Social Europe: The climate verdict of the German Constitutional Court

Legislators must therefore organise the path to zero emissions—which the court sees as required under constitutional and international law—in a way that is as forward-looking and freedom-friendly as possible. In doing so, each generation must do its fair share if there is to be a timely shift to zero fossil fuels—in sectors such as electricity, buildings, transport, cement, plastics and agriculture—and to greatly-reduced animal husbandry. In any event, following the ruling the Paris-agreement goal of keeping global heating within 1.5C above preindustrial times is on the way to becoming a constitutionally binding norm. 

The Federal Constitutional Court made it clear that legislators must not allow the entire remaining budget for greenhouse-gas emissions, as calculated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to be used up in the next few years as the German government planned more or less to do. Formally, the government has been obliged by the court to define the emissions-reduction targets for the period after 2030 more precisely. [...]

The Court of Justice of the European Union recently rejected a similar complaint. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), on the other hand—an institution of the Council of Europe—has relevant lawsuits pending. And it may also be that the complainants in our first climate lawsuit, just decided in Karlsruhe, will continue to the ECHR. Although we are very pleased with the ruling, it does not actually go far enough in terms of climate protection, given the above-mentioned criticism of the IPCC budget approach.

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Social Europe: A rail renaissance for Europe

 The momentum for a European rail renaissance is growing. A recent survey by the European Investment Bank revealed that 74 per cent of respondents intended to fly less frequently for environmental reasons, once restrictions were lifted, and 71 per cent planned to choose trains over planes for short-haul trips.

The rail system is not yet in shape, though. On average, rail accounts for only 8 per cent of passenger transport. The Achilles heel is cross-border rail: the European system is only a patchwork of national systems. Ask anyone who has ever tried to cross several European countries by train.[...]

EU funding makes up an important share of overall transport infrastructure funding and can be a lever for other sources. Yet too much goes into roads and airports, too little into rail. Much even of that is spent on mega-projects with exploding costs, long delays and sometimes only limited European value. The European Court of Auditors cautioned in 2018 that projects were often chosen on a political basis—not sound cost-benefit analysis—and lacked co-ordination across borders.

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City Beautiful: Can we make cities car free?

 Europe's cities could get there soon. The US? Maybe not.

The Guardian: Inside the airline industry's meltdown

To customers, investors and airlines, an earthbound existence was unimaginable before the coronavirus. For commercial aviation, the past two decades have been a period of superheated growth. In 1998, airlines sold 1.46bn tickets for one kind of flight or another. By 2019, that number had shot up to 4.54bn. This year has undone it all. Early in March, the International Air Transport Association (Iata) published two potential scenarios. The more extreme one forecast a global loss of revenue of $113bn. By mid-April, about 14,400 passenger planes around the world – 65% of the global fleet – had been placed into storage, according to the aviation research firm Cirium. Companies that have been brought to the brink, or in some cases collapsed entirely, include Virgin Australia and Virgin Atlantic, Flybe in the UK, South African Airways, LATAM and Avianca in South America, Compass and Trans States in the US. Airlines for America, a trade group, calculated that the last time the US averaged fewer than 100,000 daily passengers was in 1954. Emirates became so desperate for passengers that it promised to shell out $1,765 for a funeral if anyone died of Covid-19 after flying with them. [...]

Last year, KLM unveiled an initiative that sounded like a plea for less business. “Do you always need to meet face to face? Could you take the train instead?” a voiceover in an advert asked. “We all have to fly every now and then. But next time, think about flying responsibly.” (“There was a little bit of bravery in that,” a KLM executive told me. “It had to be pitched to the board three times before they approved it.”) The ad, bold as it was, also fit a broader pattern. As ever, individuals are being requested to tame their habits of consumption, even while governments and large corporations do far less than they might to curb their expenditure of carbon. At the same time, we’re assured by airline companies that our self-restraint has to be only temporary, and that some technological salvation – a plane running on batteries or hydrogen – will let us return to our habits very soon. [...]

But the true leaps in efficiency were achieved by new craft, which airlines began to request from manufacturers in the early 00s. The Boeing 787, for example, claims to burn 20% less fuel than its older sibling, the 767. Van Hooff recalled how, when KLM inducted its first 787 into its fleet in 2015, a pilot accustomed to the 747 was appointed to fly it to Dubai. “The 747 is beautiful, but it burns around 11,000 kilos of fuel per hour on a trip like this, so he was used to seeing around 100,000 kilos on his storage gauge when he got into the cockpit,” Van Hooff said. “This time, he saw 50,000. He put in a call to dispatch to ask: ‘Are you really sure this is enough?’ Of course, he knew it was. But he couldn’t get past his gut feeling that he needed more fuel.”

