Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
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The world’s largest ice shelf is melting 10 times faster than expected due to solar heating of the surrounding Antarctic Ocean, scientists have warned.
The Ross Ice Shelf covers an area roughly the size of France and is several hundred metres thick, with 90 per cent of the ice below sea level.“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.”
And enough children to mine it…
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/05/africa/congo-cobalt-dirty-energy-intl/
A report, commissioned by the Green party on the London Assembly, paints a bleak picture of life in the capital as global temperatures increase.
The report found:
Half of the underground stations in central London will be “at significant risk of flooding” with the Northern and Central lines most affected.One in five schools in the capital will face a high-risk of flooding.
Two-thirds of London flats will face extreme overheating by the 2030s.
London is the most vulnerable city in western Europe to floods, extreme cold, windstorms and drought as global temperatures rise.
It’s a bit surprising that no mention has yet been made here of the report of the Committee on Climate Change published the other day. At least this report shows that capitalist governments realise that global warming is a problem and that they are going to try to do something about it. The proposal is that the UK should aim to go “carbon neutral”, i.e that emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere should be balanced by counter-measures to take an equivalent amount out , by 2050 (the XR people want the government to aim for this by 2025) and sets out measures that should be taken to achieve this.
Of course it remains to be seen how successful implementing such a policy will be, as in the face of resistance from vested interests and of loss of competitiveness if the governments of other countries don’t follow suit and, of course, doing this just in Britain won’t have much effect on its own.
No doubt something will be done, and it will have some effect, which will mean that the worst case scenarios, based on the assumption that nothing will be done, won’t take place. What happens might be bad, but it won’t be that bad. We shouldn’t base what we say about global warming on the assumption that capitalist governments will do nothing about it. It should be that under capitalism the problem can’t be dealt with adequately.
The world’s leading scientists will warn the planet’s life-support systems are approaching a danger zone for humanity. Up to 1m species are at risk of annihilation, many within decades. People living today, as well as wildlife and future generations, are at risk unless urgent action is taken to reverse the loss of plants, insects and other creatures on which humanity depends for food, pollination, clean water and a stable climate.
Unintended consequences
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-48174218
Prof Stevenson, a specialist in atmospheric chemistry modelling, said: “We desperately need to improve air quality. However, our results suggest that in doing so, we may inadvertently worsen heatwaves.”
Entire communities might need to be moved away from coasts and rivers as the UK takes urgent action to prepare for an average global temperature rise of 4C, the Environment Agency warned.
The agency said on Thursday that difficult decisions would have to be taken in the coming years to make sure the UK was resilient amid flooding that would not be held back by higher land defences.
Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the agency, set out the regulator’s long-term strategy for tackling flooding and coastal change, which, she said, was a preparation for a 4C rise in global temperatures. The rise is far in excess of the target of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels set in the legally binding Paris Agreement of 2015.
I’m not a fan of carrying capacity theories but here is the latest
“The world would need 2.8 Earths if everyone burned through natural resources as greedily as the average person in the EU, according to a new study.”
https://www.footprintnetwork.org/content/uploads/2019/05/WWF_GFN_EU_Overshoot_Day_report.pdf
“If everybody in the world had the same ecological footprint as an average EU resident … May 10th would be the date by which humanity would have used as much from nature than our planet can renew in a whole year,” the report said.
The report also found that EU residents are currently consuming twice the amount of resources that the continent’s own ecosystems can provide.
At the national level, all of the bloc’s 28 member states consumed their yearly biocapacity before August 1, when the world consumes the Earth’s yearly biocapacity. The EU had the third largest ecological footprint in the world, behind China and the US.Luxembourg scored worst, using up its yearly biocapacity by February 16. Romania scored best, with its “overshoot day” estimated to be June 12. Germany used up its budget of yearly resources by May 3. United States’ “overshoot day” at March 13 while China’s would be June 14.
New economic system….so they think
http://news.trust.org/item/20190508170711-h09hs/
“We face a form of capitalism that has hardened its focus to short-term profit maximisation with little or no apparent interest in social good,” Jeremy Grantham, co-founder of global investment manager GMO, wrote.
