Extreme Temperature Diary- Wednesday March 25th, 2020/ Main Topic: Green New Deal Climate Activists Adjust Because Of Coronavirus

guyonclimate_mi5tor

Wednesday March 25th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials)😉

Wednesday March 25th, 2020/ Main Topic: Green New Deal Climate Activists Adjust Because Of Coronavirus

Dear Diary. Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 crisis there is a lot of talk about postponing any Green New Deal initiatives. True, unless we solve this immediate health crisis in the next few years, millions of people could potentially die, many more than from climate change effects through the year 2022. That stated, in the long run global warming post 2022 could potentially kill billions. Just because people aren’t out and about heavily using carbon intensive transportation, and industry has curtailed, this does not mean that we have substantially ceased greenhouse gas emissions. Once we have arrested the coronavirus infestation emissions will spike again as our economy makes a comeback.

Will COVID-19 put off Green New Deal goals of total electrification of our society powered by renewables? Probably, but activists should keep fighting not giving into despair. A new Washington Post article published today encapsulates how climate activists are adjusting to new life involving social distancing and long range plans. This is worth a long read:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2020/03/25/the-energy-202-climate-movement-moves-online-during-coronavirus-pandemic/5e7a5573602ff10d49ad36d3/

The Energy 202: Climate movement moves online during coronavirus pandemic

By Dino Grandoni March 25 at 8:04 AM

THE LIGHTBULB

Actress Jane Fonda holds a poster reading “No New Fossil Fuels” in a protest in Los Angeles earlier this month. (Etienne Laurent/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

With the covid-19 pandemic forcing Americans to stay indoors, the climate movement is moving online.

Plans for protests and other in-person activism, including massive marches around Earth Day next month where environmentalists wanted to raise concern over rising global temperatures, have been upended by the need for people to stay apart and stop another crisis — the emergence of a novel coronavirus that has infected more than 420,000 and killed more than 18,000 worldwide.

Climate activists are now adjusting to the new reality where most of their activism, at least in the near term, must take place online to forestall the spread of the virus. Young and Internet-savvy activists at the heart of the climate movement say they’re ready for the moment.

“Our generation was built for this,” said Stephen O’Hanlon, a co-founder of the youth-led Sunrise Movement which helped launched the Green New Deal. “We’ve spent our entire lives online.

Yet Earth Day planners, who aimed to get millions of Americans marching to commemorate the annual event’s 50th anniversary, are still disappointed they won’t be able to capture media attention with images of protesters packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the streets ahead of the November election.

“Of course, we were looking forward to all of the Earth Day activities,” said Michael Brune, head of the Sierra Club. “It was going to be a powerful manifestation of our determination to see stronger action on climate.”

But Brune made clear activists would be out in the streets once public health officials gave them the green light.

“We’ll be out in force at the earliest opportunity all the way to and through this election.”

In the meantime, Earth Day organizers now have a Plan B. They announced Tuesday they will hold a 72-hour live-streamed “digital march” featuring speeches, musical acts and demonstrations of customers cutting up credit cards from financial institutions that underwrite the fossil-fuel industry.

“What we’re trying to do is really show people that you’re not sitting alone in your bedroom doing this, but you are still part of this larger ecosystem of organizers,” said Shiv Soin, a 19-year-old New York University student and lead organizer for the New York City Youth Climate Coalition who is helping put the event together.

Among the first to call for a halt in in-person protests was Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage activist, who earlier this month asked her Twitter followers to do a “#DigitalStrike” by posting pictures of their placards safely from their homes. (Thunberg wrote online Tuesday that, while she has not been tested, she is recovering from coronavirus-like symptoms.)

Her followers responded with images from their bedrooms and backyards. 

U.S. climate activists have also modified their demands in light of the pandemic. Some labor unions and green groups, including Sunrise, have rallied around the idea of a “People’s Bailout” to press politicians to direct financial stimulus toward workers instead of oil companies and other corporations.

