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Post by Admin on Oct 3, 2023 10:05:20 GMT
THE SOLAR WORLD WE MIGHT HAVE HAD By Linda Pentz Gunter, Beyond Nuclear International. October 2, 2023 Educate! popularresistance.org/the-solar-world-we-might-have-had/Nuclear Power Has Long Stifled Renewables. Now it needs to go extinct. We needn’t have had Fukushima at all, now 12 years old and still emitting radiation, still not “cleaned up”, still responsible for forbidden zones where no one can live, play, work, grow crops. We needn’t have had Chornobyl either, or Three Mile Island, or Church Rock. We needn’t have almost lost Detroit. We could have avoided climate change as well. Not just by responding promptly to the early recognition of the damage fossil fuels were doing. But also by heeding one sensible plan that, if it had been acted upon, would have removed the nuclear power elephant from the energy solutions room and possibly also saved us from plunging into the climate catastrophe abyss in which we now find ourselves. Right from the beginning, nuclear power made a significant contribution to the climate crisis we now face. And unfortunately, as is often the case, the United States played the starring role. Nuclear power was never the answer to climate change and it’s only pretending to be now as a desperate, last-ditch survival tactic. Renewables were always the answer and we’ve known this for decades. Since the 1950s, nuclear power has been on the table for one reason only and it has nothing to do with reducing carbon footprints or sound science or strong economics. What the nuclear power choice has always been about is the misguided caché given to nuclear weapons, to which nuclear power is inextricably linked. That caché prevented an early, rapid and widespread implementation of renewable energy. And that, in turn, has resulted in the climate crisis we have now. There is growing recognition and acceptance of the role fossil fuels have played in our downfall and the imperative to eliminate their use. But there is little to no recognition of the impediment nuclear power has always been —and continues to be —when it comes to prioritizing renewable energy, along with energy efficiency and conservation. Studies today clearly show that the choice of nuclear power over renewable energy impedes progress on carbon reductions, and of course costs far more. But nuclear power was always in the way. Arguably, nuclear power is far more a contributor to climate change than it could ever be a solution to it. How can that be so? Surely, using nuclear power all these years has spared us carbon emissions? That would be true if the competition had been between nuclear and coal or nuclear and gas. But when nuclear power got started in the US, it was part of a very different agenda and what it supplanted was solar energy. On July 2, 1952, President Harry Truman sent a report to Congress that had been completed a month earlier. It was called the President’s Materials Policy Commission “Resources for Freedom”. The Commission was chaired by William S. Paley, so it is commonly referred to as the Paley Commission. Chapter 15 was entitled “The Possibilities of Solar Energy”. It went through many technical and economic scenarios, showing great potential and also flagging some stumbling blocks, most of which have since been solved. Here is what it concluded. In 1952. “If we are to avoid the risk of seriously increased real unit costs of energy in the United States, then new low-cost sources should be made ready to pick up some of the load by 1975.” Even at that early date, the Paley Commission’s authors recognized the abundance offered by solar energy, observing that, “the United States supply of solar energy is about 1,500 times the present requirement.” But here is what they were not looking to for when it came to a “new low-cost source” of energy. The Commission concluded that: “Nuclear fuels, for various technical reasons, are unlikely ever to bear more than about one-fifth of the load. We must look to solar energy.” “We must look to solar energy.” Those words must surely give one pause. And then the big what-might-have-been: “Efforts made to date to harness solar energy economically are infinitesimal. It is time for aggressive research in the whole field of solar energy — an effort in which the United States could make an immense contribution to the welfare of the free world.” [my emphases] Instead, Truman’s presidency ended in January 1953, and the next president, Dwight Eisenhower, effectively tossed the Paley Commission report in the bin. It was replaced with the now infamous Atoms for Peace. Which of course was a lie. Because it was never about atoms for peace. It was really about atoms for war. The arguments for using nuclear power to address climate change are specious as we know. It’s too slow, too expensive, unsuited to distributed generation and the coming smart grids, as well as completely impractical for rural Third World environments. It can do nothing to reduce emissions from the transportation sector or agriculture, not to mention its show-stopping liabilities — safety, security and radioactive waste. What nuclear power can boast is that is has slowed progress on achieving a low-carbon economy; wasted precious time on fruitless promises of a “renaissance”; stolen funds from renewable energy; and captured sectors of the energy market at our expense and for no other reason than to claim continued legitimacy. I love elephants. We must do everything we can to save them. But the nuclear power elephant in the room really does need to go extinct in a hurry. Otherwise, that is the fate that will instead befall all of us. This essay was derived from a January 31, 2021 talk given by the author at the Beyond Nuclear conference hosted by Helensburgh, Scotland Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and curates Beyond Nuclear International.
