The New Climate War by Mann

Ref: Michael Mann (2021). The New Climate War. The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. Hachette.

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Summary

  • Climate change involves not only the warming of Earth’s surface, but the melting of ice, sea-level rise, the shifting of rainfall and desert belts, altered ocean currents. 

  • There is no cliff that we fall off at 1.5°C (2.7°F) warming or 2°C (3.6°F) warming. A far better analogy is that we’re walking out onto a minefield, and the farther we go, the greater the risk. Conversely, the sooner we cease our forward lurch, the better off we are. 

  • We have encountered compelling evidence that a clean energy revolution and climate stabilization are achievable with current technology. All we require are policies to incentivize the needed shift. 

  • We need systemic change, which requires collective action aimed at pressuring policymakers who are in a position to make decisions about societal priorities and government investment. 

  • Consumer choice doesn’t build high-speed railways, fund research and development in renewable energy, or place a price on C emissions. Any real solution must involve both individual action and systemic change. We must beware of efforts to make it seem as if the former is a viable alternative to the latter. Studies suggest that a solitary focus on voluntary action may actually undermine support for governmental policies to hold C polluters accountable. There is a delicate middle ground—which we must seek out—that encourages personal responsibility and individual action while continuing to use all of the lever arms of democracy (including voting!) to pressure politicians to support climate-friendly governmental policies. 

  • There is no path of escape from CC catastrophe that doesn’t involve polices aimed at societal decarbonization. Arriving at those policies requires intergovernmental agreements, like those fostered by UNFCC, that bring the countries of the world to the table to agree on critical targets…We won’t get those policies without politicians in office who are willing to do our bidding over the bidding of powerful polluters. That means that we must bring pressure to bear on politicians and polluting interests. We do that through the strength of our voices and the power of our votes…Behavioral change, incentivized by appropriate government policy, intergovernmental agreements, and technological innovation—that will lead us forward on climate. It is not any one of these things, but all of them working together.

  • Anti-CC Tools: Disinformation, deceit, divisiveness, deflection, delay, despair-mongering, and doomism. 

  • DESPITE THE CHALLENGES DETAILED IN THIS BOOK, I AM CAUTIOUSLY optimistic—that is to say, neither Pollyannaish, nor dour, but objectively hopeful—about prospects for tackling the climate crisis in the years ahead. The reason for that optimism is a confluence of developments, a “perfect storm,” if you will, of eye-opening events that are helping to prepare us for the task ahead. First, there have been a series of unprecedented, extreme weather disasters that have vivified the climate-change threat. Second, a global pandemic has now taught us key lessons about vulnerability and risk. And finally, we’ve seen the reawakening of environmental activism, and, in particular, a popular uprising by children across the world that has framed climate change as the defining challenge of our time. The thesis of this book is that these developments—along with the collapse of plausible climate-change deniability—have provided us with an unprecedented opportunity for progress. 

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Introduction

  • Our planet has now warmed into the danger zone, and we are not yet taking the measures necessary to avert the largest global crisis we have ever faced. We are in a war—but before we engage we must first understand the mind of the enemy. What evolving tactics are the forces of denial and delay employing today in their efforts to stymie climate action? How might we combat this shape-shifting Leviathan? Is it too late? Can we still avert catastrophic global climate change? These are all questions to which we deserve answers, and in the pages ahead, we’ll find them. 

  • A fixation on voluntary action alone takes the pressure off of the push for governmental policies to hold corporate polluters accountable. 

  • Forces of inaction have effectively opposed measures to regulate or price C emissions, attacked viable alternatives like renewable energy, and advocated instead false solutions, such as coal burning with C capture, or unproven and potentially dangerous “geoengineering” schemes that involve massive manipulation of our planetary environment. 

  • In this book, I aim to debunk false narratives that have derailed attempts to curb climate change and arm readers with a real path forward to preserving our planet. Our civilization can be saved, but only if we learn to recognize the current tactics of the enemy—that is, the forces of inaction—and how to combat them. 

  • Here’s the four-point battle plan, which we’ll return to at the end of the book: 

    • 1) Disregard the Doomsayers: The misguided belief that “it’s too late” to act has been co-opted by fossil fuel interests and those advocating for them. It’s just another way of legitimizing business-as-usual and a continued reliance on fossil fuels. We must reject the overt doom and gloom that we increasingly encounter in today’s climate discourse. 

