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Dollar amounts to muddy waters on global warming

As massive storms cause catastrophic – and catastrophically expensive – damage to the built infrastructure, a weird and unnecessary thing happens. Actually, it doesn’t just happen. People make it happen and then make it worse, kind of like global warming:

Although traditional statistical methods cannot quantify the influence of greenhouse gases on rising disaster costs, many scientists say that global warming has intensified hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, which must be leading to greater economic losses.

“A lot of these extremes are really ramped up,” said Adam Smith, the NOAA climatologist who has led the billion-dollar disaster project for more than a decade. “If you want to act like nothing’s happening or it’s minimal, that’s just not the case in what we’ve seen in these extreme events in the United States.”

In September, Smith experienced a billion-dollar disaster firsthand when Hurricane Helene’s record rainfall overflowed the rivers that run through Asheville, N.C., where NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information is located. Smith and the other NCEI employees survived the floods, but the agency’s trove of meteorological data, including the billion-dollar disaster website, was knocked offline and remained inaccessible for weeks.

…

As the billion-dollar disaster tally climbs, the question grows more urgent: Is global warming to blame?

To answer that, it helps to first ask another question: What do scientists really mean when they say that global warming is causing a trend? For that matter, how does scientific knowledge get created in the first place? In the case of the billion-dollar disaster dataset, the answer begins with two self-described weather nerds at NOAA’s office in Asheville.

Come on people. There is no need to use one thing to confuse another. Unless you are trying to do that deliberately, in which case, not okay then.

The point becomes moot in the context of decades-earlier debates on whether it would be too expensive to do anything about global warming, and especially whether those amounts were alarmist. . As these get eclipsed by economic data adjustments and comparisons, the murky, cause-effect-correlation confusion sets in. It seems like a reasonable question to raise. But no more-perfect distraction has been designed than the billion-dollar disaster data set, other than the caveat farm itself where this story was harvested.

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Oil Sports

Like Soap Operas, only when you’re watching this week’s marquee match up® brought to you by our friends at BPExxonMobilShellConocoPhillipsChevron where “what’s a little feel good fossil fuel propaganda between friends?”

Well, the UCLA Emmet Institute on Climate Change & the Environment conducted a survey:

Many major league sports teams in the U.S. have sponsorship deals with some of the companies most responsible for the polluting products fueling climate change. But how many exactly?

This survey of 2024 sponsorships across six major league sports leagues in the U.S. reveals more than 60 recent deals with high-polluting companies. This includes sponsorship deals with oil and gas companies—most of them Big Oil’s household names. It also includes deals with lesser-known utility companies that generate electricity from fossil fuel-burning power plants and sell fossil gas directly to consumers. Not every team plays this way. This survey also highlights some that have chosen a different path.

LAT follows up with an easy-to-understand analogy:

If you’re wondering why this matters, I could tell you about research suggesting that fossil fuel companies, much like tobacco profiteers back in the day, pay off the owners of beloved institutions, including our favorite teams, to cleanse their dirty images — and lull us into forgetting that their noxious products are causing hotter heat waves,more intense wildfires and growing water scarcity (not to mention regular old deadly air pollution).

I could tell you about the research. Or I could ask you to imagine going to watch the Sacramento Kings — or the Giants, or the 49ers, or LAFC — and seeing a cigarette advertisement above the scoreboard. Or a gun ad.

Unimaginable, right? So why is Big Oil propaganda considered acceptable?

At some point, the shift in consciousness about banning fossil fuel ads will break through into legislation. It really has to. Though big statements are waiting to be redeemed for PR gold, public outcry won’t be enough. Because we may wince at the violence on the field/ice with the same grimace that we wince at these ads, allowing for both. As we consume that media – that’s what we’re doing – designed to make us think about some things rather than others, the next thing happens in our brains. Acceptance or rejection. Allowing the infringement of advertising does not allow for ambivalence. Marketers have thought of that, too. Ask me how I know.

Or better yet, start to notice the ads. In a different way.

Image via

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Never so much in common as this

Reminiscent of the fabled National Debt clock, Bloomberg Green sports a running, parts per million CO2 counter that clicks up and down at various speeds depending on, well, you can check it out.

Despite some with fancy hats acting interested in horse racing, versus others in famine-plagued refugee camps, there is a great bit of unanimity of experience in our current moment. Some dissonance concerning the effect of heat on the Miami Grand Prix notwithstanding, the inability to escape the unusual effects of global warming unites us all, on a way. Not the good kind, yet still, unity toutefois.

