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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Electrons, not molecules

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

When hydrocarbon barons do their damndest to torch the Earth with fossil fuels, they call us dreamers. They insist that there's a hard-nosed reality – humanity needs energy – and they're the ones who live in it, while we live in the fairy land where the world can run on sunshine and virtuous thoughts. Without them making the tough decisions, we'd all be starving in the frigid dark.

Here's the thing: they're full of shit.

Mostly.

Humanity does need energy if we're going to avoid starving in the frigid dark, but that energy doesn't have to come from fossil fuels. Indeed, in the long-term, it can't. Even if you're a rootin' tootin, coal-rollin' climate denier, there's a hard-nosed reality you can't deny: if we keep using fossil fuels, they will someday run out. Remember "peak oil" panic? Fossil fuels are finite, and the future of the human race needn't be. We need more.

Thankfully, we have it. Despite what you may have heard, renewables are more than up to the task. Indeed, it's hard to overstate just how much renewable energy is available to us, here at the bottom of our gravity well. I failed to properly appreciate it until I read Deb Chachra's brilliant 2023 book, How Infrastructure Works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Chachra, an engineering prof and materials scientist, offers a mind-altering reframing of the question of energy: we have a material problem, not an energy problem. If we could capture a mere 0.4% of the sun's rays that strike the Earth, we could give every person on the planet the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, only colder).

Energy isn't just wildly abundant, though: it's also continuously replenished. For most of human history, we've treated energy as scarce, eking out marginal gains in energy efficiency – even as we treated materials as disposable, using them once and consigning them to a midden or a landfill. That's completely backwards. We get a fresh shipment of energy every time the sun (or the moon) comes up over the horizon. By contrast, new consignments of material are almost unheard of – the few odd ounces of meteoric ore that survive entry through Earth's atmosphere.

A soi-dissant adult concerned with the very serious business of ensuring our species isn't doomed to the freezing, starving darkness of an energy-deprived future would think about nothing save for this fact and its implications. They'd be trying to figure out how to humanely and responsibly gather the materials needed for the harvest, storage and distribution of this nearly limitless and absolutely free energy.

In other words, that Very Serious, Hard-Nosed Grown-Up should be concerned with using as few molecules as possible to harvest as many electrons as possible. They'd be working on things like turning disused coal-mines into giant gravity batteries:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Not figuring out how to dig or flush more long-dead corpses out of the Earth's mantle to feed them into a furnace. That is a profoundly unserious response to the human need for energy. It's caveman shit: "Ugh, me burn black sticky gunk, make cave warm, cough cough cough."

Enter Exxon CEO Darren Woods, whose interview with Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram and editor Alan Murray contains this telling quote: "we basically focus our technology on transforming molecules and they happen to be hydrogen and carbon molecules":

https://fortune.com/2024/02/28/leadership-next-exxonmobil-ceo-darren-woods/

As Bill McKibben writes, this is a tell. A company that's in the molecule business is not in the electron business. For all that Woods postures about being a clear-eyed realist beating back the fantasies of solarpunk-addled greenies, Woods does not want a future where we have all our energy needs met:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-most-epic-and-literal-gaslighting

That's because the only way to get that future is to shift from molecules – whose supply can be owned and therefore sold by Exxon – to electrons, which that commie bastard sun just hands out for free to every person on our planet's surface, despite the obvious moral hazard of all those free lunches. As Woods told Fortune, when it comes to renewables, "we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders."

Woods dresses this up in high-minded seriousness kabuki, saying that Exxon is continuing to invest in burning rotting corpses because our feckless species "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society." In other words, it's just too late for solar. Keep shoveling those corpses into the furnace, they're all that stands between you and the freezing, starving dark.

Now, this is self-serving nonsense. The problem of renewables isn't that it's too late – it's that they don't "generate above-average returns for our shareholders" (that part, however, is gospel truth).

But let's stipulate that Woods sincerely believes that it is too late. It's pretty goddamned rich of this genocidal, eminently guillotineable monster to just drop that in the conversation without mentioning the role his company played in getting us to this juncture. After all, #ExxonKnew. 40 years ago, Exxon's internal research predicted climate change, connected climate change to its own profits, and predicted how bad it would be today.

