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Five Climate Change Lessons From 2020 |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51215"><span class="small">Kristy Dahl, Union of Concerned Scientists</span></a>
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Monday, 21 December 2020 13:51 |
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Dahl writes: "As we close out this year, these are the five climate lessons I'll be taking with me into 2021."
There are signs of climate action hope for 2021. (photo: R_Tee/Getty Images)
Five Climate Change Lessons From 2020
By Kristy Dahl, Union of Concerned Scientists
21 December 20
 n early January of this year, fresh off the experience of writing a year-end blog post for 2019, I started a project that I thought would make writing this year's year-end post easier. I created a little 2020 calendar on which I planned to record the one big thing that happened in the climate change space each day. In my mind I called it "The Daily Big Deal," and I could envision myself sitting here, as I am, on December 17, reviewing the year's climate-related events and deftly knitting them together in the blog post equivalent of a beautiful scarf made of reclaimed yarn. Or an ugly sweater. Or whatever.
You can see where this is going, of course. The calendar has exactly 17 entries, almost all of them before mid-March, when the U.S. shut down amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 began its seemingly never-ending nosedive. The story of 2020 will forever be one of the COVID-19 pandemic: a story of the lives lost, the heroic commitments of medical professionals, essential workers, and vaccine researchers, the deep crises of unemployment and hunger, the months of isolation from friends and family, the loss of normalcy, the failure of our federal government to stanch the spread of this deadly virus.
Despite my abandoned efforts to chronicle it, though, climate change was also deeply woven into the story of 2020. As we close out this year, these are the five climate lessons I'll be taking with me into 2021.
1. Climate change is showing up in our daily lives whether we recognize it or not
Climate change was on full display this year as a parade of extreme events marched its way around the globe. In what was a record-breaking wildfire year across the western U.S., over 4.2 million acres of California's land burned—an area larger than the state of Connecticut and more than burned during the entire decade of the 1990s. As dire as California's fires were, consider this: The year began with wildfires in Australia that burned 10 times more land than that (about 46 million acres in all). Combined with a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season with multiple direct hits to Louisiana and Nicaragua, flooding in the U.S. Midwest, heat waves in the UK associated with more than 2,500 excess deaths, locust swarms in East Africa, devastating back-to-back typhoons in the Philippines, and countless other climate-related events, it's clear that climate change was staring us in the face—or more like screaming at us—all year long.
But climate change isn't just here in the form of these extreme events. It's here in the winter coats cast aside for a few days in the Northeast in January, when places like Pittsburgh hit 70°F. It's here in the strange, early blooms of confused spring flowers. And it's here in the lack of summertime fog in my notoriously/gloriously foggy neighborhood.
Indeed, one of the year's most chilling and powerful new studies concluded that from 2012 onward, the fingerprints of climate change can be detected from any single day in the global record. Whether it is glaringly obvious or not on any given day, climate change is already shaping our everyday lives in ways big and small.
2. When it comes to cascading risks, we need to be thinking much more broadly
Against the backdrop of the pandemic, this year's climate extremes exposed the many ways in which climate change intersects with civil unrest, water quality, financial insecurity, racial inequities in access to health care and secure housing, and countless other issues that might otherwise be perceived as being wholly unrelated.
Like pandemic preparedness, effective climate adaptation and planning will require us to think much more broadly about what climate change means than we have before.
For example, we have long recognized the interconnectedness of extreme weather and our energy systems—thousands if not millions of people lose power every year during snowstorms, hurricanes, thunderstorms, and the like. But when we look at what happened when Hurricane Laura hit Lake Charles, Louisiana, this summer, we can see that the cascading risks of climate-change-driven extreme weather extend far beyond the reach of our electricity system.
