Archive for the 'Climate Change' Category

The Chilling Effect of Trump’s Climate Actions on the Climate Community

February 8th, 2025

The non-governmental organizations and institutions dedicated to climate mitigation and adaptation have long been the backbone of efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, develop sustainable technologies, and build resilient communities. However, the chilling effect of Donald Trump’s climate policies has cast a shadow over this critical work, obstructing progress at a time when urgent action is needed more than ever.

Trump’s systematic dismantling of climate policies—ranging from withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement to rolling back emissions standards and cutting climate research funding—has created a hostile environment for those working in climate science, renewable energy, and environmental advocacy. With government leadership retreating, NGOs and private organizations face increased challenges in securing funding, influencing policy, and mobilizing public support for meaningful climate action.

Yet reducing global greenhouse gas emissions remains urgent. By reversing its climate policies, the U.S. is not only losing valuable time but actively accelerating the depletion of its remaining carbon budget. As climate models have long predicted, predictable climate-related disasters—wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and sea—level rise—are arriving sooner and with greater intensity.

Recent reports confirm that we have already surpassed the critical 1.5°C warming threshold, and leading climate scientist James Hansen warns that surpassing 2.0°C is now inevitable. As Hansen states, “At the current rate, the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to somewhere between 2.7 degrees and 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5-2 degrees Celsius) is pretty much dead.” (Source: [Inside Climate News](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04022025/james-hansen-research-documents-global-warming-acceleration/)).

This stark reality underscores the importance of renewed and intensified efforts within the climate action community. Despite the chilling effect of political backtracking, non-governmental organizations, businesses, and individuals must redouble their commitments to carbon reduction, policy advocacy, and sustainable innovation. The fight for a habitable future cannot be abandoned—regardless of governmental roadblocks.

The challenge now is to rebuild momentum and push forward in the face of obstruction. The scientific consensus is clear: the climate crisis is accelerating, and every fraction of a degree matters. Whether through grassroots activism, corporate sustainability commitments, or local policy initiatives, the climate community must continue to act decisively. The cost of inaction is far too high.

(Originally published at DeadRiverJournal.org)

Avoiding the Worst Consequences of Collapse

February 7th, 2025

It’s important to take a moment in the midst of the current political turmoil to consider what‘s really at stake. What we’re seeing from the Trump White House may be a symptom of the breakdown occurring as the new Administration tries to turn back the clock in several critical areas—climate, equity, foreign aid, and public service—while pursuing global triumphalism. But the consequences of a world economy built on fossil fuels, mass consumerism, and conventional agriculture are unavoidable. We need to understand that we are in the midst of collapse, and that chaos and conflict will only accelerate it. Here’s what even ChatGPT recognizes to be the situation we face.

The Reality of Accelerating Collapse

Civilization as we know it is under immense strain. Climate change, biodiversity loss, desertification, and ocean acidification are just some of the existential crises unfolding at an accelerating pace. These environmental pressures are compounded by political instability, economic fragility, and disruptive social movements seeking to overturn the status quo. We are in the midst of what scientists and historians may come to call the most decisive decade of the 21st century. What we do—or fail to do—will determine whether the future remains habitable for humanity and countless other species

Defining a Habitable Future

A habitable future is one in which humans and ecosystems can thrive within planetary boundaries. It is a future where temperatures remain within a range that sustains food production and human health, where biodiversity supports resilient ecosystems, and where economic and social systems allow for well-being without the relentless exploitation of people and nature. It is a future in which our air, water, and soil are clean, and our societies are structured around cooperation, equity, and resilience rather than competition, extraction, and collapse Continue Reading »

Is AI Smarter than Donald Trump?

January 26th, 2025

Something led me to start reading the text of Donald Trump’s Executive Order on energy, “Unleashing American Energy,”  and I was astonished to discover an assault on an economic and scientific concept, the “social cost of carbon.”

The calculation of the “social cost of carbon” is marked by logical deficiencies, a poor basis in empirical science, politicization, and the absence of a foundation in legislation.  Its abuse arbitrarily slows regulatory decisions and, by rendering the United States economy internationally uncompetitive, encourages a greater human impact on the environment by affording less efficient foreign energy producers a greater share of the global energy and natural resource market.  Consequently, within 60 days of the date of this order, the Administrator of the EPA shall issue guidance to address these harmful and detrimental inadequacies, including consideration of eliminating the “social cost of carbon” calculation from any Federal permitting or regulatory decision. ((Source))

It’s been some years since Delton Chen and I worked on the real cost of carbon emissions on the planet, and I don’t remember all the arguments we made, except that we also distinguished a separate “risk cost of carbon” that took into account more than just the immediate deleterious effects of increasing greenhouse gases. But while we may not like estimating and reporting on the economic costs of increased carbon pollution, it’s just not useful to stick our heads in the sand.

And I very much wonder who came up with the idea of simply doing away with the concept. Continue Reading »

Latest Reflections (July 2022)

July 4th, 2022

A momentary pause in the midst of marginally-managed chaos. So much is going on, both good and bad, forward and backward. And yes, it’s still accelerating. The Earth’s population hasn’t leveled off yet; currently, it is estimated to be 7.96 billion (but see https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ for today’s calculated number). The rate of growth has however leveled off, from 2.2% to 1% per year during my lifetime. Eventually, the population will stabilize, but the question is, at what level?

