Thomas Neuburger has written political analysis for numerous publications for nearly two decades. You might have come across him as his nom de plume, Gaius Publius. He has long been a professional writer, venturing into fiction, poetry, essays and non-fiction books. Despite spending his teen years in the same Kansas town, Prairie Village, as I did, I didn’t know of Tom until I started contributing to Down With Tyranny, where he is very prolific. Tom, who resides in Portland, Oregon, is currently launching a forum at Substack. One can subscribe for an eclectic grab-bag including political essays and excerpts of longer form works in progress, including an examination of the evolving US Constitution. He named his site “God’s Spies,” encompassing all of us, with that hard-to-shake feeling that we’re characters in a novel.

A key concern of Tom’s is global warming and its potential to rewrite all our storylines. Befitting the hottest decade on record, with the six warmest years lined up since 2015, Earth just logged the hottest November ever. Timeliness is never in short supply for this topic. Tom addresses it again in the DWT piece below.

— Skip Kaltenheuser

Much of the U.S. Could Be Uninhabitable by 2050

By Thomas Neuburger

Humans die when it gets too hot; that barely merits saying. But how hot is too hot, and how fast does “too hot” catch up to them?

The answer is important because much of the country in specific, and of the world in general, is going to be too hot fast, thanks to climate change.

First, let’s look at what “too hot” means, then at what parts of the U.S. will shortly become uninhabitable. Along the way, we’ll see what change in U.S. food production will inevitably result, since heat will be a factor there as well.

How Hot Is “Too Hot”?

Human core body temperature, the temperature on the inside of our bodies, usually stays in the range of 36.5–37.5°C (97.7–99.5°F), and must stay in this range to ensure long-term survival. Bodies have a number of mechanisms for regulating core temperature. One the most important is the production of sweat on the surface of the skin which, when it evaporates, cools the body.

The amount of evaporation from the skin is, naturally, a function of the humidity and circulation of the air around the body. So by definition, at 100% humidity and no air circulation (no wind), evaporation is impossible. (“100% humidity” means the air is already saturated with as much moisture as it can hold; no more can be added, so the sweat just stays on the skin, making us sticky instead of cool.)

There have been many attempts to measure human survivability at various combinations of temperature and humidity, both with bodies at rest and bodies doing work — exercising, for example, or cleaning the gutters. The usual way to measure what core body temperature will result from a given combination of heat, humidity, wind, and other factors is by using a wet-bulb thermometer to measure the “wet-bulb temperature.” A more refined version of the wet-bulb temperature is the “wet-bulb globe temperature” (WBGT).

All you need to know is this: A “wet bulb” is basically the bulb of a thermometer with wet muslin around it, simulating the core of a human body (the bulb) with wet skin around it (the muslin). If the water in the muslin is able to evaporate, the temperature of the bulb will be lower than the temperature of the outside air. If water in the muslin can’t evaporate (at 100% humidity and no wind, for example) the temperature of the bulb can’t be lowered.

For humans, the wet-bulb temperature of an environment shouldn’t be much greater than our normal core body temperature; if it is, the environment will endanger the people experiencing it. It’s a given among scientists that a wet-bulb temperature of 95°F (35°C) is the upper limit of extended human endurability. Anything above that and after a short while, people need to stop working, go indoors or into the shade, or find some air-conditioned place to continue their activities.

Consider the chart below from a 2004 study, “Extremes of human heat tolerance: Life at the precipice of thermoregulatory failure,” by William Kenney et al. Note the temperature point (X-axis) at which human core temperature stops being stable and begins rising out of control (Y-axis).

In this graph, MDI on the X-axis is a proxy for WBGT. The Y-axis shows a rate of increase in core temperature per hour. Assuming no ability of the body to cool itself, outside temperatures above 35°C (95°F) will cause overheating, and as you can see, the hotter it is, the faster the body’s core temperature rises. At a wet-bulb temperature of 40°C (104°F), core body temperature rises two to three degrees every hour. At higher temperatures, it rises faster.

Now consider the chart below, Figure 3 from the same study.

This one graphs the equivalent of WBGT (the X-axis) against human tolerance of it in minutes (the Y-axis). Note that at wet-bulb temperatures of 35°C (95°F), bodies doing work will last less than two hours before exhaustion. At 40°C (104°F), the time to exhaustion is less than an hour. In Baghdad just this year, outside temperatures reached 125°F. Worse is coming.

The graph shows time-to-exhaustion. It’s almost ghoulish to ask time-to-death, but that’s not hard to figure from these charts.

Hyperthermia (overheating) is considered life-threatening when core body temperature reaches 104°F (40°C). From the first chart above (Figure 2 of the study), an outside wet-bulb temperature of 40°C will raise the core temperature of a body doing work — trying to build a house, for example, or a renewable energy power station — at a rate of 3°C per hour.

In other words, after three hours of work in those conditions, most healthy, non-elderly people will experience a medical emergency due to a rise in core body temperature. If the outside temperature is higher, the medical emergency comes sooner. Untreated, disability and death are the likely results.

The Climate Connection

This is a climate piece, so let’s apply what we know. The following chart shows weeks per year of ambient temperatures above 35°C (95°F) for counties in the U.S. if we continue to burn fossil fuels at a business-as-usual rate. The darker the red, the more weeks per year of these temperatures. (The source is a recent ProPublica piece entitled “New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States.”)

The eye notices the dark red — for example, Phoenix, Arizona, with half a year of above-95° heat. But look at Kansas, with 8-11 weeks above 95 degrees. In Kansas, that’s the heart of the growing season, or was.

For comparison, this is the “niche” or ideal habitable zone in the U.S., the areas where temperature and rainfall have been most favorable to human habitation for the last 6,000 years.

And here’s where that favorable climate “niche zone” will move to by 2070 under business-as-usual conditions.

Don’t let the green in the map above fool you. Look again at the map with the red on it, the one showing weeks per year above 95 degrees. As ambient temperatures in those regions rise higher and higher, much or most of the area below the “niche zone” will be uninhabitable without heavy use of electrically powered air conditioning, and to make it habitable, people would have to work long hours outside, in unbearable temperatures, to add the infrastructure needed.

Under those conditions, and knowing things will only get worse, no one will invest a dime in making those areas livable. Nor will anyone move there. Those who can afford to move and change jobs will emigrate. Others will simply flee, like refugees.

Where will they go? What kind of country will we have when this occurs?

Is It Time to Say No and Mean It?

This is going to happen. We won’t have a president who takes climate change seriously enough to begin a Green New Deal, a massive enough climate-and-infrastructure project to deal with what’s coming, until 2024 at the earliest. Who knows who will be running things after that?

Sure Biden, Slayer of Trump, will do “something” about this problem — he has to be seen to do “something” — but the odds that he will do enough, barring a civil revolt against him, are zero. “Enough” is a very large ask, even though “enough” is just the minimum required.

Are you twenty years old today? By the time you’re fifty, much of the area on the map above will be uninhabited — abandoned and feral — while everyone from those regions will crowd north. The U.S. as you know it won’t exist; it will lose territorial integrity (as will China, by the way). Most of our food will come from Canada, if they still like us. And I’m willing to bet the Canadian border will be armed and patrolled — by Canadians.

Is civil revolt — not violence, mind you, but a massive series of general strikes and shutdowns — looking like a viable option all of a sudden? It is to me. It may in fact be the only viable one on the table.

How else do you propose we stop this killing machine we call our ruling class?

(For those who like my work, I’ve launched a Substack site. You can get more information here and here. If you decide to sign up — it’s free — my thanks to you!)

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You might already know Elliott Negin, whose writings I worked into with Dance with the One that Brought You — BERNIE! on NPR’s red-baiting of Bernie, and Scott Pruitt’s Doublespeak Clarifies Him, on yet another disastrous industrial strength Trump appointee hellbent on ransacking the environment. If not, it’s never too late. You can catch other writings by Elliott at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where Elliott is a senior writer, and at a number of other publications including The Huffington Post.

