By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
Hurricane Florence slammed into the North Carolina coast near Wrightsville Beach, N.C. at 7:15 a.m. eastern time, on Sept. 14, the last day of the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco.
Florence was projected to break the 7-day rainfall record in Wilmington, N.C. by 50 percent, and it was all because of global warming. Yet, the gap between what politicians were promising at the summit and what protesters outside were demanding remained equally large.
Two days before Florence’s landfall, a team of scientists produced the first-ever advance forecast attribution of the climate change impact on a tropical cyclone.
“We find that rainfall will be significantly increased by over 50 percent in the heaviest precipitating parts of the storm,” wrote Stony Brook University’s climate modeler Kevin Reed and colleagues in a preliminary report entitled, The Human Influence on Hurricane Florence, which was posted on the university’s website Sept. 12. “The storm is approximately 80 km [50 miles] in diameter larger at landfall because of the human interference in the climate system.”
The storm’s wind-speed dropped sharply before and after landfall, but rainfall was record-breaking, as predicted.
“South Carolina joins North Carolina in setting a state rainfall record for a tropical storm or hurricane from #Florence,” the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang tweeted on Sept. 17. “They are the 3rd & 4th state in just over a year to set a new tropical storm rainfall record, joining Hawaii (Lane) and Texas (Harvey).”
Scattered rainfall was still expected for another two days.
“The idea we can’t attribute individual events to climate change is out of date, it’s just no longer true,” said team co-leader Michael Wehner, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “We’ve reached the point where we can say this confidently.”
Previous attribution studies have been done after storms have occurred. Five such studies were done after Hurricane Harvey, one of which found that it delivered one in 25,000-year rainfall to a widespread area over a 5-day period, and one in 500,000-year rains in isolated locations.
“Dangerous climate change is here; it’s not a problem for future generations,” Wehner said. “These risks have been permanently increased and we have to accept that fact.”
But the Donald Trump administration is holding fast to its denial. On Sept. 10, the New York Times revealed plans for its third major step this year to roll back climate change regulation — this one a Barack Obama-era regulation requiring companies to monitor and repair methane leaks from oil and gas wells. Methane has 25 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide.
In July, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed weakening tailpipe emission rules for carbon dioxide and in August it proposed a drastically water-down regulation of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants.
Sub-national actors step up —sort of
The Global Climate Action Summit was convened by California Gov. Jerry Brown and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as a means of maximizing and coordinating efforts of other actors to work around and against the Trump administration’s disaster-producing policies. It was the latest outgrowth of their initiative, “known as America’s Pledge, to analyze, catalyze, and showcase climate action leadership by U.S. governors, mayors, business leaders, and others,” as described in a new report, Fulfilling America’s Pledge.
The potential is huge — but still largely untapped, according a new a United Nations report, Bridging the emissions gap: The role of non-state and subnational actors.
“The number of actors participating is rising fast: more than 7,000 cities from 133 countries and 245 regions from 42 countries, along with more than 6,000 companies with at least … $36 trillion [U.S. dollars] in revenue have pledged mitigation action,” the report stated. “[However,] not even 20 percent of the world population is represented in current international initiatives, and most companies around the world still can and need to act…. Emission reduction potential from non-state and subnational action could ultimately be vast, but the current impact is still low and hard to track.”
“We were actually shocked to find that the numbers were so low,” the report’s lead author Angel Hsu told a local NBC reporter.
Still, there’s clearly a surge in momentum, with increasingly wide participation. For example, overlapping with the start of the main conference, the California Department of Food and Agriculture staged a two-day event in nearby Sonoma and Marin counties, “Scaling-Up Climate Smart Agriculture.”
In addition, due to dramatic cost reductions, renewable energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels. A new report from the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate argues that concerted climate action could bring $26 trillion into the global economy by 2030, accounting for 65 million new low-carbon jobs, while preventing more than 700,000 premature deaths and generating an estimated $2.8 trillion in new government revenue via subsidy reform and carbon pricing. That was just one of several new reports fueling a sense of optimism.
Worldwide protests demand sweeping change
Despite an impressive array of participants and reports showing remarkable progress, the summit was met with record protests, led by indigenous activists with the It Takes Roots coalition and representatives of front-line communities sharply critical of the dominant corporate-friendly approach with its lack of social justice concerns. The protestors also criticized Brown’s refusal to match emission reduction strategies with rules and regulations to reduce fossil fuel production as well.
On Sept. 8, about to 30,000 people took part in the Rise for Climate, Jobs and Justice march in San Francisco, which was echoed by more than 250,000 people at 900 protest events around the world in 90 countries.
“In northern India about 10,000 students and teachers tied red ribbons to trees in an action to end deforestation,” Democracy Now! reported.
“We are here ahead of the Global Climate Action Summit to call on Gov. Jerry Brown and elected officials at all levels to step up on climate action, phase out fossil fuels and push for a just transition for 100 percent renewables,” Thanu Yakupitiyag, of 350.org told Democracy Now!
On Sept. 10, Brown signed Senate Bill 100, legislation drafted by former state senate leader Kevin de León, that would transition California to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2045. But he continued to resist activists’ call for policies to curb fossil fuel production in the state. When Brown and Bloomberg hosted a press conference on Sept. 13, with throngs of protesters massed outside, a reporter asked about their calls to curb drilling.
“Look, as Mayor Bloomberg says, this is a 10-point, 10 dimensions where we’re looking,” Brown responded. “There’s no one-off here where you just do one thing. There’s no one thing. There’s many, many things.”
