fluctuations move things around. But the global average temperature will go up and the climate dice will be more and more loaded, including more extreme events.”
In a so far unpeer-reviewed scientific paper, Hansen and colleagues said: “It seems that we are headed into a new frontier of global climate,” one not seen for millions of years.
They warn: “As long as more energy is coming in than going out, we must expect global warming to continue.”
Al Gore is another who is alarmed by what they are witnessing: “Everywhere you look in the world, the extremes have now seemingly reached a new level,” he told The New York Times in an interview. “The temperatures in the North Atlantic and the unprecedented decline of the Antarctic sea ice, both simultaneously. We see it in upstate New York, we see it in Vermont, we see it in southern Japan, we see it in India. We see it in the unprecedented drought in Uruguay and in Argentina.”
“The climate crisis is in the main a fossil fuel crisis,” Gore added. “If the world is not permitted to discuss the phasing down of fossil fuels because the fossil fuel companies don’t want the world to discuss it, that’s the sign of a very flawed process.”
But it’s not too late to act. As Watson said: “We need to hold governments to start to act sensibly now and reduce emissions.” And its not just governments. It’s the oil industry, too; as Gore points out, this is a fossil fuel crisis. Created by the fossil fuel industry. Because their decades-old public relations strategy of denying the evidence, spreading doubt, and delaying action is the reason our world is on fire right now.
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Celebration as Last German Nuclear Plants Power Down
"The United States would do well to follow this example, rather than continue to fund nuclear power, the slowest, and most expensive of all energy choices," asserted one activist.
Apr 17, 2023
Environmentalists in Europe and beyond cheered as Germany's last three nuclear power plants went offline over the weekend, a controversial move the country's environmental minister hailed as the start of "a new era of energy production."
The Associated Press reports the Emsland, Neckarwestheim II, and Isar II nuclear plants were shut down shortly before midnight Saturday after decades of protests and pressure by anti-nuclear campaigners.
"Millions of people worked towards this day for years," Greenpeace Germany managing director Roland Hipp wrote in an opinion piece published Sunday by Common Dreams. "People who protested against reprocessing plants, nuclear waste transport, unsafe nuclear waste storage facilities, and the construction of new nuclear power plants. Those decades of resistance were worth it."
"The German nuclear phaseout is a victory of reason over the lust for profit; over powerful corporations and their client politicians," Hipp added. "It is a people-powered success against all the odds."
Germany's nuclear shutdown—which was originally scheduled for completion by the end of 2022—was postponed as part of a compromise by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a member of the Social Democratic Party, due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and subsequent fuel shortages.
The phaseout—a key component of Germany's plan to produce 80% of the country's power from renewable sources by the end of the decade—is highly controversial, as numerous experts including former NASA climate scientist James Hansen urged Scholz to keep the reactors online.
Opponents of the phaseout argued that Germany's plan to replace the roughly 6% of electricity generated by the three shuttered nuclear plants with renewables, gas, and coal—the latter of which fuels more than 30% of the country's power—poses a greater climate risk than keeping the reactors in operation.
"Germany recognizes that renewables are cheaper, faster, and safer than nuclear power and come without a lethal waste legacy."
However, German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke, a member of Alliance 90/The Greens, argued that "the risks of nuclear power are ultimately unmanageable."
Last week, Lemke visited Fukushima, Japan, site of the March 2011 nuclear disaster—the worst since the Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine in 1986, when the country was part of the Soviet Union.
Juergen Trittin, parliamentary leader of Alliance 90/The Greens, said that "we are putting an end to a dangerous, unsustainable, and costly technology."
Linda Pentz Gunter, founder of the advocacy group Beyond Nuclear, said in a statement that "the renewable energy revolution needed to save us from the worst of the climate crisis is a matter of political will, not technical know-how, and Germany's weekend shutdown of its last three nuclear reactors marks a strong step in that direction."
"The nuclear phaseout opened the way for renewable energy growth in Germany," she added. "Germany recognizes that renewables are cheaper, faster, and safer than nuclear power and come without a lethal waste legacy. The United States would do well to follow this example, rather than continue to fund nuclear power, the slowest, and most expensive of all energy choices."
Germany's neighbors remain heavily dependent upon nuclear power. France derives about 70% of its electricity from 56 nuclear power plants, while such facilities provide Switzerland and Belgium with between 30% and 40% of their electric power.
During a Group of Seven meeting that included Germany over the weekend, Canada, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States announced a new nuclear power alliance and G7 ministers put out a statement that says "those countries that opt to use nuclear energy recognize its potential to provide affordable low-carbon energy that can reduce dependence on fossil fuels, to address the climate crisis, and to ensure global energy security as a source of baseload energy and grid flexibility."
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Climate Package Is a Dangerous Fraud
His promise to direct pipeline profits to clean energy is like allowing cigarettes to be sold to kids as long as tobacco companies make generous donations to cancer research
Jul 07, 2019
It's possible that the world's top climate scientists are lying.
Trudeau's package is a dangerous fraud--one that gives us a false sense that we can dramatically increase output from Alberta's oilsands without seriously imperiling the world, and ourselves.
