The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Is a Real Dystopian Bummer

In a world rife with real-life horrors, the idea of escaping into a movie dystopia is tempting, and more than understandable. Fantasies about tyrannical governments and sharp divisions between the haves and the have-nots strike a chord for good reason: no matter how bad things get in our own world, it could always be worse somewhere else. But how desperate are we, really, for a dreary prequel that jettisons a series’ best qualities and replaces them with recycled sawdust stuffing? The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, directed by Francis Lawrence, strives to offer spectacle, drama, and excitement. But it’s really just a tired rehash, albeit an extravagant one, this time with less appealing characters. As dystopias go, it’s a real bummer.

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In The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes—adapted from Suzanne Collins’ 2020 novel of the same name, set some 60 years before the events of the Hunger Games series—Tom Blyth plays the young Coriolanus Snow, the teenager who will grow up to be the malevolent ballbuster played by Donald Sutherland in the earlier Hunger Game pictures. (The last of these was 2015’s The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 2, also directed by Lawrence, the filmmaker behind three of the four movies in the series.) But Coriolanus is not yet a baddie; he’s a principled kid who hopes to follow in the footsteps of his esteemed father, who died during the long war following the uprising of the downtrodden districts against the hoity-toity Capitol. But his family has fallen on hard times. As the 10th annual Hunger Games approach, he is, like his fellow Capitol University students, matched with a Tribute, a contestant from the districts. Coriolanus really needs the money that will be awarded to the winner, and the stakes are higher than usual, because viewer ratings have dipped. Luckily, he’s been matched with the Tribute with the mostest, a Loretta Lynn-style balladeer in a tattered peasant dress who holds her head high despite the fact she’s from the lower orders. This is Lucy Gray Baird (played by Rachel Zegler, the dynamite performer who broke out in West Side Story), and she has little interest in cooperating.

Read more: The 100 Best YA Books of All Time

Eventually, though, Lucy Gray realizes it’s in her best interest to do so, and she and Coriolanus become close. Soon, a romance brews. Here and there, she sings a song or two. Lucy Gray—who is never referred to as plain old Lucy—has a clear, strong voice, and it stirs the masses. This makes sense: Zegler is the most charismatic presence in the movie. But you also wonder how on Earth her Lucy Gray could be attracted to the faux dignity of Coriolanus—this kid is just a dud. His transformation into a true baddie is hardly a surprise, and the movie sets it up clumsily.

In the Hunger Games, as you know if you’ve read the books or seen any of the previous movies, the Tributes are pitted against one another in a series of death matches. Their Capitol counterparts advise them and cheer them on from the sidelines—nice work if you can get it. But as Lawrence stages them, the matches in The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes are unpleasant and grisly; I’d hesitate to take little kids to this movie, especially given the harsh demise of the smallest and most innocent Tribute, Wovey (played by Sofia Sanchez). No one needs that much dystopia in their entertainment.

Meanwhile, an array of ill-tempered evildoers chomp their way through the story. Viola Davis, as devious gamemaker Dr. Volumnia Gaul, cranks up the grand-lady acting while dressed in a series of costumes that look to be made of sofa fabric. (It’s Volumnia who has amped up the games’ stakes by introducing an army of menacing blue serpents to the proceedings.) Peter Dinklage is the school’s Dean Casca Highbottom, who stomps around huffily enforcing the rules. Jason Schwartzman is Lucky Flickerman, the games’ emcee, inflicting his big personality on his viewership, and on us. There are more heroic characters, too, like Coriolanus’ friend Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera), who comes from one of the Capitol’s richest families but whose idealism leads him to believe he can make life better for those in the districts.

This is a movie stuffed with too many characters and, sadly, none of them are played by Jennifer Lawrence, who was the best feature of the earlier entries: she was so likably vital that she made you feel there was something at stake in this fantasy world. Zegler is charming, but no single performer can carry a movie this unwieldy. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is divided into three (long) chapters, which feel more like 20. It’s the kind of product designed to send audiences off feeling like they’ve gotten a real bang for their buck. But it’s really an endurance test disguised as a movie.

source https://time.com/6336379/the-hunger-games-the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes-review/

What to Know Before Watching The Hunger Games Prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Fans of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games franchise can dust off their bow and arrows as the series returns to the silver screen with the long-awaited prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, out Nov. 17.

