Book: What Can I Do? by Jane Fonda: ‘If Greta Thunberg can do it, so can I’ (excerpt): The Guardian

Jane Fonda, actor and climate activist

"There was a long silence, and then she said, “Well, Jane, that’s wonderful and I’m blown away that you’re ready to put yourself out there like that, but you can’t camp overnight in Washington. It’s illegal since Occupy Wall Street camped there. But let’s figure out what is possible.” She offered to set up a conference call with her, Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, Naomi Klein, the environmental lawyer Jay Halfon, and me. Bill suggested a once-a-week protest that involved civil disobedience. Fridays had been claimed by Greta Thunberg and the student climate strikers, but the youth had also called on adults to join them. “Maybe you could do an action on Fridays as well.”

I’d been getting ready for this my whole adult life – a weekly

Jane Fonda climate activist

action that culminated in nonviolent civil disobedience. And I wouldn’t have to worry about pooping. I began planning for the maximum time I could spend in DC before I had to get ready to film our last season of Grace And Frankie on 27 January 2020. It added up to four months, 14 Fridays."

• What Can I Do? by Jane Fonda is published by HQ, at £20. To order a copy for £17.40, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
 
Go to The Guardian's article 

Related: 'The Future We Choose', Book by Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac

‘Climate Donors’ Flock to Biden to Counter Trump’s Fossil Fuel Money (excerpt): New York Times

(Pics by this blog)

Koch Industries are behind Trump

WASHINGTON — In 2009, the Obama administration’s environmental team called a group of climate activists to the White House to deliver a message: Climate change doesn’t sell and only provokes economic attacks from the right that are too difficult to counter.

As former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepares to assume the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, the changing climate is now a core campaign issue — and a focus for fund-raising. Plans for tackling rising global temperatures will be in the spotlight Wednesday at the Democratic convention. And Mr. Biden has raised more than $15 million in candidate contributions from hundreds of new donors who specifically identify with climate change as a cause.

Biden: Build Back Better

That climate-specific fund-raising may make up just about 5 percent of the total he has raised so far. It’s dwarfed by fossil fuel donations to President Trump, who took in $10 million from a single fund-raiser in June, held by the oil billionaire Kelcy Warren, and whose super PAC,America First Action, has seen millions pour in from coal and oil moguls, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign donations.

It is not known how much unregulated money is going to super PACs aligned with Democrats from other self-identified climate donors.

But the hard money climate donations represent a growing counterweight to oil, gas and coal money that has long warped the

Biden and Harris at first joint campaign event.

energy conversation in Washington. Self-identified “climate donors” are a new phenomenon in the 2020 election and are working overtime to show candidates that campaigning to eliminate emissions from fossil fuels pays — in cash.

“That is a sea change. We’ve now got a class of people called ‘climate donors’ in a way we had environmental donors before,” said David Bookbinder, general counsel for the Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

Trump's environmental rollbacks

“Climate has taken over as an issue on its own. People are finally understanding that we have a truly existential crisis on our hands,” Mr. Bookbinder added. Publicly embracing climate change solutions was viewed as a political liability, as recently as a decade ago, he said. During Barack Obama’s re-election run in 2012, the issue was hardly mentioned.'

Now donors are sending a new message: “We want to make it easy to do the right thing. We should reward campaigns and candidates for having the right policies,” said Matt Rogers, a co-founder of the digital thermostat company Nest."  ............

"A version of this article appears in print on

By Lisa Friedman

• Aug. 18, 2020

Aug. 19, 2020"

Go to complete NYT online article

Related:  Trump will roll back more environmental regulations if reelected, says EPA chief: CNBC

 Trump, Biden, Harris, #climatechange, fossil fuel industry, Koch brothers, political party donations from corporations, Democrats, Republicans, #jailclimatecriminals

Trump will roll back more environmental regulations if reelected, says EPA chief: CNBC

Koch industries fund Trump

 "Key Points

 

* President Trump will continue to weaken environmental regulations on industries if reelected in November, the EPA’s Andrew Wheeler told The Wall Street Journal. 

* The administration would establish a cost-benefit analysis of any new regulation and expand the use of “science transparency” to justify new regulations. 

* After three years in office, the administration sought to reverse

Politicians and Climate Change

more than 100 major environmental rules that it has deemed burdensome to the fossil fuel industry, even as climate change accelerates. 

* Analysts say many of the administration’s rollbacks could increase emissions and lead to thousands of additional deaths from bad air quality."

