The Long Ecological Revolution

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Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 16, 2024 3:58 pm

The Problem with Pronatalism: Pushing Baby Booms to Boost Economic Growth Amounts to a Ponzi Scheme
Posted on August 10, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. We’ve posted from time to time on alarmed media stories about how birthrates are declining around the world and at a faster rate than expected, particularly in advanced economies. The subtext is we need growth in population to have groaf, when growth is a function of both population and productivity increases. And of course, there is the elephant in the room of human consumption levels, particularly as standards of living have been rising, producing unsustainable demand for resources.

Japan in particular has tried to increase baby production, with no success. This post usefully takes on the idea that low birth rates are a problem in and of themselves.

By Emily Klancher Merchant, Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies, University of California, Davis and Win Brown, Research Affiliate, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington. Originally published at The Conversation

In the face of shrinking populations, many of the world’s major economies are trying to engineer higher birth rates.

Policymakers from South Korea, Japan and Italy, for example, have all adopted so-called “pronatalist” measures in the belief that doing so will defuse a demographic time bomb. These range from tax breaks and housing benefits for couples who have children to subsidies for fertility treatments.

But here’s the thing: Low – or, for that matter high – birth rates are not a problem in and of themselves. Rather, they are perceived as a cause of or contributor to other problems: With low birth rates come slow economic growth and a top-heavy age structure; high birth rates mean resource depletion and environmental degradation.

Moreover, birth rates are notoriously hard to change, and efforts to do so often become coercive, even if they don’t start out that way.

As demographers and population experts, we also know that such efforts are usually unnecessary. Manipulating fertility is an inefficient means of solving social, economic and environmental problems that are almost always better addressed more directly through regulation and redistribution.

A New Pronatalist Movement

According to the most likely scenario, the world’s population will peak around the beginning of 2084 at about 10.3 billion people – approximately 2 billion more than we have today. After that, the global population is projected to stop growing and will likely shrink to just below 10.2 billion by 2100.

Yet many countries are already ahead of this curve, with populations predicted to decline in the next decade. And that has prompted concerns among some nations’ economists over economic growth and old-age support. In some instances, it has also prompted nativist fears about “replacement” through immigration.

As of 2019, 55 countries – mainly in Asia, Europe and the Middle East – had explicit policies aimed at raising birth rates.

The U.S. does have a child tax credit but no policies directly aimed at raising birth rates, according to the U.N., which tracks population policies worldwide.

Even so, in recent years a new pronatalist movement has emerged in the U.S., drawing heavily from a range of ideologies, including racism, nativism, neoliberalism, effective altruism and longtermism.

Among the voices pushing for pronatalist policies are Elon Muskand influencers Malcolm and Simone Collins, who warn that the human population is on the verge of collapse.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has indicated he wants incentives for women to have more babies, and his running mate, JD Vance, has been a rare voice on the floor of Congress warning of a U.S. baby bust.

New Babies to Solve Old Problems

The pronatalist movement is, we believe, inherently misguided. It is premised on the belief that ever-larger populations are needed to spur economic growth, which alone will lift individuals and communities out of poverty.

But absent direct state intervention, this additional wealth generally accrues to those with established higher incomes, often at the expense of workers and consumers.

Seen this way, pronatalism is a Ponzi scheme. It relies on new entrants to produce returns for earlier investors, with the burdens falling most heavily on women, who are responsible for the bulk of childbearing and child-rearing, often without adequate medical care or affordable child care.

Government Intervention in Reproduction

For nearly a century, governments have used access to birth control and abortion as levers with which to try to adjust their population growth rates, but usually in the other direction: making birth control and abortion more widely available – and often pushing them on people who wanted more children – when birth rates were deemed too high. Such policies were implemented in numerous countries between the 1960s and 1990s to stimulate economic growth, with China’s one-child policy the most extreme example. Ironically, while high birth rates were once seen as a barrier to economic development, today low birth rates are seen as a drag on economic growth.

Advocates of efforts to reduce birth rates have pointed to the beneficial effects of family planning services. But critics warn that instrumentalizing reproductive health care – offering it as a means to the end of slowing population growth rather than an end in itself – makes it vulnerable to being taken away if population growth is deemed too slow.

Indeed, several of the countries that now restrict access to birth control and abortion, including South Korea and Iran, once promoted them in order to reduce their birth rate.

In 1968, the International Conference on Human Rights declared that couples had the right to decide the number and spacing of their children. At that time, the growth of the world’s population was at its all-time high of just over 2% per year.

But if humans have the inherent right to control their reproductive lives, it follows that governments need to protect that right when birth rates are low as well as when they are high. It is, in our view, incumbent on policymakers to use other interventions to reach economic and social goals.

And these more direct approaches can be effective. For example, in the U.S., we saw child poverty cut in half during the COVID-19 pandemic as a result of a higher tax credit, only to return to pre-COVID-19 levels when Congress allowed the supplemental credit to lapse.

Little Effect on Birth Rates

To date, pronatalist policies have largely focused on subsidizing the cost of child-rearing and helping parents remain in the labor force.

While enormously beneficial to parents and children, such policies have had little effect on birth rates. For example, Italy’s 2020 Family Act – a comprehensive program that provides family allowances, increases paternity leave, supplements the salaries of mothers and subsidizes child care – has not stemmed the country’s falling fertility rate.

As fertility rates continue to drop, and as popular anxiety about population collapse heightens, governments are beginning to take more draconian measures. Along with promoting assisted reproductive technologies, South Korea banned abortion in 2005. China’s State Council recently announced the goal of “reducing non-medically necessary abortions,” supposedly to promote “women’s development.”

Around the same time, Iran severely restricted access to abortion, sterilization and contraception for the express purpose of increasing the birth rate.

Borrowing from the Future

Those who deny racist, nativist or religious intentions in promoting pronatalism – especially in the U.S. – usually advocate for it on economic grounds.

Their reasoning is that declining fertility produces a top-heavy age structure. In the U.S. context, this means a large number of elderly people collecting Social Security relative to the number of working people paying into the system.

Experts have been projecting the insolvency of Social Securityfor decades. But the truth is that the U.S. does not need more babies to keep Social Security afloat. Rather, policymakers can increase the size of the working-age population through pro-immigration policies and can increase the amount of money flowing into Social Security by lifting the income cap on contributions.

Governments can provide education, contraception and other health care services, not because doing so will reduce birth rates but because these are vital components of a progressive, fair-minded society. And they can provide parental leave, child tax credits and high-quality child care, not because doing so will increase birth rates but because it will help the children who are born get the best possible start in life.

Seen through this lens, pronatalism offers a hollow-ringing promise that simply having more people will solve social and economic problems faced by a nation’s current population. But that amounts to borrowing from the future to pay the debts of the past.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08 ... cheme.html

Confronting Low Fertility Rates and Population Decline
Posted on August 16, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Even though this post looks at the question of what to do about the baby bust in wealthy countries from an economic perspective, unlike many other accounts, it treats seriously the question of how to adapt to a static or falling population. It suggests investing heavily in citizens to make them more productive, particularly focusing on education. It also recommends improving health care and allowing for more flexible work arrangements for the aged, and of course includes the usual trope of better child care.

It’s noteworthy how many of these policies are at odds with the default behavior under neoliberalism, particularly turning schooling and medical care into looting opportunities.

By David Bloom, Michael Kuhn, and Klaus Prettner. Originally published at VoxEU<

Fertility rates have been declining in high-income countries for decades. This trend, along with increasing human longevity, poses a challenge for advanced economies. This column argues that a holistic set of policies can be implemented to address the economic risks. These policies should stimulate human capital accumulation and education, which are more important than population size for economic prosperity. Furthermore, polices should promote healthy aging and more choice over retirement decisions, and family-friendly policies to slow the fall in fertility should be enacted.

Fertility rates have been declining in high-income countries for decades. From 1960 to 2023, the total fertility rate (TFR, which represents the expected lifetime number of children per woman, given current age-specific fertility rates) among OECD countries fell by more than half – from 3.29 children per woman to 1.54 (United Nations 2024a). All but one of the 38 OECD countries (Israel being the exception) currently have a TFR well below the long-run replacement rate of roughly 2.1, meaning that their total and working-age populations are on long-term contractionary paths (see Table 1).

Table 1 Total fertility rates (TFRs) of OECD countries and the world in 1960, 2023, and 2050

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Source: United Nations (2024a); see also United Nations (2024b) for a description of the TFR estimation and (medium scenario) projection methods.

In “The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population,” Charles Jones argues that the “profound implications” of low fertility include a growing paucity of new ideas that could effectively asphyxiate innovation and lead to long-run economic stagnation (Jones 2022). He points out that multiple economic growth models centre on innovation and that a larger population with larger absolute numbers of researchers, scientists, and inventors—and therefore, more bites at the (breakthrough) apple—is likely to achieve more (and more significant) discoveries. Jones proposes a model in which negative population growth leads to an ‘Empty Planet’ scenario (Bricker and Ibbitson 2019) wherein “knowledge and living standards stagnate for a population that gradually vanishes”. Jones juxtaposes this outcome against one of continued population growth and improvements in living standards that he calls the ‘Expanding Cosmos’ (Jones 2022). “Can the quality of people substitute for the quantity of people in the production of ideas?” Jones ponders in a Stanford Graduate School of Business piece. “Basically, the answer’s no. If the number of people is shrinking to zero, it’s hard to imagine that one person with lots of education can make up for a billion people that contain Einstein and Edison and Jennifer Doudna” (Gilson 2022). While Jones allows that automation and artificial intelligence could help maintain or improve living standards by propagating scientific advances, the central question of his piece’s title sounds an ominous note for declining fertility (Jones 2022).

In our recent paper (Bloom et al. 2024), we review data and ideas pertaining to the historically unprecedented fertility decline that characterises today’s wealthy industrial countries. We acknowledge that falling fertility could hinder innovation. But we argue that changes in behaviour, technology, policy, and institutions can influence the economic impacts of fertility and workforce decline and fertility levels themselves.

Innovation is indisputably a driver of economic progress, but it depends on more than just population size. Human capital – the skills and capacities that are embodied in people and enhance their ability to create valuable goods and services – is also key to innovation. Another basic feature of human capital is that it can be purposively accumulated, typically through investments in schooling, job training, or health.

Education, for example, is a well-established determinant of macroeconomic performance and economic well-being. It also tends to expand naturally under conditions of low fertility, leveraging wider and deeper investments into the knowledge and skills of small-sized cohorts. In this way, low fertility tends to enhance a population’s capacity for innovation and enables it to create more value through work, spurring both individual and societal well-being (Lee and Mason 2010, Prettner et al. 2013). Other things equal, small birth cohorts also aid population health.

History and rigorous research indicate that a population’s productive characteristics figure more prominently than its size in defining its capacity for knowledge creation and innovation. The number of healthy and well-educated people – which is distinct from the number of people – represents the human capital that rightly features in the knowledge production function as a fundamental determinant of technological progress and economic growth.

Oded Galor’s recent book, The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality, buttresses our more optimistic perspective on the implications of low fertility for economic growth. This book centres on the argument that falling fertility and rising education (and subsequent technological progress) leading to human capital formation is at the core of long-term increases in economic prosperity (Galor 2022). Indeed, Galor points out that since the 19th century, life expectancy has doubled and per capita incomes have skyrocketed 14-fold across the globe, spurred by fertility decline that alleviated population pressure, paving the way for human capital accumulation and dramatic improvements in living standards.

Low and declining fertility also translates into short- and medium-term declines in youth dependency rates, which can further charge the economic growth process by naturally boosting rates of labour force participation, savings, and capital accumulation. This boost, which is known as a demographic dividend (Bloom et al. 2003), contributed up to 2–3 percentage points to the growth rates of income per capita in many countries following the end of the baby boom that occurred in the aftermath of WWII. As such, the trend of falling fertility in high-income countries from the 1950s to the present day has promoted – not impeded – economic activity and improved standards of living.

The challenge of low fertility is magnified by the fact that it causes older-age population shares to swell. Population aging may naturally hamper economic activity insofar as older people impose significant burdens associated with public expenditures on health and long-term care and economic security and tend to work less than their younger counterparts. Social and economic adaptations to these demographic realities are nevertheless possible.

Retirement policy reforms are one of those adaptations (Kuhn and Prettner 2023). Such reforms have considerable potential to forestall workforce shrinkage by removing the disincentives to working longer that increasingly long-lived people face. This strategy is emblematic of how policies related to declining fertility may be stronger in unison than in isolation: robust investments in the health and education of a relatively small youth and prime-age adult cohort may enable that cohort – as it reaches the older ages – to be healthy and well-trained enough to work productively past traditional retirement ages. In the middle of the United Nations’ Decade of Healthy Ageing, a frequently asked question remains relevant: are we just adding years to life, or are we also adding life to years (Bloom 2019)? Coupled with allowing more choice over retirement decisions, policies promoting healthy aging could relieve the mounting pressure on pension and health systems and the accelerating demand for long-term care in the wake of population aging (Bloom 2022). Thus, stakeholders would benefit from combining synergistic policy initiatives to augment their efficacy.

Public and private policymakers also have at their disposal a myriad of family-friendly policies that can slow or reverse the fall in fertility. These policies, which seek to balance work and family responsibilities, include tax breaks for larger families, extended parental leave policies, and—most effective of all, according to Doepke et al. (2023)—public and/or subsidised childcare. Of course, if such policies achieve their aims, the short- and medium-term result would be an increase in the youth dependency ratio, with gains in workforce size not beginning to accrue for approximately 20 years.

Policy decisions must be mindful of the evolving work landscape, particularly the rise of digitalisation, robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence (see Prettner and Bloom 2020). While these tools offer tantalising potential, such evolution will not only impact the types of jobs available and how they are performed (as well as what is produced and consumed), but it will also affect the way that workers interact socially, which will likely have significant implications for dating and partnering, with an as-yet indeterminate effect on fertility levels and patterns.

Thoughtful policy changes should be holistic, recognising the social and political repercussions alongside the economic outcomes. Policies that relax or restrict international migration may be nationally or internationally destabilising, depending on contextual factors, and have implications for social and economic equity. In addition, the environmental implications of low fertility must be kept in view as it could slow or accelerate the pace of climate change depending on whether fewer people with higher incomes have the net effect of easing or intensifying greenhouse gas emissions.

Low fertility and fertility decline are indisputable realities in high-income countries across the globe. Given the significant uncertainty surrounding the nature and magnitude of its attendant economic consequences, ignoring the low-fertility alarm bell would be imprudent, particularly when fertility decline is paired with another dominant demographic trend: increasing human longevity. But demography is not destiny. Fertility decline—and its implications for population size and structure—poses serious challenges, but they are not insurmountable. Humanity has an admirable record of identifying and taking advantage of the opportunities it faces. In this situation, multiple mechanisms are available for countering low fertility and addressing its economic repercussions. The time is ripe for mounting a swift and integrated response to pinpoint and implement the most promising policy countermeasures.

See original post for references

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08 ... cline.html

Do rich countries need open-ended growth just so the rich get richer? Don't think so.

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Laundering Carbon and the New Scramble for Africa
August 11, 2024

The carbon offset market is an integral part of efforts to prevent effective climate action

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by Adam Hanieh
Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM)
August 11, 2024

In early November 2023, shortly before the COP28 summit opened in Dubai, a hitherto obscure UAE firm attracted significant media attention around news of their prospective land deals in Africa.

Reports suggested that Blue Carbon—a company privately owned by Sheikh Ahmed al-Maktoum, a member of Dubai’s ruling family—had signed deals promising the firm control over vast tracts of land across the African continent. These deals included an astonishing 10 percent of the landmass in Liberia, Zambia and Tanzania, and 20 percent in Zimbabwe. Altogether, the area equaled the size of Britain.

Blue Carbon intended to use the land to launch carbon offset projects, an increasingly popular practice that proponents claim will help tackle climate change. Carbon offsets involve forest protection and other environmental schemes that are equated to a certain quantity of carbon “credits.” These credits can then be sold to polluters around the world to offset their own emissions. Prior to entering into the negotiations of the massive deal, Blue Carbon had no experience in either carbon offsets or forest management. Nonetheless the firm stood to make billions of dollars from these projects.

Environmental NGOs, journalists and activists quickly condemned the deals as a new “scramble for Africa”—a land grab enacted in the name of climate change mitigation. In response, Blue Carbon insisted the discussions were merely exploratory and would require community consultation and further negotiation before formal approval.

Regardless of their current status, the land deals raise concerns that indigenous and other local communities could be evicted to make way for Blue Carbon’s forest protection plans. In Eastern Kenya, for example, the indigenous Ogiek People were driven out of the Mau Forest in November 2023, an expulsion that lawyers linked to ongoing negotiations between Blue Carbon and Kenya’s president, William Ruto. Protests have also followed the Liberian government’s closed-door negotiations with Blue Carbon, with activists claiming the project violates the land rights of indigenous people enshrined within Liberian law. Similar cases of land evictions elsewhere have led the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Francisco Calí Tzay, to call for a global moratorium on carbon offset projects.

Beyond their potentially destructive impact on local communities, Blue Carbon’s activities in Africa point to a major shift in the climate strategies of Gulf states. As critics have shown, the carbon offsetting industry exists largely as a greenwashing mechanism, allowing polluters to hide their continued emissions behind the smokescreen of misleading carbon accounting methodologies while providing a profitable new asset class for financial actors. As the world’s largest exporters of crude oil and liquified natural gas, the Gulf states are now positioning themselves across all stages of this new industry—including the financial markets where carbon credits are bought and sold. This development is reconfiguring the Gulf’s relationships with the African continent and will have significant consequences for the trajectories of our warming planet.

False Accounting and Carbon Laundering

There are many varieties of carbon offset projects. The most common involves the avoided deforestation schemes that make up the bulk of Blue Carbon’s interest in African land. In these schemes, land is enclosed and protected from deforestation. Carbon offset certifiers—of which the largest in the world is the Washington-based firm, Verra—then assess the amount of carbon these projects prevent from being released into the atmosphere (measured in tons of CO2). Once assessed, carbon credits can be sold to polluters, who use them to cancel out their own emissions and thus meet their stated climate goals.

Superficially attractive—after all, who doesn’t want to see money going into the protection of forests?—such schemes have two major flaws. The first is known as “permanence.” Buyers who purchase carbon credits gain the right to pollute in the here and now. Meanwhile, it takes hundreds of years for those carbon emissions to be re-absorbed from the atmosphere, and there is no guarantee that the forest will continue to stand for that timeframe. If a forest fire occurs or the political situation changes and the forest is destroyed, it is too late to take back the carbon credits that were initially issued. This concern is not simply theoretical. In recent years, California wildfires have consumed millions of hectares of forest, including offsets purchased by major international firms such as Microsoft and BP. Given the increasing incidence of forest fires due to global warming, such outcomes will undoubtedly become more frequent.

Again, this estimate depends on an unknowable future, opening up significant profit-making opportunities for companies certifying and selling carbon credits.

The second major flaw with these schemes is that any estimation of carbon credits for avoided deforestation projects rests on an imaginary counterfactual: How much carbon would have been released if the offset project were not in place? Again, this estimate depends on an unknowable future, opening up significant profit-making opportunities for companies certifying and selling carbon credits. By inflating the estimated emissions reductions associated with a particular project, it is possible to sell many more carbon credits than are actually warranted. This scope for speculation is one reason why the carbon credit market is so closely associated with repeated scandals and corruption. Indeed, according to reporting in the New Yorker, after one massive carbon fraud was revealed in Europe, “the Danish government admitted that eighty per cent of the country’s carbon-trading firms were fronts for the racket.”[1]

These methodological problems are structurally intrinsic to offsetting and cannot be avoided. As a result, most carbon credits traded today are fictitious and do not result in any real reduction in carbon emissions. Tunisian analyst Fadhel Kaboub describes them as simply “a license to pollute.”[2] One investigative report from early 2023 found that more than 90 percent of rainforest carbon credits certified by Verra were likely bogus and did not represent actual carbon reductions. Another study conducted for the EU Commission reported that 85 percent of the offset projects established under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism failed to reduce emissions. A recent academic study of offset projects across six countries, meanwhile, found that most did not reduce deforestation, and for those that did, the reductions were significantly lower than initially claimed. Consequently, the authors conclude, carbon credits sold for these projects were used to “offset almost three times more carbon emissions than their actual contributions to climate change mitigation.”[3]

Despite these fundamental problems—or perhaps because of them—the use of carbon offsets is growing rapidly. The investment bank Morgan Stanley predicts that the market will be worth $250 billion by 2050, up from about $2 billion in 2020, as large polluters utilize offsetting to sanction their continued carbon emissions while claiming to meet net zero targets. In the case of Blue Carbon, one estimate found that the amount of carbon credits likely to be accredited through the firm’s projects in Africa would equal all of the UAE’s annual carbon emissions. Akin to carbon laundering, this practice allows ongoing emissions to disappear from the carbon accounting ledger, swapped for credits that have little basis in reality.

Monetizing Nature as a Development Strategy

For the African continent, the growth of these new carbon markets cannot be separated from the escalating global debt crisis that has followed the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. According to a new database, Debt Service Watch, the Global South is experiencing its worst debt crisis on record, with one-third of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa spending over half their budget revenues on servicing debt. Faced with such unprecedented fiscal pressures, the commodification of land through offsetting is now heavily promoted by international lenders and many development organizations as a way out of the deep-rooted crisis.

The African Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI), an alliance launched in 2022 at the Cairo COP27 summit, has emerged as a prominent voice in this new development discourse. ACMI brings together African leaders, carbon credit firms (including Verra), Western donors (USAID, the Rockefeller Foundation and Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund) and multilateral organizations like the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Along with practical efforts to mobilize funds and encourage policy changes, ACMI has taken a lead role in advocating for carbon markets as a win-win solution for both heavily indebted African countries and the climate. In the words of the organization’s founding document, “The emergence of carbon credits as a new product allows for the monetization of Africa’s large natural capital endowment, while enhancing it.”[4]

ACMI’s activities are deeply tied to the Gulf. One side to this relationship is that Gulf firms, especially fossil fuel producers, are now the key source of demand for future African carbon credits. At the September 2023 African Climate Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, for example, a group of prominent Emirati energy and financial firms (known as the UAE Carbon Alliance) committed to purchasing $450 million worth of carbon credits from ACMI over the next six years. The pledge immediately confirmed the UAE as ACMI’s biggest financial backer. Moreover, by guaranteeing demand for carbon credits for the rest of this decade, the UAE’s pledge helps create the market today, driving forward new offset projects and solidifying their place in the development strategies of African states. It also helps legitimize offsetting as a response to the climate emergency, despite the numerous scandals that have beset the industry in recent years.

Saudi Arabia is likewise playing a major role in pushing forward carbon markets in Africa. One of ACMI’s steering committee members is the Saudi businesswoman, Riham ElGizy, who heads the Regional Voluntary Carbon Market Company (RVCMC). Established in 2022 as a joint venture between the Public Investment Fund (Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund) and the Saudi stock exchange, Tadawul, RVCMC has organized the world’s two largest carbon auctions, selling more than 3.5 million tons worth of carbon credits in 2022 and 2023. 70 percent of the credits sold in these auctions were sourced from offset projects in Africa, with the 2023 auction taking place in Kenya. The principal buyers of these credits were Saudi firms, led by the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco.

Beyond simply owning offset projects in Africa, the Gulf states are also positioning themselves at the other end of the carbon value chain: the marketing and sale of carbon credits to regional and international buyers.

The Emirati and Saudi relationships with ACMI and the trade in African carbon credits illustrate a notable development when it comes to the Gulf’s role in these new markets. Beyond simply owning offset projects in Africa, the Gulf states are also positioning themselves at the other end of the carbon value chain: the marketing and sale of carbon credits to regional and international buyers. In this respect, the Gulf is emerging as a key economic space where African carbon is turned into a financial asset that can be bought, sold and speculated upon by financial actors across the globe.

Indeed, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have each sought to establish permanent carbon exchanges, where carbon credits can be bought and sold just like any other commodity. The UAE set up the first such trading exchange following an investment by the Abu Dhabi-controlled sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala, in the Singapore-based AirCarbon Exchange (ACX) in September 2022. As part of this acquisition, Mubadala now owns 20 percent of ACX and has established a regulated digital carbon trading exchange in Abu Dhabi’s financial free zone, the Abu Dhabi Global Market. ACX claims the exchange is the first regulated exchange of its kind in the world, with the trade in carbon credits beginning there in late 2023. Likewise, in Saudi Arabia the RVCMC has partnered with US market technology firm Xpansiv to establish a permanent carbon credit exchange set to launch in late 2024.

Whether these two Gulf-based exchanges will compete or prioritize different trading instruments, such as carbon derivatives or Shariah-compliant carbon credits, remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that major financial centers in the Gulf are leveraging their existing infrastructures to establish regional dominance in the sale of carbon. Active at all stages of the offsetting industry—from generating carbon credits to purchasing them—the Gulf is now a principal actor in the new forms of wealth extraction that connect the African continent to the wider global economy.

