Resilience Roundup – Jan 30

January 30, 2015

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

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A roundup of the news, views and ideas from the main stream press and the blogosphere.  Click on the headline link to see the full article.


‘Hottest Year’ Story Obscures Bigger News: Ocean Warming Now Off The Charts

Joe Romm, Climate Progress
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The oceans — where over 90% of global warming heat ends up — have literally warmed up off the charts of NOAA.

The big climate news last week was NOAA and NASA announcing that 2014 was the hottest year on record, breaking the highs of 2005 and 2010. But the bigger story got buried: Global warming has continued unabated in recent years.

Indeed, it’s not just that there not been a hiatus or pause or even slowdown in surface temperature warming (see below). The oceans, where the vast majority of human-caused global warming heat goes, have seen an acceleration in warming in recent years. As climate expert Prof. John Abraham writes in the UK Guardian, “The oceans are warming so fast, they keep breaking scientists’ charts.”


We can solve climate change, but it won’t be cheap or easy

Dave Roberts, Grist
Pretty much everyone who acknowledges the problem of climate change is hungry for good news about it, which makes sense, as most of the news is overwhelming and awful. There is high demand for optimism — I hear it every time someone asks me to write or speak on climate — so inevitably there is supply…

I appreciate the can-do spirit, but as Krugman and Romm no doubt both know, the idea that aggressive climate mitigation is going to shave precisely 0.06 percent off GDP growth is utterly fantastical…

The fact is, models like those used by the IPCC are not meant to tell us anything at all about the feasibility of energy transitions in the real world. They are just projections, proofs of what is technically possible.

And that’s great. But we also need to think about feasibility. And we need metrics through which to assess it. That brings me to a paper I’ve been meaning to get to for a while: “A critical review of global decarbonization scenarios: what do they tell us about feasibility?” (It came to me via Jesse Jenkins, who used to work at the Breakthrough Institute and now is out at MIT getting into all sorts of interesting stuff, including being a co-author on this paper.)…


Let’s face it: we have to choose between our economy and our future

Christiane Kliemann, The Guardian
…Growth is the perennial buzzword of the World Economic Forum – and this year is no exception. Delegates keep assuring us that their own profitability is vital for safeguarding humanity, while we ordinary people go about our day-to-day lives: we happily drive our cars, book flights to our next holiday destination and raise our children as we’ve always done.

It seems that we are in collective denial about the threatening implications of reality. We still trust in the old narratives that growth and competition are good, that technology and experts will fix it and that capitalism is history’s ultimate victor.

Not only ecological limits and growing social inequality, but also the increasing violence of fundamentalists of all sorts indicates that it is high time for a new economic and social narrative. An economy that is essentially based on competition will always perpetuate violence and hatred…


Claims that climate models overestimate warming are "unfounded", study shows

Roz Pidcock, Carbon Brief
A new paper takes an in-depth look at the suggestion that climate models routinely overestimate the speed at which Earth’s surface is warming – and finds the argument lacking.

A look back over the past century shows that, by and large, what we see in global average temperature is extremely well captured by models, the authors tell Carbon Brief.

The new research, a collaboration between scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the University of Leeds, is published today in the journal Nature…


This Map Shows Why The Midwest Is Screwed

Tim McDonnell, Mother Jones
The ongoing drought in California has been, among other things, a powerful lesson in how vulnerable America’s agricultural sector is to climate change. Even if that drought wasn’t specifically caused by man-made global warming, scientists have little doubt that droughts and heat waves are going to get more frequent and severe in important crop-growing regions. In California, the cost in 2014 was staggering: $2.2 billion in losses and added expenses, plus 17,000 lost jobs, according to a UC-Davis study.

California is country’s hub for fruits, veggies, and nuts. But what about the commodity grains grown in the Midwest, where the US produces over half its corn and soy? That’s the subject of a new report by the climate research group headed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer (who recently shut down rumors that he might run for Senate)…

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Source: Risky Business

Link to full report


Meant to Keep Malaria Out, Mosquito Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In

Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times
BANGWEULU WETLANDS, Zambia — Out here on the endless swamps, a harsh truth has been passed down from generation to generation: There is no fear but the fear of hunger.