The film, based on the Collins’ 2020 prequel to the hit Hunger Games trilogy, stars Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird and Tom Blyth as a young Coriolanus Snow, in addition to a stacked cast that includes Hunter Schafer as Snow’s cousin, Tigris; Viola Davis as Dr. Volumnia Gaul; Peter Dinklage as Dean Casca Highbottom; and Jason Schwartzman as Lucky Flickerman. The prequel, which goes back 64 years before the events of The Hunger Games, gives audiences a look at an earlier era of Panem, as the Capitol prepares for the 10th annual Hunger Games.

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In the book and movie, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes details a fundamental turning point for the Hunger Games and draws out Snow’s backstory, adding dimension to the villainous character who later becomes Panem’s tyrannical president. Snow is crucial to making the Hunger Games not just a brutal bloodbath but a form of inescapable entertainment for the Capitol. Songbirds and Snakes sets into motion the events of The Hunger Games trilogy. Here’s what to know.

How The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes connects to The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games series and Songbirds and Snakes is set in Panem, a war-torn dystopian version of North America, comprising 13 districts and the Capitol, which has all of the money and a cast of colorful characters. Each district has goods they produce for the Capitol (oil, lumber, fish, etc.) and are numbered based on class, with District 1 being the wealthiest and resource-rich, while the others are less so. 

After an unsuccessful three-year rebellion against the Capitol by Panem citizens, about a decade before the events of Songbirds and Snakes, the Hunger Games were established as a yearly tradition of violent control. Each district is made to send a teen boy and girl—selected during a ceremony called “The Reaping”—to an arena where they fight to the death, leaving the sole survivor as the winner. The Capitol imposed the game to punish the districts and remind them who holds the power. 

The Hunger Games seen in The Hunger Games movies are a well-oiled machine of entertainment and spectacle: the tributes get makeovers and weapons training before entering violent battle in an arena that can change at any time at the whims of the game’s controllers. The games are televised, turning the tributes into characters with storylines for the Capitol audiences to root for—and, eventually, help by sending medication and food to their favored fighters.

Songbirds and Snakes opens on a cruel but much less exciting version of the Hunger Games. In the first 10 years of the games, tributes are sent into an arena with nothing but weapons, and left to fight—leading the game to end within a couple hours. Decades before Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark enter the picture, the makers of the games are figuring out how to, essentially, increase ratings and interest in the games.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes tells President Snow’s backstory

Students at the most prestigious school in the Capitol become mentors to the tributes in an effort to make the games more entertaining. Coriolanus Snow, a student at the Academy, suggests that the games play to audience interests and sets the precedent of tributes receiving gifts through sponsors. Along with his classmates, Snow is also tasked with mentoring one of the young tributes. When he meets tribute Lucy Gray, a member of a musical nomadic people who got stuck in District 12 during the war, they form an unexpected bond, throwing Snow’s future into question. She and Snow must work together to ensure her survival but, of course, not everything goes according to plan.

In the Hunger Games, Snow is Katniss Everdeen’s foil. True to his name, he’s icy and has it out for Katniss after she forces the hand of the gamemaker into letting both her and Peeta win. Songbirds and Snakes reveals why Katniss’ unwavering confidence in herself and her abilities is a particular thorn in Snow’s side: they remind him of Lucy Gray.

source https://time.com/6336296/ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes-hunger-games-what-to-know/

House Releases Scathing George Santos Ethics Report

House investigators on Thursday released a highly-anticipated ethics report on embattled Rep. George Santos, concluding there is “substantial evidence” that the New York Republican knowingly violated a litany of ethics and criminal laws.

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The explosive report by the House Ethics Committee following a months-long investigation found that Santos spent campaign funds on Botox treatments, designer goods, OnlyFans, and lavish Atlantic City trips with his husband. It also details his purported attempts to obfuscate his financial transactions, suggesting a deliberate effort to construct a misleading and “fictional” financial narrative within official records.

Shortly after the report was released, Santos announced that he would not seek reelection. “I will however NOT be seeking re-election for a second term in 2024 as my family deserves better than to be under the gun from the press all the time,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

If there was a single ounce of ETHICS in the “Ethics committee”, they would have not released this biased report. The Committee went to extraordinary lengths to smear myself and my legal team about me not being forthcoming (My legal bills suggest otherwise).

