The Long Ecological Revolution

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Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 02, 2022 3:42 pm

COP15 president: Post-2020 biodiversity framework taking shape
By Erik Nilsson, Wang Jianfen and Liu Ming | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-12-02 06:40

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Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu talks with Erik Nilsson in his office in Beijing. JIANG DONG/CHINA DAILY

Editor's note: The highly anticipated second phase of the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity will soon start in Montreal, Canada. What should you expect? And what's China's role in the COP15 presidency?

Erik Nilsson, a senior reporter of China Daily, talked with Huang Runqiu, COP15 president and China's minister of ecology and environment, about the upcoming conference and more.

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Women catch fish amid blooming water lilies in a lake at a village in Morigaon district of India's northeastern state of Assam on Nov 6, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

Q1: This year marks the 30th anniversary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. In your view, why is biodiversity important? And what challenges does the world face in this respect?

A1: As a Chinese saying goes, "All beings flourish when they live in harmony and receive nourishment from nature." Biodiversity lays the foundation for human survival and development.

Our clothing, food, shelter, means of travel - every aspect of our material and cultural lives - are closely related to biodiversity. Biodiversity provides us with rich food, fresh air, clean water and the necessities for production and life such as clothing, lumber and raw materials for medicine and industry. It makes the Earth full of vigor and vitality, fertilizes the Earth like water and roots (nourish a plant) and lays the foundation for sustainable economic development.

Data show that about half of global GDP is related to biodiversity. Over 3 billion people's livelihoods depend on marine and coastal biodiversity. Over 1.6 billion people's livelihoods depend on forests and non-lumber forest products. And about 70 percent of people living in poverty depend on activities like agriculture, fishing and forestry. As for healthcare, 70 percent of cancer drugs are natural products or originate from chemical compounds found in natural products.

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Swans on the Qingshui River in Beijing's Miyun district on Nov 15, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

In addition, biodiversity plays an important role in maintaining the natural ecological balance, for instance, by fostering water sources, purifying the environment, conserving water and soil, preventing or mediating natural disasters, safeguarding food security and protecting human health.

Over the years, the international community has become fully aware that biodiversity is of utmost importance and has acted to protect it.

However, the deterioration of biodiversity has undergone no fundamental changes.

In May 2019, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services published a report. It shows that due to human activity, 75 percent of the Earth's terrestrial environment and 66 percent of its marine environment have been significantly altered, more than 85 percent of wetlands have been lost, and about one-fourth of species face the threat of extinction.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said in a 2020 report that 41 percent of amphibians, 26 percent of mammals and 14 percent of birds are threatened with extinction. The global biodiversity crisis is worsening.

In the face of global biodiversity loss, we humans live in a community of a shared future and no country or organization or individual can remain immune.

In 2021, President Xi Jinping delivered a keynote speech at the leaders' summit of the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the Convention on Biological Diversity. He said that the international community must enhance cooperation, build consensus and pool strength to build a community of all life on Earth.

Therefore, the international community should join hands to advance biodiversity protection, champion the harmonious coexistence between humans and nature, respect, adapt to and protect nature, promote global cooperation in biodiversity protection, and uphold multilateralism and the principle of equal consultation. Only in this way can it pool strength to protect biodiversity, realize win-win results and jointly build a better home.

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A Yangtze finless porpoise jumps out of the water in the lower reaches of the Gezhouba Dam in Yichang, Hubei province, on Nov 9, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

Q2: Global biodiversity loss is accelerating. And this is a challenge for all humankind. What achievements has China made in recent years in this respect?

A2: The Chinese government has always attached great importance to biodiversity protection and has made it a key part of the country's efforts to build an ecological civilization. In recent years, with the scientific guiding principle of Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization, we have continuously enhanced the top-level designs for biodiversity conservation, such as improvements of systems, mechanisms and regulations, and we have rolled out of a series of measures. We have made clear progress in conserving biodiversity and have earned international acclaim.

For instance, the population of wild giant pandas has increased from 1,114 to 1,864. Their classification has been downgraded from "endangered" to "vulnerable". Last year, before the convening of COP15 in Yunnan province, a group of wandering wild elephants ventured northward in the province before returning to their original habitat.

The Yangtze finless porpoises, which are known in China as the "smiling angels" because they appear to grin, have frequently appeared in different sections of the Yangtze River. Snow leopards have been frequently spotted in the Sanjiangyuan National Park. Marbled cats, which had not been seen for more than 30 years, have reappeared in the Gaoligong Mountains in Yunnan province. The population of wild Hainan black-crested gibbons has increased from fewer than 10 in two groups 40 years ago to 36 in five groups.

In recent years, news about China's biodiversity protection has frequently made headlines. In our view, this progress can be attributed to several factors.

First, we have improved the top-level biodiversity-protection designs. We have elevated the biodiversity protection to a national strategy in China. We have drafted or revised a series of relevant laws and regulations, have included biodiversity conservation in development plans for governments at the central and local levels and have actively pushed to mainstream such protections.

Over the past decade, China has drafted and revised more than 20 laws and regulations pertinent to biodiversity conservation, including laws on forestry, grasslands, fisheries, wild animals, the environment, seeds, wetlands, the Yangtze River and biosecurity. We also rolled out the Opinions on Further Strengthening the Protection of Biological Diversity and implemented the China National Biodiversity Conservation Strategy and Action Plan (2011-30). Relevant departments also drew up regulations on the management of invasive species and issued lists of these species, improving prevention and control with good results.

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Shiwuli River in Hefei, Anhui province, on April 28, 2020. [Photo/Xinhua]
Second, we have established a system of protected areas with a focus on national parks. To date, China has built its first five national parks, nearly 200 botanical gardens and 250 wildlife rehabilitation and breeding centers. China has established nearly 10,000 protected areas of all types and at all levels, accounting for about 18 percent of its total land area. In this respect, we fulfilled the 17 percent Aichi Target ahead of time.

We have placed 74 percent of our key State-protected wildlife species under effective protection and have gradually rehabilitated the wild population of some rare and endangered species. In addition to the giant pandas and Hainan black-crested gibbons I mentioned just now, the crested ibis population has increased from only seven in 1981 to over 5,000 and the population of Tibetan antelopes has grown from 70,000 during the 1980s-1990s to more than 300,000. If you visit the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, you can see the magnificent view of tens of thousands of antelopes galloping together. It's really spectacular.

China has also set up a relatively complete ex-situ conservation system, including botanical gardens, germplasm-resource centers, gene banks and wildlife rehabilitation and breeding centers. Over 23,000 species of plants have been conserved, 112 species of rare and endangered wild plants native to China have been restored to their natural habitats and over 60 types of rare and endangered wild animals have been successfully bred.

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Environmental protection volunteers patrol Huaxi National Wetland Park in Guiyang, Guizhou province on Nov 4, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]
Third, we have strengthened the conservation and restoration of natural ecological spaces. We have taken the initiative to draw up ecological conservation red lines nationwide, which is an innovation, globally. The red lines cover zones that are critical to environmental function or are ecologically sensitive and stringent protection is enforced in those areas.

They account for 31.7 percent of China's total land area and protect nearly 40 percent of the water-source conservation and flood-regulation functions, 32 percent of functions to fend off sandstorms and 45 percent of the carbon-storage function.

We have also continuously launched major projects in biodiversity conservation and have pushed for the integrated conservation and systematic restoration of mountains, rivers, forests, farmlands, lakes, grasslands and deserts with annual investments of tens of billions of yuan. Our forest coverage and forest reserves have both maintained growth over the last 30 years. China's forest coverage reached 24.02 percent in 2021 and the country has realized the largest growth in forest resources among all countries in the world. Its ecological system has undergone steady improvements in its diversity, stability and sustainability.

Fourth, we have continuously raised public awareness and encouraged social participation. We encourage the involvement of various parties, facilitate channels for their participation and improve incentive mechanisms.

On important occasions, such as the International Day for Biological Diversity and World Environment Day, events are held to promote public awareness about biodiversity. Public awareness of, and participation in, biodiversity conservation are continuing to grow and an atmosphere in which everyone in society works to promote biodiversity conservation is gradually taking shape.

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Workers at the Baihua Mountain Nature Reserve fasten an infrared camera for wildlife monitoring in Beijing on Nov 9, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]
Q3: What is China doing to implement its plans?

A3: The world is undergoing changes of a scale unseen in a century and the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind has won broad support. Faced with the crises and challenges posed by biodiversity loss, we must firmly seize the important opportunity provided by COP15 to continue in the right direction of green and sustainable development, speed up the mainstreaming of biodiversity conservation and push for the start of a new chapter of biodiversity protection. To that end, China plans to make efforts in multiple fields.

The first is to improve policies and regulations on biodiversity. We will conduct further research on policies and regulations related to conservation and cement the legal foundation for it.

We will update the China National Biodiversity Conservation Strategy and Action Plan (2011-30) and improve the policy and system guarantees. We will actively study and plan for special legislation on biodiversity and make the legal system for biodiversity conservation more systematic and complete. We will enact solution-based laws in such areas as nature reserves and access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from their utilization and we will improve corresponding supervisory systems. We will also strictly implement the Biosecurity Law, strengthen the environmental safety management of biotechnologies and continue to improve the prevention and control of invasive species.

Second, we will continue to optimize the biodiversity conservation network and promote the systematic restoration of ecological spaces. We will continue to implement major projects for biodiversity conservation, step up the construction of a system of protected areas with national parks as the mainstay, strengthen the protection and supervision of key areas, such as the "red lines" for ecological conservation and priority areas for biodiversity conservation, and improve the ex-situ conservation system for rare and endangered animals and plants.

We will coordinate and promote the holistic conservation and systematic restoration of mountains, rivers, forests, farmlands, lakes, grasslands and deserts and strengthen the ecological restoration of polluted water bodies, degraded ecosystems, abandoned mines and ecologically damaged areas.

We will also focus on building a complete biodiversity-protection monitoring system, continuously carry out biodiversity background surveys, observation and evaluations, improve the technical standard system related to biodiversity surveying and monitoring and explore ways to establish technical systems for biodiversity evaluation, protection effectiveness assessment, etc.

