The Long Ecological Revolution

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Sep 26, 2022 2:48 pm

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New documents reveal callousness of fossil fuel execs—and Canada’s complicity
Originally published: Canadian Dimension on September 20, 2022 by Nick Gottlieb (more by Canadian Dimension) | (Posted Sep 24, 2022)

The United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform just held the third hearing of its investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s multi-decade campaign to block climate action by funding misinformation and misrepresenting their primary business operations. In advance of the hearing, the committee released a trove of documents obtained by subpoena, ranging from emails from communications consultants admitting that the industry was “gaslighting” the public to guidelines for employees discussing “net zero” to executives making jokes about drinking hot beverages while the planet burns.

These documents made a ripple across US and international news but seem to have largely been ignored by Canadian media focused on the funeral of the late Queen Elizabeth II. Here, I hope to plug that hole by connecting these companies’ operations in Canada, the federal government’s justifications for oil and gas expansion, and the utter disregard for stopping global warming, as demonstrated by the exposed documents.

Let’s start with Shell. Despite a recent divestment of some of its upstream assets, the company still holds significant interests in Alberta’s oil sands. In addition, it is the largest stakeholder of LNG Canada, the controversial liquified methane gas export facility being built in Kitimat, and is heavily invested in upstream assets producing fracked gas in northeast BC and Alberta. Neither of these investments would be viable without the equally controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline that is currently under construction (against the wishes of many Indigenous leaders).

Shell and the BC government work in lockstep on many of the corporation’s investments in the region. In July 2021, Shell published a press release about investments in the province, stating, “Shell’s target is to become a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050, in step with society.” The BC government published a concurrent press release repeating Shell’s claims about its net zero intentions almost word for word.

But the documents released by the US House Committee tell a different story. In them, the company presents guidelines for employees to stick to when discussing Shell’s commitment to “net zero.” These guidelines, designed to reduce Shell’s liability to shareholders for making fraudulent statements, make it clear that it has no intention of actually reducing its emissions or its fossil fuel production. Shell’s own words put it more effectively than I ever could: “Please do not give the impression that Shell is willing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to levels that do not make business sense.”

Some of Shell’s other recent investments in Canada are in carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities. Activists and environmentalists, including myself, often point to CCS, especially CCS projects backed by fossil fuel companies, as subject to an unavoidable moral hazard: they are promoted as a political tool specifically designed to prolong the life of oil and gas consumption.

Internal documents obtained from BP, which recently sold its oil sands assets to Cenovus Energy but remains involved in offshore oil and gas exploration in Canada, indicate that “[CCS could] enable the full use of fossil fuels across the energy transition and beyond.” In internal emails, a Shell employee noted the reputational risk that would come with publicly acknowledging that intent and cautioned an executive “to not talk about CCUS as prolonging the life of… fossil fuels writ large.”

ExxonMobil has major operations in Canada, too, including Kearl, one of the largest tar sands operations. According to the Global Oil & Gas Exit List, an inventory of upstream expansion plans created by the German non-profit Urgewald, Exxon has both short-term expansion and ongoing exploration plans in Canada. Like many other oil and gas companies, Exxon has publicly stated that it supports the Paris Agreement, but in a released memo prepared for the CEO, Darren Woods, the company calls for removal of a reference to the accord in an industry group’s announcement for fear it could be conceived as an actual commitment to altering the company’s business operations.

Chevron, too, has major Canadian operations including in the oils sands and offshore in Newfoundland and Labrador with significant short-term plans to expand. In an email titled “‘Just Transition’ talking points,” a Chevron employee advised an executive to say that oil and gas is vital to “any global transition,” because such operations provide “scalable, lower carbon solutions that ensure a just transition.” This is remarkably similar to Justin Trudeau’s promises of a just transition, which bypass the real meaning of the phrase in multiple ways—ultimately implying that there will be no transition at all.

While these documents are critically important, it is also remarkable to see just how dismissive of climate change and climate risk fossil fuel executives are. In 2017, Joe Ellis, now the head vice president for US government affairs at BP, forwarded an email newsletter about global temperature records being broken repeatedly to a colleague, sarcastically adding, “I’ll buy the first round Monday night before we say our goodbyes.”

The colleague, Robert Stout, who now works for an NGO called the Energy Transitions Commission, replied, “A ‘hot toddy’ maybe?”

In another released email, a Shell employee quite literally wished “bedbugs” upon activists working with the Sunrise Movement. And in another, Tom Wolf, currently a senior government relations manager at BP, replied to an article about the fossil fuel industry written by Bill McKibben by saying, “I live on earth so I don’t get what planet this guy lives on.”

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All of these companies are members of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the industry’s biggest domestic lobbying group. The page on their website addressing climate change reads, “How We Can Grow Oil and Gas Production While Meeting Climate Commitments.” It’s the (impossible) public-facing story they’re all telling and their internal documents and emails demonstrate that none of them take it seriously at all. Instead, they’re pursuing a balancing act focused on painting themselves as committed to climate action while avoiding going so far as committing investor fraud.

As the National Observer just reported, CAPP, funded by these companies but not tethered by the risk of investor fraud, is directly engaged in more nefarious tactics, too: they are currently funding a social media ad campaign under the name Canada’s Energy Citizens pushing the public to oppose emissions caps for the oil and gas sector. They’ve spent more than $500,000 on this campaign since 2019.

The Oilsands Pathways Alliance is another lobbying group backed by CNRL, Cenovus Energy, ConocoPhillips Canada, Imperial, MEG, and Suncor ostensibly focused on the oilsands’ “pathway to net zero.” Imperial is majority-owned by ExxonMobil, a company that has known about the risks of climate change for more than 50 years and deliberately misled the public to block climate action. Both the documents released by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and another new report published by the House Natural Resources Committee make it clear those efforts to block climate action haven’t stopped, they’ve just been rebranded: instead of arguing climate change isn’t happening, they are simply, as one marketing consultant admitted, “gaslighting” the public—saying they are pursuing climate action while actually rapidly expanding their oil and gas operations with no intention of ever changing.

The only reason we don’t have internal documents demonstrating just how carefully the other companies operating in Canada are manipulating their messaging is because virtually no one in government is brave enough to challenge and subpoena them. Suncor wasn’t featured in the latest document dump, but it operates on both sides of the border and its ongoing half-century of duplicity is well-documented.

Instead of holding these companies accountable, Canada’s government looks to organizations like the Oil Sands Pathways Alliance for input on climate policy, taking them at their word despite the enormous amount of evidence that we shouldn’t. Worse yet, the government seems to absorb the messages that organizations like OSPA propagate, carefully sculpted by marketing firms, later repeating them as their own, thanks to the almost unbelievable level of access the fossil fuel industry has both provincially and federally.

A briefing document prepared for Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson and Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault advised them to brag to any questioners that, “Work has already begun. The Oil Sands Pathways Alliance… was formed with the recognition that to stay competitive in a decarbonizing economy the sector had to drastically reduce it carbon footprint and achieve net zero emissions by 2050.” While ExxonMobil has announced an “ambition for net zero,” it has no real plans to do so. Internal documents from Shell about its net zero “Sky scenario” put it bluntly: “[that has] nothing to do with our business plans.”

The same document advises the ministers to say that carbon capture technologies “hold significant potential to help the oil and gas sector to meet net-zero targets.” But as documents from BP indicated, the oil companies that claim to be investing in CCS in order to pursue “net zero” are actually pursuing it precisely because of the moral hazard it poses: they see it as a way to continue using fossil fuels at current or greater levels well beyond the global “net zero” deadline.

In response to a hypothetical question about a “just transition” for Canada’s oil and gas workers, the ministers are advised—much like the Chevron executive exposed by the US committee—to note that “Canada’s petroleum sector has invested an average $1B a year in Research and Development (R&D),” seemingly a nonsequitur until you realize that they, too, see the continued production of fossil fuels as key to “any global transition.” It’s almost unbelievable that this needs saying, but a “just transition” that doesn’t involve transitioning away from fossil fuels is not a transition at all.

The fossil fuel industry’s decades long campaign to discredit climate science and block climate action hasn’t come to an end, it’s just reached a new phase. The industry, with its army of public relations firms, is painting itself as an ally in the fight against climate change. Governments like Canada’s are helping them do it, gaslighting us at every opportunity. The documents just released by the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform are the latest entry in an endless rap sheet that makes it abundantly clear: if your climate policy is supported by the oil and gas industry, it’s not climate policy at all.

https://mronline.org/2022/09/24/new-doc ... omplicity/

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1.5°C warming may trigger multiple tipping points
September 13, 2022
Five of sixteen identified tipping points are already in the danger zone

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Multiple climate tipping points could be triggered if global temperature rises beyond 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, according to a major new analysis published in the journal Science. Even at current levels of global heating the world is already at risk of passing five dangerous climate tipping points, and risks increase with each tenth of a degree of further warming.

An international research team synthesized evidence for tipping points, their temperature thresholds, timescales, and impacts from a comprehensive review of over 200 papers published since 2008, when climate tipping points were first rigorously defined. They have increased the list of potential tipping points from nine to sixteen.

The research concludes human emissions have already pushed Earth into the tipping points danger zone. Five of the sixteen may be triggered at today’s temperatures:

*The Greenland ice sheets
*West Antarctic ice sheets
*Widespread abrupt permafrost thaw
*Collapse of convection in the Labrador Sea
*Massive die-off of tropical coral reefs

Four of these move from possible events to likely at 1.5°C global warming, with five more becoming possible around this level of heating.

Already left safe climate

The Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stated that risks of triggering climate tipping points become high by around 2°C above preindustrial temperatures and very high by 2.5-4°C. This new analysis indicates that Earth may have already left a ‘safe’ climate state when temperatures exceeded approximately 1°C warming. A conclusion of the research is therefore that even the United Nations’ Paris Agreement goal to limit warming to well-below 2°C and preferably 1.5°C is not enough to fully avoid dangerous climate change.

According to the assessment, tipping point likelihood increases markedly in the ‘Paris range’ of 1.5-2°C warming, with even higher risks beyond 2°C.

The study provides strong scientific support for the Paris Agreement and associated efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C, because it shows that the risk of tipping points escalates beyond this level. To have a 50% chance of achieving 1.5°C and thus limiting tipping point risks, global greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by half by 2030, reaching net-zero by 2050.

New tipping elements

The researchers categorized the tipping elements into nine systems that affect the entire Earth system, such as Antarctica and the Amazon rainforest, and a further seven systems that if tipped would have profound regional consequences. The latter include the West African monsoon and the death of most coral reefs around the equator.

Several new tipping elements such as Labrador Sea convection and East Antarctic subglacial basins have been added compared to the 2008 assessment, while Arctic summer sea ice and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) have been removed for lack of evidence of tipping dynamics.

Co-author Ricarda Winkelmann, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a member of the Earth Commission says, “Importantly, many tipping elements in the Earth system are interlinked, making cascading tipping points a serious additional concern. In fact, interactions can lower the critical temperature thresholds beyond which individual tipping elements begin destabilizing in the long-run.”

(Based on materials provided by the University of Stockholm.)

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/0 ... ng-points/

Like the lady said:

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"Off with their heads!"
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Sep 30, 2022 3:19 pm

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“HUNGER and CAPITALISM: Pals.” Drawn by Hahn (Notecracker). From Volume 1, Number 2 of The Masses. WikiMedia Commons, Public Domain.

Imperialism is at war with our planet—and we need to stop it
By Chris Kaspar de Ploeg (Posted Sep 29, 2022)

While the rich embark on trips to space and fantasize about colonizing Mars, nearly a billion people have no access whatsoever to electricity. As many commentators have rightly argued, “humanity” as a whole cannot be responsible for climate breakdown when so many people barely emit any greenhouse gases at all. However, the climate crisis is not just marked by economic inequality—it is marked by imperialism. Ninety-two percent of the climate catastrophe engulfing the planet is caused by Global North, robbing formerly colonized countries of the atmospheric space required to ensure humane living standards. To make matters worse, each year, immense amounts of resources and labor power are drained from the Global South to the Global North in order to maintain the growth and profits of wealthy corporations that are killing off nearly all life on the planet.

This fossil fuel-based capitalism is backed by the massive imperial army of NATO, a bloc of rich countries that spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined. This bloc invades nations, overthrows governments, and brutally sanctions entire peoples who refuse to bow down. Proposals for a Green New Deal that do not tackle imperialism will simply turn the Global South into a green sacrifice zone, exacerbating a system that is marked by climate apartheid. It is high time that the climate movement in the Global North faces some harsh truths and embraces a path of international solidarity.

The Global North Is Responsible for Climate and Ecological Breakdown.
The Global North is Responsible for Climate Breakdown

A recent study in the Lancet confirmed that the Global North is responsible for 92 percent of the climate catastrophe that is engulfing the planet. The study uses a simple method: every country has a right to the same amount of emissions in proportion to their average population size since 1850. If a country goes over its fair share, it incurs a climate debt. Based on a carbon budget that limits warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century—in line with the Paris Agreement—China will likely never exceed its fair share. Most Western countries, however, exceeded their fair share decades ago.1

In 2018, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) determined that a maximum of 580 gigatons of additional carbon dioxide can be emitted if we are to stand a 50 percent chance of not exceeding 1.5 degrees of warming by 2100. Indian scientists T. Jayaraman and Tejal Kanitkar subsequently calculated the point at which the Global North should achieve zero emissions to stay within their fair share of that remaining budget, discarding, for the moment, all previous emissions.

Based on these calculations, Jayaraman and Kanitkar found that emissions must reach zero by 2025 for the United States, by 2031 for Japan, and by 2033 for the European Union. These power blocs have much higher per capita emissions than the rest of the world. Regardless, they have all set their carbon neutrality targets for 2050.

The historic climate debt preceding 2018 can be paid through climate finance for the Global South. Based on a carbon price of $135 per ton of carbon dioxide—the minimum for limiting the world to 1.5 degrees warming, according to the IPCC—the rich Group of Seven countries have a combined climate debt of $114 trillion, per the target set by Jayaraman and Kanitkar.

Research by Oxfam International shows that the G7 countries provided only $17.5 billion in climate support in 2017—18. At that rate, they will have paid off their debts by the year 6500, when the planet has long been cooked. So who is really responsible for the climate catastrophe?

The Global North Is Responsible for Ecological Breakdown
Another study in the Lancet demonstrated that high income countries are responsible for 74 percent of excess resource consumption, which drives 90 percent of biodiversity loss, fresh water stress, and various other environmental pressures. The study uses a similar methodology as the study above, but does not allow years of under-emitting to compensate for years of overshoot, which would bump Northern responsibility up to 84 percent. More importantly, due to data limitations, the study starts from the year 1970—skipping the initial period of colonialism. As such, it is safe to say that ecological breakdown has been primarily driven by the Global North.2

We do not have comprehensive historical figures for some of the specific ecological boundaries that are being pushed, but a glance at current per capita consumption levels is in itself revealing. Single-use plastic waste? The average person in the United States consumes 53 kilograms per year; in China, this amount is 18 kilograms per person per year. Freshwater use? Daily U.S. consumption is 7,800 liters per capita per day; for China, it is 2,900 liters per day. Land footprint? North America as a whole claims 1.7 hectares per person, China, 0.44 hectares per person. Note that those figures come at a time of “rising China,” a term that not just ignores centuries of colonialism, but also the more recent neoliberal period of U.S. hegemony.

Colonial Deforestation

Colonial history was characterized by massive ecocide and resource extraction. From the Malay peninsula to the Dutch East Indies, forests were cut down to build colonial shipping and make space for plantation labor camps, where the local population slaved away under barbaric conditions. As Mike Davis documented in his book, Late Victorian Holocausts, the expansion of export-oriented plantation systems led to massive famines in the Global South that caused tens of millions of deaths at the height of the imperial era. Simultaneously, trillions of dollars were robbed from the colonized world, from British-occupied India to the Dutch East Indies, directly filling the coffers of Northern governments and corporations. The former colonial powers clearly bear primary responsibility for any ecological damage incurred by this system.

We do not have good data for historical deforestation, but scientific estimates of the 2021 global carbon budget suggest massive colonial responsibilities.3 Since 1850, 40 percent of emissions due to land-use change in Asia occurred between 1850 and 1947, and 55 percent of such emissions in Africa, between 1850 and 1964.4 In India and Nigeria, half of historical land-use change emissions occurred during colonialism. In Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, this number is 40 percent. In Angola? Up to 70 percent.

The countries of the Global North also massively deforested their own territories during the colonial era. As a whole, the Global North was responsible for half of all land-use change emissions between 1850 and 2019, even counting neither informal imperialism in countries such as Brazil, Argentina, and China during the nineteenth century, nor trade-based deforestation after decolonization.

The G7 countries now report negative emissions from reforestation programs. In fact, they are simply importing deforestation through unequal trade relations, vastly exceeding their domestic reforestation efforts. Between 2001 and 2015, trade-based corrections show that within the Group of Twenty, net deforestation was almost entirely driven by the countries of the Global North, not the Global South.5

How Imperialism Fosters Ecocidal Industries In The Global South.
Globalizing Industrial Agriculture
Modern industrial agriculture is another prime perpetrator when it comes to ecological breakdown, responsible for trespassing three planetary boundaries (phosphorus pollution, nitrogen pollution, and the destruction of wildlands) and contributing significantly to four more planetary threats (climate breakdown, chemical pollution, biodiversity collapse and freshwater scarcity). So why did the world adopt industrial agriculture?

The so-called green revolution of industrial agriculture that spread across the globe was heavily financed by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and pushed by the U.S. government to roll back the threat of left-wing movements worldwide. To avoid facing questions of land redistribution, the U.S.-imposed order hoped to be able to maintain colonial-era inequalities by massively ramping up food production. But the green revolution was only buying time: industrial farming heavily depletes the soil, slowly reducing its yields and leading to a vicious debt cycle as farmers become increasingly dependent on patented seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides from Western multinational corporations. In India, this has resulted in 300,000 farmer suicides and the largest farmer protests in history.

Suppressing Land Redistribution

Traditional agro-ecological agriculture—a carbon sink that also aids in freshwater retention and helps preserves biodiversity—is much more labor-intensive. A scaled transition to agro-ecological farming would therefore require a halt or even reversal of the massive rural-urban migration flows that result from the dire poverty of rural peoples, who represent the vast majority of the world’s extreme poor and undernourished. Only a significant redistribution of land to the poorest peoples on the planet can make such a thing possible. Yet when governments make a modest attempt at land distribution, they are heavily targeted by imperialism.

In 1954, for example, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup after he attempted a modest land redistribution program. The coup brought to power a string of dictators that murdered 200,000 Indigenous peoples and rolled back Árbenz’s land reforms.

More recently, when a Zimbabwean grassroots movement of Black landless peasants seized their land back from white settler elites in 2001, the country was heavily sanctioned by the Western world. Perversely, Zimbabwe itself was then blamed for the collapsing economy by Western media, despite the fact that the Black farmers produced excellent yields.

Clearly, the land question cannot be addressed without addressing imperialism.

Imperial Pressure and Industrialization

The 8 percent of responsibility for climate breakdown that lies within the Global South (per the aforementioned Lancet study on national responsibility) is also a direct result of imperialism. The country that most over-shoots its budget is Kazakhstan, which was once a major military industrial center for the Soviet Union and crucial to halting the advance of the Nazi army.

The historical record is clear that the Soviet Union and China had major security considerations when deciding to industrialize, especially in the most heavily polluting industries. Imperialism largely forced their hand. The Western powers had tried to destroy the Bolshevik experiment in its cradle by invading during the Russian Civil War, a war that killed eight to twelve million people. After the Second World War, the United States had plans to wipe both the Soviet Union and China off the map, potentially killing an estimated 600 million people using nuclear weapons. Although it is certainly true that state socialism has had its fair share of ecological disasters, these imperial pressures are rarely taken into account, as are socialist states’ various ecological achievements.

The other major over-shooters in the Global South are equally telling: the so-called Asian Tigers and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf. These countries are all heavily in the Western geopolitical sphere—including in most cases, direct deployment of Western military bases on their soils—and received space for industrial development in return for their Western and anti-communist loyalties.

Choking out Alternatives

Tackling climate breakdown and ecological collapse while delivering on human needs requires strong government intervention. Various studies on quality-of-life indicators, such as life expectancy and education, show that socialist countries outperform their capitalist counterparts with the same level of gross domestic product (GDP) by a very wide margin.

Extensive research has conclusively demonstrated that GDP has a huge impact on environmental and energy footprints. To deliver on human needs with a small environmental footprint therefore requires socialist policies that center human needs, such as free public education and health care. Otherwise, too much production is wasted on luxury, planned obsolescence, and incredibly wasteful private service systems. There is simply no other way.

The Sustainable Development Index, which weighs both human development and its ecological and carbon footprint, shows that in 1991—just before the massive neoliberal shock doctrine went into full effect—half of the top ten performing countries were formerly socialist. As late as 2019, the last year with available data, the top ten included four post-socialist countries that did not fully dismantle their welfare systems, joined by communist-ruled Cuba and the Indian state of Kerala.6 Other countries that performed well, such as Sri Lanka and Costa Rica, all had strong public service systems.

Yet charting such an ecosocialist path is extremely difficult. Ecosocialist leader Thomas Sankara, who planted four million trees during his short rule in Burkina Faso, was assassinated by U.S. and French intelligence agencies in 1987. Explicitly ecosocialist governments in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela were also targeted for regime change. The moderately leftist government led by the Workers’ Party in Brazil, which reduced deforestation rates in the Amazon by 70 percent while dramatically reducing poverty rates, was deposed in a U.S.-backed lawfare coup in 2016. Cuba, one of the most sustainable countries on the planet, is suffering under a sixty-year long embargo from the United States. Need we go on?

The Military’s Carbon and Ecological Footprint.
The Fossil War Machine

The major (neo-)colonial powers—the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States—have been at war for most of the last five hundred years. Every revolution and independent political formation was colonized, suppressed, overthrown, coerced, co-opted, or drowned in blood. Not a single country on Earth has remained unaffected by these contemporary, (neo)-European warmongers. The development of a true ecosocialist path within the Global South first requires national sovereignty, freed from imperialism. The prime target for opening up that space should be the current tip of the imperial spear: the NATO war machine.

The U.S. military emits more carbon emissions than 140 countries across the planet. Importantly, however, the real carbon footprint of the military is vastly higher than the Pentagon’s direct emissions. The entire military-industrial complex supplying the these forces with munitions, airplanes, submarines, and massive aircraft carriers should be fully included in its footprint. The total worldwide military carbon footprint is estimated at 6 percent of total worldwide emissions, roughly on par with India or the European Union, and twice the emissions of Africa. These figures do not include the emissions from rebuilding the deliberately destroyed infrastructure of entire countries, such as Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, and Libya.

NATO countries are driving a global arms race by spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined, and seventeen times more than the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the military alliance of Russia. As such, NATO is primarily responsible for this massive waste of atmospheric space for the purpose of death and destruction.

Murdering the Land

And the destruction goes way beyond carbon emissions. During the Vietnam War, an estimated 85 percent of U.S. bombs were aimed not at the enemy, but at the environment sheltering them. The total tonnage of ordnance dropped during that U.S. invasion approximately tripled the totals for the Second World War. If that cannot count as ecocide, what can?

The infamous napalm bombs were not only used by the United States en masse to deforest Vietnam, but also in Korea, just as the French did in Algeria and Vietnam and the British in Kenya. The U.S. military has repeatedly used chemical and radioactive weapons in their wars in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The radioactive pollution in Fallujah, Iraq, became so severe that incidences of malformed babies occurred fourteen times more frequently than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs.

The massive network of U.S. military bases across the globe are poisoning the water and air of surrounding communities with chemical compounds, even within the country itself. Clearly, the war machine is not just destroying the climate. They are murdering everyone and everything that stands in its way.

The Military’s Carbon Shadow

The carbon footprint of the military is only half the story. More important is the military’s “climate shadow,” the less obvious, less visible impact of the military on human civilization’s trajectory on our planet.

Fossil Geopolitics

Military considerations have locked NATO economies—especially United States, the imperial guarantor—firmly into carbon dependence. In the name of energy security, the United States and Canada have become two of the largest producers of oil and fracked gas, the latter of which is vastly more polluting than natural gas. NATO’s economic war against Russia—which now forces the European Union to embrace more coal, as well as U.S. and Qatari shale gas—repeats the same process in Europe.

Make no mistake, however: so-called energy security is just the nationalist justification for fossil fuel drilling. The United States has been able to provide for its own energy needs for years and, before the boom in gas from shale, steadily relied on its petrodollar system for decades. The United States consciously ramped up its fossil fuel production in the 2010s to drive down global energy prices—and therefore the stability of oil and gas revenue-dependent competitors such as Venezuela, Iran, and Russia—in a coordinated effort with the Saudi Arabian government.7

When Hugo Chavez revived the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in 2001, initiating a historic period of high fossil fuel prices that immensely boosted the competitiveness of solar and wind energy—he was quickly targeted for regime change. Similarly, Saddam Hussein’s threat of lowering oil output for political goals was a well-documented motivation for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. NATO military installations, numbering about 950 in foreign countries, are dotted throughout most of the major oil-producing countries and along international pipelines and transit routes in order to project power across the globe, with the ability to cut off major oil routes if necessary. And while the Western geopolitical sphere controls the majority of the world’s oil production and a plurality of the world’s gas production, the same cannot be said of metals used to produce clean-energy technologies, the extraction and processing of which are dominated by China and the non-aligned Global South.8 As such, the very power base of the U.S. imperial alliance is heavily dependent on a global economy based in fossil fuels.

It is no surprise then that China, rather than the United States, has been far and away the largest investor in renewable energy throughout the 2010s and ‘20s. In fact, during the latest years with available data (2020—21), China installed nearly 20 percent more solar and wind capacity than the entire Western geopolitical bloc, whose combined economy is nearly three times larger than China’s.9

The Petro-Dollar System

Since 1974, the Gulf monarchies have become a key factor for U.S. economic and financial power. That year, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger used the threat of military invasion to force Saudi Arabia to sell all of its fossil fuels in dollars, ensuring that the dollar remained the global reserve currency. This allows the United States to run enormous export deficits without dropping the value of the U.S. dollar, essentially forcing the world to subsidize the U.S. economy.

The neoliberal turn, so disastrous for the environment and the people of the Global South, was directly facilitated by militarized, fossil fuel geopolitics. The major U.S. banks, flooded with petrodollars, were able to invest their humongous surpluses in the Global South, extracting huge profits. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank pried open southern markets for foreign investment, forcing privatization and ushering in a catastrophic period of human stagnation—even increasing poverty in the case of sub-Saharan Africa—combined with a rapid escalation of climate and ecological breakdown.

The military was not only crucial for facilitating gun-boat diplomacy during the oil crisis of 1973; the sector also directly benefited from the petrodollar system it helped create. Most of the oil profits are recycled through weapons purchases from the Western military-industrial complex. Saudi Arabia, which has never been invaded, has spent between 7 and 19 percent of its GDP on the military since the petrodollar system was put into place. Between 1974 and 2021, this country of 35 million inhabitants was the second biggest arms importer in the world, nearly all of which came from NATO countries. This pattern of wildly extravagant weapons purchases from the West is replicated by all the Gulf monarchies.

Militarized Economies

The military-industrial complex has had a profound impact on the way our economies are organized. The military depends on a thriving heavy-industry sector that leads militarized states to having substantially higher emissions, independent of their GDP. Major polluting industries such as industrial farming and industrial fishing derived their fundamental technologies and strategic aims from the military industrial complex. The major technologies driving our economies today, from smart phones to the Internet, were all originally projects of the military.

Yet militarization also drives economic growth, because the ability to produce en masse can be rapidly mobilized for multiple purposes in wartime. It is no secret that economic growth has long been considered a national security issue. In fact, the very concept of GDP arose in the context of war in the United States, in order to be able to quickly measure the total production of materials. As such, it is no coincidence that GDP, originally conceptualized to fuel death and destruction, is utterly useless in measuring human and ecological needs, yet has become the prime focus of most governments throughout the globe under the tutelage of the U.S.-dominated system.

Colonized Priorities

The military has a profound impact on humanity’s priorities. Western military strategists, who have been preparing for climate breakdown since the 1960s, have openly planned for resource wars and for accelerated border imperialism. They have fostered a mode of thinking that holds that climate catastrophe can be handled through global apartheid, rather than tackling the problem firsthand.

The never-ending wars—against drugs, against terrorism, against “the next Hitler,” against,” the next “troika” or “axis of evil”—have directly encouraged hatred and racism, further fueling the far right. On the international stage, they have fostered division and tensions where we direly need cooperation to tackle the ongoing climate crisis.

While major media in the West are obsessed with China and Russia—or whoever is next in line—crucial energy, resources, and attention are siphoned away from the predicament that we find ourselves in. As such, Germany could raise its military budget in one fell swoop by $113 billion dollars while claiming with a straight face that the paltry $100 billion in climate financing that was promised to the Global South (from the entire Global North) remains impossible.

The latest IPCC climate report warning that it is now or never for the world was almost completely ignored in Western media in favor of one-sided Russia-bashing. The war in Ukraine received almost twice as much coverage (562 minutes) in top-viewed U.S. media within one month as the climate breakdown received (344 minutes) in the entire year of 2021.

Even more pathetically, 2021 was a record year for climate news coverage, with more coverage than the previous three years combined (275 minutes). In 2016, the climate crisis was barely covered at all. All the wars examined in the study fared better, being equally (or nearly equally) covered in just one month than the climate was in its very best year.10

Psychological Warfare

In the case of U.S. invasions from Iraq to Afghanistan, news coverage was almost invariably positive, including straight-up staged propaganda scenes.

All of this has nothing to do with human rights concerns. The U.S. military deliberately destroyed the entire civilian infrastructure of the countries it targeted—its military doctrine is very open about this—a level of destruction even senior U.S. defense officials admit that Russia has not reached in Ukraine so far. The U.S.-led War on Terror alone is estimated to have killed six million people. Clearly, the media’s main priority is to manufacture consent for war, whether economic or military, and not to tackle the main issues threatening our lives. These psychological techniques—originally developed by the U.S. military—are copied to great effect by the Western oil industry, which employs many influential spin doctors who first built their careers as U.S. agents in psychological warfare.

In fact, the line between Western state and oil propaganda is very thin. We know Shell and BP directly financed UK Cold War propaganda during the ’50s and ’60s, and that Dick Cheney and George Bush’s election campaigns were heavily financed by Big Oil, corporations that went on to directly participate in the planning of the invasion of Iraq.

We see the same propaganda pattern on social media, where Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are downgrading antiwar voices in their algorithms and often censoring them outright. In creating these censorship policies, these social media giants are directly working with think tanks that receive funding from Western governments, arms corporations, Gulf monarchies, and the fossil fuel industry.

Not only do these policies continue to fuel an imperialist drive to war that forms the basis for fossil fuel-based capitalism, they also have a direct impact on the climate movement. Critical programs against U.S. fracking, for example, have been censored outright for being aired on Russia Today. In contrast, climate denial continues to be spread largely unhindered on Western social media and is often even amplified by social media algorithms.