It is a disgusting…

— George Santos (@MrSantosNY) November 16, 2023

The bipartisan committee asserted that Santos’ conduct warrants public condemnation and is “beneath the dignity of the office,” further contending that it has brought “severe discredit upon the House.” The report did not make a recommendation as to whether Santos should be expelled from the House—he already survived one expulsion attempt earlier this month—but said investigators are referring the matter to the Justice Department.

Despite the damning allegations, Santos maintains his innocence and has refused to resign, defying calls from numerous colleagues urging him to step down. The release of the report is expected to intensify the controversy surrounding Santos, who is already facing 23 federal criminal counts, including wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

More From TIME

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source https://time.com/6336275/george-santos-ethics-report/

Your 2023 Holiday Season Guide to COVID-19, Flu, and RSV

As you make your shopping list, plan travel, and schedule parties this holiday season, there’s something else you should add to your to-do list: making sure you’re up-to-date on the latest guidance around COVID-19, the flu, and RSV, as respiratory disease season hits full swing.

“It’s always important to factor in the possibility of either transmitting an infection to other people or becoming infected, especially when getting together in large groups,” says Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic. “There are ways to safely gather and enjoy the holiday season,” but it requires taking the right precautions.

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Here’s what to know about—and how to say safe from—COVID, the flu, and RSV this holiday season.

Will there be a COVID-19 surge this winter? What about flu and RSV?

Late fall and winter are typically peak times for COVID-19, the flu, and RSV to spread—and mid-November surveillance data suggests all three are already on the rise in the U.S. Based on historical trends, Binnicker says he expects to see continued upticks in infections in late November into December. “We typically see a surge in respiratory viruses as the temperatures drop and we proceed into the winter months,” he says.

Which shots should I get and when?

If you haven’t had COVID-19 or been vaccinated against it in at least six months, Binnicker recommends getting the updated booster shot, which was authorized in September. “If you were vaccinated a year ago or two years ago…your immunity likely isn’t going to protect you from infection with the currently circulating strains,” he says.

As of the two-week period ending Nov. 11, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated about 50% of new sequenced cases were caused by the Omicron subvariants HV.1 and EG.5. Both are descendants of the XBB family, the lineage vaccine manufacturers designed the latest booster shot to target.

Sooner is better when it comes to getting boosted. “You can’t get it an hour before and then jump into a party,” says Emily Smith, an assistant professor at Duke University with a specialty in global health. It takes about two weeks for the body to mount a full immune response after getting vaccinated.

The same goes for flu shots, Smith says. Recent research suggests you can get your COVID-19 booster and flu shot at the same time without reducing either’s efficacy, so you can schedule both appointments at once.

Finally, those eligible—people who are pregnant or elderly—should consider getting the newly approved RSV vaccine. Young babies can also get an antibody treatment meant to protect against RSV.

How long do I have to isolate if I get COVID-19?

The CDC still says anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 should isolate themselves for at least five full days. And through the 10th day after testing positive—even once the five-day isolation period is over—they should wear a high-quality mask, such as an N95 or KN95, any time they have to be around other people indoors.

If your holiday plans fall within that initial five-day isolation period, “the responsible thing to do is the hardest thing to do, which is wait until you’re better to see family,” Smith says.

The decision is a little trickier if you’re done with your five-day isolation, but still within the 10 days of recommended masking. It is possible to be contagious even after your five days of isolation are up, Binnicker notes, so it’s best to continue taking precautions. If your holiday plans involve being around people who are high-risk for severe disease, including elderly adults or people who are immunocompromised, CDC guidance suggests you should stay home. If you do keep your plans, agency guidance supports staying masked or outdoors the entire time.

The exception: if you test negative on two separate at-home tests taken 48 hours apart, the CDC says you can remove your mask, even if it hasn’t been a full 10 days.

Can I travel if I have or recently had COVID-19?

While testing requirements for travel are mostly a thing of the past, the CDC still says not to get on planes, trains, or buses during your five-day isolation period. Through day 10, if you absolutely must use public transit, you should remain masked the entire time, unless you’ve gotten your pair of negative test results.

How can I make my holiday gatherings safer?

If you’re hosting a party, Smith says it’s a good idea to ask everyone to test first, particularly if you’ll have high-risk guests in attendance. “Make a game out of it, where people have to test before they come in the house and hand them hot cocoa” while they wait, she suggests.

Hosts may also want to keep a supply of masks on hand in case any guests show up ill (or simply want to wear one while around others)—or have a plan for moving the party to an outdoor area.

