When I read Klein's remark about the governments of Ontario and India planning for jobs, ("These governments are saying to industry: we will support you, but only if you support the communities from which you profit, by providing well-paying local jobs, and sourcing your products locally), I couldn't help but see something that I had not previously considered about why some companies so vehemently defend capitalism / the free market. It seems to me that they always "trust in the infinite wisdom of the free market" because it gives them a scapegoat for their greed. When presented with countless problems such as climate change, poverty, hunger, etc. they can simply throw their hands up and say "Hey it's not my fault; this is just how the free market works!" Instead of facing the truth, which is that they are taking advantage of people who are less fortunate and much more vulnerable, they can feel better about their predatory business practices by just chalking it up to the free market.

I believe that Klein is right: businesses should have an obligation to take care of the communities that allow them to exist in the first place, whether that community is a small village, a city, or an entire country or planet!

Failure of political leaders??

Don Enss

Whenever I read about the failure of any leaders in doing what any individual or group expects, I’m reminded that it is always easier to be a Monday morning quarterback. It’s a lot harder when you’re looking at two three-hundred pound defensive ends bearing down on you and you have to decide whether to stay in the pocket or scramble for your life.

In an ideal world,  political leaders would operate in a vacuum and they could decide what is the best course for the nation to follow and then it would be implemented, not that this would be good for the citizenry, but we don’t live in that world. In most elections only a little more than one-half of the registered voters vote for the candidate who becomes the winner; in 1992, it was less than one-half. Whether you agree or disagree with our system, that’s the way it works and it’s not likely that that part will ever change.

In my opinion, where we can have the best chance to influence the political process is by working to reduce the influence of money in politics. When Klein writes about “the oil and gas industry spent just under $400,000 a day lobbying Congress and government officials,” that’s obscene. So what can we do?

Here are two links:

https://apps.tn.gov/tncamp-app/public/search.htm/   I’ll show you how to search for elected officials and candidates in Tennessee and then you need to share this knowledge with your friends and neighbors and you need to write letters to your local papers asking who is influencing your elected officials and site specific information to support your question. I’ll connect what you learn on this with the site below and you may recognize some of the names.

            http://www.opensecrets.org/

DQs Sept 6

Don Enss

1.         How would you feel if a neighbor erected a windmill in her or his backyard and it had an annoying hum all night and day?

2.         Would you be willing to travel to Washington DC in the summer time to bring a greater awareness to climate change? Would that include being willing to be arrested? Pros and Cons?

3.         What are tailing ponds and why are they important? I had never heard of them until reading about them in Klein’s book. Here’s the link to help you become familiar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands_tailings_ponds  How can we get this posted on Facebook, Twitter, and whatever?

4.         How can you get legislators to vote against their own financial and re-election interest?

Sept 6 Ch 4 ?s – This Changes Everything.

Don Enss

Chapter 4:

1.      How much of Germany’s renewable energy facilities are in the hands of farmers, citizen groups, and almost nine hundred energy cooperatives?

2.      What is NIMBY-ism and what can prevent it?

3.      What is the point that comedian Bill Maher is trying to make when he says, “You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.”?

4.      Based on the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, methane is how many times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide?

5.      How much will oil production change between 2012 and 2035?

6.      In 2013, in the United States alone, the oil and gas industry spent just under how much a day lobbying Congress and government officials and how much did they contribute to the federal, state, and local campaigns in the 2012 election cycle?

