Another oil-soaked climate summit disaster looms
November 28, 2023
South African elites join forces with petro-imperialists at the 28th Conference of Polluters
by Patrick Bond
Climate activist Patrick Bond is Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg Department of Sociology, where he directs the Centre for Social Change.
To explain environmental policy paralysis over the past quarter century, the hubris of Western governments’ delegations always looms large on my radar screen. U.S. climate czar John Kerry, for example, confirmed to Congress in July that the Biden Administration is unwilling to accept even rudimentary “polluter pays” logic. Asked by a Republican conservative, “Are you planning to commit America to climate reparations?”, Kerry answered, “No. Under no circumstances.” As for a new fund to pay compensation for what is termed “loss & damage,” Kerry emphasized, “We specifically put phrases in that negate any possibility of liability.”
He won’t be alone. South Africa, the continent’s leading greenhouse gas emissions source economy, also sends self-interested delegates to annual United Nations climate summits. At the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, the 15th Conference of Parties (COP), South African President Jacob Zuma joined leaders from four of the world’s top seven historic emitters: the United States, China, Brazil and India. After a side deal, they imposed a Copenhagen Accord with inadequate emissions cuts and no scope for climate reparations.
G77+China lead negotiator Lumumba Di-Aping warned a civil society meeting how some Africans in Copenhagen were “either lazy or had been ‘bought off’ by the industrialized nations.” He specifically observed how the Pretoria delegation “actively sought to disrupt the unity of the bloc.”
Two years later, Zuma hosted the 2011 COP17 in Durban, chosen by the UN in spite of awareness of 783 bribery charges against him stemming from a 1999 arms deal with French military firm Thales. In an email to Hillary Clinton, lead Washington negotiator Todd Stern celebrated the “significant success for the United States” in weakening what is termed “Combined But Differentiated Responsibility.” It was a classical case of climate policy imperialism.
Today, South Africa’s eloquent Environment Minister Barbara Creecy – the only white politician in the African National Congress (ANC) leadership – plays a powerful UN role. Context is vital since, as Presidential Climate Commission director Crispian Olver explained recently, her government is “dishing out mineral rights and coal rights to a whole range of, basically, a new elite emerging and – I don’t want to be too derogatory – it interfaces with the criminal economy.”
To illustrate, President Cyril Ramaphosa was an environmentally-insensitive mining tycoon who from 2005-14 sold coal in league with the endemically-corrupt commodity trader Glencore. Ramaphosa is now reversing a pledge to close South Africa’s coal-fired power plants early, made at the 2022 COP27 in exchange for a (dubious) $8.5 billion Western loan package.
Energy Minister (and ANC party chairperson) Gwede Mantashe recently accused climate activists of receiving Central Intelligence Agency funding for “a deliberate program to block development in a poor country like South Africa.” With his support, energy parastatal Eskom aims to build 4000 MW worth of methane gas-fired power plants, financed by 44 percent of the Just Energy Transition Partnership billions supposedly meant for decarbonization.
Yet methane leaks are a far more potent contributor to climate change than CO2 emissions (85 times worse over a twenty-year period). Ignoring this fact, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research proposed a national gas network, presumably after a desperate hiring search for the world’s few remaining climate-denialist ‘scientists.’
The sources of the methane gas are also diabolical. Creecy enraged environmentalists by recently approving TotalEnergies’ plan to drill for fossil fuels offshore Cape Town. She rejected last year’s court judgement against a similar proposal by Shell Oil and local gas-drilling ally Johnny Copelyn, partly won by community activists on climate grounds, but which is under appeal. Both Shell and Copelyn have been generous donors to the ANC.
At the same time, Creecy approved a pollution waiver for the continent’s largest coal-fired power station (Kusile), allowing the Eskom plant to emit lethal sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide. Scientists predict this will kill several hundred nearby residents annually. She was also recently sued by the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance for allowing the Indian steel giant ArcelorMittal’s foundries to emit toxic hydrogen sulfide gases above legal limits.
In recent days, Creecy’s approval of a controversial biodiversity offset assisted a notorious Turkish floating fossil-fuel energy generator, Karpowership. Against intense opposition, she gave permission for three Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)-powered ships to operate from sensitive harbors. Threats to local air quality, marine life and the national greenhouse gas emissions budget, as well as the firm’s extremely controversial history, were all ignored.
In search of more immediate inputs for the new fossil-gas power plants, South Africa is moving up the Indian Ocean coastline to a war zone in northern Mozambique. Since mid-2021, more than 1200 SA National Defense Force (SANDF) troops plus Rwandan and other regional armies have taken over from the Wagner Group after the Russians were defeated by Islamic rebels in 2019.
Cabo Delgado is the site of one of the world’s largest gas fields. SANDF and regional soldiers’ defense of ‘blood methane’ extraction comes at the direct behest of French President Emmanuel Macron. In May 2021, he visited Ramaphosa (and Paul Kagame) a few weeks after guerrilla attacks forced Paris-based TotalEnergies to close its $20 billion LNG facility and declare ‘force majeure’ on what is the largest single foreign direct investment in Africa.
With ExxonMobil also benefiting from a refinery restart, naturally the U.S. Pentagon’s African Command is backing the war with optimism. So is the scandal-riddled Johannesburg private military contractor Paramount Group and a subsidiary it partially bought in 2021, the British-military team Burnham Global. They offer what conflict specialist Robert Young Pelton terms a “large support and training program with the Mozambique military, new gear, training and ‘mentors’ along with ‘contract pilots’ and support technicians aka mercenaries.”
Similar fossil-fueled military missions by SANDF troops occurred, catastrophically, in 2013 in the Central African Republic, and since then in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some troops there were fired last month for operating brothels, not far from where in 2010 a $10 billion oil concession was once awarded to Khulubuse Zuma, nephew of the then South African president Jacob.
As Africa’s leading political economist, Samir Amin, complained in his autobiography, “South Africa’s sub-imperialist role has been reinforced,” since the country’s liberation from apartheid in 1994.
In this context, Creecy was chosen to manage crucial UN functions by Sultan Al Jaber, the presiding officer from the COP28 host United Arab Emirates (UAE). In a blatant conflict of interest which he attempted to Wikipedia-greenwash, Al Jaber also serves as chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc). The Abu Dhabi firm intervened in conference management and was recently exposed for cheating on gas flaring.
And because of Al Jaber’s commitment to unworkable “carbon capture and storage,” former leading UN climate official Christiana Figueres called his approach “dangerous.” Adnoc’s extraordinary selfishness became clear when this week, BBC revealed documents “prepared for the UAE’s COP28 team for meetings with at least 27 foreign governments… They included proposed ‘talking points,’ such as one for China which says Adnoc is ‘willing to jointly evaluate international LNG opportunities’ in Mozambique, Canada and Australia.”
In the same spirit, Creecy will serve as COP28 co-leader of the Global Stock Take, measuring how seriously national states have cut their economy’s emissions. The exercise is anticipated to not only replace “phase out fossil fuels” language with ineffectual voluntaristic measures, but also disguise the world’s rising combustion and leakage of methane.
In Dubai Creecy also will oppose Europe’s “unilateral taxes in the name of climate action” known as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, as it is expected to mainly hurt high-carbon multinational corporations in countries like South Africa. Instead she will continue to support carbon markets, long considered to represent the privatization of the air. Over the last two decades, that strategy has failed in the world, in Europe – what with the market price for emitting a tonne of carbon falling 27% since March amidst revelations of 30 firms gaming the system – and in South Africa, especially the vulnerable coastal city of Durban. There, one result of government’s non-adaptation to climate dangers was a series of fatal Rain Bombs from 2017-22.
Creecy’s aide Richard Sherman co-manages COP28 Loss & Damage Fund planning, which in October nearly broke down. As he confessed: “It’s late, we’re tired, we’re frustrated. We have, to a large extent, failed you.”
Will COP28 contribute to worsening the climate catastrophe? With climate imperialists and sub-imperialists like Kerry, Al Jaber and Creecy in the lead, how could it not. On the other team, though, December 9 will be a global day of protest, against what will surely be remembered as the 28th Conference of Polluters.
The West is not living up to its responsibilities on climate change
The following article by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez – a slightly expanded version of an opinion piece written for the Global Times – discusses the controversies and difficulties setting up the loss and damage fund agreed at last year’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP27).
Noting that the fund is an application of the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), which principle lies at the core of international environmental law, the article points out that the rich countries have consistently failed to meet their clear legal and moral responsibility to provide the technology and finance to ensure the Global South can continue to develop, industrialise and modernise without causing significant environmental harm. The best-known example of this is the rich nations’ failure to meet their commitment, made in 2009, to channel $100 billion per year to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change and transition to clean energy systems.
The imperialist powers have developed the bad habit of blaming China for everything that goes wrong. In terms of environmental questions, Western politicians and journalists deflect criticism of their own slow progress on green energy by essentially assigning China culpability for the climate crisis. Carlos points out that, firstly, China is a developing country and thus has different responsibilities under the framework of CBDR; secondly, China has emerged as the pre-eminent force in renewable energy, electric transport, biodiversity protection, afforestation and pollution reduction. Furthermore it’s working with other countries of the Global South on their energy transitions.
The article concludes by calling on the wealthy countries to stop blaming China and to focus instead on meeting their own responsibilities.
The most significant outcome of last year’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) was an agreement to set up a “loss and damage” fund to help climate-vulnerable countries pay for the damage caused by the escalating extreme weather events linked to climate change, such as wildfires, heatwaves, desertification, rising sea levels and crop failures. It is widely estimated that the level of funding needed for this purpose will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Simon Stiell, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary, warmly applauded this agreement, for which the developing countries – including China – had fought long and hard. “We have determined a way forward on a decades-long conversation on funding for loss and damage – deliberating over how we address the impacts on communities whose lives and livelihoods have been ruined by the very worst impacts of climate change.”
The fund is an application of the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), agreed at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change of Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Under this principle, the developed countries have a duty to support developing countries in climate change adaptation and mitigation. All countries have a “common responsibility” to save the planet, but they vary in their historical culpability, level of development and availability of resources, and thus have “differentiated responsibilities”.
CBDR lies at the core of international environmental law, and is a key demand of those campaigning for climate justice. It recognises that development is a human right, and that the countries of North America, Europe, Japan and Australia fuelled their own development with coal and oil; they got rich while colonising the atmospheric commons. The US and Europe alone are responsible for just over half the world’s cumulative carbon dioxide emissions since 1850, although representing just 13 percent of the global population.
Therefore the primary moral, historical and legal responsibility is on the developed countries to provide the technology and the finance such that the Global South can continue to develop, industrialise and modernise without causing significant environmental harm.
Unfortunately, in the year since COP27, precious little progress has been made in terms of setting up the loss and damage fund. There have been numerous disagreements about which countries will contribute and which will benefit, and the US and other advanced countries have been firmly resisting the idea that contributions should be mandatory. Meanwhile the developing countries have had to accept the fund being hosted by the World Bank – which is seen as being essentially a policy instrument of the United States.
This is a familiar story. At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, the rich nations pledged to channel 100 billion US dollars per year year to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change and transition to clean energy systems. Respected environmental journalist Jocelyn Timperley wrote that, “compared with the investment required to avoid dangerous levels of climate change, the 100 billion dollar pledge is minuscule”; and yet the promise has never been kept. The US spends upwards of 800 billion dollars a year on its military, but seems to be almost entirely unresponsive to the demands of the Global South for climate justice.
‘Blaming China’ has of course become the go-to option for Western politicians seeking to escape accountability and divert attention from their own failures. Various representatives from the wealthy countries have suggested that China – as the world’s second-largest economy and highest overall emitter of greenhouse gases – should contribute to the loss and damage fund in order for it to be fair and viable. Wopke Hoekstra, EU commissioner for climate action, recently commented: “I’m saying to China and others that have experienced significant economic growth and truly higher wealth than 30 years ago, that with this comes responsibility.”
The notion that China has the same duties as North America and Western Europe means turning the principle of CBDR on its head. China is a developing country, with a per-capita income a quarter of that of the US. It is still undergoing the process of modernisation and industrialisation.
Meanwhile, although it is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, its per capita carbon emissions are half those of the US, in spite of the US having exported the bulk of its emissions via industrial offshoring. Chinese emissions are certainly not caused by luxury consumption like in the West – average household energy consumption in the US and Canada is nine times higher than in China.
Furthermore, according to the World Food Programme, China is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, with up to 200 million people exposed to the effects of droughts and floods.
From the very beginning of the international discussions around managing climate change, China has stood together with, and taken up the cause of, the developing countries. Indeed, China was one of the countries arguing vociferously for the loss and damage fund to be created.
China has nevertheless emerged as a global leader in the struggle against climate breakdown. According to an analysis by Carbon Brief, China’s carbon dioxide emissions are expected to peak next year, six years ahead of schedule. Given China’s extraordinary investment in renewable energy – its current renewable capacity is equivalent to around half the global total, and is rising fast – there’s every likelihood that it will reach its goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 or sooner.
Meanwhile China is making a profound contribution to assisting other countries of the Global South with their energy transitions. Nigerian journalist Otiato Opali writes: “From the Sakai photovoltaic power station in the Central African Republic and the Garissa solar plant in Kenya, to the Aysha wind power project in Ethiopia and the Kafue Gorge hydroelectric station in Zambia, China has implemented hundreds of clean energy, green development projects in Africa, supporting the continent’s efforts to tackle climate change.”
While politicians and journalists in the West tend to ignore China’s successes in renewable energy, they loudly decry its construction of new coal plants. However, a recent Telegraph article provided an exception to this rule, noting that the approval of new coal plants “does not mean what many in the West think it means. China is adding one GW of coal power on average as backup for every six GW of new renewable power. The two go hand in hand.” That is, coal plants are being installed to compensate for the intermittency problems of renewable energy, and will therefore be idle for most of the time.
The US, Canada, Britain, the EU and Australia are all making insufficient progress on renewable energy, and are failing to meet their commitment to supporting energy transition in the Global South. By sanctioning Chinese solar materials and imposing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, they are actively impeding global progress. Their proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has led to a dramatic expansion in the production and transport of fracked shale gas, at tremendous environmental cost.
These countries should stop pointing the finger at China and start taking their own responsibilities seriously. Let us hope we see some evidence of this at COP28.
Niger’s Largest Solar Plant Launched Amid Sanctions
NOVEMBER 30, 2023
A view of Niamey, the capital of Niger. Photo: Sputnik/File photo.
Following a military coup in late July, Niger came under series of sanctions imposed by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which suspended all cooperation with the country, with Nigeria cutting off electricity to its northern neighbor.
Niger’s biggest solar power plant started operating amid the punitive measures imposed by neighboring Nigeria, which cut off electricity in response to a coup in Niger in July, French media reported.
There are over 55,000 solar panels on the plant, which could generate 30 megawatts of electricity, the reports noted.
According to the outlet, Niger’s military-appointed Minister of Petroleum, Mines and Energy, Mahaman Moustapha Barke, said that initially it had been planned to launch the facility on August 25. However, the departure of most technical personnel after to the coup delayed the start. Thanks to the specialists who remained in the country’s capital Niamey, the launch of the plant was made possible, the minister added.
In response to the military coup in Niger in late July, ECOWAS imposed sanctions on Niger, with Nigeria, which is also member of the regional bloc, cutting off energy supplies to its neighbor.
Niger’s national power company Nigelec reportedly purchased about 70% of the electricity in 2022 from Nigeria, Niger’s only power supplier.
However, Barke highlighted that an “improvement in the quality of the [power] service” in Niamey and the country’s towns of Dosso and Tillaberi was noted by Nigelec, the report said.
A coup took place in Niger on July 26 during which incumbent President Mohamed Bazoum was ousted and detained by his own guard, led by Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani. The military-run National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland closed the country’s borders and broke security agreements with France, the country’s former colonial master.
Record heat driving a trail of devastation and death
December 1, 2023
WMO says 2023 is certain to be hottest year on record, and extreme weather is hitting all inhabited continents
The World Meteorological Organization’s provisional State of the Global Climate report confirms that 2023 will be the warmest year on record. Data until the end of October shows that the year was about 1.40 degrees Celsius (with a margin of uncertainty of ±0.12°C ) above the pre-industrial 1850-1900 baseline. The difference between 2023 and 2016 and 2020 — which were previously ranked as the warmest years — is such that the final two months are very unlikely to affect the ranking.
The past nine years, 2015 to 2023, were the warmest on record. The warming El Niño event, which emerged during the Northern Hemisphere spring of 2023 and developed rapidly during summer, is likely to further fuel the heat in 2024 because El Niño typically has the greatest impact on global temperatures after it peaks.
Greenhouse gas levels are record high. Global temperatures are record high. Sea level rise is record high. Antarctic sea ice is record low. “It’s a deafening cacophony of broken records,” said WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas.
“These are more than just statistics. We risk losing the race to save our glaciers and to rein in sea level rise. We cannot return to the climate of the 20th century, but we must act now to limit the risks of an increasingly inhospitable climate in this and the coming centuries. Extreme weather is destroying lives and livelihoods on a daily basis — underlining the imperative need to ensure that everyone is protected by early warning services.”
Carbon dioxide levels are 50 % higher than the pre-industrial era, trapping heat in the atmosphere. The long lifetime of CO2 means that temperatures will continue to rise for many years to come.
The rate of sea level rise from 2013-2022 is more than twice the rate of the first decade of the satellite record (1993-2002) because of continued ocean warming and melting of glaciers and ice sheets.
The maximum Antarctic sea-ice extent for the year was the lowest on record, a full 1 million km2 (more than the size of France and Germany combined) less than the previous record low, at the end of southern hemisphere winter. Glaciers in North America and Europe once again suffered an extreme melt season. Swiss glaciers have lost about 10 percent of their remaining volume in the past two years, according to the WMO report.
“This year we have seen communities around the world pounded by fires, floods and searing temperatures. Record global heat should send shivers down the spines of world leaders,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.
The WMO provisional State of the Global Climate report was published to inform negotiations at COP28 in Dubai. It combines input from National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, regional climate centers, UN partners and leading climate scientists. The temperature figures are a consolidation of six leading international datasets.
Originally published: Dissident Voice on November 24, 2023 by Robert Hunziker (more by Dissident Voice) | (Posted Nov 30, 2023)
It’s 35 years since formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “to advance scientific knowledge about climate change caused by human activities.” Subsequently, COP21 at Paris ‘15 warned the world not to exceed 1.5°C, and worst case, not to exceed 2.0°C above pre-industrial or risk lasting damage to crucial life supporting ecosystems, ultimately leading to some level of an extinction event.
Following three decades of IPCC failures to convince nation/states to make a dent in greenhouse gas emissions, which increase more and more each year, a high-ranking group of rebellious climate scientists claim the IPCC’s upper temperature limits of 1.5°C to 2.0°C are too high, misleading, dangerous, disruptive to sound policy, and demanding of change.
These scientists have published a rousing 74-page Preprint (meaning, not peer reviewed): Bad Science and Good Intentions Prevent Effective Climate Action (aka: Bad Science and Good Intentions).
They argue that Paris ‘15 temperature limitations are not only too high but will be exceeded. You can count on it. Moreover, they claim surprisingly few experts are challenging current IPCC mitigation strategies which are fundamentally flawed in the face of a dangerous climate overshoot that’s already underway and rapidly getting out of hand. This trip to the cliff’s edge, in part, is the result of inappropriate IPCC strategies.
Indeed, the failure of IPCC models is highlighted in the Bad Science and Good Intentions Abstract:
This article posits that selective science communication and unrealistically optimistic assumptions are obscuring the reality that greenhouse gas emissions reduction and carbon dioxide removal will not curtail climate change in the 21st Century.
That statement goes to the heart of a consensus narrative that depends upon carbon removal/reduction technologies to bail us out of the biggest jam in human history, especially in the face of a powerful climate overshoot accelerating so rapidly that the consequences routinely qualify for TV Breaking News, massive floods, massive droughts, massive wildfires, massive storms. Everything climate related has become “massive” beckoning a revival of Noah’s Ark.
Unprecedented climate events one after another have convinced these rebellious scientists that we do not have enough time for slo-mo approaches to a disruptive, capricious climate system; for example, NASA says the Amazon Rainforest doesn’t have enough time between drought sequences to recover. This is unprecedented and a frightful leading indicator of a dangerously volatile climate system. (“ Amazon Rainforest is Drying Out. How Much More Abuse Can It Take?” DownToEarth, June 29, 2020.)
Of deeper concern, NASA’s GRACE satellite system has detected an Amazon in tenuous condition in an unprecedented state of breakdown with large areas of the Amazon classified as “Deep Red Zones” of severely constrained water levels. Alas, rainforests are at the heart and soul of life on Earth.
“About 20% of the Amazon rainforest is deforested, and 40% is degraded–which means trees are still standing, but their health has faded and they are prone to fire and drought.” (“The Amazon’s Record-Setting Drought: How Bad Will It Be?” Nature, November 14, 2023.)
“The level of the Rio Negro is dropping by 1 meter (3 feet) every three days, something that has never been recorded before.” (“Amazon Drought Cuts River Traffic, Leaves Communities Without Water and Supplies”, Mongabay, October 2023.)
According to Bad Science and Good Intentions, rapid planet cooling measures must be employed as soon as possible to slow down an indiscriminate global climate system. The threats cannot be ignored any longer, for example, a recent study shows Antarctica undergoing “polar amplification,” with direct evidence of disturbing warming well beyond anything contemplated by the IPCC, as the icy continent is heating up by 50% per decade over climate models. (“Ice Cores Reveal Antarctica is Warming Twice as Fast as Global Average“, CarbonBrief, September 13, 2023.)
The Antarctic study is a shocker to climate scientists and speaks to the necessity of taking immediate action to adopt planetary cooling measures strongly recommended in Bad Science and Good Intentions. The Antarctic ice core study anticipates “dire consequences for the low-lying lands… further warning of the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions, even in one of the most remote parts of the world.”
A motivating factor behind Bad Science and Good Intentions is a consensus narrative that’s certain to fail. It’s misdirected because there is little solid evidence supporting commonly accepted assertions that “GHG (greenhouse gases) reduction and removal” will work. In other words, speculative assumptions about “carbon removal and carbon reduction” may be nothing more than a Trojan Horse for far worse climate disaster scenarios, similar to global warming’s recent jarring disruption of Europe’s commercial rivers, the Danube, Rhine, Po, Rhone, and Loire nearly drying up in the summer of 2022 because global warming has been running in-excess of 2.0°C in the EU for some time now, impeding commercial barge traffic and threatening failure of nuclear power operations, especially France’s 56 operating reactors. For the first time in 40 years, France became a net importer of electricity because of structural repairs combined with low and too warm river water necessary for nuclear cooling purposes.
All of which begs an obvious concern: What happens globally at 2.0°C, which renowned climate scientist James Hansen claims is on track for the 2030s. This is decades ahead of IPCC expectations. Hansen’s latest paper: “ How We Know that Global Warming is Accelerating and that the Goal of the Paris Agreement is Dead“, Earth Institute, Columbia University, November 10, 2023, goes into detail about the factual evidence and clearly states:
Within less than a decade, we must expect 0.4×0.25×4°C = 0.4°C additional warming. Given global warming of 0.95C in 2010, the warming by 2030 will be about 0.95°C + 2×0.18°C + 0.4°C = 1.71°C. Global warming of 2°C will be reached by the late 2030s.
Accordingly, the authors of Bad Science and Good Intentions suggest global cooling is urgently needed t0 counter the rapid onset of global warming, which is certain to blindside policymakers.
Not only is the IPCC’s model insufficient to do the job, but even if and when they try: “IPCC models now indicate that CDR (carbon dioxide removal) must be coupled with NZE (net zero emissions) to reduce total atmospheric GHG concentrations. Present estimated costs of this removal are $100 to $200 per tonne of CO2. With estimates of how much CO2 must be removed every year ranging from 5-16 Gt per year, this represents a multi-trillion dollar per year unfunded problem that the world’s nations will have to manage,” according to Bad Science and Good Intentions.
In the final analysis, that model is probably a moot point because of (1) overwhelming scale (2) overwhelming costs, and (3) a very suspect history of carbon removal effectiveness; for example: “CCS (carbon capture and storage) is ‘a mature technology that’s failed,” according to Bruce Robertson, an energy finance analyst who has studied the top projects globally. “Companies are spending billions of dollars on these plants and they’re not working to their metrics.” (Bloomberg News, October 23, 2023.)
The IPCC is out in left field, out of touch, and thus unintentionally serving as an enabler of more climate disasters; for example, according to the IPCC’s Best-Case analysis: “If the world bands together to slash emissions immediately, the world can avoid the most catastrophic version of the climate crisis.” That statement is best left unsaid for numerous reasons, including its implied message of near certainty of catastrophic failure, which is a counter-productive suggestion, regardless of what happens.
After all, here’s the real world, which hasn’t changed in a lifetime:
In the year to July 2023, the capacity of oil-and gas-fired power stations under development around the world grew by 90GW (13%), reaching a total of 783GW, according to the latest figures from GEM’s Oil and Gas Plant Tracker. Projects ‘under development’ are those that have been announced or are in the pre-construction and construction phases but are not yet operating. If they are all built, these projects would grow the capacity of the global oil and gas power fleet by a third, at an estimate cost of $611bn in capital expenditure. (“Plans for New Oil and Gas Power Plants Have Grown by 13% in 2023“, Carbon Brief, September 20, 2023.)
Really! It’ll grow fossil fuel power plants by a third! Which is in addition to billions of funding for new oil and gas production, and just for good measure, $7 trillion in government subsidies, a new record set last year (IMF). See: “Governments Plan Massive Expansion of Fossil Fuel Production Despite Climate Crisis, UN Warns,” August 11, 2023.
Yet, 2030 is widely earmarked to be a turning point, when major carbon emissions are to be drastically cut by 50% and critical to meet IPCC net zero emissions by 2050.
Oops, emissions are headed in the wrong direction, by a long shot, going up, up, up, not down. They’ll cut through the 2030 dateline like a hot knife thru butter. Fossil fuel capital spending plans guarantee massive emissions well beyond 2030. They’re spending billions upon more billions for future production. That’s reality.
With a sense of relief, there’s good news to be found in Bad Science and Good Intentions:
Catastrophe is not inevitable; it will only occur if we fail to develop and deploy safe, realistic mitigation strategies. These will require the application of rapid climate cooling measures to reduce risks during the long time it will take to decarbonize the global economy and restore a safe, stable climate. The main obstacle to considering climate interventions beyond emissions reduction and CDR is the opposition of many well-meaning scientists and environmentalists to further investigating and potentially deploying climate cooling measures and technologies.
According to Bad Science and Good Intentions:
The Paris Agreement has created confusion through a political focus on maximum acceptable temperatures and reducing GHG emissions, rather than on the need to stabilize the climate through eliminating the Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI)—the difference between the amount of the sun’s energy arriving at the Earth and the amount returning to space. GHG concentrations in the atmosphere are limiting the amount of the sun’s energy that returns to space… NZE (net zero emissions) alone or coupled with CDR (carbon dioxide removal) will not restore EEI or prevent temperatures and sea levels from rising to ever more dangerous levels.
Energy imbalance or sunlight in versus sunlight out is currently running at a rate of 1.36 W/m 2 as of the 2020s decade. That is double the 2005-2015 rate of 0.71 w/m 2 (James Hanson, “Global Warming is Accelerating. Why? Will We Fly Blind?” September 14, 2023.) W/m 2 is watts per square meter. Accordingly, there’s more energy coming in (absorbed sunlight) than energy going out (heat radiated to space). Doubling within only a decade is beyond belief and forebodingly bad news, as bad as it gets. It’s not surprising that Hansen expects a very early arrival of a 2.0°C above pre-industrial, which will crush many life support ecosystems. As previously mentioned herein, the EU at 2.0°C nearly destroyed navigable waterways. “Global and European Temperatures”, European Environment Agency, June 20, 2023.
And, this: According to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, 75% of Spain’s land is battling climatic conditions that could lead to desertification.
There is considerable debate surrounding climate intervention; i.e., artificially cooling the planet or sometimes referred to as geo-engineering. But, according to Bad Science and Good Intentions, it’s the only way to stem the tide of ongoing global warming in time to take bolder steps, as the transition to net zero emissions will take decades whilst global warming is not in a waiting mode.
Regarding reams upon reams of incisive debate “for/against climate intervention” in the public domain, it’s interesting to note that humankind has been intervening in the climate system via industrial-driven emissions, inclusive of transport, for more than a century. That’s the cause of today’s hand-wringing. What, then, does that suggest about proposals for intervention to cool the planet?
Bad Science and Good Intentions is a tour de force of essential perspective and solid information on humanity’s most challenging days ahead, and what to do about it. Read it, study it, share it, it’s an extremely valuable resource.
Why Cuba leads the world in confronting climate crisis
November 30, 2023 Scott Scheffer
Urban farmers harvest carrots in Havana. Making cities more self-sufficient in food production has cut down on dangerous emissions.
COP28, the next annual international conference where countries plan and set goals to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), will take place in Dubai from Nov. 30 through Dec. 12. Increasingly, the conferences have come under the control of major capitalist powers – particularly the U.S.
Global South countries have barely contributed to the warming of the atmosphere, but are most vulnerable. COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, was something of a battleground between the representatives from Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the imperialist powers of Europe, Japan and especially the United States.
The details of what transpires in Dubai will be analyzed in the weeks that follow, but this is a great time for serious climate change activists to take a good look at the stellar performance of socialist Cuba in the struggle to save the planet.
It is an absolute crime that the mainstream media has ignored what can be accomplished in the global effort to mitigate the crisis of global warming without the influence of giant energy corporations and banks.
Cuba’s planned economy has enabled the island – even as the U.S. blockade hinders its ability to trade – to keep sustainability as a major priority for years. This is based on Fidel Castro’s keen understanding of the harm of capitalist industry’s emissions and the vulnerability of the underdeveloped countries of the world – the Global South. But the revolutionary leader and thinker was aware of the conundrum facing the former colonies in dealing with the destruction of the environment.
In a speech at the 1992 Earth Summit, the Cuban president said: “They have poisoned the seas and rivers, polluted the air, weakened and punctured the ozone layer, saturated the atmosphere with gases which are changing weather conditions with a catastrophic effect we are already beginning to experience.
“The forests are disappearing. The deserts are expanding. Every year billions of tons of fertile soil end up in the sea. Numerous species are becoming extinct.
“It is not possible to blame the Third World countries for this. Yesterday, they were colonies; today, they are nations exploited and pillaged by an unjust international economic order. The solution cannot be to prevent the development of those who need it most.”
The Global South needs energy. Because of the poverty from imperialist plunder, much of the world relies on burning wood for heat and for cooking, and access to fossil fuel would be a step in the right direction for development. But even with very limited access to fossil fuel due to the blockade, Cuba has lowered its emissions and at the same time provided electricity to millions more Cubans.
Workers’ government
An Aug. 24 article in the pro-capitalist Forbes magazine confirms this: “Projects from the University of Leeds, the World Wildlife Fund, the Global Footprint Network, and the Sustainable Development Index show that Cuba is among the leaders in closing the gap between human development and sustainability.”
Renewable forms of energy still only account for 4.5% of Cuba’s power generation. This amazing achievement happened because there aren’t giant energy corporations influencing the workers’ government of Cuba.
In 2006 the Cuban government replaced every incandescent light bulb in the country with more efficient fluorescent bulbs. It subsidized modern, more efficient appliances, including 2 million refrigerators, more than 1 million fans, nearly 200,000 air conditioners and a quarter million water pumps. A campaign to replace old water heaters with new models that are run with solar energy is underway now.
During this period, electricity use increased by 142%, but emissions dropped by 14%. The efficiency that accomplished this wouldn’t have been possible outside of a workers’ run government.
Cuba’s transition to urban farming, greatly reducing the need for transportation of food, is even successful in the capital city. The Forbes article quotes economist Sinan Koont, who said, “More than 35,000 hectares of land are being used in urban agriculture in Havana.” Cuba’s urban farming has become a model for small farmers throughout the Global South.
