Pinboard (jm)
https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/
recent bookmarks from jmTop climate scientists are sceptical that nations will rein in global warming2021-11-02T13:22:06+00:00
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02990-w
jmclimate environment reality science climate-change ipcc 2100 futurehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:702e39299eb7/Air pollution is much worse than we thought. Climate change is far from the only problem with fossil fuels. - Vox2020-08-14T09:49:33+00:00
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/8/12/21361498/climate-change-air-pollution-us-india-china-deaths
jm“Over the next 50 years, keeping to the 2°C pathway would prevent roughly 4.5 million premature deaths, about 3.5 million hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and approximately 300 million lost workdays in the US.”
All that prevented death, illness, and lost productivity adds up to a lot of savings: The avoided deaths are valued at more than $37 trillion. The avoided health care spending due to reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits exceeds $37 billion, and the increased labor productivity is valued at more than $75 billion. On average, this amounts to over $700 billion per year in benefits to the US from improved health and labor alone, far more than the cost of the energy transition.
Importantly, many of the benefits can be accessed in the near term. Right now, air pollution leads to almost 250,000 premature deaths a year in the US. Within a decade, aggressive decarbonization could reduce that toll by 40 percent; over 20 years, it could save around 1.4 million American lives that would otherwise be lost to air quality.
Of the potential yearly deaths prevented, Rep. Robin Kelly of Illinois remarked at the hearing, “That’s a huge number. That’s nearly three times the number of lives we lose in car accidents every year. It’s twice the number of deaths caused by opioids in the past few years. And it’s even more than the number of Americans we lose to diabetes each year.”
]]>pollution air energy environment climate-change air-quality health decarbonizationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d2ff481fa6a9/Trees on commercial UK plantations 'not helping climate crisis'2020-03-10T14:34:12+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/10/uk-commercial-tree-plantations-ineffective-climate-crisis-report
jm“There is no point growing a lot of fast-growing conifers with the logic that they sequester carbon quickly if they then go into a paper mill because all that carbon will be lost to the atmosphere within a few years,” said Thomas Lancaster, head of UK land policy at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which commissioned the report. “We should not be justifying non-native forestry on carbon grounds if it’s not being used as a long-term carbon store.”
Absolutely. Commercial forestry is not going to help address the climate change problem.]]>business economics environment climate-change forestry trees coilltehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e20d85ca43c3/The false promise of “renewable natural gas”2020-02-17T17:08:26+00:00
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/2/14/21131109/california-natural-gas-renewable-socalgas
jmRNG [renewable natural gas] can, depending on feedstock and circumstances, be low or even zero-carbon. Utilities argue that ramping up the production of RNG and blending it with normal natural gas in pipelines can reduce [greenhouse gases] faster and cheaper than electrifying buildings. By pursuing electrification, they say, regulators are pushing unnecessary cost hikes onto consumers.
It would be nice for the utilities if this were true. But it’s not. RNG is not as low-carbon as the industry claims and its local air and water impacts are concentrated in vulnerable communities. Even if it were low-carbon and equitable, there simply isn’t enough of it to substitute for more than a small fraction of natural gas. And even if it were low-carbon, equitable, and abundant, it still wouldn’t be an excuse to expand natural gas infrastructure or slow electrification.
It isn’t a close call. The research is clear: Especially in a temperate climate like California, RNG is not a viable alternative for decarbonizing buildings. It is a desperate bid by natural gas utilities to delay their inevitable decline. Policymakers would be foolish to fall for it.
]]>decarbonization carbon climate-change rng renewables natural-gas pollution environmenthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:09b991f0f720/See how climate change has impacted the world since your childhood2020-02-17T11:56:54+00:00
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-06/how-climate-change-has-impacted-your-life/11766018
jmaustralia environment visualization climate climate-change future dataviz abc terrifyinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f81d37003772/Project Drawdown2019-10-07T16:44:08+00:00
https://www.drawdown.org/solutions
jmclimate-change society environment climate drawdown futurehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5ed6c1c22778/'Bees, not refugees': the environmentalist roots of anti-immigrant bigotry | Environment | The Guardian2019-08-19T14:01:14+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/15/anti
jmproclamations of looming dystopia in the form of a mass climate-caused global refugee crisis put well-intentioned environmentalists on some shared ground with fear-mongering nativists, even as they’re attempting to convey a useful urgency about the future of the planet and the disproportionate impacts of climate crisis on the developing world.
“Not to say there won’t be climate-related migration, but I think that portrayal of migrants as climate change refugees, especially these mass movements of people, feeds into the anti-immigrant environmental worldview,” said Hartmann. “Alarmist hyperbole and stereotypes around climate conflict and even climate mass refugee dislocation is based on kind of old, racially and colonially charged stereotypes of poor people of color being more prone to violence in times of scarcity.”
A worsening climate crisis could easily become a cudgel for anti-immigration activists looking to use ecological preservation as an excuse to close borders, a means of gesturing toward doing something about climate crisis that aligns with the right’s other political goals.
“As it becomes more difficult for Republicans to deny that climate change is a thing, this is a really likely next move for the right in climate politics,” said Hultgren.
]]>environment racism politics climate-change future dystopia refugees immigrationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b8ec5fba47df/Climate change: I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle. - Vox2019-06-18T10:20:29+00:00
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/28/18629833/climate-change-2019-green-new-deal
jmWhile we’re busy testing each other’s purity, we let the government and industries — the authors of said devastation — off the hook completely. This overemphasis on individual action shames people for their everyday activities, things they can barely avoid doing because of the fossil fuel-dependent system they were born into. In fact, fossil fuels supply more than 75 percent of the US energy system. If we want to function in society, we have no choice but to participate in that system. To blame us for that is to shame us for our very existence.
[...] But that doesn’t mean we do nothing. Climate change is a vast and complicated problem, and that means the answer is complicated too. We need to let go of the idea that it’s all of our individual faults, then take on the collective responsibility of holding the true culprits accountable. In other words, we need to become many Davids against one big, bad Goliath.
]]>activism climate environment green climate-change future fossil-fuels societyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ce771fcc068e/Carnival Cruise Line to pay a $20M fine over pollution2019-06-06T14:30:29+00:00
https://www.fastcompany.com/90359828/carnivals-cruise-ships-pollute-more-than-all-of-europes-cars-study?partner=rss
jmCarnival’s pollution problem is so bad that across its fleet, the large boats pollute 10 times more than all 260 million of Europe’s cars. That tidbit comes courtesy of a study by the European think tank Transport & Environment, which looked at 203 cruise ships sailing European waters in 2017.
The report also found that besides over-tourism and crashing into ports, there’s a good reason for European cities to dislike cruise ships: they are emitting sulfur dioxide all over the place. If you can’t keep your pollutants straight, sulfur dioxide causes both acid rain and lung cancer. Cruise lines, it turns out, have been dropping the gas all over Europe; the report says Barcelona, Palma Mallorca, and Venice were the cities worst affected by sulfur dioxide emissions. Per the FT, “sulfur dioxide emissions from cars was 3.2m kt versus 62m kt from cruise ships, with Carnival accounting for half that, the study found.”
]]>carnival cruises cruise-ships pollution europe eu driving environment climate-changehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:624b949ce214/Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change2018-12-09T22:36:30+00:00
https://www.gq.com/story/billionaires-climate-change
jmThat's largely because there is no "free market" incentive to prevent disaster. An economic environment where a company is only considered viable if it's constantly expanding and increasing its production can't be expected to pump its own brakes over something as trivial as pending global catastrophe. Instead, market logic dictates that rather than take the financial hit that comes with cutting profits, it's more reasonable to find a way to make money off the boiling ocean. Nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than the burgeoning climate-change investment industry. According to Bloomberg, investors are looking to make money off of everything from revamped food production to hotels for people fleeing increasingly hurricane-ravaged areas. A top JP Morgan Asset investment strategist advised clients that sea-level rise was so inevitable that there was likely a lot of opportunity for investing in sea-wall construction.
]]>capitalism environment politics future climate-change doomhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:377632d0081a/Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals | Martin Lukacs | Environment | The Guardian2018-11-01T11:55:55+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals
jmThese pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breathe. But we could hardly be worse-served.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.
The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it. The political project of neoliberalism, brought to ascendence by Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any democratic public will. [...]
At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras.
]]>politics environment neoliberalism future climate-change greenhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:db54d4dc7c2c/Bitcoin must die2018-10-16T10:43:51+00:00
https://sluggerotoole.com/2018/10/12/bitcoin-must-die/
jmIf Bitcoin were to cease trading tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear. This is roughly equivalent to the output of ten coal-fired power plants, emitting 50 million tonnes of CO2 per year – which would cover one year’s worth of the carbon emission cuts required to limit temperature rises this century to 2C. It is not a solution by itself, but it would be a good year’s work. Bitcoin is made from ashes, and if ashes were legal tender, humanity would burn everything in sight and call it progress.
]]>environment bitcoin ecology future earth cryptocurrencies pow electricity climate-changehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c398516a443f/Crazy maths makes nonsense of Irish climate change policy2018-06-17T16:17:50+00:00
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/crazy-maths-makes-nonsense-of-irish-climate-change-policy-1.3530732#.WyOdWNI8P1Y.twitter
jmenvironment peat ireland electricity fossil-fuels policy climate-changehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ab5cf6be5272/