The vision: a new relationship between the state, local communities and nature aligned behind a more holistic notion of progress than gross domestic product (GDP).
“It is time to acknowledge that the state must play the central role in marshalling a response to looming systemic environmental shocks.
But rather than harking back to the nationalisation and executive wage caps of 1970s left-wing politics, they think governments should support communities to create new, participatory forms of economic activity that can tackle social inequality while also restoring planetary health.
Candidates include: locally-run clean energy projects, worker-owned cooperatives, many kinds of progressive businesses, and regenerative agriculture or rewilding practices that could grow exponentially in a favourable policy environment.
New economic indicators could also be developed through democratic consultations to measure advances in fairness, health or sustainability, building on examples such as the Genuine Progress Indicator, an early attempt to devise a more rounded alternative to GDP…”They have been in these economic places before.
Trashing the environment for short term profit.
Until it starts to affect profits; even by indirect processes.
Thus, eg;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_1956
Some countries had already switched to non fossil fuel energy production for geo-political strategic reasons due to the undesired dependency on fossil fuels over which they had limited control.
Thus France and Japan were producing 40% of their electricity with nuclear power.
Even though earth quake prone Japan was always probably the worst place in the world to build nuclear reactors.
…..China sees renewables as a source of energy security and not just only to reduce carbon emission.[3] China’s Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Air Pollution issued by China’s State Council in September 2013, illustrates the government’s desire to increase the share of renewables in China’s energy mix.[4] Unlike oil, coal and gas, the supplies of which are finite and subject to geopolitical tensions, renewable energy systems can be built and used wherever there is sufficient water, wind, and sun.[5]
As Chinese renewable manufacturing has grown, the costs of renewable energy technologies have dropped dramatically. Innovation has helped, but the main driver of reduced costs has been market expansion.[5] In 2015, China became the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic power, with 43 GW of total installed capacity.[6][7] From 2005 to 2014, production of solar cells in China has expanded 100-fold.[5] However, China is not expected to achieve grid parity – when an alternate source of energy is as cheap or cheaper than power purchased from the grid—until 2022.[8] In 2017, investments in renewable energy amounted to US$279.8 billion worldwide, with China accounting for US$126.6 billion or 45% of the global investments.[9] …………
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
The problem with non fossil fuel energy in the say 1970’s was that oil was so cheap.
It still is really at 50 cents a litre or whatever.
When they did hydro electric power they knew beforehand what they were doing.
Building dams was old hat for water supply as was water going downhill and turbines.
Nuclear energy looked great on paper or theoretically even if the technology was driven by military bomb making and other stuff.
Apparently some scientists wrote some blue sky science fiction stuff in the 1950’s or something about miniature nuclear generators that you could put into a submarine and how great that would be!
When the idiots at the US department of defence asked the scientist to ‘make it happen’ they responded that it was impossible and crazy or ‘utopian’ .
They actually did it in about 5 years or something.
Then the nuclear energy tails were up then; and we shouldn’t have been so timid and we can do anything with this.
The solar or photoelectric stuff, which is now looking quite good, is part of ‘material science’.
That was ‘utopian’ science and has moved ahead but mainly not from any theoretical on paper optimism but just from scientists prating about with alchemical eye of toad and tail of frog stuff.
As with flat colour screens on mobile phones etc.
It is difficult to explain why it took so long to look into wind power as the basics were in place, perhaps scientists can be shits in the sense that researching into and pushing the idea of windmills was silly and less exciting than nuclear fusion or fission.
Can’t help wondering if the situation we are in is a universal problem?
I mean if not here why not elsewhere?
Too much fossil fuel and universal capitalism burns it up and trashs the environment double quick.
Too little and the development of energy dependent technology stops or never really starts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
I think it has gone too far and it is brace for impact.
Although it is an interesting philosophical ‘egotistical’ issue; as I suspect as it won’t start to get really horrible until another 20 years or so.
I will be a bit creaky by then but the young ones will have to live or die with it more or longer than me.
