peter dykstra
Climate politics, Pogo edition
A poll this month by Cambridge University found less than fifty percent of citizens in seven Western European nations were willing to accept major changes like outlawing gasoline or diesel vehicles or restrictions on meat-eating diets.
And that's Europe.
Climate change polls
In the U.S., several polls earlier this year found a huge partisan gap in whether or not climate change was a serious problem at all: Among Democrats, 75 percent found the problem urgent enough to require immediate action; 21 percent of Republicans thought so.
In a Gallup Poll last year, 23 percent of Americans reported eating less meat than the year before, but the predominant reason was health of their innards, not the health of their environment. McDonalds can cite billions and billions of reasons why cattlemen can sleep safely for many nights to come.
Republican climate denial
Office-holding Republicans who took climate change seriously did so at their own peril. Florida's Carlos Curbelo, tapped to chair the bipartisan Congressional Climate Caucus, lost his seat in 2018. Others were "primaried" – beaten by more conservative Republicans in the preliminaries – or retired to avoid a primary loss. Even the GOP's two conspicuous Trump dissenters, Wyoming's Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger of southern Illinois, serve where Coal is King, and they tend to vote that way. Cheney sports a 2 percent lifetime rating on the League of Conservation scorecard; Kinzinger a whopping 8 percent.
Republican senators from climate-vulnerable states, like Alaska's Lisa Murkowski or John Kennedy of Louisiana, also represent oil-and-gas-dependent states and will reliably vote their carbon consciences.
So throw in coal-state Dem Joe Manchin, and the major clean energy boost in Biden's platform is toast.
Big Oil's 'Big Lie'
Big Oil is dropping millions on airing its own Big Lie in ads during news and talk shows. The American Petroleum Institute's breezy spots cast Big Oil as "the leader" in reducing American emissions, even as it lavishes its Congressional apologists with campaign cash.
And while the petrochemical industry still loves cars, trucks, planes and ships, it's actively dating other polluting suitors. Immense plastics plants are planned for Louisiana, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, negating many of the gains achieved in cutting greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere. The Daily Climate had that story, about the growth of this new market for oil, earlier this week.
Pogo's famous line
Douglas Fischer / EHS
We go back to Pogo J. Possum's famous line – "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
The McCarthy-era comic strip offered the quip as commentary on Americans' talent for acting in their own worst interest.
Next week, the world's nations will gather in Glasgow, Scotland, to weigh the next steps in cutting greenhouse gases and limiting the climate catastrophe awaiting us all.
President Biden's chief climate emissary, John Kerry, called Glasgow "the last best hope" for climate action. He added that failure by the U.S. Congress to deliver something on climate will send the worst possible signal to the world.
And the world's other colossal greenhouse emitters, China and India, are talking the talk but showing little actual progress.
Glasgow will open with raised urgency, raised ambitions – and raised doubts.
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.
His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
Peter Dykstra: SEJ enters middle age with grace
SEJ is the Jimmy Carter of non-profits – overlooked in real-time, but looking better and smarter with each passing year. This year's conference wraps up Sunday in Fort Collins, Colo (follow the action on social media via #SEJ2019)
SEJ's first national conference took place in 1991. It's now older than many of its members. At least one or two of its current Board members were fetuses back then. Most of its charter members are in their sixties, seventies, or beyond. Or gone. The membership used to be weighted toward full-time environment writers for daily newspapers. Now, the core is freelance journalists (though I've been trying to push the frequently more accurate term "subsistence journalists").
New blood working the beat
The beat has been re-energized in such legacy media giants as the Washington Post and New York Times. But SEJ's strength also lies in a proliferation of new sites doing dynamic investigative work and vivid storytelling.
Here are but a few:
The Intercept
Bankrolled six years ago by EBay entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar, this website has rattled cages across the political landscape. Sharon Lerner is their prolific investigative reporter on the environment.
Southerly Magazine
A collection of long-reads on environmental issues in the American South. The year-old startup is the work of Lyndsey Gilpin, who seeks to fill in the gaps in a region vastly underserved in environmental reporting and storytelling.
The Revelator
Two years ago, the Arizona-based advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity launched a news site, The Revelator. Its well-told stories on species, habitats, and politics rapidly became a must-read.
Heated
A few months ago, Emily Atkin took her unique blend of insight and smart-ass from a very established place, The New Republic, to her new four-times-weekly newsletter, Heated.
Inside Climate News
When a startup site wins a Pulitzer, as Inside Climate News did six years ago, it suddenly no longer looks like a startup. But publisher David Sassoon's masterful adherence to an ambitious business plan can stand as a model for all others. It turns 12 years old this month.
