We need more like this man, Prof Kevin Anderson. He knows fine well his viewers are served well by his quick delivery, in the talk below he gets through lots of points because there are lots of points … its called survival of the planet !!!
He’s certainly bright and like a breath of fresh air; a genuine hero among men.
I implore anyone and everyone to listen through completely the above presentation. He draws in the many factors all feeding into the dilemma of trying to lower carbon consumption when the dangers of hubris, of trump, of the slowness of governments and how the better off in this world are most reluctant to let go of present lifestyle. A good point he makes is realising how our affluent carbon lifestyle, air travel etc is destroying the chance of the poor accessing even a basic supply of electricity. So next time air travel is booked just think how the debit of carbon is hindering someone, a family on the other side of the world. I personally do not think the top consumers can shift their mentality, nor realise the urgency. Its an 80/20 rule and it fits. Likewise, IPCC forecasts and modelling are so ‘out of step’ with real-life data ie incorporating carbon capture when as yet the technology hasn’t been invented for the large scale required; likewise with no IPCC mention of the expected methane ‘time bomb’. Their figures will be shredded to ‘so much confetti’.
Its going to be very difficult to get the World to accept new outlooks and targets, the Economists constant desire for growth in untenable with climate changing so fundamentally. Its a bit like my experience of ‘managers’ in industry, often its always too late.
We need a few hundred more people like Prof Kevin Anderson on this planet. Heres his blog …
Also …
http://www.resilience.org/resilience-author/kevin-anderson/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Anderson_(scientist)
For those that can stand a little more reading …. heres a useful quote speaking with Amy Goodman ie http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-11-27/scientists-issue-dire-warning-climate-change-key-researcher-urges-changes-live/
I quote: KEVIN ANDERSON: Well, if you think about it, the renewable industry itself requires lots of people working in it. But also, we have to retrofit the existing infrastructure that we have in our society. If you look at the U.S., it’s very high energy consumption. That needs to change rapidly. That means retrofitting buildings and properties, people’s houses. It means much greater electrification of the energy system than we see today. There’s just a huge amount of construction work, engineering work, design work. You know, this is about really a 30-year jobs program for all of the industrialized parts of the world to transition from the very high-carbon infrastructure we have now to the low-carbon infrastructure of tomorrow. So, in that sense, surely, if his commitment to the Dust Belt was really a sincere one and he had some innovative capacity, he would see that the climate change agenda is a jobs agenda for the people that voted for him. end of quote.
In other words we need to get ‘on the ball’ and be doing all of this NOW.
Its particulary frustrating as trump is so incapable of any of this, so adamant in his refusal to acknowledge what everyone else knows; that is a statement that sums him up doesn’t it so many ways! Not even trumps usual derisory … SAD… is sufficient to describe the direction he is heading (ie backwards) more accurately CRIMINAL in his neglect and insistence on reacting as if uninformed yet always able to hear and implement the dinosaur oil and coal lobby! The boy that couldn’t read …..
And to contradict trump and his cronies … theres no such thing as clean coal.
From Kevin Anderson above I quote … If … “he had some innovative capacity” unquote, that just about sums trump up, nothing good, nothing positive, nothing created as a step forward for humanity, just a bizarre yearning by a person with an extremely contrived hair make-over to be back in the 1930’s when society was rough and stratified, when greed and impulse were fed quite easily if pockets were deep enough and political ambition fed upon upset and yearning; for the ordinary God fearing person it was not an easy a time to live through and then we had ’39-45. The sad apology trump despises science, data and learning; doing his best to run down, shift or dismiss scientists of the EPA through the Grim Reaper aka Scott Pruitt. I’d describe trump with his refusal of scientific data and learned educated opinion, hatred of minorities and folk of other colour or religious persuasion as a strange repugnant mix of Mao, Hitler and a hundred other despots throughout history.
Be vary of trump wanting a war, he’s doing his best to set nations and beliefs against each other; then as Naomi Klein sagely points out all manner of restrictions and laws will appear that a short while ago would have seemed so unthinkable, so draconian.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/11/naomi-klein-donald-trump-no-is-not-enough-interview
climate-change-briefing 