Cities and Climate Change, Enter the C40

From the NY Times title link: "It was six years ago when Mr. Clinton, working with Ken Livingstone, the leftist and then-mayor of London, drew together officials from 40 of the world’s largest cities, from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Yokohama, Japan, to share ideas for reducing carbon emissions and dealing with the inevitable impacts of a changing climate........

Cities now house more than half of the world’s population, and while they occupy 2 percent of the globe’s land mass, cities consume 70 percent of global energy and produce 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. If anything meaningful is going to happen on climate in the short term, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bloomberg and their advisers say, it has to start in the cities."

Those impressive figures come from the C40 Cities organization, strongly supported  by a joint effort of Clinton and  Bloomberg to tackle climate change by focusing on the large cities of the world.

“We are putting a stake in the ground around the idea that national and international governments have failed, possibly quite permanently, or at least in a way that they will not make any serious progress before it’s too late,” said Kevin Sheekey, a former deputy mayor of New York and principal political adviser to Mr. Bloomberg. “If you address the problems of the cities, there will be no need for China and India to sign onto some international accord. And thank God, because that’s not going to get done. It’s time to say it.”

The C40 has its next meeting in Sao Paulo Brazil, May 31 to June 2.

Access to Family Planning and Saving the Earth

On Marc Guenther's Blog, he presented the following quote from Ted Turner, of CNN fame:

Food, population and women: “What really concerns me is if we go to 8 or 9 billion. The natural world is collapsing all around us. There are two things we can do that won’t cost a lot of money… Millions of women don’t have access to family planning. If you provide people with  family planning, they won’t have unwanted pregnancies and they won’t have to  have abortions. The second thing we could do and we should have done it a long time ago is half the women in the world don’t have equal rights with men. In the Arab world, people are treated like dogs. They can’t vote in Saudia Arabia. They can’t drive a car. They don’t get an education. Women need to have equal rights with men, and equal education and equal rights to a job, and when women have that, they will choose to have smaller families.”

I have been a supporter of Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth) for a long time, and that is certainly what they advocate. A couple more quotes by Ted Turner, that will hopefully inspire you to read the title link:

The defeat of climate bill: “It’s going to go down in history as one of the great tragedies that we’ve ever had.”

Energy poverty: Rich countries should get together to help the two billion people in the world who don’t have access to electricity. “Why not give everyone in the world who doesn’t have electricity a solar panel and a light bulb so their kids can do their homework?”

The Skeptics Side

For the sake of objective presentation...and a few laughs, I wanted point out James Taylor's blog post in Forbes (title link) concerning the recent report from the National Acadeny of Scienes titled America's Climate Choices. If you read the post, also be sure to read the comments by David, as they provide an excellent counter perspective. Or you can make your own assessment of the credentials of the report's authors.

Also see NOAA's comments and the Reuters article by Elizabeth McGowan, Climate Study Congress Requested Falls on Deaf Ears in the Capitol. From this article:

"WASHINGTON—Ho hum.
The average air temperature in the United States has leapt two degrees in the last five decades. Yawn. Coastal regions in the country are disappearing because of rising sea levels. Hit the snooze button. The already-arid Southwest is becoming drier. Snore.......
"If members of Congress challenge the assertions in the report, they should hold hearings," Bledsoe (climate change specialist with the Bipartisan Policy Center) said. "If they believe and accept what's in it, they should hold hearings. One way or another they should deal with it," he concluded. "I don't see how they can ignore it." "

Shrimp Farming and the Environment

My daughter never eats shrimp because of the negative impact so many shrimp operations have on the environment. These negative impacts range from cutting down mangrove forests, to the effluent pollution from poorly operated shrimp farms. In the title link you can learn that these negative impacts  are not inevitable, and that shrimp can be farmed in an environmentally sound manner. The link includes a 16 minute video about Linda Thornton, a major pioneer in these efforts. This video also covers some details about the shrimp farming techniques developed and employed on three shrimp farms in Belize.

There is still a lot of work ahead to get these techniques learned and practiced around the world, but organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund are helping make this happen, and are also developing certification techniques for shrimp raised on environmentally sustainable shrimp farms.

Will we resort to geoengineering in 2031?

"After decades of global warming, the summer sea ice in the Arctic has vanished entirely, opening up new trade routes and vast oil and gas reserves in the Far North. China and the Pacific Rim nations, meanwhile, are enduring ever-worsening repercussions of climate change: volatile storms, food riots, and rising sea levels that displace millions of people. Suddenly.......some countries say, ‘Screw it. We have to cool this down.’  How? A bloc of Asian nations underwrites an aggressive geoengineering effort that uses specially designed aircraft to disperse thousands of tonnes of sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere."

This is a hypothetical scenario by Jason Blackstock, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario. It is contained in the title link article by John Lorinc in The Walrus. This article presents a fascinating overview of geoengineering (aka Plan B), and makes a compelling case for  at very least for discussing it in international forums:

"At this stage, [David] Keith says, a formal policy debate is certainly more important than coming up with rules. He feels there needs to be 'a lot of talk, because for so many people this is so new. [We] need a venue to allow a lot of people to express a lot of opinions, including those that say geoengineering is stupid and should be banned.'

Perhaps, Keith notes, the prospect of governments or private entities deploying these fantastically potent technologies will stir people to focus more energy on finding ways to make Plan A work."