The Long Ecological Revolution

[blindpig]

Scientists engage in civil disobedience on the steps of the Congress of Deputies in Madrid, Spain on April 6, 2022. (Photo: Scientist Rebellion)

77% of top climate scientists think 2.5°C of warming is coming-and they’re horrified
Originally published: Common Dreams on May 8, 2024 by Olivia Rosane (more by Common Dreams) | (Posted May 11, 2024)

Nearly 80% of top-level climate scientists expect that global temperatures will rise by at least 2.5°C by 2100, while only 6% thought the world would succeed in limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, a survey published Wednesday by The Guardian revealed.

Nearly three-quarters blamed world leaders’ insufficient action on a lack of political will, while 60% said that corporate interests such as fossil fuel companies were interfering with progress.

“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one South African scientist told The Guardian.

The world’s response to date is reprehensible—we live in an age of fools.

What blew me away was the level of personal anguish among the experts who have dedicated their lives to climate research.

The survey was conducted by The Guardian‘s Damian Carrington, who reached out to every expert who had served as a senior author on an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report since 2018. Out of 843 scientists whose contact information was available, 383 responded.

He then asked them how high they thought temperatures would rise by 2100: 77% predicted at least 2.5°C and nearly half predicted 3°C or more.


“What blew me away was the level of personal anguish among the experts who have dedicated their lives to climate research,” Carrington wrote on social media.

Many used words like hopeless, broken, infuriated, scared, overwhelmed.

The 1.5°C target was agreed to as the most ambitious goal of the Paris agreement of 2015, in which world leaders pledged to keep warming to “well below” 2°C. However, policies currently in place would put the world on track for 3°C, and unconditional commitments under the Paris agreement for 2.9°C.

The survey comes on the heels of the hottest year on record, which already saw a record-breaking Canadian wildfire season as well as extreme, widespread heatwaves and deadly floods. The first four months of 2024 have also been the hottest of their respective months on record, and the year has already seen the fourth global bleaching event for coral reefs.

They can say they don’t care, but they can’t say they didn’t know.

“I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years,” Gretta Pecl of the University of Tasmania told The Guardian.

[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.

Scientists said that governments and companies that profit from the burning of fossil fuels had prevented action. Many also blamed global inequality and the refusal of the wealthy world to step up, both in terms of reducing their own emissions and helping climate vulnerable nations adapt.

“The tacit calculus of decision-makers, particularly in the Anglosphere—U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia—but also Russia and the major fossil fuel producers in the Middle East, is driving us into a world in which the vulnerable will suffer, while the well-heeled will hope to stay safe above the waterline,” Stephen Humphreys at the London School of Economics said.

Despite their grim predictions, many of the scientists remained committed to researching and speaking out.

“We keep doing it because we have to do it, so [the powerful] cannot say that they didn’t know,” Ruth Cerezo-Mota, who works on climate modeling at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told The Guardian.

We know what we’re talking about. They can say they don’t care, but they can’t say they didn’t know.

Others found hope in the climate activism and awareness of younger generations, and in the finding that each extra tenth of a degree of warming avoided protects 140 million people from extreme temperatures.

“I regularly face moments of despair and guilt of not managing to make things change more rapidly, and these feelings have become even stronger since I became a father,” said Henri Waisman of France’s Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations.

But, in these moments, two things help me: remembering how much progress has happened since I started to work on the topic in 2005 and that every tenth of a degree matters a lot—this means it is still useful to continue the fight.

Peter Cox of the University of Exeter added:

Climate change will not suddenly become dangerous at 1.5°C—it already is. And it will not be ‘game over’ if we pass 2°C, which we might well do.
I’m not despairing, I’m not giving up. I’m pissed off and more determined to fight for a better world.

Many of the scientists who still saw a hope of keeping 1.5°C alive pinned it on the speeding rollout and falling prices of climate-friendly technologies like renewable energy and electric vehicles. Also on Wednesday, energy think thank Ember reported that 30% of global electricity came from renewables in 2023 and predicted that the year would be the “pivot” after which power sector emissions would start to fall. Experts also said that abandoning fossil fuels has many side benefits such as cleaner air and better public health. Though even the more optimistic scientists were wary about the unpredictable nature of the climate crisis.

“I am convinced that we have all the solutions needed for a 1.5°C path and that we will implement them in the coming 20 years,” Henry Neufeldt of the United Nations’ Copenhagen Climate Center told The Guardian.

But I fear that our actions might come too late and we cross one or several tipping points.

Several scientists gave recommendations for things that people could do to move the needle on climate. Humphreys suggested “civil disobedience” while one French scientist said people should “fight for a fairer world.”

“All of humanity needs to come together and cooperate—this is a monumental opportunity to put differences aside and work together,” Louis Verchot, based at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia, told The Guardian.

Unfortunately climate change has become a political wedge issue… I wonder how deep the crisis needs to become before we all start rowing in the same direction.

The publication of The Guardian‘s survey prompted other climate scientists to share their thoughts.

“As many of the scientists pointed out, the uncertainty in future temperature change is not a physical science question: It is a question of the decisions people choose to make,” Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote on social media.

We are not experts in that; And we have little reason to feel positive about those, since we have been warning of the risks for decades.

Aaron Thierry, a graduate researcher at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, pointed out that The Guardian‘s results were consistent with other surveys of scientific opinion, such as one published in Nature in the lead-up to COP26, in which 60% of IPCC scientists said they expected 3°C of warming or more by 2100.

James Dyke of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute argued that there was room for scientists to share more negative thoughts without succumbing to or encouraging defeatism.

“I hear the argument that we must temper these messages because we don’t want people to despair and give up. But I’m not despairing, I’m not giving up. I’m pissed off and more determined to fight for a better world,” Dyke said on social media.

NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus shared the article with a plea to “please start listening.”

“Elected and corporate ‘leaders’ continue to prioritize their personal power and wealth at the cost of irreversible loss of essentially everything, even as this irreversible loss comes more and more into focus. I see this as literally a form of insanity,” Kalmus wrote, adding that “capitalism tends to elevate the worst among us into the seats of power.”

However, he took issue with the idea that a future of unchecked climate change would be only “semi-dystopian.”

“We’re also at risk of losing any gradual bending toward progress, and equity, and compassion, and love,” Kalmus said.

All social and cultural struggles must recognize this deep intersection with the climate struggle.

https://mronline.org/2024/05/11/77-of-t ... is-coming/

You know and I know the only possible solution, world-wide socialism, so why can't these smart people figure it out? Probably a few answers to that but I think the two most important are social conditioning and class interests.

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Climate Change Is Affecting Mental Health Literally Everywhere
Posted on May 14, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This article identifies how climate change is harming emotional well-being and focuses on populations that are particularly vulnerable. IMHO the impact on the young cannot be overstated. Even though they already have many stressors, like high income inequality creating insecurity even among the well off (if you lose your perch, it can be a long way down), extortionate and seemingly only rising real estate and health care costs, and for many, student debt loads, climate change puts a deep pall over all of them. The prospect of already stressful circumstances being fundamentally upended, whether by local conditions that wreak personal havoc like wildfires and floods or societal upheaval, can’t be easy to contend with.

I am bothered that this story advocates what is essentially denialism as a coping strategy. Yours truly is not big on hope in general, and particularly in dealing with systemic crises. Some readings of the Pandora’s Box myth depict Hope emerging last, after all the other evils have been loosed upon mankind, as not a form of relief but yet another curse.

But that seems fundamental to the human condition. I sometimes repeat this tale:

In the Indian epic Mahabharata, Yudhisthira goes looking for his missing brothers, who went searching for water. He finds them all dead next to a pond. In despair, but still parched, he is about to drink, but a crane tells him he must answer some questions first.

The last and most difficult: “What is the greatest wonder of the world?” Yudhisthira answers, “Day after day, hour after hour, countless people die, yet the living believe they will live forever.” The crane reveals himself to be the Lord of Death and, after some further discussion, revives the brothers.

By Daisy Simmons, assistant editor at Yale Climate Connections. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections

Farmers who can’t sleep, worrying they’ll lose everything amid increasing drought. Youth struggling with depression over a future that feels hopeless. Indigenous people grief-stricken over devastated ecosystems. For all these people and more, climate change is taking a clear toll on mental health — in every part of the world.

Experts shared these examples and others during a recent summit organized by the Connecting Climate Minds network that brought together hundreds of scientists, doctors, community leaders, and other experts from dozens of countries who have spent the past year studying how climate change is harming mental health in their regions.

Although mental illnesses are often viewed as an individual problem, the experts made clear that climate change is contributing to mental health challenges everywhere.

The Connecting Climate Minds youth ambassador from Borneo, Jhonatan Yuditya Pratama, said his Indigenous community views nature as a sacred extension of being. Seeing the devastation of climate change on ancestral lands has brought his community “a profound sense of grief and loss,” he said.

“For us, mental health isn’t just about individuals,” he said. “It’s about the collective well-being of our communities and the land itself. When nature suffers, so do we.”

Extreme Weather and Air Pollution Are Taking a Toll

In her keynote, Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown and a Connecting Climate Minds advisory board member, explained the key ways that climate change threatens mental health.

Extreme heat is associated with increased self-harm and violence as well as more general feelings of negativity. It also leads to feelings of isolation when people feel trapped inside their relatively cooler homes.
Wildfire or extreme weather stokes anxiety leading up to an event — and afterward — that can lead to PTSD or depression for survivors who have seen cherished places or lives lost.
Farmers, fisherpeople, and others whose livelihoods are tied to the environment experience chronic stress, worry, and depression over things they can’t control, like extreme weather, habitat loss, and drought.
Water scarcity increases stress for people in charge of seeking and transporting household water. Water scarcity also makes it hard for people to stay clean, potentially leading to isolation, loneliness, and depression.
Air pollution can keep kids out of school, leading to social isolation and, over time, a sense of hopelessness about the future.
What’s more, people are experiencing the compounding effects of multiple disasters, said Emma Lawrance, who leads the Climate Cares Centre, a U.K.-based team that researches and supports mental health in the face of environmental crises: “With more frequent disasters, people can no longer recover psychologically from one before another occurs,” Lawrance said.

And these escalating hazards are exacerbating social inequality, said Alaa Abelgawad, the Connecting Climate Minds youth ambassador representing northern Africa and western Asia. “[It’s] manifesting as anxiety, depression, and a profound sense of disempowerment among marginalized populations.”

Who Is Most Vulnerable to Climate Change and Mental Health Challenges?

Many Indigenous communities have already been facing intergenerational trauma and a sense of deep disconnect from land and culture. Recurring climate devastation can intensify feelings of grief, stress, and disillusionment about the future, contributing to increased rates of addiction and suicide, participants said.

Farmers, too, are among the most vulnerable. Changing seasonal norms, increasing drought, and a higher risk of severe weather are directly affecting their livelihoods.

Sacha Wright, head of research at the youth-focused organization Force of Nature and part of Connecting Climate Minds’s “lived experience” working group, said that in Kenya, many small farmers are struggling with declining harvests and out of desperation have resorted to cutting down trees for charcoal. Though they felt they had no choice, some said cutting down the trees made the whole situation feel even worse. She spoke of high rates of depression, hopelessness, trauma, and a widespread feeling of “not knowing what to do.”

For young people, climate change can also evoke a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness. In the Yucatan, one young person Wright interviewed said the only choices in life there are to migrate or enter the military.

“When I see drought, I see my community leaving school and going to the military,” the person interviewed said.

Mercy Njeru, a member of Connecting Climate Mind’s sub-Saharan Africa working group, said extreme heat is often leading to school closures across the region, setting youth up for failure and a sense of hopelessness.

“When it’s so hot and you’re so anxious you can’t work, you can’t do anything because you’re feeling anxious or you’re feeling so sad from all the heat around you,” she said.

In addition to environmental impacts, generational inequity and a sense of moral distress also contribute to anxiety for many youth. Britt Wray, director of Stanford Medicine’s Special Initiative on Climate Change and Mental Health, said she hears from many young people that power holders aren’t taking sufficient action, instead depending entirely on their generation to solve climate change.

“This offloading of responsibility — without adequate partnership from the elder and more powerful contingents among us — can make burdensome climate anxiety and distress much worse,” she said.

What Can Be Done to Protect Mental Health as the Climate Changes?
To help address the rising tide of mental health challenges, governments and public health leaders need to know exactly what kinds of impacts people are experiencing in their own communities.

First step: looking at experiences in every region.

“We will only be successful if we can continue to connect and engage people from very different sectors, from neighborhoods all the way to multilateral organizations,” said Pamela Collins, chair of the department of mental health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Other examples of ways forward include everything from expanding health insurance to include climate-related mental health impacts to ensuring government policy supports people whose work has been affected by climate change to improve their job prospects. Several participants also spoke of the importance of returning to the wisdom of ancestral knowledge to address climate change in general, including mental health impacts.

Other specific solutions offered by Connecting Climate Minds participants include:

*More public green space. Collins, the Hopkins professor, cited a study highlighting the need for more accessible green space in cities, a move that could have multiple positive outcomes, including on mental health. Forest bathing, AKA spending dedicated time in nature, reduces stress and anxiety, increases serotonin production, and improves mood regulation and overall mental health — all while being low-intensity and low-cost, said Niaya Harper Igarashi, part of Connecting Climate Mind’s eastern and southeastern Asia working group.
*Focusing on reducing inequity. Making sure everyone has access to nutritious food, clean air and water, and sustainable energy sources is good for the climate and community.
*Talking helps. In many communities, mental health is a taboo topic. By talking more openly about it on a personal level, in social or spiritual settings, at the dinner table, or in your doctor’s office, individuals can combat stigma and contribute to a growing understanding of these issues.
*Meeting people where they are. From using vocabulary that makes sense for different communities to meeting people’s basic needs, solutions are most effective when they’re tailored for what real people are actually going through. For example, Wray, the Stanford expert, said meeting kids where they are includes screening for climate distress where many of them are every day: at school.
Lawrance, the Climate Cares lead who helped organize the summit, said it was heartening to see solutions being advanced around the world.

“The dialogue showed this really strongly: that many solutions do already exist,” she said. “And it’s by learning from each other’s ways of knowing and doing that we can best find the ones that work for our context, and ensure people experiencing the worst climate impacts have a future where they cannot just survive, but thrive."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05 ... where.html

Climate Change is just one of the maladies caused by capitalism and the psychological effects just heap upon those others associated with the massive contradiction of life in the West.

[blindpig]

Capitalism’s New Age of Plagues. Part 5: The Pandemic Machines
May 15, 2024

New zoonotic diseases are inextricably connected to the industrialization of poultry, pigs and cattle



“The most profound alteration of the animal-human relationship in 10,000 years”

Part 5 of a multi-part article on the causes and implications of global capitalism’s descent into an era when infectious diseases are ever more common. My views are subject to continuing debate and testing in practice. I look forward to your comments, criticisms, and corrections.

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

by Ian Angus

“The global food system is a slow-moving disaster, but it is not broken. It is working precisely as a capitalist food system is supposed to work: it expands constantly, concentrating wealth in a few, powerful monopolies, while transferring all the social and environmental costs onto society.”
—Eric Holt-Giménez[1]

In March, Cal-Maine Foods, the largest US egg producer, reported that chickens in one of its Texas egg factories had contracted Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Type A — better known as Bird Flu. To stop the disease from spreading, the corporation slaughtered 1.6 million birds. This was just the latest mass cull in the current Bird Flu epidemic — over 100 million farmed birds and countless wild ones across the US and Canada have died since the beginning of 2022.[2]

Across the US, Cal-Maine operates 42 “production facilities” in which 44 million hens lay over 13 billion eggs a year. In 2023 it had gross profits of $1.2 billion on $3.1 billion in sales.[3] In that context, the loss of 1.6 million birds in Texas is a minor inconvenience — especially since the US government (responding to agribusiness lobbying) pays for birds slaughtered in Bird Flu outbreaks. Millions of dead chickens are a cost of doing business, and not a major one, at that.

Naming Viruses
There are four Types of influenza viruses, A, B, C, and D. Type A is the most common and causes the most severe symptoms. Subtypes with different characteristics and effects are named for the properties of the Hemagglutinin (H) and Neuraminidase (N) proteins on their surfaces. For example, A(H7N2) is an influenza A virus subtype that has the H-7 and N-2 proteins. Over 130 Type A subtypes have been identified, and each of them occurs in multiple forms, called Clades or Groups.

Influenza viruses have been carried by waterfowl for centuries without making the birds ill, but when a variant dubbed H5N1 jumped to farmed ducks in southern China in 1996, it rapidly evolved into a form that is both highly infectious and deadly for poultry. That version subsequently jumped back to wild birds, and has continued to mutate while spreading worldwide. The disease primarily affects poultry, but between 2003 and 2019, 861 human cases were reported in 17 countries, and 455 of the patients died.[4]

An influenza variant that first appeared in pigs in the United States and Mexico in 2009 went on to infect millions of people worldwide, killing between 150,000 and 575,000 people.

Since the late 1990s, a new and highly pathogenic variant of H5N1 has become the principal cause of Avian Influenza in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America, responsible for millions of poultry deaths. In April 2024, the US Department of Agriculture reported that for the first time it had infected dairy cattle. On May 8, the CDC reported that 36 dairy herds in 9 states were affected by H5N1, but that is certainly an underestimate, since many operators are refusing to test cattle or report infections.

A dairy worker in Texas is the first-known example of mammal-to-human H5N1 transmission, but again, other cases may not have been reported, particularly since the human symptoms of this flu are mild and short-lived. The risk to human health is currently said to be low, but as epidemiologist Michael Mina and Janika Schmitt point out, “unchecked transmission among cattle means the virus is increasingly bumping up against humans. Every human exposure, in turn, provides an opportunity for new mutations that could enable human-to-human transmission. … Though the risk of an H5N1 pandemic may currently be low, the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic.”[5]

Flu Factories

Until the third quarter of the 20th Century, a Bird Flu virus that jumped to a domestic chicken or pig would have quickly hit a dead end. Almost all chickens were raised on family farms in flocks of a few dozen birds: 400 was a very large flock. Pigs were kept in much smaller numbers. So even if the virus was highly contagious, it would soon run out of new hosts to infect..

That changed with what has been called “the most profound alteration of the animal-human relationship in 10,000 years”[6] — the rapid expansion of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), more accurately called factory farms.

Today a handful of giant corporations control production of broilers (chickens raised for meat) and layers (chickens kept for eggs). A typical facility has hundreds of thousands of birds crammed into windowless buildings with little room to move. By the end of the 20th century, the poultry industry in North America was completely transformed, and its methods were widely copied, particularly in southeast Asia and China.

Hog-farming was transformed even more rapidly, beginning in the 1990s.

“In 1992 less than a third of U.S. hogs were raised on farms with more than two thousand animals, but by 2004 four out of five hogs came from one of these giant operations, and by 2007, 95 percent were. An analysis by Food & Water Watch found that between 1997 and 2007, 4,600 hogs were added to a factory farm every single day, increasing the total to more than 62 million.”[7]

Worldwide, three-quarters of all cows, chickens, pigs, and sheep are kept in confined industrial facilities. In the United States, the factory farmed proportion is much higher, including over 99% of chickens and 98%% of pigs.

The birds and animals in these industrial systems have been bred to grow rapidly, producing consistent amounts of meat or eggs while consuming a minimum of feed. Through profit-focused breeding programs, commercial poultry has lost more than half of the generic diversity of their wild ancestors.[8] Factory farms are populated by genetically-identical animals that respond similarly to new infections — a virus that makes one animal ill can do the same to the others without further mutations. If one chicken in a mega-barn contracts avian flu, most of the rest will die in a few days.

If you wanted to build a pandemic-creation machine, you could scarcely improve on the factory farm system. As Rob Wallace writes. “Our world is encircled by cities of millions of monoculture pig and poultry pressed alongside each other, an ecology nigh perfect for the evolution of multiple virulent strains of influenza.”[9]

“However unintended, the entirety of the production line is organized around practices that accelerate the evolution of pathogen virulence and subsequent transmission. Growing genetic monocultures — food animals and plants with nearly identical genomes — removes immune firebreaks that in more diverse populations slow down transmission. Pathogens now can just quickly evolve around the commonplace host immune genotypes. Meanwhile, crowded conditions depress immune response. Larger farm animal population sizes and densities of factory farms facilitate greater transmission and recurrent infection. High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a continually renewed supply of susceptibles at barn, farm, and regional levels, removing the cap on the evolution of pathogen deadliness. Housing a lot of animals together rewards those strains that can burn through them best. Decreasing the age of slaughter — to six weeks in chickens — is likely to select for pathogens able to survive more robust immune systems.”[10]

Similarly, a multi-disciplinary task force sponsored by the non-profit Council for Agricultural Science and Technology concluded:

“A major impact of modern intensive production systems is that they allow the rapid selection and amplification of pathogens that arise from a virulent ancestor (frequently by subtle mutation), thus there is increasing risk for disease entrance and/or dissemination. … Stated simply, because of the Livestock Revolution, global risks of disease are increasing.”[11]

The accelerating emergence of zoonotic diseases is inextricably connected to the industrialization of poultry, pigs and cattle, which itself is inextricably bound up with capital’s drive to expand, no matter what damage it does. Annual profits of $4.9 billion (Cargill), $4.4 billion (JBS Foods), and $4.1 billion (Tyson Foods),[12] are only possible because they offload the costs of pandemics and pollution onto society at large. So long as factory farms generates such returns, they will continue to treat epidemic disease as an acceptable cost of doing business.

Agribusiness, as Rob Wallace puts it, is in a strategic alliance with influenza. Big Food is at war with public health, and public health is losing.[13]

[To be continued]


Footnotes

[1] Eric Holt-Giménez, Can We Feed the World without Destroying It?, Global Futures (Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018), 86.

[2] Andrew Jacobs, “A Cruel Way to Control Bird Flu? Poultry Giants Cull and Cash In.,” The New York Times, April 2, 2024, sec. Science.

[3] Cal-Maine Foods, “3Q 2024 Investor Presentation.”

[4] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Highlights in the History of Avian Influenza (Bird Flu),” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, July 8, 2022.

[5] Michael Mina and Janika Schmitt, “How to Stop Bird Flu From Becoming the Next Pandemic,” TIME, May 9, 2024.

[6] Michael Greger, Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching (New York: Lantern Books, 2006), 109–10.

[7] Wenonah Hauter, Foodopoly: The Battle over the Future of Food and Farming in America (New York: New Press, 2012), 171.

[8] William M. Muir et al., “Genome-Wide Assessment of Worldwide Chicken SNP Genetic Diversity Indicates Significant Absence of Rare Alleles in Commercial Breeds,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 45 (November 11, 2008): 17312–17.

[9] Rob Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 38.

[10] Rob Wallace et al., “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital,” Monthly Review 72, no. 1 (May 1, 2020): 1–15.

[11] Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, “Global Risks of Infectious Animal Diseases,” Issue Paper, February 2005, 6.

[12] Warren Fiske, “‘Big Four’ Meat Packers Are Seeing Record Profits,” Politifact, June 30, 2022.

[13] Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu, 11; “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital,” 12.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... -machines/

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Menace on the menu: The financialisation of farmland and the war on food and farming
Originally published: Countercurrents on May 16, 2024 by Colin Todhunter (more by Countercurrents) | (Posted May 17, 2024)

Between 2008 and 2022, land prices nearly doubled throughout the world and tripled in Central-Eastern Europe. In the UK, an influx of investment from pension funds and private wealth contributed to a doubling of farmland prices from 2010-2015. Land prices in the U.S. agricultural heartlands of Iowa quadrupled between 2002 and 2020.

Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold between 2005 and 2018 and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class, with U.S. investors having doubled their stakes in farmland since 2020.

Meanwhile, agricultural commodity traders are speculating on farmland through their own private equity subsidiaries, while new financial derivatives are allowing speculators to accrue land parcels and lease them back to struggling farmers, driving steep and sustained land price inflation.

Top-down ‘green grabs’ now account for 20% of large-scale land deals. Government pledges for land-based carbon removals alone add up to almost 1.2 billion hectares, equivalent to total global cropland. Carbon offset markets are expected to quadruple in the next seven years.

These are some of the findings published in the new report ‘Land Squeeze’ by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES), a non-profit thinktank headquartered in Brussels.

The report says that agricultural land is increasingly being turned into a financial asset at the expense of small- and medium-scale farming. The COVID-19 event and the conflict in Ukraine helped promote the ‘feed the world’ panic narrative, prompting agribusiness and investors to secure land for export commodity production and urging governments to deregulate land markets and adopt pro-investor policies.

However, despite sky-rocketing food prices, there was, according to the IPES in 2022, sufficient food and no risk of global food supply shortages. Despite the self-serving narrative pushed by big agribusiness and land investors, there has been no food shortage. The increased prices were due to speculation on food commodities, corporate profiteering and a heavy reliance on food imports.

At the same time, carbon and biodiversity offset markets are facilitating massive land transactions, bringing major polluters into land markets. The IPES notes that Shell has set aside more than $450 million for offsetting projects. Land is also being appropriated for biofuels and green energy production, including water-intensive ‘green hydrogen’ projects that pose risks to local food production.

In addition, much-needed agricultural land is being repurposed for extractive industries and mega-developments. For example, urbanisation and mega-infrastructure developments in Asia and Africa are claiming prime farmland.

According to the IPES report, between 2000 and 2030, up to 3.3 million hectares of the world’s farmland will have been swallowed up by expanding megacities. Some 80% of land loss to urbanisation is occurring in Asia and Africa. In India, 1.5 million hectares are estimated to have been lost to urban growth between 1955 and1985, a further 800,000 hectares lost between 1985 and 2000, with steady ongoing losses to this day.

In a December 2016 paper on urban land expansion, it was projected that by 2030, globally, urban areas will have tripled in size, expanding into cropland. Around 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities, and this land is, on average, twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe.

This means that, as cities expand, millions of small-scale farmers are being displaced. These farmers produce the majority of food in developing countries and are key to global food security. In their place, we are seeing the aggregation of land into large-scale farms and the spread of industrial agriculture and all it brings, including poor food and diets, illness, environmental devastation and the destruction of rural communities.

Funds tend to invest for between 10 and 15 years and can leave a trail of long-term environmental and social devastation and serve to undermine local and regional food security. Returns on investments trump any notions of healthy food, food security or human need.

The IPES notes that, globally, just 1% of the world’s largest farms now control 70% of the world’s farmland. These tend to be input-intensive, industrial-scale farms that the IPES says are straining resources, rapidly degrading farmland and further squeezing out smallholders. Moreover, agribusiness giants are pursuing monopolistic practices that drive up costs for farmers. These dynamics are creating systematic economic precarity for farmers, effectively forcing them to ‘get big or get out’.

Factor in land degradation, much of which is attributable to modern chemical-intensive farming practices, and we have a recipe for global food insecurity. In India, more than 70% of its arable land is affected by one or more forms of land degradation.

Also consider that the Indian government has sanctioned 50 solar parks, covering one million hectares in seven states. More than 74% of solar is on land of agricultural (67%) or natural ecosystem value (7%), causing potential food security and biodiversity conflicts. The IPES report notes that since 2017 there have been more than 15 instances of conflict in India linked with these projects.

Nettie Wiebe, from the IPES, says:

trying to start a farm when 70% of farmland is already controlled by just 1% of the largest farms—and when land prices have risen for 20 years in a row, like in North America. That’s the stark reality young farmers face today. Farmland is increasingly owned not by farmers but by speculators, pension funds and big agribusinesses looking to cash in. Land prices have skyrocketed so high it’s becoming impossible to make a living from farming. This is reaching a tipping point—small and medium scale farming is simply being squeezed out.”

Susan Chomba, also from the IPES, says that soaring land prices and land grabs are driving an unprecedented ‘land squeeze’, accelerating inequality and threatening food production. Moreover, the rush for dubious carbon projects, tree planting schemes, clean fuels and speculative buying is displacing not only small-scale farmers but also indigenous peoples.

Huge swathes of farmland are being acquired by governments and corporations for these ‘green grabs’, despite little evidence of climate benefits. This issue is particularly affecting Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The IPES notes that some 25 million hectares of land have been snapped up for carbon projects by a single ‘environmental asset creation’ firm, UAE-based ‘Blue Carbon’, through agreements with the governments of Kenya, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Zambia and Liberia.

According to the IPES, the ‘land squeeze’ is leading to farmer revolts, rural exodus, rural poverty and food insecurity. With global farmland prices having doubled in 15 years, farmers, peasants, and indigenous peoples are losing their land (or forced to downsize), while young farmers face significant barriers in accessing land to farm.

The IPES calls for action to halt green grabs and remove speculative investment from land markets and establish integrated governance for land, environment and food systems to ensure a just transition. It also calls for support for collective ownership of farms and innovative financing for farmers to access land and wants a new deal for farmers and rural areas, and that includes a new generation of land and agrarian reforms.

Capital accumulation based on the financialisation of farmland accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis. However, financialisation of the economy in general goes back to the 1970s and 1980s when we witnessed a deceleration of economic growth based on industrial production. The response was to compensate via financial capitalism and financial intermediation.

Professor John Bellamy Foster, writing in 2010, not long after the 2008 crisis, states:

an outlet in production, capital took refuge in speculation in debt-leveraged finance (a bewildering array of options, futures, derivatives, swaps, etc.).

The neoliberal agenda was the political expression of capital’s response to the stagnation and involved four mechanisms: the raiding and sacking of public budgets, the expansion of credit to consumers and governments to sustain spending and consumption, frenzied financial speculation and militarism.

With the engine of capital accumulation via production no longer firing on all cylinders, the emergency backup of financial expansion took over. Foster notes that we have seen a shift from real capital formation in many Western economies, which increases overall economic output, towards the appreciation of financial assets, which increases wealth claims but not output.

Farmland is being transformed from a resource supporting food production and rural stability to a financial asset and speculative commodity. An asset class where wealthy investors can park their capital to further profit from inflated asset prices. The net-zero green agenda also has to be seen in this context: when capital struggles to make sufficient profit, productive wealth (capital) over accumulates and depreciates; to avoid crisis, constant growth and fresh investment opportunities are required.

