Climate Change Action Demanded by New Business Group

Climate Change Action Demanded by New Business Group

Yet another coalition of global Fortune 500 companies has been formed to urge government action on climate change. Affirming that climate change  “is a major threat to the U.S. economy,” the CEO Climate Dialogue calls on Congress and the Trump administration to enact a federal policy “as soon as possible to protect against the worst impacts.” The consortium has published six guiding principles for a market-based approach that it proposes as an outline for an effective federal policy. The 13 companies signed up to the new association are Dupont, Dow, Shell, BP, Dominion Energy, Ford, Unilever, Citi, BASF, DTE Energy, Exelon, LafargeHolcim, and PG&E. Four activist groups have joined as partners: the Environmental Defense Fund, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, World Resources Institute, and the Nature Conservancy.

CEO Climate Dialogue joins several other substantial, executive-led consortiums which are taking collective action to address climate change.

• We Are Still In includes 2,187 businesses and investors who have joined together to declare their continuing support for climate action to meet the terms of the Paris Agreement.
• The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a CEO-led association of 200 multinational companies from all business sectors, supports collaborative efforts “to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world.” Its roster of member firms represents a combined revenue of more than $8.5 trillion and 19 million employees.
• Climate Action 100 includes 320 investors with $33 trillion in assets under management who engage with a “focus list” of 160 companies to improve governance, curb emissions, and strengthen climate-related financial disclosures.

These and other business groups are taking a leadership stand in addressing climate change. Policy makers: take note.

https://www.3blforum.com/brands-taking-stands-newsletter

Clean energy one of Canada's fastest growing industries

Clean energy one of Canada's fastest growing industries

By Mia Rabson in News, Politics | May 23rd 2019 

Canada's clean-energy sector is growing faster than the economy as a whole and is rivalling some of the more well known industries for jobs, a new report shows.

Clean Energy Canada, a think-tank at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, is releasing a study today it commissioned to try to paint the first real picture of an industry it feels nobody knows much about but that is critically important to the future both in terms of climate change and the economy.

"Other countries actually keep this data and Canada doesn't," said executive director Merran Smith.

People talk about the clean-technology sector often but clean energy encompasses more than high-tech firms making hydrogen fuel cells and electric cars, said Smith.

She said clean energy includes everything from the production and transmission of renewable electricity to transit workers and construction workers making buildings more energy-efficient. So a hydroelectric-dam operator, a bus driver, and the person who installs a high efficiency furnace would all be included in Clean Energy Canada's job count.

All told, the study concluded, nearly 300,000 Canadians were directly employed in clean energy in 2017, nearly 100,000 more than Statistics Canada data said worked in mining, quarrying, and oil-and-gas extraction. There are 7.5 times as many people working in clean energy as in forestry and logging.

continued at https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/05/23/news/clean-energy-one-canadas-fastest-growing-industries

Canada's anemic response to China

Canada's anemic response to China TERRY GLAVIN  May 22, 2019 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is at long last talking tough with China, we’re told. Not only that, but there’s a senior Canadian parliamentarian in China, right now, talking tough about the arbitrary imprisonment of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, and about Beijing’s sudden embargo on billions of dollars’ worth of Canadian canola exports.

The evidence for the amusing claims about Trudeau’s tough talk is a single milquetoast discombobulation the prime minister offered to reporters on Tuesday after touring an aluminum plant in Sept-Îles, Que.

“China is playing stronger, making stronger moves than it has before to try and get its own way on the world stage and western countries and democracies around the world are pulling together to point out that this is not something that we need to continue to allow,” he said.

The tough-talking parliamentarian, Rob Oliphant, Liberal MP for Don Valley West, was appointed to serve as Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s parliamentary secretary only a couple of weeks ago. Oliphant happens to be among seven members of the 59-member Canada-China Legislative Association (CACN) who are traipsing around Shanghai, Nanjing, Hong Kong and Macao at the moment. It’s a routine junketeering escapade of the sort the ostentatiously useless CACN regularly enjoys in China.

Or perhaps it’s not entirely useless. The CACN is regarded as quite useful by the United Front Work Department, the Chinese Communist Party’s multi-billion-dollar overseas influence-peddling and diaspora-bullying enterprise. CACN members frequently banquet, confer and liaise with the UFWD, and the junkets also allow Canadian parliamentarians to mix and mingle with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the rubber-stamp legislature of subservient sweatshop billionaires with which the CACN maintains cordial relations.

