The Conundrum of Plastics – Convenience vs Waste

Over the years, I have explored the great floating ocean gyres, miles of congealed plastic waste with sunken malignancies deep below. Animals entangled in tortured twists of our garbage that refuses biodegradation, strangled slowly or poisoned with inadvertent ingestion. Litter on our landscape, recycling mythologies, and ugliness on steroids. It is the stuff of modern society, products wrapped, containers defined by convenience, particles finding their way into our own food chain, accumulating within our own bodies.

Over the years, I have explored the great floating ocean gyres, miles of congealed plastic waste with sunken malignancies deep below. Animals entangled in tortured twists of our garbage that refuses biodegradation, strangled slowly or poisoned with inadvertent ingestion. Litter on our landscape, recycling mythologies, and ugliness on steroids. It is the stuff of modern society, products wrapped, containers defined by convenience, particles finding their way into our own food chain, accumulating within our own bodies.

It is the press of 7.4 billion humans on a planet built for no more than half that number, threatening to reach 10 billion by mid-century. We are focused on the effluents with the greatest killing power: greenhouse gasses. But no number of multinational Zoom calls, commitments voiced by leaders without a cogent plan, will solve that planetary disturbance, now an existential emergency. And focus on one dire ecological disaster should not relieve mankind of its responsibility for our callous tread, our leavings, our environment toxicity, in every other way.

Even the notion of recycling plastics often does not take into consideration the energy required to collect, deliver, melt and purify that waste into reusable products. And most of that energy is still generated using fossil fuels. A costly and inefficient process, to say the least. Not to mention that over 90% of our plastic waste is not even collected to be recycled. We’ve seen some efforts to move back into treated paper containers that do in fact biodegrade on their own, and there are several efforts to find solutions for plastics that do the same. But it is too little, too late.

There has been potentially one successful development, which if widely deployed shows serious promise for the planet. Still prohibitively priced, this solution will find more efficient processes in time, but focus on efficient reuse is at the core. Understanding the flaws in the recycling process, why this process is not as environmentally “clean” as we believe, is basic to understanding even the partial solutions. There is a plastic that provides a lower carbon footprint only as it is repeatedly recycled, but the research bears exploration. 

Mark Wilson, writing for the April 23rd FastCompany.com, summarizes: “The average American generates 220 pounds of plastic waste each year. A vast majority of it is not recycled, even if you send it to a recycling facility. Most plastic ends up in a dump… There are all sorts of reasons for this. Some recycling facilities don’t have the technology to sort plastic correctly. And for companies, it’s actually cheaper to make ‘virgin’ plastic than to produce recycled plastic. Recycled plastic is far from perfect anyway. Generally produced by melting down old plastic, recycled plastic actually needs virgin plastic mixed in to keep its structure…

“But researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Energy have been studying an enticing, new type of plastic. Called polydiketoenamine, or PDK, it’s an infinitely recyclable material. Literally 100% of it can be reclaimed and reshaped into a new plastic item as many times as a company could want.

“How could a new plastic be better than old plastic? Our traditional plastics, such as polypropylene milk jugs and nylon stockings, were developed in the 1930s to be cheap and easy to mass-produce out of byproducts from the oil industry. Through that lens, they were miraculous, and they enabled breakthroughs in consumer products, from squeeze bottles to Tupperware. The problem is that nearly 100 years later, this miracle material is completely embedded in everything we make and do—and it’s killing the planet. Realistically, we can’t eliminate plastic from the supply chain, and even if we did, that wouldn’t solve the world’s climate crisis. Even more-organic materials, such as cotton, are a drain on natural resources. Which is why many experts are making a pitch for recycling to be easier—be it through the materials themselves, or recycling facilities, or ideally, both.

“‘The idea here is that we’re designing new polymers with ease of recycling in mind,’ says Corinne Scown, staff scientist and deputy division director at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab… Plastics are chains of identical molecules called monomers, which link together into the polymers we know as plastic. Additives can enter the mix, from dyes to flame retardants to customize the material for different purposes. So when you try to recycle plastic by melting it down, all the distinct substances mix together inseparably.

“‘[Today] melting a plastic down that has all kinds of fillers . . . that stuff is all going to stay in there,’ says Scown. ‘Of course you’re going to have a degraded product at the end of that process.’ And since you have a degraded material, manufacturers add in virgin plastic to make the product stronger. Even Adidas’s cutting-edge Loop shoes, which allow the company to melt an old pair into a new pair, require virgin plastics to be added to the mix. Along the same lines, Everlane, which is trying very hard to eliminate virgin plastic, hasn’t found adequate replacements for items such as zippers and spandex. The degradation of recycled plastic is a big reason why.

