3113. Australian Students Walk Out To Protest Climate Change

By Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch, November 30, 2018


Australian students gather in Sydney as part of a national school strike for climate action. SAEED KHAN / AFP / Getty Images

Thousands of Australian students defied their country's Prime Minister Friday when they walked out of school to protest insufficient government action on climate change.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had criticized the planned School Strike 4 Climate Action protests on Monday.

"Each day I send my kids to school and I know other members' kids should also go to school but we do not support our schools being turned into parliaments," Morrison said, The Guardian reported. "What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools."

But the students showed Morrison exactly what they thought of his opinion, both by gathering in Australia's capital cities and 20 regional centers en masse on Friday, as The Guardian further reported and by responding directly in some of their signs.

"Why should we go to school if you won't listen to the educated?" one sign shared by Environment Victoria on Twitter read.

Organizers told The Sydney Morning Herald that Morrison's words actually brought more students out into the streets.

"Numbers through the website since Monday have almost doubled," one campaigner said. "Sign-ups have grown significantly. We have had a flood of media."

Trent, a parent of an eight-year-old protester interviewed by Australia's ABC, said the students' education was actually driving their activism.

"I heard students today at the rally talking about the IPCC report, talking about the 700 odd days until emissions can peak before we exceed 1.5 degrees," he said. "These are kids that actually understand the science in a way that I think most of the parliamentarians don't."

The students want the government to stop investing in fossil fuel projects like the controversial Adani coal mine and move towards 100 percent renewable energy.

The Australian government, however, has said it will continue to exploit its coal reserves even after the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report called on world leaders to phase out coal by 2050 in order to keep warming to only 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Morrison has said Australia will meet its pledge under the Paris agreement to lower greenhouse gas emissions to 28 percent of 2005 levels by 2030, but the most recent IPCC report found global emissions must actually fall to 45 percent of 2010 levels by that date. The most recent UN Emissions Gap Report found that Australia had made no improvements to its climate policy since last year, BBC News reported.

The Australian students were inspired by Swedish student Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old activist who launched a similar protest movement in her country. Thunberg, in turn, took to Twitter to wish the Australian students well.

The Australian movement was spearheaded by two 14-year-olds in the state of Victoria, Milou Albrect and Harriet O'Shea Carre.

"The climate change emergency is something we have been thinking about for a long time," O'Shea Carre told BBC News. "We wrote letters and did different things but they never seemed to make a difference. Really, education, is our only power. By sacrificing that [on Friday], it's making a big point."

3088. How Climate Change Will Cause More Simultaneous Disasters

By John Schwartz, The New York Times, November 19, 2018

A seaside neighborhood in Mexico Beach, Fla., devastated by Hurricane Michael this year. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images.

Global warming is posing such wide-ranging risks to humanity, involving so many types of phenomena, that by the end of this century some parts of the world could face as many as six climate-related crises at the same time, researchers say.

This chilling prospect is described in a paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change, a respected academic journal, that shows the effects of climate change across a broad spectrum of problems, including heat waves, wildfires, sea level rise, hurricanes, flooding, drought and shortages of clean water.

Such problems are already coming in combination, said the lead author, Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He noted that Florida had recently experienced extreme drought, record high temperatures, and wildfires — and also Hurricane Michael, the powerful Category 4 storm that slammed into the Panhandle last month. Similarly, California is suffering through the worst wildfires the state has ever seen, as well as drought, extreme heat waves and degraded air quality that threatens the health of residents.

Things will get worse, the authors wrote. The paper projects future trends and suggests that, by 2100, unless humanity takes forceful action to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, some tropical coastal areas of the planet, like the Atlantic coast of South and Central America, could be hit by as many as six crises at a time.

That prospect is “like a terror movie that is real,” Dr. Mora said.