Building Real International Solidarity.
Buying off the Western Working Class

Plans for a Green New Deal that do not address neo-colonialism threaten to intensify the extraction of resources from the Global South. The “ecological overshoot” of Northern consumption levels is predominantly caused by resources that are being drained from the Global South, year in and year out, through unequal trade relations—and none of this is reflected in official climate and ecological policies and targets.

The numbers are massive: every year, 12 billion tons of raw materials, 822 million hectares of land, 21 exajoules of energy, and the equivalent of 188 million years of human labor, are net extracted from the Global South. The amount of land and energy that is robbed yearly would be sufficient to feed 6 billion people and build out and maintain the necessary infrastructure for decent housing, healthcare, education, sanitation, and so on, for 6.5 billion people.

And that does not even account for the enormous European colonial land-grabs, whose settler colonies still encompass half of the entire land-surface outside of their homeland.11 Countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia—some of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, after the massacre of most of the Indigenous population—have massive amounts of domestic resources available.

Yet Indigenous peoples continue to resist bravely. An estimated 25 percent of fossil fuel emissions in the United States and Canada were halted by Indigenous resistance movements. Some 80 percent of Earth’s biodiversity remains protected by Indigenous peoples, who steward only 22 percent of land on Earth. Clearly, Land Back campaigns are crucial for fighting climate and ecological breakdown. Yet the antithesis is also true: continued land dispossession enables Northern governments to buy off their settler populations, who benefit from the massive theft of fossil fuels and material resources.

In The Wealth of (Some) Nations, Zak Cope demonstrates that the working classes in high-income countries—both settler and non-settler—are in fact under exploited. Even if there were zero profits, there would be insufficient resources to pay the average Northern wage levels globally. This is despite the fact that research indicates that Southern laborers work longer hours and are more productive than their Western counterparts. In other words, imperialism has bought off large parts of the Western working class by sharing the spoils of Southern super-exploitation.

This is what helps explain the lack of serious anti-imperialist movements in the Global North, as well as its tendencies toward fascism. Indeed, the same imperialist forces that are invading other countries are patrolling the borders of the Global North to create a dead zone for the very refugees that they created (the U.S.-led war on terror alone caused an estimated 38 million refugees). In that sense, far-right politics walk in lock-step with the “mainstream” policy plans of every major army in the Global North, who consider climate and ecological breakdown mere “threat multipliers” that can be handled with violence, suppression, and war.

Degrowth Offers a Path to Solidarity

That is not to say that the Western working class—especially its most exploited sectors; Cope’s calculations were, after all, based on averages—have nothing to gain from an anti-imperialist green revolution. By prioritizing human and ecological needs, rather than corporate profits and consumption lifestyles, it is possible to provide for better and more meaningful lives with lower resource and energy consumption. The capitalist system is notoriously wasteful and inefficient.

The United States is the most drastic example, where healthy life expectancy (the years someone is expected to live without serious health issues) is substantially lower than in China and Cuba, despite massively higher wages and even more obscene levels of wealth.12 The U.S. privatized health care system is notoriously expensive and ineffective. A basic public health option could improve living standards in the United States while simultaneously lowering economic output. As such, pursuing a path of ecosocialist degrowth in the Global North is the only way to create a meaningful project of solidarity for the global working class.

Western Imperialism Is Still the Issue.
The Southern Middle Class Is Not the Issue

It is true that the upper-middle classes within the Global South—many of them collaborators within the imperial system—have adopted an “imperial mode of living” based on high salaries, depoliticization, a sense of entitlement, and consumption-based lifestyles. It is a problem that certainly needs to be addressed. Yet this tendency should not be exaggerated. Based on the U.S. poverty line ($15.70 per day in 2011), the vast majority of the Global South continues to live in poverty, according to World Bank data using purchasing power parities (PPP), corrected for price differences.

The percentage of people below the U.S. poverty line is, in fact, quite shocking for every region: Eastern Europe and Central Asia (56 percent), Latin America and the Caribbean (67 percent), East Asia and the Pacific (74 percent), Middle East and North Africa (87 percent), sub-Saharan Africa (98 percent), and South Asia (98.5 percent).13 Furthermore, for large swaths of the population, their level of poverty are not only degrading, but life-threatening. Nearly half the population in Latin America and Central and Southern Asia and two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to adequate food.

Using the more common European poverty line ($30) shows that the middle class is largely nonexistent outside of high-income countries: Only between 7 and 13 percent of the population rise above the poverty level in the regions of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, East Asia, and the Pacific, and less than one percent in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.14 Clearly, blaming the ecological and climate breakdown on a “rising China” or “rising Africa” seems ridiculous, if not obscene.

Warnings that the world is not able to sustain a Western lifestyle for the entire globe are also misleading, as that lifestyle would not be possible without imperialism in the first place. The Western mode of living simply cannot and will not be globalized. Even in absolute terms, the Global South’s “middle class” barely registers. The vast majority of people living above a European poverty line—a shocking 75 percent—live in high-income countries. In reality, then, we are looking at a deepening of global apartheid with a few pockets of wealthy Southern collaborators and national bourgeoisies.

The Global South Refuses to be a Sacrifice Zone

There has been a lot of criticism of leftist governments in Latin America that continued to extract natural resources, even if the profits were redirected from corporate shareholders to social welfare programs. Yet some context is necessary here. Bolivia, for example, has only used 15 percent of its fair share of the carbon budget and 70 percent of its share of the material footprint budget.15 Despite dramatic improvements in poverty reduction under the anti-imperialist Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government since 2006—which slashed the percentage of people living in poverty in half—one third of the population still earns too little to ensure a decent life expectancy.16 In other words, without climate reparations from the Global North, some level of extractivism remains a matter of survival for a large part of the Bolivian population.

And Southern populations are not actually willing to forsake their dignity for the comfortable, green-washed future of the Global North. By the end of this year, chances are that nearly the entire Latin American continent will be swept by electoral victories for the left—most of them resource nationalists, which is surely the strongest showing of the Pink Tide yet.17 The Chinese government (whose per capita emissions and material footprint should definitely be reigned in) still maintains some of the highest approval rates in the world for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

This also applies to Indigenous peoples across Latin America, who are so often tokenized by Western NGOs, academics, media, and governments in order to make their imperial agenda more palatable. The Western focus is regularly on smaller Indigenous groups that have historically been hostile to the left for complicated reasons. The lowland Indigenous peoples of Bolivia, for example, have been firmly on the right since the brutal Hugo Banzer dictatorship initiated a military-peasant alliance to prevent a Cuba-style insurgency.

Indigenous peoples as a whole, however, have consistently and overwhelmingly voted for leftist resource nationalists in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Peru. So make no illusions: without climate reparations and a fairer global economy, a “green future” can only be maintained by violent repression, coups, and mass poverty.

Capitalist Power Remains Concentrated in the West

There has been much talk about a globalized capitalist class supposedly making Western imperialism irrelevant. Make no mistake, it is certainly true that we have seen inequality rise around the globe at a time where the Washington consensus, the World Bank, and the IMF reign supreme. And it is also undeniably true that the global multimillionaire class needs to be abolished if we want to stand a chance of addressing climate and ecological breakdown. By 2030, the emissions of the richest 10 percent will already have exceeded the boundaries of the Paris climate accords, even if the rest of the world emitted zero, nada, nil.

Yet despite claims to the contrary, the capitalist class remains firmly concentrated within the Global North. More than 75 percent of ultra-high-net-worth individuals ( UHNWI)—each worth more than $30 million—are living within the Western geopolitical bloc.18 As late as 2012, the “urban very rich” in China—the highest Chinese polluters, comprising only 5 percent of the population—still had lower household carbon footprints than the average Japanese or European Union citizen, and nearly twice as low as the average person in the United States.19

Much more important than carbon footprints are those who call the shots on the structure of the global economy. Among the Forbes-ranked top 2,000 global corporations, the Western geopolitical bloc claimed 73 to 83 percent of revenues, profits, assets, and market value in 2021. That is more than sufficient to dominate the terms on the global market. A 2013 study found that eighteen of the twenty-five corporate sectors outlined in the Forbes Global 2000 report were dominated by U.S. firms, one by Japan, and none by China.

This does not even include foreign ownership: 36 percent of the shares of Gazprom, for example, are U.S.-owned; a little known fact in this cold war catastrophe. Indeed, the international shareholder structure shows a shocking amount of concentrated power. A 2011 study found that the top forty-nine shareholders—most of them in the financial sector—controlled nearly 40 percent of the output of all 43,060 multinational corporations around the world. All of these forty-nine corporations are headquartered in Western Europe, North America, or Japan.20

Western Imperialism Fuels Capitalism

Only about 15 percent of UHNWI live in countries that could be considered geopolitical competitors, mainly the Collective Security Treaty Organization and China. Ironically, these Russian and Chinese “oligarchs” have much less political power than the so-called entrepreneurs and philanthropists of the Western world, as they are regularly imprisoned and even killed. Most notoriously, the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky—once Russia’s richest man—was imprisoned for ten years and his corporation Yukos, with oil reserves the size of Iraq, was fully nationalized.

Western powers also had a direct role in the creation of the global billionaire class. The post-Soviet oligarchy was a direct result of Western economic shock therapy in the 1990s. The billionaire class in China largely arose through a survival strategy against Western imperial pressure, allowing a controlled inflow of market systems to avoid the crushing sanctions, isolation and invasions that so many other countries suffered. Notably, both the Chinese and Russian governments were favored by the West until the very moment they started reigning in the power of the oligarchs—modestly, I might add—and challenging Western hegemony.

And this does not begin to cover the role of the IMF and World Bank in creating a global oligarchy in the rest of the Global South. Research indicates that only the top 10 percent of the population benefit from the IMF structural adjustment programs to which most of the Global South was subjected. Furthermore, in Latin America and Southern Africa, the billionaire class is still heavily dominated by white settlers that strongly favor Washington’s agenda. Clearly, using the global billionaire class to argue against the relevance of Western imperialism—the very party most responsible for their existence in the first place—is simply not credible.

Internationalism or Barbarism

It is no secret that Western security services spy on climate movements, arrest and brutalize climate protestors, and lock up anyone engaged in industrial sabotage for a lifetime in prison. After retirement, many of these agents continue their spywork directly on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry. When social movements were stronger, in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, anti-imperialist movement leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Fred Hampton were assassinated by the U.S. government. Indeed, the CIA was planning to do the same to Julian Assange.

The very same imperial war machinery driving the exploitation of the Global South turns inward at any sign of serious revolt. Former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, who proposed a climate target twenty years ahead of Boris Johnson’s and combined his pledge with a fierce anti-imperialism, was preemptively threatened with a coup by the UK military, just in case he might win elections.

It is certainly true that we also see repression within the Global South and Eastern Europe. Yet it is exactly Western imperialism that empowers war hawks and authoritarians in “enemy states,” who can vigorously clamp down on civil liberties using very real imperial threats as justification. However, an ecosocialist revolution within these states would be infinitely more likely without the imperialist pressures from the Global North.

Furthermore, we should not adopt the flawed view that the United States leads a global struggle against authoritarianism. In fact, 74 percent of dictators are supported directly by the United States. The top five countries in which non-violent land and water protectors were assassinated since 2012—Brazil (317), Colombia (290), Philippines (250), Honduras (109), and Mexico (100)—all receive military aid from the U.S. government.

Clearly, any real alternative will face a massive threat from the imperial war machine, whether in the Global North or in the South. As such, we will need real international solidarity to halt the capitalist juggernaut that is murdering our planet. That is the only way forward.

https://mronline.org/2022/09/29/imperia ... o-stop-it/

Notes at link

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Connecting the dots between climate devastation and fossil fuel profits
Originally published: Midwestern Marx on September 26, 2022 by Sonali Kolhatkar (more by Midwestern Marx) | (Posted Sep 30, 2022)

What do Pakistan, Puerto Rico, and Jackson, Mississippi, have in common? They’ve all recently experienced climate-related catastrophic rains and flooding, resulting in the loss of homes, electricity, and running water. But, even more importantly, they are all low-income regions inhabited by people of color—the prime victims of climate injustice. They face inaction from negligent governments and struggle to survive as fossil fuel companies reap massive profits—a status quo that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called a “moral and economic madness.”

Pakistan, which relies on yearly monsoons to enrich its agricultural industry, has had unprecedented floods since June, impacting 30 million people and killing more than 1,500—a third of them children.

Zulfiqar Kunbhar, a Karachi-based journalist with expertise in climate coverage, explains that “things are very critical” in the rain-affected areas of his nation. Kunbhar has been visiting impacted regions and has seen firsthand the massive “agricultural loss and livelihood loss” among Pakistan’s farming communities.

Sindh, a low-lying province of Pakistan, is not only one of the most populous in the nation (Sindh is home to about 47 million people), but it also produces about a third of the agricultural produce, according to Kunbhar. Twenty years ago, Sindh was stricken with extreme drought. In the summer of 2022, it was drowning in chest-deep water.

The UN is warning that the water could take months to recede and that this poses serious health risks, as deadly diseases like cerebral malaria are emerging. Kunbhar summarizes that provinces like Sindh are facing both “the curse of nature” and government “mismanagement.”

Climate change plus government inaction on mitigation and resilience equals deadly consequences for the poor. This same equation plagues Puerto Rico, long relegated to the status of a United States territory. In September 2022, on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017 and killed nearly 3,000 people, another storm named Fiona knocked out power for the entire region.

Julio López Varona, chief of campaigns at Center for Popular Democracy Action, spoke to me from Puerto Rico, saying, “the storm was extremely slow, going at like 8 or 9 miles an hour,” and as a result, “it pounded the island for more than three days” with relentless rain. “Communities were completely flooded; people have been displaced,” he says. Eventually, the electrical grid completely failed.

Days after the storm passed, millions of people remained without power—some even lost running water—leading the White House to declare a major disaster in Puerto Rico.

Even on the U.S. mainland, it is poor communities of color who have been hit the hardest by the impacts of climate change. Mississippi’s capital of Jackson, with an 82 percent Black population and growing numbers of Latin American immigrants, struggles with adequate resources and has had problems with its water infrastructure for years.

Lorena Quiroz, founder of the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity, a Jackson-based group doing multiracial grassroots organizing, told me how the city’s residents have been struggling without clean running water since major rains and resulting floods overwhelmed a water treatment plant this summer.

“It’s a matter of decades of disinvestment in this mostly Black, and now Brown, community,” says Quiroz. In a state run by white conservatives, Jackson is overseen by a Black progressive mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who is now suing the state government over inaction on the city’s water infrastructure.

Quiroz says it’s “painful to see how government is not doing what they should, how the state government is neglecting its most vulnerable populations.”

Over and over, the same pattern has emerged on a planet experiencing catastrophic climate change. Setting aside the fact that we are still spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as the world burns and floods, the impacts of a warming climate are disproportionately borne by poor communities of color as evidenced in Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Jackson, and elsewhere.

The UN head, Guterres is doing what he can in using his position to lay blame precisely on the culprits, saying in his opening remarks to the UN General Assembly in New York recently, “It is high time to put fossil fuel producers, investors, and enablers on notice. Polluters must pay.” Guterres specifically touted the importance of taxing fossil fuel companies to cover the damage they are causing in places like Pakistan. According to the Associated Press,

Oil companies in July reported unprecedented profits of billions of dollars per month. ExxonMobil posted three months profits of $17.85 billion, Chevron of $11.62 billion, and Shell of $11.5 billion.

Contrast this windfall with the countless numbers of people who lost their homes in Pakistan and are now living in shanties on roads where they have found some higher ground from the floods. “If you lose a crop, that’s seasonal damage, but if you lose a house, you have to pay for years to come,” says Kunbhar.

Kunbhar’s view of what is happening in Pakistan applies equally to Puerto Rico and Jackson: Society is “divided between the haves and have-nots,” he says.

The poorest of the poor who are already facing an economic crisis from generation to generation, they are the most vulnerable and the [worst] victims of this crisis.[

In Puerto Rico, Varona sees displaced communities losing their lands to wealthier communities. He says that the local government in Puerto Rico is “allowing millionaires and billionaires to come and pay no taxes and to actually take over many of the places that are safer for communities to be on.” This is an “almost intentional displacement of communities… that have historically lived here,” he says.

And in Jackson, Quiroz says she is aghast at the “mean-spiritedness” of Mississippi’s wealthier enclaves and state government.

It is so difficult to comprehend the way that our people are being treated.

Although disparate and seemingly disconnected from one another, with many complicating factors, there are stark lines connecting climate victims to fossil fuel profits.

Pakistan’s poor communities are paying the price for ExxonMobil’s billions.

Puerto Rico remains in the dark so that Chevron may enjoy massive profits.

Jackson, Mississippi, has no clean drinking water so that Shell can enrich its shareholders.

When put in such terms, Guterres’s idea for taxing the perpetrators of climate devastation is a no-brainer. It’s “high time,” he said, “to put fossil fuel producers, investors and enablers on notice,” so that we can end our “suicidal war against nature.”

https://mronline.org/2022/09/30/connect ... l-profits/

Guterres is a tool of the US and no serious person should give his pablum any real consideration, it's all smoke. Tax them? We MUST expropriate them. Nothing else will do.

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Sen. Joe Manchin speaks during a news conference on Sept. 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)

Study: Manchin’s Pipeline bill would be a climate nightmare
By David Sirota (Posted Sep 29, 2022)

Originally published: The Lever on September 27, 2022 (more by The Lever) |

The Lever recently reported on the curiously absent data behind Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) proposal to expedite fossil fuel pipelines. Somehow, Democratic lawmakers have been advancing the permitting legislation—and portraying it as an environmental victory—with no comprehensive projections showing how its buildout of oil and gas infrastructure would change overall greenhouse gas emissions.

That information vacuum was suddenly filled on the eve of the first Senate votes on Manchin’s bill: On Tuesday, the environmental group Oil Change International released an analysis asserting that the legislation could wipe out all of the alleged emissions reductions from other parts of the permitting bill that boost clean energy—and vastly increase overall emissions amid the climate crisis.

While fossil-fuel-industry-linked lobbying groups like the American Clean Power Association tout the bill’s clean energy provisions, the new study tells a darker tale. It finds that the the Mountain Valley Pipeline that would be expedited by the bill, plus emissions from other proposed fossil fuel terminals now in the permitting process, would amount to 665 million metric tons of greenhouse gasses per year. That’s more than five times the purported emissions reductions that bill proponents claim will come from the legislation’s provisions supporting new transmission lines.

Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the two lead proponents of the permitting measure, are respectively Congress’s top recipients of campaign cash from the fossil fuel and utilities industries. Together they have raked in more than $340,000 from the energy company leading the Mountain Valley Pipeline project.

Some critics have previously questioned Oil Change International’s data by insisting that new fossil fuel supplies replace other sources of fossil fuel, and that therefore overall emissions may not increase as much as claimed. In its statement releasing the study, Oil Change International counters by arguing that the bill’s pipeline provisions lock in and guarantee fossil fuel emissions for the long haul. The group also notes how some groups touting the clean energy provisions of the legislation haven’t bothered to estimate the emissions effects of the fossil fuel provisions.

“While the bill would likely help speed up some transmission buildout, the actual impact of the legislation on transmission expansion is unknown. It’s possible the necessary expansion could be achieved with existing permitting requirements, or that critical and useful regulatory reforms could be enacted under existing laws without the legislation,” the group wrote.

The emissions from new fossil fuel projects are all but guaranteed. Once built, these pipelines and export facilities will pump millions of tons of [carbon dioxide] into the atmosphere each year for decades to come.

The latter assertion is backed up by a recent study from Michigan Tech researchers, which found that existing pipelines are responsible for nearly half of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, because that infrastructure speeds up the distribution and use of fossil fuels.

https://mronline.org/2022/09/29/study-m ... nightmare/

Well, he's in your party, Dave. And your party will pass this gift to the oil barons. And yet you and your ilk insist that this gang of hustlers are the 'lesser evil'. Fuck You, Dave.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Oct 11, 2022 3:27 pm

GREEN CAPITALISM IN CRISIS: END OF A CHIMERA

Eder Pena

8 Oct 2022 , 1:22 pm .

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Falling out of the bed of infinite progress has its conflicts and is what, deep down, the modern world is experiencing today (Photo: Matthew Horwood / Getty Images)

Faced with the global climate crisis, which is already evident in the destructive force of meteorological events, the question once again arises of how to deal with this phenomenon whose causes are associated with the civilizational model that has spread from the United States and Europe to the rest of the world. .

Western governments, particularly those we call powers, are caught between trying to inflate the crisis so that the shock doctrine prevails or create a cascading economic depression from default greater than anything in living memory. Borrowing more new currency to pay off current debt is no longer possible because an energy-constrained real economy cannot grow much more, and because the Global North has reached "peak debt."

Both the great economic crises of the last century (1930s and 1970s) and those of this century (after 2005 and the current one) were caused by the shortage of energy and the increase in the cost of everything else in the economy and their respective inflationary trigger .

BUT LET'S TALK ABOUT "CLIMATE CHANGE"

The use of so-called "climate change" has been orchestrated by the media to explain some of the events that are actually derived from a system in the process of massive and multidimensional implosion. Such is the case of the war provoked in Syria or the so-called "climate refugees" from a dispossessed nation like Somalia.

It should be noted that, in the early 2000s, the Republican "strategist" Frank Luntz baptized it as "change" because it could create the impression that there was some "debate" on this topic, it would also fill decisions and denials with doubts and denials. that should be taken. While "crisis" was dangerous and frightening, it forced the question of the structural causes of the problem. After several years, and the valuable time lost, there is no talk of heat waves but of "heat domes", "mega-fires" or "mega-floods".

The climate crisis is a direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) in the atmosphere, so the solution would be to stop emitting more and even remove some of it. This idea is central to the world's current plan to avert catastrophe. Some milestones outlined in a paper by a group of veteran climate scientists:

*In June 1988, James Hansen, administrator of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, gave testimony before the United States Congress and forensically presented evidence that the Earth's climate was warming and that " human beings" (never the elites) were the main cause.
*In the mid-1990s, most attention was focused on increasing energy efficiency and energy switching (such as the move from coal to gas in the UK) and the potential for nuclear power to supply large amounts of carbon-free electricity.
*In the first decade of the 21st century, Integrated Assessment Models were implemented that allowed modellers to relate economic activity to the climate, for example by exploring how changes in investments and technology could lead to changes in greenhouse gas emissions. greenhouse. They became a key guide to climate policy but removed the need for deep critical thinking.
*The models allowed us to postulate a future with more trees as atmospheric carbon sinks to compensate for the burning of coal, oil and gas, therefore it is assumed that afforestation is key to capturing the CO 2 emitted.
*Carbon capture and storage ( CCS ) offered the twist that instead of using the carbon dioxide to extract more oil, the gas would be left underground and removed from the atmosphere. This promised technological breakthrough would enable climate-friendly coal and thus the continued use of this fossil fuel.

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Climeworks is one of the few demonstration projects in operation to capture carbon dioxide from the air on the roof of a waste incineration plant in Hinwil, Switzerland (Photo: Reuters)

*When the "international climate change community" met in Copenhagen in 2009, it was clear that CCS was not going to be enough because there were no operating facilities at any coal-fired power plants, no prospect that the technology would have some impact on increased emissions from increased coal use in the foreseeable future and, not least, the cost.
*As the climate-economic modeling community was already able to include both plant-based carbon sinks and geological carbon storage (CCS) in its models, it increasingly adopted the "solution" of combining the two.
*Thus came bioenergy carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, which consists of burning "replaceable" biomass, such as wood, crops, and agricultural residues, instead of coal in power plants, and capturing carbon dioxide from power plant chimney and store it underground, the BECCS could produce electricity while removing CO 2 from the atmosphere.
*BECCS would have to remove 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year and, at that scale, would require plans for industrial-scale plantations dedicated to regular bioenergy harvesting, rather than the carbon stored in trunks, roots, and branches. forest floors.
*It has been estimated that the BECCS would require between 0.4 and 1.2 billion hectares of land. That is between 25% and 80% of all land currently under cultivation. Scientists ask: How will this be achieved while feeding 8-10 billion people by mid-century or without destroying native vegetation and biodiversity?
*Another of the most investigated geoengineering ideas is solar radiation management: the injection of millions of tons of sulfuric acid into the stratosphere that will reflect part of the Sun's energy away from Earth. Although it sounds absurd and risky, for this idea the National Academy of Sciences of the United States has recommended allocating up to 200 million dollars in the next five years to explore how geoengineering could be deployed and regulated.

And so goes the "scientific community", as the mirage of each magical technical solution disappears, another equally unfeasible alternative appears to take its place.

GIVE UP OIL? THAT'S THE QUESTION

Seven out of eight people will be dead in a year if we remove synthetic fertilizers, petroleum-based pesticides and herbicides and the ships, planes, trains and trucks that move food from field to table; It doesn't seem like an absurd number. An example is the crisis that some European countries are experiencing due to the shortage of gas and the increase in prices, which already predate the war in Ukraine, since the European neoliberal fever led them to privatize energy.

However, there are many sectors that affirm or wonder if it will be possible to "decarbonize" the energy systems that allow us to carry out daily activities, but also maintain a flow of capital and income towards a wealthy minority.

30 million joules of energy are hidden in a liter of oil. This is equivalent to the work carried out by a person for 83 hours straight without stopping or moving a car (average weight between 700 kilos and 1 ton) up to 20 kilometers. If we talk about gasoline or diesel (refined), they can provide up to 30% more power.

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Banks with zero emissions commitments last year in Glasgow also financed the top 20 oil and gas expansion companies (Photo: Banking on Fossil Fuels Report, 2022)

In turn, a third of the energy consumed around the world comes from oil and has made it possible to sustain the "free market" economic framework for some 200 years.

Oil allows the exchange of goods around the world, so the current weakness of capitalism does not consist only of debt or financialization but of the biophysical limits of the planet.

But within those limits is the number of oil deposits, whose facilities to extract are getting smaller and smaller. In 2006 its maximum extraction point was reached, that is, peak oil was reached . This means that we will have less and less liquid and capitalism will not be able to continue to grow infinitely on a planet with finite and increasingly scarce resources.

As it is a pollutant, it has a greenhouse effect and is running out. For years, many international organizations have been proposing a change in the way of producing the energy that drives the world economy.

But reality, which is richer than theory, says otherwise: the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) warns that, although it will gradually lose weight in the world energy matrix, that would not mean its death or early extinction. .

OPEC's World Oil Outlook 2021 ( World Oil Outlook 2045 ) is that the demand for oil would increase in the long term from 82.5 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2020 to 99 million bpd in 2045. Its demand would grow less than before in the second part of the projected period (2020-2045) and, although other energy sources such as renewables, gas and nuclear, would grow strongly, oil is expected to retain the largest share in the global energy matrix during the next 25 years.

In 2020, oil represented 30% of global energy needs. Coupled with its post-coronavirus demand recovery, its share share is projected to reach 28.1% by 2045.

The reason is that not all countries are developed even though they sell us the promise that we will be. Demand in emerging, so-called undeveloped, countries is expected to reach 46.3 million bpd in 2020 to 70.3 million bpd in 2045, growing 1.7% annually over the forecast period. The growth in oil demand in these countries is primarily attributed to population growth and expanding economies in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

On the other hand, in the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), called developed, the demand for oil will decrease in the long term, going from 36.3 million bpd in 2020 to 28.7 million bpd in 2045 , with an annual growth of -0.9%. This may be due to a further misalignment of economic growth due to structural changes and a political push that continues to put greater emphasis on energy efficiency and the deployment of low-carbon technologies, the reports say. In addition, total oil demand this year will reach an average of 100.3 million bpd and by 2023 demand is expected to be somewhat higher on average, that is, 103 million bpd.

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Demand from emerging countries such as China and India will set the tone for the future of oil, although today global oil demands are expected to decline (Photo: Oil World Outlook 2045)

Germany, developed from cheap energy and raw materials like the entire Global North, responded to its energy crisis by reactivating coal consumption before the destruction of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, while China plans to build new plants coal-fired power plants and the recent installation of an unmanned oil platform in the southern sea.

Nobody, neither scientists nor politicians, can imagine that the goal of 1.5°C increase in the global average temperature and the decarbonization of the economy can be achieved. The Paris agreements (2015) are just a memory while those of the Glasgow summit (2021) seem to be extinguished with the sanctions imposed by Washington and Brussels on Russian oil and gas.

The United States has abandoned the Paris Agreement and the European Union (EU) decided to include natural gas (fossil energy) and nuclear energy in the green classification or taxonomy. For his part, Chinese President Xi Jinping already warned last January against an energy transition that interferes with the "normal life" of the Chinese.

WAKING UP FROM A CHIMERA

The Global North rose to power from cheap energy; It will not be easy for any country to stop what it considers to be its right to development, neither the developed ones nor those that aspire to do so. Falling out of the bed of infinite progress has its conflicts and is what, deep down, the modern world is experiencing today.

As it embarked on saying "change" to a crisis, the so-called international "community" postponed the time to stop the accelerated use of fossil fuels by equitably sharing future emissions.

The models used by the scientific "community" (if the abuse of quotation marks is allowed) represent society "as a network of idealized and emotionless buyers and sellers", so put by the group of concerned scientists. The complex social and political realities and the biocultural diversity of each nation do not appear in these models, because it is not possible.

The messianic promise that market-based approaches will always work has crashed with a rearrangement of the world that is in process but that seems to go beyond what there is, but distributed. The scientific world preferred to choose that policy debates be limited to those most convenient for politicians and remained silent in the face of the infeasibility of agreements such as the one in Paris.

Curious that a pattern of knowledge based on demonstrable truth continues to fantasize about increases of 1.5ºC or planting up to 1.2 billion hectares of timber trees, instead of allowing ecosystems to recover from human impacts and that forests grow back.

They made the human species dream that it was "change" and not crisis, that everyone would fit into very complicated models, that debt was money. Today it seems that the world goes to war disappointed and with a tremendous hangover.

https://misionverdad.com/investigacione ... -quimera-i

Google Translator

I have serious doubts about some of these whiz bang 'solutions', that they must fit into the capitalist profit model. First we must expropriate and re-allocate. First we must put an end to the Pentagon. First we must compensate the Global South. Then we can see what else must be done. We 'fat and sassy' Westerners must make disproportionate sacrifice as our historical debt and those with the deepest pockets must be 'leveled'. The people of the Earth will accept no less.

History ain't 'bunk' but it is inescapable.

**********

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Sea level acceleration
Originally published: Dissident Voice on September 30, 2022 by Robert Hunziker (more by Dissident Voice) | (Posted Oct 03, 2022)

This article addresses the most current research on sea level rise, as well as adaptation measures being taken around the world. Of special interest, brilliant adaptation measures are taking place in the face of higher seas.

