Southern Bookman

More bad climate-change news: Carbon emissions out of control

The world is on a collision course with disaster.

After several years of leveling off, carbon emissions will increase by 2.7 percent this year, according to the latest shocking climate change report. That follows a 1.6 percent rise last year, ending a three-year period of no increases. 

The emissions jump is "a speeding freight train," according to one of the 100 scientists from more than 50 academic and research institutions who compiled the Global Carbon Project report, according to The New York Times.

China, the United States and India top the carbons-emissions list. The Trump administration is abandoning President Obama's successful efforts to curb emissions and taking steps to revive the coal industry, which will bring even higher emissions increases.

Despite China's efforts to switch to cleaner energy production,  its expanding economy still depends on coal. As in India, more and more of its population are driving gasoline-powered cars.

India's leap in emissions is also fueled by economic modernization, a mobilization to bring electricity to more of its people.

The emissions increase is the latest sign that the world is dangerously falling behind in the battle against climate change. As developing countries move toward acquiring modern conveniences the West has long enjoyed, humans have leaped aboard that doomsday locomotive.

Ben Fountain seeks restoration of America's civic virtue

Ben Fountain's "Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion and Revolution" sees Donald Trump's election as the triumph of fantasy over reality.

The Dallas-based author of the excellent 2012 novel "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" looks back on Trump's 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton from a broad historical and philosophical perspective.

Along with summaries of monthly news events that occurred during the turbulent campaign, the book gathers searching, deeply researched essays that Fountain wrote for the Guardian.

That a British newspaper would offer such thoughtful reflections on America's chaotic politics shows the deficiencies of the American media.

Rather than a blow-by-blow recap of the Trump and Clinton campaigns, the book analyzes the election from a broader historical viewpoint.

With solid grounding in literature and historical facts, Fountain traces the decline of the American middle class, GOP-led efforts to preserve white supremacy, police violence against blacks and the cultural dominance of entertainment and celebrity. He indicts American "amnesia" and an avoidance of reality.

In analyzing the erosion of American democracy, Fountain draws upon books from well-known and obscure writers. With sometimes sardonic humor and a readable style, Fountain gives a comprehensive summary of American political thought that would be a good primer for college and high school students who are so often deprived of a basic civics education these days.

Without endorsing Bernie Sanders's socialism, Fountain demolishes conservatives' war against government begun by Ronald Reagan. He demonstrates that governmental support of the economy and education led to America's glowing prosperity after World War II.

Fountain's title comes from Robinson Jeffers' poem "Apologies for Bad Dreams," sounding a call for political  and moral renewal. The California poet's jeremiad takes on deeper and ironic meaning after the recent devastating fires in Jeffers' native state and alarming climate change reports.

The book ends on a positive, if ambiguous, plea for a new commitment to America's "possibility." Countering the subtitle, Fountain places his hopes on rational thought, Jefferson's ideal of an informed, committed citizenry rather than violent revolution. 

While sounding a clarion call for progressives, Fountain expresses the belief that moderate Americans also will heed his message and restore reason and justice to the political arena.

World has 12 years to avoid complete climate change devastation, UN panel finds

The world still has time to escape the worst devastation from climate change.

A UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released this week found that the world has 12 years to head off the most extreme disaster from climate change.

The report found that enormous economic changes are needed to keep the world at a 1.5 degree celsius increase in temperatures over the pre-industrial era, rather than 2 degrees, according to a thorough article in the Guardian.

That .5 degree margin will make a big difference, according to the report, saving hundreds of millions of people from poverty and death. Sea levels won't rise as dramatically, and ocean ecosystems will have better chances of survival.

But urgent political commitment is required, as the Trump administration rejects climate change science and seeks to remove the United States from the Paris climate change treaty. Brazil's new right wing president reportedly wishes to remove his country from the treaty, and open up the Amazon Basin to commercial development. 

Other countries are also backing off their commitment to reduce carbon emissions, as agreed to in Paris several years ago.

Biillonaire progressive Tom Steyer in an appearance on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show Monday night expressed optimism that a new generation of young voters will demand action. He also said the transformation from a carbon-based economy will increase prosperity, rather than causing the economic disruption claimed by conservatives.

While Steyer's views seem too rosy, the world must take action. Alas, the UN and other groups are new age Cassandras singing to an oblivious world.

Global warming marches onward

Nathaniel Rich's history of how the country failed to stop climate change back in the late 1980s took up the entire issue of the New York Times magazine last Sunday.

Now someone like Rich needs to do such an extensive examination of what humanity can do now to save the planet. 

As wildfires consume large areas of California - the Mendocino Complex blaze is the largest ever - a distinguished scientific organization has warned that the world might already be on the path to doom from irreversible global warming.

