#Climate Leadership

[michaelgabrill]

Presidents NASA FY 2025 Funding Supports US Space Climate Leadership

The Biden-Harris Administration Monday released the President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2025, which includes funding to invest in America and the American people and will allow NASA to continue advancing our understanding of Earth and space while inspiring the world through discovery. “As history has proven, as the present has shown, and as the future […] from NASA https://ift.tt/dPh3nLy

[ecoamerica]

Thank you to all the American Climate Leadership Award applicants! @ecoamerica is inspired by your creativity, perseverance, & relentless commitment to curbing climate change. Congratulations to the top 30 semifinalists! To watch ACLA 2023, register here.

Read about the work and climate action of the top 30 semifinalists in this blog here: https://ecoamerica.org/2023-american-climate-leadership-awards-semifinalists-announced-blog/

[atompowers]

[averycanadianfilm]

American Climate Leadership Awards 2023

Be inspired by the winner and runner-up, announced live. Hosted by Bill McKibben and Vanessa Hauc, and featuring Jane Fonda, we recognize the top 10 American Climate Leadership Awards finalists. See timestamps below.

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[barbielore]

In cooperation with the Jane Goodall Institute, in 2022 Mattel created a four-doll set they called the Eco Leadership Team.

The dolls were made of recycled plastic* (much like the Jane Goodall Inspiring Women doll) and represented a Renewable Energy Engineer, a Conservation Scientist, a Chief Sustainability Officer, and an Environmental Advocate.

Oh yes, Mattel has produced a Barbie who is canonically a protestor.

There is a lot to like about this dollset: Mattel is representing women in STEM fields, Mattel is making an effort to produce more sustainable Barbies, and Mattel is actively encouraging their target audience to take an active interest in creating positive change in their community.

On the other hand...

Remember that asterisk above?

That should read *Hair and face excluded. Those parts were not recycled. And although this set is a certified carbon neutral product, per the back of the box, most Barbies are not.

I am not questioning that I think it was right for Mattel to produce this product and I think it's great in many ways, but I think perhaps Mattel as a corporation could be doing a little more.

[tomorrowusa]

A MAGA think tank (sort of an oxymoron) published a document with the official title Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise but is widely known as Project 2025 after the name of the group inside the Heritage Foundation which compiled it. Whatever you call it, it is a bloodcurdling blueprint of the shape a second Trump administration would take.

Carlos Lozada of the New York Times read 887 pages of it so we don't have to.

[W]hat is most striking about the book is not the specific policy agenda it outlines but how far the authors are willing to go in pursuit of that agenda and how reckless their assumptions are about law, power and public service. “Mandate for Leadership,” which was edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation, is not about anything as simplistic as being dictator for a day but about consolidating authority and eroding accountability for the long haul. It calls for a relentless politicizing of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering career officials at every turn and agencies and offices abolished on overtly ideological grounds. Though it assures readers that the president and his or her subordinates “must be committed to the Constitution and the rule of law,” it portrays the president as the personal embodiment of popular will and treats the law as an impediment to conservative governance. It elevates the role of religious beliefs in government affairs and regards the powers of Congress and the judiciary with dismissiveness. And for all the book’s rhetoric about the need to “dismantle the administrative state,” it soon becomes clear that vanquishing the federal bureaucracy is not the document’s animating ambition. There may be plenty worth jettisoning from the executive branch, but “Mandate for Leadership” is about capturing the administrative state, not unmaking it. The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.

We hear a lot of far right rhetoric about destroying "the deep state" or "the administrative state" – particularly from the odious Steve Bannon. But what's clear from Project 2025 is that what MAGA really intends is an unfriendly takeover of "the administrative state".

Executing a conservative president’s agenda “requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it,” the document says on its opening page. The phrasing quickly grows militaristic: The authors wish to “assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day 1 to deconstruct the administrative state.” That deconstruction can be blunt. Portions of “Mandate for Leadership” read as though the authors did a Control-F search of the executive branch for any terms they deemed suspect and then deleted the offending programs or offices. The White House’s Gender Policy Council must go, along with its Office of Domestic Climate Policy. The Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations is a no-no. The E.P.A. can do without its Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should be dismantled because it constitutes “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

Making the US safe for fossil fuel companies is a HŪGE Trump priority which gets too little attention. Remember "drill drill drill" from Trump's dictator interview? If there's any hope of reversing climate change, you can kiss it goodbye if Republicans win in November.

Of course abortion is a target of Project 2025. Christian nationalism would become the semi-official ideology.

