NY Times: U.N. Dire Climate Warning

October 9, 2018 Roger Straw

Dire Climate Warning Lands With a Thud on Trump’s Desk

By Mark Landler and Coral Davenport, Oct. 8, 2018

President Trump on Monday in Orlando, Fla., where he spoke to a convention of police chiefs. He did not mention a United Nations report on the threat of climate change. Credit Tom Brenner for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — A day after the United Nations issued its most urgent call to arms yet for the world to confront the threat of climate change, President Trump boarded Air Force One for Florida — a state that lies directly in the path of this coming calamity — and said nothing about it.

It was the latest, most vivid example of Mr. Trump’s dissent from an effort that has galvanized much of the world. While the United Nations warned of mass wildfires, food shortages and dying coral reefs as soon as 2040, Mr. Trump discussed his successful Supreme Court battle rather than how rising seawaters are already flooding Miami on sunny days.

The president’s isolation is not just from the world: In California, New York, Massachusetts and other states, governments and companies are pushing ahead with regulations and technological innovations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

That bottom-up activism is a source of hope for those who have watched in despair since last year when Mr. Trump declared he would pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord. But experts say it is no substitute for the world’s largest economy, and second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, turning its back on the fight.

“You have this enormous discrepancy between the White House and, essentially, everyone else,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “The leadership in Washington is really moving against the whole agenda.”

The United Nations report paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”

It describes a world of worsening food shortages and poverty; more wildfires; and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.

Among climate-change scientists, there were increasing fears that Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord, which at first seemed a lonely act of defiance, may embolden other countries to leave it as well.

In Brazil, voters are on track to elect a new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has vowed to withdraw his country, the world’s seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, from the pact.

Mr. Trump’s announcement last year prompted a show of solidarity from the other 194 countries that signed the accord, not to mention American political and business leaders who rallied under the slogan, “We are still in!” But to populists like Mr. Bolsonaro, Mr. Trump’s demands that the United States be given a better deal could prove appealing.

“To the extent that we get these narrow-minded, so-called nationalist, populist leaders, we could have a big problem,” said John P. Holdren, who served as President Barack Obama’s chief science adviser. “Brazil, with its huge area of forests, is going to suffer terribly from climate change.”

A wildfire burning last year near Casitas Springs, Calif. The United Nations report warns of mass wildfires, food shortages and dying coral reefs as soon as 2040. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Beyond the domino effect, Mr. Holdren, who is now a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, said there were other immediate costs to what he called “the squandering of U.S. leadership on an acute global issue.”

Mr. Trump, who has mocked the science of human-caused climate change, cut the American contribution to a global fund that supports climate mitigation and assistance efforts in developing countries by two-thirds, to $1 billion. He has tried to cut government funding of climate-related research — an effort that Congress has so far resisted.

The White House issued no public response to the United Nations report, which was issued Monday in South Korea at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders.

“Not today,” said Bill Shine, the White House communications director. “It’s a Kavanaugh night.”

After Mr. Trump returned Monday from Orlando, Fla., where he spoke to a convention of police chiefs and referred to the hurricane now approaching that state, he attended a White House ceremony to swear in Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

Following the ceremony, Lindsay E. Walters, a deputy press secretary, said, “The United States is leading the world in providing affordable, abundant and secure energy to our citizens, while protecting the environment and reducing emissions through job-creating innovation.”

She noted that carbon dioxide-related emissions declined 14 percent in the United States from 2005 to 2017, while they rose 21 percent globally during the same period.

On Saturday, an American delegation in South Korea joined more than 180 countries in accepting the report’s summary for policymakers, but a statement from the State Department added that it “does not imply endorsement by the United States of the specific findings or underlying contents of the report.”

The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” said Bill Hare, an author of previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. “We were not aware of this just a few years ago.”

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.5 degrees Celsius, above preindustrial levels by 2040.

The Paris accord set a goal of preventing warming of more than 3.6 degrees above preindustrial levels — long considered a threshold for the most severe social and economic damage from climate change. But the heads of small island nations, fearful of rising sea levels, had also asked scientists to examine the effects of 2.7 degrees of warming.

Without aggressive action, many effects that scientists once expected to happen further in the future will arrive by 2040, and at the lower temperature, the report shows.

“It’s telling us we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime,” said Myles Allen, an Oxford University climate scientist and an author of the report.

