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With sea levels rising, why don’t more Indonesians believe in human-caused climate change?

by ChristiNTA Posted on May 10, 2019

Are humans to blame for climate change? A full 97 percent of climate scientists say yes. But if you ask Indonesians, a whopping 18 percent would say no, a new survey from YouGov and the University of Cambridge reveals. Of the 23 countries surveyed, Indonesia had the biggest percentage of climate deniers, followed by Saudi Arabia (16 percent) and the U.S. (13 percent). What’s up with that?

Indonesia has a lot to lose to climate change. Capital city Jakarta is basically going to be underwater by 2050 thanks to a combination of rising sea levels and aquifer overuse. Plus, the country, which occupies just over 1 percent of the Earth’s land area, contains some of the world’s richest ecosystems. Its islands are home to 10 percent of the world’s flowering species, 12 percent of mammals, 17 percent of amphibians and reptiles, and 17 percent of birds.

All this, and yet Indonesia is the fifth largest carbon emitting country, largely due to deforestation. It is the world’s largest supplier of palm oil. Between 2001 and 2017, more than 92,000 square miles of the country’s forests, an area roughly the size of Michigan, were cut down, mainly for palm oil plantations. And Indonesia also has plans to further expand its palm oil industry, in addition to doubling domestic coal consumption by 2027 for power generation.

As Indonesia’s middle class quickly expands, its cities are becoming increasingly dependent on cars to get around. In the next decade, energy is expected to overtake deforestation as Indonesia’s No. 1 source of carbon emissions.

So why are many Indonesians are skeptical of the human causes of climate change? Religion is one factor. Both Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, the countries that topped the climate denial list, are places where religious belief is “particularly strong,” Jeffrey Winters, author of Power in Motion: Capital Mobility and the Indonesian State, explained to Grist via email. In a Pew Research Center poll from 2018, more than 90 percent of Indonesians said that religion is “very important.”

“We know that religious beliefs and supernatural ideas in general conflict with evidence-based modes of thought,” said Winters, political science department chair at Northwestern University. “We would, therefore, expect that societies where religious thought is highly influential would be more likely to deny scientific arguments about climate change.”

Another factor in the country’s high rate of climate denial could be the role of media and education. While there are efforts to add climate change into Indonesian education, climate education is not recognized in the national education system, so a majority of the population gets information about climate from public television and radio.

As for the media, a study by the British Council looked at keywords in Indonesia’s most popular newspaper, Kompas, and found that the number of articles containing ‘climate change’ ranked far below ‘corruption,’ ‘terrorism,’ and ‘election.’ Even in the articles that mentioned climate change, it was often not the main focus.

Indonesia promised to reduce carbon emissions by 29 percent by 2030 in accordance with the Paris climate accord, but it has done little to reach this goal. (To be fair, most countries are failing to meet their Paris goals.) It even threatened to pull out of the agreement when the E.U. brought up the possibility of phasing out palm oil as a biofuel. Various Indonesian officials have referenced the lack of repercussions that the U.S. faced in leaving the Paris agreement.

“The U.S. not taking climate seriously gives a big excuse for the Indonesian government to not take it seriously either,” Jonathan Busch, an environmental economist at the Earth Innovation Institute, told Vox in December. “They have lots of other domestic concerns.”

The country’s forests and peatland store huge amounts of carbon. To keep them from being destroyed and releasing that carbon into the air, experts say that wealthier countries should take the lead in supporting conservation efforts in Indonesia. Norway, for instance, has pledged $1 billion to protect Indonesian forests.

It’s unclear whether Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s current president, intends to address his country’s big carbon footprint. While he placed a moratorium on new palm oil plantations in 2011, he has since threatened to revoke the moratorium and has expressed interest in initiating unregulated, unsustainable palm oil sales to China and India. Ah, politics.

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With sea levels rising, why don’t more Indonesians believe in human-caused climate change?

