Llewellyn King: Artificial intelligence and climate change are making 2023 a scary and seminal year
Global surface temperature reconstruction over the last 2000 years using proxy data from tree rings, corals and ice cores in blue. Directly observed data is in red.
The iCub robot at the Genoa science festival in 2009
— Photo by Lorenzo Natale
His job is probably secure.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
This is a seminal year, meaning nothing will be the same again.
This is the year when two monumentally new forces began to shape the way we live, where we reside and the work we do. Think of the invention of the printing press around 1443 and the perfection of the steam engine in about 1776.
These forces have been coming for a while, they haven’t evolved in secret. But this was the year they burst into our consciousness and began affecting our lives.
The twin agents of transformation are climate change and artificial intelligence. They can’t be denied. They will be felt and they will bring about transformative change.
Climate change was felt this year. In Texas and across the Southwest, temperatures of well over 100 degrees persisted for more than three months. Phoenix had temperatures of 110 degrees or above for 31 days.
On a recent visit to Austin, an exhausted Uber driver told me that the heat had upended her life; it made entering her car and keeping it cool a challenge. Her car’s air conditioner was taxed with more heat than it could handle. Her family had to stay indoors, and their electric bill surged.
The electric utilities came through heroically without any major blackouts, but it was a close thing.
David Naylor, president of Rayburn Electric, a cooperative association providing power to four distribution companies bordering Dallas, told me, “Summer 2023 presented a few unique challenges with so many days about 105 degrees. While Texas is accustomed to hot summers, there is an impactful difference between 100 degrees and 105.”
Rayburn ran flat out, including its recently purchased natural gas-fired station. It issued a “hands-off” order which, Naylor said, meant that “facilities were left essentially alone unless absolutely necessary.”
It was the same for electric utilities across the country. Every plant that could be pressed into service was and was left to run without normal maintenance, which would involve taking it offline.
Water is a parallel problem to heat.
We have overused groundwater and depleted aquifers. In some regions, salt water is seeping into the soil, rendering agriculture impossible.
That is occurring in Florida and Louisiana. Some of the salt water intrusion is the result of higher sea levels and some of it is the voracious way aquifers have been pumped out during long periods of heat and low rainfall.
Most of the West and Florida face the aquifer problem, but in coastal communities it can be a crisis — irreversible damage to the land.
Heat and drought will cause many to leave their homes, especially in Africa, but also in South and Central America, adding to the millions of migrants on the move around the world.
AI is one of history’s two-edged swords. On the positive side, it is a gift to research and especially in life sciences, which could deliver life expectancy north of 120 years.
But AI will be a powerful disruptor elsewhere, from national defense to intellectual property and, of course, to employment. Large numbers of jobs, for example, in call centers, at fast-food restaurant counters, and check-in desks at hotels and airports will be taken over by AI.
Think about this: You go to the airport and talk to a receptor (likely to be a simple microphone-type of gadget on the already ubiquitous kiosks) while staring at a display screen, giving you details of your seat, your flight — and its expected delays.
Out of sight in the control tower, although it might not be a tower, AI moves airplanes along the ground, and clears them to take off and land — eventually it will fly the plane, if the public accepts that.
No check-in crew, no air-traffic controllers and, most likely, the baggage will be handled by AI-controlled robots.
Aviation is much closer to AI automation than people realize. But that isn’t all. You may get to the airport in a driverless Lyft or Uber car and the only human beings you will see are your fellow passengers.
All that adds up to the disappearance of a huge number of jobs, estimated by Goldman Sachs to be as many as 300 million full-time jobs worldwide. Eventually, in a re-ordered economy, new jobs will appear and the crisis will pass.
The most secure employment might be for those in skilled trades — people who fix things — such people as plumbers, mechanics and electricians. And, oh yes, those who fix and install computers. They might well emerge as a new aristocracy.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
At Boston Museum of Science: ‘Change Climate Change’
The Museum of Science spans the length of the Charles River Dam, including a parking garage at far left. The Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge is visible in the background.
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
“Boston’s Museum of Science is raising awareness of climate change through its new “Change Climate Change” initiative. Situated in the museum’s Green Wing, “Change Climate Change” consists of exhibits aimed to help visualize climate change and bring attention to the present and future of our planet.
Included in this exhibit is “Gaia,” a 23-foot-wide inflatable globe that includes high-definition NASA imagery. According to British artist Luke Jerram, this art installment aims to evoke the “Overview Effect,” a sensation that astronauts report feeling when they see the Earth from space.
"Also in the Green Wing, visitors can find a “New England Climate Stories” exhibit, which displays how the climate crisis is impacting the habitats and lives of plants and animals found in the New England region. Another part of this initiative is “Resilient Venice: Adapting to Climate Change,” an exhibit that displays how sea-level rise caused by climate change threatens Venice, which is mostly at sea level.
“When discussing the museum’s Change Climate Change initiative and how she hopes the exhibits will impact visitors, Julia Tate, project manager of touring exhibitions and exhibit production, stated that the museum ‘want[s] people to feel empowered about what they can do and what actions they can take.”’
These zones continue to change with global warming.
Roger Warburton: Nearby ocean warming a climate-change warning for New England
The changes in heat content of the top 700 meters of the world’s oceans between 1955 and 2020.
— Chart by Roger Warburton/NCEI and NOAA
New England’s historical and cultural identity is inextricably linked to the ocean that laps at nearly 6,200 miles of coastline. And the region’s ocean waters are warming, and not just a little.
The above chart shows just how much the ocean has warmed over the past 65 years and, due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, the heat dumped into the ocean has doubled since 1993. It is even more concerning that ocean warming has accelerated since 2010.
The world’s oceans, in 2021, were the hottest ever recorded by humans.
The findings of the data from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have been confirmed by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, China’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics, and the Japan Meteorological Agency’s Meteorological Research Institute.
The news for New England is worse, as the ocean here is heating up faster than that of the rest of the world.
This map illustrates the seasonally averaged sea-surface temperature anomaly in the Gulf of Maine.
—Gulf of Maine Research Institute
The Gulf of Maine Research Institute announced that between September and November of last year, the warmth of inlet waters adjacent to Maine and northern Massachusetts was the highest on record.
“This year [the Gulf of Maine] was exceptionally warm,” said Kathy Mills, who runs the Integrated Systems Ecology laboratory at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. “I was very surprised.”
The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 96 percent of the world’s oceans, increasing at a rate of 0.1 degrees Celsius (0.18 degrees Fahrenheit) annually over the past four decades.
The increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere traps heat in the air. The air in contact with the ocean transfers heat to the ocean, increasing what is called the ocean heat content (OHC).
The first measurements of ocean data were taken on Capt. James Cook’s second voyage (1772-1775). Although not very accurate, those measurements were among the first instances of oceanographic data recorded and preserved.
Today, ocean measurements are taken by a variety of modern instruments deployed from ships, airplanes, satellites and, more recently, underwater robots. A 2013 study by John Abraham, a professor at the University of St. Thomas, contains an interesting historical overview of ocean measurements.