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Children play a bird-related puzzle game during an event promoting biodiversity protection in Shanghai's Century Park on Nov 20, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]
Third, we will strengthen the sustainable use of biodiversity. Without good and sustainable utilization, it is difficult to achieve effective conservation. Therefore, we will build a whole-process, whole-chain and regular biodiversity protection and supervision mechanism and crack down on the illegal use of biological resources. We will strengthen technical research on the development and sustainable use of biological resources, guide and regulate biodiversity-friendly business activities, promote the development of green industries and franchising and build a high-quality and diversified ecological product system.

Fourth, we will also deepen international cooperation and exchanges. We will incorporate the topic of biodiversity conservation into high-level international exchanges, promote international cooperation on the issue at high levels, actively participate in global biodiversity governance, honor the CBD and other international conventions, strengthen communication, enhance partnership recognition and promote global multilateral environmental governance according to the concept of building a shared future for all life on Earth.

Last but not least, we will encourage public involvement. We need to innovate upon the means of popularization and education and enhance public awareness of and attention to biodiversity through the promotion of knowledge and concepts about biodiversity. We should set up more diversified participation channels, increase public participation, actively mobilize and encourage enterprises and social organizations to take part in biodiversity conservation and create an atmosphere in which everyone in society works to promote biodiversity conservation and sustainable use.

In the future, we will also integrate the concept of biodiversity conservation into the whole process of building an ecological civilization, actively participate in global biodiversity governance and turn the Earth into a beautiful place for all creatures to live in harmony.

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Participants attend an event for UN Biodiversity Day at the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, on Nov 16, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]
Q4: The second phase of COP15, to be held in Montreal of Canada, will define and adopt the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Could you describe the consultation process, the results so far and the positive role that China has played during its presidency?

A4: The main task of COP15's second phase is to draw upon past experiences in the development and implementation of previous global targets on biodiversity to formulate the post-2020 GBF. The aim is to put global biodiversity on a path to recovery by 2030, that is, to end the current situation of biodiversity loss.

It can be said that the framework is a guiding political document for global biodiversity governance. There are also high hopes for the framework's adoption during the second phase of the meeting.

At present, positive progress has been made in the framework's formation after negotiations and consultations during four rounds of working-group meetings. All parties have been seeking common ground while reserving differences and working in the same direction. There were sufficient exchanges and understandings about the issues and very comprehensive communication on the existing differences and suggestions.

Currently, the structure and core content of the post-2020 GBF has been agreed upon, laying a solid foundation for finalizing a solution that is acceptable to all relevant parties.

The CBD has 196 contracting parties and involves many international organizations and stakeholders. The consultations on, and negotiations of, the framework document involve all parties. So it is natural that the process is not all smooth and easy.

There are still different requirements, even big differences, on some specific issues. For instance, the Convention has three main objectives: the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from their utilization. We need to make more efforts to ensure the three objectives can be implemented in a comprehensive and balanced manner within the framework instead of overemphasizing one of them. And we have to work harder to narrow differences.

There is also much work to be done to ensure the targets set by the framework are realistic yet ambitious, and practical and balanced and that they can help promote the sustainable recovery of biodiversity.

In addition, the framework's realization ultimately depends on its implementation mechanism. For developing countries, the biggest concern is the mobilization of funds. Funding is obviously very important for the framework's application. It's an important and difficult part of the negotiations.

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LI MIN/CHINA DAILY

Since assuming the COP15 presidency, China has actively exercised leadership and coordination in its efforts to advance negotiations of the post-2020 GBF. So far, China has convened a total of 37 COP15 meetings of the presidium. It has also presided over four meetings of the open-ended working group on the post-2020 GBF in such places as Geneva and Nairobi in collaboration with the CBD secretariat.

China has made significant efforts to advance framework negotiations. The frequency of the meetings, especially the frequency of the presidium meetings, is quite rare in the process of multilateral environmental negotiations.

Moreover, China has been using all sorts of occasions, such as the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, the G20 Joint Environment and Climate Ministerial Meeting, the high-level week of the 77th session of the UN General Assembly and COP27 as opportunities to organize exchange activities on key COP15 issues in various forms, including high-level roundtables and briefings.

We have also held frequent bilateral consultations with many other contracting parties to expand consensus. These efforts have both effectively maintained the political momentum of COP15 and facilitated the bridging of differences among contracting parties to achieve greater consensus.

All parties recognized the great efforts made by China in the COP15 presidency in coordinating the positions of all parties and expressed their willingness to work with China to push for the adoption of an ambitious, practical and balanced post-2020 GBF.

Although there are still many difficulties and demands in the consultations, all parties have expressed their firm political support and confidence in the negotiation process and China's role in the COP15 presidency.

I am confident the international community will respond positively to the spirit of community embodied in the theme of the upcoming conference "Ecological Civilization: Building a Shared Future for All Life on Earth" and demonstrate the wisdom and courage to overcome these difficulties and differences.

During the second phase of COP15, China will continue to play its presidency role well. With the support of the CBD secretariat, the presidium and the host country, China will work with fellow contracting parties, international organizations and stakeholders to spare no effort to advance the negotiation process, build the broadest possible consensus in the international community, promote the adoption of the framework and ensure the second phase of COP15 in Montreal is successful.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202212/0 ... 33f_2.html

Let China lead!

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COP27 and Imperialism: Weaving a Crown of Thorns for the Global South
29 Nov
Alexia Alkadi-Barbaro and Zeyad el Nabolsy

Compared to the COP26 summit in Glasgow last year, the COP27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh has been distinguished by greater inclusion of voices from the Global South, as evidenced by the acceptance of a proposal to create a ‘loss and damage’ fund for developing countries that are suffering from climate disasters. However, it remains to be seen how the mechanisms for the implementation of this fund will be worked out. Western developed countries were vocal in their opposition to the fund throughout the summit, and it was only due to relentless pressures by developing countries that they eventually relented. If past events are anything to go by, then it is highly unlikely that the most vulnerable countries will get to have a substantial say in how the climate fund is operated. In fact, the Western developed countries are already trying to use this as an opportunity to drive a wedge between developing countries and China, whose lending and investment policy presents a favourable alternative to ‘strings-attached’ IMF funding. This is precisely one of the hallmarks of ‘climate colonialism’: a concept that refers to the deployment of justifications ostensibly related to the need to bring the causes of anthropogenic climate change under control, but which in fact serve to legitimize the domination of weaker, poorer states in the periphery of the world-system by stronger wealthier states in the core. What this means is that those who are most responsible for the impending catastrophe will get to dictate the terms of the response (even if ineffective) in a manner that would ensure they can externalize the costs to those who are least culpable. It is well known that poorer countries in warmer climates will be the most severely affected as the plant continues to warm.

Any socialist response, even at the level of mere rhetoric, which discounts the significance of imperialism to debates about how best to respond to climate change is functionally equivalent to acquiescence to a world where a starving mass of racialised people in the Global South will be left to suffer while Europe and America are transformed into gated continents; ‘fortress Europe’ and ‘fortress America’ respectively. We currently have around 270 million people who are faced with hunger due to political conditions to which climate-shocks have been causally relevant. And by 2050, 143 million people in the Global South will become climate refugees – people who have contributed the least to anthropogenic climate change will be left to suffer and die as the West fortifies its borders against a perceived racial contagion. In the worst-case scenario, such conflicts will take on the form of racially inflected wars. There will not just be ‘water wars’ for instance, but also ‘race wars over water’. This is the future which awaits us if a global ‘Green New Deal’ which neglects the past and actuality of imperialism is allowed to garner support and to pass for a ‘socialist solution’ to the climate crisis.

Despite the concessions made by developed countries at the COP27, it is unlikely that they will be followed up with substantial action. The $100 billion per year which wealthy countries committed to at the COP15 in 2009 in Copenhagen as an ‘adaptation fund’ to assist countries in the periphery in their transition to ‘greener’ development paths has not materialized and seems unlikely to ever do so. Moreover, what has been contributed so far has been mostly in the form of loans (as opposed to grants), with all the perpetuation of ties of dependency and systematic value-drain from the South to the North that this form of ‘aid’ habitually entails. Note also that this amount is not even close to the 6% of Global North GNP ($2.3 trillion per year) which is outlined as necessary for a just transition in the historic Cochabamba People’s Agreement.

As things stand now, the agenda seems to be more land grabbing in the Global South in the name of carbon offsets, and the pursuit of ‘net-zero’ through mono-cultural tree planting on land which has been cleansed of its indigenous people. As Max Ajl notes, Biden’s discourse of ‘net-zero’ is primarily aimed at placating Western oil and gas companies, by making it clear that they will not be required to reduce production and that their assets will not be devalued. What is apparent is that the ruling classes in the Global North seek to confuse their constituents through illegitimate abstractions, ‘net-zero’ being a prime example of this strategy. These ruses obfuscate the social and political terrain upon which different solutions to the climate crisis should be contested.

Representatives of the ruling class in the Global North seek to hide the fact that it has been overwhelmingly responsible for anthropogenic climate change, as in Biden’s statement last year that ‘We can keep the goal of limiting global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius within our reach if we come together, if we commit to doing our part of each of our nations [sic] with determination and with ambition. That’s what COP26 is all about.’ At the COP27, Biden maintained the same stance, emphasising that the U.S. was working towards it goals. The problem, however, is that the U.S. defines its goals unilaterally and presents an ahistorical framing of the crisis and of who is responsible for it. Between 1850 and 2011, Europe and America were responsible for 52% of global cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases. What this implies is that an equitable solution would distribute burdens in a manner that would cost the Global North more than it would cost the Global South.