If so, we can relax and feel confident that Justin Trudeau has dealt with the climate crisis in the appropriate way.
Although the prime minister approved the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline last month, he's vowed to channel pipeline profits into clean energy projects. Compared to the Conservatives, Trudeau's climate package, which includes taxes on carbon, seems reasonable and balanced--with a sweetener of environmental activism thrown in. (After all, it's 2019.)
But if climate scientists are not lying, if they're just honestly reporting their scientific findings, Trudeau's package is a dangerous fraud--one that gives us a false sense that we can dramatically increase output from Alberta's oilsands without seriously imperiling the world, and ourselves.
I'm inclined to believe the scientists. Convened by the United Nations, they reviewed more than 6,000 scientific studies and reported last fall that we have only about a dozen years left if we are to prevent truly dire climate conditions which go well beyond the kind of horrific wildfires, heat waves, droughts and floods we're already experiencing.
To avoid this, the scientists on the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called on the world to make urgent and unprecedented changes that would dramatically reduce our fossil fuel consumption.
The chances of the world doing so are, of course, slim.
But that slim hope would be reduced to a thread by the Trans Mountain expansion, which would triple the pipeline's capacity to transport the province's heavy crude oil, one of the world's dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuels.
That would be equivalent to adding 34 million cars to our roads, according to the environmental group Oil Change International.
Renowned U.S. climate scientist James Hansen has said if Alberta's oilsands are fully exploited, it's "game over."
Trudeau's promise to direct pipeline profits to clean energy--as good as that sounds--is like allowing cigarettes to be sold to kids as long as tobacco companies make generous donations to cancer research.
So Trudeau's promise to direct pipeline profits to clean energy--as good as that sounds--is like allowing cigarettes to be sold to kids as long as tobacco companies make generous donations to cancer research.
Given the Canadian political landscape, Trudeau's compromise may seem like the best we can do. But, as Winston Churchill once said: "Sometimes it is not enough to do our best; we must do what is required."
By that standard, we're failing miserably.
With climate change increasingly in the headlines, it's easy to be lulled into believing the world is finally cutting carbon emissions. In fact, they continue to rise.
The climate has warmed roughly 1degC since the 1850s, and it's expected to warm another half-degree, due to carbon already in the atmosphere. The big question is whether we can hold it to 1.5degC--a level of warming with severe but manageable consequences. At 2degC, it gets truly scary.
Ottawa admits Canada is far from meeting its carbon-reduction targets. This understates our poor performance.
A 2018 study published in the journal Nature Communications ranked Canada among countries with the world's least effective climate policies. The study found that if Canada's policies were adopted worldwide, global temperatures would rise by a disastrous 5.1degC by the end of the century. And that assessment was made before Trudeau approved the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.
Given the potential catastrophe ahead, it's amazing the subject is often discussed with detachment.
Economist Moshe Lander of Concordia University recently argued that, with the world moving toward a carbon-free future, Alberta's oil should be extracted while there's still time; "it's sort of a now or never approach."
This attitude--let's dump every bit of carbon into the air while we can still make a buck from it!--reveals a stunning indifference to the enormity of the crisis we face, and the fighting spirit we'll need to summon if we're going to save ourselves and future generations.
Winston Churchill demonstrated that sort of fighting spirit when he vowed in 1940: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets."
Imagine if he'd settled for: "We'll do our best. But we have to balance the need to fight tyranny with the need to create jobs."
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The Last Battle of the Cree Nation
The Canadian tar sands, perhaps the largest such project in the world, is rapidly accelerating the release of the carbon emissions that will, if left unchecked, soon render the planet uninhabitable for humans
Apr 29, 2019
The Beaver Lake Cree Nation, Treaty No. 6 Area, Canada--I am driving down a rutted dirt road with Eric Lameman, a member of the Cree nation.
"Over there," he says, pointing out where he was born in a tent 61 years ago.
We stop the car and look toward a wooded grove.
"That's the mass grave," he says softly, indicating a clearing where dozens of Cree who died in a smallpox epidemic over a century ago are buried.
The Cree have been under relentless assault since the arrival of the European colonialists in the 1500s. Now the 500 inhabitants of the Cree reserve, where many live in small, boxy prefabricated houses, are victims of a new iteration of colonial exploitation, one centered on the extraction of oil from the vast Alberta tar sands. This atrocity presages the destruction of the ecosystem on which they depend for life. If the Cree do not stop the exploiters this time, they, along the exploiters, will die.
The reserve is surrounded by the tar sands, one of the largest concentrations of crude oil in the world. The sands produce 98% of Canada's oil and are the United States' largest source of imported oil. This oil, among the dirtiest fossil fuels on earth, is a leading cause of atmospheric pollution, releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide. The production and consumption of one barrel of tar sands crude oil release 17% more carbon dioxide than production and consumption of a standard barrel of oil.
