Big corporations, golf courses and hotels have been taking water from locals for years. Now the fire may result in even more devastating water theft

“Projected global emissions from (national pledges) place limiting global warming to 1.5C beyond reach and make it harder after 2030 to limit warming to 2C,” the panel said. In other words, the report’s co-chair, James Skea of Imperial College London, told The Associated Press: “If we continue acting as we are now, we’re not even going to limit warming to 2 degrees, never mind 1.5 degrees.” Ongoing investments in fossil fuel infrastructure and clearing large swaths of forest for agricultu […] It’s more likely that the world will pass 1.5C and efforts will then need to be made to bring temperatures back down again, including by removing vast amounts of carbon dioxide — the main greenhouse gas — from the atmosphere. Many experts say this is unfeasible with current technologies, and even if it could be done it would be far costlier than preventing the emissions in the first place. The report, numbering thousands of pages, doesn’t single out individual countries for blame. But the figures show much of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere was released by rich countries that were the first to burn coal, oil and gas beginning with the industrial revolution. […] “We don’t actually have a remaining carbon budget to burn,” said King, who now chairs the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. “It’s just the reverse. We’ve already done too much in the way of putting greenhouse gases up there,” he said, arguing that the IPCC’s calculation omits new risks and potentially self-reinforcing effects already happening, such as the increased absorption of heat into the oceans from sea ice loss and the release of methane as permafrost melts. Such warnings were echoed by U.N. chief Guterres, citing scientists’ warnings that the planet is moving “perilously close to tipping points that could lead to cascading and irreversible climate impacts.” “But high-emitting governments and corporations are not just turning a blind eye; they are adding fuel to the flames,” he said, calling for an end to further coal, oil and gas extraction. “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.”

A dispatch from under the heat dome that shattered temperature records in the Pacific Northwest --- In a city deadened by heat, the only hive of activity I spotted was at the public park that was the epicenter of Portland’s street protests and federal occupation last year. A half-dozen activists sat in folding chairs, camped under a canopy tent that read “Community Jail Support.” They were set up, as usual, to provide what leftists call “mutual aid,” to people exiting jail at the county Justice Center, as well as to a homeless encampment lining the nearby sidewalk. Tables and a shopping cart were stacked with water and Gatorade bottles dropped off by volunteers dedicated to serving these communities. Portland is not built for this heat. About a third of Portlanders have no air conditioning. That rises to well over half of residents in nearby Seattle. But I’m not sure any place is built for this heat. And that’s the problem. The emerging extremes of climate change are survivable with the right infrastructure. But our legacy infrastructure literally buckles and melts under this new reality.

"Climate change isn't your grandchildren's problem, it’s yours.” --- “There are wide disparities in who is being exposed to the heat,” she said. “For the privileged, it’s an inconvenience. Other individuals don’t have a choice.” Among those most affected are those who have no readily available shelter, people experiencing homelessness and people who work in agriculture or construction. […] Researchers at Portland State University found that areas historically subject to racist housing discrimination policies such as red-lining are home to “urban heat islands” where temperatures can sometimes be as much as 13 degrees hotter than other parts of the city. These areas have historically been denied investments in greenspace and tree cover that act as cooling mechanisms in more affluent parts of Portland.

Here are all the currently active wildfires in the U.S. Click on a marker for more info. We check federal websites for updates every 30 minutes.

A map of wildfires currently burning in California and elsewhere in the western and northwestern US.

This crisis is a chance to rebuild our economy for the good of humanity. Let’s bail out the living world, not its destroyers, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot. --- Governments should provide financial support to company workers while refashioning the economy to provide new jobs in different sectors. They should prop up only those sectors that will help secure the survival of humanity and the rest of the living world. They should either buy up the dirty industries and turn them towards clean technologies, or do what they often call for but never really want: let the market decide. In other words, allow these companies to fail. […] The only meaningful reform is fewer flights. Anything that impedes the contraction of the aviation industry impedes the reduction of its impacts. […] In other words, let’s have what many people were calling for long before this disaster hit: a green new deal. But please let’s stop describing it as a stimulus package. We have stimulated consumption too much over the past century, which is why we face environmental disaster. Let us call it a survival package, whose purpose is to provide incomes, distribute wealth and avoid catastrophe, without stoking perpetual economic growth. Bail out the people, not the corporations. Bail out the living world, not its destroyers. Let’s not waste our second chance.