Entrenching a Fossil-Fueled Future

Over the past two decades, the Gulf’s oil and especially gas production has grown markedly, alongside a substantial eastward shift in energy exports to meet the new hydrocarbon demand from China and East Asia. At the same time, the Gulf states have expanded their involvement in energy-intensive downstream sectors, notably the production of petrochemicals, plastics and fertilizers. Led by Saudi Aramco and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Gulf-based National Oil Companies now rival the traditional Western oil supermajors in key metrics such as reserves, refining capacity and export levels.

Rather, much like the big Western oil companies, the Gulf’s vision of expanded fossil fuel production is accompanied by an attempt to seize the leadership of global efforts to tackle the climate crisis.

In this context—and despite the reality of the climate emergency—the Gulf states are doubling down on fossil fuel production, seeing much to be gained from hanging on to an oil-centered world for as long as possible. As the Saudi oil minister vowed back in 2021, “every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.”[5] But this approach does not mean the Gulf states have adopted a stance of head-in-the-sand climate change denialism. Rather, much like the big Western oil companies, the Gulf’s vision of expanded fossil fuel production is accompanied by an attempt to seize the leadership of global efforts to tackle the climate crisis.

One side to this approach is their heavy involvement in flawed and unproven low carbon technologies, like hydrogen and carbon capture. Another is their attempts to steer global climate negotiations, seen in the recent UN climate change conferences, COP27 and COP28, where the Gulf states channeled policy discussions away from effective efforts to phase out fossil fuels, turning these events into little more than corporate spectacles and networking forums for the oil industry.

The carbon offset market should be viewed as an integral part of these efforts to delay, obfuscate and obstruct addressing climate change in meaningful ways. Through the deceptive carbon accounting of offset projects, the big oil and gas industries in the Gulf can continue business as usual while claiming to meet their so-called climate targets. The Gulf’s dispossession of African land is key to this strategy, ultimately enabling the disastrous specter of ever-accelerating fossil fuel production.

Adam Hanieh is a professor of political economy and global development at the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. His forthcoming book is Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market.(Verso, September 2024).

Footnotes

[1] Heidi Blake, “The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle,” The New Yorker, October 16, 2023.

[2] Katherine Hearst, “Kenya concedes ‘millions of hectares’ to UAE firm in latest carbon offset deal,” Middle East Eye, November 5, 2023.

[3] Thales A. P. West et al., “Action needed to make carbon offsets from forest conservation work for climate change,” Science 381/6660 (August 2023), p. 876.

[4] “Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI): Roadmap Report,” ACMI, November 8, 2022, p. 12.

[5] Javier Blas, “The Saudi Prince of Oil Prices Vows to Drill ‘Every Last Molecule’,” Bloomberg, July 22, 2021.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... or-africa/

Extremely hot days double for half a billion children
August 14, 2024

Across 100 countries, over half of children experience twice as many heatwaves as 60 years ago

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“The report finds that climate change is impacting almost every aspect of child health and well-being from pregnancy to adolescence. The health impacts compound as children face climate-related hazards that often overlap. Of great concern is the risk of adverse birth outcomes, including pre-term birth and low birth weight, increasing across most climate-related hazards. Neonates and infants have a higher risk of death due to air pollution and extreme heat. Killer infectious diseases for children, like malaria, are expected to intensify with climate change. Malnutrition, underlying half of all under-five deaths globally, is set to increase due to extreme weather events, in addition to injuries.”
A THREAT TO PROGRESS: Confronting the effects of climate change on child health and well-being (UNICEF, 2024)
One in 5 children – or 466 million – live in areas that experience at least double the number of extremely hot days every year compared to just six decades ago, according to a new UNICEF analysis.

Using a comparison between a 1960s and a 2020-2024 average, the analysis issues a stark warning about the speed and scale at which extremely hot days – measured as more than 35 degrees Celsius / 95 degrees Fahrenheit – are increasing for almost half a billion children worldwide, many without the infrastructure or services to endure it.

“The hottest summer days now seem normal,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “Extreme heat is increasing, disrupting children’s health, well-being and daily routines.”

The analysis also examines country-level data and finds that in 16 countries, children now experience more than a month of additional extremely hot days compared to six decades ago. In South Sudan, for example, children are living through a yearly average of 165 extremely hot days this decade compared to 110 days in the 1960s, while in Paraguay it has jumped to 71 days from 36.

Globally, children in West and Central Africa face the highest exposure to extremely hot days and the most significant increases over time, according to the analysis. 123 million children – or 39 per cent of children in the region – now experience an average of more than one third of the year – or at least 95 days – in temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius, reaching as many as 212 days in Mali, 202 days in Niger, 198 days in Senegal, and 195 days in Sudan. In Latin America and the Caribbean, almost 48 million children live in areas that are experiencing twice the number of extremely hot days.

Heat stress within the body, caused by exposure to extreme heat, poses unique threats to the health and well-being of children and pregnant women, particularly if cooling interventions are not available. It has been linked to pregnancy complications such as gestational chronic diseases and adverse birth outcomes including stillbirth, low birth weight, and preterm birth. Excess levels of heat stress also contribute to child malnutrition, non-communicable diseases such as heat-related illnesses, and leave children more vulnerable to infectious diseases that spread in high temperatures such as malaria and dengue. Evidence shows that it also impacts neurodevelopment, mental health, and well-being.

Extreme heat also has more concerning effects when experienced in longer periods of time. While extreme heat is increasing in every country worldwide, the analysis shows that children are also exposed to more severe, longer, and frequent heatwaves. Across 100 countries, more than half of children are experiencing twice as many heatwaves today as 60 years ago. In the United States, for example, 36 million children are exposed to double the number of heatwaves compared to 60 years ago, and 5.7 million are exposed to three times as many.

The impact of climate-related hazards on child health is multiplied by how climate-related hazards affect food and water security and contamination, damage infrastructure, disrupt services for children, including education, and drive displacement. In addition, the severity of these impacts is determined by underlying vulnerabilities and inequities children face based on their socioeconomic status, gender, location, existing health status and country context.

“Children are not little adults. Their bodies are far more vulnerable to extreme heat. Young bodies heat up faster, and cool down more slowly. Extreme heat is especially risky for babies due to their faster heart rate, so rising temperatures are even more alarming for children,” Russell said.

“Governments must act to get rising temperatures under control, and there is a unique opportunity to do that right now. As governments are currently drafting their national climate action plans, they can do so with the ambition and knowledge that today’s children and future generations will have to live in the world they leave behind.”

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... -children/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 23, 2024 1:51 pm

China adopts guidelines to speed green transition
August 22, 2024

CPC promises ‘remarkable results’ in all areas of economic and social development by 2030

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This editorial was published by Xinhua, China’s state news agency, on August 11. The new guidelines are important, but it remains to be seen how they manifest in practical action.

The Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the State Council have unveiled a set of guidelines to ramp up green transition in all areas of economic and social development.

According to the recently issued guidelines, the main objectives are that by 2030, the country will achieve “remarkable results” in the green transition in all areas of economic and social development; and by 2035, a green, low-carbon, and circular development economic system will be basically established and the goal of Beautiful China will be basically achieved.

The guidelines have raised a raft of work tasks such as optimizing the development and protection of territorial space, promoting the green and low-carbon transition in industrial structure and the energy sector, as well as promoting green transition in the transport sector and urban-rural development.

The guidelines also put forward quantitative work goals for different fields. By 2030, the scale of the energy conservation and environmental protection industry in the country will reach about 15 trillion yuan (about 2.1 trillion U.S. dollars), the proportion of non-fossil energy will increase to about 25 percent of energy consumption, and the installed capacity of pumped storage hydropower will exceed 120 million kilowatts.

By 2030, the carbon emission intensity of commercial transport per unit of turnover will drop by about 9.5 percent compared with 2020, and the annual utilization of bulk solid waste will reach about 4.5 billion tonnes, with the output rate of main resources to increase by about 45 percent compared with 2020, according to the guidelines.

According to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the guidelines were issued at a time when China has made historical achievements in green and low-carbon development since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012.

For instance, as of the end of June 2024, the installed capacity of renewable energy has reached 1.653 billion kW, accounting for 53.8 percent of the country’s total installed capacity. In 2023, the nation’s energy consumption and carbon emission intensity per unit of GDP dropped by more than 26 percent and 35 percent, respectively, compared with 2012, it said.

However, the NDRC said China still faces difficulties and challenges in green transition, with the energy structure remaining biased toward coal and the proportion of fossil energy and traditional industries remaining high in the country. “In addition, the global green transition is facing setbacks, environmental and climate issues are increasingly being politicized, and green trade barriers are escalating.”

The guidelines will be of great significance to promote the green transition of the development model, comprehensively promote the construction of a beautiful China, and achieve high-quality development, according to the NDRC.

The guidelines also highlight green transition in the consumption model by encouraging people to pursue green and healthy life. They also aim to boost green consumption by expanding the scope and scale of government procurement of green products, promoting trade-in programs to boost consumer spending on green products, and carrying out marketing campaigns for new energy vehicles and green home appliances in rural regions.

According to the guidelines, the country will pursue fiscal and taxation policies that are conducive to promoting green and low-carbon development and the efficient use of resources.

In terms of financial instruments, China will extend the implementation period of carbon emission reduction support tools to the end of 2027 and actively develop financial instruments such as green equity financing, green financial leasing, and green trusts.

In terms of investment mechanisms, investment within the central budget will actively support key projects, and the government will encourage and regulate the participation of social capital in green and low-carbon projects, according to the guidelines.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... ransition/

Only a socialist society can do this. capitalist societies are incapable of such sweeping action because of their inherent requirements of profit and 'growth'. Hey you dumb-ass environmentalists, what are you waiting for?

******

In His Last 40 Days in Office, Mexico’s President Lopéz Obrador Pushes Ahead With Plans to Ban Open Pit Mining
Posted on August 20, 2024 by Nick Corbishley

For over three decades, Mexico has been a veritable paradise for global mining conglomerates, serving up some of the laxest regulations in Latin America. That is now changing.

Mexico’s outgoing President, Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (aka AMLO), may only have a little over a month left in office, but he is by no means a lame duck. Quite the contrary: During the 30 days of September he will have more legislative power backing him up that at any other time during his six-year term. And he plans to make full use of it.

This is the result of meticulous timing and cunning on AMLO’s part. After subtle tweaks to the political calendar, the new legislature begins on September 1. However, AMLO’s presidential successor, Claudia Shienbaum, does not start her term until October 1, giving AMLO a whole month with the new legislature. And in Mexico’s June elections AMLO’s party, MORENA, had won by a landslide, grabbing a “super majority” — i.e. more than two-thirds of the seats — in the lower house and falling just two seats shy of winning another in the senate.

A super majority allows for constitutional changes that have so far eluded the AMLO administration. They include a proposed root-and-branch restructuring of Mexico’s judicial system, which is causing all manner of unease and consternation on both sides of the Rio Grande, as well as sweeping constitutional reforms to Mexico’s mining laws. These proposals all form part of a package of reforms presented in February that could be approved as early as next month.

Last week, the Constitutional Affairs Committee of the Chamber of Deputies approved by 30 votes to seven two constitutional reforms aimed at banning open-pit mining and fracking, as well as significantly restricting the use of genetically modified corn — an issue that is already the subject of an investor state dispute between Mexico and its North American trade partners, the United States and Canada.

The lower house’s Constitutional Affairs Committee also agreed to amend the Constitution to prevent the exploitation of water in areas with low availability, except for in high-population areas. As we reported a couple of years ago, large swathes of Mexico, including Mexico City, are grappling with acute water shortages. Last year, the civil association Water Advisory Council estimated that 21 million people do not have daily access to drinking water.

Although the AMLO government has issued no new open pit concessions and has passed a bill to prevent this type of mining activity, the current permits have not been cancelled. That could change if the proposed reforms are passed. AMLO’s administration opposes open pit mining for what the government sees as the method’s outsized environmental impact. It also argues that the sector offers meagre contributions to state coffers, with foreign companies pocketing the lion’s share of revenues and profits. AMLO himself said last year:

[M]ining activity is not contributing to overall economic development and the redistribution of wealth in the country, so the privileges it enjoys over other land or water uses is not justified. Its contribution to overall welfare pales in comparison with the damage caused by the extraction of minerals, such as environmental degradation, irrational use of water, the pollution of rivers, channels and deforestation, among other phenomena.

A Mining Paradise No More

One thing that has set Mexico apart from most, if not all, other resource-rich countries in Latin America over the past 30 years is the extreme preferential treatment it grants to the mining industry. In the 1992 Mining Law — the brainchild of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whose presidency of Mexico (1988-1994) set the country’s economy upon a path of rampant privatisation, deregulation and trade liberalisation — mining activity took precedence over all other industries and activities. Article 6 of the law reads:

The exploration, exploitation and beneficiation of the minerals or substances referred to in this Law are public utilities and will have preference over any other use or utilization of the land, subject to the conditions established herein, and only by a Federal Law may taxes be assessed on these activities.

Thanks largely to this four-line paragraph, the claims of the mining industry on Mexican land have held greater weight than not just all other industries but all other human activity. For the following 31 years Mexico’s federal government was bound by law to act against the interests and rights of both private landlords and local communities in order to guarantee mining companies access to the lands upon which a concession was granted.

“No other mining law on the continent grants preferential access over any type of land use,” Jorge Peláez Padilla, a professor of law at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), told the investigative news website Contralinea in 2013. The result has been rampant expropriations of private — and in some cases communal or even protected park — land, for the sake of private mining operations.

The duration of the concessions granted can also be uncommonly long. The 1992 Mining Law allowed concessionaires to explore or exploit Mexican land for 50 years, and up to one century if the interested party requests an extension, without requiring an environmental impact report and without prior consultation with the communities that would be impacted.

For three decades, Mexico served as a veritable paradise for global mining conglomerates, serving up some of the laxest regulations in Latin America, all of it coinciding with the signing of NAFTA. As the Canadian independent journalist Yves Engler documents, Canadian mining companies were the biggest winners of the 1992 reforms.

Seventy per cent of foreign-owned mining companies operating in Mexico are Canadian-based. Two years ago, the front page of national daily La Jornada blared: “Poseen mineras canadienses 60% del oro mexicano” (Canadian mining companies own 60% of Mexican gold). Canadian firms have had many disputes with local communities over the impact of their operations on local water systems and ecosystems. Similarly, Canadian companies have been implicated in many rights violations including high-profile killings…

There were no Canadian mines operating in Mexico in 1994. By 2010 there were about 375 Canadian-run projects. Before the reforms that came with the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico’s constitution dictated that land, subsoil and its riches were the property of the state and recognized the collective right of communities to land through the ejido system. Constitutional changes in 1992 allowed for sale of lands to third parties, including multinational corporations. Combined with a new Law on Foreign Investment, the Mining Law of 1992 allowed for 100 percent foreign control in the exploration and production of mines.

That regime is now ending. Last year, the AMLO government began dismantling the preferential treatment for mining exploration and exploitation. As we reported at the time, the reforms, among other things, shortened the length of mining concessions, tightened the rules for water permits, expanded the grounds for cancelling licenses, banned the granting of mining concessions on protected parkland, and restricted licenses to a specific mineral instead of any type of mineral discovered within the boundaries of the licensed territory.

Global Repercussions?

Now, the government wants to go a step further, and introduce an almost total ban on open pit mining and fracking into the country’s constitution. In the package of reforms sent to the legislature, the president included a modification to Article 27 to “prohibit both the granting of concessions and the activities of exploration, exploitation, benefit, use or exploitation of minerals, metals or metalloids in the open air.”

If this package of reforms is approved, which is likely given the size of the government’s majorities in both houses, it could end up having an impact on mining not just in Mexico but also globally, especially if other national governments in the region and beyond are inspired to take similar steps.

Recent years have seen a growing resurgence of what is often termed as “resource nationalism” — which Wikipedia defines as “the tendency of people and governments to assert control over natural resources located within their territory” — not just in Mexico but across Latin America. If the trend continues to grow, it could have major repercussions for global supply chains, particularly as the world transitions toward a supposedly greener economic model — a process that is guaranteed to be mining intensive.

Mexico is the world’s largest silver producer, accounting for just under a quarter of all the precious metal mined in 2021. Much of that silver is mined in open pits. The country is also among the top ten global producers of 15 other metals and minerals (bismuth, fluorite, celestite, wollastonite, cadmium, molybdenum, lead, zinc, diatomite, salt, barite, graphite, gypsum, gold, and copper).

Mining companies and lobbying groups are warning of the dire economic fallout the proposed ban on open-pit mining could have on the domestic economy. In 2019 alone, the mining sector generated 2.3% of Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), in addition to being the fifth largest source of foreign currency, with a contribution of $18.4 billion. Open pit mining accounts for roughly 60% of the country’s mining output. According to the Mexican Mining Chamber, Caminex, a wholesale prohibition could trigger a 1% contraction in the country’s GDP, threatening some 200,000 jobs.

“Open-pit mining should not be banned, but rather encouraged so as to consolidate Mexico’s position as a producer of essential minerals,” said Camimex. “It is a serious activity that is practised throughout the world, and operating it responsibly and safely is the duty of all stakeholders. Responsible industry should not be penalised, nor should the country’s competitiveness be limited.”

A Rebalancing of Power

The potential economic hit was also flagged by an exploration executive cited in an S&P Global report published in June. The executive warned that underground operations tend to be smaller than open pit jobs, generating less revenue and creating fewer jobs. The report, however, includes an interesting caveat from Katherine Matthews and Jason Holden, mining analysts with S&P Global Commodity Insights:

While on the surface the Mining Reform may seem extreme, many of these new and amended regulations are standard practice in many jurisdictions, particularly those with a well-established mining legacy. Enhancements to environmental oversight and additional rights for Indigenous people are key to bringing Mexico up to the standard of many of the large mining destinations.

In other words, AMLO is simply bringing Mexico’s mining regulations up to most first-world standards. But his reforms also seek to rebalance power between the State and mining companies, most of them majority owned by foreign corporations, many of them based in Canada.

Also, as the Mexican newspaper El Universal noted last week, Morena and its coalition partners have approved a key exception to the proposed rules meaning that open-pit mining and fracking can be authorised “in rare cases determined by the federal Executive… due to their strategic importance for national development.”

This exception clause will almost certainly be activated for cement mines (in Cemex, Mexico boasts one of the largest cement manufacturers in the world) as well as the mining of lithium deposits and other special cases, but it will by the central government that will be ultimate decided. The government already partially nationalised the lithium deposits in 2023, allowing private firms to exploit the metal but only in partnerships with the state-owned miner LitioMx.

In response, the Chinese global battery maker and lithium miner Ganfeng Lithium, which had bought up concessions on lithium deposits in the north-western state of Sonora, has filed an ISDS arbitration case against Mexico at the World Bank’s dispute settlement centre. It is not the only case brought against Mexico as a result of the AMLO government’s mining reforms.

The British company Cadence Minerals, together with its subsidiary REM Mexico Limited, has issued a request for consultations and negotiations to the Government of Mexico under the United Kingdom-Mexico Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT), due to the revocation of the mining concessions for the Sonora Lithium Project by the General Directorate of Mines of Mexico. The Canadian company Almadex Minerals has also initiated an investor state dispute against Mexico and is claiming at least $200 million in damages.

Mexico is already the most sued member of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), as well as the most sued country at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in 2023, with a total of ten cases brought against it. In the first three-and-a-half years of USMCA’s existence (July 1, 2020 — July 1, 2023) 19 ISDS cases were filed, 14 of them against Mexico, according to Kluwer Arbitration Blog. Of those 14, 10 were filed in 2023.

As with NAFTA, US investors continue to be the main users of investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS) in the USMCA era, accounting for 74% of claims, followed by Canadian investors with 26%. Mexican investors are apparently yet to file an ISDS case under the USMCA.

This is all occurring despite the fact that USMCA was supposed to reduce investors’ ability to sue countries. Under the new trade agreement, U.S. investors already present in Canada were allowed to use investment arbitration for only three years — up until mid-2023. Mexico and the U.S. negotiated an annex that allows investment arbitration to continue, but only in well-defined circumstances. However, Canada’s relations with Mexico are regulated under the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes traditional investor–state arbitration.

Pressure will also no doubt be brought to bear by the US and Canadian embassies in Mexico City. After the passage of last year’s mining reforms, the US and Canadian trade representatives, Mary Ng and Katherine . The next day, Canada’s ambassador to Mexico and the representatives of multiple Canadian mining companies met with Mexico’s Economy Minister, Raquel Buenrostro.Tai, released a joint statement suggesting that the “changes in Mexico’s mining law” violated the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement

Yet despite all of this pressure, the Mexican government seems determined to push ahead with its ban on open pit mining. If AMLO doesn’t get the reforms over the line in September, his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, will presumably take up the baton. During her campaign, Sheinbaum, a committed environmentalist, pledged to pursue the ban.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08 ... ments.html

Can Plastic Waste Be Transformed Into Food for Humans?
Posted on August 21, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. I know this idea may seem sound on some level, but I suspect most people would rather eat bugs than eat food made from bacteria that ate up plastic If nothing else, it has taken decades to work out that ultra processed foods like high fructose corn syrup are bad for you. Any bacteria-derived food intuitively seems so removed from what humans have evolved to consume, particularly in terms of diversity and almost certain lack of micro-nutrients, that it’s hard to see it as a good idea. And one can therefore further imagine that the affluent and the health conscious will reject this as “food”.

But the odds seem high that any “bacteria that ate plastics” calorie source will be fed to animals instead….which will lead to further bifurcation, of “grass fed”, “free range” or other non-Frankenfood fattened animal (or dairy) product for those that can afford it, and yet another variety of factory food for everyone else. The story effectively acknowledges this; the envisaged use is on a very short-term, emergency basis.

The article also mentions using reactors and “high heat” to process the plastics. What is the energy cost?

By Sara Talpos, a contributing editor at Undark. Originally published at Undark

In 2019, an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense released a call for research projects to help the military deal with the copious amount of plastic waste generated when troops are sent to work in remote locations or disaster zones. The agency wanted a system that could convert food wrappers and water bottles, among other things, into usable products, such as fuel and rations. The system needed to be small enough to fit in a Humvee and capable of running on little energy. It also needed to harness the power of plastic-eating microbes.

“When we started this project four years ago, the ideas were there. And in theory, it made sense,” said Stephen Techtmann, a microbiologist at Michigan Technological University, who leads one of the three research groups receiving funding. Nevertheless, he said, in the beginning, the effort “felt a lot more science-fiction than really something that would work.”

That uncertainty was key. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, supports high-risk, high-reward projects. This means there’s a good chance that any individual effort will end in failure. But when a project does succeed, it has the potential to be a true scientific breakthrough. “Our goal is to go from disbelief, like, ‘You’re kidding me. You want to do what?’ to ‘You know, that might be actually feasible,’” said Leonard Tender, a program manager at DARPA who is overseeing the plastic waste projects.

The problems with plastic production and disposal are well known. According to the United Nations Environment Program, the world creates about 440 million tons of plastic waste per year. Much of it ends up in landfills or in the ocean, where microplastics, plastic pellets, and plastic bags pose a threat to wildlife. Many governments and experts agree that solving the problem will require reducing production, and some countries and U.S. states have additionally introduced policies to encourage recycling.

For years, scientists have also been experimenting with various species of plastic-eating bacteria. But DARPA is taking a slightly different approach in seeking a compact and mobile solution that uses plastic to create something else entirely: food for humans.

The goal, Techtmann hastens to add, is not to feed people plastic. Rather, the hope is that the plastic-devouring microbes in his system will themselves prove fit for human consumption. While Techtmann believes most of the project will be ready in a year or two, it’s this food step that could take longer. His team is currently doing toxicity testing, and then they will submit their results to the Food and Drug Administration for review. Even if all that goes smoothly, an additional challenge awaits. There’s an ick factor, said Techtmann, “that I think would have to be overcome.”

The military isn’t the only entity working to turn microbes into nutrition. From Korea to Finland, a small number of researchers, as well as some companies, are exploring whether microorganisms might one day help feed the world’s growing population.

According to Tender, DARPA’s call for proposals was aimed at solving two problems at once. First, the agency hoped to reduce what he called supply-chain vulnerability: During war, the military needs to transport supplies to troops in remote locations, which creates a safety risk for people in the vehicle. Additionally, the agency wanted to stop using hazardous burn pits as a means of dealing with plastic waste. “Getting those waste products off of those sites responsibly is a huge lift,” Tender said.

The Michigan Tech system begins with a mechanical shredder, which reduces the plastic to small shards that then move into a reactor, where they soak in ammonium hydroxide under high heat. Some plastics, such as PET, which is commonly used to make disposable water bottles, break down at this point. Other plastics used in military food packaging — namely polyethylene and polypropylene — are passed along to another reactor, where they are subject to much higher heat and an absence of oxygen.

Under these conditions, the polyethylene and polypropylene are converted into compounds that can be upcycled into fuels and lubricants. David Shonnard, a chemical engineer at Michigan Tech who oversaw this component of the project, has developed a startup company called Resurgent Innovation to commercialize some of the technology. (Other members of the research team, said Shonnard, are pursuing additional patents related to other parts of the system.)



