A weak sauce of climate half-measures

My Sunday movie was C’mon, C’mon. It’s the story of Johnny, a single middle aged man suddenly having to care for his nine-year-old nephew Jesse over several weeks. This could have been about the clueless guy stepping into being a parent and making a mess of it. There is a bit of that, but the story is so much more, which is why it got a lot of rave reviews. One reason for the depth is that Jesse’s father is mentally ill and his mother has to travel to where Dad is and get him into a treatment program. And that isn’t easy. While she’s doing that also taking care of Jesse would be too hard. So Johnny steps in. Johnny is frequently on the phone with his sister to get insight into what Jesse is doing. Jesse is very good at asking uncomfortable questions. Because of his dad, Jesse’s mother has been teaching him techniques for understanding his feelings. Johnny needs time to understand to do that too and he reads articles on how to effectively communicate with a child. By the end Johnny and Jesse get along pretty well. Johnny works with an organization that interviews kids about what they think of the future and how they’re feeling. The kids like it because here’s an adult actually interested in what they have to say. When the movie opened I saw a scene from the sky. In just a moment I realized, hey, that’s Detroit. Yes, Johnny was in Detroit for the first round of kid interviews. Johnny goes to Los Angeles to stay with Jesse. But work must happen, so they’re off to New York, then New Orleans. I enjoyed this one a lot. It’s a great story and is well acted. I am puzzled about one of the director’s artistic choices – the movie is in black and white. The big LGBTQ news of the moment: An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reports Pope Francis issued a document that approves allowing priests to bless same-sex couples. The document reaffirms opposition to same-sex marriage and civil unions and the blessings should not come near the time of the wedding or formalizing the union. It also says the request for a blessing should not cause an “exhaustive moral analysis” which should not deny the blessing. I think I see a distinction that the blessing is for the people in the union, not a blessing of the union. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed the pope’s action. Over the last several years several churches and several politicians have equated recognition of LGBTQ people with an attack on Christianity. On the same day as this news from the Pope the New York Times placed beside it news of the huge number of conservative congregations leaving my own denomination of the United Methodist Church. The NYT article says about a quarter of the nation’s 30,000 UMC churches have disaffiliated over LGBTQ issues (wouldn’t have been better to report three-quarters of the churches that stayed?). Hopefully, in April the UMC will get rid of the prohibitions over what LGBTQ people can do in the denomination, rules that aren’t being enforced anymore. Other mainline Protestant churches – United Church of Christ, Presbyterian Church, Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and others have already declared their support for LGBTQ people. There’s even an Alliance of Baptists that have split from the conservative Southern Baptist Convention. And yes, when denominations welcomed LGBTQ members, people and congregations left. That SBC has essentially purged its progressives and even moderates. And while every religious group is losing members the SBC is falling fastest. Alas, the media still equates the “Christian perspective” with the religious right. I’ve been collecting global warming articles waiting for the end of the COP28 meeting (and waiting for time to write). From December 3 an AP article said the big topic of the day at COP28 was how a warming climate affects human health. The problems come from pollution and from diseases that spread more widely as global warming upends weather systems. Also on December 3 Meteor Blades, in an Earth Matters column for Kos reported that Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan signed a bill that mandated a switch to 100% clean energy. State electricity utilities must get 50% of their power from clean sources by 2030 and 100% by 2040. That’s a quick jump, though climate activists say it should be faster. Utility engineers and Republicans say the speed of the mandates are unworkable, which will further increase energy costs and make it less reliable. There are several other provisions in the package. One problem with the package is the definition of “clean.” It can include natural gas if 90% of its carbon dioxide emissions can be captured. That may rely on corporate self-reporting that doesn’t account from leaks from wellheads and pipelines. So by 2040 calling natural gas “clean” is BS. Blades also wrote that GM, Ford, and Stellantis (current owner of Chrysler) are pulling back on their conversion to electric vehicles. That implies the whole EV market has slowed. But while demand for Big Three EVs has slowed, the overall market hasn’t. Tesla is doing quite well. Back before Thanksgiving Charles Jay of Kos discussed a report by the Guardian that determined:

The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, with dire consequences for vulnerable communities and global efforts to tackle the climate emergency.

More quotes from the Guardian, the first from Greta Thunberg:

Either we safeguard living conditions for all future generations or we let a few very rich people maintain their destructive lifestyles and preserve an economic system geared towards short-term economic growth and shareholder profit.

That elite group of 77 million people includes those paid more than $140K US per year, which seems like a low entry point, but 99% of the world’s residents earn less than that. One possibility is a high income tax or a wealth tax. But, the Guardian quoted an Oxfam report:

This elite also wield enormous and growing political power by owning media organisations and social networks, hiring advertising and PR agencies and lobbyists, and mixing socially with senior politicians, who are also often members of the richest 1%, according to the report. In the US, for example, one in four members of Congress reportedly own stocks in fossil fuel companies, worth a total of between $33m and $93m. The report says this helps to explain why global emissions continue to rise, and why governments in the global north provided $1.8 trillion to subsidize the fossil fuel industry in 2020, contrary to their international pledges to phase out carbon emissions.

