Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Returning Home

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Thursday April 18, 2024 · 5:30 PM PDT

2024/04/18 · 17:30

I decided to celebrate my birthday Monday by returning to Bolinas. It may have been two years since I drove over Mount Tamalpais to visit my old home. A friend accompanied me for the afternoon. We drove by the Bolinas Lagoon — it was low tide. Nothing had changed on the way into town. The farm stand. The nursery. Warren Weber’s Star Route Farm. Suzie Thompkin’s property on the Francisco Mesa.

We parked alongside the community center. Very few people around, a sleepy laid back day. There were only a scattering of shops open — BoGas, the Coop, John’s Store, one or two closet-like storefronts. The tiny house which was once home to the Bolinas Bay Bakery — where I moonlighted making cheesecakes 40 years ago — now sports huge Black Lives Matter signage. A Ukrainian flag was shifting in the breeze. We walked down to the beach on Wharf Road. A woman and her dog were the only people walking in the sand. No surfers. The biggest change to the town was that the post office has been closed for near 400 days now. Folks now have to drive over to Stinson Beach to fetch their mail.

A few people from the old days were on the streets so I had the opportunity to exchange a few hugs, tell people how good they looked, after all these years. My dearest friend, who is a member of the Coop, works the early shift and she had already left for the day. I could not recall how to locate her small cottage which is one of several behind a large fence on a big piece of property situated on one of the dirt side streets on the Mesa.

We drove out to Agate Beach and stopped the car outside the house where my husband and I raised our daughter. So quiet. Tall grasses basked in the sunlight up on the hill behind the house. The air smelled of ocean and pine trees. Invisible birds called out from hidden perches within the branches. The yard was vastly overgrown and several trees had been felled. It was almost like entering into a time warp. I felt as if I could just stroll down the passage to the front door, walk in, and resume my old life. It seemed possible. A Proustian moment. Leaving the Mesa, at the intersection of Overlook and Mesa Roads a sign informed us “There is only NOW.”

Turning left at the intersection, we drove past the Tacherra Ranch and turned off to visit the Vanishing Point Ranch where my daughter rode for nearly 15 years. Driving in on the deeply potholed dirt road, I almost expected I would see Mohave, her white Arabian, still grazing in the grass in his turnout. It was inconceivable to acknowledge that all of the horses that lived there were no longer alive. I yearned to knock on the door, to see if the owner and trainer Sally was around, to share with her that my daughter is still riding two or three afternoons a week. I knew how much she would love hearing the influence she had had on her life. But it felt like too big a step backwards for me to fathom; recollections of those days are fraught with such a deep sense of irretrievable loss.

Tuesday, still under the spell of the magic and my memories, I searched for houses to rent in Bolinas and actually found one on Trulia. A two bedroom about a block away from the downtown beach . Probably too expensive. Probably comes furnished. Lots of stairs. Still, I put in a request for a showing. I received a call and a text from the owner. Called him Wednesday morning to thank him but say I had changed my mind. The big girl in me knows at this stage in my life it would be too challenging and isolating to move back over the hill to West Marin. I only have a few friends still living there. Some of them have passed, others have moved away.

I texted with a friend last night about how painful it was to travel back in time, how powerful the nostalgia and poignancy. She texted back that it would be too painful for her to revisit that period in her life. It was good to know I was not alone in my feelings.

Still, I now have four new tires on my car and I’ve decided I’m going to drive over to Bo more frequently. I did some research on Airbnb and found one that accepts dogs. I’m thinking of starting to drive out every few months and spend a few nights midweek. Maybe start writing poetry again. Brush up on my cheesecake making skills. My next year’s starting to look good.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Thursday, April 11

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Thursday April 11, 2024 · 5:30 PM PDT

2024/04/11 · 17:30

The Climate Reality Project is distributing an online quiz to determine your climate knowledge ahead of Earth Day.

The 60 second quiz can be accessed here.

My daughter told me the other day that she tried out Chat GPT to update her resume and she was impressed by what it spewed out for her to work with. A few months ago, one of the nonprofits I volunteer for asked that I use AI to create content for their new shopping website — I can’t say that I was all that impressed, yet I am enjoying how google searches yield curated content for me on just about any topic. This morning I searched on AI and Climate change and found some interesting information. While there are key areas in which AI is seen to offer promise in addressing the crisis, it doesn’t come without a crisis of its own, namely the amount of energy it relies on.

Here are some highlights …

The World Economic Forum spotlights the “transformational power” of AI in the battle against climate change. Some of the ways it can be employed are:

Predict weather, track icebergs and identify pollution
Improve agriculture and reduce its environmental impact
Map deforestation
Assist with waste management
Clear polluting plastics from the ocean
Predict climate disasters
Help plan low-emission transportation routes.

AI-powered computers are pairing up with drones in Brazil to reforest the hills around the coastal city of Rio de Janeiro, Reuters reports. The computers define the targets and number of seeds to be dropped.

The initiative, which launched in January 2024, is a partnership between Rio's city hall and start-up Morfo, and aims to grow seeds in hard-to-reach areas.

A single drone can disperse 180 seed capsules per minute, which is 100 times faster than using human hands for traditional reforestation, according to the local government.

One of the criticisms of AI is that it uses too much energy. From The Hill this morning AI policy can’t ignore climate change: We need net zero AI emissions:

While there may be some efficiency gains because of AI, we can anticipate a net increase in electricity demand, particularly as the entertainment industry and others develop new and creative uses for AI. This AI-driven increase will likely begin within the next several years, well before the power network has had the time to convert from the current fossil fuel-based system to a low-emissions renewables-dominated one.

Consequently, expect more emissions from the power sector in the near term. Over the longer term, it will also reduce the available carbon budget, which is the amount of future emissions that can be accommodated within internationally agreed temperature targets.

The author suggests that “AI needs to be turned on itself to find mechanisms that result in net zero emissions and even make net negative emissions possible. This should include the development of innovative emissions reduction measures, as well as more ways to increase zero-carbon electricity production with a focus on achievable solutions.”

According to Chat GPT, a recent study by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that training a single generative AI model can consume as much as 284,000 liters of water, which is equivalent to the amount of water an average person would consume over the course of 27 years.

Over at Friends of the Earth, meanwhile, the case against AI and climate change is quite forceful in Report: Artificial Intelligence A Threat to Climate Change, Energy Usage and Disinformation:

AI systems require an enormous amount of energy and water, and consumption is expanding quickly. Estimates suggest a doubling in 5-10 years.

Generative AI has the potential to turbocharge climate disinformation, including climate change-related deepfakes, ahead of a historic election year where climate policy will be central to the debate.

The current AI policy landscape reveals a concerning lack of regulation on the federal level, with minor progress made at the state level, relying on voluntary, opaque and unenforceable pledges to pause development, or provide safety with its products.

“The skyrocketing use of electricity and water, combined with its ability to rapidly spread disinformation, makes AI one of the greatest emerging climate threat-multipliers, said Charlie Cray, Senior Strategist at Greenpeace USA, “Governments and companies must stop pretending that increasing equipment efficiencies and directing AI tools towards weather disaster responses are enough to mitigate AI’s contribution to the climate emergency.”

Letters were submitted to President Biden calling for:

Transparency: Companies must publicly report on energy usage and emissions produced, assess any environmental justice concerns related to developing AI technology and disclose how their AI models produce information in a way that prioritizes climate science.

Safety: Companies must be able to publicly demonstrate their products are safe for users and the environment. In addition, governments should develop standards on AI safety reporting and invest in research that maps the risks AI poses to the spread of climate disinformation.

