In this Issue:

3rd Oregon Gubernatorial Debate, October 9, 2018

More on IPCC Climate Change Report and the Effort Necessary to Meet the Challenges Presented

A Bit of Satire from The Consent Factory: Who doesn’t love identity politics?

3rd Oregon Gubernatorial Debate

In case you missed last night's debate on KGw between Kate Brown and Knute Buehler, you can find it here. They didn't put it on YouTube so some browsers may have issues trying to play it. It just shuts down during the introduction with my old Firefox. There are some issues clips on YouTube however:

Gov. Brown, Rep. Buehler debate Oregon's PERS program

Gov. Brown, Rep. Buehler discuss homelessness, affordable housing in Oregon

Gov. Brown, Rep. Buehler explain how they'll improve Oregon's education system

Rep. Buehler, Gov. Brown disapprove of President Trump's leadership style

Rep. Buehler supports Measure 105; Gov. Brown opposes it

Rep. Buehler says he would enforce death penalty, Gov. Brown says she will not

Gov. Brown, Rep. Buehler debate 'Cover All Kids'

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More on IPCC Climate Change Report and the Effort Necessary to Meet the Challenges Presented

Two articles of interest:

The first goes over some serious weaknesses in the report, such as minimizing the danger of a cascade of self-reinforcing feedback loops that will increase the severity and speed of climate change. The second addresses the magnitude of the effort that will be necessary to meet our climate change emergency. To put it bluntly, instead of our current never-ending war on the world, we need to put our energies and remaining resources into a war on climate change that would include a physical transformation of our economy to a zero emissions economy, as well as a transformation of our cultural practices and beliefs towards those more in line with our, and the current biosphere's survival, i.e., a truly sustainable future.

Climate report understates threat

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, released on Monday, is a major advance over previous efforts to alert world leaders and citizens to the growing climate risk. But the report, dire as it is, misses a key point: Self-reinforcing feedbacks and tipping points—the wildcards of the climate system—could cause the climate to destabilize even further. The report also fails to discuss the five percent risk that even existing levels of climate pollution, if continued unchecked, could lead to runaway warming—the so-called “fat tail” risk. These omissions may mislead world leaders into thinking they have more time to address the climate crisis, when in fact immediate actions are needed. To put it bluntly, there is a significant risk of self-reinforcing climate feedback loops pushing the planet into chaos beyond human control.
The report does describe how much more serious climatic impacts will be if the world lets warming reach 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Limiting the warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius can, for example, cut many impacts in half, including those of fresh water shortage and losses of many species and of ocean fish catch. The report is relatively optimistic that this can be done, but only with unprecedented commitment and cooperation from governments, industry, religious and secular leaders, and citizens around the world.
So far, average temperatures have risen by one degree Celsius. Adding 50 percent more warming to reach 1.5 degrees won’t simply increase impacts by the same percentage—bad as that would be. Instead, it risks setting up feedbacks that could fall like dangerous dominos, fundamentally destabilizing the planet. This is analyzed in a recent study showing that the window to prevent runaway climate change and a “hot house” super-heated planet is closing much faster than previously understood.
These cascading feedbacks include the loss of the Arctic’s sea ice, which could disappear entirely in summer in the next 15 years. The ice serves as a shield, reflecting heat back into the atmosphere, but is increasingly being melted into water that absorbs heat instead. Losing the ice would tremendously increase the Arctic’s warming, which is already at least twice the global average rate. This, in turn, would accelerate the collapse of permafrost, releasing its ancient stores of methane, a super climate pollutant 30 times more potent in causing warming than carbon dioxide.
By largely ignoring such feedbacks, the IPCC report fails to adequately warn leaders about the cluster of six similar climate tipping points that could be crossed between today’s temperature and an increase to 1.5 degrees—let alone nearly another dozen tipping points between 1.5 and 2 degrees. These wildcards could very likely push the climate system beyond human ability to control. As the UN Secretary General reminded world leaders last month, “We face an existential threat. Climate change is moving faster than we are.… If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences….”
The IPCC report makes clear for the first time that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees requires cutting short-lived super climate pollutions—black carbon, methane, and hydrofluorocarbons—along with carbon dioxide, as well as learning how to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at scale.
The report notes that there are historic precedents for the speed we need, although not for the scale of required mitigation. But the United States’ World War II industrial mobilization provides an encouraging precedent: Only three-and-a-half years elapsed between Pearl Harbor and D-Day. Our economies have a remarkable ability to adapt quickly with the right policies. So neither fatalism nor despair are warranted, but rather a sense of urgent, or even running-scared, optimism.
Governor Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco last month teamed up with technology innovators, zero-carbon energy producers, entrepreneurs, and other optimists to seize this challenge. President Macron’s One Planet Summit followed in New York during Climate Week, bringing together leaders of finance who were optimistic that managing climate risk is not only possible, but an exciting challenge that would also be profitable as new industries arise to do the most important work the world has ever demanded. (One estimate of the cost of carbon dioxide removal is a staggering $89 to $535 trillion this century—a sizable new market.)
It is critical that world leaders understand the IPCC report and use it as a template for immediate action. While its approaches have been identified before—including last year’s Well Under 2C study that we co-chaired with over 30 experts—the IPCC report should be a rallying point for nations to implement the policies needed to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Climate change should not be a divisive political issue. It is an issue of fundamental, data-driven science, an issue of human tragedy, and an issue of planetary ecosystems in peril. But above all, it is an issue we can still do something about.
Changing course will take leadership, such as we have seen in the United States from Governor Brown and the cities and states in his coalition, and from key heads of state such as China’s President Xi and India’s Prime Minister Modi, as well as France’s President Macron. These three leaders have the potential to provide Churchillian leadership to stabilize the world’s climate, starting by rallying the G20 countries responsible for 80 percent of the problem. They’ll need to speed up, and scale up, to succeed.

