A festering carcass

By Oliver Kornetzke 

Trump derangement syndrome

By Drew Sheneman

Weather control machine

Don't know who the cartoonist is.  If you know, let me know so I can give attribution. 

China's EV/PHEV sales just keep on booming

Currently, EV/PHEVs make up more than 50% of China's car sales.  Note that the growth rate has slowed (the line is rising more slowly), but it's still running at 45% YoY (lower chart).  At this growth rate, the 50% market share will rise to 72% next year, and 100% the year after.  It's not going to happen, I hear you cry.  Well, maybe not, because as we get closer to 100%, the growth rate will inevitably slow.  But I wouldn't discount it altogether.  China wants to be independent of oil imports from unreliable oil producers, shipped across shipping lanes which geopolitics (Trump) could close.  Remember, it will take 15 years for the whole car fleet to be electric, even when EVs hit 100% market share.  And plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) will also have to stop being produced and sold.  Could be a couple of years more.

Politicians will sell out the planet to the dirtiest bidders

From The Guardian

To understand this moment, we have to recognise that there is an existential struggle on both sides. While environmental scientists and activists fight for the very survival of the habitable planet, the fossil fuel, meat and internal combustion industries are fighting for their economic survival. Either they are regulated out of existence or human society across much of the world will fail. We cannot all win: either these industries survive or we do. But we can all lose, because, eventually, they will go down with the rest of us.

But “eventually” counts for nothing in their spreadsheets and annual reports. “Eventually” has no effect on share prices and dividends. “Eventually” has little traction in a four- or five-year political cycle. So, as the evidence of climate breakdown becomes undeniable to all but the most deluded, the pollutocrats must fight as never before. There was once a widespread belief (which some of us cautioned against) that governments would step up when – and only when – disaster struck. But it is precisely because disaster has struck, visibly and undeniably, that they are stepping down.


To buy himself a few more months of political survival, Rishi Sunak, representing a party that has recently taken £3.5m from major polluters and climate deniers, is threatening the welfare of the human species. He has switched, over the past fortnight, from doing a grand total of nothing to prevent climate chaos to actively sabotaging both the climate programmes he inherited and the efforts of other public bodies.

How can you tell when a politician is doing the work of the oil and gas companies? When they start promoting carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS has been the magic fix for climate breakdown promised by successive UK governments for 20 years – and never delivered. Most of the very few projects brought to fruition around the world have been abject failures.

The sole purpose of CCS is to justify the granting of more oil and gas licences, on the grounds that one day someone might be able to capture and bury the CO2 they produce. It’s no coincidence that Sunak announced both policies – more licences and CCS – in the same statement. It would be wrong to say the technology doesn’t work. It works precisely as intended, even if it never materialises: it is a highly successful method of buying more time for the fossil fuel industry.

But the worst thing Sunak has done is something few people have noticed. Underpinning the UK’s climate programme, weak and contradictory as it has always been, was the carbon market. The promise of successive governments, in and out of the EU, was that, by putting a price on carbon pollution, they would ensure that industries had no option but to switch to greener technologies. A further promise by the Conservatives was that, after Brexit, there would be no decline in environmental standards. But Sunak’s government has quietly been flooding the UK market with pollution permits, triggering a collapse in the price of carbon. While the carbon price in the EU emissions trading scheme stands at €88 (£75) a tonne, in the UK it has fallen to £47.

In the US, Donald Trump’s team plans to go much further. A programme devised for him by fossil fuel-funded junktanks intends to rip down just about every effective law and agency protecting the living world. If he gets in again, it seems as if he doesn’t intend to leave.

Sunak, Trump and others know what they are doing. They cannot be unaware of the heat domes and fires, the sea surface temperature anomalies and the shocking news from Antarctica. Their economic and security advisers must have briefed them about the likely civilisational risks presented by the closing of the human climate niche. In response, they double down on their support for the forces causing this destruction.

