I’ll have a real post up tomorrow, promise! I’m working on things that will, I hope, eventually lead to more income in the future, but for now, I trust the folks at Cody’s Showdy to be informative and entertaining.
More good news from the courts!
It has become increasingly clear over the last few decades that even without climate change threatening to wipe out humanity, the fossil fuel industry is incapable of operating in a safe and responsible manner. They spill oil and gas everywhere, at almost every stage of production, and in a time when we’re facing both the climate crisis, and a water crisis (that’s made worse by the climate crisis), the oil company hobby of poisoning land and water is an increasingly unaffordable liability. When the question of oil transportation comes up, most of us probably think of pipelines, but for all their problems, the well-titled “bomb trains” are almost certainly worse. The disaster in East Palestine earlier this year is the biggest recent example of a bomb train in action, but most of the trains that earn the moniker do so by carrying oil.
As we all know, oil companies are dedicated to extracting and burning as much of the stuff as possible before doing so drives us all to extinction. To facilitate the process, there has been an attempt to build a new railway dedicated to moving oil drilled in Utah into the national rail network. See, there’s no money to build new railways for human use, but if it’s going to make billionaires richer at the cost of the planet? Well, money is no object. Fortunately, activists have been fighting this, and have just won a small, but important victory:
“The court’s rejection of this oil railway and its ensuing environmental damage is a victory for the climate, public health, and wild landscapes,” said WildEarth Guardians legal director Samantha Ruscavage-Barz. “The public shouldn’t have to shoulder the costs of the railway’s environmental degradation while the fossil fuel industry reaps unprecedented profits from dirty energy.”
Although the ruling does not necessarily permanently block the project—which would cut through tribal land and a national forest—Carly Ferro, executive director of the Utah Sierra Club, similarly called the decision “a win for communities across the West and is critical for ensuring a sustainable climate future.”
“From its onset, this project’s process has been reckless and egregious. But today, the people and the planet prevailed,” Ferro added. “We will continue to advocate for accountable processes to ensure a healthy environment where communities can live safely, and this win will help make that possible.”
The whole industry is reckless and dangerous, but given the absurd rate of derailments in the US, oil trains really seem like the epitome of irresponsibility. That means, of course, that they’re not going to stop trying to use them, but every obstacle we can place on the tracks is a win.
The [three-judge] panel found “numerous” violations of the National Environmental Policy Act “arising from the EIS, including the failures to: (1) quantify reasonably foreseeable upstream and downstream impacts on vegetation and special-status species of increased drilling in the Uinta Basin and increased oil train traffic along the Union Pacific Line, as well as the effects of oil refining on environmental justice communities the Gulf Coast; (2) take a hard look at wildfire risk as well as impacts on water resources downline; and (3) explain the lack of available information on local accident risk” in accordance with federal law, wrote Judge Robert Wilkins. “The EIS is further called into question since the BiOp failed to assess impacts on the Colorado River fishes downline.”
As the The Colorado Sunreported Friday:
The Surface Transportation Board argued it did not have jurisdiction to address or enforce mitigation of impacts outside the 88-mile rail corridor.
The appeals court ordered the Surface Transportation Board to redo its environmental review of the project. But the court did not agree with Eagle County and the environmental groups led by the Center for Biological Diversity that the Uinta Basin Railway could lead to the opening of the long-dormant Tennessee Pass Line between Dotsero and Cañon City.
The court also did not wholly agree that the transportation board failed to adequately consider the climate impacts of burning the new crude, which could increase pollution and account for 1% of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Still, the Center for Biological Diversity celebrated the decision, with senior campaigner Deeda Seed saying that “this is an enormous victory for our shared climate, the Colorado River, and the communities that rely on it for clean water, abundant fish, and recreation.”
“The Uinta Basin Railway is a dangerous, polluting boondoggle that threatens people, wildlife, and our hope for a livable planet,” Seed added. “The Biden administration needs to dismantle this climate bomb and throw it in the trash can where it belongs.”
