We Have Two Paths to Avoid the Worst of Climate Change – The Atlantic

These excerpts from the article by Robinson Meyer.  ...Earlier this month, the United Nations–led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the latest volume of its current “synthesis report,” its omnibus summary of what humanity knows about the climate. As I wrote at the time, while the other volumes focus on the impacts of climate change, this newest report narrows in on how to prevent it.

Of the hundreds of scenarios that the IPCC analyzed, all fell into one of three buckets. In the first bucket, every scenario forecasts that the world will soon be removing tens of gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Carbon removal is still a bit of a dream. Not only is it technologically unproven at scale; it is extremely energy intensive. But the IPCC report implies that within the lifetime of children alive today, the world might be spending more than a third of its total energy production removing carbon from the atmosphere, according to Zeke Hausfather, an IPCC author…

The second bucket of scenarios tells a different story, one in which the world rapidly curtails its energy usage over the next two decades, slashing carbon pollution not only from rich countries, such as the United States, but also from middle-income countries, such as Brazil, Pakistan, and India.

By “curtailing energy demand,” I’m not talking about the standard energy-transition, green-growth situation, where the world produces more energy every year and just has a larger and larger share of it coming from zero-carbon sources. Rather, these scenarios imagine a world where total global energy demand collapses in the next few decades. There’s a good reason for this—as far as the models are concerned, this tactic is one of the best ways to crash carbon pollution within 10 years—but it is not how any country approaches climate policy….

…And then there’s the third bucket. In these scenarios in the new report, humanity fails to limit global temperature growth to 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), blowing past the more ambitious of the Paris Agreement’s climate goals. Passing 1.5 degrees Celsius means that the world could encounter deadly droughts, mass migrations, and fatal outdoor temperatures by the middle of the century.

Summary: First, humanity must invest more in carbon removal as quickly as possible. So far, most of the money spent on carbon removal has come from the private sector; two weeks ago, I wrote about Stripe’s effort. But the funding to remove billions of tons a year can come only from the government. Many climate thinkers hope that the federal government will step in and administer carbon removal as a public waste-management service, at least in the United States. There’s currently little bipartisan political will to do so, but it is beyond past time to begin implementing that.

On Climate, the Public Holds Two Sticks: Activism and Litigation (IPCC mitigation report, part 3)

...Meanwhile, the IPCC report itself continues to be a catalyst for protest. From the report's release day, on April 4, til April 9, 2022 Scientist Rebellion called for the largest global scientific and academic strike in history, demanding "immediate and radical action in the face of the Climate Emergency." Announcing "1.5 is dead. We need a climate revolution," the group leaked an earlier draft of the IPCC report (a thing that really seems to terrify the IPCC!) and called for scientists and climate researchers to take to the streets. On April 6th, over 1,000 Scientist Rebellion activists in more than 25 countries did just that, many chaining themselves to government offices or corporate headquarters and risking arrest. In Los Angeles, four activists chained themselves to the doors of JP Morgan Chase Bank in peaceful protest and were met with a swarm of police in riot gear who arrested them. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus was one of the four and he was arrested. He says the group wasn't expecting that level of police turnout at all. Kalmus later criticized the media for failing to cover both the IPCC report and the Scientist Rebellion action. While outlets that routinely cover climate news—Inside Climate News, Scientific American, Smithsonian—covered it, as did a few local outlets (LAist, for example), few mainstream national or international outlets did (Al Jazeera and The Independent were notable exceptions), despite the fact that it was, as promised, the largest civil disobedience campaign by scientists in history. 

"The governments of the world must immediately stop expanding fossil fuel infrastructure and begin to ramp it down quickly according to a detailed plan - no more vague "net-zero by 2050" sloganeering. This is, of course, what the new IPCC report recommends," Kalmus says. He explained that the reason his group in LA and several others around the world targeted JPMorgan Chase in particular is that it currently funds more new fossil fuel infrastructure around the world than any other bank.

There has long existed an anti-protest bias in the U.S. media, which has also struggled to adequately cover the climate crisis for decades. Which is unfortunate, given that Chapter 13 of the IPCC report also clearly states: "The media shapes the public discourse about climate mitigation. This can usefully build public support to accelerate mitigation action, but may also be used to impede decarbonisation."

Danger Persists: Rising Authoritarianism and Worsening Climate Change Share a Secret

Published: April 27, 2022  By Eve Darian-Smith

Professor of Global and International Studies, University of California, Irvine  

Excerpt: In democratic systems, elected leaders are expected to protect the public’s interests, including from exploitation by corporations. They do this primarily through policies designed to secure public goods, such as clean air and unpolluted water, or to protect human welfare, such as good working conditions and minimum wages. But in recent decades, this core democratic principle that prioritizes citizens over corporate profits has been aggressively undermined.

Today, it’s easy to find political leaders – on both the political right and left – working on behalf of corporations in energy, finance, agribusiness, technology, military and pharmaceutical sectors, and not always in the public interest. These multinational companies help fund their political careers and election campaigns to keep them in office.

In the U.S., this relationship was cemented by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United. The decision allowed almost unlimited spending by corporations and wealthy donors to support the political candidates who best serve their interests. Data shows that candidates with the most outside funding usually win. This has led to increasing corporate influence on politicians and party policies.

When it comes to the political parties, it’s easy to find examples of campaign finance fueling political agendas.

In 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen testified before a U.S. Senate committee about the greenhouse effect, both the Republican and Democratic parties took climate change seriously. But this attitude quickly diverged. Since the 1990s, the energy sector has heavily financed conservative candidates who have pushed its interests and helped to reduce regulations on the fossil fuel industry. This has enabled the expansion of fossil fuel production and escalated CO2 emissions to dangerous levels.  Photo is James Hansen being arrested at the White House in 2011.  Hansen was taking part in a civil disobedience action at the White House organized to halt the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, 23 years after his original testimony to Congress about the danger of carbon in the atmosphere.