In the aftermath of Laura, hundreds of thousands of people were without power and water for days while a severe heat wave rode in on the storm's heels. Lake Charles' residents—about half of whom are Black and about 20 percent of whom live below the poverty line—had to somehow try to rebuild their homes and lives; keep themselves safe from the heat despite not being able to run their air conditioners or fans; and avoid contracting COVID-19 despite being unable to wash their hands. Add to that the financial insecurity many were experiencing after having been laid off during the pandemic shutdown, and we can see that the impacts of climate change reach deeply into so many different systems.
3. COVID-19 and climate change are racial injustices
The pandemic has touched all of our lives this year, but has taken a particularly devastating toll on Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities. In just one example, as of June, nearly one in three Black Americans personally knew someone who had died from COVID-19 compared with roughly one in 10 white Americans.
The disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on communities of color are a crystal-clear manifestation of the deep racial inequities that have built up over centuries of systemic racism in the U.S. Millions of people around the world rose up this summer to protest another manifestation of those inequities: the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people by the police.
The disproportionate impacts of climate change are yet another injustice that racism inflicts on communities of color. My colleagues and I have written extensively about these issues recently, and, personally, I'm closing this year out with a deeper understanding of the fact that we cannot and will not be able to address challenges like climate change and COVID-19 without addressing the systemic racism that results in the disproportionate suffering of Black and brown people.
4. When it comes to emissions reductions, we need profound change, but not the kind of devastating change we experienced this year
This year we expect that carbon dioxide emissions—the primary contributor to human-caused climate change–will have dropped by about 7 percent globally and about 11 percent in the U.S., primarily as a result of the widespread economic and emotional pain caused by the pandemic. This is not the kind of transformative change, driven by deep and sustained policies, that we need to meet our climate goals—and it is likely to be short-lived.
Studies show that we'll need to accomplish decreases of roughly that same magnitude every year for the next 10 years to be on track to limit future warming to 1.5-2°C, and we'll have to do so in ways that encourage economic stability, improve the quality of life for people around the globe, reduce—rather than exacerbate—racial inequities, and ensure a just transition to safe, well-paying jobs for those whose livelihoods have been entwined with the production of fossil fuels.
It's a task that looks more and more daunting by the day, particularly because emissions are on track to increase by 2 percent per year globally between now and 2030 if we continue on a business-as-usual path.
But there are multiple technically feasible pathways to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, with steep near-term reductions in emissions. And economic recovery packages that invest in clean energy rather than continuing to prop up the loathsome fossil fuel industry (as they have thus far) could put us on a path toward accomplishing near- and long-term emissions reductions.
5. In the U.S. and around the world there is cause for hope
In a clear signal of the importance of climate change in U.S. voters' minds, climate change was a prominent topic in the presidential and vice-presidential debates. Indeed, pre-election surveys showed that, particularly for voters identifying as Democrats climate change was a high-priority issue despite the many immediate challenges the country faces.
The country then went on to elect a president and vice president who understand the science behind climate change and embrace the need for rapid, transformative climate action. President-elect Biden has affirmed his commitment to climate action in announcing an exciting slate of nominees and appointees who have long focused on issues of climate change and justice, including Deb Haaland, John Kerry, Gina McCarthy, and Mike Regan.
On the international front, China's pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060 along with signals of similarly ambitions pledges from the EU, UK, Japan, and South Korea all serve as challenges for other countries—particularly developed countries like the U.S.—to commit to aggressive emissions reduction plans.
While we can't erase the past years and decades of climate inaction, all of these are signs that we may begin to right our path in earnest in 2021.
I think I can speak for many in the climate community when I say that the last four years have been grueling. Many of the drastic climate impacts we've long been warning about are coming to pass sooner than we had expected yet we've had to continue to fight for the issue of climate change to be named and recognized at all by our federal government. But there's been a heartening crescendo of calls over the last few years for intersectional solutions to climate change, and the incoming Biden Administration seems to be hearing those calls. There is a tremendous amount of work ahead of us as individuals, as a nation, and as a global society. But for the first time in years, I find myself hopeful that we'll start to see more meaningful progress on climate action in 2021.