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Social Europe: China takes the climate stage

The online exchanges were, by all accounts, meatier than expected. But that was no preparation for what happened next. On September 22nd, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, made a surprise announcement: China would aim for carbon neutrality ahead of 2060. 

Xi has done big climate policy before. In November 2014 he appeared alongside the then US president, Barack Obama, to declare that China—despite its status as a developing country and although the climate problem was the historical responsibility of the west—would make commitments to curb its emissions from 2030. That declaration opened the door to the Paris Agreement. [...]

For the mass of the Chinese population, the threat of catastrophic flooding this summer was a far greater concern than fear of Islamism in Xinjiang or troublesome student protests in Hong Kong. Authoritarian environmentalism under the banner of ‘ecological civilisation’ is one of the watchwords of Xi’s regime.

Increasingly, climate is being inserted into a vision of great-power rivalry, rather than co-operation. In the US there are already voices calling for the establishment of green energy policies on the basis of a bipartisan national-security front against China.

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99 Percent Invisible: For the Love of Peat

Some scientists from Switzerland tried to calculate how much carbon could be removed if we planted trees all around the world. They published a paper in the journal Nature arguing that if humans planted a trillion trees, it could remove one-third of all of the CO2 we had put up there in the first place. It was a dramatic finding that led to a lot of dramatic headlines. The way that the paper was being described in some articles, you would think that trees were some kind of climate change panacea, that they were the key to fixing global warming. [...]

Richard Lindsay is a scientist at the University of East London’s Sustainability Institute. “Everybody’s saying, let’s plant a million trees, let’s plant a billion trees,” he says, “Yes, I’m all in favor of that. But let’s plant the right tree in the right place.” Lindsay has personal experience watching a lot of trees get planted in the wrong place. Back in the 1980s, he saw firsthand the impact of a controversial tree planting scheme in Scotland that ended up threatening one of the most special ecosystems in the world.

In the 1980s, the British government started using tax breaks to private citizens to encourage tree planting efforts around the country. The goal was to boost the UK’s timber supply. And it was a really good tax break, especially for the super-rich. But questions started to emerge about where exactly these trees were going to go. In order for this to work, investors needed large tracts of undeveloped, unwanted land. And there was one place that met the criteria—it was called the Flow Country. The Flow Country is a vast open area in the far north of Scotland that looks almost like the arctic tundra. The best way to appreciate the flow country might be in an airplane. From the sky, it looks like a Persian rug—streaked with colorful sphagnum mosses and dotted with little pools of water.

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BBC4 Analysis:Planning for the Worst

 How ready are we for the next pandemic, cyber attack, volcanic eruption, or solar storm? Our world, ever more interconnected and dependent on technology, is vulnerable to a head-spinning array of disasters. Emergency preparedness is supposed to help protect us and the UK has been pioneering in its approach. But does it actually work? In this edition of Analysis, Simon Maybin interrogates official predictions past and present, hearing from the advisers and the advised. Are we any good at anticipating catastrophic events? Should we have been better prepared for the one we’ve been living through? And - now that coronavirus has shown us the worst really can happen - what else should we be worrying about?

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BBC Radio 4 Analysis: Humans vs the Planet

 As Covid-19 forced humans into lockdown, memes emerged showing the earth was healing thanks to our absence. These were false claims – but their popularity revealed how seductive the dangerous idea that ‘we are the virus’ can be.

At its most extreme, this way of thinking leads to eco-fascism, the belief the harm humans do to Earth can be reduced by cutting the number of non-white people.

But the mainstream green movement is also challenged by a less hateful form of this mentality known as ‘doomism’ – a creeping sense that humans will inevitably cause ecological disaster, that it’s too late to act and that technological solutions only offer more environmental degradation through mining and habitat loss.

What vision can environmentalists offer as an antidote to these depressing ideas? And how can green politics encourage radical thinking without opening the door to hateful ideologies?

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Deutsche Welle: How the coronavirus has spurred change in Germany

 But now, more than half a year after the pandemic broke out, an increasing number of people are seeing COVID-19 not solely as a disaster, but also as a possible catalyst for reforms. And as an event that has torn down mental barriers that were hitherto thought permanent. [...]

Claussen said he was particularly impressed by the German government's Neustart Kultur ("Culture Relaunch") intitiative, a €1-billion ($1.2 billion) scheme passed by parliament at the end of July. "There is no premium for scrapping cars, but money for art and culture," he noted, referring to aborted plans to boost the car industry by paying car owners to trade old cars for new. For Claussen, this was a sign that Germany still saw itself as a country that values culture even amid the coronavirus crisis. [...]