“Sea level has been fairly stable for 6,000 years, which is most of human civilization… but its risen eight (8) inches or twenty (20) centimeters in the last century, and the rate is tripling right now.”1

According to knowledgeable sources, regardless of mitigation efforts, sea levels are destined to rise by approximately one foot by 2050. Thereafter, fairly high probabilities indicate up to 5 feet-to-10 feet by the end of the century, which is considerably more than “up to 3 feet in a high-GHG emissions scenario” forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The oceans have absorbed 93% of the planet’s heat, and there’s no off switch to stop warming ocean waters from melting the world’s two largest ice structures Greenland and Antarctica. What if the oceans did not absorb 93% of the planet’s heat? According to scientists’ calculations in the multi-award-winning documentary Chasing Coral (2017) if oceans stopped absorbing heat, land temps would average 122°F.

During the 1990s Greenland and Antarctica combined lost 81 billion tons of ice mass per year on average. A decade later, during the decade of the 2010s, the ice mass loss increased 6-fold to 475 billion tons per year on average.2

NASA’s findings, published online in the journal Nature from an international team of 89 polar scientists from 50 organizations, are the most comprehensive assessment to date of the changing ice sheets. It is startling information that seems to predestine higher sea levels. The question of the decade, therefore: How to stop the runaway-freight-train loss of ice by Greenland and Antarctica? Is it even possible to control a warming ocean as the root cause?

Speaking of which, on August 30, 2022 the Journal of Geophysical Research published the following paper by A. T. Bradley, et al: “The Influence of Pine Island Ice Shelf Calving on Basal Melting”. (Basal melting occurs from heat delivered by the ocean beneath ice shelves.)

Synopsis of the Bradley paper: “Pine Island Ice Shelf in West Antarctica, which holds back enough ice to raise sea levels by 0.5 meters (1.5 feet), could be more vulnerable to complete disintegration than previously thought. A new study led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) scientists shows two processes whose recent enhancement already threatens the stability of the shelf can interact to increase the likelihood of collapse.” 3

Pine Island ice shelf, which serves to buttress Pine Island Glacier, is but one of a few hundred ice shelves surrounding Antarctica that hold back the potential of rapid flow of glacial ice to the sea. A collapsing ice shelf is equivalent to taking the goalie out of a hockey game; the net is wide open for rapid flow of the glacier to the sea. As it happens, an ice shelf collapse increases the rate of glacial flow by up to eight (8) times.

It goes without saying that collapsing ice sheets that buttress glacial ice flow are not a welcomed event for the world’s 136 port cities, each with more than one million inhabitants.

Scientists are still shaking in their boots over the shocking disintegration/collapse of Conger Ice Shelf six months ago. It’s the first-ever ice shelf collapse on East Antarctica, which is the coldest and driest location on the planet. On March 14-16 Conger ice shelf suddenly disappeared from satellite photos. It had been there for over a thousand years. All it took was an unusual warm spell and more than a thousand years of solid ice collapsed within only a few days! It’s little wonder scientists are still shaken. East Antarctica has always been considered invincible… until the recent past.

U.S. Harbors of Rockland, ME recently interviewed John Englander, an oceanographer and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz and one of the world’s foremost speakers on sea level rise.1

According to Englander: “By midcentury, it’s going to be at least a foot higher and by the end of the century, perhaps 5-to-10 feet higher. We need to wake up to a new reality about sea level because sea level determines the shoreline… We need to start now re-designing harbors for the future… Adaptation to higher sea levels is the future.”

Of major concern, “The rate of global sea level rise has tripled in 30 years. It’s gone from an average of a millimeter and a half up to five millimeters in 30 years… if we only melt 5% of global glacial ice, it’s 10 feet of sea level rise.”

Yet, Englander says: “The good news is that we have time to adapt. The bad news is it’s going to change harbors; it’s going to change every coastline from big cities like Jakarta and New York to rural fishing villages in Thailand and Africa.”

A leading institution for ocean studies is NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which will increasingly be an important resource for civil engineers around the world. A recent NASA JPL seminar provides perspective: (1) sea level change (2) how fast it is rising (3) contributing factors, and (4) the influence of land hydrology and melting ice. Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA JPL recently conducted the following seminar: “Rising Tide: Tackling Sea Level Rise from Above and Below”, California Institute of Technology, 2022.

The oceans cover more than 2/3rds of the planet’s surface, and they are rising. In Willis’s view, “it’s a bit of a startling idea that 2/3rds of the planet is rising.” The rising sea level is a well-documented event since the early nineties by a series of satellites that have been launched to give a record of how sea levels change all across the planet. The satellites with launch dates: Sentinel 6 (2020) Jason 3 (2016) OSTM/Jason 2 (2008) Jason 1 (2001) and TOPEX/Poseidon (1992).

Thereby, NASA has tools to measure sea level rise as well as its causes. In precise fashion, satellite measurements of the ocean repeatedly occur every second of the hour. This produces an entire map of the ocean once every ten days, providing a global picture of the ocean, similar to tidal gauges of the world.

According to Willis: The planet has been warming pretty rapidly for the past 100 years. And on an historic basis, it’s happening very quickly. What’s different today is that over the last 150 years we’ve changed the composition of the atmosphere radically and increased CO2 by almost a factor of two, meaning we’re running at double the rate of CO2 of the past one-half million years. This is a major global change that will not go away for a long time.

As such, we are changing how the climate works as most of the excessive energy or heat that’s trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the ocean; it’s actually 93%. Thus the oceans get warmer as well as bigger as heated water expands, which accounts for 1/3rd of modern day sea level rise. In total (1) melting inland glaciers and (2) melting ice sheets and (3) warming of the water account for sea level rise.

Significantly, the past 150 years of sea level rise is unprecedented in human history. A graph of the last 30 years of satellite recordings demonstrates the rate of rise increasing during the first 10 years at 2mm per year followed by 3mm in the middle 10 years and 4.5mm per year over the past 10 years. That rate of rise has more than doubled in only 30 years. NASA views this as one of the most comprehensive indicators of how much human influence has changed the climate.

Additionally, Grace satellite missions are another source that actually weigh the land. For example, since the early 2000s, Greenland (20+ feet of water trapped in ice) has lost 5,000,000,000 (five trillion) tons of ice. The heated oceans are responsible for melting Greenland around the edges of the island, which is the major contributor to sea level rise.

New research by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland claims that anthropogenic-influenced climate change has set in motion irreversible Greenland ice loses amounting to 110 trillion tons, which would trigger nearly a one-foot global sea level rise this century on its own.4.

Moreover, the National Ocean Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 2022 Sea Level Rise Report technical analysis provides an updated projection for U.S. coastal waters thru the year 2150. Accordingly, the next 30 years or today’s generation will see sea level rise of 10-12 inches or one solid foot along U.S. coastlines. This projection is equivalent to the sea level rise of the past 100 years, 1920-2020 happening in only 30 years. This is one more example of acceleration.

Making matters much more tenuous, NOAA warns: “Failing to curb future emissions (ed.- which is about where mitigation efforts stand today) could cause an additional 1.5-5.0 feet of rise for a total of 3.5-7.0 feet by the end of this century.” 5

Adaptation to Higher Sea Levels
According to John Englander, society needs a new vision of the planet. It needs to learn to “build higher and smarter.”

For example, Korea is building the first floating community for thousands of homes. Busan Metropolitan City, Korea, the second-largest city in South Korea and home to the country’s largest port is home to Oceanix Busan, a floating city prototype to house 12,000 people. The floating city will be dependent upon its own energy, water, and food without relying upon city resources. Completion date is set for 2025. The design will help regenerate marine ecosystems by promoting coral reef growth underneath the complex.

In the Netherlands, floating homes of Schoonschip in Amsterdam rise up during flood periods with utilities attached via an umbilical that absorbs movement. During flooding episodes, homes float and then settle back down to the ground able to handle 6-8 feet of sea level rise.

Finest Bay Area Development (Finnish/Estonian), Shimizu Corporation (Japanese), and Blue21 (Dutch) have plans to build Green Float Tallinn, a floating island city for 40,000 inhabitants on the Baltic Sea. The floating island will not generate waste. Resources will either be reused, recycled, or upcycled. The objective is to achieve food self-sufficiency, energy autarky, circular water systems, and carbon positivity within a closed loop system.

The Dutch floating home model is now a project under construction in the Maldives. The first block of floating homes for the Maldives Floating City development of 5,000 homes are tethered to a lagoon floor and linked together.

Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK are all strengthening design standards for building and coastal infrastructure to protect against sea level rise according to the OECD Responding to Rising Seas report, utilizing sea walls, surge barriers, water pumps, and overflow chambers.

China is building sponge cities. The underlying principle of sponge cities is to give water enough room and enough time to drain into the soil where it falls instead of channeling it away and sequestering it in dams. Sponge cities require large green spaces. An example is the coastal city Ninbgo, where an eco-corridor on an uninhabitable post-industrial site turned the channelized river into a meandering waterway surrounded by native plants that filter water. It has become a habitat for native flora and fauna and improved water quality as well as control over flooding.

British architecture studio Grimshaw and Dutch manufacturer Concrete Valley are developing Modular Water Dwellings, floating concrete and glass houses for areas subject to flooding. The dwellings will be prefabricated in factories and used to turn waterfronts into new city neighborhoods. Solar panels will allow each dwelling to self-generate power. Prototypes are under construction.

San Francisco Bay, which has lost 90% of its wetlands, still has some of the most important coastal wetlands in the Western Hemisphere. It is working to expand and protect its wetlands, which are key to a functioning hydrology system: “Wetlands not only provide valuable habitat for fish and birds, acting as the base of the marine ecosystem, but wetlands have also been shown to be one of nature’s most efficient plant communities for capturing carbon from the atmosphere, trapping organic carbon quicker and better than forests, thus reducing carbon in the atmosphere. Coastal wetlands also help to buffer our communities from sea level rise, acting as a sponge to capture floodwaters before they reach our homes and businesses. In short, wetlands, if protected, expanded and restored, are one of the most valuable ecosystem tools for reducing the impact of climate change.” 6

Adaptation planning has never been more important. Mauna Loa, Hawaii measurements of CO2, continue a relentless upwards trajectory, causing more global warming, which nowadays should be labeled “global heating,” as sea level goes ever higher, and higher, at ever faster rates.

Mauna Loa CO2 measurements:

August 2022 @ 417.19 ppm

August 2021 @ 414.47 ppm

August 2020 @ 412.78 ppm

During the 1960s the global growth rate of CO2 averaged +0.8 ppm. Today it’s nearly three times that rate. Corr0respondingly, the rate of sea level rising of the past 30 years has more than doubled.

Since the beginnings of humanity when rubbing two sticks together was an eye-opening moment nothing compares to today’s rate of CO2 and sea level rise. Could it be that a few thousand years of the wonderful Goldilocks era not too hot, not to cold fostered complacency? Which, in turn, propagates the brand-new Age of Adaptation.

Post Script: Adaptation takes on new significance when consideration is given to the following update from a highly respected source. The following statement comes from Climate Dominoes, Publisher: Breakthrough—National Centre for Climate Restoration, Melbourne, May 2022 by David Spratt, Climate Code Red, September 28, 2022:

At just 1.2°C of global average warming, tipping points have been passed for several large Earth systems. These include Arctic sea ice, the Greenland Ice Sheet, The Amundsen Sea glaciers in West Antarctica, the eastern Amazonian rainforest, and the world’s coral systems. The world will warm to 1.5°C by around 2030, with additional warming well beyond 1.5°C in the system after that. Yet even at the current level of warming, these systems will continue to move to qualitatively different states. In most cases, strong positive feedbacks are driving abrupt change. At higher levels of warming, the rate of change will quicken. The meme that “we have eight years to avoid 1.5°C and tipping points” should be deleted from the climate advocacy vocabulary. It is simply wrong.

Certainly, in the case of West Antarctica, the evidence continues to pile in that the Thwaites glacier is primed to trigger a much wider loss of ice mass across the Amundsen sea glacial system, for example: Thwaites ‘doomsday’ glacier could begin rapid melt with ‘just a small kick’, researchers say.

Similarly, scientists now report that Greenland ice sheet has passed a point of system stability and is now “irreversibly committed” to a significant sea-level rise regardless of twenty-first-century climate pathways.


_________________________________________________________

Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide.

Notes:
1.↩ John Englander, Expert on Sea Level Rise, Talks with U.S. Harbors About Changing Coastal Waters, July 5, 2022.
2.↩ “Greenland, Antarctica Melting Six Times Faster Than in the 1990s”, NASA, March 16, 2020.
3.↩ British Antarctic Survey, “Scientists Expose Vulnerabilities of Critical Antarctic Ice Shelf”, Phys.org, September 21, 2022.
4.↩ Jason E. Box, et al, “Greenland Ice Sheet Climate Disequilibrium and Committee Sea-Level Rise”, Nature Climate Change, August 29, 2022.
5.↩ 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
6.↩ “Expand & Restore Bay Wetlands to Fight Climate Change”, April 30, 2022.

************

After the floods, Pakistan needs reparations, not charity
October 10, 2022
The people of Pakistan are the latest victims of a global crisis to which they have contributed almost nothing

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by Farooq Tariq
New Internationalist, September 13, 2022

At the time of writing, more than one-third of Pakistan is under water. Flash floods, generated by abnormal monsoon rains have so far claimed the lives of 1350 people. One million residential buildings are totally or partially damaged, leaving more than 50 million people displaced from their homes.

Crucially, the flood is expected to add $10 billion worth of damage to an already teetering economy. More than 793,900 livestock have died, and families across Pakistan of a critical source of sustenance and livelihood. Around two million acres of crops and orchards have been impacted.

These impacts are undeniably a symptom of an accelerating climate crisis. Despite producing less than one per cent of global carbon emissions, Pakistan bears some of the worst consequences of the climate crisis globally. The nation has consistently ranked in the Global Climate Risk Index as among the top ten most vulnerable countries in the world over the past twenty years. As Julien Harneis, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Pakistan says: “This super flood is driven by climate change — the causes are international.”

The people of Pakistan are the latest victims of a global crisis to which they have contributed almost nothing,— and which has instead been driven by the excess emissions of rich countries and corporate polluters. This fundamental injustice is at the root of increasing demands for climate reparations from Pakistan and the wider Global South.

One such demand is debt cancellation. Debt injustice and the climate crisis go hand in hand. As extreme weather events intensify countries on the frontlines, such as Mozambique, and island states in the Caribbean are facing increasing economic damages. After these events, low-income (and often already heavily indebted) governments face a shortfall in funding and have little choice but to take out further loans to rebuild livelihoods and communities.

We can already see this cycle happening in Pakistan. Even before the floods, Pakistan was drowning in debt, having faced a steep fall in foreign exchange because of soaring global commodity prices and a rise in the US dollar. The cost of electricity and food has soared. By the end of this year, Pakistan will have had to pay a total of around $38 billion dollars to the IMF, World Bank and other financial institutions including the Chinese State Bank. A spiral of borrowing is generating an impending economic crisis.

The floods have prompted a flurry of foreign aid, with USAID contributing $30 million, adding to a United Nations contribution of $3 million last week. The UN is launching a new flood relief plan for Pakistan, as its officials echoed calls for greater contributions from around the world. But still, it is nowhere near enough.

As humanitarian organizations scrabbled for emergency funds, a familiar face reared its head once more. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), recently approved a bailout request with a plan to release $1.1 billion to the country. At first glance, this may seem like a vital step in Pakistan’s recovery, but to pile further debt on a country already in the grips of a financial crisis will only end in further disaster.

The empirical evidence overwhelmingly supports the view that a large portion of government debt harms economic growth potential, and in many cases, the impact gets more pronounced as debt increases. Pakistan’s high degree of indebtedness has made it more vulnerable to economic shocks and weakened the country politically vis-a-vis powerful external lenders. It has also greatly reduced Pakistan’s ability to invest in education and healthcare, or its infrastructure.

If the West intends on supporting Pakistan through this crisis, it needs to implement a series of measures that tackle the scale of damage inflicted by the Global North upon the South since the Industrial Revolution. As a first step, this should include comprehensive debt cancellation, alongside greatly increased climate finance to support communities to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

In addition, many climate-vulnerable countries including Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Tuvalu are now also calling for compensation from rich countries for the disasters they are now facing.

This is often termed as ‘Loss and Damage’, which even now in 2022 is still not an official part of the negotiations agenda at the UN climate change conference, COP. Climate-vulnerable countries have on numerous occasions demanded climate compensation from the rich countries and corporations that have created climate chaos – each time they have been blocked. At COP27, there must be further concrete progress on these discussions.

The concept of waiving debt is not new. During the pandemic, some debt relief was put in place for low-income countries, although the private sector has continued to collect payments, which inevitably exacerbated the economic crisis generated by Covid-19. But even private creditors can be kept at bay when there is a strong moral demand. In July, a few months after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s creditors made a landmark agreement to cease collecting debt payments during the war. This provided vital relief to the Ukrainian economy and allowed the country to focus on spending every available penny on supporting its people.

If international institutions suspended the collection of debts, Pakistan wouldn’t need new loans. The money sent out of Pakistan to pay off international creditors could be spent instead on rehousing the millions who are displaced. Pakistan needs at least four years to rebuild and reconstruct its economy and to cover up the damages done by floods and heavy rains.

But there also remains a wider question: who should pay for the climate crisis? Why should Pakistan have to take out any loans at all to pay for the impacts of a crisis it has not caused? Pakistan’s climate minister Sherry Rehman told The Guardian that global emission targets and reparations must be reconsidered, given the accelerated and relentless nature of climate catastrophes hitting countries such as Pakistan.

Of course, repairing climate apartheid and fixing the crisis is not as simple as writing a cheque, and many other measures are needed to support Pakistan’s people through the catastrophe they are facing.

Yet without debt relief or funding to compensate for loss and damage, Pakistan’s cycle of debt and climate crises is only set to worsen.

Farooq Tariq is the General Secretary of the Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee, a network of 26 peasant organizations and a coalition member of La Via Campesina.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/1 ... t-charity/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 17, 2022 2:08 pm

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Alexandra Lobo

Vehicles of Extraction
Originally published: Science for the People on Volume 25, no. 2, Bleeding Earth by Paris Marx (more by Science for the People) | (Posted Oct 16, 2022)

After years of false starts, the electric vehicle (EV) finally seems to be picking up steam. Last year, the Biden administration announced ambitious targets to increase the adoption of EVs, along with funding for a number of measures aimed at making them more attractive to Americans. By 2030, the president wants half of all new vehicle sales to be electric. To encourage that, the government is providing financial incentives for drivers to buy them, installing new charging stations across the country, helping build the supply chain, and extending support to retool the factories that are manufacturing these supposed cars of the future.1 It’s a comprehensive plan for a large-scale effort, and industry seems to be on board.

In 1990, the California Air Resources Board mandated automakers to begin selling EVs, but after opposition from car companies, the oil industry, and the George W. Bush administration, it was reversed in 2003. This time, automakers seem to be taking the transition seriously. All the major companies are in the process of rolling out electric models and announcing ambitious targets for more, and some are even setting dates for the phase-out of the internal combustion engine that has powered our vehicles for the past century.

The oil industry won’t be happy to lose such a major source of demand, but the mining industry is eager to capitalize on the shift and use it to greenwash their extractive operations. EVs may not need to be filled with gas, but that doesn’t mean they’re clean, green driving machines. Their batteries are highly resource-intensive, requiring minerals from all over the world, and rising demand for EVs will produce a rush to increase extraction. Vehicle batteries account for much of the growth in mineral demand, and it won’t be extracted without serious consequences.

Following decades of delay, it’s refreshing to see political leaders finally beginning to recognize the climate crisis and the transportation sector’s contribution to it. But as interests converge around EVs, their environmental benefits are being exaggerated: the absence of tailpipe emissions is being used to paint them as a silver bullet for sustainable mobility and to distract from the many problems they don’t solve—and the new ones they’ll create.

Car Economy

In his influential work Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880, the late British urban planner Peter Hall wrote that, “at the end of the 1920s, it was still possible to see the car as a benign technology.”2 The car had not yet cemented its dominance over North American streets, let alone those of Europe, and as a result its drawbacks were not immediately clear. Sprawling suburbs that enforced car dependency had not yet been built; automobile-produced air pollution caused by the mass adoption of cars was still decades away; cars were associated with touring instead of hours stuck in traffic; and their contribution to the climate crisis was an unimaginable concern. Still, their growing presence on city streets prompted a backlash.

When the automobile emerged, it found itself in competition with trains, streetcars, carriages, bicycles, and people’s own legs as the means for people to get around. Cars allowed drivers to go faster than other road users, but as they intruded into shared streets with rules and norms adapted to lower speeds, the death toll began to mount. In Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, historian Peter Norton documented that by the 1920s the disproportionate numbers of children and young women killed by cars spurred protests, demonstrations, and attempts to limit the speed and capabilities of automobiles. Ultimately, however, such efforts were not successful in halting the car’s takeover of the mobility system.

As automobile sales grew, and especially following the Second World War, a strong lobby formed that favored remaking communities and transportation infrastructure to facilitate—or even enforce—the mass adoption of the automobile. The automotive industry was at the forefront of this effort, but so were its suppliers (most notably the oil industry) and the new businesses that relied on the automobile. Meanwhile, suburban expansion served real estate developers, and the construction industry prospered with all the homes, roads, and highways that needed to be built. As these industries generated employment, particularly unionized manufacturing jobs, labor groups also got on board as the government subsidized the buildout of the automotive city and changed everything from tax policy to the legal code to encourage people to become motorists.

As the fossil fuel industry that powers our vehicles is responsible for environmental catastrophes, it becomes clear that we should rethink our dependence on the personal vehicle and our decision to build our communities in ways that force people to drive.

Manufacturing automobiles created jobs, building infrastructure generated economic activity, and the suburbs provided a means of wealth creation for certain segments of the population. However, there were and remain many drawbacks to mass automobility and the subsequent virtual abandonment of other forms of transportation across much of the United States. A significant decline in road deaths achieved in the early 2000s has been virtually wiped out. They’ve been soaring in recent years, reaching their highest number since 2005 with 42,915 deaths in 2021.3 On top of that, the air pollution generated by motor vehicles is estimated to cause an additional 53,000 premature deaths every year.4 Before the COVID-19 pandemic, commute times were actually getting longer as drivers spent more time in traffic and were forced to move further away from work due to soaring home prices.5 All that time behind the wheel also has detrimental effects on people’s health.6

Beyond the human cost, car ownership also has a high financial cost for the driver. In 2021, the American Automobile Association estimated that someone buying a new vehicle would pay an average of $9,666 every year when all the costs were accounted for. The bill is even higher for owners of trucks and SUVs, and it has soared as fuel prices have gone through the roof in early 2022.7 Even more crucial is the fact that transportation accounts for 27 percent of total emissions in the United States, while the fossil fuel industry that powers our vehicles is responsible for environmental catastrophes the world over,8 and it becomes clear that we should rethink our dependence on the personal vehicle and our decision to build our communities in ways that force people to drive. But the big question right now is whether focusing narrowly on electrification will enable us to achieve the necessary transformation.

EVs for the Few

When politicians and corporate leaders talk about EVs, it’s common for them to refer to the vehicles as “zero-emissions,” making them seem like the obvious solution to the climate impact of automobiles. But this conflates the lack of tailpipe emissions with an overall absence of emissions. The language is intentionally designed to mislead the public about the bargain we’re signing up for, leaving us in the dark about how little will really be solved by electrifying the vehicle fleet.

I want to be explicit about this point: in the vast majority of cases, the lifecycle emissions of an EV will be less than an internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV), but they may not always be as much lower as we expect. When an EV rolls off the assembly line, its emissions are higher than that of an ICEV because the production of its battery is an emissions-intensive process. After a certain number of miles driven, the lifecycle emissions of the vehicle will fall below that of an equivalent ICEV—the specific number depends on many factors, including the efficiency of the vehicle, the initial emissions profile of the battery, and whether the battery is being charged on a grid powered by fossil fuels or renewables.

However, the EV rollout has faced an important problem: many early EVs, particularly the much-hyped status symbols sold by Tesla, haven’t accumulated enough miles to make up for its higher initial emissions. For the most part, EVs are expensive, so many of the early buyers have been high-income individuals who do not use them as their primary vehicles. Not only were those wealthy drivers the beneficiaries of subsidies aimed at reducing the price of EVs, but since the vehicle’s real benefits come from replacing the miles driven in someone’s primary ICEV, they aren’t delivering the environmental benefits that we would expect.

The International Energy Agency estimates that the demand for minerals used in batteries will soar by 2040, including by up to 1,900 percent for nickel, 2,100 percent for cobalt, and 4,200 percent for lithium.

Norway is often held up as the standard-bearer for the EV transition, but when researchers at the University of Sussex and Aarhus University spoke to experts in the Nordic countries, they encountered significant concerns about the equity of the policy. One of the experts explained, “In the beginning, I thought the negative reactions to Teslas was [sic] related to envy or jealousy. But after thinking more about it, it’s a rational and emotional reaction. Why should we lose a lot of money for rich people getting a cheap, expensive, luxury car?” Another told the researchers that Tesla drivers have a high income, yet a Tesla Model X owner received subsidies equivalent to 30,000 trips on the bus or subway in 2016, showing just how much more the wealthy Tesla owner was valued above transit riders.9

Mining Boom
Electrification will be a key part of any transportation policy that aims to significantly reduce emissions, but the decision to place so much emphasis on electric personal vehicles and to distract consumers from their drawbacks—if not outright deny them—is financially and politically motivated. Many of the same interests that promoted the automobile in its early years now see a potential benefit in a relatively swift transition to EVs and the expectation that people replace their existing vehicles on an accelerated timeline.

The auto industry will profit from selling millions of new vehicles, and there’s an expectation that will create new manufacturing employment as companies scale up production. Those industrial jobs are likely to be unionized, a bonus for politicians when they hit the campaign trail. Then there’s the manufacture of the batteries and the extraction of all the minerals that will go into creating them—which will be a boon for the mining industry.

The International Energy Agency estimates that the demand for minerals used in batteries will soar by 2040, including by up to 1,900 percent for nickel, 2,100 percent for cobalt, and 4,200 percent for lithium.10 That will mean the expansion of existing mines and the opening of new ones, and thus major profits for international mining companies. The push to move supply chains to North America and Europe is already spurring protests to stop extractive projects with human and environmental consequences. But the majority of the mining will continue to occur in the Global South, where the externalities will be out of sight and mind for Western consumers.

For example, EVs recently overtook smartphones as the biggest source of demand for cobalt, representing 34 percent of the global total.11 Most cobalt continues to be extracted from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and even though Elon Musk has talked about experimenting with cobalt-free batteries, Tesla signed a deal with mining giant Glencore in 2020 for cobalt to supply its German and Chinese factories.12 Cobalt extraction in the DRC has produced enormous harm to the environment, the miners, and the surrounding communities. Tesla was one of several companies sued by the families of children who were killed or injured while mining cobalt in the DRC, including at mines controlled by Glencore.13

A truly sustainable world will require us to reckon not just with our emissions but with the broader harm and injustice that has arisen from our capitalist system.

Lithium is another of the minerals necessary to the electric transition, and while there are efforts to increase its extraction in North America and Europe, much of the future supply is likely to come from the salt flats of South America, where existing developments already threaten the water supplies of local communities without sharing the benefits. The governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Mexico are seeking to secure national control over their lithium supplies so that revenues may be used to improve living conditions for their citizens, rather than just padding the bottom lines of multinational mining companies. Unsurprisingly, global capitalist forces, which have long reaped the rewards, are mobilizing to secure their interests.

A Just Mobility Transition

In 2019, Bolivian president Evo Morales fled the country after false allegations of electoral irregularities, which he later called a “lithium coup” by U.S.-backed interests looking to gain control over the country’s reserves of the mineral. Musk added fuel to the fire when he tweeted, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” In truth, it’s highly unlikely that Morales was deposed over lithium, but the event and its broader context does point to the power struggles in a resource-intensive transition to supposedly “clean” technologies.

The wealth of the global North has long depended on the colonial and imperial subjugation of the rest of the world to extract resources and accumulate riches. The auto industry, with its vast supply chains, is no stranger to this history. Yet as we face the need to reassess not just how we move, but the larger social and economic structures through which we move, we have an opportunity to build an environmentally sustainable world that transcends those historical precedents. The future being pushed by the automotive industry, the mining industry, and the political leaders who want to perpetuate the status quo will do no such thing. A mobility transition that merely replaces ICEVs with EVs will maintain imperialist extraction from the South to serve the North, just with some tinkering for a different resource mix.

A truly sustainable world will require us to reckon not just with our emissions but with the broader harm and injustice that has arisen from our capitalist system. This in turn will compel us to challenge automobility, as well as the physical environment we’ve built to support it, at a much more fundamental level. Instead of obliging everyone to buy their own vehicle at great human, financial, and environmental cost so that businesses can enrich their owners and shareholders, the state needs to make serious investments that allow us to escape our forced dependence on the automobile. People tend to forget the massive commitment that forced an earlier generation into cars and out to the suburbs: that energy now needs to be channeled into reversing those mistakes.

If we want to get serious about solving climate change and global inequality, we need collective mobility solutions that center reliable and affordable public transit, while ensuring people can safely and conveniently choose to take their bike instead of owning a car. But we also need to think beyond mobility to the communities we live in, locating services within a reasonable distance of our homes and keeping housing affordable so we can live in dense, vibrant neighborhoods without having to worry about landlords and speculators sending costs through the roof. Realizing such a vision requires more than investment; it forces us to transform the economic structures that profit global capitalists, replacing them with structures that support a good life for all.

Notes
The White House, “FACT SHEET: President Biden Announces Steps to Drive American Leadership Forward on Clean Cars and Trucks,” The White House, August 5, 2021, www.whitehouse.gov
Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880 (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 167.
Michael Laris, “Deaths on U.S. Roads Soared to 16-Year High in 2021,” Washington Post, May 17, 2022, www.washingtonpost.com
Jennifer Chu, “Study: Air Pollution Causes 200,000 Early Deaths Each Year in the U.S,” MIT News, August 29, 2013, news.mit.edu
Christopher Ingraham, “Nine Days on the Road. Average Commute Time Reached a New Record Last Year,” The Washington Post, October 7, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com
Carolyn Kylstra, “10 Things Your Commute Does to Your Body,” Time, February 26, 2014, time.com
Ellen Edmonds, “Sticker Shock: Owning a New Vehicle Costs Nearly $10,000 Annually,” AAA Newsroom, August 19, 2021, newsroom.aaa.com
“Fast Facts on Transportation Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” United States Environmental Protection Agency, accessed August 1, 2022, www.epa.gov
Benjamin K. Sovacool et al., “Energy Injustice and Nordic Electric Mobility: Inequality, Elitism, and Externalities in the Electrification of Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) Transport,” Ecological Economics: The Journal of the International Society for Ecological Economics 157 (March 1, 2019): 205—17, doi.org
“Mineral Requirements for Clean Energy Transitions—The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions—Analysis,” IEA, accessed July 18, 2022, www.iea.org
Neil Hume, “Electric Vehicles Overtake Phones as Top Source of Cobalt Demand,” Financial Times, May 17, 2022, www.ft.com
David Stringer and Thomas Biesheuvel, “Tesla Strikes Deal to Buy Cobalt from Glencore ahead of Future Supply Squeeze,” Financial Post, June 16, 2020, financialpost.com
Annie Kelly, “Apple and Google Named in U.S. Lawsuit over Congolese Child Cobalt Mining Deaths,” The Guardian, December 16, 2019, amp.theguardian.com

https://mronline.org/2022/10/16/vehicles-of-extraction/

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China sets example by blazing green transition trail

By Erik Solheim | China Daily Global | Updated: 2022-10-17 09:26

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Wind turbines dominate the mountain ridge at the Baguanao Scenic Area in Shicheng county, Jiangxi province, on Aug 30. ZHU HAIPENG/FOR CHINA DAILY

Policymakers around the world have been facing a dilemma — how to deliver economic growth and at the same time preserve nature. Countries face the challenge of shifting to a path of win-win policies for the ecology and the economy.

