Opinion: This is how law leads non-state actors to decarbonise

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Here I estimate the global inequality of individual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between 1990 and 2019 using a newly assembled dataset of income and wealth inequality, environmental input-output tables and a framework differentiating emissions from consumption and investments.

Why climate change is an LGBTQI rights issue

Nothing more queer than nature | Brigitte Baptiste | TEDxRíodelaPlata

Queering Climate Change: Exploring the Influence of LGBTQ+ Identity on Climate Change Belief and Risk Perceptions*

We connect you with grassroots climate change solutions.

Climate change and the ever-growing environmental crisis are a collective action problem.

The most efficient route toward enacting such policy, the authors argue, lies not in convincing deniers to believe in climate change but in galvanizing those who already do.

In a 2015 study published in PLOS One, Maibach and colleagues found that telling people that experts agreed on climate change increased the chances that those individuals would accept that climate change was happening, was human-caused, and presented a real threat. Extra encouraging: That strategy was also particularly influential on Republicans, though liberals might also need a nudge.

For many skeptics, Neha Thirani Bagri has written in Quartz, delineating the myriad potential harms of unmitigated climate change is not an effective strategy. Instead, it can be more productive to illustrate the potential benefits that mitigation may carry. She writes:A comprehensive study published in 2015 in Nature surveyed 6,000 people across 24 countries and found that emphasizing the shared benefits of climate change was an effective way of motivating people to take action — even if they initially identified as deniers. For example, people were more likely to take steps to mitigate climate change if they believe that it will produce economic and scientific development. Most importantly, these results were true across political ideology, age, and gender.

research has found that conservatives are more likely to support a pro-environmental agenda when presented with messages containing themes of patriotism and defending the purity of nature.

the best predictor of whether we agree with the science is simply where we fall on the political spectrum.

According to the researchers, proximity was tied to certainty. The farther away a climate-related event was perceived to be, the less certain viewers were that humans were causing it. That made them feel less responsible for doing something about it and “lowered their own perceived ability to influence global climate change outcomes,” says Tsay-Vogel, a COM assistant professor of communication.

How We Can Take Effective Climate Action Right Now

This example illustrates the potential for an unintended consequence to move between categories and demonstrates that there are times when it is necessary to review and reflect. What is considered known and knowable changes over time: has the state of knowledge developed or an unintended consequence been identified?

seeded properly

the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its “synthesis” report summarizing the findings of its sixth assessment (the last occurred in 2014). The findings are painfully familiar: the world is falling far short of its emission goals, and without rapid reductions this decade, the planet is likely to shoot to beyond 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius of warming this century (we are at 1.1 degrees now). We seem to be stuck in a doom-loop news cycle where scientific reports create headlines, and earnest climate commentators insist the new report represents a true “wake-up call” for action, and then . . . emission keep rising. They hit a record once again in 2022. The world of climate politics appears to exist in two completely different worlds. There is a largely liberal and idealist world of climate technocrats where science informs policy, and there is the real, material capitalist world of power.

“I think we’re on the cusp of a massive transformation . . . ultimately, the market is going to make the decisions, not the government.”

He said he and Arkush “went through every possible objection” and found no legal barrier for prosecutors to raise criminal charges against companies that he said have lied about their knowledge of the danger of burning fossil fuels. “What’s really probably stopping them is that no one has done it before,” Braman said. “The level of culpability and the extent of the harm is so massive that it’s not the kind of thing that prosecutors are used to prosecuting.”

In addition, at least two justices have ties to the oil industry writ large. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s father was a Shell attorney for nearly three decades and served in leadership positions with the American Petroleum Institute, and Justice Samuel Alito owns stock in ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 (Alito recused himself from the Baltimore case but Barrett did not).

Knowledge about problems on this scale brings paralyzing guilt, fear, and a sense of helplessness

Ads, Andrew and James discuss where the the climate movement is right now, how deep time plays into the effects we are having on the planet, when good people do bad things because of poor systems and what happens next if 1.5C fails.

Discussion on how to downscale the climate change boundary has now become a political and equity issue more than a scientific issue. For example, how does one decide the allocation of the CO2 emissions? Should the past emissions be considered? Should the amount of emissions account for the current welfare of the countries, allowing less developed countries to emit more? Or, is it sufficient to calculate a global per capita value that is the same everywhere?