In one reactor, shown here at a recent MTU demonstration, some deconstructed plastics are subject to high heat and the absence of oxygen — a process called pyrolysis. Visual: Kaden Staley/Michigan Technological University
After the PET has broken down in the ammonium hydroxide, the liquid is moved to another reactor, where it is consumed by a colony of microbes. Techtmann initially thought he would need to go to a highly contaminated environment to find bacteria capable of breaking down the deconstructed plastic. But as it turned out, bacteria from compost piles worked really well. This may be because the deconstructed plastic that enters the reactor has a similar molecular structure to some plant material compounds, he said. So the bacteria that would otherwise eat plants can perhaps instead draw their energy from the plastic.

After the bacteria consume the plastic, the microbes are then dried into a powder that smells a bit like nutritional yeast and has a balance of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins, said Techtmann.



Materials for the MTU project are shown at a recent demonstration. Before being placed in a reactor, plastic feedstocks (bottom row) are mechanically shredded into small pieces. Visual: Kaden Staley/Michigan Technological University


After PET is broken down in the ammonium hydroxide, the liquid is moved to a reactor where it is consumed by a colony of microbes. Visual: Kaden Staley/Michigan Technological University
Research into edible microorganisms dates back at least 60 years, but the body of evidence is decidedly small. (One review estimated that since 1961, an average of seven papers have been published per year.) Still, researchers in the field say there are good reasons for countries to consider microbes as a food source. Among other things, they are rich in protein, wrote Sang Yup Lee, a bioengineer and senior vice president for research at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in an email to Undark. Lee and others have noted that growing microbes requires less land and water than conventional agriculture. Therefore, they might prove to be a more sustainable source of nutrition, particularly as the human population grows.

Lee reviewed a paper describing the microbial portion of the Michigan Tech project, and said that the group’s plans are feasible. But he pointed out a significant challenge: At the moment, only certain microorganisms are considered safe to eat, namely “those we have been eating thorough fermented food and beverages, such as lactic acid bacteria, bacillus, some yeasts.” But these don’t degrade plastics.

Before using the plastic-eating microbes as food for humans, the research team will submit evidence to regulators indicating that the substance is safe. Joshua Pearce, an electrical engineer at Western University in Ontario, Canada, performed the initial toxicology screening, breaking the microbes down into smaller pieces, which they compared against known toxins.

“We’re pretty sure there’s nothing bad in there,” said Pearce. He added that the microbes have also been fed to C. elegans roundworms without apparent ill-effects, and the team is currently looking at how rats do when they consume the microbes over the longer term. If the rats do well, then the next step would be to submit data to the Food and Drug Administration for review.

At least a handful of companies are in various stages of commercializing new varieties of edible microbes. A Finnish startup, Solar Foods, for example, has taken a bacterium found in nature and created a powdery product with a mustard brown hue that has been approved for use in Singapore. In an email to Undark, chief experience officer Laura Sinisalo said that the company has applied for approval in the E.U. and the U.K., as well as in the U.S., where it hopes to enter the market by the end of this year.

Even if the plastic-eating microbes turn out to be safe for human consumption, Techtmann said, the public might still balk at the prospect of eating something nourished on plastic waste. For this reason, he said, this particular group of microbes might prove most useful on remote military bases or during disaster relief, where it could be consumed short-term, to help people survive.

“I think there’s a bit less of a concern about the ick factor,” said Techtmann, “if it’s really just, ‘This is going to keep me alive for another day or two.’”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08 ... umans.html

(Have we hit bottom yet?)

******

‘This Is a Push to Pass Laws Criminalizing Protest of Fossil Fuel Infrastructure’:
CounterSpin interview with Emily Sanders on criminalizing pipeline protest
Janine Jackson

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Janine Jackson interviewed ExxonKnews‘ Emily Sanders about criminalizing pipeline protests for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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FAIR.org (11/22/16)
Janine Jackson: We have not forgotten the years of protest by the people of Standing Rock in resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The cause could not have been more fundamental. The news and images were dramatic, and the support was global and cross-community.

Fossil fuel makers, who would like to keep making money from the destruction of the planet’s capacity for life, along with their ally enablers in law and law enforcement, want nothing like that to ever happen again, and certainly not for you to see it and take inspiration.

Pursuant to that are new efforts reported by our guest.

Emily Sanders is senior reporter for ExxonKnews, a project of the Center for Climate Integrity. This story was co-published with the Lever. She joins us now by phone from Queens. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Emily Sanders.

Emily Sanders: Hi. Thanks so much for having me again.

JJ We’re talking, to start, about congressional actions. What is the context behind this new rulemaking authorization process that you’re writing about, and how did laws around pipeline protest get into this conversation?
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HuffPost (8/26/21)
ES: Congress is currently working to reauthorize the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, which would set the agency’s funding and mandates for safety rulemaking on pipelines over the next few years. And that’s at the same time as the agency sets out to make new rules for carbon dioxide pipelines.

And both these processes are especially crucial right now, as the oil and gas industry plans to build out tens of thousands of additional miles of pipeline for carbon capture projects. And CO2 is an asphyxiant. It can travel long distances, it can shut down vehicles, and sicken, suffocate or even kill people and wildlife.

So these pipelines can be incredibly dangerous if and when they leak, as was the case in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020, when a Denbury pipeline, now owned by ExxonMobil, ruptured and stalled emergency vehicles, sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with reportedly zombie-like symptoms.

So, after that, and now in the wake of yet another leak in Sulphur, Louisiana, earlier this year, advocates and community members have really been pushing the agency to take a hard look at these pipelines, and provide more transparent information to communities and first responders, who are often just underfunded, or volunteer fire departments tasked with dealing with these leaks at the last minute. And they’re asking the agency to implement real rules and oversight for the companies that, in these cases of leaks, were not appropriately monitoring their sites.

So back in April, I reported on how the oil industry was lobbying to limit the scope of those rules, and dictate its own safety standards, so that it can build out CO2 pipeline infrastructure as quickly as possible, since it stands to benefit from huge tax incentives for CCS passed under the Biden administration.

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Emily Sanders: “This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.”

And what I found, as I dug further into those lobbying records, is that oil companies and their trade groups are now trying to pressure lawmakers to use this PHMSA reauthorization process to push through measures that could further criminalize pipeline protests at the federal level.

The federal penalty for damaging or destroying pipelines is already a felony charge of up to 20 years in prison. But in hearing testimony that I found, and policy briefs posted online, oil industry trade group executives were basically pushing lawmakers to expand the definition of so-called “attacks” on pipelines that can be punished under felony charges to include vague language like “disruptions of service” or “attacks on construction sites.”

And that could implicate a much broader set of activities that are used to protest fossil fuel infrastructure. So something like “disruption of service,” or interfering at a construction site, that could implicate anything from planting corn in the path of a pipeline construction, to a march, or a sit-in at a site. And it’s really hard to say what that actually means, which is why it’s so concerning.

And we’re now already seeing this language show up in committee bills. So the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s draft reauthorization bill, which was one of two committee bills being negotiated before the legislation goes to the Senate, would add impairing the operation of pipelines, damaging or destroying such a facility under construction, and even attempting or conspiring to do so as felony activities punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

So this is something industry lobby groups have tried before, back in 2019, to use this reauthorization process towards this purpose. They say it’s about preventing damage or destruction of pipelines that could create a harmful situation for communities on the ground. But, again, that’s already a felony under federal law. This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.

JJ: Well, you’ve hit all the points, but let me just draw some out, because the perversity here—it’s not irony—this is coming at the center of legislative work about rules for industry due to devastating harms, like breaches in a carbon dioxide pipeline, things that have actively harmed the community.

So in the process of legislating rules around that, fossil fuel makers have said, “Oh, well, while we’re talking about safety of pipelines, let’s also wiggle in this idea that protesters might be endangering pipelines.”

And then here’s where it gets to peak irony, the idea that protesters might cause harm to human beings by protesting pipelines, when the context is we’re talking about the harm that these pipelines themselves have caused. I mean, it’s kind of off the chart.

ES: Exactly. And this is as these same companies are continuing to invest in more and more fossil fuel infrastructure, while every scientific body is telling us that we have to do the opposite to avoid cataclysmic climate impacts. So they’re really using this growing pushback against their own operations to take this opportunity to silence that opposition.

JJ: And then, of course, the vagueness of the language, which you point to in the piece, that is part of it, that you’re not supposed to quite understand, well, what counts as “protest,” what counts as “impairing the operation” of the pipeline. It’s very much suppressive of free speech and action.
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Extra! (4/13)
ES: Exactly. There’s precedent for this, as you alluded to in your opening; this is part of a larger push to pass laws criminalizing protest of fossil fuel infrastructure since the protest against Keystone XL and Dakota Access, which brought together enormous coalitions of people that cross cultural and political boundaries to oppose those pipelines.

And much of the legislation we’ve seen since then, which has been lobbied for by companies like Exxon and Marathon, Koch and Enbridge—much of that legislation was primarily based on a model bill crafted by the oil- and gas-funded American Legislative and Exchange Council, or ALEC, which made it a felony to trespass on the industry’s so-called critical infrastructure.

And those critical infrastructure bills use a lot of the same, very vague types of language to describe trespass, which can make it incredibly dangerous, not just for protesters, many of whom are Indigenous people and farmers and other landowners just trying to protect their land and water rights, but also journalists and the press, who go to report on these protests on the ground. And, again, it’s just especially concerning when the cost to the planet and people’s safety are so high.

JJ: I just want to ask, finally, it’s kind of open-ended, but I mean, it’s just not plausible to think that people are going to stop resisting or stop protesting or stop speaking out against the harms climate disruption is inflicting, that are evident much more every single day. And I just wonder—obviously, these fossil fuel companies are hoping that news media will use their age-old frames about criminality and law-breaking to push people back into the idea of, “Oh, it’s OK to want what you want”—like, not to see the capacity for human life on the planet destroyed—”it’s OK for you to want that, but just do it through proper channels. Don’t do it by protesting, because now that’s illegal in a new way.” And I just wonder, media have to do something different, big media have to do something different to actually rise to this occasion.
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ExxonKnews (6/17/24)
ES: I think it’s all about talking to the actual people on the ground who are doing the protesting. Like you said, it’s so easy to paint people as criminals, when the definition of a criminal is defined or written by the same industry trying to protect the product that those people are protesting. So I think it’s just so important to get their perspective, find out why they’re there. A lot of the time these are regular people, not just activists who are there because of the climate, but also just people who are there trying to protect their water, protect their land and their homes and livelihoods, or journalists who are trying to report on what’s going on. And I just think getting their voice heard from a source is the most important thing.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Emily Sanders, senior reporter for ExxonKnews. You can find the piece, “Big Oil Wants to Increase Federal Criminal Penalties for Pipeline Protests,” online at ExxonKnews.org, as well as LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Emily Sanders, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ES: Thanks again for having me.

https://fair.org/home/this-is-a-push-to ... structure/

******
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 28, 2024 3:09 pm

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What should we do about ‘degrowth’?
By Marx Memorial Library (Posted Aug 28, 2024)

Originally published: Morning Star Online on August 26, 2024 (more by Morning Star Online) |

PART 1 of this answer argued that environmental destruction is driven by the fundamental contradiction in capitalism—between the forces and relations of production and its relentless drive for profit. Capitalism depends on continued growth, without which it would collapse. Non-exploitative capitalism is a contradiction in terms. There is not a single “human ecology”—every social system has its own ecological dynamic, and capitalism’s is a particularly destructive one.

Just as capitalism, as an economic system, depends on exploiting workers, so too does it depend on exploiting the resources—living and non-living—of our planet. That was something recognised by Marx and Engels with their concept of the “metabolic rift” between humans and nature.

Marx focused on agriculture, the depletion of soil nutrients and the pollution of waterways by run-off and human sewage. He was an early advocate of recycling. Today we recognise that the wider impacts of capitalism threaten the whole planet. As Barry Commoner, a Marxist ecologist and one of the founders of the modern environmental movement wrote a half-century ago (at the same time of the MIT computer models discussed in part 1 of this Q&A):

The world is being carried to the brink of ecological disaster, not by a singular fault, which some clever scheme can correct, but by the phalanx of powerful economic, political and social forces that constitute the march of history. Anyone who proposes to cure the environmental crisis undertakes thereby to change the course of history.

Fifty years later, that observation—both the origins of the environmental crisis and the need to “change the course of history” as part of the cure—has greater force than ever. That is recognised in (for example) the United Nations Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) which emphasises that the world is “far off track” in its declared objectives of combating climate change and addressing poverty, inequality, hunger, disease and conflict.

Changing the course of history is of course the objective of all who understand that capitalism is inherently exploitative both of people and of the planet and that the constant drive to accumulate leads inevitably to hardship for the former and disaster for the latter. Labour’s election programme under Keir Starmer is based on his declaration that “growth is everything. It’s not just the quickest way out of this—it’s the only way” and has been rightly dubbed by this paper “Project Hopeless.”

That understanding, in turn, raises issues regarding the organisation of production and consumption within socialism. An end to the conspicuous and unnecessary consumption of a few at the expense of the “many” (both within countries and between them) is an essential element of any socialist transition. It seems clear also, if further privation and suffering of that “many” is to be avoided, that a socialist transition must be a necessary component of degrowth.

Marx’s critique of capitalism included an examination of the way that alienation at the point of production is accompanied by dysfunctional and damaging patterns of consumption. However it is clear that individual lifestyle choices can at best have only a minor impact on the problems—local and global—that debates around degrowth address.

The majority of the world’s population are not in a position to adopt them, whether in the global South or in the supposedly affluent West. Those who are so privileged should of course avoid excessive and polluting consumption, but this in itself will have little positive impact and, worse, can often be a virtuous self-satisfied cop-out unless accompanied also by recognition of the causes of crisis and a determination to address them at their root.

Increasingly, terms like “ecosocialism” and “degrowth communism” form a focus for debate, both as objectives and as to ways of securing them. One argument is the need for a shift, in the so-called global North to “net zero capital formation” focused on “replacement investment” to deliver qualitative advances in production with reduced environmental impacts. This would need to be coupled with a reversal of dependency and “unequal exchange” whereby the “advanced economies” of capitalism’s metropolitan heartlands rely on a large net appropriation of value (including food, raw materials, and people) from the rest of the world, which currently suffers the worst environmental consequences of capitalist accumulation.

The critical questions of course are to do with how that sustainable socialism can be achieved. The chances of this happening without a change in the dominant institutions of state and government—in effect, a revolution—are slim, and such a revolution would involve a decisive shift in class power.

Those shifts, of course, are under way, with setbacks and reversals, in every part of the planet, not least in China which would not survive today in the face of (capitalist) economic and military encirclement if it were not for its determination to “beat the West at its own game” but which is nevertheless progressing in multiple ways to a “greener” future.

A fundamental tenet of any socialist vision is production for human need rather than for profit. This in turn raises the question how production can be best organised—through central planning (a “command economy”?), through some form of “market socialism” or through communal or co-operative production, locally managed but co-ordinated through information technologies (including AI) which facilitates feedback on those needs and how they can best be met.

In the meantime it is clear that our Earth’s resources, geological and biological (in particular the equilibrating capacity of biogeochemical cycles) and even physical space are insufficient for everyone to “enjoy’”(a curious word) private luxury on the scale of Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. The planet will not support everyone living the wasteful luxury lifestyle of the 1 per cent whose wealth is in any case extracted from the labour of the 99 per cent. Neither will it support the 99 per cent wanting to drive their own cars when good accessible public transport could be available. Nor—as the current energy crisis demonstrates—will our planet support continued capital accumulation by large corporations and their financial backers, without plunging millions into destitution and misery.

The pursuit of “growth” has become a policy mantra of both right and left. As a recent article in this paper points out, it is one of the few areas where Starmer has not committed a U-turn. As the economy slides into recession, Labour follows the Tories in asserting that “economic growth” must be its priority aim, parroting the Tories’ discredited mantra of “trickle-down economics,” declaring:

Our mission is to achieve the highest sustained growth in the G7.

But gross domestic product as a measure of economic activity makes no distinction between destructive activities and those which are sustainable or which can even improve human and planetary well-being. Its development as a metric in the 1930s accompanied attempts by national governments to compete—and to prepare for military combat. It was never intended to be a measure for societal welfare. This is widely recognised in attempts to develop alternatives such as a Human Development Index, Social Progress Index and Genuine Progress Indicator.

Ultimately the problem is not one of metrics. It is a problem of the inherent drive of capitalism to accumulate.

There is ample evidence that within a sane economic system focused on production for human need, not profit; on quality, not quantity, with demographic stabilisation (which depends crucially on progressive policies including healthcare, education and women’s rights) and if—a big if—climate change (with its disastrous consequences for food production) can be contained, our Earth could provide everyone with personal sufficiency (water, food, energy, clothes, decent housing) and allow all to share and enjoy public luxury—good education, health and social care; public libraries, museums, and community centres; playgrounds, sports centres and swimming baths; a good transport and communications infrastructure, local greenspace and public parks.

That’s a socialist vision; a tall order but it’s a realistic and achievable one. Its realisation depends on us.

https://mronline.org/2024/08/28/what-sh ... -degrowth/

(So then, what we should do about 'De-growth' is put it on the shelf labeled 'After the revolution' because nothing like that can ever be reality in a capitalist society. Floating this idea when the majority of humanity doesn't have a pot to piss in is a non-starter and political suicide on a planetary level. And we cannot be sure if or how much will be required after production is re-prioritized, after wealth is redistributed, after spending on the military and advertising is reduced to near zero. Which is not to say that the 'Golden Billion' couldn't stand reducing it's extravagances. We don't know and cannot know until after the revolution.

***

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Milei, Elon Musk and the Lithium Triangle
Originally published: Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World on August 15, 2024 by Juan Samaniego (more by Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World) (Posted Aug 28, 2024)

He went to Davos to introduce himself to the world at the World Economic Forum. To Israel and Italy to strengthen his international position. To Washington to meet with Donald Trump, to Texas to meet with Elon Musk at his Tesla factory, and to Los Angeles to shake hands with Silicon Valley heavyweights. And he ended up in Madrid to close ranks with VOX. Javier Milei’s first six trips after winning the Argentine elections were a declaration of intentions, not only political and ideological, but also economic. Beyond rhetorical gestures and political fuss, the president has a clear agenda: to open Argentina’s doors to foreign investment at any cost.

In parallel to his travels around the globe, the government born out of the elections of October and November 2023 has launched a large number of legislative reforms with the same objective, some of them with serious environmental implications. The first major regulatory package, baptized as the Omnibus Law, sought to repeal the Native Forest Protection Law and the Glacier Protection Law, although both reforms eventually fell out of the proposal after strong internal and external pressures (including a warning from several UN human rights rapporteurs).

What the new far-right government did end up pushing through was a reform of the Land Law—which no longer limits the possession of land by foreign individuals and legal entities—and the Incentive Regime for Large Investments (RIGI), which puts the environmental and social sovereignty of Argentina’s provinces at risk. “Milei sees environmental, labor or human rights standards as an impediment to investment and development,” explains Pia Marchegiani, director of environmental policy at the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN).

In the midst of the reformist agenda of Milei’s government, there is one strategic resource that shines above the rest and takes us back to Silicon Valley and the office of Elon Musk and many other tech tycoons: lithium.

Who wants Argentina’s lithium?
Chile, Bolivia and Argentina form the three corners of the lithium triangle, a region that concentrates around half of the known reserves of this metal worldwide, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Moreover, these are high quality and easily accessible reserves, since lithium is dissolved in brines, waters with a high salt concentration characteristic of the Andean salt flats. In fact, an estimate by the National University of La Plata indicates that the triangle concentrates 85% of the planet’s easily extractable lithium reserves. In Argentina, these reserves are concentrated in the provinces of Catamarca (Salar de Hombre Muerto, Salar de Antofalla), Salta (Salar del Rincón) and Jujuy (Salar de Olaroz, Salar de Cauchari).

Lithium is not a particularly scarce metal in the earth’s crust, but its demand has skyrocketed in recent years, fueled mainly by the growing battery industry for digital technologies and electric mobility. The International Energy Agency estimates that global demand for this metal related to the energy transition rose from 200,000 tons in 2021 to 325,000 last year, and will grow to 2.5 million tons by 2040. Faced with this scenario, Argentina—which is the fourth largest producer worldwide—has long had the objective of multiplying its mining activity. And it wants to do so, to a large extent, with the help of foreign capital.

“Even before the arrival of Javier Milei, Argentina had a very permissive legislation with foreign capital, setting few limits and obtaining very few benefits for the Treasury and the communities in exchange for the extraction of raw materials with almost no restrictions,” says Ernesto Picco, researcher at the National University of Santiago del Estero. Pia Marchegiani agrees with this diagnosis and points out that there are more than 40 mining projects in different stages of processing supported by giants of the automobile, fossil fuel and electronic components industries in the United States, Europe, China, Japan and Australia.

According to FARN’s board of directors, many names are familiar to all of us: Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, BMW, LG, Samsung or BP. Others, such as CATL or ByD, the two big Chinese battery manufacturers, are less well known, but no less important. “Speaking specifically of Elon Musk, he has long had his eye on the region’s resources for the batteries for his Tesla,” adds Picco.

In fact he already has negotiations with companies operating in Argentina, such as China’s Ganfeng or U.S.-based Livent. And now it clearly benefits him to have a president who is going to give priority to foreign companies over the inhabitants of the territory.

In fact, Musk has been the tycoon who has been the most explicit in his support for Javier Milei, both before and after the elections. He has done so, as usual, through X (which before he bought it was called Twitter), with messages as clear as “I recommend investing in Argentina”. “Musk and Milei are two like-minded people, I don’t know if by political ideology, but certainly at the level of discourse and of stirring up controversy through social networks,” Marchegiani points out. “Beyond this, I believe that one has a clear commercial interest in selling Argentina’s lithium and the other in accessing a key resource for his business strategies,” he adds.

The case of the Salar del Hombre Muerto: the law versus social agreement

Located in the south of the Puna de Atacama, the Salar del Hombre Muerto is one of the most important lithium deposits in the world. Mining began there in 1997. Since that same year, the indigenous communities living in the area began to see the obvious damage that mining and the lack of environmental control caused to ecosystems, water sources and their livelihoods. After more than two decades of struggles, threats and pressure of all kinds, the communities succeeded last March in getting an Argentine court to suspend the granting of new mining permits in the area.

“The legal reforms proposed by Javier Milei and largely included in the RIGI liquefy any process of social dialogue and indigenous consultation and generate a framework of greater criminalization and greater conflict,” says Pia Marchegiani.

This, surely, does not translate in the long term into greater stability for investors, as the case of the Salar del Hombre Muerto shows. If one does not take into account the social demand and what the communities want, one risks that all projects and decisions end up being discussed in the realm of justice.

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Salar del Hombre Muerto lithium mine in Argentina.

Deregulation to favor lithium mining is also behind the social outburst in the Argentine province of Jujuy (where Salar de Olaroz and Salar de Cauchari are located). The reform of the province’s constitution last year to enable new mining areas in the Andean altiplano sparked strong protests among indigenous communities, which were violently repressed by local authorities. The situation, with the new political context, does not look set to improve.

“Lithium was already a key resource before Milei. We are in a process of production expansion that will surely bring many changes in the region, and not all of them will be good,” concludes Ernesto Picco.

Milei’s new laws go a little further and leave local communities and, in particular, indigenous communities at the bottom of importance in the face of development and investments. It is part of the philosophy of this government. It is enough to remember Milei’s statements during the campaign where he said that a company that invests and produces has the right to pollute a river as much as it wants.

“For me, this debate has two central issues. One is that of demand: is it really the way to solve the climate crisis for everyone in North America or Europe to have access to an electric car?” reflects Pia Marchegiani.

The other is that of North-South justice and justice with indigenous peoples. There are countries that have contributed much more to the problem and are now also appropriating resources for the supposed solutions. And indigenous communities have been adapted for centuries to live in ecosystems that they care for and respect and that we are now going to sacrifice in order to theoretically solve climate change. I think we need to seriously rethink how we are going to get out of this crisis.

https://mronline.org/2024/08/28/milei-e ... -triangle/

*****

‘This Was Not Caused by God, But Caused by Climate Change’:
CounterSpin interview with Victoria St. Martin on suing Big Oil
Janine Jackson

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Janine Jackson interviewed Inside Climate News‘ Victoria St. Martin about suing Big Oil for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: A lot of us have started seeing local weather forecasts with numbers unfamiliar to us for this time of year. As reporters, you could treat that as, “Oh, isn’t that curious? How are folks on the street dealing with this? Are sales of sunscreen going up?” Or, as a reporter, you can seriously engage the predicted, disastrous effects of fossil fuel production as predicted and disastrous—not, though, in terms of what, in other contexts, we would call criminal.

So what does it look like when business as usual is called out as an actual crime? Our next guest is reporting on an important case in a county in Oregon.

Veteran journalist and educator Victoria St. Martin covers health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Victoria St. Martin.

Victoria St. Martin: Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be here.
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Inside Climate News (7/8/24)
JJ: So what happened in summer 2021 in northwest Oregon, such that it became the subject of scientific study? What happened there? What were the harms?

VSM: The county called this a “heat dome disaster,” but basically there was a heat dome over three days in June of ’21 that recorded highs of 108°, 112°, 116° Fahrenheit. During that time, 69 people died from heat stroke, and most of them were in their homes.

