Al Gore: The Climate Crisis Is the Battle of Our Time, and We Can Win

Al Gore: The Climate Crisis Is the Battle of Our Time, and We Can Win

We have the tools. Now we are building the political power.
By Al Gore

Mr. Gore was the 45th vice president of the United States.
Sept. 20, 2019

Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen much faster than you thought they could.

The destructive impacts of the climate crisis are now following the trajectory of that economics maxim as horrors long predicted by scientists are becoming realities.

More destructive Category 5 hurricanes are developing, monster fires ignite and burn on every continent but Antarctica, ice is melting in large amounts there and in Greenland, and accelerating sea-level rise now threatens low-lying cities and island nations.

Tropical diseases are spreading to higher latitudes. Cities face drinking water shortages. The ocean is becoming warmer and more acidic, destroying coral reefs and endangering fish populations that provide vital protein consumed by about a billion people.

Worsening droughts and biblical deluges are reducing food production and displacing millions of people. Record-high temperatures threaten to render areas of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, North Africa and South Asia uninhabitable. Growing migrations of climate refugees are destabilizing nations. A sixth great extinction could extinguish half the living species on earth.

Finally people are recognizing that the climate is changing, and the consequences are worsening much faster than most thought was possible. A record 72 percent of Americans polled say that the weather is growing more extreme. And yet every day we still emit more than 140 million tons of global warming pollution worldwide into the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I often echo the point made by the climate scientist James Hansen: The accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases — some of which will envelope the planet for hundreds and possibly thousands of years — is now trapping as much extra energy daily as 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs would release every 24 hours.

This is the crisis we face.

Now we need to ask ourselves: Are we really helpless and unwilling to respond to the gravest threat faced by civilization? Is it time, as some have begun to counsel, to despair, surrender and focus on “adapting” to the progressive loss of the conditions that have supported the flourishing of humanity? Are we really moral cowards, easily manipulated into lethargic complacency by the huge continuing effort to deceive us into ignoring what we see with our own eyes?

More damage and losses are inevitable, no matter what we do, because carbon dioxide remains for so long in the atmosphere. So we will have to do our best to adapt to unwelcome changes. But we still retain the ability to avoid truly catastrophic, civilization-ending consequences if we act quickly.

Greta Thunberg at the climate protest in New York on Friday.

This is our generation’s life-or-death challenge. It is Thermopylae, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Lexington and Concord, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Bulge, Midway and Sept. 11. At moments of such crisis, the United States and the world have to be mobilized, and before we can be mobilized, we have to be inspired to believe the battle can be won. Is it really too much to ask now that politicians summon the courage to do what most all of them already know is necessary?

We have the technology we need. That economic maxim about slow-fast phenomena, first articulated by the M.I.T. economist Rudiger Dornbusch and known as Dornbusch’s Law, also explains the tsunami of technological and economic change that has given us tools to sharply reduce global warming pollution much faster than we thought was possible only a short time ago. For example, according to the research group Bloomberg New Energy Finance, as recently as 2014 — a year before the Paris climate agreement was reached — electricity from solar and wind was cheaper than new coal and gas plants in probably 1 percent of the world. Today, only five years later, solar and wind provide the cheapest sources of new electricity in two-thirds of the world. Within five more years, these sources are expected to provide the cheapest new electricity in the entire world. And in 10 years, solar and wind electricity will be cheaper nearly everywhere than the electricity that existing fossil fuel plants will be able to provide.

This transition is already unfolding in the largest economies. Consider the progress made by the world’s top four emitters of greenhouse gases. Last year, solar and wind represented 88 percent of the new electricity capacity installed in the 28 nations of the European Union, 65 percent in India, 53 percent in China and 49 percent in the United States.

This year, several American utilities have announced plans to close existing natural gas and coal generating plants — some with decades of useful life remaining — to replace their output with cheaper electricity from wind and solar farms connected to ever-cheaper battery storage. As the chief executive officer of the Northern Indiana Public Service Company said recently, “The surprise was how dramatically the renewables and storage proposals beat natural gas.” He added, “I couldn’t have predicted this five years ago.”

Today, the fastest-growing occupation in the United States is solar installer, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it has exceeded average job growth sixfold in the last five years. The second-fastest growing job: wind turbine service technician.

In Australia, a high-tech entrepreneur, Mike Cannon-Brookes, is reportedly planning to sell renewable electricity generated in the Northern Territories to South Asian cities over a long-distance undersea cable. Globally, close to 200 of the world’s largest companies have announced commitments to use 100 percent renewable energy, and several have already reached that goal. A growing number of cities, states and provinces have pledged to do the same.

The number of electric vehicles on the road has increased by 450 percent in the past four years, and several automobile manufacturers are shifting research and development spending away from internal combustion vehicles, because the cost-reduction curve for E. V.s is expected to soon drop the cost of the vehicle well below comparable gasoline and diesel models’. Over half of all buses in the world will be electric within the next five years, a majority in China, according to some market experts. At least 16 nations have set targets to phase out internal combustion engine vehicles.

More broadly, the evidence now indicates that we are in the early stages of a sustainability revolution that will achieve the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution and the speed of the Digital Revolution, made possible by new digital tools. To pick one example, Google has reduced the amount of electricity required to cool its enormous server farms by 40 percent using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence. No new hardware was required. Sustainable alternatives to existing methods of industrial production are being pursued by more and more companies.

