American, Chinese scientists identify new chemical pathway of air pollution in China
China and climate change: an exchange
Posted Apr 12, 2021 by Richard Smith, Simon Pirani, and Eds.
Climate Change , Ecology , Environment , Political Economy Asia , China Exchange Featured
In the Notes from the Editors to the March 2021 issue of Monthly Review, the MR editors questioned some of the arguments in Richard Smith’s book, China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse, as well as replied to Simon Pirani’s related criticisms (writing under his pseudonym of Gabriel Levy) of MR editor John Bellamy Foster on China and the environment. Both Smith and Pirani have written replies to our March editorial, which we are publishing here, along with our own rejoinder.
“China Is a Unique Threat to the Global Environment”
Richard Smith
In the March Notes from the Editors, MR editors said that “Smith claims to utilize a ‘Marxist mode of production theorization’ but instead relies on out-of-date statistics, the charge that China’s leadership is characterized by ‘sociopathic behavior’ and the notion that China is unique in the extent of its accumulation drive.” Allow me to respond.
The editors did not cite which statistics are supposedly outdated. Let me cite one from March 2021: Despite the fact that China has reduced the carbon intensity of its economy as the editors point out, already exceeding its Paris commitment, its carbon dioxide emissions are still growing absolutely and as a share of global emissions: “China’s CO2 emissions surged 4% in the second half of 2020” after dropping 3 percent in the first half due to COVID shutdowns. “In total across 2020, CO2 emissions grew by 1.5% compared with 2019.”1 By contrast, U.S. emissions fell by 11 percent in 2020.2 This extends by another year the pattern I described in my book completed in December 2019, namely that China’s carbon emissions have been relentlessly climbing since 1990 while those of the United States, European Union, and Japan have been declining (though not fast enough to meet their own Paris commitments). By 2019, U.S. emissions had dropped 843 million metric tons (the equivalent of Germany’s total emissions) from their peak in 2007, EU emissions have been declining since 1990, and Japan’s 2019 emissions were down 12 percent from their peak in 2013.3 No doubt U.S. carbon emissions will rise as the economy grows this year, but they are unlikely to reverse their downward trajectory let alone catch up with China. China’s annual carbon emissions account for 30 percent of the global total against the U.S. 15 percent, EU 9 percent, India’s 7 percent, and Japan’s 4 percent.4 In other words, “socialist” or not, China is by far the leading driver of global climate collapse, and indeed the gap between China and the rest of the world widened last year and is likely to widen further this year if China’s growth reaches its target of 6 percent.
China presents a climate crisis paradox: it is the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, and leads the world in installed capacity of both. President Xi Jinping has promised to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 and aspires to turn China into an “ecological civilization.” Speaking to the United Nations last September, Xi called on countries to “achieve a green recovery of the world economy in the post-COVID era.”
Yet, instead of prioritizing that green recovery, China is developing fossil fuels as fast as, if not faster than, renewables. The government is ending subsidies for wind and solar, it is ramping up construction of new coal-fired power plants, importing record quantities of oil and natural gas, massively expanding domestic production of oil and gas, and super-polluting coal-to-gas plants.5 In its bid to replace coal with clean energy to heat homes, offices, and factories across smoggy northern China, the government is replacing coal not with solar and wind but with another fossil fuel: natural gas.6 Coal is still growing too. “Last year China’s coal power plant capacity increased by more than three times the rest of the world’s.”7China was building 88 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plants in 2020, even as the rest of the world made cuts of 17 gigawatts. China’s coal consumption rose by 1 percent in 2020, while in India, the second largest coal consumer, it declined by 3.4 percent.8 On top of this, China has now become the world’s second largest consumer of oil, third largest consumer of natural gas, and largest importer of both. In short, instead of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables, China is boosting production and consumption of “all of the above.”
The editors also claim that “China has achieved world-record reductions in air pollution,” citing Michael Marshall’s “China’s Cuts to Air Pollution May Have Saved 150,000 Lives Each Year.” Given that 1.24 million people died from air pollution in China in 2017, saving 150,000 lives is an improvement.9 But pollution reduction has a long way to go. Lung cancer is the leading cause of death in northern China and air pollution takes five to ten years off lifespans in northern China.
How do we explain these anomalies and contradictions?
I contend that China’s hybrid Stalinist-capitalist mode of production is unique and has its own contradictions, drivers, and tendencies. In this system, China’s rulers must obey three nationalist-statist maximands that are at least as powerful and ecosuicidal, if not more so, than the profit maximization driver of capitalism.
They must maximize economic growth and self-sufficient industrialization.
As a state-based communist ruling class in a world dominated by more advanced capitalist powers, Mao Zedong and his successors have understood that they must “catch up and overtake the United States” to insure they will not be reconquered by imperialism. Mikhail Gorbachev’s loss of the economic and arms race to the United States doomed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Xi Jinping is keen to avoid that error. But to overtake the United States, he must maximize hypergrowth of fossil fuel-based industries even if this means forsaking his carbon neutral pledge, abandoning his dream of an ecological civilization, and leading the planet to climate collapse. I point out that only a third of China’s carbon emissions come from coal-fired power plants. Most of the rest come from “hard-to-abate” industries like steel, aluminum, cement, aviation, shipping, chemicals, plastics, textiles, and electronics—industries that cannot be significantly abated with current or foreseeable technology, but which are essential to Xi’s mega infrastructure projects and his Made in China 2025 plan for global high-tech supremacy. Ergo, either he gives up the race or he lets the polluters pollute.
They must maximize employment, not because they are socialists but because they fear the workers and need to maintain stability.
Yet keeping China’s hundreds of millions of workers busy with make-work projects means producing superfluous steel, needless industries, needless infrastructure, empty airports, ghost cities, and so on. Maximizing employment is a major driver of overproduction, overconstruction, “blind growth,” “blind demolition,” and profligate waste of energy and resources across the economy.
They must maximize consumerism.
With the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the Chinese communists’ own near-death experience in 1989, the party resolved to create a mass consumer economy and raise incomes in order to focus people’s attention on consumption and take their minds off politics. That is why successive Five-Year Plans have promoted one consumer craze after another: cars, condos, shopping malls, tourism, golf courses, theme parks, cruise boats, food delivery, online shopping, and more. No doubt, after centuries of privation and decades of Maoist austerity, China’s masses were overdue for some creature comforts. But the promotion of mindless consumerism for the sake of consumerism on the model of capitalism contributes mightily to China’s and the world’s waste and pollution crises.
Lastly, the editors object to my characterization of China’s leadership as “sociopathic.” What would they call political leaders who are sacrificing life on Earth to preserve their power and privilege?
“Chinese Claims to Building an ‘Ecological Civilization’ Are Not Credible”
Simon Pirani
In the March Notes from the Editors, you tell your readers that, in a blog post, I found John Bellamy Foster “insufficiently critical of China” on energy policy. More exactly, it is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders of which he is insufficiently critical, in my view. You protest that he “focus[es] on basic facts.” Fine. But we disagree about interpreting those facts. Four significant divergences are:
Foster thinks Chinese investment in renewables is more significant than its investment in coal; I think the opposite.
In one article about China, Foster pointed to “a growing share of non-fossil-fuel energy consumption” as demonstrative of China’s progress toward “sustainable development”; in another, he argued that “no country seems to be accelerating so rapidly [as China] into the new world of alternative energy.” In neither did he mention the unprecedented expansion of China’s coal production and consumption over the last twenty-five years. Maybe he wrote about it elsewhere, but I could not find anything.
There is no dispute about China’s renewables investment. The dispute is about the significance of its far greater investment in coal. In my view, the Chinese leaders’ decision in the 1990s to go for coal-intensive industrial development was a key step toward potentially disastrous global warming. Those leaders prioritized their understanding of economic development—primarily, industrialization to supply world markets—over the ruinous consequences for future generations of Chinese and other people.
I think that, to understand Chinese policy, the decision to initiate the biggest coal-fired economic boom in world history is central; Foster does not.
Foster considers China’s environmental problems as “the inevitable result of extremely rapid economic growth.” In my view, problems caused by the coal-fired boom were not “inevitable.” (I disagree, too, with your editorial’s emphasis on China “freeing itself from its dependence on coal,” as though that dependence was solely an externally imposed factor.) While coal is in some senses inevitably the go-to fuel for developing nations in Asia, its use at unprecedented scale, for the purpose of export-focused industrialization, was a policy choice.
That choice was implicitly challenged in the 1990s not only by dissident environmentalists whose work was suppressed, but also by the senior CCP economist Deng Yingtao. Were Deng’s proposals, to avoid following what he termed the “Western model of economic growth,” viable? Was it “inevitable” that they were rejected? I offered some comments on this. Perhaps Monthly Review could engage with Deng’s book, published in English in 2017 and, I believe, ignored by the entire left.
I think the Chinese leadership’s current policy, overall, is damaging to the cause of preventing dangerous global warming; Foster does not.
Your editorial, with which I presume Foster agrees, warmly welcomes China’s declaration of its 2060 net zero target, and is encouraged that “China is on track to reach its 2030 goal,” which requires a 60 to 65 percent drop in the economy’s carbon intensity compared to 2005.
I see these facts from a different angle. The projected drop in carbon intensity is less impressive than it sounds, since the carbon intensity of China’s economy in 2005 was, due to the coal-fired boom, nearly twice India’s and more than three times Brazil’s. What is more significant is China’s goal for greenhouse gas emissions: that they will continue to rise until 2030, and only decline after that. The reluctance to cut them in this decade—like the inadequate pledges made by other nations at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference—is widely recognized as ruinous in terms of climate change.
Your editorial sees the Climate Action Tracker assessment that China will meet its 2030 goals as positive. The Climate Action Tracker is less sanguine than Monthly Review, and designates China’s climate policies as “highly insufficient.” To its acknowledgment that the inadequate 2030 target will be met, it adds that China “lacks the policies and direction [for] a low-carbon trajectory”; “China’s coal activities remain a large concern and are inconsistent with the Paris Agreement”; and China would need to phase out coal by 2040 on 1.5°C-compatible pathways, but “appears to be going in the opposite direction.”
Foster sees Chinese leaders’ claims to be moving toward “ecological civilization” as a credible framework for discussion; I do not.
All ruling elites elaborate ideological justifications for their actions. In my view, socialists analyze the actions first, and consider ideologies in that context. The Chinese leaders’ talk of “ecological civilization” is no more a basis for understanding their policy than the Communist in their party’s title.
To avoid confusion: Gabriel Levy, author of articles on the People & Nature blog, is a pseudonym I used.
China and the Challenge of Ecological Civilization
The Editors
In the Notes from the Editors to the March 2021 issue of Monthly Review, we responded to positions on China and the environment taken by two noted ecosocialist analysts, Richard Smith and Simon Pirani (writing under the pseudonym of Gabriel Levy). Both Smith and Pirani have written replies, allowing for a wider exchange.
Smith’s stance toward China is openly accusatory: China is the “engine of environmental collapse”; Xi Jinping is a “climate arsonist”; and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is “an environmental catastrophe” engendering an “environmental rogue state”—all quoted from titles to his recently published works (cited in our March Notes from the Editors), including an article in the establishment, neoliberal, New Cold War journal Foreign Policy.
According to Smith, it is possible to demarcate, in “historical materialist” terms, two forms of capitalism: (1) “normal capitalism,” represented above all by the United States and the other wealthy capitalist states, and (2) the “Stalinist capitalist” system, represented primarily by China. China is said to be unique in its accumulation drive, which is greater than that of today’s “normal capitalist” states, making it a far greater threat to the planet. All of this can be traced to what he calls the “sociopathic” and “suicidal” nature of the CCP leadership, which is to be sharply distinguished from the Western power elite.
The empirical basis of Smith’s argument concentrates on one factor: China’s heavy dependence on coal (a dirtier fossil fuel than oil or natural gas) and the effect that this has on enlarging China’s carbon emissions, given also its high rate of economic growth. Smith’s main argument here is simple and seemingly straightforward: the core capitalist countries of the triad of the United States/Canada, Western Europe, and Japan are all reducing their carbon emissions. In contrast, China’s carbon emissions, we are told, have been rising in recent decades, mainly because of China’s coal dependence, coupled with, as he says in the present piece, the “ecosuicidal drivers of hyper growth” built into its system. China’s “Stalinist capitalist” system thus removes it from the relatively rational path of “normal capitalism,” putting the whole world on a trajectory to climate catastrophe.
This simple story, however, lacks crucial social, historical, and global dimensions. A few basic facts should suffice to indicate that Smith’s argument that China is the “engine of climate catastrophe” falls short and runs into significant contradictions:
*The global carbon budget is determined by the cumulative carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, not simply by current emission rates. In terms of cumulative carbon emissions, the United States is more accountable for the rise of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere above the preindustrial level than is China by a factor of ten.10
*China is an emerging, not yet a rich or developed, economy, ranking only seventy-second in the world in per capital income. The 1992 Kyoto Protocol and the other initial agreements of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) originally excluded the Global South from carbon dioxide emission reductions, requiring that developed economies (Annex I countries) reduce their emissions on average 5 percent below the 1990 level—with the United States, although never ratifying the agreement, required to reduce its emissions by 7 percent below its 1990 level—by 2008–2012. More than two and a half decades later, in 2019, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, despite reductions from their high point in 2007, were still 2 percent above the 1990 level.11 This continuing failure of the rich capitalist countries to reduce their emissions in accordance with the UNFCC agreement has put additional pressure on emerging economies to pick up the slack.
*Per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the United States today are currently more than twice that of China.12Yet, from a Global South perspective, the only meaningful way of addressing climate change is by a process of contraction and convergence, whereby per capita emissions of all countries are equalized.
*Carbon emissions by the U.S. military (even when excluding the emissions from its hundreds of bases abroad) are greater than the annual carbon emissions of 140 countries, yet are not included in the U.S. carbon emissions count.13
*While recorded carbon emissions in the United States have been decreasing in recent years, this is mainly the result of the natural gas boom from fracking, and the shifting of much of the industrial production that occurred in the United States and other developed countries to the Global South in general, and China in particular. The attribution of emissions on a consumption rather than production basis would increase total U.S. carbon emissions by about 8 percent while decreasing those of China by around 14 percent.14
*Although U.S. coal consumption per capita has dropped over the last decade or so due to the fracking boom, as recently as 2010 it was considerably higher than that of China today. Australia has far higher coal consumption per capita than China.15
*China has large supplies of coal (ranking fourth in the world), while its oil and gas reserves are considerably less, creating an internal fossil-fuel dependence on coal for its economic development. It now has the world’s largest high-efficiency (“clean”) coal power system, with “ultra-low emissions technology” incorporated into 80 percent of its coal-fired plants, which are more efficient in reducing emissions than coal plants in the United States. Although the share of coal in China’s energy mix has dropped by over 10 percentage points in the last decade, its coal consumption has not yet peaked. To reach zero net emissions, China will need to move away from coal and toward alternative energy sources.16
In the face of evidence provided in our March Notes from the Editors that China is flattening out its carbon emissions—together with its 2020 pledge to reach net carbon zero emissions before 2060, relying in part on its strong emphasis on alternative energy technology, where it is the world leader—Smith tries to salvage his thesis that China is the ultimate engine of ecological destruction. He thus points to estimates that China’s carbon emissions went up by 1.5 percent during 2020, while those of the United States fell by 11 percent. But China’s increase, which involved commissioning more coal-fired plants in the context of an attempt to recover quickly from the COVID-19 crisis, is no more likely to reflect the general trend for that country than the U.S. emissions drop of 11 percent, which simply reflected the much deeper economic crisis in the United States, are likely to be representative of the U.S. trend. Indeed, U.S. coal consumption alone is projected to rise by 16 percent in 2021, and by another 3 percent in 2022.17
There is no doubt that China, while experiencing world-record reductions in pollution, remains the world’s biggest polluter by most measures on a year-by-year basis, as well as the leading current source of carbon emissions (though its share of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere is small compared to the United States and Europe). China, like the rest of the world, desperately needs an ecological revolution, which must necessarily go beyond mere ecological modernization. This will mean questioning the whole role of economic growth. Nevertheless, as we said in our March Notes from the Editors, we see a “ray of hope” in the Chinese leadership’s increasingly strong commitment to building an ecological civilization. This is occurring in the context of vast ecological struggles taking place in China and the conflict of China’s central leadership with powerful local governments and private business interests.18 In this ongoing struggle in China, Monthly Review identifies most strongly with those forces fighting for ecological civilization.
Simon Pirani’s reply to our March Notes from the Editors continues his earlier criticisms of MR editor John Bellamy Foster. Yet, in contrast to his earlier blog piece where he cited specific passages by Foster—which we demonstrated to be distorted and taken out of context—he chose this time around to present allegations with no pretense of any empirical backing whatsoever, basing his criticisms on his own direct perceptions of Foster’s thoughts.
In his first charge, Pirani writes: “Foster thinks Chinese investment in renewables is more significant than its investment in coal.” Foster, the defendant in this case, however, has never intimated any such thing. What needs to be recognized, though, is that the two energy paths of coal versus alternative energies are obviously related, and a shift to alternative energy technology is the key to China moving away from coal and from fossil fuels in general. As noted above, coal consumption has been diminishing as a portion of China’s energy mix, though it has not yet peaked.
