This event talks about the historical realities of political ideology, and discuss the ramifications of the 2016 election. Professor Snyder is one of the leading experts on Eastern European history, and recently published a new book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, winner of the MacMillan Center’s Gustav Ranis International Book Prize. Professor Snyder will discuss recent presidential election and the state of European and American political history.
8 Nov 1989 – Margaret Thatcher Speech on Global Environment to United Nations General Assembly Many people’s first exposure to climate science was when they saw Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Gore took a topic that was beyond most people’s comprehension and made it easy to understand. Back in 1988, however, it was a different politician who put the science of climate change firmly on the global agenda. Unbeknownst to many, that person was Margaret Thatcher. As a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s national science academy, she presented a series of high profile speeches on the topic of climate change. Armed with a degree in chemistry from Oxford, her scientific expertise enabled her to speak from a position of strength and knowledge about climate-related issues. She used that knowledge to act as a champion for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and personally opened the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research (the UK’s foremost climate change research centre). Margaret Thatcher and her environment secretary Nicholas Ridley did more than anyone in the last 60 years to put green issues on the national agenda and swell the membership of groups like Friends of the Earth. “Things really took off during Mrs Thatcher’s short-lived green period. From 1987/1988 when she started to talk about the ozone layer and acid rain and climate change, a lot of people who had said these issues were for the tree- hugging weirdos thought, ‘ooh, it’s Mrs Thatcher saying that, it must be serious’. “She played a big part in the rise of green ideas by making it more accessible to large numbers of people. Nicholas Ridley was one of the best recruiting sergeants we ever had. He was always on the wrong side of the science and public opinion. We always had a fantastic response every time he talked.”
President Trump agrees that climate change is man-made but disputes the real harm it will have on the planet.
Amid an unprecedented wildfire season on the West Coast, President Donald Trump in Tuesday’s debate tried to pin the annual blazes on a lack of forest management. Experts emphasize that weather conditions like severe drought, exacerbated by warming global temperatures due to climate change, as well as human error are also significant factors, though poor management of dry vegetation can create conditions that exacerbate wildfires in the West. Trump, who has rolled back a number of Obama-era environmental protections designed to protect waterways and air quality, acknowledged that human pollution contributes to global warming “to an extent” among “a lot of things.” The president also characterized the 2015 Paris Climate Accord — out of which he pulled the United States — as “a disaster from our standpoint.” Trump and former Vice President Biden faced off in their first debate on Sept. 29, in front of a crowd that was dramatically scaled back because of COVID-19. Thirty-five days before Election Day, the candidates covered a range of topics from the pandemic and the economy to protests over police violence.
Watch live coverage as President Biden delivers remarks on climate change, creating jobs, and restoring scientific integrity at the White House.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explains what he says are the biggest threats facing the U.S. as President Biden focuses on climate change.
Yuval Noah Harari interviewed by Alec Russell, FT Weekend editor, in the session, ‘The World after Covid’, during the FTWeekend Digital Festival 2021.
Joe Biden kick-started leaders summit on climate crisis. 40 world leaders including Narendra Modi, Presidents of Russia & China joined. Each leader pledged their part of ‘climate action’ on the summit which coincides with Earth Day 2021. Here’s a roundup from day 1.
GLOBAL COLLAPSE IS A LEADER’S POLITICAL CHOICE
Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed (2005) posits that worldwide global warming is a political choice. Diamond declares that the most visible effect of global warming in Montana, and perhaps anywhere in the world, is in Glacier National Park. While glaciers all over the world are in retreat—on Mt. Kilimanjaro, in the Andes and Alps, on the mountains of New Guinea, and around Mt. Everest—the phenomenon has been especially well studied in Montana because its glaciers are so accessible to climatologists and tourists.
When the area of Glacier National Park was first visited by naturalists in the late 1800s, it contained over 150 glaciers, now, there are only about 35 left, mostly at just a small fraction of their first reported size. At present rates of melting, Glacier National Park will have no glaciers at all by the year 2030. Such declines in the mountain snow-pack are bad for irrigation systems, whose summer water comes from melting of the snow that remains up in the mountains. It’s also bad for well systems tapping the Bitterroot River’s aquifer, whose volume has decreased because of recent drought.
