Resilience Roundup – Oct 30

October 30, 2015

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

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


Indonesia is burning. So why is the world looking away?

Geroge Monbiot, The Guardian
I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work. What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.

A great tract of Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st century – so far…

Fire is raging across the 5,000km length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn’t require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone’s front page. It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. And in three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.


Greenland Is Melting Away

Coral Davenport, Josh Haner, Larry Buchanan and Derek Watkins, New York Times 
…“We scientists love to sit at our computers and use climate models to make those predictions,” said Laurence C. Smith, head of the geography department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the leader of the team that worked in Greenland this summer. “But to really know what’s happening, that kind of understanding can only come about through empirical measurements in the field.”

For years, scientists have studied the impact of the planet’s warming on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But while researchers have satellite images to track the icebergs that break off, and have created models to simulate the thawing, they have little on-the-ground information and so have trouble predicting precisely how fast sea levels will rise…


Overlooking the Obvious With Naomi Klein

Craig Collins, Counterpunch
First off, I want to congratulate Naomi Klein on her inspiring book. This Changes Everything has helped her readers better understand the germination of a broad based, multi-dimensional climate movement from the ground up and its potential to galvanize and revitalize the Left. Also, she’s shown the courage to name the source of the problem—capitalism—when so many activists shrink from mentioning the “c” word. In addition, her focus on the fossil fuel industry as the strategic target of the movement clearly highlights the importance of isolating one of the most malignant sectors of industrial capitalism.

But despite her insightful and inspirational treatment of the climate movement’s potential to change everything, I believe Klein over-states her case and overlooks crucial features of the dangerously dysfunctional system we’re up against. By putting climate change on a pedestal, she limits our understanding of how to break capitalism’s death grip over our lives and our future.

For instance, Klein ignores the deep connection between climate chaos, militarism, and war. While she spends an entire chapter explaining why Virgin Airlines owner, Richard Branson, and other Green billionaires won’t save us, she devotes three meager sentences to the most violent, wasteful, petroleum-burning institution on Earth—the US military.[1] Klein shares this blind spot with the United Nations’ official climate forum. The UNFCCC excludes most of the military sector’s fuel consumption and emissions from national greenhouse gas inventories.[2] This exemption was the product of intense lobbying by the United States during the Kyoto negotiations in the mid-1990s. Ever since, the military establishment’s carbon “bootprint” has been officially ignored.[3] Klein’s book lost an important opportunity to expose this insidious cover-up…

Another important blind spot in Klein’s book is the issue of “peak oil.” This is the point when the rate of petroleum extraction has maxed out and begins to terminally decline. By now it’s become widely accepted that global CONVENTIONAL oil production peaked around 2005.[10] Many believe this produced the high oil prices that triggered the 2008 recession and instigated the latest drive to extract expensive, dirty unconventional shale oil and tar sands once the price point finally made them profitable.[11]…


Imagine if Exxon had told the truth on climate change

Bill McKibben, The Guardian
Like all proper scandals, the #Exxonknew revelations have begun to spin off new dramas and lines of inquiry. Presidential candidates have begun to call for Department of Justice investigations, and company spokesmen have begun to dig themselves deeper into the inevitable holes as they try to excuse the inexcusable…

As the latest expose instalment from those hopeless radicals at the Los Angeles Times clearly shows, Exxon made a conscious decision to adopt what a company public affairs officer called “the Exxon position.” It was simple: “Emphasise the uncertainty.” Even though they knew there was none.

Someone else will have to decide if that deceit was technically illegal. Perhaps the rich and powerful have been drafting the laws for so long that Exxon will skate; I confess my confidence that the richest company in American history can be brought to justice is slight…


Fossil fuel companies risk plague of ‘asbestos’ lawsuits as tide turns on climate change

Ambrose Evans Pritchard, The Daily Telegraph
Oil, gas and coal companies face the mounting risk of legal damages for alleged climate abuse as global leaders signal an end to business-as-usual and draw up sweeping plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions, Bank of America has warned…


Climate-conscious Boulder takes energy future into its own hands

Ned Resnikoff, AlJazeera
Every Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential election favors a lightly regulated, market-based energy strategy. But the city hosting Wednesday’s GOP debate is conducting an experiment in precisely the opposite approach.

Boulder, Colorado, is attempting to shed its private energy utility, Xcel Energy, and replace it with a public, city-owned service. Supporters of the “municipalization” effort say a publicly owned utility would invest more in renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions while keeping down customers’ energy bills. If the transition to a different energy model is successful, they hope that Boulder can serve as an example to other cities.

Boulder began to pursue municipalization — the transfer of corporations to municipal or city ownership — in 2010, when the city council declined to renew its 20-year franchise agreement with Xcel, a major consumer of coal.