A farmer-led regenerative agriculture revolution that is also underway avoids plowing and focuses on building soil health by sequestering carbon dioxide in the ground, making the land more fertile. The farmers are using rotational grazing and planting trees and diverse cover crops to enrich soil and protect against erosion.

And so far, the best available technology for pulling carbon dioxide from the air is something called a tree. That’s why many nations are starting ambitious tree planting efforts. Ethiopia recently planted 353 million trees in 12 hours, nearly double the goal of 200 million. Scientists calculate that we have enough available land worldwide to plant between one trillion and one and a half trillion trees. To protect our vast but dwindling forests, new satellites and digital tools can now monitor deforestation virtually tree by tree, so corporations will know if the products they buy were grown on razed or burned forestland.

Yet for all this promise, here is another hard truth: All of these efforts together will not be enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently without significant policy changes. And right now, we don’t have the right policies because the wrong policymakers are in charge. We need to end the mammoth taxpayer-funded subsidies that encourage the continued burning of fossil fuels. We need to place a direct or indirect price on carbon pollution to encourage the use of cheaper, sustainable alternatives that are already out there. New laws and regulations may be needed as well to encourage innovation and force more rapid reductions in emissions.

The political reconfiguration we have desperately needed has been excruciatingly slow in coming, but we now seem to be at an inflection point, when political change begins to unroll more rapidly than we thought was possible. It’s Dornbusch’s Law, brought to politics.

The people, in their true function as the sovereign power, are quickly understanding the truth of this crisis, and they are the ones who must act, especially because the president is not on speaking terms with the truth and seems well beyond the reach of reason.

This will require a ferocious attack on the complacency, complicity, duplicity and mendacity of those in Congress who have paid for their careers by surrendering their votes and judgment to powerful special interests that are sacrificing the planet for their greed. To address the climate crisis, we must address the democracy crisis so that the people themselves can reclaim control of their destiny.

As has often been the case in successful political revolutions, young people have taken up the gauntlet with inspiring passion. Greta Thunberg has stirred millions as the school strike movement she began in Sweden spread to many countries. The Sunrise Movement, the Extinction Rebellion, Zero Hour and other youth-led movements are gathering momentum daily. On Friday, hundreds of thousands of people around the world were marching and gathering to call for action on climate change. Employees of many corporations are aggressively demanding that their employers take action to help save the climate balance.

The “Blue Wave” that gave Democrats control of the House in last year’s midterm elections was fueled in part by concern about climate. The Green New Deal, introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, ties solutions to the climate crisis to environmental justice and a “just transition” that will create millions of well-paying jobs. This effort has won support from many Americans, just as the nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s attracted wide approval and helped pave the way for an arms control agreement between President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union.

Virtually all of this year’s Democratic presidential candidates are making the climate a top priority. Many have released impressive and detailed plans that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. A CNN poll in April found that the climate crisis was the No. 1 concern of Democrats who are registered to vote. Another recent poll showed that a record 79 percent of American adults and 86 percent of teenagers believe, finally, that the climate crisis is caused by human activity, and, even more significantly, so do 60 percent of Republicans. Americans’ disapproval of President Drumpf’s approach to the climate was higher, at 67 percent, than on any other issue.

College Republicans at dozens of schools have called on the Republican National Committee to support a carbon tax and have loudly warned the party that it will forfeit support from younger voters if it does not. Another recent poll shows that 67 percent of millennial Republican voters say their party needs to do more on climate.

Next year’s election is the crucial test of the nation’s commitment to addressing this crisis, and it is worth remembering that on the day after the 2020 election, the terms of the Paris climate accord will permit the United States to withdraw from it. We cannot allow that to happen. Political will is a renewable resource and must be summoned in this fight. The American people are sovereign, and I am hopeful that they are preparing to issue a command on the climate to those who purport to represent them: “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” nyt
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Al Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for his work to slow global warming. He is the author of, among other books, “An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming.”

Climate denial: ask a philosopher

The Philosophy Of Climate Denial : How do you change the minds of climate deniers and people who doubt the scientific process in general? We ask a philosopher of science for some answers... https://t.co/bSoWFpYTY6

— Philosophy Matters (@PhilosophyMttrs) September 20, 2019

How I Learned to Cycle Like a Dutchman

In the bike-friendly Netherlands, cyclists speed down the road without fearing cars. For an American, the prospect is thrilling—and terrifying.
By Dan Kois

...For cyclists used to being second-class citizens, watching bikes navigate the Netherlands is revelatory. It’s not just that Dutch train stations all house massive underground bicycle garages, with thousands of bicycles, or fietsen, locked up on tiered racks. It’s not just that every busy street has a handsome bike lane, paved in dark-red brick. It’s that on Dutch streets, bikes rule the road. They take priority in design and traffic flow. Traffic circles are laid out so that cyclists need never stop for cars. Busy intersections often have overpasses or underpasses, so that cyclists never have to slow down.

The 18 million residents of Holland own more than 22 million bicycles

Most important, drivers look out for cyclists, cede the right of way, and are rarely surprised by them. After all, nearly all those drivers are cyclists themselves. The eighteen million residents of the Netherlands own, in total, more than twenty-two million bicycles. Dutch kids ride in child seats practically from birth, are on balance bikes by two, and are cycling unaided by four. Old people continue to cycle, too: when pedalling gets too difficult, they switch to battery-assisted e-bikes, which now outsell standard adult bikes in the Netherlands.

