climate change – Sheila Kennedy

Ship To Shore

We are a bit over halfway on our cruise across the Pacific–by far the longest such trip these old folks have ever taken–and the days at sea have allowed me to maintain a certain distance from the news of the day. Not that we can escape knowing about the wars–both the actual ones in Ukraine and Israel and the political ones in the United States–but the time differences and internet interruptions allow for a bit more space for reflection.

Most of the passengers on this voyage are–like us– elderly, and the entertainment tends to cater to our age cohort. For example, one night, as we were visiting islands in French Polynesia with their breathtakingly beautiful landscapes (and obvious reliance on tourism dollars), the ship’s “World Stage” substituted the 1958 film “South Pacific” for the usual live entertainment.

It had been quite a while since I’d last seen South Pacific, and what struck me most forcefully was how very contemporary its message has remained. If my math is correct, it has been 65 years since the movie was filmed, but the issues it addressed remain uncomfortably relevant: war, of course, but especially bigotry –the ways in which that bigotry gets transmitted and the ways in which it distorts our perspectives and our relations with other human beings.

If I had to guess, I’d assume that every regular reader of this blog is familiar with Lt. Cable’s famous lament, “You have to be taught to hate.”

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade—
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

We haven’t come very far in those 65 years….

There have been several other “lessons” I’ve gleaned from being on a ship that is most often far from land. One is the recognition of just how dependent we passengers are upon the safety and sea-worthiness of that ship and the competence and care of its crew.

As I have measured my steps along the Promenade Deck, I’ve seen members of the crew working non-stop to keep the vessel in safe and seaworthy condition. Whenever we’re in port, the entire crew participates in safety drills–some focused on the lifeboats, others I don’t begin to understand–all of which they clearly take very seriously.

The analogy sort of writes itself.

We’re all passengers on two other, larger ships: the ship of state, and “spaceship Earth” –and we aren’t tending to either one with even a fraction of the attention and craftsmanship being displayed daily by the crew of this cruise ship.

My husband and I would not have boarded a ship run by a cruise line noted for its rejection of reality–a line managed by people who pooh-poohed the dangers of weather and navigation. I rather imagine that the people who comment here are equally cautious when choosing modes of transportation. We expect that airline pilots and ship’s captains will be trained professionals, that the mechanics and other crew members will have the requisite expertise and that they all will take their jobs seriously.

America’s Congress just elected a Speaker of the House who insists that the Earth is 6000 years old, that climate change is a hoax, and that all Americans should abide by his biblical beliefs. The systemic failures that led to his election will impede efforts to address the warming of the planet, and may well sink the ship of state.

I wouldn’t board a ship captained by someone who trusted his version of deity to steer a course. I wouldn’t board a ship being maintained by an untrained crew–especially one that inhabited an alternate reality in which the sea’s dangers went unrecognized. I wouldn’t board a ship on which the captain and crew cared only about the safety and well-being of passengers who looked like them and shared their religious beliefs.

I’m very much afraid, however, that both of those larger ships we humans share–the global one and the political one– are sailing in turbulent and life-threatening waters.

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Wow…

Allow me to begin with an admission: I’m not a scientist and I don’t play one on TV.

That said, the various newsletters and publications I receive increasingly feature reports of scientific breakthroughs (one of which is described below), reminding me that a constant focus on humanity’s seeming inability to escape tribalism and social discord gives one a distorted picture of where we are as a species.

There is a substantial mis-match between humankind’s social/political progress and our very impressive advancements in science and technology. I am definitely not advocating that we sit back and ignore climate on the theory that science will save the day. We still need policies to address the reality of a warming planet. But in addition to other measures aimed at reducing harmful emissions, those public policies need to incorporate and encourage insights produced by the scientific community.

Some of the emerging technologies that promise to have a significant effect on climate change:

Carbon capture and storage that captures carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants and industrial facilities, preventing them from entering the atmosphere. Evidently, the captured emissions can then be stored underground or used in various industries.
Breakthroughs in renewable energy promise significant reductions in the cost of energy. The last few years have seen increases in solar and wind power generation, advancements in batteries that store energy, and improvements in the efficiency of renewable energy systems.
Consumers have warmed to electric vehicles, and we are on the cusp of widespread adoption of electric automobiles as driving range has increased and charging infrastructure improves.
Green hydrogen is hydrogen produced through renewable energy sources (such as electrolysis of water using electricity from wind or solar power.) Carbon-free hydrogen (with which I was–and am– unfamiliar) has a wide variety of applications.
The movement toward sustainable agriculture doesn’t just reflect health concerns; innovative agricultural practices reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon sequestration.

