NASA: ‘Planetary warming does not care about the election’ #auspol

By Dr Joe Romm

A very warm October ensures 2016 will be the hottest year by far.

NASA Land and Ocean Temperature Index (LOTI) for October.

Last month was the second-hottest October on record, NASA reported Tuesday. Combined with a record-smashing January through September — and a very warm November — this new data guarantee that 2016 will demolish the previous record for hottest year, set way back in 2015.

Of course, 2015 itself crushed the previous record for hottest year that was set in 2014 — a three-year run never seen in the 136 years of temperature records.

Dr. Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wants everyone to know that our current man-made global warming is indifferent to politics:

Climatologists actually predicted this latest “jump” in global temperatures.

There is “a vast and growing body of research,” Climate Central explained in February 2015, indicating that “humanity is about to experience a historically unprecedented spike in temperatures.” One 2015 study concluded that we could even see Arctic warming rise an alarming 1°F (0.56°C) per decade by the next decade.

Speaking of the Arctic, look again at the top map from NASA. Large parts of the Arctic super-heated in October, as much 15.6 6°F (8.7°C) above the 1951–1980 mean temperature. No surprise, then, that last month saw the lowest October ice extent on record and that “as of November 1, sea ice volume is lowest on record.”

Recent research finds that rapid Arctic warming and sea ice loss are already worsening extreme weather. Amplified warming also means that the rapidly melting Greenland ice sheet, which is already unstable, will disintegrate even faster, boosting sea level rise more than previously estimated, upwards of six feet this century.

Finally, our current period of rapid Arctic warming sea ice loss threatens to speed up the release of vast amounts of carbon from thawing permafrost. This dangerous amplifying feedback alone could add as much as 1.5°F (0.8°C) to total planetary warming this century.

The only way to stop this vicious cycle of ever-more dangerous threats is through a global effort to slash carbon pollution deeply and rapidly. Tragically, elections can and do affect whether major emitters like the United States will keep trying to solve the problem — or become a major reason we don’t.

Press link for more: Think Progress

The Guardian view on climate change: Trump spells disaster #auspol

Reaching a global agreement on climate change took more than 20 years of tortuous negotiations. Signed just under a year ago, the insufficient but workable Paris agreement at last constructed a legally binding framework for the principle of cutting carbon emissions.

 It was to be the foundation of a sustained ratcheting up of ambition that would hold global warming below 2C.

 Last Tuesday night, as one by one from east coast to west the United States went Republican red, that progress was wiped out.
Donald Trump is the first self-declared climate denier to lead of one of the world’s biggest emitters. 

Even President George W Bush, though he surrounded himself with sceptics, did not publicly disavow climate science. 

He even managed a few helpful moves. But Mr Trump has pledged to unpick the Paris agreement. In Marrakech, where delegates are meeting for the first time since Paris, they are putting a brave face on proceedings. But they know the outlook is bleaker than it has been since the collapse of the Copenhagen talks in 2009.
Mr Trump cannot instantly extricate the US from the Paris accord: legal technicalities means withdrawal would take four years, although he may try to speed up the process. That, though, is just legal stuff. His chilling effect on climate negotiations has already begun. That is because these talks rely as much – if not more – on trust, good faith and political will as they do on law and legal process. Remember, for instance, that only the framework of the Paris pact is legally binding, not each country’s commitments on greenhouse gas emissions.
Trust and goodwill can go a long way: the personal charm offensive that President Obama launched on Beijing when he made climate change a legacy issue led to the historic joint statement without which the Paris deal could never have been made. The prospect of its success drew the presence of almost all major world leaders to Paris for the launch of the talks last December, sending an unmistakable signal to their negotiating teams. Now, even if the US remains technically a signatory for a while longer, all this is lost from inauguration day in January.
With a hostile US, China may cool on its commitments, or at least take a tougher stance, as it has done before. India was already a reluctant participant and the change in the US position is likely only to make its grumbles louder.
Games of “what if” are irresistible at this stage. As delegates started to gather in Marrakech, the world appeared on the brink of an unprecedented phase of stability. The Paris agreement had come into force within a year of its agreement, an astonishing achievement after the discord and mistrust that had threatened all the preceding meetings and even the whole UN climate process. But now that huge achievement may be shattered. Diplomats are working furiously to reassure countries that the departure of the US would not mean the end of the road and the process can continue.

And it is not only the global talks. 

In the US, too, more climate-unfriendly actions from a Republican-dominated Congress, like changes to clean energy subsidies, are on the cards, while President Obama’s clean power plan to regulate power stations is under grave threat. Mr Trump’s proposed leader of the Environmental Protection Agency is a prominent climate sceptic, Myron Ebell, a man once described by a senior George W Bush aide as “crazy Myron”.

Finally, a right-leaning supreme court may put a brake on future legal challenges from environmental groups. Taken with Mr Trump’s support for coal, US emissions may soon be back firmly on their upward track. And if he really wants to “cancel” Paris, Trump could even pull the US out of the UN framework convention on climate change, the foundation treaty under which Paris was signed.