In his second attack on Foster’s thoughts, Pirani declares: “I think that, to understand Chinese policy, the decision to initiate the biggest coal-fired economic boom in world history is central; Foster does not.” With respect to Foster, this is completely unfounded. Indeed, no rational observer would deny the importance of China’s coal-based carbon emissions at present with respect to the earth’s remaining climate budget. But while is true that China initiated the biggest coal boom in history measured in absolute terms (though, from a historical standpoint, British dependence on coal in its Industrial Revolution was obviously much higher than China today), as recently as 2010, China’s per capita coal consumption was still considerably lower than that of the United States. Moreover, China’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions overall remain far lower today than those of the United States.19 China’s current attempt to shift away from coal as an energy source, relying more on alternative energy sources, is the main reason that it is flattening its carbon emissions at present.
In his third charge directed at Foster’s inner thoughts, Pirani says: “I think the Chinese leadership’s current policy, overall, is damaging to the cause of preventing dangerous global warming; Foster does not.” This too is false where Foster is concerned, precisely because it lacks nuance. As indicated in the March Notes from the Editors, the Chinese leadership has provided the world with a “ray of hope” in its incorporation of the goal of an ecological civilization into its five-year plans, its shift of China’s energy mix toward alternative energy sources, and its commitment to reach zero net carbon emissions before 2060. But there is still a long way to go, and clearly China is still at present contributing massively to planetary ecological destruction. We agree with Pirani that it would have been much better if the Chinese leadership had listened to the advice of Deng Yingtao in his A New Development Model in China (1991). While conditions have dramatically changed since then, much of his analysis remains vital in any attempt to carry out an ecological revolution in China.20
Finally, in his fourth charge leveled against Foster, Pirani says that “Foster sees Chinese leaders’ claims to be moving toward ‘ecological civilization’ as a credible framework for discussion; I do not.” Here, Pirani is correct in his criticisms. Foster, and all of us on the MR editorial committee, believe, in contradistinction to Pirani, that the Chinese leadership’s commitment to creating an ecological civilization is a framework well worth discussion. The future of humanity may very well weigh in the balance.21
Notes
↩ Lauri Myllyvirta, “Analysis: China’s CO2 Emissions Surged 4% in Second Half of 2020,” CarbonBrief, March 3, 2021.
↩ “EIA Expects U.S. Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions to Fall 11% in 2020,” U.S. Energy Information Administration, December 9, 2020.
↩ “Countries,” Climate Action Tracker, accessed March 28, 2021.
↩ “Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, accessed March 28, 2021.
↩ Tsvetana Paraskova, “China Aims to Boost Its Oil and Gas Production in 2020,” OilPrice, June 22, 2020; Chen-Wei Yap and Chieko Tsuneoka, “China’s Pursuit of Natural Gas Jolts Markets and Drains Neighbors,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2021.
↩ Eric Yep and Cindy Liang, “China Proposal to Replace Coal in Over 7 Million Homes May Boost Winter LNG Demand,” S&P Global Platts, September 30, 2020.
↩ David Stanway, “China’s New Coal Power Plant Capacity in 2020 More Than Three Times Rest of World’s: Study,” Reuters,February 2, 2021.
↩ “Coal and Lignite Domestic Consumption,” in Global Energy Statistical Yearbook 2020, Enerdata, accessed March 28, 2021.
↩ Peng Yin et al., “The Effect of Air Pollution on Deaths, Disease Burden, and Life Expectancy Across China and Its Provinces, 1990–2017: An Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017,” Lancet, August 17, 2020.
↩ James Hansen et al., “Young Peoples’ Burden: Requirements of Negative CO2 Emissions,” Earth System Dynamics 8 (2017): 578; James Hansen, “China and the Barbarians, Part 1,” Columbia University, November 24, 2010.
↩ U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Draft Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–2019 (Washington DC: EPA, 2021), ES-4; John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 13–14.
↩ “Each Country’s Share of CO2 Emissions,” Union of Concerned Scientists, August 12, 2020.
↩ Neta C. Crawford, “Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Cost of War” (Watson Institute, Brown University, November 13, 2019); “The U.S. Military Produces More Greenhouse Gas Emissions than Up to 140 Countries Combined,” Newsweek, June 25, 2019; “Pentagon to Lose Emissions Exemption Under Paris Climate Deal,” Guardian, December 14, 2015.
↩ Hannah Ritchie, “How Do CO2 Emissions Compare When We Adjust for Trade,” Our World in Data, October 7, 2019.
↩ “Per Capita Energy Emissions from Coal, 2019,” Our World in Data, accessed April 7, 2021.
↩ China Power Team, “How Is China’s Energy Footprint Changing?,” China Power, January 30, 2021; “Everything You Think You Know About Coal in China is Wrong,” Center for American Progress, May 15, 2017; “China’s Coal Share of Energy Consumption Falls in 2020 but Overall Coal Use Is Up,” Reuters, February 28, 2021.
↩ “World’s Three Biggest Coal Users Get Ready to Burn Even More,” Bloomberg, March 19, 2021.
↩ “The Rock Standing in the Way of Climate Ambitions: Coal,” New York Times, March 16, 2021.
↩ “Per Capita Energy Emissions from Coal.”
↩ Deng Yingtao, A New Development Model and China’s Future (London: Routledge, 2014).
↩ On the history and significance of the concept of ecological civilization from a historical materialist standpoint, see John Bellamy Foster, “The Earth-System Crisis and Ecological Civilization,” International Critical Thought 7, no. 4 (2017): 439–58.
https://mronline.org/2021/04/12/china-a ... -exchange/
The response to the anti-communist propagandists was so good from the Editors of MR(for a change...)that the propaganda was needed for context even tho a waste of space.
The Long Ecological Revolution
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Japan To Dump Contaminated Radioactive Wastewater Into the Sea
People protesting outside Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea, April 14, 2021. | Photo: Xinhua
Published 14 April 2021
When announcing the appalling decision, the Japanese government explained that the Fukushima nuclear plant operator was running out of storage capacity.
Japan announced Tuesday that it will dump more than one million tons of contaminated radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The decision has been met with strong opposition at home and abroad, as it will threaten global marine ecosystems and food security.
RELATED:
Pollution To Cause Millions of 'Premature Deaths' By 2050
The disposal of contaminated wastewater has been a decade-long problem since the Fukushima nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011. After suffering core meltdowns, the Fukushima plant has been generating massive amounts of radiation-tainted water.
Substances like tritium, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear reactors, are hard to filter out despite using a liquid processing system.
“Tritium is light, so it could reach as far afield as the U.S. West Coast within two years,” said Ken Buesseler at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
Traces of ruthenium, cobalt, strontium, and plutonium isotopes in the wastewater also raise concerns, not to mention whether Japan's plan to use a filtering process will pan out or not.
What is more worrying is the possibility that the wastewater, if dumped from Fukushima prefecture, might circle around the entire Pacific Ocean. Whether the ocean can digest or filter out the radioactive matters remains uncertain.
If the radioactive matters can't be digested or filtered out by the ocean, the situation would be dire. Once the marine ecosystem is destroyed by the wastewater, it can never be restored.
Out of this concern, many Japanese people oppose the government's plan. A poll conducted by Asahi Shimbun newspaper in January showed that 55 percent of respondents were against the government's plan to discharge contaminated radioactive wastewater into the sea.
When announcing the appalling decision, the Japanese government explained that the local nuclear plant operator was running out of storage capacity and excluded a negative impact on the environment or human health.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Jap ... -0005.html
Looks like one of the plumes is headed straight for the Pike Place Fish market...
********************************************
Japan plan to dump nuclear wastewater into Pacific sparks anger
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2021-04-14 09:11
Editor's note:
The tolerance of Western politicians and media outlets, particularly US support of Japan's decision to discharge nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, has sparked global concern and discussion. China Daily readers share their opinions.
Tenith
Japan prides itself for having recycled many things and demonstrating all their sort of cute recycled products. So how come they didn't recycle the water by using it for their agriculture produce and car wash, etc?
If it is so safe, why doesn't Japan use it to water their agriculture produce and for their own inland fish breeding? After all, isn't Japan into recycling? Very funny the West doesn't even question Japan's act.
I suspect this is not the last we will hear from China about this matter.
People protesting outside Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea, April 14, 2021. | Photo: Xinhua
Published 14 April 2021
When announcing the appalling decision, the Japanese government explained that the Fukushima nuclear plant operator was running out of storage capacity.
Japan announced Tuesday that it will dump more than one million tons of contaminated radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The decision has been met with strong opposition at home and abroad, as it will threaten global marine ecosystems and food security.
RELATED:
Pollution To Cause Millions of 'Premature Deaths' By 2050
The disposal of contaminated wastewater has been a decade-long problem since the Fukushima nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011. After suffering core meltdowns, the Fukushima plant has been generating massive amounts of radiation-tainted water.
Substances like tritium, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear reactors, are hard to filter out despite using a liquid processing system.
“Tritium is light, so it could reach as far afield as the U.S. West Coast within two years,” said Ken Buesseler at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
Traces of ruthenium, cobalt, strontium, and plutonium isotopes in the wastewater also raise concerns, not to mention whether Japan's plan to use a filtering process will pan out or not.
What is more worrying is the possibility that the wastewater, if dumped from Fukushima prefecture, might circle around the entire Pacific Ocean. Whether the ocean can digest or filter out the radioactive matters remains uncertain.
If the radioactive matters can't be digested or filtered out by the ocean, the situation would be dire. Once the marine ecosystem is destroyed by the wastewater, it can never be restored.
Out of this concern, many Japanese people oppose the government's plan. A poll conducted by Asahi Shimbun newspaper in January showed that 55 percent of respondents were against the government's plan to discharge contaminated radioactive wastewater into the sea.
When announcing the appalling decision, the Japanese government explained that the local nuclear plant operator was running out of storage capacity and excluded a negative impact on the environment or human health.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Jap ... -0005.html
Looks like one of the plumes is headed straight for the Pike Place Fish market...
********************************************
Japan plan to dump nuclear wastewater into Pacific sparks anger
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2021-04-14 09:11
Editor's note:
The tolerance of Western politicians and media outlets, particularly US support of Japan's decision to discharge nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, has sparked global concern and discussion. China Daily readers share their opinions.
Tenith
Japan prides itself for having recycled many things and demonstrating all their sort of cute recycled products. So how come they didn't recycle the water by using it for their agriculture produce and car wash, etc?
If it is so safe, why doesn't Japan use it to water their agriculture produce and for their own inland fish breeding? After all, isn't Japan into recycling? Very funny the West doesn't even question Japan's act.
I suspect this is not the last we will hear from China about this matter.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
In this systemic crisis of capital, water is one of the most appreciated commodities (Photo: AFP)
WILL THERE BE WARS OVER WATER?
Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein
In this systemic crisis of capital, water is one of the most appreciated commodities (Photo: AFP)
17 Apr 2021 , 1:01 pm .
According to a report from the Union of Land Workers (UTT) of Argentina cited by the Latin American Summary portal , according to the 2010 National Census in that country "5.3 million people do not have access to drinking water inside their homes and close to out of 1 million do not have it on the perimeter of their land ", which means that 13% of the inhabitants are unable to have water in their homes.
The same report indicates that the causes of this situation must be found in Climate Change, changes in land use and the increase in extractivism, all of which negatively influence the lives of citizens in general and the workers who need water to do their jobs. The inhabitants of some rural areas must pay eight times more than those of the urban areas and sometimes even walk many hours to obtain the water necessary to meet the minimum needs for life.
In Chile, it has recently been denounced that Fuad Chahín, candidate for the Constitutional Convention and president of the right-wing Christian Democratic Party - who was the main promoter of the coup against President Allende, a propagandist of the dictatorship in its early years and a leading beneficiary of the post-dictatorship - has used his connections within power to safeguard family interests, promoting laws so that his relatives have privileged access to water, violating the law that he supposedly swore to defend. In his time as a parliamentarian, Chahín voted on issues related to his own interests or those of his clan, if one considers that some of his direct relatives, in addition to being owners of a large number of water rights in the commune of Curacautín in the Region of La Araucanía in southern Chile,
These are just two recent examples that express the gradual conflict arising from the impossibility for important sectors of the population to have access to water. Perhaps this is what led US Vice President Kamala Harris on February 7 to declare in a threatening tone that: "For years the wars have been fought over oil, [but that] in a short time they will be for Water".
Although he was referring to a local problem in his country in which he recognized "inequalities in access", one must consider what the meaning of the word "war" has, when it is mentioned by the second most important figure in the country's administration. powerful, aggressive and warmongering of the world.
It must be remembered that fresh water only represents 2.5% of the 1,386 million cubic kilometers of water reserves in the world, however 70% of that total corresponds to poles and glaciers, at the same time as other significant amount is found in untreated rivers.
The peoples of all the latitudes and longitudes of the planet are widely aware of what happens when the United States has deficiencies in its reserves of some resource or when there are internal insufficiencies that do not guarantee daily consumption. In the same way, a lot is known about the ways and methods you use to obtain them. If pressure, blackmail, threats, sanctions, blockades, and assassinations of leaders don't work, they turn to war, this time announced in advance by Vice President Harris.
Although it seems incredible that the lack of water is a cause of conflict and war, this is almost as old as society itself. Michael Klare in his Resource Wars. The future scenario of the global conflict reminds us that already in the Old Testament it is indicated that before the inability of the Israelites to enter the fertile valleys of the Jordan River without first expelling its inhabitants, God instructed them to enter that land whenever he would be in charge of expelling the autochthonous peoples that populated it. Later, he ordered Josué - Moses' successor - to cross the Jordan and exterminate "the inhabitants of Jericho and other settlements in the area."
Throughout history there are countless acts of war related to water. Recently, a conflict of unsuspected dimensions has been intensifying between three countries (Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia) of the 11 that are in the basin of the Nile River, the largest in the world.
The Nile River has two main sources: the White Nile that contributes 20% and the Blue Nile that represents 80% of its waters. The latter has its source in Lake Tana in Ethiopia and flows north towards Sudan and later on to Egypt and then empties into the Mediterranean Sea.
In 2011 Ethiopia began construction on the Blue Nile of the "Great Dam of the Ethiopian Renaissance" - the largest in Africa - without previously reaching an agreement with the two other countries that are also subsidiaries of the river downstream. However, in 2015 an agreement was signed between the three by which Ethiopia pledged not to affect the availability of water in Sudan and Egypt. But recently, various disagreements between the parties increased the tension threatening to throw the colossal work overboard.
Egypt's link with the Nile is historical and fundamental since the river was the main sustenance to build a great civilization in ancient times, which has marked an important part of the life of the country and its diplomacy in the last century.
Since 1902, Egypt has been making international agreements aimed at strengthening its dominant position on the Nile, which is not to the liking of Ethiopia or Sudan. In an article entitled " The water wars. Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia " published on the Rebellion portalby specialized analyst Germán Romano, the author recalls that Butros Butros-Ghali, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt, in an interview with the BBC newspaper during 1985 exposed the position of his country in relation to the Nile: "The next war in the Middle East it will be fought by water, not by politics ”. Later, he had to modify his point of view when he assumed functions as Secretary General of the UN between 1991 and 1996, favoring cooperation as a way of making optimal use for all those involved with the great river. Thus, Butros-Ghali preceded the current vice president of the United States in her perception of the conflict that the lack of water can generate in the international system.
In the aforementioned article, Romano points out that:
"In the event of an armed conflict between these countries, the consequences will fall on the populations that suffer the effects of governments that are not elected by the people (sic). Likewise, access without distinction of borders for irrigation used by women farmers is at risk. and farmers ".
From this point of view, it should not be understood as a coincidence strictly linked to energy wealth that the military interventions of the United States and NATO in Libya and Iraq have taken place. In the case of the African country, under its desert is one of the largest reservoirs of water in the entire continent. The interest in exploiting and distributing the liquid in wide sectors of the population, became the strategic work of greater scope of the government of Muammar Gaddafi, who managed to make a green revolution in the sands of the Sahara, turning his country into a great orchard that It made possible access to water and food for large sectors of the population, leading the country to be the one with the highest Human Development Index (HDI) on the continent.
In Iraq, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was the sustenance for the origin of the Mesopotamian civilization that gave so much brilliance and so many advances to humanity in terms of science and technology. That wealth, in addition to its large oil and gas reserves, constituted the axis of the imperial ambition that motivated the invasion of that country in 2003.
So the announcement from Vice President Harris is late. In case you don't know, your country has been the protagonist of cruel incursions into countries that own large stocks of water, which the imperial tentacles have also wanted to get their hands on. Latin America must take note of this new war threat. Possessor of the Guaraní aquifer in the confines of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay and the basins of the Amazon, the Negro River and the Orinoco where an important part of the planet's fresh water reserves are concentrated, our region is a fundamental objective of the imperial interest in an element vital to life on the planet.
https://misionverdad.com/opinion/habra- ... or-el-agua
Google Translator
WILL THERE BE WARS OVER WATER?
Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein
In this systemic crisis of capital, water is one of the most appreciated commodities (Photo: AFP)
17 Apr 2021 , 1:01 pm .
According to a report from the Union of Land Workers (UTT) of Argentina cited by the Latin American Summary portal , according to the 2010 National Census in that country "5.3 million people do not have access to drinking water inside their homes and close to out of 1 million do not have it on the perimeter of their land ", which means that 13% of the inhabitants are unable to have water in their homes.