With that always weighing on his mind, Mwewa Ndefi gets up at dawn, just as the first orange rays of sun are beginning to spear through the papyrus reeds, and starts to unclump a mosquito net.

Nets like his are widely considered a magic bullet against malaria — one of the cheapest and most effective ways to stop a disease that kills at least half a million Africans each year. But Mr. Ndefi and countless others are not using their mosquito nets as global health experts have intended.

Nobody in his hut, including his seven children, sleeps under a net at night. Instead, Mr. Ndefi has taken his family’s supply of anti-malaria nets and sewn them together into a gigantic sieve that he uses to drag the bottom of the swamp ponds, sweeping up all sorts of life: baby catfish, banded tilapia, tiny mouthbrooders, orange fish eggs, water bugs and the occasional green frog…

“I know it’s not right,” Mr. Ndefi said, “but without these nets, we wouldn’t eat.”…


The myth of the American love affair with cars

Emily Badger, Washington Post
For decades, Americans have been in love with the automobile — or so the saying goes. This single idea has been a central premise of transportation policy, pop culture and national history for the last half-century. It animates how we think about designing the world around us, and how we talk about dissidents in our midst who dislike cars.

“This ‘love affair’ thesis is like the ultimate story,” says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia, who warns that we need to revisit how we came to believe this line before we embrace its logical conclusion in a future full of driverless cars. “It’s one of the biggest public relations coups of all time. It’s always treated as folk wisdom, as an organic growth from society. One of the signs of its success is that everyone forgets it was invented as a public relations campaign.”…


Obama’s Plan: Allow Drilling in Atlantic, but Limit It in Arctic

Coral Davenport, New York Times
The Obama administration moved Tuesday to open up a vast stretch of East Coast waters to oil and gas drilling, a decision that could have a profound impact on the economic and environmental future of states from Virginia to Georgia. The move also adds a new dimension to the legacy of President Obama.

In an announcement that outraged environmentalists and brought grudging cheers from the oil and gas industry, the Interior Department unveiled the latest part of its five-year plan for the government to sell leases for oil and gas development in federal waters from 2017 to 2022.

The plan would open up one lease sale area off the southeast stretch of the Atlantic Seaboard, an area the oil industry has long hungered to exploit. It would also open new portions of the Gulf of Mexico, which is already open to drilling. And in a move that appeased environmentalists but angered Alaskan Republicans, it will ban drilling in portions of the Arctic Ocean’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas…


Saudi Aramco to renegotiate some contracts on low oil price -CEO

Reem Shamseddine and Marwa Rashad, Reuters
Saudi Aramco will renegotiate some contracts and postpone some projects due to falling oil prices, the head of Saudi Arabia’s state oil company said on Tuesday, stressing the top crude exporter will not single handedly balance the global oil market… Saudi Aramco Chief Executive Khalid al-Falih, speaking at a conference in Riyadh, did not specify which projects or contracts would be affected by low prices…


Senate Passes Keystone XL Pipeline Bill

Stefanie Spear, Ecowatch
This afternoon, the U.S. Senate passed legislation to approve the Keystone XL, a proposed 1,179-mile oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Every Republican Senator and a handful of Democrats voted in favor of building the pipeline with a final vote of 62 to 36 to pass S. 1.

“Now that we have burned through three weeks of the Senate’s time, Senate Republicans have succeeded in passing their first piece of legislation: a gift for Big Oil that the President has already said he will veto,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). “I’m glad the President will veto this bill because the Keystone XL pipeline would be a disaster for our health and environment—enabling expanded development of one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet and exacerbating climate change. I hope we can now put this debate behind us and move on to more serious legislative efforts to address the major issues facing our country.”..


Shell urges shareholders to accept climate resolution

Damian Carrington, The Guardian
Shell is set to confront the risk that climate change may pose to its future, after backing a resolution from activist shareholders. The move came on the same day it announced $15bn (£10bn) in cost cutting due to plummeting oil prices and said it wanted to resume drilling for oil in the Arctic.

The resolution, filed by 150 investors who control hundreds of billions of pounds, requires the oil major to test whether its business model is compatible with the pledge by the world’s nations to limit global warming to 2C.