 If he did, the world would lose its global forum for taking fair and effective action on greenhouse gases and adapting to climate change.
Withdrawal may be a step too far even for Trump, for the treaty gives the US a seat at the table that pragmatists would rather retain, even if they try to saw the legs off.
For delegates in Marrakech, the only source of optimism may be their years of experience in holding the talks together. But they cannot do it on their own. In the end, it may all come down to scientifically literate Republicans in Congress. They must be the voice of the two-thirds of Americans who understand the link between human activity and global warming – and want to break it.

For more press link: theguardian.com

Noam Chomsky: ‘Republican Party Has Become Most Dangerous Organization in World History’ #auspol

By C.J. Polychronio
On Nov. 8, Donald Trump managed to pull the biggest upset in U.S. politics by tapping successfully into the anger of white voters and appealing to the lowest inclinations of people in a manner that would have probably impressed Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels himself.

But what exactly does Trump’s victory mean and what can one expect from this megalomaniac when he takes over the reins of power on Jan. 20, 2017? 

What is Trump’s political ideology, if any and is “Trumpism” a movement? 

Will U.S. foreign policy be any different under a Trump administration? 

Some years ago, public intellectual Noam Chomsky warned that the political climate in the U.S. was ripe for the rise of an authoritarian figure.

 Now, he shares his thoughts on the aftermath of this election, the moribund state of the U.S. political system and why Trump is a real threat to the world and the planet in general.

Q. Noam, the unthinkable has happened: In contrast to all forecasts, Donald Trump scored a decisive victory over Hillary Clinton, and the man that Michael Moore described as a “wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath” will be the next president of the U.S. In your view, what were the deciding factors that led American voters to produce the biggest upset in the history of U.S. politics?

A. Noam Chomsky
Before turning to this question, I think it is important to spend a few moments pondering just what happened on Nov. 8, a date that might turn out to be one of the most important in human history, depending on how we react.
No exaggeration.
The most important news of Nov. 8 was barely noted, a fact of some significance in itself.
On Nov. 8, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) delivered a report at the international conference on climate change in Morocco (COP22) which was called in order to carry forward the Paris agreement of COP21. 

The WMO reported that the past five years were the hottest on record.

 It reported rising sea levels, soon to increase as a result of the unexpectedly rapid melting of polar ice, most ominously the huge Antarctic glaciers. 

Already, Arctic sea ice over the past five years is 28 percent below the average of the previous 29 years, not only raising sea levels, but also reducing the cooling effect of polar ice reflection of solar rays, thereby accelerating the grim effects of global warming. 

The WMO reported further that temperatures are approaching dangerously close to the goal established by COP21, along with other dire reports and forecasts.

Another event took place on Nov. 8, which also may turn out to be of unusual historical significance for reasons that, once again, were barely noted.
On Nov. 8, the most powerful country in world history, which will set its stamp on what comes next, had an election. 

The outcome placed total control of the government—executive, Congress, the Supreme Court—in the hands of the Republican Party, which has become the most dangerous organization in world history.
Apart from the last phrase, all of this is uncontroversial. 

The last phrase may seem outlandish, even outrageous. But is it? 

The facts suggest otherwise. The party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life. There is no historical precedent for such a stand.
Is this an exaggeration? Consider what we have just been witnessing.
During the Republican primaries, every candidate denied that what is happening is happening—with the exception of the sensible moderates, like Jeb Bush, who said it’s all uncertain, but we don’t have to do anything because we’re producing more natural gas, thanks to fracking. 

Or John Kasich, who agreed that global warming is taking place, but added that “we are going to burn [coal] in Ohio and we are not going to apologize for it.”
The winning candidate, now the president-elect, calls for rapid increase in use of fossil fuels, including coal; dismantling of regulations; rejection of help to developing countries that are seeking to move to sustainable energy; and in general, racing to the cliff as fast as possible.
Trump has already taken steps to dismantle the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by placing in charge of the EPA transition a notorious (and proud) climate change denier, Myron Ebell. Trump’s top adviser on energy, billionaire oil executive Harold Hamm, announced his expectations, which were predictable: dismantling regulations, tax cuts for the industry (and the wealthy and corporate sector generally), more fossil fuel production, lifting Obama’s temporary block on the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The effects of Republican denialism had already been felt.

 There had been hopes that the COP21 Paris agreement would lead to a verifiable treaty, but any such thoughts were abandoned because the Republican Congress would not accept any binding commitments, so what emerged was a voluntary agreement, evidently much weaker.
Effects may soon become even more vividly apparent than they already are. 

In Bangladesh alone, tens of millions are expected to have to flee from low-lying plains in coming years because of sea level rise and more severe weather, creating a migrant crisis that will make today’s pale in significance. 

With considerable justice, Bangladesh’s leading climate scientist said that “These migrants should have the right to move to the countries from which all these greenhouse gases are coming. Millions should be able to go to the United States.” 

And to the other rich countries that have grown wealthy while bringing about a new geological era, the Anthropocene, marked by radical human transformation of the environment. 

These catastrophic consequences can only increase, not just in Bangladesh, but in all of South Asia as temperatures, already intolerable for the poor, inexorably rise and the Himalayan glaciers melt, threatening the entire water supply. Already in India, some 300 million people are reported to lack adequate drinking water. And the effects will reach far beyond.

