CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #99

 

CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #99, OCTOBER 31, 2022

Population Growth: 8 billion in November
The Limits of Growth
Mark Hertsgaard.  Biden’s Climate Bill.
Dick.  The Importance of Time.

Jack St George. Trillion Trees

Over-Population
Population Connection | Join a Discussion with our Communications Team!   1-28-22

Engage 1-28-22

Hi James R.,

The global population is racing towards 8 billion—a milestone we’re due to reach next month.  Since the UN released its World Population Prospects over the summer, our Communications staff have been hard at work reporting on the latest projections….We invite you to join a discussion with them to learn more about key takeaways from the UN’s latest population projections, which included the identification of November 15, 2022, as the date that our global population will reach 8 billion.

Their presentation, A Demographic Milestone: Reporting on the 8 Billion Mark will take place NEXT Wednesday, November 2^nd, at 1pm ET/10am PT.

You can register for the discussion here!  Please reach out to us at engage@popconnect.org 

Kind Regards--  Natalie and Stephanie, Population Connection Membership Relations

 

Limits to Growth
Don’t forget population growth as a cause of virus, climate, and war crises.  VIRUS: Increasing Human population is driving animals off their land and into contact with humans.  --Dick

The Editors (October 6, 2022). “ The Limits of Growth.”  Monthly Review.  October 2022 (Volume 74, Number 5).

buy this issue  This year is the fiftieth anniversary of The Limits of Growth, one of the most influential, and also controversial, environmental studies ever written. No other environmental work of the 1970s offered such a direct challenge to the underlying assumptions of capitalist neoclassical growth economics, or was responded to so vehemently by establishment thinkers. | more…

 

Biden’s Climate Bill
Mark Hertsgaard.  “A Big Deal.”  The Nation (9.5-12.2022).  Biden’s climate bill, The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, “is the biggest positive step the government has ever taken on climate change.”  [Let’s not forget, though, that Bernie’s original bill’s proposed expenditure was three-times more.]   Most important, it hopes to make clean energy so cheap it will squeeze fossil fuels out of the market.  But Republican “climate wrecking” continues and might block those hopes.  In response, before the next election, “reporters covering them, Democrats [and Independents] running against them, and constituents deciding whether to vote for them” should be asking GOP candidates “over and over” “why anyone who wants a livable climate…would want a Republican Congress.”  [Hertsgaard is a distinguished climatologist, author of the still excellent Hot (2011).  --D]

In contrast read: Notes from the Editors, Monthly Review (November 2022): The inadequate IRA “is best regarded as a chronic symptom of, rather than a partial solution to, the present planetary crisis” (64).

 

IMPORTANCE OF TIME.

The actor spokesman for the Viking travel company’s ads on PBS’ Masterpiece Mysteries  declares: “There’s only one thing we don’t have enough of, and that’s time.”  So we should choose our time wisely.  Travel for education and broadening ourselves is one of the wisest uses of our time.  The catch?   Alas, we don’t have time.

     The protagonist of  Dalton Trumbo’s novel about WWI, Johnny Got His Gun, has been grotesquely, almost totally dismembered by a bomb, but is being kept alive in a hospital.  He thinks: “No matter how far you are separated from other people if you have an idea of time why then you are in the same world with them you are part of them but if you lose time the others go on ahead of you and you are left alone hanging in air lost to everything forever.”

     The situation for us today is reversed.   Not uniquely mutilated soldiers, but our leaders and their followers have lost time, in this instance not ordinary time but now its urgency, all who will not apprehend how little time is left to us even to slow the full onslaught of the calamity of climate’s derangement.  They have lost time by holding insistently to the past, living as though we were still in the 1950s or 70s.  Driving big cars, running our air conditioners, warring and traveling.  Instead of the wisdom of countering planetary catastrophe with commensurate cooperation, we pretend there’s time to prolong business as usual, a choice that could leave us all lost to everything forever.   Dick

 

TRILLION TREES?

Zack St. George.   “The Trouble with Trees.  Can Planting a Trillion New Trees Save the World?”  New York Times Magazine (July 17, 2022). Actually, the “trillion” is aspirational; much that is claimed must be taken on faith. We don’t know “where things really stand” in the planting, sustaining, and verification of new trees, for the “movement” is highly fragmented.  What has been actually planted and being planted—seeds and seedlings included, when both are risky?  A trillion would be impossible under the present chaotic diversification, and even if we could it wouldn’t be sufficient to save us.  Advocates have “drastically overestimated the climate-mending effects of planting trees.”  Tree-planting is “just one solution among the many that are needed…. for climate mitigation.”  [The author does not speculate on what would be sufficient to save us, or what a centrally controlled and funded crash program under the UN, like a combined Manhattan Project-Apollo Mission-Marshall Plan, might accomplish.  --Dick]