The authors include a list of caveats about the research: Since it is a review of papers, it will reflect some of the potential biases of science in this area, which include the possibility that scientists might focus on negative effects more than positive ones; there is also a margin of uncertainty involved in discerning the imprint of climate change from natural variability.

New York can expect to be hit by four climate crises at a time by 2100 if carbon emissions continue at their current pace, the study says, but if emissions are cut significantly that number could be reduced to one. The troubled regions of the coastal tropics could see their number of concurrent hazards reduced from six to three.

The paper explores the ways that climate change intensifies hazards and describes the interconnected nature of such crises. Greenhouse gas emissions, by warming the atmosphere, can enhance drought in places that are normally dry, “ripening conditions for wildfires and heat waves,” the researchers say. In wetter areas, a warmer atmosphere retains more moisture and strengthens downpours, while higher sea levels increase storm surge and warmer ocean waters can contribute to the overall destructiveness of storms.

In a scientific world marked by specialization and siloed research, this multidisciplinary effort by 23 authors reviewed more than 3,000 papers on various effects of climate change. The authors determined 467 ways in which those changes in climate affect human physical and mental health, food security, water availability, infrastructure and other facets of life on Earth.

The paper concludes that traditional research into one element of climate change and its effects can miss the bigger picture of interrelation and risk.

Climate change also has different ramifications for the world’s haves and have-nots, the authors found: “The largest losses of human life during extreme climatic events occurred in developing nations, whereas developed nations commonly face a high economic burden of damages and requirements for adaptation.”

People are not generally attuned to dealing with problems like climate change, Dr. Mora said. “We as humans don’t feel the pain of people who are far away or far into the future,” he said. “We normally care about people who are close to us or that are impacting us, or things that will happen tomorrow.”

And so, he said, people tend to look at events far in the future and tell themselves, “We can deal with these things later, we have more pressing problems now.” But, he added, this research “documented how bad this already is.”

The paper includes an interactive map of the various hazards under different emissions scenarios for any location in the world, produced by Esri, which develops geographic information systems. “We see that climate change is literally redrawing the lines on the map, and revealing the threats that our world faces at every level,” said Dawn Wright, the company’s chief scientist.

Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the paper, said it underscored the urgency for action to curb the effects of climate change and showed that “the costs of inaction greatly outweigh the costs of taking action.”

Dr. Mann published a recent paper suggesting that climate change effects on the jet stream are contributing to a range of extreme summer weather events, such as heat waves in North America, Europe, and Asia, wildfires in California and flooding in Japan. The new study, he said, dovetails with that research, and “is, if anything, overly conservative” — that is, it may underestimate the threats and costs associated with human-caused climate change.

A co-author of the new paper, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hailed its interdisciplinary approach. “There’s more than one kind of risk out there,” he said, but scientists tend to focus on their area of research. “Nations, societies in general, have to deal with multiple hazards, and it’s important to put the whole picture together.”

Like military leaders developing the capability to fight wars on more than one front, governments have to be ready to face more than one climate crisis at a time, Dr. Emanuel said.

Dr. Mora said he had considered writing a book or a movie that would reflect the frightening results of the research. His working title, which describes how dire the situation is for humanity, is unprintable here. His alternate title, he said, is “We Told You So.”

2768. The "Living Forest" Proposal to Fight Climate Change

By Miriam Anne Frank, Amazon Watch, December 7, 2017

On November 6-17, 2017, a delegation of Indigenous Kichwa leaders from the community of Sarayaku, deep in Ecuadorian Amazon, accompanied by Amazon Watch, traveled to the 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP23) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn, Germany, to promote their Kawsak Sacha ("Living Forest") proposal – a comprehensive vision for living in harmony with the natural world based upon their ancestral practices.

The Kawsak Sacha "Living Forests" vision is vital for many reasons, most fundamentally that maintaining the ecological balance of the Amazon is essential to Earth's health and capacity to mitigate climate change. The Amazon has long played the critical role of sequestering carbon but rapidly on its way to losing this sink function and become a carbon source due to deforestation. Consequently, protecting the Amazon rainforest, the largest of the world's tropical forests, must be central to climate change discussions and policies.