Flooded homes last month in Lumberton, N.C., after Hurricane Florence hit. Credit Johnny Milano for The New York Times

To prevent 2.7 degrees of warming, the report said, greenhouse emissions must be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and by 100 percent by 2050. It also found that use of coal as an electricity source would have to drop from nearly 40 percent today to 1 to 7 percent by 2050.

“This report makes it clear: There is no way to mitigate climate change without getting rid of coal,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University and an author of the report. Mr. Trump has vowed to increase the burning of coal.

“It makes me feel angry when I think about the U.S. government,” Mr. Shindell said. “My kids feel like it’s their future being destroyed.” He watched as the grounds of his son’s high school in Durham, N.C., and the roads around it flooded last month after Hurricane Florence.

Dr. Allen said there was little question the report will be ignored in Washington. “The current administration doesn’t seem interested in it all,” he said, although he added that as a scientist, he takes the long view.

“One way or another,” he said, “the facts do win out.”

Mr. Trump encouraged scientists recently when he nominated Kelvin Droegemeier, a well-respected meteorologist who is an expert on extreme weather, to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The post had been vacant since Mr. Trump took office.

But it is unlikely that Mr. Droegemeier will change the president’s views on climate change, and other influential aides are hardly going to challenge him.

For example, the Trump administration’s counterterrorism strategy, released last week, made no mention of climate change as a cause for extremism. The Obama administration regularly cited it in threat assessments because of its effect on migration and the competition for food and water.

“I don’t think climate change is a cause of international terrorism,” said the national security adviser, John R. Bolton.

For all that, scientists said that they saw a few rays of sunshine amid the clouds. A Democratic takeover of the House would raise the odds that Congress would continue blocking cuts to research. And despite his criticism of the Paris accord as “very unfair” to the United States, Mr. Trump has left the door open to staying in the deal, if the terms were improved.

“I have been of the opinion all along that we can definitely see the U.S. back in the Paris agreement, even under Trump,” Mr. Rockström said.

Legally, he noted, the United States cannot formally withdraw from the pact until 2020, and the agreement’s terms are voluntary.

“He can sit there in the White House and draw up his own plan,” Mr. Rockström said.

Mark Landler reported from Washington, and Coral Davenport from Incheon, South Korea. Reporting was contributed by Somini Sengupta.

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 8, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Climate Warning Hits Silent Wall On Trump’s Desk.

Climate Change, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, United Nations

NY Times summary: Landmark U.N. Climate Report: by 2040, inundated coastlines, intensified droughts & poverty

October 9, 2018 Roger Straw

Repost from The New York Times

Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040

By Coral Davenport, Oct. 7, 2018

Harry Taylor, 6, played with the bones of dead livestock in Australia, which has faced severe drought. Credit Brook Mitchell/Getty Images

INCHEON, South Korea — A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”

The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.

The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. “We were not aware of this just a few years ago.” The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change.

The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will come much sooner, at the 2.7-degree mark.

Why Half a Degree of Global Warming Is a Big Deal

It may sound small, but a half-degree of temperature change could lead to more dire consequences in a warming world, according to a sweeping new scientific assessment.

Avoiding the most serious damage requires transforming the world economy within just a few years, said the authors, who estimate that the damage would come at a cost of $54 trillion. But while they conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required to avoid 2.7 degrees of warming, they concede that it may be politically unlikely.

[How much hotter is your hometown today than when you were born? Find out here.]

For instance, the report says that heavy taxes or prices on carbon dioxide emissions — perhaps as high as $27,000 per ton by 2100 — would be required. But such a move would be almost politically impossible in the United States, the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China. Lawmakers around the world, including in China, the European Union and California, have enacted carbon pricing programs.

People on a smog-clouded street in Hebei Province, China, in 2016. China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, followed by the United States. Credit Damir Sagolj/Reuters

President Trump, who has mocked the science of human-caused climate change, has vowed to increase the burning of coal and said he intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement. And on Sunday in Brazil, the world’s seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gas, voters appeared on track to elect a new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has said he also plans to withdraw from the accord.

The report was written and edited by 91 scientists from 40 countries who analyzed more than 6,000 scientific studies. The Paris agreement set out to prevent warming of more than 3.6 degrees above preindustrial levels — long considered a threshold for the most severe social and economic damage from climate change. But the heads of small island nations, fearful of rising sea levels, had also asked scientists to examine the effects of 2.7 degrees of warming.