Abraham’s study used data from new instruments, such as expendable bathythermographs and Argo floats. The Argo program is an array of more than 3,000 autonomous floats that return oceanic climate data and has advanced the breadth, quality and distribution of oceanographic data.
As heat accumulates in the Earth’s oceans, they expand in volume, making this expansion one of the largest contributors to sea-level rise.
Although concentrations of greenhouse gases have risen steadily, the change in ocean-heat content varies from year to year, as the chart above shows. Year-to-year changes are influenced by events, such as volcanic eruptions and recurring patterns such as El Niño. In fact, in the chart one can detect short-term cooling from major volcanic eruptions of Mounts Agung (1963), El Chichón (1982) and Pinatubo (1991).
The ocean’s temperature plays an important role in the Earth’s climate crisis because heat from ocean surface waters provides energy for storms and influences weather patterns.
Roger Warburton, Ph.D., is a Newport, R.I., resident. He can be reached at rdh.warburton@gmail.com.
References: Cheng, L. J, and Coauthors, 2022, “Another record: Ocean warming continues through 2021 despite La Niña conditions. Adv. Atmos. Sci., https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-022-1461-3.
Abraham, J. P., et al. (2013), “A review of global ocean temperature observations: Implications for ocean heat content estimates and climate change,” Rev. Geophys.,51, 450–483, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rog.20022.
Llewellyn King: Climate crisis, population growth and a solution; N.E.'s densest community
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It wasn’t front and center at the recent climate-change summit, COP26, in Glasgow, but it was whispered about informally, in the corridors and over meals.
For politicians, it is flammable, for some religions, it is heresy. Yet it begs a hearing: the growth of global population.
While the world struggles to decarbonize, saving it from catastrophic sea-level rise and the other disasters associated with climate change, there is no recognition officially anywhere that population plays a critical part.
People do things that cause climate change from burning coal to raising beef cattle. A lot of people equal a lot of pollution equals a big climate impact, obvious and incontrovertible.
In 1950, the global population was at just over 2.5 billion. This year, it is calculated at 7.9 billion. Roughly by mid-century, it is expected to increase by another 2 billion.
There is a ticking bomb, and it is us.
There was one big, failed attempt to restrict population growth: China’s one-child policy. Besides being draconian, it didn’t work well and has been abandoned.
China is awash with young men seeking nonexistent brides. While the program was in force from 1980 to 2015, girls were aborted and boys were saved. The result: a massive gender imbalance. One doubts that any country will ever, however authoritarian its rule, try that again.
There is a long history to population alarm, going back to the 18th century and Thomas Malthus, an English demographer and economist who gave birth to what is known as Malthusian theory. This states that food production won’t be able to keep up with the growth in human population, resulting in famine and war; and the only way forward is to restrict population growth.
Malthus’s theory was very wrong in the 18th Century. But it had unfortunate effects, which included a tolerance of famine in populations of European empire countries, such as India. It also played a role in the Irish Great Famine of 1845-53, when some in England thought that this famine, caused by a potato blight, was the fulfillment of Malthusian theory, and inhibited efforts to help the starving Irish. Shame on England.
The Boston Irish Famine Memorial is on a plaza between Washington Street and School Street. The park contains two groups of statues to contrast an Irish family suffering during the Great Famine of 1845–1852 with a prosperous family that had emigrated to America. Southern New England was a focal point for Irish immigrants to America, and Irish-Americans still comprise the largest ethnic group in much of the region.
The idea of population outgrowing resources was reawakened in 1972 with a controversial report titled “Limits to Growth” from the Club of Rome, a global think tank.
This report led into battles over the supply of oil when the energy crisis broke the next year. The anti-growth, population-limiting side found itself in a bitter fight with the technologists who believed that technology would save the day. It did. More energy came to market, new oil resources were discovered worldwide, including in the previously mostly unexplored Southern Hemisphere.
Since that limits-to-growth debate, the world population has increased inexorably. Now, if growth is the problem, the problem needs to be examined more urgently. I think that 2022 is the year that examination will begin.
Clearly, no country will wish to go down the failed Chinese one-child policy, and anyway, only authoritarian governments could contemplate it. Free people in democratic countries don’t handle dictates well: Take, for example, the difficulty of enforcing mask-wearing in the time of the Covid pandemic in the United States, Germany, Britain, France and elsewhere.
If we are going to talk of a leveling off world population we have to look elsewhere, away from dictates to other subtler pressures.
There is a solution, and the challenge to the world is whether we can get there fast enough.
That solution is prosperity. When people move into the middle class, they tend to have fewer children. So much so that the non-new-immigrant populations are in decline in the United States, Japan and in much of Europe -- including in nominally Roman Catholic France and Italy. The data are skewed by immigration in all those countries -- except Japan, where it is particularly stark. It shows that population stability can happen without dictatorial social engineering.
In the United States, the not-so-secret weapon may be no more than the excessive cost of college.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Web site: whchronicle.com
Occupying slightly over 4 square miles, with a population of 81,360 (as of the 2019 Census) (including a myriad of immigrants from all over the world), Somerville is the most densely populated community in New England and one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the nation.
Caitlin Faulds: Trying to keep climate change from turning more toxic at N.E. waste sites
Providence County, in Rhode Island, and Suffolk County, in Massachusetts, are two of the most at-risk counties in New England from pollution buried at toxic sites.
— Conservation Law Foundation map
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
Hazardous-waste sites and chemical facilities pockmark New England, leftovers of the region’s industrial past. And little action is being taken to prevent climate change from affecting these sites and cooking up a toxic future, according to analysts at the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF).
A regional report by CLF Massachusetts released this fall combined projections of climate risk with data on social vulnerability and hazardous- waste sites to build a comprehensive map of anticipated toxic-pollution risk from Connecticut to Maine. The results, which show that much of New England could face compounding threats, are startling — even to the mapmakers.
“I bought a house like six months ago … and was actually surprised by the number ... of [Superfund] sites that are in such close proximity to residential neighborhoods,” said Deanna Moran, CLF Massachusetts director of environmental planning. “It’s a little bit scary, but it’s a healthy amount of fear.”
In Rhode Island, Providence County was determined to be the county at highest risk, due to a combination of moderate wildfire risk, severe heat risk, high social vulnerability and 143 hazardous sites. Massachusetts’ s Suffolk County, which includes Boston, was deemed most at-risk in New England.
“A lot of people don’t realize how ubiquitous hazardous sites are, even Superfund sites are, throughout our region,” Moran said. “Even if a site is under remediation or fully remediated, those are the sites that we are still worried about because they were remediated without climate change at the forefront.”
The county-level analysis factors in risk associated with nearly 3,000 hazardous sites. These New England locations include landfills, Superfund sites, brownfields and 1,947 facilities across the region that generate large quantities of hazardous waste or are permitted for the treatment, storage or disposal of toxic chemicals. Many of these hazardous sites are aging, use failing technology, and/or do not have sufficient safeties in place to protect nearby communities in a warmer world, according to the CLF report.
“The techniques that we used to remediate those sites 20 years ago might not anticipate more extreme precipitation or flooding or heat,” Moran said, “and those are the ones that I think are really concerning ’cause they’re really not on the radar.”
Floods could damage infrastructure containing hazardous waste, trigger chemical fires, hinder technology monitoring toxic pollution, and create a toxic stew of floodwater and contaminants, according to the report. Rising temperatures could damage protective caps over contaminated properties and raise the toxicity level of some materials. Wildfires could ravage hazardous-waste sites, damaging protective infrastructure and releasing airborne contaminants.
The lineup of climate risks — which, according to CLF Massachusetts policy analyst Ali Hiple, were “weighted equally” in the report — paints a bleak scene of the region’s future, a future that has been glimpsed in isolated events across the country in recent years.
“Luckily, we have not seen that type of impact in the New England region yet, but we want to make sure that we’re being proactive now and not reactive later,” Moran said.
But despite knowing the dangers that climate poses, federal agencies “are not doing enough to address them, and that puts our communities in danger,” according to the CLF report. In 2019, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report suggested the Environmental Protection Agency should consider climate to ensure long-term Superfund site remediation and protection plans.
“We really just want to see the EPA really leading on this,” said Saranna Soroka, a legal fellow at CLF Massachusetts. “They’ve indicated they know the risk that climate change poses to these sites … but we want to see really consistent, really clear standards applied.”
Soroka noted that the federal agency could analyze climate impact as part of its existing Superfund-site review framework, which mandates site checks every five years. So far, climate analyses have not been incorporated, she said, despite EPA authority to do so.
“I think we’re well beyond the time of thinking through how we should be doing this,” Moran said. “We know the risks are real. In some cases, we’re already seeing them, and the time to be acting on them is now.”
Editor’s note: Here are links to EPA-designated Superfund sites in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
Caitlin Faulds is an ecoRI News journalist.
David Warsh: Looking at a ‘three-pronged approach’ to global warming
Average surface air temperatures from 2011 to 2020 compared to the 1951-1980 average
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
The most memorable theater scene I’ve ever witnessed was performed one summer evening long ago in a courtyard at the University of Chicago. The play was Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, a complicated work from the 1920s about the relationship between authors, the stories they tell, and the audiences they seek.
At one point, a company of actors, having been interrupted in their rehearsal by a family of six seeking a playwright to tell their story, are bickering furiously with their interrupters when, at the opposite end of courtyard, two key members of the family had slipped away, to be suddenly illuminated by a spotlight as they stood beneath a tree to make a telling point: their story was as important as the play – maybe more. The act ended and the lights came up for intermission.
That was the technique known as up-staging with a vengeance, an abrupt diversion of attention from one focal point to another.
I remembered the experience after reading Three Prongs for Prudent Climate Policy, by Joseph Aldy and Richard Zeckhauser, both of the Harvard Kennedy School, a sharply critical appraisal of the prevailing consensus on the prospects for controlling climate change. Delivered originally as Zeckhauser’s keynote address to the Southern Economic Association in 2019, you can read it here for free at Resources for the Future. Its thirty pages are not easy reading, but they are formidably clear-headed, and I doubt that you can find a better roundup of the situation that the leaders are discussing blah-blah-blah next month at the U.N.’s Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.
The possibility of greenhouse warming was broached 125 years ago by the Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius. The specific effect was discovered by Roger Revelle in 1957, and the growing problem brought into sharp focus in the U.S. by climate scientist James Hansen in Senate testimony in 1988. It has taken thirty years to reach a broad global consensus about the first of Aldy and Zeckhauser’s three prongs.
“For three decades, advocates for climate change policy have simultaneously emphasized the urgency of taking ambitious actions to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and provided false reassurances of the feasibility of doing so. The policy prescription has relied almost exclusively on a single approach: reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other GHGs. Since 1990, global CO₂ emissions have increased 60 percent, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have raced past 400 parts per million, and temperatures increased at an accelerating rate. The one-prong strategy has not worked.’’
A second prong, adaptation, has been added in to most menus in recent years: everything from design changes (moving electric installations to roofs instead of basements) to seawalls, marsh expansions, and resettlement of populations. Adaptations are expensive. A six-mile long sea barrier with storm surge gates might protect New York City from climate change, but would take 25 years to build.
A third prong of climate policy ordinarily receives little attention. This is amelioration, or “the ‘G’-word,” as the chair of British Royal Society report dubbed it in 2009, meaning the broad topic of geo-engineering. For a dozen years, it was thought possible that fertilizing the southern oceans might grow more plankton, absorb more atmospheric carbon, and feed more fish. Experiments were not encouraging. The technique considered most promising today is solar-radiation management, meaning creating atmospheric sun-screens for the planet. The third prong is by far the last expensive of the three. It is also the most alarming.
Ever since “the year without a summer” of 1816, it has been known that volcanic eruptions, spewing sulfur particles into the atmosphere, produce worldwide net cooling effects. Climate scientists now believe that airplanes could achieve the same effect by spraying chemical aerosols at high altitudes into the atmosphere. The trouble is that very little is known with any certainty about the feasibility of such measures, much less their ecological effects on life below.
Many environmentalists fear that the very act of public discussion of solar- radiation management will further bad behavior – create “moral hazard” in the language of economists. Glib talk by enthusiasts of economic growth about cheap and easy redress of climate problems will diminish the imperative to reduce emissions of greenhouse governance, some say. Others think that sulfur in the air above would accelerate acidification in the oceans below. Still others doubt that global governance could be achieved, since such measures would not offset climate change equally in all regions, Rogue nations might undertake projects that they hoped would have purely local effects.
Aldy and Zeckhauser argue that bad behavior may in fact be flowing in the opposite direction. Climate change is an emotional issue; circumspection with respect to solar-radiation management is the usual stance; opposition to research is often fierce. As a result, very little has been performed. One of the first outdoor experiments – a dry run – was shut down earlier this year.
In his 2018 Nobel lecture, William Nordhaus, of Yale University, saw the problem somewhat differently.
“To me, geo-engineering resembles what doctors call ‘salvage therapy’– a potentially dangerous treatment to be used when all else fails. Doctors prescribe salvage therapy for people who are very ill and when less dangerous treatments are not available. No responsible doctor would prescribe salvage therapy for a patient who has just been diagnosed with the early stage of a treatable illness. Similarly, no responsible country should undertake geo-engineering as the first line of defense against global warming.’’
After a while, it seemed to me that the debate over global warming does indeed bear more than a little resemblance to what goes on in Pirandello’s play. Three possible policy avenues exist. The first is talked about constantly: the second enters the conversation more frequently than before. The third is all but excluded from mainstream discussion.
It’s not so much about what stage of a treatable illness you think we’re in. Public opinion around the world will determine that, as time goes by. It’s about whether the question of desperate measures should be systematically explored at all. The three-pronged approach is a policy in search of an author.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.
Thomas C. Jorling: How to use the highway system, new building codes to address climate change
Map of the current Interstate Highway System in the 48 contiguous states
From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)
Climate change is real and accelerating. It requires an urgent response that focuses all the strategies and tactics necessary to stabilize the Earth’s temperature regime.