If “Mandate for Leadership” has its way, the next conservative administration will also target the data gathering and analysis that undergirds public policy. Every U.S. state should be required by Health and Human Services to report “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence and by what method.” By contrast, the government should prohibit the collection of employment statistics based on race or ethnicity, and the Centers for Disease Control should discontinue gathering data on gender identity, on the grounds that such collection “encourages the phenomenon of ever-multiplying subjective identities.” (Why the executive branch might concern itself with the subjective identities of American citizens becomes clearer some 25 pages later, when the document affirms that the government should “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”)

A far right army of ideological zealots is to be recruited to replace anybody in the federal government not sufficiently pro-Trump.

One of the “pillars” of Project 2025 is the creation of a personnel database — a sort of “right-wing LinkedIn,” The Times has reported, seeking to attract some 20,000 potential administration officials. “Mandate for Leadership” maintains that “empowering political appointees across the administration is crucial to a president’s success,” and virtually every chapter calls for additional appointees to wrest power from longtime career staff members in their respective departments.

In short... (emphasis added)

This book does not call for an effort to depoliticize the administrative state. It simply wishes to politicize it in favor of a new side. Everybody does it; now it’s our turn. Get over it.

The book is hardly a secret. The far right is quite open about its intent.

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (PDF)*

As with Mein Kampf, we know ahead of time what the bad guys will do if they hold power. We need to take the danger more seriously than Germany of the early 1930s.

What's needed to defeat Trump is a pro-democracy mobilization of the United States. That means putting aside ideological quibbles with other anti-Trump groupings and becoming more politically active in real life.

EDIT*: Tumblr is telling me that the link to Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise isn't working and refuses to let me post it. But I just checked it twice and it's fine. Until this peculiar glitch gets fixed, go to this Substack article and click "Mandate for Leadership" in the middle of the first paragraph.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests.

Joe Biden’s presidency has increased the profile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen.

The plan to “break up NOAA” is laid out in the Project 2025 document written by more than 350 rightwingers and helmed by the Heritage Foundation. Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president.

The document bears the fingerprints of Trump allies, including Johnny McEntee, who was one of Trump’s closest aides and is a senior adviser to Project 2025. “The National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the proposal says.

That’s a sign that the far right has “no interest in climate truth”, said Chris Gloninger, who last year left his job as a meteorologist in Iowa after receiving death threats over his spotlighting of global warming.

The guidebook chapter detailing the strategy, which was recently spotlighted by E&E News, describes NOAA as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity”. It was written by Thomas Gilman, a former Chrysler executive who during Trump’s presidency was chief financial officer for NOAA’S parent body, the Commerce Department.

Gilman writes that one of NOAA’S six main offices, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, should be “disbanded” because it issues “theoretical” science and is “the source of much of Noaa’s climate alarmism”. Though he admits it serves “important public safety and business functions as well as academic functions”, Gilman says data from the National Hurricane Center must be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate”.

But NOAA’S research and data are “largely neutral right now”, said Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “It in fact basically reports the science as the scientific evidence accumulates and has been quite cautious about reporting climate effects,” he said. “It’s not pushing some agenda.”

The rhetoric harkens back to the Trump administration’s scrubbing of climate crisis-related webpages from government websites and stifling climate scientists, said Gloninger, who now works at an environmental consulting firm, the Woods Hole Group.

“It’s one of those things where it seems like if you stop talking about climate change, I think that they truly believe it will just go away,” he said. “They say this term ‘climate alarmism’ … and well, the existential crisis of our lifetime is alarming.”

NOAA also houses the National Weather Service (NWS), which provides weather and climate forecasts and warnings. Gilman calls for the service to “fully commercialize its forecasting operations”.

He goes on to say that Americans are already reliant on private weather forecasters, specifically naming AccuWeather and citing a PR release issued by the company to claim that “studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable” than the public sector’s. (The mention is noteworthy as Trump once tapped the former CEO of AccuWeather to lead NOAA, though his nomination was soon withdrawn.)

The claims come amid years of attempts from US conservatives to help private companies enter the forecasting arena – proposals that are “nonsense”, said Rosenberg.

Right now, all people can access high-quality forecasts for free through the NWS. But if forecasts were conducted only by private companies that have a profit motive, crucial programming might no longer be available to those in whom business executives don’t see value, said Rosenberg.

“What about air-quality forecasts in underserved communities? What about forecasts available to farmers that aren’t wealthy farmers? Storm-surge forecasts in communities that aren’t wealthy?” he said. “The frontlines of most of climate change are Black and brown communities that have less resources. Are they going to be getting the same service?”

Private companies like Google, thanks to technological advancements in artificial intelligence, may now indeed be producing more accurate forecasts, said Andrew Blum, author of the 2019 book The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast. Those private forecasts, however, are all built on NOAA’S data and resources.