One of the questions is whether this great common crisis may elicit in us urgency for collective action that serves the greater good. And yes, cynicism circles the globe twice every morning before hopefulness pours its first cup. But this forced grouping of everyone with everyone else no matter your station under the banner of This Is Happening kicks our profit-maximizing distraction seeking onto a side street. And you know how people like to browse.

There are many things to see. Maybe you consider picking up something special – like something for someone everyone else.

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Apropos-eclipse

Making up things to fight, an interesting use of creative energy – if round is what you like. As we go in circles, we should at least tend the energy fires that are burning behind this particular chase.

God love the MBAs ( someone needs to), but every endeavor is not in need of being maximized for profit. Without the need to be philosophically opposed to financial gain, a re-alignment is in order, especially while we still know those words. Maybe a list of activities deserving special dispensation above net yield is in order – or maybe a reconsideration of ‘net’ and ‘yield’. Proposed exemptions:

Fire protection, water, public safety, health care.

But if we blaspheme bracket these, the human and physical infrastructure underlying them quickly follows: transportation, education, housing, food… the entire edifice of maximizing gains begins to crumble as soon as we grant agency to locking down any of its particular aspects. But we should still consider this! Again, while we can. That sounds like a scare tactic but the degree to which we have internalized the corporate ethos of business should terrify us – and does when/if we step back from it.

And again, it need not be the full socialismso, just set some standards and stick to them.

And if we need to do away with the internet because it’s not profitable, that’s fine. Things were okay before, and in terms of ‘net effect’ it’s really not helping.

Just something to consider when the light goes dim for a few minutes on Monday.

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Making Whether

This Bloomberg Cleaner Tech (!) article about whether humans can control forces beyond our control (the weather) accidentally highlights the ways we ignore the choices and actions well-within our grasp:

In an effort to control future rainstorms, scientists in Japan are working on an ambitious government-backed project involving everything from giant curtains floating on the sea to fields of wind turbines to protect the island nation. Their goal, they say, is to turn extreme weather into “a blessing” — if it works.

The effort feels ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, but it’s attracted dozens of researchers across Japan. The team, led by Kosei Yamaguchi, an associate professor at Kyoto University, is focused on reducing so-called “guerrilla” rainstorms that can bring large quantities of rainfall within a short period of time. Their goal is to develop an array of weather control technologies that can reduce deluges to manageable rain and roll them out by 2050.

It’s the shiny-object school of journalism – the very next words in that article are the subhead ‘Dams in the air’ – we need something new/fresh/exciting/risky/improbable/easy to attract eyeballs and viewers and clicks. What actually happens even when this works – and let’s not consider whether it’s the true function (whoopsie!) – is that people simply move on.

That’ simply moving on’ repeated over and over into perfection becomes its own feedback loop. Not sure ‘soothing’ is the right word, but numbness definitely follows. An ensuing restlessness opens the door to helplessness, what can I do, what does any of it matter? At the bottom of that fountain (l’eau impotable) lies despair. And adding in the crucial context for a business publication, of course Billions are at Stake. And they certainly are. But which billions, other billions, are left unconsidered.

Image: cloud seeding rocket (Photographer: Zhang Haiqiang/VCG/Getty Images)

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The Palo Alto System

Courtesy of the Review – subscribe and invest in media, whatever it is you read. The NYRB works for me – a review/discussion of two new books about the history of Silicon Valley. You’ll never guess the rationale behind the creation of Stanford the University. Wait – yes, sure you will:

Stanford wanted to breed stronger horses, faster. There was a clear business rationale: at the time, horses were essential for transportation, agriculture, and war. He proposed transforming horse production in the same way that the production of so many other commodities was being transformed during the second industrial revolution: with modern techniques and technologies. This modernizing mentality, as Harris demonstrates, was visible everywhere in California, which has been “a high-technology zone from the beginning of Anglo colonization.” Because there were never enough wage workers, the state relied particularly heavily on “labor-saving machinery” in agriculture, which by the 1860s had overtaken mining as its main economic driver.

The Palo Alto Stock Farm turned out to be a big success. The principal innovation was the Palo Alto System, which involved teaching horses to trot when they were young. That way, Stanford and his operatives could identify the promising ones early, train them intensively, and then use them as studs to produce more promising colts, thereby transmitting talent via superior genes. “Instead of optimizing for adult speed, they optimized for visible potential,” Harris writes.

The Palo Alto System didn’t stop with horses. It became the guiding philosophy of the university that Stanford carved out of his estate in 1885. Harris focuses in particular on David Starr Jordan, the university’s first president, whom Harris credits with bringing the Palo Alto System “out of the barn and into the classroom.” Like many self-styled modernizers of the period, Jordan loved eugenics. Under his direction, Harris argues, “the small, young university became a national center for controlled evolution.” Young white people with potential would be identified and intensively trained, in the hope of staving off racial decay.

