The Long Ecological Revolution
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Europe’s Blue Hydrogen Plans Risk Generating Annual Emissions on Par With Denmark
Posted on October 15, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Israel’s barbaric conduct of its wars, the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, and the hard-fought US presidential election have been dominating the news. That makes it way too easy for legitimately important stories to go by the wayside, particularly ones involving scams. Blue hydrogen is one of the far too many supposed climate easy fixes that are taken up by promoters and sold as far more effective than they are (keep in mind that overstated impact justifies overspending).
But blue hydrogen, as DeSmog explains below, looks far more cynical than that. A pet initiative of fossil fuel companies, its backers are trying to claim it should get “low carbon” subsidies. DeSmog’s analysis shows that, based on the performance of existing projects, it should not qualify.
By Aline Nippert. Originally published at DeSmogBlog. This is the fourth part of a DeSmog series on carbon capture and was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe and published in partnership with Le Monde
Billed by the fossil fuel industry as a climate solution, dozens of planned blue hydrogen projects in Europe could consume more natural gas each year than France, and produce emissions on a par with Denmark, a DeSmog analysis has found.
The findings raise new questions over blue hydrogen’s climate impact as EU officials deliberate over technical standards that could allow the technology to count as “low-carbon” — and thus qualify for billions of euros in subsidies.
The term blue hydrogen is used to describe hydrogen made from natural gas, where carbon capture and storage(CCS) technology is deployed to trap much of the large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) generated during the production process, then bury it underground.
Hydrogen emits no CO2 at the point of use. If produced cleanly, the molecule is theoretically capable of decarbonising various sectors, including chemicals and petrochemicals, steel, cement, power, road transport and potentially aviation.
Although Europe has yet to produce any blue hydrogen at scale, Shell, BP, Equinor, TotalEnergies, Eni, and ExxonMobil are among dozens of oil and gas companies promoting the technology as a way of meeting climate goals.
However, industry has yet to provide the kind of comprehensive data needed to estimate how far any possible climate benefits from switching to blue hydrogen produced by the planned projects may offset the residual CO2 emissions and methane leaks associated with making it.
To begin to fill this gap, DeSmog teamed up with Christophe Coutanceau, a professor at the Institute of Chemistry of Poitiers: Materials and Natural Resources, and co-lead of a hydrogen working group at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, known by its French acronym CNRS. [Details of the methodology used can be found at the end of this story].
By reviewing extensive industry reports and technical data on 46 proposed blue hydrogen projects in the EU, UK and Norway listed by the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), DeSmog found that 27 involve building new hydrogen production facilities. Another 15 envisage retrofitting existing hydrogen plants with carbon capture, while the status of four remained undetermined. More than a third of the total volume of hydrogen gas produced by these 46 projects would be used for oil refining — the main use of hydrogen today, according to a DeSmog tally of available data.
In collaboration with Coutanceau, DeSmog estimated that these 27 new blue hydrogen facilities could consume 48 billion cubic metres (bcm) of natural gas each year — about a tenth of the total consumption in the EU, UK and Norway in 2022 (499 bcm), and more than the annual amount of gas burned in France (38 bcm).
DeSmog’s analysis estimated the total annual emissions associated with the 46 planned blue hydrogen projects at 38 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) — about as much as Denmark or Switzerland emitted in 2022 (42 million tonnes of CO2). Our calculations factored in methane leaks in the natural gas supply chain and the partial efficiency of carbon capture units.
A further 33 million tonnes of CO2 could be released while the plants are being built in the one-off process used to manufacture the amine-based solvent used in the most common types of capture units, the analysis found.
“We should be very cautious with blue hydrogen. We should not buy into a false sense of complacency that it is a low-carbon fuel,” said Lorenzo Sani, power analyst at financial think tank Carbon Tracker, who reviewed DeSmog’s methodology and findings. “A badly managed development of blue hydrogen will increase carbon emissions while creating new gas demand that risks extending energy security concerns.”
The concerns were echoed by Paul Martin, a chemical engineer and decarbonisation consultant at Spitfire Research, who also reviewed the findings.
“This analysis confirms the fact that so-called ‘blue’ hydrogen is rather ‘blackish blue’,” Martin said. “Even technological innovations in the field of hydrogen production from fossil gas don’t change this.”
Coutanceau, the CNRS hydrogen expert, underscored the huge scale of the task fossil fuel companies face in realising plans to sequester the captured CO2 in disused oilfields in the North Sea.
“In addition to the tens of million tonnes of CO2 equivalent that blue hydrogen projects would release every year, what are we going to do with the captured CO2?” Coutanceau said. “There’s talk of underground storage in saline cavities, but to my knowledge this infrastructure doesn’t yet exist on an industrial scale.”
In April, workers began boring a hole under the seawall at the Port of Rotterdam, marking the start of construction of the Porthos carbon capture and storage project — which aims to start sequestering CO2 captured at two planned blue hydrogen projects in a disused offshore gas field from 2026.
Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies plan to store millions of tonnes of CO2 under the North Sea in their Northern Lights joint venture, which opened a storage facility near Bergen last month. Equinor says the project will initially store 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 a year — with that capacity already committed to ammonia, cement and bioenergy plants.
Lack of Data
Hydrogen Europe, an industry association grouping hundreds of companies — ranging from Shell and BP, to utilities and engineering firms — dismissed concerns over the potential emissions footprint of the planned blue hydrogen projects, saying substituting blue hydrogen for fossil fuels would have a net climate benefit.
“You want me to admit that we have a lot of CO2 emissions because of blue [hydrogen]. That’s not true,” Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, Hydrogen Europe’s CEO, told DeSmog in an interview. “You have to look at the big picture: With blue hydrogen, there will be fewer CO2 emissions than if you used natural gas as your [source of fuel]. You criticize the fact that we’re reducing emissions. I don’t understand the logic.”
According to the Hydrogen Council, a global trade association, producing one kilogram of blue hydrogen using natural gas and a high level of capture (90 to 98 percent) would emit a maximum of 3.9 kilograms of CO2 — 70 percent less than a conventional hydrogen plant.
However, it’s difficult to independently estimate the decarbonisation potential of the planned blue hydrogen projects without access to data showing how the gas will be used, and thus how far it might reduce demand for fossil fuels.
“For now, we don’t have enough data,” Coutanceau said. “To arrive at a precise calculation of avoided emissions, we’d need to know whether the hydrogen would be used as a feedstock in a manufacturing process, to produce heat, or used in fuel cells to produce electricity. It’s not the same [decarbonisation] gain.”
Hydrogen Europe declined to respond to DeSmog’s request for an estimate for the quantity of CO2 emissions that could be saved by the 46 proposed blue hydrogen projects. The Global CCS Institute, an oil and gas industry body, did not respond to a request for comment.
Regarded as one of the most authoritative models for decarbonising the energy system, the IEA’s Net Zero by 2050 Roadmap sees an increase in global blue hydrogen production capacity to 18 million tonnes (Mt) by 2030 from the negligible amounts produced today. But the 46 planned blue hydrogen projects in Europe alone would produce 10 million tonnes of blue hydrogen — or more than half the global total needed in the IEA scenario, DeSmog found.
Only a handful of the proposed projects have received a final investment decision, meaning there is no guarantee they will all be built. Nevertheless, climate advocates say the discrepancy between the scale of the proposed build-out, and the Net Zero 2050 roadmap, raises questions over whether industry is intent on using blue hydrogen to preserve demand for natural gas, even as Europe transitions away from fossil fuels.
Make-or-Break Moment’
Fossil fuel companies, utilities and industrial gas producers are vying for a share of a cumulative total of $100 billion in state support for hydrogen projects that had been announced by EU member states and other European countries by 2023, according to data from BloombergNEF.
Some climate groups are urging governments to back “green” hydrogen — the term used for hydrogen produced in an emissions-free but energy-intensive process powered by wind and solar. In contrast to blue hydrogen’s reliance on natural gas as a feedstock, green hydrogen is made using large quantities of water.
The EU has set up Hydrogen Bank to help scale up the technology, with the Renewable Energy Directive stipulatingthat 42 percent of hydrogen used in industry will have to be produced solely from renewable energy sources by 2030, and 60 percent by 2035.
But environmental groups are concerned that industry lobbyists may convince the European Commission to shift those obligations from green hydrogen to a more loosely defined “low-carbon” hydrogen — which would include blue hydrogen projects. That could crowd out investment in green hydrogen, which is much costlier to produce.
“If selection is based solely on price, since blue hydrogen will be cheaper than green hydrogen, blue hydrogen projects will [win out] and will make green hydrogen disappear,” Geert De Cock, electricity and energy manager at Transport & Environment, a Brussels-based research and advocacy group, told DeSmog. “In my opinion, this is a frontal attack on green hydrogen.”
In April, Transport & Environment and other environmental groups, joined by wind and solar companies, wrote an open letter urging the European Commission to adopt a “robust definition” for low-carbon hydrogen, with stringent conditions attached to blue hydrogen production.
The Renewable Hydrogen Coalition, environmental tank Bellona, and the Environmental Defense Fund were among signatories urging Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson and Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič to ensure the new rules reflected the entirety of greenhouse gas emissions associated with a particular blue hydrogen project; set a minimum rate of carbon capture; and set maximum rates for methane leakage.
The letter’s signatories also call for a guarantee that any blue hydrogen to qualify as “low-carbon”, “will only be produced from existing (not additional) gas production capacity”.
“If the rules are sufficiently strict, the new [blue hydrogen] projects will not happen,” De Cock said. “It is really make-or-break for the industry.”
Betting on Blue
Today, almost all industrial hydrogen is of the “grey” variety, where the CO2 emitted during the process of making it from natural gas is vented into the atmosphere, accounting for about two percent of global CO2 emissions, according to the IEA. About half of this hydrogen is used in oil refining, where the gas is used to strip sulphur from refined products, and make diesel and other oils.
Some climate advocates suspect that the fossil fuel industry is backing blue hydrogen in part because the resulting demand for natural gas will serve to prolong the useful life of existing gas deposits, drilling rigs, pipelines and other infrastructure. That could reduce the risk that the EU’s goal to slash carbon emissions by 55 percent by 2030 will saddle oil and gas companies with billions of euros of stranded assets.
In the Netherlands, site of 12 of the 46 proposed blue hydrogen projects, U.S. industrial gases company Air Products and French rival Air Liquide have announced plans to retrofit their existing grey hydrogen plants in the Port of Rotterdam with carbon capture equipment to produce blue hydrogen. “Hydrogen plays a critical role in the energy transition and in mitigating the effects of climate change,” Air Products says on its website.
The captured CO2 will be handled by Porthos, a joint venture between state-owned firms Energie Beheer Nederland, Gasunie, and the Port of Rotterdam Authority. The project aims to store 2.5 million tonnes of CO2 captured annually from various industries in depleted gas fields under the North Sea for 15 years, starting in 2026.
Elsewhere in the Netherlands, in the maritime province of Zeeland, Air Liquide is building a new plant to supply blue hydrogen to Zeeland Refinery, a joint venture between TotalEnergies and Russia’s Lukoil. Air Liquide is also participating in the Kairos@C project in the Belgian port of Antwerp, which aims to capture more than 14 million tonnes of CO2 over its first 10 years of operations, including from two blue hydrogen plants.
“The Group has a complete portfolio of technological solutions and services to support the decarbonisation of its customers around the world,” Air Liquide said in its 2022 strategic plan.
American-German gas manufacturer Linde, which is headquartered in the UK, also sees blue hydrogen as a growth opportunity. “Blue hydrogen is the next step,” the company says on its web page. “Gray and blue hydrogen are important stepping stones on the path to green hydrogen as they will allow for the necessary frameworks and infrastructures to be developed while green hydrogen production reaches the necessary scale.”
Oil Companies Spy Opportunities
The track record of the fewer than 10 existing commercial blue hydrogen plants in operation has been uneven. For example, Shell’s Quest project in Canada, capable of producing 900 tonnes of hydrogen a day, captured five million tonnes of CO2 from 2015-2021 — but released more than 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases during the same period, according to a report based on official data collated by Global Witness.
Nevertheless, oil companies are talking up the benefits of blue hydrogen, with TotalEnergies, Eni, Shell and BP all characterising the gas as a clean fuel that can be used to bridge the gap before green hydrogen becomes more economical.
In January last year, Norway’s state-owned oil company Equinor signed a memorandum of understanding with the German energy provider RWE to jointly develop blue hydrogen projects in Norway for export via pipeline to Germany. Equinor announced last month that it had scrapped the plans, citing excessive costs and insufficient demand.
In the UK, site of 14 of the 46 blue hydrogen projects on the drawing board, BP is developing a large-scale blue hydrogen plant, called H2 Teesside. The project aims to produce 160,000 tonnes of blue hydrogen a year, with the developers pledging to capture two million tonnes of associated CO2 emissions and bury them under the North Sea.
“The project is already well advanced,” said Sani, the power analyst at Carbon Tracker, and author of a June reporton blue hydrogen in the UK. “Although the final investment decision has not yet been taken, several agreements have already been concluded, and the construction of a new [liquefied natural gas] terminal to supply the plant with fossil gas has been proposed.”
Meanwhile, U.S. major ExxonMobil, which has various carbon capture interests in the Netherlands, Belgium and UK, describes blue hydrogen as “one of the few proven technologies that could deliver significant reductions in CO2 emissions in high-emitting, hard-to-decarbonise sectors.”
Battle of Perceptions
Industry groups are keen to kick-start the planned blue hydrogen projects by portraying them as equivalent to their green hydrogen rivals — downplaying the differences in the emissions footprint of the technologies, and focusing on economics.
“It’s about decarbonisation, it’s not about colour,” said Chatzimarkakis, the Hydrogen Europe CEO, reiterating a position commonly advanced by industry. “If we start to criticize technologies that help to decarbonise, to the energy transition, we’re making a big mistake. We need to be ‘technology diverse’. We need to have every technology that allows for CO2 abatement to play its role.”
Under existing EU rules, the maximum threshold of greenhouse gas emission for hydrogen to be considered “low-carbon” is equivalent to that of green hydrogen: 3.38 kilograms of CO2e per kilogram of hydrogen. But whether or not a particular blue hydrogen facility meets that definition depends on the methodology used to calculate its emissions.
In May, the EU adopted a raft of new rules on gas and hydrogen under its Green Deal climate framework — and tasked officials with developing a methodology for determining which hydrogen projects count as “low-carbon” within a year. The European Commission published a draft of the new rules on September 27, and opened a month-long public consultation.
The draft proposed that blue hydrogen projects should be subjected to a “full life-cycle analysis” — meaning that emissions estimates would include factors such as methane leakages during the production and transport of the natural gas, and stringent rules for assessing carbon capture rates.
But the devil is in the details, campaigners say.
In a response to the draft, Transport & Environment questioned the rigour of proposed measures to factor in methane leakages, while Bellona noted a lack of measures to deter the build-out of new natural gas infrastructure.
Many more questions remain unanswered.
The draft suggests that all emissions associated with the process of capturing CO2, then transporting the gas and injecting into undersea storage sites, will be taken into account when measuring the carbon footprint of a blue hydrogen project. But the rules are silent on the question of whether the emissions associated with the production of the amine-based solvent needed to operate the most common carbon capture technology should also be factored in.
It has also yet to be determined how to account for likely leaks of hydrogen — which is considered an “indirect” greenhouse gas because it causes chemical reactions that affect concentrations of methane, ozone, and stratospheric water vapor, as well as aerosols. Other questions include: How will the natural gas supply chain be certified? And how to ensure such certifications are accurate? Would it make more sense to calculate the warming impact of the methane over a period of 20 years (84 times greater than CO2), as advocated by environmental groups, or 100 years (28 times greater), as desired by industry?
“European policymakers need to set strong guarantees for blue hydrogen projects, as they risk derailing net zero strategies if they are developed without addressing supply chain emissions,” said Carbon Tracker’s Sani. “Without stringent regulatory frameworks, blue hydrogen could inadvertently become a setback in our fight against climate change.”
Variations in the methane leakage rates in different gas-producing regions further complicate efforts to calculate blue hydrogen’s carbon footprint.
Norway’s gas industry is said to limit its leakage rates to below 1.0 percent — less than the estimated global average of 1.4 to 2.0 percent. However, with Norway’s gas production committed to existing customers, it seems likely that future blue hydrogen projects will turn to suppliers such as the United States, where shale oil and gas reserves are being massively exploited, and estimates for the proportion of methane molecules escaping into the air can be 3.5 percent, or higher. In some parts of the U.S., such as the Permian Basin in New Mexico, leakage rates above 9.0 percent have been recorded — meaning that even within a given country, where the gas comes from can have a big impact on the level of climate harm.
Chatzimarkakis, of Hydrogen Europe, said the origin of the natural gas was outside the scope of his group’s remit. “I don’t know where the gas will come from,” he said. “We are not a gas lobby. That’s not our business.”
Aline Nippert’s new book Hydrogen Mania: An Investigation into the Totem of Green Growth is published in French by Le passager clandestin.
Additional reporting by Michael Buchsbaum and Sharon Kelly
Methodology and Assumptions[/i]
We began by examining the 51 proposed blue hydrogen projects in the EU, UK and Norway featured in a databasemaintained by the International Energy Agency (data current as of October 2023). We excluded four projects in the UK that have been canceled (H2 Leeds City Gate project; Cavendish Phases 1 and 2; and a project at the Fawley refinery) and one in Norway (Aukra CCS). To simplify the calculations, we assumed that all the projects used natural gas, commonly used to make hydrogen in Europe. (Hydrogen can also be produced from oil and coal).
Project by project, we trawled specialised websites, press releases, and technical reports to ascertain whether the developers were planning to retrofit an existing grey hydrogen plant to produce blue hydrogen — or build a new blue hydrogen plant from scratch.
We found developers were planning:
15 retrofits
27 new projects
4 undetermined
Estimating Natural Gas Consumption
We used the developer’s projections for how much blue hydrogen a given plant would produce each year to estimate how much natural gas it would consume.
We used a standard assumption that it takes 3.6 kilograms of methane (the main ingredient of natural gas) to produce 1.0 kilogram of hydrogen.
We then increased the result by 22 percent to reflect scientific estimates for the additional natural gas that would be required to power the carbon capture process. The total amount of natural gas required by the 46 plants (new plants and retrofits) was estimated at 67 billion cubic metres (bcm).
We concluded that the planned 27 new blue hydrogen facilities would consume a total of 48 billion bcm of natural gas each year as a feedstock — about a tenth of the total consumption in the EU, UK and Norway in 2022 (499 bcm), and more than the amount of gas burned in France (38 bcm).
Estimating CO2 Emissions
To estimate the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) associated with the 46 planned blue hydrogen projects, we took various factors into account:
The amount of CO2 that would be emitted directly each year during the process of producing blue hydrogen, which is a factor of the average efficiency of the capture equipment (either 60 percent or 90 percent depending on the type of production process): 18 million tonnes.
The amount of CO2e escaping into the atmosphere each year as a result of methane leaks during the process of extracting, storing and transporting the natural gas. (Between 20 and 48 million tonnes of CO2e for leakage rates of 1.5 percent and 3.5 percent respectively).
The amount of CO2 generated by the one-off production of the amine-based solvent used in most carbon capture units: (33 million tonnes). Since the solvent can be reused, the emissions associated with solvent production will only occur when the plants are being built.
In all, we estimated that building all 46 blue hydrogen projects would lead to the minimum release of 38 million tonnes of CO2e every year — on a par with Denmark’s annual emissions of 42 million tonnes.
Here is a more detailed breakdown of each stage of our calculations:
Carbon Capture Efficiency
Under existing blue hydrogen technology, about 40 to 60 percent of the CO2 molecules present in a given volume of flue gas are captured, according to the IEA. We therefore estimated a 60-percent capture rate for the 15 retrofit projects.
For the 27 new-build projects, we assumed 90 percent efficiency, in line with industry projections for next generation capture technologies.
Multiplying the total amount of CO2 released during the production process by the percentage capture rate (90 percent for new plants; 60 percent for retrofits) leads to 18 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.
Amine-based Solvent
The most common carbon capture technologies rely on an ammonia-derived solvent to absorb CO2 molecules in the flue gases. We calculated the one-off emissions associated with the necessary ammonia production at 33 million tonnes of CO2, using the following assumptions:
Producing 1.0 tonnes of ammonia generates 2.4 tonnes of CO2 .
250 kilograms of ammonia are required to produce 1.0 tonne of solvent
1.4 tonnes of solvent are needed to capture 1.0 tonne of CO2
Note: We excluded the nine blue hydrogen projects involving Air Liquide, whose Crypocap carbon capture technology does not rely on an amine-based solvent.
Industry says it is working to decarbonise ammonia production by using blue hydrogen as a feedstock. However, only four of the 46 proposed blue hydrogen projects are designed to produce ammonia.
Methane Leakage
To convert the likely quantity of methane leakage associated with the projects into CO2e, we multiplied the quantity of methane by a factor known as Global Warming Potential (GWP).
Methane exerts a greater warming effect in the short term, before it gradually breaks down. That means its GWP is higher over a 20-year horizon (84 times greater than that of CO2) than a 100-year horizon (28 times greater).
Estimates for the amount of methane that leaks during the extraction, transport and storage of the natural gas used to make blue hydrogen vary widely, depending on the origin of the gas.
Conservatively, assuming a leakage rate of 1.5 percent (and a GWP of 28 over a 100-year horizon), the emissions due to methane leaks associated with the natural gas used to feed the 46 projects equal 20 million tonnes of CO2e per year.
Less conservatively, assuming a 3.5 percent leakage rate (and a GWP of 28), this figure more than doubles to 48 million tonnes of CO2e per year.
Under various assumptions, the methane leakage associated with the 46 blue hydrogen projects could range from 20 million tonnes of CO2e (leakage rate of 1.5 percent and GWP of 28) to 117 million tonnes of CO2e (leakage rate of 3.5 percent and GWP of 84).
Expert Review
DeSmog’s analysis was carried out earlier this year in collaboration with Christophe Coutanceau, a professor at the Institute of Chemistry of Poitiers: Materials and Natural Resources, and co-lead of a hydrogen working group at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, known by its French acronym CNRS.
Power analyst Lorenzo Sani, who has carried out similar work on blue hydrogen projects in the UK for Carbon Tracker, and Paul Martin, chemical engineer and decarbonisation consultant at Spitfire Research, reviewed our methodology and findings.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10 ... nmark.html
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Climate activists protesting forest biomass outside a conference at the World Forestry Center in Portland, Oregon last month. (WNV/Nick Englefried)
West Coast climate activists battle the false ‘solution’ of forest biomass
Originally published: Waging Nonviolence on October 8, 2024 by Nick Engelfried (more by Waging Nonviolence) | (Posted Oct 15, 2024)
“Who will own the forests? Who will own the sky?” sang dozens of umbrella-wielding protesters as rain drizzled outside the World Forestry Center in Portland, Oregon on Sept. 25. Inside the building, timber company representatives, investors and others involved in deciding the fate of forest ecosystems were meeting for an event called CANOPY: Forests + Markets + Society.
Billed as “the premier annual event on institutional forestland investing,” CANOPY is a conference whose 2023 attendees included Weyerhaeuser, Boise Cascades, biomass energy giant Drax and J.P. Morgan. It was formerly called “Who Will Own the Forests?” and has drawn criticism from climate groups concerned about its focus on corporate and investor-led approaches to forest management. Last year, climate activists blockaded entrances to the event’s opening reception for over an hour.
Organizers of the 2024 conference not only changed the name, but erected chain-link fencing around the World Forestry Center to keep out anyone unable to pay the $1,660 registration fee.
“The title of the event has changed, but the conference has not,” Brenna Bell, forest campaign manager for 350-PDX, told the crowd chanting in the rain outside.
At it’s root this is a capitalist event, and the so-called climate solutions being promoted here are Wall Street backed and funded.
Bell is part of the growing movement to defend forests from industries that hope to turn a profit by investing in carbon-dense ecosystems during the transition away from fossil fuels. Examples include firms involved in the controversial practice of buying forestlands as carbon “offsets,” and those trying to turn trees into “renewable” biomass energy. This last point is especially relevant for West Coast communities.
Global energy companies are currently pushing to build at least four major biomass pellet plants along the West Coast: two in Washington and two in California. The rhetoric they use to describe these projects includes phrases like “carbon neutral” and “renewable energy,” terms also featured prominently at the CANOPY conference.
However, for communities that will bear the brunt of the forest biomass industry’s environmental impacts, the benefits of these types of projects are far less clear than they appear in the rosy picture painted at CANOPY. In fact, up and down the West Coast the burgeoning biomass boom threatens to derail hard-won progress on climate, ecosystem protection and environmental justice.
Brenna Bell speaking outside the forestry industry event in Portland last month. (WNV/Nick Engelfried)
Burning forests
Gloria Alonso Cruz had recently started a job as the environmental justice advocacy coordinator for Little Manila Rising, a grassroots organization in South Stockton, California, when she heard that a company called Golden State Natural Resources wanted to build a wood pellet storage and export facility in the community.
“They hadn’t provided many details,” Alonso Cruz said.
But I attended a scoping meeting the company was putting on. All I knew going in was this was a project having to do with vegetation management that would lead to shipments coming through Stockton.
To Alonso Cruz’s surprise, the virtual meeting was joined by activists from around the world, some as far away as Japan and Australia. Many spoke about negative impacts of the forest biomass industry in their countries.
“That’s how I got a more comprehensive picture of what this industry is and the greenwashing it does,” Alonso Cruz said.
In regions where the biomass industry is well established, like the U.S. South and British Columbia, forests have been denuded as companies like Maryland-based Enviva and U.K.-based Drax turned their wood into pellets. Now, Golden State Natural Resources, or GSNR, wants to build pellet plants in California’s Tuolumne and Lassen Counties.
Together, these plants would have the annual capacity to process almost two million tons of wood from forests in the Sierra Nevadas, where battles over logging have raged between environmental groups and timber companies for more than a century. Both plants would send their pellets to be exported out of the Port of Stockton.
“It would lead to more rail and truck traffic through our community, which already has some of the highest asthma rates in the country,” Alonso Cruz said.
At the other end of GSNR’s supply chain, environmental groups worry about where wood to supply the proposed plants will come from. Biomass companies typically insist they will mainly process “waste” wood like sawdust and slash leftover after logging. This claim is key to the industry’s assertion that it is an environmentally friendly, carbon neutral enterprise–a portrayal that doesn’t match the experience of communities close to where forest biomass companies have set up shop.
“I can guarantee additional logging will happen if this plant is built,” said Nick Joslin of the Mount Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center, which works to protect forests near where the Lassen County plant would be built.
They want high quality, dense wood because that gives them the biggest return on their investment. Their plant will increase logging on nearby national forest lands, and I don’t know anyone familiar with the project who’d say otherwise.
Logs awaiting export at the port of Longview. (CC/Sam Beebe)
In 2022, a whistleblower accused biomass company Enviva of turning large, whole trees into pellets in North Carolina, in violation of its own sustainability policies. In 2022, the BBC documented another biomass giant, Drax, sourcing trees for its mills from British Columbian old-growth forest. Drax, which has operated for years in Canada and the South, is also the main backer of a proposed pellet plant in Longview, Washington. Earlier this year, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with GSNR.
“Drax has shown themselves to be a bad actor,” Joslin said.
GSNR wants to portray themselves as a more responsible company, but they don’t have the money to bring these projects to completion on their own. So, they’ve sold out to a multinational corporation that basically does whatever it wants.
Before any biomass company can break ground on a project in California or elsewhere on the West Coast, it will need a variety of permits from state and local governments entities. Climate, forest and environmental justice groups are already rallying their supporters to engage in this permitting process.
“We’re getting members of the public to submit comments, educating the community and trying to give people a voice on this issue,” said Megan Fiske of Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch, an organization based near Tuolumne County that opposes GSNR’s project there. In Washington State, where the other two West Coast pellet plants would be located, activists are mounting similar efforts.
The grassroots movement against forest biomass taking shape up and down the coast resembles the one that successfully beat back a flood of proposals to export coal, oil and natural gas from the same region last decade. Most of those fossil fuel export projects were eventually stopped, with communities at the points of extraction, transport and export speaking out against their local pollution and global climate impacts. Today, opponents of forest biomass are building similarly diverse coalitions.
In doing so, they are pushing back against an emerging, powerful industry that is endangering forests and action on climate change, even as it claims to be furthering the clean energy transition.
Trees as energy
An irony of the push to develop forest biomass is that it’s largely a response to policies meant to combat climate change. At industry conferences like CANOPY, turning trees into energy is seen as a way for companies to take advantage of government subsidies for renewables established in European and East Asian countries.
The U.K. is perhaps the most prominent example of a country embracing biomass as a domestic energy source. Biomass is now the U.K.’s second-largest source of renewable energy, meeting 12.9 percent of the country’s electricity needs in 2021. Much of this energy comes from the massive Drax power plant in North Yorkshire, England, which last year finished fully transitioning to burn wood pellets instead of coal. Drax’s shift to wood has helped the U.K. eliminate coal from its energy mix, but at a cost to North American forests.
“This whole idea that we should cut down forests in California, use a lot of energy to send them overseas, burn the wood there, and that somehow this is a win for the climate, just doesn’t make sense,” Joslin said.
Burning trees for energy releases carbon into the atmosphere–more per unit combusted than coal, in fact. Still, biomass companies claim their product is carbon neutral because this CO2 can theoretically be reabsorbed if the trees are allowed to grow back. Even when forests harvested for biomass do regenerate, though, there is a lag time of decades during which heat-trapping gases remain in the atmosphere. This is known as the “carbon payback period,” and it is especially long when mature trees supply the fuel for biomass.
The biomass industry also argues it will remove wood from forests that would otherwise burn during Western states’ increasingly long, dry, fire seasons. However, the science on forest thinning as a means to reduce fire is inconclusive–and to the extent that it results in removing large, whole trees that are relatively fire resistant, it may actually do more harm than good.
“As someone who lives in a fire prone area myself, one of my biggest frustrations with GSNR’s project is it’s wasting time and money without fixing the real problem,” Fiske said.
Meanwhile it’s sending us backward rather than forward in terms of carbon emissions.
In certain regions of the U.S., such as the Northeast, state laws that classify biomass as clean energy have given rise to a domestic forest biomass industry. However, in most parts of the country the financial incentives to turn forests into energy come mainly from overseas. Biomass companies like Drax and GSNR don’t qualify for major subsidies under U.S. federal law–at least not yet.
Enviva Pellets Ahoskie facility in Hertford County, North Carolina. (Dogwood Alliance)
Drax competitor Enviva has submitted an application to the U.S. Treasury Department to receive clean energy tax breaks under climate provisions of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Companies aren’t required to disclose publicly if they are applying for these incentives, so it’s unclear how many others in the biomass industry may be doing so. However, recent moves by Drax, such a decision announced last year to establish a North American headquarters in Houston, suggest the company is positioning itself to play a bigger role in the U.S. energy market.
Regardless of whether biomass companies eventually receive additional subsidies for generating “clean” energy in the U.S., the fight over industrialization of forestlands in the name of climate solutions is shaping up to be a major front for the climate movement on the West Coast in the years ahead.
“Now that Drax is involved, they can take advantage of global financing and private equity to support their biomass projects,” Joslin said.
To them, this is just a money-making deal for investors. It’s not about the health of forests or the climate at all.
https://mronline.org/2024/10/15/west-co ... t-biomass/
*****
CovertAction Bulletin: A Handful of Billionaires are Causing Climate Chaos for the World
By Rachel Hu and Chris Garaffa - October 16, 2024 0
CLICK HERE to listen on podcast platforms worldwide https://linktr.ee/CovertActionBulletin
Hurricane Milton approached the physical limits of what a hurricane can be before it made landfall, and this was driven in part by the fact that 13 major Western corporations are responsible for the deforestation of 17% of the Amazon rainforest over the last few decades.
The drastic effects of climate change are causing havoc across the globe. In the southeastern U.S. and into Appalachia, hurricanes Helene and Milton have killed hundreds, left thousands without shelter and caused untold billions in damage. On the other side of the planet, parts of the Sahara desert flooded for the first time in nearly 50 years after intense rainstorms dropped 8 inches of rain in 2 days on parts of Morocco that don’t get more than an inch or so yearly. These storms and many other examples are showing that no one is safe from so-called storms of the century that seem to be happening weekly.
Meanwhile, insurance companies in Florida have been denying claims even from people who have been paying for hurricane-specific policies, and big landlords and investors are looking to profit from these disasters by buying up more land – all while doing nothing to address the climate crisis.
We’re joined today Ali by Abdel-Qader, a Palestinian organizer and Tampa-based activist who’s involved in relief efforts on the ground, and Tina Landis, author of Climate Solutions Beyond Capitalism.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... the-world/
The Murder of Juan Lopez, Defender of Life
By James Phillips - October 16, 2024 0
Juan Lopez, (right)—seen here seated in front of a painting depicting Carlos Escaleras, an environmental activist in Tocoa, Honduras who was murdered in October of 1997. The nature reserve that contains the headwaters of the Guapinol River is named after him. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Lucy Edwards]
On the evening of September 14, Delegate of the Word Juan López had just finished leading a Saturday evening service at the Catholic church in Tocoa, Honduras.
Witnesses say that, as he was getting to his car, someone on a motorcycle rode by and shot him multiple times, killing him.
López was a teacher, community leader, and a member of the Tocoa municipal council. He was also a human rights activist and the most prominent environmental defender in Honduras since the assassination of water protector Berta Cáceres in 2016.
In 2015, the year before her assassination, Cáceres was awarded the international Goldman Environmental Prize for Indigenous environmental activism. In 2019 the Institute for Policy Studies awarded López, on behalf of the Guapinol Water Defenders, the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award for the defense of sovereignty, environment and human rights.
Berta Cáceres [Source: goldmanprize.org]
Juan López is already mourned throughout Honduras. There are demands not only to find and indict his killers—the one who shot him and those who ordered the killing—but also to condemn those who have institutionalized the systematic theft of the region’s environment and the displacement of its rural communities. That region is the Aguán Valley that has for long been a particularly violent area for land conflict and the destruction of peasant communities and cooperatives.
For many years, López had been fighting the devastation of mining and other uncontrolled environmental exploitation. He was part of a group of local people who have been waging decades-long resistance to the poisoning of the area’s rivers from mining. They are known in Honduras as the Guapinol Water Defenders for trying to protect their community and the Guapinol and San Pedro rivers.
Guapinol Water Defenders. [Source: uusc.org]
During the previous Honduran government—the U.S.-backed “narco-dictatorship” of Juan Orlando Hernández—the struggle to protect the environment in the area increased in urgency and danger when the mining company Los Pinares, owned by one of the wealthiest families in Honduras, began work on a large mining-hydropower complex.
Mining projects like this require enormous amounts of water, diverting it from local farmers and communities.
The result is that what little water remains is polluted, the surrounding area is difficult or impossible to farm, and communities are left with little or no potable water. The hydropower part of the Los Pinares mining plant meant the capture of more water, further threatening local communities and the environment.
The mining concession to Los Pinares was within the boundaries of the Carlos Escaleras National Park, a major environmental reserve that contains the headwaters of various rivers that provide water to local communities. People were concerned about their water supply and they were angered that the National Park was invaded by a mining project.
[Source: contracorriente.red]
The Guapinol Water Defenders, including Juan López and others, tried for years to get Los Pinares to enter into a consultation about this project, but met with little success. In frustration, they held a large public meeting to discuss and vote on the will of the local communities.
The vote was a resounding NO to the project. The government reacted by charging the Water Defenders with illegal association (i.e., conspiracy to commit crime), and detained and jailed dozens of people, including Juan López. Some were later released, but others were transferred to a high-security prison in another region where they remained for almost two years.
Los Pinares was initially a joint venture between the Honduran group EMCO and the giant U.S. steel company Nucor based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Nucor’s website boasts that the company is “North America’s most sustainable steel and steel products company.”
Nucor claims its direct investment in Los Pinares ended in 2019. The U.S. government over many years has failed to hold U.S.-based corporations to account, and has at least tacitly supported a climate of fear and intimidation in Honduras to ensure that U.S. corporations in Honduras and Honduran companies like Los Pinares continue to provide materials and wealth to the U.S.
[Source: qcnews.com]
The U.S. and powerful Honduran interests have issued warnings against trying to restrict or regulate foreign enterprise and extraction. This amounts to a prohibition against engaging in the kind of environmental and human rights activism exemplified by López and the Guapinol defenders. The U.S. ambassador and others have issued thinly veiled warnings to Honduran President Xiomara Castro’s government not to try to change this situation.
People came to Juan López for counsel and aid. His murder comes in the context of increasing pressures on the government of President Castro.
The United Nations and the Inter-American Committee on Human Rights had both mandated that the Honduran government provide protective measures (medidas cautelares) for López. Despite such protection, an assassin was able to kill him. The double message is clear to many Hondurans: Defenders of human rights and the environment will be eliminated and, despite all the protections, the killers and their bosses can kill anyone they want.
Xiomara Castro [Source: womensmediacenter.com]
The murder of López highlights the inability (weakness) of the Castro government in the face of the powerful corruption that still poisons much of the political economy and daily life of the country. When she was elected in 2021, Castro pledged to work to build a political economy that would de-emphasize dependence on foreign extraction and instead promote local enterprise and safeguard local communities.
Her government has taken some courageous actions—such as withdrawing from an international accord that allowed foreign corporations to sue Honduras for ending contracts with these corporations.
[Source: rowman.com]
The larger issue is the inability of governments to regulate the predations of international corporations on their soil, especially those based on the extraction or destruction of natural resources.
As I show in detail in my book, Extracting Honduras: Resource Exploitation, Displacement, and Forced Migration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2022), such destruction is a root cause of emigration from countries like Honduras. But, despite all the hand wringing and vitriol about immigration police and border “security” in U.S. politics, U.S. and other foreign governments that should exercise regulation over the exploits of their corporations in countries like Honduras manifest a singular lack of will to do so.
The people of Honduras are victims of this aggressive and virtually uncontrolled exploitation. When their people try to defend their land and sovereignty, they are jailed or murdered with impunity.
The murder of Juan López is yet another stark reminder of the criminality of a global political economy that kills both people and the earth.
It is also a reminder that this criminal enterprise will always be strongly resisted by courageous defenders of life and environment.
But they could use the support of U.S. citizens working to hold U.S. politicians and corporations accountable for what they do in countries like Honduras.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... r-of-life/
*****
How climate change destroyed a tar sands boomtown
October 16, 2024
Fire Weather: A remarkable account of the reality of disaster in modern neoliberal society
John Vaillant
FIRE WEATHER
On the Front Lines of a Burning World
Penguin Random House, 2023
reviewed by Martin Empson
I write this review in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Milton’s devastation of parts of Florida. Milton followed Helene, just a week or so earlier. Both hurricanes cut a swathe through parts of North America, leaving death and destruction in their paths.
John Vaillant’s recent book Fire Weather is subtitled a “true story from a hotter world” and the story of hurricanes Milton and Helene could have shared that subtitle. They were both made worse by the hotter world we now live on. Scientists and environmentalists have longed warned about the feedback mechanisms of a warmer planet. As the world gets warmer, climate change further encourages the warming of the world. This cycle accelerates the speed of warming. The catastrophes that accompany a hotter planet come thicker and faster.
Fire Weather deals with just one such catastrophe, but it is an emblematic and enlightening one, the destruction of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada in 2016. There’s a grim feedback mechanism in play here, for McMurray is at the heart of fossil fuel capitalism. It was for many years a boomtown driven by the wealth of the region’s tar sands. The bitumen deposits here are difficult to turn into profitable commodities. But when the price of oil is high enough there are bonanzas to be made. McMurray was a town built on bonanza.
Vaillant traces the history of McMurray, and indeed, the history of industrial capitalism’s obsession with oil. Its a fascinating story that shows the way that capitalism embedded nature, and its resources, into a global commodity system. McMurray started off as an isolated place where animal skins and fur were trapped and sold, before morphing into an (isolated) 21st century oil city. Weaved in with this history is a longer story of humanity’s relationship with fire. Combustion, burning, fire are essential for humans. We need fire for travel, heating and food. But fire is also intrinsic to nature. The boreal forests that surround McMurray for tens of thousands of square miles need fire to renew and propagate. Humans think of such fires as a threat that needs to be fought — an invading army that has to be countered with traps, weapons and occasional retreat (the retreats are more common now). But the fires that engulf Alberta are part of that ecological system, its just that (unfortunately for humanity) they are more frequent, more intense and more common in a warming world.
Vaillant explains fire to us. But his use of metaphor is interesting. Describing how wildfires crossover (“when the ambient temperature in degrees Celsius exceeds the relative humidity as a percentage”) and become an exponentially faster, more agile, more dangerous fire, Vaillant says that “if unregulated free market capitalisms were a chemical reaction, it would be a wildfire in crossover conditions.” He continues “Alberta’s bitumen industry follows a similar growth pattern, with market forces standing in for weather.”
Capitalism is the problem here. It drives an endless accumulation of wealth for the sake of accumulation, based on an insatiable burning of natural resources. It is a wildfire of production, and as it grows it sucks in more nature, more humanity and expels material that pollutes and destroys. The irony of McMurray is that it was destroyed by its own forces of production, or rather the consequences of the usage of the use-values it produced. In fact Vaillant’s book is really about the intersection of urban fossil fuel capitalism and wildfire. As he writes:
“Combustive energy had drawn people to Fort McMurray in steadily increasing numbers over the course of a century, and combustive energy was driving them out again, en masse, in a single afternoon… the exodus of May 3 [2016] was the largest, most rapid displacement of people due to fire in North American history. It took the form of an unbroken ribbon of vehicles crawling in ranks, like army ants, northward and southward out of the city while fire raged along the highway, in some cases right up to the breakdown lanes.”
Hurricane Milton in mind, as well as Vaillant’s accounts of the escape from McMurray, it might be that the defining images of 21st century global warming in the Global North will be endless streams of SUVs and trucks driving away from environmental disasters. Climate refugees from the global south are met with barbed wires and closed borders. In the global north the Ford F-150s were given a much friendlier welcome. In one way the Fort McMurray fire was a very unusual climate disaster. Unusual circumstances combined with a rare urban environment.
“Hundredth-percentile fire weather conditions during the hottest, driest May in recorded history, following a two-year drought in a sudden city filled with twenty-five thousands petroleum-infused boxes and surrounded by millions of desiccated trees.
But as Vaillant points out, “this is the nature of twenty-first-century WUI [Wildland Urban Interface] fire.” Once in a lifetime events are becoming once in a decade events. Soon they’ll be more common.
If Vaillant had only written the story of McMurray and the urban-wildfire environment it would have been a fine book. But at the heart of the story is that of McMurray’s population. His account of the desperate evacuation, the struggle of the authorities to adjust to rapidly changing and unprecedented fire condition and the battle of the firefighters itself is a remarkable account of the reality of disaster in modern neoliberal society.
It is the story of a city that is really unable to deal with the disaster, not because of incompetence, or lack of training, or even lack of resources (something that most people in the world facing disaster will not have), but because there was no real understanding that a disaster on this scale could even happen. In many ways McMurray was better prepared than most cities for fire, because it could draw on the resources and fire-fighting experience provided by the oil industry itself. But the failure to control the fire happened because it was on a scale far beyond imagination. In fact clear is that traditional fire fighting doesn’t work in the in the 21st century WUI, and new methods of fire control need to be learnt. Interestingly it seems that allowing firefighters and workers to make decisions based on events and knowledge, rather than centralized leadership, is one lesson to be learnt from these massive fires.
Reading Vaillant’s account of the breakdown of control I was reminded of those highly popular 1970s brick sized novels epitomized by Arthur Hailey. In those wonderful disaster stories, tiny mistakes and failures would accumulate into a giant failure. In McMurray there were plenty of such failures that combined to help the fire reach epidemic proportions, but there was no lack of bravery. In fact the stories of the firefighters and indeed ordinary workers who fought day after day to save their city are inspiring. One wonders what is left for them. Vaillant quotes one Radio director who said afterward, “imagine a city — thousands of people — all living in everyday harmony, each and every one with some aspect of PTSD.”
There’s going to be more. Vaillant writes that “hotter and drier now, the atmosphere has been tilted in fire’s favor.” As the hammer of global warming drives more and more hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves and floods against the anvil of capitalism’s fractured and divided society, there will be endless death and destruction. There will also be plenty of PTSD for the survivors. But the bravery, industry and inventiveness of the workers who fought the fire in McMurray, and who rebuilt the town, are the potential force for change. John Vaillant concludes his superb book, by arguing for a different vision to that offered by fossil fuel capitalism — “devoting our energy and creativity to regeneration and renewal, rather than combustion and consumption.” Let’s hope that these lessons are learned, from Fort McMurray and hurricanes Helene and Milton.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... rich-city/
Posted on October 15, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Israel’s barbaric conduct of its wars, the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, and the hard-fought US presidential election have been dominating the news. That makes it way too easy for legitimately important stories to go by the wayside, particularly ones involving scams. Blue hydrogen is one of the far too many supposed climate easy fixes that are taken up by promoters and sold as far more effective than they are (keep in mind that overstated impact justifies overspending).
But blue hydrogen, as DeSmog explains below, looks far more cynical than that. A pet initiative of fossil fuel companies, its backers are trying to claim it should get “low carbon” subsidies. DeSmog’s analysis shows that, based on the performance of existing projects, it should not qualify.
By Aline Nippert. Originally published at DeSmogBlog. This is the fourth part of a DeSmog series on carbon capture and was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe and published in partnership with Le Monde
Billed by the fossil fuel industry as a climate solution, dozens of planned blue hydrogen projects in Europe could consume more natural gas each year than France, and produce emissions on a par with Denmark, a DeSmog analysis has found.
The findings raise new questions over blue hydrogen’s climate impact as EU officials deliberate over technical standards that could allow the technology to count as “low-carbon” — and thus qualify for billions of euros in subsidies.
The term blue hydrogen is used to describe hydrogen made from natural gas, where carbon capture and storage(CCS) technology is deployed to trap much of the large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) generated during the production process, then bury it underground.
Hydrogen emits no CO2 at the point of use. If produced cleanly, the molecule is theoretically capable of decarbonising various sectors, including chemicals and petrochemicals, steel, cement, power, road transport and potentially aviation.
Although Europe has yet to produce any blue hydrogen at scale, Shell, BP, Equinor, TotalEnergies, Eni, and ExxonMobil are among dozens of oil and gas companies promoting the technology as a way of meeting climate goals.
However, industry has yet to provide the kind of comprehensive data needed to estimate how far any possible climate benefits from switching to blue hydrogen produced by the planned projects may offset the residual CO2 emissions and methane leaks associated with making it.
To begin to fill this gap, DeSmog teamed up with Christophe Coutanceau, a professor at the Institute of Chemistry of Poitiers: Materials and Natural Resources, and co-lead of a hydrogen working group at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, known by its French acronym CNRS. [Details of the methodology used can be found at the end of this story].
By reviewing extensive industry reports and technical data on 46 proposed blue hydrogen projects in the EU, UK and Norway listed by the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), DeSmog found that 27 involve building new hydrogen production facilities. Another 15 envisage retrofitting existing hydrogen plants with carbon capture, while the status of four remained undetermined. More than a third of the total volume of hydrogen gas produced by these 46 projects would be used for oil refining — the main use of hydrogen today, according to a DeSmog tally of available data.
In collaboration with Coutanceau, DeSmog estimated that these 27 new blue hydrogen facilities could consume 48 billion cubic metres (bcm) of natural gas each year — about a tenth of the total consumption in the EU, UK and Norway in 2022 (499 bcm), and more than the annual amount of gas burned in France (38 bcm).
DeSmog’s analysis estimated the total annual emissions associated with the 46 planned blue hydrogen projects at 38 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) — about as much as Denmark or Switzerland emitted in 2022 (42 million tonnes of CO2). Our calculations factored in methane leaks in the natural gas supply chain and the partial efficiency of carbon capture units.
A further 33 million tonnes of CO2 could be released while the plants are being built in the one-off process used to manufacture the amine-based solvent used in the most common types of capture units, the analysis found.
“We should be very cautious with blue hydrogen. We should not buy into a false sense of complacency that it is a low-carbon fuel,” said Lorenzo Sani, power analyst at financial think tank Carbon Tracker, who reviewed DeSmog’s methodology and findings. “A badly managed development of blue hydrogen will increase carbon emissions while creating new gas demand that risks extending energy security concerns.”
The concerns were echoed by Paul Martin, a chemical engineer and decarbonisation consultant at Spitfire Research, who also reviewed the findings.
“This analysis confirms the fact that so-called ‘blue’ hydrogen is rather ‘blackish blue’,” Martin said. “Even technological innovations in the field of hydrogen production from fossil gas don’t change this.”
Coutanceau, the CNRS hydrogen expert, underscored the huge scale of the task fossil fuel companies face in realising plans to sequester the captured CO2 in disused oilfields in the North Sea.
“In addition to the tens of million tonnes of CO2 equivalent that blue hydrogen projects would release every year, what are we going to do with the captured CO2?” Coutanceau said. “There’s talk of underground storage in saline cavities, but to my knowledge this infrastructure doesn’t yet exist on an industrial scale.”
In April, workers began boring a hole under the seawall at the Port of Rotterdam, marking the start of construction of the Porthos carbon capture and storage project — which aims to start sequestering CO2 captured at two planned blue hydrogen projects in a disused offshore gas field from 2026.
Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies plan to store millions of tonnes of CO2 under the North Sea in their Northern Lights joint venture, which opened a storage facility near Bergen last month. Equinor says the project will initially store 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 a year — with that capacity already committed to ammonia, cement and bioenergy plants.
Lack of Data
Hydrogen Europe, an industry association grouping hundreds of companies — ranging from Shell and BP, to utilities and engineering firms — dismissed concerns over the potential emissions footprint of the planned blue hydrogen projects, saying substituting blue hydrogen for fossil fuels would have a net climate benefit.
“You want me to admit that we have a lot of CO2 emissions because of blue [hydrogen]. That’s not true,” Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, Hydrogen Europe’s CEO, told DeSmog in an interview. “You have to look at the big picture: With blue hydrogen, there will be fewer CO2 emissions than if you used natural gas as your [source of fuel]. You criticize the fact that we’re reducing emissions. I don’t understand the logic.”
According to the Hydrogen Council, a global trade association, producing one kilogram of blue hydrogen using natural gas and a high level of capture (90 to 98 percent) would emit a maximum of 3.9 kilograms of CO2 — 70 percent less than a conventional hydrogen plant.
However, it’s difficult to independently estimate the decarbonisation potential of the planned blue hydrogen projects without access to data showing how the gas will be used, and thus how far it might reduce demand for fossil fuels.
“For now, we don’t have enough data,” Coutanceau said. “To arrive at a precise calculation of avoided emissions, we’d need to know whether the hydrogen would be used as a feedstock in a manufacturing process, to produce heat, or used in fuel cells to produce electricity. It’s not the same [decarbonisation] gain.”
Hydrogen Europe declined to respond to DeSmog’s request for an estimate for the quantity of CO2 emissions that could be saved by the 46 proposed blue hydrogen projects. The Global CCS Institute, an oil and gas industry body, did not respond to a request for comment.
Regarded as one of the most authoritative models for decarbonising the energy system, the IEA’s Net Zero by 2050 Roadmap sees an increase in global blue hydrogen production capacity to 18 million tonnes (Mt) by 2030 from the negligible amounts produced today. But the 46 planned blue hydrogen projects in Europe alone would produce 10 million tonnes of blue hydrogen — or more than half the global total needed in the IEA scenario, DeSmog found.
Only a handful of the proposed projects have received a final investment decision, meaning there is no guarantee they will all be built. Nevertheless, climate advocates say the discrepancy between the scale of the proposed build-out, and the Net Zero 2050 roadmap, raises questions over whether industry is intent on using blue hydrogen to preserve demand for natural gas, even as Europe transitions away from fossil fuels.
Make-or-Break Moment’
Fossil fuel companies, utilities and industrial gas producers are vying for a share of a cumulative total of $100 billion in state support for hydrogen projects that had been announced by EU member states and other European countries by 2023, according to data from BloombergNEF.
Some climate groups are urging governments to back “green” hydrogen — the term used for hydrogen produced in an emissions-free but energy-intensive process powered by wind and solar. In contrast to blue hydrogen’s reliance on natural gas as a feedstock, green hydrogen is made using large quantities of water.
The EU has set up Hydrogen Bank to help scale up the technology, with the Renewable Energy Directive stipulatingthat 42 percent of hydrogen used in industry will have to be produced solely from renewable energy sources by 2030, and 60 percent by 2035.
But environmental groups are concerned that industry lobbyists may convince the European Commission to shift those obligations from green hydrogen to a more loosely defined “low-carbon” hydrogen — which would include blue hydrogen projects. That could crowd out investment in green hydrogen, which is much costlier to produce.
“If selection is based solely on price, since blue hydrogen will be cheaper than green hydrogen, blue hydrogen projects will [win out] and will make green hydrogen disappear,” Geert De Cock, electricity and energy manager at Transport & Environment, a Brussels-based research and advocacy group, told DeSmog. “In my opinion, this is a frontal attack on green hydrogen.”
In April, Transport & Environment and other environmental groups, joined by wind and solar companies, wrote an open letter urging the European Commission to adopt a “robust definition” for low-carbon hydrogen, with stringent conditions attached to blue hydrogen production.
The Renewable Hydrogen Coalition, environmental tank Bellona, and the Environmental Defense Fund were among signatories urging Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson and Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič to ensure the new rules reflected the entirety of greenhouse gas emissions associated with a particular blue hydrogen project; set a minimum rate of carbon capture; and set maximum rates for methane leakage.
The letter’s signatories also call for a guarantee that any blue hydrogen to qualify as “low-carbon”, “will only be produced from existing (not additional) gas production capacity”.
“If the rules are sufficiently strict, the new [blue hydrogen] projects will not happen,” De Cock said. “It is really make-or-break for the industry.”
Betting on Blue
Today, almost all industrial hydrogen is of the “grey” variety, where the CO2 emitted during the process of making it from natural gas is vented into the atmosphere, accounting for about two percent of global CO2 emissions, according to the IEA. About half of this hydrogen is used in oil refining, where the gas is used to strip sulphur from refined products, and make diesel and other oils.
Some climate advocates suspect that the fossil fuel industry is backing blue hydrogen in part because the resulting demand for natural gas will serve to prolong the useful life of existing gas deposits, drilling rigs, pipelines and other infrastructure. That could reduce the risk that the EU’s goal to slash carbon emissions by 55 percent by 2030 will saddle oil and gas companies with billions of euros of stranded assets.
In the Netherlands, site of 12 of the 46 proposed blue hydrogen projects, U.S. industrial gases company Air Products and French rival Air Liquide have announced plans to retrofit their existing grey hydrogen plants in the Port of Rotterdam with carbon capture equipment to produce blue hydrogen. “Hydrogen plays a critical role in the energy transition and in mitigating the effects of climate change,” Air Products says on its website.
