Beat reporters are now panicked because they read the IPCC report released yesterday. Never mind that the IPCC reports are distillations of previously-conducted research and that they could have bothered to read that research. The IPCC has spoken!

IPCC report’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell

This is a Guardian reporter's (Damian Carrington's) take on the report. Climate change is the crime of humanity. From the tenor of this piece we might assume that all humanity is equally responsible for the climate crisis, from the oil corporation CEOs to the rag-pickers of the slums of Manila and Mumbai, all bad. Okay, feel ashamed now, good liberals. And don't forget to recommend some action!

“If we do not halt our emissions soon, our future climate could well become some kind of hell on Earth,” says Prof Tim Palmer at the University of Oxford.

It is resolved, then, that all emissions be halted at once. (Why do they talk that way?) Shut down the society as a whole. Everyone starve to death now, unless you live on a farm and have solar-powered cookery. We are not going to truck food into your metropolitan area: emissions y'know. Moreover, all hospital ICUs must cease at once: the doctors are guilty of emissions and must go home. The alternative is hell on Earth, remember.

Of course, nobody thinks this way. Damian Carrington's cerebral repertoire apparently extends to quoting people and stamping his feet and not too much further. There must in reality be a transition plan. Kate Aronoff, who covers climate for the New Republic, knows this. Here is her article: Playing Nice With the Fossil Fuel Industry Is Climate Denial. Aronoff's virtue is that she puts thought into her pieces. Thought is good. Or at least that's what we should be telling our public school students.

Aronoff's thesis:

Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are at their highest point in two million years. We can no longer avoid some of the catastrophic warming coming our way. Avoiding the rest will entail “immediate, rapid, and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” per IPCC Vice Chair Ko Barrett. Most of those reductions need to come from polluting sectors the Biden administration continues to treat with kid gloves.

Of course, the Biden administration IS those polluting sectors. But whaddaya gonna do, vote for Republicans? More specifically:

It’s not that politicians in powerful countries have done nothing in the past two decades. The problem, rather, is that where they’ve done anything at all, it has tended to be the wrong thing, emphasizing subtle market tweaks and shiny new technologies instead of the core work of decarbonization: getting off fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

Life in a cult is hard. It gets worse when getting down to specifics. Aronoff continues:

So what is the White House doing to make good on its promise of sparking an E.V. revolution? Last week, the White House announced that it had reached a nonbinding deal with the country’s biggest automakers that half their new vehicles would be electric, plug-in hybrid, or hydrogen-electric by 2030.

That target in fact falls short of what car companies themselves previously pledged. And the funding for the goal is pretty meager, too.

Joe is going to school those automakers. Watch and learn, corporate titans. THIS is how you do nothing while looking good. At any rate, Aronoff suggests a solution:

Decarbonization is fundamentally a planning problem. The U.S. (among other rich countries) has grown allergic to planning, at least in the areas that might help reduce emissions. Even in the places where it’s most bullish, like E.V.s, the best the administration can imagine is tweaks around the edges.

Sure, planning would be nice. But if, as Aronoff says, the US has grown allergic to planning, then there has to be a prior stage in which basic prerequisites are met, basically a revolution. I'd love to start one here -- my area is surrounded by climate-change-amplified fires (1) (2) (3), so my Air Quality Index is something like 200 or 250. Don't look to the (D) cult to complete that revolution. Absent such a revolution, btw, THIS is what you're going to get.

BONUS COVERAGE: A second sweep reveals two pieces. "The Conversation" released a report ahead of the release of the IPCC report, explaining to newbies what the conversation is about. And Justin Worland of TIME Magazine had a piece called "The Last Big Climate Report Changed the Conversation. Will This One Do the Same?" dumped into my mailbox. This piece doesn't show up on a Google search, so I have to assume it's subscribers-only, though the subscription service is free. At any rate, Worland wanted to comment at length about what other people would think about the IPCC report, and about would it change their thinking. Would the report change anyone's minds about the urgency of doing something about climate change? Worland's conclusion:

Will that change any minds? It’s too soon to say, of course. But I think there are reasons to be just a little bit hopeful. Opposition to climate change at the international level has always been about national interest, with countries only wanting to help insofar as it would pay dividends at home. But the dividends that come from ignoring the problem are drying up fast. Meanwhile, the latest IPCC report is an urgent, stark reminder that no one escapes what comes next.

It seems to me, though, that the dividends accruing to the politicians will remain unchanged. If the politicians do nothing of substance, they will get money from the capitalists. If they rock the boat, the capitalists will cut off the money.

SECOND BONUS COVERAGE:

A webpage called "Fourth International" (Trotskyists?) suggests:

The catastrophe can only be stopped in a manner worthy of our humanity by a double movement consisting of reducing global production and radically reorienting it to serve real human needs, those of the majority, democratically determined. This double movement necessarily involves the suppression of useless or harmful production and the expropriation of capitalist monopolies - first and foremost in energy, finance and agribusiness. It also requires a drastic reduction in the consumption extravagances of the rich. In other words, the alternative is dramatically simple: either humanity will liquidate capitalism, or capitalism will liquidate millions of innocent people to continue its barbaric course on a maimed, and perhaps unliveable, planet.

I like the mention of "worthy of our humanity" in this paragraph. Here one thinks of Cordelia Fine's book "A Mind Of Its Own" -- are we really capable of stopping the tendency to fool ourselves long enough to see this?