German Labor Minister Hubertus Heil is already working on a bill that will give people the right to work from home if possible. Heil, from the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), has pushed for changes during the pandemic — especially, for example, in the meat industry. After COVID-19 outbreaks in several slaughterhouses, contracts under which workers are employed by sub-contractors will be banned in the sector, along with the use of agency workers.

The coronavirus is also speeding up some climate protection measures in the energy sector. Politicians were forced to link both the German government's €130-billion aid package and the historic €1.8-trillion EU aid package to climate protection measures.

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statista: Beef: It's What's Contributing to Climate Change

Global meat production has dropped by 3 percent in 2020, going from an estimated 339 million tons in 2019 to 333 million this year. That’s the largest dip in at least 20 years for meat producers, and while some of that can be attributed to supply chain and production deficiencies from COVID-19, a growing body of data shows people may slowly be turning away from meat. And in the case of beef, that’s good news for the climate.

In data collected by Bloomberg from a Poore and Nemecek report, beef contributes roughly 60 kilograms of CO2 to the environment for every kilogram of product produced. For example, if a steer with a weight of 450 kilograms produces 200 kilograms of retail cuts at slaughter, that steer and the processes required from birth to retail cuts contributes roughly 12,000 kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere. Compare that to pork and chicken, which produce just 7 and 6 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of product, respectively.

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Electrek: EGEB: Portugal kills coal two years ahead of schedule

Portugal has ended its coal-burning two years ahead of schedule. It’s the third EU country to close its coal plants early in 2020, after Austria and Sweden. Belgium was the first EU country to end coal, in 2016.

Portuguese energy utility EDP announced the closure of its Sines coal power plant, which emitted 13.5% of all carbon dioxide in Portugal. Sines (pictured) is south of Lisbon, on the coast. EDP will close one more plant and convert another unit in Spain. The utility is now evaluating the development of a green hydrogen production project in Sines, according to its website. [...]

The German city of Wuppertal partnered with Cologne in 2018 to order 40 hydrogen-powered buses made by Belgian manufacturer Van Hool NV. Cologne is running 30 of them, and the remaining 10 will soon be on the road in Wuppertal. It’s thought to be the largest order for hydrogen buses in Europe.

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Social Europe: The Green Deal may not be green enough

The Green Deal covers areas such as energy, construction, agriculture and transport, and further develops the concept of the ‘circular economy’ as well as the EU’s biodiversity strategy. The details of how existing policies will have to be adapted and new ones introduced will be worked out over 2020 and 2021.

However, the plan as currently constituted is not enough. The Green Deal remains ‘a new growth strategy’, based on the same ideology that led us into the climate crisis. Although the aim is to reduce the carbon-intensity of our lifestyle, it is continuing the path of further growth. It allows continuous extraction and consumption of unsustainable and non-renewable resources, with natural gas—specifically the less carbon-intensive liquefied natural gas—as an important part of the energy strategy for an (indefinite) transition period, including carbon-capture and storage (which is a long-term strategy by default). [...]

The speed and intensity with which we act is decisive: the more moderately we act, the more effort will be needed to try to contain global warming to an average 1.5C—if that’s still possible. Climate NGOs further stress that the EU should choose strategies that avoid a temporary overshoot of the 1.5-degree objective and which consequently also rely least on unproven removal technologies (including carbon capture and storage) to bring the temperature rise back below 1.5C in case of overshoot. They are not the only experts judging that the development and deployment of sustainable negative emission technologies at a global scale is unreliable today. [...]

What we need instead is a revolution in our lifestyles. We need a radically different way of thinking. We need to tap into existing movements and forms of organisation that have a ‘healthy eco-system-first’ strategy and apply indicators that do not reflect quantitative production capacity (gross domestic product) but the improvement of our (qualitative) wellbeing. Without this change, we cannot reach net-zero emissions and we cannot contain global warming to 1.5 degrees.

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Scientific American: Coronavirus Responses Highlight How Humans Have Evolved to Dismiss Facts That Don’t Fit Their Worldview

“Motivated reasoning” is what social scientists call the process of deciding what evidence to accept based on the conclusion one prefers. As I explain in my book, “The Truth About Denial,” this very human tendency applies to all kinds of facts about the physical world, economic history and current events.

The interdisciplinary study of this phenomenon has made one thing clear: The failure of various groups to acknowledge the truth about, say, climate change, is not explained by a lack of information about the scientific consensus on the subject. [...]