The objective to guide research, development and implementation is straightforward: Achieve an all-electric economy. Simply put, all sectors of energy use—agriculture, transportation, industrial, residential, business, etc.—must transition to electricity. Where liquid fuels are necessary, such as aviation, they must be produced from biological processes.
This objective, however, can be satisfied only by transforming electricity generation to alternative—non-combustion—sources that convert into electricity the energy from the inexhaustible clean supply provided by the sun and ecosystem, primarily wind and solar.
As the transition occurs, existing fossil-fuel energy will be replaced and future growth will be accommodated. It is a transition that has historical examples and precedents: wood to coal, oil and gas; horses to automobiles; hard lines to cell phones, among many other examples of progress. Dislocations associated with these transitions have occurred, but they were quickly overcome by innovation and adaption. This has been the story of human progress.
While some elements of the transition require intervention at the national level such as the Clean Air Act addressing health-damaging air pollution, the need now is for federal and state legislation and policy to discipline and make fair the transition from coal, oil and gas.
Needed: A smart grid
There is no question the nation needs a “smart grid” to facilitate the delivery of alternatively generated electricity across geography and time zones. This raises the question: Can such a grid be created without defiling the countryside and disrupting ecosystems? The answer is yes.
A significant portion of the cost of the Interstate Highway System was incurred securing rights-of-way. As a transportation system, it has been highly successful. One consequence, which is greatly unappreciated, is that these rights-of-way represent a tremendously valuable federal and state asset that shouldn’t be limited to concrete and asphalt.
Even a quick look at a national map of the Interstate Highway System reveals a network connecting rural America and urban America. The highway network can also be a connection between and among the same areas for electricity generation, management and distribution. Buried, reinforced conduit along the rights-of-way of the system can connect—and make smart—the grid, enabling electricity to be moved and delivered efficiently and effectively. This will allow electricity, from generation to user, to be managed back and forth across the country as needed in response to changing seasons, weather and time of day.
More than transportation
We need to change these rights-of-way from single-use to multiple-use. This network, already invested in by the public, can accommodate not only an electric grid, but also pipelines and even elevated high-speed rail. Letting the asset represented by this extensive right-of-way network be underutilized is a travesty. It can and should be used for multiple national needs. All of which can help address climate change.
The development of a multiuse right-of-way based on the Interstate Highway System to accommodate a smart electrical grid, expansion of broadband and other networks presents opportunities and challenges for higher education. Among opportunities, use of the highway network can enable rapid expansion and availability of broadband, not just to institutions but to communities all across the country. This would enable all citizens, families and communities to benefit from full access to the internet and overcome the disparities of access to make higher education more available to everyone. Among challenges, using the Interstate Highway System as a multiuse asset will require the innovation of higher-education institutions (HEIs). Ways to stimulate that innovation could include, for instance, a competition among HEIs, especially those with technically oriented capability, to design easily and rapidly installed, low-cost conduit structures on or in the ground for the electric grid on the interstate highway network. HEIs should become centers of innovation and excitement for the societal transformations that are going to occur as the U.S., indeed the world, addresses the challenges of climate change and the sustainability of communities and infrastructure in the quest for a better future.
We do not need to establish new rights of way across the American landscape taking any more forest or agricultural land that plays so important a role in capturing and storing carbon in wood, fiber and soil.
Another grossly underutilized resource is the extensive areas of roofs on structures, especially flat-roofed structures and the parking areas adjacent to the structures, that now cover extensive areas of our landscape. Before human settlement and the expansion of built-up land, these areas captured the energy of the sun in what ecologists call primary productivity: that is, plant photosynthesis converting sunlight into biomass in complex ecosystems. These areas can once again be used to capture the sun’s energy and convert it to electricity.
To this end, the country needs to adopt national building codes to require:
New building structures to be physically oriented and designed, to the extent possible, for maximum use of sunlight, both passive and through photovoltaic systems.
Every flat-roofed structure newly constructed that has a surface area greater than half an acre should be required to install rooftop solar photovoltaic panels.
All current flat-roofed structures greater than an acre should be required to retrofit the roof with solar panels within five years. Creative partnerships between owners, utilities and solar investors and installers could flourish in this effort.
All parking lots greater than an acre should be required to install elevated solar panels. This can be done by the parking lot owner or leased for a nominal or no charge to a solar panel installer.
All forms of federal assistance (such as loans, guarantees, grants or tax benefits) for housing and economic development, should be conditioned on financially support measures to achieve energy efficiency and install solar electric-generation opportunities.
These achievable, cost-effective steps can result in the production of large amounts of electricity and contribute significantly to achieving an economy without fossil fuels. These widely distributed systems, connected through a smart grid, in protected conduits (rather than vulnerable suspended wire systems), could assist in making our economy sustainable and the people supported by resilient and reliable electric power.
Thomas C. Jorling is the former commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and former director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Williams College among other key posts.
The average insolation in Massachusetts is about 4 sun hours per day, and ranges from less than 2 in the winter to over 5 in the summer.
Melissa Bailey: In Mass. and elsewhere, climate change hurts patients’ health
Mount Auburn Hospital's first building, the Parsons Building, built 1886. Patients had to be moved in the Cambridge hospital in 2019 because of a heat wave.
BOSTON
A 4-year-old girl was rushed to the emergency room three times in one week for asthma attacks.
An elderly man, who’d been holed up in a top-floor apartment with no air conditioning during a heat wave, showed up at a hospital with a temperature of 106 degrees.
A 27-year-old man arrived in the ER with trouble breathing ― and learned he had end-stage kidney disease, linked to his time as a sugar-cane farmer in the sweltering fields of El Salvador.
These patients, whose cases were recounted by doctors, all arrived at Boston-area hospitals in recent years. While the coronavirus pandemic is at the forefront of doctor-patient conversations these days, there’s another factor continuing to shape patients’ health: climate change.
Global warming is often associated with dramatic effects such as hurricanes, fires and floods, but patients’ health issues represent the subtler ways that climate change is showing up in the exam room, according to the physicians who treated them.
Dr. Renee Salas, an emergency physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, said that she was working a night shift when the 4-year-old arrived the third time, struggling to breathe. The girl’s mother felt helpless that she couldn’t protect her daughter, whose condition was so severe that she had to be admitted to the hospital, Salas recalled.
She found time to talk with the patient’s mother about the larger factors at play: The girl’s asthma appeared to be triggered by a high pollen count that week. And pollen levels are rising in general because of higher levels of carbon dioxide, which she explained is linked to human-caused climate change.
Salas, a national expert on climate change and health, is a driving force behind an initiative to spur clinicians and hospitals to take a more active role in responding to climate change. The effort launched in Boston last February, and organizers aim to spread it to seven U.S. cities and Australia over the next year and a half.
Although there is scientific consensus on a mounting climate crisis, some people reject the idea that rising temperatures are linked to human activity. The controversy can make doctors hesitant to bring it up.