Tar sands oil is a thick, mucky, clay-like substance that is infused with a hydrocarbon called bitumen. The oil around Beaver Lake is extracted by a process known as steam-assisted gravity drainage, which occurs under the earth and is similar to fracking. Farther north, extraction is done by strip-mining the remote boreal forest of Alberta, 2 million acres of which have already been destroyed. The destruction of vast forests, sold to timber companies, and the scraping away of the topsoil have left behind poisoned wastelands. This industrial operation, perhaps the largest such project in the world, is rapidly accelerating the release of the carbon emissions that will, if left unchecked, soon render the planet uninhabitable for humans. The oil is transported thousands of miles to refineries as far away as Houston through pipelines and in tractor-trailer trucks or railroad cars. More than a hundred climate scientists have called for a moratorium on the extraction of tar sands oil. Former NASA scientist James Hansen has warned that if the tar sands oil is fully exploited, it will be "game over for the planet." He has also called for the CEOs of fossil fuel companies to be tried for high crimes against humanity.
It is hard, until you come here, to grasp the scale of the tar sands exploitation. Surrounding Beaver Lake are well over 35,000 oil and natural gas wells and thousands of miles of pipelines, access roads and seismic lines. (The region also contains the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range, which has appropriated huge tracts of traditional territory from the native inhabitants to test weapons.) Giant processing plants, along with gargantuan extraction machines, including bucket wheelers that are over half a mile long and draglines that are several stories high, ravage hundreds of thousands of acres. These stygian centers of death belch sulfurous fumes, nonstop, and send fiery flares into the murky sky. The air has a metallic taste. Outside the processing centers, there are vast toxic lakes known as tailings ponds, filled with billions of gallons of water and chemicals related to the oil extraction, including mercury and other heavy metals, carcinogenic hydrocarbons, arsenic and strychnine. The sludge from the tailings ponds is leaching into the Athabasca River, which flows into the Mackenzie, the largest river system in Canada. Nothing here, by the end, will support life. The migrating birds that alight at the tailings ponds die in huge numbers. So many birds have been killed that the Canadian government has ordered extraction companies to use noise cannons at some of the sites to scare away arriving flocks. Around these hellish lakes, there is a steady boom-boom-boom from the explosive devices.
The water in much of northern Alberta is no longer safe for human consumption. Drinking water has to be trucked in for the Beaver Lake reserve.
Streams of buses ferry workers, almost all of them men, up and down the roads, night and day. Tens of thousands from across Canada have come to work in the tar sands operations. Many live in Fort McMurray, about 180 miles from Beaver Lake, and work punishing 12-hour shifts for three weeks at a time before having a week off.
The Cree, the Dene and other tribes that live amid the environmental carnage and whose ancestral lands have been appropriated by the government to extract the tar sands oil suffer astronomical rates of respiratory and other illnesses. Cancer rates are 30% higher than in the rest of Alberta, according to the Alberta Cancer Board, which was disbanded soon after releasing this information in 2008.
When he was a child, Eric Lameman was taken from his parents by the government, a common practice a few decades ago, and sent to an Indian boarding school where beatings were routine, speaking Cree or any of the other indigenous languages was forbidden and native religious and cultural practices were outlawed. He says the forced severance from his family and his community, along with the banning of his traditions, was psychologically devastating. He remembers his father and other Cree elders on the reserve performing religious rituals in secret. He would sneak to the woods to watch them as, risking arrest, they clung to their beliefs and spiritual practices.
Lameman defied the efforts to wipe out his identity and his culture, which he nurtured in spite of the attempts to eradicate them. He remained a Cree. And he says it is only his Cree roots that keep him whole and make it possible for him to endure. He suffered extreme poverty. He also had periods of addiction and even episodes of violence. It is hard to avoid personal disintegration when the dominant culture seeks to eradicate your being. Canada's indigenous people represent 4 percent of the population, but they make up more than a quarter of the inmates in the nation's federal prisons. Lameman's wife left him and their young children. She died from alcoholism on the streets of Calgary. He worked as a heavy machine operator in the tar sands. He quit when he realized the land he was despoiling would never recover and he began to get sick. He survives now on welfare.
We are back in his small house, seated in the tiny kitchen. His daughter Crystal Lameman, an internationally known indigenous rights activist, heats juniper in an iron skillet until fumes of the pungent herb drift upward. We cup our hands and pull the smoke into our nostrils. The Cree and others say "smudging" cleanses negative energy, helps bring clarity and vision, and centers those exposed to the scent. We sit quietly.
The more the Cree recover their traditions to defy the capitalist mantra of hoarding, profit, exploitation, self-promotion and commodification of human beings and the earth, the more their life has an intrinsic value rather than a monetary value. This recovery is the antidote to despair. It grounds the Cree spiritually. It permits transcendence. It at once estranges them from reality and brings them closer to it. Resistance is not only about challenging the extraction companies in court, as the Cree have done in trying to block the tar sands industry and the pipelines from their traditional land; it is about holding fast to another orientation to reality, one that we all must adopt if we are to survive as a species. It is about the recovery of the sacred. The white exploiters seek not only to steal the land and natural resources and commit genocide against indigenous communities but to wipe out this competing ethic.
"I need my people," Eric Lameman says. "I need the ones that know our history, our language, our spiritual practices and our culture. I rely on them to pass it on to me so I can pass it on."