To have a 50% chance of reaching the goal of ensuring that global temperatures do not increase by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, the number of gigatons of Carbon emitted after the beginning of 2020 cannot exceed 500.Because the U.S. has the highest per capita rate of emissions among the world’s large emitters of carbon (excepting Saudi Arabia and Australia) at 16 tons per person, to stay within the global emissions threshold it is necessary to demand that the U.S. reduce its emissions per capita at a faster rate than countries with much lower rates of emissions per capita. The U.S. would require an annual reduction of around 20% in its carbon dioxide emissions to stay within the global carbon budget (relativised to per capita emissions), whereas, for example, China would only need a 10% annual reduction, and Brazil would require only 3.4%. As John Ross observes, the dominant U.S. discourse calls for a 50% reduction in its emissions by 2030, which would enable the U.S. to remain a privileged state able to have per capita emissions which are 42% higher than China’s are today. Moreover, the demand for a uniform percentage reduction without discrimination is likely to hinder the development of countries which have hardly contributed anything to global greenhouse gas emissions, e.g., most African countries. Yet Biden still maintained the 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 line at COP27. The aforementioned points were conveniently ignored.

Another imperialist ruse that the U.S. and its allies have succeeded in pulling concerns their efforts to render military related emissions invisible on carbon budgets. Despite the fact that the U.S. military has a larger carbon footprint than most countries in the world, military related emissions have been only partially reported. The U.S. military budget, geared towards the development and procurement of weapons which guzzle up oil-derived fuels such as the F-35 fighter jet (which burns 5,600 liters of fuel per hour), constitutes 40% of the world’s military spending. Thus, demilitarisation must be at the top of the climate agenda. A topic which representatives of the U.S. ruling class were keen to keep off it entirely.

Another manner in which imperialist relations are left unchallenged by the climate action discourse of the COP27 is that emissions tend to be calculated on a production-basis rather than on a consumption basis. Emissions which are counted as the product of developing or poorer countries, but which express the systematic drain of value from the South to the North – for example, outsourced manufacturing activities of Western-based multinationals exploiting cheap Southern labour, based on global prices differences (differences which persist even when one adjusts for productivity levels) for products of the same value, i.e., products with value x, measured based on socially necessary labour time, produced in some Global South country may be priced far lower than products with value x produced in some Global North country – should be counted as emissions for which the developed countries with their conspicuous consumption are responsible. Clarifying the two different modes of calculation is important because it also makes it clear that although a country like China would be seen as the largest polluter in the world on the basis of production-based emission calculations, this would not be the case if we adopt a consumption-based framework.

The climate action plan that is being proposed by the ruling class in the Global North and which externalizes the costs to the Global South is part of a prolonged attack on the gains of anti-colonial movements in the aftermath of the retreat of the Bandung-era project(s) in the 1970s. Anthropogenic climate change threatens to roll back nearly all of the social, health, and economic gains which have been achieved in the aftermath of independence.

The climate action plan presented at COP27 also signals the continuation of a policy of ignorance of and contempt towards popular anti-imperial movements, and demands made from poor, working class peoples from nations within the Global South , as well environmental movements led by Black and indigenous peoples in the Global North. It is worth illustrating how movements for global consciousness and demands for environmental protection from industries, policies, and economic adjustment programs have long demanded localised environmental practices and knowledge to be central in determining green technologies and economic policies around questions of environmental preservation.

The connection between local environmental movements and anticolonial movements illustrates how people within the Global South have long demanded setting an environmental agenda that is antiracist, anticapitalist, abolishes the afterlives of the colonial international hierarchical order and is both future oriented while taking into account the environmental harms of the past. While many of the popular led environmental movements that took off in the 1960s and rose to prominence throughout the three decades that followed were localised in form – that is, confined to national contexts and thus dealing with local issues pertaining to immediate ecological surroundings – growing consciousness of the unequally inherited effects of environmental degradation among historically racialised nations within the Global South led to convergences between local and global consciousness.[1]

Popular narratives about the rise of environmental degradation usually find their origin stories in the early 1970s, when the United Nations’ Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm resulted in the declaration to focus on “underdevelopment” and “overpopulation” as factors central to environmental degradation. By 1973, with the reverberations of the first oil-shock felt on a global scale, shifts in the types of energy being used (oil versus nuclear) became a predominant issue especially within the United States and across Western Europe. Spurred by the outbreak of grassroots movement actors in the United States and across the Global North, eco-friendly development initiatives were introduced to transnational corporations headquartered in the U.S. and Europe and operating in resource rich nations within the Global South. However, by the mid-1970s, with economic and political pressures for recently decolonised nations to rapidly industrialise, elites at the state level in the Global North and Global South did not succeed in embracing or requiring environmentally conscious policies around economic development. Meanwhile, amidst the backdrop of elite-driven political discourse and technocratic planning over what should be, and what could be done while still promoting the common good of the international economy, grassroots movements that resulted in the establishment of transnational NGOs like Greenpeace International or Friends of the Earth provided a platform for progressive environmental agendas premised on taking seriously (at least by their own account) popular environmental movements across the globe.[2] But between each of these major historical moments was the often unacknowledged work on behalf of anticolonial activists within the Global South or their diasporas in the U.S. organising to ensure that the gains made during and after movements for decolonisation would not be rolled back in the grip of neo-imperial politics.

The intersection between anticolonial movements and environmental consciousness can be traced, in part, to the organising work of a handful of transnational activists influenced by the rise of Pan-Africanism. Figures such as Trinidadian activist and ecological engineer Pauluu Kamarakafego, Australian-Indigenous environmental activist and poet Jack Davis, Black American activist and educator Thais Aubry, for example, all overlapped in their various forms of activism around land rights for African, Black American, Aboriginal and Indigenous people of the Pacific and North America in the mid-20th century. Historian Quito Swan has recently illustrated how Kamarakafego’s transnational travels from the 1960s onward helped to forefront Black environmental consciousness within both elite-driven and grassroots movements agendas in the United States, Ghana, Trinidad, Bermuda, Cuba, Australia, and Fiji.[3]

Kamarakafego’s environmental agenda focused on how movements for self-determination could center solutions for moving beyond ecologically extractivist practices. Along with contemporaries such as Walter Rodney and Kwame Nkrumah, Kamarakafego rightly predicted that ecological extractivism would be paramount to the continuation of economic domination set in place through colonisation, and solidified during the neoliberal counterrevolution on behalf of Western Europe and the United States. His activism centered on fostering and bringing to the forefront of international policy localised, indigenous knowledge of how best to care for and produce raw materials. In each place that Kamarakafego travelled, he would meet with local activists who were often farmworkers, hear about the issues they faced with massive agricultural farmlands owned and run by European or American private corporations, and help to strategise ways to build a transnational consciousness about these problems. In effect, Kamarakafego, along with other activists of his time, sought to sow consciousness about how localised environmental issues stemmed from the racialised economic policies coming out of institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, peddled by elite-actors within the Global North.

Like Kamarakafego, Jack Davis and Thais Aubry spent years organising and helping to raise local and transnational knowledge about the shared environmental struggles that African, Black and Indigenous communities faced, and the need for a collective, transnational grassroots movement that sought to put Indigenous land knowledge at the forefront of international agendas. Inspired by the Pan-African movement for self-determination, Davis travelled to the United States to work alongside Black organisers such as Queen Mother Moore and to build alliances with Indigenous people around land rights and environmental self-determination. His work was influential in mobilizing Aboriginal self-determination movements in Australia. Thais Aubry organized around environmental land rights for Pacific Islanders from the 1960s through to the 1970s. Her consistent involvement in the Women Speak Out! A Report of the Pacific Women’s Conference helped to build a transnational Black and Aboriginal feminist environmental consciousness about the way in which economic policies and environmental technologies from the Global North together not only posed a problem for non-Western forms of self-determination, but for Black and Aboriginal women’s liberation.

All three of these figures came of age during the rise of mass rural farmworker uprisings across the Black Atlantic in the mid-twentieth century. Chief among these uprisings were those spurred in Ghana between 1945 and 1951. In large part brought on by increasing discontent among Ghanian farmers with British colonial control over cocoa crops, extractivist policies, and the environmentally degrading effects of mass agricultural farm lots, farmworkers movements quickly spread, colliding with broader movement politics in the Global South to secure land rights among Indigenous and Aboriginal peoples. Farmworker movements that sought to center the environment and the demand for overcoming economic domination spanned from the Caribbean, West Africa, and the United States. These were, in part, early attempts to make anticolonial environmentalism a part of the international human rights agenda at the United Nations. At the end of his life, Kamarakafego himself worked as a consultant on rural development and renewable energy resources. He helped build the International Network of Small Island Developing States of NGOs and Indigenous People, and served on the executive and steering committees on the UN Commission on Sustainable Development reporting on the demands of farmworkers movements across the Black and Indigenous diaspora.

Kamarakafego, Davis, and Aubry are just a few representative examples of many environmental activists who followed after them and sought to build transnational agendas for environmental racial justice. In the late 1970s, on the Southside of Chicago, Black environmental justice activists and their white allies came together to form People for Community Recovery (PCR) which, while initially focused on the overdue repair work in Altgeld Gardens, would become best known for its work calling attention to and demonstrating against urban environmental pollution once it became known that the Southside of Chicago had a higher rate of cancer than in any other part of the city. PCR activists argued that, due to the heavy concentration of industrial pollution, residential communities in the area were exposed to exorbitantly higher rates of toxic chemicals compared to other communities across Chicago. By the 1980s, PCR activists were travelling to Brazil, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, South Africa and Indigenous communities within the United States. They would end up collaborating with Greenpeace to halt the transnational actions of ChemWaste which operated in several nations and in the Southside of Chicago. Hazel Johnson, the founder of PCR, and the activists involved would again highlight that local issues required a transnational response rooted in popular movement demands.[4] As of today, race in the United States continues to be the largest contributor to whether one lives next to a toxic waste dump or not.

Aware of the unequally inherited effects of climate change on people within the Global South, especially food security and forced migration, these early activists influenced by the global anticolonial moment foreshadowed a strand of environmental consciousness that is necessary for combating the possibility of neo-imperial climate strategies, strategies that continue to put unfettered capitalist economic profit over the livelihood of the people. Their activism prefigured the organising necessary to attend to the environmental catastrophes we and they have inherited today. To undo the continuation of neo-imperial ‘green technology transfers’ and elite-decision making power, a space must be opened up on an international scale that takes seriously the demands of the people in the Global South slated to bear the brunt of climate disaster. Their claims have long been articulated, the question is if we choose to listen, and how we choose to respond.