The same report indicates that the causes of this situation must be found in Climate Change, changes in land use and the increase in extractivism, all of which negatively influence the lives of citizens in general and the workers who need water to do their jobs. The inhabitants of some rural areas must pay eight times more than those of the urban areas and sometimes even walk many hours to obtain the water necessary to meet the minimum needs for life.
In Chile, it has recently been denounced that Fuad Chahín, candidate for the Constitutional Convention and president of the right-wing Christian Democratic Party - who was the main promoter of the coup against President Allende, a propagandist of the dictatorship in its early years and a leading beneficiary of the post-dictatorship - has used his connections within power to safeguard family interests, promoting laws so that his relatives have privileged access to water, violating the law that he supposedly swore to defend. In his time as a parliamentarian, Chahín voted on issues related to his own interests or those of his clan, if one considers that some of his direct relatives, in addition to being owners of a large number of water rights in the commune of Curacautín in the Region of La Araucanía in southern Chile,
These are just two recent examples that express the gradual conflict arising from the impossibility for important sectors of the population to have access to water. Perhaps this is what led US Vice President Kamala Harris on February 7 to declare in a threatening tone that: "For years the wars have been fought over oil, [but that] in a short time they will be for Water".
Although he was referring to a local problem in his country in which he recognized "inequalities in access", one must consider what the meaning of the word "war" has, when it is mentioned by the second most important figure in the country's administration. powerful, aggressive and warmongering of the world.
It must be remembered that fresh water only represents 2.5% of the 1,386 million cubic kilometers of water reserves in the world, however 70% of that total corresponds to poles and glaciers, at the same time as other significant amount is found in untreated rivers.
The peoples of all the latitudes and longitudes of the planet are widely aware of what happens when the United States has deficiencies in its reserves of some resource or when there are internal insufficiencies that do not guarantee daily consumption. In the same way, a lot is known about the ways and methods you use to obtain them. If pressure, blackmail, threats, sanctions, blockades, and assassinations of leaders don't work, they turn to war, this time announced in advance by Vice President Harris.
Although it seems incredible that the lack of water is a cause of conflict and war, this is almost as old as society itself. Michael Klare in his Resource Wars. The future scenario of the global conflict reminds us that already in the Old Testament it is indicated that before the inability of the Israelites to enter the fertile valleys of the Jordan River without first expelling its inhabitants, God instructed them to enter that land whenever he would be in charge of expelling the autochthonous peoples that populated it. Later, he ordered Josué - Moses' successor - to cross the Jordan and exterminate "the inhabitants of Jericho and other settlements in the area."
Throughout history there are countless acts of war related to water. Recently, a conflict of unsuspected dimensions has been intensifying between three countries (Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia) of the 11 that are in the basin of the Nile River, the largest in the world.
The Nile River has two main sources: the White Nile that contributes 20% and the Blue Nile that represents 80% of its waters. The latter has its source in Lake Tana in Ethiopia and flows north towards Sudan and later on to Egypt and then empties into the Mediterranean Sea.
In 2011 Ethiopia began construction on the Blue Nile of the "Great Dam of the Ethiopian Renaissance" - the largest in Africa - without previously reaching an agreement with the two other countries that are also subsidiaries of the river downstream. However, in 2015 an agreement was signed between the three by which Ethiopia pledged not to affect the availability of water in Sudan and Egypt. But recently, various disagreements between the parties increased the tension threatening to throw the colossal work overboard.
Egypt's link with the Nile is historical and fundamental since the river was the main sustenance to build a great civilization in ancient times, which has marked an important part of the life of the country and its diplomacy in the last century.
Since 1902, Egypt has been making international agreements aimed at strengthening its dominant position on the Nile, which is not to the liking of Ethiopia or Sudan. In an article entitled " The water wars. Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia " published on the Rebellion portalby specialized analyst Germán Romano, the author recalls that Butros Butros-Ghali, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt, in an interview with the BBC newspaper during 1985 exposed the position of his country in relation to the Nile: "The next war in the Middle East it will be fought by water, not by politics ”. Later, he had to modify his point of view when he assumed functions as Secretary General of the UN between 1991 and 1996, favoring cooperation as a way of making optimal use for all those involved with the great river. Thus, Butros-Ghali preceded the current vice president of the United States in her perception of the conflict that the lack of water can generate in the international system.
In the aforementioned article, Romano points out that:
"In the event of an armed conflict between these countries, the consequences will fall on the populations that suffer the effects of governments that are not elected by the people (sic). Likewise, access without distinction of borders for irrigation used by women farmers is at risk. and farmers ".
From this point of view, it should not be understood as a coincidence strictly linked to energy wealth that the military interventions of the United States and NATO in Libya and Iraq have taken place. In the case of the African country, under its desert is one of the largest reservoirs of water in the entire continent. The interest in exploiting and distributing the liquid in wide sectors of the population, became the strategic work of greater scope of the government of Muammar Gaddafi, who managed to make a green revolution in the sands of the Sahara, turning his country into a great orchard that It made possible access to water and food for large sectors of the population, leading the country to be the one with the highest Human Development Index (HDI) on the continent.
In Iraq, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was the sustenance for the origin of the Mesopotamian civilization that gave so much brilliance and so many advances to humanity in terms of science and technology. That wealth, in addition to its large oil and gas reserves, constituted the axis of the imperial ambition that motivated the invasion of that country in 2003.
So the announcement from Vice President Harris is late. In case you don't know, your country has been the protagonist of cruel incursions into countries that own large stocks of water, which the imperial tentacles have also wanted to get their hands on. Latin America must take note of this new war threat. Possessor of the Guaraní aquifer in the confines of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay and the basins of the Amazon, the Negro River and the Orinoco where an important part of the planet's fresh water reserves are concentrated, our region is a fundamental objective of the imperial interest in an element vital to life on the planet.
https://misionverdad.com/opinion/habra- ... or-el-agua
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Depriving the poor of energy is bad climate policy
By Bjorn Lomborg | China Daily | Updated: 2021-04-19 08:03
Experts have commended a China-US joint climate statement issued amid the rift between the world's two largest economies. [Photo/IC]
To tackle climate change, rich countries are promising to end fossil fuel use in 29 years. As this becomes excruciatingly costly, the G7 is now thinking about making the world's poor pay for it. That will go badly.
The rich world has seen an incredible development on the back of enormous increases in mostly fossil fuel energy. A couple of hundred years ago, most available power came from backbreaking human work. Even by the end of the 1800s, human labor made up 94 percent of all industrial work in the United States. Today, it constitutes just 8 percent.
If we think of the energy we use in terms of "servants", each with the same work power as a human being, every person in the rich world today has access to 150 servants who clean, cook, drive, heat and do almost everything else for them.
Despite green protestations, rich people still get 79 percent of their energy from fossil fuels. Ending that will be hard, socially destabilizing and surprisingly ineffective.
To see how difficult, take the United Nations' pronouncement that our Paris Agreement promises really mean reducing world emissions by 7.6 percent every year this decade. The UN cheerfully notes this was almost achieved in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic-induced shutdowns across countries.
But this year, we need twice the reduction, equal to two 2020-like shutdowns. And three times the reduction in 2022, ending with the equivalent of eleven global shutdowns every year from 2030. Economic models show this will cost tens of trillions of dollars a year.
Besides, it will also destabilize rich countries. They have seen their per-person growth rates decline－in Europe, it is now edging toward zero. As climate policies reduce growth further, this will threaten long-term social coherence as people realize their children won't be better off and pensions will wither.
Moreover, the cuts will matter little for the environment. Even if all Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries cut their entire CO2 emissions today, the standard climate UN model shows it will reduce warming by just 0.4 Celsius by 2100.
The reason? Six billion not-rich people also want access to plentiful and cheap energy, lifting them out of hunger, sickness and poverty. They are more concerned about economic growth that will create welfare and resilience against disease and even climate change.
Unfortunately, climate policies harm the developing world. The Paris Agreement will force more people into poverty by 2030 than otherwise would have happened. If we aim to keep temperature rise below 2 C or 1.5 C, it will, according to a recent peer-reviewed study, mean at least 80 million more poor by 2030 and more than 100 million more starving by mid-century.
Now, rich countries want the world's poor to pay the costs through carbon tariffs. The United Kingdom is pushing such tariffs as a key priority of its G7 presidency, and the proposal is falling on sympathetic ears in other European countries, and the US and Canada.
As the US and Europe drive up energy costs, more businesses will escape to less-burdened areas such as China, India and African countries. Slapping a border tariff on imports according to their underlying emissions reduces that move. But such tariffs also make it harder for the developing world to compete, because most rich countries use carbon more sparingly. Globally, these tariffs are inefficient and make climate policies even costlier. And more crucially, they act as back-door protectionism for rich countries.
For the rich world to cut 20 percent of its emissions, a standard model shows it will cost them $310 billion a year. Using carbon tariffs, the rich world can instead end up $400 billion better off, making $90 billion by forcing businesses to move back to the rich world. Instead, they impose more than half a trillion dollar in extra costs onto the world's poor. As one highly quoted study concludes, "the main effect of carbon tariffs is to shift the economic burden of developed-world climate policies to the developing world".
The European Union and other developed economies believe that higher tariff threats will force the developing world to adopt their own costly climate policies. This could be a disastrous misjudgment.
If the US were to implement a national $40 tax per ton of carbon, one recent study shows, it would cost $73 billion yearly in lost growth. If the US also decided to force Chinese exporters to pay tariffs equivalent to this carbon tax, it would confer a $24 billion loss on China. But this wouldn't help push China to implement its own $40 carbon tax domestically, because that would cost the country an eye-watering $210 billion a year.
Instead, it is likely that forcing developing countries to choose between losing billions and losing even more billions will lead to profound resentment with a rich world that claims to implement climate policies to help, but in reality shifts the costs onto the world's poor. It could lead to a tariff war and the developing countries shaping their separate free trading regime.
The effective way to address the real problem of climate change is to dramatically ramp up investment into green energy research and development. If the price of green energy could be innovated below fossil fuels over the next decade, everyone would happily switch.
In particular, China and its partners need to force sense back into climate policy and insist on smart green innovation. China, on its part, should warn a smug West that depriving the world's poor of the twin drivers of development, abundant energy and free trade is unacceptable.
Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus.
The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... b6508.html
Carbon taxes have always been a capitalist scam meant to keep the ruling class in charge and handily profiting too. As is typical, the negatives are offloaded on the backs of the powerless.Nothing short of ending the profit/consumption driven organization of the world economy can hope to get a handle on the woes cascading upon us.
Allow me to fix this paragraph:
"The ineffective way to address the real problem of climate change is to dramatically ramp up investment into green energy research and development. If the price of green energy could be innovated below fossil fuels over the next decade, everyone would happily switch."
As long as profits are the goal of economic policy any and all plans, schemes and dreams will prioritize them and render all other consideration secondary, if that. Only a change in the very philosophy of the economy can put the horse before the cart, the needs of humanity over the aggrandizement of the Owners. Mitigating the climate change already in the pipe and not aggravating further disruptions is most certainly a human need.
By all means the scientific work required mush be supported and magnified but we cannot expect much in the way of effective mitigation on a global scale and with justice until the productive forces of society are marshaled by a scientifically planned economy. The 'freedom' of the ruling class is killing us.
*****************************
US climate summit must be more than 'dinner party'
By Lidy Nacpil | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2021-04-19 09:57
On April 22, Earth Day, US President Joe Biden will host the Leaders Summit on Climate, which has invited 40 world leaders to attend. It is the first major international event to be held by the new president at the White House, and the world is watching, especially since the previous president refused to talk about such a "hoax" as climate change and kept the door shut for four years. The US special climate envoy John Kerry has been touring the world to invite these leaders, and to encourage them to show up with gifts.
Polite guests usually bring a token gift to a dinner party, sometimes a bottle of wine, sometimes a salad, or dessert. So far, it seems at least Canada, Japan and South Korea, have their gifts packaged. Canada will raise their emission cut targets, and both Japan and South Korea will announce an end to overseas coal financing. Some other guests are expected to bring some flowers or compelling stories for atmospheric purposes at the banquet.
Naturally, the highlight will be the main course the host will be serving. The whole world, as well as the 40 honored guests, all of whom have been waiting eagerly for over four years, will be watching with anticipation what climate actions the US, under the new administration, will present. The question is, will it be good enough for a world that urgently needs a major helping of assistance in the area of climate rescue?
In terms of domestic actions, "if the Biden Administration wants the US to be a climate leader, its new 2030 Paris Agreement target should aim for national emissions reductions of at least 57-63 percent below 2005 levels," according to the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), a climate scientist group. A big chunk of this emission cut needs to come from the building sector and transportation sector. By 2030, almost all sales of new light-duty vehicles in the US must be zero-emissions. This alone is no easy task for a population addicted to cars.
An approach where the US is all in is the least of what the US must do domestically. The US Climate Action Network, a coalition of climate NGOs, believes that the US fair share of the global mitigation effort in 2030 is equivalent to a reduction of 195 percent below its 2005 emissions levels. This means more efforts have to be made by the US in other countries, especially with financial and technological support for emission reductions in Global South countries, and an immediate stop of all its financial support for fossil fuels.
According to climate civil society group Oil Change International, the US has been spending on average more than $4 billion of taxpayer money each year to support overseas fossil fuel projects, at times exceeding $10 billion in a single year. The NGOs, in their open letter, underlined gas, which, viewed as a "bridge fuel", has been receiving increasing investment under both the Obama and Trump administrations.
As the world's largest historical emitter, the US also owes billions of dollars each year, as an "ecological debt" to climate-vulnerable countries, such as Bangladesh, Bhutan, Jamaica and the Marshall Islands. Their leaders are among the 40 guests invited to the summit on April 22.
While John Kerry is going from door to door to deliver the invitations, President Joe Biden is busy in the White House's kitchen now preparing his main course. His climate change pledges, both to boost domestic economy and to strengthen US global influence, contributed to his win in the 2020 presidential race. Now that he has successfully put the US back at the climate negotiation table, the summit is when he displays his climate sincerity for an audience in and outside America.
Ambitious emission cuts, an immediate end to fossil fuel financing, and sufficient monetary commitments to support vulnerable countries' mitigation and adaptation, are all just necessary ingredients. The more challenging task is how to really earn the trust from the 40 guests, and the larger global community. A climate action package from President Biden, without high targets for domestic actions and determination and generosity for overseas actions, will be only half done and missing the most important ingredient: sincerity.
Without sincere and ambitious climate pledges from the US, this Leaders Summit on Climate will be nothing but a dinner party to entertain the host.
Fool me once, shame on you. The world still remembers how it was also an Earth Day, five years ago, when John Kerry, then US secretary of state, signed the Paris Agreement, carrying his granddaughter, as a symbol of the future generations who deserve a legacy of safe climate. At the same time, the memory of ex-president Donald Trump announcing a complete cease of all participation in the Paris Agreement, just two years later, still leaves a bitter taste.
This mistrust and suspicion will likely linger for a bit longer, probably even till after COP26 in Glasgow. President Joe Biden has a lot to do to earn back the rest of the world's trust. The world cannot afford to be fooled a second time.
The author is an activist working on economic, environmental, social and gender justice issues in national, regional and global campaigns. She is the coordinator of the Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development, co-coordinator of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, co-founder of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice, and vice-president of Freedom from Debt Coalition.
The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of China Daily and China Daily website.
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... b6671.html
By Bjorn Lomborg | China Daily | Updated: 2021-04-19 08:03
Experts have commended a China-US joint climate statement issued amid the rift between the world's two largest economies. [Photo/IC]
To tackle climate change, rich countries are promising to end fossil fuel use in 29 years. As this becomes excruciatingly costly, the G7 is now thinking about making the world's poor pay for it. That will go badly.
The rich world has seen an incredible development on the back of enormous increases in mostly fossil fuel energy. A couple of hundred years ago, most available power came from backbreaking human work. Even by the end of the 1800s, human labor made up 94 percent of all industrial work in the United States. Today, it constitutes just 8 percent.
If we think of the energy we use in terms of "servants", each with the same work power as a human being, every person in the rich world today has access to 150 servants who clean, cook, drive, heat and do almost everything else for them.
Despite green protestations, rich people still get 79 percent of their energy from fossil fuels. Ending that will be hard, socially destabilizing and surprisingly ineffective.
To see how difficult, take the United Nations' pronouncement that our Paris Agreement promises really mean reducing world emissions by 7.6 percent every year this decade. The UN cheerfully notes this was almost achieved in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic-induced shutdowns across countries.
But this year, we need twice the reduction, equal to two 2020-like shutdowns. And three times the reduction in 2022, ending with the equivalent of eleven global shutdowns every year from 2030. Economic models show this will cost tens of trillions of dollars a year.
Besides, it will also destabilize rich countries. They have seen their per-person growth rates decline－in Europe, it is now edging toward zero. As climate policies reduce growth further, this will threaten long-term social coherence as people realize their children won't be better off and pensions will wither.
Moreover, the cuts will matter little for the environment. Even if all Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries cut their entire CO2 emissions today, the standard climate UN model shows it will reduce warming by just 0.4 Celsius by 2100.
The reason? Six billion not-rich people also want access to plentiful and cheap energy, lifting them out of hunger, sickness and poverty. They are more concerned about economic growth that will create welfare and resilience against disease and even climate change.
