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
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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 2nd, 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]
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