The exploiters have sought to corrupt the Cree and bastardize their traditions. Extraction companies have paid off some tribal leaders to support pipelines or surrender tribal territory to oil development. The companies use the quislings to mount propaganda campaigns in favor of extraction, to divide and weaken indigenous communities and to attempt to discredit leaders such as Crystal. The federal government last year staged a Cree religious ceremony, complete with honor songs and drums, to bless the Trans Mountain Expansion Project and Canada's $4.5 billion purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline, developments that mean death for the Cree people.
"This is what they call reconciliation," Eric says bitterly.
"It's cultural appropriation," Crystal says. " 'Reconciliation' is a bullshit word. Reconciling with whom? Reconciling what? Reconciling us with the current colonial systems of exploitation? Until they dismantle the structures of exploitation there can be no reconciliation."
The man camps of tens of thousands of tar sands workers fuel the prostitution industry. Indigenous girls and women, living in squalor and poverty, are lured by the seemingly easy and fast money. Their sexual degradation soon leads to addictions to blunt the pain. This too is a legacy of colonialism. Canada began as a military and commercial outpost of Britain. The Hudson's Bay Company did not permit European women to immigrate to Canada. Brothels, populated by prostituted indigenous girls and women, were established alongside the military forts and trading posts. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police issued a report in 2015 that found that indigenous, or First Nations, women, who constitute 4.3% of Canada's female population, are four times more likely to go missing or be murdered than other Canadian women. They are 16% of female murder victims and are the objects of 11% of missing person's cases involving women.
"I was on a panel in Vancouver," Crystal Lameman says. "I used the word 'prostitution.' A trans person got up and told me to use the term 'sex work,' saying it was a choice. Impoverished and vulnerable indigenous girls and women do not choose to be prostitutes. They are forced into that world. Girls are conditioned for this from familial disintegration and sexual abuse. ... Sexual abuse, a common experience for girls in residential schools and the foster care system, is another one of the legacies of colonialism."
The infusion of workers with disposable incomes has also seen an explosion in drugs in northern Alberta such as crack cocaine and crystal meth, and with the drugs has come a rash of suicides among the native population. Suicide and non-suicidal intentional self-injuries are the leading causes of death for First Nations people under the age of 44 in Canada. Young indigenous males are 10 times more likely to kill themselves than other Canadians. Young indigenous females are 21 times more likely to commit suicide. Beaver Lake has not been spared, losing seven people to suicide in a 12-month period in 2014 and 2015. All of them were under the age of 44, and all were drug addicts or alcoholics.
"There are two roads into Fort McMurray," Crystal says. "There's Highway 63 and Highway 881, which runs through here. This is one of the stops for the drugs. The traffickers say, 'Well, there's a little town, we'll stop there and drop drugs there too. A lot of the drug runners are from small towns, from these communities. It is a quick way to make money."
"Our community used to be safe," she says. "We left the doors unlocked, even when we slept. We would leave our vehicles running. Nobody worried."
"It's dangerous now," she goes on, speaking of the rash of robberies by addicts. She adds, "You can't get into altercations. It's the drugs. They affect people's mental health. People live in fear."
The resurrection of the old ceremonial practices such as the annual sun dance, along with the traditional medicine camp, harvesting camps and sweat lodges, is about another way of being, one that honors the interconnectedness of all living beings, including the earth on which we depend for life.
"We are seeing the effects," Crystal says. "Our cultural practices and language embody a belief system that is the opposite of capitalism and globalization, the lust for money and material wealth."
"I used to think globally," she says. "I was in D.C. on the front lines. I was in the climate march in New York. I was everywhere. I traveled internationally. I was at every rally. But I wasn't here, at home, doing the real work. It's easier being out there, instead of being in our community. Yes, there is this big black cloud, but there is also another, beautiful side. The women in the community are bringing the ceremonies back. The more we return to the land, the closer we are to achieving holistic wellness. My community is not in despair. We are doing our diligence to be well again. I think about my dad. My dad was one of those people he's talking about [when he says] 'I had friends that I can't trust now because they're not well because of the drugs.' My dad was one of those in despair. But he has come back to us and to himself."
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Oil and Gas Industry Has Way Too Much Control Over Congress
Either we escape from the malign grip of the oil and gas industry, or humanity will suffer climate wreckage for generations to come
Apr 17, 2019
In October 1992, the United States Senate ratified the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the global treaty to stop human-induced global warming, which became enforceable two years later. Yet for the quarter century since then, the US Congress has failed to pass a single major piece of legislation to implement the treaty.
The oil and gas industry finances the campaigns of many Republican members of Congress, as well as some Democrats from oil-producing states, who repeatedly side with their financiers against the interests of the American people.The reason is straightforward: the oil and gas industry finances the campaigns of many Republican members of Congress, as well as some Democrats from oil-producing states, who repeatedly side with their financiers against the interests of the American people.
In an effort to underscore the urgency of political action on this issue, I recently testified in Congress. As I listened to the Republican members question the two witnesses ahead of my panel, former Secretary of State John Kerry and former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, I was struck by the crazy state of affairs of our country. One Republican member, Rep. Thomas Massie, asked such an absurd question that Kerry finally had to respond, "Are you serious?"