Elliott’s guest post below underscores that corporate behemoth Exon-Mobile, the world’s fourth-largest oil company and largest that is investor-owned, takes top honors among the world’s phonies. While its public relations people now fret about climate change and claim support for the Paris climate agreement, it continues to pour money into outfits that undermine public awareness of man’s role in global warming and that derail efforts to regulate energy and the environment. While claiming to support a carbon tax, it greases climate denying legislators who oppose it. Does Exxon-Mobil have any connections to the Dark Money sloshing about Washington? Who knows, but I’d bet on it. Recall that Exxon’s scientists warned its executives about the critical impacts of man-made climate change over forty years ago and that their scientists have since been cutting edge in climate science, their knowledge just not shared with the public.

No one is short on cynicism these days, but it’s worth considering such corporate phonies now, as Amy Coney Barrett is catapulted onto the Supreme Court with an irrevocable corporate fix. Her father was a lawyer for Shell Oil for decades and a major player in the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying entity for 600 oil and gas corporations. Why focus on a parent? Because when Barrett was asked about climate change her reply, given while swaths of the American West were aflame, was that she had “no firm views” and couldn’t “offer any kind of informed opinion” on the causes of global warming. Most fourth-graders could best that know-nothing answer. So it sounds like Barrett will be another oil and gas tentacle, at a time the API and affiliates, including Shell, have a lot of skin in the game in cases coming before the Supreme Court.

Elliott describes other tentacles below. — Skip Kaltenheuser

ExxonMobil Claims Shift on Climate But Continues to Fund Climate Science Deniers
Courtesy of Elliott Negin, senior writer

After decades of public denial, ExxonMobil now acknowledges that “the risk of climate change is real” and says it is “committed to being part of the solution,” at least according to the company’s website and statements. To that end, the largest investor-owned oil company in the world claims it supports a federal carbon tax and the Paris climate agreement.

But the company’s recently released grantmaking report shows that it has not ended its two-decade-long campaign to stymie government efforts to address climate change. By ExxonMobil’s own accounting, it gave $690,000 to eight climate science denier groups in 2019, a 10 percent drop from 2018. In addition, it continued to fund federal lawmakers who oppose a carbon tax, despite its supposed longtime support for the idea. Forty percent of the nearly $1 million it has contributed so far to congressional incumbent campaigns during the 2019-20 election cycle has gone to 115 of the 150 climate science deniers still in office.

Sixty percent of ExxonMobil’s 2019 donations to climate obstructionist groups for “public information and policy research” went to the US Chamber of Commerce, while another 30 percent was split between the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which have been receiving annual grants from the company since it began financing climate disinformation 22 years ago. All told, ExxonMobil has spent more than $37 million on climate science denier organizations from 1998 through 2019, more than any individual funder besides Charles Koch and his brother, the late David Koch, the billionaire owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries. Koch-controlled foundations spent more than $145 million on many of the same groups over roughly the same time period.

Did the top three recipients of ExxonMobil grants for climate science denier groups in 2019 toe the company’s publicly stated line on climate? The short answer is no. If actions speak louder than words, the donations call into question ExxonMobil’s commitment to seriously address the climate crisis and deserve a closer look.

The US Chamber still opposes carbon pollution standards

The US Chamber of Commerce has been a major player in blocking action on climate change going back to the 1990s, when the business lobby and Exxon were members of the Global Climate Coalition, a consortium of corporations and trade associations opposed to government policies that would cut carbon emissions.

But in 2009 — the same year ExxonMobil first announced its support for a carbon tax in a cynical attempt to derail cap-and-trade climate legislation — the Chamber’s united front began to crack. A handful of Fortune 500 companies — including Apple, Exelon Corporation and Pacific Gas & Electric — quit the Chamber over its opposition to the cap-and-trade bill while two other high-profile companies — Nike and Johnson & Johnson — retained their membership but rebuked the business lobby for the same reason. Since then, at least a dozen Chamber members, including Hewlett-Packard, General Mills, Mars, Nestlé and Unilever, have headed for the exits.

By contrast, ExxonMobil not only retained its Chamber membership, but it also pledged $5 million in annual installments to help pay for the Chamber’s $250-million renovation of its Washington, D.C., headquarters. In 2019, the company donated $400,000 for the building rehabilitation and another $15,000 to the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total contributions since 2014 to $4.8 million.

What does ExxonMobil get for its money? Among other things, the business lobby goes to bat for it in court by filing lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and in the court of public opinion by funding misleading climate-related reports. A prime example is the Chamber’s widely debunked 2017 report that grossly exaggerated the cost to the US economy of complying with the Paris climate agreement. President Donald Trump cited that report as his primary rationale for ignoring the US commitment to the accord, and he has vowed to officially pull the United States out in early November.

However, in 2019, the Chamber seemed to take a 180-degree turn, declaring on its website: “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” Although one could quibble with the assertion that human activity is merely contributing to climate change when in fact burning fossil fuels is the main cause, it was a far cry from when the organization maintained in comments submitted to the EPA in 2009 that “a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans.”

But the Chamber’s turnabout was not complete. Although it now concedes the reality of human-caused climate change, it is still pushing private-sector innovation as the solution to the climate crisis rather than much-needed government regulation, which historically has driven technological advances.

So, while the Chamber supports government funding for research and development of advanced nuclear reactors, utility-scale batteries, and carbon capture and storage technology, it backed the Trump administration’s rollbacks of the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced power plant carbon emissions, and its 2015 “Waters of the United States” rule, which would have protected small streams, wetlands and groundwater from toxic chemicals.

More recently, the Chamber supported the Trump administration’s weakening of the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act by limiting public input in the infrastructure project approval process and rescinding a requirement that federal agencies consider a proposed project’s impact on the climate.

Unlike ExxonMobil’s professed support for a carbon tax, the Chamber has no official position, but if carbon tax legislation ever made it to the Senate or House floor, it presumably would oppose it given its dim view of government regulation.

Likewise, the Chamber’s avowed support for US compliance with the Paris climate accord includes a major caveat. Dan Byers, vice president for policy at the Chamber’s Global Energy Institute, told Politico in August 2019 that it is “absolutely important for the US to remain in the Paris climate agreement” but added that the “Obama administration’s pledge was unrealistic, [and] was going to have a negative impact on our economy. And so we’d like to see that revisited.” In other words, the Chamber would like the United States to remain a party to the agreement so that it could lobby to weaken the US commitment to it.

American Enterprise Institute still downplays the climate threat

In 2019, ExxonMobil gave the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) $110,000, bringing its total since 1998 to $4.76 million — more than any other of its climate science denier grantees. The 82-year-old, free market think tank also receives generous funding from other climate disinformation network supporters, including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation.

What does ExxonMobil get for its money from AEI? A cheerleader for fossil fuels, economist Benjamin Zycher, who — contrary to the company’s professed climate positions — argues that a carbon tax would be “ineffective” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.”

In March, Zycher published a report arguing that “any plausible policy” to curb carbon emissions “would yield trivial effects while imposing large costs.” Instead, he recommended the federal government adopt a policy of “watchful waiting, adaptation over time, and ongoing investment in resilience against the future effects of climactic [sic] changes.”

How could Zycher recommend “watchful waiting” given the large costs climate change is already imposing right now? Granted, he published his report before this summer, when heat waves and wildfires burned up the West Coast and hurricanes slammed the Southeast. But last summer was not that different, and climate change-related disasters have been racking up considerable damage over the last few years. From 2017 through 2019, there were 44 unique extreme weather and climate-linked events across the country causing damages of $1 billion or more, collectively costing more than $460 billion.

Nevertheless, Zycher insists fossil fuels are indispensable. “Opposition to fossil fuels implies a reduction in policies — education, training, health care, and the like — that add to human capital and so increase incomes and the demand for conventional energy,” he wrote. “Therefore, opposition to fossil fuels is fundamentally antihuman.”