For the developing world, this opens a new pathway to development, creating jobs and prosperity by going green. In this sense, China is setting an example for the developing world at large, which can take a leaf out of China's book.

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, China has abolished extreme poverty — 10 years ahead of the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development target — and made remarkable achievements in economic development.

According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, the nation's average contribution to global economic growth was the highest during the 2013-21 period, exceeding 30 percent. In 2021 alone, China's economic aggregate accounted for 18.5 percent of the world's total after currency translation based on average annual exchange rates — the second largest in the world and up 7.2 percentage points from its 2012 global share.

As a response to the call for all-out war against pollution, the concept of an ecological civilization was elevated to be a national strategy in 2012. An ecological civilization is a concept promoted by President Xi Jinping for balanced and sustainable development that features harmonious coexistence between mankind and nature.

This concept brings us a very different way of environmental thinking. It is positive, being focused on creating a better world for everyone.

An ecological civilization is predicated on the belief that humans can and should live better, healthier lives in harmony with nature. The emphasis is on how to organize the global community in a new way to work on issues with global implications. We should act out of respect for Mother Earth, on whom we all depend, and in so doing increase the happiness and dignity of human beings.

To build a beautiful China, the country has launched an ambitious plan for a system of national parks. China is on track to keep a total area of 230,000 square kilometers of land under national-park protection and give space to endangered species such as the giant panda, Siberian tiger and Tibetan antelope. The 10 national parks, which are spread across 12 provinces, are dedicated to protecting the habitats of vulnerable species such as snow leopards and bringing them back from the brink of extinction.

In addition, China is now by far the most enthusiastic tree planting nation in the world, having planted more than 78 billion trees in the past four decades, doubling the forest coverage rate from the early 1980s.

Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the nation is now taking the lead in renewable energies. Over the past decade, global solar panel manufacturing capacity has increasingly shifted from Europe, Japan and the United States to China, which has become a leader in investment and innovation in solar panels. The International Energy Agency said in a special report in July that China now holds a market share in excess of 80 percent in all the stages of solar panel manufacturing.

The latest UN projections suggest that the world's population could grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050, before reaching a peak of around 10.4 billion people during the 2080s. The population is expected to remain at that level until 2100.

The planetary crises such as climate change are putting the living environment of humans and other species in jeopardy. We need the concept of ecological civilization to achieve a harmonious relationship with nature.

The 20th CPC National Congress is an opportunity for China to celebrate more than 40 years of the most unprecedented economic growth anywhere and at any time in world history and the success of bringing nearly 100 million rural residents out of poverty. It is also the opportunity to highlight the country's resolve to accelerate its green transition.

The author is president of the Belt and Road Initiative Green Development Institute and former executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... 7ce16.html

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Red Alert...
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence 12 Oct 2022

Image
Image: Ingram Pinn

Red Alert...

A Love Supreme— A Love Supreme —A Love Supreme— First
Nation prayers for Mother Earth’s creatures and gifts… Amassing
spirits, protecting rivers/streams—Our lifeblood… A Love
Supreme— A Love Supreme —A Love Supreme surging seven
generations-deep—Needing new boots on the ground…

A Love Supreme— A Love Supreme —A Love Supreme First
Nation prayers for Mother Earth’s creatures and gifts… Amassing
spirits, protecting rivers/streams—Our lifeblood… A Love
Supreme— A Love Supreme —A Love Supreme surging seven
generations-deep—Needing new boots on the ground… Combatting
dangerous dances/lethal love songs for profits!

If water’s life—capitalism’s death! Death to our
Mother— profaned/poisoned—Her waters weaponized:
fouled Flint’s coffee brown, birthing babies with
brains showing signs of industrial strength damage…
Mississippi’s muddy mocha, unfit to the eye—much less to drink!
The Gulf’s greasy, slimy, mussel, crab, shrimp-killing BP
cesspool— inky class war crime against humanity…
Pennsylvania’s prison aqua, the cancerous, dirty, black devil’s
brew— Fracking fluid stew!

Calling all Climate Marchers!
Calling all Climate Marchers: wean yourselves from methane
promises of cross-dressing fossil fools fluent in Forked
Tongue— Haughty hot air huffers and puffers!

Calling all Climate Marchers!
Calling all Climate Marchers: wean yourselves from solar-powered
prisons/police state ‘visions—’ of organic, orange cotton jump-
suits; of re-cycled rubber sneakers and bamboo baton beatings…

Calling all Climate Marchers!
Calling all Climate Marchers wean yourselves from carbon
capturing corporate ‘compromises—’
Empire protected by solar-powered aircraft carriers and electric
tanks…


https://www.blackagendareport.com/red-alert
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Oct 18, 2022 2:35 pm

GLOBAL WARMING, THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT AND SOCIALISM
Posted by MLToday | Oct 17, 2022 | Other Featured Posts | 0

Global Warming, the Environmental Movement and Socialism

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BY CHARLES ANDREWS
October 15, 2022


The biggest environmental crisis facing humankind – greenhouse gas warming of the atmosphere – calls for a new society and new insights into the laws of nature. Anything less will bring more hurricanes, storms, wildfires, droughts, and crop failures until we learn this lesson and take revolutionary action.

The environmental movement – a worldwide, diffuse movement heavily staffed by youth and informed by scientists who speak bold truth – has righteously pushed this crisis into our face. The movement has also indicted micro-plastics in the ocean, pesticides in the soil, pollution in the air we breathe, and cancerous chemicals in our food.

What to do about it? Although the movement has no single charter of demands and solutions, we can list several common ones.

The single-family automobile is one of the worst contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Ride a bicycle or an electric scooter. Air travel is a disaster for the atmosphere; most of it should stop.

We are told that we must stop eating particular things or save them for a once-a-month treat. The industrial production of meat takes too much grain, gives off too much greenhouse gas, and poisons the soil with half-treated waste. Factory farms are a global polluting machine. Most food should be grown and raised locally, using more labor and less chemicals.

At the worst a Malthusian gloom pervades. There are simply too many people, more than the planet can sustain at an asserted “carrying capacity.”

On the other hand, one of the most progressive conclusions of the movement is its anti-militarism. Environmentalists have tallied the outsized contribution of air forces, navies, and armies to global warming.

Environmentalists, technology, and fiscal nudges

It is understandable when we see the emission of greenhouse gases as a consequence of technology. Technology is concrete, while capitalism is a pervasive net of economic relationships. Corporations – the engines of capitalist depredation – are largely free to ignore what their chosen technologies do to the environment.

Calling out the deadly effects of some technologies, environmentalists embrace others. Sections of the movement welcome imitations of meat from soy and other vegetables, for example. The big technological-environmental field today is the changeover of automobiles, trucks, ships, and even airplanes to run on battery-operated electric motors. Exactly how the electricity that charges the batteries will be generated is in contention.

How much of the environmental movement is anti-capitalist? It has skewered Chevron and the other big oil monopolists for their hypocrisy, their lies, and their willingness to put humankind at risk so long as Chevron makes a profit to the dying day. Environmentalists have gone after electric utilities over their mix of energy sources, too.

So far, however, only a sliver of the environmental movement has turned to revolutionary socialism. An equal regret is that the communist movement has not done enough theoretical, ideological, and organizational work to unite with environmentalists.[1]

Consequently, the magnificent mass anger of environmentalists expresses itself, and then the “practical” work begins. It comes down to carbon taxes, to incentives that reward producers who adopt low-carbon and low-methane technologies, and rebates for consumers who buy green products. Regulations may set deadlines by which time manufacturers must stop making internal combustion engines, gas kitchen ranges, and air conditioners that use CFC refrigerant.

The most elaborate government tool is carbon cap and trade. Corporations must get an allowance certificate for each metric ton of greenhouse gas their production process emits. The government may give them some tons of allowance and auction off more tons. Then corporations and speculators can trade allowances on a market. Cap and trade quickly became a swamp of technical disputes, competing projections, and back-room lobbying over next year’s limits.

Cap and trade tries to make global warming a cost item for corporations. Of course, they resist. And when they bow to the inevitable, they look for methods of production that also reduce labor cost. Or the corporation must raise the price; the well-to-do feel good about buying ecologically sound products, while broad sections of the working class can’t afford what used to be affordable.

Underlying such government subsidies and taxes is a belief that the technical means to reach net-zero emission of greenhouse gases are at hand or nearly so. The main technologies are solar and wind power, perhaps conventional nuclear fission, and removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into so-called carbon sinks, mainly more trees. Without going into details, two big problems are the low energy density of solar and wind compared with the oil they are to replace, and the deleterious effects of mining and refining their raw materials.

The U.S. government issued a programmatic statement on The Long-Term Strategy of the U.S. It aims at net-zero emissions by 2050. This “strategy” motivates the estimated $369 billion of climate-change subsidies enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. (The total is spread over ten years for most provisions.) The government admits, “The eventual U.S. pathway to net-zero emissions will depend on the evolution of technologies, the specifics of policy and regulatory packages, and factors such as economic growth, sociodemographic shifts, and market prices for commodities and fuels across the next three decades.” (p. 6)[2] The list reads like someone opened a bag of five billiard balls onto a pool table in the hope that they will come to rest in a straight line. There is no confidence that U.S. capitalism and its system of governance will get to net-zero by 2050.

Socialism and science

More than most controversial issues, the environmental problem requires attention to the back and forth between class interests and our powers of production, the productive forces. Global warming needs what can crudely be called technological fixes as well as scientific breakthroughs. Socialist politics alone will not do it. Technological marvels within capitalism will not do it. Socialism and technological effort must go together.

Communists standing in the ranks with working people have always combined our fight to defend wages, working conditions, and social support with the struggle to get rid of capitalism and build socialism. Communists as environmentalists must also combine the fight to address global warming with the struggle to get rid of capitalism and build socialism.

Profit drives a capitalist economy with no necessary relation to human welfare, while socialism develops the economy toward a defined set of goals. We want to bring global warming to a halt; we want everyone to have good food, housing, and healthcare; we want every worker to attain a rising cultural level, with opportunities to master two or three occupations of choice during his working life.

To build this socialism, we have two key tools. The first is communist politics, which continues throughout socialist society. Socialism either keeps advancing through a series of communist projects, or it falls back into capitalism.[3]

The second key tool is economic planning. Capitalists and their professors mock it. You can’t issue every factory, shop, and office daily work plans from one center, they tell us. That is a straw-man argument. The essence of economic planning is the overall allocation of investment. Next year, and over the next five years, what industries, technologies, and occupations shall we expand, and which shall we wind down?[4]

We find the answer by iterative planning exercises. Take a first stab at a plan. It must be consistent: each industry will have the inputs it needs from other industries, and the output of each industry will be taken up by users. Compare the plan with the goals. How many tons of greenhouse gases will be emitted? What healthcare needs will be met and which are still to be met? What changes of occupation does the plan require? These comparisons will point out how investment could be allocated better. Revise the plan and repeat.

Iterative discussion and calculation happen before the plan launches. This is the overall allocation of investment.

If the plan shows that we must invest in renewable energy production and shut down some oil refineries, let’s do it. There is no worry about Chevron’s profits and share price. Suppose we agree to renovate our cities with mass transit comprised of frequent runs along a dense network of streets, using buses and jitneys powered by electromagnetic lines laid under the streets. We can do it without resistance from General Motors, Toyota or Tesla.

No capitalist regime can direct the economy this way. Each capitalist executive invests where he sees the most profitable opportunity. The government can lay down a rule here and offer a tax incentive there. It’s all nibbling around the edges.

A historic change of energy base

Humankind is on the threshold of passing from industrial civilization powered by burning hydrocarbons to a fundamentally new energy base that supports and is supported by a new mode of production.

The human species began by applying our own muscle energy. We added the power of domesticated animals. This energy base took us through the eras of foraging and hunting and then agriculture. After several thousand years we added water and wind power in some places, using wooden mills.

The second great energy base of human society was burning (oxidizing) carbon. We moved from burning wood to coal and then to oil and other hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbon energy made industrialization possible. We created machines driven by the energy of burning carbon. Indeed, some machines were required in order to capture the energy of burning carbons: the steam engine and the internal combustion engine.

Scientific knowledge advanced hand in hand with the industrial revolution, principally mechanics, chemistry, and the marvels of electricity and electronics.

When the energy base was human and animal power, the mode of production was agrarian rule. Peasants toiled, and their crops and meat fed priests in ancient Egypt, lords and the Church in medieval Europe, landed gentry and mandarins in dynastic China. When the energy base is burning hydrocarbons, workers labor, and their output is the commodity wealth of capitalists.

We are at the door of both socialism and a new energy base of human society. We will find this foundation. We will attain greater insight into nature than was achieved by peasant wisdom and by the largely mechanical way of scientific thinking under capitalism.

Socialism puts more resources into science and technology than capitalism, not less. Socialism makes more use of the fruits of science and technology than capitalism, not less.

There are already hints of a new energy base. We know four basic forces in nature: gravity, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force, and electromagnetism. In 1989 Martin Fleischmann, an electrochemist and Fellow of the Royal Society, and Stanley Pons, the chemistry chair at the University of Utah, concluded from tabletop experiments that they had tapped the huge store of energy locked in nuclear bonds. Fleischmann and Pons gave a jump-start to the study of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR).[5] It is a misnomer; the locked-up energy is huge. The challenge is to tap it with a low-energy trigger of some kind.

Billions of dollars pour into attempts at nuclear fusion ignited by lasers that heat a tiny target inside a complicated container to several times the temperature of the sun. Meanwhile, the field of LENR has not done well. Government grants have been a tiny fraction of one percent of the funds given to high-energy nuclear fusion projects. Con men swept into the void, swindling investors with physics gobbledygook and fake devices.

LENR requires deep, innovative scientific work. It is much more difficult than the big nuclear fusion experiments. The latter are more applied research than new science. Really basic research moves slowly under capitalism. Typically, we must explore many disparate avenues; most will lead to a dead end. Basic discoveries are difficult to lock up in property that one capitalist can block other capitalists from taking freely. Truly new results threaten a vast amount of assets on corporate books. LENR would decimate the hydrocarbon corporations, the electric utilities, and many other industries.

While LENR deserves a big push, it is too early to say that LENR is the door to the new energy base. Solar, wind, tidal energy, and improved types of fission reactors (like an update of the breeder or integral fast reactor) will probably serve as stop-gaps, along with better insulation of buildings and the planting of trees to absorb carbon.

One way or another, we need a new energy base, and we can find it. We need it to escape further disaster from global warming. We need it to pass from the deadly capitalist world to a better world for all. Let environmentalists and socialists find unity in this quest – and in revolutionary action to embark on it.

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] There are also the so-called democratic socialists. But try to make sense of their ricochet between capitalism and socialism: “Creating a fully ecological society will require a revolutionary transformation to replace the capitalist social order based on exploitation and oppression with a new society based on cooperation, equity, and justice. A Green New Deal must serve as a bridge toward this future. To that end, we support the resolutions introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House and Sen. Ed Markey in the Senate while recognizing that they are conversation starters.” “DSA’s Green New Deal Principles,” Feb. 28, 2019. Next, seven principles in effect demand that capitalism behave like socialism.

[2] The Long-Term Strategy of the U.S., United States Department of State
and the United States Executive Office of the President, Washington DC. November 2021.

[3] See “Socialism is a series of communist projects.”

[4] For more on the basic mechanism of socialist economy, see No Rich, No Poor by this author.

[5] LENR is not necessarily “cold fusion” of atoms; there are a variety of reactions among the weak and strong nuclear forces.

https://mltoday.com/global-warming-the- ... socialism/

NO NATIONAL SECURITY WITHOUT CLIMATE SECURITY
Posted by MLToday | Oct 17, 2022

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BY THE NATIONAL PRIORITIES PROJECT
September 2022

Climate change represents arguably the biggest threat to U.S. national security – and human security – of the 21st century. Decades of inaction have led to worsening and more frequent extreme weather events, with associated loss of life and property. And yet in Washington, “national security” is still primarily synonymous with military approaches to geopolitical challenges.


A Twenty–Year Failure to Invest in Climate Action
Through FY 2022, climate change prevention represented barely a blip in the nation’s budget:

• In the 20 years following 9/11, the U.S. spent $21 trillion on militarized versions of security, including the Pentagon and war, veterans’ programs, homeland security, and federal law enforcement. For less than a quarter of that cost, $4.5 trillion, the U.S. could have built a fully renewable national energy grid.
• In 2018, the average taxpayer handed over more than $3,400 for the military and nuclear weapons, $123 for disaster relief for increasingly frequent fires, storms, and floods, but barely more than $8 for renewable energy and energy efficiency.
• In 2021, the average taxpayer gave more than $900 to corporate military contractors, 18 times more than the $51 for public transit and trains that reduce fossil fuel emissions.

The Inflation Reduction Act Doesn’t Measure Up to Military Investments
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) represents the largest investment in climate security in this nation’s history. And yet, climate investment under the IRA will average just $37 billion per year over the next ten years. The annual budget for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons is now more than 21 times that much, and is poised to grow by as much as $65 billion this year alone

https://mltoday.com/no-national-securit ... -security/

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Poor nations to demand climate justice at Cop27

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An old hotel is submerged by rising water levels in Lake Baringo in Kampi ya Samaki, Kenya on July 20, 2022.
AUNITED NATIONS’ group called today for compensation to poorer countries suffering from climate change to be high up on the Cop27 agenda.

Least Developed Countries group chairwoman Madeleine Diouf Sarr said that the UN conference in Egypt next month should “capture the voice and needs of the most climate-vulnerable nations and deliver climate justice.”

Ms Sarr said the group, comprised of 46 nations that make up just a small fraction of global emissions, would like to see “an agreement to establish a dedicated financial facility” that pays nations that are already facing the effects of climate change at the summit.

Issues such as who pays for poorer nations to transition to cleaner energy, making sure no communities get left behind in an energy transition and boosting how well vulnerable people can adapt to climate change have long been on the bloc’s agenda, but little progress has been made.

One pledge that remains unmet is the promise of $100 billion (£89 bn) a year in climate aid made over a decade ago.

Developing nations still face serious challenges accessing clean energy finance, with Africa attracting just 2 per cent of the total clean energy investment in the last 20 years, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

The UN weather agency recently estimated that global clean energy supplies must double by 2030 for the world to limit global warming within the set targets.

“We can no longer afford to have a Cop that is ‘all talk’,” Ms Sarr said.

“The climate crisis has pushed our adaptation limits, resulted in inevitable loss and damage, and delayed our much-needed development.”

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article ... tice-cop27

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GREEN CAPITALISM IN CRISIS: END OF A CHIMERA (AND II)

Eder Pena

Oct 17, 2022 , 12:29 p.m.

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The transition that the elites have designed intends to change so that their emissions, consumption levels and accumulation do not change (Photo: Getty Images)

The modern agro-urban-industrial system and the globalist financial megabingo underpin capitalism and narrate a development that is not made for all the inhabitants of the planet. It is heard everywhere that if we wanted to live in the style of the American middle class, we would need up to 3.5 planets.

What few people ask is how many planets it would take to live in a "green" world. Green capitalism does not question power as it is exercised in the so-called "global village", much less the levels of technological and cultural dependence that this corporate power imposes.

RENEWABLES, ALTERNATIVES, BUT... AT WHAT COST?

Since the Paris Agreement in 2015, the energy "transition" towards renewable energies has been launched with great enthusiasm, while it was said that the use of fossil energies (oil, coal and gas) could end in 2050. A report led by the Stanford University (2017), in which other universities in the United States and Europe have participated, points out that:

The use of renewables would supply 139 countries that currently account for 99% of world consumption.
Such energies would create 52 million jobs and more than compensate for the jobs lost with the energy transition.
The demand for other renewable energy (solar photovoltaic and wind, mainly) was projected to expand from 6.8 million barrels equivalent per day in 2020 to 36.6 million bpd in 2045.
They are the fastest growing energy sources with an estimated 10.4% share of the global mix in 2045, up from just 2.5% in 2020.
However, despite this significant advance, the consumption of fossil fuels, according to OPEC itself, will represent 69.9% (oil: 28.1%, coal: 17.4% and gas: 24.4%) in the world energy matrix in 2045.
This is a very expensive and complicated effort in which different countries and regions will be affected unevenly, so analysts and forecasters have said for years, however slow and orderly it may be, a transition from an unjust world also in the energetic to another equally unfair, invites us to question the value of the effort.

With contradictory approaches in the design of the world they claim, the elites support terms such as " the Great Reset ", "the new green deal" or "the fourth industrial revolution". They know that "green" technologies depend on complex global supply chains powered by fossil fuels at every stage of their manufacture, transportation, deployment, maintenance and decommissioning.

Another report ( PDF ) on the generation of electricity and its evolution throughout these first years of "transition" shows that renewable energies, at the moment, only accompany the growth in electricity consumption, but are not replacing gas, nor coal, which continue to grow.

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In China, the increase in the implementation of “green” energies such as wind (blue) and solar (yellow) has been evident, as well as the vertiginous increase in the use of fossil sources such as coal (coal) (Photo: EIA)

Few question the Promethean goal of economic growth and increased living standards for the North, because in their imagination it is predestined to be universal. Tim Watkins, author of The Conscience of the Sheep , says that there were two periods in the history of Europe in which their ancestors approached the peak of what was technologically possible, using only renewable energy:

The Roman Empire of the 1st century, which reached a level of technology that would not be seen again until the 17th century.
The Atlantic slave and merchandise trade system in the 17th century, also founded on looting and piracy.
Both depended on a mass of slaves to keep the system running. The supremacy achieved by the Euro-Atlantic axis, and which has now been replicated by other emerging powers, always has the "renewable" and endosomatic energy of the slaves and soldiers that we poor people provide. Also market systems based on total looting, in which resources are not compensated in equivalent terms.

CONCERNS ABOUT THE "GREEN" TRANSITION
International forums are concerned that some industries and countries will pay a higher cost to transform to "net zero" than others, because of the risk of a "hasty and disorderly" transition that would make markets and energy prices still more volatile than they are now. This would create risks of power supply disruptions and slower economic growth.

Surely they are also worried about the lives that will be lost if everything turns out differently from the models we talked about in part I of this research , but they don't have time to talk about "life" when "growth" and the markets are ahead. They convince us every day that the growth and stability of the markets are equivalent to a better quality of life, and this will be the case as long as "quality of life" is consumption, and as long as consumption is the deterioration of human and extra-human life.

The consulting firm McKinsey & Company has analyzed data in its new report :

The transition required for the world to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 would require spending of $275 trillion between 2021 and 2050, or $9.2 trillion in average annual spending on physical assets, 10% of global GDP.
This annual average includes investment in the energy, mobility, industry, building, agriculture and forestry, and other land use sectors. The estimated spending on all of that must be $3.5 trillion per year more than today.
20% of the world's gross domestic product (GDP) is found in the fossil fuel sector and the automotive sector. If decarbonized, the production costs of steel and cement would increase by around 30% and 45%, respectively, by 2050, compared to today.
On the other hand, they are also concerned that high raw material prices for the key metals of the energy transition (lithium, nickel, aluminium, copper and cobalt) could undo years of cost reduction and delay renewable energy projects and targets for electric vehicles due to commodity price shocks.

When they admit that there is a "crisis" it is because they seem to foresee the end of the times in which these raw materials were cheap. According to the latest publication by Rystad Energy, a prestigious Norwegian energy research company, 25% of solar panels and batteries produced on the European market are in danger.

The report explains that low-carbon manufacturers based their production capacity on stable and cheap energy prices, an equation that is broken in 2022: if the price of electricity (mainly from Russian gas) does not fall and stabilises, Europe's "green energy" production and competitiveness is seriously at risk.

If it's not cheating, it seems.

NET ZERO: "BURN NOW AND PAY LATER"
But the "international community" and the mechanism that accompanies our pattern of scientific knowledge already have more solutions bathed in magic and should be. They are closely linked and are called "Net Zero Emissions" (or Net Zero) and "Nature Based Solutions" (NBS), both based on carbon offsets. His approach is simple: if trees capture carbon, the planting of many more can be financed or protected areas can be created to offset the amount of CO 2 or other greenhouse gases (GHG) that are emitted.

It starts from a perspective in which "nature" is considered a capital or an asset, something that we can put a price on and trade in the market. This exchange is carried out in the financial markets, through the creation of carbon credits. And that's what governments mean by "net zero": they don't really intend to reduce their emissions to zero, they simply intend to "offset" those emissions elsewhere, paying to make it appear that way.

Net Zero is the point at which any residual GHG emissions are balanced by the technologies that remove them from the atmosphere, in effect helping to perpetuate the belief in technological salvation and lessening the sense of urgency around the need to stop emissions now. As long as we all wish hard enough, we could replace all coal, gas, and oil with sunlight, wind, and perhaps celestial frost. And by doing so, nothing would really change.

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Carbon offsets are based on mechanisms that put the weight on initiatives that reduce the sense of urgency around the need to curb emissions now (Photo: ChutterSnap)

To be productive, Net Zero would have to generate more surplus energy for the economy at large than is currently available from fossil fuels, in turn they have been suffering from a decline in surplus energy since the 1970s and that has reached a peak oil , as has been said.

In Europe, renewables have a rather parasitic relationship with the economy, absorbing surplus energy through subsidies, while simultaneously undermining the energy system in general. The German and UK governments chose to shut down coal and nuclear power (also expensive and subsidized) long before anyone had invented a storage solution or a viable (non-hydrogen) alternative to gas to balance intermittency.

“Renewable” technologies were not ready for two years of economic lockout due to the pandemic, for the disconnection of Russian gas, nor for the dismantling of fossil fuel subsidies. Even if today its politicians, mired in measures like boiler bans, 20kph speed limits and speculative green bubbles, were to do a U-turn as protesting crowds in Europe are calling for, there may not be as much oil and gas left cheap to produce.


Spending in the Net Zero economy will be unevenly distributed around the world. The same "developing" countries, producers of fossil fuels and minerals, but also those most exposed to the effects of climate change, will have to spend more as a percentage of their GDP than other countries. For sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, India and other Asian nations, this spending would be about 1.5 times that of advanced economies, or more, according to McKinsey.

No one dares to say that what the system needs in order not to shipwreck is for the working classes to give up their "quality of life" in the cities. Much of the (increasingly debt-based) consumption has fueled the financialized economy (what we call megabingo ) over the last three decades; that would have to go away.

It is necessary to rethink a system in which the accumulation of a few, directly proportional to growth, is not the ultimate goal. Most of the work will have to be refocused on truly essential activities, such as growing food and transporting basic goods. But no one is prepared for that conversation.

SBN: THE CHIMERA OF A "GREEN" INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Governments and mega-corporations such as Nestlé, BP, Chevron, Equinor, Total, Shell, Eni, BHP, Dow Chemical Company, Bayer, Boeing, Microsoft, Novartis, Olam, Coca-Cola, Danone, Unilever, etc., added to a network of Conservation NGOs (or Conservation Industrial Complex), almost always financed by these corporations, promoted SBNs at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), which took place in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2021. However, they were classified as a "dangerous scam" by 257 organizations, networks and movements from 61 countries.

"It's a concept that the UK government, the world's biggest polluters and the conservation industry are trying to sell," they said in a statement .

The mega-corporations and their "green" NGOs fight for corporate welfare through government subsidies and handouts, because that's what neoliberalism is for. Between bogus green crowdfunding scams like solar roads and tree-shaped Savonius wind turbines, which consume far more energy than they can produce, they want us to believe that they are fighting vested interests on a global scale to save the future generations from the catastrophe.

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The manufacture of wind rotors consumes more energy than it can produce, in addition, every 3 megawatts requires high amounts of concrete, steel, copper, aluminum, rare earths, zinc and molybdenum (Photo: File)

This is a global interest that is currently worth about $900 billion and is expected to rise to $1.2 trillion by 2030. Adding up the spectrum of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment, there are about $50 billion of dollars today, which will increase to 160 billion in the next decade.

SBNs first appeared in 2009, in a document prepared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for global climate negotiations, the concept was described by the Conservation Industrial Complex as the "forgotten solution" to climate change. The approach: nature has the solutions to our various environmental crises and, in the case of climate change, we can mitigate it by avoiding more emissions from natural and agricultural ecosystems by creating more Protected Areas (PAs) and/or increasing carbon sequestration (within or outside of them) by planting trees or restoring forests.

THE THIN LINE OF CLIMATE COLONIALISM
Instead of facing crisis (or change?), governments, companies and big conservation NGOs are asking the financial sector for help because 30% of global climate mitigation can be achieved through SBN, according to global debates on climate and biodiversity.

According to 2017 estimates, (re)forestation accounts for almost half of the climate mitigation potential, but would require planting trees in an estimated area of ​​almost 700 million hectares, almost the size of Australia. Where is that land to be found? In France or the UK (supporters of SBNs)?

The clear risk is that many indigenous peoples and local communities, on whose lands 80% of biodiversity is found and who are least responsible for the climate crisis, lose their lands; also that biodiverse forests are generally replaced with monoculture plantations, some transgenic .

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According to the World Forest Movement, industrial transgenic tree plantations accelerate the depletion of water, contamination with agrochemicals, the destruction of biodiversity and the loss of traditional livelihoods (Photo: File)

A new European Union Commission biodiversity initiative called NaturAfrica treats PAs as a massive carbon sink, which can "provide exciting opportunities to generate income streams for communities through carbon credits." Several human rights organizations and independent investigations have shown for years how the creation of PAs, especially in Africa and Asia, is done without the consent of indigenous or local communities, who lose full access to their ancestral lands, and are accompanied by an increase in militarization and violence.

The conservation industry drives SBNs because they can make large sums by selling carbon credits from the PAs they manage to fund new PAs and pay salaries of more than $1 million to their CEOs. Meanwhile they ignore the exploitation of human and extra-human nature for profit and accelerate excessive consumption, driven by the Global North.

Of the 20 targets of the previous global biodiversity action plan , which covered the period 2010-2020, the only one achieved was to increase the area of ​​the Earth designated as PA to 17%, however, biodiversity has decreased faster and faster during the same period.

