Climate Change 1980-2018

Two tigers talking and one is saying, "You can tell humans apart by their fingerprints. They are as unique as our stripes." I’ve been cleaning up and organizing all of my folders and over the year have saved some screenshots that I label “Ideas”. They are mostly quotes to overlay on beautiful cat images for social sites, so I’ve created a few, but today had that bizarre stripe / finger print idea come out of nowhere. I sent it to LaWanna to see if Cindy Arthur, or one of our artists could illustrate that.

Howie is feeling better and decided he’s now ready to remake the cartoon I had done to promote our federal bill to ban cub petting. His edits are great, but now it means pretty much starting from scratch with the cartoonist. I’m going to give it another day or so, because he will want to change things a few times and no sense paying for work that is just going to have to be redone. Jamie and Victor went fossilizing for something new yesterday. It’s an old mine where they hit a pocket of fossilized clams. Jamie says the animal part of the clams turns to crystals and that’s what she’s digging. I have crystals in my pockets and on my desks as a reminder that we are all made of light.

I’m continuing to read the NYT piece on climate change. I found this interesting and wondered if Jamie hopped back onto the planet in 1980 to be a part of the change that was needed to save the earth?

On April 3, 1980, Senator Paul Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat, held the first congressional hearing on carbon-dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. Gordon MacDonald testified that the United States should “take the initiative” and develop, through the United Nations, a way to coordinate every nation’s energy policies to address the problem. That June, Jimmy Carter signed the Energy Security Act of 1980, which directed the National Academy of Sciences to start a multiyear, comprehensive study, to be called “Changing Climate,” that would analyze social and economic effects of climate change. More urgent, the National Commission on Air Quality, at the request of Congress, invited two dozen experts, including Henry Shaw himself, to a meeting in Florida to propose climate policy.

Two days before Halloween in 1980 Rafe Pomerance traveled to a cotton-candy castle on the Gulf of Mexico, near St. Petersburg, Fla, that locals called the Pink Palace. The Don CeSar hotel was a child’s daydream with cantilevered planes of bubble-gum stucco and vanilla-white cupolas that appeared to melt in the sunshine like scoops of ice cream. The hotel stood amid blooms of poisonwood and gumbo limbo on a narrow spit of porous limestone that rose no higher than five feet above the sea. In its carnival of historical amnesia and childlike faith in the power of fantasy, the Pink Palace was a fine setting for the first rehearsal of a conversation that would be earnestly restaged, with little variation and increasing desperation, for the next 40 years.

2015-2018: The Paris Agreement is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), dealing with greenhouse-gas-emissions mitigation, adaptation, and finance, starting in the year 2020. The agreement's language was negotiated by representatives of 196 state parties at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC in Le Bourget, near Paris, France, and adopted by consensus on 12 December 2015. As of November 2018, 195 UNFCCC members have signed the agreement, and 184 have become party to it. The Paris Agreement's long-term goal is to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels; and to limit the increase to 1.5 °C, since this would substantially reduce the risks and effects of climate change.

Under the Paris Agreement, each country must determine, plan, and regularly report on the contribution that it undertakes to mitigate global warming. No mechanism forces a country to set a specific target by a specific date, but each target should go beyond previously set targets. In June 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw his country from the agreement. Under the agreement, the earliest effective date of withdrawal for the U.S. is November 2020, shortly before the end of President Trump's current term. In practice, changes in United States policy that are contrary to the Paris Agreement have already been put in place.

In July 2017 French Environment Minister Nicolas Hulot announced a plan to ban all petrol and diesel vehicles in France by 2040 as part of the Paris Agreement. Hulot also stated that France would no longer use coal to produce electricity after 2022 and that up to 4 billion will be invested in boosting energy efficiency. To reach the agreement's emission targets, Norway will ban the sale of petrol- and diesel-powered cars by 2025; the Netherlands will do the same by 2030. Electric trains running on the Dutch national rail network are already entirely powered by wind energy. The House of Representatives of the Netherlands passed a bill in June 2018 mandating that by 2050 the Netherlands will cut its 1990 greenhouse-gas emissions level by 95%—exceeding the Paris Agreement goals. What will we do?

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