Scoreboard
?ï The de-growth movement -- the idea that we need to shrink the size of the human enterprise in order to deal with our predicament -- has gained traction in activist if not political circles. (I've written extensively about the ways that growth is no longer producing human happiness in the ways we expect, at least in rich countries). But Kelsey Piper, writing in Vox, argues that, because most new greenhouse-gas emissions are going to come from poor countries, which even de-growth advocates acknowledge need to expand, such a strategy may not accomplish as much as its proponents hope.
?ï Democratic senators led by Chris Van Hollen, of Maryland, offered legislation last week that would charge the big oil companies up to $500 billion dollars in climate damages. "It's based on a simple but powerful idea that polluters should pay to help clean up the mess they caused, and that those who polluted the most should pay the most," Van Hollen said.
?ï A truly depressing new computer model suggests that forest fires in California will increase dramatically this decade. And then they will decline, because there won't be much left to burn.
?ï ?ï As Maine, New York, and other jurisdictions begin divesting their pension plans from fossil fuels, activists are increasingly asking why the Biden Administration doesn't push to do the same with the federal Thrift Savings Plan, which provides retirement accounts for federal workers. The President has the power to appoint all the members of the board overseeing the retirement fund.
?ï Daniel K. Gardner, a co-organizer of the China Environmental Group, at Princeton University's High Meadows Environmental Institute, has an account of recent increases in China's use of coal. "The protests in Hong Kong, the trade war with the U.S. and the COVID-19 pandemic have shifted Chinese policymakers' focus away from environmental reform," he writes in the Los Angeles Times. "So, too, has the slowdown in growth in China's gross domestic product and the rise in unemployment. The government has been more interested in stimulating traditional, energy-intensive industries such as steel, iron and cement." Gardner proposes a face-to-face summit between Biden and President Xi Jinping.
?ï With electric vehicles parked on the South Lawn of the White House, the President last week announced a commitment from the auto industry to be selling as many electric vehicles as gas-powered cars by 2030. Some environmentalists expressed doubts, however: the Union of Concerned Scientists said that loopholes in the plan make it barely stronger than Obama-era mileage standards.
Warming Up
Honor the Earth, one of the Indigenous-led groups fighting the Line 3 tar-sands pipeline, in Minnesota, is planning an open-air concert in Duluth next week, featuring, among others, Bon Iver, in its first live appearance of the pandemic era. Police are growing increasingly heavy-handed with nonviolent protesters along the upper Mississippi, where pipeline construction is under way: one of them, Tara Houska, showed welts on her arms left by rubber bullets. And activists are growing increasingly angry: here's the Honor the Earth founder, Winona LaDuke, in the Times, accusing the Biden Administration of betraying Native Americans.
Bill McKibben
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