“However, PDK plastics are manufactured in such a way that they can be melted down, not by heat, but by acid. This acid process is more controllable. It cleanly separates the monomers from additives. And all of those monomers can be reused in the next batch of plastic. Scown’s team actually demonstrated, using advanced simulations, that this approach could work at scale. Without heat, the process is less carbon-intensive than recycling typical plastic. And it allows more plastic, period, to be reclaimed.

“So could PDK replace all of our other plastics? Probably not, from a practical sense. To produce a virgin batch of PDK with current methods costs roughly 10 to 20 times more than regular plastics, largely because that process hasn’t been honed to scale with optimal efficiency yet, according to Scown. Also, its initial carbon footprint is actually worse due to a few specialized chemicals needed for the process. However, over time, as a product is recycled again and again, PDK makes more sense. A key metric Scown discovered is that it is cheaper to recycle PDK even just once than it is to produce a new piece of typical virgin plastic.

“‘There’s still a lot of testing to be done to understand what applications, packaging, and durable product applications this is good for, and how we might tailor new monomers in the future to get the specifications we want,’ says Scown. ‘It’s not like this is going to replace all plastics tomorrow. There will be some applications where it works and others where it doesn’t in its current form.’” There is so much we do not know, so many bad habits that will be exceptionally difficult to break, but as more people squeeze into a climate change contracted space, we must learn to respect the planet that gives us life.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the accumulation of human toxic waste that began with the industrial revolution mandates immediate and dire attention.

Post-Brexit – Let’s Just Say It’s Awkward

“Hello, I can’t understand why the French, especially those in Paris, hate the British so much. Despite the historical wars of CENTURIES ago, we have been through so much together, especially during the World Wars. We have worked together since then, the Channel Tunnel being an example. Many French citizens work in Great Britain and many Brits visit or settle as expats in France. The attitude of the average Paris-born person is ridiculous and just outright rude! As someone who was thinking of living in Paris for a year, I am very put-off by this superficial attitude of many Frenchies. Can you explain why the French or Parisians have this dreadful attitude towards the British?” Letter to the editor, Swamp.Media.com, April 

“Hello, I can’t understand why the French, especially those in Paris, hate the British so much. Despite the historical wars of CENTURIES ago, we have been through so much together, especially during the World Wars. We have worked together since then, the Channel Tunnel being an example. Many French citizens work in Great Britain and many Brits visit or settle as expats in France. The attitude of the average Paris-born person is ridiculous and just outright rude! As someone who was thinking of living in Paris for a year, I am very put-off by this superficial attitude of many Frenchies. Can you explain why the French or Parisians have this dreadful attitude towards the British?” 

Letter to the editor, Swamp.Media.com, April 25th

The French and the British may have fought wars together as allies, they are virtually neighbors separated by a narrow body of water, once bound within the European Union and share much history and many values to the present day. Maybe it is the fact that France conquered Britain beginning with the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (the “Norman Conquests”), or maybe it’s just part of being “French.” How about the Napoleonic era? Conflicts were common. Both France and England also engaged in excessive global colonialism from the 17th through the 20th centuries, often having bordering colonial territories with less-the-clear boundaries. Fighting for resources and global influence was particularly acute between Brits and the French. Skirmishes from North America to Asia were part of their relationship, even as royals intermarried on occasion. Remember the French helped the nascent 13 US colonies in their revolution against England.

These two powers even engaged in secret treaties to carve up losers in wars and hapless powerless nations where they were most vulnerable, occasionally creating new “nations” along the most unnatural boundaries that failed to take the local population into consideration. Like the infamous back-room Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916 that established each nation’s respective post-WWI claims to large sections of the Middle East. Nobody consulted the people who lived there.

Even when the Maastricht Treaty (aka, The Treaty on European Union) was signed in 1992 and implemented by subsequent agreements, that rather obvious lack of trust that the French evidenced against the UK lingered. Believing that the UK were financial sector “cowboys,” very much like the United States also viewed as economically predatory by the French, the French were determined to keep the European Central Bank anywhere but England, even willing accept once mortal enemy Germany over England. Wow! 

