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Global Warming May Sap Productivity for Those With Outdoor Jobs
Jeremy van Loon, Bloomberg
Tea pickers in India, coffee-bean harvesters in Vietnam and millions of outdoor workers will be less productive because of rising temperatures from global warming, according to a study.
People working outside in Delhi, for example, may suffer a 30 percent drop in productivity in the coming decades should temperatures continue climbing, Australian National University researcher Tord Kjellstrom said today in a report for Oxfam.
Residents of tropical countries and cities are likely to be hurt, especially if temperatures rise as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) above current conditions, the Oxfam report said. Temperatures that surpass 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, stress manual laborers, affect productivity and ultimately their income, the study said.
Mortality rates in Delhi rise by as much as 4 percent, and 6 percent in Bangkok, with every 1 degree boost in temperature, according to Oxfam, a U.K.-based anti-poverty group.
(6 July 2009)
With Something for Everyone, Climate Bill Passed
John M. Broder, New York Times
As the most ambitious energy and climate-change legislation ever introduced in Congress made its way to a floor vote last Friday, it grew fat with compromises, carve-outs, concessions and out-and-out gifts intended to win the votes of wavering lawmakers and the support of powerful industries.
The deal making continued right up until the final minutes, with the bill’s co-author Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, doling out billions of dollars in promises on the House floor to secure the final votes needed for passage.
The bill was freighted with hundreds of pages of special-interest favors, even as environmentalists lamented that its greenhouse-gas reduction targets had been whittled down.
(30 June 2009)
Politics-as-Usual While the Planet Burns
Brian Tokar, ZNet
A palpable sense of triumph accompanied the passage last week of a first-of-its-kind global warming bill in the US House of Representatives. Rep. Henry Waxman of California, one of the bill’s two main sponsors, called it a “decisive and historic action,” and President Obama described the bill as “a bold and necessary step.”
Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund, among the most corporate-friendly of the major environmental groups, called it no less than “the most important environmental and energy legislation in the history of our country.” After twenty years of congressional inaction on the worldwide threat of catastrophic climate changes, there was a palpable sense of anxiety underlying the view that any step in the direction of regulating carbon dioxide and other climate damaging greenhouse gases is better than nothing.
But is it? Throughout the 2 1/2 months that the current bill meandered its way through various congressional committees, groups like Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, and Greenpeace issued sharp critiques. Even more scathing were analyses from smaller independent groups such as Chesapeake Climate Action and the Arizona- based Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). The bill falls far short of international standards in mandating a meaningful level of reductions in global warming pollution, and seeks to implement decades of emissions cuts through the market-based device known as “cap-and-trade.” It also contains a number of Trojan Horse provisions that could ultimately forestall, rather than encourage, genuine climate progress. While low expectations and politics-as-usual continue to impede progress in the US, activists in Europe and throughout the global South are raising far more forward-looking demands in the lead-up to the next global UN climate summit, to be held in Copenhagen in December.
To those who may not have followed all the legislative play-by-play since this bill was first released by Waxman’s House Energy and Commerce Committee in early April, the loopholes are staggering to behold.
… Many argue that, for all their uncertainty, these highly manipulable financial dealings are worth the risk because they facilitate the phase-in of an enforceable cap on global warming pollution. But the ACESA legislation replicates another of the most egregious features of the largely failed Kyoto Protocol: a virtual “hole in the cap,” in the form of an offset feature that allows companies to meet their obligations by investing instead in pollution control projects anywhere in the country, and even overseas. Companies could satisfy their full obligation to reduce CO2 by buying offsets until 2027; those familiar with ACESA’s fine print suggest that companies could stretch this out for 30-40 years.
An entirely new global mythology has arisen around the idea of carbon offsets. Nearly every time you buy tickets for an airplane flight, or for some major cultural events, someone is out to sell you offsets to alleviate your contribution to global warming. Carbon offsets have become the postmodern version of the indulgences the Catholic church used to sell in the Middle Ages to buy your way out of sin. But on a global scale, with corporations instead of individuals as the main players, they have become a scam of gigantic proportions.
… The current debate on climate policy is even more disturbing in light of international developments. The US, which still produces a quarter of the world’s global warming pollution, is still seen as one of the main obstacles to a meaningful climate treaty being approved in Copenhagen at the end of the year. The other is Japan …
… In response, European activists are planning major demonstrations to coincide with the Copenhagen talks. At a meeting earlier in June, they agreed on a comprehensive five point agenda, reaching well beyond the increasingly corporate-dominated UN process. Their priorities include leaving fossil fuels in the ground, socializing and decentralizing energy production, relocalizing food systems, respecting indigenous peoples’ rights, regenerating ecosystems, and repaying the ecological and climate debts owed by the richest countries to those who are most affected by resource extraction and climate-related disasters.
Brian Tokar is the Director of the Vermont-based Institute for Social Ecology (social-ecology.org). His books include Earth for Sale , Redesigning Life? and the forthcoming collection (co-edited with Fred Magdoff), Crisis in Food and Agriculture: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal (Monthly Review Press).
(2 July 2009)
A House in the Woods, After the Woods Are Gone
Jim Robbines, New York Times
TWELVE years ago, my wife and I looked at 11 acres on the outskirts of Helena, Mont. We knew this was where we wanted to build our home. The land was covered with dense forest, including dozens of stately old-growth ponderosa pines.
… Four years ago, the beetles came. First a couple of our oldest pine trees turned red. Alarmed, we quickly cut them down and covered them with black plastic. It’s stomach-churning when the tree reaper comes to claim your forest. One day ivory-colored plugs that look like candle wax are plastered on the trunk, a sign the tree is pumping out resin to try to halt a drilling bug. Sometimes a tree wins by entombing a beetle; far more often the trees lose to the mob assault.
Then things went exponential. One dead tree turned to five and the next year five turned to 30, dying far faster than I could cut them down. Now the mortality count is in the hundreds, more than 95 percent of our forest, and many more in the national forest around us.
Last week we threw in the towel. A logging crew cut down all but a few of our trees, taking away our forest and leaving us a meadow. The trees, too damaged to be turned into lumber, were hauled off to a pulp plant, where they will be ground into an oatmeal-like slurry and turned into cardboard boxes. I won’t make money; in fact it will cost me some $700 an acre to get rid of them. And good riddance — the sooner they’re gone the better. Dead trees are a fire waiting to happen.
The beetles aren’t just claiming our forest. A hike to the hilltop behind my house reveals an entire mountain valley covered with dead and dying trees.
… Living in a valley where the forest is dead is dislocating, even apocalyptic. Over the years I’ve written much about how the West is being affected by climate change. Now it’s personal.
… We’ll miss our forest. The fact, though, is that nature is constantly changing. It’s a tough lesson to learn, especially with change this sudden. But a warming planet promises more of the same, so we’d better get used to it
(1 July 2009)
