The Kids Are All Right

How can we sleep

When our beds are burning? 

   -Midnight Oil

Butterflies and seabirds

And fairy tales

    _Jimi Hendrix

     

Good news  Supreme Court hands Exon Crushing blow

                   Jay Inslee Runs for President on Climate Change Platform

PSA   Joint Committee on Carbon Reduction    1/28 5:00  pm

Greetings

     How about those kids?   Here's what 14 year old Greta Thunberg says to world leaders

For 25 years countless people have stood in front of the UN climate conferences, asking our nation’s leaders to stop the emissions. But, clearly, this has not worked since the emissions just continue to rise.

So I will not ask them anything.

Instead, I will ask the media to start treating the crisis as a crisis.

Instead, I will ask the people around the world to realize that our political leaders have failed us.

Because we are facing an existential threat and there is no time to continue down this road of madness… So we have not come here to beg the world leaders to care for our future. They have ignored us in the past and they will ignore us again.

We have come here to let them know that change is coming whether they like it or not.

Here's the video

Also :

Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope,” [Greta] Thunberg said, “But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”

It's quite refreshing to see this young women "tell it like it is"}

We must not "continue down this road of madness"

Here is a quick peak at the madness    Yesterday's paper carried a report about the unprecedented heat wave in Australia.

"This month, fruit growers in South Australia reported that the pits in peaches and nectarines had gotten so hot that they burned the fruit from the inside. (Nyt)

Butterflies and Seabirds? 

The total number of West Coast monarchs was estimated at approximately 4.5 million in the 1980s. In the latest count, that number fell to 28,429, dipping below the number scientists estimate is needed to keep the population going.   (NYT)     See also. The Insect Apocalypse is Here.   (New York Times)

As for seabirds

Over a 60-year period up to 2010, for example, worldwide seabird populations declined by approximately 70%, and globally, species are being lost 1,000 times faster than the natural rate of extinction (9, 10). 

Other kids are beginning to make noise   The Extinction Rebellion  started im 2018, already has groups om 35 coumyties.  see here   and here Portland Group here

Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez  (AOC)  is grabbing lots of attention promoting the Green New Deal.    According to some 80% support the Green New Deal   But that may be because it means different things to different people.  See here

One thing hat the it seems to contain is continued economic growth.  This of course requires "decoupling" of carbon from growth.    This is a very risky strategy.   It's not clear whether the proponents understand just how risky it is. But we hope

We seem to have a natural desire to believe fairy tales.  Whether it's too cheap to meter, the hydrogen highway,  corn based bio-fuel, cold fusion, algea based bio-fuel, burning wood as "green" power, ehatever. 

A very interesting article by Dave Robert's looks closely at recent studies on decoupling. .    He notes that recent studies call the notion of decoupling into question.     Simply put there is no precedent for such a rapid change.   It has never happened before and to assume it will happen the future can be seen as believing in magic, or fairy tales 

First it's clear that currently rich countries that appear to be decoupling are merely exporting their carbon emissions.

They specifically distinguish two different ways of classifying emissions: territorial, i.e., carbon emissions that take place within a country, and consumption-based, i.e., the carbon emissions represented by the production and transport of the (often imported) goods and services consumed by citizens of a country. (By way of example, consider a television that is manufactured in China and shipped to America. Which country is responsible for the emissions involved? Territorially, China. In consumption-based terms, America.)

In a nutshell, they found that “over this period there is some evidence of decoupling between economic growth and territorial emissions, but no evidence of decoupling for consumption-based emissions.” As economies get wealthier, they tend to offshore carbon-intensive industries, shift to more service-based economies, and clean up their energy sectors; emissions generated within their borders decline. They (at least partially) decouple their growth from territorial emissions.

But as they get wealthier, they consume more, and every bit they consume represents carbon emissions generated somewhere else. A country with a growing, developed economy may produce fewer emissions directly, but is still responsible for more greenhouse gases with every bit it grows. Again, consumption-based emissions are not decoupling from growth.

  According to this study

" The world’s current economies are not capable of the emission reductions required to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees. If world leaders insist on maintaining historical rates of economic growth, and there are no step-change advances in technology, hitting that target requires a rate of reduction in carbon intensity for which there is simply no precedent. Despite all the recent hype about decoupling, there’s no historical evidence that current economies are decoupling at anything close to the rate required.

“The key insight,” they write, “is that marginal, incremental improvements in energy and carbon efficiency cannot do the job and that what is needed is a structural transformation.” In other words, 2 degrees requires radicalism.