Unfortunately, climate policies harm the developing world. The Paris Agreement will force more people into poverty by 2030 than otherwise would have happened. If we aim to keep temperature rise below 2 C or 1.5 C, it will, according to a recent peer-reviewed study, mean at least 80 million more poor by 2030 and more than 100 million more starving by mid-century.
Now, rich countries want the world's poor to pay the costs through carbon tariffs. The United Kingdom is pushing such tariffs as a key priority of its G7 presidency, and the proposal is falling on sympathetic ears in other European countries, and the US and Canada.
As the US and Europe drive up energy costs, more businesses will escape to less-burdened areas such as China, India and African countries. Slapping a border tariff on imports according to their underlying emissions reduces that move. But such tariffs also make it harder for the developing world to compete, because most rich countries use carbon more sparingly. Globally, these tariffs are inefficient and make climate policies even costlier. And more crucially, they act as back-door protectionism for rich countries.
For the rich world to cut 20 percent of its emissions, a standard model shows it will cost them $310 billion a year. Using carbon tariffs, the rich world can instead end up $400 billion better off, making $90 billion by forcing businesses to move back to the rich world. Instead, they impose more than half a trillion dollar in extra costs onto the world's poor. As one highly quoted study concludes, "the main effect of carbon tariffs is to shift the economic burden of developed-world climate policies to the developing world".
The European Union and other developed economies believe that higher tariff threats will force the developing world to adopt their own costly climate policies. This could be a disastrous misjudgment.
If the US were to implement a national $40 tax per ton of carbon, one recent study shows, it would cost $73 billion yearly in lost growth. If the US also decided to force Chinese exporters to pay tariffs equivalent to this carbon tax, it would confer a $24 billion loss on China. But this wouldn't help push China to implement its own $40 carbon tax domestically, because that would cost the country an eye-watering $210 billion a year.
Instead, it is likely that forcing developing countries to choose between losing billions and losing even more billions will lead to profound resentment with a rich world that claims to implement climate policies to help, but in reality shifts the costs onto the world's poor. It could lead to a tariff war and the developing countries shaping their separate free trading regime.
The effective way to address the real problem of climate change is to dramatically ramp up investment into green energy research and development. If the price of green energy could be innovated below fossil fuels over the next decade, everyone would happily switch.
In particular, China and its partners need to force sense back into climate policy and insist on smart green innovation. China, on its part, should warn a smug West that depriving the world's poor of the twin drivers of development, abundant energy and free trade is unacceptable.
Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus.
The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... b6508.html
Carbon taxes have always been a capitalist scam meant to keep the ruling class in charge and handily profiting too. As is typical, the negatives are offloaded on the backs of the powerless.Nothing short of ending the profit/consumption driven organization of the world economy can hope to get a handle on the woes cascading upon us.
Allow me to fix this paragraph:
"The ineffective way to address the real problem of climate change is to dramatically ramp up investment into green energy research and development. If the price of green energy could be innovated below fossil fuels over the next decade, everyone would happily switch."
As long as profits are the goal of economic policy any and all plans, schemes and dreams will prioritize them and render all other consideration secondary, if that. Only a change in the very philosophy of the economy can put the horse before the cart, the needs of humanity over the aggrandizement of the Owners. Mitigating the climate change already in the pipe and not aggravating further disruptions is most certainly a human need.
By all means the scientific work required mush be supported and magnified but we cannot expect much in the way of effective mitigation on a global scale and with justice until the productive forces of society are marshaled by a scientifically planned economy. The 'freedom' of the ruling class is killing us.
*****************************
US climate summit must be more than 'dinner party'
By Lidy Nacpil | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2021-04-19 09:57
On April 22, Earth Day, US President Joe Biden will host the Leaders Summit on Climate, which has invited 40 world leaders to attend. It is the first major international event to be held by the new president at the White House, and the world is watching, especially since the previous president refused to talk about such a "hoax" as climate change and kept the door shut for four years. The US special climate envoy John Kerry has been touring the world to invite these leaders, and to encourage them to show up with gifts.
Polite guests usually bring a token gift to a dinner party, sometimes a bottle of wine, sometimes a salad, or dessert. So far, it seems at least Canada, Japan and South Korea, have their gifts packaged. Canada will raise their emission cut targets, and both Japan and South Korea will announce an end to overseas coal financing. Some other guests are expected to bring some flowers or compelling stories for atmospheric purposes at the banquet.
Naturally, the highlight will be the main course the host will be serving. The whole world, as well as the 40 honored guests, all of whom have been waiting eagerly for over four years, will be watching with anticipation what climate actions the US, under the new administration, will present. The question is, will it be good enough for a world that urgently needs a major helping of assistance in the area of climate rescue?
In terms of domestic actions, "if the Biden Administration wants the US to be a climate leader, its new 2030 Paris Agreement target should aim for national emissions reductions of at least 57-63 percent below 2005 levels," according to the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), a climate scientist group. A big chunk of this emission cut needs to come from the building sector and transportation sector. By 2030, almost all sales of new light-duty vehicles in the US must be zero-emissions. This alone is no easy task for a population addicted to cars.
An approach where the US is all in is the least of what the US must do domestically. The US Climate Action Network, a coalition of climate NGOs, believes that the US fair share of the global mitigation effort in 2030 is equivalent to a reduction of 195 percent below its 2005 emissions levels. This means more efforts have to be made by the US in other countries, especially with financial and technological support for emission reductions in Global South countries, and an immediate stop of all its financial support for fossil fuels.
According to climate civil society group Oil Change International, the US has been spending on average more than $4 billion of taxpayer money each year to support overseas fossil fuel projects, at times exceeding $10 billion in a single year. The NGOs, in their open letter, underlined gas, which, viewed as a "bridge fuel", has been receiving increasing investment under both the Obama and Trump administrations.
As the world's largest historical emitter, the US also owes billions of dollars each year, as an "ecological debt" to climate-vulnerable countries, such as Bangladesh, Bhutan, Jamaica and the Marshall Islands. Their leaders are among the 40 guests invited to the summit on April 22.
While John Kerry is going from door to door to deliver the invitations, President Joe Biden is busy in the White House's kitchen now preparing his main course. His climate change pledges, both to boost domestic economy and to strengthen US global influence, contributed to his win in the 2020 presidential race. Now that he has successfully put the US back at the climate negotiation table, the summit is when he displays his climate sincerity for an audience in and outside America.
Ambitious emission cuts, an immediate end to fossil fuel financing, and sufficient monetary commitments to support vulnerable countries' mitigation and adaptation, are all just necessary ingredients. The more challenging task is how to really earn the trust from the 40 guests, and the larger global community. A climate action package from President Biden, without high targets for domestic actions and determination and generosity for overseas actions, will be only half done and missing the most important ingredient: sincerity.
Without sincere and ambitious climate pledges from the US, this Leaders Summit on Climate will be nothing but a dinner party to entertain the host.
Fool me once, shame on you. The world still remembers how it was also an Earth Day, five years ago, when John Kerry, then US secretary of state, signed the Paris Agreement, carrying his granddaughter, as a symbol of the future generations who deserve a legacy of safe climate. At the same time, the memory of ex-president Donald Trump announcing a complete cease of all participation in the Paris Agreement, just two years later, still leaves a bitter taste.
This mistrust and suspicion will likely linger for a bit longer, probably even till after COP26 in Glasgow. President Joe Biden has a lot to do to earn back the rest of the world's trust. The world cannot afford to be fooled a second time.
The author is an activist working on economic, environmental, social and gender justice issues in national, regional and global campaigns. She is the coordinator of the Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development, co-coordinator of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, co-founder of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice, and vice-president of Freedom from Debt Coalition.
The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of China Daily and China Daily website.
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... b6671.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
UN Says US Must Halve Emissions to Spur Global Climate Action
Scientists say that, in order to prevent cataclysmic climate impacts, global emissions must plummet this decade and reach net zero by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. | Photo: Twitter/@thejillbeat08
Published 19 April 2021 (15 hours 31 minutes ago)
The Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres urged the United States to commit this week to at least cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, which could unlock similar action from the world’s other significant emitters.
The United States—which is the planet's largest economy and second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China—hosts a virtual climate change summit on April 22-23, as Washington has insisted world leaders use the platform as an opportunity to commit to more significant emissions cuts.
The UN Secretary-General reminded that the White House's own pledge would need to set the bar high if other countries are to follow suit.
"My expectation is that the United States will be able to present a reduction of emissions for 2030, in relation to 2010 levels, above 50%," Guterres told Reuters in an interview.
“If it happens, I have no doubt that it will have very important consequences in relation to Japan, in relation to China, in relation to Russia -- in relation to other areas of the world that have not yet entirely defined these levels,” he continued.
According to research firm the Rhodium Group, climate analysts predict the White House will release a plan to slash emissions by at least 50% by 2030, from 2005 levels, which would be similar to a 47% reduction by 2030 compared with 2010 levels.
As climate change is already intensifying heatwaves, strengthening hurricanes, and making wildfires more widespread, Guterres referred to this week's global meeting as a "make it or break it" moment for bold climate leadership.
Scientists remind that global carbon emissions must plummet this decade and reach net zero by 2050 to limit global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels if the globe is to prevent disastrous climate impacts.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/UN- ... -0023.html
Fat chance as long as the anarchy of capitalism is in the saddle. This headline should be on top of every US outlet but it won't be, defenders of 'The American Way' and profits would be apoplectic. I can imagine the rhetoric: "no air conditioning in summer!", " a 'governor' on your car's accelerator limiting speed to 55mph! Unconstitutional!", "NASCAR outlawed!", "digital currency outlawed!" "Beef outlawed!" and so forth....
Well, not exactly, but certainly food for thought(but don't think too long). The 'watts per person' regime proposed by China and other developing nations is about as just as we're gonna get and could get the job done. Leveling the consumption of persons on the US regardless of class would take some of the sting out of this for workers. Reducing the Pentagon and other so-called national security agencies by 90% would go a good ways towards leveling the field.
Socialism or barbarism.
Scientists say that, in order to prevent cataclysmic climate impacts, global emissions must plummet this decade and reach net zero by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. | Photo: Twitter/@thejillbeat08
Published 19 April 2021 (15 hours 31 minutes ago)
The Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres urged the United States to commit this week to at least cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, which could unlock similar action from the world’s other significant emitters.
The United States—which is the planet's largest economy and second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China—hosts a virtual climate change summit on April 22-23, as Washington has insisted world leaders use the platform as an opportunity to commit to more significant emissions cuts.
The UN Secretary-General reminded that the White House's own pledge would need to set the bar high if other countries are to follow suit.
"My expectation is that the United States will be able to present a reduction of emissions for 2030, in relation to 2010 levels, above 50%," Guterres told Reuters in an interview.
“If it happens, I have no doubt that it will have very important consequences in relation to Japan, in relation to China, in relation to Russia -- in relation to other areas of the world that have not yet entirely defined these levels,” he continued.
According to research firm the Rhodium Group, climate analysts predict the White House will release a plan to slash emissions by at least 50% by 2030, from 2005 levels, which would be similar to a 47% reduction by 2030 compared with 2010 levels.
As climate change is already intensifying heatwaves, strengthening hurricanes, and making wildfires more widespread, Guterres referred to this week's global meeting as a "make it or break it" moment for bold climate leadership.
Scientists remind that global carbon emissions must plummet this decade and reach net zero by 2050 to limit global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels if the globe is to prevent disastrous climate impacts.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/UN- ... -0023.html
Fat chance as long as the anarchy of capitalism is in the saddle. This headline should be on top of every US outlet but it won't be, defenders of 'The American Way' and profits would be apoplectic. I can imagine the rhetoric: "no air conditioning in summer!", " a 'governor' on your car's accelerator limiting speed to 55mph! Unconstitutional!", "NASCAR outlawed!", "digital currency outlawed!" "Beef outlawed!" and so forth....
Well, not exactly, but certainly food for thought(but don't think too long). The 'watts per person' regime proposed by China and other developing nations is about as just as we're gonna get and could get the job done. Leveling the consumption of persons on the US regardless of class would take some of the sting out of this for workers. Reducing the Pentagon and other so-called national security agencies by 90% would go a good ways towards leveling the field.
Socialism or barbarism.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
A model U.S. “fair shares” pledge
Posted Apr 22, 2021 by Eds.
Originally published: EcoEquity by Tom Athanasiou (April 20, 2021)
You remember the Paris Agreement, right? As a good thing, right?
There are two reasons why you should. The first is that Paris actually exists, and really could serve as a keystone of planetary climate mobilization. The second is that its “ambition mechanisms” (its “ambition ratchet”) are intended to strengthen the national pledges of action (official known as “nationally determined contributions” or NDCs) over and over again, as time goes by. Such that, when the history of the climate reckoning is finally written, the Paris ratchet will be a crucial part of the story. If it has worked, then all the Agreement’s shortcomings will be forgiven. If it hasn’t, we’ll have to admit, for whatever cold comfort it brings us, that the cynics in our ranks were right, and that Paris was just another false promise.
This isn’t a piece on the ambition ratchet, though I plan to write one. Rather, it’s a quick note to announce the “Fair Shares NDC” that was recently released by a rather ad-hoc coalition of people and groups from the U.S. climate left, for the explicit purpose of modeling the actions we believe the U.S. should actually be pledging, in this the pivotal first year of what promises to be a pivotal decade. We don’t claim the Fair Shares NDC is perfect—this is a work in progress—but we do claim that its asks, “unrealistic” or “utopian” though you may judge them to be, should not be casually set aside, not if we intend to achieve the Paris temperature goals. Rather, at a minimum, take the Fair Shares NDC as a standard against which to measure the Biden Administration’s more official offering.
One key bit of context—the climate mobilization has now begun in earnest, and it wasn’t Paris that set the spark. Paris didn’t hurt, but if you look back for the single best marker, the one that most clearly illuminates the end of the denialist interregnum and the beginning of today’s struggle towards seriousness, you’d be better off choosing the IPCC’s special report on Global warming of 1.5°C, which somehow managed to shift the frame. You can see this in the shape of the current negotiations, in which countries around the world are being asked to announce commitments to reduce their emissions to “net zero” by 2050. This figure comes directly from the IPCC report, which told us, among much else, that we had best do our damnedest to hold the warming to 1.5°C, and that this means global reductions of about 50% by 2030.
There’s a lot to say about these numbers, but the point here is only that they’ve gone viral, and mainstream, and indeed have taken on an almost normative air. You’re nobody, these days, if you haven’t made a net zero 2050 pledge. Which is not the problem. The problem is rather that ours is a world in which some countries are fantastically rich, while others are not, in which some countries have emitted huge amounts of greenhouse gases, while others have not, and yet the international pressure to achieve a universal push for unconditional national net zero 2050 pledges takes very little account of these defining facts. To the point where now, with 2030 pledges high on the agenda, even rich countries like the U.S. can get away with adopting the global average figure—a 50% by 2030 reduction target—and expect it to be widely accepted as being, well, fair enough.
The problem is that the 50% number—which the IPCC asserted as a global 2030 reduction target—is not in any way a proper guide to national fair shares, nor will it ever be. There is no future in which the 2030 U.S. fair share, and the 2030 fair share of, say, Sierra Leone, are going to be the same. Which brings us to the question at the heart of the Fair Shares NDC—what should the U.S. pledge in its new NDC? Or, more precisely, what would it pledge if it was actually proposing to do its fair share, relative to the demands of the 1.5°C global temperature goal, and in the light of its outsized national wealth and responsibility?
This is a big question, and I’m going to duck most of the details by just noting that it was answered a while back, at least within the U.S. Climate Action Network, which has officially agreed to support a U.S. fair shares target of 195%. More precisely, USCAN has laid down the following marker . . .
USCAN believes that the U.S. fair share of the global mitigation effort in 2030 is equivalent to a reduction of 195% below its 2005 emissions levels, reflecting a fair share range of 173-229%
. . . and now, as a bit of a follow up, our ad-hoc coalition has released the Fair Shares NDC, which builds upon the USCAN position in two key ways. It’s wide ranging, for one thing—there’s more to a national NDC than just an quantified action target—and, the point here, it breaks down that rather boggling “195%” into more easily digestible terms.
Action Aid is a core member of the U.S. fair shares group. Here’s how they put it:
“According to the analysis that provides the basis of the Fair Shares NDC, the United States must commit to the equivalent of 195% reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. That’s about 14 gigatonnes (billion metric tons) of greenhouse gases annually by 2030. In order to reach this goal, the United States should aim to do two things:
* cut emissions by 70% by 2030 (about 5 gigatonnes annually), and
* support developing countries to reduce their emissions by an additional 9 gigatonnes annually by 2030–thus making up the remaining 125% of our 195% target.
(For perspective, NASA compares 1 gigatonnes to 10,000 fully-loaded U.S. aircraft carriers.)
We worked through a variety of methodologies to figure out what that 125% target for international support would look like if we converted it into dollars. The answers vary widely, but all credible estimates are in the trillions. In the Fair Shares NDC, we call on the United States to commit to providing $800 billion in public climate finance for the period 2021-2030, as a down payment toward a fair share that is in reality much larger.”