There’s much more. I lack the background to fully understand these advances, but from what I read, it appears that advanced materials being developed for use in construction and manufacturing can also significantly reduce emissions and our carbon footprint.

And that brings me to the “wow” of today’s title. The Washington Post recently reported that scientists have found a way to create energy out of virtually any material.

Nearly any material can be used to turn the energy in air humidity into electricity, scientists found in a discovery that could lead to continuously producing clean energy with little pollution.

The research, published in a paper in Advanced Materials, builds on 2020 work that first showed energy could be pulled from the moisture in the air using material harvested from bacteria. The new study shows nearly any material, such as wood or silicon, can be used, as long as it can be smashed into small particles and remade with microscopic pores…

“What we have invented, you can imagine it’s like a small-scale, man-made cloud,” said Jun Yao, a professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the senior author of the study. “This is really a very easily accessible, enormous source of continuous clean electricity. Imagine having clean electricity available wherever you go.”

It’s worth emphasizing–as the article does–that this discovery is just the beginning. It will take much more work and experimentation to bring the energy generation to scale and make the invention commercially usable.

The scientists first must work out which material would be most efficient to use in different climates. Eventually, Yao said he hopes to develop a strategy to make the device bigger without blocking the humidity that can be captured. He also wants to figure out how to stack the devices on top of each other effectively and how to engineer the Air-gen so the same size device captures more energy.
It’s not clear how long that will take.

“Once we optimize this, you can put it anywhere,” Yao said.
It could be embedded in wall paint in a home, made at a larger scale in unused space in a city or littered throughout an office’s hard-to-get-to spaces. And because it can use nearly any material, it could extract less from the environment than other renewable forms of energy.

“The entire earth is covered with a thick layer of humidity,” Yao said. “It’s an enormous source of clean energy. This is just the beginning in making use of that.”

Good news, but it’s all about timing. Once again, humankind finds itself needing to avoid calamity in the interim between now and a promising future. At a bare minimum, avoiding the unthinkable will require a Congress composed of rational adults, and that will require the defeat of the GOP’s current clown show.

Fingers crossed.

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Money Over Sanity

Before the presidency of Donald Trump and the rise of the MAGA/QAnon crazies, I would sometimes need to search for a good example of bad public policy to discuss in my classes. Indiana supplied many of those, but if even the Hoosier state lacked an appropriate case of WTF, I could always depend on Texas.

An article from the New York Times I read a while back suggests that it isn’t only the Texas governor and legislature, or Texas’ outsized influence on textbook selection. The state evidently supplies all manner of nefarious actors seeking to shape federal policies in ways favorable to their bottom lines. The organization profiled by the Times operates beneath the radar, in a far too successful effort to protect fossil fuel companies from those silly laws intended to save the planet.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation is an Austin-based nonprofit organization backed by–and serving the interests of– “oil and gas companies and Republican donors.

With influence campaigns, legal action and model legislation, the group is promoting fossil fuels and trying to stall the American economy’s transition toward renewable energy. It is upfront about its opposition to Vineyard Wind and other renewable energy projects, making no apologies for its advocacy work.

Even after Democrats in Congress passed the biggest climate law in United States history this summer, the organization is undaunted, and its continued efforts highlight the myriad forces working to keep oil, gas and coal companies in business.

In Arizona, the Texas Public Policy Foundation campaigned to keep open one of the biggest coal-fired power plants in the West. In Colorado, it called for looser restrictions on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. And in Texas, the group crafted the first so-called “energy boycott” law to punish financial institutions that want to scale back their investments in fossil fuel projects, legislation adopted by four other states.

The article also notes that the organization spreads misinformation about climate science, producing YouTube videos, sponsoring pundits to appear on Fox and Friends, and social media campaigns. The message–aimed at lawmakers and the public–is that a transition away from oil, gas and coal would harm Americans.

They have frequently seized on current events to promote dubious narratives, pinning high gasoline prices on President Biden’s climate policies (economists say that’s not the driver) or claiming the 2021 winter blackout in Texas was the result of unreliable wind energy (it wasn’t).

Foundation personnel travel widely in order to encourage lawmakers in various state to punish companies trying to reduce their carbon emissions. It sponsors an initiative called Life:Powered, that makes what the organization calls “the moral case for fossil fuels.” The basic argument–which doesn’t seem all that moral–is that “American prosperity is rooted in an economy based on oil, gas and coal.

The article quoted the chief executive of an Austin-based trade group for renewable energy companies, who pointed out that the Foundation, whose members spent decades advocating for offshore oil drilling, oppose offshore windfarms. It opposes subsidies for renewables. (Last time I looked, the government continues to subsidize fossil fuel industries to the tune of 20 billion dollars annually.)