Accountability: Governments should enforce rules on investigating and mitigating the climate impacts of AI with clear, strong penalties for noncompliance. Companies and their executives must be held accountable for any harms that occur as a result of their products.

UN climate chief presses for faster action, says humans have 2 years left ‘to save the world’

OXFORD, England (AP) — Humanity has only two years left “to save the world” by making dramatic changes in the way it spews heat-trapping emissions and it has even less time to act to get the finances behind such a massive shift, the head of the United Nations climate agency said.

With governments of the world facing a 2025 deadline for new and stronger plans to curb carbon pollution, nearly half of the world’s populations voting in elections this year, and crucial global finance meetings later this month in Washington, United Nations executive climate secretary Simon Stiell said Wednesday he knows his warning may sound melodramatic. But he said action over the next two years is “essential.”

“We still have a chance to make greenhouse gas emissions tumble, with a new generation of national climate plans. But we need these stronger plans, now,” Stiell said in a speech at the Chatham House think tank in London. He suggested that climate action is not just for powerful people to address — in a not-so-veiled reference to the electoral calendar this year.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Thursday, April 4

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Thursday April 04, 2024 · 5:30 PM PDT

2024/04/04 · 17:30

As futile efforts to maintain global heating at 1.5 degrees C give rise to the reality of an apocalyptic future, ideas of intervening in climate systems are being widely funded by governments, foundations, and universities . This week’s search for news on the climate crisis yielded two deep dives by the New York Times into geoengineering. The Times’ Buying Time series investigates the “risky ways” nature is being manipulated to combat global warming.

In Warming Is Getting Worse. So They Just Tested a Way to Deflect the Sun, a San Francisco engineer is experimenting with a device which shoots particles hundreds of feet into the air to determine if it is possible to “consistently spray the right size salt aerosols through the open air, outside of a lab.” The end game is to change cloud composition, and thereby cool the earth’s temperature.

“Every year that we have new records of climate change, and record temperatures, heat waves, it’s driving the field to look at more alternatives,” said Robert Wood, the lead scientist for the team from the University of Washington that is running the marine cloud brightening project. “Even ones that may have once been relatively extreme.”

Brightening clouds is one of several ideas to push solar energy back into space — sometimes called solar radiation modification, solar geoengineering, or climate intervention. Compared with other options, such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, marine cloud brightening would be localized and use relatively benign sea salt aerosols as opposed to other chemicals.

in a sidebar The New Climate Tech,reporter Christopher Flavelle discusses the controversial direct air capture technology already being widely funded and employed, noting:

It’s not unusual for a new technology to gain momentum before the major questions about its efficacy, safety and regulation are resolved. Who deserves the right to alter the planet, and what burdens of proof should they first meet?

Right now, there are no international standards governing these new technologies, even though they could affect the whole planet. As one professor of environmental philosophy told me, “We don’t have a great track record of sustained global cooperation.”

In another NYT piece, David Gelles asks Can We Engineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis?

On a windswept Icelandic plateau, an international team of engineers and executives is powering up an innovative machine designed to alter the very composition of Earth’s atmosphere.

If all goes as planned, the enormous vacuum will soon be sucking up vast quantities of air, stripping out carbon dioxide and then locking away those greenhouse gases deep underground in ancient stone — greenhouse gases that would otherwise continue heating up the globe.

-snip-

Researchers are studying ways to block some of the sun’s radiation. They are testing whether adding iron to the ocean could carry carbon dioxide to the sea floor. They are hatching plans to build giant parasols in space. And with massive facilities like the one in Iceland, they are seeking to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air.

As the scale and urgency of the climate crisis has crystallized, “people have woken up and are looking to see if there’s any miraculous deus ex machina that can help,” said Al Gore, the former vice president.

Inside Climate News reports Geoengineering Faces a Wave of Backlash Over Regulatory Gaps and Unknown Risks reports on efforts to put the brakes on experimenting with the climate. Ideas like seeding oceans with iron and using aerosols in clouds to produce rain, the article says, could have negative consequences — such as drastically changing weather or further damaging the ozone layer.

Though geoengineering has rapidly advanced in the past decade, laws to regulate it have not. In the U.S., companies or individuals planning to inject aerosols into the atmosphere must submit a one-page form with the country’s Commerce Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at least 10 days before, based on a law from the 1970s (see the form here).

Considering the stakes of these experiments, critics say this is not enough.

“There’s no governance on the international level, national governance, there’s no state governance, there’s nothing,” David Bookbinder, a longtime climate attorney who previously served as Sierra Club’s chief climate counsel, told E&E News.

Currently, there is an international ban on large scale geoengineering projects, but this does not prohibit smaller ventures such as the controversial company Make Sunsets which launches weather balloons in Nevada and Mexico which emit particles to reflect sunlight.

From their website:

We deploy our reflective clouds above 12.4 miles (20km) from the Earth's surface using balloons. The reflective clouds stay up for about a year reflecting some of the Sun's rays just like the natural clouds below. Think of it as applying sunscreen spray to protect your skin from the Sun. Just one gram of our clouds offsets the warming effect of one ton of CO₂ for a year.

Atmospheric scientists link Arctic sea loss ice to strong El Niño events

A new study, published in Science Advances by researchers at the University at Albany and Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in China, has found that these events, which typically occur once every few years, might become even stronger due to melting Arctic sea ice.

Climate One Podcast

We’re living through a climate emergency; addressing this crisis begins by talking about it. Co-hosts Greg Dalton and Ariana Brocious bring you empowering conversations that connect all aspects of the challenge — the scary and the exciting, the individual and the systemic. Join us. Subscribe to access ad-free episodes and much more on Patreon.

Latest episode:

Rising Temperatures, Rising Prices: How Climate Drives Inflation

Climate change means extreme weather, shifting landscapes, and generally more instability. More and more, you can feel the impacts of climate disruption in your wallets. Drought is pushing up the cost of candy and leading to shipping delays in the Panama Canal.
Globally, researchers say climate could add one percent to inflation every year until 2035. The costs of car insurance, health insurance and property insurance are rising. And whether it’s tea in the morning or wine in the evening, disrupted climate patterns and extreme weather are making certain foods more expensive.

A First Step Toward a Global Price on Carbon

It didn’t make many headlines, but last week, at a meeting of the International Maritime Organization, something potentially world-changing happened.

The United Nations agency, which regulates the shipping industry, essentially committed to creating the world’s first global carbon price.

“I’m very confident that there is going to be an economic pricing mechanism by this time next year,” Arsenio Dominguez, the Secretary General of the maritime organization, said. “What form it is going to have and what the name is going to be, I don’t know.”

The proposal would require shipping companies to pay a fee for every ton of carbon they emit by burning fuel. In other words, it’s a tax.

Homeowners Say Climate Change Is Destroying Their Home Values

U.S.homeowners are worried that climate change is impacting the values of their houses amid elevated insurance costs across the country fueled by the increased frequency of natural disasters.

Forty percent of homeowners who have had to file insurance claims say that climate change is affecting their home values, according to a survey from Insurify. Overall, 25 percent said climate change is responsible for bringing down their property values, while 60 percent said the opposite.

Stop saying climate change will destroy the world. The truth Is far scarier

Perhaps unfortunately, the evidence tells us not that climate change will lead us to a single cataclysmic point at which all humans, or even all life, will go extinct (although some species certainly will). In all likelihood, there will be life on Earth for a very long time — and we should be very, very concerned about the quality of those lives. The global temperature is going to rise, many coastal areas will go underwater, and there will be more and more extreme weather events. It’s important to realize that mankind isn’t going to die off before things go from bad to worse: Many people will be alive and forced to endure the conditions our species has created.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Global Warming Speeding Up Time?