    • 2) A Child Shall Lead Them: The youngest generation is fighting tooth and nail to save their planet, and there is a moral authority and clarity in their message that none but the most jaded ears can fail to hear. They are the game-changers that climate advocates have been waiting for. We should model our actions after theirs and learn from their methods and their idealism. 

    • 3) Educate, Educate, Educate: Most hard-core climate-change deniers are unmovable. They view climate change through the prism of right-wing ideology and are impervious to facts. Don’t waste your time and effort trying to convince them. But there are many honest, confused folks out there who are caught in the crossfire, victims of the climate-change disinformation campaign. We must help them out. Then they will be in a position to join us in battle. 

    • 4) Changing the System Requires Systemic Change: The fossil fuel disinformation machine wants to make it about the car you choose to drive, the food you choose to eat, and the lifestyle you choose to live rather than about the larger system and incentives. We need policies that will incentivize the needed shift away from fossil fuel burning toward a clean, green global economy. So-called leaders who resist the call for action must be removed from office. 

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Ch 1: The Architects of Misinformation and Misdirection 

  • In reference to DDT bans, the Montreal Protocol, and the CAA (see Chronology), environmental policy actually works. 

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Ch 2: The Climate Wars 

  • 1989: The Global Climate Coalition is formed as a consortium of fossil fuel interests, which includes ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute, and others, joined by other industry think tanks and front groups. Collectively they constituted a facade of impressive-sounding organizations, institutions, and individuals who would challenge—through newspaper op-eds, public debates, fake scientific articles, and any other means available—the basic science of climate change. They would seek to carry the argument that the science was too uncertain, the models too unreliable, the data too short and too error-ridden, the role of natural variability too unknown to establish any clear human role in global warming and climate change. 

  • Jun, 1991: The Cato Institute holds the very first known climate-change-denial conference titled “Global Environmental Crisis: Science or Politics?” 

  • 1998: The Oregon petition is signed with 31K nominal “scientist” signatories, and touted as evidence of widespread scientific opposition to the research underlying models of human-caused climate change. This is in spite of the fact that few of the supposed signatories were actually scientists (the list included the names Geri Halliwell, one of the Spice Girls; and B. J. Hunnicutt, a character from the TV series M*A*S*H). Not to mention that a majority of signatories who actually were scientists indicated they no longer supported the petition or couldn’t remember signing the petition, or were deceased, or failed to respond when they were contacted by Scientific American. 

  • Late Summer, 2009: Climategate; thousands of emails between climate scientists around the world are stolen from a university computer server in Great Britain. Bits and pieces of the emails were disingenuously rearranged and taken out of context by climate-change deniers to misrepresent both the science and the scientists. 

  • Climate-change deniers would cling to one curious dataset—a satellite-derived estimate of atmospheric temperatures produced by two contrarian scientists from the U. of Alabama at Huntsville, John Christy and Roy Spencer—that appeared to contradict all the other evidence of warming. The cooling claimed by Christy and Spencer would later be shown to be an artifact of serial errors on their part. 

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Ch 3: The “Crying Indian” and the Birth of the Deflection Campaign 

  • Flame Retardants: Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) that are added to products to inhibit flammability. They are also toxic and accumulate in the human body over time. 

  • Bottle Bill: Legislation that placed a deposit on bottles and cans (typically five or ten cents) that would be refunded to consumers upon their return, promoting returnable and refillable bottles and encouraging consumers to recycle rather than toss. 

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Ch 4: It’s YOUR Fault 

  • We all face real-world challenges and tough choices that complicate the effort to completely decarbonize our lives in a system that is still reliant on fossil fuel infrastructure. We must change that system. Individual efforts to reduce one’s carbon footprint are laudable. But without systemic change, we will not achieve the massive decarbonization of our economy that is necessary to avert catastrophic climate change. 

  • Advocates for change have the greatest reach, as measured by media accessibility, public speaking opportunities, and engagement with policymakers and stakeholders, working within the system that exists. 

  • Green New Deal: Introduced by AOC in Feb, 2019 supporting a “10-year national mobilization over the next 10 years,” which includes among its planks the following: 1) “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the US. 2) Providing all people of the US with—(i) high-quality health care; (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing; (iii) economic security; and (iv) access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and nature. 3) Providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the US.” 