Cuba is also a world leader in reforestation. At the time of the revolution, only about 14% of the island was forested. That figure is now up to 30.6%.
Internationalism
Given that Global South countries contribute only a tiny fraction of the world’s GHG emissions, and their weakened ability to recover from climate catastrophes, the concern for countries saddled with the debt traps of imperialism has rightfully been adaptation – protecting their own populations and recovering from weather related catastrophes.
Mitigation of the global crisis is the responsibility of the biggest polluters. Yet Cuba’s internationalist outlook has led this commendable effort to contribute to the effort to save the planet over and above what should be its responsibilities.
Cuban socialism has guided the struggle to adapt to the island’s vulnerability to extreme weather and even to mitigate CO2 emissions. These earnest efforts and concern for all humanity puts the U.S. – the world’s per capita worst emitter of GHGs — to shame.
Imagine what could be done if Cuba were free of the blockade. It is that example that the imperialist countries fear from Cuba.
Breaking the blockade won’t happen without the intervention of the people’s movement throughout the world. That is far from out of the question. At the United Nations General Assembly, 187 countries voted to end the blockade. Only two, the U.S. and its client apartheid state of Israel, voted to keep the Trump/Biden warfare against Cuba in place.
More than 100 entities, including city councils in NYC, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit and others, and scores of union locals and labor councils, have passed resolutions calling on Joe Biden to take Cuba off the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism and end the blockade.
The United Nations has no power of enforcement. Only a powerful people’s movement can and will make it happen.
Wall Street Journal: “Why No One Wants to Pay for the Green Transition”
Posted on November 30, 2023 by Yves Smith
Just because you heard it at the Wall Street Journal does not make it wrong. Your truly (and a few lonely commentators of broadly similar view) have criticized the snake oil sold by the Green New Deal type and other Green Transition hopium peddlers as at least as dangerous as doing nothing. They hyped the idea that shifting to lower-carbon energy sources would generate jobs and not (or not unduly) raise energy costs and inconvenience business and consumers.
Now it is true that there is low-hanging fruit on the energy front, and a fair bit of that (like better home insulation) has not been pursue systematically enough. But arresting the freight train of rising energy use, including the difficulty of transitioning away from fossil fuels, the too frequent failure to consider the total energy (including infrastructure) and environmental costs of lower carbon, and the unwillingness to curb energy use (via pricing or bans) is pretty much impossible under our neoliberal system. We need more top down planning, not just on comparatively narrow issues like whether and how to get the grid and related charging stations in place to allow for greater EV use, but on bigger questions of city/residential design (would it be a big net energy savings to attempt reconfigurations, or would the building front-load too much in the way of CO2 costs?).
But a second problem under neoliberalism is a dearth of people capable of looking at problems like this in a broad-gauged enough way, and their lack of political credibility even if they did.
So after selling various schemes that relied on savings that often were not available across populations, and “build it and they will come” assumptions, the green transition is running into the reality that it will entail costs…something that was pretty much never conveyed to voters and consumers. And that’s before getting to the fact that the investments and behavior change needed to make a serious dent in the global warming trajectory is large and growing. We’ve repeatedly said that the only way to get there from here is radical conservation, as in going on a very big energy consumption diet. But again, how can you achieve that when most people in a neoliberal system need to sell their labor to survive, which means getting to work (usually entailing gas/diesel use), provisioning (again transportation energy), heating and cooling often free-standing, energy-inefficient homes?
The Journal focuses on more immediate issues, using the green energy programs in the Biden Inflation Reduction Act as a point of departure. As author Greg Ip points out:
This year the fantasy ended. With electric vehicle demand falling short of expectations, manufacturers are dialing back production and buying back stockinstead. Offshore wind developers have canceled projects. The S&P Global Clean Energy Index has fallen 30% this year. Ford’s market cap is down to $42 billion….
But the economics of getting to net zero remain, fundamentally, dismal: Someone has to pay for it, and shareholders and consumers decided this year it wouldn’t be them….
….the green transition is driven by public policy. It is “a negative supply shock, with an accompanying need to finance investments whose profitability cannot be taken for granted,” French economist Jean Pisani-Ferry wrote in a reportcommissioned by the French prime minister and released in English in November. “By putting a price—financial or implicit—on a free resource (the climate), the transition increases production costs, with no guarantee that the reduction in energy costs will eventually offset them, while the investments it calls for do not increase productive capacity but must nevertheless be financed.”…
He notes the transition involves hefty capital spending today to replace fossil-fuel consumption in the future. Pisani-Ferry estimates a middle-class French family would spend 44% of annual disposable income for a heat pump, and 120% for an electric car. These investments boost demand, but don’t leave families better off since they simply do the same thing as what they replace. And if taxes rise to pay for these investments, families will be worse off, financially.
The article then depicts a carbon tax or cap and trade as the most efficient way to shift investment and consumption away from fossil fuels, and how Europe has implemented some of these approaches, only to get Gillet Jaunes protests and other resistance.
The problem is that any taxation scheme is inadequate and it’s misleading to equate taxation and quantitative restrictions are similar (there is the separate question of whether the carbon tax is set high enough and whether cap and trade schemes have set limits low enough and are sufficiently comprehensive). Andrew Haldane summarized Martin Weitzman’s classic approach to how to select the right policy approach, taxation or prohibition. From Haldane’s The $100 billon question:
Public policy has increasingly recognised the risks from car pollution. Historically, they have been tackled through a combination of taxation and, at times, prohibition. During this century, restrictions have been placed on poisonous emissions from cars – in others words, prohibition. This is recognition of the social costs of exhaust pollution. Initially, car producers were in uproar….
The taxation versus prohibition question crops up repeatedly in public choice economics. For centuries it has been central to the international trade debate on the use of quotas versus subsidies. During this century, it has become central to the debate on appropriate policies to curtail carbon emissions.
In making these choices, economists have often drawn on Martin Weitzman’s classic public goods framework from the early 1970s. Under this framework, the optimal amount of pollution control is found by equating the marginal social benefits of pollution-control and the marginal private costs of this control. With no uncertainty about either costs or benefits, a policymaker would be indifferent between taxation and restrictions when striking this cost/benefit balance.
In the real world, there is considerable uncertainty about both costs and benefits. Weitzman’s framework tells us how to choose between pollution-control instruments in this setting. If the marginal social benefits foregone of the wrong choice are large, relative to the private costs incurred, then quantitative restrictions are optimal. Why? Because fixing quantities to achieve pollution control, while letting prices vary, does not have large private costs. When the marginal social benefit curve is steeper than the marginal private cost curve, restrictions dominate.
The climate change application of this approach is that the social costs of climate change (flooding, mass migration, disruption of agricultural production) are so high that prohibitions/output restrictions are the sound policy approach. But the “private” costs are also high and there are plenty of who are also disproportoinately affected.
But the US isn’t prepared to require sacrifice. Again from the Journal:
U.S. leaders have rejected any federal tax or fee on carbon. Biden’s solution is to not ask consumers to pay for the green transition…..
Subsidies can play a vital role by giving green energy time to scale up and innovate until it is competitive with fossil fuels. But the IRA has been undermined by extraneous conditions such as made-in-America requirements, and by green tech inflation—a byproduct of the IRA itself, which helped fuel demand…
For years, the cost of wind and solar plummeted, but since 2021 they have risen…..
Many developers can no longer economically supply power at the rates previously agreed to. Denmark’s Orsted, the world’s largest wind developer, took a $4 billion charge in early November for pulling out of two projects off New Jersey. The company today is worth 75% less than in early 2021.
ClearView Energy Partners estimates about 30% of state-contracted offshore wind capacity has been canceled, and another 25% may be rebid….
The financial appeal of EVs has similarly faded….For most drivers, the trade off still doesn’t work—even with subsidies.
True, the IRA has spurred a boom in EV and battery factories. But a successful green transition requires that those factories be profitable, and Detroit’s automakers are still losing money on every EV they sell….
In a sobering report this week, Morgan Stanley auto analysts estimated the average nonfinancial company in the S&P 500 spends its market cap in capital expenditure and research and development in about 50 years. GM and Ford spend theirs in 1.9 and 2.6 years, respectively. “This cannot continue, in our view.”
This sorry outcome is in no small measure the result of not making the dangers of climate change tangible and visceral enough to most people, and conveying the impression that the green transition would be rainbows and unicorns. That is not to say it would have been easy to get broad social support for concerted action. But no serious attempt has been made.
Just as with taxes, the rich refuse to pay. The problem comes down to class society.
It is absurd to expect capitalism, which has brought this existential crisis on, to fix it. It only makes things worse.
Bolding added.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
COP28: The mirage that capitalism can solve its destruction
By Andy Higginbottom (Posted Dec 01, 2023)
Mirages in the desert occur when hot air bends light in such a way that it acts as a mirror, inverting reality. The delusionary effect of the mirage is that there is a pool of water shimmering in the far distance. Desperate thirst impels the traveller onwards towards the mirage. But each time it recedes ever further afar, until the exhausted traveller collapses and dies, cruelly tortured by the deception. The mirage is a real illusion.
The COP28 summit taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates from 30 November to 12 December is a colossal illusion, a mirage in the desert. Certainly, there will be much hot air. The delusionary effect is that the capitalist system is capable of reforming itself sufficiently to prevent global climate catastrophe, even as all the evidence points to the opposite conclusion.
Amongst the swathe of reports published on the eve of the summit, the stark message of the latest UN Environment Programme report stands out: on current policies the planet will most likely warm by an average of 2.9°C this century, there is only a slim chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C. UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2023 – subtitle ‘Broken Record – Temperatures hit new highs, yet world fails to cut emissions (again)’ – is even graver than all other mainstream scientific warnings.1
Science and experience agree: environmental catastrophe is upon us
There will be a stock taking at COP28, the culmination of eight years of hypocrisy and dirty deals since the targets of 1.5°C and 2.0°C were set at the Paris COP in 2015. But Paris was itself a compromise beyond the safe limit of 1°C that was proposed by Evo Morales of Bolivia at the Copenhagen COP in 2009, but rejected by the major capitalist powers.2
The planet has since already passed the safe limit, we are into the danger zone in so many ways.3 COP28 is a grand show of concern that will raise false hopes in the current system’s capacities at the very moment when what is needed is a revolution of thought and in action.
The unfolding disaster has a physical causal chain that runs from the burning of fossil fuels to the emission of green house gases (GHG) to the heating up of the planet’s surface to multitudinous, overlapping and accelerating environmental impacts.4 Such a totalising problem has to be addressed from all possible angles, but there is one inescapable crunch point: if there is not an immediate wholesale cut in fossil fuel combustion, all other attempted solutions will fail.
Cumulative Emissions Already Put the World in Danger Zone
Unless current production is cut drastically, the world is already past the ‘carbon budget’ of cumulative Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, that would limit global warming to 1.5°C, and is on the cusp of breaching the budget to stay within 2°C. UNEP reports: “coal, oil and gas extracted over the lifetime of producing and under-construction mines and fields as at 2018 would emit more than 3.5 times the carbon budget available to limit warming to 1.5°C with 50 per cent probability, and almost the size of the budget available for 2°C.”5
| Figure 1 Committed CO2 emissions from existing fossil fuel infrastructure compared with carbon budgets reflecting the long term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement | MR Online
Source: UNEP (2023) Emissions Gap Report, p35.
The whole point of fossil fuels is that they burn, they give off their stored calorific energy, it is in their nature. An environmentally rational humanity would limit their use under controlled conditions. In the capitalist system fossil fuels continue to be highly profitable to extract and process as commodities, and they are deployed profitably as inputs to many industrial processes as well as end-use burning. Cheap fossil energy is embedded in the capitalist way of life, absolutely so in the blatant luxury consumption of the super-rich, but also to a degree by wider populations privileged to have imperialist modes of living, and further with even greater contradictions for the mass of working humanity in the Majority World (Global South).6
What passes for capitalist ‘civilisation’ runs on the release of fossilised carbon, especially in transport, heating and increasingly petrochemicals.7 Corporations and capitalist states built around profitability as their determining essential character will not voluntarily give up their surplus-profits gained from fossil fuels.
The target is to limit the global average temperature rise over pre-industrial temperatures. There are two points to bear in mind about average. Firstly, averaging over time, with the target figure being averaged over a decade or more. But in any given month there could be considerable overshoot, as in September and October 2023 where the rises were 1.8°C and 1.7°C respectively,8 although the smoothed longer-term average is as yet considered to be 1.2°C above the pre-industrial level.
Secondly the averaging is across the surface of the globe. At 1.1°C the average ocean temperature is 0.9°C above, whereas land masses are 1.4°C over pre-industrial levels. There were particularly high increases of over 3°C in the central landmasses of all the continents.9 Regional fluctuations of meteorological conditions drive temperatures even higher with catastrophic results; as in India, Southern Europe, Northern America earlier this year, and Brazil right now.10 Parts of the Arctic are warming seven times faster than the global average, threatening a tipping-point of accelerated melting ice caps, that would raise sea levels all over the world.11
At a local level within cities, the extreme differences in ambient temperatures are down to class inequalities, as in Mumbai where people in the shacks of Dharavi suffer 6°C hotter than the neighbouring rich district.12 The World Meteorological Organisation details how most healthcare is inadequate for dealing with global heating. “Between 2000 and 2019, estimated deaths due to heat were approximately 489,000 per year”; ten million people have died.13
It’s the Profits, Stupid!
Time has run out, yet the perverted show of COP’s annual meetings trundles on. Despite the overwhelming evidence before the world’s national governments assembled for COP28, still their horse trading means this urgency will be diverted and lost, and the drastic measures required will once again be kicked down the line.
What solutions are being proposed? The International Energy Agency (IEA) was set up by the OECD club of rich nations to coordinate their policies after the first oil price hike in 1973. The IEA has been championing a switch to renewable energy sources (wind and solar) on the grounds that their costs of production have come down rapidly and are now comparable to the cost of a kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity produced by fossil fuels.14
This trust in the market is misplaced, the authoritative tone of the IEA disguises its projections are based on sand, that will blow away at the first gust of capitalist self-interest. As Brett Christophers and others argue, the IEA’s ‘cost centric’ approach misses the essential point, what matters to capitalist investors is the profits that are achieved. “To understand the economics of the energy transition, we should adopt a “profit-centric” perspective, rather than a cost-centric one.” Internal rates of return (IRRs) are the profits over time less the cost of financing, used by companies to assess investment projects. Crucially, the IRRs of hydrocarbon projects are “around 15% to 20%, or higher”, whereas “typical IRRs on renewables today are around 5% to 6%.” 15 although the majors think they can do better than existing renewables companies and lift returns to about 10%. In fact, 10% profitability is the recent average for UK business capital. 16
Hydrocarbon production generates much more than average profitability, at least twice as much as renewables. There is debate on this: McKinsey reports median upstream hydrocarbon IRRs declining from 2010 to 2020 at around 25%;17 the IEA is more optimistic in favour of renewables, arguing that “oil and gas projects currently produce slightly higher returns on investment, but those returns are less stable.”18
Yet the super-majors continue to expand production on the expectation of higher-than-average profit returns. UK based Shell expects IRRs of 30% on its brownfield expansion in the Gulf of Mexico.19 BP’s expected returns from investments in renewables are in the 6% to 8% range, whereas its minimum hurdle for investing in new oil and gas projects is 15% to 20%, which is conservative as it assumes crude will sell at $60 a barrel; at $70 a barrel the rate of return would be in the 20% to 25% range.20 BP had declared in 2019 that it would scale down hydrocarbon production by 40% by 2030, but this target was subsequently reduced to a 25% cut, which the shareholders still do not like and is in any case not being met. It is only in its messaging that BP is an outlier amongst the big oil companies.
In October 2023 the two US giants ExxonMobil and Chevron bought other companies in mega-deals to considerably increase their production capacities to 5.1 million barrels of oil a day (mb/d) and 4.4 mb/d respectively.21 Exxon is now moving into lithium mining because “the returns on lithium projects are also higher than renewables and more in line with oil and gas.”22
Competing Scenarios of Oil and Gas Demand
Much of the debate crystallises around different demand projections for oil over the next thirty years. The Financial Times asks will we reach the much vaunted ‘peak oil’ within this decade? Will then green transition policies really begin to bite and oil production decline significantly to 2050? Or will demand actually increase and profitable production continue to expand? Or, finally will oil and gas production plateau at just over current levels? The last option is increasingly the most likely, not just because it is the mid-point scenario, but radical change within the current world system is just not happening. All of this makes for, the FT concludes, ‘an age of energy uncertainty’.23
To highlight this, compare the IEA’s projections with those of oil producer group OPEC. The IEA posits three scenarios, similar to the reference scientific study by the IPCC and many other reports. In its stated policies scenario, the IEA projects that oil production will increase by about 5% to reach a peak of 99 mb/d by 2030 and from then decline slightly to about the same level as today. In this scenario oil prices remain at $85 a barrel. The scenario to reach net zero by 2050, would by 2030 already require a drastic reduction in the world’s oil production, and a (highly unlikely) price drop to just $40 a barrel, with the result that ‘high cost producers are pushed out of the market’. 24 It is notable that in this scenario 90% of the world’s oil would be supplied from the low cost Middle East producers.
Figure 3. Carbon Tracker Initiative. Image source: The Climate Alliance, “Stranded assets in the fossil fuel industry and why they are important,” 1 April 2016.
As the graphic shows the Carbon Tracker Initiative warns that “fossil fuel companies risk destroying investor returns”. It seeks to “align capital market actions with climate reality.”30 The problem is that climate realities are subordinated to capital markets, not the other way round, and wishful thinking will not change that. This really is the nub.
The problem is that the carbon super-majors and the asset funds that back them are not biting on this hook. As we have seen, although the oil companies have increased their investment in renewables somewhat this is still only at the margins, leaving hydrocarbons at over 97% of their production.
The problem is that the big banks and asset managers are ploughing huge funds into fossil fuel extraction, they are ‘banking on climate chaos’, to the tune of “$5.5 trillion in the seven years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement”. 31 The counteracting effect of shifting investment through ethical and green finance is massively over-hyped. A recent study found that less than 5% of the finance capital placed in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds is actually consistent with 1.5°C.32
Fossil fuel producers are expanding production, despite claims and promises, on their calculation of future profits. Just in the Americas: Canada has missed every single emissions reduction target since the tar sands were opened up; 33 in the US, rapid development of the Permian field and fracking have made it the world’s biggest producer; and huge new plays deep under the Atlantic Ocean are being pursued off Mexico, Guyana, Suriname, Brazil and Argentina.34
There is no good COP, it’s all bad COP.
If you think that this version of capitalism is bad, wait until you see the next one. The core groups of world capitalism are set on a course for average 2.9°C increase by 2100. Everything will get worse.
There is a sharpening polarisation in mass politics within the rich industrialised countries, whose populations are socialised in imperial modes of consumption but at least with a conscious minority now taking militant action to save the planet; the polarisation between countries that starts with the basic rupture of the ‘North/South’ divide in a world system still profoundly shaped by the legacy of the colonisers and the colonised; and compounded by the divergent interests of producers and consumers.
Figure 4. Global North and South Divide. Image source: Hesperian.
The politics of climate change has to shift towards bringing together all the grass roots movements, a rekindling of the spirit and ambition of the Cochabamba social movement conference reconstructed democratically.35 The ‘zones of sacrifice’ are the zones of resistance on the frontline, as in the case of Total’s EACOP pipeline in Uganda. 36 Despite their criminalisation the environmental defenders continue to fight, and are drawing solidarity actions around them.37
The fundamental solution will come from the many, many indigenous and impoverished communities in the Majority World who are mobilised in confrontation with extractive capitalism for their very survival emerging at the centre of a global alliance of working people.
As we go to press it has just been reported that the person put in charge of COP28 has been briefed to make side deals to sell oil and gas under cover of climate change meetings.38 You really could not make this up, it is the clearest indication of the perverted process on which the future of the entire planet and humanity depends.
We have so reached the end of the road. Under capitalist, that is to say imperialist, relations of production the challenge to put a stop to climate catastrophe is impossible. There is one conceptual step further than the profit centred approach. We need to grasp that the pursuit of surplus-profits (Marx) or super-profits (Lenin) is the economic driver underpinning why capitalist imperialism is destroying the planet.
Given how much our societies already rely on fossil fuels, constructing an equitable and ecologically sustainable socialist system starting from the existing material base will be an immense challenge. One thing is clear, saving life on earth means that we have to destroy capitalist imperialism.
Revolution, not reform, is the only life affirming answer to the capitalist mirage in the desert.
Any so-called environmentalist who maintains the we can address the climate debacle through capitalism is an idiot or a liar.
Despicable derailment of UN Climate negotiations
Originally published: ISA (International Socialist Alternative) on November 29, 2023 by Arne Johansson - Socialistiskt Alternative (ISA in Sweden) (more by ISA (International Socialist Alternative)) | (Posted Dec 02, 2023)
“I cannot emphasise enough that time is running out. Irreversible climate tipping points are alarmingly close. We can either save our world or condemn humanity to a hellish future”, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has summarised the scientific message ahead of the 28th UN Climate Change Conference, COP28, in the United Arab Emirates capital Dubai.
Unfortunately, there is nothing to suggest that COP28 will manifest anything other than another failure of the UN climate negotiations.
The massive failure to get to grips with the global climate crisis is the message of the latest report from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The report holds out virtually no possibility of limiting warming to 1.5°C. or of averting the accelerating climate disasters that this implies.
In order to limit warming to the Paris Agreement’s target of no more than 2°C, the world needs to cut emissions by 28 percent by 2030. To stay within the safe limit of 1.5°C requires a 42 percent reduction at the same time. Yet greenhouse gases releases are still increasing!
Heading to 1.5°C Before 2027
Climate scientists warned earlier this year that there is a 66 percent probability that the world could reach 1.5°C for the first time before 2027. This has been underlined by the fact that by the beginning of October this year, with the added boost of the increased strength of the El Niño weather phenomenon, 86 days consecutive were recorded with temperatures exceeding pre-industrial levels by 1.5°C. September was the warmest month on record, with global average temperatures 1.8°C above pre-industrial levels.
But El Niño is only an amplifying factor. After a temporary dip during the COVID-19 pandemic, greenhouse gas emissions increased again between 2021 and 2022, meaning that, according to the UN’s Emissions Gap Report 2023 published in November, the world is heading for 3°C of warming by the end of this century. Today’s nationally pledged targets point to a 66 per cent probability of 2.9°C.
At COP28, a Global Stocktake will be done for the first time, showing how the world has so far succeeded or failed in delivering a roadmap in line with the Paris Agreement to limit warming to as close to 1.5°C as possible. According to the State of Climate Action 2023 report, the actions taken by the world’s countries so far are “woefully inadequate” in 41 of the 42 indicators used, ranging from power generation, buildings, industries and transport to forests and land, food and agriculture–as well as measures to capture carbon and finance climate change mitigation and adaptation.
The pace of action in more than half of the indicators needs to more than double this decade. Incredibly, six key indicators point in the wrong direction. While the share of electric vehicles sold in four years increased from 1.6 percent to 10 percent is considered a bright spot (the only one), global public subsidies for fossil fuels doubled between 2020 and 2021 to the highest level in a decade. At the same time, deforestation continued at a rate equivalent to the area of Croatia in 2022.
According to the same report, achieving the necessary interim targets by 2030 would require a dramatic increase in the rate of expansion of solar and wind power from 14 percent to 24 percent per year. Coal would need to be phased out seven times faster than today, light rail built six times faster–the equivalent of three times New York’s entire public transport system every year for the entire decade.
Sabotage of Climate Goals No mention is made of the rapidly growing sabotage of climate goals through war and the military arms race. According to the Global Landscape of Climate Finance 2023, the world’s grossly inadequate annual climate finance costs (flows) totalled US$1.3 trillion in 2021—2022, compared to roughly twice that amount in military spending. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s estimate, the world’s military expenditure amounts to more than US$2.2 trillion, a figure that grossly underestimates the total military expenditure of the United States in particular.
As governments and companies increasingly turn a blind eye to the need to reduce emissions, they are talking more and more about offsetting continued emissions with measures to capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in forests and soil, bedrock and seabeds, and reach net zero through such “negative emissions” (Carbon Capture and Storage, CCS).
So far, this mostly involves biological methods using afforestation and biomass. The absurdity and frivolity of the world’s governments’ approach to climate change is demonstrated by the latest Land Gap Report, which states that the climate plans of rich and emission-leading countries include totally unrealistic proposal measures on a staggering scale. They suggest that one billion hectares of land will be restored or reforested–somewhere. This is an area larger than India, South Africa, Turkey and the EU combined!
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), the host country of the COP28 climate summit, is also a villain in this context, having burned in flares methane gas every day for 20 years. Under the leadership of Sultan Al Jaber, who is not only the president of the COP28 meeting but also the CEO of the state oil company ADNOC, the oil state is planning to compensate for continued large-scale oil and gas development with plantations in Africa. The UAE plans to plant or preserve forest on an area equal to half of Sweden covering 10 percent of Liberia and similar areas in Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Kenya.
These projects very rarely generate any real emission reductions. For example, according to a recent study published in Science, millions of carbon credits approved by Verra, the world’s leading certifier in the industry, are virtually worthless. As forests dry, they are increasingly becoming carbon sources, and forest fires make this much worse. Canada’s fires this summer released over 410 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, more than the UK’s annual total.
These plans for ultra-large plantations also clash with the demands of food security, sustainable ecosystems and the rights of local populations in a world whose population is expected to grow by 1.7 billion by 2050, much of it in the major cities of Asia and Africa.
Emissions Capture and Storage: Reality Gap
Equally large is the gap between talk and reality when it comes to technical capture and storage of emissions. According to a research report from the University of Oxford, trends indicate that this would need to be increased 30 times by 2030 and 1,300 times more than so far by 2050. The International Energy Agency recently warned against banking on the technology, stating that oil and gas companies need to start “letting go of the illusion” that “implausibly large” amounts of carbon capture will solve the climate crisis.
“Companies can’t make a profit from permanently storing carbon dioxide underground, and so far, governments haven’t exactly jumped up and down with joy about pumping money into climate action,” one of the researchers behind the report told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
According to a long series of scientific studies, to meet climate targets most of the known reserves would have to stay in the ground. But according to data from the Global Oil and Gas Exit List (Gogel), which details the activities of more than 1,600 companies with 95 percent of global production, they are ignoring the warnings of the world’s climate scientists. According to statistics based on the International Energy Agency (IEA), no new oil and gas production can take place after 2023 if the 1.5C target is to be met. Yet the head of ADNOC, which runs one of the world’s three largest net-zero energy companies, alongside Saudi Aramco and QatarEnergy, will chair COP28 in Dubai.
According to the Gogel report, $170 billion has been invested in the search for new oil and gas reserves since 2021. Almost all (96 percent) of the 700 companies involved have continued on this path, while more than a thousand companies are planning new gas pipelines, gas-fired power plants and liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals.
“To keep 1.5C alive, a rapid, planned decline in oil and gas production is crucial. Instead, oil and gas companies are building a bridge to climate chaos, explains the head of the research team, Nils Bartsch, who also says he finds it hard to understand how an oil company boss like Al Jaber could have qualified to lead the climate negotiations.
“COP28 host UAE has world’s biggest climate-destroying oil plans,” summarises a telling headline in the UK’s The Guardian.
But against this absurd derailment of the UN climate negotiations, not a single one of the world’s capitalist governments, banks or corporations has raised so much as a peep of objection. For what would happen to the world’s financial markets if suddenly trillions of dollars invested in the bulk of the capitalist world’s energy system were suddenly found to be worthless?
Oxfam’s report for the COP28 Climate Equality, A Planet for the 99 percent, explained that the richest one percent account for as much of the pollution that heats up the planet as two-thirds of humanity.
Capitalism is taking humanity to disaster with a tiny minority doing most of the damage. Every day it is clearer that revolutionary, democratic and socialist change is needed to have the possibility of a decent life for future generations.
Solving the Climate Crisis Means Ending Our Addiction to Economic Growth
Posted on December 1, 2023 by Yves Smith
Yves here. I don’t mean to sound critical of well-meaning efforts to stop the accelerating climate disaster. But when I look at lists like this, I despair. We live in highly complex societies. The organizing principle is that (unless you have capital or are in a caste on public support, like priests) your survival depends on your labor. This is true even in the pre-modern era, where most people were subsistence farmers or in specialized service roles like blacksmiths. How can you make broad-scale changes to how society provisions itself if you can’t assure people they will be not much worse off in any new system?
By Emilia Reyes, programme director of policies and budgets for equality and sustainable development at Gender Equity: Citizenship, Work and Family, co-convenor of the Women’s Working Group on Financing for Development, and co-lead of the Economic Justice and Rights Action Coalition. Originally published at openDemocracy
World leaders are now touching down in Dubai for COP28, where they are set to discuss how to fast-track the global push towards clean energy.
And with the Global North responsible for 92% of the world’s excess carbon dioxide emissions and 74% of excess material use (half of which is extracted in the Global South), it’s clear the current ecological crisis is the responsibility of the industrialised economies who will be sat around the table.
The source of the problem lies in the very economic system that prioritises economic growth, profit and wealth accumulation over the wellbeing of people and the planet. The blind pursuit of exponential economic growth has propelled economic decision-making. But exponential economic growth brings about exponential extraction and exponential deepening of inequalities.
Governments of industrialised economies have presented ‘green new deals’ (GNDs) as the solution. But their aims and measures are reinforcing the economic structures that rely on colonial extraction in the Global South. Building the entire infrastructure of the so-called energy transition proposed by GNDs will require a new wave of extraction of rare and critical minerals. The global demand for lithium alone would go up to 4,200% by 2040.
This level of extraction will devastate entire ecosystems, primarily in the Global South, and alter the ecological balance globally. It will also create and cement racist sacrifice zones everywhere.
Global North countries instead need to transition into a post-growth economy. The way to achieve this is through a conscientious and planned process of degrowth. Degrowth questions the premise that profits matter more than people and ecological balance. In practice, this means investing in processes of production and consumption that are geared towards the needs of a diverse world, moving away from our current system of wastefulness and scarcity. Where we make decisions about what and where to extract, how to produce and for whom based on what is really needed to deliver the wellbeing of people and the planet.
Processes of degrowth need to map its impacts in the larger global dynamics. Otherwise, it will simply have no effect in the real battle for survival of life on this planet. A post-growth economy needs to have a decolonial and global justice approach.
The Global South cannot endure being pillaged for wealth accumulation in the Global North. Reparations are key alongside, as Priya Lukka states, a complete reform of the global economic and financial architecture, as an assurance of non-repetition. This includes:
Tax justice, (including a UN tax convention, tackling illicit financial flows, promoting progressive taxation and eliminating regressive taxation)
Debt justice (including debt cancellation and the creation of a debt workout mechanism)
Trade justice (including the assessment of trade and investment impacts, as well as tackling investor-state dispute settlements that force developing countries to carry out practices that go against human rights or ecological commitments)
Technological justice (including the creation of a global system to evaluate potential impacts of technologies on the environment, the labour market, livelihoods and society)
Financial justice (which requires the regulation of financial institutions and capital account management)
The ratification of the primacy of public finance over private finance, and the assessment of the real impacts of privatisation and private investments in the wellbeing of people and the planet
As part of this, the Global South needs to be cleared of any ties with the Global North that are based on colonial or imperial logic. This requires that governments and citizens plan for the internal transition towards a post-extractive economy that is cognisant of the different needs of the diverse groups of people, and of the primacy of sovereignty when it comes to decision-making, while promoting cross-working with other countries in the Global South.
So there are solutions to the economic and ecological mess that are feasible and achievable, and degrowth in the Global North is one step, but it cannot solve all the problems unless it is carried out hand in hand with a complete reform of global economics.
The key elements lie in centring global impacts and introducing reparations for those least responsible for the present global crises.