"My message here at COP 23 for the people, for allies of the world, is that we need to fight together, unite forces, because the states that are here speaking in our name are at a negotiating table where supposedly they are looking for solutions, but these solutions are for them, not for Indigenous peoples. Our people are in our communities, while they are here making decisions for us. They are putting prices on our natural resources, they are putting prices on us, without fully comprehending that within our territories we exist as communities with huge wisdom, knowledge, science, technology. So we are asking allied peoples to keep resisting, because this fight is how we must maintain life, and to have the freedom to express ourselves, " said Mirian Cisneros, president of Sarayaku.

The Kichwa from Sarayaku are gaining ground in alliance with Indigenous and frontline communities around the world working to defend the sacred and keep oil in the ground, including a strong bond with indigenous peoples of the Standing Rock community. As Franco Viteri, a historic Kichwa leader remarked during his visit to Standing Rock in September 2016, "My people are very conscious, because of our history and our tradition, just like the tribes here, of our connection with nature, with Mother Earth; we know that this is what gives balance to life here on earth. The transnational corporations, like those trying to build this oil pipeline, are blind because they don't understand the language of nature.”

Two years after COP 21 in Paris, elected leaders around the globe have proven their unwillingness to take the bold, urgent action needed to respond to the climate chaos beginning to wreak havoc on the planet. At COP23 Indigenous peoples continue to actively advocate their positions largely outside of the formal meetings they have limited access to. The Kichwa delegation took part in a range of actions to deliver their message – the Climate March, the Rights of Nature Tribunal – and multiple press opportunities, highlighting their truly sustainable solutions for advancing climate justice.

Inside the negotiations, the Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC) – the Indigenous representative body focused directly on impacting the COP – realized what they consider a small victory in regards to the operalization of the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform created at COP21 in Paris. This Platform was designed to create a space where they can exchange lessons learned and share their unique perspectives on reducing emissions, adapting, and building resilience. During the course of the two weeks the Parties at COP23 debated how much decision-making power they could concede to these nonparty "stakeholders.” In the final decision, a shared chairmanship by state and local communities and Indigenous Peoples' representatives was agreed to. While Indigenous Peoples clearly consider themselves rights holders (not stakeholders) in the UNFCCC negotiations the hope of the IIPFCC is that they - on the frontlines climate change - can increase their role in these intergovernmental talks and contribute to deciding their own future via mechanisms such as the Platform.

When Patricia Gualinga, a former Kichwa leader represented the global climate justice movement at the High-Level Segment at COP23 her impassioned speech contrasted sharply to those by heads of governments, reminding everyone that "Climate change is not a business.... We, the grassroots communities and Indigenous Peoples of the world, we have the real solutions. From the people of Sarayaku to Standing Rock, from the Ogoniland to Lancashire to the Ende Gelände movement here in Germany - we are all fighting against destruction and for a decent life. We are fighting for Climate Justice! ...Our struggle is for life, for justice, for Mother Earth. For women, youth, our children and their children. For our future!”

For the world to stay within the rise in temperatures per the Paris Climate Agreement, new fossil fuel production must be halted. Potential carbon emissions from the oil, gas, and coal present in the worlds currently operating fields and mines would take us beyond 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming as per that agreement.

"Considering that global climate chaos is here and global experts are warning that three-quarters of the world's fossil fuels must be kept in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change, protecting the Amazon is a greater priority than ever. We stand with Indigenous peoples and allies to stop Amazon destruction, advance Indigenous solutions, and support climate justice," said Leila Salazar-López, Executive Director of Amazon Watch.