    • “Saddling a climate movement with a laundry list of other worthy social programmes risks alienating needed supporters (say, independents and moderate conservatives) who are apprehensive about a broader agenda of progressive social change.”

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Ch 5: Put a Price on It. Or Not.

  • We need mechanisms that force polluters to pay for the climate damage done by their product—fossil fuels—tilting the advantage to those forms of energy that aren’t destroying our planetary home. 

  • Cap and Trade: Government allocates or sells a limited number of permits to pollute, and the polluters can buy and sell these permits. This strategy limits pollution by providing economic incentives for polluters to reduce emissions. 

  • Carbon Tax: A tax is levied at the point of sale on the C content of fuels or any other product yielding GHG emissions. 

  • Carbon Credits: Granted for activities that take C out of the atmosphere and bury or store it, thus offsetting C emissions. 

  • Regressive taxes selectively hurt low-income workers.

  • The IMF has estimated that there is an effective global average price of roughly $2 per metric ton, given the various C-pricing systems that are in place around the world. It has warned, however, that the world needs an average price of $75 per metric ton if we are to meet the Paris Agreement goal of keeping warming below 2°C. (An even higher price would be needed to keep warming below 1.5°C—a level of warming increasingly considered to constitute dangerous climate change. 

  • Republican pollster Frank Luntz found that Republican voters <44yo favor a fee-and-dividend C-pricing policy by a six-to-one margin. 

  • “We have 12 years to save the planet”: This is a bastardization of the scientifically backed estimate that we only have around 12y to bring C emissions down (by a factor of two) if we are to avert a dangerous 1.5°C warming. 

  • Incentives must involve both supply-side and demand-side measures. Supply-side measures take the form of blocking pipeline construction, banning fracking, stopping mountain-top-removal coal mining, divesting in fossil fuel companies, and putting a halt to most new fossil fuel infrastructure. 

  • Just as personal action is no substitute for systemic change, supply-side efforts are no substitute for demand-side approaches. Both are necessary. Demand-side measures attempt to level the playing field, so that climate-friendly energy, transportation, and agricultural practices outcompete fossil fuels in the marketplace. C pricing is one of the most powerful tools we have to do that. 

  • We need incentives for energy providers to replace fossil fuels with cleaner, safer, C-free energy (and, conversely, eliminating the perverse existing subsidies that are provided to fossil fuel energy producers). 

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Ch 6: Sinking the Competition 

  • According to the IMF, the oil industry receives ~$500B globally in explicit subsidies, such as in the form of assistance to the poor for the purchase of fossil-fuel-generated electricity, tax breaks for capital investment, and public financing of fossil fuel infrastructure. It’s a lot of money. But when implicit subsidies are included—that is to say, the health costs and damage born by citizens for the associated environmental pollution, including the damage done by climate change—the estimate rises to a whopping $5 trillion. 

  • The energy-poverty conceit rests on the flawed premise that lack of access to energy (rather than to, say, food, water, health care, and so on) poses the primary threat to people in the developing world, and, moreover, that fossil fuels are the only viable way to provide that energy. In other words, if you are concerned about the disadvantaged of the world, you should be promoting fossil fuels.

  • The irony of the energy-poverty myth is that climate-change impacts will actually place far more people in poverty than are in poverty today. 

  • The actual contribution of livestock to C emissions comes from entirely different processes: fermentation, manure management, feed production, and energy consumption. Cows do also belch CH4, which is itself a potent GHG, but its lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter than that of CO2. The true net contribution to C emissions from livestock is ~15%.  

  • Natural gas yields ~500g C per kWh while Coal yields ~ 900g per kWh. 

  • The world’s richest 10% produce half of global C emissions. The problem isn’t so much “too many people” as it is “too many people who burn a lot of C.” 

  • Even without any technological innovation—that is, using current renewable energy and energy-storage technology—we could meet up to 80% of global energy demand by 2030 and 100% by 2050. This would be accomplished through increased energy efficiency, electrification of all energy sectors, and decarbonization of the grid through a mix of generation sources, including residential rooftop solar and solar plants, onshore and offshore wind farms, wave energy, geothermal energy, and hydroelectric and tidal energy. 