The IPES report notes that nearly 45% of all farmland investments in 2018, worth roughly $15 billion, came from pension funds and insurance companies. Based on workers’ contributions, pension fund investments in farmland are promoting land speculation, industrial agriculture and the interests of big agribusiness at the expense of smallholder farmers. Workers’ futures are tied to pension funds, which are supporting the growth and power of global finance and the degradation of other workers (in this case, cultivators).

Sofía Monsalve Suárez, from the IPES, states:

It’s time decision-makers stop shirking their responsibility and start to tackle rural decline. The financialisation and liberalisation of land markets is ruining livelihoods and threatening the right to food. Instead of opening the floodgates to speculative capital, governments need to take concrete steps to halt bogus ‘green grabs’ and invest in rural development, sustainable farming and community-led conservation.

Unfortunately, ordinary people cannot depend on ‘decision-makers’ and governments to bring about such change. Ordinary people themselves have always had to struggle for change and improvements to their lives. Groups across the world are fighting back, and the IPES report provides some inspiring examples of their achievements.

https://mronline.org/2024/05/17/menace-on-the-menu/

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As Corals Bleach Worldwide, Some Outlets Are Willing to Name the Cause: Fossil Fuels
OLIVIA RIGGIO


NOAA image of a coral before and after bleaching

NOAA (4/15/24) found temperature levels in every ocean high enough to cause coral bleaching.

Record levels of heat in the ocean are causing once-colorful coral reefs around the world to bleach a ghostly white. In April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the planet’s fourth mass coral-bleaching event on record—the second in the last decade.

While they might look like plants, corals are actually invertebrate animals related to jellyfish. They get their vibrant colors from tiny algae that live on them and provide them with food. But when ocean temperatures become too hot, corals get stressed and expel the algae, losing their food source and color. Starving coral can recover if their environments improve, but the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that even with the Paris Agreement’s allotted warming of 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels, 70–90% of the world’s coral reefs will still die.

Because coral reefs provide such vibrant ecosystems for sea life, mass coral death will impact economies and food security for humans as well. By protecting coasts, sustaining fisheries, generating tourism and creating jobs, it is estimated that coral reefs provide ecosystem services worth trillions of dollars each year (MIT Science Policy Review, 8/20/20; GCRMN, 10/5/21).

ABC News (7/25/23) reported last year that “ocean temperatures have a strong connection to climate change”—but didn’t mention what climate change is connected to.

In the past year alone, we’ve seen staggering and unprecedented ocean temperatures amid widespread heatwaves. Last summer, water temperatures of more than 100°F were recorded off the coast of Florida (ABC, 7/25/23). Scientists say the El Niño weather phenomenon, solar activity and a massive underwater volcanic eruption have played a role in recent supercharged ocean temperatures, but the biggest cause of this coral crisis is undisputed: climate change. The IPCC reports that it’s “virtually certain” ocean temperatures have risen unabated since 1970, absorbing more than 90% of excess heat from the climate system. We also know that the burning of fossil fuels changes the climate more than any other human activity does.

Therefore, in order to give the public the most complete understanding of what’s going on—and how we can fix it—reporting on coral bleaching should not only link the phenomenon to climate change, but link climate change to its main culprit: the fossil fuel industry. While much reporting deserves credit for clearly making this connection, some reports from major outlets were still behind, implying the climate crisis might be some sort of act of God, rather than something humans have caused—and have the power to mitigate.

Good news about bad news
Coral bleaching is bad news, but I’d like to take a rare moment to highlight the good news, too: A lot of reporting on this crisis was thorough, setting a solid example of how the increasing number of climate change-related phenomena should be reported on.

Vox (4/26/24) spells it out: “Ultimately, the only real solution is reducing carbon emissions. Period.”

Vox (4/26/24) dedicated a whole piece to climate change’s effects on coral, making that fossil fuel connection. Senior environmental reporter Benji Jones wrote:

Ultimately, the only real solution is reducing carbon emissions. Period. Pretty much every marine scientist I’ve talked to agrees. “Without international cooperation to break our dependence on fossil fuels, coral bleaching events are only going to continue to increase in severity and frequency,” [NOAA marine scientist Derek] Manzello said.

The New York Times (4/15/24) made the fossil fuel connection, too, in an article by Catrin Einhorn: “Despite decades of warnings from scientists and pledges from leaders, nations are burning more fossil fuels than ever and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.”

NPR dedicated an episode of All Things Considered (4/17/24) to scientists’ work to breed heat-tolerant corals and algae, in hopes that they can help restore reefs. The piece, by Lauren Sommer and Ryan Kellman, outlined this work’s promise—and its limitations. Heat-tolerant algae may not share as many nutrients with the coral, potentially causing the coral to grow more slowly and reproduce later. Regulators will need to assess whether these lab-grown corals are safe for wild populations and their ecosystems as a whole. Logistically, the sheer amount of heat-tolerant coral needed to replace affected reefs is vast, and it’s only a temporary solution.

“It’s not our ‘get out of jail free’ card,” said Australian coral biologist Kate Quigley:

Maybe that gets us to 2030, 2050, for a very few number of species that we can work with. If we don’t have an ocean to put them back in that’s healthy, no amount of incredible technology or money is worth it.

The episode ended with an acknowledgment that these scientific mitigations are meant only to buy time while humans work to halt climate change, which will require “cutting heat-trapping emissions from the largest source—burning fossil fuels—and switching to alternative energy sources like solar and wind.”

All Things Considered’s coverage of the scientists’ work was impactful because it took time to explain that creating these heat-tolerant corals was an important mitigation, but that the ultimate solution is to cut fossil fuels. Without the latter, the former would be in vain.

Capable of accountability
As a media critic for an organization that’s been at this since 1986, to me it’s heartening when news outlets’ work actually improves. It’s definitely not yet time to pop the champagne—there’s still a chronic lack of clear reporting linking climate disasters to fossil fuels, as FAIR has noted in coverage of last year’s wildfires (7/18/23, 8/25/23), climate protests (9/29/23), the potential breakdown of a crucial Atlantic current (7/31/23), overstating the potential of new carbon-capture technology (1/4/24) and more. But these few coral-focused pieces offer hope that some outlets might be improving their climate reporting practices to include accountability. At the very least, it proves they are certainly capable.

Aside from the effects of the climate crisis becoming harder and harder to ignore each year, there is a commendable movement to train journalists on how best to report on climate through a number of initiatives and organizations. There’s a lot of work to do, but these stories indicate progress since Big Media was applauding Big Oil’s efforts to clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 (Extra!, 3–4/90) and giving platforms to “scientists” on Big Oil’s payroll who asserted climate change was not occurring (Extra!, 11–12/04, 5–6/07).

The new denial

CNN (5/9/24) waited until the the 24th paragraph (out of 24) to tell readers that we “need to curb climate-warming carbon emissions.”

Climate denial today is more nefarious. Due to the unanimity and widespread knowledge of the scientific consensus, respectable outlets can no longer parrot views that the Earth isn’t warming. What they can do is bury or gloss over information on its primary cause, who profits off of it, and what needs to be done to prevent it from getting much worse.

In a piece on the potential of artificial reefs to mitigate this crisis that linked coral bleaching to climate change, CNN‘s Michelle Cohan (5/9/24) waited until the very last paragraph to mention the need to “curb climate-warming carbon emissions.” There’s nothing untrue about that statement, but it doesn’t tell you where those emissions come from, and leaves open the interpretation that “curbing” emissions can come from carbon capture and storage—a strategy that is largely industry greenwashing (FAIR.org, 1/4/24).

Despite likely short-form word limits, a solutions-oriented piece like this does a disservice to readers—and the scientists working on saving corals—by giving such an incomplete sketch of the necessary long-term change. It would benefit from a clear explanation that a) we need to phase out fossil fuels and b) alternative energy sources already exist, are reliable, and are more affordable than fossil fuels already. It’s not arduous or wordy to do so. All Things Considered did most of it in one sentence.

An ABC piece (4/15/24) by Leah Sarnoff and Daniel Manzo covered the coral-bleaching event, but only mentioned climate change in passing toward the end. Otherwise, “warming oceans” were just depicted as something that happened, with no clear connection or cause.

In an article expressing the dire condition of the reefs, the Washington Post‘s Rachel Pannett (4/18/24) likewise made the link to climate change only once: “Climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef, and coral reefs globally,” said Roger Beeden, the chief scientist of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. There was another quote from a research director with the Australian nonprofit Climate Council, who merely noted that the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef is “a disaster at our doorstep.”

It’s important to express the dire condition the reefs are in, and the devastating risks it poses to ocean and human life. But by only mentioning “climate change” in passing, and not discussing its causes, it comes across as a natural but unfortunate phenomenon. Not highlighting its causes means not highlighting its solutions, either. The result is a potentially paralyzing doomsday narrative that is more likely to dampen than galvanize necessary climate action—especially against fossil fuels.

‘Heat stress’

The word “climate” never appears in this Washington Post piece (4/15/24).

Another Washington Post piece (4/15/24), by Amudalat Ajasa, mentioned the “heat stress” on corals, but not even climate change, let alone the culpability of fossil fuels. This piece quoted NOAA’s Manzello, saying that this global event should be a wake-up call, but didn’t elaborate on what that wake-up call would be for. Wake up to do what? This piece didn’t explain.

The piece also took a grave tone, describing the ghastly reefs off the coast of Florida, Australia and the Caribbean island of Bonaire. It quoted Francesca Virdis, a chief operating officer at Reef Renewal Bonaire: “It’s hard to find a silver lining or a positive note with everything happening.”

The article explained the role of El Niño—a naturally occurring climate pattern that warms areas of the Pacific every 2–7 years—and the hope that it will soon let up and give way to La Niña, its cooler counterpart, but did not explain that the phenomenon plays a smaller role than ongoing, human-caused warming. The aforementioned Vox piece also discussed the role of El Niño, but was sure to specify that reefs have been collapsing long before this current crisis.

The feeling of alarm is justified, but journalists should remind readers that the coral bleaching crisis—and climate change as a whole—are not totally uncontrollable acts of nature. We know what is to blame. While it may be too late to avoid breaching the 1.5°C limit even if we cut emissions tomorrow, the sooner we cease burning fossil fuels, the more catastrophic impacts we’ll avoid.

The message is urgent and dire, but there’s plenty that humans—especially those in power—can do, and there’s plenty journalists can do to make the public aware.

https://fair.org/home/as-corals-bleach- ... sil-fuels/

[blindpig]

Global people’s movements are leading the fight for our planet
May 20, 2024
A conversation with Ashley Dawson, author of Environmentalism from Below


Small farmers protest in Delhi.

Ashley Dawson is a professor at the City University of New York, the biggest Metropolitan University system in the United States with about 400,000 students, most first-generation learners of color from working class backgrounds. He spoke with Ian Rappel, a socialist ecologist based in Wales who works for the Real Farming Trust and the Black Mountains College.

Originally from South Africa, Ashley Dawson went to New York to study post-colonial studies with Edward Said, Rob Nixon, and Anne McClintock. Researching his dissertation on anti-racism in Britain from the time of the Windrush generation to the new Millennium, he was drawn towards the way that the landscape in the UK was created through a contrapuntal movement between exploitation and dispossession in the colonies, and those processes as they simultaneously played out across British landscapes.

Ashley Dawson’s interest in environmental issues grew while living in New York City, where he was exposed to environmental justice movements arising across New York’s working-class communities of color that were, and remain, disproportionately impacted by the city’s polluting energy and infrastructure projects. Through participation and activism, Dawson developed an interest in the connections between local environmental justice movements and those working for international climate justice. Writing on those links, he was invited to the World Peoples Conference on Climate Justice and the Rights of Mother Nature in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010, where delegates laid out an overarching call for ecological reconstruction for and from the Global South, including calls for climate reparations from the polluting countries in the Global North that would facilitate that. His latest book, Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements are Leading the Fight for Our Planet (Haymarket 2024), opens with his reflections on that experience and builds on many years of studying grassroots environmentalism.

What do you mean by ‘Environmentalism from Below’? And how would you contrast it with the kind of ‘environmentalism from above’ that we are perhaps more used to in the Global North?

‘Environmentalism from below’ describes the kind of popular movements that are reacting to threats to the ecosystems that they depend on in an immediate way for their sustenance, but also for their cultural heritage. These are movements that combine struggles around protection of ‘the Commons’ in a material sense with defense of their cultural ties to the environment around them.

In that definition I’m building on a tradition of analysis that comes out of historians and critics located in the Global South. Ramachandra Guha, for example, wrote extensively about the movements to defend Indian forests from the national forestry service, a bureaucracy initiated by the British Empire in India. That forestry department was charged with taking over communally controlled land and transferring its ownership, initially to the colonial power and then to the Indian state after independence. By the 1970s it had become obvious that the Indian state was logging these forests in a way that was completely unsustainable. In response, local people, particularly women, went into the forests and defended the trees with their bodies. They put themselves physically between the chainsaws and the trees because they were sustainably harvesting some of the forest produce themselves but also because the forests were seen by local communities as sacred in some form and were part of their collective identity. That example of the Chipko movement in India is what I mean when I use the phrase ‘environmentalism from below’.

We can contrast that with ‘environmentalism from above’ where that carries two different expressions. First, in the context of settler colonialism in the USA, for example, we have a historical preservationist approach. Here, as settlers arrive at a frontier, they push Indigenous people off, and then start to develop the land through agriculture and then industrialization. Eventually this results in efforts to set aside some of that land as it becomes recognized as particularly beautiful and part of national patrimony. Through this route we witness the invention of the National Park system which in the US expresses itself through Yellowstone and all the other ‘great’ national parks.

The central idea behind this approach is that we need to conserve ‘wild’ places. But such wilderness preservation is based on enforcing a kind of dichotomy between people and nature. Nature must be seen as a thing ‘out there’, separate from human communities. And nature, in that assumed condition, needs to be preserved somehow by the state. In this attitude towards wilderness, you need to make sure that there are no human beings who live within preservation areas. In the US that process required the dispossession of Native Americans, who were violently kicked out of national parks like Yellowstone.

You can tolerate humans in such constructed preservation areas for sure, but the preference is for wealthy white people – historically, hunters like Theodore Roosevelt and, today, mainly middle class white city dwellers who drive from San Francisco or wherever up to Yosemite. This neocolonial environmental vision is a direct product of settler colonialism. It reinforces the false dichotomy, a symptom of the alienation that capitalism enhances, between people and nature. It is also a powerful illustration of the ‘metabolic rift’ that the system creates between society and ecology. From the perspective of environmentalism from below, I think that the neocolonial construction of wilderness is a highly racist tradition, both historically and in the present. I examine the long history and genealogy of this kind of wilderness construction and conservation, as well as its impacts and how people are resisting settler colonialism in a chapter of the book.

Seen from the perspective of environmentalism from below, there is a second problematic legacy that flows from development of the environmental movement itself. The Western environmental movement from the 1960s and 1970s onward was highly important and impactful, and of course had a very populist component to it. In the US, for instance, Rachel Carson testified before the US Congress to advocate successfully for the banning of DDT pesticides. That then led to the creation of various government regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and positive legislation through the Clean Air Act. All those developments were tremendous victories that still resonate but they crucially rely on the state to protect the environmental Commons.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, many decades ago, we have had a consistent right-wing attack on the state which has mobilized a lot of people politically because they see the state as somehow inimical to their interests. Now, some of that animosity is grounded in racism but I also think that it’s not entirely unfounded to be skeptical about the bourgeois state and, by extension, the kind of flawed environmentalism from above that places all its eggs in the basket of state environmental regulation. I think it is certainly a problematic project in comparison to what environmentalism from below entails – mass mobilization of people who want to defend the environmental Commons that they depend upon.

Today, the significance of environmentalism from below is not restricted to the poorest of the Global South – those who the historian Ramachandra Guha referred to as ‘ecosystem people’ – but to all of us. At some level today we are now all ‘ecosystem people’ facing ecocide, climate change and mass extinction. So, what I would argue, and I do in the book, is that there’s a lot of political potency in an idea of environmentalism from below and the kinds of movements that sustain it as they are spreading all around the world today. We need to pay attention to them and what they are doing, particularly since the main institutions that we think characterize so-called Western civilization – capitalism, the state and urbanization – are all so ill-fitted for the current moment.

In the next few decades, we’re likely to blow through a series of key tipping points, from the collapse of the Gulf Stream to levels of heating that are going to displace a third to half of humanity. And these things are not wild speculation but up-to-date scientific assessments. So, we’re passing all these tipping points and all these institutions that Western modernity has created and exported to the rest of the world – like the nation-state – are totally maladapted. People will need to be able to move, and they will need to be able to engage in forms of bottom-up mutual aid and disaster communism. That’s what my book ‘Environmentalism from Below’ is looking at; how people are already really doing that kind of thing in a variety of different organizational forms, in a variety of different scales, and taking that kind of project very seriously.

Coming from the West, one of the things that is noticeable around environmentalism from above is that we have official state-sanctioned versions of environmentalism as you say. These could express themselves through so-called independent but state-funded environmental bodies (the EPA in the US, or Natural Resources Wales from where I’m speaking). Arguably, these have been mainly disarmed over the last few decades through ‘regulatory capture’ and have been flipped over to the other side. But alongside those bodies, the other accepted form of environmentalism seems to be based on NGOs. Most of these have their origins in the upheavals of the 1960s – the likes of Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and WWF – but even where they are supported by a mass membership base it feels sometimes that they are trapped in a form of top-down and substitutionist environmentalism. Their approach towards their base seems to be almost transactional where their membership provides money, but direct activism and political engagement is undertaken by the NGO – from political lobbying to the scaling of a skyscraper or oil rig. Does the kind of environmentalism from below that you are outlining in the book offer a more empowering approach and enriching tradition for environmental politics?

I would say that it does, but I’m not trying to argue that there cannot be a role for nonprofit organisations putting pressure on the state or environmentalists mobilizing through some of these existing nonprofits. But if these NGOs, pressure groups and progressive political movements are not connected to the people who are really mobilising on the ground then they risk becoming co-opted top-down entities.

I start the book by reflecting on the World Peoples Conference on Climate Justice and the Rights of Mother Nature in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010, but in writing I was also thinking about the Green New Deal that was being promoted because Cochabamba was happening at a time of excitement around environmental economics following the Great Recession of 2008. There was a lot of discussion about a Green New Deal coming out of Britain and Europe, and it even caught on to a certain extent here in the belly of the beast in the US, but then it receded as a series of right-wing governments got elected across the world. That resulted in more austerity economics being implemented and all those Green New Deal discussions just seemed to end.

Even before it retreated, I had concerns and was writing about the Green New Deal, worrying about the top-down Keynesianism of it and the lack of any sense that we need to rein in capitalist growth. That problem with Keynesianism comes from its origins in a different historical moment – a time when people weren’t thinking about the precariousness of planetary ecosystems the way we are today. But I was also concerned about how those Green New Deal plans tended to be framed within the boundaries and assumptions of the nation state. Their approaches and solutions were consequently not just limited and top-down but also neocolonial in outlook.

The Green New Deal proposals resurfaced in the period 2017 through 2019, as progressive politicians mobilised around the Bernie Sanders campaign here in in the US, and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. Those campaigns produced some exciting policy proposals. But I felt that once again they were not addressing our environmental problems in terms of the planetary system and, most of all, were not oriented around what is needed for the Global South and communities on the front lines of climate crisis.

What I try to do in the book is to redress that imbalance by exploring a variety of different issues that are of primary importance in the Global South, starting with agriculture – which as you know almost never gets talked about in Western Green New Deal plans – followed by urbanization, energy transition, biodiversity conservation and migration. Across those themed chapters I try to look at a variety of different forms of organization on different scales. For example, with the chapter on ‘Decolonizing Food’ I look at the global peasants’ movement, La Via Campesina, which is a transnational organization that has its own forms of representative governance built in. This movement doesn’t seem to suffer from the kind of substitutionalism that you’re characterizing in relation to the nonprofit environmental sector in the West. It really does try to mobilize people in a quite direct democratic fashion, including a strong gender equality component.

La Via Campesina probably lies at the most organized end of the spectrum of the movements that I look at in the book. I also look at groups that some might see as “disorganized”, in the sense that they are not utilizing hierarchical representative structures and transnational governance models. I’m talking about things like squatter groups in the neighborhoods of Global South cities where people are fighting against eviction.

In applying that broader bottom-up approach I’m really interested in exploring the kinds of traditions which originated with British radical historiography embodied, for instance, by EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. I have tried to emulate that whole idea of doing history from below by taking seriously people’s forms of organization as he did. In a place like India that tradition led to Subaltern Studies, an approach to history that exposed how peasants mobilized and resisted incursions on their land by British imperial forces. In mainstream top-down historiography we would never get to actually hear such voices because it was always the imperial functionaries who were writing about popular “riots.”

The kinds of mobilizations I look at need a bottom-up approach. They would be hard to understand clearly without that because they have a very flexible and, one might even say, spontaneous mode of organizing. In the book I have tried to reveal that broader spectrum of mobilization formations that are developing in a Global South context.

In the context of that broad spectrum of mobilizations and their forms, do you think there are any shared organizational strengths that are revealed through bottom-up environmentalism? For example, whether explicitly class conscious (in the case of La Via Campesina) or more spontaneous, do these mobilizations have greater democratic resilience and therefore stronger guiding principles? If so, are they better placed to resist being pressed into the official service of neoliberalism in contrast to some co-opted Western environmental NGOs?

Well, popular movements are sites of political ferment and contestation. While these movements are fighting to defend the environmental commons, they are also always under pressure from elite interests and the state. Leaders can sometimes be bought off, and people can be cowed into silence. But what I found in terms of a kind of set of principles is that a lot of these movements are thinking about environmentalism in a very extended sense. In contrast, elite interests are trying to narrow the lens of environmentalism. Elites might admit that we have a climate crisis, but they narrow its scope to focus purely on carbon dioxide. That allows them to argue that the crisis can be taken care of through technological fixes like carbon capture and storage. Or they can push neoliberal carbon offsetting mechanisms as narrow solutions. That elite narrowing hides the truth of our environmental crisis and its myriad different interwoven and intersecting facets.

I think that the actual complexity of environmental issues is better understood by people on the ground where, for example, the climate crisis is really hitting. Just by virtue of their material circumstances, they and their movements have more accurate understandings.

As a specific example, in the book’s chapter on energy transition, I explore the case of South Africa where the ANC government has at least accepted the discourse of a ‘just energy transition’. But the way that they are attempting to achieve that is very narrow: they are just bringing in private contracting firms to build renewable energy. Many of those firms are from the Global North, specifically Europe, so there are lots of questions being asked by popular movements about equity – an important consideration given the very high unemployment levels in a place like South Africa. So, the crucial question there is what are the implications of having an energy transition being run by a bunch of corporate consultants and engineers from some place in the European Union?

That’s an important question because, meanwhile, there are popular movements on the ground that are blocking roads because their communities are suffering constant brownouts – sudden drops in the voltage magnitudes of the power grids. Those serious outages reflect the fact that the national energy authority, Eskom, is in a state of political crisis. The people on the ground see that they are threatened in terms of their housing because they cannot afford to pay the utility rates that the state utility provider is imposing. They also see poverty and energy provision as life and death issues in the context of increasing urban temperatures related to the climate crisis. These movements see a connection between overlapping issues of housing, energy access, climate and poverty. On top of that, because of the ANC government’s approach toward energy transition, they have an awareness of the corporate capture of the state. All those issues are seen as interconnected, and they then fight those kinds of issues through direct action. Importantly, because of that interconnectedness, they are also putting pressure on labour unions and trying to bring them over to their side and into their struggles.

The movements for energy transition justice are just one of many different struggles, in very diverse contexts, that I look at in the book. If there is one set of unifying principles across all those struggles, then it is the kind of intersectional environmentalism where people really are making connections because they are directly exposed to these multifarious crises on the ground. That kind of environmentalism contrasts sharply with the top-down and narrowing type – where efforts are spent on saving one part or one issue in the environment – that is so readily co-optable by neoliberal discourse.

It sounds like bottom-up environmentalism entails a more holistic approach. How much of that is down to radicalism – in the sense that, to maintain holism, you would need to dig down to the causal roots of a crisis and build back up to find the connections with other trends, factors, issues and mass movements?

If that assessment is relevant how is holistic radicalism able to counter the kind of single-issue environmentalism that we have inherited from Western science and the political choices stemming from Rio ’92 – when the world’s political leaders pushed an agenda that broke down the emerging environmental crisis into a series of discreet environmental ‘issues’ – biodiversity, climate, desertification, pollution and so on?

Does the kind of bottom-up and radical-holistic approach you explore hold the key to infusing serious environmentalists with a newfound sense of radical optimism? Would that outlook prove helpful to young people in particular who are describing themselves as ‘the last generation’?

We are only going to win the environmental struggle if we get mass movements engaged. That is the only way to do things because environmentalism from above, despite some of its successes, is clearly always going to be vulnerable to political backlash. And, of course, that danger of political backlash grows stronger and stronger as the climate and the environment more broadly goes into deeper crisis.

Mainstream ‘liberal’ politicians in the Global North are coping with the climate crisis by promising to speed up the energy transition from above by throwing public money at private corporations like Ørsted, the big offshore wind developer. In the US, that’s what the Inflation Reduction Act under President Biden is doing, and I know similar things are happening with the EU’s European Green Deal. The problem is that even as these initiatives are developed from the top down, we are in a moment of unparalleled boom for fossil fuels. Politicians, including ‘liberals’ like Joe Biden, are not doing anything serious about that contradiction because they are, on one hand, saying to environmentalists; we are doing what is necessary by pushing Green New Deals. But, on the other hand, the message they are sending to fossil fuel interests, and their associated financial speculators, is do not worry; your capital will be safe, we are going to carry on digging out fossil fuels, and you will be fine.

While we are in that perilous moment in the West, there is a kind of parallel situation in the Global South. Politicians like India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, stating that India needs to enhance its energy independence and its energy sovereignty for economic development. To those ends the Indian government is building significant solar power projects but it also and in tandem intends to open billions of pounds worth of coal seams and build new coal-fired power plants.

I’m using Modi and India as an example, but this is a problem throughout the Global South because these countries feel like their space for development has been foreclosed by the pollution that the West has put into the atmosphere historically. There is anger in the sense that elites in some Global South nations are arguing that it is their time to develop economically now, and they are not going to cut back on the fossil fuels they feel are needed to achieve that.

The horrendous irony is that the economic power unleashed in that way by fossil fuels benefits a limited percentage of the population in a country like India, even as the country itself is one of the planet’s most vulnerable places to the environmental apocalypse that is brewing. I see those contradictions as being one of the huge dangers we face in terms of the current political establishment and its top-down approaches.

To make things worse, there is the threat of the far right and of fascists who are utilising explicit xenophobia to demonise certain populations and migrants. This eco-fascism is most evident in rich countries like those of the EU but are also mirrored in the Global South, where a leader like Modi is targeting Muslims in ways explicitly modelled on Western Islamophobia.

I guess if we are going to think seriously about optimism then, it must be about being able to mount some kind of meaningful bottom-up opposition to both of those political trends – the kind of liberal duplicity that encourages fossil capital and energy transition simultaneously, and the kind of fascist response to climate crisis that increasingly attacks migrants.

There are some good signs that the need for radical action is resonating in the West and that people here are radicalizing environmentally. As an indicator we might think about Andreas Malm’s book ‘How to Blow up a Pipeline’ becoming a bestseller, being adapted into a film, and his work being profiled in the New York Times and so reaching a much broader audience. At the same time, you have Extinction Rebellion in the UK that has been in the lead for this kind of bottom-up and youthful radical protest. The kind of radicalization and holistic perspectives that we have been talking about are definitely happening, but the resulting repression is also a serious issue.

Of course, that pattern has been happening for a long time in the Global South. In fact, what I argue in the book is that movements in the Global South have been blowing up pipelines and defending the environmental commons for a long time. Militant action, including armed resistance by people whose environment has been threatened, has been ongoing for decades in Global South countries. That resistance doesn’t always get labelled ‘environmentalism’, but it is often a form of defence of the environmental Commons. Resulting repression by postcolonial forces, including bourgeois state actors and international interests like fossil fuel firms, has also been unfolding through that environmental politics for a very, very long time.

Those major political forces that are at work in the current global moment are unfolding at a time when everything that we have taken for granted in the relative climate-stability of the Holocene is being upended. Going forward, all the political certainties that we have become used to – nation states, national boundaries and the world’s mega-cities – are about to be thrown up in the air, probably within our lifetimes but certainly by 2100. Preparing for that massive reconfiguration – while still trying to build from below what we need to survive and make energy transition happen as much as possible – is I think the key set of environmental struggles we have before us.

Going into that uncertain world how important are the traditional principles of political struggles and mass mobilization? For example, what role does internationalism have in terms of creating the critical mass of environmentalism from below; joining up all the struggles that you’ve outlined, and making them politically holistic by joining environmentalism to broader struggles for social justice and peace as well?

Also, linked to that internationalism and again coming from traditions of struggle, how significant are the principles of class-consciousness and class solidarity? Environmentalism from below has good examples of class-conscious organizations like La Via Campesina, but how important is it that connections be forged between such environmental movements and the urban working class?

I think on both counts, internationalism and class solidarity, these are important questions. I start the book with my experience going to Cochabamba for the World Peoples Conference on Climate Justice and the Rights of Mother Nature. That event was convened by movements in response to the 2009 Climate COP in Copenhagen where global elites basically refused to agree to mandatory greenhouse gas emissions cuts – the beginning of the failing road that got us to the Paris Agreement. Evo Morales and others from various Global South nations were so disgusted by that direction that they concluded that we needed a people’s movement – a kind of global class response, based on grassroots environmentalism – a Green International. I feel so fortunate to have been there and be part of the deliberations that took place in Cochabamba. I wish that it had kept going but, you know, the political circumstances changed. The rolling back of Pink Tide governments in Latin America, and the election of fascists in places like Brazil meant that that project struggled. But I think it’s a movement that is worth supporting and fighting for, so I continue to be part of efforts to help organize this kind of Green International.

