Interesting to read @KateAronoff's latest about progressive efforts to make sure Biden's executive branch is staffed with climate hawks (newrepublic.com/article/158198…) alongside a Reuters report on intra-party conflict over a report issued by the DNC's Climate Council. Key quote👇
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It seems painfully the case that the Democratic party is divided over the need for climate action, pulled in one direction by progressives and in another direction by finance and fossil-fuel labor.
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Of course, polling shows that the majority of Democratic voters agree with progressives on climate and support policies implied by the #GreenNewDeal. But the DNC doesn't think that majority is solid or big enough to help them win in swing states.
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Couple that with the DNC's reliance on big money from blue-leaning finance, which is itself ambivalent, at best, about decarbonization, and you have a party and a candidate guaranteed not to do enough about #ClimateBreakdown.
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Some of the tasks ahead, then: how to sweeten the deal for fossil-fuel labor, so their workers retain jobs paying $60 an hour or more, and how to use moral and economic suasion to get finance on board with the 1.5C target rather than the 3C one a la Nordhaus.
This week’s recomendation is to avoid the phrase “reduce emissions” and to start using the phrase “phase out fossil fuels” in its place.
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This advice has a great deal of research behind it, but its importance was highlighted for me this week, when I read a report released by Potential Energy with @YaleClimateComm.
This report really signals a contradiction at the heart of our current climate politics.
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One of the most powerful English professors of the past 40 years stole an argument I made in a seminar presentation, turning it into the core of his next book.
The week after my presentation, he came into the classroom and...
...and he read a conference paper he was going to deliver at the Shakespeare Association that month, re-articulating exactly what I had said about the same material the week before. The 15 or so grad students around the seminar table were dumbfounded. Jaws on the floor.
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It was the classic Trumpy move: do something illegal, but be so blatant about it, trusting that your power gives you immunity, that somehow committing the criminal act manages to normalize it simultaneously.
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Today @WilliamJRipple et al released the 2023 report on the terrifying state of our #climate.
It should be read by every policymaker, decisionmaker, and journalist on the planet.
Here is a thread of some key takeaways.
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"Unfortunately, time is up."
"The rapid pace of change has surprised scientists and caused concern about the dangers of extreme weather, risky climate feedback loops, and the approach of damaging tipping points sooner than expected."
Here is fossil fuel companies' new defense in lawsuits accusing them of deceiving the public about climate change:
They perpetrated no deception, they say, because the "alleged impact of fossil fuel use on the global climate has been ‘open and obvious’ for decades."
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They're calling us stupid, you know.
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I really love the contradiction between the claim that the impact of fossil fuel use on the global climate is "open and obvious" and the adjective "alleged," in "alleged impact."
Talk about wanting to have it both ways! Is the impact obvious, or is it "alleged"?
I'm lucky enough to be reading an advance copy of @MichaelEMann's new book. It is really fascinating!
Mann acts like the Virgil to the reader's Dante, taking us on a deep tour of past uninhabitable climates to reveal wild facts about science & our possible futures.
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Eg. did you know that during the Pliocene, CO2 concentrations were btwn 380 & 420 ppm, yet the planet was much warmer than climate models project for such concentrations today? Mann shows why this is the case, and why seas were much higher than models project too.
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What's really valuable about this kind of analysis is that it teaches us (or at least taught me) that as much as warming is a function of atmospheric CO2, climate is an expression of the structure of the biosphere — a wholistic, systemic perspective we so need.
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Some climate scientists, including the new @IPCC_CH chair @JimSkeaIPCC, have recently been working overtime to disprove inaccurate claims by "doomers."
This comms strategy ignores the actual data about the electorate in top 15 emitting countries & is therefore misguided.
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As you can see from this 2022 @YaleClimateComm
survey, only minorities in most top-emitting countries are "alarmed," which is to say only minorities of the electorate understand that climate change is "happening, human-caused, and an urgent threat."
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@YaleClimateComm Most people are still unsure if climate change is even happening or human-caused; or they think about it not at all; or they dismiss it completely; or, at best, they are concerned but believe, mistakenly, that the problem is still distant in time and space. MOST PEOPLE.