Our trading partners have inadvertently exported invasive species. Chinese insects, fresh water, and people reach overseas countries by ship and plane, other inadvertent exports arrive in the atmosphere. China became the world’s largest producer and consumer of gaseous ozone-depleting substances, such as chlorofluorocarbons, after First World countries phased them out in 1995. China also now contributes to the atmosphere 12% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions that play a major role in global warming. If current trends continue—emissions rising in China, steady in the US, declining elsewhere—China will become the world’s leader in carbon dioxide emissions, accounting for 40% of the world’s total, by the year 2050.
China already leads the world in production of sulfur oxides, with an output double that of the US. Propelled eastwards by winds, the pollutant-laden dust, sand, and soil originating from China’s deserts, degraded pastures, and fallow farmland get blown to Korea, Japan, Pacific islands, and across the Pacific within a week to the US and Canada. Those aerial particles are the result of China’s coal-burning economy, deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, and destructive agricultural methods.
The next exchange between China and other countries involves an import doubling as an export: imported timber, hence exported deforestation. China ranks third in the world in timber consumption, because wood provides 40% of the nation’s of the nation’s rural energy in the form of firewood, and provides almost all the raw material for the paper and pulp industry and also the panels, and lumber for the construction industry. But a growing gap has been developing between China’s increasing demand for wood products and its declining domestic supply, especially since the national logging ban went into effect after the floods of 1998. Hence China’s wood imports have increased six-fold since the ban. Diamond claims that China’s wood imports is deforesting the tropics and Australia.
Australia’s agricultural production produces greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane. That’s an especially serious problem for Australia because global warming (thought to result in large degree from greenhouse gases) is breaking down the pattern of reliable winter rains that turned wheat grown in southwestern Australia’s wheat belt into Australia’s single most valuable agricultural export. The carbon dioxide emissions from Australian agriculture exceed those produced by motor vehicles and all the rest of the transport industry. Even worse are cows, whose digestion produces methane, 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide in causing global warming. The simplest way for Australia to fulfill its stated commitment to reduce it greenhouse gas emissions would be to eliminate its cattle!
While that and other radical suggestions have been put forward, there are currently no signs of their being adopted soon. It would be a “first” for the modern world if a government voluntarily decided to phase out much of its agricultural enterprise, in anticipation of future problems, before being forced in desperation to do so. Nevertheless, even the mere existence of these suggestions raised a larger point. Australia illustrates in extreme form the exponentially accelerating horse race in which the world now finds itself. (“Accelerating means going faster and faster; “exponentially accelerating” means accelerating in the manner of a nuclear chain reaction, twice as fast and then 4, 8, 16, 32… times faster after equal time intervals.)
On the one hand, the development of environmental problems in Australia, as in the whole world, is accelerating exponentially. On the other hand, the development of environmental problems in Australia, as in the whole world, is accelerating exponentially. On the other hand, the development of pubic environmental concern, and of private and governmental countermeasures, is also accelerating exponentially. Which horse will win the race? Many readers of this book are young enough, and will live long enough, to see the outcome.
Perhaps the commonest circumstance under which societies fail to perceive a problem is when it takes the form of a slow trend concealed by wide up-then-down fluctuations. The prime example in modern times is global warming. We now realize that temperatures around the world have been slowly rising in recent decades, due in large part to atmospheric changes caused by humans.
Politicians use the term “creeping normality” to refer to such slow trends concealed within noisy fluctuations. If the economy, schools, traffic congestion, or anything else is deteriorating only slowly, it’s difficult to recognize that each successive year is on the average slightly worse than the year before, so one’s baseline standard for what constitutes “normalcy” shits gradually and imperceptibly. It may take a few decades of a long sequence of such slight year-to-year changes before people realize, with a jolt that conditions used to be much better several decades ago, and that what is accepted as normalcy has crept downwards.
Another term related to creeping normalcy is “landscape amnesia”: forgetting how different the surrounding landscape looked 50 years ago, because the change from year to year has been so gradual; example involves the melting of Montana’s glaciers and snowfields caused by global warming.