In fact, if the weather in your area allows, consider hosting an entirely outdoor gathering. If it’s too cold to be outside, Smith says opening a few windows to improve air flow is better than nothing.

What if I spent time with someone who tests positive for COVID-19?

At this point, “it’s probably inevitable that there will be many people in the country who will show up to a gathering and someone will be coughing, sneezing, acting visibly unwell,” Binnicker says.

If that person turns out to have COVID-19, you don’t have to completely isolate yourself unless you also develop symptoms or test positive, the CDC says. However, the agency recommends taking certain precautions in the following days, including wearing a mask when you’re around other people indoors, monitoring yourself for symptoms, and testing yourself. Recent research suggests that, after an Omicron exposure, it can take only about three days for an illness to start.

source https://time.com/6335691/covid-19-holidays-flu-rsv/

What Happens When You Put a Fossil Fuel Exec in Charge of Solving Climate Change

For a taste of the United Arab Emirates, try the cappuccino at Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace hotel. At around $25, it’s a quality cup of coffee, but the gold flakes that come sprinkled on top are its primary selling point. Every turn in the Palace, one of the most expensive hotels ever built, radiates opulence: marble from floor to ceiling, more than 1,000 crystal chandeliers, gold trim, and a choice of Michelin-starred restaurants on site.

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Just across the street is the source of the immense wealth that created this place, and transformed the UAE from a desolate patch of desert to a country with a higher GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power) than the U.S.: the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC. In contrast to the lavish hotel, the glass skyscraper is polished but efficient, the offices corporate, almost austere. Employees and visitors dress modestly, following the 13-page dress-code manual I received ahead of my visit.

I traveled to Abu Dhabi in late October, not to sip gilded cappuccinos, but to interview Sultan Al Jaber, the Ph.D. economist turned renewable-­energy executive turned ADNOC CEO, who is presiding over the U.N. climate conference to be held in Dubai in December. The conference, known as COP28, comes as, at the close of the hottest year on record, scientific consensus demands that we cut fossil-fuel use right now. At the same time, money continues to flow into fossil fuels; more than $1 trillion in new funding was invested this year alone, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Al Jaber, as the head of both COP28 and one of the world’s largest fossil-fuel companies, is tasked with reconciling those realities. Sitting in a meeting room at the Emirates Palace hotel dressed in the traditional white thobe and sneakers, he is both a target for criticism and a symbol of possibility. “A phasedown of fossil fuels is inevitable, it is essential,” he tells me. “We have to accept that.” At the same time, he says, the world is not ready to entirely kick oil and gas. “We need to get real,” he says. “We cannot unplug the world from the current energy system before we build a new energy system.”

Most years, the COP president plays a largely functionary role, shuttling between member countries to find common ground on wonky areas of climate policy. Al Jaber has taken a very different approach. He has extended an invitation to oil and gas companies and prioritized private-sector climate solutions. In Al Jaber’s view, the success of COP28, not to mention the broader efforts to fight climate change, hinges as much on embracing the private sector and shifting market conditions as it does on wonky negotiations. “There’s going to be a paradigm shift,” he says. “The political process needs to be well complemented with private capital and a business mindset.”

Success is far from assured. A “business mindset” doesn’t necessarily map well onto diplomatic negotiations between 200 countries. And companies—especially those in the oil and gas business—do not have a great track record of following through on climate commitments. Critics from Greta Thunberg to Al Gore say Al Jaber is just a stalking horse for the fossil-fuel industry’s continuing efforts to stall the global climate agenda. Al Jaber says he’s uniquely positioned to reconcile the many interests in the climate fight.

That debate will define the coming COP summit. We need to begin to phase out oil and gas while managing the ­continued dependence of our economic system on fossil fuels. Al Jaber’s not wrong that that requires cold-eyed realism, but no one knows where his version of realism will lead. In Abu Dhabi, I sat down with John Kerry, the former U.S. Secretary of State now serving as President Biden’s climate envoy. He has been supportive of Al Jaber from the beginning, but acknowledges the difficulties. “It may or may not work,” says Kerry. “Some might call it an experiment to have an oil-and-gas-­producing entity host COP. That’s the big question.”

