Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
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The issue is certainly exercising more members of the public who have not been involved before in activist protest.
Our blog has this to say.
Capitalism issues a warning.
The world is facing a climate catastrophe and businesses around the world must address it urgently – or face the ultimate sanction for a public company – shareholders who refuse to back them anymore.
That is not a message from an environmental action group but from the largest money manager in the UK, Legal & General Investment Management, which manages £1 trillion worth of UK pension fund investments.
Even more bad news
A new study shows that emissions of a potent greenhouse gas from thawing permafrost in the planet’s northernmost region may be 12 times higher than previously thought. Nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than CO2, stays in the atmosphere for an average of 114 years
N2O “has conventionally been assumed to have minimal emissions in permafrost regions,” But the new study’s findings challenge that assumption.
Planetary warming isn’t the only threat posed by rising N2O emissions.
“Nitrous oxide poses a second, special threat,” the statement said. “Up in the stratosphere, sunlight and oxygen team up to convert the gas into nitrogen oxides, which eat at the ozone.”More capitalist warnings
“…The global financial system faces an existential threat from climate change and must take urgent steps to reform, the governors of the Bank of England and France’s central bank have warned, writing in the Guardian.
In an article published in the Guardian on Wednesday aimed at the international financial community, Mark Carney, the Bank’s governor, and Villeroy de Galhau, the governor of the Banque de France, said financial regulators, banks and insurers around the world had to “raise the bar” to avoid catastrophe.
They said: “As financial policymakers and prudential supervisors we cannot ignore the obvious physical risks before our eyes. Climate change is a global problem, which requires global solutions, in which the whole financial sector has a central role to play…”Can’t I get away from the bad news.
The release of methane and carbon dioxide from thawing permafrost will accelerate global warming and add up to $70tn (£54tn) to the world’s climate bill, according to the most advanced study yet of the economic consequences of a melting Arctic. It shows how destabilised natural systems will worsen the problem caused by man-made emissions, making it more difficult and expensive to solve.
Permafrost melt is the main concern. Greenhouse gases, which have been frozen below the soil for centuries, have already begun to escape at the current level of 1 degrees Celsius of global heating. So far the impact is small. Ten gigatonnes of CO2 have been released from the ice but this source of emissions will grow rapidly once temperatures rise beyond 1.5C. On the current trajectory of at least 3C of warming by the end of the century, melting permafrost is expected to discharge 280 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and 3 gigatonnes of methane.
“It’s disheartening that we have this in front of us,” said Dmitry Yumashev of Lancaster University. “Even at 1.5C to 2C, there are impacts and costs. But they are lower so we can limit this. We have the technology and processes, but we are not moving fast enough. We still have a time bomb, but it’s not as large as previously believed,” said Yumashev. But he warned against complacency because even at the low end the damages are huge, the study has a considerable degree of uncertainty and the costs of several other potential tipping points have yet to be calculated.
It’s the poor who suffer
While equatorial nations in Africa, Asia and South America have been hardest hit by hotter temperatures, those at more northerly latitudes – like Canada and Norway – have seen their economies grow by a third. The UK’s economy today is 10 per cent larger than it would have been without man made warming, while Sudan’s – the hardest hit nation – is 36 per cent smaller. India’s economy is 31 per cent smaller than it would have been without warming.
Wealthier nations, who have seen their GDP improve by 10 per cent on average thanks to warming, are also the biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses driving climate change.
The world’s lowest emitters over the past 50 years have seen their GDP fall by around 25 per cent.
Bad news keep on comin’
Up to a million species face possible extinction because of destructive human behavior. The warning comes from a forthcoming United Nations report.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) landmark three-year assessment was prepared by 150 experts from 50 countries, with additions from another 250 contributors will show how tens of thousands of species are at high risk of extinction, how countries are using nature at a rate that far exceeds its ability to renew itself, and how nature’s ability to contribute food and fresh water to a growing human population is being compromised in every region on Earth.
I do take issue with IPBES chair Robert Watson who said that “there are also two big indirect drivers of biodiversity loss and climate change—the number of people in the world and their growing ability to consume.”
But like many scientists, his understanding about social systems and economics may not be as informed as his ecological credentials.
https://news.yahoo.com/one-million-species-risk-extinction-due-humans-draft-131407174.html
Yanis Varoufakis and the Global Green New Deal
“… a pragmatic plan to raise $8tn – 5% of global GDP – each year, coordinate its investment in the transition to renewable energy and commit to providing climate protections on the basis of countries’ needs, rather than their means… public financing will involve a mix of taxes and bond instruments. On the former, we can introduce a global minimum corporate tax rate that is then redistributed on the basis of their sales. On the latter, public investment banks – including the European Investment Bank, the World Bank and the KfW, Germany’s state-owned development bank – can coordinate the issue of green bonds that the major central banks agree collectively to support in the secondary markets…”
“Carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS) will be necessary to meet the UK’s existing climate change targets at least cost, the report by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee said. “Failure to deploy CCUS would also mean the UK could not credibly adopt a ‘net zero emissions’ target” the report said.
CCUS involves the capture of emissions from power plants and industry to allow them to be compressed and stored for use in industrial applications such as making drinks fizzy.
Campaigners have said the government’s current target does not go far enough to meet pledges made under the Paris climate agreement to try to limit a rise in global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and that a net zero target should be set.
George Monbiot – Still talking the talk but never walking the walk
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/25/capitalism-economic-system-survival-earth
George Monbiot – Still talking the talk but never walking the walk
Well for what its worth ‘Prolerat’ has commented. Here.
Bad news yet again…can’t even go on a cruise to get away from it, not that I was intending one.
“The world’s oceans have become more stormy during the past three decades, according to the largest and most detailed study of its kind. The findings add to concerns that as the world gets hotter, extreme events such as storms and floods could become more frequent and more devastating in their impact…the observations were in line with predictions by climate models and from historical records that suggested that as the world got hotter, weather and storms became more extreme, although the relationship was complex and not fully understood…”
The UK government’s plan to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2040 is too tame, advisers will say.
Drivers will benefit if electric cars come to dominate the new car market a full decade earlier, they will claim.
The Committee on Climate Change believes electric cars will be cheaper to buy than petrol or diesel vehicles by 2024-5.
But the speed of installing charging points will have to radically improve to cope with the coming demand.The UK government’s current policy is to insist that by 2040, all new cars and vans sold in the UK should be zero emissions – that means electric or hydrogen.
But critics have pointed out that would mean some older petrol and diesel vehicles will still be on the roads after 2050.
That’s the expected date by which the government should have reduced carbon emissions from all sources to zero.The committee will say 2030 would be a feasible date for the government to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. But members have to be sure their recommendations are achievable and they’re not certain there will be enough cobalt in the world by then to build the batteries needed.
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