Needed: Climate radicalism

Joe Biden returning us to the Paris Accords without admitting their actual Jell-o, or "the Squad" accepting his 10 percent of their 10 percent knockoff of the original Green New Deal, while still paying full devotion to capitalism, doesn't get us bupkis on climate change.

Ben Ehrenreich tells the truth, noting that Biden had issued drilling permits before the pause on them, and taken many other half-steps. It's in the larger framework of analyzing a paper co-written by 17 scientists about just how self-screwed we're getting.

Ben even channels his inner Ed Abbey.

As innocuous as it may sound, “growth” should be understood to describe the frenzied ruination of nearly every ecosystem on the planet so that its richest human inhabitants can hold on to their privileges for another generation or two. Rejecting the idolatry of growth means tilting the organization of our societies toward other social goods—health, for instance, and the freedom to exist on a planet that is not on fire. This should not be unimaginable.

Can't be much blunter than that.

He ties this to Biden's pledge of racial "equity" and the issue of long standing of climate justice.

That said, contra "The Squad's" knockoff, Ehrenreich holds zero hope for the future under the current dispensation:

It is of course foolish to the point of derangement to imagine that Joe Biden would consent to any such transformation.

He does end with a glimmer of hope.

(I)t would be just as naïve to believe that current political configurations are any more stable or permanent than the climate, or any less vulnerable to concerted human action. If we do actually listen to the science, then we understand what ghastly futures await us and we know how bold we must be to avoid them.

But, there never was much hope. Ben notes that carbon offset pledges by big companies would require an area more than half as big as the US become entirely forested. (And that ignores that rising temps may lower forests' ability to be carbon sinks.) He also notes that most of the current climate plans rely on aggressive use of the still largely unproven technology of carbon capture.

The original paper is worth its own read. It's "we" is the whole world, including the Global South. Sub-saharan Africa is a ticking time bomb, for example. It looks to face some of the worst problems with climate change, while most of the countries with the world's highest birth rates are there at the same time.

Mass extinctions continue as the nations of the world failed to meet a vacuous 2010 pledge.

That's a vacuous pledge based on UNCC claims that are too conservative. As World Met notes, per Counterpunch, we're almost certain to break 2C. My own prediction is that we've got a 1-in-4 chance of 3C by 2050 and will almost certainly be that high if not higher by 2100. Sadly, though, the author of that Counterpunch piece is a career Democrat bureaucrat at the EPA who claims Status Quo Joe's infrastructure plan is like the Green New Deal.

Biodiversity loss continues, perhaps contributing to COVID-19.

IPCC modeling remains on the conservative side (it DOES, Michael Mann, Katherine Hayhoe and other climate change conservatives), meaning most people don't know how bad it is.

Finally, per Yale Climate, how does equity factor in?

In reality, it makes good talk, but unless Biden's prepared to set aside money to relocate millions of non-rich people who can't do that on their own, especially if they're renters who can't leverage homeowners' insurance in some way, equity doesn't factor in.

 

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At the same time, this is NOT just a US problem. Allegedly climate-woke Europe is not so much; it loves it some biomass burning. I know that Europe doesn't have the same solar power potential as the US, but it's not that far off on wind. And, because of an overall milder climate and other factors, it's less energy-intensive than the US. (We're not the worst, though; that's the Aussies.)

Not only is it not carbon-neutral, but any idiot can see that deforestation affects the environment in other ways. And, there's surely a risk of "better burner" trees that are also relatively fast growers being touted for biomass monocrop reforestation. To some degree, that's already happening, with loblolly pine being planted as a replacement tree in the Southeast. And, it's not "waste wood,"either.

Linked within that piece is another one, from 2015, reminding us that Dear Leader, with his "all of the above" strategy on energy production, came close to going down Europe's road.

Here's your nutgraf, from the main link, about the biomass "harvesting" in the US:

Even if new trees are planted in their place, many studies suggest they will take decades, and in some cases centuries, to absorb enough carbon to “pay back” the carbon debt from burning the older trees. That’s a problem, because scientists don’t believe the world can wait decades, much less centuries, to cut emissions. So at a time when global demand for pulpwood is already rising, the U.S. is already the top supplier, and the world is supposed to be expanding its carbon sinks to avoid climate calamities, the green-sounding technology of bioenergy is pulling even more carbon-rich wood out of U.S. forests.

Exactly. We need radicalism here, too.

Will Status Quo Joe give us that?

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In case you suspected otherwise, Gang Green neoliberal environmental groups aren't going to give us climate radicalism, judging by the Massachusetts chapter of the Audubon Society selling carbon credits to Big Oil companies via the Cal Air Resources Board for trees it (I HOPE) never intended to log in the first place, then getting all butt-hurt when Pro Publica et al started asking questions.

Meanwhile, the CARB itself looks like a gutless wonder in all this. Shock me. California's water sustainability system is almost as loophole-ridden as Arizona regs requiring new residential developments to have a guaranteed 30-year water supply.

And, as the likes of Fancy Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Betty Crocker, Dianne Feinstein, show, California "librulz" are wasted space in national politics, courtesy of a willfully hypercapitalist Cal Democratic Party.

 

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And, while it's nice that a climate-concerned hedge fund has now gotten its candidates on eXXXon's board of directors, remember that the bottom line is the capitalist bottom line for these companies. Engine No. 1 even admits this. Remember, per Einstein, expecting more of the capitalism that got us into this situation to fix it is insanity.

And, per the World Meteorological Organization, that situation, re the target temperature of the Paris Accords' nonenforceable 1.5 C, has a 40 percent chance of arriving in the next five years. Sadly, Michael Mann (along with many of his "climate MSM" fellow travelers) appears to be, not a climate change minimalist, but a climate change "moderate." He, Katharine Hayhoe and others of their ilk are like GangGreen environmental groups. Hayhoe and some others have been political noobs before, including doubling down on attacking those who pointed this out. Like me. Per that link, we could perhaps call them "climate change Obamiacs," who think that singing Kumbaya enough will fix this. It's people like them that lead me to continue to wonder if the James Kunstlers aren't right after all.