Three new U.S. reports on the climate crisis were released Thursday—from the White House, the U.S. intelligence community, and the Pentagon. For those Americans who have kept themselves informed about the crisis, these reports won’t hold any surprises. But they reinforce the previously ridiculed view that the warming climate, in addition to all its other impacts, is a crucial matter of national defense. Here are reporters Shane Harris and Michael Birnbaum:
The Pentagon report in particular marks a shift in how the U.S. military establishment is incorporating climate issues into its security strategy, analysts said. Until now, when the Defense Department has considered climate change, it has tended to focus on how floods and extreme heat can affect military readiness rather than the broader geopolitical consequences of a warming world. Now it is worried that climate change could lead to state failure.
“Climate change is altering the strategic landscape and shaping the security environment, posing complex threats to the United States and nations around the world,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement that accompanied the Pentagon report. “To deter war and protect our country, the [Defense] Department must understand the ways climate change affects missions, plans, and capabilities.”
Included in the Pentagon report is a National Intelligence Estimate warning that stark effects of climate change are already happening in a big way and worsening. It states, “We assess that climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to U.S. national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about how to respond to the challenge.” With just days left before thousands of delegates from around the world meet in Glasgow for the COP26 climate summit—in which updated pledges to cut greenhouse emissions under the Paris climate agreement is at the top of the agenda—the NIE notes that “current policies and pledges are insufficient” to fulfill existing pledges, much less more aggressive ones.
Charles P. Pierce at Esquire writes:
These are not utopian tree-huggers making these predictions. They are hard-nosed intelligence analysts who don’t talk to blueberries before picking them or ask permission of mushrooms before eating them. They are people who spend their time looking for loose nuclear material and the next bin Laden. I have no use for some of their past crimes and blunders, nor for the cover-ups that ensued thereafter. The intelligence “community” has been in need of serious reform as long as I’ve been alive. But there’s no reason to discount this report. We didn’t all work to overthrow the elected governments of Iran and Guatemala, but we all are living with the consequences of the climate crisis, and our descendants will live with those consequences as they deepen. And the NIE is unsparing in its assessment of whether or not current nation-states are willing to confront the crisis head-on.
If we were naive or had just arrived on the scene, we might believe that these three reports will spur a turnaround on climate action among congressional lawmakers who haven’t already signed on. We know better. Facts contained in six U.N. assessments over the past quarter century and thousands of other studies haven’t budged the naysayers, neither the ignoramuses nor the fossil fuel puppets. This is an instance when the Republican playbook is worth imitating. Climate action obstructionists should be called out on the campaign trail and at every other opportunity for being weak on national defense.
This year’s Nina Mason Pulliam Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists went jointly to the non-profit investigative site ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine for the series Where Will Everyone Go? How Climate Refugees Might Move Across International Borders. Said Gene D’Adamo, president and CEO of the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust, “This exceptionally researched and reported series lays bare the alarming plight of climate refugees.” The award includes a $10,000 prize. Environmental reporter Abrahm Lustgarten dug into how refugees will try to cross international borders to escape unlivable conditions brought on by climate change. by crossing international borders. ProPublica staff members Al Shaw, deputy editor of news apps, and Lucas Waldron, a visual investigations producer, worked with Lustgarten and independent photographers Meridith Kohut and Sergey Ponomarev on the series. While focusing on what a future world might look like, the team shared the experiences of people who are already being displaced by climate change.
“This deeply reported and powerfully written series delivers a gut punch as it asks, and seeks to answer, some troubling questions about what will happen as a changing climate makes a growing number of places less amenable to human habitation,” the judges wrote. “Superb photography, video, mapping and graphics make for a stunning multimedia package. The takeaways are sobering, and sure to deepen readers’ understanding of the human consequences of failing to control emissions.”
Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting reporter Johnathan Hettinger and editors got an SEJ honorable mention for Dicamba on Trial, which “laid out the culpability of the pesticide’s manufacturers and of federal regulators." The judges said: "Dogged accountability journalism isn’t solely the province of large newsrooms. The nonprofit Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting deserves mention for digging deep to tell how many farms and natural areas had been poisoned by widespread spraying of the herbicide dicamba.”