Zycher made the same argument in a May 7 column in the Financial Times, ranting that environmentalists who aim to deprive the world of fossil fuels “hate humanity, and the planet too.”

Putting aside Zycher’s ad hominem attack on the “environmental left,” he deliberately confuses the societal benefits of energy with how it is generated. At several junctures in history, humans switched from wood to coal to natural gas to warm their homes. Likewise, they switched from whale oil to kerosene to incandescents to LEDs to illuminate their homes.

Opposition to coal and kerosene in the past or fossil fuels today is not “fundamentally antihuman” when there are better, cleaner alternatives. And it turns out the alternatives — solar and wind, specifically — are now the cheapest sources of electricity, and they could have been more widely available years ago if ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies had not stood in the way.

The Manhattan Institute is still in love with fossil fuels

The Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based libertarian think tank, received $90,000 from ExxonMobil in 2019. Since 1998, the company has given the organization more than $1.4 million.

For the last decade, the institute’s go-to energy expert has been Robert Bryce, who, like AEI’s Zycher, is no fan of a carbon tax, ExxonMobil’s supposed pet climate solution. Before he left the think tank at the end of 2019, Bryce spent much of his time bashing renewable energy and extolling fossil fuels in reports and in the pages of the National Review, New York Post, Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Bryce routinely disparages renewables without providing context. In an August 2019 column on the conservative website RealClearEnergy, for example, he maintained that the wind industry is “facing increasing opposition” at least partly because of what he insists is the major threat it poses to eagles and other birds, an assertion he has been making ad nauseum for years. In fact, the top human-caused threats to birds are climate change, buildings, power lines, misapplied pesticides, communications towers, and oil and gas industry fluid waste pits — not wind turbines.

As for wind energy’s specific threat to eagles, Dan Ashe, a former director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, debunked Bryce’s fallacious claim in a December 2016 HuffPost column. “Public attention on eagle loss in recent years has focused almost exclusively on wind energy,” Ashe wrote. “In truth, wind turbine collisions comprise a fraction of human-caused eagle losses. Most result from intentional and accidental poisoning and purposeful shooting. The majority of non-intentional loss occurs when eagles collide with cars or ingest lead shot or bullet fragments in remains and gut piles left by hunters. Others collide with or are electrocuted on power lines. Disproportionately and solely focusing on wind energy distorts public perceptions at a time when we desperately need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Cutting carbon pollution is hardly a goal that Bryce or any of his Manhattan Institute colleagues would ever publicly endorse. Doing so would certainly not please their other climate science denier benefactors, which include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Charles Koch Foundation, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer’s Mercer Family Foundation, and Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, a Manhattan Institute trustee. All have donated considerably more money to the think tank than ExxonMobil in recent years and, unlike the oil company, do not pretend to care about the climate crisis.

Maintaining the status quo in Congress

The New York Times recently ran a story pointing out that European and US oil companies are heading in very different directions when it comes to climate change. While BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and other European-based companies are beginning to sell their oil fields and invest in renewable energy, their US counterparts Chevron and ExxonMobil are betting that oil and gas will continue to make up at least 50 percent of the energy market for at least the next 20 years.

Instead of transitioning to solar and wind, the two US oil giants are spending relatively trivial amounts on unproven technologies, such as modular fusion nuclear reactors (Chevron), algae-based biofuel (ExxonMobil), and carbon capture and storage schemes (both), which so far have been costly failures. If those pipe dreams were ever demonstrated to work at the necessary scale, it would still take decades to commercialize them.

The main reason European oil and gas companies are taking baby steps to embrace renewables? Government pressure. The European Union has set a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and seven EU countries plan to phase out vehicles powered by gasoline and diesel over the next few decades. Austria, with the most aggressive timetable, will ban internal-combustion-engine vehicle sales after 2020.

Although California recently announced it would ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035 and most diesel-powered trucks by 2045, the Trump administration has taken the opposite tack, gutting landmark Obama-era rules curbing vehicle and power plant carbon emissions, rolling back methane emission and coal ash storage regulations, and lifting bans on oil and gas drilling on public land. Congress, meanwhile, has declined to consider climate bills that have been introduced since the beginning of the 2019-20 session.

The September 21 New York Times story cited unnamed energy analysts who excused Chevron and ExxonMobil for not changing their business models. “US lawmakers,” the analysts told the Times, “have simply not given them enough incentives to make a radical break.”

A major reason Congress has not given the US oil industry enough incentives to change course is because oil and gas companies have been giving a critical mass of US lawmakers enough incentives to do nothing. As mentioned above, $401,198 of the $991,329 ExxonMobil has spent so far on congressional incumbent campaigns during the current election cycle has gone to 115 of the 150 climate science deniers on Capitol Hill. Likewise, Chevron has spent $936,489 on incumbent campaigns so far. A little more than $433,000 — 46 percent — has gone to 82 climate science deniers.

Besides making campaign contributions, oil companies spend a lot of money to keep tabs on their friends in Washington. So far, the top three oil and gas lobbyists during the 2019-20 cycle are Koch Industries, which has spent $30.72 million; Chevron, which has spent $28.54 million; and ExxonMobil, which has spent $28.36 million.

Why does ExxonMobil still support so many climate science deniers in Congress while contending to be so keen on a carbon tax? After all, just two years ago the company announced it would donate $1 million over two years to Americans for Carbon Dividends, a political action group created to promote a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

Some lawmakers are bullish on a carbon tax, but ExxonMobil largely ignores them. Since January 2019, eight representatives, two Republicans and six Democrats — and nine senators, all Democrats — have introduced 10 carbon tax bills and one cap-and-trade bill. But only one of the eight representatives and four of the nine senators received a campaign contribution from ExxonMobil during this election cycle. The total amount the company donated to the five lawmakers was $15,000 — a measly 4 percent of what it gave climate science deniers.

To be sure, ExxonMobil’s spending on climate disinformation has shrunk dramatically in recent years. The company’s 2019 outlay was less than half of what it spent in 2017 and the lowest amount since 1999, when Exxon was going through its merger with Mobil. Likewise, its campaign contributions to climate science deniers in Congress dropped from $1.1 million during the 2017-18 election cycle to only $400,000, this cycle.

But the fact remains that, while the company is saying all the right things publicly about the need to address climate change, it is continuing to fund think tanks and lawmakers who dispute the science and oppose government action. That suggests that its professed support for a carbon tax is no more than a disingenuous public relations ploy to delay government action.

The tobacco industry used the very same tactic to hold off regulations for decades, and it worked well until it didn’t, when the industry lost in court and agreed to pay $246 billion in fines to states over 25 years.

Author’s note: Besides the US Chamber of Commerce ($415,000), American Enterprise Institute ($110,000) and Manhattan Institute ($90,000), ExxonMobil gave grants in 2019 to five other climate science denier groups: Center for American and International Law ($5,000), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000). For an overview of ExxonMobil’s grants from 1998 through 2019, click here.

This article, which was originally published by Truthout, was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Even for those already in the climate choir, Jane Fonda’s sermon last month at the National Press Club is well worth the time to read or watch and listen to. I’ve logged loads of press club luncheon speeches over the years. This was one of the finest I’ve heard. Fonda eloquently described how global warming has us up against the wall. Not just the heartfelt delivery one expects from Oscar winners, but the essential substance and slightly wicked wit woven throughout. Send it to those needing motivation to confront the stark realities before us to act.

Fonda’s many actions include “Fire-drill Fridays,” protests for which she temporarily moved to DC in September, at which she’s been arrested a half dozen times. If you’re around Washington, the last drill before her return to acting commitments in LA is January 10th, 11 AM at the US Capitol. Guest speakers will include Bill McKibben and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Fonda’s speech took no prisoners, calling out a range of climate villains, including Exxon, which over forty years ago knew the truth about the effect of increasing CO2 gases and the short window to address it, and whose executives, when their scientists informed them of the global impacts, replied “This problem is not as significant to mankind as a nuclear holocaust or world famine.”