A 2015 metastudy showed that ideological polarization over the reality of climate change actually increases with respondents’ knowledge of politics, science and/or energy policy. The chances that a conservative is a climate science denier is significantly higher if he or she is college educated. Conservatives scoring highest on tests for cognitive sophistication or quantitative reasoning skills are most susceptible to motivated reasoning about climate science. [...]

Unwelcome information can also threaten in other ways. “System justification” theorists like psychologist John Jost have shown how situations that represent a perceived threat to established systems trigger inflexible thinking. For example, populations experiencing economic distress or an external threat have often turned to authoritarian leaders who promise security and stability.

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Slate: In Europe, Green Is the New Red

When Green parties throughout Europe saw unprecedented success in European Parliament elections last year, it was clear that voters were responding to concerns about the climate crisis as well as a loss of confidence in the big mainstream parties that have dominated politics for decades. But EU elections are often favorable for protest votes and fringe parties, and there were questions about whether the enthusiasm would last. “People were already starting to flirt with us. Now they have had a one-night stand. Whether this is a permanent relationship is totally unclear,” Sven Giegold, a leading German Green MEP told me last June. Judging from recent election results, the infatuation hasn’t faded. In fact, in several countries the greens appear on the verge of eclipsing old-school socialist or social-democratic parties as the main electoral voice of the left. [...]

The coalition deal was approved by an overwhelming 93 percent of the Green Party’s membership. Writing in the American socialist magazine Jacobin, activist Teresa Petrik suggests we shouldn’t be surprised by this. “Some Green voters might identify as left-wing,” she writes, “Yet most of the party’s base are highly educated and financially well off. They are not the people who will suffer from continued welfare cuts and the neoliberal policies the new government is pushing forward.”

Austria’s strange new government is more troubling evidence of just how easily environmental concerns can be wedded to a hard-line anti-immigration agenda. But on the other hand, it’s also a sign that the climate issue has become so mainstream in Europe that even the bona fide right-wingers are embracing it. The U.S. is not quite there yet.

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The Guardian: Fast-growing mini-forests spring up in Europe to aid climate

Advocates for the method say the miniature forests grow 10 times faster and become 30 times denser and 100 times more biodiverse than those planted by conventional methods. This result is achieved by planting saplings close together, three per square metre, using native varieties adapted to local conditions. A wide variety of species – ideally 30 or more – are planted to recreate the layers of a natural forest.

Scientists say such ecosystems are key to meeting climate goals, estimating that natural forests can store 40 times more carbon than single-species plantations. The Miyawaki forests are designed to regenerate land in far less time than the 70-plus years it takes a forest to recover on its own. [....]

The higher biodiversity is due partly to the forests’ young age and openness, explained Fabrice Ottburg, an animal ecologist who led the Wageningen study. This allows more sunlight to reach flowering plants that attract pollinators. Diversity is also boosted by planting multiple species, which “provide more variety in food and shelter for a higher diversity of animals like insects, snails, butterflies, amphibians, bugs, grasshoppers”, Ottburg said.

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Politico: American nationalists’ European vacation

“It’s a definite paradox,” said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, a social media analytics firm that tracks these campaigns. “The U.S. far right, a nationalist and racist movement, is now trying to go global itself.” [...]

Despite a groundswell in the volume of American-made misinformation in Europe, activists’ efforts largely failed to sway public opinion, according to online campaign analysts, hate-speech experts and policymakers who have tracked the growth of American digital activists operating in the EU over the last four years. [...]

Soon, the hashtags #GetBrexitDone and #TakeBackControl started trending in the U.S., despite most Americans being largely apathetic toward Brexit. The idea of a polarized Britain — and a leader like Johnson who rose to the occasion to champion the will of the people — served to boost Trump’s “stick it to the elites” narrative. [...]

While the groups failed to get much attention in France, their anti-Macron hashtag was soon trending back home in the U.S. — despite most American Twitter users not interested in European politics. That allowed these activists to portray the soon-to-be French president as someone from a corrupt political elite and to link the scandal to Trump’s pledges to “drain the swamp.” [...]

Ahead of the European Parliament election in May, 2019, for instance, European activists grew tired, and even angry, over American groups’ interest. The efforts coincided with the failed attempt by Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, to unify the region’s nationalist political parties under one umbrella. [...]

Increasingly, political operators — on the right and the left — are moving away from paid-for social media ads and toward so-called organic content, or regular social media posts published in private Facebook groups to reach their target audiences.