Typically, in this part of Oregon, they have very gentle summers. The highs top out at about 81°. But this was unprecedented.

And one of the attorneys that is working with the county says this was not an act of God. This was not caused by God, but caused by climate change.

JJ: And that’s exactly the point. Oftentimes, folks might be surprised to hear, but environmental impacts were legitimately, legally written off, if you will, as acts of God. This is just nature, this is just what’s happening. So this is actually something new.

VSM: Yes. The attorney that I was speaking about, his name’s Jeffrey B. Simon; he is a lawyer for the county. He talks about this idea of how, no, this is not an act of God. This catastrophe was caused by “several of the world’s largest energy companies playing God with the lives of innocent and vulnerable people, by selling as much oil and gas as they could.”

JJ: What is a heat dome, just for folks who might not know?

VSM: Let’s see, how would I describe it? I would call it the atmosphere creating an intense umbrella of heat, and especially in areas where they don’t typically see this type of heat, like northwest Oregon. We’ve had heat domes this summer already, all across the nation, in places that typically don’t have this type of high heat.

JJ: So it’s a thing we all need to get familiar with. If you don’t know what it means today, you need to figure it out for tomorrow.

VSM: Yeah, some scientists, they say it’s like the atmosphere traps hot air, and, yeah, I said an umbrella, but like a lid or a cap being put on a bottle, and trapping that hot air for days like it did in northwest Oregon.

JJ: We’ve had issues with news media who want to separate the stories. It’s not that they don’t cover things, it’s that they don’t connect dots. They separate a story from: Here was a heat emergency, in this particular case, and it was horrible, and people suffered from it. And then on another page, or on another day, they’ll have a story about fossil fuel companies lobbyists influencing laws. But part of the problem with news media is they don’t connect these things.

And so I wonder, as a person who, besides being a journalist, a person who thinks about journalism, where are the gaps or the omissions or the missing dots that you think that media could be doing on this could-not-be-more-important story of climate disruption?

VSM: Yes. One of my editors says that covering climate, it’s one of the greatest stories of the century, right, the greatest story of our lifetime, that we are covering. And I think one thing that we did well, journalism-wise, in the past 10 or so years, is we’ve pushed this idea that journalists have to be multidimensional, that they have to know how to edit photo and video and create a graphic and write a story.

But what I think was lost in that, and what is important here and what is missing in these heat dome stories, these stories that are very, very plainly, as you can see, climate change stories, but what is missing here is journalists aren’t necessarily trained to be multidimensional in subject matter.

And while there are environmental desks growing in newsrooms throughout the nation, newsrooms aren’t allowing the journalists interdisciplinary roles, to be able to cover a weather event and talk about climate. And we need to do more of that. I think in order to connect those dots, to connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more of that.

I love how last summer, I think I really saw it come to a head, because the Canadian wildfires came to the East Coast and turned the skies orange in New York. And it was this story you could not ignore anymore. And it forced newsrooms to really start talking about wildfires, and is it safe to breathe the air? And what is the air pollution from a wildfire, and what causes wildfires? I think we need to do more of that.

While I don’t want climate disasters like wildfires to continue to happen, I do want journalists to think on their toes, think on their feet, think multidimensional, and be able to tell stories in a full and nuanced way, because we are not servicing our readers, our viewers, our listeners, if we aren’t. Our viewers, our listeners and our readers are here to get the full story, and we need to give them the full story and the full picture.

JJ: And just finally, in terms of journalistic framework, what I think is so interesting with the Multnomah County story is we’re moving the actions of fossil fuel companies into the category of crime. You knew this was going to cause harm, and you still did it, and it caused harm, and that’s a crime. And I feel like that’s, for journalism, for media, that’s a framework shift. Lobbying is a story, and legislative influence is a story. And then crime is a whole different story, and a whole other page. But if we’re talking about actions that cause people to die, that cause people to be harmed, well, then, a lot of things that fossil fuels companies are doing are crimes, and that’s what’s paradigm-breaking with this Multnomah County story.

VSM: I think also what’s different here is the attorneys reaching out once the county filed suit, once the attorneys filed suit, letting us know what’s happening, making sure that the story is amplified and gets out there. I think I appreciate it always, as a journalist, when there’s an open dialogue, and that I’m able to share the story with readers, viewers and listeners, because I had access to information, I had access to the lawsuit.

I think, what is that saying? When a tree falls in the forest…. I’m so thankful that somebody called me up and said, “Hey, this is what’s happening.” So I think everybody does their part, and I think in this case, it was a moment of allowing journalists to be a part of that process, and to be able to see behind the curtain and see what’s actually happening. Sometimes law can be…

JJ: Opaque.

VSM: …slow and boring and monotonous, and I think, just like anything, like science…. But I think when you allow journalists to have a front-row seat, it helps to tell the story.

JJ: Absolutely.

Well, any final thoughts in terms of what you would like folks to take away from this piece that you wrote about the effort to call fossil fuel companies out for the harms that they’re causing? Any tips for other journalists who might be looking at the same story?

VSM: I think one thing I constantly thought about when I was reporting this story, and something I did not see, is there’s a great database looking at lawsuits that have been filed by states and counties and cities that are seeking damages from oil and gas companies for the harms caused by climate change.

Again, there are about three dozen lawsuits out there right now, but this is one of the only lawsuits that is focused on a heat dome. And so this is what makes that case unique. This is what sets this case apart from the rest. And, for me, that was important to report.

So I’m thankful that you got to read it, and that others have gotten to read it, and I hope more people read about it. I think that was key here, and that was something I did not see before. There are other lawsuits, but this one, a lot of law experts think, could really change the game here, because it’s focusing on a specific disaster, and how this county is going to pay for the costs that they’ve incurred from the effects of the heat dome.

I think for journalists, when we’re reporting on these things, think of ways to get ahead of the pack, think of what makes the story unique, what sets the story apart from other weather event stories, or other climate change stories, and how to really help paint a picture about how important this story is.

Sixty-nine people died over the course of three days. That is huge, and it is something that, for me, needed to be at the top of the story. The fact that this was one of the only cases that looked at heat dome disasters, that was something that needed to be at the top of the story for me. And I hope to keep reporting on this, so I can’t wait to see what happens next.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with journalist Victoria St. Martin. You can find her work on this and other stories at InsideClimateNews.org. Victoria St. Martin, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VSM: Thank you so much.

https://fair.org/home/this-was-not-caus ... te-change/

(Saying that journalists are poorly trained is a cop-out. Journalists at ALL mainstream publications are OWNED, whether they operate conscious of the fact or not. They toe the ruling class line or they are out of that well-paying job. Which explains why all honest journalists worth a damn are in the 'alternative press'(along with some hacks)

******

Maasai people protest forced evictions and loss of rights
August 26, 2024
‘Like Apartheid.’ Tanzanian pastoralists expelled from traditional lands, denied voting rights

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by Chris Lang
REDD Monitor, August 26, 2024

The Maasai Indigenous People living in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania are facing a new round of violence and eviction from their homes. In January 2024, the government announced that will change the legal status of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to prevent human settlement inside the protected area. About 100,000 people, nearly all Maasai pastoralists, would be forcibly evicted as a result.

In August 2024, the government removed the Ngorongoro division from the voters’ register thus denying Maasai pastoralists their right to vote. Ezeiel Omelangi, a Maasai activist from Ngorongoro accused the government of deliberately denying essential services from the Maasai. Healthcare and education services as well as water supply have been cut, and now the right to vote has been removed.

“This is a clear violation of our right to vote,” Omelangi told Down to Earth. “Our way of life and our very freedom are under attack.”

Onesmo Olengurumwa is the National Coordinator of the Tanzania Human Rights Defenders Coalition. He told Down to Earth that nearly half the population of Ngorongoro has been left out of the voters’ register. “Denying these people the right to vote means the the entire district cannot choose leaders of their choice,” Olengurumwa said. “It is time to end this systemic discrimination against the Maasai people.”

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‘Like Apartheid’

On 18 August 2024, thousands of Maasai blocked the road to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in protest against the forced evictions and loss of basic rights. 16 people were arrested but subsequently released.

One of the banners held by the Maasai read, “We are required to move with pass cards in our own land. Like Apartheid SA.”

Joseph Oleshangay, a human rights lawyer, told Down to Earth: “It may not be white against black as in Apartheid South Africa. But we feel like we are living in a Bantustan. … It is just like South Africa now for the Maasai. Their healthcare has been cut. If they want to go to the nearest health centre in the surrounding districts, they must carry their pass. Else the authorities will never allow them back in.”

Maasai community members have accused park rangers and security forces of “intimidation and rights abuses, including killings, sexual assaults and livestock seizures,” Al Jazeera reports.

The protest was organized to raise awareness about the human rights abuses that the Maasai communities in Ngorongoro are facing, including the threat of eviction from their homes.

Yet in a bizarre statement issued on 18 August 2024, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority states that, “The demonstrations, widely reported on social media platforms, should serve as clear evidence to the international community and the media that there are no human rights violations or mistreatment of residents with the NCA.”

The protests against conservation related human rights abuses in Tanzania are having some effect. In June 2024, the EU stopped funding for a conservation project in Tanzania. The US$20 million conservation project was initially meant for Tanzania and Kenya. Ana Pisonero Hernandez, an EU spokeswoman, told Al Jazeera that “the decision to amend the call was made to ensure the project’s objectives in terms of human rights protection and environmental concerns are achieved given recent tensions in the region.”

In 2023, the government of Tanzania denied three Members of European Parliament entry to the country who wanted to investigate the human rights abuses against the Maasai.

And in April 2024, the World Bank suspended funding for its Resilient Natural Resource Management for Tourism and Growth (REGROW). This US$150 million project is supposed to improve management of natural resources and tourism assets in Southern Tanzania, including the Ruaha National Park. But widespread human rights abuses were taking place against communities living near the park.

Two villagers, with support from the Oakland Institute, filed a complaint with the Bank’s Inspection Panel, which led to the suspension of funding.

Bishop Wofgang Pisa, the President of the Tanzania Episcopal Conference, urged the government “to respect the basis of good governance, transparency, truth, peace, and justice,” Vatican News reports. Bishop Pisa said,

“For what is happening in Ngorongoro, we ask the government ot return to the table and talk with the people of Ngorongoro, listen to them, and do not force them to relocate, or deny them essential social services, or block food from reaching them. Also, they should be given the right to vote where they currently reside. Today, you cannot tell the Tanzanian public that the Maasai are relocating voluntarily and then tomorrow we see Maasai on the streets crying and claiming their rights are being taken away.”
The Maasai International Solidarity Alliance (MISA) released this statement 19 August 19.
SUPPORT THE NGORONGORO MOVEMENT

The Maasai International Solidarity Alliance (MISA) stands in full solidarity with the Maasai of Ngorongoro who have bravely blocked the Ngorongoro-Serengeti road on Sunday 18 August 2024. Thousands of protesters demonstrated peacefully, sharing their plight with the world: “We are evicted so rich people change our homes into hotels”, “We are experiencing apartheid practices from Tanzanian government”, “It is sad to witness women suffering of oppression led by a woman President” or “Prisoners vote but Maasai of Ngorongoro not allowed to register as voters”. MISA is deeply impressed with the courage, determination and unity of the Ngorongoro Maasai, and fully supports their demands. It is high time their right to live and stay on the land is recognized, and their human rights as Tanzanian citizens are respected.

MISA calls on the Tanzanian President to:

Immediately initiate a dialogue process with legitimate and elected Maasai leaders;
Respect the right to peaceful demonstration and refrain from any form of violence;
Uphold the right of all Tanzanian citizens, including the people of Ngorongoro, to vote and select their elected representatives by allowing them to participate in the ongoing voters’ registration;
Restore all social services that have been blocked for almost three years, to respect and fulfil the human rights to food, education and health;
Put an end to any attempt to displace the Maasai from Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA);
Develop a sustainable strategy to address the acute food insecurity and humanitarian crisis in NCA, including lifting the ban on subsistence farming, ensuring full access to grazing areas and supporting pastoralism as a viable and resilient livelihood;
Ensure full participation of the people living in NCA in the management of the area and obtain free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) for any decision impacting their lives and livelihoods;
Ensure local communities substantially benefit from tourism operations in NCA including through benefit-sharing, decent employment and participatory management of tourism activities to ensure tourism levels remain sustainable;
Stop all forms of anti-Maasai discrimination, confiscation of livestock and the alienation of land across all Maasai districts.
Recognizing the historical and shared responsibilities of the European Union and its Member States (including Germany), the United Kingdom and the United States in the current crisis, MISA calls on the international community to:

Openly condemn the decision to deny the Maasai of Ngorongoro the right to vote; donors funding good governance and the democratization of Tanzania should insist that the rights of Maasai must be respected like those of any other Tanzanian citizen;
Address the current food security crisis in NCA, including by making funding available for pro-pastoralist programmes to advance people’s right to feed themselves, and by providing urgent humanitarian assistance;
Stop funding conservation projects that separate humans from nature and lead to the displacement of Indigenous Peoples from their lands; Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) should immediately stop all its activities in Maasai land, especially in Loliondo where it is complicit in the grabbing of land (Pololet).
Noting that Ngorongoro was recognized as Natural World Heritage in 1979, Biosphere Reserve in 1981, Cultural World Heritage in 2010 and as Ngorongoro-Lengai Global Geopark in 2018, MISA calls on UNESCO, the World Heritage Committee (WHC) and advisory bodies ICOMOS and IUCN to:

Recognize that its recommendations have, over the last 20 years, had a negative impact on the human rights of people in NCA, including their right to food, by encouraging a cultivation ban and prohibiting access to essential grazing areas such as the Ngorongoro, Olromti and Embakaai craters; all these restrictions should be lifted;
Stop facilitating the displacement of Maasai from NCA including by recommending that incentives be set up to relocate people;
Recognize that Maasai people, their culture and pastoralist practices are contributing to the integrity and conservation of the site and should be protected;
Condemn the removal of social services in NCA and demand that people’s right to education, health and housing be respected;
Review the nomination status of NCA in light of the fact that Indigenous Peoples have the right to FPIC and that Maasai were never consulted;
Condemn the lack of involvement, participation and consultation of the Maasai in the management of the World Heritage Site, which is contrary to UNESCO rules of procedures, and demand immediate action to ensure co-management by Indigenous Peoples;
Ensure full participation, involvement and consent of the Maasai in UNESCO and WHC decision-making processes including reactive missions and all decisions about Ngorongoro.
——————–

The Maasai International Solidarity Alliance (MISA) is an international alliance standing in solidarity with the Maasai of Northern Tanzania. We bring together international faith-based organizations, human rights organizations, international aid and development organizations, as well as grassroots organizations, individual activists, researchers and lawyers representing the Maasai in several land cases. Our alliance includes, among others, the Africa Europe Faith Justice Network (AEFJN), Agrecol Association for AgriCulture & Ecology, Coalition of European Lobbies for Eastern African Pastoralism (CELEP), CIDSE – International family of Catholic social justice organizations (International), Indigenous Movement for Peace Advancement and Conflict Transformation (IMPACT), FIAN International, FINAL GOVERNANCE, KOO – Koordinierungsstelle der Österreichischen Bischofskonferenz (Coordinating Office of the Austrian Bishops’ Conference), Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (Society for Threatened Peoples), Misereor, PINGO’s Forum (Pastoralists Indigenous Non-Governmental Organizations), PWC (Pastoral Women’s Council), TEST (Traditional Ecosystems Survival Tanzania), UCRT (Ujamaa Community Resource Team) and Welthaus Graz. Our main objective is to put an end to the human rights violations facing the Maasai of northern Tanzania.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... of-rights/

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Climate NGOs Go to Court Against EU Over Insufficient Emissions Targets

Image
Pollution from a coal power plant in Germany. Photo: X/ @JoanieLemercier

August 28, 2024 Hour: 7:57 am

Annual emissions in the buildings, agriculture, waste, small industry, and transport sectors were unlawful, they said.
On Tuesday, Climate Action Network (CAN) and the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) have taken the European Commission to court, urging the Commission to revise its greenhouse gas emissions targets for the bloc’s member states from now until 2030.

They said the annual emissions limits through 2030 for each European Union country in the buildings, agriculture, waste, small industry, and transport sectors were unlawful. These sectors account for about 57 percent of the total 27-country bloc’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The EU set a 40 percent aggregate emissions reduction target, compared to 1990 levels, for these sectors and an economy-wide target of 55 percent less emissions for the EU as a whole.

The NGOs argued that the EU’s overall climate ambition remains alarmingly off-track from the 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming limit set out by the Paris Agreement.


To address this, the EU must enable more ambitious emission cuts in the near term and achieve at least a 65 percent reduction in gross emissions from 1990 levels by 2030, the NGOs said.

The case was initially presented in February 2024, following the European Commission’s refusal to reassess annual emissions allocations for its member states until 2030.

A hearing at the European Union General Court could potentially be held in the second half of 2025 and a judgment released in early 2026.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/climate- ... s-targets/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Sep 11, 2024 3:29 pm

No Solid Scientific Basis for Degrowth
Posted on September 11, 2024 by Yves Smith

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Yves here. I imagine readers will take issue with this post, analytically and practically. Let’s start out with the lack of authority economists have to discuss climate change analyses, given their acceptance of the destructive work of William Nordhaus, appallingly legitimated by giving him a Nobel Prize. The authors are on extremely thin ice in criticizing the caliber of degrowth studies in light of how they’ve celebrated appalling poor studies that fit their preferences. Steve Keen is good one-stop shopping for an evisceration of his claims.

This article pointedly ignores the lack of any solutions to our accelerating climate change crisis that are remotely adequate to the scale of the problem. It also takes the position that the needs of the economy take precedence over the future of the biosphere and the intermediate -term survival of something dimly representing modern civilization (we are likely past that being an achievable outcome, but it should at least be acknowledged as an aim). And it also implicitly ignores that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

By Ivan Savin and Jeroen van den Bergh. Originally published at VoxEU

In the last decade, many publications have appeared on degrowth as a strategy to confront environmental and social problems. This column reviews their content, data, and methods. The authors conclude that a large majority of the studies are opinions rather than analysis, few studies use quantitative or qualitative data, and even fewer use formal modelling; the first and second type tend to include small samples or focus on non-representative cases; most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies; and of the few studies on public support, a majority and the most solid ones conclude that degrowth strategies and policies are socially and politically infeasible.

In the last decade, numerous studies have been published in scientific journals that propose the strategy of ‘degrowth’, as an alternative to green growth (Tréquer et al. 2012, Tol and Lyons 2012, Aghion 2023). The notion of degrowth refers to reducing the size of the economy to confront environmental and social problems. While having little academic stance (yet), the topic is receiving quite some attention in the media and the public sphere in general. Witness two conferences organised in the European Parliament.

To assess the scientific quality of degrowth thinking, we conducted a systematic literature review of 561 published studies using the term in their title (Savin and van den Bergh 2024). This allowed us to determine the share of studies offering conceptual discussion and subjective opinions versus data analysis or quantitative modelling. In addition, we examined if studies addressed climate/environmental policy, including policy support/feasibility, and whether this was well embedded in the broader literature on this.

Distribution of Studies Over Time, Countries, and Presence of Scientific Methods

Figure 1 shows a growing number of studies on degrowth over time. As indicated by the red line, ten years ago virtually all studies in this vein explicitly mentioned the term “degrowth” in their title, while more recently many use the vaguer term “postgrowth” instead, possibly to reduce resistance.

The large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis. Only nine studies (1.6% of the sample) use a theoretical model, eight (1.4%) employed an empirical model, 31 (5.5%) performed quantitative data analysis, and another 23 studies (4.1%) qualitative data analysis (e.g. interviews). As Figure 3 shows, there is no clear trend indicating that the share of studies with a concrete method is increasing.

Figure 1 Time distribution of academic publications on degrowth

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Note: The histogram depicts the frequency of studies by year while the red line indicates the number of studies that used “degrowth” (as opposed to post-growth) in their title.
Most authors in the sample are affiliated with institutes in Western Europe and the US (Figure 2), with the UK, Spain, and Germany leading by a large margin. This is in line with earlier research finding that there is little support for degrowth in the Global South (King et al. 2023).

Figure 2 Geographical frequency of author affiliations

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Figure 3 The time pattern of the share of studies using one of the four methods

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Focus on Small Samples and Lack of Systemic Perspective on the Economy

Inspecting the 54 studies that used qualitative or quantitative data analysis, we find that they tend to include small samples or focus on peculiar cases – for example, ten interviews with 11 respondents on the topic of local growth discourses in the small town of Alingsås, Sweden (Buhr et al. 2018), or two locations of ‘rural-urban (rurban) squatting’ in the Barcelona hills of Collserola (Cattaneo and Gavaldà 2010). This easily gives rise to non-representative or even biased insights. This weakness of empirical research on degrowth is understandable to some extent. The idea of degrowth is so far from reality and has seen no serious implementation, which makes good empirical studies a challenging task. Past experiences as in communist countries (e.g. Cuba), low-growth countries (e.g. Japan), or economic decline due to COVID-19 do not serve as convincing examples of degrowth. Arguably the best one can achieve is stated-preference research and behavioural experiments. Whereas this should then be done for sufficiently large samples, this ambition tends to be lacking in studies on degrowth. The few studies that do use larger data sets tend to not collect these themselves but rely on data of a general nature, such as the European Value Study (Paulson and Büchs 2022). The problem is that these do not explicitly inquire about degrowth but pose rather general questions about growth versus environment which are open to interpretation (Drews et al. 2018). As a result, the associated studies arrive at overly optimistic conclusions about support for degrowth (Paulson and Büchs 2022). This is confirmed by several solid studies by psychologists which find that most participants in experiments tend to emotionally react negatively to a message of advocating radical degrowth, while many perceive degrowth strategies as a threat. In addition, earlier surveys which try to clearly separate the distinct positions on growth versus environment (like by Drews et al. 2019) find more support for ‘agrowth’, i.e. being agnostic about or ignoring GDP (van den Bergh, 2011), than degrowth among academic researchers broadly as well as the general public.

Since degrowth strategies tend to be radical, i.e. they propose major changes in socioeconomic systems, it is crucial to have good insight into their systemic and macroeconomic consequences. But unfortunately, many studies propose to undertake a large socioeconomic experiment with big socioeconomic risks without having insight into the bigger picture. Most quantitative and qualitative studies focus on small and local issues, usually with non-representative and very small samples – making it impossible to draw conclusions about the systemic impacts. Out of the 561 studies we reviewed, only 17 studies using theoretical or empirical modelling shed some light on these broader consequences. Several of them draw rather pessimistic conclusions in this regard. For example, Hardt et al. (2020) find that a shift towards labour-intensive service sectors – part of many degrowth proposals – would result in small reductions in overall energy use because of their indirect energy use. And Malmaeus et al. (2020) conclude that universal basic income, a popular theme in degrowth writings, is less compatible with a local, labour-intensive and self-sufficient economy than with a global, capital-intensive and high-tech economy.

It is worthwhile noting that a lot of research that goes under the label of ‘degrowth’ is not original but comes down to relabelling existing research, such as on worktime reduction, circular economy, refurbishing houses, or the bioeconomy. This is ironic given the plea for ‘decolonising’ in the degrowth community (Deschner and Hurst 2018).

Why So Many Bad Studies and the Need for Self-Criticism?

One may wonder how it is possible that so many degrowth studies of inferior quality got published. One explanation is that around 100 articles in our sample were published in special issues (14 in total) while another 18 were published by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), which has been accused of being a predatory publisher (Ángeles Oviedo-García 2021). Another possible explanation is that many reviewers are selected based on their sympathy for degrowth (indicated by past publications promoting it) instead of shown expertise regarding application of methods. Altogether, the journal review process to judge papers was likely more lenient for many degrowth studies than for the average academic article. As a consequence, published research on degrowth is dominated by ideology while lacking scientific quality.

Through drawing attention to several weaknesses in the way research on degrowth is undertaken, our review suggests the need for a healthy degree of self-criticism and modesty in the degrowth community. The research should become more ambitious in terms of case study selection to assure that local- or region-scale studies are complementary and representative. In turn, this will allow for generalisation or upscaling of findings to arrive at a credible global picture. To further contribute to this goal, also more studies are needed of a systemic nature – to assess the relative role of scale versus substitution and efficiency as well as to determine indirect economic, social, and environmental effects, notably energy/carbon rebound. Next, for degrowth research to be taken more seriously, it is essential that it sets higher standards for size and representativeness of samples in empirical studies, investigates public and stakeholder support of degrowth thinking, and strives for synergy with existing research fields (e.g. economics, psychology, policy studies) as these offer a wealth of insights about designing effective, efficient, and equitable environmental/climate policy that can count on sufficient public support.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/09 ... rowth.html

(One would expect the employees of capital to defend their gravy train. And of course all their arguments are the wrong ones. 'De-growth' is a possibly feasible strategy for the 'Golden Billion' but we can expect the rest of humanity will slam a door in your face if you try to sell them that. And I see few advocates of De-growth' recognizing the difference.

It is futile to talk about 'De-growth' while capitalism is extant, ain't never gonna happen. Why turn people against you for useless blather?

The pressing need is for capitalism to be overthrown, for labor and resources be re-dedicated to human need and survival. Then, when the dust clears we can see what needs to be done.)