The industry’s power in shaping policy plays out in examples like the coalition of 19 Republican state attorneys general and coal companies suing to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Source: Fracking is Injustice: The High Human and Climate Toll of Fracking and LNG Expansion – Physicians for Social Responsibility

New Compendium, analysis finds ‘no evidence’ fracking can be done without severe health, climate harms.  Contact: Gabrielle Levy, glevy@climatenexus.org
EXCERPTS: ...The eighth edition of the Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking is being released today by Concerned Health Professionals of New York (a project of the Science and Environmental Health Network) and Physicians for Social Responsibility (winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize) released. By bringing together and analyzing the evidence comprehensively, the report uniquely provides an assessment of the state of the fracking industry and its impacts. Amidst the report’s analysis are three big-picture findings that are essential for the public and policymakers to understand, including governors, state and local officials, and especially President Biden and his administration:

1. Globally, the expansion of fracking and LNG is accelerating the climate crisis and is directly at odds with climate goals, including the Paris Agreement. North American fracking operations for both oil and gas are driving the current surge in global levels of methane, a greenhouse gas 86 times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year period and which has contributed 40 percent of all global warming to date.
   – LNG is even worse for the climate. Liquefying natural gas via superchilling to allow its overseas transport requires immense energy and evaporative cooling technology, both of which add further to the greenhouse gas emissions of natural gas obtained via fracking.
   – Carbon capture and storage (CCS) fails to mitigate the dangers of fracking. CCS does not in fact capture methane emissions but instead makes local air pollution from fracking infrastructure worse. It is mostly used as a technique to extract more oil from depleted wells.
2. Strong evidence from hundreds of studies demonstrates that drilling, fracking, storing, transporting, and disposing of oil and gas cause serious harm to human health, including respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular disease, and impairments to infant and maternal health. Toxic air pollution and water contamination accompany fracking and associated activities everywhere, imperiling public health.
3. Fracking is an injustice. Toxic air pollution, water contamination, and other impacts disproportionately affect communities of color and low-income communities. Across the United States, the environmental justice effects of fracking are apparent and, in many cases, getting worse...

Sandra Steingraber, PhD, co-founder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York and an author of the Compendium, said, “The scientific evidence reveals conclusively that fracking causes widespread and severe harm to people and the climate. For over ten years, individual studies have demonstrated impacts in multiple areas, including toxic air pollution, water contamination, radioactive releases, earthquakes, methane emissions, and much more. The Compendium takes stock of all the science together, which shows that continuing and expanding fracking brings with it a grave cost...”

Other Global Good News

Declines in Poverty
Bangladesh and Canada have both recorded declines in poverty in the past two years. Poverty in Bangladesh decreased from 12.5% in 2020 to 11.9% in 2021, making the country a role model for poverty reduction in the developing world. Meanwhile 1.4 million people in Canada were lifted out of poverty in 2020 thanks to substantial government supports during the pandemic.
 
Malaria Vaccines
Over one million children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi have now received one or more doses of the world’s first malaria vaccine. The rollout began as a pilot program in Malawi in 2019 and once widely deployed, could save the lives of up to an additional 80 000 children each year. WHO

Laudato Si Action Platform - Nearly 3,000 Institutions Enrolled 
The rollout of the Laudato Si' Action Platform has not been without its challenges or delays. Most recently, the enrollment deadline for the first Laudato Si' cohort was pushed back from Earth Day (April 22) to Oct. 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi and the close of the Season of Creation.

The integral human development dicastery now plans for a regular enrollment schedule where each year new sign-ups open on Nov. 14, the World Day of the Poor, and close on Oct. 4, with a 40-day prayer campaign then preceding the start of the next enrollment period.

Organizers say the new schedule provides more time for people to familiarize themselves with the platform, especially as COVID-19 and economic challenges have dominated attention for many parishes and schools for the past two years, as have global events like the ongoing war in Ukraine and other conflicts.

"We realized that people are still getting to know the action platform," said Salesian Fr. Joshtrom Kureethadam, coordinator of the dicastery's ecology sector.

The extended enrollment period also allows for more promotion of the platform during creation-centric times on the church calendar. This May, the now-annual Laudato Si' Week will spotlight the action platform, with each day focusing on one of its seven Laudato Si' goals. And the Season of Creation (Sept. 1–Oct. 4) will also be a time to raise awareness, Kureethadam said.

Of those enrolled, nearly 2,700 are institutions, compared to about 1,900 individuals or families. The largest share among institutional sectors are religious orders and congregations. Forty-five percent of enrollees to date are from English-speaking countries. Geographically, about 40% of enrollments have come from Europe, with nearly 27% from North America.

The Vatican has celebrated the fact that the largest women and men's religious orders, the Salesian Sisters and Jesuits, have committed to the platform, with expectations that their communities and institutions will help build momentum.

Laudato si: The Light Offered by Faith
Given the complexity of the ecological crisis and its multiple causes, we need to realize that the solutions will not emerge out of just one way of interpreting and transforming reality. Respect must also be shown for the various cultural riches of different peoples, their art and poetry, their interior life and spirituality. If we are truly concerned to develop an ecology capable of remedying the damage we have done, no branch of the sciences and no form of wisdom can be left out, and that includes the religious and the idiom proper to it. The Catholic Church is open to dialogue with philosophical thought; this has enabled her to produce various syntheses between faith and reason. The development of the Church’s social teaching represents such a synthesis with regard to social issues, which is called to be enriched by taking up new challenges. (LS #63)

Thomas Berry 1914-2009

Reflections from the Thomas Berry Foundation.