Quiz Sep6

Ch4

1. What has cut off the past and orphaned critical opinion in the present?

2. What stopped the President from seizing the moment of financial crisis to create a transitional climate opportunity?

3. How can natural gas serve as an effective short-term transition fuel?

4. How are the Canadian tar sands not like science fiction?

5. What do intelligent investors know about the results and commitments of U.N. climate summits?

6. What language has become foreign to a great many of us?

DQ

• What happened to Barack Obama's "new energy economy"? 
• Would it have been as easy as Klein suggests to create a "robust coalition of trade unions, immigrants, students, environmentalists and everyone else" in 2009? 121
• Would you park (or sell) your car if you could commute to school and work via high-speed rail?
• Is there anything "wrong with telling large corporations how to run their businesses"? 125
• Is it consistent or correct to blame the right for "making climate about economics" and then emulate them? 125
• "Trade unions can be counted on to fiercely protect jobs, however dirty, if these are the only jobs on offer." 126 Should we hold unions and industry to the same standard of public interest?
• Do you agree that we need to fix existing transportation infrastructure but don't need more highways?
• If the market will not create climate jobs supporting renewables on the scale required, what's your reply to "the market has spoken and that's that"?
• Can Germany's and Denmark's "commons" model of public utility work here? 130-1  
• How do we get from NIMBY to POOL (and get over WIIFM)? 132 
• Is "agroecology" the solution? 134
• Was the Green Revolution not all it's been cracked up to be? 135
• Will we learn from Germany's experience with coal, and impose strict rules against its extraction and burning? 136, 138
• Is James Hansen an alarmist, or would it really be "game over" if we tapped the tar sands?  140
• Do you support nuclear energy as a transition source, or should we drop it entirely as too risky and too slow to bring online? 137
• Is a philosophy of "no" enough, to inspire and sustain a new way of living lightly on the planet? 141
• Is the market more likely to innovate new ways to get hard-to-reach fossil fuels than with green alternatives? 142
• Is Bill McKibben an alarmist? 148
• Yours please

Obama interview on climate change... Coastal flooding has already begun (nyt)...

	Bill Nye (@BillNye)
9/5/16, 6:19 PM If you're not concerned about climate change yet, try this: #MadhouseEffect by @MichaelEMann & @TomTolesToons:amazon.com/Madhouse-Effec…

	Cass Sunstein (@CassSunstein)
9/2/16, 5:04 PM Good news, bad news, and climate change. nytimes.com/2016/09/04/opi…

Weather vs. climate

Dogs make everything easier to understand.

Presidential Candidates position on Climate Change

Don Enss

I'm attaching four links that you can click on to get the complete article.  I'm sure that there are many more articles and some that are more objective, but this is just to give you an idea and not influence your thinking on a particular candidate. There may be something within these and others that can serve as a guide for anyone who wants to create a dialogue to be used on our video.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/2016/08/02/donald-trump-climate-change-hillary-clinton/87628818/

 http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/trump-climate-change-new-york-times-letter-ad/486335/

http://reason.com/archives/2016/06/10/gary-johnson-on-science-policy

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/jill-stein-green-party-climate-state-of-emergency

Sept 1 Chap. 3 questions – This Changes Everything

Don Enss

Chapter 3:

1.      What was the one key factor that made the world’s most rapid shift to wind and solar power?

2.      What was the first U.S. city to take steps to reverse privatization of their power systems?

3.      “During good times, it’s easy to deride “big government” and talk about the inevitability of cutbacks. But during disasters, most everyone loses what?

4.      The perception of  _________ – that one set of rules applies to players big and small – has been entirely missing from our collective responses to climate change so far.

5

Quiz Sep1

Ch3

1. What is Energiewende?

2. Within what time-frame did Jacobson and Delucchi conclude we could shift to renewables?

3. What percentage of profits did the Big Five oil companies devote to renewables in 2008?

4. What was missing from President Carter's famous "malaise" speech, according to Christopher Lasch?

DQ:

• "...a robust social movement will need to demand (and create) political leadership that is not only committed to making polluters pay for a climate-ready public sphere, but willing to revive two lost arts: long-term public planning, and saying no to powerful corporations." 119 Has the movement begun?
• We went to the moon in less than a decade. What will it take to generate similar enthusiasm for a climate moonshot? 102
• Is the absence of universal health care an environmental issue? 105
• What should replace the "brutal logic of austerity"? 106 How do we break the austerity "vicious cycle"? 108
• If public transit were free for three days, would you use it? 109
• Do you think most Americans consider rationing and sharing un-American? 114
• Is consumption patriotic? Is frugality un-American? 116
• Post your DQs please 

http://www.iflscience.com/environment/scientists-vote-we-have-entered-the-anthropocene-epoch-earths-newest-geological-chapter/

This is an article about the anthropocene becoming the new geological time period.

Degrowth, the core conversation

"You're having the core conversation of our time."

That was the message delivered on Tuesday by author Naomi Klein to participants of a conference whose focus is on "concrete steps towards a society beyond the imperative of growth."

Klein's opening address to the Fourth International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity, which kicked off Tuesday in the German city of Leipzig, made perfect sense, as the themes of her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate, overlap those of the conference — that addressing the climate crisis is incompatible with the current growth-focused economy... (continues)

DQs August 30

DQ August 30

1.       Is Naomi Klein approach discussed in Chapter 2 under “Growing the Caring Economy, Shrinking the Careless One,” an achievable one?  Has she complicated the resolution by weaving in elements of a change to the economic system which while they might be true would be a show stopper for anyone who might listen to a rational presentation on the changing climate?

