A Good Week in Worrying Times

Midterms, COP27, Ukraine, Twitter/Mastodon

A different projection of voting results, taking into account the number of voters in a region. It’sA more blue and less red map. (@karim_douieb and @politicalmiller)

More positive than negative news

The "cucumber season" is one of those Dutch words that are not easily understood when translated into English. We use it in the Netherlands to refer to the quiet summer period when there is little newsworthy to report. Cucumbers used to be harvested in the summer when not much else was happening, and the cucumber season became associated with the lack of news and activities.

There are many variants of cucumber season in other languages, such as Norwegian and Danish (agurketid), German (Sauregurkenzeit) and Polish (sezon ogórkowy), French (la morte-saison), English (the silly season), or in the U.S. where it is called the gooseberry season.

I wonder what the opposite term for the cucumber season is. There must be a word for a newsworthy season where so many developing stories dominate the news that it is hard to keep track of it all. This week was a good example. So let's make an effort to make sense of the top news items of this week. It's a mix of good and evil, but I see more positive than negative news, which makes this a refreshing week in worrying times. 

Midterms

You will no doubt have followed the midterm elections, and I hope that the American readers of this newsletter voted. The midterms show a strange and typical American pattern; based on an analysis of historical data from the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, any president during the midterms should be concerned that the past might be an indication of the future. 

The data show that in a president's first midterm election since 1946, the party in opposition to the White House has gained an average of 28 House seats and two Senate seats. The pattern is even more pronounced when a president's support rating is low, as was the case with Biden this time. His approval ratings were stuck in the low 40s, so there were many predictions that Democrats would suffer shocking defeats, and Republicans were anticipated to make significant gains. 

But we may now add President Biden to the short list of exceptions to this pattern of the White House suffering in midterm elections. Other examples were the midterm elections of President Bill Clinton in 1998 and President George W. Bush in 2002. 

Republicans seem to be on track to gain a far narrower House majority than they had predicted. While I write this on Sunday afternoon, there is even a tiny (but not impossible) chance that they don't even get the majority. 

Senate

And the Republicans lost the battle for a Senate majority. This weekend, we first learned that the Democratic Senator Mark Kelly managed to keep his Arizona seat, and last night, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto won the tight race in Nevada. On December 6, the runoff election in Georgia could give the Democrats a majority in the Senate, making governing much easier considering Joe Manchin's role in the first two years of Biden's presidency. 

Watching American politics from Ottawa is like having a balcony seat in a theater. Looking down at a stage below us to the south feels like watching a classic drama where good and evil challenge each other. Georgia is the next act on stage. Republican Herschel Walker challenges Democrat Raphael Warnock. I won't spend much ink on Walker here, but those future historians I have mentioned in my articles will shake their heads in disbelief when they read that it was such a tight race between these two candidates. How can this even be a difficult choice? 

But the other side of the political spectrum seems to wonder the same. An NBC News exit poll of Georgia voters found that 88 percent of white born-again or evangelical Christians voted for Herschel Walker. Just to spill a bit more ink: Walker is an avowed abortion opponent who denies allegations by two women that he urged them to have abortions. Nor do I think that accusations of domestic violence could be a winning ticket in politics. This election should be a no-brainer for any voter, but I sit back more relaxed on my balcony seat after the Nevada win and will watch if the voters in Georgia will make the right choice.

Abortion

Zooming out from Georgia to the entire federation: abortion was a defining issue during the midterms. Looking back, the Supreme Court seems to have done the Democrats a favor by the removal of federal abortion laws. The outrage likely motivated many to get out and vote, including many young people and people of color.

Republicans must be worried: the window of opportunity to grab and hold to power permanently is closing. A new multiracial generation is joining the ranks of voters not charmed by their conservative views on issues like reproduction, guns, inequality, failed trickle-down economy beliefs, and sacrificing this beautiful planet on the altar of shareholder value.

Biden supports climate action

This brings me to COP27. I considered opening this article with this yearly climate conference since the planet's fate is more important than the fate of Donald Trump's party. (Note to self: Hey, I didn't even mention him. It seems I already forgot about Trump, just like many of his supporters did last Tuesday by ignoring the 'stop the steal’-candidates that he supported).

I started with the midterms since the climate change policy of the U.S. is relevant for the whole planet. On Friday, I was interviewed by TRT World Television about Biden's climate policy. I haven't found it on YouTube yet, so I will share it later in this newsletter or in the Buy-me-a-Coffee posts I usually use for these kinds of short items (and my photos or short stories). I spoke positively about Biden's speech at the COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh but also focussed on the need to do much more.

President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act will invest nearly $370 billion to boost renewable energy and reduce emissions. The bill will put the U.S. on track to meet its target for limiting global warming. It has also put the U.S. back on the map as an active and critical player in the fight against climate change. 

But the U.S. should do more

However, that is just one aspect of the total picture. Although fewer emissions from the U.S. should be welcomed by everyone on the planet, more must be done by the historically biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses. 