Even at the climate-change discussion in Boston, one panelist suggested the topic may be too political for the exam room. Dr. Nicholas Hill, head of the Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Division at Tufts Medical Center of Medicine, in Boston, recalled treating a “cute little old lady” in her 80s who likes Fox News, a favorite of climate-change doubters. With someone like her, talking about climate change may hurt the doctor-patient relationship, he suggested. “How far do you go in advocating with patients?”
Doctors and nurses are well suited to influence public opinion because the public considers them “trusted messengers,” said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, who co-organized the Boston event and co-directs the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard’s school of public health. People have confidence they will provide reliable information when they make highly personal and even life-or-death decisions.
Bernstein and others are urging clinicians to exert their influence by contacting elected officials, serving as expert witnesses, attending public protests and reducing their hospital’s carbon emissions. They’re also encouraging them to raise the topic with patients.
Dr. Mary Rice, a pulmonologist who researches air quality at Beth-Israel Deaconess Medical Center here, recognized that in a 20-minute clinic visit, doctors don’t have much time to spare.
But “I think we should be talking to our patients about this,” she said. “Just inserting that sentence, that one of the reasons your allergies are getting worse is that the allergy season is worse than it used to be, and that’s because of climate change.”
Salas, who has been a doctor for seven years, said she had little awareness of the topic until she heard climate change described as the “greatest public health emergency of our time” during a 2013 conference.
“I was dumbfounded about why I hadn’t heard of this, climate change harming health,” she said. “I clearly saw this is going to make my job harder” in emergency medicine.
Now, Salas said, she sees ample evidence of climate change in the exam room. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, for instance, a woman seeking refuge in Boston showed up with a bag of empty pill bottles and thrust it at Salas, asking for refills, she recalled. The patient hadn’t had her medications replenished for weeks because of the storm, whose destructive power was likely intensified by climate change, according to scientists.
Climate change presents many threats across the country, Salas noted: Heat stress can exacerbate mental illness, prompt more aggression and violence, and hurt pregnancy outcomes. Air pollution worsens respiratory problems. High temperatures can weaken the effectiveness of medications such as albuterol inhalers and EpiPens.
The delivery of health care is also being disrupted. Disasters like Hurricane Maria have caused shortages in basic medical supplies. Last November, nearly 250 California hospitals lost power in planned outages to prevent wildfires. Natural disasters can interrupt the treatment of cancer, leading to earlier death.
Even a short heat wave can upend routine care: On a hot day in 2019, for instance, power failed at Mount Auburn Hospital, in Cambridge, Mass., and firefighters had to move patients down from the top floor because it was too hot, Salas said.
Other effects of climate change vary by region. Salas and others urged clinicians to look out for unexpected conditions, such as Lyme disease and West Nile virus, that are spreading to new territory as temperatures rise.
In California, where wildfires have become a fact of life, researchers are scrambling to document the ways smoke inhalation is affecting patients’ health, including higher rates of acute bronchitis, pneumonia, heart attacks, strokes, irregular heartbeats and premature births.
Researchers have shown that heavy exposure to wildfire smoke can change the DNA of immune cells, but they’re uncertain whether that will have a long-term impact, said Dr. Mary Prunicki, director of air pollution and health research at Stanford University’s center for allergy and asthma research.
“It causes a lot of anxiety,” Prunicki said. “Everyone feels helpless because we simply don’t know — we’re not able to give concrete facts back to the patient.”
In Denver, Dr. Jay Lemery, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said he’s seeing how people with chronic illnesses like diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease suffer more with extreme heat.
There’s no medical code for “hottest day of the year,” Lemery said, “but we see it; it’s real. Those people are struggling in a way that they wouldn’t” because of climbing temperatures, he said. “Climate change right now is a threat multiplier — it makes bad things worse.”
Lemery and Prunicki are among the doctors planning to organize events in their respective regions to educate peers about climate-related threats to patients’ health, through the Climate Crisis and Clinical Practice Initiative, the effort launched in Boston in February.
“There are so many really brilliant, smart clinicians who have no clue” about the link between climate change and human health, said Lemery, who has also written a textbook and started a fellowship on the topic.
Salas said she sometimes hears pushback that climate change is too political for the exam room. But despite misleading information from the fossil fuel industry, she said, the science is clear. Based on the evidence, 97 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming.
Salas said that, as she sat with the distraught mother of the 4-year-old girl with asthma in Boston, her decision to broach the topic was easy.
“Of course I have to talk to her about climate change,” Salas said, “because it’s impairing her ability to care for her daughter.”
Melissa Bailey is a reporter for Kaiser Health News.
Melissa Bailey: @mmbaily
David Warsh: Getting beyond despair: Three prongs to address climate change
— By Adam Peterson
Flooding caused by Super Storm Sandy in Marblehead, Mass., on Oct. 29, 2012
From economicprincipals.com
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Weighed down by not knowing what to expect of the coronavirus timetable, I spent a day last week reading about climate change. Specifically, I read Three Prongs for Prudent Climate Policy, by Joseph Aldy and Richard Zeckhauser, both of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
Paradoxically I came away feeling better. Grim though the situation they describe is, theirs is anything but a counsel of despair.
For three decades, advocates for climate change policy have simultaneously emphasized the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and provided unrealistic reassurances of the feasibility of doing so. It hasn’t worked out, say Alby and Zeckhauser.
The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 imposed binding commitments on industrial nations to reduce emissions below 1990 levels in a decade. They exceeded them. Even so, global carbon dioxide emission grew 57 percent over the same ten years, because developing nations hadn’t joined the accord.
So the Paris Agreement of 2015 established “pledge and review” commitments by from virtually every nation in the world, designed to prevent warming of more than 2 degrees centigrade by 2030. But even if every country honors its pledge, the policy is unlikely to succeed in meeting the target, say Aldy and Zeckhauser,
That’s because what’s already in the atmosphere is a stock, not a flow. From the pre-industrial period to 1990, carbon dioxide concentration increased by about 75 parts per million. Since 1990, CO2 has increased by another 55 parts per million, and despite the agreements, the rate of increase is apparently accelerating.
Meanwhile, global temperature have increased around half a degree centigrade in the last 30 years. They are likely to rise faster in the years ahead. Storms, droughts, floods, fires, melting will increase. Mass migrations in response to these weather events have barely begun.
So, the authors say, after 30 years of single-minded stress on emission reductions in climate change discourse, two other policy prongs are urgently needed.
One of these headings, adaptation, is well-known and uncontroversial, except that it costs a lot in more complicate applications than in simple adjustments. Moving heating plants from basements to upper stories so that equipment is not damaged by flooding is simple and relatively cheap. Sea barriers and storm gates to protect coastal cities are another. The sea wall to protect the Venice lagoon is almost finished, but the Army Corps of Engineers plan to protect New York City would take 25 years to construct.