At COP27, governments agreed to create a “contribution unit” as part of the establishment of new carbon markets under the Paris Agreement - a clear sign of support for this evolution in claims

HOW CAN CLIMATE SCIENTISTS ALLOW THEMSELVES TO TELL THE TRUTH?

Most future climate scenarios envisage large-scale deployment of so-called “negative emissions,” where we suck CO2 out of the atmosphere in order to keep warming below 2°C. One proposed method for achieving that is “enhanced weathering”—accelerated silicate weathering done by grinding up silicate rock and spreading it on agricultural fields to react with CO2 from the air and fertilize plants at the same time. Brantley’s work shows that for such efforts to be successful, those fields would need a good supply of water and—crucially—would probably need to be plowed regularly to expose fresh minerals to the air. “If you're not going to be turning it over, you'll start to precipitate secondary minerals, and… most of the surface area could be occluded from reaction,” said Brantley.

Over geological time, those landscape proportions have changed in response to shifting tectonic plates. This has changed how efficient silicate weathering has been at removing the CO2 emitted by volcanoes, thereby allowing high CO2 levels and warm climates at times, like in the Cretaceous, or lower CO2 levels and a cool climate when plate tectonics was building lots of “kinetic-limited” mountainous landscapes, like over the last few million years.

The most telling real-world results came from the final stock count. For example, no Felix product is more beloved than its best-selling meatballs, yet with customers encouraged to make decisions on climate value, they remained on the shelves, whereas Felix’s new, plant-based meatball alternatives had sold out. Shoppers had learned that the classic dish they had eaten since childhood might not, after all, be the best option for their own children’s future.

The way in which shoppers were presented with practical climate information was repeatedly commented on as a brilliantly simple idea that people felt ought to be the norm in food retail. Plus, we saw repeat visits – parents so impressed by the concept’s educative value that they came back a second time with their children.As one shopper shared: “I didn’t expect this when walking in. The visuals with the three different bags explained everything so well. I learned so much more compared to, say, a lecture.”

The results told us Felix’s demographic really wanted to shop for climate-friendly food brands, but found the sustainability information too confusing and – perhaps as a result – believed sustainable grocery shopping to be too expensive.Our strategy was clear: Give shoppers better information on the climate impact of Felix products and, in the process, demonstrate how easy it is to make climate-friendly choices when products are clearly labelled. We called it The Climate Store (Klimatbutiken) – the world’s first grocery shop in which the ‘price’ of food would be based on its carbon footprint.

a new and insidious tactic is threatening to undermine our efforts to build a more sustainable future: climate delay

dismissives

Climate deniers are victims not villains

Make the case that the status quo is inequitable

two social drivers actively impair global efforts to achieve 1.5 C. Those are corporate responses and global consumption patterns

Most of them are, in general, moving in the right direction. They just aren’t aggressive enough yet to be consistent with the kind of transformative social change required to achieve the 1.5 C target.

To provide an indication of the projected timing of climate depar-ture under alternative greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, we havedeveloped an index that determines the year when the values of agiven climatic variable exceed the bounds of historical variabilityfor a particular location (Fig. 1a).

I agree as I have heard from many young people that they aren't voting because they don't trust the politicians. They hear their promises and then when they get elected they don't deliver on those promises, so young people feel helpless to change the system.

Forty-one per cent of people globally see climate change as a ‘very serious threat’ to their country

The Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll

In the first edition of the Hamburg Climate Fu-tures Outlook published in 2021

Lacking thefeasibility of a robust probabilistic assessment, wehave developed an alternative framework to assessthe plausibility of climate futures (Chapter 2).

based on present knowledge of social drivers andphysical processe

Hamburg Climate FuturesOutlook

Among the many possible climatic futures, not allare plausible.

Over 50% of people reported feeling powerless or helpless in the previously mentioned study.

The survey — the largest of its kind — asked 10,000 young people in 10 countries how they felt about climate change and government responses to it.The results, released in a preprint on 14 September1, found that most respondents were concerned about climate change, with nearly 60% saying they felt ‘very worried’ or ‘extremely worried’. Many associated negative emotions with climate change — the most commonly chosen were ‘sad’, ‘afraid’, ‘anxious’, ‘angry’ and ‘powerless’ (see ‘Climate anxiety’). Overall, 45% of participants said their feelings about climate change impacted their daily lives.

real-life situations can be much more complicated, the authors’ model allows for the exact 25 percent tipping point number to change based on circumstances. Memory length is a key variable, and relates to how entrenched a belief or behavior is.