Those predictions were spookily accurate and the company took them to heart, leaping into action. For 40 years, the company has been building its offshore drilling platforms higher and higher in anticipation of rising seas and superstorms – and over that same period, Exxon has spent millions lobbying and sowing disinformation to make sure that the rest of us don't take the emergency as seriously as they are, lest we switch from molecules to electrons.

Exxon knew, and Exxon lied. McKibben quotes Woods' predecessor Lee Raymond, speaking in the runup to the Kyoto Treaty negotiations: "It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now."

When Woods says we need to keep shoveling corpses into the furnace because we "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society," he means that his company lied to us in order to convince us to wait too long.

When Woods – and his fellow enemies of humanity in the C-suites of Chevron and other corpse-torching giants – was sending the arson billions to his shareholders, he held back a healthy share to fund this deceit. He colluded with the likes of Joe Manchin ("[D-POLLUTION]" -McKibben) to fill the Inflation Reduction Act with gifts for molecules. The point of fantasies like "direct air carbon-capture" is to extend the economic life of molecule businesses, by tricking us into thinking that we can keep sending billions to Exxon without suffocating in its waste-product.

These lies aren't up for debate. Back in 2021, Greenpeace tricked Exxon's top DC lobbyist Keith McCoy into thinking that he was on a Zoom call with a corporate recruiter and asked him about his work for Exxon, and McCoy spilled the beans:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew

He confessed to everything: funding fake grassroots groups and falsifying the science – he even names the senators who took his bribes. McCoy singled out Manchin for special praise, calling him "a kingmaker" and boasting about the "standing weekly calls" Exxon had with Manchin's office.

Exxon's response to this nine-minute confession was to insist that their most senior American lobbyist "wasn't involved at all in forming policy positions."

McKibben points to the forthcoming book The Price Is Wrong, by Brett Christophers, which explains how the neoclassical economics establishment's beloved "price signals" will continue to lead us into the furnace:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong

The crux of that book is:

We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing.

Nearly 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Today, we can say that it's impossible to get an oil executive to understand that humanity needs electrons, not molecules, because his shareholders' obscene wealth depends on it.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

#pluralistic #bill mckibben #exxon #exxonknew #solarpunk #climate #climate emergency #climate crisis #gaslighting #guillotine watch #Darren Woods #incentives matter

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 7 months

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“Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.”

― Bill McKibben

#quotes #Bill McKibben #belief #Scripture #Ben Franklin #love of neighbor #getting it wrong

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kp777 · 2 months

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#climate change #climate crisis #bill mckibben

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climatecalling · 7 months

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“We are all here for one reason: to end fossil fuels around the planet,” Ocasio-Cortez told a rally at the finish of the march, which ended close to the UN headquarters where world leaders will gather this week. “And the way we create urgency is to have people around the world in the streets.” She said: “The United States continues to be approving a record number of fossil fuel leases and we must send a message, right here today,” adding that despite record profits the support for the fossil fuel industry was “starting to buckle and crack”. Climate action requires a democratic restructuring of the economy, she said. “What we’re not gonna do is go from oil barons to solar barons.” Organizers estimated that between 50,000 and 75,000 people attended the march in Manhattan and had anticipated it would be the biggest climate march in the US in the past five years. ... Biden has been praised by climate activists for last year passing a historic $369bn climate law but criticized for allowing oil drilling projects and the expansion of gas facilities in the Gulf of Mexico. ... The veteran environmental activist Bill McKibben travelled to New York City to attend the march. “I think it’s a real restart moment after the pandemic for the big in-the-streets climate movement,” he said. “It’s good to see people get back out there.” The crowd, he said, reflected the diversity of New York City. “I’m glad to see there’s a lot of old people like me here,” said McKibben, who founded Third Act, an activist group aimed at elders. “We’ll be marching in the back because we’re slow!” More than 650 global climate actions took place earlier this week; earlier on Sunday activists sprayed orange paint on to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany.