For humans, forests represent much value that becomes jeopardized by cutting them down. Most obviously, they are our principal source of timber products, among which are firewood, office paper, newspaper, paper for books, toilet paper, construction timber, plywood, and wood for furniture. For the Third World people, who constitute a substantial fraction of the world’s population, they also are the principal source of non-timber products such as natural rope and roofing materials, birds and mammals hunted for food, fruits and nuts and other edible plant parts, and plant-derived medicines.
For First World people, forests offer popular recreational sites. They function as the world’s major air filter removing carbon monoxide and other air pollutants, and forests and their soils are a major sink for carbon, with the result that deforestation is an important driving force behind global warming by decreasing the carbon sink. Water transpiration from trees returns water to the atmosphere, so that deforestation tends to cause diminished rainfall and increased desertification. Trees retain water in the soil and keep it moist. They protect the land surface against landslides, erosion and sediment runoff into streams.
Some forests, notably some tropical rain-forests, hold the major portion of an ecosystem’s nutrients, so that logging and carting the logs away tends to leave the clear land infertile. Finally, forests provide the habitat for most other living things on the land: for instance, tropical forests cover 6% of the world’s land surface but hold between 50% and 80% of the world’s terrestrial species of plants and animals.
For many years, scientists debated the reality, cause, and extent of global warming: are world temperatures really historically high now, and, if so by how much, and are humans the leading cause? Most knowledgeable scientists now agree that, despite year-to-year ups and downs of temperature that necessitate complicated analyses to extract warming trends, the atmosphere really has been undergoing an unusually rapid rise in temperature recently, and that human activities are the or a major cause.
The remaining uncertainties mainly concern the future expected magnitude of the effect: e.g., whether average global temperatures will increase by “just” 1.5 degrees centigrade, or by 5 degrees Centigrade over the next century. Those numbers may not sound like a big deal, until one reflects that average global temperatures were “only” 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age.
While one might at first think that we should welcome global warming on the grounds that warmer temperatures mean faster plant growth, it turns out that global warming will produce both winners and losers. Crop yields in cool areas with temperatures marginal for agriculture may indeed increase while crop yields in already warm or dry areas may decrease. In dry climates, the disappearance of mountain snow-packs will decrease the water available for domestic use and for irrigation that actually limits crop yields in those areas. The rise in global sea levels as a result of snow and ice melting posses danger of flooding and coastal erosion for densely populated low-lying coastal plains and river deltas already barely about or even blow sea level worldwide.
People in the Third World aspire to First World living standards. They develop that aspiration through watching television, seeing advertisements for first World consumer products sold in their countries, ad observing First world visitors to their countries. Even in the most remote villages and refugee camps today, people know about the outside world. Third World citizens are encouraged in that aspiration by First World and United Nations development agencies, which hold out to them the prospect of achieving their dream if they will only adopt the right policies, like balancing their national budgets, investing in education and infrastructure, and so on.
But no one in First World governments is willing to acknowledge the dream’s impossibility: the unsuitability of a world in which the Third World’s large population were to reach and maintain current first World living standards. It is impossible for the First World to resolve that dilemma by blocking the Third World’s effort to catch up; but there have been those that have come close to success: China and India. And the 15 rich Western European countries making up the European Union have just extends Union membership to 10 poorer countries of Eastern Europe in effect thereby pledging to help those 10 countries catch up.
Even if the human populations of the Third World did not exist, it would be impossible for the First World alone to maintain it present course, because it is not in a steady state but is depleting its own resources as well as those imported from the Third world. At present, it is untenable politically for First World leaders to propose to their own citizens that they lower their living standards, as measured by lower resource consumption and waste production rates. What will happen when it finally dawns on all those people in the Third World that current First World standards are unreachable for them, and that the First World refuses to abandon those standards for itself? Life is full of agonizing choices based on trade-offs, but that’s the cruelest trade-off that we shall have to resolve: encouraging and helping all people to achieve a higher standard o living, without thereby undermining that standard through over-stressing global resources.