Activists Link Climate Change, Gaza in a Campaign Targeting Citigroup
Posted on August 29, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. We’ve noted that protesting is a very long term and difficult process. It takes a long time to reduce the perceived legitimacy of powerful interests and institutions to the degree that they change course. And then they tend not to do so in a gratifying way. For instance, they try to pretend that they were early among their peers to move away from the now-admitted-to-be-retrograde position.

I am not sure about the effectiveness of connecting Gaza and climate change as issues. If nothing else, the climate impact of our supersized US military footprint and our insistence on backing Israel no matter how bad its conduct is. That is leading us to commit even more resources as the Axis of Resistance is waging an attritional war, which neither the US nor Israel is set up to wage.

The article does not make as clear as I would like how strongly the Stop the Heat protestors connect the two. I would be happier if they were protesting arms investments generally and using Gaza as a poster child instead. Note that some of the groups involved in this campaign are.

However, it is worth pointing out (to those of you who are student protestor connected, since they will be coming to campuses soon) that big financial institutions like Citigroup are much more powerful leverage points against the Israel economy than investments by university endowment, which (with perhaps the exception of their itty bitty share in VC investments) do little to help Israel. In general, endowment and pension funds invest the overwhelming amount of their monies in existing investments (technically, secondary markets). They are not providing financing to economic activity, like making loans or providing trade finance to Israeli companies or making meaningful new equity investments (ex a very marginal venture capital participation).

Perhaps the messaging is broader than this article suggests, but as reported, the Citigroup initiative seems to focus on divestiture, when lending and trade support are more important to the Israeli economy.

That is not to say that pro-Palestine campus protestors should stop trying to get university endowments to divest from Israel-related holdings. Universities are very prestigious. Even a merely/largely symbolic sanction of Israel’s genocide would carry real weight. That’s why the Zionist squillionaires came down so hard on university leaders to get them to squash the demonstrations.

But these activists should consider that big banks are a more immediate leverage point and widen their focus to include them.

By Yessenia Funes, an editor-at-large for Atmos, an independent magazine, who also publishes a creative climate newsletter called Possibilities. Her work can be found in The Guardian, Vogue, National Geographic, Vox, Scientific American, and more. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections

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Protesters outside Citigroup’s headquarters in New York City (Image credit: Alysce Zuleger)

When Ricky Gonzalez began organizing pro-Palestine protests in New York City this year, he didn’t expect that work would eventually lead him to the glass doors of Citigroup’s headquarters.

It was a breezy July morning when the 29-year-old activist, along with about 20 others, rushed to block the building’s entrance. Gonzalez wore a red muscle tee that read, “ARMS EMBARGO NOW.” With a white and black kaffiyeh wrapped around his head, he sat on the concrete in front of the Citigroup entrance. His arms were locked into black PVC pipes painted with bold white words: “NO GENOCIDE FUNDING.”

“Hey, Citi! Get off it! Put planet over profit,” the group chanted, delaying Citigroup employees from entering their offices for about a half hour.

The protest was the work of a nascent coalition of activists targeting Citigroup, Inc., a multinational investment bank, over two seemingly disparate issues: the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East and global climate change.

The campaign — dubbed Summer of Heat and led by groups like Stop the Money Pipeline and New York Communities for Change — includes demands that Citigroup stop funding fossil fuel companies, rapidly increase funding for renewable energy, and pay into a reparations fund, such as a U.N. fund aimed at helping poor countries recover from the economic damage of climate change. Activists have also called on Citi to halt its investments in companies that manufacture arms for Israel.

Since June, protesters have led more than a dozen actions — including people falling to the ground to symbolize deaths from climate change — aimed at drawing attention to the bank’s investments. The New York City Police Department has made some 456 arrests in connection with the protests.

The Climate Impact of War
The Israel-Hamas war began when Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 others hostage. Israel responded with a bombing campaign and invasion of Gaza that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and displaced millions. More than 300 Israeli soldiers have died in the fighting, and tens of thousands of Israeli civilians have also been displaced.

No matter where it takes place, war is itself a large source of planet-warming pollution. Researchers estimate that Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Palestine resulted in the release of at least 281,000 metric tons of carbon pollution in the first 60 days of the war, the result of burning fossil fuels in planes, tanks, and other vehicles, plus pollution from bombs, artillery, and rockets.

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Ricky Gonzalez (middle) protesting outside of Citigroup headquarters. (Image credit: Alysce Zuleger)

“We know that the military-industrial complex — that war — is a huge driver of environmental injustice and the climate crisis. We can’t address the climate crisis without addressing militarism,” said Alec Connon, coalition director of the Stop the Money Pipeline, which is made up of over 200 organizations focused on the institutions funding fossil fuel projects. Connon was among those arrested at the July Citigroup protest.

The war has also been a catalyst for activism for many young people. Some of them got their first introduction to organizing during the recent student-led pro-Palestine encampments and marches across the U.S., including at Yale University, which frequently called for institutions to divest from companies that do business in or with Israel. At the New York protests against Citigroup, activists have also been joined by a group of older organizers, migrants, and people from the Gulf South, a hot spot for fossil fuel expansion, who traveled to the city to join protests.

Gonzalez’s activism began to sprout in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter uprisings. This year, however, his work blossomed to new heights when he helped organize protests with the Shut It Down for Palestine coalition. Then, he began seeing connections to the wider climate crisis, fossil fuels, and the U.S. relationship with oil-rich nations in the Middle East.

“We are dependent on oil,” he said, “but ultimately, it is a finite resource that has geopolitical consequences.”

Alongside about 150 others, Gonzalez was arrested for the first time in May for blocking traffic on the Manhattan Bridge — but that wouldn’t be the last time he’d walk away from a protest in handcuffs. He was arrested again during a July lockbox action in front of Citigroup headquarters.

Lockbox actions can involve protesters locking their arms into PVC pipes to create a blockade. Lockboxes are considered a dangerous form of direct action because police can injure participants if they aren’t careful with their arms when removing them.

Gonzalez said he saw no other choice but to take that risk.

“This is the hottest summer we’ve had so far,” he said as police escorted him to a van for his arrest. “If you wait until it’s in your own backyard, it will be too late.”

Why Citigroup?
Campaign organizers began to target Citigroup three years ago, said lead organizer Alice Hu, who is the climate campaigner with activist group New York Communities for Change. They decided to turn up the pressure this year as temperatures rose in New York, where the bank is headquartered. Summer isn’t over yet, but the city has already experienced four heat waves.

What began as a climate effort soon expanded in scope.

“It’s been impossible to ignore what’s happened since Oct. 7,” Hu said.

Estimates vary on how much money Citigroup lends to fossil fuel companies. The bank committed $396 billion in loans, debt underwriting, and equity issuances to fossil fuels between 2016 and 2023, according to a report by environmental groups and independent research organization Profundo.

Bloomberg reported that Citigroup’s financing of fossil fuels has declined in recent years but that it is the sixth-largest provider of loans to fossil fuels since the 2015 signing of the Paris Agreement. Though the financial institution has publicly committed to going net-zero by 2050 and has pledged $1 trillion to financing the low-carbon transition, Citi has also acknowledged that nearly half of its energy clients lack plans to move away from oil, gas, and coal.

Citigroup was named in a June 20 United Nations statement that called for an end to arms transfers to Israel. The statement listed numerous companies and financial institutions that invest in arms companies, including Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and BlackRock.

“Failure to prevent or mitigate their business relationships with these arms manufacturers transferring arms to Israel could move from being directly linked to human rights abuses to contributing to them, with repercussions for complicity in potential atrocity crimes,” the statement said.

Citi did not respond to multiple requests for comment, instead pointing Yale Climate Connections to its annual climate report.

Bigger than Citi
Big financial institutions have largely ignored calls to phase out fossil fuels, said Jennie Stephens, a professor of climate justice at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Over the years, individual banks have pledged to stop funding specific projects, such as coal or Arctic-based fossil fuel exploration and drilling. These actions, however, have done little to stop money from flowing into the fossil fuel industry at large. Though dollars have decreased in the last few years, the world’s 60 biggest private banks invested $6.9 trillion since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2016.

“It’s really important that these protesters are focusing on finance and banks because it’s a critical part of what’s necessary for the transformative change that is overdue,” Stephens said. “There’s currently a misalignment between climate policy and financial regulation.”

Banks are mandated to make as much money as possible, but that makes it difficult to wean off fossil fuels, which have historically been a source of high profits. To address that conundrum, central banks need to take action to shift how financial institutions operate, Stephens said.

What if they set higher interest rates for lending to polluting industries, for instance?

“You want to be incentivizing things that are good for society and you want to be disincentivizing investments and things that we know are destructive,” she said.

Stephens added that though the issue is systemic, a Citigroup agreement to stop financing fossil fuels would be a strong first step in the right direction. Activists share that hope.

“If we can unlock movement from one U.S. bank in terms of financing fossil fuels, then the others would move like a pack,” Hu said.

So far, the activists have secured one meeting with Citigroup. People who have been directly affected by climate change joined the meeting to share their experiences with executives such as Chief Sustainability Officer Val Smith and Managing Director and Global Head of Environmental and Social Risk Management Eliza Eubank. The Citigroup employees pointed participants to their climate plan, activists recalled. Connon, who was present at the meeting, considered it a “stalemate,” he said.

Regardless of how the bank moves forward or how the Israel-Hamas war resolves, Gonzalez says he’s only getting started.

“We’re climate activists,” he said. “The work doesn’t end at cease fire. Truthfully, there’s always going to be work to be done.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08 ... group.html

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Methane emissions rising faster than ever
September 10, 2024

Atmospheric concentrations of methane are now the highest they’ve been for at least 800,000 years

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The Global Methane Budget 2024 shows a 20 per cent increase in methane emissions from human activities in the past two decades.

Methane is one of three core greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. It lasts in the atmosphere for just a few decades, less than carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, but has the highest short-term global warming potential because it holds more heat in the atmosphere.

The budget, produced by the Global Carbon Project, covers 17 natural and anthropogenic (human-induced) sources. It shows that methane has increased by 61 million metric tonnes per year.

“We have seen higher growth rates for methane over the past three years, from 2020-2022, with a record high in 2021,” says Pep Canadell, a director of the Global Carbon Project. “This increase means methane concentrations in the atmosphere are 2.6 times higher than its pre-industrial (1750) levels,” “Human activities are responsible for at least two-thirds of global methane emissions, adding about 0.5°C to global warming that has occurred to date.”

The report concludes that agriculture contributes 40 per cent of anthropogenic global methane emissions. The fossil fuel sector produces 34 per cent, solid waste and wastewater 19 per cent, and biomass and biofuel burning 7 per cent.

The top five country emitters in 2020 were China (16 per cent), India (9 per cent), USA (7 per cent), Brazil (6 per cent), and Russia (5 per cent).

The European Union and Australasia have reduced their anthropogenic methane emissions over the past two decades. However, global trends clearly jeopardize international commitments to reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030.

For net-zero emission pathways consistent with the Paris Agreement objective of a maximum 2°C temperature increase from pre-industrial levels, anthropogenic methane emissions need to decline by 45 per cent by 2050, relative to 2019 levels.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... than-ever/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Sep 14, 2024 2:07 pm

US Militarism a Lead Driver of Climate Catastrophe
September 13, 2024

Washington’s military interventions are not just wars on people — they’re also wars on the climate, writes Marjorie Cohn.

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U.S. combat soldier in the rubble at one of Sadaam Hussein’s palaces in Baghdad, April 24, 2003. (U.S. Air Force, Cherie A. Thurlby, National Archivers, Public domain)

By Marjorie Cohn
Truthout



This week marks 23 years since George W. Bush declared a U.S.-led “war on terror” and the people of Afghanistan and Iraq are still suffering its consequences.

After the U.S. invaded Iraq, an estimated half a million Iraqis were killed and at least 9.2 million were displaced. From 2003-2011, more than 4.7 million Iraqis suffered from moderate to severe food insecurity.

Over 243,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan/Pakistan war zone since 2001, more than 70,000 of them civilians. Between 4.5 and 4.6 million people have died in the post-9/11 wars.

The U.S.’ “war on terror” also escalated the climate catastrophe, resulting in local water shortages and extreme weather crises that are only getting worse. In 2022, Afghanistan had its worst drought in 30 years and it is facing a third consecutive year of drought.

“The war has exacerbated climate change impacts,” Noor Ahmad Akhundzadah, a professor of hydrology at Kabul University, told The New York Times.

Meanwhile in the current moment, U.S. military assistance to Israel’s genocidal campaign is also intensifying the climate crisis.

As we look back across more than two decades of the “war on terror,” it is clear that many lives will be saved if we can bring a halt to U.S. military interventions throughout the world and simultaneously target the U.S. military’s catastrophic contributions to the climate crisis that threaten us all.

“The U.S. military is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world,” Taylor Smith-Hams, U.S. senior organizer at 350.org, a global climate justice organization, said at a workshop on the Impact of Current Wars on Climate Crisis at the Veterans For Peace (VFP) Convention on Aug. 17.

“Militarism and war are key drivers of the climate crisis,” she added, citing fighter jets, warships and the U.S.’s massive constellation of military bases throughout the world.

Climate Effects of ‘War on Terror’

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Bush delivering an address on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2011. (U.S. National Archives, Public domain)

On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 men committed suicide and took roughly 3,000 people with them by flying two airliners into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one into a field in Pennsylvania.

None of the hijackers hailed from Afghanistan or Iraq; 15 came from Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, the Bush administration illegally invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and overthrew their governments, then killed, injured and tortured nearly three-quarters of a million of their people.

Beyond the terrible death tolls in both countries, a lesser known consequence of the “war on terror” was the exacerbation of the climate catastrophe, both in the countries targeted by the war and globally.

Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol excluded military emissions from the counting of national emissions figures, U.S. military emissions are significantly undercounted. Although militaries are a significant source of carbon emissions, little is understood about their carbon footprint.

One of the first studies to expose direct and indirect military emissions as a result of combat was conducted by Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher, Kirsti Ashworth and Reuben Larbi.

They examined the use of concrete “blast walls” by U.S. forces in Baghdad, Iraq, from 2003-2008, the first five years of Bush’s “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” to measure the carbon footprint of the war. Concrete walls and barriers were also used in U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Kandahar and Kabul, Afghanistan, from 2008-2012 during “Operation Enduring Freedom.” (Although these two wars did not bring freedom, their effects on the climate crisis are enduring.)

While occupying Baghdad, the U.S. military erected hundreds of miles of blast walls in order to control the urban population pursuant to its counterinsurgency strategy. “Effective weaponisation of concrete has an extraordinary carbon footprint,” Neimark, Belcher, Ashworth and Larbi wrote.

“The large carbon footprint comes mainly from the amount of heat and energy in cement production, the main ingredient in concrete.”

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Concrete blast walls in Baghdad, 2016. (David Stanley, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

The logistical movement of troops, convoys, weapons, supplies and equipment, as well as firepower itself, carry a direct carbon cost. Jet propulsion fuel for fighter jets is a major culprit. U.S. military fuel use is “one of the largest single institutional carbon polluters in modern history,” the researchers wrote.

But the indirect emissions in blast walls that result from the concrete supply chains that furnish the U.S. military are also substantial, Neimark and his coauthors argue.

“Parts of Afghanistan have warmed twice as much as the global average” New York Times international climate reporter Somini Sengupta wrote in 2021, and the war has intensified the impact of climate change.

Afghanistan ranks in the top 10 countries undergoing extreme weather conditions, including droughts, storms and avalanches, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported a year ago. Afghanistan ranks fourth among countries with the highest risk of a crisis and eighth on the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index of nations most vulnerable and least prepared to deal with climate change.

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Open-air burn pit emissions at Forward Operating Base Sharana in Afghanistan in May 2013. (Special IG for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

The story of what happened in Afghanistan provides a chilling example of the long-term consequences of war on climate change. Decades from now, Gaza, which was already vulnerable to the climate crisis before Oct. 7, 2023, will invariably suffer increased climate effects from Israel’s current genocidal campaign.

“Climate consequences including sea level rise, drought and extreme heat were already threatening water supplies and food security in Palestine,” Nina Lakhani wrote in a January article in The Guardian. “The environmental situation in Gaza is now catastrophic.”

US-Aided Israeli Genocide’s ‘Immense’ Climate Effect

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Israeli military during ground invasion of the Gaza Strip on Oct. 31, 2023. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has killed at least 41,000 Palestinian people, and likely many more. During the first two months of Israel’s genocidal campaign, emissions that warmed the planet exceeded the annual carbon footprint of over 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, according to a study by Benjamin Neimark, Patrick Bigger, Frederick Otu-Larbi and Reuben Larbi.

Roughly 281,000 metric tons of war-related carbon dioxide were emitted in the first two months of the war following Oct. 7, 2023. More than 99 percent of these emissions resulted from Israel’s bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza and U.S. supply flights to Israel.

The climate cost was equivalent to the burning of at least 150,000 tons of coal. Almost half of the emissions were caused by U.S. cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel. Hamas rockets fired into Israel accounted for the equivalent of 300 tons of coal, an indicator of the asymmetry of Israel’s war on Palestine.

“The role of the U.S. in the human and environmental destruction of Gaza cannot be overstated,” said Patrick Bigger, coauthor of the study and research director at the thinktank Climate + Community Project (CCP). During the VFP workshop, Bigger called it an “environmental Nakba.”

David Boyd, U.N. special rapporteur for human rights and the environment, said, “This research helps us understand the immense magnitude of military emissions — from preparing for war, carrying out war and rebuilding after war. Armed conflict pushes humanity even closer to the precipice of climate catastrophe, and is an idiotic way to spend our shrinking carbon budget.”

“From an ecological perspective, there is no such thing as an ‘effective’ or ‘green’ technology or military,” Neimark, Belcher, Ashworth and Larbi, coauthors of the concrete blast wall study, found.

While Israel touts itself as a global leader in climate change adaptation and mitigation, it is actually engaged in “greenwashing” — misleading marketing practices to make policies appear more environmentally friendly. Indeed,

“Israel’s green technologies are fundamentally structured by the Zionist project of appropriating Palestinian lands,” Sara Salazar Hughes, Stepha Velednitsky and Amelia Arden Green argue in their 2022 article, “Greenwashing in Palestine/Israel: Settler colonialism and environmental injustice in the age of climate catastrophe.”

Israel’s systems of waste management, renewable energy and agricultural technologies (“agritech”) are actually mechanisms for appropriation and dispossession of Palestinian territory, according to Hughes, Velednitsky and Green. Although Israel promotes itself as a responsible steward of Palestinian lands, “Israeli sustainability sustains settler colonialism.”

“Climate crisis in Palestine cannot be detached from the Israeli occupation. The brutal and extensively documented apartheid regime that Israel imposes and maintains over Palestinians is fundamentally incompatible with the tenets of climate justice,” Patrick Bigger, Batul Hassan, Salma Elmallah, Seth J. Prins, J. Mijin Cha, Malini Ranganathan, Thomas M. Hanna, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Johanna Bozuwa wrote for the think tank CCP.

Bigger and his coauthors cite Israel’s settler-colonial campaign to replace native olive groves with nonnative plants that reduce biodiversity, increase susceptibility to fire and put unsustainable pressure on natural resources. Palestinians, they write, are much more vulnerable than Israelis to the effects of climate change.

“While Palestinians are displaced to support Israel’s renewable energy industry, Palestinian solar projects are destroyed as ‘illegal constructions,’ having failed to secure permits from Israeli authorities.”

As the largest provider of military hardware to the Israeli regime, the U.S. government is “directly complicit” in Israel’s genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

“An immediate, permanent ceasefire and the end of U.S. funding for Israeli apartheid and occupation is needed to halt the ongoing violence and address the driving forces of climate breakdown in Palestine,” Bigger and coauthors wrote.

About 20 percent of the U.S. military’s annual operational emissions is devoted to protecting fossil fuel interests in the Gulf, which is warming twice as rapidly as the rest of the world, according to Neta Crawford, author of The Pentagon, Climate Change and War.

Nevertheless, the U.S. and other NATO countries are largely concerned with climate change as a national security threat. They don’t focus on their contributions to it.

“Here in the U.S., our government continues to dump enormous amounts of money into death and destruction at home and around the world, while cutting social programs and refusing to adequately contribute to international climate finance commitments, always with the excuse that there isn’t enough money,” Smith-Hams said at the VFP workshop.

Our anti-militarism work should target the U.S. military’s devastating contributions to the climate crisis. Our future depends on it.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/09/13/u ... tastrophe/

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Climate Strike Philippines / September 20, 2019. 600 students and other youth advocates across the Philippines joined today’s Climate Strike at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City, Philippines. (PHOTO / LEO M. SAANGAN II)

More than 2,100 land and environmental defenders killed globally between 2012 and 2023
Originally published: Global Witness on September 10, 2024 by Global Witness Staff (more by Global Witness) | (Posted Sep 12, 2024)

An estimated 196 land and environmental defenders were killed in 2023 around the world, according to a new Global Witness report published today
The new figures take the total number of defenders killed between 2012 to 2023 to 2,106
For the second year running, Colombia had the highest number of killings worldwide—with a record 79 defenders killed last year, followed by Brazil (25), Mexico (18) and Honduras (18)
Once again, Latin America had the highest number of recorded killings worldwide, with 166 killings overall—54 killings across Mexico and Central America and 112 in South America
Environmental defenders are also being increasingly subject to range of tactics for silencing those who speak out for the planet across Asia, the UK, EU and U.S.
At least 196 land and environmental defenders were killed last year for trying to protect their homes, community or the planet, according to a new report by Global Witness released today, working in collaboration with global partners. The new figures bring the total number of defender killings to 2,106 between 2012 and 2023.

Overall, Colombia was found to be the deadliest country in the world, with 79 deaths in total last year—compared to 60 in 2022, and 33 in 2021. This is the most defenders killed in one country in a single year Global Witness has ever recorded. With 461 killings from 2012 to 2023, Colombia has the highest number of reported environmental defender killings globally on record.

Other deadly countries in Latin America include Brazil, with 25 killings last year, and Mexico and Honduras, which both had 18 killings.

Central America has emerged as one of the most dangerous places in the world for defenders. With 18 defenders killed in Honduras, the country had the highest number of killings per capita in 2023. A total of 10 defenders were also killed in Nicaragua last year, while four were killed in Guatemala, and four in Panama.

Worldwide, Indigenous Peoples and Afrodescendents continue to be disproportionately targeted, accounting for 49% of total murders.

Laura Furones, Lead Author and Senior Advisor to the Land and Environmental Defenders Campaign at Global Witness said:

As the climate crisis accelerates, those who use their voice to courageously defend our planet are met with violence, intimidation, and murder. Our data shows that the number of killings remains alarmingly high, a situation that is simply unacceptable.

Governments cannot stand idly by; they must take decisive action to protect defenders and to address the underlying drivers of violence against them. Activists and their communities are essential in efforts to prevent and remedy harms caused by climate damaging industries. We cannot afford to, nor should we tolerate, losing any more lives.

While establishing a direct relationship between the murder of a defender and specific corporate interests remains difficult, Global Witness identified mining as the biggest industry driver by far, with 25 defenders killed after opposing mining operations in 2023. Other industries include fishing (5), logging (5), agribusiness (4), roads and infrastructure (4) and hydropower (2).

In total, 23 of the 25 mining-related killings globally last year happened in Latin America. But more than 40% of all mining-related killings between 2012 and 2023 occurred in Asia—home to significant natural reserves of key critical minerals vital for clean energy technologies.

As well as highlighting the number of killings worldwide, the report unearths wider trends in non-lethal attacks and their harmful impacts on communities globally. It highlights cases of enforced disappearances and abductions, pointed tactics used in both the Philippines and Mexico in particular, as well as the wider use of criminalisation as a tactic to silence activists across the world.

The report also explores the crackdown on environmental activists across the UK, Europe and the U.S., where laws are increasingly being weaponised against defenders, and harsh sentences are more frequently imposed on those who have played a role in climate protests. The findings form part of a concerning trend of criminalisation cases emerging worldwide.

Jonila Castro, a Filipino activist who was abducted by the Philippines military in 2023 and currently facing criminalisation, featured in the report, said:

Even after our release from abduction, threats continued. We are facing difficulties in returning to our homes and communities. We are still experiencing surveillance, red-tagging, and intimidation. Attacks to silence environmental defenders challenge our advocacy for environmental protection and people’s rights.

Environmental devastation and human rights violations are interconnected, both sustained by governments and the extractive systems they defend. Our experience highlights the urgent need for stronger protection and recognition of community activists and environmental defenders in the global fight for climate justice.

Despite the escalating climate crisis—and governments pledging to achieve the Paris Agreement target of 1.5C—land and environmental defenders are being increasingly subject to a wide range of attacks to stop their efforts to protect the planet. At least 1,500 defenders have been killed since the adoption of the Paris Agreement on 12 December 2015.

Nonhle Mbuthuma, author of the report’s foreword and Goldman Environmental Prize Winner 2024, said:

Across every corner of the globe, those who dare to expose the devastating impact of extractive industries—deforestation, pollution, and land grabbing—are met with violence and intimidation. This is especially true for Indigenous Peoples, who are essential in the fight against climate change, yet are disproportionately targeted year after year.