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Green Getaways for Eco-Conscious Travelers

by KlausFairchild Posted on June 4, 2018

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Britain Will Spend the Next Decade Doing Nothing But Negotiating a Pointless Exit From the EU

by StewartOZX Posted on February 10, 2017

Mother Jones

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For a brief moment, let’s turn our attention away from Donald Trump and focus on another country’s woes. The folks over at National Review are no fans of the EU and have generally been pretty happy about the passage of Brexit. Today, however, Andrew Stuttaford—relying on Brexit expert Christopher Booker—is pretty scathing about prime minister Theresa May’s handling of the whole thing. First, here’s Booker explaining what he’s learned over the past 25 years about exiting the EU:

As I came to appreciate just how enmeshed we were becoming with that system of government, was that extricating ourselves from it would be far more fiendishly complicated than most people realised…Also, as I listened and talked to politicians, was how astonishingly little they seemed really to know about how it worked. Having outsourced ever more of our lawmaking and policy to a higher power, it was as if our political class had switched off from ever really trying to understand it.

That sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it? Continuing:

On leaving the EU the UK becomes what the EU terms a “third country”, faced with all the labyrinth of technical barriers to trade behind which the EU has shut itself off from the outside world. Last week I read a series of expert papers explaining some of the mindbending regulatory hurdles we would then have to overcome in trying to maintain access to what is still by far our largest single overseas market.

Take, for instance, our chemicals and pharmaceutical industries, which currently account for a quarter of all our exports to the EU, which currently account for a quarter of all our £230 billion a year exports to the EU. By dropping out of the EU, these would lose all the “authorisations” which give them what Mrs May calls “frictionless” entry to its market, and the process of negotiating replacements for them would be so complex that it could take years.

And now Stuttaford:

Booker observes that these aspects of Britain’s divorce from the EU “could have been achieved infinitely more easily if Mrs May had not slammed the door on our continued membership of the EEA the European Economic Area, which would guarantee us much the same “frictionless” access we enjoy now”.

That would be the ‘Norway option’ that you may have read about a few times in this very Corner, an option rejected by May for reasons so unclear that I cannot keep thinking the (doubtless unfair) thought that she has very little idea of what it actually is.

And then, Booker frets, there is May’s “terrifying” threat “that, if she is not given what she wants, she will simply “walk away”.” He’s right to worry. May has said that “no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain”, an elegant but false dichotomy: “No deal” for Britain would be a “bad deal”, a very bad deal indeed.

This has all the signs of becoming an unbelievable cockup. By a slim 52-48 vote, Britain has doomed itself to many, many tortuous years of negotiating dozens or hundreds of separate agreements with the EU. Switzerland has done the same, and it’s taken them the better part of 20 years.

If there were any real advantage to this, it might be worth it. But just to keep Polish immigrants out? This might be one of the dumbest things any country has ever voluntarily subjected itself to.

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Britain Will Spend the Next Decade Doing Nothing But Negotiating a Pointless Exit From the EU

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The Dakota Access Pipeline just got its final green light.

by AllenKula3 Posted on February 7, 2017

The Seattle City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to withdraw $3 billion from the bank, in part because it is funding the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the city’s mayor said he would sign the measure.

The vote delivered a win for pipeline foes, albeit on a bleak day for the #NoDAPL movement. Earlier in the day, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that it will allow construction of the pipeline’s final leg and forgo an environmental impact statement.

Before the vote, many Native speakers took the floor in support of divestment, including members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Tsimshian First Nation, and Muckleshoot Indian Tribe.

Seattle will withdraw its $3 billion when the city’s current contract with Wells Fargo expires in 2018. Meanwhile, council members will seek out a more socially responsible bank. Unfortunately, the pickings are somewhat slim, as Bank of America, Chase, CitiBank, ING, and a dozen other banks have all invested in the pipeline.

While $3 billion is just a small sliver of Wells Fargo’s annual deposit collection of $1.3 trillion, the council hopes its vote will send a message to other banks. Activism like this has worked before — in November, Norway’s largest bank sold all of its assets connected to Dakota Access. With any luck, more will follow.

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The Dakota Access Pipeline just got its final green light.