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Thursday March 28, 2024 · 5:30 PM PDT

2024/03/28 · 17:30

Global warming is causing a shift in the earth’s rotation which is altering universal time, giving rise to the possibility of inserting a negative “leap second” into timekeeping by 2029. A study in Nature attributes this to the melting of polar ice which is making the earth more spherical.

“Global warming is managing to actually measurably affect the rotation of the entire Earth,” said study author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the University of California at San Diego. “Things are happening that have not happened before.”

Since the 1970s, there have been 27 leap seconds added to the universal clock because earth was slowing down. In one leap second the earth rotates a distance which is roughly equivalent to four football fields.

A leap second has not been added since 2016 because the earth stopped slowing down. This would be the first time that a negative leap second has been necessary.

“It is like a weather prediction of a big storm or hurricane. We can’t say for certain what will happen and when. However, we can say there is a higher percentage chance of a negative leap second than say 25 years ago,” Nick Stamatakos, head of the U.S. Naval Observatory’s Earth Orientation Department wrote.

“This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal,” said Agnew. “It’s not a huge change in the Earth’s rotation that’s going to lead to some catastrophe or anything, but it is something notable. It’s yet another indication that we’re in a very unusual time.”

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAid) today hosted the Global Summit on Extreme Heat to call attention to the probability of a “mass-fatality heat disaster.”

This comes on the heels of 2023’s “record-shattering temperatures, when 3.8 billion people – half the world’s population – sweltered in extreme heat for at least one day,” the Guardian reports.

The summit discussed the idea of naming heatwaves to garner them the attention other extreme disasters receive and explored projects such as tree planting and reflective roof coverings which can lower temperatures indoors. It also called for the development of heat action plans by national and local governments as well as corporations, schools, hospitals, and humanitarian groups.

Jagan Chapagain, the IFRC secretary general, drew comparisons to Kim Stanley Robinson’s apocalyptic novel Ministry for the Future, which opens with a deadly heatwave in India that kills millions of people, some of whom are poached alive in a lake they hoped to cool off in.

“It is, for now, science fiction,” he said. “We’re not there, yet. But extreme heat, far less visually dramatic than hurricanes or floods, is claiming lives and livelihoods with a stealth which belies its impact. Climate change is dramatically increasing the probability that we will see a mass-fatality extreme heat disaster soon.”

By 2050, with a temperature rise of 2C, heat related deaths could increase by four times, according to a recent study in the Lancet; China is currently well on the way to between 20,000 and 80,000 deaths annually, according to Guardian reporting.

In an Al Jazeera article Extreme heat is the silent assassin of climate change, Chapagain announced the first Heat Action Day this June 2 which will unveil an online toolkit to assist people in preparing for summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

… Half the world’s people – 3.8 billion in fact – simmered under extreme heat for at least one day last year.

Heatwaves across Europe killed more than 60,000 people in 2022. In the United Kingdom, roads melted and almost 3,000 people died. India sees at least 1,000 deaths a year attributable to extreme heat. In the United States, the number is similar. Extreme heat there kills more people than floods and tornadoes combined.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Having Kids in a Climate Changed World

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Thursday March 21, 2024 · 5:30 PM PDT

2024/03/21 · 17:30

I’ve been participating in a Women’s Climate Group since January where most of the women are of child bearing age and wrestling with whether or not they will have have kids. Being my age, and the mother of a daughter who is not having children because of the state of the world, the issue is fraught with sadness. Not only does my daughter miss out on the joys of having children, I also miss out on the opportunity of being a grandmother.

Back in 2022, NYT reporter Ezra Klein noted the most frequent question he is asked in his podcast is whether or not people should have children given the climate crisis. Klein, noting that folks dedicating their life to fighting climate change continue to have children, referenced two polls:

A 2020 Morning Consult poll found that a quarter of adults without children say climate change is part of the reason they didn’t have children. A Morgan Stanley analysis found that the decision “to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.”

A recent Lancet poll determined “36% of teens and young adults were hesitant to have children due to climate change,” as reported in an article in Tuesday’s Detroit News Some young people planning fewer or no kids because of climate change.

Chicago — Collin Pearsall has friends who have started having children. But he has chosen a different path — due, in large part, to climate change.

Pearsall worries about the greenhouse gas emissions a child would add to a planet already experiencing the effects of rising temperatures.

And he is concerned about the impact climate change would have on the child: “the feeling of impending doom, every day, for their whole life.”

When he and his wife discussed having kids, he said, they found they were on the same page: “Why would we want to bring a child into the world with no consent as to whether they want to (deal with) all these problems?”

The decision on having children a climate threatened world is twofold: not only is there concern about bringing a child into the world, there is also concern about their carbon footprint.

In a Rochester Beaton article discusses how much polluting carbon dioxide can be reduced by having one less child. In How many children should couples have given ongoing climate change? the author cites research which compares the amount of CO2 emissions saved by abandoning automobile use for a year (2.4 metric tons of carbon) to having one less child a year (58.6 metric tons of carbon).

As a second example, research by statisticians shows that if carbon dioxide emissions stayed similar to 2005 levels for several generations, an American couple having one less child would save the equivalent of 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide. In contrast, driving a more fuel-efficient car, i.e., one that gives 10 more miles to the gallon, saves the equivalent of only 148 metric tons of carbon dioxide! In other words, compared to other environmentally friendly actions such as driving an electric vehicle, installing solar panels on one’s rooftop, and reducing red meat consumption, the decision to have one less child has a dramatic effect.

Virtual Reality & Climate Activism

A recent study in Science Communication determined that people are more likely to be motivated to actively support environmental causes if information is presented via virtual reality platforms.

“It’s difficult to communicate environmental issues to non-scientists because the consequences are usually long-term and not easily foreseeable,” said Mengqi Liao, first author and doctoral candidate in mass communication at Penn State. “Not to mention that it’s usually very hard to bring people to an environment that has been damaged by climate change, such as coral reefs, which, based on decades of data collected in part from NASA’s airborne and satellite missions, have declined rapidly over the past 30 years. This is where VR comes in handy. You can bring the environment to people and show them what would happen if we fail to act.”

Participants in the loss-framed experiences saw healthy then unhealthy coral ecosystems, with a message explaining the negative consequences of failing to adopt climate change mitigation behaviors. Those in the gain-framed versions saw unhealthy then healthy coral ecosystems, with messages explaining the positive impacts of adopting climate policies. www.psu.edu/...

UN weather agency issues ‘red alert’ on climate change after record heat, ice-melt increases in 2023

GENEVA (AP) — The U.N. weather agency is sounding a “red alert” about global warming, citing record-smashing increases last year in greenhouse gases, land and water temperatures and melting of glaciers and sea ice, and is warning that the world’s efforts to reverse the trend have been inadequate.

The World Meteorological Organization said there is a “high probability” that 2024 will be another record-hot year.

The Geneva-based agency, in a “State of the Global Climate” report released Tuesday, ratcheted up concerns that a much-vaunted climate goal is increasingly in jeopardy: That the world can unite to limit planetary warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels.

“Never have we been so close – albeit on a temporary basis at the moment – to the 1.5° C lower limit of the Paris agreement on climate change,” said Celeste Saulo, the agency’s secretary-general. “The WMO community is sounding the red alert to the world.”

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Charging Fossil Fuel Companies With Homicide

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Thursday March 14, 2024 · 5:30 PM PDT

2024/03/14 · 17:30

A movement to prosecute fossil fuel companies with homicide is currently being considered along with legislation to hold them guilty of “fraud, deceptive advertising, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, conspiracy, racketeering...” according to an article in the New Republic.