When you’re biking on a Dutch street, the person next to you in a Renault Clio is driving today only because she broke her arm or has to cart furniture home from the store. Most days, she’d be biking next to you, unprotected from cars except by custom, respect, and the forethought that comes from being able to think like a cyclist. In the Netherlands, drivers don’t turn right without checking their blind spots. They don’t park in bike lanes, not even just for a minute, to drop something off. And no Dutch cyclist ever half-waves at a driver for making a required stop—they assume that drivers will see them and obey the law.

Even if something goes wrong, a biker will still likely emerge unscathed. Dutch transportation designers strive to create what Wim Bot, an official in the Dutch cyclist’s union, calls “forgiving infrastructure”—systems that allow users to make errors without causing a crash. Studies have demonstrated that when a car hits a cyclist at speeds in excess of thirty kilometres per hour the cyclist is not likely to survive. Therefore, Bot told me, “thirty kilometres is the maximum speed in every living area in the Netherlands.” This consistent speed limit means that “it’s safe to have shared space between users of different forms of mobility.” Even though nobody wears bike helmets in the Netherlands, the fatality rate there is six times smaller than that of the United States... (continues)

2050: How Earth Survived

BY BILL MCKIBBEN
SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
IDEAS
McKibben is the author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? and a co-founder of 350.org

Let’s imagine for a moment that we’ve reached the middle of the century. It’s 2050, and we have a moment to reflect—the climate fight remains the consuming battle of our age, but its most intense phase may be in our rearview mirror. And so we can look back to see how we might have managed to dramatically change our society and economy. We had no other choice.

There was a point after 2020 when we began to collectively realize a few basic things.

One, we weren’t getting out of this unscathed. Climate change, even in its early stages, had begun to hurt: watching a California city literally called Paradise turn into hell inside of two hours made it clear that all Americans were at risk. When you breathe wildfire smoke half the summer in your Silicon Valley fortress, or struggle to find insurance for your Florida beach house, doubt creeps in even for those who imagined they were immune.

Two, there were actually some solutions. By 2020, renewable energy was the cheapest way to generate electricity around the planet—in fact, the cheapest way there ever had been. The engineers had done their job, taking sun and wind from quirky backyard DIY projects to cutting-edge technology. Batteries had plummeted down the same cost curve as renewable energy, so the fact that the sun went down at night no longer mattered quite so much—you could store its rays to use later.

And the third realization? People began to understand that the biggest reason we weren’t making full, fast use of these new technologies was the political power of the fossil-fuel industry. Investigative journalists had exposed its three-decade campaign of denial and disinformation, and attorneys general and plaintiffs’ lawyers were beginning to pick them apart. And just in time.

These trends first intersected powerfully on Election Day in 2020. The Halloween hurricane that crashed into the Gulf didn’t just take hundreds of lives and thousands of homes; it revealed a political seam that had begun to show up in polling data a year or two before. Of all the issues that made suburban Americans—women especially—­uneasy about President Drumpf, his stance on climate change was near the top. What had seemed a modest lead for the Democratic challenger widened during the last week of the campaign as damage reports from Louisiana and Mississippi rolled in; on election night it turned into a rout, and the analysts insisted that an under­appreciated “green vote” had played a vital part—after all, actual green parties in Canada, the U.K. and much of continental Europe were also outperforming expectations. Young voters were turning out in record numbers: the Greta Generation, as punsters were calling them, made climate change their No. 1 issue... (continues)

Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns

What if the banking, asset-management, and insurance industries moved away from fossil fuels?

By Bill McKibben

I’m skilled at eluding the fetal crouch of despair—because I’ve been working on climate change for thirty years, I’ve learned to parcel out my angst, to keep my distress under control. But, in the past few months, I’ve more often found myself awake at night with true fear-for-your-kids anguish. This spring, we set another high mark for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: four hundred and fifteen parts per million, higher than it has been in many millions of years. The summer began with the hottest June ever recorded, and then July became the hottest month ever recorded. The United Kingdom, France, and Germany, which have some of the world’s oldest weather records, all hit new high temperatures, and then the heat moved north, until most of Greenland was melting and immense Siberian wildfires were sending great clouds of carbon skyward. At the beginning of September, Hurricane Dorian stalled above the Bahamas, where it unleashed what one meteorologist called “the longest siege of violent, destructive weather ever observed” on our planet. The scientific warnings of three decades ago are the deadly heat advisories and flash-flood alerts of the present, and, as for the future, we have hard deadlines. Last fall, the world’s climate scientists said that, if we are to meet the goals we set in the 2015 Paris climate accord—which would still raise the mercury fifty per cent higher than it has already climbed—we’ll essentially need to cut our use of fossil fuels in half by 2030 and eliminate them altogether by mid-century. In a world of Drumpfs and Putins and Bolsonaros and the fossil-fuel companies that back them, that seems nearly impossible. It’s not technologically impossible: in the past decade, the world’s engineers have dropped the price of solar and wind power by ninety and seventy per cent, respectively. But we’re moving far too slowly to exploit the opening for rapid change that this feat of engineering offers. Hence the 2 a.m. dread.

There’s good news, too: as the crisis grows more obvious, far more people are joining in the fight. In the year since the scientists imposed that deadline, we’ve seen the rise of the Green New Deal, the cheeky exploits of Extinction Rebellion, and the global spread of the school strikes started by the Swedish teen-ager Greta Thunberg. It seems that there are finally enough people to make an impact. The question is, what levers can we pull that might possibly create change within the time that we need it to happen?