“Without a concerted (global) policy shift to deep decarbonization, a rapid transition to renewable energy sources, structural change in production, consumption, and transportation, and a transformation of finance,” they write, “the decoupling will not even come close to what is needed.”

see also Why growth cant be green. (Foreign Policy)

George Monbiot puts it this way

We're getting there, aren’t we? We’re making the transition  towards an all-electric future. We can now leave fossil fuels in the ground and thwart climate breakdown. Or so you might imagine, if you follow the technology news.

So how come oil production, for the first time in history, is about to hit 100m barrels a day? How come the oil industry expects demand to climb until the 2030s? How is it that in Germany, whose energy transition (Energiewende) was supposed to be a model for the world, protesters are being beaten up by police as they try to defend the 12,000-year-old Hambacher forest from an opencast mine extracting lignite – the dirtiest form of coal? Why have investments in Canadian tar sands – the dirtiest source of oil – doubled in a year?

The answer is, growth. There may be more electric vehicles on the world’s roads, but there are also more internal combustion engines. There be more bicycles, but there are also more planes. It doesn’t matter how many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things. Given that economic growth, in nations that are already rich enough to meet the needs of all, requires an increase in pointless consumption, it is hard to see how it can ever be decoupled from the assault on the living planet

 When a low carbon industry expands within a growing economy, the money it generates stimulates high-carbon industry. Anyone who works in this field knows environmental entrepreneurs, eco-consultants and green business managers who use their earnings to pay for holidays in distant parts of the world and the flights required to get there. Electric vehicles have driven a new resource rush, particularly for lithium, that is already polluting rivers and trashing precious wild places. Clean growth is as much of an oxymoron as clean coal. But making this obvious statement in public life is treated as political suicide.

So, is insisting on more economic growth "acting like the house is om fire"?  I doubt it.    Is it worth the risk?

  The problem is that a growing industrial economy has produced lots of goodies,  and so it appears to be "unthinkable" that we could operate things in any other way.   Even if we have to "burn down the house"

Here's what Jay Inslee says:

When you want college education for your kids, when you want better health care, when you want net neutrality, when you want all of those things, but your house is on fire and it's burning down, you've got to put the fire out first and get your family out of the house," he said.

Looking at pointless consumption, how about this sensible suggestion.  Suppose the top 20% tightened our belts a little.   After all it is " our" lifestyle that is the problem.  

Here's an interesting alternative from Kevin Anderson

KEVIN ANDERSON: Well, firstly, although Oxfam used that data, that originally came from some work by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, and Piketty is well known for his work as an economist. And that demonstrates that rather than necessarily always focusing on countries, we need to focus on the people who are actually emitting. So the idea that 10 percent of the global population are responsible for 50 percent of global emissions, or 20 percent of the global population are responsible for 70 percent of all global emissions, tells us that we need to be tailoring our policies towards that small group, rather than trying to squeeze the emissions out of the majority of the world’s population, who are hardly emitting anything at all.

So, one of the ways to explain this that I often use, which will hopefully be helpful, is that if that 10 percent of high emitters reduce their carbon footprint, their individual carbon footprint, to the level of the average European citizen, that would be equivalent of a one-third cut in global emissions, even if the other 90 percent did nothing. I mean, a one-third cut in global emissions just from the 10 percent reducing to the level of the average European citizen.

I'll close with some more words from Dave Roberts

In a sense, we’re already screwed, at least to some extent. The climate is already changing and it’s already taking a measurable toll. Lots more change is “baked in” by recent and current emissions. One way or another, when it comes to the effects of climate change, we’re in for worse.

But we have some choice in how screwed we are, and that choice will remain open to us no matter how hot it gets. Even if temperature rise exceeds 2 degrees, the basic structure of the challenge will remain the same. It will still be warming. It will still get worse for humanity the more it warms. Two degrees will be bad, but three would be worse, four worse than that, and five worse still.

Indeed, if we cross 2 degrees, the need for sustainability becomes more urgent, not less. At that point, we will be flirting with non-trivial tail risks of species-threatening — or at least civilization-threatening — effects.

In sum: humanity faces the urgent imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then eliminate them, and then go “net carbon negative,” i.e., absorb and sequester more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits. It will face that imperative for several generations to come, no matter what the temperature is.

Yes, it’s going to get worse, but nobody gets to give up hope or stop fighting. Sorry.