“Climate change is not a tragedy, it’s a crime.” This refrain, increasingly common among climate activists, encapsulates rising moral outrage at major fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP as more information has come to light about their knowledge and conduct regarding global warming. The essential fact pattern is this: Fossil fuel companies have long understood—with shocking accuracy—that their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate change. Instead of shifting their business model or at least alerting the public to this threat, the companies concealed what they knew and executed a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign to spread doubt about climate science.

-snip-

The crime that best captures the nature, scale, and gravity of their misconduct in most jurisdictions might be homicide. In criminal law, homicide means causing a death with a culpable mental state. If someone substantially contributes to or accelerates a death, that counts as “causing” it. If they did so intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly, that counts as “culpable mental state.” So the basic questions in a climate homicide trial are as follows: Did fossil fuel companies substantially contribute to or accelerate deaths, and did they do so at least recklessly, if not knowingly or intentionally? These questions would be presented to a jury. If you think the jury should say “yes,” you’re not alone.

“Meat and dairy should be suing oil and gas”

Big Meat is looking more like Big Oil every day. A new study published in the journal Climatic Change finds that, much like fossil fuel industry, the animal agriculture industry has been creating and funding academic research institutions that claim the world doesn’t need to consume less of their products; that it’s not necessary to preserve a safe and livable climate.

That is, to be clear, not what non-industry funded research says. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—whose findings are compiled by hundreds of climate scientists and signed off on by 195 countries—has warned that the industry-preferred strategy of “technical fixes only” is not moving fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe. “Despite significant technical potential” for reductions in animal agriculture emissions, the IPCC says, “there is evidence that little progress has been made in the implementation of mitigation measures at the global scale.” This is extremely important, because even if fossil fuels were eliminated immediately, emissions from agriculture would still push global warming past safe levels. And meat and dairy make up most of agriculture emissions.

Climate-Science Deniers, Right-Wing Think Tanks, and Fossil Fuel Shills Are Plotting Against the Clean Energy Transition

The Sierra Club magazine discusses the “coordinated campaign to undermine climate solutions.”

For fossil fuel ideologues, sowing misinformation about wind and solar power is proving to be an effective stall tactic. Public opinion surveys show that renewable energy remains popular with a bipartisan majority of Americans; in a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, seven out of 10 people said they'd be comfortable with a wind farm in their own community. But in New Jersey—where Morano's group has gone so far as to buy billboards reading "Save Whales Stop Windmills"—nearly half of all the state's residents now believe that such a connection probably exists, according to an August poll from Monmouth University.

"There is absolutely zero evidence that any of the offshore wind activity has been involved in any of those strandings," says Douglas Nowacek, a professor of marine conservation technology at Duke University. Claims that noise from offshore wind surveys are driving whales into harm's way don't hold water, according to Nowacek—and it bears noting that seismic surveys for oil and gas are far louder. Many of the dead whales have borne signs of ship strikes or entanglement in fishing gear.

Yet in lawsuits challenging offshore wind projects, opponents continue to routinely cite alleged threats to whales...

Newly elected leaders to be held to same climate obligations, says Cop29 chief

Incoming governments of whatever stripe would still have to cope with the reality of the climate crisis, he [president of Cop29, Mukhtar Babayev] said, and the Azerbaijan presidency would hold them to their committments . “I think all countries will follow their obligations, and we will move to this direction,” he said. “I’m optimistic. We will do everything and will do our best to [ensure] all countries move in this direction.”

Noting that elections were taking place in many countries, Babayev declined to single out any specific states but acknowledged that the US election was “a very interesting process”.

It’s Official: America Is Experiencing a Solar Power Explosion Unmatched in History

When reading about climate change, good news is hard to come by—hard but not impossible. Take, for example, this new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association, which states that renewables hit a milestone not seen since World War II this year. The U.S. added 32.4 gigawatts of solar capacity, which shatters the 2021 record of 23.6 gigawatts. That represents 52 percent of all added energy capacity in the U.S., with natural gas coming in a distant second with only 18 percent.

According to the environmental website Grist, California and Texas led the charge, with large utility-scale solar projects going online in 2023.

The Ukraine War Blew Up the World’s Energy Economy

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics unpacks the underlying drivers of inflation into three main categories: food, fuel, and everything else. Throughout the most recent U.S. spike in inflation in 2022, the energy category alone was responsible for around half of total inflation. And that’s just counting the direct effects. Indirectly, a good portion of the food price increases ever since are also due to higher energy costs. If the farmer pays more to harvest the crop, soon those commodity prices increase as well.

Higher temperatures force New England fishers off ice early: ‘Global warming is real’

On a recent Tuesday in late February, with midwinter temperatures pushing into the balmy 50s, fishers on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnepocket were scrambling to pull their bob-houses off the rapidly melting ice.

Johnny Cutter and Ethan O’Neil rushed to slide their ice shanties off the lake with winches and tractor-like all terrain vehicles, before it got warm enough for them to fall through the ice.

“Global warming is real,” said Cutter, wading through puddles in his ice cleats. “I never thought it was, but it is.”

Methane leaks are three times worse than the EPA's official estimate

… the United States is now the biggest producer of methane pollution from oil and gas extraction, thanks to the Permian fracking boom, with actual leakage rate triple the official numbers. A new survey finds mega-emitters responsible for the lion’s share of the pollution.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Get Involved Helping Biden Campaign

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Thursday March 07, 2024 · 5:30 PM PST

2024/03/07 · 17:30

The growing sense of doom encased me as I watched the results rolling in on Super Tuesday. Of course, I was watching MSNBC where I would expect more progressive framing. But even there, as the states reported in, TFGs victories were always announced before Biden’s. The election map depicting where primaries were being held was filled in with red even though democratic primaries were also being held and Biden was pulling in bigger percentages of the vote than TFG. Was this on purpose? Was their coverage being subliminally slanted to leave us with the impression of the overwhelming power of the MAGA movement?

As the live coverage was winding down, my angst grew exponentially when Rachel Maddow and her team discussed how TFG is turning to Elon Musk for funding, From the NYT Wednesday:

Donald Trump, who is urgently seeking a cash infusion to aid his presidential campaign, met on Sunday in Palm Beach, Fla., with Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, and a few wealthy Republican donors, according to three people briefed on the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private discussion.

-snip-

It’s not yet clear whether Mr. Musk plans to spend any of his fortune on Mr. Trump’s behalf. But his recent social media posts suggest he thinks it’s essential that Mr. Biden be defeated in November — and people who have spoken to Mr. Musk privately confirmed that is indeed his view.

Although Musk announced on X that he has no intention of supporting either of the two presidential candidates, I was gripped by the similarities between how I feel about the election and the sense of hopelessness I feel in the face of Big Oil and our futile efforts to address global warming. There are many similarities.

With the Supreme Court, much of the media, big business, and the whole of the Republican party in his corner, TFG can seem too powerful to beat. I was reminded of all the years of climate activism I have engaged in only to find us at the point we are now, where within a decade (or decades) the dire warnings we have been receiving will become reality. Lessons in futility.

Should TFG regain office, he has vowed that “Drill, Drill Drill” will be one of his first orders of business on day one. We can forget about our continued involvement in the Paris Agreement. We can kiss the IRA good-bye.

