In the summer of 2001, Ben Saunders, then just 23 years old, tried together with a friend to reach the North Pole. It was rough going over the ice, and they eventually turned back. But in 2003, Saunders made it to the Pole on his own. And in the spring of 2004, the freelance adventurer attempted a solo trip across the Pole from Cape Artichevsky in Siberia to Canada. Seventy-two days after starting out, he had to be rescued about 30 miles from Canada because open water blocked his way. He had trekked 599 miles, often without mittens or hat, logging temperatures as high as 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5 degrees Celsius) compared with 2001 when they had averaged 33 F. (0.5 C). “The weather this year was the warmest since they began keeping records,” he told a reporter at the Ottawa Citizen before flying back to his U.K. home.</p>
The warmest since they began keeping records. That, of course, has become the refrain of our age. And this week the National Snow and Ice Data Center released its Arctic Report Card 2022, which reconfirmed the Arctic situation. The 139-page report is the 16th in the series and is more than three times as long as the first annual report in 2006.
One key element the 150 scientists involved in putting the report together concluded is that the Arctic is getting wetter and stormier. That can create major problems for wildlife. Bison and caribou, for instance, break through the snow in winter to reach the plants they eat. But if rain falls instead of snow, and then freezes, it can mean a thick layer of ice over the snow makes it difficult for the animals to break through, and they starve, as did a third of the Alaskan bison population last winter. Another takeaway this year: “As seasons shift, climate-driven disturbances, such as wildfires, extreme weather, and unusual wildlife mortality events, become increasingly difficult to assess within the context of what has been previously considered normal,” the report states.
For one thing, the Arctic continues to “warm more than twice as fast as the rest of the globe, with even greater warming in some locations and times of year.” As Raymond Zhong at The New York Times reported Tuesday, the region has warmed at four times the global average rate over the past 40 years, not two or three times as had often been reported, scientists in Finland said this year. They noted that some parts of the Arctic are warming at up to seven times the average rate. The impacts are broad and deep. For instance:
“Our homes, livelihoods and physical safety are threatened by the rapid-melting ice, thawing permafrost, increasing heat, wildfires and other changes,” said Jackie Qatalina Schaeffer, an author of a chapter in the report card on local communities, the director of climate initiatives for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and an Inupiaq from Kotzebue, Alaska.
While Saunders skied over the ice on his 2004 trip, marveling at the changes from three years before, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program was putting the finishing touches on its Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), Impacts of a Warming Arctic. The 300 scientists who researched and wrote it concluded that Arctic temperatures had been rising abnormally since 1980. Negative effects of rising temperatures, they said, could include a vast reduction in sun-reflecting sea ice, further retreating of glaciers, globally rising seas, coastal erosion, permafrost thawing causing infrastructure damage, possible extinction of ice-dependent species like polar bears and some seals, and a shifting of vegetation onto the tundra that could mean trouble for caribou and reindeer, all of which could mean nutritional and cultural difficulties for Indigenous people. Impacts in the Arctic wouldn’t stay in the Arctic, the scientists declared. But they couldn’t yet say definitely that humans were causing the effects they were witnessing. Only more study would determine that.
Even so, the climate science deniers came out in full force. For years afterward, some of them went so far as to claim that more summer Arctic ice was being added each year and polar bears were doing just fine.
This, of course, was all part of the war that fossil fuel companies and their puppets in government and reckless media had been waging since 1989 when Exxon, the American Petroleum Institute, automotive companies, and other energy companies formed the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition. Its mission: Recruit scientists to create doubt in the public mind about climate change. Given that at least 149 elected Republicans in the House and Senate, as of Jan. 1, reject climate science, you have to concede the creation of doubt has been mighty successful, even if, as seems likely, many of these public doubters are only fake deniers who know the climate crisis is real but want to keep getting the fossil fuel campaign money and other perks that denying garners them.
This is so even as each annual Arctic Report Card, backed by hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, has confirmed the suspicions of those scientists in 2004 about climate change being caused by humans. No longer “probably.” Definitely.