One other point, lest you think this analysis, well, unrealistic. What we’re doing here is asserting a new kind of realism, in which we center the actions we see as necessary, rather than those we think we can immediately get. Which is also why the Fair Shares NDC doesn’t restrict itself to mitigation, but rather takes adaptation and loss & damage costs very, very seriously. The $800 billion we’re asking for is divided into three partitions; the $267 billion (for the decade) that’s for mitigation is matched by an equivalent figure for adaptation, and matched again by an equivalent figure for loss & damage. To see the details, click over to the Fair Shares NDC and look at the technical annex, which summarizes the very preliminary costing data available on all three fronts—mitigation, adaptation, and loss & damage—and shows, in painful detail, just how low-ball a number $800 billion really is.
A few additional points. First, it really is true that we imagine the $800 billion as a good faith down payment. We absolutely don’t expect the U.S. to pay its entire fair share in the absence of a multilateral accord in which other wealthy countries do the same. Second, it’s past time to get clear about mitigation costs. To wit, the renewables revolution is real. Solar and wind and efficiency are in fact getting so cheap that fossil energy can’t successful compete with them in anything like a “free market,” were such a thing to exist. But this doesn’t mean the overall cost of the energy transition is going to be “net negative,” as techno-optimists keep insisting. Such claims ignore the tremendous challenges presented by the 1.5°C target, and pretend that a rapid renewables transition will occur without significant transitions costs, and it will not. See the Annex in the Fair Shares NDC for a more detailed discussion of these points.
All of which is to say that any U.S. NDC that commits to a 50% by 2030 domestic emissions reduction target, delivered with no additional stipulation of international support, is utterly incompatible with both a fair shares analysis and the 1.5C goal. The 195% target, on the other hand, is actually quite reasonable, which you can see by breaking it down, step by step, from the initial responsibility and capacity calculation, through the conservative costing on all three fronts, to the final step in which only a down payment would be unconditionally tabled. Not, of course, that we expect beltway realists to grant this point, not easily in any case, but it stands nonetheless. Much greater ambition is needed from the United States if we’re to avoid climate injustice on a catastrophic global scale.
It’s helpful, in all this, to remember the so-called “Overton window”, which Wikipedia defines as “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time”. The point is that such policies, which are typically considered moderate or realist, are by definition too small and incremental to stabilize the climate system, a goal that, at this point, requires an end to fossil fuel emissions, and indeed an end to the extraction of fossil fuels. What then must we do? The answer is obvious—we have to get as much immediate action though the Overton window as we possibly can, and we also have to expand the window, so that much larger structural transformations also come to be “politically acceptable to the mainstream population.” We have to do both of these things at the same time. There is no choice, not if we honestly hope to achieve the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals.
Thus, the Fair Shares NDC lays out a series of actions the Biden administration could take, and policies that Congress could implement, in order to meet the massive level of action required if the United States is to do its fair share. We recognize that these actions and policies add up to huge, transformational changes, and we do not expect them to be achieved, in full, while the cold civil war against the lunatic authoritarian nationalists of the right defines the parameters of acceptable political ambition. But we do expect them to be honestly debated.
We have not given up on 1.5°C.
The IPCC report actually calls for reductions of about 45% below the 2010 baseline by 2030. But it was published in 2018 and life has gone on. The 45% was routinely rounded to 50% before the pandemic. It will still do.
https://mronline.org/2021/04/22/a-model ... es-pledge/
Well, Joe Biden has his big chance today to show that the US will do it's fair share.....any bets?
I expect not, rather we will see a doubling down on across the board emission reduction with little to zero consideration of historical factors, per capita emissions and the touting of US initial advantages without context. Essentially a shit show and a cudgel with which to beat chosen adversaries. Would that I am wrong about this but as with all greenwashing this will likely be an exercise in PR, placating domestic and foreign critics.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Low-carbon lifestyles given huge push
By HOU LIQIANG | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2021-04-23 07:31
Zhang Jiaxuan is making every effort to promote a low-carbon lifestyle.[Photo/China Daily]
Green-living advocates step up campaigns
Ni Huan became accustomed to seeing strangers at her home in Shanghai, with 15,000 people visiting it from September 2014 to November 2019.
"On average, five to six strangers arrived each day," she said, adding that the number would have continued to rise had not the family moved to another area after she had her daughter.
The visitors were attracted by a solar power system in the 44-year-old's apartment in the city's Minhang district, the first to use CIGS－a thin-film photovoltaic technology for civil use on the Chinese mainland.
The arrivals were fascinated by a facility capable of purifying water, while also using excrement from fish to nourish plants.
Ni is just one of the participants in a low-carbon campaign that began in China even before the country announced targets for carbon dioxide emissions to peak ahead of 2030 and for carbon neutrality to be realized before 2060.
Working for two decades in environmental protection, she said she viewed the arrival of the solar-powered system as an opportunity to experience the implementation of the government's preferential policies for low-carbon development.
"The experience has been very good," Ni said.
She spent nearly three months taking part in community hearings and in discussions with neighbors to win their consent for the system to be installed.
She said it took less than a week for State Grid to complete the work, adding that she also received a subsidy from the authorities.
In 2013, the central government introduced a national preferential policy for the development of solar energy, pledging a subsidy of 0.42 yuan (6.4 cents) for every kilowatt hour of power generated by solar power stations such as the one in Ni's home.
According to a regional policy unveiled in Shanghai a year later, Ni was entitled to another subsidy of 0.4 yuan for each kW/h of electricity produced for a period of five years.
While taking advantage of the free electricity provided by the system, she said she received 3,000 yuan from the government on average every year from 2014 to 2019.
News that a solar power facility had been installed at her home spread fast. Visitors soon arrived, plunging Ni's life into chaos.
The head of her residential block's management committee told Ni a group of 10 pupils were coming to her home. However, the apartment was quickly overwhelmed by more than 40 visitors.
Their keen interest in a low-carbon environment inspired Ni to launch the Shanghai Green Light-Year Environmental Service Center in 2016 to better advocate sustainable lifestyles.
Many student volunteers with the NGO helped visitors to her home and assisted at low-carbon demonstration facilities elsewhere. In 2018, the organization began transforming itself into a sustainable education institution.
Ni said at least 50 families in Shanghai and nearby areas installed solar power stations after visiting her home. The NGO has also sowed the seeds of interest among the younger generation.
Many volunteers choose majors related to the environment and sustainable development for their further studies. "Some students' experience with the NGO has changed their interests," Ni said.
Fu Demin wants entrepreneurs to adopt a low-carbon approach to development. [Photo/China Daily]
Factories closed
In Gulin county, Sichuan province, Fu Demin, 39, has become a firm low-carbon advocate after being involved for years in her family's business, which had high emission levels.
The family used to run half of the more than 60 brick factories in Gulin, employing over 1,000 workers.
However, in 2015, local authorities closed the family's factories due to their high emission levels."I felt the Chinese government's deep resolve to control industries with high emissions," Fu said.
She then looked for openings in environmental protection, an area she believes boasts rich opportunities.
Having no related knowledge, Fu took up whatever environment-related training she could find in 2016.
A year later, she decided to concentrate on carbon after discovering that China had been piloting carbon trading. Meanwhile, seven central government bodies published a guideline for establishing a green financial system.
"I still spend about 300,000 yuan a year on carbon-related education," Fu said.
She and four of her siblings tried to include carbon asset management as a business category at a company they run after hearing that the National Development and Reform Commission held a conference in late 2017 on setting up a national carbon market for the power generating industry.
Fu said the category was so unfamiliar that it was not included in the local commerce authority's registration system.
She has also been attempting to get local entrepreneurs to adopt a low-carbon approach to development.
In 2019, Fu and more than 50 entrepreneurs jointly launched Zhongtan Lvlinbao Low Carbon Technology Co in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province. One of the company's businesses now encourages a low-carbon approach, with a training program themed on carbon asset management.
More than 200 entrepreneurs have taken part in the program, which features two-day training sessions every month, Fu said.
The company and the education department in Sichuan plan to launch a pilot program in a university town in Yibin to promote low-carbon sustainable lifestyles among students.
Ni Huan is among the participants in a low-carbon campaign. [Photo by Xiao Muyi/For China Daily]
Cycling to work
Since 2016, Yang Xinmiao, deputy director of Tsinghua University's Institute of Transportation Engineering, has been commuting by bicycle to promote a low-carbon lifestyle.
Like many of his colleagues, Yang used to drive to work despite only living about 1 kilometer from the campus in Beijing.
This changed in 2016, when a student chose to wear a face mask all the time due to concerns about poor air quality.
Yang decided to cycle after the student criticized him for driving to work, describing this practice as environmentally unfriendly. His determination to take to two wheels increased after he was recommended a power-assisted bicycle.
Half of Yang's colleagues, who number in their thousands, have also decided to cycle to work.
Cycling has become increasingly popular since Yang persuaded the university management and authorities in Haidian district, where the institution is located, to set up a bike lane between the university and the residential block where many Tsinghua teachers live.
In 2017, with the help of a friend from the Jiusan Society, one of China's non-communist parties, Yang submitted a proposal to promote power-assisted cycling to the country top political advisory body, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
Last year, he also managed to have another proposal submitted to the body's Beijing committee, in which he suggested improving the capital's cycling infrastructure.
His proposals received a positive response. In September, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport promised to introduce a series of measures to promote commuting by bicycle, including exploring the possibility of setting up cycle lanes along the city's waterways.
Yang recently collaborated with the Chinese University Cycling Association. With his help, a member of the association from Peking University drafted a plan for a cycle lane network in Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi province. The pair, together with a local NGO, plan to lobby authorities in the city to implement the plan.
"Generally, the situation is good. ... Things are proceeding quicker than I imagined," Yang said of his efforts to promote cycling.
Meanwhile, Zhang Jiaxuan, 22, a graduate of Tsinghua University's environmental school, has been doing everything she can to lead and promote a low-carbon lifestyle. Her efforts include taking public transportation and avoiding the use of air conditioners as much as possible.
Zhang's enthusiasm for climate-related issues resulted in her being elected head of the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate youth delegation to the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid, the Spanish capital.
Launched that year, the alliance's aims are to increase cooperation on climate-related issues, foster greater engagement with climate stakeholders, and promote environmental practices by universities, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and conventions on climate change.
In discussions with climate-change followers at home and abroad, Zhang has found that while high-profile campaigns on the issue are being promoted in the West, climate change is being tackled in a low-key manner in China and other Asian nations.
"Despite having done a lot of work, we don't talk about it that much. Many of us are just concentrating on doing things silently in our own way," she said.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202104/2 ... bc0_1.html
By HOU LIQIANG | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2021-04-23 07:31
Zhang Jiaxuan is making every effort to promote a low-carbon lifestyle.[Photo/China Daily]
Green-living advocates step up campaigns
Ni Huan became accustomed to seeing strangers at her home in Shanghai, with 15,000 people visiting it from September 2014 to November 2019.
"On average, five to six strangers arrived each day," she said, adding that the number would have continued to rise had not the family moved to another area after she had her daughter.
The visitors were attracted by a solar power system in the 44-year-old's apartment in the city's Minhang district, the first to use CIGS－a thin-film photovoltaic technology for civil use on the Chinese mainland.
The arrivals were fascinated by a facility capable of purifying water, while also using excrement from fish to nourish plants.
Ni is just one of the participants in a low-carbon campaign that began in China even before the country announced targets for carbon dioxide emissions to peak ahead of 2030 and for carbon neutrality to be realized before 2060.
Working for two decades in environmental protection, she said she viewed the arrival of the solar-powered system as an opportunity to experience the implementation of the government's preferential policies for low-carbon development.
"The experience has been very good," Ni said.
She spent nearly three months taking part in community hearings and in discussions with neighbors to win their consent for the system to be installed.
She said it took less than a week for State Grid to complete the work, adding that she also received a subsidy from the authorities.
In 2013, the central government introduced a national preferential policy for the development of solar energy, pledging a subsidy of 0.42 yuan (6.4 cents) for every kilowatt hour of power generated by solar power stations such as the one in Ni's home.
According to a regional policy unveiled in Shanghai a year later, Ni was entitled to another subsidy of 0.4 yuan for each kW/h of electricity produced for a period of five years.
While taking advantage of the free electricity provided by the system, she said she received 3,000 yuan from the government on average every year from 2014 to 2019.
News that a solar power facility had been installed at her home spread fast. Visitors soon arrived, plunging Ni's life into chaos.
The head of her residential block's management committee told Ni a group of 10 pupils were coming to her home. However, the apartment was quickly overwhelmed by more than 40 visitors.
Their keen interest in a low-carbon environment inspired Ni to launch the Shanghai Green Light-Year Environmental Service Center in 2016 to better advocate sustainable lifestyles.
Many student volunteers with the NGO helped visitors to her home and assisted at low-carbon demonstration facilities elsewhere. In 2018, the organization began transforming itself into a sustainable education institution.
Ni said at least 50 families in Shanghai and nearby areas installed solar power stations after visiting her home. The NGO has also sowed the seeds of interest among the younger generation.
Many volunteers choose majors related to the environment and sustainable development for their further studies. "Some students' experience with the NGO has changed their interests," Ni said.
Fu Demin wants entrepreneurs to adopt a low-carbon approach to development. [Photo/China Daily]
Factories closed
In Gulin county, Sichuan province, Fu Demin, 39, has become a firm low-carbon advocate after being involved for years in her family's business, which had high emission levels.
The family used to run half of the more than 60 brick factories in Gulin, employing over 1,000 workers.
However, in 2015, local authorities closed the family's factories due to their high emission levels."I felt the Chinese government's deep resolve to control industries with high emissions," Fu said.
She then looked for openings in environmental protection, an area she believes boasts rich opportunities.
Having no related knowledge, Fu took up whatever environment-related training she could find in 2016.
A year later, she decided to concentrate on carbon after discovering that China had been piloting carbon trading. Meanwhile, seven central government bodies published a guideline for establishing a green financial system.
"I still spend about 300,000 yuan a year on carbon-related education," Fu said.
She and four of her siblings tried to include carbon asset management as a business category at a company they run after hearing that the National Development and Reform Commission held a conference in late 2017 on setting up a national carbon market for the power generating industry.
Fu said the category was so unfamiliar that it was not included in the local commerce authority's registration system.
She has also been attempting to get local entrepreneurs to adopt a low-carbon approach to development.
In 2019, Fu and more than 50 entrepreneurs jointly launched Zhongtan Lvlinbao Low Carbon Technology Co in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province. One of the company's businesses now encourages a low-carbon approach, with a training program themed on carbon asset management.
More than 200 entrepreneurs have taken part in the program, which features two-day training sessions every month, Fu said.
The company and the education department in Sichuan plan to launch a pilot program in a university town in Yibin to promote low-carbon sustainable lifestyles among students.
Ni Huan is among the participants in a low-carbon campaign. [Photo by Xiao Muyi/For China Daily]
Cycling to work
Since 2016, Yang Xinmiao, deputy director of Tsinghua University's Institute of Transportation Engineering, has been commuting by bicycle to promote a low-carbon lifestyle.
Like many of his colleagues, Yang used to drive to work despite only living about 1 kilometer from the campus in Beijing.
This changed in 2016, when a student chose to wear a face mask all the time due to concerns about poor air quality.
Yang decided to cycle after the student criticized him for driving to work, describing this practice as environmentally unfriendly. His determination to take to two wheels increased after he was recommended a power-assisted bicycle.
Half of Yang's colleagues, who number in their thousands, have also decided to cycle to work.
Cycling has become increasingly popular since Yang persuaded the university management and authorities in Haidian district, where the institution is located, to set up a bike lane between the university and the residential block where many Tsinghua teachers live.
In 2017, with the help of a friend from the Jiusan Society, one of China's non-communist parties, Yang submitted a proposal to promote power-assisted cycling to the country top political advisory body, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
Last year, he also managed to have another proposal submitted to the body's Beijing committee, in which he suggested improving the capital's cycling infrastructure.
His proposals received a positive response. In September, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport promised to introduce a series of measures to promote commuting by bicycle, including exploring the possibility of setting up cycle lanes along the city's waterways.
Yang recently collaborated with the Chinese University Cycling Association. With his help, a member of the association from Peking University drafted a plan for a cycle lane network in Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi province. The pair, together with a local NGO, plan to lobby authorities in the city to implement the plan.
"Generally, the situation is good. ... Things are proceeding quicker than I imagined," Yang said of his efforts to promote cycling.
Meanwhile, Zhang Jiaxuan, 22, a graduate of Tsinghua University's environmental school, has been doing everything she can to lead and promote a low-carbon lifestyle. Her efforts include taking public transportation and avoiding the use of air conditioners as much as possible.
Zhang's enthusiasm for climate-related issues resulted in her being elected head of the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate youth delegation to the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid, the Spanish capital.
Launched that year, the alliance's aims are to increase cooperation on climate-related issues, foster greater engagement with climate stakeholders, and promote environmental practices by universities, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and conventions on climate change.
In discussions with climate-change followers at home and abroad, Zhang has found that while high-profile campaigns on the issue are being promoted in the West, climate change is being tackled in a low-key manner in China and other Asian nations.
"Despite having done a lot of work, we don't talk about it that much. Many of us are just concentrating on doing things silently in our own way," she said.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202104/2 ... bc0_1.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Climate Scientists: ‘Net Zero’ is a dangerous trap
April 22, 2021
The only way to keep humanity safe is by immediately and radically cutting emissions in a socially just way.
Climeworks CO2 capture and storage plant under construction in Iceland. Such projects may demonstrate applications for captured carbon, but will have no impact on global warming.
by James Dyke, Robert Watson, and Wolfgang Knorr
Sometimes realization comes in a blinding flash. Blurred outlines snap into shape and suddenly it all makes sense. Underneath such revelations is typically a much slower-dawning process. Doubts at the back of the mind grow. The sense of confusion that things cannot be made to fit together increases until something clicks. Or perhaps snaps.
Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero? In our defense, the premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us.
The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it follows that we must stop emitting more and even remove some of it. This idea is central to the world’s current plan to avoid catastrophe. In fact, there are many suggestions as to how to actually do this, from mass tree planting, to high tech direct air capture devices that suck out carbon dioxide from the air.
The current consensus is that if we deploy these and other so-called “carbon dioxide removal” techniques at the same time as reducing our burning of fossil fuels, we can more rapidly halt global warming. Hopefully around the middle of this century we will achieve “net zero.” This is the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere.
This is a great idea, in principle. Unfortunately, in practice it helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.
We have arrived at the painful realization that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.
To understand how this has happened, how humanity has gambled its civilization on no more than promises of future solutions, we must return to the late 1980s, when climate change broke out onto the international stage.
Steps towards net zero
On June 22 1988, James Hansen was the administrator of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a prestigious appointment but someone largely unknown outside of academia.
By the afternoon of the 23rd he was well on the way to becoming the world’s most famous climate scientist. This was as a direct result of his testimony to the US congress, when he forensically presented the evidence that the Earth’s climate was warming and that humans were the primary cause: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
If we had acted on Hanson’s testimony at the time, we would have been able to decarbonize our societies at a rate of around 2% a year in order to give us about a two-in-three chance of limiting warming to no more than 1.5°C. It would have been a huge challenge, but the main task at that time would have been to simply stop the accelerating use of fossil fuels while fairly sharing out future emissions.
Graph showing how fast mitigation has to happen to keep to 1.5℃.
Four years later, there were glimmers of hope that this would be possible. During the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, all nations agreed to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases to ensure that they did not produce dangerous interference with the climate. The 1997 Kyoto Summit attempted to start to put that goal into practice. But as the years passed, the initial task of keeping us safe became increasingly harder given the continual increase in fossil fuel use.
It was around that time that the first computer models linking greenhouse gas emissions to impacts on different sectors of the economy were developed. These hybrid climate-economic models are known as Integrated Assessment Models. They allowed modelers to link economic activity to the climate by, for example, exploring how changes in investments and technology could lead to changes in greenhouse gas emissions.
They seemed like a miracle: you could try out policies on a computer screen before implementing them, saving humanity costly experimentation. They rapidly emerged to become key guidance for climate policy. A primacy they maintain to this day.
Unfortunately, they also removed the need for deep critical thinking. Such models represent society as a web of idealized, emotionless buyers and sellers and thus ignore complex social and political realities, or even the impacts of climate change itself. Their implicit promise is that market-based approaches will always work. This meant that discussions about policies were limited to those most convenient to politicians: incremental changes to legislation and taxes.
Around the time they were first developed, efforts were being made to secure US action on the climate by allowing it to count carbon sinks of the country’s forests. The US argued that if it managed its forests well, it would be able to store a large amount of carbon in trees and soil which should be subtracted from its obligations to limit the burning of coal, oil and gas. In the end, the US largely got its way. Ironically, the concessions were all in vain, since the US senate never ratified the agreement.
Postulating a future with more trees could in effect offset the burning of coal, oil and gas now. As models could easily churn out numbers that saw atmospheric carbon dioxide go as low as one wanted, ever more sophisticated scenarios could be explored which reduced the perceived urgency to reduce fossil fuel use. By including carbon sinks in climate-economic models, a Pandora’s box had been opened.
It’s here we find the genesis of today’s net zero policies.
That said, most attention in the mid-1990s was focused on increasing energy efficiency and energy switching (such as the UK’s move from coal to gas) and the potential of nuclear energy to deliver large amounts of carbon-free electricity. The hope was that such innovations would quickly reverse increases in fossil fuel emissions.
But by around the turn of the new millennium it was clear that such hopes were unfounded. Given their core assumption of incremental change, it was becoming more and more difficult for economic-climate models to find viable pathways to avoid dangerous climate change. In response, the models began to include more and more examples of carbon capture and storage, a technology that could remove the carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations and then store the captured carbon deep underground indefinitely.
This had been shown to be possible in principle: compressed carbon dioxide had been separated from fossil gas and then injected underground in a number of projects since the 1970s. These Enhanced Oil Recovery schemes were designed to force gases into oil wells in order to push oil towards drilling rigs and so allow more to be recovered – oil that would later be burnt, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Carbon capture and storage offered the twist that instead of using the carbon dioxide to extract more oil, the gas would instead be left underground and removed from the atmosphere. This promised breakthrough technology would allow climate friendly coal and so the continued use of this fossil fuel. But long before the world would witness any such schemes, the hypothetical process had been included in climate-economic models. In the end, the mere prospect of carbon capture and storage gave policy makers a way out of making the much needed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
The rise of net zero
When the international climate change community convened in Copenhagen in 2009 it was clear that carbon capture and storage was not going to be sufficient for two reasons.
First, it still did not exist. There were no carbon capture and storage facilities in operation on any coal fired power station and no prospect the technology was going to have any impact on rising emissions from increased coal use in the foreseeable future.
The biggest barrier to implementation was essentially cost. The motivation to burn vast amounts of coal is to generate relatively cheap electricity. Retrofitting carbon scrubbers on existing power stations, building the infrastructure to pipe captured carbon, and developing suitable geological storage sites required huge sums of money. Consequently the only application of carbon capture in actual operation then – and now – is to use the trapped gas in enhanced oil recovery schemes. Beyond a single demonstrator, there has never been any capture of carbon dioxide from a coal fired power station chimney with that captured carbon then being stored underground.
Just as important, by 2009 it was becoming increasingly clear that it would not be possible to make even the gradual reductions that policy makers demanded. That was the case even if carbon capture and storage was up and running. The amount of carbon dioxide that was being pumped into the air each year meant humanity was rapidly running out of time.
With hopes for a solution to the climate crisis fading again, another magic bullet was required. A technology was needed not only to slow down the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but actually reverse it. In response, the climate-economic modelling community – already able to include plant-based carbon sinks and geological carbon storage in their models – increasingly adopted the “solution” of combining the two.
So it was that Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage, or BECCS, rapidly emerged as the new saviour technology. By burning “replaceable” biomass such as wood, crops, and agricultural waste instead of coal in power stations, and then capturing the carbon dioxide from the power station chimney and storing it underground, BECCS could produce electricity at the same time as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s because as biomass such as trees grow, they suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By planting trees and other bioenergy crops and storing carbon dioxide released when they are burnt, more carbon could be removed from the atmosphere.
With this new solution in hand the international community regrouped from repeated failures to mount another attempt at reining in our dangerous interference with the climate. The scene was set for the crucial 2015 climate conference in Paris.
A Parisian false dawn
As its general secretary brought the 21st United Nations conference on climate change to an end, a great roar issued from the crowd. People leaped to their feet, strangers embraced, tears welled up in eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.
The emotions on display on December 13, 2015 were not just for the cameras. After weeks of gruelling high-level negotiations in Paris a breakthrough had finally been achieved. Against all expectations, after decades of false starts and failures, the international community had finally agreed to do what it took to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.
The Paris Agreement was a stunning victory for those most at risk from climate change. Rich industrialized nations will be increasingly impacted as global temperatures rise. But it’s the low lying island states such as the Maldives and the Marshall Islands that are at imminent existential risk. As a later UN special report made clear, if the Paris Agreement was unable to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the number of lives lost to more intense storms, fires, heatwaves, famines and floods would significantly increase.
But dig a little deeper and you could find another emotion lurking within delegates on December 13. Doubt. We struggle to name any climate scientist who at that time thought the Paris Agreement was feasible. We have since been told by some scientists that the Paris Agreement was “of course important for climate justice but unworkable” and “a complete shock, no one thought limiting to 1.5°C was possible.” Rather than being able to limit warming to 1.5°C, a senior academic involved in the IPCC concluded we were heading beyond 3°C by the end of this century.
Instead of confront our doubts, we scientists decided to construct ever more elaborate fantasy worlds in which we would be safe. The price to pay for our cowardice: having to keep our mouths shut about the ever growing absurdity of the required planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal.
Taking center stage was BECCS because at the time this was the only way climate-economic models could find scenarios that would be consistent with the Paris Agreement. Rather than stabilize, global emissions of carbon dioxide had increased some 60% since 1992.
Alas, BECCS, just like all the previous solutions, was too good to be true.
Across the scenarios produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with a 66% or better chance of limiting temperature increase to 1.5°C, BECCS would need to remove 12 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. BECCS at this scale would require massive planting schemes for trees and bioenergy crops.
The Earth certainly needs more trees. Humanity has cut down some three trillion since we first started farming some 13,000 years ago. But rather than allow ecosystems to recover from human impacts and forests to regrow, BECCS generally refers to dedicated industrial-scale plantations regularly harvested for bioenergy rather than carbon stored away in forest trunks, roots and soils.
Currently, the two most efficient biofuels are sugarcane for bioethanol and palm oil for biodiesel – both grown in the tropics. Endless rows of such fast growing monoculture trees or other bioenergy crops harvested at frequent intervals devastate biodiversity.
It has been estimated that BECCS would demand between 0.4 and 1.2 billion hectares of land. That’s 25% to 80% of all the land currently under cultivation. How will that be achieved at the same time as feeding 8-10 billion people around the middle of the century or without destroying native vegetation and biodiversity?
Growing billions of trees would consume vast amounts of water – in some places where people are already thirsty. Increasing forest cover in higher latitudes can have an overall warming effect because replacing grassland or fields with forests means the land surface becomes darker. This darker land absorbs more energy from the Sun and so temperatures rise. Focusing on developing vast plantations in poorer tropical nations comes with real risks of people being driven off their lands.
And it is often forgotten that trees and the land in general already soak up and store away vast amounts of carbon through what is called the natural terrestrial carbon sink. Interfering with it could both disrupt the sink and lead to double accounting.
As these impacts are becoming better understood, the sense of optimism around BECCS has diminished.
Pipe dreams
Given the dawning realization of how difficult Paris would be in the light of ever rising emissions and limited potential of BECCS, a new buzzword emerged in policy circles: the “overshoot scenario.” Temperatures would be allowed to go beyond 1.5°C in the near term, but then be brought down with a range of carbon dioxide removal by the end of the century. This means that net zero actually means carbon negative. Within a few decades, we will need to transform our civilization from one that currently pumps out 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, to one that produces a net removal of tens of billions.
Mass tree planting, for bioenergy or as an attempt at offsetting, had been the latest attempt to stall cuts in fossil fuel use. But the ever-increasing need for carbon removal was calling for more. This is why the idea of direct air capture, now being touted by some as the most promising technology out there, has taken hold. It is generally more benign to ecosystems because it requires significantly less land to operate than BECCS, including the land needed to power them using wind or solar panels.
Unfortunately, it is widely believed that direct air capture, because of its exorbitant costs and energy demand, if it ever becomes feasible to be deployed at scale, will not be able to compete with BECCS with its voracious appetite for prime agricultural land.
It should now be getting clear where the journey is heading. As the mirage of each magical technical solution disappears, another equally unworkable alternative pops up to take its place. The next is already on the horizon – and it’s even more ghastly. Once we realize net zero will not happen in time or even at all, geoengineering – the deliberate and large scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system – will probably be invoked as the solution to limit temperature increases.
One of the most researched geoengineering ideas is solar radiation management – the injection of millions of tons of sulphuric acid into the stratosphere that will reflect some of the Sun’s energy away from the Earth. It is a wild idea, but some academics and politicians are deadly serious, despite significant risks. The US National Academies of Sciences, for example, has recommended allocating up to US$200 million over the next five years to explore how geoengineering could be deployed and regulated. Funding and research in this area is sure to significantly increase.
Difficult truths
In principle there is nothing wrong or dangerous about carbon dioxide removal proposals. In fact developing ways of reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide can feel tremendously exciting. You are using science and engineering to save humanity from disaster. What you are doing is important. There is also the realization that carbon removal will be needed to mop up some of the emissions from sectors such as aviation and cement production. So there will be some small role for a number of different carbon dioxide removal approaches.
The problems come when it is assumed that these can be deployed at vast scale. This effectively serves as a blank check for the continued burning of fossil fuels and the acceleration of habitat destruction.
Carbon reduction technologies and geoengineering should be seen as a sort of ejector seat that could propel humanity away from rapid and catastrophic environmental change. Just like an ejector seat in a jet aircraft, it should only be used as the very last resort. However, policymakers and businesses appear to be entirely serious about deploying highly speculative technologies as a way to land our civilization at a sustainable destination. In fact, these are no more than fairy tales.
The only way to keep humanity safe is the immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way.
Academics typically see themselves as servants to society. Indeed, many are employed as civil servants. Those working at the climate science and policy interface desperately wrestle with an increasingly difficult problem. Similarly, those that champion net zero as a way of breaking through barriers holding back effective action on the climate also work with the very best of intentions.
The tragedy is that their collective efforts were never able to mount an effective challenge to a climate policy process that would only allow a narrow range of scenarios to be explored.
Most academics feel distinctly uncomfortable stepping over the invisible line that separates their day job from wider social and political concerns. There are genuine fears that being seen as advocates for or against particular issues could threaten their perceived independence. Scientists are one of the most trusted professions. Trust is very hard to build and easy to destroy.
But there is another invisible line, the one that separates maintaining academic integrity and self-censorship. As scientists, we are taught to be sceptical, to subject hypotheses to rigorous tests and interrogation. But when it comes to perhaps the greatest challenge humanity faces, we often show a dangerous lack of critical analysis.
In private, scientists express significant skepticism about the Paris Agreement, BECCS, offsetting, geoengineering and net zero. Apart from some notable exceptions, in public we quietly go about our work, apply for funding, publish papers and teach. The path to disastrous climate change is paved with feasibility studies and impact assessments.
Rather than acknowledge the seriousness of our situation, we instead continue to participate in the fantasy of net zero. What will we do when reality bites? What will we say to our friends and loved ones about our failure to speak out now?
The time has come to voice our fears and be honest with wider society. Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now. That is the very simple acid test that must be applied to all climate policies. The time for wishful thinking is over.
Republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. James Dyke is Senior Lecturer in Global Systems, University of Exeter. Robert Watson is Emeritus Professor in Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia. Wolfgang Knorr is Senior Research Scientist, Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... rous-trap/
All true but as any Marxist regarding academia knows a tough row to hoe. We can't even get our academics to say 'revolution', fer chris sake.
April 22, 2021
The only way to keep humanity safe is by immediately and radically cutting emissions in a socially just way.
Climeworks CO2 capture and storage plant under construction in Iceland. Such projects may demonstrate applications for captured carbon, but will have no impact on global warming.
by James Dyke, Robert Watson, and Wolfgang Knorr
Sometimes realization comes in a blinding flash. Blurred outlines snap into shape and suddenly it all makes sense. Underneath such revelations is typically a much slower-dawning process. Doubts at the back of the mind grow. The sense of confusion that things cannot be made to fit together increases until something clicks. Or perhaps snaps.
Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero? In our defense, the premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us.
The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it follows that we must stop emitting more and even remove some of it. This idea is central to the world’s current plan to avoid catastrophe. In fact, there are many suggestions as to how to actually do this, from mass tree planting, to high tech direct air capture devices that suck out carbon dioxide from the air.
The current consensus is that if we deploy these and other so-called “carbon dioxide removal” techniques at the same time as reducing our burning of fossil fuels, we can more rapidly halt global warming. Hopefully around the middle of this century we will achieve “net zero.” This is the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere.
This is a great idea, in principle. Unfortunately, in practice it helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.
We have arrived at the painful realization that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.
To understand how this has happened, how humanity has gambled its civilization on no more than promises of future solutions, we must return to the late 1980s, when climate change broke out onto the international stage.
Steps towards net zero
On June 22 1988, James Hansen was the administrator of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a prestigious appointment but someone largely unknown outside of academia.
By the afternoon of the 23rd he was well on the way to becoming the world’s most famous climate scientist. This was as a direct result of his testimony to the US congress, when he forensically presented the evidence that the Earth’s climate was warming and that humans were the primary cause: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
If we had acted on Hanson’s testimony at the time, we would have been able to decarbonize our societies at a rate of around 2% a year in order to give us about a two-in-three chance of limiting warming to no more than 1.5°C. It would have been a huge challenge, but the main task at that time would have been to simply stop the accelerating use of fossil fuels while fairly sharing out future emissions.
Graph showing how fast mitigation has to happen to keep to 1.5℃.
Four years later, there were glimmers of hope that this would be possible. During the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, all nations agreed to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases to ensure that they did not produce dangerous interference with the climate. The 1997 Kyoto Summit attempted to start to put that goal into practice. But as the years passed, the initial task of keeping us safe became increasingly harder given the continual increase in fossil fuel use.
It was around that time that the first computer models linking greenhouse gas emissions to impacts on different sectors of the economy were developed. These hybrid climate-economic models are known as Integrated Assessment Models. They allowed modelers to link economic activity to the climate by, for example, exploring how changes in investments and technology could lead to changes in greenhouse gas emissions.