  • We don’t need a miracle. The solution is already here. We just need to deploy it rapidly and at a massive scale. It all comes down to political will and economic incentives. 

  • A renewable energy transition would create millions of new jobs, stabilize energy prices in the absence of fuel costs, reduce power disruption, and increase access to energy by decentralizing power generation. 

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Ch 7: The Non-Solution Solution 

  • THE INACTIVISTS HAVE SOUGHT TO HIJACK ACTUAL CLIMATE progress by promoting “solutions” (natural gas, C capture, geoengineering) that aren’t real solutions at all. Part of their strategy is using soothing words and terms—“bridge fuels,” “clean coal,” “adaptation,” “resilience”—that convey the illusion of action but, in context, are empty promises. 

  • Natural Gas: Energy rich, and it is readily burned for heating, cooking, or electricity generation. Or it can be cooled into a liquid (liquefied natural gas, or LNG) that can be used as a fuel for transportation. 

  • Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): Typically, the CO2 released during the burning of coal is scrubbed from emissions and captured, compressed, and liquefied. It is then pumped deep into the Earth, several km beneath the surface, where it is reacted with porous igneous rocks to form limestone. 

    • The first full-scale proof of concept for CCS was built in Illinois. Called FutureGen, it was designed to provide data about efficiency, residual emissions, and other matters that would enable scientists to evaluate CCS performance. It was ultimately canceled in 2015 as a result of difficulties acquiring public funds. 

      • Scientists involved in the project estimated that they could bury roughly 1.3M tons of CO2 annually, equivalent to roughly 90% of the C emitted by the plant’s coal burning. 

    • Global CCS Institute reports that there are today 51x CCS facilities globally in some stage of development that plan to capture nearly 100M tons of CO2 per year. (19 facilities are currently in operation, and another 32 are either under construction or in development.) Of these, 8 are in the US. 

    • Most of the CO2 that is captured in CCS is placed into tapped oil wells for enhanced oil recovery. The oil that is recovered, when burned, yields several times as much CO2 as was sequestered in the first place by CCS. 

  • “Clean coal” and natural gas “bridge fuels” aren’t the solution. 

Geoengineering: Schemes that employ global-scale technological intervention with the planet in the hope of offsetting the warming effects of C pollution. 

  • A fundamental problem with geoengineering is that it presents what is known as a moral hazard, namely, a scenario in which one party (e.g., the fossil fuel industry) promotes actions that are risky for another party (e.g., the rest of us), but seemingly advantageous to itself. 

  • Sulfate Aerosols: Proposals to shoot reflective particulates—sulfate aerosols—into the stable upper part of the atmosphere known as the stratosphere, where they would reside for years. This human-produced effect would mimic the way volcanic eruptions cool the planet. An explosive tropical volcanic eruption can put enough reflective sulfate particles into the stratosphere to cool the planet for a while. 

    • It would likely render less viable one of the most important and safest of climate solutions: solar power. The sulfate aerosols would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface that is available to produce solar energy. 

  • Ocean Iron Fertilization: Over much of the world’s oceans, Fe is the primary limiting nutrient for algae, or phytoplankton, which take up CO2 when they photosynthesize. It is therefore possible to generate phytoplankton blooms by sprinkling iron dust into the ocean, which in turn metabolizes CO2. When the phytoplankton die, they tend to sink to the ocean bottom, burying their C with them. One of the advantages of ocean Fe fertilization is that it is solving the problem at its source, taking C out of the atmosphere. That means it also prevents the worsening of ocean acidification. 

    • Subsequent experiments have shown that the scheme doesn’t really work. Iron fertilization leads to more vigorous cycling of C in the upper ocean, but no apparent increase in deep C burial, which means no permanent removal of atmospheric carbon. To make matters worse, studies showed that it could actually favor harmful “red tide” algae blooms that create oceanic dead zones. 

  • Synthetic Trees: Synthetic trees with “leaves” treated with sodium carbonate which turn the C they extract from the atmosphere into baking soda, which can be buried for the long term. 

    • An array of 10M synthetic trees around the world could take up a significant chunk, perhaps as much as 10%, of our current carbon emissions. But this so-called DAC would be difficult and expensive to do, perhaps costing more than $500 per ton of C removed. 

