Renewable Revolution

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March 1, 2022


🦕🦖🐍 Developed nations, including the U.S., pushed to remove key phrases and figures relating to adaptation finance, nature-based solutions and solar geoengineering from the Summary For Policymakers of yesterday's blockbuster IPCC report, Climate Home reports. The U.S. led a bloc including Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Norway in pushing to replace the phrase "losses and damages" with "adverse impacts."
 

In the context of international climate negotiations, "loss and damage" refers to a provision of the Paris Agreement in which signatories agreed to aid those hurt by climate impacts. Wealthy countries have fought hard against specific financing for those losses and refuse to accept any liability for their causation of climate change.

The U.S., unsuccessfully in the face of opposition from developing nations led by India, also sought to replace "finance for adaptation" with " investment," 😈  and pushed for more focus on 💰🎩 private funding.

“The Biden administration is not only shutting their eyes to the reality of the climate crisis – they’re trying to blindfold the rest of the world too,” said Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator at ActionAid International. “They appear to wear a badge of  climate leadership, while doing all they can to block those most in need from getting help. It’s dishonest and utterly shameful.” (Climate Home)
The 🦕🦖 Hydrocarbon 👹 Hellspawn Fossil Fuelers DID THE Clean Energy Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, Government corrupting, human health depleting CRIME. Since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks, they are trying to AVOID DOING THE TIME or PAYING THE FINE!  Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on! 

March 1, 2022



While crops are essential to feed the world’s growing population, a new study in Nature Food shows that current practices are not sustainable. Cropland has expanded by an area the size of Egypt in just two decades, often at the expense of forests and other natural ecosystems.

Five major takeaways emerged from this study, including where this expansion is happening, how fast it’s happening and what impacts might occur without better global land use. You can see a visualization of the data by the Land and Carbon Land.

Learn more. 👀

March 1, 2022

Erika Thi Patterson Action Center on Race and the Economy
<email@acrecampaigns.org>

We're demanding these 4 banks stop funding the 🦖 fossil fuel industry

If you bank with 🦕 Chase, 🦖 Citibank, 🦕 Wells Fargo or 🦖 Bank of America, please
join thousands of other customers and sign on to the Customers for Climate Justice Open
Letter to 🎩 CEOs.

March 1, 2022

​💡 SPOTLIGHT

We’re all Sweden now: How COVID fatigue brought us back to herd immunity
Early in the pandemic, Swedish authorities were roundly criticized for the lack of COVID-19 restrictions and for arguing for a different cost-benefit calculation in trying to eliminate the virus at all costs. Now, more and more countries are dropping all restrictions even as Omicron continues to spread. But is this really about herd immunity?

Since Denmark became the first European nation to drop all COVID restrictions in late January, a slew of countries around the world have followed suit — including Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, the Dominican Republic and, most recently, the UK. After almost two years of curfews and mask mandates, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared Monday it was time to “live with the coronavirus.”

And the list of others taking the same path is set to grow: Italy and Spain recently lifted masking mandates for outdoor spaces, while French authorities have announced indoor masking will no longer be mandated starting next week. Meanwhile, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer harkens “a dignified spring awakening” with most restrictions to be lifted by March 5 — while German Chancellor Olof Scholz hailed last Wednesday “a very special day of the pandemic” after agreeing with 16 state governors on a schedule to drop most restrictions in the coming months.

But all of this rosy talk and rescinded restrictions also begs the question of why this is a special time. Why, as the Omicron variant is spreading far faster than previous versions, and when it’s clear that no nation on Earth has come close to conquering COVID, is it time to abandon containment efforts?

Indeed, public health experts are warning that lifting restrictions risks repeating a wave of winter infections and causing further mutations of the virus. But leaders around the world aren’t listening this time, deciding — seemingly in unison — that the era of lockdowns, closed borders and mask-wearing has come to an end.

The justification? That the healthcare systems in most countries are no longer overburdened — tipping the cost-benefit scales towards the imperative of keeping the economy and society from collapsing.

But let's remember that is the very justification Swedish state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell gave for refusing lockdowns in the first place — and for which he and Sweden were widely derided as a wrong-headed and cynical policy. Tegnell was forced to repeat ad nauseam in the Swedish and international press that this was not, in fact, a concerted attempt at defeating the virus by achieving “herd immunity” with a majority of the population immunized via infection. Instead, this was the very same kind of cost-benefit calculation based on the specific context of Sweden, whose healthcare system was never overburdened and population in favor of light restrictions.

So what do we make of the fact that Sweden’s strategy (held up globally as a case of reckless defiance or some misguided sense of northern exceptionalism) is now becoming the strategy of the world? To be clear, this isn’t saying that Sweden didn’t make mistakes: After all, the country’s Public Health Agency has admitted that a central part of the strategy, i.e. protecting the old, failed as nursing homes were under-equipped and ill-prepared to follow health protocols. In addition, the constantly evolving health and social distancing “guidelines” issued by authorities eventually became too numerous and confusing to be effective.