References
[1] For more on this, see: David Naguib Pellow. Resisting global toxics: Transnational movements for environmental justice (MIT Press, 2007).

[2] Paul F.Steinberg and Stacy D. VanDeveer, eds. Comparative environmental politics: theory, practice, and prospects (MIT 2012).

[3] Quiot J. Swan. Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020).

[4] Pellow, Ibid.

https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/cop ... mperialism

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11 568 KM2 of Forest Lost in the Brazilian Amazon in 12 Months

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The highest rate of deforestation (27 700km2) in the Brazilian Amazon was recorded in 2014, according to the Legal Amazon Deforestation Satellite Monitoring Project. Nov. 30, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@GracielaMariani

Published 30 November 2022

Between August 2021 and July 2022, the deforested area of the Amazon region reached 11 568 square kilometers, said the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).


According to INPE data released on Wednesday, the figure indicates a decrease of 11.27 percent compared to the period from August 2020 to July 202, when 13 038 square kilometers of forest were lost.

The Satellite Monitoring of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon Project (Prodes), considered the most accurate for measuring annual deforestation rates, provided the above figures.

In 2004, the country recorded the highest rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, with 27 700 square kilometers of forest lost.

In contrast, 2012 was the year with the least devastation in the Amazon, when 4 500 square kilometers were lost, according to Prodes. Three years later, the situation was reversed.

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Four years of the Bolsonaro government, 45 thousand km2 of forest have been totally cut down. The worst: a new frontier of land grabbing has been consolidated, in Acre, BR-319, around the Transamazonia (west of PA and south of AM). High risk for Amazonia (follow the thread) +

Under the government of incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, rainforest loss increased by 59.5 percent, said the Climate Observatory.

The entity's executive secretary, Marcio Astrini, said after the release of the INPE data that "Bolsonaro received the country with a rate of 7 500 square kilometers of deforestation in the Amazon and is handing it over with 11 500 kilometers."

President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who will take office on January 1, 2003, has pledged to put Brazil back on the environmental stage and diplomacy.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/11- ... -0021.html.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 23, 2022 4:02 pm

Deforestation in the Amazon grows 94% during the Bolsonaro government

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The Socio-environmental Institute assured in its annual report that the Bolsonaro administration "meant the greatest environmental setback of the century". | Photo: EFE
Published December 23, 2022

A deforestation rate of 157 percent was reported in indigenous territories, as part of the Bolsonaro administration's promotion of environmental illegality.

The deforestation of the Amazon during the government of the outgoing president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, which began in 2019 and will end in eight days, increased by 94 percent, compared to years before his administration, according to a study.

The Socio-environmental Institute assured in its annual report that the Bolsonaro administration "meant the greatest environmental setback of the century, with an increase of 94 percent in deforestation compared to years prior to his administration."

According to data from the non-governmental organization (NGO), the main cause of the abrupt increase is directly related to the dismantling of environmental management bodies.


In addition, the strike affected the demarcation of indigenous lands and the sell-out actions of large territorial extensions to transnational companies.

The study reported a deforestation rate of 157 percent in indigenous territories, as part of the Bolsonaro administration's promotion of environmental illegality over ancestral territories.


He added that the balance of deforestation in Protected Areas in the Government of Bolsonaro "has a disastrous balance."

“Data from Prodes show that these areas are under intense pressure and that the increase in forest degradation on indigenous lands has reached 157 percent,” he mentioned.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/brasil-d ... -0004.html

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‘The Oil Companies Are the Reason We Don’t Have Climate Policy’
CounterSpin interview with Richard Wiles on fossil fuel lies
JANINE JACKSON


Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Climate Integrity’s Richard Wiles about the lies of the fossil fuel industry for the December 16, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.


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Center for Climate Integrity (12/9/22)
Janine Jackson: The House Oversight Committee has revealed new documentation showing that fossil fuel companies have long been well aware of their industry’s impact on climate disruption, with all of its devastating effects. And rather than respond humanely to human needs, they’ve opted to use every tool in the box, including bold lying, pretend naivete and aggressive misdirection, to continue extracting every last penny that they can.

It invites a question: If an investigation falls in the forest and no laws or tax policies or news media approaches are changed by it, does it make a sound?

Our next guest’s group collects and shares the receipts on fossil fuel companies’ architecture of deception—not for fun, but for change. Richard Wiles is president of the Center for Climate Integrity. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Richard Wiles.

Richard Wiles: Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.

JJ: I don’t think we can assume listeners will have heard the details from this House committee. What, most importantly to your mind, did the evidence that they unearthed show or confirm or illustrate about the actions and intentions of fossil fuel companies with regard to climate change?

RW: I guess the big new findings here are internal emails, internal communications, PowerPoint presentations, prepared for the CEO of the oil majors that reveal in a number of different ways the way they continue to aggressively mislead the public and the Congress and the media about their role in solving climate change—which is nothing, as you can imagine.

So this investigation was limited to internal documents that the company might have after the Paris Agreement in 2015. The committee subpoenaed any communications that they might have had relevant to climate change since that date.

And that’s important because there’s around 28 states and municipalities, plus another 16 communities in Puerto Rico, that are now suing oil companies for basically lying about what they knew about climate change, and their ongoing deception and greenwashing.

And the committee’s work, the documents that they’ve uncovered, have really added a lot to the evidence that will support those cases that make the case, particularly since 2015, that the companies continue to lie about their commitment to solving the problem.
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Wall Street Journal (10/3/21)
And they do it in a number of different ways. I’m sure that some of your listeners have seen Exxon’s famous and seemingly never-ending ads about algae, right, which internal emails to the company make clear is never going to be any kind of a significant contributor to solving climate change, or being a carbon-free fuel.

There’s a lot more stuff in the weeds, like the companies talk about how they support the Paris Climate Accords. But then, internally, they’re saying things like, “God, please don’t say anything that’ll commit us to advocate for the Paris Agreement.”

There’s lots about how they want to position natural gas as a climate solution, when they know that it isn’t a climate solution. And they talk about that in these documents.

So the Committee’s efforts, this investigation, has produced a lot of information that is going to be helpful to holding the companies accountable in court, and also just educating members of Congress and the media about the fact that these companies are the problem, they’re not part of the solution. They’re aggressively part of the problem.

And it’s one thing to have somebody like me say that, or environmental advocates say that, or public interest groups say that. It’s another thing to be able to prove it with the company’s internal communications.

So that’s basically the contribution they made.

JJ: Let me just, as a side note, this is with available information, right, because some of the biggest players just said, “Nope—transparency, public oversight, indicate our internal conversations? Nope, not gonna do it.” Right?

RW: Right. The committee used its subpoena power. But the companies have fancy lawyers, and they’re not particularly interested in cooperating on this issue.

And so they did produce, I think, a million pages of documents, but probably roughly 900,000 of those pages, probably more than that, were things that were irrelevant, like company websites and whatever, that stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with what the committee wanted.

In a lot of cases, some of the players, like API, among others—that’s the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying group for the oil industry—they would just redact page after page of these internal documents, and might give you a sentence or two.

So there was a lot of redactions, a lot of withholding. I think it’s clear that the companies and the trade association fundamentally obstructed this investigation.

But at the same time, they also knew they had to turn over something. And what they did turn over did contain a significant amount of evidence of this ongoing duplicity and deception around climate change, and their role in causing it, and their role in “solving it.”

JJ: Yeah. You know, it’s shorthanded to the House Oversight Committee, including by me, but it’s called the Oversight and Reform Committee.

And the Center for Climate Integrity, you guys seem post-weasel words, post–”Yes, they do harm, but look at the good they also do”–style conciliation.

You seem to take the fact that fossil fuel industries are in bad faith, as not like, “Let’s talk about it,” but a factor to consider in what we do moving forward, right?

RW: Right, exactly. One hundred percent.

JJ: I appreciate that. And so many people are like, “Oh, well, they’re the experts on the industry. So if we’re going to regulate them, obviously the industry needs to be part of how they define how we regulate them.” And it’s just such a merry-go-round.

And I want to ask you, as a group that steps outside of that, what are we calling for now? What is our work, concretely, now? How do we get off this dime?
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Richard Wiles: “The only way we’re going to have the kind of meaningful climate policy change…is if we actually beat the oil guys.”
RW: Yeah, this is a good point. You got to think about the oil industry the way you think about the tobacco industry, the opioid industry, right? Nobody is looking to the tobacco companies for healthcare policy advice anymore, and the same for the opioid guys.

These guys, they cause a problem, and there was no way to work it out with them, right? They had a very profitable product, they knew it was killing people left and right, and they didn’t care at all.

And the only way they were stopped was by head-on confrontation in the courts—not the Congress, which they fundamentally own, but to the courts.

And our view is that, while obviously the Congress has a role here, and we hope someday the Congress passes meaningful climate legislation, that certainly hasn’t happened yet.

We had a good energy bill this fall, but it didn’t do anything to reduce emissions or to rein in these companies.

The only way we’re going to have the kind of meaningful climate policy change that ushers in an era of renewable energy is if we actually beat the oil guys. We have to actually win. It’s not a negotiation, it’s a fight. They want us to think it’s a negotiation, because that means they’ve won; we’re talking to them.

But if anyone can think of a time in human history where the most powerful industry or interest group of that era, that time, voluntarily committed suicide, voluntarily said, “Ah, you know, we don’t want all this power, we don’t want all this money….”

JJ: “We’ll just show ourselves out.”

RW: “…go out of business,” right. Yeah, if you can show me that, maybe I’ll change my mind. But you’ve got to be pretty naive to think that’s what’s going to happen here.

And all the evidence shows that’s not true. We can say that, and there’s still powerful forces who think, “Oh, well, they’re just naive, of course you’re going to have to work with the oil guys.”