The singer-composer offers a call to action and discusses why her defining environmental song is more urgent than ever. --- You ask, “What can we do?” You can talk to everyone you know about this on a constant basis and try to create consensus about it. You can create groups of people and think tanks to try to counter the billionaire-subsidized think tanks that are forming our current trajectory as a species. If there’s anything you can do, it’s to get profoundly involved. Like, quit your fucking job and do something useful. Hold yourself accountable. It’s painful, I can say that from experience. You’re going to have to sit with your own hypocrisy. And then you have to get real comfortable with people telling you that you’re a killjoy.

How one Swedish teenager armed with a homemade sign ignited a crusade and became the leader of a movement. --- Thunberg’s face was controlled fury. This was the persona: an adolescent iron-willed truth teller. The Davos one-percenters clapped and rattled their Rolexes. It has become a disconcerting pattern for Thunberg appearances that would be repeated at the European Commission: Greta tells the adults they are fools and their plans are lame and shortsighted. They still give her a standing ovation. A few minutes later, she was gone and the audience dispersed into a fleet of black BMWs and Mercedes, belching diesel into the Alpine sky. […] The irony of the Greta Age is that we now have options, but refuse to take them. Clean-energy technology has evolved to a point where old arguments that fossil fuels remain the cheapest way to create energy are now obviously nonsense. The cost of clean energy is no longer a barrier to change. Over the past decade, it became an obvious truth: Burning fossil fuels no longer made economic sense anywhere, anytime. What remains is the power and influence of the energy conglomerate superpowers to maintain the status quo. No politician has the courage to face them down. By 2018, it became even clearer that politicians could not be trusted. Talk was wasted. Companies would continue to put profits before nature. We were on our own. And that’s when Greta came along. […] “I’m very weak in a sense,” says Thunberg quietly. “I’m very tiny and I am very emotional, and that is not something people usually associate with strength. I think weakness, in a way, can be also needed because we don’t have to be the loudest, we don’t have to take up the most amount of space, and we don’t have to earn the most money.”

Earth Day should be a time for thinking about time. --- Just as a satellite view shocks us with the strange beauty of our seemingly familiar home, Earth Day has the potential to give us a new temporal perspective. There is no natural basis for a week or a decade, and the endless extractive growth that corporations project has no analogue in nature. Earth's clock is richer than the Western manmade clock, an overlapping set of rhythms in which many scales coexist: not only days and seasons but also tides, flowering events, ecological successions, and geologic accumulations. […] I would like Earth Day to be like that: a pause for consideration, a day unlike other days, a time for thinking about time. Some things are visible only from a remove. Let this day be a porthole through which we look out on the vastness of ecological time, laughing in retrospect at our small-minded schedules and wondering how we might think and act in different ones. If we agreed to do that, I wouldn't be surprised if the effects of Earth Day cascaded into all our other days.

She says 'Miss Anthropocene' is about making "climate change fun"—and she can't stop talking about her hopes for an AI-driven future. But she might just be playing with our perceptions. --- But the Internet is notoriously good at simplifying the messiness of reality into cut-and-dry projections of our deepest hopes and fears—symbols so gripping that they can sometimes cause us to make assumptions that go against our values. To believe that Grimes has made an album designed to spread good faith in Silicon Valley is to undermine her intelligence and agency as an artist, one whose artistic reckoning with the world—and her place within it—has never been anything close to straightforward. The trouble with owning one's perceived badness so completely that you transform yourself into a literal demon, though, is that it's a bit of an out. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to use technology to democratize music-making, or to offset our reliance on fossil fuels—but it's hard to take techno-optimism seriously when its proponents also seem strangely blind to the world that exists right in front of them. In the realm of business, that blindness can take the form of building a fortune partly based on the idea that you're trying to stop climate change while also discouraging your employees from unionizing. In the realm of art, it can mean getting so carried away by the grand design of your vision that you fail to realize that it's motivated by something a bit solipsistic, a mirror of your unique prison of pain. At worst, it can produce art that is less a reflection of shared experience than a vision of the world that was dreamed up in a corporate boardroom, by people who have the luxury of turning existential crises into an entertaining thought-exercise.

This is really dark and really sad and probably our actual future.

I’m not very into this album but this review absolutely nails it. Grimes’ first project as a bona fide pop star is more morose than her previous work, but no less camp. Her genuineness shines through the album’s convoluted narrative, and the songs are among her finest. --- So much about the actual music of Miss Anthropocene succeeds that the choice to bury it below a warped—and yes, misanthropic—concept about “The Environment” makes it hard to connect with who Grimes is as an artist today. Standing in the way of humans reckoning with climate emergency are multiple delusions: that wealth brings freedom, that boundless acquisition and unchecked growth remain tenable, and that political and economic institutions are inherently trustworthy actors. Grimes sounds like the pop star she’s worked very hard to become, but her imagination seems diminished—or, like many of her celebrity ilk, is cordoned off in a bubble floating above the rest of humanity. In 2020, revolutionary pop stardom might try to clarify, rather than obscure, the havoc that systems wreak when it comes to, say, gender roles and social compliance, technology and surveillance capitalism, nationalism and land exploitation, or whiteness and pathological denial.