People seem mystified by this apparent perversity. But it’s a clear manifestation of the pollution paradox, which I see as essential to understanding modern politics. The most damaging companies have the greatest incentive to invest money in politics (by making donations to political parties, funding lobbyists and junktanks, hiring troll farms and microtargeters and all the other overt or covert techniques). So politics, in our money-driven system, comes to be dominated by the most damaging companies.

Sunak, Trump and many others like them are not just desperate politicians who will try anything to retain or regain power (though they are that). Nor are they simply representatives of capital. They are representatives of the dirtiest, most destructive varieties of capital, the varieties engaged in a war against humanity. In the conflict between the two existential crises, they know which side they’re on.

‘More oil and gas licences are justified on the grounds that one day someone might be able to capture and bury the CO2 they produce.’ Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

What denialists say now

 By Ruben Bolling

Meanwhile at Twitter

By de Adder 

Worst July on record for wildfires

 From The Guardian

Last month was the world’s worst July for wildfires since at least 2003 when satellite records began, scientists have said, as swaths of North America, Siberia, Africa and southern Europe continue to burn.

Driven by extreme heat and prolonged drought, the ignition of forests and grasslands released 343 megatonnes of carbon, about a fifth higher than the previous global peak for July, which was set in 2014.

“This stands out by a clear margin,” said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist in the EU’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, which estimates the carbon releases. “The July global total this year is the highest since our records began in 2003.”

The unprecedented mid-summer burn is the latest in a series of unwelcome recent records that underscore the destructive impacts of human-driven global heating.

More than half of the carbon came from two regions – North America and Siberia – that have experienced unusually hot and dry weather. In western Canada and the US, forest fires have followed protracted and intense heatwaves. In Siberia, much of the taiga in the Sakha Republic has been engulfed in flames and clouds of toxic smoke that have drifted as far as the north pole.

The global conflagration is widening to the eastern and central Mediterranean, where many nations are encountering an unusually fierce start to the fire season.

Last week, the heat intensity from fires in Turkey was four times higher than the previous daily national record. So far this year, 128,000 hectares (316,000 acres) have burned – eight times higher than the average, according to the European Forest Fire Information System.

What will it take for our politicians to stop pocketing bribes from fossil fuels companies to do something about slashing emissions?

Vaccination rates by country

 Herd immunity probably requires at least 70% of the population be vaccinated.  Only one country has reached that, though others are close.  It's instructive to look at the difference between Canadian ans US levels.  In Canada, all parties support vaccination.  In the USA, the Republicans and their QAnon allies maintain that Covid is fake, the vaccines dangerous, and that it's all part of a communist plot.  Demented.

I am so angry

 For a long time, it was possible to say that climate change was just a lot of leftist bleeding-heart pointy-headed intellectuals whingeing. I mean, data? Trends? Charts? How we laughed.

But we can all see, with our own eyes, that it's happening. 50 degrees C in Canada? C'mon, Canada? Bushfires north of the Arctic circle? Record heat, again and again. One-in-a-thousand-year floods/droughts happening every second year. Temperatures so high that people are just dying. It's happening right now, everywhere.

And the oil and coal companies did their level best to misinform and to lie, to harass climate scientists, to buy politicians, to stop or slow the transition to clean energy. They deserve no pity, no indulgence. The collapse of our environment is now obvious, and they have made it worse.

It is true that even paid-off and depreciated coal is now more expensive than new-build wind and solar, almost everywhere. But the coal miners and power stations are not going to go quietly. They're going to ask for subsidies to keep going. They're calling them 'capacity supports', just in case renewables don't provide all the power needed. Never mind that for the billions they're asking, we could put in enough batteries to give us power for hours and hours.

They're labelling themselves 'green', with lots of feel-good ads featuring families and chortling babies, happy little penguins, green forests. They are not. There is no such thing as green oil or clean coal. But if they can bamboozle us for another few years, then their jobs and their bonuses and their Bentleys are safe.