Well, no. And what these documents do is help make it clear to people who need to have it made clear to them, like members of Congress and the media, that the oil companies are the problem, period. That’s it. That’s the reason we don’t have climate policy. There’s no other reason. It’s because these very wealthy, powerful, vested interests make sure that the public is confused about climate change, that everybody thinks that they’re part of the solution, that all these things that we know aren’t true, and that this evidence helps us show are not true.

So our view is you’ve got to attack the companies, you’ve got to expose them for all the lies that they live off of. And you’ve got to make them pay, both reputationally and financially, through the courts, for their ongoing lies and deception. And for the damage that those lies do, in terms of the cost that communities face from extreme storms and hurricanes, and just the routine business of adapting to climate change.

Building a seawall we didn’t have to build. Now we need a cooling center, or suddenly we got to move the sewage treatment plant. Look, our drinking water’s loaded with salt water now. Whatever it is, all these costs that were foisted upon us by the industry, they need to pay.

And I guess our view is if they’re held accountable financially, and if people understand through that process—like they do with Big Pharma now, that “opioids, not good, really bad, these companies deliberately and knowingly killed people.”

If we can hang that same kind of messaging around the necks of the oil and gas industry, where it belongs, then I think we can change the conversation about how we’re going to solve climate. It’ll be a much more fruitful conversation.

And if the companies have to pay, also, if these cases are successful and the companies are made to pay for the damage that they knowingly caused—and I want to emphasize that the companies knew 50 years ago that their products would cause climate change, and they wrote it down, and they talked about catastrophes that would happen. And then they decided, at some point in the early ’90s/late ’80s, that they needed to run a massive disinformation campaign instead of tell the truth. If they’re held accountable to that, it’s a big financial cost that they absolutely deserve to have to pay.

And they’ll be very different-looking industries if they’re made to pay those costs. And at that point, maybe, just maybe, we will get the kind of climate solutions that we need.

Until we do that, I don’t think there’s any reasonable path that’s going to get us to the transformational kind of change that we need to get to, if the oil companies and gas companies are just standing in the way, as powerful as they are today, and everybody thinks that really the problem is them, right? That’s what they’ve done, right?
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Washington Post (12/9/22)
JJ: And how long a shower they take, right? And I would love to put a pin in that right there. But I feel obliged to ask you a final question, which is that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, his takeaway, as he tweeted, was, “Second only to hydrocarbons, the biggest product of the fossil fuel industry is lies.” That’s what he took away.

But then I read this Washington Post subhead, that was, “Some oil companies remain internally skeptical about the switch to a low-carbon economy even as they portray their businesses as partners in the cause, documents say.”

I mean, uff da, what the heck is that?

RW: Right? Sheldon Whitehouse nailed it, right? The number two product is lies.

JJ: How’s that kind of media coverage going to get us, is what I’m saying.

RW: Yeah, that’s just completely wrong. That’s what we’re battling against, right? There’s somehow this notion that the companies have a legitimate skepticism, and internal debates about whether or not they should really try harder on climate, and that’s what the documents showed…No, that’s not what the documents show.

The documents show that they are lying about their commitment to solving the problem. The documents show that they’re going to increase drilling in the Permian Basin by maybe 1,000% while they’re going to say that they’re in favor of the Paris Climate Accords.

That’s what the documents showed. They showed ongoing duplicity and lies. And, yeah, that’s part of the challenge, is to get the media to report this correctly.

We’re up to that challenge. And we think the more documents come out, the clearer it’s going to be, and the more attorneys general that step up and sue these companies for consumer fraud, and the more municipalities that demand to have the cost that they are spending to adapt to climate change covered by the oil companies, like they should be, the more evidence that comes out, I think, the better we’ll do.

And the more people understand, the message in the media will change. But we got a long way to go.

But this investigation is a good step in the right direction, for sure. You’re building a wall; it’s just a brick in the wall. And at some point, it’s going to be a wall that they can’t get out around. So in the meantime, we’ll just keep building.

JJ: Keep on keeping on.

RW: Yeah, that’s what we do.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Richard Wiles. He’s president of the Center for Climate Integrity. You can find their work online at ClimateIntegrity.org. Richard Wiles, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RW: Oh, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

https://fair.org/home/the-oil-companies ... te-policy/

Yeah, 'the oil guys' are at the front of the slavering pack but if not them then some other capitalists with a big stake in whatever we're talking about. cause 'oil' is just the specific problem while capitalism is the general, over-arching problem.

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Climate change: Co-extinction will cause loss of a quarter of species by 2100, says study
Originally published: NewsClick.in on December 19, 2022 by Sandipan Talukdar (more by NewsClick.in) | (Posted Dec 20, 2022)

Another worrisome situation of climate change and pattern of land usage has been predicted by scientists where Earth may see a loss of its biodiversity by over a quarter by 2100. In a recent study published in Science, scientists analysed how the co-extinction of species accelerates the overall loss of biodiversity and predicted possible loss.

Previous studies have also indicated that biodiversity loss is accelerated by co-extinctions, which is the extinction of interconnected species. The new study did a systematic analysis of the interconnected vertebrate food webs and came out with a quantitative prediction of the probable scenario in future. The study used computer modelling to carry out the analysis in the context of climate changes and the patterns of land usage.

In this collaborative work, European and Australian scientists developed a computer model where 15,000 food webs were used to predict the fate of interconnected species that will become extinct due to climate change and land usage. The researchers created a model of Earth with virtual species using one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers. The results reveal that cascading extinctions are unavoidable, and the Earth may witness a 10% loss of its animals and plants by 2050, which can rise to beyond 25% by the end of this century.

Explaining the findings, study co-author Corey J.A. Bradshaw said in a statement, “Think of a predatory species that loses its prey to climate change. The loss of the prey species is a ‘primary extinction’ because it succumbed directly to a disturbance. But with nothing to eat, its predator will also go extinct (a ‘co-extinction’). Or, imagine a parasite losing its host to deforestation, or a flowering plant losing its pollinators because it becomes too warm. Every species depends on others in some way.” Bradshaw is a professor at the Flinders University of Australia.

Experts opine that the new study is one of the first attempts to analyse how interconnected species at a global scale will suffer an additional loss due to co-extinctions. There have been excellent studies previously where the fate of species was analysed as a direct outcome of climate change and habitat loss; however, more was needed to connect them.

In their model, the scientists built a virtual Earth where species interconnected to one another are linked by the food chains, like who eats what. This way, they built a massive network. Then the factors of climate change and land usage were applied to the network, and the predictive calculations were made. The model also encompassed the dynamics of changing habitats by the species in changing environments.

Explaining the computer model Giovanni Strona of Helsinki University said,

Essentially, we have populated a virtual world from the ground up and mapped the resulting fate of thousands of species across the globe to determine the likelihood of real-world tipping points. We can then assess adaptation to different climate scenarios and interlink with other factors to predict a pattern of co-extinctions. By running many simulations over three main scenarios of climate until 2050 and 2100—the so-called Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we show that there will be up to 34% more co-extinctions overall by 2100 than are predicted from direct effects alone.

Moreover, the predictions suggested that the extinction rate of the most vulnerable species will be increased by a staggering 184% by the end of the century.

The researchers claim the study to be unique in that it is not only confined to the estimation of species loss as a direct effect of climate change and land usage but also accounts for the secondary effect on biodiversity, which is enormous. Children born today and who live till the age of 70 will witness the disappearance of thousands of species in one lifetime. This will include tiny insects, many plants to large animals like elephants, the study warns.

However, there remains a caveat; the study is only based on computer simulations, which may account for some variations in the degree of loss as has been predicted. But, the essence of the study is not ignorable. Mass extinction is inevitable due to climate change and patterns of land usage.

https://mronline.org/2022/12/20/climate-change/

Hypocrisy of rich countries: Ignoring the storage problems in rich countries
A low fossil fuel path needs grid-level storage costs to drop drastically. Pretending this is not necessary is hypocritical of wealthy countries

December 16, 2022 by Prabir Purkayastha

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It did not bother us earlier that green energy has a storage problem. Coal or gas-fired plants hooked to a grid can be used to meet shortfalls due to variable supplies from renewables. The shortage of renewables is not a problem so long as these sources are not the primary source of supply for the grid. Once renewables become the principal source, the reliability of grid supply will depend on grid-level storage batteries.

How variable are the supplies of renewables? In Germany, in 2019, wind energy went from supplying 59% to the grid on one day to as low as 2.6% on another. In the same year, solar peaked at 25% of the grid supply and bottomed out at 0.3%. What happens if both solar and wind are simultaneously unavailable? It would mean installing much bigger storage batteries than we are planning today, with the luxury of fossil fuel as a backup, to make grid supply more reliable.

Many may feel having two renewable sources should take care of the relative unreliability of either source. It, unfortunately, does not work that way. During a prolonged calm that typically lasts days, both sources will be unavailable at night. It can be an even bigger problem in higher altitudes, where the days are short and the nights longer.

We can either spend money now on providing a reliable grid based on renewables or continue using fossil fuels as long as we can and postpone the transition. To pretend that only coal-fired plants are fossil fuel-based while natural gas is a transitional fuel is to defer the investments that the rich countries must make in grid-level energy storage.

Arguing that all big emitters should cut emissions is to put the burden of the transition on India and China, two countries with the largest populations and very little gas supply. That is why we see the pretense that coal alone is the major source of greenhouse gases and the refusal to admit that natural gas, with its leaky infrastructure, is as big a culprit in global warming.

I have written earlier on the significant and much higher warming effects of natural gas, the so-called transitional fuel, than the rich countries claim. Current studies with actual measurements of methane leaks in New Mexico show the losses are six times the claims. This wipes out any benefit from switching from coal to gas. In any case, the United States and Europe want this with much more because their coal-fired plants are ageing. Against a calculated life span of 25 years, the average age of coal-fired plants is more than 40 years in the United States and 35 years in Europe. They are simply making a virtue of phasing out their coal plants which are already too old to maintain.