Agreements are subjected to climate agreements and not the other way around that could be 00:53:10 an option

we have individual capitalists who try 00:48:45 to make the most profit and this is linked to their capital and productivity so to achieve more in less time and 00:48:57 productivity is linked to energy [Music] the only source of energy to increase profit is carbon oil and gas and this has resulted in a change in our 00:49:15 atmosphere we have to put an entities if we wish to live in our planet can our capitalism do this based on the current data we won't be able to do so 00:49:28 therefore perhaps we should do the following reflection if capitalism is unable to do so either Humanity will die with it or 00:49:42 Humanity will overcome capitalism so that we can live in our planet

you've had problems in your area where you tried to get legislation and the oil and gas industry came in and fought you right in my state same thing every piece 00:44:08 of pro-climate legislation at the national level the regional level the local level Municipal level the oil and gas industry and the coal industry they come in and fight it tooth and nail and 00:44:21 they use their legacy network of political influence and wealth to stop progress the rest of us have to reform these International institutions so that the people of this world and including 00:44:34 the young people of this world can say we are now in charge of our own destiny we're going to stop using the sky as an open sewer we're going to save the future and give people hope we can do it 00:44:47 and remember that political will is itself a renewable resource

you've got a climate denier in charge of 00:42:13 the World Bank so why are you surprised that the World Bank is completely failing to do its job

we are today concluding that we're outside even of the just boundary on climate

within the next decade we are at risk of pushing ourselves outside of the safe 00:10:15 boundary of 1.5 degrees Celsius

if we continue with our greenhouse gas emissions then by 2070 as many as 3 00:03:25 billion people will live in uninhabitable zones and mostly in poorer countries and this basically means that these people who probably have the least contribution to the climate problem have 00:03:39 been the ones that are most exposed

can have a pretty outsized  carbon footprint and I'm wondering how   you reconcile the vast amount of computational  power necessary to accomplish this work and its   negative impact on the environment and whether  or not this is something you all are considering

adrienne maree brown wrote not long ago that there is an element of science fiction in climate action: “We are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle.”

The moral vocabulary that climate activists and public health professionals use is not able to activate the moral and political imagination that effective ecological and health governance require. To respond to the recurring crises that are coming, the governance of complex societies must be able to reach the tap roots latent in their own moral ethos, politics, and motivational structures.

People newly faced with the precarity of future expectations and the loss of attachments to habitual ways of life tighten their grip on them, no matter how objectively unsustainable, and turn toward blaming the other, the victims, rather than extending empathy and solidarity toward them.

Much of what they do can be done without eliciting the ire of nation-states. Bike shares, pedestrian zones, insulated buildings, renovated port facilities, congestion fees, car emission limits, furnace specifications, fuel upgrades (from oil to gas to alternative energy) and white paint roofs, for example, are only some of the innovations city officials can promote to effect significant reductions in emissions and pollutants.

here states have grown dysfunctional and sovereignty has become an obstacle to global democratic action—as when the United States (or China, France, or Canada) refuses to compromise its sovereignty by permitting the international monitoring of carbon emissions on its soil—cities have increasingly proven themselves capable of deliberative democratic action on behalf of sustainability, as they have actually done in intercity associations like the C-40 or ICLEI. If presidents and prime ministers cannot summon the will to work for a sustainable planet, mayors can. If citizens of the province and nation think ideologically and divisively, neighbors and citizens of the towns and cities think publicly and cooperatively.

A deliberative democracy in which competent citizens participate in policy decisions about the long-term challenges facing their society is an ideal setting for confronting the threat of climate change. Democratic deliberation is designed to help selfish individuals reformulate their interests in the language of the communities to which they belong—to allow them to move from “me thinking” to “we thinking” and to substitute long-term, future-minded thinking for the short-term, present-minded, special-interest thinking. It allows private opinion to be shaped by shared belief and the discipline of inter-subjective (“scientific”) knowledge.