Diamond describes sets of problems separate from each other. In fact, they are linked: one problem exacerbates another or makes its solution more difficult. For example, human population growth affects all 11 other problems: more people means more deforestation, more toxic chemicals, and more demand for wild fish, etc. The energy problem is linked to other problems because use of fossil fuels for energy contributes heavily to greenhouse gases, the combating of soil fertility losses by using synthetic fertilizers requires energy to make the fertilizers, fossil fuel scarcity increases our interest in nuclear energy which poses potentially the biggest “toxic” problem of all in case of an accident, and fossil fuel scarcity also makes it more expensive to solve our freshwater problems by using energy to desalinize ocean water. Depletion of fisheries and other wild food sources puts more pressure on livestock, crops, and aquaculture and aqua-culture. Problems of deforestation, water shortage, and soil degradation in the Third World foster wars there and drive legal asylum seekers and illegal emigrants to the First World from the Third World.
Major soil problems also affect the First World due to global warming climate changes. California agriculture is desalinization as a result of irrigation agriculture, ruining expanse of agricultural land in California’s Central Valley, the richest farmland in the United States.
Because rainfall is low in Southern California, Los Angeles depends for its water on long aqueducts, principally from the sierra Nevada mountain rage and adjacent valleys of Northern California, and from the Colorado River on the eastern border of our state. With the growth of California’s population, there has been increasing competition for those water supplies among farmers and cities. With global warming, the Sierra snow-pack that provides most of our water will decrease, just as in Montana, increasing the likelihood of water shortages in Los Angeles.
President Trump answers a question on China at his G7 news conference. “I think I know more about the environment than most people.
ENVIRONMENT
Firms May Have To Disclose Climate-Related Risks In Financial Disclosures
April 25, 20218:00 AM ETHeard on Weekend Edition Sunday
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Companies like to talk about fighting climate change. But they’re not necessarily keen to admit if they have a factory in an area prone to flooding or if their supplier was just hit by a hurricane. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/25/990610469/firms-may-have-to-disclose-climate-related-risks-in-financial-disclosures
Meet the Press Reports delves into the aging water infrastructure and water scarcity. NBC News’ Deepa Shivaram discusses the ongoing water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. Aired on 04/23/2021.
Diamond declares that most environmental problems involve detailed uncertainty that are legitimate subjects for debate. In addition, however, there are many reasons that are commonly advanced to dismiss the importance of environmental problems, and that are in my opinion not well informed. These objections are often posed in the form of simplistic “one-liners.” Here are are a few of the commonest:
- The environment has to be balanced against the economy.
- Technology will solve our problems.
- There really isn’t a world food problem; there is already enough food; we only need to solve the transportation problem of distributing that food to places that need it (The thing could be said for energy.) Or else: The world’s food problem is already being solved by the Green Revolution, with its new high-yield varieties of rice and other crops, or else it will be solved y genetically modified crops.
- As measured by commonsense indicators such as human lifespan, health, and wealth (in economists’ terms, per-capita gross national product of GNP), conditions have actually been getting better for many decades. Or, Just look around you: the grass is still green, there is plenty of food in the supermarkets, clean water still flows from the tap, and there is absolutely no sign of imminent collapse.
- Look at how many times in the past the gloom-and-doom predictions of fear mongering environmentalist have proved wrong. Why should we believe the this time?
- The population crisis is already solving itself, because the rate of increase of the world’s population is decreasing, such that world population will level off at less than double its present.
- The world can accommodate human population growth indefinitely. The more people, the better, because more people mean more inventions and ultimately more wealth.
- Environmental concerns are a luxury affordable just by affluent First World yuppies, who have no business tell desperate Third World citizens what they should be doing. If those environmental problems become desperate, it will be at some time far off in the future, after I die, and I can’t take them seriously.
This leaves us with two other common one-liners that we have not considered: there are big differences between modern societies and those past societies of Easter Island, Maya and Anasazi who collapsed, so that we can’t straightforwardly apply lessons from the past. And: What can I, as an individual, do, when the world is really being shaped by unstoppable powerful juggernauts of governments and big business? In contrast to the previous one-liners, which upon examination can be quickly dismissed, these two concerns are valid and cannot be dismissed.
marygravitt 