For that to succeed it must be consistently anchored in the global majority so that it reflects the demands of people’s movements in the Global South. We need to make sure that the history of global justice traditions – the fights against neoliberalism that took place against all the international trade agreements of the 1990s and the WTO – are very much woven into emerging forms of international environmental solidarity.

In terms of class consciousness, it is essential that we nurture connections and solidarity between people who are positioned in different parts of the capitalist world system. We need to go back to the lessons outlined by Antonio Gramsci who fought to connect the industrial proletariat of Northern Italy with the peasantry of the country’s South. That level of class solidarity is a paradigm that we need to continue to build for the present times and struggles. It is a vital element of developing the kind of holistic struggle we have already discussed. But in developing holism I think we also need to include other struggles that orientate around different elements of identity. That includes the kind of anti-colonial and anti-racist elements that very much came to the fore in Cochabamba, where very clear arguments were made that the pollution of the global atmospheric Commons was a product of colonialism. That led to an understanding that capitalism and colonialism should be seen as intertwined, with the conclusion that environmentalism needs also to be a kind of decolonial movement that has anti-racism as its linchpin.

Pushing outwards into other struggles we of course need to start analyzing gender. Women are at the forefront of ecological struggles around the world, and we need awareness of how the climate crisis breaks down disproportionately along gender lines to impact women. Women are key to social reproduction, and what we are witnessing is essentially the collapse of societies’ capacity to reproduce themselves around the world. To reflect the urgency of these struggles, we need to make feminism and transnational feminist mobilizing key parts of the environmental struggles we are engaging with. In turn, for that to be effective, that gender element needs to be clearly connected to class consciousness and internationalist anti-colonial efforts.

Environmentalism from below needs to be approached holistically as a movement but I know it can be a challenge to do that. The political left and social movements often run aground as they try to keep all these elements of struggle in play and strive to be as just as possible. But I think that unity and holism is what we have to struggle for, and I look to organizations like La Via Campesina as really good examples for how this can be done.

Did you find grounds for meaningful hope that environmentalism from below can help us with the traditional struggles for unity that we need to address? Finally, does the ecological plane itself hold any potential to enhance unity through from below – what benefits come from incorporating radical elements of the ecological struggle such as agroecology?

Well, as I put it in my book, people have no option but to keep fighting. I learned a great deal about the grounds for that real determination not to surrender in writing Environmentalism from Below. On one hand it is a ridiculously sweeping book because I basically sat down to think about how the key environmental themes illustrate where crises are unfolding today, and how movements are mobilizing in response. The themed book chapters start out by diagnosing the set of problems the capitalist exploitative dynamic is creating for an environmental topic, and then explore alternatives from below.

For example, in the Decolonizing Food chapter, I set out to analyze the crisis in agriculture and the food system and then go on to describe the alternatives that come from agroecology. For that chapter – in an approach I took for each theme – I tried to learn as much as I could about soil ecosystems by speaking to as many experts and doing as much reading as I could. In this case, that research got me thinking about the complexity of soil ecology and the immense variety of life found in each and every square sample of soil. That diverse suite of organisms is interconnected through an incredibly beautiful ecological interplay that, in turn, maintains the immense richness of the soil. That is a superb analogy for the kinds of holistic radical politics that we have been talking about, but it is also exactly the kind of natural system that we need to figure out how to sustain through our radical politics.

The ecological and political analogies expand in other directions too. The agro-industrial model of treating the soil as a neutral substrate that you can just dump chemicals onto with abandon is clearly no longer working. But the dominance of that monocultural approach reveals much about the authoritarian style of the system that capitalism is exporting around the world. The criticisms of communism have always been that it is totalitarian but if you think about the kind of ecological systems that flow from industrial capitalism, they are as top down and destructive as any form of totalitarian political rule that you could imagine.

In contrast, if we look at natural ecosystems of the kind we see in healthy soils, we can learn a lot about what a generalised environmentalism from below might look like. But we can also speculate on the holistic requirements that will be needed to shape the kind of genuine disaster communism that we must rely on increasingly. In that respect, towards the end of Environmentalism from Below, I discuss the coming necessity for border abolition and how Western countries have spent so much more on militarizing their borders, while encouraging Global South nations to interdict migrants, than they have on climate reparations. The required abolition of nation states and racist borders is one very good concrete way we could think about our environmental crisis and response because almost all of us are going to have to move as climate change accelerates.

Environmental from Below ends with a discussion of the political issues that we have been talking about, and how the current systems that we have in place are utterly unsustainable given the environmental crises that they are creating. In the face of all those realities we need to build up other forms of solidarity and alternative ways of being in relation to the planet. In a neat reversal of the Thatcherite slogan, we must do that because there is no alternative.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... ur-planet/

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(Photo: Guy Edwarde)

Ian Angus’s “The War Against the Commons”: A vital new history of the bloody rise of capitalism
Originally published: Firebrand on May 18, 2024 by Steve Leigh (more by Firebrand) (Posted May 22, 2024)

In Marxist theory, primitive accumulation is, as Marx defined it in Capital Volume I, “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” Occurring at different times in different regions around the world, primitive accumulation is the stage of history during which the ruling class took wealth from the lower classes–unjustly, usually by force or by theft–in order to accumulate the capital they would need to become the capitalist class.


The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism, by Ian Angus

The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism is an excellent new book on this history from Canadian ecosocialist Ian Angus. It is a beautifully written examination of the rise of capitalism and the destruction of peasant livelihoods as the centuries-old social relations of feudalism were abandoned for a new mode of production. Though it largely focuses on the transformation of feudalism into capitalism in England and Scotland, it has many implications for socialist organizing and for environmentalism today.

Angus’s book is especially valuable for the way it sharply refutes the reactionary thesis of “the tragedy of the commons.” It also provides substantial clarity on Marx’s views of, as he put it,

so-called primitive accumulation.

The rise of capitalism required the war on the commons
In The War Against the Commons, Angus argues that for hundreds of years, peasants had successfully managed common land to the benefit of all. They democratically decided on its use and did not over-exploit it as the reactionary thesis contends. Often peasants repartitioned the private strips of land around the common area to give every family enough land to survive.

Of course this was not some agrarian utopia. Under feudalism, landlords ruthlessly exploited the masses of peasantry, either as serfs, who were kept in bondage, or as free farmers who were still very much tied to the land. Peasants paid rent or performed service on the lord’s demesne (the lord’s private land, attached to their manor), or both. Peasants’ rights were limited and were at the whim of the lord when it came to justice. During times of war they might be called on to fight and die for the lord’s material interests.

But in return for that exploitation, peasants were allowed the collective use of common areas. The commons were absolutely essential to the livelihoods of the peasants.

Beginning with the rise of the market economy in the 15th century, landlords were under more pressure to raise revenue. As Angus writes,

Landed families which stuck to the old ways, left rents as they were and continued to grant long leases soon found themselves trapped between static incomes and rising prices.

There were several related strategies employed by the landlords during this period of primitive accumulation: raising rents, enclosing the commons and adding it to their demesnes, consolidating farms into larger units, and replacing farming with sheep raising. The latter required less labor and created higher profits. Overt time, the economic differentiation of the peasantry–some peasants growing more wealthy while others slipped further into poverty–aided the landlords’ efforts.

The peasant class did not just go along with these land grabs and forcible changes to the previous social arrangement. They continually resisted these attacks that denied their livelihood, and peasant revolts broke out from time to time throughout this entire process.

These revolts peaked at particular times, sometimes culminating in revolutionary situations, such as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381. More often they involved re-taking common lands by tearing down fences and hedgerows. In the 1640s, these peasant revolts intersected with the English Revolution and Civil War.

According to Angus, the peasant revolts did not fuel either side of the Civil War exclusively. Though the Parliamentarians at first seemed to take the side of the peasants against the Royalists, in the end the consolidation of power by Parliament furthered the accumulation of land in the hands of the landlords.

The most radical elements during this period were the Diggers, who tried to extend communal ownership of land both physically and through political organizing.

At the beginning of the war against the commons, the English Crown tried to restrain enclosures. They feared depopulation that would deny the needed soldiers for war; and they also feared social unrest.

Thus, the Crown passed laws to slow down the enclosure process. But landlords, who often controlled the local justices of the peace, prevented effective enforcement of these laws. Over time, Crown resistance to land consolidation and enclosure waned as the new capitalist relations dominated the economy more and more.

Angus also examines the role of the “commonwealth men” who were theoretically against capitalist development, but also opposed peasant resistance to the rising power of capitalism. They were similar to the “feudal socialists” whom Marx and Engels denounced in the Communist Manifesto–the aristocrats who railed against the exploitation of the new capitalist order and attempted to sway the proletariat to their side, while still holding deeply reactionary views. “What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat,” they wrote,

as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.

Despite the peasant revolts, the dominant trend was toward enclosure and consolidation as rural residents were expelled from the land. Many became vagabonds who tried to survive by begging and stealing. Over time, the peasants who were kicked off the land became the basis of the working class that capitalism needed in industry. Thus, primitive accumulation created the proletarian class even as it destroyed feudalism.

During this era, rural people with small cottages entered the capitalist system directly by working for capitalists as weavers or in other trades under the “putting-out system.” Under this system, merchants would sell raw materials to cottagers who would work it up into products. Merchants would then buy the finished product back at a fixed rate, rather than pay a wage.

Marx called this the “formal subsumption” of labor to capital as opposed to the “real subsumption” of wage labor.

Wage labor was the last resort
When peasants were expelled from the land, wage labor was the last resort for survival. Thus, people saw wage labor as another form of slavery. As Marx wrote in Capital:

A new class of wage-laborers was born in England when great masses of men were suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.

Under feudalism, they had largely controlled their own labor. The work day was governed by the weather, seasons, and other natural conditions. Under capitalism, labor was controlled by the clock and working hours were longer.

To enforce wage labor, the state now dominated by capitalism used draconian methods, including actual slavery. “Poaching” was outlawed for the poor who needed food, but hunting was allowed for the rich who did not need it. For a period, England enforced the death penalty for hundreds of offenses, including poaching and petty theft, and also made regular use of transportation to the colonies in Australia and elsewhere.

The destruction of the old rural economy unleashed more people than the rising capitalist economy could absorb. Even if there was not enough wage work available, vagabonds were punished for not working for a master. The creation of capitalism was based on the horrific oppression of ordinary people.

This process of consolidating capitalism in England took hundreds of years, from the 15th to the 18th centuries. The practice of enclosure persisted well into the 19th century in England. In Scotland, it happened much faster after the English conquest; the results were equally bloody but much more condensed in time.

Apologists for capitalism contend that it made agriculture much more efficient. Angus thoroughly refutes this, showing that many of these improvements arose during the period of peasant management of the commons.

Angus also shows that caloric intake declined as capitalism rose. “Most industrial workers and agricultural laborers were malnourished,” he writes. “They were less healthy and died younger than their ancestors a century earlier.” According to Angus,

The expansion of the capitalist world system caused a dramatic and prolonged process of impoverishment on a scale unprecedented in recorded history.

The destructive birth of capitalism
Importantly, Angus explains Marx’s critical views of the war against the commons. Too many would-be Marxists stress the progressive nature of the rise of capitalism. Marx, on the other hand, saw it as a destructive process, even though it ultimately developed the productive forces that would allow the working class to take power and establish communism. As Marx famously put it,

Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

Marx preferred to discuss the war against the commons as “original expropriation” rather than primitive accumulation. Marx ultimately felt that “primitive accumulation” was too neutral a term–which is why he often qualified the phrase as so-called primitive accumulation.

Too many people miss Marx’s sarcasm when discussing this issue. Marx made it clear that capitalists stole their wealth from others rather than amassing it through hard work or intelligence, as the capitalist myth would have it. When workers no longer have access to the means of production, they end up having to work for those who stole it from them.

A large part of this original theft came from colonization. Angus explains the process of wealth seizure in the colonies as a further basis for the accumulation of capital in England. The effects on the native population of the Western Hemisphere and on enslaved Africans are well-known. As Marx wrote in Capital:

The veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.

He goes on:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent , the beginnings of the conquest and looting of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

Thus the issues raised by this history are directly relevant to anticolonial and antiracist struggles today.

Debates on the left and the ongoing relevance of the history of accumulation
According to Angus, the war against the commons continues to this day. He believes Marx saw expropriation as a continual basis of capitalism, not just a contained process occurring at its dawn. Though capitalism now dominates the world economy, the dispossession of the world’s peasantry continues. Capital still accumulates through expropriation.

This bears on current political controversies on the left. David Harvey, for example, focuses in his writings on current “accumulation by dispossession.” Harvey seems to downplay the importance of the basic process of mature capitalism: accumulation by exploitation–in other words, not paying workers the full value of what they produce. Angus does not explicitly endorse Harvey’s position but does argue the importance of the continuation of expropriation of peasant land.

This is an important emphasis which solidifies our understanding: “Since the late 1900s, capital’s continuing war against the commons has dispossessed millions of peasant families in Africa, Latin America and Asia.”

Modern-day peasant resistance to being forced off their land is certainly a struggle that the left should support. Peasants can be allies with workers in the war against capitalism–Marx agreed with this approach. Angus notes the positive attitude Marx had toward the peasant communes in Russia. He thought they could become the basis of a transformation to communism–but importantly only if connected to the international working-class revolution. Marx rejected a utopian view of the peasant commune.

Nor does Marx’s attitude mean that Marxists support the preservation of peasant property even after the working-class revolution. The goal is still collective control of the whole economy, including land, by the population as a whole.

In spite of the need for Marxists to defend the remaining commons, the current context is important. In the period that Angus focuses on in early modern England, capitalism was still forming. Most of the world was pre-capitalist. The seizure of the commons was absolutely essential to the rise of capitalism.

Today, the situation has been transformed. The world economy is now universally capitalist. Even the remaining peasant agriculture is largely commercial and integrated into the capitalist market. Subsistence agriculture, which was the essence of agriculture during the rise of capitalism, is now more marginal.

Over the last 141 years since Marx’s death, much of the common land has been taken by capitalists. The expropriation of peasant land today is a transfer of wealth among participants in the capitalist system. It is no longer the destruction of a pre-capitalist mode of production to make way for capitalism. Today, expropriation is an important supplement to exploitation, but only a supplement.

Contra Harvey, the main emphasis of anticapitalists today needs to be resistance against the exploitation of workers, and opposition to the oppression that divides workers. The form of a worker-peasant alliance will differ from country to country, but defense of peasants should be integrated into the working-class revolution rather than being seen as a separate struggle.

Angus argues that Marx and Engels were more flexible and less dogmatic than later Marxists are. He discusses how Engels was reluctant to give advice to Russian activists because of ignorance of Russian politics. Angus also says that Marx and Engels supported assassination as a political strategy in Russia even while opposing it in Britain.

This attitude is an important corrective to dogmatism. Marxists need to understand the political and economic situation before pronouncing on it. We must learn before we can teach! However, the world has transformed in the last 140 years. The spread of the capitalist system across the world means that Marx’s strategies for the capitalist countries in the 1880s are more applicable across the world today than they were in his time. Although we need to understand the specifics of each situation, the broad contours of the focus on working-class struggle are applicable everywhere. The Communist Manifesto’s famous conclusion, “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains,” is even truer today than when Marx and Engels wrote it.

This shift is shown by the changing strategy of Russian Marxists, including the Bolsheviks, before the Revolution. As capitalism developed in Russia in the early 20th century, they moved away from Marx’s positive attitude to the Narodniks, who were oriented to the peasantry. Instead, they focused on organizing the industrial working class.

Finally, Angus raises the very important issue of overcoming the division between the town and country. Marx and Engels were very clear on the importance of spreading the population rather than having it concentrated in cities. They saw this as similar to the abolition of class division. In The Housing Question (1878), Engels wrote,

The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wage workers.

The War Against the Commons is a brilliant examination of the rise of capitalism. It smashes some of the bases of capitalist ideology, and vindicates the possibility of democratic control of the earth. It makes a valuable contribution to current debates on the left, connecting anticapitalism to defense of the environment. It shows that capitalism has always been opposed to ecological sanity–for example demonstrating the direct connection between capitalism and fossil fuels, especially coal.

For all these reasons, it is a must-read for socialists and for all who care about the future of humanity and the planet.

https://mronline.org/2024/05/22/ian-ang ... apitalism/

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“There is no Planet B” placard. (Photo: Ivan Radic / CC BY 2.0)

On the edge of the ‘climate abyss’
By John Clarke (Posted May 21, 2024)

Originally published: Counterfire on May 15, 2024 (more by Counterfire) |

A survey conducted by the Guardian of almost 400 ‘of the world’s leading climate scientists’ finds that a great majority of them have concluded that ‘global temperatures [will] rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet.’

All those whose views were sought out were part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Nearly 80% of the scientists ‘foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F).’ A mere 6% had an expectation that the internationally accepted standard of 1.5C (2.7F) was still attainable.

A large proportion of the experts felt angry or despondent over the lack of effective action to deal with the climate crisis and pointed to a future marked by ‘famines, conflicts and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.’

Gretta Pecl, at the University of Tasmania, predicted ‘major societal disruption within the next five years’ and suggested that states will be ‘overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.’

The rate of global warming over the last four years is put at 1.2C, which is already producing major impacts, but present climate policies suggest an increase of 2.7C will occur, with a significant minority of scientists concluding that even this dire prediction is likely to be exceeded. Many of them also stressed that global inequality means that the effects of climate change will disproportionately impact poor countries. ‘I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the global south,’ one South African scientist noted, adding bitterly that the ‘world’s response to date is reprehensible – we live in an age of fools.’

Finger of blame
When it comes to pointing the finger of blame for this situation, a ‘lack of political will was cited by almost three-quarters of the respondents, while 60% also blamed vested corporate interests, such as the fossil fuel industry.’ This suggests that, while some are on the right track, the scientists have a much clearer idea of the process of climate change than they do of the social and economic forces that are driving it.

For its part, the Guardian followed up its announcement by interviewing a series of UN officials. These, very predictably, focused on appealing to fossil-fuel capitalists and governments to see the dangers ahead and change course. Alok Sharma, president of the Cop26 summit in 2021, felt that the ‘survey should be another wake-up call for governments to stop prevaricating.’ The official spokesperson for António Guterres, the UN secretary general, declared that the ‘goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C is hanging by a thread … They need to realise we are on the verge of the abyss.’

While the survey provides compelling evidence that we should consider very carefully, there is little reason to suppose that those who have continued to drive global warming in the interests of profit making will be roused by this particular ‘wake up call’. The liberal media and UN officialdom may not agree, but those who can prevent climate disaster aren’t gathered in corporate boardrooms or around cabinet tables. It is working-class people, their movements and the struggles they take up that can make a difference.

Beyond the alarming views of climate scientists, evidence of how rapidly climate disaster is unfolding is all around us. I wrote an article for Counterfire in April on the prospect of another terrible wildfire season in Canada this year and this now appears even more likely. CBC reports that some 52 fires are currently burning in the province of Alberta and one of them, ‘classified as out of control at 1,000 hectares … is about 16 kilometres away from Fort McMurray.’ Residents of that town have been told to be ready to evacuate at short notice.

In neighbouring British Columbia, according to Al Jazeera, thousands ‘of people … have been evacuated from their homes as authorities warn that an enormous wildfire continues to grow.’ Residents of Fort Nelson and nearby Fort Nelson First Nation have been told that ‘it is imperative that you leave the community immediately for your own safety.’ It is horrifying that such developments are taking place weeks before the worst of the summer heat creates the greatest level of danger.

As fires burn in Canada, we learn from the Associated Press that ‘flash floods from unusually heavy seasonal rains in Afghanistan have killed more than 300 people and destroyed over 1,000 houses.’ The full extent of the catastrophe remains unclear and, as UN special rapporteur Richard Bennett pointed out, ‘the floods are a stark reminder of Afghanistan’s vulnerability to the climate crisis.’

Dozens of people have also been killed in Indonesia by mudslides of volcanic ‘cold lava’ released by flood conditions. A report from the BBC includes comments by Wengki Purwanto, the director of the West Sumatra branch of the Indonesian Forum for Environment. He stresses that the increased risk of flash floods is compounded by ‘excessive exploitation of natural resources and haphazard development.’

Intensifying impacts
An ‘explainer’ that the Guardian published to complement its survey of climate scientists, looks at what it means for ‘global heating … to soar past internationally agreed limits.’ Even at the 1.5C ‘benchmark’, which is now almost certain to be breached, major impacts are predicted, including ‘ice sheet collapses and permafrost thawing’. At 2C, major heatwaves would massively increase and ‘direct flood damage’ would double. If the world reaches a 2.7C increase, then two billion people would ‘no longer enjoy the benign conditions in which the whole of civilisation arose over the past 10,000 years.’ At 3C, some of the world’s most heavily populated cities would ‘end up below sea level.’

In his Capitalism in the Anthropocene, John Bellamy Foster draws a conclusion that the editors of the Guardian wouldn’t want to endorse. He suggests that the destructive course on climate that has been set is not the result of a bad choice that can be remedied by scientific evidence and appeals to reason. He suggests that the competitive drive towards short-term profit that is fundamental to capitalism is at odds with sustainability. It is, as he puts it, ‘this irrational system of artificially stimulated growth, economic waste, financialized wealth, and extreme inequality that needs to be overturned if we are to create a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality’ (p.75).

Yet, if capitalism has a destructive relationship with the natural world and creates the conditions for climate disaster, it is also incapable of dealing effectively with the impacts that it generates. Even in wealthy countries, the lack of preparedness to deal with the now inevitable proliferation of heatwaves, drought, storms and flooding is readily apparent. In the face of the economic and social dislocation that these impacts will bring, no rational and just plan to cope is possible in a society dominated by an exploiting class and shaped by the pursuit of profit.

On a global scale, the situation is even more dreadful. Poor countries that contribute the least to the climate crisis pay the greatest price for it. They lack the resources and the infrastructure to respond and rebuild when they face climate impacts. Their capacity to cope is further undermined by exploitation and ruinous debt loads.

We need to unite in practical struggles for immediate measures to reduce emissions and to protect populations in the face of the effects of climate change. Certainly, there is every reason to believe that real and vital gains can and must be won in this way. At the same time, however, the dire situation and grim predictions that the survey of climate scientists reveals won’t be remedied by appeals for a change of heart on the part of those in power. The struggle for climate justice must be part of a challenge to the capitalist system itself.

https://mronline.org/2024/05/21/on-the- ... ate-abyss/

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Collapse of the Thwaites Glacier Has Accelerated
Posted on May 23, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. We have yet another cheery sighting on the state of global warming, in the form of a Thwaites Glacier update.

By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies


Location of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica (source)

The Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-sized mass of ice at the coast of Western Antarctica, has been called the “doomsday glacier” because of its potential to wreak havoc all by itself.


Source

As you can imagine, there’s a certain freaking out caused by this, more so from scientists (see also here and here) than from those who owe their lives to the moneyed class.

In how “many decades” could this all occur? My money’s on two or three, by the mid-2050s.

Global Sea Level Rise vs. Sea Levels Near You

But whatever the time scale for Thwaites’ complete collapse, the change it will bring won’t be smooth, but sudden, in stages. If a Florida-sized chunk of ice that’s not submerged, suddenly falls into the sea, it will raise sea level globally — on its own — by as much as two feet.

And that rise won’t be well distributed. The sea near New York, for example, will rise 1½ times the global average:



The Thwaites collapse, when it comes, will change everything. And the Western Antarctic collapse, following that, will ice the rest of the cake. The first could come in the next twenty years or so — remember, everything’s accelerating.

And the second … well, when that arrives may not matter at all, given how scrambled our eggs will be by then.

The Solution

The solution, of course, is action of a “vigorous” kind. The State knows this far better than most. That’s why it’s been gearing up. We’ll look at that soon.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05 ... rated.html

Revolution is the vigorous action needed. It will not be easy but is utterly necessary.

******

Despite promising climate action, oil and gas giants double down on drilling
May 23, 2024

All announced energy transition policies are ‘insufficient’ or ‘grossly insufficient’



[Oil Change International] Big oil and gas companies’ climate pledges and plans are dangerously inadequate, and put the world on a path to climate chaos and widespread harm to communities. The case for keeping oil, gas, and coal in the ground has never been stronger, but big oil and gas companies continue to resist and block a fast and fair transition to clean, renewable energy.


Click to download report (pdf) https://www.oilchange.org/wp-content/up ... 1_2024.pdf

Oil Change International’s Big Oil Reality Check report assesses the climate pledges and plans of eight international oil and gas companies – Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalEnergies, BP, Eni, Equinor, and ConocoPhillips – against 10 criteria representing the bare minimum for aligning with the Paris Agreement to limit global heating below 1.5°C.

Key Findings:

The Big Oil Reality Check report finds that these oil majors fail to align with international agreements to phase out fossil fuels and to limit global temperature rise to 1.5ºC. Every company is “Grossly Insufficient” or “Insufficient” on a majority of criteria. and three of them (Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil) are “Grossly Insufficient” – the lowest rating – on all criteria.

Combined, these 8 companies’ current oil and gas extraction plans are consistent with more than 2.4°C of global temperature rise,(1) likely leading to global devastation. These companies alone are on track to use 30% of our remaining carbon budget to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C.

Of the 8 analyzed companies, 6 have explicit goals to increase oil and gas production. Even those without such plans are advancing new fossil fuel projects and selling polluting assets rather than shutting them down, masking their actions as contributing to an energy transition while perpetuating climate pollution.

None of the 8 companies have set comprehensive targets to ensure their total emissions decline rapidly and consistently, starting now. Every company intends to rely on carbon capture and storage (CCS), offsets, and/or other methods that delay and distract from ending fossil fuels, and prolong the health and community safety impacts of dirty energy.

All of the companies fail to meet basic criteria for just transition plans for workers and communities where they operate. All of them fail to meet basic criteria on upholding human rights.

While last year the world committed to “transition away from fossil fuels” at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, the report reveals that oil and gas companies are moving in the opposite direction, by doubling down on drilling that unleashes damage to our climate and fuel disasters by poisoning us, our air, land, and water.

If oil and gas companies were serious about the climate crisis, the first way they’d show it would be ceasing to add new fuel to the fire – meaning no new exploration, expansion, or production of fossil fuels. Instead, 6 of the 8 companies (Chevron, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, ConocoPhillips, Equinor, and Eni) have explicit goals to increase oil and gas production.

Even those companies (BP and Shell) that don’t have explicit plans to increase total production are putting forward new fossil fuel projects for approval, while framing themselves as contributing to the energy transition with a different strategy: selling polluting assets to other companies who will almost certainly make sure those fossil fuels are burned. Selling polluting assets can make it look like BP and Shell are heading in a better direction, but unless oil and gas fields are retired, the reality is this strategy protects their bottom lines while climate pollution continues.

The Big Oil Reality Check report reveals that none of the companies we analyzed have set comprehensive targets to ensure their total emissions decline rapidly and consistently, starting now. Instead of phasing out production as rapidly as possible, every company intends to rely on carbon capture and storage (CCS), offsets, and/or other methods that delay and distract from ending fossil fuels, and prolong the health and community safety impacts of dirty energy. All are lobbying against climate action, greenwashing, and otherwise maneuvering to undermine the energy transition.

While many companies have co-opted the language of ‘just transition’ from labor and climate justice movements in recent years, all the companies fail to meet basic criteria for just transition plans for workers and communities where they operate. Five companies score “Grossly Insufficient” and three score “Insufficient.”

On upholding human rights, five score “Grossly Insufficient” and three score “Insufficient”. These companies’ track record when it comes to protecting human rights and Indigenous Peoples’ rights is deeply concerning. Each is experiencing resistance from frontline communities to their projects based on human rights, health, and/or safety concerns.

An Oil Change International investigation in March 2024 revealed that ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies, BP, Shell, and Eni are all complicit in facilitating the supply of crude oil to Israel. This is in the context of the Israeli military’s ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and mounting evidence of war crimes. Human rights are non-negotiable and these companies’ apparent disregard for it is yet another reason they should not be trusted to take climate action.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... -drilling/

******


CCS acronym for Carbon Capture Storage words CCS on a wood block on the environmental background. Net zero action concept. Save energy, green energy, reduce carbon footprint, carbon capture.

What’s wrong with carbon capture?
Originally published: Pearls and Irritations on May 23, 2024 by Ralph Evans (more by Pearls and Irritations) (Posted May 24, 2024)

It sounds wonderful. Politicians and fossil fuel companies love it. But more often than not carbon capture and storage (CCS) is raised as a smokescreen for something that will harm the world.

What do Anthony Albanese, Angus Taylor, David Littleproud, Barack Obama, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and Joe Biden have in common? All are enthusiasts for carbon capture and storage and have advocated sloshing loads of public money into it.

CCS and the variant CCUS (carbon capture utilisation and storage) sound terrific. They let you go on burning coal and gas. Presto! The carbon dioxide that is causing climate change is hidden somewhere out of sight, forever.

This is the idea. Politicians love it. Fossil fuel companies love it even more.

The trouble is, it’s expensive and it doesn’t work very well.

There are several ways to separate carbon dioxide from fossil or “natural” gas or from gases going up a chimney. The best-known way is to “scrub” the gas through a water-based solution of amine (a chemical), which absorbs the CO₂. The solution is heated in another part of the plant to release the CO₂ and then cooled and cycled back.

It takes quite a lot of energy to run this process, and much more to compress the CO₂ to many times atmospheric pressure and pipe it to the place where it is injected underground.

CCS has been proposed as a magic solution in generating power from coal or gas, in cutting the emissions of natural gas production and in several industrial processes.

In the power sector, the CCS dream is well and truly over. Renewable power has come down in cost dramatically and is now cheaper than fossil-fuel power without CCS—so it is far cheaper than fossil power with CCS added on. The fate of CCS in power was sealed when two new American coal plants built to use it were scrapped: Kemper in Mississippi (converted to gas in 2017, shut in 2021) and Petra Nova in Texas (shut in 2021).