Environmentalists say bulldozing the village to expand the Garzweiler mine would result in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. The government and utility company RWE argue the coal is needed to ensure Germany's energy security.Police officers use water cannons on protesters in Luetzerath on Saturday. (Thilo Schmuelgen/Reuters)The regional and national governments, both of which include the environmentalist Green party, reached a deal with RWE last year allowing it to destroy the abandoned village in return for ending coal use by 2030, rather than 2038.Some speakers at Saturday's demonstration assailed the Greens, whose leaders argue that the deal fulfils many of the environmentalists' demands and saved five other villages from demolition.What on Earth?Why the reversal of a decades-old coal policy sparked controversy in Alberta"It's very weird to see the German government, including the Green party, make deals and compromise with companies like RWE, with fossil fuel companies, when they should rather be held accountable for all the damage and destruction they have caused," Thunberg said."My message to the German government is that they should stop what's happening here immediately, stop the destruction, and ensure climate justice for everyone."

Finally, statistics should reinforce the fact that any patterning found cannot be explained as accidental.

i think climate change is going to put  a strong pressure in the sense that you know i   think when people see more and more catastrophic  climatic events you know i think attitudes toward   globalization and attitudes toward inequality in  general you know can change very quickly because   00:43:25 you know at some point i think people will  not find it funny at all to have all these   billionaires you know giving lessons using  their private jet doing your space tourism   et cetera you know at some point you know i think  nobody is going to find this funny at all and   there can be a very quick and and fast you know  complete change in attitude following this

Brian Eno – "We need the creative industry to help inspire climate action"

While the average human is responsible for an estimated 5t 퐶푂2푒per year,2 the authors trained a Transformer (big) model [136] withneural architecture search and estimated that the training procedureemitted 284t of 퐶푂2. Training a single BERT base model (withouthyperparameter tuning) on GPUs was estimated to require as muchenergy as a trans-American flight.

Below, I pose four critical questions. How the Biden administration answers these questions will say a lot about whether Justice40 sets a new marker for environmental justice in the United States—or if the promise of Justice40 is squandered.

Splooting, or more technically heat dumping, is a process through which animals stretch their hind legs back and lie on cooler surfaces to reduce their body heat. It’s commonly done by squirrels and sometimes, by dogs, and it’s no reason for concern, it’s just a sign that the animal is hot and trying to cool off.

Rising greenhouse gas concentrations have resulted in detectable trends in average climate (particularly temperature), but also in changes in the timing of key seasons in some locations and in daily weather variability, including extreme weather and climate events like heat waves and droughts [10,11,12]. It is primarily through these changes in weather and seasonality, rather than through gradual, long-term trends, that climate change is likely to influence malaria risk. These impacts on malaria could occur both directly, as optimum climate ranges and critical thresholds for vector and parasite development are crossed, and indirectly, as society grapples with the disruptive effects of changes in weather patterns and seasonal cycles.

Climate can influence malaria directly, through transmission dynamics, or indirectly, through myriad pathways including the many socioeconomic factors that underpin malaria risk. These indirect effects are largely unpredictable and so are not included in climate-driven disease models. Such models have been effective at predicting transmission from weeks to months ahead. However, due to several well-documented limitations, climate projections cannot accurately predict the medium- or long-term effects of climate change on malaria, especially on local scales. Long-term climate trends are shifting disease patterns, but climate shocks (extreme weather and climate events) and variability from sub-seasonal to decadal timeframes have a much greater influence than trends and are also more easily integrated into control programmes.

Trends in some regions are clear, but insect biology, climate quirks, and public health preparedness will determine whether outbreaks occur.

For effective vector control, the influence of climatic factors on vector-borne diseases should be studied since the mosquito vectors are also sensitive to the alterations in the climatic condition and the existing vector control approaches are inadequate to combat with the adverse effects of global warming.

Leaks show attempts to water down UN climate report, Greenpeace says Some countries tried to remove findings threatening their economic interests from an IPCC report, documents seen by Greenpeace have revealed. The report comes before a critical round of UN climate talks.

A 2020 study by the European Union found that contrails and other non-CO2 aircraft emissions warm the planet twice as much as the carbon dioxide released by airplanes.

Skatten på arbete sänks med inriktning på låg- och medelinkomsttagare, liksom skatten på pension. För att stötta hushållen ytterligare sänks skatten på sparande. Hushållen kompenseras för de höga elpriserna och drivmedelspriserna sänks kraftigt, bland annat genom att reduktionsplikten sänks till EU:s miniminivå.