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The Chilling Rise of Copycat Mass Shooters

by KatlynKaufmann Posted on July 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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As a string of gun rampages continues in America and beyond, more evidence is emerging that copycat mass shooters are on the rise—a danger amplified and accelerated by social media. Two mass shootings this month build on disturbing patterns seen in other recent cases: an attack on police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and another on mallgoers in Munich, Germany, whose perpetrator displayed a host of behaviors underscoring this troubling phenomenon.

The attacker in Baton Rouge, a 29-year-old black Army veteran who killed three cops and wounded three others before a SWAT officer took him out, was prolific on social media before he struck. Among the many YouTube videos Gavin Long made of himself and shared via Twitter and Facebook are ones where he expressed his admiration for the mass killer who gunned down officers in Dallas just 10 days before Long’s own attack. “With a brother killing the police you get what I’m saying—it’s justice,” Long declared about the Dallas attacker—himself a young black Army veteran who had served in a war zone.

The gun rampage carried out in Munich last Friday by 18-year-old Ali Sonboly threw that city into chaos over fears of a multipronged terrorist attack. (Early reports of active shootings these days invariably are fraught with misinformation—a similar unfounded panic hit Dallas—though Munich had plenty of reason to overreact, with Germany increasingly targeted by ISIS.) But Sonboly, the lone perpetrator who killed nine people and injured numerous others before committing suicide as law enforcement closed in, appears to have had no connection to Islamist terrorism.

Instead, investigators have uncovered a range of evidence suggesting Sonboly was a textbook copycat attacker. The many parallels with past cases are striking:

Obsession with prior mass shooters
One such piece of evidence was literally a textbook: In the apartment where Sonboly lived, investigators found a German-language edition of Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. The book’s author, American psychologist and school shootings expert Peter Langman, told me that his “heart sank” when he learned of that discovery. It was not the first time an attacker displayed an interest in Langman’s case studies. The 18-year-old who went on a rampage at Arapahoe High School in Colorado in December 2013 also had a copy of the book. Investigators in Munich also learned that Sonboly had collected news coverage and other information on past attacks, a behavior familiar from the Newtown killer and many other mass shooters.

Such content helps fulfill the need of aspiring killers to find people they can identify with, says Langman. “Having a role model or an ideology that supports their violent intentions may serve the purpose of transforming what is otherwise aberrant and abhorrent into something admirable,” he says. “It validates their urge toward violence.”

Targeting an anniversary
Sonboly went on his rampage precisely five years after one of Europe’s worst massacres in modern history, the attack carried out in July 2011 in Norway by a lone killer who took the lives of 77 people and injured hundreds of others. As with the Norway massacre, which took place primarily at a youth summer camp, most of Sonboly’s victims were teenagers.

A game the Munich perpetrator reportedly was “obsessed” with

The desire to strike on the anniversary of a high-profile mass killing is not uncommon among would-be copycats, as I documented last year in my investigation of the “Columbine effect.” Since 1999, at least 14 perpetrators who emulated the Columbine killers have plotted to attack schools around the United States on that same date in April.

“Pseudocommando” ambitions
Forensic psychologists specializing in threat assessment have documented numerous mass shooters who cultivated a “pseudocommando” image—those who were obsessed with military weapons and paraphernalia and aspired to a “warrior mentality.” In Sonboly’s case, he may have nurtured such tendencies in part through first-person shooter games, including Counter-Strike: Source, a game that German investigators said he was obsessed with.

Weaponizing social media
Particularly chilling is how Sonboly apparently used Facebook to try to lure young victims to a McDonald’s restaurant across from Munich’s Olympia shopping mall, where he shot seven of his victims. (According to investigators, he may either have hacked a teenage girl’s account or created a phony Facebook page where he promised free food at the restaurant.)

Other recent rampage shooters have used social media as a tool in their attacks: In August 2015, an enraged ex-TV journalist gunned down two former colleagues in Virginia during a live broadcast and then posted his own footage of the killing on Facebook and Twitter, in what was dubbed the first “social-media murder.” And in June, the mass killer who struck inside an Orlando nightclub logged onto Facebook while he was in the process of killing, to see if news of his attack had gone viral. Threat assessment experts warn of more of this behavior to come.

A pre-attack pilgrimage
Another disturbing facet of Sonboly’s attack planning connects to a previous case: Investigators found evidence that he began preparing for the rampage about a year ago, after he visited the site of a 2009 school massacre in Winnenden, Germany. “We found a manifesto of his, in which he considers such attacks,” said Robert Heimberger, the chief of the Bavarian State Criminal Police. “From photos we found on a digital camera, we know that he visited the site and took pictures there.” Heimberger added that Sonboly was “obsessed” with the school shooting in Winnenden.

How the media inspires copycat mass shooters—and six ways it could stop doing so

Other mass shooters have engaged in these types of pilgrimages, seeking inspiration, tactical information, or both. As my investigation last year also showed, there are three publicly known cases in which perpetrators traveled to Columbine High School from other states as they plotted lethal attacks, two of which were ultimately carried out. (One took place in Washington state and another in North Carolina; an attack planned for a school in Utah was thwarted.) And those are just the cases that have been reported in the media—there have been more. In the course of my research on mass shootings, several veteran law enforcement officials have told me about other cases—involving Columbine as well as other sites of high-profile attacks—that have drawn these kinds of visits. (The officials, from regional and federal law enforcement agencies, shared this information under the condition that the details remain private.)

The rise of ISIS-inspired attacks in Europe and the United States has only further complicated the question of what motivates individuals to carry out mass shootings. A complex set of factors plays into this, from mental health to the role of social media. In the aftermath of Orlando, popular wisdom quickly settled on “ISIS terrorist”—but as I reported then, some threat assessment experts suggest that explanation, favoring the ideological over the clinical, may have been too simple or possibly even wrong.

Over the last few months, as I’ve spoken with threat assessment and security experts who work in a wide range of settings around the country, I’ve been struck by a similar theme from many of them: Threat caseloads have been growing, and their “op tempo” has been rising. A bitterly contentious political climate, the threat of terrorism, and global instability undoubtedly are factors. But with mass shootings heavily in the air these days—perhaps in part because of unwarranted hype from the media—some top security experts are concerned that we’ve entered “a new normal.”

During and immediately after the Baton Rouge attack earlier this month, I happened to be attending a conference with numerous law enforcement officials and security experts; unsurprisingly, the atmosphere among this typically stoic group of professionals included some palpable emotion and concern. One veteran school security leader from Colorado spoke of dealing with a record threat caseload over the past year. A leader of a SWAT unit from a Northeastern state described to me the added security contingencies he was now tasked with putting in place for any public events drawing crowds—now there is the added layer of protecting the police as they protect the public.

There is a troubling sense of streams converging, of thresholds being crossed.

“I think that the more the taboo against mass murder is broken, the easier it becomes for the next perpetrator. Thus, it seems to me that this phenomenon is feeding on itself, growing with each new incident,” says Langman. “For those who feel like they are nobody, the path to becoming somebody is very simple—get a gun and shoot a lot of people.”

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The Chilling Rise of Copycat Mass Shooters

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Piano performance next to a crumbling glacier will give you chills

by Zandra23Mqghpna Posted on June 21, 2016

Ice ice baby grand

Piano performance next to a crumbling glacier will give you chills

By on Jun 21, 2016Share

The Arctic Ocean may not be a typical venue for a piano performance, but it’s a prime setting for making a point about climate change. Ludovico Einaudi, an Italian composer-pianist, performed an original piece while stranded on an “artificial iceberg” (or rather, a floating platform made of white, wooden triangles) as Norway’s Wahlenbergbreen glacier collapsed in the background.

Greenpeace shipped the baby grand piano from Germany to the Arctic for the stunt, which was meant draw attention to a proposal to create a sanctuary in 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean, protecting it from oil drilling, fishing trawlers, and other exploitation.

There are no promises it will work, but enjoy the exciting performance on a stranded iceberg — no polar bears needed.