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10 October 2018

The UN chief calls for emergency climate action, but what does that actually mean in practice?

by David Spratt

“We face a direct existential threat” on climate for “the emergency we face”, UN Secretary General António Guterres told the world on 10 September. This was a most powerful voice in the rising chorus of recognition that existential climate risks requiring a global emergency response.

But what does an emergency response mean in practice?

The Melbourne-based Breakthrough - National Centre for Climate Restoration has just published a short guide to answer that question. Here is what is says.

Understanding climate emergency mode

Many of us have experienced emergency situations such as bushfires, floods or cyclones where, for the duration, nothing else matters as much as responding to the crisis. If we want to survive, or help others effectively, we don’t rush thoughtlessly in, but focus on a plan of action, implemented with thought and all possible care and speed to protect others and get to safety. Everyone chips in, with all hands on deck.

Climate warming has now created an emergency situation, which is being recognised by leading climate scientists, public leaders and community activists. “We face a direct existential threat” on climate for “the emergency we face”, UN Secretary General António Guterres recently said. Local government regions in Australia and the USA have recognised that climate emergency action is the only response that can fully address the scale and speed of the climate crisis. This guide provides an overview of what constitutes emergency mode to help us understand how it can be applied to developing sound strategy and policy.

Emergency threats

An emergency is a threat to people, property and/or society that has the potential to overwhelm them. It could be a natural disaster, a pandemic, a food–water crisis, or a human-made disaster such as a nuclear meltdown, war, or climate damage.

The challenge is to stop the problem escalating out of control and return to safety. In responding, failure and tradeoffs are not an option, because the consequences are so grave.
Action is time sensitive, because delay in responding leads to escalation and increased damage and cost.

Emergencies may be of short, medium or long duration, and their geographical impact may be local/regional, national or global.

Bushfire: local emergency

For natural emergencies, such as bushfires, emphasis is placed on anticipating how severe an event could be, not just middle-of-the road projections. People are educated about those high-end risks, and appropriate responses such as preparing property and evacuation plans. Government agencies are expected to be honest about the threats and what needs to be done.

The response is coordinated by government. Where emergency situations are of a familiar type, plans are made well in advance for labour, equipment and logistical capacity adequate to the task. The affected population is mobilised for firefighting, support services, care of the vulnerable, and other tasks. Communities are informed and consulted.

As the event materialises, some “business-as-usual” functioning of the affected community may be suspended: schools and other facilities closed, transport rerouted, dangerous activities prohibited, and volunteers take leave from their work.