The city’s decision to sever its relationship was driven in part by grassroots sentiment in favor of more aggressive carbon-cutting measures. Boulder officials were also reluctant to enter a two-decade relationship with Xcel without provisions to adopt evolving industry practices and renewable technologies.

“Xcel was not able to do a franchise that was less than 20 years,” said Sara Huntley, a Boulder city government spokeswoman. “We were really looking for a 5- or 10-year franchise, mainly because the industry is in such a state of change right now.”

Xcel has often touted its success in reducing emissions. In its 2014 Corporate Responsibility Report, the energy company said it had successfully slashed companywide carbon dioxide emissions by 22 percent since 2005.

Yet Boulder activists say they can do better. Volunteers for RenewablesYES did their own modeling and projected that a publicly owned utility could shrink the city’s emissions by more than half…


Deadly Heat Is Forecast in Persian Gulf by 2100

John Schwartz, New York Times
By the end of this century, areas of the Persian Gulf could be hit by waves of heat and humidity so severe that simply being outside for several hours could threaten human life, according to a study published Monday. Because of humanity’s contribution to climate change, the authors wrote, some population centers in the Middle East “are likely to experience temperature levels that are intolerable to humans.”

The dangerously muggy summer conditions predicted for places near the warm waters of the gulf could overwhelm the ability of the human body to reduce its temperature through sweating and ventilation. That threatens anyone without air-conditioning, including the poor, but also those who work outdoors in professions like agriculture and construction.

The paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, was written by Jeremy S. Pal of the department of civil engineering and environmental science at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and Elfatih A. B. Eltahir of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previous studies had suggested that such conditions might be reached within 200 years. But the new research, which depends on climate models that focus on regional topography and conditions, foresees a shorter timeline…


Is there any point in trying to restrict fossil fuel supplies? A new paper says yes.

David Roberts, Vox
There’s long been a tension between climate activists and climate wonks.

Activists have found that their greatest successes — in terms of the people they can organize, funds they can attract, and media attention they can generate — come from supply-side battles, attempts to block or shut down fossil fuel extraction and transportation projects. These battles have key features that lend them to organizing: clear villains, diverse constituencies (because of the local land, water, and air damage such projects do), and unambiguous metrics of victory.

Climate wonks, however, tend to believe that supply-side battles are pointless, and that demand-side policy — reducing demand for fossil fuels through subsidies for alternative energy, carbon pricing systems, pollution regulations, energy efficiency standards, and the like — is the only kind that makes a difference in the long term. As long as demand for fossil fuels remains, they reason, shutting down supply projects is an endless game of whack-a-mole. Knock one down, another pops up…

Now a trio of researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute has released a new paper that sets out to challenge that conventional wisdom. It argues that the demand-side policies overwhelmingly favored for the past several decades have not done the job. Nor does the new round of commitments (INDCs) from countries headed to the Paris climate talks yet add up to enough to avoid 2 degrees of warming. So it’s time to take another look at supply-side policy, they say — not as alternative to demand-side policy, but as a complement.

I’m not sure I’m 100 percent convinced, but it’s an interesting argument. Let’s walk through it…


Hurricane Patricia: The role of El Niño, climate change and good fortune

Roz Pidcock, Carbon Brief
The strongest hurricane ever seen in the western hemisphere came ashore in southwest Mexico at 6:15pm local time on Friday. Looming menacingly off the coast, US scientists branded it “potentially catastrophic”. But a stroke of luck meant it caused far less damage than feared.

Why did Patricia spin up so fast? What factors helped lessen the blow? Carbon Brief looks at the role of climate change and other factors in understanding what made this hurricane so unusual…


From "Sustainable" to "Regenerative" – the Future of Food

André Leu and Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association, Truthout
This week, the paywalled site PoliticoPro reported that the US Secretary of Agriculture wants "farmers and agricultural interests to come up with a single definition of sustainability in order to avoid confusing the public with various meanings of the term in food and production methods."

We agree with Secretary Tom Vilsack that the word "sustainability" is meaningless to consumers and the public. It’s overused, misused and it has been shamelessly co-opted by corporations for the purpose of greenwashing.

But rather than come up with one definition for the word "sustainable" as it refers to food and food production methods, we suggest doing away with the word entirely. In its place, as a way of helping food consumers make conscious, informed decisions, we suggest dividing global food and farming into two categories: regenerative and degenerative…


How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

David Roberts, Vox
In the Atlantic, Julie Beck has a great new piece on "How Friendships Change in Adulthood." It will ring true for Vox readers of, uh, a certain age. Like my age, for instance. Old, is what I’m saying.

I do think, however, that Beck left out an interesting piece of the puzzle. Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. "Land use," as it’s rather aridly known, shapes behavior and sociality. And in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built…

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

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