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Looking out the window of the Bell 412 helicopter ferrying me out of Abu Dhabi, I get a glimpse of the classic vision of the Arabian Desert: a sea of wavy sand dunes stretching as far as the eye can see. Visible through the other window is a science-­fiction-like array of solar panels, covering an area larger than Manhattan. Tracing the border of the solar park, we descend to get a closer look at the nearly 900-ft. tower loaded with molten salt that absorbs and stores the energy from the 70,000 mirrors that surround it.

Al Jaber’s team arranged the ride to Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, among the world’s largest, to showcase the UAE’s climate work. As impressive as the solar farm is, I’m just as intrigued by the ride to the site. We lift off from a helipad in Abu Dhabi, getting a stunning, if brief, view of the skyscrapers that have emerged from the desert that 60 years ago was an impoverished community suffering from the decline of the pearl-diving trade. From there, we fly over the Persian Gulf, where I can spot some of the UAE’s offshore oil rigs in the distance, contributing to the nearly 3 million barrels of oil the country produces every day.

Read more: Why Renewables Are Key to COP28 Success

Al Jaber is at the center of this energy ecosystem. At age 50, the bespectacled executive runs ADNOC and serves as the chairman of Masdar, the state-owned company he co-founded that now operates renewable-­energy projects in over 40 countries. When we sit down, he addresses me warmly, and jumps right into his résumé. He was appointed to run ADNOC in 2016, he says, months after the world had inked the Paris Agreement, in part to “future-proof” the business amid the global transition away from fossil fuels. “They wanted a smart, progressive disruption,” he says.

Progressive is a relative term. Al Jaber hasn’t committed ADNOC to cutting its oil production, nor has he charted a path for it to become a renewables company. Instead, the company is investing more than $150 billion on growth projects, including expanding its crude-oil production capacity to 5 million barrels per day by 2030. A fraction of that money, $15 billion, is dedicated to reducing the emissions that oil extraction will generate. That said, it has led to some improvement: Offshore oil rigs now run on electricity, and digital tools allow the company to map areas where energy is wasted. And the company has begun building big-budget carbon-­capture projects.

As COP28 chief, he has called on other oil companies to come to Dubai with similar commitments to crack down on leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and to decarbonize their own operations. “If it wasn’t for what I’ve been able to do, and demonstrate to everybody in this industry, I wouldn’t be in a position to ­convince them,” he says. The conversations haven’t been easy, with some state-owned oil companies in particular resisting aggressive proposals.

Al Jaber describes his approach as “realism.” Oil is in high demand, and even in the most aggressive decarbonization scenarios, we will still need some supply by the middle of the century. He argues it’s best that whatever oil we use has the lowest carbon content available. That’s especially important in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, where oil is so cheap that it will likely remain in the global energy mix longer than oil from anywhere else.

Decarbonizing oil and gas is certainly insufficient, and some argue that it represents a fig leaf for the industry. The sector’s operations represent 15% of global energy-­related emissions, but the real problem is the product they’re selling. In September, a U.N. assessment stated that “phasing out all unabated fossil fuels” would be “indispensable” to keeping the Paris Agreement goals within reach.

So it’s unsurprising that the criticism of Al Jaber, as a leader of a fossil-fuel company, has been unrelenting. More than 100 members of the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress declared in May that Al Jaber had “severely jeopardized” the COP process and called on him to resign. This summer, Gore said in a TED talk that fossil-­fuel interests “have brazenly seized control of the COP process.” Of Al Jaber, Gore said, “He’s a nice guy. He’s a smart guy. But a conflict of interest is a conflict of interest.”

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To paraphrase Al Jaber, let’s get real for a minute. Is an oil and gas CEO from a petrostate the ideal candidate to lead a transition away from fossil fuels? The concerns are legitimate, to say the least. But to see Al Jaber as an agent for resurgent fossil-fuel companies misses the context. Since COVID-19, markets have revalued fossil fuels. The war in Ukraine led some climate champions to call for more oil drilling and gas infrastructure to combat Russia. President Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, provides a lifeline to oil companies via subsidies for a range of industry-­friendly ­technologies like hydrogen, geothermal, and carbon dioxide removal. Of the latter, Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub told an industry conference earlier this year, “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”

Read more: Major Oil Deals Can’t Stop The Green Transition

The reality of a thriving oil industry at this critical juncture has thrust the climate movement into a search for new strategies to decarbonize. The activist group 350.org, which rose to prominence opposing oil pipelines, has shifted strategies “to unite around the banner of advancing solutions, not just fighting,” says executive director May Boeve. That means advocating for renewable energy, in hopes that will push fossil fuels out of the mix. A group of more than 130 corporations including the likes of Ikea and eBay signed on to a letter lobbying policy­makers “to phase out the use and production of fossil fuels,” an initiative that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. “When you talk to the industry, they say, well, the demand is still there,” says María Mendiluce, the head of the We Mean Business Coalition, which organized the letter. “We’re mobilizing to show that actually demand is in decline.”