2.       Who decides who sacrifices in the “selective degrowth”? With only 29.1% of registered Tennesseans voting in the midterm elections in 2014, what is the reality that legislators will consider any meaningful legislation to address climate change? How many of you are currently register to vote?

Growing the Caring Economy, Shrinking the Careless One

Growing the Caring Economy, Shrinking the Careless One

Don Enss

In chapter two, as I read Klein’s section “Growing the Caring Economy, Shrinking the Careless One,” I thought about her approach and how effective it would be with the average person throughout the world. Many may be experiencing discomfort right now in varying degrees and those in California and Louisiana to a greater degree with the recent fires and flooding but here in Tennessee, there is a sense that fall and football are in the air and soon our attention will be diverted from any discussion about climate change and certainly if it is introduced not just as a threat to human survival necessitating a change but one which will require us to be more conservative and do with less, it will not fly.

I know what she saying is valid, but how you market it to get citizens’s buy-in is where we may disagree.  If you tell me that you have a little intermittent pain in your tooth and I tell you that if you don’t have an immediate dental checkup that your tooth will deteriorate and you will need to have a root canal and suffer extreme pain, you’ll think about it, but if the pain subsides, you’ll put it off.  All of the suggested frightening outcome might be true, but I’ll be more successful if I focus on getting you to the dentist without dwelling on the horror story. Then once you’ve seen the dentist and the x-rays come back positive, then you will buy into the proposed treatment and maybe avoid a root canal.

We had that opportunity back in 1988 and we let it slip away. Then 79% of Americans knew about the greenhouse effect; that was the time to strike.  Now, those individuals who heard that message are twenty-eight years older today and many of them don’t see where they have experienced that drastic of a change. Maybe the winters are a little warmer, but that’s welcomed and the summers a little hotter, but we have air conditioning so how do you get a buy-in to alter one’s lifestyle.

I think you have to start with education and granted we may not have a lot of time, but since Naomi Klein published her book and held her seminar, how much have we read or heard about climate change in Tennessee. Conservatives control the majority of radio talk shows and are very prominent in our state and federal legislatures controlling one or both chambers so any discussion of climate change legislation is dead on arrival. I believe that the solution is the social media through a rational approach focused on first getting buy-in to the problem and then manageable solutions to begin addressing it. It may not be the best approach, but right now it would be better than nothing.

I may feel differently at the conclusion of our course, but based on what I’ve read, that’s where I am now.

August 30 Questions Ch 1 and 2

 Don Enss

Chapter 1:

1.      What explains “individuals’ belief about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”?

2.      What is it always easier to deny than to allow our worldview to be shattered?

3.      What is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives?

4.      According to Klein, “without a doubt,” what “is neoliberalism’s single most damaging legacy.”?

Chapter 2:

1.      “Rather than compete for the best, most effective supports for green energy, the biggest emitters in the world are rushing to the WTO to do what?

2.      “If the climate movement had a birthday,” what would it be and why?

3.      According to Robyn Eckersley, what was “the pivotal moment that set the shape of the relationship between the climate and trade regimes?

“Rather than pretending that we can solve the climate crisis without rocking the economic boat,” what does Anderson and Bows-Larkin argue should be done?

Best-case scenario

In the same vein as Don's cartoon...

Timely Comic strip

Don Enss

Check out the WuMO comic strip for August 27, 2016.  How appropriate and timely to our discussion about climate change attitudes. I tried to post the image below, but if it didn't work, then you should be able to see it by clicking on the link below and going to August 27, 2016.

http://www.gocomics.com/wumo

Quiz Aug30

CE 1-2

1. What percentage of climate scientists have concluded that anthropogenic climate change is real?

2. What is the Heartland Institute devoted to?

3. What was Upton Sinclair's famous observation?

4. What is "green fascism"?

5. Who did Al Gore proclaim to have "the best green energy program" in North America?

6. What three "policy pillars" are incompatible with bringing emissions to safe levels?

7. What accounting system has created a distorted picture of the drivers of global emissions?

8. What logic, "even more entrenched than free trade," must be confronted if we're to have a chance of achieving lower emissions in time?