The other strut, amelioration, is considerably less discussed, mainly for fear of the ease with which the remedy may be embraced, once the cost differences are better understood. “Solar radiation management” means putting a sunscreen into the sky – most likely sulfur particles injected into the upper atmosphere by specially built airplanes. Major volcanic eruptions over the centuries have proven that the principle will work, though myriad details of its practical application are hazy. What’s clear is that so-called “geo-engineering” would cost considerably less than emissions reduction or adaptation, especially if time were of the essence.
The only place I see radiation management brought up regularly in the things I read is in Holman Jenkins’s twice-a-week column in the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. The other day Jenkins noted Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’s intention to spend $10 billion to fight climate change. Don’t spend it touting nuclear power, Jenkins advised; Bill Gates is already working on that. And never mind carbon taxation; that must come, if it comes, from the Left. Instead, why not atmospheric aerosol research?
Right though Jenkins may be about the possibilities of solar-radiation mitigation, he is preaching to those ready to be converted. That’s why I was interested in the Aldy-Zeckhauser paper: they are several steps closer to the mainstream. Aldy served as the Special Assistant to the President for Energy and Environment in 2009-2010. Zeckhauser works in in the tradition of tough-minded cooperation pioneered by his mentor, the policy intellectual (and Nobel laureate) Thomas Schelling.
But if we can’t handle a virus, what hope is there of devising effective policies against climate change? That’s just the point: we can handle a virus. It just takes a year, or, probably, two. The problem of arresting global warming is much more difficult, but if you believe the science, there can be no doubt that disastrous events will sooner or later cause public opinion around the world to come around
Wisdom begins with the recognition that there are three policy prongs with which to address the problem of greenhouse gases, not just one. Slowing the effects of carbon dioxide emissions – while continuing to slow emissions themselves – turns on the next election, and the two or three elections after that.
David Warsh, an economic historian and a veteran columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.
© 2020 DAVID WARSH, PROPRIETOR
web design by PISH P
Frank Carini: How to start blocking catastrophe
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
History will not be kind to many of us, most notably Baby Boomers, Millennials, the Joneses and Gen Xers. We’ll be remembered for savaging the planet even though we knew better. We’ll be synonymous with selfishness. Our hubris will be infamous.
The latest projections from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) aren’t pretty: widespread drought, food shortages, and a mass die-off of coral reefs, perhaps as soon as 2040. Our collective modus operandi will be to ignore the report’s facts, discredit its science, and blame more frequent and intense storms and raging wildfires on everything but the burning of fossil fuels, our unrelenting procreation, and human arrogance, from flatulent bovines to the pesky sun.
We’ve been ignoring climate change for generations. Even though our 140-character attention span was recently increased to 280, the issue is too big for our selfie society to take the time to understand. Plus, if we did, we’d actually have to change our behaviors and reduce our consumption.
The future other generations — and many of us — are facing will be even crueler to the desperate and will be more devoid of biodiversity. More people will suffer and more species will be lost. And you know what, the sad truth is we don’t give a damn — at least not enough of us, at least not yet.
The daily news cycle largely ignores the topic of climate change, because it doesn’t change much from day to day. It can’t be measured in polls, there aren’t many sexy soundbites, and it doesn’t get good ratings. Plus, much of the media can’t be bothered to focus on a slow-motion crisis that impacts everyone and everything on the planet.
The IPCC’s recent report, which was released Oct. 8, warns that world governments have only a dozen years to take meaningful action. The reaction so far to the latest climate warning? You can hear what’s left of the world’s crickets chirping.
With recent climate-change projections being more dire than previously thought, heading off disaster and suffering will require a massive effort from governments around the world. Unfortunately, generations’ worth of evidence shows there’s little reason to believe that humanity is up for the challenge.
The kind of political will and movement away from partisan pandering required to make the necessary changes could be driven by a nagging public, but that sort of pressure depends on the collective public diverting its attention away from the latest iPhone, the escapades of real housewives, the D.C. follies, and the fortunes of sports teams. The odds are against that, which is exactly what the profiteers want. We’re easily distracted when the status quo yells “squirrel.”
For instance, the recent U.N. report, which stresses the need to protect and restore forests, was released two weeks after more than 200 organizations, elected officials, and scientists unveiled their Stand4Forests campaign. The nationwide effort demands the protection of forests as a vital climate solution and warns against false technology solutions such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. The campaign’s message has largely been ignored.
“Climate science shows that we cannot stop a climate catastrophe without scaling up the protection of forests around the world,” according to Stand4Forests supporters.
In Rhode Island, the ongoing debate surrounding the protection of forestland provides a microcosm of the world’s larger problem. During the past several years, Rhode Island has clear-cut forest, both young and oldish, to build a casino and an office park, and to accommodate other revolutionary ideas, such as a fossil-fuel power plant. There’s a current rush intensifying to chop down forests to build solar arrays, to help power our growing collection of mobile devices and televisions. To defend this shortsighted practice, some profiteers have argued that this sacrifice is necessary to protect the environment. They ignore the land we have already ruined for use as potential solar fields.
Just because renewable energy is much cleaner than fossil fuels doesn’t mean that such projects have the right to be sited irresponsibly.
The current recorded amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is nearly 406 parts per million (ppm) — well beyond the 350 ppm that climate scientists have deemed safe for humans, never mind most of the planet’s other living inhabitants.
Nevertheless, the U.S. forest industry, for one, is rapidly replacing much of the nation’s mature forests with younger forests and commercial tree plantations. Degraded and fragmented woodlands are far less effective at storing carbon than old-growth forests, they are more vulnerable to wildfires, and they aren’t nearly as helpful when it comes to flood prevention.
Forests, especially mature ones, also provide clean air and fresh water, are home to thousands of species of plants and animals, and are a vital necessity when it comes to addressing climate change — should we ever really decide to.
Part of a true action plan, according to the Stand4Forests campaign, should include:
Ending subsidies for false solutions such as industrial-scale bioenergy and genetically engineered trees.
Investing in forest protection as a resiliency and adaptation strategy for communities vulnerable to the impacts of pollution and climate change.
Developing just economic transition strategies for communities dependent on an extractive forest economy and provide more options for landowners and municipalities to keep forests standing and thriving.
Rhode Island could also start doing its part, beyond signing toothless executive orders, ignoring policy recommendations, and supporting schemes such as voluntary compliance.
The time is now for Rhode Island and the rest of the world to reflect on our behaviors, actions, and attitudes that are bankrupting the future. The only real answer to mitigating our life-changing impacts is sacrifice. It starts with you.
Frank Carini is the ecoRI News editor.
Joanna Detz: Climate change won't be televised
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
They say that the revolution won’t be televised. And neither, apparently, will climate change.
But you can be sure that headline-grabbing extreme weather events will be. In the past few days, newscasts have been studded with scary militarized weather terms like Bomb Cyclone and Bombogenesis.
Snowstorm, anyone?
The literal media barrage of storm coverage in advance of the Jan. 4 snowstorm in New England sent the usual panicking crowds to the grocery stores, where the masses stripped the shelves of bread, milk and even broccoli before hunkering down, presumably to watch more storm coverage.
[Cut to the shot of the fur-hooded reporter squinting against the wind informing viewers that, “It’s really coming down out here.”]