At the moment the burden on the Earth is increasing. The planet is already in “overshoot” on seven of the nine (soon to be ten) ecological boundaries. So in some sense, we are already in the midst of collapse — and in which we are still accelerating, putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, degrading the environment, and continuing the loss of biodiversity. These trends need to be reversed, sooner rather than later.

To reach even the modest goals of the cities, states, and the national government, greenhouse gas emissions need to peak by 2024 and then start a rapid descent from their all-time high, when the temperature is actually expected to reach the 1.5°C level.

So this is the big picture, and indeed this is a large part of what I have been focused on in the process of joining and quickly becoming Earth Regenerators’ fiscal sponsor. Meanwhile, locally, we’ve moved to Rochester, bought a small house in Brighton (an inner-ring suburb), and I’m busy transforming what used to be a quarter acre of lawn into a permagarden — an orchard, a vegetable garden, and a pollinator garden.

Writing this I’m conscious of leaving out much of the narrative and of the context of how we got here, which will have to wait for another time. What’s new, though, is the intention to keep posting reflections on a regular basis, to begin to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for myself, to be able to reconstruct at least the story from here on.

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Biodiversity for a Livable Climate

November 15th, 2014

Biodiversity for a Livable Climate was founded in 2013 by Jim Laurie, Karl Thidemann, Helen D. Silver, Jane Hammer and Adam Sacks.  We saw an urgent need to expand the climate conversation to include the seriously underestimated positive impacts of the biosphere on the climate and physical world.  We see how appropriate human approaches to nature may be able to reverse the effects of global warming despite our inability to date to reduce emissions in a timely manner.  Our goal is to contribute to planetary regeneration through research, education, collaboration and action to restore essential global biodiversity.

https://www.facebook.com/bio4climate

http://bio4climate.org

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Crowdfunding for PACE in New Jersey

August 7th, 2014

JCloudStorerSmThe challenges we face in New Jersey as a result of climate change are significant, and so therefore are the opportunities. The experience of Superstorm Sandy showed us just how ill-prepared we are for the more frequent recurrence of extreme weather; and how important it is that we set an example for taking action to mitigate our own greenhouse gas emissions, as other states are doing around us. And there’s also no doubt about the urgency of it — as you can see from this remarkable video:
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Launching Our Crowdfunding Campaign Today

August 5th, 2014

See it live at http://NJPACE.CauseVox.com.

NJPACEOrg-logoDG-MakeaDonationDeveloping our crowdfunding campaign is giving us an extraordinary opportunity to explore using PACE to revitalize New Jersey communities. By itself, PACE is an innovative business model that creates jobs and economic development while providing the ultimate tool to finance energy efficiency and renewable energy projects on private properties. But leveraging PACE for community development is where the real payoff is, that is to say, for the benefit of the community as a whole.
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“A World that Works for No One”

February 23rd, 2014

Diary of the Future — February 23, 2014

83David_Korten

Unless people of good will join in common cause to build a truly democratic world that works for all, we will find ourselves living in a world that works for no one. —David Korten (2000)

There is a sense in which we already find ourselves living in “a world that works for no one”: not the rich, and certainly not the poor; not the believer or the agnostic, not the Ph.D. or the high school drop-out, not the pop celebrity or the homeless veteran still suffering from PTSD. It’s not just that the rich are as depressed, confused, and cynical as the rest of us, which is certainly true in many cases; or that the world we live in seems to be unravelling in a dozen different ways, which has certainly been the case during all of our lifetimes. It’s that the world cannot work for anyone unless it at least begins to work for everyone.

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Diary of the Future

February 22nd, 2014

February 22, 2014: Climate disruption is becoming increasingly evident in our times. As we begin to thaw out from what has been a surprisingly cold and snowy winter, it seems almost comical to have to ask whether this is somehow connected with global warming. It is. The southward migration of the polar vortex, which we’ve all started hearing about, is partly caused by an upwelling of warm air in the Arctic, causing the center of the vortex to rise and the edges to spill outward. This doesn’t mean that global warming causes it, but only that it likely exacerbates it, continuing a changing pattern of weather events that taken together are what we mean by “climate change.”

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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

,—,”Of course this is not the first ‘Arctic winter’ to be experienced in the U.S., though it dropped record amounts of snow and broke all of the low temperature records set since the National Weather Service started keeping them in the 1870s. And the disturbance may well be linked to climate change. According to Phil Plait writing in Slate (Feb 2014): “”warming water in the Arctic leads to ice loss which leads to more warm water. Some climate scientists think this may be disrupting the air flow in the polar vortex, which in turn leads to the meanders in the jet stream. This idea is pretty new and not yet verified. But the irony is clear: If these scientists turn out to be right, not only does the cold weather not disprove global warming, it may actually be caused by it.”””
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Finally, Some Sanity on Climate Change

June 27th, 2013

June 25, 2013: A great deal of what Obama just said on climate change at Georgetown University will seem like common sense to many of us, so it’s important to recognize just how dramatic a shift in the public conversation it is likely to cause.

Several distinct concepts were introduced and reinforced in the speech, most notably that of “carbon pollution,” which is clearly more emotionally and politically powerful than “greenhouse gas emissions.” By calling it (some might say “calling it out as”) carbon pollution more than a dozen times during the speech, he laid the groundwork for a comprehensive approach to the challenge of climate change as a priority for the U.S. and for the rest of the world — including placing the U.S., now second in the world as a carbon emitter to China, at the head of the line in addressing the problems.

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