The Brits retaliated by retaining their own currency, but the Central Bank was located in Frankfort and run with a heavy emphasis on German financial values: based heavy fears of the kind of currency diluting inflation they experienced after WWI and less concerned with economic contraction, whether by way of recession or even a potential depression. This is one of the reasons that the Central Bank focuses on “austerity” when making loans to financially struggling EU member states, as we have seen in Spain, Portugal and Greece. Hardly the go-go growth models embraced by British capitalism.

In many quarters of France, when the Brits pulled Brexit out of a hat and voted to leave the European Union, there was a sigh of relief. Good riddance? The difficulty in reaching a post-Brexit accord with the UK was littered with issues, some seeming without reference to France – like keeping Northern Ireland (part of the UK) economically within the EU via an open border with Ireland (EU) – to simple yet difficult UK-French battles over fishing rights, which obviously had to deal with the “English” Channel. Were these real or just a way to keep the tensions front and center? The fishermen felt the reality; the politicians may have felt the traditional animosity.

Some of the unresolved issues, ones that allow for French insistence on economic containment of UK efforts in the continued economic world, are now devolving around the wording of the post-Brexit accord. You see, the UK is heavily dependent on its marketing of global financial services and its equity markets as one of its largest economic sectors and less so on manufactures. But the accord deals only with goods, a catch-22 of which the French are acutely aware.

The April 22nd BBC.com explains: “The European Parliament [was] expected to ratify the post-Brexit EU-UK trade deal, amid tensions including a French threat of reprisals against the UK… The Trade and Co-operation Agreement (TCA) has been operating provisionally since January and [was] ratified by MEPs [on April 27th]... French Europe Minister Clément Beaune accused the UK of blocking fishing rights. He said the EU could respond with ‘reprisals’ in financial services.

“The TCA covers EU-UK trade in goods… It means goods - but not services - can be traded free of tariffs or quotas. The UK economy is dominated by services… The TCA has still resulted in more paperwork, extra costs and less trade between the two sides, since the UK left the EU.

“Praising the deal when it was agreed in December, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said ‘we have taken back control of our laws and our destiny.’… He described it as ‘a deal which will if anything allow our companies and our exporters to do even more business with our European friends.’…

“France's Clément Beaune threatened reprisals in sectors such as financial services if the UK failed to implement agreements on fishing in full… The UK made fishing rights a key issue in the negotiations, with control over access to its waters seen as a sign of British sovereignty… Mr Beaune warned that France could hold up approvals for British financial service operators to work in the EU.

‘‘The United Kingdom is expecting quite a few authorisations from us for financial services. We won't give any for as long as we don't have guarantees on fishing and other issues,’ he said on French news channel BFMTV… French fishermen have complained of being prevented from operating in British waters because of difficulties in obtaining licences.” Indeed, the final vote tally on the TCA among the Members of the European Parliament says it all: 660 votes in favor to 5 opposed, while 32 abstained. I suspect we shall see petty grievances to litter the future relations of the European Union (pressed by France) and the UK. Sigh!

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is strange that the very construct (the EU) that was created to prevent intra-European animosity, which historically gave rise to numerous smaller wars (often prolonged) and two major world wars, never completely settled the British-French mutual distrust, a fact which seems to face renewed escalation in the post-Brexit era.

Civic Literacy & Racial Justice

There are so many indices that Americans simply do not understand or appreciate their legal and governmental structure or truly recognize the political distortions that separate us. This reality has been further distorted by the recent proclivity to base judicial appointments on political litmus tests, to accept the overwhelming power of unbridled political contributions under Citizen United vs FEC, to believe that it is acceptable to make voting difficult for classes of voters who oppose incumbent political parties, for vast swaths of Americans to eschew interpretations of the US Constitution from courts in favor of ad hoc and erroneous interpretations from peers and biased social and other media, to elect candidates pledged to the force of “never compromise” if elected and finally to the belief of members of political factions who have been soundly defeated though a very normal election process that they have a right to negate opposing votes and accordingly to reverse published and certified election results.

There are so many indices that Americans simply do not understand or appreciate their legal and governmental structure or truly recognize the political distortions that separate us. This reality has been further distorted by the recent proclivity to base judicial appointments on political litmus tests, to accept the overwhelming power of unbridled political contributions under Citizen United vs FEC, to believe that it is acceptable to make voting difficult for classes of voters who oppose incumbent political parties, for vast swaths of Americans to eschew interpretations of the US Constitution from courts in favor of ad hoc and erroneous interpretations from peers and biased social and other media, to elect candidates pledged to the force of “never compromise” if elected and finally to the belief of members of political factions who have been soundly defeated though a very normal election process that they have a right to negate opposing votes and accordingly to reverse published and certified election results.