[What on Earth is going on? Sign up to get our latest stories about climate change.]

Absent aggressive action, many effects once expected only several decades in the future will arrive by 2040, and at the lower temperature, the report shows. “It’s telling us we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime,” said Myles Allen, an Oxford University climate scientist and an author of the report.

To prevent 2.7 degrees of warming, the report said, greenhouse pollution must be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. It also found that, by 2050, use of coal as an electricity source would have to drop from nearly 40 percent today to between 1 and 7 percent. Renewable energy such as wind and solar, which make up about 20 percent of the electricity mix today, would have to increase to as much as 67 percent.

“This report makes it clear: There is no way to mitigate climate change without getting rid of coal,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University and an author of the report.

The World Coal Association disputed the conclusion that stopping global warming calls for an end of coal use. In a statement, Katie Warrick, its interim chief executive, noted that forecasts from the International Energy Agency, a global analysis organization, “continue to see a role for coal for the foreseeable future.”

Ms. Warrick said her organization intends to campaign for governments to invest in carbon capture technology. Such technology, which is currently too expensive for commercial use, could allow coal to continue to be widely used.

Despite the controversial policy implications, the United States delegation joined more than 180 countries on Saturday in accepting the report’s summary for policymakers, while walking a delicate diplomatic line. A State Department statement said that “acceptance of this report by the panel does not imply endorsement by the United States of the specific findings or underlying contents of the report.”

The State Department delegation faced a conundrum. Refusing to approve the document would place the United States at odds with many nations and show it rejecting established academic science on the world stage. However, the delegation also represents a president who has rejected climate science and climate policy.

“We reiterate that the United States intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement at the earliest opportunity absent the identification of terms that are better for the American people,” the statement said.

The report attempts to put a price tag on the effects of climate change. The estimated $54 trillion in damage from 2.7 degrees of warming would grow to $69 trillion if the world continues to warm by 3.6 degrees and beyond, the report found, although it does not specify the length of time represented by those costs.

The report concludes that the world is already more than halfway to the 2.7-degree mark. Human activities have caused warming of about 1.8 degrees since about the 1850s, the beginning of large-scale industrial coal burning, the report found.

Climate Change Is Complex. We’ve Got
Answers to Your Questions.

We know. Global warming is daunting. So here’s a place to start: 17 often-asked questions with some straightforward answers.

The United States is not alone in failing to reduce emissions enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change. The report concluded that the greenhouse gas reduction pledges put forth under the Paris agreement will not be enough to avoid 3.6 degrees of warming.

The report emphasizes the potential role of a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. “A price on carbon is central to prompt mitigation,” the report concludes. It estimates that to be effective, such a price would have to range from $135 to $5,500 per ton of carbon dioxide pollution in 2030, and from $690 to $27,000 per ton by 2100.

By comparison, under the Obama administration, government economists estimated that an appropriate price on carbon would be in the range of $50 per ton. Under the Trump administration, that figure was lowered to about $7 per ton.

The World Coal Association disputed the conclusion that stopping global warming calls for an end of coal use. Credit Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group funded by the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch, has made a point of campaigning against politicians who support a carbon tax.

“Carbon taxes are political poison because they increase gas prices and electric rates,” said Myron Ebell, who heads the energy program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded Washington research organization, and who led the Trump administration’s transition at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The report details the economic damage expected should governments fail to enact policies to reduce emissions. The United States, it said, could lose roughly 1.2 percent of gross domestic product for every 1.8 degrees of warming.

A wildfire in Shasta-Trinity National Forest in California last month. The new I.P.C.C. research found that wildfires are likely to worsen if steps are not taken to tame climate change. Credit Noah Berger/Associated Press

In addition, it said, the United States along with Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam are home to 50 million people who will be exposed to the effects of increased coastal flooding by 2040, if 2.7 degrees of warming occur.

At 3.6 degrees of warming, the report predicts a “disproportionately rapid evacuation” of people from the tropics. “In some parts of the world, national borders will become irrelevant,” said Aromar Revi, director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and an author of the report. “You can set up a wall to try to contain 10,000 and 20,000 and one million people, but not 10 million.”