Fully privatizing forecasting could also threaten the accuracy of forecasts, said Gloninger, who pointed to AccuWeather’s well-known 30- and 60-day forecasts as one example. Analysts have found that these forecasts are only right about half the time, since peer-reviewed research has found that there is an eight- to 10-day limit on the accuracy of forecasts.

“You can say it’s going to be 75 degrees out on May 15, but we’re not at that ability right now in meteorology,” said Gloninger. Privatizing forecasting could incentivize readings even further into the future to increase views and profits, he said.

Commercializing weather forecasts – an “amazing example of intergovernmental, American-led, postwar, technological achievement” – would also betray the very spirit of the endeavor, said Blum.

In the post-second world war era, John F. Kennedy called for a global weather-forecasting system that relied on unprecedented levels of scientific exchange. A privatized system could potentially stymie the exchange of weather data among countries, yielding less accurate results.

The founding of weather forecasting itself showcases the danger of giving profit-driven companies control, said Rosenberg. When British V. Adm Robert FitzRoy first introduced Britain to the concept of forecasts during Victorian times, he was often bitterly attacked by business interests. The reason: workers were unwilling to risk their lives when they knew dangerous weather was on the horizon.

“The ship owners said, well, that means maybe I lost a day’s income because the fishermen wouldn’t go out and risk their lives when there was a forecast that was really bad, so they didn’t want a forecast that would give them a day’s warning,” Rosenberg said. “The profit motive ended up trying to push people to do things that were dangerous … there’s a lesson there.”

[vox-anglosphere]

King Charles delivers a moving address on climate change at COP28

[hiddensandtrap]

the way that the MDZS sect leaders are all directly hypocritical to their sect values is really good, actually

Jiang Sect - prizes innovation; Jiang Fengmian is stuck in an unhappy marriage due to traditional expectations (or a marriage made unhappy by traditional expectations if you prefer), Jiang Cheng cannot think outside the box at all and is afraid of being associated with deviancy

Lan Sect - prizes justice; Qingheng-jun's whole deal was a subversion of justice (either one way or another), Lan Xichen is so averse to conflict that he never investigates anything of his own accord and so cannot determine the truth well enough to determine justice

Nie Sect - prizes strength; both Nie Mingjue and his father were murdered thanks to a weakness in their cultivation, Nie Huaisang is of course a schemer not a fighter

Jin Sect - prizes reputation; Jin Guangshan was so bad at curtailing his worst impulses that everyone knew he had major indiscretions, Jin Guangyao's lies fell apart and took the sect's reputation down with him, Jin Ling chose truth over reputation

Wen Sect - prizes family; Wen Ruohan's actions led to the near-total obliteration of his immediate and extended family

like tell me without telling me that the dynastic inheritance system is going badly

[commonsensecommentary]

“When they occur simultaneously—which certainly seems to be the case in America today—arrogance, ignorance, and stupidity endanger to the very existence of a nation, and we might be perilously close to this point today.”

[censemaking]

Whole System Learning and Evaluation

There aren't extraneous factors anymore: systems awareness and evaluation are what's necessary for making sense of what we do and the influence we have #eval #evaluation #systemsthinking

Persistent, dramatic changes are taking place that influence our work, communities, and personal lives and understanding what it means to learn, respond, and succeed will take changes in how we evaluate it all. A key feature of change in a complex system is that once its shifted, it never goes back; there’s no ‘undoing’ what’s been done. We can change it again to something else, but we will not…

[atompowers]

🌞 3 Powerful Forces Energizing Autumn Wonderlands of Renewable Action

[ceevee5]

Sunak’s reason for not going – to concentrate on the UK’s economic statement – was questioned. Mohamed Nasheed, speaker of the Maldives parliament and former president, said: “[It’s] very worrying that the UK thought there was anything more serious than climate change. You can count the pennies but might lose the pounds.”

[mater-earth]

Gender Equality and Biodiversity Objectives

Accelerating progress towards gender equality and biodiversity objectives.

+ Improve gender-equitable ownership, access to, use and control of land and other resources

+ Recognize women's roles and responsibilities

+ Draw upon gender-specific knowledge of biodiversity

+ Identify gender-specific values and priorities related to biological resources

+ Enhance the full, effective and equitable participation of all genders in biodiversity, management and conservation

+ Promote the equitable distribution of costs and benefits from biodiversity

+ Address gendered risks and vulnerabilities

Steps to creating and enabling environment for equitable policies, institutions and access to finance

+ Collect sex-disaggregated data and evidence on gender and biodiversity

+ Create and uphold gender-equitable policies, institutions and access to finance

+ Support gender equitable policy engagement and leadership

+ Address gendered risks and vulnerabilities

Via CGIAR