Yet the brutality of these attacks reveals something profound: the power that ordinary people wield when they unite for justice. Leaders have a duty to listen and ensure that land and environmental defenders can speak out, everywhere, without fear of reprisal. This responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of every wealthy and resource-rich nation worldwide.

https://mronline.org/2024/09/12/more-th ... -and-2023/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 24, 2024 1:50 pm

Profiteering lets Mpox epidemic spread out of control
September 15, 2024
Four years on, nothing has been learned from COVID-19

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Editors’ Note: Sadly, socialists in the global north have had little to say about Mpox and other plagues now spreading in central and southern Africa, so we were pleased to see this article on the UK In Defense of Marxism website. It provides a useful overview of the Mpox crisis, and a strong critique of the capitalist drug monopolies, but is weak on solutions — simplistic calls for “communism” won’t save any lives. We need to focus more attention on concrete demands and struggles for health justice: as always, C&C welcomes your comments and contributions.

by Jonathan Hinckley

A new strain of Mpox is tearing through Central Africa. Since the start of the year, 13 African countries have reported more than 22,800 Mpox cases and 622 deaths, which represents a 160 percent increase compared with the same period in 2023. This is likely only a fraction of the real number. What is clear is that, four years on, nothing has been learned from COVID-19.

The recent explosion of the disease threatens a worldwide outbreak. In August, the WHO declared Mpox a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC). Shortly afterwards cases were detected in Sweden, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand.

With the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic fresh in mind – as well as the last global outbreak of Mpox in 2022 – one might assume that the governments of the world would join together to tackle this crisis before it gets out of control. On the contrary. In spite of the frantic calls of the global health community, the world is stumbling blindly and inevitably into a new health crisis, blighted by exactly the same things that undermined a rational, global response to COVID-19: the private ownership of the pharmaceutical industry, and antagonistic nation states.

The disease

Mpox (formerly known as Monkeypox) is a virus from the same family as Smallpox, though it is much less fatal. Although not as easily transmissible as COVID-19, being largely transmitted by bodily contact, it is three to four times more deadly. Among its symptoms are fever, aching muscles, and, most recognizably, an outbreak of blister-like rashes all over the body.

The disease is endemic in forested areas of West and Central Africa, and 90 percent of the current cases stem from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Congo is largely covered by a gigantic rainforest and, as a result, it is here that diseases tend to leap from animal to human populations. Spillovers of this type are estimated to have increased due to the extinction of large game, which has forced people to hunt and eat small mammals, the typical couriers of many of these diseases.

As capitalism destroys environments, drives extinctions, forces unusual migrations of animals, and pushes human beings to the margins, new epidemics and pandemics are becoming increasingly common: from HIV to Ebola, Nipah, Zika, SARS, COVID-19 and Mpox, not to mention worse outbreaks of familiar killers, including malaria and cholera.

Mpox is transmitted via close contact, and it is much more dangerous among those with compromised immune systems (e.g. those with HIV) and children. In fact, children younger than 15 account for 66 percent of cases and 82 percent of deaths in the recent outbreak.

Thus, as one of the most impoverished and underdeveloped countries in the world, the DRC is a perfect breeding ground for disease. Only 25 percent of the population have access to clean water (even though the country possesses half of Africa’s water reserves) and 40 percent of children are malnourished and their immune systems are thus very weak. At the same time, poor, dependent, and exploited Congo lacks the infrastructure to properly track and treat diseases: with a modern healthcare system, the death rate of the current Mpox epidemic could be halved.

As a result, on top of Mpox, DRC has suffered from the world’s second highest number of malaria cases and deaths, the world’s worst measles epidemic, and was last year reported to be experiencing outbreaks of yellow fever, cholera, and Bubonic plague. The current crisis in the Congo, which is set to spiral into full blown war, has massively exacerbated these problems. So far, the war has caused the internal displacement of 7.2 million, and the exodus of 1.1 million refugees. Attempting to flee the nightmare caused by imperialism, these poor souls have become vectors of Mpox, spreading it over the country and across the continent. The barbarism and war that capitalism is spreading across the continent is bringing these horrors in its train.

Since its discovery in 1951, Mpox was left to fester in the Congo and surrounding region, until, in 2022, cases exploded internationally. In what was then the worst outbreak of the virus in its history, it spread to 111 countries, infecting 87,000 and causing 140 deaths. At that time, the WHO designated Mpox a PHEIC. This was dropped in May 2023, when, panicked into action, America and Europe sharply reduced cases with a costly vaccination program. The virus was not eradicated, however, and remained an emergency in Congo.

As a result, the current outbreak – which began in 2023 – is set to be much worse. The new outbreak, caused by the clade Ib, has an estimated mortality rate of between 1 and 10 percent, compared to >1 percent in clade 2, responsible for the 2023 outbreak. Already, the death count of the new strain has surpassed the 2022 outbreak by at least fourfold.

The cure

If you are a shareholder of Bavarian Nordic, this is all fantastic news, for Bavarian Nordic is lucky enough to share a duopoly of the Mpox vaccine. In fact, when the classification of Mpox as a PHEIC was announced, shares in the company jumped 46 percent! These ‘enterprising’ capitalists charge between $100 and $200 for shots that cost $4 or less to produce.

Some have criticized this as obvious profiteering but, in the words of the CEO – who earns about $2 million a year: “Of course we’re also a company, we have to make money.” As he later said: “At the end of the day, if we financially damage Bavarian Nordic in any way, that doesn’t benefit the world’s society because then there’s no vaccine available for anyone.”

He also noted that, “There hasn’t been a lot of demand from sub-Saharan Africa.” This is probably because it would cost an estimated $4 billion to buy and distribute the 10 million vaccines the continent desperately needs. This is small change to the advanced capitalist countries, but a fortune to war-torn central Africa. As the vice president of investor relations at Bavarian Nordic candidly put it, “It’s very unlikely that any African country will ever be responsible for buying vaccines.”

Instead, the afflicted, impoverished nations are reduced to begging for the cure from the rich. So far, 265,000 vaccines have been donated to the DRC by the EU and the US, which translates to 2.65 percent of what is estimated to be necessary. This is absurd. Bavarian Nordic itself has a stockpile of half a million doses. Over the 2022 outbreak, it supplied over 15 million doses, most of which are sitting unused in stockpiles. The holders of these stores have been coy about the real totals, but the US alone is reported to be sitting on 7 million vials.

The Netherlands has outrageously refused to send any of its 100,000 vaccines, even though some of them are soon to expire. But this is not an aberration. It only displays the narrow, cynical, and selfish interests that govern all capitalist nations. In the same way, the US preferred to let 20 million Mpox vaccines expire instead of distributing them to where they were needed. This greedy stupidity left them totally undefended before the 2022 outbreak.

In the midst of this madness, the WHO has attempted to call the world to order and organize the necessary coordinated world response. But it is a toothless body. It can make all sorts of declarations, but it is totally undermined by the cutthroat competition of the countries that fund it. It has, for example, only been able to give one tenth of what is required to set up an Mpox surveillance program. Instead, it has been forced to go cap in hand to its donors to ask for the extra $15 million.

Capitalism must be eradicated

Under capitalism, it’s every man for himself, and every national gang of capitalists for itself. Rather than rationally distribute medical supplies to where they are needed in the world, the countries with the means to do so hoard them. From their perspective, in a world breaking apart into hostile camps, with all the powers sharpening their knives for imperialist butchery, vaccinating far away Africa is at the bottom of the agenda.

Over the last four years, it is estimated that between 19 and 36 million people died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of those because of an international lack of coordination and unpreparedness. But nothing has been learned. In spite of all of their treaties, handshakes, and sober declarations that next time they’ll come together for the greater good, these parasites are driven by the same interests that led to a complete worldwide catastrophe in 2020.

Viruses know no borders. Only when a disaster inevitably flares up, do they scramble to do something.

Mpox is not Covid, however. We have known about Mpox since the 1950s. We have the means to track it and we have the cure in abundance. The COVID-19 pandemic and the 2022-23 outbreak of Mpox have given the world fair warning. And yet, we’re tobogganing with our eyes closed towards another public health catastrophe. There was no attempt to distribute PPE to affected areas, to carry out public educational programs, or mass vaccination.

Mpox is unlikely to assume the same proportions as COVID-19 in the rich countries. But thousands of people will die. Their misfortune is that they live in the poorest countries on Earth, and therefore the wealthy capitalist nations do not give a damn.

Mpox is one of many diseases that, left alone, could develop into devastating pandemics. Dengue fever, Chikungunya, Lassa fever; these are just a few of the viruses currently circulating amongst the poor of the world. Yet the holders of the wealth turn a blind eye, and the holders of the vaccine patents make millions.

It is not merely viruses and bacteria that are at the root of these increasingly common healthcare emergencies, but capitalism itself. So long as the planet is divided into nations engaged in a mutually exclusive struggle for resources, and so long as production is directed in the interests of a handful of billionaires, these nightmares will persist. Communism is the solution. If the private owners of medical infrastructure were expropriated, a rationally planned, fully funded, international public health system could work systematically to eliminate such diseases. Until then, capitalism will continue to unleash famine, war and pestilence on the mass of humanity.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... f-control/

PS - The editorial note is asinine.

The environmental cost of Israel’s genocide in Gaza
September 17, 2024
Western support of war means support for unprecedented environmental destruction

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by Sweta Choudhury
Stop the War Coalition (UK), August 30, 2024

One of the most graphic depictions of the environmental costs of war was when 700 of Kuwait’s oil fields were set ablaze during the first Gulf War leaking an astounding 11 million barrels of crude oil into the Persian Gulf and creating a smoke plume stretching 800 kilometers. Nearly 300 oil lakes developed inland on the desert’s surface, contaminating the soils for many years.[1]

Two decades on and after many such disasters in war zones around the world and endless analysis and debate over the relationship between wars and climate change, Israel’s genocide in Gaza is once again exposing the lethal, planet-warming emissions of wars. Yet governments around the world, including ours, largely ignore the impact of foreign policy and defense choices on the climate.

According to a preliminary assessment published by the UN Environment Program (UNEP), the environmental impact of the war in Gaza is unprecedented, exposing the community to rapidly growing soil, water and air pollution and risks of irreversible damage to its natural ecosystems.[2]

Another piece of research reveals that carbon emissions during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations.[3]

The West’s support for Israel’s genocide and the failure of the international community to bring an end to this catastrophic war has once again highlighted their damning hypocrisy on the climate crisis. On one hand, they keep prattling about the perils of the climate breakdown, yet they fail to acknowledge the mounting concern about the long-term effects of Israel’s war and occupation. But it’s not just the carbon footprint of the war that is staggering. Reconstructing Gaza will come at a bigger environmental price. It has been estimated that Gaza’s reconstruction will generate nearly 60m tonnes of CO2. The emissions associated with rebuilding Gaza are projected to be higher than the annual emissions of over 135 countries, equating them to those of Sweden and Portugal.[4]

The Palestinian people have long been the victims of war and occupation but they are also in a region that is most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The Gaza strip, the West bank and the areas surrounding it are predominantly hot areas with a large part of the territory arid or semi-arid.[5] And with climate change, the rise in temperatures and lack of water are becoming more extreme.[6] The effects of climate change, such as water scarcity, food insecurity, and extreme weather events, are further exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and threatening the well-being of its remaining population.

The war in Gaza is just a glimpse of the larger military boot print of wars and the military industrial complex. Military emissions are at an all-time high and recent data reveals that global CO2 emissions were 182 times higher in 2022 than they were in 1850.

The war in Ukraine teaches us similar lessons about the carbon footprint of wars. A comprehensive study by EcoAction revealed that since the invasion, 175 million tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have been released into the atmosphere. In Yemen, Somalia and Sudan, war and climate change are intensifying the humanitarian crises with rise in endemic and epidemic diseases, extreme drought and flooding and food shortages. Vulnerable war-torn countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq continue to grapple with climate change driven extreme weather and related disasters and have been left to adapt to the cruel realities of climate change on their own without proper funding and support.

The COP UN climate conferences have repeatedly failed hold the military industrial complex accountable for its staggering emissions. And it’s not just emissions from fossil fuels but also the radioactive contamination from nuclear energy that militaries need to be held accountable for. In fact, last year at COP28, there were “no outcome documents that mentioned the contribution that military activities or warfighting makes to the climate crisis.”[7]

The US was the highest military spender in 2023, with $916 billion dedicated to the military. They only pledged $17.5 billion to the COP28 loss and damage fund while Israel, Russia and Ukraine, who are causing huge wartime environmental destruction and increasing military greenhouse gas emissions, didn’t pledge anything. While military emissions may have been missing from the negotiations, and the outcome document, militaries certainly weren’t missing from the conference with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg making disingenuous statements about impact of climate change on defense, the toxic legacy of wars, and the need for net zero militaries.[8]

Climate activists have long demanded that wealthy nations should divert 5% of their military budgets to climate finance.[9] While military spending has increased exponentially, exceeding $2.2 trillion in 2022, only $90bn was spent on climate finance in 2021, far below the required amount to tackle the climate crisis. Without cutting unnecessary military spending, especially by the 31 NATO members states, who account for more than half of all global military spending and whose total emissions account for over 233 million metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent green house gases, we cannot achieve the climate goals that have been set out.

The evidence is out there. Wars, NATO and the military industrial complex are three of the biggest contributors to the climate emergency. The unwillingness of governments and policy makers to enact foreign and defense policies that will reduce future military emissions must be challenged. Only by building a strong antiwar movement that focuses on the catastrophic environmental impact of militarism and campaigns effectively to end it can we truly begin to tackle climate devastation.

[1] https://unfccc.int/news/conflict-and-climate
[2] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/p ... m-recovery
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/ ... ate-change
[4] https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2024/ ... flict.html
[5] https://earthjournalism.net/stories/cop ... ate-action
[6] Ibid.
[7] https://ceobs.org/always-money-for-war- ... -on-cop28/
[8] Ibid.
[9] https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... tary-funds

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... de-in-gaza

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Big Ag’s Road to Brazil
Posted on September 23, 2024 by Lambert Strether

By Rachel Sherrington, an investigative researcher and reporter based in Brussels, and Hazel Healy, DeSmog’s UK Editor. Originally published at DeSmog.

This week, as business and government leaders, investors and campaigners gather for New York Climate Week, DeSmog is relaunching its big agriculture series, which will scrutinise the power of food and farming companies.


Agriculture used to play second fiddle to energy when it came to global warming, considered as a nice-to-have. But as global heating continues apace, emissions associated with food are rising fast.

Nitrous oxide – a planet-heating gas nearly 300 times as potent as CO2 when measured over 100 years – is accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere at unprecedented levels. Levels of methane – another powerful greenhouse gas critical to reducing emissions – have soared since the start of the decade and are showing “no hint of decline”.

But while the science shows that food systems are fuelling global heating, the world’s largest agriculture companies continue to argue that they are the solution to climate breakdown.

This claim comes as evidence mounts that major agribusiness polluters are using their sizeable economic and political clout to block environmental legislation worldwide – and as the emissions footprints of the largest meat and dairy firms’ continue to grow.

DeSmog’s renewed focus on agriculture comes ahead of a pivotal and eventful year for climate, and food politics, with major summits related to biodiversity, energy and food due over the coming months in Colombia and Azerbaijan this year.

The COP30 climate summit in Brazil in the city of Belém follows in 2025, in the gateway to the Amazon rainforest – the world’s most important biome.

These summits matter because the future of agriculture is tied not only to global heating but to nourishing human populations – and key to preserving the habitats and species with which we share our world.

Food and farming is both driving global heating and falling victim to its impacts. This year an extreme weather phenomenon made harsher and more frequent by climate change killed 7.1 million cattle, sheep and goats in Mongolia. Known as a dzud, this combination of drought and severe winters wiped out more than a tenth of the country’s herds.

In Jamaica Hurricane Beryl destroyed over $6.4 million worth of food crops and supporting infrastructure in the country, leaving devastating communities facing food shortages after it swept through the country this July.

These events underline why in an annual assessment the UN agency the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has now identified climate change as one of the key drivers of food insecurity, and warned that accelerating climate risks threaten to send global efforts to address world hunger backwards.

The farming industry is also directly imperilling our natural world. Agriculture is the leading driver of biodiversity loss, and responsible for 80 percent of land use change, which is resulting in deforestation rates of around 10 football pitches a minute.

As world leaders prepare for crunch talks at the COP30 climate summit, which will take stock of climate efforts in the last five years and ask governments to show greater ambition in the face of the current planetary emergency, they can expect company from corporations with a vested interest in the status quo.

A major report released in July found that the world’s largest meat and dairy companies – some of whose emissions rival those of countries – are using a slew of tactics borrowed from the fossil fuel and tobacco industries to block action on climate.

A landmark assessment from the World Health Organisation has also found that Big Food companies – including those from the meat and dairy sector – have used a range of tactics to derail European health policy, which it estimated has led to thousands of early deaths in the region.

Policies to Play for

We anticipate that big agribusiness will be stepping up its PR and influencing efforts at a time when food is high on the multilateral agenda. Ahead of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, which is of course home to some of the world’s largest agribusiness companies like meat giant JBS, countries will be asked to submit new plans to reduce emissions in agriculture.

On the road to Belém, we’ll be covering other touchstone moments where industry’s influencing efforts are likely to be in full swing – including two major summits this year.

First up is the biodiversity summit, COP16, this October – a fora which has been of increasing interest to agrichemical giants over recent years, as governments are increasingly called on to tackle climate and nature emergencies together.

Shortly after COP16, we’ll be tracking industry’s boots on the ground at the COP29 climate summit, which will take place soon after in Baku, Azerbaijan. Expected to be top of the agenda is finance, which large agribusiness in countries such as the EU and US have proved adept at hoovering while globally smallholders continue to miss out on green subsidies.

Like last year, the climate summit will offer agribusiness multiple routes to influence. Baku – another host with an alarming record on human rights and climate to follow on from the COP28 in Dubai in 2023 – will play host to hundreds of industry delegates, and host a dedicated food day, side events, at least one food initiative and agriculture-focused pavilions.

Azerbaijan’s COP coincides with the G20, a two-day gathering of world leaders hosted by Brazil, where crises climate and hunger will be up for discussion (and where agribusiness has already given a taste of the messaging it will be using).

In addition to covering these summits, DeSmog will continue to scrutinize the terms favoured by industry in its ‘net-zero’ plans terms, such as the promise of a shift “regenerative agriculture”, which is due to be enshrined in new voluntary initiatives, such as Regen10, next year.

DeSmog will also be digging into misleading arguments that the world’s largest food companies are the panacea to hunger and food security – a prevalent rallying cry.

After last year’s COP, meat industry bosses left the summit galvanised for what’s to come and vowed to “keep pushing”.

As the battle for the future of food heats up and countries are asked to submit new ambitious targets we’ll be keeping tabs on industry’s counter-offensive.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/09 ... razil.html

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Microplastics crisis: Pollution levels could double by 2040
Originally published: Al Mayadeen on September 20, 2024 by News Website (more by Al Mayadeen) | (Posted Sep 24, 2024)

Microplastics have infiltrated every environment on Earth, and contamination from this pollution is projected to worsen.

According to a new study published in the journal Science, microplastic pollution could more than double by 2040, highlighting the urgent need for regulations.

This review, which encompasses over 20 years of research on microplastics, emphasizes the necessity for global action to address the spread of these tiny plastic particles.

“Environmental contamination could double by 2040 and widespread harm has been predicted,” the researchers noted in the paper.

“Twenty years after the first publication using the term microplastics, we review current understanding, refine definitions, and consider future prospects,” they added.

Dive deeper
Microplastics are small plastic particles, usually measuring less than 5 millimeters, that come from the degradation of larger plastic products or are intentionally created for industrial purposes. It is estimated that approximately 40 megatons of microplastics are released annually.

These particles have been found in diverse environments globally, including oceans, rivers, soil, tap water, food, animals, the air we breathe, and even within the human body. Their minuscule size makes them extremely difficult to eliminate from the environment, and they have the potential to accumulate in food chains.

“Everywhere we look, we have found plastics. From remote locations across the globe to the inside our own bodies, plastics have been identified,” said Joel Rindelaub, a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland.

“Plastic pollution doesn’t really disappear; it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. While research into environmental plastic pollution is still ongoing, one thing remains clear: plastics are here and they are here to stay,” he added.

The full impact of microplastic exposure on human health is not yet fully understood, but existing studies have already identified harmful effects, including respiratory problems, disruption of gut microbiota, endocrine disruption, and toxicity from chemicals linked to microplastics.

In the paper, the scientists emphasize the current research on microplastics, their sources, and their impacts, while proposing strategies to address this significant pollution issue. They highlight the need for improved sampling methods and more precise categorization of microplastics to facilitate effective regulation.

The experts argue for a multi-disciplinary approach to regulation under the upcoming Global Plastics Treaty. Set to enter its fifth round of discussions in November, this treaty presents a crucial opportunity for international collaboration against microplastics. The researchers point out that while minimizing the release of microplastics is important, it is also essential to reduce overall plastic production to avoid “a high risk of irreversible environmental damage.”

https://mronline.org/2024/09/24/microplastics-crisis/

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 10, 2024 3:24 pm

Climate crisis enters ‘critical and unpredictable new phase’
October 9, 2024

Scientists warn: ‘The future of humanity hangs in the balance.’

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This blunt warning opens The 2024 State of the Climate Report published yesterday in the journal BioScience.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

An international coalition of scientists headed by William Ripple and Christopher Wolf of Oregon State University tracks 35 planetary vital signs. This year, 25 of those indicators are at record extremes. These graphs illustrate some of the climate-related trends since 1980:

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Climate related time series, 1980-2024. Source: Bioscience, October 8, 2024.

The three hottest days ever came in July 2024, and fossil fuel emissions are at an all-time high. The annual consumption of fossil fuels climbed by 1.5% in 2023, mainly because of big jumps in coal (1.6%) and oil use (2.5%).

The Earth’s average surface temperature is at an all-time high. Ocean acidity and heat content, as well as average global sea level, are at record extremes. Greenland ice mass, Antarctica ice mass and average glacier thickness are at all-time lows.

The report shows that annual tree cover loss globally rose from 22.8 million hectares in 2022 to 28.3 million in 2023. Based on global year-to-date averages, the concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane are at all-time highs.

The past year saw multiple climate-related disasters, including a series of heat waves across Asia that killed more than a thousand people and led to temperatures reaching 50°C (122°F) in parts of India. Climate change has already displaced millions of people, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions or even billions.

The report, which is subtitled Perilous times on planet Earth, concludes:

“We must urgently reduce ecological overshoot and pursue immediate large-scale climate change mitigation and adaptation to limit near-term damage. Only through decisive action can we safeguard the natural world, avert profound human suffering, and ensure that future generations inherit the livable world they deserve. The future of humanity hangs in the balance.”

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... new-phase/

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Study Warns of ‘Irreversible Impacts’ From Overshooting 1.5°C, Even Temporarily
Posted on October 10, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. As Helene and Milton deliver a one-two punch to the Southeast US, and many parts of the world are besieged by record-setting heat and community and crop wrecking floods, a new study provides further confirmation that we can’t afford more climate inaction or rationalizations. Exceeding the 1.5°C global temperature increase boundary will have very very long lived effects and is likely to trigger cascades like methane release from melting permafrost.

By Jessica Corbett, a staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams

ust over a month away from the next United Nations climate summit, a study out Wednesday warns that heating the planet beyond a key temperature threshold of the Paris agreement—even temporarily—could cause “irreversible impacts.”

The 2015 agreement aims to limit global temperature rise this century to 1.5ºC, relative to preindustrial levels.

“For years, scientists and world leaders have pinned their hopes for the future on a hazy promise—that, even if temperatures soar far above global targets, the planet can eventually be cooled back down,” The Washington Postdetailed Wednesday. “This phenomenon, known as a temperature ‘overshoot,’ has been baked into most climate models and plans for the future.”

As lead author Carl-Friedrich Schleussner said in a statement, “This paper does away with any notion that overshoot would deliver a similar climate outcome to a future in which we had done more, earlier, to ensure to limit peak warming to 1.5°C.”

“Only by doing much more in this critical decade to bring emissions down and peak temperatures as low as possible, can we effectively limit damages,” stressed Schleussner, an expert from Climate Analytics and the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis who partnered with 29 other scientists for the study.

The paper, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, states that “for a range of climate impacts, there is no expectation of immediate reversibility after an overshoot. This includes changes in the deep ocean, marine biogeochemistry and species abundance, land-based biomes, carbon stocks, and crop yields, but also biodiversity on land. An overshoot will also increase the probability of triggering potential Earth system tipping elements.”

“Sea levels will continue to rise for centuries to millennia even if long-term temperatures decline,” the study adds, projecting that every 100 years of overshoot could lead seas to rise nearly 16 inches by 2300, on top of more than 31 inches without overshoot.

The scientists found that “a similar pattern emerges” for the thawing of permafrost—ground that is frozen for two or more years—and northern peatland warming, which would lead to the release of planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane. They wrote that “the effect of permafrost and peatland emissions on 2300 temperatures increases by 0.02ºC per 100 years of overshoot.”

