THE MEDIA ARE *NOT* THE MESSAGE

The media are simply not doing their job in reporting on climate change. This has been brought to my attention in recent days by two separate incidents. 

First, about a thousand climate scientists around the world engaged in acts of civil disobedience in a desperate attempt to get the message out about the seriousness of climate change. This got just about zero press coverage.

Then there was the ridiculous disparity in coverage between the Will Smith/Chris Rock nonsense and the release of the IPCC Working Group 3 report on climate change mitigation. This rich piece of show-biz gossip got about 100-- or was it 1,000?-- times as much coverage as the latter. Absurd.

The media continue to deal with climate change as if it were of interest only to some minor demographic called 'environmentalists.' This has got to STOP!

THE BIG PIVOT

 Bill McKibben is right. We should use Putin's energy blackmail as a rationale to begin the Big Pivot away from fossil fuels.

'So now is the moment to remind ourselves that, in the last decade, scientists and engineers have dropped the cost of solar and windpower by an order of magnitude, to the point where it is some of the cheapest power on Earth. The best reason to deploy it immediately is to ward off the existential crisis that is climate change, and the second best is to stop the killing of nine million people annually who die from breathing in the particulates that fossil fuel combustion produces. But the third best reason – and perhaps the most plausible for rousing our leaders to action – is that it dramatically reduces the power of autocrats, dictators, and thugs.'

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/25/this-is-how-we-defeat-putin-and-other-petrostate-autocrats?fbclid=IwAR01wu4c6CSmO2ave1iVKUpVdjUb7Ol8qUUYbv7VzZIESg8zWiGdKTSzexo

#EmergencyMode

 #EmergencyMode

The President should declare a National Climate Emergency, and the UN should declare a Planetary Climate Emergency. We might not know what specific policies would emerge from this, but something's simply got to be done to get people's attention.

ipcc 6th assessment

 Well, the newest IPCC assessment of climate change has come out, and it ain't pretty:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/09/ipcc-report-un-climate-report-delivers-starkest-warning-yet.html?__source=sharebar|facebook&par=sharebar&fbclid=IwAR3Ee9puGHgiEfsyouTaimTkzwzlNfhmoAiSCHiIQ_VF_q82RXH_vDKA2Uw

This report puts things in pretty stark perspective. The UN Secretary General calls it 'Code Red' for the planet.

'Great Conjunction'

 'Great Conjunction' of Jupiter (and four of its moons) and Saturn, December 21, 2020. (Saturn is actually about twice as far from Earth as Jupiter is in this image.)

my problem with the 'green new deal' is my problem with the whole climate change 'debate'

There's one thing I like about the 'Green New Deal' unveiled by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement: It's dramatic enough to deal with the scale of the climate change problem. There's one thing I don't like about it, though, and I think it's enough to make it sink like a stone politically: Why is it tied in with this big social-justice agenda (guaranteed jobs, basic income, racial 'equity,' etc.)? What's that got to do with climate change?

I've never really understood why climate change has become this big right-vs-left issue. To me, it's just science. The thing is, the Republicans used to agree with this, back in the 1990s and early 2000s. They were just looking for a market based approach to the issue-- and they came up with one: cap and trade, which came out of the American Enterprise Institute. But then sometime toward the end of that decade the word seems to have gone out that, no, climate change was to be seen as some kind of leftist plot to Take Away Your Freedoms and install a UN One World Government. My guess is that the fossil fuel interests let the GOP bigwigs know that they were not amused.

But now the Democrats are just doubling down on this approach. You may or may not be in favor of Medicare for All, but what on Earth does it have to do with climate change? Nothing, that's what! I just wish the Democrats would deal with this issue alone, on its merits. I think there's plenty there to attract voters turned off by Trump's willful ignorance on the subject. But trying to tie it to this whole left-wing social-justice agenda seems like a really bad, self-defeating idea.

a word to the wise: my letter to president trump

November 20, 2018

President Donald Trump

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Trump:

You call yourself a nationalist. People on the left, of course, think that nationalism is a bad thing in and of itself, but I think it depends what purpose nationalism is harnessed to. If it were harnessed to the cause of dealing effectively with climate change, it would be a very good thing indeed.

The problem is, you don’t acknowledge the reality of man-made climate change, and as long as you don’t, other countries—notably China—will corner the market on the emerging technologies that deal with it, many of which we actually invented. Is that really what you want?