Tactically, instead of going forward with door-to-door voter registration drives planned around Earth Day in April, Sunrise volunteers plan to use peer-to-peer texting to make sure people have their paperwork to vote in November. And instead of in-person meetings, the group started on Tuesday a series of online classes called “Sunrise School” to train 3,500 young people in campaining.

Fridays for Future, which helped organize weekly student climate protests, asked supporters to instead email politicians, post on social media and organize online strikes on Zoom, the videoconferencing app that has rocketed in popularity since the start of the outbreak.

Activists say they have seen some success with their online organizing efforts.

The League of Conservation Voters, which pumped more than $80 million into the 2018 election, had to cancel an in-person fundraiser in New York last week. Instead, it held a webinar for donors.

“LCV has not held virtual fundraisers before. This is new for us,” spokeswoman Emily Samsel said. Though the group did not disclose how much money it raised, it called the online event a “success.”

And Sierra Club spokesman Adam Beitman said that group saw an “extremely high response rates” to emails calling on members to urge lawmakers not to bail out oil and gas companies.

Still, there are some forms of public pressure — such as cornering politicians and pressing them on their environmental positions, as activists have done several times with former vice president Joe Biden, who is ahead in the race for the Democratic nomination — that simply have no online equivalent.

But when it comes to heeding the call from epidemiologists and other public health officials, climate activists say they have no other choice but to listen to the scientists.

“Look, we can’t all go out in the streets. We can’t be doing civil disobedience this time around,” author and environmentalist Bill McKibben said. “That’s because we understand that biology is real and that the coronavirus has to be taken seriously — just in the same way that we understand that physics and chemistry are real and that the carbon dioxide molecule and the methane molecule have to be taken seriously.” 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

— Senate and White House reach $2 trillion stimulus deal: “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced the breakthrough on the Senate floor around 1:30 a.m.,” Erica Werner, Mike DeBonis, Paul Kane and Jeff Stein report. McConnell said the Senate would pass the legislation later Wednesday.

  • Airlines: $50 billion would go to passenger airlines and $8 billion would be directed to cargo airlines, per Werner et al.
  • Oil: Taken out of the final package, however, is $3 billion for refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, according to Schumer’s office. Senate Republicans initially asked for that money to help struggling oil companies.
  • But, but… It’s still not a done deal yet. “With the House out of session, action there could take longer, depending on whether lawmakers can agree to pass the bill by ‘unanimous consent,’ which would require agreement from all members of the chamber.”

President Trump has said warm weather could slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, but experts explain it’s too early to know if the virus is seasonal. (John Farrell, Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)

— Early research hints warm, humid weather could slow coronavirus: Several preliminary studies suggest the novel virus could be slowed by warm and humid weather — raising the possibility that the pandemic could slow in parts of North America and Europe as summer approaches, as Andrew Freeman and Simon Denyer report.

  • The findings… “A new study uploaded to the research site SSRN over the weekend finds that 90 percent of the coronavirus transmissions so far have occurred within a specific temperature (37 to 63 degrees) and absolute humidity range. For areas outside this zone, the virus is still spreading, but more slowly, according to the study by two scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
  • …and some major caveats: The studies have not been peer-reviewed. And even if the findings pan out, they suggest the pandemic could come back in the fall. And “for many countries there may not be a window at all” with sufficiently high temperatures and humidity to slow the virus, Qasim Bukhari of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT said.

The Mountain View Mine near Thomas, W.Va. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

— Coal miners told to keep working: West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) called coal “so essential it is unbelievable.” And both President Trump and the mine workers union agree. Pennsylvania, which ordered coal mines closed because of the coronavirus, then changed course and called them “essential.” 

  • But some worry about the risk: “Because of the nature of the work — a lot of crowding, coughing and spitting — and the significant incidence of lung damage from years of exposure to coal dust, silica and diesel exhaust, coal miners may be especially vulnerable to the coronavirus, medical researchers say,” Will Englund reports.
  • What is “essential”: Arguments can be made about whether coal mining is so essential, especially as “coal provides less than a quarter of America’s electricity, at a moment when demand for power is falling and there are already large stockpiles of coal nationwide because of the warm winter, as well as a glut of cheap natural gas.”

