Oh, Oregon is holding hearings on HB 2020, a baby step around putting feet to fire of those so-called polluters. I will list it below. I have been asked to attend a skyped hearing, one that tells me to go for no more than 3 minutes.
This is Kabuki Theater. The bill is about green as the new black. It’s always about Democrats and 350.org looking to capitalism to solve a problem — an entire set of problems — created by capitalism.
Around the world, atypical climate change grows increasingly threatening to all life on the planet, principally because of excessive CO2 emissions. Paradoxically, this is happening on the heels of the Paris 2015 climate accord among nations of the world.
But, didn’t almost all of the countries of the world pledge to cut back greenhouse gas emissions?
Oh yes, they did, but CO2 emissions set new records year after year after year. Ever since Paris 2015 nothing positive has happened to halt global warming, almost nothing!
It is time we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today.
— Jem Bendell, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy”, July 27th, 2018
There is no greater failure than the failure to respond to this ecological crisis. We need a wartime-speed mobilization and a just transition to race to zero greenhouse gas emission and to take carbon out of the atmosphere in order to restore a safe climate. We are called to heroism in this hour of grave consequences. We still have an opportunity to fight for all humanity and all life on Earth to avert the worst of the disaster as it is still technically and economically possible.
On Thursday, 13 December 2018, Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old climate activist from Sweden, addressed the U.N. Plenary Session at Katowice, Poland, to condemn global inaction in the face of the climate change crisis. Her address of under 4 minutes was a diamond of unadorned clarity, a challenge to all adults worldwide.
Two hundred nations at Katowice COP24 Poland just wrapped up two-weeks of climate meetings. If history is a guide, CO2 emissions will continue to accelerate until COP25 next year in Chile. Still, the delegates did adopt a rule book to put Paris ’15 into action, Ahem!
But, hark! There’s a ray of sunshine peering out from behind the Katowice coal-clouded skyline because big money interests may be altering the landscape for combating global warming.
In stark contradiction to a frequent refrain of the Republican Party in the United States, the European Union reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 23 percent and grew its economy by 53 percent in the last quarter century.
The European Commission revealed its figures at the start of the United Nations Climate Conference in Bonn, Germany, on Tuesday.
According to climate commissioner Miguel Arias Canete, the quest to cut CO2 emissions is a key reason why the EU economy continues to grow.
In the next few decades we’ll be driving species to extinction a thousand times faster than we should be.
— Dr. Stuart Pimm, conservation ecologist, Duke University.
It is quite possible that the baby boomer generation is the most impactful generation that this planet has ever seen.
— Racing Extinction directed by Louie Psihoyos, Discovery Channel, 2015.)
A Chinese boy cycles past a cooling towers of a coal-fired power plant in Dadong, Shanxi province, China.
China’s coal-to-chemical industry could produce CO2 emissions in excess of 400 million tons a year by the end of the decade — a more than fourfold increase from the 90 million emitted in 2015.
Coal-to-chemical projects, which convert coal to other chemical properties, including oil and gas, are extremely carbon intensive, accounting for roughly 3% of the country’s total CO2 emissions in 2012.
