Quiz Oct 25

Class canceled so we can attend the Free Speech event at 4:30 in the Tennessee Room (JUB). We'll go over this on Thursday.

AH 8-10

1. What new form of extraction halved US OPEC imports?

2. Name a seemingly small initiative that contributes to reduced demand for oil products.

3. What lesson might we learn from the 2013 rail tragedy in Quebec?

4. What was Randolph Kirkpatrick's "not entirely crackbrained" idea?

5. Why does Dieter Helm hate wind turbines?

6. Why isn't gas going to solve the climate problem?

7. By what date are we now projected to use up our entire carbon budget?

8. Why are fossil-fuel companies fundamentally overvalued?

9. What are green bonds?

DQ

• Is Ralph Nader right about solar energy and the oil industry? (89)
• If the fossil fuel industry is a geriatric with hardened arteries (93), are we obliged to treat it according to the ethics of Hippocrates?
• Whose fault is it that the public is ignorant of the importance of biofuels?
• "We often see what we want to see" (98) - how do we rectify that?
• If wind turbines looked like natural foliage would people love them? Should we allow our reflexive aesthetic reaction to unfamiliar things to dictate our policies and practices?
• "If it is wrong to wreck the climate, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage." (106) Would a politician running on that platform in the next election succeed?
• Research assignment: how many colleges, cities, and religious institutions have now committed to selling their stock holdings in fossil fuels? (It was 6, 17, & 12 respectively in '14)
• What high-sustainability investments are you willing to make?

Andy Revkin (@Revkin)

10/20/16, 9:43 PM Is this earliest English-language news item on CO2-driven climate change? 1912, N.Z. paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROT… ht>@do_you_cli_fi_ pic.twitter.com/FTD0pF43YA

We are approaching the Trumpocene, a new epoch where climate change is just a big scary conspiracy
the guardian

Websites pushing climate science denial are growing their audience in an era where populist rhetoric and the rejection of expertise is gaining traction Read the full story

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Greenland Is Melting - Elizabeth Kolbert

...I first visited the Greenland ice sheet in the summer of 2001. At that time, vivid illustrations of climate change were hard to come by. Now they’re everywhere—in the flooded streets of Florida and South Carolina, in the beetle-infested forests of Colorado and Montana, in the too warm waters of the Mid-Atlantic and the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, in the mounds of dead mussels that washed up this summer on the coast of Long Island and the piles of dead fish that coated the banks of the Yellowstone River.
But the problem with global warming—and the reason it continues to resist illustration, even as the streets flood and the forests die and the mussels rot on the shores—is that experience is an inadequate guide to what’s going on. The climate operates on a time delay. When carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, it takes decades—in a technical sense, millennia—for the earth to equilibrate. This summer’s fish kill was a product of warming that had become inevitable twenty or thirty years ago, and the warming that’s being locked in today won’t be fully felt until today’s toddlers reach middle age. In effect, we are living in the climate of the past, but already we’ve determined the climate’s future.
Global warming’s back-loaded temporality makes all the warnings—from scientists, government agencies, and, especially, journalists—seem hysterical, Cassandra-like—Ototototoi!—even when they are understated. Once feedbacks take over, the climate can change quickly, and it can change radically. At the end of the last ice age, during an event known as meltwater pulse 1A, sea levels rose at the rate of more than a foot a decade. It’s likely that the “floodgates” are already open, and that large sections of Greenland and Antarctica are fated to melt. It’s just the ice in front of us that’s still frozen...

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Outside magazine declared Australia’s Great Barrier Reef dead. Scientists pushed back, but say it’s in trouble...

The essay read like an obituary. It was an obituary. For the Great Barrier Reef. It began: “The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old.” Within hours, scientists in Australia and beyond were pushing back. Saying the 1,400-mile long onetime-wonderland of biodiversity is not dead. But it is, they say, in terrible shape. And a giant warning of trouble. Listen here.