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Post by Admin on Oct 3, 2023 10:06:12 GMT
SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS ON POST-GROWTH OVER GREEN GROWTH By Teemu Koskimäki, Medium. October 2, 2023 Educate! popularresistance.org/scientific-consensus-on-post-growth-over-green-growth/According to new research, a scientific consensus is forming for a new economic paradigm that looks beyond growth. This post presents proof and answers why green growth no longer seems viable. At present, there are two main strategy options for countries to achieve sustainability: green growth and post-growth. The green growth approach seeks more economic growth while decreasing environmental impacts at the same time. There is a good chance this is what your country currently tries to do. In contrast, the post-growth approach seeks to secure the well-being of people and nature regardless of economic growth. It seeks to create a prosperous future beyond growth. Within academia, the debate between green growth and post-growth has persisted for a long time. However, recent evidence suggests that a consensus is starting to form in favour of post-growth. This case has been made particularly clear by three scientific articles that came out this year: two independent global surveys and one global analysis of green growth. Survey Of Climate Policy Researchers In August 2023, Lewis C. King, Ivan Savin & Stefan Drews published a paper in the high-profile Nature Sustainability journal, in which they demonstrate widespread scepticism against green growth with a global survey of 789 researchers who had published papers on climate policy (Figure 1). rest in link
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Post by Admin on Oct 11, 2023 22:28:11 GMT
Decarbonisation tech instantly converts CO2 to solid carbon Researchers have developed a smart and super-efficient new way of capturing carbon dioxide and converting it to solid carbon, to help advance the decarbonisation of heavy industries. The carbon dioxide utilisation technology from RMIT researchers is designed to be smoothly integrated into existing industrial processes. Decarbonisation is an immense technical challenge for heavy industries like cement and steel, which are not only energy-intensive but also directly emit CO2 as part of the production process. The new technology offers a pathway for instantly converting carbon dioxide as it is produced and locking it permanently in a solid state, keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere. The research is published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science. www.rmit.edu.au/news/media-releases-and-expert-comments/2022/jan/decarbonisation-tech
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Post by Admin on Oct 13, 2023 13:51:51 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 17, 2023 21:05:13 GMT
NEWS | ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH Scientists Unveil 637-Page Road Map for Transitioning the US Off of Fossil Fuels The report includes 80 recommendations for how the U.S. can achieve its target of net-zero emissions by 2050. By Tik Root , GRIST PublishedOctober 17, 2023 truthout.org/articles/scientists-unveil-637-page-road-map-for-transitioning-the-us-off-of-fossil-fuels/Meeting the Biden administration’s goal for the United States to be a net-zero greenhouse gas emitter by 2050 is a monumental challenge that must be tackled at an even more daunting pace. But the nation’s top scientists envisioned that future and laid out a plan for realizing it in a report released on Tuesday. In a sweeping 637-page document, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine made 80 recommendations for how the United States can justly and equitably pursue decarbonization policies. It includes recommendations for everything from establishing a carbon tax to phasing out subsidies for high-emissions animal agriculture and codifying environmental justice goals. “This report addresses how the nation can best overcome the barriers that will slow or prevent a just energy transition,” said Stephen Pacala, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University and chair of the committee that authored the latest findings, which build on an earlier report released in 2021. He added that only about a quarter of the recommendations require congressional action, with many being targets at private institutions and federal agencies. There is also a recognition that some changes are unlikely to happen immediately.