Both TFG and the climate crisis have resulted in a feeling of learned helplessness for me, a futile feeling of being inconsequential, insignificant, overwhelmed, and overpowered. Both the judicial and the legislative branches of government continue to fail us: the judicial, for its handling of TFGs appeals, its rulings on the EPA; the legislative, for its failure to find TFG guilty in his impeachment trials, for refusing to pass legislation to fund Ukraine, and for cow towing to TFG by refusing to take up the immigration bill; and the media, by its biased over-the-top coverage of Biden’s ‘shortcomings,’ continuing to provide a stage for TFG to spew his venom and lies, and its failure to aggressively cover the climate crisis. I could go on.

The Courts and the EPA

In a span of 11 months, the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered a one-two punch against the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to combat air and water pollution in twin rulings that cloud future EPA regulatory moves, according to legal experts.

Rulings last week and in June 2022 constrained the EPA's regulatory powers over protected wetlands and the emissions of greenhouse gases from power plants. Environmental groups decried the decisions as putting the interests of polluting industries and landowners ahead of public health and the environment. Many Republicans and conservatives lauded the rulings as necessary checks on the power of federal agencies and unelected officials. www.reuters.com/...

The media and Trump

“But by itself that doesn’t really explain the minute-by-minute broadcasting of his private plane arriving in New York Monday or the blanket coverage of his speech yesterday evening. That kind of saturation approach suggests the networks could return to a model that simply allowed Trump to monopolize coverage.”Has the media forgotten lessons learned from covering Trump in 2016?

Former President Trump has said he’d be a dictator for one day, echoed anti-immigrant words of Adolf Hitler, called for terminating the Constitution, lied about America’s election system and vowed to use the power of the Justice Department as his personal tool for revenge. So how should the press cover Trump in the coming year? Laura Barrón-López discussed that with Jeff Goldberg and Jay Rosen. KQED

At the conclusion of her stint in the anchor chair Tuesday night, Maddow said it wasn’t going to be enough for us to just show up and vote for Biden in November. We had to get involved in this election. True, there is no way I will be able to summon up the fervor shared by so many of us in supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012. I recall the joy of being involved in the Obama campaign. Working out of the headquarters in the East Bay, hosting phone banks in my home, being active in the online Rapid Response team created by the folks responsible for the Obama website, the rallies I attended. The time I met him and shook his hand.

Nope, no way I’m going to recapture that magic. But the reality is that the choice has been made: it’s Biden or Trump. And there can be no sitting this one out.

Rachel is right. We have to become involved now! We have to feel that come election day we each have done everything in our power to prevent TFG from retaking the White House. We don’t have time for inertia.

I went over to check out the Biden website Wednesday morning to see what they’re doing to generate interest and involvement. For starters, if you are looking for employment, they are actively recruiting people to work with them … ”from field organizers to digital directors and communications staff. All levels of experience and fields of interest are encouraged to apply.”

Here are some virtual events you can participate in:

Organize Your Community: Friendbank: Wednesdays and Saturdays

Join us to organize people you know and learn about our campaign objectives and priorities. We’ll take action from the lists we build and learn how to use Reach to support our outreach.

We’re building an organizing program around a simple principle: that YOU are the best advocate with the people in your life. Join us for a friendbank & training on organizing the people in our lives with our relational organizing tool, Reach!

Please RSVP so we know if you can make it. This is a virtual training hosted on Zoom, so we recommend joining from a computer and having your phone accessible for our tool onboarding process. You'll receive the link to join on Zoom once you sign up.

For more information on Reach, visit: https://democrats.org/reach/

National Organizing Call w/ President Joe Biden & Other Special Guests: Saturday March 9

Get ready to be part of a historic moment as we bring together President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, First Lady Jill Biden, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, National Organizing Director Roohi Rustum, and other special guests for a National Organizing Call!

Join supporters from across the country to get the inside scoop on our campaign's roadmap to victory in 2024 and learn more about how you can play a pivotal role in our campaign throughout the month of March. You won't want to miss this event.

Sign up today and invite a friend to join, too!

This event will be hosted virtually. RSVP today to receive details to join the call.

In their volunteer section they write:

In the final stretch, we want you and your community to volunteer with us! We have a wide variety of opportunities for volunteers depending on availability, experience and location. We have in person and virtual roles to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to help elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Volunteer opportunites are not yet active but along with in person opportunities in your area, you’ll be able to train to participate in phone banks or texting. There will also be opportunities to attend regional organizing strategy sessions and participate in slack communities.

And then, of course, there’s donations. The NYT reports that the president’s campaign had about $46 million in cash on hand at the end of the year, compared with $33 million for Mr. Trump. But TFG has been meeting with big money donors to close the funding gap.

Reuters reports: “While much of Trump's Republican base skews white and working class, he retains support among some wealthy Americans who espouse conservative social values or are eager for Trump-led tax legislation that benefits the wealthy.”

One complication for Trump: The more he needs funds for his legal defense, the more some donors say they are reluctant to send money that is meant to help promote his candidacy with voters but that could be used to pay legal fees.

"I'm not going to write him a check for $50,000 when I don't know where the hell it's going - to lawyers or who knows what else," said a major California-based donor.

"The biggest grumbling I hear from donors is they don't want to give money if Trump turns around and uses it on his legal fees," he added. He said he had heard that from more than half a dozen donors.

Trump is expected to make a fundraising trip to California in the next few weeks, according to a source briefed on the plans, which he cautioned were still tentative.

Currently, in California, Biden outpaces Trump $14.4M to $8.9M in fundraising.

Head over to the official Biden campaign site and make a donation now.

Let’s do this.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Thurs, Feb. 29

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Thursday February 29, 2024 · 5:30 PM PST

2024/02/29 · 17:30

A WAPO article reported on a study by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy which found that the greenest car on the road today is the Toyota Prius Prime SE, a plug in hybrid. The car only travels 44 miles on electric before switching to gas but additional factors such as the vehicle’s weight, the size of its battery and its overall efficiency were taken into account. “While a gigantic electric truck weighing thousands of pounds might be better than a gas truck of the same size, both will be outmatched by a smaller, efficient gas vehicle. And the more huge vehicles there are on the road, the harder it will be for the United States to meet its goal of zeroing out emissions by 2050.”

The GreenerCars report analyzes 1,200 cars available in 2024, assessing both the carbon dioxide emissions of the vehicle while it’s on the road and the emissions of manufacturing the car and battery. It also assesses the impact of pollutants beyond carbon dioxide, including nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and particulate matter — all of which can harm human health.

Combining these factors, the authors gave each car a “green score” ranging from 0 to 100. The Toyota Prius Prime received a score of 71, followed by several all-electric cars such as the Nissan Leaf and Mini Cooper SE with scores in the high 60s. The Toyota RAV4 Prime, a plug-in hybrid SUV with 42 miles in range, got a score of 64. One gas hybrid, the Hyundai Elantra Blue, made the list as well — thanks to an efficient design and good mileage. www.washingtonpost.com/...

Bill McKibben writes in his substack The Crucial Years As Winter Melts Away

And yet the changes underway on our planet are now so extreme, and so remarkable, that sometimes we do need to stand back and simply gaze in awe and sadness. At my latitude (43.97 degrees north, or very nearly halfway between the North Pole and the equator) the changes in winter may be the most dramatic signs yet. And the most dramatic in my heart for sure, because winter is the time I love the most.

This year in North America has been about as close as we’ve ever come to a year without a winter—the geological obverse of 1816, the year when an Indonesian volcano put so much sulfur into the air that there was no real northern hemisphere summer. We’re the volcano now, and the gases we produce increase the temperature: it was 70 degrees in Chicago yesterday, in February—which was also the day that the Windy City decided to join other American cities in suing the fossil fuel industry for damages. But that was just one of a hundred heat records broken in the course of the day, from Milwaukee to Dallas (94 degrees). But it wasn’t a single day of heat—it’s been an almost unrelentingly warm winter, with by far the lowest snow coverage for this time of year ever recorded (13.8 percent of the lower 48 as of Monday, compared with an average of more than 40 percent) and with the Great Lakes essentially free of ice.