A sign on a door of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

— EPA to waive compliance requirements: The agency is set to forgo compliance enforcement, such as deadlines to switch to cleaner-burning gasoline and delays to cleanup site deadlines, the Wall Street Journal reports.

  • A response to concerned industries: Oil refiners, water utilities and sewage plants are among those impacted by the pandemic. The EPA has “received an onslaught of requests from businesses and state regulators seeking help. It is reviewing potential changes that could give companies and regulators short-term compliance relief while they deal with staffing shortfalls and an economic downturn, administration officials said.”

A Ford Motor Co. sign. (Wolfram Schroll/Bloomberg News)

— More automakers chipping in: Ford Motor Co. will work with 3M Co. and GE to help manufacture medical equipment to support health-care workers and first responders, Bloomberg News reports. The company’s executive chairman Bill Ford said: “We’re just going as fast as we can.” 

  • The details: “The automaker will work with 3M Co. to accelerate production of the respirators and have United Auto Workers members assemble more than 100,000 plastic face shields a week, according to a statement Tuesday. Ford also will help General Electric Co.’s health-care unit boost output of ventilators that hospitals desperately need for coronavirus patients.”

The Casey Station in the Australian Antarctic Division. (Nisha Harris/Australian Antarctic Division/Reuters)
 

— The one place untouched by the coronavirus: Antarctica has so far been spared the blight of the spreading pandemic. It’s a place used to its isolation. “Even in normal times, only a limited number of people are allowed in and out of Antarctica, with medical workers screening for signs of influenza and other illnesses before arrival,” Adam Taylor and Stefano Pitrelli report.

  • No better quarantine”: More than two dozen countries have research stations on Antarctica. A U.S. research base on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf can be home to more than 1,000 residents, and many stay for a season or longer for scientific research.
  • But: “People stationed in Antarctica might be unlikely to catch the virus, but they would be at great risk if they did,” Taylor and Pitrelli write. “While most bases would be able to handle a single case of a serious respiratory infection, they would struggle to contain one that spreads as rapidly as the coronavirus.”

— Occidental Petroleum cutting pay to deal with fallout: Facing plummeting oil prices because of a coronavirus-fueled drop in economic activity, Occidental Petroleum Corp. is cutting salaries for U.S. employees by up to 30 percent, the Wall Street Journal reports. “Chief Executive Vicki Hollub’s salary will be cut by 81% and the oil-and-chemical company’s top executives’ pay will be cut by an average of 68%, according to the email,” per the report. “…The company said the drastic steps were necessary to weather the steep decline in oil prices.”

Here’s what a coronavirus-like response to the climate crisis would look like We asked eight experts if the global mobilization to slow the pandemic might pave the way for climate action.

https://www.latimes.com/people/sammy-roth

EXTRA MILEAGE

— Abandoned cities: A haunting series of photos from The Post shows deserted areas in New York, Miami, Seattle and other cities.

Empty Times Square in Manhattan on March 24, 2020. (Jeenah Moon for The Washington Post)

…………………………………………………………………

I’ll be reporting more on how the coronavirus and climate crisies are interacting with each other and how we as a society are trying to solve both simultaneously. This is a new very tall order for society, which may have another big excuse to drop the ball on climate. Personally I had no clue back in late 2019 that the coronavirus would be the most pressing issue to start out the new decade. One lesson here is that the future is not set in stone, and that nature can throw a big monkey wrench into all plans.

Now, here are some of todays articles on the horrendous coronavirus pandemic:

Here is more climate and weather news from Wednesday:

(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)

Here is one big “ET” from Tuesday (yesterday):

(If you like these posts and my work please contribute via the PayPal widget, which has recently been added to this site. Thanks in advance for any support.) 

Guy Walton “The Climate Guy”

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