The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Another Opinion…What’s Worse? Climate Denial or Climate Hypocrisy?
Dear Diary. As stated, when I began this site in early 2017, I won’t entertain any debate on whether or not climate change is occurring due to carbon pollution. Instead, we have dealt with the questions of how fast and hoe badly conditions will get. I’m also keeping a keen eye on reaction by the world that is just in the beginning phases of taking steps to halt additional warming. It’s also interesting to me to see how greed plays out her, pertaining to the many tentacles that the fossil fuel interests play into this whole mix. For example, these tentacles torpedoed Biden’s Build Back Better plan that would have gone a long way towards a green transition for the United States.
Doomism is frowned upon by climate experts within the circles of activists, yet on this site I want to present the best information pertaining to our future as a species, even if that info points to doom. Let’s keep it real, folks. As of June 2022 I just don’t see enough action to prevent atmospheric carbon from going up by about 2.5 parts per million per year. I also see that those in climate denial have dwindled considerably. In this country only ignorant bobble heads on right wing radio or Fox News carry on denial propaganda, with still too much influence, unfortunately. So what’s worse? Climate denial or climate hypocrisy among those trying to greenwash this dire situation?
David Wallace-Wells wrote a book called the Uninhabitable Earth after I began this site, which is pretty much a doomist Bible, upsetting the likes of Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. Katherine Hayhoe because saying to people that no matter what is done, we are already too well done and baked, and it’s too late to save our climate, spurring inaction. I do frown on his book since experts remain adamant that we still have enough carbon budget for a fix if society acts very quickly. Yet today he does have a point. Climate hypocrisy is rampant with greenwashing occurring at levels which could derail our climate efforts. Here is his new opinion:
David Wallace-Wells
What’s Worse: Climate Denial or Climate Hypocrisy?
June 22, 2022
By David Wallace-Wells
Opinion Writer
In early 2020, Larry Fink — the chief executive of BlackRock, a financial firm whose $10 trillion in assets under management are roughly equivalent to the aggregate wealth of Latin America, and about twice that of Africa — did his best to stake his claim as the face of an environmentally responsible business future. “Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects,” Fink wrote in his annual letter to C.E.O.s that year. He called global warming the most serious threat to the financial system in his 40 years of experience and promised a drastic response from his firm: making sustainability “integral to portfolio construction and risk management”; ditching investments that contribute to the problem; and pursuing not just sustainability but transparency, too, so we all could see what impacts the company was having.
Not long before, captains of industry like Fink could have gotten away with climate indifference, and many with outright denial. But something had changed — with the Paris agreement and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, with Greta Thunberg’s school strikes and the arrival, in the global North, of obvious climate disasters long sequestered in the global South. And finance seemed to take the hint, creating a new wave of purportedly virtuous “environmental, social and governance” (E.S.G.) investing.
But in his annual letter this January, just two years later, Fink struck a radically different tone, rejecting “woke” capitalism and elevating the principle that investors should center only on profits. In the spring, the firm announced it would support fewer shareholder resolutions on climate change, “as we do not consider them to be consistent with our clients’ long-term financial interests.” Just months before, BlackRock closed a $15.5 billion investment in Saudi pipelines.
What should we call an about-face like this? The word that comes most easily to mind is “hypocrisy” — or perhaps “greenwashing,” the insult that activists like to lob at companies that use eco-friendly rhetoric to launder their reputations. But this basic phenomenon, in which powerful people make climate pledges that turn out to wildly outrace their genuine commitments, has now become so pervasive that it begins to look less like venality by any one person or institution and more like a new political grammar. The era of climate denial has been replaced with one plagued by climate promises that no one seems prepared to keep.
For years, when advocates lamented the “emissions gap,” they meant the gulf between what scientists said was necessary and what public and private actors were willing to promise. Today that gap has almost entirely disappeared; it has been estimated that global pledges, if enacted in full, would most likely bring the planet 1.8 degrees Celsius of warming — in line with the Paris agreement’s stated target of “well below two degrees” and in range of its more ambitious goal of 1.5 degrees. But it has been replaced by another gap, between what has been pledged and what is being done. In June, a global review of net-zero pledges by corporations found that fully half of them had laid out no concrete plan for getting there; and though 83 percent of emissions and 91 percent of global G.D.P. is now covered by national net-zero pledges, no country — not a single one, including the 187 that signed the Paris agreement — is on track for emissions reductions in line with a 1.5 degree target, according to the watchdog group Climate Action Tracker.
In trading denial for dissonance, a certain narrative clarity has been lost. Five years ago, the stakes were clear, to those looking closely, but so were the forces of denial and inaction, which helps explain the global crescendo of moral fervor that appeared to peak just before the pandemic. Today the rhetorical war has largely been won, but the outlook grows a lot more confusing when everyone agrees to agree, paying at least lip service to the existential rhetoric of activists. It’s not just Boris Johnson — who once mocked “eco-doomsters” — declaring at the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference that it was “one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock.” The 1.5-degree goal was recently described as “fundamental for the survival of the ecosystem as a whole” by, of all people, the head of OPEC.