Putting climate change in perspective. When people say "The climate has changed before," these are the kinds of changes they're talking about.

For as long as I can remember, climate campaigns have been animated by the same basic idea: big ad outreach, lots of strange bedfellows from the military, business, or celebrity worlds, educational town halls, all pushing for broader awareness and engagement on the issue. These campaigns avoid specific policies or politicians out of fear of being divisive. They seek, like Kerry, to bring everyone together around the table. […] There have been many, many credulous stories over the years, starting in the early 2000s, that conservatives are on the verge of coming around on climate change — that the youth are demanding change and a few brave Republicans are speaking up. The narrative rarely changes; the list of brave Republicans rarely changes; the heralded shift never arrives. Yet Democrats, especially those who consider themselves moderate and open to compromise, have trouble letting go of the dream. […] All young people today have ever seen is Republicans trying to tear those institutions down. They witnessed the theft of the 2000 presidential election; 9/11; the horrifically botched response to 9/11; the Iraq War; Hurricane Katrina; the 2008 financial crisis; the Tea Party’s frenzied resistance to the first black president; the birther conspiracy and the endless conspiracy theories to follow; and finally, the triumph of Donald Trump and unbridled American white supremacy. […] The Democratic elite has always seemed to believe that there’s a large, silent, persuadable middle out there that just needs to be told the news about climate change. But youth activists believe that the lines have been drawn, left and right, and most everybody is already on one side or another. “There is no conservative or moderate solution to climate change,” Evan Weber of the Sunrise Movement told me. “There’s no quick market fix or easy bipartisan compromise waiting to be had. Actual solutions to climate change go against everything that the Republican Party stands for, and dealing with the climate crisis through a ‘moderate’ approach will mean the suffering and death of untold millions.” […] Because the left is an unwieldy coalition of diverse interest groups and the right is more ethnically and ideologically homogeneous (see Matt Grossman’s Asymmetric Politics), the conflict often shakes out as: the left’s climate people vs. the entire right (and some parts of the left); the left’s labor people vs. the entire right (and some parts of the left); the left’s poverty people vs. the entire right (and some parts of the left); the left’s judicial reform people vs. the entire right (and some parts of the left); and so on. Because the right sees a lump of evil everywhere outside its bubble, it is always mobilized, hyped up by a paranoid media ecosystem to see the threat of socialism behind every tax credit or efficiency standard. The left can rarely summon such intense unanimity, except perhaps on Social Security, LGBTQ marriage, and a few other issues. Long story short, lots and lots of people who agree that climate change is a problem and that something ought to be done are nonetheless sitting out elections and the larger political process. They don’t need to be educated or made more aware. They need someone to pull their asses off the couch and get them voting and fighting. […] Lovers of bipartisanship are forever saying that a truly comprehensive solution to climate change is only possible with bipartisan support, and that may be true. But unified Republican opposition is making bipartisan cooperation impossible, and there’s no time to wait.

I don’t think Baby Boomers did this. I think capitalism did, and there’s something both depoliticizing and isolating about the generational frame. There are people in every generation who tried so hard to stop this from happening, who raised the alarm, and people who died in the struggle. I think movements that are just of young people tend to be short lived. On the other hand, indigenous movements, and many other movements that have been fighting for hundreds of years, have a role for every generation to play, and that’s part of how we protect these young people with so much courage.

Of course, children have a rich tradition of taking political action on their own behalf. Just as kids have sexuality (whether adults like it or not), they also have politics (whether adults like it or not). During the early twentieth century, American children organized against their own labor exploitation. During the civil rights movement, black kids brave enough to integrate white schools drew admiration and sympathy, often far more than the adults putting their bodies on the line to integrate lunch counters and public transit. On television, the sight of these children, facing extreme racism, dressed in their Sunday best, with such serious faces, explaining to reporters, in a matter-of-fact way, their intention to attend school, had a profound effect on white American consciousness. We admire such children, at least when we support their cause. Yet we greet their political involvement with a sense of unease. The more we sympathize, the more we see their activism as a sign of how bad things are. It makes us feel, as adults, that we’ve failed. Kids shouldn’t have to take political action to stop mass human extinction or keep armed madmen out of their schools. Those who do are like the children of alcoholics who have to care for the parents, get dinner on the stove, and put the little brother to bed. Western societies—though it is not only the West that clings to this construct—believe that childhood is supposed to be a separate, playful, safe realm, protected from sordid grown-up business. Kids are supposed to be kids, doing kid things. […] One reason to fight for a better world is to allow all kids a real childhood, free not only from climate change and gun violence, but also from poverty and war—so that they can do profoundly inconsequential stuff.