President Biden may have called for unity, recognizing that most of his “early days” political actions are quite popular across the board among the “people” (of both major parties), but the current state of distorted pollical factors noted above – which leads The Economist to label the United States as a flawed democracy – has produced a political schism, particularly notable in the narrow margin of majority control in the Senate, where except for “my way” or “plain vanilla wrap” legislation, the elected representatives of an entire political party have vowed to oppose the will of both the Democratic majority in Congress (under the Senate filibuster/cloture blocking rules) and the President just because they believe that will force them to victory in the 2022 mid-term Congressional election. 

Long a critic of election distortions and human rights violations in other nations, the United States has of late been forced to listen to the raging rhetoric of autocratic regimes lambasting our credibility after the “big lie” promulgated by Trumpers, the racial injustice reflected in the blue-on-Black reality of police shootings (an African American is three times more likely to be shot than a White person at a police stop) now routinely captured on video, our voter suppression efforts in most red states and the notion of political instability and factionalism evidenced by the January 6th assault on the Capitol.

Indeed, at the high-level political conference that took place in Anchorage, Alaska in late March, an immediate personal conflict took place at the US Secretary of State who met with a comparable delegation from the People’s Republic of China: “In the combative dialogue held face-to-face between two nations which reporters described as ‘sharp and unusual public rebukes’, US criticized China about Hong Kong and Xinjiang human rights abuses, while the Chinese delegation launched scathing attacks on the US saying it can no longer speak from ‘position of strength’ asking [US Secretary of State Anthony] Blinken to address ‘deep-seated issues’ such as racism, berating US of incivility.” RepublicWorld.com, March 20th. 

Even as one of the world’s most virulent human rights abusers, China was unambiguous in its reference to US failings: the rising White supremacy, right wing politics, the BLM movement, an election where fraud is alleged from an entire political party and all of the factors I have noted above., To China and much of the rest of the world, the United States has lost its credibility to criticize undemocratic systems elsewhere.

The polls on racial injustice within the United States reflect changing demographics. Older voters, naturally fading, seem to be diametrically different in the relevant attitudes than rising voters. Racial and ethnic schisms within our body politic also reflect attitudinal changes, many of which are not yet reflected in those elected to Congress. The Journal of the American Bar Association (April 29th) reported the results of its own political attitudinal polling (a March poll of one thousand voters), both in terms of numerical splits in voting preferences and in their perception of what is happening in their country:

“A new survey released by the ABA on Thursday [4/28] found stark divisions based on age and race when it comes to believing that there are racial biases built into the rules, procedures and practices of the justice system… While 45% of white respondents said they agree or strongly agree with that statement, 80% of Black respondents and 63% of Hispanic respondents agreed or strongly agreed.

“Additionally, the ABA 2021 Survey of Civic Literacy discovered that more than two-thirds of Americans ages 18-34 believe racial biases exist in the justice system, but only about one-third of Americans age 65 and older do… The ABA’s third annual survey of civic literacy, which assesses the public’s knowledge about the basics of U.S. democracy, also included questions about issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Its results were released as part of Law Day, a national event established by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 to recognize the country’s commitment to the rule of law…

“When asked whether ‘the nation’s judicial system adheres to the rule of law, under which all individuals are treated equally in the eyes of the law,’ 56% of total respondents said they agreed. However, only 41% of Black respondents and 47% of respondents ages 18-34 agreed with the statement…

“Among its other data related to racial justice, the survey found:

• 57% of white respondents, compared to 50% of Hispanic respondents and 43% of Black respondents, support charging juveniles who are younger than 18 as adults for serious crimes.

• 50% of respondents think ‘defund the police’ means ‘redirect funding from the police department to essential social services,’ while 17% think the phrase means ‘strip police force of all funding’ and 14% said that it equates to ‘abolish the police force.’

• 33% of respondents ages 18-34 believe aggressive prosecution is the main factor contributing to mass incarceration rates in the United States, while 43% of respondents age 65 and older believe an increase in crime is the main factor.”