The captured CO2 will be handled by Porthos, a joint venture between state-owned firms Energie Beheer Nederland, Gasunie, and the Port of Rotterdam Authority. The project aims to store 2.5 million tonnes of CO2 captured annually from various industries in depleted gas fields under the North Sea for 15 years, starting in 2026.
Elsewhere in the Netherlands, in the maritime province of Zeeland, Air Liquide is building a new plant to supply blue hydrogen to Zeeland Refinery, a joint venture between TotalEnergies and Russia’s Lukoil. Air Liquide is also participating in the Kairos@C project in the Belgian port of Antwerp, which aims to capture more than 14 million tonnes of CO2 over its first 10 years of operations, including from two blue hydrogen plants.
“The Group has a complete portfolio of technological solutions and services to support the decarbonisation of its customers around the world,” Air Liquide said in its 2022 strategic plan.
American-German gas manufacturer Linde, which is headquartered in the UK, also sees blue hydrogen as a growth opportunity. “Blue hydrogen is the next step,” the company says on its web page. “Gray and blue hydrogen are important stepping stones on the path to green hydrogen as they will allow for the necessary frameworks and infrastructures to be developed while green hydrogen production reaches the necessary scale.”
Oil Companies Spy Opportunities
The track record of the fewer than 10 existing commercial blue hydrogen plants in operation has been uneven. For example, Shell’s Quest project in Canada, capable of producing 900 tonnes of hydrogen a day, captured five million tonnes of CO2 from 2015-2021 — but released more than 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases during the same period, according to a report based on official data collated by Global Witness.
Nevertheless, oil companies are talking up the benefits of blue hydrogen, with TotalEnergies, Eni, Shell and BP all characterising the gas as a clean fuel that can be used to bridge the gap before green hydrogen becomes more economical.
In January last year, Norway’s state-owned oil company Equinor signed a memorandum of understanding with the German energy provider RWE to jointly develop blue hydrogen projects in Norway for export via pipeline to Germany. Equinor announced last month that it had scrapped the plans, citing excessive costs and insufficient demand.
In the UK, site of 14 of the 46 blue hydrogen projects on the drawing board, BP is developing a large-scale blue hydrogen plant, called H2 Teesside. The project aims to produce 160,000 tonnes of blue hydrogen a year, with the developers pledging to capture two million tonnes of associated CO2 emissions and bury them under the North Sea.
“The project is already well advanced,” said Sani, the power analyst at Carbon Tracker, and author of a June reporton blue hydrogen in the UK. “Although the final investment decision has not yet been taken, several agreements have already been concluded, and the construction of a new [liquefied natural gas] terminal to supply the plant with fossil gas has been proposed.”
Meanwhile, U.S. major ExxonMobil, which has various carbon capture interests in the Netherlands, Belgium and UK, describes blue hydrogen as “one of the few proven technologies that could deliver significant reductions in CO2 emissions in high-emitting, hard-to-decarbonise sectors.”
Battle of Perceptions
Industry groups are keen to kick-start the planned blue hydrogen projects by portraying them as equivalent to their green hydrogen rivals — downplaying the differences in the emissions footprint of the technologies, and focusing on economics.
“It’s about decarbonisation, it’s not about colour,” said Chatzimarkakis, the Hydrogen Europe CEO, reiterating a position commonly advanced by industry. “If we start to criticize technologies that help to decarbonise, to the energy transition, we’re making a big mistake. We need to be ‘technology diverse’. We need to have every technology that allows for CO2 abatement to play its role.”
Under existing EU rules, the maximum threshold of greenhouse gas emission for hydrogen to be considered “low-carbon” is equivalent to that of green hydrogen: 3.38 kilograms of CO2e per kilogram of hydrogen. But whether or not a particular blue hydrogen facility meets that definition depends on the methodology used to calculate its emissions.
In May, the EU adopted a raft of new rules on gas and hydrogen under its Green Deal climate framework — and tasked officials with developing a methodology for determining which hydrogen projects count as “low-carbon” within a year. The European Commission published a draft of the new rules on September 27, and opened a month-long public consultation.
The draft proposed that blue hydrogen projects should be subjected to a “full life-cycle analysis” — meaning that emissions estimates would include factors such as methane leakages during the production and transport of the natural gas, and stringent rules for assessing carbon capture rates.
But the devil is in the details, campaigners say.
In a response to the draft, Transport & Environment questioned the rigour of proposed measures to factor in methane leakages, while Bellona noted a lack of measures to deter the build-out of new natural gas infrastructure.
Many more questions remain unanswered.
The draft suggests that all emissions associated with the process of capturing CO2, then transporting the gas and injecting into undersea storage sites, will be taken into account when measuring the carbon footprint of a blue hydrogen project. But the rules are silent on the question of whether the emissions associated with the production of the amine-based solvent needed to operate the most common carbon capture technology should also be factored in.
It has also yet to be determined how to account for likely leaks of hydrogen — which is considered an “indirect” greenhouse gas because it causes chemical reactions that affect concentrations of methane, ozone, and stratospheric water vapor, as well as aerosols. Other questions include: How will the natural gas supply chain be certified? And how to ensure such certifications are accurate? Would it make more sense to calculate the warming impact of the methane over a period of 20 years (84 times greater than CO2), as advocated by environmental groups, or 100 years (28 times greater), as desired by industry?
“European policymakers need to set strong guarantees for blue hydrogen projects, as they risk derailing net zero strategies if they are developed without addressing supply chain emissions,” said Carbon Tracker’s Sani. “Without stringent regulatory frameworks, blue hydrogen could inadvertently become a setback in our fight against climate change.”
Variations in the methane leakage rates in different gas-producing regions further complicate efforts to calculate blue hydrogen’s carbon footprint.
Norway’s gas industry is said to limit its leakage rates to below 1.0 percent — less than the estimated global average of 1.4 to 2.0 percent. However, with Norway’s gas production committed to existing customers, it seems likely that future blue hydrogen projects will turn to suppliers such as the United States, where shale oil and gas reserves are being massively exploited, and estimates for the proportion of methane molecules escaping into the air can be 3.5 percent, or higher. In some parts of the U.S., such as the Permian Basin in New Mexico, leakage rates above 9.0 percent have been recorded — meaning that even within a given country, where the gas comes from can have a big impact on the level of climate harm.
Chatzimarkakis, of Hydrogen Europe, said the origin of the natural gas was outside the scope of his group’s remit. “I don’t know where the gas will come from,” he said. “We are not a gas lobby. That’s not our business.”
Aline Nippert’s new book Hydrogen Mania: An Investigation into the Totem of Green Growth is published in French by Le passager clandestin.
Additional reporting by Michael Buchsbaum and Sharon Kelly
Methodology and Assumptions[/i]
We began by examining the 51 proposed blue hydrogen projects in the EU, UK and Norway featured in a databasemaintained by the International Energy Agency (data current as of October 2023). We excluded four projects in the UK that have been canceled (H2 Leeds City Gate project; Cavendish Phases 1 and 2; and a project at the Fawley refinery) and one in Norway (Aukra CCS). To simplify the calculations, we assumed that all the projects used natural gas, commonly used to make hydrogen in Europe. (Hydrogen can also be produced from oil and coal).
Project by project, we trawled specialised websites, press releases, and technical reports to ascertain whether the developers were planning to retrofit an existing grey hydrogen plant to produce blue hydrogen — or build a new blue hydrogen plant from scratch.
We found developers were planning:
15 retrofits
27 new projects
4 undetermined
Estimating Natural Gas Consumption
We used the developer’s projections for how much blue hydrogen a given plant would produce each year to estimate how much natural gas it would consume.
We used a standard assumption that it takes 3.6 kilograms of methane (the main ingredient of natural gas) to produce 1.0 kilogram of hydrogen.
We then increased the result by 22 percent to reflect scientific estimates for the additional natural gas that would be required to power the carbon capture process. The total amount of natural gas required by the 46 plants (new plants and retrofits) was estimated at 67 billion cubic metres (bcm).
We concluded that the planned 27 new blue hydrogen facilities would consume a total of 48 billion bcm of natural gas each year as a feedstock — about a tenth of the total consumption in the EU, UK and Norway in 2022 (499 bcm), and more than the amount of gas burned in France (38 bcm).
Estimating CO2 Emissions
To estimate the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) associated with the 46 planned blue hydrogen projects, we took various factors into account:
The amount of CO2 that would be emitted directly each year during the process of producing blue hydrogen, which is a factor of the average efficiency of the capture equipment (either 60 percent or 90 percent depending on the type of production process): 18 million tonnes.
The amount of CO2e escaping into the atmosphere each year as a result of methane leaks during the process of extracting, storing and transporting the natural gas. (Between 20 and 48 million tonnes of CO2e for leakage rates of 1.5 percent and 3.5 percent respectively).
The amount of CO2 generated by the one-off production of the amine-based solvent used in most carbon capture units: (33 million tonnes). Since the solvent can be reused, the emissions associated with solvent production will only occur when the plants are being built.
In all, we estimated that building all 46 blue hydrogen projects would lead to the minimum release of 38 million tonnes of CO2e every year — on a par with Denmark’s annual emissions of 42 million tonnes.
Here is a more detailed breakdown of each stage of our calculations:
Carbon Capture Efficiency
Under existing blue hydrogen technology, about 40 to 60 percent of the CO2 molecules present in a given volume of flue gas are captured, according to the IEA. We therefore estimated a 60-percent capture rate for the 15 retrofit projects.
For the 27 new-build projects, we assumed 90 percent efficiency, in line with industry projections for next generation capture technologies.
Multiplying the total amount of CO2 released during the production process by the percentage capture rate (90 percent for new plants; 60 percent for retrofits) leads to 18 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.
Amine-based Solvent
The most common carbon capture technologies rely on an ammonia-derived solvent to absorb CO2 molecules in the flue gases. We calculated the one-off emissions associated with the necessary ammonia production at 33 million tonnes of CO2, using the following assumptions:
Producing 1.0 tonnes of ammonia generates 2.4 tonnes of CO2 .
250 kilograms of ammonia are required to produce 1.0 tonne of solvent
1.4 tonnes of solvent are needed to capture 1.0 tonne of CO2
Note: We excluded the nine blue hydrogen projects involving Air Liquide, whose Crypocap carbon capture technology does not rely on an amine-based solvent.
Industry says it is working to decarbonise ammonia production by using blue hydrogen as a feedstock. However, only four of the 46 proposed blue hydrogen projects are designed to produce ammonia.
Methane Leakage
To convert the likely quantity of methane leakage associated with the projects into CO2e, we multiplied the quantity of methane by a factor known as Global Warming Potential (GWP).
Methane exerts a greater warming effect in the short term, before it gradually breaks down. That means its GWP is higher over a 20-year horizon (84 times greater than that of CO2) than a 100-year horizon (28 times greater).
Estimates for the amount of methane that leaks during the extraction, transport and storage of the natural gas used to make blue hydrogen vary widely, depending on the origin of the gas.
Conservatively, assuming a leakage rate of 1.5 percent (and a GWP of 28 over a 100-year horizon), the emissions due to methane leaks associated with the natural gas used to feed the 46 projects equal 20 million tonnes of CO2e per year.
Less conservatively, assuming a 3.5 percent leakage rate (and a GWP of 28), this figure more than doubles to 48 million tonnes of CO2e per year.
Under various assumptions, the methane leakage associated with the 46 blue hydrogen projects could range from 20 million tonnes of CO2e (leakage rate of 1.5 percent and GWP of 28) to 117 million tonnes of CO2e (leakage rate of 3.5 percent and GWP of 84).
Expert Review
DeSmog’s analysis was carried out earlier this year in collaboration with Christophe Coutanceau, a professor at the Institute of Chemistry of Poitiers: Materials and Natural Resources, and co-lead of a hydrogen working group at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, known by its French acronym CNRS.
Power analyst Lorenzo Sani, who has carried out similar work on blue hydrogen projects in the UK for Carbon Tracker, and Paul Martin, chemical engineer and decarbonisation consultant at Spitfire Research, reviewed our methodology and findings.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10 ... nmark.html
******
Climate activists protesting forest biomass outside a conference at the World Forestry Center in Portland, Oregon last month. (WNV/Nick Englefried)
West Coast climate activists battle the false ‘solution’ of forest biomass
Originally published: Waging Nonviolence on October 8, 2024 by Nick Engelfried (more by Waging Nonviolence) | (Posted Oct 15, 2024)
“Who will own the forests? Who will own the sky?” sang dozens of umbrella-wielding protesters as rain drizzled outside the World Forestry Center in Portland, Oregon on Sept. 25. Inside the building, timber company representatives, investors and others involved in deciding the fate of forest ecosystems were meeting for an event called CANOPY: Forests + Markets + Society.
Billed as “the premier annual event on institutional forestland investing,” CANOPY is a conference whose 2023 attendees included Weyerhaeuser, Boise Cascades, biomass energy giant Drax and J.P. Morgan. It was formerly called “Who Will Own the Forests?” and has drawn criticism from climate groups concerned about its focus on corporate and investor-led approaches to forest management. Last year, climate activists blockaded entrances to the event’s opening reception for over an hour.
Organizers of the 2024 conference not only changed the name, but erected chain-link fencing around the World Forestry Center to keep out anyone unable to pay the $1,660 registration fee.
“The title of the event has changed, but the conference has not,” Brenna Bell, forest campaign manager for 350-PDX, told the crowd chanting in the rain outside.
At it’s root this is a capitalist event, and the so-called climate solutions being promoted here are Wall Street backed and funded.
Bell is part of the growing movement to defend forests from industries that hope to turn a profit by investing in carbon-dense ecosystems during the transition away from fossil fuels. Examples include firms involved in the controversial practice of buying forestlands as carbon “offsets,” and those trying to turn trees into “renewable” biomass energy. This last point is especially relevant for West Coast communities.
Global energy companies are currently pushing to build at least four major biomass pellet plants along the West Coast: two in Washington and two in California. The rhetoric they use to describe these projects includes phrases like “carbon neutral” and “renewable energy,” terms also featured prominently at the CANOPY conference.
However, for communities that will bear the brunt of the forest biomass industry’s environmental impacts, the benefits of these types of projects are far less clear than they appear in the rosy picture painted at CANOPY. In fact, up and down the West Coast the burgeoning biomass boom threatens to derail hard-won progress on climate, ecosystem protection and environmental justice.
Brenna Bell speaking outside the forestry industry event in Portland last month. (WNV/Nick Engelfried)
Burning forests
Gloria Alonso Cruz had recently started a job as the environmental justice advocacy coordinator for Little Manila Rising, a grassroots organization in South Stockton, California, when she heard that a company called Golden State Natural Resources wanted to build a wood pellet storage and export facility in the community.
“They hadn’t provided many details,” Alonso Cruz said.
But I attended a scoping meeting the company was putting on. All I knew going in was this was a project having to do with vegetation management that would lead to shipments coming through Stockton.
To Alonso Cruz’s surprise, the virtual meeting was joined by activists from around the world, some as far away as Japan and Australia. Many spoke about negative impacts of the forest biomass industry in their countries.
“That’s how I got a more comprehensive picture of what this industry is and the greenwashing it does,” Alonso Cruz said.
In regions where the biomass industry is well established, like the U.S. South and British Columbia, forests have been denuded as companies like Maryland-based Enviva and U.K.-based Drax turned their wood into pellets. Now, Golden State Natural Resources, or GSNR, wants to build pellet plants in California’s Tuolumne and Lassen Counties.
Together, these plants would have the annual capacity to process almost two million tons of wood from forests in the Sierra Nevadas, where battles over logging have raged between environmental groups and timber companies for more than a century. Both plants would send their pellets to be exported out of the Port of Stockton.
“It would lead to more rail and truck traffic through our community, which already has some of the highest asthma rates in the country,” Alonso Cruz said.
At the other end of GSNR’s supply chain, environmental groups worry about where wood to supply the proposed plants will come from. Biomass companies typically insist they will mainly process “waste” wood like sawdust and slash leftover after logging. This claim is key to the industry’s assertion that it is an environmentally friendly, carbon neutral enterprise–a portrayal that doesn’t match the experience of communities close to where forest biomass companies have set up shop.
“I can guarantee additional logging will happen if this plant is built,” said Nick Joslin of the Mount Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center, which works to protect forests near where the Lassen County plant would be built.
They want high quality, dense wood because that gives them the biggest return on their investment. Their plant will increase logging on nearby national forest lands, and I don’t know anyone familiar with the project who’d say otherwise.
Logs awaiting export at the port of Longview. (CC/Sam Beebe)
In 2022, a whistleblower accused biomass company Enviva of turning large, whole trees into pellets in North Carolina, in violation of its own sustainability policies. In 2022, the BBC documented another biomass giant, Drax, sourcing trees for its mills from British Columbian old-growth forest. Drax, which has operated for years in Canada and the South, is also the main backer of a proposed pellet plant in Longview, Washington. Earlier this year, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with GSNR.
“Drax has shown themselves to be a bad actor,” Joslin said.
GSNR wants to portray themselves as a more responsible company, but they don’t have the money to bring these projects to completion on their own. So, they’ve sold out to a multinational corporation that basically does whatever it wants.
Before any biomass company can break ground on a project in California or elsewhere on the West Coast, it will need a variety of permits from state and local governments entities. Climate, forest and environmental justice groups are already rallying their supporters to engage in this permitting process.
“We’re getting members of the public to submit comments, educating the community and trying to give people a voice on this issue,” said Megan Fiske of Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch, an organization based near Tuolumne County that opposes GSNR’s project there. In Washington State, where the other two West Coast pellet plants would be located, activists are mounting similar efforts.
The grassroots movement against forest biomass taking shape up and down the coast resembles the one that successfully beat back a flood of proposals to export coal, oil and natural gas from the same region last decade. Most of those fossil fuel export projects were eventually stopped, with communities at the points of extraction, transport and export speaking out against their local pollution and global climate impacts. Today, opponents of forest biomass are building similarly diverse coalitions.
In doing so, they are pushing back against an emerging, powerful industry that is endangering forests and action on climate change, even as it claims to be furthering the clean energy transition.
Trees as energy
An irony of the push to develop forest biomass is that it’s largely a response to policies meant to combat climate change. At industry conferences like CANOPY, turning trees into energy is seen as a way for companies to take advantage of government subsidies for renewables established in European and East Asian countries.
The U.K. is perhaps the most prominent example of a country embracing biomass as a domestic energy source. Biomass is now the U.K.’s second-largest source of renewable energy, meeting 12.9 percent of the country’s electricity needs in 2021. Much of this energy comes from the massive Drax power plant in North Yorkshire, England, which last year finished fully transitioning to burn wood pellets instead of coal. Drax’s shift to wood has helped the U.K. eliminate coal from its energy mix, but at a cost to North American forests.
“This whole idea that we should cut down forests in California, use a lot of energy to send them overseas, burn the wood there, and that somehow this is a win for the climate, just doesn’t make sense,” Joslin said.
Burning trees for energy releases carbon into the atmosphere–more per unit combusted than coal, in fact. Still, biomass companies claim their product is carbon neutral because this CO2 can theoretically be reabsorbed if the trees are allowed to grow back. Even when forests harvested for biomass do regenerate, though, there is a lag time of decades during which heat-trapping gases remain in the atmosphere. This is known as the “carbon payback period,” and it is especially long when mature trees supply the fuel for biomass.
The biomass industry also argues it will remove wood from forests that would otherwise burn during Western states’ increasingly long, dry, fire seasons. However, the science on forest thinning as a means to reduce fire is inconclusive–and to the extent that it results in removing large, whole trees that are relatively fire resistant, it may actually do more harm than good.
“As someone who lives in a fire prone area myself, one of my biggest frustrations with GSNR’s project is it’s wasting time and money without fixing the real problem,” Fiske said.
Meanwhile it’s sending us backward rather than forward in terms of carbon emissions.
In certain regions of the U.S., such as the Northeast, state laws that classify biomass as clean energy have given rise to a domestic forest biomass industry. However, in most parts of the country the financial incentives to turn forests into energy come mainly from overseas. Biomass companies like Drax and GSNR don’t qualify for major subsidies under U.S. federal law–at least not yet.
Enviva Pellets Ahoskie facility in Hertford County, North Carolina. (Dogwood Alliance)
Drax competitor Enviva has submitted an application to the U.S. Treasury Department to receive clean energy tax breaks under climate provisions of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Companies aren’t required to disclose publicly if they are applying for these incentives, so it’s unclear how many others in the biomass industry may be doing so. However, recent moves by Drax, such a decision announced last year to establish a North American headquarters in Houston, suggest the company is positioning itself to play a bigger role in the U.S. energy market.
Regardless of whether biomass companies eventually receive additional subsidies for generating “clean” energy in the U.S., the fight over industrialization of forestlands in the name of climate solutions is shaping up to be a major front for the climate movement on the West Coast in the years ahead.
“Now that Drax is involved, they can take advantage of global financing and private equity to support their biomass projects,” Joslin said.
To them, this is just a money-making deal for investors. It’s not about the health of forests or the climate at all.
https://mronline.org/2024/10/15/west-co ... t-biomass/
*****
CovertAction Bulletin: A Handful of Billionaires are Causing Climate Chaos for the World
By Rachel Hu and Chris Garaffa - October 16, 2024 0
CLICK HERE to listen on podcast platforms worldwide https://linktr.ee/CovertActionBulletin
Hurricane Milton approached the physical limits of what a hurricane can be before it made landfall, and this was driven in part by the fact that 13 major Western corporations are responsible for the deforestation of 17% of the Amazon rainforest over the last few decades.
The drastic effects of climate change are causing havoc across the globe. In the southeastern U.S. and into Appalachia, hurricanes Helene and Milton have killed hundreds, left thousands without shelter and caused untold billions in damage. On the other side of the planet, parts of the Sahara desert flooded for the first time in nearly 50 years after intense rainstorms dropped 8 inches of rain in 2 days on parts of Morocco that don’t get more than an inch or so yearly. These storms and many other examples are showing that no one is safe from so-called storms of the century that seem to be happening weekly.
Meanwhile, insurance companies in Florida have been denying claims even from people who have been paying for hurricane-specific policies, and big landlords and investors are looking to profit from these disasters by buying up more land – all while doing nothing to address the climate crisis.
We’re joined today Ali by Abdel-Qader, a Palestinian organizer and Tampa-based activist who’s involved in relief efforts on the ground, and Tina Landis, author of Climate Solutions Beyond Capitalism.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... the-world/
The Murder of Juan Lopez, Defender of Life
By James Phillips - October 16, 2024 0
Juan Lopez, (right)—seen here seated in front of a painting depicting Carlos Escaleras, an environmental activist in Tocoa, Honduras who was murdered in October of 1997. The nature reserve that contains the headwaters of the Guapinol River is named after him. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Lucy Edwards]
On the evening of September 14, Delegate of the Word Juan López had just finished leading a Saturday evening service at the Catholic church in Tocoa, Honduras.
Witnesses say that, as he was getting to his car, someone on a motorcycle rode by and shot him multiple times, killing him.
López was a teacher, community leader, and a member of the Tocoa municipal council. He was also a human rights activist and the most prominent environmental defender in Honduras since the assassination of water protector Berta Cáceres in 2016.
In 2015, the year before her assassination, Cáceres was awarded the international Goldman Environmental Prize for Indigenous environmental activism. In 2019 the Institute for Policy Studies awarded López, on behalf of the Guapinol Water Defenders, the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award for the defense of sovereignty, environment and human rights.
Berta Cáceres [Source: goldmanprize.org]
Juan López is already mourned throughout Honduras. There are demands not only to find and indict his killers—the one who shot him and those who ordered the killing—but also to condemn those who have institutionalized the systematic theft of the region’s environment and the displacement of its rural communities. That region is the Aguán Valley that has for long been a particularly violent area for land conflict and the destruction of peasant communities and cooperatives.
For many years, López had been fighting the devastation of mining and other uncontrolled environmental exploitation. He was part of a group of local people who have been waging decades-long resistance to the poisoning of the area’s rivers from mining. They are known in Honduras as the Guapinol Water Defenders for trying to protect their community and the Guapinol and San Pedro rivers.
Guapinol Water Defenders. [Source: uusc.org]
During the previous Honduran government—the U.S.-backed “narco-dictatorship” of Juan Orlando Hernández—the struggle to protect the environment in the area increased in urgency and danger when the mining company Los Pinares, owned by one of the wealthiest families in Honduras, began work on a large mining-hydropower complex.
Mining projects like this require enormous amounts of water, diverting it from local farmers and communities.
The result is that what little water remains is polluted, the surrounding area is difficult or impossible to farm, and communities are left with little or no potable water. The hydropower part of the Los Pinares mining plant meant the capture of more water, further threatening local communities and the environment.
The mining concession to Los Pinares was within the boundaries of the Carlos Escaleras National Park, a major environmental reserve that contains the headwaters of various rivers that provide water to local communities. People were concerned about their water supply and they were angered that the National Park was invaded by a mining project.
[Source: contracorriente.red]
The Guapinol Water Defenders, including Juan López and others, tried for years to get Los Pinares to enter into a consultation about this project, but met with little success. In frustration, they held a large public meeting to discuss and vote on the will of the local communities.
The vote was a resounding NO to the project. The government reacted by charging the Water Defenders with illegal association (i.e., conspiracy to commit crime), and detained and jailed dozens of people, including Juan López. Some were later released, but others were transferred to a high-security prison in another region where they remained for almost two years.
Los Pinares was initially a joint venture between the Honduran group EMCO and the giant U.S. steel company Nucor based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Nucor’s website boasts that the company is “North America’s most sustainable steel and steel products company.”
Nucor claims its direct investment in Los Pinares ended in 2019. The U.S. government over many years has failed to hold U.S.-based corporations to account, and has at least tacitly supported a climate of fear and intimidation in Honduras to ensure that U.S. corporations in Honduras and Honduran companies like Los Pinares continue to provide materials and wealth to the U.S.
[Source: qcnews.com]
The U.S. and powerful Honduran interests have issued warnings against trying to restrict or regulate foreign enterprise and extraction. This amounts to a prohibition against engaging in the kind of environmental and human rights activism exemplified by López and the Guapinol defenders. The U.S. ambassador and others have issued thinly veiled warnings to Honduran President Xiomara Castro’s government not to try to change this situation.
People came to Juan López for counsel and aid. His murder comes in the context of increasing pressures on the government of President Castro.
The United Nations and the Inter-American Committee on Human Rights had both mandated that the Honduran government provide protective measures (medidas cautelares) for López. Despite such protection, an assassin was able to kill him. The double message is clear to many Hondurans: Defenders of human rights and the environment will be eliminated and, despite all the protections, the killers and their bosses can kill anyone they want.
Xiomara Castro [Source: womensmediacenter.com]
The murder of López highlights the inability (weakness) of the Castro government in the face of the powerful corruption that still poisons much of the political economy and daily life of the country. When she was elected in 2021, Castro pledged to work to build a political economy that would de-emphasize dependence on foreign extraction and instead promote local enterprise and safeguard local communities.
Her government has taken some courageous actions—such as withdrawing from an international accord that allowed foreign corporations to sue Honduras for ending contracts with these corporations.
[Source: rowman.com]
The larger issue is the inability of governments to regulate the predations of international corporations on their soil, especially those based on the extraction or destruction of natural resources.
As I show in detail in my book, Extracting Honduras: Resource Exploitation, Displacement, and Forced Migration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2022), such destruction is a root cause of emigration from countries like Honduras. But, despite all the hand wringing and vitriol about immigration police and border “security” in U.S. politics, U.S. and other foreign governments that should exercise regulation over the exploits of their corporations in countries like Honduras manifest a singular lack of will to do so.
The people of Honduras are victims of this aggressive and virtually uncontrolled exploitation. When their people try to defend their land and sovereignty, they are jailed or murdered with impunity.
The murder of Juan López is yet another stark reminder of the criminality of a global political economy that kills both people and the earth.
It is also a reminder that this criminal enterprise will always be strongly resisted by courageous defenders of life and environment.
But they could use the support of U.S. citizens working to hold U.S. politicians and corporations accountable for what they do in countries like Honduras.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... r-of-life/
*****
How climate change destroyed a tar sands boomtown
October 16, 2024
Fire Weather: A remarkable account of the reality of disaster in modern neoliberal society
John Vaillant
FIRE WEATHER
On the Front Lines of a Burning World
Penguin Random House, 2023
reviewed by Martin Empson
I write this review in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Milton’s devastation of parts of Florida. Milton followed Helene, just a week or so earlier. Both hurricanes cut a swathe through parts of North America, leaving death and destruction in their paths.
John Vaillant’s recent book Fire Weather is subtitled a “true story from a hotter world” and the story of hurricanes Milton and Helene could have shared that subtitle. They were both made worse by the hotter world we now live on. Scientists and environmentalists have longed warned about the feedback mechanisms of a warmer planet. As the world gets warmer, climate change further encourages the warming of the world. This cycle accelerates the speed of warming. The catastrophes that accompany a hotter planet come thicker and faster.
Fire Weather deals with just one such catastrophe, but it is an emblematic and enlightening one, the destruction of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada in 2016. There’s a grim feedback mechanism in play here, for McMurray is at the heart of fossil fuel capitalism. It was for many years a boomtown driven by the wealth of the region’s tar sands. The bitumen deposits here are difficult to turn into profitable commodities. But when the price of oil is high enough there are bonanzas to be made. McMurray was a town built on bonanza.
Vaillant traces the history of McMurray, and indeed, the history of industrial capitalism’s obsession with oil. Its a fascinating story that shows the way that capitalism embedded nature, and its resources, into a global commodity system. McMurray started off as an isolated place where animal skins and fur were trapped and sold, before morphing into an (isolated) 21st century oil city. Weaved in with this history is a longer story of humanity’s relationship with fire. Combustion, burning, fire are essential for humans. We need fire for travel, heating and food. But fire is also intrinsic to nature. The boreal forests that surround McMurray for tens of thousands of square miles need fire to renew and propagate. Humans think of such fires as a threat that needs to be fought — an invading army that has to be countered with traps, weapons and occasional retreat (the retreats are more common now). But the fires that engulf Alberta are part of that ecological system, its just that (unfortunately for humanity) they are more frequent, more intense and more common in a warming world.
Vaillant explains fire to us. But his use of metaphor is interesting. Describing how wildfires crossover (“when the ambient temperature in degrees Celsius exceeds the relative humidity as a percentage”) and become an exponentially faster, more agile, more dangerous fire, Vaillant says that “if unregulated free market capitalisms were a chemical reaction, it would be a wildfire in crossover conditions.” He continues “Alberta’s bitumen industry follows a similar growth pattern, with market forces standing in for weather.”
Capitalism is the problem here. It drives an endless accumulation of wealth for the sake of accumulation, based on an insatiable burning of natural resources. It is a wildfire of production, and as it grows it sucks in more nature, more humanity and expels material that pollutes and destroys. The irony of McMurray is that it was destroyed by its own forces of production, or rather the consequences of the usage of the use-values it produced. In fact Vaillant’s book is really about the intersection of urban fossil fuel capitalism and wildfire. As he writes:
“Combustive energy had drawn people to Fort McMurray in steadily increasing numbers over the course of a century, and combustive energy was driving them out again, en masse, in a single afternoon… the exodus of May 3 [2016] was the largest, most rapid displacement of people due to fire in North American history. It took the form of an unbroken ribbon of vehicles crawling in ranks, like army ants, northward and southward out of the city while fire raged along the highway, in some cases right up to the breakdown lanes.”
Hurricane Milton in mind, as well as Vaillant’s accounts of the escape from McMurray, it might be that the defining images of 21st century global warming in the Global North will be endless streams of SUVs and trucks driving away from environmental disasters. Climate refugees from the global south are met with barbed wires and closed borders. In the global north the Ford F-150s were given a much friendlier welcome. In one way the Fort McMurray fire was a very unusual climate disaster. Unusual circumstances combined with a rare urban environment.
“Hundredth-percentile fire weather conditions during the hottest, driest May in recorded history, following a two-year drought in a sudden city filled with twenty-five thousands petroleum-infused boxes and surrounded by millions of desiccated trees.
But as Vaillant points out, “this is the nature of twenty-first-century WUI [Wildland Urban Interface] fire.” Once in a lifetime events are becoming once in a decade events. Soon they’ll be more common.
If Vaillant had only written the story of McMurray and the urban-wildfire environment it would have been a fine book. But at the heart of the story is that of McMurray’s population. His account of the desperate evacuation, the struggle of the authorities to adjust to rapidly changing and unprecedented fire condition and the battle of the firefighters itself is a remarkable account of the reality of disaster in modern neoliberal society.
It is the story of a city that is really unable to deal with the disaster, not because of incompetence, or lack of training, or even lack of resources (something that most people in the world facing disaster will not have), but because there was no real understanding that a disaster on this scale could even happen. In many ways McMurray was better prepared than most cities for fire, because it could draw on the resources and fire-fighting experience provided by the oil industry itself. But the failure to control the fire happened because it was on a scale far beyond imagination. In fact clear is that traditional fire fighting doesn’t work in the in the 21st century WUI, and new methods of fire control need to be learnt. Interestingly it seems that allowing firefighters and workers to make decisions based on events and knowledge, rather than centralized leadership, is one lesson to be learnt from these massive fires.
Reading Vaillant’s account of the breakdown of control I was reminded of those highly popular 1970s brick sized novels epitomized by Arthur Hailey. In those wonderful disaster stories, tiny mistakes and failures would accumulate into a giant failure. In McMurray there were plenty of such failures that combined to help the fire reach epidemic proportions, but there was no lack of bravery. In fact the stories of the firefighters and indeed ordinary workers who fought day after day to save their city are inspiring. One wonders what is left for them. Vaillant quotes one Radio director who said afterward, “imagine a city — thousands of people — all living in everyday harmony, each and every one with some aspect of PTSD.”
There’s going to be more. Vaillant writes that “hotter and drier now, the atmosphere has been tilted in fire’s favor.” As the hammer of global warming drives more and more hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves and floods against the anvil of capitalism’s fractured and divided society, there will be endless death and destruction. There will also be plenty of PTSD for the survivors. But the bravery, industry and inventiveness of the workers who fought the fire in McMurray, and who rebuilt the town, are the potential force for change. John Vaillant concludes his superb book, by arguing for a different vision to that offered by fossil fuel capitalism — “devoting our energy and creativity to regeneration and renewal, rather than combustion and consumption.” Let’s hope that these lessons are learned, from Fort McMurray and hurricanes Helene and Milton.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... rich-city/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Capitalism’s climate catastrophe: How fossil fuel giants fueled the storm crisis
October 18, 2024 Scott Scheffer
The mountain community of Asheville, N.C., was utterly destroyed by flooding.
On Sept. 26, Hurricane Helene hit near Tampa, Florida, and tore north and then northwest through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, even reaching the eastern part of Tennessee.
Helene stretched about 400 miles across and sustained 140 mph winds, smashing into homes and leaving millions without electricity. The flooding and devastation from the wind were at a historic level.
No areas near the path were spared, and the mountain community of Asheville, North Carolina, was utterly destroyed by flooding. A local journalist reported seeing two homes being swept away by raging water that then crashed into each other.
Just two weeks later, Hurricane Milton landed 75 miles south of Helene’s landfall and ripped its way north/northwest across the panhandle and then out into the Atlantic. Work crews were clearing debris from Helene when Milton arrived.
It’s not unusual for hurricanes to spawn a few tornados. Usually, they’re weak and fizzle out quickly. Not these. The storm yielded a record 38 of them, and they smashed everything in their paths.
As of Oct. 15, the combined death toll had climbed to 268, and there were still 192 people unaccounted for. Damage estimates are all over the map, from $35 billion to $200 billion.
These were two of the most destructive storms in history. “Thousand-year” storms are happening frequently now. Hurricanes, droughts, and cyclones are increasing in severity. Heat waves are more frequent and threaten to make some cities that millions call home uninhabitable.
This is all a product of the capitalist economy. Giant energy companies and their banking partners have pushed the exploitation of fossil fuels, spewed gigatons of CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and caused global warming.
They’ve spent millions of dollars to spread misinformation to deny climate change or push the responsibility onto individuals. British Petroleum invented the whole idea of a “carbon footprint,” as if the working class could just change our habits and solve the problem.
Oil company scientists have known the consequences of continued fossil fuel use for decades. They kept the information secret, ridiculed scientists who sounded the alarm and ignored endless dire warnings from the United Nations.
Fracking for natural gas intensified as the U.S. took over the European market, a consequence of the U.S. proxy war against Russia. During roughly the same period, Biden began handing out new oil drilling contracts like candy on Halloween.
Instead of yielding to the growing awareness and anger over the global capitalist destruction of the planet, the energy giants have literally stepped on the gas. Emissions of greenhouse gases are now at an all-time high.
Scholarly reports have also revealed that military activity is responsible for a hefty percentage of greenhouse gases. But the U.S. is the motivator of constant military exercises to threaten China, active wars in Ukraine, and now the horrible Zionist genocidal campaign against Gaza and war against the people of Lebanon.
Hurricanes are not only more severe
As the earth’s atmosphere has heated, hurricanes are not only more severe but also intensify more quickly, leaving less time for preparation and evacuations.
This was particularly so with Helene and Milton. That rapid intensification was noted about Hurricane Otis in October 2023, which slammed into Acapulco, Mexico, as well. High ocean temperatures also fueled a cyclone in February of last year that was the longest-lasting cyclone ever recorded — Cyclone Freddy. It lasted for 36 days, crossed the entire Indian Ocean, and ravaged Madagascar, Malawi, and Mozambique.
Ocean temperatures have reached all-time highs in the last several years, alarming climatologists.
This phenomenon is creating superstorms. Rising sea temperatures are destroying marine life and acidifying seawater, and sea levels are rising.
That happens for the same reason that a pot of boiling water rises as it warms. Water expands from heat.
The Gulf of Mexico’s rise in sea level is nearly twice that of the rest of the world, which means storm surges are worse. Beyond that, the heat and energy from the oceans is being picked up by tropical storms, fueling their rapid development into more destructive, less predictable hurricanes.
As they develop, the storms pick up much more moisture as they work their way across oceans. It isn’t uncommon now for hurricanes to slow down after landfall and dump rain on a region for sustained periods. What Katrina did to New Orleans and now Helene did to Asheville, North Carolina, are perfect examples of that.
Global warming and climate change can be reversed. Renewables in the form of solar, wind, and geothermal energy are already an important component, even with the question of intermittency, which still needs to be resolved. Electric vehicles can limit emissions from the millions of cars traveling daily.
The People’s Republic of China has been instrumental in the progress that has been made in those areas. Other technologies and ideas may improve on these or spawn whole new ideas that can lower global temperatures.
The hard science developed around climate change proves that fossil fuels are the root cause. But another kind of science leads us to the solution: social science. Private ownership of the means of production – the profit system – is a roadblock to our planet’s recovery. Part 2 will explore the role of the U.S. empire in causing global warming and the role China is playing in cleaning up the atmosphere.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... rm-crisis/
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Thomas Neuburger: Carbon Sinks Are Failing
Posted on October 17, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. This latest climate sighting is a very big addition to a long and growing list of seriously unfavorable development, at least as far as the survival of something dimly resembling modern life looks like. It seems unlikely that carbon sinks becoming much less effective was contemplated in climate modeling. So this development amounts to a major accelerant.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
I very much dislike climate alarm posts these days for reasons already stated (see “Name the Damn Perp”).
But climate news posts, on the other hand, deserve our notice — in particular, posts about unanticipated changes in “crisis scheduling.” We’ve been taught by those who get rich from the oil economy that “worrying later is fine; the crisis won’t come for decades, if at all.”
Unfortunately for them and us, news that the crisis is not sticking to schedule seems always to appear. This is one of those stories.
Carbon Sinks Are Failing
From The Guardian we learn:
Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing?
The sudden collapse of carbon sinks was not factored into climate models – and could rapidly accelerate global heating
A carbon sink is a thing or a process that removes CO2 from the air. Our oceans are CO2 sinks. CO2 in the air dissolves in ocean water the same way it dissolves in regular water. There are other CO2-removal processes at work in the oceans. Like this one:
It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.
This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions.
After the obligatory “scientists are concerned” disclaimer that comforts the uncomfortable (more on that below), we see this:
In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.
There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.
According to one of the scientists involved in the study, “Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end.”
After more disclaimers — this could be temporary; all could still be well — the writer says this:
The kind of rapid land sink collapse seen in 2023 has not been factored into most climate models. If it continues, it raises the prospect of rapid global heating beyond what those models have predicted.
Indeed.
A Note: ‘Scientists Are Concerned’
Paragraph three, high enough in the Guardian piece to be actually read, states: “But as the Earth heats up, scientists are increasingly concerned that those crucial processes are breaking down.”
This is a key part of the meta content of the story. This phrasing, while accurate, puts the focus on the scientists, not the problem, and emphasizes their “concern,” a mild emotion.
A better, more accurate statement is the following: “Those crucial processes are breaking down.” Period.
Because they are. The source of the Guardian article makes that clear. The authors say that “CO2 growth rate was … 86% above the previous year” (a fact), yet CO2 emissions only increased by “0.1 to 1.1 %” (another fact). Why the difference? CO2 removal has severely slowed or stopped.
It’s a simple equation. What goes into the air is a number. What remains is another number. The difference, a minus b, is what’s taken out. The amount taken out last year is vastly smaller than any previous year. The paper accounts for fluxes and latency. The data and scientists are clear: The carbon sink effect “is coming to an end.”
The Guardian, though, would rather mitigate your fear than give you straight facts. Thus “scientists are concerned,” not “here’s what’s happening.” The reader can decide who The Guardian is protecting.
Be Prepared
Another failure in the climate system says the crisis is ahead of schedule as our rulers define it. (Their projected schedule is whatever keeps you from feeling afraid.)
Warming is already nicely above the magic +1.5°C mark that the IPCC said spells disaster.
And +2°C is not far behind.
Daily global surface temperatures for each year since 1940 relative to pre-industrial baseline (0.00 on the y-axis). Yellow line shows surface temperatures for 2023. Red shows the same for 2024.
Most timelines put warming of +2.0°C in the mid-2030s. We could beat that by a lot if the carbon sinks fail. I’d consider being prepared.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10 ... iling.html
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Ubiquitous plastic: A deadly threat to human health
October 19, 2024
Every year, millions of tons enter our lungs, blood, and brains
The world is on track to produce 736 million tons of plastics each year by 2040
PLASTIC PLASTIC EVERYWHERE, INCLUDING IN WHAT WE DRINK
|by Erik Assadourian
(reposted, with permission, from Gaian Way)
The image of smoldering plastic in a little pit on the side of the street, white wisps of smoke dancing up, burned forever in my brain. I saw it, and many other pits like it, when doing moral educational research in Bangalore, India back in 1998. So the recent Nature study on how much plastic is open burned around the world1—with India in the #1 spot globally—brought that image flooding back to my consciousness. Only now though, do I attempt to do the math. I visited 26 years ago. Over those two and a half decades, how much countless plastic has been burned on the streets of Delhi, Kolkata, Mysore, etc.? In 2020, Bangalore open burned 55,000 tons and Delhi, 144,000 tons. Year after year, India is burning millions of tons—5.8 million in 2020—and that’s just one country. In total, the world open burned about 22 million tons of plastic in 2020, while another 30 million tons ended up wild in the landscape.
And with all this plastic waste spewn across the land, water, and air over the decades, it begs the question: how much plastic has gone into lungs, not just of humans but countless creatures big and small?
There have been several recent studies finding that plastics have now invaded everywhere. Humans breathe in about 74,000-121,000 microplastic particles a year, according to this study. Plastic is in our brains (possibly contributing to dementia); it’s in our blood vessels, increasing the odds of heart attacks and strokes, and in other organs, potentially doing all sorts of bad things there like increasing cancer rates and perhaps causing a brand new disease, plasticosis.2
Worse, this is one of those problems that has become almost invisible, or so embedded in the cultural and economic systems we’re part of that we can no longer even see it. There was an article back in June about the widespread plastic use in agriculture—so much is being used there that plastic is becoming a permanent part of the soil, leading scientists to rename agriculture as “plasticulture.” This brings with it all sorts of problems, including causing changes in the soil—from shifts in flora and fauna, retention of toxins, and reduction of nutrient availability.3
Is this the end?
Does this plastic orgy simply continue until we’re all reproductively compromised and the problem solves itself? Or is there a solution to the plastic world we’re entombing ourselves in?
One current attempt is the effort to pass a global treaty to address plastic pollution (including its design, production, and disposal) started in 2022 and supposed to conclude this November. However, there is stiff resistance by the fossil fuel and chemical industries (who sent nearly 200 lobbyists to the most recent negotiations in April, up 37% from the previous meeting). And the odds are this process will either be delayed or the treaty will not be strong enough to make a dent in the 462 million tons of plastic the world produces each year.
In fact, looking at industry research, plastic is here to stay for the foreseeable future. A recent consultant case study of “a large unnamed sports equipment producer” that uses lots of plastic in its products and packaging found that even in the best case scenario (where plastic waste reduction and circular economy programs are integrated into its business model) its plastic pollution only goes down from 83,000 tons in 2023 to 75,000 tons by 2040. Yes, that’s 8,000 tons less, and 46,000 tons less than its business as usual path (if it implements no programs), but multiply that by hundreds of thousands of plastic dependent companies and the end of the plastic problem seems to be nowhere in sight.
A brand new report from the OECD reinforces these industry analyses, finding that the world is on track to produce 736 million tons of plastics each year by 2040—that’s 70% more than 2020 levels. The report projects that mismanaged plastic waste will also increase, unless the world implements “stringent policies” like limiting plastic demand to 508 million tons per year and quadrupling plastic recycling rates. While that scenario reduces “plastic leakage into the environment” by 96%, what’s more telling is that the world is still producing 508 million tons of plastic per year—that’s more than today!
Since at least the 1970s, there have been great policy ideas to deal with plastic pollution bouncing around. In A Blueprint for Survival, Edward Goldsmith suggested a differential tax for single-use plastics versus durable plastics. That alone could help reduce demand for the less valuable forms of plastic, especially if that tax were ratcheted up year after year.
But in truth, we’re so dependent on plastic at this point—and the producers have spent so long deceiving the public about plastic—that it’s going to be hard to shift directions. That’s not to say it’s impossible. Just this past week, the California Attorney General sued ExxonMobil, the largest producer of plastic polymers in the world, arguing the company has been deceiving consumers about the recyclability of plastic for fifty years, and continues to deceive them with their new claims that “advanced” or chemical recycling will solve the plastic crisis.4
As with PFAS, the more fronts opened against corporate producers, the more they’re put on the defensive, creating space for bigger initiatives—like the global plastics treaty. But in reality, unlike the PFAS problem, which has a relatively small number of producers, plastic is now ubiquitous in everything and I’m not sure the will to transition to a different path is present. And oil producers, which wield significant influence over policymakers around the world, increasingly depend on plastics in their future business models, particularly as oil production is hemmed in by the renewables transition—and thus will fight tooth and nail to defend this revenue stream.
Considering the dual-headed nature of these companies—both spewing toxins—this reinforces the need to nationalize, rein in, and even dismantle these petrochemical companies. But that’s just a piece of the puzzle—as with most environmental problems, a large part of the solution will be found in degrowth: reducing overall production and consumption (and over time, the human population and our dependent species). Shifting from a high-speed disposable culture oriented around growth, supporting farmers to shift to more durable materials and phase out plastics, and drawing plastic out of all industries as much as possible—saving plastic for only the most essential uses—is paramount.5
But that assumes we follow a rational pathway out of this crisis, which may be an irrational hope to have, considering our inability to do this with the climate crisis, not to mention the fact that our increasingly plasticized brains may soon find rational thought increasingly difficult to come by!
Endnotes
1) Open burned means burning in “open uncontrolled fires.”
2) In related news, this new Nature article describes the “plastisphere,” the new ecosystems forming in global plastic waste that are serving as a home for many pathogenic (and even antibiotic-resistant) bacteria and viruses.
3) Working at a small local farm, I can attest to the rampant plasticization of soils—from decaying hoop house walls to plastic sheeting to prevent weeds, to the inevitable plastic contamination found in municipal compost.
4) If you’re not familiar with chemical recycling, here’s a good primer on all its problems.
5) Alternatively, perhaps we can eat our way out of this problem. A 2022 sci-fi movie, Crimes of the Future, starts with a scene of a young human boy chomping on a small pink bathroom garbage pail, having evolved to eat plastic. More realistically, it turns out a new study finds that certain bacteria can eat PET plastic. As the article notes, this is not a solution when we’re producing hundreds of millions of tons of plastic a year, but perhaps part of the solution to clean up lingering microplastic pollution in the environment once the era of producing plastics is over.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... th-threat/
Basic physics explains why storms are getting stronger
October 20, 2024
Climate is not just changing, it HAS changed. Historical assumptions no longer hold.
by Peter Sinclair
This is Not Cool, October 18, 2024
After the last three weeks, it should be clear to everyone that hurricanes and storms in a climate-altered world are different and much more dangerous threats than what humanity has dealt with historically.
The Smoky Mountain region is still counting up damages from massive Hurricane Helene, that drove from the Gulf of Mexico, deep into the heartland, delivering 42 trillion gallons of water to mountain terrain already saturated from previous storms, hydraulically pulverizing billions of dollars of infrastructure, businesses, and homes.
For comparison, the previous flood of record in the area was in 1916, when, according to Accuweather, “The Swannanoa River at Biltmore rose to 21.70 feet, a record that stood for more than 100 years, until Helene sent it to 26.10 feet, breaking that record by 5 feet.”
Accuweather estimated Helene’s damages at $250 billion or more. Milton, which quickly followed, added another $50 – $100 billion in still-spiraling damage estimates.
Basic physics describes the factors that are turbocharging storms in a warmer world.
First, a warming atmosphere holds more moisture, which is latent energy for storms. Hot ocean waters are also like gasoline for hurricanes.
At the beginning of this past summer, meteorologists warned about the implications of record warm sea surface temperatures for potential storms. After a strong start to this hurricane season, conditions turned sour for storm development in the Atlantic, suppressing hurricanes thru July and August.
But the heat and water vapor were still there, and physics will always find a way.
In June, for example, a saturated tropical depression dropped 13 inches of rain on South Florida. Hurricane Beryl came ashore in Texas, drifted northeast and triggered a flooding disaster in Northern Vermont, exactly one year after a similar flood catastrophe. In September, a blob of clouds too disorganized to even have a name dropped “500 year” rains on the coastal Carolinas.
In a warmed world, we don’t need a major hurricane to see major hurricane damages.
We don’t have to live on the beach to suffer enormous hurricane impacts.
Second, hot ocean waters favor “Rapid Intensification”– storms which explode from tropical depressions to major hurricanes at frightening speed. For example, in October 2023, Pacific Hurricane Otis winds intensified by 100 mph in 24 hours, hitting Acapulco with almost no warning as the first Category 5 ever to make landfall on Mexico’s Pacific coast.
Milton over performed all predictions with its rapid intensification in the Gulf.
Storms that rapidly intensify make it much harder for authorities to prepare and issue proper warnings – increasing impacts, damages, and deaths.
Third, a warmer climate increases hurricane wind speeds. According to Meteorologist Jeff Masters, even a small percentage increase in wind speeds translates into much greater damage potential. One NOAA estimate suggests that, “a Category 2 hurricane with 100 mph winds will do 10 times the damage of a Category 1 hurricane with 75 mph winds.”
Fourth, all hurricanes today are riding on a higher sea level, which makes storm surges more damaging, and is a bigger threat to infrastructure, homes and businesses built for a different time, literally a different planet.
Additionally, a new peer reviewed study in the journal Nature shows that more cyclone are making landfall with major intensity, while yet another study shows an increasing trend in storms that land as a 1-2 punch, like Helene and Milton just demonstrated.
Climate is not just changing, it HAS changed, yet our thinking has not kept up.
We live now in a world where historical assumptions no longer hold – and the changes are going to keep coming.
The Washington Post reports this week on a harsh new reality – “Climate calamities are becoming more frequent, deadly and costly in a country already facing massive fiscal challenges.”
The Post quotes Mark Zandi, Chief economist of Moody’s analytics, “I think the cost of climate [change] is increasingly a threat to our already very fragile fiscal outlook,” – when we factor in “tens of billions or hundreds of billions more each year to help mitigate the fallout of climate events, the outlook looks even darker.”
No society can deal with a problem it is unwilling to recognize and name. Our politics has been paralyzed by a highly effective, 40-year campaign by fossil fuel interests to degrade Americans’ confidence in the scientific and engineering authorities that are the very foundation of our prosperity and global leadership.
Solutions, in the form of clean, carbon free energy, are at hand, and as we have seen in Midland and surrounding counties, immediately improve quality of life in hosting communities by massively increasing tax revenues, adding resilience to electric grids, and stabilizing family farm incomes, while they help insure a viable and sustainable future for our children and generations to come.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... -stronger/
October 18, 2024 Scott Scheffer
The mountain community of Asheville, N.C., was utterly destroyed by flooding.
On Sept. 26, Hurricane Helene hit near Tampa, Florida, and tore north and then northwest through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, even reaching the eastern part of Tennessee.
Helene stretched about 400 miles across and sustained 140 mph winds, smashing into homes and leaving millions without electricity. The flooding and devastation from the wind were at a historic level.
No areas near the path were spared, and the mountain community of Asheville, North Carolina, was utterly destroyed by flooding. A local journalist reported seeing two homes being swept away by raging water that then crashed into each other.
Just two weeks later, Hurricane Milton landed 75 miles south of Helene’s landfall and ripped its way north/northwest across the panhandle and then out into the Atlantic. Work crews were clearing debris from Helene when Milton arrived.
It’s not unusual for hurricanes to spawn a few tornados. Usually, they’re weak and fizzle out quickly. Not these. The storm yielded a record 38 of them, and they smashed everything in their paths.
As of Oct. 15, the combined death toll had climbed to 268, and there were still 192 people unaccounted for. Damage estimates are all over the map, from $35 billion to $200 billion.
These were two of the most destructive storms in history. “Thousand-year” storms are happening frequently now. Hurricanes, droughts, and cyclones are increasing in severity. Heat waves are more frequent and threaten to make some cities that millions call home uninhabitable.
This is all a product of the capitalist economy. Giant energy companies and their banking partners have pushed the exploitation of fossil fuels, spewed gigatons of CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and caused global warming.
They’ve spent millions of dollars to spread misinformation to deny climate change or push the responsibility onto individuals. British Petroleum invented the whole idea of a “carbon footprint,” as if the working class could just change our habits and solve the problem.
Oil company scientists have known the consequences of continued fossil fuel use for decades. They kept the information secret, ridiculed scientists who sounded the alarm and ignored endless dire warnings from the United Nations.