#climate activism #climate crisis #march to end fossil fuels #aoc #bill mckibben

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never-was-has-been · 1 month

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Imagine if you will, a baby born this year, could live and grow up to be 77 yrs old… The year would be 2101, the 1st year of the 22nd century. But if the globally warm and unstable Earth's climate does not reverse or get reversed by our human species, Human beings and possibly ALL life will have disappeared from this planet…permanently!

#In the year 2101 #bill mckibben #2100 and Before

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the-book-ferret · 2 years

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When we work together, we humans can do incredible things.

#thebookferret #books #booklr #book worm #booknerd #book pets #book addict #book photography #bibliophile #ferret #ferrets of tumblr #pets of tumblr #wasabi #we are better together #bill mckibben #mac kids books #stevie lewis

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blogdemocratesjr · 2 years

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If industrial civilization is ending nature, it is not utter silliness to talk about ending—or, at least, transforming—industrial civilization.

Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (p.186)

#Bill McKibben #climate change #climate crisis #nature

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trmpt · 3 months

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#bill mckibben #biden #oil industry

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dubbatrubba · 4 months

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Big Red Sun Blues

First let’s hear from the brilliant singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams: Everything is goin’ wrongIt’s not right anymoreWe can’t seem to get alongThe way we did beforeSun is hangin’ in the skySinkin’ low and so am I Then let’s listen to journalist/author/environmentalist (and Sunday school teacher) Bill McKibben in this article about LNG. “The good Lord was kind enough to hang a large ball of…

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#Bill McKibben #Lucinda Williams #Solar power

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xtruss · 5 months

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Photograph Courtesy the Author

At Least We Can Give Thanks For a Tree! Visiting The Largest Known White Pine.

— By Bill McKibben | Thursday November 23, 2023 (Thanksgiving Day)

As far as the climate (and, truthfully, much else) is concerned, 2023 has felt like one nasty jack-in-the-box moment after another; there have been a record number of billion-dollar natural disasters in the United States and much worse in the rest of the world. That may explain why I was so pleased a few months ago to read a short article in a Syracuse newspaper about something both unexpected and quite unreservedly lovely: this past July, in the remote Moose River Plains Wild Forest, in the Adirondacks, a young botanist named Erik Danielson found the largest Eastern white pine known to exist. Indeed, it is the largest tree of any kind known in that great wilderness, and ever since I read about it I’d been hoping he might be persuaded to take me for a look. Earlier this month, with a dusting of snow on the ground, he led a small group of enthusiasts on a two-hour bushwhack into the forest.

Danielson, aged thirty-three, is a self-taught botanist who works for the Western New York Land Conservancy, helping to, among other things, identify rare and endangered plant communities. “I’m particularly interested in mosses and liverworts,” he said, and, indeed, we’d barely left the dirt road between Indian Lake and Inlet, New York, before he was bent over a carpet of green. But, in his spare time, Danielson is a big-tree hunter, at work for the Gathering Growth Foundation, on a book about the big trees of New York. He’s part of a small band that has systematically sought out the patches of old-growth forest that were left across the East after the rapacious logging of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. I’ve known some of these sleuths for years—I spent a pleasant day a quarter century ago with one of Danielson’s mentors, another autodidact tree-lover named Bob Leverett, measuring white pines in a state park in the Berkshires. I’ve visited forest patches in the Carolinas, Vermont, and New Hampshire, but much of the remaining Eastern old growth is confined to the Adirondacks, the vast and sparsely populated quarter of New York that rises north of Saratoga, south of Quebec, and between the Mohawk and St. Lawrence Rivers, Lake Champlain, and Lake Ontario. Though the region is high and cold, with a short growing season, it’s also protected and empty, as long as you stay away from the scenic High Peaks around Lake Placid. I’ve often wandered there for days on end seeing no one.