In a Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists report, 16 scientists say that "feedback loops" - continuous global warming occurrences that multiply like cancer cells - could bring the globe to much higher than the 2 degree Celsius threshold adopted by the world's nations several years ago.

Even if human begins meet the goal of 2 degrees above average preindustrial temperatures, the "feedback loops" could be set off, and might already be under way. New York magazine's indispensable environmental writer David Wallace-Wells analyzes the report on the magazine's web site.

Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate change treaty pledging the world's nations to take action to meet the 2 degree Celsius goal. Even without Trump's rash action, the world is falling behind on meeting the standards, after initial progress.

The report makes clear that failure to halt global warming could make much of the world uninhabitable. 

Don't let it get you down, it's only the world burning

While Atlanta has experienced a relatively mild summer, if frequent 90-degree-plus highs can be considered moderate, temperatures have soared to unprecedented extremes across the world.

Wildfires rage from Greece to Yosemite. Even the Arctic withstands temperatures in the 90s. Sweden suffers through an alarming heat wave, as India cities grow inhabitable. A city in Oman hit 122 degrees.

As New York magazine environmental writer David Wallace-Wells points out, as climate change doom appears more and more real, the media treat the reports as old news and the public yawns. While the wildfires and high temperatures have been covered, they receive less attention than Trump's chaotic presidency and celebrity and sports news.

Cited by Wallace-Wells,  New Republic writer Emily Atkins criticizes the media, including The New York Times, for failing to link the heat and blazing fires to climate change.

The climate crisis is receiving attention: Harper's in its current edition looks at global wirefires. The problem is that the media are treating the heat as an anomaly, rather than a long-term pattern of climate change.

Along with failing to stop carbon emissions, the world is also depleting its water supplies. Esquire writer Charles Pierce cited a New York Times article reporting that 21 of the world's 37 underground aquifers are near collapse. In Arizona and California, corporate agriculture and real estate are using up underground water resources that have existed for thousands of years. Underground water is also running out in Asia and the Mideast. 

Goodbye to the aquifers. Goodbye to the coral reefs. Goodbye to the coastal cities. Goodbye to human life as we have known it.

Bill McKibben sounds alarm for Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef is dying.

Environmental activist Bill McKibben sounds the death knell in a piece for the New Yorker's web site.

The huge coral system's rapid demise is the most acute warning system for the Earth. 

Yet, as McKibben details, political leaders considered environmentally conscious are acting to increase carbon emissions.

Canada's Justin Trudeau recently announced that his government will develop a pipeline to transport oil from Alberta's tar sands to the Pacific Coast. California's Jerry Brown has boosted his approvals of drilling permits.

As the Great Barrier Reef bleaches away, Australia takes ineffective action, as McKibben details. The Australian government wants to accelerate coal mining.

McKibben rode a motorboat to examine the barrier reef's deterioration. Critics will cry that a motorboat emits carbon into the atmosphere.

A motorboat makes little difference when oil pipelines and drilling permits extract more petroleum from the earth, and send it into the atmosphere.  

New Yorker's Jill Lepore acclaims Rachel Carson's ocean rhapsodies

Rachel Carson's sea books gave a prescient warning about the fragility of oceans, and command attention along with her celebrated "Silent Spring," New Yorker writer and Harvard history professor Jill Lepore says in last week's issue of the magazine.

After an uncharacteristically muddled lead paragraph, Lepore presents a vivid portrait of Carson. In heartbreaking contrast with today's anti-science Congress and proliferation of frivolous, self-absorbed books, Carson's "Silent Spring" led to the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Wilderness Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. It also resulted in the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. It's hard to imagine a book bringing such beneficial change today.

While "Silent Spring" remains a classic, Lepore calls for renewed attention to Carson's earlier books, "Under the Sea Wind," and "The Sea Around Us." As with "Silent Spring," the latter was published as a multipart series in William Shawn's New Yorker.

Lepore mourns that Carson's sea writings are not included in a new Library of America collection, "Silent Spring and Other Writings on the Environment," edited by Sandra Steingraber.

Blasting Steingraber for rejecting the sea books because they, unlike "Silent Spring's" campaign against the pesticide DDT, "call for no particular action," Lepore says, "political persuasion is a strange measure of the worth of a piece of writing whose force lies in knowledge and wonder."

As 87,000 pounds of plastic waste float in the Pacific, consumed by fish and sea turtles, Carson's words about the oceans' beauty give their own effective protest. Lepore says that Carson, before she died of cancer after battling the chemical industry over its devastation of nature with DDT, planned to explore climate change and rising sea levels.

Here are some of Carson's words about her wonder at the sea, as cited by Lepore.

"The shore is an ancient world."

"Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earthbound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon; and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere."

"The lobster feels his way with nimble wariness through the perpetual twilight."

 

You got ideas? Mercedes-Benz wants them

Atlanta really is an international city after all.

Mercedes-Benz opened its new North American headquarters in Sandy Springs Thursday and announced that an automotive ideas lab will be opened in the Atlanta metro area, according to a triumphant report arrayed across The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's front page.

The German company has similar labs in Stuttgart, its home city, Berlin and Beijing. Now, Atlanta will get a Lab1886, referring to the year the company launched the world's first gas-powered car. With the labs, the company seeks to remain at the forefront of technology and innovation. 

Mercedes' vision appears far different from Atlanta's traffic-snarled present. The company, citing Atlanta's universities and high-tech entrepreneurial work force, showed a belief that the state and metro area will change its transportation future. 

The ideas lab will be autonomous from new headquarters campus in Atlanta's burgeoning northern suburb. Mercedes Benz USA CEO Dietmar Exler said that the lab will operate separately "from the operations of the big mothership," with the freedom to explore "promising ideas wherever they come from - internally and externally," according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

The company sums up the driving future with its CASE formula: connectivity, autonomous driving, flexible use (shared and services) and electric power.

Lab1886 will have limitless horizons, including business development outside of automobiles. Robots, driverless cars, ride-sharing, smart roads, flying cars. global markets, and new industrial processes and materials are some of the possibilities.

While the company built its new campus in Sandy Springs, the AJC surmised that the intown high-tech area around Georgia Tech would be attractive for the ideas lab, which will employ 24 people and open this summer. A site near Tech would give the lab the required distance from the headquarters building. 

The company is keeping its lab location secret for now, but I thought it interesting that Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was shown in an AJC photo along with Gov. Nathan Deal and Mercedes execs looking at a primitive 19th century car.

Mercedes' news could also persuade Amazon to take a closer look at Atlanta as the site of its second headquarters. The Seattle conglomerate at least will take notice of Mercedes' ideas lab announcement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surge in SUV popularity signals retreat in emissions reductions

SUV purchases are rising across the world, a major setback in reducing carbon emissions and limiting climate change.

The large, low-fuel-efficient vehicles accounted for 1 in 3 car sales globally last year, according to a New York Times story this week. The SUV share of the world market has tripled from a decade ago, the article said.

While SUV sales soar, progress in cutting emissions has stalled. From 2005-2008, emissions fell by 1.8 percent, but the reduction sank to 1.1 percent by 2015, according to the article. A 3 percent cut is required to stabilize car emissions, which make up 14 percent of the total.

Here in Atlanta, SUVs rule. A new generation of young mothers ferry their kids in bigger and bigger Suburbans and European, Korean and Japanese crossovers. Rappers, lawyers and hedge-fund wonder boys also love the power surge the tank-like behemoths give.

I've owned an SUV or two, when my children were small. The cars give the illusion of safety, and provide room for groceries and household items. 

Now, countries like China and Australia  have caught SUV fever. As the article points out, electric cars are losing out to the big gas-guzzling cruisers.

At shadowy dawn of time, Neanderthals created haunting cave paintings

The Neanderthals weren't such dim brutes after all, recent discoveries show.

Long believed less intelligent than modern humans, the Neanderthals made cave paintings in Spain at least 20,000 years before their human cousins appeared in Europe, according to an article in Science magazine, and other media reports.

The Neanderthals' paintings at three Spanish sites are at least 64,000 years old, based on uranium-thorium dating of calcium carbonate deposits, researchers said. The accompanying photo shows a ladder-like image with vertical and horizontal lines.

The discovery of the Neanderthals' paintings shows that they were capable of abstract, symbolic thought. That means they might have used language, according to a New York Times article.

The mainly red and black images, the oldest dated cave paintings in the world, include representations of various animals, linear signs, geometric shapes, hand stencils, and handprints, Science reported.

"Thus, Neanderthals possessed a much richer symbolic behavior than previously assumed," the magazine concludes.

After sharing the earth with humans for thousands of years, the Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago, possibly killed by their human cousins. Earlier research found interbreeding among humans and Neanderthals, and their DNA remains in our bodies.

Humans later did more elaborate cave paintings of animals, and their symbolic cognitive ability led to writing, religion, painting, and increasingly complex technology. It also brought prejudice and ideological and scientific abuses. Perhaps tribalism, the flip side of symbolic thought, led to the Neanderthals' demise.

The interactions between Neanderthals and humans remain mysterious. Did Neanderthals once rule, to be overthrown by humans? Were they victims of disease, environmental disruptions, or human warfare against them? Or did they disappear through interbreeding with humans?

Their cave paintings show they were very much like us.