From amyh at texnology.com Thu May 26 10:39:40 2022 From: amyh at texnology.com (Amy Hendrickson) Date: Thu, 26 May 2022 13:39:40 -0400 Subject: [Act-ma_discuss] More info on climate activism and what we are up against Message-ID: <0b0601d87127$93ffaea0$bbff0be0$@texnology.com> Terrific email from Mary Sabolsi! This is the kind of passion that is needed to get something to happen if we are to save our climate and life on earth!! Here is more information that I gathered for Physicians for Social Responsibility; I think that it is perhaps hopeful that we `only' need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground. After all it is only a small percent of the human population that is making money off selling it and polluting the planet, whereas there are a lot more people that will suffer from its use if they are allowed to continue. ==================== More info on the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/08/climate-crisis-fossil-fuels-ground Good article in the Guardian breaks down the amount that cannot be used by country. The US needs not to use 97 percent of our coal, not to use 31 percent of our oil, and 52 percent of our gas reserves, according to an article in Nature. "In May, an IEA report concluded that there could be no new oil, gas or coal development if the world was to reach net zero by 2050. A UN report in December found fossil fuel production must fall rapidly to keep under 1.5C and avoid ?severe climate disruption? but that countries were planning increased outputs. The new research, published in the journal Nature, used a complex model of global energy use that prioritised use of the fossil fuels that are cheapest to extract, such as Saudi oil, in using up the remaining carbon budget. Costly and highly polluting reserves, such as Canada?s tar sands and Venezuelan oil, are left in the ground in the model." ---- The UN Sustainable Development Goals is a good source of information and study on climate issues, although I didn't see anything in a quick glance on the topic of keeping hydrocarbons in the ground. https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal13 https://sdgs.un.org/news/call-inputs-global-sustainable-development-report-2023-34347 ====== I find it interesting in following cultural shifts when discussing climate change-- it seems to me that only recently people have been looking directly at the oil companies and the necessity to stop putting greenhouse gases into our shared global commons; earlier people were trying to wriggle out of this problem by talking about drawdown and direct carbon capture, and planting trees. But by now it is pretty clear that it would make a lot more sense to not put the GHG in the atmosphere, full stop. Oil Change International is taking on the companies directly. ---- Another important new organization is ScientistRebellion, https://scientistrebellion.com/ We are scientists, calling for a climate revolution who recently had demonstrations in many locations around the world, including a small subset in Boston on Earth Day. More info at link. ================================== Apropos the fossil fuel companies? See the Yale study linked below on the $5.9 Trillion yearly that is given by the US and several other governments to the fossil fuel companies!! https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trillion-in-subsidies-in-2020-report-finds#:~:text=Fossil%20Fuels%20Received%20%245.9%20Trillion%20In%20Subsidies%20in%202020%2C%20Report%20Finds,-An%20open%2Dpit &text=Coal%2C%20oil%2C%20and%20natural%20gas,8%20percent%20of%20the%20total. Coal, oil, and natural gas received $5.9 trillion in subsidies in 2020 ? or roughly $11 million every minute ? according to a new analysis from the International Monetary Fund. Explicit subsidies accounted for only 8 percent of the total. The remaining 92 percent were implicit subsidies, which took the form of tax breaks or, to a much larger degree, health and environmental damages that were not priced into the cost of fossil fuels, according to the analysis. ?Underpricing leads to overconsumption of fossil fuels, which accelerates global warming and exacerbates domestic environmental problems including losses to human life from local air pollution and excessive and road congestion and accidents,? authors wrote. ?This has long been recognized, but globally countries are still a long way from getting energy prices right.? The report found that 47 percent of natural gas and 99 percent of coal is priced at less than half its true cost, and that just five countries ? China, the United States, Russia, India, and Japan ? account for two-thirds of subsidies globally. All five countries belong to the G20, which in 2009 agreed to phase out ?inefficient? fossil fuel subsidies ?over the medium term.? -------------------------------------- Solidarity, Amy Hendrickson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: