Category: Global Warming

Ecosocialism: The “Green-and-Red Agenda” to Eradicate Capitalism

Not all environmentalists are motivated by a desire to destroy capitalism. But some are. See below.

(p. 26) Joel Kovel, a former Freudian psychiatrist who evolved into an apostle of what he called ecosocialism, a so-called green-and-red agenda against the environmental evils of globalization and in favor of the nonviolent eradication of capitalism, died on Monday [April 30, 2018] in Manhattan.
. . .
Whenever he launched an ideological crusade, he did so zealously — even if, as in the case of ecosocialism, its very definition and the collateral demand for an appealing alternative to capitalism were not self-evident.
Under ecosocialist theory, income would be guaranteed, most property and means of production would be commonly owned, and the abolition of capitalism, globalism and imperialism would unleash environmentalists to vastly curtail industrialization and development whose pollution would otherwise cause catastrophic global warming.
“Capitalist production, in its endless search for profit, seeks to turn everything into a commodity,” Dr. Kovel wrote in 2007 on the socialist website Climate and Capitalism. “It is plain that production will have to shift from being dominated by exchange — the path of the commodity — to that which is for use, that is for the direct meeting of human needs.”

For the full obituary, see:
Sam Roberts. “Dr. Joel Kovel, a Founder of Ecosocialism, Is Dead at 81.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, May 6, 2018): 26.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date May 4, 2018, and has the title “Dr. Joel Kovel, a Founder of Ecosocialism, Is Dead at 81.”)

California Regulation Adds $9,500 to Average Home Cost

(p. A1) The California Energy Commission voted 5-0 to approve a mandate that residential buildings up to three stories high, including single-family homes and condos, be built with solar installations starting in 2020.
The commission estimates that the move, along with other (p. A2) energy-efficiency requirements, would add $9,500 to the average cost of building a home in California. The state is already one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, with a median price of nearly $565,000 for a single-family home, according to the California Association of Realtors.

For the full story, see:
Erin Ailworth. “Solar Panel Mandate Jolts Housing Industry.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, May 10, 2018): A1-A2.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated May 9, 2018, and has the title “California Takes Big Step to Require Solar on New Homes.”)

Hundreds of Years of CO2 Emissions Could Be Stored Forever in Oman’s Rocks

(p. A10) IBRA, Oman — In the arid vastness of this corner of the Arabian Peninsula, out where goats and the occasional camel roam, rocks form the backdrop practically every way you look.
But the stark outcrops and craggy ridges are more than just scenery. Some of these rocks are hard at work, naturally reacting with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into stone.
Veins of white carbonate minerals run through slabs of dark rock like fat marbling a steak. Carbonate surrounds pebbles and cobbles, turning ordinary gravel into natural mosaics.
Even pooled spring water that has bubbled up through the rocks reacts with CO2 to produce an ice-like crust of carbonate that, if broken, re-forms within days.
Scientists say that if this natural process, called carbon mineralization, could be harnessed, accelerated and applied inexpensively on a huge scale — admittedly some very big “ifs” — it could help fight climate change. Rocks could remove some of the billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that humans have pumped into the air since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
And by turning that CO2 into stone, the rocks in Oman — or in a number of other places around the world that have similar geological formations — would ensure that the gas stayed out of the atmosphere forever.
“Solid carbonate minerals aren’t going anyplace,” said Peter B. Kelemen, a geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who has been studying the rocks here for more than two decades.
Capturing and storing carbon dioxide is drawing increased interest. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that deploying such technology is essential to efforts to rein in global warming.
. . .
The rocks are so extensive, Dr. Kelemen said, that if it was somehow possible to fully use them they could store hundreds of years of CO2 emissions. More realistically, he said, Oman could store at least a billion tons of CO2 annually. (Current yearly worldwide emissions are close to 40 billion tons.)

