NEW BIPARTISAN GROUP TO PROMOTE ACTION ON CLIMATE

With the impacts of climate change increasing and scientists warning that the global response is too slow, 60 prominent political figures and celebrities have created World War Zero to mobilize the planet’s citizens. 

“When America was attacked in World War II we set aside our differences, united and mobilized to face down our common enemy,” former Secretary of State John Kerry said recently in announcing the effort. “We are launching World War Zero to bring that spirit of unity, common purpose, and urgency back to the world today to fight the great threat of our time.”

WWZ aims to offer a unifying story that can anchor other efforts, focused on the economic benefits of climate action and the national-security and public-health risks of climate change.

The bipartisan coalition will push for immediate policy changes. The goal is to hold more than 10 million “climate conversations” in the coming year with Americans across the political spectrum. In January, Kerry and other coalition members will hold town meetings across the country. Members will head to 2020 battleground states, to military bases where climate discussions are rare, and to economically depressed areas that WWZ leaders say could benefit from clean-energy jobs.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Republican governor of California, is another WWZ leader. He pointed out that his state’s economy is growing at a healthy clip despite having some of the nation’s most ambitious environmental laws. “It just shows you the power that we have by going green and the kind of jobs we created,” Schwarzenegger said on NBC’s “Meet the Press’’ with Chuck Todd. “And I think that’s what we want to do: We want the whole United States to go in that direction, the whole world to go in that direction.”

Kerry said while individual members might promote specific climate policy proposals, like a tax on carbon dioxide pollution, or the Green New Deal, the coalition is not aimed at promoting any particular plan.

“We are bringing together unlikely allies who may not agree on everything, but who have enlisted in this effort to do everything they can to mobilize people to tackle climate change on every front.”

Katie Eder, founder of The Future Coalition, a network for youth-led organizations that helped organize climate strikes around the country in September, supports the Green New Deal and is a WWZ member. She told The New York Times’ Lisa Friedman that people who care about climate change need to look past their differences. “While I may be disagreeing with some of the things that other folks involved in World War Zero believe, that doesn’t mean we can’t work together,” she said. “Collaboration is our key to survival.”

Other coalition members, some of whom are from overseas, include former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter; retired military officers such as General Stanley McChrystal and Brigadier General Stephen Cheney; Cindy McCain; former Ohio Governor John Kasich; and celebrities Emma Watson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ted Danson, and Sting.  

Despite the enormity of the climate challenge, Kerry saw reason for encouragement. “Something extraordinary is happening in America,” he told Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic. “States have passed renewable-portfolio laws, so you’ve got [37] states that are locked in already to moving towards Paris, no matter what the president does. You also have the mayor of every major city in America signed on to the mayor’s commitment to try to live by the Paris Agreement. So you have this dichotomy in America, where the president of the United States has said I’m out, but, frankly, the majority of the American people are still saying, We’re in.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a similar point last week. She and 14 other members of the House and Senate traveled to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Madrid. “Congress’s commitment to take action on the climate crisis is iron-clad,” she said. “By coming here we want to say to everyone, ‘We’re still in. The United States is still in.’”

“It is doable,” Kerry told Meyer, “but you don’t see a very specific set of proposals for how you do it. For instance, bringing the auto manufacturers into the White House and sitting them down and saying: ‘Okay, we’ve got to move this faster. I want to know what the hurdles are. I want to know how we take them out of your way. I want to know what kind of incentives we’re going to need for people to be able to afford to buy the electric car.’ Then you’ve got to bring the utility people in.”

Schwarzenegger rejected the Trump administration’s argument that China must do more to curb emissions before the United States acts.  He told The Times’ Friedman: “I always say to myself, what is happening here? America never ever in its history has said, ‘Let some other country do something first.’ We should lead.”

Climate change poses greater threat to children's health

Many of us fear that our children and grandchildren are inheriting a damaged planet. In fact, younger generations are already taking a hit. 

A new report from the medical journal The Lancet, found that children are especially vulnerable to CO2 emissions. Failing to limit these emissions would lead to health problems caused by infectious diseases, worsening air pollution, rising temperatures and malnutrition, New York Times reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis wrote.

The report compared human health consequences under two scenarios: one in which the world meets the commitments laid out in the Paris Agreement and reins in emissions so that increases in global temperatures remain “well below 2 degrees Celsius” by the end of the century, and one in which it does not.