Some of us have begun to change our own lives, pledging to fly less and to eat lower on the food chain. But, whatever our intentions, we’re each of us currently locked into burning a fair amount of fossil fuel: if there’s no train that goes to your destination, you can’t take it. Others—actually, often the same people—are working to elect greener candidates, lobbying to pass legislation, litigating cases headed for the Supreme Court, or going to jail to block the construction of pipelines.

These are all important efforts, but we need to do more, for the simple reason that they may not pay off fast enough. Climate change is a timed test, one of the first that our civilization has faced, and with each scientific report the window narrows. By contrast, cultural change—what we eat, how we live—often comes generationally. Political change usually involves slow compromise, and that’s in a working system, not a dysfunctional gridlock such as the one we now have in Washington. And, since we face a planetary crisis, cultural and political change would have to happen in every other major country, too.

But what if there were an additional lever to pull, one that could work both quickly and globally? One possibility relies on the idea that political leaders are not the only powerful actors on the planet—that those who hold most of the money also have enormous power, and that their power could be exercised in a matter of months or even hours, not years or decades. I suspect that the key to disrupting the flow of carbon into the atmosphere may lie in disrupting the flow of money to coal and oil and gas.

Following the money isn’t a new idea. Seven years ago, 350.org (the climate campaign that I co-founded, a decade ago, and still serve as a senior adviser) helped launch a global movement to persuade the managers of college endowments, pension funds, and other large pots of money to sell their stock in fossil-fuel companies. It has become the largest such campaign in history: funds worth more than eleven trillion dollars have divested some or all of their fossil-fuel holdings. And it has been effective: when Peabody Energy, the largest American coal company, filed for bankruptcy, in 2016, it cited divestment as one of the pressures weighing on its business, and, this year, Shell called divestment a “material adverse effect” on its performance. The divestment campaign has brought home the starkest fact of the global-warming era: that the industry has in its reserves five times as much carbon as the scientific consensus thinks we can safely burn. The pressure has helped cost the industry much of its social license; one religious institution after another has divested from oil and gas, and Pope Francis has summoned industry executives to the Vatican to tell them that they must leave carbon underground. But this, too, seems to be happening in too-slow motion. The fossil-fuel industry may be going down, but it’s going down fighting. Which makes sense, because it’s the fossil-fuel industry—it really only knows how to do one thing.

So now consider extending the logic of the divestment fight one ring out, from the fossil-fuel companies to the financial system that supports them. Consider a bank like, say, JPMorgan Chase, which is America’s largest bank and the world’s most valuable by market capitalization. In the three years since the end of the Paris climate talks, Chase has reportedly committed a hundred and ninety-six billion dollars in financing for the fossil-fuel industry, much of it to fund extreme new ventures: ultra-deep-sea drilling, Arctic oil extraction, and so on. In each of those years, ExxonMobil, by contrast, spent less than three billion dollars on exploration, research, and development. A hundred and ninety-six billion dollars is larger than the market value of BP; it dwarfs that of the coal companies or the frackers. By this measure, Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, is an oil, coal, and gas baron almost without peer.

But here’s the thing: fossil-fuel financing accounts for only about seven per cent of Chase’s lending and underwriting. The bank lends to everyone else, too—to people who build bowling alleys and beach houses and breweries. And, if the world were to switch decisively to solar and wind power, Chase would lend to renewable-energy companies, too. Indeed, it already does, though on a much smaller scale. (A spokesperson for Chase said that the bank has committed to facilitate two hundred billion dollars in “clean” financing by 2025, but did not specify where the money will go. The bank also pointed out that it has installed 2,570 solar panels at branches in California and New Jersey.) The same is true of the asset-management and insurance industries: without them, the fossil-fuel companies would almost literally run out of gas, but BlackRock and Chubb could survive without their business. It’s possible to imagine these industries, given that the world is now in existential danger, quickly jettisoning their fossil-fuel business. It’s not easy to imagine—capitalism is not noted for surrendering sources of revenue. But, then, the Arctic ice sheet is not noted for melting... (continues)

Al Gore at MTSU

Al Gore spoke with deep gratitide for his parents' influence, & with impassioned urgency when asked what he wanted students in the audience to understand about the climate crisis. "We know what we have to do. What's not to like about doing the right thing?!" #mtsu #AlGore https://t.co/aNMGVvFmKF

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 17, 2019

Piers Sellers, Before the Flood

Piers Sellers, former astronaut and climate change scientist, passed away on December 23, 2016, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 61. Before his death, though, he recorded this short video message, reaching out to the global community as a scientist concerned about these changes and their largest cause: humanity.

Throughout his career, Sellers focused on characterizing and understanding changes in the Earth’s climate system. He was particularly interested in interactions between the Earth’s biosphere — its life — and the atmosphere.

In his message, Sellers describes Earth as a “beautiful planet” and speaks about how the planet and the life it supports have evolved “to fit each other perfectly.” However, humanity’s clear and measurable impact on the climate has the potential to wreak “potentially disastrous” results. He calls for groups such as scientists, policymakers, and industrialists to work together towards the common goal of maintaining the Earth as “a planet that can continue to support life — including all of us.” astronomy.com

The White House Blocked My Report on Climate Change and National Security/Defending Science...

