Unearthed today: The Nightmare before the Election
Hello there! Sorry, took a week off there. Right – back to the news in 2020. The year where every day is Halloween.
And nowhere more so than in the Amazon where satellite imagery shows the number of fires is up 25% in the first 10 months of 2020, compared to a year ago – when things were terrible.
“In only the first 10 months of the year, 2020 has surpassed the total number of fires for full-year 2019,” Reuters reports. Fires in the crucial and biodiverse wetland – the Pantanal – also increased. For the year through Oct. 25, 28% of the wetland has burned. Twenty-Eight Percent.
Somewhere in the back of our mind, we know this is bad, but it’s easy to leave it there what with everything else that’s happening. After all, the implications are rarely spelt out in the blow-by-blow account that filters through onto our doom feeds.
Yet – in many ways – this could be a bigger story than the pandemic or US election. The continued mass destruction of the world’s rainforests will accelerate climate chaos beyond our control whilst wiping out biodiversity, threatening food supply and bringing us into contact with a plethora of new pathogens we are not yet familiar with. There is no scientific scenario for avoiding the uncontrolled spiral in global temperatures that allows the Amazon to be burnt on this scale.
It is not a force of nature. It is an avoidable event, driven by the decisions of corrupt politicians who boast they do not care, the ongoing blind-eye of the world’s largest meat and agribusiness firms and a lack of global political leadership from China, Europe and the US.
It is – to be frank – slightly absurd to talk about dreams of planting trees whilst those we do have are wiped out with such little fanfare. Right, now I’ve got that out of my system. Back to what’s in the main news:
I’m reading about… the importance of climate to the US election.
Rightly or wrongly ff Biden loses tomorrow’s US presidential his stance on climate change – and the US oil industry in particular – will be held up as one possible cause.
The New York Times has published detailed, state-by-state polling on attitudes to climate change and the issues related to it which impact that state.
Overall it shows that more Americans are concerned by climate change than aren’t, with both a strong partisan and gender split. But let’s skip straight to Pennsylvania where the poll still showed a Biden lead – but with some interesting/frightening details.
A striking 61% of men support fracking – something many (incorrectly) believe Biden wants to ban, whilst just 24% oppose it. Overall more than half the population backs the technique, whilst just over a quarter oppose it. Broken down by age, the only constituency that opposes drilling is the one generally viewed as least likely to vote (18-29). Even 25% of Biden’s own supporters are on board with it. Most (though not all polls) still point to a Biden lead, of course. If they are wrong – we’ll be going back to this.
But even if we do it’s worth noting that it is – of course – more complex than this kind of binary polling question can capture – as this brilliant Grist piece from last week explores. Pennsylvania has a long – and complex – history with fossil fuel extraction, and a respect for the industry, but are not necessarily as obsessed with it as the campaigns may think/fear.
And the UK’s ability to deliver on its target.
The pandemic has shone an unflattering light on many things, and one of them is the difference between government targets and actually making the details happen.
Today The Guardian reports that Britain’s bid to build enough offshore windfarms to power every home in the country by 2030 risks being derailed by outdated regulation which is slowing investment in the electricity grid.
“The one thing that is delaying our projects is the onshore connections,” said Tom Glover, RWE’s UK boss. “It’s getting quite serious. We are getting to the point of concern over whether that 40GW target can be met purely because of the onshore grid. It is only the onshore grid which could stop this happening.”
The Times, meanwhile, reports on a discussion we haven’t really even started yet – about how we need to replace all our gas boilers to have any chance of reducing emissions by enough to meet our goals.
Ther Social Market Foundation said: “A near-full decarbonisation of heat will require replacing gas boilers at a rate of nearly one million a year.” It warned that take-up of electric heat pumps, one of the main low-carbon alternatives to boilers, was very low, with only 30,000 installed last year.
SMF polling found that less than one in five of voters knew about technologies such as heat pumps that could replace a gas boiler. Only 30 per cent could correctly identify the meaning of “net-zero” and 29 per cent had not heard of it.
On which note – over in the Independent – Ed Miliband makes the case for a massive wave of investment, including in home heating, to re-start the economy ahead of the UK hosting a major climate summit next year.
“When delegates gather in Glasgow in 12 months, they should be coming to a country that has in that time created hundreds of thousands of green jobs through an ambitious green recovery, in everything from retrofitting homes to building the zero-emission engines of the future to planting trees and green spaces.”