Updates from the news #6 – 22 September 2023

In addition to the huge march in NYC last Sunday, Climate Week 2023 has been packed with demonstrations, acts of civil disobedience, and bird-dogging. 75,000 or more mainly young people participated in the March. You can watch video recordings of key panel discussions and presentations here. Civil disobedience actions included blocking the entrances to the Federal Reserve. Dozens of marchers blocked traffic outside BlackRock and Citibank on Wednesday. Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! reviews some of the actions. More than 149 people were arrested.

Bird-dogging is when a climate denier, delayer, or minimizer is confronted in public and hounded off a podium or as they walk down the street. Here is an example of bird-dogging Tommy Beaudreau, the official from the Commerce Department who approved the Willow Project. Beaudreau was on his way to speak on climate change at an event during Climate Week. Unfortunately, many of the speakers and panelists were bureaucrats who gave only performative mention of the young people who were marching. 

The world’s two biggest polluters were not invited to speak at UN meeting on effective climate action. This week, the U.S. and China were excluded from the UN Summit on Climate Ambition.

The Biden White House has announced the launch of American Climate Corps to train young people. This was included in the Inflation Reduction Act with about $10bn in funding, but it was removed. Now it is being created by executive order and it is unclear how well it will be funded. Regardless, the potential is huge. We desperately need legions of climate workers and professionals to manage the biosphere.

Inside Climate News reports on the funding that has been found for the American Climate Corps. An amount is not mentioned but it will be drawn from existing agencies including Agriculture, Energy, Interior, Labor, AmeriCorps, and NOAA.

Wildfire risk is soaring for low-income, elderly, and other vulnerable populations in California, Washington, and Oregon.

The Canadian wildfires from this year’s wildfire season has emitted over 2 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. This huge amount is a positive feedback to global heating that is not reported in Canada’s Nationally Determined Contributions. Instead, Canada (and many other countries) claim forests as offsets, i.e., net sinks.

First Street Foundation has produced a cornerstone analysis of the insurance industry. This is a must-read for all Floridians with homeowner insurance.

The Nation provides an analysis by Michael T. Klare, who argues that we are witnessing the first stages of civilization’s collapse. I believe that he makes a compelling case. The latest review of human breaches of the Earth’s Planetary Boundaries supports this conclusion.

Grist provides a science-based analysis of the collapse of marine ecosystems in Florida Bay due to the record extreme ocean temperatures this summer.

Worldweatherattribution.org has completed an analysis of extreme weather in the Mediterranean in early September. It shows that rainfall levels that devastated Libya killing at least 3,000 people were up to 50 times more likely due to global heating.

Yet again, another analysis shows that the nature-based carbon offsets used by major brands and governments are mostly garbage. The offsets have been used in the multi-billion-dollar carbon trading industry by governments, organizations and corporations including oil and gas companies, airlines (Delta is a prime offender), fast-food brands, fashion houses, tech firms, art galleries, and universities.

The era of climate migration is here. Leaders of some of the most vulnerable states met separately at the UN Summit this week to highlight the dire challenges of millions of climate migrants on the move.

Marginalized communities in Miami are hotter. This is due to the practice of Redlining and is no coincidence. Many cities are now working to improve “tree equity”

This post reviews the absolute bullshit behind the marketing claim of climate-friendly beef. The only climate-friendly beef is the beef that you don’t eat.

Climate policy researchers are turning away from the economic prospects of Green Growth and increasingly embracing degrowth, a topic that we will cover in the last module of my courses on climate change.  

Opponents of offshore wind have spread lies about dead whales.

Billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. through August 2023.

Although it is still winter in most of Brazil, temperatures could soar to 45C this week. Authorities have warned that this could be a life-threatening heat dome. South America Heat Wave for today: Highest temperature today was 43.6C at Villamontes in Bolivia. Exceptionally hot nights in some areas with a Tmin of 29.5C at Establecimiento Miguel y Jesús in Paraguay. Tomorrow the heat will intensify and spread in area and reach historic levels

Elephants in Africa are moving long distances to find water. They are dying in greater numbers likely result of increased poaching and heat stress.

Peter Hotez is a scientist at Baylor Medical School who publicly promoted vaccination during the pandemic. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He has been harassed, demonized, and threatened on rightwing media. His new book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science is an excellent chronicle of how the extreme rightwing has damaged science and threatened many scientists. This interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education includes several important observations. Some of his remarks: (1) What scares scientists from making public statements defending science is they lack the backing of administrators and scientific societies. (2) He sees most of the anti-science attacks as a one-dimensional partisan attack from the radical right. (3) With respect to the lab-leak theory of the origin of COVID-19, he states: “We have at least half a dozen papers in top journals like Science, as opposed to lab leak or gain of function. You know how many papers we have on that? Zero, because there’s no there there.” [Note: you can access the Chronicle by registering. The article is free]

For my students: I usually avoid referencing Al Gore because of his unfairly damaged reputation with the extreme rightwing. Citing him on social media draws absurd and vicious attacks. His activism on climate change has been unwavering since his documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize along with the IPCC in 2007. The extreme rightwing has attacked him professionally and through ad hominen lies about his personal life. He is founder and chair of The Climate Reality Project. In 2017 I found myself walking next to him during a climate march in D.C. Recently he appeared at the TED Countdown Summit with this barnburner of a talk. This is a must-watch if you have not seen it.

The winners of the 2023 Covering Climate Now Journalism awards are:  “Manka Behl, who reports for The Times of India from the frontlines of the crisis in one of the world’s most climate-important countries; Damian Carrington, whose science-based reporting for the Guardian explains that politics and corporate power, not a lack of green technologies, are what block climate progress; and Amy Westervelt, whose prolific, multi-platform reporting for Critical Frequency exposes how fossil fuel companies continue to mislead the public and policymakers alike.” You can see synopses of their work here.

The Story Exchange provides a review of 10 women who have been environmental leaders