Spencer Bokat-Lindell | Do We Need to Shrink the Economy to Stop Climate Change? – The New York Times

By Spencer Bokat-Lindell

Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor.

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

“If there is a dominant paradigm for how politicians and economists today think about solving climate change, it is called green growth. According to green growth orthodoxy — whose adherents populate European governments, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank and the White House — the global economy can both continue growing and defuse the threat of a warming planet through rapid, market-led environmental action and technological innovation.

But in recent years, a rival paradigm has been gaining ground: degrowth. In the view of degrowthers, humanity simply does not have the capacity to phase out fossil fuels and meet the ever-growing demand of rich economies. At this late hour, consumption itself has to be curtailed.

Degrowth is still a relatively marginal tendency in climate politics, but it’s been attracting converts. In 2019, more than 11,000 scientists signed an open letter calling for a “shift from G.D.P. growth” toward “sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being.” And in May, a paper published in the journal Nature argued that degrowth “should be as widely and thoroughly considered and debated as are comparably risky technology-driven pathways.” “

Spencer Bokat-Lindell | A Farewell to Readers – The New York Times

Climate, changed

“In the many instances when I mentioned to friends or other journalists that I was writing an edition of this newsletter on climate change, I often got a quizzical response: In view of the overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue, what more was there really left to debate?

Quite a lot, as it turned out. For starters: Is it even politically and technologically possible for the United States to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of zeroing out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050? And given that the United States has done more than any other country to contribute to climate change, what does it owe the rest of the world?

The challenge of decarbonization also raises profound questions about how our economic system may need to change in the coming years, in ways both large and small. Is Americans’ love of cars — even if they are replaced with electric ones — and gas stoves sustainable? To expedite the renewable energy transition, would a carbon tax suffice, or do we need a more sweeping industrial policy like the Green New Deal? On a planet with finite resources, might rich countries even need to shrink their economies?

As the costs of climate change mount — and they will, for the next few decades at least, no matter what we do now — attention is turning toward the urgency and limits of adapting to a hotter planet. Should humanity start to approach those limits, it will go looking with increasing desperation for technological solutions to the crisis, each of which courts factions of boosters and detractors: lab-grown meat, old-fashioned nuclear fission, nascent nuclear fusion — even turning the sky white.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT  NYT comment:

Bravo. Spencer Bokat-Lindell. Keep it up. You wrote: “The challenge of decarbonization also raises profound questions about how our economic system may need to change in the coming years, in ways both large and small. Is Americans’ love of cars — even if they are replaced with electric ones — and gas stoves sustainable? To expedite the renewable energy transition, would a carbon tax suffice, or do we need a more sweeping industrial policy like the Green New Deal? On a planet with finite resources, might rich countries even need to shrink their economies?” That last sentence might be key the the survival of homo sapiens and millions of other innocent species we are destroying with our now 8 billion humans. So there is plenty to work on. It is amazing how few economists grasp that GNP is no longer the right metric. Quality of life is closer to the right issue to measure. I recommend to you, “The Hidden Connections, A Sciencer for Sustainable Living” by Fritjof Capra, and the work of the sustainable economist, Herman Daly, the author of “No Growth Economics” David blogs at InconvenientNews.net

Spencer Bokat-Lindell | Biden’s Climate Change ‘Revolution’ Isn’t Coming – The New York Times

By Spencer Bokat-Lindell

Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor.

“When President Biden took office, one of the first things he did was make a pledge: The United States, he vowed, would finally “meet the urgent demands of the climate crisis” through “a clean energy revolution.” That revolution was to be set in motion by a $2 trillion plan for putting the country on a path to 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035 and to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, in line with the Paris agreement’s goal of keeping global warming well below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. (It now stands at 2.2 degrees.)

But after more than a year of negotiations, compromises, deal-making and belt-tightening, that plan appeared to collapse last week when Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia and a key swing vote in Congress, announced that he would not support funding for climate or energy programs.

What does the collapse of Biden’s agenda mean for the domestic and global politics of climate action moving forward? Here’s what people are saying.”

“. . .  As far as national electoral politics are concerned, The Times’s David Leonhardt argues, the fact that a single Democratic politician was able to derail Biden’s climate agenda should prompt Democrats to redouble their efforts to increase their Senate majority, particularly by winning over more voters in red and purple states. “It is clear that many blue-collar voters don’t feel at home in the Democratic Party — and that their alienation is a major impediment to the U.S. doing more to slow climate change,” he writes.

It is also possible that the government’s sclerosis could spur interest in less conventional and extra-electoral avenues to addressing climate change, among them nuclear power (the promise and drawbacks of which have been explored in this newsletter); the “degrowth” movement; speculative technological fixes such as solar geoengineering; and mass movements of civil and uncivil disobedience, as the ecologist Andreas Malm called for in his book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.”

As the Colorado River reservoirs dry up, as the death toll from the record-setting heat waves and wildfires scorching Europe rises, and as more than a billion people in South Asia recover from a season of heat extreme enough to test the upper limits of human survivability, “this moment feels interminable,” Meyer of The Atlantic writes. “But what is unsustainable cannot be sustained. If one man can block the industrial development of what is, for now, the world’s hegemon, then its hegemony must be very frail indeed.”

But then, climate change seems to remain a relatively minor concern among the U.S. electorate: Just 1 percent of voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll named it as the most important issue facing the country; even among voters under 30, that figure was 3 percent.

That is just one poll. But it would perhaps be premature to rule out another direction the politics of climate change might take, one that could prove familiar to those who have witnessed how the American public has processed other cumulative traumas, like the drug overdose crisis or gun violence or the pandemic: a resigned acceptance of mass suffering, punctuated by moments of shock that serve only as reminders of how the unimaginable became normal.”   -30-

Spencer Bokat-Lindell | Is There a Nuclear Option for Stopping Climate Change? – The New York Times

By Spencer Bokat-Lindell

Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor.

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

“Humanity’s failure to avert the crisis of a warming climate is sometimes framed as a grand technological problem: For centuries, countries relied on fossil fuels to industrialize their economies and generate wealth, and it was only in recent years that alternative ways of powering a society, like solar and wind energy, became viable.

But when it comes to electricity, at least, that story isn’t true. Today, the United States gets 60 percent of its electricity from fossil fuels and just 20 percent from renewables. The final 20 percent comes from nuclear power, a technology that has existed since the 1950s, produces no carbon dioxide and has killed far fewer people than fossil fuels.”

Spencer Bokat-Lindell | Did the Supreme Court Just Kill the Voting Rights Act? – The New York Times

By Spencer Bokat-Lindell

Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor.

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

“Bans on ballot collection. Limits on vote-by-mail drop boxes. Shorter hours at polling places. Across the country, Republican legislatures are passing laws to make it harder to vote. Which is why, for proponents of expansive voting rights, the Supreme Court decision last week upholding two such laws could scarcely have come at a worse time.

“What is tragic here is that the court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, which was joined by the two other liberal justices. “What is tragic is that the court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting.’” “