It is hard to find words to capture the fact that humans are facing the most important question in their history—whether organized human life will survive in anything like the form we know—and are answering it by accelerating the race to disaster.
Similar observations hold for the other huge issue concerning human survival: the threat of nuclear destruction, which has been looming over our heads for 70 years and is now increasing.
It is no less difficult to find words to capture the utterly astonishing fact that in all of the massive coverage of the electoral extravaganza, none of this receives more than passing mention. At least I am at a loss to find appropriate words.
Turning finally to the question raised, to be precise, it appears that Clinton received a slight majority of the vote. 

The apparent decisive victory has to do with curious features of American politics: among other factors, the Electoral College residue of the founding of the country as an alliance of separate states; the winner-take-all system in each state; the arrangement of congressional districts (sometimes by gerrymandering) to provide greater weight to rural votes (in past elections, and probably this one too, Democrats have had a comfortable margin of victory in the popular vote for the House, but hold a minority of seats); the very high rate of abstention (usually close to half in presidential elections, this one included). Of some significance for the future is the fact that in the age 18-25 range, Clinton won handily and Sanders had an even higher level of support. How much this matters depends on what kind of future humanity will face.
According to current information, Trump broke all records in the support he received from white voters, working class and lower middle class, particularly in the $50,000 to $90,000 income range, rural and suburban, primarily those without college education. 

These groups share the anger throughout the West at the centrist establishment, revealed as well in the unanticipated Brexit vote and the collapse of centrist parties in continental Europe. [Many of] the angry and disaffected are victims of the neoliberal policies of the past generation, the policies described in congressional testimony by Fed chair Alan Greenspan—”St. Alan,” as he was called reverentially by the economics profession and other admirers until the miraculous economy he was supervising crashed in 2007-2008, threatening to bring the whole world economy down with it. 

As Greenspan explained during his glory days, his successes in economic management were based substantially on “growing worker insecurity.” Intimidated working people would not ask for higher wages, benefits and security, but would be satisfied with the stagnating wages and reduced benefits that signal a healthy economy by neoliberal standards.
Working people, who have been the subjects of these experiments in economic theory, are not particularly happy about the outcome. They are not, for example, overjoyed at the fact that in 2007, at the peak of the neoliberal miracle, real wages for nonsupervisory workers were lower than they had been years earlier, or that real wages for male workers are about at 1960s levels while spectacular gains have gone to the pockets of a very few at the top, disproportionately a fraction of 1%. Not the result of market forces, achievement or merit, but rather of definite policy decisions, matters reviewed carefully by economist Dean Baker in recently published work.
The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the ’50s and ’60s, the minimum wage—which sets a floor for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today, it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15.
With all the talk of near-full employment today, labor force participation remains below the earlier norm. And for working people, there is a great difference between a steady job in manufacturing with union wages and benefits, as in earlier years and a temporary job with little security in some service profession. Apart from wages, benefits and security, there is a loss of dignity, of hope for the future, of a sense that this is a world in which I belong and play a worthwhile role.

The impact is captured well in Arlie Hochschild’s sensitive and illuminating portrayal of a Trump stronghold in Louisiana, where she lived and worked for many years. She uses the image of a line in which residents are standing, expecting to move forward steadily as they work hard and keep to all the conventional values. But their position in the line has stalled. Ahead of them, they see people leaping forward, but that does not cause much distress, because it is “the American way” for (alleged) merit to be rewarded. 

What does cause real distress is what is happening behind them. They believe that “undeserving people” who do not “follow the rules” are being moved in front of them by federal government programs they erroneously see as designed to benefit African-Americans, immigrants and others they often regard with contempt. All of this is exacerbated by [Ronald] Reagan’s racist fabrications about “welfare queens” (by implication Black) stealing white people’s hard-earned money and other fantasies.
Sometimes failure to explain, itself a form of contempt, plays a role in fostering hatred of government. I once met a house painter in Boston who had turned bitterly against the “evil” government after a Washington bureaucrat who knew nothing about painting organized a meeting of painting contractors to inform them that they could no longer use lead paint—”the only kind that works”—as they all knew, but the suit didn’t understand. That destroyed his small business, compelling him to paint houses on his own with substandard stuff forced on him by government elites.
Sometimes there are also some real reasons for these attitudes toward government bureaucracies. Hochschild describes a man whose family and friends are suffering bitterly from the lethal effects of chemical pollution but who despises the government and the “liberal elites,” because for him, the EPA means some ignorant guy who tells him he can’t fish, but does nothing about the chemical plants.

These are just samples of the real lives of Trump supporters, who are led to believe that Trump will do something to remedy their plight, though the merest look at his fiscal and other proposals demonstrates the opposite—posing a task for activists who hope to fend off the worst and to advance desperately needed changes.
Exit polls reveal that the passionate support for Trump was inspired primarily by the belief that he represented change, while Clinton was perceived as the candidate who would perpetuate their distress. 

The “change” that Trump is likely to bring will be harmful or worse, but it is understandable that the consequences are not clear to isolated people in an atomized society lacking the kinds of associations (like unions) that can educate and organize. That is a crucial difference between today’s despair and the generally hopeful attitudes of many working people under much greater economic duress during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
There are other factors in Trump’s success. Comparative studies show that doctrines of white supremacy have had an even more powerful grip on American culture than in South Africa, and it’s no secret that the white population is declining. In a decade or two, whites are projected to be a minority of the work force and not too much later, a minority of the population. 