Fracking for natural gas intensified as the U.S. took over the European market, a consequence of the U.S. proxy war against Russia. During roughly the same period, Biden began handing out new oil drilling contracts like candy on Halloween.
Instead of yielding to the growing awareness and anger over the global capitalist destruction of the planet, the energy giants have literally stepped on the gas. Emissions of greenhouse gases are now at an all-time high.
Scholarly reports have also revealed that military activity is responsible for a hefty percentage of greenhouse gases. But the U.S. is the motivator of constant military exercises to threaten China, active wars in Ukraine, and now the horrible Zionist genocidal campaign against Gaza and war against the people of Lebanon.
Hurricanes are not only more severe
As the earth’s atmosphere has heated, hurricanes are not only more severe but also intensify more quickly, leaving less time for preparation and evacuations.
This was particularly so with Helene and Milton. That rapid intensification was noted about Hurricane Otis in October 2023, which slammed into Acapulco, Mexico, as well. High ocean temperatures also fueled a cyclone in February of last year that was the longest-lasting cyclone ever recorded — Cyclone Freddy. It lasted for 36 days, crossed the entire Indian Ocean, and ravaged Madagascar, Malawi, and Mozambique.
Ocean temperatures have reached all-time highs in the last several years, alarming climatologists.
This phenomenon is creating superstorms. Rising sea temperatures are destroying marine life and acidifying seawater, and sea levels are rising.
That happens for the same reason that a pot of boiling water rises as it warms. Water expands from heat.
The Gulf of Mexico’s rise in sea level is nearly twice that of the rest of the world, which means storm surges are worse. Beyond that, the heat and energy from the oceans is being picked up by tropical storms, fueling their rapid development into more destructive, less predictable hurricanes.
As they develop, the storms pick up much more moisture as they work their way across oceans. It isn’t uncommon now for hurricanes to slow down after landfall and dump rain on a region for sustained periods. What Katrina did to New Orleans and now Helene did to Asheville, North Carolina, are perfect examples of that.
Global warming and climate change can be reversed. Renewables in the form of solar, wind, and geothermal energy are already an important component, even with the question of intermittency, which still needs to be resolved. Electric vehicles can limit emissions from the millions of cars traveling daily.
The People’s Republic of China has been instrumental in the progress that has been made in those areas. Other technologies and ideas may improve on these or spawn whole new ideas that can lower global temperatures.
The hard science developed around climate change proves that fossil fuels are the root cause. But another kind of science leads us to the solution: social science. Private ownership of the means of production – the profit system – is a roadblock to our planet’s recovery. Part 2 will explore the role of the U.S. empire in causing global warming and the role China is playing in cleaning up the atmosphere.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... rm-crisis/
******
Thomas Neuburger: Carbon Sinks Are Failing
Posted on October 17, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. This latest climate sighting is a very big addition to a long and growing list of seriously unfavorable development, at least as far as the survival of something dimly resembling modern life looks like. It seems unlikely that carbon sinks becoming much less effective was contemplated in climate modeling. So this development amounts to a major accelerant.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
I very much dislike climate alarm posts these days for reasons already stated (see “Name the Damn Perp”).
But climate news posts, on the other hand, deserve our notice — in particular, posts about unanticipated changes in “crisis scheduling.” We’ve been taught by those who get rich from the oil economy that “worrying later is fine; the crisis won’t come for decades, if at all.”
Unfortunately for them and us, news that the crisis is not sticking to schedule seems always to appear. This is one of those stories.
Carbon Sinks Are Failing
From The Guardian we learn:
Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing?
The sudden collapse of carbon sinks was not factored into climate models – and could rapidly accelerate global heating
A carbon sink is a thing or a process that removes CO2 from the air. Our oceans are CO2 sinks. CO2 in the air dissolves in ocean water the same way it dissolves in regular water. There are other CO2-removal processes at work in the oceans. Like this one:
It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.
This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions.
After the obligatory “scientists are concerned” disclaimer that comforts the uncomfortable (more on that below), we see this:
In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.
There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.
According to one of the scientists involved in the study, “Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end.”
After more disclaimers — this could be temporary; all could still be well — the writer says this:
The kind of rapid land sink collapse seen in 2023 has not been factored into most climate models. If it continues, it raises the prospect of rapid global heating beyond what those models have predicted.
Indeed.
A Note: ‘Scientists Are Concerned’
Paragraph three, high enough in the Guardian piece to be actually read, states: “But as the Earth heats up, scientists are increasingly concerned that those crucial processes are breaking down.”
This is a key part of the meta content of the story. This phrasing, while accurate, puts the focus on the scientists, not the problem, and emphasizes their “concern,” a mild emotion.
A better, more accurate statement is the following: “Those crucial processes are breaking down.” Period.
Because they are. The source of the Guardian article makes that clear. The authors say that “CO2 growth rate was … 86% above the previous year” (a fact), yet CO2 emissions only increased by “0.1 to 1.1 %” (another fact). Why the difference? CO2 removal has severely slowed or stopped.
It’s a simple equation. What goes into the air is a number. What remains is another number. The difference, a minus b, is what’s taken out. The amount taken out last year is vastly smaller than any previous year. The paper accounts for fluxes and latency. The data and scientists are clear: The carbon sink effect “is coming to an end.”
The Guardian, though, would rather mitigate your fear than give you straight facts. Thus “scientists are concerned,” not “here’s what’s happening.” The reader can decide who The Guardian is protecting.
Be Prepared
Another failure in the climate system says the crisis is ahead of schedule as our rulers define it. (Their projected schedule is whatever keeps you from feeling afraid.)
Warming is already nicely above the magic +1.5°C mark that the IPCC said spells disaster.
And +2°C is not far behind.
Daily global surface temperatures for each year since 1940 relative to pre-industrial baseline (0.00 on the y-axis). Yellow line shows surface temperatures for 2023. Red shows the same for 2024.
Most timelines put warming of +2.0°C in the mid-2030s. We could beat that by a lot if the carbon sinks fail. I’d consider being prepared.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10 ... iling.html
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Ubiquitous plastic: A deadly threat to human health
October 19, 2024
Every year, millions of tons enter our lungs, blood, and brains
The world is on track to produce 736 million tons of plastics each year by 2040
PLASTIC PLASTIC EVERYWHERE, INCLUDING IN WHAT WE DRINK
|by Erik Assadourian
(reposted, with permission, from Gaian Way)
The image of smoldering plastic in a little pit on the side of the street, white wisps of smoke dancing up, burned forever in my brain. I saw it, and many other pits like it, when doing moral educational research in Bangalore, India back in 1998. So the recent Nature study on how much plastic is open burned around the world1—with India in the #1 spot globally—brought that image flooding back to my consciousness. Only now though, do I attempt to do the math. I visited 26 years ago. Over those two and a half decades, how much countless plastic has been burned on the streets of Delhi, Kolkata, Mysore, etc.? In 2020, Bangalore open burned 55,000 tons and Delhi, 144,000 tons. Year after year, India is burning millions of tons—5.8 million in 2020—and that’s just one country. In total, the world open burned about 22 million tons of plastic in 2020, while another 30 million tons ended up wild in the landscape.
And with all this plastic waste spewn across the land, water, and air over the decades, it begs the question: how much plastic has gone into lungs, not just of humans but countless creatures big and small?
There have been several recent studies finding that plastics have now invaded everywhere. Humans breathe in about 74,000-121,000 microplastic particles a year, according to this study. Plastic is in our brains (possibly contributing to dementia); it’s in our blood vessels, increasing the odds of heart attacks and strokes, and in other organs, potentially doing all sorts of bad things there like increasing cancer rates and perhaps causing a brand new disease, plasticosis.2
Worse, this is one of those problems that has become almost invisible, or so embedded in the cultural and economic systems we’re part of that we can no longer even see it. There was an article back in June about the widespread plastic use in agriculture—so much is being used there that plastic is becoming a permanent part of the soil, leading scientists to rename agriculture as “plasticulture.” This brings with it all sorts of problems, including causing changes in the soil—from shifts in flora and fauna, retention of toxins, and reduction of nutrient availability.3
Is this the end?
Does this plastic orgy simply continue until we’re all reproductively compromised and the problem solves itself? Or is there a solution to the plastic world we’re entombing ourselves in?
One current attempt is the effort to pass a global treaty to address plastic pollution (including its design, production, and disposal) started in 2022 and supposed to conclude this November. However, there is stiff resistance by the fossil fuel and chemical industries (who sent nearly 200 lobbyists to the most recent negotiations in April, up 37% from the previous meeting). And the odds are this process will either be delayed or the treaty will not be strong enough to make a dent in the 462 million tons of plastic the world produces each year.
In fact, looking at industry research, plastic is here to stay for the foreseeable future. A recent consultant case study of “a large unnamed sports equipment producer” that uses lots of plastic in its products and packaging found that even in the best case scenario (where plastic waste reduction and circular economy programs are integrated into its business model) its plastic pollution only goes down from 83,000 tons in 2023 to 75,000 tons by 2040. Yes, that’s 8,000 tons less, and 46,000 tons less than its business as usual path (if it implements no programs), but multiply that by hundreds of thousands of plastic dependent companies and the end of the plastic problem seems to be nowhere in sight.
A brand new report from the OECD reinforces these industry analyses, finding that the world is on track to produce 736 million tons of plastics each year by 2040—that’s 70% more than 2020 levels. The report projects that mismanaged plastic waste will also increase, unless the world implements “stringent policies” like limiting plastic demand to 508 million tons per year and quadrupling plastic recycling rates. While that scenario reduces “plastic leakage into the environment” by 96%, what’s more telling is that the world is still producing 508 million tons of plastic per year—that’s more than today!
Since at least the 1970s, there have been great policy ideas to deal with plastic pollution bouncing around. In A Blueprint for Survival, Edward Goldsmith suggested a differential tax for single-use plastics versus durable plastics. That alone could help reduce demand for the less valuable forms of plastic, especially if that tax were ratcheted up year after year.
But in truth, we’re so dependent on plastic at this point—and the producers have spent so long deceiving the public about plastic—that it’s going to be hard to shift directions. That’s not to say it’s impossible. Just this past week, the California Attorney General sued ExxonMobil, the largest producer of plastic polymers in the world, arguing the company has been deceiving consumers about the recyclability of plastic for fifty years, and continues to deceive them with their new claims that “advanced” or chemical recycling will solve the plastic crisis.4
As with PFAS, the more fronts opened against corporate producers, the more they’re put on the defensive, creating space for bigger initiatives—like the global plastics treaty. But in reality, unlike the PFAS problem, which has a relatively small number of producers, plastic is now ubiquitous in everything and I’m not sure the will to transition to a different path is present. And oil producers, which wield significant influence over policymakers around the world, increasingly depend on plastics in their future business models, particularly as oil production is hemmed in by the renewables transition—and thus will fight tooth and nail to defend this revenue stream.
Considering the dual-headed nature of these companies—both spewing toxins—this reinforces the need to nationalize, rein in, and even dismantle these petrochemical companies. But that’s just a piece of the puzzle—as with most environmental problems, a large part of the solution will be found in degrowth: reducing overall production and consumption (and over time, the human population and our dependent species). Shifting from a high-speed disposable culture oriented around growth, supporting farmers to shift to more durable materials and phase out plastics, and drawing plastic out of all industries as much as possible—saving plastic for only the most essential uses—is paramount.5
But that assumes we follow a rational pathway out of this crisis, which may be an irrational hope to have, considering our inability to do this with the climate crisis, not to mention the fact that our increasingly plasticized brains may soon find rational thought increasingly difficult to come by!
Endnotes
1) Open burned means burning in “open uncontrolled fires.”
2) In related news, this new Nature article describes the “plastisphere,” the new ecosystems forming in global plastic waste that are serving as a home for many pathogenic (and even antibiotic-resistant) bacteria and viruses.
3) Working at a small local farm, I can attest to the rampant plasticization of soils—from decaying hoop house walls to plastic sheeting to prevent weeds, to the inevitable plastic contamination found in municipal compost.
4) If you’re not familiar with chemical recycling, here’s a good primer on all its problems.
5) Alternatively, perhaps we can eat our way out of this problem. A 2022 sci-fi movie, Crimes of the Future, starts with a scene of a young human boy chomping on a small pink bathroom garbage pail, having evolved to eat plastic. More realistically, it turns out a new study finds that certain bacteria can eat PET plastic. As the article notes, this is not a solution when we’re producing hundreds of millions of tons of plastic a year, but perhaps part of the solution to clean up lingering microplastic pollution in the environment once the era of producing plastics is over.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... th-threat/
Basic physics explains why storms are getting stronger
October 20, 2024
Climate is not just changing, it HAS changed. Historical assumptions no longer hold.
by Peter Sinclair
This is Not Cool, October 18, 2024
After the last three weeks, it should be clear to everyone that hurricanes and storms in a climate-altered world are different and much more dangerous threats than what humanity has dealt with historically.
The Smoky Mountain region is still counting up damages from massive Hurricane Helene, that drove from the Gulf of Mexico, deep into the heartland, delivering 42 trillion gallons of water to mountain terrain already saturated from previous storms, hydraulically pulverizing billions of dollars of infrastructure, businesses, and homes.
For comparison, the previous flood of record in the area was in 1916, when, according to Accuweather, “The Swannanoa River at Biltmore rose to 21.70 feet, a record that stood for more than 100 years, until Helene sent it to 26.10 feet, breaking that record by 5 feet.”
Accuweather estimated Helene’s damages at $250 billion or more. Milton, which quickly followed, added another $50 – $100 billion in still-spiraling damage estimates.
Basic physics describes the factors that are turbocharging storms in a warmer world.
First, a warming atmosphere holds more moisture, which is latent energy for storms. Hot ocean waters are also like gasoline for hurricanes.
At the beginning of this past summer, meteorologists warned about the implications of record warm sea surface temperatures for potential storms. After a strong start to this hurricane season, conditions turned sour for storm development in the Atlantic, suppressing hurricanes thru July and August.
But the heat and water vapor were still there, and physics will always find a way.
In June, for example, a saturated tropical depression dropped 13 inches of rain on South Florida. Hurricane Beryl came ashore in Texas, drifted northeast and triggered a flooding disaster in Northern Vermont, exactly one year after a similar flood catastrophe. In September, a blob of clouds too disorganized to even have a name dropped “500 year” rains on the coastal Carolinas.
In a warmed world, we don’t need a major hurricane to see major hurricane damages.
We don’t have to live on the beach to suffer enormous hurricane impacts.
Second, hot ocean waters favor “Rapid Intensification”– storms which explode from tropical depressions to major hurricanes at frightening speed. For example, in October 2023, Pacific Hurricane Otis winds intensified by 100 mph in 24 hours, hitting Acapulco with almost no warning as the first Category 5 ever to make landfall on Mexico’s Pacific coast.
Milton over performed all predictions with its rapid intensification in the Gulf.
Storms that rapidly intensify make it much harder for authorities to prepare and issue proper warnings – increasing impacts, damages, and deaths.
Third, a warmer climate increases hurricane wind speeds. According to Meteorologist Jeff Masters, even a small percentage increase in wind speeds translates into much greater damage potential. One NOAA estimate suggests that, “a Category 2 hurricane with 100 mph winds will do 10 times the damage of a Category 1 hurricane with 75 mph winds.”
Fourth, all hurricanes today are riding on a higher sea level, which makes storm surges more damaging, and is a bigger threat to infrastructure, homes and businesses built for a different time, literally a different planet.
Additionally, a new peer reviewed study in the journal Nature shows that more cyclone are making landfall with major intensity, while yet another study shows an increasing trend in storms that land as a 1-2 punch, like Helene and Milton just demonstrated.
Climate is not just changing, it HAS changed, yet our thinking has not kept up.
We live now in a world where historical assumptions no longer hold – and the changes are going to keep coming.
The Washington Post reports this week on a harsh new reality – “Climate calamities are becoming more frequent, deadly and costly in a country already facing massive fiscal challenges.”
The Post quotes Mark Zandi, Chief economist of Moody’s analytics, “I think the cost of climate [change] is increasingly a threat to our already very fragile fiscal outlook,” – when we factor in “tens of billions or hundreds of billions more each year to help mitigate the fallout of climate events, the outlook looks even darker.”
No society can deal with a problem it is unwilling to recognize and name. Our politics has been paralyzed by a highly effective, 40-year campaign by fossil fuel interests to degrade Americans’ confidence in the scientific and engineering authorities that are the very foundation of our prosperity and global leadership.
Solutions, in the form of clean, carbon free energy, are at hand, and as we have seen in Midland and surrounding counties, immediately improve quality of life in hosting communities by massively increasing tax revenues, adding resilience to electric grids, and stabilizing family farm incomes, while they help insure a viable and sustainable future for our children and generations to come.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... -stronger/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
COP or CON? Big Conservation corrupts biodiversity protection
October 22, 2024
Colonial, abusive and ineffective, but hugely profitable for certain actors
by Fiore Longo, Survival International
African Arguments, October 21, 2024
Some 31 years after the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) came into force, the latest Conference of the Parties – as the regular jamborees of governments, NGOs and others with a stake in these conventions are known – starts this week in the bustling Colombian city of Cali.
This one, COP16, is particularly important as it’s supposed to resolve some vital but unfinished business concerning the new global “action plan” for biodiversity, known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Don’t be misled by the typically pedestrian title: what’s at stake here could dramatically affect millions of people around the world, especially Indigenous and local communities, because the Framework has a number of fatal flaws.
These collectively mean that what could, and should, have been a transformational initiative is instead repeating the same old approach to “biodiversity protection” – promoting a top-down, government- and international agency-driven colonial model that is rooted in racism and has been comprehensively discredited but persists nonetheless.
Symptomatic of how the new action plan was co-opted from the start was the decision to finance its implementation not by setting up an innovative global fund, as many nations in the Global South wanted, but rather to establish a fund under the auspices of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a long-standing collaboration between the World Bank, various UN agencies, and governments.
The choice of the Global Environment Facility was highly problematic as the organization does not require that Indigenous peoples have the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent over any projects it funds which may affect their lives, lands and rights.
And because the new fund, known as the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF), is in a sense a subsidiary of the GEF, it has adopted its rules. The result is that it will only accept proposals to fund new biodiversity projects from one of the designated “GEF Agencies”. This is a group of 18 institutions all of which are multinational development banks or big conservation corporations like WWF or Conservation International that have long histories of complicity in human rights violations.
Following the money
Survival has analyzed the documentation for all the 22 projects that have so far been approved. What we’ve found suggests that the worst fears of the GBFF’s critics were amply justified:
Only one of the 22 projects so far approved will likely be of benefit to Indigenous people and is clearly directed to them.
The total fees to be paid to the proposer agencies – that is, above and beyond actual project activity costs – comes to 24% of the total funds available. The proportion of project funds staying within these agencies will likely be higher still.
Of the proposing (and implementing) agencies, the US chapter of WWF has been the most successful in capturing funds. Its five approved projects or concepts (including preparation grants) account for $36 million, almost exactly a third of the total funding. The next most successful – the UN Development Program (UNDP) and Conservation International (CI), which have nine and two projects respectively – account for about a quarter of the total funds each. Together with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, these agencies will receive 85% of the first $110 million in funding.
One of the projects will fund (through WWF) Protected Areas in Africa which have long histories of dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands and brutality against them by eco-guards.
A huge chunk of funding is going towards the “30×30” target to increase the extent of Protected Areas to 30% of the Earth’s land and seas by 2030. This is of particular concern because National Parks, wildlife reserves and other conservation areas are already one of the biggest threats to Indigenous peoples.
Such parks have almost always involved brutal evictions and exclusions, violence and destruction of Indigenous livelihoods. These problems continue today, such as in the horrifying eviction of thousands of Maasai people from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania.
Survival International believes that the structure and operation of this whole funding model is fundamentally flawed. It is tilted strongly in favor of “business as usual”, top-down, conservation projects, rather than promoting a new, and much-needed, rights-based approach to biodiversity protection. And it’s almost entirely inaccessible to Indigenous people themselves.
We believe that the entire funding mechanism should be reconsidered. The GBFF needs to be given a completely new direction, wherein funding is primarily directed to Indigenous peoples and local communities. The funding of new or expanded “fortress conservation” projects should be prohibited.
More generally, the extraordinarily large sums (such as $700 billion annually) supposedly needed for biodiversity protection are being proposed by conservation corporations with a vested interest in creating such targets. Far less funding for biodiversity protection would really be required if the emphasis were to be on wider recognition of Indigenous peoples’ lands and rights, rather than the expensive, colonial, top-down, militarized approach, which remains the economic mainstay of the conservation industry.
Biodiversity credits: a new threat
As if all that were not worrying enough, the COP16 meeting will see the launch of a number of initiatives to create biodiversity credits.
The concept of biodiversity credits is similar to that of carbon markets, where companies or organizations can supposedly “offset” their climate change-causing pollution by buying carbon credits from projects elsewhere that believed to be preventing carbon emissions or actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. In reality, both the idea and the practice are deeply flawed: such projects put a price on nature, treating Indigenous and local communities’ lands as a carbon stock to be exchanged in the market so polluters can keep polluting, whilst the conservation industry benefits to the tune of billions of dollars. Indigenous peoples and local communities, on the other hand, end up dispossessed and stripped of their livelihoods.
Biodiversity credits, like carbon credits, are part of a new push for the commodification of nature. A recent statement from more than 250 environmental, human rights, development and community organisations worldwide (including Survival International) calls for an immediate suspension of the development of biocrediting schemes.
As well as the technical, moral, philosophical and practical problems with putting a price on the conservation of species or entire ecosystems, and trading them against destruction elsewhere, the idea poses a serious threat to Indigenous peoples. They would face growing pressure from land grabs as bio-offsetting projects seek to profit from the often rich biodiversity of the places in which Indigenous peoples live and that they have managed for generations.
Similar problems have occurred many times with carbon offsetting schemes already. Many Indigenous leaders simply say that the commodification of nature implicit in biocrediting and trading runs counter to their worldviews and values.
So how much hope is there for this COP? Not much, is the honest answer. The whole process of biodiversity protection has been captured almost as soon as it’s started by the same institutions that have enriched themselves at the expense of Indigenous peoples – the guardians of much of the world’s biodiversity – for decades.
At the very least, the right of Indigenous peoples to give – or withhold – their Free, Prior and Informed Consent to any project that affects them must be respected. Indigenous organizations, together with allies, will be doing everything possible to ensure it is.
The answer to how to protect the world’s biodiversity is really quite straightforward: respect Indigenous peoples’ land rights, and tackle the underlying causes of biodiversity destruction, namely the exploitation of the world’s resources for profit. How refreshing it would be if that were top of the COP agenda.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... rotection/
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Tribal communities in India fight government-corporate nexus to save Hasdeo forest
Hasdeo Aranya, one of central India’s largest forests, faces destruction from BJP-backed corporate deforestation and coal mining projects
October 22, 2024 by Abdul Rahman
Source: Tribal Army/X
Last week, scores of people protesting against coal mines in an ecologically sensitive forest in Chhattisgarh were attacked by police and injured. Protesters have opposed the felling of thousands of trees in the Hasdeo Aranya forest. Tree felling began after both the central and state governments approved a new coal mine despite long-standing protests by tribal rights groups and environmental activists.
The new coal mine is an extension of the Parsa East Kente Basan (PEKB) mining project. Like its predecessor, it is controlled by Rajasthan Vidyut Utpadan Nigam, a company operated by India’s corporate giant Adani.
Protesters claim the project could result in the loss of between 250,000 and 800,000 trees and cause massive displacement of local tribal communities, as well as devastating long-term environmental harm.
Permission for the second phase of mining was granted by the pro-corporate, ultra-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led central government in 2022. However, after protests, the Congress-led state government opposed the decision, filing an affidavit in the top court stating that land used by the previous PEKB phase holds enough coal (around 350 million tonnes) to supply the attached 4,300 MW power plant for the next 20 years.
Despite this, the BJP government, newly elected in the state and still in power centrally, granted further permission to the Adani-controlled company, claiming the first mine was exhausted.
Activists allege that environmental regulations and constitutional provisions requiring local consent were tampered with to push the project forward. Under India’s Constitution and PESA (Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act), explicit consent from local self-governing bodies is required for mining projects in Scheduled Areas. Local communities claim that the BJP government obtained consent through coercion and deceit, disregarding the spirit of these legal provisions.
Threat to ecology and local economy
Mining in the Hasdeo forest has been opposed by the local population for years. In 2021, protesters from affected districts walked hundreds of kilometers to the state capital, demanding an end to all mining leases in the Hasdeo area. That protest pushed the Congress government to withdraw new mining projects and file an affidavit in the country’s top court.
Alok Shukla, leader of the Save Hasdeo Forest Resistance Committee, which is spearheading protests to save the forest, recently told Frontline that the clashes around Hasdeo represent a battle “between corporate profit on one side and the rights of people to their livelihoods on the other.” Shukla claimed that corporations are backed by the authorities, which target and attack protesters to eliminate opposition to their profit-driven motives.
Due to its environmental significance, Hasdeo was one of the areas declared “no-go” for commercial purposes before the BJP came to power in 2014. Spanning around 170,000 hectares, it is one of the largest contiguous stretches of dense forest in central India, according to research conducted by the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in 2021. It is also one of the last remaining old-growth forests in the country.
The forest is the catchment area for the Hasdeo River, the largest tributary of the Mahanadi River, and serves as a watershed for the Hasdeo reservoir, which is critical for irrigating around 300,000 hectares of double-cropped land across at least three districts in Chhattisgarh.
Hasdeo Aranya forest is home to various protected tribal groups such as Abujhmaria, Bihor, Halwa, and others, and it is a biodiversity hotspot. Some parts of it, like the Lemru Elephant Reserve declared by the state assembly in July 2022, are protected animal reserves. The fate of these areas is at risk if the mining contracts are not revoked.
The WII has opposed the mining projects in the region in a report submitted to the ICFRE, claiming that they would have adverse environmental impacts, including affecting the Hasdeo River, increasing human-animal conflicts, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, and causing a loss of precious biodiversity.
Chhattisgarh Kisan Sabha, a part of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), India’s largest organization of farmers, has also been involved in opposing mining in the Hasdeo forest. Following the violent attacks on tribals protesting against the fresh round of tree felling last week, it issued a statement condemning the police action and deforestation as an assault on the tribals’ livelihoods and the environment. The organization said that both the state and central governments are acting as agents of big capital, showing complete disregard for the people, the state, and the environment.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/10/22/ ... eo-forest/
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Heterodox Approaches Will Provide Answers to the Multiple Cascading Crises of Our Future
Posted on October 23, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. KLG, drawing on the ideas of Elinor Olstrom, argues that the thinking that got us into our current mess, particularly but not solely climate climate change and environmental degradation, is inherently ill-suited to come up with remedies.
While heterodox ideas and experiments are our only hope, in my usual devil’s advocate manner, I believe the nature of the problem is more severe than Olstrom (and KLG, inspired by her) believes. What we are up against is not just neoliberalism. It is a highly complex society, with most occupying very specialized roles, combined with capitalism, which requires a large majority of people to sell their labor to survive. Oh, and worse, sell that labor in a competitive market. That generally means that trying to do things differently as a current or prospective employee is likely to result in not having a paycheck.
Individuals are typically subject to multiple sets of responsibilities, and they often conflict. The number of conflicts tends to increase as societies become more complex, starting with family/tribal, local communities, national, global. Humans have seldom been good at working out how to manage competing levels of responsibility. The tensions and contradictions get greater as societies become more complex. As the great philosopher, Jamie Lannister, said:
So many vows…they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It’s too much. No matter what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or the other.
Nearly everyone will put family/tribal first. In a capitalist system, that means taking steps that might threaten your job or worst make you permanently unemployable are anathema. So living in a “good” suburb so as to provide for a decent level of education for your kids implies all sorts of other things, like owning a car or two for a working spouse so as to commute, take said kids to various events and play dates (or even pick them up from school), and provision for the family, are perceived necessities that lock most people into participating in high energy consuming lifestyles. It is hard to see how many, even if they wanted to, can shift away from that.
In other words, we do need new thinking and approaches. But “heterodox” may be too polite to signal the radicalism needed.
By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health
Heterodox, from the OED: Not in accordance with established doctrines or opinions, or those generally recognized as right or “orthodox.” The past two centuries of orthodoxy have led us to our current pass, where at least half the people may be poor in the so-called Global North and more than half are poor in much of the Global South, our environment is severely damaged, and climate catastrophe is no longer beyond the horizon. Something else will be required to retrieve the situation as best we can. Received “wisdom” will not be the answer.
But the orthodox, thoroughly neoliberal interlocutor will ask, “Can your solutions really work?” [1] My reply is usually, “It is scarcely imaginable they will do worse.” And besides, the world is heterogeneous, i.e., composed of diverse elements or constituents; consisting of parts of different kinds (OED). Our world is granular and polymorphic in all things biological, physical, social, cultural, and political. But orthodox politics and economics have little room for diversity, much less place. Under the current Neoliberal Dispensation one place is necessarily the same as another even though all places are distinct. This is at the root of our present difficulties. If we (all of us) are to survive, we must learn the importance of place, and in the words of Wendell Berry and Christopher Alexander we must solve for place and for pattern.
This can be done from the ground up, but only if the straitjacket of Neoliberalism is dissolved. We have the heterodox leaders who can lead the way. Previously in this series we discussed the environmental economist Herman Daly (1938-2022) who was viewed as unacceptably heterodox when he placed the “economy” firmly within the ecosphere, which will not support semi-infinite growth of anything material. A justifiably infamous economist, then at the World Bank, responded to Daly’s true but heterodox thesis with “That is not the way to look at it!” This vignette is recounted in Beyond Growth (1996), which is still in print and as current now as it was 28 years ago.
Another heterodox problem solver is Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) who was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2009 for her “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.” Elinor Ostrom is the first, and after the recent Nobel announcements, still the only woman to win this prize. [2] If we are to survive and possibly thrive in the coming world, Elinor Ostrom has much to teach us. What follows is not a list of what must be done. These remain unknown. But how we should proceed is clear if we are serious.
Elinor Ostrom is an excellent place to start. She began her work on the commons in opposition to the well-known essay by Garrett Hardin that appeared in Science in 1968: The Tragedy of the Commons (pdf). This tragedy was inevitable for Hardin, who later wrote another famous essay entitled Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor (pdf) that has been published in several collections since. Hardin was not incorrect in his view that population growth could exceed the carrying capacity of the ecosphere, but his approach was tiresomely conventional, cramped, and misanthropic in the extreme. It foreshadowed the Neoliberal Dispensation which began in earnest not long after his famous essay during the single Presidential term of Jimmy Carter.
Hardin’s work was not sui generis. He was apparently quite the traditional “conservative” by the standards of his day, including his assent to the utter nonsense that was The Bell Curve later in his career. His perspective dovetails with two other influential documents produced just after The Tragedy of the Commons. The first is the article from the New York Times Magazine on 13 September 1970 by Milton Friedman: A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. This virtual throwaway became the prime justification for the marketization of virtually everything in the name of corporate profit, very narrowly defined. This “Friedman Doctrine” remains current because Milton Friedman was extraordinarily influential both inside and outside his academic home as a member of the Chicago School (14 “Nobel” laureates and counting). He also wrote a regular column in Newsweek from 1966 through 1984, when Time and Newsweek were the two essential American newsweeklies with circulation in the millions.
The second document is the Powell Memorandum (23 August 1971) entitled Attack on American Free Enterprise System (pdf, 23 August 1971), written for the United States Chamber of Commerce by Lewis Powell, then a Virginia corporate lawyer for Big Tobacco and later an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. There is nothing surprising in Powell’s reaction to the 1960s, nor the utility of his eponymous memo in autochthonous emergence of conservative reaction in think tanks, including Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Legislative Exchange Council, and Manhattan Institute. Each is dedicated to preserving the “American Way of Life.” Hardin, Friedman, Powell, and their friends have had far-reaching influence that continues.
Elinor Ostrom responded. What made her heterodox – the radical with conservative tendencies to the extent that she appreciated the Public Choice Theory [3] of James Buchanan – was that she always called herself a political economist instead of an economist. Indeed, there is no economics without politics, something often left unappreciated by the profession, especially in how it is taught to undergraduates in the business schools of our colleges and universities. It was possible to major in Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences in my day, but I never came across that person. Ostrom’s research across many different problems showed that the collapse of the commons was not due to human cupidity or some innate flaw in human nature.
On the other hand, trust is the key to a thriving commons of any kind – pasture, woodland, water, fisheries, air, and extending the concept, healthy food, healthy social and political organization, and healthcare. Trust has often been problematic for many at the margins of society, but today trust is almost completely lacking for “bad and sufficient reason” among the many, who are inevitably commoners. In direct conflict with Hardin, Ostrom also found, along with others [4], that “enclosing the commons” by whatever mechanism, has often been a common antecedent of their failure. It is not an accident that enclosure in England was a natural, classical Lockean action to make land productive as a capital asset rather than remain a sustainable resource for commoners. The line is not straight from enclosure to Neoliberalism, but the thread is there, as cultural attributes such as equality, grassroots democracy, and peaceful cooperation were subsumed by the market that operated at an increasing remove from commoners.
To return to the commons for commoners, the solutions to our multiple cascading crises must be found using a polycentric approach that requires citizens to act at every level from the individual to the community and through the regions and countries in which our local communities are embedded. The solution to these problems must also be polycentric. Ostrom did not neglect institutions while concentrating on the commons. In a diverse and granular world, no one solution (e.g., The Market) will solve every problem. Rather local society and overarching institutions that mediate different processes are essential. Anthropogenic global warming cannot be solved by individuals, but Roger Scruton was not wrong in his view that small local solutions are the place to begin. From Ostrom’s “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems,” American Economic Review 100, 3: 641-672 Quoted in Derek Wall, p. 58:
The most important lesson…is that humans have a more complex motivational structure and more complex social dilemmas than posited in earlier rational-choice theory. [5] Designing institutions to force…entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been a major goal of (public policy) for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans. We need to ask diverse polycentric institutions help or hinder the innovativeness, learning, adapting, trustworthiness, levels of cooperation of participants , and the achievement of more effective, equitable, and sustainable outcomes at multiple scales.
Yes, and none of these desired outcomes are possible under the Neoliberal Dispensation. A sustainable commons for the commoners (the 90%, at least) requires Deep Democracy, which was another primary problem addressed by Ostrom. Deep Democracy requires that people shape their lives rather than electing a small minority to legislate their lives for them. Deep Democracy has no connection to the Our Democracy™ of today’s Professional Managerial Class (PMC), but it will be essential if we are to learn to thrive again in local communities, i.e., where we live, breathe, and eat. In a democratic, humane society, this can be done. Conventional politics has now answer. It is only a Manichean fight for status between advocates of suspect notions of good and evil that politics has become over the past fifty years, especially in the Uniparty of the United State. How do we get there? The floor is open to all.
What is clear throughout the work of Elinor Ostrom is that “what we need is at hand.” I first came across this expression in the work of Harland Hubbard, artist and homesteader at Payne Hollow on the Ohio River in Kentucky. We cannot all live like Anna and Harlan Hubbard, nor should we. But we can live as Anna and Harlan as independent, free, thoughtful, humane beings who are at one with a world of multiple integrated commons for commoners. We cannot do this without trust, and as Derek Wall puts it very well:The commons fail, ultimately because distrust leads to a lack of cooperation. Without trust and cooperation, we are doomed. Elinor Ostrom “did not believe that human beings were either basically cooperative or inevitably selfish…She was instead interested in how trust and cooperation could be nurtured to overcome the commons dilemma and similar problems.
Trust is local at its origin and expands outward, from where it should be reciprocated by institutions. [6] Reciprocity is now severed from both directions. Once again the floor is open for discussion followed by good work.
What may be most important in the work that Elinor Ostrom left us is that she did what every good scientist, artist, writer, and clinician does. She identified problems and searched for solutions. This is the scientific method, such as it has been best described by the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright and her collaborators: What works to produce useful knowledge is more important than what is true according to theory. [7] Elinor Ostrom worked in her Ostrom Workshop, which continues to extend her vision. A Workshop is the perfect mechanism for producing useful knowledge. A workshop allows for transdisciplinary approaches to polycentric problems. [8] This best work also requires the Deep Democracy contributed by non-disciplinary contributions from citizens. One major thread through the work of Elinor Ostrom is that academics on every field do not have the only answers, as noted by Derek Wall (p. 88):
(Ostrom’s) approach was to suggest that the people who participate in a commons are just as likely, probably more so, to have good ideas about solving this problem that outside experts. Garrett Hardin argued that the commoners would fail to maintain the commons and an outside power would need to be brought in. The outside power would be equipped with expertise that the commoners lack. This is a straightforward elitist view of knowledge production…Ordinary people…lack knowledge (while) academics (who) make up an intellectual elite and government officials can use the expertise of academics to implement solutions.
Regarding the intellectual elite, not hardly, as they say in these parts. All of us – scientist, academic, bureaucrat, and citizen alike – operate from The Way of Ignorance, which can only be dispelled in a vibrant workshop that includes many voices and perspectives and is thoroughly integrated into the living world.
One criticism from the Left (neglecting what the Left really is) has been that Elinor Ostrom cannot be placed there. While this is true in a broader sense, it is intelligible only to those who have not been paying attention. Neither Left nor Right, and certainly not the Center, has an exclusive grasp on the truth of anything. The world, especially as we approach the Inconvenient Apocalypse brought on by our effective unreason, is too large for one truth, from wherever it comes.
Heterodox analyses of our problems are not new. Nearly one hundred years ago members of another workshop [9] understood where we were headed. They were conservatives opposed when not ignored by the Chapel Hill Liberals associated with Howard Odum and most of the rest of the intellectuals of their day – the incipient PMC. The conservatives could write the following though, and their perspicacity endures:
Industrialism is the economic organization of American society. It means the decision of society to invest its economic resources in the applied sciences. But the word science has a certain sanctitude. It is out of order to quarrel with science in the abstract, or even the applied sciences when their applications are made subject to criticism and intelligence. The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become extravagant and uncritical…(and has)…enslaved our human energies to a degree now clearly felt to be burdensome. The apologists…take refuge in saying that they are devoted simply to science! They are really devoted to the applied sciences and to practical production. Therefore it is necessary to employ a certain skepticism even at the expense of the Cult of Science, and to say, It is an Americanism, which looks innocent and disinterested, but really is not either.
The amenities of life also suffer under the curse of a strictly-business or industrial civilization. They consist of such practices as manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, romantic love – in the social exchanges which reveal and develop sensibility in human affairs. If religion and the arts are founded on right relations of man-to-nature, these are founded on right relations of man-to-man.
In conclusion, this much is clear: If a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find a way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole community, section, race, or age thinks it cannot be done, then it has simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to impotence.
Add oblivion to impotence. Thus wrote the soldier, poet, philosopher, literary critic, and teacher John Crowe Ransomin the “Introduction: Statement of Principles” to I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). Alter the English usage at the margin to please modern ears and change a few terms (e.g., industrialism to Neoliberalism) and the diagnosis is as valid today as it was in 1930.
The world will get smaller whether we want it too, or not, and soon. Unless we – all of us, including the billionaires with their fever dreams of bolt holes in New Zealand – relearn the arts and sciences of managing our various commons for commoners, the future will be grim in every way that makes life humane. The heterodox among us will necessarily lead the way, one commons, one community, and one region at a time. Elinor Ostrom, Herman Daly, Wendell Berry, Christopher Lasch, and even the Nashville Agrarians of one hundred years ago, have much to teach us if we are willing to learn. Our current PMC in its unthinking certitude, not so much.
Notes
[1] To repeat myself: Neoliberalism holds that “The ‘Market’ is the measure of all things, even those that cannot be measured.” This is a simple but useful working definition. Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown is the best single analysis of Neoliberalism I have read.
[2] I have been reading individual works of Elinor Ostrom for years, but the outline of what follows is based in large part on Elinor Ostrom: Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives Beyond Markets and States (2017) by Derek Wall, which I found serendipitously in a sale email from Pluto Press. This is a highly recommended and readable account of Ostrom’s work for the most part. But Wall might disagree with himself now on the benign utility of the Internet and the long-term future of Uber.
[3] Public Choice Theory, according to Tyler Cowan and Alexander Tabarrok of George Mason University – the font of academic libertarianism, goes back to the wit and wisdom of John C. Calhoun of Fort Hill. The internal logic leading to formal justification of a system has no relationship to the effect(s), good or ill, the system has on the world.
[4] For example: R. Netting, Balancing on an Alp, Cambridge, 1981, where Netting found documentation of management of the mountain commons dating back 800 years to 1224.
[5] Or, Homo economicus does not exist except in modern economic theory and the works of Ayn Rand.
[6] As Wendell Berry has noted of his humane world that is Port William, in the local economy and culture someone can be trusted to be unreliable. This is important knowledge lost in our larger, mostly inhumane economy and often relearned only at great expense.
[7] This remains largely unrecognized by the “economic sciences” and several others. For an outstanding rant about the state of modern physics, see the inimitable and indispensable Sabine Hossenfelder here. Parallels between modern physics and modern economics are unmistakable. Ditto for much of Biomedicine. For how biomedical science has become Biomedicine, mostly due to neoliberalization that was made possible by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, there are several previous contributions to this series. A definitive treatment by Philip Morowski is reviewed here.
[8] I have been fortunate. The laboratories I have worked in have been workshops with scientists, technicians, and students bringing complementary expertise to interrelated questions that addressed important problems. One of those led to a discovery that revolutionized cell biology, quite by accident, while we were studying how certain sea creatures are nearly 100% efficient at transferring energy in the form of blue light from one protein to another protein that emits green light (from blue to green is energetically downhill).
[9] The professional Southerners (e.g., neo-Confederates and their ill-tempered ilk) who use the Agrarians as a prop to support their anachronistic and illegitimate views are as inevitable as fleas on a farm dog or a barn cat during a Southern summer. They are to be ignored, steadfastly.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10 ... uture.html
Indeed, " Received “wisdom” will not be the answer." Time for the 'Nihilists' (Russian revolutionary version) to step up.
October 22, 2024
Colonial, abusive and ineffective, but hugely profitable for certain actors
by Fiore Longo, Survival International
African Arguments, October 21, 2024
Some 31 years after the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) came into force, the latest Conference of the Parties – as the regular jamborees of governments, NGOs and others with a stake in these conventions are known – starts this week in the bustling Colombian city of Cali.
This one, COP16, is particularly important as it’s supposed to resolve some vital but unfinished business concerning the new global “action plan” for biodiversity, known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Don’t be misled by the typically pedestrian title: what’s at stake here could dramatically affect millions of people around the world, especially Indigenous and local communities, because the Framework has a number of fatal flaws.
These collectively mean that what could, and should, have been a transformational initiative is instead repeating the same old approach to “biodiversity protection” – promoting a top-down, government- and international agency-driven colonial model that is rooted in racism and has been comprehensively discredited but persists nonetheless.
Symptomatic of how the new action plan was co-opted from the start was the decision to finance its implementation not by setting up an innovative global fund, as many nations in the Global South wanted, but rather to establish a fund under the auspices of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a long-standing collaboration between the World Bank, various UN agencies, and governments.
The choice of the Global Environment Facility was highly problematic as the organization does not require that Indigenous peoples have the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent over any projects it funds which may affect their lives, lands and rights.
And because the new fund, known as the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF), is in a sense a subsidiary of the GEF, it has adopted its rules. The result is that it will only accept proposals to fund new biodiversity projects from one of the designated “GEF Agencies”. This is a group of 18 institutions all of which are multinational development banks or big conservation corporations like WWF or Conservation International that have long histories of complicity in human rights violations.
Following the money
Survival has analyzed the documentation for all the 22 projects that have so far been approved. What we’ve found suggests that the worst fears of the GBFF’s critics were amply justified:
Only one of the 22 projects so far approved will likely be of benefit to Indigenous people and is clearly directed to them.
The total fees to be paid to the proposer agencies – that is, above and beyond actual project activity costs – comes to 24% of the total funds available. The proportion of project funds staying within these agencies will likely be higher still.
Of the proposing (and implementing) agencies, the US chapter of WWF has been the most successful in capturing funds. Its five approved projects or concepts (including preparation grants) account for $36 million, almost exactly a third of the total funding. The next most successful – the UN Development Program (UNDP) and Conservation International (CI), which have nine and two projects respectively – account for about a quarter of the total funds each. Together with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, these agencies will receive 85% of the first $110 million in funding.
One of the projects will fund (through WWF) Protected Areas in Africa which have long histories of dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands and brutality against them by eco-guards.
A huge chunk of funding is going towards the “30×30” target to increase the extent of Protected Areas to 30% of the Earth’s land and seas by 2030. This is of particular concern because National Parks, wildlife reserves and other conservation areas are already one of the biggest threats to Indigenous peoples.
Such parks have almost always involved brutal evictions and exclusions, violence and destruction of Indigenous livelihoods. These problems continue today, such as in the horrifying eviction of thousands of Maasai people from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania.
Survival International believes that the structure and operation of this whole funding model is fundamentally flawed. It is tilted strongly in favor of “business as usual”, top-down, conservation projects, rather than promoting a new, and much-needed, rights-based approach to biodiversity protection. And it’s almost entirely inaccessible to Indigenous people themselves.
We believe that the entire funding mechanism should be reconsidered. The GBFF needs to be given a completely new direction, wherein funding is primarily directed to Indigenous peoples and local communities. The funding of new or expanded “fortress conservation” projects should be prohibited.
More generally, the extraordinarily large sums (such as $700 billion annually) supposedly needed for biodiversity protection are being proposed by conservation corporations with a vested interest in creating such targets. Far less funding for biodiversity protection would really be required if the emphasis were to be on wider recognition of Indigenous peoples’ lands and rights, rather than the expensive, colonial, top-down, militarized approach, which remains the economic mainstay of the conservation industry.
Biodiversity credits: a new threat
As if all that were not worrying enough, the COP16 meeting will see the launch of a number of initiatives to create biodiversity credits.
The concept of biodiversity credits is similar to that of carbon markets, where companies or organizations can supposedly “offset” their climate change-causing pollution by buying carbon credits from projects elsewhere that believed to be preventing carbon emissions or actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. In reality, both the idea and the practice are deeply flawed: such projects put a price on nature, treating Indigenous and local communities’ lands as a carbon stock to be exchanged in the market so polluters can keep polluting, whilst the conservation industry benefits to the tune of billions of dollars. Indigenous peoples and local communities, on the other hand, end up dispossessed and stripped of their livelihoods.
Biodiversity credits, like carbon credits, are part of a new push for the commodification of nature. A recent statement from more than 250 environmental, human rights, development and community organisations worldwide (including Survival International) calls for an immediate suspension of the development of biocrediting schemes.
As well as the technical, moral, philosophical and practical problems with putting a price on the conservation of species or entire ecosystems, and trading them against destruction elsewhere, the idea poses a serious threat to Indigenous peoples. They would face growing pressure from land grabs as bio-offsetting projects seek to profit from the often rich biodiversity of the places in which Indigenous peoples live and that they have managed for generations.
Similar problems have occurred many times with carbon offsetting schemes already. Many Indigenous leaders simply say that the commodification of nature implicit in biocrediting and trading runs counter to their worldviews and values.
So how much hope is there for this COP? Not much, is the honest answer. The whole process of biodiversity protection has been captured almost as soon as it’s started by the same institutions that have enriched themselves at the expense of Indigenous peoples – the guardians of much of the world’s biodiversity – for decades.
At the very least, the right of Indigenous peoples to give – or withhold – their Free, Prior and Informed Consent to any project that affects them must be respected. Indigenous organizations, together with allies, will be doing everything possible to ensure it is.
The answer to how to protect the world’s biodiversity is really quite straightforward: respect Indigenous peoples’ land rights, and tackle the underlying causes of biodiversity destruction, namely the exploitation of the world’s resources for profit. How refreshing it would be if that were top of the COP agenda.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... rotection/
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Tribal communities in India fight government-corporate nexus to save Hasdeo forest
Hasdeo Aranya, one of central India’s largest forests, faces destruction from BJP-backed corporate deforestation and coal mining projects
October 22, 2024 by Abdul Rahman
Source: Tribal Army/X
Last week, scores of people protesting against coal mines in an ecologically sensitive forest in Chhattisgarh were attacked by police and injured. Protesters have opposed the felling of thousands of trees in the Hasdeo Aranya forest. Tree felling began after both the central and state governments approved a new coal mine despite long-standing protests by tribal rights groups and environmental activists.
The new coal mine is an extension of the Parsa East Kente Basan (PEKB) mining project. Like its predecessor, it is controlled by Rajasthan Vidyut Utpadan Nigam, a company operated by India’s corporate giant Adani.
Protesters claim the project could result in the loss of between 250,000 and 800,000 trees and cause massive displacement of local tribal communities, as well as devastating long-term environmental harm.
Permission for the second phase of mining was granted by the pro-corporate, ultra-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led central government in 2022. However, after protests, the Congress-led state government opposed the decision, filing an affidavit in the top court stating that land used by the previous PEKB phase holds enough coal (around 350 million tonnes) to supply the attached 4,300 MW power plant for the next 20 years.
Despite this, the BJP government, newly elected in the state and still in power centrally, granted further permission to the Adani-controlled company, claiming the first mine was exhausted.
Activists allege that environmental regulations and constitutional provisions requiring local consent were tampered with to push the project forward. Under India’s Constitution and PESA (Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act), explicit consent from local self-governing bodies is required for mining projects in Scheduled Areas. Local communities claim that the BJP government obtained consent through coercion and deceit, disregarding the spirit of these legal provisions.
Threat to ecology and local economy
Mining in the Hasdeo forest has been opposed by the local population for years. In 2021, protesters from affected districts walked hundreds of kilometers to the state capital, demanding an end to all mining leases in the Hasdeo area. That protest pushed the Congress government to withdraw new mining projects and file an affidavit in the country’s top court.
Alok Shukla, leader of the Save Hasdeo Forest Resistance Committee, which is spearheading protests to save the forest, recently told Frontline that the clashes around Hasdeo represent a battle “between corporate profit on one side and the rights of people to their livelihoods on the other.” Shukla claimed that corporations are backed by the authorities, which target and attack protesters to eliminate opposition to their profit-driven motives.
Due to its environmental significance, Hasdeo was one of the areas declared “no-go” for commercial purposes before the BJP came to power in 2014. Spanning around 170,000 hectares, it is one of the largest contiguous stretches of dense forest in central India, according to research conducted by the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in 2021. It is also one of the last remaining old-growth forests in the country.
The forest is the catchment area for the Hasdeo River, the largest tributary of the Mahanadi River, and serves as a watershed for the Hasdeo reservoir, which is critical for irrigating around 300,000 hectares of double-cropped land across at least three districts in Chhattisgarh.
Hasdeo Aranya forest is home to various protected tribal groups such as Abujhmaria, Bihor, Halwa, and others, and it is a biodiversity hotspot. Some parts of it, like the Lemru Elephant Reserve declared by the state assembly in July 2022, are protected animal reserves. The fate of these areas is at risk if the mining contracts are not revoked.
The WII has opposed the mining projects in the region in a report submitted to the ICFRE, claiming that they would have adverse environmental impacts, including affecting the Hasdeo River, increasing human-animal conflicts, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, and causing a loss of precious biodiversity.
Chhattisgarh Kisan Sabha, a part of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), India’s largest organization of farmers, has also been involved in opposing mining in the Hasdeo forest. Following the violent attacks on tribals protesting against the fresh round of tree felling last week, it issued a statement condemning the police action and deforestation as an assault on the tribals’ livelihoods and the environment. The organization said that both the state and central governments are acting as agents of big capital, showing complete disregard for the people, the state, and the environment.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/10/22/ ... eo-forest/
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Heterodox Approaches Will Provide Answers to the Multiple Cascading Crises of Our Future
Posted on October 23, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. KLG, drawing on the ideas of Elinor Olstrom, argues that the thinking that got us into our current mess, particularly but not solely climate climate change and environmental degradation, is inherently ill-suited to come up with remedies.
While heterodox ideas and experiments are our only hope, in my usual devil’s advocate manner, I believe the nature of the problem is more severe than Olstrom (and KLG, inspired by her) believes. What we are up against is not just neoliberalism. It is a highly complex society, with most occupying very specialized roles, combined with capitalism, which requires a large majority of people to sell their labor to survive. Oh, and worse, sell that labor in a competitive market. That generally means that trying to do things differently as a current or prospective employee is likely to result in not having a paycheck.
Individuals are typically subject to multiple sets of responsibilities, and they often conflict. The number of conflicts tends to increase as societies become more complex, starting with family/tribal, local communities, national, global. Humans have seldom been good at working out how to manage competing levels of responsibility. The tensions and contradictions get greater as societies become more complex. As the great philosopher, Jamie Lannister, said:
So many vows…they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It’s too much. No matter what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or the other.
Nearly everyone will put family/tribal first. In a capitalist system, that means taking steps that might threaten your job or worst make you permanently unemployable are anathema. So living in a “good” suburb so as to provide for a decent level of education for your kids implies all sorts of other things, like owning a car or two for a working spouse so as to commute, take said kids to various events and play dates (or even pick them up from school), and provision for the family, are perceived necessities that lock most people into participating in high energy consuming lifestyles. It is hard to see how many, even if they wanted to, can shift away from that.
In other words, we do need new thinking and approaches. But “heterodox” may be too polite to signal the radicalism needed.
By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health
Heterodox, from the OED: Not in accordance with established doctrines or opinions, or those generally recognized as right or “orthodox.” The past two centuries of orthodoxy have led us to our current pass, where at least half the people may be poor in the so-called Global North and more than half are poor in much of the Global South, our environment is severely damaged, and climate catastrophe is no longer beyond the horizon. Something else will be required to retrieve the situation as best we can. Received “wisdom” will not be the answer.
But the orthodox, thoroughly neoliberal interlocutor will ask, “Can your solutions really work?” [1] My reply is usually, “It is scarcely imaginable they will do worse.” And besides, the world is heterogeneous, i.e., composed of diverse elements or constituents; consisting of parts of different kinds (OED). Our world is granular and polymorphic in all things biological, physical, social, cultural, and political. But orthodox politics and economics have little room for diversity, much less place. Under the current Neoliberal Dispensation one place is necessarily the same as another even though all places are distinct. This is at the root of our present difficulties. If we (all of us) are to survive, we must learn the importance of place, and in the words of Wendell Berry and Christopher Alexander we must solve for place and for pattern.
This can be done from the ground up, but only if the straitjacket of Neoliberalism is dissolved. We have the heterodox leaders who can lead the way. Previously in this series we discussed the environmental economist Herman Daly (1938-2022) who was viewed as unacceptably heterodox when he placed the “economy” firmly within the ecosphere, which will not support semi-infinite growth of anything material. A justifiably infamous economist, then at the World Bank, responded to Daly’s true but heterodox thesis with “That is not the way to look at it!” This vignette is recounted in Beyond Growth (1996), which is still in print and as current now as it was 28 years ago.