If trends continue as reflected in the above analysis, the current GOP base supporting White supremacy and parallel nationalism/populism will continue to lose traction, getting voter support primarily by marginalizing and excluding obvious voting blocks that oppose them. We can expect lockstep and systematic Trump-oriented Republican directed Congressional gridlock through several more election cycles, very much dependent on whether or not they secure judicial support for voter suppression efforts and gerrymandering, until those demographic trends marginalize these populist elected officials. We can expect a longer battle in the reddest of the red states, but the writing is on the wall. If the fading base becomes desperate enough and if gun control cannot be implemented on a rational basis, the “most real” threat (according to the FBI) of right-wing domestic terrorism could reach as far as another civil war. Time will tell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it may take an inordinate amount of time for so many Americans to put country over undemocratic but charismatic political leadership.

Cop Out

American police (sheriffs, highway patrol and prison guards included) unions are powerful beasts. They are fierce political machines, able to generate campaign contributions, rank and file support and powerful arguments for public funding. They also represent the officers who, along with federal law enforcement officers, form the point of entry for a quarter of all the incarcerated prisoners on earth. The United States, by far, has a far greater litany of crimes, often exceptionally longer sentences and the largest number of inmates in the world. Oh, and the United States only accounts for 4% of the world’s population. The average cost of incarceration is about $35,000 per inmate per year, although the range is between $20,000 and $50,000 with vastly more for those sentenced to death. We average over 400 persons in prison for every 100,000 in population with somewhere around 1.5 million incarcerated individuals at any given moment.

American police (sheriffs, highway patrol and prison guards included) unions are powerful beasts. They are fierce political machines, able to generate campaign contributions, rank and file support and powerful arguments for public funding. They also represent the officers who, along with federal law enforcement officers, form the point of entry for a quarter of all the incarcerated prisoners on earth. The United States, by far, has a far greater litany of crimes, often exceptionally longer sentences and the largest number of inmates in the world. Oh, and the United States only accounts for 4% of the world’s population. The average cost of incarceration is about $35,000 per inmate per year, although the range is between $20,000 and $50,000 with vastly more for those sentenced to death. We average over 400 persons in prison for every 100,000 in population with somewhere around 1.5 million incarcerated individuals at any given moment.

With the advent of body cams and smart phone videos, American police are under the greatest public scrutiny in American history. The entire BLM movement has been motivated by the harsh statistical reality that African Americans are three times more likely than Caucasians to die in a routine confrontation with a law enforcement officer. Video footage, such as what the world witnessed in the trial of Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, is showing the fallibility – frequently less-than-subtle racial bias – that has become all too common across the United States, from blue to red cities and states. Cries to “defund the police” have subsided somewhat, although there is a move to shift some enforcement matters – particularly those related to domestic abuse, mental illness and drug addiction – into alternative governmental diversionary programs.

The US Department of Justice has also begun to investigate target cities with recent high-profile blue-on-Black killings for potential civil rights abuses. Many are questioning law enforcement officer training, often just an extension of the military experience that so many police officers have received, where resort to gunshots becomes a normal police response. When you think that in some nations, like the UK, cops almost never even carry guns, that gunfire is used so often here becomes questionable. Many officers carry tasers, but when they deploy their firearms, it is almost always in a shoot-to-kill mode as oppose to shoot-to-disable alternative. Major urban cities and counties often pay tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars each every year to settle wrongful use-of-force claims. 

Given the hue and cry in the public, the general outrage of so many blue-on-Black killings and the pervasive dissemination of most embarrassing video footage of fatal police missteps, you’d think police reform would be a slam dunk. But cops have to make split second decisions, they are often themselves at severe risk, asked to perform some of society’s most dangerous and essential services.  Their unions push hard against change. The notion of some level of municipal and even officer immunity from prosecution or liability is one of the cornerstones of police reform debate, both at the state and federal level. There are no easy answers, but if you think blue states offer a much easier path to police reform, particularly in oh-so-liberal California, think again.

Writing for the May 1st Los Angeles Times, Anita Chabria describes how hard that reform effort is in California. “Despite weeks of street protests over the killing of George Floyd and California’s reputation for progressive politics, a series of major police reforms proposed in Sacramento largely fizzled in 2020.

“Backers hoped to have more success in 2021, with the pandemic waning, legislators spending more time on the issue and momentum building to address inequities in policing… But police reform is hitting hard times again this year, including a plan common in other states to oust bad cops.

“Across the nation, 46 states have rules preventing abusive officers from jumping jobs, furthering their careers by switching agencies even after they’ve committed serious misconduct or been fired. California is not one of them — but a proposed law to change that is facing unexpectedly fierce opposition at the Capitol.