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Congressman Joe Neguse, both Colorado Democrats, also welcomed the ruling in a joint statement.
“This ruling is excellent news,” the pair said. “The approval process for the Uinta Basin Railway Project has been gravely insufficient, and did not properly account for the project’s full risks to Colorado’s communities, water, and environment. A new review must account for all harmful effects of this project on our state, including potential oil spills along the Colorado River and increased wildfire risk.”
“An oil train derailment in the headwaters of the Colorado River would be catastrophic—not only to Colorado, but the 40 million Americans who rely on it,” they added. “We’re grateful for the leadership of Eagle County and the many organizations and local officials around Colorado who made their voices heard.”
The institutions of government are, with very few exceptions, designed to privilege capitalists, which is why it is so slow, painful, and sometimes impossible to actually stop destructive corporate activity, or enact changes to law and policy that benefit people in general. As I said the other day, I’m not inclined to place much hope in courts or the government, but I do like seeing things that make me question that pessimism.
On an unrelated note, does anyone need a Bluesky invite?
This year’s fire season has been rough on Canada, helping to make the point that with the entire planet warming, we can’t simply move everyone north, and expect the weather to move with us like a neat map of horticultural growth zones. For average temperatures, that’s a fine way to show things, but the reality is that we don’t really get to have average temperatures, or “normal conditions” anymore. With global air and water currents changing, we can see temperatures of over 100F/38C in the Arctic Circle, and that tends to come with fires. This year, for the first time, the entire city of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, has been evacuated. This is the northern-most city in Canada, in a landscape covered with lakes, streams and ponds, but that seems to offer little protection. Fire season has always been a thing in Canada, but never like this. Over 20,000 residents have been given till this weekend to leave the city, ahead of an advancing fire that’s deemed likely to cut off the only road out.
More than 20,000 residents – the entire population – have been given until noon on Friday to leave their homes, as water bombers flew throughout the night and authorities warned that the fire could reach the city by the weekend.
Evacuation flights are also due to begin on Thursday afternoon, and will continue until the entire population has safely left the city, said the Yellowknife mayor, Rebecca Alty. She warned residents to bring water and food with them to the city’s airport as they could face long waits to get on a flight.
The out-of-control wildfire – which was least measured at 163,000 hectares wide (402,000 acres) – is currently 16km from Yellowknife, the capital of the vast and sparsely populated Northwest Territories. The city lies roughly 250 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
Canada is enduring its worst wildfire season, with more than 1,000 active fires burning across the country, including 236 in the Northwest Territories.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was due to convene a meeting of the Incident Response Group, a group of ministers and senior officials and ministers which meets in moments of crisis.
The blaze near Yellowknife has also prompted the evacuation of several other nearby towns, including the Dene First Nation communities of N’dilo and Dettah.
“The reality is we’ve been fighting this fire for over a month. This fire has burned deep, this fire has burned hot, and it has found ways through multiple different sets of established [control] lines,” said the Northwest Territories fire information officer Mike Westwick.
As thick smoke blanketed the city, traffic backed up the main road leading towards the town of Fort Providence, where hundreds of people spent the night sleeping in their cars in the parking lot of a service station.
Linda Croft, the manager of the Big River service station, said that traffic had been heavy since Wednesday morning as people attempted to escape. “It’s lined up right back along the highway, no end in sight,” she said.
More than 2m hectares of the territory have been burned this season, and more than half of its population is now under evacuation order. Roads out of the region also pass through areas with active fires.
On the other side of Great Slave Lake, residents of the village of Hay River were told to leave Sunday.
Garth Carman, who drove out with his 16 cats, described witnessing scenes like “the apocalypse”, with bears and other wild animals burned alive on the roadside.
“A wall of flames just washed over the highway and trees just began exploding in the fire – poof, poof, poof – one after the other, coming towards us. It was hell driving through this,” he told CBC.
