Six on History: Earth Day/Climate Change
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1) Living Through the Climate Emergency, Columbia Journalism Review
"IMAGINE A WILDFIRE was bearing down on your community. Smoke was darkening the sun; flames were hopping from one canyon to the next. The local fire expert, who had been warning of this moment for years, said the time had come to evacuate. Right now.
But the local newsroom wasn’t so sure. Wouldn’t businesses suffer if residents fled? Surely there were people who thought the crisis would pass. Why don’t we all stay put?
That would be an absurd journalistic reaction, of course. And yet, it is still happening every day in too many newsrooms in the US and around the world.
The planet is burning. It’s time for journalism to recognize that the climate emergency is here—and to emphasize that this is a statement of science, not of politics.
Thousands of scientists—including James Hansen, the former NASA scientist whose 1988 US congressional testimony put the problem on the public agenda, and Sir David King and Hans Schellnhuber, former science advisers to the British and German governments have said humanity faces a “climate emergency.”
Why “emergency” rather than “problem” or “crisis”? Because words matter. To preserve a livable planet, scientists say, humanity must take far-reaching action immediately. Failing to slash the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will make the extraordinary heat, storms, wildfires, and ice melt of 2020 a routine occurrence and could “render a significant portion of the Earth uninhabitable,” warned Scientific American."
"Of the many fronts the Biden administration is diverging from its predecessor, the most striking — and likely most consequential — is on climate. For four years under former president Donald Trump, the federal government of the United States cut itself adrift from the broad international consensus. It turned its back on the Paris climate accords, undermined coordination on climate efforts at major summits, boosted the fossil fuel industry and championed narrow national interests in the face of what the U.S.’s own intelligence community sees as a looming global catastrophe.
President Biden immediately shifted course. He restored American participation in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, while recognizing that the world’s biggest economies are already lagging behind in the face of an escalating climate emergency. He issued executive orders mobilizing agencies across the federal government to focus on tackling climate change and has proposed a multitrillion dollar infrastructure and jobs plan that would accelerate the country’s transition to a greener economy.
Biden also tapped former secretary of state John F. Kerry to be the White House climate czar. The former top diplomat jetted off on a globe-spanning tour, heralding the United States’ revived commitment to what he has described as “the decisive decade” of the climate fight. Over the weekend, Kerry held two days of closed-door talks in Shanghai with Chinese counterparts and emerged with a joint statement of intent to combat climate change “with the seriousness and urgency that it demands.”
Those talks ended as the Biden administration prepares for a major leaders summit on climate starting Thursday, where it hopes to catalyze new international action. “Ahead of that gathering, the Biden administration has said it will unveil a more aggressive plan to cut U.S. emissions — probably around 50 percent by the end of the decade, compared with 2005 levels,” my colleagues reported. “That would basically double the goal first put forth by President Barack Obama as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.”
Leaders elsewhere have welcomed the Biden administration’s initiative. “It’s time to deliver. It’s time to rush, and President Biden is 100 percent right to do so,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” that aired Sunday. That urgency, he added, was justified by the pattern of extreme weather-related events of recent years.
“We are living [through] the first consequences of … the climate disaster,” Macron said, gesturing to the need for major emitters in the developing world to drastically curb their emissions, too. “We need to accelerate innovation and ability to deliver. We need India and China to be with us.”
Some 40 world leaders are expected to participate in Biden’s virtual climate summit. It’s unclear if Chinese President Xi Jinping will be one of them. Delegations will discuss a host of thorny issues, from methods to curbing emissions to the burgeoning realm of climate finance, as governments and international donors reckon with the toll climate change is already exacting on poorer and more vulnerable countries.
“It’s not a collection of our best friends,” a Biden administration official told Today’s WorldView, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the event. “It’s a gathering of the world’s major economies, who also happen to be the major emitters. It’s an opportunity for level-setting and to start a conversation with the most important players at the outset of a critical decade.”