Then I looked up the campaign funding of the various congressmen on Open Secrets, which tracks money in politics, and had a plausible explanation for the tragedy before my eyes. Perhaps the congressmen that I had been listening to were not really as ignorant as they seemed to be. Perhaps they were simply corrupted by campaign financing.
My own testimony was to the Environment Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform (Kerry and Hagel had been testifying to the full committee). Every one of the five Republican members of the subcommittee received 2018 campaign funds from political action committees (PACs) of the oil and gas industry. That was true of only one of the seven Democrats. The Republicans combined received $181,150 in oil and gas PAC money, compared with $3,000 for the single Democratic recipient.
By now, most Americans know that our congressional system is broken, corrupted, in large part, by corporate money. According to a recent Gallup poll, only 11% of the public expresses a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress, down from 42% in 1973 (when Gallup began collecting this kind of data). And only 8% described the honesty and ethical standards of Congress as "high" or "very high."
According to Open Secrets, looking at Congress as a whole, the oil and gas sector contributed $84.4 million in the 2018 election cycle. Of those funders, Koch Industries was the largest single campaign funder, at $10.5 million. And of the total oil and gas sector contributions to candidates, 87% went to Republicans. Of the Koch contributions, 99.4% went to Republicans. For perspective, total campaign spending by the oil and gas sector since 1990 has totaled $625 million, with 81% of the contributions to candidates going to Republicans.
In addition to the campaign spending, the oil and gas industry spends an astonishing sum on lobbying. The sector's lobbying outlays totaled $124.8 million during 2018. The top five lobbying clients -- ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell and the American Petroleum Institute -- had a combined lobbying spend of over $46 million. And the oil and gas industry's total lobbying outlays during 1998-2018 amounted to a shocking $2.2 billion.
And their lobbying efforts bear real fruit. Just before President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, 22 Republican senators wrote a letter to Trump urging that action. Every one of those senators received contributions from oil and gas PACs. The total oil and gas PAC spending for the 22 senators, for the period of 2013-18, covering the campaign committee and leadership PAC, came to $4,095,071.
The oil and gas industry continues to invest heavily to develop new oil and gas fields despite the urgent need to shift to renewable energy, and the rise of state-level regulations to shift to renewables.The oil and gas industry continues to invest heavily to develop new oil and gas fields despite the urgent need to shift to renewable energy, and the rise of state-level regulations to shift to renewables. Indeed, the New York State attorney general is suing ExxonMobil to seek "redress for a longstanding fraudulent scheme by Exxon, one of the world's largest oil and gas companies, to deceive investors and the investment community, including equity research analysts and underwriters of debt securities (together, "investors"), concerning the company's management of the risks posed to its business by climate change regulation." ExxonMobil vehemently denies the allegations.
So, what is the result of all of this corruption? Nothing less than the continuing threats to the planet at the hands of executives of ExxonMobil, Chevron, Koch Industries and other companies ready to destroy the environment for the sake of stock options. Just consider the past five years -- the hottest five years on record. The Earth has already warmed by 1.1 degree C above the pre-industrial level. As a result, the United States and rest of the planet are being hit by extraordinary heat waves, droughts, floods, forest fires and extreme storms.
The damage from climate-related disasters in the United States during the past three years (2016-2018) exceeds $450 billion, or an average of $150 billion per year. And much worse could come. As Columbia University Professor James Hansen has shown, the warming to date and that still on the way could lead to a catastrophic rise of sea level by 8 meters (26 feet), as occurred the last time the planet was as warm as it is now or perhaps just slightly warmer (115,000 years ago).
The most important step to climate safety is a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, especially wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and bio. Engineering studies demonstrate that we already have the technologies needed to decarbonize the world energy system, and that comprehensive decarbonization of the energy system is within reach and is economical. The key steps are to shift electricity generation from coal, oil, and gas to renewable, zero-carbon sources, mainly solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal and to electrify automobiles and home heating. Other energy needs, for shipping, aviation, trucking and heavy industry, will be met through a combination of electrification and synthetic fuels manufactured with zero-carbon electricity.
In view of these findings, the recent proposals for a Green New Deal make eminent sense, and a decarbonization action plan should be put into legislation as soon as possible. Just this month, a major new report demonstrates that every major world region could decarbonize the power, transport and building sectors by 2050. Several states, including California and New York, are aiming to decarbonize their power sector before that date, yet the federal government is rudderless and without a plan because of the chronic inaction of the US Congress.
Our hopes for a habitable planet now rest with politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who run their election campaigns without accepting the corrupting money of oil and gas PACS. Either we escape from the malign grip of the oil and gas industry, or humanity will suffer climate wreckage for generations to come.
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The Hard Lessons of Dianne Feinstein's Encounter with the Young Green New Deal Activists
Youth carry the moral authority here
Feb 23, 2019
One imagines that Senator Dianne Feinstein would like a do-over of her colloquy with some young people on Friday afternoon. A group of school students, at least one as young as seven, went to the senator's San Francisco office to ask her to support the Green New Deal climate legislation. In a video posted online by the Sunrise Movement, she tells them that the resolution isn't a good one, because it can't be paid for, and the Republicans in the Senate won't support it. She adds that she is at work on her own resolution, which she thinks could pass. Then, when the group persists in supporting the Green New Deal, which was introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Feinstein responds, "You know what's interesting about this group? I've been doing this for thirty years. I know what I'm doing. You come in here and you say, 'It has to be my way or the highway.' I don't respond to that. I've gotten elected, I just ran, I was elected by almost a million-vote plurality," she continued. "And I know what I'm doing. So, you know, maybe people should listen a little bit."