They seemed like a miracle: you could try out policies on a computer screen before implementing them, saving humanity costly experimentation. They rapidly emerged to become key guidance for climate policy. A primacy they maintain to this day.
Unfortunately, they also removed the need for deep critical thinking. Such models represent society as a web of idealized, emotionless buyers and sellers and thus ignore complex social and political realities, or even the impacts of climate change itself. Their implicit promise is that market-based approaches will always work. This meant that discussions about policies were limited to those most convenient to politicians: incremental changes to legislation and taxes.
Around the time they were first developed, efforts were being made to secure US action on the climate by allowing it to count carbon sinks of the country’s forests. The US argued that if it managed its forests well, it would be able to store a large amount of carbon in trees and soil which should be subtracted from its obligations to limit the burning of coal, oil and gas. In the end, the US largely got its way. Ironically, the concessions were all in vain, since the US senate never ratified the agreement.
Postulating a future with more trees could in effect offset the burning of coal, oil and gas now. As models could easily churn out numbers that saw atmospheric carbon dioxide go as low as one wanted, ever more sophisticated scenarios could be explored which reduced the perceived urgency to reduce fossil fuel use. By including carbon sinks in climate-economic models, a Pandora’s box had been opened.
It’s here we find the genesis of today’s net zero policies.
That said, most attention in the mid-1990s was focused on increasing energy efficiency and energy switching (such as the UK’s move from coal to gas) and the potential of nuclear energy to deliver large amounts of carbon-free electricity. The hope was that such innovations would quickly reverse increases in fossil fuel emissions.
But by around the turn of the new millennium it was clear that such hopes were unfounded. Given their core assumption of incremental change, it was becoming more and more difficult for economic-climate models to find viable pathways to avoid dangerous climate change. In response, the models began to include more and more examples of carbon capture and storage, a technology that could remove the carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations and then store the captured carbon deep underground indefinitely.
This had been shown to be possible in principle: compressed carbon dioxide had been separated from fossil gas and then injected underground in a number of projects since the 1970s. These Enhanced Oil Recovery schemes were designed to force gases into oil wells in order to push oil towards drilling rigs and so allow more to be recovered – oil that would later be burnt, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Carbon capture and storage offered the twist that instead of using the carbon dioxide to extract more oil, the gas would instead be left underground and removed from the atmosphere. This promised breakthrough technology would allow climate friendly coal and so the continued use of this fossil fuel. But long before the world would witness any such schemes, the hypothetical process had been included in climate-economic models. In the end, the mere prospect of carbon capture and storage gave policy makers a way out of making the much needed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
The rise of net zero
When the international climate change community convened in Copenhagen in 2009 it was clear that carbon capture and storage was not going to be sufficient for two reasons.
First, it still did not exist. There were no carbon capture and storage facilities in operation on any coal fired power station and no prospect the technology was going to have any impact on rising emissions from increased coal use in the foreseeable future.
The biggest barrier to implementation was essentially cost. The motivation to burn vast amounts of coal is to generate relatively cheap electricity. Retrofitting carbon scrubbers on existing power stations, building the infrastructure to pipe captured carbon, and developing suitable geological storage sites required huge sums of money. Consequently the only application of carbon capture in actual operation then – and now – is to use the trapped gas in enhanced oil recovery schemes. Beyond a single demonstrator, there has never been any capture of carbon dioxide from a coal fired power station chimney with that captured carbon then being stored underground.
Just as important, by 2009 it was becoming increasingly clear that it would not be possible to make even the gradual reductions that policy makers demanded. That was the case even if carbon capture and storage was up and running. The amount of carbon dioxide that was being pumped into the air each year meant humanity was rapidly running out of time.
With hopes for a solution to the climate crisis fading again, another magic bullet was required. A technology was needed not only to slow down the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but actually reverse it. In response, the climate-economic modelling community – already able to include plant-based carbon sinks and geological carbon storage in their models – increasingly adopted the “solution” of combining the two.
So it was that Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage, or BECCS, rapidly emerged as the new saviour technology. By burning “replaceable” biomass such as wood, crops, and agricultural waste instead of coal in power stations, and then capturing the carbon dioxide from the power station chimney and storing it underground, BECCS could produce electricity at the same time as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s because as biomass such as trees grow, they suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By planting trees and other bioenergy crops and storing carbon dioxide released when they are burnt, more carbon could be removed from the atmosphere.
With this new solution in hand the international community regrouped from repeated failures to mount another attempt at reining in our dangerous interference with the climate. The scene was set for the crucial 2015 climate conference in Paris.
A Parisian false dawn
As its general secretary brought the 21st United Nations conference on climate change to an end, a great roar issued from the crowd. People leaped to their feet, strangers embraced, tears welled up in eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.
The emotions on display on December 13, 2015 were not just for the cameras. After weeks of gruelling high-level negotiations in Paris a breakthrough had finally been achieved. Against all expectations, after decades of false starts and failures, the international community had finally agreed to do what it took to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.
The Paris Agreement was a stunning victory for those most at risk from climate change. Rich industrialized nations will be increasingly impacted as global temperatures rise. But it’s the low lying island states such as the Maldives and the Marshall Islands that are at imminent existential risk. As a later UN special report made clear, if the Paris Agreement was unable to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the number of lives lost to more intense storms, fires, heatwaves, famines and floods would significantly increase.
But dig a little deeper and you could find another emotion lurking within delegates on December 13. Doubt. We struggle to name any climate scientist who at that time thought the Paris Agreement was feasible. We have since been told by some scientists that the Paris Agreement was “of course important for climate justice but unworkable” and “a complete shock, no one thought limiting to 1.5°C was possible.” Rather than being able to limit warming to 1.5°C, a senior academic involved in the IPCC concluded we were heading beyond 3°C by the end of this century.
Instead of confront our doubts, we scientists decided to construct ever more elaborate fantasy worlds in which we would be safe. The price to pay for our cowardice: having to keep our mouths shut about the ever growing absurdity of the required planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal.
Taking center stage was BECCS because at the time this was the only way climate-economic models could find scenarios that would be consistent with the Paris Agreement. Rather than stabilize, global emissions of carbon dioxide had increased some 60% since 1992.
Alas, BECCS, just like all the previous solutions, was too good to be true.
Across the scenarios produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with a 66% or better chance of limiting temperature increase to 1.5°C, BECCS would need to remove 12 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. BECCS at this scale would require massive planting schemes for trees and bioenergy crops.
The Earth certainly needs more trees. Humanity has cut down some three trillion since we first started farming some 13,000 years ago. But rather than allow ecosystems to recover from human impacts and forests to regrow, BECCS generally refers to dedicated industrial-scale plantations regularly harvested for bioenergy rather than carbon stored away in forest trunks, roots and soils.
Currently, the two most efficient biofuels are sugarcane for bioethanol and palm oil for biodiesel – both grown in the tropics. Endless rows of such fast growing monoculture trees or other bioenergy crops harvested at frequent intervals devastate biodiversity.
It has been estimated that BECCS would demand between 0.4 and 1.2 billion hectares of land. That’s 25% to 80% of all the land currently under cultivation. How will that be achieved at the same time as feeding 8-10 billion people around the middle of the century or without destroying native vegetation and biodiversity?
Growing billions of trees would consume vast amounts of water – in some places where people are already thirsty. Increasing forest cover in higher latitudes can have an overall warming effect because replacing grassland or fields with forests means the land surface becomes darker. This darker land absorbs more energy from the Sun and so temperatures rise. Focusing on developing vast plantations in poorer tropical nations comes with real risks of people being driven off their lands.
And it is often forgotten that trees and the land in general already soak up and store away vast amounts of carbon through what is called the natural terrestrial carbon sink. Interfering with it could both disrupt the sink and lead to double accounting.
As these impacts are becoming better understood, the sense of optimism around BECCS has diminished.
Pipe dreams
Given the dawning realization of how difficult Paris would be in the light of ever rising emissions and limited potential of BECCS, a new buzzword emerged in policy circles: the “overshoot scenario.” Temperatures would be allowed to go beyond 1.5°C in the near term, but then be brought down with a range of carbon dioxide removal by the end of the century. This means that net zero actually means carbon negative. Within a few decades, we will need to transform our civilization from one that currently pumps out 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, to one that produces a net removal of tens of billions.
Mass tree planting, for bioenergy or as an attempt at offsetting, had been the latest attempt to stall cuts in fossil fuel use. But the ever-increasing need for carbon removal was calling for more. This is why the idea of direct air capture, now being touted by some as the most promising technology out there, has taken hold. It is generally more benign to ecosystems because it requires significantly less land to operate than BECCS, including the land needed to power them using wind or solar panels.
Unfortunately, it is widely believed that direct air capture, because of its exorbitant costs and energy demand, if it ever becomes feasible to be deployed at scale, will not be able to compete with BECCS with its voracious appetite for prime agricultural land.
It should now be getting clear where the journey is heading. As the mirage of each magical technical solution disappears, another equally unworkable alternative pops up to take its place. The next is already on the horizon – and it’s even more ghastly. Once we realize net zero will not happen in time or even at all, geoengineering – the deliberate and large scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system – will probably be invoked as the solution to limit temperature increases.
One of the most researched geoengineering ideas is solar radiation management – the injection of millions of tons of sulphuric acid into the stratosphere that will reflect some of the Sun’s energy away from the Earth. It is a wild idea, but some academics and politicians are deadly serious, despite significant risks. The US National Academies of Sciences, for example, has recommended allocating up to US$200 million over the next five years to explore how geoengineering could be deployed and regulated. Funding and research in this area is sure to significantly increase.
Difficult truths
In principle there is nothing wrong or dangerous about carbon dioxide removal proposals. In fact developing ways of reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide can feel tremendously exciting. You are using science and engineering to save humanity from disaster. What you are doing is important. There is also the realization that carbon removal will be needed to mop up some of the emissions from sectors such as aviation and cement production. So there will be some small role for a number of different carbon dioxide removal approaches.
The problems come when it is assumed that these can be deployed at vast scale. This effectively serves as a blank check for the continued burning of fossil fuels and the acceleration of habitat destruction.
Carbon reduction technologies and geoengineering should be seen as a sort of ejector seat that could propel humanity away from rapid and catastrophic environmental change. Just like an ejector seat in a jet aircraft, it should only be used as the very last resort. However, policymakers and businesses appear to be entirely serious about deploying highly speculative technologies as a way to land our civilization at a sustainable destination. In fact, these are no more than fairy tales.
The only way to keep humanity safe is the immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way.
Academics typically see themselves as servants to society. Indeed, many are employed as civil servants. Those working at the climate science and policy interface desperately wrestle with an increasingly difficult problem. Similarly, those that champion net zero as a way of breaking through barriers holding back effective action on the climate also work with the very best of intentions.
The tragedy is that their collective efforts were never able to mount an effective challenge to a climate policy process that would only allow a narrow range of scenarios to be explored.
Most academics feel distinctly uncomfortable stepping over the invisible line that separates their day job from wider social and political concerns. There are genuine fears that being seen as advocates for or against particular issues could threaten their perceived independence. Scientists are one of the most trusted professions. Trust is very hard to build and easy to destroy.
But there is another invisible line, the one that separates maintaining academic integrity and self-censorship. As scientists, we are taught to be sceptical, to subject hypotheses to rigorous tests and interrogation. But when it comes to perhaps the greatest challenge humanity faces, we often show a dangerous lack of critical analysis.
In private, scientists express significant skepticism about the Paris Agreement, BECCS, offsetting, geoengineering and net zero. Apart from some notable exceptions, in public we quietly go about our work, apply for funding, publish papers and teach. The path to disastrous climate change is paved with feasibility studies and impact assessments.
Rather than acknowledge the seriousness of our situation, we instead continue to participate in the fantasy of net zero. What will we do when reality bites? What will we say to our friends and loved ones about our failure to speak out now?
The time has come to voice our fears and be honest with wider society. Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now. That is the very simple acid test that must be applied to all climate policies. The time for wishful thinking is over.
Republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. James Dyke is Senior Lecturer in Global Systems, University of Exeter. Robert Watson is Emeritus Professor in Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia. Wolfgang Knorr is Senior Research Scientist, Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... rous-trap/
All true but as any Marxist regarding academia knows a tough row to hoe. We can't even get our academics to say 'revolution', fer chris sake.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Global climate governance crucial to saving the planet
By Adriel Kasonta | China Daily Global | Updated: 2021-04-28 09:11
A group of chinstrap penguins huddle on top of an iceberg floating near Lemaire Channel in Antarctica. UESLEI MARCELINO/REUTERS
President Xi Jinping, at the invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron, joined a videoconference on April 16 with Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The virtual gathering of the three most prominent promoters of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change turned its focus to climate issues.
At the conference, all parties concerned agreed to greater cooperation on matters concerning climate change as well as the protection of biodiversity－the latter issue also to be discussed in October at a conference in Kunming in Southwest China's Yunnan province.
Both Germany and France welcomed President Xi's reaffirmation of Beijing's goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2060－a commitment he initially made in September－and voiced their support for China's efforts to also adjust short-term emissions reduction goals. Furthermore, the Chinese leader renewed his pledge that China will strive to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030.
In order to strengthen Beijing's firm commitment to the climate agenda, Xi also promised that China will ratify the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which is an international agreement to gradually reduce the consumption and production of hydrofluorocarbons.
On the other hand, at the invitation of China's Ministry of Ecology and Environment, John Kerry, who is US President Joe Biden's special envoy for climate, met in Shanghai on April 14 and 15 with China's special climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua, in order to seek common ground on global warming ahead of the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP 26, which will be held in Glasgow in November.
The two-day meeting culminated in a joint statement in which the world's two biggest emitters of carbon dioxide expressed their commitment to cooperate "with each other and with other countries to tackle the climate crisis, which must be addressed with the seriousness and urgency that it demands".
Despite this seemingly positive development, as well as President Xi Jinping's participation in the recent virtual Leaders Summit on Climate hosted by Biden on Thursday and Friday, many observers do not perceive current US behavior as sincere, let alone convincing－bearing in mind that the US officially rejoined the Paris Agreement only in February after former president Donald Trump pulled the country out of the accord in 2017.
Far from being a "remarkable success", as economist Jeffrey Sachs boldly described Biden's summit in a recent piece for CNN, the climate change steps taken by the US president seem to be aimed at "making poorer countries dependent on private finance" and contributing to "expansion of state-mediated greenwashing", according to an editorial in The Guardian.
With hostile rhetoric toward China similar to that of the Trump era coming from Washington, D.C., and tension over an array of issues between the European Union and China, it is understandable that President Xi warned during the videoconference with Merkel and Macron of not using climate change as "a geopolitical bargaining chip, a target for attacks on other countries or an excuse for trade barriers".
As Chinese Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Le Yucheng rightly noted during an interview with The Associated Press, "for a big country with 1.4 billion people, these goals are not easily delivered," and demanding that Beijing "do more on climate change" is simply not realistic.
Moreover, such demands clearly lack good faith, especially since developed countries contribute the most to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The current dynamic between the West and China can be understood as an intergroup conflict, which can be explained by realistic conflict theory, which holds that positive relations can only be restored if superordinate goals are in place. These are understood as goals that are worth completing, but requiring two or more groups to cooperatively achieve them.
Climate change is a global challenge that is related to the future of mankind, and therefore should serve as the superordinate goal.
China, the EU and the US would be well-advised to move together in the same direction to jointly build a more just and sustainable future for the planet and its inhabitants.
The focus should be on an honest commitment to building a win-win global climate governance system that not only saves our planet, but also mitigates egotistical disagreements, which in contrast with the climate challenge appear to be of far less importance.
The writer is former chairman of the international affairs committee at The Bow Group think tank in the United Kingdom. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... badca.html
Bolding added.
We cannot expect bourgeois democracy to countenance solutions which do not advantage the ruling class of that society. It is a ruling idea of our society that government exists as the arbitrator of class differences and not the heavy hand of the ruling class. The petty bourgeois must believe this desperately lest cognitive dissonance ensue. This fallacy, entertained by Keynes and KS Robinson is his latest opus, is easily dashed by a peep at history, whence the ruling class never ever backs away from it's own immediate interests unless a gun, literal or figurative, is held to it's collective head. But more on Robinson's paean to petty booj sensibilities later.
By Adriel Kasonta | China Daily Global | Updated: 2021-04-28 09:11
A group of chinstrap penguins huddle on top of an iceberg floating near Lemaire Channel in Antarctica. UESLEI MARCELINO/REUTERS
President Xi Jinping, at the invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron, joined a videoconference on April 16 with Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The virtual gathering of the three most prominent promoters of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change turned its focus to climate issues.
At the conference, all parties concerned agreed to greater cooperation on matters concerning climate change as well as the protection of biodiversity－the latter issue also to be discussed in October at a conference in Kunming in Southwest China's Yunnan province.
Both Germany and France welcomed President Xi's reaffirmation of Beijing's goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2060－a commitment he initially made in September－and voiced their support for China's efforts to also adjust short-term emissions reduction goals. Furthermore, the Chinese leader renewed his pledge that China will strive to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030.
In order to strengthen Beijing's firm commitment to the climate agenda, Xi also promised that China will ratify the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which is an international agreement to gradually reduce the consumption and production of hydrofluorocarbons.