What Yves said, in spades. De-growth is a non-starter in the real world, Emilia is deluded or a despicable liar. Do we see the capitalists who rule the planet talking de-growth? Of course not, it would be an existential nightmare for them, capitalism requires constant growth. And the poor majority of this planet have every right to be alarmed by this loose talk. De-throne capitalism first, properly distribute the resources and fruits of labor equitably and then let's see where we stand. It's the only way.
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Capitalist climate crisis: Fossil fuel industries seizes helm of COP28
December 2, 2023 Scott Scheffer
Ahead of COP28, the Women’s March for Climate took place in Dakar, Senegal, on Nov. 25. The protesters aimed to amplify the voices of African women, especially from rural areas, who are heavily impacted by the effects of climate change.
Delegates from around the world are gathered in Dubai preparing for the opening of the 28th annual Conference Of the Parties (COP28), to be held from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12. The leadership is in the hands of Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, the head of United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil company, Adnoc.
Al-Jaber’s rise to leadership is a handover of power to the fossil fuel industry in the global effort to fight climate change. Now, leaked documents reveal that Al-Jaber’s team planned to use COP28 to obtain oil and gas deals in meetings with at least 27 countries.
Al-Jaber’s reputation had to be transformed in order to gain support to take over the presidency. The process was carried out by the largest public relations firms in the world – all of them PR mercenaries with a boatload of resources at their disposal. And they are all U.S. corporations.
According to a June 2023 article in Politico, “During the past decade, the UAE has spent more than $1 million on direct climate-focused advocacy and paid millions more to advisory firms and think tanks helping to polish its green credentials…”
Activists called Al-Jaber’s presidency of COP28 “asking arms dealers to lead peace talks.” However, initially, the White House seemed okay with the choice.
Last January, John Kerry, Biden’s Presidential Envoy for Climate, signaled that the U.S. was comfortable with an oil company executive being pushed for the job when he said, “I think that Dr. Sultan Al-Jaber is a terrific choice because he is the head of the company.” That is not likely the level of comfort now, but it isn’t just this new scandal that may cause the U.S. to sour on Al-Jaber.
A careful look at the agenda that Al-Jaber will push reveals intentions for a crafty strategic shift in favor of energy profits. Until now, the push at the series of international conferences has been to “phase out” fossil fuels. Part of his plan is to shift that language to “limit emissions from the production of fossil fuels” during the transition to renewables. This doesn’t include emissions from the use of fossil fuels – only the production at refineries.
Limiting emissions means using carbon capture technology. Energy companies favor carbon capture not only because it will be profitable but also because they can make the claim that fossil fuels can be exploited with lower emissions during the transition to other forms of energy. Scientists and engineers know that to scale it up enough to be effective is impossible.
Fossil fuel subsidies
Al-Jaber’s role is full of contradictions. He plays up the idea that he and his team (he has appointed dozens of staff from the oil company to positions in the leadership of COP28) are in the vanguard of clean energy. He pledges to raise $20 billion for renewable energy for the Global South. But the UAE also plans to spend $100 billion to boost its oil production from 4 billion to 7.5 billion barrels per year.
There is also no intention to enter any opposition to fossil fuel subsidies as there has been in all previous COP gatherings. The U.S. hands over up to $50 billion per year to oil companies. Globally, energy giants raked in $4 trillion in 2022.
Presumably, all of this would be okay with the energy companies and the banks that finance fossil fuel extraction, as well as with the White House. But another part of Al-Jaber’s agenda is more likely to run afoul of powerful U.S. interests.
U.S. delegates have fought against proposals to fund the Global South to help with adapting to the extreme weather. Those countries that have been robbed of their resources during the colonial era and during the stage of imperialism are underdeveloped industrially. As a consequence, they’ve added little to global CO2 emissions. It was the U.S. and Britain that emitted the lion’s share of carbon in the atmosphere today.
The idea of a fund to help the Global South adapt to and recover from extreme weather disasters has gained ground throughout the history of these international conferences. In previous COP conferences, an agreement was struck that the U.S. and Europe would pay $100 billion per year into a fund for adaptation. The payments never happened.
At COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, the anger of Global South delegates finally forced a formal agreement to set up the Loss and Damage Fund. But the U.S. is reportedly refusing to concede on how the fund will be structured. They want it to be run through the World Bank, and that would give the donors the opportunity to claim that aid packages that were already pledged could be considered part of the Loss and Damage Fund.
On Al-Jaber’s agenda is a way to exploit this divide between the interests of the rich capitalist countries and those of the Global South. Many countries don’t have enough fuel of any kind to heat homes adequately or can barely run factories. In other words, in order to develop, they need energy of some kind, and transitioning to renewables is out of reach for them. While the U.S. is throwing up obstacles to the Loss and Damage Fund, Al-Jaber is talking up paying for fuel to aid in their development and, in some cases offering to aid their transition to a renewables-based power grid. This is a way for him to try to get past opposition to the fossil fuel industry’s power grab.
Delegates have to approve the new president of the conference each year at its opening. Until now, it’s been a formality. That could change. So much is uncertain as this conference is set to begin. It’s entirely possible that Al-Jaber won’t survive the leaked documents scandal. The only certainty is that the climate change movement has to stay in the streets.
The deterioration of high mountain ecosystems increases the risk of landslides and floods.
On Sunday, an initiative to protect the world's glaciers was launched at the China Pavilion of the COP28 climate change conference.
At the side event of COP28, or the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, delegates and scientists shared their views on the risks of melting glaciers and ways to slow down that process.
A project named "Memory of Glaciers: Global Exploration Initiative" was launched to step up research and protection of glaciers as well as raise public awareness.
Glaciers bear witness to the history of climate change on the planet, and melting glaciers will bring a series of risks aside from rising sea levels, delegates said.
Potential risks will include damage to high mountain ecosystems, increased hazards of landslides and floods, as well as losses of tourism and cultural assets. Measures that need to be taken include limiting global warming through reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing adaptation strategies which can help reduce hazardous impacts.
According to the report "Ten New Reflections in Climate Science," which was prepared by Future Earth, The Earth League and World Climate Research Programme, humanity is about to exceed the limit of 1.5 degrees of global warming set in the Paris Agreement.
Therefore, it is essential to reduce as much as possible the magnitude and time in which the world is above 1.5 degrees to reduce losses, damages, and the risk of irreversible changes.
Yes, it's important. So many things are very important. I live and breath biodiversity. Nonetheless it is a diversion of our attention and a distraction. Because if capitalism is not replaced with a scientific system all that good work for endangered species or whatever is just pissing in the wind, feel-good bromides to mask refusal to tackle the primary issue which will eventually render all that good work moot.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
British empire marketing board poster from 1928. Credit: GRANGER – Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
How colonial rule radically shifts historical responsibility for climate change
Originally published: Carbon Brief on November 26, 2023 by Simon Evans and Verner Vaiisainen (more by Carbon Brief) | (Posted Dec 05, 2023)
The first-of-its-kind analysis offers a thought-provoking fresh perspective on questions of climate justice and historical responsibility, which lie at the heart of the global climate debate.
In total, humans have collectively pumped 2,558bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) into the atmosphere since 1850, enough to warm the planet by 1.15C above pre-industrial temperatures.
This means that, by the end of 2023, more than 92% of the carbon budget for 1.5C will have been used up—leaving less than five years remaining if current annual emissions continue.
However, responsibility for using up this global budget is highly unequal. The wealthiest countries—and within each nation the wealthiest individuals–have taken a disproportionate share.
Previous Carbon Brief analysis already showed the U.S. (20%) to be the world’s largest contributor to warming. Yet it implicitly allocated none of the responsibility for emissions under colonial rule to the colonial rulers, even though they held ultimate decision-making authority at the time.
The new analysis tests the implications of reversing this assumption. It finds the U.S. (21%) and China (12%) still top—but the share of former colonial powers growing significantly.
The French share of historical emissions rises by half, the UK nearly doubles, the Netherlands nearly triples and Portugal more than triples. Together, the EU+UK’s responsibility for warming rises by nearly a third, to 19%.
India is among the former colonies seeing its share of historical responsibility fall (by 15%, to below the UK), with Indonesia down by 24% and Africa’s already small contribution also dropping 24%.
How cumulative national CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, land use, land use change and forestry change over time during 1850-2023, million tonnes, when accounting for emissions under colonial rule. The remaining carbon budget for a 50/50 chance of staying below 1.5C is shown by the doughnut chart in the bottom right. Source: Carbon Brief analysis of figures from Jones et al (2023), Lamboll et al (2023), the Global Carbon Project, CDIAC, Our World in Data, the International Energy Agency and Carbon Monitor. Animation by Carbon Brief.
Notably, former colonial powers such as the UK and the Netherlands are much more prominent in the history of cumulative global CO2 emissions shown in the animation above.
While former colonies such as India and Indonesia are less prominent as a result, they still have significant emissions in the post-colonial era, pushing them into the top 10 as of 2023.
As before, the new analysis is based on CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and cement production, along with land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF).
It covers the period from 1850—often taken as the baseline for current warming—through to 2023, drawing primarily on a recent compilation of emissions estimates.
The assignment of colonial responsibility for emissions is largely based on research into the emergence of independent nation states since the early 19th century.
Other key findings of the analysis include:
As a group, the EU+UK collectively ranks second for emissions within its own borders (375GtCO2, 14.7% of the global total). This climbs by nearly a third after adding colonial emissions, to 478GtCO2 and 18.7% of the global total — just behind the U.S.
The UK ranks fourth in the world when accounting for colonial emissions — jumping ahead of its former colony India. Including emissions under British rule in 46 former colonies, the UK is responsible for nearly twice as much global warming as previously thought (130GtCO2 and 5.1% of the total, instead of 76GtCO2 and 3.0%).
The largest contributions to the UK’s colonial emissions are from India (13GtCO2, cutting its own total by 15%), Myanmar (7GtCO2, -49%) and Nigeria (5GtCO2, -33%).
The Netherlands accounts for nearly three times as much warming when accounting for colonial emissions (35GtCO2 and 1.4% of the total, rather than 13GtCO2 and 0.5%). This is largely due to LULUCF emissions in Indonesia, under Dutch rule, of 22GtCO2.
Africa–the vast majority of which was under colonial rule — sees its share of historical emissions fall by nearly a quarter, from 6.9% to 5.2%. Despite a 21-times larger population, this 5.2% share is only fractionally higher than the UK’s 5.1%.
When weighted by current populations, the Netherlands (2,014tCO2 per person) and the UK (1,922tCO2) become the world’s top emitters on a cumulative per-capita basis. They are followed by Russia (1,655tCO2), the U.S. (1,560tCO2) and Canada (1,524tCO2).
On this per-capita measure, China (217tCO2 per person), the continent of Africa (92tCO2) and India (52tCO2) are far behind developed nations’ contributions to warming.
Many former colonial powers are also net CO2 importers today. While data on CO2 imports and exports is limited, available figures further raise their shares of historical emissions.
These findings reinforce the significant historical responsibility of developed countries for current warming, particularly the former colonial powers in Europe.
While they account for less than 11% of the world’s population today, together, the U.S., EU and UK are responsible for 39% of cumulative historical emissions and current CO2-related warming.
Many of these countries now have small and declining emissions. Yet their relative wealth today—and their historical contributions to current warming—are recognised within the internationalclimate regime as being tied to a responsibility to lead, not only in terms of cutting their own emissions, but also in supporting the climate response in less developed countries.
The article below sets out why cumulative CO2 matters, how colonial rule changes responsibility for warming and where colonial emissions come from. It then looks at the impact of weighting emissions on a per-capita basis and accounting for emissions embedded in traded goods.
The article also includes a sortable, searchable table showing these key metrics for each country, as well as further details on the methodology used to produce this analysis.
Why cumulative CO2 matters
How colonial rule changes responsibility for warming
Where colonial emissions come from
How population size affects responsibility for warming
How emissions imports and exports affect responsibility for warming
Table: Historical emissions and colonial responsibility
Methodology: Historical emissions and colonial responsibility
Methodology: Why this analysis starts in 1850
Why cumulative CO2 matters
There is “unequivocal” evidence that humans have warmed the planet, causing “widespread and rapid” changes to Earth’s oceans, ice and land surface, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sixth assessment report.
The summary for policymakers states that current warming has been caused by “more than a century of net GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions from energy use, land-use and land use change, lifestyle and patterns of consumption, and production”.
Global warming is virtually certain to reach a new record high in 2023. Yet global greenhouse gas emissions have also climbed to record levels.
Meanwhile, climate change to date is already causing widespread impacts that disproportionatelyaffect low-income countries, from deadly heatwaves and droughts to “catastrophic” ice loss.
Human-caused CO2 emissions are the largest contributor to warming and there is a direct, linear relationship between the amount of CO2 released and the warming of the Earth’s surface.
Moreover, the timing of a tonne of CO2 being emitted has only a limited impact on the amount of warming it will ultimately cause. Once emitted, the resulting increase in atmospheric CO2 levels is essentially permanent on human timescales. This is despite the fact that individual CO2 molecules have a limited lifetime in the atmosphere, as they circulate around the carbon cycle.
As a result, CO2 emissions from previous centuries continue to contribute to the heating of the planet—and current warming is determined by the cumulative total of CO2 emissions over time.
This is the scientific basis for the carbon budget, namely, the total amount of CO2 that can be emitted to stay below any given limit on global temperatures.
This analysis uses the latest estimates of the remaining carbon budget for a 50/50 chance of limiting warming to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
The carbon budget is now smaller than the figure used in Carbon Brief’s 2021 analysis, due to updated understanding of the warming impact of non-CO2 greenhouse gases.
Adding up all of the human-caused CO2 emissions tracked in this analysis, during 1850-2023, amounts to 2,558GtCO2. (See: Methodology: Why this analysis starts in 1850.)
This means the remaining carbon budget for 1.5C will be just 208GtCO2 by the end of 2023. Less than 8% of the budget will be left—and the entire budget would be used up within less than five years, if global CO2 emissions were to continue at current levels.
In the first decade covered by Carbon Brief’s analysis, land-related emissions including deforestation account for more than 90% of the CO2 being released each year.
This pattern is reversed in the present day, with fossil fuels and cement production accounting for an estimated 91% of global CO2 emissions in 2023, as shown in the figure below.
Annual global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement overtook land-related emissions for the first time in 1947—coincidentally, the year that India and Pakistan gained independence.
Overall, fossil fuels and cement account for more than two-thirds of cumulative CO2, some 71% of the total emissions released during 1850-2023. Land use and forestry account for the other 29%.
Annual global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement (dark blue) as well as from land use, land-use change and forestry (red), 1850-2023, billions of tonnes. Source: Carbon Brief analysis of figures from Jones et al (2023), Lamboll et al (2023), the Global Carbon Project, CDIAC, Our World in Data, the International Energy Agency and Carbon Monitor. Chart by Carbon Brief.Carbon Brief’s estimates of cumulative emissions since 1850—and the remaining carbon budget as of the present day—are fully aligned with the latest updates since the IPCC report in 2021.
The accelerating depletion of the carbon budget for 1.5C is illustrated by markers in the figure above, showing the years when 25%, 50% and 75% of the budget had been used up.
This shows that it took 107 years to use up the first quarter of the carbon budget, then just 33 years to use up the next quarter and only a further 22 years for the third quarter.
At the current rate, the final quarter of the 1.5C budget will have been used up in 16 years.
How colonial rule changes responsibility for warming
Historical responsibility is ethically complex, but it is clear that colonial powers had a significant influence on landscapes, natural resource use and development patterns taking place under their rule. It would be hard to justify ignoring this completely.
Indeed, it is well known that colonial powers extracted natural resources from colonised lands to support their economic, military and political power.
Yet the link to historical emissions has never been quantified, until now.
This analysis assigns full responsibility for past emissions to those with ultimate decision-making authority at the time, namely, the colonial rulers. This reverses the implicit assumption of previous analyses, where none of the responsibility was given to colonial powers.
Arguably, the true share of responsibility for current warming lies somewhere between these two extremes, where emissions are fully assigned to either the colonial powers or their former colonies.
In line with this approach, the analysis assigns responsibility for emissions within the former Soviet republics to Russia, because decision-making authority was heavily centralised in Moscow.
The figure below shows the top 20 countries in the world in terms of their cumulative historical CO2 emissions. The blue columns show emissions taking place within each country’s current borders, while the red chunks show emissions that took place under its rule, in controlled territories. The light blue chunks show emissions reallocated from former colonies to the former colonial power.
Notably, the major post-colonial European powers, including the UK (+70%), France (+51%) and the Netherlands (+181%), all see significant increases in their share of historical emissions.
While they do not appear in the top 20, there are similar effects for Belgium (+33%), Portugal (+234%) and Spain (+12%). Collectively, the EU+UK take on much larger responsibility (+28%).
On the flip side, India (-15%) and Indonesia (-24%) are particularly notable for their reduced share of cumulative emissions, under this new approach to historical responsibility for warming.
The top 20 countries for cumulative CO2 emissions from fossil fuels cement land use land use change and forestry 1850 2023 billion tonnes CO2 emissions that occurred within each countrys national borders are shown in dark blue while those that took place overseas during periods of imperial rule are coloured red Emissions reallocated to former imperial powers are shaded light blue EU+UK is shown in addition to the relevant individual countries Source Carbon Brief analysis of figures from <a href=httpswwwnaturecomarticless41597 023 02041 1 target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>Jones et al<a>2023 <a href=httpswwwnaturecomarticless41558 023 01848 5 target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>Lamboll et al<a> 2023 the <a href=httpswwwglobalcarbonprojectorg target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>Global Carbon Project<a> <a href=httpscdiacess divelblgov target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>CDIAC<a> <a href=httpsgithubcomowidco2 data target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>Our World in Data<a> the <a href=httpswwwieaorgdata and statisticschartsdirect co2 emissions from aviation in the net zero scenario 2000 2030 target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>International Energy Agency<a> and <a href=httpscarbonmonitororg target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>Carbon Monitor<a> Chart by Carbon Brief
Russia also sees a significant increase in its historical responsibility for current warming, which rises by two-fifths to 9.3% of the global total, under the approach taken in this analysis.
Nevertheless, some argue that the nature of the power dynamics within the former Soviet Union was different to those between European colonialists and the peoples they colonised overseas.
While also not appearing in the top 20, there are big shifts, too, for Austria (+72%) and Hungary (+70%), as a result of the former Austro-Hungarian empire. This, too, was of a different nature to the overseas colonisations of other European powers.
Accounting for colonial rule alters the relative ranking of a number of countries.
The UK is the most prominent example, climbing from eighth-largest contributor to climate change to fourth. This means it leapfrogs its former colony, India, in terms of past responsibility.
Similarly, while the Netherlands does not quite overtake Indonesia, their relative rankings are significantly different after accounting for colonial responsibility for past emissions.
These shifts are illustrated in the figure below, which shows the top 20 countries in the world ranked according to their share of cumulative emissions. On the left, only emissions within present-day borders are considered, while on the right, emissions under colonial rule are added.
(Note that the EU+UK is shown as a bloc, in addition to the top 20 countries.)
The top 20 countries in the world ranked in terms of their share of cumulative historical emissions 1850 2023 within current national borders left and after accounting for periods of foreign rule right Source Carbon Brief analysis of figures from <a href=httpswwwnaturecomarticless41597 023 02041 1 target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>Jones et al<a> 2023 <a href=httpswwwnaturecomarticless41558 023 01848 5 target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>Lamboll et al<a> 2023 the <a href=httpswwwglobalcarbonprojectorg target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>Global Carbon Project<a> <a href=httpscdiacess divelblgov target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>CDIAC<a> <a href=httpsgithubcomowidco2 data target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>Our World in Data<a> the <a href=httpswwwieaorgdata and statisticschartsdirect co2 emissions from aviation in the net zero scenario 2000 2030 target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>International Energy Agency<a> and <a href=httpscarbonmonitororg target= blank rel=noreferrer noopener>Carbon Monitor<a> Chart by Carbon Brief
The other obvious shifts in the ranking chart, above, are for Ukraine and Kazakhstan, both former Soviet republics that were under centralised rule from Moscow for much of the 20th century.
Unlike other emissions reassignments under Carbon Brief’s new analysis, these and other former Soviet republics have large amounts of fossil fuel-based CO2 emissions shifted off their books.
Referring back to the chart of fossil- versus land-based emissions over time, above, illustrates the major reason why this is the case. Annual CO2 emissions were dominated by contributions from LULUCF until the middle of the 20th century, when fossil fuel use started to explode.
Many former European colonies in Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas had gained independence well before the point when fossil fuel use accelerated. In contrast, former Soviet republics were part of the Soviet Union administered from Moscow until its collapse in 1991.
Images/graphs disallowed...You'd think they'd want this information disseminated....
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Carbon dioxide becomes more potent as world heats
December 4, 2023
Future CO2 emissions will cause more 25% warming than CO2 emissions today
Stratosphere cooling caused by CO2 causes subsequent increases in CO2 to have a larger heat-trapping effect.
The effect of increasing the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) on global average surface air temperature might be expected to be constant, but this is not the case. A study published in the journal Science shows that carbon dioxide becomes a more potent greenhouse gas as more is released into the atmosphere.
The researchers used climate models and other tools to analyze the effect increasing CO2 has on a region of the upper atmosphere — the stratosphere — that scientists have long known cools with increasing CO2 concentrations. They found that this stratosphere cooling causes subsequent increases in CO2 to have a larger heat-trapping effect than previous increases, causing carbon dioxide to become more potent as a greenhouse gas.
The amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere from a proportionate increase in CO2, which scientists refer to as radiative forcing, has long been thought of as a constant that does not change over time. In fact, doubling the atmospheric CO2 concentration increases the impact of any given increase in CO2 by about 25%
“Future increases in CO2 will provide a more potent warming effect on climate than an equivalent increase in the past,” said the study’s lead author Haozhe He, who completed the work as part of his Ph.D. studies at the University of Miami. “This new understanding has significant implications for interpreting both past and future climate changes and implies that high CO2 climates may be intrinsically more sensitive than low CO2 climates.”
Worldwide, 1 in 12 hospitals won’t survive extreme weather
December 4, 2023
Risk of damage to hospitals from extreme weather has increased by 41% since 1990
Flooding at Nalanda Medical College and Hospital (NMCH), after heavy rains in Bihar, India, 2018
On December 2, XDI Cross Dependency Initiative, an consultancy that specializes in understanding and managing unavoidable climate change, released report that evaluates physical climate risks facing over 200,000 hospitals around the world.
Key Findings include:
⊕ Without a phase out of fossil fuels, by 2100, 1 in 12 hospitals worldwide will be at high risk of total or partial shutdown from extreme weather events — a total of 16,245 hospitals.
⊕ Without a phase out of fossil fuels, all of these 16,245 hospitals will require adaptation, where suitable. Even with this enormous investment, for many, relocation will be the only option.
⊕ The analysis suggests that the risk of damage to hospitals from extreme weather events has already increased by 41% since 1990 due to greenhouse gas emissions.
⊕ Limiting global warming to 1.8 degrees Celsius with a rapid phase out of fossil fuels would halve the damage risk to hospital infrastructure compared to a high emissions scenario.
⊕ If emissions are high, the risk of damage to hospitals around the world from extreme weather will increase more than four-fold (311%) by the end of the century. In a low emissions scenario, this increase in risk is reduced to just 106%
⊕ Even with a rapid decrease in fossil fuels, the risk of damage to hospital infrastructure will still increase by 2100 due to emissions that have already occurred or appear unavoidable. However, a lower emissions scenario will significantly lessen this risk.
⊕ Hospitals located on coastlines and near rivers are most at risk. Today, riverine and surface water flooding dominates the risk of damage to hospitals. Towards the end of the century, coastal inundation rapidly increases (exacerbated by sea-level rise) and becomes the most significant hazard after riverine flooding by 2100.
⊕ Of the 16,245 hospitals identified as high risk by 2100, 71% (11,512) of them are in low and middle income countries.
Activists protest against fossil fuels on the sidelines of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates on December 5, 2023. (Photo: by Karim Sahib/AFP via Getty Images / Common Dreams)
Relying on carbon capture and storage could Unleash ‘carbon bomb’
Originally published: Common Dreams on December 5, 2023 by Jessica Corbett (more by Common Dreams) | (Posted Dec 07, 2023)
While the United Nations climate summit continued in the Middle East, researchers in Germany warned Tuesday that depending on technology to trap and sequester planet-heating pollution could unleash a “carbon bomb” in the decades ahead.
Specifically, the new briefing from the Berlin-based think thank Climate Analytics states that reliance on carbon capture and storage (CCS) could release an extra 86 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere between 2020 and 2050.
“The climate talks at COP28 have centered around the need for a fossil fuel phaseout,” the publication notes, referring to the United Arab Emirates-hosted U.N. conference.
But some are calling for this to be limited to ‘unabated’ fossil fuels.
The term ‘abated’ is being used as a Trojan horse to allow fossil fuels with dismal capture rates to count as climate action.
Over 100 countries at COP28 support calling for “accelerating efforts toward phasing out unabated fossil fuels,” or operations that don’t involve technological interventions such as CCS,” as Common Dreams reported earlier Tuesday.
The new briefing highlights the risks of targeting only unabated fossil fuels. Contrary to claims that significant oil and gas consumption can continue thanks to new tech, it says,
pathways that achieve the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C limit in a sustainable manner show a near complete phaseout of fossil fuels by around 2050 and rely to a very limited degree, if at all, on fossil CCS.
Additionally, “there is no agreed definition of the concept of abatement,” and “a weak definition of ‘abated’—or even no definition at all—could allow poorly performing fossil CCS projects to be classed as abated,” the document explains. The report’s authors suggest that the focus on unabated fossil fuels is driven by polluters who want to keep cashing in on wrecking the planet.
“The term ‘abated’ is being used as a Trojan horse to allow fossil fuels with dismal capture rates to count as climate action,” declared report co-author Claire Fyson.
‘Abated’ may sound like harmless jargon, but it’s actually language deliberately engineered and heavily promoted by the oil and gas industry to create the illusion we can keep expanding fossil fuels.
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare, who also contributed to the document, said that “the false promises of ‘abated’ fossil fuels risks climate finance being funneled to fossil projects, particularly oil and gas, and will greenwash the ‘unabatable’ emissions from their final use, which account for 90% of fossil oil and gas emissions.”
Report co-author Neil Grant stressed that “we need to cut through the smoke and mirrors of ‘abated’ fossil and keep our eyes fixed on the goal of 1.5°C. That means slashing fossil fuel production by around 40% this decade, and a near complete phaseout of fossil fuels by around 2050.”
As a Tuesday analysis from the Civil Society Equity Review details, a “fair” phaseout by mid-century would involve rich nations ditching oil and gas faster than poor countries, and the former pouring billions of dollars into helping the latter. The United States, for example, should end fossil fuel use by 2031 and contribute $97.1 billion per year toward the global energy transition.
The United States is putting money toward what critics call “false solutions” like carbon capture, and it is not alone. An Oil Change International (OCI) report from last week notes that “governments have spent over $20 billion—and have legislated or announced policies that could spend up to $200 billion more—of public money on CCS, providing a lifeline for the fossil fuel industry.”
OCI found that rather than permanently sequestering carbon dioxide, 79% of the global CCS capacity sends captured CO2 to stimulate oil production in aging wells, which is called “enhanced oil recovery.” The group also reviewed six leading plants in the United States, Australia, and the Middle East, and concluded that they “overpromise and underdeliver, operating far below capacity.”
Lorne Stockman, OCI’s research director, asserted last week that “governments need to stop pretending that fossil fuels aren’t the problem. Instead of throwing a multibillion-dollar lifeline to the fossil fuel industry with our tax dollars, they should fund real climate solutions, including renewable energy and energy efficiency. Fossil fuel phaseout must be the central theme of COP28, not dangerous distractions like CCS propped up with public money.”
Underscoring Stockman’s point that such projects are incredibly expensive, the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment on Monday published research showing that a high carbon capture and storage pathway to net-zero emissions in 2050 could cost at least $30 trillion more than a low CCS pathway.
“Relying on mass deployment of CCS to facilitate high ongoing use of fossil fuels would cost society around a trillion dollars extra each year—it would be highly economically damaging,” said Rupert Way, an honorary research associate at the school.
“Any hopes that the cost of CCS will decline in a similar way to renewable technologies like solar and batteries appear misplaced,” he added.
Our findings indicate a lack of technological learning in any part of the process, from CO2 capture to burial, even though all elements of the chain have been in use for decades.
******* ‘A Sick Joke’: Six Ways of Looking at a COP
Posted on December 7, 2023 by Yves Smith
Yves here. After so many climate initiatives, from IPCC reports to COP meetings to the Paris Accords, that have generated a lot of hot air and not much climate action, if you are not cynical or jaded, you have not been paying attention. So it is fitting that this year’s COP is being held in Dubai, one of the world capitals of air conditioning.
Tom Neuburger invoked Wallace Stevens as the inspiration for this post. But I prefer Rashomon, with four inconsistent accounts of the same crime.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
“Cohosting COP will help restore our reputation.”
—Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy (see video above)
“There is no science out there that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5 [degrees Celsius].”
—Sultan Al Jabar, COP 28 President-designate and CEO, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, quoted here
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.”
—Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
The world’s most climate-interested people-with-power meet this year in Dubai, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates, a nation with the seventh largest oil reserves in the world. The Emirates are net-sellers of fossil fuels.
Interesting? Let’s consider this conference and the issue it addresses from more than one angle. With homage to Wallace Stevens, this is “Six ways of looking at a COP.”
Using the Climate Conference to Sell Oil
The first angle is pure corruption. A meeting to address global warming is being used to increase it.
Writing in Newsweek (and not The Onion), fed-up climate scientist Peter Kalmus says this:
The annual United Nations climate summit started yesterday. We’re up to the 28th edition: “COP28.” Past UN summits have obviously failed us, but this is a new low. Everyone on Earth needs to know that the meeting has been overrun by fossil fuel executives, making it a sick, planet-destroying joke. There’s no real hope of stopping catastrophic global heating until we fix this.
Kalmus is not wrong. Why does he call it a “joke”?
In this hottest year in human history, the climate summit is being held in the United Arab Emirates and presided over by a fossil fuel chief executive named Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber. It’s hard to imagine anything more cynical or more evil. And yet, things did get more cynical and more evil, with recent revelations that the U.A.E. has been abusing its host role to strike side deals to expand fossil fuels.
The president of this year’s UN climate conference is a fossil fuel CEO who plans to use the conference to … sell oil. Because why not, if your major customers are there?
Behind the scenes, the Emirates has sought to use its position as host to pursue a contradictory goal: to lobby on oil and gas deals around the world, according to an internal document made public by a whistle-blower.
In one example, the document offers guidance for Emirati climate officials to use meetings with Brazil’s environment minister to enlist her help with a local petrochemical deal by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the Emirates’ state-run oil and gas company, known as Adnoc.
Emirati officials should also inform their Chinese counterparts that Adnoc was “willing to jointly evaluate international LNG opportunities” in Mozambique, Canada and Australia, the document indicates. LNG stands for liquefied natural gas, which is a fossil fuel and a driver of global warming.
There’s not much moral distance between this and using 12-step meetings to peddle drugs. Except that this is far worse. You could screw up, at most, a few hundreds of lives by perverting some 12-step meetings. Oil and gas dealers doom billions.
Carrots or Sticks? Let Corporations Decide
All of this takes place in a world where the powerful struggle to decide whether to use carrots or sticks to address the climate change. In this case, the carrots are subsidies for renewable energy, and the sticks are quotas and controls.
As Yves Smith points out in this article at Naked Capitalism, the classic way to choose between quotas and subsidies is to assess the private costs of each. Since the private cost of the sticks approach — taxes on carbon, carbon credit schemes, or (my personal favorite) outright bans — is bound to be both high and painful, the powers-that-be in the West have opted for carrots. That is, they will (grudgingly) allow subsidies in order to avoid taxes and bans.
But the subsidy approach is now encountering a problem: no profit there either. From the Wall Street Journal:
In the past few years, Washington and Wall Street started fantasizing that the transition to net-zero carbon emissions could be an economic bonanza. “When I think climate change, I think jobs,” President Biden said. When Wall Street heard green energy, it saw profits.