For the full story, see:

Henry Fountain. “How Oman’s Rocks Could Help Save the Planet.” The New York Times (Saturday, APRIL 28, 2018: A10-A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 26, 2018.)

Global Warming Most Affects Coldest Regions

(p. A11) Winters in the United States have gotten warmer in the past 30 years, and some of the coldest parts of the country have warmed up the most.
In Minnesota, winters between 1989 and 2018 were an average of 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, compared to a 20th century baseline, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration analyzed by The New York Times. Florida’s winters were 1.4 degrees warmer, on average, during that time.
For each 30-year period above, the maps show how much warmer or cooler winters were across the contiguous United States, compared to an average winter for that location during the 20th century. Though it might not always feel like it, warmer winters have become more common across most of the country. The most significant temperature increases can be seen in the Northern Great Plains, a region stretching from Montana to Michigan.
The Northern Great Plains have warmed up particularly quickly in part because of the dry winter conditions typical there, said Kenneth Blumenfeld, a senior climatologist at the Minnesota State Climate Office. Cold air moving into the area from Canada and the Arctic is also not as cold as it used to be, he said.
“In Minnesota, we used to get to negative 30 or negative 40 degrees with certain frequency. But no longer. Maybe we’ll now hit negative 30 with the frequency we used to hit negative 40,” Dr. Blumenfeld said. But, he added, this difference in cold extremes can be difficult for people to perceive. When it’s that cold out, after all, people tend to stay inside.
The pattern of warming shown here is largely consistent with global trends, said Jake Crouch, a scientist at NOAA’s climate monitoring branch. “In general, northern latitudes are warming faster than southern latitudes. Interior locations are warming faster than coastal locations.”

For the full story, see:
NADJA POPOVICH and BLACKI MIGLIOZZI. “Where Are America’s Winters Warming the Most? In Cold Places.” The New York Times (Saturday, MARCH 17, 2018): A11.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 16, 2018.)

“Science Didn’t Lie”

(p. 22) In the words of The Saturday Evening Post: “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southern and Eastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in turn.”
According to Thomas C. Leonard, who teaches at Princeton, the driving force behind this and other such laws came from progressives in the halls of academia — people who combined “extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise.” “Illiberal Reformers” is the perfect title for this slim but vital account of the perils of intellectual arrogance in dealing with explosive social issues. Put simply, Leonard says, elite progressives gave respectable cover to the worst prejudices of the era — not to rabble-rouse, but because they believed them to be true. Science didn’t lie.
But barring undesirables was only half the battle; the herd also had to be culled from within. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to legalize forced sterilization, starting a landslide endorsed by progressive icons like Theodore Roosevelt and the birth control champion Margaret Sanger.

For the full review, see:
DAVID OSHINSKY. “No Justice for the Weak.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, March 20, 2018): 1 & 22-23.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 14, 2018, and has the title “‘Imbeciles’ and ‘Illiberal Reformers’.”)

The book under review, is:
Leonard, Thomas C. Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Mackenzie Was Wrong in Thinking He Was a Failure, but Was Right About the Northwest Passage