1942. Drop in Greenhouse Gases Emission in the U.S. Due to Recession Not Fracking

By Sarah Zielinski, Smithsonian, July 21, 2015

Fracking in California

For decades, the United States increased the amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere each successive year. But recently emissions have begun to decline, dropping about 11 percent between 2007 and 2013. Some scientists and media reports attributed the change to the rise of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and the replacement of "dirty" coal with clean-burning natural gas.

But a new analysis of national consumption patterns finds that natural gas played only a minor role in the carbon story—the root of the decline can be found in the Great Recession of 2007.

Starting around the middle of the 20th century, the majority of U.S. electricity was generated through the burning of coal. In 2007, 50 percent of the nation’s electricity came from the fossil fuel. But by 2012, coal accounted for just 37 percent of the country's electricity generation, because it was replaced mostly by natural gas.

Burning natural gas emits half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy as burning coal. Because the decline in carbon emissions began at about the same time that natural gas use started rising, many thought the two events must be related. But no one had actually looked closely at the reasons for the emissions decline. So Klaus Hubacek of the University of Maryland, College Park and his colleagues examined the major contributors to U.S. carbon emissions since 1997, including population growth, changes in consumption volume, patterns of consumption, the amount of energy used and the mix of fuels used to create that energy.

The team found that prior to 2007, the rise in emissions was primarily driven by increases in the amounts of goods and services consumed, as well as a growing U.S. population. Then, in mid-2007, the U.S. housing bubble burst, sparking a severe recession. Unemployment more than doubled over the next two years. Incomes dropped, and the poverty rate increased. And between 2007 and 2009, carbon emissions fell by 9.9 percent.

From 2007 to 2009, when carbon emissions declined the most, 83 percent of the decrease was due to economic factors, including consumption and production changes. Just 17 percent of the decline related to changes in the nation's fuel mix.(Feng K, Davis SJ, Sun L, Hubacek K. 2015. Drivers of the US CO2 emissions 1997-2013. Nature Communications. doi: 10.1038/NCOMMS8714)

In effect, more than half the carbon decline was due to a drastic drop in the volume of goods consumed by the U.S. population. Almost a third of the drop could be attributed to changes in production structure, including offshoring American industries to China and other countries. Only 17 percent could be attributed to changes in the mix of fuels used to generate energy, and that wasn’t due to the rise in fracking. The shale gas boom didn’t start until 2009, the researchers note. Before that, coal had already been on the decline.

“Changes in the U.S. fuel mix from 2007 to 2009 alone would not have caused a decrease in U.S. emissions,” the team concludes in their paper, which appears this week in Nature Communications.

After 2009, as the economy began to recover and Americans started consuming goods in greater volumes, carbon emissions decreased by only 0.2 percent each year, on average. At that point, the shale gas boom began to have an effect on carbon emissions. But even then, it wasn’t the biggest factor in the decline. Changes in production and consumption dominated from 2009 to 2011, and after that, a mild winter in 2012 and high gas prices from 2011 to 2013 meant that Americans used less energy overall, emitting less carbon.

The Obama Administration has set targets for reducing U.S. carbon emissions by 17 percent in 2020 and 83 percent in 2050, relative to 1997 levels. Getting there won’t be easy. “Further increases in the use of natural gas in the U.S. may not have a large effect on global greenhouse gas emissions and warming, and further emissions reductions due to decreases in energy intensity are not inevitable,” says study coauthor Laixiang Sun of the University of Maryland.

The natural gas boom could even make the situation worse. In the short term, gas will compete with renewables, such as wind and solar, notes Hubacek. Plus, coal may be on the decline in the United States, but the nation is still exporting the fuel to China and other countries, which, in effect, exports the resulting carbon emissions around the world. 

1872. Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ Challenged by NOAA Research

By Justin Gillis, The New York Times, June 4, 2015

Scientists have long labored to explain what appeared to be a slowdown in global warming that began at the start of this century as, at the same time, heat-trapping emissions of carbon dioxide were soaring. The slowdown, sometimes inaccurately described as a halt or hiatus, became a major talking point for people critical of climate science.