Well, maybe. But Feinstein was, in fact, demonstrating why climate change exemplifies an issue on which older people should listen to the young. Because--to put it bluntly--older generations will be dead before the worst of it hits. The kids whom Feinstein was talking to are going to be dealing with climate chaos for the rest of their lives, as any Californian who has lived through the past few years of drought, flood, and fire must recognize.
This means that youth carry the moral authority here, and, at the very least, should be treated with the solicitousness due a generation that older ones have managed to screw over. Feinstein's condescension, though it's less jarring in the video of the full encounter, which also shows gracious moments--including one when she offers a young person an internship--echoed that of Nancy Pelosi, from earlier this month, when the Speaker of the House talked about "the green dream, or whatever they call it. Nobody knows what it is, but they're for it, right?"
This smugness stings--although, of course, it stings far less than the climate denialism emanating from the White House. But that's not really the problem. The problem is that, even if you give Feinstein every benefit of the doubt, her response illustrates the fix we're in. Later Friday evening, Feinstein's aides released portions of her proposal, and on first view they appear to be warmed-over versions of Obama-era environmental policy: respect for the Paris climate accord, a commitment to a mid-century conversion to renewable energy.
It's not that these things are wrong. It's that they are insufficient, impossibly so. Not insufficient--and here's the important point--to meet the demands of hopelessly idealistic youth but because of the point that the kids were trying to make, which is that the passage of time is changing the calculations around climate change.
Feinstein is, in fact, right: on most questions, a "my way or the highway" attitude doesn't get you very far. If I'm a lawmaker and I think that the minimum wage should be thirty dollars an hour, and you're one who thinks that eight dollars is generous, we'll probably try to pass a law that sets the mark somewhere near fifteen dollars, and then argue about it again after the next election. There would be no point in holding out for what I can't get. But, in the case of the environment, the opponent is not the Chamber of Commerce. The opponent is physics, and physics doesn't negotiate. It's not moved by appeals to centrist moderation, or explanations about the filibuster. And it has set a firm time limit. Scientists have told us what we must do and by when, and so legislators must do all they can to match those targets. The beauty of the Green New Deal legislation is not that it's shiny or progressive or a poke in the eye to the oil companies. Its beauty is that it actually tries to meet the target that science has given us.
The irony is that, when Feinstein said she's been "doing this for thirty years," she described the precise time period during which we could have acted. James Hansen brought the climate question to widespread attention with his congressional testimony in 1988. If we'd moved thirty years ago, moderate steps of the kind that Feinstein proposes would have been enough to change our trajectory. But that didn't get done, in large part because oil and gas companies that have successfully gamed our political system didn't want it to get done. And the legislators didn't do anywhere near enough to fight them. So now we're on the precipice. Indeed, we're over it. The fires that raged in California last fall were the fires of a hell on earth.
Given the failure of old-style politics on this issue, it is no surprise that youth are taking the initiative. Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest congresswoman in American history. The Green New Deal was hatched by the Sunrise Movement, which is composed of recent college graduates. And they are ancient compared with the sixteen-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who was in Paris last week to watch thousands of French youths join her in spreading the Friday for Future strikes, in which students skip school to demonstrate for climate action.
"You didn't vote for me," Feinstein said to one of the young people in her office. Which was true, because the girl in question is sixteen. In our reigning political calculus, that makes her powerless--she can't vote and she doesn't have money to give. But that calculus must shift; the job of older people, at this late date, is to have the backs of the young. We have skills to bring to the task: Feinstein has amassed a career's worth of legislative savvy, and she can put it to good use here; Ocasio-Cortez could doubtless use the help. But, having blown our chance at leading, it's time for those of us of a certain age to follow, with all the grace that we can still muster.
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After 40 Years of Government Inaction on Climate, Have We Finally Turned a Corner?
Policy expert Gus Speth talks about Our Children’s Trust’s lawsuit, explaining the U.S.’s longtime knowledge of climate change even as it pushed fossil fuels. But now we've got a fighting chance.
Feb 22, 2019
In 2015, 21 young people sued the U.S. government for promoting the fossil fuel industry even when it was aware of the dangers of climate change. In Juliana v. United States, the youths accused the government of endangering their future well-being thereby violating the government's public trust responsibility and their constitutional rights.
The U.S. government has repeatedly tried to stop this case from moving to trial. Courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have denied or refused to rule on government challenges. The case is currently before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on yet another motion to dismiss.
The suit centers on whether the government actively promoted the use of fossil fuels despite being aware of evidence that such action endangered the future of the planet. The youths, represented by the nonprofit Our Children's Trust, retained experts to contribute supporting reports for the suit, including from environmental lawyer and climate policy expert James Gustave Speth. He reviewed what each administration from Carter to Trump knew about climate change and alternative energy and what actions were taken. Speth concluded in his report, which was filed in 2018, that every administration "continued full-throttle support for the development and use of fossil fuels." This pattern is "the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic," he wrote.