The mainstream media, in general, do a great job of covering extreme weather events such as storms — it’s their bread and butter (and milk), so to speak.
But the challenge of contextualizing extreme weather events as part of a larger pattern of climate change continues to elude the news media. Perhaps it’s because climate change is a complex and slow-moving disaster, and one that’s difficult to distill into word cocktails that trigger clicks, hashtags, and retweets.
It could be the media is simply responding to what viewers want. It’s far easier to think about an impending snowstorm than it is the existential threat posed by human-made climate change. Ain’t no amount of bread and milk gonna fix that.
As I watch the falling snow — or is it the “bombing” snow? — I’m still waiting for the day that climate change will begin to inspire the same level of action, anxiety, and preparation that motivates the bread-and-milk crowd before a winter snowstorm.
So, here’s a thought. Let’s start by eliminating the hyperbole around weather terminology. Here are some suggested replacements:
Bomb Cyclone (n.) Snowstorm
Nor’easter (n.) Snowstorm
Bombogenesis (n.) Snowstorm
Snowmageddeon (n.) Snowstorm
Frankenstorm (n.) Snowstorm
As for Climate Change (n.), we need to come up with a far scarier term to get prime media placement and the accompanying attention of those bread-and-milk folks. Please send suggestions to jo@ecoRI.org, subject line: Triple Doppler Threat Tracker.
Joanna Detz is the executive director of ecoRI News.
James P. Freeman: Why Mass. AG Healey should be ousted
In his dutiful and forceful concession remarks in November 2014, John Miller, the Republican candidate that year for Massachusetts attorney general, gave fair warning: “The fight for impartial, fact-based justice from a non-partisan attorney general goes on.” Miller, even in defeat, believed – and presumably feared — that the Bay State was still in “desperate need” of an attorney general who would take a “professional, not a political approach” to the office.
His fears are confirmed.
In June of 2016, it is now evident that the winner that November night, Maura Healey, is using her office to punish those whose views of public policy differ from her own. As a consequence, Healey is no longer fit to hold the office of attorney general.
As reported last week, Healey is now using the power of her office to investigate conservative groups with supposed ties to ExxonMobil. Her subpoena charges that the oil giant lied to shareholders and consumers about the risks of global warming in its communications and shareholder filings.
Healey is seeking 40 years-worth of ExxonMobil documents and communications with right-leaning “think tanks.” Locally, these include the Beacon Hill Institute and Acton Institute. According to The Boston Herald, the basis of the investigation is “deceptive business practices.” The energy company countered by filing a federal lawsuit claiming, rightly, that Healey’s action is no more than a “fishing expedition,” part of a “political agenda,” and the attorney general is “abusing the power of government.” It is a disgracefully overt political maneuver.
Remarkably, both the Left and Right have been critical of state attorneys-general engaged in this scrutiny of ExxonMobil. Harvey Silverglate, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union in Massachusetts, called the investigation “pure harassment.” Added Silverglate, “It’s not the way scientific or factual or even political battles are settled in this country, which last I checked is still a free country.” The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel wrote that the attack on ExxonMobil is really a “front,” and that the real target is “a broad array of conservative activist groups.”
So this is what we have come to in Massachusetts: a hyper-partisan attorney general, motivated by political expediency, who believes that ExxonMobil defrauded the public and its shareholders by systematically advancing the idea of “climate denial.” Seriously.
Where is the outrage on Beacon Hill? Where is the outrage from the prestige media in greater Boston?
Perhaps more so than any other Massachusetts elected official – including Sen. Elizabeth Warren — Healey is the penultimate programmed progressive. Her core belief-system centers around identity politics and so-called diversity… of everything; except political thought.
On her Web site, maurahealey.com, Healy calls herself the “People’s Lawyer” (she is, apparently, the lawyer of all of the people, except, that is, conservative people). In a January posting she brags that she is “looking ahead to the challenges around the bend and we’re already pushing hard on our top priorities.” ExxonMobil’s thoughts on so-called climate disruption are a priority for the people of Massachusetts?
Healey’s behavior is reminiscent of the Lois Lerner and IRS scandal from a few years ago. Then, as now, conservative groups were targeted under a legal pretense. If Healey’s actions were based in fact and based on the law, warranting the full force and authority of her office, why hasn’t she called for the complete divestiture of ExxonMobil investments by the state’s pension system (which in 2015 was valued at $151 million in the Domestic Equity portfolio)?
Among the first official undertakings by Healey in 2015 was a social-media “campaign.” It involved the collection of testimonials from same-sex couples for an amicus brief that was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, supporting national recognition of gay marriage. However laudable, such time and expense amounted to a political lagniappe but not a legal imperative.
In Massachusetts, it seems identity politics is a greater priority than identity theft, which should be a priority.
Identity theft – the unauthorized use of personal information to defraud or commit crimes – is the fastest-growing crime in America. The Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security notes that victims spend “between 30-60 hours of their time” and “approximately $1,000 of their own money clearing up the problem.”
The Boston Globe noted two years ago that 1.2 million people in the Commonwealth had personal information and financial data compromised in 2013. In February 2015, a “data breach” occurred at insurer Anthem, compromising personal information of 78.8 million Americans. One million of those reside in Massachusetts.
But don’t tell that to Healey.
On mass.gov/ago, victims are cautioned: “You should be aware that not all identity-theft complaints can or will be investigated.” These people, unlike ExxonMobil, will likely not be accorded a vigorous campaign. What is unsettling is that Healey and fellow progressives believe they can effectively combat climate disruption to their satisfaction but not identity theft.
Healey will probably not resign from office. She also probably not be impeached under the articles of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. As a last resort, however, she should be recalled. Interestingly, the voter initiative and referendum provisions in the constitution specifically exclude the recall/removal of judges. But the Constitution is silent regarding recall/removal of executive branch officers.
Let the petition begin.
James P. Freeman is a columnist for The New Boston Post.
Janet Redman: Climate change at Trump properties
Via OtherWords.org
Newsflash: Donald Trump isn’t as retrograde on climate change as we thought. It turns out he’s well aware of the dangers of global warming — at least to his golf courses.
The Republican presidential hopeful is so concerned, in fact, that he’s petitioned the Irish government to let him build a seawall to secure his luxury golf course and hotel on the County Clare seaside.
According to an application filed by one of Trump’s companies, to “do nothing” as the ocean continues to eat away at the waterfront greens would pose a “real and immediate risk” to Trump’s beachfront property. And it explicitly cites rising global temperatures as the root of those threats.
As any good neighbor would, the real estate magnate also sounded the alarm to local residents. A brochure circulated by his company to surrounding towns makes the case for coastal protection, pointing out that more frequent storms brought on by global warming will increase the rate at which beaches disappear in the coming decades.
Climate change, Trump seems to be saying, is an existential threat to his Irish golf course. But what does he say about it here in the United States? It’s a Chinese-orchestrated “hoax.” It’s “BS.” It’s “pseudo-science.”
It doesn’t stop there. Trump’s also picked a pro-oil and coal climate denier as a top energy adviser. And he’s promised to trash domestic rules and international agreements that cut carbon pollution.