We need to cut emissions by half this decade. By half. If we do that, then the decade-by-decade rise in temperatures, currently ~0.2 degrees C, will also halve, and we stand a chance of limiting the increase to 1.7 degrees by 2050. We're already up by 1.2 degrees since pre-industrial levels.  And look how bad things are now!

Yes, the writing is on the wall for coal and oil. But their lie departments are working full time on techniques to keep the fountains of money flowing, at our cost. Don't be misled by the cutesy ads. They've never cared about us, and if they could, they would ban wind turbines and solar panels and electric cars, and bugger the climate. Bugger us.

I am so angry.

Cutesy oil company ad

Denialists getting angrier

From Medium:

Climate change deniers are getting angrier and angrier because there is less and less ground that they can even moderately stand upon. They are being forced off of multiple positions and the world is ignoring their opinions en masse.

People used to be able to believe that warming wasn’t occurring without much cognitive dissonance.

In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas, or values, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

More and more, their position is being challenged in multiple ways, and they are being forced to greater and greater mental leaps in order to hold on to their position. But even when they move, it’s stressful and embarrassing, leading to more anger.

Cognitive dissonance makes people mad. Being forced to change makes people mad. Being forced to admit, even subconsciously, that they were wrong and were often wrong publicly and loudly, makes people mad.

I created this continuum of positions on climate change a while ago. It ranges from the extreme of not believing that any warming is occurring at all, to believing in impacts above the range of IPCC scenarios.

Some people, in the face of overwhelming evidence, continue to hold to the position that warming isn’t occurring. Most who held it have been forced off of it. They have been forced to change by the sheer weight of evidence which says that they are wrong. But usually they just move slightly to the right on the continuum.

A lot of people who firmly held the belief that CO2 emissions from humans were insignificant have been forced off of that position too. And every position to the left of the chart. Basically, the leftmost positions are intellectually and empirically untenable, so anyone with a fragment of intellectual self-respect who holds them is confronted daily with evidence that gives them cognitive dissonance, and if they move to a slightly more moderate position for relief, it doesn’t help much.

What evidence of the shift to the right exists? Well, an Australian organization has surveyed people about their positions since 2010 and finds regular movement, and an acceleration in it.

And in the USA, despite recent events, climate change is shaping up to be a game-changing election issue, with denialists increasingly unable to get elected, and once again with recent rapid strides.

The new survey found a growing number of registered voters understand global warming is happening: “Three in four (73%, up 7 points since Spring 2014) now think it is happening. Large majorities of Democrats — liberal (95%) and moderate/conservative (80%) — think it is happening, as do three in four Independents (74%, up 15 points since Spring 2014) and the majority of liberal/moderate Republicans (71%, up 10 points).”

Basically, the further to the left on the chart you are, the more likely you are to be bitter and angry. But anyone to the left of the low-end IPCC projections is likely to be annoyed and dismayed and lash out occasionally.

As to why they are so common, that’s simple. A group of self-interested companies and individuals set out on a course of creating uncertainty about climate change far beyond any that existed a couple of decades ago. It worked. Sadly.

[There's more.  Read it here]

Climate change vs Noah

US trend growth has nearly halved

The chart shows US real GDP, with two long-term trends, plotted on a log scale.  A key factor in the lower growth rate since 2009 has been the fact that the economy recovered so sluggishly after the GFC.  It did much better than Europe, though, because the Obama administration was prepared to run huge deficits to get the economy restarted.  In Europe the EU forced weaker countries to tighten policy, causing a economic "double-dip" and 10 wasted years.

But I think a second factor is the way that the income of ordinary people stopped growing in real terms.  This made it much harder for GDP to grow as it had done before.  The shift of income upwards to the 10% and the 1% reduced growth.  Enlightened millionaires and billionaires should be in favour of a whole range of progressive ideas, such as increasing the minimum wage, spending more on education to uplift workers, a better health system, and so on, because they would increase growth which means they (the wealthy) would also be better off.  Enlightened self interest.

Don't hold your breath.