“For seven tense hours Tuesday [4/27] — one week after a former Minneapolis police officer was convicted of murdering Floyd — legislation to ban peace officers found to have acted with significant malfeasance in California seemed on the verge of dying in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“The bill’s author, a Black man representing Gardena, had to promise to compromise on key provisions to keep it alive, even as he vented about the pushback he met on one of the proposal’s first steps through the legislative process… ‘If not now, when?’ Sen. Steven Bradford asked the committee, his frustration evident. ‘This is a tough issue, but it’s a righteous issue…. It’s better than what we have, and it surely beats nothing.’

“Currently, only Hawaii, New Jersey, Rhode Island and California do not have centralized systems allowing state officials to revoke an officer’s right to work in law enforcement if they are found to have violated set standards, similar to licensing rules for doctors, barbers or acupuncturists. California had that ability in a more limited fashion until a 2003 law pushed by sheriffs and signed by Gov. Gray Davis ended it… It is the only state to have ever revoked its own oversight right, said Roger Goldman, a professor emeritus at St. Louis University who studies law enforcement decertification… Despite years of efforts, police reforms remain difficult to pass at a state Capitol in which moderate and progressive Democrats are often divided, and law enforcement unions remain powerful…

“One key issue is how juries should determine whether an officer had the intent to violate civil rights. To be found liable for civil rights abuse under current interpretations of the law, an officer must not only have committed a physical act of coercion, threat or intimidation — such as firing a gun or withholding medical care — but also have meant to violate constitutional rights while doing it… Critics of that ‘specific intent’ standard say it’s too high a bar and one that was never meant to exist.

“Bradford and advocates have suggested returning to pre-2017 standards — meaning that the act of committing the violation would be enough to prove a ‘general intent’ to ignore civil rights. Such a shift would bring state law more in line with federal standards, but some worry it only re-creates the ambiguity the court sought to fix [in an earlier judicial] San Francisco decision.” 

There is no question but that now is the time for a ground-up ethical reexamination of police biases, training and the standards of conduct applied to their operations. The routine use of military assault vehicles and tactics in civilian applications is a particularly dark spot in our enforcement practices. But we cannot forget how hard being a cop really is. We cannot overlook the stresses, the sky-high divorce and suicide rates and generl public risk we impose on law enforcement officers. Reform while respecting what police officers to and what risks they face is absolutely possible… and necessary.

I’m Peter Dekom, and our law enforcement practices are nothing more than a reflection of the biases and anomalies that exist in the world around us… but policing is a really good place to start in transforming public attitudes toward tolerance and racial justice.

Energy Hope Mired in Our Reality

Even as the United States and China engaged in a partial thaw in horribly strained relations to agree to work together to contain climate change, we remain on shaky environmental ground. Even as the pandemic stemmed energy usage for a time, the predictions for our immediately approaching months are anything but reassuring. For example, ecologists in California, measuring the moisture content in natural vegetation across the state, warned that local plant life was significantly drier than in any earlier year. Prognoses in recently fire charred areas around the world reflect similar findings. Climatologists predict still warmer temperatures, embraced by powerful winds. Fire warnings are everywhere.

Even as the United States and China engaged in a partial thaw in horribly strained relations to agree to work together to contain climate change, we remain on shaky environmental ground. Even as the pandemic stemmed energy usage for a time, the predictions for our immediately approaching months are anything but reassuring. For example, ecologists in California, measuring the moisture content in natural vegetation across the state, warned that local plant life was significantly drier than in any earlier year. Prognoses in recently fire charred areas around the world reflect similar findings. Climatologists predict still warmer temperatures, embraced by powerful winds. Fire warnings are everywhere.

Indeed, as these experts measured the rising water temperatures in ocean seas where typhoons and hurricanes are born, they warn of more such tropical storms, likely slower and heavier with greater intensity. While green energy sources across the planet have risen to produce 30% of our total energy needs, the growing Malthusian level population, plus the explosion of pent-up energy demand that experts predict will follow as the pandemic fades, suggest that mankind has done relatively little to stem global warming. 

“The International Energy Agency (IEA) is predicting a major surge in CO2 emissions from energy this year, as the world rebounds from the pandemic… Total energy emissions for 2021 will still be slightly lower than in 2019, the agency says… But CO2 will rise by the second largest annual amount on record.

