The Magazine section of the New York Times has assembled a collection of heavy hitting articles around the theme of Climate Change. You may want to bookmark this post as a reference for the years ahead. The issues they discuss are not going away. Each of these articles by itself is at Read The Whole Thing level.
Investors are finally paying attention to climate change — though not in the way you might hope.
If you think the markets will find an answer to Climate Change, guess again. Jesse Baron has a discouraging account of how business and Wall Street is responding to Climate Change. The answer is, as you might expect, maximizing short term gains to increase shareholder value even if it means long term disaster. Would you believe using renewable energy to find cheaper ways to keep extracting fossil fuels?
...No decision had been made to execute a bootleg turn away from hydrocarbons. Exxon’s executives, like everyone in the energy business, had watched as the cost of renewable power tumbled ever lower in Texas, where a lattice of high-tension power lines carried electricity from the bright, windy plains of the far West and the Panhandle to the thirsty cities below. Far from feeling worried, Exxon saw an opportunity. Fracking is a very electricity-intensive method of extracting hydrocarbons. By using solar energy for just a portion of its operations in Texas, Exxon could save on electricity costs and keep more cash. It could profit by turning renewable power back into the hydrocarbon power it existed to replace.
The market isn’t focused on how to make money while fighting Climate Change — it’s focused on the much surer bet of making money from the problems it creates.
...In economics, there is a theory called the Lauderdale Paradox, which the Scottish politician James Maitland articulated in the early 19th century. The theory says that capitalism undervalues public resources, like air and water and soil, because they are so plentiful, and overvalues whatever is private and scarce. A barrel of oil sells for $50 or $60, yet the emissions from that oil appear on no one’s balance sheet.
Baron notes this isn’t written in stone — things can change. The question is how.
As they see it, global warming stands to make corporate security as high-stakes in the 21st century as it was in the 19th.
Noah Gallagher Shannon (and isn’t Noah an appropriate name in this context) has a look at a growth industry in the years ahead: security. As the Pentagon is well aware — and Trump is not — Climate Change is going to cause breakdowns in social order, leading to bad things. Lots of bad things. Per Shannon,
For Pinkerton, the bet is twofold: first, that there’s no real material difference between climate change and any other conflict — as the world grows more predictably dangerous, tactical know-how will simply be more in demand than ever. And second, that by adding data analytics, Pinkerton stands to compete more directly with traditional consulting firms like Deloitte, which offer pre- and postdisaster services (supply-chain monitoring, damage documentation, etc.), but which cannot, say, dispatch a helicopter full of armed guards to Guatemala in an afternoon. In theory, Pinkerton can do both — a fully militarized managerial class at corporate disposal.
So, even as corporations destroy the planet, they’ll be able to hire people to protect themselves from the consequences of their actions. These words are especially chilling:
As Jack Zahran, the president of Pinkerton, put it to me, Pinkerton is a 150-year-old start-up, still pitching the same basic vision: You aren’t prepared enough, and the government is too clumsy to save you.
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Fixing the planet is going to be expensive. Can we stomach the bill for human survival?
Nathaniel Rich dives into the costs of Climate Change — how much, who will pay, how, and can capitalism provide answers?
The most fundamental question is whether a capitalistic society is capable of sharply reducing carbon emissions. Will a radical realignment of our economy require a radical realignment of our political system — within the next few years? Even if the answer is no, we have some decisions to make. How, for instance, should the proceeds of a carbon tax be directed? Should they be used to finance clean-energy projects, be paid out directly to taxpayers or accrue to the national budget? In a healthy democracy, you could expect a rigorous public debate on this question. But such a debate has rarely surfaced in the United States because, as of this writing, only a handful of Republican members of the House of Representatives, out of a caucus of 197, have endorsed the basic concept of a carbon tax — an idea that has its roots in conservative economic thought.
To cut to the chase, Rich has reached a disturbing conclusion:
It has become commonplace to observe that corporations behave like psychopaths. They are self-interested to the point of violence, possess a vibrant disregard for laws and social mores, have an indifference to the rights of others and fail to feel remorse. A psychopath gains a person’s trust, mimics emotions but feels nothing and passes in public for human (with a charming Twitter feed, say). The psychopath is calm, calculated, scrupulous — never more so than while plotting murder. There can be no reasoning with a psychopath; neither rational argument nor blandishment has a remote chance of success. If this indeed is the pathology that we are dealing with when it comes to the climate impasse, then we should be honest about the appropriate course of treatment. Coercion must be the remedy — exerted economically, politically and morally, preferably all at once. The psychopath respects only force.
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Economists have workable policy ideas for addressing climate change. But what if they’re politically impossible?
David Leonhardt looks at the problem of — assuming we can agree on action and want to carry it out — implementing those actions. The simplest way to get off fossil fuels is with a carbon tax — make them so expensive people stop using them. Simplicity is not a virtue, because taxes come down hard on people who can least afford to pay them. So….