A Cambridge University study published in 2019, which analyzed more than 12,000 PAs in 152 countries, revealed that, with a few individual exceptions, reducing human pressure on wildlife has failed.

BLOOD BONDS
In other so-called carbon sink initiatives, existing vegetation must be cleared and, in addition to new plantations being more susceptible to fire, most are harvested within a few years to make paper and charcoal that quickly return all the carbon captured. to the atmosphere. Real forests of native trees would need to grow for decades before they start absorbing much carbon.

One of the close and emblematic cases is that of the Montes de María, in northern Colombia, where there were 40 massacres with 115 deaths between 1991 and 2003 carried out by paramilitary groups. These events caused more than 470,000 survivors to flee their homes by selling, giving away or abandoning their land.

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Even when the Colombian company Argos develops an "environmental project" with which it sells "green" bonds, a court ruled against it because the company did not prove its "good faith" without fault when buying some hectares in Montes de María (Photo : File, Archive)

Through an act called " in good faith " by its defense, in 2005 the Argos cement company bought some 1,000 hectares of 26 farms from the victims of the conflict, after the demobilization of the Héroes de Los Montes de María Bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), but in the midst of the action of other illegal groups. Then he bought another 5,000 more and began to use those lands for planting and subsequent marketing of teak wood ( Tectona grandis ), as part of an environmental project with which they still support the issuance of "green" bonds.

The same company, sued by the victims of the conflict, carries out carbon offset business by issuing bonds with high demand and declares that it has voluntarily planted up to 114 million trees, among other measures that would qualify as SBN.

The global environmental and social impact of wealthy elites on human and nonhuman nature has been such that the post-Industrial Revolution period, simultaneous human and planetary well-being, has been called the Anthropocene , and will not be reversed in the long run if they continue accumulation and excessive consumption of the rich. The more apt name should be Capitalocene , fueled by economic systems and international trade mechanisms that allow the Global North to shift that impact onto the world's poor.

It is challenging to achieve sufficient decoupling of these detrimental environmental and social impacts from economic growth through technological innovation alone, rather the profit-driven mechanism of prevailing economic systems precludes the necessary reduction in impacts and resource utilization per se . .

https://misionverdad.com/investigacione ... imera-y-ii

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Analysis: Nine key moments that changed China’s mind about climate change

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JIANQIANG LIU
25.10.2021 | 8:00am
CHINA POLICY
Analysis: Nine key moments that changed China’s mind about climate change

Over the past year, China’s president Xi Jinping has made three key commitments to tackle climate change.

In September 2020, he told the United Nations general assembly: “We aim to have CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.”

Then, last month, he offered a further commitment to the same gathering of world leaders. China “will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad”, he said via videolink.

The pledges represent the latest staging posts on China’s long journey towards tackling its carbon emissions, which, currently, are the largest of any nation.

However, China’s attitude to addressing climate change has undergone a significant transformation over the course of this century.

Little over a decade ago, China was strongly arguing against reducing the emissions being caused by its booming, coal-fuelled economic growth. Instead, it said rich, developed nations should be leading the way.

Speaking to a diverse range of experts within China and beyond, Carbon Brief has learned that Xi has personally played “the most important role” in this shift in views.

Below, Carbon Brief describes nine key moments over the past two decades that have helped to influence China’s attitudinal change.

These moments – many of which have not been widely reported before – do not include the more obvious important incidents, such as Xi becoming China’s leader in 2012, or China ratifying the Paris Agreement in 2016.

But each of them – some of which might appear trivial at first – has impacted and influenced China’s current stance on climate change.

Walking through each one in turn chronologically, this article then concludes with a summary of the three broader reasons why China’s stance on climate change has shifted.


1. 2003: Xi starts a newspaper column called ‘Zhijiang Xinyu’
2. 2004: Concept of ‘Green GDP’ is evoked
3. 2005: Xi gives ‘lucid water and lush mountains’ speech
4. 2009: Hu Angang calls for a ‘green revolution’
5. 2012: Zou Ji plots a ‘Kuznets curve’ for China
6. 2013: Beijing struck by record-breaking smog
7. 2014: Xi says China’s economy has reached a ‘new normal’
8. 2018: Xi’s ‘Thought on Ecological Civilisation’ established
9. 2020: Xie Zhenhua coordinates new research on ‘low-carbon transition’
Summary: Three reasons why China’s stance on climate change has shifted

2003: Xi starts a newspaper column called ‘Zhijiang Xinyu’
Many of the China experts interviewed by Carbon Brief for this article say that one of Xi Jinping’s most distinctive characteristics is that he attaches great importance to environmental protection and sustainable development – something that is in stark contrast to previous Chinese leaders.

Furthermore, this characteristic was clear to see years before he became China’s top leader in 2012.

Evidence of this first arises in a series of newspaper articles Xi wrote which show that he was one of the first officials to realise that China’s “energy-intensive and high-polluting” economic model was unsustainable.

From 2002 to 2007, Xi, then in his early 50s, was the secretary of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee, the region’s highest ranking party official. Zhejiang is a province on the east coast of China. It went through rapid economic development following China’s “reform and opening up” – a national policy devised by Deng Xiaoping, then the nation’s leader, in 1978 with the aim of “opening up” China to the world.

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Zhejiang province is located in the Yangtze river delta area in southeast China. The designations employed and the presentation of the material on this map do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of Carbon Brief concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. Credit: Carbon Brief.

On 25 February 2003, Zhejiang Daily, the official daily newspaper of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee, introduced a new opinion column called “Zhijiang Xinyu.” (The term “Xinyu” is inspired by a 1,600-year-old classic Chinese text called “Shishuo Xinyu“, 世说新语, which, translated, means “a new account of the tales of the world”. Zhijiang is the name of a key river in the region.) The author was listed as “Zhe Xin”, which is Xi’s pseudonym.

Xi wrote this column for four years and, on average, published one article per week. The articles were normally very short – with most of them comprising just 200-300 Chinese characters.

Xi later said: “That was like documenting my daily feelings in a few words.”

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Xi Jinping wrote “officials should serve the people, not themselves” in an article published on 12 May 2004 in Zhejiang Daily.

On 25 March 2007, Xi left Zhejiang to work in Shanghai. On that day, he published his very last piece in the newspaper – after having penned 230 articles in total. Xi’s last column was a special edition containing not one, but two entries – one cautioning officials not to become “bookworms” and the other advising them to regularly check and control their “wants”.

“Zhijiang Xinyu” covered a wide range of topics. Some articles talked about how to drive the economic and social development of Zhejiang. Others focused on officials’ work ethics and guided them to view power and their interests “correctly”. A few even advised officials to read more, cultivate “delight in life” and improve the writing of their official documents.

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A screenshot of Zhejiang Daily, dated 20 February, 2006. In the article, Xi quoted five ancient Chinese sayings to warn officials to be “honest”. Source: Zhejiang Daily.

Carbon Brief analysis of Xi’s 232 articles shows that at least 22 – or 9.5% of the total – touched upon environment-related subjects, such as environmental protection, sustainable development, circular economy, conservation-oriented society and reducing resource consumption and pollution.

This was extremely unusual for that time. As Xi was writing “Zhijiang Xinyu”, no other provincial-level official from China’s 30-plus provinces and regions were routinely promoting environmental protection and sustainable development. For them, the most crucial thing was economic growth, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP).

After China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, it underwent an economic boom. Its per-capita GDP rose from US$1,038 in 2001 to US$6,767 in 2013 and its economy jumped from the sixth to second largest in the world. At the same time, China became known as the “world’s factory”.

When Xi worked in Zhejiang, China’s bureaucratic assessment system regarded GDP as the most important indicator. As a result, officials were keen to seek investment in industrial factories to drive their regions’ economic growth and, in turn, boost their own work performance.

Energy, chemical and steel projects quickly became a typical official’s “first choice” because of the considerable investment they required. However, these projects also brought with them high energy consumption, high pollution and high emissions. But most officials simply ignored the environmental consequences.

At the same time, Xi was expressing his opinions in plain, non-bureaucratic language, as seen in this article published on 16 May 2005:

“Since the reform and opening up, the average annual economic growth rate of our province has reached 13%, but it has also paid a heavy environmental price. Now, the problem of environmental pollution is no longer a partial or temporary problem.


The Jiangnan water town is polluted and there is no water to drink, so it is necessary to transfer water from here and buy water from there. The coastal waters are polluted and red tides occur frequently. This is like borrowing money to do business. The money is earned, but it also owes a lot of debts to the environment and at the same time pays high interest rates. Repaying debts is justified. It is better to pay the debts of the ecological environment as early as possible, and take the initiative early, otherwise there will be no way to explain to future generations.


Why should we strive to build a resource-saving and environment-friendly society? You are kind to the environment, and the environment is friendly; if you pollute the environment, the environment will turn around one day, and will retaliate ruthlessly against you.”


Xi later said in 2018:

“I had always taken ecological and environmental work very seriously. During my terms in Zhengding, Xiamen, Ningde, Fujian, Zhejiang and Shanghai – among other places – I treated [the ecological and environmental] work as an important mission and a major task.”

His enthusiasm for environmental protection was even evident when he was a young man. This is reflected in a letter sent by Xi on 6 January 2020 in reply to student representatives of the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate:

“Over four decades ago, I lived and worked for many years in a small village on the Loess Plateau in western China. Back then, the ecology and environment there was seriously damaged due to over-development and the local people were trapped in poverty as a result. This experience taught me that man and nature are a community of life and that the damage done to nature will, ultimately, hurt mankind. I have since put forward the concept that lucid waters and lush mountains [see below] are invaluable assets in themselves.”


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Xi Jinping (second from the left) in 1973, aged 20, posing with his colleagues in Yanchuan county of Northwest China’s Shaanxi province during a period known as “up to the mountains and down to the farms”. The period was part of China’s decade-long Cultural Revolution and saw millions of “educated youngsters” being sent from their urban homes to the countryside to “learn” from farmers for several years. Xi lived in rural Shaanxi for seven years. Source: Sohu.com.

(much, much more....)

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-ni ... te-change/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

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Cashing in on carbon capture: How Big Oil will spend our money
Originally published: Food & Water Watch on October 17, 2022 by Jorge Aguilar (more by Food & Water Watch) | (Posted Oct 19, 2022)

The crises of the past few years have done a number on our economy. From rising rent, to climbing grocery bills; from a deadly pandemic to climate-fueled natural disasters.

Recently, our elected officials have passed two major legislation packages that aim to bring relief to workers and families. These packages have also been touted as environmental wins that will help us fight and adapt to climate change. But they also came with major gifts to Big Oil.

These gifts are endangering our chances for a livable future. And while everyday people struggle to pay their bills, our taxpayer money is headed for Big Oil’s already overflowing pockets.

In one of the greatest heists of our climate crisis, the companies responsible for the crisis are raking in billions of our taxpayer dollars. And much of that money is being poached through the industry’s latest scam–carbon capture and storage.

Carbon Capture Flushes Our Money Down An Oil Well
Carbon capture refers to pie-in-the-sky greenwashing technologies meant to remove carbon pollution from smokestacks or the atmosphere. And Big Oil is all for it, because it means they can go about business as usual–polluting and plundering, just with a shiny new toy attached.

In fact, the corporations responsible for the climate crisis stand to profit from many of the carbon capture projects planned. Thanks to all the recent hype, ExxonMobil announced it expects the carbon capture market to grow $2 trillion through 2040. It’s now positioning itself as a major player in that field, despite their disinterest in clean energy so far.

That’s because rather than combatting climate change, carbon capture will only prolong the fossil fuel industry.

This technology is incredibly energy-intensive. Food & Water Watch found that if every power plant in the U.S. were retrofitted with it, we would use more natural gas and coal than we already do (39 and 43% more, respectively).

Moreover, while proponents claim all the carbon will be stored safely underground, that hasn’t played out so far. At least 95% of CO2 currently captured is used to push more fossil fuels out of the ground via enhanced oil recovery.

Our government has already invested billions of our dollars in carbon capture scams. And that money has only produced more climate pollution and more profits for Big Oil.

The U.S. Has Already Spent Billions On Failed Carbon Capture Projects
The U.S. has piloted carbon capture projects for over a decade now, with little to show for it.

It began with the failure of the 1980s “clean coal” scam, which industry claimed would remove carbon pollution from the coal equation. Then, in 2009, Congress invested $3.4 billion in carbon capture. That money funded nine huge projects, of which only two remain operational. None of the carbon capture power plant projects are still running.

These pilots have failed for a number of reasons, like construction complications and lack of economic viability, even with government subsidies. Moreover, all carbon capture projects have failed to capture the amount of carbon they promised. Many captured less than half. In fact, the use of carbon capture in this country has led to a net increase in emissions, thanks to all the energy it requires.

Despite the failures, faith (and funds) in carbon capture remain alive and well. That’s because some politicians are willing to do the bidding of energy corporation executives who see the climate crisis as yet another money-making opportunity.

If Big Oil Has Its Way, We’ll Keep Spending On Carbon Capture
In recent years, our government has ramped up investments in the carbon capture boondoggle. In 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law designated more than $7 billion in taxpayer money to carbon capture projects. That’s in addition to the $2.7 billion in regular appropriations from the Department of Energy from 2009 to 2021.

Moreover, in 2008, Congress established 45Q, a tax credit to companies using carbon capture technology. Funded with taxpayer money, companies could “earn” credit with every ton of CO2 they claimed they could capture. By 2020, companies claimed almost all of the available credit (estimated at $886 million)–even though most carbon capture projects failed to work at the scale promised, or at all.

Now, this year’s Inflation Reduction Act will grow the 45Q program, allowing companies to “earn” even more money per ton of captured CO2 claimed. The IRA also lowered the amount of carbon a facility can claim to sequester to qualify for the tax credit. As a result, a congressional research agency estimates that 45Q alone will cost taxpayers $3.2 billion over the next 10 years.

We Can–And Must–Stop Carbon Capture In Its Tracks
Economic and climate anxieties have pushed public opinion ever more in favor of getting our emissions in check. Oil and gas executives have happily hopped on the bandwagon–while getting away with polluting even more and even longer. While corporations tout new climate and “net-zero” goals, they siphon billions of our taxpayer dollars for failing schemes and lip service.

Because they know the truth as much as we do–carbon capture is an unproven, unrealistic racket that distracts from real climate action.

There are plenty of important investments our tax dollars could fund. From renewable energy deployment and climate resilience, to infrastructure improvements and programs supporting working families. But right now, Big Oil is sweet-talking Congress into funneling our money toward their carbon capture scam.

We can’t let them get away with it any longer.

https://mronline.org/2022/10/19/cashing ... n-capture/

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Anti-oil protesters throw tomato soup on van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” Screenshot from Twitter.

Disruptive action on the climate deserves our support
Originally published: Canadian Dimension on October 23, 2022 by Nick Gottlieb (more by Canadian Dimension) | (Posted Oct 25, 2022)

Earlier this month, a pair of young activists with a group called Just Stop Oil threw soup on a Van Gogh painting at a gallery in London.

I am tempted to not even clarify this, but the painting was covered by glass and is unharmed.

Many prominent climate pundits, including climatologist and commentator Michael Mann, condemned the action. Mann even went so far as suggesting it might have been a false flag operation devised by devious oil industry agents to turn people away from climate action.


He was far from alone in his condemnation. Indeed, many have argued that actions like this alienate the public and effectively reduce public support for climate causes. But this is a questionable conclusion in itself. The reality is the research on social change and radical protest is very murky. We do not know what works and what does not. If we did, we would have won by now.

The bigger problem with this argument, though, is the logical jump that comes afterwards: the unspoken assumption that the key missing ingredient in achieving climate action is more public support. It is also a basic premise of liberalism. We live in democracies, therefore when the public moves in a certain direction, legislation will follow.

The problem, of course, is that we have centuries of experience demonstrating that this is not actually true; that liberal democracies are complex systems with many nodes of power, and public opinion is often not one of the strongest among them.

The most basic evidence for this is all around us: in the U.S., Medicare for All enjoys supermajority public support. In both the U.S. and Canada, wealth taxes are overwhelmingly popular, supported even by conservatives. Are we on the cusp of seeing either of these become law? No.

Looking specifically at climate makes the point even more clearly. Seventy-four percent of Americans and 86 percent of Canadians support the Paris Agreement. Sixty-five percent of Americans and 70 percent of Canadians think “governments should do more to address climate change.” Nearly 40 percent in both countries think governments need to do “much more.”

Despite this, the assumption—from Mann and from many others working or organizing in the climate space—is that we just need more public support. I have even had an elected official in British Columbia say it to me explicitly: that they just need more public support in order to make the climate-related votes they know are morally correct, and urgent.

A new study in Nature Communications assessed this phenomenon directly, naming it as a “false social reality: a near universal perception of public opinion that is the opposite of true public sentiment.” According to the study, in the U.S. (and there is no reason to believe that Canada is substantively different), “supporters of climate policies outnumber opponents two to one, while Americans falsely perceive nearly the opposite to be true.”

Climate action is overwhelmingly popular, but governments continue to double down on expanding the fossil fuel economy. That alone ought to raise serious questions about the notion that polite or inoffensive protest should be focused on garnering some mythical level of “public support.”

The unfortunate reality is that liberal democracies are governed by a constellation of actors and that the ultra-rich, particularly in countries with acute wealth inequality, wield outsized influence over the direction our governments take.

A study in the U.S. attempted to quantitatively assess the comparative impacts on policy of public preferences, advocacy groups, economic elites, and business groups. The results were unsurprising: “elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

Consider, for example, that at least three of Canada’s richest families own controlling shares in the domestic oil industry.

There is no doubt that public opinion plays a role in policy-making. But despite the influence of decades of disinformation and manipulation campaigns that continue today, public opinion on climate has shifted. Climate action has widespread support, even in places like Canada where some legislators regularly dabble in climate denial.

Which raises a big question about the argument Mann and others made against the soup throwers. Say they are right—that this kind of action could alienate some of the public. Does it influence public policy in other ways?

The question we need to be asking as a movement is not, “How can we make climate action more popular?” It already is popular. The question needs to be, “How can we make governments take climate action?” That is fundamentally a question of power.

It is the core question underlying all social movements: how do we achieve change? And the answer has never been, “Politely convince the public this is an important issue.” To Mann’s credit, the answer is not always clear, and it is certainly not clear in terms of climate change. We can learn from past movements and we can and should study the results of the many tactics activists are employing.

But we cannot keep operating under this pair of false assumptions: that climate action does not yet have enough public support, and that public support is the primary driver of change in liberal democracies.

I do not know whether or not the soup throwing action “worked.” No one does, and it cannot really be assessed in isolation. But I do know that it took a tremendous amount of bravery and that the British government will probably punish these young activists unfairly. I also know that what a movement needs to succeed in this environment is what is called a “diversity of tactics.”

I have no problem with people like Mann spending their time courting centrist voters and trying to move the needle even further along than it already is.

But we need to be taking other actions that confront and challenge power structures in more direct ways, too, and I am grateful these activists are putting it all on the line in an attempt to do just that.

https://mronline.org/2022/10/25/disrupt ... r-support/

Not unlike the arguments about the 'Nihilists' one hundred fifty years ago in Russia. Actually, for this sort of theater to work it need be more 'pointed', like dumping expended DU munitions on some corpsters lawn.

But this won't change the bosses' minds, just as in Russia they will double down. But I doubt it will affect the masses much until they are personally afflicted.

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Environmental racism is poisoning the waters in the US
Thousands of people in US cities have been left without access to clean water. Communities say institutional racism is to blame

October 18, 2022 by Natalia Marques

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In several cities across the United States, residents struggle with system-wide neglect of water systems and the failure of the government to provide access to what is arguably the most essential resource.

The United Nations General Assembly recognized “the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights” on July 28, 2010. Yet, 12 years later, this human right is still out of reach for millions across the globe, particularly in the Global South. Even in the United States, which has the largest gross domestic product globally, poor and working-class people, and in particular Black and Brown people, are denied this fundamental right. In several cities across the United States, residents struggle with system-wide neglect of water systems and the failure of the government to provide access to what is arguably the most essential resource.

The struggle for water is a struggle against racism
Dennis Diaz, a resident of the public housing project Jacob Riis Houses in the East Village, New York City, said that after he experienced nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, and migraine headaches around late August and early September, he took preliminary tests that revealed he had been exposed to arsenic.

As early as August 4, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) was alerted about cloudy water conditions at the Jacob Riis public housing complex. After apparently testing the water for E. coli and chlorine more than a week later, on August 16, NYCHA announced that the water was safe to drink. But after 11 p.m. on September 2, NYCHA revealed that there was arsenic in the water supply. According to an article in City and State, the city said that officials had known about the arsenic two weeks prior.

Diaz called New York “the greatest city in the world” and explained his frustration with the double standard that he feels local politicians allow to persist when it comes to quality-of-life issues between majority-minority neighborhoods like his own and wealthier, predominantly white residential areas. “Imagine if,” he said, arsenic was found in the water by residents in Manhattan’s “Fifth Avenue or Soho, or Williamsburg,” Brooklyn. “Maybe the outcomes would have been different for them. But for minorities in my community, we’re next to nothing to the politicians.” According to the 2016 data provided by NYCHA, 40% of the heads of the households living in public housing under the Housing Choice Voucher Program were Black, while 48% had Latin American ancestry.

The city of New York is now denying that there ever was arsenic in the water at Jacob Riis, claiming that the testing method “introduced trace levels of arsenic” to the sample they collected. But Dennis Diaz, who recently received his bloodwork results showing low levels of arsenic, is not convinced. “They’re lying,” he said while referring to the latest statement by the city officials. “They did it in Flint, Michigan, where they lied to them [the residents] for years. You can’t believe these people.”

Since NYCHA’s inception in 1934, New York City’s public housing has fallen into disrepair as the federal government drastically reduced funding for public housing in the 2000s. In 2018, 400,000 tenants sued NYCHA for squalid conditions. Also in 2018, then-US Federal Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman sued NYCHA for health and safety violations, exposing children to lead paint, and training NYCHA workers to “deceive” federal inspectors.

In Baltimore, water in the western part of the city tested positive for E. coli on September 5. Affected neighborhoods included the area of Harlem Park/Sandtown-Winchester. Authorities advised residents in these areas to boil water before use due to the contamination.

By September 6, the “boil water advisory” stretched across West Baltimore and into the surrounding southwestern Baltimore County. The neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park is 96.7% Black, within the 62.8% Black city of Baltimore. This neighborhood also has a history of police brutality. In 2015, Freddie Gray died due to injuries sustained while in police custody after he was arrested in the area. A medical examiner ruled that his death was a homicide “because officers failed to follow safety guidelines.” In 2017, Harlem Park was locked down by police for nearly a week after a detective was murdered before testifying at a trial against other police officers. Some organizations questioned whether this action by the police was lawful.

Baltimore resident Rachel Viqueira was located in the boil water advisory zone. “While facing decades of underinvestment and neglect, these neighborhoods have simultaneously faced increasing racist police violence and surveillance,” she said. In 2020, Baltimore responded to the massive public protests surrounding George Floyd’s death by defunding the police budget by $22 million. But in 2021, Baltimore City increased police funding by $28 million. This not only canceled out the 2020 decrease but also tacked on an additional $8 million to the police budget.

“In Baltimore, and many other cities, the police budgets have ballooned at the expense of public investment in infrastructure, health, jobs, housing, and education,” Viqueira said.

Jackson, Mississippi, was under a boil water notice from July 29 to September 15. And from August 30 to September 5, the water stopped running for many of Jackson’s more than 150,000 residents, leaving public spaces like schools without running sinks or working toilets. Although water pressure has now been restored, the water remains contaminated.

Derykah Watts, who distributed water to Jackson residents as part of her student group Jackson Water Crisis Advocacy Team, said, “This is a reality that Jackson has faced for a very long time. I know growing up, I remember always hearing my mother say, ‘Oh, we’re on boil water notice this week, don’t use the water [straight from the tap].’”

Jackson is 82.5% Black, and this water crisis is only the latest in a chain of failures in the city’s underfunded water system. The roots of the water crisis originate in the era immediately following the racial desegregation of schools in Jackson in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Following desegregation, white residents left the city en masse. From 1960 to 1990, the white population residing in Jackson shrunk by 6,000. White departure meant that white residents, historically more well-off than descendants of Black people who were enslaved, would no longer constitute a large portion of the tax base for city funding.

Instead of finding concrete solutions to address the water crisis resulting from systemic racism, both the city of Jackson and the state of Mississippi have been considering privatizing the city’s water supply following the crisis. “We’ve already seen how privatization of Texas’ electrical grid meant massive shut-offs of heat in the middle of a winter storm,” said local activist Bezal Jupiter. “People lost their power, people froze, and some people even died [as many as 246]. Do we want the same future for Jackson’s water system?”

A water crisis that never ended
The majority-Black city of Flint, Michigan, made headlines in 2016 when it was revealed that for two years, the State government had been covering up the fact that residents were actively being poisoned by lead in their water supply. Six years later, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy said that the amount of lead in the water complies with state and federal standards, yet scientists insist that no amount of lead in water is safe. And as of April of 2022, the government was yet to replace 1,800 lead pipes.

“[Governments] will fund rich white communities for infrastructure upgrades, but they absolutely won’t do it for cities like Flint, Baltimore, and Jackson,” said Mitchell Bonga, a law clerk at Goodman, Hurwitz and James, a law firm that filed a class action lawsuit against former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder for his role in the Flint crisis.

‘They could have done it all along’
In the neighboring city of Detroit, which also has a majority-Black, low-income population, residents who cannot pay their water bills have been struggling against water shut-offs. “People can’t afford the water bill [in Detroit],” said local activist and Detroit resident Tharron Combs. “People sometimes owe hundreds of dollars in debt to the city for their water bill and when it gets shut off, obviously it’s a public health crisis.”

The city imposed a moratorium on water shut-offs for the pandemic, extending it through 2022. But although the mayor announced his intention to end water shutoffs “once and for all,” the moratorium will expire at the end of the year. “They actually put [shut-offs] on pause for the pandemic, which kind of exposed one of the contradictions of capitalism,” said Combs. “They could have done it all along, and just let people have access to clean water.

“[People] can’t afford their water, or their water is unclean when they can afford it. They don’t have access to food. And this is not a condition that’s really unique to Detroit. This is the case in really any major Black city in the country… Clearly, it’s environmental racism all the way down,” said Combs.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/10/18/ ... in-the-us/

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Anti-Mining Activist is Murdered in Molleturo, Ecuador

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Alba Bermeo, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @spaicuk

Published 24 October 2022

Her murder occurs amid extremely violent attacks against the residents of Molleturo who are resisting illegal and legal mining.


On Monday, Ecuador's Alliance of Organizations for Human Rights (AODH) reported that groups involved in gold mining murdered environmental activist Alba Bermeo, a 24-year-old woman who was five months pregnant at the time of the crime.

This murder occurred on the night of Oct. 21 in San Pedro de Yumate, a town belonging to the Molleturo parish, near the EcuaGoldmining S.A. mining concession.

The victim and her brother were traveling from Guayaquil to Molleturo in a crane. During the journey, the crane was intercepted by an unknown person who asked them to tow a truck that was loaded with gold.

Since the crane driver and the environmental activist did not accept the request, the stranger shot them.

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The tweet contains images of the march that accompanied the presentation of 300,000 signatures of citizens who support a popular consultation for the Metropolitan District of Quito to be declared a mining-free area.

"The murder of the environmental defender occurs amid extremely violent attacks against this community, which have been denounced to the authorities. This is the third attack with firearms against the residents of Molleturo, who are resisting illegal and legal mining," the AODH said in a statement.

In this regard, local outlets recalled that another environmental activist and her son were attacked in their home on Oct. 1. Days later, another Molleturo resident was injured in her leg.

Despite the seriousness of these events, “neither the Azuay government, nor the Police, nor the Prosecutor's Office have taken measures to provide protection to environmental defenders in Molleturo. They have also done nothing to prevent illegal mining," Rop News commented.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ant ... -0010.html

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I read these articles, I read what I've posted today, and I cannot but feel hatred for the owners and their thugs. I think it proves that I'm alive.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 28, 2022 4:47 pm

Judging from what I've been seeing on the internet recently there is growing reaction against every aspect of Western imperialism throughout the Global South and other declared enemies of Western hegemony. While generally a good thing it has spawned ugly and stupid responses too. One such 'take' is that climate change is just another scam to continue the impoverishment of the South by denying them the ability to generate wealth and well-being in their nations and to impose technologies on the world which Western capital monopolizes.

Of course just because the West promotes these new technologies does not mean they will abandon the old, not when there is money to be made. The behavior of the current US administration which sold itself as pro-environmental but works hammer and tongs to pump and burn more oil is case in point. Fracking, which has made the USA the leading oil producing country emits 20x more methane than conventional oil rigs but they ain't shutting those down. Environmentalists are such chumps.

It is undoubtedly true that Green Capitalism is a scam, that the ruling class will not do anything to mitigate climate change if they cannot reap great financial reward. Many of these scams, like 'carbon credits' do nothing but make money for the already rich. The proposed macro engineering scams also stand to 'make billions'. And all of this will be controlled by Western governments and their compradors, corporations , banks. So there are some very big reasons for skepticism from those on the exploited end of the bayonet.

That much of such criticism comes from oil producing states 'on the outs' with the US does not surprise nor does it disqualify. While there is self interest to be sure it seems that of citizens, not of the oil producing entities or governments.A justifiable reaction, but wrong, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Just look to China. Unless you're a Trot or other afflicted by the 'juvenile malady' you know that China is the leading socialist state of the world today. China utilizes capitalist practice to achieve socialist goals, which confuses some but if you've paid and attention to the recently concluded Party Congress you know that China is firmly dedicated to socialism and the Communist Party completely dominates their captive capitalist sector. And what do the Chinese think about climate change?

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 54c1a.html

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 544a5.html

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 544a5.html

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 67ba6.html

https://www.telesurtv.net/telesuragenda ... -0035.html

https://mronline.org/2022/10/01/why-is- ... -to-china/

We may not agree with the methods or pace of some of China's actions but it is clear that they recognize the problems posed by climate change biodiversity loss, and ocean pollution and they are honestly 'doing something'. And we must remember that China's government is 'of the people', and the people expect improvements in their lives which they know are possible. So the people's needs must be met or else the government could lose it's mandate. It's a tricky gamut but it must be run.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 02, 2022 2:58 pm

Greta Thunberg throws in her lot with the anti-capitalist Left

The activist has been showing a more overtly political stance in London

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Greta Thunberg at the Royal Festival Hall. Credit: Getty

Last night, London’s Royal Festival Hall hosted a children’s crusade. The purpose? To “celebrate” the launch of The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg’s coffee-table manifesto which collects essays from climate scholars, interspersed with photography and doom data (the cover itself is a colour chart of global temperature, moving from halcyon blue to DEFCON red). London answered the call.