“And they continued to drill,” said Fonda. “Exxon, Shell, Mobil, and others knew that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks. So they used the same consultants that the tobacco companies had used to launch a huge communications effort, to develop strategies on how to fool us.”

“The difference is that tobacco companies were primarily harming people who smoke. The fossil fuel companies are harming the entire planet and all its inhabitants. The companies not only hid what they knew, a coalition, together with the Koch brothers and other billionaires spent tens of millions of dollars on think tanks, like the Heartland Institute, that promote false science, sowing confusion about global warming, so that people won’t try to stop them. Their line was, and continues to be, that the, “Science about climate change is not clear. And even if it were, the fault lies with governments and consumers, not with them.” You see, but the thing is, these oil companies have played a big role in actively stopping governments from enacting clean energy policies, with Exxon leading the way.”

That includes Exxon’s undermining the 1998 International Treaty on Climate, the Kyoto Protocol. Fonda points to other bad actors, like the American Petroleum Institute, with its new video, America’s Energy Security: A Generation of Progress at Risk, equating fracking and drilling with patriotism, as Republicans including Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania introduce resolutions to prohibit a President from implementing a unilateral moratorium on fracking, and as the Manhattan Institute, with significant backing from fossil fuels concerns, warns of global recession if the US bans fracking. It won’t shock that Fonda advocates legal consequences for knowing deceptions and environmental damage.

To claims like Toomey’s that American oil and gas production is the only path to energy security, Fonda asks if it’s necessary for energy security, what are we doing shipping it overseas? She quoted Oil Change International that 45% of existing drilling wouldn’t be profitable without taxpayers subsidizing fossil fuels with over $16 billion dollars a year.

She didn’t mention it, but that’s dwarfed by military expenditures underpinning escapades with oil in mind. They arguably include backing Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-88, the invasions of Iraq, and shoring up the Saudi regime and the UAE and pumping up their ally Israel. Now we’re doing that trio’s bidding with a dance in the dark with Iran.

Fonda stressed the importance of workers like coal miners not being treated as stranded assets, unlike the fossil fuels that must become stranded assets left in the ground if we’re to have a chance. She acknowledged how overwhelming the tasks before us must seem, how disruptive and expensive addressing global warming will be. Fonda then pointed out the costs of billion dollar weather and climate events, which over the last three years exceeded $450 billion.

Referencing The Grapes of Wrath, one of Hollywood’s masterworks and one that starred her father Henry, Fonda noted the 1930s was a time of both massive financial collapse (the Great Depression) and an environmental collapse (the Dustbowl). In response to the social unrest it generated, FDR responded to those demanding government action, “I agree with you. Now go out and make me do it.”

Fonda connected political challenges then with those current:

“Now the rich and powerful hated the New Deal, hated Roosevelt, because it set a precedent for the federal government to play a central role in the economic and social affairs of the nation. It was criticized as fascist, as socialist. Bankers tried to overthrow Roosevelt. Big business, big railroads, big banks ranted and raved against it. But there were millions of people in the streets demanding that Roosevelt do more, because it was helping them. And, because of that, it succeeded.”

“The same interests that hated the New Deal are the ones telling us today that the Green New Deal is bad, that government shouldn’t be so involved in economic and social regulation…But it’s not the size of government that matters, it’s who the government is working for. And for too long, it’s been a government controlled by corporations, most particularly the fossil fuel industry. This is why it hasn’t been working for working people.”

“And powerful forces are arrayed against the efforts to change this, just like back in the 1930s. Already, there’s a rash of new laws …that specifically criminalize protests aimed at fossil fuel infrastructure. These new laws are called critical infrastructure laws, since they reclassify fossil fuel infrastructure as critical, in order to justify harsh penalties against climate advocates exercising their Constitutional right to peaceful protest.”

By the way, I’m not sure we’re secure from a returning double whammy of both financial and environmental collapse. Pamela Martin at Wall Street on Parade is parsing the well-concealed tea leaves at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It looks to her that in a recent short period the bank pumped trillions of dollars in cumulative loans into Wall Street trading houses, some of them again up to their gills in derivatives. The infusions appear to be going straight into the stock market, which has nil to do with the Fed’s monetary policy mandate.

Addressing the media in the room, Fonda said it’s hard to get people to increase their activism in concert with others when only 43 percent of Americans report hearing about climate change, and 23 percent say they never hear about it. She called for media to step up with more coverage of the best practices of states and cities transitioning from fossil fuels. And especially to drop the “two sides to the story” narrative, given 97% agreement in the scientific community.

Fonda asserted that because of the fossil fuel industry, which lost the country decades of critical time to act, and shrank our carbon budget — the amount of carbon that could be burned without passing the tipping point — it’s too late for moderation. “And given the emergency, it’s those who believe in moderation, in pre-Trump ‘business as usual’, who are truly delusional.”

Perhaps wisely, when aiming to convince a broad political spectrum to confront the political power of the fossil fuel industry, Fonda declined to name her favorite for President in 2020. But she allowed this:

“You know, I’ve said pretty clearly, it’s too late for moderation. So I guess that tells you something…You know, the idea that going back to what existed before Trump, I mean Trump isn’t some unicorn that appeared out of nowhere. There’s a reason that he was elected. And so the solution requires much more than going back before he was elected. It requires addressing the reasons that he was elected. And that’s why I like the Green New Deal, because it’ll not only solve the climate crisis, it will address the reasons that someone like Trump could get elected in a country that is supposed to be a Democracy.”

Asked if Michael Bloomberg, who spent millions underscoring climate issues, was on the same side, despite often putting his money behind Republicans, Fonda replied:

“I like Michael. I admire much — I love his work on gun control. But I don’t like the fact that he supports candidates — I mean Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania was running against a very progressive woman. And Michael Bloomberg put a lot of money into Toomey’s campaign, because Toomey is good on guns. But he’s terrible on climate and fracking. So there’s a lot about where Bloomberg is coming from, that I don’t like. But, on top of that, I don’t like people buying their way into the electoral process. We got to get money out of politics.”

There are some journalists, I can think of a few on both TV and radio, who are like a terrier with a sock trying to put words in someone’s mouth until they get the talking point they want that supports their narrative. I won’t imitate them now. Draw your own conclusions as to which candidate best threads the needle of Fonda’s druthers, and which ones don’t.

Ah, but I will digress in timely fashion. A presidential candidate who is Fonda’s junior has earned the mantle of the leading climate candidate. Corporate media and a shameful number of those in Congress are working overtime to disparage the Green New Deal that Bernie champions. But the detailed version here, including transitioning jobs in fossil fuels to work that creates green infrastructure, will help make Bernie a home stretch closer. Fonda mentioned Yale scientist Anthony Leiserowitz telling her that 43 million Americans would do something about climate change, but nobody asked them. Bernie’s asking. His campaign is a vehicle for climate involvement. Larger and larger swaths of the public connect the dots between shriveled crops, flooded hog farms, polluted waters, smoking forests and diminished prospects for their children. Many of them will recognize Bernie’s campaign as legit action. Bernie will be ticking like a Timex as people anxious over a heating planet enable him to come from behind like Seabiscuit.

By the way, If you haven’t signed up for David Sirota’s Bern Notice newsletter, part of the campaign’s end run around the Bezos Brigade and other media hostiles, you can do so here.

My only complaint on Fonda’s speech is that she didn’t share who brokered her soul. She turned eighty-two the week of her speech and no one would ever pick her out of a line-up as an octogenarian on a crime spree. Even allowing for star-power wealth and privilege, she’s a reminder that age is not an average of expectations for a particular number, it’s a very individual matter. Though every day is a roll of the dice as we move through the casino of health breaks and genetics, we prejudge at our peril. That’s whether or not one is still among, as an accomplished polio victim once phrased it for me, the temporarily-abled.