Bill McKibben on what would happen if the banking, asset-management, and insurance industries decided to move away from fossil fuels, and on how the financial sector affects climate change. --- Persuading giant financial firms to give up even small parts of their business would be close to unprecedented. And inertia is a powerful force—there are whole teams of people in each of these firms who have spent years learning the fossil-fuel industry inside and out, so that they can lend, trade, and underwrite efficiently and profitably. Those people would have to learn about solar power, or electric cars. That would be hard, in the same way that it’s hard for coal miners to retrain to become solar-panel installers. But we’re all going to have to change—that’s the point. Farmers around the world are leaving their land because the sea is rising; droughts are already creating refugees by the millions. On the spectrum of shifts that the climate crisis will require, bankers and investors and insurers have it easy. A manageably small part of their business needs to disappear, to be replaced by what comes next. No one should actually be a master of the universe. But, for the moment, the financial giants are the masters of our planet. Perhaps we can make them put that power to use. Fast.

Despite what the library industrial complex tells us, reading is not the only avenue to the kind of self-surprise that gives you reasons to go on. You could learn how to make your own whisky and hand it out to your neighbors, or move to Washington like Jane Fonda, with the goal of getting arrested as much as possible. You could help stop traffic for the kids who are climate striking so the kids can concentrate on yelling, or go stand with workers at one of the many strikes taking place right now in many sectors of the economy, quite possibly near you.

In 1993, Portland was the first city in the US to create a climate action plan, yet we still don’t consistently report our results. This lack of basic accounting allows government agencies to control the progress narrative and doesn’t allow for the honest reckoning this issue demands. This lapse in basic accountability begs us to ask whether the city’s Bureau of Planning & Sustainability (BPS, who compiles the report) or the Mayor who oversees them, is either not competent enough to monitor the biggest crisis of our generation, is trying to spin the truth, or simply doesn’t care enough to prioritize it.

Stop obsessing with how personally green you live – and start collectively taking on corporate power. --- While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet. The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it. […] Of course we need people to consume less and innovate low-carbon alternatives – build sustainable farms, invent battery storages, spread zero-waste methods. But individual choices will most count when the economic system can provide viable, environmental options for everyone—not just an affluent or intrepid few. If affordable mass transit isn’t available, people will commute with cars. If local organic food is too expensive, they won’t opt out of fossil fuel-intensive super-market chains. If cheap mass produced goods flow endlessly, they will buy and buy and buy. This is the con-job of neoliberalism: to persuade us to address climate change through our pocket-books, rather than through power and politics.

People in power have never willingly dismantled the systems that benefit them. Thus David Wallace-Wells earned an eye-popping advance for The Uninhabitable Earth, a book in which he makes some solid and necessary points, and then concludes, in the absence of credible evidence, that “we,” who are responsible for climate change, will solve it with geoengineering; Nathaniel Rich was given a whole issue of the New York Times Magazine in which to wax poetic about “our” failure to stop climate change, a story optioned almost instantly for a book and a film; Jonathan Safran Foer will soon join them with his own version of the “we are all to blame” narrative, We Are the Weather, in which he argues first, incorrectly, that human diets are the primary cause of climate change, and then that “we” need to tackle it by making the necessary lifestyle changes. There are more, believe. The system explicitly rewards these men for visualizing the future as a parallel system that leaves the patriarchal, capitalist pyramid intact. It’s all they know how to imagine, and all the rest of us are permitted to imagine: a future in which the right politicians, coupled with the right scientists and corporate executives, will turn climate change into an opportunity, not a crisis, with jobs and profits for all! It’s an epic saga in which they are the heroes, an apocalyptic sci-fi video game or movie in which a few good men will just get rid of the bad guys in the third act. No need to dismantle patriarchy and white supremacy, envision a different and better way of living, re-think economic and societal structures, or remove power over the fate of humanity from the hands of a self-interested few. […] There was also a lot of talk back then about natural gas stores and how to make them profitable, and eventually US companies developed the technology to do just that (via hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”), and exported it around the world. When other countries said no thanks to contaminating their water sources for the sake of natural gas, U.S. companies said no worries, we’ll frack here and export it. That’s one reason the U.S. became the world’s number-one energy supplier and why, at a time when scientists are saying we need to have started on a path toward zero emissions yesterday, global emissions are climbing. How exactly was the general public supposed to stop that? […] Rather than imagining an industrial or corporate-friendly response to the crisis, what it would look like to shut down fossil fuel production tomorrow? What if conversations about “adaptation” focused on acclimating to that new reality? It matters because the same patriarchal elites have remained comfortably in power for so long that their imaginations are unequal to the task we face. Arguments for civility, for “forgiveness,” for “we’re all in this together”, for a preservation of the status quo with just a few tweaks, won’t keep us all from going over the cliff.