Rich countries have the commitment to help the poorer countries, and the world looks first of all at the U.S. Have a look at this chart by Tom Pearson in Carbon Brief analysis, using 2020 data. It shows the national climate finance shortfall or surplus in billions of dollars relative to meeting the $100bn target in proportion to historical emissions. Negative numbers, shaded red, indicate countries giving less than their "fair share" of the total, and positive numbers, colored blue, indicate those giving more.

Some 20% of all historical emissions since the mid-19th century are from the United States. Based on those numbers, Carbon Brief calculated their fair share of the promised 100 billion dollars per year fund to help the poorer countries in the world. The chart shows that the United States paid less than 8 billion instead of the nearly 40 billion they should have paid. Unfortunately, many other western countries also find themselves on the wrong side of this graph. I'm happy to see my country, the Netherlands, in the blue zone. 

I can understand the anger and frustration of the global south, where countries that are not responsible for climate change endure the worst impacts of the extreme weather it causes. And unfortunately, they are also least prepared to deal with the consequences. Therefore I believe Western countries should pay their fair share, and as you see in the graph, the world looks first of all at the U.S.

Comparing data is never easy: looking at today's emissions gives another picture: last year, China emitted 2.5 times as much carbon dioxide as the United States. Of course, that doesn't release the U.S. of an obligation to do more, but that also doesn't mean that today's most significant polluter shouldn't do more. The governments of the biggest countries in the world have much to disagree on, but I hope they will find a way to agree that we need a livable planet for our populations. Perhaps we should remind our leaders of the risk that someday they may find nobody alive anymore to disagree with. 

COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh

The meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh is the 27th so-called COP, which stands for Conference of the Parties, which means the countries that have signed and ratified the UN climate treaty known as UNFCCC: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Sadly, since all countries agreed on this treaty in 1992, we have produced more greenhouse gasses than in all centuries before its adoption. 

Each year, the COP is also a moment when all kinds of new studies on climate change are presented. This year there were some profoundly worrying conclusions (like we have nine, or maybe even less than seven years until the atmosphere hits the 1,5 Celsius warming limit) and some that give hope. One of them concludes that economic growth no longer means higher carbon emissions. In the past decade, more than 30 countries, home to over 1 billion people, have managed to increase their GDP while reducing their emissions.

Population growth

That number of one billion people becomes more relevant when we know how many people live on the planet.

Although the exact number of people alive at any given time is unknown, the UN's best projection is that we will hit 8 billion people this Tuesday. That's a lot, but there is good news too. Although the planet's population is expanding swiftly, the expansion rate is beginning to decline. As a result, it will eventually fall, and our civilizations will become smaller, impacting our planet over the next century.

Over the past 200 years, the world's population has increased sevenfold, massively increasing humanity's influence on the environment. One of our generation's primary concerns is how to sustainably supply space, food, and resources for a sizable global population into the foreseeable future. Population growth is still rapid, with 140 million births and 58 million deaths yearly. The difference is the 82 million extra individuals we add each year to the world's population.

The world population's yearly growth rate, or the percentage change in population each year, is displayed in red. It peaked about fifty years ago. Peak population growth of 2.1% per year occurred in 1968. Since then, the population growth rate has dropped and is now a little over 1% annually.

The global population curve is becoming less and less steep as population growth declines. As a result, the earth will be extremely close to the end of the demographic transition by the end of the century, when, according to UN projections, worldwide population growth will have decreased to 0.1%. But further in the future, the predictions become less confident. In 2050, according to the most recent UN estimates, there will be 9.7 billion people on the planet. But the range of reasonable possibilities in 2100 is considerably more comprehensive, between 8.9 and 12.4 billion. 

A good week in worrying times

So this non-cucumber-news week brought a mix of good and bad developments. But the outcome of the U.S. elections was far better than expected by many, and the U.S. shows commitment to fighting climate change at the highest levels of government. It's getting more crowded on our small beautiful planet, but there is a reasonable expectation that the end of growth is in sight. And there was more good news, like another critical milestone in the liberation of eastern Ukraine.

We also saw the power of Twitter users, showing its new owner that his authority based on billions of dollars is not unlimited. Newly "verified" accounts, bought for eight dollars, quickly changed their names into Elon Musk and showed with a sense of humor that a get-richer-quick scheme for news media shouldn't be based on selling credibility. Musk was forced to pause signups for the Twitter Blue badges on Thursday after impersonation accounts flooded the platform.

Meanwhile, Mastodon is snowballing, and I find it an oasis of good-quality information and debate. You can follow me here on Mastodon. 

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Notes:

https://onzetaal.nl/taalloket/komkommertijd

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/seats-congress-gainedlost-the-presidents-party-mid-term-elections

https://www.npr.org/2014/10/30/360133533/the-devastating-history-of-midterm-elections

https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-88-evangelical-christians-vote-herschel-walker-1758201

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/11/08/economic-growth-no-longer-means-higher-carbon-emissions

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-13/earths-population-reaches-eight-billion-people/101643854

https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth#global-population-growth

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-us-falling-32bn-short-on-fair-share-of-100bn-climate-finance-goal/