 

...........................

 

"Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has released a plan to put $2 trillion into green infrastructure and energy over four years to curb climate change and spur economic growth, which the Trump campaign has argued would hurt the oil and gas industry. "

 

Go to the CNBC article 

Published Thu, Sep 3 2020

Trump and Biden: Little room for climate change in US election (excerpt): DW

The White House

As the US faces wildfires and storms, climate change remains one of the most divisive topics among voters. Yet despite the high stakes, so far, it has played a minor role in the upcoming election. 

US President Donald Trump has undone many major pieces of climate policy during his term, walking out on the Paris Agreement to limit global warming and eliminating numerous Obama-era environmental regulations. 

However, climate change doesn't even make the top 10 concerns among registered voters, even as the US faces extreme weather from wildfires to storms, scientists say are more prevalent by global warming. It ranks 11th behind the economy, health care, Supreme Court appointments and the pandemic, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center published in August. 

While climate doesn't top the voters' agenda, it's still one of the most divisive issues among Trump and Biden supporters. Some 68% of Democratic voters see climate change as high priority compared to 11% of Republicans, found the Pew survey. 

Following a storm in Iowa last month, estimates suggested that almost a third of the state's crop-growing land was affected

Wildfires are becoming more frequent in California, where the ground and vegetation has suffered from long, dry summers

But what are the Biden and Trump campaigns promising to do on climate change and the environment — and how does it tally with what voters want?

Go to complete DW article

 Related: Donald Trump is hampering fight against climate change, WEF warns (excerpt) : The Guardian (2 years ago)

Trump, Biden, #USA, USA, voters, #climate crisis, #climatecriminals, #jailclimatecriminals, 

Germany's coastal lowlands under the shadow of climate change: DW

German mud flats in danger

"Much of Germany's North Sea coast is low enough to put it at risk from the waters at its door. Not least in an era of warming temperatures and predicted sea level rise."

"The wind whips threatening clouds across a dark blue sky above the North Frisian island of Pellworm. Petra Feldkamp casts a glance toward a high green dike in the near distance. Directly behind it, the sea rolls and roars. Out of sight, but not out of mind.

Particularly after a summer in which the realities of our warming global climate have been scorched into the German consciousness.
"I think we all take it seriously. When you live here, you see the situation, you feel it," says Feldkamp, whose family has been on the island for generations. "But this is a place of calm, so it doesn't really scare you."

Though she acknowledges that her sense of calm is in large part due to the protective dikes that were recently raised, and without which the island "would drown," she says she feels "totally safe."

When the sea is calm, so is the sense of living alongside it.

For Thomas Langmaack of the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein's agency for coastal defense, national parks and marine conservation (LKN), that's a cause for concern.


Too close yet too comfortable

It is also his job to foster an understanding among communities inhabiting the 3,900 square kilometers (1,505 square miles) of lowland — some of which was originally sea snared over time through the construction of dikes — of the capricious and sometimes ferocious nature of the waters that swirl around them.

"People have largely become careless," Langmaack said. "They've suppressed it, because there hasn't been a devastating storm surge for several decades."

And because the several hundred kilometers of complex dikes form a wall between them and the sea, they are safer than ever before.

Dikes are constantly being repaired and renewed

Dikes are constantly being repaired and renewed to enable the people to continue to live in the flatlands in relative safety

"But even they can fail," LKN spokesman Hendrik Brunkhorst said. "We have to make people aware of the dangers."

The sea rose only 28 centimeters (11 inches) between 1940 and 2007, which is in keeping with recordings from the previous century. But there is a sense of urgency about the need to prepare local communities for the worst, in part stirred by cyclone Xaver, which hit the region in 2013, but also because both sea and storm water levels are predicted to rise within the coming decades.

Planning for the unknown

Besides alerting the population, the agency for coastal defense has been strengthening its fortifications with so-called "climate dikes."

A far cry from the early hand-built clay incarnations that began appearing on the flat northern German landscape around a millennium ago, these precision-engineered giant green slopes are designed to keep the waves at bay in such a way that it would be easy to add a new layer on top if water levels were to suddenly rise much faster than current forecasts suggest.

"We have to look to the future," Langmaack said. "What we have is rising temperatures, and that means rising sea levels, but nobody can tell us how the curve is going to develop, and that makes it very difficult."

"We're genuinely planning for the next 100 years," he continued."

.......................