At least Oliphant is unlikely to be kidnapped and hustled away in a car with black-tinted windows and ministry of public security licence plates. In any case, Freeland’s Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, won’t even take her calls. Canadian cabinet ministers have been burning up the telephone lines to their counterparts ever since Beijing began its retaliations for the apprehension of the Communist Party’s untouchable Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer for the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, last December. None of them has taken our calls. The CACN’s last guided tour was in January, to no effect, as if it were necessary to say.

It is useful to recall that Wanzhou, wanted by the U.S. Justice Department on several counts of bank fraud and misrepresentation in the course of dodging American sanctions in Iran, is the daughter of Huawei’s big boss, Ren Zhengfei. It should also be remembered that daddy is a ranking Communist Party member and former People’s Liberation Army officer who still manages to pass himself off outside China as a wholly independent corporate chief executive officer who would never dream of complying with the rigid provisions of Chinese law requiring Huawei to collaborate with Beijing’s intelligence agencies, on command. Besides, 99 percent of the holding company that owns Huawei is owned by a “trade union” that does not answer to Huawei workers, but instead reports directly to the Communist Party’s central committee.

Huawei is the “national champion” corporation and cutting-edge high-tech population control and surveillance behemoth that Xi Jinping has assigned to lead Beijing’s technological war with the world’s liberal democracies. And Team Trudeau is still pretending that Huawei is a serious contender for Canada’s rollout of fifth-generation (5G) internet connectivity. This is so, even though three former Canadian intelligence chiefs have called Huawei a national security threat, as have the Americans — Democrat and Republican (long before Donald Trump came along) — the Australians, and intelligence agencies in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, Poland, and on and on, even Vietnam.

Beijing has been quite clear: Canada must abrogate the terms of the Canada-U.S. extradition treaty, suspend Meng Wanzhou’s court proceedings, allow her to leave her $15-million mansion in Vancouver’s posh Shaughnessy neighbourhood where she’s living while awaiting hearings, and let her return to Shenzhen as she pleases.

continued at https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-canadas-anemic-response-to-china

But it is worse than that....

This is not my position but I think it is worth considering and reflecting upon.


But it is worse than that. by Marc Doll
from https://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/

I realize there is something I have known for some time but have never said, and, since I have just spent another 4 hours of my life in climate change academia I have to get this out of my system.

Please understand that many of you reading this won’t live to a ripe old age… and likely will start scrolling after one or 2 more paragraphs… (edit…Ok I was wrong on this point. This is now my 2nd most shared post of all time.. (edit)…make that my most shared)

The IPCC report and Paris accord are incredibly overly optimistic and that commits the world to a target that means the death of hundreds of millions if not more.

But it is worse than that.

Even the commitments made by countries in the Paris accord don’t get us to a 2 degree world.

But it is worse than that.

The 2 degree target is now unattainable (unless of course the entirety of civilization does a 180 today…) and is based on geo-engineering the climate of the earth as well as the sequestering of every molecule of carbon we have produced since 1987, as well as every molecule we are producing today, as well as every molecule we produce tomorrow…. with magical technologies that don’t exist, won’t exist and, even if they did would likely cause as many if not more problems than they fix.

But it is worse than that.

The 2 degree target of the IPCC does not factor in the feedback loops such as the increased absorption of heat due to a drastic reduction in the albedo (reflectivity) effect caused by the 70% loss of arctic ice, and the release of methane from a thawing arctic (there is more energy stored in the arctic methane than there is in coal in all the world). This is called the methane dragon. If the process of the release of the methane, currently frozen in the soil and ocean beds of the arctic, which may have already begun, spins out of control we are looking at an 8 degree rise in temperature.

But it is worse than that.

The report which gives us 12 years to get our heads out of our arses underestimated the amount of heat stored in the world’s oceans, as we discovered in mid-January, by 40%… so no , we don’t have 12 more years.

But it is worse than that

The conservative American Meteorological Society indicates that our willful blindness and greed will have effects well beyond the climate. The worlds oceans will see a 150% increase in acidity and over a full degree Celsius in warming. This is well down the path to the Permian extinction where 96% of marine species disappeared forever.

But it is worse than that.

The IPCC report ignores the effects of humans messing up the Nitrogen cycle through agricultural fertilizers and more… Don’t go down this rabbit hole if you want to sleep at night.

But it is worse than that.