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“To hedge and protect against high-risk outcomes, we identify the geophysical need for a preventive carbon dioxide removal capacity of several hundred gigatonnes,” the authors noted. “Yet, technical, economic, and sustainability considerations may limit the realization of carbon dioxide removal deployment at such scales. Therefore, we cannot be confident that temperature decline after overshoot is achievable within the timescales expected today. Only rapid near-term emission reductions are effective in reducing climate risks.”

In other words, as co-author and Climate Analytics research analyst Gaurav Ganti, put it, “there’s no way to rule out the need for large amounts of net negative emissions capabilities, so we really need to minimize our residual emissions.”

“We cannot squander carbon dioxide removal on offsetting emissions we have the ability to avoid,” Ganti added. “Our work reinforces the urgency of governments acting to reduce our emissions now, and not later down the line. The race to net-zero needs to be seen for what it is—a sprint.”

While the paper comes ahead of COP29, the U.N. conference in Azerbaijan next month, co-author Joeri Rogelj looked toward COP30, for which governments that have signed the Paris agreement will present their updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to meet the climate deal’s goals.

“Until we get to net-zero, warming will continue. The earlier we can get to net-zero, the lower peak warming will be, and the smaller the risks of irreversible impacts,” said Rogelj, a professor and director of research for the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. “This underscores the importance of countries submitting ambitious new reduction pledges, or so-called ‘NDCs,’ well ahead of next year’s climate summit in Brazil.”

The U.N. said last November that countries’ current emissions plans would put the world on track for 2.9°C of warming by 2100, nearly double the Paris target. Since then, scientists have confirmed that 2023 was the hottest year in human history and warned that 2024 is expected to set a new record.

The study in Nature was published as Hurricane Milton—fueled by hot waters in the Gulf of Mexico—barreled toward Florida and just a day after another group of scientists wrote in BioScience that “we are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled.”

Those experts emphasized that “human-caused carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of climate change. As of 2022, global fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes account for approximately 90% of these emissions, whereas land-use change, primarily deforestation, accounts for approximately 10%.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10 ... arily.html
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 11, 2024 2:17 pm

Chris Hedges: Burn the Planet & Lock Up the Dissidents
October 10, 2024

The imprisoned Roger Hallam believes that resistance is not, ultimately, about what we can or cannot achieve. It is about a “re-enchantment of the world,” he says. “It is about our spirit taking center stage.”

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Roger Hallam — by Mr. Fish.

By Chris Hedges
in Norfolk, U.K.
Scheerpost

I am sitting with Roger Hallam, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, in the visitor’s room at HM Prison Wayland. On the walls are large photographs of families picnicking on lawns, verdant meadows and children playing.

The juxtaposition of the photographs, no doubt hung to give the prison visiting room a homey feel, is jarring. There is no escaping, especially with prison guards circulating around us, where we are.

Roger and I sit on squat upholstered chairs and face each other across from a low, white plastic table. Roger’s lanky fra Edit Edit date and timeme tries to adjust to furniture designed to accommodate children.

Roger, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, is serving a five-year prison sentence for “causing a public nuisance without reasonable excuse.”

He and his four co-defendants, who each received four-year sentences, were convicted for hosting a Zoom call in 2022 to organize activists to climb onto bridges over the M25, the main motorway that circles Greater London. The short-term aim was to stop traffic. The long-term aim was to force the government to stop new oil and gas licenses.

This was not a symbolic protest, exemplified by protesters hurling tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, preserved by protective glass, in the National Gallery in London. It was a protest designed to disrupt, as it did, commerce and the machinery of state. Although even the protestors who tossed soup at the painting, which was not damaged, received harsh prison terms of nearly three years.

Global warming is expected to exceed 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the 2020s and 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Farenheit) before 2050, according to a 2023 study published in the Oxford Open Climate Change journal. NASA scientists warn that “a 2-degree rise in global temperatures is considered a critical threshold above which dangerous and cascading effects of human-generated climate change will occur.”

The more the planet warms, the more extreme events such as severe droughts, heat waves, intense storms, and heavy rainfall intensify. The extinction of animal and plant life — one million plant and animal species are currently threatened with extinction — accelerates.

We are on the verge of tipping points, thresholds beyond which ice sheets, ocean circulation patterns, and other components of the climate system sustain and accelerate irreversible changes.

There are also tipping points in ecosystems, which can become so degraded that no effort to save them can halt the effects of runaway climate change. At that point “feedback loops” see environmental catastrophes accelerate each other. The game will be up. Nothing will save us.

Mass death from climate disasters is becoming the norm. The official death toll from Hurricane Helene is at least 227, making it the deadliest in mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In North Carolina, South Carolina and northern Georgia 1.1 million people remain without power.

Mountain towns, without electricity and cell phone service, are cut off. Hundreds of people are missing with many of them feared dead. Anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 people were killed last year in a single night by Cyclone Daniel in Libya.

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Devastation in Asheville, North Carolina, caused by Hurricane Helene, on Sept. 27. (Bill McMannis, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

These climate catastrophes, which occur routinely in the Global South, will soon characterize life for all of us.

“A billion refugees, the worst episode of suffering in human history,” Roger says of the 2 degrees Celsius mark, “and then human extinction.”

And yet with the devastation outside their doors, including the Southwest United States enduring the highest temperatures ever recorded in October — 117 degrees Fahrenheit in Palm Springs — the global oligarchs have no intention of risking their privilege and power by disrupting an economy driven by fossil fuel and animal agriculture, which is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Livestock and their byproducts account for 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released each year into the atmosphere and 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead of a rational response, we get more drilling and oil leases, more catastrophic storms, more wildfires, more droughts, toxic factory farms, the charade of the U.N. Conference of the Parties (COP) summits, the eradication of the rain forests and the false panacea of geoengineering, carbon capture and artificial intelligence.

Fossil fuel subsidies have increased worldwide — from $2 trillion to $7 trillion according to the International Monetary Fund — as governments seek to protect consumers from rising energy prices. This is despite the fact that two years ago, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments promised to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.

[See: COP27: A Global COP-Out]

Overlords of Global Genocide

The governments that facilitate genocide in Gaza are, not surprisingly, the overlords of global genocide.

As the Swedish author and professor of human ecology Andreas Malm writes, “the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the earth.”

“The destruction of Gaza is executed by tanks and fighter jets pouring out their projectiles over the land: the Merkavas and the F-16s sending their hellfire over the Palestinians, the rockets and bombs that turn everything into rubble — but only after the explosive force of fossil fuel combustion has put them on the right trajectory,” writes Malm who with Wim Carton wrote Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.

“All these military vehicles run on petroleum. So do the supply flights from the US, the Boeings that ferry the missiles over the permanent airbridge. An early, provisional, conservative analysis found that emissions caused during the first 60 days of the war equaled annual emissions of between 20 and 33 low-emitting countries: a sudden spike, a plume of CO2 rising over the debris of Gaza.

If I repeat the point here, it is because the cycle is self-repeating, only growing in scale and size: Western forces pulverize the living quarters of Palestine by mobilizing the boundless capacity for destruction only fossil fuels can give.”


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Building in Gaza damaged by Israeli air strikes, Dec. 6, 2023. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The genocide is tied to fossil fuels in other ways.

“One of the many frontiers of oil and gas extraction is the Levant basin along the coast running from Beirut via Akka to Gaza,” Malm writes. “Two of the major gas fields discovered here, called Karish and Leviathan, are in waters claimed by Lebanon. What does the West think of this dispute? In 2015, Germany sold four warships to Israel so it could better defend its gas platforms against any eventualities.

Seven years later, in 2022, as the war in Ukraine caused a crisis on the gas market, the state of Israel was for the first time elevated into a fossil fuel exporter of note, supplying Germany and other EU states with gas as well as crude oil from Leviathan and Karish, which came online in October of that year. 2022 sealed the high status of Israel in this department.”


“A year later, Toufan al-Aqsa [the incursion into Israel from the Gaza by Palestinian fighters on Oct. 7, 2023] threw a spanner in the expansion,” Malm notes. “It posed a direct threat to the Tamar gas platform, which can be seen from northern Gaza on a clear day; in the range of rocket fire, the platform was shut down.

A major player on the Tamar field is Chevron. On 9 October, the New York Times reported: ‘The fierce fighting could slow the pace of energy investment in the region, just as the eastern Mediterranean’s prospects as an energy center have gained momentum.”

Expanding Israeli production requires occupying Gaza’s coastline and the removal of the Palestinians.

“Five weeks after 7 October, however, when most of northern Gaza had been comfortably turned into rubble, Chevron resumed operations at the Tamar gas field,” Malm continues.

“In February, it announced another round of investment to further bolster output. In late October, the day after the ground invasion of Gaza began, the state of Israel awarded 12 licenses for the exploration of new gas fields — one of the companies picking them up being BP, the very same company that first discovered oil in the Middle East and built the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline.”

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US Energy Information Administration 2013 map of known oil and gas fields in the Levant Basin. (USEIA, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

The connection between the genocide in Gaza and global mass death is not lost on the Global South, where climate refugees are dying on the open seas and in deserts as they attempt to flee north.

UNHCR, the U.N.’s refugee agency, calculates that weather-related “sudden onset hazards” — such as floods, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures — forcibly displaced an annual average of 21.5 million people every year between 2008 and 2016.

There are now 260 million people in coastal areas — an increase of 100 million from three decades ago — who are at “high risk” of being displaced by rising sea levels. Ninety percent of them live in poor developing countries and small island states.

As the ecocide and genocide in Gaza accelerates, we also get more draconian laws to criminalize protests.

Laws designed to protect the fossil fuel industry in the U.K. include “conspiracy to interfere with national infrastructure” or the new “lock on” offense that can see a protester who attaches him or herself to an object, land or another person with some form of adhesive or handcuffs, in a manner that is capable of causing serious disruption, go to prison for six months and receive an unlimited fine.

The trajectory is clear. Burn the planet. Lock up dissidents. Censorship. Crush those who resist, especially those in the Global South, with industrial weapons and indiscriminate violence. And, if you are part of the privileged class, retreat into gated compounds that provide food, water, medical care, electricity and security that will be denied to the rest of us.

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Extinction Rebellion protest in London, Nov. 24, 2018. (Steve Eason, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

In the end, everyone will go the way of the dinosaurs, who, at least, were not responsible for their own demise. The tragedy is that most of the ruling criminal class will probably survive a little longer than the rest of us.

Collective suicide will define what we call human progress.

The three-week trial for the Just Stop Oil activists, like the court hearings for Julian Assange, denied the accused the right to submit objective evidence. The defendants were not permitted to speak about climate change, the motive for their protest. Roger, defying the ban, attempted to address the jury about the climate crisis.

The judge ordered him arrested for contempt of court. He was removed from the courtroom by six police officers. When the judge sentenced Roger and his co-defendants, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin, he told them that they had “crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic.”

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Roger Hallam in July 2020. (Jamie L. Lowe, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The five activists were not convicted for taking part in the protests, but for its planning. The evidence used in court to convict them came from an online Zoom meeting that was captured by Scarlet Howes, a reporter posing as a supporter from the tabloid newspaper The Sun. No doubt some fossil fuel think tank is dreaming up a journalism prize for Howes now.

Sentences for those engaging in climate protests have steadily got harsher, longer than many of the sentences imposed on those who engaged in acts of violence during the racist riots in Southport, as Linda Lakhdhit, the legal director of Climate Rights International, points out.

I have long admired Roger, who has on the rust-colored vest all prisoners in the visiting room are required to wear, not only for his courage, but for his belief that resistance against radical evil is a moral imperative. It is not, ultimately, about what we can or cannot achieve. It is about defying, quite literally when we speak of the ecocide, the forces of death to protect and nurture life.

I addressed a crowd in London on Sept. 11 to raise money for the legal defense of the five imprisoned activists. The organizers at the Kairos Center played a recorded introduction Roger had sent from his prison cell before my talk.

“Change,” he said in the taped message,

“comes about not through instrumental reason, that meaning, you do something in order to get something to happen, but rather because you cannot stand by, and so you act, in order to be what you are. The critical reason we’re failing, in my view, is because we buy into the idea that they can oppress us by sending us to prison. While in fact, power resides in our fear of going to prison, not the act of doing it in itself. Once we realize it’s all about fear, we have that lightbulb moment. It’s not what they do to us, it’s how we choose to react that determines their power.”

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Aerial of HMP Wayland in Griston near Thetford in Norfolk. U.K. (John Fielding, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

“You carry out the good, not to create good outcomes,” he says to me, “but because it is good, because it’s truthful, because it’s a beautiful thing to do, because it creates a metaphysical harmony, a balance.”

The tactics employed over the past few decades by environmentalists — marching, lobbying, voting and petitioning — have failed.

In 1900, the burning of fossil fuel — mostly coal — produced about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide. That number rose threefold by 1950. Today the level is nearly 20 times higher than the 1900 figure. During the six decades the increase in CO2 was 100 times faster than what the earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is Roger’s seventh time incarcerated in the British prison system which is plagued by a lack of adequate funding, decaying infrastructure, reduced services, staff recruitment and retention issues and severe overcrowding.

“When I first went to prison the guards could be sadists, ex-military from our colonial wars,” he says. “Now they are usually polite, but nothing works.”

His shoes disintegrated, but his repeated requests for new shoes were ignored. Another prisoner, who had an extra pair, gave them to him.

I line up at the small canteen to buy us something to eat. I have been allowed to bring 40 British pounds into the prison. On the menu they have a vegan sausage sandwich. Roger and I are vegan. But when I get to the counter, I am curtly informed the vegan options are unavailable.

Roger argues that if 10,000 people are willing to engage in civil resistance, which means accepting prison terms for non-violent civil disobedience, carry out grassroots educational campaigns and mobilize public assemblies, they can ignite 1-to-2 percent of the population to embrace the militancy to rupture the existing order.

He draws on the research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, and Maria J. Stephan who examined 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book Why Civil Resistance Works. They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings.

Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them.

And we only need 1-to-5 percent of the population actively working for the overthrow of a system, history has shown, to bring down even the most ruthless totalitarian structures.

“It’s not only about changing the world,” Roger says.

“It’s about seeing the world in a different way, one that rejects the narrative of the dominant ideology. It is a re-enchantment of the world. It is about our spirit taking center stage. This is where it belonged all the time. But the spirit only becomes real through action. The spirit is made flesh, to use some old language.”

“I am not calling for an individualistic journey to personal enlightenment, which is a contradiction in terms,” he says.

“I am not calling for calmness that never leaves your head, that never gets you off the couch and into the streets. The spirit is in the street. The street is the spirit. The spirit is in the prison cell. The time for pretending is over. We are facing the end of the old world, and we are going to have to battle to create what comes next.”


And then it is time to leave. We embrace. I promise to mail him books. Those of us in the visiting room are lined up and escorted by the guards through a series of locked doors to the prison courtyard.

Roger is paying a steep price for resistance, for the moral life.

Henry David Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax to protest the U.S. invasion of Mexico, which he condemned as an effort to seize territory to expand slavery. He was arrested and jailed for tax evasion in 1846.

“I say, break the law,” Thoreau wrote in his essay “Civil Disobedience.” “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalist philosopher whose Divinity School address provoked outrage among the clergy and led Harvard University not to invite him back to speak for another 30 years, visited Thoreau in jail.

“Henry, what are you doing in here?” Emerson asked.

“What are you doing out there?” Thoreau responded.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/10/c ... issidents/

"Moralism' is well and good, but only mass organization against capitalism led by the serious socialists will get the job done.

*****

Decaying capitalism can’t protect us from not-so-natural disasters
October 10, 2024 Stephen Millies

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People fill up sandbags at Donna Fiala Eagle Lakes Community Park in Naples, Florida, as Hurricane Milton approaches the state.

Cuts in public transportation mean more lives will be lost

What happened in Florida is horrendous and preventable. Millions of people were trying to escape as Hurricane Milton approached. Mile after mile of expressways were clogged with cars, and over a thousand gas stations ran out of fuel.

The Pentagon has close to a trillion-dollar budget. At least $175 billion has been spent on the U.S. proxy war with the Russian Federation in Ukraine. Another $18 billion has been spent on the genocidal war against Gaza and all of Palestine.

Yet the U.S. capitalist state is incapable of protecting its own population from disasters as capitalist climate change makes them all the more likely to happen.

What we’ve seen in Florida is a repeat of the same preventable tragedy that happened during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. At least 1,392 people were killed as President Bush let Black and poor people drown and die in New Orleans.

How are disabled people, prisoners, people needing dialysis treatments, going to survive the current hurricane? To the billionaire class and its stooge, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, all these people are expendable.

One obvious way to evacuate people would be to mobilize public transportation. Instead of Air Force planes being used to send U.S. troops to Western Asia, the aircraft would be used to carry thousands of people to safety. Commercial airliners could move many more, with free fares paid out of the misnamed defense budget.

Buses would be mobilized as well. Meanwhile, hotels and empty apartments — kept off the market to jack up rents — would be prepared to house families.

The labor movement could help organize this evacuation.

Where did the trains go?

A major way to evacuate people would be to use extra passenger trains. But railroad passenger service has shriveled.

Back in 1955, U.S. railroads owned 32,000 passenger cars. Accounting for dining cars and other equipment, this fleet could carry more than a million passengers in coaches and sleeping cars.

Amtrak currently has around 1,500 passenger cars. The commuter

railroad agencies have maybe another 2,000.

Railroads used to carry tens of thousands to special events. Just for the Army Navy Game traditionally held in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Railroad would run dozens of charter trains carrying football fans. (The Pennsylvania’s tracks between New York City and Washington D.C. are now part of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor.)

Since railroad passenger cars are roomier than planes or buses, they would be especially needed to carry disabled and older people.

The CSX rail system is headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, and has nearly 21,000 miles of track throughout the eastern United States. Last year, it had revenues of nearly $15 billion.

The former railroads that formed CSX dumped their passenger trains back in 1971 when Amtrak was formed. CSX, however, has a fleet of 14 business cars that carry its executives in luxury.

Used in a relay of several trips, this equipment could carry thousands of people to safety. Why hasn’t CSX offered to use this equipment? Former CSX CEO John Snow was Bush’s Treasury Secretary while people died needlessly during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Capitalist cutbacks, including cutbacks in passenger trains, can kill. Despite U.S. economic sanctions, socialist Cuba evacuated 2.6 million people — nearly a quarter of its population — before Hurricane Ike struck in 2008.

We need what Cuba has, a socialist revolution.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... disasters/

*****

485 million years of heat, carbon dioxide, and human survival
October 10, 2024

Humans and our hominid ancestors have only lived in the most recent cool period

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485 Million years of Earth’s surface temperature. [Science, Sep 20, 2024] The entire history of hominid life occurred only in the cool years of the late Cenozoic, on the lower right of the graph. Click for larger image.

A new study offers the most detailed glimpse yet into how Earth’s surface temperature has changed over the past 485 million years. The data show that Earth has been and can be warmer than today — but humans and animals cannot adapt fast enough to keep up with human-caused climate change.

Published in the journal Science, the study presents a curve of global mean surface temperature that reveals Earth’s temperature has varied more than previously thought over much of the Phanerozoic Eon a period of geologic time when life diversified, populated land and endured multiple mass extinctions. The curve also confirms Earth’s temperature is strongly correlated to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The start of the Phanerozoic Eon 540 million years ago is marked by the Cambrian Explosion, a point in time when complex, hard-shelled organisms first appeared in the fossil record. Although researchers can create simulations all the way back to 540 million years ago, the temperature curve in the study focuses on the last 485 million years since there is limited geological data of temperature before then.

Refining scientists’ understanding of how Earth’s temperature has fluctuated over time provides crucial context for understanding modern climate change. “If you’re studying the last couple of million years, you won’t find anything that looks like what we expect in 2100 or 2500,” said Scott Wing, a co-author on the paper and a curator of paleobotany at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “You need to go back even further to periods when the Earth was really warm, because that’s the only way we’re going to get a better understanding of how the climate might change in the future.”

The new curve reveals that temperature varied more greatly during the past 485 million years than previously thought. Over the eon, the average global temperature spanned 11 to 36 degrees Celsius. Periods of extreme heat were most often linked to elevated levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“This research illustrates clearly that carbon dioxide is the dominant control on global temperatures across geological time,” said co-author Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona. “When CO2 is low, the temperature is cold; when CO2 is high, the temperature is warm.”

The findings also reveal that the Earth’s current global temperature of 15°C is cooler than Earth has been over much of the Phanerozoic. But greenhouse gas emissions from human-caused climate change are currently warming the planet at a much faster rate than even the fastest warming events of the Phanerozoic, the researchers say. The speed of warming puts species and ecosystems around the world at risk and is causing a rapid rise in sea level. Some other episodes of rapid climate change during the Phanerozoic have sparked mass extinctions.

Rapidly moving toward a warmer climate could spell danger for humans who have mostly lived in a narrow range of cooler global temperatures. “Our entire species evolved to an ‘ice house’ climate, which doesn’t reflect most of geological history,” Tierney said. “We are changing the climate into a place that is really out of context for humans. The planet has been and can be warmer — but humans and animals can’t adapt that fast.”

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... -survival/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sun Oct 13, 2024 4:56 pm

Economic Models Ignoring “Look Out the Window” Climate Change Effects
Posted on October 11, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. In our Links feature, we’ve been featuring only a small subset of the extreme weather events of the last year. Even though destructive storms like Helene and Milton have gotten headline status, there has been an almost endemic level of articles about enduring extreme heat (new daily and monthly highs, record highs for overnight temps, new high ocean readings) along with epic floods produced by sustained rain. Both parching and flooding are set to lower agricultural output, which in turn will increase prices, producing hardship and potentially in some areas, shortages. Yet economic forecasts are simply ignoring what ought to be “in your face” real world events.

Keep in mind that in the US, if voters do turf out Team Dem, one reason will be that they are still suffering the effect of a big jump in food prices, even if inflation has moderated. In the UK, the government is cutting winter fuel subsidies. Even though the poorest pensioners will still get the benefit, those right above it will not, and many experts have warned that their situation is precarious. How will they and others fare if (when) they are whacked by higher food costs too?

Richard Murphy point out how it is obvious that the UK will have serious agricultural production problems over the next year, potentially much longer, yet economic models are paying it no mind.

And let us also not forget that food shortages and scarcity generate political upheaval. Nomura back in the day created a model of household fuel and food costs as a percentage of average incomes across the Middle East. As it predicted, countries that had fallen into high levels of high basic survival costs relative to typical standards of living were more likely too, and in fact did, have Arab Spring revolts.

Having said that, macroeconomic models are not what they are cracked up to be.

By Richard Murphy, part-time Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School, director of the Corporate Accountability Network, member of Finance for the Future LLP, and director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Fund the Future

The Guardian reported yesterday:

England has suffered its second worst harvest on record – with fears growing for next year – after heavy rain last winter hit production of key crops including wheat and oats.

On staple crops, England’s wheat haul is estimated to be 10m tonnes, or 21%, down on 2023, according to analysis of the latest government data by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

Whilst the Treasury obsesses about its spreadsheets and the City confuses economic activity with private equity exploitation, in the real world on which we all actually depend there is a crisis going on as a result of climate change.

The UK’s environment is in crisis. And it won’t be better next year. I can tell you, living as I do in a deeply agricultural area, that rainfall over the last weeks is playing havoc with planting for next year in waterlogged soils. The flood overflow systems are already very high around here: another metre or so and I will have never seen them higher, and this is October, not March.

I took this picture at Welney wildlife reserve in. the fens last weekend – that signpost should be three metres above water levels right now – and is not. No one is going to walk alongside that ‘drain’, as it is called, for some time:

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For decades, the demand for financial returns has meant that we have ignored economic reality. We will not be able to do so for much longer: it is coming back to bite us very hard.

And, for the record, there is a real inflation risk in this – and changing the interest rate will do absolutely nothing to alter that fact, whatever Andrew Bailey might think. People need to be fed. They have to be fed. They cannot live off higher interest rates that will only make the lives of the most impacted harder still.

It really is time that economists started walking about and noticing that there is a world beyond their numbers, and that’s where the real issues are.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10 ... fects.html

'Modeling' is no panacea, it's worst effect is that it's practitioners confuse their abstractions with reality.

The Cash Will Soon Flow
Posted on October 13, 2024 by Conor Gallagher

By Joshua Frank, an award-winning California-based journalist and co-editor of CounterPunch. He is the author of the new book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America. Originally published at TomDispatch.

Considered Angola’s crown jewel by many, Lobito is a colorful port city on the country’s scenic Atlantic coast where a nearly five-kilometer strip of land creates a natural harbor. Its white sand beaches, vibrant blue waters, and mild tropical climate have made Lobito a tourist destination in recent years. Yet under its shiny new facade is a history fraught with colonial violence and exploitation.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to lay claim to Angola in the late sixteenth century. For nearly four centuries, they didn’t relent until a bloody, 27-year civil war with anticolonial guerillas (aided by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces) and bolstered by a leftist coup in distant Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, overthrew that colonial regime in 1974.

Lobito’s port was the economic heart of Portugal’s reign in Angola, along with the meandering 1,866-kilometer Benguela Railway, which first became operational in the early 1900s. For much of the twentieth century, Lobito was the hub for exporting to Europe agricultural goods and metals mined in Africa’s Copperbelt. Today, the Copperbelt remains a resource-rich region encompassing much of the Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Zambia.

