What just happened in America is the beginning of the end of climate change mitigation doom loop

We do not understand nor appreciate just how bad shit is going to get now Trump has committed this public vandalism against the environment…

HOUSTON — A potent combo of MAGA policy and global energy demand is bringing a harsh reality check to climate change efforts, Axios’ Ben Geman writes.

• • Why it matters: Powerful execs gathered here for the marquee U.S. energy conference are declaring a new realism — even as temperatures keep shattering records.

“Energy realism is taking center stage,” Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, head of UAE state energy giant Adnoc, said today in remarks at CERAWeek by S&P Global.

• • “We need every energy option available. We need it all,” he said, citing oil, gas, nuclear and renewables.

BlackRock Chairman Larry Fink — once a leading Wall Street advocate for net-zero emissions goals — told the audience: “Across the board, we have to think about power and energy in a pragmatic way.”

• • American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers told Axios: “An emerging theme that I’ve seen already is kind of: We’re back to energy pragmatism.”

🔭 The big picture: Comments here from U.S. and global execs distill what’s been building in C-suites and across governments.

• • The rapid spread of zero-carbon energy is still too slow for net-zero emissions aims. And the willingness to absorb the political and economic costs of a faster transition is waning.

🔬 Zoom in: A new Bain & Co. survey of hundreds of executives finds that just 32% expect the world to hit net-zero emissions in 2050, down from 50% in prior surveys.

• • There’s no single reason for the rethink. But several forces are at work, including …

🇺🇸 1. The U.S. political pivot, with Trump 2.0 officials reversing Biden-era policies and abandoning multilateral climate efforts.

• • Energy Secretary Chris Wright declared that global warming needs to be knocked down on the priority list.
  • “The previous administration’s policy was focused myopically on climate change, with people as simply collateral damage,” he said in his conference-opening speech.

🇪🇺 2. Even in the EU, where climate has long been a bigger priority, nations are recalibrating tradeoffs between green goals and industrial competitiveness.

• • Recent moves include giving automakers more flexibility on emissions and easing ruleson corporate emissions reporting.

💻 3. AI and other new technologies are pushing up electricity demand, with tech companies seeking energy of all sorts.

• • Fink described his conversations with “hyperscalers” — large-scale cloud service providers offering data and computing services.
  • “About four years ago, they would say: ‘If we’re building a data center, it must be with renewables,'” Fink said. “About two years ago, they said: ‘We prefer renewables.’ And today, they care about power.”

📈 4. Coal, oil and natural gas use keep rising in developing nations as people aspire to higher living standards.

…’energy pragmatism’ is the new phrase that justifies adding more climate changing pollution to our environment as that environment burns!

The Guardian was scathing of the changes announced this week at this climate polluter jamboree…

Trump officials to reconsider whether greenhouse gases cause harm amid climate rollbacks

Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the US government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health.

The so-called endangerment finding, which followed a supreme court ruling that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases, provides the underpinning for all rules aimed at cutting the pollution that scientists have unequivocally found is worsening the climate crisis.

Despite the enormous and growing body of evidence of devastation caused by rising emissions, including trillions of dollars in economic costs, Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and dismissed those concerned by its worsening impacts as “climate lunatics”.

Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said the agency would reconsider the endangerment finding due to concerns that it had spawned “an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas”.

Zeldin wrote that Wednesday was the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history” and that “we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age”.

Zeldin boasted about the changes and said his agency’s mission is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business”.

Environmentalists reacted with horror to the announcement and vowed to defend the overwhelming findings of science and the US’s ability to address the climate crisis through the courts, which regularly struck down Trump’s rollbacks in his first term. “The Trump administration’s ignorance is trumped only by its malice toward the planet,” said Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.

“Come hell or high water, raging fires and deadly heatwaves, Trump and his cronies are bent on putting polluter profits ahead of people’s lives. This move won’t stand up in court. We’re going to fight it every step of the way.”

In all, the EPA issued 31 announcements within just a few hours that take aim at almost every major environmental rule designed to protect Americans’ clean air and water, as well as a livable climate.

…extractive capitalism will continue to sell a burning planet to consumers.

In the words of Professor Wayne Hope from his new incredible book, The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Global Futures…

The corporate ambit of emissions culpability also includes transnational finance capital. In October 2019, journalist Patrick Greenfield drew from the think tank Influence Map and business data specialists Proxy Insight to examine the investment holdings of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. Their combined portfolios presided over US$286.7 billion of oil, coal and gas company shares administered through 1 712 funds. These figures excluded direst and non-listed fund holdings. Such investments were, and are, used to manage major funds involving pensions, university endowments and insurance companies. These figures reiterate the general principle of corporate culpability for carbon emissions and point to the contribution of global finance. Further to this matter, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney surmised that multi trillion-dollar world capital markets were financing projects and activities likely to raise average global temperatures 4% more than pre-industrialised levels.

As global networks of fossil fuel extraction, refining, industrial use and related financial investment produce carbon emissions, wealthy elites dominate carbon consumption. Explaining the process first requires a short excuses on wealth distribution, luxury consumer culture and class. Clearly, global wealth growth benefits super-rich individuals from the TCC. The richest 1% of the world’s population took 38% of all additional wealth between 1995 and 2021. Just 2% went to the bottom 50% of humankind. For the same period, billionaires’ share of total global wealth grew from 1 to 3%. Tim Di Muzio, writing in 2015, depicted such differentials as a global plutonomy whereby economic growth powered and consumed mostly by the wealthy few, excluded the vast majority. With huge money surplus to spend on precious metals, property portfolios, home residences, retreats, first-class travel, cars, yachts, jets, exclusive cultural pursuits and leisure activities, the rich and super rich demarcate social prestige among themselves. Individuals, families and groups strive to symbolically out-consume their class peers, while the upper-middle classes aspire to emulate their superiors. The entire set-up, led by the dominant owners of capital, is ecologically unsustainable.    

…we have to now acknowledge with this tsunami of pro-polluter policy that there is no chance any longer of remaining under 1.5 and that the more catastrophic elements of catastrophic climate change will continue to become more than less likely.

This demands a revolution in our economy into post growth capitalism because ecological socialism quickly becomes the only option left as the climate changes beyond some societies capacity to adapt.

There is a revolution coming whether you can see it or not.

 

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