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FOCUS: Biden's Pick for Agriculture Secretary Raises Serious Red Flags |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51545"><span class="small">George Goehl, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 21 December 2020 12:52 |
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Goehl writes: "Tom Vilsack is a corporate yes man and former lobbyist with a dismal record in his previous time as secretary. This is appalling."
'If the Biden team was looking for ways to unite the multi-racial working class, they have done so - in full-throated opposition to this pick.' (photo: Larry Downing/Reuters)
Biden's Pick for Agriculture Secretary Raises Serious Red Flags
By George Goehl, Guardian UK
21 December 20
Tom Vilsack is a corporate yes man and former lobbyist with a dismal record in his previous time as secretary. This is appalling
t’s unlikely that Joe Biden expected that, of all his cabinet nominees, his choice for US agriculture secretary would cause the most blowback. Yet that is exactly what happened.
The former secretary Tom Vilsack, fresh off the revolving door, is a kind of all-in-one package of what frustrates so many about the Democratic party. His previous tenure leading the department was littered with failures, ranging from distorting data about Black farmers and discrimination to bowing to corporate conglomerates.
Vilsack’s nomination has been roundly rejected by some of the exact people who helped Biden defeat Trump: organizations representing Black people, progressive rural organizations, family farmers and environmentalists. If the Biden team was looking for ways to unite the multi-racial working class, they have done so – in full-throated opposition to this pick.
We remember when Vilsack toured agricultural communities, hearing devastating testimony of big ag’s criminal treatment of contract farmers. He went through the motions of expressing concern, but nothing came of it: the Department of Justice and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) kowtowed to agribusiness lobbyists and corporate interests, squandering a golden opportunity to rein in meat processing monopolies.
We remember when Vilsack’s USDA foreclosed on Black farmers who had outstanding complaints about racial discrimination and whitewashed its own record on civil rights. That’s in addition to the ousting of Shirley Sherrod, a Black and female USDA official, when the far-right media published a doctored hit piece, forcing her resignation.
We remember when Vilsack left his job at the USDA a week early to become a lobbyist as the chief executive of the US Dairy Export Council. He was paid a million-dollar salary to push the same failed policies of his USDA tenure, carrying out the wishes of dairy monopolies. Despite being nominated to lead the USDA again, he’s still collecting paychecks as a lobbyist.
The president-elect should have righted these wrongs by charting a bold, new course for rural communities and farmers in America. Instead, Vilsack’s nomination signaled more of the same from Democratic leadership.
“Democrats need to do something big for rural people to start supporting them again,” Francis Thicke, a family farmer in Fairfield, Iowa, told us recently. “The status quo won’t work, and that’s one reason why Vilsack is the wrong choice.”
Following Trump’s win in 2017, the organization I direct, People’s Action, embarked on a massive listening project. We traveled across rural America – from family farms in Iowa, to the Driftless region of Wisconsin, up the Thumb of Michigan, to the hills of Appalachia – and had 10,000 conversations with rural Americans. When we asked the people we met the biggest barrier to their community getting what it needed, the top answer (81%) was a government captured by corporate power. The Vilsack pick does nothing to assuage these concerns.
As Michael Stovall, founder of Independent Black Farmers, told Politico: “Vilsack is not good for the agriculture industry, period. When it comes to civil rights, the rights of people, he’s not for that.”
Mike Callicrate, a rancher from Colorado Springs, was equally direct. “Vilsack assisted big agribusiness monopolies in preying upon and gutting rural America,” he told us, “greatly reducing opportunities for young people to return and remain on our farms and ranches. His policy led to catastrophic rural decline, followed by suicide rates not seen since the 1980s farm crisis.”
Biden had a chance to finally right some wrongs. Sadly, he missed the mark on this one by a country mile.