Most CCS projects are in the oil and gas sector. Many wells produce CO₂ as a byproduct. Traditionally, this was just “vented” to the atmosphere, driving more climate change. For several decades now, some companies have captured part of their CO₂ and injected it underground. The usual reason to do this is to push more oil and gas out of declining wells.

When oil and gas people talk about “capturing” and “sequestering” carbon dioxide, the CO₂ they refer to was underground and is being returned underground. What they really want is to increase their oil or gas output. This will eventually be burnt, releasing carbon dioxide to the air.

CCS can capture only part of the CO₂ in any project. The largest CCS project in the world happens to be in Australia, the Gorgon project run by major American oil company Chevron at Barrow Island in WA. The CCS unit there, finished in 2016, cost over $3 billion.

Chevron could not get it to work properly in its first years. It is now reported to be capturing around 40 percent of the CO₂ that Gorgon produces along with its natural gas.

A large part of the CO₂ produced in liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects comes from burning gas in the turbines that run the compressors. This is too dilute to capture and is just vented.

The Australian company Santos is proposing to develop the Barossa gas project in the Timor Sea. Barossa gas contains 18 percent carbon dioxide, an unusually high proportion. This one project is likely to add four million tonnes to Australia’s annual CO₂ emissions.

Santos says they may be able to eliminate part of their emissions using CSS, if they can find a suitable undersea reservoir.

All gas projects have a secret additional impact on the climate through leakage of the very potent greenhouse gas methane. Methane emissions are currently not measured in Australia but should be.

So beware when you hear politicians who waltz with fossil fuel executives talking about CCS. It sounds wonderful, but it may well be a smokescreen for something that will emit lots of CO₂ and methane and worsen the already dire outlook for climate change.

There may yet be useful applications for CCS in industrial processes where it is otherwise hard to cut carbon emissions, as has been pointed out several times by Greg Bourne, a climate and energy expert at the Climate Council.

https://mronline.org/2024/05/24/whats-w ... n-capture/

[blindpig]

A farmer spreading fertiliser on a field in North Yorkshire, March 10, 2021.

Marxism and ecology: Does the answer ‘lie in the soil?’
Originally published: Morning Star Online on May 27, 2024 by Marx Memorial Library (more by Morning Star Online) | (Posted May 29, 2024)

READERS of a certain age may remember a wireless (sorry, radio) comedy in which one of the characters Rambling Syd Rumpo (played by Kenneth Williams) replies to any question:

The answer lies in the soil.

Two recent reports, one from the government’s Environment Agency and the other from Rothamsted Research (previously the Rothamsted Experimental Station, one of the oldest agricultural research institutions in the world, founded in 1843) reveal that the question is still important.

The Rothamsted report, for example, sheds new light on how intensive, fertiliser-based farming impoverishes the soil’s “natural” fauna and flora, damages soil structure (the layers in the soil and the way that individual particles of sand, silt and clay are aggregated into soil “crumbs”) and leads the loss of soil carbon into the atmosphere, contributing significantly to global warming.

The report is in many ways an update and gloss on an earlier but equally significant report entitled “Modern Farming and the Soil” published 50 years ago by Britain’s then agricultural advisory council of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. Then the emphasis was more on the use of heavy farm machinery as much as on fertilisers, and the resulting destructuring and soil erosion, particularly on silt soils.

But concern about the soil goes back well before this. Frederick Engels in his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1843) complained that capitalism had made “the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence” an object of huckstering.

And Karl Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (written the following year) observed how “we live from nature [and] must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if we are not to die. To say that physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for we are part of nature.”

As the views of the 24-year-old Engels and the 26-year-old Marx matured, they progressively incorporated a growing awareness of human impacts on the natural environment and its interconnectedness. In their Communist Manifesto, they emphasised the dynamism of capitalism, constantly transforming the world in the search for profit and the need to transform society for the benefit of people.

During, and especially subsequent to, the publication of Volume I of Capital both Marx and Engels became deeply interested in the dynamic of human-nature relations and the ecological damage wrought by capitalism. Although the analytical focus of Marx’s Capital was economics, key passages reveal a concern with the evolutionary origins and biological nature of humans and our relations with the non-human world.

Both Marx and Engels saw environmental degradation as not just a problem of the burgeoning industrial cities but a more general consequence of the alienation of humans from nature. Soil was a particular focus. Marx’s own research for Capital included a study of Justus Von Liebig’s work on agricultural chemistry.

Liebig pioneered the study of nutrient cycling and the role of chemical elements in plant growth (including the carbon cycle) but while promoting the manufacture of inorganic fertiliser he was also concerned about the depletion of soil organic matter and argued for the recycling of human sewage.

Engels was particularly influenced by his close friend in Manchester, the “Red Chemist” Carl Schorlemmer whose address he used to avoid police opening his letters. Schorlemmer (Marx nicknamed him Jollymeir because of his sense of humour) was one of the foremost organic chemists of his time and his influence, with Liebig and others, was almost certainly pivotal in Marx’s concept of the “metabolic rift.”

At that time systemic biogeochemical impacts of human activities were unknown, and their attention focused on specific issues to do with land management such as soil degradation and deforestation. Capitalist agriculture was a particular concern. Awareness of the consequences of monocropping in nutrient depletion, soil destructuring and pest infestation had informed the agricultural innovations which underpinned Britain’s industrial revolution.

With the intensification of farming, facilitated by inclosures, soil deterioration became in some areas a major problem, only partly addressed by a new trade in horse manure from the growing towns. Joseph Fison, John Lawes and other entrepreneurs made huge profits from the mining of mineral fertilisers. But the substitution of manures by inorganic fertiliser led to a reduction in soil organic matter (itself, together with the burning of fossil fuels, a significant contribution to atmospheric CO2).

In Volume I of Capital Marx declares that “capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth–the soil and the labourer.”

Whether Marx or Engels were aware of Charles Darwin’s final work The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits published in 1881 and containing the results of 40 years of research on earthworms, is unclear but it seems likely: the book sold 6,000 copies in its first year, more than Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859.

Later, in writings assembled by Engels as Volume III of Capital, published in 1894 after Marx’s death, he writes of the moral imperative of environmental stewardship:

Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies together, are not the owners of the Earth. They are only its keepers, its beneficiaries, and [ … ] they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.

Fast forward a century and a half and it is clear that soil is something infinitely more complicated than either Darwin or Marx could have envisaged. Leonardo da Vinci is said to have declared: “We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.” It’s a moot point whether that remains the case but it is clear that our understanding has grown considerably since Marx and Engels wrote.

To take one example, as a paper entitled “Socialism in soil?” in the prestigious British Ecological Society’s Journal of Ecology stated: “Almost all plants are engaged in symbiotic relationships with mycorrhizal fungi.” These soil fungi can promote plant growth by supplying limiting nutrients to plant roots in return for plant assimilates. The relationship can be destroyed by poor agricultural practices including overploughing, overgrazing, excessive use of fertilisers and pesticides, and monoculture.

As socialist soil scientist Charlie Clutterbuck said in a recent edition of Gardener’s World, among the plant roots and earthworms is a “teeming mass of little mites”–a “ferment of little rotters.” Shortly before this in a Marx Memorial Library seminar series Food, Farming and the Future (available on the Library’s website) he and Tim Lang (joint authors of a hugely influential text More Than We Can Chew: The Crazy World of Food and Farming (Arguments for Socialism), argued that soil destruction is part of a wider crisis of agriculture which in turn arises from a dysfunctional and exploitative economic system.

Every farmer, gardener and environmentalist must at some point have had thoughts echoing those of Engels who wrote in his notes later published as Dialectics of Nature:

Let us not flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us.

The soil is part of the complex “web of life” on which we humans and our planetary ecosystem depend. Together with human labour, it delivers 95 per cent of global food supplies. Soil holds three times as much carbon as the atmosphere, it reduces the risk of flooding by absorbing water, and it is a wildlife habitat in its own right.

Soil conservation is critical for human wellbeing.

So, does the answer lie in the soil? No, but the soil provides an important focus for understanding the relation between corporate capitalism and the environment and we neglect it at our collective peril.

https://mronline.org/2024/05/29/marxism-and-ecology/



Whether bird flu is on the march misses the point
By Rob Wallace (Posted May 28, 2024)

One [of the two kinds of fantastic fiction], most often seen in horror novels and movies, offers up a reality which has to be accommodated or exiled by the status quo it is attempting to overtake. Sometimes, as in any exorcism movie—and most horror movies are that, by other names—the alien thorn is successfully removed from the suppurating flank of the real. On other occasions the visitor becomes part of the fabric of “everyday” life. Superman is, after all, an alien life form. He’s simply the acceptable face of invading realities.

The second kind of fantastique is far more delirious. In these narratives, the whole world is haunted and mysterious. There is no solid status quo, only a series of relative realities…

— Clive Barker (1990)

You’d expect a report on the new round of highly pathogenic avian influenza spilling over into mammals and humans to begin with a just-the-facts update.

That’d be good practice. And we’ll get there. But to start with such an encapsulation would serve only to miss the point of the latest epizootic episode, much in the way the near entirety of the press corps has in splattering H5N1 all over us. And just off its role in burying the still circulating COVID-19.

To understand this bird flu, we need to begin elsewhere, indeed on other topics entirely. We must begin with a different flub, one we hope tips in our favor.

One of the dangers of giving an informal lecture is that even with notes one is writing a first draft with your mouth.

In ending a recent workshop on modeling collective COVID choice, I offered that, however generous in connecting governance to people’s everyday lives, Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen’s (and Kenneth Arrow’s) logic system around societal decision-making embedded itself in the expansive liberalism of the 1960s. We can connect reason and civil society, the modelers argued.

That sounds well enough. Where’s the problem in such an objective?

Liberal governance mid-century cared about democracy and welfare economics only to the extent that they together helped defuse rebellion against capitalism’s intrinsic expropriation. They served as social bribes.

Once the U.S. empire began to wilt on the far side of the cycle of American accumulation, the nomenklatura who followed folded away even this utilitarian generosity. Keeping the machine running unimpeded now involved, on the one hand, sharper forms of labor discipline and, on the other, assistance largely in ridiculous lines of expensive credit as just another market into which capital expanded.

That is, despite liberalism’s postwar political dominance, such a politics represented only one descendant of the celebrated Enlightenment. Lost twins abounded. The Fordism of Auschwitz-Birkenau, for instance, hideously. And neoliberalism, Kenyesianism’s flashier (and nastier) younger brother.

Farther off the road, indeed much more the enemy, there was also an array in Red Reason, represented, for instance, by a line of followers of Spinoza and Hegel. These objected to the eclecticism of the postmodernism children of fascistic Heidegger and Nietzsche. They claimed using rationality for the direct benefit of everyday people.

Grand narratives, the Reds argued against the postmodernists, aren’t grounds for self-sabotage, but the bases of dialectical biologist Richard Levins’s version of living Marx’s 11th thesis: Against all efforts to infer colonial expropriation as the natural order of things, we can practice a science for the people that fights for a fairer redistribution in wealth and resources. We can fight for a better world global North and South that against capitalist cant is well within our grasp.

Here lies the flub. I ended the lecture in a joshing offhand that in the spirit of such rationality perhaps the guillotine of revolutionary Paris served as a different kind of calculator. It was only upon circling back long after the Brady Bunch windows of the workshop winked away into the Zoom afternoon that I decided that last remark was a joke.

*

In short, yes, we need to try to remember the long haul in how we arrived upon our protopandemic moment. The 24-hour news cycle around H5N1 or Biden vs. Trump or any other ahistorical kerfuffle is a punishing reset of a Memento amnesia.

We know any synthesis of an historical moment of whatever length of origin is surely something other than its components. One thinks of the silly graphic of the snake swallowing an elephant to become a sauropod dinosaur.

In the other direction, however, these now passing contributions to such a Hegelian dialectic remain remembered by those who followed the history how we got here. We remember the snake. We remember the elephant. We still see them as they were. It’s what gives the synthesis its frisson.

Concern over possible pandemics come in more regular waves than actual outbreaks. That should be considered a good thing. A deadly pandemic every couple years just seems horrific. I’ve learned over 25 years of tracking bird flu, however, the danger may also be in the alerts serving more to absolve the world system from acting on the alarms.

I named the problematic at the very start of The Fault in Our SARS:

Each “surprise” that the virus refuses to cooperate with such hopium, acting in its own interests instead of ours, also serves to protect the system from the implications of its refusal to act. These surprises—pretending we don’t know what we know—are themselves an ideological project. The logic of fantasy remains stuck to the logic of production. The business of governing a system in decline, after all, is about managing expectations. All is well, get back to work, until, suddenly, it isn’t, as it always was.

A related if slightly orthogonal condition is presenting a crisis mentality as a form of competence. We wrote during West Africa Ebola of the uses emergencies served in boxing out structural interventions:

Emergency responses are critical, of course, but such logistics are an indirect, if perhaps in most cases unintended, means by which to avoid addressing the greater foundational contexts driving the emergence of diseases. That is, however critically unaware its practitioners, the omission serves as an ideological design feature partial to the present political and economic orders.

With the resulting damage embedded one into the other:

Commoditizing the forest may have lowered the region’s ecosystemic threshold to such a point that no emergency intervention can drive the Ebola outbreak low enough to burn out. Novel spillovers suddenly express larger forces of infection. On the other end of the epicurve, a mature outbreak continues to circulate, with the potential to intermittently rebound. In short, neoliberalism’s structural shifts are no mere background on which the emergency of Ebola takes place. The shifts are the emergency as much as the virus itself.

Do not mistake our meaning. We all must continue to pronounce the obvious until the dreamers are shook awake (or the schemers shook off). Otherwise, as I wrote in Big Farms Make Big Flu, our cynicism flatters us into inaction. Another kind of somnolence to avoid, this one of our own ostensible opposition.

*

But the core complication remains whether or not we embrace such a Gramsician optimism of the will.

Social epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves’s latest identifies a variant on this peculiar American penchant for gilding a turd. Which, at this end of the cycle of accumulation, will be the imperial standard here on out.

Gonsalves finds in the liberal moment an anti-empiricism pretending away COVID in the way New Yorker religion writer Emma Green weaponized against the People’s CDC in late 2022. “On the one hand,” Gonsalves writes,

we’re getting a triumphalist tribute to our performance during the first four years of the (ongoing) pandemic. At the same time, we’re being told we got it all wrong in our response to Covid. Either way, these narratives don’t bode well for our future.

The best and brightest are now found at these Biden barricades:

First, we have David Wallace-Wells’s New York Times piece on “Who ‘Won’ Covid.” I mean, OK, it’s a little ghoulish to horse-race this after more than 1.1 million American deaths (a number that is likely an undercount), but Wallace-Wells’s bottom line is that hey, we’re not Uganda, Zambia, Chad, Zimbabwe or Mozambique. Or, as he says, the U.S. is “nevertheless closer to the world’s best performers than its worst ones.”

This “nevertheless” carries a lot of weight for Wallace-Wells, because compared to our peer nations in the G7, there is not much to crow about: We did terribly. He acknowledges this, but assures us that, “nevertheless,” we did good, people. Yay. The piece is designed to obfuscate, not elucidate. After reading Wallace-Wells, I feel like we’re winning so much, I am now quite tired of winning, as the oracle of Mar-a-Lago predicted so long ago.

From COVID to Palestine, fascism, a death cult, isn’t a political party. It’s a social formation wherein the political class of both parties stateside redirects the accumulating rage at a program organized around helping the rich cash out on the last of the public commons—redirects it upon the poorest and most vulnerable.

Gonsalves disabused me of my sore hope that a colleague hadn’t taken up the reins helping the gallop right through the Overton window:

Our last example of Covid revisionism comes from inside the house, in a compilation of essays by Sandro Galea, the dean of the Boston University School of Public Health. His new book, Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time, chastises his peers in a way that seems off the mark.

First, Galea suggests that public health “got political” during the pandemic, in part as an overreaction to “an empowered right-wing and the Trump administration’s frequent hostility to public health.” This is a deeply ahistorical reading of public health, one that fails to recognize that it has always been political. From its roots in the Industrial Revolution, public health has oscillated between a progressive vision, which was represented by pioneers such as Rudolf Virchow and Friedrich Engels, and a far less liberal one, in which, as Yale historian Frank Snowden has said, “urban cleansing took on a figurative as well as a literal sense, and was seen as a potential solution to the threat posed by the ‘dangerous classes.’”

This dialectic has persisted in public health since its start; I fear that Galea’s idea of a space free from politics hides a less-than-objective predisposition. It’s meant to claim a specific viewpoint as neutral and true…

And on whom does liberal Galea glom during these illiberal times?

Galea has a soft spot in his book for the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by lockdown skeptics in October 2020. He’s fond of it not because, he says, he believes in its assumptions or prescriptions but because the rest of us tried, judged, and convicted the authors in the court of public opinion instead of judging it scientifically. Galea fails to mention that the Great Barrington Declaration was not a scientific manuscript, but a document issued by a right-wing think tank. It was never proposed for scientific review…

I may have mistaken Galea hosting then-CDC director and soft eugenicist Rochelle Walensky as a combination of a dean’s obligations to his school and ten-dimensional chess to maneuver the political class back to practicing—rather than violating—public health. As, in contrast, I think Steven Woolf tries in two excellent attempts (here and here) in the American Journal of Public Health.

“So much of this, as other writers have said,” Gonsalves explains,

is about class in America. The [New York] Times’ Covid coverage has frequently tilted toward the needs of white and wealthy readers—ones who could sequester away at home or in their country houses during the height of the pandemic, whose kids went to schools with new ventilation systems and Covid testing and for whom the pandemic response was just good enough (we’re not Uganda!). For others like [NPR apostate Uri] Berliner and Galea, there seems to be a deep need to lean into power in its ascendancy—that is, to show conservatives that they have a friend, with support for the lab leak theory and the Great Barrington Declaration meant trot out their bona fides.

“Except,” Gonsalves follows through on the implications for global health,

this all makes us more vulnerable to the next pandemic, by suggesting that mitigation efforts were overzealous, not supported by the data, did more harm than good, and were “just political,” and that what happened to us was not so bad in terms of international comparisons. And the obsequiousness with which some try to gain the favor of conservatives shows a real misreading of the threats coming for public health from a possible Donald Trump presidency, ongoing attacks on public health at the state and local level, and a willingness to play fast and loose with the data.

The aforementioned Dick Levins, in whose lab Galea served as a postdoc, would have been disappointed.

(Much more at link.)

https://mronline.org/2024/05/28/whether ... the-point/

*******

Lost in the Green Transition: Which Workers Win and Lose
Posted on May 28, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Green New Deal boosters tout all the great jobs that the energy transition will create. They overlook employment losses and/or simply assume those workers will be able to step into new roles. The post below suggests the skill difference means that may not be the case. And “let them eat training” remedies don’t have a great record of success.

By Orsetta Causa, Senior Economist Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD); Maxime Nguyen, Consultant Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD); and Emilia Soldani, Economist Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). Originally published at VoxEU

Greening the economy will entail the contraction of high-polluting jobs. This column presents new OECD research using labour force data from a large sample of European countries that suggests green and high-polluting jobs are unequally distributed across socioeconomic groups. Green jobs are associated with higher educational attainment, high-polluting jobs with lower educational attainment, and women are underrepresented in both green and high-polluting jobs. Minimising transition costs – with targeted policies that facilitate reskilling and match workers with high-demand jobs – will be crucial to accelerating decarbonisation while reducing displacement penalties for affected workers.

Greening the economy refers to the transition towards more sustainable and environmentally friendly practices in various sectors (Pisu et al. 2022). This can significantly impact labour market outcomes and inequalities, including job creation and transformation, skills demand and training, as well as territorial disparities. While aggregate employment effects could be relatively small, the combination of policies and technological change needed to bring about decarbonisation will require reallocation of production factors, which will have distributional effects, possibly increasing inequality.

One lesson from the impact of globalisation/technological change is that moderate aggregate effects or even aggregate gains can go hand-in-hand with concentrated losses for certain groups of workers and their communities, especially when the changes take place rapidly (Ottaviano et al. 2021). Preventing this from happening in the green transition requires understanding labour market dynamics and elaborating appropriate policy responses. Such policies would improve the allocation of workers and their deployability – for instance, towards performing green tasks – as well as working to manage and minimise the scarring effects associated with job losses in polluting industries. Understanding and addressing distributional implications of climate policies is also fundamental for political acceptability (Stantcheva et al. 2022).

Based on our two recent papers (Causa et al. 2024a, 2024b), in this column we deliver new evidence and stylised facts on the incidence across selected European countries of green and high polluting jobs, their geographical distribution, and their incidence among different categories of workers. By identifying the characteristics of affected workers, we provide insights on how public policies can support workers and a just transition to low-emission economies.

A New Empirical Framework to Study the Labour Market Effects of the Green Transition

The starting point is a new empirical framework to study the labour market effects of the green transition, contributing to the literature and debate along the following dimensions: (1) the cross-country comparative perspective, (2) the use of individual/worker-level data, and (3) the empirically based granular analysis. Most of the empirical literature in this area has focused either on single countries, in particular the US thanks to the availability of high-quality ready-to use data, or on cross-country aggregate data.

The analysis builds on established measurement approaches for identifying ‘green’ and ‘high-polluting’ jobs, in particular O*NET (2010) based on US information. The framework is worked out and revisited to be applied to harmonised European labour force survey data. To overcome the limitations of applying US-based metrics, this paper proposes a new approach to identify ‘high-polluting’ jobs, based on European emission data by country and industry. The main advantage of relying on country-specific data on emissions is that it allows the capture of cross-country heterogeneity in emission intensity by industry. The analysis shows that these differences can be very large: for instance, in electricity, gas, steam, and air conditioning supply activities, the most polluting countries emit four times more GHG per worker than the least polluting countries.

Stylised Facts About Green and High Polluting Jobs

The Big Picture
Based on the newly developed empirical approach, Figure 1 reports the estimated shares of green and high polluting jobs across European countries over the period 2011–2019. The main highlights are:

The estimated share of green jobs is 8% on average across the countries covered. The incidence of green jobs varies between around 10% in the UK and Estonia, and 5% in Greece.
The estimated share of high polluting jobs is around 4% on average across the countries covered. This share varies from around 9% in Czechia and the Slovak Republic to 2% in Austria and Portugal.
Over the last decade, labour markets have not become significantly greener, on average, across the European countries covered. There has been no significant change in the share of green and high polluting jobs; some countries have actually experienced an increase in the incidence of high polluting jobs.
Figure 1 Green and high polluting jobs across European countries, 2011–2019

Share of total employment (%)

A) Green jobs


B) High polluting jobs


Note: The estimated employment share of green jobs in Belgium is 7.3% in 2011 and rises to 8% in 2019, while that of high polluting jobs is stable at 2.4%. See text for definitions.
Source: EULFS and authors’ calculations.
Going Granular

A more granular picture about green and high polluting jobs, focusing on their incidence across different socioeconomic groups, delivers the following insights:

In all countries, women are less likely to hold green jobs (Figure 2, Panel A). For example, in the UK, 15% of male workers are employed in green jobs, more than double the rate (6%) for female workers. This largely reflects the over-representation of women in service industries like hospitality, health, and education, which are mostly neutral from an environmental perspective. By contrast, men are overrepresented in manufacturing, construction, and utilities (the industries with the highest share of both green and high polluting jobs).
Workers with higher levels of education are more likely to hold green jobs relative to workers with middle and lower levels of education (Figure 2, Panel B). In Germany, 11% of workers with high levels of education are employed in green jobs, which is almost double the rate (6%) for workers with low or middle levels of education. This pattern is in line with evidence from the US showing that green occupations are, on average, higher-skill and less routine-intensive than non-green occupations and that they require high-level analytical and technical skills linked to technology (Vona et al. 2018).
Figure 2 Green jobs across socioeconomic groups, share of group employment in 2019

A) Gender


B) Educational attainment


Note: In France, 11% of employed males hold green jobs, by contrast with 4.6% of employed females. In Germany, 11% of workers with higher educational attainment hold green jobs, by contrast with 5.6% of low and middle educated workers.
Source: EULFS and authors’ calculations.
The distribution of green and high polluting jobs also varies between different areas, especially between urban and rural areas; in particular, high polluting jobs are systematically overrepresented in rural areas (Figure 3). This is in line with recent OECD work on the green transition and local economic development (OECD 2023).

Figure 3 The prevalence of high polluting and green jobs in rural and urban areas, 2019

Ratio between the share of high polluting/green jobs located in rural /urban areas and the share of all jobs located in rural/urban areas

A) High polluting jobs


B) Green jobs


Note: In Spain, high polluting jobs are more than twice as prevalent in rural areas than in the whole country, while they are half as prevalent in urban areas.
Source: EULFS and authors’ calculations.

The quality of jobs is not formally included in the measurement of green or high polluting jobs, the literature in this area being still at an early stage for reaching consensus on measuring quality alongside job quantity. Yet, labour force survey data can be mobilised to shed some light on this important issue. One key dimension in the context of the green transition is workers’ access to training: this is an especially relevant aspect of job quality insofar as moving towards greener activities may require requalification. Interpreting the results of this analysis with caution due to the simple bivariate nature of the exercise, the evidence suggests that in all countries covered, workers employed in high polluting jobs are less likely to participate in training relative to workers employed in green and other jobs (Figure 4). This raises policy concerns in the context of the green transition to the extent that workers in high polluting jobs are more likely to be displaced and to require requalification and other forms of training to facilitate labour market mobility.

Figure 4 Participation to training among workers employed in green and high polluting jobs, 2019

Percentage of workers who have attended non-formal education learning during the last four weeks


Note: In France, 25% of workers in green jobs have participated to non-formal training during the last four weeks, by contrast with 17% of workers in high polluting jobs.
Source: EULFS and authors’ calculations.

Policy Implications

The descriptive evidence in this column points to the policy challenges associated with greening the economy from a labour market perspective, reflecting several pieces of evidence, in particular: 1) the low progress achieved in terms of green jobs expansion, notwithstanding the still uncertain measurements and data, 2) the inequalities in terms of the socioeconomic composition of green jobs, especially the pervasive under-representation of women and workers with lower levels of education, and 3) the spatial divides associated with the geography of high-polluting and green jobs, particularly the concentration of high-polluting jobs in rural areas. In this context, achieving progress in reaching environmental objectives will require identifying workers and communities at risk of displacement and taking policy action to accompany individuals and localities navigating the transition. This includes well-designed and targeted active labour market policies, for instance to support job search, training, and requalification, and to remove obstacles to geographical relocation. At the same time, place-based policies will also be needed to support economic redeployment and social stability in the areas affected by the contraction of high-polluting production processes.

See original post for references

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05 ... -lose.html

Clues From Bird Flu’s Ground Zero on Dairy Farms in the Texas Panhandle
Posted on May 26, 2024 by Conor Gallagher

Conor here: Present in the following piece from KFF Health News are all the classics from US pandemic response:

The prioritization of commerce over public health.
The inability to collect data.
The distrust of the public health establishment for various reasons.
Failure to err on the side of caution. In this case, the following piece notes that “Federal restrictions have triggered a backlash from farmers who find them unduly punishing, given that pasteurized milk and cooked beef from dairy cattle appear to pose no risk to consumers.”
But a study just released in The New England Journal of Medicine notes the following:

Heat treatment at 72°C was performed, with the default settings of the PCR thermocycler (i.e., preheated lid at 105°C) or with a metal lid (heated to 72°C) covering the PCR block (see the Supplementary Appendix for details). After heat treatment, samples were inoculated into embryonated chicken eggs or Madin–Darby canine kidney (MDCK) cells for virus detection. Under these conditions, heat treatment for 15 or 20 seconds reduced virus titers by more than 4.5 log units but did not completely inactivate the virus…

By Amy Maxmen, a public health local editor and correspondent at KFF Health News. She covers efforts to prevent disease and improve well-being outside of the medical system, and the obstacles that stand in the way. Originally published at KFF Health News.

In early February, dairy farmers in the Texas Panhandle began to notice sick cattle. The buzz soon reached Darren Turley, executive director of the Texas Association of Dairymen: “They said there is something moving from herd to herd.”

Nearly 60 days passed before veterinarians identified the culprit: a highly pathogenic strain of the bird flu virus, H5N1. Had it been detected sooner, the outbreak might have been swiftly contained. Now it has spread to at least eight other states, and it will be hard to eliminate.

At the moment, the bird flu hasn’t adapted to spread from person to person through the air like the seasonal flu. That’s what it would take to give liftoff to another pandemic. This lucky fact could change, however, as the virus mutates within each cow it infects. Those mutations are random, but more cows provide more chances of stumbling on ones that pose a grave risk to humans.

Why did it take so long to recognize the virus on high-tech farms in the world’s richest country? Because even though H5N1 has circulated for nearly three decades, its arrival in dairy cattle was most unexpected. “People tend to think that an outbreak starts at Monday at 9 a.m. with a sign saying, ‘Outbreak has started,’” said Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist at the World Health Organization. “It’s rarely like that.”

By investigating the origins of outbreaks, researchers garner clues about how they start and spread. That information can curb the toll of an epidemic and, ideally, stop the next one. On-the-ground observations and genomic analyses point to Texas as ground zero for this outbreak in cattle. To backtrack events in Texas, KFF Health News spoke with more than a dozen people, including veterinarians, farmers, and state officials.

An early indication that something had gone awry on farms in northwestern Texas came from devices hitched to collars on dairy cows. Turley describes them as “an advanced fitness tracker.” They collect a stream of data, such as a cow’s temperature, its milk quality, and the progress of its digestion — or, rather, rumination — within its four-chambered stomach.

What farmers saw when they downloaded the data in February stopped them in their tracks. One moment a cow seemed perfectly fine, and then four hours later, rumination had halted. “Shortly after the stomach stops, you’d see a huge falloff in milk,” Turley said. “That is not normal.”

Tests for contagious diseases known to whip through herds came up negative. Some farmers wondered if the illness was related to ash from wildfires devastating land to the east.

In hindsight, Turley wished he had made more of the migrating geese that congregate in the panhandle each winter and spring. Geese and other waterfowl have carried H5N1 around the globe. They withstand enormous loads of the virus without getting sick, passing it on to local species, like blackbirds, cowbirds, and grackles, that mix with migrating flocks.