All these struggles have led activists to have second thoughts about carbon pricing. John Podesta, who helped direct climate policy in the Obama administration, told me that a new political strategy was necessary. The Green New Deal — a progressive wish list on the issue — includes neither a carbon tax nor a cap-and-trade system. Foreign Affairs recently ran an article with the headline “Why Carbon Pricing Isn’t Working,” by Jeffrey Ball, a former energy reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican who spent six years as the top United Nations climate official, told me: “An economist would probably argue that the most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gases is to put a price on carbon. But efficient is not always what can be attained from a political perspective. I would rather move now on what we can do than wait for economists’ perfection.”
There is no chance of enlisting the Republican Party to support anything that can be called a tax. They have become radicalized to the point where it is unthinkable. The answer — hopefully — is to craft measures that cross party boundaries.
...For a long time, environmental activists have shown an almost compulsive — and in many ways admirable — honesty. They have chosen policies, like carbon taxes, that emphasize the downsides: Energy prices will rise. The Green New Deal and the recent clean-energy ballot initiatives do the reverse. They emphasize the benefits of clean energy and minimize the downsides. “There is a lot of anxiety and uncertainty in America today,” Gunn-Wright said. “Any solution that is tied to tangible economic benefits is going to have a better chance of passing.”
Don’t talk about the costs — emphasize the benefits: health, jobs, security, and the costs of doing nothing. It will still be an uphill fight if the fossil fuel forces want to make it one, but the key is not letting them frame the choices.
At the site of a Bangladeshi town lost to devastating storms, locals make do by
scavenging what remains.
Andrea Frazzetta has put together a photo essay showing what life on the edge of a rising ocean and bigger storms is like:
...Researchers warn that within a few decades, Bangladesh may lose more than 10 percent of its land to sea-level rise, displacing as many as 18 million people. Decisions to leave coastal communities aren’t really decisions at all. Families leave because there are no other options. There is no work. There are no homes. Over the past decade, an average of 700,000 Bangladeshis a year migrated because of natural disasters, moving to Dhaka to live in sprawling slums as climate refugees. Kulsum and Komola have managed to forge opportunity from disaster; they will stay, for now. They will continue to collect bricks to build the new village, even if the new village will most likely meet the same fate as the old one. — Jaime Lowe
Think of it as a prelude for America as our coasts begin to move inland. Scavenging in the ruins will become a cottage industry — and probably a commercial one as well.
The threat of flooding isn’t just a coastal one — it’s one in flyover country as well. Back in March the NY Times had an article that shows it’s not just a country like Bangladesh facing devastation from climate change and water. ‘Breaches Everywhere’: Flooding Bursts Midwest Levees, and Tough Questions Follow. That was followed in April by another monster bomb cyclone. Massive amounts of snow, with flooding expected to follow, and now waves of tornadoes.
Survival is becoming a question more of us will face in the years ahead. Some face it now as a constant threat. (see below)
Local communities are taking the world’s largest polluters to court. And they’re using the legal strategy that got tobacco companies to pay up.
Brooke Jarvis has a tale from South America of a city that could be destroyed at any moment — and Climate Change is the root cause.
...On Dec. 13, 1941, a piece broke off a hanging glacier and fell into Palcacocha, creating a great wave that overwhelmed a natural dam and sent a flood surging toward Huaraz, a provincial capital in the Peruvian Andes, about 14 miles below. A third of the city was destroyed and at least 1,800 people were killed. In response, the government reinforced the natural dam and installed drainage tubes to lower the level of the lake. Huaraz boomed to 130,000 inhabitants from 20,000. Occasionally there was a scare — a rock slide into the lake in 2003 sloshed a smaller amount of water over the edge, causing panic — but to many people in Huaraz the danger began to seem remote. Until it became clear that the lake was getting bigger.
In 2009, glaciologists found that amid the widespread melting of Andean ice, the amount of water held in Palcacocha had increased by 3,400 percent over just a couple of decades. Even more worrying, this melt associated with climate change was destabilizing the glaciers hanging above it, making major avalanches more likely. The regional government declared a state of emergency and began posting guardians to watch the lake around the clock.
Where legislative remedies are lacking, people are turning to the judiciary. If you can’t get government to act, the courts are one way to seek redress. Jarvis recounts a number of actions in the court as people seek a way to force action on climate. They are getting some powerful arguments.
...Heede’s work reveals that, if you include all the carbon extracted and supplied, just 90 companies are responsible for two-thirds of all the greenhouse gases emitted between 1751 and 2016. Even more startling, more than half those emissions have occurred since 1988, the year that the climate scientist James Hansen, then at NASA, appeared before Congress to urge that “it is time to stop waffling” and recognize the clear link between the emission of greenhouse gases and the warming of the planet.
Heede’s data underpins many of the new United States lawsuits, as well as Luciano Lliuya’s claim about RWE’s share of climate emissions. Plaintiffs believe that they can establish fault that meets the required standard of substantially contributing to a harm by combining these estimates with recent revelations that oil companies had knowledge of the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as the 1960s but actively worked to undermine the public’s trust in climate science…
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The path through the courts is a tortuous (and tortious) one; the legal process is not often remarked on for delivering speedy or simple remedies — especially given the resources of the plaintiffs versus the defendants. It is one where progress is being made at least. Will it be enough?