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Post by Admin on Oct 18, 2023 12:13:20 GMT
How to escape climate apathy Do you recognise there’s a climate emergency, yet find yourself looking away? Here’s how to get motivated and take action now by Elizabeth Cripps psyche.co/guides/how-to-escape-climate-apathy-and-help-to-avert-catastropheNovember 2021, and the 26th UN climate summit was in Glasgow. I was at home in Edinburgh, trying to motivate myself to get a bus, then a train, to join the march for justice. The problem? I wanted to spend this cold, wet day curled up inside with my children, like most of my friends would be doing. It was a familiar dilemma. I hate that climate change is destroying the world my children and others will inherit. I hate that it is already killing people. But when almost everyone around me is acting as if everything is completely fine, how can I make myself do anything about it? How can you? How can any of us? Scientifically and morally, the situation is clear. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to avoid catastrophic climate change, we – the human race collectively – must cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050 (meaning any remaining emissions are balanced out by human and natural removal of emissions). By catastrophic climate change, I mean the sort that destroys homes and crops with wildfires, droughts and floods. The sort that will kill many, many people, usually those who have done least to cause it. To redress this terrible injustice, governments and corporations must change what they do, now. The situation is so urgent that all of us – as individual consumers, citizens and shareholders – must try to help bring about this change. The climate emergency requires immediate collective action, but the problem is no-one seems to care. I live in the UK, and in rich societies like mine people mostly seem to ignore the climate crisis – at least outwardly. When I look around, most people aren’t changing their behaviour, they aren’t holding their politicians to account for inaction, or even talking much about the emergency. Climate apathy is everywhere. In many cases, this apathy isn’t caused by people not knowing the facts about the climate emergency, rather it’s that they don’t act on what they know. Consider the latest figures on attitudes to climate change, as collected by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. They report that only 11 per cent of Americans are ‘Dismissive’, believing that ‘global warming is not happening, human-caused, or a threat’. More than twice as many people (26 per cent) are actively ‘Alarmed’ and they ‘strongly’ support climate policies – yet, even among this group, most ‘do not know what they or others can do to solve the problem’. (In between these two groups are citizens with a range of views, from those who are concerned, but see climate change as comparatively low priority, to the disengaged or doubtful.) As a moral philosopher, this situation makes me want to bang my head against the wall. But, from a psychological perspective, climate apathy is less surprising. The way we live now, individuals are predisposed to weigh short-term gains more heavily than future ones. From what we eat, to how we get around, our embedded tastes, habits and attitudes are difficult to overturn. When these clash with ‘inconvenient truths’ like climate change, the easier option is to ignore the facts. ‘We are, at our core, imitators,’ says the psychologist Per Espen Stoknes in his book What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming (2015). If our friends and colleagues don’t change their lifestyles, it’s less likely that we will. If they don’t challenge irresponsible climate policies, we probably won’t either. Take my own profession. It’s still the norm for academics to fly around the world for conferences and seminars. That makes it harder for any one of us to take the climate crisis seriously, or to change what we do. This is part of a bigger picture: a culturally created image of the way we should live that revolves around exploiting our fellow humans and the nonhuman world, combined with an unrealistic faith in technology. Technical innovation is crucial. We need adaptation technology (such as drought-resistant crops) so communities can live with already-inevitable temperature rises. We need renewable energy and carbon capture and storage. But technological revolutions won’t save us in time, not without the political, corporate and individual will to use them appropriately: that is, to enable systematic change rather than shore up ‘business as usual’. And that requires a level of motivation, including a major turnaround by the mainstream media, that is currently lacking.
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Post by Admin on Oct 23, 2023 9:37:49 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 2, 2023 12:02:25 GMT
Dear Friend,
Our climate is changing before our eyes. Flooding has killed seven people and forced hundreds more from their homes in the UK in recent weeks. While Italy has been hit by yet more extreme weather.
Torrential rain has become a regular occurrence for many of us. And another storm is already wreaking havoc in the south of England as I write.
This is just a taste of what’s to come. Our climate is changing and our weather is becoming increasingly unpredictable – and hostile, in many cases. Do we really want to accept this as our future?
More bumper profits for oil companies
In the context of climate breakdown, it’s deeply frustrating to see it’s simply business as usual from big oil companies.
Today Shell announced another round of huge profits: they made £5 billion profit between July and September alone.
On Tuesday BP posted a £2.7 billion profit in the same period of time.
It’s not only that the big fossil fuel companies are making huge profits in a time of climate breakdown – but also what they are doing with these profits.