Another heterodox problem solver is Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) who was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2009 for her “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.” Elinor Ostrom is the first, and after the recent Nobel announcements, still the only woman to win this prize. [2] If we are to survive and possibly thrive in the coming world, Elinor Ostrom has much to teach us. What follows is not a list of what must be done. These remain unknown. But how we should proceed is clear if we are serious.
Elinor Ostrom is an excellent place to start. She began her work on the commons in opposition to the well-known essay by Garrett Hardin that appeared in Science in 1968: The Tragedy of the Commons (pdf). This tragedy was inevitable for Hardin, who later wrote another famous essay entitled Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor (pdf) that has been published in several collections since. Hardin was not incorrect in his view that population growth could exceed the carrying capacity of the ecosphere, but his approach was tiresomely conventional, cramped, and misanthropic in the extreme. It foreshadowed the Neoliberal Dispensation which began in earnest not long after his famous essay during the single Presidential term of Jimmy Carter.
Hardin’s work was not sui generis. He was apparently quite the traditional “conservative” by the standards of his day, including his assent to the utter nonsense that was The Bell Curve later in his career. His perspective dovetails with two other influential documents produced just after The Tragedy of the Commons. The first is the article from the New York Times Magazine on 13 September 1970 by Milton Friedman: A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. This virtual throwaway became the prime justification for the marketization of virtually everything in the name of corporate profit, very narrowly defined. This “Friedman Doctrine” remains current because Milton Friedman was extraordinarily influential both inside and outside his academic home as a member of the Chicago School (14 “Nobel” laureates and counting). He also wrote a regular column in Newsweek from 1966 through 1984, when Time and Newsweek were the two essential American newsweeklies with circulation in the millions.
The second document is the Powell Memorandum (23 August 1971) entitled Attack on American Free Enterprise System (pdf, 23 August 1971), written for the United States Chamber of Commerce by Lewis Powell, then a Virginia corporate lawyer for Big Tobacco and later an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. There is nothing surprising in Powell’s reaction to the 1960s, nor the utility of his eponymous memo in autochthonous emergence of conservative reaction in think tanks, including Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Legislative Exchange Council, and Manhattan Institute. Each is dedicated to preserving the “American Way of Life.” Hardin, Friedman, Powell, and their friends have had far-reaching influence that continues.
Elinor Ostrom responded. What made her heterodox – the radical with conservative tendencies to the extent that she appreciated the Public Choice Theory [3] of James Buchanan – was that she always called herself a political economist instead of an economist. Indeed, there is no economics without politics, something often left unappreciated by the profession, especially in how it is taught to undergraduates in the business schools of our colleges and universities. It was possible to major in Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences in my day, but I never came across that person. Ostrom’s research across many different problems showed that the collapse of the commons was not due to human cupidity or some innate flaw in human nature.
On the other hand, trust is the key to a thriving commons of any kind – pasture, woodland, water, fisheries, air, and extending the concept, healthy food, healthy social and political organization, and healthcare. Trust has often been problematic for many at the margins of society, but today trust is almost completely lacking for “bad and sufficient reason” among the many, who are inevitably commoners. In direct conflict with Hardin, Ostrom also found, along with others [4], that “enclosing the commons” by whatever mechanism, has often been a common antecedent of their failure. It is not an accident that enclosure in England was a natural, classical Lockean action to make land productive as a capital asset rather than remain a sustainable resource for commoners. The line is not straight from enclosure to Neoliberalism, but the thread is there, as cultural attributes such as equality, grassroots democracy, and peaceful cooperation were subsumed by the market that operated at an increasing remove from commoners.
To return to the commons for commoners, the solutions to our multiple cascading crises must be found using a polycentric approach that requires citizens to act at every level from the individual to the community and through the regions and countries in which our local communities are embedded. The solution to these problems must also be polycentric. Ostrom did not neglect institutions while concentrating on the commons. In a diverse and granular world, no one solution (e.g., The Market) will solve every problem. Rather local society and overarching institutions that mediate different processes are essential. Anthropogenic global warming cannot be solved by individuals, but Roger Scruton was not wrong in his view that small local solutions are the place to begin. From Ostrom’s “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems,” American Economic Review 100, 3: 641-672 Quoted in Derek Wall, p. 58:
The most important lesson…is that humans have a more complex motivational structure and more complex social dilemmas than posited in earlier rational-choice theory. [5] Designing institutions to force…entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been a major goal of (public policy) for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans. We need to ask diverse polycentric institutions help or hinder the innovativeness, learning, adapting, trustworthiness, levels of cooperation of participants , and the achievement of more effective, equitable, and sustainable outcomes at multiple scales.
Yes, and none of these desired outcomes are possible under the Neoliberal Dispensation. A sustainable commons for the commoners (the 90%, at least) requires Deep Democracy, which was another primary problem addressed by Ostrom. Deep Democracy requires that people shape their lives rather than electing a small minority to legislate their lives for them. Deep Democracy has no connection to the Our Democracy™ of today’s Professional Managerial Class (PMC), but it will be essential if we are to learn to thrive again in local communities, i.e., where we live, breathe, and eat. In a democratic, humane society, this can be done. Conventional politics has now answer. It is only a Manichean fight for status between advocates of suspect notions of good and evil that politics has become over the past fifty years, especially in the Uniparty of the United State. How do we get there? The floor is open to all.
What is clear throughout the work of Elinor Ostrom is that “what we need is at hand.” I first came across this expression in the work of Harland Hubbard, artist and homesteader at Payne Hollow on the Ohio River in Kentucky. We cannot all live like Anna and Harlan Hubbard, nor should we. But we can live as Anna and Harlan as independent, free, thoughtful, humane beings who are at one with a world of multiple integrated commons for commoners. We cannot do this without trust, and as Derek Wall puts it very well:The commons fail, ultimately because distrust leads to a lack of cooperation. Without trust and cooperation, we are doomed. Elinor Ostrom “did not believe that human beings were either basically cooperative or inevitably selfish…She was instead interested in how trust and cooperation could be nurtured to overcome the commons dilemma and similar problems.
Trust is local at its origin and expands outward, from where it should be reciprocated by institutions. [6] Reciprocity is now severed from both directions. Once again the floor is open for discussion followed by good work.
What may be most important in the work that Elinor Ostrom left us is that she did what every good scientist, artist, writer, and clinician does. She identified problems and searched for solutions. This is the scientific method, such as it has been best described by the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright and her collaborators: What works to produce useful knowledge is more important than what is true according to theory. [7] Elinor Ostrom worked in her Ostrom Workshop, which continues to extend her vision. A Workshop is the perfect mechanism for producing useful knowledge. A workshop allows for transdisciplinary approaches to polycentric problems. [8] This best work also requires the Deep Democracy contributed by non-disciplinary contributions from citizens. One major thread through the work of Elinor Ostrom is that academics on every field do not have the only answers, as noted by Derek Wall (p. 88):
(Ostrom’s) approach was to suggest that the people who participate in a commons are just as likely, probably more so, to have good ideas about solving this problem that outside experts. Garrett Hardin argued that the commoners would fail to maintain the commons and an outside power would need to be brought in. The outside power would be equipped with expertise that the commoners lack. This is a straightforward elitist view of knowledge production…Ordinary people…lack knowledge (while) academics (who) make up an intellectual elite and government officials can use the expertise of academics to implement solutions.
Regarding the intellectual elite, not hardly, as they say in these parts. All of us – scientist, academic, bureaucrat, and citizen alike – operate from The Way of Ignorance, which can only be dispelled in a vibrant workshop that includes many voices and perspectives and is thoroughly integrated into the living world.
One criticism from the Left (neglecting what the Left really is) has been that Elinor Ostrom cannot be placed there. While this is true in a broader sense, it is intelligible only to those who have not been paying attention. Neither Left nor Right, and certainly not the Center, has an exclusive grasp on the truth of anything. The world, especially as we approach the Inconvenient Apocalypse brought on by our effective unreason, is too large for one truth, from wherever it comes.
Heterodox analyses of our problems are not new. Nearly one hundred years ago members of another workshop [9] understood where we were headed. They were conservatives opposed when not ignored by the Chapel Hill Liberals associated with Howard Odum and most of the rest of the intellectuals of their day – the incipient PMC. The conservatives could write the following though, and their perspicacity endures:
Industrialism is the economic organization of American society. It means the decision of society to invest its economic resources in the applied sciences. But the word science has a certain sanctitude. It is out of order to quarrel with science in the abstract, or even the applied sciences when their applications are made subject to criticism and intelligence. The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become extravagant and uncritical…(and has)…enslaved our human energies to a degree now clearly felt to be burdensome. The apologists…take refuge in saying that they are devoted simply to science! They are really devoted to the applied sciences and to practical production. Therefore it is necessary to employ a certain skepticism even at the expense of the Cult of Science, and to say, It is an Americanism, which looks innocent and disinterested, but really is not either.
The amenities of life also suffer under the curse of a strictly-business or industrial civilization. They consist of such practices as manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, romantic love – in the social exchanges which reveal and develop sensibility in human affairs. If religion and the arts are founded on right relations of man-to-nature, these are founded on right relations of man-to-man.
In conclusion, this much is clear: If a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find a way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole community, section, race, or age thinks it cannot be done, then it has simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to impotence.
Add oblivion to impotence. Thus wrote the soldier, poet, philosopher, literary critic, and teacher John Crowe Ransomin the “Introduction: Statement of Principles” to I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). Alter the English usage at the margin to please modern ears and change a few terms (e.g., industrialism to Neoliberalism) and the diagnosis is as valid today as it was in 1930.
The world will get smaller whether we want it too, or not, and soon. Unless we – all of us, including the billionaires with their fever dreams of bolt holes in New Zealand – relearn the arts and sciences of managing our various commons for commoners, the future will be grim in every way that makes life humane. The heterodox among us will necessarily lead the way, one commons, one community, and one region at a time. Elinor Ostrom, Herman Daly, Wendell Berry, Christopher Lasch, and even the Nashville Agrarians of one hundred years ago, have much to teach us if we are willing to learn. Our current PMC in its unthinking certitude, not so much.
Notes
[1] To repeat myself: Neoliberalism holds that “The ‘Market’ is the measure of all things, even those that cannot be measured.” This is a simple but useful working definition. Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown is the best single analysis of Neoliberalism I have read.
[2] I have been reading individual works of Elinor Ostrom for years, but the outline of what follows is based in large part on Elinor Ostrom: Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives Beyond Markets and States (2017) by Derek Wall, which I found serendipitously in a sale email from Pluto Press. This is a highly recommended and readable account of Ostrom’s work for the most part. But Wall might disagree with himself now on the benign utility of the Internet and the long-term future of Uber.
[3] Public Choice Theory, according to Tyler Cowan and Alexander Tabarrok of George Mason University – the font of academic libertarianism, goes back to the wit and wisdom of John C. Calhoun of Fort Hill. The internal logic leading to formal justification of a system has no relationship to the effect(s), good or ill, the system has on the world.
[4] For example: R. Netting, Balancing on an Alp, Cambridge, 1981, where Netting found documentation of management of the mountain commons dating back 800 years to 1224.
[5] Or, Homo economicus does not exist except in modern economic theory and the works of Ayn Rand.
[6] As Wendell Berry has noted of his humane world that is Port William, in the local economy and culture someone can be trusted to be unreliable. This is important knowledge lost in our larger, mostly inhumane economy and often relearned only at great expense.
[7] This remains largely unrecognized by the “economic sciences” and several others. For an outstanding rant about the state of modern physics, see the inimitable and indispensable Sabine Hossenfelder here. Parallels between modern physics and modern economics are unmistakable. Ditto for much of Biomedicine. For how biomedical science has become Biomedicine, mostly due to neoliberalization that was made possible by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, there are several previous contributions to this series. A definitive treatment by Philip Morowski is reviewed here.
[8] I have been fortunate. The laboratories I have worked in have been workshops with scientists, technicians, and students bringing complementary expertise to interrelated questions that addressed important problems. One of those led to a discovery that revolutionized cell biology, quite by accident, while we were studying how certain sea creatures are nearly 100% efficient at transferring energy in the form of blue light from one protein to another protein that emits green light (from blue to green is energetically downhill).
[9] The professional Southerners (e.g., neo-Confederates and their ill-tempered ilk) who use the Agrarians as a prop to support their anachronistic and illegitimate views are as inevitable as fleas on a farm dog or a barn cat during a Southern summer. They are to be ignored, steadfastly.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10 ... uture.html
Indeed, " Received “wisdom” will not be the answer." Time for the 'Nihilists' (Russian revolutionary version) to step up.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Hydrogen Stocks Crash as Hype Faces Reality Check
Posted on October 30, 2024 by Conor Gallagher
Conor here: More bad news for Europe — and especially Germany — which bet big on this boondoggle to supply energy for sectors where electrification is not an option, such as in parts of industrial manufacturing. The following piece touches briefly on that risky wager, but here’s more from Energy Connects:
Germany plans to build more than 20 power plants much bigger than the one in Leipzig, which it advertises as the continent’s first “hydrogen-ready” facility. They’ll be supplied by state-of-the-art liquefied natural gas terminals equipped to handle niche clean fuels such as ammonia, and a network of special pipes stretching roughly 6,000 miles (9,600 kilometers).
But there were always a lot of buts:
But there’s no official definition of what makes a plant hydrogen-ready, opening the door for greenwashing. For power plants, burning hydrogen hasn’t even been tested at scale.
…Then there’s the problem of moving hydrogen around. The Leipzig plant isn’t hooked up to the grid (and hasn’t yet set up its own electrolyzers), which means the highly combustible fuel will have to be trucked in until the second part of the government’s grand plan comes to fruition. It’s building a €1 billion liquefied natural gas terminal in Brunsbuettel, a town along the North Sea, that will initially import LNG but [could] be designed to also handle futuristic clean fuels.
Hydrogen can only be liquefied at -253C (-423F), well beyond the capabilities of today’s LNG ships. So Germany is planning to import hydrogen in the form of liquid ammonia, a combination of hydrogen and nitrogen that can more easily be turned into a liquid. But ammonia is toxic and handling requires better ventilation systems. Many components in the terminal, including control valves and fire and gas sensors as well as inline devices — most of which have not been tested with ammonia — will also need upgrades, according to Fraunhofer ISI, an energy think tank.
Germany doesn’t have an ammonia pipeline network and there are limitations to moving it via trucks on an industrial scale because it’s hazardous. That means ammonia will have to be converted back into hydrogen, yet there’s no economically viable technology currently available to do that. The terminal’s operator said it will discuss alternative strategies if none emerge by next year.
…The difference is that wind and solar produce clean electricity — a commodity the world already uses. Green hydrogen, on the other hand, will require building more solar and wind farms when, in many cases, it would be simpler to just use that clean energy directly. By the time hydrogen is made, stored and burned to make electricity again, there’s nearly 70% less energy than at the start — and the cost has tripled.
Green hydrogen will probably only be useful towards the end of the energy transition, once primary electricity demand is being comfortably met by renewables, according to Pierre Wunsch, Belgium’s top central banker.
By Tsvetana Paraskova, a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. Originally published at Oil Price.
The initial excitement surrounding low-carbon hydrogen has faded due to high project costs, regulatory uncertainty, and weak demand.
Only a small percentage of hydrogen projects in North America and Europe have reached final investment decisions.
Major energy companies like Shell and Equinor have paused green hydrogen plans in Europe, citing poor project economics and unclear regulatory frameworks.
The low-carbon hydrogen hype has begun to fade in recent months as companies and investors realize that their ambitions face the reality of costly projects amid regulatory stumbling blocks and uncertain future demand.
The momentum behind green hydrogen from two years ago, generated by the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), has slowed amid still high costs and macroeconomic headwinds. In addition, regulatory uncertainty and a lack of committed demand are undermining the 2030 production goals for low-carbon hydrogen, both in the United States and Europe.
As a result, investors are re-thinking funding, companies are re-drawing hydrogen production strategies, and share prices of major hydrogen players are crashing.
For example, Denmark’s Green Hydrogen Systems (CPH: GREENH), a provider of standardized, modular alkaline electrolyzers, has plunged by 65% year to date. U.S.-based Plug Power (NASDAQ: PLUG) has seen its stock tumble by 53% year to date, and Ballard Power Systems Inc (NASDAQ: BLDP) has crashed by 58%.
Other firms focused on green hydrogen and technologies have also seen their share prices battered amid signs that despite progress in project announcements, project commitments with final investment decisions (FID) are a fraction of the total pipeline of projects.
Just 18% of U.S. low-carbon or renewable hydrogen projects in North America, and only 5% of such projects in Europe that aim to begin operations by 2030 have reached FID so far, McKinsey & Company and the Hydrogen Council said in a report last month.
“A key sector-specific challenge for the hydrogen industry is uncertainty associated with a number of regulatory frameworks,” including the EU regulatory framework and the rulebook for the investment tax credit in the IRA. All of this “impedes project bankability,” the authors of the report wrote.
“Coupled with cost increases for renewable power and electrolysers, this has led to delays and cancellations of projects – in particular, renewable hydrogen projects,” they added.
In Europe, the European Commission has set unrealistic hydrogen production and import targets—the EU is not on track to achieve them, the European Court of Auditors, the supreme audit institution of the EU, said in a report this summer.
The Commission has been partially successful in creating the necessary conditions for the emerging hydrogen market and the hydrogen value chain in the EU, but it now needs “a reality check,” the European Court of Auditors said.
Even the International Energy Agency (IEA), the most vocal backer of all things renewable, has warned that policy and demand uncertainty are slowing down green hydrogen adoption globally.
According to the IEA, the main reasons for the slow uptake of low-carbon hydrogen “include unclear demand signals, financing hurdles, delays to incentives, regulatory uncertainties, licensing and permitting issues and operational challenges.”
A lack of visibility on demand and regulatory uncertainties have halted several major projects in Europe this year alone.
Spanish energy firms Repsol and Cepsa, for example, are pausing green hydrogen investments in Spain, as one of the most promising EU markets for renewable hydrogen is considering making the windfall tax on energy firms permanent.
The idea that a version of the tax could become permanent infuriates many major companies, including energy firms with plans to invest in green energy projects.
The Spanish firms halting projects are the latest European firms to pause or ditch green hydrogen plans due to either policy or demand concerns.
Most recently, Shell and Equinor have ditched plans for low-hydrogen production and transportation in north Europe due to a lack of demand.
Investors are not rushing to invest in backing green hydrogen projects, either, due to poor economics and potential returns.
“Green hydrogen is still not investable. It’s rubbish in terms of investment,” Mark Lacey, head of thematic equities at UK asset manager Schroders, told the Financial Times.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10 ... check.html
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The deadly environmental toll of superyachts and private jets
October 28, 2024
Every week, the ultra-rich emit more greenhouse gas than the poorest people produce in a lifetime
The private jets of 23 super-rich individuals emitted an average of 2,074 tonnes of carbon a year. This is equivalent to 2,000 years’ worth emissions for someone in the global poorest 50%. On average, these super-rich individuals took 184 flights in 2023, spending 425 hours in the air. (Oxfam)
The carbon footprint of a super-rich European, accumulated from nearly a week of using super yachts and private jets, matches the lifetime carbon footprint of someone in the world’s poorest 1 percent, a new Oxfam report shows. The study, Carbon Inequality Kills, tracks the emissions from private jets, yachts and polluting investments, amidst growing fears that climate breakdown is accelerating, driven largely by the emissions of the richest people.
“The super-rich in Europe are treating our planet like their personal playground. Their dirty investments, their private jets and yachts are not just symbols of excess; they are fueling inequality, hunger and even death”, said Chiara Putaturo, Oxfam EU tax expert.
The report presents detailed new evidence of how the super-rich’s outsized emissions are accelerating climate breakdown and wreaking havoc on lives and economies. The world’s poorest countries and communities have done the least to cause the climate crisis, yet they experience its most dangerous consequences.
One ultra-rich European takes an average of 140 flights a year, spending 267 hours in the air and producing as much carbon as the average European would in over 112 years.
In the same period, one superyacht user emits as much carbon as an ordinary European would in 585 years.
Less than a week of emissions from the superyachts and jets of one of the 31 of the richest people in the EU exceeded the entire lifetime emissions of a person in the world’s poorest 1%.
Fifty of the world’s richest billionaires on average emit more carbon through their investments, private jets and yachts in just over an hour and a half than the average person does in their entire lifetime.
If the world continues its current emissions, the carbon budget (the amount of CO2 that can still be added to the atmosphere without causing global temperatures to rise above 1.5°C) will be depleted in about four years.
However, if everyone’s emissions matched those of the richest 1 percent, the carbon budget would be used up in under five months.
And if everyone started emitting as much carbon as the private jets and superyachts of the average billionaire in Oxfam’s study, it would be gone in two days.
Billionaires’ lifestyle emissions dwarf those of ordinary people, but the emissions from their investments are dramatically higher still — the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires are around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined. Through these investments, billionaires have huge influence over some of the world’s biggest corporations and are driving us over the edge of climate disaster.
Nearly 40 percent of billionaire investments analyzed in Oxfam’s research are in highly polluting industries: oil, mining, shipping and cement. The total investment emissions of 36 of the EU’s richest billionaires are equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4.5 million Europeans.
Oxfam’s analysis details three critical areas, providing national and regional breakdowns, where the emissions of the wealthiest 1 percent since 1990 are already having — and are projected to have — devastating consequences:
Global inequality. The emissions of the richest 1 percent in the EU have caused global economic output to drop by 179 billion international US dollars since 1990. The biggest impact will be in countries least responsible for climate breakdown. Globally, low- and lower-middle-income countries will lose about 2.5 percent of their cumulative GDP between 1990 and 2050 due to the climate crisis. South Asia, South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will lose 3 percent, 2.4 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively. High-income countries, on the other hand, will accrue economic gains.
Hunger. The emissions of the richest 1 percent in the EU have caused crop losses due the climate crisis. These crop losses could have provided enough calories to feed nearly 900,000 people a year between 1990 and 2023. This will rise to 1.7 million people annually between 2023 and 2050.
Death. The emissions of the richest 1 percent in the EU are causing excess heat-related deaths of nearly 80,000 people between 2020 and 2120.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... vate-jets/
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WaPo Says Not to Worry About Climate Disruption’s Disastrous Costs:
Reassuring report based on long-debunked climate contrarian
Julie Hollar
In a lengthy piece (10/24/24) headlined “The Real Reason Billion-Dollar Disasters Like Hurricane Helene Are Growing More Common,” Post Climate Lab columnist Harry Stevens highlighted a NOAA chart depicting a notable increase in billion-dollar weather disasters hitting the US that he says is widely used by government reports and officials “to help make the case for climate policies.” But, in fact, Stevens tells readers:
The truth lies elsewhere: Over time, migration to hazard-prone areas has increased, putting more people and property in harm’s way. Disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.
The takeaway is clear: The (Democratic) government is lying to you about the supposedly devastating impacts of climate change.
Distorting with cherry-picked data
The problem is, it’s Stevens’ story that’s doing the misleading. It relies heavily on the work of one source, Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime climate contrarian beloved by climate denial right-wingers, who cherry-picks data to distort the truth.
What’s worse, from a media critic’s perspective, is that it’s not even a new story; it’s been debunked multiple times over the years. Pielke—a political scientist, not a climate scientist, which Stevens never makes clear—has been promoting this tale since 1998, when he first published a journal article that purported to show that, as Stevens describes, “after adjusting damage to account for the growth in people and property, the trend [of increasing economic costs from weather disasters] disappears.”
He makes “corrections” for some things (notably, more people putting themselves in harm’s way) but not others. Some adjustments, such as for hurricane losses for the early 20th century, in which the dollar value goes up several hundred–fold, are highly flawed. But he then uses this record to suggest that the resulting absence of trends in damage costs represents the lack of evidence of a climate component. His record fails to consider all tropical storms and instead focuses only on the rare land-falling ones, which cause highly variable damage depending on where they hit. He completely ignores the benefits from improvements in hurricane warning times, changes in building codes, and other factors that have been important in reducing losses. Nor does he give any consideration to our understanding of the physics of hurricanes and evidence for changes such as the 2005 season, which broke records in so many ways.
Similarly, in discussing floods, Pielke fails to acknowledge that many governing bodies (especially local councils) and government agencies (such as the US Army Corps of Engineers) have tackled the mission of preventing floods by building infrastructure. Thus even though heavy rains have increased disproportionately in many places around the world (thereby increasing the risk of floods), the inundations may have been avoided. In developing countries, however, such flooding has been realized, as seen for instance this year in Pakistan, China and India. Other tenuous claims abound, and Pielke cherry-picks points to fit his arguments.
That year, climate expert Joe Romm (Climate Progress, 2/28/10) called Pielke “the single most disputed and debunked person in the entire realm of people who publish regularly on disasters and climate change.”
Debunked a decade ago
The backlash led 538 to give MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (3/31/14) a column to rebut Pielke, in which she explained that while it’s of course true that “changing demographics” have impacted the economic costs of weather disasters, Pielke’s data didn’t support his assertion “that climate change has played no role in the observed increase in damages.” She pointed to the same kinds of methodological flaws that Science did, noting that her own research with Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn projected that through the year 2100, “global hurricane damage will about double owing to demographic trends, and double again because of climate change.”
That all happened ten years ago. So why is Pielke’s same old ax-grinding getting a platform at the Washington Post shortly before Election Day?
Stevens does tell readers—quite far down in the article—that Pielke has “clashed with other scientists, journalists and government officials” over his research—though Stevens doesn’t give any details about those clashes, or about Pielke’s reputation among climate scientists more generally.
Stevens also briefly notes that Pielke was recently hired by the American Enterprise Institute, which Stevens characterizes as “center-right,” but more helpfully might have characterized as “taking millions from ExxonMobil since 1998.” But in the same paragraph, Stevens also takes pains to point out that Pielke says he’s planning to vote for Harris, as if to burnish Pielke’s climate-believer bonafides.
Pielke agrees with Pielke
Similar studies have failed to find global warming’s fingerprint in economic damage from hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and crop losses. Of 53 peer-reviewed studies that assess economic damage from weather events, 52 could not attribute damage trends to global warming, according to Pielke’s 2020 review of the literature, the most recent and comprehensive.
You’ll notice Stevens just used Pielke’s own review to bolster Pielke’s argument. But the journal that published that review (Environmental Hazards, 8/5/20) immediately followed up with the publication of a critique (10/12/20) from researchers who came to the opposite conclusion in their study on US hurricanes. They explained that there are “fundamental shortcomings in this literature,” which comes from a disaster research “field that is currently dominated by a small group of authors” who mostly use the same methodology—adjusting historical economic losses based strictly on “growth in wealth and population”—that Pielke does.
The authors, who wrote a study that actually accounted for this problem and did find that economic losses from hurricanes increased over time after accounting for increases in wealth and population, point out that Pielke dismissed their study and two others that didn’t agree with his own results essentially because they didn’t come to the same conclusions. As the authors of the critique write drily: “Pielke agrees with studies that agree with Pielke.”
A phony ‘consensus’
Stevens includes in his article an obligatory line that experts say
disputing whether global warming’s influence can be found in the disaster data is not the same as questioning whether climate change is real or whether society should switch from fossil fuels.
He also adds that
many scientists say that global warming has intensified hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, which must be leading to greater economic losses.
Note that he frames it as only “many,” and suggests they are only using (faulty, simplistic) logic, not science. But of course, climate change is intensifying extreme weather, as even Stevens has reported as fact recently (in the link he provides in that passage). In contrast, Stevens writes that
the consensus among disaster researchers is that the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.
But in fact, as mentioned above, there’s not consensus even among disaster researchers (who are primarily economists). And the “many scientists” who disagree with Pielke aren’t the scientists the Post chooses to focus on. While Stevens quotes a number of different experts, including some who disagree with Pielke, they are not given anywhere near the space—or credence—Pielke and his arguments are. (Pielke’s name appears 15 times across the article and its captions.)
When he does get around to quoting some of the scientists, like MIT’s Emanuel, whose research shows that extreme weather events are intensifying, Stevens presents the conflicting conclusions as a back-and-forth of claims and counterclaims, giving the last word in that debate to a disaster researcher whose goal is to refocus blame for disasters on political decisions—like supporting building in vulnerable locations—rather than climate change.
Changes in our built environment, and governments’ impact on those changes, are certainly an important subject when it comes to accounting for and preventing billion-dollar disasters—which virtually no one disputes. (Indeed, the four government reports Stevens links to in his second paragraph as supposedly misusing the NOAA data explicitly name some variation of “increased building and population growth” as a contributing factor to growing costs.) It’s simply not an either/or question, as the Post‘s teaser framed it: “Many blame global warming. Others say disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.” So it’s bizarre and frankly dangerous that ten years after climate scientists debunked Pielke’s claim that there’s no evidence climate change is increasing extreme weather costs, Stevens would take, as the “urgent” question of the moment, “Is global warming to blame” for the growing billion-dollar disaster tally?
By giving the impression that the whole thing is basically a government scam to justify climate policies, Stevens’ direct implication is that even if climate change is indisputable, it doesn’t really matter. And it feeds into climate deniers’ claims that the climate change-believing government is lying about climate change and its impacts, at a time when a large number of those deniers are seeking office.
https://fair.org/home/wapo-says-not-to- ... ous-costs/
The best lies are coated in truths irrelevant to the lie. Pielke's purpose is clearly climate denialism. His pet theory is not incorrect factually, many, many more people have moved to 'the coast' in the past 40 years. The primary reason this happened at this time was the passing in Congress of Federal Flood Insurance. Initially intended for the then current inhabitants of the region, then the real estate lobbyists got ahold of it and extended coverage to new construction, which any fool but not a congress critter could see as a disaster waiting to happen. But not for Real Estate, which has built until there's no place feasible left(and then they start on the unfeasible). Whadda they care, they got their check. If Hatteras or Hilton Head is ground zero for a really big one the US economy will crash. It's just that with the changing climate the 100 year storm that they couldn't be bothered with has become the ten year storm. In any case the cash value of this real estate is a piss poor metric for judging events of planetary change.
The purpose the this is equally bogus, that by printing this post now the NYT was throwing shade on the Dems, the supposed champions of the environment. Whadda sick joke, under Biden fracking in the USA has increased. Fracking is the method most conducive of releasing methane into the atmosphere, many times more harmful than CO2. Oil and gas production in general are at record highs, the US is the largest hydrocarbon producer in the world. Meanwhile the US military stomps across the planet, consuming more hydrocarbons than the average country. 'Environmental President' my ass. Sure there have been some showpieces, but you'll find those cost the investor class little, which is why they're allowed to happen. But try and get between the rich and money and you'll draw back a nub, if you survive. .
The R's 'promise' climate change, the Ds do in behind our backs.
And here we are.
Perhaps the real problem isn't climate change per se, which in a different world would be addressed much differently, but the capitalism which is the primary driver of this change and which cannot address it cause profits got nothing to do with it.
Posted on October 30, 2024 by Conor Gallagher
Conor here: More bad news for Europe — and especially Germany — which bet big on this boondoggle to supply energy for sectors where electrification is not an option, such as in parts of industrial manufacturing. The following piece touches briefly on that risky wager, but here’s more from Energy Connects:
Germany plans to build more than 20 power plants much bigger than the one in Leipzig, which it advertises as the continent’s first “hydrogen-ready” facility. They’ll be supplied by state-of-the-art liquefied natural gas terminals equipped to handle niche clean fuels such as ammonia, and a network of special pipes stretching roughly 6,000 miles (9,600 kilometers).
But there were always a lot of buts:
But there’s no official definition of what makes a plant hydrogen-ready, opening the door for greenwashing. For power plants, burning hydrogen hasn’t even been tested at scale.
…Then there’s the problem of moving hydrogen around. The Leipzig plant isn’t hooked up to the grid (and hasn’t yet set up its own electrolyzers), which means the highly combustible fuel will have to be trucked in until the second part of the government’s grand plan comes to fruition. It’s building a €1 billion liquefied natural gas terminal in Brunsbuettel, a town along the North Sea, that will initially import LNG but [could] be designed to also handle futuristic clean fuels.
Hydrogen can only be liquefied at -253C (-423F), well beyond the capabilities of today’s LNG ships. So Germany is planning to import hydrogen in the form of liquid ammonia, a combination of hydrogen and nitrogen that can more easily be turned into a liquid. But ammonia is toxic and handling requires better ventilation systems. Many components in the terminal, including control valves and fire and gas sensors as well as inline devices — most of which have not been tested with ammonia — will also need upgrades, according to Fraunhofer ISI, an energy think tank.
Germany doesn’t have an ammonia pipeline network and there are limitations to moving it via trucks on an industrial scale because it’s hazardous. That means ammonia will have to be converted back into hydrogen, yet there’s no economically viable technology currently available to do that. The terminal’s operator said it will discuss alternative strategies if none emerge by next year.
…The difference is that wind and solar produce clean electricity — a commodity the world already uses. Green hydrogen, on the other hand, will require building more solar and wind farms when, in many cases, it would be simpler to just use that clean energy directly. By the time hydrogen is made, stored and burned to make electricity again, there’s nearly 70% less energy than at the start — and the cost has tripled.
Green hydrogen will probably only be useful towards the end of the energy transition, once primary electricity demand is being comfortably met by renewables, according to Pierre Wunsch, Belgium’s top central banker.
By Tsvetana Paraskova, a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. Originally published at Oil Price.
The initial excitement surrounding low-carbon hydrogen has faded due to high project costs, regulatory uncertainty, and weak demand.
Only a small percentage of hydrogen projects in North America and Europe have reached final investment decisions.
Major energy companies like Shell and Equinor have paused green hydrogen plans in Europe, citing poor project economics and unclear regulatory frameworks.
The low-carbon hydrogen hype has begun to fade in recent months as companies and investors realize that their ambitions face the reality of costly projects amid regulatory stumbling blocks and uncertain future demand.
The momentum behind green hydrogen from two years ago, generated by the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), has slowed amid still high costs and macroeconomic headwinds. In addition, regulatory uncertainty and a lack of committed demand are undermining the 2030 production goals for low-carbon hydrogen, both in the United States and Europe.
As a result, investors are re-thinking funding, companies are re-drawing hydrogen production strategies, and share prices of major hydrogen players are crashing.
For example, Denmark’s Green Hydrogen Systems (CPH: GREENH), a provider of standardized, modular alkaline electrolyzers, has plunged by 65% year to date. U.S.-based Plug Power (NASDAQ: PLUG) has seen its stock tumble by 53% year to date, and Ballard Power Systems Inc (NASDAQ: BLDP) has crashed by 58%.
Other firms focused on green hydrogen and technologies have also seen their share prices battered amid signs that despite progress in project announcements, project commitments with final investment decisions (FID) are a fraction of the total pipeline of projects.
Just 18% of U.S. low-carbon or renewable hydrogen projects in North America, and only 5% of such projects in Europe that aim to begin operations by 2030 have reached FID so far, McKinsey & Company and the Hydrogen Council said in a report last month.
“A key sector-specific challenge for the hydrogen industry is uncertainty associated with a number of regulatory frameworks,” including the EU regulatory framework and the rulebook for the investment tax credit in the IRA. All of this “impedes project bankability,” the authors of the report wrote.
“Coupled with cost increases for renewable power and electrolysers, this has led to delays and cancellations of projects – in particular, renewable hydrogen projects,” they added.
In Europe, the European Commission has set unrealistic hydrogen production and import targets—the EU is not on track to achieve them, the European Court of Auditors, the supreme audit institution of the EU, said in a report this summer.
The Commission has been partially successful in creating the necessary conditions for the emerging hydrogen market and the hydrogen value chain in the EU, but it now needs “a reality check,” the European Court of Auditors said.
Even the International Energy Agency (IEA), the most vocal backer of all things renewable, has warned that policy and demand uncertainty are slowing down green hydrogen adoption globally.
According to the IEA, the main reasons for the slow uptake of low-carbon hydrogen “include unclear demand signals, financing hurdles, delays to incentives, regulatory uncertainties, licensing and permitting issues and operational challenges.”
A lack of visibility on demand and regulatory uncertainties have halted several major projects in Europe this year alone.
Spanish energy firms Repsol and Cepsa, for example, are pausing green hydrogen investments in Spain, as one of the most promising EU markets for renewable hydrogen is considering making the windfall tax on energy firms permanent.
The idea that a version of the tax could become permanent infuriates many major companies, including energy firms with plans to invest in green energy projects.
The Spanish firms halting projects are the latest European firms to pause or ditch green hydrogen plans due to either policy or demand concerns.
Most recently, Shell and Equinor have ditched plans for low-hydrogen production and transportation in north Europe due to a lack of demand.
Investors are not rushing to invest in backing green hydrogen projects, either, due to poor economics and potential returns.
“Green hydrogen is still not investable. It’s rubbish in terms of investment,” Mark Lacey, head of thematic equities at UK asset manager Schroders, told the Financial Times.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10 ... check.html
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The deadly environmental toll of superyachts and private jets
October 28, 2024
Every week, the ultra-rich emit more greenhouse gas than the poorest people produce in a lifetime
The private jets of 23 super-rich individuals emitted an average of 2,074 tonnes of carbon a year. This is equivalent to 2,000 years’ worth emissions for someone in the global poorest 50%. On average, these super-rich individuals took 184 flights in 2023, spending 425 hours in the air. (Oxfam)
The carbon footprint of a super-rich European, accumulated from nearly a week of using super yachts and private jets, matches the lifetime carbon footprint of someone in the world’s poorest 1 percent, a new Oxfam report shows. The study, Carbon Inequality Kills, tracks the emissions from private jets, yachts and polluting investments, amidst growing fears that climate breakdown is accelerating, driven largely by the emissions of the richest people.
“The super-rich in Europe are treating our planet like their personal playground. Their dirty investments, their private jets and yachts are not just symbols of excess; they are fueling inequality, hunger and even death”, said Chiara Putaturo, Oxfam EU tax expert.
The report presents detailed new evidence of how the super-rich’s outsized emissions are accelerating climate breakdown and wreaking havoc on lives and economies. The world’s poorest countries and communities have done the least to cause the climate crisis, yet they experience its most dangerous consequences.
One ultra-rich European takes an average of 140 flights a year, spending 267 hours in the air and producing as much carbon as the average European would in over 112 years.
In the same period, one superyacht user emits as much carbon as an ordinary European would in 585 years.
Less than a week of emissions from the superyachts and jets of one of the 31 of the richest people in the EU exceeded the entire lifetime emissions of a person in the world’s poorest 1%.
Fifty of the world’s richest billionaires on average emit more carbon through their investments, private jets and yachts in just over an hour and a half than the average person does in their entire lifetime.
If the world continues its current emissions, the carbon budget (the amount of CO2 that can still be added to the atmosphere without causing global temperatures to rise above 1.5°C) will be depleted in about four years.
However, if everyone’s emissions matched those of the richest 1 percent, the carbon budget would be used up in under five months.
And if everyone started emitting as much carbon as the private jets and superyachts of the average billionaire in Oxfam’s study, it would be gone in two days.
Billionaires’ lifestyle emissions dwarf those of ordinary people, but the emissions from their investments are dramatically higher still — the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires are around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined. Through these investments, billionaires have huge influence over some of the world’s biggest corporations and are driving us over the edge of climate disaster.
Nearly 40 percent of billionaire investments analyzed in Oxfam’s research are in highly polluting industries: oil, mining, shipping and cement. The total investment emissions of 36 of the EU’s richest billionaires are equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4.5 million Europeans.
Oxfam’s analysis details three critical areas, providing national and regional breakdowns, where the emissions of the wealthiest 1 percent since 1990 are already having — and are projected to have — devastating consequences:
Global inequality. The emissions of the richest 1 percent in the EU have caused global economic output to drop by 179 billion international US dollars since 1990. The biggest impact will be in countries least responsible for climate breakdown. Globally, low- and lower-middle-income countries will lose about 2.5 percent of their cumulative GDP between 1990 and 2050 due to the climate crisis. South Asia, South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will lose 3 percent, 2.4 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively. High-income countries, on the other hand, will accrue economic gains.
Hunger. The emissions of the richest 1 percent in the EU have caused crop losses due the climate crisis. These crop losses could have provided enough calories to feed nearly 900,000 people a year between 1990 and 2023. This will rise to 1.7 million people annually between 2023 and 2050.
Death. The emissions of the richest 1 percent in the EU are causing excess heat-related deaths of nearly 80,000 people between 2020 and 2120.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... vate-jets/
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WaPo Says Not to Worry About Climate Disruption’s Disastrous Costs:
Reassuring report based on long-debunked climate contrarian
Julie Hollar
As the country begins to vote in an election that will be hugely consequential for the climate crisis, the central task of news outlets’ climate beats should be informing potential voters of those consequences. Instead, the Washington Post‘s “Climate Lab” seems to be working hard to cast doubt on whether climate change is really causing weather disasters to be more expensive.
The Washington Post (10/24/24) claims that “the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.”
In a lengthy piece (10/24/24) headlined “The Real Reason Billion-Dollar Disasters Like Hurricane Helene Are Growing More Common,” Post Climate Lab columnist Harry Stevens highlighted a NOAA chart depicting a notable increase in billion-dollar weather disasters hitting the US that he says is widely used by government reports and officials “to help make the case for climate policies.” But, in fact, Stevens tells readers:
The truth lies elsewhere: Over time, migration to hazard-prone areas has increased, putting more people and property in harm’s way. Disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.
The takeaway is clear: The (Democratic) government is lying to you about the supposedly devastating impacts of climate change.
Distorting with cherry-picked data
The problem is, it’s Stevens’ story that’s doing the misleading. It relies heavily on the work of one source, Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime climate contrarian beloved by climate denial right-wingers, who cherry-picks data to distort the truth.
What’s worse, from a media critic’s perspective, is that it’s not even a new story; it’s been debunked multiple times over the years. Pielke—a political scientist, not a climate scientist, which Stevens never makes clear—has been promoting this tale since 1998, when he first published a journal article that purported to show that, as Stevens describes, “after adjusting damage to account for the growth in people and property, the trend [of increasing economic costs from weather disasters] disappears.”
When Pielke published the argument in his 2010 book, the journal Science (11/26/10) published a withering response, describing the chapter as “a diatribe against the IPCC and other scientists that is based on highly selective and distorted figures and his own studies.” It detailed the multiple methodological problems with Pielke’s argument:
A review of Roger Pielke’s book The Climate Fix in the journal Science (11/26/10) accused him of writing “a diatribe against the IPCC and other scientists that is based on highly selective and distorted figures and his own studies.”
He makes “corrections” for some things (notably, more people putting themselves in harm’s way) but not others. Some adjustments, such as for hurricane losses for the early 20th century, in which the dollar value goes up several hundred–fold, are highly flawed. But he then uses this record to suggest that the resulting absence of trends in damage costs represents the lack of evidence of a climate component. His record fails to consider all tropical storms and instead focuses only on the rare land-falling ones, which cause highly variable damage depending on where they hit. He completely ignores the benefits from improvements in hurricane warning times, changes in building codes, and other factors that have been important in reducing losses. Nor does he give any consideration to our understanding of the physics of hurricanes and evidence for changes such as the 2005 season, which broke records in so many ways.
Similarly, in discussing floods, Pielke fails to acknowledge that many governing bodies (especially local councils) and government agencies (such as the US Army Corps of Engineers) have tackled the mission of preventing floods by building infrastructure. Thus even though heavy rains have increased disproportionately in many places around the world (thereby increasing the risk of floods), the inundations may have been avoided. In developing countries, however, such flooding has been realized, as seen for instance this year in Pakistan, China and India. Other tenuous claims abound, and Pielke cherry-picks points to fit his arguments.
That year, climate expert Joe Romm (Climate Progress, 2/28/10) called Pielke “the single most disputed and debunked person in the entire realm of people who publish regularly on disasters and climate change.”
Debunked a decade ago
Pielke peddled the story in 538 (3/19/14) four years later—and lost his briefly held job as a contributor for it, after the scientific community spoke out against it in droves, as not being supported by the evidence.
In response to Pielke, climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (538, 3/31/14) pointed out that it’s not necessarily appropriate to normalize damages by gross domestic product (GDP) if the intent is to detect an underlying climate trend,” since “GDP increase does not translate in any obvious way to damage increase,” as “wealthier countries can better afford to build stronger structures and to protect assets.”
The backlash led 538 to give MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (3/31/14) a column to rebut Pielke, in which she explained that while it’s of course true that “changing demographics” have impacted the economic costs of weather disasters, Pielke’s data didn’t support his assertion “that climate change has played no role in the observed increase in damages.” She pointed to the same kinds of methodological flaws that Science did, noting that her own research with Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn projected that through the year 2100, “global hurricane damage will about double owing to demographic trends, and double again because of climate change.”
That all happened ten years ago. So why is Pielke’s same old ax-grinding getting a platform at the Washington Post shortly before Election Day?
Stevens does tell readers—quite far down in the article—that Pielke has “clashed with other scientists, journalists and government officials” over his research—though Stevens doesn’t give any details about those clashes, or about Pielke’s reputation among climate scientists more generally.
Stevens also briefly notes that Pielke was recently hired by the American Enterprise Institute, which Stevens characterizes as “center-right,” but more helpfully might have characterized as “taking millions from ExxonMobil since 1998.” But in the same paragraph, Stevens also takes pains to point out that Pielke says he’s planning to vote for Harris, as if to burnish Pielke’s climate-believer bonafides.
Pielke agrees with Pielke
Stevens tells Post readers that the science is firmly on Pielke’s side:
Roger Pielke “agrees with studies that agree with Pielke” (Environmental Hazards, 10/12/20).
Similar studies have failed to find global warming’s fingerprint in economic damage from hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and crop losses. Of 53 peer-reviewed studies that assess economic damage from weather events, 52 could not attribute damage trends to global warming, according to Pielke’s 2020 review of the literature, the most recent and comprehensive.
You’ll notice Stevens just used Pielke’s own review to bolster Pielke’s argument. But the journal that published that review (Environmental Hazards, 8/5/20) immediately followed up with the publication of a critique (10/12/20) from researchers who came to the opposite conclusion in their study on US hurricanes. They explained that there are “fundamental shortcomings in this literature,” which comes from a disaster research “field that is currently dominated by a small group of authors” who mostly use the same methodology—adjusting historical economic losses based strictly on “growth in wealth and population”—that Pielke does.
The authors, who wrote a study that actually accounted for this problem and did find that economic losses from hurricanes increased over time after accounting for increases in wealth and population, point out that Pielke dismissed their study and two others that didn’t agree with his own results essentially because they didn’t come to the same conclusions. As the authors of the critique write drily: “Pielke agrees with studies that agree with Pielke.”
A phony ‘consensus’
Stevens includes in his article an obligatory line that experts say
disputing whether global warming’s influence can be found in the disaster data is not the same as questioning whether climate change is real or whether society should switch from fossil fuels.
He also adds that
many scientists say that global warming has intensified hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, which must be leading to greater economic losses.
Note that he frames it as only “many,” and suggests they are only using (faulty, simplistic) logic, not science. But of course, climate change is intensifying extreme weather, as even Stevens has reported as fact recently (in the link he provides in that passage). In contrast, Stevens writes that
the consensus among disaster researchers is that the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.
But in fact, as mentioned above, there’s not consensus even among disaster researchers (who are primarily economists). And the “many scientists” who disagree with Pielke aren’t the scientists the Post chooses to focus on. While Stevens quotes a number of different experts, including some who disagree with Pielke, they are not given anywhere near the space—or credence—Pielke and his arguments are. (Pielke’s name appears 15 times across the article and its captions.)
When he does get around to quoting some of the scientists, like MIT’s Emanuel, whose research shows that extreme weather events are intensifying, Stevens presents the conflicting conclusions as a back-and-forth of claims and counterclaims, giving the last word in that debate to a disaster researcher whose goal is to refocus blame for disasters on political decisions—like supporting building in vulnerable locations—rather than climate change.
Changes in our built environment, and governments’ impact on those changes, are certainly an important subject when it comes to accounting for and preventing billion-dollar disasters—which virtually no one disputes. (Indeed, the four government reports Stevens links to in his second paragraph as supposedly misusing the NOAA data explicitly name some variation of “increased building and population growth” as a contributing factor to growing costs.) It’s simply not an either/or question, as the Post‘s teaser framed it: “Many blame global warming. Others say disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.” So it’s bizarre and frankly dangerous that ten years after climate scientists debunked Pielke’s claim that there’s no evidence climate change is increasing extreme weather costs, Stevens would take, as the “urgent” question of the moment, “Is global warming to blame” for the growing billion-dollar disaster tally?
By giving the impression that the whole thing is basically a government scam to justify climate policies, Stevens’ direct implication is that even if climate change is indisputable, it doesn’t really matter. And it feeds into climate deniers’ claims that the climate change-believing government is lying about climate change and its impacts, at a time when a large number of those deniers are seeking office.
https://fair.org/home/wapo-says-not-to- ... ous-costs/
The best lies are coated in truths irrelevant to the lie. Pielke's purpose is clearly climate denialism. His pet theory is not incorrect factually, many, many more people have moved to 'the coast' in the past 40 years. The primary reason this happened at this time was the passing in Congress of Federal Flood Insurance. Initially intended for the then current inhabitants of the region, then the real estate lobbyists got ahold of it and extended coverage to new construction, which any fool but not a congress critter could see as a disaster waiting to happen. But not for Real Estate, which has built until there's no place feasible left(and then they start on the unfeasible). Whadda they care, they got their check. If Hatteras or Hilton Head is ground zero for a really big one the US economy will crash. It's just that with the changing climate the 100 year storm that they couldn't be bothered with has become the ten year storm. In any case the cash value of this real estate is a piss poor metric for judging events of planetary change.
The purpose the this is equally bogus, that by printing this post now the NYT was throwing shade on the Dems, the supposed champions of the environment. Whadda sick joke, under Biden fracking in the USA has increased. Fracking is the method most conducive of releasing methane into the atmosphere, many times more harmful than CO2. Oil and gas production in general are at record highs, the US is the largest hydrocarbon producer in the world. Meanwhile the US military stomps across the planet, consuming more hydrocarbons than the average country. 'Environmental President' my ass. Sure there have been some showpieces, but you'll find those cost the investor class little, which is why they're allowed to happen. But try and get between the rich and money and you'll draw back a nub, if you survive. .
The R's 'promise' climate change, the Ds do in behind our backs.
And here we are.
Perhaps the real problem isn't climate change per se, which in a different world would be addressed much differently, but the capitalism which is the primary driver of this change and which cannot address it cause profits got nothing to do with it.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
An uncredited cartoon depicting Otto von Bismarck at the Berlin Conference (1884-85) cutting a cake labeled ‘Africa’ with a knife, symbolizing the division of the continent (3 January 1885).
Carbon markets and the new scramble for African land
Originally published: ROAPE (Review of African Political Economy) on October 30, 2024 by Thelma Arko (more by ROAPE (Review of African Political Economy)) | (Posted Nov 05, 2024)
Introduction
In 2023, the global carbon offset market reached $2 billion, with projections suggesting a hundredfold increase by 2050. This explosive projected growth, touted as a solution to the climate crisis, masks a disturbing reality: carbon markets are fueling a new scramble for African land and perpetuating colonial-era exploitation.
Carbon offset markets operate through the buying and selling of carbon credits. A carbon credit allows the holder to emit one metric ton of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in greenhouse gases. Carbon markets and offsetting practices have been widely embraced as market-based mechanisms to incentivise a transition to a low-carbon economy. These markets provide economic incentives for entities to reduce emissions or invest in offset projects, enabling companies that can reduce emissions cost-effectively to sell their unused credits to those facing higher reduction costs.
However, beneath the veneer of sustainability and development, these mechanisms, particularly in Africa, are unveiling a complex web of injustices, power imbalances, and conflicts over land rights. The very solutions intended to safeguard our planet are, in reality, perpetuating colonial-era land grabs, dispossessing local communities, and entrenching neoliberal agendas that favour foreign interests over the needs of the Global South.
The current structure of carbon markets and offset projects involves the enclosure of vast tracts of land, including primary forests and ecosystems, effectively continuing a legacy of land expropriation. This dispossession of ancestral lands and livelihoods not only prioritizes carbon sinks and conservation areas over the subsistence farming, pastoralism, and cultural practices of local communities, particularly Indigenous peoples, but also disrupts their way of life. The neoliberal framework within which these offset schemes are promoted enables corporations in the Global North to outsource their environmental responsibilities and effectively greenwash their unsustainable practices by purchasing offsets.
It is becoming clear that the pursuit of market-based climate solutions, beyond addressing pressing climate change concerns, inadvertently propagates social injustice and human rights violations that deserve urgent redress.
Carbon markets and their role in climate change mitigation
In the face of the pressing challenge to limit global warming to below 2°C, as emphasized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, carbon markets have emerged as a key strategy in the global fight against climate change. The concept, introduced by the Kyoto Protocol in 2005, marked the birth of carbon as a tradable commodity, ushering in a new era of emissions financialization.
Carbon markets offer a pathway for industries that face challenges in reducing their carbon footprint, such as the hard-to-abate sectors, to contribute to emissions reduction and drive green investments. They provide a mechanism for these sectors, which cannot easily or quickly reduce their emissions, to still participate in climate change mitigation efforts. This flexibility allows for a more inclusive transition to a low-carbon economy, where all actors can play a part.
Nature-based solutions, particularly Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), play a significant role in the carbon offsets arena. With the market’s exponential growth, investors are increasingly attracted to sectors such as plantation forestry, especially in Africa and other developing regions rich in forest resources.
| Former US Secretary John Kerry delivers remarks at a Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation REDD Conference in Oslo Norway Wikimedia Commons 15 June 2016 | MR Online
Former U.S. Secretary John Kerry delivers remarks at a Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) Conference in Oslo, Norway (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, 15 June 2016)
The carbon market undeniably provides several benefits, including driving investments in green technologies and conservation projects, creating economic incentives for emissions reduction, and potentially accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy. However, the prioritization of market mechanisms and the neoliberal foundation on which it is based undermine collective action and democratic decision-making, perpetuating global inequalities while serving as a pretext for economic expansion, which overshadows genuine environmental progress.
By reducing the value of ecosystems to their carbon storage capacity, this approach enables the privatization of commons. It increases corporate control over forest resources, ignoring the intrinsic value of ecosystems and their broader ecological functions. Through the implementation of such a market-based mechanism, wealthy nations and corporations are able to effectively buy their way out of their emission reduction responsibilities by merely investing in offset projects, while developing countries bear the brunt of climate change impacts and are left to adapt to a changing environment. This dynamic perpetuates the historical extraction of resources and labour from the Global South, fueling the consumption patterns and development agendas of the Global North.
Carbon markets also enable greenwashing, where polluters make false claims of emission reduction achieved. . Wealthy nations and corporations in the Global North are effectively outsourcing their emissions reduction responsibilities to the Global South through offset projects. Whether these projects provide an added value to emission reduction is often questionable, and the promised benefits to local communities often do not materialise.
