OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #124

 

OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #124, APRIL 24, 2023
Our Print Magazines Imagine the Future
Mother Jones: Electricity and Regional Transmission
Nukewatch Quarterly: Renewables and No Nuclear Weapons
 In These Times: Reparations

To Have a Future: Electrify and Regional Transmission Lines.  Mother Jones Magazine (May-June 2023) contains several articles on climate change, especially decarbonizing USA   “Electrify Everything” includes Bill McKibben’s “Yes in Our Backyards” and Lois Parshley’s “Powered Up.”   McKibben celebrates the building/solar panels boom.  Parshley urges regional transmission lines. 

To Have a Future: 1.  Massive Production of Renewables, 2. Total Abolition of Nuclear Weapons
Nukewatch Quarterly (Spring 2023) in a debunking article on “nuclear  fusion” as an energy breakthrough, “Clean Energy or Weapons?”  M. V. Ramana argues that the fusion research will not produce the energy its boosters claim, while on the other hand it “will contribute far more to U.S. efforts to further develop its terrifyingly destructive nuclear weapons arsenal.”   The fusion research has been a “dangerous distraction.”  “The Intergovernmental  Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that to stop irreversible damage from climate change, the world will have to achieve zero net emissions by 2050.  Given this short timeline to turn round our economies and ways of living, spending billions of dollars on fusion power only amounts to diverting money and resources away from proven and safer renewable energy sources.   Meanwhile, nuclear fusion experiments will further the risk posed by the nuclear arsenal. We need nuclear weapons abolition, but programs like [the fusion research] offer nuclear weapons modernisation,  which is just a means to assure destruction forever.”  Orig. pub. in Beyond Nuclear, (12-16-2022).  M. V. Ramana occupies the Chair in Disarmament at U. of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Another Necessary Big Idea for the Future: Just Transition   In These Times Magazine (March 2023) supports climate reparations in “The Big Idea: Climate Reparations.”  “The idea that wealthy nations should pay to mitigate the planetary emergency, which they caused and which disproportionately affects poorer countries.”  (A major advocacy of the Green New Deal. –D)