“The use of coal in Asia is expected to be key: the IEA says it will push global demand up by 4.5%, taking it close to the global peak seen in 2014.” BBC.com, April 20th. While demand in some sectors, notably travel (jet and passenger ocean liner fuel), may remain below traditional demand levels, we can look at 2020 as a pandemic-driven anomaly. Coal – noting there is no such thing as commercially viable “clean” coal – is still the biggest climate warming demon: “The empty roads, high streets and airports that marked the global response to coronavirus saw the biggest fall in demand for energy since World War Two… That decline saw carbon emissions tumble by around 6% in 2020, as the more carbon-intensive fuels such as coal and oil were hardest hit by restrictions.

“Many hoped that these changes in energy use would be sustained in the recovery from the pandemic, but these latest predictions from the IEA indicate that is not likely to be the case… Energy demand is booming in the developing world, with a rise of 3.4% predicted for this year - this contrasts with richer economies, where overall energy use is expected to still be 3% below 2019… In the places where energy demand is growing, coal is playing a key role… Overall global use declined by around 4% in 2020, but is expected to rise by 4.5% this year.

“This is mainly happening in Asia, where China is leading the way and expected to account for more than half of the global coal growth this year… But even in the US and EU, where coal has been on the back foot for some time, demand is expected to rise - although it will still likely remain below 2019 levels in these regions.

“According to the IEA, coal demand is likely to be close to the global peak seen in 2014 - and that has implications for efforts to rein in climate change… ‘Global carbon emissions are set to jump by 1.5 billion tonnes this year - driven by the resurgence of coal use in the power sector,’ said Fatih Birol, the IEA's executive director… ‘This is a dire warning that the economic recovery from the Covid crisis is currently anything but sustainable for our climate.’” BBC.com. After many years of binge-building coal fired power plants to meet its growing energy needs, China finally hit that environmental wall and in 2018 committed to shift out of coal into renewables. Too little too late? Perhaps, but at least it is moving a little in the right direction.

It is essential to foster global policies to counter our climate change emergency. Pollutants, particularly greenhouse emissions, obviously do not recognize international boundaries. Glacial destruction accelerates warming as reflective ice is replaced by darker patches of land an ocean beneath that simply absorb the sun’s heat. Melting ice raises ocean waters across the planet. The resulting temperature rises flow into every nook and cranny in and on the planet. Every living thing on earth is profoundly impacted. There is no escape. But we do have to begin with our own malignant contributions to the problem. 

And while government budgetary expenditures and executive orders and decisions can help – of necessity reversing the previous administrations efforts to deregulate limits on greenhouse gaseous emissions – in the end, the magnitude of the problem is so massive that only a concerted effort by all three branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial) can make a difference. As of now, our legal system, from taxation to environmental regulation, is still biased in favor of fossil fuel energy. See my recent Ending the Subsidies to Fossil Fuel blog for more details. We’re are killing ourselves, decimating our economic future and dooming ourselves to massively more expensive recovery costs from climate change caused or severely enhanced natural disasters. Climate change denial and marginalization must end. Our lives depend on that.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while preparing for an environmentally sound future will create millions of American jobs (by far more than any jobs lost to the contraction of fossil fuel extraction and energy creation), remaining primarily reactive to resulting natural disasters just might break our financial ability and bring our economy into utter destructive chaos.

Ending the Subsidies to Fossil Fuel

There has been an unholy alliance between the fossil fuel driven energy sector – and that most definitely includes the automotive industry – and the government. The wink-wink handshake deal has included tax loopholes, unique and rather huge tax deductions, direct “failure” guarantees, exemption from common sense financial responsibility for clearly direct and measurable environmental damage and shelter from pollution regulation. 

There has been an unholy alliance between the fossil fuel driven energy sector – and that most definitely includes the automotive industry – and the government. The wink-wink handshake deal has included tax loopholes, unique and rather huge tax deductions, direct “failure” guarantees, exemption from common sense financial responsibility for clearly direct and measurable environmental damage and shelter from pollution regulation. 

The arguments to maintain these taxpay subsidies, even as billionaires profit the most, generally revolve against job loss and the cost for a changeover. Billionaires, particularly in red states with fossil fuel economies, tend to make the biggest campaign contributions and pay for those massive media campaigns to convince blue collar workers to oppose a most necessary phasing out of old world and highly destructive traditional carbon-based energy production. Even though it is clear that not only can we replace lost blue-collar jobs in this movement towards green alternative energy but actually grow the overall employment base well beyond its current state in the world of fossil fuel energy extraction and generation.