Danielson was alerted to this particular corner of the Adirondacks by a hunter, Matt Kane, who posted a picture of a giant white pine on a Facebook group this year. Kane had been researching the logging history of the area, which came into state hands in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when it was still largely virgin forest. In 1950, a huge storm—still known as “the big blowdown”—toppled most of the trees there, and though the area was officially protected wilderness, the state allowed a controversial “salvage logging” of downed trees. For the first half of the hike, we followed, in places, an overgrown former logging road. Danielson has tools that his predecessors lacked, most notably lidar scans—basically, a Light Detection and Ranging aircraft pulses a laser down at the earth, measuring distances so accurately that it can build a 3-D picture of any area. “I was processing the canopy height model, and you could see that there had to be trees that were a hundred and forty to a hundred and sixty feet tall,” Danielson said. “In the Adirondacks, that’s very tall. And what made it really exciting was that it was a large area—it looked like five hundred or five hundred and fifty acres. Usually what you find are very small clusters”— such as the eight-acre Elder’s Grove, near Paul Smith’s College, where the state’s onetime tallest pine, Tree 103, fell in 2021.

Sometimes, as with the Elder’s Grove pine, these giant trees are situated conveniently near a road. Not in this case. We clambered along the remains of the logging road until we came to a sizable brook; you could plot a theoretical course across the rocks, but, as is often the case, theory succumbed to practice, and I slipped and got my boots wet (thank science for Gore-Tex). Across the brook, the forest began to deepen, and so did Danielson’s story (though it gave way at regular intervals to short seminars on bronze grape fern, which comes in two forms, and Northeastern sedge, “which looks a lot like yellow sedge except for some details”). He was describing his July expedition to us. On the first day, he found a very big white pine, but barely had time to catalogue it. “It felt so remote,” he said. “Usually, there are some signs of hunters, but here I didn’t even see a beer can.” He hit on a small brook, and followed it up through a quiet forest, scrambling across giant deadfalls—“nurse logs” sprouting hundreds of seedlings. “I was in a kind of ecstatic state, especially after I saw that waterfall over there,” he said. “Then I glimpsed an extra-large trunk through the trees and, as I got closer, it wasn’t getting any smaller.” Foresters, charmingly, measure the size of trees by D.B.H., or diameter at breast height, which is calculated from the circumference. He added, “When I wrapped my tape around it, it was 16.39 feet”—one of the largest ever measured for a white pine. (This tree’s D.B.H. is more than five feet.) But base circumference does not make a big tree—indeed, most really wide white pines are comparatively squat. “Looking up at this one, though, I could tell it was tall,” Danielson said. He crossed a gully to a small glade where he could get a clear view of the crown and, using a hypsometer, measured the tree’s height at a hundred and fifty-one feet and six inches.

That’s not the tallest pine we know about—last year, Danielson, not surprisingly, had measured the post-Tree 103 New York State height champion, on the other side of the Adirondacks, near Lake George, at a hundred and seventy-four feet. But many tall trees, including that one, are relatively skinny. This Moose River Plains pine, which he named Bigfoot, is a solid pole heading up into the sky. He could tell that, even at eighty feet, it was still forty inches in diameter, and he was able to conservatively estimate its volume (of the trunk and the main branches) at fourteen hundred and fifty cubic feet—reportedly, a record for the species. Indeed, Danielson says there are fewer than a dozen known, living, and verifiable specimens of white pine larger than a thousand cubic feet.

There’s enormous practical value in a big tree—new research makes it clear that they sequester vast amounts of carbon, and that letting big old trees grow is an even more effective way to draw down greenhouse gases than planting new ones. But the impractical value is likely larger; to be in the presence of a giant is for some reason calming—the air felt tranquil here, the sunlight scattered, the wind stilled. And it was somehow hopeful to think of what the tree had lived through in what Danielson says must be at least three centuries of life (it hasn’t been cored yet, and probably won’t be) and of what it might yet witness. Among many other things, that tally includes the Civil War, a trauma that exceeds even our current discontents. As it happens, one of the people on the hike was an old friend, Aaron Mair, who was the first African American president of the Sierra Club and now works with the Adirondack Council, the region’s premier conservation group. This past summer, Mair oversaw the first rendition of the Timbuctoo Institute—which draws its name from the settlement established for free Black men and their families outside Lake Placid, near John Brown’s homestead—bringing students of color from New York City to the Adirondacks to work with botanists, wildlife experts, and other conservation professionals. “It was a huge success,” Mair said. “I’ve got hundreds of kids who want to come next year, and they are going to be rangers, biologists, you name it.” Often, even amid the traumas of the moment, the seeds of what comes next are growing; sometimes they grow into something very mighty indeed. ♦

