Good morning 99percenters!
Morning climate news dump and music by Jimmie Vaughn

Halfway Through Paris... And a Very Long Way from World-Saving Deal
'I refuse to go home without an agreement that I can look my grandchildren in the eye and be proud of my contribution.'

The COP21 climate talks in Paris reached their halfway point on Saturday, but a deal that experts and global justice campaigners would consider acceptable remains a long way off as the fossil fuel industry and wealthy nations maintain their powerful grip on the direction of the international summit.

Given the troubled history of the UN-sponsored talks, most members of civil society headed to Paris acknowledging the two-week gathering was unlikely to yield the kind of agreement that either the science of global warming, or the movement for climate justice, would find acceptable.

However, in the wake of released draft texts by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the body governing the talks, environmental campaigners and rights groups are expressing contempt for the negative influence that powerful corporations and the fossil fuel industry—backed by the world's wealthiest and most polluting nations—are having on the progress towards reaching an ambitious and transformative deal.

Fracking is still not the answer: Gas will not solve the climate-warming problem
Shale gas has become plentiful and cheap, with an economic advantage over renewables -- but not a scientific one

“When you’ve got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas.”
Anonymous

One of the great geological controversies of centuries past was the battle between the Plutonists and Neptunists over the origins of Earth’s surface. The Plutonists, who had Thomas Huxley on their side, asserted that rocks such as basalt and granite erupted in a molten state from deep within Earth, and that the other rock types, such as sandstone and slate, were derived from their breakdown and re-deposition as silt and mud. The Neptunists, who counted Goethe among their number, believed that Earth was originally covered in ocean, and that all rocks were formed as deposits on the floor of the ancient seas. By the mid-nineteenth century the matter had been all but settled in the Plutonists’ favour. But then in 1912, Randolph Kirkpatrick, a curator of corals at the Natural History Museum in London, published a bombshell which re-ignited the debate.

In his book “The Nummulosphere,” Kirkpatrick argued that the entire planet consisted of fossilised fragments of extinct foraminifera of the genus Nummulites. Foraminifera are amoeba-like organisms that live in the sea. Their supposedly universal distribution in rocks of all types was, Kirkpatrick argued, clear proof that the Neptunists were correct.

Kirkpatrick’s idea is not as entirely as crackbrained as it sounds. He had noticed that the Egyptian pyramids were made of Nummulites’ skeletons similar in size and shape to a dime (nummulite being derived from a Latin word meaning little coin). In fact Nummulite fossils abound in rocks across vast swathes of Asia, north Africa and Europe. But Kirkpatrick claimed that he could see them in basalts and granites as well—rocks in which no fossils had ever been found.

Huge Questions About Paris Climate Agreement as Rich Nations and Giant Polluters Exercise Control
With the rich nations clearly in charge and big polluters acting as corporate sponsors, is a meaningful climate change agreement truly possible?

The first week of the U.N. climate talks in Paris, or COP21, has culminated in delegates coming to an agreement on the draft text of the international climate agreement, a 48-page blueprint that ministers will review and hopefully finalize into a comprehensive agreement by the time the conference ends on December 11.

The final agreement, they hope, will keep the increase in the Earth's surface temperature to a maximum of 2° Celsius, the level the scientific community believes must not be crossed in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

BBC News environment correspondent Mark McGrath reported that many of the delegates were "relieved that they had at least reached this point, as it marks a critical point after four years of negotiations."

A Big Fat Radioactive Lie

Not long ago, no billionaire worth his cufflinks would be caught dead without hurling bales of money at our nation’s educational system. They bankrolled charter schools, high-stakes testing, and the splintering of big high schools into smaller academies. Their failure to make American kids learn more scuffed the luster on this enduring philanthropic fad.

Billionaires have landed, therefore, on a new mission. As Donald Trump might say, they want to make nuclear energy great again.

“If we are serious about replacing fossil fuels, we are going to need nuclear power,” PayPal co-founder and Facebook mega-investor Peter Thiel crowed in a New York Times op-ed shortly before negotiators from 195 nations gathered in Paris to seal an international climate pact.

Uruguay Now Gets Nearly 95 Percent of Its Electricity From Renewable Sources

Less than 10 years after instituting a new energy policy, Uruguay has slashed its carbon footprint without government subsidies or higher consumer costs, reports the country’s head of climate change policy.

Ramon Mendez, formerly the country’s national director of energy, presented one of the most ambitious national pledges during the first week of talks at the United Nations climate talks in Paris: an 88 percent cut in carbon emissions from the country’s 2009-13 average by 2017.

The share of renewable sources in Uruguay’s total energy mix is now 55 percent. The global average is 12 percent and Europe’s is about 20 percent.

Why Are We Not Doing All We Can to Prevent Climate-Related Deaths?

As he flew into Paris on Sunday for the United Nations climate conference, President Obama’s motorcade made a detour to the makeshift memorial at Bataclan, where just two weeks earlier gunmen killed more than 80 concertgoers.

Obama was flanked by French President Francois Hollande and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who joined him in laying down single-stemmed white flowers. They stood in silence for a long moment, their heads bowed as they mourned the dead, and then they walked off somberly, their body language expressing solidarity, likely for the benefit of the cameras present.

If we could go back in time and prevent the attacks from happening, we would do so without hesitation. But many officials seem to be reluctant to do anything about the deaths from climate change—deaths in huge, unfathomable numbers that far outpace the mortality from acts of terrorism.