Carbon offset projects perpetuate neocolonial power dynamics by reinforcing dependency relationships. Developing countries, in their pursuit of investment and revenue, may become reliant on carbon offset projects funded by entities from the Global North. This dependency can limit their agency in negotiating project terms, leading to deals that favour foreign investor interests over those of local communities.
The focus on market-based solutions diverts attention from the need for more fundamental structural changes in energy, transportation, and industrial systems. Rather, land grabs, displacement of Indigenous communities, and the destruction of biodiverse ecosystems to make way for monoculture plantations optimised for carbon removal have become the dominant trend of carbon offset projects.
The complexities of land rights in Africa
Land rights in Africa are inherently tied to a complex historical narrative of colonial exploitation, dispossession, and ongoing struggles for justice and recognition. The legacy of colonial land grabs, where Indigenous communities were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands, continues to cast a long shadow over present-day land tenure systems.
Customary land tenure, prevalent in many African societies, is rooted in unwritten rules and cultural practices that recognize collective community rights. This system is deeply intertwined with cultural identity and traditional ways of life. However, customary land tenure frequently comes into conflict with statutory or formal land tenure regimes imposed during the colonial era and perpetuated in the post-independence period.
The interplay between customary and statutory land tenure regimes has resulted in tensions and insecurity for local communities. Customary systems provide a sense of communal ownership and connection to the land but are often not formally recognized or protected by national laws and policies. Statutory systems, on the other hand, are typically based on individual land ownership and privatization, which often marginalizes traditional land use practices and excludes communities from decision-making processes.
Many African countries inherited unequal land distribution patterns and a history of dispossession from their colonial past, perpetuating social and economic inequalities. This has fueled ongoing land reform movements and demands for the recognition of customary land rights, as well as the redistribution of land to address historical injustices.
Women play a pivotal role in African agriculture, yet face significant discrimination in land rights. Customary laws often restrict women’s land ownership and inheritance rights. According to the UN, women own less than 20% of the world’s land, with the disparity particularly acute in Africa. Efforts to address this, such as Kenya’s 2010 constitution recognizing women’s equal rights to land, have faced challenges in implementation.
Land rights in Africa are further complicated by contestations over natural resources, particularly in regions rich in minerals, oil, or valuable ecosystems. The extraction of natural resources has often led to the displacement of local communities, environmental degradation, and conflicts over land ownership. The entry of foreign investors and the establishment of conservation areas or carbon offsets exacerbate these tensions, marginalizing and excluding local communities from decisions about their own land.
Carbon markets and the new contestations for land rights
The emergence of carbon markets has ignited a fresh wave of land rights disputes in Africa, exacerbating the already intricate issues surrounding land ownership and utilisation. The growing demand for carbon offsets has sparked violent land grabs, frequently infringing upon the rights of local and indigenous communities. Several instances of community rights violations have surfaced, with projects being undertaken without adequate consultation or consent from those bearing the brunt of the impact.
The imposition of conservation or renewable energy projects without the free, prior, and informed consent of local communities, as outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, is leading to the destruction of biodiverse ecosystems, disruption of water cycles, and loss of habitat for endangered species. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, families were kicked off land they had owned and farmed for generations to make way for a carbon offsetting project for oil giant Total Energies.
This situation, dubbed the “new scramble for Africa,” mirrors the land grabs of the colonial era, perpetuating a cycle of dispossession and marginalisation. As concerning is the surge in carbon offsetting agreements between African nations and Middle Eastern investors, “the Dubai-Africa carbon deals”, raising pressing questions about equitable benefit distribution and the potential for greenwashing.
Projects centred on reforestation, afforestation, and conservation demand vast tracts of land, intensifying competition and pitting local communities against investors. The rights of indigenous peoples, who constitute a small global population yet safeguard a significant proportion of global biodiversity, are often disregarded, leading to land disputes, arrests, and property confiscation.
The implications of carbon market agreements, which can span decades, are profound and far-reaching. Many of these transactions have occurred unbeknownst to governments in many African regions. Instances of “carbon cowboys” employing violence and deception to expel Indigenous people from their territories have surfaced. The vast expanse of land and labour devoted to tree-planting initiatives has often resulted in food shortages and unequal benefit distribution.
REDD+ projects aimed at reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation have had mixed outcomes. While they attract funding for forest conservation and infrastructure, they have also constrained Indigenous communities’ livelihoods and, in certain cases, led to forced evictions and harassment. The operations of Green Resources, funded by Nordic countries, encapsulate the troubling trends within carbon market projects. In Uganda, Green Resources’ endeavors have directly impacted over 8,000 people, including instances of forced evictions and restricted access to essential resources. With a long-term lease to sell carbon credits, the company has worsened food insecurity, caused the loss of land access, and contributed to environmental degradation through the use of agrochemicals.
In other words, the flooding did not have to be this bad.
Another vector of failure was the lack of official warnings:1
Angry residents in Valencia, throw mud at the Spanish king after it became known that residents were warned too late about flood by civil authorities which lead to kill more than 150 people
#Valencia #SpanishPM #Spain
And this level of citizen action is gratifying, but not sufficient on its own:
Today is public holiday in Spain and literally thousands of people in Valencia came out to help the victims of the October 29 disaster armed with shovels and brooms.
A flood of people against the flood of water.
It may seem strained to discuss the poor long-term planning and emergency responses in Valencia to official performance in the US after Helene. But we are going to see more and more instances of climate disasters meeting infrastructure that either didn’t or inadequately contemplated severe floods and winds. Keeping tabs on them, particularly across countries, can help develop lessons.
To turn to FEMA and Helene, it would be nice to perform a Lambertian deep dive and assemble clips across a wide range of sources. However, I am not confident of how informative it would really be, since the reporting on the official responses to this disaster has a “dog that didn’t bark” quality to it. So I will instead use Helene as a point of departure for examining higher-level issues.
The reasons to question the caliber of government responses are the paucity of stories either giving favorable coverage of FEMA’s action, either overall or heart-warming anecdata. An obvious reason is the geographic remoteness of many of the hard-hit areas in a generally media-poor part of the US. Contrast that with Katrina, which took place in a major metropolitan/commercial center, familiar to most reporters, with a large airport and many highways. 2005 was also early in the hollowing-out of newsrooms.
By all accounts, Asheville, NC, which was particularly hard hit and more accessible by result of being a relatively large city, is still in recovery mode more than a month after the storm hit. Notice how the House Majority Leader Steve Scalise visited North Carolina on November 1 with a North Carolina representative and representatives from other states. Further notice the lack of mention, let alone praise, for FEMA. From his press release:
Yesterday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) visited Asheville, North Carolina with Congressman Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) alongside Congressman Jason Smith (R-Mo.), Congressman Mark Alford (R-Mo.), and Congressman Mike Collins (R-Ga.) to tour communities devastated by Hurricane Helene. Leader Scalise met with local officials, volunteers, and small business owners working to rebuild and released the following statement:
“Hurricane Helene had a devastating impact across western North Carolina. But I saw in Asheville today what I saw in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: resilient people coming together in the face of destruction and tragedy to lend helping hands to their neighbors and rebuild their vibrant community. I’m thankful to have been here to see the challenges firsthand and to meet many of the incredible volunteers, restaurateurs, and business owners already working to restore what was lost. My friend Congressman Chuck Edwards is working tirelessly in the wake of this storm to help these hard-hit areas and aid them on their road to recovery. North Carolina is not alone in this fight.”
Even though this recent local account (five days old) does praise FEMA, it seems to unintentionally reveal shortcomings in official responses to disasters of this scale:
It has been a month since the storm, and there are still many roads closed and homes without power. The city water is unfit to drink; we have to boil it even to wash dishes, and what flows from the tap is a cloudy, rust-colored fluid. It has been so bad and left so many people stranded or homeless that Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen has come to feed those in need.
At our house, we were otherwise lucky. Our neighborhood had fewer fallen trees than others, and we were high enough in elevation that we avoided the flooding. Beyond our little neighborhood, though, it looked very, very much like the devastation of Katrina.
The first week after the storm was hellacious. No power; no water; no phone; no wifi; no cable; no air conditioning. Dark at 7:00 p.m., and no lights anywhere. The fridge and freezer sat silent. On the fourth day, we had to throw out all the food in both and scrub the interiors with bleach to kill the faint smell of mold. With no water, we could not flush the toilets and, being unable to stop the physiology of the human body, we had to go somewhere. The commodes were becoming rank….
And it was a huge military operation: National Guard and Marines; search-and-rescue operations looking for people cut off from roads or stranded on roofs; dog teams looking for bodies in the debris. I have since heard ignorant people spout conspiracy theories about the failures of FEMA or the government in general, but those trolls weren’t there. I have never been so impressed at the seriousness and effectiveness of everyone, government or civilian working, to recover. The lies being spouted are reprehensible. Evil, actually.
The Asheville airport was covered with military planes and scores of copters. The only way into the area for the first days was by air. I-40, the main highway, was cut off on both ends by landslides. The bridges along I-26 were washed out. All roads in and out of Buncombe County were blocked and closed. If we had wanted to leave, we couldn’t.
This article is not at all clear on the military operation was about, but it seems to have been concentrated on the mentioned search and rescue. While that is critically important, one has to wonder why the official disaster response did not encompass other predictable needs, such as for clean water and food (why is World Central Kitchen the lead actor?)
A patchwork approach is a feature, not a bug. As FEMA defenders and readers have pointed out, it was never designed to be a first responder. But in a world where ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) is a central component of military operations, why are those capabilities not being applied to large scale disasters? Why are localities and states required to go through the game of escalation based on fragmented on-the-ground demands before drone fleets are deployed to report back the scale and nature of destruction and identify humans who seem to be in trouble? Given the storm path and widely anticipated severity, why were they not pre-positioned?
One can argue that this approach is the result of America’s federal structure. I don’t buy it for a second. In banking, the Federal government has pre-empted nearly all banking oversight that formerly fell to state authority. For instance would be possible to have a mandate for Federal action once a hurricane was predicted to exceed certain levels (say severity of predicted winds and rain and size of exposed population). But that would put the Feds more in charge and therefore more accountable. Can’t have that, now can we?
Instead, we have this sort of thing. I personally find it weird that the not just the Vox interviewer but more important, interviewee Claire Connolly Knox, founder of the Emergency and Crisis Management program at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, depicts a balkanized and therefore cumbersome response to big disasters as hunky-dory and even worse, inevitable.
Mind you, a great deal of ad-hocracy, overlapping roles and just plain scrambling are inevitable when confronted with a big emergency. But there should be an effort to establish backbones quickly, most of all of gathering and dissemination of information. I don’t see that here. Instead, the piece starts with sanctimoniousness about not spreading disinformation, which has the effect of tamping down reports of real problems and shortcomings. It’s as if not harming Team Biden-Harris was more important than improving disaster relief efforts over time.
From interviewer Umair Irfan at Vox in Is FEMA messing up? An expert weighs in:
Umair Irfan
How would you evaluate their [FEMA’s] response? Are they graded on a curve when it comes to a disaster like this? And should FEMA have seen this coming and done more?
Claire Connolly Knox
Every disaster starts and ends locally, so every disaster response starts at the local level, and it ends at the local level. A lot of people don’t realize that. They think immediately of FEMA. FEMA has the purse strings, they help pay for a lot of this.
But the response is local. It goes to the state if locals can’t handle it. The state then does an emergency declaration to release additional funds. If it’s going to be more than they can handle, they go to their FEMA region. That then goes up to FEMA national, and then to the president for an emergency declaration or disaster declaration depending on which is needed.
Every state adheres to the same standards set forth by FEMA to have a comprehensive emergency management plan to train their local emergency managers to have the capacity to respond to a disaster.
Knox does dutifully cite how the Federal Stafford Act dictates how emergency aid operates, and how states have also set up mutual aid arrangements to supplement that. And she explains how FEMA has tried to become more pro-active in the wake of Katrina, with some arguable success in Hurricane Sandy, despite conservative and state/local pushback.2
Contrast this “‘just-so’ story” with some contrasting accounts. From We Are The Relief: How Queer Appalachian Mutual Aid Showed Up After Helene:
As the image circulated widely, I soon discovered that the five DJs — only two of whom are actually DJs — are part of the queer mutual aid organization Pansy Collective. Within 48 hours of the storm, they had partnered with the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief network, which was formed after Hurricane Sandy. Alongside The Pinhook in Durham, NC, they gathered physical donations and purchased additional supplies with the funds they raised. Long before FEMA had any presence in Western North Carolina, Pansy Collective distributed six truckloads, two trailers, and a box truck filled with non-perishable food, water, cleaning supplies, diapers, gas and gas cans, toiletries, batteries, and hygiene products to various hubs, including remote mountain locations where residents were unable to leave….
Ri, a Pansy Collective organizer, says that the collective’s remarkable ability to respond so quickly to devastation caused by Helene came from experience gained during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The framework of community care became a central concern across the country when COVID hit, and COVID kind of radicalized people too, Ri told Them. “The networks of mutual aid have grown and continue to have a strong presence in Asheville because Covid just happened.”
Moving forward, the collective wants to continue being a lifeline for as many types of people affected by the storm as possible. With funds from the influx of support that came after Helene, the group will keep redistributing aid as they simultaneously launch a bailout initiative for people arrested during the crisis of the storm, as well as a service worker and sex worker microgrant program for those left out of work.
From the other end of the ideological spectrum, Unherd provides data that suggests that Helene was a bigger disaster than Katrina yet received fewer Federal resources:
Bush’s response to Katrina was criticised at the time for being lumberingly slow and ineffective. But the relief effort being mounted now is a pale shadow of what was done a mere 19 years ago, and that makes the silence around this disaster even more ominous.
In 2005, significant planning and resourcing was being carried out days before the storm even made landfall. Ten thousand members of the National Guard had gathered from several states to deal with the damage Katrina was about to cause. The final number who helped with the effort measured closer to 20,000. But those guardsmen did not stand alone: the US Army was preparing to assume overall command of the entire rescue effort through US Northern Command, where its battle staff coordinated response forces over various state lines. The regular Army helped too, including forces from the 82nd Airborne Division and the Army Corps of Engineers…..
This time, things are very different. At the time of writing, fewer than 7,000 guardsmen are helping with Helene disaster relief, and there was no equivalent preparation before the storm actually hit. US Northern Command, which can only assume responsibility if it is asked to do so by other government authorities, is not coordinating the overall effort. During Katrina, more than 350 military helicopters were involved with the rescue efforts. This time, in a mountain disaster zone where many more helicopters are needed than in a coastal area, well below 100 helicopters have currently been committed……
Appalachia has always been forgotten; the people there are used to being treated like dirt. Talking to locals whose families were still stuck in the disaster area, the common refrain was that the help wasn’t arriving because the elites simply hate the people now in need of help. Talking to people in D.C., however, quickly dispelled that notion. What is going on right now isn’t malice, it’s somehow even worse: it’s senility. People weren’t enjoying the suffering of fellow Americans; they were simply so oblivious and zoned out that they couldn’t even notice a problem.
Currently, a hurricane disaster that is significantly more challenging than Katrina is being serviced by something like a third of the resources that Louisiana called upon. And yet few people in Washington even think this is a problem. At the same time as Congress has borrowed another 10 or 20 billion dollars to hand over to Ukraine and Israel, presidential candidate Kamala Harris has announced that the victims of Helene will be able to apply for $750 in relief assistance to help them get back on their feet.
My sources have no reason to lie. Perhaps some exaggeration but it all seems too likely to me.
FEMA is a charlie foxtrot, whatever its apologists and administrators say. Almost every person who applies for the $750 is denied. For example, if you have insurance, no $750 because your benevolent insurance company will pay. Yeah, but for many, only after being dragged kicking and screaming to cut the check. An assistant rents her house in rural Georgia. Her losses are real but because she is a renter, no $200 to replace the farm produce and meat lost in her freezer due to a week without electricity. That’s all she asked for. $200B or whatever for Ukraine but no $200 for her. Some areas still do not know when power will be restored. Compared to the mountains of North Carolina, these are the fortunate. This is the message the people are getting.
And GM weighed in, pointing out that the USSR’s response to the far more dangerous Chernobyl, contrary to Western denigration, showed the weakness our neoliberal approach:
If you recall in the mid-00s collapse was a popular topic. Strangely, it isn’t now, even though we are much closer to it — presumably because very high oil prices back then made it palpable, while now it is some combination of them not being so high and everyone having become just numb to it all after everything that has happened recently.
Anyway, back then a consensus opinion emerged that when the USSR collapsed it was much better prepared for it than the US was and would ever be. Because the USSR was a non-market economy, with a strong centralized state, strong relationships between people, a vast social safety net to cushion the fall, the infrastructure was built rationally and much better prepared for a shrinking resource usage, etc. etc.
Well, we see it now. The disasters in the USSR in the late 1980s — Chernobyl, the Armenian earthquake, etc. — were in retrospect quite expertly handled. Especially Chernobyl, if you look at it without the ideological bias lenses, was a systemic screw up in terms of what caused it, but once it happened, it was very well handled — the scientists and engineers were put in charge, the necessary resources and the whole state machinery were mobilized, no questions asked about the cost, and the situation was brought under control.
Meanwhile in the US we had Katrina first and the Great Financial Crisis as harbingers, then the Puerto Rico hurricane, the Hawaii fires, the toxic spill in Ohio, now these hurricanes, and the state has just largely abandoned regular people affected by the disasters to their fate. Plus, of course, the biggest such issue of them all — COVID. And surely there is more to come…
Related to this — there appear to be absolutely no plans to evacuate the population in any kind of shelters in case of a nuclear exchange. They have those in Russia and the other “enemy” countries, but in the West nobody is going to bother. The implications are clear. The elite will board their private jets and set off towards the southern hemisphere, and abandon the plebs to their fate. Continuation of current policies. Or rather, current policies being an indicator of what the plans for the future…
The lack of media and official acknowledgement FEMA’s underperformance in Helene means there are not enough press clips to serve as a basis for demanding better funding and even more important, structural changes.3 Instead, we are all expected to form our own Pansy Collectives and otherwise hope for the best.
_____
1 A system called AEMET issued a warning at 8 AM but Valencia authorities did not alert citizens until 8 PM which was too late.
2 I have reservations about claims about FEMA regarding Hurricane Sandy from my vantage in New York City at the time. It was evident that Occupy Sandy, which was entirely outside any formal Federal/state/city relief structure, ran rings around official efforts.
3 Claire Connolly Knox, in the Vox interview cited above, blandly said that the worst disasters wound up being omitted from official post-mortems:
That’s where my research comes in. I study after-action reports, or things that went well and things that did not go well during a disaster. They frequently include an implementation plan, so taking those lessons learned, who is the lead to implement this lesson, if there’s any funding needed, and a timeline of when to expect that particular lesson to be implemented.
Unfortunately, an after-action report is not required after every disaster. What I have found is that in areas that tend to be heavily destroyed — looking at Asheville, North Carolina — I would not anticipate an after-action report coming from them.
Knox seems wonderfully blind to the fact that unless she supplemens her research with other information, it’s a garbage-in, garbage-out exercise .
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... short.html
Greenwashing Case Against Santos Could Set Global Precedent
Posted on November 4, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. These greenwashing cases may seem to be weak tea, but they do have the advantage of having the potential to get to discovery and allow for, among other things, the deposing of top executives. The potential for personal embarrassment and reputational damage is not something normally well-bunkered top brass are well set up to handle. And enough legal actions along the lines below might even have some stock price impact, another thing of great import to soi-disant corporate leaders.
The false advertising claims being pursued in the US would seem to be a promising angle, since a successful plaintiff can recover attorney’s fees. Those claims would also seem to dovetail neatly with false representations under securities laws.
As disheartening as it is to see the slow pace of climate action, cases like this will expose the inadequacy and cynicism of many widely-hyped corporate and investor initiatives.
By Felicity Bradstock, a freelance writer specialising in Energy and Finance. Originally published at OilPrice
In the most recent in a long line of oil and gas companies to be accused of greenwashing, Australia’s second-largest independent oil firm is being sued by the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR) for misguiding consumers on its decarbonisation aims. The ACCR is a shareholder activist group that has purchased shares in several high-emissions companies to try to encourage them to pursue Paris Climate Agreement targets. It is not the first time that an activist organisation has accused an oil and gas company of greenwashing and misleading the public, but the outcome of the trial could have an impact on future legal action in the sector.
Monday marked the first day of the 13-day Santos trial in Australia’s federal court. The lawsuit, which was launched in 2021, claims that Santos did not have a proper basis for saying it had a clear strategy for reducing emissions by 26 percent, to 30 percent by 2030, and to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040. The ACCR says this constitutes misleading or deceptive conduct and puts the company in breach of Australian corporate and consumer laws. The case is the first of its kind and could provide the blueprint for lawsuits against oil and gas majors in other countries in the future.
The ACCR’s lawyer, Noel Hutley, stated, “We’ll be submitting that Santos lacked reasonable grounds for making these statements.” Hutley suggested that Santos’s climate strategy was “little more than a series of speculations … cobbled together in a matter of weeks”, rather than a comprehensive pathway to decarbonisation. The ACCR is using additional examples to support its argument that Santos was wilfully greenwashing its oil and gas activities, such as the company calling natural gas a “clean fuel”. Santos also referred to blue hydrogen, which is produced using fossil fuels, as “clean” and “zero emissions”.
Santos has often stated that its net-zero plans rely heavily on the deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, to help decarbonise its operations. The company aims to expand its oil and gas production while reducing emissions by using CCS technology. However, ACCR argues that Santos made “a range of undisclosed qualifications and assumptions about CCS processes”. Dan Goucher, ACCR’s Director of Climate and Environment, stated, “We read annual reports and sustainability reports from a range of companies every day. And some of these claims are completely unjustified… The key point for us I guess is that it’s become very difficult for any investor to differentiate between companies making genuine claims and companies that are not genuine.”
Santos is worth approximately $22 billion and operates both onshore and offshore in Australia, the U.S., Papua New Guinea, and Timor-Leste. The court judgement is being watched closely by activist groups around the globe that hope it will put greater pressure on oil and gas companies to be more transparent about their environmental impact and climate efforts going forward. The ACCR hopes the court will forbid Santos from engaging in deceptive conduct in the future, as well as force the company to issue a corrective notice about the environmental impact of its activities.
Earlier in the year, Rob Bonta, the Attorney General of California, filed an amended complaint aimed at encouraging some of the biggest players in oil and gas to relinquish profits that were made while misleading consumers about their contribution to climate change. In June, Bonta filed a lawsuit against the American Petroleum Institute (API), as well as BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell, for their deceptive conduct. Bonta accused the companies of false advertising and possible greenwashing. A press release said that the firms used words such as “clean” and “green” to make consumers believe their products were more environmentally friendly than they actually were.
Meanwhile, Italy’s oil major Eni was sued last year for alleged early knowledge of the climate crisis. It was the first climate lawsuit to be launched in Italy. Several environmental groups sought legal action, accusing Eni of “lobbying and greenwashing” to encourage higher levels of fossil fuel production despite having an awareness of the risks its products posed since 1970. The allegations are largely based on a study commissioned by Eni between 1969 and 1970 that determined rising fossil fuel use could result in a climate crisis within just a few decades.
The report by the Isvet research centre stated, “Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to a recent report by the UN secretary, given the increased use of [fossil fuels], has increased over the last century by an average of 10 percent worldwide; around the year 2000 this increase could reach 25 percent, with ‘catastrophic’ consequences on climate.”
A new wave of lawsuits, aimed at forcing oil and gas majors to be more transparent about their environmental impact and climate efforts, is taking place in several countries around the globe. Environmental organisations and activists are no longer standing for greenwashing and are asking state and federal courts to impose restrictions on the use of misleading language, as well as force oil and gas companies to produce viable decarbonisation strategies with clear policies and mid-term targets to achieve their climate goals.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... edent.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Warming turns ordinary dry spells into unprecedented droughts
November 7, 2024
As Earth warms, droughts are getting bigger, drier and more frequent
Higher temperatures caused by anthropogenic climate change made an ordinary drought into an exceptional drought that parched the American West from 2020–2022. Evaporation accounted for 61% of the drought’s severity, while reduced precipitation only accounted for 39%. Evaporative demand has played a bigger role than reduced precipitation in droughts since 2000, which suggests droughts will become more severe as the climate warms.
“Research has already shown that warmer temperatures contribute to drought, but this is, to our knowledge, the first study that actually shows that moisture loss due to demand is greater than the moisture loss due to lack of rainfall,” said Rong Fu, a UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and corresponding author of a study published in Science Advances.
A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor before the air mass becomes saturated, allowing water to condense and precipitation to form. In order to rain, water molecules in the atmosphere need to come together. Heat keeps water molecules moving and bouncing off each other, preventing them from condensing. This creates a cycle in which the warmer the planet gets, the more water will evaporate into the atmosphere — but the smaller fraction will return as rain. Therefore, droughts will last longer, cover wider areas and be even drier with every little bit that the planet warms.
UCLA researchers found that climate change has accounted for 80% of the increase in evaporative demand since 2000. During the drought periods, that figure increased to more than 90%, making climate change the single biggest driver increasing drought severity and expansion of drought area since 2000.
Compared to the 1948–1999 period, the average drought area from 2000–2022 increased 17% over the American West due to an increase in evaporative demand. Since 2000, in 66% of the historical and emerging drought-prone regions, high evaporative demand alone can cause drought, meaning drought can occur even without precipitation deficit. Before 2000, that was only true for 26% of the area.
“During the drought of 2020–2022, moisture demand really spiked,” Fu said. “Though the drought began through a natural reduction in precipitation, I would say its severity was increased from the equivalent of ‘moderate’ to ‘exceptional’ on the drought severity scale due to climate change.” Moderate means the 10–20% strongest drought, while “exceptional’ means the top 2% strongest drought on the severity scale, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Further climate model simulations corroborate these findings. That leads to projections that greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels will turn droughts like the 2020–2022 from exceedingly rare events occurring every thousand years to events that happen every 60 years by the mid-21st century and every six years by the late 21st century.
“Even if precipitation looks normal, we can still have drought because moisture demand has increased so much and there simply isn’t enough water to keep up with that increased demand,” Fu said. “This is not something you could build bigger reservoirs or something to prevent because when the atmosphere warms, it will just suck up more moisture everywhere. The only way to prevent this is to stop temperatures from increasing, which means we have to stop emitting greenhouse gases.”
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... s-drought/
Fossil fuel CO2 emissions set new record
November 13, 2024
‘No sign’ of transition; CO2 removal captures only one-millionth of new emissions
Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels will reach a record high in 2024, according to new research.
The 2024 Global Carbon Budget projects fossil carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of 37.4 billion tonnes, up 0.8% from 2023. A preprint of the 19th annual annual report, produced by an international team of more than 120 scientists, provides was published in the journal Earth System Science Data on November 13.
Despite the urgent need to cut emissions to slow climate change, the researchers say there is still “no sign” that the world has reached a peak in fossil CO2 emissions.
With projected emissions from land-use change (such as deforestation) of 4.2 billion tonnes, total CO2 emissions are projected to be 41.6 billion tonnes in 2024, up from 40.6 billion tonnes last year.
Over the last 10 years, fossil CO2 emissions have risen while land-use change CO2 emissions have declined on average – leaving overall emissions roughly level over that period. This year, both fossil and land-use change CO2 emissions are set to rise, with drought conditions exacerbating emissions from deforestation and forest degradation fires during the El Niño climate event of 2023-2024.
With over 40 billion tonnes released each year at present, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise – driving increasingly dangerous global warming.
“The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly dramatic, yet we still see no sign that burning of fossil fuels has peaked,” said lead author Pierre Friedlingstein, of the University of Exeter.
“Time is running out to meet the Paris Agreement goals – and world leaders meeting at COP29 must bring about rapid and deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions to give us a chance of staying well below 2°C warming above pre-industrial levels. Until we reach net zero CO2 emissions globally, world temperatures will continue to rise and cause increasingly severe impacts.”
Other key findings from the 2024 Global Carbon Budget include:
Globally, emissions from different fossil fuels in 2024 are projected to increase: coal (0.2%), oil (0.9%), gas (2.4%). These contribute 41%, 32% and 21% of global fossil CO2 emissions respectively. Given the uncertainty in the projections, it remains possible that coal emissions could decline in 2024.
China’s emissions (32% of the global total) are projected to marginally increase by 0.2%, although the projected range includes a possible decrease in emissions.
US emissions (13% of the global total) are projected to decrease by 0.6%.
India’s emissions (8% of the global total) are projected to increase by 4.6%.
European Union emissions (7% of the global total) are projected to decrease by 3.8%.
Emissions in the rest of the world (38% of the global total) are projected to increase by 1.1%.
International aviation and shipping (3% of the global total, and counted separately from national/regional totals) are projected to increase by 7.8% in 2024, but remain below their 2019 pre-pandemic level by 3.5%.
Globally, emissions from land-use change (such as deforestation) have decreased by 20% in the past decade, but are set to rise in 2024.
Permanent CO2 removal through reforestation and afforestation (new forests) is offsetting about half of the permanent deforestation emissions.
Current levels of technology-based Carbon Dioxide Removal (excluding nature-based means such as reforestation) only account for about one-millionth of the CO2 emitted from fossil fuels.
Atmospheric CO2 levels are set to reach 422.5 parts per million in 2024, 2.8 parts per million above 2023, and 52% above pre-industrial levels.
The effects of the temporary El Niño climate event also led to a reduction in carbon absorption by ecosystems on land (known as the land CO2 “sink”) in 2023, which is projected to recover as El Niño ended by the second quarter of 2024.
Emissions from fires in 2024 have been above the average since the beginning of the satellite record in 2003, particularly due to the extreme 2023 wildfire season in Canada (which persisted in 2024) and intense drought in Brazil.
The land and ocean CO2 sinks combined continued to take up around half of the total CO2 emissions, despite being negatively impacted by climate change.
At the current rate of emissions, there is a a 50% chance that global warming will consistently exceed 1.5°C in about six years. This estimate is subject to large uncertainties, but it is clear that the time left to meet the 1.5°C target and avoid the worst impacts of climate change has almost run out.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... -going-up/
******
US EPA Enables Polluting Plastics Plants by Failing to Update Wastewater Limits, Report Says
Posted on November 15, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Due to so much competing news, we’ve been light on climate and environment coverage. Established readers may recall that Jerri-Lynn covered the war on plastics intensely. Then and now, the media reports how scientists are finding plastic in more and more places in human tissue. A few of many sightings:
Presence of microplastics in human stomachs Forensic Science International https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... d=coauthor
Microplastics found in brain tissue in new study EHN
Given the regular news about the extent and health damage from plastic pollution, one wonders why the considerable number of health fetishists in the elite aren’t loudly demanding reforms.
And the worst is it’s not as if this environmental threat can’t be greatly reduced: https://t.co/7YxSwYvFJt
So why didn’t Trump appoint RFK, Jr., an environmental lawyer, to the EPA, where he could have done a lot of good by going after abuses and weak enforcement in areas where it affects health? It seems that the real agenda is deregulation. Trump and RFK, Jr. seem to labor under the misguided view that deregulation n the medical area will improve health, when the record with the environment shows the opposite.
By Shannon Kelleher. Originally published at The New Lede
ederal regulators have enabled US plastics plants across the country to dump dangerous chemicals into waterways by failing to update wastewater limits for over 30 years, according to a new analysis by a watchdog group.
While the Clean Water Act requires the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review wastewater discharge limits every five years to keep up with advances in water treatment technologies, the agency has not updated its guidelines for the plastics sector since 1993.
“Most folks don’t know that the plastics industry is not required to use modern wastewater treatment controls to limit the amount of pollution they pour into our waterways,” Jen Duggan, the executive director of EIP, said in a press call Thursday. “It’s long past time these plants clean up.”
In its analysis, the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) focused on 70 plants that make raw plastics called “nurdles,” tiny pellets later used to make products such as water bottles, food containers and toy
Over 80% of the plants violated pollution limits in their permits at least once between 2021 and 2023, according to the report, yet the EPA only issued financial penalties to 14% of violators, the report found. The Chemours Washington Works plant in West Virginia received 115 violations over this period – more than any other plant studied – but was not issued any penalties by regulators, the EIP analysis found.
Additionally, 40% of the plastics plants are operating on outdated water pollution control permits, the study found.
The EPA said it is reviewing the report and would “respond appropriately.”
The report comes as nations prepare for further negotiations this month in Busan, Korea over a global treaty designed to curb plastic pollution. While the plastics treaty is “incredibly important,” said Duggan, it wouldn’t directly address discharges of harmful pollutants from plastics plants “anytime soon, if at all,” while implementing the existing Clean Water Act would dramatically reduce discharges, she said.
Most of the plants EIP analyzed lacked any limits in their permits for a number of concerning pollutants. None of the plants had limits on total nitrogen and only one had a limit on phosphorus— nutrients that can lead to toxic algae blooms and “dead zones” that damage waterways.
In 2023, the 70 plants released nearly 10 million pounds of nitrogen and almost 2 million pounds of phosphorus into rivers, lakes and streams across the country, according to the analysis.
The report noted that the EPA has not set any federal wastewater limits for 1,4-dioxane, a chemical classified by the EPA as a likely carcinogen that is produced when plants make plastic for water bottles, and dioxins, which the report calls “one of the most toxic chemicals known to science.” While a few plants’ permits included limits on these chemicals that were set by states, most did not.
Eight plastics plants reported releasing over 74,000 pounds of 1,4-dioxane into waterways in 2022 while 10 PVC plants reported releasing 1,374 grams of dioxins and similar compound the same year, according to the report.
“All of this data was provided to us by the industry itself,” James Hiatt, executive director of the nonprofit For a Better Bayou, said at the press conference. “The reality is, the numbers that we have are probably lower than the actuality.”
Petrochemical plants are also potential sources of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), so-called “forever chemicals” linked to certain cancer, hormone disruption and other health problems that are found in rivers and streams across the US. However, there is little data on PFAS released by these plants due to a lack of EPA limits or monitoring requirements, notes the report.
In April 2023, EIP and other environmental groups filed a lawsuit in the US Court of Appeals in the Ninth Circuit against the EPA over the agency’s outdated limits on toxic chemicals in wastewater from plastics plants, as well as oil refineries, fertilizer factories and other industrial facilities.
On December 5, the groups will present their oral arguments for the case, said an attorney for EIP.
Despite the shifting political tide following Donald Trump’s recent presidential win, Duggan said she expects the court will uphold standards set by the Clean Water Act.
“No matter what Trump’s plans are, Trump cannot unilaterally wave away these kinds of mandatory, statutory requirements,” she said. “The Clean Water Act has a very clear mandate that EPA update these water pollution standards to keep pace with technology. Even one of the most conservative courts in the country, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, has ruled to this effect.”
“This is a mandatory obligation imposed by a statute,” Duggan added. “It is a must-do. EPA can’t ignore it no matter who is in the White House.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... -says.html
As Rumours Swirl That Mexico Has Lost USMCA Case on GM Corn Ban, Sheinbaum Pledges to Protect Mexico’s Native Corn
Posted on November 15, 2024 by Nick Corbishley
The USMCA trade agreement, now in its fifth year of existence and up for renegotiation next year, is looking increasingly frail.
This is a story we have been tracking fairly closely over the past couple of years, and unfortunately, as things currently stand, it doesn’t look like it’s going to have a happy ending — unless, of course, you’re a Big Ag exec. Mexico has purportedly lost the dispute settlement panel brought by the US and Canada over its ban on imports of genetically modified corn for direct human consumption. That’s according to unnamed sources briefed on the ruling in a preliminary official report that has already been released to interested parties.
Those parties appear to include Mexico’s Economy Minister Marcel Ebrard. Speaking at a conference on the future of North America on Wednesday, Ebrard acknowledged that it could lose the corn dispute against its USMCA partners: “Now they have already given us the preliminary results of the [case], the process is not yet finished,… but maybe they will beat us.”
In other words, not only will the US government have sued Mexico for not buying their high-risk GMO products, citing basic precautionary reasons related to health and the environment, it also appears to have won the case.
Stiff Penalties
After a year of presentations and deliberations, the three arbitrators chosen to oversee the case are expected to issue a ruling by the end of this month. If that ruling goes against Mexico, as the sources cited by publications like El Economista claim, the government will have to reverse its 2023 decree banning GM corn for human consumption — or face stiff penalties, including possibly sanctions.
Mexico’s government may opt for the latter, says Timothy A Wise, author of Eating Tomorrow and senior adviser at the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy:
“If Mexico loses, it could accept the penalty but keep the policy. AMLO [President Andrés Manuel López Obrador] has also indicated that he would seek hearings in other international venues. What I think is safe to say is that Mexico has no intention of allowing GM corn into its tortillas.”
Whether that is true or not, time will soon tell. Early indications suggest that AMLO’s presidential successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, is not for budging. Two months before winning the presidential election in June, Sheinbaum signed an accord with Mexico’s peasant organisations to uphold the ban on transgenic maize in food and replace glyphosate with safer alternatives.
On the day of her inauguration, she learnt that US congressmen had just sent a letter to the US Trade Representative exhorting her to pressure Sheinbaum to back down on the GM corn ban. Uncowed, Sheinbaum used her inaugural speech to reiterate Mexico’s rejection of genetically modified corn. Yesterday, as rumours swirled that Mexico had lost the dispute, Sheinbaum announced that her government would in the coming days present a plan to enshrine the protection of the country’s non-genetically modified white corn in the constitution.
We have to differentiate between white corn and yellow corn. Mexico is self-sufficient in white corn and we have an obligation to ensure that the white corn cultivated in Mexico is not genetically-modified. This will be in the constitution as this is the best defence we have for biodiversity as well as for our health.
The potential health risks posed by GM corn — painstakingly documented by the hundreds of peer-reviewed studies cited in Mexico’s defence, including indications of serious kidney and liver ailments in adolescents after even low-level exposures to glyphosate — are magnified in Mexico, where the national diet revolves around minimally processed white corn, in particular tortillas. Cornmeal provides more than 60% of the average Mexican’s daily calories and protein, which is around 10 times the US average, putting Mexicans at 10 times the risk.
“The Emperor Has No Science”
In a recent article for TruthDig, Wise explains why a ruling against Mexico would make very little sense. A brief three-point summary:
Mexico’s restrictions have not reduced U.S. corn exports in any meaningful way. On the contrary, Mexican imports of US corn have actually surged to record levels during the year-and-a-half since the presidential decree, largely as a result of the country’s drought last year. And even as Mexico gradually phases out its consumption of GM corn for other purposes, mainly as animal feed, US farmers will always have the option of producing non-GM white corn and securing their Mexican markets for the long haul.
In its complaint, the US government alleged that Mexico’s approach to biotechnology is not based on science, and challenged the Mexican government to prove otherwise. Which it proceeded to do in emphatic fashion, “providing mountains of evidence from peer-reviewed literature that showed ample cause for concern about the risks of consuming GM corn and the residues of the herbicide glyphosate — most commonly known as Roundup — that often come with it.”
For its part, Mexico has challenged the US to show that its GM corn is safe to eat in the quantities and forms that Mexicans consume it, and has seemingly received no response. “As a Reuters headline put it in March: ‘Mexico waiting on US proof that GM corn is safe for its people.’ No such proof was forthcoming as the U.S. government flailed in its attempts to counter the hundreds of studies Mexico identified that showed risk. A U.S. filing claiming to rebut the evidence did no such thing.”
As Wise puts it, “the emperor has no science.” But that won’t prevent it from prevailing. The practice of science is a pale shadow of what it used to be, as KLG’s excellent essays keep reminding us.
If the Mexican government loses this case and is forced to repeal the 2023 decree banning GMO corn, it will have effectively lost the ability to set its own food policies. As notes an excellent backgrounder provided by The Nation, this would represent a brutal loss of national sovereignty and food security that could have reverberations far beyond North America:
Do nations have the right to determine their own food policies? Can they make laws to safeguard domestic agriculture, public health, the environment, and the genetic integrity of the national diet?
If sovereignty means anything, the answer to these questions is yes. Defending food supplies is an ancient cornerstone of the social contract, one enshrined in 21st-century trade pacts, including the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the successor to NAFTA. In December 2023, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador invoked this right when he banned genetically modified corn for human consumption and announced a plan to phase out the use of glyphosate, GM corn’s signature herbicide, which the World Health Organization calls “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The measure, said López Obrador, was necessary to guarantee Mexicans’ “rights to health and a healthy environment, native corn, [and] ensure a nutritious, sufficient, and quality diet.”…
[W]hatever [the dispute panel’s] judgement, the US-Mexican dispute has put a needed spotlight on mounting global concern about the consolidation of a global food system dominated by a handful of biotech and chemical firms. Mexico’s challenge has also bolstered its standing as hemispheric leader of an agroecology movement gaining momentum across the global south.
“If the biotech companies defeat maize in its center of origin, it will embolden them to do the same in other centers of origin,” said Tania Monserrat Téllez, an organizer with Sin Maiz, No Hay Pais (Without Corn, There Is No Nation), a coalition of groups in Mexico supporting the ban. “We are challenging an entire model of production that threatens not just Mexico, but the world.”
That model revolves around the mass production of lab-designed GM seeds for crops that will end up laced with toxic herbicides like glyphosate. The accompanying business model involves the ruthless enforcement of rigid intellectual copyright and patent laws. It is a business model that has been vigorously opposed by campesino groups throughout Latin America, which, together with North America, is one of the two most important regions of the world for GM crop cultivation.
In 2013, for example, Colombia’s government passed into law a resolution that sought to force the nation’s farmers to exclusively use certified seeds – patented by the world’s largest agribusiness companies. When Colombian farmers realised that sharing or giving away seeds – a practice that dates back millennia – was now a crime, they mounted a collective resistance struggle that brought large swathes of the country’s rural heartland to a standstill, culminating in direct, bloody clashes with government and paramilitary forces.
Eventually, Colombia’s Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional, not least of all because indigenous communities had not been consulted before its implementation. As Sheinbaum explained during her press conference, the GMO business model is one based primarily on forced dependence:
“Genetically modified organisms have an additional problem which is that the farmer always depends on the seeds. When he sows hybrid corn that is modified in the laboratory… he buys the seed and depends on the seed to be able to continue growing corn. At the same time, the genetic diversity of Mexico’s corn that resulted from our peoples’ toil and that has remained more or less in tact until [now] will be lost.”
That loss would be a tragedy not only for Mexico but for the world as a whole, as argues a 2018 article in Scientific American:
Commercial corn farmers in Mexico planted around 3.2 million acres during the rainy season; the rest—more than 11.5 million acres—was planted by campesinos, the researchers reported in August in Proceedings of the Royal Society. Using previous estimates, [the research team was] able to calculate that in 2010 alone family farmers in Mexico grew approximately 138 billion genetically different maize plants. The domestication of native maize across a wide range of temperatures, altitudes and slopes has allowed rare mutations to take hold that would otherwise disappear, Bellon notes. “Campesinos are generating an evolutionary service that is essential for them, for the country and, given the global importance of maize, for the world,” he says.
In a rational world, Mexico would be allowed — indeed, encouraged — to safeguard this treasure trove of biodiversity against GMO contamination. But alas, this is not a rational world.
That said, it’s not all doom and gloom just yet. There are at least two silver linings to this story:
As Wise muses, Mexico’s public filings in the GM corn case, which are now a matter of public record, “may actually reopen the debate in the US and elsewhere over the safety of GM crops and their associated chemicals.” Also, as AMLO has said, Mexico will take the case to other international fora. For its part, the Sheinbaum government has announced plans to boost local production of corn and beans, Mexico’s two main staples, while escalating its war on obesity. Whether it can actually deliver on those objectives, only time will tell.
Bayer, the owner of glyphosate (after buying Monsanto in 2018 in arguably the worst merger of modern corporate history), is in dire financial straits. As the FT reported earlier this year, “its breakup looks inevitable.” Its shares continue to slide, having already lost roughly 80% of their value since 2018, and are now worth just 20 billion euros, significantly below its net debt (39 billion euros). In its latest earnings statement, the much-diminished German chemicals giant reported a net loss of 4.18 billion euros in the third quarter. Worldwide sales of glyphosate are sinking and one of the worst performing regions for its agricultural market is Latin America. Just what the German economy needed…
With Friends Like These…
The US’ corn dispute with Mexico is one of a host of trade disputes that have been brought against the Mexican government by its USMCA partners since the signing of the trade deal in 2018. In 2023, Mexico had received the most investment arbitration claims under investment protection treaties worldwide, according to the Transnational Institute.
It is a trend that shows no sign of abating. In coming months, the Sheinbaum government is planning to pass over a dozen constitutional reforms, on (among other things) mining, energy, housing, agriculture and labour rights, etc, that are also likely to ruffle feathers in the C-suites of US and Canadian companies.
The USMCA trade agreement, now in its fifth year of existence and up for renegotiation next year, is looking increasingly frail. Trump is threatening to impose ratcheting tariffs of up to 100% on Mexican goods if the Sheinbaum government doesn’t close its border with the US. Of course, this could be pure electoral bluster coming from Trump. But if he does follow through on these threats, it would seriously undermine the very trade deal he himself helped broker as well as invite tit-for-tat tariffs from Mexico’s government.
Meanwhile, in Canada the governor of Ontario, Doug Ford, has called for the removal of Mexico altogether from the trade agreement due to its growing trade and diplomatic ties with China (a topic we covered just a couple of months ago).
“Since signing on to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Mexico has allowed itself to become a backdoor for Chinese cars, auto parts and other products into Canadian and American markets, putting Canadian and American workers’ livelihoods at risk while undermining our communities.”
The Canadian government is also up in arms about the Sheinbaum government’s plans to radically rewrite Mexico’s mining laws. For over three decades, Mexico has been a veritable paradise for global mining conglomerates, many of them based in Canada, serving up some of the laxest regulations in Latin America. That is now changing. The proposed reforms include a near-total ban on open-pit mining and much stricter restrictions on the use of water in areas with low availability.
Ford’s proposal to eject Mexico from USMCA has an ironic twist given that it was Mexico’s AMLO government that allegedly intervened to helped seal Canada’s membership of the USMCA. By late 2018, relations between Trump and Trudeau had soured to the point where Trump was threatening to leave Ottawa out of the trade deal altogether after already signing a preliminary agreement with Mexico. But AMLO apparently said to Trump: “No, we are going to have Canada participate as well.” And President Trump acceded.
Now, Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, Economy Minister and WEF Trustee Chrystia Freeland is paying Mexico’s government back by echoing US concerns that Mexico’s trade policy is not in line with its US allies on China. Speaking to reporters in Ottawa this week, Freeland claimed to have heard these concerns from people expected to serve alongside US President-elect Donald Trump, as well as current Biden administration officials and other US business leaders.
Another irony in all this is that as tensions have risen between the US and Mexico, business has never been better. Due to changing global trade patterns and nearshoring strategies, Mexico has become the US’ biggest trading partner, as the volume of goods the US buys from its southern neighbour has surged past those of China and Canada. Exports to the US from Mexico have increased 20 percent-plus annually between 2020 and mid-2024 while exports from China have steadily fallen, according to data cited by CNBC.
But while the Mexican economy may have benefited enormously from rising trade with the US over the past five years, the price tag is growing rapidly.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... ution.html
November 7, 2024
As Earth warms, droughts are getting bigger, drier and more frequent
Higher temperatures caused by anthropogenic climate change made an ordinary drought into an exceptional drought that parched the American West from 2020–2022. Evaporation accounted for 61% of the drought’s severity, while reduced precipitation only accounted for 39%. Evaporative demand has played a bigger role than reduced precipitation in droughts since 2000, which suggests droughts will become more severe as the climate warms.
“Research has already shown that warmer temperatures contribute to drought, but this is, to our knowledge, the first study that actually shows that moisture loss due to demand is greater than the moisture loss due to lack of rainfall,” said Rong Fu, a UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and corresponding author of a study published in Science Advances.
Historically, drought in the West has been caused by lack of precipitation, and evaporative demand has played a small role. Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels has resulted in higher average temperatures that complicate this picture. While drought-induced by natural fluctuations in rainfall still exist, there’s more heat to suck moisture from bodies of water, plants and soil. Now rising temperatures are leading to intense droughts, with precipitation as a secondary factor.Anthropogenic warming has ushered in an era of temperature-dominated droughts in the western United States
“Historically, meteorological drought in the western United States (WUS) has been driven primarily by precipitation deficits. However, our observational analysis shows that, since around 2000, rising surface temperature and the resulting high evaporative demand have contributed more to drought severity (62%) and coverage (66%) over the WUS than precipitation deficit. This increase in evaporative demand during droughts, mostly attributable to anthropogenic warming according to analyses of both observations and climate model simulations, is the main cause of the increased drought severity and coverage. The unprecedented 2020–2022 WUS drought exemplifies this shift in drought drivers, with high evaporative demand accounting for 61% of its severity, compared to 39% from precipitation deficit. Climate model simulations corroborate this shift and project that, under the fossil-fueled development scenario (SSP5-8.5), droughts like the 2020–2022 event will transition from a one-in-more-than-a-thousand-year event in the pre-2022 period to a 1-in-60-year event by the mid-21st century and to a 1-in-6-year event by the late-21st century.” [Science Advances, November 6, 2024]
A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor before the air mass becomes saturated, allowing water to condense and precipitation to form. In order to rain, water molecules in the atmosphere need to come together. Heat keeps water molecules moving and bouncing off each other, preventing them from condensing. This creates a cycle in which the warmer the planet gets, the more water will evaporate into the atmosphere — but the smaller fraction will return as rain. Therefore, droughts will last longer, cover wider areas and be even drier with every little bit that the planet warms.
UCLA researchers found that climate change has accounted for 80% of the increase in evaporative demand since 2000. During the drought periods, that figure increased to more than 90%, making climate change the single biggest driver increasing drought severity and expansion of drought area since 2000.
Compared to the 1948–1999 period, the average drought area from 2000–2022 increased 17% over the American West due to an increase in evaporative demand. Since 2000, in 66% of the historical and emerging drought-prone regions, high evaporative demand alone can cause drought, meaning drought can occur even without precipitation deficit. Before 2000, that was only true for 26% of the area.
“During the drought of 2020–2022, moisture demand really spiked,” Fu said. “Though the drought began through a natural reduction in precipitation, I would say its severity was increased from the equivalent of ‘moderate’ to ‘exceptional’ on the drought severity scale due to climate change.” Moderate means the 10–20% strongest drought, while “exceptional’ means the top 2% strongest drought on the severity scale, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Further climate model simulations corroborate these findings. That leads to projections that greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels will turn droughts like the 2020–2022 from exceedingly rare events occurring every thousand years to events that happen every 60 years by the mid-21st century and every six years by the late 21st century.
“Even if precipitation looks normal, we can still have drought because moisture demand has increased so much and there simply isn’t enough water to keep up with that increased demand,” Fu said. “This is not something you could build bigger reservoirs or something to prevent because when the atmosphere warms, it will just suck up more moisture everywhere. The only way to prevent this is to stop temperatures from increasing, which means we have to stop emitting greenhouse gases.”
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... s-drought/
Fossil fuel CO2 emissions set new record
November 13, 2024
‘No sign’ of transition; CO2 removal captures only one-millionth of new emissions
Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels will reach a record high in 2024, according to new research.
The 2024 Global Carbon Budget projects fossil carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of 37.4 billion tonnes, up 0.8% from 2023. A preprint of the 19th annual annual report, produced by an international team of more than 120 scientists, provides was published in the journal Earth System Science Data on November 13.
Despite the urgent need to cut emissions to slow climate change, the researchers say there is still “no sign” that the world has reached a peak in fossil CO2 emissions.
With projected emissions from land-use change (such as deforestation) of 4.2 billion tonnes, total CO2 emissions are projected to be 41.6 billion tonnes in 2024, up from 40.6 billion tonnes last year.
Over the last 10 years, fossil CO2 emissions have risen while land-use change CO2 emissions have declined on average – leaving overall emissions roughly level over that period. This year, both fossil and land-use change CO2 emissions are set to rise, with drought conditions exacerbating emissions from deforestation and forest degradation fires during the El Niño climate event of 2023-2024.
With over 40 billion tonnes released each year at present, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise – driving increasingly dangerous global warming.
“The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly dramatic, yet we still see no sign that burning of fossil fuels has peaked,” said lead author Pierre Friedlingstein, of the University of Exeter.
“Time is running out to meet the Paris Agreement goals – and world leaders meeting at COP29 must bring about rapid and deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions to give us a chance of staying well below 2°C warming above pre-industrial levels. Until we reach net zero CO2 emissions globally, world temperatures will continue to rise and cause increasingly severe impacts.”
Other key findings from the 2024 Global Carbon Budget include:
Globally, emissions from different fossil fuels in 2024 are projected to increase: coal (0.2%), oil (0.9%), gas (2.4%). These contribute 41%, 32% and 21% of global fossil CO2 emissions respectively. Given the uncertainty in the projections, it remains possible that coal emissions could decline in 2024.
China’s emissions (32% of the global total) are projected to marginally increase by 0.2%, although the projected range includes a possible decrease in emissions.
US emissions (13% of the global total) are projected to decrease by 0.6%.
India’s emissions (8% of the global total) are projected to increase by 4.6%.
European Union emissions (7% of the global total) are projected to decrease by 3.8%.
Emissions in the rest of the world (38% of the global total) are projected to increase by 1.1%.
International aviation and shipping (3% of the global total, and counted separately from national/regional totals) are projected to increase by 7.8% in 2024, but remain below their 2019 pre-pandemic level by 3.5%.
Globally, emissions from land-use change (such as deforestation) have decreased by 20% in the past decade, but are set to rise in 2024.
Permanent CO2 removal through reforestation and afforestation (new forests) is offsetting about half of the permanent deforestation emissions.
Current levels of technology-based Carbon Dioxide Removal (excluding nature-based means such as reforestation) only account for about one-millionth of the CO2 emitted from fossil fuels.
Atmospheric CO2 levels are set to reach 422.5 parts per million in 2024, 2.8 parts per million above 2023, and 52% above pre-industrial levels.
The effects of the temporary El Niño climate event also led to a reduction in carbon absorption by ecosystems on land (known as the land CO2 “sink”) in 2023, which is projected to recover as El Niño ended by the second quarter of 2024.
Emissions from fires in 2024 have been above the average since the beginning of the satellite record in 2003, particularly due to the extreme 2023 wildfire season in Canada (which persisted in 2024) and intense drought in Brazil.
The land and ocean CO2 sinks combined continued to take up around half of the total CO2 emissions, despite being negatively impacted by climate change.