On December 6 Bill Laurel of the Kos community posted one of his updates of the health of the planet. At the top of the post is the chart of daily surface air temperature that caused a lot of consternation when it showed a big jump at the start of July. The chart now has data through November and since July the daily temperature has remained noticeably above the lines for every year since 1979, sometime as much as a half degree Celsius above. Also on the 6th Blades reported on an investigation by Drilled that showed that in major trusted news sources stories about the climate crisis frequently have alongside sponsored material. “Known as advertorials or native advertising, the sponsored material is created to look like a publication’s authentic editorial work, lending a veneer of journalistic credibility to the fossil fuel industry’s key climate talking points.” This is a partnership between the media companies and the fossil fuel industry and is essentially greenwashing the fossil fuel companies. On December 11 Camila Domonoske of NPR explained why the big oil companies are not big energy companies that supply energy from all kinds of sources, not just oil. Yeah, some companies are dipping toes into diversification. But the return on investment (I think that’s the measurement used) is 20% to 50% for fossil fuels and 5% to 10% for renewable energy. Renewables have the advantage of reducing the huge economic costs of climate change and save millions of lives. But those don’t appear in a company’s financial spreadsheet. Also, those companies are well established and have lower risk. Companies pushing renewables are newer and have higher risk. Yeah, wind and solar companies make profits, but oil companies make big profits. In another Earth Matters article Blades reported during the COP28 conference that Kamala Harris pledged $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund. This is the fund to help developing nations adapt to a warming climate. It has been significantly underfunded since it was created. Good to hear Harris made the pledge. Good luck getting it through the US House. Blades also reported on an article by Sara Miller Llana and Stephanie Hanes of the Christian Science Monitor who interviewed young people around the world. These young people have unprecedented children’s rights, such as a safe home and the ability to go to school, yet this Climate Generation is facing unprecedented challenges. What they found is the youth are stepping up to meet those challenges and pushing back on the way things are done now. Back on December 8 Kos of Kos wrote about the dispute between Venezuela and Guyana. Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro declared he was annexing a big chunk of Guyana, known as the Essequibo region. Kos explains what is going on, starting with the history of colonization. There’s a big reason why Venezuela wants the area – lots of potential for oil and mineral wealth. There’s also a big reason why Venezuela’s claim won’t get far – the disputed region is wilderness. Guyana very intentionally created no roads between itself and it’s greedy neighbor. In the December 17 edition of Earth Matters Blades included reactions from the end of COP28 and the report it issued. Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News reported the good news is the final consensus report actually named fossil fuels as the major contributor to global warming. The bad news is what to do about it is “a weak sauce of climate half-measures” that are not anywhere near adequate to do anything. One reason why it is weak is COP28 president Sultan al-Jaber, an oil executive, gavelled through the report when the representatives of 39 small island states most affected by global warming were out of the room. A tweet from Peter Kalmus:

Everyone is celebrating the first ever inclusion of “fossil fuels” in a COP stocktake, whereas I feel this is shameful. 28 years? To simply mention the cause of this global heating nightmare? Shows just how the entire COP process has been co-opted. This is how we lose a planet.

Brad Johnson of Hill Heat noted the final agreement includes the phrase “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems” and that it has “a flurry of caveats and loopholes.” One of those loopholes is the word “transitioning” is way too vague. David Wallace-Wells of NYT wrote that the report is an endorsement of the status quo. Yeah, there is movement in the right direction...

Global sales of internal-combustion engine vehicles peaked in 2017. Investment in renewable energy has exceeded investment in fossil fuel infrastructure for several years running now. In 2022, 83 percent of new global energy capacity was green. The question isn’t about whether there will be a transition, but how fast, global and thorough it will be. The answer is: not fast or global or thorough enough yet, at least on the current trajectories, which COP28 effectively affirmed.

Kate Aronoff of The New Republic said nearly 200 countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels. But countries most adamant the final report should say “phaseout” rather than transition are the ones planning to increase their extraction of fossil fuels. The top countries planning an increase are the US, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Umair Irfan of Vox reported one big omission from the final report – the methane from the food we eat.

From tilling soil to planting crops, to fertilizer, livestock, manure, harvesting, shipping, and waste, food systems produce 34 percent of overall greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture is the single-largest anthropogenic, or human-driven, source of methane, and most of that is from our appetite for meat. Animals raised for food account for 32 percent of human-driven methane.

Bill McKibben of Common Dreams wrote about the word “transition”

If the language means anything at all, it means no opening no more new oil fields, no more new pipeline. No more new LNG export terminals. And by itself it will accomplish nothing. ... But it is—and this is important—a tool for activists to use henceforth. The world’s nations have now publicly agreed that they need to transition off fossil fuels, and that sentence will hang over every discussion from now on—especially the discussions about any further expansion of the fossil fuel energy.

Asad Reman of The Guardian wrote:

The UK, US and the EU not only point-blank refused to discuss cutting their own emissions in line with both fairness and science, but their agreement on “fossil fuel phase-out” has more loopholes than a block of Swiss cheese. It comes without acknowledgment of historical responsibility, or redistribution, or the remaking of a financial system of debt, tax and trade that has been rigged to keep developing countries locked into exploiting resources simply to fill the coffers of rich countries. Our movements, our frontline communities, know these are lies. Scientists know they are lies, and so do many developing countries. Those already living the realities of unjust climate breakdown know that 1.5C will result in a death sentence for the poorest, yet we remain on track for 3C global heating.

Naveena Sadasivam of Grist wrote about how the nasty guy and the Republican Party will trash any efforts to reduce emissions. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that has a large number of green goodies in it is being rebranded as “Irresponsible Reckless Alarming.” Patrick Blower has a cartoon about the conclusion of COP28. Two men are walking toward the waiting airplanes. One has a document “Yet Another Climate Deal” and the back of his shirt shows a COP World Tour from Bonn in 2017 to Baku next year. The other says, “See you next year, man...”