As my colleagues explained earlier this month, the main target many are focusing on is the need “to limit the Earth’s warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels — a threshold beyond which scientists predict irreversible environmental damage.” On Saturday, Kerry and veteran Chinese climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua affirmed their two countries’ ambition of keeping that temperate limit “within reach.”
Climate is seen as perhaps the sole arena for substantive U.S.-Chinese cooperation, given the wider animosities that now define the relationship between the two powers. But even there, numerous challenges abound. “The intensifying rivalry over technology could spill into climate policy, where innovations in energy, batteries, vehicles and carbon storage offer solutions for reducing emissions,” noted the New York Times. “Already, American lawmakers are demanding that the United States block Chinese products from being used in the infrastructure projects that Biden has proposed.”
Some U.S. analysts argue that the Biden administration should leverage the support of Western allies to pressure China into reforming its energy supply through a series of carbon taxes on Chinese imports. “Negotiating proactively with China cannot curtail climate change; Beijing would impose unacceptable costs while failing to deliver on its end of any bargain,” wrote Andrew Erickson and Gabriel Collins in Foreign Affairs. “Only a united climate coalition has the potential to bring China to the table for productive negotiations, rather than the extractive ones it currently pursues.”
Chinese officials, meanwhile, do not seem to have placed great stock in the Biden administration’s climate overtures. “The expectations that climate cooperation could help reverse the downward spiral in bilateral ties are largely misplaced,” Pang Zhongying, an international affairs specialist at the Ocean University of China, told the South China Morning Post. “With both China and the U.S. hardening their stance towards each other, it’s getting harder by the day for them to still cooperate on climate in the middle of deepening, across-the-board competition.”
On his missions abroad, Kerry said the Biden administration was acting from a position of “humility,” aware of both the enormous role the United States has played for decades in emitting greenhouse gases and, more recently, in stalling more aggressive climate action under the Trump administration. On the American left, activists and some Democratic lawmakers see climate action as Washington’s moral responsibility.
“Much of the CO2 in the atmosphere is red, white and blue,” Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said at a webinar event earlier this month, referring to the historic legacy of American and British industrialization. “You can’t preach temperance from a bar stool.”
Since 2018, the idea of a Green New Deal has emerged with force in the public debate in the United States thanks to a new-found alliance between climate justice activists and left policymakers. This alliance came to fruition in February 2019 when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D‑Mass.) presented House Resolution 109 in the U.S. House of Representatives. Their Green New Deal proposal assigns the State a key role in coordinating national decarbonization, retraining workers to enable a just transition from dirty industries to cleaner industries, implementing a federal job guarantee, and expanding the welfare state to decommodify essential services.
H.Res.109 does not explicitly mention economic growth as a policy objective, but the idea is implicit in its goals to “spur economic development” and “to grow domestic manufacturing.” Besides, three major policy experts associated with the Green New Deal proposal — Justin Talbot Zorn, Ben Beachy and Rhiana Gunn-Wright—argue that boosting working-class wages and upgrading infrastructure is worthwhile because it would strengthen economic growth, therefore making H.Res.109 “fiscally responsible.” Some, like economist Robert Pollin, go even further by framing economic growth not only as a result of the Green New Deal, but also as its engine. Thus, the Green New Deal should be funded with a set share of national GDP. Growth is desirable, then, because higher levels of GDP will correspondingly mean a higher level of investment being channeled into clean-energy projects.
All of this might sound reasonable enough on the face of it, because we are so accustomed to believing that growth is good and necessary. But there’s a problem. Pursuing growth actually works against the objectives of the Green New Deal, and may even make it impossible to achieve.
The key point to grasp is that GDP growth entails increasing total energy demand. While no robust conclusion can be drawn on the direction of causality, studies show that energy and GDP are strongly related. For example, as much as we like to think that growth in rich countries is mostly driven by materially light services (e.g. finance, insurance, digital platforms), the reality is that the fast growth of the information industry has drastically expanded energy consumption. This is a problem, because the more energy we use, the more difficult it is to cover it with renewable sources. We can see this happening in real time: The International Energy Agency finds that, despite significant improvements in energy efficiency and renewable rollout between 2017 and 2018, global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions increased by 1.5%. Why? Because economic growth is outstripping our gains. The rate of decarbonization would have needed to be about three times faster simply to overcome growth in energy use, and faster still to actually reduce emissions. The importance of both reducing energy demand and increasing efficiency is supported by recent research, which illustrates that, historically, this method has been the pathway for decreasing emissions.