The 2C target means only a quarter of existing, exploitable fossil fuel reserves are burnable, according to a series of recent analyses. That implies trillions of dollars of oil, gas and coal held by investors could become worthless and that continuing exploration for fossil fuels may be pointless.

The resolution, also filed with BP, includes a ban on corporate bonuses for climate-harming activities and a commitment to invest in renewable energy…


China’s coal consumption fell in 2014

Lauri Myllyvirta, Greenpeace Energydesk
For the first time this century China’s coal consumption has fallen, according to preliminary data from both the Chinese Coal Industry Association and the National Energy Administration.

The amount by which coal use declined last year remains an open question, with the Coal Industry Association reporting a reduction of around 3.5% but NEA data showing a fall of only 0.4%…


Greece: the first Green government in Europe?

Adam Ramsay, Ecowatch
The sound system was playing Bella Ciao. Flags of parties from across the left and the continent wiggled as their bearers danced and sang along. Ouzo flowed and fireworks flared. We could have been outside a G8 summit in the early noughties.

Only the explosives weren’t directed at police lines, but in the air. The crowd chanting at the politician wasn’t protesting. It was cheering. An international movement which has become very good at licking its wounds was pretty quick to learn to celebrate. In fact, with perhaps 10% of the people at the rally in front of the Athens academy coming from outside Greece, this was very much a party for the European left – in the beer, loud music, and dancing sense of the word.

But also, of course, in the political sense. So I should be clear. When I say that Syriza’s victory is in a sense the first Green government in Europe, it’s obviously not just Greens. Because Syriza is effectively a merger between most of the left wing parties in Greece, most left parties in Europe can reasonably see it as their sister. It has already been seen for a couple of years now as the archetypal party of the European left.

Having said that, there is a remarkable extent to which Syriza is in practice a Green government. First, the Greek Green Party is a part of the Syriza coalition – they got one MP elected, who was promptly promoted to deputy environment minister. Secondly, as Kostas Lukeris, a member of the Greek Green Party’s ruling council put it to me over souvlaki on Syntagma square on the day of the vote “they adopted all of our platform”. Look through the policy commitments of Tsipras’ government and the manifestoes of the Green parties in the UK, and you’ll find little to separate them…


A 3-day week will help to save life on Earth

Naomi Klein, The Big Issue
Some economists are now talking about moving beyond the idea of growth and our obsession with GDP. Is that a good thing? It’s exciting that people are talking about these things. We know chasing endless growth doesn’t deliver well-being or economic stability and is leading to widening inequality. So it’s much easier to challenge now. It’s really about having a strategic economy, focusing on parts of the economy we want to expand or extract.

You write about “selective degrowth” and ideas like a shorter working week and a universal basic income to discourage “shitty work”. Do you think people are ready for those ideas? I think people know they’re overworked. And overworking is intimately tied to a particularly wasteful model of consumption – you have no time after work to do anything other than grab a takeaway, and less time for low-consumption activities like cooking…


Oil collapse could trigger billions in bank losses

James Titcomb, The Daily Telegraph
British banks including Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays may be sitting on billions in losses from the collapse in oil prices after a surge in junk loans to the industry.

UK banks have been behind more than $50bn of leveraged loans — high-yield, non-investment grade debt — to the oil and gas industry in the past four years, according to data from Dealogic.

Although British lenders are not the most exposed to the oil collapse, with most debt issuance arranged by US and Canadian institutions, leveraged loans arranged by UK lenders have more than doubled since 2011 amid the North American shale boom…


The World’s Next Mortgage Crisis?

David Frum, The Atlantic
My breakfast companion looked gloomy.

He’d flown into Washington from Vienna the day before. When he deplaned, he found a shocking email waiting for him: a demand from his banker for immediate payment of €12,000. Although a resident of Austria, he had taken a home mortgage in Swiss francs, which carried a lower interest rate than mortgages in euros. But 48 hours before he had arrived in the United States, the Swiss franc had surged by 20 percent against the euro. That currency appreciation had wiped out his equity in the house. His frightened banker wanted a new infusion of cash to replace the vanished equity.

In the second half of January, hundreds of thousands of homeowners across Europe—and especially across Central and Eastern Europe—have been jolted in similar ways. Their distress is contributing to a political and financial crisis in a region already shadowed by economic anxiety and Russian aggression…

News clippings image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.

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