Greta was in conversation with a beaming Samira Ahmed (“You’re the coolest 19-year-old I’ve ever met!”), who gently quizzed her about life as the world’s most famous climate activist. The crowd adored her. They lapped up her awkward ingenuousness. It was the perfect middle-class day out, like a trip to Glyndebourne or Blenheim. Some had even brought their young children, clearly hoping to inspire them into the same breed of activism. And, belying her reputation for aggressive sermonising, Greta was perfectly charming. The fury of “How dare you!” Greta has given way to a likeable figure of exasperated passion.

But this isn’t the only thing about the Swede that has changed. Previously, she’d sold herself as a five-foot human alarm bell, a climate Cassandra. Her role was to warn, not to instruct: her most viral moments involved her scolding political leaders, not trying to supplant them. She strenuously avoided programmatic detail, saying such things were “nothing to do with me”. But now, on stage and in this book, she has found her political feet, specifically the Left-wing ideology of anti-capitalism and de-growth.

Interspersed among the usual directives about the need to pressure political leaders, her message was more radical and more militant than it has been in the past. There is no “back to normal”, she told us. “Normal” was the “system” which gave us the climate crisis, a system of “colonialism, imperialism, oppression, genocide”, of “racist, oppressive extractionism”. Climate justice is part of all justice; you can’t have one without the others. We can’t trust the elites produced by this system to confront its flaws — that’s why she, much like Rishi Sunak, won’t be bothering with the COP meeting this year. COP itself is little more than a “scam” which facilitates “greenwashing, lying and cheating”. Only overthrow of “the whole capitalist system” will suffice.

So now we are finally seeing the contours of Thunbergism. Run your eye down the contributors to The Climate Book and you can see who she’s been reading: Jason Hickel, Kate Raworth, Naomi Klein. For these people the climate crisis isn’t man-made. It’s made by capitalism, as are the other forms of social injustice which plague society. There’s no GDP growth — especially of the capitalist sort — without increasing carbon emissions. The only solution to this state of emergency is for rich countries to immediately abandon economic expansion as a social goal.

It is hardly surprising that Greta thinks this way given how closely tied environmental activism has become with the more experimental end of the modern Left. De-growth is surely not the only feasible solution to the climate crisis, but Greta appears to have no doubts. And, like the bulk of her generation, she has lost any faith in the gradualist, establishment Left’s power to change things. Her teens spent chiding national governments have made her one of the most famous people in the world — her twenties look set to be far more explosive, and even revolutionary.

https://unherd.com/thepost/greta-thunbe ... list-left/

This is from a center /right site(best I can tell), the responses were negative to vitriolic. Perhaps the young woman is growing up? Although nearly all animals are capable of learning we humans do it best(though sometimes ya wouldn't know it...). She has a huge platform, let's hope her education progresses and she comes to see that the true 'green' is red.

It is noticeable that three 'conventional' news sites, 'Sky', Guardian, and Reuters made little to no mention of her anti-capitalist stance, telling, that.

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US' green energy ambitions losing spark
By LIA ZHU in San Francisco | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-07-05 07:26

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Belching smoke behind the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge, a sprawling ExxonMobil refinery serves as a reminder of the urgency for the US to reduce its emissions, in this image released on Saturday. Yet the Supreme Court, in a ruling last week, acted to limit government powers to curb greenhouse gases. The ruling has angered environmental campaigners. DAVID GRUNFELD/AP

Projects for renewables and batteries tottering as supply snags combine with rising prices, tariffs to threaten climate goals

Editor's note: Clean energy projects have encountered setbacks in the United States. China Daily examines the faltering progress in the country's transition from fossil fuels.

Across the United States, big renewable energy and battery projects have been delayed or canceled due to supply chain constraints, rising prices of materials and increased tariffs on solar panels. The setbacks dealt to the country's green energy ambitions could even jeopardize its lofty climate goals, industry experts say.

The delays started in 2021 when solar installations came in at levels lower than expected. Developers have postponed 13 percent of the planned projects for 2022 by a year or more or canceled them outright, according to a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association, or SEIA, in April.

In recent months, several major battery projects meant to store power on the grid also have been reported postponed, scrapped or renegotiated.

Among them are six clean-energy projects of Central Coast Community Energy, a community-owned public agency in California. The projects, including 122 megawatts of storage, were expected to come online in 2022 and 2023, but the developers have warned of delays of between six and 12 months.

Another project, the Big Beau solar and storage project under development in California, recently wound up in court after its developer, EDF Renewables, asked to increase the price by $76.8 million, a 233 percent jump.

Early this year, Rhode Island's first utility-scale battery storage facility was scrapped by the developer. The 140-megawatt project was meant to be a key component of renewable energy sources.

In Hawaii, utility company Hawaiian Electric also is experiencing delays in solar and storage projects designed to replace the state's only coal-fired power plant. Developer Innergex Renewable Energy says it is seeking to renegotiate the terms of the deal-including price and timing-after receiving force majeure notices from its battery supplier, Tesla, according to Reuters.

Utility-scale battery storage is a necessary component for transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy, because renewable power such as wind and solar is intermittent and not able to continuously generate power, especially when power demand peaks in the evening after the sun sets.

Energy storage can absorb energy during abundant periods and provide power during peak hours, and the storage sources are mostly lithium-ion batteries, Gabe Murtaugh, storage sector manager at California Independent System Operator, or CAISO, told a webinar held by California Energy Storage Alliance, or CESA.

Energy storage makes up about 3 percent of operating clean energy capacity in the US and has been growing rapidly. Installations soared 170 percent in the first quarter to 758 megawatts, according to the American Clean Power Association.

CAISO has more than 3,500 megawatts of installed storage, according to Murtaugh, up from about 1,500 megawatts last year. The state government is calling for a massive buildout of storage to achieve its target of 100 percent clean electricity by 2045, he says.

California aims to have 50 percent of its power come from renewable sources by 2025, up from 33 percent in 2020, but it has not been able to match rising peak power demand in summer heat waves with new battery storage capacity.

"To get to that 2045 goal, we're going to need a very diverse mix of storage resources, and a lot of those storage resources are going to need to be long duration," Murtaugh says.

Crucial shortages

The slowdown in utility-scale battery installations is partly due to battery shortages. Prices for lithium-ion batteries have soared since last year on the back of costlier lithium and nickel, coupled with pandemic-induced disruptions to manufacturing and shipping.

"Lithium is a big deal in our world," Alex Morris, executive director of CESA, said at a workshop held by the California Energy Commission in May.

He says the lithium price changes are "significant" for developing a storage project because "there's usually a very competitive process and there are slim margins on it".

"The changes in the underlying and unhedgeable lithium carbonate costs will completely flip a project from lightly profitable to deeply unprofitable," he says. "So when you see these price spikes in lithium carbonate-like the 300 percent increase since last fall-you very quickly know that the projects will be underwater."

He says a 100-megawatt-hour battery configuration would have been priced at around $16 million last fall, but it would cost $23 million now. The 40 percent increase, excluding costs for other components and shipping, will "really much flip the project into negative returns and it's really catastrophic for the project", he says.

The industry also faces competition from electric vehicle producers that have robust demand for batteries. "The lithium-ion technology has been supported by electric vehicles over the last 10 years. We're still evolving and facing headwinds and the manufacturing base is not fully built to resist all of that," Morris says.

Aside from the battery shortage, uncertainty over potential tariffs on Asian imports has recently caused turmoil in the solar industry.

The US Department of Commerce announced in March that it would proceed with an anti-dumping circumvention investigation of solar cells from four Southeast Asian countries.

The investigation is a response to a petition by California solar company Auxin Solar, which accused solar-panel makers in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia of circumventing anti-dumping tariffs imposed on China by buying the same priced parts from China and then shipping them to skirt the duties that can range up to 250 percent.

The Commerce Department's investigation could take a year to resolve, but the industry has already felt the severe impact.

Seventy-eight percent of companies say they already had solar module orders canceled or delayed after the investigation was announced, according to a survey conducted by the SEIA on 412 firms in April.

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Heliostatic mirrors reflect sunlight at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California's Mojave Desert on Feb 19. BING GUAN/GETTY IMAGES

Insufficient capacity

More than 80 percent of the domestic manufacturers say they expected severe or devastating impacts. Two-thirds of the respondents report that at least 70 percent of their solar and storage workforce is at risk and 56 percent of them say at least 70 percent of their current-year solar pipeline is at risk, according to the survey.

The SEIA's data shows that 84 percent of all US module imports come from the four countries affected by the investigation, and there is not sufficient capacity to supply US demand anywhere else in the world except China, which is already subject to tariffs of 40 percent to 275 percent.

If enacted, these new tariffs could reduce solar deployment by up to 16 gigawatts annually, and put 70,000 US solar jobs at risk, according to the national association.

The Auxin petition has also affected energy storage development. Since most energy storage projects are paired with solar, without the solar components, the energy storage components are likely to become uneconomical, according to the SEIA. Putting aside the economics, moving forward would require renegotiation of all project financing agreements.

The renewable energy and storage industries are also grappling with the effects of the "Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act" signed into law by US President Joe Biden in December.

The key to the legislation is "rebuttable presumption", which extends the import restrictions to any company that operates in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, a mountainous area in Northwest China, unless it can prove its shipments aren't tied to forced labor.

The act took effect on June 21. It has caused confusion for the industry, as "a lot of the industry folks are wrapping their head around what this means", Morris says.

Xinjiang is home to about 50 percent of the world's polysilicon production. Polysilicon is used to make solar wafers, cells and modules, which generate power from light as part of photovoltaic panels.

Despite China's denial of the accusations, US Customs and Border Protection blacklisted solar suppliers in Xinjiang in June last year and two-thirds of the solar modules used in the US became subject to the agency's sweeping detentions from August.

The American Clean Power Association, representing more than 700 companies in the solar industry, has warned that detention and the slow pace of the clearance process have come with a huge economic cost.

The trade group says nearly one-third of the planned utility-grade solar projects set for development in 2021 were delayed or canceled and further unnecessary detentions would translate into billions of dollars in lost economic opportunities and put tens of thousands of people out of work.

There are multiple steps regulators can take to help alleviate some of these disruptions, says Morris, but "the fundamental story is there are a lot of different issues, and each issue has its own discrete set of solutions".

The disruptions to clean-energy projects and utility-scale battery installations are likely to threaten the pace of the US transition from fossil fuels as the Biden administration has set a goal of reaching 100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035.

In California, a state that already relies heavily on renewable energy, the delayed or potentially canceled solar projects as well as the storage capacity could cause operators to extend the life span of fossil fuel plants, setting the state back in its ambitious goal of relying entirely on zero-emission energy sources for its electricity by 2045.

The Biden administration has announced it would waive tariffs for two years on solar panels from countries affected by the Commerce Department investigation, an attempt to revitalize solar installations.

The White House also announced funding of $3.16 billion to assist with battery shortage development in the country. Officials said the money would help domestic manufacturers make more batteries in the US to address the supply chain issues for components.

Industry experts said bringing a supply chain to the US would take years.

Even siting and permitting a US plant could take a year or more, while construction and production could take an additional one to three years, according to the SEIA report surveying the Auxin petition's impact.

Based on Chinese and Southeast Asian public filings, the association estimates the construction periods for cells and modules at 6-24 months and for polysilicon and wafer at 12-24 months.

Vanessa Witte, a senior energy storage research analyst with Wood Mackenzie, says building the manufacturing and raw-material capacity to meet that demand could take time.

A new mine, for instance, takes around five years to set up, while a battery manufacturing plant would require at least two years, she told Utility Dive, an energy industry news website. "These things just take time to catch up, and that's really been the source of the issue," Witte says.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 4e5_2.html

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Ukrainian soldiers fire a mortar on the front line near Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region, September 26, 2022. (Photo courtesy the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine/Twitter.)

As Ukraine war escalates, the climate movement goes AWOL
Originally published: Canadian Dimension on October 28, 2022 by Dimitri Lascaris (more by Canadian Dimension) | (Posted Nov 02, 2022)

As the Ukraine war has escalated into a potentially catastrophic conflagration for all of humanity, the climate movement has gone AWOL.

A case in point is the ongoing leadership contest of the Green Party of Canada.

The Green Party leadership contest was launched nearly two months ago. In that time, all six leadership candidates have spoken at length, as one would expect, of the urgency of the climate crisis, but not one of the candidates (Anna Keenan, Chad Walcott, Sarah Gabrielle Baron, Simon Gnocchini-Messier, Elizabeth May or Jonathan Pednault) has issued a single statement on their campaign websites, or posted even one tweet, calling for negotiations to resolve the Ukraine war.

To be fair to them, one can understand their apparent reluctance to speak out against the relentless escalation of this existentially dangerous conflict. After all, the public discourse around this war has become so suffocating and toxic that one can hardly utter the words ‘peace,’ ‘negotiation,’ or ‘de-escalation’ without being accused of appeasing an aggressor or being a Putin propagandist.

The stakes, however, are simply too high for us to remain silent.

Indeed, there are good grounds to believe that the Ukraine war is far more dangerous for humanity than even the Cuban missile crisis, and that this conflict may constitute the most dangerous moment in human history.

Why? First and foremost, because NATO is at war with Russia.

Now many of you may point out that no NATO government has formally declared war on Russia. The realities on the ground, however, tell a very different story.

Although active-duty members of NATO militaries have not been ordered (so far as we know) into direct combat with Russian troops, NATO militaries have supplied billions of dollars worth of sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine. NATO is training recently mobilized Ukrainians to kill Russians. NATO is providing battlefield intelligence to the Ukrainian military, which is being used to target Russian troops and military assets. Special operations forces of certain NATO members, including Canada, are currently in Ukraine aiding Ukrainian troops in ways that are not entirely clear. Former soldiers of NATO militaries are engaged in direct combat with Russian troops, with the tacit approval or acquiescence of NATO governments. On top of all that, NATO governments have imposed upon Russia unprecedented sanctions that were explicitly designed to destroy Russia’s economy.

Plainly, NATO is at war with Russia in all but name.

Collectively, NATO states and Russia possess enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over. Even worse, both sides have expressly and repeatedly stated that they are prepared to use those weapons if they deem their use to be necessary.

There is no question that the climate crisis constitutes an existential danger to humanity, but the danger posed by large-scale nuclear war is considerably worse. The climate crisis threatens to render the planet unlivable over a period of generations. That time scale will afford to humanity at least some opportunity to adapt, mitigate and innovate. By contrast, a large-scale nuclear war leaves no opportunity for adaptation, mitigation and innovation. A disaster of such a nature would render the planet unlivable in a matter of months, weeks or even days.

No amount of human ingenuity will save human civilization from nuclear Armageddon.

For these reasons alone, it behooves all of us—whether or not we are activists for the climate—to speak out now. For the sake of our children and future generations, we must demand that our governments pursue vigorous, good faith negotiations with a view to ending this heinous conflict as rapidly as possible.

For those of us who are climate activists, there are even greater reasons to demand a swift and peaceful resolution of this war.

First, NATO states and Russia are huge contributors to global emissions. We cannot resolve the climate emergency unless these emitters work cooperatively to transition their economies away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. Obviously, there is no realistic prospect of achieving the requisite level of cooperation and mutual trust in a state of escalating war.

Second, the Ukraine war is consuming vast (but scarce) economic resources that are desperately needed to fund the transition of our economies toward renewable energy and greater efficiency. Those resources are also required to assist poorer nations—particularly those which have contributed negligibly to the climate crisis—to protect themselves from the ravages of global heating.

Third, the war itself has become a significant, direct contributor to global emissions, precisely at the moment when the world must reduce them. The operation of large mechanized armies across a 1,000-kilometre front line requires the consumption of huge quantities of fossil fuels. The relentless bombardment of military equipment, infrastructure, weapons stores and fuel depots generates massive fires. The reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure will also generate large emissions. The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines (which almost certainly was the handiwork of one or more NATO militaries) is believed to have been the largest single release of methane ever recorded.

From a climate and ecological perspective, the Ukraine war is an unmitigated disaster.

Moreover, given how little time remains for the world to transition to a zero emissions economy, this war could not have befallen us at a worse time.

To put it bluntly, this is no time to prioritize political expediency and serenity over the reputational perils of anti-war activism.

The world desperately needs climate activists to step up and step up now, to lead and re-invigorate the enfeebled anti-war movement.

Ultimately, if we climate activists fail to answer the call, there may soon be no planet left to save from the climate emergency.

https://mronline.org/2022/11/02/as-ukra ... goes-awol/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 07, 2022 4:07 pm

Climate change summit kicks off in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt

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COP27 will be held in this city until November 18. Nov. 06, 2022. | Photo: COP27 Presidency of the UN Conference on Climate Change

Published 6 November 2022

COP27 begins in a climate of alarm due to the multiplication of extreme meteorological phenomena around the world.


The Conference of the Parties (COP27) on climate change began this Sunday in the city of Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, with the challenge of transforming into action and concrete commitments the promises to reduce emissions and finance damages and losses to developing countries.

This massive gathering, which will be attended by 45,000 people, comes in a year in which the world has seen how the climate crisis is not only a threat to future generations, but a crisis with disastrous consequences for millions of people today.

"We only have to look at the summer we have just had, and this, again, goes beyond the vulnerable countries," reminded the United Nations (UN) Executive Secretary for Climate Change, Simon Stiell.


"Extreme heat, fires, floods, droughts. And whether in Europe, in North America, in China, the consequences, the realities of climate change and its impact, are being felt," he warned.

Among the objectives of the meeting is financing so that less developed countries can implement measures to reduce greenhouse gases.

At the opening of the Summit, the president of the 27th Conference on Climate Change (COP27), Sameh Shoukry, warned that humanity must move from the stage of commitments to the implementation of measures to confront this scourge.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ger ... -0013.html



During the opening ceremony of COP27, which will be held in this city until November 18, the Egyptian Foreign Minister affirmed that the current stage requires a broad participation of all parties involved to combat this problem.

Shougry questioned the failure of developed countries to fulfill their promises to provide 100 billion dollars a year to poor nations to fight climate change.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Cli ... -0002.html

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Declare a climate emergency: South Asian People’s Action on Climate Change
Originally published: Countercurrents on November 3, 2022 by Countercurrents Staff (more by Countercurrents) | (Posted Nov 06, 2022)

The following statement is issued by the South Asian People’s Action on Climate Change (SAPACC), a rainbow coalition of individuals and organizations from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka who are deeply concerned about the climate crisis.

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) have caused an observed average global warming of 1.1o C above pre-industrial temperatures. That global warming is due to anthropogenic carbon emissions, which grew exponentially after industrial capitalism struck deep roots in the 19th Century, has been known since 1896 when Svante Arrhenius published his computations on this subject. Since the early 20th Century scientists, to name a few—Callendar, Plass, Keeling, Lorenz, Emiliani, Manabe, Broecker, and Hansen, have warned the world of the grave dangers carbon emissions pose to the planet because they will the earth’s disturbed energy balance, weaken the thermohaline circulation, collapse Antarctic’s ice sheets, bleach of coral reefs, trigger extreme weather events and increase cyclonic storm frequencies and intensities. Thaw the permafrost, and consequently impact human society adversely.

The hydrocarbon industry, e.g., Exxon, BP, Chevron, and many governments of large carbon-emitting countries were aware of the risks of climate change for over half a century. Yet fossil fuel burning continued unabated till today to up the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations to ~420 ppm, which is 50% greater than pre-industrial times. To protect their business interests, a section of the hydro-carbon industry even funded global warming deniers.

Failure of the climate agreements
The Kyoto Protocol aimed to reduce developed countries’ (Annex 1 countries) emissions by 5.2% by 2012 over the base year 1990. Instead, during this period, the consumptive emissions of these countries increased by 14.5%. The primary emissions reduction instruments—the clean development mechanism (CDM) and joint implementation (JI) failed to deliver. Between 2008 and 2021, CDM projects theoretically prevented or removed emissions amounting to 2.16 GtCO2, constituting just 1.25% and 0.5% of the cumulative emissions of the Annex 1 countries and global emissions, respectively. Up to September 2021, JI had effected an emission reduction of 872 MtCO2, i.e., 0.5% of the cumulative emissions of the Annex 1 countries. Even if we presume that the CDM and JI worked well, they prevented or removed less than 2% of the cumulative emissions of Annex 1 countries, a fraction that is too small to make a difference.

There were other reasons for the CDM’s failure. The CDM did not deliver real, measurable, and more importantly, additional emissions reduction, i.e., emission reductions that happen solely due to the CDM. Studies done by the Oko Institute, Grantham Institute and Compensate show that a large number of projects were granted CDM status even though they would have effected emissions reduction without this status. In many projects, the declared emissions reduction was inflated, and some projects caused human rights violations. The inclusion of ‘sink’ projects, e.g., forestry, in the CDM undermined the effort to reduce emissions by the Annex 1 countries. Since certified emission reduction credits (CERs) under the CDM are market-tradable instruments, their demand and price fluctuated with economic swings. The 2008 economic slowdown reduced Europe’s emissions and consequently the demand for CERs.

The Paris Agreement has not worked, at least till now. In their latest report, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, released in August 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warns that to meet the ≤1.50 C warming ambition, current emissions must be halved by 2030-35, and the world should become net carbon zero by 2050-55. That implies that emissions must be reduced by >7% per annum (pa) for the next 30 years. But global emissions have been growing by 1.2% pa since the 2015 Paris Agreement was signed.

Per the United Nations Environment Programme’s Emission Gap reports, the difference between projected emissions in 2030 considering national pledges to reduce emissions, and the desired ones to be ≤1.5o C compliant, known as the emissions gap, has increased by 33-35% between 2016 and 2022.

In the quarter century, since the Kyoto Protocol was signed, global energy consumption doubled to 14 Gtoe [1] in 2019, with fossil fuels and renewables contributing to 67% and 15% of the energy expansion, respectively, between 1997-2019 (see Table 1 in the Annex). renewable energy supplemented fossil fuels rather than replace them—a classic Jevon’s paradox. In the same period, the energy consumption of the Annex 1 countries remained constant at a little over 4 Gtoe, with just 0.3 Gtoe of fossil fuels being replaced by renewable energies—an unimpressive performance.

The low ambition of the largest GHG emitters, the odds at which climate science and policy are, and the failure of the market mechanisms have created an unenviable situation where we have 8 years left to halve our emissions. Instead of analysing the fundamental causes of climate change and its remedies, the 2021 Glasgow Conference of Parties (COP) 26 spent much time framing rules for the Paris Agreement’s market instruments that are akin to the failed ones under the Kyoto Protocol. The primary discourse in the COP meetings has ignored the fundamental role that anthropocentrism and privatization of nature have played in history in sanctifying and encouraging unbridled growth that is at the root of social inequality and unsustainability.

Our current emissions trajectory will cause an unbearable average global warming closer to 3o C by 2100 that will have catastrophic consequences for the environment and human society. India and the world are witnessing accelerated impacts-such as this year-at barely 0.8o C and 1.1o C average warming, respectively.

Winners and losers
With the head start that developed nations (Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and Japan) had for using fossil fuels since the industrial revolution began, the average per capita GDP of high-income countries in 2018 was US$ 44,787, ten-fold greater than that of low + middle-income countries (US$ 4,971) and twenty times that of South Asia (US$ 1,903).

There is a correlation between material development measured by per capita GDP, the Human Development Index (HDI) and per capita energy consumption and CO2 emissions (see Table 2 in the Annex). North countries have historically used more energy (per capita energy use today is 4.6 toe) and consequently have higher cumulative CO2 emissions. Developed countries with 16% of the global population today have consumed 69% of all fossil fuels expended since the industrial revolution and therefore are materially more advanced than developing countries. The latter constitute 84% of the world’s population today, but their per capita energy consumption is only 1.3 toe. The per capita cumulative emissions of North and South nations are 1,200 and 85 t/person [2], respectively (India’s per capita cumulative emissions are 35 t/person).

The world’s remaining available carbon space to be compliant with <1.5o C warming is <500 GtCO2. This space will shrink with the thawing of permafrost and further loss of the Amazon and boreal forests, leaving as little as 100 GtCO2 of carbon space to remain compliant with a warming of 1.5o C. At the current emission rate of ~40 GtCO2/year, the remaining carbon space will be erased in the next few years.

Developing countries are in a Catch22 situation. If they burn more fossil fuels to “develop,” they will contribute significantly to warming that will contribute to crossing the 1.5-2o C redlines. If they control their emissions to avoid crossing the temperature rise redlines, they will remain permanently backward in comparison to the developed countries. There is no visible alternative energy source replacement for fossil fuels that currently contribute 79% of the world’s commercial energy. Even if the entire remaining carbon space is given to developing countries, they cannot achieve the material standards of developed countries.

The extreme vulnerability of South Asia
South Asia is one of two regions that already is, and will be most affected by climate change. It has a quarter of the world’s population but only 3.6% of its cumulative emissions. South Asia’s vulnerability is due to two factors—its geography and its low development. Its large land mass makes heat waves more severe, and its river deltas promote increased sea rise, decreased snow and glacier melt with warming will cause a decrease of water flow to snow-fed rivers and consequently cause water stress. South Asia’s current per capita GDP, which is less than a fifth of the global average, makes its population less resilient to meet climate change impacts. The primary risks to South Asia are outlined below:

Sea level rise: Seawater intrusion will render inland water sources close to the Bangladesh coastline unusable for drinking and agriculture. With sea level rise, the mangroves of the Sundarbans forest will erode, and with it, the protection it offers against frequent storm surges during cyclones will diminish. By 2100, about 20-25% of Bangladesh’s land mass will be lost to the sea, creating 50 million Bangladeshi climate refugees by 2050 and probably double that number by the end of the 21st Century. Bangladeshi refugees will be forced to migrate to North Bangladesh and into neighbouring countries. Having lost their livelihood, they will be subject to all manner of indignity and abuse—unemployment, disease, and child trafficking.

By 2100, Maldives, an archipelago of ~1,200 low-lying islands and atolls in the Indian Ocean with a population of 500,000, will become all but uninhabited as sea rise will drown almost the entire island state. The entire population of Maldives will become climate refugees.

Water stress: Global warming is expected to significantly impact snow and glacier melt in the Himalayas. Water stress will impact all South Asian countries, except Bhutan. As the glaciers melt, they will initially cause an increase in meltwater in snow-fed drivers, followed by a decline. Glacial melt will impact all major snow-fed South Asian rivers—Brahmaputra (India, Bangladesh), Ganga (India, Bangladesh), Indus (India, Pakistan), Amu Darya (Afghanistan) and their tributaries.

Snow and glacier melt contribute a significantly higher amount to the total discharge (see Table 3 in Annex) in the Indus (60%) and the Amu Darya (70%) in comparison to the Ganga and the Brahmaputra (9-21%). The Indus basin is largely in Pakistan and a part of the Amu Darya basin is in Afghanistan. The Indus is the only major river that flows through Pakistan. In a warming world, the discharge of the Indus, and the Amu Darya will decrease significantly, causing large parts of Pakistan and northeastern Afghanistan to become severely water-stressed and drought-stricken by 2040-50, and that will compromise the water and food security of about 60 million people living in these basins. Though Sri Lanka does not have any major rivers, it will be water-stressed in a few decades.

Glacial lake outburst floods: As glaciers melt, the volume of water in a glacial lake located at the mouth of many Himalayan glaciers will increase and exert greater pressure on the moraine dam that holds it. When the water pressure on the dam exceeds its material failure limit, it will give way and the glacial lake will pour out millions of tonnes of water, causing a Glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF), whose impact will be felt for up to 100-150 km downstream. Villages, fields and everything else that is in a GLOF’s path will be washed away. A recent study compiled an inventory of 62 GLOFs that have occurred in the Himalayas in the last 80 years (see Table 4 in the Annex). With climate change, the frequency of GLOF is expected to increase in the Himalayas.

Extreme weather events: South Asia saw extremely hot March-April months, with temperatures soaring 4-5o C above normal. South Asia also had a very wet monsoon this year that killed 3,700 persons in floods that occurred in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. A third of Pakistan was flooded in July-August, affecting 33 million persons, killing over 1,500 people, putting half a million people in relief camps and causing a property loss of $40 billion.

India will be impacted by many types of climate change-related events—sea rise, GLOFs, extreme weather events (abnormally high temperatures or precipitation), floods, drought, cyclones, significant crop yield losses, erratic rainfall, heat stress, etc. A large number of extreme weather events have occurred in India in the last 15 years (see Table 5 in the Annex), indicating that more of them are likely to happen in future.

A study on heat stress and mortality done in Surat concludes that “There is an increase of 11% all-cause mortality when temperature crossed 40o C. There is a direct relationship between mortality and HI (high heat index). Mean daily mortality shows a significant association with daily maximum temperature and HI.” Another recent study established a correlation between high temperatures and chronic kidney disease (CKD) in rural areas by reviewing studies done in several continents—Asia, North and South America and Africa. The study concludes, “One of the consequences of climate-related extreme heat exposure is dehydration and volume loss, leading to acute mortality from exacerbations of pre-existing chronic disease, as well as from outright heat exhaustion and heat stroke.”

SAPACC’s demands
Considering the grave situation described above and the time for correction is very short, SAPACC calls upon the President of COP 27, the United Nations General Secretary, and all nations to declare a climate emergency immediately and consider implementing the following measures to move towards a sustainable, equitable and peaceful society:

Sustainability: Developed nations must pledge to become net carbon negative in consumption emissions by 2030-35 to create space for developing nations to decarbonise by 2040-50. Decarbonisation must focus primarily on: a) Mitigation focussed on the reduction of consumption levels in the Global North, and supply-side management, leaving >90% of the remaining fossil fuel reserves in the ground; b) Sequestration focussed on Nature Based Solutions that centre climate and social justice. In addition, decarbonization strategies must eschew failed, untested, hypothetical market-based solutions and techno-fixes. Through these means, gross global consumption should be reduced to sustainable levels, the measure for which should be a quantifiable justice-centric sustainability index.
Environmental justice: a) Responsibility for loss & damage: Nations/regions should take responsibility for climate change impacts attributable to them—displacement, property loss, etc—in proportion to their cumulative emissions (emissions from 1750-to date); Developed countries should deliver promised climate finance in time; b) Sharing benefits and risks equally: All people of the world should share equally the wealth created by GHG emissions as well as the risks caused by them. Humans have no property rights over fossil fuels as it is nature that made them.
Equity: The maximum/minimum ratio for income/energy consumption for all people in the world should be ≤5.
Environmental restitution: Degraded land, water, air, and to the extent possible, biodiversity should be restituted to their pre-industrial period quality.
Decentralization, democratic, transparent climate governance: As people’s involvement is essential for tackling the climate crisis, climate governance should be decentralized and democratized, governance information should be in the public domain, and people’s assemblies set up worldwide to allow people’s voices to be heard and reflected in climate decisions.
Annex: Tables

Table 1: Global and Annex 1 country energy use by type since the Kyoto Protocol

World Annex 1 countries
Total energy (Gtoe) Fossil fuels (Gtoe) Renewable energy (Gtoe) Total energy (Gtoe) Fossil fuels (Gtoe) Renewable energy (Gtoe)
1997 7.9 7.74 0.67 5.12 4.29 0.34
2019 13.96 11.76 1.6 5.14 4.1 0.63
(Data available at https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix)

Table 2: Correlation between material Greenhouse gases (GHGs) and energy consumption and CO2 emissions

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Table 3: Basin characteristics and snow/glacier melt contribution to downstream discharge

Parameter Ganga Brahmaputra Indus Amu Darya
Snow and glacier melt contribution
to downstream discharge (%)[7]

8.7 21 60 77
(Sources: https://doi.org/10.1659/MRD-JOURNAL-D-12-00027.1., https://www.the-cryosphere.net/9/1105/2 ... 5-2015.pdf., https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 018-1429-0)

Table 4: Frequency of GLOF occurrence in the last century

Period Central Himalayas Eastern Himalayas Per cent occurrence
Nos Nos %
1930-39 1 3
1940-1959 0 5 13
1960-79 7 2 23
1980-1999 9 4 33
2000-2019 8 3 28
Total 25 14 100
(Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... l_analysis)

Table 5: Extreme weather events in India in the 21st Century

Year Event Location Estimated deaths
2005 Very heavy rainfall Mumbai 1,100
2013 Cloudburst Kedarnath >5,000
2015 Very heavy rainfall Chennai 500
2018 Heatwave All over India 2,405
2018 Very heavy rainfall Kerala 500
2019 Very high temperatures Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh 50
2019 Heavy rainfall & floods Maharashtra, Karnataka, Goa, Kerala ~300
2022 Heavy rainfall & floods Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Assam, Telangana 992
2022 Heatwave All over India
Notes:
[1] 1 toe-tonne of oil equivalent, i.e., the energy contained in 1 t of oil = 42 Giga Joules. G = Giga. 1 Gtoe = 4.2 x 1018 Joules

[2] Per capita cumulative emissions are computed by dividing the cumulative emissions (1751-2017) of a country/region divided by the current population.