#Ecology | Conservation | Trees 🌴 🌲 🌳 | New York #Climate Change | Adirondacks #Largest Known White Pine 🌲#Bill McKibben #The New Yorker

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

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Stinkpump Linkdump

Next Tuesday (December 5), I'm at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, with my new solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, which 350.org's Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel: perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."b

Once again, I greet the weekend with more assorted links than I can fit into my nearly-daily newsletter, so it's time for another linkdump. This is my eleventh such assortment; here are the previous volumes:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I've written a lot about Biden's excellent appointees, from his National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chair Rohit Chopra to FTC Chair Lina Khan to DoJ antitrust boss Jonathan Kanter:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

But I've also written a bunch about how Biden's appointment strategy is an incoherent mess, with excellent appointees picked by progressives on the Unity Task Force being cancelled out by appointees given to the party's reactionary finance wing, producing a muddle that often cancels itself out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/08/fiduciaries/#but-muh-freedumbs

It's not just that the finance wing of the Democrats chooses assholes (though they do!), it's that they choose comedic bunglers. The Dems haven't put anyone in government who's as much of an embarrassment as George Santos, but they keep trying. The latest self-inflicted Democratic Party injury is Prashant Bhardjwan, a serial liar and con-artist who is, incredibly, the Biden Administration's pick to oversee fintech for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC):

https://www.americanbanker.com/news/did-the-occ-hire-a-con-artist-to-oversee-fintech

When the 42 year old Bhardjwan was named Deputy Comptroller and Chief Financial Technology Officer for OCC, the announcement touted his "nearly 30 years of experience serving in a variety of roles across the financial sector." Apparently Bhardjwan joined the finance sector at the age of 12. He's the Doogie Houser of Wall Street:

https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2023/nr-occ-2023-31.html

That wasn't the only lie on Bhardjwan's CV. He falsely claimed to have served as CIO of Fifth Third Bank from 2006-2010. Fifth Third has never heard of him:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-occ-crowned-its-first-chief-fintech-officer-his-work-history-was-a-web-of-lies

Bhardjwan told a whole slew of these easily caught lies, suggesting that OCC didn't do even a cursory background search on this guy before putting him in charge of fintech – that is, the radioactively scammy sector that gave us FTX and innumerable crypto scams, to say nothing of the ever-sleazier payday lending sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

When it comes to appointing corrupt officials, the Biden administration has lots of company. Lots of eyebrows went up when the UN announced that the next climate Conference of the Parties (COP) would be chaired by Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, who is also the chair of Dubai's national oil company. Then the other shoe dropped: leaks revealed that Al-Jaber had colluded with the Saudis to use COP28 to get poor Asian and African nations hooked on oil:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67508331

There's an obvious reason for this conspiracy: the rich world is weaning itself off of fossil fuels. Today, renewables are vastly cheaper than oil and there's no end in sight to the plummeting costs of solar, wind and geothermal. While global electrification faces powerful logistical and material challenges, these are surmountable. Electrification is a solvable problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

And once we do solve that problem, we will forever transform our species' relationship to energy. As Deb Chachra explains in her brilliant new book How Infrastructure Works, we would only need to capture 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface to give every person on earth the energy budget of a Canadian (AKA, a "cold American"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

If COP does its job, we will basically stop using oil, forever. This is an existential threat to the ruling cliques of petrostates from Canada to the UAE to Saudi. As Bill McKibben writes, this isn't the first time a monied rich-world industry that had corrupted its host governments faced a similar crisis:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-corrupted-cop

