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On Donald Trump: Why a comic can't fix the climate

6/23/2016

#TrumpNotWelcome (Photo credit: Paul Murphy)

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is on his way to Scotland. He was scheduled to visit Ireland, but cancelled that leg of the journey after our Prime Minister called him “racist and dangerous” and rumors circulated that Trump would be confronted with a crowd of Irish protesters who did not welcome him in our "land of a thousand welcomes".

Trump owns a golf-course on the southwest coast of Ireland. It’s at risk of falling into the sea due to erosion exacerbated by the Atlantic storms that are occurring with more intensity as a result of climate change.

Ironically, Trump’s company in Ireland has applied to the local county council to build a sea wall (yes, another wall!) to protect his golf course. They cited ”rising sea levels and increased storm frequency and wave energy associated with global warming” as the reason the wall should be built. While in America, Trump calls climate change a “hoax” and a “con job”.

For the rest of the world, electing Donald Trump quite possibly means the end of planet Earth as we know it. This sounds like hyperbole, but when it comes to climate change I'm deadly serious. We have a limited window of time to tackle climate change once and for all. To keep our Earth’s temperature within safe limits for life as we know it, we now have to make dramatic and swift changes to how we generate energy and power our homes, transport, and food production systems. To solve climate change, we have to transform to an essentially fossil-fuel free society across the globe within the next three decades.

In December 2015, 197 countries within the United Nations agreed to attempt such change as part of the Paris Climate Agreement, but if Donald Trump is elected president he could single-handedly undo that tremendous global effort. He already said as much when his energy adviser, Congressman Kevin Cramer (a self-professed climate denier) recommended he “just pull out” of the U.N. Climate Agreement and Trump agreed that “at minimum” he would “renegotiate the deal” – A deal that has already taken over 21 years to negotiate.

For the climate, the alarm bells are sounding now as Arctic temperatures reach unprecedented warming and we see flooding and storms around the world the likes of which we’ve never seen before. We no longer have time for further negotiation, let alone a U.S. president who doesn’t take the biggest global challenge of our time seriously.

Watching interviews of Trump, one can see some appeal in his speaking style. It’s somewhat refreshing to see a politician that isn’t trying to please everyone for the sake of a vote and trying to please corporations for the sake of campaign funding. Naturally, when we watch someone on television week-after-week we begin to trust them as they keep us company in our living rooms. Donald Trump has garnered the public’s trust over the years more than most politicians could dream of thanks to his TV exposure.

wndu.com

Guardian journalist, Dave Eggers' assessment of Trump supporters at a rally in Sacramento recently was probably the most accurate of media analysis - that they’re not all misogynists, racists and homophobes, but rather normal women and men looking for something different in American politics and they see Trump as an entertaining answer to that search.

Eggers called Trump a modern day Andrew Dice Clay, an irreverent American comedian of the 1990s who was known for misogynistic jokes. The similarities are palpable. It seems America may vote for a president on the basis of entertainment value without acknowledging the key role of the U.S. president in matters of vital global importance.

Throughout history, U.S. Presidents have played an essential role in matters of global conflict, trans-boundary environmental problems like depletion of the ozone layer, and humanitarian crises.

Climate change is undoubtedly the most difficult problem of all. If left unchecked, it will affect every person on every corner of the globe and make much of the world uninhabitable by the end of the century, and yet to solve it requires changing everything we do, everywhere.

The United States, as a global “superpower” and one of the largest emitters of the gases that contribute to climate change, must lead the way in solving this crisis. Without U.S. leadership, the climate and the world’s future is at risk of eventual chaos. America, if you're listening, please don’t choose a president for the sake of a few laughs at the rest of the world’s expense. The climate can't be fixed in the hands of a comic.

Keep fighting the good fight!
-Cara

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Ireland's Transport Silence

6/22/2016

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Just before Alan Rusbridger retired as Editor of the Guardian newspaper in March 2015, he wrote an editorial saying his only regret was not giving climate change the attention it deserved. He explained:

'We prefer to deal with what has happened, not what lies ahead. We favour what is exceptional and in full view over what is ordinary and hidden'.

Subsequently, the Guardian has covered climate almost daily, giving climate change the front-page at least once a week.