Atlanta-based Southern Co. has announced that completion of two new Georgia nuclear power reactors that were once promoted as the leading edge of what would be a torrent of new nuclear power plants in the United States has once again been delayed. The project has suffered from extended testing and inspections, poor construction, time spent redoing substandard work, and the bankruptcy of Westinghouse, the company that designed the reactors.
When the concrete foundations were poured in 2009, it was estimated the Georgia reactors would cost $14 billion. One was scheduled to come on line in 2016, the other in 2017. Now, with the final cost expected to hit at least $28.5 billion, company officials say June 2022 and sometime in 2023 are the expected start-up dates. Every month’s delay costs $90 million in capital costs.
Unlike other reactors that have been custom-built on site, Westinghouse developed a modular design, built mostly offsite in a standard way. This, it was asserted, would allow a much faster buildout, make inspections easier, cost less than other nukes in the past, and spur previously reluctant investors to take on funding more nuclear power plants after the drought of new projects following the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. It has hardly worked out that way. Two more of the Westinghouse reactors being built in South Carolina were shuttered less than half-finished in 2017 after the owners had blown through $10 billion. South Carolina utility customers will be paying for this fiasco for years to come even though the reactors never generated a nanowatt of electricity.
Jon Queally at Common Dreams points out that the long-awaited Report on Climate-Related Financial Risk released by the White House Thursday was met with “disappointment tinged with outrage” for falling “pitifully” short given the urgency of the crisis. The report was put together by the Financial Stability Oversight Council created by President Joe Biden’s executive order in May and chaired by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, “It’s extremely disappointing to see this long-awaited report be so watered down by what can only be described as climate apathetic FSOC members.” Collin Rees, U.S. campaigns manager at Oil Change International, was also critical:
“This report might have been welcomed if it had been included as a memo five months ago accompanying President Biden’s executive order — but as the result of several months’ work, it is deeply disappointing,” said Reese. “FSOC’s inability to move beyond basic recognition of climate-related financial risk and refusal to recommend tangible actions to effectively mitigate that risk is woefully insufficient to meet the moment.”
Here’s a different view of FSOC’s work from Avery Ellfeldt at ClimateWire.
The report was researched and written by Dallas Goldtooth and Alberto Saldamando of the Indigenous Environmental Network and Kyle Gracey of Oil Change International, with contributions from Tom Goldtooth of IEN and Collin Rees of OCI. It was undertaken to:
“uplift the work of countless Tribal Nations, Indigenous water protectors, land defenders, pipeline fighters, and many other grassroots formations who have dedicated their lives to defending the sacredness of Mother Earth and protecting their inherent rights of Indigenous sovereignty and self determination. In this effort, Indigenous Peoples have developed highly effective campaigns that utilize a blended mix of non-violent direct action, political lobbying, multimedia, divestment, and other tactics to accomplish victories in the fight against neoliberal projects that seek to destroy our world via extraction.In this report, we demonstrate the tangible impact these Indigenous campaigns of resistance have had in the fight against fossil fuel expansion across what is currently called Canada and the United States of America. More specifically, we quantify the metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions that have either been stopped or delayed in the past decade due to the brave actions of Indigenous land defenders. Adding up the total,Indigenous resistance has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.”
OPINION
Joe Manchin Is the One with an "Entitlement Mentality," by Celine-Marie Pascale. By refusing to support a massively popular social spending plan, Manchin is showing just how out of step he is with the American public and his own voters—like a modern day Marie Antoinette.
To fight the climate crisis, banks must stop financing factory farming, by Kari Hamerschlag and Christopher D. Cook: “As the climate crisis boils over, new research shows that reducing methane emissions is our best hope to rapidly stem the crisis. It’s time to turn up the heat on the industrial meat industry and dramatically curtail its climate harm, which includes 32% of global methane emissions. Yet instead development banks are using public funds to expand this sector that generates 16.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).”