Rather, the point is that there’s something worrying about our leaders rebranding what was only months ago agreed upon as a dangerous “herd-immunity” approach as a joyful spring awakening.

Of course, we know from history that politicians have a special talent for proclaiming lost wars a victory. Perhaps, as it’s by now hard to see how anyone would score these last two years a win, the narrative around COVID and restrictions had to change. The real winner is what we’ve come to call “COVID fatigue,” where the economic and health calculations are swept aside by the simple fact that the virus has exhausted society.The deepening cultural and political divide over everything from lockdowns to vaccines stand as a sad testament to that we now live in a global society where seemingly nothing — not even a common enemy as lethal as this pandemic — can bring the herd together.

— Carl-Johan Karlsson 🤦‍♂️

 
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February 28, 2022





Remember when multi-shirting white nationalism peddler turned Presidential strategist 😈 Steve Bannon said the Trump administration would bring about the “deconstruction of the administrative state?” Many were skeptical that the administration would be successful at undoing 130 years of governance, and indeed, it may seem like it failed.

That undoing might be underway today, as the Supreme Court hears West Virginia v. EPA, a case The Federalist Society the Supreme Court 🦖 justices appointed by 🦖🐘 presidents who lost the popular vote could use as a vehicle to fulfill Bannon’s promise, and effectively destroy the federal government’s ability to protect the public from any manner of threat, from climate change and more traditional pollution, to bad pharma, financial scams, and food safety inspections.

Because for the past century and half or so, and specifically since the Court decided Chevron v. NRDC in 1984, federal courts recognized a degree of deference in the relationship between Congress passing laws and the executive branch then developing regulations to enforce those statutes. The creation of those regulations requires lots of careful consideration by subject matter experts, like scientists, to set how strict a pollution limit should be, for example, or how low the risk of a side-effect should be for a medication to be approved and sold. Congress more or less sets a goal, and the federal government figures out how to meet it. And when things end up in court, the deference goes to federal agencies, since they’re staffed with the experts who know the issue best. 

But now, the Supreme Court has decided to take up a case against Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which never went into effect. The Trump administration tossed the proposed plan, and the Biden administration is content to leave it dead, because we met the emission reduction goals addressed in the proposed plan without it ever going into effect. Why is the Court taking a case about a law that never was and never will be?

Unfortunately, the likely reason is because a majority of the justices intend to use it to achieve a decades-long plan by conservative, industry-funded legal lobbyists, to achieve what Bannon never could: a deconstructing of the administrative state.

The Supreme Court hears argument today, and the justices will decide in the next few months whether, or more likely how extensively, to incapacitate the federal government’s ability to protect the public. A majority of the justices could choose a path where unless Congress explicitly legislates, for example, that CO2 emissions should be below X million (billion) tons per year, or that it is illegal to sell a specific combination of herbal supplements as a medication that claims to cure COVID or Parkinsons or any other ailment or disease, regulatory bodies like the EPA and FDA wouldn’t be able to do much, if anything, about it.
 
That’s the short version. The long version?

…how much time ya got?

Because there’s lots of reading you’ll need to do to understand the whole ugly story. Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists has an  op-ed in Scientific American, if you want a science take. On the law side,  Vox has a great explainer on the moot case, Richmond Law Professor Noah Sachs  educated us about the possible consequences in the American Prospect, and  Pamela King covered how Justice Kavanaugh (who  lied to Congress, almost certainly committed sexual assault, and still hasn't explained  who paid off his credit card debt) should recuse himself from the case (but obviously won’t), and  Jennifer Hijazi covered the amicus brief filed by Democratic lawmakers.  Karen Sokol explained it concisely at Slate, and Elie Mystal doesn’t mince words about it at The Nation:  Supreme 🦕👿 Court vs. the Earth. Meanwhile,  Sierra Club,  NRDC, and  EDF all have blog posts running down the high stakes of the case.

But it’s a piece by  Andrew Perez in the Daily Poster that we’ll focus on, because Perez focused on the fact that beyond Bannon, this assault on the government’s ability to protect the public from profiteers, has been fueled for decades by the Koch empire.

The Koch network’s chief political arm, 🐘🦖 Americans for Prosperity, led campaigns supporting the confirmation of all three of Trump’s Supreme Court justices: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch. Barrett’s confirmation was a particularly significant win for the fossil fuel industry — she has familial ties to Shell Oil, and refused to recuse herself in a case involving that oil giant.

…

Several more 🦖 Koch-funded dark money groups have filed similar amicus briefs in the case. That includes the Cato Institute, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Mountain States Legal Foundation.

This is essentially the 🦖end game of decades of covert lobbying and legal disinformation, a culmination of hundreds of millions of dollars of PR spending, front group think tank reports, academic-center white papers and good old fashioned dirty politics. 

Unfortunately, with the Supreme Court solidly in the hands of 🦖😈 polluters, there’s little we can do.


Aside from, of course, stacking the courts with enough uncompromised judges to rule in the public’s best interest, instead of polluters’.
 
And if you think court-packing sounds radical, just wait until you see the changes that result from the decision this Court makes.