Today the words “energy independence” are still not used to support green renewables as much as they are used to encourage the fuller exploitation of our fossil fuel reserves. Those arguments have been made for decades. Funny, it we had accepted the inevitable when it first became obvious, that transition would almost be over by now. Instead, we are not that far from where we were decades ago, a few steps forward, a few Trump steps back, but nowhere near where we should be to counter the most destructive force humanity has ever known. Unlike disease-driven pandemics, which can be contained, and which phase out over time, the damage from climate change aggregates, accelerates, intensifies, disrupts and destroys seemingly without any vision of a satisfactory end.

With Republicans in Congress vowed to oppose Biden’s policies wherever they can, with a particularly diabolical focus against any proposals to shift out of fossil fuel, make corporate America actually pay for the damage they cause, and to shift out of a heavily focused form of what can only be described as corporate socialism. These pro-fossil fuel practices are labeled as “pro-business” and supportive of “capitalism”… a “free market.” But an industry that has its own specialized rules that provide governmental economic benefits that are only accorded to a preferential corporate few is by its own definition not a “free market.” The GOP hypocritically labels this government handouts and safety nets to this energy sector as capitalism but safety nets for disadvantaged ordinary Americans as socialism (which, even under the most basic dictionary definition, it is not).

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, writing an OpEd for the Guardian UK (April 18th) notes: “When industrial policy was last debated, in the 1980s, critics recoiled from government ‘picking winners.’ But times have changed. Devastating climate change, a deadly pandemic and the rise of China as a technological powerhouse require an active government pushing the private sector to achieve public purposes.

“The dirty little secret is that the US already has an industrial policy, but one that’s focused on pumping up profits with industry-specific subsidies, tax loopholes and credits, bailouts and tariffs. The practical choice isn’t whether to have an industrial policy but whether it meets society’s needs or those of politically powerful industries.

“Consider energy. The fossil fuel industry has accumulated ‘billions of dollars in subsidies, loopholes and special foreign tax credits,’ in Biden’s words. He intends to eliminate these and shift to non-carbon energy by strengthening the nation’s electrical grid, creating a new ‘clean electricity standard’ that will force utilities to end carbon emissions by 2035 and providing research support and tax credits for clean energy… It’s a sensible 180-degree shift of industrial policy… The old industrial policy for the automobile industry consisted largely of bailouts – of Chrysler in 1979 and General Motors and Chrysler in 2008.

“Biden intends to shift away from gas-powered cars entirely and invest $174bn in companies making electric vehicles. He’ll also create 500,000 new charging stations… This also makes sense. Notwithstanding the success of Tesla, which received $2.44bn in government subsidies before becoming profitable, the switch to electric vehicles still needs pump priming.” There are obvious as well as hidden consequences.

We are discovering that beyond the increasing unaffordability of job rich urban centers, the recent exodus from cities to other regions is also being triggered by this harmful ecological realty: urban air pollution. China is seeing this happening with particular frequency. So are we. Economics Professor Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak summarized (Yale Insights, April 13th) a recent Yale University by School of Management study: “They found that, indeed, people tended to flee from polluted cities—but this trend was much more pronounced among skilled, educated employees. Those individuals were leaving places where there was already a scarcity of skilled workers, and relocating to places where they were more skilled people, making their presence a little less useful—causing aggregate productivity to drop. Further, since they leave behind a shortage of skilled labor to manage and train unskilled colleagues, productivity drops further in the places they escape.” 

Rising younger American voters place getting real with climate change as their number one priority. Within their relatively young lives, they have already witnessed a massive increase in hurricane intensity and frequency, wildfires, drought, coastal erosion and flooding within the continental United States. Recent polls tell us that a majority of Americans believe the time for serious prioritization and addressing the containment of climate change is immediate. 

The continued mainstream GOP denial or marginalization of the severity of climate change devastation, mirroring that same denial and marginalization of the COVID threat before it killed well over half a million Americans and infected millions of others, tell us that the Republican Party is not only on the wrong side of history but that it is alienating rising generations of voters and make a very bad problem so much worse. Planting the seeds of its own demise. Nature will not relent because it faces political denial! Humanity cannot vote climate change away.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is time to unify Americans against nature’s apolitical wrath that we must now call a climate change “emergency.”