The report also finds that, in the likelihood that governments fail to avert 2.7 degrees of warming, another scenario is possible: The world could overshoot that target, heat up by more than 3.6 degrees, and then through a combination of lowering emissions and deploying carbon capture technology, bring the temperature back down below the 2.7-degree threshold.

In that scenario, some damage would be irreversible, the report found. All coral reefs would die. However, the sea ice that would disappear in the hotter scenario would return once temperatures had cooled off.

“For governments, the idea of overshooting the target but then coming back to it is attractive because then they don’t have to make such rapid changes,” Dr. Shindell said. “But it has a lot of disadvantages.”

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter. Coral Davenport covers energy and environmental policy, with a focus on climate change, from the Washington bureau. She joined The Times in 2013 and previously worked at Congressional Quarterly, Politico and National Journal.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Trump, US Supreme Court

Robert Reich: We must unite to fight back against our country’s bullies

October 7, 2018 Roger Straw

Repost from the San Francisco Chronicle

We must unite to fight back against our country’s bullies

By Robert Reich, October 7, 2018

Brett Kavanaugh uses emotional bullying in an effort to get his way. | Erin Schaff / New York Times

As a kid, I was always a head shorter than other boys, which meant I was bullied — mocked, threatened, sometimes assaulted.

Childhood bullying has been going on forever. But America has become a culture of bullying — the wealthier over the poorer, CEOs over workers, those with privilege and pedigree over those without, the white over the brown and black, men over women.

Sometimes the bullying involves physical violence. More often it entails intimidation, displays of dominance, demands for submission, or arbitrary decisions over the lives of those who feel they have no choice but to accept them.

The hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 27 was a window into our bullying culture.

On one side: powerful men who harass or abuse women and get away with it, privileged white men intent on entrenching their power on the Supreme Court, men vested with the power to take away a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body.

On the other side: women with the courage to tell what has happened to them, to demand an end to white male privilege, and to preserve and enlarge their constitutional rights.

Christine Blasey Ford was poised, articulate, clear and convincing. More than that: She radiated self-assured power.

Kavanaugh, by contrast, showed himself to be a vicious partisan — a Trump-like figure who feels entitled to do and say whatever he wants, who suspects left-wing plots against him, who refuses to take responsibility for his actions, and who uses emotional bullying and intimidation to get his way.

Even if Kavanaugh gets on the Supreme Court, a large portion of the American public will never trust him to be impartial. Many will never believe his denials of sexual harassment. Most will continue to see him as the privileged, arrogant, self-righteous person he revealed himself to be.

Which brings us to the upcoming midterm elections.

It’s not really a contest between Democrats or Republicans, left or right. It’s a contest between the bullies and the bullied. It’s about the power of those who are rich, white, privileged or male — or all of the above — to threaten and intimidate those who aren’t.

And it’s about the courage of the bullied to fight back.

Donald Trump is America’s bully-in-chief. He exemplifies those who use their wealth to gain power and celebrity, harass or abuse women and get away with it, lie and violate the law with impunity, and rage against anyone who calls them on their bullying.

Trump became president by exploiting the anger of millions of white working-class Americans who for decades have been economically bullied by corporate executives and Wall Street.

Even as profits have ballooned and executive pay has gone into the stratosphere, workers have been hammered. Their pay has gone nowhere, their benefits have shrunk, their jobs are less secure.

Trump used this anger to build his political base, channeling the frustrations and anxieties into racism and nativism. He encouraged Americans who have been bullied to feel more powerful by bullying people with even less power: poor blacks, Latinos, immigrants, Muslims, families seeking asylum.

This bullying game has been played repeatedly in history, by self-described strongmen who pretend to be tribunes of the oppressed by scapegoating the truly powerless.

Trump is no tribune of the people. He and his enablers in the Republican Party are working for the moneyed interests — the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and other corporate and Wall Street chieftains — by cutting their taxes, eliminating regulations, slashing public services and allowing them to profit off public lands, coastal waters and privatized services.

The moneyed interests are America’s hidden bullies. They have enlarged their net worth by repressing wages (or pushing the companies they invest in to do so), and enlarged their political power through gerrymandering and suppressing votes (or pushing their political lackeys to do so).

Their capacity to bully has grown as the nation’s wealth has become concentrated in fewer hands, as the economy has become more monopolized, and as American politics have become more engulfed by big money.

It is time to fight back against the bullies. It is time to join together to reclaim economic and political power.