At the current rate of emissions, there is a a 50% chance that global warming will consistently exceed 1.5°C in about six years. This estimate is subject to large uncertainties, but it is clear that the time left to meet the 1.5°C target and avoid the worst impacts of climate change has almost run out.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... -going-up/
******
US EPA Enables Polluting Plastics Plants by Failing to Update Wastewater Limits, Report Says
Posted on November 15, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Due to so much competing news, we’ve been light on climate and environment coverage. Established readers may recall that Jerri-Lynn covered the war on plastics intensely. Then and now, the media reports how scientists are finding plastic in more and more places in human tissue. A few of many sightings:
Presence of microplastics in human stomachs Forensic Science International https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... d=coauthor
Microplastics found in brain tissue in new study EHN
Given the regular news about the extent and health damage from plastic pollution, one wonders why the considerable number of health fetishists in the elite aren’t loudly demanding reforms.
And the worst is it’s not as if this environmental threat can’t be greatly reduced: https://t.co/7YxSwYvFJt
So why didn’t Trump appoint RFK, Jr., an environmental lawyer, to the EPA, where he could have done a lot of good by going after abuses and weak enforcement in areas where it affects health? It seems that the real agenda is deregulation. Trump and RFK, Jr. seem to labor under the misguided view that deregulation n the medical area will improve health, when the record with the environment shows the opposite.
By Shannon Kelleher. Originally published at The New Lede
ederal regulators have enabled US plastics plants across the country to dump dangerous chemicals into waterways by failing to update wastewater limits for over 30 years, according to a new analysis by a watchdog group.
While the Clean Water Act requires the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review wastewater discharge limits every five years to keep up with advances in water treatment technologies, the agency has not updated its guidelines for the plastics sector since 1993.
“Most folks don’t know that the plastics industry is not required to use modern wastewater treatment controls to limit the amount of pollution they pour into our waterways,” Jen Duggan, the executive director of EIP, said in a press call Thursday. “It’s long past time these plants clean up.”
In its analysis, the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) focused on 70 plants that make raw plastics called “nurdles,” tiny pellets later used to make products such as water bottles, food containers and toy
Over 80% of the plants violated pollution limits in their permits at least once between 2021 and 2023, according to the report, yet the EPA only issued financial penalties to 14% of violators, the report found. The Chemours Washington Works plant in West Virginia received 115 violations over this period – more than any other plant studied – but was not issued any penalties by regulators, the EIP analysis found.
Additionally, 40% of the plastics plants are operating on outdated water pollution control permits, the study found.
The EPA said it is reviewing the report and would “respond appropriately.”
The report comes as nations prepare for further negotiations this month in Busan, Korea over a global treaty designed to curb plastic pollution. While the plastics treaty is “incredibly important,” said Duggan, it wouldn’t directly address discharges of harmful pollutants from plastics plants “anytime soon, if at all,” while implementing the existing Clean Water Act would dramatically reduce discharges, she said.
Most of the plants EIP analyzed lacked any limits in their permits for a number of concerning pollutants. None of the plants had limits on total nitrogen and only one had a limit on phosphorus— nutrients that can lead to toxic algae blooms and “dead zones” that damage waterways.
In 2023, the 70 plants released nearly 10 million pounds of nitrogen and almost 2 million pounds of phosphorus into rivers, lakes and streams across the country, according to the analysis.
The report noted that the EPA has not set any federal wastewater limits for 1,4-dioxane, a chemical classified by the EPA as a likely carcinogen that is produced when plants make plastic for water bottles, and dioxins, which the report calls “one of the most toxic chemicals known to science.” While a few plants’ permits included limits on these chemicals that were set by states, most did not.
Eight plastics plants reported releasing over 74,000 pounds of 1,4-dioxane into waterways in 2022 while 10 PVC plants reported releasing 1,374 grams of dioxins and similar compound the same year, according to the report.
“All of this data was provided to us by the industry itself,” James Hiatt, executive director of the nonprofit For a Better Bayou, said at the press conference. “The reality is, the numbers that we have are probably lower than the actuality.”
Petrochemical plants are also potential sources of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), so-called “forever chemicals” linked to certain cancer, hormone disruption and other health problems that are found in rivers and streams across the US. However, there is little data on PFAS released by these plants due to a lack of EPA limits or monitoring requirements, notes the report.
In April 2023, EIP and other environmental groups filed a lawsuit in the US Court of Appeals in the Ninth Circuit against the EPA over the agency’s outdated limits on toxic chemicals in wastewater from plastics plants, as well as oil refineries, fertilizer factories and other industrial facilities.
On December 5, the groups will present their oral arguments for the case, said an attorney for EIP.
Despite the shifting political tide following Donald Trump’s recent presidential win, Duggan said she expects the court will uphold standards set by the Clean Water Act.
“No matter what Trump’s plans are, Trump cannot unilaterally wave away these kinds of mandatory, statutory requirements,” she said. “The Clean Water Act has a very clear mandate that EPA update these water pollution standards to keep pace with technology. Even one of the most conservative courts in the country, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, has ruled to this effect.”
“This is a mandatory obligation imposed by a statute,” Duggan added. “It is a must-do. EPA can’t ignore it no matter who is in the White House.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... -says.html
As Rumours Swirl That Mexico Has Lost USMCA Case on GM Corn Ban, Sheinbaum Pledges to Protect Mexico’s Native Corn
Posted on November 15, 2024 by Nick Corbishley
The USMCA trade agreement, now in its fifth year of existence and up for renegotiation next year, is looking increasingly frail.
This is a story we have been tracking fairly closely over the past couple of years, and unfortunately, as things currently stand, it doesn’t look like it’s going to have a happy ending — unless, of course, you’re a Big Ag exec. Mexico has purportedly lost the dispute settlement panel brought by the US and Canada over its ban on imports of genetically modified corn for direct human consumption. That’s according to unnamed sources briefed on the ruling in a preliminary official report that has already been released to interested parties.
Those parties appear to include Mexico’s Economy Minister Marcel Ebrard. Speaking at a conference on the future of North America on Wednesday, Ebrard acknowledged that it could lose the corn dispute against its USMCA partners: “Now they have already given us the preliminary results of the [case], the process is not yet finished,… but maybe they will beat us.”
In other words, not only will the US government have sued Mexico for not buying their high-risk GMO products, citing basic precautionary reasons related to health and the environment, it also appears to have won the case.
Stiff Penalties
After a year of presentations and deliberations, the three arbitrators chosen to oversee the case are expected to issue a ruling by the end of this month. If that ruling goes against Mexico, as the sources cited by publications like El Economista claim, the government will have to reverse its 2023 decree banning GM corn for human consumption — or face stiff penalties, including possibly sanctions.
Mexico’s government may opt for the latter, says Timothy A Wise, author of Eating Tomorrow and senior adviser at the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy:
“If Mexico loses, it could accept the penalty but keep the policy. AMLO [President Andrés Manuel López Obrador] has also indicated that he would seek hearings in other international venues. What I think is safe to say is that Mexico has no intention of allowing GM corn into its tortillas.”
Whether that is true or not, time will soon tell. Early indications suggest that AMLO’s presidential successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, is not for budging. Two months before winning the presidential election in June, Sheinbaum signed an accord with Mexico’s peasant organisations to uphold the ban on transgenic maize in food and replace glyphosate with safer alternatives.
On the day of her inauguration, she learnt that US congressmen had just sent a letter to the US Trade Representative exhorting her to pressure Sheinbaum to back down on the GM corn ban. Uncowed, Sheinbaum used her inaugural speech to reiterate Mexico’s rejection of genetically modified corn. Yesterday, as rumours swirled that Mexico had lost the dispute, Sheinbaum announced that her government would in the coming days present a plan to enshrine the protection of the country’s non-genetically modified white corn in the constitution.
We have to differentiate between white corn and yellow corn. Mexico is self-sufficient in white corn and we have an obligation to ensure that the white corn cultivated in Mexico is not genetically-modified. This will be in the constitution as this is the best defence we have for biodiversity as well as for our health.
The potential health risks posed by GM corn — painstakingly documented by the hundreds of peer-reviewed studies cited in Mexico’s defence, including indications of serious kidney and liver ailments in adolescents after even low-level exposures to glyphosate — are magnified in Mexico, where the national diet revolves around minimally processed white corn, in particular tortillas. Cornmeal provides more than 60% of the average Mexican’s daily calories and protein, which is around 10 times the US average, putting Mexicans at 10 times the risk.
“The Emperor Has No Science”
In a recent article for TruthDig, Wise explains why a ruling against Mexico would make very little sense. A brief three-point summary:
Mexico’s restrictions have not reduced U.S. corn exports in any meaningful way. On the contrary, Mexican imports of US corn have actually surged to record levels during the year-and-a-half since the presidential decree, largely as a result of the country’s drought last year. And even as Mexico gradually phases out its consumption of GM corn for other purposes, mainly as animal feed, US farmers will always have the option of producing non-GM white corn and securing their Mexican markets for the long haul.
In its complaint, the US government alleged that Mexico’s approach to biotechnology is not based on science, and challenged the Mexican government to prove otherwise. Which it proceeded to do in emphatic fashion, “providing mountains of evidence from peer-reviewed literature that showed ample cause for concern about the risks of consuming GM corn and the residues of the herbicide glyphosate — most commonly known as Roundup — that often come with it.”
For its part, Mexico has challenged the US to show that its GM corn is safe to eat in the quantities and forms that Mexicans consume it, and has seemingly received no response. “As a Reuters headline put it in March: ‘Mexico waiting on US proof that GM corn is safe for its people.’ No such proof was forthcoming as the U.S. government flailed in its attempts to counter the hundreds of studies Mexico identified that showed risk. A U.S. filing claiming to rebut the evidence did no such thing.”
As Wise puts it, “the emperor has no science.” But that won’t prevent it from prevailing. The practice of science is a pale shadow of what it used to be, as KLG’s excellent essays keep reminding us.
If the Mexican government loses this case and is forced to repeal the 2023 decree banning GMO corn, it will have effectively lost the ability to set its own food policies. As notes an excellent backgrounder provided by The Nation, this would represent a brutal loss of national sovereignty and food security that could have reverberations far beyond North America:
Do nations have the right to determine their own food policies? Can they make laws to safeguard domestic agriculture, public health, the environment, and the genetic integrity of the national diet?
If sovereignty means anything, the answer to these questions is yes. Defending food supplies is an ancient cornerstone of the social contract, one enshrined in 21st-century trade pacts, including the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the successor to NAFTA. In December 2023, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador invoked this right when he banned genetically modified corn for human consumption and announced a plan to phase out the use of glyphosate, GM corn’s signature herbicide, which the World Health Organization calls “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The measure, said López Obrador, was necessary to guarantee Mexicans’ “rights to health and a healthy environment, native corn, [and] ensure a nutritious, sufficient, and quality diet.”…
[W]hatever [the dispute panel’s] judgement, the US-Mexican dispute has put a needed spotlight on mounting global concern about the consolidation of a global food system dominated by a handful of biotech and chemical firms. Mexico’s challenge has also bolstered its standing as hemispheric leader of an agroecology movement gaining momentum across the global south.
“If the biotech companies defeat maize in its center of origin, it will embolden them to do the same in other centers of origin,” said Tania Monserrat Téllez, an organizer with Sin Maiz, No Hay Pais (Without Corn, There Is No Nation), a coalition of groups in Mexico supporting the ban. “We are challenging an entire model of production that threatens not just Mexico, but the world.”
That model revolves around the mass production of lab-designed GM seeds for crops that will end up laced with toxic herbicides like glyphosate. The accompanying business model involves the ruthless enforcement of rigid intellectual copyright and patent laws. It is a business model that has been vigorously opposed by campesino groups throughout Latin America, which, together with North America, is one of the two most important regions of the world for GM crop cultivation.
In 2013, for example, Colombia’s government passed into law a resolution that sought to force the nation’s farmers to exclusively use certified seeds – patented by the world’s largest agribusiness companies. When Colombian farmers realised that sharing or giving away seeds – a practice that dates back millennia – was now a crime, they mounted a collective resistance struggle that brought large swathes of the country’s rural heartland to a standstill, culminating in direct, bloody clashes with government and paramilitary forces.
Eventually, Colombia’s Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional, not least of all because indigenous communities had not been consulted before its implementation. As Sheinbaum explained during her press conference, the GMO business model is one based primarily on forced dependence:
“Genetically modified organisms have an additional problem which is that the farmer always depends on the seeds. When he sows hybrid corn that is modified in the laboratory… he buys the seed and depends on the seed to be able to continue growing corn. At the same time, the genetic diversity of Mexico’s corn that resulted from our peoples’ toil and that has remained more or less in tact until [now] will be lost.”
That loss would be a tragedy not only for Mexico but for the world as a whole, as argues a 2018 article in Scientific American:
Commercial corn farmers in Mexico planted around 3.2 million acres during the rainy season; the rest—more than 11.5 million acres—was planted by campesinos, the researchers reported in August in Proceedings of the Royal Society. Using previous estimates, [the research team was] able to calculate that in 2010 alone family farmers in Mexico grew approximately 138 billion genetically different maize plants. The domestication of native maize across a wide range of temperatures, altitudes and slopes has allowed rare mutations to take hold that would otherwise disappear, Bellon notes. “Campesinos are generating an evolutionary service that is essential for them, for the country and, given the global importance of maize, for the world,” he says.
In a rational world, Mexico would be allowed — indeed, encouraged — to safeguard this treasure trove of biodiversity against GMO contamination. But alas, this is not a rational world.
That said, it’s not all doom and gloom just yet. There are at least two silver linings to this story:
As Wise muses, Mexico’s public filings in the GM corn case, which are now a matter of public record, “may actually reopen the debate in the US and elsewhere over the safety of GM crops and their associated chemicals.” Also, as AMLO has said, Mexico will take the case to other international fora. For its part, the Sheinbaum government has announced plans to boost local production of corn and beans, Mexico’s two main staples, while escalating its war on obesity. Whether it can actually deliver on those objectives, only time will tell.
Bayer, the owner of glyphosate (after buying Monsanto in 2018 in arguably the worst merger of modern corporate history), is in dire financial straits. As the FT reported earlier this year, “its breakup looks inevitable.” Its shares continue to slide, having already lost roughly 80% of their value since 2018, and are now worth just 20 billion euros, significantly below its net debt (39 billion euros). In its latest earnings statement, the much-diminished German chemicals giant reported a net loss of 4.18 billion euros in the third quarter. Worldwide sales of glyphosate are sinking and one of the worst performing regions for its agricultural market is Latin America. Just what the German economy needed…
With Friends Like These…
The US’ corn dispute with Mexico is one of a host of trade disputes that have been brought against the Mexican government by its USMCA partners since the signing of the trade deal in 2018. In 2023, Mexico had received the most investment arbitration claims under investment protection treaties worldwide, according to the Transnational Institute.
It is a trend that shows no sign of abating. In coming months, the Sheinbaum government is planning to pass over a dozen constitutional reforms, on (among other things) mining, energy, housing, agriculture and labour rights, etc, that are also likely to ruffle feathers in the C-suites of US and Canadian companies.
The USMCA trade agreement, now in its fifth year of existence and up for renegotiation next year, is looking increasingly frail. Trump is threatening to impose ratcheting tariffs of up to 100% on Mexican goods if the Sheinbaum government doesn’t close its border with the US. Of course, this could be pure electoral bluster coming from Trump. But if he does follow through on these threats, it would seriously undermine the very trade deal he himself helped broker as well as invite tit-for-tat tariffs from Mexico’s government.
Meanwhile, in Canada the governor of Ontario, Doug Ford, has called for the removal of Mexico altogether from the trade agreement due to its growing trade and diplomatic ties with China (a topic we covered just a couple of months ago).
“Since signing on to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Mexico has allowed itself to become a backdoor for Chinese cars, auto parts and other products into Canadian and American markets, putting Canadian and American workers’ livelihoods at risk while undermining our communities.”
The Canadian government is also up in arms about the Sheinbaum government’s plans to radically rewrite Mexico’s mining laws. For over three decades, Mexico has been a veritable paradise for global mining conglomerates, many of them based in Canada, serving up some of the laxest regulations in Latin America. That is now changing. The proposed reforms include a near-total ban on open-pit mining and much stricter restrictions on the use of water in areas with low availability.
Ford’s proposal to eject Mexico from USMCA has an ironic twist given that it was Mexico’s AMLO government that allegedly intervened to helped seal Canada’s membership of the USMCA. By late 2018, relations between Trump and Trudeau had soured to the point where Trump was threatening to leave Ottawa out of the trade deal altogether after already signing a preliminary agreement with Mexico. But AMLO apparently said to Trump: “No, we are going to have Canada participate as well.” And President Trump acceded.
Now, Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, Economy Minister and WEF Trustee Chrystia Freeland is paying Mexico’s government back by echoing US concerns that Mexico’s trade policy is not in line with its US allies on China. Speaking to reporters in Ottawa this week, Freeland claimed to have heard these concerns from people expected to serve alongside US President-elect Donald Trump, as well as current Biden administration officials and other US business leaders.
Another irony in all this is that as tensions have risen between the US and Mexico, business has never been better. Due to changing global trade patterns and nearshoring strategies, Mexico has become the US’ biggest trading partner, as the volume of goods the US buys from its southern neighbour has surged past those of China and Canada. Exports to the US from Mexico have increased 20 percent-plus annually between 2020 and mid-2024 while exports from China have steadily fallen, according to data cited by CNBC.
But while the Mexican economy may have benefited enormously from rising trade with the US over the past five years, the price tag is growing rapidly.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... ution.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Extreme heat weakens land’s power to absorb carbon
November 17, 2024
Disturbing research suggests nature is losing the ability to absorb greenhouse gas emissions
The extreme heatwaves of 2023, which fueled huge wildfires and severe droughts, also undermined the land’s capacity to soak up atmospheric carbon. This diminished carbon uptake drove atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to new highs, intensifying concerns about accelerating climate change.
Measurements from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory showed that atmospheric carbon concentrations surged by 86% in 2023 compared to the previous year, marking a record high since tracking began in 1958. Despite this sharp increase, fossil fuel emissions only rose by about 0.6%, suggesting that other factors, such as weakened carbon absorption by natural ecosystems, may have driven the spike.
Typically, land absorbs roughly one-third of human-generated carbon dioxide emissions. However, research published in National Science Review on October 22 reveals that in 2023, this capacity fell to just one-fifth of its usual level, marking the weakest land carbon sink performance in two decades.
Changes in the declining northern land carbon sink (blue) and the variations of tropical land flux (green) for 2015–2023. The solid lines reflect analyses using dynamic global vegetation models while the dotted lines are based on data from NASA–JPL’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission.
Philippe Ciais, from France’s Laboratory for Climate and Environmental Sciences, explained,
“Our research shows that 30% of this decline was driven by the extreme heat of 2023, which fueled massive wildfires that ravaged vast areas of Canadian forest and triggered severe drought across parts of the Amazon rainforest. These fires and droughts led to substantial vegetation loss, weakening the land ecosystem’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide. This was further compounded by a particularly strong El Niño, which historically reduces the carbon absorption capacity in the Tropics.”
Widespread wildfires across Canada and droughts in the Amazon in 2023 released about the same amount of carbon to the atmosphere as North America’s total fossil fuel emissions, underscoring the severe impact of climate change on natural ecosystems.
The Amazon – one of the world’s most crucial carbon sinks – is showing signs of long-term strain, with some regions shifting from absorbing carbon to becoming net sources of carbon emissions.
The researchers suggest that the declining capacity of Earth’s land ecosystems to absorb carbon dioxide may indicate that these natural carbon sinks are nearing their limits and no longer able to provide the mitigation service they have historically offered by absorbing half of human-induced carbon dioxide emissions.
Current climate models might be underestimating the rapid pace and impact of extreme events, such as droughts and fires, on the degradation of these crucial carbon reservoirs, so achieving safe global warming limits will require even more ambitious emission reductions than previously anticipated.
Clement Albergel of the European Space Agency described the results as “particularly alarming, especially considering the difficulty the world is having limiting warming to 1.5°C, as laid out in the Paris Agreement.”
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... rb-carbon/
AMOC
Meltwater from Greenland and the Arctic is weakening ocean circulation, speeding up warming down south
Originally published: The Conversation on November 18, 2024 by Laurie Menviel, Gabriel Pontes (more by The Conversation) | (Posted Nov 21, 2024)
A vast network of ocean currents nicknamed the “great global ocean conveyor belt” is slowing down. That’s a problem because this vital system redistributes heat around the world, influencing both temperatures and rainfall.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation funnels heat northwards through the Atlantic Ocean and is crucial for controlling climate and marine ecosystems. It’s weaker now than at any other time in the past 1,000 years, and global warming could be to blame. But climate models have struggled to replicate the changes observed to date – until now.
Our modelling suggests the recent weakening of the oceanic circulation can potentially be explained if meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet and Canadian glaciers is taken into account.
Our results show the Atlantic overturning circulation is likely to become a third weaker than it was 70 years ago at 2°C of global warming. This would bring big changes to the climate and ecosystems, including faster warming in the southern hemisphere, harsher winters in Europe, and weakening of the northern hemisphere’s tropical monsoons. Our simulations also show such changes are likely to occur much sooner than others had suspected.
Changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
The Atlantic ocean circulation has been monitored continuously since 2004. But a longer-term view is necessary to assess potential changes and their causes.
There are various ways to work out what was going before these measurements began. One technique is based on sediment analyses. These estimates suggest the Atlantic meridional circulation is the weakest it has been for the past millennium, and about 20% weaker since the middle of the 20th century.
Evidence suggests the Earth has already warmed 1.5ºC since the industrial revolution.
The rate of warming has been nearly four times faster over the Arctic in recent decades.
Meltwater weakens oceanic circulation patterns
High temperatures are melting Arctic sea ice, glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet.
Since 2002, Greenland lost 5,900 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of ice. To put that into perspective, imagine if the whole state of New South Wales was covered in ice 8 metres thick.
This fresh meltwater flowing into the subarctic ocean is lighter than salty seawater. So less water descends to the ocean depths. This reduces the southward flow of deep and cold waters from the Atlantic. It also weakens the Gulf Stream, which is the main pathway of the northward return flow of warm waters at the surface.
The Gulf Stream is what gives Britain mild winters compared to other places at the same distance from the north pole such as Saint-Pierre and Miquelon in Canada.
Our new research shows meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic glaciers in Canada is the missing piece in the climate puzzle.
When we factor this into simulations, using an Earth system model and a high-resolution ocean model, slowing of the oceanic circulation reflects reality.
Our research confirms the Atlantic overturning circulation has been slowing down since the middle of the 20th century. It also offers a glimpse of the future.
As they travel northwards, the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Current cool as they lose heat to the atmosphere. The waters then become dense enough to sink to depth and form North Atlantic deep water, which travels southward at depth and feeds the other ocean basins. Modified from Nature Reviews Earth & Environment (2020)
Connectivity in the Atlantic Ocean
Our new research also shows the North and South Atlantic oceans are more connected than previously thought.
The weakening of the overturning circulation over the past few decades has obscured the warming effect in the North Atlantic, leading to what’s been termed a “warming hole”.
When oceanic circulation is strong, there is a large transfer of heat to the North Atlantic. But weakening of the oceanic circulation means the surface of the ocean south of Greenland has warmed much less than the rest.
Reduced heat and salt transfer to the North Atlantic has meant more heat and salt accumulated in the South Atlantic. As a result, the temperature and salinity in the South Atlantic increased faster.
Our simulations show changes in the far North Atlantic are felt in the South Atlantic Ocean in less than two decades. This provides new observational evidence of the past century slow-down of the Atlantic overturning circulation.
The addition of meltwater in the North Atlantic leads to localised cooling in the subpolar North Atlantic and warming in the South Atlantic. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01568-1
What does the future hold?
The latest climate projections suggest the Atlantic overturning circulation will weaken by about 30% by 2060. But these estimates do not take into account the meltwater that runs into the subarctic ocean.
The Greenland ice sheet will continue melting over the coming century, possibly raising global sea level by about 10 cm. If this additional meltwater is included in climate projections, the overturning circulation will weaken faster. It could be 30% weaker by 2040. That’s 20 years earlier than initially projected.
Such a rapid decrease in the overturning circulation over coming decades will disrupt climate and ecosystems. Expect harsher winters in Europe, and drier conditions in the northern tropics. The southern hemisphere, including Australia and southern South America, may face warmer and wetter summers.
Our climate has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. More rapid melting of the ice sheets will accelerate further disruption of the climate system.
This means we have even less time to stabilise the climate. So it is imperative that humanity acts to reduce emissions as fast as possible.
https://mronline.org/2024/11/21/meltwat ... own-south/
Sad Earth (Photo: Sara S_K_S / Flickr)
The planet under threat of breakdown
Originally published: Dissident Voice on November 19, 2024 by Robert Hunziker (more by Dissident Voice) | (Posted Nov 21, 2024)
There’s a new trend in the world that’s working against the planet, you know, the one you’re standing on. This new trend, over the past year or so, spells “thumbs down” for planet Earth. It’s a disheartening, and fraught with danger, change in attitude, dismissing commitments, left and right.
A figurative Planet Support Switch has been turned off by several key players. Proof of this agnostic attitude is found in every meeting of nations of the world over the past couple of years. They are turning their noses up on prior commitments. This is a new attitude. And it’s happening as climate change has turned into an ogre of destruction that’s impossible to ignore, featured on nightly news programs with automobiles tumbling as if children’s toys in torrential rivers of city streets (Paiporta).
Meanwhile, COP29, the UN Conference of the Parties on climate change, Nov 11th-22nd, is being held in oil-rich Azerbaijan. Such a strange coincidence: UN climate meetings have become an outgrowth of oil producer largess. After all, they do have spectacular venues, hmm. Gotta wonder what they’ll do to stave off all-time record heat, caused by fossil fuel emissions, Co2? The paradox is devastatingly inescapable.
A key data point exposes the challenge COP29 faces: Annual CO2 released into the atmosphere, 37.4 billion metric tons in 2023 vs. 9 billion metric tons in 1960.
According to Dr. Patrick McGuire, of the University of Reading and National Centre for Atmospheric Science: “The new Global Carbon Budget reveals a disturbing reality—global fossil CO2 emissions continue to climb, reaching 37.4 billion tonnes in 2024. Despite clear evidence of accelerating climate impacts, we’re still moving in the wrong direction. The need for rapid decarbonization has never been more urgent.” (Source: “Fossil Fuel Co2 Emissions Increase Again in 2024,” University of Reading, November 13, 2024)
Also, of more than passing interest at COP29, according to Victoria Cuming, head of global policy at BloombergNEF: “Donald Trump’s dramatic victory in the U.S. election will drip poison into the climate talks.” (Source: Bloomberg Green Daily: COP29 Climate Money Fight)
The planet is losing key support. Yet, it doesn’t take a climate scientist to figure out the planet has already gone ballistic with (1) rampant wildfires (2) torrential rains (3) massive destructive floods (4) brutal scorching droughts (5) pounding hailstorms (6) frightening thunder/lighting all unprecedented and all on a regular schedule nowadays. There are no more once-in-100-year storms; they’re every other year.
Recent talks on protecting nature at the UN Biodiversity Conference d/d October 21-November 1st in Colombia collapsed when nations could not agree on key goals. This was the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. It was a disaster: “Talks were overshadowed by a lack of progress on implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the landmark ‘Paris Agreement for nature’ deal made at COP15 in Montreal in 2022.” (Source: Carbon Brief Nov. 2, 2024) By summit’s end, only 44 out of 196 parties had come up with a new biodiversity plan. This is pitiful.
As for Net Zero prospects to halt global warming, forget it!
At the G20 summit September 9-10 countries demanded rolling back promises to cut back burning oil, coal, and gas (Source: “G20 Countries Turning Backs on Fossil Fuel Pledge, Say Campaigners,” The Guardian, Sept. 10, 2024).
Over the last few months, we’ve seen everyone from major corporations to countries backpedaling on climate commitments made in the recent months and years. Despite growing, urgent evidence that climate change continues to accelerate, this is no real surprise. ( Source: Countries Are Rolling Back Their Climate Commitments, Climatebase, October 7, 2024)
Global corporations from Ford to J.P. Morgan Chase are all rolling back their commitments to climate change, which is all deeply intertwined with what played out ahead of COP29, now playing before bemused Middle Eastern oligarchs.
“Instead of indicating that the money required to green the economy is ready to flow, industry leaders now say their first priority is delivering financial returns for clients—and that means energy-transition investments will only be undertaken if they’re considered profitable,” (Source: “Wall Street Wants You to Know Profit Comes Before Net Zero,” Bloomberg, September 18, 2024.)
The bankers are pointing their fingers at the politicians and governments, who have been largely unwilling to make significant headway in fighting climate change globally.
Meanwhile, stating the obvious, which cannot be emphasized enough, climate warning signs have never been stronger than this year. Just for starters, a 2—3-foot sea level rise hangs by a cryosphere thread at the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. If it goes down for the count, and there’s reason to think it’ll happen during current generations, all bets are off for 8 of the world’s 10 largest megacities, nestled along coastlines. This is but one of several tipping points at the edge, and tipping. The protagonist is fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide (CO2) which makes up around 76% of total greenhouse gas emissions, making it the primary greenhouse gas responsible for the majority of climate change impacts.
And it is a fool’s errand that carbon capture/sequester will save the day; it’s too slow too unwieldy too expensive too inefficient takes too long and overwhelmed by the task at hand, sans super-duper-effective technology. “Despite its long history, carbon capture is a problematic technology. A new IEEFA study reviewed the capacity and performance of 13 flagship projects and found that 10 of the 13 failed or underperformed against their designed capacities, mostly by large margins.” (Source: “Carbon Capture Has a Long History of Failure,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1, 2022)
Losing key support for the planet couldn’t come at a worse time. According to Perilous Times on Planet Earth: 2024 The State of the Climate Report, 25 of 35 planetary vital signs are at record extremes. Two-thirds with record-extremes is viewed by climate scientists as a clear mandate for a planet “on the edge.”
Alas, losing key support because of “concern over profits” is nonsensical and trivial at best, thinking small, not big. A report by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research contradicts that notion and exposes the silliness behind focus on “profit over planet,” to wit: “The analysis of data from 1,500 regions over the past 30 years showed that 30 percent have managed to lower their carbon emissions while continuing to thrive economically.” (Source: Green Growth: 30 percent of regions worldwide achieve economic growth while reducing carbon emissions, Potsdam Institute For Climate Impact Research, Oct. 29, 2024)
Beyond the insanity of profits at the expense of mitigation efforts for the planet, which exposes the underbelly of high-end capitalism, some good news: According to some climate experts, Trump’s re-election and his statements that green energy is a scam, and the likelihood that he withdraws the U.S. from UN Climate agreements might drive a new sense of unity, even building a coalition that actually does something positive to stop fossil fuel emissions to support a parched planet. It’s possible, but here in America Wall Street prefers profits over planet. Umm, honestly, shouldn’t that be reversed?
https://mronline.org/2024/11/21/the-pla ... breakdown/
November 17, 2024
Disturbing research suggests nature is losing the ability to absorb greenhouse gas emissions
The extreme heatwaves of 2023, which fueled huge wildfires and severe droughts, also undermined the land’s capacity to soak up atmospheric carbon. This diminished carbon uptake drove atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to new highs, intensifying concerns about accelerating climate change.
Measurements from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory showed that atmospheric carbon concentrations surged by 86% in 2023 compared to the previous year, marking a record high since tracking began in 1958. Despite this sharp increase, fossil fuel emissions only rose by about 0.6%, suggesting that other factors, such as weakened carbon absorption by natural ecosystems, may have driven the spike.
Typically, land absorbs roughly one-third of human-generated carbon dioxide emissions. However, research published in National Science Review on October 22 reveals that in 2023, this capacity fell to just one-fifth of its usual level, marking the weakest land carbon sink performance in two decades.
Changes in the declining northern land carbon sink (blue) and the variations of tropical land flux (green) for 2015–2023. The solid lines reflect analyses using dynamic global vegetation models while the dotted lines are based on data from NASA–JPL’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission.
Philippe Ciais, from France’s Laboratory for Climate and Environmental Sciences, explained,
“Our research shows that 30% of this decline was driven by the extreme heat of 2023, which fueled massive wildfires that ravaged vast areas of Canadian forest and triggered severe drought across parts of the Amazon rainforest. These fires and droughts led to substantial vegetation loss, weakening the land ecosystem’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide. This was further compounded by a particularly strong El Niño, which historically reduces the carbon absorption capacity in the Tropics.”
Widespread wildfires across Canada and droughts in the Amazon in 2023 released about the same amount of carbon to the atmosphere as North America’s total fossil fuel emissions, underscoring the severe impact of climate change on natural ecosystems.
The Amazon – one of the world’s most crucial carbon sinks – is showing signs of long-term strain, with some regions shifting from absorbing carbon to becoming net sources of carbon emissions.
The researchers suggest that the declining capacity of Earth’s land ecosystems to absorb carbon dioxide may indicate that these natural carbon sinks are nearing their limits and no longer able to provide the mitigation service they have historically offered by absorbing half of human-induced carbon dioxide emissions.
Current climate models might be underestimating the rapid pace and impact of extreme events, such as droughts and fires, on the degradation of these crucial carbon reservoirs, so achieving safe global warming limits will require even more ambitious emission reductions than previously anticipated.
Clement Albergel of the European Space Agency described the results as “particularly alarming, especially considering the difficulty the world is having limiting warming to 1.5°C, as laid out in the Paris Agreement.”
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... rb-carbon/
AMOC
Meltwater from Greenland and the Arctic is weakening ocean circulation, speeding up warming down south
Originally published: The Conversation on November 18, 2024 by Laurie Menviel, Gabriel Pontes (more by The Conversation) | (Posted Nov 21, 2024)
A vast network of ocean currents nicknamed the “great global ocean conveyor belt” is slowing down. That’s a problem because this vital system redistributes heat around the world, influencing both temperatures and rainfall.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation funnels heat northwards through the Atlantic Ocean and is crucial for controlling climate and marine ecosystems. It’s weaker now than at any other time in the past 1,000 years, and global warming could be to blame. But climate models have struggled to replicate the changes observed to date – until now.
Our modelling suggests the recent weakening of the oceanic circulation can potentially be explained if meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet and Canadian glaciers is taken into account.
Our results show the Atlantic overturning circulation is likely to become a third weaker than it was 70 years ago at 2°C of global warming. This would bring big changes to the climate and ecosystems, including faster warming in the southern hemisphere, harsher winters in Europe, and weakening of the northern hemisphere’s tropical monsoons. Our simulations also show such changes are likely to occur much sooner than others had suspected.
Changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
The Atlantic ocean circulation has been monitored continuously since 2004. But a longer-term view is necessary to assess potential changes and their causes.
There are various ways to work out what was going before these measurements began. One technique is based on sediment analyses. These estimates suggest the Atlantic meridional circulation is the weakest it has been for the past millennium, and about 20% weaker since the middle of the 20th century.
Evidence suggests the Earth has already warmed 1.5ºC since the industrial revolution.
The rate of warming has been nearly four times faster over the Arctic in recent decades.
Meltwater weakens oceanic circulation patterns
High temperatures are melting Arctic sea ice, glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet.
Since 2002, Greenland lost 5,900 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of ice. To put that into perspective, imagine if the whole state of New South Wales was covered in ice 8 metres thick.
This fresh meltwater flowing into the subarctic ocean is lighter than salty seawater. So less water descends to the ocean depths. This reduces the southward flow of deep and cold waters from the Atlantic. It also weakens the Gulf Stream, which is the main pathway of the northward return flow of warm waters at the surface.
The Gulf Stream is what gives Britain mild winters compared to other places at the same distance from the north pole such as Saint-Pierre and Miquelon in Canada.
Our new research shows meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic glaciers in Canada is the missing piece in the climate puzzle.
When we factor this into simulations, using an Earth system model and a high-resolution ocean model, slowing of the oceanic circulation reflects reality.
Our research confirms the Atlantic overturning circulation has been slowing down since the middle of the 20th century. It also offers a glimpse of the future.
As they travel northwards, the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Current cool as they lose heat to the atmosphere. The waters then become dense enough to sink to depth and form North Atlantic deep water, which travels southward at depth and feeds the other ocean basins. Modified from Nature Reviews Earth & Environment (2020)
Connectivity in the Atlantic Ocean
Our new research also shows the North and South Atlantic oceans are more connected than previously thought.
The weakening of the overturning circulation over the past few decades has obscured the warming effect in the North Atlantic, leading to what’s been termed a “warming hole”.
When oceanic circulation is strong, there is a large transfer of heat to the North Atlantic. But weakening of the oceanic circulation means the surface of the ocean south of Greenland has warmed much less than the rest.
Reduced heat and salt transfer to the North Atlantic has meant more heat and salt accumulated in the South Atlantic. As a result, the temperature and salinity in the South Atlantic increased faster.
Our simulations show changes in the far North Atlantic are felt in the South Atlantic Ocean in less than two decades. This provides new observational evidence of the past century slow-down of the Atlantic overturning circulation.
The addition of meltwater in the North Atlantic leads to localised cooling in the subpolar North Atlantic and warming in the South Atlantic. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01568-1
What does the future hold?
The latest climate projections suggest the Atlantic overturning circulation will weaken by about 30% by 2060. But these estimates do not take into account the meltwater that runs into the subarctic ocean.
The Greenland ice sheet will continue melting over the coming century, possibly raising global sea level by about 10 cm. If this additional meltwater is included in climate projections, the overturning circulation will weaken faster. It could be 30% weaker by 2040. That’s 20 years earlier than initially projected.
Such a rapid decrease in the overturning circulation over coming decades will disrupt climate and ecosystems. Expect harsher winters in Europe, and drier conditions in the northern tropics. The southern hemisphere, including Australia and southern South America, may face warmer and wetter summers.
Our climate has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. More rapid melting of the ice sheets will accelerate further disruption of the climate system.
This means we have even less time to stabilise the climate. So it is imperative that humanity acts to reduce emissions as fast as possible.
https://mronline.org/2024/11/21/meltwat ... own-south/
Sad Earth (Photo: Sara S_K_S / Flickr)
The planet under threat of breakdown
Originally published: Dissident Voice on November 19, 2024 by Robert Hunziker (more by Dissident Voice) | (Posted Nov 21, 2024)
There’s a new trend in the world that’s working against the planet, you know, the one you’re standing on. This new trend, over the past year or so, spells “thumbs down” for planet Earth. It’s a disheartening, and fraught with danger, change in attitude, dismissing commitments, left and right.
A figurative Planet Support Switch has been turned off by several key players. Proof of this agnostic attitude is found in every meeting of nations of the world over the past couple of years. They are turning their noses up on prior commitments. This is a new attitude. And it’s happening as climate change has turned into an ogre of destruction that’s impossible to ignore, featured on nightly news programs with automobiles tumbling as if children’s toys in torrential rivers of city streets (Paiporta).
Meanwhile, COP29, the UN Conference of the Parties on climate change, Nov 11th-22nd, is being held in oil-rich Azerbaijan. Such a strange coincidence: UN climate meetings have become an outgrowth of oil producer largess. After all, they do have spectacular venues, hmm. Gotta wonder what they’ll do to stave off all-time record heat, caused by fossil fuel emissions, Co2? The paradox is devastatingly inescapable.
A key data point exposes the challenge COP29 faces: Annual CO2 released into the atmosphere, 37.4 billion metric tons in 2023 vs. 9 billion metric tons in 1960.
According to Dr. Patrick McGuire, of the University of Reading and National Centre for Atmospheric Science: “The new Global Carbon Budget reveals a disturbing reality—global fossil CO2 emissions continue to climb, reaching 37.4 billion tonnes in 2024. Despite clear evidence of accelerating climate impacts, we’re still moving in the wrong direction. The need for rapid decarbonization has never been more urgent.” (Source: “Fossil Fuel Co2 Emissions Increase Again in 2024,” University of Reading, November 13, 2024)
Also, of more than passing interest at COP29, according to Victoria Cuming, head of global policy at BloombergNEF: “Donald Trump’s dramatic victory in the U.S. election will drip poison into the climate talks.” (Source: Bloomberg Green Daily: COP29 Climate Money Fight)
The planet is losing key support. Yet, it doesn’t take a climate scientist to figure out the planet has already gone ballistic with (1) rampant wildfires (2) torrential rains (3) massive destructive floods (4) brutal scorching droughts (5) pounding hailstorms (6) frightening thunder/lighting all unprecedented and all on a regular schedule nowadays. There are no more once-in-100-year storms; they’re every other year.
Recent talks on protecting nature at the UN Biodiversity Conference d/d October 21-November 1st in Colombia collapsed when nations could not agree on key goals. This was the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. It was a disaster: “Talks were overshadowed by a lack of progress on implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the landmark ‘Paris Agreement for nature’ deal made at COP15 in Montreal in 2022.” (Source: Carbon Brief Nov. 2, 2024) By summit’s end, only 44 out of 196 parties had come up with a new biodiversity plan. This is pitiful.
As for Net Zero prospects to halt global warming, forget it!
At the G20 summit September 9-10 countries demanded rolling back promises to cut back burning oil, coal, and gas (Source: “G20 Countries Turning Backs on Fossil Fuel Pledge, Say Campaigners,” The Guardian, Sept. 10, 2024).
Over the last few months, we’ve seen everyone from major corporations to countries backpedaling on climate commitments made in the recent months and years. Despite growing, urgent evidence that climate change continues to accelerate, this is no real surprise. ( Source: Countries Are Rolling Back Their Climate Commitments, Climatebase, October 7, 2024)
Global corporations from Ford to J.P. Morgan Chase are all rolling back their commitments to climate change, which is all deeply intertwined with what played out ahead of COP29, now playing before bemused Middle Eastern oligarchs.
“Instead of indicating that the money required to green the economy is ready to flow, industry leaders now say their first priority is delivering financial returns for clients—and that means energy-transition investments will only be undertaken if they’re considered profitable,” (Source: “Wall Street Wants You to Know Profit Comes Before Net Zero,” Bloomberg, September 18, 2024.)
The bankers are pointing their fingers at the politicians and governments, who have been largely unwilling to make significant headway in fighting climate change globally.
Meanwhile, stating the obvious, which cannot be emphasized enough, climate warning signs have never been stronger than this year. Just for starters, a 2—3-foot sea level rise hangs by a cryosphere thread at the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. If it goes down for the count, and there’s reason to think it’ll happen during current generations, all bets are off for 8 of the world’s 10 largest megacities, nestled along coastlines. This is but one of several tipping points at the edge, and tipping. The protagonist is fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide (CO2) which makes up around 76% of total greenhouse gas emissions, making it the primary greenhouse gas responsible for the majority of climate change impacts.
And it is a fool’s errand that carbon capture/sequester will save the day; it’s too slow too unwieldy too expensive too inefficient takes too long and overwhelmed by the task at hand, sans super-duper-effective technology. “Despite its long history, carbon capture is a problematic technology. A new IEEFA study reviewed the capacity and performance of 13 flagship projects and found that 10 of the 13 failed or underperformed against their designed capacities, mostly by large margins.” (Source: “Carbon Capture Has a Long History of Failure,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1, 2022)
Losing key support for the planet couldn’t come at a worse time. According to Perilous Times on Planet Earth: 2024 The State of the Climate Report, 25 of 35 planetary vital signs are at record extremes. Two-thirds with record-extremes is viewed by climate scientists as a clear mandate for a planet “on the edge.”
Alas, losing key support because of “concern over profits” is nonsensical and trivial at best, thinking small, not big. A report by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research contradicts that notion and exposes the silliness behind focus on “profit over planet,” to wit: “The analysis of data from 1,500 regions over the past 30 years showed that 30 percent have managed to lower their carbon emissions while continuing to thrive economically.” (Source: Green Growth: 30 percent of regions worldwide achieve economic growth while reducing carbon emissions, Potsdam Institute For Climate Impact Research, Oct. 29, 2024)
Beyond the insanity of profits at the expense of mitigation efforts for the planet, which exposes the underbelly of high-end capitalism, some good news: According to some climate experts, Trump’s re-election and his statements that green energy is a scam, and the likelihood that he withdraws the U.S. from UN Climate agreements might drive a new sense of unity, even building a coalition that actually does something positive to stop fossil fuel emissions to support a parched planet. It’s possible, but here in America Wall Street prefers profits over planet. Umm, honestly, shouldn’t that be reversed?
https://mronline.org/2024/11/21/the-pla ... breakdown/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Environment: The future of humanity hangs in the balance
Originally published: Pearls and Irritations on November 24, 2024 by Peter Sainsbury (more by Pearls and Irritations) (Posted Nov 25, 2024)
‘Perilous times on planet Earth’
We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis. Despite warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024, and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius (°C) peak warming by 2100. Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage. We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence. We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo.
This is from the opening paragraph of an article in the journal Bioscience by fourteen highly respected climate scientists who feel it is ‘our moral duty and that of our institutions to alert humanity to the growing threats’. The article analyses the latest trends across an array of the planet’s vital signs, reviews recent climate-related disasters, and provides snappy summaries of an eclectic range of climate issues (e.g. human population size and consumption, energy, forests, coral bleaching, social justice, feedback loops and tipping points, and the risk of societal collapse).
Image: Supplied
Human activities that harm the natural environment and destabilise the global climate 1980-2024
Image: Supplied
Changes in the natural environment (climate anomalies) 1991-2024. In each case, the general trend of the last 30 years has become more extreme in the last two years.
The authors conclude that the evidence is ‘alarming and undeniable’, that the outlook for the world’s poor is ‘horrific’, that the world has made very minor headway on tackling climate change, indeed that we are currently going in the wrong direction, and that they fear the danger of a climate catastrophe and climate breakdown.
A few commendable but very broad and not new policy goals and ideas are proposed:
A rapid phase down of fossil fuel use as a top priority, partially achieved through high global prices on both carbon and methane. The revenue raised could be used for climate mitigation and adaptation programs and to restrain the emissions of the wealthy.
Transformative changes across society to drastically reduce overconsumption and waste, especially by the affluent, gradually reduce the human population, reform food production and consume more plant-based diets.
‘Adopting an ecological and post-growth economics framework that ensures social justice’—sounds great but it’s not clear exactly what the authors have in mind.
Greater effort to protect, restore and re-wild ecosystems.
The article finishes in the same vein as it started: ‘The surge in yearly climate disasters shows we are in a major crisis with worse to come if we continue with business as usual. Humanity’s future depends on our creativity, moral fibre, and perseverance. The future of humanity hangs in the balance’.
Donkeys in the outback
If you missed it, it’s worth taking a look at the ABC’s Australian Story broadcast on November 4th (or transcript available online). The story highlights a range of environmental dilemmas.
In a nutshell, Chris Henggeler bought the remote Kachana Station 120km south west of Kununura as the crow flies (and flying is the only way to get there) nearly 40 years ago. Chris is very determined, very innovative and very hard working and has had nothing but the best of intentions for the property since the beginning.
It didn’t take long for Chris to realise that the soil was blowing away, the land was becoming like a desert and that he had to do something to stop the rot. His first response was to destock but that seemed to make things worse. His controversial next move was to install more cattle and ‘wild’ donkeys, practising ‘holistic’ land management:
‘”We view our cattle to be the gardeners; to mulch, fertilise and prune the vegetation, build soils, rehydrate the landscapes,” Chris says.
The donkeys extend that work to places cattle don’t readily go; into the rocky ranges and spinifex-coated plateaus that make up the bulk of Kachana.’
Chris’s logic is that the hard-hooved cattle and donkeys are recreating the ground conditions that megafauna created when they roamed across Australia.
Not surprisingly, however, the WA Department of Agriculture and Regional Development don’t think much of Chris’s donkeys (‘feral pests’ in WA) and issued him with a cull order in 2021—a direction Chris has refused to implement. Chris has gathered evidence to support his case and has appealed to the WA Administrative Tribunal.
I am not at all qualified to comment on the science or the law in this dispute and I admit that there seems to be little doubt that Chris has created a much wetter, greener environment than existed a few decades ago. But the crucial point, as I see it, is not whether the country now looks more pleasant (to some eyes) than 30 years ago but the extent to which it resembles a pre-colonisation environment. Simply making somewhere verdant that hasn’t looked that way in recent centuries does not seem like nature conservation or regeneration. It seems more like the generation of a new ecosystem.
That said, the Department of Agriculture doesn’t have a problem with Chris’s (or any other grazier’s) cattle which have similar effects on the environment as his donkeys. The dispute may be more about what the WA law defines as a ‘pest’ than what’s good for nature.
Have a look at the program and see what you think.
Extreme heat reduces crops and farmers’ incomes
In Kansas, climate change is already seriously affecting farmers’ output and income. Forty years (1981-2020) of data on crop yields, farmers’ incomes and temperature covering 7,000 wheat, soybean and corn farms in Kansas has been used to examine the effect of extreme heat on crop yields and farmers’ income. A measure of farm exposure to extreme heat (extreme-degree days or EDD) was calculated from the number of days when the temperature was above 32o C (the temperature at which yields start to decline) and the amount by which the temperature exceeded 32o C on each day.
The EDDs per year increased from 54 to 57 between the first and second decades of the study.
Warming of 1o C was associated with a 16-20% reduction in crop yields and a 66% drop in farm net income. Although warmer temperatures also increased the length of the growing season, the negative effects of extreme temperatures were stronger than the positive effects of the longer growing season.
By 2050, hot days are projected to double and crop yields to fall by 20-30%.
Over a 30-year period, the value of the farmers’ land increased by 53% but it would have been 58% without the increasing extreme heat.
Farmers’ financial losses were reduced by having crop insurance (which halved net income losses from extreme heat), government payments, access to irrigation and smoothing yearly incomes by holding some crops in storage during good years (hardly a novel approach, Joseph, the one with the colourful coat, was a fan of that strategy thousands of years ago). The results quoted above took all of these strategies into account.
Australia is not Kansas but it’s difficult to believe that Australian farmers are not going to experience very similar problems. In fact, eastern and southwestern Australia are among the world’s crop growing areas most at high risk of water stress in coming years as a result of global warming and unpredictable rain.
| Image Supplied | MR Online
Image: Supplied
Action by individual farmers, farmers’ organisations, insurance companies, lenders, researchers, seed companies and government is required to help individual farmers manage their land and ensure an adequate supply of food as global warming increases. Strategies for managing water more sustainably and ensuring food security include: better measurement and risk assessment, reducing food loss and waste, shifting to more plant-based diets, not converting land to plantations for bioenergy, increasing water use efficiency, investing in nature-based solutions such as protecting and restoring forests and regenerative farming, and ensuring that water is distributed equitably throughout a basin.
Still increasing fossil fuel emissions create the perilous times
The production of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels and related industrial activities such as cement making, both in total and from each component, continues to increase despite 30 years of talking and promising. A further just lest than 1% increase in the total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels is expected in 2024 and there seems to be no sign that fossil CO2 emissions have peaked.
Fossil fuel related CO2 emissions (total top; by source bottom)
https://mronline.org/2024/11/25/environ ... e-balance/
******
After Ending in Overtime, COP29 Called ‘Big F U to Climate Justice’
Posted on November 24, 2024 by Conor Gallagher
Conor here: As this news broke I was reading an argument from Canadian environmentalist Tzeporah Berman that treaties to wind down fossil fuels could be hashed out among major emitters the same way the Cold War foes tried to limit the spread of nukes (an uninspiring comparison considering the New Not-So Cold War today).Is there anything that would get us there in an expedited time frame?
By Jessica Corbett, a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams, from where this piece was cross-posted.
It was early Sunday by the time the United Nations climate summit wrapped up in Baku, Azerbaijan after running into overtime to finalize deals on carbon markets and funding for developing countries that were sharply condemned by campaigners worldwide.
“COP29 was a dumpster fire. Except it’s not trash that’s burning—it’s our planet,” declared Nikki Reisch of the Center for International Environmental Law. “And developed countries are holding both the matches and the firehose.”
Recalling last year’s conference in the United Arab Emirates, Oil Change International global policy senior strategist, Shady Khalil highlighted that “the world made a deal at COP28 to end the fossil fuel era. Now, at COP29, countries seem to have been struck with collective amnesia.”
“With each new iteration of the texts, oil and gas producers managed to dilute the urgent commitment to phase out fossil fuels,” Khalil said. “But let’s be clear: Rich countries’ failure to lead on fossil fuel phaseout and to put the trillions they have hoarded on the table has done more to imperil the energy transition than any obstructionist tactics from oil and gas producers.”
This year’s conference began November 11 and was due to conclude on Friday, but parties to the Paris agreement were still negotiating the carbon market rules, which were finalized late Saturday, and the new collective quantified goal (NCQG) on climate finance.
“The carbon markets in Article 6 of the Paris agreement were pushed through COP29 in a take-it-or leave-it outcome,” said Tamra Gilbertson of Indigenous Environmental Network, decrying “a new dangerous era in climate change negotiations.”
Despite the best efforts of activists and some climate negotiators, the agreement reached on Article 6 carbon markets at #COP29 in Baku risks facilitating cowboy carbon markets at a time when the world needs a sheriff.
Negotiators failed to fix #Article6.@DiabolicalIdea…
— Carbon Market Watch (@CarbonMrktWatch) November 23, 2024
As Climate Home Newsreported, they establish two types of markets: “The first—known as Article 6.2—regulates bilateral carbon trading between countries, while Article 6.4 creates a global crediting mechanism for countries to sell emissions reductions.”
The outlet pointed to expert warnings that “the rules for bilateral trades under 6.2 could open the door for the sale of junk carbon credits—one of the weaknesses of the previous crediting mechanism set up by the U.N. known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).”
Jonathan Crook of Carbon Market Watch said in a statement that “the package does not shine enough light on an already opaque system where countries won’t be required to provide information about their deals well ahead of actual trades.”
“Even worse, the last opportunity to strengthen the critically weak review process was largely missed,” he continued. “Countries remain free to trade carbon credits that are of low quality, or even fail to comply with Article 6.2 rules, without any real oversight.”
As for Article 6.4, “much lies in the hands of the supervisory body” that’s set to resume work in early 2025, said Crook’s colleague, Federica Dossi. “To show that it is ready to learn from past mistakes, it will have to take tough decisions next year and ensure that Article 6.4 credits will be markedly better than the units that old CDM projects will generate.”
“If they are not, they will have to compete in a low-trust, low-integrity market where prices are likely to be at rock bottom and interest will be low,” Dossi added. “Such a system would be a distraction, and a waste of 10 years worth of carbon market negotiations.”
Some campaigners suggested that no matter what lies ahead, the embrace of carbon markets represents a failure. Kirtana Chandrasekaran at Friends of the Earth International said that “the supposed ‘COP of climate finance’ has turned into the ‘COP of false solutions.’ The U.N. has given its stamp of approval to fraudulent and failed carbon markets.”
“We have seen the impacts of these schemes: land grabs, Indigenous peoples’ and human rights violations,” Chandrasekaran noted. “The now-operationalized U.N. global carbon market may well be worse than existing voluntary ones and will continue to provide a get out of jail free card to Big Polluters whilst devastating communities and ecosystems.”