-snip-

All of which is to say that the impact of the climate crisis is psychological as well as physical. The deepest patterns of our lives—the ways our bodies understand the cycle of the seasons and the progress of time—are now slipping away. The fight to slow the warming of the planet is the fight to save billions of people and millions of species, but it’s also the fight to hold on to profound beauty and profound meaning, not to mention sheer gorgeous powdery magic.

Within the course of a day I can vacillate several times between the horrifying notion of Trump winning in November or (as Thom Hartmann wrote yesterday) stealing the election when the electors go to DC and a calm feeling that Biden’s got this.

We don’t usually write about politics here at KTK, but I can’t stop obsessing the upcoming election and I was really upset about the MSM coverage of the Michigan primary,

Following the results on tv and in the papers, I became incensed when I noticed that the NYT lede story was about the Trump victory with some coverage about the uncommitted vote in the state. Afterall, Obama in 2012 received 11% uncommitted and not much was made of that at the time, as I recall. But then the stakes weren’t as high.There’s much written here about the MSM giving Trump top billing too frequently and I’m at the point now where I really don’t know where to go to get a fair and balanced take on the race.

The 13% of folks who voted uncommitted represents 100,000 dissatisfied people, some of whom I have heard on television sounding quite determined to not support Biden in November if he doesn’t change his position on aid to Israel and push for a permanent ceasefire. Calling Israel’s actions in Gaza “over the top” isn’t going to cut it for these democratic voters. Many of them might just not participate.

Can we afford to lose Michigan?

Plus, as the NYT notes, the uncommitted movement most likely will appear in other upcoming primaries as the group Listen to Michigan is reaching out for support to Minnesota and the state of Washington.

“This is the only option we have to enact democracy in this moment,” said Asma Mohammed, a progressive activist who is among the leaders of a new group called Uncommitted Minnesota. “We are against a Trump presidency, and we also want Biden to be better. If that means pushing him to his limit, that is what it will take.”

WAPO reports:

… many Democrats conceded that the sheer number of people who voted “uncommitted” was a flashing warning sign that the president must change course and rebuild trust with key parts of the Democratic Party if he hopes to win the critical swing state in November. Some said privately that they feared the Biden campaign was significantly underestimating the anger among Arab Americans, Muslims, young voters and people of color over the president’s nearly unwavering support for Israel, whose onslaught in Gaza has resulted in the deaths of almost 30,000 Palestinians.

“Over 100,000 Democratic voters choosing uncommitted and 75 percent of Arab American voters doing so should be a warning that the status quo policies on Gaza are eroding the broad, multiracial, modern Democratic coalition that Obama built,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who is a Biden surrogate but disagrees with his Israel policy.

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Poll

33 votes Show Results

How worried are you about the 2024 election?

33 votes Vote Now!

How worried are you about the 2024 election?

Not at all.

0 votes

Extremely worried.

22 votes

Somewhat concerned.

8 votes

I just don't allow myself to think about it.

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Herd of Animal Puppets Prompt "soft, beautiful evocation to think differently” on Climate Crisis

boatsie for ClimateBrief

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday February 23, 2024 · 9:44 AM PST

2024/02/23 · 09:44

A herd of animal puppets will travel thousands of miles through European and African cities to initiate new conversations about the climate crisis. The project is being spearheaded by Palestinian artist Amir Nizar Zuabi, who produced the Little Amal puppet, which focused on Europe’s refugee crisis.

Zuabi says this endeavor will be a “soft, beautiful evocation to think differently” about the climate crisis.

“Climate change is the biggest story we’re facing now,” said Zuabi. “It’s often presented in terms of emissions and the Kyoto agreement – people struggle to fathom that, but what Amal did beautifully and what we hope The Herd becomes is a visceral engagement with the issue.”

The “core” herd will contain about 30 puppets representing the migrating animals of the Serengeti, but they will be joined by a “massive migration” of different animals as they arrive in new locations – creating a herd that could swell to many dozens of puppets.

“The idea is that we’re migrating with an ever evolving, growing group of animals,” said Zuabi. www.theguardian.com/...

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity, COP16, scheduled to take place in Columbia this fall will continue pursuit of its plan to protect 30% of global land and seas by 2030 as Colombia vows to put nature at the heart of global environmental negotiations.

The next round of global biodiversity negotiations will put nature at the heart of the international environment agenda, Colombia’s environment minister has said, as the country prepares for the Cop16 summit.

Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister, who is expected to be the Cop16 president, said the South American country would use the summit to ensure nature was a key part of the global environmental agenda in the year building up to the climate Cop30 in the Brazilian Amazon in 2025, where countries will present new plans on how they will meet the Paris agreement.

“Although the climate is affecting biodiversity, nature is an answer to the climate crisis. It is not the only answer but it is a very important pillar and we want to position it very strongly to build towards Cop30 in Brazil,” Muhamad told the Guardian.

-snip-

Colombia has become a leading environmental voice on the global stage. At Cop28 in Dubai last year, the leftwing Petro announced that Colombia would back calls for a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty, becoming the first large fossil fuel producer to do so. Petro said his country’s biodiversity would become the basis of its economic strength after the green transition.

Switzerland calls on UN to explore possibility of solar geoengineering

Switzerland has initiated a global debate on whether the “risks, benefits and uncertainties” of dimming the sun should be studied by a United Nations expert group.

It is proposing that the world body should gather information about ongoing research into solar geoengineering, and set up an advisory panel that could suggest future options for the untested and controversial approach to reduce global heating, which would have implications for food supply, biodiversity, global inequality and security.

The Swiss proposal, submitted to the United Nations environment assembly that begins next week in Nairobi, focuses on solar radiation modification (SRM). This is a technique that aims to mimic the effect of a large volcanic eruption by filling the atmosphere with sulphur dioxide particles that reflect part of the sun’s heat and light back into space.

UK government can never accept idea nature has rights, delegate tells UN

Legal experts have been working on the rights of nature, which aims to strengthen protections for species and ecosystems that have been devastated by the prevailing market view of them as resources to be slaughtered or harvested.

A multiplicity of campaigns around the world have made progress in this area, which is often also associated with efforts to unify Indigenous knowledge, ethical thinking and environmental protection. The Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights has collated a list of the countries, regions and legal systems that have recognised rights for nature. Ecuador, Bolivia, Uganda, the US, Canada, Brazil, New Zealand, Mexico and Northern Ireland have some recognition of the rights of nature in their constitutions, national laws or local regulations.

PetroStates of Decline: oil and gas producers face growing fiscal risks as the energy transition unfolds

...petrostates are facing substantial risks from the energy transition, as falling oil and gas demand is set to put downward pressure on commodity prices and place future government revenues in jeopardy.

While a small handful of countries have reduced their vulnerability, overall the 40 petrostates we analyse are just as vulnerable as in our original analysis and in many ways face growing risks.

The Daily Show produced and aired a segment with Michael Kosta on Duluth, MN as a climate change safe haven.

YouTube Video

Oceantic Network launches West Coast Supplier Council to help support US west coast floating offshore wind

Floating offshore wind is poised to play a significant role in achieving US clean energy targets and west coast states have a unique opportunity to lead the way and create a new American industry that will deliver long-term economic benefits. However, the exponential growth in demand for floating offshore wind on the west coast will present new challenges to the supply chain and, unless these issues are addressed, the industry will not move forward in a way that delivers the most value to communities.

