Help build support for a climate emergency declaration

4 thoughts on “Help build support for a climate emergency declaration”

1. Given the dire news on climate, the huge damage to public health and the steepening coal industry death spiral we can’t afford to muck around. We need a concerted effort to make sure that we make a just transition to 100% renewable energy at the earliest possible opportunity.

2. Record-breaking heat run continues through March

   First 3 months of 2016 are 1.51C above late 19th century

   The temperature data for March 2016 is out. March was 1.53C hotter than late nineteenth century.

   The record-breaking El Nino has driven up temperatures by about 0.2C, to a mind-blowing set of figures over last year. So the NASA temperature data last shows last 6 months (compared to 1880-1909 baseline) as

   Oct 2015 – 1.31C
   Nov – 1.28C
   Dec – 1.35C
   Jan 2016 – 1.39C
   Feb – 1.60C
   Mar – 1.53C

   Average for first 3 months of this year: 1.51C

   April is currently running ~1.4C but may drop a little.

   The raw data is here:
   http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.C.txt

   So much for all the blah about how we have got 30 or 40 years to get to zero emissions to keep to under 1.5C of warming!

   David Spratt

3. On 14 April, Bernie Sanders went public again on the need for a WW2 emergency response to climate. The Altantic Magazine called it “The Democrats’ Most Substantive Climate Debate Yet” (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/the-democrats-most-substantive-climate-debate-so-far/478503/)

   Throughout the back-and-forth on climate, Sanders compared global warming to warfare. The United States should respond to melting icecaps like it would respond to a foreign invasion, he said: “If we approach this, Errol, as if we were literally at a war — you know, in 1941, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we moved within three years, within three more years to rebuild our economy to defeat Nazism and Japanese imperialism. That is exactly the kind of approach we need right now.”

   The idea that climate change will require a mass economic mobilisation on the level required by World War II is an increasingly popular idea among environmentalists. It’s been written about in these pages:

   Not war and war: politics and environmentalism
   http://www.basecase.org/env/not-war-and-war

   The Atlantic Magazine: Why Solving Climate Change Will Be Like Mobilizing for War
   http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/why-only-a-technocratic-revolution-can-win-the-climate-change-war/410377/

   and Al Gore has called for it as a way to end the global savings glut:

   The Economist: The global secular savings stagnation glut
   http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/puzzles

   It is also the opposite of the world’s current approach, which is effectively to divert investment from fossil fuels to clean energy. Seeing this idea enter mainstream Democratic rhetoric so forcefully bodes well for its chances.

4. Did anyone notice the heading tucked away on page 10 of last Saturday’s Age? (26/3/16) – ‘Time is running out for climate’. Everyone knows we have to take emergency action if a small baby’s temperature goes up a degree or two. But do we know what to do when the ‘baby’ is the whole earth life system?
   Yet the biggest power everyone has right now is to vote in the next election for clear-eyed parliamentary representatives who are publicly resolute about the costs of not acting and who have a real and concrete plan for rapidly winding down coal, oil and gas production to transition Australian industry to energy based on solar and other clean power sources.
   The Turnbull government’s recently quietly launched productivity Growth Centre for oil, gas, coal seam gas, coal and uranium (Age 24/3/16) and the emails revealed by FOI showing they wanted CSIRO to cease ALL public good climate work (Age 4/4/16) augur badly. There’ll be no viable economy without a viable climate.

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