Sea level rise will not be gradual. Even assuming that the billions of tons of water that is currently being dumped down to the ground level of Greenland isn’t creating a lubricant which eventually will allow the ice to free-flow into the northern oceans; it is only the friction to the islands surface that is currently holding the ice back. Then consider the same process is happening in Antarctica but is also coupled with the disappearance of the ice shelves which act as buttresses holding the glaciers from free flowing into the southern ocean. Then factor in thermal expansions; the simple fact that warmer water takes up more space and It becomes clear that we are not looking at maintaining the current 3.4mm/yr increase in sea level rise (which incidentally is terrifying when you multiply it out over decades and centuries.) We will be looking at major calving events that will result in much bigger yearly increases coupled with an exponential increase in glacial melting. We know that every increase of 100ppm of C02 increases sea level by about 100 feet. We have already baked in 130 feet of sea level rise. It is just a question of how long it is going to take to get there… and then keep on rising..

But it is worse than that.

Insects are disappearing at 6 times the speed of larger animals and at a rate of about 2.5% of their biomass every year. These are our pollinators. These are links in our food chain. These represent the basic functioning of every terrestrial ecosystem/

But it is worse than that.

58% of the biomass of vertebrate life on earth has been lost since 1970. That is basically in my lifetime! Additionally, a new study has shown that over 1 million species are now in danger of extinction due to human activity. Millions of years of evolution are being wiped out on a daily bases.

But it is worse than that.

The amount of Carbon we add to the atmosphere is equal to a yearly human caused forest fire 20% bigger than the continent of Africa. Yes, that is every single year!

But it is worse than that.

Drought in nearly every food …

…to be continued

Can the legacy of trauma be passed down the generations?

Can the legacy of trauma be passed down the generations??

SADLY, YES

Our children and grandchildren are shaped by the genes they inherit from us, but new research is revealing that experiences of hardship or violence can leave their mark too.

By Martha Henriques

26 March 2019 http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190326-what-is-epigenetics

In 1864, nearing the end of the US Civil War, conditions in the Confederate prisoner of war camps were at their worst. There was such overcrowding in some camps that the prisoners, Union Army soldiers from the north, each had the square footage of a grave. Prisoner death rates soared.

For those who survived, the harrowing experiences marked many of them for life. They returned to society with impaired health, worse job prospects and shorter life expectancy. But the impact of these hardships did not stop with those who experienced it. It also had an effect on the prisoners’ children and grandchildren, which appeared to be passed down the male line of families.

While their sons and grandsons had not suffered the hardships of the PoW camps – and if anything were well provided for through their childhoods – they suffered higher rates of mortality than the wider population. It appeared the PoWs had passed on some element of their trauma to their offspring.

But unlike most inherited conditions, this was not caused by mutations to the genetic code itself. Instead, the researchers were investigating a much more obscure type of inheritance: how events in someone’s lifetime can change the way their DNA is expressed, and how that change can be passed on to the next generation.

This is the process of epigenetics, where the readability, or expression, of genes is modified without changing the DNA code itself. Tiny chemical tags are added to or removed from our DNA in response to changes in the environment in which we are living. These tags turn genes on or off, offering a way of adapting to changing conditions without inflicting a more permanent shift in our genomes.

UK Parliament declares climate change emergency & Climate change: UK 'can cut emissions to nearly zero' by 2050

UK Parliament declares climate change emergency

MPs have approved a motion to declare an environment and climate emergency.

This proposal, which demonstrates the will of the Commons on the issue but does not legally compel the government to act, was approved without a vote.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who tabled the motion, said it was "a huge step forward".

Environment Secretary Michael Gove acknowledged there was a climate "emergency" but did not back Labour's demands to declare one.

The declaration of an emergency was one of the key demands put to the government by environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion, in a series of protests over recent weeks.

Addressing climate protesters from the top of a fire engine in Parliament Square earlier, Mr Corbyn said: "This can set off a wave of action from parliaments and governments around the globe.

 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-48126677

Climate change: UK 'can cut emissions to nearly zero' by 2050

The UK should lead the global fight against climate change by cutting greenhouse gases to nearly zero by 2050, a report says.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) maintains this can be done at no added cost from previous estimates.

Its report says that if other countries follow the UK, there’s a 50-50 chance of staying below the recommended 1.5C temperature rise by 2100.

A 1.5C rise is considered the threshold for dangerous climate change.

Some say the proposed 2050 target for near-zero emissions is too soft and still risks harming the climate. But others will fear that the goal could damage the UK's economy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48122911