About 39km south of Hay River, the town of Enterprise has been 90% destroyed by fire.
Nowhere is safe.
Global warming is not a problem that can simply be avoided by stepping out of its way, because there is no “out of its way” on this planet. It’s a problem that must be directly confronted.
Evacuating people ahead of an advancing fire or storm is a very good thing, but I think it’s obvious that literally dodging disasters isn’t a sustainable response. We have to end fossil fuel use, and because corporate greed has delayed action for so long, we have to undertake that monumental task, while dodging disasters. This is not a good position to be in, regardless of political or economic system, but I think it’s made much, much worse by the fact that we are burdened by a parasitic capitalist class, which values its wealth and power over all life on this planet. I say “parasitic”, but really, they are parasitoids – feeding off all of us until there’s nothing left but withered corpses.
With luck, and the efforts of firefighters, these people will be able to return to smoke-damaged homes by winter. Fire season tapers off as the weather cools, and despite this year looking like yet another “hottest on record”, less sunlight still means the temperature drops, so we’ve got that going for us. The problem is that this doesn’t end until greenhouse gas levels are lower than they were a decade ago, and right now, they’re still climbing fast. We’re running short on time, and thanks to capitalism, we’re also needlessly short on resources to spend on mitigation or adaptation.
I think that by now, a lot of people are aware of some of the abuses that police have committed in the past. COINTELPRO is probably the most infamous example in the US, and in the UK, undercover cops formed relationships and even fathered children with left-wing activists, as part of spying on them. I suppose some people on the far right might defend this stuff, but nobody pretends it didn’t happen.
Unfortunately, I think some people believe that because these abuses were uncovered, and made headlines, and caused outrage, that cops don’t do that anymore, because now it’s not allowed, or because they won’t want to get caught again. I think it’s a reasonable, but misguided assumption that relies on the fact that for most of us, if we get caught doing something anywhere near that bad, we would suffer for it. The same isn’t generally true of police, or not to the same degree. Most of the time, the main concern is changing tactics so they don’t get caught again, and for that, they have a huge budget to spent on all kinds of surveillance toys, and the settlements they might have to pay for using them:
On Monday August 1st, Michigan activist Peatmoss found 2 GPS tracking devises attached with powerful magnets to the rear axle of their car, see pictures here. This happened after Peatmoss spent a week hanging out with friends at the Camp Gayling Week of Action against the Camp Grayling national guard base.
A lawyer calling the police on Peatmoss’s behalf relayed that the police confirmed the trackers were placed by law enforcement, though they refused to name the agency.
Three days before, on the evening of Friday July 28th, Peatmoss was arrested outside Lansing, MI after being followed by a large blue Ford pickup truck into a church parking lot to meet two other folks. The arrest stemmed from a warrant issued in another area of Michigan. During the arrest the police verbally stated that they believed the car had been present at a recent legal demonstration put on by Sunrise Ann Arbor on the sidewalk in front of Accident Fund headquarters, an insurer of the Cop City project. The cops stated they knew the car had driven by the home of Accident Fund CEO Lisa Corless, which was nearby at 3945 Turnberry Lane, Okemos, Michigan.
While in custody police attempted to coerce consent to a DNA sample by threatening Peatmoss with a longer detention. Peatmoss refused and was released without giving a sample. They also noticed their file had an “FBI number” highlighted underneath their SSN.
The second week of May, Peatmoss was followed for 45 minutes by a blacked out Ford sedan. The car began following them at their legal residence, the first time they had been home in several months. The car followed them onto the highway, off the highway, around in circles in a neighborhood, and then back onto the highway, only leaving when they were about to cross the Michigan-Ohio state border. They had given their legal name and address when putting money on many Atlanta Solidarity Fund defendants’ commissary accounts earlier this year.
This is police using their unaccountable power to harass and intimidate activists who oppose the continued increase in that power.