It begins with the midterm elections on Nov. 6.

"Push poll", Benicia City Attorney Heather McLaughlin, Benicia Municipal Code, EMC Research, Heather McLaughlin, Benicia City Attorney, Kari Birdseye, Legal action, Lionel Largaespada, Local elections, November election, Research America

Valero paid for smear campaign, survey attorney claims it was not a “push poll”

October 6, 2018 Roger Straw

Repost from the Vallejo Times-Herald
[Editor: Download City Attorney’s Oct. 5 letter here. – R.S.]

Valero refinery sponsored survey calls, Benicia City Attorney says

By John Glidden, October 5, 2018 at 5:32 pm

BENICIA — The mystery of who sponsored a poll to survey Benicia residents about the upcoming City Council election has been solved.

Officials with the Valero Benicia Refinery confirmed to Benicia City Attorney Heather Mc Laughlin on Thursday that Valero authorized the polling.

Mc Laughlin revealed the information in a formal letter she sent the Los Angeles-based Kaufman Legal Group. A copy of Mc Laughlin’s letter was provided to this newspaper.

Valero Benicia Refinery General Manager Don Wilson couldn’t be reached for comment on Friday.

Mc Laughlin was ultimately responding to a letter Kaufman attorney Gary S. Winuk sent the city on Monday defending Research America, Inc. and EMC Research.

A representative from Research America, a data collection company, previously confirmed to the Times-Herald that the firm was hired to gather polling information for EMC.

Contacted by phone on Friday afternoon, Winuk didn’t want to confirm if Kaufman is representing both Research America and EMC Research.

“I don’t have anything to say about it,” Winuk said before abruptly hanging up the phone.

Several Benicia residents, including Vice Mayor Steve Young, said they received a phone call from a group — later identified as Research America, Inc. — asking to conduct a survey about the City Council, senatorial and gubernatorial contests.

However, Young, said that most of the questions centered on Benicia City Council candidates Kari Birdseye and Lionel Largaespada.

“The statements about Mr. Largaespada were uniformly positive and stated how, for example, he would use his small business background to improve the city’s economy and relations with its businesses,” Young wrote in a Sept. 20 letter published by the Benicia Independent. “The statements about Ms. Birdseye were the opposite. Among these statements were ‘She wants to shut down Valero, costing hundreds of jobs,’ and ‘She will bring radical left-wing politics to City Hall.’”

Young said the survey was a “push poll,” a type of survey meant to influence voters instead of gathering objective survey information from those called.

Winuk in his Monday letter denied that the survey was a “push poll.”

“The public opinion research survey in question was designed to gather feedback from local voters on issues relevant to the upcoming election. It involved a robust sample methodology, designed to achieve a random sampling of likely voters from within the city of Benicia,” Winuk wrote.

He further said 256 randomly selected likely voters from within Benicia were contacted from Sept. 6 to Sept. 20 to participate in the survey.

In response to the calls, the Benicia City Council met in closed session on Tuesday. A majority of the council directed Mc Laughlin to contact Research and EMC Research about the survey, and ask for a copy of the questions and provide information on who paid for the poll. She was also directed to contact the California Fair Political Practices Commission about the calls.

At issue is the alleged failure of the companies to disclose who paid for the poll — a violation of the Benicia Municipal Code.

“From the reports I received, the polling by your clients may have contained “push” questions without disclosing the payor and amount spent,” Mc laughlin wrote in her letter to Winuk. “The caller also did not provide a ‘paid for by’ disclaimer at the end of the phone calls.”

Winuk previously said the poll was not a campaign communication, and “did not require any disclaimer and did not violate any federal, state or local laws, including the provisions of the Benicia Municipal Code.”

Mc Laughlin’s Friday letter officially requested a copy of the poll questions.

“In order to avoid having to issue a subpoena, I would ask that you voluntarily provide a copy of the poll questions to me within the next 72 years,” Mc Laughlin wrote to Winuk.

She also requested an itemized invoice which shows the times, dates and number of calls made. Finally, she asked that Winuk file disclosure reports for any future push polls, which meet the definition of an independent expenditures, and also ensure a disclaimer is provided with the calls.

“The city believes strongly that an open, fair and truthful election process is essential to promoting and improving public trust in the election process,” she wrote. “The city also believes that candidates should have meaningful opportunities to respond to claims about their qualifications and positions on issues.”