But with so many other issues facing dairy farmers, geese didn’t register. “One thing you learn in agriculture is that Mother Nature is unpredictable and can be devastating,” Turley said. “Just when you think you have figured it out, Mother Nature tells you you do not.”

Cat Clues

One dairy tried to wall itself off, careful not to share equipment with or employ the same workers as other farms, Turley recalled. Its cattle still became ill. Turley noted that the farm was downwind of another with an outbreak, “so you almost think it has to have an airborne factor.”

On March 7, Turley called the Texas Animal Health Commission. They convened a One Health group with experts in animal health, human health, and agriculture to ponder what they called the “mystery syndrome.” State veterinarians probed cow tissue for parasites, examined the animals’ blood, and tested for viruses and bacteria. But nothing explained the sickness.

They didn’t probe for H5N1. While it has jumped into mammals dozens of times, it rarely has spread between species. Most cases have been in carnivores, which likely ate infected birds. Cows are mainly vegetarian.

“If someone told me about a milk drop in cows, I wouldn’t think to test for H5N1 because, no, cattle don’t get that,” said Thomas Peacock, a virologist at the Pirbright Institute of England who studies avian influenza.

Postmortem tests of grackles, blackbirds, and other birds found dead on dairy farms detected H5N1, but that didn’t turn the tide. “We didn’t think much of it since we have seen H5N1-positive birds everywhere in the country,” said Amy Swinford, director of the Texas A&M Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory.

In the meantime, rumors swirled about a rash of illness among workers at dairy farms in the panhandle. It was flu season, however, and hospitals weren’t reporting anything out of the ordinary.

Bethany Boggess Alcauter, director of research at the National Center for Farmworker Health, has worked in the panhandle and suspected farmworkers were unlikely to see a doctor even if they needed one. Clinics are far from where they live, she said, and many don’t speak English or Spanish — for instance, they may speak Indigenous languages such as Mixtec, which is common in parts of Mexico. The cost of medical care is another deterrent, along with losing pay by missing work — or losing their jobs — if they don’t show up. “Even when medical care is there,” she said, “it’s a challenge.”

What finally tipped off veterinarians? A few farm cats died suddenly and tested positive for H5N1. Swinford’s group — collaborating with veterinary labs at Iowa State and Cornell universities — searched for the virus in samples drawn from sick cows.

“On a Friday night at 9 p.m., March 22, I got a call from Iowa State,” Swinford said. Researchers had discovered antibodies against H5N1 in a slice of a mammary gland. By Monday, her team and Cornell researchers identified genetic fragments of the virus. They alerted authorities. With that, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that H5N1 had hit dairy cattle.





Genomic sequences from H5N1 viruses suggest the current bird flu epidemic started with a spillover from birds into cows in Texas, and then spread to other states within cattle. Routes and timing remain uncertain because of limited data. (KFF HEALTH NEWS MAY 15 SCREENSHOT OF NEXTSTRAIN.ORG)

Recalling rumors of sick farmworkers, Texas health officials asked farmers, veterinarians, and local health departments to encourage testing. About 20 people with coughs, aches, irritated eyes, or other flu-like symptoms stepped forward to be swabbed. Those samples were shipped to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All but one were negative for H5N1. On April 1, the CDC announced this year’s first case: a farmworker with an inflamed eye that cleared up within days.

Thirteen dairy farms in the panhandle had been affected, said Brian Bohl, director of field operations at the Texas Animal Health Commission. Farmers report that outbreaks among the herds last 30 to 45 days and most cows return to milking at their usual pace.

The observation hints that herds gain immunity, if temporarily. Indeed, early evidence shows that H5N1 triggers a protective antibody response in cattle, said Marie Culhane, a professor of veterinary population medicine at the University of Minnesota. Nonetheless, she and others remain uneasy because no one knows how the virus spreads, or what risk it poses to people working with cattle.

Although most cows recover, farmers said the outbreaks have disrupted their careful timing around when cattle milk, breed, and birth calves.

Farmers want answers that would come with further research, but the spirit of collaboration that existed in the first months of the Texas outbreak has fractured. Federal restrictions have triggered a backlash from farmers who find them unduly punishing, given that pasteurized milk and cooked beef from dairy cattle appear to pose no risk to consumers.

The rules, such as prohibiting infected cattle from interstate travel for 30 days, pose a problem for farmers who move pregnant cattle to farms that specialize in calving, to graze in states with gentler winters, and to return home for milking. “When the federal order came out, some producers said, ‘I’m going to quit testing,’” Bohl said.

In May, the USDA offered aid, such as up to $10,000 to test and treat infected cattle. “The financial incentives will help,” Turley said. But how much remains to be seen.

Federal authorities have pressed states to extract more intel from farms and farmworkers. Several veterinarians warn such pressure could fracture their relationships with farmers, stifling lines of communication.

Having fought epidemics around the world, Farrar cited examples of when strong-arm surveillance pushed outbreaks underground. During an early 2000s bird flu outbreak in Vietnam, farmers circumvented regulations by moving poultry at night, bribing inspection workers, and selling their goods through back channels. “Learning what drivers and fears exist among people is crucial,” Farrar said. “But we always seem to realize that at a later date.”

A powerful driver in the U.S.: Milk is a $60 billion industry. Public health is also bound to bump up against politics in Texas, a state so aggrieved by pandemic restrictions that lawmakers passed a bill last year barring health officials from recommending covid-19 vaccines.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said that when he heard that federal agents with the CDC and USDA were considering visits to farms — including those where farmers reported the cattle had recovered — he advised against it. “Send federal agents to dairy that’s not sick?” he said. “That doesn’t pass the smell test.”

From Texas to the Nation

Peacock said genomic analyses of H5N1 viruses point to Texas as ground zero for the cattle epidemic, emerging late last year.

“All of these little jigsaw puzzle pieces corroborate undetected circulation in Texas for some time,” said Peacock, an author on one report about the outbreak.

Evidence suggests that either a single cow was infected by viruses shed from birds — perhaps those geese, grackles, or blackbirds, he said. Or the virus spilled over from birds into cattle several times, with only a fraction of those moving from cow to cow.

Sometime in March, viruses appear to have hitched a ride to other states as cows were moved between farms. The limited genomic data available links the outbreak in Texas directly to others in New Mexico, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, and South Dakota. However, the routes are imprecise because the USDA hasn’t attached dates and locations to data it releases.

Researchers don’t want to be caught off guard again by the shape-shifting H5N1 virus, and that will require keeping tabs on humans. Most, if not all, of about 900 people diagnosed with H5N1 infections worldwide since 2003 acquired it from animals, rather than from humans, Farrar said. About half of those people died.

Occasional tests of sick farmworkers aren’t sufficient, he said. Ideally, a system is set up to encourage farmworkers, their communities, and health care workers to be tested whenever the virus hits farms nearby.

“Health care worker infections are always a sign of human-to-human transmission,” Farrar said. “That’s the approach you want to take — I am not saying it’s easy."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05 ... andle.html

[blindpig]

A pump jack over an oil well near Dacono, Colorado. US banks contributed 30% of the total $705bn provided in 2023, the report found. (Photo: David Zalubowski/AP)

Banks give $7tln to fossil fuel firms since Paris deal: Report
Originally published: The Guardian on May 13, 2024 by Damien Gayle (more by The Guardian) (Posted May 30, 2024)

The world’s big banks have handed nearly $7tn (£5.6tn) in funding to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris agreement to limit carbon emissions, according to research.

In 2016, after talks in Paris, 196 countries signed an agreement to limit global heating as a result of carbon emissions to at most 2C above preindustrial levels, with an ideal limit of 1.5C to prevent the worst impacts of a drastically changed climate.

Many countries have since promised to reduce carbon emissions, but the latest research shows private interests continued to funnel money to oil, gas and coal companies, which have used it to expand their operations.

Eight in 10 of the world’s most eminent climate scientists now foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, according to the results of a Guardian survey published last week—an outcome expected to lead to devastating consequences for civilization.

Researchers for the banking on climate chaos report, now in its 15th edition, analysed the world’s top 60 banks’ underwriting and lending to more than 4,200 fossil fuel firms and companies causing the degradation of the Amazon and Arctic.

Those banks, they found, gave $6.9tn in financing to oil, coal and gas companies, nearly half of which—$3.3tn—went towards fossil fuel expansion. Even in 2023, two years after many large banks vowed to work towards lowering emissions as part of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, bank finance for fossil fuel companies was $705bn, with $347bn going towards expansion, the report says.

U.S. banks were the biggest financiers of the fossil fuel industry, contributing 30% of the total $705bn provided in 2023, the report found. JP Morgan Chase gave the most of any bank in the world, providing $40.8bn to fossil fuel companies in 2023, while Bank of America came in third. The world’s second biggest financier of fossil fuels was the Japanese bank Mizuho, which provided $37.1bn.

London-based Barclays was Europe’s biggest fossil fuel financier, with $24.2bn, followed by Spain’s Santander at $14.5bn and Germany’s Deutsche Bank with $13.4bn. Overall, European banks stumped up just over a quarter of the total fossil fuel financing in 2023, according to the report.

Tom BK Goldtooth, the executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, which co-authored the study, said:

Financiers and investors of fossil fuels continue to light the flame of the climate crisis. Paired with generations of colonialism, the fossil fuel industry and banking institutions’ investment in false solutions create unlivable conditions for all living relatives and humanity on Mother Earth.

As Indigenous peoples, we remain on the frontlines of the climate catastrophe, and the fossil fuel industry targets our lands and territories as sacrifice zones to continue their extraction. Capitalism and its extraction-based economy will only perpetuate more harm and destruction against our Mother Earth and it must come to an end.

Critics of the report said its methodology, which relied on investigating deals reported by financial market data companies such as Bloomberg and Refinitiv, meant researchers did not have a detailed view of what was being financed, and by whom.

Specifically, syndicated loans, bond issues and underwriting arrangements often involved several banks with varying levels of exposure. And financing to fossil fuel companies to fund transition technology projects could not be distinguished from financing for new oil wells, they said.

Spokespeople for Barclays, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Santander all emphasised that their organisations were supporting energy sector clients’ transitions toward more sustainable business models. Mizuho declined a request for comment.

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask if you would consider supporting the Guardian’s journalism as we enter one of the most consequential news cycles of our lifetimes in 2024.

With the potential of another Trump presidency looming, there are countless angles to cover around this year’s election—and we’ll be there to shed light on each new development, with explainers, key takeaways and analysis of what it means for America, democracy and the world.

From Elon Musk to the Murdochs, a small number of billionaire owners have a powerful hold on so much of the information that reaches the public about what’s happening in the world. The Guardian is different. We have no billionaire owner or shareholders to consider. Our journalism is produced to serve the public interest—not profit motives.

And we avoid the trap that befalls much U.S. media: the tendency, born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality. We always strive to be fair. But sometimes that means calling out the lies of powerful people and institutions—and making clear how misinformation and demagoguery can damage democracy.

From threats to election integrity, to the spiraling climate crisis, to complex foreign conflicts, our journalists contextualize, investigate and illuminate the critical stories of our time. As a global news organization with a robust U.S. reporting staff, we’re able to provide a fresh, outsider perspective—one so often missing in the American media bubble.

Around the world, readers can access the Guardian’s paywall-free journalism because of our unique reader-supported model. That’s because of people like you. Our readers keep us independent, beholden to no outside influence and accessible to everyone—whether they can afford to pay for news, or not.

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*****

Preparing for Collapse: Why the Focus on Climate/Energy Sustainability Is Destructive
Posted on May 30, 2024 by Yves Smith

In the later part of this post, I am reproducing a new article from Yale Climate Connections, how to talk with (just about) anyone about climate and the 2024 elections, because it illustrates how fatally off track well-meaning Green New Deal and others advocating various climate sustainabilty strategies are.

Mind you, the piece does give some good tips on how to engage individuals with political beliefs differing from yours and hopefully chip away a bit at them. But the bigger issue is that we are well past the point where that amounts to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It leads people who are worried about the grim future for planetary health and what that means for civilization to think that there are various fixes that can prevent very bad outcomes. We are way past that.

Lambert and I have regularly talked about the Jackpot, from the William Gibson novel The Peripheral. People from about 70 years in the future have figured out how to mess with the present (Gibson does point out that that creates forks in events, rather than people from the future being able to meddle with the present so as to change the reality they are in). Here Wilf from the future speaks to heroine Flynn in the present (which is actually the nearer future):

[The Jackpot] was androgenic, [Wilf] said, and [Flynn] knew from Ciencia Loca and National Geographic that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late.

So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad sh*t, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did….Wilf told her [the Jackpot] killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years…

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there. ….

But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of sh*t, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable. ….[/i]

Bear in mind that Gibson depicts his story as romantic, and not just because the major characters get happily hitched at the end. Gibson recognizes that a Hail-Mary-pass level techno-save is vanishingly unlikely, even with decades of horror during the transition.

We have some readers who are going in a survivalist direction, including retirees who have gotten arable land in areas that look to have water and energy sources that are secure and are well on the way to subsistence farming. How one contends with injury and ill health is another matter (how do you enlist medically knowledgeable people in your effort? What regularly used medications have long shelf lives? What do you do when supplies run out?). This exercise is likely productive for individuals and communities for a while, but again, the profile of the problem is markedly worse.

Key sections from the must read, The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? from the MIT Press Reader, an interview by science fiction writer Peter Watts, with Dan Brooks, co-author of A Darwinian Survival Guide:

Peter Watts: In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.

In response to all of this, the last COP was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas….

Daniel Brooks: Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?…

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive….

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours….

What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those [desirable] elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?…

It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be “OK.” We don’t think that’s realistic. It is a possibility, but we don’t think that’s a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and that’s what we’re really talking about: What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we “recover”? In other words — and this is in analogy with Asimov’s Foundation trilogy — if we do nothing, there’s going to be a collapse and it’ll take 30,000 years for the galaxy to recover. But if we start doing things now, then it maybe only takes 1,000 years to recover. So using that analogy, what can some human beings start to do now that would shorten the period of time necessary to recover? Could we, in fact, recover within a generation? Could we be without a global internet for 20 years, but within 20 years, could we have a global internet back again?

There is more to this discussion, but I hope that is sufficient to sober you up.

Contrast this with the so-well-meaning-that-the-treaclyness-hurts-my-teeth article from the Conversation we mentioned at the outset. I don’t mean to sound as if I am singling out the author. The piece exemplifies a pervasive school of PMC-think, that if enough people have “conversations” and reach sufficient agreement, that solves problems. It’s pure symbol-manipulator behavior, as if a shared vision is tantamount to action. Not only are plans not action, when formulated this way, they are often too general and/or abstract to serve as adequate guides for action. And that’s before considering the elephant in the room of greatly underestimating the scale of what needs to happen.

By Osha Davidson, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Scientific American, National Geographic, the New York Times, Discover, Sierra, High Country News, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and Grist, among others. He served as contributing editor at Earthzine, a NASA-funded journal covering remote sensing, and blogged about the emerging clean energy market for Forbes. His books include “The Best of Enemies,” which was a finalist for the NYPL’s Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism and was later adapted into a film starring Sam Rockwell and Taraji P. Henson. “The Enchanted Braid” was shortlisted for the UK Natural World Book Prize, often called the “Green Booker.” “Under Fire” was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and appeared on several “best books of the year” lists. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections

Climate change may not officially be on the ballot this November, but the climate and energy policies of the two major parties couldn’t be further apart. President Joe Biden has taken a number of historic steps toward a clean energy economy. While far more needs to be done, a Trump victory “would become an all-out assault on any possible progress on climate change,” according to Pete Maysmith of the League of Conservation Voters.

For people who are concerned about how the election could affect climate action, one of the most effective ways to have an impact is by talking about it with other voters. Here are some tips for how to talk about the climate stakes of the 2024 election with friends, family, and neighbors.

Start by Listening

In her more than two decades as director of the Sierra Club’s chapter in purple-state Arizona, Sandy Bahr has plenty of experience talking with voters from across the political spectrum about the impact elections can have on climate policy. The most important advice she has for these dialogues is the one most frequently neglected.

“A big part of a conversation is listening,” she says. “What do they think about climate change? You have to know where the other person is coming from to move the conversation forward.”

Jane Conlin, co-leader of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby in Tucson, agrees. “You have to approach people with an open mind and with respect.” People don’t want to be lectured to.

“We always begin by searching for common ground,” explains Conlin. “It’s just talking about the things that you see and experience every day. There are so many ways to have a conversation because we know that climate change is affecting every aspect of our lives.”

All Climate Politics Is Local

Where people live determines what they care about most. In Arizona, for example, nearly everyone is concerned about water. In rural areas, the issue may be agriculture.

“Ranchers and farmers know that there’s less water coming down the Colorado River,” Bahr says.

In the southern part of the state, the Sonoran desert, the fast-growing urban centers have long relied on the Colorado and on groundwater, which, Bahr says, is shrinking due to both over-pumping and slower recharging from a decreasing amount of rainfall.

“Not all water issues are attributable to climate change,” she points out, “but it’s making a situation that was already bad much worse. So leading with water is a good way to connect with people here.”

No place is immune from extreme weather linked to the changing climate, as demonstrated by 2023, the warmest year for the planet in recorded history. Along the Gulf Coast states, climate change is causing sea level rise and more powerful and more frequent hurricanes. Last year, triple-digit temperatures across the Plain states to the southeastern U.S. in August were associated with the formation of massive heat domes linked to hundreds of deaths. Increased humidity from a warming ocean fed “atmospheric rivers” causing massive destruction across the West Coast. For weeks the northeastern seaboard was blanketed with smoke from Canadian wildfires exacerbated by climate change. Whatever form weather extremes took, the people who lived through them won’t forget their impact and will likely be eager to talk about them.

Talk about Electrification

Because over 75% of climate change is caused by burning fossil fuel for power, electrifying the grid and transportation is critical to a sustainable future. Fortunately, transitioning to a clean energy economy offers a variety of issues that are engaging.

As Sandy Bahr points out climate change “is a pocketbook issue. Even if it’s just higher prices for electricity, that’s a big concern for almost everybody.”

With the cost of solar panels dropping by 85% over the last decade, Conlin says that clean energy is a hot topic in Tucson, where residents experienced a record 14 days of 110-plus degree temperatures last summer.

“We talk about the economic benefits of installing solar panels because people already have sky-high electricity bills from air conditioning in the desert. And then we can talk about voting for candidates in November who support clean and cheap energy.”

Electrification on such a massive scale is pushing technological innovations that fascinate people regardless of their politics. Conlin recalls a discussion she had recently with a man doing maintenance work on her house.

“He was interested in new technologies so I showed him my induction stove. I didn’t tell him the climate reasons for getting the stove. I just showed him how fast it heated water through magnetism.”

He was enthralled. When the conversation moved to cars, Conlin asked if he’d ever seen an electric vehicle up close.

“He had,” she says, “and he talked about how cool they are.”

Conlin’s under no illusion that the conversation will necessarily move the man to vote for climate-positive candidates.

“But,” she says, “I am hopeful that he has become more receptive to hearing about a transition from fossil fuels to an electricity-fueled economy. We expanded the conversation from the stove to cars to just, you know, how electrons are our friends! It’s an example of meeting people where they are and moving them along.”

Provide an Antidote to Feelings of Powerlessness

“With climate change, sometimes people feel a bit helpless and that creates inaction,” Bahr says. “It’s not always that people don’t care. It can be that they’re just overwhelmed.”

Even small actions can be an effective antidote to feelings of powerlessness, she says, pointing to a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that provided millions of dollars for a program in Phoenix where volunteers plant shade trees to make the city more livable as temperatures increase.

“Things like the tree-planting program,” Bahr says, “where people can go out and physically do something, helps them overcome that feeling of helplessness. It can be a powerful motivator to get involved.”

That personal participation can lead to voting for candidates who understand the issues and provide solutions.

How to Talk to Young Voters

All the above points hold for talking with younger voters, but there are additional factors to take into consideration, says Taylor Conley, an 18-year-old high school senior and climate activist in Tempe, Arizona.

“Personally, I’ve always felt a lot of concern about Arizona’s changing climate,” Conley says, “especially the worsening heat. So when a neighbor brought me to the Youth Climate Strike at the state capitol building in March 2019, I really liked both the community of youth there and the opportunity to do something to help the climate.”

Conley joined the Arizona Youth Climate Coalition and while helping organize events she had an epiphany.

“I realized I could actually have an impact,” she says. “I discovered that there’s power in working with others.”

Today, Conley codirects the Arizona Youth Climate Coalition, where her duties include talking with other students about voting for climate policy. It’s not always an easy conversation.

“A lot of kids are just absorbed in what they have going on in their lives right now,” she says, “and they don’t really want to think about it.”

Others know that climate change is real but they don’t believe that they can have an effect. When speaking with them, Conley brings up Tucson’s climate action and adaptation plan and mentions that Arizona Youth Climate Coalition’s Tucson team helped write the plan.

“Some of those students are surprised by what we’ve already accomplished. It’s empowering and it can lead to the next step: voting for candidates who support policies that align with our values.”

Conley, Bahr, and Conlin are all gearing up for the November election, and each is optimistic that a combination of proper messaging and hard work will lead to decisive action on climate policy.

“It’s a scary time for the environment,” says Bahr, “and a scary time for our democracy. But I don’t believe in trying to motivate people out of fear. I hope that people will be motivated by love for their fellow humans, for their communities, and for the other creatures we share this planet with.”

However the conversation begins, Bahr personally believes climate change itself has to be part of the conversation for several reasons.

“Some voters may not be engaged on the issue of climate change because no one has taken the time to talk with them about it in terms they can understand,” she says. “People don’t care about what they don’t know.”

Bahr adds that because the pace of warming is increasing, climate change has to be addressed directly.

“We really need to get this ball rolling faster,” Bahr says. “We need to reduce emissions as rapidly as possible while we’re also making ourselves more resilient to the impacts of climate change. We can’t afford to wait."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05 ... ctive.html

'Changing the way we behave', yes, but as Yves says the individualistic hippie survivalist mode ain't gonna cut it, for the example given and other reasons. Rather our behavior must change from individualist to social, from self-help to politics. So necessarily from capitalism to socialism, by any means necessary.

*****


A man irrigating a field with river water in northern New Mexico. (Photo: Jim O’Donnell)

A closer look at America’s water crisis
Originally published: The Progressive Magazine on May 29, 2024 by Christian Thorsberg (more by The Progressive Magazine) | (Posted May 31, 2024)

The sunflowers behind Conjunto Preschool in Española, New Mexico, are still inedible.

The soils that they sprout from are saturated with tetrachloroethene. The water poured by preschoolers, receiving some of their first lessons in gardening around these raised beds, is contaminated with trichloroethylene.

More than two decades ago, byproducts from cleaning supplies flowed from a local dry cleaner and laundromat into Española’s sole groundwater aquifer, the only source of drinking water for the town’s 10,000 residents. The contaminants also trickled into individual wells, a key water source for the Santa Clara Pueblo tribe’s 2,400 members.

For eighteen years, the fifty-eight-acre North Railroad Avenue Plume Superfund site underwent studies, treatments, and reviews at the direction of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 2019, cleanup and maintenance duties were transferred to the state’s hands. To this day, according to Beata Tsosie, a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, their water remains affected.

“Humans are an indicator species for the health of the environment, especially Indigenous people,” says Tsosie, the organizational director of Breath of My Heart Birthplace, a free midwifery care clinic and birth center in Española. Tsosie is also involved in Indigenous and environmental advocacy work.

“We’ve seen cancers, we’ve seen miscarriages, we’ve seen birth defects—the burden of proof of the harm [is] falling on us as one of the most impacted communities,” she adds.

Yet these school garden sunflowers continue to grow. And, if they had not been deemed “unacceptable risks to human health” by EPA guidelines, their seeds, stems, leaves, and petals could have been used in local recipes and healthy meals. Until then, the community continues to hope for a future brimming with cleaner, healthier New Mexico waters—a vision that last May, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 5 to 4 favor of Sackett v. EPA, turned all the more hazy.


Blue waters in Navajo Dam. (Photo: Jim O’Donnell)

The Clean Water Act’s scope shrunk significantly as a result of the ruling, which removed federal protections for America’s small streams and wetlands that do not run with water year-round or are disconnected from major waterbodies.

No state lost more than New Mexico, where an arid climate and mountainous geography make seasonal flows, isolated basins, and small channels the norm. Overnight, 96 percent of the state’s waterways—which in addition to supplying water for drinking and sanitation support the economies of subsistence fishers, growers, and a $2.4 billion outdoor recreation industry—were left federally unguarded, vulnerable to pollution and unregulated usage.

Making matters worse, says Rachel Conn, the deputy director of Amigos Bravos, a freshwater-focused environmental nonprofit in Taos, New Mexico, is a well-intentioned yet unprepared state government. The New Mexico Water Quality Act (NMWQA), a strong piece of state-level legislation, is the last safeguard standing for a majority of the state’s waters. Yet currently, it’s more bark than bite with virtually no infrastructure to support and enforce it.

“We don’t have a state program, we don’t have the regulations set, we don’t have the staff hired, we don’t have the systems in place to implement its protections,” Conn says.

So we’re left really vulnerable to unregulated discharges of pollution into our waterways.

New Mexico is one of only two states without a surface water permitting program, and one of three states that lacks the authority to issue National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPES) permits under the Clean Water Act. Officials estimate between $43 million and $54 million would be needed annually to support such a program. A significant victory was achieved this past January, when the state legislature approved the Land of Enchantment Legacy Fund with bipartisan support. The fund’s $300 million appropriation is the state’s first-ever consistent and long-term funding source for water and stream conservation.

But how and if the funds are allocated and used across New Mexico’s departments and communities remains to be seen. For the sake of its waters, the state has only a short window to get its act together. In roughly five years’ time, the current EPA-issued permits that regulate discharge and pollution—in mining, construction, or other development-oriented enterprises—will expire.

“That’s kind of the point we expect to see a lot of permits drop off,” Conn says.

It’s hard to monitor projects that go forward without a paper trail.

In April, New Mexico’s water worries featured prominently in the American Rivers Association’s annual “Most Endangered Rivers of 2024” report. It was a unique yet necessary decision to give the top spot to the entirety of the state’s riparian ecosystem, says Matt Rice, the association’s southwest regional director.

While a majority of New Mexico’s freshwater flows in its four largest rivers—the Rio Grande, the Gila, the San Juan, and the Pecos—there is virtually no part of the state’s vast watershed that is unconnected. High-elevation wetlands filter snowmelt into cool headwaters that flow into tributaries and channels, eventually proceeding to rivers’ main stems. But these alpine ecosystems, which act as water-purifying sponges, are no longer protected due to the Supreme Court’s decision. What begins in the mountains cascades down to surface water, crop fields, sinks, and showers.

“If there’s pollution going into one part of the watershed, it’s going to end up in the main stem, where there are structures that divert surface water for drinking,” Conn says.

If the water is dirtier, it is going to be more expensive to treat, and [that] will be a huge financial burden on New Mexico communities.

In May, New Mexico’s government released a new Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plan, outlining its intentions to strengthen water infrastructure, supply systems, and treatment facilities. The report also included dismal weather forecasts that these goals would need to overcome: statewide average temperature increases of between 3 degrees Fahrenheit and 5 degrees Fahrenheit, and from 5 to 10 percent less precipitation in all but a few counties by 2050.

“We no longer use the word ‘drought,’ because it suggests that there’s an end,” Rice says.

This is a different world, this is the aridification of the West. The climate crisis is a water crisis.

“Temperature is considered a pollutant,” Conn adds.


A dried up riverbed in the San Juan Basin watershed. (Photo: Jim O’Donnell)

New Mexico’s current hydrology and its leadership’s actions have the potential to be a blueprint for states like Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado. “If we can demonstrate to the Western United States that a diverse group of people, organizations, and interests can get together and protect rivers of natural, cultural, and community value, we can do anything,” Rice says.

And it isn’t just the West watching. Drier summers and milder winters across the country are already demoting full-time flows to weaker or part-time trickles. In February, a study of North American rivers published in Science found that 40 percent of the continent’s northern rivers, and 18 percent of its central rivers, are experiencing a “significant decrease in river flow seasonality.”

New Mexico is the last U.S. state with a citizen’s legislature, meaning that its lawmakers receive no salary and tend to step down at the end of their respective terms. This June, both the Senate (20 seats) and House (28 seats) chambers are up for election, setting up a major shake-up at a time when bipartisan partnership and prioritizing of water is needed more than ever.

“When everyone was talking about Flint, Michigan, it’s like, ‘We have that here, too,’” says Demis Foster, the executive director of Conservation Voters New Mexico, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to informing voters and holding leaders accountable on matters of the environment.

This is a very heartfelt issue here, and we have a lot of young people running for office who have watched their community suffer. It gives me hope that we have real community people running.

Across party lines and in both rural and urban counties, water is a top concern for New Mexico’s voters. According to a 2024 Colorado College State of the Rockies poll, 88 percent of the state’s respondents said that poor water quality due to old infrastructure or pollutants was a serious problem, and 96 percent said low river flows were an extremely serious problem. In the poll’s 2023 edition, 83 percent of New Mexicans said they “support requiring local governments to determine whether there is enough water available before approving new residential development projects.”

The next state legislature session, which lasts 60 days in odd-numbered years, opens in January 2025. For the sake of the state’s waters, Foster says, not a minute can afford to be wasted.

“We have to be ready with some kind of state rulemaking and policy that we can get put in place immediately,” she says.

So we have a water coalition in New Mexico now that is working really intensely on how we can put the policy together. These new candidates are going to be key to getting that done for us.

The effects of both climate and policy changes are felt first and most intimately at the local level.

In Northern New Mexico, these impacts are expected to endanger the health of acequias—surface-water community ditches that collect and divert freshwater from headwaters and streams, and have been prevalent in rural communities since Spanish colonizers and settlers introduced the practice in the 1600s. In the years since, these have become crucial social and environmental pillars within New Mexican culture and economies, providing small ranchers and growers with the water they need to water fields, grow crops, and raise livestock.