Perhaps it won’t shock you to learn that, half a century after Portugal’s colonial control of Angola ended, neocolonialism is now sinking its hooks into Lobito. Its port and the Benguela Railway, which travels along what’s known as the Lobito Corridor, have become a key nucleus of China’s and the Western world’s efforts to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in our hot new world. If capitalist interests continue to drive this crucial transition, which is all too likely, while global energy consumption isn’t scaled back radically, the amount of critical minerals needed to power the global future remains unfathomable. The World Economic Forum estimates that three billion tons of metals will be required. The International Energy Forum estimates that to meet the global goals of radically reducing carbon emissions, we’ll also need between 35 and 194 massive copper mines by 2050.

It should come as no surprise that most of the minerals from copper to cobalt needed for that transition’s machinery (including electric batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels) are located in Latin America and Africa. Worse yet, more than half (54%) of the critical minerals needed are on or near Indigenous lands, which means the most vulnerable populations in the world are at the most significant risk of being impacted in a deeply negative fashion by future mining and related operations.

When you want to understand what the future holds for a country in the “developing” world, as economists still like to call such regions, look no further than the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “With growing demand, proceeds from critical minerals are poised to rise significantly over the next two decades,” reports the IMF. “Global revenues from the extraction of just four key minerals — copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium — are estimated to total $16 trillion over the next 25 years. Sub-Saharan Africa stands to reap over 10 percent of these accumulated revenues, which could correspond to an increase in the region’s GDP by 12 percent or more by 2050.”

Sub-Saharan Africa alone is believed to contain 30% of the world’s total critical mineral reserves. It’s estimated that the Congo is responsible for 70% of global cobalt output and approximately 50% of the globe’s reserves. In fact, the demand for cobalt, a key ingredient in most lithium-ion batteries, is rapidly increasing because of its use in everything from cell phones to electric vehicles. As for copper, Africa has two of the world’s top producers, with Zambia accounting for 70% of the continent’s output. “This transition,” adds the IMF, “if managed properly, has the potential to transform the region.” And, of course, it won’t be pretty.

While such critical minerals might be mined in rural areas of the Congo and Zambia, they must reach the international marketplace to become profitable, which makes Angola and the Lobito Corridor key to Africa’s booming mining industry.

In 2024, China committed $4.5 billion to African lithium mines alone and another $7 billion to investments in copper and cobalt mining infrastructure. In the Congo, for example, China controls 70% of the mining sector.

Having lagged behind that country’s investments in Africa for years, the U.S. is now looking to make up ground.

Zambia’s Copper Colonialism

In September 2023, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in India, Secretary of State Antony Blinken quietly signed an agreement with Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the European Union to launch the Lobito Corridor project. There wasn’t much fanfare or news coverage, but the United States had made a significant move. Almost 50 years after Portugal was forced out of Angola, the West was back, offering a $4 billion commitment and assessing the need to update the infrastructure first built by European colonizers. With a growing need for critical minerals, Western countries are now setting their sights on Africa and its green energy treasures.

“We meet at a historic moment,” President Joe Biden said as he welcomed Angolan President João Lourenço to Washington last year. Biden then called the Lobito project the “biggest U.S. rail investment in Africa ever” and affirmed the West’s interest in what the region might have to offer in the future. “America,” he added, “is all in on Africa… We’re all in with you and Angola.”

Both Africa and the U.S., Biden was careful to imply, would reap the benefits of such a coalition. Of course, that’s precisely the kind of rhetoric we can expect when Western (or Chinese) interests are intent on acquiring the resources of the Global South. If this were about oil or coal, questions and concerns would undoubtedly be raised regarding America’s regional intentions. Yet, with the fight against climate change providing cover, few are considering the geopolitical ramifications of such a position — and even fewer acknowledging the impacts of massively increased mining on the continent.

In his book Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara exposes the bloody conditions cobalt miners in the Congo endure, many of them children laboring against their will for days on end, with little sleep and under excruciatingly abusive conditions. The dreadful story is much the same in Zambia, where copper exports account for more than 70% of the country’s total export revenue. A devastating 126-page report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) from 2011 exposed the wretchedness inside Zambia’s Chinese-owned mines: 18-hour work days, unsafe working environments, rampant anti-union activities, and fatal workplace accidents. There is little reason to believe it’s much different in the more recent Western-owned operations.

“Friends tell you that there’s a danger as they’re coming out of shift,” a miner who was injured while working for a Chinese company told HRW. “You’ll be fired if you refuse, they threaten this all the time… The main accidents are from rock falls, but you also have electrical shocks, people hit by mining trucks underground, people falling from platforms that aren’t stable… In my accident, I was in a loading box. The mine captain… didn’t put a platform. So when we were working, a rock fell down and hit my arm. It broke to the extent that the bone was coming out of the arm.”

An explosion at one mine killed 51 workers in 2005 and things have only devolved since then. Ten workers died in 2018 at an illegal copper extraction site. In 2019, three mineworkers were burned to death in an underground shaft fire and a landslide at an open-pit copper mine in Zambia killed more than 30 miners in 2023. Despite such horrors, there’s a rush to extract ever more copper in Zambia. As of 2022, five gigantic open-pit copper mines were operating in the country, and eight more underground mines were in production, many of which are to be further expanded in the years ahead. With new U.S.-backed mines in the works, Washington believes the Lobito Corridor may prove to be the missing link needed to ensure Zambian copper will end up in green energy goods consumed in the West.

AI Mining for AI Energy

The office of KoBold Metals in quaint downtown Berkeley, California, is about as far away from Zambia’s dirty mines as you can get. Yet, at KoBold’s nondescript headquarters, which sits above a row of trendy bars and restaurants, a team of tech entrepreneurs diligently work to locate the next big mine operation in Zambia using proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI). Backed by billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, KoBold bills itself as a green Silicon Valley machine, committed to the world’s green energy transition (while turning a nice profit).

It is in KoBold’s interest, of course, to secure the energy deposits of the future because it will take an immense amount of energy to support their artificially intelligent world. A recent report by the International Energy Agency estimates that, in the near future, electricity usage by AI data centers will increase significantly. As of 2022, such data centers were already utilizing 460 terawatt hours (TWh) but are on pace to increase to 1,050 TWh by the middle of the decade. To put that in perspective, Europe’s total energy consumption in 2023 was around 2,700 TWh.

“Anyone who’s in the renewable space in the western world… is looking for copper and cobalt, which are fundamental to making electric vehicles,” Mfikeyi Makayi, chief executive of KoBold in Zambia, explained to the Financial Times in 2024. “That is going to come from this part of the world and the shortest route to take them out is Lobito.”

Makayi wasn’t beating around the bush. The critical minerals in KoBold mines won’t end up in the possession of Zambia or any other African country. They are bound for Western consumers alone. KoBold’s CEO Kurt House is also honest about his intentions: “I don’t need to be reminded again that I’m a capitalist,” he’s been known to quip.

In July 2024, House rang his company’s investors with great news: KoBold had just hit the jackpot in Zambia. Its novel AI tech had located the largest copper find in more than a decade. Once running, it could produce upwards of 300,000 tons of copper annually — or, in the language investors understand, the cash will soon flow. As of late summer 2024, one ton of copper on the international market cost more than $9,600. Of course, KoBold has gone all in, spending $2.3 billion to get the Zambian mine operable by 2030. Surely, KoBold’s investors were excited by the prospect, but not everyone was as thrilled as them.

“The value of copper that has left Zambia is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Hold that figure in your mind, and then look around yourself in Zambia,” says Zambian economist Grieve Chelwa. “The link between resource and benefit is severed.”

Not only has Zambia relinquished the benefits of such mineral exploitation, but — consider it a guarantee — its people will be left to suffer the local mess that will result.

The Poisoned River

Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) is today the largest ore producer in Zambia, ripping out a combined two million tons of copper a year. It’s one of the nation’s largest employers, with a brutally long record of worker and environmental abuses. KCM runs Zambia’s largest open-pit mine, which stretches for seven miles. In 2019, the British-based Vedanta Resources acquired an 80% stake in KCM by covering $250 million of that company’s debt. Vedanta has deep pockets and is run by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal, affectionately known in the mining world as “the Metal King.”

One thing should be taken for granted: You don’t become the Metal King without leaving entrails of toxic waste on your coattails. In India, Agarwal’s alumina mines have polluted the lands of the Indigenous Kondh tribes in Orissa Province. In Zambia, his copper mines have wrecked farmlands and waterways that once supplied fish and drinking water to thousands of villagers.

The Kafue River runs for more than 1,500 kilometers, making it Zambia’s longest river and now probably its most polluted as well. Going north to south, its waters flow through the Copperbelt, carrying with them cadmium, lead, and mercury from KCM’s mine. In 2019, thousands of Zambian villagers sued Vedanta, claiming its subsidiary KCM had poisoned the Kafue River and caused insurmountable damage to their lands.

The British Supreme Court then found Vedanta liable, and the company was forced to pay an undisclosed settlement, likely in the millions of dollars. Such a landmark victory for those Zambian villagers couldn’t have happened without the work of Chilekwa Mumba, who organized communities and convinced an international law firm to take up the case. Mumba grew up in the Chingola region of Zambia, where his father worked in the mines.

“[T]here was some environmental degradation going on as a result of the mining activities. As we found, there were times when the acid levels of water was so high,” explained Mumba, the 2023 African recipient of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. “So there were very specific complaints about stomach issues from children. Children just really wander around the villages and if they are thirsty, they don’t think about what’s happening, they’ll just get a cup and take their drink of water from the river. That’s how they live. So they’ll usually get diseases. It’s hard to quantify, but clearly the impact was there.”

Sadly enough, though, despite that important legal victory, little has changed in Zambia, where environmental regulations remain weak and nearly impossible to enforce, which leaves mining companies like KCM to regulate themselves. A 2024 Zambian legislative bill seeks to create a regulatory body to oversee mining operations, but the industry has pushed back, making it unclear if it will ever be signed into law. Even if the law does pass, it may have little real-world impact on mining practices there.

The warming climate, at least to the billionaire mine owners and their Western accomplices, will remain an afterthought, as well as a justification to exploit more of Africa’s critical minerals. Consider it a new type of colonialism, this time with a green capitalist veneer. There are just too many AI programs to run, too many tech gadgets to manufacture, and too much money to be made.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10 ... -flow.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Oct 15, 2024 2:56 pm

Overshoot-and-return: A dangerous climate change illusion
October 14, 2024

Once the 1.5°C limit is passed, there will be no going back

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“As a consequence of ever-delayed emission reductions, there is a high chance of exceeding global warming of 1.5 °C, and even 2 °C, under emission pathways reflecting current policy ambitions1. Even if global temperatures are brought down below those levels in the long term, such an overshoot will come with irreversible consequences. Only stringent, immediate emission reductions can effectively limit climate risks.” —Nature, October 9, 2024

HOW MAINSTREAM CLIMATE SCIENCE ENDORSED
THE FANTASY OF A GLOBAL WARMING TIME MACHINE

by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm


When the Paris agreement on climate change was gaveled into being in December 2015, it briefly looked like that rarest of things: a political victory for climate activists and delegates from the poorest regions of the world that, due to colonization by today’s wealthy nations, have contributed little to the climate crisis—but stand to suffer its worst ravages.

The world had finally agreed an upper limit for global warming. And in a move that stunned most experts, it had embraced the stretch target of 1.5°C, the boundary that small island states, acutely threatened by sea-level rise, had tirelessly pushed for years.

Or so, at least, it seemed. For soon, the ambitious Paris agreement limit turned out to be not much of a limit at all. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC, the world’s foremost body of climate experts) lent its authority to the 1.5°C temperature target with its 2018 special report, something odd transpired.

Nearly all modeled pathways for limiting global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels involved temporarily transgressing this target. Each still arrived back at 1.5°C eventually (the deadline being the random end point of 2100), but not before first shooting past it.

Scientists responsible for modeling the response of Earth’s climate to greenhouse gas emissions—primarily caused by burning fossil fuels—called these “overshoot” scenarios. They became the dominant path along which mitigating climate change was imagined to proceed, almost as soon as talk of temperature limits emerged.

De facto, what they said was this: staying below a temperature limit is the same as first crossing it and then, a few decades hence, using methods of removing carbon from the atmosphere to dial temperatures back down again.

From some corners of the scientific literature came the assertion that this was nothing more than fantasy. A new study published in Nature has now confirmed this critique. It found that humanity’s ability to restore Earth’s temperature below 1.5°C of warming, after overshooting it, cannot be guaranteed. Many impacts of climate change are essentially irreversible. Those that are might take decades to undo, well beyond the relevant horizon for climate politics. For policy makers of the future, it matters little that temperatures might eventually fall back again; the impacts they will need to plan for are those of the overshoot period itself.

The rise of overshoot ideology

Even if global average surface temperatures are ultimately reversed, climate conditions at regional levels might not necessarily follow the global trend and might end up different from before. Delayed changes in ocean currents, for instance, could mean that the North Atlantic or Southern Ocean continue warming while the rest of the planet does not.

Any losses and damages that accumulate during the overshoot period itself would of course be permanent. For a farmer in Sudan whose livestock perishes in a heat wave that would have been avoided at 1.5°C, it will be scant consolation to know that temperatures are scheduled to return to that level when her children have grown up.

Then there is the dubious feasibility of planetary-scale carbon removal. Planting enough trees or energy crops to make a dent in global temperatures would require whole continents of land. Direct air capture of gigatonnes of carbon would consume prodigious amounts of renewable energy and so compete with decarbonization. Whose land are we going to use for this? Who will shoulder the burdens for all this excess energy use?

If reversal cannot be guaranteed, then clearly it is irresponsible to sanction a supposedly temporary overshoot of the Paris targets. And yet this is exactly what scientists have done. What compelled them to go down this dangerous route?

Our own book on this topic (Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, published last week by Verso) offers a history and critique of the idea.

When overshoot scenarios were summoned into being in the early 2000s, the single most important reason was economics. Rapid, near-term emissions cuts were deemed prohibitively costly and so unpalatable. Cost optimization mandated that they be pushed into the future to the extent possible.

The models for projecting possible mitigation trajectories had these principles written into their code and so for the most part could not compute “low” temperature targets like 1.5 or 2°C. And because modelers could not imagine transgressing the deeply conservative constraints that they worked within, something else had to be transgressed.

One team stumbled upon the idea that large-scale removal of carbon might be possible in the future, and so help reverse climate change. The EU and then the IPCC picked up on it, and before long, overshoot scenarios had colonized the expert literature. Deference to mainstream economics yielded a defense of the political status quo. This in turn translated into reckless experimentation with the climate system. Conservatism or fatalism about society’s capacity for change flipped into extreme adventurism about nature.

Time to bury the time machine

Just as the climate movement scored an important political victory, compelling the world to rally behind an ambitious temperature limit, an influential group of scientists, amplified by the world’s most authoritative scientific body on the subject, effectively helped water it down. When all is said and written about the post-Paris era, this surely should stand as one of its greatest tragedies.

By conjuring up the fantasy of overshoot-and-return, scientists invented a mechanism for delaying climate action and unwittingly lent credibility to those (and they are many) who have no real interest in reigning in emissions here and now; who will seize on any excuse to keep the oil and gas and coal flowing just a little longer.

The findings of this new paper make it perfectly clear: There is no time machine waiting in the wings. Once 1.5°C lies behind us, we must consider that threshold permanently broken.

There then remains only one road to ambitious mitigation of climate change, and no amount of carbon dioxide removal can absolve us of its inconvenient political implications.

Avoiding climate breakdown demands that we bury the fantasy of overshoot-and-return and with it another illusion as well: that the Paris targets can be met without uprooting the status-quo. One limit after the other will be broken unless we manage to strand fossil fuel assets and curtail opportunities for continuing to profit from oil and gas and coal.

We will not mitigate climate change without confronting and defeating fossil fuel interests. We should expect climate scientists to be candid about this.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... -illusion/

(That's a pretty milquetoast way of saying we need to overthrow capitalism.)

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... -illusion/

Global water supply faces unprecedented stress
October 14, 2024

The hydrological cycle has accelerated, becoming more erratic and unpredictable

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The year 2023 marked the driest year in over three decades for rivers around the world, according to a new report coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The State of Global Water Resources 2023 report, released on October 7, highlights unprecedented stress on global water supplies, with five consecutive years of below-normal river flows and reservoir inflows. This shortage is affecting communities, agriculture, and ecosystems. In addition, glaciers experienced their largest mass loss in the last 50 years, with 2023 marking the second year of widespread ice loss globally.

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Click to download full report (pdf) https://library.wmo.int/viewer/69033/do ... avigator=1

Every region in the world where glaciers are present reported ice loss. The ice loss has produced more than 600 gigatonnes of water, much of which has ended up in the ocean as well as some riverways.

Meanwhile, 2023 was recorded as the hottest year on record, leading to elevated temperatures and widespread dry conditions, which contributed to prolonged droughts. WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo describes water as “the canary in the coalmine of climate change.”

“We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts which wreak heavy toll on lives, ecosystems and economies said. Freshwater resources face unprecedented stress, exacerbated by climate change and increasing demand. As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water.”

Now in its third year, this report is the most comprehensive, including new data on lakes, reservoirs, soil moisture, and glaciers. It aims to build a global dataset of hydrological variables to support early warning systems for water-related hazards by 2027. With 3.6 billion people currently facing water shortages, projected to exceed 5 billion by 2050, the report underscores the urgent need for action

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/1 ... ed-stress/


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Derek Seidman

‘The insurance industry is the fossil fuel industry’
By Janine Jackson (Posted Oct 14, 2024)

Originally published: FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) on October 10, 2024 (more by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting)) |

Janine Jackson interviewed writer/researcher Derek Seidman about insurance and climate for the October 4, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Washington Post (9/3/24)
Janine Jackson: As we watch images of devastation from Hurricane Helene, it’s hard not to hold—alongside sadness at the obvious loss—anger at the knowledge that things didn’t have to be this way. Steps could have been, still could be taken, to mitigate the impact of climate change, and making weather events more extreme, and steps could be taken that help people recover from the disastrous effects of the choices made.

As our guest explains, another key player in the slow-motion trainwreck that is U.S. climate policy—along with fossil fuel companies and the politicians that abet them—is the insurance industry, whose role is not often talked about.

Derek Seidman is a writer, researcher and historian. He contributes regularly to Truthout and to LittleSis. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Derek Seidman.

Derek Seidman: Hey, thank you. Great to be here.

JJ: In your super helpful piece for Truthout, you cite a Washington Post story from last September. Here’s the headline and subhead:

Home Insurers Cut Natural Disasters From Policies as Climate Risks Grow:

Some of the largest U.S. insurance companies say extreme weather has led them to end certain coverages, exclude natural disaster protections and raise premiums.

I think that drops us right into the heart of the problem you outline in that piece. What’s going on, and why do you call it the insurance industry’s “self-induced crisis”?

DS: Thank you. Well, certainly there is a growing crisis. The insurance industry is pulling back from certain markets and regions and states, because the costs of insuring homes and other properties are becoming too expensive to remain profitable, with the rise of extreme weather. And so we’ve seen a lot of coverage in the past few months over this growing crisis in the insurance industry.

But one of the critical things that’s left out of this is that the insurance industry itself is a main actor in driving the rise of extreme weather, through its very close relationship to the fossil fuel industry. And in this narrative in the corporate media, the insurance industry on the one hand and extreme weather on the other hand, are often treated like they’re completely separate things, and they’re just sort of coming together, and this “crisis” is being created, and it’s a real problem that the connections aren’t being made there.

So I guess a couple things that should be said, first, are that the insurance industry is the fossil fuel industry, and its operations could not exist without the insurance industry.

We can look at that relationship in two ways. So first, of course, is through insurance. The insurance giants, AIG, Liberty Mutual and so on and so on, they collectively rake in billions of dollars every year in insuring fossil fuel industry infrastructure, whether that’s pipelines or offshore oil rigs or liquified natural gas export terminals. This fossil fuel infrastructure and its continued expansion, this simply could not exist without underwriting by the insurance industry. It would not get its permit approvals, it would just not be able to operate, it couldn’t attract investors and so on. So that’s one way.

Another way is that, and this is something a lot of people might not be aware of, but the insurance industry is an enormous investor in the fossil fuel industry. Basically, one of the ways the insurance industry makes money is it takes the premiums, and it pools a chunk of it and invests those. So it’s a major investor. And the insurance industry, across the board, has tens of billions of dollars invested in the fossil fuel industry.

And this is actually stuff that anybody can go and look up, because some of it’s public. So, for example, the insurance giant AIG, because it’s a big investor, it has to disclose its investments with the SEC. And earlier this year, AIG disclosed that, for example, it had $117 million invested in ExxonMobil, $83 million invested in Chevron, $46 million in Conoco Phillips, and so on and so on.

So, on the one hand, you have this hypocritical cycle where the insurance industry is saying to ordinary homeowners, who are quite desperate, we need to jack up the price on your premiums, or we need to pull away altogether, we can’t insure you anymore—while, on the other hand, it’s driving and enabling and profiting from the very operations, fossil fuel operations, that are causing this extreme weather in the first place, that the insurance industry is then using to justify pulling back from insuring just regular homeowners.
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Jacobin (2/7/22)
JJ: This is a structural problem, clearly, that you’re pointing to, and you don’t want to be too conspiratorial about it. But these folks do literally have dinner with one another, these insurance executives and the fossil fuel companies. And then I want to add, you complicate it even further by talking about knock-on effects, that include making homes uninsurable. When that happens, well, then, that contributes to this thing where banks and hedge funds buy up homes. So it’s part of an even bigger cycle that folks probably have heard about.

DS: Yeah, absolutely. This whole scenario, it’s horrible, because it impacts homeowners and renters. If you talk to landlords, they say that the rising costs of insurance are their biggest expense, and they are, in part, taking that out on tenants by raising rents, right?

But it also really threatens this global financial stability. I mean, with the rise of extreme weather, and homes becoming more expensive to insure, or even uninsurable, home values can really collapse. And when they collapse, aside from the horrific human drama of all that, banks are reacquiring foreclosed homes that, in turn, are unsellable because of extreme weather, and they can’t be insured.

The big picture of all this is that it leads to banks acquiring a growing amount of risky properties, and it can create a lot of financial instability. And we saw what happened after 2008, as you mentioned, with private equity coming in and scooping up homes. And so, yeah, it creates a lot of systemic financial instability, opens the door for financial predators like private equity and hedge funds to come in.
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Insure Our Future
JJ: And it seems to require an encompassing response, a response that acknowledges the various moving pieces of this. I wonder, finally, is there responsive law or policy, either on the table now or just maybe in our imagination, that would address these concerns?

DS: There are organizers that are definitely starting to do something about it, and there are some members of Congress that are also starting to do something about it.

For this story, I interviewed some really fantastic groups. One of them is Insure Our Future, and this is sort of a broader campaign that is working with different groups around the country, and really demanding that insurers stop insuring new fossil fuel build-out, that they phase out their insurance coverage for existing fossil fuels, for all the reasons that we’ve been talking about today.

At the state level, there’s groups that are doing really important and interesting things. So one of the groups that I interviewed was called Connecticut Citizen Action Group, and they’ve been working hard, in coalition with other groups in Connecticut, to introduce and pass a state bill that would create a climate fund to support residents that are impacted by extreme weather. (Connecticut has seen its fair share of extreme weather.) And this fund would be financed by taxing insurance policies in the state that are connected to fossil fuel projects. So it’s also a disincentive to invest in fossil fuels.

In New York, a coalition of groups and lawmakers just introduced something called the Insure Our Communities bill. And this would ban insurers from underwriting new fossil fuel projects, and it would set up new protections for homeowners that are facing extreme weather disasters.

I spoke to organizers in Freeport, Texas, with a group called Better Brazoria, and these are people that are on the Gulf Coast, really on the front lines. And Better Brazoria is just one of a number of frontline groups along the Gulf Coast that are organizing around the insurance industry, and they’re trying to meet with insurance giants, and say to them, “Look, what you’re doing is, we’re losing our homeowner insurance while you’re insuring these risky LNG plants that are getting hit by hurricanes, and fires are starting,” and trying to make the case to them that this is just not even good business for them.
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Truthout (9/27/24)
And then, more recently, you’ve seen Bernie Sanders and others start to hold the insurance industry’s feet to the fire a little more, opening up investigations into their connection to the fossil fuel industry, and how this is creating financial instability.

So I think this is becoming more and more of an issue that people are seeing is a real problem for the financial system, and it’s something that we should absolutely think about when we think about the climate crisis, and the broader infrastructure that’s enabling the fossil fuel industry to exist, and continue its polluting operations that are causing the climate crisis and extreme weather. So I think we’re going to see only more of this going forward.

JJ: All right, then, we’ll end it there for now.

We’ve been speaking with Derek Seidman. You can find his article, “As Florida Floods, Insurance Industry Reaps What It Sowed Backing Fossil Fuels,” on Truthout.org. Thank you so much, Derek Seidman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DS: Thank you.

https://mronline.org/2024/10/14/the-ins ... -industry/

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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