And now, we are about to enter a recession, with prob'ly a long period of sluggish growth, which will reduce trend growth even further.

Welcome to the future

Climate denialists are still out there, still spruiking their dotty denial of basic science.  But Exxon knew about the risks of global warming way back in 1982.  And proceeded to fund denialist websites, politicians, and stinktanks.  Their disgraceful lies and propaganda were then picked up by the hate-for-hire politicians and the toxic sludge of right-wing media, such as the Murdochcracy.   So successful have these malignant low-lifes been that there are still some ordinary folk who believe that the science isn't settled (it is) and that transitioning to a carbon-free economy will cause economic collapse (it won't, whereas inactivity on climate will).  But Exxon's scientists got it exactly right.  They forecast that CO₂ would reach 415 parts per million (ppm) by 2020 (the highest in 3 million years.) And it has.  They forecast the consequent global temperature rise of 0.9 degrees C.  And we reached that in 2017.

Next time someone tells you that the models haven't correctly predicted global temperatures, point out that the earliest model, by the scientists at an oil company, got it right.

From Climate Denialist Crock of the Week (Peter Sinclair)

For the record, here's what actually happened to the temperature since 1970:

Source: NOAA

Saying and doing

Two reports show how companies are talking big about how they care about climate change and that they are "committed" to dealing with it.  Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they continue to support global warming.

From DeSmogBlog:

A new report by a British think tank estimates that since the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world’s five largest listed oil and gas companies spent more than $1 billion lobbying to prevent climate change regulations while also running public relations campaigns aimed at maintaining public support for climate action.

Combined, the companies spend roughly $200 million a year pushing to delay or alter climate and energy rules, particularly in the U.S. — while spending $195 million a year “on branding campaigns that suggest they support an ambitious climate agenda,” according to InfluenceMap, a UK-based non-profit that researches how corporations influence climate policy.

InfluenceMap cites as an example ExxonMobil’s heavily-touted algae-biofuels research, which the oil giant says “offers some of the greatest promise for next-generation biofuels” with significant climate benefits and has made it the focus of its “The Tiny Organism” ad campaign.

InfluenceMap notes that “detailed disclosures from the company show its goal of 10,000 barrels of bio-fuel a day would equate to only 0.2 percent of its current refinery capacity.”

Oil industry spending on Facebook and Instagram ads leading up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.

From EcoWatch:

A report published Wednesday names the banks that have played the biggest recent role in funding fossil fuel projects, finding that since 2016, immediately following the Paris agreement's adoption, 33 global banks have poured $1.9 trillion into financing climate-changing projects worldwide.


The top four banks that invested most heavily in fossil fuel projects are all based in the U.S., and include JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi and Bank of America. Royal Bank of Canada, Barclays in Europe, Japan's MUFG, TD Bank, Scotiabank and Mizuho make up the remainder of the top 10. 

This report comes as March has already brought deadly weather to places such as the American Midwest, where historic flooding has left four dead and farm losses could reach $1 billion, and Mozambique, where Tropical Cyclone Idai has devastated the East African country and President Filipe Nyusi estimated that more than a thousand people are likely dead.

Both disasters have been linked to climate change. "Increased flooding is one of the clearest signals of a changing climate," said 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben in a statement published by ThinkProgress, adding that flooded Nebraska's "current trauma is part of everyone's future."

Nebraska flooding

Politicians, companies, billionaires have started talking the talk, because it's obvious to everyone that global warming is happening and will be catastrophic, and that ordinary people are afraid and concerned.  But they are not walking the walk. 

 Time to call them out.  We have just 30 years to get to zero emissions.  To reach that goal, emissions must fall by 9% per annum, compound.  In fact, last year they went up.  We are losing the fight.

Trump is God's plan

Top tax rates

A cartoon mocking Howard Schultz by Tom Tomorrow of The Nib.  The top income tax rates from 1932 to 1981 exceeded 60%.

The wall

A cartoon by Jim Morin

Ban doors

Where truth goes to die