COP28 negotiators so far seem to agree on one part of this question: they’ve found common ground with a commitment to triple renewable-­energy capacity. But the talks over an agreement for countries to phase down fossil fuels have not found similar consensus.

Al Jaber recognizes the gap. His strategy to overcome it has characteristically focused on changing the economic math to make clean energy a better investment. He has tried to galvanize everyone from the utility industry to private finance, pushing to get money flowing. And he has given renewable-­energy companies a center-stage role and elevated their concerns, like permitting reform and redesigning power markets.

In a bit of symbolism, when he visited New York City for the U.N. General Assembly in September, he left the confines of midtown Manhattan, where ministers and government ­officials hole up for days, to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. “What’s good for the merchants is good for Dubai,” said Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, one of the UAE’s founding fathers. Al Jaber, it seems, is bringing the same approach to climate. On the road over the past year, he has met business leaders like Mike Bloomberg in addition to political leaders like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and religious leaders like Pope Francis.

For all his diplomacy, he does resent the personal criticism. “You asked me, is it fair? It is absolutely not fair,” he tells me, pausing to wave off aides telling him that we had run out of time. “My whole track record and my experience have been centered around ­sustainability, economic diversification, project management, and delivery.”

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A key question going into COP28 is whether other market players will come along. Two days after my interview with Al Jaber, I sat down with Kerry in the Palace’s cavernous lunch hall as climate and energy ministers from around the world milled about the room. Just as Kerry launched into his take on how inflation has affected climate action, we heard someone shouting, “John! John!”

It was Abdulaziz Bin Salman al Saud, Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister and half-brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kerry obliquely asked for confirmation that the kingdom was on board for some undisclosed part of the talks: “My good friend,” Kerry said, “you guaranteed us, correct?” Abdul­aziz replied, to laughter among those around us, “It depends…”

Behind the scenes it has been clear the Saudis are key to Al Jaber’s success or failure in reconciling the diverging needs of the climate crisis and the fossil-­fuel industry. The country has the world’s second largest oil reserves and has historically worked to protect its fossil-fuel economy in climate negotiations. “The extent to which there is any ambition depends on whether Saudi Aramco thinks it’s a good thing,” says one official with knowledge of the discussions among oil and gas companies, referring to the Saudi national oil company.

Big oil producers are not the only obstacle to broad agreement at COP28. The U.S. and Europe have historically resisted measures that might hold them liable for the costs of their emissions. India and China have historically resisted demands to phase out coal. In theory, the UAE is well positioned to bridge some of these gaps, thanks to good relations with nearly all players. “The time has come for us to capitalize on our expertise gained over the years, the relationships we’ve created,” says Al Jaber.

Read more: How the Inflation Reduction Act Has Reshaped the U.S.—and The World

The officials closest to talks largely view Al Jaber as a good-faith actor. “I believe that he’s fully committed,” says Maros Sefcovic, the official overseeing climate policy in the European Union. “They have an unimaginable challenge ahead of them,” says Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, “but our expectations are high.”

That doesn’t mean that COP28 will be a success. Al Jaber’s business-­minded approach has led to a series of confounding decisions. He cycled through PR firms. He has relied on McKinsey for guidance, despite the firm’s lack of expertise navigating delicate climate talks. And he spent months on a listening tour, which some say set back negotiations.

Upon returning home from Abu Dhabi, I reflected on the question being asked widely in the climate community: “Is he legit?” Despite all the awkwardness of his position, I find him to be consistent. Realism to Al Jaber means accepting that a move away from fossil fuels will happen only when the economics change. In the meantime, there’s profit for him to make in oil. For all our sake, let’s hope that changes soon.

—With reporting by Julia ­Zorthian

source https://time.com/6335225/sultan-al-jaber-cop28-interview/

Climate Change is Hitting Every Part of Americans’ Daily Lives, Major Report Warns

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Revved-up climate change now permeates Americans’ daily lives with harm that is “already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States,” a massive new government report says.