It is hard when you are older and have spare cash not to use it on luxurious bling, stay vegetarian and turning the heating down so as not to trash the planet.
Our movement has been fairly reticent in claiming that the climate crises risks human extinction, restricting ourselves to speculating at most that we perhaps face civilization collapse.
Other authorities are more alarmist.
“…Increasingly complex, growing and related risks, from global warming to pollution and epidemics, threaten human survival if left to escalate, the United Nations warned on Wednesday. A biennial assessment report on how the world is dealing with disasters said the past could no longer be relied on as a guide to the future, with new risks emerging “in a way that we have not anticipated”. It identified a range of major threats to human life and property, including air pollution, diseases, earthquakes, drought and climate change…”
“If we continue living in this way, engaging with each other and the planet in the way we do, then our very survival is in doubt,” said Mami Mizutori, special representative of the U.N. secretary-general for disaster risk reduction.
“Our movement has been fairly reticent in claiming that the climate crises risks human extinction, restricting ourselves to speculating at most that we perhaps face civilization collapse.”
My view on this is that it is more a matter of one single issue – although a hugely important and pressing issue. When we discuss it it will be clear that we consider this to be one of the ‘problems’ that capitalism/capitalists won’t address. We come from it from a point of view that recognizes the pressure to keep individuals – all individuals if possible – to continually aim at increasing their consumption of absolutely everything, everything, whether food, clothing, household goods, cars, newest technology, more toys and other stuff that both children and adults could never get full use of, totally indiscriminate consumption – – –
The bottom line is simply that this ‘issue’ will not be approached seriously until socialism becomes the chosen path, when quite probably the situation could be irreversible. We know the planet can evolve, change and continue, with or without us, but is humanity in general too stupid to recognize what needs to be done?
Our problem is how do we call for rational consumption which means a reduction in all that consumerist throwaway trash advertisers insist we cannot do without and not sound as we are calling for in Sylvia’s Pankhurst words “for penurious thrift, and self-denial.” But there was a poignant truth in Reginald Perrin’s business model of producing crap.
Some members have suggested that even speculating on such policy is premature and that as you say only when we already do have socialism will the issue becomes a serious one to contemplate.
But we can generalize that when carrying capacity of the planet is determined on the American or European consumption rates, we should say less will be better and more probable.
I wish we has some statistic whizz who could calculate the number of superfluous workers there will be in socialism and the amount of resources and production that goes into supporting the war economy and the buying and selling exchange economy, with its built-in obsolescence so that the usability and life of something is fully extended beyond a year or two guarantee and add to this the savings made when we do not have the collateral damage of unnecessary crime and illness and built in obsolescence.
Only then will we be able to convince our doubters that abundance is really possible with some hard facts and figures, but an abundance of what society considers to be the necessities and necessaries of a full happy life. Some say we are in no position to determine that. But can we not produce, low, medium and high projections as science already does on various future projections today?
A lot of statistics on climate projections are based on- modelling. A capitalist mind will base it on capital projections- and it is profit orientated- that is: profit now; and pay later.
Even now, the notion of ‘carbon credit’ permits resource industries to ‘pay to pollute’ and maximise profit over the environment. It is capturing carbon in profits, and in a capital mode of production, profit is over carbon.
Under a socialist mode the carbons/pollutants would be managed, as profit is eliminated, and human economics centres all activity- it will not cost a thing to manage global warming (in the capital sense of costs). Democratic productions does not rely on costs, but sheer will, knowledge, and activity… and behavioural change.
There is no statistic whiz who will give an answer, for it relies on who pays for them; what their policy is; what their philosophy is… sounds negative- but I live in an electorate that says we can have clean coal… A last gasping breath from the liberal/mining industry- they call it the ‘energy mix’!
L.B
This is not a problem of statistic and petty bourgeois intellectuals justifications. The problem is that capitalism is destroying, or has already destroyed the earth and a bunch of imbeciles are supporting them and negating the reality, if peoples do not wake up from their stupid dreams and social opium mankind is going to be wiped out from the face of the earth. It is very simple
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