Tag: Climate Activism

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 14, 2021

The weekend got off to a good start with Bannon indicted and Britany freed. But the final outcome at COP26 is the big news. The final agreement was announced on Saturday. It calls for reductions in coal and fossil fuel use and a transition to renewables. Those are all firsts in the more than 25-year history of UN climate talks.

Still, countries like Saudi Arabia or China were resistant; so the wording had to be significantly watered down. Wednesday’s draft mentioned phasing out coal, but Saturday’s speaks only of accelerating “efforts towards the phase-out of unabated coal power”.

What seems to have happened is a lot of speechifying, including Boris Johnson sounding a lot like Greta Thunberg. But not much happened in terms of concrete political action.

There is some good news: a net-zero pledge from India, a commitment from the US and China to work together, and a toothless but significant global agreement to reduce methane emissions.

One thing that is easy to overlook is that there were no climate deniers among the countries represented at COP26, a first. But a preliminary analysis of the agreement published by Carbon Brief suggests that, all told, the agreements coming out of COP26 may shave only 0.1 degree Celsius off of future warming.

The disconnect between rhetoric and reality has several possible explanations, but Occam’s Razor suggests it can be explained best in three words: Talk is cheap.

As Wrongo has said, not all the climate change news is bad: the probabilities of the worst-case scenarios seem to be falling a bit. The flip side of this is that, at present, the probability of the best-case scenario (holding global warming to 1.5 degrees C. above the pre-industrial baseline) also seems to be fading, and all of the medium-range outcomes look pretty terrible. On to cartoons.

Climate warriors won’t fight:

Infrastructure Week finally arrives:

Not everyone is enthusiastic about Infrastructure week:

GOP is unfriending the infrastructure-positive Republicans:

Ted Cruz is one of the smarmiest politicians ever, so it isn’t a surprise that he tried to score political points by going after Sesame Street’s Big Bird, who tweeted that he had gotten his COVID-19 vaccine. “My wing is feeling a little sore,” he said, “but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.” It was a nice thing to tell children now that they can get the vaccine. Cruz didn’t see it as nice, nor did the Right-wing blowhards on Fox News and Newsmax. They were livid about Big Bird’s message:

Republicans turn back the clock:

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Climate Change Summit, Part II

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Princeton, Buena Vista, CO – October 2021 photo by Haji Mahmood

Biden sees the Glasgow Climate Summit as a legacy event that will bring about substantive change. But nobody believes that. Change doesn’t occur easily, and in the case of climate change, the forces arrayed against it are overwhelming.

Corporations will not give up profits easily. Individuals will not willingly pay more for goods once companies jack up their prices to maintain margins. Countries will try desperately to avoid being the first to bend the CO2 curve, knowing that their economic growth will slow precipitously.

Sometimes a change in culture has to occur before political change can begin. Think about the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, or the anti-war movement in the early 1970s. Those great political changes were built on a foundation of cultural change. One came from Black churches, and the other from college students.

We’re in the middle of a 2-year Covid debacle on top of a 13-year economic debacle. Before the Great Recession, if people weren’t making it, they (and everyone else) thought the problem wasn’t America’s politics or our economic system, but it was mostly about their laziness or lack of skills. Back then, we believed that anyone could make it. Few thought the system was rigged, and there wasn’t a widespread push for serious change.

Now, young people are tumbling to the fact the problem isn’t them – it’s the system. Think of it as a game of musical chairs, where the people sitting down never stand up when the music plays. From Ian Welsh: (Brackets by Wrongo)

“They [the young] think, ‘it’s you, not me’ where ‘you’ = society and politics. They may have…student loans, but they know boomers paid….[only] a nominal amount for university. They know they can’t afford a home or apartment, not because they don’t earn enough, but because wages have effectively gone down, and real home prices have gone up….They know medical care is too expensive and that drugs didn’t used to cost nearly this much.”

Young people are beginning to understand that without political change, their lives aren’t going to get better. In fact, they will probably get worse. This is true for the climate as well as for the basic inequalities in our society.

We need a political revolution to change these things, but America’s political system doesn’t like big changes. It does enable smaller cultural and political changes all the time. Our politicians give us intermittent reinforcement: They are amenable and sometimes eager to serve up limited forms of change, but not what most people want, or what the planet needs.

And the longer we rely on today’s politicians to save us, the farther we will be from the changes we need. Our political system is very resistant to change, as the prolonged debate over Biden’s social spending bill shows.

And there’s no political will at any level to change the system.