  • Artificial Rock: Atmospheric CO2 removal through the artificial enhancement of weathering by rocks, might be less expensive—somewhere in the range of $50 to $200 per ton of C. But its proponents concede that it could remove, at the very most, only about 2B tons of CO2 per year. 

  • Afforestation: One study claimed that an additional 0.9B hA of the planet’s surface is available for this purpose. That translates to billions of new trees that collectively could capture just over 200B tons of CO2 over the next couple of decades. That’s a rate of C sequestration of roughly 11B tons of CO2 per year. 

  • Bioenergy with CCS (BECCS): Use of biomass for energy followed by the capture and sequestration of any CO2 produced. 

  • Biofuels: C neutral fuels, having taken as much CO2 out of the atmosphere when they were plant matter as they release when they’re burned. 

  • Nuclear Power Plants (Gen IV, Next Gen): Includes molten-salt reactors that automatically cool down when they get too hot, or very-high-temperature reactors (VHTR), which could be coupled to a neighboring H production facility for significantly reduced cost. 

    • Nuclear could provide large, convenient, affordable, safe baseload power.

    • The average nuclear power generating cost is about $100 per MWh, compared with $50 for solar and $30 to $40 for onshore wind. 

Adaptation & Resilience

  • The last refuge of the false solutionists is the language of “adaptation” and “resilience.” 

  • Global Commission on Adaptation: Recommends pursuing five key areas of climate-change adaptation over the next decade: early warning systems, climate-resilient infrastructure, altered agricultural practices, protection of coastal mangrove ecosystems, and more resilient water resource management. 

  • A viable path forward on climate involves a combination of energy efficiency, electrification, and decarbonization of the grid through an array of complementary renewable energy sources. 

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Ch 8: The Truth Is Bad Enough 

  • There is a danger in overstating the threat in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, feeding into a sense of doom, inevitability, and hopelessness. 

  • Research shows that the most motivating emotions are worry, interest, and hope. Importantly, fear does not motivate, and appealing to it is often counterproductive, as it tends to distance people from the problem, leading them to disengage from, doubt, or even dismiss it. 

  • A September 2019 CBS News poll found that 26% of those who don’t feel climate change should be addressed cite the belief that there is “nothing we can do about it,” a larger percentage than those citing the belief that “it’s not happening.” Doomism, it seems, now trumps denialism as a cause for inaction. 

  • The most comprehensive study to date, published in April 2020 in the premier journal Nature, found that <2% of species assemblages will undergo collapse (what the authors call “abrupt ecological disruption”) from climate change if we keep planetary warming below 2°C (3.6°F). The number rises to 15% if warming reaches 4°C. That is certainly very troubling, but it doesn’t constitute a “mass extinction” event of the sort that is evident in the geological record. 

  • Why do the doomists seem to be inordinately obsessed with Arctic warming and methane? We know that methane is a very potent GHG. And some of the best-known natural examples of catastrophic past warming events appear to have involved substantial releases of methane trapped either in permafrost or in the so-called methane hydrate along the sea floor. For example, warming of roughly 14°C (25°F) occurred at the end of the Permian period 250 Ma, resulting in one of the greatest mass extinction events in Earth’s history: 90% of all life was wiped out. At the boundary of the Paleocene and Eocene epochs (the PETM) roughly 56 Ma, Earth experienced warming of as much as 7°C (13°F), with, again, widespread extinction. 

  • Mechanisms whereby warming of the Arctic releases massive amounts of CH4 previously frozen in the permafrost, leading to more warming, more melting ice, more CH4 release, and a runaway warming scenario. The problem is that, aside from the questionable claims of a handful of contrarian scientists, there’s simply no evidence that the projected warming could lead to such an event. Authoritative reviews of the scientific literature on the topic reveal “no evidence that methane will run out of control and initiate any sudden, catastrophic effects.” 

  • Although there has been a global uptick in CH4, the evidence suggests it’s coming from natural gas extraction and not natural sources such as melting permafrost. 

  • Soft doomists don’t quite argue for the inevitably of our demise as a species, but they typically imply that catastrophic impacts are now unavoidable and that reducing carbon emissions won’t save us from disaster. Soft doomism in a sense plays the same role among progressives that soft denial plays among conservatives. 