(p. 10) In the summer of 1789, a young fur trader named Alexander Mackenzie led an expedition in search of a Northwest Passage. He and his voyageurs and Chipewyan guides were attempting, 14 years before Lewis and Clark, to cross North America, paddling birch bark canoes down a river they hoped would pierce the Rocky Mountains. Mackenzie was a businessman who wanted to speed the pace of trade by connecting New York and China via an interior passage through the continent. He did find such a route, without knowing it. Mackenzie died thinking he was a failure, when he was really just 200 years early.
Some ideas are fantastically ahead of their time. In 1636, René Descartes created contact lenses, using glass tubes filled with water; unfortunately, the wearer was unable to blink. Charles Babbage invented digital “difference engines” — essentially modern programmable computers but powered by steam — in the 1820s. And Kodak developed digital cameras in 1974 but discarded the product idea because it thought no one wanted to look at photos on televisions.
In a particularly ill-timed episode, Giovanni Caselli invented the fax machine in 1856. Letter writers could scribble a message onto electrically charged foil, and the portions covered by ink would block the flow of current. The stylus of Caselli’s device then scanned each line of text, transmitting the signal via telegraph lines to a second machine, which would scrawl out a “fac simile” of the letter.
To be practical, the system required a coordinated investment throughout a region, and Napoleon III had plans to modernize all of France with Caselli’s pantelegraph, more than a decade before Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. But before it could be installed, Napoleon III lost the Franco-Prussian War, his government fell, and Paris descended into the brutal anarchy of the Commune. Caselli faded into obscurity, and his technology was forgotten for a century.
Like the fax machine and computer, Alexander Mackenzie’s Northwest Passage was too forward-looking to be practical or useful. Today the melting Northwest Passage — along the North Slope of Alaska, through the maze of Canadian Arctic islands, then back down along Greenland’s west coast, to the Atlantic — is regularly in the news. A holy grail for generations of explorers is now finally open, because of climate change. Giant cargo and oil tankers regularly ply those seas, and even the Crystal Serenity cruise ship, with 1,700 people onboard (many in black tie), has made the journey the past two summers.
. . .
Ideas do not exist only on their own merits. Timing matters.

For the full commentary, see:
Brian Castner. “The Northwest Passage That Might Have Been.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sunday, March 11, 2018): 10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 10, 2018.)

Castner’s commentary is related to his book:
Castner, Brian. Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage. New York: Doubleday, 2018.

Scientists Find 1.5 Million More Penguins

(p. D2) A new colony of Adélie penguins has been discovered near Antarctica, substantially increasing the known populations of the knee-high creatures.
. . .
Using a drone doctored to work in the extreme climate of the region, the researchers were able to get a precise estimate of the numbers of breeding pairs of Adélie penguins in the region: about 750,000 (or 1.5 million individuals).

For the full story, see:
Karen Weintraub. “Black and White: Big Colony of Penguins Is Spotted Near Antarctica.” The New York Times (Tuesday, March 13, 2018): D2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 5 [sic], 2018, and has the title “A Supercolony of Penguins Has Been Found Near Antarctica.”)

High Energy Costs Killed 15,000 of the Poor in Britain in Winter of 2014-2015

(p. A15) Higher costs from policies like stringent emissions caps and onerous renewable-energy targets make it even harder for the poorest citizens to afford gas and electricity.
. . .
In the U.K., the cost of electricity has increased by 36% in real terms since 2006, while the average income has risen only 4%. Environmentalists point out that energy usage has fallen as a result. But they ignore the fact that the poorest households cut back their consumption much more than average, while the richest have not reduced electricity consumption at all. Meanwhile, the share of income the bottom tenth of Britons spend on energy has increased rapidly, to almost 10%, while the share of income spent by the top tenth is still under 3%.
One 2014 poll shows that one-third of British elderly people leave at least part of their homes cold, and two-thirds wear extra layers of clothing, because of high energy costs. According to a report in the Independent, 15,000 people in the U.K. died in the winter of 2014-15 because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes properly.
Climate change is a real challenge for every country, but we need to maintain some perspective. The United Nations’ climate-change panel estimates that global warming could cause damage amounting to 2% of global gross domestic product toward the end of the century. That makes it a problem, but not the Armageddon produced by some feverish imaginations.

For the full commentary, see:
Bjorn Lomborg. “Climate-Change Policies Can Be Punishing for the Poor; America should learn from Europe’s failure to protect the needy while reducing carbon emissions.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Jan. 5, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 4, 2018.)