Politics intruded on science and intelligence. That’s why I quit my job as an analyst for the State Department.

By Rod Schoonover
Dr. Schoonover was a senior analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department.
July 30, 2019

Ten years ago, I left my job as a tenured university professor to work as an intelligence analyst for the federal government, primarily in the State Department but with an intervening tour at the National Intelligence Council. My focus was on the impact of environmental and climate change on national security, a growing concern of the military and intelligence communities. It was important work. Two words that national security professionals abhor are uncertainty and surprise, and there’s no question that the changing climate promises ample amounts of both.

I always appreciated the apolitical nature of the work. Our job in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was to generate intelligence analysis buttressed by the best information available, without regard to political considerations. And although I was uncomfortable with some policies of the Drumpf administration, no one had ever tried to influence my work or conclusions.

That changed last month, when the White House blocked the submission of my bureau’s written testimony on the national security implications of climate change to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The stated reason was that the scientific foundation of the analysis did not comport with the administration’s position on climate change.

After an extended exchange between officials at the White House and State Department, at the eleventh hour I was permitted to appear at the hearing and give a five-minute verbal summary of the 11-page testimony. However, Congress was deprived of the full analysis, including the scientific baseline from which it was drawn. Perhaps most important, this written testimony on a critical topic was never entered into the official record... (continues)==

SCIENCE SALON # 77

Dr. Lee McIntyre — The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience

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In this engaging conversation on the nature of science, Dr. McIntyre and Dr. Shermer get deep into the weeds of where to draw the line between science and pseudoscience. It may seem obvious when you see it (like Justice Potter’s definition of pornography — “I know it when I see it”), from a philosophical perspective it isn’t at all easy to articulate a formula for science that perfectly weeds out all incorrect or fraudulent scientific claims while still retaining true scientific claims. It really comes down to what Dr. McIntyre describes as a “scientific attitude” in an emphasis on evidence and scientists’ willingness to change theories on the basis of new evidence. For example, claims that climate change isn’t settled science, that evolution is “only a theory,” and that scientists are conspiring to keep the truth about vaccines from the public are staples of some politicians’ rhetorical repertoire. In this podcast, and in more detail in his book, McIntyre provides listeners and readers with answers to these challenges to science, and in the process shows how science really works.

McIntyre and Shermer also discuss:

• the strengths and weaknesses of Karl Popper’s “falsification” criteria for the line of demarcation
• how conspiracy theorists draw their own line of demarcation between their version of the conspiracy vs. that of others within their own community
• the problem of anomalies that are not explained by the mainstream theory and what to do with them
• McIntyre’s adventure at the Flat Earth conference
• Graham Hancock and alternative archaeology
• Creationists and why they are wrong (and how evolution could be falsified)
• similarities between Evolution deniers and Holocaust deniers
• anti-vaxxers and their motives
• climate deniers and why they’re inappropriately skeptical of climate science, and
• how to talk to a science denier of any stripe.

Listen to Science Salon via iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and Soundcloud.

Green burial

Rest Me in a Pine Box and Let the Fiddle Play

After helping her father have the homegrown funeral he planned, an environmentalist is designing her own.
By Mallory McDuff

“I hope to be around for a long time,” my father said, “but I’ve written my funeral plan so we’re all prepared.”

That morning, he’d cycled to the farm in Fairhope, Ala., where he volunteered in exchange for organic vegetables. My dad was 62 but could pedal faster than his four middle-aged kids. He had gathered us at our childhood home to share his goal of having a burial that relied on family and friends, not a funeral home.

After almost four decades of marriage, he was learning to live alone. Dad had lost his cycling partner when my mom was hit and killed by a teenage driver while biking to the same farm the month before. My father, a retired IBM salesman, wanted to make sure he — and we — were prepared for his death when the time came.

“First I’d like my body to rest in the bed under Mom’s quilt for four hours,” he said. “Then you can wrap me in linen tablecloths as a shroud and place me inside the casket. I’ve talked to my friend Jeff who’ll build my pine casket if I can’t do it myself.”

(continues)

The Trees Might Save Us Yet

A new study suggests that restoring forests could help reverse global warming.
By Margaret Renkl

...A new study recently sought to quantity the benefits that could be derived from planting trees in the coming cataclysm. A Times summary of the new report noted that “the planet could support nearly 2.5 billion additional acres of forest without shrinking our cities and farms, and that those additional trees, when they mature, could store a whole lot of the extra carbon — 200 gigatons of carbon, to be precise — generated by industrial activity over the last 150 years.” Planting trees, in other words, could go a long way toward saving us from ourselves. Although ecosystem changes may complicate the planting in this new climate, we have to try.

In Richard Powers’s magnificent novel “The Overstory,” which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, one character repeats a Chinese saying: “When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.”

Then she continues: “When is the next best time? Now.”

nyt

Why Donald Drumpf Suddenly Decided to Talk About the Environment

“Brazen” might as well be the official motto of the Trump Administration. Even so, it’s hard to top the most ecologically unsound President in modern American history giving a speech on Monday touting his environmental record while standing in the East Room of the White House beside David Bernhardt, the former oil lobbyist who is the Interior Secretary, and Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist who is the administrator of the E.P.A.—both of whom have been trying to gut America’s environmental laws. Oh, and on the day when a rainfall described by local authorities as “historic” managed to flood the White House basement.