No, instead, we should try to control the commanding heights of these environmental technologies ourselves. We should dominate the market in them. We should also emphasize environmental nationalism rather than military nationalism. If we limited our military to a truly defensive posture—just enough to make sure that nobody tangles with us or our allies— we could devote a significant portion of the savings to research and development for renewables, energy conservation, carbon removal, maybe nuclear power.

You should summon up all of the nation’s intellectual, economic, and social resources to deal with this crisis. In the wake of the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite in 1957, President Eisenhower proposed and Congress approved, on a bipartisan basis, the National Defense Education Act. The purpose of the act was to train more scientists and mathematicians to meet the Soviet challenge. Later, President Kennedy set the goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. This was an explicitly nationalist goal, yet it wasn’t criticized on that account. Although Kennedy never lived to see it, the goal was realized in 1969. Rather than a National Defense Education Act, we need a National Climate and Energy Education Act to train the nation’s youth to address the climate crisis. Beyond that, we need to marshal all the nation’s resources to meet this challenge.

Toward that end, we should create a Climate and Energy Research Projects Agency (CERPA) based on the model of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

You should become an environmental nationalist. Then the adversary wouldn’t be ‘the climate’—that’s too abstract. No, the adversary would then become China. Everybody can understand that. I certainly don’t want the Chinese controlling these technologies. Do you?

You pride yourself on being a realist, but you’re not being realistic about this at all. You’re being woefully, willfully ignorant about the reality of man-made climate change. You should take a tip from the medieval English king Canute. In order to counter the assertion of some flattering courtiers that he was above even natural laws, Canute set his throne by the sea shore and commanded the incoming tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes. Yet of course the tide continued to rise as usual and dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person. So King Canute leapt backwards, saying, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.” In other words, nobody—not even you—can defy the laws of physics and chemistry.

A word to the wise, pal.

Yours etc.,

Jonathan Greenblume

the trouble with the green party

The trouble with the Green Party (USA) is that it's not green enough. If you go to their website:

http://www.gp.org/

you'll find that 'Ecology' is just one of their 'Four Pillars'-- and it's not even first! (The others are 'Peace,' 'Social Justice,' and 'Democracy.' One may or may not agree with their positions on these various other issues, but the main problem is that they're just spreading themselves too thin. Especially given the direness of the climate crisis, they need to be concentrating on this issue alone.

I also have a bit of a problem  with perennial candidate Jill Stein. I fear her shtik is getting a bit old; she's a little too pleasant and inoffensive. We need somebody with more fire in the belly, our own Bernie Sanders. Dr. Stein should go back to being a physician, rather than trying to have a career running for an office she will never-- and may not even want to-- win.

environmental nationalism

 I know, you don't expect to see those two words in the same sentence, let alone the same phrase.  People on the left think that nationalism is bad in and of itself. But I think it depends what purpose nationalism is harnessed to. And if it’s harnessed to the purpose of dealing effectively with the climate crisis, that is a very good thing.

We should control the commanding heights of environmental technology. Summon up all of the nation’s intellectual, economic, and social resources to deal with this crisis. We want to dominate the market in these technologies.

We should emphasize environmental nationalism rather than military nationalism. If we limited our military to a truly defensive posture—just enough to make sure that nobody would screw with us— we could devote a significant portion of the savings to research and development for renewables, energy conservation, carbon removal, maybe nuclear power.

In the wake of Sputnik, President Eisenhower proposed and the Congress approved, on a bipartisan basis, the National Defense Education Act, to train more scientists and mathematicians to meet the Soviet threat. Later, President Kennedy set the goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. This was a specifically nationalist appeal, yet no one criticized it on that basis. Although he never lived to see it, the goal was realized in 1969. Rather than a National Defense Education Act, we need a National Climate and Energy Education Act to train the nation’s youth to address the climate crisis. Beyond that, we need to marshal the nation’s resources to meet this challenge.

will wonders never cease?

A Republican carbon tax? I know, it's hard to believe, but here it is, put forward by the Climate Leadership Council headed by Reagan-era luminaries George Shultz and James Baker, backed by Larry Summers, Christine Todd Whitman, and Janet Yellen. They don't call it a tax, of course, but a 'fee' or something. That's what it is, though.

https://www.clcouncil.org/