Now, new research suggests the whole thing may have been based on incorrect data.

When adjustments are made to compensate for recently discovered problems in the way global temperatures were measured, the slowdown largely disappears, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared in a scientific paper published Thursday. And when the particularly warm temperatures of 2013 and 2014 are averaged in, the slowdown goes away entirely, the agency said.

“The notion that there was a slowdown in global warming, or a hiatus, was based on the best information we had available at the time,” said Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information, a NOAA unit in Asheville, N.C. “Science is always working to improve.”

The change prompted accusations on Thursday from some climate-change denialists that the agency was trying to wave a magic wand and make inconvenient data go away. Mainstream climate scientists not involved in the NOAA research rejected that charge, saying it was essential that agencies like NOAA try to deal with known problems in their data records.

At the same time, senior climate scientists at other agencies were in no hurry to embrace NOAA’s specific adjustments. Several of them said it would take months of discussion in the scientific community to understand the data corrections and come to a consensus about whether to adopt them broadly.

“What you have is a reasonable effort to deal with known biases, and obviously there is some uncertainty in how you do that,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, who heads a NASA climate research unit in New York that deals with similar issues.

Some experts also pointed out that, depending on exactly how the calculation is done, a recent slowdown in global warming still appears in the NOAA temperature record, though it may be smaller than before. “These trends are very sensitive to the time periods you use to compute them,” said Gerald A. Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Scientists like Dr. Meehl never accepted the notion, put forward by some climate contrarians, that the slowdown disproved the idea that global warming poses long-term risks. But they said they believe it is real and demands an explanation.

A leading hypothesis to explain the slowdown is that natural fluctuations in the Pacific Ocean may have temporarily pulled some heat out of the atmosphere, producing a brief flattening in the long-term increase of surface temperatures.

NOAA is one of four agencies around the world that attempts to produce a complete record of global temperatures dating to 1880. They all get similar results, showing a long-term warming of the planet that scientists have linked primarily to the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests. A huge body of physical evidence — notably, that practically every large piece of land ice on the planet has started to melt — suggests the temperature finding is correct.

Yet the temperature record is plagued by many problems: thermometers and recording practices changed through time, weather stations were moved, cities grew up around once-rural stations, and so on. Entire scientific careers are devoted to studying these issues and making corrections.

In their paper published online Thursday by the journal Science, and in interviews, scientists at NOAA said that in coming months they would roll out new versions of their temperature record that incorporate numerous improvements.

The previous record showed that temperatures from 2000 to 2014 had warmed at about two-thirds the rate of temperatures from 1950 to 1999. In the new analysis, the rate of warming in those two time periods is basically identical.

NOAA said the improvements in its data set included the addition of a huge number of land measurements from around the world, as a result of improving international cooperation in sharing weather records. But the disappearance of the slowdown comes largely from adjustments in ocean temperatures.

The ocean covers 70 percent of earth and thus the temperature at its surface has a huge influence on the overall record. Yet ocean measurements in particular are rife with difficulties.

For many decades, into the mid-20th century, the main measurements came from sailors hauling up buckets of seawater and plopping thermometers into them.

The buckets varied, the thermometers varied, and some of the sailors were more diligent than others about following instructions. On average, scientists believe, the water tended to cool off a bit before the temperature was recorded.

NOAA had long believed the data glitches from the buckets had largely disappeared after World War II, but new information suggests that bucket measurements continued on some commercial vessels long after the war. The new NOAA data set attempts to correct for this and other problems in the ocean records.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington that is critical of climate science, issued a statement condemning the changes and questioning the agency’s methodology.

“The main claim by the authors that they have uncovered a significant recent warming trend is dubious,” said the statement, attributed to three contrarian climate scientists: Richard S. Lindzen, Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. Knappenberger.