They’re for looser restrictions on fracking and drilling, but greater restrictions for solar and wind. This organization exists to defend fossil fuels from any threat to their market share.”

On Thanksgiving, Jason Isaac, an executive at the group, tweeted “Today, I’m thankful to live a high-carbon lifestyle and wish the rest of the world could too. Energy poverty = poverty. #decarbonization is dangerous and deadly.”

The article goes on to describe the various ways the amply-funded Foundation influences policy and protects the financial interests of fossil fuel industries.It’s a textbook example of the way monied interests drive American policy.

There are several issues here, the most obvious of which is how these people can sleep at night. An overwhelming scientific consensus warns that continued reliance on fossil fuels threatens the Earth. Perhaps they don’t care about other people, but presumably many of them have children and grandchildren…

Less obvious, perhaps, but equally confounding ,is the ability of this organization and others like it–organizations that are pursing equally dangerous and/or dishonest goals (ALEC comes to mind, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of others)– to wield dramatically disproportionate influence in America’s legislative bodies.

Ordinary citizens lack the resources to hire lobbyists, make significant campaign contributions and otherwise mount effective responses to these organizations. Worse still, the stealthy ways in which these organizations influence policy keeps most of us ordinary citizens from recognizing their existence or understanding what they are doing and how they are doing it.

It’s fashionable these days to attack capitalism, but America no longer has a genuinely capitalist economic system; it has corporatism— control of government by large interest groups.

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Dangerous Insanity

Climate change denialism has become much more difficult lately, as evidence in the form of heat waves, increasingly strong hurricanes, wildfires and the like continue to grow. And in most countries, as a recent article from the New York Times notes in its opening paragraphs, political fights over efforts to combat global warming are focused on the “how”–not on the immediacy or existential nature of the threat.

But then there’s the good old USA, and the GOP.

The article’s headline is “Weaponizing Public Office Against Climate Action,” and it documents yet another drawback of American federalism–the ability of Republican officeholders in Red States to actually bolster fossil fuel companies at the expense of the climate. It isn’t just in Texas, where we’ve become used to the deranged antics of Gov. Greg Abbott. (Abbott has actually prohibited state agencies from investing in businesses that have cut ties with fossil fuel companies.)

The Times investigation revealed a “coordinated effort by state treasurers to use government muscle and public funds to punish companies trying to reduce greenhouse gases.

Nearly two dozen Republican state treasurers around the country are working to thwart climate action on state and federal levels, fighting regulations that would make clear the economic risks posed by a warming world, lobbying against climate-minded nominees to key federal posts and using the tax dollars they control to punish companies that want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the past year, treasurers in nearly half the United States have been coordinating tactics and talking points, meeting in private and cheering each other in public as part of a well-funded campaign to protect the fossil fuel companies that bolster their local economies.

Last week, Riley Moore, the treasurer of West Virginia, announced that several major banks — including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo — would be barred from government contracts with his state because they are reducing their investments in coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

This is–rather obviously– insane. It’s as if an immensely wealthy patient diagnosed with terminal cancer were to decree that none of his monies could ever be used for cancer research or for the production of cancer treatments–and should instead be invested in Roundup and other cancer-producing products.

Mr. Moore and the treasurers of Louisiana and Arkansas have pulled more than $700 million out of Ti, the world’s largest investment manager, over objections that the firm is too focused on environmental issues. At the same time, the treasurers of Utah and Idaho are pressuring the private sector to drop climate action and other causes they label as “woke.”

And treasurers from Pennsylvania, Arizona and Oklahoma joined a larger campaign to thwart the nominations of federal regulators who wanted to require that banks, funds and companies disclose the financial risks posed by a warming planet.

Reporters traced these efforts to a little-known nonprofit organization based in Shawnee, Kansas, identifying the State Financial Officers Foundation, an organization that once focused on cybersecurity, as the “nexus” of these actions . Following the election of President Biden, who pledged to make addressing climate change a significant element of his agenda, the Foundation began pushing Republican state treasurers–elected officials responsible for managing their state’s finances–“to use their power to promote oil and gas interests and to stymie Mr. Biden’s climate agenda, records show.”

The Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute and the American Petroleum Institute are among the conservative groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry that have been working with the State Financial Officers Foundation and the treasurers to shape their national strategy.

The Times notes that Democratic treasurers in Blue states support efforts to combat climate change; they encourage banks and investment firms to acknowledge the risks that climate change poses to returns for retirees and others. But they haven’t created anything like the national campaign being orchestrated by the State Financial Officers Foundation.