The National Climate Assessment, which comes out every four to five years, was released Tuesday with details that bring climate change’s impacts down to a local level.

Overall, it paints a picture of a country warming about 60% faster than the world as a whole, one that regularly gets smacked with costly weather disasters and faces even bigger problems in the future.

Since 1970, the Lower 48 states have warmed by 2.5 degrees (1.4 degrees Celsius) and Alaska has heated up by 4.2 degrees (2.3 degrees Celsius), compared to the global average of 1.7 degrees (0.9 degrees Celsius), the report said. But what people really feel is not the averages, but when weather is extreme.

With heat waves, drought, wildfire and heavy downpours, “we are seeing an acceleration of the impacts of climate change in the United States,” said study co-author Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth.

And that’s not healthy.

Climate change is “harming physical, mental, spiritual, and community health and well-being through the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, increasing cases of infectious and vector-borne diseases, and declines in food and water quality and security,” the report said.

Compared to earlier national assessments, this year’s uses far stronger language and “unequivocally” blames the burning of coal, oil and gas for climate change.

Read more: How Psychology Can Help Fight Climate Change—And Climate Anxiety

The 37-chapter assessment includes an interactive atlas that zooms down to the county level. It finds that climate change is affecting people’s security, health and livelihoods in every corner of the country in different ways, with minority and Native American communities often disproportionately at risk.

In Alaska, which is warming two to three times faster than the global average, reduced snowpack, shrinking glaciers, thawing permafrost, acidifying oceans and disappearing sea ice have affected everything from the state’s growing season, to hunting and fishing, with projections raising questions about whether some Indigenous communities should be relocated.

The Southwest is experiencing more drought and extreme heat – including 31 consecutive days this summer when Phoenix’s daily high temperatures reached or exceeded 110 degrees – reducing water supplies and increasing wildfire risk.

Northeastern cities are seeing more extreme heat, flooding and poor air quality, as well as risks to infrastructure, while drought and floods exacerbated by climate change threaten farming and ecosystems in rural areas.

In the Midwest, both extreme drought and flooding threaten crops and animal production, which can affect the global food supply.

In the northern Great Plains, weather extremes like drought and flooding, as well as declining water resources, threaten an economy dependent largely on crops, cattle, energy production and recreation. Meanwhile, water shortages in parts of the southern Great Plains are projected to worsen, while high temperatures are expected to break records in all three states by midcentury.

In the Southeast, minority and Native American communities — who may live in areas with higher exposures to extreme heat, pollution and flooding — have fewer resources to prepare for or to escape the effects of climate change.

In the Northwest, hotter days and nights that don’t cool down much have resulted in drier streams and less snowpack, leading to increased risk of drought and wildfires. The climate disturbance has also brought damaging extreme rain.

Hawaii and other Pacific islands, as well as the U.S. Caribbean, are increasingly vulnerable to the extremes of drought and heavy rain as well as sea level rise and natural disaster as temperatures warm.

Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb, who wasn’t part of the assessment team, said, “at the center of the report are people — across every region of the country – who have escalating risks associated with climate change as well as clear opportunities for win-win climate action.”

The United States will warm in the future about 40% more than the world as a total, the assessment said. The AP calculated, using others’ global projections, that would slate America to get about 3.8 degrees (2.1 degrees Celsius) hotter by the end of the century.

Hotter average temperatures means weather that is even more extreme.

“The news is not good, but it is also not surprising,” said University of Colorado’s Waleed Abdalati, a former NASA chief scientist who was not part of this report. “What we are seeing is a manifestation of changes that were anticipated over the last few decades.”

The 2,200-page report comes after five straight months when the globe set monthly and daily heat records. It comes as the U.S. has set a record with 25 different weather disasters this year that caused at least $1 billion in damage.

“Climate change is finally moving from an abstract future issue to a present, concrete, relevant issue. It’s happening right now,” said report lead author Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy and a professor at Texas Tech University. Five years ago, when the last assessment was issued, fewer people were experiencing climate change firsthand.

Surveys this year by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research show that.

In September, about 9 in 10 Americans (87%) said they’d experienced at least one extreme weather event in the past five years — drought, extreme heat, severe storms, wildfires or flooding. That was up from 79% who said that in April.

Hayhoe said there’s also a new emphasis in the assessment on marginalized communities.

