A Stupendous Day for Planet Earth: Will It Matter?
There was some good news for the planet yesterday, locally and nationally, reflective of the reality that addressing climate change wins the economic argument; the moral argument and the political argument.
San Diego’s County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to move the county to zero carbon emissions, making it the largest county in the U.S. to commit to achieving such a goal by 2035.
In Washington DC, President Biden announced far-ranging plans to shift the U.S. away from fossil fuels, create millions of jobs in renewable energy, and conserve vast swaths of public lands and water, saying “This is not a time for small measures.”
The planet and its inhabitants needed some good news, because things are starting to look grim.
Despite a 7% fall in fossil fuel burning due to coronavirus lockdowns, the world saw the joint highest global temperatures on record (tying 2016), along with record heat and wildfires in the Arctic, and 29 tropical storms in the Atlantic.
Heat-trapping carbon dioxide continued to build up in the atmosphere, also setting a new record. The average surface temperature across the planet in 2020 was 1.25C higher than in the pre-industrial period of 1850-1900, dangerously close to the 1.5C target set by the world’s nations to avoid the worst impacts.
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At the County level, newly elected board members Terra Lawson-Remer and Nora Vargas led the effort, directing staff to work in partnership with the University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy to develop a framework for the region.
Nearly 1,500 San Diego County residents submitted a petition urging the Supervisors to take this action. “The fact is, the climate crisis is an existential threat to our way of life in San Diego and around the globe,” the petition read. “We must face this historic challenge with historic ambitions to match. We must decarbonize San Diego County as quickly as possible.”
“Residents are demanding action to fight the climate crisis and decarbonize our region, and this is a new Board that is committed to listening to the public, and putting our children and planet first,” said Supervisor Lawson-Remer. “This is a collective endeavor, and I am proud to work with the community to build on the efforts of grassroots leaders. I thank the thousands across San Diego who have led the way, and this vote is proof that climate action, green jobs and social equity are now a priority for San Diego County.”
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“This is not a time for small measures,” said President Biden as he announced far-ranging plans to shift the U.S. away from fossil fuels, create millions of jobs in renewable energy, conserve vast swaths of public lands and water, and establish new interagency groups and government offices to promote environmental justice.
"It's about coming to the moment to deal with this maximum threat that is with us now, facing us, climate change, with a greater sense of urgency. In my view, we've already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis," Biden said, adding "Environmental justice will be at the center of all we do."
Biden’s aggressive proposals were praised by environmental activists and many Democrats.
From the Washington Post:
American Clean Power Association CEO Heather Zichal, who served as one of Obama’s top climate advisers, said no one should be surprised by Biden’s approach, given the mounting scientific evidence of the Earth’s continued warming and advances in recent years that have helped make renewable energy cheaper.
“If we’re going to remove 51 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually and get to zero [emissions] in 30 years, this is going to require drastic action,” she said, adding that her members are prepared to invest $1 trillion in the coming years on clean energy projects. “We see nothing but opportunity.”
Biden’s special envoy on climate, John F. Kerry, told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that the scientific reality gives the president little choice.
“It is now cheaper to deal with the crisis of climate than it is to ignore it,” Kerry said, noting the massive sums taxpayers have spent recovering from increasingly devastating hurricanes in recent years. “We’re spending more money, folks. We’re just not doing it smart. We’re not doing it in a way that would actually sustain us for the long term.”
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1354542372785369097?s=20
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The devil in these grand plans at both the county and national level is in the details.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government should act more aggressively to combat climate change, and almost as many say the problem is already affecting their community in some way, according to a survey released in June by the Pew Research Center.
The fossil fuel industry and its allies are shifting tactics, even as some Republican elected officials continue to engage in ridiculous attempts to deny human caused climate change.
For people with two eyes and a brain, the scientific evidence has become impossible to dispute in light of the dramatic increases in extreme weather events, megafires and polar melting in recent years.
Climatologist Michael Mann, best known for the hockey stick graph, which he and his colleagues published in a 1998 scientific paper, has written a newly published book explaining the shift in tactics by the fossil fuel industry.
In an interview at Scientific American, he says opposition to policies addressing climate change involves five “D’ words: deflection, delay, division, despair mongering, doomism. Following are few selected quotes…
...To start with, there is an effort to deflect attention away from systemic solutions. They are trying to convince people that climate change is not the result of their corporate policies but of our own individual actions.
...If you can get people arguing over these individual lifestyle choices, then you are creating division over questions such as “Are you vegan or not?” “Do you fly?” So it’s a twofer—you deflect attention away from the need for real policy change, and you get infighting within the climate movement so that climate advocates are not speaking with one coherent voice.
...An e-mail sent to journalists in 2020 by CRC Advisors [a PR firm that represents industry players and others] contained talking points that appeared to attempt to sow racial division within the climate movement. The e-mail suggested that the Green New Deal—supported by white environmentalists—would hurt minority communities. It is an attempt to drive a wedge right down the center of the progressive movement—between social activists and climate activists.
We need to look at arguments that these Green New Deal -ish are too little, too late. Some traditional climate change deniers have adopted this conclusion as their latest excuse for doing nothing. Mann calls this “inactivism.”
Another side of this argument involves activists who say we need to be doing more than what current policy proposals include.
One contentious area involves the extraction of materials needed for green technology. Minerals such as cobalt, nickel, lithium and rare earths are scarcely mined in the U.S. now, and the protections for the workers and communities where they’re produced are weak.
From the Huffington Post:
This month, less than a week before Trump left office, the Bureau of Land Management approved the nation’s second-ever lithium mine, in an ecologically sensitive stretch of Nevada highlands. Two activists, Max Wilbert and Will Falk, are now camped at the site, hoping to block bulldozers from arriving.
“This is not a ‘clean transition,’” Wilbert wrote in an op-ed for the Sierra Nevada Ally. “It’s a transition from one dirty industrial energy source to another.”
Readers of the now-defunct San Diego Free Press will recognize the name Will Falk. His first person accounts of environmental activism (and some good poetry) in Hawaii, Canada, and the Colorado River were among the best things published during its seven year run..
There are many activist groups, including the youth-oriented Sunrise Movement, who have no intention of easing up in their efforts to save the planet. They’ll be watching elected officials at both the national and local levels to make sure that promises are turned into meaningful actions.
https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1354603918555312130?s=20
I’d like to end with mentioning a ProPublica article I read this morning: The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try.
Reporter Elizabeth Well told the story of Scientist Peter Kalmus’ personal struggles in the face of research-based realization of just how serious the problem of climate change is. One theme running through the account is the inability of people around him to accept and act on logical conclusions.
In January, a team of 19 climate scientists published a paper, “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future,” that said, “The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its life forms — including humanity — is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts.” The language of this sentence could not be more dire. It makes the mind go numb.
WE need to understand and support the notion that a global problem requires global solutions. Given that the planet is divided into many parts, every win in each of those parts will encourage others to follow.
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Lead photo: Aurora Borealis over Earth
taken from the International Space Station.