Keep the last sentence in mind as you read the rest.
For years, the cost of wind and solar plummeted, but since 2021 they have risen, according to investment bank Lazard. Interest rates are an important factor, which Lazard estimates affect offshore wind and solar more than natural gas.
Many developers can no longer economically supply power at the rates previously agreed to. Denmark’s Orsted, the world’s largest wind developer, took a $4 billion charge in early November for pulling out of two projects off New Jersey. The company today is worth 75% less than in early 2021.
ClearView Energy Partners estimates about 30% of state-contracted offshore wind capacity has been canceled, and another 25% may be rebid. ClearView analyst Timothy Fox noted lawmakers often mandate increased renewables, but utility regulators must approve the contracts, and one of their primary considerations is cost to ratepayers. …
Regarding electric vehicles, “automakers are still losing money on every EV they sell.”
And of course, the private sector’s in charge. As a result, as the article says, “The green transition remains critical, but its path will be fraught until someone agrees to pay for it.” Unspoken: That won’t be us.
The Cost Will Indeed Be High
The private sector, which loves only money, is not wrong about the cost of truly addressing the crisis. Carbon taxes will extract wealth from their pockets. Even if that wealth is directly returned to the people, they’ll tout it as a tax on everyone. It’s what they do.
But the people will also suffer from the transition as well. If Kalmus is right and “the only way out of this emergency is to … end the fossil fuel industry,” given the deadlines we’re on…
…it’s not hard to imagine some rationing will be involved. Perhaps a lot of it. After all, declaring a World War II-style emergency for the real World War II meant a lotof rationing.
The fossil fuel industry uses “goodbye big-screen lifestyle” to scare people toward carrots for a reason — “goodbye big-screen lifestyle” may be in the cards.
Infinite Growth
The final angle from which to view this year’s conference is this one, and it’s stark. Emilia Reyes, a contributor to the 2022 IPCC Working Group 2 report, Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, writes this:
Solving the climate crisis means ending our addiction to economic growth
But degrowth in the Global North will not work unless it is done alongside reparations for the Global South
… [W]ith the Global North responsible for 92% of the world’s excess carbon dioxide emissions and 74% of excess material use (half of which is extracted in the Global South), it’s clear the current ecological crisis is the responsibility of the industrialised economies who will be sat around the table.
The source of the problem lies in the very economic system that prioritises economic growth, profit and wealth accumulation over the wellbeing of people and the planet. The blind pursuit of exponential economic growth has propelled economic decision-making. But exponential economic growth brings about exponential extraction and exponential deepening of inequalities.
Let’s pause for a second. You’ve probably heard this before: The modern (capitalist-driven) pursuit of unlimited growth is not consistent with addressing climate change, since pursuit of unlimited growth is one of its causes.
To decide if this is right, consider: The two main causes of the coming climate crisis are 1) the growth in world population, and 2) the socially-blessed greed of those with all the power.
Which means:
As long as population grows, consumption will increase.
As long as greed rules our world, economic entities — companies, businesses, countries — will be forced to grow, be taken over, or die.
Running in place is death for a major enterprise. Think of Sears, or Braniff, or any of a dozen dead or recycled enterprises you recall from youth. It’s entirely possible that the system we’re trying to fix can only be fixed by its death, our death, or both.
The details behind this argument are convincing:
Governments of industrialised economies have presented ‘green new deals’ (GNDs) as the solution. But their aims and measures are reinforcing the economic structures that rely on colonial extraction in the Global South. Building the entire infrastructure of the so-called energy transition proposed by GNDs will require a new wave of extraction of rare and critical minerals. The global demand for lithium alone would go up to 4,200% by 2040.
Imagine a world where global lithium use increases 42-fold in 15 years. That’s the world that supports our “big-screen lifestyle” into the future.
But let’s say we succeed. What happens ten years after? Increased extraction, of course. See where this goes?
The Path to Degrowth
Reyes lays out a process that gets us there, to a growth-free and fairer world. But it’s a big ask.
…than to re-enter caveman life while he’s still alive.
I’m not sure he’s right. The caves may come sooner than that.
India recorded extreme weather events on 235 of the 273 days from January 1 to September 30, 2023. This means that in 86 per cent of the first nine months of this year, India had an extreme weather event breaking in one or more parts of the country. It also experienced record-breaking temperatures for several months, and regions across the country were deluged because of very heavy and extremely heavy rainfall. This led to floods and the loss of life and livestock. This speaks of the increased frequency and intensity of the extreme events that we are seeing in our rapidly warming world. …
India has seen a disaster nearly every day in the first nine months of this year-from heat and cold waves, cyclones and lightning to heavy rain, floods and landslides. These disasters have claimed 2,923 human lives, affected 1.84 million hectares (ha) of crop area, destroyed over 80,563 houses and killed close to 92,519 livestock. This calculation of loss and damage is probably an underestimate as data for each event is not collated, nor are the losses of public property or crop calculated.
With an event every second day, Madhya Pradesh saw the highest number of days with extreme weather events; but Bihar saw the highest number of human deaths at 642, followed by Himachal Pradesh (365 deaths) and Uttar Pradesh (341 deaths). Himachal Pradesh reported the highest number of damaged houses (15,407) and Punjab reported the highest number of animal deaths (63,649).
Madhya Pradesh has experienced an extreme weather event on 138 days since the beginning of 2023. Despite this, official records indicate no crop area damage. However, media reports suggest that at least 45,000 hectares of crop area were affected. This discrepancy could be due to gaps in loss and damage reporting.
While January remained slightly warmer than average (1981-2010), February exceeded all previous records to become the warmest in 122 years. Northwest India was especially hot, with a 2.78oC temperature anomaly above average (1981-2010). March was modestly warmer for India once again, however, the average minimum temperature in Northwest India was 1.34oC above usual. The country’s mean temperature stayed near average in April and May, with the exception of the South Peninsula, which had the third highest average maximum temperature for April, with an anomaly of 0.77oC. This June was the sixth warmest on record for the country, with the South Peninsula reporting its warmest June on record. In July, the country had its second-warmest minimum temperature in 122 years. August and September were again the warmest ever for the country.
India also recorded its sixth driest February and its driest ever August in 122 years. Meanwhile, March remained unusually wet for Central India and the South Peninsula, with the two regions receiving 206 per cent and 107 per cent of the long-term average (1971-2020) rainfall, respectively.
This is the watermark of climate change. It is not about the single event but about the increased frequency of the events-an extreme event we saw once every 100 years has now begun to occur every five years or less. Worse, it is now all coming together-each month is breaking a new record. This, in turn, is breaking the backs of the poorest, who are worst impacted and are fast losing their capacities to cope with these recurring and frequent events.
In terms of the “nature” of the event, all types of extreme weather have been seen in the past nine months — lightning and storms were reported in all 36 states and Union Territories and claimed 711 lives. Then, every day of the three months of monsoon-from June to August-shows heavy to very heavy and extremely heavy rainfall in some parts of the country. This is why the flood devastation has not sparred any region-in Himachal Pradesh, for instance, vast parts of the state were submerged and people lost lives, homes and sources of livelihood.
This is why the extreme weather report card is important to understand. It tells us of the number of such events; the fact that this will lead to cumulative and extensive damage. And that fact that we need systems to better account for the losses so that climate change and its impact have the human face of their victim.
It speaks of the need to do much more to manage these extreme events-we have to move beyond the management of the disaster to reducing risks and improving resilience. This is why we need more than words to improve the systems for flood management-deliberately building drainage and water recharge systems on the one hand and investing in green spaces and forests so that these sponges of water can be revitalized for the coming storms.
This also speaks of the need to demand reparations for the damage from the countries that have contributed to the emissions in the atmosphere and are responsible for this damage. The models that explain the impacts of climate change are clear that extreme weather events will increase in frequency and intensity. This is what we are seeing today. This report card is not good news. But it needs to be read so that we understand the revenge of nature that we are witnessing today and also understand that it will get worse tomorrow if we do not combat climate change at the scale that is needed.
COP28: Where fossil fuel industries go to gloat
Originally published: Dissident Voice on December 5, 2023 by Binoy Kampmark (more by Dissident Voice) | (Posted Dec 08, 2023)
The sequence of COP meetings, ostensibly a United Nations forum to discuss dramatic climate change measures in the face of galloping emissions, has now been shown for what it is: a luxurious, pampered bazaar for the very industries that fear a dip in their profits and ultimate obsolescence. Call it a drugs summit for narcotics distributors promoting clean-living; a convention for casino moguls promising to aid problem gamblers. The list of wicked analogies is endless.
Reading the material from the gathering that is known in its longer form as the United Nations Climate Change Conference, one could be forgiven for falling for the sweetened agitprop. We find, on the UN website explaining the role of COP28, that the forum is “where the world comes together to agree on ways to address the climate crisis, such as limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, helping vulnerable communities adapt to the effects of climate change, and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.”
Then comes the boggling figure: 70,000 delegates will be mingling and haggling, including the parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Business leaders, young people, climate scientists, Indigenous Peoples, journalists, and various other experts and stakeholders are also among the participants.
The view from outside the conference is a matter of night and day. Fernando Racimo, evolutionary biologist and member of the activist group Scientist Rebellion, sums up the progress of ever bloating summitry in this field since 1995: “Almost 30 years of promises, of pledges,” he told Nature,
and yet carbon emissions continue to go up to even higher levels. As scientists, we’re recognizing this failure.
In Dubai, where COP28 is being held, representatives from the coal, oil and gas industries have come out in numbers to talk about climate change. They, it would seem, are the business leaders and stakeholders who matter. And such representatives have every reason to be encouraged by the rich mockery of it all: the United Arab Emirates is a top league oil producer and member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
According to an analysis from the environmental Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition, 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to the summit.
In a year when global temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions shattered records, there has been an explosion of fossil fuel lobbyists heading to UN talks, with nearly four times more than were granted last year.
The breakdown of the attendee figures makes for grim reading. In the first place, fossil fuel lobbyists have outdone the number delegates from climate vulnerable nations: the number there comes to a mere 1,509. In terms of country delegations, the fossil fuel group of participants is only outdone by Brazil, with 3,081 people.
In contrast, the numbers of scientist presents are minimal to the point of being invisible. Climate change activists, the young, and journalists serve in decorative and performative roles, the moralising priests who give the last rites before the execution.
The theme of the conference had already been set by COP president Sultan al-Jaber, who felt, in his vast wisdom, that he could simultaneously host the conference with high principle and still conduct his duties as CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc).
This, after all, presented a wonderful chance to gossip about climate goals in hazy terms while striking genuine fossil fuel deals with participating countries. This much was shown by leaked briefing documents to the BBC and the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR).
The documents in question involve over 150 pages of briefings prepared by the COP28 team for meetings with Jaber and various interested parties held between July and October this year. They point to plans to raise matters of commercial interest with as many as 30 countries. The CCR confirms “that on at least one occasion a nation followed up on commercial discussions brought up in a meeting with Al Jaber; a source with knowledge of discussions also told CCR that Adnoc’s business interests were allegedly raised during a meeting with another country.”
The COP28 team did not deny using bilateral meetings related to the summit to discuss business matters. A spokesperson for the team was mightily indifferent in remarking that Jaber “holds a number of positions alongside his role as COP28 President-Designate. That is public knowledge. Private meetings are private, and we do not comment on them.”
The Sultan proved to be more direct, telling a news conference that such “allegations are false, not true, incorrect, are not accurate. And it’s an attempt to undermine the work of the COP28 presidency.” Jaber went on to promise that he had never seen “these talking points that they refer to or that I ever even used such talking points in my discussions.” No need for notes, then, when advancing the fossil fuel interests of country and industry.
Concerned parties are attempting to find various ways of protesting against a summit that has all the hallmarks of gross failure. Scientists and environmentalists are choosing to voice their disagreement in their respective countries, thereby avoiding any addition to the increasingly vast carbon footprint being left by COP28. As well they should: Dubai is, essentially, hosting an event that could be best described as a museum piece of human failings.
Currently, delegates are poring over a draft of the final agreement that proposes “an orderly and just phase-out of fossil fuels”. What is just here is a fascinating question, given the lobbying by the fossil fuel advocates who have a rather eccentric notion of fairness. As Jean Paul Prates, CEO of Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras declared, “The energy transition will only be valid if it’s a fair transition.” The prospects for an even more grandiose, stage-managed failure, helped along by oil and gas, is in the offing.
With the figures of science essentially excluded from these hot air gatherings in favour of industries that see them as troubling nuisances best ignored, the prospect for local and domestic reform through informed activism becomes the only sensible approach. There are even heartening studies suggesting that climate protest can warm frigid public opinion, the only measure that really interests the vote getting politician. Unfortunate that this seems a last throw for much of humanity and the earth’s ecosystem.
Why Cuba leads the world in confronting climate crisis
November 30, 2023 Scott Scheffer
Urban farmers harvest carrots in Havana. Making cities more self-sufficient in food production has cut down on dangerous emissions.
COP28, the next annual international conference where countries plan and set goals to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), will take place in Dubai from Nov. 30 through Dec. 12. Increasingly, the conferences have come under the control of major capitalist powers – particularly the U.S.
Global South countries have barely contributed to the warming of the atmosphere, but are most vulnerable. COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, was something of a battleground between the representatives from Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the imperialist powers of Europe, Japan and especially the United States.
The details of what transpires in Dubai will be analyzed in the weeks that follow, but this is a great time for serious climate change activists to take a good look at the stellar performance of socialist Cuba in the struggle to save the planet.
It is an absolute crime that the mainstream media has ignored what can be accomplished in the global effort to mitigate the crisis of global warming without the influence of giant energy corporations and banks.
Cuba’s planned economy has enabled the island – even as the U.S. blockade hinders its ability to trade – to keep sustainability as a major priority for years. This is based on Fidel Castro’s keen understanding of the harm of capitalist industry’s emissions and the vulnerability of the underdeveloped countries of the world – the Global South. But the revolutionary leader and thinker was aware of the conundrum facing the former colonies in dealing with the destruction of the environment.
In a speech at the 1992 Earth Summit, the Cuban president said: “They have poisoned the seas and rivers, polluted the air, weakened and punctured the ozone layer, saturated the atmosphere with gases which are changing weather conditions with a catastrophic effect we are already beginning to experience.
“The forests are disappearing. The deserts are expanding. Every year billions of tons of fertile soil end up in the sea. Numerous species are becoming extinct.
“It is not possible to blame the Third World countries for this. Yesterday, they were colonies; today, they are nations exploited and pillaged by an unjust international economic order. The solution cannot be to prevent the development of those who need it most.”
The Global South needs energy. Because of the poverty from imperialist plunder, much of the world relies on burning wood for heat and for cooking, and access to fossil fuel would be a step in the right direction for development. But even with very limited access to fossil fuel due to the blockade, Cuba has lowered its emissions and at the same time provided electricity to millions more Cubans.
Workers’ government
An Aug. 24 article in the pro-capitalist Forbes magazine confirms this: “Projects from the University of Leeds, the World Wildlife Fund, the Global Footprint Network, and the Sustainable Development Index show that Cuba is among the leaders in closing the gap between human development and sustainability.”
Renewable forms of energy still only account for 4.5% of Cuba’s power generation. This amazing achievement happened because there aren’t giant energy corporations influencing the workers’ government of Cuba.
In 2006 the Cuban government replaced every incandescent light bulb in the country with more efficient fluorescent bulbs. It subsidized modern, more efficient appliances, including 2 million refrigerators, more than 1 million fans, nearly 200,000 air conditioners and a quarter million water pumps. A campaign to replace old water heaters with new models that are run with solar energy is underway now.
During this period, electricity use increased by 142%, but emissions dropped by 14%. The efficiency that accomplished this wouldn’t have been possible outside of a workers’ run government.
Cuba’s transition to urban farming, greatly reducing the need for transportation of food, is even successful in the capital city. The Forbes article quotes economist Sinan Koont, who said, “More than 35,000 hectares of land are being used in urban agriculture in Havana.” Cuba’s urban farming has become a model for small farmers throughout the Global South.
Cuba is also a world leader in reforestation. At the time of the revolution, only about 14% of the island was forested. That figure is now up to 30.6%.
Internationalism
Given that Global South countries contribute only a tiny fraction of the world’s GHG emissions, and their weakened ability to recover from climate catastrophes, the concern for countries saddled with the debt traps of imperialism has rightfully been adaptation – protecting their own populations and recovering from weather related catastrophes.
Mitigation of the global crisis is the responsibility of the biggest polluters. Yet Cuba’s internationalist outlook has led this commendable effort to contribute to the effort to save the planet over and above what should be its responsibilities.
Cuban socialism has guided the struggle to adapt to the island’s vulnerability to extreme weather and even to mitigate CO2 emissions. These earnest efforts and concern for all humanity puts the U.S. – the world’s per capita worst emitter of GHGs — to shame.
Imagine what could be done if Cuba were free of the blockade. It is that example that the imperialist countries fear from Cuba.
Breaking the blockade won’t happen without the intervention of the people’s movement throughout the world. That is far from out of the question. At the United Nations General Assembly, 187 countries voted to end the blockade. Only two, the U.S. and its client apartheid state of Israel, voted to keep the Trump/Biden warfare against Cuba in place.
More than 100 entities, including city councils in NYC, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit and others, and scores of union locals and labor councils, have passed resolutions calling on Joe Biden to take Cuba off the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism and end the blockade.
The United Nations has no power of enforcement. Only a powerful people’s movement can and will make it happen.
Chinese modernisation is the modernisation of harmony between humanity and nature
In the following article, which was originally published in the English language July/August 2023 edition of Qiushi, the theoretical journal of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Wang Guanghua, the Minister and Secretary of the CPC Leadership Group of China’s Ministry of Natural Resources, introduces the thesis put forward at the CPC’s 20th National Congress regarding “the need to advance the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts via a Chinese path to modernisation and pointing out that Chinese modernisation is the modernisation of harmony between humanity and nature.”
Noting that “Marxism states that ‘man lives on nature’ and humanity lives, produces, and develops by continuously interacting with nature,” Wang argues that: “President Xi’s innovation explains the interdependence between humans and the natural world, as well as their mutually reinforcing dialectical unity, and it is a succinct expression of contemporary Marxism in China as well as 21st century Marxism in the area of ecological conservation. The ecological wisdom embodied in China’s traditional culture constitutes the national soil and cultural roots of the theory of harmony between humanity and nature in Chinese modernisation.” Xi Jinping, he continues, has “integrated the essence of Marxist thought with the best of China’s traditional culture and with the common values that our people intuitively apply in their everyday lives, thus infusing modernisation theory with distinctive Chinese features.”
The CPC has led the Chinese people in exploring how to achieve the country’s modernisation since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. This has included, “theoretical and practical investigations of how to approach the relationship between humanity and nature. Mao Zedong pointed out that the CPC’s task is to focus on building modernised industry, agriculture, science and culture, and national defence. He also called for conservation of mountains and rivers as well as afforestation.”
After detailing a number of the practical steps that China has taken, Wang continues:
“China has an enormous population that exceeds the total population of the world’s developed countries. Nevertheless, our per capita resources and factors of production are below the global average levels, and we have limited and unevenly distributed land suitable for living and working as well as a lack of focus on ecological protection and restoration in the past. We also face new challenges, such as global climate change and frequent extreme weather events. Our population has peaked, and we are experiencing population aging, declining fertility, and varying regional trends of population growth and decline, all of which are having a profound impact on our management of territorial space. We must improve our awareness of the issues we face and approach problems, make decisions, and act based on our national conditions. We must fully consider resource and environmental carrying capacities and endowments and keep developing new thinking, new approaches, and new ways to effectively resolve problems.”
And he draws a clear line of demarcation with the modernisation paradigm followed under capitalism:
“In the modern era, the modernisation of Western countries has largely been at the expense of resources and the environment. In addition to creating substantial material wealth, it has led to issues including environmental pollution and resource depletion, which have created tension between humans and the natural environment and seen nature take merciless revenge at times. To promote modernisation of harmony between humanity and nature, we must strive to avoid the environmental issues that have arisen in the course of Western capitalist modernisation and renounce the old approach of ‘pollute first, clean up later.’ We must stay committed to green, low-carbon development and adhere to the basic requirement of pursuing protection amidst development and development amidst protection. We must also allocate resources equitably and rationally within and between generations, so that the present generation and those to come can enjoy abundant material wealth while also being able to enjoy stars in the night sky, lush mountains, and fresh flowers.”
“The fundamental objective of the modernisation of the harmony between humanity and nature,” the Minister insists, “is to serve and benefit the people.”
The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) held in October 2022 expounded the theory of Chinese modernization, emphasizing the need to advance the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts via a Chinese path to modernization and pointing out that Chinese modernization is the modernization of harmony between humanity and nature. The congress also stressed the need to uphold and act on the principle that lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets and to maintain harmony between humanity and nature when planning development. This represents an important innovation in modernization theory, the latest theoretical innovation of Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Conservation, and a practical requirement for advancing ecological conservation.
I. The logic of the modernization of harmony between humanity and nature
Since its 18th National Congress, the CPC has built on existing foundations to make innovative breakthroughs in theory and practice that have successfully advanced and expanded Chinese modernization.
From a theoretical perspective, the theory of harmony between humanity and nature in Chinese modernization is the crystallization of the wisdom of Marxism adapted to the Chinese context and the needs of our times
The cornerstone of this theory is Marxist thought on the relationship between humanity and nature. Marxism states that “man lives on nature” and humanity lives, produces, and develops by continuously interacting with nature. Chinese President Xi Jinping inherited and developed this Marxist thought, which he has combined with the specific realities of ecological conservation in China to propose the modernization of harmony between humanity and nature. President Xi’s innovation explains the interdependence between humans and the natural world, as well as their mutually reinforcing dialectical unity, and it is a succinct expression of contemporary Marxism in China as well as 21st century Marxism in the area of ecological conservation. The ecological wisdom embodied in China’s traditional culture constitutes the national soil and cultural roots of the theory of harmony between humanity and nature in Chinese modernization. Always respecting and loving nature, the Chinese people have cultivated rich ecological elements in the culture during more than 5,000 years of Chinese civilization. President Xi has developed philosophical concepts from traditional Chinese culture, such as the unity of humanity and nature and “The Dao follows what is natural,” and integrated the essence of Marxist thought with the best of China’s traditional culture and with the common values that our people intuitively apply in their everyday lives, thus infusing modernization theory with distinctive Chinese features and adding original contemporary elements to traditional Chinese culture.
From a historical perspective, the theory of harmony between humanity and nature in Chinese modernization is the distillation of the CPC’s experiences of modernization
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the CPC has led the people in arduous explorations to achieve the modernization of China, including theoretical and practical investigations of how to approach the relationship between humanity and nature. Mao Zedong pointed out that the CPC’s task is to focus on building modernized industry, agriculture, science and culture, and national defense. He also called for conservation of mountains and rivers as well as afforestation. In the new period of reform and opening up and socialist modernization, the CPC noted the multifaceted nature of modernization and the need for an overall balance between various initiatives, with the emphasis on finding a path that strikes a balance between nature and human development and developing a resource-conserving, environmentally friendly society. The CPC has accumulated valuable experience from the theories it composed in various historical periods to manage the relationship between humanity and nature in the course of modernization. In the new era that began in 2012, the CPC Central Committee with Xi Jinping at its core has adopted the overall approach of achieving the sustainable development of the Chinese nation. It has fully grasped the key role and strategic significance of ecological conservation to socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era, strived to promote theoretical, practical, and institutional innovations related to ecological conservation, and introduced a series of creative new ideas, new thinking, and new strategies. All of this has culminated in the formation of Xi Jinping thought on ecological conservation, which has opened up a new realm of development in the topic.
From a practical perspective, the theory of harmony between humanity and nature in Chinese modernization is a vivid illustration of the great practice and achievements of ecological conservation in the new era
Since the 18th CPC National Congress, the Central Committee and the State Council have formulated and implemented the functional zoning strategy and issued and implemented the Integrated Reform Plan for Promoting Ecological Conservation. Major progress has been made with the development of a property rights system concerning natural resources, a system for the development and protection of territorial space, integrated plans for China’s territorial space, a system for the regulation and comprehensive conservation of resources, systems for the paid use of natural resources and for the provision of environmental compensation, an environmental governance system, a market system for ecological conservation, and a performance evaluation and accountability system pertaining to ecological progress. The legal system for ecological conservation has been improved. Effective steps have been taken to develop and protect China’s territorial space and coordinate the tasks of drawing redlines to protect ecosystems, agricultural land, and permanent basic cropland and of delineating urban development boundaries.
Further efforts have been made toward a national park-based nature reserve system, including integrating and establishing nearly 9,200 nature reserves and setting up the first batch of five national parks. The systematic management of mountains, waters, forests, farmlands, grasslands, and deserts has been promoted, and 44 projects have been implemented that take a holistic approach to conserving and improving such ecosystems, resulting in the restoration and improvement of 53,700 km2 of land. Expansive land greening programs have continued, leading to an increase in China’s forest coverage from 21.63% in 2012 to 24.02% in 2021, which was the largest increase in forest resources of any country in the world in that period. A comprehensive conservation strategy has been implemented, which led to falls in energy consumption per unit of GDP, water consumption, land consumption (area of land allotted to construction), and carbon dioxide emissions by 26.4%, 45%, 40.85%, and 34.4%, respectively, between 2012 and 2021.
Efforts have been made to achieve victory in the battle to prevent and control pollution, resulting in sustained improvements to the quality of our atmosphere, water, and soil. The central authorities have launched government environmental inspections and natural resource inspections and resolutely investigated and addressed severe and typical cases of damage to the natural environment, solving a raft of issues of deep concern to the people.
China remains actively involved in global governance of natural ecosystems, including proactively yet prudently promoting peak carbon and carbon neutrality objectives and hosting conferences of the parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Convention on Wetlands. China’s Saihanba afforestation community in Hebei Province and the Green Rural Revival Program in Zhejiang Province both won the UN Champions of the Earth Award. China’s Shan-Shui Initiative (for the integrated conservation and restoration of mountain, water, forest, farmland, grassland, and desert ecosystems) was selected as one of the UN’s first batch of 10 World Restoration Flagships. As President Xi says, if humanity does not fail nature, nature shall never fail humanity. A healthy natural environment has infinite economic value, as it provides endless returns and enables sustainable socioeconomic development. China is in the stage of high-quality development, and we have one of the highest economic growth rates among the major economies. This is ample proof of the feasibility and stability of the modernization path of harmony between humanity and nature, which is the correct path to build China’s strength and achieve national rejuvenation.
II. The main requirements for the modernization of harmony between humanity and nature
Since the 18th CPC National Congress, the CPC Central Committee led by Xi Jinping has, from an entirely new perspective, deepened its understanding of the principles that underlie governance by a communist party, the development of socialism, and the evolution of human society, achieving major theoretical breakthroughs. Modernization featuring harmony between humanity and nature, which has been incorporated into the theoretical system of Chinese modernization, is an essential element of the Chinese path to modernization and the new form of human advancement.
Chinese modernization of harmony between humanity and nature is modernization that promotes ecological conservation under the CPC’s overall leadership
Since the start of the new era in 2012, the CPC has prioritized ecological conservation in its overall work and achieved remarkable results that have attracted worldwide attention. On the new journey, we must uphold the CPC’s leadership, ensure that Chinese modernization secures enduring harmony between humanity and nature, patiently advance the course of history, maintain a firm strategic resolve, and ensure successive progress from generation to generation. We must uphold the strictest possible systems and most rigorous legal framework to ensure that decisions and arrangements of the CPC Central Committee establish firm roots and generate actual results. We must constantly reform institutions and mechanisms related to ecological conservation to eliminate weaknesses and provide an endless source of vitality to the modernization of harmony between humanity and nature, thereby creating broad prospects for advancing the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
Chinese modernization of harmony between humanity and nature is modernization that responds to the tight constraints posed by resources and the environment
China has an enormous population that exceeds the total population of the world’s developed countries. Nevertheless, our per capita resources and factors of production are below the global average levels, and we have limited and unevenly distributed land suitable for living and working as well as a lack of focus on ecological protection and restoration in the past. We also face new challenges, such as global climate change and frequent extreme weather events. Our population has peaked, and we are experiencing population aging, declining fertility, and varying regional trends of population growth and decline, all of which are having a profound impact on our management of territorial space. We must improve our awareness of the issues we face and approach problems, make decisions, and act based on our national conditions. We must fully consider resource and environmental carrying capacities and endowments and keep developing new thinking, new approaches, and new ways to effectively resolve problems.
Chinese modernization of harmony between humanity and nature is modernization featuring green, low-carbon, and sustainable development
In the modern era, the modernization of Western countries has largely been at the expense of resources and the environment. In addition to creating substantial material wealth, it has led to issues including environmental pollution and resource depletion, which have created tension between humans and the natural environment and seen nature take merciless revenge at times. To promote modernization of harmony between humanity and nature, we must strive to avoid the environmental issues that have arisen in the course of Western capitalist modernization and renounce the old approach of “pollute first, clean up later.” We must stay committed to green, low-carbon development and adhere to the basic requirement of pursuing protection amidst development and development amidst protection. We must also allocate resources equitably and rationally within and between generations, so that the present generation and those to come can enjoy abundant material wealth while also being able to enjoy stars in the night sky, lush mountains, and fresh flowers.
Chinese modernization of harmony between humanity and nature is modernization featuring collaboration between people to achieve and share the benefits of environmental wellbeing
Similar to economic development, protecting the environment is about improving people’s wellbeing. The fundamental objective of the modernization of the harmony between humanity and nature is to serve and benefit the people. In addition to creating greater material and cultural wealth to meet people’s ever-growing requirements for a better life, it also provides more quality ecological goods to meet people’s growing demands for a beautiful environment. We need to strive to achieve simultaneous growth in our material and ecological wealth by promoting the transformation of ecological strengths into development strengths and the transformation of ecological wealth into material wealth. We must make ecological conservation a conscious choice of the people so that everyone becomes a protector, contributor, and beneficiary of the environment.
Chinese modernization of harmony between humanity and nature is modernization featuring harmony between the production, living, and ecological spheres
Land is a scarce and singular resource that is involved in production, living, and ecological activities, making it essential that we manage multiple objectives and strike a balance between development and protection and between current and future interests. We must apply systems thinking and pursue a model of sound development featuring improved production, higher living standards, and healthy ecosystems. We need to devise an overarching plan for the development and protection of our territorial space, methodically arrange production, living, and ecological spaces, and strive to make our production spaces intensive and efficient, our living spaces friendly and reasonable, and our ecological spaces beautiful and unpolluted. We need to strengthen basic requirements, safeguard natural ecological boundaries and baselines, and ensure economic and other human activities respect resource and environmental carrying capacities, and factor in the requisite time and space for nature to recuperate.
Chinese modernization of harmony between humanity and nature is modernization featuring participation in global conservation
Protecting nature and ensuring resource security are global challenges. In pursuing modernization of harmony between humanity and nature, we must expand our global vision, draw inspiration from all the outstanding achievements of human civilization, contribute fully to global ecological governance, and respond to the general concerns of people of all countries. We must also pursue our own development while contributing to global governance and use it to encourage and lead the formation of an equitable, reasonable, cooperative, and mutually beneficial system of global governance, offering Chinese solutions and wisdom to building a global community of shared future for all life on Earth. These efforts can lead to an even better world.
III. Practical steps toward the modernization of harmony between humanity and nature
The next five years will be crucial for getting our efforts to build a modern socialist country off to a good start as well as for promoting green development and harmony between humanity and nature. The Ministry of Natural Resources shall adhere to the objectives of safeguarding resource security, optimizing the layout of territorial space, promoting green and low-carbon development, and protecting rights and interests related to natural resource assets. We shall remain committed to sustainable development and to the principles of prioritizing resource conservation and environmental protection and letting nature restore itself, as well as devote ourselves to the practical steps required to achieve the modernization of harmony between humanity and nature.