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Norway is building a billion-dollar bicycle superhighway

by JaymeCarvosso Posted on March 4, 2016

Norway is building a billion-dollar bicycle superhighway

By on 4 Mar 2016commentsShare

There’s goes Norway, making the rest of us look like lazy, gas-guzzling, emission-belching, planet-wrecking Neanderthals again.

The country announced last week that they will be investing 8 billion Kroner — or nearly $1 billion — in an extensive network of superhighways. For bikes.

The system, as CityLab reports, will include 10 two-lane bike roadways around Norway’s largest cities, designed for both in-city travel and long distance trips. While the new bike infrastructure will surely be good for growing strong lungs and tights buns in Norway, the investment is more about addressing climate change than encouraging exercise: The Norwegian government wants to increase the annual number of bike trips by up to 20 percent by 2030 as part of their plan to reduce the transportation sector’s carbon emissions by half.

There, is however, some resistance: Cycling is less common in Norway than it is in most of Scandinavia, not in small part due to the climate (frigid) and the landscape (mountainous), and some leaders say bikeways are a waste of good Kroner that should be spent rebuilding the nation’s road and rail systems. Besides, much of the country is pitch black and covered in ice for most of the year.

Regardless of the cost, Norway is making moves to invest in infrastructure for the future. The country’s massive fossil fuel industry has been hit by the global downturn in the price of crude oil, leading to a devaluation of their currency and an unbalanced economy. Since oil prices plummeted, fossil fuel employers in Norway have cut 30,000 jobs, and investment in the economy has dropped by a third. Norway, according to economists, must diversify their revenue sources to avoid collapse. And with the investment in biking, they’re diversifying their transit options, too.

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This Chart Shows America Has a Unique Problem With Gun Violence

by EusebiaWaite Posted on December 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Christmas Day, in a bitter reminder that, unlike stores and offices, gun violence in America doesn’t stop during the holidays, 27 people were killed and 63 others were injured by firearms, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

As the Washington Post‘s Christopher Ingraham notes, as many people were killed by firearms in the United States on Christmas day this year as in all of Austria, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong and Iceland combined, in one year. That’s 27 people out of nearly 29 million people in a given year, compared to 27 people out of a possible 320 million in one day. Granted, no one was killed from guns in Bermuda, Hong Kong, or Iceland at all, and the fatalities and injuries on Christmas Day in the United States are actually fewer than on a typical day this year. But the comparison is a stark reminder that gun violence in America is a unique health crisis.

Christopher Ingraham/Washington Post

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This Chart Shows America Has a Unique Problem With Gun Violence

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Take a hint, “clean coal.” The world is so over you

by NatishaMaur4838 Posted on December 4, 2015

Take a hint, “clean coal.” The world is so over you

By on 4 Dec 2015 4:05 pmcommentsShare

Like that old classmate still hanging around your hometown pub, playing pool, and talking about the great business idea that he had back in high school, clean coal is about to sidle up to the world’s barstool and — in a slightly slurred and defeated voice — tell you that, despite a few setbacks, it could still work.

You’ll smile and nod and pretend to be interested, but in truth, a lot’s happened since your days of joyriding around the suburbs and late-night Kmart runs. It’s 2015, and an old Volkswagen bus-turned-mobile Blockbuster just doesn’t seem like a lucrative idea anymore. Likewise, the promise of guilt-free fossil fuels in a time of dropping renewable energy prices and mounting clean coal disappointments seems a bit passe.

For a quick refresher, the basic idea behind clean coal is this: Instead of pumping CO2 directly into the atmosphere, coal plants equipped with carbon capture technology would just grab that CO2 on its way out of the plant and shove it back into the ground from whence it came. Simple, right? Well, not really. Here’s more from the AP:

In 2013, Norway pulled the plug on a major carbon capture project it had likened to the moon landing, citing spiraling costs. Another big setback came on Nov. 25, just days ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Paris, when Britain abruptly canceled 1 billion pounds ($1.5 billion) in funding for carbon capture technology, raising doubts about the fate of two projects competing for the money.

There’s currently only one clean coal plant up and running — the Boundary Dam power station in Saskatchewan, Canada — that was designed to capture about 1 million tons of CO2 annually, but managed less than half that during its first year, the AP reports.