DQ:

• Is it possible to reason with, and persuade, ideologists who are convinced that "climate change is a plot to steal American freedom"? 32 What's the best way to persuade those who've not made up their minds?
• If it's "always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered," 37 how do we change that and raise a generation of reality-based humans? 
• Are you more chastened or heartened by the phenomenon of rapid shifts in public opinion (as, for instance, about the reality of climate change)? 
• If climate deniers and climate progressives are both intransigently committed to their positions, are we doomed? Or, "may the best side win"?
• Is "free trade" a good idea in principle, but not in our world of corporate globalism? What kind of globalism would be good in practice?
• Should climate progressives consider themselves at war with the fossil fuel industry? Do you support Klein's "heavy-duty interventions"? 39
• Does the climate crisis "demand collective action on an unprecedented scale, and a dramatic reining in of market forces"? 41
• Is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged irrelevant? 44
• Is white male privilege one of the root causes of the climate crisis? 46
• Are economic geologists deluded? 46
• How do we overcome the "empathy-exterminating mind-set"? 48
• How do we create a public-spirited insurance industry? 50
• Why shouldn't we expect more altruism and generosity on a much warmer planet? 53
• How can we avoid "green fascism"? 54
• Is nuclear technology inherently objectionable because it reinforces our sense of mastery over nature? 57
• Would it work, in the short term, to "pitch climate action as a way to protect America's high-consumerist way of life"? 58
• Are we "not worth saving"? 62
• Is it wrong to say "climate is not about left and right but "right and wrong"? 63
• How do we get local governments to defend their emission-reducing activities and not "cave in early, not wanting to to appear anti-free trade"? 71 How do we get the WTO to apply and enforce trade agreements in a way not harmful to local green initiatives?
• How do weholdcountries responsible for the pollution they create beyond their own borders? 79
• Is there anything good to be said about "reflexive political centrism"? 83
• Al Gore: hero or villain? 85
• COMMENT: "Many degrowth and economic justice thinkers also call for the introduction of a basic income, as a recognition that the system cannot provide jobs for everyone and that it is counterproductive to force people to work in jobs that simply fuel consumption... 'While making people work shitty jobs to 'earn' a living has always been spiteful, it's now starting to seem suicidal.'" 94
• Please post yours (especially from ch2)

	Andy Revkin (@Revkin)
8/25/16, 6:02 AM In a changing climate, what does the second century of our National Park system look like? reports.climatecentral.org/nps/future/ @blkahn @ClimateCentral

A terrifyingly clear visualization shows how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess rawstory.com/2016/08/a-terr…

Hot and dry this summer

Don Enss

I found this story in Saturday's edition of our local paper, The Daily News Journal. It describes the effects of a warmer climate on our vegetable crops and flowers and ultimately on us as climate conditions continue to deteriorate. Climate change deniers will point to the benefits of the warmer weather for bermuda grass and Zoysia, I don't know about you but right now neither are on my menu of things to eat.

Here's the link:

http://www.dnj.com/story/life/2016/08/26/most-tennessee-hot-dry-summer/894282261/

What do you think?

Posted for Don

Questions from Introduction:

August 25 Introduction questions – This Changes Everything.

Don Enss

Introduction:

1.      How can you already see the early stages of the climate change process?
2.      Why did the Copenhagen summit cause such great despair?
3.      When historians look back on the past quarter century of international negotiations, what will be the two defining processes?
4.      What are the three policy pillars of this era?

Essay

Is gloomy picture of our climate real – if so what can anyone do?

Don Enss

In the introduction, Naomi Klein paints a pretty gloomy picture of what is happening to our climate and for individuals who have been following this issue for many years going back to acid-rain destruction of segments of the Black Forest in Germany the images are powerful. https://newint.org/features/1988/06/05/dying/ . Unfortunately, we sometimes become anesthetized to the images and accept that it’s just part of life and that there isn’t much any one of us can do and we know what she is saying is probably true, but we look around our immediate environment and we don’t see it, so we don’t engage.

People living in Baton Rouge and other parts of Louisiana may be a little more receptive to explanations about global climate change, but unfortunately, too many of them have been inundated by messages from certain groups whose focus is to discredit the scientific basis and support for it and rather than questioning the source, they simply accept it because it is coming from a source that they trust and any rational argument that challenges that trust is discarded.

Several years ago, I traveled to New Orleans Louisiana to see what I could learn about an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meeting. These meetings are not open to the public, but are open to corporate lobbyists and representatives who sit down with legislators from all fifty states to draft legislation. I got there early enough in the morning before anyone arrived to see who some of the major contributors were. This was right after the BP oil spill and BP was the top contributor. Can you guess why?  Also, contributing was the Heartland Institute.

My only suggestion to you is get involved and spread the word – you can make a difference!

Here are a couple of links to consider:

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/heartland-institute-and-alec-partner-to-pollute-classroom-science/

http://www.prwatch.org/cmd

 http://www.dnj.com/story/life/2016/08/26/most-tennessee-hot-dry-summer/89428226/