But none of the 10 “Climate Action Strategies” in the America’s Pledge report issued before the summit had anything to do with fossil fuel production. On May 18, Oil Change International released a report, Sky’s the Limit California, which focused on two key elements that were missing from Brown and Bloomberg’s agenda: a managed reduction in fossil fuel production, and planning and funding for a just transition that takes care of impacted workers and communities.
The report’s conclusions were reinforced in late July, when six Nobel Peace Prize laureates sent Brown a letter urging him to develop a plan to transition California “away from oil and gas production” and “to become the first major fossil fuel producer to begin a managed and just transition off oil and gas production.”
“Cutting with Both Arms of the Scissors”
“It’s a basic economic principle that supply and demand are linked, and working to reduce both at once is the most effective approach to reducing emissions,” the report’s lead author, Kelly Trout, told Random Lengths News.
That approach is known as “cutting with both arms of the scissors.”
“The America’s Pledge report lays out some important actions such as retiring coal power once and for all, but it has a huge, gaping hole when it comes to tackling fossil fuel supply,” Oil Change International spokesman David Turnbull told Random Lengths News. “The simple fact is that we already have more carbon underneath the existing fossil fuel projects around the world than we can afford to burn, so it’s essential that we work to phase out our fossil fuel production and embark on a managed and just decline of that production. Trying to tackle the climate crisis without limiting fossil fuel supply is like crawling out of a hole with one arm tied behind your back. It just can’t be done.”
As Sky’s the Limit California explained:
[M]eeting the state’s goals to reduce oil consumption in transportation would cause some decrease in global oil prices, in turn encouraging greater consumption in other states or countries. However, simultaneously reducing California’s production of oil would have the opposite price effect and encourage less consumption, thus reinforcing the benefits of demand-side measures.
The first stage in suggested cuts would come from shutting down drilling within a 2,500-foot “health buffer zone” around homes, schools and hospitals — dramatically reducing drilling throughout Los Angeles County, specifically in the Wilmington Oil Field. The report noted that Brown’s goal to reduce oil use in vehicles by 50 percent by 2030 would save about 430 million barrels of oil over the next 12 years, far less than the 660 million barrels California will produce if the reduction plans aren’t adopted.
“If California does not limit production, it could add a greater amount of new oil supply to the market, undermining the effectiveness of demand-side measures,” the report concluded.
“I believe California has the most far reaching plan to deal with any emissions as well as oil consumption and production,” Brown said at the press conference. “Our goal is a 45 percent reduction in oil production, as well as consumption.”
However, he did not say a word about how that reduction would magically occur.
“Gov. Brown has resisted demands to actually take on oil and gas production in California,” Turnbull told Random Lengths News. “He has failed to stand up to the oil industry in our state, and meanwhile communities with drill rigs in their backyards continue to bear the brunt of health impacts from oil extraction practices and our state burns from global warming supercharged wildfires.
“His comments are an attempt to skirt the issue, which is that oil and gas production in our state remains unchecked…. The governor still has an opportunity in his waning days to show transformational leadership by putting our state on a just and managed phase out of oil and gas production in California. He just needs to grow the courage to do so.”
Climate Justice Calls Link Harbor Area To Worldwide Struggles
Bloomberg’s response was even more contemptuous when greeted by protesters at the opening of the plenary meeting a few minutes late.
“Only in America could you have environmentalists protesting an environmental conference,” he said.
In a Democracy Now! interview, Eriel Deranger, founder and executive director of the group Indigenous Climate Action, immediately took issue with him.
“First off, Bloomberg, that’s a misrepresentation,” she said. “At almost every single COP or UNFCCC international gathering, there have been protests outside those gatherings, from the very same people that were outside of the Global Climate Action Summit. So it’s not only in America. This is a global issue.”
Deranger, a member of the Athabaskan Chippewa First Nation, was quite clear about the issues Bloomberg was trying to avoid.
“Front-line communities want to see effective change that doesn’t just reduce emissions but effectively addresses their human rights, the rights of their communities and their ability to have sovereignty and autonomy over their lands, territories and lives,” she said.
While the summit reflected heavy involvement of business, two surveys underscored the problem with expecting them to lead. A poll of registered voters found that about 80 percent favored their state replacing fossil fuel-generated electricity with renewables. Meanwhile, a study of 200 of the world’s largest industrial companies showed that 90 percent still have ties to industry associations that are “actively opposing” leadership on climate action.
“There are divergences within the movement, from the climate justice folks, from the people that are on the front lines of the extractive industries and from the proposed false solutions around ways to move forward effectively,” said Deranger, in contrast to the climate summit’s business embrace.
These viewpoint differences are deeply rooted, she noted.
“Front-line communities want to see effective change that doesn’t just reduce emissions but effectively addresses their human rights, the rights of their communities and their ability to have sovereignty and autonomy over their lands, territories and lives,” she said.
Locally, residents living in the Wilmington Oil Field, or in the shadows of local refineries, have very similar concerns. As Jerry Brown is about to leave office, he leaves most of their concerns unmet.
More on Rln
SCR’s Sense and Sensibility Not All a Jane Austen Adaptation Can Be
Celebrate Mexican Independence with Gregorio Luke
Dear Tries Comeback
McCain’s Funeral was a Ritual Salute to the One Not Invited
LGBTQ Community Celebrates 25 Years of Long Beach Film
Wilmington Job and Safety at Refineries