As investigative reporters at Inside Climate News concluded in 2015, Exxon leadership knew from its own scientists more than four decades ago that human-caused climate change was real. The oil giant’s leaders realized that opposition to fixes could only be created by lying. So it paid millions to rent some liars. It wasn’t alone, of course. The Koch brothers did more than their share, funding bogus “institutes” and front groups just as Big Tobacco had done to create doubt that cigarettes cause cancer. In their seminal 2010 book, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway created a name for the fossil fuel shills and their paymasters: Merchants of Doubt.
The liars who in 2004 ridiculed the ACIA report on the Arctic have disappeared or retooled their arguments away from outright denial. But as climatologist Michael Mann writes in The Fight to Take Back Our Planet: The New Climate War:
“[Deniers] are being replaced by other breeds of deceivers and dissemblers, namely downplayers, deflectors, dividers, delayers, and doomers—willing participants in a multi-pronged strategy to deflect blame, divide the public, delay action by promoting ‘alternative’ solutions that don’t actually solve the problem, or insist we simply accept our fate—it’s too late to do anything about it anyway, so might as well keep the oil flowing.”
These days, the merged ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other fossil fuel giants pay for advertisements pretending the environment is their No. 1 priority while they lobby behind the scenes to kill or dilute public policy proposals and build new infrastructure to keep the oil (and big profits) flowing. For example, 636 fossil fuel lobbyists showed up in November at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt. It would be encouraging to believe that there will someday be a reckoning for these companies’ lies, which have helped steer the rest of us toward a reckoning with climate impacts we might otherwise have avoided. But there are still many we can avoid if only we can get more of our elected representatives to stop listening to and enabling these climate desperados.
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GREEN TAKES
In an investigative report, Maya Miller at ProPublica and Tony Schick at Oregon Public Broadcasting found that consumption of contaminated Columbia River Basin salmon at average tribal rates is high enough to create adverse health effects in the 68,000 tribal members in the basin. “These deeply troubling results directly endanger people’s health and must lead to change,” wrote Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to the reporters in an emailed statement in which he took note of congressional funding for the Columbia River Basin Restoration Program. “I intend to continue to fight for funding for this and other programs, as well as policy changes, to end this toxic threat to Tribal members from the salmon they count on.” But neither he nor other contacted lawmakers offered any specifics.
Because neither the federal or state governments consistently monitor the waters of the Columbia for pollution in fish, the reporting team did their own testing. They bought 50 salmon from tribal fishers and had a lab test them for 13 metals and two classes of chemicals known to be present in the river. Findings? Mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) registered at levels considered unsafe by the Environmental Protection Agency and Oregon’s and Washington’s health agencies. Big sources of these chemicals are the run-off of agricultural pesticides and fertilizers from factory farming and timber harvesting.
The tribes have been raising the issue of contamination for decades, ever since the fish wars of the 1960s and 1970s pitted commercial fisheries against Indigenous people dependent on fishing that they were guaranteed by 19th century treaties.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., also said that failing to take action in response to the findings could open up the government to legal liability. In the mid-1850s, the United States government signed binding treaties to preserve tribes’ right to fish for salmon as the country overtook millions of acres of tribal land. “This is the federal government’s obligation,” Rep. Blumenauer said. [...]
“The ability to exercise treaty rights to fish is completely dependent upon clean water and healthy ecosystems,” Aja DeCoteau, the executive director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission wrote in a letter to the EPA last September, when the agency first began engaging with tribes on this potential revision. “EPA must consider their treaty-based obligations.”
The EPA has proposed amendments to the Clean Water Act that would improve monitoring and incorporate tribal health and culture into federal water quality standards.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) released its encouraging 159-page 2022 renewables outlook Monday. Between now and 2027, it states, the world will boost renewables capacity by 75%, or about 2,400 gigawatts (GW). Of the total of all new energy installations in those five years, IEA forecasts that 80% will come from solar and wind. As a result, the cumulative solar photovoltaic capacity will triple to 1,500 GW over the period, exceeding natural gas by 2026 and coal by 2027. “China’s 14th Five-Year Plan and market reforms, the REPowerEU plan and the US Inflation Reduction Act are the main drivers of the revised forecasts,” the IEA states.