Rational people–a category that rather clearly excludes these Republican treasurers–understand that global warming is already damaging agriculture and causing extreme weather events that devastate communities and cost taxpayers billions in recovery and rebuilding. Instead, they insist that efforts to reduce emissions threaten employment.

These GOP treasurers have turned climate science into yet another issue in the Republicans’ unrelenting and suicidal culture wars.

But here’s the thing: It’s one thing to recognize that the economic health and quality of life in Blue states is superior to that of Red States. Americans can shrug–or move. However, we can’t create environmental silos–the stupidity and/or cupidity of these GOP officeholders affects the future livability of the entire globe.

The GOP proudly asserts that it isn’t “woke.” (We’ve noticed.)

The opposite of wakefulness, of course, is sleep. In this case, it’s a coma…..

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The Long And The Short Of It

Like lots of Americans, I go to the doctor twice a year for check-ups, and I respond to the standard initial questions: have I fallen in the past six months? Have I been depressed? Thought about harming myself?

I have standard responses to those last two standard questions: I’m only depressed when I pay attention to the news. I haven’t wanted to harm myself, but I have definitely wanted to harm some other people I could name….

Actually, I’m pretty sure I have a widely-shared medical condition I’ll call “news sickness.” Its symptoms are lack of focus, feelings of futility, and free-floating anger.

The lack of focus is most maddening. What should I be concentrating on–what news should I be following– at a time when there is a new threat to democracy, to well-being, to sanity every single day? A morning scan of the media highlights the most recent atrocity, in this case, the murder of yet more innocent children and their teachers in a Texas classroom. That followed closely on the White Nationalist massacre in Buffalo, and has prompted media reviews of the unthinkable number of mass shootings in America, along with statistics showing that gun violence is a peculiarly American problem. (Evidently, the mentally-ill in other countries are less murderous…)

These recent events have operated to overshadow other recent and important matters: an unprovoked war in Ukraine that is killing thousands, displacing millions, and threatening to ignite World War III; revelations of traitorous behaviors uncovered almost daily by the January 6th Committee in the course of its investigation into the unprecedented attempt to overthrow a duly elected President; the increasing successes of the retrograde movement to strip women of their right to self-determination, beginning with abortion but sending strong signals that the war on women and gay people won’t end there…

And then there are ongoing debates over COVID measures, and the shameful revelations about Baptist clergy, who–it turns out–are just as prone to sexual misbehavior as Catholic priests (and undoubtedly other “men of the cloth.”).

Hovering over all of these and many other issues is the threat posed by climate change. And hovering over all of it is the adamant refusal of the Republican Party to engage responsibly with any of these issues, and its determination to keep others from doing anything about them either.

Here, for example, is a recent report from the New York Times, detailing an organized GOP effort to punish corporations trying to be responsible stewards of the environment.

In West Virginia, the state treasurer has pulled money from BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, because the Wall Street firm has flagged climate change as an economic risk.

In Texas, a new law bars the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that the state comptroller says are boycotting fossil fuels. Conservative lawmakers in 15 other states are promoting similar legislation.

And officials in Utah and Idaho have assailed a major ratings agency for considering environmental risks and other factors, in addition to the balance sheet, when assessing states’ creditworthiness.

Across the country, Republican lawmakers and their allies have launched a campaign to try to rein in what they see as activist companies trying to reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.

Every single day, we get media reports with the same story: Republicans continue to block even the most modest gun control efforts. State-level Republicans are passing draconian measures aimed at criminalizing abortion and punishing both women and those who might help them obtain one. Republican lawmakers are resisting subpoenas and refusing to testify to the January 6th Committee. Senate Republicans filibustered and defeated the recent anti-terrorism bill. Senate Republican “leadership” refuses to sanction the party’s (several) “out and proud” congressional White Supremicists. A significant number of Congressional Republicans resist sending help to Ukraine, and to varying degrees, offer justifications for Russia’s invasion.

If you make a list of the most pressing issues facing the United States, it becomes blindingly clear that the federal government and the various governments of America’s Red states are doing virtually nothing to address those issues. It also becomes blindingly clear why that is: today’s Republican Party has morphed into a White Christian Supremicist cult, dismissive of science and evidence and intent upon “returning” the country to a time that never was. Thanks to gerrymandering and several outdated elements of America’s electoral system, that cult wields considerably more power than fair democratic elections would otherwise give it, and it is using its disproportionate and unrepresentative power to thwart passage of desperately-needed legislation.

What’s wrong with America today can be reduced to one simple statement: the Republican stranglehold on government.

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