BP, for example, has invested nine times more into new fossil fuel extraction than they have in developing renewables over the past two years, research from the IPPR shows.
While Shell will use half of its £5 billion profits announced today to buyback shares, to boost their stock price.
It can’t be business as usual
Meanwhile the government and the Labour party have both rowed back on their commitments to reduce the UK’s emissions.
We can’t accept business as usual. We demand our politicians take action before it is too late.
That’s why we’re pushing for a bigger windfall tax on oil companies profits – and a tax on share buybacks.
This money could be used to invest in green energy, better public transport and, overall, a fair green transition.
Taxing excess profits of fossil fuel companies can only go so far. To achieve more systemic change, we need a wider transformation of our tax system to tackle environmental and climate breakdown.
Tax the super rich and big polluters
Those who emit the most carbon – generally super rich individuals and fossil fuel companies – must also be incentivized to reduce their impact.
Taxing their carbon emissions would do this and would raise significant sums that could, again, be invested in a fair green transition.
We saw a big success in this campaign recently, when Oxfam came out in favour of taxing polluters fairly.
TaxJustice.UK
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Post by Admin on Nov 7, 2023 21:34:39 GMT
WORLD NEWS Kenya declares a surprise public holiday for a national campaign to plant 15 billion trees apnews.com/article/kenya-tree-planting-king-charles-climate-change-c0b82a93b185d8b47e2867e4f3ca7b9fNAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The Kenyan government announced Monday a surprise public holiday on Nov. 13 for a nationwide tree planting day, part of its ambitious plan to plant 15 billion trees by 2032 Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki made the announcement via a gazette notice posted on the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, following a cabinet meeting held last week and chaired by President William Ruto. “The Government has declared a special holiday on Monday, November 13, 2023, during which the public across the Country shall be expected to plant trees as a patriotic contribution to the national efforts to save our Country from the devastating effects of Climate Change,” said Kindiki.
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Post by Admin on Nov 9, 2023 8:24:42 GMT
EU Scientists 'Can Say With Near Certainty' That 2023 Will Be Hottest in 125,000 Years Noting the global temperature records "obliterated" thoughout the year, one expert said that "the sense of urgency for ambitious climate action going into COP28 has never been higher." www.commondreams.org/news/hottest-year-on-record-2023
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Post by Admin on Nov 14, 2023 11:57:09 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 23, 2023 11:28:11 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 4, 2023 9:41:23 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 4, 2023 9:42:41 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 12, 2023 1:44:51 GMT
ENVIRONMENT DEC 9, 2023 Why Climate Change Is a Classic “Wicked Problem” Rittel and Webber noted that wicked problems have ten important characteristics. www.truthdig.com/articles/the-10-boxes-the-wicked-problem-of-climate-change-checks/We all like simple problems, because they exercise our mental and physical abilities. A life of pure leisure is boring. So, people who have to endure too much leisure often go out of their way to tackle trivial problems to keep themselves busy; currently popular ones include Sudoku puzzles and video games. Alternatively, they can approach problems voyeuristically by, for example, binge-watching TV police procedurals, in which a murder is committed and a brilliant detective ferrets out the stealthy killer, all in 60 minutes. However, nobody likes “wicked problems”—a term introduced in 1973 by design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber to underscore the complexities of planning and policy. While mathematics and chess offer more-or-less “tame” problems with solutions that everyone agrees on, wicked problems lack clarity and are subject to real-world constraints that prevent risk-free resolution. Rittel and Webber noted that wicked problems have ten important characteristics: They can’t be formulated definitively. They don’t have a “stopping rule,” or an inherent logic that signals when they are solved. Their solutions are not true or false, only good or bad. There is no way to test their solutions. They cannot be studied through trial and error. Their solutions are irreversible so, as Rittel and Webber put it, “every trial counts.” There is no end to the number of solutions or approaches to a wicked problem. Each wicked problem is unique. Wicked problems can always be described as symptoms of other problems. The way a wicked problem is described determines its possible solutions. Planners who work on wicked problems “are liable for the consequences of the solutions they generate; the effects can matter a great deal to the people who are touched by those actions.” In other words, there are consequences both for those who take up the challenge of solving a wicked problem, and for those impacted by its solutions. Climate change is a wicked problem: it checks all ten boxes. Crucially, there is no way to solve it without sacrificing something that society currently