In the United States, renewable energy capacity is set to increase by 74%—more than 280 GW—by 2027. This year’s forecast was revised upward by 25% from last year’s after the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act.
Renewables [will] become the largest source of global electricity generation by early 2025, surpassing coal. Their share of the power mix is forecast to increase by 10 percentage points over the forecast period, reaching 38% in 2027. Renewables are the only electricity generation source whose share is expected to grow, with declining shares for coal, natural gas, nuclear and oil generation. Electricity from wind and solar PV more than doubles in the next five years, providing almost 20% of global power generation in 2027. These variable technologies account for 80% of global renewable generation increase over the forecast period, which will require additional sources of power system flexibility. Meanwhile, the growth of dispatchable renewables including hydropower, hydropower, bioenergy, geothermal and concentrated solar power remains limited despite their critical role in integrating wind and solar PV into global electricity systems.
GREEN RESOURCES & action
The Climate Impact of Your Neighborhood, Mapped. The New York Times reveals stark disparities in how different U.S. households contribute to climate change. Looking at America’s cities, a pattern emerges:
Households in denser neighborhoods close to city centers tend to be responsible for fewer planet-warming greenhouse gases, on average, than households in the rest of the country. Residents in these areas typically drive less because jobs and stores are nearby and they can more easily walk, bike or take public transit. And they’re more likely to live in smaller homes or apartments that require less energy to heat and cool. [...]
A map of emissions linked to the way people consume goods and services offers a different way to view what’s driving global warming. Usually, greenhouse gases are measured at the source: power plants burning natural gas or coal, cows belching methane or cars and trucks burning gasoline. But a consumption-based analysis assigns those emissions to the households that are ultimately responsible for them: the people who use electricity, drive cars, eat food and buy goods.
Finding the Antidote to Climate Anxiety in Stories About Taking Action by Kiley Bense. Launched in 2021, Pique Action is a media startup committed to telling stories about climate solutions.
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Having More Fun Is Good for the Planet by Kate Aronoff at The New Republic. Thanks to a combination of boosted economic activity and higher temperatures, the Energy Information Agency projects that domestic power consumption will hit record highs this year. For utilities and gas drillers—many of them attempting to brandish environmental credentials—this is great news. Rising demand tends to mean rising profits. For the planet, however, this isn’t great—even if renewables start to make up a larger share of power generation. [...] But what if consuming less energy could be pleasurable? “Less” could be popular with voters, for example, if it’s less of things people tend not to like: namely, work. The EIA’s report projected commercial energy sales rising to a record 1,376 billion kilowatt hours as people return to the office this year. What if some of that could be reduced—not just by continuing remote work where feasible but with more imaginative reforms, even for those who need to work in person? Calls for a four-day week—which have long floated in the ether of progressive policymaking—got a new jolt of energy as a result of the pandemic, when working from home became the norm.
The Shutdown of “Luxury Emissions” Should Be at the Center of Climate Revolt by Christopher Ketcham and Charles Komanoff at The Intercept. Seven hundred “climate rebels” cut holes in the fence at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport on Nov. 5. Another 800 people gathered for a march and sit-in at the airport’s main plaza. Every single private jet at Schiphol ended up grounded that day. “The superrich have got used to polluting as they please with a total disregard for people and planet, and private jets are the pinnacle of these luxury emissions that we simply cannot afford,” Jonathan Leggett, one of the activists, told us. “Our action brought them back to earth. We wanted to show the extremeness and injustice related to this manner of transport.” In other words: a perfectly tailored climate action. Not a highway sit-down ensnaring hapless motorists and keeping cars running, and emitting, longer. Not sit-ins at banks that broker investments in fossil fuels but don’t directly cause their combustion. And certainly not spattering soup on museum art, with its unsettling aura of sullying humanity’s heritage in order to save it.