However, Russell S. Vose, chief of the climate science division at NOAA’s Asheville center, pointed out in an interview that while the corrections do eliminate the recent warming slowdown, the overall effect of the agency’s adjustments has long been to raise the reported global temperatures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a substantial margin. That makes the temperature increase of the past century appear less severe than it does in the raw data.

“If you just wanted to release to the American public our uncorrected data set, it would say that the world has warmed up about 2.071 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880,” Dr. Vose said. “Our corrected data set says things have warmed up about 1.65 degrees Fahrenheit. Our corrections lower the rate of warming on a global scale.”

Even if the warming slowdown in the early 21st century was real, there seems to be little question that it is ending. By a small margin, the global temperature hit a record in 2014, and developing weather patterns suggest that record will likely be broken by a larger margin in 2015.

1871. Climate Change Policy: The Need for a Big Stick

By Eduardo Porter, The New York Times, June 2, 2015

Coal trains in Norfolk, Virginia

Few economists are as versed in the global diplomatic effort to combat climate change as Nicholas Stern of Britain.

So it was particularly distressing to hear him say, at a debate in New York a few weeks ago, that the international effort to achieve a worldwide climate agreement in Paris next December is already falling short on its most critical goal. The various pledges by nations to cut their emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, he noted, will not be enough to prevent the Earth’s temperature from rising beyond the level scientists consider the tipping point to devastating environmental disruption.

Professor Stern does not call this “failure.” At least emissions will be lower than without a deal. And he expects the agreement to include a mechanism to review progress every few years, so countries might ramp up their efforts to cut emissions as needed. “This is very much worth having,” he said.

Perhaps the word failure fits, however. More than a quarter-century of fruitless efforts to induce the world’s major greenhouse gas polluters like China and the United States to significantly cut their emissions suggests the entire approach may be fundamentally flawed.

Such failure indicates that getting countries to make the costly but necessary investments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions will require more than diplomacy. It will require a big stick.

Consider the United States, the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter.

What if every other advanced nation, as a way to encourage energy efficiency and spur investments in alternatives to fossil fuels, agreed to put a price of $25 per ton on carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere? As a tax, that would add some 22 cents to the price of a gallon of gas, something few American politicians — fearing public anger — are yet ready to consider.

According to calculations by William Nordhaus, an expert on the economics of climate change at Yale, the United States, on net, would gain $8 billion a year by benefiting from everybody else’s efforts to slow down the Earth’s warming without having to exert any effort itself.

But if the other advanced nations had a stick — a tariff of 4 percent on the imports from countries not in the “climate club” — the cost-benefit calculation for the United States would flip. Not participating in the club would cost Americans $44 billion a year.

This sort of approach offers perhaps the best chance of preventing a climatic upheaval.

In an article published in April in The American Economic Review, Professor Nordhaus proposed just such a climate club, in which countries committed to reducing carbon emissions would impose a uniform tariff on imports from nonmembers.

Even if they agreed on a carbon price of as much as $50 a ton — which is consistent with the White House’s estimates of the overall costs imposed by climate change on society — a fairly low external tariff could induce near-universal participation in the club.

“The idea is exciting and provocative,” said Scott Barrett of Columbia University, one of the world’s leading experts on the dynamics of climate diplomacy. “He is aiming at a central problem in a direct and ambitious way.”

Martin Weitzman, a professor of economics at Harvard and co-author of “Climate Shock,” published by Princeton University Press in February, agreed. “Bill’s proposal kind of wins by default,” he said. “I don’t see anything else out there.”

To game theorists, it is no surprise that the many rounds of climate talks, including the Kyoto agreement in 1997, have failed time and again.

Most successful international agreements include some sort of device to encourage membership and ensure compliance. The Montreal Protocol, which successfully phased out the chlorofluorocarbons once used in aerosol sprays that were blowing a hole in the ozone layer, was built around enforcement. Countries that did not sign up to the deal could not trade CFCs with members of the club, encouraging everyone to join.