The Most Important Climate Summit in History Is a Local News Story Too, by Andrew McCormick. “Given the historic importance and global implications of COP26, journalists everywhere, in newsrooms large and small, should be covering it. And audiences are hungry for coverage like this! A 2020 public-opinion survey by Yale and George Mason universities found that 78 percent of US adults want more news about climate impacts in their local area. Equally wide majorities—76, 79, and 75 percent, respectively—want more news about how local, national, and foreign governments are tackling the climate crisis.”
The wrong policies will hinder electrification — here's what we need to do, by Abigail Anthony. “Utilities' priority must be delivering clean, reliable power as efficiently as possible, so as a regulator, I'm skeptical when utilities propose that their role is to promote electrification with their ratepayers' money.”
ECO-DATA
The graphic below covers electric car registrations through the end of 2020. But from January to September this year, as Dan Gearino reports, U.S. consumers bought 305,324 all-electric vehicles, an increase of 83% over the 166,957 in the same period of 2020, according to the Kelley Blue Book.
CLIMATE ACTIVISM
U.S. activists will confront fossil fuel funders next Friday
On Friday, Oct. 29, youth climate activists and their adult allies are taking to the streets to demand an end to the funding of climate chaos. In San Francisco, the demands are being taken to the front doors of BlackRock, the world’s largest investor in fossil fuels. Other actions are happening across the country. Some will target JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest funder of climate chaos. In the Bay Area, Youth vs. Apocalypse will lead a mass youth march, and numerous Indigenous-led organizations will lead the painting of a block-long street mural outside of BlackRock’s headquarters; the mural will be painted using ashes from the California and Amazon wildfires. The protesters will be joined by survivors of California’s recent wildfires, including families whose homes burned in the Paradise fire of 2018. Protesters will meet outside BlackRock’s headquarters at 9 a.m. RSVP here to get full details here.
RESOURCES
Got a possibly persuadable person in your life who spouts climate change myths? Here’s a tool from Reality Drop that gives you information for challenging 110 such myths, big and small.
Picturing sea level rise: Climate and energy choices this decade will influence how high sea levels rise for hundreds of years. Which future will we choose? At the linked website, you can find visualizations of sea level rise for 184 locations from Gdańsk to Capetown, Houston to Hoboken.
Climate Disinformation Database: If you aren’t familiar with DeSmog, you’re missing out on some excellent climate- and other environment-related reporting and advocacy. One DeSmog project, the Climate Disinformation Database, lets you browse research on individuals and organizations that “have helped to delay and distract the public and our elected leaders from taking needed action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and fight global warming.”
CLIMATE BRIEFS FOR THE PAST TWO WEEKS
• Climate Brief: Using satellite data to verify country-by-country methane emissions, by billlaurelMD
• Climate Brief: Dimming the sun- $100m geoengineering research programme, by Angmar.
• Climate Brief: News Roundup, Ford Foundation to Divest Millions From Fossil Fuels, by eeff
• Climate Brief: “Ever wanted to flatten a banker?” Confessions of a Carbon Emitter, by boatsie
• Climate Brief: Using "Green Arithmetic" To Understand Climate Change, by boatsie
• Climate Brief: News Roundup, A US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him, by eeff
• Climate Brief:Earth is dimming due to Climate Change-contributing to global warming, by Angmar
• Climate Brief: How well have climate models predicted global warming?, by billlaurelMD
• Climate Brief: Tourism accounts for around 8 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, by Angmar
• Climate Brief: News Roundup, IEA says clean energy progress remains ‘far too slow’, by eeff
• Climate Brief: US Impotent in Glasgow Without Passage of Infrastructure Bill, by boatsie
• Climate Brief: Winter is Coming, by SninkyPoo
• Climate Brief: China's cities begin to darken as warming enhanced rainfall flood their coal mines, by Pakalolo
• Climate Brief: News Roundup, by eeff
• Climate Brief: Ignoring 'code red', Illinois' far-sighted new energy law, fossil fuel protest in DC, by Meteor Blades
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The writers in Climate Brief work to keep the Daily Kos community informed and engaged with breaking news about the climate crisis around the world while providing inspiring stories of environmental heroes, opportunities for direct engagement, and perspectives on the intersection of climate activism with spirituality, politics, and the arts.