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State department’s Daniel Kammen quits with note calling out Charlottesville and Paris accord – and a hidden message in the first letters of each paragraph
One of the US state department’s three science envoys publicly resigned on Wednesday, the latest in a wave of defections over Donald Trump’s response to a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Daniel Kammen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a letter posted on his Twitter account that Trump had failed to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis, part of “a broader pattern of behavior that enables sexism and racism, and disregards the welfare of all Americans, the global community and the planet”.
Related: Ex-intelligence chief: Trump's access to nuclear codes is 'pretty damn scary'
Mr. President, I am resigning as Science Envoy. Your response to Charlottesville enables racism, sexism, & harms our country and planet. pic.twitter.com/eWzDc5Yw6t
What happened in Charlottesville on 12 August?
Continue reading...The term ‘climate change’ was changed to simply ‘climate’ on website of the National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading public health research body
The National Institutes of Health deleted multiple references to climate change on its website over the summer, continuing a trend that began when the Trump administration took charge of the dot.gov domain.
The changes were first outlined in a report by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), which has been using volunteers to track changes to roughly 25,000 pages across multiple government agencies since Trump took office. EDGI counted five instances in which the term “climate change” was changed to simply “climate” on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) site.
Related: Trump is deleting climate change, one site at a time
The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
Continue reading...Special report: The pace of coal plants shutting down in Australia could mean the country’s fleet could be gone before 2040. The transformation is enormous – and seems inevitable
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For a glimpse into the future of coal power in Australia, go west. The country’s last major investment in coal-fired electricity was in Western Australia in 2009, when Colin Barnett’s state government announced a major refurbishment of the Muja AB station about 200km south of Perth, far from the gaze of the east coast political-media class.
The plant was 43 years old and mothballed. Reviving it was meant to cost $150m, paid for by private investors who would reap the benefits for years to come. But costs and timeframes blew out. An old corroded boiler exploded. The joint venture financing the project collapsed; a wall followed suit. The bill ultimately pushed beyond $300m, much of it to be stumped up by taxpayers – and once completed, the plant was beset with operational problems. It ran only 20% of the time.
The coal-fired power sector is in free fall, and wind and solar are competing on cost with fossil fuels
I don’t think the banking sector and the industry are looking to build coal-fired power stations
It was a far cry from February, when the treasurer brandished a piece of coal in parliament
Continue reading...A new study finds a stark contrast between Exxon’s research and what the company told the public
Read all of these documents and make up your own mind.
That was the challenge ExxonMobil issued when investigative journalism by Inside Climate News revealed that while it was at the forefront of climate science research in the 1970s and 1980s, Exxon engaged in a campaign to misinform the public.
Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public
Nations are being urged to cut emissions without knowing either the severity of the problem – that is, will Earth’s temperature increase over the next 50–100 years? – or the efficacy of the solution – will cutting CO2 emissions reduce the problem?
these still-unanswered questions (1) Has human activity already begun to change temperature and the climate, and (2) How significant will future change be?
Continue reading...De Brum saw the effects of rising seas from his home in the Marshall Islands and became a leading advocate for the fight against climate change
Tony de Brum, the former Marshall Islands foreign minister who became a leading advocate for the landmark Paris Agreement and an internationally recognised voice in the fight against climate change, has died aged 72.
De Brum, who was also the Pacific nation’s climate ambassador, died on Tuesday in the capital Majuro surrounded by his family, according to Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine.
Related: Losing paradise: the people displaced by atomic bombs, and now climate change
Continue reading...A Buddhist leader has told environment minister Josh Frydenberg he would stand in front of machinery if digging started. All people of faith should join him
Earlier in August, six faith leaders met Australia’s environment and energy minister, Josh Frydenberg. Our group included Bishop Philip Huggins, the president of the National Council of Churches, a Uniting Church reverend, a rabbi, a Catholic nun and an ordained Buddhist. This is not the start of a joke, but a polite and serious exchange.
It might seem that religion has little to do with the environment or energy. Yet each of us at the meeting wanted to raise a matter that, when we consider the deepest values of our respective traditions, is of grave moral concern: the proposed Adani coalmine. We were there to ask the minister to revoke its environmental licence.
Related: Indian opposition calls for investigation into Adani over financial fraud allegations
Whichever way you look at it, this is the great moral issue of our time
Related: Why Adani's planned Carmichael coalmine matters to Australia – and the world
Continue reading...As the motor car industry is at the forefront of environmental degradation both globally and locally, it is only right that manufacturers take a lead in tackling the problem (Ford launches £2,000 scrappage scheme, 22 August). Instead, they offer only a scheme to sell more cars based on an unproven theory. This appears to posit that the pollution created by running an “old” car is so much greater than that of running a “new” one, that an environmental disaster might be delayed if we buy new cars more quickly. If Ford will reveal their figures for this old/new pollution differential and compare them with an evaluation of the pollution created in manufacturing a brand-new vehicle, then we might establish whether or not they know what they are talking about.Dr Kevin BannonLondon
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Continue reading...South Australian premier signals possible collaboration on alternative to clean energy target, and urges Turnbull to face down rightwing pressure
Podcast: ‘They’re insatiable’ – Jay Weatherill on his clash with the Coalition
The South Australian premier, Jay Weatherill, has renewed his warning that Labor-led state governments could go it alone on energy policy if the Turnbull government can’t resolve its internal battle over the clean energy target.
If we are going to do it ourselves we might as well design the best system
Related: South Australia to get $1bn solar farm and world's biggest battery
Continue reading...Turning the rejection of scientific expertise into a pathology mistakenly presents individual ignorance as the bottleneck in political disagreements
The elevation of science to a central theme in American politics is an extraordinary development in the co-evolution of science and society. Three months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, 40,000 or so people turned out in the rain in Washington, DC for the March for Science, with similar numbers in other cities. Given Trump’s all-out attack on the role and size of government—his proposed 2018 budget slashes almost all programs other than national defence—there could just as easily have been a March for Education or a March for Affordable Housing.
But the high profile of science in national politics has been building since the turn of the millennium, fuelled by controversies around embryonic stem cell research, and of course climate change. Starting with the year 2000 presidential campaign between George W. Bush and Al Gore, Democrats explicitly began positioning themselves as the party of science. During the 2004 campaign, Democratic candidate John Kerry pledged that “I will listen to the advice of our scientists, so I can make the best decisions. . . . This is your future, and I will let science guide us, not ideology.”
Continue reading...A necessary essay from the sharp end of the global warming crisis
Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) was an effective consciousness-raising exercise, focusing on Al Gore’s “slide shows”, as he calls them, on the reality of climate change. Eleven years on, the sequel brings home the intensification of the crisis: needless to say, as the film’s timeline approaches the present, the spectre of Trump looms like an iceberg on a foggy Arctic night. As Gore visits the world’s environmental flashpoints, the footage of floods, storms and exploding glaciers adds ballast to the statistics. There’s a sliver of against-the-clock narrative at the 2015 Paris climate summit, although the film simplifies matters in suggesting that India’s coming on board was the result of Gore making a few well-placed phone calls behind the scenes. Useful as a teaching tool, strictly functional as cinema.
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