Less Global Warming Since 1990 than IPCC Predicted

(p. C3) Though temperatures have increased, the rise is not accelerating and has fallen short of the most authoritative projections. In 1990, the first assessment report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that temperatures would rise at the rate of 0.3 degree Celsius per decade, equivalent to 3 degrees Celsius (or 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) a century. In fact, temperatures have risen since 1990 at between 0.121 and 0.198 degrees Celsius per decade, depending on which of the best data sets is used–that is, at a third to two-thirds of the rate projected by the IPCC.
. . .
Over the past several decades, the world has been getting slowly warmer, slightly wetter and less icy. It has also been no stormier, no more flood-prone and a touch less drought-prone. And sea level continues to creep slowly upward.

For the full commentary, see:
Benny Peiser and Matt Ridley. “Bad Weather Is No Reason for Climate Alarm.” The Wall Street Journal Saturday, Jan. 13, 2018): C3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 12, 2018.)

New York City Mayoral Health Regulator Shook Salt onto His Saltine Crackers

(p. A17) Purring in the mild winter day, a small armada of S.U.V.s was parked Thursday morning along 42nd Street outside the New York Public Library. Inside was Mayor Bill de Blasio, at an interfaith prayer breakfast that went on for quite a while.
By divine right of mayoralty, or someone, 13 vehicles waited at the curb in a no-standing zone, among them four black S.U.V.s (three Chevy Suburbans and one Yukon XL) an ambulance, a huge E.M.S. vehicle and a police school safety van. The engines on those big boys were running while the mayor was inside, for about two hours.
At least one of the S.U.V.s had Taxi and Limousine Commission plates. It may not have been part of the official mayoral entourage, but its dashboard was anointed with the holiest of government oils: a police placard giving it license to park where unblessed mortals cannot.
One day earlier, Mr. de Blasio announced that the city would sue five big oil companies for the hardships and costs inflicted on New York by climate change.
. . .
Hypocrisy is more widely practiced by humans than any creed. Mr. Bloomberg’s health department wanted restaurants to cut sodium from their recipes but he was known to shake salt on slices of pizza and saltine crackers.

For the full commentary, see:
JIM DWYER. “Battling Climate Change From the S.U.V. Back Seat.” The New York Times (Friday, January 12, 2018): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JAN. 11, 2018, and has the title “About New York; Battling Climate Change from the Back Seat of an S.U.V.”)

Entrepreneur Claims Intel Is Not “Doing What Comes Next”

(p. B3) SAN FRANCISCO — Over 28 years at the giant computer chip maker Intel, Renée James climbed to its No. 2 position, becoming one of Silicon Valley’s prominent female leaders.
Now she is taking aim at Intel’s most lucrative business, one that she helped build.
Ms. James, who announced in 2015 that she would resign from Intel, on Monday revealed a start-up backed by the private equity firm Carlyle Group to sell chips to handle calculations in servers. Those computers run most internet services and corporate back-office operations.
. . .
Ms. James emphasized her respect for her former employer and played down potential competition. She said her new company, Ampere, was designing chips for new, specialized jobs at cloud services that aren’t Intel’s primary focus.
“I think they’re the best in the world at what they do,” Ms. James said of Intel. “I just don’t think they’re doing what comes next.”
. . .
Ms. James learned management skills from Andrew Grove, the acclaimed former Intel chief. Before he died in 2016, she said, Mr. Grove encouraged her to follow her dream of a chip start-up — a plan with parallels to the 1968 founding of Intel as a breakaway from a chip pioneer, Fairchild Semiconductor.
“He said, ‘I just want you to know, this is a really hard job,'” Ms. James recalled. “I said: ‘I know. But it’s so much fun.'”
Her venture is the latest in a series of largely unsuccessful attempts, dating back more than seven years, to shake up the server market with technology licensed by ARM Holdings that is used as a mainstay of smartphones. One selling point is reduced power consumption, a hot topic in data centers.

For the full story, see:
DON CLARK. “Intel’s Former No. 2 Aims At Lucrative Chip Market.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 6, 2018): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 5, 2018, and has the title “She Was No. 2 at Intel. Now She’s Taking Aim at the Chip Maker.”)