Big Tobacco spent decades fueling science denial, funneling money to sellout scientists who deliberately cast doubt on both sound science and the very idea that we could know anything. As Tim Harford describes in The Data Detective, Darrell Huff's 1954 classic How to Lie With Statistics was part of a tobacco-industry-funded project to undermine faith in statistics itself (the planned sequel was called How To Lie With Cancer Statistics):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. When the families of the people murdered by tobacco disinformation campaigns started winning eye-popping judgments against the tobacco industry, the companies shifted their marketing to the Global South, on the theory that they could murder poor brown people with impunity long after rich people in the north forced an end to their practice. Big Tobacco had a willing partner in Uncle Sam for this project: the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the world's poorest countries into accepting "Investor-State Dispute Settlements" as part of their treaties. These ISDS clauses allowed tobacco companies to sue governments that passed tobacco control legislation and force them to reverse their democratically enacted laws:

https://ash.org/what-is-isds-and-what-does-it-mean-for-tobacco-control/

As McKibben points out, the oil/climate-change playbook is just an update to the tobacco/cancer-denial conspiracy (indeed, the same think-tanks and PR agencies are behind both). The "Oil Development Sustainability Programme" – the Orwellian name the Saudis gave to their plan to push oil on poor countries – maps nearly perfectly onto Big Tobacco's attack on the Global South. Nearly perfectly: second-hand smoke in Indonesia won't give Americans cancer, but convincing Africa to go hard on fossil fuels will contribute to an uninhabitable planet for everyone, not just poor people.

This is an important wrinkle. Wealthy countries have repeatedly demonstrated a deep willingness to profit from death and privation in the poor world – but we're less tolerant when it's our own necks on the line.

What's more, it's far easier to put the far-off risks of emissions out of your mind than it is to ignore the present-day sleaze and hypocrisy of corporate crooks. When I quit smoking, 23 years ago, my doctor told me that if my only motivation was avoiding cancer 30 years from now, I'd find it hard to keep from yielding to temptation as withdrawal set in. Instead, my doctor counseled me to find an immediate reason to stay off the smokes. For me, that was the realization that every pack of cigarettes I bought was enriching the industry that invented the denial playbook that the climate wreckers were using to render our planet permanently unsuited for human habitation. Once I hit on that, resisting tobacco got much easier:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/i-quit/

Perhaps OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al-Ghais is worried about that the increasing consensus that Big Oil cynically and knowingly created this crisis. That would explain his new flight of absurdity, claiming that the world is being racist to oil companies, "unjustly vilifying" the industry for its role in the climate emergency:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/27/opec-says-oil-industry-unjustly-vilified-ahead-of-climate-talks-.html

Words aren't deeds, but words have power. The way we talk about things makes a difference to how we act on those things. When discussions of Israel-Palestine get hung up on words, it's easy to get frustrated. The labels we apply to the rain of death and the plight of hostages are so much less important than the death and the hostages themselves.

But how we name the thing will have an enormous impact on what happens next. Take the word "genocide," which Israel hawks insist must not be applied to the bombing campaign and siege in Gaza, nor to the attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. On this week's On The Media, Brooke Gladstone interviews Ernesto Verdeja, executive director of The Institute for the Study of Genocide:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/genocide-powerful-word-so-why-its-definition-so-controversial-on-the-media

Verdeja lays out the history of the word "genocide" and connects it to the Israeli government and military's posture on Palestine and Palestinians, and concludes that the only real dispute among genocide scholars is whether the current campaign it itself an act of genocide, or a prelude to an act of genocide.

I'm not a genocide scholar, but I am a Jew who has always believed in Palestinian solidarity, and Verdeja's views do not strike me as outrageous, or (more importantly) antisemitic. The conflation of opposition to Israel's system of apartheid with opposition to Jews is a cheap trick, one that's belied by Israel itself, where there is a vast, longstanding political opposition to Israeli occupation, settlements, and military policing. Are all those Israeli Jews secret antisemites?

Jews are not united in support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians. The hardliners who insist that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic are peddling an antisemitic lie: that all Jews everywhere are loyal to Israel, and that we all take our political positions from the Knesset. Israel hawks only strengthen that lie when they accuse me and my fellow Jews of being "self-hating Jews."