Speth's advocacy for alternative energy pathways spans four decades. Under President Jimmy Carter, he headed the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, which recommended pursuing renewable energy and energy conservation as means to reduce the threat of climate change. He is a founder of the Natural Resource Defense Council and the World Resources Institute and served as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. He is currently a senior fellow at the Vermont Law School, the Democracy Collaborative, and the Tellus Institute, and a former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Fran Korten: The U.S. government seems very intent not only on winning the youths' lawsuit, but also on the trial not moving forward at all.
Gus Speth: The whole strategy of the government now for three years has been to prevent the trial from happening. I think they don't want the spotlight put on all this information or on the threats to the well-being of this new generation, which is going to absorb all the shock of our neglect. It is important that the lawsuit is brought by young people, because it really makes everyone face the reality of the challenge. I just hope and pray that the case gets to trial. I think it will be a landmark in public education. And it could lead to a decision that would really galvanize action.
Korten: As you reviewed four decades of government knowledge and action on climate change, what did you conclude?
Speth: Every administration I looked at did a great deal to promote the continued use of fossil fuels at a very high level. No president has looked at that fossil fuel use curve and said, "You know, we have got to bend it down and get out of this business." The percentage of U.S. energy that fossil fuels provides only went from about 90 percent with Carter to about 80 percent today.
Korten: You led the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality under Carter. Many of us remember Carter advocating turning down the heat and wearing sweaters. And he put solar panels on the White House. Do you feel Carter was personally convinced of the dangers of climate change way back in the late 1970s?
Speth: I think he believed that the federal government had to assert itself as a leader in energy policy and energy directions. He felt he had to reduce oil imports, which had skyrocketed in the period before him. That led to a whole series of actions to promote alternatives to imported oil, including greater use of domestic coal. But he repeated over and over that the long-term solution depended on developing renewable energy. He championed our Council on Environmental Quality report about what the U.S could do on solar and other renewables. And he set a national goal for the year 2000 of 20 percent of energy coming from renewables. He deeply believed in an energy future that was primarily one of renewable energy resources with a sharp increase in energy efficiency and conservation.
I know from speaking with him personally and from his public remarks that he understood the risks of climate change.
Korten: Let's turn to Reagan. What happened to concern about renewables and climate change when Reagan came in?
Speth: Well, there really were two Reagans in this era. One was the initial Reagan, in which he had a very antienvironmental crew--James Watt at the Interior Department and Anne Gorsuch at EPA, among them.
The country was not crazy then, and there were good Republicans as well as good Democrats. People like John Chafee, a great Republican senator from Rhode Island. They pushed for the appointment of credible people--Bill Ruckelshaus at EPA and then his successor, Lee Thomas. Throughout much of the later Reagan administration, EPA and others put out numerous reports on the seriousness of the climate issue. Really good reports. The Department of Energy had a strong research program on it.
But Reagan didn't pay any attention to them. His administration just went full bore for more fossils fuels. The '80s were also the time when we first had compelling scientific evidence linking the theory of global warming to changes actually happening on Earth. This was brought forth in the testimony of [NASA scientist] James Hansen in 1982, 1986, and 1988. Three times he went to the Hill and testified, each time with more alarm that the Earth was changing due to the carbon dioxide buildup.
Korten: When did serious government opposition to action on climate change develop?
Speth: The opposition began to form during President George Herbert Walker Bush's administration. It didn't have to be too overt at that time, but it was very successful. It had top people within the White House who ensured that almost everything Bill Reilly at EPA would try to do on this issue would get squelched. Around this time, Exxon began its shift away from being a source of credible information on climate to supporting climate change denial, as documented by InsideClimate News in its report The Road Not Taken.
Korten: And when did climate change become so divisive in the broad public?
Speth: Ironically, an important shift occurred during the Clinton-Gore administration. They came in with a determination to make the issue a public concern. Al Gore had been a leader on climate. The polling suggests that their efforts tended to increase Democratic support slightly but that Republican voter support for climate action went in exactly the opposite direction. The Democrats and the Republicans diverged further, and that increased over time, driven by several factors, including a well-funded disinformation campaign taken from the tobacco playbook.
Behind all this is ideological opposition to government action, the great power of the fossil fuel industry, and America's vast economic insecurity.
Korten: What president do you feel did the most to act on climate?
Speth. I think Obama did the most. His policymakers were developing regulations about methane that Trump quickly axed. They had a clean power plan that Trump's been trying to get rid of. They put in fairly aggressive fuel economy standards for automobiles. But even if you add up the things that Obama was doing toward the end of his administration, they still would do less than the cap-and-trade plan that passed the U.S. House in the early years of his administration but failed to pass in the Senate.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration was rigorously promoting fossil fuels.
Korten: Writing your report for the young people's lawsuit forced you to reimmerse yourself in years of data about the increasing urgency of climate change accompanied by very little action. How was it emotionally for you to review all of that history of missed chances?