"As a conservationist, Fröhlich doesn't generally sanction the idea of tampering with nature, but climate change  induced sea level rise could, he says, be grounds enough for an exception.

"I think we underestimate what's around the corner," he said. "I'm worried that large parts of this area will be lost. I really am."

And if that happens, if the Wadden Sea starts to swallow itself, there's a very good chance the sense of calm it instills in those who live with and from it, will sink as well."

Go to the original, complete, 2018 DW article

Ref: Sea Level Rise and Implications for Low-Lying Islands, Coasts and Communities: IPCC

Related:  Related: East Antarctic Melting Hotspot Identified by Japanese Expedition – Ice Melting at Surprisingly Fast Rate: SciTechDaily

Donald Trump is hampering fight against climate change, WEF warns (excerpt) : The Guardian (2 years ago)

Trump digs coal

Two years after 2018 the situation is even worse.

"World Economic Forum outlines huge increase in all five eco risks since the US president assumed office


The World Economic Forum delivered a strong warning about Donald Trump’s go-it-alone approach to tackling climate change as it highlighted the growing threat of environmental collapse in its annual assessment of the risks facing the international community."

............." the WEF avoided mentioning Trump by name but said “nation-state unilateralism” would make it harder to tackle global warming and ecological damage.

The WEF’s global risks perception survey showed Trump’s arrival in the White House in 2017 had coincided with a marked increase in concern about the environment among experts polled by the Swiss-based organisation.

It said all five environmental risks covered by the survey – extreme weather events, natural disasters, failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and human-made natural disasters – had become more prominent.

“This follows a year characterised by high-impact hurricanes, extreme temperatures and the first rise in CO2 emissions for four years. We have been pushing our planet to the brink and the damage is becoming increasingly clear. 

“Biodiversity is being lost at mass-extinction rates, agricultural systems are under strain, and pollution of the air and sea has become an increasingly pressing threat to human health.”

Trump has threatened to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris agreement under which nations agreed to take steps to limit the increase in global temperature. He has said the commitments made by his predecessor, Barack Obama, would damage the American economy.

Other states have said they will keep to the pledges made in Paris, an approach supported by the WEF."

Larry Elliott Economics editor

Thu 18 Jan 2018

Go to complete The Guardian article

ALSO

Trump suggests the climate may actually be 'fabulous' after an ominous UN report on looming disaster

Sinéad Baker

Oct 10, 2018, 

Trump digs coal

  

   • President Donald Trump on Tuesday sought to cast doubt on a UN report on climate change that had dire warnings about how little time we have to stop a global catastrophe.

 
   • Trump suggested that the world’s climate might actually be “fabulous” and that he’d seen reports expressing that position.

 
   • The UN report outlines the effects of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

 
   • Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax,” and last year he announced he would pull the US out of the Paris climate accord.

Trump, WEF, Paris Agreement, #climate crisis, #jailclimatecriminals, #criminales-climáticos-de-la-cárcel, #criminalesclimáticosdelacárcel, #extremeheat, #icemelting, hurricanes,  climatechangedenial

'The Future We Choose', Book by Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac

The defining book on the climate crisis that shows us how we can and will survive. 

'The Paris Agreement was a landmark for humanity. In this timely and important book, two of the principle creators of that agreement show us why and how we can now realise its' promise. I hope it is widely read and acted on.' - Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace

The Future We Choose is a passionate call to arms, written by former UN Secretary for Climate Christiana Figures and Tom Rivett-Carnac, her UN political strategist. They outline two scenarios for our future: how life on Earth will be by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement climate targets; or how it will look and feel to live in a carbon neutral, regenerative world. Each of us must confront the crisis head on, with determination and optimism.

Practical and empowering, The Future We Choose features ten things we can do today to make a difference. The Future We Choose is for all of us, teenagers to adults, who feel powerless to stop the climate emergency.

This is the final hour: it can be our finest hour. We can solve our climate emergency, but we must act now.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis Paperback – 3 March 2020 

Amazon: $19.00

'I strongly recommend this enlightening book! The next few years are the most important in humanity's fight to solve the climate crisis. In The Future We Choose, Christiana and Tom show us what's to come, how to face it, and what can be done to make the right choice to save our planet for future generations.' - Al Gore

Paris Agreement, #climate crisis, climate targets, climate emergency, book, #jailclimatecriminals,

Related: A bit rich: business groups want urgent climate action, after resisting it for 30 years (excerpt): The Conversation


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