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FOCUS: Both Houses of Congress Finally Agreed on a COVID Relief Package, and Almost Nobody Was Happy With It |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Monday, 21 December 2020 11:49 |
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Pierce writes: "I'm not sure when 'close enough' became a public policy goal."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
Both Houses of Congress Finally Agreed on a COVID Relief Package, and Almost Nobody Was Happy With It
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
21 December 20
I'm not sure when 'close enough' became a public policy goal.
 ate Sunday night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell magnanimously allowed the government to function, albeit at half-speed and six months too late. A relief package aimed at ameliorating some of the economic pain brought on by the pandemic passed both houses and was signed by the president*, and almost nobody was very happy with it. It's half-a-loaf, to be sure, but it would've been politically untenable for these people to go home for the holidays having done nothing at all. Even McConnell doesn't have enough brass for that.
(At the same time, the Congress passed a one-day spending bill to keep the lights on so they could get the agreement written up in proper legislative language, a process which, if not watched carefully, can be a fine vehicle for mischief.)
From The New York Times:
Although text was not immediately available, the agreement was expected to provide $600 stimulus payments to millions of American adults earning up to $75,000. It would revive lapsed supplemental federal unemployment benefits at $300 a week for 11 weeks — setting both at half the amount provided by the original stimulus law. It would also continue and expand benefits for gig workers and freelancers, and it would extend federal payments for people whose regular benefits have expired. The measure would also provide more than $284 billion for businesses and revive the Paycheck Protection Program, a popular federal loan program for small businesses that lapsed over the summer. It would expand eligibility under the program for nonprofits, local newspapers and radio and TV broadcasters and allocate $15 billion for performance venues, independent movie theaters and other cultural institutions devastated by the restrictions imposed to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Gone, apparently, is the odious corporate immunity proposal, and the deal to trade local aid for the immunity proposal fell of its own weight. Pat Toomey's attempt to preemptively cripple the Biden administration by depriving the Federal Reserve of ways to help it out is probably dead, although we should all wait to see what the final language looks like. The fact remains that the new package is painfully inadequate to deal with the fiscal crisis caused by the pandemic. By comparison, Canada's relief package is positively luxurious, as, apparently, Canadian politicians are not scared out of their mukluks at the prospect of a deficit. Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland explained why that is. From the BBC:
On Monday, Ms Freeland defended the record deficit as affordable - thanks to low interest rates - and necessary for Canada's economy. "As we have learned from previous recessions, the risk of providing too little support now outweighs that of providing too much," she said. "We will not repeat the mistakes of the years following the Great Recession of 2008."
That sound you hear is Messrs. Simpson and Bowles weeping into their official Pete Peterson coffee mugs.
At the same time, and assuming the final language isn't monkey-wrenched into something unrecognizable, this may have been close to being the best deal available. There is some well-founded concern that the Democrats in Congress missed the opportunity to wedge the Republicans on the direct payments to people. However, this requires a considerable leap of faith. You have to believe that people like Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri—and, even more improbably, the president*—were sincere in their attempts to increase the payments to $1,200. Nevertheless, compared to the Heroes Act passed by the Democratic House back in March, currently serving as a placemat on McConnell's desk, this legislation is pretty small beer. And there are provisions in the proposed package that, given the context of the times, are incredibly odious. For example, airlines got bailed out while restaurants are left hanging.
What seems particularly rickety is the theory that Congress will pass this package, and then pass a bigger one once Joe Biden is president. In the first place, the Democratic majority in the House would be a thin four votes and, even if the Democrats sweep the two Georgia Senate races, they will have a majority only through the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. None of this accounts for the cadre of "centrist" Democratic lawmakers who look as though they will have considerable clout in both chambers. And, as has been obvious for a month now, the Republicans are once again horrified by The Deficit because there's another Democratic president coming to town, and that's the way that goes. I don't believe that Biden's magic bipartisan skills will be enough to keep McConnell from screwing up anything he wants.
I don't know when it became doctrine that any deal that both sides hate must be a good one. Nor do I know when Close Enough became a public policy goal, but that's where we are. Some people will be helped by this package. Some people will be helped more than some other people will helped, because this is America, and we're so very special.