“It is less a matter … of what hits where, but more what hits whom and how well those people can manage the impacts,” said University of Colorado’s Abdalati, whose saw much of his neighborhood destroyed in the 2021 Marshall wildfire.

Biden administration officials emphasize that all is not lost and the report details actions to reduce emissions and adapt to what’s coming.

Americans on every level of government are “stepping up to meet this moment,” said White House science adviser Arati Prabhakar. “All of these actions, taken together, give us hope because they tell us that we can do big things at the scale that’s required, at the scale that the climate actually notices.”

By cleaning up industry, how electricity is made and how transport is powered, climate change can be dramatically reduced. Hausfather said when emissions stops, warming stops, “so we can stop this acceleration if we as a society get our act together.”

But some scientists said parts of the assessment are too optimistic.

“The report’s rosy graphics and outlook obscure the dangers approaching,” Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson said. “We are not prepared for what’s coming.”

source https://time.com/6334843/national-climate-assessment-american-daily-lives-impacted/

Apart From EV Sales, World Is Failing To Keep Key Climate Goals on Track

The world is off track in its efforts to curb global warming in 41 of 42 important measurements and is even heading in the wrong direction in six crucial ways, a new international report calculates.

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The only bright spot is that global sales of electric passenger vehicles are now on track to match what’s needed — along with many other changes — to limit future warming to just another couple tenths of a degree, according to the State of Climate Action report released Tuesday by the World Resources Institute, Climate Action Tracker, the Bezos Earth Fund and others.

On the flip side, public money spent to create more fossil fuel use is going in the wrong direction and faster than it has in the past, said study co-author Kelly Levin, science and data director at the Bezos Earth Fund.

“This is not the time for tinkering around the edges, but it’s instead the time for radical decarbonization of all sectors of the economy,” Levin said.

“We are woefully off track and we are seeing the impact of inaction unfold around the world from extensive wildfire fires in Canada, heat-related deaths across the Mediterranean, record high temperatures in South Asia and so on,” she said.

Read more: Why Renewables Are Key to COP28 Success

Later this month, crucial international climate negotiations start in Dubai that include the first time world negotiators will do a global stocktake on how close society is to meeting its 2015 climate goals. In advance of the United Nations summit, numerous reports from experts are coming out assessing Earth’s progress or mostly the lack of it, including a United States national assessment with hundreds of indicators. Tuesday’s 42 indicators offers one of the grimmest report cards, detailing multiple failures of society.

The report looks at what’s needed in several sectors of the global economy — power, transportation, buildings, industry, finance and forestry — to fit in a world that limits warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times, the goal the world adopted at Paris in 2015. The globe has already warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the mid 19th century.

Six categories — the carbon intensity of global steel production, how many miles passenger cars drive, electric buses sold, loss of mangrove forests, amount of food waste and public financing of fossil fuel use — are going in the wrong direction, the report said.

“Fossil fuel consumption subsidies in particular reached an all-time high last year, over $1 trillion, driven by the war in Ukraine and the resulting energy price spikes,” said report co-author Joe Thwaites of the Natural Resources Defense Council environmental group.

Read more: We Need Geoengineering to Stop Out of Control Warming, Warns Climate Scientist James Hansen

Another six categories were considered “off track” but going in the right direction, which is the closest to being on track and better than the 24 measurements that are “well off track.” Those merely off track include zero-carbon electricity generation, electric vehicles as percentage of the fleet, two- and three-wheel electric vehicle sales, grazing animal meat production, reforestation and share of greenhouse gas emissions with mandatory corporate climate risk reporting requirements.

People should be worried that this report is one of “too little, too late,” said University of Arizona climate scientist Katharine Jacobs, who wasn’t part of the report but praised it for being so comprehensive.

“I am not shocked that at a global scale we are not meeting expectations for reducing emissions,” Jacobs said in an email. “We cannot ignore the fact that global commitments to (greenhouse gas) reductions are essentially unenforceable and that a number of major setbacks have taken a toll on our progress.”

When trying to change an economy, the key is to start with “low-hanging fruit, i.e., the sectors of the economy that are easiest to transition and give a big bang for your buck,” said Dartmouth climate scientist Justin Mankin, who isn’t part of the report. But he said the report shows “we’re really struggling to pick the low-hanging fruit.”

source https://time.com/6334834/world-failing-to-keep-climate-goals-on-track/