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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: “Change your diet, save the climate – eat the rich” [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-19  

Good evening, Kibitzers, As usual, this is an open thread, which also serves as my weekly roundup of climate-related news stories gleaned from Blue Sky and the World Wide Web.

How are all of you doing this evening?

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg participated earlier today in Fossil Free London’s protest outside the JP Morgan building after having been arrested at an earlier demonstration Tuesday. The company was selected as site for the protest because, according to the organization, over the last seven years JP Morgan has financed fossil fuels to the tune of $434bn annually, earning it the position as number one funder of fossil fuels in the world.

“Society in the future is likely to judge companies that continue such fossil fuel investments as both immoral and as operating outside international law,’ said a statement issued to JP Morgan’s head of sustainability Luke Nelson. “What does JP Morgan plan to do right now to avoid such a judgment?”

Protestors handed out £10 notes issued by the “bank of climate chaos” which said: “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of loss and damage,” while chanting “Change your diet, save the climate – eat the rich,” the Guardian reports.

A spokesperson for Fossil Free London, which organised the protest, told the Guardian: “We are here at the entrance to JP Morgan because they are, in the last seven years since the last Paris agreement, the worst financier of fossil fuels. They poured $434bn into fossil fuel financing, and this is a company that makes tens of billions of dollars in profit every year. “We know that London is the heaving engine of financing for fossil fuel companies and as you know we have been protesting at the Oil & Money conference [Energy Intelligence Forum] and JP Morgan have been represented at the conference. “We are saying at this time of massive inequality and climate change that is damaging the global south, here and now, that we need them to pay for loss and damage for the communities and people affected with some of their profits.”

The Biden administration has begun funding projects as part of the $110 billion + Inflation Reduction Act (ACT) to ensure the monies are in use prior to the potential change in administrations in 2025.

To date, funds have been allocated to projects to protect Pacific fisheries for salmon and steelhead, to create urban canopies in dozens of cities, including Atlanta and Phoenix, and to outfit two NOAA weather research ships. Additionally, tens of millions have been allocated to addressing wildfires by mapping the best “fuel breaks”.

According to Heat Map:

… tax credits are the bill’s centerpiece and largest source of funding in the law. They are meant to incentivize people and businesses to switch to clean energy and other climate-friendly technologies. Although they could eventually disburse more than $1 trillion into the economy, according to a Goldman Sachs estimate, we do not yet have public data on their takeup. The Loan Programs Office, meanwhile, has sent out more than $13 billion in loans to help build new electric-vehicle and battery plants since the law’s passage. Grants and rebates make up the IRA’s third plank — and one of the largest portions of publicly available funding from the law. They are our first glance at how the law is working.

The Biden Administration is investing $7 billion in seven regional hydrogen hubs, claiming clean hydrogen is “essential” in weaning Americans off fossil fuels and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, CBS news reports. This ‘green hydrogen” is mostly developed utilizing renewable sources. In the future the goal is to utilize solar and biomass to generate hydrogen. Still, the projects also can involve employing natural gas and carbon capture, something which is not advocated by environmentalists as it does not spearhead the movement away from employing fossil fuels in clean energy production.

Transportation and utilities are emerging markets, with more than 70,000 hydrogen-powered forklifts already moving warehouse products around and increasing investments in clean hydrogen for long-haul trucks and transit buses. Over the long terms, hydrogen could help decarbonize a slew of industries and contribute to more than 20% of annual global emissions reductions by 2050, according to an analysis by McKinsey & Co

Researchers estimate that the number of heat-related deaths in the US workplace is likely in the thousands.

While Bureau of Land Statistics figutes attribute over 600 deaths between 2005 and 2021 to excessive heat, federal regulators claim these numbers are “vast underestimates:” because “health impacts of heat, the deadliest form of weather event, are infamously hard to track, especially in work environments,” Grist reports. The majority of deaths during the six years were Latinos.

In 2015, California mandated that when temperatures surpass 95% workers get a break every two hours.

Labor advocates in Florida have demanded that lawmakers pass heat protections for outdoor workers for the past five years. There have been more attempts to pass a heat protection bill in Florida than in any other state — but almost all of them have died without being heard in a single committee meeting. Industry groups have not spoken out publicly against these proposals, but lobbyists, activists, and lawmakers who support worker protections told Grist they are most likely conducting private conversations with state representatives to garner opposition.

The “godfather of climate science” James Hansen co-authored a commentary “El Niño fizzles. Planet Earth Sizzles. Why?” which predicts the planet will exceed the 1.5 degree warming limit envisioned in the Paris Agreement early next year.

Hansen et al argue that aerosols from China and the worldwide shipping fleet are the culprit in the spike in global temperatures earth has experienced this year.

The Guardian notes:

Aerosols interact with sunlight and clouds to produce a cooling effect that until recently has offset some of the underlying heat caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A decline in aerosols pollution, motivated by a desire to improve air quality, could unmask human-induced heating already in the global system.

Introduction to The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World … most educators are aware that we are at a turning point in education, requiring enhanced skills to respond to these times.(5) But few are aware of what psychologists, affect theorists, narrative experts, and students of most wisdom traditions and social movements all know—that the key to these outcomes is not logic, information, data, or facts, but (as much, and relatedly) emotion. “An older problem with teaching climate was to make it relevant, touchable, imminent, because it was framed in dominant climate spaces as distant, abstract, and uncertain; this is no longer the case—a majority of students feel climate change is relevant to their lives right now.” ...students barely have the patience to go through the motions of getting an education as a means to an individualist, career-oriented end. They are waking up to the fact that their time on this planet is limited, and that what they—and we--do now will significantly shape the future of life for all beings on this planet. Students want something different from their education than what their professors studied. How will we as educators—often exhausted, burned out, and despairing, too—rise to this moment?

The chance that a storm will get much more dangerous in less than a day has more than doubled over the past few decades. Hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean are now twice as likely to grow from a weak storm into a major Category 3 or higher hurricane within just 24 hours, according to a study published Thursday. “These findings should serve as an urgent warning,” said Andra Garner, an assistant professor of environmental science at Rowan University and the author of the new paper. Many of the costliest climate-related disasters to strike the United States in recent years have been hurricanes that intensified unusually quickly. Hurricane Maria, which killed more than 3,000 people in Puerto Rico and neighboring islands in 2017, strengthened from a Category 1 to Category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours before making landfall.

Airlines say they’ve found a route to climate-friendly flying, Vox reports.

Major airlines like American, Delta, Southwest, and United have all set targets of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. They’re using a suite of tactics including buying more fuel-efficient aircraft, electrifying their ground vehicles, and increasing the efficiency of their operations. They’re also testing the winds on battery- and hydrogen-powered planes, as well as some radically different aircraft designs. However, in terms of where they expect to make their biggest gains, airlines have begun to arrive at a common strategy: Classic carbon offsets are out, and sustainable aviation fuel is in. But the long haul toward sustainability is just beginning.

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