In other words, pursuing GDP growth makes our task much harder than it needs to be. If our goal is to decarbonize the U.S. economy by 2030, we need to be smarter than this. We need to actively reduce total energy use. This is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of empirics. The Low Energy Demand scenario proposed in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 report indicates that, in the absence of speculative negative emissions technologies (such as bio-energy with carbon capture and storage), the only feasible way to achieve our climate goals is to scale down global energy use by 40% over the coming decades, with high-income countries leading the way. The less energy we use, the easier it is to supply it with renewables in the short time we have left.
This requires that we rethink some of our assumptions about how the economy should work. Instead of assuming that all sectors of the economy should grow, all the time, regardless of whether or not we actually need them to, we should think about which sectors we actually want to grow (renewable energy, public healthcare, public transportation), and which sectors are less necessary and can actively be scaled down (SUVs, industrial beef, advertising and so on).
The good news is that the United States doesn’t need more economic growth. We often assume that growth is necessary in order to improve people’s lives. But Spain beats the United States on life expectancy (by a staggering five years) with 56% less GDP per capita. Estonia beats the United States in education with 64% less GDP per capita. Costa Rica beats the United States in health outcomes and well-being indicators with 81% less GDP per capita. And these are not outliers. A total of 41 countries have higher life expectancy than the United States with less GDP per capita. In most cases these high-performers have around 20% to 50% less. For some (Costa Rica, Lebanon, Cuba) it is as much as 80% less.
What explains these countries’ success is that they have robust, universal public healthcare, education, transportation and affordable housing. In other words, provisioning of key social goods is either wholly or partly decommodified, and available to all as a human right. And the empirical record is clear that this is cheaper and more efficient than private, for-profit provisioning (Spain’s public healthcare system costs 80% less than the U.S. system, and delivers significantly better outcomes). This is precisely why Medicare for All should be a tenet of a radical Green New Deal; because it enables people to access the resources they need to live long, flourishing lives, without needing perpetual growth in order to do so."
"Parallel to the Biden Administration’s global climate summit, EARTHDAY.ORG will have its second Earth Day Live digital event, right here. The global show begins at 12 PM Eastern Time.
Workshops, panel discussions, and special performances will focus on Restore Our Earth™ — we’ll cover natural processes, emerging green technologies, and innovative thinking that can restore the world’s ecosystems.
More topics will include:
- Climate and environmental literacy
- Climate restoration technologies
- Reforestation efforts
- Regenerative agriculture
- Equity and environmental justice
- Citizen science
- Cleanups, and more.
Climate Change Lesson Plans for PreK-12 Students
This collection serves as a great resource for educators to find a wide-range of relevant preK-12 lessons on climate change or supporting young people as they continue to lead the conversation around the climate change crisis. What is the difference between weather and climate? How do they impact people and the planet? Are there things we do that can address climate change? Explore curated, free lesson plans, activities and resources from educators and leaders in the field that include content like:
- A Vanishing Island | Global Oneness Project
- Human Water Cycle: Water, Food & Energy
- Healthy Oceans: Preventing Plastic Pollution
Learn more about the March for Science and Earth Day and Earth Day Live. Also, check out our collection, Celebrating Earth Day and Arbor Day.
#7 Collection of 2018
This video lesson aids educators in teaching climate change. Students will learn why the climate is changing, what it means for us, and what we can do about it...
- MULTIPLE SUBJECTS
- HIGH SCHOOL
A week of activities about climate change for ages 9 – 11. Ideal for a week in the summer, or you can pick and choose from the resources available, tailoring the work...
- SOCIAL STUDIES
- K-2, 3-5