Over New Years I took my two kids, young adults on break from school, to the Delaware beaches and a coastal state park, for walkabouts along and through dunes anchored by pine and oak. Temperatures reached sixty-five. There’s always unusually warm winter days in the mid-Atlantic. But averages are steadily creeping up. Watching waves break, I thought of the 1959 apocalyptic film On the Beach, in which Australia is the last to go, not among the first. Now it’s the early bellwether. I couldn’t shake the notion that our pleasures were the flip-side of hundreds of millions of animals perishing in Australia’s bush fires. It makes me uneasy about what might be knocking on America’s door this summer.

Looking at DC forecasts for the next ten days, several top off in the mid-sixties. That’s a bit weird for January, normally our coldest month. For years after I moved from Kansas to DC in ’79, I could count on snowy city shutdowns and a week or so of cross-country skiing in the valley of Rock Creek National Park that winds though the chunk of the city where I live. Then it became occasional. Finally, rare. At present in DC, it’s a good bet Frosty will go extinct this entire winter, leaving our sleds in hibernation and our snowballs imaginary.

The post Jane Fonda is Pitching for Our Future. Lend an Ear. appeared first on Traveling Archive.

• 9% of Americans have been on vacation without their partner and lied to them about it
• Main reasons are to go with friends, drink more heavily and to have a break from each other
• More than two fifths got found out by their partner; one in five broke up as a result
• One in ten Americans have cheated on their partner whilst on vacation

The study was undertaken by the team behind flight-comparison website www.us.jetcost.com, in which more than 4,100 people over the age of 18 were quizzed about previous vacations. All respondents revealed that they are – or have been – in a relationship during the past five years while they’ve travelled.

Respondents were initially quizzed on things that they do without their partner, and the most common things were found to be ‘going to a club/bar’ (76%), ‘shopping’ (63%) and ‘going to a sports match’ (54%). What’s more, one in 11 (9%) admitted that they have been on vacation without their other half and lied about it, of which 71% were male and 29% were female. The most common reasons were ‘wanting to go with friends’ (38%), ‘to drink more heavily’ (26%) and ‘to have a break from one other’ (14%).

The most common excuses used by those that lied about going on vacation were ‘to stay with family’ (40%), ‘going on a work trip’ (31%) and ‘to visit a friend’ (26%). Of those that lied, more than two fifths (43%) said that they had been found out by their other half, and one in five (20%) of these broke up with their partner as a result.

A further one in ten respondents (10%) said that they had cheated on their partner when on vacation, and shockingly of these, 5% did the deed whilst they were away with them.

Conversely, a number of Americans admitted that they had been on a vacation with their partner without telling other people, with 14% admitting to this feat. On this occasion, 76% of people who did this were women, and the rest men.

The most common people lied to were friends (53%), and the predominant reason was ‘because my friends had asked me to do something at the same time’ (47%).

Commenting on the findings of the study, a spokesperson for www.us.jetcost.com said:

“It’s not healthy to spend 100% of your time with your partner, but there really shouldn’t be any need to go to the extent of lying about going on vacation. They should understand if you want to go away without them, whether it’s with friends or for a bit of a break, and vice versa your friends should understand if you want to go away with your partner.”

2019’s Best Places for Oktoberfest Celebrations & Fun Facts

With Oktoberfest soon to kick off and the average flight from New York to Munich from mid-September to late-October costing $500-$1,000, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its report on 2019’s Best Places for Oktoberfest Celebrations as well as accompanying videos, along with fun and interesting facts about the event in its Oktoberfest Facts – History, Beer, Food & More infographic. To determine the best cities for partaking in the epic German festival, WalletHub compared the 100 largest cities across 24 key metrics, ranging from share of German population to number of beer gardens per capita to average price for Oktoberfest celebration ticket.

To view the full report and your city’s rank, please visit: https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-for-oktoberfest/24327/

Oktoberfest Fun Facts:

• $5,000: Estimated cost for an American to attend Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany.
• 1.98 Million: Gallons of beer consumed during Oktoberfest.
• 510,000+: Number of whole roast chickens eaten, plus 60,000 sausages and 59,000 pork knuckles.
• $1.43 Billion: Oktoberfest’s annual economic impact on Munich.
• $70,120: Median annual income for German-American households ($60,336 for all households).

To view the full infographic, please visit: https://wallethub.com/blog/oktoberfest-facts/24332/

A Letter to British Airlines from Traveling Boy’s Brom Wikstrom

Dear British Airlines,

My wife and I recently returned from a 13-hour flight from Stockholm, transferring in Heathrow and continuing home to Seattle. Flight B049. I seek clarification of issues that have caused us both a great deal of distress and hope that you can help.

I do have an extreme issue regarding our flight re-assignment.  When we made our reservations several months ago we clearly stated that our need for bulkhead seating was a medical necessity as I am a high-level quadriplegic and am 6’4” long. On a flight of this duration I am at risk of developing pressure sores and need to be able to shift my weight frequently to avoid a complication. In bulkhead seating this is not a problem as I can readily move my body forward to relieve the pressure.

Imagine our horror when checking in at Heathrow and being informed that our seats had been switched because someone was willing to pay an upcharge to secure our prearranged seats. We were informed that nothing could be done since the flight was full and overbooked. This was simply not true as the seat beside us and in front of us were unoccupied. With no alternative, I was tightly wedged into the fourth row aisle seat and completely unable to move my body forward, to the side or otherwise adjust my position. About the 7^th hour of our 10 hour flight I began to experience sharp chest pains that did not subside for the remainder of the flight (nor have they abated since after spending all of yesterday at the emergency room with x-rays, ct scans etc.). I may have sustained an attack of pleurisy, something I’ve never experienced. I thought I was having a cardiac arrest and that you might have had a corpse on your hands.

I also sustained a pressure sore on my posterior that will take some weeks to heal. We are angry, perplexed and confused that we were not informed of our impending reassignment and would have gladly paid the up-charge to maintain the seats we so carefully thought we had secured. We observed the people who had our seats and they were not mothers with children nor did they have any other visible need to be there.

I write travel articles for Travelingboy.com and my personal site bromwikstrom.com and seek to give travelers with disabilities insights and advice on how to make their journeys as safe and as memorable as possible. This has been a memorable journey for us for all the wrong reasons. You may inform me of the fine print in your travel contract that allowed you to change our seating assignment without notification.

I do not fault BA for the hour delay in departing Heathrow nor blame BA for the 2-hour delay in recovering our bags in Seattle. Your staff and crew were excellent hosts and exemplify the fine service we have come to expect from BA.

Regrettably, I will no longer be able to recommend British Air to my readers.

Sincerely yours

Brom Wikstrom

11 Endangered Bucket List Destinations (And How to Visit Them Responsibly)

Courtesy of Mariana Zapata, SmarterTravel

Climate change and overtourism make daily headlines now and are stark reminders that some of the most beautiful places in the world are at risk of disappearing. For many travelers, the natural response to this is “last chance tourism,” or a rush to see endangered places while they’re still here. But before writing obituaries for these endangered destinations, consider instead taking actionable steps before and during your trip to keep them from disappearing. Here are 11 at-risk destinations and what you can do to help preserve them.

Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Teeming with biodiversity, beauty, and Finding Nemo references, the Great Barrier Reef is one of the most impressive natural wonders of the world. Sadly, climate change and irresponsible tourism have placed a strain on this natural wonder. About half of the reef is estimated to have died since 2016.

What you can do to help: Switch to reef-safe, oxybenzone-free sun care products.

Where to stay: Lady Elliot Island Eco Resort is secluded, peaceful, and on its way to being 100 percent sustainable by 2020.