11/11 Instead of offsets, we must focus on phasing out #FossilFuels, investing in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and participatory policies. Communities need justice, not false promises. #ActOnClimate #RealZero #COP29
— 🕊 Seb Duyck @duycks.bsky.social #COP29 (@duycks) November 23, 2024
Chandrasekaran’s colleague Seán McLoughlin at Friends of the Earth Ireland was similarly critical of the conference’s finance deal, asserting that “Baku is a big F U to climate justice, to the poorest communities who are on the frontlines of climate breakdown.”
“COP29 has failed those who have done least to cause climate change and who are most vulnerable to climate breakdown because the process is still in thrall to fossil fuel bullies and rich countries more committed to shirking their historical responsibility than safeguarding our common future,” he said. “Now it’s back to citizens to demand our governments do the right thing. We must keep demanding the trillions, not billions owed in climate debt and a comprehensive, swift, and equitable fossil fuel phaseout. The struggle for climate justice is not over.”
Campaigners and developing nations fought for $1.3 trillion in annual climate finance from those most responsible for the planetary crisis. Instead, the NCQG document only directs developed countries to provide the Global South with $300 billion per year by 2035, with a goal of reaching the higher figure by also seeking funds from private sources.
The deal almost didn’t happen at all. As The Guardiandetailed Saturday: “Developed countries including the U.K., the U.S., and E.U. members were pushed into raising their offer from an original $250 billion a year tabled on Friday, to $300 billion. Poor countries argued for more, and in the early evening two groups representing some of the world’s poorest countries walked out of one key meeting, threatening to collapse the negotiations.”
While Simon Stiell, executive secretary of U.N. Climate Change, celebrated the NCQG as “an insurance policy for humanity, amid worsening climate impacts hitting every country,” Chiara Martinelli, director at Climate Action Network Europe, put it in the context of the $100 billion target set in 2009, which wealthy governments didn’t meet.
“Rich countries own the responsibility for the failed outcome at COP29,” Martinelli said. “The talk of tripling from the $100 billion goal might sound impressive, but in reality, it falls far short, barely increasing from the previous commitment when adjusted for inflation and considering the bulk of this money will come in the form of unsustainable loans. This is not solidarity. It’s smoke and mirrors that betray the needs of those on the frontlines of the climate crisis.”
Also stressing that “it’s not even real ‘money,’ by and large,” but rather “a motley mix of loans and privatized investment,” Oxfam International’s climate change policy lead, Nafkote Dabi, called the agreement “a global Ponzi scheme that the private equity vultures and public relations people will now exploit.”
“The terrible verdict from the Baku climate talks shows that rich countries view the Global South as ultimately expendable, like pawns on a chessboard,” Dabi charged. “The $300 billion so-called ‘deal’ that poorer countries have been bullied into accepting is unserious and dangerous—a soulless triumph for the rich, but a genuine disaster for our planet and communities who are being flooded, starved, and displaced today by climate breakdown.”
#COP29, held in a country with a track record of human rights violations and with significant restrictions on civic space, saw significant backsliding on #HumanRights, reflective of the broader political climate in many countries this year.
More pic.twitter.com/f8ykhq9gH4
— Center for International Environmental Law (@ciel_tweets) November 24, 2024
Rachel Cleetus from the Union of Concerned Scientists, who is in Baku, took aim at not only rich governments, but also the host, saying that “the Azerbaijani COP29 Presidency’s ineptitude in brokering an agreement at this consequential climate finance COP will go down in ignominy.”
Cleetus’ group is based in the United States, which is preparing for a January transfer of power from Democratic President Joe Biden to Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who notably ditched the Paris agreement during his first term.
“The United States—the world’s largest historical contributor of heat-trapping emissions—is going to see a monumental shift in its global diplomacy posture as the incoming anti-science Trump administration will likely exit the Paris agreement and take a wrecking ball to domestic climate and clean energy policies,” Cleetus warned. “While some politically and economically popular clean energy policies may prove durable and action from forward-looking states and businesses will be significant, there’s no doubt that a lack of robust federal leadership will leave U.S. climate action hobbled for a time.”
“Other nations—including E.U. countries and China—will need to do what they can to fill the void,” she stressed. “Between now and COP30 in Brazil next year, nations have a lot of ground to make up to have any hope of limiting runaway climate change.”
Ben Goloff of the U.S.-based Center for Biological Diversity called out the departing Biden administration, arguing that it “should be going out with at least a signal of its moral climate commitment, not copping out ahead of the Trump 2.0 disaster.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... stice.html
Data Centers Highlight the Limits of Renewable Energy Scaling
Posted on November 25, 2024 by Conor Gallagher
Conor here:
By Irina Slav, a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry. Originally published Oil Price.Yasha Levine
@yashalevine
·
Follow
worth it to clear cut 30% of the amazon
Lesbian Enforcer
@yuri_bullet
God bless AI art
[youtube]http://x.com/i/status/1860340436058902671[/youtube]
Data centers are turning into an unexpected obstacle that may well compromise the whole transition offensive against hydrocarbons.
Wind and solar could supply power to data centers for certain periods of a day, week, or month, but the bulk of the round-the-clock supply must come from baseload generation facilities.
The part about the affordability of the energy system likely has to do with emissions rather than money.
Until about a year ago, no one paid much attention to data centers. Everyone used them, of course, but they didn’t think about them. Then, the AI rush began. It was followed by a rush for energy supply. One year in, and data centers are threatening the very energy transition on which so many governments have staked everything.
Power utilities, regulators, and climate activists appear to be experiencing growing concern about the immediate outlook for oil and gas demand, Reuters reported this week, saying the fast growth in demand for electricity caused by the mushrooming of data centers had come as a surprise to many. There may have been some frustration, too, because wind and solar have been unable to scale up fast enough to cover this additional demand, per some of the people Reuters spoke to—even though there is no scale that would have covered that demand, not for intermittents.
The worry is real, for sure. The Washington Post also published a worry-laden article this week about the increase in electricity demand due to data center proliferation and the risk this is posing to “decades of progress cutting greenhouse gas emissions, as utilities lay plans for scores of new gas power plants to meet soaring electricity demand.”
Data centers are turning into an unexpected obstacle that may well compromise the whole transition offensive against hydrocarbons. Data centers need reliable, uninterrupted electricity around the clock, and there is no way either wind or solar, even with battery backup, can guarantee this to the extent that data centers need. No wonder their operators are turning to gas and coal generators. They’re even planning to build new nuclear and revive old nuclear. The race for electricity supply is on.
Natural gas generators and natural gas producers are only too happy to oblige, of course. After years of depressed prices, natural gas drillers are due some respite. They see it in the surge in electricity demand driven by data centers and their new and much greater needs originating with AI development. Data centers have become more power hungry. Gas is the most easily available source of that power.
Last month, S&P Global estimated that growth in data centers could add between 3 billion cu ft and 6 billion cu ft in new daily gas demand to the U.S. total by 2030. “We believe that combination of data center demand and ongoing security concerns will underpin hydrocarbon revenues, and particularly natural gas demand, for at least the next decade,” S&P analysts said.
Indeed, the ratings agency expects electricity demand from data centers to grow at an annual rate of 12% over the next six years, which is certainly a healthy pace from natural gas producers’ perspective. And there is no realistic way this demand can be reliably met by wind and solar, the pillars of the energy transition. Yet this does not mean that pressure on data center operators to green-up is not growing.
“I think everyone agrees that we need more and more renewable energy to keep up with a growing demand,” Meta spokesman Jim Cullinan said recently, as quoted by Reuters. “I think it is up to the utilities to comment on how they will fill the supply.”
Passing the ball to the power utilities, however, is not going to change the situation. That situation is that wind and solar could supply power to data centers for certain periods of a day, week, or month, but the bulk of the round-the-clock supply must come from baseload generation facilities, emissions and all. With that, the data center situation gives us a taste of what the energy transition would actually look like—because the central idea of the transition is total electrification.
“Data centers are just a warm-up act compared to the amount of electrification we’re going to have going forward,” the chief executive of transition advocacy outlet RMI told Reuters. “And if our first instinct is to start building gas plants and nuclear plants in order to do that, we’re just going to create an energy system we cannot afford.”
The part about the affordability of the energy system likely has to do with emissions rather than money, but the first part about data centers being a warm-up is spot-on. The surge in electricity demand from these facilities is an excellent illustration of the insurmountable obstacles to the success of the energy transition as envisioned by its net-zero champions. It also exposes the shortcomings of wind and solar, and dispels the myth that they can replace, instead of complement, gas and coal generation.
Whatever Big Tech corporate spokespeople say, the fact is that their industry needs a reliable electricity supply, and the poster tech of the transition falls short on that very condition. One can either have green or reliable power supply. The sooner this gets acknowledged by the transition leaders, the better for everyone—including the planet.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... aling.html
So we eliminate the Pentagon and commercial data centers. That would be a good start beneficial to humanity.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
COP-out 29: The Baku Betrayal
November 27, 2024
The 2024 climate summit was a disaster for the developing world, a betrayal of both people and planet
by Michael Roberts
There was a tortuous and painful end to COP29, the international climate change conference held in oil-rich Baku, Azerbaijan. The main issue was how much would the rich countries hand over to the poor countries to pay for the measures to mitigate global warming and handle the damage caused by rising ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions. The finance target set was for more than $1.3trn a year by 2035. But the final deal was based on just $300bn in actual grants and low-interest loans from the developed world. The rest would have to come from private investors and perhaps levies on fossil fuels and frequent flyers – the details of which remained vague.
The offer from the ‘developed’ countries, funded from their national budgets and overseas aid, is supposed to form the inner core of a so-called ‘layered’ finance settlement, accompanied by a middle layer of new forms of finance such as new taxes on fossil fuels and high-carbon activities, carbon trading and ‘innovative’ forms of finance; and an outermost layer of investment from the private sector, into projects such as solar and windfarms. This was a cop-out from providing real money transfers.
Mohamed Adow, director of the Power Shift Africa thinktank, said:
“This [summit] has been a disaster for the developing world. It’s a betrayal of both people and planet, by wealthy countries who claim to take climate change seriously. Rich countries have promised to ‘mobilize’ some funds in the future, rather than provide them now. The check is in the mail. But lives and livelihoods in vulnerable countries are being lost now.”
Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s climate envoy concluded:
“This is definitely not enough. What we need is at least $5tn a year, but what we have asked for is just $1.3tn. That is 1% of global GDP. That should not be too much when you’re talking about saving the planet we all live on.” The final deal “comes to nothing when you split it. We have bills in the billions to pay after droughts and flooding. It won’t put us on a path to 1.5C. More like 3C.”
More than 60,000 people had registered to attend the conference which had seen hotel prices rocket 500%. A standard room at the Baku Holiday Inn cost £700 a night for the duration of the conference compared to the usual £90. FlightRadar24, a flight tracking website, revealed that 65 private jets landed in Baku in the first week, twice as many as usual.
Edi Rama, Prime Minister of Albania commented
“People there eat, drink, meet and take photos together – while images of voiceless leaders play on and on and on in the background. To me, this seems exactly like what happens in the real world every day. Life goes on, with its old habits, and our speeches – full of good words about fighting climate change – change nothing. What does it mean for the future of the world if the biggest polluters continue as usual? What on earth are we doing in this gathering, over and over and over, if there is no common political will on the horizon to go beyond words and unite for meaningful action?”
At COP29, there was no further talk of ‘the transition away from burning fossil fuels’ as pledged by the world’s nations just a year ago, with 2024 on track to set another new record for global carbon emissions.
The latest data indicate that the planet-heating emissions from coal, oil and gas will rise by 0.8% in 2024. In stark contrast, emissions have to fall by 43% by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping to the 1.5C temperature rise target set by the COP Paris agreement. That target is dead and the planet is heading fast towards 2.0C rise (and above) compared to pre-industrial times.
Indeed, current policies put the temperature rise on track for a 2.7C rise. The expected level of global heating by the end of the century has not changed since 2021, with “minimal progress” made this year, according to the Climate Action Tracker project. The consortium’s estimate has not shifted since the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow three years ago. “We have clearly failed to bend the curve,” said Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga, from Climate Analytics. The expected level of warming is slightly lower when including government pledges and targets, at 2.1C, but that has also not changed since 2021. Warming in the most optimistic scenario rose slightly from 1.8C last year to 1.9C this year, the report found. We are causing global warming 100 times faster than past natural changes. “We are taking Earth’s climate beyond natural limits, with CO2 & temps levels not seen for 3 million years.” said Mark Maslin.
Changes in average global temperatures that sound small can lead to massive human suffering. Last month, a study found half of the 68,000 heat deaths in Europe in 2022 were the result of the 1.3C of global heating the world has seen so far. At the higher temperatures that are projected for the end of the century, the risk of irreversible and catastrophic extremes is also set to soar. Researchers warned their median warming estimate of 2.7C by 2100 had a wide enough margin of error that it could translate into far hotter temperatures than scientists were expecting. “There is a 33% chance of our projection being 3C or higher, and a 10% chance of being 3.6C or higher,” said Gonzales-Zuniga. The latter would be “absolutely catastrophic”, she added.
And it’s not just carbon emissions. The fossil fuel industry emits dangerous amounts of its methane emissions – the most damaging of the greenhouse gases. While it may not persist as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, over a 20-year timescale methane is 80 times more potent at trapping heat. It has been responsible for an estimated 30 per cent of the world’s warming since the industrial revolution.
Methane emissions are rising at a record rate, according to a study published in September in the journal Earth System Science Data. Over the past two decades, they have increased by around 20 per cent. Atmospheric concentrations of the gas are now more than 2.6 times higher than in pre-industrial times, the highest they’ve been in at least 800,000 years. It finds its way into the environment in several ways: vented into the atmosphere from oil and gas fields for safety reasons or in emergencies, or “flared” from pipes or chimneys, which turns it primarily into smoke and carbon dioxide. (If the flaring is inefficient, pure methane is emitted too.)
Fossil fuel air pollution is already responsible for 1 in 5 deaths worldwide —roughly the population of New York City. In the US, 350,000 premature deaths are attributed to fossil fuel pollution. Exposure to particulate matter from fossil fuels accounted for 21.5% of total deaths in 2012, falling to 18% in 2018 due to tightening air quality measures in China. In contrast, in India, fossil fuel pollution was responsible for the deaths of nearly 2.5 million people (aged over 14) in 2018; representing over 30% of total deaths in India among people over age 14. Thousands of kids under age 5 die each year due to respiratory infections attributed to fossil fuel pollution.
Mainstream economics has failed to recognize the scale and impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the world economy. William Nordhaus was awarded a Nobel (Riksbank) Prize in Economics in 2018 for modelling the costs and benefits of acting on climate change through limiting emissions. He pioneered the mainstream economic analysis of climate change. Nordhaus’ contribution was to develop a model that could supposedly gauge the likely impact on economies from climate change.
Nordhaus constructed so-called integrated assessment models (IAMs) to estimate the social cost of carbon (SCC) and evaluate alternative abatement policies. IAMs are used to calculate the social cost of carbon (SCC). They attempt to model the incremental change in, or damage to, global economic output resulting from 1 tonne of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions or equivalent. These SCC estimates are used by policymakers in cost–benefit analyses of climate-change-mitigation policies. But because the IAMs omit so many of the big risks, SCC estimates are often way too low. The values often depend crucially on the ‘discounting’ used to translate future costs to current dollars.
These discount rates are central to any discussion. Most current models of climate-change impacts make two flawed assumptions: that people will be much wealthier in the future and that lives in the future are less important than lives now. The former assumption ignores the great risks of severe damage and disruption to livelihoods from climate change. The latter assumption is ‘discrimination by date of birth’. It is a value judgement that is rarely scrutinized, difficult to defend and in conflict with most moral codes.
The discount rate used to calculate the likely monetary damage to economies is arbitrary. If we use a 3% discount rate, that means the current rise in global warming would lead to $5trn of economic damage (loss of GDP), but the cost in current money of global warming would be no more than $400bn, about what China spends on hi-speed rail. So, on this discount rate, global warming causes little economic damage and thus the social cost of carbon (SCC) is only about $10/ton and mitigation action can be limited. This is what Nordhaus used in his model.
But why 3%? In 2018, Nicholas Stern, of the famous Stern Review on climate change, took Nordhaus’ data and applied a 1.4% discount rate. The SCC then rises to $85/ton – meaning that it costs economies $85 for every ton of Co2, or closer to $3trn. More recently, using more complex methods and realistic assumptions than the original, estimates for SCC have risen to $180-300 a ton.
Nordhaus’ IAMs have flaws that make them close to useless as tools for policy analysis. IAMs struggle to incorporate the scale of the scientific risks, such as the thawing of permafrost, release of methane, and other potential tipping points. Furthermore, many of the largest potential impacts are omitted, such as widespread conflict as a result of large-scale human migration to escape the worst-affected areas. IAMs do not account for risks and uncertainty. These models estimate damages each year by some damage factor x multiplied by T2 that year–meaning the very simple damage function is a gently upward-sloping line.
Recently deceased climate economist Martin Weitzman, a colleague of Nordhaus, disagreed with this approach to ‘discounting’ the future,. Weitzman pointed out the tremendous uncertainty in the forecasts of climate impacts, including tipping points, large error bars, and ‘unknown unknowns’. In economics-speak, he characterized this as enormous “downside risk,” including a potentially small—but fundamentally unknown—chance of total human annihilation.
Weitzman argued that averages do not tell the full story. Indeed, a Pareto probability distribution function of the current projections has ‘fat tails’ that suggest there is a 1% likelihood of a 12⁰C increase in temperature. Weitzman: “the most striking feature of the economics of climate change is that its extreme downside is non-negligible. Deep structural uncertainty about the unknown unknowns of what might go very wrong is coupled with essentially unlimited downside liability on possible planetary damages.” With that kind of temperature increase, human life would probably not survive. The problem is that “nobody lives in ‘global-average-land’!”
The storm following a drought that dumps a season of rainfall in a day likely has implications for financial risk, but is not captured in metrics of average annual precipitation in a region. Economic models ignore these subtleties in climate. The model used by many of the world’s central banks, for example, relies on a damage function that relates regional economic and labor productivity to annual temperature and precipitation.
Steve Keen has argued that IAMs “assumed that empirical relationships derived from data on change in temperature and GDP between 1960 and 2014 can be extrapolated out to 2100—thus assuming that 3.2°C more of global warming won’t alter the climate! They have assumed that tipping points—critical features of the Earth’s climate such as the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon rain forest, and the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” which keeps Europe warm today—can be tipped with only “minimal additional damage to GDP”.
Econometric calculations based on past behavior ignore not only the ‘tipping points’ like methane releases from the melting permafrost, but also the ones that are far easier to to see, like the Great Salt Lake running dry. Society, too, has tipping points; infrastructure has breaking points; ecosystems have thresholds; after some level of temperature rise, crops don’t lose productivity, they just die—same with humans.
Despite the huge flaws in IAMs, they continue to have influence on policy, in particular to advocate ‘market solutions’ to climate change that do not require public investment in climate control or public ownership of the fossil fuel industry. For example, Nordhaus was invited by the ECB and the G20 to advise on measures to deal with global warming. Nordhaus’s answer was carbon pricing markets.
Nordhaus’ IAMs assume that the world economy will have a much larger GDP in 50 years so that even if carbon emissions rise as predicted, governments can defer the cost of mitigation to the future. In contrast, if you apply stringent carbon abatement measures eg ending all coal production, you might lower growth rates and incomes and so make it more difficult to mitigate in the future. Instead, according to Nordhaus, with carbon pricing and taxes we can control and reduce emissions without reducing fossil fuel production and consumption at source.
This is the tobacco/cigarette pricing and taxing solution. The higher the tax or price, the lower the consumption, without touching the tobacco industry. Leaving aside the question of whether smoking has really been eradicated globally by pricing adjustments, can global warming really be solved by market pricing? Market solutions to climate change are based on trying to correct “market failure” by incorporating the nefarious effects of carbon emissions via a tax or quota system. The argument goes that, as mainstream economic theory does not incorporate the social costs of carbon into prices, the price mechanism must be “corrected” through a tax or a new market.
Countries agreed a deal at the COP29 climate conference on rules for a global market to buy and sell carbon credits that proponents say will mobilize billions of dollars into new projects to help fight global warming. Yet carbon credits have proved to be faked. Last year, a Bloomberg investigation found that almost 40% of the offsets purchased in 2021 came from renewable energy projects that didn’t actually avoid emissions.
This approach is hopelessly inadequate and unworkable. The world’s clean energy plans (and they are only plans) still fall almost one-third short of what is needed to reach that figure. And to reach the necessary level of investment, climate finance will need to increase to about $9tn a year globally by 2030, up from just under $1.3tn in 2021-22, according to the Climate Policy Initiative. The $1.3trn target set by COP29 (and now not met anyway) is miles short.
At COP29, IMF chief, Kristalina Georgieva said that “98% of adaptation finance comes from public sources. This is not sustainable. We need to unleash the private sector at adaptation as well as mitigation. It can be done!” And ECB chief, Christine Lagarde added: “We urgently need to unlock all possible sources of capital, at speed and at scale.” But private climate finance is pathetic at just $21.9bn in 2022, according to the OECD. And much of the public funding so far has been taken from existing overseas aid budgets. Only $21-24.5bn of the $83bn remains as pure climate finance without strings attached, according to Oxfam in its Climate Finance Shadow Report 2023.
Why is the climate target not being met? Why is the necessary finance not forthcoming? It is not the cost price of renewables. Prices of renewables have fallen sharply in the last few years. The problem is that governments are insisting that private investment should lead the drive to renewable power. But private investment only takes place if it is profitable to invest.
Profitability is the problem. Average profitability globally is at low levels and so investment growth in everything has similarly slowed. Ironically, lower renewables prices drag down the profitability of such investments. Solar panel manufacturing is suffering a severe profit squeeze, along with operators of solar farms. This reveals the fundamental contradiction in capitalist investment between reducing costs through higher productivity and slowing investment because of falling profitability.
This is the key message from yet another excellent book by Brett Christophers, The Price is Wrong – why capitalism won’t save the planet. Christophers argues that it is not the price of renewables versus fossil fuel energy that is the obstacle to meeting the investment targets to limit global warming. It is the profitability of renewables compared to fossil fuel production.
Market solutions won’t work because for capitalist companies it is just not profitable to invest in climate change mitigation. As the IMF itself put it:
“Private investment in productive capital and infrastructure faces high upfront costs and significant uncertainties that cannot always be priced. Investments for the transition to a low-carbon economy are additionally exposed to important political risks, illiquidity and uncertain returns, depending on policy approaches to mitigation as well as unpredictable technological advances.”
Indeed:
“The large gap between the private and social returns on low-carbon investments is likely to persist into the future, as future paths for carbon taxation and carbon pricing are highly uncertain, not least for political economy reasons. This means that there is not only a missing market for current climate mitigation as carbon emissions are currently not priced, but also missing markets for future mitigation, which is relevant for the returns to private investment in future climate mitigation technology, infrastructure and capital.”
In other words, it ain’t profitable to do anything significant.
A global plan could steer investments into things society needs, like renewable energy, organic farming, public transportation, public water systems, ecological remediation, public health, quality schools and other currently unmet needs. And it could equalize development the world over by shifting resources out of useless and harmful production in the North and into developing the South, building basic infrastructure, sanitation systems, public schools, health care. At the same time, a global plan could aim to provide equivalent jobs for workers displaced by the retrenchment or closure of unnecessary or harmful industries.
Planning not pricing. COP29 offered nothing like that.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... l-in-baku/
Global plans require global socialism.
******
COP29 Puts World on Course for More Extreme Weather – and More Deaths
Posted on November 26, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. COP29 was such a disappointment that climate activists seem at a loss as to what to do next. Paul Rogers’ forecasts that it will likely take another decade of worsening weather and the fires and floods they generate to hit the Global North hard before advanced economies get religion about climate change. While the time frame sounds reasonable, there’s another factor that is likely to come to bite even sooner, and that’s diminished food production and rising costs.
In France, food prices had been increasing into the 1780s due to population increases outpacing food supply growth. A harsh winter in 1788 produced famines and food riots. During the 1997 Asian economic crisis, both Thailand and Indonesia had food riots.
If we have that sort of rupture, it’s not conducive to reaching a consensus on climate action, even if climate is the driver.
By Paul Rogers, Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies in the Department of Peace Studies and International Relations at Bradford University, and an Honorary Fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College. He is openDemocracy’s international security correspondent. He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers. Originally published at openDemocracy
While COP29 in Baku narrowly avoided collapsing, its results were bitterly disappointing for delegations from across the Global South, who ended up with barely a quarter of the annual $1.3trn of support they were seeking by 2035 to respond to climate breakdown.
Quite apart from other factors, more than 1,500 pro-carbon lobbyists worked hard to limit progress and ensure that burning oil, gas and coal at profit continues for as long as possible whatever the global consequences. After all, the world’s fossil fuel industries rake in around a trillion dollars in profits a year.
Meanwhile, more and more examples are emerging of accelerating climate breakdown. The flooding in Valencia is just one, but scarcely noticed in Europe is the thoroughly weird weather being experienced in the eastern United States.
This autumn there have been over five hundred wildfires in New Jersey alone, a 5,000-acre fire has been burning for a week on the New York-New Jersey border prompting a voluntary evacuation, and New York City’s Fire Department was called out to deal with 271 brush fires in the first two weeks of November alone.
As if timed for that and certainly released with COP29 in mind, Carbon Brief, a website covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy, has mapped every published study on ‘impossible’ weather events – record heatwaves or storms that would not have happened without the overall global climate changes.
The first such study came in 2004, the year after weeks of extreme heat hit Europe and killed 70,000 people across the continent over several months. That early example of an ‘impossible’ weather event kick-started a new field of research known as ‘extreme event attribution’, which looks at how climate change has influenced extreme weather.
There are now 600 studies of 750 such extreme events spanning the past 20 years – a tiny fraction of the total number of these kinds of events. Of these 750, Carbon Brief found that scientists and researchers had concluded that 74% were made more likely or more severe because of climate change.
This has added to the growing sense of urgency right across the climate science community coupled with a highly critical view of the whole COP process. Even before the dismaying summit in the Azerbaijani capital, both last year’s COP in Abu Dhabi and the year before in Egypt were notable for their lack of progress even as the urgency of preventing climate breakdown was becoming more and more obvious.
There are other risks to global security including nuclear weapons, pandemics, cyber warfare, AI misuse and the progressive destruction of biodiversity, but climate breakdown is different from all of these. It is not a future risk, it is a current happening, it is accelerating, and we now have very few years left to get on top of it. If we don’t then a worldwide catastrophe with many hundreds of millions dying and societal collapse will become increasingly likely.
Does it have to be like that?
As things stand, in terms of changing attitudes, developments in renewables, resistance of the fossil carbon industries and, of course, Donald Trump’s looming presidency in the US, a reasonable prognosis for the next decade has three elements.
First, the use of renewable energy resources does continue to increase but not at anything like the rate required, so net carbon emissions will continue to rise, not fall, for most of the next ten years. Second, resistance to decarbonisation will continue from many quarters, no doubt now including the White House. Finally, severe weather events will become both more common and more destructive.
Eventually, and it might take more than a decade, the disasters will be so great, including sudden weather events in rich cities in the Global North killing many tens of thousands of people, that public pressure across the world will force governments to respond. There will be no alternative to engage in truly transformative change.
But what that means is that the task ahead by then will be hugely greater than if the transformation starts much sooner, so timescales become crucial, especially what can speed up the process.
There is, though, one thing to remember at a time of widespread pessimism. If nations had got their act together 25 years ago after the Kyoto Protocols, were signed we would be in a far more favourable position worldwide than we are now. We are acting more than two decades late.
But climate breakdown is not happening as a slow, steady process of change, creeping up almost unawares. If that had been the case then with all the reasons not to act, especially the global fossil carbon lobby, we would have been in an even worse position now. Instead, it is happening at variable rates in two respects, some parts of the world – such as the polar regions – are warming up much faster than others and extreme weather events are happening much more often.
We are therefore getting a foretaste of what will affect everyone a few years before it does, and this gives us just a little more time to act. It means that the next ten years, and perhaps even the five years to 2030, will be the key time for us to come to terms with the transformation in society that is essential for global well-being. That is possible, just.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... eaths.html
Can Desalination Quench Agriculture’s Thirst?
Posted on November 28, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Perhaps I am a too much of a Luddite, but the search for more “affordable” forms of desalination to make brackish water in aquifers usable for crops seems more a testament of the intensifying pressure on water supplies than a hopeful story about “innovation”. The article does mention energy costs in passing. The article suggests the decentralized desalination plants would be solar panel powered, and the desalination does not need to be done continuously, but would they require enough in the way of solar panels to impinge on productive fields? It also discusses the problem of the disposition of the salty residues; the hope is that it can be reduced to salt crystals, which is easier to dispose of than intensely salty brine.
I’ve read about some of these technologies before (many years before) in articles discussing desalination in the Middle East, so it does not appear the technologies per se are new, but the refinement of the applications may well be. Nevertheless, it’s disturbing to see so much effort devoted to producing non-essential, water-intensive crops like pistachios rather than considering that maybe pistachios should be priced as a luxury good.
By Lela Nargi. Originally published at Knowable Magazine; cross posted from Yale Climate Connections
Ralph Loya was pretty sure he was going to lose the corn. His farm had been scorched by El Paso’s hottest-ever June and second-hottest August; the West Texas county saw 53 days soar over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer of 2024. The region was also experiencing an ongoing drought, which meant that crops on Loya’s eight-plus acres of melons, okra, cucumbers and other produce had to be watered more often than normal.
Loya had been irrigating his corn with somewhat salty, or brackish, water pumped from his well, as much as the salt-sensitive crop could tolerate. It wasn’t enough, and the municipal water was expensive; he was using it in moderation and the corn ears were desiccating where they stood.
The hidden threat from rising coastal groundwater
Ensuring the survival of agriculture under an increasingly erratic climate is approaching a crisis in the sere and sweltering Western and Southwestern United States, an area that supplies much of our beef and dairy, alfalfa, tree nuts and produce. Contending with too little water to support their plants and animals, farmers have tilled under crops, pulled out trees, fallowed fields and sold off herds. They’ve also used drip irrigation to inject smaller doses of water closer to a plant’s roots, and installed sensors in soil that tell more precisely when and how much to water.
In the last five years, researchers have begun to puzzle out how brackish water, pulled from underground aquifers, might be de-salted cheaply enough to offer farmers another water resilience tool. Loya’s property, which draws its slightly salty water from the Hueco Bolson aquifer, is about to become a pilot site to test how efficiently desalinated groundwater can be used to grow crops in otherwise water-scarce places.
Desalination renders salty water less so. It’s usually applied to water sucked from the ocean, generally in arid lands with few options; some Gulf, African and island countries rely heavily or entirely on desalinated seawater. Inland desalination happens away from coasts, with aquifer waters that are brackish — containing between 1,000 and 10,000 milligrams of salt per liter, versus around 35,000 milligrams per liter for seawater. Texas has more than three dozen centralized brackish groundwater desalination plants, California more than 20.
Such technology has long been considered too costly for farming. Some experts still think it’s a pipe dream. “We see it as a nice solution that’s appropriate in some contexts, but for agriculture it’s hard to justify, frankly,” says Brad Franklin, an agricultural and environmental economist at the Public Policy Institute of California. Desalting an acre-foot (almost 326,000 gallons) of brackish groundwater for crops now costs about $800, while farmers can pay a lot less — as little as $3 an acre-foot for some senior rights holders in some places — for fresh municipal water. As a result, desalination has largely been reserved to make liquid that’s fit for people to drink. In some instances, too, inland desalination can be environmentally risky, endangering nearby plants and animals and reducing stream flows.
But the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, along with a research operation called the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) that’s been granted $185 million from the Department of Energy, have recently invested in projects that could turn that paradigm on its head. Recognizing the urgent need for fresh water for farms — which in the U.S. are mostly inland — combined with the ample if salty water beneath our feet, these entities have funded projects that could help advance small, decentralized desalination systems that can be placed right on farms where they’re needed. Loya’s is one of them.
U.S. farms consume over 83 million acre-feet (more than 27 trillion gallons) of irrigation water every year — the second most water-intensive industry in the country, after thermoelectric power. Not all aquifers are brackish, but most that are exist in the country’s West, and they’re usually more saline the deeper you dig. With fresh water everywhere in the world becoming saltier due to human activity, “we have to solve inland desal for ag … in order to grow as much food as we need,” says Susan Amrose, a research scientist at MIT who studies inland desalination in the Middle East and North Africa.
Brackish (slightly salty) groundwater is found mostly in the Western United States. (Image credit: J.S. Stanton et al. / USGS)
That means lowering energy and other operational costs; making systems simple for farmers to run; and figuring out how to slash residual brine, which requires disposal and is considered the process’s “Achilles’ heel,” according to one researcher.
The last half-decade of scientific tinkering is now yielding tangible results, says Peter Fiske, NAWI’s executive director. “We think we have a clear line of sight for agricultural-quality water.”
Swallowing the high cost
Fiske believes farm-based mini-plants can be cost-effective for producing high-value crops like broccoli, berries and nuts, some of which need a lot of irrigation. That $800 per acre-foot has been achieved by cutting energy use, reducing brine and revolutionizing certain parts and materials. It’s still expensive but arguably worth it for a farmer growing almonds or pistachios in California — as opposed to farmers growing lesser-value commodity crops like wheat and soybeans, for whom desalination will likely never prove affordable. As a nut farmer, “I would sign up to 800 bucks per acre-foot of water till the cows come home,” Fiske says.
Loya’s pilot is being built with Bureau of Reclamation funding and will use a common process called reverse osmosis. Pressure pushes salty water through a semi-permeable membrane; fresh water comes out the other side, leaving salts behind as concentrated brine. Loya figures he can make good money using desalinated water to grow not just fussy corn, but even fussier grapes he might be able to sell at a premium to local wineries.
Such a tiny system shares some of the problems of its large-scale cousins — chiefly, brine disposal. El Paso, for example, boasts the biggest inland desalination plant in the world, which makes 27.5 million gallons of fresh drinking water a day. There, every gallon of brackish water gets split into two streams: fresh water and residual brine, at a ratio of 83% to 17%. Since there’s no ocean to dump brine into, as with seawater desalination, this plant injects it into deep, porous rock formations — a process too pricey and complicated for farmers.
But what if desalination could create 90 or 95% fresh water and 5 to 10% brine? What if you could get 100% fresh water, with just a bag of dry salts leftover? Handling those solids is a lot safer and easier, “because super-salty water brine is really corrosive … so you have to truck it around in stainless steel trucks,” Fiske says.
Finally, what if those salts could be broken into components — lithium, essential for batteries; magnesium, used to create alloys; gypsum, turned into drywall; as well as gold, platinum and other rare-earth elements that can be sold to manufacturers? Already, the El Paso plant participates in “mining” gypsum and hydrochloric acid for industrial customers.
Loya’s brine will be piped into an evaporation pond. Eventually, he’ll have to pay to landfill the dried-out solids, says Quantum Wei, founder and CEO of Harmony Desalting, which is building Loya’s plant.There are other expenses: drilling a well (Loya, fortuitously, already has one to serve the project); building the physical plant; and supplying the electricity to pump water up day after day. These are bitter financial pills for a farmer. “We’re not getting rich; by no means,” Loya says.
More cost comes from the desalination itself. The energy needed for reverse osmosis is a lot, and the saltier the water, the higher the need. Additionally, the membranes that catch salt are gossamer-thin, and all that pressure destroys them; they also get gunked up and need to be treated with chemicals.
Reverse osmosis presents another problem for farmers. It doesn’t just remove salt ions from water but the ions of beneficial minerals, too, such as calcium, magnesium and sulfate. According to Amrose, this means farmers have to add fertilizer or mix in pretreated water to replace essential ions that the process took out.
To circumvent such challenges, one NAWI-funded team is experimenting with ultra-high-pressure membranes, fashioned out of stiffer plastic, that can withstand a much harder push. The results so far look “quite encouraging,” Fiske says. Another is looking into a system in which a chemical solvent dropped into water isolates the salt without a membrane, like the polymer inside a diaper absorbs urine. The solvent, in this case the common food-processing compound dimethyl ether, would be used over and over to avoid potentially toxic waste. It has proved cheap enough to be considered for agricultural use.
Amrose is testing a system that uses electrodialysis instead of reverse osmosis. This sends a steady surge of voltage across water to pull salt ions through an alternating stack of positively charged and negatively charged membranes. Explains Amrose, “You get the negative ions going toward their respective electrode until they can’t pass through the membranes and get stuck,” and the same happens with the positive ions. The process gets much higher fresh water recovery in small systems than reverse osmosis, and is twice as energy efficient at lower salinities. The membranes last longer, too — 10 years versus three to five years, Amrose says — and can allow essential minerals to pass through.
Data-Based Design
At Loya’s farm, Wei paces the property on a sweltering summer morning with a local engineering company he’s tapped to design the brine storage pond. Loya is anxious that the pond be as small as possible to keep arable land in production; Wei is more concerned that it be big and deep enough. To factor this, he’ll look at average weather conditions since 1954 as well as worst-case data from the last 25 years pertaining to monthly evaporation and rainfall rates. He’ll also divide the space into two sections so one can be cleaned while the other is in use. Loya’s pond will likely be one-tenth of an acre, dug three to six feet deep.
The desalination plant will pair reverse osmosis membranes with a “batch” process, pushing water through multiple times instead of once and gradually amping up the pressure. Regular reverse osmosis is energy-intensive because it constantly applies the highest pressures, Wei says, but Harmony’s process saves energy by using lower pressures to start with. A backwash between cycles prevents scaling by dissolving mineral crystals and washing them away. “You really get the benefit of the farmer not having to deal with dosing chemicals or replacing membranes,” Wei says. “Our goal is to make it as painless as possible.”
Another Harmony innovation concentrates leftover brine by running it through a nanofiltration membrane in their batch system; such membranes are usually used to pretreat water to cut back on scaling or to recover minerals, but Wei believes his system is the first to combine them with batch reverse osmosis. “That’s what’s really going to slash brine volumes,” he says. The whole system will be hooked up to solar panels, keeping Loya’s energy off-grid and essentially free. If all goes to plan, the system will be operational by early 2025 and produce seven gallons of fresh water a minute during the strongest sun of the day, with a goal of 90 to 95% fresh water recovery. Any water not immediately used for irrigation will be stored in a tank.
Spreading Out the Research
Ninety-eight miles north of Loya’s farm, along a dead flat and endlessly beige expanse of road that skirts the White Sands Missile Range, more desalination projects burble away at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The facility, run by the Bureau of Reclamation, offers scientists a lab and four wells of differing salinities to fiddle with.
On some parched acreage at the foot of the Sacramento Mountains, a longstanding farming pilot project bakes in relentless sunlight. After some preemptive words about the three brine ponds on the property — “They have an interesting smell, in between zoo and ocean” — facility manager Malynda Cappelle drives a golf cart full of visitors past solar arrays and water tanks to a fenced-in parcel of dust and plants. Here, since 2019, a team from the University of North Texas, New Mexico State University and Colorado State University has tested sunflowers, fava beans and, currently, 16 plots of pinto beans. Some plots are bare dirt; others are topped with compost that boosts nutrients, keeps soil moist and provides a salt barrier. Some plots are drip-irrigated with brackish water straight from a well; some get a desalinated/brackish water mix.
Eyeballing the plots even from a distance, the plants in the freshest-water plots look large and healthy. But those with compost are almost as vigorous, even when irrigated with brackish water. This could have significant implications for cash-conscious farmers. “Maybe we do a lesser level of desalination, more blending, and this will reduce the cost,” says Cappelle.
Pei Xu, has been co-investigator on this project since its start. She’s also the progenitor of a NAWI-funded pilot at the El Paso desalination plant. Later in the day, in a high-ceilinged space next to the plant’s treatment room, she shows off its consequential bits. Like Amrose’s system, hers uses electrodialysis. In this instance, though, Xu is aiming to squeeze a bit of additional fresh — at least freshish — water from the plant’s leftover brine. With suitably low levels of salinity, the plant could pipe it to farmers through the county’s existing canal system, turning a waste product into a valuable resource.
Xu’s pinto bean and El Paso work, and Amrose’s in the Middle East, are all relevant to Harmony’s pilot and future projects. “Ideally we can improve desalination to the point where it’s an option which is seriously considered,” Wei says. “But more importantly, I think our role now and in the future is as water stewards — to work with each farm to understand their situation and then to recommend their best path forward … whether or not desalting is involved.”
Indeed, as water scarcity becomes ever more acute, desalination advances will help agriculture only so much; even researchers who’ve devoted years to solving its challenges say it’s no panacea. “What we’re trying to do is deliver as much water as cheaply as possible, but that doesn’t really encourage smart water use,” says NAWI’s Fiske. “In some cases, it encourages even the reverse. Why are we growing alfalfa in the middle of the desert?”
Franklin, of the California policy institute, highlights another extreme: Twenty-one of the state’s groundwater basins are already critically depleted, some due to agricultural overdrafting. Pumping brackish aquifers for desalination could aggravate environmental risks.
There are an array of measures, say researchers, that farmers themselves must take in order to survive, with rainwater capture and the fixing of leaky infrastructure at the top of the list. “Desalination is not the best, only or first solution,” Wei says. But he believes that when used wisely in tandem with other smart partial fixes, it could prevent some of the worst water-related catastrophes for our food system.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... hirst.html
November 27, 2024
The 2024 climate summit was a disaster for the developing world, a betrayal of both people and planet
by Michael Roberts
There was a tortuous and painful end to COP29, the international climate change conference held in oil-rich Baku, Azerbaijan. The main issue was how much would the rich countries hand over to the poor countries to pay for the measures to mitigate global warming and handle the damage caused by rising ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions. The finance target set was for more than $1.3trn a year by 2035. But the final deal was based on just $300bn in actual grants and low-interest loans from the developed world. The rest would have to come from private investors and perhaps levies on fossil fuels and frequent flyers – the details of which remained vague.
The offer from the ‘developed’ countries, funded from their national budgets and overseas aid, is supposed to form the inner core of a so-called ‘layered’ finance settlement, accompanied by a middle layer of new forms of finance such as new taxes on fossil fuels and high-carbon activities, carbon trading and ‘innovative’ forms of finance; and an outermost layer of investment from the private sector, into projects such as solar and windfarms. This was a cop-out from providing real money transfers.
Mohamed Adow, director of the Power Shift Africa thinktank, said:
“This [summit] has been a disaster for the developing world. It’s a betrayal of both people and planet, by wealthy countries who claim to take climate change seriously. Rich countries have promised to ‘mobilize’ some funds in the future, rather than provide them now. The check is in the mail. But lives and livelihoods in vulnerable countries are being lost now.”
Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s climate envoy concluded:
“This is definitely not enough. What we need is at least $5tn a year, but what we have asked for is just $1.3tn. That is 1% of global GDP. That should not be too much when you’re talking about saving the planet we all live on.” The final deal “comes to nothing when you split it. We have bills in the billions to pay after droughts and flooding. It won’t put us on a path to 1.5C. More like 3C.”
More than 60,000 people had registered to attend the conference which had seen hotel prices rocket 500%. A standard room at the Baku Holiday Inn cost £700 a night for the duration of the conference compared to the usual £90. FlightRadar24, a flight tracking website, revealed that 65 private jets landed in Baku in the first week, twice as many as usual.
Edi Rama, Prime Minister of Albania commented
“People there eat, drink, meet and take photos together – while images of voiceless leaders play on and on and on in the background. To me, this seems exactly like what happens in the real world every day. Life goes on, with its old habits, and our speeches – full of good words about fighting climate change – change nothing. What does it mean for the future of the world if the biggest polluters continue as usual? What on earth are we doing in this gathering, over and over and over, if there is no common political will on the horizon to go beyond words and unite for meaningful action?”
At COP29, there was no further talk of ‘the transition away from burning fossil fuels’ as pledged by the world’s nations just a year ago, with 2024 on track to set another new record for global carbon emissions.
The latest data indicate that the planet-heating emissions from coal, oil and gas will rise by 0.8% in 2024. In stark contrast, emissions have to fall by 43% by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping to the 1.5C temperature rise target set by the COP Paris agreement. That target is dead and the planet is heading fast towards 2.0C rise (and above) compared to pre-industrial times.
Indeed, current policies put the temperature rise on track for a 2.7C rise. The expected level of global heating by the end of the century has not changed since 2021, with “minimal progress” made this year, according to the Climate Action Tracker project. The consortium’s estimate has not shifted since the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow three years ago. “We have clearly failed to bend the curve,” said Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga, from Climate Analytics. The expected level of warming is slightly lower when including government pledges and targets, at 2.1C, but that has also not changed since 2021. Warming in the most optimistic scenario rose slightly from 1.8C last year to 1.9C this year, the report found. We are causing global warming 100 times faster than past natural changes. “We are taking Earth’s climate beyond natural limits, with CO2 & temps levels not seen for 3 million years.” said Mark Maslin.
Changes in average global temperatures that sound small can lead to massive human suffering. Last month, a study found half of the 68,000 heat deaths in Europe in 2022 were the result of the 1.3C of global heating the world has seen so far. At the higher temperatures that are projected for the end of the century, the risk of irreversible and catastrophic extremes is also set to soar. Researchers warned their median warming estimate of 2.7C by 2100 had a wide enough margin of error that it could translate into far hotter temperatures than scientists were expecting. “There is a 33% chance of our projection being 3C or higher, and a 10% chance of being 3.6C or higher,” said Gonzales-Zuniga. The latter would be “absolutely catastrophic”, she added.
And it’s not just carbon emissions. The fossil fuel industry emits dangerous amounts of its methane emissions – the most damaging of the greenhouse gases. While it may not persist as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, over a 20-year timescale methane is 80 times more potent at trapping heat. It has been responsible for an estimated 30 per cent of the world’s warming since the industrial revolution.
Methane emissions are rising at a record rate, according to a study published in September in the journal Earth System Science Data. Over the past two decades, they have increased by around 20 per cent. Atmospheric concentrations of the gas are now more than 2.6 times higher than in pre-industrial times, the highest they’ve been in at least 800,000 years. It finds its way into the environment in several ways: vented into the atmosphere from oil and gas fields for safety reasons or in emergencies, or “flared” from pipes or chimneys, which turns it primarily into smoke and carbon dioxide. (If the flaring is inefficient, pure methane is emitted too.)
Fossil fuel air pollution is already responsible for 1 in 5 deaths worldwide —roughly the population of New York City. In the US, 350,000 premature deaths are attributed to fossil fuel pollution. Exposure to particulate matter from fossil fuels accounted for 21.5% of total deaths in 2012, falling to 18% in 2018 due to tightening air quality measures in China. In contrast, in India, fossil fuel pollution was responsible for the deaths of nearly 2.5 million people (aged over 14) in 2018; representing over 30% of total deaths in India among people over age 14. Thousands of kids under age 5 die each year due to respiratory infections attributed to fossil fuel pollution.
Mainstream economics has failed to recognize the scale and impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the world economy. William Nordhaus was awarded a Nobel (Riksbank) Prize in Economics in 2018 for modelling the costs and benefits of acting on climate change through limiting emissions. He pioneered the mainstream economic analysis of climate change. Nordhaus’ contribution was to develop a model that could supposedly gauge the likely impact on economies from climate change.
Nordhaus constructed so-called integrated assessment models (IAMs) to estimate the social cost of carbon (SCC) and evaluate alternative abatement policies. IAMs are used to calculate the social cost of carbon (SCC). They attempt to model the incremental change in, or damage to, global economic output resulting from 1 tonne of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions or equivalent. These SCC estimates are used by policymakers in cost–benefit analyses of climate-change-mitigation policies. But because the IAMs omit so many of the big risks, SCC estimates are often way too low. The values often depend crucially on the ‘discounting’ used to translate future costs to current dollars.
These discount rates are central to any discussion. Most current models of climate-change impacts make two flawed assumptions: that people will be much wealthier in the future and that lives in the future are less important than lives now. The former assumption ignores the great risks of severe damage and disruption to livelihoods from climate change. The latter assumption is ‘discrimination by date of birth’. It is a value judgement that is rarely scrutinized, difficult to defend and in conflict with most moral codes.
The discount rate used to calculate the likely monetary damage to economies is arbitrary. If we use a 3% discount rate, that means the current rise in global warming would lead to $5trn of economic damage (loss of GDP), but the cost in current money of global warming would be no more than $400bn, about what China spends on hi-speed rail. So, on this discount rate, global warming causes little economic damage and thus the social cost of carbon (SCC) is only about $10/ton and mitigation action can be limited. This is what Nordhaus used in his model.
But why 3%? In 2018, Nicholas Stern, of the famous Stern Review on climate change, took Nordhaus’ data and applied a 1.4% discount rate. The SCC then rises to $85/ton – meaning that it costs economies $85 for every ton of Co2, or closer to $3trn. More recently, using more complex methods and realistic assumptions than the original, estimates for SCC have risen to $180-300 a ton.
Nordhaus’ IAMs have flaws that make them close to useless as tools for policy analysis. IAMs struggle to incorporate the scale of the scientific risks, such as the thawing of permafrost, release of methane, and other potential tipping points. Furthermore, many of the largest potential impacts are omitted, such as widespread conflict as a result of large-scale human migration to escape the worst-affected areas. IAMs do not account for risks and uncertainty. These models estimate damages each year by some damage factor x multiplied by T2 that year–meaning the very simple damage function is a gently upward-sloping line.
Recently deceased climate economist Martin Weitzman, a colleague of Nordhaus, disagreed with this approach to ‘discounting’ the future,. Weitzman pointed out the tremendous uncertainty in the forecasts of climate impacts, including tipping points, large error bars, and ‘unknown unknowns’. In economics-speak, he characterized this as enormous “downside risk,” including a potentially small—but fundamentally unknown—chance of total human annihilation.
Weitzman argued that averages do not tell the full story. Indeed, a Pareto probability distribution function of the current projections has ‘fat tails’ that suggest there is a 1% likelihood of a 12⁰C increase in temperature. Weitzman: “the most striking feature of the economics of climate change is that its extreme downside is non-negligible. Deep structural uncertainty about the unknown unknowns of what might go very wrong is coupled with essentially unlimited downside liability on possible planetary damages.” With that kind of temperature increase, human life would probably not survive. The problem is that “nobody lives in ‘global-average-land’!”
The storm following a drought that dumps a season of rainfall in a day likely has implications for financial risk, but is not captured in metrics of average annual precipitation in a region. Economic models ignore these subtleties in climate. The model used by many of the world’s central banks, for example, relies on a damage function that relates regional economic and labor productivity to annual temperature and precipitation.
Steve Keen has argued that IAMs “assumed that empirical relationships derived from data on change in temperature and GDP between 1960 and 2014 can be extrapolated out to 2100—thus assuming that 3.2°C more of global warming won’t alter the climate! They have assumed that tipping points—critical features of the Earth’s climate such as the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon rain forest, and the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” which keeps Europe warm today—can be tipped with only “minimal additional damage to GDP”.
Econometric calculations based on past behavior ignore not only the ‘tipping points’ like methane releases from the melting permafrost, but also the ones that are far easier to to see, like the Great Salt Lake running dry. Society, too, has tipping points; infrastructure has breaking points; ecosystems have thresholds; after some level of temperature rise, crops don’t lose productivity, they just die—same with humans.
Despite the huge flaws in IAMs, they continue to have influence on policy, in particular to advocate ‘market solutions’ to climate change that do not require public investment in climate control or public ownership of the fossil fuel industry. For example, Nordhaus was invited by the ECB and the G20 to advise on measures to deal with global warming. Nordhaus’s answer was carbon pricing markets.
Nordhaus’ IAMs assume that the world economy will have a much larger GDP in 50 years so that even if carbon emissions rise as predicted, governments can defer the cost of mitigation to the future. In contrast, if you apply stringent carbon abatement measures eg ending all coal production, you might lower growth rates and incomes and so make it more difficult to mitigate in the future. Instead, according to Nordhaus, with carbon pricing and taxes we can control and reduce emissions without reducing fossil fuel production and consumption at source.
This is the tobacco/cigarette pricing and taxing solution. The higher the tax or price, the lower the consumption, without touching the tobacco industry. Leaving aside the question of whether smoking has really been eradicated globally by pricing adjustments, can global warming really be solved by market pricing? Market solutions to climate change are based on trying to correct “market failure” by incorporating the nefarious effects of carbon emissions via a tax or quota system. The argument goes that, as mainstream economic theory does not incorporate the social costs of carbon into prices, the price mechanism must be “corrected” through a tax or a new market.
Countries agreed a deal at the COP29 climate conference on rules for a global market to buy and sell carbon credits that proponents say will mobilize billions of dollars into new projects to help fight global warming. Yet carbon credits have proved to be faked. Last year, a Bloomberg investigation found that almost 40% of the offsets purchased in 2021 came from renewable energy projects that didn’t actually avoid emissions.
This approach is hopelessly inadequate and unworkable. The world’s clean energy plans (and they are only plans) still fall almost one-third short of what is needed to reach that figure. And to reach the necessary level of investment, climate finance will need to increase to about $9tn a year globally by 2030, up from just under $1.3tn in 2021-22, according to the Climate Policy Initiative. The $1.3trn target set by COP29 (and now not met anyway) is miles short.
At COP29, IMF chief, Kristalina Georgieva said that “98% of adaptation finance comes from public sources. This is not sustainable. We need to unleash the private sector at adaptation as well as mitigation. It can be done!” And ECB chief, Christine Lagarde added: “We urgently need to unlock all possible sources of capital, at speed and at scale.” But private climate finance is pathetic at just $21.9bn in 2022, according to the OECD. And much of the public funding so far has been taken from existing overseas aid budgets. Only $21-24.5bn of the $83bn remains as pure climate finance without strings attached, according to Oxfam in its Climate Finance Shadow Report 2023.
Why is the climate target not being met? Why is the necessary finance not forthcoming? It is not the cost price of renewables. Prices of renewables have fallen sharply in the last few years. The problem is that governments are insisting that private investment should lead the drive to renewable power. But private investment only takes place if it is profitable to invest.
Profitability is the problem. Average profitability globally is at low levels and so investment growth in everything has similarly slowed. Ironically, lower renewables prices drag down the profitability of such investments. Solar panel manufacturing is suffering a severe profit squeeze, along with operators of solar farms. This reveals the fundamental contradiction in capitalist investment between reducing costs through higher productivity and slowing investment because of falling profitability.
This is the key message from yet another excellent book by Brett Christophers, The Price is Wrong – why capitalism won’t save the planet. Christophers argues that it is not the price of renewables versus fossil fuel energy that is the obstacle to meeting the investment targets to limit global warming. It is the profitability of renewables compared to fossil fuel production.
Market solutions won’t work because for capitalist companies it is just not profitable to invest in climate change mitigation. As the IMF itself put it:
“Private investment in productive capital and infrastructure faces high upfront costs and significant uncertainties that cannot always be priced. Investments for the transition to a low-carbon economy are additionally exposed to important political risks, illiquidity and uncertain returns, depending on policy approaches to mitigation as well as unpredictable technological advances.”
