2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #29

Posted on 21 July 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz

A listing of 32 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 14, 2024 thru Sat, July 20, 2024.

Story of the week

As reflected by preponderance of coverage, our Story of the Week is Project 2025. Until now traveling mostly unobserved below the surface of public attention, this public policy submarine launched by the Heritage Foundation and loaded with missiles targeted at civil society as we express it via competent and impartial governance (or sincere attempts at such) now emerges as a hot topic of concern, spanning many domains of public administration. 

What’s Project 2025? If you didn’t follow the link above, here’s shorthand supplied by the instigators:

Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.

This ambition is accompanied by a detailed plan of action assembled by people well qualified for this task. Project members include over two dozen former Trump administration figures, all now well familiar with federal government and— per the policy formulation they’ve created— bringing their experience to bear with laser focus on inviting avenues of attack on our civil infrastructure.  

Project 2025 certainly gives nods to various voguish culture war issues, but a scan of the entire plan reveals a bit of a pattern. “Deconstructing the administrative state” roughly translates into crippling the US government’s capacity to impose accountability for external costs— by all necessary means.

As a practical matter, avoiding responsibility for burdens unilaterally imposed on other people follows a fairly simple logic. We cannot assign ownership of those harms people (us) don’t know of. Hence ignorance is strength when seeking to hide uninvited costs visited on others at industrial scale. In our context of Project 2025— which at a glance appears to be operating chiefly to the benefit of interests uncaring of others–  blinding and deafening the eyes and ears of government is thus a fast and efficient route to serenely peaceful and maximally effective pursuit of profit.

How is all of this relevant to human-caused climate change and climate mitigation obstruction? Beyond one project author having form as a climate science vandal, the plan is quite specific. In particular, Project 2025 calls out NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), naming it “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and explicitly calling for the agency’s dismantlement. This seems to be the main objection to NOAA on the plan’s part, and is exemplary of how the authors are using their informed perspective to lean toward complete decapitation (or in some cases “only” bureacratic lobotomy) rather than tinkering around the edges of offending branches of government. More generally to the overall point of Project 2025, there can hardly be a better example of astronomically expensive external costs than human-caused climate change.

“Freedom” is a word much bandied about in the US., and Project 2025 uses the term liberally— in more than one sense. Freedom of thought and religion are certainly founding principles of the country. It’s however highly doubtful that the authors of the Bill of Rights intended that we each should be free to end our sanitary sewer at our neighbor’s property line. Yet human nature is such that some people will do exactly that— if they can sneak it by and nobody notices, or has no recourse to object. 

Why do we agree to governance, and support the infrastructure of government as it pertains to law and regulation? In no small part it’s because we know very well thanks to history (and our current climate predicament) that a small percentage of people with whom we all share space won’t behave in a socially acceptable manner unless they’re forced. If Project 2025 is an indicator, the Heritage Foundation doesn’t seem to have good grasp of this underlying and pervasive feature of human behavior— and commensurate requirement for effective and robust civil governance. That seems unlikely, so it may be more parsimonious to assume that the Heritage Foundation simply doesn’t believe in cooperative behavior as the foundation of true social prosperity.

With the Project 2025 submarine now exposed to view various contributing authors and participating organizations are jumping ship, but the document stands as the bared soul of poorly socialized people and what they’ll do with access to levers of power. This circus of the self-interested has told us in plain language what they’d like to see, and whether or not they desert the Heritage Foundation we should appreciate their candor, listen to it, think about what it implies. None of them are actually learning from the general revulsion they’re hearing and will all continue their program of “it’s all about me,”  regardless of whether or not we continue paying attention.

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before July 14

• Artist punches holes in UN climate report six hours a day for Dutch installation, The Guardian, Mariam Amini. Johannes-Harm Hovinga has to take painkillers to complete 20-day artistic protest at Museum Arnhem
• Climate change could return us to the pre-antibiotic era, Analysis, Salon, Howard Dean. “We are in a race with ever-evolving bacteria — and we are losing. Climate change is making the battle much harder”
• ‘All threats to the sea come from humans’: how lawyers are gearing up to fight for the oceans, Environment, The Guardian, Karen McVeigh. “A rising number of lawsuits in courts around the world are holding governments and corporations to account for their treatment of the seas and those who rely on them”
• Study: Weaker ocean circulation could enhance CO2 buildup in the atmosphere, MIT News, Jennifer Chu . “New findings challenge current thinking on the ocean’s role in storing carbon.”
• Only 4{2add217ad2235d262e63a186eb2903fa1b3aade4b9d8db7a510444e5d82aac71} of TV news correctly connected Hurricane Beryl to climate change, electrek, Jameson Dow.
• Heat, humidity, wildfires: what the weather report reveals about your health risks, Explainer, Narwhal, Shannon Waters & Emma McIntosh. “Climate change is making summer weather more dangerous. It’s time to get serious about heat”
• Opinion: We built our world for a climate that no longer exists, Opinion, CNN, Jeff Goodell.