Apparently the billionaire-turned-politician is happy to appeal for government support to protect his overseas assets. But he’s not on board with public policies meant to keep his fellow Americans and their homes safe.
And the threat to his fellow Americans is very real.
A recent study by the humanitarian group Christian Aid calculated that 34 million people in the United States — that’s 10 percent of us — will be living in towns and cities exposed to coastal flooding by 2030. The Eastern Seaboard is especially at risk.
Miami ranks eighth for world cities whose residents face being washed out. It’s forecast to shoulder the highest financial costs from rising oceans of anywhere on earth, with $3.5 trillion in exposed assets over the next 50 years alone. New York City, Trump’s hometown, comes in a close third at $2.1 trillion in expected losses.
But when the storms come, it won’t be people like Trump who pay the biggest price.
After extreme coastal storms, ordinary families face formidable obstacles to accessing insurance payouts to cover the costs of rebuilding their lives. Billionaires like Donald Trump, on the other hand, can call a private jet to whisk them off to their second (or third) home.
You can bet that if Trump knows climate change is bad for business at his golf course, he knows it’s bad for business, period — small and large, in Ireland or here in the United States. But he’s happy to let the sea swallow our homes, as long as his own property gets a wall.
That double standard should give voters across the political spectrum pause. It’s not about blue or red. It’s about a brash billionaire thinking that his interests are more important than everyone else’s.
Janet Redman directs the Climate Policy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Don Pesci: Senator Murphy's bizarre climate-Mideast brutality link
Only a few years ago a politician might have been laughed out of Congress for postulating that the troubles in the Middle East – Islamic irredentism; the emergence of Iran, still considered a terrorist state, as a regional Middle East power; the attempt by Shiites, rebuffed during the Iraq war, to establish a caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria; the threats against the United States and other Western nations that pour like a flood of mighty waters from the throats of its former enemies; the scurrying of foreign states once friendly to the United States from a U.S to a Russian protectorate; the sea of women, children and young men murdered, homeless and enslaved Christians, immigrant hordes persecuted by Islamic terrorists now flooding Europe’s shores, largely owing to the recession of U.S. power and influence in the Middle East; all this and more -- were traceable to global warming, the tocsin of a boisterous environmental movement.
The civil wars in Syria and Mali, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, noted in a New Haven Register interview “… were preceded by a ‘massive multi-year drought,’ which were consequences of global warming. ‘The instability that we are seeing in the Middle East and in Africa is today the result of climate change,’ with more challenges coming, Murphy said.”
The connection between global warming and world-altering disturbances in the Middle East, remote at best, is one of the CliffsNotes taken from the current Democratic Party campaign playbook. The global warming bell will be sounded ad nauseam during the coming political campaigns. Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has already warmly embraced the queer notion. Surprisingly, Mr. Murphy has thrown his support to Hillary Clinton, not Sanders.
Mr. Murphy’s current term in office ends January 2019, and so he can well afford to flourish ideological banners on behalf of movement progressives, which includes the environmental lobby. Nothing Mr. Murphy says, however absurd, will cost him a vote in the near future. Mr. Murphy’s present assertion entails no immediate political cost to him; it is a form of cheap grace. Mr. Murphy’s comrade in the Senate, Dick Blumenthal, is up for re-election in the current cycle, and the remote prospect of losing an election has made the always cautious Mr. Blumenthal wary. Off-election year senators are usually able to find their spines.
Mr. Murphy’s assertion – Middle East instability is caused by climate change -- is a near-perfect example of the post hoc fallacy, which may be stated as follows: A occurred, then B occurred; therefore, A caused B. The rooster Chanticleer crowed, then the sun rose; therefore, the crowing caused the sun to rise.
Messy thinking is the principal cause of a messy foreign policy, and the Obama administration is full of threadbare thoughts. Dangerous errors in foreign policy are the product of political procrusteanism, which occurs when politicians seek to fit the wide and various world into their narrow ideological beds: Feet are lopped off, fingers are sheered away, and one ends up with a dead and useless mutilated corpse, an apt description of U.S. foreign policy in the Age of Obama. Far-fetched claims such as those made by Mr. Sanders and seconded by Mr. Murphy obscure the wreckage. But these bizarre notions can be exploded by an application of “Occam’s Razor,” which holds that the most economical explanation of a phenomenon that accounts for all the important facts is usually the right one.
Here is an economical explanation that embraces real-world data in the Middle East:
Syria is ruled by Bashar Assad whose father, Hafez al-Assad, was only slightly more bloodthirsty than his son. In 2012, President Obama drew his famous “red line in the sand” in Syria. He said that the use of chemical weapons by Assad would cross “a red line” that would entail “enormous consequences” and “change my calculus” on American military intervention in Syria’s civil war. A year later, In August 2013, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus was attacked with sarin gas, and Mr. Obama’s red line inauspiciously disappeared.
Concurrent with Mr. Obama’s red line doctrine, American troops that had ousted Saddam Hussein in Iraq were withdrawn from that country, fulfilling an Obama campaign pledge. The improvident withdrawal of troops created a vacuum in northern Iraq and Syria that soon was filled with the soldiers of Allah, peace be upon him, whose ambition it was to recreate a caliphate. They expressed their fidelity to the Koran by capturing territory from the infidel, killing men who might oppose them, enslaving their children and making concubines of their wives. They also drew the sword of Allah, peace be upon him, across the throats of infidel Christians, which caused Mr. Obama to claim that the ruffians were not behaving in a manner that was faithful to Islam, the Koran or the prescriptions of Mohammed, peace be upon him.
Islamic scholars who are more faithful interpreters of the Koran would heartily disagree.
With the supposed failure of President George W. Bush’s policy towards Iraq before her and the imprecations of Democratic politicians ringing in her ears, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now the leading Democratic candidate for president, simply repeated the so-called “policy errors” of Mr. Bush and persuaded Mr. Obama to oust Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi from power. The ouster was a success: “We came, we saw, he died,” boasted Mrs. Clinton. Libya descended into chaos, and the Obama administration – refusing steadfastly to let a crisis go to waste – began shipping war material from a Libyan compound to American-supported, anti-Assad forces in northern Syria. The American compound in Benghazi, Libya, soon was destroyed by Islamic terrorists. It is no exaggeration to say that the terrorists who murdered Christians, among others, in the newly established caliphate and in Paris and Brussels and the United States and Canada and London and the Netherlands were, all of them, faithful followers of Mohammed, peace be upon him.
This is only a thimble full of real-world data that should be included in any assessment of the origin and causes of the bloody mess in the Middle East, a good part of it attributable to Mr. Obama’s failed foreign policy. Mr. Murphy’s fanciful theory that Middle East instability is the result of climate change is little more than a head-fake designed in an election year to draw public attention from inconvenient truths. Mr. Murphy, who certainly is no Joe Lieberman, has until 2019 to get it straight before he comes up for re-election, plenty of time for visions and revisions that time will soon erase.
Don Pesci is a political writer based in Vernon, Conn.