[3] Current and cumulative CO2 emissions are territorial emissions.

[4] Per World Bank classification.

[5] Central Asia consists of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Their country statistics are clubbed with that of Europe as they are former Soviet republics and were earlier reported as part of Soviet Union. Since their combined population in 2018 was 72.5 million, i.e., 0.95% of global population, and their per capita energy consumption and CO2 emissions are relatively low, combining their statistics with Europe will not alter the understanding of Europe significantly.

[6] Data for Europe and Europe+Central Asia for 2017.

[7] It is important to note that the discharge figures for Amu Darya is for elevations >2,000 m, whereas the figures for Ganga, Brahmaputra and Indus are for total discharges. While the contribution of snow and glacier melt as a fraction of discharge that is quoted in this paper is probably higher than for the total discharge of this river, as much of the Amu Darya drainage is in the Pamir mountains whose elevations are >1,000-2,000 m. The figure quoted in this paper provides the reader with an approximate idea of the probable percentage contribution of snow and glacier melt to this river.

https://mronline.org/2022/11/06/declare ... te-change/

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COP27: Fiddling while the world burns
November 5, 2022
Effective action must replace talk, delay and false solutions

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Statement drafted the Ecosocialist Alliance (UK), and endorsed by the organizations listed at the end.

COP 27, which will meet from the 6th – 18th November 2022, unfolds against a backdrop of growing climate chaos and ecological degradation. As this latest COP approaches, economic recession, increased poverty and war run alongside the multiple interlinked and inseparable crises of climate, environment, extinction and zoonotic diseases. We now face a global economic recession likely to be deeper even than that of 2008.

The economic spiral into recession will make addressing environmental crisis even more difficult, as states and corporations rush to increase fossil fuel production to offset the deepening energy crisis. They will try to make working people pay with their living standards and their lives, for the crisis of their rotten system. Resources which should be directed at adaptation and amelioration of the climate crisis will be diverted to war and fossil fuel production including dangerous Fracking and Underground Coal Gasification (UCG).

We face increasingly destructive wars, most notably in Ukraine which is destabilizing world food supplies, and which has the potential for the use of nuclear weapons. War causes huge physical and social damage to people and societies and the military industrial processes produce 6% of all greenhouse gasses. The impact of wars in Ukraine, Yemen, Palestine and other places in terms of human and environmental cost, and on food production and energy costs, will continue to exacerbate the crises facing the environment and the global economy. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine must not be the pretext for a rush to fossil fuels, new coal and gas and the resumption of fracking. Quite the opposite- it should be a spur to shift more rapidly towards renewables.

As Ecosocialists, we say another world is possible. A massive social and political transformation is needed, requiring the mobilisation of the mass of working people, women and men, across the globe. Only the end of capitalism’s relentless pursuit of private profit, endless waste, and rapacious drive for growth, can provide the basis for a solution not only to climate change, environmental degradation, and mass extinction, but to global poverty, hunger, and hyper exploitation.

The COP 27 conference will take place in an isolated, heavily policed tourist resort, with only one major road in and out, and hotels charging rates that will likely push the entire COP beyond the means of many grassroots organisations, especially those from poorer countries in the Global South. The Egyptian government say there will be room for opposition, but what they mean, is that activists will be offered fake protests opportunities where state-affiliated NGOs demonstrate around the convention giving the impression of an independent local civil society. No real Egyptian or other opposition will be allowed near Sharm El-Sheikh. We send solidarity to Egypt’s climate campaigners, women’s organisations, Trade Unionists and workers fighting for democracy.

2022 has seen floods in Pakistan, directly affecting thirty-three million people, Australia and elsewhere. We have seen wildfires, extreme heat, ice melt, drought, and extreme weather events on many continents, yet governments pursue still more fossil fuel production. 2022’s summer of disasters broke records worldwide. In 2021, global sea level set a new record high and is projected to continue to rise. The United Nations reports that research shows that women and children are up to fourteen times more likely than men to die during climate disasters.

The big issues of climate change will be debated in Egypt but whatever is agreed, capitalism left to itself can at best mitigate, not end them. Environmental destruction is woven into the very fabric of the system itself. However, much big business resists, we will have to force it to act on a global scale. Ultimately, only the ending of capitalism itself and its replacement by democratic Ecosocialist planned production for need and not private profit can guarantee the necessary action.

Genuine climate solutions cannot be based on the very market system that created the problem. Only the organised working class, and the rural oppressed of the global south -women and men have the power to end capitalism, because their labour produces all wealth and they have no great fortune to lose if the system changes, no vested interests in inequality, exploitation, and private profit.

Sustainability and global justice

The long-term global crisis and the immediate effects of catastrophic events impact more severely on women, children, elders, LGBTQIA+, disabled people and the people of First Nations. An eco-socialist strategy puts social justice and liberation struggles of the oppressed at its core.

Migration is, and will increasingly be, driven by climate change and conflicts and resource wars resulting from it. Accommodating and supporting free movement of people must be a core policy and necessary part of planning for the future.

Action now to halt climate change!

We demand:

All new fossil fuels must stay in the ground – no new gas, coal, or oil! No to Fracking and UCG!
A rapid move to renewable energy for transport, infrastructure, industry, agriculture, and homes.
A massive global programme of public works investing in green jobs, and replacing employment in unsustainable industries.
The retrofitting of homes and public buildings with insulation and other energy saving measures to reduce fuel use and to address fuel poverty.
A globally funded just transition for the global south to develop the necessary sustainable technologies and infrastructure.
A major cut in greenhouse gas emissions of at least 70% by 2030, from a 1990 baseline. This must be comprehensive – including all military, aviation, and shipping emissions – and include mechanisms for transparent accounting, measurement, and popular oversight.
The end of emissions trading schemes.
No to ‘offsetting’ of carbon emissions- we need a real zero not net-zero.
We call for:

Immediate cancellation of the international debt of the global south.
A rapid shift from massive factory farms and large-scale monoculture agribusiness towards eco-friendly farming methods and investment in green agricultural technology to reduce synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use in agriculture and replace these with organic methods and support for small farmers.
A massive reduction in meat and dairy production and consumption, with a view to its phasing out, through education and provision and promotion of high- quality, affordable plant-based alternatives.
The promotion of agricultural systems based on the right to food and food sovereignty, human rights, and with local control over natural resources, seeds, land, water, forests, knowledge, and technology to end food and nutrition insecurity in the global south.
The end of deforestation in the tropical and boreal forests by reduction of demand for imported food, timber, and biofuels.
A massive increase in protected areas for biodiversity conservation.
End fuel poverty through retrofitting energy existing homes and buildings with energy efficient sustainable technologies.
We demand a just transition:

Re-skilling of workers in environmentally damaging industries with well-paid alternative jobs in the new economy.
Full and democratic involvement of workers to harness the energy and creativity of the working people to design and implement new sustainable technologies and decommission old unsustainable ones.
Resources for popular education and involvement in implementing and enhancing a just transition, with environmental education embedded at all levels within the curriculum.
Urgent development of sustainable, affordable, and high-quality public transport with a comprehensive integrated plan which meets peoples’ needs and reduces the requirement for private car use.
A planned eco-socialist economy which eliminates waste, duplication and environmentally harmful practices, reduction in the working week and a corresponding increase in leisure time.
Work practices reorganized with the emphasis on fair flexibility and working closer to home, using a free and fast broadband infrastructure.
An end to ecologically and socially destructive extractivism, especially in the territories of Indigenous peoples and First Nations .
Respect for the economic, cultural, political and land rights of Indigenous peoples and First Nations.
As eco-socialists we put forward a vision of a just and sustainable world and fight with every ounce of our energy for every change, however small, which makes such a world possible. We will organize and assist wherever worker’s and community organizations internationally, raising demands on governments and challenging corporations.

Initial signatories

Left Unity, UK
Anti-Capitalist Resistance, UK
Green Left, UK
Global Ecosocialist Network, International
RISE, Ireland
Parti de Gauche Marseille Nord, France
Socialist Project, Canada
Breakthrough Party, UK
People Before Profit, Ireland
Climate and Capitalism, International
XR Camden, UK
Anti-Fracking Nanas, UK
West Cumbria Friends of the Earth, UK
Save Euston Trees, UK
Ecosocialist Alliance UK Facebook Group, UK
…and a growing list of individuals.

To add your name, email eco-socialist-action@protonmail.com

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/1 ... rld-burns/

Well, a lot of this is just more 'fiddling'. Quite a laundry list of Western oriented, liberal 'solutions, blithely not taking into account the wants, needs and preferences' of 90%of humanity. But them well-off white folks know best, huh?

The vast majority of this list is wishful thinking as long as capitalism is in the saddle. The only things that might be accomplished are those which the capitalists can profit by. The rest is beyond capital's consideration.

Other than issues of class interests, no small thing, the hunt for 'solutions' by these folks is overwhelmingly technical in nature, but technical solutions can only follow social action, not lead them. The 'technical solution response reminds me of the fascist fantasies of 'secret weapons' getting them out of the jam they created for themselves.

Revolution now for survival!

The hottest eight years on record
November 6, 2022

Sea level rise accelerates, European glacier melt shatters records, extreme weather causes devastation

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The past eight years are on track to be the eight warmest on record, fueled by ever-rising greenhouse gas concentrations and accumulated heat. Extreme heatwaves, drought and devastating flooding have affected millions and cost billions this year, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s provisional State of the Global Climate in 2022 report.


The tell-tale signs and impacts of climate change are becoming more dramatic. The rate of sea level rise has doubled since 1993. It has risen by nearly 10 mm since January 2020 to a new record high this year. The past two and a half years alone account for 10 percent of the overall rise in sea level since satellite measurements started nearly 30 years ago.

2022 took an exceptionally heavy toll on glaciers in the European Alps, with initial indications of record-shattering melt. The Greenland ice sheet lost mass for the 26th consecutive year and it rained (rather than snowed) there for the first time in September.

The global mean temperature in 2022 is currently estimated to be about 1.15 [1.02 to 1.28] °C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average. A rare triple-dip cooling La Niña means that 2022 is likely to “only” be fifth or sixth warmest. However, this does not reverse the long-term trend; it is only a matter of time until there is another warmest year on record.

Indeed, the warming continues. The 10-year average for the period 2013-2022 is estimated to be 1.14 [1.02 to 1.27] °C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline. This compares with 1.09°C from 2011 to 2020, as estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report.

Ocean heat was at record levels in 2021 (the latest year assessed), with the warming rate particularly high in the past 20 years.

Introducing the report, WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said:

“The greater the warming, the worse the impacts. We have such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now that the lower 1.5°C of the Paris Agreement is barely within reach.

“It’s already too late for many glaciers and the melting will continue for hundreds if not thousands of years, with major implications for water security. The rate of sea level rise has doubled in the past 30 years. Although we still measure this in terms of millimeters per year, it adds up to half to one meter per century and that is a long-term and major threat to many millions of coastal dwellers and low-lying states.

“All too often, those least responsible for climate change suffer most – as we have seen with the terrible flooding in Pakistan and deadly, long-running drought in the Horn of Africa. But even well-prepared societies this year have been ravaged by extremes – as seen by the protracted heatwaves and drought in large parts of Europe and southern China. Increasingly extreme weather makes it more important than ever to ensure that everyone on Earth has access to life-saving early warnings.”

Report Highlights

Concentrations of the main greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide – once again reached record levels in 2021. The annual increase in methane concentration was the highest on record. Data from key monitoring stations show atmospheric levels of the three gases continue to increase in 2022.

Temperature: The global average temperature in 2022 is estimated to be about 1.15 [1.02 to 1.28] °C above the 1850-1900 average. 2015 to 2022 are likely to be the eight warmest years on record. La Niña conditions have dominated since late 2020 and are expected to continue until the end of 2022. Continuing La Niña has kept global temperatures relatively «low» for the past two years – albeit higher than the last significant La Niña in 2011.

Glaciers and ice: In the European Alps, glacier melt records were shattered in 2022. Average thickness losses of between 3 and over 4 metres were measured throughout the Alps, substantially more than in the previous record year 2003.

In Switzerland, 6% of the glacier ice volume was lost between 2021 and 2022, according to initial measurements. For the first time in history, no snow outlasted the summer season even at the very highest measurement sites and thus no accumulation of fresh ice occurred. Between 2001 and 2022 the volume of glacier ice in Switzerland decreased from 77 km3 to 49 km3, a decline of more than a third.

A low snowpack at the end of winter and repeated coverings of Saharan dust set the scene for unprecedented ice loss between May and early September as a result of the long and intense heatwaves.

Global mean sea level has risen by an estimated 3.4 ± 0.3 mm per year over the 30 years (1993-2022) of the satellite altimeter record. The rate has doubled between 1993-2002 and 2013-2022 and sea level increased by about 5 mm between January 2021 and August 2022. The acceleration is due to increasing ice melt.

Ocean heat: The ocean stores around 90% of the accumulated heat from human emissions of greenhouse gases. The upper 2000m of the ocean continued to warm to record levels in 2021 (the latest year for which figures are available). Warming rates are especially high in the past two decades. It is expected that it will continue to warm in the future – a change which is irreversible on centennial to millennial time scales.

Overall, 55% of the ocean surface experienced at least one marine heatwave in 2022. In contrast only 22% of the ocean surface experienced a marine cold spell. Marine heatwaves are becoming more frequent, in contrast to cold waves.

Arctic sea-ice extent was below the long-term (1981-2010) average for most of the year. The September extent was 4.87 million km2, or 1.54 million km2 below the long-term mean extent. Antarctic sea-ice extent dropped to 1.92 million km2 on 25 February, the lowest level on record and almost 1 million km2 below the long-term average.

Extreme weather: In East Africa, rainfall has been below average in four consecutive wet seasons, the longest in 40 years, with indications that the current season could also be dry. As a result of the persistent drought and other compounding factors, an estimated 18.4 to 19.3 million people faced food “Crisis” or worse levels of acute food insecurity before June 2022. Humanitarian agencies are warning that another below-average season will likely result in crop failure and further exacerbate the food insecurity situations in Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia.

Record breaking rain in July and August led to extensive flooding in Pakistan. There were at least 1 700 deaths and 33 million people affected. 7.9 million people were displaced. The flooding came hard on the heels of an extreme heatwave in March and April in both India and Pakistan.

The southern Africa region was battered by a series of cyclones over two months at the start of the year, hitting Madagascar hardest with torrential rain and devastating floods. Hurricane Ian caused extensive damage and loss of life in Cuba and southwest Florida in September.

Large parts of the northern hemisphere were exceptionally hot and dry. China had the most extensive and long-lasting heatwave since national records began and the second-driest summer on record. The Yangtze River at Wuhan reached its lowest recorded level for August.

Large parts of Europe sweltered in repeated episodes of extreme heat. The United Kingdom saw a new national record on 19 July, when the temperature topped more than 40°C for the first time. This was accompanied by a persistent and damaging drought and wildfires. European rivers including the Rhine, Loire and Danube fell to critically low levels.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/1 ... on-record/

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Climate urgency stressed at COP27
By WANG XIAODONG in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-11-07 07:25

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A logo of the COP 27 summit. [Photo/Agencies]

The world needs to act urgently to increase the political will to fight climate change and transform words into actions, which was described at the opening on Sunday of a key global conference on climate change as "humanity's greatest challenge" in modern times.

"Today, a new era begins, and we begin to do things differently," Simon Stiell, the United Nations' climate change executive secretary, said at the opening ceremony of the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP27, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

"Paris gave us the agreement. Glasgow gave us the plan. And Sharm El-Sheikh shifts us to implementation," he said, referring to two previous COP sessions held in France and Scotland.

"We must demonstrate this transformational shift to implementation, put in negotiations into concrete actions. And every corner of human activity must align with our Paris commitment of pursuing efforts to limit" the global temperature increase to 1.5 C above preindustrial levels.

With intensified havoc caused by climate change-induced extreme weather across the globe, ranging from record-breaking high temperatures in many countries in Europe and North America this past summer to ongoing severe drought in the Horn of Africa, this year's UN climate change conference has prompted high expectations from around the world to find solutions to climate change.

Much of the agenda at this year's conference focuses on implementation of major targets reached during previous climate conferences, such as developed countries providing $100 billion each year to help poorer countries fight climate change.

Many experts have also called for wealthy developed countries, which have contributed to the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming, to compensate developing countries for the loss and damage caused by global warming, — a topic expected to be hotly discussed during COP27.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, president of COP27, said the conference will become a milestone for countries in renewing commitment and scaling up ambitions and for seriously implementing the agreements and plans to efficiently deal with "humanity's biggest challenge" in modern times.

"All types of evidence undoubtedly show that climate change is a real threat to people's lives, wherever they live. ... The development track that humanity has endorsed since the Industrial Revolution is no longer sustainable. And if it continues without any radical change, future generations will definitely face more serious consequences compared with those witnessed by current generations," he said at the opening ceremony.

Shoukry cited the unprecedented floods in Pakistan that claimed hundreds of lives over the summer, the extremely hot summer in North America and Europe, and the Horn of Africa drought, which has left millions of people on the verge of starvation.

He called for rich countries to honor their pledge to provide $100 billion annually to developing countries to fight climate change.

The international community should unite to tackle the dire challenges of climate change, he added.

Li Gao, chief of climate change affairs at China's Ministry of Ecology and Environment, said that implementation of existing policies, plans and projects should be a primary task of COP27. Li also urged developed countries to honor their pledge of financial assistance to help developing countries fight climate change.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... 7454b.html

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The people need a Green New Deal, but imperialism opts for “Better dead than red”
At the recent webinar marking the first anniversary of the International Manifesto Group’s document ‘Through Pluripolarity to Socialism’, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez made a contribution about the ecological crises faced by humanity, comparing the progress (or lack thereof) tackling global warming in the West with that made by China.

Carlos observes that, in spite of the Biden administration’s oft-stated commitment to seriously reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, the US-led proxy war against Russia is having a disastrous environmental impact, leading to an increase in fracking and coal consumption. Meanwhile China is leading the world in renewable energy, electric vehicles and afforestation; and instead of cooperating with China and finding common solutions to common problems, the West instead imposes sanctions on Chinese products that are crucial to green energy supply chains. So, while people in the West might want a Green New Deal, but what they’re actually getting is “better dead than red.”


What I’m going to address in these brief remarks is the question of climate change; how it’s covered in the Manifesto, and the developments that have taken place in the last year since the Manifesto was released.

The Manifesto talks of “an ecological emergency of climate warming, pollution and biodiversity loss, rendering our planet increasingly uninhabitable.” And it points the blame for this situation at neoliberal capitalism, which has “turned everything the earth offers humanity gratis into plunder and profit.”

In terms of what neoliberal capitalism is doing, this analysis – very sad to say – still holds true. Indeed the situation is in many ways worse than it was a year ago, in spite of a great deal of rhetoric and the passing into US law, two months ago, of the Inflation Reduction Act, including climate commitments that Joe Biden considers to be a landmark success of his presidency to date.

It is, unquestionably, the US’s must important set of climate commitments thus far. Unfortunately, that’s not saying very much. It’s still nowhere near the type of unprecedented action the world needs from the US – which, of the major countries, has the highest per capita emissions in the world, and which has contributed a full quarter to global cumulative carbon emissions, in spite of having just four percent of the world’s population.

Even if the US meets its targets under the Inflation Reduction Act – which is doubtful enough – then in five years time it will still be generating significantly less renewable energy than China will generate this year.

But anyway, it’s more fruitful to look at what the US and its allies are actually doing, as opposed to what they say they’re doing or will do.

Most obviously, the US is driving NATO’s proxy war against Russia, which is nothing short of disastrous in environmental terms.

In order to punish Russia, to consolidate the Western military-economic-ideological alliance, and to generate profits for the US’s domestic fossil fuel industry, the Biden administration has been heavily promoting sanctions on Russian gas and pushing Europe towards reducing its reliance on Russian energy long term.

You might hope that at least that might mean a massive commitment to renewable energy. It doesn’t. It actually means:

1) A major increase in US exports of fracked shale gas to Europe.
2) A return to coal for much of Central Europe.
3) Ramped up drilling for oil in the North Sea.
4) A renewed interest in fracking in Britain and elsewhere.

All of these are significantly more damaging in environmental terms than Russian natural gas.

Hydraulic fracturing – fracking – is an unproven and likely extremely dangerous technology, which potentially causes earthquakes, water pollution, and serious leaks of methane – which has 40 times the greenhouse effect that carbon dioxide does. And even if everything goes according to plan, well, shale gas is still a fossil fuel.

And to get it from North America to Europe, it has to be liquified, stored at minus 70 degrees celcius, and transported by ship. This whole process is obviously extremely costly in both financial and energy terms, certainly much more so than using existing pipelines running from Russia through Europe.

Meanwhile Germany, for decades a poster child of the renewable energy movement, has started reopening its coal mines. Its coal use is up 17 percent on last year, corresponding to a decrease in natural gas imported from Russia. As most people know, coal is the worst of the fossil fuels, associated with twice the carbon emissions of natural gas. And if there isn’t enough farce and irony in the story so far, well, it’s the German Green Party that’s most hawkishly pushing these policies as part of an overall anti-Russia strategy.

As is so often the case, the expression that comes to mind is: thank goodness for the existence of the People’s Republic of China.

A couple of months after the release of the Manifesto last year, China announced some historic commitments: achieving peak greenhouse gas emissions before 2030, and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060.

This is entirely in line with what the UN and the intergovernmental panel on climate change have recommended for developing countries, and will constitute by far the fastest transition away from fossil fuels for an industrialised country.

And China is generally in the habit of keeping its promises. It already looks like it will hit peak emissions before 2030, and is already exceeding its targets for renewable energy generation.

Coal has gone from 80 percent of China’s power mix 20 years ago to under 50 percent now. It’s actually a smaller proportion of the power mix than in Australia. The Belt and Road is getting greener and greener, with coal projects cut out and a big emphasis on renewables.

China is responsible for a third of all renewable energy investment globally. It’s the world leader in electric buses, electric trains and electric cars. It is by far the global leader in the installation, generation and consumption of solar power, wind power and hydro power.

No country has done as much as China in terms of reforestation. In the last four decades, forest coverage has doubled, from 12 percent to 24 percent.

What allows this progress of course is the class structure of Chinese society. Power isn’t dominated by a wealthy elite; by a class of people that own and deploy capital, as is the case – by definition – in capitalist countries. Power is exercised by and on behalf of the people, hence the government represents the interests of the people. That’s why the idea of a Green New Deal, which is a completely marginal, pie-in-the-sky, radical-left idea in the West, is pretty close to what’s actually happening in China.

Unlike the US, unlike Britain, unlike the EU or Canada or Australia, China spends significantly more on renewable energy and environmental protection than it does on its military.

Meanwhile, as the rich countries continue to fail to meet their commitment – agreed in Copenhagen in 2009 – to provide 100 billion dollars annually in climate finance to poorer countries, China in that time period has conducted hundreds of foreign assistance programs related to climate change adaptation and mitigation; and has helped to build hydropower, solar and wind power stations in dozens of countries.

All of this serves to highlight the utter recklessness and shortsightedness of the New Cold War. If the US genuinely cared about protecting the planet and saving humanity, it would do everything possible to cooperate with China on climate change, learn from its example and benefit from its innovations. Actually it’s doing the opposite – in support of its slander campaign regarding human rights in Xinjiang, it’s imposing sanctions on Chinese products, including essential components for solar power.

The people might want a Green New Deal, but what they’re getting is: “Better dead than red.”

It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that – in the interests of the survival of our species – the peoples of the world need to follow the example of the socialist countries; to follow humanity’s trajectory through pluripolarity to socialism.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/11/02/t ... -than-red/

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UK 'reneging' on $300m climate fund commitment
By JULIAN SHEA in London | China Daily Global | Updated: 2022-11-04 10:33

With just days to go until the start of the United Nations COP27 climate summit in Egypt, the British government, which was president and host of COP26 last year in Glasgow, has been criticized for failing to make good on $300 million worth of climate finance payments it had promised.

Newly-installed British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had initially said he would not be attending the major gathering of world leaders because of more pressing political concerns at home, until he was forced into making a U-turn after being criticized by climate lobby groups, opposition politicians and members of his own government.

Now the Politico website reports that the government, which has been in turmoil with three prime ministers in the last two months, failed to meet its September deadline to donate $288 million to the Green Climate Fund, or GCF, a resource to help developing countries, many of which contribute least to climate change but feel its effects the most, to make adaptations to mitigate climate effect. An additional pledge of $20.6 million to the same fund has also not yet been forthcoming.

In the minutes of a recent GCF board meeting in South Korea, it was noted that three projects the fund had given approval to were currently unable to proceed because of a "lower volume of contributions from contributors than was anticipated".

Clare Shakya, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development's climate change group, called the government's failure to honor its obligations "very, very poor timing".

"This is in the context when COP26 was all about rebuilding trust," she said.

"The UK has pushed every other country to up what they are doing to increase climate and adaptation funding.

"And now, even before COP27, the engineers of the trust-building exercise are reneging on their own promises. It's such a strong negative signal to developing countries that they should not trust rich nations."

Caroline Lucas, the only Green Party representative in the British Parliament, welcomed Sunak's decision to go after what she called "an embarrassing misstep on the world stage", and said it was important to send out a similarly positive message about the issue of climate payments.

"Let this be a lesson to (Sunak) — climate leadership matters," she tweeted. "Now he urgently needs to increase UK ambition on emission reduction targets and pay what we owe to global climate funds."

A year on from having hosted COP26, Britain is ending its presidency "weaker" and with "disappointing" leadership, Alyssa Gilbert, director of policy at Imperial College London's Grantham Institute told the BBC, as summed up by Sunak's U-turn.

"One of the key things about COP is political leadership from the top," she said. "Dithering from the prime minister is worse in a year when we are the presidents of COP."

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... 80455.html

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Germany Far From Achieving Climate Targets for 2030: Report

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A train passes a thermal power plant in Berlin, Germany, Sept. 8, 2022. | Photo: Xinhua/Ren Pengfei

Published 4 November 2022

Germany aims to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 65 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, and to be climate neutral by 2045, five years earlier than originally planned.

Europe's largest economy is a long way from achieving its climate targets for 2030, according to a report by the German government's expert council on climate issues published on Friday.

"The emission reduction rates achieved so far are far from sufficient to meet the 2030 climate protection targets," council member Thomas Heimer said, stressing that the targets have been missed by individual sectors as well as the economy as a whole.

Germany aims to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 65 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, and to be climate neutral by 2045, five years earlier than originally planned.

Annual emissions reductions would have to more than double to achieve these targets, Heimer stressed. Meanwhile, Germany's transport sector would require a 14-fold increase in reductions.

During the review period 2000-2021, greenhouse gas emissions in Germany fell by around 27 percent. The country's energy sector contributed almost half of this reduction, according to the government's report, presented in the run-up to the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, from Nov. 6 to 18.

On the other hand, Germany's industry, and buildings and transport sectors saw a "phase of stagnation or even a slight increase" in emissions. Although emissions in industry and transport fell due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this trend was reversed in 2021, the report found.

The effects of emission-reducing technologies were offset by more prosperity and economic growth. "Efficiency gains have been counteracted by overall economic growth, larger living spaces, and increased transport volumes," the council's chairman Hans-Martin Henning said.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 09, 2022 3:41 pm

RICH COUNTRIES CONTRIBUTE LESS THAN POOR ONES TO COMBAT CLIMATE CHANGE
7 Nov 2022 , 4:05 p.m.

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African countries receive funding from developed nations for climate change mitigation, but must pay it back in a way that leaves them without resources to improve their climate action (Photo: Vincent Tremeau)

There is no doubt that the countries that pollute the most are the developed and industrialized ones, and, therefore, they should be the ones that provide the most resources to curb climate change. However, an investigation revealed that rich countries apply deceptive and dishonest practices to exaggerate the climate financing they give to developing countries.

"Contributions from rich countries not only remain well below target, they are misleading by accounting for climate finance in a way that is neither correct nor adequate," said Nafkote Dabi, Oxfam's climate change policy officer. International, the group leading the investigation.

What is the real value of climate finance? According to Oxfam research, in 2020 it was between 21 thousand and 24 thousand 500 million dollars, compared to the figure of 68 thousand 300 million dollars that rich countries declared to contribute in public financing.

Other data:

*In total, added to the private financing, it was proclaimed that what was contributed was 83 thousand 300 million dollars, whose overestimation could reach 225%.
*The global climate finance target is set at $100 billion annually. That is, even inflating the numbers, the goal is not met.
*Excessive lending is putting poor countries in debt, which remain unprepared to deal with the climate crisis.
*Funded projects often have a lesser climate focus than declared.
*"Forcing poor countries to repay loans in order to deal with the climate crisis to which they have barely contributed is deeply unfair," the report says.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ric ... -0003.html
*They do not support countries facing droughts, cyclones and floods; they put them in debt
*All financing is overestimated, including that of multilateral entities such as the World Bank.
*If developed countries would honor their commitment and truly address their climate finance accounting errors, it would be possible to avert a large-scale climate catastrophe.
*Poor countries pay more and pollute less.

https://misionverdad.com/paises-ricos-a ... -climatico

Google Translator

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A general view of the opening meeting of the UN Conference at the Folkets Hus in Stockholm. (Photo: The Environment & Society Portal)

Limits to growth: Inconvenient truth of our times
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram (Posted Nov 08, 2022)

Originally published: JOMO on November 7, 2022 by Hezri A. Adnan (more by JOMO) |

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 08, 2022 (IPS). Ahead of the first United Nations environmental summit in Stockholm in 1972, a group of scientists prepared The Limits to Growth report for the Club of Rome. It showed planet Earth’s finite natural resources cannot support ever-growing human consumption.