Venice, Italy

The unfortunate poster child for overtourism, Venice struggles with pollution, overcrowding, and the mass exodus of its locals. It’s also slowly sinking. Fast and convenient water taxis are often the preferred mode of transportation for tourists in the city, but it’s these same water taxis that contribute to many of the issues facing this historic city. Moto Ondoso, or wake pollution, is an issue distinct to Venice in which waves corrode the city’s structure and put it at risk of sinking.

What you can do to help: Go the scenic route and walk or enjoy a gondola ride instead. 

Where to stay: Formerly a monastery, the 500-year-old Santa Chiara Hotel lets you experience the city like it was before the giant cruise ships came.

Machu Picchu, Peru

Machu Picchu survived the fall of the Inca Empire, but it might not survive tourists. After earning a well-deserved place as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, the breathtaking archeological site continues to see an extreme surge in tourism. The groups that arrive en masse are not always at their best—leaving trash behind on the Inca Trail and even vandalizing stones. One detrimental behavior that even conscious travelers often engage in is not respecting marked trails. Stepping over the ugly rope seems harmless and gets you a better Instagram picture, but when millions of people do it, the effect is substantial.

What you can do to help: Stay within the marked paths to help preserve this wonderful UNESCO World Heritage Site. Or, consider visiting one of the similar but lesser-known “lost” Inca cities like Choquequirao instead.

Where to stay: An upscale ecological retreat far from the noise of Aguas Calientes and the commercialization of Cuzco, explora Valle Sagrado is committed to responsible tourism across the Sacred Valley and to Machu Picchu itself.

The Florida Everglades

Nicknamed the “River of Grass,” the Florida Everglades is a unique and largely underappreciated ecosystem. Having already lost almost nine of its 11 million acres, the Everglades is officially the most endangered national park in the United States.

What you can do to help: The most eco-friendly way to see the Everglades is a walk through the swamp. (Yes, a walk.) Photographer Clyde Butcher offers guided swamp walks that will have you wading waist-deep in the water. If you’re not ready to get so close to nature, a minimal-impact airboat tour might be your best bet. 

Where to stay: The locally-owned Ivey House is a stone’s throw away from the Everglades’ wilderness

The Amazon

Spanning nine countries, the Amazon rainforest contains unimaginable biodiversity and hundreds of indigenous communities. But massive deforestation in the name of cattle ranching and mining is assailing the “lungs of the world,” threatening not just the Amazon but the health of the planet as a whole.

What you can do to help: When you visit the Amazon, choose a tour company that supports local communities most directly affected by the deforestation. Gondwana Ecotours, for example, works with indigenous communities to help them preserve their autonomy and customs. It also offers a carbon offset program for your flight to Ecuador.

Where to stay: Enjoy comfort in the heart of the jungle at Kapawi Ecolodge. 

Antarctica

Though one of the most remote places on earth, Antarctica is on the front lines of the effects of climate change. Ice is melting at an alarming rate, and overfishing of krill threatens the region’s entire food chain.

What you can do to help: You should endeavor to have as little impact as possible when you visit, and one of the best ways to do this is to go cozy rather than big when choosing a cruise ship. Smaller ships have a smaller carbon footprint and produce less waste; they also allow you more time on land, since only 100 people are allowed on shore at any given time. On bigger ships, you’ll have to wait your turn. 

Where to stay: Though you’ll spend most of your nights on board, One Ocean offers on-shore camping options for travelers. They also use their vessels to help conduct scientific research. 

Borneo, Malaysia and Indonesia

While in Borneo, you’ll probably want to take in the beaches, hike Mount Kinabalu, and trek through the forest. In the past 30 years, the Bornean forest has been reduced by a third due to legal and illegal logging and palm oil plantations. The good news is that this is one example where visiting this endangered natural habitat can actually help the situation.

What you can do to help: Activists argue that spending money on park fees and sustainable tours will convince the government that preserving the forest is good for business, prompting leadership to support conservation efforts rather than the exploitation of the forest. 

Where to stay: Borneo Rainforest Lodge provides a five-star eco experience right in the middle of the rainforest. 

Big Sur, California

The extreme and somewhat unforgiving geographical conditions of Big Sur are also what makes it so breathtaking. The area has always been prone to heavy rainfall and landslides, but as climate change worsens, so do these natural catastrophes. To the dismay of lovers of dramatic landscapes and bohemian history, the scenic drive through Big Sur might not be possible in the future.

What you can do to help: Rent a hybrid or electric car for your road trip. The impact might seem miniscule, but if every one of the five million annual visitors who pass through Big Sur did this, it’d be anything but. 

Where to stay: Get scenic ocean and mountain views at the locally owned Post Ranch Inn.

The Alps

Global warming strikes yet again, and this time the victims are the iconic ice caps of the Alps. With rising temperatures, ice throughout this European mountain range is melting. Since many towns around the Alps depend economically on winter sport tourism, they are resorting to covering the snow with blankets and overusing snowmaking machines. The problem is that these machines contribute to global warming, and trap the towns in a vicious cycle of trying to preserve their livelihood in a way that contributes to its destruction.

What you can do to help: Enjoy the beauty of the Alps in summer. You’ll get lower prices and also help tip the balance towards activities that don’t depend on manmade snow.

Where to stay: The Austrian town of Werfenweng is leading efforts toward sustainable tourism in the Alps with carbon-neutral vacation offerings. Stay at Hochhausl Pension to support these efforts; the views aren’t too bad either.

The Great Wall of China

One of ancient humanity’s greatest accomplishments is endangered, in part, because people won’t stop tearing it apart. Whether to build other structures or to sell bits and pieces as souvenirs, locals are stealing parts of the wall and tourists are more than happy to buy them. The situation is so dire that almost a third of the wall built during the Ming Dynasty is gone.

What you can do to help: This one’s pretty obvious. Don’t buy parts of the wall.

Where to stay: Stay at Brickyard Retreat at Mutianyu Great Wall to escape being rushed through the most frequented parts of the wall. 

The Galapagos

If you visit the Galapagos today, you’ll still be able to see around 95 percent of the species Charles Darwin saw. However, scientists warn that if tourism continues to grow at its current rate, that might not be the case for long.

What you can do to help: Besides practicing common sustainable tourism practices like not feeding wild animals and staying within marked paths, you can also watch what you eat while traveling around the Galapagos. Overfishing and illegal fishing are endangering species like sea cucumbers, lobsters, and sharks. Avoid eating these and try to find restaurants that buy from artisanal fishers. If you’re really craving lobster, the WWF recommends buying it live rather than going for the tail. Doing this can increase the price, which raises profits and lowers demands on fishermen. 

Where to stay: Many people travel through the Galapagos on boat, but land travel is a great way to interact with the local community. Stay at locally owned Galapagos Eco Friendly for a relaxed, no-frills experience.

The Middle Seat Is About to Get Wider on Some Planes

(CNN) — It is a truth universally acknowledged that middle seats on airplanes are the worst.Being awkwardly sandwiched in between two people while fighting for elbow room is the bane of most passengers. Now a new design might actually make people want the middle seat — or at least make the travel experience less miserable. The S1 design from the Colorado-based startup, Molon Labe Seating, features three economy seats in a staggered layout, putting the middle seat slightly behind the aisle and window seats, and at a slightly lower height.

Sitting directly adjacent to two people means that passengers only have so much shoulder room. But moving the middle seat back a few inches allows for more space, so the company made the middle seat about three to five inches wider than the standard 18 inch seat.

“That little bit of stagger means that every single person gets to spread out a little more,” Hank Scott, the founder and CEO of Molon Labe Seating, told CNN.

Passengers won’t have to fight over elbow space either. The armrests are also built so that they are not a uniform height from front to back. They will allow the aisle and window passengers to rest their elbows on the front of the armrest while leaving space at the back, which is lower, for the middle passenger.

“No seats are any smaller, one seat ends up being wider, and we’ve solved the elbow wars,” Scott said.