Naturskyddsföreningen är starkt kritisk till den tillträdande regeringens programförklaring. – Jag känner mig både besviken och djupt oroad. Utifrån vad som hittills framkommer så verkar det vara väldigt tunt med politik som tar itu med miljöproblemen. Istället riskerar problemen att förvärras med de åtgärder som läggs fram, säger Karin Lexén, generalsekreterare Naturskyddsföreningen i ett pressmeddelande. Enligt programförklaringen ska miljöprövningen av vattenkraft pausas. – Det är oansvarigt. Omprövningen av den svenska vattenkraften genomförs för att förse kraftverken med moderna miljövillkor, det är ett måste för att Sverige ska kunna leva upp till sina internationella åtaganden om skydd av biologisk mångfald och EU:s vattendirektiv. Sverige har vid upprepade tillfällen fått kritik från EU-kommissionen i frågan, säger Karin Lexén.

Men förutom elektrifieringen nämns inget om transporter som står för en stor del av Sveriges nationella utsläpp, cirka en tredjedel. Det brukar lyftas fram som ett nyckelområde när klimatmål ska nås. – Jag är väldigt förvånad att transporter inte får ett enda ord i avtalet och närmast bestört över att det inte är ett av de sju prioriterade områden som lyftes fram, säger Mattias Goldmann, klimatexpert och en av grundarna till 2030-sekretariatet.

In a recent paper published in Nature Climate Change, scientists found that major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now ‘inevitable’ even if the burning of fossil fuels were to halt overnight. Using satellite observations of Greenland ice loss and ice cap from 2000 to 2019, the team found the losses will lead to a minimum rise of 27 cm regardless of climate change.

Peter Kalmus, Data Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory: [Update 23 August 2019: This comment was updated for clarity.] What science projects under plausible scenarios of human courses of action is varying degrees of further disruption of fundamental planetary life support systems (e.g. water, agriculture, ecosystems) needed to support the nearly 8 billion humans currently living on Earth. This disruption poses some degree of existential risk to civilization as we know it—with the amount of risk likely still depending on how rapidly we reduce radiative and ecological forcings—but these degrees of risk are not quantified with any certainty. Ice models have had difficulty projecting the melting rate of the Greenland ice sheet; predicting the mechanism of the collapse of civilization and the number of lives lost as a result is a far more complex problem, and there is no scientific consensus that six billion lives will be lost. On the other hand, models have tended to underestimate ice sheet melting, and model projections in general have been systematically “conservative.” I unfortunately don’t see how the possibility of six billion deaths can be ruled out with confidence, especially when the intrinsically unpredictable but real possibility of climate-related war (which could include nuclear weapons) is considered. In other words, Hallam’s claim is speculative, but given the depth and rapidity of anthropogenic change, so is confidently ruling it out. While I don’t agree that “science predicts” the death of six billion people, in my opinion Hallam’s broader warning has qualitative merit and in the context of a lay translation of risk his use of “six billion” might reasonably be interpreted as figurative, an illustration of a worst-case scenario (again, that I don’t think can be ruled out). Whether to interpret this claim literally or figuratively is a question perhaps best left to humanists. Given this ambiguity I judge it “unrateable.”

Leaving aside those far-right doubts about the existence of a climateproblem, any government that wanted to cut carbon emissions substantiallycould not avoid implementing much tougher emissions regulations andhigher business taxes. But any government that did so in advance of othergovernments would only force its corporations to move production andthousands of jobs elsewhere.

Pollin: Neither negative emissions technologies nor nuclear power can likely contribute significantly to building an alternative global clean energy infrastructure. Indeed, it is more likely that they will create still more severe problems. Let’s start with nuclear.

Renewable energy critics argue that wind and solar are not reliable sources because of their variability. Others argue that wind farms encroach on pristine environment and destroy a country’s natural habitat, as is the case with the installation of thousands of wind turbines on scores of Greek islands in the Aegean Sea. How would you respond to such concerns, and are there ways around them?

"Respondents across all countries were worried about climate change (59% were very or extremely worried and 84% were at least moderately worried). More than 50% reported each of the following emotions: sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty. More than 45% of respondents said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning, and many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate change (eg, 75% said that they think the future is frightening and 83% said that they think people have failed to take care of the planet).