Optimizing the layout of China’s territorial space
Promoting the formation of a spatial development pattern that has effective restrictions based on functional zoning and that systematically protects territorial space is a strategic measure with a bearing on the wider picture of ecological conservation. We will enhance the system of functional zoning and supporting policies to enable regions to leverage their comparative advantages. We will implement the “two counterbalances and one freeze” (counterbalancing arable land used for non-agricultural purposes, counterbalancing arable land converted for other agricultural purposes, and freezing the release of equivalent arable land reserved for quota adjustments against illegal appropriation of arable land for non-agricultural purposes), maintain current levels of high-quality arable land in the north of the country and increase levels in the south, and encourage rural households who farm arable land in the mountains to move their operations to non-mountainous areas, so that the spatial layout of agriculture in China better conforms to our natural geographic conditions and the principles of agricultural production. We will strengthen management of ecological conservation redlines by strictly controlling human activities and conduct geological surveys and mining of strategic mineral resources within ecological conservation redline areas in accordance with the law, so as to strike a better balance between ecological protection and our energy and resource security. We will promote coordinated terrestrial and marine development, economically and intensively use neritic and offshore areas, and develop deepwater spaces and resources. We will adapt to changes to our total population as well as population structure and mobility trends and guide the efficient and intensive development of urbanized areas. We will strictly manage urban development boundaries, create urban and rural spaces that are beautiful, livable, green, safe, and resilient, and make rural areas comfortable places for people to live and work. We will also work to protect nature, our historical and cultural heritage, and scenic spots and sights so as to better showcase the unique beauty of China’s landscapes.
Ensuring efficient use of resources
A comprehensive conservation strategy is essential to overcome resource bottlenecks and protect the environment. We must promote overall management as well as methodical allocations, comprehensive conservation, and circular use of resources to continuously raise the efficiency of utilizing resources, including land, minerals, oceans, forests, and grasslands. We need to improve the system for regulating the use of territorial space, strengthen controls on the total area of construction land, and systematically manage the timings and areas of land designated for construction projects. We need to deploy both incentives and constraints and improve systems of standards to encourage a shift toward making the best use of available urban land for development purposes, toward the integrated development of spaces above and below ground, and toward better use of funds and technology in developing land for infrastructure. We will promote environmentally friendly methods of mineral resource exploration to quickly increase reserves and production and promote the exploitation and utilization of associated minerals. We must increase market-based transfers of marine resources and support the establishment of an exit mechanism for inefficient use of marine resources. We must also promote the sustainable management of forests, implement the system for balancing preservation of grasslands and use for grazing, and increase development of cultivated pastures.
Increasing the diversity, stability, and sustainability of ecosystems
Ecosystems are organic communities of living organisms. We must promote the holistic and systematic conservation and improvement of mountains, waters, forests, farmlands, grasslands, and deserts. We need to accelerate the development of the national park-based nature reserve system and complete the integration and optimization of nature reserves across the country. We need to ensure that the first batch of national parks are of a high quality and move quickly to establish the new batch of national parks, including the Yellow River Estuary, Qinling Mountains, Ruoergai (Zoigê) Wetland, Qiangtang (Byang Thang), and Asian Elephant national parks. We will continue to implement the national plan for undertaking major projects to protect and restore important ecosystems and, with the focus on key ecological function zones, ecological conservation redlines, and nature reserves and with guidance from China’s Shan-Shui Initiative, we will coordinate projects involving the ecological restoration of abandoned mining areas, and projects for the protection and improvement of marine ecosystems, along with other important national ecological projects, to create durable shields for our national ecological security. We will carry out major biodiversity protection programs and intensify efforts to prevent the spread of invasive species. We shall respect the principle of territorial differentiation and methodically launch large-scale land greening programs. We will also promote the natural regeneration of grasslands, forests, rivers, lakes, and wetlands.
Steadily achieving peak carbon and carbon neutrality
Ecological conservation in China has reached a critical juncture, in which reducing carbon emissions is a major strategy, with efforts being made to reduce both pollutants and emissions, encourage the green transformation of every aspect of economic and social development, and reach the tipping point from quantitative to qualitative environmental improvements.
Based on the premise of safeguarding our national energy security, we will advance initiatives to reach peak carbon emissions in a well-planned and phased manner. We will take a proactive approach to planning and developing a new type of energy system that prioritizes the development and utilization of local wind and solar energy resources, encourages the construction of large-scale wind and photovoltaic power bases, mainly in desert areas, the Gobi, and other arid areas, promotes large-scale, commercial use of ocean energy, and strengthens exploitation and development of geothermal resources. We will continue to increase the carbon absorption capacity of our ecosystems, focusing on coordination of the restoration and improvement of carbon sinks. We will develop green finance and encourage the inclusion of carbon trading in the national emissions trading scheme. We will also promote technological research, demonstrations, and industrial applications of largescale carbon capture, utilization, and storage.
Promoting global sustainable development
In the face of environmental challenges, humanity shares a common future, in which prosperity or suffering of one affects all. We need to increase the international community’s understanding of Xi Jinping thought on ecological conservation, with the focus on communicating to the world China’s conservation story. Based on our blue partnerships with the EU and other countries and regions, we must expand our network of ecological conservation partners to shape a new system of global ecological governance. We need to fully implement international conventions in the areas of natural resources and ecology, participate in international negotiations and consultations such as on the agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction, and voluntarily undertake international obligations that are commensurate with our national conditions, stage of development, and capabilities. We will promote the joint development of nature reserves and ecological corridors that transcend borders and drainage basins. In the area of ecological conservation, we will train outstanding personnel, participate extensively in the formulation and implementation of international standards and regulations, and strengthen platforms for international cooperation.
Furthering reform of systems and mechanisms of ecological conservation
Reform is an ongoing process. On the new journey, we must focus on significant issues and overcome difficulties in major reform tasks. We need to improve the management system for natural resource assets and implement all aspects of the entrusted agent mechanism for proprietary rights of publicly owned natural resource assets. We will improve the system for market-based allocations of resources and environmental factors and improve the system of paid use for natural resources. We will consolidate the framework of integrated plans for the country’s territorial space and enhance mechanisms for the coordination of national territorial planning, national medium- and long-term development planning, and key dedicated planning. We will also adopt a holistic design to manage spatial requirements and conflicts. We will establish a sound unified system for regulating the use of China’s territorial space that covers all regions and all types of land use. We will further reform of the collective forest rights system and improve the diversified investment mechanism for ecological protection and restoration. We will quickly move ahead with key legislative work, such as laws on territorial space development and protection, territorial space planning, mineral resources, farmland protection, and national parks. We will boost national natural resource inspections and adopt strict measures to uphold redlines in ecological conservation and farmland protection. Based on the integrated territorial space planning underpinned by basic territorial space information platforms, we will develop a digital governance system for building a Beautiful China.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Ecological uprising evicts transnational mining company
December 10, 2023
Panamanian socialist describes “the biggest mobilizations we have ever seen in this country”
A million people took to the streets on November 22, protesting plans to expand the Cobre Panamá mine.
by Federico Fuentes, Antonio Neto & José Cambra
Green Left, December 5, 2023
Panama’s Supreme Court has ruled that the contract signed between the state and Minera Panamá to operate the Cobre Panamá mine is unconstitutional, following weeks of mass sustained protests demanding its closure.
Minera Panamá — a subsidiary of transnational First Quantum Minerals (FQM) — had been exploiting the huge open-pit copper and gold mine in the ecologically sensitive Mesoamerican Biological Corridor for the past 20 years. But under a new contract approved by Congress in October, Minera Panamá was set to extend its operations there for another 20 years, with further powers to expropriate nearby lands outside its existing concession and divert entire rivers for private use.
To find out more about the mass environmental uprising that evicted a mining transnational, Green Left’s Federico Fuentes and Revista Movimento’s Antonio Neto spoke to José Cambra, a socialist activist and Association of Professors of Panama (ASOPROF) member.
Can you explain the trigger for these protests?
The Panamanian constitution prohibits the administration of Panama’s natural resources by foreign states. FQM is owned by capital from Canada, United States, South Korea and China. It is not just a private foreign company, it is also in part owned by capital from these foreign states.
Despite this, the company had been exploiting copper and other minerals at the mine without paying tax between 2017 and 2023. According to FQMs financial reports, the Cobre Panama mine accounted for 48% of FQM’s global profits.
The issue came to a head in August, when the government presented a new contract to the Assembly of Deputies. Trade unions, lawyers and environmentalists responded by saying the contract had the same flaw as previous ones, and that the Supreme Court should declare the government in contempt because the contract was unconstitutional.
Instead, Congress approved the contract on October 21 after only three days of discussion. This provoked a social explosion in a country already fed up with the unaffordable price of medicines, the lack of social security and the very high cost of living.
Panama had experienced mobilizations last year that forced the government into an agreement on some of these issues. But the government failed to fulfil them. So, the people took to the streets again.
Could you tell us a bit more about last year’s mobilizations?
The intensity of these most recent protests can largely be explained by the non-fulfilment of last year’s agreement. In 2022, we saw the biggest mobilizations this country had seen up to that point. All over the country, there were demonstrations, marches and confrontations with the police demanding a reduction in the cost of medicines and food.
All this resulted in public negotiations between the government and the organizations that led the struggle. We demanded the negotiations be broadcast on TV, which was spectacular. By the end, the business chamber was asking the president to shut down the broadcast because the whole country was listening to the debate, in which the oligarchy was being publicly denounced.
A very large part of the population followed the negotiations, something that is rarely seen. All of a sudden, people in the streets were saying to us: “Hey, I agree with what you were talking about yesterday, I agree it should be like that.”
Mobilizations took place every day for a month. Though they were not as big as the recent ones, there were large marches in Panama City — Panama’s biggest city — mainly led by the teachers union, ASOPROF, and the construction workers’ union, SUNTRACS.
ASOPROF and SUNTRACS have also played an important role in the latest struggles. Can you explain why?
Yes, that is right. We started building an alliance together of popular organizations at the beginning of last year. Unfortunately, we did not manage to draw everyone into this alliance, but we did manage to involve many other organizations.
This alliance is called People United for Life Alliance (APUV). It involves SUNTRACS, ASOPROF, community movements, youth movements. It is a very strong alliance, but it is not the only alliance. There is also the National Alliance for the Rights of the Organized People (ANADEPO) and the National Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples in Panama (COONAPIP).
It is important to note that First Nations peoples played a very important role in these recent protests, particularly the Ngäbe who throughout blockaded the Inter-American Highway heading towards Costa Rica, successfully shutting down one of Panama’s most important highways.
In terms of my union, ASOPROF, we held teachers’ assemblies in each region after the October 21 vote, at which members voted to go on a 48-hour strike. This strike was then extended for another 48 hours and on October 30 we declared an indefinite strike.
By November 3, it was clear that protests had gone to a new level. There were road blockades all over the country, far beyond what we saw in 2022. People we had never come across at protests, but who were fed up with the current situation, came out to blockade streets in their neighborhoods.
There were also spontaneous calls on social media for marches along the Coastal Beltway in Panama City, which at one point mobilized a quarter of a million people against mining. There were also important protests by communities living in the areas surrounding the mine. When consulted by Congress deputies, they said they were totally against the project.
So much so that fisherfolk began sabotaging the mine by preventing boats from leaving the mine with ore or entering with supplies of coal required to produce electricity for the mine. They essentially forced the mine to shut down. In some cases, this meant having to confront the Panamanian Naval Force with Molotov cocktails. For this, the population considers them heroes.
On land, local communities and truck drivers blockaded roads going to the mines, successfully sabotaging its operation. All this was an incredible expression of strength.
Of course, behind this eruption of protests was discontent over water shortages, electricity blackouts, the lack of jobs for youths, and the corruption and privileges of the pro-bosses politicians. This created an effective breeding ground for the biggest mobilizations we have ever seen in this country, with an estimated 1 million people on the streets across the whole country on November 22.
What we saw was a truly self-managed movement, where different sections, for example the fisherfolk, made decisions based on their local knowledge and carried them out with the support of the rest of the movement. We saw youth organizing direct actions and organizing self-defense guards.
There was a rupture between civil society and political society. The level of political disaffection was so high that it would not be unfair to characterize it as a pre-revolutionary situation. There was no power vacuum nor were permanent bodies of dual power created. But the mobilizations were so strong that they acted as an independent power.
As a result of all this, the Supreme Court ruled the mine contract as unconstitutional on November 28. The protests also forced the minister of commerce, who signed the contract, to resign, and the approval in early November of a mining moratorium law halting any further concessions from being granted.
Where next for the struggle?
While the struggle was for the mine’s closure, we recognize that there are still about 5000 workers employed at the mine. Our proposal is that those same workers preside over the gradual closure of the mine. We understand the mine cannot be shut down straight away, that what is required are measures for a safe and ecological reconversion of the site. We believe the workers should stay on for that process.
We have also proposed that a commission involving workers’ and popular organizations, as well environmentalists with technical expertise, be formed to preside over this process. We are not in favor of nationalizing the mine, as this would mean the state paying for the reconversion process.
Instead the mining company, which was responsible for having contaminated the environment and which took so much profit out of the country, should bear the costs. Our slogan is: “Make the polluters pay."
Few peoples of non-socialist striving countries are as resentful of US/corporate imperialism as Panamanians, they have been schooled.
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Concerns aired over illegal wildlife trade
By XU WEIWEI in Dubai, UAE | China Daily | Updated: 2023-12-11 07:37
This undated handout picture released by SERFOR shows a chameleon Jackson (Trioceros jacksonii), a species protected internationally by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), after being seized from a passanger at the Lima International airport in Lima. [Photo/Agencies]
The astonishing scale, nature and consequences of illegal wildlife trade across the globe mean that it should be put on the agenda of the climate club, as well as biodiversity, heard a panel at COP28 on Saturday.
The panel, titled "Wildlife Crime, Biodiversity and Climate Change", was held at the Climate Finance Stage at the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties in Dubai. The event was organized by Emirates NBD, one of the UAE's top banks.
Participants discussed challenges brought about by illegal wildlife trade, its connections to organized crime, the socioeconomic effects on local communities, and the implications for global sustainability.
"Here at COP28 and beautiful Dubai in the UAE, we've heard of some amazing commitments and pledges that have been made, but what is missing from this entire climate agenda is the nexus of wildlife crime, biodiversity and climate change," said Jennifer Croes, a conservation scientist and director for the United for Wildlife.
"Climate change and biodiversity loss have a detrimental impact on planetary health, but also on our own survival. It's crucial for us to understand, particularly today, how nature's decline and climate change are so inextricably linked," Croes said.
Wildlife crime is the second-biggest threat to species loss after environmental damage. It is the fourth-largest illicit trade after drugs, counterfeiting and human trafficking, valued at over $23 billion a year, making it one of the most lucrative trades usually run by criminal networks.
Species survival
According to experts on the panel, illegal wildlife trade has become a critical concern affecting not only the survival of numerous species but also the climate and biodiversity. It disrupts ecosystems, endangering the balance of our planet.
John Scanlon, the chairman of the Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime, said this illegal trade is both transnational and an organized crime, where multiple billions of profits are being made.
Nature-based solutions are highly important to achieving Paris Agreement goals, Scanlon said.
Victor Matafonov, the group chief compliance officer at Emirates NBD, a panelist, said banks have regulatory obligations to protect the financial system from being abused by criminals.
Victoria Bowden, a group sustainability senior manager at DP World, a leading provider of end-to-end supply chain solutions in the world, said it is expected that 72 to 90 percent of the illegal wildlife trade products are transported through the maritime sector, which is a big problem.
She also said that DP World has just launched a new partnership with the United for Wildlife and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to "really bring together key stakeholders", which include the financial sector, the transport sector and law enforcement, she said.
Bolivia is committed to non-commercialization in the face of climate change
Pacheco also indicated that there must be a greater effort for developed countries to comply with their climate commitments. | Photo: Vice Presidency of Bolivia
Published December 12, 2023 (8 hours 44 minutes ago)
The COP28 Climate Change Conference began on December 1 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
The Government of Bolivia referred to its commitment this Monday at the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) for mechanisms not based on commercialization and carbon markets as the main solution to confront the global climate crisis.
“Bolivia postulates the implementation of mechanisms not based on commercialization and carbon markets as the main solution to confront the global climate crisis, in addition to strengthening the vision of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities to confront this crisis,” said the general director of Living Well and Foreign Policy of the Vice Presidency of Bolivia, Diego Pacheco.
The Bolivian authority explained that in this version of COP28 “there is strong pressure from developed countries to eliminate the principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities, by which these countries have the obligation to take the lead in reducing emissions to fight the climate crisis, and also provide financial resources and technology transfer to developing countries.”
By pointing out that the results of COP28 will have to respond to the global solution to the climate crisis, Pacheco also indicated that there must be a greater effort for developed countries to comply with their commitments.
He stated that the southern countries claim that the promised provision of climate financing and the technology to face the problems of the crisis have not existed.
One of the central axes of COP28, which began on December 1 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and concludes this Tuesday, is related to an agreement of all countries on the first evaluation of the implementation of the Paris Agreement, which was approved in 2015.
Lights shine from Al Wasl Dome at Expo City at the Cop28 UN Climate Summit.
[img]Cop28: Elite politics won’t save the planet[/img]
Originally published: Morning Star Online on December 10, 2023 by Richard Hebbert (more by Morning Star Online) | (Posted Dec 12, 2023)
WATCHING the glitzy opening of the Cop28 meeting in Dubai, one could not help but be struck, whatever it may have looked like when the first Conference of the Parties took place in 1995, by how performative it has all become.
It is surely part of the performance that the current meeting is being held in a petro-state like the United Arab Emirates and that its chair is the CEO of that country’s state-owned oil company; a veneer of inclusivity to suggest that we are “all in this together”–while BBC reports suggest that the host country intends to use the conference to make oil and gas deals.
King Charles delivers one of the opening speeches, while the Prime Minister flies to Dubai fresh from having, in the pursuit of votes at the next general election, scaled back his government’s plans on reaching net zero. The self-congratulatory applause on the first day at last to put some figures on funding loss and damage reparations–a principle agreed a year ago on which nothing has happened since.
As the great and the good rub shoulders with each other and with the fossil fuel companies who have become an increasing presence at Cop meetings, it’s hard not to wonder who speaks for the “little people”–who speaks for us?
It’s an important question, because those who suffer most from environmental destruction and climate change are not the petro-states, the fossil fuel companies or the monarchs–those who have most, but, both between countries and within countries, it is those who have least who bear, disproportionately, the effects and the burden of unfolding climate disaster.
Climate change and social inequality cannot be separated. Globally, nationally and individually it is those in the in the richest parts of the world who historically have produced and currently contribute the highest levels of greenhouse gas emissions, but are cushioned from their effects, enabling them to continue with “business as usual” while meeting once a year to wring their hands and quietly sabotage any genuine attempt at meaningful action on climate change.
A report, the result of work by Oxfam, the Stockholm Institute together with the Guardian newspaper and published last month, showed that the richest 1 per cent of humanity accounts for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66 per cent.
A group of just 77 million people paid over £112,500 a year were responsible for 16 per cent of all CO2 emissions in 2019–enough to cause 1.3 million deaths from the effects of heat, using the U.S. Environment Protection Agency “mortality cost” of 226 excess deaths for every million tonnes of carbon.
The carbon footprint of the richest 0.1 per cent is 77 per cent higher than an upper level required to achieve the 1.5°C limit on post-industrial global warming agreed in the Paris Accord, with significant contributions from the use of super-yachts, private jets, mansions and space flights.
The super-rich have significant shareholdings in highly polluting companies and wield huge political power through media, social networks, lobbying and access to senior politicians–themselves, in many cases, members of the richest 1 per cent.
The report adds that suffering the effects of carbon emissions disproportionately affects people living in poverty, marginalised ethnic communities, migrants and women and girls where these groups are more likely to work outside or live in vulnerable homes and are less likely to have access to social protection or insurance from economic and physical risk.
Developing countries suffer 91 per cent of deaths related to extreme weather. It would take someone in the bottom 99 per cent about 1,500 years to produce as much carbon as the richest billionaires do in a year.
We can be unsurprised by some of this data; the Oxfam report perhaps confirms a picture of climate change with which we are not unfamiliar.
But while it may not be news that the global North pollutes at the expense of the global South, Climate Change and Social Inequality, a 2017 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs report by S Nazrul Islam and John Winkel, showed that climate change-driven social inequality exists not just at a global level, but also within countries.
Islam and Winkel found within countries a cycle where initial inequality causes disadvantaged groups to suffer disproportionately from climate change–which then results in greater inequality.
There are three channels through which inequality as the aggravating effect of climate change arises–increased exposure of disadvantaged groups to the effects of climate change, an increase in susceptibility to damage caused by climate change and a decrease in the ability to cope with and recover from the damage suffered.
The inequalities which follow are seen in how they affect by gender, race, ethnicity, religion and age–particularly those with least in terms of assets and income–and result in reduced access to education, healthcare, housing and finance.
They argue for the imposition of a cut-off on individual emissions to reduce inequality, but recognise that this would be difficult where those suffering most have the least access to public decision-making and political power.
Which brings us back to where we started. The lack of access to political power is (with perhaps the exception of Davos) nowhere more on display than at Cop meetings. This may seem counter-intuitive where the meeting is a UN-organised event and where occasionally we see representatives of indigenous peoples and communities speak.
Fossil fuel companies are a growing presence at Cop meetings, where as much business is done behind the scenes as on the floor. But where is the access to power for those who have lost the most and stand to lose much more in the future? If Cop meetings are to effect real, desperately needed change, their voices, above all others, must be heard.
A scientist’s warning on how climate change is rooted in violence
Originally published: Countercurrents on December 10, 2023 by Hasan Abdullah (more by Countercurrents) | (Posted Dec 12, 2023)
Basics of Climate Change
Natural ecosystems comprise a particular physical environment and a set of living organisms. The ecosystems keep evolving as different organisms act and interact. The energy of the universe is constant, but its entropy tends to a maximum. Useful energy that can perform work is out-of-equilibrium energy with low entropy. An excessive increase in entropy raises the temperature. Hence more free energy becomes available to drive the weather. That leads to frequent extreme weather events and climate change. So, watch out for avoidable entropy increase as every act, even simple breathing, produces heat and increases entropy. That means, the outcome of the act is crucial. And ‘social benefit v/s entropy increase’ criterion is an apt yardstick to judge desirability of an action, as entropy is the record keeper of all actions across space and time. Not only climate change, even phenomena such as COVID-19 is a consequence of disturbance to harmonious evolution of the ecosystems!
Major Follies
i) Metabolic Rift
Metabolic rift is Karl Marx’s key conception of ecological crisis tendencies under capitalism. It signifies the irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism. Humankind consumes the constituent elements of soil through food and clothing. Our urine and excrete contain elements useful for the soil. Capitalism creates village-town dichotomy, which stops these elements from returning to the soil. Thus, metabolic rift is a fundamental source of avoidable entropy increase, because of three reasons.
One, the artificial replenishment of soil involves expenditure of resources. Two, the resources are spent to dispose of our urine and excrete! And, third, the capitalist production robs long-lasting sources of that fertility, though it increases the fertility of the soil for a while. It undermines the original sources of the wealth — the soil and the worker. During England’s second agricultural revolution, soil fertility became an issue. Britain and other powers initiated policies for the importation of bone and guano.
ii) Furthering Arms’ Industry
At the end of WWII, the U.S. was the only nuclear power; and she was the only country that did not agree to halt further development of nuclear arms, thereby starting an arms’ race. To justify this, despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki presenting horrifying scenarios, she used othering of the USSR, a WWII ally, as the ideological prop. Whereas the U.S. imperialism needed a flourishing arms industry to promote wars to concentrate resources—through usurpation of other nations’ resources and waste of resources.
The production of weapons is a waste of natural resources and labour power. Besides, the military spends a humongous amount of resources. Also, the use of weapons destroys useful products. Thereafter, reconstruction consumes huge natural resources and labour power. Thus, war helps imperialism waste resources and snatch other nations’ resources. Moreover, arms’ imports are a major contributor to most nations’ debt. And because of the debt, these nations lose their independence to the imperialist U.S.
iii) Ignoring Environment
The ruling classes focus on production and consumption—not distribution, rejuvenation, and sustainability—as a peaceful egalitarian society is an anathema. Our actions’ adverse impact on the environment, the ultimate repository, is ignored. Else, for long, humankind has been privy to the concept of entropy. And excessive increase in entropy results in climate change.
For over three decades, the rulers have held the Conference of Parties to discuss climate change, every year. But the situation has kept worsening, as the scientists’ suggestions are ignored. Meanwhile, global military expenditure, violence, and inequality have continually increased! Despite being preventable, increase in the above negatives means that these are systemic!
The Violence
Under the ‘social good v/s entropy increase’ criterion, armed violence, especially war—the most horrendous source of increased entropy and climate change—fares worst, as it wastes labour power and natural resources in large quantity, and without any social good. Larger the scale of violence, more the entropy increase! Hence, we need to probe the violence-prone system that furthers arms industry and encourages wars.
In short, the ideology of othering creates exclusivity, which transforms to hatred and thereafter enmity—the fodder for violence. The internal othering helps the ruling classes divide the people and rule over them. It also leads to societal violence. The external othering prepares ground for war between nation states.
The education system kills innate curiosity and hinders the development of scientific attitude and is thus conducive for the philosophy of othering. Even this lopsided knowledge is not available to all. Thus, people become oblivious to the universality of humankind and species’ interdependence.
Truman’s March 1947 speech to Congress reflected imperialism’s philosophy of othering. It started the Cold War. It designated the USSR as the other and provided justification for violence globally. Thus, any country, under the influence of the USSR, was considered a threat to imperialism and a potential enemy to make a proxy war with.
In 1991, the USSR’s disintegration unnerved imperialism, as vanishing of the designated other inadvertently promoted peace and adversely impacted Defence-related industries. In 1993, Samuel Phillips Huntington came to imperialism’s rescue, when he proposed The Clash of Civilizations theory and filled the vacancy of the other with Muslim civilisation. Before losing steam, that served imperialism for over a quarter century.
NATO looks East, because imperialism cannot survive without hegemony and wars! But the U.S. realises that it can ill afford a direct confrontation with China. However, the U.S. successfully incited Russia to start war with Ukraine. That started in February 2022 and continues (as of December 8, 2023). Meanwhile, after the attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Israel (with the U.S. support) unleashed ethnic cleansing and has been committing war crimes daily. The point is that in the absence of such wars, resources cannot be wasted nor capital concentrated.
It is rightly said that war is the continuation of politics through other means! And, in normal times, the policies of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, WIPO, and NATO—influenced by the US—help U.S. imperialism usurp resources and egg on countries to purchase arms. Imperialism corrupts, co-opts, and coerces ruling classes of different countries to buy arms, create violence-prone environment, and wage wars. It punishes or overthrows the governments that refuse to fall in line.
The legislature, executive, judiciary, and media are supposedly a nation state’s pillars of democracy. But it is the Deep State and the secrecy that are crucial for a government. With the help of all these, the ruling classes indulge in internal violence and war.
Salvaging Future!
A global movement—based on the Philosophy of Coalescing—working for peace and debt cancellation appears to be our best bet to salvage future. The Philosophy of Coalescing that considers Nature as all-encompassing, interconnected and in continual motion—with peaceful and shared coexistence as its cornerstone—is antithesis of the Philosophy ofOthering, the ideological basis of violence.
The Movement’s agenda should be disarmament and cancellation of international debts because armaments lead to war and debts to inequality. Only after the Movement captures the levers of power, can the armaments and wars—the most abominable source of excessive entropy increase—be eliminated. With focus on Nature, we can also adopt other ways to minimise entropy increase. That will help improve the climate change scenario to the extent possible.
Big Meat and Dairy Delegates Triple at COP28
Posted on December 12, 2023 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Wars and funding fights have sucked the air supply out of other news stories, particularly the “ought to be pretty important” COP28. In general, the fraught geopolitical environment has put climate change efforts on the back burner.
Nevertheless, the progress, or lack thereof, at COP28 does reveal how priorities have been shifting. DeSmog deserves a round of applause for taking note of how Big Ag had finally gotten on the climate change agenda, to the degree that the incumbents are waging war to prevent change.
By Rachel Sherrington, Clare Carlile and Hazel Healy. Originally published at DeSmogBlog
Lobbyists from industrial agriculture companies and trade groups have turned out in record numbers at COP28, which this year has a strong focus on tackling emissions from the food sector.
Attendees are present from some of the world’s largest agribusiness firms – such as meatpacker JBS, fertiliser giant Nutrien, food giant Nestlé and pesticide firm Bayer – and powerful industry trade groups.
Meat and dairy interests are especially well represented with 120 delegates in Dubai, triple the number that attended COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
Overall the analysis of the delegates list by DeSmog shows that the total number of people representing the interests of agribusiness has more than doubled since 2022 to reach 340.
In addition, the analysis reveals that over 100 delegates have travelled to Dubai as part of country delegations, which grants privileged access to diplomatic negotiations. This number is up from just 10 in 2022.
The findings of the UN’s climate science body the IPCC show that the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement cannot be met without climate action on food.
Meat and dairy firms in particular are coming under increasing scrutiny due to pollution from livestock, which emits around a third of the global output of methane, a short-lived greenhouse gas identified as the quickest route to slowing global heating.
“With greater scrutiny over emissions from meat and dairy companies, it is not surprising they are stepping up their game to head off any COP outcome that might hinder their operations,” Ben Lilliston, from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy told DeSmog.
“Even so, a tripling of delegates is alarming – it drives home the urgent need for reforms that limit corporate influence at UN climate meetings.”
Meat isn’t the only industry under the spotlight. Farmers, retailers, and processors also drive greenhouse gas emissions by clearing trees, using fossil-fuel derived synthetic fertilisers and in packing transport, packaging and storage.
Karina Gonçalves David, a small-scale farmer representative from Brazil who has travelled to Dubai, is concerned by the presence of powerful and polluting firms. “If they are inside, they have an advantage,” she says. “This place is about solutions to face the climate crisis but the companies are appropriating it to do lobbying. They are going the opposite way.”
<Outsized Agribusiness Influence
DeSmog’s analysis found an uptick in attendance by companies across the industrial food and farming sector.
Industrial meat and dairy groups have brought 120 delegates to the talks – this far outstrips the 80-strong delegation of Barbados, a small island in the Caribbean that is highly vulnerable to climate impacts.
The world’s top five meat companies’ emissions are estimated to be significantly larger than those of oil giants Shell and BP while the dairy industry’s 3.4 percent contribution to global human-induced emissions is a higher share than aviation.
The world’s largest meat company JBS brought 11 delegates – including its chief executive Gilberto Tomazoni – up from four in 2022. The Brazilian meat giant, which is under pressure for its outsized climate and environmental impacts, was recently ordered to retract net zero claims by a U.S. ad body.
Outspoken meat lobby groups are also on the ground in Dubai. They include the North American Meat Institute, which as recently as 2022 claimed the extent of man-made climate change was “unknown”, and delegates attending under the umbrella of the Animal Agriculture Alliance, which has claimed meat is “villainized”, and its climate impacts exaggerated.
The world’s second largest dairy company and largest food processor Nestlé also hiked its delegates to 14 this year, up from just two in 2022 – including its chief executive Ulf Markus Schneider.
Pesticide firms also turned out in high numbers this year, jumping by 30 percent compared to 2022. Bayer, Syngenta, BASF and their trade association CropLife – which has pushed back against attempts to enact new climate measures – sent 29 delegates.
Bayer, which is the world’s second largest pesticides producer – brought 16 delegates – more than the East African country of Eritrea.
The synthetic fertiliser industry has also seen a steep rise in representatives. The analysis found 40 delegates are attending the UN talks in 2023, up from just 13 last year.
A spokesperson from Bayer said it had brought delegates from across all divisions of its business to help fight climate change. “We are represented in Dubai because two of the most important issues in combating climate change are its impact on the health and nutrition of a growing world population,” they said, adding that Bayer had set itself “ambitious sustainability targets and is well on its way to achieving them”.
