Broadening the conversation

Top news this week was the UN IPCC’s dire warning that humanity has a little over a decade to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or we will suffer the effects of greater than 2 degrees centigrade global warming in as little as 30 years. The announcement was widely covered in the international media throughout the week.

News of the report coincided with the landfall of the devastating Hurricane Michael, which came ashore near Mexico Beach, Florida as a Category 4 cyclone, one of the strongest to ever strike the Florida Panhandle. The news of the hurricane was not, for a change, separated from the science presented in the IPCC report, CNN reporting that “Hurricane Michael isn’t really a natural disaster.”

In what was widely felt as a rebuke to the Trump Administration’s willful ignorance and active dismantling of climate change programs, the Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to William D. Nordhaus, the New York Times reporting that Nordhaus “has spent the better part of four decades trying to persuade governments to address climate change, preferably by imposing a tax on carbon emissions.”

Unfortunately, as Nordhaus pointed out in the same interview “The policies are lagging very, very far — miles, miles, miles behind the science and what needs to be done,” Professor Nordhaus said shortly after learning of the prize. “It’s hard to be optimistic. And we’re actually going backward in the United States with the disastrous policies of the Trump administration.”

The cause of carbon taxation has been taken up by someone who might previously have been viewed an unlikely proponent, George Schultz. Schultz served as Secretary of the Treasury under Richard Nixon and Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan. His editorial, co-authored with Ted Halstead, appeared in the Business section of Wired describes the Baker-Schultz Carbon Dividend Plan which calls for taxing carbon at a beginning rate of $40 per ton to begin and giving the proceeds to the American people. The net for a family of four would be approximately $2000.00 per year, nicely off-setting any consumer price increases the tax would generate while encouraging increased energy efficiency. The dividend would make the increase politically palatable and thus have a higher likelihood of passage. Schultz’s conservative credentials are well-established, as are those of co-author James Baker III, and most of the other luminaries in the Climate Leadership Council’s individual founding members.

The Atlantic reported on the growing body of research regarding on how forests effect the climate. The magazine wrote: “The schism between the atmospheric and life sciences that Swann encountered was a holdover from the late 1800s, when the U.S. government proclaimed that planting crops and trees would turn the arid Great Plains wet. The government had embraced a dubious theory pushed by land speculators and rejected the counsel of one of the nation’s top scientists, John Wesley Powell.”

In the Arts, France 24 offered a review of climate change fiction, or “cli-fi”.  Quoting an Agence France Presse interview, France 24 reported ‘”Climate change is slow-moving and intensely place-based,” said US literary expert Elizabeth Rush, a lecturer at Brown University.

“It is difficult for us to notice these things in our day-to-day lives,” she told AFP.

But with climate fiction, “you can imagine being a person whom flood or drought displaces, and with that imaginative stance can come radical empathy.”’