It’s important to understand that the abuses of government agents don’t stop happening just because they are uncovered. There need to be actual changes in the law that lawmakers have already demonstrated they don’t want to make, which means that it is on us to reshape the justice system, not just by voting in a system rigged to cater to the “elite”, but also by building collective power through workplace organizing, community organizing, and mutual aid, with which to carry out strikes and other disruptive actions. That’s the only way I can see to get revolutionary change, without a revolutionary war.
Government repression, particularly of left-wing political thought and action, never stopped. It is an ongoing problem, and one with which we will have to contend if we want to build a society that actually values justice and human rights. Police power is being used right now to quell movements for real action not just on the cops themselves, but on climate change, and economic injustice, and a whole host of other issues. For pretty much any change we’re hoping to make, if it improves life for people at the bottom, police stand in the way. They stand in the way because that is their job, and they will use every tool at their disposal to do it. That is why it is so important to organize, and to act together, because on our own, it’s easy for even a local police department to destroy us.
Peatmoss has an activist community supporting them, and helping to get the word out about what the cops are doing. That’s why the cops are deliberately targeting the community efforts to support activists who’ve been arrested – because community support works.
I want to close on this thought: it’s currently fairly easy for the police to target people like Peatmoss, because while they are not standing alone, they are a pretty small group. What I hope to see, and what the police fear to see, is that dynamic multiplied across the country. People willing to take direct action, and put their bodies on the line for a better world, supported by communities willing to defend them against repression. If that happened, then the changes we’re always told are so utopian might suddenly seem well within our reach.
If you value the work I do, please consider helping to pay for it over at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Even small contributions like a couple dollars per month add up to make a big difference! If you can’t afford that, then I definitely don’t want your money, but I’d appreciate it if you shared this post with others, to help me increase my readership. Thanks for reading, and be sure to take care of yourselves in this scary world!
Growing up, I was exposed to a great deal of U.S. patriotism, in the form of songs, fictionalized propaganda like Little House on the Prairie, and Fourth of July parades. After 9/11, it all became much more about the US armed forces (which is actually very appropriate, given US history), but what sticks with me is the focus on the landscape. The landscape was a revelation for the Europeans who created the United States, despite the fact that they murdered the people who had shaped and maintained that landscape, and set about trying to turn it into a version of the European terrain they’d left behind by clear-cutting, straightening rivers, building cities and monoculture farms, and wiping out species they viewed as bad. Still, much of the landscape remains beautiful, and a lot of American pride remains tied to that beauty. It’s not surprising, then, that the state constitution of Montana, home of Yellowstone National Park (along with Idaho and Wyoming) guarantees a right to a “clean and healthful environment”. The only problem is that, as with democracy, this noble principle is incompatible with capitalism, so oil companies have largely had their way.
In Held v. State of Montana, District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled that rights of the plaintiffs—who range in age from 5 to 22— have been violated by the Montana Environmental Policy Act because the law has prevented the state from assessing the climate impacts of mining projects.
Fossil fuel emissions including Montana’s “have been proven to be a substantial factor” in heating the planet and causing pollution, Seeley said in the nation’s first ruling on a constitutional, youth-led lawsuit regarding the climate.
Because the Montana Constitution guarantees residents a “clean and healthful environment,” the state’s environmental policy law violates the document, said Seeley.
“This is HUGE,” said meteorologist Eric Holthaus.
It is huge. The cynical part of me says I’ll believe it when I see real change from it, but this is absolutely a win, not just because of changes to policy in Montana because of it, but because this lawsuit is far from alone, and this ruling sets a precedent that will be very helpful going forward:
As Common Dreams reported last month, lawsuits around the world have emerged as a key driver of climate action as a wide range of plaintiffs—from children in the U.S. to senior citizens in Switzerland—have argued that their human rights have been violated by the companies and lawmakers that have promoted fossil fuel production despite scientific evidence of the danger it poses.
Out of approximately 2,200 worldwide climate cases, about three-quarters have been filed in the United States, according to the United Nations Environment Program and the Sabin Center, and the number of legal challenges has more than doubled since 2017.