One of the features of the Palo Alto System as it applied to horses was an obsession with quantification. As the system migrated to humans, this quantifying impulse turned toward intelligence testing. Lewis Terman, a psychologist who joined Stanford University in 1910, helped popularize the notion that intelligence could be expressed in a single number, such as an IQ score. He was especially interested in high-IQ children. “Budding geniuses needed to be identified and elevated,” Harris writes, “while young degenerates needed to be corralled where they couldn’t dilute the national race or turn their underachievement into social problems.”

And… once again, here we are. Racism continues to be our fundamental foundation, regardless of region. There is no realm in which the wealthy can’t channel their profits into their hatred. Great job, everybody.

Image: Palo Alto Stock Farm (Photos: Stanford Archives)

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Almost as If

Dr. K brings the medium, sensible heat today regarding Russian failures in Ukraine. It’s a good explainer without the jingoism, importantly including the economic offensives alongside the military ones that have been less than dispositive, or perhaps more so depending on your rooting interest.

But the kudos to Europe for not only resisting energy blackmail but in so doing, also for revealing that the planning and execution of the energy transition are well under way:

So what can we learn from the failure of Russia’s energy offensive?

First, Russia looks more than ever like a Potemkin superpower, with little behind its impressive facade. Its much vaunted military is far less effective than advertised; now its role as an energy supplier is proving much harder to weaponize than many imagined.

Second, democracies are showing, as they have many times in the past, that they are much tougher, much harder to intimidate, than they look.

Finally, modern economies are far more flexible, far more able to cope with change, than some vested interests would have us believe.

For as long as I can remember, fossil-fuel lobbyists and their political supporters have insisted that any attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be disastrous for jobs and economic growth. But what we’re seeing now is Europe making an energy transition under the worst possible circumstances — sudden, unexpected and drastic — and handling it pretty well. This suggests that a gradual, planned green energy transition would be far easier than pessimists imagine.

Read or listen to (not recommended!) the business news any day of the week and everything any normal person would consider good news – strong jobs report, tight labor market, increased consumer protections, penalizing reckless banking and investment behavior – is all cast in terms of doom and gloom. The sky is always falling and we can’t do this or have that and so stop wanting it and vote for more oppression of the powerless. Kick down, pull up the ladders, that’s all we can do.

What if – and yes, caution, slight optimism ahead – all of that is itself just a form of corruption? The fossil fuel industry, just as an obvious example, has been assuring us since the 1970s that it just can’t be done, there is no way to replace coal as our primary energy source, so stop trying. Wind stops blowing. Solar? Have you heard of nighttime? It’s too expensive, too impractical, is itself bad for the environment. Birds! Plus, people hate to see windmills. They don’t want electric cars. Meanwhile what has happened? What is happening?

What if we decided to get even more bold, rather than cowering in fear about what we’re afraid to do, that we are reminded we can’t do? What other issues out there might not be so inviolate?

Guns?

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Really Gross Domestic Product

Leading the index alongside racism, guns, and the forced birth, it’s pandering. And it’s not even close.

Dr. K takes on rural rage in a column this week:

In terms of resources, major federal programs disproportionately benefit rural areas, in part because such areas have a disproportionate number of seniors receiving Social Security and Medicare. But even means-tested programs — programs that Republicans often disparage as “welfare” — tilt rural. Notably, at this point rural Americans are more likely than urban Americans to be on Medicaid and receive food stamps.

And because rural America is poorer than urban America, it pays much less per person in federal taxes, so in practice major metropolitan areas hugely subsidize the countryside. These subsidies don’t just support incomes, they support economies: Government and the so-called health care and social assistance sector each employ more people in rural America than agriculture, and what do you think pays for those jobs?

What about rural perceptions of being disrespected? Well, many people have negative views about people with different lifestyles; that’s human nature. There is, however, an unwritten rule in American politics that it’s OK for politicians to seek rural votes by insulting big cities and their residents, but it would be unforgivable for urban politicians to return the favor. “I have to go to New York City soon,” tweeted J.D. Vance during his senatorial campaign. “I have heard it’s disgusting and violent there.” Can you imagine, say, Chuck Schumer saying something similar about rural Ohio, even as a joke?

Not without conniptions from across the spectrum, including the so-called liberal media – which would probably be leading the charge for apologies. That’s a sort of reflexive pandering that doesn’t even work, performance that no one believes nor allows credit but still happens. And it provides confirmation for the entire industrial pandering complex to double their efforts.