Rusbridger's regret is a problem with climate coverage in the media worldwide. Climate is the biggest challenge facing humanity and solving it means changing everything about the way we live within the next three decades, but it rarely gets a mention in mainstream press relative to its significance.

When climate does make the news, it's usually in a manner that doesn't bring us any closer to solving the problem.

Where Irish Times gets it right

That's why I’ve been enjoying the Irish Times so much lately. I've seen a real shift in how they're covering climate change. At the U.N. Climate Summit in Paris last December they had not one but three journalists in attendance, and they've been covering climate from all angles ever since. This week alone, climate solutions have featured in:

It’s refreshing to see an Irish news source taking its obligation to prepare the public for the inevitable changes ahead, and I hope more of Ireland's media sources will follow their lead as the world begins its low-carbon transition in line with the U.N. Climate Agreement.

Where Irish Times got it wrong

I was equally pleased to see an Irish Times article on June 20th regarding best buys for eco-friendly cars as I'm in the market for one myself, but I was pretty shocked at their analysis. In addition to including mostly hybrid vehicles (a weak compromise that won't actually solve climate change), the article included a used Volkswagen model – a company that notoriously cheated the public and enabled the release of 40 times the legally acceptable level of nitrogen oxides in 11 million cars worldwide. A recent peer-reviewed study in Environmental Research Letters demonstrated the excess emissions in the U.S. alone will lead to 59 premature deaths and 45,000 disability adjusted life years at a cost of $39 billion dollars due to the excess particulate pollution Volkswagen generated.

The Irish Times article argued the Volkswagen diesel scandal was over nitrogen oxide, which they claimed “does not contribute to climate change”. This is scientifically incorrect. Oxides of nitrogen (NOx) contribute indirectly to climate change by increasing formation of ozone (a greenhouse gas) and methane (which has 28 times more global warming potential than carbon dioxide). One can hardly call a vehicle produced by a company that knowingly damaged the health of people around the world, in addition to taking a toll on our already fragile climate, “eco-friendly”.

A more accurate analysis of eco-friendly cars would have to be limited to fully electric options or maybe hydrogen fueled cars (if they existed) because that is the technological transition we have to make if we really want to prevent climate change from reaching unbearable limits.

If you want to read a much better analysis of eco-friendly cars, check out Dave Robbins practical blog on electric vehicles in Ireland written after he'd purchased one himself.

We're getting it all wrong on cars...

Transport's impact on climate change has been weighing on me a lot recently. Last week was National Bike Week and at an event I spoke at for Dublin Cycling Campaign, I was reminded by one of their members just how much cars dominate our advertising space. It seems every second radio and television ad is telling us to buy a Skoda, Volkswagen, Ford, etc. Maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Irish Times got it wrong on eco-friendly vehicles given the number of petrol-guzzling cars that dominates its pages.

But it's not just the Irish Times that got it wrong on cars and transport. When Harry McGee interviewed climate change Minister Dennis Naughten this week, Minister Naughten seemed to think that the only solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector was to wait until we could replace all petrol vehicles with electric ones. There was no mention of improving public transport or cycling infrastructure. Our government seems to think "transport" means cars and roads and nothing in between.

Cars are even used as a plaster for our struggling economy. Every time the government needs a boost of capital, they issue a scrappage scheme to get us to throw away our old cars and buy new ones! When you think about the fact that we need to move our economy from this linear "take-make-and throw away" model to a more circular economy to address our resource limits to growth, this whole scrappage concept is madness but it keeps the exchequer and the motor dealers fat and happy.

Last May, Ireland's EPA reported:

“Transport emissions are projected to show strong growth over the period to 2020 with a 13%-19% increase on current levels depending on the level of policy implementation."

Given where our country's greenhouse gas emissions need to go (way way down), the EPA's announcement was shocking but it didn't even make the news. We're letting transport away with a free pass and shrugging our shoulders while we all bicker about how agriculture needs to do its fair share to address climate change and complain about the prospect of ever more wind turbines on the horizon. Ultimately, allowing transport emissions to grow either means agriculture and energy have to reduce their emissions even more to compensate or tax payers will have to pay millions of euros in EU fines as Ireland fails to meet its emission reduction targets.