By now, we are used to Trump’s big-lie technique. Even by that standard, however, the claim that “we are working harder than many previous Administrations, maybe almost all of them,” on environmental protection will be believed by exactly no one for whom words have not yet lost their common-sense meaning. Trying to parse the nonsense of Trump’s speech sentence by sentence is silly, so concentrate instead on its underlying meaning: the oil companies clearly won a crucial battle with Trump’s election, postponing their moment of reckoning. (Less so the coal barons, whose decline was already too far advanced). But they clearly sense that they are losing the war, and more decisively than before. Trump’s big-man folly—withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, for instance, when it would have been easy enough to sabotage progress more quietly—has decisively discomforted the suburban voters that he must retain for reëlection.

By all accounts, it was the President’s pollsters who insisted on this strange talk, because they are desperately afraid that they are losing those independents (particularly women) who have come to fear the physical future that climate change is imposing. What does it mean, after all, to boast that we have the “cleanest air” ever, when wildfire smoke now obscures swaths of sky for large portions of the year? What does it mean to say the water is cleaner than it was in 1970, when water now drops from the sky in such volumes that insurance companies have begun to declare cellars “uninsurable?”

The absurdity of the whole enterprise is clear when you remember that Trump doesn’t even believe that global warming is real—he has stated this repeatedly. In that case, only fear of the polls could possibly drive him to stress that America’s carbon emissions are down (except for, um, last year, when they went, um, up). Why else would he care? So that’s craven as well as brazen. But cravenness is probably a good sign—it means that the school strikers and the divestment campaignersand the pipeline protesters and the marching scientists have carried the debate. The tiny minority of climate deniers currently wield federal political power, but it’s finally beginning to sink in with the broader public that climate change is the threat of our time. Among Democrats, that process is well advanced—by some measures, climate change is the No. 1 voting issue in the primary, and, indeed, they are announcing serious cash-on-the-barrelhead plans to do something about it. But Trump’s performance on Monday must indicate that it’s also increasingly the case among independents, the group that holds the key to his electoral future.

This is good not because it means that Trump will act—he won’t. It’s good because it means that if we move past Trumpism there’s at least a somewhat greater chance that the larger political system will move, too. But, at this point, it’s also hard to believe that political action will be swift enough or comprehensive enough to make a decisive difference. After all, the Obama Administration, which sincerely believed that climate change was real, succeeded only in replacing some coal-fired power generation with natural gas, which in turn succeeded only in replacing heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions with heat-trapping methane emissions. (It’s not clear that total greenhouse-gas emissions budged at all during the Obama years.) If the G.O.P. maintains any political traction at all in the next dispensation, it will be hard to pass legislation like the Green New Deal, which represents precisely the scale of commitment needed to catch up with the out-of-control physics of global warming. If the Trump follies have lowered the bar to the point where a return to Obama-era politics is all that’s politically possible, then significantly slowing the rise of the planet’s temperature by federal action will remain difficult.

So it’s profoundly important that activists keep the pressure on other power centers, too: on state and local governments, and on the financial institutions that keep the fossil-fuel industry afloat. To use an unfortunately apropos metaphor, all that pressure will eventually force a hole in the dam. The political flop sweat that Trump was trying to mop up on Monday is a sure small sign of the coming deluge.

By Bill McKibben
July 8, 2019

Bill McKibben, a former New Yorker staff writer, is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College. His latest book is “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?”Read more »

NYer

Climate Change, as Explained by a Sex-Ed Teacher

Photograph from Everett

You have probably noticed some differences in our planet lately, and I want you to know that they are completely normal. Just like the changes that your body is going through, they’re part of a natural cycle. With all that’s happening, it’s important you stay calm, and know that any uncomfortable or strange sensations that may arise are part of a sometimes awkward, but absolutely predictable, process. Like your body, on some days, the entire outside world might appear alien to you. Is this really my planet? It looks and feels so different! I assure you, it most certainly is.

Some of you may notice body hair growing in funny places, or plants growing in seasons they never grew in before. Don’t let this alarm you. Simply buy yourself a razor and enjoy the fact that we still have flowers—they won’t be here forever! And, remember, if you cut yourself the first time you try to shave, don’t panic. Instead, take a tip from our international climate agreements and just put a Band-Aid on it.

At times, the weather might seem as unpredictable as your moods. You may not understand why you’re suddenly angry, or why it’s sunny and hot outside one minute and thirty degrees and snowing the next. Sometimes, it will feel like you’re your own worst enemy, and like the weather is literally trying to make packing for a weekend trip to the Catskills impossible. Take a deep breath, and calmly whisper to yourself, “This is all part of the change.”

You may be experiencing urges to do things you never did before, like kissing someone you find attractive. You might even fantasize about things you are ashamed of. Don’t worry—you are not alone! The earth also has new wants and desires. It craves sustainable energy and, for some reason, Priuses make it super horny. If you get overwhelmed, just remember: you don’t have to act on every impulse you have—like how we clearly don’t have to act on any of the carbon goals that we’ve set.

A lot of you are getting hotter than you used to be and are starting to perspire under your arms. At the same time, you might notice the outside temperature hitting record highs and miles of ice collapsing into the oceans. This is nothing to be embarrassed about! Can you imagine what would happen if the earth cried every time an ice cap melted? Our entire continent would be underwater by now. So, please, dry your eyes—we can’t afford the sea-level rise.