All the hokum about IRS funding we’re about to hear, in the same breath as concerns over budget deficits no less, is merely beating a drum that has been fine-tuned. A lot of this malfeasance lies at the feet of journalism schools and the savvy of corporate media. Politicians who are supposedly afraid of men in dresses and American history now traffic exclusively in hate, and whether it’s performative or not matters not a whit. The results are the same.

Rural voters and the politicians who fan their rage may also be entitled to find out that patience for their antics has limits. Like children, they are absolutely in search of them.

Image: Calculus 1, intro to limits, via the internet

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How to stop running if you hate it so much

Reverse of this real story in the WAPO. I mean, really.

When companies/governments go quiet about their so-called ESG efforts, whether it’s investing or actually taking steps to reduce their carbon print(s), to avoid criticism and backlash well, you know we are once again through the looking glass:

The phenomenon, known as green hushing, has become pervasive even as businesses set more ambitious internal targets, according to a survey by South Pole, a climate consultancy and carbon offsets developer.
South Pole surveyed 1,200 large companies from 12 different countries, all of which have set net-zero targets and more than two-thirds of which identify as “heavy emitters.” It found that although a majority of companies have set science-based targets to help them deliver on their commitments, 23% “don’t plan to publicize” them.
The findings suggest that the stigma of so-called greenwashing, where a company exaggerates its green credentials, is so feared that executives will do anything to avoid being accused of it. Being labeled a greenwasher brings with it reputational harm, financial damage and, increasingly, the scrutiny of regulators. And once tainted by such allegations, companies can struggle to resurrect their reputations.

But green hushing also comes at a cost, South Pole said.
“More than ever we need the companies making progress on sustainability to inspire their peers to make a start,” said Renat Heuberger, chief executive and co-founder of South Pole. “This is impossible if progress is happening in silence.”

So, it’s a preemptive PR move, if that makes you feel any better (Ed: it doesn’t). But it does remind us who/what companies serve first – their reputations. If everything is done for optics, what are we ultimately looking at? Much less seeing. We do well to keep this in mind across many contexts – which news stories, politicians, examples of corruption, coups d’etat get more play – all are choices. There’s nothing celestial about which news makes headlines. Someone decided.

It’s much the same with these companies who decide that ‘being quiet about it’ is just another tool in their climate tool box. People and planet need confirmation, verification, allies, and affirmation.

Apologies to Dylan Thomas but Do not go quiet into that good night,

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Skins in the game

sidewalk plaque in Charlottesville, Virginia plaque featured chalk graffiti added by local artist Richard Parks.
(Courtesy of Richard Parks)

As if we need reminding (ed: we do!), set aside how much we hate women and remember how racist we are! The discussion about American universities – especially our oldest, most venerable institutions of higher learning – and their deep connections to slavery has barely begun to break through, even and especially at our oldest, most venerable institutions. So, while the public remains largely unaware of the history, we might wonder how universities have for so long escaped scrutiny about the past – about how they were built, how they succeeded, who they succeeded for, and how so much of this was connected to buying and selling people to use as free labor. The NYRB dives into a four new books, and sets the stage rather clearly:

One reason, perhaps, that academic institutions were spared from scrutiny was that they seemed, by design, to be physically removed from the vulgar transactions of commercial life. The trading houses where merchants contracted for consignments of cotton, rum, molasses, and human chattel; the insurance firms that indemnified slave owners for loss of human property; the clothiers that manufactured coarse smocks for enslaved field hands—all these were likely to be found among shops and markets, close to the banks from which they obtained credit and the wharves where human goods were loaded or unloaded for sale.

Think, on the other hand, of our early colleges: Harvard on its bluff above the Charles River, or Yale looking across New Haven Green toward the Long Island Sound, or Brown atop the heights of Providence. Their architecture (ecclesiastical) and setting (pastoral) seemed to say, “We stand above the fray, removed from the workaday world, in a high-minded sphere of our own.” For people like me whose shelves are filled with books about these colleges, it’s not a bad idea to paste a note every foot or so along the edge of the shelf bearing this reminder from the novelist James McBride: “The web of slavery is sticky business. And at the end of the day, ain’t nobody clear of it.”

And friends, of course it’s not just the Ivies. The preponderance of screaming denials (CRT!) and counter-recriminations (Woke!) arise out of fear and cowardice about facing this history as it bleeds to profusely into our present. Can’t stop the bleeding without finding the wound, cleaning it carefully, repairing as much damage as possible, dressing it and providing all available care for full recuperation. Only then can we attend and check on the healing.

Image via WAPO