“The West Coast is at a critical stage in its offshore wind development, and we look forward to encouraging its sustainable and intentional growth” said John Begala, vice president of federal and state policy at Oceantic Network. “We are fortunate to have assembled a strong collection of companies with the experience and capabilities to get projects delivered on time and on budget. These are the businesses that will serve as the backbone of a robust offshore wind supply chain, with potential to employ countless workers at a competitive wage.”

The Rising Cost of the Oil Industry’s Slow Death

Unplugged oil and gas wells accelerate climate change, threaten public health and risk hitting taxpayers’ pocketbooks. ProPublica and Capital & Main found that the money set aside to fix the problem falls woefully short of the impending cost.

Until wells are properly plugged, many leak oil and brine onto farmland and into waterways and emit toxic and explosive gasses, rendering redevelopment impossible. A noxious lake inundates West Texas ranchland, oil bubbles into a downtown Los Angeles apartment building and gas seeps into the yards of suburban Ohio homes.

But the impact is felt everywhere, as many belch methane, the second-largest contributor to climate change, into the atmosphere.

There are more than 2 million unplugged oil and gas wells that will need to be cleaned up, and the current production boom and windfall profits for industry giants have obscured the bill’s imminent arrival. More than 90% of the country’s unplugged wells either produce little oil and gas or are already dormant.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Old Friends

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Thursday February 22, 2024 · 5:30 PM PST

2024/02/22 · 17:30

I am in San Francisco on Presidents Day meeting up with three old friends at The Eagle Cafe on San Francisco’s Pier 39. When I took an Uber in to the city for our 1 o’clock lunch, the forecast called for thunderstorms and heavy winds so I am dressed in my waterproof jacket and pants, not exactly looking my best. In fact, I was so nervous about venturing out in the weather I even thought of cancelling, The three of us had been close friends in the 1970s and 1980s and had fallen out of touch until last year when we met up after more than 30 years of not seeing one another.

John, who had left the Bay Area 15 years ago to return home to North Carolina, was in the city for a few days before his trip to Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Hong Kong. He is traveling solo. He had been following me for several years on Instagram but I thought it was someone else with the same name, even when he reached out and said hello. This John posted pictures from travels all over the world and it just didn’t gel with the John I had known so many years ago. Yet I finally decided to respond to his message and sure enough, it was my John.

Fortunately, the three of us remain progressives and so we could talk about politics, could actually talk comfortably about anything that came up. A lot of laughter as we recalled shared memories.Probably the same ones we laughed over last year but so what. It was fun. Energizing.

“So how are you really doing?” John turned to me when our other friend left to use the restroom. I shrugged my shoulders “What can I say?” Life being life and time seeming to accelerate with each passing day. We both shrugged our shoulders and shared how life was really going for us for a few minutes and in that short conversation I found myself missing him so much. Missing the me he remembered and the me he was still seeing.

It is bittersweet, reconnecting with such old friends. There is a salient energy which percolates beneath the surface, reignited by shared memories and fond laughter. It takes less than ten minutes before the time between seems to evaporate and I feel as if I am reconnected with myself, as if there is a solid line between my person today and the one whom these people know. The power of their recollections is enough to rebirth me. I can’t get enough of these people!

The thunderstorms did not materialize Monday and my two old friends waited with me outside the Hardrock Cafe as I waited for my Uber to take me back over the Golden Gate Bridge. As I opened the door, they both at the same time extended their arms to me in a virtual hug. Time just kind of seemed to stand still. I waved to them as we drove away, feeling like I was saying good-bye to two friends who will be tied to me forever. It was as if no time had passed.

Sabrina, Romanoff, a clinical psychologist and professor at Yeshiva University notes the benefits of reconnecting with old friends.

Reliving happy memories: Spending time with an old friend can help us remember and relive happy memories, adventures, and the strong bonds we developed through challenging times.

Getting in touch with your past: Rekindling friendships from different times in our lives can help us reconnect with different parts of ourselves. Old friends can remind us of the person we used to be and help get us in touch with parts of ourselves that might have become suppressed over the years.

Offering a new perspective: Reconnecting with old friends can give us a new perspective on our lives now relative to the past. We can also get a perspective on the past from someone who has been through it with us.

Building your community: Reestablishing a friendship with an old friend can help us strengthen our roots and feel more grounded in our community. A deeper feeling of connectedness contributes to better well-being. www.verywellmind.com/....

YouTube Video

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing: In Search of Narnia

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Thursday February 15, 2024 · 5:30 PM PST

2024/02/15 · 17:30

So my daugher and I are headed to Ireland come the end of May. It will be the first time I have visited since I received my Irish citizenship and we are going to look at some properties for sale just for the fun of it. The idea of becoming an expat at my age is somewhat daunting, but it will be fun to see what’s available and imagine what it might be like. Going to Ireland feels like returning home to me, undoubtedly because all of my ancestors are Irish. I will never forget when I first stepped out of the plane’s doors onto the tarmac in Dublin back in 1999, feeling the Irish air on my face.

Our original plan was to only visit the Republic of Ireland but we’ve decided now to expand our horizons and venture into Northern Ireland as well. We are both really excited about visiting the area which inspired C.S. Lewis’ Narnia and to visit places which figured prominently in Game of Thrones. My daughter plans on spending a day or two horseback riding:

Imagine yourself riding the Kings Road, through the Isle of Pyke and Renly’s camp. Our coast line is filled with iconic settings from the show and our Game of Thrones taster experience overs a truly authentic and unique way to experience our Game of Thrones territory and take in the stunning Causeway Coast.

A little background on C.S. Lewis:

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898. A prolific writer and academic, he produced an immense body of work during his lifetime as well as holding positions in English literature at both Oxford University and Cambridge University. But it's The Chronicles of Narnia for which he will be remembered forever. A series of seven fantasy novels, published between 1950 and 1956, they captured the public's imagination and have become part of our culture, having been adapted for radio, television, the stage, film and even video games.

But from where did Lewis draw inspiration for his magical tales such as The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe? Why, from the epic landscapes of Northern Ireland, of course!

Our exploring will take us past the Mourne Mountains, to

Tollymore Forest Park, and the Narnia Trail in Kilbroney Park. Of course, we won’t want to miss Dunluce Castle!

Then after trolling around Belfast, we’ll head back to the Republic of Ireland for a visit to Galway on the west coast.

It’s going to be a short trip. It’s a little challenging determining lodging because I snore. I’m planning on asking my daughter if she would be able to sleep in noise canceling headphones or else we’ll have to find places where we can get adjoining rooms.

In the meantime, we are going to get together next week one night to plan more of the trip and watch the movie Narnia.

WAPO has an interesting article Dreaming of expat life? Here’s what it takes to buy a home in Europe.

Since I moved from the United States to Switzerland, people back home have asked whether my life is a parade of cafes, beautiful architecture and natural vistas worthy of cutaway shots on “House Hunters International.”

Even if I tell the unvarnished truth — the taxes are complicated, most stores are closed on Sundays and I sort my trash into seven (literally seven) categories — I still hear plenty of wistful sighs, followed by: I’d love to live in Europe.