Mostly, there is political bipartisanship to do “whatever it takes” and no effort or resources are spared.

War: long emergency

Many of the same approaches apply to mobilisation at times of conflict. Whilst wars are terrible events, how nations mobilise give insights into responding to grave threats. Like a natural emergency, plans are made for the worse that could happen, the population is mobilised in an all-out effort, and generally there is bipartisanship.

A “whatever it takes” attitude means that government plans and directs the nation’s resources and capacity towards building up the war effort. This can be done at amazing speed. After the surprise Japanese attack on the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbour in 1941, the US economy was transformed from the world’s largest producer of consumer goods to world’s largest producer of military goods in a year. Government directed the whole war effort, but business boomed as the national economy grew quickly. The proportions of national economies dedicated to the effort in World War II were staggering. Military outlays in 1943 as proportion of total economy were: USA 42%; UK 55%; Germany 70%; and Japan 43%. Japan’s percentage reached about 70% in 1945.

War mobilisations are characterised by crash programs to rapidly scale up of capacity and innovate. With so much directed toward the war effort, non-essential consumption is curtailed (for example, increased taxation and the sale of savings programs such as “war bonds”), whilst the basics for everyone are guaranteed. During World War II, rationing of some essentials was accepted by the population because such action or sacrifice was understood fair and necessary.

Rapid economic transitions

Also relevant to the framing of a climate emergency response is understanding the lessons of recent, rapid economic transitions, such as Japan, the Asian tiger economies and China. For example, in two decades, South Korea transformed itself completely from being a poor agricultural economy to a middle-income, world-competitive manufacturing economy. These changes came with very high human and environmental costs, but they demonstrate that programs to transform the organisation of production can be implemented quickly. The challenge for climate emergency action is to figure out how to transform the physical economy very fast without the high human and environmental cost.

Emergency mode

An emergency declaration shows that the government rates the problem as very serious, that priority will be given to resolving the crisis, that we are all in the crisis together and that, officially, “business as usual” and “reform-as-usual” no longer applies.
Here are some characteristics of emergency mode:

• Clarity of purpose 
In a bushfire, one clear goal is to save all human life. With climate warming, the purpose of emergency action is to protect all people, societies and ecosystems. This is not the case with the present climate policymaking processes, which arbitrarily debates how much death and destruction should be tolerated.

• Risk management 
An emergency response starts by fully assessing all the risks and potential damage, especially the “high-end” and existential risks which would be devastating for human societies. Special precautions that go well beyond conventional risk management practice are required if the increased likelihood of very large climate impacts are to be adequately dealt with. International and national climate policymaking has not adopted this approach, and exhibited a preference for conservative projections.

• Full and frank communication 
Emergency mode is a whole-of-society effort which requires an aware and motivated population. In most cases it also requires political bipartisanship. A full and frank discussion of the threat, the response and what that means for the society is critical is building and maintaining active commitment across the community. By contrast, international policymakers, most governments, and much of the non-government sector so far have failed to clearly communicate the real risks and responses.

• Highest priority 
An emergency identifies a task as the highest priority of the society for the duration of the emergency, to which sufficient resources will be applied in order to succeed. Recently, Climate Councillor Prof. Will Steffen told The Intercept in an interview published on 14 August 2018 that “Getting greenhouse gas emissions down fast has to be the primary target of policy and economics (with) something ‘more like wartime footing’ to roll out renewable energy and dramatically reimagine sectors like transportation and agriculture ‘at very fast rates’.”

• Government leadership
All very fast, large-scale transformations are characterised by strong government leadership in planning, coordinating and allocating resources. This response is backed by sufficient administrative power to achieve a rapid response that is beyond the capacity of the society’s normal functioning. Only national government has society-wide capacity to plan, direct resources, develop labour skills, provide funding from taxation, manage savings and investments, coordinate innovation efforts, and set a regulatory framework for effective emergency action. To do this, the prevailing neoliberal ideology (privatisation, deregulation, lower taxes, less government spending, and so on) must be suspended even where societies see it as the preferred approach for managing the economy in normal times.