Instead of an honest discussion about how to reach a low-carbon trajectory quickly, the politics of rich countries is how “we” can postpone our transition to green energy, with natural gas as a “transitional” fuel, thereby dumping the energy transition problem on the poor countries. The rich countries can then extract profits from selling us renewable technology and the batteries to store it. The most hypocritical of the lot are the Nordic countries, who argue they can fund the development of gas and oil fields in African countries provided the gas and oil are exported entirely to them. They expect African countries to go in exclusively for renewable energy. This is what W. Gyude Moore and Todd Moss said in a recent article in Foreign Policy, “Europe to Africa: Gas for Me but Not for Thee”.

The storage problem in renewable energy is well known. Fossil fuels are stores of energy and sources of energy, but that assumes coal, gas and oil resources are inexhaustible. Earlier, that they are not inexhaustible was considered a problem for future generations. Just as global warming was relegated to a problem of the future until droughts, heat waves, and increasingly extreme weather events convinced us the problem has arrived. It means we must plan for a grid that uses much larger quantities of renewables, which must be in place as quickly as possible. To do this, we will have to solve the grid-level energy storage problem.

The simplest storage for any grid is pumped storage, which means converting the existing hydroelectric plants to run exclusively as complementary to wind and solar energy. This system works except when inflows exceed storage levels, as often happens during the rainy season. Converting hydro turbines is also not a significant expense. Storage reservoirs already exist, and adding, if required, a small reservoir at the bottom involves low cost and virtually no impact in terms of land acquisition. The big storage reservoirs already exist, as do numerous hydroelectric plants with reversible hydro-turbines. The main problem with hydroelectric power—land acquisition and displacement—does not exist here, and new hydroelectric projects are not required. In the current scenario, using hydroelectricity for any purpose except meeting the peak load or in pumped storage mode is sheer waste.

The second is to look at how energy is being used today and what we can do about it. The transportation sector accounts for about 25-30% of the total world energy consumption. The switch to electric vehicles conceals that the battery is only for storing electricity and must be charged with grid electricity. As the batteries of electric vehicles are charged from grid electricity, they do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions: they merely transfer the problem of emissions from transportation to the grid. So we are back to the problem of storing electricity at the grid level, the critical issue of renewable energy.

Is there a way to reduce emissions in the transportation sector itself? Yes, if it is our objective to reduce emissions per person-kilometer or ton-kilometer for goods traffic, subject to the journey time remaining the same. Emissions per kilometer are the only indicator that matter. It can be done with existing technology and is well-known to all who have even cursory knowledge of the sector. All we require is replacing private with public transport, as China has been doing. Buses, metro and rail, have much lower carbon footprints than private cars, and they need no new technology.

Why, then, do we not implement this solution? The political power of the auto industry, backed by the fossil fuel lobby, prevents it—the same auto industry that wants to sell us private electric vehicles instead of private petrol vehicles. It is emission per kilometer that we need to reduce, not simply the emission at the tailpipe of vehicles. The profits of the auto and fuel industries come from how many cars and how much fuel they can sell today. To hell with our future! Capital privileges current profits over the future. That is the nature of the beast.

To answer the serious question of how to reach a low carbon path rapidly, we need to look not only at future solutions that may or may not arrive but also at ones that already exist. Instead of trying to shift the burden of the energy transition onto poorer countries, we must look at not just the total carbon emission of a country but its per capita emissions. I am not even going into historical emissions, of which the rich countries have the lion’s share but simply pointing out that it is people who consume electricity and, therefore, the emissions. Comparing the total emissions of China to the United States, with a population five times lower than China, or India’s emissions with European countries with much smaller populations, to lump all of them as large emitters is to confuse the issues. For the record, India uses 60% of its grid energy from fossil fuels instead of 68.6% in the United States. In the last three years, China has added more renewables each year than the United States and Europe combined.

There are two ways to meet the climate crisis: look honestly at the problem, and each country does its best to avert the impending crisis. I am not talking of a just share of carbon space, but that rich countries do not occupy even the remaining carbon space as the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom seem bent on doing. This means not playing games with climate targets, accepting that rich countries have to shoulder a larger share of the transition costs, and not to charge extortionary rates for patents or know-how from poorer countries. And to not single out coal while pretending natural gas is a transitional fuel. The capitalist principle of beggar thy neighbor may help rich countries in the short run but will only bring disaster for humanity.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/12/16/ ... countries/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sun Dec 25, 2022 5:11 pm

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Our survival depends on a world without billionaires
Originally published: Liberation on December 18, 2022 by Tina Landis (more by Liberation) | (Posted Dec 24, 2022)

A recent report from Oxfam entitled “Carbon Billionaires: The Investment Emissions of the World’s Richest People” points the finger at the wealthiest individuals for causing and continuing to fuel climate change through not only their individual carbon footprints but more importantly their investments in polluting industries. The study looks at the impact of 125 of the richest billionaires globally, whose carbon emissions equal those of France, or 67 million people, and shows that just the richest 10 of those individuals own more wealth than the poorest 40% of humanity. The average billionaire in the study is responsible for carbon emissions over one million times higher than the average person in the bottom 90% of humanity.

While their lavish lifestyles–yachts, private jets, mansions and other excessive material wealth—contribute to climate change, their investments account for 50% to 70% of their carbon footprint. Fourteen percent of these investments are in fossil fuels and other polluting industries, with only one of these 125 billionaires having investments in a renewable energy company. A disclaimer from Oxfam states that these figures are likely low estimates of the true carbon emissions of the wealthiest due to lack of independent verification for half of corporate emissions disclosures, as well as failure by most companies to report Scope 3 emissions from their supply chains and consumer use of their products, which often have significant impacts.

The report suggests that governments should increase taxation on the wealthiest, tighten regulations on industry and investors and provide more transparency through income-based emissions reporting. It also highlights the inequities in emissions versus climate impacts with the Global North holding the majority of the responsibility for causing climate change while the still-developing Global South and working-class communities are bearing the brunt of climate disasters. The amount of emissions from the richest sectors of society mirrors income inequality. So the report argues that by taxing the richest, we can distribute wealth more evenly and reduce overall emissions to levels that can stem climate catastrophe–as if just hindering the investment choices of a few bad actors will shift the trajectory we are on.

But what is missing from this report is that the system of capitalism is the root cause. The very nature of capitalism–endless growth, maximization of profits, competition over markets and resources, lack of centralized planning–has caused climate change. The insatiable need to endlessly produce products using the cheapest materials and most exploitative labor with complete disregard for the long-term implications has decimated ecosystems worldwide and spewed massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

Imperialist domination of markets backed by military might has impeded Global South countries from developing on a sustainable path due to indebtedness, interventions and domination by the Global North. No amount of taxation and regulation will change this dynamic. The wealthy already find ways to avoid paying taxes by hiding funds in offshore accounts and taking advantage of the many tax loopholes and benefits that cater to the elite. And the corporations literally write legislation with the consent of our so-called representatives, while environmental laws protect the right of industry to profit above the health of our communities.

Capitalism can never be environmentally sustainable, as it treats the living world as a commodity to be exploited until there are no more profits to be made. For instance, before colonization, North America was a lush, bountiful landscape supporting an abundance of biodiversity due to the Indigenous peoples’ understanding and respect for the natural world. With the invasion of Europeans came capitalist market forces that drove entire species to near extinction for profit–beaver and otters were killed for their fur, bison slaughtered for their meat, bones and hide, and forests clear cut for lumber, cash crops and cattle grazing.

This drive for profits, largely to feed the markets of Europe, forever altered the ecosystems of this continent. The disruption of the inextricable balance between species that had evolved over millions of years to create the most optimal conditions for all life to thrive impacted how water cycled through the landscape and transformed once-lush ecosystems into deserts.

This environmental decimation has been replicated around the globe, along with the burning of fossil fuels and ongoing land use changes. It has created the current state of droughts, fires, floods and extreme weather, which is seen by the capitalists as mere collateral damage in the paramount goal of profit making.

Continuing ecological destruction–rainforests being cleared for palm oil, cattle, and biofuels, mineral and fossil fuel extraction that poisons landscapes, petrochemical industries producing a constant stream of synthetic materials and disposable plastics that choke the oceans–is all being carried out to bring increasing returns on investments for these billionaires.

The majority of planet-warming emissions stem from these same corporations that plunder the planet. The corporate media, owned by the same ruling elite, loves to promote philanthropic efforts as the path to solving the climate crisis—from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos to Bill Gates, who in reality do nothing with their money that won’t in the end bring some benefit to themselves while improving their brand.

Working-class individuals and the poorest of the world have little impact on the problem and little choice regarding their carbon footprint with limited resources at hand. Most can’t afford energy efficient housing and often have to rely on getting around by gas-powered vehicles due to lack of adequate public transit or the funds to buy a zero-emission vehicle. Billionaires have that choice, but considering that their wealth came from plundering the planet and exploiting our labor, looking to them to solve the problem is delusional.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change continues to warn us that the window is rapidly closing to maintain a habitable world with only a few years remaining for rapid emission reductions. It is too late for taxes and regulations. If we are to survive, the workers must take control of our economies and create a socialist system. Under a worker-controlled socialist government and a planned economy, the wealth and resources of society would be utilized in a sustainable and equitable manner to meet the needs of the people and the planet. A world without billionaires is the only path forward.

https://mronline.org/2022/12/24/our-sur ... lionaires/

'Red' added.

I would like to know the net amount of billionaire owned assets compare to mere millionaire owned assets. I strongly suspect that the millionaire owned assets vastly outweigh those of them nasty billionaires. So while the Musk & Co have high visibility useful for propaganda demonizing them alone lets capitalism off the hook. It is not enough to go after the low-hanging fruit of billionaires, the means and methods of their ill-gotten gains must be eliminated root & branch. And if that hurts the feeling of those mushily left philanthropists of significant means too bad, they are most certainly part of the problem and catering to their touchy guilt serves only them. And perhaps those managers of environmental and other NGO's dependent upon their largess. It is time we got serious and dismiss concern for the feelings(actually interests...) of the petty bourgeois and their owners...