  • The true warming rate is about 0.2°C (~0.4°F) per decade. Since current warming stands at about 1.2°C (~2.2°F), it would at current rates take a decade and a half to reach 1.5°C (2.7°F) warming, and another two and a half decades to reach 2°C (3.6°F) warming. 

  • Emissions remained flat in 2019, with power-sector emissions actually dropping, and total emissions are poised to drop in 2020 (though in the latter case that’s at least in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic). To quote the International Energy Agency (IEA), “Emissions trends for 2019 suggest clean energy transitions are underway, led by the power sector. Global power sector emissions declined by some 170 Mt [million metric tons], or 1.2%, with the biggest falls taking place in advanced economies where CO2 emissions have dropped to levels not seen since the late 1980s (when electricity demand was one-third lower).” 

  • It is important to communicate both the threat and the opportunity in the climate challenge. I learned this the hard way. For years my standard public lecture on climate change focused only on the science and the impacts, because I am a scientist. I would then pay lip service to “climate solutions,” with the obligatory final slide depicting a montage of recycling efforts, wind turbines, solar panels, and the like. I was fortunate that my audiences were made up of thoughtful and sharing folks. And when they would linger afterward to talk with me, I heard the same thing over and over: “That was a great presentation. But it left me so depressed!” But I was inspired to do my due diligence and to inform myself about where we really stood, and what was truly necessary to avert catastrophe—to study the literature, crunch the numbers, and figure out how far down the climate-change highway we’ve gone and what exit ramps are still realistically available to us. 

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Ch 9: Meeting the Challenge 

  • Recent polling shows that Americans in general support C pricing by a four-to-one margin, and Republicans under <40yo by a six-to-one margin (Frank Luntz).  

  • History teaches us that social transitions are often not gradual but instead sudden and dramatic, and they don’t even require a majority in support of change. A committed vocal minority can potentially push collective opinion past a “tipping point.” 

  • One group of climate experts has published a set of “concrete interventions to induce positive social tipping dynamics.” They propose, as key ingredients, “removing fossil-fuel subsidies and incentivizing decentralized energy generation, building C-neutral cities, divesting from assets linked to fossil fuels, revealing the moral implications of fossil fuels, strengthening climate education and engagement, and disclosing GHG emissions information.” 

  • Coal, the most carbon-intense fossil fuel, is in a death spiral. The state of NY, for example, has retired its last coal-fired power plant. The Canadian mining giant Teck Resources has withdrawn plans for its $20B tar sands project. 

  • In the space of a few days in early July 2020, three multibillion-dollar oil and natural gas pipeline projects in the United States—Atlantic Coast, Dakota Access, and Keystone XL, were at least temporarily halted due to what the Washington Post characterized as “legal defeats and business decisions.” 

  • More than a thousand college campuses and other institutions throughout the US (accounting for >$11T in holdings) have divested of fossil fuel stocks. 

  • In the US we’ve crossed a critical milestone. Renewable energy capacity has now reached 250 GW, amounting to 20% of total power generation, a consequence of growth in installed wind and solar voltaic capacity, enhanced energy storage, and an increase in electric vehicle sales. 

  • Government has an obligation to protect the welfare of its citizens by providing aid, organizing an appropriate crisis response, alleviating economic disruption, and maintaining a functioning social safety net. Citizens, in turn, have a responsibility to hold politicians accountable whenever government fails to uphold its end of the “social contract.” 

  • Call out false solutions for what they are. We’ve seen that many of the proposed geoengineering schemes and technofixes that have been proposed are fraught with danger. Moreover, they are being used to take our eye off the ball—the need to decarbonize our society. 

  • There are countless things we can do and ought to do to limit our personal C footprint—and indeed our total environmental impact. And there are many reasons for doing them: they make us healthier, save us money, make us feel better about ourselves, and set a good example for others to follow. But individual action can only get us so far. 

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Epilogue

  • Today we see an incessant procession of heat extremes, withering droughts, infernal wildfires, drenching floods, and catastrophic superstorms. 

  • We have just under a decade to halve global C emissions if we are to remain on course for keeping warming below truly dangerous levels. We cannot afford any dead ends or wrong turns. The answer is simple: We’ve got to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible. We need policies and politicians that will make that happen.