Countries join the World Trade Organization because they want to benefit from lower tariffs in other countries. They don’t slap arbitrary restrictions on another country’s products, because they would suffer the cost of retaliation.

Climate change is tougher. For one thing, it will be more costly for a country to limit emissions of greenhouse gases. The benefits will be shared by the entire world. Moreover, the threshold for devastating consequences is uncertain. For many, the optimal strategy will be to lie low and reap the gains as so-called free riders.

While countries might cooperate if they were absolutely certain of the tipping point that led to catastrophe, climate science doesn’t work like that. Experiments by Professor Barrett and Astrid Dannenberg from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have found that where there is uncertainty, free-riding becomes irresistible, cooperation breaks down and catastrophe occurs.

Professor Nordhaus’s proposal would change the rules of the game. “Unless we do something like this,” he said, “we will continue down the road we’ve been on since 1997.”

Adopting Professor Nordhaus’s proposal, of course, would not be easy. One reason there is no truly enforceable climate agreement yet is that most countries are reluctant to sign up.

A system like that proposed by Professor Nordhaus would require some agreement to amend the rules of the World Trade Organization, to prevent countries hit by the tariff from retaliating with tariffs of their own. Those countries most dependent on fossil fuels may not quickly climb on board.

And while it works fairly well at $50 a ton or so, the mechanism starts breaking down when the price of carbon rises higher.

The question that must be answered, however, is whether the world has any viable, effective alternative.

Professor Stern still holds out hope for the current diplomatic process, which relies on peer pressure to do the trick, allowing each country to decide on its own how much it wants to contribute to the climate goal.

Professor Barrett suggests breaking the problem into smaller chunks that are easier to solve — like eliminating hydrofluorocarbons or imposing new regulations on aluminum production — rather than continuing to aim for the grand deal that has eluded global leaders for so long.

These seem thin threads on which to hang the Earth’s future. “When you add up all of this, even in my wildest dream you are not going to solve the problem,” Professor Barrett told me.

Professor Weitzman may be the most realistic of all. “I think, alas, that we will keep drifting to higher and higher greenhouse gas concentrations until climate change is perceived as something catastrophic at a grass-roots level,” he said.

As a result, many are clutching at straws. In the absence of real progress, some experts are tweaking the science instead: coming up with increasingly far-fetched assumptions that hinge on dubious concepts like “negative emissions” in hopes that new calculations push back the climate change timeline and make addressing the problem seem more feasible.

“The issue is not whether we will have disastrous effects,” Professor Weitzman told me, “but when climate change will have disastrous effects.”

Given the dearth of alternatives, Professor Nordhaus’s scheme, draconian as it may sound, looks like the only game in town.

1610. Why the San Francisco Bay Area 350.org's Call for "Getting Out the Vote" for Democrats Is a Grave Mistake

By Kamran Nayeri, October 26, 2014

Climate justice march in Oakland, California. 

The San Francisco Bay Area 350.org has issued a call to get out the vote for the Democratic party candidates in the mid-term U.S. election, especially in the close Senate races.  

In a dramatically titled October 25 email message “Your phone calls in the next 10 days may determine the fate of the world,” (my emphasis) it declares:

“The stakes for the climate are critical in the Tuesday, Nov 4th elections.  It's best for the climate if the Democrats do well in the midterms. Terrible otherwise.  It is unusually important for grassroots people power to kick in now to Get Out The Vote (GOTV).  That's why 350 Bay Area is sending this rare call to help out in general elections.

“By signing up to call with MoveOn & Progressive Democrats of America, you will just be encouraging democratic voters to actually vote, not trying to change their mind about anything.
Please sign up for a shift -- or more than one -- now … at whatever time is convenient for you!
Sign up to make calls in these close Senate races:

• Michigan to help elect Gary Peters.

• South Dakota to help elect Rick Weiland.

