We begin today with
Paul Krugman who analyzes the economics of fighting climate change:
This just in: Saving the planet would be cheap; it might even be free. But will anyone believe the good news?
I’ve just been reading two new reports on the economics of fighting climate change: a big study by a blue-ribbon international group, the New Climate Economy Project, and a working paper from the International Monetary Fund. Both claim that strong measures to limit carbon emissions would have hardly any negative effect on economic growth, and might actually lead to faster growth. This may sound too good to be true, but it isn’t. These are serious, careful analyses.
But you know that such assessments will be met with claims that it’s impossible to break the link between economic growth and ever-rising emissions of greenhouse gases, a position I think of as “climate despair.” The most dangerous proponents of climate despair are on the anti-environmentalist right. But they receive aid and comfort from other groups, including some on the left, who have their own reasons for getting it wrong.
Janet Redman at The Nation:
I’m going to guess you’ve heard of the People’s Climate March by now. It’s been all over Facebook, the blogosphere, buses and subway cars—it’s even shown up on network news, which has been something of a black hole for climate activism.
But in case you’re just getting back from vacation (or a cave), here’s the deal: on Sunday, September 21, tens of thousands of people are expected to flood the streets of New York City to call on global leaders to take action on climate change.
What’s been somewhat forgotten in the truly herculean effort to make this the biggest climate mobilization ever is what global leaders are doing in town in the first place.
The truth is, they’ve been called to New York by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to meet in an unofficial capacity, because formal negotiations for a global treaty to stabilize the climate aren’t going so well.
Much more below the fold...
Eddie Bautista, LaTonya Crisp-Sauray and Bill McKibben:
We march because the world has left the Holocene behind: scientists tell us that we’ve already raised the planet’s temperature almost one degree Celsius, and are on track for four or five by century’s end. We march because Hurricane Sandy filled the New York City subway system with salt water, reminding us that even one of the most powerful cities in the world is already vulnerable to slowly rising ocean levels.
We march because we know that climate change affects everyone, but its impacts are not equally felt: those who have contributed the least to causing the crisis are hit hardest, here and around the world. Communities on the frontlines of global warming are already paying a heavy price, in some cases losing the very land on which they live. This isn’t just about polar bears any more. [...]
And we march for generations yet to come, our children, grandchildren and their children, whose lives will be systematically impoverished and degraded. It’s the first time one century has wrecked the prospects of the millennia to come, and it makes us mad enough to march.
At Newsday,
Alex Beauchamp examines how fracking contributes to climate change:
Natural gas has been seen by some as a "bridge fuel" that might slowly transition our society away from antiquated habits of the past, but science now confirms otherwise. A study from Cornell University demonstrates that fracking for gas is at least as harmful to our climate as burning coal. Additional analysis from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading international authority on climate change, identifies two primary reasons for this. First, methane, the main component of fracked gas, is 87 times stronger in trapping greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Second, alarming and widely underestimated amounts of methane leak into the atmosphere throughout the fracking process -- from drilling, to gas compression and storage, to pipeline transport, to eventual consumer delivery.
We cannot dodge the climate crisis by swapping one dirty fossil fuel for another. We must reject fracking for natural gas and turn decisively toward truly clean, renewable energy sources. Thankfully, we already have the technology to do so. What we lack is the political will. This is where Cuomo comes in: He is still undecided, saying only he "will let the science decide." Governor, the science is in, and it isn't pretty.
Meanwhile,
The Economist looks at the actions which have the done the most to slow global warming (make sure to click through for the chart):
Guus Velders of the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment has compared the warming effect that would have come about if the emissions of such chemicals had continued to grow at the rate they were growing before the protocol with what has come about thanks to their banning. The net effect is equivalent to that of a whopping 135 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. That is more than twice today’s total annual greenhouse-gas emissions, which are equivalent to about 50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (carbon dioxide itself makes up about three-quarters of that, with methane, nitrous oxide and some gases used in industry making up the rest). Durwood Zaelke of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, a think-tank, says that if CFCs were uncontrolled the annual figure would be 8 billion tonnes higher. The Montreal protocol has had nearly as big an effect as all the rest of our list put together.
Turning to the topic of Ebola,
Michele Barry of the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University and
Lawrence Gosti, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and professor of Global Health Law at Georgetown University, call for action:
The world needs a new approach to solving massive international health crises and preventing future ones. Taking as our model the U.S. military reserve forces, we propose the formation of a Global Health Workforce Reserve, in which trained physicians and nurses with experience in low-resource settings enlist for a period of time. By joining the reserves, they would agree to be deployed when needed for epidemics and catastrophic events. Such a corps could be scaled up quickly and would be centrally managed by WHO or the United Nations.
Recruits would go through short-term boot camp training for disaster relief and outbreak management, then would attend occasional additional training during their enlistment. Given the interest in global health training programs in the last 10 years, as documented by the Consortium of Universities for Global Health, we think there would be no dearth of volunteers.
Over at
The Denver Post, the editors hail the president's strategy:
President Obama's decision to send 3,000 U.S. military personnel and a considerable amount of aid to West African countries battling an Ebola outbreak may be controversial in some quarters, but it's fully justified.
Speed in dispatching aid is of the essence in keeping the devastating outbreak from expanding even faster.
Yet, the generosity displayed by this country will not be enough by itself to make the effort a success.
Other nations need to step up, as Australia and Germany recently did in pledging more money, transport planes and a mobile hospital to combat the deadly virus. But perhaps even more importantly, a central command system must be established to address medical needs in the countries.
David Firestone on the vote to arm moderate Syrian rebels:
“It’s a pretty significant issue,” Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, said angrily this afternoon in the understatement of the day.
Yes, the decision to arm moderate Syrian rebels — whoever they may turn out to be — is “pretty significant” and could have long-term implications for the region, but as Mr. Begich pointed out, the Senate refused to take a clear vote on it. The aid was approved late in the afternoon, but only as a small piece of an emergency-spending bill needed to keep the government running through mid-December while lawmakers campaign and vacation.
Most voters will never know whether their senator approved the rebel aid out of principal, or to prevent a government shutdown. And that ambiguity is just the way that most senators who are up for re-election in November wanted it. They were afraid that a clear vote, one way or the other, might anger a voter somewhere, so they ducked the issue and fled the Capitol.
And, on a final note,
Eugene Robinson gives his take on "mission creep":
President Obama is adamant that the war against the Islamic State will not escalate to the use of U.S. ground troops. But the more I see and hear of his strategy, the more I fear that “mission creep” — even if the president resists it — is baked in from the start. [...] Obama’s vow to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State means intervening in both the Syrian civil war and the Sunni-Shiite conflict in Iraq. The former is a horror-filled bloodbath; the latter, a centuries-old religious struggle. U.S. airstrikes will inevitably change the course of both conflicts — and not necessarily in ways we would like. [...]
It is not hard to imagine the sequence: more trainers, more weapons, more support staff, more combat-like roles, more troops to execute missions beyond the capacity of our less-than-impressive proxies. We’ve seen it before.
I cannot avoid concluding that the logic of Obama’s strategy points toward escalation. If that’s not true, I wish he would explain why.