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Terminology

  • Clean Energy Standard: Requires utility companies to purchase an increasing fraction of electricity from clean sources, setting a goal of 80 percent carbon-free energy by 2030 and 100 percent by 2035. 

  • Gaia Hypothesis: Life interacts with Earth’s physical environments to form a synergistic and self-regulating system (Margulis & Lovelock, 1970s). 

  • Hippie Punching: Establishing one’s conservative bona fides by opposing perceived leftist environmentalists. 

  • Ozone Layer: Part of the lower stratosphere that protects from damaging, high-energy UV radiation from the Sun. 

  • Watermelons: Green on the outside, red on the inside; people who secretly want to use environmental sustainability as an excuse for overthrowing capitalism and ending economic growth. 

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Resources (Pro CC)- According to the Author

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Resources (CC Skeptics)- According to the Author

  • American Energy Alliance (AEA): Free market congressional energy accountability dashboard; https://www.americanenergyalliance.org/ 

  • American Greatness: The leading voice of the next generation of American conservatism; https://amgreatness.com/ 

  • Breakthrough Institute (BTI): A group originally linked to fossil fuel interests that has more recently been called a “nuclear [industry] front group; https://thebreakthrough.org/ 

  • Breitbart News: An American right syndicated news, opinion, and commentary website founded in mid-2007 by American conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart; https://www.breitbart.com/ 

  • Cato Institute: Promotes an American public policy based on individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peaceful international relations; https://www.cato.org/  

  • CNS News: A project of the Media Research Center, a front group for fossil fuel interests and the right-wing Scaife family; https://www.mrctv.org/division/cnsnews 

  • CO2 Coalition: Successor of the George C. Marshall Institute (closed in 2015); https://co2coalition.org/ 

  • Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT): A DC based organization that fights for free market solutions to today’s environmental and energy issues; https://www.cfact.org/ 

  • Competitive Enterprise Institute: Founded in 1984 as a libertarian think tank to advance principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty; https://cei.org/  

  • Copenhagen Consensus Center: A think tank founded by Bjorn Lomborg that researches and publishes the smartest solutions to the world’s biggest problems; https://copenhagenconsensus.com/ 

  • Daily Telegraph (Australia): Owned by Rupert Murdoch; https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/

  • Heartland Institute: Koch funded American conservative and libertarian public policy think tank known for its rejection of both the scientific consensus on climate change and the negative health impacts of smoking; https://heartland.org/ 

  • Herald Sun (Australia): Owned by Rupert Murdoch; https://www.heraldsun.com.au/ 

  • International Energy Agency (IEA): Works with countries around the world to shape energy policies for a secure and sustainable future; https://www.iea.org/ 

  • New York Post: Owned by Rupert Murdoch; https://nypost.com/ 

  • Power the Future: The voice of energy workers advocating for their jobs and communities, and pushing back on the radical environmental movement; https://powerthefuture.com/ 

  • Sunday Telegraph (UK): Owned by Rupert Murdoch; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ 

  • Wall Street Journal: Owned by Rupert Murdoch; https://www.wsj.com/ 

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Misc Quotes

“Who ya gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”-Groucho Marx. 

“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”-R. Buckminster Fuller. 

“The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media . . . lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”-Carl Sagan. 

The good thing about science is that it possesses “self-correcting machinery.” The processes of peer review, replication, and consensus, mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”-Carl Sagan. 

“Our energy woes are in many ways the result of classic market failures that can only be addressed through collective action, and government is the vehicle for collective action in a democracy.”-Sherwood Boehlert.  

“For a lot of people, shaming is its own reward: that feeling of standing on the moral high ground is a hell of a drug.”-John Schwartz. 

“Don’t leave the issues of climate and the future of the planet… These are natural conservative issues, don’t leave this to the left or you’ll get an anti-business, anti-enterprise, anti-technology response.”-Cameron (to fellow Conservatives). 

“The only thing we have to fear is… fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”-FDR. 

“The word ‘catastrophe’ is not permitted as long as there is danger of catastrophe turning to doom.”-Christa Wolf. 

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Chronology

  • 15 Nov, 2021: The USG under POTUS Biden enacts a $1T bipartisan infrastructure deal that provides substantial support for climate-friendly measures, including a major investment in passenger rail, a massive expansion of electric vehicle charging stations.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 2021: The Only C capture coal-fired power plant in the US shutters its doors, after failing to achieve viable, cost-effective capture of C pollution.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 2021: BP is ordered by a Dutch court, to cut its GHG emissions by 45% (relative to 2019 levels) by 2030.-New Climate by Mann.