The seats are intended for shorter, domestic flights, though the company is developing a version for longer flights that include more padding and larger TV screens.

So when can passengers test out these seats for themselves?

The seats were certified by the Federal Aviation Administration last month, and are being manufactured by Primus Aerospace in Colorado. Scott said that he expected they would be available on two airlines by April or May of 2020. Though he could not disclose which airlines would feature the seats, he said one of them is based in North America.

It’s not just passengers who will be happier with the new arrangement, Scott said. The seats are lighter than standard airline seats, which could help cut down on fuel costs.

“For an airline, it’s kind of a no-brainer,” he said.

The S1 seats won’t fix everything about flying — the seats don’t recline or offer any more legroom. And that’s not to mention the food, the chatty passengers, the inefficient boarding and de-boarding processes … and the list goes on.

“It’s still going to suck,” Scott said. “Now it’s going to suck less.”

The post Americans on Vacation, An Open Letter appeared first on Traveling Archive.

The Doomsday Clock was set last year at a two-minutes until midnight, (midnight being the endgame), and there it now remains. There’s little comfort to be had in standing on what University of Chicago astrophysicist Robert Rosner characterized as a precipice we’d best quickly leap back from. Bulletin president and CEO Rachel Bronson stressed that the clock remaining where it is, the closest it has been to world catastrophe, is not stability, but “a stark warning to leaders and citizens around the world.”

William Perry said the organization views our current situation as precarious as it was in 1953, in the gloom of the Cold War while the Korean War still raged. Jerry Brown said, “ The blindness and stupidity of the politicians and their consultants is truly shocking in the face of nuclear catastrophe and danger….the business of everyday politics blinds people to the risk, we’re playing Russian Roulette with humanity,” with the danger of an incident that will kill millions if not igniting a conflict that will kill billions.

Brown told journalists while they may love the Trump tweets and news of the day, “the leads that get the clicks,” the final click could be a nuclear accident, a mistake. “It’s hard to even feel or sense the peril and danger we are in, but these scientists know what they’re talking about, and I can say, based on my understanding of the political process, the politicians, for the most part, do not.” Referring to Congress’s inaction on related matters, Brown called it “massive sleep walking all over the place.” He committed to spending the next few years doing everything he can to “sound the alarm and  get us back on the track to dialogue, collaboration and arms control.”

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and the Doomsday Clock are creations of a group of scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project. The clock’s current position was determined by a group of scholars and scientists that includes fifteen Nobel Laureates. These are serious people. It is heartening to see their avoidance of political talking points or partisan tilt in favor of Joe Friday’s focus on “just the facts, ma’am.” Just the chilling facts that let the chips fall where they may. About thirty-three minutes into the conference Jerry Brown gave a Dutch uncle talk to Democrats who maintain the attack mode on Putin on all matters without holding open the option for nuclear dialogue. It brought to mind the discussions of Washington’s bipartisan War Party prompted by William Atkin’s recent critique of NBC and MSNBC.

The Bulletin has been criticized for going beyond the original nuclear realm to include a number of other perils. But it seems if there is one thing we’re learning now from climate and polar ice studies and being slapped around by extreme weather events, it’s that seemingly unrelated factors cascade and overlap, interacting and accelerating in ways we hadn’t understood. No doubt more surprises will come. Certainly the impacts of climate change on food and water supplies, on ocean health and on migration will bear on political systems and on future tensions and conflicts. Perhaps it’s too far afield, but a case could be made to include prospects of financial meltdowns from bankers behaving badly. Economic calamities have lit a lot of fuses.

Stanford cyber expert Herb Lin focused on the ongoing debasement of institutions that hold leaders accountable. While nuclear risks and climate change lead the concerns, that witches brew is now put into the blender by the misinformation on steroids enabled by the Internet. Says Lin, “Events in 2018 have helped us to better understand an ongoing and intentional corruption of the information environment.  Our leaders complain about fake news and invoke alternative facts when reality is inconvenient. They are shamelessly inconsistent.”

So we have Information warfare combining with information overload to compromise the public’s ability to absorb and analyze critical issues. Among other things, information warfare delegitimizes the values and truths embodied by science, causing a cheapening and distrust of all information, opening a Pandora’s Box of distortions that allow the public and politicians to avoid grappling with the serious issues before them.

Fine by me if the experiences of the past few years inoculate the public with a healthy cynicism, offering some protection from the Gatling guns spewing talking points. But if the public discards the legitimacy of scientific thought and proof, not so good.

Here’s a few excerpts from the Bulletin statement on the Doomsday Clock.

Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention. These major threats — nuclear weapons and climate change — were exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger.

In the nuclear realm, the United States abandoned the Iran nuclear deal and announced it would withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), grave steps towards a complete dismantlement of the global arms control process. Although the United States and North Korea moved away from the bellicose rhetoric of 2017, the urgent North Korean nuclear dilemma remains unresolved. Meanwhile, the world’s nuclear nations proceeded with programs of “nuclear modernization” that are all but indistinguishable from a worldwide arms race, and the military doctrines of Russia and the United States have increasingly eroded the long-held taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.

On the climate change front, global carbon dioxide emissions — which seemed to plateau earlier this decade — resumed an upward climb in 2017 and 2018. To halt the worst effects of climate change, the countries of the world must cut net worldwide carbon dioxide emissions to zero by well before the end of the century. By such a measure, the world community failed dismally last year. At the same time, the main global accord on addressing climate change — the 2015 Paris agreement — has become increasingly beleaguered. The United States announced it will withdraw from that pact, and at the December climate summit in Poland, the United States allied itself with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait (all major petroleum-producing countries) to undercut an expert report on climate change impacts that the Paris climate conference had itself commissioned.

Amid these unfortunate nuclear and climate developments, there was a rise during the last year in the intentional corruption of the information ecosystem on which modern civilization depends. In many forums, including particularly social media, nationalist leaders and their surrogates lied shamelessly, insisting that their lies were truth, and the truth “fake news.” These intentional attempts to distort reality exaggerate social divisions, undermine trust in science, and diminish confidence in elections and democratic institutions. Because these distortions attack the rational discourse required for solving the complex problems facing humanity, cyber-enabled information warfare aggravates other major global dangers — including those posed by nuclear weapons and climate change — as it undermines civilization generally.

Worrisome nuclear trends continue. The global nuclear order has been deteriorating for many years, and 2018 was no exception to this trend. Relations between the United States and both Russia and China have grown more fraught. The architecture of nuclear arms control built up over half a century continues to decay, while the process of negotiating reductions in nuclear weapons and fissile material stockpiles is moribund. The nuclear-armed states remain committed to their arsenals, are determined to modernize their capabilities, and have increasingly espoused doctrines that envision nuclear use. Brash leaders, intense diplomatic disputes, and regional instabilities combine to create an international context in which nuclear dangers are all too real.

A number of negative developments colored the nuclear story in 2018.

First, the United States abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the multilateral agreement that imposed unprecedented constraints on Iran’s nuclear program and allowed unprecedented verification of Iran’s nuclear facilities and activities. On May 8, President Trump announced that the United States would cease to observe the agreement and would instead launch a campaign of “maximum pressure” against Iran. So far, Iran and the other parties have continued to comply with the agreement, despite the absence of US participation. It is unclear whether they will keep the agreement alive, but one thing is certain: The Trump administration has launched an assault on one of the major nuclear nonproliferation successes of recent years and done so in a way that increases the likelihood of conflict with Iran and further heightens tensions with long-term allies.