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BBC4 Analysis: The Return of Reality?

Before Covid-19 hit, the latest research showed we were more polarised than ever. We broadly agree on the issues - it's the emotions where things get tricky.

If someone is part of the other tribe then we want little to do with them. And the more polarised we are, the more prone we are to what philosophers call 'knowledge resistance' - rejecting information that doesn't fit our worldview.

If we're in a situation where identity trumps truth, is there anything that can pull us back to reality? Peter Pomerantsev, author of This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, looks at whether Covid-19 could bring us back towards a sense of shared reality - or whether it might push us further apart.

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EURACTIV: In political U-turn, Czechs back EU’s green recovery plan

If confirmed, the move would mark a U-turn from previous government positions. In March, as the coronavirus pandemic started spreading across the continent, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš urged Europe to “forget about the Green Deal now and focus on the coronavirus instead”. [...]

The European Commission has promised to raise the EU’s emissions reduction target to 50-55% by 2030, up from 40% currently. The proposal is due to be released later this year, after the EU executive completes a detailed cost-benefit analysis.[...]

In addition, Czechs seem broadly supportive of climate action. According to a survey published in March, 84% of Czech people think that climate change caused by human activities threatens their future. And 79% believe the Czech Republic should aim to achieve net-zero emissions, the survey found.

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Aeon: The fruits of anger

The philosopher Amia Srinivasan at the University of Oxford is an advocate of anger’s merits. Her work makes the case for anger by drawing extensively on fields ranging from political science and sociology to feminist epistemology. Among the many arguments in her seminal article, ‘The Aptness of Anger’ (2018), she notes that anger can be productive epistemically – that is, in the production, shaping and organising of our knowledge and understanding. It better enables victims to make sense of their oppression by heightening their emotions and allowing them to focus on specific features of their victimisation. Victims of injustice or circumstance are often told by their oppressors to blame themselves; consider, for instance, the black single mother blamed for ‘choosing’ to become a ‘welfare queen’, or those languishing in caged homes in Hong Kong, who are told that their socioeconomic circumstances are their own fault. Gaslighting and dismissal of their lived experiences are part and parcel of everyday life for the voiceless. Anger supplies those who are wronged or slighted with the resilience to say: ‘No! It is not my fault.’ It clarifies the injustice that befalls them, enabling individuals to make sense of their situations by access to their authentic feelings. [...]

The philosopher Maxime Lepoutre at Nuffield College in Oxford argues that anger – as expressed through speech or nonverbal cues – can direct attention to the most morally pressing features of particular situations. For instance, victims of domestic abuse, through spontaneous anger, articulate publicly the extent of violation and pain they experience at the hands of their abusers. Thunberg’s angry speech reminds us of the extent to which we are actively, presently complicit in the persistence of climate change. Communicative anger helps us understand what is at stake, and what is most important to those with whom we are speaking.

Anger can motivate people, too. Malcolm X’s anger found voice in his call for violent self-defence and active resistance towards both the institutionally racist police force and the tacitly racist American middle class. His advocacy epitomised a willingness to subvert established legal structures and social norms in advancement of African American interest. Anger mixed with symbolic or psychological violence – as opposed to the non-violent, non-confrontational methodology for which Martin Luther King became known – was the driving force behind those who found King’s methods too conciliatory and inefficacious. Regardless of how one assesses the moral legitimacy of Malcolm X’s methods, his radical activism reshaped public discourse, rendering King’s advocacy not only more palatable, but even honourable in the eyes of the fundamentally shaken American public. As Srinivasan notes: ‘It is historically naive, after all, to think that white America would have been willing to embrace King’s vision of a unified, post-racial nation, if not for the threat of Malcolm X’s angry defiance.’ [...]

Anger is an overriding emotion – it is, by its vindictive and impulsive nature, uncontrollable and blinding. It wages war against cool and steady consideration of all reasons in decisionmaking, by amplifying disproportionately our thirst for what we take to be justice. At its worst, anger is what propels terrorist ideology and mass violence, committed by psychopathic individuals to exact revenge and attain justice under their ideological conceptions. More mundanely, anger causes us to shut out dissent and take pleasure in inflicting pain upon others – it transforms others’ suffering into something we take to be right and warranted. We can be easily skewed by our biases and pre-existing views to project our anger on to the wrong individuals, thereby undermining our ability to act upon our considered judgments.

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Ministry Of Ideas: Climate of Denial

Human-caused climate change is real and growing in impact. Yet many Americans see climate change as a belief that they can opt out of. Two belief structures are to blame: American Protestantism and postmodernism.

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