The traditional conservative culture is also perceived as under attack by the successes of identity politics, regarded as the province of elites who have only contempt for the ”hard-working, patriotic, church-going [white] Americans with real family values” who see their familiar country as disappearing before their eyes.
One of the difficulties in raising public concern over the very severe threats of global warming is that 40 percent of the U.S. population does not see why it is a problem, since Christ is returning in a few decades. About the same percentage believe that the world was created a few thousand years ago. If science conflicts with the Bible, so much the worse for science. It would be hard to find an analogue in other societies.
The Democratic Party abandoned any real concern for working people by the 1970s and they have therefore been drawn to the ranks of their bitter class enemies, who at least pretend to speak their language—Reagan’s folksy style of making little jokes while eating jelly beans, George W. Bush’s carefully cultivated image of a regular guy you could meet in a bar who loved to cut brush on the ranch in 100-degree heat and his probably faked mispronunciations (it’s unlikely that he talked like that at Yale), and now Trump, who gives voice to people with legitimate grievances—people who have lost not just jobs, but also a sense of personal self-worth—and who rails against the government that they perceive as having undermined their lives (not without reason).
One of the great achievements of the doctrinal system has been to divert anger from the corporate sector to the government that implements the programs that the corporate sector designs, such as the highly protectionist corporate/investor rights agreements that are uniformly mis-described as “free trade agreements” in the media and commentary. 

With all its flaws, the government is, to some extent, under popular influence and control, unlike the corporate sector. It is highly advantageous for the business world to foster hatred for pointy-headed government bureaucrats and to drive out of people’s minds the subversive idea that the government might become an instrument of popular will, a government of, by and for the people.

Press link for more: ecowatch.com

Emergency campaign to persuade Trump climate change is real amid fears of ‘planetary disaster’ #auspol

US President-elect is ‘not only mad and bad but he’s also dangerous’, UK politician says

Mr Trump was described as ‘dangerous’ by Lib Dem leader Tim Farron AP
One of the biggest ever environmental campaigns has been launched by a group of the world’s most eminent scientists and environmentalists in an ’emergency’ effort to convince the President-elect, Donald Trump, that global warming is real before he becomes US President in January.
Mr Trump, who described climate science as a “hoax” perpetrated by China, has already appointed a prominent climate change denier, Myron Ebell, to a key environmental post and promised that he will rip up the landmark Paris Agreement climate deal when he enters the White House. Climate sceptics in Australia crowed that the Paris Agreement was “cactus” – meaning finished – following his election this week.
Among those now preparing for arguably the most important campaign ever designed to change the mind of a single individual in modern history is the Sierra Club – an environmental group founded by legendary conservationist John Muir in 1892, which now has more than two million members and supporters globally.

Visitors to the club’s website are now being urging to “make an emergency donation”. “We are not licking our wounds, we are preparing for the fights to come. Fight Back Against Trump,” it explains.

Meanwhile the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is bringing together leading scientists from across the US to urge Mr Trump to listen to the evidence, rather than accept the testimonies of conspiracy theorists and fossil fuel lobbyists. 

Dr Rush Holt, the chief executive of the AAAS, told The Independent: “During the campaign, Trump was all over the place, saying different things about different issues at different times, and so it is hard to know really what he will do.
“There are troubling signs in that he has appointed as a key member of his transition team a person who is, I guess I’d say, antagonistic to restricting carbon emissions [Ebell]. 

That’s not a good sign. AAAS, for more than half a century, has been outspoken to policymakers and the public about the risks of human-induced climate change and the need to take action to mitigate it. 

“I think we will be urging him to look at the evidence even before his first day because climate change is a major, historic, global problem and he should be looking at that even now.”
Dr Holt, who described climate change as a “looming emergency”, said Mr Trump might be swayed by the financial implications of removing the US from the signatories of the Paris Agreement or otherwise abandoning efforts to cut emissions.
“We would condemn such moves and say that such action would put our country and our friends and competitors around the world in dangerous situations and that climate change is already costly in lives and dollars. If strong action isn’t taken, it will be only more so by all estimates, more costly than the cost of addressing it,” he said.
“Maybe he [Trump] would respond to arguments of dollars and cents.”

The U.S. will become a pariah when Trump pulls out of the Paris Climate Agreement #auspol #COP22

By Dr Joe Romm

The vast majority of U.S. voters and policymakers have no clue how cataclysmic it will be for this country when Trump keeps his promise to exit the landmark Paris Climate Agreement. (But then why would they, when much of the media also has no clue about the existential nature of the climate fight after a quarter century of ignoring the warnings of scientists?)

It is not “if” he keeps his promise, it is “when,” since the Trump team is already looking to quit Paris as fast as possible, perhaps within a year, according to “a source on his transition team,” Reuters reported Sunday. Another reason to take Trump seriously: He appointed fellow climate science deniers to top positions in his transition team and administration — while the media normalizes his radical words and deeds.

Since the United States was a leader in making Paris happen, when the country pulls out (and then works to kill climate action at home and abroad), it will suddenly become a global pariah. Think of the sanctions against Putin’s Russia — or, think about a massive, global boycott, like the one against apartheid South Africa, times 10.