The outcome of the Montana case could “open up the floodgates for more climate lawsuits,” said Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media.
I talk a lot about the ways in which our government and “justice” system are corrupt and illegitimate, but there is no questioning their power, and there are many within those institutions who take them seriously. I think it’ll be some time before we can actually see the material effects of this ruling, but it seems like this isn’t just going to go away.
This is also one reason why it’s better to have the corrupt, illegitimate system we know, than the corrupt, illegitimate system that the fascists running the GOP intend to create, if they manage to finish destroying the laws and institutions that protect what democracy we do have, and that protect the working classes from absolute rule by capitalists. Workplace and community organizing remain essential, but it’s a very good thing that people are fighting for change in the courts, as well. In my more cynical moments, I tend to view court cases and electoral campaigns as the things we have to do to demonstrate the need for action outside the official channels. It’s nice to have a reminder that it really is fighting this battle on all fronts, because there is victory to be found.
It’s been a long day that involved picking blackberries, and getting attacked by nettles. I’m tired, and I’ve still got other work to do, so I’m going to leave you in the capable hands of Unlearning Economics, who will explain why free stuff is good, actually.
I guess this weekend’s theme is “things I believed about the United States when I was young and naive”. Today’s edition is the idea that the US has ever been a democracy. There are a number of ways in which you could approach this issue, but today we’re talking about felon disenfranchisement. See, when slavery was “ended” by the 13th amendment, an exception was explicitly made for people who had been convicted of a crime. In the generations since, the Land of the Free has become one of the most incarcerated populations on the planet, private prisons are pushing to lock up more people, and people enslaved by the US law enforcement system generate 11 billion dollars in goods and services annually. There are many ways in which this system is enforced and maintained, but one of them is the practice of felony disenfranchisement. If you’ve got a bunch of enslaved people, and you want to keep that free labor force, the it’s important to make sure that the slaves don’t have a say in the laws that make them slaves. For most people, it’s probably not too hard of a sell to say that if you’re locked up, you shouldn’t have the right to vote. You’re being punished with a loss of freedom, so why not add voting in along with that? Now, I personally disagree with that, but what’s really sinister, is when a state, like Mississippi for example, makes the ban on voting a lifelong punishment.
You got convicted of robbing a store at 18? Congratulations, you are now cut out of having any voice in this “democracy”. It sure seems like this ought to be illegal, for all I think it’s entirely in keeping with the original spirit of the US constitution. Fortunately, we may be seeing some movement in the right direction on this; from August 4th:
A federal appeals court on Friday struck down Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era policy of permanently revoking voting rights from certain people with felony convictions, ruling that it is unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
The 2-1 panel ruling is a surprise victory from the conservative fifth circuit court of appeals just over a month after the US supreme court refused to hear a challenge to the discriminatory law.
Before Friday’s ruling, Mississippi’s felony disenfranchisement law denied a higher percentage of its residents the right to vote than any other states in the United States. The policy blocked more than 10% of the adult population from voting if they had ever been convicted of one of 22 crimes, including murder, rape, bribery, theft and arson. The vast majority – more than 90% – of those people are no longer in prison.
The state’s policy also disproportionately affected Black voters, with nearly 16% of the Black voting age population prevented from casting a ballot because of a prior felony conviction.
In its ruling, the court found that the state’s policy serves no penological purpose.
“By severing former offenders from the body politic forever, [the state’s policy] ensures that they will never be fully rehabilitated, continues to punish them beyond the term their culpability requires, and serves no protective function to society,” the opinion said. “It is thus a cruel and unusual punishment.”
