Earth Matters is a Daily Kos compendium of wonderful, disturbing, and hideous news briefs about the environment.
• Response to pandemic cuts greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, but it’s just a blip: The World Meteorological Organization reported Monday that global emissions this year will fall as much as 7%. But that decline won’t make a long-term difference in the addition of the three most powerful greenhouse gases in our already over-burdened atmosphere, the WMO stated in its annual greenhouse gas bulletin. They just accumulated at a slower pace:
Preliminary estimates indicate a reduction in the annual global emission between 4.2% and 7.5%. At the global scale, an emissions reduction this scale will not cause atmospheric CO2 to go down. CO2 will continue to go up, though at a slightly reduced pace (0.08-0.23 ppm per year lower). This falls well within the 1 ppm natural inter-annual variability. This means that on the short-term the impact of the COVID-19 confinements cannot be distinguished from natural variability, according to the Bulletin.
The current level of CO2 in the atmosphere in 2019 hasn’t been seen since 3-5 million years ago, WMO stated. And concentrations of another greenhouse gas, methane, increased last year by 8 parts per billion, which “continues the trend of the past decade of methane increasing by 5–10 ppb per year,” the WMO noted. Oksana Tarasova, head of the WMO's atmospheric research division, told Inside Climate News, "Now you would say, 'Wow, we were in complete lockdown, it felt like life was stopped,' but the decrease for the year is only 7% at most. But it is not surprising because we didn't change anything fundamentally. It was basically business as usual. It shows how life is so deeply connected with emissions, with everything we do."
Whether we alter this deep connection in a meaningful way depends on how far we—as a global species of 7.8 billion—are willing to abandon business as usual and recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic by deploying a green approach. More aggressive Paris Climate agreement pledges, more investment in renewable energy, adopting more sustainable agriculture, and ending fossil fuel subsidies and bailouts are just a few of the pieces needed to accomplish a green transformation
• Oxford English Dictionary folks couldn’t settle on one word to describe 2020: As Mary Jo DiLonardo writes, the typical person might come up with something profane—my personal invention was 20fucking20—one word just isn’t enough. Last year, the OED team came up with “climate emergency.” This year they analyzed their steadily updated database of about 11 billion words to highlight the “words of an unprecedented year.” Many of those include the word “pandemic.” Mention of that word itself increased by more than 57,000% over last year, they said. "I’ve never witnessed a year in language like the one we’ve just had," said Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl in a statement. "It’s both unprecedented and a little ironic—in a year that left us speechless, 2020 has been filled with new words unlike any other." Now, there’s a word I’d like to see a lot less of in 2021: “unprecedented.”
• When complete, Invenergy’s 1.3 gigawatt solar farm will be America’s largest: Named the Samson Solar Energy Center, the $1.6 billion Texas project will be built in five phases, with each phase switching on as they are completed. The farm is scheduled to be operational by 2023, capable of generating enough electricity to power 300,000 homes. Invenergy says Samson will also generate 600 construction jobs over the next 36 months, and provide $250 million in land owner payments plus nearly $200 million in property tax revenues over the life of the project.
• Nature-hating Trump undermines program he used to greenwash his environment record: In August, Donald Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act, a truly bipartisan bill allocating $9.5 billion to fix the nation’s decaying National Parks infrastructure and permanently funding the Land and Water Conservation Fund at $900 million a year, the revenue coming from offshore fossil fuel fees and royalties to protect parks, forests, and wildlife refuges and habitat. This was a substantial increase from previous funding, and a surprise since the Trump regime had repeatedly tried to slash the LWCF’s budget. Trump used the signing to boast that “There hasn’t been anything like this since Teddy Roosevelt, I suspect.” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt noted at the time that the law wouldn’t have passed without Trump’s strong and bold action. Proving to all that this move marked no change of heart but mere pre-election greenwashing, on Nov. 9, Bernhardt issued an order that gives state and local governments authority to veto LWCF acquisitions they don’t like. The order is a gift to extremists eager to turn federal lands over to the states where, in many cases, protection is the last thing politicians have in mind.
• National Park Service considers Bush childhood home and former Japanese internment camp for new park sites: The home where President George W. Bush lived as a boy is in Midland, Texas. The remains of Granada, the former internment camp also known as Camp Amache, is in southeast Colorado near the Kansas border. It was one of 10 “War Relocation Centers” where 120,000 Japanese Americans were detained on the grounds they represented a threat to U.S. security after the Pearl Harbor attack. Camp Amache itself held about 7,000 detainees. Although government officially declared that someone with just 1/16th Japanese ancestry could be interned, the architect of the plan—Colonel Karl Bendetsen—said, "I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp." Public comments on the plans to turn the Bush home into a national park are open until Feb. 28 and for Camp Amache until Feb. 15.
• Mary Heglar has a “maniacal plan” to bring down fossil fuel companies with “greentrolling”: Heglar’s climate change essays have a devoted audience, and she’s also half of the duo producing Hot Take, a newsletter and podcast she co-hosts with the journalist Amy Westervelt. Her strategy started taking shape after the oil giant BP shared a carbon footprint calculator on Twitter last fall. Tired of environmental advocates trashing each other for flying or eating meat, she wanted to see this anger focused on the companies generating the largest proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions. So she started scrutinizing the social media feeds of Shell, Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips, pointing out their hypocrisy. “I’m petty like that,” she said. “I am a Scorpio and I am vindictive.” Exxon blocked her. Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard University research associate who studies fossil fuel propaganda tactics, views Heglar’s approach as a way for people to “fight back. “Until recently, fossil fuel propaganda was almost entirely a one-way street,” Supran said. As Heglar sees it, greentrolling is more than just blowing off steam. “The point,” Kate Yoder writes, “isn’t to convince oil companies to do better. It’s to make sure that people aren’t misled by corporate PR teams—to try and shatter the idea that they’re champions of the environment, and point out the ways they shift blame to individuals to avoid accepting responsibility for their role in the climate crisis.”
• FEMA study trashes the nation’s outdated building codes: The 189-page report notes that 65% of U.S. counties do not have modern building codes. This makes these places more vulnerable to flooding, strong winds, and earthquakes than they would be with upgraded codes. And that means property losses of $32 billion over 20 years, $1.6 billion a year. For instance, codes that add hurricane safeguards add about $4,500 to the cost of a $300,000 home, but over 30 years, this mandated protection would avoid $48,000 in damages. "The question now is whether policymakers are ready to take these findings to heart and act on them," said Gabe Maser, vice president of federal relations for the International Code Council, which writes model construction codes that some states and cities have adopted.