Consider how a United States exit will look.

The world will rightly blame the United States for destroying humanity’s last, best hope to avoid catastrophic warming. We will be blamed for the multiple ever-worsening catastrophic climate impacts that befall the planet in the coming years (and decades and beyond). And why not? We’re the richest country and the biggest cumulative carbon polluter, and the pledge we made for Paris was just about the weakest we could offer. And now we aren’t even going to do that.

From the world’s perspective, U.S. voters just elected a man who actively campaigned on a plan to kill the Paris agreement, undo all U.S. climate action, boost coal and fossil fuel use, and zero out funding for all international climate-related aid, domestic climate science, and clean energy R&D. Oh, and he thinks global warming is a hoax, and he has named a well-known climate science denier to run the EPA transition (if not the EPA itself) — and another to be his top White House aide and chief strategist.

It bears repeating that on October 26, Trump promised, “I will also cancel all wasteful climate change spending from Obama-Clinton, including all global warming payments to the United Nations. These steps will save $100 billion over 8 years.”

Not only is Trump appointing hard-core climate science deniers to high level positions, but even everyday Republicans — like Trump’s newly appointed Chief of Staff Reince Priebus — are critical of climate action. Indeed, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other GOP leaders have actively lobbied other countries against the Paris climate deal and lobbied states to disregard the EPA’s Clean Power Plan standards for electricity generation.

So there’s every reason to believe Trump will keep his climate campaign promises, making the United States a pariah nation, and potentially triggering carbon taxes and environmental tariffs.

On Sunday, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy (2007–2012) said Europe should “adopt a carbon tax at the borders of Europe, a tax of 1 to 3 percent for all products that come from the United States.” The center-right Sarkozy, who is running to get his old job back, explained, “We cannot find ourselves in a situation where our businesses have [environmental] obligations but where we continue to import products from countries that meet none of those obligations.”

If that happened, it’s not too hard to imagine the response of the president-elect — who has already threatened to put tariffs on a great many foreign countries. The United States will lose all of its so-called “soft power” as the world’s “indispensable nation” goes rogue.

That means any effort Trump makes to keep his commitment to be tough on other countries on trade will find zero support around the world. Indeed, a more plausible response would be for the world to treat us like Russia, Iran or apartheid South Africa. That would particularly be the case if, as appears entirely likely, Trump cozies up to Putin and Russia, as he did in the campaign.

Why am I laying out the worst-case scenario? Because right now, this should be considered the business-as-usual scenario — and the overwhelming majority of the so-called intelligentsia (aka the climate ignorati) simply don’t get it.

Take this Saturday article, in which “Politico asked 17 experts to game out a Trump presidency,” specifically, “What’s the worst-case scenario? The best?“

Only two of them mentioned any of the actual impacts from failing to stop catastrophic climate change (though a third did mention the climate in passing).

One of those was 350.0rg founder Bill McKibben, who noted the worst case is that Trump “succeeds in derailing the very fragile global turn towards clean energy just at the moment when it was starting to accelerate — and the result of that is measured in degrees of global temperature and meters of sea level rise stretching out over millennia.”

Apparently, outside of actual climate experts, it is hard to find “experts” who realize the future of humanity is on a knife’s edge. The one exception was economist Daniel Altman, who warns Trump “could easily cause as many deaths and inflict as much hardship [as the Iraq War] … by reversing the world’s progress to combat climate change.”

Historically, the best way to avoid the worst-case scenario is if a great many people actively work to avoid it. If humanity had taken seriously the worst case scenario on climate— which is now coming true — we would have started taking action long enough ago to avert the catastrophe we now face. And if team Clinton had taken seriously the worst case scenario for the election — which also came true — they definitely would have adopted a different strategy, which might have avoided it.

Right now, the worst-case scenario is a two-term Trump presidency where he does exactly what he has said he will. In that scenario, Trump sets us back on a path towards 7°F warming or more — in which case war like those in Iraq and Syria become the norm.

Press link for more: Think Progress

CO2 emissions level off, still too high to save climate – report #auspol #COP22

Emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide stayed level in 2015 at 36.3 billion tons (GtCO2) and are projected to rise ‘only slightly,’ by 0.2% in 2016.

