Suing For Survival

George Monbiot.

Our survival is not an afterthought. The defence of the living planet cannot be tacked retrospectively onto business as usual. Yet this is how almost all governments operate. They slap the word “sustainable” on damaging projects they have already approved, then insist this means they’ve gone green. If we are to survive and prosper, everything must change. Every decision should begin with the question of what the planet can withstand. 

This means that any discussion about new infrastructure should begin with ecological constraints. The figures are stark. A paper published in Nature last year showed that existing energy infrastructure, if it is allowed to run to the end of its natural life, will produce around 660 gigatonnes of CO2. Yet, to stand a reasonable chance of preventing more than 1.5°C of global heating, we can afford to release, in total, no more than 580 gigatonnes. In other words, far from building new fossil power plants, the survival of a habitable planet means retiring the damaging projects that have already been built. Electricity plants burning coal and gas and oil will not secure our prosperity. They will destroy it.

But everywhere special interests dominate. Construction projects are driven, above all, by the lobbying of the construction industry, consultancies and financiers. Gigantic and destructive schemes, such as the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway, are invented by lobbyists for the purpose of generating contracts. Political support is drummed up, the project achieves its own momentum, then, belatedly, a feeble attempt is made to demonstrate that it can somehow become compatible with environmental promises. This is what destroys civilisations: a mismatch between the greed of economic elites and the needs of society.

Read the piece by Guardian columnist,  George Monbiot - “Suing For Survival.”

Liberals have a responsibility too: make climate change a top issue

(In a brutal news sense, this story is a little dated, but the topic is as current as tomorrow - Robert McLean)

On Thursday when the announcement hit that Trump was taking America out of the Paris Climate Accord, my social media feed predictably blew up. As an environmental journalist with a lot of left-leaning friends, you can imagine what it looked like: anger, frustration, shock, sadness, another outrage from the world’s most outrageous leader. All of a sudden every one I knew was talking about climate change; I’ll admit it was a nice change of pace, but after nearly ten years of covering climate change I also knew it would be fleeting.

A firefighter carries a woman from her car after it was caught in street
flooding as a powerful storm moves across Southern California on
February 17, 2017 in Sun Valley, California. After years of severe drought,
 heavy winter rains have come to the state and the evacuation of hundreds
of residents from Duarte, California for fear of flash flooding from areas
denuded by a wildfire last year. Research has shown that California’s
drought was likely worsened by climate change. And climate change,
 as well, is also leading to heavier, more extreme rainfalls worldwide.

Liberals have been the champions of climate action for decades, but they’ve largely championed it as an afterthought, something that comes near the end of a long to-do list, like the brussels sprouts you conveniently forget to pick up at the grocery store (polling bears this out). When I bring up climate change during chats with left-leaning friends, I often get that pause – that suspended moment – when I can see someone in the group look askance. I can see what they’re thinking, “Again, Jeremy, with the climate change?”

Read the story on The Guardian by Jeremy Hance - "Liberals have a responsibility too: make climate change a top issue.”