“With every degree of warming, a child born today faces a future where their health and well-being will be increasingly impacted by the realities and dangers of a warmer world,” said Dr. Renee N. Salas, a clinical instructor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the United States policy brief that accompanied the report. “Climate change, and the air pollution from fossil fuels that are driving it, threatens the child’s health starting in the mother’s womb and only accumulates from there,” she said.

Children are especially vulnerable, partly because of their physiology. “Their hearts beat faster than adults’ and their breathing rates are higher than adults’,” said Dr. Mona Sarfaty, the director of the program on climate and health at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, who was not involved in the report. As a result, children absorb more air pollution given their body size than an adult would in the same situation.

But unless nations halt emissions, air pollution, which, according to the report, killed seven million people worldwide in 2016, will quite likely increase. The burning of fossil fuels also releases a type of fine air pollution called PM 2.5 that can damage the heart and lungs when inhaled. Exposure to PM 2.5 air pollution is correlated with health problems such as low birth weight and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma.

Research published in The New England Journal of Medicine after the passage of policies designed to improve air quality “shows that the children who grew up when the air was better quality literally had more functioning lung tissue,” Dr. Sarfaty told The Times.

Part of the exposure risk that children face is simply that they spend more time outside than adults. Coupled with their differing physiology, it makes them more susceptible to fine particulate pollution. These same factors also mean they are more likely to suffer from the effects of extreme heat associated with climate change. 

As heat waves become more severe, parents and coaches “may not realize that the children are more exposed and therefore more vulnerable,” Dr. Sarfaty said. A 2017 report that she helped prepare found that, in the United States, heat-related illnesses are the leading cause of death and disability in young athletes.

Air pollution became so severe in Delhi, India, recently that five million masks were distributed at schools. Officials were forced to declare a public health emergency and have closed city schools four days so far this month. "I didn't realize how bad it would get," one resident told BBC. "Do we really want our kids to grow up in such an environment? No one really cares; no one wants to improve the situation."

A Supreme Court-mandated panel imposed several restrictions in Delhi and two neighboring states, as air quality deteriorated to "severe" levels. Dangerous particulate levels in the air are about 20 times the World Health Organization (WHO) maximum. Delhi's Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said the city had been turned into a "gas chamber."

In addition to the emissions associated with burning fossil fuels, the report said future generations would be exposed to a growing source of fine-particulate pollution: wildfires. As temperatures rise, wildfires are becoming more frequent, in part because hotter temperatures dry out vegetation, making it easier to ignite. The smoke, like the smoke that comes from burning fossil fuels, threatens human health.

According to the report published in The Lancet, since the middle of this decade there has been a 77 percent increase in the number of people exposed to wildfire smoke worldwide. 

One way to reduce the threat to our children’s health is to increase the price paid so that it reflects such costs. In effect, we are subsidizing the damage to their lungs, brains, and other organs. Urge those who represent you on Capitol Hill to support one of the carbon tax bills now before the House and Senate.

HOW MANY OF US WILL BECOME CLIMATE REFUGEES?

Lori Rittel packed up and left her Montana home to live in the Florida Keys. Paradise found, right? Not exactly. Rittel, 60, may have escaped long winters, but two years ago climate change knocked at her door.

That’s when Hurricane Irma, packing winds of 130 miles per hour, hit the Keys. Afterwards, large portions of the Lower Keys “looked like a war zone,” The Miami Herald reported. More than 27,000 homes suffered some degree of damage, including 1,179 that were  destroyed.

Rittel cannot afford to rebuild or repair her bungalow. Her bedroom is too badly damaged for her to sleep in it, and her bathroom is missing a wall. Her best hope for escape is to sell it to the government to knock down. “I just want to sell this piece of junk and get the hell out,” she told Prashant Gopal of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “This will happen again.”

Taxpayer buyouts for homeowners in flood-prone areas such as New Orleans, Houston, and Staten Island, New York, are enabling some Americans to get out of harm’s way. Florida, the state with the most people and real estate at risk, is just starting to buy homes, wrecked or not, and bulldoze them to clear a path for swelling seas before whole neighborhoods get wiped off the map, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

By the end of the century, 13 million Americans will need to move just because of rising sea levels, at a cost of $1 million each, according to Florida State University demographer Mathew Haeur, who studies climate migration. Even in a “managed retreat,” coordinated and funded at the federal level, the economic disruption could resemble the housing crash of 2008.