We have had some degree of mass education for the better part of 100 years, it is time for Working Class Intellectuals to come to the fore.
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 06, 2023 3:28 pm

Is it time to give up on 1.5°C?
By Michael Spence | China Daily | Updated: 2023-01-04 06:43

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Net-zero commitments are all the rage. Countries, companies, and others worldwide have committed to eliminating their net greenhouse-gas emissions by a particular date — for some, as early as 2030. But net-zero targets are not tantamount to limiting global warming to the Paris climate agreement's goal of 1.5° Celsius — or any particular level of warming, for that matter. It is the path to net-zero emissions that makes all the difference.

This is well understood among experts. A 2021 report by the International Energy Agency, for example, charts a detailed path, divided into five-year intervals, toward achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 — and giving the world "an even chance of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5°C". The most striking feature of this analysis, at least to me, is the magnitude of the decline that is required by 2030: roughly eight billion tons of fossil-fuel-based emissions, taking us from the 34 gigatons carbon dioxide today to 26 Gt.

To achieve this, emissions would have to decline by 5.8 percent per year. If the global economy grows at a conservatively estimated annual rate of 2 percent over that period, the global economy's carbon intensity (CO2 emissions per $1,000 of GDP) would need to decline by 7.8 percent per year. While carbon intensity has been declining over the last 40 years, the trend has been nowhere near this rate: from 1980 to 2021, carbon intensity fell by just 1.3 percent per year, on average.

That rate was not high enough to keep CO2 emissions anywhere near constant, let alone cause them to decline. In fact, with global GDP growth exceeding the rate of carbon-intensity decline by about two percentage points, emissions roughly doubled during that period. One reason is precious little effort was made to reduce carbon intensity for most of that time. The decline that occurred was largely a byproduct of emerging economies becoming wealthier. (More developed economies have lower carbon intensities.)

To be sure, as climate change gained more attention from policymakers, the rate of decline did accelerate, averaging 1.9 percent per year since 2010. And with supply-side constraints now encumbering the global economy — annual growth could well run at just 2 percent in the next few years — a modest further reduction in carbon intensity could be enough to put the global economy at or near the peak of its total CO2 emissions. Higher global growth might not even set back efforts to reduce the economy's carbon intensity, if it is fueled by the proliferation of digital technologies.

An emissions peak would be an important milestone. But unless it was followed immediately by a sharp decline, we would still be pumping some 34 Gt of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. While the IEA report does not address what would happen if we fell significantly short of the first two interim targets (2025 and 2030), one can probably assume that it will be next to impossible to avoid crossing the 1.5°C threshold.

We have the tools to reach the IEA's targets. As the report makes clear, no new technological breakthroughs are needed in the first decade. Moreover, the costs do not appear to be prohibitive. The prices of wind and solar energy, for example, have declined substantially in recent years. But there would have to be huge changes in almost every corner of the global economy, and those changes do not appear to be occurring nearly as fast as the IEA timeline would demand.

The sobering fact is that the IEA report's target of 26 Gt of CO2 by 2030 is not within reach, because the global economy's carbon intensity is declining at barely a quarter of the required rate. A sharp discontinuity in this variable is possible, and perhaps some would argue that 26 Gt remains a useful aspirational target. But it does not seem particularly realistic.

Is it better to cling to an unattainable target, because it represents the best path for people and the planet, or revise that goal to something more feasible? Can continuing to tout an unrealistic goal hamper progress, as people become demotivated or simply stop viewing the effort as credible? Or is it worse to acquiesce to the consequences of abandoning the ambitious path, including the risk of crossing irreversible tipping points?

Whichever route the world chooses, the challenge will remain the same: reduce CO2 emissions dramatically — and fast. Of course, that is easier said than done. The world economy comprises 195 countries with different cultures and political systems and at different stages of economic development, as well as countless businesses of all sizes and types, and eight billion individuals. Complicating matters further, the widespread distributional effects of both action (rapid energy transitions) and inaction (climate change) are difficult to address, especially in international negotiations.

But there are ways to simplify the challenge. Half of global greenhouse gas emissions come from just eight economies: China, the United States, the European Union, Japan, India, Canada, Australia, and Russia. The G20 economies account for 70 percent. A concerted and coordinated effort in these large economies would make a material difference in emissions trajectories and, perhaps more important, generate the technologies and management approaches that will be needed to reach the net-zero goal.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... a77fd.html

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“If there is to be a livable future, it will be a future offline”
By Owen Schalk (Posted Jan 05, 2023)

Originally published: Canadian Dimension on January 1, 2023 (more by Canadian Dimension) |

At this point, it is a commonplace that the techno-optimist promises of the Internet’s early proponents were either naïve or lies.

Claims of the system’s power to connect far-flung individuals and enrich one’s social life are risible. In the West, at least, the Internet’s primary effect has been to dissipate social energies into simulated flickers of friendship, comradery, or antagonism that more often than not ripple into nothingness before any deeper human experience can take root, rendering a large chunk of one’s time and attention pointless beyond the fact that it can be monetized to the benefit of seemingly omnipresent tech companies.

Additionally, the future of “frictionless” consumption promised by an incipient class of tech barons proved to be a new stage in the discipling of productive labour, primarily in the Global South, and the submersion of consumers, mostly in the North, into networks of technological production that rely on out-of-sight-out-of-mind dispossession, mineral extraction, and assembly.

The notion that the Internet represented a supposed democratization of power and influence, one that could generate an anti-systemic, anti-authoritarian movement against state domination, also proved delusional, as the system’s privatization led corporations to devise new methods of time and value appropriation for the digital space.

Of course, it should be noted that even during the Internet’s earliest and supposedly most auspicious days, this democratization was never a possibility. As Yasha Levine outlines in his 2018 book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, the Internet and personal computing technology were developed during the Cold War as counterinsurgency tools by the U.S. military-industrial complex, and even after their privatization, their capacity for surveillance and data collection has been utilized by states against their own populations (as the NSA leaks of 2013 verified).

In his new book, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, Jonathan Crary declares: “If there is to be a livable and shared future on our planet, it will be a future offline… If we’re fortunate, a short-lived digital age will [be] overtaken by a hybrid material culture based on both old and new ways of living and subsisting cooperatively.” This new culture, Crary proposes, must include “the expansion of local food production and distribution, the making available of basic health care and paramedical services, the protection of water supplies, and the equitable remaking of existing housing stocks.” This is a future that must be extricated as much as possible from the atomizing, monetizing, anti-communitarian and pro-neoliberal logic of what he dubs the “internet complex.”

Crary argues that the Internet as it developed—or, more accurately, as it was always going to develop given its origins—has reified new patterns of value extraction by the ruling classes in Western countries upon the productive populations of the world, a deeply racialized and sexualized domination that disproportionately impacts those in the Global South.

For most of its users, meanwhile, Crary argues that “the internet complex is the implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration,” an imposed reality that inculcates a kind of digital realism akin to a “passive acceptance of numbing online routines as synonymous with living.”

Meanwhile, for those whose lands, resources, and traditional ways of living stand in the way of the material extraction required to maintain the internet complex, the “frictionless” reality of technologized, globalized capitalism often takes the form of military and police encroachment, criminalization, dispossession, and even murder. Crary writes:

Violence to both people and their lands defines [the internet complex’s] imperial and neocolonial operations, as it has for several centuries. The very possibility of a ‘digital age’ requires the expansion of these destructive industrial practices to world-vanquishing extremes.

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The NSA’s National Security Operations Center in 2012. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In Crary’s argument, dispossession defines the workings of the internet complex globally and within the imperial core. On one level, this means the expropriation of lands for the construction of mines, assembly plants, and unsustainable data centres that require millions of gallons of water per day to cool. On another, it means the dispossession of people of their productive time, either through forcing them into exploitative production relationships or infusing tech platforms like social media with increasingly addictive qualities to increase the hours that consumers waste on digital products.

On still another level, it means the active dispossession of individuals of their eyes, faces, and voices through the collection of biometric data meant to “optimize” user experience through the gathering of facial and vocal data, the analysis of this data by company software, and the implementation of changes to increase “eye-catching” features, “smile time,” and above all, monetizable hours.

“High-tech corporations model their ambitions around an ‘attention economy’ in which financial success requires soliciting the greatest number of ‘eyeballs,’” Crary explains.

Just as time-motion studies and scientific management techniques sought to make efficient the motions and work of the body during a key phase of industrial capitalism, now scrutiny of the eye [and face and voice] serves the goal of managing an observer… and training [them] to be an accessory of information processing… But spying on individuals and their personal proclivities is not one of its main objectives. A more important goal is the discovery of large-scale regularities among targeted demographics, with the aim of financializing the harvested information [that] provides analytics needed by designers for steering sight into appropriately attentive behaviors.

He concludes that our main concern with the collection of biometric data and its monetization “should be that we are all increasingly inhabiting and interacting with online worlds fabricated to effect predetermined, routinized visual [and emotional] responses.” This interaction constitutes “a contemporary mode of informal work that produces value as marketable information for corporate and institutional interests.”

Crary’s overarching argument is that the internet complex is undergirded by a globe-spanning system of social, economic, and political organization that he labels “scorched earth capitalism”—essentially the neoliberal, technoscientific model exported around the world during the “globalization” era of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His analysis incorporates both the micro (impacts of tech overuse on Gen Z) and macro (the Enlightenment turn to the objectification of the natural world) to argue that scorched earth capitalism is antithetical to cultures of commonality, ecological harmony, and equitability between peoples.

In his book, Crary convincingly outlines that the globalization of scorched earth capitalism has defaced the world and its inhabitants on a massive scale. It has sought to impose a 24/7 model of value extraction on consumers to monopolize and monetize their attention spans. It has demeaned the social lives of young people in the Global North and subjected the youth of Southern countries to “austerity, indebtedness, famine, and state terror.” It has undermined the possibility of meaningful grassroots political organization. It has attacked the longevity of local and regional forms of sociality, production, and consumption while feeding the life extension fantasies of tech oligarchs who have tried to globalize their cold, spiritless vision of the future. Meanwhile, it continues to justify itself with long-discredited myths about the liberatory nature of platforms and systems whose primary function is value extraction, social division, and the perpetuation of global inequality.