MARRAKESH, Morocco – Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels have been nearly flat for three years in a row – a “great help” but not enough to stave off dangerous global warming, a report said Monday, November 14.
Emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide stayed level in 2015 at 36.3 billion tons (GtCO2) and were projected to rise “only slightly”, by 0.2% in 2016, according to the annual Global Carbon Budget report compiled by teams of scientists from around the world.
“This third year of almost no growth in emissions is unprecedented at a time of strong economic growth,” said research leader Corinne Le Quere of the University of East Anglia.
Driven largely by reduced coal use in China, this was a “clear and unprecedented break” with the preceding decade’s fast emissions growth, at a rate of some 2.3% per year from 2004 to 2013, before dipping to 0.7% in 2014.
“This is a great help for tackling climate change but it is not enough,” said Le Quere.
For the world’s nations to make true on the global pact to limit average global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial Revolution levels, emissions must do more than level off, the study found.
A decrease of 0.9% per year was needed to 2030.
The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has continued to grow, the report warned, hitting a record level of 23 GtCO2 last year that looked set to reach 25 GtCO2 in 2016.
Quota running out
The analysis was published in the journal Earth System Science Data, to coincide with the UN climate conference in Morocco.
Climate envoys are gathered in Marrakesh to put plans in place to execute the so-called Paris Agreement concluded in the French capital a year ago.
It envisions a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas-producing coal, oil and gas use for energy.
The new report said humanity has emitted 2,075 GtCO2 since 1870 – adding 40 GtCO2 in 2016 alone.
“We have already used more than two thirds of the emissions quota to keep climate change well below two degrees,” it warned.
“The remaining quota would be used up in less than 30 years at the current emissions level.”
Under the so-called Paris Agreement’s predecessor the Kyoto Protocol, rich nations had to meet emissions reduction targets. Developing countries were excused as they needed coal and oil to fuel rapidly growing populations and economies.
China, despite not having any Kyoto targets, has been fast moving away from coal – driven in large part by major air pollution concerns.
After growth of 5.3% per year from 2005-2014, China recorded a decline of 0.7% in 2015 and is set for a 0.5% drop in 2016.
This decline in the world’s most populous nation and biggest greenhouse gas polluter “largely accounts” for the global trend, the report said.
The world’s number two emitter, the United States, decreased emissions by 2.6% in 2015, with a fall of 1.7% projected for 2017.
The election of Donald Trump, who has threatened to “cancel” the Paris pact, has cast a long shadow over the Marrakesh talks, where many fear the US will abandon its targets to the detriment of the global goals. – Rappler.com

WMO: We have already passed 1C warming. #auspol #climatechange

The increasingly visible human footprint on extreme weather and climate events with dangerous and costly impacts is evident in a detailed analysis of the global climate 2011-2015 – the hottest five-year period on record, by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
The record temperatures were accompanied by rising sea levels and declines in Arctic sea-ice extent, continental glaciers and northern hemisphere snow cover. 

All these climate change indicators confirmed the long-term warming trend caused by greenhouse gases. 

Carbon dioxide reached the significant milestone of 400 parts per million in the atmosphere for the first time in 2015, according to the WMO report submitted to the UN climate change conference.

The 2011-2015 period was the warmest five-year period on record globally and for all continents apart from Africa (second warmest). 

Temperatures for the period were 0.57 °C above the average for the standard 1961–1990 reference period. 

The warmest year on record to date was 2015, during which temperatures were 0.76 °C above the 1961–1990 average, followed by 2014.

 The year 2015 was also the first year in which global temperatures were more than 1 °C above the pre-industrial era.

The Global Climate 2011-2015 also examines whether human-induced climate change was directly linked to individual extreme events. 

Of 79 studies published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society between 2011 and 2014, more than half found that human-induced climate change contributed to the extreme event in question.

 Some studies found that the probability of extreme heat increased by 10 times or more.

The Paris Agreement aims at limiting the global temperature increase to well below 2 ° Celsius and pursuing efforts towards 1.5 ° Celsius above pre-industrial levels. “This report confirms that the average temperature in 2015 had already reached the 1°C mark,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, who predicted that even that record is likely to be beaten in 2016.

As pointed out by the WMO official, the effects of climate change have been consistently visible on the global scale since the 1980s: rising global temperature, both over land and in the ocean; sea-level rise; and the widespread melting of ice. It has increased the risks of extreme events such as heatwaves, drought, record rainfall and damaging floods.

The report highlighted some of the high-impact events.

 These included the East African drought in 2010-2012 which caused an estimated 258,000 excess deaths and the 2013-2015 southern African drought; flooding in South-East Asia in 2011 which killed 800 people and caused more than US$40 billion in economic losses, 2015 heatwaves in India and Pakistan in 2015, which claimed more than 4,100 lives; Hurricane Sandy in 2012 which caused US$67 billion in economic losses in the US, and Typhoon Haiyan which killed 7,800 people in the Philippines in 2013.

The report was submitted to the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The five-year timescale allows a better understanding of multi-year warming trends and extreme events such as prolonged droughts and recurrent heatwaves than an annual report. Today (Nov 14) WMO will release its provisional assessment of the state of the climate in 2016 to inform the climate change negotiations in Marrakech, Morocco.

Press link for more: Gulf times

Will Trump end California’s climate rules?