Some small communities are moving lock, stock and barrel. In 2016, Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles became the first place to be given federal money to replant itself. The residents, situated on an island being eaten away by the sea, are headed for a former sugar cane farm 30 miles inland. “We are called climate refugees but I hate that term,” said Chantal Comardelle, who grew up there.

In Alaska, a dozen coastal towns, inhabited mostly by Inupiats and other Alaska Natives, are also planning to relocate. Diminishing sea ice is exposing them to storms, and rising temperatures are thawing the very ground beneath them. 

The migration from the nation’s coastal areas would be dramatic. The closest analogue could be the Great Migration, a period spanning a large chunk of the 20th century when about 6 million African Americans departed the Jim Crow South for cities in the North, Midwest and West, Oliver Milman wrote in The Guardian.

“I don’t see the slightest evidence that anyone is seriously thinking about what to do with the future climate refugee stream,” Orrin Pilkey, professor emeritus of coastal geology at Duke University, told Milman. “It boggles the mind to see crowds of climate refugees arriving in town and looking for work and food.”

Pilkey’s new book, written with his son Keith and titled Sea Level Rise: A Slow Tsunami on America’s Shores, envisions apocalyptic scenes where millions of people, largely from south Florida, will become “a stream of refugees moving to higher ground.”

It seems clear that the federal government will have to become more active in coordinating efforts to move Americans out of danger and to limit the financial toll on them--and on the country as a whole. “The scale of this is almost unfathomable,” Billy Fleming, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “If we take any of the climate science seriously, we’re down to the last 10 to 12 years to mobilize the full force of the government and move on managed retreat. If we don’t, it won’t matter, because much of America will be underwater or on fire.”

Philip Stoddard is the mayor of Miami Beach, which is on the front lines, and he has been a forward-looking advocate of strong action to counter climate change. One point he makes is that our nation faces some difficult choices. “We need a plan as to what will be defended because at the moment the approach is that some kid in a garage will come up with a solution,” he said in an interview with The Guardian. “There isn’t going to be a mop and bucket big enough for this problem.”

GOP's Fitzpatrick Introduces Carbon Tax Bill

A Republican congressman from Pennsylvania is the latest lawmaker to author a bill to tax carbon emissions. While dozens of cities, from Alaska to Florida, were having their hottest Septembers on record, Brian Fitzpatrick, who represents a suburban district just east of Philadelphia, was trying to do something to combat the forces believed to be driving our temperatures ever higher. 

“The lion’s share of economists say that putting an honest price on carbon--one that includes the costs that burning carbon imposes on all of us--is the fastest and most efficient way to tackle climate change,” said George T. Frampton, co-founder of the Partnership for Responsible Growth (PRG). “We welcome any such legislation, but it’s especially exciting when a Republican is the lead sponsor. Our nation needs a bipartisan spirit to meet this enormous challenge.”

To improve his legislation’s prospects, Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent and a leader of the House Climate Solutions Caucus, signed up two Democratic colleagues as co-sponsors: Representatives Salud Carbajal and Scott Peters, both of California.

Fitzpatrick’s Market Choice Act calls for a tax of $35 per metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2021 with rates increasing cumulatively thereafter.

This measure is the eighth carbon tax bill introduced this year. The bills propose different rates that would increase at varying speeds, and they also differ in how the massive proceeds would be used. The Pennsylvania congressman calls for investing most of that money in the nation’s infrastructure. “With the American public overwhelmingly seeking fixes to our crumbling roads and bridges while searching for solutions to mitigate the dangerous effects of climate change, our bipartisan bill is a dynamic solution that seeks to tackle both problems,” Fitzpatrick said.  

Reporting on the introduction of this legislation, The Hill’s Miranda Green wrote, “The push to regulate greenhouse gas emissions comes as both Democrats and Republicans face pressure from their constituents, and in some cases the fossil fuel industry itself, to regulate carbon emissions that lead to climate change.”

Another Republican congressman who is out front in combating climate change is Francis Rooney of Florida. He has introduced two carbon tax bills this year. One would use most of the revenue to reduce payroll taxes, while the other would return the revenue to U.S. households as monthly rebate checks.

The “obvious, no-brainer tool for curbing carbon emissions,” wrote columnist Catherine Rampell, is “putting a price on carbon. A carbon tax (or its cousin, a cap-and-trade system) is almost universally embraced by economists on both the left and the right. With good reason, too. Taxing carbon means pricing in, upfront, the implicit costs that come from using fossil fuels — especially, though not exclusively, the cost of warming our planet.”