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Trickle-Down Economics Doesn't Work but Build-Up Does - Is Biden Listening? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9643"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 21 December 2020 09:33 |
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Reich writes: "How should the huge financial costs of the pandemic be paid for, as well as the other deferred needs of society after this annus horribilis?"
Robert Reich. (photo: unknown)
Trickle-Down Economics Doesn't Work but Build-Up Does - Is Biden Listening?
By Robert Reich, Guardian UK
21 December 20
A new study confirms tax cuts for the rich do not benefit the rest. Recovery from the pandemic is a chance to change course
 ow should the huge financial costs of the pandemic be paid for, as well as the other deferred needs of society after this annus horribilis?
Politicians rarely want to raise taxes on the rich. Joe Biden promised to do so but a closely divided Congress is already balking.
That’s because they’ve bought into one of the most dangerous of all economic ideas: that economic growth requires the rich to become even richer. Rubbish.
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once dubbed it the “horse and sparrow” theory: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”
We know it as trickle-down economics.
In a new study, David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London lay waste to the theory. They reviewed data over the last half-century in advanced economies and found that tax cuts for the rich widened inequality without having any significant effect on jobs or growth. Nothing trickled down.
Meanwhile, the rich have become far richer. Since the start of the pandemic, just 651 American billionaires have gained $1tn of wealth. With this windfall they could send a $3,000 check to every person in America and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic. Don’t hold your breath.
Stock markets have been hitting record highs. More initial public stock offerings have been launched this year than in over two decades. A wave of hi-tech IPOs has delivered gushers of money to Silicon Valley investors, founders and employees.
Oh, and tax rates are historically low.
Yet at the same time, more than 20 million Americans are jobless, 8 million have fallen into poverty, 19 million are at risk of eviction and 26 million are going hungry. Mainstream economists are already talking about a “K-shaped” recovery – the better-off reaping most gains while the bottom half continue to slide.
You don’t need a doctorate in ethical philosophy to think that now might be a good time to tax and redistribute some of the top’s riches to the hard-hit below. The UK is already considering an emergency tax on wealth.
The president-elect has rejected a wealth tax, but maybe he should be even more ambitious and seek to change economic thinking altogether.
The practical alternative to trickle-down economics might be called build-up economics. Not only should the rich pay for today’s devastating crisis but they should also invest in the public’s long-term wellbeing. The rich themselves would benefit from doing so, as would everyone else.
At one time, America’s major political parties were on the way to embodying these two theories. Speaking to the Democratic national convention in 1896, populist William Jennings Bryan noted: “There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”
Build-up economics reached its zenith in the decades after the second world war, when the richest Americans paid a marginal income tax rate of between 70% and 90%. That revenue helped fund massive investment in infrastructure, education, health and basic research – creating the largest and most productive middle class the world had ever seen.
But starting in the 1980s, America retreated from public investment. The result is crumbling infrastructure, inadequate schools, wildly dysfunctional healthcare and public health systems and a shrinking core of basic research. Productivity has plummeted.
Yet we know public investment pays off. Studies show an average return on infrastructure investment of $1.92 for every public dollar invested, and a return on early childhood education of between 10% and 16% – with 80% of the benefits going to the general public.
The Covid vaccine reveals the importance of investments in public health, and the pandemic shows how everyone’s health affects everyone else’s. Yet 37 million Americans still have no health insurance. A study in the Lancet estimates Medicare for All would prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year, while saving money.
If we don’t launch something as bold as a Green New Deal, we’ll spend trillions coping with ever more damaging hurricanes, wildfires, floods and rising sea levels.
The returns from these and other public investments are huge. The costs of not making them are astronomical.
Trickle-down economics is a cruel hoax, while the benefits of build-up economics are real. At this juncture, between a global pandemic and the promise of a post-pandemic world, and between the administrations of Trump and Biden, we would be well-served by changing the economic paradigm from trickle down to build up.
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ach day, they go to work in communities across America doing the thankless but essential jobs that someone has to do.