Indeed:
“The large gap between the private and social returns on low-carbon investments is likely to persist into the future, as future paths for carbon taxation and carbon pricing are highly uncertain, not least for political economy reasons. This means that there is not only a missing market for current climate mitigation as carbon emissions are currently not priced, but also missing markets for future mitigation, which is relevant for the returns to private investment in future climate mitigation technology, infrastructure and capital.”
In other words, it ain’t profitable to do anything significant.
A global plan could steer investments into things society needs, like renewable energy, organic farming, public transportation, public water systems, ecological remediation, public health, quality schools and other currently unmet needs. And it could equalize development the world over by shifting resources out of useless and harmful production in the North and into developing the South, building basic infrastructure, sanitation systems, public schools, health care. At the same time, a global plan could aim to provide equivalent jobs for workers displaced by the retrenchment or closure of unnecessary or harmful industries.
Planning not pricing. COP29 offered nothing like that.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... l-in-baku/
Global plans require global socialism.
******
COP29 Puts World on Course for More Extreme Weather – and More Deaths
Posted on November 26, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. COP29 was such a disappointment that climate activists seem at a loss as to what to do next. Paul Rogers’ forecasts that it will likely take another decade of worsening weather and the fires and floods they generate to hit the Global North hard before advanced economies get religion about climate change. While the time frame sounds reasonable, there’s another factor that is likely to come to bite even sooner, and that’s diminished food production and rising costs.
In France, food prices had been increasing into the 1780s due to population increases outpacing food supply growth. A harsh winter in 1788 produced famines and food riots. During the 1997 Asian economic crisis, both Thailand and Indonesia had food riots.
If we have that sort of rupture, it’s not conducive to reaching a consensus on climate action, even if climate is the driver.
By Paul Rogers, Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies in the Department of Peace Studies and International Relations at Bradford University, and an Honorary Fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College. He is openDemocracy’s international security correspondent. He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers. Originally published at openDemocracy
While COP29 in Baku narrowly avoided collapsing, its results were bitterly disappointing for delegations from across the Global South, who ended up with barely a quarter of the annual $1.3trn of support they were seeking by 2035 to respond to climate breakdown.
Quite apart from other factors, more than 1,500 pro-carbon lobbyists worked hard to limit progress and ensure that burning oil, gas and coal at profit continues for as long as possible whatever the global consequences. After all, the world’s fossil fuel industries rake in around a trillion dollars in profits a year.
Meanwhile, more and more examples are emerging of accelerating climate breakdown. The flooding in Valencia is just one, but scarcely noticed in Europe is the thoroughly weird weather being experienced in the eastern United States.
This autumn there have been over five hundred wildfires in New Jersey alone, a 5,000-acre fire has been burning for a week on the New York-New Jersey border prompting a voluntary evacuation, and New York City’s Fire Department was called out to deal with 271 brush fires in the first two weeks of November alone.
As if timed for that and certainly released with COP29 in mind, Carbon Brief, a website covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy, has mapped every published study on ‘impossible’ weather events – record heatwaves or storms that would not have happened without the overall global climate changes.
The first such study came in 2004, the year after weeks of extreme heat hit Europe and killed 70,000 people across the continent over several months. That early example of an ‘impossible’ weather event kick-started a new field of research known as ‘extreme event attribution’, which looks at how climate change has influenced extreme weather.
There are now 600 studies of 750 such extreme events spanning the past 20 years – a tiny fraction of the total number of these kinds of events. Of these 750, Carbon Brief found that scientists and researchers had concluded that 74% were made more likely or more severe because of climate change.
This has added to the growing sense of urgency right across the climate science community coupled with a highly critical view of the whole COP process. Even before the dismaying summit in the Azerbaijani capital, both last year’s COP in Abu Dhabi and the year before in Egypt were notable for their lack of progress even as the urgency of preventing climate breakdown was becoming more and more obvious.
There are other risks to global security including nuclear weapons, pandemics, cyber warfare, AI misuse and the progressive destruction of biodiversity, but climate breakdown is different from all of these. It is not a future risk, it is a current happening, it is accelerating, and we now have very few years left to get on top of it. If we don’t then a worldwide catastrophe with many hundreds of millions dying and societal collapse will become increasingly likely.
Does it have to be like that?
As things stand, in terms of changing attitudes, developments in renewables, resistance of the fossil carbon industries and, of course, Donald Trump’s looming presidency in the US, a reasonable prognosis for the next decade has three elements.
First, the use of renewable energy resources does continue to increase but not at anything like the rate required, so net carbon emissions will continue to rise, not fall, for most of the next ten years. Second, resistance to decarbonisation will continue from many quarters, no doubt now including the White House. Finally, severe weather events will become both more common and more destructive.
Eventually, and it might take more than a decade, the disasters will be so great, including sudden weather events in rich cities in the Global North killing many tens of thousands of people, that public pressure across the world will force governments to respond. There will be no alternative to engage in truly transformative change.
But what that means is that the task ahead by then will be hugely greater than if the transformation starts much sooner, so timescales become crucial, especially what can speed up the process.
There is, though, one thing to remember at a time of widespread pessimism. If nations had got their act together 25 years ago after the Kyoto Protocols, were signed we would be in a far more favourable position worldwide than we are now. We are acting more than two decades late.
But climate breakdown is not happening as a slow, steady process of change, creeping up almost unawares. If that had been the case then with all the reasons not to act, especially the global fossil carbon lobby, we would have been in an even worse position now. Instead, it is happening at variable rates in two respects, some parts of the world – such as the polar regions – are warming up much faster than others and extreme weather events are happening much more often.
We are therefore getting a foretaste of what will affect everyone a few years before it does, and this gives us just a little more time to act. It means that the next ten years, and perhaps even the five years to 2030, will be the key time for us to come to terms with the transformation in society that is essential for global well-being. That is possible, just.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... eaths.html
Can Desalination Quench Agriculture’s Thirst?
Posted on November 28, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Perhaps I am a too much of a Luddite, but the search for more “affordable” forms of desalination to make brackish water in aquifers usable for crops seems more a testament of the intensifying pressure on water supplies than a hopeful story about “innovation”. The article does mention energy costs in passing. The article suggests the decentralized desalination plants would be solar panel powered, and the desalination does not need to be done continuously, but would they require enough in the way of solar panels to impinge on productive fields? It also discusses the problem of the disposition of the salty residues; the hope is that it can be reduced to salt crystals, which is easier to dispose of than intensely salty brine.
I’ve read about some of these technologies before (many years before) in articles discussing desalination in the Middle East, so it does not appear the technologies per se are new, but the refinement of the applications may well be. Nevertheless, it’s disturbing to see so much effort devoted to producing non-essential, water-intensive crops like pistachios rather than considering that maybe pistachios should be priced as a luxury good.
By Lela Nargi. Originally published at Knowable Magazine; cross posted from Yale Climate Connections
Ralph Loya was pretty sure he was going to lose the corn. His farm had been scorched by El Paso’s hottest-ever June and second-hottest August; the West Texas county saw 53 days soar over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer of 2024. The region was also experiencing an ongoing drought, which meant that crops on Loya’s eight-plus acres of melons, okra, cucumbers and other produce had to be watered more often than normal.
Loya had been irrigating his corn with somewhat salty, or brackish, water pumped from his well, as much as the salt-sensitive crop could tolerate. It wasn’t enough, and the municipal water was expensive; he was using it in moderation and the corn ears were desiccating where they stood.
The hidden threat from rising coastal groundwater
Ensuring the survival of agriculture under an increasingly erratic climate is approaching a crisis in the sere and sweltering Western and Southwestern United States, an area that supplies much of our beef and dairy, alfalfa, tree nuts and produce. Contending with too little water to support their plants and animals, farmers have tilled under crops, pulled out trees, fallowed fields and sold off herds. They’ve also used drip irrigation to inject smaller doses of water closer to a plant’s roots, and installed sensors in soil that tell more precisely when and how much to water.
In the last five years, researchers have begun to puzzle out how brackish water, pulled from underground aquifers, might be de-salted cheaply enough to offer farmers another water resilience tool. Loya’s property, which draws its slightly salty water from the Hueco Bolson aquifer, is about to become a pilot site to test how efficiently desalinated groundwater can be used to grow crops in otherwise water-scarce places.
Desalination renders salty water less so. It’s usually applied to water sucked from the ocean, generally in arid lands with few options; some Gulf, African and island countries rely heavily or entirely on desalinated seawater. Inland desalination happens away from coasts, with aquifer waters that are brackish — containing between 1,000 and 10,000 milligrams of salt per liter, versus around 35,000 milligrams per liter for seawater. Texas has more than three dozen centralized brackish groundwater desalination plants, California more than 20.
Such technology has long been considered too costly for farming. Some experts still think it’s a pipe dream. “We see it as a nice solution that’s appropriate in some contexts, but for agriculture it’s hard to justify, frankly,” says Brad Franklin, an agricultural and environmental economist at the Public Policy Institute of California. Desalting an acre-foot (almost 326,000 gallons) of brackish groundwater for crops now costs about $800, while farmers can pay a lot less — as little as $3 an acre-foot for some senior rights holders in some places — for fresh municipal water. As a result, desalination has largely been reserved to make liquid that’s fit for people to drink. In some instances, too, inland desalination can be environmentally risky, endangering nearby plants and animals and reducing stream flows.
But the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, along with a research operation called the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) that’s been granted $185 million from the Department of Energy, have recently invested in projects that could turn that paradigm on its head. Recognizing the urgent need for fresh water for farms — which in the U.S. are mostly inland — combined with the ample if salty water beneath our feet, these entities have funded projects that could help advance small, decentralized desalination systems that can be placed right on farms where they’re needed. Loya’s is one of them.
U.S. farms consume over 83 million acre-feet (more than 27 trillion gallons) of irrigation water every year — the second most water-intensive industry in the country, after thermoelectric power. Not all aquifers are brackish, but most that are exist in the country’s West, and they’re usually more saline the deeper you dig. With fresh water everywhere in the world becoming saltier due to human activity, “we have to solve inland desal for ag … in order to grow as much food as we need,” says Susan Amrose, a research scientist at MIT who studies inland desalination in the Middle East and North Africa.
Brackish (slightly salty) groundwater is found mostly in the Western United States. (Image credit: J.S. Stanton et al. / USGS)
That means lowering energy and other operational costs; making systems simple for farmers to run; and figuring out how to slash residual brine, which requires disposal and is considered the process’s “Achilles’ heel,” according to one researcher.
The last half-decade of scientific tinkering is now yielding tangible results, says Peter Fiske, NAWI’s executive director. “We think we have a clear line of sight for agricultural-quality water.”
Swallowing the high cost
Fiske believes farm-based mini-plants can be cost-effective for producing high-value crops like broccoli, berries and nuts, some of which need a lot of irrigation. That $800 per acre-foot has been achieved by cutting energy use, reducing brine and revolutionizing certain parts and materials. It’s still expensive but arguably worth it for a farmer growing almonds or pistachios in California — as opposed to farmers growing lesser-value commodity crops like wheat and soybeans, for whom desalination will likely never prove affordable. As a nut farmer, “I would sign up to 800 bucks per acre-foot of water till the cows come home,” Fiske says.
Loya’s pilot is being built with Bureau of Reclamation funding and will use a common process called reverse osmosis. Pressure pushes salty water through a semi-permeable membrane; fresh water comes out the other side, leaving salts behind as concentrated brine. Loya figures he can make good money using desalinated water to grow not just fussy corn, but even fussier grapes he might be able to sell at a premium to local wineries.
Such a tiny system shares some of the problems of its large-scale cousins — chiefly, brine disposal. El Paso, for example, boasts the biggest inland desalination plant in the world, which makes 27.5 million gallons of fresh drinking water a day. There, every gallon of brackish water gets split into two streams: fresh water and residual brine, at a ratio of 83% to 17%. Since there’s no ocean to dump brine into, as with seawater desalination, this plant injects it into deep, porous rock formations — a process too pricey and complicated for farmers.
But what if desalination could create 90 or 95% fresh water and 5 to 10% brine? What if you could get 100% fresh water, with just a bag of dry salts leftover? Handling those solids is a lot safer and easier, “because super-salty water brine is really corrosive … so you have to truck it around in stainless steel trucks,” Fiske says.
Finally, what if those salts could be broken into components — lithium, essential for batteries; magnesium, used to create alloys; gypsum, turned into drywall; as well as gold, platinum and other rare-earth elements that can be sold to manufacturers? Already, the El Paso plant participates in “mining” gypsum and hydrochloric acid for industrial customers.
Loya’s brine will be piped into an evaporation pond. Eventually, he’ll have to pay to landfill the dried-out solids, says Quantum Wei, founder and CEO of Harmony Desalting, which is building Loya’s plant.There are other expenses: drilling a well (Loya, fortuitously, already has one to serve the project); building the physical plant; and supplying the electricity to pump water up day after day. These are bitter financial pills for a farmer. “We’re not getting rich; by no means,” Loya says.
More cost comes from the desalination itself. The energy needed for reverse osmosis is a lot, and the saltier the water, the higher the need. Additionally, the membranes that catch salt are gossamer-thin, and all that pressure destroys them; they also get gunked up and need to be treated with chemicals.
Reverse osmosis presents another problem for farmers. It doesn’t just remove salt ions from water but the ions of beneficial minerals, too, such as calcium, magnesium and sulfate. According to Amrose, this means farmers have to add fertilizer or mix in pretreated water to replace essential ions that the process took out.
To circumvent such challenges, one NAWI-funded team is experimenting with ultra-high-pressure membranes, fashioned out of stiffer plastic, that can withstand a much harder push. The results so far look “quite encouraging,” Fiske says. Another is looking into a system in which a chemical solvent dropped into water isolates the salt without a membrane, like the polymer inside a diaper absorbs urine. The solvent, in this case the common food-processing compound dimethyl ether, would be used over and over to avoid potentially toxic waste. It has proved cheap enough to be considered for agricultural use.
Amrose is testing a system that uses electrodialysis instead of reverse osmosis. This sends a steady surge of voltage across water to pull salt ions through an alternating stack of positively charged and negatively charged membranes. Explains Amrose, “You get the negative ions going toward their respective electrode until they can’t pass through the membranes and get stuck,” and the same happens with the positive ions. The process gets much higher fresh water recovery in small systems than reverse osmosis, and is twice as energy efficient at lower salinities. The membranes last longer, too — 10 years versus three to five years, Amrose says — and can allow essential minerals to pass through.
Data-Based Design
At Loya’s farm, Wei paces the property on a sweltering summer morning with a local engineering company he’s tapped to design the brine storage pond. Loya is anxious that the pond be as small as possible to keep arable land in production; Wei is more concerned that it be big and deep enough. To factor this, he’ll look at average weather conditions since 1954 as well as worst-case data from the last 25 years pertaining to monthly evaporation and rainfall rates. He’ll also divide the space into two sections so one can be cleaned while the other is in use. Loya’s pond will likely be one-tenth of an acre, dug three to six feet deep.
The desalination plant will pair reverse osmosis membranes with a “batch” process, pushing water through multiple times instead of once and gradually amping up the pressure. Regular reverse osmosis is energy-intensive because it constantly applies the highest pressures, Wei says, but Harmony’s process saves energy by using lower pressures to start with. A backwash between cycles prevents scaling by dissolving mineral crystals and washing them away. “You really get the benefit of the farmer not having to deal with dosing chemicals or replacing membranes,” Wei says. “Our goal is to make it as painless as possible.”
Another Harmony innovation concentrates leftover brine by running it through a nanofiltration membrane in their batch system; such membranes are usually used to pretreat water to cut back on scaling or to recover minerals, but Wei believes his system is the first to combine them with batch reverse osmosis. “That’s what’s really going to slash brine volumes,” he says. The whole system will be hooked up to solar panels, keeping Loya’s energy off-grid and essentially free. If all goes to plan, the system will be operational by early 2025 and produce seven gallons of fresh water a minute during the strongest sun of the day, with a goal of 90 to 95% fresh water recovery. Any water not immediately used for irrigation will be stored in a tank.
Spreading Out the Research
Ninety-eight miles north of Loya’s farm, along a dead flat and endlessly beige expanse of road that skirts the White Sands Missile Range, more desalination projects burble away at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The facility, run by the Bureau of Reclamation, offers scientists a lab and four wells of differing salinities to fiddle with.
On some parched acreage at the foot of the Sacramento Mountains, a longstanding farming pilot project bakes in relentless sunlight. After some preemptive words about the three brine ponds on the property — “They have an interesting smell, in between zoo and ocean” — facility manager Malynda Cappelle drives a golf cart full of visitors past solar arrays and water tanks to a fenced-in parcel of dust and plants. Here, since 2019, a team from the University of North Texas, New Mexico State University and Colorado State University has tested sunflowers, fava beans and, currently, 16 plots of pinto beans. Some plots are bare dirt; others are topped with compost that boosts nutrients, keeps soil moist and provides a salt barrier. Some plots are drip-irrigated with brackish water straight from a well; some get a desalinated/brackish water mix.
Eyeballing the plots even from a distance, the plants in the freshest-water plots look large and healthy. But those with compost are almost as vigorous, even when irrigated with brackish water. This could have significant implications for cash-conscious farmers. “Maybe we do a lesser level of desalination, more blending, and this will reduce the cost,” says Cappelle.
Pei Xu, has been co-investigator on this project since its start. She’s also the progenitor of a NAWI-funded pilot at the El Paso desalination plant. Later in the day, in a high-ceilinged space next to the plant’s treatment room, she shows off its consequential bits. Like Amrose’s system, hers uses electrodialysis. In this instance, though, Xu is aiming to squeeze a bit of additional fresh — at least freshish — water from the plant’s leftover brine. With suitably low levels of salinity, the plant could pipe it to farmers through the county’s existing canal system, turning a waste product into a valuable resource.
Xu’s pinto bean and El Paso work, and Amrose’s in the Middle East, are all relevant to Harmony’s pilot and future projects. “Ideally we can improve desalination to the point where it’s an option which is seriously considered,” Wei says. “But more importantly, I think our role now and in the future is as water stewards — to work with each farm to understand their situation and then to recommend their best path forward … whether or not desalting is involved.”
Indeed, as water scarcity becomes ever more acute, desalination advances will help agriculture only so much; even researchers who’ve devoted years to solving its challenges say it’s no panacea. “What we’re trying to do is deliver as much water as cheaply as possible, but that doesn’t really encourage smart water use,” says NAWI’s Fiske. “In some cases, it encourages even the reverse. Why are we growing alfalfa in the middle of the desert?”
Franklin, of the California policy institute, highlights another extreme: Twenty-one of the state’s groundwater basins are already critically depleted, some due to agricultural overdrafting. Pumping brackish aquifers for desalination could aggravate environmental risks.
There are an array of measures, say researchers, that farmers themselves must take in order to survive, with rainwater capture and the fixing of leaky infrastructure at the top of the list. “Desalination is not the best, only or first solution,” Wei says. But he believes that when used wisely in tandem with other smart partial fixes, it could prevent some of the worst water-related catastrophes for our food system.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... hirst.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
People over profit: How China tackled climate change
December 1, 2024 Scott Scheffer
The panda solar farm in Datong, China.
It’s so fitting that just after the 75th anniversary of China’s revolution on Oct. 1, a milestone in China’s efforts to deal with greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) has emerged in the narrative surrounding global warming. What they have accomplished shows how people’s ownership of the world’s productive forces, instead of a tiny clique of billionaires owning everything, will solve this planetary crisis.
Climatologists and scientists widely recognize that China will likely reach its peak greenhouse gas emissions in 2024, although further research will be needed to confirm this with complete accuracy. If the data ultimately shows that the peak does not occur in 2024, it is almost certain to happen in 2025. Even in that case, China would still achieve peak emissions five years earlier than its official target, which President Xi Jinping announced at the 2020 UN General Assembly. This target aimed to reach peak emissions by 2030.
Other countries have reached peak emissions as well, but because China is so huge, UN figures and climatologists are buzzing with excitement over this development. It has great implications for the entire world, particularly for the Global South.
U.S. corporate media often portray China’s crowning achievement as a problem rather than progress.
Mass production of renewables
Chinese mass production of renewable energy components — wind and solar — has driven down the prices globally. It isn’t just the solar panels on rooftops that millions are aware of; China has developed renewables on an industrial scale — wind and solar farms built at much lower costs and capable of supplying energy for cities and industry.
What this means to the Global South cannot be overstated. For instance, a struggling country in Africa, Latin America, or Asia relying on coal for energy can now replace a decrepit coal-fired power plant with a solar or wind farm more cheaply than repairing or replacing that coal plant.
The flaw of wind and solar power’s intermittent availability is still there. China is still running coal plants in its territory as a backup for those times when the sun goes down, or the wind stops.
On average, Chinese coal plants run half the time or less. This simple first step provided what seems to be an outsized result, and it can be replicated where it is needed in the Global South until the intermittency problem with renewables is resolved via other methods.
Control over the means of production
The Communist Party of China faces a real challenge — trying to balance raising and safeguarding the living standards of 1.4 billion people while still developing its scientific and productive capacities and combating climate change at the same time.
China’s capacity to overcome significant challenges stems from the people’s control over the means of production.
When the world’s manufacturing shifted to China in 1979, private interests began to invest in mines and other power generation sources. But that didn’t last long because the CPC and the government recognized that energy has to belong to the people, and they began nationalizing the mines. That process began in the 1980s, and now the number of mines in private hands is insignificant, and they are the smallest, least productive mines.
Inexpensive EVs
Chinese mass production of inexpensive electric vehicles has also been a factor in moving forward in the campaign to lower GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions. Millions of workers in China can now afford the price of a car, not only because 850 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty but also because China has wonderful, inexpensive electric cars.
Over the past decade, the Chinese state has spent $230 billion on research and development of EVs and batteries. China’s spectacular success in producing electric vehicles has prevented a surge in emissions from the increased use of cars.
Some of China’s EVs sell for as little as 10,000 U.S. dollars. They are getting rave reviews and are being sold in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe.
The Biden/Trump tariffs make buying one in the U.S. difficult, but the no-emissions cars are now helping to cut emissions throughout the rest of the world. The sales and use of EVs in China’s territory alone are a significant factor in reducing the world’s GHG emissions.
Beyond cars, the shift to electric power for trucks and trains, both passenger and freight, has been crucial in curbing emissions and achieving peak emissions goals.
Environmental protection in the constitution
The Communist Party of China has taken the significant step of incorporating environmental protection into both its party constitution and the constitution of the People’s Republic of China.
The leadership of the CPC and the Chinese state do not face opposition from super-rich monopoly corporations. Still, this achievement of reaching peak emissions doesn’t mean that reaching “net zero” by the year 2060 will proceed in a straight line.
Like many developing countries, China is still struggling to overcome what it calls the “century of humiliation,” when imperialist Western countries robbed China of its resources and used their military advantage to enforce the theft. The 1949 revolution was only the first step, and it still faces challenges.
In the short term, China needs to develop AI, which will require a lot of electrical energy. Their goal is to power AI with renewables.
They are also investing in research and development of many projects, ranging from areas that seem nearly ready to use, like green hydrogen as fuel whose only by-product is water, to their “artificial sun,” China’s fusion energy project. All of this is being implemented and studied while also trying to help develop the resources for global south countries to mitigate global warming and help them adapt to climate change.
2024 will prove to be the hottest year on record globally. Alongside the horrors of the genocide in Gaza and the U.S. proxy war against Russia, capitalism has dished out the most punishment of the planet in recent memory. Only socialism can end imperialist war and save the planet.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... te-change/
******
“The Upside of Climate Pessimism”
Posted on November 30, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. I do not even remotely understand the very strong message here of “optimism good, pessimism generally bad”. It has been repeatedly documented that pessimists are much better at accurately estimating the likelihood of bad events occurring than optimists. Note some of the highly questionable reasoning here, such as:
One recent survey of 59,440 people from 63 countries found that messages focusing solely on the catastrophic nature of climate breakdown performed more poorly than solutions-oriented messaging in motivating climate action.
Dear God, the climate action to date and the rainbows and unicorns schemes like the Green New Deal are inadequate? What good is “solutions-oriented messaging” is if all it produces is putting Band-Aids on gunshot wounds?
As Lambert says apropos the near-total abandonment of Covid precautions, “The optimists will kill us all.”
By Katarina Zimmer, a science and environment journalist. Her work has been published in Knowable Magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Grist, Nautilus Magazine, and more. Originally published at Undark
Hope is often said to be the best medicine, essential to getting people through difficult times. So it’s unsurprising that it has seemingly become a mantra of climate communication in recent years. Instilling hope, the theory goes, is key to motivating people to act; without it, people will succumb to despair and apathy.
The emphasis on hope may help explain why so many climate scientists keep their predominantly grim views about our future climate to themselves, while cautioning against what they perceive to be doom-and-gloom narratives in social media (although many scientists are genuinely optimistic). Last year, when a major report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that we’ll likely fail to contain warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, many scientists — and journalists — nonetheless presented the 1.5 degree goal as achievable. In reality, most scientists believe that warming will reach at least 2.5 degrees Celsius, according to a recent survey by The Guardian. Being unhopeful about climate change is so unpopular that I myself, an environment-focused journalist, am fearful of publicly admitting my own pessimistic outlook.
But social science and psychology research presents a more nuanced picture of the emotions that drive action. Certainly, hope is an important psychological motivator for many people, and relying solely on doom-and-gloom messaging could push some people into despondency. But not all hope is equally effective; wishful thinking often falls short. And certain breeds of pessimists are actually highly motivated by threat-centered communication.
What matters, it seems, is not so much whether a person feels hopeful or unhopeful about the future, but how constructively they deal with their emotions. “How people interpret their emotions and rationalize the threat of climate change might be the determining factor in whether it leads to action or inaction,” Matthew Ballew, an environmental psychologist at Pierce College in Puyallup, Washington, wrote to me in an email. In this light, effective climate communication means not only highlighting the rosier end of climate trajectories and the solutions that may help get us there, but also the possibility of a bleak future and the massive amount of work it will take to avoid it.
These nuances of climate emotions were illustrated in a 2019 study that Ballew co-authored, which surveyed American adults during the Obama administration. One arm of the survey encompassed 1,310 adults demographically representative of the U.S. population, focusing on people who believed that climate change is happening.
The researchers distinguished between participants with what they call constructive hope (who agreed to statements like “humanity will rise to the occasion”) and those with false hope (“we don’t need to worry about global warming/climate change because nature will take care of it”). They similarly distinguished between constructive doubt (“most people are unwilling to take individual action”) and fatalistic doubt (“humans can’t affect global warming/climate change because you can’t fight Mother Nature”). Participants were then asked how likely they’d be to contact their government officials, sign petitions demanding more climate action, or support policies like regulating carbon emissions or instituting tax rebates for electric vehicles. Remarkably, the authors found that constructive doubt and constructive hope both correlated with increased policy support and willingness to take political action, whereas false hope and fatalistic thinking had a negative association.
The study is limited in that it looked at people’s self-reported willingness to engage in climate action rather than their actual behavior, noted co-author Brittany Bloodhart, a social psychologist at California State University, San Bernardino. And it’s not clear if feeling doubtful necessarily caused people to be more willing to take action, or if the two correlate for other reasons. Nevertheless, the relationship between constructive doubt and political engagement, the authors wrote, suggests it may be worthwhile to recognize the difficulties inherent in addressing climate change.
Interestingly, a recent survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults found that people experiencing psychological distress related to climate change were more likely to engage in collective climate change action or to report a willingness to do so. And other research has found a positive correlation between climate anxiety and climate action. While anxiety or distress are not exactly the same as doubt or pessimism, they’re similarly believed to cause people to shut down, when in fact they may be a helpful driver of action. “The people that I know who are really seriously working on these issues and who are engaging in climate change activism,” Bloodhart said, stressing that this is her personal observation, “they have a little bit of hope, but they mostly are pretty pessimistic and concerned.”
So why do people choose to act when they believe the worst outcomes are the most likely?
Some light may come from psychological research on so-called defensive pessimists. While run-of-the-mill pessimists might become immobilized and despondent by focusing on negative outcomes, defensive pessimists take action to avoid them. “They use their worry and their anxiety about that worst possible outcome to drive them to take action so that it never becomes a reality,” said social and health psychology researcher Fuschia Sirois of Durham University. In one 2008 experiment, for example, defensive pessimists performed relatively poorly in a word puzzle when prompted to imagine a positive scenario, but they did much better, on average, when they were prompted to imagine the opposite, negative effect.
In another study that tracked university students for over four years, researchers found that defensive pessimists had higher self-esteem compared to other students with anxiety, and even eventually reached nearly similar levels of confidence as optimists. Research comparing optimists and defensive pessimists has often found similar benefits, although pessimists tend to have a less enjoyable journey towards achieving outcomes, Sirois added.
Although there is no data on how defensive pessimists cope with collective action problems like climate change, existing studies suggest they may respond well to clear information about threats — provided it’s paired with guidance on how their individual actions can help avoid negative outcomes. “For people who are defensive pessimists, that’s what’s going to mobilize them to action,” Sirois said.
None of this is to say that purely doomsday messaging can’t have counterproductive outcomes: One recent survey of 59,440 people from 63 countries found that messages focusing solely on the catastrophic nature of climate breakdown performed more poorly than solutions-oriented messaging in motivating climate action. Fortunately, however, surveysof the American public do not indicate a rise in fatalism in the population. The percentage who believes it’s too late to act on climate change has hovered around 13 percent for years, social scientist John Kotcher of George Mason University wrote in an email. “At the very least, this calls into question whether there’s actually a growing sense of fatalism among Americans, despite the online discourse and concern around doom-and-gloom messaging.”
It just means that we shouldn’t hold back from clearly communicating the risk at hand and the scale of work that lies ahead. Indeed, some of Kotcher’s studies have found that threat information can help increase public engagement with climate change in productive ways. Research from health psychology, meanwhile, suggests that people need both explicit information about the threat — for instance, that smoking can cause lung cancer — and what they can do to avoid it. Highlighting the solutions that are already underway is also important. Some behavioral experiments suggest that people are more willing to help tackle a problem if they know that they’re not starting from scratch.
If anything, the public is not worried enough about climate change, said Lorraine Whitmarsh, an environmental psychologist at the University of Bath. And while it’s hard to pinpoint the right amount of hope, Whitmarsh thinks people tend to be overly optimistic. One poll suggests that although 64 percent of Americans say they’re at least “somewhat worried” about climate change, less than half of those report they are “very worried.” Whitmarsh said she believes this stems from techno-optimism among policymakers and the media that has fostered a widespread belief that incremental changes through recycling or green technologies will be enough, without requiring behavioral changes such as reducing meat consumption or using more public transportation. “Maybe a lot of those people are acknowledging that there is a major problem but they think that — because they’ve heard it from politicians and many other people — technology will save us,” Whitmarsh said, adding, “and like, there’s not much that I can do as an individual.”
This is why climate communication should not just be about instilling hope. It means also confronting the worst possible outcomes and the tough, transformative work that lies ahead. That means inspiring not only the optimists among us but the pessimists, too.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... imism.html
Book Review: The Many Bounties of Collaboration in Nature
Posted on December 1, 2024 by Lambert Strether
Lambert Strether: Dang, another book to read: Kropotkin.
By Elizabeth Svoboda, a science writer in San Jose, California, and the author of What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness.” Originally published at Undark.
In the opening scene of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World,” a flock of birds descends on a tree heavy-laden with fruit. Though the birds devour the waxy purple berries with fervor, there are more than enough to go around — not just for the robins and cedar waxwings, but for Kimmerer and her human companions. “There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way,” Kimmerer writes. “And yet here they are.”
Kimmerer’s book, the long-awaited follow-up to her best-selling 2013 essay collection “Braiding Sweetgrass,” is a novella-length meditation on the abundance that sharing and mutual exchange can create. A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, which is native to the Great Lakes region, Kimmerer grounds her worldview in traditions that resist attempts to quantify or hoard what the Earth produces.
Unlike Westerners who prize individual ownership and accumulation, many Indigenous peoples live in “a culture of gratitude” that recognize natural bounty as belonging to all, discourage mindless consumption, and embrace giving’s multiplicative effects. “A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance natural well-being,” she writes. “The economic unit is ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, as all flourishing is mutual.”
Though these ideas wend their way through “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Kimmerer’s latest book examines them more rigorously. She brings a botanist’s eye to descriptions of natural thriving that evoke collaboration’s rewards. The berries she and the birds enjoyed, she notes, could never have ripened without a host of willing contributors — the cedar waxwing that dropped the serviceberry seed so it could germinate, the microbes that fertilized the soil. She traces repeated cycles of flourishing: After single-celled algae take up molecules of phosphorus, zooplankton eat the algae and excrete the phosphorus back into the ocean, where a new generation of algae can feast on it.
“The Serviceberry” continues a long tradition of naturalistic writing about interdependence in the wild. Among the first to cover this ground, over 100 years ago, was Russian naturalist and revolutionary Peter Kropotkin, who observed how animals on the steppe protected each other and collaborated to secure food — and whose work rebuked the idea that nature mostly consisted of winners and losers. “Sociability,” Kropotkin wrote, “is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.”
Like Kropotkin, Kimmerer draws on cooperative successes in nature to mount a vigorous case against human greed and opportunism. “The Serviceberry” broadly indicts economic and political systems that run on the idea that a win for one person must mean a loss for someone else. “There is a tragedy in believing the proffered narrative of our system,” she writes, “which turns us against each other in a zero-sum game.” She compares unchecked accumulators to the mythical Potawatomi villain Windigo, who eats and eats yet is never satisfied.
There’s a distinctly American fear — propped up by “welfare queen” stereotypes — that offering resources up to a communal pool invites freeloaders to drain that pool, a mindset crystallized in ecologist Garrett Hardin’s famed 1968 paper “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In this particular “mathematics of worthiness,” those who could benefit most from community aid are marked as least trustworthy and deserving.
But Kimmerer deftly turns this calculus on its head. Evolutionary scientists like David Sloan Wilson, she notes, are finding that cooperative human and animal societies actually do better across time and generations than those whose members distrust others and look out for number one. “When the focus shifts to the level of a group,” she writes, “cooperation is a better model, not only for surviving but for thriving.”
While “The Serviceberry” convincingly links hoarding to long-term decline, the book’s most resonant passages celebrate the joy to be found in connection and reciprocity, as well as the ongoing ways they multiply. Kimmerer profiles her neighbor Paulie Drexler, who invites community members to come pick her serviceberries for free — mostly because it lifts her spirits to do so. “In the berry patch, all I hear are happy voices,” Drexler says. “It feels good to give that little bit of delight.”
Yet the reciprocal effects of offering that delight, as Kimmerer shows, accrue to both Drexler and the wider community. Grateful berry-pickers may return to Drexler’s farm for sunflowers, blueberries, and pumpkins, and buoyed by their immersion in the joyful harvest, they might even end up voting for farmland-preservation measures on the next ballot. Kimmerer’s narrative complements years of research showing that people who share what they have — time, love, or resources — are happier and more fulfilled than their stingier counterparts.
Though readers are bound to wonder how thriving local gift economies can drive broader shifts away from zero-sum thinking, that isn’t really the province of this book. Kimmerer notes that gift economies do best in small-scale communities, village atmospheres where everyone knows each other on sight. What holds people back from spoiling the commons is a sense of obligation to those around them, and on larger scales, this communal obligation often disappears.
Kimmerer envisions gift exchanges, mutual aid networks, and all the rest as “yes-and” solutions that will play out against a capitalistic backdrop, not direct systemic rebukes. “I don’t think it’s pie in the sky,” she writes, “to imagine that we can create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy.”
Yet Kimmerer is a bit vague about what would compel us to launch these smaller-scale giving ventures. She artfully describes the rewards reciprocal systems produce once we set them in motion, but she’s less clear about what might motivate more of us to do so. What would make a critical mass of Americans, marinating in a rugged individualist culture, want to become their neighbors’ keepers? How dramatically would our current system have to cave in — whether through climate disaster, civil unrest, or autocracy — before a more communal ethos could take hold?
The promise and peril of the world Kimmerer envisions is that it requires a leap of faith, a kind of hurling yourself into the universe and trusting that others will be there to catch you. In our dogged focus on punishing freeloaders, and on seizing whatever can be stockpiled, we’ve collectively detached from that trust.
“The Serviceberry” is an impassioned call not just to return to the natural webs of exchange that are our birthright‚ but to recapture the fulfillment that stems from interdependence. “To replenish the possibility of mutual flourishing, for birds and berries and people,” she writes, “we need an economy that shares the gifts of the Earth, following the lead of our oldest teachers, the plants.” Whether we emulate their example is up to all of us.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12 ... ature.html
Well and good. While nature is not nearly as often "red of tooth and claw" as the Social Darwinists would like neither should we go down the road of sentimentality as 'crackpotkin' does. What works for one species does not work for all and the long twisty trail of evolutionary development often leaves behind possibilities that might have been.
December 1, 2024 Scott Scheffer
The panda solar farm in Datong, China.
It’s so fitting that just after the 75th anniversary of China’s revolution on Oct. 1, a milestone in China’s efforts to deal with greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) has emerged in the narrative surrounding global warming. What they have accomplished shows how people’s ownership of the world’s productive forces, instead of a tiny clique of billionaires owning everything, will solve this planetary crisis.
Climatologists and scientists widely recognize that China will likely reach its peak greenhouse gas emissions in 2024, although further research will be needed to confirm this with complete accuracy. If the data ultimately shows that the peak does not occur in 2024, it is almost certain to happen in 2025. Even in that case, China would still achieve peak emissions five years earlier than its official target, which President Xi Jinping announced at the 2020 UN General Assembly. This target aimed to reach peak emissions by 2030.
Other countries have reached peak emissions as well, but because China is so huge, UN figures and climatologists are buzzing with excitement over this development. It has great implications for the entire world, particularly for the Global South.
U.S. corporate media often portray China’s crowning achievement as a problem rather than progress.
Mass production of renewables
Chinese mass production of renewable energy components — wind and solar — has driven down the prices globally. It isn’t just the solar panels on rooftops that millions are aware of; China has developed renewables on an industrial scale — wind and solar farms built at much lower costs and capable of supplying energy for cities and industry.
What this means to the Global South cannot be overstated. For instance, a struggling country in Africa, Latin America, or Asia relying on coal for energy can now replace a decrepit coal-fired power plant with a solar or wind farm more cheaply than repairing or replacing that coal plant.
The flaw of wind and solar power’s intermittent availability is still there. China is still running coal plants in its territory as a backup for those times when the sun goes down, or the wind stops.
On average, Chinese coal plants run half the time or less. This simple first step provided what seems to be an outsized result, and it can be replicated where it is needed in the Global South until the intermittency problem with renewables is resolved via other methods.
Control over the means of production
The Communist Party of China faces a real challenge — trying to balance raising and safeguarding the living standards of 1.4 billion people while still developing its scientific and productive capacities and combating climate change at the same time.
China’s capacity to overcome significant challenges stems from the people’s control over the means of production.
When the world’s manufacturing shifted to China in 1979, private interests began to invest in mines and other power generation sources. But that didn’t last long because the CPC and the government recognized that energy has to belong to the people, and they began nationalizing the mines. That process began in the 1980s, and now the number of mines in private hands is insignificant, and they are the smallest, least productive mines.
Inexpensive EVs
Chinese mass production of inexpensive electric vehicles has also been a factor in moving forward in the campaign to lower GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions. Millions of workers in China can now afford the price of a car, not only because 850 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty but also because China has wonderful, inexpensive electric cars.
Over the past decade, the Chinese state has spent $230 billion on research and development of EVs and batteries. China’s spectacular success in producing electric vehicles has prevented a surge in emissions from the increased use of cars.
Some of China’s EVs sell for as little as 10,000 U.S. dollars. They are getting rave reviews and are being sold in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe.
The Biden/Trump tariffs make buying one in the U.S. difficult, but the no-emissions cars are now helping to cut emissions throughout the rest of the world. The sales and use of EVs in China’s territory alone are a significant factor in reducing the world’s GHG emissions.
Beyond cars, the shift to electric power for trucks and trains, both passenger and freight, has been crucial in curbing emissions and achieving peak emissions goals.
Environmental protection in the constitution
The Communist Party of China has taken the significant step of incorporating environmental protection into both its party constitution and the constitution of the People’s Republic of China.
The leadership of the CPC and the Chinese state do not face opposition from super-rich monopoly corporations. Still, this achievement of reaching peak emissions doesn’t mean that reaching “net zero” by the year 2060 will proceed in a straight line.
Like many developing countries, China is still struggling to overcome what it calls the “century of humiliation,” when imperialist Western countries robbed China of its resources and used their military advantage to enforce the theft. The 1949 revolution was only the first step, and it still faces challenges.
In the short term, China needs to develop AI, which will require a lot of electrical energy. Their goal is to power AI with renewables.
They are also investing in research and development of many projects, ranging from areas that seem nearly ready to use, like green hydrogen as fuel whose only by-product is water, to their “artificial sun,” China’s fusion energy project. All of this is being implemented and studied while also trying to help develop the resources for global south countries to mitigate global warming and help them adapt to climate change.
2024 will prove to be the hottest year on record globally. Alongside the horrors of the genocide in Gaza and the U.S. proxy war against Russia, capitalism has dished out the most punishment of the planet in recent memory. Only socialism can end imperialist war and save the planet.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... te-change/
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“The Upside of Climate Pessimism”
Posted on November 30, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. I do not even remotely understand the very strong message here of “optimism good, pessimism generally bad”. It has been repeatedly documented that pessimists are much better at accurately estimating the likelihood of bad events occurring than optimists. Note some of the highly questionable reasoning here, such as:
One recent survey of 59,440 people from 63 countries found that messages focusing solely on the catastrophic nature of climate breakdown performed more poorly than solutions-oriented messaging in motivating climate action.
Dear God, the climate action to date and the rainbows and unicorns schemes like the Green New Deal are inadequate? What good is “solutions-oriented messaging” is if all it produces is putting Band-Aids on gunshot wounds?
As Lambert says apropos the near-total abandonment of Covid precautions, “The optimists will kill us all.”
By Katarina Zimmer, a science and environment journalist. Her work has been published in Knowable Magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Grist, Nautilus Magazine, and more. Originally published at Undark
Hope is often said to be the best medicine, essential to getting people through difficult times. So it’s unsurprising that it has seemingly become a mantra of climate communication in recent years. Instilling hope, the theory goes, is key to motivating people to act; without it, people will succumb to despair and apathy.
The emphasis on hope may help explain why so many climate scientists keep their predominantly grim views about our future climate to themselves, while cautioning against what they perceive to be doom-and-gloom narratives in social media (although many scientists are genuinely optimistic). Last year, when a major report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that we’ll likely fail to contain warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, many scientists — and journalists — nonetheless presented the 1.5 degree goal as achievable. In reality, most scientists believe that warming will reach at least 2.5 degrees Celsius, according to a recent survey by The Guardian. Being unhopeful about climate change is so unpopular that I myself, an environment-focused journalist, am fearful of publicly admitting my own pessimistic outlook.
But social science and psychology research presents a more nuanced picture of the emotions that drive action. Certainly, hope is an important psychological motivator for many people, and relying solely on doom-and-gloom messaging could push some people into despondency. But not all hope is equally effective; wishful thinking often falls short. And certain breeds of pessimists are actually highly motivated by threat-centered communication.
What matters, it seems, is not so much whether a person feels hopeful or unhopeful about the future, but how constructively they deal with their emotions. “How people interpret their emotions and rationalize the threat of climate change might be the determining factor in whether it leads to action or inaction,” Matthew Ballew, an environmental psychologist at Pierce College in Puyallup, Washington, wrote to me in an email. In this light, effective climate communication means not only highlighting the rosier end of climate trajectories and the solutions that may help get us there, but also the possibility of a bleak future and the massive amount of work it will take to avoid it.
These nuances of climate emotions were illustrated in a 2019 study that Ballew co-authored, which surveyed American adults during the Obama administration. One arm of the survey encompassed 1,310 adults demographically representative of the U.S. population, focusing on people who believed that climate change is happening.
The researchers distinguished between participants with what they call constructive hope (who agreed to statements like “humanity will rise to the occasion”) and those with false hope (“we don’t need to worry about global warming/climate change because nature will take care of it”). They similarly distinguished between constructive doubt (“most people are unwilling to take individual action”) and fatalistic doubt (“humans can’t affect global warming/climate change because you can’t fight Mother Nature”). Participants were then asked how likely they’d be to contact their government officials, sign petitions demanding more climate action, or support policies like regulating carbon emissions or instituting tax rebates for electric vehicles. Remarkably, the authors found that constructive doubt and constructive hope both correlated with increased policy support and willingness to take political action, whereas false hope and fatalistic thinking had a negative association.
The study is limited in that it looked at people’s self-reported willingness to engage in climate action rather than their actual behavior, noted co-author Brittany Bloodhart, a social psychologist at California State University, San Bernardino. And it’s not clear if feeling doubtful necessarily caused people to be more willing to take action, or if the two correlate for other reasons. Nevertheless, the relationship between constructive doubt and political engagement, the authors wrote, suggests it may be worthwhile to recognize the difficulties inherent in addressing climate change.
Interestingly, a recent survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults found that people experiencing psychological distress related to climate change were more likely to engage in collective climate change action or to report a willingness to do so. And other research has found a positive correlation between climate anxiety and climate action. While anxiety or distress are not exactly the same as doubt or pessimism, they’re similarly believed to cause people to shut down, when in fact they may be a helpful driver of action. “The people that I know who are really seriously working on these issues and who are engaging in climate change activism,” Bloodhart said, stressing that this is her personal observation, “they have a little bit of hope, but they mostly are pretty pessimistic and concerned.”
So why do people choose to act when they believe the worst outcomes are the most likely?
Some light may come from psychological research on so-called defensive pessimists. While run-of-the-mill pessimists might become immobilized and despondent by focusing on negative outcomes, defensive pessimists take action to avoid them. “They use their worry and their anxiety about that worst possible outcome to drive them to take action so that it never becomes a reality,” said social and health psychology researcher Fuschia Sirois of Durham University. In one 2008 experiment, for example, defensive pessimists performed relatively poorly in a word puzzle when prompted to imagine a positive scenario, but they did much better, on average, when they were prompted to imagine the opposite, negative effect.
In another study that tracked university students for over four years, researchers found that defensive pessimists had higher self-esteem compared to other students with anxiety, and even eventually reached nearly similar levels of confidence as optimists. Research comparing optimists and defensive pessimists has often found similar benefits, although pessimists tend to have a less enjoyable journey towards achieving outcomes, Sirois added.
Although there is no data on how defensive pessimists cope with collective action problems like climate change, existing studies suggest they may respond well to clear information about threats — provided it’s paired with guidance on how their individual actions can help avoid negative outcomes. “For people who are defensive pessimists, that’s what’s going to mobilize them to action,” Sirois said.
None of this is to say that purely doomsday messaging can’t have counterproductive outcomes: One recent survey of 59,440 people from 63 countries found that messages focusing solely on the catastrophic nature of climate breakdown performed more poorly than solutions-oriented messaging in motivating climate action. Fortunately, however, surveysof the American public do not indicate a rise in fatalism in the population. The percentage who believes it’s too late to act on climate change has hovered around 13 percent for years, social scientist John Kotcher of George Mason University wrote in an email. “At the very least, this calls into question whether there’s actually a growing sense of fatalism among Americans, despite the online discourse and concern around doom-and-gloom messaging.”
It just means that we shouldn’t hold back from clearly communicating the risk at hand and the scale of work that lies ahead. Indeed, some of Kotcher’s studies have found that threat information can help increase public engagement with climate change in productive ways. Research from health psychology, meanwhile, suggests that people need both explicit information about the threat — for instance, that smoking can cause lung cancer — and what they can do to avoid it. Highlighting the solutions that are already underway is also important. Some behavioral experiments suggest that people are more willing to help tackle a problem if they know that they’re not starting from scratch.
If anything, the public is not worried enough about climate change, said Lorraine Whitmarsh, an environmental psychologist at the University of Bath. And while it’s hard to pinpoint the right amount of hope, Whitmarsh thinks people tend to be overly optimistic. One poll suggests that although 64 percent of Americans say they’re at least “somewhat worried” about climate change, less than half of those report they are “very worried.” Whitmarsh said she believes this stems from techno-optimism among policymakers and the media that has fostered a widespread belief that incremental changes through recycling or green technologies will be enough, without requiring behavioral changes such as reducing meat consumption or using more public transportation. “Maybe a lot of those people are acknowledging that there is a major problem but they think that — because they’ve heard it from politicians and many other people — technology will save us,” Whitmarsh said, adding, “and like, there’s not much that I can do as an individual.”
This is why climate communication should not just be about instilling hope. It means also confronting the worst possible outcomes and the tough, transformative work that lies ahead. That means inspiring not only the optimists among us but the pessimists, too.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... imism.html
Book Review: The Many Bounties of Collaboration in Nature
Posted on December 1, 2024 by Lambert Strether
Lambert Strether: Dang, another book to read: Kropotkin.
By Elizabeth Svoboda, a science writer in San Jose, California, and the author of What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness.” Originally published at Undark.
In the opening scene of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World,” a flock of birds descends on a tree heavy-laden with fruit. Though the birds devour the waxy purple berries with fervor, there are more than enough to go around — not just for the robins and cedar waxwings, but for Kimmerer and her human companions. “There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way,” Kimmerer writes. “And yet here they are.”
Kimmerer’s book, the long-awaited follow-up to her best-selling 2013 essay collection “Braiding Sweetgrass,” is a novella-length meditation on the abundance that sharing and mutual exchange can create. A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, which is native to the Great Lakes region, Kimmerer grounds her worldview in traditions that resist attempts to quantify or hoard what the Earth produces.
Unlike Westerners who prize individual ownership and accumulation, many Indigenous peoples live in “a culture of gratitude” that recognize natural bounty as belonging to all, discourage mindless consumption, and embrace giving’s multiplicative effects. “A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance natural well-being,” she writes. “The economic unit is ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, as all flourishing is mutual.”
Though these ideas wend their way through “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Kimmerer’s latest book examines them more rigorously. She brings a botanist’s eye to descriptions of natural thriving that evoke collaboration’s rewards. The berries she and the birds enjoyed, she notes, could never have ripened without a host of willing contributors — the cedar waxwing that dropped the serviceberry seed so it could germinate, the microbes that fertilized the soil. She traces repeated cycles of flourishing: After single-celled algae take up molecules of phosphorus, zooplankton eat the algae and excrete the phosphorus back into the ocean, where a new generation of algae can feast on it.
“The Serviceberry” continues a long tradition of naturalistic writing about interdependence in the wild. Among the first to cover this ground, over 100 years ago, was Russian naturalist and revolutionary Peter Kropotkin, who observed how animals on the steppe protected each other and collaborated to secure food — and whose work rebuked the idea that nature mostly consisted of winners and losers. “Sociability,” Kropotkin wrote, “is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.”
Like Kropotkin, Kimmerer draws on cooperative successes in nature to mount a vigorous case against human greed and opportunism. “The Serviceberry” broadly indicts economic and political systems that run on the idea that a win for one person must mean a loss for someone else. “There is a tragedy in believing the proffered narrative of our system,” she writes, “which turns us against each other in a zero-sum game.” She compares unchecked accumulators to the mythical Potawatomi villain Windigo, who eats and eats yet is never satisfied.
There’s a distinctly American fear — propped up by “welfare queen” stereotypes — that offering resources up to a communal pool invites freeloaders to drain that pool, a mindset crystallized in ecologist Garrett Hardin’s famed 1968 paper “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In this particular “mathematics of worthiness,” those who could benefit most from community aid are marked as least trustworthy and deserving.
But Kimmerer deftly turns this calculus on its head. Evolutionary scientists like David Sloan Wilson, she notes, are finding that cooperative human and animal societies actually do better across time and generations than those whose members distrust others and look out for number one. “When the focus shifts to the level of a group,” she writes, “cooperation is a better model, not only for surviving but for thriving.”
While “The Serviceberry” convincingly links hoarding to long-term decline, the book’s most resonant passages celebrate the joy to be found in connection and reciprocity, as well as the ongoing ways they multiply. Kimmerer profiles her neighbor Paulie Drexler, who invites community members to come pick her serviceberries for free — mostly because it lifts her spirits to do so. “In the berry patch, all I hear are happy voices,” Drexler says. “It feels good to give that little bit of delight.”
Yet the reciprocal effects of offering that delight, as Kimmerer shows, accrue to both Drexler and the wider community. Grateful berry-pickers may return to Drexler’s farm for sunflowers, blueberries, and pumpkins, and buoyed by their immersion in the joyful harvest, they might even end up voting for farmland-preservation measures on the next ballot. Kimmerer’s narrative complements years of research showing that people who share what they have — time, love, or resources — are happier and more fulfilled than their stingier counterparts.
Though readers are bound to wonder how thriving local gift economies can drive broader shifts away from zero-sum thinking, that isn’t really the province of this book. Kimmerer notes that gift economies do best in small-scale communities, village atmospheres where everyone knows each other on sight. What holds people back from spoiling the commons is a sense of obligation to those around them, and on larger scales, this communal obligation often disappears.
Kimmerer envisions gift exchanges, mutual aid networks, and all the rest as “yes-and” solutions that will play out against a capitalistic backdrop, not direct systemic rebukes. “I don’t think it’s pie in the sky,” she writes, “to imagine that we can create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy.”
Yet Kimmerer is a bit vague about what would compel us to launch these smaller-scale giving ventures. She artfully describes the rewards reciprocal systems produce once we set them in motion, but she’s less clear about what might motivate more of us to do so. What would make a critical mass of Americans, marinating in a rugged individualist culture, want to become their neighbors’ keepers? How dramatically would our current system have to cave in — whether through climate disaster, civil unrest, or autocracy — before a more communal ethos could take hold?
The promise and peril of the world Kimmerer envisions is that it requires a leap of faith, a kind of hurling yourself into the universe and trusting that others will be there to catch you. In our dogged focus on punishing freeloaders, and on seizing whatever can be stockpiled, we’ve collectively detached from that trust.
“The Serviceberry” is an impassioned call not just to return to the natural webs of exchange that are our birthright‚ but to recapture the fulfillment that stems from interdependence. “To replenish the possibility of mutual flourishing, for birds and berries and people,” she writes, “we need an economy that shares the gifts of the Earth, following the lead of our oldest teachers, the plants.” Whether we emulate their example is up to all of us.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12 ... ature.html
Well and good. While nature is not nearly as often "red of tooth and claw" as the Social Darwinists would like neither should we go down the road of sentimentality as 'crackpotkin' does. What works for one species does not work for all and the long twisty trail of evolutionary development often leaves behind possibilities that might have been.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."