I believe that our criminal justice system is designed, among other things, to create and maintain a criminal underclass, and felon disenfranchisement, where it exists, plays a big role in that. It’s good to see this ruling, and I very much hope that it will be upheld. The so-called Justice System in the United States is a travesty, and prisons are basically giant torture factories by design. We have a lot of work to do to dismantle that, but this is a step in the right direction. I’ll leave you with a discussion on this from the folks at The Majority Report:
There are a number of reasons why I’m fairly certain that I have ADHD, but one of them is that it is very easy for me to lose track of time, both over the course of a day, and from one week or month to the next. This is made worse by the fact that I’m currently entirely self-employed, and I don’t have money to go out and do things, so my days all look pretty similar. That that means is that I’m now posting a video that I had meant to post six days ago.
On August 6th, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, it did the same to the city of Nagasaki. The casualties are estimated at around two hundred thousand people, but it’s hard to know for sure, because of the scale of destruction. The vast majority of those killed were civilians.
The story I heard most, growing up, was that this was done avoid a costly and bloody land invasion, but as I’ve learned more, I’ve come to believe that while invasion plans may have existed, just as the Pentagon doubtless has “invasion plans” for most countries on the planet, but I don’t believe they had an intention to invade, because they didn’t need to. Even if surrender wasn’t on the table, Japan had no ability to fight in any meaningful way, and no ability at all to project power outside its shores. All the Allies had to do was maintain a blockade, and do conventional bombing runs. There was no reason to invade.
Further, the Allies were listening in on all of Japan’s communications, knew that they were trying to get the USSR to negotiate a surrender, with their biggest sticking point being the life and safety of Emperor Hirohito – a condition the Allies were entirely fine with, outside of propaganda concerns back home. No, the reason the bombs were dropped had very little to do with the people killed and injured by them. It was done primarily as a display of power, directed primarily at the Soviet Union, and I think that Shaun’s video, below, does an excellent job of laying out the case for that. It’s a long video, but well worth your time.
Posting something daily can be a bit of a drag, sometimes. I recently decided to increase my non-blog workload, and I’m still adjusting to it, which means that posting daily suddenly feels like more effort, because it’s now on top of other stuff. It’s also more than a little depressing to write about stuff in the news, because there always seems to be more bad than good. I think that’s largely because things are getting worse in a number of very real ways, but some of it could well be that bad news sells better. Some of it, for me, is also that bad news feels easier to write about. Good news is nice, and all, but in my life, I’ve rarely encountered good news that meant that an existing problem was actually solved. Maybe that’s just how things work, though – there will always be people trying to make the world worse for their personal benefit, so we’ll always have to fight to keep the good things that we have. It’s a tiring vision of the future, but I guess the goal is to have tomorrow’s fights be easier, and backed up by yesterday’s victories. In a lot of ways, that’s what a “victory” is – something that makes the next fight a little easier, even if all you did was prevent an opponent from making it harder. Case in point, the Democratic Party’s recent big win in Ohio:
Ohio voters on Tuesday decisively rejected a Republican-authored measure that would have made it more difficult to amend the state constitution through the ballot initiative process, a billionaire-funded effort aimed at preempting a November vote on abortion rights.
If approved by voters, the measure known as Issue 1 would have raised the threshold for passage of a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60%. The measure also would have imposed more stringent signature requirements for Ohio ballot initiatives.
The GOP proposal—which was the only item on the ballot in Tuesday’s special election—failed by a vote of 43% to 57%, according to the Ohio secretary of state’s office.
“Issue 1 was a blatant attempt by its supporters to control both the policy agenda and the process of direct democracy,” said Rachael Belz, the CEO of Ohio Citizen Action, one of the groups that mobilized in opposition to the proposal. “When they forced Issue 1 onto the ballot, they awakened a sleeping giant and unleashed a movement. And that movement isn’t going away tomorrow. It will continue to build and grow and to carry us through to victories in November and beyond.”
The Republican push for Issue 1 drew national attention given the implications for both the democratic process and reproductive rights in Ohio, where abortion is currently legal through 22 weeks of pregnancy—though the state GOP is working to change that.
A proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot in November would codify the right to abortion access in the Ohio constitution, stating that “every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.”
Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state and a U.S. Senate hopeful, said in June that Issue 1 was ” 100% about” preventing passage of the abortion rights amendment.
Recent polling indicates that around 58% of Ohioans back the proposed amendment—a level of support that would have been insufficient had Issue 1 succeeded.
“From defeating Issue 1 tonight to submitting nearly twice the amount of signatures needed to get a measure protecting abortion access on the ballot in November, Ohio voters have made clear that they will settle for nothing less than reproductive freedom for all,” Mini Timmaraju, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said in a statement late Tuesday.
“Republicans should be ashamed of their efforts to subvert the will of voters,” Timmaraju added. “Seeing this measure defeated is a victory for our fundamental rights and our democracy. We’re grateful to our partners on the ground for their tireless efforts to secure abortion rights and access. We look forward to fighting by their side to lock this fundamental freedom into law in November.”
I look forward to seeing that result, but I’m not gonna hold my breath while I wait for Republicans to develop the ability to feel shame. The Democratic Party has been kicking the can down the road on abortion rights for decades, using it as a fundraising issue, and then refusing to actually codify those rights into federal law. When it comes to the kind of good news I mentioned, probably the biggest bit of that, for the US, has been the way Democrats at the state level have apparently been moved to actual action by the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court. The battle’s far from over, but it seems that there are a growing number of Democrats who are no longer afraid of wielding power for progressive causes, and it’s nice to see. As the Majority Report says, this is a huge win for Democracy in Ohio:
I like Commondreams.org, as a news source. They have an unabashedly progressive bias, and they do a decent job in finding a balance as they cover the climate crisis, as we’re about to see. Back in April, I wrote about an unexplained and unprecedented spike in ocean temperatures, that was happening ahead of the impending El Niño. Well, that scary situation has only gotten scarier in the months since, as Antarctic winter sea ice is at its lowest peak on record, and the water just keeps getting hotter:
Climate scientists on Friday said the rapidly rising temperature of the planet’s oceans is cause for major concern, particularly as policymakers in the top fossil fuel emissions-producing countries show no sign of ending planet-heating oil and gas extraction.
The European Union’s climate agency, Copernicus Climate Change Service, reported this week that the average daily global ocean surface temperature across the planet reached 20.96°C (69.7°F), breaking the record of 20.95°C that was previously set in 2016.
The record set in 2016 was reported during an El Niño event, a naturally occurring phenomenon which causes warm water to rise to the surface off the western coast of South America. The weather pattern was at its strongest when the high ocean temperature was recorded that year.
El Niño is forming this year as well, but has not yet reached its strongest point—suggesting new records for ocean heat will be set in the coming months and potentially wreak havoc in the world’s marine ecosystems.
Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, told the BBC that March is typically when the oceans are at their hottest.
“The fact that we’ve seen the record now makes me nervous about how much warmer the ocean may get between now and next March,” she told the outlet.The warming oceans are part of a feedback loop that’s developed as fossil fuel emissions have increasingly trapped heat in the atmosphere.
Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are warming the oceans, leaving them less able to absorb the emissions and contributing to intensifying weather patterns.
“Warmer sea surface temperatures lead to a warmer atmosphere and more evaporation, and both of these lead to more moisture in the atmosphere which can also lead to more intense rainfall events,” Burgess told “Today” on BBC Radio 4. “And warmer sea surface temperatures may also lead to more energy being available for hurricanes.”
The warming ocean could have cascading effects on the world’s ecosystems and economies, reducing fish stocks as marine species migrate to find cooler waters.
“We are seeing changes already in terms of species distributions, prevalence of harmful algae blooms popping up maybe where we would not necessarily expect them, and the species shifting from warmer southern locations up into the colder regions as well which is quite worrying,” Helen Findlay, a biological oceanographer at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the United Kingdom, told The Evening Standard.
“We are also seeing more species coming up from the south, things like European anchovy or recently examples of Mediterranean octopus coming up into our waters and that is having a knock-on impact for the fish that we catch, and consequences of economics,” she added.