A Nestlé spokesperson told DeSmog: “Our very small delegation at COP28 is focused on food systems. We are committed to scale up efforts to make food production and agriculture more sustainable and resilient”.
Karina Gonçalves David, an organic farmer from Brazil, at the UN climate talks in Dubai. Credit: DeSmog
Food Agendas
Delegates from agribusiness join over 84,000 participants at this year’s summit, which is being held in Dubai’s state of the art $8 billion Expo City over four square kilometres. Overall numbers of attendees have doubled since COP27 – and also include over 2,400 delegates linked to fossil fuel industries.
“Just as with the influx of oil lobbyists, industrial agriculture businesses are scared,” said Raj Patel, panel expert with sustainability think tank IPES-Food and professor at the University of Texas-Austin. “They’ve read the science and they know how much their business has driven the climate crisis.”
Big food and farming representatives are keen to steer conversations away from dietary change, which is under discussion at the summit. At Food, Water, and Agriculture Day on December 10, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation is set to release the first draft of its roadmap to achieving a 1.5 C-aligned global food system, which is expected to call on rich nations to cut meat consumption.
This follows the recommendation of the EAT-Lancet Commission, which suggests people consume no more than 15.7 kg per year – in 2020, the average person in the U.S. consumed 126 kg of meat, while Nigerians ate around 7 kg.
Last week, more than 130 countries also pledged to include food system emissions in their climate reduction plans.
Ahead of the summit, DeSmog and The Guardian reported that industrial meat and dairy companies and their affiliated lobbying groups were preparing a major campaign to convince policymakers that meat was good for the environment.
Smallholder farmers are worried they will be sidelined by the power of the agribusiness lobby. A recent report showed small-scale producers get just 0.3 percent of international public climate finance despite producing a third of the world’s food.
“Family farmers are already rolling out more diverse and nature-friendly practices which the UN’s IPCC says is needed,” said Esther Penunia, Secretary-General of the Asian Farmers’ Association for Sustainable Development, an alliance of organisations representing 13 million family farmers.
“Yet our concerns, and the solutions we are putting forward, are being drowned out. We struggle for our voices to be heard above the voices of those with more money and more power.”
Privileged Access to Negotiations
Most corporations, lobby groups, and NGOs that attend the COP climate summits have “observer” status.
But DeSmog’s analysis shows a surge in the number of industry representatives who are attending COP28 with their country governments, making companies and lobby groups party to diplomatic negotiations.
Participating as country delegates, Nusa Urbancic from the Changing Markets Foundation explains, means that industry may be perceived more as peers by policymakers who then “give greater credibility” to their positions.
In total, 102 industry representatives are in Dubai as part of country delegations, 30 percent of the sector’s total. In 2022, they made up less than six percent.
The highest numbers of agribusiness representatives were brought in by Brazil, with 36 delegates linked mostly to the meat industry. It brought in nine employees of JBS compared to just one last year (a further two JBS staffers came in with other groups). Brazil also brought 12 representatives of meat company Minerva.
Next in line was Russia, which handed out 15 passes to people affiliated with fertiliser companies and lobby groups, followed by Canada, which offered tickets to eight more delegates from fertiliser firms.
Nitrogen fertiliser, which is made from natural gas, is mostly used to grow cereal crops, which Russia and Canada export in high volumes. It also contributes roughly two percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions.
Dairy companies also found willing hosts in country governments. China handed out four passes to Yili Group and Mengniu Group, which are listed in the top 10 dairy companies in the world. France gave country badges to dairy giant Danone (and supermarket chain Carrefour) while Denmark brought in dairy firm Arla and New Zealand gave three seats to Fonterra.
As the host country, the UAE brought the largest delegation in the summit’s history. Its 4,400+ guests included several agribusiness executives including Juan Luciano, the chief executive of major commodity trader Archer Daniels Midlands, and Michael Gelchie of commodity firm Louis Dreyfus.
Other nations that brought in powerful agricultural representatives include: Kazakhstan, which brought fertiliser firm EuroChem; Singapore, which brought agribusiness giant Olam; Guinea, which brought Cargill; and Namibia, which brought two representatives of Coca Cola. Pesticide company Syngenta’s Foundation came with Ukraine.
“They are here because they knew it would be a food COP,” said Fabricio Muriana from Brazil’s Instituto Regenera, who is attending as an observer with the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. “It’s a cynical move because these people are not even beginning to scratch the surface of reducing harm, let alone addressing climate. We need stricter criteria on who is coming, and with what intentions.”
Glenn Hurowitz, the chief executive of Mighty Earth, told DeSmog: “There is no better expression of the meat industry’s regulatory capture of government than their ability to be included in official delegations.
“Governments should be representing their people and their environment. Not the private interests of the biggest polluters on the planet.”
Pushing for Voluntary Action and Innovation
Big food companies have announced a handful of voluntary initiatives at COP28. One is the UAE and U.S-led AIM for Climate partnership, which has been criticised for skewing heavily towards techno-fixes and commercial interests of large corporations.
Another is the multi-million “Regenerative Landscapes” initiative launched in Dubai on Tuesday, which includes 17 major corporations, including Olam, Unilever, Yara, and Nestlé. It pledges to apply nature-repairing farming techniques to an area three times the size of France, but appears to lack concrete and time-bound targets to phase out harmful environmental practices.
“The narratives and solutions that Big Ag is pushing will only maintain a disastrous status quo,” Greenpeace’s Sophie Nodzenski says, adding that allowing companies into policymaking circles inevitably favours voluntary initiatives over more robust measures. She warns policymakers to “see beyond the greenwashing when designing solutions to curb emissions from food systems”.
At the summit, six of the world’s largest dairy companies also committed to disclose their emissions, but fell short of setting targets to cut the sector’s methane pollution, which accounts for 10 percent of the global total. Campaigners point out that the dairy industry has plans to grow by over 70 percent in the next decade.
French dairy giant, Danone, is the only major company outside the oil and gas industry currently to have a methane reduction target.
A spokesperson from Nestlé said: “Nestlé’s own commitments include sourcing 50% of its key ingredients from regenerative agricultural practices by 2030 to halve emissions by 2030.”
A spokesperson from Danone said: “We believe that food companies have a key role to play to drive sustainable transformation of food systems, and that’s why we actively participated in the COP agenda, working with other companies and NGOs on initiatives to reduce emissions – especially methane emissions in dairy – and scale the adoption of solutions such as regenerative agriculture.”
Fertiliser company Yara told DeSmog it had reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent since 2005, adding: “There is a tremendous urgency to reduce emissions, and we believe that we are a part of the solution. We see regenerative agriculture as the best systematic approach to adopt sustainable farming practices that affects nature and climate in a positive way.”
The Bigger Picture
DeSmog’s findings were produced through an analysis of the COP28 delegate list, which includes over 81,000 entries.
The list was analysed for the largest corporations in major food sectors – meat and dairy, pesticide and fertiliser firms, food processors, commodity and seed traders, and grocery retail – which wield significant control in a highly concentrated food chain, and account for the majority of trade.
In addition, DeSmog also included global and regional industry trade groups, some of which brought their own delegations to Dubai, along with national farmer unions and institutes that have corporate affiliations and/or a history of lobbying aligned with industry demands.
But DeSmog’s analysis only gives a snapshot of the industrial agriculture sector’s influence.
Agriculture and trade ministers, which fell outside the scope of DeSmog’s analysis, have been fierce advocates for the interests of agribusiness at UN fora in recent years.
Government officials from Brazil and Argentina – both major producers of beef – pushed to water down scientific recommendations about reducing meat-eating in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The U.S. Secretary of State Tom Vilsack, a former dairy lobbyist, told industry groups ahead of COP28 that the U.S. would use COP to advocate for its market-based approach to agricultural policy, which shuns calls for regulation of industries like meat and dairy.
Ireland’s Minister of Agriculture, Charlie McConalogue, is in attendance at COP28 this year, along with several other departmental representatives. Documents uncovered by the Changing Markets Foundation suggest that the Irish government used discussions around methane at COP26 to push for the controversial GWP* metric, which has been criticised as a way for long-standing polluters to evade cutting methane.
“They are running way ahead of us,” reflects small farmer Gonçalves David. “But the agroecology movement in Brazil, and in the world, does a lot without much support. Not only in COP but in our territories. So if the focus was on us, we could make a big transformation happen. If we had the same opportunity, we could catch up.”
Methodology note available here. DeSmog dataset is available on request.
COP28 Concludes With Agreement for Energy Transition
Climate activists at the COP28, Dec, 11, 2023. | Photo: X/ @Greenpeace
Published 13 December 2023
The Colombian Environment Minister highlighted that the final agreement does not introduce changes to the international power structures that drive the current climate crisis.
On Wednesday, 198 countries approved the final declaration of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) through which it was agreed to advance an energy transition through the gradual abandonment of fossil fuels.
The COP28 text seeks to limit the increase in global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. To this end, deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions of 43 percent by 2030 and 60 percent by 2035 are requested, taking the emissions recorded in 2019 as a reference.
"It is a historic and unprecedented achievement," said COP28 President Emirati Sultan Al Yaber, who thanked the hard work of the delegations that negotiated the "Global Balance" text to reach consensus until the early hours of today.
For the first time in United Nations climate summits, the current text acknowledges the need for a transition away from fossil fuels and opens the door to transitional fuels and carbon capture and storage technologies.
"Many said this couldn't be done, but when I spoke to you at the beginning of this assembly, I promised a different summit, one that would bring everyone together: the private and public sectors, civil society, NGOs, religious leaders, youth, and Indigenous peoples. Everyone came together from day one," Al Yaber pointed out.
"The world has just made a historic decision at COP28 to initiate an irreversible and accelerated transition away from fossil fuels," said Wopke Hoekstra, the European Commissioner for Climate Action.
"It is not all done, but we have taken a very important step forward," said the Spanish Ecological Transition Minister Teresa Ribera.
"It's a first step and an advance over the Paris Agreement. Let's accelerate!" said French President Emmanuel Macron.
The general atmosphere at the Dubai convention center was one of satisfaction, but dissenting voices were also heard.
"It is crucial that developed countries take the lead and ensure the necessary means for developing countries," explained Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva.
The text represents a "step forward" but "does not provide the necessary balance to strengthen global action," reacted the Alliance of Small Island States.
Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad lamented the inclusion of transitional fuels in the COP28 agreement and recalled that her nation has joined a coalition of countries committed to ceasing investments in oil exploitation.
Furthermore, the ambition outlined in the COP28 agreement to move away from fossil fuels must be supported by "a change in the rules of the international economic and financial system," Muhamad requested.
"Those rules are currently disadvantageous and maintain structural inequality between developed and developing countries," the Colombian minister stressed.
"To ensure that the goals set today truly reach 1.5 degrees, a more structural change must be made that we have not really achieved in this COP. We haven't even sent a strong and sufficient political signal," she lamented.
This lack of decisiveness poses risks such as "fossil capital taking over decarbonization spaces under the banner of transitional fuels, which are still fossil fuels and do not contribute to the transformation we need in the time we need it," Muhamad warned.
"It's a risk that the text leaves open, and if there is not a real action to treat climate as an emergency, as we did with COVID with extraordinary measures, it can easily materialize."
COPOUT 28 Taking stock of COP28: Thirteen observations
December 15, 2023
Final declaration of the debacle in Dubai mentioned fossil fuel, but promised nothing
The mountain has labored and brought forth a mouse
The 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN’s framework convention on climate change wrapped up on December 13 with a last-minute agreement that mentions fossil fuels, but promises little or no action. With over 90,000 people registered, including over 2,400 fossil fuel industry lobbyists, it was, as many observers commented, a debacle in the desert.
In an interview with Reuters, Greta Thunberg said the conference’s final text “is toothless and it is nowhere even close to being sufficient to keep us within the 1.5-degree limit. It is a stab in the back for those most vulnerable.”
The following summary was prepared by Carbon Brief, a UK-based website that covers climate science, but climate policy and energy policy. For more detail, see their in-depth report on Key Outcomes of COP28.
Fossils away: Nearly 200 countries have agreed to help the world “transition away from fossil fuels”, as part of the “global stocktake” decided at COP28, according to Carbon Brief’s in-depth summary of the talks. The deal “call[ed] on” all countries to contribute, using the weakest-possible UN legal language to ask for action. Yet even this was hard-won, with an earlier draft deal having left action on fossil fuels entirely optional.
Whither finance? The stocktake also called for the tripling of renewables, doubling of energy efficiency and “substantially reducing” methane emissions, all by 2030. These targets ticked four of the five “pillars” to keep 1.5C in reach, set out by the International Energy Agency (IEA) ahead of COP28. The crucial fifth pillar — finance for developing countries, which could have unlocked greater ambition elsewhere — was largely missing.
‘Moment of truth’: COP28 agreed new targets, but only countries can deliver action. The stocktake “encourages” them to submit ambitious new 2035 pledges aligned with 1.5C, with a deadline of 2025. This will be the “moment of truth,” one expert told Carbon Brief.
Action stations: The stocktake also launched a four-year “dialogue” on implementing the deal, as well as “mission 1.5C”, designed to boost “ambition…action and implementation.” This mission will be run by COP30 hosts Brazil – who said it would work towards cutting fossil fuel dependence — along with the UAE COP28 presidency and COP29 host Azerbaijan. The role of the “mitigation work program” — launched at COP26 to “urgently scale up mitigation ambition and implementation in this critical decade” — remains unclear.
Adaptation
Money talks: Negotiations over a “framework” to guide a “global goal” on climate adaptation faced significant tensions. African countries and others said they needed strong commitments that developed countries would financially support them. The US and the EU did not want to discuss money. Large, emerging economies were accused of blocking talks by insisting on references to the different responsibilities facing developed and developing countries.
New focus: The final text did not contain any of the developing countries’ major priorities. Parties agreed to focus adaptation on several key themes and decided on a handful of ill-defined targets. However, it kick-starts a formalized global effort for countries to scale up their adaptation efforts, with a first round of planning and reporting given a deadline of 2030.
Loss and damage
Fund agreed: Nations launched a new “loss-and-damage fund” on day one of COP28, in what one observer called a “diplomatic coup” for the UAE. This was welcomed as the first time a major outcome had emerged from a COP opening session. It marked the culmination of a decades-long effort by climate-vulnerable nations to secure funds for the unstoppable harm caused by climate disasters.
Money needed: With no obligation to pay into the fund, filling it will largely depend on the generosity of wealthy countries. Several parties, including the UAE, Germany and the EU, kick-started the fund with $770.6m of pledges, some of which were existing funds that had been re-pledged. Campaigners pointed out this amounted to less than 0.2% of developing countries’ annual needs.
Emirati leadership
Overshadowed presidency: COP28 president and oil executive Dr. Sultan Al Jaber hailed the “world-first” achievement of getting “fossil fuels” in a UN climate change agreement. However, his presidency was overshadowed by allegations the UAE intended to use COP28 to make oil-and-gas deals — and by resurfaced remarks he made questioning the science of a fossil-fuel phase-out at an online event on the need to include women in climate action.
‘Low-carbon’ oil: Mere hours after the summit, Al Jaber told the Guardian that his company, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), will continue investing in oil. He claimed to the paper that his oil can be considered “low-carbon” because it is “extracted efficiently and with less leakage than other sources.”
Food, forests and nature
Food: Carbon Brief has just published a separate in-depth look at what COP28 delivered for food, land, forests and nature. “Food day” at COP28 saw the launch of the Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation — a group of five countries committed to pushing the agenda of systemic change in food systems. But the Sharm el-Sheikh joint work on agriculture and food security failed to reach an agreement, leaving parties frustrated.
Forests: The global stocktake “emphasizes” that halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030 will be key to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement — the first time such a pledge has garnered formal recognition in a UN climate change legal text. Several countries put forward new ideas for protecting forests at COP28, but Brazil stole the show with its $250bn “tropical forests forever” fund proposal.
Nature: COP28 hosted an unprecedented number of high-level events on the links between climate change and nature loss. In a first-of-its-kind initiative, COP28 president UAE and COP15 president China released a Joint Statement on Climate, Nature and People acknowledging the interconnected nature of climate change and biodiversity loss, signed by 20 countries. The world’s landmark nature deal agreed in 2022, the Global Biodiversity Framework, was also referenced in a UN climate change text for the first time.
Will COP28’s legacy be loophole-ridden promises and lack of concrete funding?
D. Raghunandan of the Delhi Science Forum explains the main takeaways from the COP28 summit that recently concluded in Dubai. He analyzes the details of the declaration’s commitment to transition away from fossil fuels and talks about the follow-up to the Global Stocktake
December 15, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch
D. Raghunandan of the Delhi Science Forum explains the main takeaways from the COP28 summit that recently concluded in Dubai. He analyzes the details of the declaration’s commitment to transition away from fossil fuels and talks about the follow-up to the Global Stocktake. He also talks about the lack of funding for dealing with climate-change related issues and the Global North’s refusal to honor its promises.
Climate breakdown to bring new challenges to health in the UK
The global rise of temperatures is set to change the health landscape in the UK, with the appearance of new and infectious diseases, growing risk of antimicrobial resistance
December 14, 2023 by Peoples Health Dispatch
Climate change in the United Kingdom is certain to impact health, as indicated by the UK Health Security Agency. The increasing effects of heat-related incidents are already noticeable throughout the country, affecting both people’s wellbeing and placing additional financial stress on the health system.
In addition to rising temperatures, the likelihood of new and infectious diseases emerging will increase, along with a surge in excess deaths and added strain on health services. The report underscores the dangers associated with fluctuations in heat and cold temperatures, the occurrence of wildfires, droughts, flooding, and the risks posed by vector-borne diseases. In the coming decades, the UK may witness the emergence of diseases such as dengue and the West Nile virus.
If global warming is not limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the climate changes are likely to have a detrimental impact on mental health. The report also predicts that these climate-related changes will increase the issue of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). While an estimated 10 million people are projected to die due to AMR by 2050, this number could escalate if the increasing temperatures are not addressed.
Although the health-related consequences of climate change will affect the entire UK population, the report emphasizes “clear geographical and sociodemographic differences.” Those most affected will include populations with limited ability to change their living conditions or lifestyles, such as children, individuals over 65, the homeless, prison populations, and those under the care of social services.
The report warns that under optimistic scenarios of low warming, temperatures will likely peak in the mid- to late-century, coinciding with the working age of a child born today. In this case, individuals who are currently of working age and will be in retirement when the peak impact occurs, along with today’s young children, will face the most challenging adaptation process. However, if temperature growth exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius, the impact will extend much further, bringing unknown consequences for the health of future generations.
Keep Capitalism Out of Conservation
Posted on December 14, 2023 by Yves Smith
Yves here. I must confess to finding the argument made by soi-disant ecologist Thomas Eisner to be revolting, as if the reason to preserve rain forests is for better human exploitation. We will never pull out of our climate/environmental nose dive if we see everything as meant to serve only us, and even worse, only pretty immediately. This attitude strikes me as going beyond capitalism, and goes back to Genesis:
Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.
I know Louis C.K. has gone out of fashion, but IMHO he nailed it here (I wish I did not have to use the animated version but it is all I could find on YouTube):
By Louise Fabiani, whose science writing and critical essays have appeared previously in Undark, as well as in Sierra, JSTOR Daily, Aeon, Slate, Science, New Scientist, the TLS, and elsewhere. Originally published at Undark
A few years after earning my master’s degree in environmental studies, I attended a public lecture at McGill University, my alma mater. The famed chemical ecologist Thomas Eisner concluded his talk on “The Hidden Value of Nature” by saying that a major reason for protecting rainforests is the possibility of finding the next wonder drug there. I recall asking him if, by putting a higher value on particular plants (or animals or fungi), there wasn’t a danger of caring less for everything else, namely the species that do not appear useful. The question seemed to surprise him, but I don’t remember how he replied.
Eisner’s rhetoric clashed with my biocentric view of the environment — and may have proved unnecessary. His small audience consisted of science professors, students, and alumni like me — presumably pre-sold on the idea of biological conservation. He was not tasked with convincing shareholders in the pharmaceutical industry or owners of cattle operations to allow some of the planet’s living jewels, tropical rainforests, to keep on living. His appeal “to reason” lifted arguments straight out of the capitalism handbook.
Everyone from biodiversity prospectors to ecologists seeks to unveil the hidden value of everything in the natural world, with or without different ends in mind. Some things are considered goods, like the Madagascar periwinkle, source of vincristine, an alkaloid used for chemotherapy; others are services, like a mushroom’s ability to detoxify soil.
In the decades since Eisner’s talk, conservationists have drawn attention to the idea of ecosystem services, or ES, that they once directed to individual poster-child species. In the 1990s, the endangered spotted owl became an emblem of old-growth, West coast forests, with protesters trying to halt logging — and angry loggers putting a price of a different kind on the owl’s feathered head. These days, the conservationist’s greatest rhetorical weapon for garnering support for their causes tends to be the story of a whole ecosystem and its many wonders.
The argument goes as follows: When nature provides free of charge something humans need or want, that utility justifies losing any revenue earned from exploiting or even destroying the ecosystem in question. A good example might be deciding not to build a fancy beachside resort that would eventually ruin the nearest coral reef, home to a vibrant marine community that helps feed local people and attracts tourists. There is hardly anything more fundamental to economics than the cost-benefit analysis.
The field of study has branched out since the 1970s, when the concept of ES first appeared. The United Nations–affiliated Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, employs the contentious term “sustainable use” as it lists the ways humanity depends on the more-than-human world. Environmental scientist Gretchen Daily’s work has given rise to the Natural Capital Project, an ambitious program that urges world leaders to appreciate nature — essentially by putting a monetary value on it. Then there’s the catchy term “nature-based solutions,” which proposes ways to employ ES to improve human welfare. Its appeal lies in cases of immediate need, such as using green spaces to decrease urban heat-island effects.
A recent editorial in Science admits that biodiversity credits — which provide a way for companies to finance activities that, on the whole, increase biodiversity — may sound like promising sources of conservation funds. But the authors contend that “the risk that trading ill-defined generic biodiversity credits will result in biodiversity loss, not conservation, should be considered. Scarce resources could be diverted to market regulation rather than conservation.” Even The Economist Impact notes that the “difficulty of quantifying biodiversity units as opposed to carbon units renders impact assessment challenging.”
And then there is the startling rise this century of green (or eco-) capitalism — to some, an oxymoron. Capitalism seeks endless growth. Ecology sees growth as part of a larger process. So why has conservation embraced capitalism so enthusiastically? The quick answer is that everyone understands money — how it changes hands, how it accumulates, what happens when it’s scarce — and most realize that conservation can be extremely expensive. The typical nature-lover would save endangered species and spaces at almost any cost; after all, extinction is forever. As a result, those working to protect nature frame their efforts in language people grasp immediately. Unfortunately, that can mean mentioning, say, a mangrove swamp’s amazing ability to absorb coastal storm surges in the same breath as the cost of real estate protected.
One recent opinion piece observed that “scientific articles increasingly highlight the benefits of, rather than the threats to, habitats,” the latter being too gloomy, off-putting. Talking about how urban tree cover reduces the heat-island effect sounds positive. In contrast, describing yet another unfolding disaster will turn many people off.
A team of environmental researchers in 2013 described several major metaphors for our actual or potential relationships with the rest of the living world. Of these, the researchers wrote, one predominates: economic production, meaning that humans treat nature like a warehouse and service center. I have found that the old idea of stewardship — which at least cautions the dominant species, us, to take good care of everything else — is about the best metaphor currently available. That isn’t saying much. Anthropocentrism remains front and center, no matter how it’s dressed up.
We certainly need to obtain raw materials from the geosphere and the biosphere, but other species do not exist for us. It can be a challenge to tease these realities apart, especially as many cultures condone human privilege to use “resources” as we see fit.
As I brashly pointed out to a respected scientist many years ago, whenever we call certain species or communities “valuable,” we create de facto categories — in-groups and out-groups. This is profoundly arrogant and myopic. As the iconic 20th-century conservationist Aldo Leopold said, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” No one can deny that we are master tinkerers, but maybe not such intelligent ones. The species we end up devaluing could be linchpins for ecological processes yet to be comprehended.
As ES research continues, and persuasive examples accumulate, how do researchers, editors, and science journalists frame the results? Do they uncritically further the capitalist, everything-has-a-price agenda? Do they reinforce the idea that humanity possesses some right to pass judgment on which organisms best suit us and our chosen companions? Finally, when we discover these wonders and decide what to do with them — exploit or protect — do we ensure reparations to local peoples thereby avoiding charges of biopiracy or environmental injustice?
A recent article in Nature proposes taking neither an anthropocentric nor a purely biocentric approach to evaluating nature, but a diverse, “pluricentric” one. Instead of objectifying the natural world, we ought to see ourselves as part of it, a stance commonly associated with Indigenous peoples.
In the meantime, ignorance, arrogance, and stubborn adherence to outmoded capitalist mythologies — not to mention the climate crisis — almost ensure that threats to biodiversity will increase. We know far too little to make snap “Sophie’s Choice” decisions about what to save, exploit, or merely leave to its fate. The market adds complications. Let’s cultivate some humility, in both science and society. We clearly cannot save everything, but we must not believe that putting a price on nature’s functions is the best way to save as much as possible.
Marxian Ecology, East and West: Joseph Needham and a non-Eurocentric view of the origins of China’s ecological civilisation
We are pleased to reproduce the below article by John Bellamy Foster, editor of the prestigious socialist journal, Monthly Review, who is also professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, concerning the contributions of the late Dr. Joseph Needham (1990-1995) to the understanding of the deep roots of China’s views on an ecological civilisation in particular and the dialectical nature of much of traditional Chinese philosophy and culture more generally. The article is especially important in that, whilst the contribution of Needham, who, at the time of his death was described by Britain’s Independent newspaper as “possibly the greatest scholar since Erasmus”, to the understanding of science and civilisation in China, the title of his monumental, multi-volume, lifelong work, remains known in some relevant academic circles, for example through the work of the Needham Research Institute, and somewhat more generally through a popular biography by Simon Winchester, his lifelong Marxism, and his significant contributions to Marxist theory, have been all but forgotten.
Bellamy Foster begins by posing the question as to why the most developed version of ecological Marxism is to be found today in China and argues:
“The answer is that there is a much more complex dialectical relation between East and West with respect to materialist dialectics and critical ecology than has been generally supposed, one that stretches back over millennia.”
He further explains that:
“Materialist and dialectical conceptions of nature and history do not start with Karl Marx. The roots of ‘organic naturalism’ and ‘scientific humanism,’ according to the great British Marxist scientist and Sinologist Joseph Needham (李約瑟), author of Science and Civilisation in China, can be traced to the sixth to third centuries BCE both in ancient Greece, beginning with the pre-Socratics and extending to the Hellenistic philosophers, and in ancient China, with the emergence of Daoist and Confucian philosophers during the Warring States Period of the Zhou Dynasty.”
In ‘Within the Four Seas: The Dialogue of East and West’, a 1969 book by Needham, the author noted “the absolute alacrity with which ‘dialectical materialism’ was taken up in China during the Chinese Revolution… The Marxian materialist dialectic, with its deep-seated ecological critique rooted in ancient Epicurean materialism, was in Needham’s view, so closely akin to Chinese Daoist and Confucian philosophies as to create a strong acceptance of Marxian philosophical views in China, particularly since China’s own perennial philosophy was in this roundabout way integrated with modern science. If Daoism was a naturalist philosophy, Confucianism was associated, Needham wrote, with ‘a passion for social justice.'”
Bellamy Foster further notes that: “The Needham thesis, as presented here, can also throw light on the spurious proposition, recently put forward by cultural theorist Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct, that the Chinese conception of ecological civilisation is derived entirely from China’s own traditional philosophy, rather than being influenced by Marxism. Lent’s argument fails to acknowledge that ecological civilisation as a critical category was first introduced by Marxist environmentalists in the Soviet Union in its closing decades, and immediately adopted by Chinese thinkers, who were to develop it more fully.”
He acknowledges that, “of course, the Needham thesis may seem obscure at first from the usual standpoint of the Western left”, one reason being a “deep Eurocentrism characteristic of contemporary Marxism in the West, associated with the systematic downplaying of colonialism and imperialism.”
But, also citing the work of the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin, Bellamy Foster quotes Needham as explaining that “the basic fallacy of Europocentrism is therefore the tacit assumption that because modern science and technology, which grew up indeed in post-Renaissance Europe, are universal, everything else European is universal also.” However, Bellamy Foster continues:
“Marxist thought and socialism in general have always been radically opposed to Eurocentrism, understood as the ideology of Western colonialism. This is as true of Marx and Frederick Engels, particularly in their later years, as it was of V.I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. In the twentieth century, moreover, the impetus for revolution shifted to the Global South and its struggle against imperialism, generating in the process new Marxist analyses in the works of figures as distinct as Mao Zedong, Amílcar Cabral, and Che Guevara, all of whom insisted on the need for a world revolution.”
Whilst it is possible to point to traces of European ethnocentrism in some of Marx’s early work, Bellamy Foster notes that, by the late 1850s, he had “become increasingly focused on the critique of colonialism, actively supporting anti-colonial rebellions, and progressively more concerned with analysing the material and cultural conditions of non-Western societies.” This was “further facilitated by the ‘revolution in ethnological time’ with the discovery of prehistory and the rise of anthropological studies, occurring in tandem with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.” In this regard, Bellamy Foster draws a line of demarcation with the recent influential work, ‘Marx in the Anthropocene‘ by the Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito.
Bellamy Foster draws out the connection between Needham’s pioneering work and Xi Jinping’s thoughts on this issue, citing Chinese scholar Huang Chengliang explaining that “the theoretical origins of Xi Jinping’s thought on Ecological Civilisation can be traced to five sources: (1) Marxist philosophy, integrating “the three fundamental theories of ‘dialectics of history, dialectical materialism and dialectics of nature’”; (2) traditional Chinese ecological wisdom on “[human]-nature unity and the law of nature”; (3) the actual historical context of ecological governance in China in response to the ecological crisis; (4) struggles to develop a progressive and ecological model of sustainable development; and (5) the articulation of ecological civilisation as the governing principle of the new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
He concludes:
“In Xi’s analysis, the traditional Chinese emphasis on the harmony of humanity and nature, or the view that ‘the human and heaven are united in one,’ is wedded to Marxian ecological views with a seamlessness that can only be explained in terms of Needham’s thesis of the correlative development of organic materialism in both the East and West, with Marxism as the connecting link. From this perspective, the Chinese notion of ecological civilisation, due to its overall theoretical coherence and coupled with China’s rise in general, is likely to play an increasingly prominent role in the development of ecological Marxism worldwide. As Needham wrote: ‘China has in her time learnt much from the rest of the world; now perhaps it is time for the nations and the continents to learn again from her.’”
This article, first published in Monthly Review, is based on a talk presented online to the School of Marxism, Shandong University, in Jinan, in March 2023 and was revised and expanded from an original published version, printed in International Critical Thought, a journal of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.[/quote]
Ecological materialism, of which ecological Marxism is the most developed version, is often seen as having its origins exclusively within Western thought. But if that is so, how do we explain the fact that ecological Marxism has been embraced as readily (or indeed, more readily) in the East as in the West, leaping over cultural, historical, and linguistic barriers and leading to the current concept of ecological civilization in China? The answer is that there is a much more complex dialectical relation between East and West with respect to materialist dialectics and critical ecology than has been generally supposed, one that stretches back over millennia.