Limits used integrated computer modelling to investigate twelve planetary scenarios of economic growth and their long-term consequences for the environment and natural resources.

Emphasizing material limits to growth, it triggered a major debate. Authored by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, Limits is arguably even more influential today.

Within limits

Limits considered population, food production, industrialization, pollution and non-renewable resource use trends from 1900 to 2100.

It conceded, “Any human activity that does not require a large flow of irreplaceable resources or produce severe environmental degradation might continue to grow indefinitely”.

Most projected scenarios saw growth ending this century. Ominously, Limits warned of likely ecological and societal collapses if anthropocene challenges are not adequately addressed soon enough.

Failure would mean less food and energy supplies, more pollution, and lower living standards, even triggering population collapses.

But Limits was never meant to be a definitive forecast, and should not be judged as such. Instead, it sought to highlight major resource threats due to growing human consumption.

Off-limits?

Gaya Herrington showed three of Limits’ four major scenarios anticipated subsequent trends. Two lead to major collapses by mid-century. She concluded, “humanity is on a path to having limits to growth imposed on itself rather than consciously choosing its own.”

Limits stressed the urgent need for radical transformation to achieve ‘sustainable development’. The ‘international community’ embraced this, in principle, at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, two decades after Stockholm.

With accelerating resource depletion—as current demographic, industrial, pollution and food trends continue—the planet’s growth limits will be reached within the next half-century. The Earth’s ‘carrying capacity’ is unavoidably shrinking.

For Limits, only a “transition from growth to…a desirable, sustainable state of global equilibrium” can save the environment and humanity.

The report maintained it was still possible to create conditions for a much more sustainable future while meeting everyone’s basic material needs. As Gandhi said, “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”

No other environmental work then, or since, has so directly challenged mainstream growth beliefs. Unsurprisingly, it attracted strong opposition.

The 1972 study was long dismissed by many as neo-Malthusian prophecy of doom, underestimating the potential for human adaptation through technological progress.

Many other criticisms have been made. Limits was faulted for focusing too much on resource limits, but not enough on environmental damage. Economists have criticized it for not explicitly incorporating either prices or socioeconomic dynamics.

Beyond limits

In Beyond the Limits (1993), the two Meadows and Randers argued that resource use had exceeded the world environment’s carrying capacity.

Using climate change data, they highlighted the likelihood of collapse, going well beyond the earlier focus on the rapid carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere.

In another sequel, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (2004), they elaborated their original argument with new data, calling for stronger actions to avoid unsustainable excess.

Dennis Meadows stresses other studies confirm and elaborate Limits’ concerns. Various growth trends peak around 2020, suggesting likely slowdowns thereafter, culminating in environmental and economic collapse by mid-century.

Limits’ early 1970s’ computer modelling has been overtaken by enhanced simulation capabilities. Many earlier recommendations need revision, but the main fears have been reaffirmed.

Limitless?

Two key Limits’ arguments deserve reiteration. First, its critique of technological hubris, which has deterred more serious concern about the threats, thus undermining environmental, economic and other mitigation efforts.

As Limits argued, environmental crisis and collapse are due to socioeconomic, technological and environmental transformations for wealth accumulation, now threatening Earth’s resources and ecology.

Conventional profit-prioritizing systems and technologies have changed, e.g., with resource efficiency innovation. Such efforts help postpone the inevitable, but cannot extend the planet’s natural limits.

Of course, innovative new technologies are needed to address old and new problems. But these have to be deployed to enhance sustainability, rather than profit.

The Limits’ critique is ultimately of ‘growth’ in contemporary society. It goes much further than recent debates over measuring growth, recognizing greater output typically involves more resource use.

While not necessarily increasing exponentially, growth cannot be unlimited, due to its inherent resource and ecological requirements, even with materials-saving innovations.

This Earth for all

Thankfully, Limits’ fourth scenario—involving significant, but realistic transformations—allows widespread increases in human wellbeing within the planet’s resource boundaries.

This scenario has inspired Earth for All—the Club of Rome’s Transformational Economics Commission’s 2022 report—which more than updates Limits after half a century. Its subtitle—A Survival Guide for Humanity—emphasizes the threat’s urgency, scale and scope.

It argues that ensuring the wellbeing of all is still possible, but requires urgent fundamental changes. Major efforts are needed to eradicate poverty, reduce inequality, empower women, and transform food and energy systems.

The comprehensive report proposes specific strategies. All five need significant investments, including much public spending. This requires more progressive taxation, especially of wealth. Curbing wasteful consumption is also necessary.

More liquidity—e.g., via ‘monetary financing’ and International Monetary Fund issue of more special drawing rights—and addressing government debt burdens can ensure more policy and fiscal space for developing country governments.

Many food systems are broken. They currently involve unhealthy and unsustainable production and consumption, generating much waste. All this must be reformed accordingly.

Market regulation for the public good is crucial. Better regulation—of markets for goods (especially food) and services, even technology, finance, labour and land—is necessary to better conserve the environment.

Limited choice

The report includes a modeling exercise for two scenarios. ‘Too Little Too Late’ is the current trajectory, offering too few needed changes.

With growing inequalities, social trust erodes, as people and countries compete more intensely for resources. Without sufficient ‘collective action’, planetary boundaries will be crossed. For the most vulnerable, prospects are grim.

In the second ‘Giant Leap’ scenario, the five needed shifts are achieved, improving wellbeing all around. Everybody can live with dignity, health and security. Ecological deterioration is sufficiently reversed, as institutions serve the common good and ensure justice for all.

Broad-based sustainable gains in wellbeing need pro-active governance reshaping societies and markets. This needs sufficient political will and popular pressure for needed reforms.

But as the world moves ever closer to many limits, the scenario looming is terrifying: ecosystem destruction, gross inequalities and vulnerabilities, social and political tensions.

While regimes tend to bend to public pressure, if only to survive, existing discourses and mobilization are not conducive to generating the popular political demands needed for the changes.

Adnan A Hezri is an environmental policy analyst and Fellow of the Academy of Sciences, Malaysia. He is author of The Sustainability Shift: Reshaping Malaysia’s Future.

https://mronline.org/2022/11/08/limits- ... our-times/

How ya gonna limit the profits of capitalists? Good luck with that. Without seriously addressing the current dominate mode of production we have no idea what or where the limits should be set other that the undoubted need to reduce fossil fuel burning.

Green capitalism is a horrible scam but to reject climate change science as a tool of hegemony throws the baby out with the bathwater. This is reprehensible especially coming from nominal Marxists; I thought we apply the latest and best science?

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President Maduro Proposes to Reduce Capitalist Consumerism

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Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro at COP27, Nov. 8, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @MObras_Publicas

Published 8 November 2022 (8 hours 59 minutes ago)

“The environmental imbalance and crisis created in nature are comparable to the conditions of inequality and injustice that capitalism has created against humanity,” he said.

On Tuesday, at the High-Level Segment at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27), Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro urged countries to change consumption patterns fostered by capitalism. in order to preserve life on the planet.

“The climate crisis is an inescapable reality, which can only be faced with concrete, urgent, and immediate facts,” he said, emphasizing that the dimension of the crisis is not a surprise.

"Since the beginning of environmental diplomacy, there was enough data to declare an early emergency and act accordingly," Maduro recalled.

“Each hour, month, and year of inaction, hesitation, and indolence translates today into destroyed ecosystems, extinct species, and deterioration of living conditions on the planet.”


The Bolivarian leader stressed that the problem is no longer simply global warming but the "absolute collapse" of ecosystems, since current trends indicate that the planet could have very harsh living conditions for the human species in about 30 or 40 years.

“Existence as we knew it was forever disrupted to the detriment of all living species on the planet,” Maduro said, blaming “savage and predatory” capitalism for the possible extinction of human life.

“The environmental imbalance and crisis created in nature are comparable to the conditions of inequality and injustice that capitalism has created against humanity,” the Venezuelan president pointed out, adding that “a system normalizing human exploitation does not have ethical conditions to respect other forms of existence”.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Pre ... -0006.html

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SCAM ALERT! * SCAM ALERT! * SCAM ALERT!

COP27 Launches Carbon Markets Initiative & Investment Facility

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Logo of the ACMI initiative, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @SEforALLorg

Published 8 November 2022

The Africa Carbon Markets Initiative and Rwanda's Ireme Invest seek to mitigate global warming.


On Tuesday, a new initiative to expand Africa's participation in voluntary carbon markets was launched at the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change being held in Sharm El-Sheikh.

Led by a 13-member steering committee of African leaders, CEOs, and carbon credit experts, the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI) was launched to support the growth of carbon credits production, create jobs and protect biodiversity in Africa.

ACMI announced a bold ambition for the continent to reach 300 million credits offered annually by 2030. This level of supplies would unlock US$6 billion in income and support 30 million jobs. By 2050, ACMI is targeting over 1.5 billion credits annually in Africa, leveraging over US$120 billion and supporting over 110 million jobs.

A number of African nations including Kenya, Malawi, Gabon, Nigeria and Togo shared their commitments to collaborating with ACMI to scale up carbon credit production via voluntary carbon market activation plans.


On Tuesday, Rwanda also launched a new green investment facility to spur investment in the private sector-led green growth in the country by availing sustainable finance.

Dubbed Ireme Invest, the investment facility with US$104 million initial capitalization provided by the Development Bank of Rwanda and other partners, was launched as a side event at the COP27.

"Ireme Invest embodies Rwanda's commitment to achieving tangible results toward a green economy through public-private partnerships in key areas," Rwandan President Paul Kagame said, noting that climate adaptation requires big changes in how countries produce and consume energy.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/COP ... -0005.html

Another kind of colonialism.

COP27: Egypt Urges Rich Countries to Honor Financial Pledges

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Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi addresses the opening of the Sharm El-Sheikh Climate Implementation Summit (SCIS) during the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, on Nov. 7, 2022. | Photo: Xinhua/Sui Xiankai

Published 7 November 2022

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi Monday called on developed countries to fulfill their climate pledges to help developing countries that suffer the most from the climate crisis.


Sisi made the remarks in an inaugurating speech to the Sharm El-Sheikh Climate Implementation Summit (SCIS), which gathers heads of state and government worldwide here at the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP27) in Egypt's coastal city of Sharm El-Sheikh.

Addressing the summit, Sisi called on world leaders to take real and concrete steps towards reducing emissions, enhancing adaptation to the consequences of climate change, and providing the necessary financing for developing countries that suffer the most from the current climate crisis.

"Time is running out for the world and there is no way to retreat from implementing climate commitments," Sisi said.

"It is necessary for developing countries, especially in our African continent, to feel that their priorities are responded to and taken into consideration," he said.

"These countries bear their responsibility, to the extent of their capabilities and the amount of appropriate support and finance, in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, granting them some satisfaction with their position on global efforts to combat climate change," Sisi added.

He stressed that this can only happen by creating an atmosphere of confidence as well as taking additional serious steps and of developed countries to fulfill their climate finance commitments.

He pointed out that the world is still facing many challenges that cast a shadow on its ability to reach the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which is to keep the global average temperature rise this century as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Addressing the climate summit, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also warned global leaders of the current climate challenges.

"We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator," he said.

"Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising, and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible," he adds.

He noted that humanity must "cooperate or perish" in the face of international crises that have battered economies and shaken international relations.

"It is either a climate solidarity pact, or a collective suicide pact," Guterres warned.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/COP ... -0014.html

There can be no solidarity from individualists capitalism. Better red than dead!

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Developed countries should fulfill climate finance promise: Chinese envoy
Xinhua | Updated: 2022-11-09 08:10

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China's Special Envoy for Climate Change Xie Zhenhua addresses the Climate Implementation Summit at the COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, Nov 8, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt - The developed countries should fulfill their promise of providing $100 billion in climate finance as soon as possible and draw a road map for doubling the adaptation fund, China's Special Envoy for Climate Change Xie Zhenhua said Tuesday.

Xie, also the special representative for Chinese President Xi Jinping, made the remarks in an address to the Climate Implementation Summit at the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Egypt's coastal city of Sharm El-Sheikh.

Facing the grave challenges posed by the frequent extreme weather events that have caused heavy losses on every continent and by the emergence of energy and food crises this year, multilateralism, solidarity and cooperation remain the only way out of the predicament, Xie said.

Meanwhile, the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and the mechanism of nationally determined contributions are still the "inevitable choice" to overcome the climate challenges, he said.

As the UNFCCC marks its 30th anniversary this year and the Paris Agreement has entered the stage of full implementation, the COP27 shoulders the important mission of upholding the consensus on the UNFCCC principles and promoting pragmatic actions by all parties, the Chinese envoy said.

Noting that China has been actively tackling climate change with persistent and pragmatic actions, Xie said that, with the recent successful conclusion of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), China's determination to follow the path of green development was further strengthened.

"China's firm determination and position to implement the goals of reaching carbon peak and achieving carbon neutralization, and to actively participate in global climate governance will never change," Xie vowed.

He expressed the hope that the COP27 will focus on the implementation of promises, while urging the developed countries to take the lead in exerting more effective efforts to reduce emissions so to achieve carbon neutralization significantly ahead of schedule, and achieve substantive results on the adaptation and finance issues.

China hopes that "the developed countries will fulfill their pledge of providing $100 billion as soon as possible and draw a road map for doubling adaptation finance to enhance mutual trust and joint action between the North and the South," Xie said.

"We are willing to work with all parties to adhere to multilateralism, build a fair and reasonable global climate governance system with win-win cooperation, and make greater contribution to tackling the challenges posed by global climate change," he added.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... 74d57.html

Billionaires 'ruining world's climate'
By ANGUS McNEICE in London | China Daily Global | Updated: 2022-11-09 10:07

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Investments made by billionaires are exacerbating the climate crisis, Oxfam said in a report that estimates 125 of the world's wealthiest people are responsible for 393 million tons of emissions each year, which is equivalent to those of France.

Whether it be the upkeep of megamansions, private jets, or super yachts, the extravagant lifestyles of billionaires lead to personal carbon footprints that are thousands of times greater than the average person, Oxfam said, but it is the investments made by the uber-rich that carry the most significant carbon burden.

The British charity estimates that, when business activities are taken into account, the average billionaire's annual emissions equal 3 million tons, roughly 1 million times higher than the 2.76 tons produced by the average individual outside the top 10 percent of incomes.

The report was released during the first week of the United Nations Climate Change Conference known as COP27 that is underway in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where delegates from around the world have gathered to negotiate domestic and international policies to combat global warming.

"We need COP27 to expose and change the role that big corporates and their rich investors are playing in profiting from the pollution that is driving the global climate crisis," said Oxfam Chief Executive Danny Sriskandarajah.

In collecting data, Oxfam analyzed the activities of the 220 individuals on the Bloomberg Billionaires list for 2022. It then whittled the list down to the 125 billionaires for whom detailed emissions data was readily available.

The study found that, among these billionaires, 14 percent of total investments involved high-polluting industries, such as fossil fuels. Eighteen percent of investments were in consumer staples, and 11 percent were in financials. Just one billionaire in the sample had direct investments in a renewable energy company.

"We need governments to tackle this urgently, by publishing emission figures for the richest people, regulating investors and corporates to slash carbon emissions, and taxing wealth and polluting investments," said Sriskandarajah.

Oxfam said billionaires needed to take a leadership role in efforts to combat global warming, and make more responsible, climate-friendly, investments.

"Humanity must significantly reduce carbon emissions," Sriskandarajah said. "This will mean radical changes in how investors and corporations conduct business, and how policymakers manage both."

Inequality has been a heated topic during the initial sessions of COP27, which opened on Sunday. Rich and poor nations have clashed over the prospect of climate reparations, through which developing regions might receive payments for damage caused by historical emissions. Rich UN member states have also been criticized over a failed pledge to generate $100 billion in annual climate aid for poor countries.

"By 2030, climate change is expected to push an additional 132 million into extreme poverty," said Anurit Kanti, a global shaper for the World Economic Forum. "Without a focus on climate justice, this year's COP27 is in danger of failing to protect and amplify the voices of the primary victims of climate change."

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... 74e8d.html

Why do we confine our criticism to billionaires? I suspect the mass of 'mere' millionaires greatly outweighs the relative handful of billionaires. Are we trying not to offend the upper middle class and those who aspire to overweening wealth? Fuck those people.

Tackling warming spurs growth, UN event hears
By WANG XIAODONG in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt | China Daily Global | Updated: 2022-11-09 09:34

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The file photo shows a wind power plant in Zhangjiakou, North China's Hebei province. [Photo/Xinhua]

Tackling climate change can provide new incentives for economic growth, as demonstrated by China's successful experiences in developing new energy, said senior officials attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 27, on Tuesday.

"Coping with climate change is a challenge and an opportunity as well," said Zhao Yingmin, Chinese vice-minister of ecology and environment, during a side event at the conference. "Data have shown transforming to a low-carbon economy has provided great development opportunities."

China achieved economic development at an average annual rate of 6.5 percent between 2012 and last year, at the cost of annual growth of 3 percent of energy consumption, he said. During the decade, China's emissions of carbon dioxide per unit of gross domestic product decreased by a third due to increased efficiency in energy use, resulting in energy savings equivalent to 1.4 billion metric tons of coal.

China has also become a world leader in new energy development, driven by a low-carbon transformation. China's electric vehicle market accounts for more than half of the global market, and China has remained at the top spot for many years in terms of total installed capacity for wind and solar power, Zhao said.

"We need to accelerate the transformation to a low-carbon economy, and ensure the process is fair, orderly and secure," he said.

Manuela Ferro, regional vice-president for East Asia and Pacific at the World Bank, said China has made remarkable progress in renewable energy, and accumulated experiences useful for many other countries. "I think that there are many lessons from China from both its development story and developing a more sustainable, climate-wise way," she said.

Facts have shown it is possible for China to continue to grow, and grow in a more sustainable way that is consistent with China's own goals, she said, adding that coping with climate change can bring growth including job creation.

Despite the challenges China faces in fighting climate change, China is well positioned to meet its climate commitments of achieving peak carbon emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060, and transition to a greener economy while meeting its development goals, according to a report released by the World Bank last month.

'Green jobs'

In the renewable energy sector, China has already created about 54 million "green jobs", with more than 4 million jobs in renewable energy, the report said.

Zhao said during a COP 27 side event on Sunday that the Chinese government attaches high importance to managing climate change, and it will unswervingly follow a path of low-carbon development.

China will accelerate integrating the reduction of carbon emissions with high-quality economic development, and work with the international community to contribute to fighting global climate change, he said.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... 74e4e.html

"But but China is too slow weening off fossil fuels!" screams the liberal environmentalists. Well, the Chinese are honest and transparent. They are successful because they are more democratic than we are but in doing so they must meet the people's expectations or they could lose their mandate. Whereas in the US all we get is posturing and bullshit while the frakking continues hammer and tong.

Xi calls for global co-op on wetlands conservation
Xinhua | Updated: 2022-11-05 17:24

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President Xi Jinping delivers a speech via video at the opening ceremony of the 14th Meeting of the Conference of the Contracting Parties to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands held in Wuhan, Central China's Hubei province, Nov 5, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING - President Xi Jinping on Saturday called for strengthening cooperation on wetlands conservation and scaling up wetlands action across the world.

He made the remarks while delivering a speech via video at the opening ceremony of the 14th Meeting of the Conference of the Contracting Parties to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (COP14).

In his speech, Xi noted that it is important to build global consensus on prizing wetlands, show respect for nature, minimize disruption and damage caused by human activities, and protect the ecological security of wetlands in order to leave the beautiful wetlands to future generations.

"It is important that we advance the global process on wetlands conservation, redouble efforts to preserve authenticity and integrity, include more important wetlands in nature reserves, improve cooperation mechanisms and platforms, and increase the coverage of wetlands of international importance," Xi said.

He also called for enhancing people's well-being globally by leveraging the role of wetlands in promoting sustainable development, tackling climate change, protecting biodiversity, and delivering more benefits to people around the world.

Historic achievements have been made in wetlands conservation in China. The country has increased the area of wetlands to 56.35 million hectares, put in place a protection system and enacted a Wetlands Conservation Law, according to Xi.

The president further noted that China will pursue a modernization of harmony between humanity and nature, and promote high-quality development in the wetlands conservation cause.

China has recently drawn up a layout plan of national parks. Under the plan, China will designate a number of national parks, accounting for about 10 percent of the country's land area. About 11 million hectares of wetlands will be incorporated in the national park system, with a focus on developing wetland national parks including the Three-River-Source National Park, the Qinghai Lake National Park, the Ruoergai National Park, the Yellow River Estuary National Park, the Liao River Estuary National Park and the Songnen Plain Crane Homeland National Park.

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Birds forage in the water at the Horqin National Nature Reserve, Inner Mongolia autonomous region. [Photo by Yang Fusheng/For chinadaily.com.cn]

A national wetlands conservation plan and major conservation projects will be implemented, Xi added.

China will promote international exchanges and cooperation to protect the four bird migration routes passing China and to build an international mangrove center in Shenzhen, Xi said, adding that China supports the convening of a conference of the World Coastal Forum.

"Let us join hands to write a new chapter in global wetlands conservation," said the Chinese president.

Themed "Wetlands Action for People and Nature," the COP14 is scheduled to run from Nov 5 to 13 in China's Wuhan and Switzerland's Geneva.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... 743db.html

"Anyone who doesn't know or care that biodiversity is crashing hasn't been paying attention or is a greedhead or moron. I've been watching the ever accelerating crash since the 60s as an amateur naturalists: everything that I've loved is disappearing and capitalism is the primary culprit.

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‘Loss and Damage’ is officially on the agenda as COP27 kicks off in Egypt

After a years-long push by the global South, the UN climate conference will discuss funding for loss and damage related to the climate crisis. Over a 100 heads of state are set to address the summit being held in the wake of severe climate disasters from Pakistan to Somalia

November 07, 2022 by Tanupriya Singh

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The 27th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change begins in Egypt. Photo: Cop27/Twitter

Over 45,000 people from 196 countries, including 120 heads of state, are gathering in the city of Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt as the 27th iteration of the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP27, began on Sunday, November 6.

“We are gathering this year at a time when global climate action is at a watershed moment,” stated Egyptian Foreign Affairs Minister and COP27 President Sameh Shoukry, as the country took over leadership of the summit from the UK.

“Multilateralism is being challenged by geopolitics, spiraling prices, and growing financial crises, while several countries battered by the pandemic have barely recovered, and severe and depleting climate change-induced disasters are becoming more frequent.”

The two-week long conference had a delayed start amid negotiations over its agenda which stretched onto Sunday morning.

However, a key outcome is that for the first time in its history, the COP will address Loss and Damage finance: “Matters relating to funding arrangements responding to loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including a focus on addressing loss and damage,” has been included under point 8(f) of the agenda.

This was following a proposal presented on behalf of the G77+China by Pakistan, which is recovering from devastating floods which killed over 1,700 people and submerged one-third of its territory.

For decades now, vulnerable countries have been demanding reparations from the global North to address the historical and ongoing harms of colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism that have placed much of the global South at the frontlines of the climate crisis.

A group of 16 countries led by Vanuatu are also in the process of seeking an “advisory opinion” from the International Court of Justice on the legal obligations of all countries for prevention and redressal of the adverse effects of the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, the Global North has consistently restricted any efforts to address Loss and Damage in any meaningful way. Existing frameworks on the issue have focused on “cooperation and facilitation” on “enhancing knowledge, coherence, action and support”.

Areas of “cooperation and facilitation” under the Paris Agreement included emergency preparedness, slow onset events, non-economic losses, and the resilience of communities, livelihoods, and ecosystems.

There has been no mention of financing.

At COP26, a demand to set up a fund for Loss and Damage was blocked by the US and the European Union and ultimately diluted to a decision to have a “dialogue” on “arrangements for the funding of activities to avert, minimize and address loss and damage.”

Before this dialogue has even begun, the global North has yet again undercut its potential outcome, to shield itself from accountability— Shoukry clarified during the opening ceremony that outcomes of the discussions would be based on “cooperation and facilitation and do not involve liability or compensation.”

It would also “launch a process with a view to adopting a conclusive decision no later than 2024.”

Not only has the Global North refused to commit to Loss and Damage compensation, it has not even fulfilled existing funding targets set under international agreements.

Manipulation and gaps in climate financing
In 2009, wealthy countries agreed to provide financing worth $100 billion per year until 2020 to help vulnerable countries respond to climate change. This target has been missed consistently. Not only that, analysis has found that responsible countries have intentionally used misleading accounting to misrepresent climate finances – inflating their contributions to vulnerable countries by up to 225%.

The report figure of public climate finance provided in 2020 was $68.3 billion, alongside another $15 billion in private finance and export credits, already far short of the promised $100 billion. Oxfam has found that the “true value” of the funds provided stands between just $21-24.5 billion.

At the same time, over 70% of public climate finance is actually loans, trapping poorer countries under debt even further. For Senegal, 85% of its climate finance was in the form of loans, or effectively debt.

Meanwhile, latest analysis from Carbon Brief has revealed the extent to which rich countries are failing in the $100 billion pledge. The US is responsible for 52% of the historic emissions released by wealthy and industrialized countries. Accordingly, Carbon Brief states that it must contribute $39.9 billion to the annual pledge.

In actuality, the US provided less than $8 billion in funding in 2020, the latest year for which data is available. Countries such as Canada, the UK, and Australia have also not paid their proportionate share, falling short by $1.4-$3.3 billion.

“No credible pathway to 1.5C”
Just as COP27 was kicking off, the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published its interim ‘Global State of the Climate’ report, ahead of its final release in April 2023. WMO found that the last eight years had been the hottest ever on record. It added that the average global temperature this year would be 1.15C above pre-industrial levels.

Sea levels are rising at twice the rate as compared to 1993 and the presence of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane in the atmosphere has hit record levels.

As fossil fuel giants like Shell, BP, and Total Energies are raking in billions profiting off of the cost-of-living crises affecting people across the world, the UN environment agency has warned that there is “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place.” Even if current pledges for action by 2030 are fulfilled in their entirety, the global rise in temperature will still reach 2.5C, precipitating disastrous climate events.

Since COP26, only 29 out of 194 countries have presented new national action plans, and even then the updated pledges will only remove about 1% off emissions in 2030. The extent of cuts actually required to meet the 1.5C target is 50%.

Meanwhile, by 2030, the carbon emissions of the richest 1% of the world’s population is set to exceed the level compatible with the 1.5C threshold by 30 times. Eight years from now, an estimated 132 million people will be pushed into extreme poverty due to the climate crisis. According to the World Health Organization, between 2030 and 2050, an additional 250,000 people will die each year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress.

Research has found that extreme heat will disproportionately increase death rates in poorer countries.

According to such analyses, there are millions of people who simply do not have the option of thinking about the climate crisis as something that will impact them 20, or eight, or even one year into the future.

“You have got to worry about now”

“What future?” Historian and journalist Vijay Prashad had asked at the People’s Summit for Climate Justice held at the sidelines of the official COP26, “Children in the African continent, in Asia, in Latin America, they don’t have a future, they don’t have a present… you have got to worry about now.”

“2.7 billion people can’t eat now and you’re telling people to reduce their consumption. How does it sound to a child who hasn’t eaten in days?”

19 million children were among the 38.7 million people in Pakistan, Nigeria, India, Chad, and South Sudan who were affected by floods between August and October 2022. Countries in East Africa are facing the worst drought in decades—in Somalia, 6.7 million people are at risk of acute food insecurity out of which over 300,000 are expected to face famine by the end of 2022.

On the whole, Carbon Brief has found that extreme weather events have killed at least 4,000 people and affected another 19 million people across Africa in 2022 alone so far. Over 70% of the world’s refugees are from countries most vulnerable to climate change— including Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen, and Syria. It is also important to note that most of these countries have also faced years of imperialist intervention and war.

West Asia and North Africa are warming at a rate that is double the global average. Severe wildfires have raged from Algeria, to Australia, to the US.

The Philippines, which witnesses an average of 20 storms and typhoons each year, was just hit by tropical storm Nalgae which killed over 100 people and caused widespread flooding and landslides. Parts of Latin America have been hit by multiple hurricanes within quick succession.

As various heads of state gear up for closed-door meetings and public addresses at COP27 between November 7 and 8, any commitment to addressing the climate crisis must at its core acknowledge disproportionate vulnerabilities and inequities.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/11/07/ ... -in-egypt/

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Rich Nations Slammed for Reluctance to Provide Climate Finance

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International Convention Centre, Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Nov. 6, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @PhilstarNews

Published 9 November 2022

The Coalition for Rainforest Nations said that developed countries "have a lot of excuses" to dodge providing the promised US$100 billion in climate finance.


A huge slogan -- "We need US$100 billion annually to save our rainforests" -- on the wall of the Papua New Guinea pavilion has grabbed wide attention.

At the ongoing 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) held in Sharm el-Sheikh, representatives from developing countries have blasted advanced economies for dragging their feet on climate finance.

Naz Baloch, member of Pakistan's National Assembly, said that the developed countries have been reluctant to fulfill their pledge of providing US$100 billion in climate finance as they do not "understand the significance of climate change and have their own priorities."

"What happened in Pakistan will not stay in Pakistan," said Baloch, citing the slogan of the Pakistan pavilion for COP27. "No country is immune to climate change. We realize the pain because we've been through it, and we want the rest of the world to understand how tough it is. We should act before it's too late," Baloch said.

Kevin Conrad, director of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, said that developed countries "have a lot of excuses" to dodge providing the promised US$100 billion in climate finance.


"In 2022, they still haven't delivered. What we are trying to say is that US$100 billion are not enough only for protecting rainforests. We need more than that," Conrad said, adding that the amount of funds to protect rainforests is estimated at US$400 billion per year.

"Countries who are historically responsible have a moral obligation in duty to deliver US$100 billion. That has been promised," Fiji's Permanent Representative to the UN Satyendra Prasad said at Moana blue club pavilion co-organized by 14 South Pacific island countries.

Facing the double threats of rising sea levels and increasingly frequent natural disasters, island countries need climate finance that is "within reach and speedy," Prasad said, noting that "the system is delivering less than 10 percent of the climate finance that is needed."

Without climate finance, "the progress towards the goal of climate change will suffer. So it's necessary for the international community to seek incentive mechanisms to promote climate finance," said Mazin al-Lamki, chief executive officer of Energy Development Oman.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ric ... -0003.html

Imagine if the US Pentagon budget was applied to addressing the environmental catastrophe. We'd be well on our way..............
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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