Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – As I pointed out on Sunday, the Big Oil and Big Coal countries in the G20 — Russia, Saudi Arabia, India and China — prevented the New Delhi summit’s joint communique from making any specific commitments to reduce carbon pollution.
At his news conference in Hanoi, President Biden was pressed by Aurelia End of AFP about this failure to lay out goals with teeth.
President Biden, who seems to be more energetic and more on top of issues than most people half his age, gave a pretty robust answer. First, he underscored that G20 schmee 20, the United States would meet its Paris goals, and indeed, would exceed them, and he said he felt confident that other countries would, as well.
Biden also underlined his commitment to preserving major carbon sinks, which absorb carbon dioxide and bury it, such as the Amazon rain forest and the Congo rain forest. He mentioned meeting with Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on this issue. He said the wealthy countries have a responsibility to give to “those countries that don’t have the economic wherewithal and did not cause the problem in the first place.” He recalled working with the late Republican Senator Dick Lugar (R-IN) when the two were on the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, about the desirability of tying debt forgiveness to maintenance of those carbon sinks.
He sees clearing the rain forests to grow cattle as one of the ingredients of our current climate disaster. Scientists have found that “the world’s forests sequestered about twice as much carbon dioxide as they emitted between 2001 and 2019. In other words, forests provide a ‘carbon sink’ that absorbs a net 7.6 billion metric tonnes of CO2 per year, 1.5 times more carbon than the United States emits annually.” Biden remembered this principle, but mistakenly thought that the Amazon alone absorbed as much CO2 as the US emits every year.
Biden also wants to give out green energy foreign aid, helping Global South countries such as Angola in Africa erect a network of solar panels. He pointed out that such projects are in the interest of the whole world.
The president then waxed a bit philosophical, underscoring that such green foreign aid is essential because “the only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a — than a nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next 20 — 10 years. We’re — that’d be real trouble. There’s no way back from that.”
Forbes: ” Biden Recounts Movie With John Wayne, ‘Indians’ Discussing Climate Change In Vietnam”
Climate scientists worry that if the average surface temperature of the earth rises by 1.5 degrees Celsius / 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above the preindustrial average, it could make our planet’s climate turn chaotic. We already see signs of this additional “complexity” in the rise of slow-moving but extremely fierce mega-hurricanes distinguished by previously very rare wind speeds and by their ability to dump massive amounts of water on coastal cities. The heating of the waters of the Atlantic and the Caribbean is part of the reason for these monster storms. Hot water feeds the hurricanes, whipping up their winds, and it has more water vapor above it, which the hurricanes draw up and then release on making landfall over cooler solid ground. Despite their 150-mile-an-hour winds (or more, increasingly), they move slowly. So such a storm could just sit on a city like Savannah and whip around destroying buildings and electricity poles for many days.
It is not clear that contemporary, urban civilization can survive such extreme climate effects, since we are so dependent on electricity, the internet, and the reliability of food growing and transportation.
Moreover, if the seas rise 6 feet or more in this century, that could make places like the Egyptian Delta, where 60 million people live, or Bangladesh, where 150 million people live, uninhabitable. Hundreds of millions of people could be displaced.
And then there is the double whammy we are seeing in the Mediterranean, of dry spells causing forest fires, followed by Mediterranean cyclones that dump so much water on Greece as to create a new body of water where farms used to produce a quarter of the country’s food. There didn’t used to be Mediterranean cyclones.
If we did nothing and just took the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 800, which is where we are now headed, it wouldn’t be the end of human beings, necessarily, but it would kill a lot of people and make the lives of the rest of them very uncomfortable and uncertain. And as Biden says, at the moment we have no way practical way to reverse atmospheric carbon, which could stay up there thousands of years. (Carbon capture is vaporware).
Biden ended by emphasizing that the US and other G20 countries can plausibly triple renewable energy by 2030, a goal that was vaguely adopted in New Delhi. As I have pointed out, for Russia and Saudi Arabia, which have almost no renewables, tripling is too low a bar.
Biden also pointed to his Inflation Reduction Act, with $369 billion for the green energy transition, as an engine of job creation and economic growth, and as a program other countries in the world would be wise to emulate.
Biden ended by deriding climate change denialists, who still dominate the Republican Party and some cable news organizations. I’ll let him have the last word, since it is colorful:
“And there’s a — my — my brother loves having — there’s famous lines from movies that he always quotes. You know, it’s — and one — one of them is — there’s — there’s a movie about John Wayne. He’s an Indian scout. And they’re trying to get the Ap- — I think it was the Apache — one — one of the great tribes of America back on the reservation.
And he’s standing with a Union so- — so he’s — they’re all on their — and they’re on their horses in their saddles. And there’s three or four Indians in headdresses, and the Union soldiers — and the Union soldiers are basically saying to the Indians, “Come with me, we’ll take care of you. We’ll — everything will be good.”
And the Indian scou- — the Indian looks at John Wayne and points to the Union soldier and says, “He’s a lying, dog-faced pony soldier.”
Well, there’s a lot of lying, dog-faced pony soldiers out there about — about global warming, but not anymore. All of a sudden, they’re all realizing it’s a problem. And there’s nothing like seeing the light.
As Poppy Noor at The Guardian noted, there doesn’t seem to be a John Wayne film with that dialogue. There is a 1952 film entitled Pony Soldier starring Tyrone Power
Noor wrote, “There is, reportedly, a line in the film in which a chief says: “The pony soldier speaks with a tongue of the snake that rattles.”
So that film may be where the notion of a lying pony soldier comes from. The “dog-faced” bit must derive from some other film. But Biden’s amalgam of these images for this purpose is poetic justice. The US cavalry did commit genocidal acts against American Indians, whose way of life was far less destructive for our planet than European industrial, high-carbon “civilisation.” And today’s climate denialists are just as genocidal in effect as were the lying pony soldiers in their day.
© 2024 All Rights Reserved