Certain parts of the world’s oceans provoked particular alarm among scientists in recent days, with water off the coast of Florida hitting 38.44°C—over 101°F—last week.
It’s hard to know exactly what’s going to come from this, but it seems clear that this temperature spike is far from over. The only real questions are, how much damage it will do, and what will happen next? The planet isn’t going to stop warming until greenhouse gas levels go down, or it reaches a new stability, at a much higher temperature. Where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us with plenty to fear, and no clear idea what we can actually do about it. It’s all very discouraging, and a lot of publications don’t really talk much about what people can do besides voting, which doesn’t seem to help much. Fortunately, Common Dreams has us covered, with a Bill McKibben article saying some stuff I agree with, in response to the question of where to move, to be safe as the planet warms:
There is no safe place.
And yet I remain glad I live where I do, not because it’s protected from climate change, but because it’s at least a little bit more equipped to deal with it. And that, in turn, is because it has high levels of social trust. Only 38% of Americans say they mostly or completely trust their neighbors, but a 2018 Vermont survey found that 78% of residents think that “people in my neighborhood trust each other to be good neighbors”; 69% of Vermonters said that they knew most of their neighbors, compared with 26% of Americans in general. Those levels of social trust help explain, I think, why the state had the lowest level of fatalities from Covid-19, much lower than its neighboring states and much lower than other small rural states with similarly homogeneous populations. Everyone wore masks, everyone got vaccinated. In the same way, when this summer’s floods hit, people came together, reenacting the surge of mutual aid that came after Hurricane Irene similarly drenched the state in 2011.
This is not an argument to move to Vermont.
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Instead it is an argument to get to work building that kind of social trust in as many places as possible, because we’re going to need it. We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: If you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren’t going to be like that; we’re going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around you. We’re going to need to rediscover that we’re a social species, which for Americans will be hard—at least since Reagan we’ve been told to think of ourselves first and foremost (it was his pal Margaret Thatcher who insisted “there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women.”) And in the Musk/Trump age we’re constantly instructed to distrust everyone and everything, a corrosion that erodes the social fabric as surely as a rampaging river erodes a highway.
But it’s not impossible to change that. President Joe Biden has been frustratingly dunderheaded about approving new pipelines and oil wells, and hydrocarbon production has been soaring on his watch. He has been much better about trying to restore some sense of national unity—he has been trying to scale down national division by rebuilding left-behind economies, and also by appealing to our better angels. And those angels exist: The most hopeful book for our time remains Rebecca Solnit’s Paradise Built in Hell, which recounts how communities, whenever natural disaster strikes, pull together, just like Vermont this summer. It happens in cities as easily as in rural areas—maybe more easily, since cities are places where the gregarious gather.
I would quibble a little with the casting of this as “easy”. If that sense of community doesn’t already exist, trying to start it means asking people to put in time and energy when they have little enough of both to spare. I also think it’s a bit much to stereotype city-dwellers as “the gregarious”. People live in cities for a lot of reasons, a big one being that it’s often the only place to find a job. Living in a city, even by choice, does not mean you’re an extrovert by any stretch. Furthermore, most people in the city rent their homes, which means that we’re likely to move pretty often, which means starting over again every couple years or so. People do pull together in a crisis, true, but cities can be difficult places to build anything lasting, or at least that’s how it tends to feel to me.
That said, he’s right on the main point. For an individual “action” that would actually help, we absolutely need social solidarity, and it’s good to see an article advocating that, right next to an article about how scientists are terrified about what’s happening to our climate. “Neighborliness” isn’t going to solve the global problem, but it’ll go a long way to helping us survive, which is a key part of solving most problems. It would be silly for me to say that people shouldn’t move to seek a better life, since I’ve done that myself. The catch is that when it comes to climate change, nowhere is safe, so it’s worth doing the work to build community, if you’re able, even if you’ll have to move on sooner than you’d like. We’re all in this together, and our best shot at getting out is also together.