Undark
Another Pulitzer winner, MIT's Deborah Blum, puts out a stream of big-think pieces at Undark. Its tagline: Truth, beauty, science.
And the list goes on...
There are too many other quality sites to mention, but here are four more that shouldn't be ignored: The solution-oriented theme of Ensia; the urban-ish tone of Citylab; the food-oriented scoops of FERN; and the saltwater stories of Hakai.
One recent casualty in the perilous world of nonprofit publishing is Pacific Standard, whose deep dives into environmental stories will be missed. It main funder pulled the plug in August.
Climate news goes mainstream
With climate change finally breaking through as a frontline issue for virtually all news outlets, and a zillion other plagues – ocean plastics, glyphosate, water quality, Trump's regulatory purge – making waves, our beat is poised to rise in prominence for the worst of all reasons: Out home planet is literally a hot mess.
We also press forward with an uncomfortable form of vindication: The planet is indeed warming up, and despite some strong efforts, getting dirtier. Species are indeed disappearing. So are habitats, from Arctic ice to tropical forests. Just like SEJ members and others have been reporting for decades.
The beat continues to face traditional foes: Indifference or timidity on the part of some bosses; the shaky financial footing for all journalism; well-heeled, slick, and often unprincipled interests who like to portray our news as Fake News.
But the beat goes on, and it's more crucial than ever.
Peter Dykstra: From impeach to impair
to energy research projects and NGO'S focused on raising awareness, or raising hell, over inaction on climate change.And he was making progress—until he announced that he was joining the bloated field of Democratic presidential hopefuls.
In November 2016, Donald Trump's stunning victory over Hillary Clinton changed everything for America, and for Steyer. Only months into the Trump presidency, Tom Steyer became more ubiquitous than plaque psoriasis ads on cable news broadcasts, starring in his own 30-second calls to impeach Donald Trump. He poured a reported $10 million into the campaign.
Steyer was calm, almost shy, in firmly describing Trump's "clear and present danger." Response to the www.Needtoimpeach.com petition was impressive. Combined with efforts from Moveon.org and other groups, Steyer delivered 10 million petition signatures to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib in early 2019.
But since climate denial is not an impeachable offense, it marked a major departure for Steyer.
Rewarding 'Fox & Friends'
He spent millions on broadcast ads, promoting the petition while paradoxically shipping the sales checks to reward cable news outlets – notorious delinquents on climate coverage. Steyer even spent a reported $700,000 on ad placement in Fox & Friends, the morning show said to be a must-watch for Trump.
As late as January, Steyer waved off questions about his own presidential ambitions. Then, earlier this month, he cannonballed into the crowded Democratic pool to join the two dozen already treading water there. In his announcement video, Steyer laid out the challenges in classic Liberal fashion. Climate change rated two lines of the four-minute piece.
Turning a firehose of philanthropy on himself
To me, Steyer has swapped out any claim to moral authority for an exercise in both narcissism and futility. In all likelihood, the late-arriving Steyer won't even qualify for the ludicrous spectacle of marching hopefuls out to podiums in groups of ten, with each candidate getting less than ten minutes to make their case to America.
To advocates of action on climate change, this has to be tragic: Steyer has turned his firehose of climate philanthropy on himself. Meanwhile, several presidential hopefuls whose prospects are scarcely better than Steyer's could instead be focused on chasing climate deniers out of the Senate.
The GOP Senate goes unchallenged
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock could challenge Republican Sen. Steve Daines next year. (You forgot Bullock was running for President, didn't you?) Ex-Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper could run against incumbent Sen. Cory Gardner – despite the fact that Gardner's 10% lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters makes him one of the greenest GOP Senators.
Two of the Big Blue Wave could challenge Texas incumbent Sen. John Cornyn—Beto O'Rourke or Julian Castro. And South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigeig would have two opportunities to unseat either of Indiana's two Republican Senators, but they wouldn't face reelection until 2022 and 2024, respectively.
If Tom Steyer doesn't burn off his enthusiasm or his cash supply on his D.O.A. vanity presidential run, he could fund them all, help topple Mitch McConnell's Senate stranglehold and guide the U.S. to right its sunken ship of state on climate.
Peter Dykstra: Of ice and men.
Nearly 5,000 men and women have reached the summit of the world's tallest mountain. An estimated 300 died trying, or, more frequently, died on the descent. Two-thirds of those bodies have never been recovered. But as Everest warms with the rest of the world, its snow- and ice-cover lessens, and dwindling glaciers move more quickly, Nature is giving up thawing corpses. Stephen King must surely be taking copious notes.