Speth: It was a very hard thing to deal with. I have said to people that this is the saddest story ever told, because the consequences are so huge and so long-lasting and so devastating. And we knew what we should have done. There were people in every administration who knew that what they were doing was wrong. So it made me sad, and it made me mad. It was also sobering in the sense that the climate activists had tried, we really tried.
Thousands and thousands of the smartest people in our country have pushed hard for 40 years, and to see so little actually accomplished is disturbing. We're up against the huge power of the fossil fuel industry; the extraordinary ideological opposition to the federal government doing anything important; money going into disinformation campaigns that people readily bought into. And it's still going on.
It is a sure sign in my view that we need to change the system of political economy in which we are struggling. It's sobering, as I say. But not discouraging, because we're still fighting.
Korten: Where do you think we are now on this issue in terms of public sentiment?
Speth: I actually believe that in terms of public awareness and getting something moving finally, we may have turned a corner.
It's going to be a hard slog. But with all the events that have brought public awareness forward--fires and floods and much more--and the number of cities and governors who are now acting, something has changed within the past year or two. Progressive momentum on the issue has begun. But it has a long way to go. We are in such a hole and have so much power arrayed against action. There's still so much misunderstanding and manipulated denialism.
Korten: What do you think ordinary citizens can do to help address climate change?
Speth: The important thing is for people to redouble their efforts. Now that we've got a fighting chance, we really have to fight.
We all should be engaged with a Green New Deal. I think one reason the idea is getting so much attention is that it is not just about climate and the environment. They are seeing the connections with other issues--the need to deal with impacted communities and create a huge new jobs programs and have a major infusion of finance into renewables and efficiencies and all kinds of retrofits. Bringing these issues together has created some real momentum.
Among other things, Green New Deal proponents see no problem with the government having the capacity to spend money into the economy to get these things done--quantitative easing for the planet, not just for the big banks. Lord knows where it's all going to go. Opposition is already building.
Above all, to deal with the climate issue, we need a powerful movement of movements. And we need to get a lot more "in the streets" about it--a fusion of progressive forces that is activist and rambunctious and full of spunk and determination.
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School Strikes Take Off as Legacy From 'Grandfather of Climate Science'
The death of one of the world’s leading climate scientists this week and the swiftly expanding school climate strikes is symbolic of a generational baton change in the fight against global warming.
Feb 21, 2019
More than 40 years after Wallace Smith Broecker published his landmark 1975 paper 'Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?' the world is still to set into action a global plan to prevent climate chaos.
While close to 200 countries reached the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 and adopted a set of rules governing climate action at the UN climate talks in Katowice (COP24) last December, they have so far failed to commit to accelerated climate action.
This ongoing political inaction is what drives the burgeoning school climate strikes inspired by Swedish girl Greta Thunberg, who boldly warned leaders at COP24 that "people will not wait for change, we will tell them change is coming".
But Broecker - who passed away in a New York City hospital this week at the age of 87 - did not get to see the concerted climate action he called for throughout much of his working life.
In the 1970s, when Broecker correctly predicted that rising carbon dioxide emissions would lead to atmospheric warming - and in doing so broke with now famously incorrect predictions of global cooling - the impacts of climate change were not yet visible.
Throughout the 1980s, as the scientific consensus on global warming increased and other leading scientists such as James Hansen called for political action, governments debated and discussed the threat of climate change.
At the same time, sceptics and fossil fuel companies consistently sowed doubt about climate science and sought to undermine solutions.
Talk and political inaction has followed in the two decades since, while temperatures have continued to rise. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has said the 20 warmest years on record have occurred in the past 22 years. The past four years have been the world's warmest.
The result is that the effects of this warming are now visible and weather extremes experienced around the world are being increasingly linked to climate change.
This year has kicked off where 2018 ended, with extreme weather in many parts of the world - record heat, wildfires and rainfall in South America and Australasia, dangerous and extreme cold in North America and heavy snowfall in the Alps and Himalayas.
Climate change is the greatest threat humanity has faced and the urgency of action has never been greater. Last October, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that we have just 12 years left to save the climate.
But there is hope. The inspirational climate strikes from Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Villasenor in the US and many others like them show the kind of resolve and sense of purpose required. The youth suing their governments in the US and Germany are also leading the way.
Now, in the lead-up to an international school climate strike on March 15, we must all show solidarity to the youth taking action.
It must not be left to the young to clean up the climate mess older generations have created. There is still time to avert chaos, but it requires the world's politicians and corporations to accept and embrace the responsibility of action.
Though toxic algae blooms like this occur naturally, they have grown in frequency and intensity in recent years, with elevated water temperatures from climate change being one of many likely reasons. (c) Steve Nesius
The equation is simple, the challenge is great, but the possibilities endless. Global CO2 emissions can and must be halved by 2030 before falling to net zero by 2050 at the latest.
Although leaders failed to commit to heightened climate action at COP24 - just two months after the IPCC's dire warning - they can rectify that failure now and in the lead-up to the UN Secretary-General's Climate Summit in September by ramping up action.
As the new generation walks out of school and takes to the streets carrying forth the warnings of climate science forerunners such as Broecker, it's time our politicians showed the same courage and vision and acted in solidarity with them. The time is now and we still have time, but only just.
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