This leads to the absurd circumstance in which gentiles police Jews' views on Israel. It's weird enough when white-nationalist affiliated evangelicals who support Israel in order to further the end-times prophesied in Revelations slam Jews for being antisemitic. But in Germany, it's even weirder. There, regional, non-Jewish officials charged with policing antisemitism have censured Jewish groups for adopting policies on Israel that mainstream Israeli political parties have in their platforms:

https://jewishcurrents.org/the-strange-logic-of-germanys-antisemitism-bureaucrats

Antisemitism is real. As Jesse Brown describes in his recent Canadaland editorial, there is a real and documented rise in racially motivated terror against Jews in Canada, including school shootings and a firebombing. Likewise, it's true that some people who support the Palestinian cause are antisemites:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/is-jesse-a-zionist-editorial/

But to stand in horror at Israel's military action and its vast civilian death-toll is not itself antisemitic. This is obvious – so obvious that the need to say it is a tribute to Israel hardliners – Jewish and gentile – and their ability to peddle the racist lie that Israel is Jews and Jews are Israel, and that every Jew is in support of, and responsible for, Israeli war-crimes and crimes against humanity.

One need not choose between opposition to Hamas and its terror and opposition to Israel and its bombings. There is no need for a hierarchy of culpability. As Naomi Klein says, we can "side with the child over the gun":

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/why-are-some-of-the-left-celebrating-the-killings-of-israeli-jews

Moral consistency is not moral equivalency. If you're a Jew like me who wants to work for an end to the occupation and peace in the region, you could join Jewish Voice For Peace (like me):

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org

Now, for a jarring tone shift. In these weekend linkdumps, I put a lot of thought into how to transition from one subject to the next, but honestly, there's no good transition from Israel-Palestine to anything else (yet – though someday, perhaps). So let's just say, "word games can be important, but they can also be trivial, and here are a few of the latter."

Start with a goodie, from the always brilliant medievalist Eleanor Janeaga, who tackles the weirdos who haunt social media in order to dump on people with PhDs who call themselves "doctor":

https://going-medieval.com/2023/11/29/doctor-does-actually-mean-someone-with-a-phd-sorry/

Janega points out that the "doctor" honorific was applied to scholars for centuries before it came to mean "medical doctor." But beyond that, Janega delivers a characteristically brilliant history of the (characteristically) weird and fascinating tale of medieval scholarship. Bottom line, we call physicians "doctor" because they wanted to be associated with the brilliance of scholars, and thought that being addressed as "doctor" would add to their prestige. So yeah, if you've got a PhD, you can call yourself doctor.

It's not just doctors; the professions do love their wordplay. especially lawyers. This week on Lowering The Bar, I learned about "a completely ludicrous court fight that involved nine law firms that combined for 66 pages of briefing, declarations, and exhibits, all inflicted on a federal court":

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2023/11/federal-court-ends-double-spacing-fight.html

The dispute was over the definition of "double spaced." You see, the judge in the case told counsel they could each file briefs of up to 100 pages of double-spaced type. Yes, 100 pages! But apparently, some lawyer burn to write fat trilogies, not mere novellas. Defendants accused the plaintiffs in this case of spacing their lines a mere 24 points apart, which allowed them to sneak 27 lines of type onto each page, while defendants were confined to the traditional 23 lines.

But (the court found), the defendants were wrong. Plaintiffs had used Word's "double-spacing" feature, but had not ticked the "exact double spacing" box, and that's how they ended up with 27 lines per page. The court refused to rule on what constituted "double-spacing" under the Western District of Tennessee’s local rules, but it ruled that the plaintiffs briefs could fairly be described as "double-spaced." Whew.

That's your Saturday linkdump, jarring tone-shift and all. All that remains is to close out with a cat photo (any fule kno that Saturday is Caturday). Here's Peeve, whom I caught nesting most unhygienically in our fruit bowl last night. God, cats are gross:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53370882459/

It's EFF's Power Up Your Donation Week: this week, donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation are matched 1:1, meaning your money goes twice as far. I've worked with EFF for 22 years now and I have always been - and remain - a major donor, because I've seen firsthand how effective, responsible and brilliant this organization is. Please join me in helping EFF continue its work!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/02/melange/#defendants_motion_to_require_adherence_with_formatting_requirements_of_local_rule_7.1

Stinkpump Linkdump

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 months

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Mike Luckovich

* * * *

“And the third, of course, is climate change, perhaps the greatest of all these challenges, and certainly the one about which we’ve done the least. It may not be quite game-ending, but it seems set, at the very least, to utterly change the board on which the game is played, and in more profound ways than almost anyone now imagines. The habitable planet has literally begun to shrink, a novel development that will be the great story of our century.”