holds dear, and without thereby generating more problems. For example, shrinking the economy would reduce carbon emissions, but it would throw a lot of people out of work (in effect, we did trial runs during the financial crash of 2008 and the COVID pandemic of 2020; both times, carbon emissions plunged, yet everyone was eager to “get back to normal”). Building vast amounts of low-carbon energy-producing and energy-using infrastructure would also reduce emissions, but that would require tens of trillions of dollars of investment as well as enormous quantities of depleting, non-renewable minerals—the mining of which would generate pollution and destroy wildlife habitat. There’s no easy answer to global warming, and the wickedness heading our way doesn’t stop with climate change. Only One Extinction-Level Crisis at a Time, Please All societies have to face several problems at any given time. After all, life—even in a hunter-gatherer band—is complicated. But it is decidedly unusual for any society to confront multiple crises that are each capable of killing nearly everybody. Nevertheless, that is humanity’s current dilemma, and it is why pundits have minted the new buzzword, “polycrisis.” In addition to climate change, our global existential risks include: resource depletion, the disappearance of wild nature, persistent toxic chemicals capable of disrupting reproduction in humans and other complex organisms, and weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear bombs and missiles (a more lengthy discussion of these risks is available here). The list is growing: in recent years we’ve added the possibility that artificial intelligence (AI) could get so much smarter than people that it concludes that humans and other species are inefficient and expendable. Then there are wicked problems that are not extinction-level, but that make it much harder to deal with problems that are indeed make-or-break. In this category, two items rise to the top of the heap: soaring economic inequality, which leads to political polarization and infighting; and the buildup of enormous amounts of unrepayable household, business, and government debt, which makes economies act like giant pyramid schemes and introduces the likelihood of global deflationary financial collapse. In order to manage the risk of climate change, we need social solidarity and economic stability. Worsening inequality and ballooning debt bubbles couldn’t come at a worse time. There’s no easy answer to global warming, and the wickedness heading our way doesn’t stop with climate change. Facing several wicked problems at once is challenging because crises interact in ways that make it increasingly difficult to address each one in isolation. For example, the best solution to the disappearance of wildlife would be to increase natural habitat (which industrial society has been destroying relentlessly) by leaving half of Earth free from human settlement and resource extraction, so that nature can recover. But that’s hard to do when climate change is forcing increasing numbers of people to move to safer areas, and when the energy transition (our answer to climate change) requires more land for solar panels, wind turbines, and mining operations. Paradoxically, each of humanity’s current existential risks emerged as a consequence of efforts to solve prior problems. Climate change is the result of using fossil fuels for the economic and material betterment of humanity. Nuclear weapons were the solution to the problem of defeating aggressive fascist regimes during World War II. The destruction of wildlife results from human population growth and people seeking new living space, food, and natural resources. Now there is talk of using AI to solve climate change. Maybe it could think of a fix that mere humans would miss. Or perhaps its massive energy usage would more than offset any climate benefit. One thing we’ve learned from the past introductions of major new technologies: expect the unexpected. Here’s the Answer! When people are introduced to the concept of the polycrisis and evidence of its reality and severity, they naturally feel uncomfortable. Their discomfort grows as they realize that virtually everything they do in their daily lives is contributing to a tangle of worsening existential problems. This discomfort is itself a problem, which government, media, and environmental advocacy organizations try to solve. While environmental scientists have the job of measuring and understanding trends like global warming and the disappearance of species, environmental advocacy orgs have the goal of actually changing those trends. For these organizations, as well as for politicians who formulate environmental policies, it is vital to keep constituents from descending into defeatist apathy. Therefore, most environmental orgs and sympathetic politicians tend to foster an attitude that’s been dubbed “solutionism,” which holds that all environmental and social problems have benign solutions that involve the application of technology. Solutionism offers a way out of the discomfort of contemplating the polycrisis. But it leads large numbers of people to treat the wicked problem of climate change as if it were a math problem with a simple answer. Further, climate solutionists tend to ignore other problems (such as resource depletion and the toxics plague), and the feedbacks between problems, because contemplating these makes them more aware of the trade-offs that their solutions will impose. rest in link.
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