CLIMATE CRISIS DISCUSSIONS -- A Final Look At The Work

[ancianita]

previous posts
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1017628074
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214775507
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214783130
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214808596
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214840967

As always, all new sourced information is welcome.

Climate Change Work is all over the place all over the planet. It is too much to take in and not enough to succeed. So far.

We can throw more money into what’s working so far, begin the Green New Deal which coordinates current and new ‘shovel ready’ projects, then to use carrot and stick methods against sources of heavy pollution — Big Fossil -- even as BP has taken a first step to transform itself toward producing renewables.



The US is aspirationally back into the Climate Work.

In our politics:
During his first moments in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Biden returned the United States to the Paris climate accord, which goes into effect 30 days from Jan 20 — Feb 19.
Biden ordered federal agencies to review scores of climate and environmental policies enacted during the Trump years and, if possible, to quickly reverse over 100 of them.

President Biden has made it clear that his cabinet will make climate their first priority. As
the new head of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg has said, “The President has made it very clear that he expects all of us to work on delivering a new climate vision.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/biden-cabinet-climate-change/2021/01/21/a288a12e-5b5d-11eb-b8bd-ee36b1cd18bf_story.html

Nearly half of the regulations that the new administration targets come from the Environmental Protection Agency, on issues as varied as drinking water, dangerous chemicals and gas-mileage standards.

President Biden plans more sweeping action, to
— elevate climate in domestic and national security policy.
— direct "science and evidence based decision-making" in federal agencies.
— reestablish the Presidential Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.
— announce that U.S. data will help underpin the Climate Leadership Summit that Biden will host in Washington in late April.
"While many of Biden's actions Wednesday will take effect over time, he is planning on
— rescinding the presidential permit Trump granted the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from Canada across the border into the United States.
— instructing the EPA and Transportation Department to strengthen fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks
— imposing a temporary moratorium on all oil and natural gas leasing activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is home to caribou, polar bears and Indigenous people.”

In our Work on Energy
An overview (start at 4:01)

For anyone interested in getting in the weeds on energy storage innovation, this video presents cost/benefit analyses that reveal competition in
-- engineering innovation vs technological lock-in
-- 1st to market vs better engineered storage product
-- battery life that withstands extremes of temperature
-- liquid metal batteries vs lithium ion batteries

It shows how the innovative liquid metal storage -- a way to keep servers running with green energy, extreme temperatures, and/or if there's a grid attack or power outages -- is finally being taken to scale by Terrascale in Nevada.

— Renewables are okay, but have been argued as inadequate, that clean energy is in.

— Clean energy storage technology review -- flow batteries, thermal batteries, gravity-based systems like pumped hydro, energy vaults,

Other countries such as Australia, India and China, have more energy storage in development.

Gates is at work on reusing depleted uranium as fuel through traveling wave reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower)


Examples of Pollution Cleanup

— Gasification:

— Carbon Capture:

— Saving ocean life:

If the energy work timeline (2040? 2050? Seriously?) helps Biosphere growth, it might not be enough.
However. ‘Not enough,' when tried by all agent networks and governments, could be enough. We’re still not sure if what seems to be working will be enough.

So far, all our work isn’t working. Why?

Because average global temperature is still rising. THAT is the measure of our failure. (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2020-will-rival-2016-for-hottest-year-on-record/)

Reporters of Climate Work

Monitors
-- NASA Global Climate Change
https://climate.nasa.gov

-- The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change
https://www.ipcc.ch

-- Scientists
https://medium.com/thebeammagazine/four-environmental-scientists-who-changed-our-understanding-of-the-world-9ab7ed5a5d4

-- U.S. Think Tanks — Environment, science and technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_think_tanks_in_the_United_States


How Biosphere Work could work better

OPEN SOURCE
https://opensource.com/article/19/4/environment-projects

JOBS 2020


Climate work and our money
Already, the international fiat money transfer system — the SWIFT system (eg, back in 2005 I used SWIFT to wire transfer money to my son’s bank account in Australia) — will be replaced by a new transfer system called XRP

https://www.coindesk.com/what-is-a-cbdc



Climate liability litigations:
upside, they produce legal precedents; downside, they’re time consuming
— against fossil fuel corporations
— against governments of generations that have profited (Juliana v the United States)
— against nations that have profited (“climate justice”)

New idea: Enforce corporate compliance of Big Fossil and distributors through judicial dissolution, known as charter revocation, or charter death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_dissolution

The New New Deal
-- The world GDP is $100 TRILLION
-- Americans pay $7.8 TRILLION in taxes every year in a $20 trillion economy
Many don't understand, or pretend not to understand, how upfront spending is less costly
than back end crisis coping spending, which, as crisis managing climate crises, will
cost in the quadrillions.
-- Leveraging debt won't work to as the world's economic approach to scaling solutions because it
kicks debt down the road to our descendants. Ending debt will be our only answer -- and
spending all we've got.

Imagineering work by global government cooperation, coordinating capitalist competition could be successful, or a time waster.
Who leads might depend on who’s got the most money to spend the most on innovation.
But for-profit competition already seems to slow the to-market scaling of solutions.

Video sources below are meant to give us a broader picture, though not a complete one by any stretch.
There are hundreds of related videos about similar areas of climate interest to expand our awareness of the urgency of climate that doesn’t care about cost.
Videos, imo, offer the feel of how we humans are in this together, as we work on what we hope will stop the burning of Earth’s biosphere.

If we start with a general global plan, take stock every few years, we have a chance to avoid Biosphere death.

— The corporate sell on taking the lead on green innovation

— Energy waste and interconnectivity

— Inertia in Australia:

— China

— India (which will first suffer deadly heat waves)

— Africa

The Paris Agreement Global Stocktake

Carrots and sticks:
-- CO2 machines @ 30,000 per, we can make a million through the War Time Production Act
-- Financial networks can invest in clean energy through cryptocurrency
(https://atozmarkets.com/news/what-is-central-bank-digital-currency-cbdc/)
-- Central Banks blockchain both fiat money and the Carbon Coin to carrot Big Fossil into the
Antarctic
-- End Big Fossil subsidies put that money into re-icing the Antarctic
-- Tax all unsequestered fossil fuel at 50% per metric ton
-- Establishing a Nobel Prize for Climate Action

Imagineers work on biological pathways

Oceans
Seaweed farmer Bren Smith

Marine permaculture

Land
Meet Ms. Leydel, winner of the (not really) Environmental Nobel Prize
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/360729?fbclid=IwAR3qp0IcgGmRPwjYPnMo9ljg2t4pdYYQkDySYa1UbCEasanB2nuPozJlUsA

Paul Stamets
-- Fungi are the foundation of the food web.
-- Biodiversity is biosecurity, and microdiversity determines biodiversity.
-- The solution to climate changes is building soil. 85% of fungi is carbon.
-- Mycelium exists in gigatons.

Low tech soaking up of atmospheric water


Imagineers also write about our possibilities.
https://www.axios.com/robinson-climate-change-book-ministry-467d021f-2b57-40d8-85fa-a31a318342ff.html


Climate doesn't care how overwhelmed we are -- with our human dramas of politics, or money, or our work, diseases, floods or fires.

The Work must bring us into harmony with nature again, if our descendants are to exist.
If we fail, the Anthropocene Period, because of us, will end without us.



Continues Thursday…