Materialist and dialectical conceptions of nature and history do not start with Karl Marx. The roots of “organic naturalism” and “scientific humanism,” according to the great British Marxist scientist and Sinologist Joseph Needham (李約瑟), author of Science and Civilization in China, can be traced to the sixth to third centuries BCE both in ancient Greece, beginning with the pre-Socratics and extending to the Hellenistic philosophers, and in ancient China, with the emergence of Daoist and Confucian philosophers during the Warring States Period of the Zhou Dynasty.1 As Samir Amin indicated in his Eurocentrism, the “philosophy of nature [as opposed to metaphysics] is essentially materialist” and constituted a “key breakthrough” in tributary modes of production, both East and West, beginning in the fifth century BCE.2
In Within the Four Seas: The Dialogue of East and West in 1969, Needham noted the absolute alacrity with which “dialectical materialism” was taken up in China during the Chinese Revolution and how this was treated as a great mystery in the West. Nevertheless, the sense of mystery, he contended, did not extend in the same way to the East itself. He wrote: “I can almost imagine Chinese scholars,” confronted with Marxian materialist dialectics, “saying to themselves ‘How astonishing: this is very like our own philosophia perennis integrated with modern science at last come home to us.’”3 The Marxian materialist dialectic, with its deep-seated ecological critique rooted in ancient Epicurean materialism, was in Needham’s view, so closely akin to Chinese Daoist and Confucian philosophies as to create a strong acceptance of Marxian philosophical views in China, particularly since China’s own perennial philosophy was in this roundabout way integrated with modern science. If Daoism was a naturalist philosophy, Confucianism was associated, Needham wrote, with “a passion for social justice.”4
The Needham convergence thesis—or simply the Needham thesis, as I am calling it here—was thus that Marxist materialist dialectics had a special affinity with Chinese organic naturalism as represented especially by Daoism, which was similar to the ancient Epicureanism that lay at the foundations of Marx’s own materialist conception of nature. Like other Marxist scientists and cultural figures associated with what has been called the “second foundation of Marxism,” centered in Britain in the mid-twentieth century, Needham saw Epicureanism as providing many of the initial theoretical principles on which Marxism, as a critical-materialist philosophy, was based.5 It was the similar evolution of organic materialism East and West—but which, in the case of Marxism, was integrated with modern science—that explained dialectical materialism’s profound impact in China.6
The Needham thesis, as presented here, can also throw light on the spurious proposition, recently put forward by cultural theorist Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct, that the Chinese conception of ecological civilization is derived entirely from China’s own traditional philosophy, rather than being influenced by Marxism.7 Lent’s argument fails to acknowledge that ecological civilization as a critical category was first introduced by Marxist environmentalists in the Soviet Union in its closing decades, and immediately adopted by Chinese thinkers, who were to develop it more fully.8 For environmental philosophers and scientists in postrevolutionary societies who were familiar with dialectical materialism, it was natural to see the answer to ecological problems as demanding a new ecological civilization, constituting a necessary evolutionary development of socialism itself. This was further propelled by the fact that China, according to Needham, had avoided the disassociation of thought characteristic of the West through the identical opposites of abstract idealism/theology and mechanistic materialism. Hence, from the critical standpoint introduced by Needham, the concept of ecological civilization can be seen as an organic outgrowth of the philosophies of dialectical naturalism in both the East and West to which Marxism added a crucial scientific component.
Of course, the Needham thesis may seem obscure at first from the usual standpoint of the Western left, since it relies on a classical Epicurean Marxist interpretation of the origins of historical materialism, while at the same time viewing this in relation to a conception of Chinese science and civilization over the millennia that is unfamiliar to Western eyes. This double disconnect has to do with the well-known alienation of the Western Marxist tradition from both science and materialism, coupled with a deep Eurocentrism characteristic of contemporary Marxism in the West, associated with the systematic downplaying of colonialism and imperialism.9
All of this suggests that the Needham thesis, which sees dialectical materialism as having roots in materialist and ecological ideas that arose separately and with quite different histories in East and West, but leading to a special affinity with Marxism in China, is well worth discussing in our time of planetary crisis, given the need for the reunification of humanity on more ecorevolutionary terms.10 However, addressing the ancient philosophies underlying ecological materialism in both East and West, and the relation of this to the development of ecological-materialist Marxism today, requires that we strive to overcome the Eurocentric and other culturalist barriers that stand in the way of the emergence of an ecology of praxis on a planetary scale.
Eurocentrism and Marxism
The critique of Eurocentrism as constituting a definite ideological form first arose within the Marxist tradition. It was introduced by Needham in Within the Four Seas and was later employed by Amin in the preface to the first edition of his Eurocentrism. For both Needham and Amin, Eurocentrism is defined as the notion that European culture is the universal culture to which all other cultures must conform, given that non-Western cultures are reduced simply to being particular cultures.11 As Needham argued, “The basic fallacy of Europocentrism is therefore the tacit assumption that because modern science and technology, which grew up indeed in post-Renaissance Europe, are universal, everything else European is universal also.”12 Likewise, Amin writes: “Eurocentrism…claims that imitation of the Western model by all peoples is the only solution to the challenges of our time.” Eurocentrism both projects itself as the universal culture and rejects the true universalism of peoples.13
Viewed in this way, classical Marxist thought and socialism in general have always been radically opposed to Eurocentrism, understood as the ideology of Western colonialism. This is as true of Marx and Frederick Engels, particularly in their later years, as it was of V. I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. In the twentieth century, moreover, the impetus for revolution shifted to the Global South and its struggle against imperialism, generating in the process new Marxist analyses in the works of figures as distinct as Mao Zedong, Amílcar Cabral, and Che Guevara, all of whom insisted on the need for a world revolution.
To be sure, one can point to traces of European ethnocentrism in some of Marx’s early work, which was affected by the sources that he had available at the time, most of which came from European colonial reports. Nevertheless, it has been recognized by Marxist theorists of underdevelopment for decades—initially in the work of Horace B. Davis in the United States, Kenzo Mohri in Japan, and Suniti Kumar Ghosh in India—that by the late 1850s, Marx had become increasingly focused on the critique of colonialism, actively supporting anticolonial rebellions, and progressively more concerned with analyzing the material and cultural conditions of non-Western societies.14 Marx’s growing attention to noncapitalist societies was a product of his identification with various revolts against colonialism, and was further facilitated by the “revolution in ethnological time” with the discovery of prehistory and the rise of anthropological studies, occurring in tandem with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.15 Marx made a massive effort to research the history and cultures of societies on the periphery of Europe, leading to his studies of the Russian language, his exploration of the Russian peasant commune, and his research into social formations in Algeria, India, China, Indonesia, and the Indigenous nations of the Americas. He was, at least initially, a strong supporter of the Taiping Revolution in China.16
In this respect, Kohei Saito’s important work Marx in the Anthropocene constitutes a sharp deviation from the growing scholarship demonstrating that Marx was never Eurocentric (in the terms discussed above) and had moved decisively away from any residual European ethnocentrism by the late 1850s and early ’60s. In support of his contrary view, Saito points to the statement in the preface to the first edition of Capital where Marx “notoriously” informs his German readers that “the tale is told of you,” meaning German bourgeois development would follow the basic path already laid out by English bourgeoisie. For Saito, this in itself establishes that Marx’s Capital was Eurocentric in assuming all countries everywhere had to follow the same linear European path. Yet, the question of the non-European world was altogether absent from the argument in the preface to Capital, which was directed solely at conditions in Western Europe, and specifically at the significance of the British developments for what was to come in Germany. Marx later clarified this in his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich (as well in the various drafts to that letter) by indicating that the argument on linear development in Capital was specific to Western Europe, and that fundamentally different lines of development were possible in Russia and in other noncapitalist societies.17
Saito seeks to back up his charge of Eurocentrism in the first volume of Capital by highlighting Marx’s contention that noncapitalist village communities in Java and elsewhere in Asia were to be viewed as economically unchanging, or stagnant. Quoting Marx’s reference to “the riddle of the [economic] unchangeability of Asiatic societies,” Saito says this constitutes evidence not only of Eurocentrism but “Orientalism.” Yet, when viewed in context, it is clear that Marx was concretely addressing the economic tendency of village communities in Java, where a developed exchange economy did not yet exist, to reproduce themselves on the basis of simple, rather than expanded, reproduction. Thus, Marx quotes his source, T. Stamford Raffle’s History of Java (1817), as saying that the “internal economy” of the village communities “remains unchanged” despite all the political shifts going on within their larger societies, which in this respect were hardly static. Hence, with regard to the economically unchanging character and stagnation of village communities in Java and elsewhere in Asia, which Marx places against the backdrop of the continual upheavals and never-ceasing changes in dynasty within these same societies, he was clearly referring to concrete, material productive forms/relations within peasant communities at the base of the society. Naturally, the simple reproduction of such village communities stood out when contrasted to the constantly expanding economies and incessant technological revolutions of the accumulative societies of the West at the time of the Industrial Revolution. For Marx, such differences were to be understood in historical and materialist, not culturalist, terms.18
The “Great Divergence” between East and West at the time of the Industrial Revolution was a major issue in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one for which explanations were sought not only by Marx but by all of the classical political economists. Moreover, this same debate remains fundamental to today’s historiography.19 There is no doubt that the East, for a time, stagnated economically relative to the West. For example, China in 1800 accounted for a third of the world’s industrial potential. By 1900 this had fallen to 6.3 percent (and in 1953 to a mere 2.3 percent).20 Marx explained this historical divergence between East and West, already evident in his time, in terms of specific productive forms/modes, and as a product, to a considerable degree, of European colonialism. In the first volume of Capital, he described the terrible effects of Dutch colonial slavery in Java and how it served to undermine the village communities. None of this was developed in cultural nationalist or racist terms, as was the case in the dominant colonial-Eurocentric tradition within the West.21
Thus, Marxism, as classically represented first by Marx and Engels, and later by figures such as Lenin and Luxemburg, was strongly opposed to any kind of Eurocentrism and Western colonialism/imperialism, explaining developments in materialist rather than culturalist terms. However, later Western Marxism, as a distinct philosophical tradition, has often been ambivalent with respect to imperialism and deeply ethnocentric in its approach to Marxism, viewing Marxism in the West, as Needham critically observed, as having a kind of “a priori superiority,” despite the fact that revolution has long since shifted to the periphery of the capitalist world system.22 This has gone hand in hand with Western Marxism’s denial of the dialectics of nature, and thus science, nature, and any kind of ontological materialism. In many post-Marxist analyses, notions of class and socialism were also abandoned.23
The primary challenge confronting ecosocialism in the West is therefore reconnecting Marxism to its materialist roots. A materialist conception of history could not exist in a meaningful way apart from a materialist conception of nature (and vice versa). Marx’s theory of metabolic rift in fact depended on this much broader conception. Nor could Marxism exist in purely ideational form separate from the critique of class and imperialism or divorced from the new revolutionary vernaculars emerging throughout the Global South. In this sense, the parallels between the materialist conception of nature and organic materialism that Needham pointed to with respect to pre-Socratic and Hellenistic Greece and the Warring States Period in China are crucial to understanding both the history and the future of ecological Marxism. Most importantly, the Chinese concept of ecological civilization needs to be put in this context of the rediscovery of the roots of an organic-ecological materialism.
Epicureanism and Daoism
To better understand the Needham thesis on the affinity of Marxism with traditional Chinese philosophy, it is necessary to recognize that—like many of the other scientists and cultural theorists associated with the second foundation of Marxism—Needham saw Epicurean materialism as the key to the Marxian materialist conception of nature, and as underlying dialectical materialism. The essence of the materialist view, common to both Epicureanism and Daoism, and the basis of all scientific humanism, was that nature could be understood in its own terms, as spontaneously originating. For Daoism, “The Tao [the Way of nature] came into existence of itself”; meanwhile, for Epicureanism, “Nature loosed from every haughty lord/And forthwith free, is seen to have done all things/Herself and through herself of her own accord/Rid of all gods.”24 Chinese culture, Needham argued in Science and Civilization in China, had retained “an organic philosophy of Nature…closely resembling what modern science has been forced to adopt [most fully within dialectical materialism] after three centuries of mechanical materialism.”25 “Naturalism in the Dao De Jing,” P. J. Laska indicates in the introduction to his English translation of this work,
is similar to the naturalism that evolved in ancient Greek philosophy, beginning with the Presocratics, and continuing through the atomic systems of Democritus and Epicurus. What [however] is distinctive about the naturalism of ancient China is the addition of the concept of Dao, meaning “the Way,” the cosmic process that encompasses both Being and Non-being. Ancient Greek materialism lacks this proto-ecological concept.… What the naturalism of East and West have in common is the debunking of anthropogenic projections that turn natural occurrences into supernatural agents…. In the Dao De Jing natural order is seen as developing spontaneously from the interaction of the various “beings” that comprise “the One.”
The result was a “holistic naturalism,” one built, like Epicurean materialism and Marxian dialectical naturalism, on the basis of conceptions of the unity of opposites and unending process.26
Marx noted that for Epicurus, in whose work was found an “immanent dialectic” in accord with nature, the “world is my friend.”27 Likewise, for Daoism, Needham insisted, “the natural world was not something hostile or evil, which had to be perpetually subdued by will-power and brute force, but something more like the greatest of living organisms, governing principles of which had to be understood so that life could be lived in harmony with it.”28 Thus, “the Order of Nature was a principle of ceaseless motion, change, and return…. This was a concept not of non-action [wu wei], but of no action contrary to Nature.” In Chinese thought, “matter disperses and reassembles in forms ever new.”29 In the West, Epicureanism provided a similar materialist view, leading to notions of emergence and integrative levels and providing a critical realism that was to be developed most fully with Marxian-influenced materialist dialectics. Like Daoism, Epicureanism saw sufficiency (the principle of enough) as a key value. “Today,” Needham stated, “we are all Taoists and Epicureans.”30
If Epicurean materialism was an organic materialism akin to Daoism, its more radical and environmental elements, for Needham, had been lost in the prevailing culture in the West, where it had been overtaken by a mechanistic materialism and a one-sided conception of the “domination of nature”—what he called, following Theodore Roszak, a “mechanistic imperative” and a “scientization of nature” that had become destructive. In response to this mechanistic view (and to abstract idealism), Marxist dialectical materialism, Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, and the new philosophies of emergence were the main counter forces, representing the highest levels of development of scientific thought.31
In contrast to the dominant mechanistic and idealist dualism of the West, China had in many ways retained its organic naturalism and was able to incorporate this with modern science by making use of Marxist dialectical materialism, with its more complex understanding of the relation of humanity to evolutionary ecology, mediating between Western science and traditional Chinese philosophy. Traditional Chinese natural philosophy reached its highest level, according to Needham, in the twelfth century with Neo-Confucianism, which was “in fact, an organic conception of Nature, a theory of integrative levels, an organic naturalism…closely allied to the conceptions of dialectical materialism.” One of “the most profound of Neo-Confucian ideas,” he wrote, is to be found “in the famous phrase wu chi erh thai chi, ‘that which has no Pole and yet itself is the supreme Pole,’ namely the conception of the whole universe as an organic unity, in fact, as a single organism.”32
Bertrand Russell, Needham suggested, was simply paraphrasing the second part of the Dao De Jing in his book The Problem of China when he summarized Daoism as “Production without possession, action without self-assertion, development without domination.”33 As an expression of the human social relation to nature, this was deeply ecological. With its very different relation to the natural world, Needham pointed out, China had avoided some of the worst aspects of the metabolic rift in soil fertility (critically analyzed by figures such as Justus von Liebig and Marx) through the continued “use of human excreta as fertilizer,” preventing “the losses of phosphorous, nitrogen, and other soil nutrients which happened in the West.”34
Ecological Civilization as Marxian Ecology with Chinese Characteristics
According to what I have called the Needham thesis, Marxist dialectical naturalism, which developed as an organic-materialist ontology with deep roots in ancient Greek materialist philosophy, had a special affinity with traditional Chinese philosophy, since this form of scientific humanism had not been supplanted in China by a hegemonic dualism of mechanistic materialism and abstract idealism/theology as it had been in the West. The fact that the Chinese Revolution was a peasant-based revolution also meant that it was rooted in very different material conditions than those that governed bourgeois civilization in the West. These ideational and material conditions made China, as Needham argued in the 1970s, more open to Marxism in its dialectical-materialist form, and to the revolutionary ecological conceptions arising from that tradition, as well as drawing on traditional Chinese philosophy. Socialism with Chinese characteristics, from Mao to the present, thus includes a dialectical-ecological component that has become more, rather than less, evident, and is exemplified today by the notion of ecological civilization.
The concept of ecological civilization, as we have seen, arose in the final decade of the Soviet Union as a natural extension of socialism. According to the Soviet environmental philosopher Ivan T. Frolov writing in 1983, Marx’s approach to the unity/alienation of humanity and nature began with recognizing that human beings as social beings regulate the metabolism between themselves and nature as a whole through their production and their development of a “second nature” within society. The alienated character of production under capitalism created various contradictions between human beings and nature, now referred to as the metabolic rift.35 The answer, Frolov argued, was the “humanization of science” and the development of a “scientific humanism,” in accord with socialized production, pointing to the need for a new ecological culture. As the Soviet philosopher V. A. Los’ put it,
It is in the course of shaping an ecological culture [ecological civilization] that we can expect not only a theoretical solution of the acute contradictions existing in the relations between man and his habitat under contemporary civilisation, but also their practical tackling. Society, which has created an ecological culture, is, as Karl Marx put it, “the complete unity of man with nature—the true resurrection of nature—the accomplished naturalism of man—and the accomplished humanism of nature.”36
The idea of ecological civilization was quickly adopted by the Chinese thinker Ye Qianji in 1987 and became central to the definition of socialism with Chinese characteristics under Hu Jintao in the first decade of this century.37 Ecological civilization is often seen as little more than a socialist counterpart of capitalist ecological modernization. However, in fact, it is radically removed from the general conception of industrial civilization in the West. Rather, it is conceived as a form of genuinely sustainable human development, exemplifying the goals of socialism with Chinese characteristics. It is an outgrowth of Marx and Engels’s classical ecological critique, plus the cultural and historical conditions of China itself.38 As Chen Xueming wrote in The Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital, “Unlike capitalist society, socialist society does not lead [the] human being to become an ‘economic animal’ who only knows how to fulfill himself with respect to material life. The aim of socialism is not to develop the way of life under capitalist conditions, but to create a new way of life.… The essential characteristics and core values of socialism consist of creating a way of being, which, unlike the capitalist way of life, aims at realizing the whole-sided development of the human being.”39
But if Marxian dialectical and historical materialism, particularly based on the classical ecological critique introduced by Marx himself, has played a central part in the development of the Chinese concept of ecological civilization, the natural synergy of this (as expressed in the Needham thesis) with traditional Chinese thought is not to be ignored. To do so would, in fact, be Eurocentric. The complex, dialectical relation of the concept of ecological civilization to socialism with Chinese characteristics can be seen in Xi Jinping’s thought in this area. As Huang Chengliang has explained, the “Theoretical Origins of Xi Jinping’s Thought on Ecological Civilization” can be traced to five sources: (1) Marxist philosophy, integrating “the three fundamental theories of ‘dialectics of history, dialectical materialism and dialectics of nature’”; (2) traditional Chinese ecological wisdom on “[human]-nature unity and the law of nature”; (3) the actual historical context of ecological governance in China in response to the ecological crisis; (4) struggles to develop a progressive and ecological model of sustainable development; and (5) the articulation of ecological civilization as the governing principle of the new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics.40
Hence, characteristic of Chinese understanding of ecological civilization today, as exemplified in Xi’s thought, is a Marxian ecological dialectics and political economy interwoven with compatible elements taken from Daoism, Confucianism, and Neo-Confucianism, creating a powerful organic, ecological-materialist philosophy. Rather than simply an ideational product, the concept and implementation of ecological civilization is determined by the ecological crisis, struggles for ecologically sustainable development, and the new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics in which the development of a mature socialism characterized by a new ecological way of life becomes the primary goal.
This is apparent today in some of Xi’s most famous pronouncements on ecological civilization. Thus, one can see Marxian and traditional Chinese ecological values wedded when he declared:
Man and nature form a community of life; we, as human beings, must respect nature, follow its ways, and protect it. Only by observing the laws of nature can humanity avoid costly blunders in its exploitation. Any harm we inflict on nature will eventually return to haunt us. This is the reality we have to face. The modernization we pursue is one characterized by harmonious coexistence between man and nature.… We should have a strong commitment to socialist eco-civilization and work to develop a new model of modernization with humans developing in harmony with nature.41
This was coupled with declarations that China would “encourage simple, moderate, green, and low-carbon ways of life, and oppose extravagance and excessive consumption.”42 In his April 2020 speech, “Build an Eco-Civilization for Sustainable Development,” Xi started out by quoting Engels: “Let us not however flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us.” Xi concluded: “We must understand fully how humanity and nature form a community of life and step up efforts on all fronts to build an eco-civilization.”43
In Xi’s analysis, the traditional Chinese emphasis on the harmony of humanity and nature, or the view that “the human and heaven are united in one,” is wedded to Marxian ecological views with a seamlessness that can only be explained in terms of Needham’s thesis of the correlative development of organic materialism in both the East and West, with Marxism as the connecting link.44 From this perspective, the Chinese notion of ecological civilization, due to its overall theoretical coherence and coupled with China’s rise in general, is likely to play an increasingly prominent role in the development of ecological Marxism worldwide. As Needham wrote: “China has in her time learnt much from the rest of the world; now perhaps it is time for the nations and the continents to learn again from her.”45
Shows river near Mildura before the introduction of the lock system. Man standing in dry riverbed beside the small flow of water—all that remained because of the drought. Source: Wilf Henty, 1901/1940, State Library Victoria, slv.vic.gov.au.
The Price of Water and the Ongoing Colonization of Nature: Australian Cases in Global Context
By Scott Robinson (Posted Dec 22, 2023)
Nothing is more useful than water; but it will scarce purchase anything; scarce anything may be had in exchange for it.
—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
The water crisis results from an erroneous equation of value with monetary price. However, resources can often have very high value while having no price.
—Vandana Shiva, Water Wars
In parsing the dual definition of the word value in terms of utility and what we call exchange, Adam Smith mused that water might have “the greatest value in use” but little value in exchange.1 I can hardly charge you for a cupful of water, but I can command great riches with a cupful of diamonds, goes a paradox that only the dehydrated would dispute. Fortunately for those committed to ensuring everything is given its fair price, competition over fresh, clean water supplies is leading corporations and their partners in government into situations that transform water from a useful common good to a scarce, exchangeable asset. This process of commodification and financialization is imbricated in an ongoing colonization of nature, one starkly illustrated in settler colonial contexts like Australia. Too rarely are fears about commodification connected to this ongoing colonization, and further to the capitalist dynamics that drive it.
One recent example helps us see how variation in the price of water works to support capitalist accumulation.2 Taking a legal settlement (an “enforceable undertaking”), one price is starkly demonstrated by a recent “agreement” between Illawarra Coal Holdings, a subsidiary of South32, and the New South Wales’s Natural Resources Access Regulator. They settled on a payment (or what the undertaking calls a “donation/contribution for public benefit”) imposed for taking unlicensed surface water from Sydney’s drinking water catchment area.3 According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation‘s Tim Fernandez, the mine operator drained five megaliters per day over a period of five years (a figure not recorded in the undertaking or other reporting).4 The undertaking requires the mining operators to contribute $2,878,138 to a community project, as well as $70,000 to cover investigation, legal, and monitoring costs. By my estimate, this puts the price of a liter of water at around $0.00032. If the aim is to disincentivize the theft of water, this is a very light deterrent. The Dendrobrium Mine at which the illegal activity occurred already paid $5.6 million to license “passive water take resulting from underground activities.” If the mine’s production of around five million tons of coking coal remained steady from available figures for 2019 and 2020 sold at average prices of around $210 AUD (based on average estimates for exchange rates), the mine could have had revenue of around $1 billion.5 Prices for coking coal have since risen, according to the International Energy Agency, and despite scrapping plans to expand the mine, it is likely that production rose.6 It is a safe assumption that an enforceable undertaking of under $3 million is well worth it for the mining operator. Moreover, recent legislation in New South Wales (NSW) will make retrospectively licensing water takes by “enabling” companies to “trade” allocations.7 The implied price of $0.00032 can be compared with consumer prices, between $0.0035 and $0.0025 depending on if you live in Melbourne or Sydney. This suggests that consumers pay ten times more for water than companies who steal it.
Do such numbers tell us anything? Perhaps only that we take water for granted because most users pay little more (or much less) than a nominal service fee. But that would accept the identification of value and price. Prices are useful to a capitalist system because they allow different uses to be compared by the same abstract measure: money. They are also useful to the capitalist system because, as David Harvey writes in The Limits to Capital, “the act of exchange tells us nothing about the conditions of labor of producers, for example, and keeps us in a state of ignorance concerning our social relations as these are mediated by the market system. We respond solely to the prices of quantities of use values.”8 Prices are meant to be a measure of value, and yet they work forcefully to conceal real social relations. One feature starkly demonstrated by the penalty imposed on Illawarra Coal is that the state is intimately involved in sanctioning this sleight of hand.
Property and Colonial Expropriation
One response to the difference in the apparent price of water for the mine’s illegal taking and for the intended consumers is that it is unfair. And certainly, there is a case to be made for its injustice and the hypocrisy of asking increasing prices for consumers while illegal and destructive expropriation of water goes mostly unpunished. Yet, this risks foreclosing the question of our use of water in the first place and the social relations that enable it. Water has been more explicitly folded into the regime of colonial property through practices of expropriation, neoliberal privatization, and intensified irrigation regimes in the context of ecological stress. As Brenna Bhandar writes in Colonial Lives of Property:
The imperatives of settler colonialism, itself a capitalist formation, require the maintenance of noncapitalist rationales for the appropriation of indigenous lands. Dispossession achieved through ongoing forms of primitive accumulation requires a panoply of premodern and modern property logics that operate in conjunction with one another, reflecting the fragmented and contradictory nature of colonial modernity.9
Paying consumer prices enables us to turn on the tap and forget about the vast subterranean infrastructure feeding our instantaneous demand. (We violently notice it when it doesn’t work, though communities that rely on bores are certainly more aware.) Beneath the layers of market exchange, as Karen Piper and Vandana Shiva argue, this infrastructure itself is a product of colonization, a process which led to dam-building projects around the world.10 Colonization involved, as Thorstein Veblen wrote in 1923, “a settled practice of converting all public wealth to private gain on a plan of legalized seizure.”11
The Dendrobrium mine is far from the only recent example of water theft in Australia. There is a veritable cascade of examples, linked to what many, such as Maude Barlow, call a global water crisis.12 Using such language tends to abstract from the “mosaic of local and regional crises” that constitute the global pattern, as Derek Vollmer and Ian J. Harrison argue.13 Similarly, Andreas Bieler and Madelaine Moore propose that for the purposes of resisting ongoing water colonization and privatization, we should view these interconnected crises as “differentiated moments of the same process.”14
The process tracks the ongoing effects of colonialization alongside new forms of capitalist expropriation and exploitation as part of the neoliberal era. By analyzing the World Water Forum and its illustrious corporate attendees, Karen Piper demonstrates that there is a concerted campaign to privatize and commodify water supplies from municipal to global levels.15 The campaign is increasingly part of a green-branding exercise for fossil capital, but the premise is far from sustainable. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark write in The Robbery of Nature, “The ecological contradictions of received economics are most evident in its inability to respond to the planetary environmental crisis.”16
One way in which this plays out is the willful ignorance about historical social relations and the ways that property is acquired. Prices require firm property rights, and the process of acquiring them has often been and remains violent.17 Mary Gilmore’s 1934 memoir Old Days, Old Ways illustrates one example of this phenomenon.18 Gilmore describes how as a child in the 1870s living near Wagga Wagga on the Murrumbidgee River, fish traps and other aquacultural interventions conserved fish in streams during dry seasons and enabled their reproduction. But as colonial settlers and pastoralists destroyed and replaced the “balks” with larger, permanent dams, “the great fish would devour the smaller varieties and the end would be loss—a loss that the years since have proved fact.”19 I detect Gilmore here also allegorizing the process of colonial violence: a big fish eating smaller ones. But her sensitivity to the disruption of an ecological land custodianship is also redolent in the identification of “loss,” almost in the abstract. A wider loss is being recorded that performs an inverse accounting of the private gains made by colonial landholders’ reserves of water. But the location and enumeration of violence in the past risks providing cover to the ongoing accumulation by dispossession, or the enclosure of commons, that turns common goods into private property.20
The Management of Malpractice
A survey of older historical accounts of the establishment of agriculture in the Murray Darling Basin, such as Ernestine Hill’s triumphalist 1937 Water into Gold, gives the impression that, after a few pioneering decades, settlement and development were accomplished by the early twentieth century.21 The water was, as it were, tamed, and the dry, brown land turned verdant European green. But the process Gilmore described continues. Illegal dam construction remains a prominent concern for environmentalists and water managers, such as the practice of flood plain harvesting which over the last seventy years has captured in private dams water that would have replenished common flows.22
As government resource managers reckon with the environmental costs of climate change and intensified agriculture, their calculations about a “healthy” river system use baseline figures. These figures are politically contested and almost invariably revised downward when it comes to actually delivering environmental water, as recent development in Basin management illustrate.23 While major rivers and government dams can be monitored with a degree of accuracy, floodplains are more difficult. The NSW government identified 1,386 dams in the northern floodplain area, with an estimated holding capacity of 1,450 gigalitres (about 12,500 out of 32,500 gigaliters are used for agriculture in the basin each year).
After the millennium drought and a drought in 2015, the value of water became far more palpable. Rather than reflecting on its value to humans and ecosystems, businesses respond instead by enclosing greater swathes. Dam building intensified in the years after the drought, as an ABC Four Corners report exposed in 2017.24 While national attention often gravitates toward the Murray-Darling Basin, with its cross-continental span, private dams are a tactic of accumulation by dispossession in smaller water systems as well. For instance, flows in the Moorabool River near Ballarat in Victoria are threatened by unlicensed dams that have expanded over the last ten years.
Matthew Colloff, a water scientist at the Australian National University, commented that “it’s not that an individual is causing a problem, but where you get a proliferation of unlicensed dams across the catchment that can severely compromise the environment.”25 Strictly speaking, it is true that an individual dam may not damage an entire river system (though it depends on the size of the dam in relation to the river system). But this diffusion of responsibility treats each instance of dam construction as a disconnected infraction rather than a strategy of organized dispossession. Moreover, Colloff uses the phrase “free for all” to describe the proliferation of dams, in contrast to what he calls a “public good.” The phrase is interesting because a public good is in a way free for all, whereas private dams make a public good free for the property owner.
The Frontier of Environmental Markets
Southern Rural Water, the regulator responsible for managing the Moorabool (a river believed to be named after the Wadawarrung word for the “haunt or cry of a curlew or ghost”), found sixty-four breaches of the Water Act in 2022, but there were no prosecutions. Calls to establish a resources regulator like NSW’s Natural Resources Access Regulator, which fined Illawarra Coal, may be warranted, but it may do little to stop the cycle of businesses pushing the frontiers of expropriation before appearing to be reined in. Moreover, regulators and resource managers risk building in the unlicensed takes depending on when they begin measurements and how they judge average flows through river systems that have already been profoundly changed by agricultural and other industrial activity.
When penalties are applied, as in the case of the Dendrobrium mine, they are light. In the first successful prosecution of a tier-one offence by NSW’s Natural Resources Access Regulator, an irrigator in Moree Plains in northern NSW was fined $353,750 plus costs of $2,374 for the construction of an unlawful dam and under-recording water takes.26 While not operating on coal mining profit margins, the Environmental Defenders Office pointed out that the fine was only 5 percent of the maximum possible penalty. The approximate quantity of unrecorded, illegal water taken over the “offending period” from 2016 to 2018 was 1,418 megaliters. In the spirit of the exercise of pricing water, this makes for the equivalent of $0.0002 per liter. Given these examples, it is a deep irony that water markets were introduced with the intention not just to maximize “productive benefit,” as Lin Crase, Phil Pagan, and Brian Dollery note, but also to improve ecological and environmental outcomes.27 The precise mechanism through this would be achieved is a persistent area of vagueness in the wide literature on water markets in the Murray-Darling system. My impression is that by pricing water entitlements, irrigators were meant to make more efficient use of water—not to reduce water use, but to redistribute it according to the prevailing market imperatives.