“Acequias are fundamental cornerstones of New Mexico’s history and culture, they’re important and beautiful components of life and water rights across generations,” Conn says.

Those dependent on these shared ditches, which have offered families and low-income residents cost-effective access to water for generations, will now face the real possibility of their contamination.

Though acequias aren’t the only water-distribution solution, they also are not ubiquitously appreciated. Indigenous growers know there used to be a greater balance between the use of irrigation ditches and dryland farming techniques that are less water-intensive, such as rainwater catchment, earthwork building, contour farming, and food forest ecologies. In the past, these growing practices withstood times of pre-colonization drought.

But Tsosie has observed an increased number of irrigation systems in her Santa Clara Pueblo, a legacy of Spanish influence. Here, the history of New Mexico’s hydrology has been reflected by the hardiness of her community’s seeds.

“There’s a possibility that some of our seeds may have gotten spoiled by having an abundance of water,” she says.

But we still have a lot of dryland seeds that grow only with rainwater.

The resurgence of these older growing methods may prove vital for small-time farmers, both Indigenous and non, whose only water supplies are now doubly endangered by pollution and drought. The possibility of relying on city water systems and state-led testing programs is both uncertain and potentially expensive, sparking questions that New Mexico’s government will need to answer soon.

“The cost to farmers, if contamination in our water and sewage systems is found, is going to be huge,” Tsosie says.

How are we going to adapt and switch over to different technologies? Is crop sampling [for toxic chemicals] going to be available? Are we going to have to pay for that?[/i]

https://mronline.org/2024/05/31/a-close ... er-crisis/

[blindpig]

Temperature rise ‘unprecedented in the instrumental record’
June 5, 2024
1.3°C jump in 2023; emissions budget shrinking fast



The second annual Indicators of Global Climate Change report, which is led by the University of Leeds, reveals that human-induced warming has risen to 1.19 °C over the past decade (2014-2023) — an increase from the 1.14 °C seen in 2013-2022 (set out in last year’s report).

Looking at 2023 in isolation, warming caused by human activity reached 1.3 °C. This is lower than the total amount of warming we experienced in 2023 (1.43 °C), indicating that natural climate variability, in particular El Niño, also played a role in 2023’s record temperatures.

The analysis also shows that the remaining carbon budget — how much carbon dioxide can be emitted before committing us to 1.5 °C of global warming — is only around 200 gigatons (billion tons), around five years’ worth of current emissions.

In 2020, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculated that the remaining carbon budget for 1.5 °C was in the 300–900 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide range, with a central estimate of 500. Since then, CO2 emissions and global warming have continued. At the start of 2024, the remaining carbon budget for 1.5 °C stood at 100 to 450 gigatons, with a central estimate of 200.

Project coordinator Piers Forster of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures said:

“Our analysis shows that the level of global warming caused by human action has continued to increase over the past year, even though climate action has slowed the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Global temperatures are still heading in the wrong direction and faster than ever before. Our analysis is designed to track the long-term trends caused by human activities. Observed temperatures are a product of this long-term trend modulated by shorter-term natural variations. Last year, when observed temperature records were broken, these natural factors were temporarily adding around 10% to the long-term warming.”

The authoritative source of scientific information on the state of the climate is the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but as its next major assessment will not happen until around 2027, this creates an “information gap,” particularly when climate indicators are changing rapidly. The new report is accompanied by an open data, open science platform — the Climate Change Tracker’s Indicators of Global Climate Change dashboard, which provides easy access to updated information on the key climate indicators.

Other key findings

Human-induced warming has risen to 1.19 °C over the past decade (2014-2023) — an increase from the 1.14 °C seen in 2013-2022 (set out in last year’s report).
Human-induced warming has been increasing at a rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record, reaching roughly 0.26 °C per decade over 2014-2023.
This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of greenhouse gas emissions being consistently high, equivalent to 53 billion tons of CO2 per year, as well as ongoing improvements in air quality, which are reducing the strength of human-caused cooling from particles in the atmosphere.


Graph from Carbon Brief summarizes percentage changes in global climate change indicators between 2019 and 2023. Data from Indicators of Global Climate Change.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... al-record/

******

When It Comes to the Environment, There Really Is No Such Thing as a “Good” Car
Posted on June 7, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. We’re doubling up on environment-related posts today to make up for having neglected this area a bit of late. This offering crystalizes an issue I have not articulated myself, and I realize also contributes to my annoyance with electric cars as climate change hopium. We need far more radical reductions in energy and materials use to have any hope of escaping worst outcome that pretty much all Green New Deal schemes contemplate. The Green New Deal is at its core, “Let’s use techno-fixes, better shopping, and some mild activity dis-incentives to allow us to preserve the way we do business now.”

Aside from the near-necessity of cars for dispersed single family homes, another climate-costly addiction, the auto industry is a massive source of economic activity, both directly and through procurement and sales networks (and in the US, financing!). As proof, look at how the US is fighting tooth and nail to prevent the entry of cheap Chinese EVs, which would eat considerably into the sale of US EVs and conventional cars. It’s too late now, but if we had more lead time, imagine the economic displacement caused by a serious and well funded effort to improve public transportation (even with that more forceful measure not being adequate either). Horrors!

Opening comment by Bill Haskell at Angry Bear. Original text by Emily Atkin and published at Heated