4 ways the ocean can play a key role in healing the climate and rebuilding the economy --- While rising seas represent material threats to coastal communities, the ocean can, and should, be a big part of the solution — it can catapult us toward the Green New Deal’s vision of simultaneously improving our environment and economy, while reducing inequality.

Governments and schools are not communicating the most effective ways for individuals to reduce their carbon footprints, according to new research. […] Published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the study from Lund University, found that the incremental changes advocated by governments may represent a missed opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions beneath the levels needed to prevent 2°C of climate warming. […] "We found there are four actions that could result in substantial decreases in an individual's carbon footprint: eating a plant-based diet, avoiding air travel, living car free, and having smaller families. For example, living car-free saves about 2.4 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, while eating a plant-based diet saves 0.8 tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year. "These actions, therefore, have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (which is 4 times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (8 times less effective)." The researchers also found that neither Canadian school textbooks nor government resources from the EU, USA, Canada and Australia highlight these actions, instead focussing on incremental changes with much smaller potential to reduce emissions.

The 71% of emissions that 100 companies are responsible for are producing?? They are mainly the result of extracting and refining fossil fuels that individuals are using for flying and driving and importing bottled water from glaciers and plastic bird feeders from China. Economic questions of supply and demand are far more salient to the matter of emissions than is any aspect of political will. Human activity is interconnected. When the breakneck demand for these things ends–as indeed it must and will, either in time, or too late–there will no longer be a market for what the energy oligarchs are selling. From a purely logical economic perspective, it’s the only real way to stop them. Let’s have a look at this remark of Lukacs’s again. “Collectively taking on corporate power” is just exactly what will happen when millions of individuals stop flying on airplanes, which, again, is a thing that has to happen in order for the planet to survive. Whether through a global individual cap and trade program or simply because individual people collectively realize, together, that they are dooming the Earth and had better drive to their next holiday, is entirely immaterial. Though even a casual witness to the abject stupidity of the world’s politicians must surely suspect that the latter course has better chances. In any case, the bigger problem with the anti-individualist stance to taking collective action is an even simpler one. There is no way to achieve collective action without individual action. Collective action doesn’t fall off a tree, it is made up of countless individual acts that turn into conversations, writings, meetings, plans. Individual actions are the only material from which collective action can be made, and to suggest that individuals are helpless and somehow just don’t matter now, in the current emergency, at a time of rising confusion, anger, hopelessness and dread, is nothing short of enraging.

China doesn’t want to sort your trash anymore. If the world of recycling is to move forwrd, the emphasis should be on re-educating the public and holding corporations responsible for creating affordable, accessible, eco-friendly products. NOTE: This entire comic strip is inaccessible because there is no alt text or transcription. 🙄

Most of what you’ll hear about is paid for by someone; benefits someone. If there is information that might hurt the reputation of anyone in power—their exercise of that power, or their ability to make money—massive resources will be spent to conceal it from you, divert your attention, change the subject.

We’re calling for a global strike on 20 September. Disrupting our normal lives is the only way to secure our future, says Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben and others

Who of us behaves as if we were in immediate trouble? We work, and at the end of the day, if we think at all, all we have time to think about is that we are cowards, or, before the thought comes, to escape it. Raise your hand if you have never hoped you will die before you have to thoroughly disrupt your own life for the lives of those who will live after you are dead. I do not mean to yell at anyone. Every day, I ask myself, what are you willing to do? And sometimes I feel righteous and strong, but mostly what I feel is fear, and a drive towards self preservation. I can laugh at the prettily arranged soap, or the privately-viewed sunsets, or the Jet Skis, because those are not my drugs, but Niu Kitchen, and all that goes with it, will be dragged from my fake wedding-ring-adorned cold dead hands.

Hurricane Florence will make landfall in the Carolinas on the same day the US Department of Energy announces that the US has likely surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia in crude oil production.