• Colorado to help elect Mark Udall.

• North Carolina to help elect Kay Hagan.

• Iowa to help elect Bruce Braley.

• Kentucky to defeat Mitch McConnell.” (all emphases in the original) 

Democratic party is the graveyard of social movements
There is a long history of social movements being dragged into supporting the Democratic party, the graveyard of progressive movements in the U.S.  Witness the contemporary history of the labor movement, black liberation movement, woman liberation movement, and the environmentalist movement. Every major victory for any of these movements had come when they mobilized mass actions in the streets not when they followed a policy of getting Democrats elected.  When the latter “strategy” dominated, the mass base of these movements were demobilized expect to get them to vote for Democrats on the election day. 

As such, labor and social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s proved ill-prepared when the capitalist offensive by the corporate elite and their government began in the aftermath of the  world recession of 1973-75 that signaled the end of the post-World War II capitalist prosperity.  The leadership of these movements that have relayed on the Democratic party politicians to gain a few concession in exchange for political support for the capitalist policies of this party proved unable to resist the class war that ensued and continues to this day.   Both Republican and Democratic parties participated in this class warfare, although they employed different tactics.  Without any serious mobilization to resist these attacks, the demobilized mass base of the labor and social movements became demoralized. 

This why major environmentalist group today are reduced to Internet “campaigns” that call on their supporters to “take action” on the crisis of the day by clicking a button to send a message to this or that politician or office pleading to save this or that species, habitat, ecosystem, etc.   From a proactive movement, they have become reactive bureaucratic organizations that are not even interested in mass mobilization and street actions.   Clearly, this has been a losing game. 

The reason 350.org stands out from the main environmentalist groups is that it has resorted to focused grassroots mass actions that have successfully mobilized hundreds of thousands in the U.S. and inspired others to do the same worldwide.  The People’s Climate March is a shining example of that approach (for my brief discussion of it see here).  What we can learn from that experience is to educate, organize and mobilize more people for larger streets actions, not to ask them to elect Democrats! 

By claiming that the “next 10 days will determine the fate of the world” by electing Democrats the San Francisco Bay Area 350.org leaders make the same exact mistake that the leaders of labor and social movements, including the environmentalist movement, have committed to disastrous result.  There is no reason to make the same mistake again!

The need for an alternative to the capitalist order

Instead what is required is forging an alternative leadership to the Democratic and Republican parties that represents the interests of the 99% of the peoples of the planet and a program that ensure social and environmental justice.  We need a series of immediate and transitional demands to stop and reverse climate change and to educate, organize and mobilize in election time and beyond.  Recent reports show that in some local and state elections even Republican candidates are forced to adopt a climate friendly approach.  By resorting to get out the vote for Democrats the 350.org activists will miss an opportunity that the election time offers.  The planetary crisis, including global warming and catastrophic climate change, require radical changes to Our Way of Life mediated by the capitalist social relations of production on the global scale.  Thus, to claim that electing a few more Democratic politicians will change the “fate of the world” is ignorant at best and a disservice to the activists of the environmental movement.  

The social and planetary crisis of our day are really one and the same problem.  It is the crisis of the age of Anthropocene that began with the Agricultural Revolution to control and dominate nature on which we are but a tiny part. This alienation from nature prepared for social and individual alienation.  The global capitalist cultural and economy is the modern day manifestation of the Anthropcene.  To overcome it we need to rebuild human society from the grounds up.  To think that electing a few more Democrats to the Senate can substitute for such deep going task is to fool oneself into accepting the status quo with minor modifications. It will not address the root-cause the planetary crisis, including climate change, and social crisis.  We need a radical solution to the world problem—radical in the sense of going to the roots of the problems we face. 

Nothing less will do and humanity cannot afford committing the same errors leaderships of the labor and social movements have done for decades once again. There is precious little time for us to learn quickly, stand on our own feet and act as leaders not flowers of capitalist parties.