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I'll be taking a bus to a swing state to help elect Harris this coming weekend. You don't need to do quite that much; there are actions hosted near you to join.

The reason is that while Harris isn't in absolute 100% agreement with me on every detail (unless I run for office, no candidate will be), she's the candidate much closer to taking adequate climate action. The Biden/Harris administration did a lot, starting with Harris casting the deciding vote for the Inflation Reduction Act., a key piece of climate legislation. We even saw major cuts to the leasing of federal lands for coal, as well as big cuts to oil and gas leasing

By contrast, Trump appointed a coal lobbyist to run the EPA and took steps to increase not just greenhouse gas emissions, but a wide variety of human-impacting pollutants, and surrounded by people who want to eliminate any effort to address the climate problem

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> New research predicts global CO2 emissions will begin to decline this year and halve by 2050. That’s not fast enough to meet climate goals.

To summarize: Trump has a real history of telling lies in order to maximize fossil fuel extraction and consumption. Harris has helped take at some action in the direction of getting the US off of fossil fuels though not yet enough.

I'm very much in favor of stopping Trump, so if you want to help out, you can do that here

This should not be a surprise; he put a coal lobbyist in charge of the EPA, and proceeded to roll back as many environmental regulations as he could.

If you're in the US and want to stop him, get involved

Archived copy of the article

The paper is here

Here is more information: https://www.stopeacop.net

A group of 28 NGOs have written to 34 banks, insurance companies and the Chinese government, urging them to deny financing and other support for oil and gas projects in Uganda.

The letters, written by U.S.-based Climate Rights International (CRI) and 27 Africa-based NGOs, follow a report detailing numerous human rights violations and environmental harms at the Kingfisher oil project sites in Uganda. Similarly, Uganda’s Tilenga oil fields also face scrutiny over their ecological and social harms, including impacts on wildlife and displacement of local communities.

Both Kingfisher and Tilenga are co-owned by French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company Uganda Ltd. (CNOOC), and the Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC). Both projects are also part of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline initiative (EACOP), where TotalEnergies is a major partner. The initiave aims to transport oil and gas from Uganda to Tanzania for export.

[...]

Major banks and insurance companies in Europe, Japan and North America have ruled out support for the projects, he added. “Now it’s time for all banks and insurance companies, whether in Europe, China, the Gulf States, Africa, or elsewhere, to publicly rule out any continuing or further support.”

[...]

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/14326042

> Australia’s biggest carbon credit scheme is barely removing any greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, according to a new study, despite hundreds of millions of dollars being pumped into it by businesses and the government. > > One of the study’s authors, Dr Megan Evans from UNSW Canberra, said the findings about the Human Induced Regeneration scheme, known as HIR, pointed to “such huge failures that it’s almost beyond belief”.

Interesting and sometimes funny video about how Chevron has wrecked havoc in Ecuador and attacked everyone trying to stop them.

> Our best estimate is that heavy 3-day rainfall events have become about 18% more intense and just over twice more likely

"Geothermal does currently cost more per megawatt hour than wind or solar, but those more-established renewables require big batteries to keep power flowing around the clock."

>Back in the pre-pandemic winter of 2019, the University of Minnesota-Duluth held a two-day conference with a timely theme: “Our Climate Futures: Meeting the Challenges in Duluth.” The keynote was delivered by Jesse M. Keenan, an urban planner whose research focuses on climate adaptation and the built environment. Keenan had been crunching the numbers and studying the projections on future climate migration — or “climigration” — in the United States; and he had begun speculating about where climate migrants would go. One place they might go, he told the audience, is Duluth. Yes, the city had suffered decades of post-industrial decline in the late 20th century, but what matters now, as the country adapts to new climate realities, is that Duluth is an upper Midwestern city, far from the eroding coastlines of the Southeast and the blistering heatwaves of the Southwest. The cost of living is relatively low, the education and healthcare sectors robust. Perhaps most important of all, the city is located at a latitude of 46° north on the western shores of Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes and one of the largest sources of freshwater on the planet...

>Other northern cities have been making similar cases. The mayor of Buffalo, New York, declared that the former industrial city on the shores of Lake Erie — a sort of easterly twin to Duluth— will be a “climate refuge.” The chief sustainability officer of Cleveland, also on Lake Erie, described the Ohio city as a “haven,” where the “climate refugee crisis is bound to catalyze further growth.” And a Milwaukee public radio reporter asked, “Could Wisconsin become a climate haven?” America’s Rust Belt has emerged as the geographic focal point in a growing conversation about how the nation’s demography will shift as places like Phoenix, Dallas, and Miami — Sunbelt cities that are still some of the fastest-growing in the country — experience ever deadlier weather that threatens to destabilize housing markets and jeopardize entire industries, such as agriculture and real estate development.

>The questions raised by such a reversal of migratory patterns are as complex as they are urgent. In the coming decades, as rising seas and rising temperatures drive large-scale domestic migration, which places will lose population, and which places will see sizable gains? Which groups will be the first to flee, and which will struggle to find safety? America’s political leaders and policy makers ought to be grappling with these questions right now...

>... Already, inaction on the part of governments and industries has foreclosed the most optimistic climate adaptation scenarios; several years ago, as Lustgarten writes, leading scientists came to the gloomy consensus that the world was “hitting critical warming benchmarks sooner, and with more dramatic consequences, than expected.” In his 2019 talk, Jesse Keenan qualified his optimism about “climate-proof Duluth” by conceding that no place will ever be immune from the impacts of a changing climate; too much has changed already. But if the challenges are immense, even historically unprecedented, we still have the ability to respond, to shape our future. At the end of his sobering book, Jake Bittle offers this hope:

> "The world is already being remade, but its future shape is far from set in stone. The next century may usher us into a brutal and unpredictable world, a world in which only the wealthiest and most privileged can protect themselves from dispossession, or it may usher us into a fairer world — a world where one’s home may not be impregnable, but where one’s right to shelter is guaranteed. Both worlds are possible. We still have time to choose between them.”

This is why cheaply rolling out renewables isn't enough — it's going to take having a supply constraint of some sort on fossil fuels as well

My impression is that this is a PR push, designed to avoid having to invest in renewables, and let them keep on burning gas and coal, rather than something likely to come to fruition.

Archived copies of the article:

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Americans who want to help stop him, vote, and volunteer

> The Biden administration has said its plan would protect communities from pollution and help the nation meet long-term goals to combat the climate crisis.

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For comparison, the New York Times coverage of this

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I think that what's not in this article, but needs to be, is that rooftop solar in the rest of the world costs about 1/4 what it does in the US. Getting US prices down to where they are elsewhere would do wonders for closing this big gap.

The Ghanaian government is set to repeal its controversial pro-mining legislation, following weeks of demonstrations against environmentally disastrous mining, including the threat of a nationwide labor strike.

In November 2022, the government issued LI 2462, a directive allowing mining in forest reserves, including biodiversity hotspots. Mongabay previously reported on how LI 2462 threatened to exacerbate the extensive harm from mining to Ghana’s environment. According to the Ghana Institute of Foresters (GIF), mining leases were granted over about 390,000 hectares (964,000 acres), a fifth of the country’s forests, in the year following its passage.

(...)

The ruling party introduced legislation to repeal LI 2462 in parliament on October 15.

> Investors say climate change poses biggest risk to their assets, and urge Albanese government to see the economic dangers of a slow path to net zero

> We’ve only had 1.3C of global average warming, but it’s enough to popularize the entire category of personal cooling devices. So when people say, “You won’t even notice 1C of global warming,” the market tells us that that’s absolute bullshit.