Contrasting EVs to gas powered vehicles. And will EVs be as bad or worst that gasoline powered vehicles. And some promoters of EVs go in the opposite direction over promoting EVs or what the article calls green washing EVS.

~~~~~~~~

Financially motivated EV misinformation comes from both sides of the aisle (the lane?). Industries that see EVs as a threat exaggerate their harms in a bid to get you to hate EVs. And industries profiting from EVs greenwash their benefits in a bid to get you to love EVs.

Most often, you can recognize EV misinformation by its attempts to promote black and white thinking. It’ll either be “Electric cars are bad and gas cars are good” or “Electric cars are good and gas cars are bad.”

But the truth is, when it comes to the environment, there really is no such thing as a “good” car. The real question is: how bad are these cars in relation to one another? This is where most EV misinformation lies.

Misleading: It’s more environmentally harmful to make an EV than a gas car.

This statement, by itself, is technically true. ”To run, EVs require six times the mineral input, by weight, of conventional vehicles, excluding steel and aluminum,” the Washington Post reported in 2023.

That’s because each EV has a 900-pound battery block containing roughly 353 pounds of crucial materials or metals including cobalt, nickel, lithium, manganese, aluminum and copper. Gas cars don’t have that, so it’s less emissions-intensive to create a gas car than an electric car.

What’s misleading about the statement is not the statement itself, but the context in which gas car proponents say it. Usually, they’re saying it to convince you that electric cars are way worse than gas cars for the environment. And that’s just frankly illogical, because the vast majority of pollution that comes from cars does not come from making the car. It comes from driving the car.



If you’re only buying a car to simply look at it and never drive it, then absolutely, it would be way more environmentally-friendly to buy a gas-powered car.

But if you do, in fact, intend to actually drive the car you buy, then an EV is going to be the less environmentally harmful choice—even if coal is part of your local electricity mix.

That’s not according to me, either. That’s according to a peer-reviewed study funded by the Ford Motor Company, a company that makes most of its profits from gas-powered vehicles.

That study, conducted by the University of Michigan, found that EVs become less emissions-intensive than gas cars after “1.4 to 1.5 years for sedans, 1.6 to 1.9 years for S.U.V.s and about 1.6 years for pickup trucks, based on the average number of vehicle miles traveled in the United States.”



Another study, conducted by Ricardo PLC for the nonprofit Fuels Institute, similarly found that driving a gas car is far worse for the planet than EVs, even when coal is part of the electricity mix.

Over 200,000 miles of driving, it found, a gas car emits 66 tons of greenhouse gas emissions, while an EV using the current average U.S. electricity mix emits 39 tons. In states that already have low-carbon electricity, an EV becomes less emissions-intensive than a gas car within 19,000 miles.

As time goes on, experts expect that it will take less and less driving time for EVs to become cleaner than gas cars. That’s not only because the electricity mix is expected to become cleaner; but also because the majority of battery materials used to make the cars are likely to be recycled.

Recycling and reusing the minerals used to make EV batteries “will drastically cut down the amount of wasted material compared with fossil fuels which disappear invisibly but harmfully to heat the planet,” the Guardian noted in December. The story cited data that suggests that “after recycling, battery material waste over an electric car’s life will be about the size of a football, or 30kg, by 2030.”

Of course, we all know how trustworthy corporations have been about recycling. But the point stands: anyone who says the creation of EVs makes them environmentally worse than gas-powered vehicles is either misinformed or trying to mislead you.

Myth: Because gas-powered cars are worse for the environment, we don’t need to worry about the harms of EVs.

Gas-powered cars are worse for the environment than EVs. But this does not mean EVs are good for the environment. Anyone telling you that is either misinformed or trying to mislead you.

In a recent investigation of this same debate, the Guardian found that gas vehicles were worse for the planet than electric vehicles. But it also ended on this important note: “the green credentials of electric cars [do not] absolve the buyers of battery minerals of responsibility for abuses in the supply chain.”

As Washington Post climate advice columnist Michael J. Coren wrote last year:

Mining minerals is never a clean affair. Cobalt from Congo, lithium and graphite from China, nickel from Indonesia and Russia, and battery supply chains that run through Xinjiang, in the Uyghur region where forced labor has been rampant: All of these have immediate problems, which The Washington Post explored in our “Clean Cars, Hidden Toll” series. Guinea, home to the world’s largest bauxite reserves for aluminum, yields misery for local communities. Nickel refiners in Indonesia are adopting a risky technology. Mineworkers in South Africa, the world’s largest producer of manganese, face neurological ills.

“The transition to low-carbon fuels is not a magic bullet with no negative outcome,” Sergey Paltsev, a senior research scientist at MIT, told Cohen. “There is no free lunch. But it’s much less harmful than if we stay with fossil fuels. That’s the conclusion.”

Misleading: The U.S. electric grid can’t handle widespread EV adoption.

HEATED reader Oscar asked us to research the widespread claim that a large increase in electric vehicle adoption would place massive stress on the U.S. electric grid.

Oscar also wanted to know how much current U.S. infrastructure would need to be updated to accommodate a massive increase in EV adoption.

For a really detailed answer to both questions, I recommend reading this 2022 article in Scientific American, “Why Electric Vehicles Won’t Break the Grid.” But if you don’t have time, here’s the gist in one quote:

“We can’t just sit back and say, ‘OK, the grid can handle it; it’ll take care of itself,’” Baldwin added. “It will take attention, and it will take some adjustments to how things have been done in the past, but all in all, I’m optimistic that this is something that we can do.”

A big conclusion I took from the article is how much gas car proponents are exaggerating the strain on the grid from EVs:

In California—the national leader in electric cars with more than 1 million plug-in vehicles—EV charging currently accounts for less than 1 percent of the grid’s total load during peak hours. In 2030, when the number of EVs in California is expected to surpass 5 million, charging is projected to account for less than 5 percent of that load, said Buckley, who described it as a “small amount” of added demand.

But as people continue to buy EVs—and they are, across the world—it’s true that utilities will need to make adjustments to accommodate increases in demand. But experts say it’s not the huge deal gas car proponents are making it out to be.

“We’re talking about a pretty gradual transition over the course of the next few decades,” said Ryan Gallentine, transportation policy director at Advanced Energy Economy. “It’s well within the utilities’ ability to add that kind of capacity.” …

That success will hinge on utilities being proactive in planning for millions of additional EVs on the roads in the coming decades. It will also take some adjustments, experts said. EV owners and utilities must take advantage of up-and-coming charging technologies that will save the grid from unnecessary stress.

More EV Claims, Untangled

The Guardian’s “EV mythbusters” series, written by financial journalist Jasper Jolly, has been incredibly helpful in furthering my own understanding of EV misinformation.

Here are some of the questions Jolly tackles, and key quotes from his findings if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing:

Do electric cars pose a greater fire risk than petrol or diesel vehicles?
Key quote: “‘All the data shows that EVs are just much, much less likely to set on fire than their petrol equivalent,’ said Colin Walker, the head of transport at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank.” However: “There is a definite puzzle for firefighters, as battery fires require more water to put out, can burn almost three times hotter, and are more likely to reignite, according to EV FireSafe.”
Is it right to be worried about getting stranded in an electric car? Key quote: “Banishing range anxiety is tricky because it relies on electric vehicles’ use patterns as well as the charging network. It is not yet possible to say that every journey is well served … Most authorities are clear, however, that range anxiety should not be a problem for most people.”
Are electric cars too heavy for roads, bridges and car parks?
Key quote: “Some car park owners may be affected, and if electric trucks are heavier when they become widespread that could add to road maintenance costs.But almost all of the direct costs will be borne by infrastructure maintenance budgets. The ECIU’s Walker said concerns about extra weight for EVs were simply “massively overstated”. However, he added that carmakers do have a responsibility to produce smaller electric cars, after years of focusing on the most profitable SUVs.”
Do electric cars have an air pollution problem?
Key quote: “It is certainly the case that ever heavier cars almost certainly produce more [tire] particulates. Electric cars are – for now – heavier still than equivalents. But even so, [tire] pollution appears roughly comparable between petrol, diesel and electric cars.”
Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol and diesel vehicles?
Key quote: “For mostly urban drivers in cities such as Los Angeles, it “makes a lot of sense” financially but it is another calculation for Texas highway drivers, Shivers said. “It’s going to be very person-specific because everybody’s case is different,” he added.
Will hydrogen overtake batteries in the race for zero-emission cars? Key quote: “The answer is no,” said Liebreich, without a moment’s hesitation. Carmakers betting on a large share for hydrogen are “just wrong”, and heading for an expensive disappointment, he added.

EV mythbusters, The Guardian, Jasper Jolly

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... d-car.html

Research on Earth’s Raging Heat of 2023-24 Is Picking Up
Posted on June 7, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. The generally scary heat levels of this year are set to abate a bit. But a break in trends should not be mistaken for much of a change in trajectory.

By Bob Henson, a meteorologist and journalist based in Boulder, Colorado. He has written on weather and climate for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Weather Underground, and many freelance venues. Bob is the author of “The Thinking Person’s Guide to Climate Change” and of “The Rough Guide to Climate Change,” a forerunner to it, and of “Weather on the Air: A History of Broadcast Meteorology”, and coauthor of the introductory textbook “Meteorology Today”. For five years and until the summer of 2020 he co-produced the Category 6 news site for Weather Underground. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections

Fyou’ve got a chronic health concern and you suddenly get acutely sick, you and your doctors face two big issues: what’s behind your short-term crisis, and what are the implications for your longer-term health?

Our world’s “planet doctors” have been at a similar stress point for close to a year now. They’ve been scrambling to figure out why Earth’s surface – including both atmosphere and oceans – got hit with an unprecedented spike of heat that’s run from mid-2023 well into 2024. They’ve also been addressing what, if anything, the spike tells us about the next few years and beyond.

Several fresh papers are out on two unique and much-publicized factors that may have influenced the astounding global heat of 2023-24. There’s much more coming down the research pike: for example, five journals within the Nature umbrella are joining forces for a special cross-journal issue that will focus on the spike. As the submission invitationput it, “It is not yet clear what caused the various climatic anomalies in 2023, but the answers will shape our understanding of what is to come – whether 2023 was a singular outlier year, or if it is a new baseline from which warming will continue to new levels.”

The planet’s immediate fever hasn’t yet broken. Looking at the global-scale averages calculated daily by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, surface air temperatures have set records on dozens of dates since mid-2023, and sea surface temperatures have set records each day for more than a solid year (see Figures 1 and 2 below).


Figure 1. Globally averaged daily surface air temperature from 1940 through June 2, 2024. Record global highs were set on nearly every date in the second half of 2023 and on many days in the first half of 2024. (Image credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service).


Figure 2. Globally averaged sea surface temperature (SST) from 1940 through June 2, 2024. Every date since May 4, 2023, has set a new global record for that date, and on March 20 and 21, 2024, the global SST average set the current all-time record high of 21.09°C. (Image credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service).

As catalogued here in monthly posts by Jeff Masters, every month since June 2023 has been the warmest globally in observations and analyses going back to 1850. This month NOAA and NASA will likely concur with the Copernicus Climate Change Service that May 2024 set yet another global monthly heat record.

In a special address on Wednesday (World Environment Day) titled “A Moment of Truth”, UN Secretary General António Guterres referred to the latest Copernicus data as well as a new report from the World Meteorological Organization. The WMO gave a 47% chance that the period 2024-2028 will average at least 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, and an 86% chance that at least one year in that period will set a new yearly global record, beating out 2023.

May 2024 was the hottest May in history, marking 12 straight months of hottest months ever.

Our planet is telling us something, but we don’t seem to be listening.

It’s time to mobilise, act & deliver.

It’s #ClimateAction crunch time. pic.twitter.com/7IIy5mJaxg

— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) June 5, 2024

In April alone, 34 locations set all-time monthly highs for their respective nations and territories. And in May and early June, many populous tropical and subtropical locations from India to southeast Asia to Mexico have endured miserable, dangerous heat at or or near all-time records.

Even satellite-based lower-atmosphere temperature data – long used as ammunition by those who would dismiss or deny long-term warming – haven’t escaped the intense spike.

Global warming has stopped! The pause has begun!

NO WARMING SINCE APRIL 2024! pic.twitter.com/q1FQCGyckJ

— Andrew Dessler (@AndrewDessler) June 4, 2024

The handwriting does appear to be on the wall for the demise of the 2023-24 heat spike, mainly because the Pacific is rapidly transitioning toward La Niña. The upwelling caused by La Niña typically brings immense volumes of deeper, cooler water to the surface of the eastern tropical Pacific, spanning an area that can sprawl larger than the United States. We can expect that cool infusion to bring down globally averaged air and ocean temperatures by a few tenths of a degree Fahrenheit for at least a few months. That should be enough to end the current string of daily global records and near-records, perhaps as soon as July.

It may take a lot longer to fully understand what’s happened in the last year, and what it may portend for our future.

El Niño peaked in December 2023 as one of the five strongest on record.

Because of the extra heat and moisture in our atmosphere, our weather will continue to be more extreme.

#EarlyWarningsForAll initiative remains WMO’s top priority. https://t.co/13qHHwNYDW pic.twitter.com/tmjAiwJ3Dy

— World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) June 4, 2024

Ships, Smokestacks, and Sunlight

It should go without saying that the 2023-24 heat spike arose on top of relentless long-term warming, caused by the greenhouse gases pumped out as fossil fuels get burned. Global temperatures simply couldn’t have hit such a peak without a century-plus of global heating bolstering the spike.

The next biggest factor was the El Niño event of 2023-24, the strongest since 2015-16 and one of the two strongest of the 21st century thus far. In contrast to La Niña, the oceanic warmth slathered across the eastern tropical Pacific by El Niño typically raises global surface air temperature by several tenths of a degree Fahrenheit.

In fact, Michael Mann (University of Pennsylvania) and others have argued that much like the El Niño heat peak of 2015-16, the 2023-24 values fall within the margin of natural variability around the longer-term warming trend.

Still, there was a hefty difference of around 0.24 degree Celsius or 0.43 degrees Fahrenheit between the 2015-16 and 2023-24 peaks (based on May-to-April data from NOAA, as shown in Fig. 3 below). And questions remain: exactly how did natural variability, and/or something more, manage to produce such a jump from one strong El Niño event to the next? And why was September 2023 in particular such a record-destroyer?

It’s when you drill down past long-term warming and El Niño that the science saga gets more intriguing and more contentious.


Figure 3. Global surface temperatures (land and ocean), averaged for 12-month periods from May through April. The 2023-24 period was 0.24°C (0.43°F) warmer than 2015-16, compared to a long-term warming trend (1974-2024) of 0.15°C (0.27°F) when carried across the same eight-year period. (Image credit: Annotated from original via NOAA/NCEI)

One of the often-cited secondary factors at work is a sharp drop in the sulfate aerosol emissions spewed out from global shipping. That decline was triggered by regulations put into effect by the International Maritime Organization in 2020. They reduced sulfate emissions from shipping by some 70% and global sulfate emissions by roughly 10%.

The direct effect – fewer sun-blocking aerosols and thus more sunlight reaching Earth’s surface – is fairly straightforward. Changes in sulfates also have indirect effects: the presence of aerosols can shift the numbers and size distribution of cloud droplets, which in turn affects how much sunlight reaches Earth’s surface.

Taking both processes into account, a 2023 analysis by Carbon Brief estimated that global temperatures will be about 0.05 degrees Celsius warmer than otherwise expected by 2050 as a result of the 2020 sulfate emission cuts – in effect, speeding up global warming by about two years.

That may seem like a mere drop in the climate-change bucket. But the influx of energy has been greatest along oceanic shipping lanes – including, importantly, those across the North Atlantic, the spawning ground for U.S. Gulf and Atlantic hurricanes. Sea surface temperatures across the North Atlantic have been smashing records over most of the past year. They’re now at unprecedented heights for the start of hurricane season, as discussed here by Michael Lowry in a May 22 post.

The sea surface temperature averaged over the North Atlantic has now been record-warm for 15 consecutive months. One does start to wonder how or when it stops breaking its own records every month and year… this is not normal. pic.twitter.com/BbLPS7U43Y

— Brian McNoldy (@BMcNoldy) June 4, 2024

A new paper in Communications Earth and Environment led by Tianle Yuan (GESTAR-II/University of Maryland) estimates that the increased solar input from the drop in sulfates – which the paper calls an “inadvertent geoengineering termination shock” – could lead to a doubled rate of global warming in the 2020s compared to the last half-century. The new energy balance estimates from the Yuan paper are roughly consistent with earlier studies, but there’s been some pushback on technical grounds in the paper’s extrapolation from energy balance to global temperature trends.

“This is a timely study, but it makes very bold statements about temperature changes and geoengineering which seem difficult to justify on the basis of the evidence,” said Dr. Laura Wilcox, associate professor at the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science in the University of Reading, in a roundup of reactions at Science Media Centre.

Update (June 5): Another new paper – still in preprint form at EGUSphere, and not yet peer-reviewed – describes CESM ensemble simulations that incorporate a 90% drop in sulfate emissions from shipping in 2020, and produce a delayed global-warming spike in 2023 not unlike the one actually observed.

Three new papers just added to the ongoing research surrounding the role of 2020 reduction in shipping sulfates on the recent spike in global temperatures – two suggest minor contributions while @danvisioni and colleagues find a more substantial warming. Science in action! https://t.co/Tx1LdwfDia

— Michael Lowry (@MichaelRLowry) June 5, 2024

Figure 4. A view from the Himawari-8 satellite of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption as it pushed above the Southwest Pacific at 0450 UTC on January 15, 2022. (Image credit: Japan Meteorological Agency, via Digital Typhoon and Wikimedia Commons)

What About That Undersea Volcano?

The eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano in the Southwest Pacific on January 15, 2022, grabbed the attention of vulcanologists and climate scientists worldwide. The eruption was the most powerful since that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991.

The immense blast from Pinatubo spewed enough sulfates into the stratosphere to bring down global temperatures by as much as 0.6 Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) over the next year-plus. The new wrinkle with the latest eruption: Hunga Tonga is located beneath the Southwest Pacific, rather than atop an island. The eruption ended up pushing less sulfur dioxide than Pinatubo into the atmosphere, but it added a massive infusion of water vapor, enough to boost the total amount of stratospheric moisture by as much as 10 percent. The added water vapor has since worked its way to higher latitudes within the stratosphere.

As with other greenhouse gases at high altitudes, the radiative effects of the water vapor added by Hunga Tonga have been to cool the stratosphere while slightly warming Earth’s surface. A couple of early estimates were that the eruption’s sulfates led to around 0.004°C of global cooling in 2022, and that the water vapor would lead to as much as 0.035°C of global warming over five years, perhaps accounting for a minor slice of the recent global heat spike.

A paper in review at ESS Open Archive led by Mark Schoeberl (Science and Technology Corporation) estimates that the net effect from both water vapor and sulfate aerosols from Hunga Tonga has actually been a tiny cooling of Earth’s surface, and that the combined radiative effects were nearly gone by the end of 2023. The study does not evaluate conditions above 35 km in the stratosphere, where water vapor remains roughly 10 to 20 percent more prevalent than before the eruption, as the effects on climate from water vapor at such high altitudes have been considered negligible.

The transition to higher altitude is particularly pronounced.

It’s plausible, e.g. Solomon et al. 2010, that this greatly reduces the climate impact of this water vapor, but I also wonder how well we really understand these changes, which have essentially never been seen before. pic.twitter.com/EVAZA3u3Z7

— Dr. Robert Rohde (@RARohde) May 7, 2024

Another recent paper, this one just published in the Journal of Climate, asserts that we could see a complex web of regional weather and climate effects for years to come as a result of Hunga Tonga’s water vapor. Led by Martin Jucker (University of New South Wales), the paper uses the WACCM global climate model, which incorporates stratospheric chemistry, to simulate a Hunga Tonga-like eruption and its impacts up to a decade out.

The study’s estimate of global warming from the added water vapor was a mere 0.015 degrees Celsius. What’s much more striking is a projected reshuffling of weather patterns over the latter half of the 2020s, apparently caused by interacting circulation changes and cloud feedbacks. If this new study’s projections end up on target, winter warming across the northern high latitudes (including the Arctic) and springtime warming across much of Eurasia could intensify, while Australian winters could be cooler and wetter than average, all else being equal. There are also hints of El Niño conditions being favored in the tropical Pacific.

Discussing these and other “surprising, lasting impacts” in an essay for The Conversation, Jucker added: “…we hope that our study will stir scientific interest to try and understand what such a large amount of water vapor in the stratosphere might mean for our climate.”

Yet another (but very minor) factor is the timing of the ongoing peak in the 11-year solar cycle. Variations in solar heat energy across the cycle are minimal (less than 1%) compared to the forcing from greenhouse gases, and the ups and downs of the cycle don’t affect our long-term warming trajectory. Still, the sun is now approaching the peak of Solar Cycle 25, spitting out active regions (and triggering a spectacular auroral display in May), so there may be a tiny, temporary dollop of extra solar energy in the mix right now. This cycle has been more active than predicted, even if it’s still among the weakest of the last 200 years.

The Main Headline Hasn’t Changed

For all the cool science it’s generating, the 2023-24 heat spike is first and foremost a danger sign. Even assuming that globally averaged air and sea temperatures manage to drop a bit below record levels for the next one to several years – something that’s quite possible, perhaps even likely – the spike has given us a preview of what might become “normal” as soon as the 2030s, as greenhouse gases from human activity continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. That accumulation will continue even when global emissions level out and begin to drop, as may happen over the next several years. Only when emissions drop to near zero will the accumulation cease.

Given how strange the spike has been, it’s wise not to assume too much about its demise just yet. One of the most ominous recent takes is from eminent NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who asserted with coauthors in a 2023 Oxford Open Climate Change paper, Global Warming in the Pipeline, that declining global aerosol emissions (including the cuts triggered by the new shipping regulations) will accelerate the planetary warming rate well beyond standard projections.

Zeke Hausfather offered a counterpoint in a Carbon Brief post on April 4, stressing that some acceleration in warming has long been projected by models and that the 2023-24 spike may not signal anything unusual: “There is a risk of conflating shorter-term climate variability with longer-term changes – a pitfall that the climate science community has encountered before.”

An ongoing thread launched with a RealClimate post on May 30 is highlighting new research and data points related to the 2023 extremes. Post author Gavin Schmidt, who succeeded Hansen as director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, also penned a commentary in Nature on March 19 entitled Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory. In that writeup, Schmidt stressed:

…the 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modelers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system. If the anomaly does not stabilize by August — a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events — then the world will be in uncharted territory.”

Jeff Masters contributed to this post.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... ng-up.html

In Virginia, Data Centers Collide with Zero-Carbon Goals
Posted on June 6, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This post on data centers and their energy costs is another “micro illuminating the macro” piece, along with our post today on Mount Sinai. We and other sites have been pointing out the well-anticipated development, that AI and crypto are producing even more computer use, to the degree that it is resulting in more data center energy hogging. And that conflicts greatly with the need to preserve some semblance of civilization as we know it by cutting energy use.

Interestingly, Virginia is not capitulating (at least not immediately) to tech industry demands. By contrast, the Biden Administration is trying to have it both ways, as OilPrice reports in Biden Wants Big Tech To Invest in Power Generation for AI Boom. Having said that, yes it is true that zero-carbon is not an ambitious enough goal, so it’s disheartening to see even this line as hard to hold.

By Sarah Vogelsong, a freelance journalist based in Richmond, Virginia. Originally published at Inside Climate News

While short-lived, the denial came as a surprise.

This March, Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, D.C. in Northern Virginia that is home to the greatest concentration of data centers in the world, made an unexpected move: It rejected a proposal to let a company build a bigger data center than existing zoning automatically allowed.

“At some point we have to say stop,” said Loudoun Supervisor Michael Turner during the meeting, as reported by news site LoudounNow. “We do not have enough power to power the data centers we have.”

County supervisors would later reverse the decision, approving a smaller version of the project. But the initial denial sent ripples throughout Virginia, where concern over the rapid growth of data centers and what that means for the state’s ambitious decarbonization goals is growing.

“It is really a salient issue for climate right now,” said Tim Cywinski, a spokesperson for the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, which has been vocal about its desire to slow down data center development in the state. “The data center industry is about 2 percent of global carbon emissions,” he said, adding “In about two years, I think it will surpass the airline industry.”

Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest electric utility, has forecast that data centers will be the most significant driver of rising energy demand in the state over the next 15 years. And while the utility has pledged it will decarbonize its Virginia grid by 2045, in line with the Virginia Clean Economy Act passed by the state legislature in 2020, it has also indicated in its most recent long-range plan for utility regulators that new natural gas plants will be needed to meet demand.

“We are 100 percent committed to achieving the goals of the VCEA. We are not taking our foot off the accelerator with renewables,” said Aaron Ruby, a spokesperson for Dominion. But, he added, “the clean energy transition is more challenging than it was a few years ago. The inescapable reality is we are experiencing unprecedented growth in electric demand.”

While some environmentalists say the skyrocketing data center growth threatens Virginia’s ability to go zero-carbon, others say it can be done — but it will require new ways of managing the grid.

“To me it’s not a question of data centers or clean energy,” said Nate Benforado, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “I think there is a path forward if we make some improvements.”

Data centers and Virginia have been hand in glove for almost three decades, since companies like MAE-East, Equinix and AOL built some of the earliest modern facilities in the Washington suburbs. With close proximity to the federal government and the defense firms ringing it, Northern Virginia — and especially Ashburn in Loudoun County, known as “Data Center Alley” — quickly became the beating heart of the U.S. data center industry.

“There are data centers located in other areas of Virginia, but roughly 80% of the industry is located in Loudoun County,” Dominion wrote in a recent long-term plan submitted to state regulators. “To put this in perspective, the aggregate of the next six largest data center markets in the U.S. is not as big as Loudoun County’s market.”

Lawmakers have embraced the business. Beginning in 2010, Virginia exempted data centers from sales and use tax for many of the key components of their business as long as they met certain criteria: They had to invest at least $150 million in their facility, create 50 new jobs in the locality where it was sited, and pay at least 150 percent of the prevailing annual average wage. The exemption remains Virginia’s largest economic development incentive.

The gambit worked. A 2019 report by Virginia’s legislative watchdog, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, found the exemption “has a sizable influence” in attracting data centers to the state. It also has a “moderate economic benefit” for the state, generating about $27 million in Virginia gross domestic product for every $1 million in foregone tax revenue, JLARC concluded.

But as data centers have continued to flock to Virginia, concerns have increased. In Loudoun and neighboring Prince William County, residents complain the facilities’ 24/7 operations produce a constant humming that never stops. Conservationists fear the centers’ expanding footprint is consuming too much land, while their heavy water use could strain local supplies.

How to deal with the facilities’ power use is also an increasingly urgent question. Data centers are highly electricity-intensive, requiring a steady stream of power to operate around the clock. As the industry expands, more electricity is needed to meet their demand, triggering the construction of not only new sources of power but transmission lines to carry that power from where it’s generated to where it’s used.

Data center representatives have pointed out many companies in the space have been active drivers of renewables development across the nation. In a statement, Data Center Coalition President Josh Levi noted two-thirds of the renewable power bought by U.S. corporations has been wind and solar contracted to data centers and their customers. Companies have also set their own goals: Google aims to operate its data centers on carbon-free energy by 2030, while Amazon is pushing for net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

“Data centers are highly efficient facilities that enable energy savings and efficiencies for homes, businesses, utilities and other end users,” said Levi. Many, he added, are “on pace to achieve voluntary clean energy targets that predate and outpace many state mandates and targets.”

Even with those commitments, the sheer magnitude of the facilities’ growth in Virginia poses a challenge for utilities, and particularly Dominion. While data centers’ peak energy usage in 2022 was almost 2.8 gigawatts — roughly one and a half times the power produced at Dominion’s largest Virginia plant, the North Anna nuclear facility in Louisa County — the company forecasts they will require roughly 13.3 gigawatts by 2038. Much of that may be due to Amazon Web Services, which Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin last year announced intends to invest $35 billion in data center campuses in the state by 2040, although Dominion does not disclose information about specific customers.

“The amount of data center load growth we’re dealing with is absolutely phenomenal,” said Devi Glick, a principal at consultancy Synapse Energy Economics, who testified for the Sierra Club at hearings in Richmond this September on the utility’s Integrated Resource Plan, a non-binding roadmap for how it intends to meet customer demand over the next 15 years. “Everything we’re dealing with is massive and kind of, like, novel.”

Some environmental groups have challenged the accuracy of Dominion’s forecasts, arguing the utility is overestimating future growth as a way to justify keeping existing natural gas plants running and build new ones, including a proposed peaker plant in Chesterfield County.

Others, including nonprofit Appalachian Voices, say the forecast is shakier than it appears because so much of the expected demand comes from a very small number of companies. According to figures from Dominion, two firms account for 62 percent of the demand the utility expects to see from data centers in 2030. Five account for 80 percent.

“If even one of those five companies changes its growth plans, or if one or more counties in northern Virginia takes an aggressively hostile turn against data center expansion, the actual growth in Virginia could be radically different from what Dominion estimates now,” wrote Rachel James, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center representing Appalachian Voices, this October.

Despite those disagreements, there’s little debate that in the near term, data centers’ electricity demand is skyrocketing. Dominion Vice President of Strategic Partnerships Alan Bradshaw told regulators this September that data centers have signed electric service agreements with Dominion that call for the utility to provide over 5.8 gigawatts to various new facilities by 2032. Bradshaw said he wasn’t aware of any data center customer in Dominion territory abandoning a project after such an agreement had been signed. Over 10 additional gigawatts are in earlier stages of development by companies working with Dominion to obtain power for future projects.

“This week we’ve had an executive meeting with a new entrant on the market, and they want to add two campuses that have 1.2 gigawatts of load,” Bradshaw said at the Sept. 21 hearing. “Literally on the way to the courthouse today, we had another customer call us about a half-gigawatt campus they want to meet with us on. So they just continue to come.”

But while economic development boosters see the uptick in investment as a boon for state and local coffers, environmental groups say if left unchecked, the growth threatens Virginia’s ability to decarbonize its electric grid by 2050.

“We have to make the hard choice about what data centers look like in Virginia now and if it’s worth the cost,” said Cywinski of the Sierra Club. “And right now, we think it’s not.”

All of the long-range plans Dominion presented to regulators last year included new natural gas capacity, ranging anywhere from 970 to 2,900 megawatts of the fuel, an approach the company has defended as necessary to ensure reliability.

“There is no realistic way that we can serve all this growth, keep our customers’ power on around the clock, and only do it with renewables,” said Ruby, the Dominion spokesman. “That is just not realistically possible.”

Ruby said the utility’s calculus isn’t just based on available megawatts. It’s also a matter, he said, of how quickly units can be brought online to meet demand in a crisis. Solar and wind can’t produce electricity around the clock, and while nuclear will remain a mainstay of Virginia power supply — it currently accounts for about a third of Dominion’s Virginia capacity — both the North Anna and Surry plants require hours to ramp up.

In contrast, he said, with a natural gas plant like the new Chesterfield facility the utility has proposed, “we can ramp that up and dispatch 1,000 megawatts to the grid in 10 to 20 minutes.”

Environmental groups, however, say Dominion shouldn’t be planning to expand its carbon resources in the long term given state law requiring the utility to stop emitting carbon by the middle of the century.

“The transition to clean energy, that is the commonwealth’s policy. It is in the law. That is what we are working towards,” said Benforado, who along with James represented Appalachian Voices in the September case.

How data centers’ rising power demands may impact Virginia’s ability to transition from fossil fuels to renewables is one of the issues the state’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission is tasked with assessing this year. And although lawmakers put forward more than a dozen proposals related to data centers during the last legislative session, the General Assembly delayed consideration of most until the next session, after the state study’s release. Among the bills put forward were proposals to require data centers to meet certain energy efficiency targets to qualify for state tax incentives and have local governments study the regional grid impacts of potential facilities.

“The JLARC study really sucked the wind out of a lot of these,” said Benforado.

In regulatory proceedings, Appalachian Voices and the Sierra Club have argued that rather than building new gas plants, Dominion should explore other ways to meet data centers’ power needs. Proposals include demand response programs that let energy consumers shift or reduce their power usage during times of high demand, such as extremely cold or hot weather. The environmental groups also argued for long-duration battery storage, an emerging but limited technology, and transmission upgrades.

“I think we need much more sophisticated planning that looks at lots of options, lots of tools,” said Benforado. “I do not accept this idea that we have to build gas. … To me, that’s not backed up by analysis.”

With as many as 11 gigawatts of power needed over the next 15 years to supply data centers, he said, “I think this is the time we need to refocus our efforts.”

“Clean energy aside, if you don’t have smart planning, optimized solutions, it’s going to be really expensive to supply 11 gigawatts,” he said.

Levi of the Data Center Coalition noted that “grid planning and management is ultimately the role of utilities and grid operators.” However, he said the industry “is committed to leaning in as an engaged partner.”

Rising tensions could complicate the search for solutions. Local conflicts over the industry have led to the ousting of at least one official in Prince William County, and in December 2023, 25 nonprofits and other groups, including the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, announced they were forming the Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition to seek more regulation of data centers.

Still, Benforado said he believed “win-win solutions” could be found in partnership with the industry.

“I think they’re motivated,” he said. “I hope they’re motivated.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... goals.html

[blindpig]

For wildlife, the next pandemic is already here
June 9, 2024
Disease from megafarms has killed millions of wild birds and mammals



by Diana Bell
Professor of Conservation Biology, University of East Anglia

I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.

I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.

This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding program in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.

How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.

This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose. This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.

The first signs

Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centers in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.

We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.

Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.

Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.

Unfortunately, our warnings were correct.

A roving sickness

Two decades on, bird flu is killing species from the high Arctic to mainland Antarctica.

In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.


In South America, bird flu has killed tens of thousands of sea lions.

Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.

The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.

Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.

At the crossroads

Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.

Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.

It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.

Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.

Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.

How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.

To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... eady-here/

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To change the way we consume energy, we must shift the way we think about the economy, writes Cassandra Jeffery. (Photo: Rijksmuseum/Flickr)

Less can mean more: Reducing energy consumption to manage the climate crisis
Originally published: Canadian Dimension on June 7, 2024 by Cassandra Jeffery (more by Canadian Dimension) | (Posted Jun 10, 2024)
Capitalism, Environment, Inequality, StrategyAmericas, CanadaNewswire
I wrote a first version of this article perched at a bar on a hot May afternoon in 2023. Music thrummed through massive speakers and fans bolted to the ceiling blew hot air around to little effect. Four TVs, one in each corner of the room, broadcast a hockey game, the ice on the screen impervious to the sweltering spring heat. I remember I was the only patron sipping a beer on the patio; most folks found respite in the air-conditioned section of the bar.

Earlier that day, I went through the yearly ritual of arguing with my husband about whether we should get an air-conditioning unit for our ninth-floor apartment in British Columbia’s temperate Lower Mainland. Every year it seems to get hotter and smokier from the now annual fire season, and every year I do my best to explain that getting an air-conditioning unit will only add fuel to the climate crisis fire. As more and more people consume more and more energy, our society moves collectively further away from mitigating climate catastrophe. But what impact will our one air-conditioning unit have when we live in such a heavily consumption-driven society?

The reality is that we, denizens of the wealthy countries of the Global North, are all going to have to learn to live with less. And fast. I don’t think I need to beleaguer readers with the roster of climate crisis catastrophes and statistics. Unless you’re a hardcore climate crisis denier, we can all agree that things are changing. The 2023 wildfire season in BC was the worst on record, destroying more than 2.84 million hectares of forest and land. Tens of thousands of people were forced to evacuate, and hundreds of homes and structures were lost or damaged. The impacts to people’s health and wellbeing are unquantifiable, and many residents are still reeling from the 2023 wildfire season while nervously awaiting the violence of 2024 fires. On top of the fires, we’re facing serious challenges with our domestic food system. Floods, landslides, and droughts are happening every year and in all seasons. Against the backdrop of all these compounding crises, energy demand is expected to rise, and at least in the BC context, managing unseasonable temperature swings is a key factor in projected demand increases. A spike in energy to heat homes in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland region during the winter of 2024 being another example.

Renewables and carbon capture—enough to manage climate crisis?
By 2050, power consumption globally is expected to triple as electrification expands and living standards rise. For a comparatively small population of 39 million people, Canada is one of the largest consumers per capita of energy, surpassing the United States, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Norway. Statistics from the Energy Institute suggest residents of Canada consumed an average of 367.78 gigajoules per capita in 2022. For context, the 2022 global average was 153 gigajoules per capita with Europe averaging around 142. Canada’s sixth-place ranking for primary energy consumption in 2022 doesn’t offer much solace, either. Primary energy consumption per capita in Canada has jumped 45 percent from 1965 to 2022, bringing the average kilowatt-hours per person up to 102,160 from 70,550 kWh. Primary energy consumption refers to the energy inherent in natural resources such as crude oil, coal, and wind before transformation. Total energy consumption per capita refers to the aggregate measure of energy consumed divided by a country’s population. Globally, total energy demand has recovered from COVID-19-related reductions, and “despite record levels of investments in renewable energy, global greenhouse gas emissions” have reached new heights. Energy transition is not on track to meet climate targets set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Despite this bleak outlook, renewables are projected to account for 80-90 percent of power generation globally by 2050, and the development of still largely unproven carbon capture technology has been touted as a remedy for centuries’ long fossil fuel emissions. Yet these tools for tackling the climate crisis—renewable energy, carbon capture and storage, and greater energy efficiency—will not mitigate the effects of the climate crisis without a simultaneous decrease in total energy demand globally. Reducing energy demand is difficult, though, because of its connection to economic growth: as the economy expands, our need for energy to produce more goods grows too.

Let’s start with renewables. They emit far less carbon than fossil fuel generation but require raw materials to produce and fossil fuels to extract and transform these inputs. As our demand for energy increases, we will need to extract more minerals and metals to build more fields of solar panels, wind farms, and water-powered dams. Both the process of extraction and clearing for construction have devastating impacts on ecosystems, and unhealthy ecosystems cannot withstand rising temperatures, giving rise to extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves, forest fires, and floods. The effects of these climate catastrophes are felt predominantly in countries where mineral mining occurs without stringent labour and environmental protections, while the raw materials mined often support energy sectors in wealthier countries.

Advancements in energy efficiency and carbon capture technologies will not suffice either—not without decreasing energy consumption. In general, evangelizing any technological innovation to address the climate crisis ignores the underlying reality that high-income, heavy carbon-emitting countries are simply consuming too much. Looking to artificial intelligence as a beacon of hope amidst the escalating climate crisis is a case in point, as science journalist Andrew Nikiforuk points out.

Particularly in high-income countries, energy efficiency technologies have had the counterintuitive effect of increasing energy demand and consumption because energy is cheaper and more readily accessible. In keeping with the Jevons Paradox, a group of economists found that energy efficiency improvements at the household level lead to rebound effects that offset potential energy and emissions savings. Their study suggests that not only are households consuming more energy because efficiencies reduce the cost, but they are also consuming more goods and services that require energy to produce. In other words, the cheaper our electricity bill, the more disposable income we have to purchase other goods and services and the more energy is pumped into meeting the increased demand for these goods and services. The energy saved from these efficient technologies does not necessarily offset the energy generation and carbon emissions from the increased production of goods and services.

Carbon capture technology, on the other hand, aims to capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere and is usually designed for sources of heavy carbon emissions, such as fossil fuel power plants or industrial facilities. Carbon capture technologies are expensive to build and operate and they require significant inputs of energy to run, which may be sourced from an emissions-producing fossil fuel. For this reason, calculating the effectiveness of carbon capture technology requires an assessment of CO2 levels avoided rather than CO2 levels captured, but there are currently no obligations for fossil fuel producers to communicate these figures transparently to the public.

The cost of carbon capture technology varies based on the type of technology used and the level of C02 concentration in the emissions stream: the lower the C02 concentration in the gas, the higher the energy demand required for separating out the C02. Estimated costs for carbon capture with concentrated C02 streams, such as from natural gas processing, ranges from CAD $27-48 per tonne of C02 captured. More diluted gas streams, such as coal-fired power plants, steel, cement, and some hydrogen production have a higher price tag, in the range of CAD $50-150 per tonne of CO2 captured or CAD $45-205 per tonne of C02 avoided. These estimates do not include additional costs, such as transportation or storage. Retrofitting a natural gas-fired power plant at an oil sands facility is estimated to cost CAD $111-144 per tonne of CO2. The International Institute for Sustainable Development questions whether the limited payoff is worth the significant financial price tag, while the United Nations has stated that these technologies are “economically unproven, especially at scale, and pose unknown environmental and social risks.”

In some cases, carbon capture has been used to increase oil production and extend the life of wells, a counterintuitive use for a technology that is marketed as an emissions-reduction tool. Of the seven commercial carbon capture projects currently up and running in Canada, five are in the oil and gas sector, one is in the coal-fired electricity generation sector, and one is in the agricultural sector. These seven projects combined capture a mere 0.05 percent of national emissions.

In Canada, the Pathways Alliance, a coalition of Canada’s six largest oil sands producers have a plan to build a carbon capture network in Alberta that “proposes a combination of technologies to capture, transport, and store C02 emissions from over 20 oil sands facilities.” The cost of developing and implementing these technologies is estimated at $16.5 billion, and the Alliance is expecting to pay for it with “substantial government subsidies”—namely, our tax dollars. In spite of all the technological, fiscal, and environmental red flags, carbon capture technology continues to be a pillar of Canada’s climate change strategy.

Just to clarify, I am not advocating for a brake on technological exploration, especially if it may help manage the climate crisis, but we need to think more critically about how these technologies are being used, whom they benefit, and if they adequately address the root cause of the climate crisis. Grappling with these big questions presents opportunities to constructively critique the economic and social structures that underpin everything, including the energy sector, and generate new ideas to create a more equitable society that isn’t as vulnerable to climate catastrophe.

Energy and the growth-at-any-cost economic model


(Photo: Gilles Sabrié)

“The idea of a non-growing economy may be anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is anathema to an ecologist,” points out British ecological economist Tim Jackson.