By Paul Rogers

After eight years in which California had a partner in President Barack Obama in expanding renewable energy and electric vehicles, signing international deals and writing tougher pollution laws to the consternation of industry and Republicans, the election of Donald Trump now sets up the Golden State as a land in environmental exile.
Experts say it’s about to become a country within a country, moving sharply in the opposite direction of the White House and Congress on climate change and environmental policy, as California sets its own agenda with sympathetic states and countries.
“We will protect the precious rights of our people and continue to confront the existential threat of our time – devastating climate change,” Gov. Jerry Brown said following Trump’s stunning upset.
The president-elect’s views on climate change couldn’t be more different from Obama’s. Trump has called it “an expensive hoax.” He promises to pull out of the Paris agreement that Obama signed with 195 countries last December to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 26 percent in a decade. He has championed coal mining, and his advisers and potential cabinet secretaries include oil company presidents and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, all eager to boost oil and gas production on public lands and along coastlines.
In recent years, Brown and his predecessor, former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have signed dozens of major environmental laws. California set up a mandatory cap-and-trade system that has forced power plants, factories and refineries to pay to pollute. The state required 50 percent of its electricity to come from renewable sources like solar and wind by 2030. Silicon Valley companies like Tesla have hired thousands of workers.
California has also mandated the nation’s toughest smog limits on cars and the most far-reaching energy efficiency rules on everything from new office buildings to big-screen TV sets. Polls show broad public support for those measures.
Brown has even acted as a de facto head of state, signing agreements endorsed now by 136 other cities, states and countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. Those partners with California include France, Italy, Costa Rica, British Columbia, New York City and dozens of others. Together they have 832 million residents and produce a third of the world’s economy.
Trump will almost certainly target many regulations that Obama put in place by executive order, said Frank Maisano, a spokesman for Bracewell & Giuliani, a Houston law firm that lobbies on behalf of oil refineries, electric utilities and other industries.
The new president will also probably kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency drew up to require coal plants to dramatically clean up or shut down. He also is likely to rewrite or drop Obama’s rules requiring automobiles to double their gas mileage standards to a fleet average of 54 miles per gallon by 2025. And rules limiting fracking for natural gas on public lands probably also will be waived, he said.

On Wednesday, the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, issued a statement saying Trump’s victory shows that Americans do not support the Paris climate agreement. 

Inhofe also said that Republicans will soon name a new justice to the Supreme Court to “decide the final fate” of Obama’s EPA rules limiting greenhouse gases from power plants.
Does that mean Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress will try to overturn California’s climate rules?
Probably not.
“Congress can do a lot of things, but I highly doubt this Congress, which has a heavy states-rights focus, will start meddling in the affairs of states on energy policy issues,” Maisano said. “If that’s what Californians are going to keep voting for, I don’t see why anybody would tell them to stop doing that.”
Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board, agrees. On Friday, Nichols said she doesn’t expect Congress will try to pre-empt California’s state laws because it would require Congress to pass complex new national laws — on issues such as renewable energy or cap-and-trade programs — and impose a one-size-fits-all law for all states.
Instead, she said, California could well go back to where it was during the administration of President George W. Bush. When Bush took office in 2001, he abandoned the Kyoto climate treaty that the Clinton administration negotiated and loosened pollution rules on industry, saying they were too costly. California responded by passing Assembly Bill 32, its landmark cap-and-trade law, along with cleaner car standards and renewable energy mandates. Other states, including Washington, Oregon and New England states, copied many of those policies, she noted.
“This isn’t just a matter of state pride,” Nichols said. “We have an economy that is tied to the growth of renewable energy and clean technology. We are attracting investments at a record rate. It would be foolish from an economic standpoint to go backward.”
Billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer, of San Francisco, a donor to environmental causes, said the world will look to California even more for leadership.
“This is a very dangerous policy that they say they are going to pursue,” he said of the Republicans’ plans. “California’s role becomes much more important. There’s no question about that.”
Other environmentalists are bracing for a new federal effort to expand oil drilling off California’s coast, similar to when President Ronald Reagan appointed James Watt as interior secretary in the 1980s. Watt then sought to drill off Big Sur and the San Mateo and Sonoma coasts.
Although national marine sanctuaries now stretch from Hearst Castle to Point Arena in Mendocino County, oil companies have wanted to drill for years off Humboldt, Orange County, Malibu and other areas, said Richard Charter, a veteran activist in Bodega Bay with the Ocean Foundation. The California Coastal Commission and coastal cities will file lawsuits to block drilling if the Trump administration tries to allow it, he added.
“We knew eventually the oil companies would come back,” Charter said. Former Sierra Club leader “David Brower said that all of our victories in the environmental movement are temporary and all of our losses are permanent. We are really in danger of some earth-shattering losses if we aren’t careful.”
Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the UC Berkeley School of Law, said the federal government could affect California industries by limiting or ending tax credits for electric vehicles, solar and wind power. A big infrastructure bill could boost pollution if most of the money goes to highways in suburban areas instead of urban centers and renewable energy projects, he said.
“California is the fifth largest economy in the world,” Elkind said. “That’s quite a powerful entity to be committed to these climate goals. I don’t think all is lost, but this election is a big setback for climate policy.”

Press link for more: mercurynews.com

Autocracy: Rules for Survival #Auspol

Protestors outside Trump Towers the day after the election, New York City, November 9, 2016

By Masha Gessen
“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. 

We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. 

We are standing at the edge of the abyss. 

Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. 

The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”
That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday. 

Instead, she said, resignedly,
We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle [that] we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.
Hours later, President Barack Obama was even more conciliatory:
We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country. The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy. And over the next few months, we are going to show that to the world….We have to remember that we’re actually all on one team.
The president added, “The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.” As if Donald Trump had not conned his way into hours of free press coverage, as though he had released (and paid) his taxes, or not brazenly denigrated our system of government, from the courts and Congress, to the election process itself—as if, in other words, he had not won the election precisely by acting in bad faith.
Similar refrains were heard from various members of the liberal commentariat, with Tom Friedman vowing, “I am not going to try to make my president fail,” to Nick Kristof calling on “the approximately 52 percent majority of voters who supported someone other than Donald Trump” to “give president Trump a chance.” 