  • Jan, 2021: POTUS Biden announces the most wide-ranging package of executive actions in history to address the climate crisis, promoting climate-forward policies in every sector of the federal government.-New Climate by Mann.

  • Dec, 2020: The USG under POTUS Biden enacts a $35B green energy stimulus as part of a COVID relief bill.-New Climate by Mann.

  • Jul, 2020: Three multibillion-dollar oil and natural gas pipeline projects in the US—Atlantic Coast, Dakota Access, and Keystone XL, are at least temporarily halted due to “legal defeats and business decisions (WAPO).”-New Climate by Mann.

  • 2018: France’s Yellow Vest revolt sabotages governmental efforts to introduce a C tax.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 2018: Great Thunberg, aged 15, begins protesting outside the Swedish parliament to raise awareness about the threat of climate change.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 2015: POTUS Obama blocks construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, that would have delivered Canadian Tar Oil Sands to refineries in TX.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 2012: ExxonMobil and Russian state oil company Rosneft sign a partnership to develop the largest currently untapped oil reserves in the world—Arctic, Siberian, and Black Sea petroleum reserves worth an estimated $500B.-New Climate by Mann.

  • Late Summer, 2009: Climategate; thousands of emails between climate scientists around the world are stolen from a university computer server in Great Britain. Bits and pieces of the emails were disingenuously rearranged and taken out of context by climate-change deniers to misrepresent both the science and the scientists.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 1998: The Oregon petition is signed with 31K nominal “scientist” signatories, and touted as evidence of widespread scientific opposition to the research underlying models of human-caused climate change. This is in spite of the fact that few of the supposed signatories were actually scientists (the list included the names Geri Halliwell, one of the Spice Girls; and B. J. Hunnicutt, a character from the TV series M*A*S*H). Not to mention that a majority of signatories who actually were scientists indicated they no longer supported the petition or couldn’t remember signing the petition, or were deceased, or failed to respond when they were contacted by Scientific American.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 1997: The Kyoto Protocol is adopted, committing countries of the world to substantial reductions in C emissions with the aim of avoiding “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”-New Climate by Mann.

  • Jun, 1991: The Cato Institute holds the very first known climate-change-denial conference titled “Global Environmental Crisis: Science or Politics?”-New Climate by Mann.

  • 1990: The USG under POTUS Bush signs the Clean Air Act (CAA), which requires coal-fired power plants to scrub S emissions before they exit the smokestacks. Between 1990 and 2004, S emissions from coal-fired plants falls 36%, even as power output increased by 25%. The roughly 9M ton cap on S emissions was reached in 2007 and fell to about 5M tons in 2010.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 1989: The Global Climate Coalition is formed as a consortium of fossil fuel interests, which includes ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute, and others, joined by other industry think tanks and front groups. Collectively they constituted a facade of impressive-sounding organizations, institutions, and individuals who would challenge—through newspaper op-eds, public debates, fake scientific articles, and any other means available—the basic science of climate change. They would seek to carry the argument that the science was too uncertain, the models too unreliable, the data too short and too error-ridden, the role of natural variability too unknown to establish any clear human role in global warming and climate change.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 1987: The Montreal Protocol is signed by 46 countries, including the US under Reagan, to ban the production of CFCs.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 1972: The USG bans DDT.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 1971: Ralph Nader founds Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), a network of groups throughout the US focused on consumer and environmental advocacy.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 1962: Rachel Carson publishes her book “Silent Spring”, describing how DDT was decimating populations of bald eagles and other birds by thinning their eggs and killing the embryos within. The pesticide was accumulating in food webs, soils, and rivers, creating an increasingly dire threat to wildlife- and ultimately, humans. Silent Spring ushers in the modern environmental movement.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 1960: Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a trillion-dollar international organization is founded by five petrostates—Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. It now consists of 14 oil-exporting countries that own 80% of the world’s proven oil reserves.-New Climate by Mann.

  • 56 Ma: Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM); Earth warms as much as 7°C (13°F), with, widespread extinction.-New Climate by Mann. 

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