"Because of global warming, the ice sheet and glaciers are fast melting, and the dead bodies that remained buried all these years are now becoming exposed," guide leader Ang Tshering Sherpa told the BBC. The Sherpas have tried to bring the bodies down off the mountain, but every effort is delayed: A frozen corpse weighs about twice as much as a thawed one.
'Pyramids of human excrement'
But wait! There's more! Since the duo of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first conquered the mountain in 1953, the mountain has become a veritable conga line of climbers during the weeks-long window of good weather each spring. And the masses have left masses of abandoned gear, oxygen tanks, and a "fecal time bomb" behind. Tons of human waste, also presumably unfreezing, now adorn the path to the Top of the World. Good times.
Spy satellites and water loss
A study led by Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Observatory has accessed declassified spy-satellite photos of the Himalayas to estimate that ice and snow melt there has roughly doubled since 1975. Spy satellites? That's not because Everest has become a high-altitude sh*t-show. Himalayan snowmelt slakes the thirst and waters the crops of nearly a billion people in Bangaladesh, India, Pakistan, and parts of China. Snow-less Himalayas would be an existential threat to that huge population. If you want to know why climate change is a global security issue, here's Exhibit A.
Peeking under the ice
It's not the first time that Cold War sleuthery was turned into unintended service for climate science. For twenty years, University of Washington scientists have accessed declassified logs of both U.S. and Russian nuclear submarines as they conducted routine patrols beneath Arctic ice. A routine function of such patrols was to measure the thickness of Arctic sea ice -- the better to poke through said ice and blast the world to smithereens.
The data show a steady and alarming loss of ice thickness over half a century. Since the mid-seventies, satellites have provided a reliable measure of the demise of Arctic ice. But we can thank the American and Soviet navies for providing an extended record of climate change – slow motion mutually assured destruction, 21st century style.
Peter Dykstra: The 800-lb (cheap, plastic) gorilla in our oceans
But in the 1967 film The Graduate, Brooke slung his arm around the shoulder of a young Dustin Hoffman and offered a vision of the future:
'Plastics'
"Plastics"
Half a century later, Brooke's career advice looks more and more like an albatross around the necks of humanity – and for that matter, around the necks of albatrosses.
In 1950, 17 years before Brooke's career counsel, the world produced an estimated two million metric tons of plastic. By 2015, that had jumped to 380 million metric tons – more than humanity's own weight in plastic.
'Smog' of plastic
Trash floating in Lake Jackson, south of Atlanta, after a rain
An estimated 150 million metric tons of plastic now swirl in our waterways:
- abandoned, miles-long driftnets that ensnare fish and seabirds;
- drink bottles and soccer balls washed down storm sewers into rivers and lakes (see this news clip of runoff plastic in Lake Jackson, downstream from a half-million or so metro Atlanta homes);
- single-use bags, straws, cups and cigarette filters by the billions;
- long-lasting microbeads of plastic built into soaps and detergents;
- and partly decomposed plastic bits that cloud the water and clog the bellies of fish, birds and marine mammals – a veritable "smog of the sea."
40+ years of warnings
Marine litter spoiling the view in Norway.
You can't say we weren't warned.
On April 5, 1989, a team of NOAA scientists presented an ominous, peer-reviewed work on the mounting dangers of ocean-borne plastic debris. Not surprisingly, their warnings went unheeded by all but a handful of marine scientists and activists.
I was feeling good about myself finding the 30 year-old plastics paper, and I mentioned it in the weekly segment I do for Public Radio International's Living On Earth.Then, the sleuths at a very useful web publication called The Revelator found others from the 1970's. That's how long we've known about the crisis we've been building.
Ugly death by plastic
Darrell Blatchley, director of D'Bone Collector Museum Inc., pulls plastic waste from the stomach of a Cuvier's beaked whale that washed ashore in Compostela Valley, in the Philippines.
Last week, an item worthy of the Guinness Book of World Records washed in from the Philippines, where the carcass of a Cuvier's beaked whale (really more an oversized dolphin than a great whale) yielded 88 pounds of plastic bags.
Like so many other environmental ills, the plastic pollution of the oceans is something we've known about for decades. Like climate change or ocean acidification, the solutions to plastics pollution are daunting. They don't involve the shutting of a lone drainpipe or smokestack. They involve altering the consumptive mindsets of nearly all of us about how we produce, consume, and dispose of plastics.
We've developed the ability to alter the acid/alkaline chemistry of the vast oceans, and we're filling them up with things inimical to life. Now all we have to do is develop the ability to stop ourselves.
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Here's a trailer from "The Smog of the Sea," a new documentary on ocean plastics featuring musician Jack Johnson
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