Even the politicians who have in the past appealed to the less-establishment part of the Democratic electorate sounded the conciliatory note. 

Senator Elizabeth Warren promised to “put aside our differences.” 

Senator Bernie Sanders was only slightly more cautious, vowing to try to find the good in Trump: “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.”
However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. 

In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician. 

There has until now been little evidence that he can be one.
More dangerously, Clinton’s and Obama’s very civil passages, which ended in applause lines, seemed to close off alternative responses to his minority victory. 

(It was hard not to be reminded of Neville Chamberlain’s statement, that “We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.”) 

Both Clinton’s and Obama’s phrases about the peaceful transfer of power concealed the omission of a call to action. 

The protesters who took to the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities on Wednesday night did so not because of Clinton’s speech but in spite of it. 

One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrat’s favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over.
The second falsehood is the pretense that America is starting from scratch and its president-elect is a tabula rasa.

 Or we are: “we owe him an open mind.” 

It was as though Donald Trump had not, in the course of his campaign, promised to deport US citizens, promised to create a system of surveillance targeted specifically at Muslim Americans, promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico, advocated war crimes, endorsed torture, and repeatedly threatened to jail Hillary Clinton herself. 

It was as though those statements and many more could be written off as so much campaign hyperbole and now that the campaign was over, Trump would be eager to become a regular, rule-abiding politician of the pre-Trump era.
But Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. 

Trump will be only the fourth candidate in history and the second in more than a century to win the presidency after losing the popular vote. 

He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.
I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate him—from the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.
He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crowds have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word. If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, if he instead focuses, as his acceptance speech indicated he might, on the unifying project of investing in infrastructure (which, not coincidentally, would provide an instant opportunity to reward his cronies and himself), it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief. Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.
To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets again—but by that time Dubnow had been killed. Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in history—it’s just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it.
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.
Of course, the United States has much stronger institutions than Germany did in the 1930s, or Russia does today. Both Clinton and Obama in their speeches stressed the importance and strength of these institutions. The problem, however, is that many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them—including the ones enshrined in law—depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution.
The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information.
The power of the investigative press—whose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Trump campaign—will grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government, or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues. Coverage, and thinking, will drift in a Trumpian direction, just as it did during the campaign—when, for example, the candidates argued, in essence, whether Muslim Americans bear collective responsibility for acts of terrorism or can redeem themselves by becoming the “eyes and ears” of law enforcement. Thus was xenophobia further normalized, paving the way for Trump to make good on his promises to track American Muslims and ban Muslims from entering the United States.
Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.
Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American leader in recent history. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. There is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The country is at war abroad and has been in a state of mobilization for fifteen years. This means not only that Trump will be able to move fast but also that he will become accustomed to an unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase it—his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin—and the way to achieve that is through mobilization. There will be more wars, abroad and at home.
Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold. Democrats in Congress will begin to make the case for cooperation, for the sake of getting anything done—or at least, they will say, minimizing the damage. Nongovernmental organizations, many of which are reeling at the moment, faced with a transition period in which there is no opening for their input, will grasp at chances to work with the new administration. This will be fruitless—damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech, that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.
Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.
November 10, 2016, 5:26 pm

Press link for more: Nybooks.com

Naomi Klein Delivers Sydney Peace Prize Lecture Against Backdrop of Trump Win #auspol

In Australia this week, Klein blasted Trump’s dangerous climate policies as ‘immoral and atrocious’byDeirdre Fulton, staff writer

Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein accepted the 2016 Sydney Peace Prize in Australia on Friday, delivering a searing speech that reflected on Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the United States and the factors that allowed it to happen.
“If there is a single overarching lesson in the Trump victory, perhaps it is this: Never, ever underestimate the power of hate, of direct appeals to power over the ‘other’…especially during times of economic hardship,” said Klein, whose books include The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
Calling Trump the “demagogue of the moment,” Klein went on to identify other lessons to “take from our barely three-day-old reality.”

One, she said, is that “economic pain is real and not going anywhere—four decades of corporate, neoliberal policies and privatization, deregulation, free trade, and austerity have made sure of that.”
Another, she continued, is that “only a bold and genuinely re-distributive agenda has a hope of speaking to that pain and directing it where it belongs—the politician-purchasing elites who benefited so extravagantly from the auctioning off of public wealth, the looting of our land, water, and air, and the deregulation of our financial system.”
But to create such an agenda requires the learning of an even “deeper lesson,” Klein said.
“If we want to defend against the likes of Donald Trump—and every country has their own Trump—we must urgently confront and battle racism and misogyny in our culture, in our movements, and in ourselves. This cannot be an afterthought, it cannot be an add-on. It is central to how someone like Trump can rise to power.”
“Neither can we tell ourselves that when we fight for peace and economic justice, it will benefit black people and Indigenous people the most because they are the most victimized in our current system of economic inequality, state repression, and climate change,” she said. “There is too long and too painful a track record of left and liberal movements leaving workers of color and Indigenous people and women and their labor out in the cold. To build a truly inclusive movement, there needs to be a truly inclusive vision that starts with, and is led by, the most brutalized and excluded.”
Watch the rest of Klein’s lecture, which received a standing ovation, below (starts around 25 minutes):

Press link:  commondreams.org