To change the way we consume energy, we must shift the way we think about the economy. Our immediate and seemingly infinite access to fossil hydrocarbons has vastly increased the energy available in our human economy, contributing greatly to the scale of growth in populations, productivity, and modern advancements. In other words, we can do more and have more with less energy, which in turn gives us more time and energy to produce more and buy more. And so, the cycle of economic growth continues indefinitely. The catch, however, is that we live on an ecologically fragile planet with ultimately finite natural resources. Theoretically, natural resources can replenish themselves but we are currently draining surplus energy from the Earth faster than natural processes can replenish it. At the same time, capitalism is contingent on dense energy extraction, which as we know, negatively impacts ecosystems and exacerbates the climate crisis.

Our growth-at-any-cost economic model dismisses negative impacts on ecosystems (including human societies) as “externalities.” When only the financial costs of energy extraction are deemed relevant to the growth model, it’s easy to see how factors such as forest health, ocean acidification, and cancer rates in human populations are discounted. The true financial costs of the increased burden on the health care system or water restoration projects, for example, are not factored into GDP growth rates.

For decades economists have been calling into question the long-held myth that GDP growth accurately reflects our realities and is a good gauge of societal wellbeing. Some critical economists turn to the degrowth model as a way to consider both planetary boundaries and the physical and psychological wellbeing of the planet’s inhabitants, including humans. This model seeks to situate human systems of production and consumption within broader planetary ecosystems. The term degrowth is often confused with negative GDP growth, which is incorrect because such a state would be considered a recession or depression when prolonged. By contrast, degrowth refers to a “trajectory where the ‘throughput’ (energy, materials and waste flows) of an economy decreases while welfare, or wellbeing, improves.” The scale of a degrowth economy will inevitably shrink GDP by virtue of declines in throughput: if the consumption of material goods and services decreases, so too does the demand for production of material goods and services and the exploitation of the environment and people.

Thinking about the economy in terms of degrowth runs contrary to classical economic narratives but, as scholar Giorgos Kallis points out, the economy is not a fixed and independent system. Rather, it is a social and political construct: “an invention of people in particular societies to represent and organize part of their experiences.” This construction is constantly evolving, influenced by social norms of the day and susceptible to scrutiny. The economy is not an indisputable law of physics, and therefore can be contested and reconfigured based on evolving data. The current structure of the economy is, however, a system of production for profit designed to amass wealth for an increasingly small proportion of people at the expense of the physical, social, and emotional wellbeing of an increasing majority of people and the biophysical health of ecosystems. Surplus is required for investments and economic growth. For capitalists to create surplus, something or someone must be exploited somewhere in the world. If everyone was paid the actual value of their labour, there wouldn’t be surplus to reinvest, and if we didn’t exploit the environment for natural resources, we wouldn’t have surplus energy to fuel exponential growth.

Proponents of perpetual growth of our energy-based economy tend to proceed from the assumption that greater energy access at a lower cost will ensure all boats rise together on the tide of trickle-down economics. But from what we’ve seen to date, this theory hasn’t translated into equitable stability for the majority; the consumption divide between high-income and low-income countries persists and has widened in recent decades. Income inequality within nation states has deepened, too. Ecosystem devastation and increased emissions from resource extraction and energy generation have affected all populations, but the impacts are disproportionately felt in rural and remote communities and between social classes. In many of these cases, the financial benefits of resource extraction in rural and remote communities do not extend proportionally to the broader population, but rather accrue to corporate stakeholders. Instead of grappling with these deficiencies, proponents of the prevailing economic model tend to dismiss degrowth theory, often labelling it as “crazy” or impossible. Resorting to name calling instead of critically engaging with an idea doesn’t reflect well on degrowth naysayers; it’s not unreasonable to assume that they speak on behalf of those who have the most to lose from a model that challenges excessive consumption in the interest of a healthy planet and the social, emotional, and physical wellbeing of our fellow humans.

There’s also the challenge of redesigning our institutions to support a different type of economy. Modern government policies, academic institutions, and international governance institutions were established and continue to operate directly and indirectly to promote capital accumulation that’s rooted in natural resource extraction and the extraction of surplus value from workers. Nation states develop policies to maintain production and consumption, and resource extraction to fuel the production of the things we buy. Despite the devastating impact this cycle of infinite consumption and growth has on climate stability, nation states continue to promote its legitimacy domestically to secure status and compete internationally. A topical example would be increasing domestic GPD by investing in green technology to court international investors and attract talent from abroad. Policies to bring about a green economic boon are supported by academic institutions funded by the state to research topics with specific agendas. The gains that allowed wealthier nations, such as Canada, to establish its governance and academic institutions were accumulated through the colonization of people and ecosystems during the 19th and 20th centuries, and the protection of these gains now continues through international exploitation propped up by global capitalism. One only has to look at organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to see how wealthy nations use their dominance in the global capitalist system to exploit low-income nations and protect their wealth. The IMF provides loans to low-income countries on condition that these countries intensify energy extraction to increase GDP growth and exploit wage labour to compete on global markets, by slashing workers’ rights and consolidating markets to increase exports, for example. The benefits of this model are disproportionately tilted to wealthy nations receiving interest payments on loans and cornering new export markets for natural resources in exchange for cheap goods and services.

Less can mean more


Demonstrators take part in the March for a Clean Energy Revolution, Philadelphia, 2016. (Photo: Flickr)

An economy largely driven by material consumption that is supported by natural resource consumption at the cost of our planet’s health is unsustainable. In hyper-consuming countries, we’re inundated with choice, and we’re encouraged to excessively consume to keep the economy humming along, but do these consumer goods make us any happier? Many studies suggest that connection and community contribute more to wellbeing than designer clothes and gadgets.

Regardless of our consumption preferences, the need for a degrowth economy will become increasingly urgent as our ecosystems are further degraded and natural disasters become more frequent. Resisting consumer culture, reducing energy consumption, and advocating for collective societal and economic change are important personal choices; however, these options pale in comparison to the impact one large corporation can have by simply reducing production. Our individual choices must be mirrored by extraction and production restrictions such as caps on oil extraction and production of cheap plastics; and we must examine the role of marketing and advertising industries that peddle fulfillment through merchandise.

The other piece of the consumption and climate crisis puzzle rests in the hands of our governing bodies and public leaders, including policy makers, civil servants, and politicians. It is up to them to develop and implement people-and planet-focused policies and laws that reflect a different conception of what defines a successful economy in light of our world in crisis. Of course, politicians and corporations will not make these required changes willingly.

The flaws of capitalism are entrenched and cyclical: Politicians rely on GDP growth to entice domestic and foreign investments, and corporations promote increased consumption while simultaneously reducing quality of service and safety to increase dividends to their shareholders who in turn re-invest gains (think Canadian airlines reducing seat sizes and increasing baggage fees while receiving government bailouts during COVID). Our political system is beholden to capitalism because things like the promise of strong and steady GDP growth wins votes. And yet growth in much of the Western world has been decelerating for at least two decades, while the lion’s share of growth has ended up in the pockets of the ultra-wealthy.

The difficult part of this problem is that there isn’t one singular “bad guy” to fixate on. Of course, there are a lot of rich people who have amassed a lot of wealth under our current system, and they both invest in and work for powerful corporations which have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Many of these rich and powerful people are smart and understand exactly what they’re doing (think Bill Gates), as they champion and benefit from green technofixes within an economic model that disenfranchises people and exploits lands and waterways. Most of us, however, are stuck operating in an economic system that can make us feel powerless; a system that ties our worth to production and attempts to promote individual choices to recycle or refrain from home air-conditioning, while discouraging and repressing collective organizing to dismantle an exploitative system.

Unions, labour leaders, civil and environmental activists, teachers, academics—essentially anyone that has the ability and platform to mobilize collective action and encourage critical thought of seemingly fixed truisms¬¬—has a role to play in challenging and dismantling our current capitalist system. But it’s not just about education and clear communication: it’s about articulating a vision for the future that allows people to see themselves in it, a vision that values the social, emotional, and physical wellbeing of all communities over limitless profit growth. It’s important that this vision of the future remain flexible and adaptable, allowing people to engage with it and shape its progress through democratic exchange. We need to contend with the intersections of capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and democracy, and raise fundamental questions about whether what has been called the “imperial mode of living” is the best and only way to live, especially since the privileged way of life in the Global North comes at the expense of other people elsewhere in the world and at the cost of our planet. The challenge ahead of us is two-fold: amass support around these ideas and work toward social change by influencing and holding politicians accountable, and simultaneously, challenge the confines of capitalism by focusing our energy and attention on people and our natural environment. The possibilities of the latter, unlike economic growth, are infinite: volunteering in our communities, spending time outdoors, caring for friends and family, reaching across social, economic, class, and cultural divides to generate understanding and dialogue, participating in civil discourse and grassroots activism, prioritizing creativity, and shifting our mindsets to be less individualistic are just a few examples of energy spent outside the consumption-production cycle. At the individual level, it’s slowing down enough to appreciate quality over quantity.

Somewhere between technological evangelism and anarcho-primitivism there are policy ideas that can fundamentally change our understanding of a successful economy, and with organized social movements supporting these ideas, we can democratically transition our societies to live in a way that is more appropriate to our world in crisis. If we fail to transition to a less-is-more mindset soon, ecological collapse will engender all kinds of scarcity in the form of famine, resource depletion, mass migration and geopolitical tensions. If our current trajectory is any indication of our future, these global disasters will not be managed democratically.

Almost a year since I first drafted this piece, wildfires from 2023 continue to burn as affected residents and first responders anxiously wait to see if 2024 will set a new precedent for devastation. It’s true, our current situation is dire, but it doesn’t have to be hopeless. While thousands fight to save their homes and their livelihoods from fire, policymakers, politically engaged citizens, and average consumers alike can push the dial of progress forward from the ground-up. We have a real opportunity to build a society that is more connected to the things that truly matter—emotional, physical, and psychological safety, family, friends, community, solidarity, sharing, learning, listening, feeling fulfilled, and understanding and appreciating our natural environment and our role in it. Let’s not waste it.

https://mronline.org/2024/06/10/less-can-mean-more/

'De-Growth' for the 'Golden Billion', yes. But for the rest of humanity it ain't gonna fly. They demand that they have decent lives, and who can blame them? Should they 'take one for the team', ignoring the fact that the nations of the 'Golden Billion' brought us to this situation?

Yes, a grocery list of 'Good Thing We can Do', but none of that will be addressed in any effective manner under 'current management'. Revolution or collapse, revolution or ecocide, no other options.

But, you know, 'anything but communism'...

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At least 41 people die from heat in eastern India


Odisha has suffered several severe heat waves this summer, which in Indian territory lasts between April and June, with temperatures exceeding 45 degrees in several locations. PHOTO: EFE

By: Digna Díaz

June 11, 2024 Time: 09:12

In the last 72 hours alone, authorities reported eight deaths whose possible cause is high temperatures.

The number of deaths due to heatstroke in the state of Odisha, in eastern India, increased to 41 people since the beginning of summer, reported a statement from the Odisha State Emergency Operations Center.

It is expected that this figure could increase to more than one hundred if the authorities confirm dozens of other bodies pending autopsy.

In the current season of the year, 159 deaths suspected of heat stroke have been recorded. 45 cases have been ruled out and another 73 are being reviewed.


In the last 72 hours alone, authorities reported eight deaths whose possible cause is high temperatures.

Odisha has suffered several severe heat waves this summer, which in Indian territory lasts between April and June, with temperatures exceeding 45 degrees in several locations.

These figures are unusual in this coastal state, so together with the humidity they combine to increase the risk of heat stroke.

https://www.telesurtv.net/al-menos-41-p ... -la-india/

Google Translator

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Carbon Capture Will Extend Oil Production by 84 Years, Industry Study Finds
Posted on June 11, 2024 by Conor Gallagher

Conor here: In addition to prolonging oil production as the following piece lays out, there are also major risks from the pipelines that carry the captured CO2 to where it’s pumped back into the ground.From Bold Nebraska:

In the event of a carbon pipeline rupture or leak, an explosive plume of CO2 gas can emerge, odorless and colorless, an asphyxiant that can suffocate all living beings, and prevent combustion vehicles like cars from starting to enable an escape to safety.

This happened in 2020 in Satartia, Mississippi. Details from Huff Post:

It was just after 7 p.m. when residents of Satartia, Mississippi, started smelling rotten eggs. Then a greenish cloud rolled across Route 433 and settled into the valley surrounding the little town. Within minutes, people were inside the cloud, gasping for air, nauseated and dazed.

Some two dozen individuals were overcome within a few minutes, collapsing in their homes; at a fishing camp on the nearby Yazoo River; in their vehicles. Cars just shut off, since they need oxygen to burn fuel. Drivers scrambled out of their paralyzed vehicles, but were so disoriented that they just wandered around in the dark.

The first call to Yazoo County Emergency Management Agency came at 7:13 p.m. on February 22, 2020.

“CALLER ADVISED A FOUL SMELL AND GREEN FOG ACROSS THE HIGHWAY,” read the message that dispatchers sent to cell phones and radios of all county emergency personnel two minutes later.

First responders mobilized almost immediately, even though they still weren’t sure exactly what the emergency was. Maybe it was a leak from one of several nearby natural gas pipelines, or chlorine from the water tank.

The first thought, however, was not the carbon dioxide pipeline that runs through the hills above town, less than half a mile away. Denbury Inc, then known as Denbury Resources, operates a network of CO2 pipelines in the Gulf Coast area that inject the gas into oil fields to force out more petroleum. While ambient CO2 is odorless, colorless and heavier than air, the industrial CO2 in Denbury’s pipeline has been compressed into a liquid, which is pumped through pipelines under high pressure. A rupture in this kind of pipeline sends CO2 gushing out in a dense, powdery white cloud that sinks to the ground and is cold enough to make steel so brittle it can be smashed with a sledgehammer.

By Geoff Dembicki, an investigative climate journalist based in New York City. He is author of The Petroleum Papers and Are We Screwed? Originally published at DeSmog.

A major Canadian oil field in the province of Saskatchewan would likely have reached the end of its life eight years ago. But thanks to carbon capture and storage, a technology widely touted by the oil and gas industry and some political leaders as a key solution for climate change, the field could still be producing 1.5 million barrels of oil annually by the year 2100.

That’s according to calculations from Calgary-based senior geological advisor Menhwei Zhao, who authored a paper about his findings in the February 2024 issue of the AAPG Bulletin, a journal published by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

Though oil and gas producers have since the 1970s been capturing carbon dioxide from their operations and then pumping it into depleted oil wells, a process known as “enhanced oil recovery,” few studies “demonstrate in detail how CO2 injection impacts oil production and extends the lifespan of the oil pools,” Zhao writes.

He analyzed more than 22 years of production data from the Weyburn Midale oil pool, which since 2000 has been receiving carbon dioxide injections. It’s the world’s longest-running enhanced oil recovery project using carbon capture and storage. Zhao concluded that “without CO2 injection the pool would have ended its life by 2016,” but that “enhanced oil recovery could extend the pool’s lifespan to 39 or even 84 more years.”

That’s deeply worrying news for the climate, according to David Schlissel of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a research nonprofit that focuses on the clean energy transition. “The fact that the oilfield would have been retired,” he told DeSmog, “and now it could conceivably go past the year 2100 is astounding and frightening.”

Zhao said that even though he focused on a specific project in Canada he would expect to see “similar results” for largescale carbon capture and storage projects around the world: decades of extended oil production for depleted fields — or “pools” as he refers to them — that otherwise would have to be shut down.

Brazilian oil major Petrobras injected a record 10.6 million tons of CO2 underground in 2022 that went towards extracting more oil. Saudi Arabia has ambitious plans to increase enhanced oil recovery. And U.S. companies like Occidental continue to expand the technology in oil-producing regions such as the Permian Basin.

“Oil pools are all different — different geology, different quality,” Zhao told DeSmog of the global prospects for the technology. “So the reaction to CO2 injection might be different. But overall, it should help oil production for sure.” It’s a win-win for the industry and climate, he writes, because “most of the injected CO2 is permanently stored in the old oil pools.”

There is a lot of dispute around that among climate and energy experts, however. A DeSmog investigation of 12 large-scale carbon capture projects around the world found “a litany of missed carbon capture targets” as companies failed to properly bury the greenhouse gas or in some cases simply vented it into the atmosphere.

Writing about enhanced oil recovery earlier this year, Harvard University professor Naomi Oreskes noted that “every new barrel of oil and cubic foot of gas sold and burned is putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. So not only do these kinds of projects not help, but they perpetuate our use of fossil fuels at a critical moment in history when we need to do the opposite.”

Huge Public Subsidies

The AAPG Bulletin study comes as the Canadian and Albertan governments prepare to give upwards of $15.3 billion in tax credits to the country’s largest oil sands producers for building carbon capture and storage projects. The U.K. government is meanwhile promising £20 billion in subsidies and U.S. oil and gas producers can obtain a tax credit of $85 for every tonne of carbon dioxide they bury in underground geological formations (the credit is lowered to $60 per tonne if the CO2 is used for enhanced oil recovery).

Ostensibly these huge public subsidies are for lowering global greenhouse gas emissions. The Biden administration argues that “large-scale deployment” of carbon capture and storage technologies “is crucial to addressing the climate crisis.”

But the vast majority of the carbon dioxide being buried by the oil and gas industry is currently being used to extract more oil. As DeSmog reported last year, 22 of the world’s 32 commercial carbon capture facilities use captured CO2 to prolong the life of aging oil wells.

The potential for enhanced oil recovery using captured carbon dioxide is vast. “Of the total of 600 billion barrels of oil that have been discovered in the United States, approximately 400 billion barrels are unrecoverable by conventional methods. Half of that unrecoverable oil (200 billion barrels) is at reasonable depths at which [enhanced oil recovery] may be applicable,” the U.S. Department of Energy has estimated.

‘Produce Oil and Gas Forever’

Oil and gas producers insist that even if carbon capture is used for oil production it’s still beneficial for the climate because the buried carbon neutralizes the climate impact of burning the new oil. Using such technology, “there’s no reason not to produce oil and gas forever,” Vicki Hollub, CEO of the U.S. company Occidental Petroleum, told NPR last year.

That argument relies on deeply flawed math, Schlissel counters. He points to U.S. government calculations showing that injecting a metric tonne of carbon dioxide into an aging oil well can produce up to three barrels of oil. Those three barrels, when burned, release nearly 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “You’ve wiped out the savings from capturing the CO2,” he said.

The ultimate impact is to prolong our dependence on oil and gas. When the Weyburn carbon capture project in Saskatchewan was first announced in 1997 it was promoted as a way to extend the life of an aging oil field by 25 years, and then later touted as “a transitional technology that will allow the world to meet climate change challenges.”

More than a quarter century later, the Weyburn field is “still going strong,” according to Pipeline Online. “There’s a billion barrels of oil still in this reservoir,” one expert told the industry publication in 2022.

Zhao’s recent calculations in the AAPG Bulletin suggest that the project, and many others like it, can keep producing oil long past the 2050 deadline that scientists say is necessary for achieving net-zero emissions worldwide and avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

That demonstrates to experts like Charles Harvey, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies carbon capture and storage, that the huge amounts of taxpayer dollars going toward this technology under the pretense of lowering global emissions are in fact bolstering the fossil fuels at the heart of the climate crisis.

“Subsidizing this tilts the playing field away from technologies that don’t produce CO2 to begin with,” he told DeSmog, such as truly low-carbon energy sources like wind and solar. “And so it leads to a bigger market for oil.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... finds.html

[blindpig]

Two views (both wrong) on Marx, degrowth, and productivism
June 13, 2024

Saito versus Huber and Phillips: Opposing views both promote the myth of Marxist Prometheanism



The claim that Karl Marx advocated unlimited material growth has been revived recently, from two opposing points of view — one side claims that Marx abandoned such anti-ecological views late in life, and the other strongly supports his supposed Prometheanism. In this editorial, the editors of Monthly Review argue that both sides misunderstand and misrepresent Marx’s views. Reposted, with format changes, from Monthly Review, June 2024.

The term Promethean, referring in this context to extreme productivism, first entered into the ecological debate as a censure aimed almost entirely at Karl Marx. It was adopted as a form of condemnation by first-stage ecosocialists in the 1980s and ’90s, who sought to graft standard liberal Green theory onto Marxism, while jettisoning what were then widely presumed to be Marx’s anti-ecological views.


However, the Promethean myth with respect to Marx was to be subjected to a sustained attack, commencing twenty-five years ago, in the work of second-stage ecosocialists, represented by Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature, and John Bellamy Foster’s “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift” in the American Journal of Sociology — followed soon after by Foster’s Marx’s Ecology.

Here it was understood that the outlook of classical historical materialism was not that of the promotion of production for its own sake — much less accumulation for its own sake — but rather the creation of a society of sustainable human development controlled by the associated producers. The key analytical basis of this recovery of the classical historical-materialist ecological critique was Marx’s theory of metabolic rift.

On the basis of the recovery of Marx’s deep-seated ecological critique, ecosocialism has made major advances over the last quarter-century. One notable work, in this respect, was Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism which brought additional evidence to bear on the critique of the Promethean myth and on the development of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift.

The result was the emergence of powerful ecological Marxist assessments of the contemporary planetary crisis provided by a host of thinkers, including such notable figures as Ian Angus, Jacopo Nicola Bergamo, Mauricio Betancourt, Brett Clark, Rebecca Clausen, Sean Creaven, Peter Dickens, Martin Empson, Michael Friedman, Nicolas Graham, Hannah Holleman, Michael A. Lebowitz, Stefano Longo, Fred Magdoff, Andreas Malm, Brian M. Napoletano, Ariel Salleh, Eamonn Slater, Carles Soriano, Pedro Urquijo, Rob Wallace, Del Weston, Victor Wallis, Richard York, and many others too numerous to name.

However, in the last couple of years, the myth of Prometheanism in Marx’s thought has been reintroduced in ghostly fashion by thinkers such as Saito, in his latest works, and by Jacobin authors Matt Huber and Leigh Phillips, representing two opposite extremes on the issue of the role of productive forces/technology. The result has been to erect a Tower of Babel that threatens to extinguish much that has been achieved by Marxian ecology.

In his two most recent studies, Marx in the Anthropocene and Slow Down ( originally titled Capital in the Anthropocene), Saito has gone back on his earlier contention in Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism that Marx was not a Promethean thinker, and now insists, drawing on the largely discredited work of the “analytical Marxist” G. A. Cohen, that Marx was a technological determinist for most of his life.

The about-face by Saito on Marx and Prometheanism is clearly designed to accentuate what Saito now calls Marx’s “epistemological break,” beginning in 1868. From that point on, Marx is supposed to have entirely abandoned his previous historical materialism, rejecting all notions of the expansion of productive forces in favor of a steady-state economy, or degrowth. However, since there is not even the slightest textual evidence anywhere to be found in support of Saito’s claim on Marx and degrowth (beyond what has long been argued, that Marx was a theorist of sustainable human development), Saito is forced to read between the lines, imagining as he goes along.

The thrust of his new thesis is that the “last Marx” concluded that the productive forces inherited from capitalism formed a trap, causing him to reject growth of productive forces altogether in favor of a no-growth path to communism.

Such a view, however, is clearly anachronistic. Naturally, the fact that planned degrowth is a real issue today (see Monthly Review July–August 2023) does not mean that the problem would have presented itself in that way to Marx in 1868, in horse and buggy days, when industrial production was still confined to only a small corner of the world. (On Saito’s analysis, see Brian Napoletano, “Was Marx a Degrowth Communist?”)

Ironically, Saito’s thesis that Marx was a Promethean up to and including the publication of Capital (viewed by Saito as a transitional work in this respect) receives strong backing from Huber and Phillips in their article “Kohei Saito’s ‘Start from Scratch’ Degrowth Communism,” published in Jacobin in March

Proudly holding up a “Promethean Marxism” banner, Huber and Phillips present themselves as belonging to a long tradition of well-known Prometheans, including not only Marx and Frederick Engels, but also V. I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin. For the Jacobin authors, for whom Marxism = Prometheanism, Saito is thus to be faulted not for suggesting that Marx was Promethean up until the writing of Capital, but rather for his claim that Marx jettisoned his Prometheanism in his white-beard years, failing to carry it all the way to his grave.

Although they adopt a Marxist cover, the views of Huber and Phillips on technology and the environment are virtually identical to those of Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate Resource (Princeton University Press, 1981) and the leading anti-environmentalist critic of the ecological limits to growth within the neoclassical-economic orthodoxy in the 1970s and ’80s (see Foster’s “Ecosocialism and Degrowth.”).

The Jacobin authors thus adopt a view that is not so much ecomodernist in orientation as a form of total human exemptionalism from ecological determinants, in which humanity is presumed to be able to transcend by technological means all Earth System limits—including those of life itself. The metabolic rift, we are told, does not exist since it is dependent on a rift in a nonexistent “balance of nature.”

Here they ignore the fact that the notion of anthropogenic rifts in the biogeophysical cycles of life on the planet, raising the issue of mass extinction, extending even to human life itself, is central to modern Earth System science. It is not a question of a “balance of nature” as such, but rather one of preserving the earth as a safe home for humanity and innumerable other species.

Going against the current world scientific consensus, Huber and Phillips explicitly deny the reality of the nine planetary boundaries (climate change, biological integrity, biogeochemical cycles, ocean acidification, land system change, freshwater use, stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, and novel entities). Rather, they insist in their total exemptionalism that there are no biospheric limits to economic growth.

Hence, “there is no need,” they tell us, “to move to a steady-state economy…to return to more ‘appropriate’ technologies, to abandon ‘megaprojects,’ or to critique…a ‘metabolic rift’ with the rest of nature which,” they say, “[does] not exist.” Words like “commons” and “mutual aid” are classified as mere “buzzwords.” All arguments for “limits to growth” are by definition forms of “Malthusianism.” Nuclear power is to be promoted as a key solution to climate change and pollution generally.

To cap it off, they contend, in social Darwinist terms, that capitalism itself is somehow integral to natural selection: “So as far as the rest of nature is concerned, whatever we humans do, via the capitalist mode of production or otherwise, from combustion of fossil fuels to the invention of plastics, is just the latest set of novel evolutionary selection pressures.”

Phillips has gone even further in his 2015 book Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff. “The Socialist,” he declares, “must defend economic growth, productivism, Prometheanism.… Energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.” The ultimate goal is “more stuff.” What is required is “a high energy planet, not modesty, humility, and simple living.” With a brazen display of irrealism, Phillips bluntly asserts: “you can have infinite growth on a finite planet.” The earth, we are duly informed, can support “282 billion people”—or even more. Marxists who have questioned the nature of contemporary technology, such as Herbert Marcuse, are summarily dismissed as proponents of “neo-luddite positions.” Phillips openly celebrates Simon’s reactionary work, The Ultimate Resource, the bible of anti-ecological total exemptionalism.

Huber and Phillips’s bold advocacy of a “Promethean Marxism” in their Jacobin article was delivered with a panache that must have left the capitalist Breakthrough Institute green with envy. It has already led to a strong backlash in left-liberal environmental circles against the inanities of so-called “orthodox Marxism.”

This can be seen in an article by Thomas Smith titled “Technology, Ecology and the Commons—Huber and Phillips’ Barren Marxism.” Here we are told, in a further retreat from reason, that Huber and Phillips, in their total contempt for ecology, are simply “toeing the Marxist line,” promoting the “promethean Marxist dogma”—as if their views could be seen as representative of “orthodox Marxism” (which, as Georg Lukács famously said, is related entirely to method), or as if their outlook were one with that of Marxism in the world today. Neither is the case.

In twenty-first-century conditions, socialism is ecology and ecology is socialism. Perhaps the most important aspect of Saito’s own analysis, despite all of the contradictions in his most recent work, is that it recognizes that a deep ecological view was present classically within the work of Marx (and, we would add, Engels), and that this constitutes a theoretical foundation on which all those committed to the philosophy of praxis today can draw in their struggles to create an economically egalitarian and ecologically sustainable world.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... ductivism/

(The entire issue can be summed up in the question, "What is human 'need'?")

******


UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell (Photo: Jon Linden | UN Climate Change)

Two years to save the world
Originally published: United Nations Climate Change on April 10, 2024 by Simon Stiell (more by United Nations Climate Change) | (Posted Jun 14, 2024)



The following is the transcript of a speech delivered by UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell on 10 April 2024 at Chatham House in London, England.

Two years to save the world…

Good afternoon,

Some of you may think the title of today’s event is overly dramatic. Melodramatic, even.

So let me start by explaining briefly why the next two years are so essential in saving our planet.

First, we know the stakes. You’ve heard me talk before about record shattering heat and massive damage to economies, and how there’s no room for half measures. Let’s take all that as a given.

Second, we are at the start of a race which will determine the biggest winners in a new clean energy economy.

And with the global index of living standards in constant flux, each country’s climate responses will be key to whether they rise up the ladder or fall.

Whether they thrive or barely survive.

Third, for many countries, they will only be able to implement strong new climate plans if we see a quantum leap in climate finance this year.

Fourth, it’s about how the Paris Agreement works.

As of today, national climate plans—called Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs—in aggregate will barely cut emissions at all by 2030.

We still have a chance to make greenhouse gas emissions tumble, with a new generation of national climate plans. But we need these stronger plans, now.

And while every country must submit a new plan, the reality is G20 emissions are around 80% of global emissions.

So G20 leadership must be at the core of the solution, as it was during the great financial crisis. That’s when the G20 came of age and showed major developed and developing economies can work together to avert global economic catastrophes.

Fifth and finally, every citizen of every country has an opportunity to be part of this transition. Every voice makes a difference. This year and next, we will need every voice more than ever.

Let’s consider for a moment what is up for grabs if we do make the next two years really count.

Bold new national climate plans will be a jobs jackpot and economic springboard to boost countries up that global ladder of living standards.

In the face of crop-destroying droughts, much bolder climate action to curb emissions and help farmers adapt will increase food security, and lessen hunger.

Cutting fossil fuel pollution will mean better health and huge savings for governments and households alike.

The transformative potential of bold climate action—in tandem with steps to advance gender equality—is one of the fastest ways to move away from business as usual.

For those who say that climate change is only one of many priorities, like ending poverty, ending hunger, ending pandemics, or improving education, I simply say this: none of these crucial tasks—indeed none of the Sustainable Development Goals—will be possible unless we get the climate crisis under control.

In fact, business-as-usual will further entrench the gross inequalities between the world’s richest and poorest countries and communities that unchecked climate impacts are making much worse.

These inequalities are kryptonite for cooperative global climate action, and every economy, every country and its people pays the price of that.

To start curing this global cancer of inequality, we need to enable bold new national climate plans by all nations that protect people, boost jobs and drive inclusive economic growth. And we need them by early next year.

The next generation of national climate plans must be investment plans for sustainable and strong economies.

Which brings us back to the crucial importance of climate finance…

…Because it’s hard for any government to invest in renewables or climate resilience when the treasury coffers are bare, debt servicing costs have overtaken health spending, new borrowing is impossible, and the wolves of poverty are at the door.

A quantum leap this year in climate finance is both essential and entirely achievable.

Every day, finance ministers, CEOs, investors, and development bankers direct trillions of dollars. It’s time to shift those dollars from the energy and infrastructure of the past, towards that of a cleaner, more resilient future…

…And to ensure that the poorest and most vulnerable countries benefit.

This year, at COP29 in Baku, we need to agree a new target for climate finance that meets developing country needs. But it’s not enough to agree a target. We need a new deal on climate finance, between developed and developing countries.

That deal should have four key components.

First, more concessional finance. Especially for the poorest and most vulnerable countries.

Second, we need new sources of international climate finance, as the G20, International Maritime Organization, and others are working on.

Third—as Prime Minister Mottley and President Ruto have made clear—we must reform development banks to make them work better for developing countries, embed climate in their decision-making, and build a financial system fit for the twenty-first century.

Fourth, debt relief for the countries that need it most to give them the fiscal space for climate investment. Developing countries spent more than four hundred billion dollars servicing debts last year.

Experts have shown that if we do all of this together, we can meet developing country needs, mobilizing hundreds of billions of dollars.

Ever-closer cooperation between international institutions is more important than ever. I offer UN Climate Change’s partnership wherever it can help to support stronger and faster climate-related outcomes. To the World Bank, IMF at the upcoming Spring Meetings. To the G7, G20, and their finance ministers. Together we can make this deal real.

Together we must step up the pace. The Spring Meetings are not a dress rehearsal. Averting a climate-driven economic catastrophe is core business. It can’t slip between the cracks of different mandates.

We can’t afford a talkfest without clear steps forward, when there is an opportunity to make real progress on every part of the new climate finance deal all nations need.

At the Spring Meetings we need an ambitious round of replenishment for the World Bank’s International Development Association. Doing so could lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and increase clean energy access, especially across Africa.

Progress in Washington DC on revising the World Bank’s capital requirements could free up billions more for concessional lending without asking donors for more money.

Next, to help give countries the fiscal space they need for climate action, the IMF can help more countries deal with debts made worse by climate change and the pandemic. For example, by making more use of the Catastrophe Containment Relief Trust.

The World Bank’s work on Climate Resilient Debt Clauses—which allow countries facing supercharged storms to focus on recovery—are another welcome step in the right direction. Eligibility should now be expanded beyond small and island states to more countries and more climate impacts.

The G7 has a crucial role too, this year chaired by Italy.

G7 governments are the key shareholders in the World Bank and IMF. In truth, they provide both capital and direction. With their say-so, these institutions can do much more to use all the tools at their disposal to deliver large-scale impacts on the ground.

It’s entirely in the interests of every G7 country to take much bolder climate action at home and abroad, including on climate finance.

Firstly, because serious progress on climate finance is a pre-requisite for bold new national climate plans from developing countries, without which all economies, the G7’s included, will soon be in serious and permanent strife.

Secondly, because resilience building is equally urgent to protect the supply chains that all economies depend on. We have just seen what supply chain disruptions flowing from covid did to inflation, and to households and businesses. Well, you can bet your bottom dollar these disruptions and inflationary impacts will only get dramatically worse, without bolder climate action.

So too, the world needs the G20 to rise to this moment.

We are all aware of geopolitical challenges. I do not downplay them. But they cannot be an excuse for timidity, amidst this worsening crisis.

I’ll be candid: blame-shifting is not a strategy. Sidelining climate isn’t a solution to a crisis that will decimate every G20 economy and has already started to hurt.

So the financial firepower the G20 marshaled during the global financial crisis should be marshaled again and pointed squarely at curbing runaway emissions and building resilience now.

Brazil, who also host COP30, has a vital role to play to kickstart the ambitious action we need.

I’m encouraged that the G20, under Brazilian leadership, is exploring ways to find new finance for climate and development. Brazil itself is also trialing new ways to reduce unreasonable borrowing costs for clean energy which could work for other developing countries.

Ultimately, it’s not enough to invest in clean energy and resilient infrastructure without measures that also speed up the decline of fossil fuels. Stronger domestic progress on carbon pricing is essential to reflect the real economics of fossil fuels, including the massive health and economic costs of greenhouse gas pollution, which should not be shunted on to government, households, and other industries to pay.

When I say we have two years to save the world, it begs the question—who exactly has two years to save the world?

The answer is every person on this planet.

More and more people want climate action right across societies and political spectrums, in large part because they are feeling the impacts of the climate crisis in their everyday lives and their household budgets…

…Rising costs for fossil-fuel-powered transport… for heating and cooling… energy… rising food prices as climate disasters hit production and supply chains… to name just a few.

A recent survey by Gallup of 130,000 people in 125 countries found that 89% want stronger climate action by governments.

Yet too often we’re seeing signs of climate action slipping down cabinet agendas.

There is a disconnect—because in living rooms around the world, climate impacts and costs are rising quickly up the list of household worries.

The only surefire way to get climate up the cabinet agenda is if enough people raise their voices.

So my final message today is for people everywhere.

Every voice matters. Yours have never been more important.

If you want bolder climate action, now is the time to make yours count.

Thank you.

https://mronline.org/2024/06/14/two-yea ... the-world/

******

Biofuels Manufacturing Found To Be a Significant Source of Hazardous Air Pollution
Posted on June 14, 2024 by Yves Smith
By Dana Drugmand. Originally published at The New Lede

Hazardous air pollutants emitted in the manufacturing of biofuels is nearly as bad as air pollution stemming from oil refineries, and for several types of dangerous pollutants such as formaldehyde the emissions from biofuel production are far greater, a new report finds.

The assessment, which was conducted by researchers with the environmental watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), looked at emissions generated by 275 ethanol, biodiesel and renewable diesel facilities in the United States. The researchers found that the facilities frequently violated air pollution permits while at the same time benefiting from legal exemptions and federal policy supports such as fuel-blending mandates.


As the biofuels industry continues expanding with more than 30 new facilities under construction or proposed, the industry should be seen as a threat to public health, the report warns. Stronger regulatory oversight from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is needed, according to EIP.

“Despite its green image, the biofuels industry releases a surprising amount of hazardous air pollution that puts local communities at risk – and this problem is exacerbated by EPA’s lax regulation” Courtney Bernhardt, EIP director of research, said in a statement.

According to the EIP report released on Wednesday, biofuels manufacturing generated 12.9 million pounds of hazardous air pollutants in 2022. That compares to 14.5 million pounds of hazardous air pollutants emitted by oil refineries that year, according to data from EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory.


(Source: Environmental Integrity Project report)

Emissions from biofuel factories were significantly higher than oil refineries for four types of hazardous pollutants – formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, acrolein, and hexane, according to the EIP report. In 2022, biofuel facilities reported releases of nearly 7.7 million pounds of hexane, over 2.1 million pounds of acetaldehyde, 235,125 pounds of formaldehyde, and 357,564 pounds of acrolein. By comparison, oil refineries that year emitted 2.6 million pounds of hexane, 10,420 pounds of acetaldehyde, 67,774 pounds of formaldehyde, and zero pounds of acrolein.

Formaldehyde is carcinogenic to humans (according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer) and acetaldehyde is a probable human carcinogen, according to EPA. Acrolein is “toxic to humans following inhalation, oral or dermal exposures” and can cause upper respiratory tract irritation, nausea, vomiting and shortness of breath, while hexane exposure can affect the central nervous system and cause irritation of the eyes and throat.

As the new report explains, these “same four pollutants also contribute to the formation of ground-level ozone, or smog, which is linked to a wide variety of respiratory ailments; as well as microscopic, soot-like particulates that can trigger heart and asthma attacks.”

The biofuels industry is the largest source of acrolein emissions in the US, and Cargill’s ethanol plant located in Blair, Nebraska is the nation’s single biggest acrolein emitter. In 2022 this facility reported releases of 34,489 pounds of the toxic pollutant, according to EIP. Researchers also found that the largest single industrial emitter of hexane in the country is the Archer-Daniels Midland (ADM) ethanol and grain processing facility located in Decatur, Illinois. The plant released 2.2 million pounds of the pollutant in 2022.

Neither ADM nor Cargill responded to a request for comment.

Geoff Cooper, CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, took issue with the EIP report, saying it was “fundamentally flawed” in its understanding of the US renewable fuels industry, and was conflating ethanol, biodiesel and renewable diesel production. He said, for example, that hexane is not used at all in the ethanol production process anywhere in the US, yet the “falsely attributes hexane emissions to fuel ethanol.” Moreover, he said, the companies listed with the largest emissions are not ethanol plants per-se, but rather wet mills where ethanol is only one of several products. More than 90% percent of fuel ethanol is produced at dry mills, according to Cooper.

“Further, US ethanol facilities are tightly regulated on their emissions, and producers are in compliance with all federal and state emissions limits. When violations have been noted, which is very rare, producers have immediately taken corrective action and quickly moved into compliance,” he said.

In addition to hazardous air pollutants, biofuels production generates greenhouse gas emissions that are driving dangerous climate change. US biofuels plants emitted over 33 million metric tons of this climate pollution in 2022, the report found, which is comparable to more than eight coal-fired power plants operating around the clock. “That’s a notable amount for an industry that portrays itself as climate friendly and environmentally sustainable,” Bernhardt said during a Wednesday press briefing.

Previous research has also cast doubt on the perception of these plant-based fuels as a greener alternative to petroleum. A 2022 study for example suggested that corn-based ethanol production is no less carbon-intensive, and may be even more so, than gasoline, particularly when considering the full lifecycle impacts including fertilizer consumption and land-use conversion.


(Source: Environmental Integrity Project report)

The US is the world’s largest producer of biofuels, with 18.5 billion gallons produced in 2022 alone (about 40% of the global total). The vast majority of that production, about 15 billion gallons, was ethanol, which is made primarily from corn and also from soybeans. As the report notes, almost half of all soybeans and more than a third of all corn grown goes not towards food, but rather for fuel production.

Supported by billions of dollars in government subsidies and dozens of federal policies and incentives, the US biofuels industry has grown rapidly over the last several decades. And the industry continues to expand, with at least 32 new or expanded facilities under construction or proposed that could increase production capacity 33% over 2023 levels, according to the EIP report. Much of this planned new production is for so-called “sustainable aviation fuels” made from wood or plant feedstock.

But existing biofuels facilities, the new research suggests, have a poor track record of environmental compliance and are considerable contributors to climate and hazardous air pollution that risks endangering the health of the largely rural residents living near or downwind of these factories.

The ADM plant in Illinois, one of the largest biofuels facilities in the country, was the industry’s biggest polluter in 2022, releasing 4 million metric tons of greenhouse gases and around 3 million pounds of hazardous air pollutants.

“People near Decatur, IL, are constantly exposed to air pollution that can harm their brains and cause dizziness and nausea. ADM’s ethanol plant also emits more greenhouse gases than places like oil refineries in Illinois,” said Robert Hirschfeld, director of water policy at the Prairie Rivers Network, an Illinois-based environmental organization.

Eliot Clay, land use director at the Illinois Environmental Council, contended during the press briefing that the industrial agriculture sector “continues to greenwash biofuels.” He said the new report helps expose the truth that people in central and southern Illinois “live with an alarming level of exposure to toxic industrial emissions.”

And yet, as the report explains, biofuels are exempt from more stringent air pollution controls, as the EPA in 2007 removed corn-based ethanol from the list of facilities subject to stricter pollution thresholds under the Clean Air Act. The report also found that over a third of biofuel plants (with available data) failed Clean Air Act air pollution compliance as measured through “stack tests” and that 41 percent of facilities violated their air pollution control permits at least once between July 2021 and May 2024.

In addition to better enforcement, the EIP report recommends that federal regulators end permitting exemptions for ethanol manufacturers, improve monitoring and control of hazardous air pollutants from biofuels facilities, require that producers enhance the accuracy of their emissions reporting, and calls for an end to biofuels subsidies and mandates such as the Renewable Fuel Standard.

“The environmental benefits of these government supports are questionable at best,” Bernhardt said.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... ution.html