You are becoming a new person, and the earth is becoming a new planet. Be patient. Take baths. Journal. In just a few short years, you will be a woman, and Earth will be Mars. 

New Yorker

• Elizabeth Zephyrine McDonough is a writer, actress, and filmmaker living in Brooklyn.
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Writing the Pulitzer-Winning The Overstory Changed Richard Powers’s Life

The author’s 12th novel was inspired by what he’s described as a kind of “religious conversion.”

“Writing The Overstory quite literally changed my life, starting with where and how I live,” the author Richard Powers told the Chicago Review of Books. Before writing the book, Powers had been living and teaching in Palo Alto, between tech-centric Silicon Valley and California’s old-growth forests. An encounter with a giant redwood shook him; in a Guardian profile, he describes it as a kind of “religious conversion” that showed him his place in “a system of meaning that doesn’t begin and end with humans.” Powers then began work on the novel, and his research took him to Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. Months later, he moved there to live deep in the woods, where “walking a trail has become as important to me as writing.”

The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction on Monday, is as close as it gets to a founding text for Powers’s environmentalism. The novel follows nine characters—among them a Vietnam veteran, a young coding prodigy, and the last descendant of immigrant pioneers—whose close relationships with trees, lasting sometimes for generations, lead them to a deep appreciation of the world’s threatened forests. Nearly all the characters become activists in some form—five of them eventually come together in protest against a timber company—and throughout their personal transformations, the trees around them are so exquisitely rendered that they seem like characters themselves. The result is what the Pulitzer committee praises as “an ingeniously structured narrative” that approaches trees and the threats facing them with wonder, reverence, and an urgency that could be enough to change minds.

Powers’s novels can be categorized as part of “the grand realist tradition”; Nathaniel Rich, writing in the June 2018 issue of The Atlantic, noted the author’s penchant for critical documentation of contemporary society, exploring “our most complex social questions with originality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about dogma.” Powers himself, however, views his work as allegorical, and, indeed, The Overstory in particular has a mythic scope. The trees at its heart are godlike in scale, “as old as Jesus or Caesar”; over hundreds of years, they engage in social behaviors, communicating with one another through a vast network of roots. Human characters treat them as revered ancestors; after all, they share significant amounts of DNA with us. Fantastic as they might sound, all these qualities of trees are real. With The Overstory, Powers has not created a fable so much as translated reality into a compelling system of belief.

The Overstory fits well within the growing genre of “climate fiction,” which explores the effects of climate change and humans’ impact on the Earth. Although the term, coined by the former journalist Dan Bloom, has been in use for about a decade, it’s gained new prominence within the past few years as a number of recent works have tackled ever more pressing problems such as global warming, drought, and rising sea levels. Climate fiction is often speculative: Books such as Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, for example, envision drought-stricken dystopias in the American West. But as other novels—such as C. Morgan Babst’s The Floating World, set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—demonstrate, the consequences of climate change don’t need to be imagined. They’re already very real.

Powers was a Pulitzer finalist in 2006 for his novel The Echo Maker, about a woman struggling to care for her brother after a brain injury, which won the National Book Award for fiction. That book, as Powers told the Los Angeles Review of Books last year, was also in part “a story of forgotten kinship” between humans and birds, whose intelligence is “deep and foreign enough to be invisible to many of us.” The Overstory takes this theme of connection with the natural world a step further, challenging people to recognize trees as creatures like themselves. It is the 12th novel Powers has published, and after a storied three-decade career, he seems to regard it as a kind of arrival, artistic and personal, at the place where he’s always been headed. “I just want to walk, look, listen, breathe, and write this same book,” he told the Chicago Review of Books, “again and again, from different aspects and elevations, with characters as old and large as I am able to imagine.”

Atlantic

The Flower That Came Back From the Dead

The Tennessee coneflower is proof that much of nature might yet recover — if we commit ourselves to change.
By Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — Certain old-fashioned words from fairy tales and storybooks still cling to me from childhood. Moor. Vale. Bog. Glade. For a child, such words conjure magical places — untouched, holy lands where fairies might live and animals might speak in ways I understand. Not long after I moved to Tennessee, I heard the term “limestone cedar glade” for the first time and immediately thought again of magic. But I’ve been here almost 32 years now, and until last week I had never visited the site of one of conservation’s greatest success stories: the Tennessee coneflower.

This unassuming purple flower is a member of the genus echinacea. It grows in a tiny ecological niche — the limestone barrens and cedar glades of Tennessee’s Davidson, Rutherford and Wilson Counties. In limestone cedar glades, rock formations lie so close to the surface that soil is too shallow for the kinds of trees that grow in the deciduous forests surrounding them. Instead, this hot, stony land supports vegetation more typical of grasslands or deserts, including uncommon wildflowers: limestone fame flower, limestone glade milkvetch, cedar gladecress, glade savory, glade violet, glade bluet and a host of others.

The star of the cedar glades of Middle Tennessee is the Tennessee coneflower. First identified as a distinct species in 1898, it was for decades assumed to be extinct. In 1968 it was rediscovered by Elsie Quarterman, a legendary Vanderbilt botanist, who immediately went to work to protect it. The Tennessee coneflower became one of the first plant species added to the Endangered Species List.