Rhetoric this unmoored from reality is often called disinformation. It is also simply disorienting — especially given how many narratives have been layered over our picture of the post-warming future. Yes, there’s still an awful lot of fossil-fuel propaganda out there, as well as a profusion of wishful thinking, climate poptimism and giddy techno-solutionism. But even among those who take the inevitability of warming seriously, there’s also a lot of normalization and compartmentalization, which allow many of the world’s most privileged to regard climate suffering as distant, if tragic. And there are the narrative temptations of apocalyptic thinking, too — which, while often misleading, at least gives a familiar shape to a future that can be otherwise quite difficult to make sense of.
As significant climate impacts have begun unmistakably to arrive, indeed now almost daily, the curtain of denial has been pulled back, revealing not a simple story but a complicated new world. During the South Asian heat wave, we heard warnings of wet-bulb temperatures that approached the theoretical limit for human survivability, but then the punishing heat wave endured for three months with relatively few deaths. We hear about the rapid decline in the price of renewables — photovoltaic solar power is now the “cheapest source of electricity in history,” according to the International Energy Agency — but also that major oil companies are reportedly planning more than 200 new projects globally in just the next three years; in May, 73 percent of shareholders of Exxon Mobil, which has a 2050 net-zero pledge, voted against trying to reduce emissions at all.
Among the disorienting features of climate news is that it isn’t actually all bad anymore; the planet seems not to be veering as certainly toward a worst-case future as felt likely just a few years ago. Those trying to project a climate outcome through the veil of uncertainty now estimate that, given current policies, the world is probably heading this century for about 2.5 or three degrees of warming — a full degree or two cooler than was described as “business as usual” as recently as a few years ago, but a degree or more warmer than has been described as “disastrous” for longer still. An enormous amount of possible suffering may have been averted; but an unconscionable amount still lies in store, at least in the absence of rapid and monumental additional action.
Those straining to make the math work on the back end, by invoking large-scale carbon removal later this century, are generating novel dissonance, too. We see headlines about Stripe and its tech allies making a $925 million commitment to removal — perhaps without realizing that the I.P.C.C. has already built into nearly all its lower-warming scenarios the fact that, by 2050, every single year many billions of tons of carbon will be removed from the atmosphere. We nod our heads reflexively about proposals to plant a trillion trees, without realizing that doing so, as climate scientists like David Ho have pointed out, would set the carbon clock back by less than eight months at current emissions levels. (Plus, trees burn, unfortunately; last year, in fact, the carbon released by wildfires exceeded that released by any of the world’s economies except the United States and China.)
OPINION CONVERSATION The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them?
- What does climate change look like around the world?
From “Postcards From a World on Fire,” these 193 stories show how climate change is reshaping reality. - What should our leaders be doing?
Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency. - What are the worst climate risks in your country?
Select a country, and we’ll break down the climate hazards it faces. - Where are Americans suffering most?
Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S.
In this new world, it’s natural to want a neat fable, a clear sense of direction. If you had to choose just one story to tell, probably the most descriptive one is this: Warming is going to get considerably worse than it is today, with the damage created primarily by the world’s rich pummeling the world’s poor. But climate change is not only a morality tale of that kind, and how we regard the near-term future is not a simple, binary choice between two mood-affiliation poles — good news and bad, optimism and pessimism, damage or resilience. It is likely to unleash all of those at once, along with a lot of suffering and social fragmentation. Between the (now unlikely) worst cases and the (even more unlikely) best cases is an ugly muddle, through which we are now already wading — feeling our way toward anything that might qualify, even by degraded standards, as a relatively safe shore.
More on Hypocrisy
Lefty Substack-er Judd Legum on E.S.G. and investor hypocrisy, from his invaluable Popular.info newsletter.
Climate-change minimizer Bjorn Lomborg strikes a similar note, about the empty promises of the world’s wealthy nations, in The Wall Street Journal.
The GFANZ alliance of climate-conscious investors organized by former Bank of England and Bank of Canada chief Mark Carney has been “accused of exploiting loopholes and ‘greenwashing’ in climate pledge,” writes Fiona Harvey in The Guardian. She finds that the 450 big banks making up the $130 trillion alliance, announced to much fanfare at COP26, “can still invest unlimited amounts in coal mining and coal power, despite promises to tighten the rules on their lending.”
“Fund flows into equity E.S.G. ETFs went negative last month,” writes Nat Bullard.
In May 2020, the European Commission pledged to plant three billion trees by 2030 as part of a biodiversity program. “Two years on, however, the E.U. is far from that goal. A tracker launched in December 2021 to monitor progress shows that, as of 15 June, the E.U. has planted 2,946,015 trees — not even 1 percent of the three billion goal,” according to Euractiv.
Other Things to Read
“The global pipeline of offshore wind projects has almost doubled within a year from 429GW of potential new capacity to 846GW,” reports Business Green.
“China’s wind and solar potential is ‘nine times’ that needed for carbon neutrality,” says Carbon Brief.
David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells), a writer for Opinion and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth.”
Here are some “ET’s” from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as an extreme precipitation report. Record reports coming out of Europe are very disturbing:
Here is more climate and weather news from Wednesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)
(If you like these posts and my work please contribute via this site’s PayPal widget. Thanks in advance for any support.)
Guy Walton “The Climate Guy”