On the other hand, at the invitation of China's Ministry of Ecology and Environment, John Kerry, who is US President Joe Biden's special envoy for climate, met in Shanghai on April 14 and 15 with China's special climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua, in order to seek common ground on global warming ahead of the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP 26, which will be held in Glasgow in November.
The two-day meeting culminated in a joint statement in which the world's two biggest emitters of carbon dioxide expressed their commitment to cooperate "with each other and with other countries to tackle the climate crisis, which must be addressed with the seriousness and urgency that it demands".
Despite this seemingly positive development, as well as President Xi Jinping's participation in the recent virtual Leaders Summit on Climate hosted by Biden on Thursday and Friday, many observers do not perceive current US behavior as sincere, let alone convincing－bearing in mind that the US officially rejoined the Paris Agreement only in February after former president Donald Trump pulled the country out of the accord in 2017.
Far from being a "remarkable success", as economist Jeffrey Sachs boldly described Biden's summit in a recent piece for CNN, the climate change steps taken by the US president seem to be aimed at "making poorer countries dependent on private finance" and contributing to "expansion of state-mediated greenwashing", according to an editorial in The Guardian.
With hostile rhetoric toward China similar to that of the Trump era coming from Washington, D.C., and tension over an array of issues between the European Union and China, it is understandable that President Xi warned during the videoconference with Merkel and Macron of not using climate change as "a geopolitical bargaining chip, a target for attacks on other countries or an excuse for trade barriers".
As Chinese Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Le Yucheng rightly noted during an interview with The Associated Press, "for a big country with 1.4 billion people, these goals are not easily delivered," and demanding that Beijing "do more on climate change" is simply not realistic.
Moreover, such demands clearly lack good faith, especially since developed countries contribute the most to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The current dynamic between the West and China can be understood as an intergroup conflict, which can be explained by realistic conflict theory, which holds that positive relations can only be restored if superordinate goals are in place. These are understood as goals that are worth completing, but requiring two or more groups to cooperatively achieve them.
Climate change is a global challenge that is related to the future of mankind, and therefore should serve as the superordinate goal.
China, the EU and the US would be well-advised to move together in the same direction to jointly build a more just and sustainable future for the planet and its inhabitants.
The focus should be on an honest commitment to building a win-win global climate governance system that not only saves our planet, but also mitigates egotistical disagreements, which in contrast with the climate challenge appear to be of far less importance.
The writer is former chairman of the international affairs committee at The Bow Group think tank in the United Kingdom. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... badca.html
Bolding added.
We cannot expect bourgeois democracy to countenance solutions which do not advantage the ruling class of that society. It is a ruling idea of our society that government exists as the arbitrator of class differences and not the heavy hand of the ruling class. The petty bourgeois must believe this desperately lest cognitive dissonance ensue. This fallacy, entertained by Keynes and KS Robinson is his latest opus, is easily dashed by a peep at history, whence the ruling class never ever backs away from it's own immediate interests unless a gun, literal or figurative, is held to it's collective head. But more on Robinson's paean to petty booj sensibilities later.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Can sabotage stop climate change?
April 28, 2021
Andreas Malm’s call for minority violence is eloquent and sincere, but self-defeating
Andreas Malm
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE
Learning to Fight in a World on Fire
Verso, 2021
reviewed by Simon Butler
Despite the climate movement’s growth, epitomized by Extinction Rebellion and Student Strike for Climate, fossil fuel extraction continues to grow, and a safe climate can seem dismayingly distant. Given a choice between forgoing capital accumulation and tipping the whole world into a furnace, our rulers prefer the furnace.
In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm asks how the climate movement can emerge from the Covid-19 hiatus as a stronger force. In particular, he questions whether the movement’s until now near-universal commitment to non-violent protest is holding it back. “Will absolute non-violence be the only way, forever the sole admissible tactic in the struggle to abolish fossil fuels? Can we be sure that it will suffice against this enemy? Must we tie ourselves to its mast to reach a safer place?”
To make his point, Malm cites examples of popular historic movements, some of which are invoked by today’s climate campaigners as examples of non-violent change. The overthrow of Atlantic slavery involved violent slave uprisings and rebellions. The suffragettes of early 20th century Britain regularly engaged in property destruction. The US civil rights movement was punctuated by urban riots. As part of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa Nelson Mandela co-founded the armed wing of the African National Congress. The Indian National Congress is known for its non-violent tactics but violence also played a role of the resistance to British rule from the Great Rebellion of 1857 until independence.
Malm absolutely rules out violence that harms people, but he wants the climate movement to include sabotage and property destruction in its plans.
He puts forward several reasons why these kinds of protests might help “break the spell” of the status quo. Targeting the luxury consumption of the rich in this way could help to stigmatize the notion that the rich can blithely condemn the rest of us to ecological disaster. Physical attacks on new CO2 emitting devices might reduce their use and make them less popular options for new investment. He also speculates that such actions could help bring together a “radical flank” of the movement, helping to win partial reforms by making elites more keen to compromise with the movement moderates.
Malm believes such tactics could make for some powerful political symbolism: “Next time the wildfires burn through the forests of Europe, take out a digger. Next time a Caribbean island is battered beyond recognition, burst in upon a banquet of luxury emissions or a Shell board meeting. The weather is already political, but it is political from one side only, blowing off the steam built up by the enemy, who is not made to feel the heat or take the blame.”
Malm’s arguments have been met with alarm in some quarters. In a review posted on the Global Ecosocialist Network website Alan Thornett says adopting the book’s proposals would “not only be wrong but disastrous” and anyone who did so would soon have “armed police kicking down their door.” He calls Malm’s argument an impatient “bid for a shortcut” resulting from “frustration compounded by the lack of a socially just exit strategy from fossil energy.”
James Wilt’s review in Canadian Dimension is even harsher: he says How to Blow Up a Pipeline “veers awfully close to entrapment” — a totally unworthy accusation. More to the point, Wilt says Malm doesn’t look deeply at the likely outcomes of his proposals, failing to mention any “planning for the inevitable backlash” and repression activists would face.
But, as Bue Rübner Hansen points out in a Viewpoint Magazine article, Malm’s “provocative title makes a pitch for viral controversy, but its contents are more nuanced and equivocal.”
Early in the book, Malm says that acts of property destruction should complement, not substitute for, mass movements for climate justice — disciplined and planned mass protests are still “the main way forward.” He writes: “The determination of the movement to scale up its challenge to business-as-usual by means of ever bigger, bolder mass actions of precisely this kind cannot be called into question.”
He recognizes that acts of political violence and property destruction could alienate support, so “non-violent mass mobilization should (where possible) be the first resort, militant action the last.”
Malm opposes reckless actions — “controlled political violence” should be regarded a “fine art to be mastered” and “time and timing are of the essence.” Because violent actions could backfire and “make a movement look so distasteful as to deny it all influence,” climate saboteurs must be “especially circumspect and mindful” of the wider cause, as the “negative effects could be unusually ruinous.”
He is very critical of the sabotage tactics of groups such as EarthFirst! and the Earth Liberation Front in North America in the 1980s and 1990s. Their of acts of “ecotage” produced “no lasting gains” because “they were not performed in a mass movement, but largely in a void.”
His opposition to “the temptation to fetishize one kind of tactic” includes “property destruction and other forms of violence.” Since “the tactic with the greatest potential for this movement might be something different,” political violence may not be useful for the climate movement after all.
Malm’s support for political violence is more limited and conditional than some of his critics suggest, but his fondness for provocative formulations must take some of the blame for any misunderstanding. A more accurate title would be Consider blowing up a pipeline, at the right time, after careful consideration, in ways that complement non-violent mass action; but don’t mess things up for others, definitely don’t hurt anyone, and maybe don’t do it at all — but of course How to Blow Up A Pipeline attracts more attention and controversy.
What is radical?
Malm’s argument that non-violent protest and civil disobedience is a tactic rather than a permanent strategy is well made. The climate movement should not make a fetish of any particular type of action — but Malm’s repeated equation of “militant” protest with violence does not help the discussion.
No particular form of protest is inherently the most radical or militant. Actions that demoralize, divide or hinder the movement are not radical or militant no matter what slogans are raised or how much property is destroyed.
The types of action Malm discusses — from deflating SUV tires to destroying fossil fuel infrastructure — appeal mostly to a minority who are already radical. It is easy to say that such actions must be an organic part of a wider climate movement, but hard to ensure in practice.
Rather than creating an influential “radical flank,” separating squads of dedicated property-wreckers from the majority who hold liberal illusions is most likely to isolate the left and strengthen the aggressively reformist, ecomodernist wing of the climate movement.
The most radical organizers are those who get more people into motion, helping ever larger numbers to engage in mass action to change the world and change themselves. The most revolutionary acts are those that create conditions in which people can deepen their political understanding and gain confidence in their collective political potential. The best militants don’t lead by heroic individual example: they work to maximize experiences that make others more militant. The most important movement leaders are not the best speakers or the most selfless activists — they are those who make their own leadership redundant by facilitating the development of new leaders.
Malm is genuinely committed to advancing the climate movement, making it more radical and hence more effective at dealing with a crisis caused by capitalism, but his call for sabotage and property destruction by a minority is misplaced, despite the many qualifications he includes. No matter how sincere it is, How to Blow Up a Pipeline undermines the more radical strategy of bringing wider layers of people into struggle and helping them to see themselves as key protagonists in this fight for the future.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... te-change/
I find myself in disagreement with Malm and Butler. First of all, destruction of property is A-OK when it is bourgeois property. It is a tactic but it is not the war and while certainly satisfying on a level it will not bring contrition but only retaliation. Which is fine too but do not expect much else, history has shown the politics of the deed have limited effectiveness. Mass action is the only true lever on power that we got but restricting that to nicey-nice 'speaking truth to power' is a futile time waster when we got no time to spare. Shut shit down, trash their assets, put the fear in the bastards on mass scale and too bad for anyone who would stop us. Assuming that mass action including destruction of property against the destroyers of our world is counter-productive becomes less operative every day but the petty bourgeois will cling to it desperately for the sake of class interest.
Of course a party, even a coherent movement, would be massively useful. Nothing comes of spontaneity sans organization except defeat despite the assurances of the infantile left.
April 28, 2021
Andreas Malm’s call for minority violence is eloquent and sincere, but self-defeating
Andreas Malm
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE
Learning to Fight in a World on Fire
Verso, 2021
reviewed by Simon Butler
Despite the climate movement’s growth, epitomized by Extinction Rebellion and Student Strike for Climate, fossil fuel extraction continues to grow, and a safe climate can seem dismayingly distant. Given a choice between forgoing capital accumulation and tipping the whole world into a furnace, our rulers prefer the furnace.
In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm asks how the climate movement can emerge from the Covid-19 hiatus as a stronger force. In particular, he questions whether the movement’s until now near-universal commitment to non-violent protest is holding it back. “Will absolute non-violence be the only way, forever the sole admissible tactic in the struggle to abolish fossil fuels? Can we be sure that it will suffice against this enemy? Must we tie ourselves to its mast to reach a safer place?”
To make his point, Malm cites examples of popular historic movements, some of which are invoked by today’s climate campaigners as examples of non-violent change. The overthrow of Atlantic slavery involved violent slave uprisings and rebellions. The suffragettes of early 20th century Britain regularly engaged in property destruction. The US civil rights movement was punctuated by urban riots. As part of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa Nelson Mandela co-founded the armed wing of the African National Congress. The Indian National Congress is known for its non-violent tactics but violence also played a role of the resistance to British rule from the Great Rebellion of 1857 until independence.
Malm absolutely rules out violence that harms people, but he wants the climate movement to include sabotage and property destruction in its plans.
He puts forward several reasons why these kinds of protests might help “break the spell” of the status quo. Targeting the luxury consumption of the rich in this way could help to stigmatize the notion that the rich can blithely condemn the rest of us to ecological disaster. Physical attacks on new CO2 emitting devices might reduce their use and make them less popular options for new investment. He also speculates that such actions could help bring together a “radical flank” of the movement, helping to win partial reforms by making elites more keen to compromise with the movement moderates.
Malm believes such tactics could make for some powerful political symbolism: “Next time the wildfires burn through the forests of Europe, take out a digger. Next time a Caribbean island is battered beyond recognition, burst in upon a banquet of luxury emissions or a Shell board meeting. The weather is already political, but it is political from one side only, blowing off the steam built up by the enemy, who is not made to feel the heat or take the blame.”
Malm’s arguments have been met with alarm in some quarters. In a review posted on the Global Ecosocialist Network website Alan Thornett says adopting the book’s proposals would “not only be wrong but disastrous” and anyone who did so would soon have “armed police kicking down their door.” He calls Malm’s argument an impatient “bid for a shortcut” resulting from “frustration compounded by the lack of a socially just exit strategy from fossil energy.”
James Wilt’s review in Canadian Dimension is even harsher: he says How to Blow Up a Pipeline “veers awfully close to entrapment” — a totally unworthy accusation. More to the point, Wilt says Malm doesn’t look deeply at the likely outcomes of his proposals, failing to mention any “planning for the inevitable backlash” and repression activists would face.
But, as Bue Rübner Hansen points out in a Viewpoint Magazine article, Malm’s “provocative title makes a pitch for viral controversy, but its contents are more nuanced and equivocal.”
Early in the book, Malm says that acts of property destruction should complement, not substitute for, mass movements for climate justice — disciplined and planned mass protests are still “the main way forward.” He writes: “The determination of the movement to scale up its challenge to business-as-usual by means of ever bigger, bolder mass actions of precisely this kind cannot be called into question.”
He recognizes that acts of political violence and property destruction could alienate support, so “non-violent mass mobilization should (where possible) be the first resort, militant action the last.”
Malm opposes reckless actions — “controlled political violence” should be regarded a “fine art to be mastered” and “time and timing are of the essence.” Because violent actions could backfire and “make a movement look so distasteful as to deny it all influence,” climate saboteurs must be “especially circumspect and mindful” of the wider cause, as the “negative effects could be unusually ruinous.”
He is very critical of the sabotage tactics of groups such as EarthFirst! and the Earth Liberation Front in North America in the 1980s and 1990s. Their of acts of “ecotage” produced “no lasting gains” because “they were not performed in a mass movement, but largely in a void.”
His opposition to “the temptation to fetishize one kind of tactic” includes “property destruction and other forms of violence.” Since “the tactic with the greatest potential for this movement might be something different,” political violence may not be useful for the climate movement after all.
Malm’s support for political violence is more limited and conditional than some of his critics suggest, but his fondness for provocative formulations must take some of the blame for any misunderstanding. A more accurate title would be Consider blowing up a pipeline, at the right time, after careful consideration, in ways that complement non-violent mass action; but don’t mess things up for others, definitely don’t hurt anyone, and maybe don’t do it at all — but of course How to Blow Up A Pipeline attracts more attention and controversy.
What is radical?
Malm’s argument that non-violent protest and civil disobedience is a tactic rather than a permanent strategy is well made. The climate movement should not make a fetish of any particular type of action — but Malm’s repeated equation of “militant” protest with violence does not help the discussion.
No particular form of protest is inherently the most radical or militant. Actions that demoralize, divide or hinder the movement are not radical or militant no matter what slogans are raised or how much property is destroyed.
The types of action Malm discusses — from deflating SUV tires to destroying fossil fuel infrastructure — appeal mostly to a minority who are already radical. It is easy to say that such actions must be an organic part of a wider climate movement, but hard to ensure in practice.
Rather than creating an influential “radical flank,” separating squads of dedicated property-wreckers from the majority who hold liberal illusions is most likely to isolate the left and strengthen the aggressively reformist, ecomodernist wing of the climate movement.
The most radical organizers are those who get more people into motion, helping ever larger numbers to engage in mass action to change the world and change themselves. The most revolutionary acts are those that create conditions in which people can deepen their political understanding and gain confidence in their collective political potential. The best militants don’t lead by heroic individual example: they work to maximize experiences that make others more militant. The most important movement leaders are not the best speakers or the most selfless activists — they are those who make their own leadership redundant by facilitating the development of new leaders.
Malm is genuinely committed to advancing the climate movement, making it more radical and hence more effective at dealing with a crisis caused by capitalism, but his call for sabotage and property destruction by a minority is misplaced, despite the many qualifications he includes. No matter how sincere it is, How to Blow Up a Pipeline undermines the more radical strategy of bringing wider layers of people into struggle and helping them to see themselves as key protagonists in this fight for the future.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... te-change/
I find myself in disagreement with Malm and Butler. First of all, destruction of property is A-OK when it is bourgeois property. It is a tactic but it is not the war and while certainly satisfying on a level it will not bring contrition but only retaliation. Which is fine too but do not expect much else, history has shown the politics of the deed have limited effectiveness. Mass action is the only true lever on power that we got but restricting that to nicey-nice 'speaking truth to power' is a futile time waster when we got no time to spare. Shut shit down, trash their assets, put the fear in the bastards on mass scale and too bad for anyone who would stop us. Assuming that mass action including destruction of property against the destroyers of our world is counter-productive becomes less operative every day but the petty bourgeois will cling to it desperately for the sake of class interest.
Of course a party, even a coherent movement, would be massively useful. Nothing comes of spontaneity sans organization except defeat despite the assurances of the infantile left.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."