The economic dogma is that markets turn scarcity into a virtue, but allocating capital to the most profitable use. The 2021 Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report into the Murray-Darling Basin water markets is replete with the promise to turn scarcity to the advantage of the economy, but the environment does not really figure. The report reads: “It is important that institutions and other governance arrangements are designed to focus on making the markets work—to ensure users are able to maximise the benefits, for themselves and for the economy, from vital, scarce resources.”28
In case we didn’t get it the first time, they repeat:
Water is scarce; and where it is demanded or valued most changes over time. The ability to trade water helps people access water where it is wanted most—to put it to its most productive use. With water trade, irrigators produce more of the things valued most and the Australian economy benefits.29
Another mechanism in the arsenal of advocates for the market is that it internalizes what was previously an externality, a cost not considered by the water user. Once again, it is perhaps an irony that rather than confront users with a cost, the introduction of the market led many to realize and begin to trade “sleeper” entitlements. A managerial intervention meant to force users to allocate a scarce resource more efficiently ended up increasing water use dramatically, despite consistently unrealized promises to reclaim water for the environment.30 One reason the promise of environmental water remains unfulfilled is because the release of environmental water moves through the same system as that which private users draw from, and without agreements with landholders, the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office “had to avoid releasing large volumes in case it made its way onto private land or blocked low level river crossings.”31
Managing water through the market also has the non-incidental effect of prioritizing profitable water use, which leaves the environment and Indigenous water users far down the list. Irrigator councils and business groups—organized capital—constantly complain about what they see as the threat of environmental water. Their complaints lay bare the contradiction of capitalist expropriation of nature. One report cited an irrigator for whom, “what can get lost in debates like these is the human factor. The Murray-Darling Basin is not merely an ecosystem—it is a resource, and a vital one for the immense agricultural interests it sustains.”32 This extraordinary reversal of the conditions of possibility shows just how much of a social relation the question of natural scarcity remains. Nevertheless, there is the more or less obvious fact that the irrigator is wrong: water is first and foremost part of an ecosystem and can only secondly be a resource if it is to have the possibility of regenerating and reproducing itself.
Private Assets and Public Losses
Markets can also make private owners seems essential to the reproduction of an ecosystem. Waves of public infrastructure privatization in the 1980s and ’90s created a natural monopoly for corporations like Veolia and Suez. Sydney’s drinking water, jeopardized by the Dendrobrium mine’s illegal extraction, is in part managed by Suez. Despite Maude Barlow’s assertion that rich nations would “never permit foreign corporations to run and profit from their water supplies,” both municipal and agricultural water are owned by foreign entities in Australia.33 They promise to “optimise the efficiency and performance” of municipal assets and “improve or expand ageing infrastructure and gain greater value from their investment.”34 Projects like the Prospect Reservoir water treatment facility have attracted capital from institutional investors like UniSuper.35
The fact that such projects attract investors means the projects offer “attractive returns,” as UniSuper head of property and private markets says. Such essential public infrastructure is perfect for long-term investment to siphon money into private hands because governments will always step in to rescue it should anything go wrong, often socializing risk. As Clark and Foster put it,
growth of natural scarcity is seen as a golden opportunity to further privatize the world’s commons.… This is best illustrated by the rapid privatization of freshwater, which is now seen as a mega-market for global [private] accumulation. The drying up and contamination of freshwater diminishes public wealth, creating investment opportunities for capital, while profits made from selling increasingly scarce water are recorded as contributions to income and riches.36
According to Karen Piper, pollution, groundwater loss, and climate change are the three main problems facing freshwater.37 Alongside the scarcity framework often applied to water, pioneers of “natural capital” and “sustainable development” like Edward Barbier in The Water Paradox also propose that it is outdated management, underpricing, and lack of innovation that has exacerbated scarcity.38 This funnels the problem into the technocratic organization of functioning markets that price goods and resources based on the information channeled through the market.
Markets, in some proponents’ terms, sound perfectly suited to managing complex ecosystems. Advocates like Terry Anderson suggest that markets are, in a sense, like water: dynamic, flowing, connective. This link also provides markets with naturalistic legitimacy, mimicking the natural flows of nature as gravity provides water to the lower stretches of a river. In an illustration of his “free market environmentalism,” Anderson recommends strengthened, enforceable property rights that allow transfer and exchange to the maximum extent.39 In other words, he recommends maximal fluidity so that market transactions can best make use of and reflect ecological conditions. Water markets, especially in their mature form with interstate and inter-river trades, give the illusion that economic transactions are followed by neat hydrological exchange. In dynamically responding to conditions, prices do what no scientist or environmental manager can.
Of course, this whole view tends to elide the extent to which market actors respond not to environmental conditions but to economic conditions, and that their aim as market actors is not ecologically sustainability but profit. Markets provide information on a single, limited, and abstract axis of value: price. Moreover, making property rights “well-defined, enforced and transferable” enables users to trade with security but it does nothing for the river itself.40 It is silent on the health of the waters and is an obstacle to the effective repair of the environment. Not only do markets make property rights enforceable, they also create a sense of entitlement when water is requisitioned without free exchange. The need to reclaim water for the environment is perceived as a threat to market exchange, as cumbersome bureaucratic meddling or monopolistic behavior.
The Reproductive Crisis of Water
In fact, it is the ferocious intensification of demand for water as a commodity that threatens the environment and healthy living conditions for communities. A further part in the mosaic of water crises is water mining, which contributed to Tamborine Mountain’s bores running dry and its residents left stranded without drinking water in 2019, despite warnings two years earlier.41 Residents’ fears of “running dry” were realized and the sight of trucks carrying water harvested from the mountain out of the town was a stark reminder of how market priorities allocate resources: “When the school bore ran dry last week, trucks carrying emergency water up the mountain passed trucks carrying local water to bottling plants.”42
Private companies, including Coca Cola Amatil, have long relied on a 2011 study that found water mining was “sustainable,” but warned about reduced ecological outcomes and flagged numerous unknown hydro-ecological factors in the complex groundwater systems.43 It is a pattern repeated globally that has adverse health effects on Indigenous people.44 At a site in Canada, Nestlé exploits legislative loopholes and oversight to pay a mere $503.71 CAD per million liters extracted ($0.0005/liter). As Maude Barlow argues, corporations are “imposing a new form of colonial conquest dressed up as the one and only economic model available.”45 Both the local and Queensland governments claimed their hands were tied either by jurisdictional issues or old development applications, echoing longstanding complexities in jurisdictional management of water in Australia. The extraction of groundwater, which receives little regulatory oversight, is all the more precarious since the mechanisms that replenish it are not well known and extracting it can change soil and ground dynamics. The fact that these effects are “risks” renders the effects of continued water extraction a gamble and absolves the companies or governments of responsibility, since in a sense the almost inevitable ensuing disaster was only a possibility.
The image of trucks carrying water off the mountain as a town runs dry is the epitome of the Lauderdale paradox that Foster and Clark use to describe the irrationality of the expropriation of natural commons. Foster and Clark describe the paradox as the “inverse correlation between public wealth and private riches such that an increase in the latter often served to diminish the former.”46 Many classical economists recognized this before modern economic theory buried it by conflating wealth with value, and so denying that the common natural wealth had any value before it was exchanged on a market.
In On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), David Ricardo picked up Smith’s water paradox, writing, “Gold, on the contrary, though of little use compared with air or water, will exchange for a great quantity of other goods. Utility then is not the measure of exchangeable value, although it is absolutely essential to it.”47 He continues that unlike most commodities, which receive their value from labor, “there are some commodities, the value of which is determined by scarcity alone,” adding in his notes a quote from Smith: “Where she is munificently beneficent, [nature] always works gratis.”48 Ricardo seems to recognize the potential for undervaluing natural resources, but elects instead to treat nature as a “free gift.” Classical political economy’s cover for environmental expropriation would lay the foundations for the further step taken by neoliberal economists, including precursors like Carl Menger, who saw nature as “abundantly available (non-economic) goods” that must be rendered economic, including by imposing scarcity if necessary.49
This way of rendering value erases the specific character of natural, variegated entities like water. It makes little sense to homogenize “water” into a single molecular construction in real social and economic contexts where complex factors of hydrology and ecology dramatically change the way in which water must be treated. Moore and Bieler insist that “water is neither a natural resource nor merely an economic good but is constantly being reimagined through these dynamics.”50 The historical and material changes enacted by bringing economics to bear on water have also changed its conceptual character. The broader category of resource, Vandana Shiva notes in Water Wars, originates in the Latin root meaning surge, implying “that which has the capacity to rise again.”51 Resources are not mute repositories awaiting the benediction of economic evaluation. Capitalist production has treated nature as a “free gift,” meaning it has no “[re]production cost.” The ongoing task of repair and replenishment, as well as the forbearance before the promise of short-term rewards, are occluded by this lens. This is not some intellectual error or calculation mistake, this is simply the price of extracting surplus that encloses nature to leaven the accumulation of private riches.
Despite narratives of liberal apology and reform that locate the violence of colonial capitalism in the past, expropriation remains a common strategy, as Elizabeth Povinelli argues in Between Gaia and Ground.52 Campaigners like Maude Barlow use the word theft as a description of commodification and privatization, signaling the moment at which state-managed resources are often requisitioned for capital. This process maintains at least the formal contours of an exploitative exchange relationship. Nevertheless, real theft and expropriation remain an ongoing process, with “expropriation that then fuels expanded exploitation within new (often extractive) industries.” They argue that we must see this continued expropriation as part of colonization, premised on the destruction and invasion of Indigenous country, for which “water is not separate from land.”53
The occlusion of this relationship has led water managers and even some environmentalists alike to ignore what Paul Humphries describes as the “role that Indigenous people have played in the ecology of freshwater ecosystems in the Murray-Darling Basin,” melancholically illustrated by Gilmore’s recollections.54 These relationships cannot be simply abstracted from the specific local cultural practices and ecological sensitivity they encoded. They represent a barrier to the abstractions of managers and businesses in the allocation of entitlements, who seem to see water trades as transferring molecules (albeit in the billions) from one piece of property to another, one account to another. Water, embedded in the specific relations it sustains and that sustain it, does not mechanically obey.
Consolidating Colonization
The visible effects of this ongoing colonization necessary to put a price on water are on display at the Barmah Choke, or Barmah-Millewa Reach, on the Murray River. A narrow section of river, the choke is also an economic boundary with water trades above and below restricted to “back trades,” which require water to be traded in both directions.55 Demand for water below the choke to fund irrigation must be balanced against the fragile ecosystem in the choke (as well as “mitigate flooding of private land”). It is an important site for biodiversity, with wetlands fed by “a braided network of anabranch creeks.”56 A range of upstream activities, including land clearing, gold mining, de-snagging, and river regulation, exacerbated by 2022 flooding, have created a sand slug that is making its way through the choke.57 The sand buildup is partly an effect of historical land clearing and mining in the nineteenth century, restricting water flow by more than two thousand megaliters per day. In 2019 and 2020, an investigation showed more than twenty million cubic meters of sand built up near the choke being driven downstream.58 The sand acts like a flow visualization for the river’s accumulated sediments, a silted knot of impediment to the transformation of the wetlands area into a special economic zone.
In a separate but related situation, plans to store million tons of salt in a lined landfill in southern Queensland risk contaminating the Murray-Darling Basin with mining waste.59 The brine used for coal seam gas production would be crystallized and stored in the “cheapest short-term option,” as Stuart Khan remarked. This is the lesson failing to be learned by extractive capitalism, as it seeks the easiest, cheapest channel for waste disposal. Lined landfills, like the one proposed, require constant management inconsistent with the smash-and-grab strategies of mining corporations. Notable in the reporting is the emphasis on threats to property, with community groups like Lock the Gate marshalling landholders as a uniquely affected group opposed to coal seam gas and other fossil fuel extraction.60 Their opposition to new extractive industries threatening the production of food and fiber casts a historical veil over the originary expropriation that produces their property as private in the first place. In this instance, it is possible to see the protest against mining contamination as a defense of property rights, as Moore and Bieler have done.61 The integration of prior acts of colonization into a legitimate, stakeholder-style process of resource management reflects the complicity of the legal system in the consolidation of expropriation.
Laws and the legal system, including the sort of penalties applied to the Dendrobrium mine case and others, work to reintegrate the frontiers of extraction and economic evaluation in the aftermath of incidents of mass theft, toxicity, and violence. The price exacted in the form of a penalty is a tactical retreat in a wider business strategy that involves expropriation. This extends the colonial frontier of the social license to operate, the entrepreneurial testing of the limits of our commitment to a nature we can inhabit. Regulators like the National Resources Access Regulator preside over a moving line of “lawful,” though even its head Grant Barnes states that, “if you run a jurisdiction where there’s no consequence, it’s natural that people would take a chance.”62 Water theft has a price and, according to the logic of capitalism, it is worth paying.
The Laughing Stock of COP28 – How the UAE Event Became a Farce
Martin Jay
December 17, 2023
The failure of the event can really be determined by how media were mismanaged from the beginning.
It was always going to be a balancing act keeping the credibility of the global environmental talk shop COP28 in check while holding it in a country where they are producing fossil fuels like it is going out of fashion. It might not have been a wise choice of the UAE’s president Mohamed Bin Zaid to give the top job of presiding over the event to the oil minister and the boss of the national oil company, but it was equally unwise for Sultan al-Jabar to have used the event as a way of promoting the UAE and its oil production to other countries. Something about that smacks of shooting yourself in the foot and perhaps Mr Al Jabar’s denials and feigned innocence at the opening day press conference just made the whole fiasco even more of a farce than it already was.
The UAE tycoon just lowered himself into the vat of sulphuric acid when – in media terms – he couldn’t pull off the ultimate stunt that all politicians dream of but very few actually achieve: to lie to the press and get away with it.
Lazy journalists might have just left it at that. But then they started to look more closely at Mr Al Jaber who had paid Lynton Cosby, the infamous Australian media and political consultant to handle all the PR for the event – and decided that the Emirate minister’s unchecked, feral speaking needed a closer look. It didn’t take much digging to find even more controversy days earlier when he more or less mocked the science behind climate change in defence of fossil fuels, leading many to ask how did the UAE get this gig in the first place and couldn’t its elite have chosen someone with more media elan?
The failure of the event can really be determined by how media were mismanaged from the beginning when the early signs were there back in January when the Guardian launched its first attack against Mr Al Jaber questioning his credentials. That might have been a good indicator that Jaber and his team needed to listen and learn with a serious of crisis management media training sessions which Mr Cosby should have set up and wheeled in the grey haired retired journalists in London to help with the dummy interviews. But presumably, being someone who has enjoyed silencing the press – the UAE has probably one of the most servile press in the world, often with media outlets running front page stories about the elite opening a shopping mall or just repeating one of their tweets – it was little surprise that Jaber believed that the world’s press wouldn’t turn against him. The old story that when you mess up media, you become the story, became the story. Jaber, within a matter of hours, became the focus of attention by journalists who were the to find a good story and didn’t find one from the organised conferences and hullabaloo.
The UAE needs to think much more about international media if it is going to court the attention of the world. Its elite need to wake up and realise that international press whose journalists fly in and leave a few days later are working from a very different hymn sheet than the local expats who work for The National, which despite huffing and puffing and blowing hot for Jaber right from the beginning made no impact whatsoever on global opinion which has written off the event as an unprecedented PR disaster. Indeed, it was Yanis Varoufakis, a media darling and former Greek Finance minister who put it so succinctly on Twitter:
“UN Chief denounces COP28’s President. What did they expect? Appointing Sultan al-Jaber, the head of UAE’s oil company, as Head of COP28 was like appointing the leader of a pack of wolves to preside over a conference on making the world vegan”. The UAE doesn’t have a satire magazine like Private Eye so we won’t pity those who were robbed of the opportunity to lay on the irony hard and thick. But the lessons are there for the royals of the UAE who must be dumbfounded by the calamity of the event and just how much the whole event has become an international laughing stock. Perhaps think about media more next time?
This Generation’s Problem: Climate Chaos
Posted on December 20, 2023 by Yves Smith
Yves here. More sobering realism on the climate front.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
From James Hansen’s latest version of his latest paper, “Global Warming in the Pipeline,” we find this (emphasis mine):
Consistent analysis of temperature over the full Cenozoic era … implies that CO2 was 300–350 ppm in the Pliocene and about 450 ppm at transition to a nearly ice-free planet, exposing unrealistic lethargy of ice sheet models.
Keep that number — “450 ppm at transition to a nearly ice-free planet” — in mind as you read the following.
CO2 Growth Is Accelerating
First, the latest CO2 data from NOAA monthly averages:
and a close look at recent data:
Note the peak at 424 ppm, and consider again: “Consistent analysis of temperature over the full Cenozoic era [implies] about 450 ppm at transition to a nearly ice-free planet.”
Like global warming itself, the rate of CO2 growth is accelerating. Annual growth is now 2.4°C per year, up from 2°C per year in the previous decade.
CO2 Levels Through 2060
So let’s do the math. Assuming acceleration of annual growth — meaning, the world’s governments never reject fossil fuels — the decade of the 2020s could see CO2 growth of nearly 30 ppm per year; the 2030s, growth above 35 ppm per year; the 2040s, growth near 45 ppm per year; and so on.
That yields CO2 numbers like these:
2030 — 438 ppm (no accel.)
2040 — 463 ppm (no accel.)
2050 — 487 ppm (no accel.)
2030 — 444 ppm (with accel.)
2040 — 479 ppm (with accel.)
2050 — 522 ppm (with accel.)
Need we go on?
A ‘Chinese Century’?
That makes even predictions like these optimistic. In a dire thread that starts here, Ian Welsh writes this at the end:
By the 2080s? I think the nation-splitting chaos will start a lot sooner.
The above took hundreds of years. We’ll see the same, globally, in less than ten once the real crisis takes hold: the scramble for food, for high ground, against disease, and all the regional disasters that threaten integrated global life, like shipping of goods.
Will this generation dodge the bill for its own climate failure? Or pay for its sins itself?
We’re Going To Need Better Leaders
I really do wish people would take this stuff seriously. By “people” I mean people with power.
Barring that, I wish people like us would remove those people-with-power, and pretty darn soon. We’re gonna need better leaders, and pretty darn soon.
Here's the thing about comparing the present to the fall of the Roman Empire: neither were such great shakes for the vast majority. Things had already deteriorated greatly for the working class, most of them had already been enserfed. It was the rich who fell the farthest, in both cases a disaster of their own making.
******
How to Make Recyclable Plastics Out of CO2 to Slow Climate Change
Posted on December 22, 2023 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Perhaps readers will tell me I am wrong, but I find the claims made in this article about CO2 to plastic to be fantastic. At best, they omit the full life cycle energy and possible/probable CO2 cost of fabricating and disposing of these product. The author actually praises disposable cups, when we need societally to wean ourselves off them. She also appears not to comprehend that if a cup made with CO2 plastics that is also biodegradable would not sequester the CO2 (as cement incorporating CO2 arguably would) but would release it back into the environment.
By Ann Leslie Davis, an award-winning freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Grist, Mother Jones, Science News, Modern Farmer, and many other publications. She covers biotech and climate issues, focusing on plastics and emerging carbon dioxide removal methods. An earlier version of this article was published by Science News. This adaptation was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute
It’s morning, and you wake up on a comfortable foam mattress made partly from greenhouse gas. You pull on a T-shirt and sneakers manufactured using carbon dioxide pulled from factory emissions. After a good run, you stop for a cup of joe and guiltlessly toss the plastic cup in the trash, confident it will fully biodegrade into harmless organic materials. At home, you squeeze shampoo from a bottle that has lived many lifetimes, then slip into a dress fashioned from smokestack emissions. You head to work with a smile, knowing your morning routine has made Earth’s atmosphere a teeny bit cleaner.
Sound like a dream? Hardly. These products are already on the marketaround the world. And others are in the process of being developed. They’re part of a growing effort by academia and industry to reduce the damage caused by centuries of human activity that has sent CO2 and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
The need for action is urgent. In its 2022 report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, stated that rising temperatures have already caused irreversible damage to the planet and increased human death and disease.
Meanwhile, the amount of CO2 emitted continues to grow. In 2023, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted that if current policy and growth trends continue, annual global CO2 emissions could increase from more than 35 billion metric tons in 2022 to 41 billion metric tons by 2050.
Capturing—and Using—Carbon
Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is a climate mitigation strategy with “considerable” potential, according to the IPCC, which released its first report on the technology in 2005. CCS traps CO2 from smokestacks or ambient air and pumps it underground for permanent sequestration; controversially, the fossil fuel industry has also used this technology to pump more oil out of reservoirs.
As of 2023, almost 40 CCS facilities operate worldwide, with about 225 more in development, according to Statista. The Global CCS Institutereports that, in 2022, the total annual capacity of all current and planned projects was estimated at 244 million metric tons. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act includes $3.5 billion in funding for four U.S. direct air capture facilities.
But rather than just storing it, the captured carbon could be used to make things. In 2022, for the first time, the IPCC added carbon capture and utilization, or CCU, to its list of options for drawing down atmospheric carbon. CCU captures CO2 and incorporates it into carbon-containing products like cement, jet fuel, and the raw materials used for making plastics.
CCU could reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 20 billion metric tons in 2050—more than half of the world’s global emissions today, the IPCC estimates.
Such recognition was a significant victory for a movement that has struggled to emerge from the shadow of its more established cousin, CCS, says chemist and global CCU expert Peter Styring of the University of Sheffield in England, during a 2022 interview. He adds that many CCU-related companies are springing up, collaborating with each other and with more established companies, and working across borders. London-based consumer goods giant Unilever, for example, partnered with companies from the United States and India to create the first laundry detergent made from industrial emissions.
The potential of CCU is “enormous,” both in terms of its volume and monetary prospects, said mechanical engineer Volker Sick at an April 2022 conference in Brussels following the IPCC report that first included CCU as a climate change strategy. Sick, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, directs the Global CO2 Initiative, which promotes CCU as a mainstream climate solution. “We’re not talking about something that’s nice to do but doesn’t move the needle,” he added. “It moves the needle in many, many aspects.”
The Plastics Paradox
The use of carbon dioxide in products is not new. CO2 makes soda fizzy, keeps foods frozen (as dry ice), and converts ammonia to urea for fertilizer. What’s new is the focus on creating products with CO2 as a strategy to slow climate change. According to Lux Research, a Boston-based research and advisory firm, the CCU market, estimated at nearly $2 billion in 2020, could mushroom to $550 billion by 2040.
Much of this market is driven by adding CO2 to cement (which can improve its strength and elasticity) and to jet fuel—two moves that can lower both industries’ large carbon footprints. CO2-to-plastics is a niche market today, but the field aims to battle two crises: climate change and plastic pollution.
Plastics are made from fossil fuels, a mix of hydrocarbons formed by the remains of ancient organisms. Most plastics are produced by refining crude oil, which is then broken down into smaller molecules through a process called cracking. These smaller molecules, known as monomers, are the building blocks of polymers. Monomers such as ethylene, propylene, styrene, and others are linked together to form plastics such as polyethylene (detergent bottles, toys, rigid pipes), polypropylene (water bottles, luggage, car parts), and polystyrene (plastic cutlery, CD cases, Styrofoam).
But making plastics from fossil fuels is a carbon catastrophe. Each step in the life cycle of plastics—extraction, transport, manufacture, and disposal—emits massive amounts of greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, according to the Center for International Environmental Law, a nonprofit law firm with offices in Geneva and Washington, D.C. These emissions alone—more than 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2019—are enough to threaten global climate targets.
And the numbers are about to get much worse. A 2018 report by the Paris-based intergovernmental International Energy Agency projected that global demand for plastics will increase from about 400 million metric tons in 2020 to nearly 600 million by 2050. Future demand is expected to be concentrated in developing countries and vastly outstrip global recycling efforts.
Plastics are a severe environmental crisis, from fossil fuel use to their buildup in landfills and oceans. But we’re a society addicted to plastic and all it gives us—cell phones, computers, comfy Crocs. Is there a way to have our (plastic-wrapped) cake and eat it too?
Yes, Sick says. First, cap the oil wells. Next, make plastics from aboveground carbon. Today, there are products made of between 20 and 40 percent CO2. Finally, he says, build a circular economy that reduces resource use, reuses products, and then recycles them into other new products.
“Not only can we eliminate the fossil carbon as a source so that we don’t add to the aboveground carbon budget, but in the process, we can also rethink how we make plastics,” Sick says. He suggests that plastics be specifically designed “to live very, very long so that they don’t have to be replaced… or that they decompose in a benign manner.”
However, creating plastics from thin air is not easy. CO2 needs to be extracted from the atmosphere or smokestacks, for example, using specialized equipment. It must often be compressed into liquid form and transported, generally through pipelines. Finally, to meet the overall goal of reducing the amount of carbon in the air, the chemical reaction that turns CO2 into the building blocks of plastics must be run with as little extra energy as possible. Keeping energy use low is a unique challenge when dealing with the carbon dioxide molecule.
A Bond That’s Hard to Break
There’s a reason that carbon dioxide is such a potent greenhouse gas. It is incredibly stable and can linger in the atmosphere for 300 to 1,000 years. That stability makes CO2 hard to break apart and add to other chemicals. Lots of energy is typically needed to ensure that chemical reaction.
“This is the fundamental energy problem of CO2,” says chemist Ian Tonks of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in a July 2022 interview. “Energy is necessary to fix CO2 to plastics. We’re trying to find that energy in creative ways.”
Catalysts offer a possible answer. These substances can increase the rate of a chemical reaction and thus reduce the need for energy. Scientists in the CO2-to-plastics field have spent more than a decade searching for catalysts that can work at close to room temperature and pressure and coax CO2 to form a new chemical identity. These efforts fall into two broad categories: chemical and biological conversion.
First Attempts
Early experiments focused on adding CO2 to highly reactive monomers like epoxides to facilitate the necessary chemical reaction. Epoxides are three-membered rings composed of one oxygen atom and two carbon atoms. Like a spring under tension, they can easily pop open.
In the early 2000s, industrial chemist Christoph Gürtler and chemist Walter Leitner of RWTH Aachen University in Germany found a zinc catalyst that allowed them to break open the epoxide ring of polypropylene oxide and combine it with CO2. Following the reaction, the CO2 was joined permanently to the polypropylene molecule and was no longer in gas form—something that is true of all CO2-to-plastic reactions.
Their work resulted in one of the first commercial CO2 products—a polyurethane foam containing 20 percent captured CO2. As of 2022, the German company Covestro, where Gürtler now works, sells 5,000 metric tons of CO2-based polyol annually in the form of mattresses, car interiors, building insulation, and sports flooring.
Other research has focused on other monomers to expand the variety of CO2-based plastics. Butadiene is a hydrocarbon monomer that can be used to make polyester for clothing, carpets, adhesives, and other products.
In 2020, chemist James Eagan at the University of Akron in Ohio mixed butadiene and CO2 with a series of catalysts developed at Stanford University. Eagan hoped to create a carbon-negative polyester, meaning it has a net effect of removing CO2 from the atmosphere rather than adding it. When he analyzed the contents of one vial, he discovered he had created something even better: a polyester made with 29 percent CO2 that degrades in high-pH water into organic materials.
“Chemistry is like cooking,” Eagan says during an interview. “We took chocolate chips, flour, eggs, butter, mixed them up, and instead of getting cookies, we opened the oven and found a chicken potpie.”
Eagan’s invention has immediate applications in the recycling industry, where machines can often get gummed up from the nondegradable adhesives used in packaging, soda bottle labels, and other products. An adhesive that easily breaks down may improve the efficiency of recycling facilities.
Tonks, described by Eagan as a friendly competitor, took Eagan’s patented process a step further. By putting Eagan’s product through one more reaction, Tonks made the polymer fully degradable back to reusable CO2—a circular carbon economy goal. Tonks created a startup in 2022 called LoopCO2 to produce a variety of biodegradable plastics.
Microbial Help
Researchers have also harnessed microbes to help turn carbon dioxide into useful materials, including dress fabric. Some of the planet’s oldest living microbes emerged at a time when Earth’s atmosphere was rich in carbon dioxide. Known as acetogens and methanogens, the microbes developed simple metabolic pathways that use enzyme catalysts to convert CO2 and carbon monoxide into organic molecules. In the last decade, researchers have studied the microbes’ potential to remove CO2 and CO from the atmosphere or industrial emissions and turn them into valuable products.
LanzaTech, based in Skokie, Illinois, partners with steel plants in China, India, and Belgium to turn industrial emissions into ethanol using the acetogenic bacterium Clostridium autoethanogenum. The first company to achieve the conversion of waste gases to ethanol on an industrial scale, LanzaTech designed bacteria-filled bioreactors to fit onto existing plant facilities. Ethanol, a valuable plastic precursor, goes through two more steps to become polyester. In 2021, the clothing company Zara announced a new line of dresses made from LanzaTech’s CO2-based fabrics.
In 2020, steel production emitted almost 2 metric tons of CO2 for every 1 metric ton of steel produced. By contrast, a life cycle assessment study found that LanzaTech’s ethanol production process lowered greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80 percent compared with ethanol made from fossil fuels.
In February 2022, researchers from LanzaTech, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and other institutions reported in Nature Biotechnology that they had genetically modified the Clostridium bacterium to produce acetone and isopropanol, two other fossil fuel-based industrial chemicals. The spent bacteria is used as animal feed or biochar, a carbon dioxide removal method that stores carbon in the soil for centuries.
Other researchers are skipping living microbes and just using their catalysts. More than a decade ago, chemist Charles Dismukes of Rutgers University began looking at acetogens and methanogens to capture and use atmospheric carbon. He was intrigued by their ability to release energy when making carbon building blocks from CO2, a reaction that usually requires energy. He and his team focused on the bacteria’s nickel phosphide catalysts, which are responsible for the energy-releasing carbon reaction.
Dismukes and colleagues developed six electrocatalysts to make monomers at room temperature and pressure using only CO2, water, and electricity. The energy-releasing pathway of the nickel phosphide catalysts “lowers the required voltage to run the reaction, which lowers the energy consumption of the process and improves the carbon footprint,” says Karin Calvinho, a former student of Dismukes. Calvinho is now the chief technical officer at RenewCO2, a startup that began to commercialize Dismukes’ innovations in 2018. RenewCO2 plans to obtain CO2 from biomass, industrial emissions, or direct air capture, then sell its monomers to companies wanting to reduce their carbon footprint, Calvinho says during an interview.
Barriers to Change
Yet researchers and companies face challenges in scaling up carbon capture and reuse. Some barriers lurk in the language of regulations written before CCU existed. An example is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s program to provide tax credits and other incentives to biofuel companies. The program is geared toward plant-based fuels like corn and sugarcane. LanzaTech’s approach for producing jet fuel doesn’t qualify for credits because bacteria are not plants.
Other barriers are more fundamental. Styring points to the long-standing practice of fossil fuel subsidies, which in 2021 topped $440 billionworldwide. According to the International Energy Agency, global government subsidies to the oil and gas industry keep fossil fuel prices artificially low, making it hard for renewables to compete. Styring advocates shifting those subsidies toward renewables.
“We try to work on the principle that we recycle carbon and create a circular economy,” he says. “But current legislation is set up to perpetuate a linear economy.”
The happy morning routine that makes the world carbon-cleaner is theoretically possible. It’s just not the way the world works yet. Getting to that circular economy, where the amount of carbon aboveground is finite and controlled in a never-ending loop of use and reuse, will require change on multiple fronts. Government policy and investment, corporate practices, technological development, and human behavior would need to align effectively and quickly in the interests of the planet.
In the meantime, researchers continue their work on the carbon dioxide molecule.
“I try to plan for the worst-case scenario,” Eagan said during an interview. “If legislation is never in place to curb emissions, how do we operate within our capitalist system to generate value in a renewable and responsible way? At the end of the day, we will need new chemistry.”
Fully agree with Yves' assessment of this article. Technical fetishism will not save us from the ravages of capitalism. To paraphrase: At the end of the day, we will need new social/economic system.(Italics added.)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