Through the combined efforts of Dr. Quarterman, the Tennessee chapter of the Nature Conservancy, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as many private and corporate donors, the Tennessee coneflower population rebounded. It was removed from the endangered species list in 2011. Dr. Quarterman attended the delisting ceremony at Cedars of Lebanon State Park. She was 101... (continues)

Climate crisis (TED)

JUNE 7, 2019

Climate Crisis

There's no greater threat to humanity than climate change. What can we do to stop the worst consequences? This hour, TED speakers explore how we can save our planet and whether we can do it in time. Guests include climate activist Greta Thunberg, chemical engineer Jennifer Wilcox, research scientist Sean Davis, food innovator Bruce Friedrich, and psychologist Per Espen Stoknes.

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Surviving Despair in the Great Extinction

One million species of plants and animals are heading toward annihilation, and it’s our fault. How can we possibly live with that truth?
By Margaret Renkl
May 13, 2019 nyt

NASHVILLE — The gift of springtime is the panoply of new life: gray buds breaking open into bright flowers, gray branches sprouting leaves in a thousand shades of green to make a bower of our common lives. In the treetops, birds throw back their heads to sing their full-throated, body-shuddering songs. An ordinary suburban yard becomes a carpet of wildflowers, each one visited by tiny, iridescent bees which seem to materialize overnight out of nothing but the mild springtime air.

But it’s not all flowers and bird song; springtime is also deadly. All the new mouths must be fed. The bluebirds in my nest box are catching those tiny bees for their four hungry nestlings. Somewhere in this yard a large rat snake is hunting, and I can’t be sure if the baffle I’ve mounted on the nest-box pole is large enough to keep the snake out. Even if it does, a house wren with murder on his mind is scooting around in the underbrush with a dagger of a beak, and he will kill those bluebird nestlings in an instant if their father isn’t vigilant enough to protect them.

I worry. Every year I worry about the bluebird babies, and every year I remind myself that house wrens and snakes have their own purposes for springtime, each as urgent as the bluebird’s. This is just the way the natural world works. Pay attention, and it will break your heart a dozen times before dinner.

Last week, the United Nations released the summary of an enormous report that broke my heart in more ways than any backyard-nature observations ever have. The Times article about the report, “Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace,” called it “the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization.” The story opens with the picture of an olive ridley sea turtle washed up on an Indian beach. The turtle is dead, apparently strangled: Fishing rope is looped around its neck, cutting into its throat.

That photo undid me. All week long I found myself coming back to it until I had it committed to memory, the shapes and the colors, though part of me would prefer never to think about that image again. I kept being struck anew by the sorrow of that one lost creature, that one preventable tragedy. The turtle’s great head is bowed, resting on the sand. Its eyes are closed; its ancient face is drawn back in a mask of grief. The turtle’s whole body signals resignation, surrender. In the background, children play in the surf.

If the photo is traumatizing, the story is worse. Because of human activity — both direct activity, like fishing and farming, and indirect activity, like the fossil fuels that accelerate climate change — up to one million species of plants and animals are headed for extinction if we don’t take immediate measures to halt the devastation.

That’s one million species. Every individual creature in a species — times one million. We can’t possibly conceive of such a thing. We can hold in mind, however uncomfortably, the image of a single animal who died a terrible death. Devastation on this scale is beyond the reach of imagination. How could we hold in mind a destruction so vast it would take not just one sea turtle but all that animal’s kind, as well as all the kind of 999,999 other species?

Whole expanses of the natural world are disappearing. It’s not just poster animals like polar bears, tigers and elephants; it’s life on earth as we know it.

I hear a truth like that and succumb to despair. I look around at all the ways I’ve tried to help — at the reusable grocery bags and the solar-field subscription, at the pollinator garden and the little meadow of wildflowers, at the lawn mower blades set high enough to harm no snakes or nesting cottontails, at the recycle bins and the worm composter, at the nest box for the bluebirds and the nest box for the house wrens and the nest box claimed this year by a red wasp — and it all strikes me as puny, laughable, at best a way to feel better about myself. How is any of this a solution? Or even the path to a solution?

I asked myself those questions even as I filled the bird feeders and cleaned the birdbaths, even as I planted more milkweed seeds and watered the new cedar and serviceberry trees we planted this spring to feed wildlife in the years to come. What’s the point? How will any of this matter?

And then I noticed that I hadn’t seen any activity in the bluebird box for some time. Over and over again I’d get up from my desk, stand at the front window and watch — but there was no sign of either parent. In midafternoon, just as I’d made up my mind to check on the nestlings that I was sure were dead, the male bluebird flew up with a caterpillar in his beak and climbed into the box. Relief whooshed through my body; all the muscles I didn’t know I was tensing relaxed.

I don’t have the power to reclaim soil degraded by industrial farming practices. I can’t persuade equatorial countries to protect their rain forests. I’m not able to affect in any way the irresponsible decisions of my own country’s president — decisions that will unquestionably hasten the great extinction — much less those made by the leaders of other nations. But I can put up boxes for cavity-nesting birds and roosting boxes for bats. I can cultivate the host plants of butterflies, knowing that some of their caterpillars will feed baby birds. I can make my yard a haven for insects, including the red wasp, an important pollinator which is too quickly maligned. I can keep my yard free from chemicals and let the wildflowers go to seed.

And I can remind myself, all day long every day, that there’s a difference between doing something and doing nothing. That “something,” small as it might seem, is not “nothing.” The space between them is far apart, limitless stretching distances apart. It’s the difference between a heartbeat and silence.