Second, in October the Trump administration announced that it intends to withdraw from the INF Treaty, which bans missiles of intermediate range. Though bedeviled by reciprocal complaints about compliance, the INF agreement has been in force for more than 30 years and has contributed to stability in Europe. Its potential death foreshadows a new competition to deploy weapons long banned. Unfortunately, while treaties are being eliminated, there is no process in place that will create a new regime of negotiated constraints on nuclear behavior. For the first time since the 1980s, it appears the world is headed into an unregulated nuclear environment — an outcome that could reproduce the intense arms racing that was the hallmark of the early, unregulated decades of the nuclear age even as arms control efforts wane, modernization of nuclear forces around the world continues apace. In his Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly on March 1, Russian President Vladimir Putin described an extensive nuclear modernization program, justified as a response to US missile defense efforts. The Trump administration has added to the enormously expensive comprehensive nuclear modernization program it inherited from the Obama administration.

Ominous climate change trends. The existential threat from human-caused global warming is ominous and getting worse. Every year that human activities continue to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere irreversibly ratchets up the future level of human suffering and ecosystem destruction that will be wrought by global climate disruption. The key measure of improvement on the climate front is the extent of progress toward bringing global net carbon dioxide emissions to zero. On this measure, the countries of the world have failed dismally.

Global carbon dioxide emissions rates had been rising exponentially until 2012 but ceased growing from 2013 to 2016. Even if this emissions plateau had continued, it would not have halted the growth of warming. Net emissions need to ultimately be brought to zero to do so, given the persistence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for up to thousands of years. The ominous news from 2017 and 2018 is that world emissions appear to have resumed their upward climb.

Even nations that have strongly supported the need to decarbonize are not doing enough. Preliminary estimates show that almost all countries contributed to the rise in emissions. Some countries, including the United States and some members of the EU, increased their emissions after years of making progress in reducing them.

The United States has also abandoned its responsibilities to lead the world decarbonization effort. The United States has more resources than poorer nations have; its failure to ambitiously reduce emissions represents an act of gross negligence. The United States stood alone while the other G20 countries signed on to a portion of a joint statement reaffirming their commitment to tackle climate change. Then in 2018, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poland, the United States joined with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait — all major oil producers — to undercut a report on the impacts of climate change.

The threat of information warfare and other disruptive technologies. Nuclear war and climate change threaten the physical infrastructure that provides the food, energy, and other necessities required for human life. But to thrive, prosper, and advance, people also need reliable information about their world — factual information, in abundance.

Today, however, chaos reigns in much of the information ecosystem on which modern civilization depends. In many forums for political and societal discourse, we now see national leaders shouting about fake news, by which they mean information they do not like. These same leaders lie shamelessly, calling their lies truth. Acting across national boundaries, these leaders and their surrogates exacerbate existing divisions, creating rage and increasing distrust in public and private institutions. Using unsupported anecdotes and sketchy rhetoric, denialists raise fear and doubt regarding well-established science about climate change and other urgent issues. Established institutions of the government, journalism, and education — institutions that have traditionally provided stability — are under attack precisely because they have provided stability.

In this environment, communication inflames passions rather than informing reason.

Many countries have long employed propaganda and lies — otherwise known as information warfare — to advance their interests. But a quantitative change of sufficient magnitude qualifies as a qualitative change. In the Internet age, the volume and velocity of information has increased by orders of magnitude. Modern information technology and social media allow users easy connectivity and high degrees of anonymity across national borders. This widespread, inexpensive access to worldwide audiences has allowed practitioners of information warfare to broadcast false and manipulative messages to large populations at low cost, and at the same time to tailor political messages to narrow interest groups.

By manipulating the natural cognitive predispositions of human beings, information warriors can exacerbate prejudices, biases, and ideological differences. They can invoke “alternative facts” to advance political positions based on outright falsehoods. Rather than a cyber Armageddon that causes financial meltdown or nationwide electrical blackouts, this is the more insidious use of cyber tools to target and exploit human insecurities and vulnerabilities, eroding the trust and cohesion on which civilized societies rely.

The Enlightenment sought to establish reason as the foundational pillar of civilized discourse. In this conception, logical argument matters, and the truth of a statement is tested by examination of values, assumptions, and facts, not by how many people believe it. Cyber-enabled information warfare threatens to replace these pillars of logic and truth with fantasy and rage. If unchecked, such distortion will undermine the world’s ability to acknowledge and address the urgent threats posed by nuclear weapons and climate change and will increase the potential for an end to civilization as we know it. The international community should begin multilateral discussions that aim to discourage cyber-enabled information warfare and to buttress institutions dedicated to rational, fact- based discourse and governance.

Particularly regarding the 2016 election, Russia and fake news have become inseparable to many. My lingering view remains that any impact from Internet mischief the Russians did during elections was a blip next to all the rot that’s been flying about for years, much of it funded by homegrown dark money and most of it owing to good old-fashioned American lack of integrity. On the other hand, I don’t have a cell phone, am not on cable and have never been on Facebook, so maybe I’m just clueless about how easily people are significantly swayed by a select few of the gazillion bits of information firehosing them, even those bits that people happily cobble into personal echo-chambers. But it seems that folks who are birthers and such don’t have to depend on the far flung for nonsense readily available and riding down a hotel escalator. The American realm of carefully calculated election misinformation from incognito sources is wonderfully underscored by the POV film Dark Money. It shows how dark money, ramped up by Citizens United, distorted elections in Montana, targeting both Democrats and Republicans who didn’t do a sufficient kowtow to the big money. Not to Putin’s druthers, but to the big money, to polluters, Koch brothers allies, ALEC objectives and such. But I digress, because that’s the beauty of a blog post.

Back to bombs. According to the Federation of American Scientists, nine nations together have about 15,000 nuclear bombs, most far more powerful than those used on Japan, 1,800 of those possessed by the US and Russia are kept on high-alert status. Ride along with Major Kong here, and sing along with Vera Lynn here on “We’ll Meet Again,” as humanity exits stage left. Here’s a version picking some of the 331 atmospheric tests the US conducted from 1945 to 1962. Try the comfort of the largest bomb exploded, the Tsar Bomba, aka Ivan, aka Vanya. If you’d like to explore the impacts of a single one megaton bomb, (eighty times larger than the Hiroshima bomb but tiny compared to some modern bombs), as well as the global impacts of an exchange of 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs, perhaps a conflict between Pakistan and India, here you go. Perhaps pass these along to George W. Bush so he has a better idea of how to look for a WMD, maybe at a correspondents dinner.

By the way, do you think kids in the Fifties might have had a few issues to work out later?

Actions and statements by Trump figure significantly in the clock’s advancement in 2017 to two and a half minutes before midnight. A then-incoming President Trump made alarming statements regarding nuclear proliferation, the prospect of using nuclear weapons and his opposition to US commitments on climate change.

And in 2018 he helped move the clock ahead thirty seconds by announcing his intent to scrap the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) that for decades was a lynchpin for global arms control. He also pulled out of the agreement with Iran. By the way, that latter idiocy was greased by nuclear power Israel, Sheldon Adelson and their American neocon minions like John Bolton. Invading Iraq wasn’t enough horror.

I do wish Trump luck for a good follow-through with North Korea that might relax the minute hand a bit. The world needs a win.

Trump recently reincarnated the illusion of a global defense system. A worthy critique by Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, is his essay “Donald Trump’s Mission Impossible: Making His Unrealistic Missile Plan Work.”

That man behind the curtain has nothing on Trump. Now we have the news of Trump’s latest misdirection, Venezuela. In 1975 I traveled overland to South America. Two impressions of Venezuela linger, the startling transition over a few hours going from snow in the Andes to the streamy tropics below, and the surreal feel while waterskiing between the oil derricks in Lake Maracaibo. Like slicks on the water, oil money was everywhere, a pleasant-looking lifestyle for many of the privileged youths darting about in convertibles filled with cheap gas. I can’t grasp the changes since then. Whatever way out of the miseries of a failed state might be found, it’s hard to imagine lighting the fuse for a civil war would prove beneficial. Perhaps Venezuelans will come knocking seeking asylum, quoting Trump’s description of their plight, never mind contributing US pressures. In any case, Venezuela should give us pause at how fast things can change.

Tick Tock.

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