I get it. Life here is great, minor inconveniences notwithstanding. And it’s easy to find yourself down a fantasy real estate rabbit hole. Just like in the United States, houses for sale in Europe are listed on websites — for instance, Seloger in France, Fotocasa in Spain and Immobiliare in Italy — sometimes with appealing prices. But the process of actually buying one can get complicated quickly.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Atmospheric Rivers & Climate Anxiety

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Thursday February 08, 2024 · 5:30 PM PST

2024/02/08 · 17:30

It was extremely eerie during the worse part of the storm in Northern California Sunday night as the power in my house flickered on and off every ten minutes. I watched as, just outside the window, the porch furniture was shuffled back and forth across the deck and a weary cypress pine was split down the middle and bent in half. Come 8:45, when I had to take the dog up to the street for her last outing of the day, the wind was ferocious. Frightening. Certainly not safe. I slipped my phone into my pocket in case we were hit by a toppling tree. The rain had let up finally for a spell but wow, what a wind.

Meanwhile, my friend a few blocks away was out in her car texting. They had lost power several hours before and word from PG&E was that it would not be restored until Monday afternoon.

As Brad Johnson writes over at Hill Heat:

California is in a state of emergency, as three people have died, struck by falling trees, in the freak carbon-pollution-driven deluge battering the state. Parts of Los Angeles have seen more than 11 inches of rain, shattering historic records and causing hundreds of mudslides.

Some climate scientists believe it’s time to add Category 6 to the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale, now that by burning hundreds of billions of tons of fossil fuels we humans have created cyclones with sustained wind speeds of greater than 192 mph.

The slow moving atmospheric river which swallowed parts of California was strengthened by El Niño and global heating and fueled by thousands of miles of moisture extending through the subtropics. While the winds bore down on Northern California, in the South the problem was mostly mudslides and floods.

On Monday, when I checked out the county’s emergency notifications, I read that friends in my old town of Bolinas were been told to shelter in place and that parts of Highway 1 heading out there were closed due to mudslides and felled trees. My stepdaughter texted me that winds of 100 mph had been clocked in nearby San Geronimo.

Power was still out in much of the county Monday morning. The sun was struggling to slice through the dark grey over cover. The paths my dog and I walked on were littered with leaves and large discarded limbs. Yoga was late as the teacher had to navigate a mudslide on Panoramic Highway and take the long way down from her house on Mt. Tamalpais. The class was nearly empty.

It certainly felt like the morning after a disaster.

Things continued to worsen in Southern California as flash flood warnings remained in effect on Tuesday and rainfall totals continued to rise. Still, experts say that the volume of rain the state is experiencing will not adequately address California’s water shortage.

The Washington Post reports on the lack of infrastructure to manage the vast amounts of water which have inundated the State over the past few years.

Even as dry periods are becoming longer and more severe, climate change is making precipitation events warmer, wetter and more intense — enhancing their destructiveness and making it more difficult for people and ecosystems to capture the rainfall as a buffer against drought.

This conundrum is yet another example of how human-caused warming is intensifying California’s climate of extremes and exacerbating its water challenges.

“When we do get these storm events, they’re going to be bigger and flashier, and we need to be better prepared to capture that water,” said Karla Nemeth, director of the state’s Department of Water Resources.

According to the Orange County Register, the amount of rain in this last system was historical in Southern California.

Sunday and Monday totals amounted to the third-wettest two-day stretch for Los Angeles since records were kept starting in the 1870s, said Ariel Cohen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, in a Tuesday morning update.

“We still have light to moderate rain ongoing across the greater L.A. area,” Cohen said. “Soils are so saturated it will take very little additional rain to increase already flooded areas with more flooding, landslides, mudslides and debris flow.”

While the rain slowed in L.A. County overnight, areas such as Bel Air and the Sepulveda Canyon have seen 12.19 inches and 11.89 inches respectively, over a 48-hour period. Woodland Hills had more than 11 inches on Monday night.

YouTube Video

These atmospheric rivers and the erratic weather systems they bring along with them are only going to get worse as temperatures continue to increase.

Tuesday morning we headed to Good Earth one town over but the exit was closed, flooded out by high tides. The next exit was open but backed up onto the freeway as cars maneuvered through deep water. The tide that morning was less than 5’ so the overflow undoubtedly was due to the swelling of the bay with rainwater. There is just no where left for the water to go.

The traffic was so horrendous we decided to just turn around and head home.

This is the new reality, I suppose. High tides will just keep getting higher. Our ways of navigating through the neighborhoods where we live will be challenged. Power outages will become routine and our routines will be altered. It’s already happening. It’s here.

As of this morning, according to Accuweather, the State is facing nearly $11 billion in damages from the storm. Record rainfall and almost 500 mudslides make travel in affected areas impossible and tens of thousands remain without power.

The Climate Emotional Resilience Institute provides lists of resources — books, podcasts, videos, research reports, networks for supporting emotional well being in dealing with climate collapse.

YouTube Video

Facing it, a podcast about love, loss, and the natural world

The age of climate crisis is upon us, and grief and anxiety are on the rise. This podcast explores the emotional burden of climate change, and why despair leaves so many people unable to respond to our existential threat. Overcoming that paralysis is the first step in moving to action, and yet official climate strategies rarely address the emotional toll of climate grief and eco anxiety. Meanwhile, frontline communities — particularly people of color, indigenous communities, and other historically-marginalized groups — are experiencing the heaviest mental health impacts of climate disruption and displacement. This series introduces ways to move from despair to action by addressing the psychological roots of our unprecedented ecological loss.

From the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication: The prevalence of Climate Change Psychological Distress among American adults a study on Generalized Anxiety Disorder-2 and climate change related anxiety and depression.

Climate change is increasingly harming mental health. While recent studies have indicated high rates of climate anxiety in various populations – especially young people – validated short measures of climate change-related psychological distress have yet to be developed. Screening tools to identify people who may be experiencing potentially serious levels of psychological distress from climate change can help assess its presence and the need for appropriate interventions.

We modified two previously validated and widely used mental health screening tools – the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-2 instrument (GAD-2) and Patient Health Questionnaire-2 instrument (PHQ-2) – to assess the prevalence of climate change-related anxiety and depression, respectively. Following the practice established in the mental health literature (i.e., PHQ-4), the two modified tools were combined to form a 4-item composite measure to assess overall Climate Change Psychological Distress (CCPD). In the December 2022 Climate Change in the American Mind survey, we used these modified measures to assess the prevalence of climate change-related anxiety (GAD-2 Climate), depression (PHQ-2 Climate), and CCPD among American adults.

The measures included the following questions: “Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by the following problems?” (1) Feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge because of global warming, (2) Not being able to stop or control worrying about global warming, (3) Little interest or pleasure in doing things because of global warming, and (4) Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless because of global warming. The response options included: 0 = “Not at all,” 1 = “Several days,” 2 = “More than half the days,” and 3 = “Nearly every day.”

Findings

We found that 3% of American adults scored above the cutoff on the GAD-2 Climate measure, which suggests they may be experiencing potentially serious levels of anxiety due to climate change. Hispanic/Latino adults are especially likely to be experiencing high levels of climate anxiety (10%) compared to Black Americans (4%) and Whites (2%). Further, Gen Z and Millennials and Gen X are experiencing a higher rate of climate anxiety (5% and 4%, respectively) compared to Baby Boomers and older adults (1%).

- snip-

Overall, 7% of American adults are experiencing at least mild levels of climate change psychological distress (CCPD). Hispanic/Latino adults (17%) are significantly more likely to be experiencing mild or higher levels of CCPD as compared to Black Americans (5%) and Whites (5%), and they have the highest rate of severe CCPD (3%) compared to all other race/ethnicity, gender, and age cohorts. Gen Z and Millennials (10%) and Gen X (8%) are more likely than Baby Boomers and older generations (3%) to experience at least mild levels of CCPD.

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

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