• Focus on physical transformation 
More than anything else, climate emergency mobilisation is about the transformation of the physical economy at great speed, delivering an integrated package of solutions for a safe-climate economy, zero emissions and large-scale carbon dioxide drawdown. Emphasis is also given to critical research and development of solutions to close the gap between what is needed for effective protection and what is currently possible

• Fairness  
We now face large-scale climate disruption: either planned by way of an emergency transition to restore a safe climate,, or unplanned chaos because social and physical system failure will inevitably occur as warming intensifies. This dislocation requires a focus on equity — both internationally and within the nation — so that the burden of transformation is shared in a reasonable manner. Without a sense that the emergency and the changes are both fair and necessary, the public mandate for such change is unlikely to be built or maintained. The good news is that even if a climate emergency were
to be declared at a time of economic health, the tasks are so challenging — building a zero-emissions economy, taking carbon out of the air, and finding the means to cool the planet — that every scrap of productive capacity will be required.

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A Bit of Satire from C. J. Hopkins & The Consent Factory: Who doesn’t love identity politics?

Who Doesn’t Love Identity Politics?

If there is one thing that still unites Americans across the ever more intellectually suffocating and bitterly polarized political spectrum our imaginations have been crammed into like rush hour commuters on the Tokyo Metro, it’s our undying love of identity politics.

Who doesn’t love identity politics? Liberals love identity politics. Conservatives love identity politics. Political parties love identity politics. Corporations love identity politics. Advertisers, anarchists, white supremacists, Wall Street bankers, Hollywood producers, Twitter celebrities, the media, academia … everybody loves identity politics.

Why do we love identity politics? We love them for many different reasons.

The ruling classes love identity politics because they keep the working classes focused on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on, and not on the fact that they (i.e., the working classes) are, essentially, glorified indentured servants, who will spend the majority of their sentient existences laboring to benefit a ruling elite that would gladly butcher their entire families and sell their livers to hepatitic Saudi princes if they could get away with it. Dividing the working classes up into sub-groups according to race, ethnicity, and so on, and then pitting these sub-groups against each other, is extremely important to the ruling classes, who are, let’s remember, a tiny minority of intelligent but physically vulnerable parasites controlling the lives of the vast majority of human beings on the planet Earth, primarily by keeping them ignorant and confused.

The political parties love identity politics because they allow them to conceal the fact that they are bought and paid for by these ruling classes, which, in our day and age, means corporations and a handful of obscenely wealthy oligarchs who would gut you and your kids like trout and sell your organs to the highest bidder if they thought they could possibly get away with it. The political parties employ identity politics to maintain the simulation of democracy that prevents Americans (many of whom are armed) from coming together, forming a mob, dismantling this simulation of democracy, and then attempting to establish an actual democracy, of, by, and for the people, which is, basically, the ruling classes’ worst nightmare. The best way to avoid this scenario is to keep the working classes ignorant and confused, and at each other’s throats over things like pronouns, white privilege, gender appropriate bathrooms, and the complexion and genitalia of the virtually interchangeable puppets the ruling classes allow them to vote for.
. . . .

The fake Left loves identity politics because they allow them to pretend to be “revolutionary” and spout all manner of “militant” gibberish while posing absolutely zero threat to the ruling classes they claim to be fighting. Publishing fake Left “samizdats” (your donations to which are tax-deductible), sanctimoniously denouncing racism on Twitter, milking whatever identity politics scandal is making headlines that day, and otherwise sounding like a slightly edgier version of National Public Radio, are all popular elements of the fake Left repertoire.

Marching along permitted parade routes, assembling in designated “free speech areas,” and listening to speeches by fake Left celebrities and assorted Democratic Party luminaries, are also well-loved fake Left activities. For those who feel the need to be even more militant, pressuring universities to cancel events where potentially “violent” and “oppressive” speech acts (or physical gestures) might occur, toppling offensive historical monuments, ratting out people to social media censors, or masking up and beating the crap out of “street Nazis” are among the available options. All of these activities, by herding potential troublemakers into fake Left ghettos and wasting their time, both on- and off-line, help to ensure that the ruling classes, their political puppets, the corporate media, Hollywood, and the rest of the culture industry can keep most people ignorant and confused.

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More here.