“With his leadership as the lead sponsor, Congressman Fitzpatrick has showed that he is a true conservative and patriot,” said The Rev. Mitchell C. Hescox, president and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network.  

The bill was widely praised by leaders in the conservation community. “Increasingly severe storms, droughts, floods and megafires all make clear the urgent need for strong, bipartisan action to reduce carbon emissions and prepare our communities for unavoidable impacts,” said Shannon Heyck-Williams, director of climate and energy policy at the National Wildlife Federation. Fitzpatrick’s bill, she stated, would “increase investments in clean energy and natural climate solutions that will make communities and ecosystems more climate-resilient.”

Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, which has created a Carbon Tax Research Initiative, has produced an online guide titled “What You Need to Know About a Federal Carbon Tax in the United States.” It provides a high-level overview of carbon-pricing basics, the major decisions that policymakers confront when designing a carbon tax, the implications of those decisions, and the proposals in Congress today. In addition, Jason Ye of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions has analyzed such legislation.

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT PEAT FIRES IN SIBERIA

The fires in the Amazon have set off alarms around the world--and with good reason. But half a planet away, Eastern Siberia is also on fire, as are large parts of the Arctic Circle. The “unprecedented” Siberian blazes began in June after temperatures peaked at 8-10°C warmer than the average from 1981 to 2010. The heat dried out the landscape, producing tinder for natural forest fires that were probably ignited by lightning, The Economist explained.

But it is what is happening below ground that most worries ecologists and climate scientists, according to the magazine. Many of the Siberian and Alaskan fires are burning carbon-dense peat soils, which would normally be waterlogged. Peat fires produce much more carbon dioxide and methane from the combustion of carbon that has been locked in the ground for hundreds or thousands of years. Burning soil therefore eliminates important carbon sinks that cannot be replaced on any useful timescale.

This, in turn, generates feedback loops that are not accounted for in the climate projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For example, The New York Times’ Kendra Pierre-Louis explained, the Arctic fires exacerbate global warming because of the soot produced by burning peat. When the soot settles on nearby glaciers, the ice absorbs the sun’s energy instead of reflecting it, speeding up the melting of the glacier.

The latest research indicates that Arctic permafrost is much richer in carbon than scientists believed. Researchers now suspect that for every one degree Celsius rise in Earth’s average temperature, permafrost may release the equivalent of four to six years’ worth of coal, oil, and natural gas emissions—double to triple what scientists thought a few years ago, according to a September National Geographic article by Craig Welch. 

And the rate of temperature increase in the Arctic is startling. Welch toured part of Siberia with ecologist Sergey Zimov, who has been studying the Arctic for decades. He and his son Nikita run the Northeast Science Station in Cherskiy. “Three years ago, the temperature in the ground above our permafrost was minus 3 degrees Celsius [27 degrees Fahrenheit],” Sergey Zimov said. “Then it was minus 2. Then it was minus one. This year, the temperature was plus 2 degrees.”

As a result, Arctic permafrost isn’t thawing gradually, as scientists once predicted. Geologically speaking, it’s thawing almost overnight. 

“What is scary about the Arctic fires is that they are driven by climate change, and as such, there’s very little you can do,” said Thomas Smith, who studies wildfires at the London School of Economics. “You can’t raise the water table for an area the scale of northern Alaska or Siberia,” he told The Economist.

Smoke from the wildfires has engulfed hundreds of villages in Siberia—and spread as far as Seattle and Vancouver, The Wall Street Journal’s Georgi Kantchev reported. Meantime, large-scale flooding, due mostly to heavy rain, has added to Russians’ misery. The twin threats are “injecting fresh urgency into rethinking the country’s usually skeptical stance toward the dangers posed by climate change.”

Every Friday for more than 20 weeks, 25-year-old violinist Arshak Makichyan stood at Moscow’s central Pushkin Square holding a placard warning of the dangers of global warming. Social media dubbed him the city’s only climate protester. But suddenly, the violinist is not so lonely: More than 1.2 million people have signed a petition for authorities to do more to counter the environmental problems in Siberia.

President Vladimir Putin is concerned, too. He warns that Russia is being hit hard, with temperatures in the country rising 2½ times as fast as the global average. “We take this matter very seriously,” he said. 

When will Congress and the White House catch up to Putin? Americans need to sound the alarm and push our elected officials into motion so we can counter this threat before it’s too late. The quickest remedy? Putting an honest price on carbon dioxide.