Still, it has to change, or it will self-destruct. When you are at Wrongo’s advanced age, the temptation is to say, “the future is hopeless.” But America’s youth will soon replace the elders in both political parties. They will not be staying quiet.

What must happen is a cultural change that a significant portion of the population will buy into. It doesn’t have to be everyone, but it has to be compelling to at least a 10%-20% minority which can then influence the other 80%-90%.

We live in a culture that values greed, power, and control over other people’s lives. So, the new culture must be built on a different set of values. Insisting on a different set of values is something we can all do both individually and collectively.

The Trumpists have attempted this with middle-aged White Americans. Steve Bannon knew that change must first happen culturally, that the culture has to want it, or at least allow it. But so far, the Trumpist appeal seems limited to 30% of the population.

The other 70% are on the sidelines, waiting for a reason to believe in something else.

If you doubt that young people can have an outsized impact, watch “The Children Will Rise Up!” an climate change anthem written by Nandi Bushell, who gained social media fame as a drummer, and Roman Morello, son of Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello. Here these two 10 year-olds perform with cameos by Jack Black and Greta Thunberg:

Sample Lyric:

They let the earth bleed to feed their greed.
Stop polluting politicians poisoning for profit.
While they are killing all the trees, now we all can’t breathe
As the temperature’s a rising, nothing is surviving.

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Wake Up Call – Climate Edition, September 23, 2019

The Daily Escape:

Greenland shows its melting glaciers – September 14, 2019 photo by Steve Mueller. Mueller gives a personal testimony, describing similar flights over Greenland in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s when ice & snow covered most of it. Sadly, that’s no longer true today.

Wrongo rarely writes about climate change, because he’s had very little hope that the world will act to solve, or delay the reality in front of us.

Until now.

There is something very hopeful when young people around the globe are calling out those in power and calling out the rest of us who have exacerbated the warming problem through our commitment to economic growth at any price. That price includes income inequality and the ever-accelerating use of our planet’s resources to fuel that economic growth.

The emergence of young people as activists adds a different dimension to the argument. They are worried about what kind of world we’re leaving them. The movement is personified by the 16-year-old Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg. On Monday, she spoke to the UN Climate Change Summit, and did not mince words. She implored world leaders to act urgently:

“I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

“Anger is an energy” said the Sex Pistols in 1972. And we’re seeing both anger and all of its kinetic energy on display by these kids. It’s reminiscent of teenagers in the 1960s and 1970’s in the US, first with the Civil Rights movement, and later, with less effect, in the Vietnam War protests.

Time will tell if this social movement ends up helping to create big policy change, or if it’s just another footnote, a bit like Occupy Wall Street. But, It’s given Wrongo some hope that it is still possible to battle against entrenched money interests, at least on the question of climate change.

Returning to the climate consequences as shown in Steve Mueller’s photo, The Economist’s cover story this week is about climate. They point out that temperatures in the Arctic are warming twice as fast as the global average:

When floating sea ice vanishes, it exposes deep blue waters, which absorb more solar energy than the white ice does. In turn, this speeds up melting: it’s a classic positive-feedback loop. The ice recedes to an annual minimum extent every September. The record low was set in 2012.

Some sceptics point to cold snaps in North America as evidence that concern about global warming is overblown. They should be told that such days are caused by chilly air escaping polar latitudes. Which in itself, may be another consequence of a warming Arctic.

A good analogy is the problem supertankers face if they try to make a U-turn. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and time to overcome the ship’s momentum, to slow the tanker from cruising speed to a point where a u-turn can begin.

For climate change, we must overcome our momentum, reversing how we create energy, how we manufacture our goods, how we travel, how we heat and cool our homes, and how we provision our foods.

The next challenge is if this can be done while continuing to expand the global economy, keeping in mind that the global population may be 50% larger by 2100.

Back in corporate life, Wrongo used to talk about things that could be fixed “If your life depended on it” and those that couldn’t be fixed even if your life did depend on it.

If the problem can be fixed if your life depended on it, you fix it or die, no excuses. This is where we are today. Maybe it’s not our lives that depend on it,  it’s those of our grandchildren. They are counting on us to rise up now, in a global movement to make change.

Wake up America! The kids couldn’t be clearer:  They do not want pats on the head, where we tell them how “inspiring” they are.

For Boomers and Millennials, the climate problems posed in the second half of the 21st century can still seem largely hypothetical. But for those born after 2000 like Greta Thunberg, and 2.6 billion others, it’s more like half their lives. This gives a huge moral weight to their demands.

But it will take more than political activism. The kids want our leadership, our votes, and most importantly, our action to confront this crisis.

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