[P2P-F] Fwd: The New York Times just published a blockbuster story about climate change

[Michel Bauwens]

I don't know if I'm right in this, but I seem to sense a change in
awareness of climate change, perhaps the result of the accumlating
devastating news ?

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ryan Fortune <ryan.fortune2012 at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 12:40 PM
Subject: The New York Times just published a blockbuster story about
climate change
To: <michel at p2pfoundation.net>


But fails to name and shame climate villains...
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=dfd2ddbc64&e=96e15d4563>


*The New York Times Fails to Name and Shame Climate Villains
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=0ad156df6c&e=96e15d4563>*
*What it gets right and wrong in its blockbuster story.*
Rebecca Leber
Mother Jones
1 August 2018

The New York Times Magazine has just published an ambitious and
heavily-promoted issue entitled “Losing Earth,”
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=2fa5eb1565&e=96e15d4563>
which
is entirely devoted to telling a single complicated story: How the world
missed its window to address climate change.

Nathaniel Rich’s historical narrative looks at the politicians, scientists,
public officials, and others who, from 1979 to 1989, were central to
raising the alarm on a subject that scientists had already been studying
for years.





*In revealing the choices they did and did not make, Rich pinpoints the
markers that led us to today, in which the attempt to address climate
change is a story of failure. George Steinmetz’s photography of receding
glaciers and extreme weather around the world accompanying the issue is a
window to the consequences of largely ignoring the early warnings. Today,
we’re in what Rich says is the “second chapter — call it The Reckoning.
There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without
understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.”*
Thirty years ago, in his famous testimony to Congress, NASA climate
scientist James Hansen warned that we were running out of time to address
the consequences of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions. “Major
greenhouse climate changes are a certainty,” he had written. “By the 2010s
[in every scenario], essentially the entire globe has very substantial
warming.”

Rich’s story starts even before that testimony, in 1979, when environmental
activist Rafe Pomerance discovered mentions of the effect of rising carbon
emissions on the future climate in a generally ignored EPA report on coal.

He wondered why no one else seemed to be talking about it. From there, Rich
unspools a detailed history of how NASA scientist James Hansen and a number
of scientists, activists, and politicians, organized around global warming,
and how others, namely President George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff John
Sununu, tried to scuttle progress.

Notably, almost everyone in the story is a man with the exception of some
peripheral characters — a female scientist who speaks up in a meeting, and
the men’s wives.

Rich concludes with the first major global conference in Noordwijk, the
Netherlands, in 1989, which became the first in a very long series of
meetings that have avoided taking binding action to slash emissions.

This all took place before partisan lines had calcified. Indeed, by today’s
standards, there was unheard-of agreement across party lines.

George H.W. Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly and
Republicans like Rhode Island Rep. John Chafee were early leaders, even
though today we mostly remember the role of then-Tennessee Rep. Al Gore,
who has since become the embodiment of climate change activism.

The early criticisms of the story, some of which came up at a preview event
the Times hosted on Tuesday night for a few dozen scientists, academics,
sources, and reporters, zero in on Rich’s unwillingness to assign clear
blame.

He writes:

*A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent
decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book
bravado. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the
machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the
propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate,
long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show
of denialism. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not
begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding decade, some
of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith
efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible
solutions.*

Al Gore, who was then chair of an oversight science committee, clearly saw
the need to simplify the narrative in order to both dramatize environmental
stories and create compelling political theater.

“Environmental and health stories had all the elements of narrative drama:
villains, victims and heroes. In a hearing, you could summon all three,
with the chairman serving as narrator, chorus and moral authority,” Rich
writes, summarizing Gore’s approach.
But Rich doesn’t follow that narrative trope, and he presents the fossil
fuel industry as a willing partner in action in those early years.

That account is contested by the story’s critics, who point to industry
efforts beginning in the 1980s to seed confusion.

*In the early 1990s, industry interests including the National Association
of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute formally launched the
Global Climate Coalition, which was responsible
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=93a5661143&e=96e15d4563>
for
a series of misinformation campaigns and lobbying efforts to derail
action. *

*(Please read Inside Climate News‘ blockbuster investigation
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=45dd3230e5&e=96e15d4563>
into
Exxon to complement the Times story).*

Specifically, he does not target the oil and coal industries that had the
most to lose, or conservative Republicans for scuttling action in these
early years.

And while you do learn how Reagan and Bush officials helped to block and
delay action, Rich ends the story by pointing to human folly, not specific
actors. Sununu is quoted saying a strict global deal “couldn’t have
happened” anyway because of the competing national interests of individual
countries.

Sununu did have one point. If climate change were as simple as one nation
taking the lead — even the nation that is historically the biggest polluter
— then slashing emissions would not continue to be so difficult. And there
are important omissions.

The Times story doesn’t address how a more meaningful agreement in the mold
of the earlier Montreal Protocol on chlorofluorocarbons could have changed
China’s or India’s course adopting fossil fuels. (Perhaps that could be the
subject of another 30,000 words).

Much as New York Magazine’s “Uninhabitable Earth”
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=6d21fd63f1&e=96e15d4563>
cover
story did a year ago, “Losing Earth” expands the conversation to include a
broader audience when too few outlets connect the dots
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=6429c45975&e=96e15d4563>
to
the freakish weather we’re seeing around the globe.

In asking how we got to this point, this retelling could provide fuel
to both side’s arguments in the new liability lawsuits against big oil
companies for their role in creating this mess.

The history of climate change non-action in the United States is a
difficult one to tell. A few years ago, I asked four leading
environmentalists for their theories on exactly what point climate change
became so polarized and received four different answers.

One person blamed Al Gore for politicizing the issue, while another blamed
Big Oil’s misinformation campaign.

Even if reading this 30,000-word exploration doesn’t resolve the issue, it
goes a long way to filling in more pieces of the puzzle.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE LINK
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=d537fae12b&e=96e15d4563>

------------------------------

*FURTHER READING:*
The Problem With *The New York Times*’ Big Story on Climate Change
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=639883b486&e=96e15d4563>
*By portraying the early years of climate politics as a tragedy, the
magazine lets Republicans and the fossil-fuel industry off the hook.*
Robinson Meyer
The Atlantic
1 August 2018

Who's to Blame for Global Warming?
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=0de64cbcbf&e=96e15d4563>
*The latest issue of the New York Times offers a surprising,
controversial answer*
Emily Atkin
The New Republic
1 August 2018

Raising My Child in a Doomed World
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=b3cd0d2940&e=96e15d4563>
*Some
would say the mistake was having our daughter in the first place.*


*Roy Scranton New York Times 16 July 2018*

The study on collapse they thought you should not read – yet
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*27 July 2018*

A research paper concluding that climate-induced collapse is now
inevitable, was recently rejected by anonymous reviewers of an academic
journal.

It has been released directly by the Professor who wrote it, to promote
discussion of the necessary deep adaptation to climate chaos.

*“I am releasing this paper immediately, directly, because I can’t wait any
longer in exploring how to learn the implications of the social collapse we
now face,”* explained the author Dr Bendell, a full Professor of
Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria, UK
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*Copyright © 2018 Ryan Fortune, All rights reserved.*
Because we have borrowed this world from our children...

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Ryan Fortune
Rainbow Warriors International
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South Africa

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