― Bill McKibben, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

#climate change #Mike Luckovich #Bill McKibben #Falter #quotes #challenges #habitable planet

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kp777 · 4 months

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By Olivia Rosane

Common Dreams

Jan. 9, 2024

"I won't allow for them to continue to poison my kids," one Gulf Coast environmental justice advocate said.

Climate advocates and frontline community leaders published a letter Tuesday urging concerned individuals to join them in Washington, D.C., in early February for a sit-in at the Department of Energy where they will demand that it end the expansion of liquefied natural gas exports.

Stopping the LNG buildout has emerged as a major priority for the climate movement in recent months, as just one proposed project, Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) facility, would emit 20 times more climate pollution than the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. But CP2 is only one of more than 20 LNG export facilities planned for the Gulf Coast, which would have combined emissions that exceed those of the European Union or 850 coal plants, Stop LNG said in a statement.

"If [President Joe Biden] wants to be a true climate president, his administration will stop the approval of new LNG facilities. If not we'll keep pushing until they do," letter signatory and Gulf Coast environmental justice organizer Roishetta Ozane wrote on social media. "I won't allow for them to continue to poison my kids."

The action is planned for February 6-8 at the Department of Energy. "We're writing to ask you to do something hard but important: Come to Washington D.C. in the middle of this winter, to join a demonstration and, if you can, risk arrest in a large-scale civil disobedience action," the letter—which was signed by several prominent activists including Alexandria Villaseñor, Bill McKibben, Jane Fonda, Rebecca Solnit, and Varshini Prakash—begins.

The planned direct action builds on months of pressure on the administration to stop the planned expansion of LNG exports, including a petition to the DOE signed by more than 300,000 people and a letter to Biden signed by more than 170 scientists. Polling from Data for Progress and Fossil Free Media found that 60% of likely voters would support the Biden administration limiting LNG exports.

"We need the DOE to tell the president the truth: Expanding LNG damages our climate, and economy, and the communities forced to live alongside these facilities."

"It's time to convince the Department of Energy to stop licensing new export terminals for liquefied natural gas," Tuesday's letter reads. "Time after time they've approved these proposals, so the U.S. is now the biggest exporter of gas on Earth—and that volume could quadruple if the industry has its way. There's no bigger climate bomb left on planet Earth."

There are signs the administration is paying attention to the growing clamor and may be open to a change in policy. On Monday, Politico reported that the DOE was reviewing its decision-making process for approval LNG projects to make sure that it was considering the climate, economic, and security impacts.

"This would be smart policy and good politics," Jamie Henn of Fossil Free Media posted in response to the news.

The letter states that organizers "need the administration to stop CP2—the next big facility up for approval—and all other facilities by committing to a serious pause to rework the criteria for public interest designation, incorporating the latest science and economics, before any such facility is permitted," the letter reads.

"We need the DOE to tell the president the truth: Expanding LNG damages our climate, and economy, and the communities forced to live alongside these facilities," it continues. "That includes the land, water, and air in Louisiana and Texas, where most of these facilities are built—it's why some of us have fought on the front lines for years. We've rushed kids with asthma attacks to the hospital, seen our fishing spots and beaches polluted with chemicals, and breathe air filled with poisons everyday. We know what's at stake."

The letter writers said that they had committed "to keep this action peaceful in word, mood, and action." Those who cannot travel to D.C. may participate in solidarity actions from their home. Those who do plan to participate should sign up on stoplng.org. They will need to complete online training, including one session the night before risking arrest.

"2023 saw the hottest weather on this planet in at least 125,000 years; we think it is an honor to rise in defense of the planet we love, and the places where we live," the letter concludes. "Thank you for considering joining in."

#lng #cp2 #louisiana #u.s. department of energy #climate emergency #climate crisis #climate change #climate action #bill mckibben #joe biden #jamie henn #roisheitta ozane #lng export terminals #venture global #fossil free media

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