What the pesticide industry doesn’t want you to know by Stacy Malkan, Kendra Klein, and Anna Lappé at Environmental Health News. Like Big Oil, pesticide companies spend hundreds of millions every year on deceitful PR strategies to keep their products on the market, even as evidence mounts that many pesticides still used today are tied to certain cancers, damage to children’s developing brains, biodiversity collapse, and more. A new report, “Merchants of Poison,” documents a case study of such pesticide industry disinformation, revealing a PR playbook similar in strategy, institutions—and at times, the very same individual players—as that of the fossil fuel industry. The report shows how pesticide giant Monsanto (purchased by Bayer in 2019) spent millions on deceptive communications strategies over decades to promote the narrative that its bestselling herbicide glyphosate, better known as Roundup, which Monsanto once claimed is as safe as table salt.
How Do My—and Your—Greenhouse Gas Emissions Threaten Biodiversity? by Mark Schapiro at Capital & Main. Last week I flew from San Francisco to Montreal for a meeting of the most important global body trying to protect the planet’s biodiversity [at COP15]. Before taking off on my Air Canada flight, I wondered how the greenhouse gases coming from our airplane might, perhaps, impact the biodiversity many of us were headed to find out how to protect.[...] The greenhouse gas contribution of my one flight to Montreal, though tiny compared to what was released on a thousand or so flights that day and every day, is surely contributing to the biodiversity wipeout, for the turmoil in the atmosphere caused by greenhouse gases is one of the leading causes of biodiversity loss. But just as the pilot did not seem to be aware of the airplane’s emissions, many journalists often don’t make the connection between those emissions and biodiversity. The interplay between the disruptive effect of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—including those from my fossil fuel–burning airplane—and the conditions for all living organisms on the Earth far below is a feedback loop that is often missing from journalism about climate change or biodiversity. Climate change is a biodiversity story, and biodiversity is a climate story.
We’re Succeeding on Climate. We’ll Fail on Biodiversity by
David Fickling at Bloomberg Green.
The climate change summit in Sharm El-Sheikh in November and the biodiversity meeting currently underway in Montreal are both attempts to review progress and thrash out the rule book on major global environmental treaties. Both the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity originate from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Both see furrow-browed politicians and earnest activists milling through convention halls, meeting late into the night, and making precious little visible difference. That’s where the resemblances end, however. Though climate denialists on the right and environmentalists on the left might consider both treaties to be motivated by the same objective—a sense of idealism that puts the fate of the planet before people’s baser needs—in truth, they’ve grown to be very different beasts. The world is finally bending the curve on tackling climate change. It will fail in efforts to halt the rising tide of extinctions.
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“A fund for loss and damage is essential—but it’s not an answer if the climate crisis washes a small island state off the map, or turns an entire African country to desert. The world still needs a giant leap on climate ambition. To have any hope of keeping to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we need to massively invest in renewables and end our addiction to fossil fuels. We must avoid an energy scramble in which developing countries finish last—as they did in the race for COVID-19 vaccines. Doubling down on fossil fuels is double trouble.” —U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
The world is struggling to figure out conservation. First Nations have some ideas by Chris Arsenault at Grist. Talks on a plan to protect land and water globally are underway at the COP15 meeting in Montreal, with the host nation Canada among a legion of countries pushing for a “30×30” deal to protect 30% of the world’s land and ocean by 2030. Agreements on the targets, approaches and language in the post-2020 global biodiversity framework have been especially slow, with ministers from around the world set to arrive tomorrow to approve on the text. Indigenous delegates and analysts are calling for the integration of Indigenous land rights, knowledge and financing to resolve the 30×30 conservation target. In Canada, First Nations guardian programs may offer one example of how governments can work with Indigenous peoples to reach global goals, Indigenous delegates at COP say. Five years ago, there were 30 guardians programs in Canada. There are more than 120 today. The Canadian government has committed $800 million for Indigenous-run protected areas, with plans to expand them by nearly 1 million square kilometers (247 million acres) over the next seven years.