Not to be left out, the U.S. has been working on its own clean coal plant down in Mississippi for almost a decade. Check out this Grist Special Report from former Grist fellow Sara Bernard for an in-depth look at that whole mess. The project has been mired in construction delays and unexpected costs since it was first proposed in 2006. Its initial price tag of $1.8 billion has risen to about $6.5 billion, and its construction, which began in 2010 and was supposed to be done by now, still trudges on.

According to the International Energy Agency and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, carbon capture technology on its own — as in, not necessarily attached to a power plant — might be a necessary tool in avoiding a 2-degree Celsius temperature rise. Fortunately, the independent technology has had somewhat more success than its clean coal application, although not by much. Here’s more from the AP:

There are 13 large-scale carbon capture projects in the world, collecting 26 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the International Energy Agency. But that’s less than one one-thousandth of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

“There’s activity out there, but it’s not what various organizations would have hoped for,” said Juho Lipponen, who heads the IEA’s carbon capture unit.

In Paris, only eight of the 170 action plans submitted by individual nations point to carbon capture technology as a necessary mitigation tool, the AP reports:

Bill Hare, who heads the Climate Analytics institute in Berlin, said carbon capture may have missed its moment when investments didn’t take off despite a lot of “hype” a decade ago. Now, he said, the falling costs of renewable energy mean carbon capture has a lot of catching up to do.

“It’s probably harder to get this moving now than 10 years ago,” Hare said.

Likewise, Netflix and that VW emissions scandal will probably make your old buddy’s Blockbuster bus a harder sell today than it was 10 years ago. Although, let’s be real, it was a pretty killer idea back then.

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‘Clean coal’ technology fails to capture world’s attention

, The Associated Press.

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Offshore wind power is finally coming to the U.S.

by AngelitEhj Posted on July 24, 2015

A wind in the waters

Offshore wind power is finally coming to the U.S.

By on 24 Jul 2015commentsShare

Clean energy advocates aren’t usually excited by the sight of energy infrastructure off their coastlines, but the barges floating beyond Block Island, R.I., are different. The envoy of crane ships and flatboats are preparing the site of a new offshore wind farm, set to launch after the turbines are installed next summer. Though it will be small by wind farm standards — only five turbines — it will power 17,000 homes when complete.

The Block Island project, by offshore wind developer Deepwater Wind, follows on the heels of Fisherman’s Energy breaking ground on a wind farm off the coast of Atlantic City, N.J., last December. While Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Norway have recently proven the viability of the technology and infrastructure necessary to build an offshore wind farm, there are currently no permanent offshore farms in the United States. One of the problems: the price tag.

The New York Times reports:

“There are many good reasons why offshore wind has not been yet developed while other renewables have in the U.S.,” chiefly its high cost, said Paul Bledsoe, an energy consultant based in Washington and former climate adviser in the Clinton White House. “However, we’re still at a point where we have less than 10 percent renewable energy and if we are going to increase that number dramatically to somewhere near some of the major European countries, offshore wind will almost surely be part of that mix.”

That will take time. When the first offshore farm was built, in Denmark in 1991, developers were not thinking that it would suddenly become a mainstream form of energy, said Michael Hannibal, chief executive of the offshore division at Siemens Wind Energy, which supplied the turbines for that first plant. It took about a decade of testing and planning — and putting in place a set of programs and generous subsidies — for the market to begin taking off in Europe.

The U.S. mostly subsidizes wind energy via a mechanism called the production tax credit (PTC), which, unsurprisingly, provides tax breaks for wind farm production. Offshore farms are especially expensive, though: The radically different infrastructure can cost up to twice as much as onshore wind. The Block Island farm, then, will offer a case study in whether or not the ostensibly sustainable offshore energy can in fact be sustainable in the U.S. regulatory environment. Either way, Obama administration targets state that we’re supposed to hit 20 percent wind energy by 2030. Time to get those turbines turning.

Source:
Offshore Wind Farm Raises Hopes of U.S. Clean Energy Backers

, The New York Times.

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