The government's ignorance on transport isn't just limited to national politics... This week, Kilkenny Council announced it was shutting down its only public city bus as it continues to fund road development. In speaking to Kilkenny County Councillor Malcolm Noonan (Green Party) about this turn of events, he said:

Bernard and Kavanagh Coaches Ltd.

The existing bus service operator and I mapped three routes that would take in all major employers, the Watershed, schools and residential areas. I spoke to a utility company and other possible partners to develop an electric three shuttle bus service, subsidised from on street parking charges and the State. Effectively, we handed a proposal for a service to the Council on a plate and nothing happened.

Now, we have a short window of time to drastically reduce emissions from transport, but more importantly, create a healthy people centered City where the private car is not king. It's all about priorities and we have gotten ours badly wrong... At a time when Local Authorities across the world are investing in public transport, cycling and walking to improve urban air quality and overall health, we are investing almost 17m in a road and bridge that are not connected to anything and will make traffic problems in the City worse.”

As with nearly every environmental injustice, this kind of behavior impacts the most vulnerable in our society first. Failure to invest in public transport and cycling infrastructure isn't just environmental injustice, it's social injustice too. Elderly people in Kilkenny are distraught at the prospect of losing this bus service. In rural Ireland, the expectation that everyone can afford and is able to drive a car to get around is shocking and unfair.

But there's nothing stopping us from getting it right!

The solution to transport emissions is actually pretty simple. We don't need to wait for e-car technology and infrastructure to reach maturity (ahem, Minister Naughten!), we just need to divert a portion of National Transport Authority (NTA) funds away from road construction and into cycling infrastructure and fossil-fuel free public transport. As usual, it all comes down to money! Cyclist.ie and Dublin Cycling Campaign have an easy way for all of us to ask Transport Minister Shane Ross to make that happen on their website, and it's great that the cycling community has recently joined the Stop Climate Chaos network in Ireland to make climate action a core part of their work.

Dublin Cycling Campaign has already demonstrated how such efforts can be wildly successful when they worked with NTA to build the outstanding cycle path along the Grand Canal. Dublin sacrificed 200 car parking spaces for that path, but now we're seeing people who would have never felt safe cycling before using the path as part of their daily commute. We need to increase public cycling in our nation's capital from its paltry 5% to the levels we see in places like Copenhagen of 35-45%, but to do that we need cycle paths that we'd feel safe enough to let our kids ride on.

Aside from addressing climate change, there are a lot of other reasons to move from a car-dominated society to a cycling and public transport dominated one. To name a few:

Grand Canal cycle path, Dublin. Credit: Eamon Ryan

Revitalized town centers - Those who use public transport/cycling are far more likely to spend money on their commute than those in cars. Dublin businesses have already said they're losing money because congestion has gotten so bad and many of our towns' high streets are crumbling as shoppers move out to retail estates with plentiful parking. We need to get those shoppers out of their cars if we want them back.
Reduced obesity and mental health issues - Those who walk/cycle are far less likely to suffer from such problems. We have a mental illness crisis in this country and we're on our way to becoming the fattest nation in Europe by 2030, so now might be a good time to hop on the bike or put on the walking shoes.
Reconnection of communities - Pope Francis said in his recent Encyclical that public transport connects us while cars isolate us. Amen! (But he forgot to mention that there's WiFi on our buses and trains now so we don't need to talk to each other.)
Improved air quality - Ireland has some of the highest asthma rates in the world and vehicle emissions are a major contributor to respiratory illness.
Improved road safety - Less road fatalities occur when a transport system is dominated by public transport and cycling
Less road congestion - This creates more optimum conditions for heavy goods vehicles and trade.
Quieter streets! - A passing car generates far more noise than a wind turbine, so why don't we complain more about vehicle noise?

I'm becoming more suspicious that the media and the government are giving transport an easy time on climate action because car sales suit their bottom line. If that's true, then all the more need for the people of Ireland to push them harder on transport related issues, not just for environmental reasons but for reasons of societal well-being too. We all need to be more proactive about asking our politicians (national and local) and our media to break the transport silence and get to work on solutions.

Keep fighting the good fight!
-Cara

P.S. I sent my observations by email to Minister Naughten and the Irish Times this week, but received no reply so please feel free to share any of the above far and wide if you're so inclined. #TransportSilence #VerdantYank