One of climate change’s great mysteries is finally being solved by Shannon Osaka at The Washington Post. For over a decade, the largest scientific uncertainty about how the planet will respond to warming temperatures hasn’t come from how much carbon dioxide will be soaked up by the ocean or absorbed by the trees. It’s come, instead, from clouds. The fluffy, whimsical collections of water droplets floating in the air have, for some time, confounded climate scientists and models alike. Scientists have long known that depending on how clouds respond to warming temperatures, the world could become even warmer or a little bit cooler. They just haven’t known which. But in the past few years, scientists have begun to nail down exactly how clouds will change shape and location in the rapidly warming world. The result is good news for science — but not good news for humanity. “We’ve found evidence of the amplifying impact of clouds on global warming,” said Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
Bolivia looks to opaque methods, firms to build lithium powerhouse by Ian Morse at Mongabay. As fossil fuel use aggravates climate breakdown, companies and governments are looking to lithium-ion batteries to replace carbon-intensive technologies. Lithium prices have hit all-time highs, pushing the market to seek more sources to meet forecasted demand. To fill the gap, companies have turned to Bolivia, whose 2019 election was marred by turmoil exacerbated by allegations of foreign powers seeking its lithium that some called an attempted coup. Six foreign firms expect a decision from the Bolivian government about which will earn the opportunity to use new technologies, collectively called direct lithium extraction, to speed up the country’s production of the world’s largest recorded reserves of lithium.
See also: Five pressing questions for the future of lithium mining in Bolivia.
The obscure calculation transforming climate policy by Ula Chrobak at Knowable. Barring a mass Homo sapiens extinction event from, say, nuclear war or another disaster, many more billions of humans will be born on the Earth in the coming millennia. For philosophers and economists, this poses a tricky question: What do we owe these future humans? How should we divide our resources between the 8 billion people alive now and those to come? This isn’t just fodder for a thorny thought experiment. While it’s not often stated explicitly, all governments make trade-offs with the welfare of future generations when they make decisions that have long-term consequences, such as those related to energy production and infrastructure. Economists have even devised calculations to better explore such trade-offs, as well as a key variable — the social discount rate — which has been the subject of a hot debate for at least the past 15 years. Just last month, the Biden Administration proposed a consequential change for how the United States handles the math used to probe this ethical question. Officials recommended that the government nearly quadruple its social cost of carbon — a monetary estimate of the costs to the economy, environment, and human welfare for every ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere.
The overlooked benefits of real Christmas trees by Jocelyn Timperley at the BBC. The environmental pros and cons of Christmas trees go far beyond the climate impact of "real or plastic", scientists say. So what's the best choice for a green Christmas? Christmas trees are certainly not a hugely significant use of land, or a big player in the global carbon cycle, especially compared to timber production or crops like maize or wheat. But they do provide an interesting area to consider, in part because many humans have far more direct engagement with them than perhaps any other forest product. "There's a lot of folks that don't interact with nature a lot," says Kosiba. "It is pretty cool to think all these people are bringing a tree [...] into their house [and] sort of revering it, and appreciating it." This festive appreciation may be a good opportunity to consider the wider role of different trees, and how and where they are grown.
ECO-LINKS
• What Happens to Wind Turbine Blades at the End of Their Life Cycle? • Demand soars for EV charging at multifamily properties • Study explains surprise surge in methane during pandemic lockdown • They Fought the Lawn. And the Lawn Lost • The ‘Power of Aridity’ is Bringing a Colorado River Dam to its Knees • The time is right to ban uranium mining in the Grand Canyon. But the Senate needs to hurry. • African countries are tapping their fossil fuel wealth. Why aren’t they getting rich? • In Kenya, Wildlife Orphans Get A Second Chance • Rising costs imperil nation’s leading small reactor project • How Pruitt nudged Trump to dump the Paris climate deal • Calls Grow to ‘Stop Building New Oil Pipelines’ as Data Shows Severity of Keystone Leaks