In a “seminal moment” European leaders announced today “an ambitious blueprint to pivot away from fossil fuels over the next nine years, a plan that also has the potential to set off global trade disputes.”
“Our current fossil fuel economy has reached its limit,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels.
The effort, pushed by the European Commission, the E.U.’s bureaucracy, makes the 27-country bloc’s proposal the most aggressive and detailed plan in the world to reach a carbon-neutral economy by 2050, proposing big changes during this decade. To force the issue, Brussels has committed in law to reducing its emissions of greenhouse gases 55 percent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels.
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A White House official said on Wednesday afternoon that it was reviewing the European Commission’s proposals and broadly welcomed the idea of a carbon border tax. Congressional Democrats took a preliminary step on Wednesday toward a similar tax, which they called a “polluter import fee” also intended to reduce emissions.
Ezra Klein writes a stunning opinion piece in today’s New York Times, It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let the World Burn, questioning why we haven’t seen more widespread acts of aggressive action from the millions of people who have participated in massive rallies calling on governments and corporations to stop polluting the earth.
The piece, overall, reviews and questions suggestions from Andreas Malm’s “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.”
From Malm’s book:
“Here is what this movement of millions should do, for a start,” Malm writes. “Announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.
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“Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations ...
Malm posits that “strategic pacificism,” the belief that nonviolent action is more likely to be successful is at play in calculations to maintain a peaceful climate movement, with acts of civil disobedience mostly limited to symbolic “die-ins” or handcuffing to fences or the entrances to buildings. Klein suggests that those who did participate in radical activism would be sentenced to long prison terms and that widespread direct acts of violence such as blowing up pipelines would lead to a rise in energy costs which would impact those who would suffer the most; namely, the poor and marginalized. But, Klein notes, “the American Revolution was not peaceful.”
Klein’s article raises the question of why we are not more alarmed about the climate crisis, even if we are not about to engage in eco-terrorism. Why don’t we care more? Why aren’t we more engaged? A Times magazine article Why Your Brain Can’t Process Climate Change article might have an answer.
When you think about yourself while inside the narrow metal tube of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a certain part of your brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex, or MPFC, will light up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. If you think about a family member, the MPFC will still light up, though less robustly. And if you think about other people whom you feel no connection to—like, say, the inhabitants of the South Asian island nation of the Maldives, which will likely one day be erased by climate-change-driven sea level rise—the MPFC will light up even less.
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… as Jane McGonigal, the research director of the Institute for the Future, noted in a 2017 article for Slate, if you think about your own self, but in the future, you’ll see less activation in the MPFC than when you imagine your present self. The further out in time you imagine that self, the weaker that activation. As McGonigal writes: “Your brain acts as if your future self is someone you don’t know very well and, frankly, someone you don’t care about.” And if we view our own selves in the future as virtual strangers, how much less do we care about the lives of generations yet to be born?
Perhaps more MPFCs are lighting up as here in the United States we are living through record-breaking drought and wildfires in Western North America and an increase in high tide flooding in coastal areas of the US. Recently, Hurricane Elsa flooded some New York City subway stations in waist-deep water.
On the political front, US Special Climate Envoy John Kerry joined his Russian counterpart Ruslan Edelgeriyev to announce plans to work together on meeting the Paris 2015 goals.
Kerry also spoke by phone with Russian President Putin.
“Climate change is one of the areas where Russia and the United States have common interests and similar approaches,” a Kremlin statement said, following a Wednesday phone call between Putin and Kerry.
This followed a pact earlier this week cementing similar commitments between the US and China.