In ‘scorched earth capitalism’ and its specific extensions into the realms of information processing, globalized food production, militarization, and more, Crary sees a system bent on the homogenization of deeply varied peoples, cultures, and ways of organizing economic and political life. The purpose of this homogenization is to impose uniform models of production and consumption on the world—models based on digitization, heavy industrialism, unequal exchange, and the offloading of ecological consequences onto the South—to allow more efficient upward transfers of wealth to a transnational oligarchy mainly based in Western countries.

Crary’s solution is common sense but, in the digitized funhouse of scorched earth capitalist discourse, uncommonly radical. His suggestions revolve around recognizing the materiality and sensuousness of the human body and pursuing activities that deepen one’s awareness of this materiality, the materiality of others, and the communal nature of the senses and intellect.

One of the central concepts he includes is that of the “encounter,” borrowed from Zapatista political philosophy and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. The encounter, Crary writes, is both a sensuous experience of sociality and nature and a political project based around community meetings and workers’ councils. The theme that unites these concepts is that of directness: direct engagement with people and community, direct appreciation for the natural world, and direct, grassroots forms of political organization aimed at nurturing group interdependence and building direct democracy. Such a system would spurn the objectifying incentives of the internet complex and reclaim the autonomy of the local in areas such as food production, health care, and housing.

Given the intensifying strain that global capitalism in its material and digital forms is putting on our selves, our communities, and our world, the just, compassionate, and direct vision of the future that Crary presents in Scorched Earth is one that demands our consideration.

https://mronline.org/2023/01/05/if-ther ... e-offline/

Just what we needed, another "fill in the blank capitalism"....To be generous we might recall the blind men and the elephant. OTOH, we might interpret this parade of 'parentheses capitalisms' as a serial striving for 'anything but communism'. Well, the more poisoned and depleted our environment becomes the less room for 'generosity'. Because it's all just capitalism, the so-named variants nothing but the continual development of new means of accumulation, otherwise hardly different than any other technological 'advance' in capitalism's history. It's just plain capitalism regardless and that should be made plain. Any of these variants leaves the door open for reformism, needless and obscuring the necessities of the system by which the capitalists dominate society and destroys our environment as an afterthought.
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 10, 2023 4:59 pm

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Fertilizing, May 1972. Photo by Charles O’Rear from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Documerica project/US National Archives/Flickr.

The lesson we should have learned from ‘Silent Spring’
Originally published: Canadian Dimension on January 3, 2023 by Nick Gottlieb (more by Canadian Dimension) | (Posted Jan 10, 2023)

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Last year marked six decades since the publication of Rachel Carson’s seminal work Silent Spring, the book often credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement (at least in North America).

One impactful line from the book stands out as being even more true today than it was in 1962:

Every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

Chemical pollutants have been found in rainwater, at Earth’s highest and lowest points, and in human placentas and fetuses. A study published earlier this year found glyphosate residues in 80 percent of a representative sample. There are discoveries about new frontiers that man-made chemicals have surpassed virtually every month.

Many of the chemicals Carson described by name are still in wide circulation today and thousands more have been synthesized and marketed since then. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark put it,

Despite a number of victories, Carson and those who followed in her footsteps lost the war against synthetic pesticides.

We lost because the environmental movement took the wrong lessons from Silent Spring, focusing on Carson’s expository work—the compelling description of the human and ecological damage being caused—and ignoring her explanations of how and why we got here. The movement seized on the idea that public awareness was all that was missing, but it failed to understand the more radical part of her analysis: that the devastation was being wrought primarily to create markets for an over productive chemical industry, not because of some kind of innate, consumer-driven demand for poison.

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), the chemical that inspired Carson’s book, provides an illustrative example. The U.S. government coordinated large amounts of DDT production during the Second World War in order to use it to treat lice and eliminate typhus among soldiers. As the war came to an end, massive amounts of DDT (and DDT manufacturing capacity) needed a new market. The U.S. government and the nascent chemical industry worked in coordination to create that market by selling DDT, both literally and figuratively, to the general public. Carson went so far as saying it wasn’t just chemicals that needed a market after the war: large numbers of surplus planes and pilots did, too, driving the push for widespread aerial spraying campaigns.

In another example of state-sponsored market creation, Carson discussed the fire ant. It had been endemic in the southern U.S. since the First World War but was generally considered nothing more than a nuisance and not a major threat to agricultural production until 1957, when the U.S. government embarked on an anti-fire ant marketing campaign. They ran ad campaigns and even produced films aimed at rebranding the fire ant as the biggest threat to agriculture in the South. Having painted a picture of the ant as an enemy, the state then initiated a multi-million dollar spraying program in the region, giving chemical companies a massive new source of revenue. Carson managed to dig up a quote from an industry trade journal that said the quiet part out loud:

United States pesticide makers appear to have tapped a sales bonanza in the increasing numbers of broad-scale pest elimination programs conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The proliferation of pesticide use in the postwar era wasn’t a natural response to a new, useful technology. It was proactively driven by capitalists—often leveraging the state itself as a tool—seeking to solve their postwar overproduction crisis and ensure continual growth.

Production patterns inaugurated by the Second World War shaped our futures in other areas, too: plastics followed an almost identical pattern to organic pesticides. Plastic was a relatively new material before the war but it proved to be extremely useful for the military; productive capacity grew dramatically to meet that need. At the end of the war, the plastic industry needed to find new markets, which it did by creating the culture of disposability we see today. As one researcher put it,

We were trained to buy this stuff.

The context of the war was somewhat unique (although U.S. warmongering throughout the latter half of the 20th century continued to prove a cash cow for the chemical industry), but the phenomenon at play—the need for capitalists to find or create new markets to support constant growth and excess productive capacity—is not. Virtually every environmental woe we have today is at least in part a result of the same mechanism.

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The pesticide DDT was widely dispersed in the U.S. in the mid-20th century. (Photo courtesy Bettmann/Getty/Canadian Dimension.)

Glyphosate, an organophosphate that hadn’t yet been identified as a potent herbicide when Carson was writing, has, in just thirty years, become the most widely used herbicide in history. Its story demonstrates the many avenues by which industry creates and entrenches demand for destructive (and often unneeded) products, all while manipulating the public sphere to protect itself.

Glyphosate was first released as an herbicide in 1974 under the trade name “Roundup,” but its use didn’t explode until the mid-1990s when Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) released the first “Roundup Ready” crops, genetically modified plants that could tolerate direct application of glyphosate during the growing season. This development facilitated a whole new approach to industrial agriculture—one that used much higher amounts of herbicide. Within just two decades of the release of the GMO crops, 19 billion pounds of the chemical had been used.

Roundup Ready crops were a technological development, but they also represented a new frontier for the monopolization of agriculture and the creation and perpetuation of demand for Monsanto’s products: by selling them, Monsanto was able to lock farmers that chose to use their crops into their herbicide (and vice versa). The new crops encouraged farmers to use more Roundup than ever before, quickly making glyphosate into a cash crop of its own.

Widespread use of herbicides, as Carson pointed out 60 years ago, inevitably leads to one thing: resistant weeds and the need for new, more toxic alternatives. Glyphosate has been no exception to this rule. But resistance, it turns out, isn’t a problem for chemical manufacturers—it’s a business plan. They’re all developing GMO crops resistant to other herbicides and patenting and selling new herbicide formulations to sell to farmers desperate to control the superweeds these products have created. As Carson put it, “Chemical control is self-perpetuating, needing frequent and costly repetition.” It is part of the “modern trend to built-in obsolescence.”

Roundup Ready crops didn’t just accelerate the already-present treadmill of herbicide application and resistance: they enabled Monsanto to use legal tools and the nature of both seed and aerosol spraying to force farmers to use their products against their wishes.

Monsanto patented the genes defining their Roundup Ready trait and went to work rooting out farmers—complete with a snitch line—who accidentally ended up with Roundup-resistant strains growing on their property. In Canada in 1998, just a few years after the crops first became available, Monsanto sued a farmer, Percy Schmeiser, and won: the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that even though Schmeiser didn’t knowingly plant Monsanto’s seeds, he was still in violation of their patent.

The Union of Concerned Scientists published a study in 2004—just a handful of years into the GMO crop revolution—finding that (patented) GMO DNA had already contaminated large portions of the ostensibly non-engineered seed supply.

A report published by the Center for Food Safety in 2013 found that both Monsanto and DuPont, another major agrochemical company, had large numbers of staff (and in some cases, third-party private investigators) focused solely on identifying farmers with herbicide-resistant GMO crops growing on their property, whether intentionally or not. At the time the report was published, U.S. courts had awarded Monsanto nearly $24 million dollars in these cases, but that doesn’t include those settled out of court and, more significantly, it doesn’t include the profits Monsanto made by using these legal tools to scare farmers into paying for their products.

Herbicides are generally sprayed, which means that spray can drift beyond where it’s intended. Farmers that choose not to use these herbicide-resistant strains (and, as such, don’t apply herbicides during the growing season) can be impacted by neighbouring farms that are using them. With the growing ubiquity of herbicide-resistant GMO crops (and the heavy spraying practices that come with them), that pressure can drive farmers to use Monsanto’s products. In one particularly egregious example, Monsanto released a dicamba-and-glyphosate-resistant strain before the U.S. government had approved the version of dicamba they intended to sell with the crop. Farmers that bought the new dicamba-resistant seeds went ahead and used other, pre-existing forms of dicamba that were more prone to drift and devastated their neighbours’ crops.

The agrochemical companies aren’t held responsible when herbicide drift happens, but they gain another lifetime customer every time a farmer is forced to start using their herbicide-resistant crops after having their harvest damaged by drift too many times.

These companies also use international trade law, international institutions, and the soft power of host countries (predominantly the U.S.) to create and protect their markets around the world. The most straightforward way they do this is by campaigning against bans on their products in other jurisdictions. A Reuters investigation reported that the U.S. government and Bayer (which bought Monsanto in 2018) worked together to force Thailand to back out of a plan to ban glyphosate. Just last year, the Guardian reported that Bayer, CropLife America (a trade association), and the U.S. government were exerting similar pressure on Mexico in advance of a proposed ban on glyphosate.

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Glyphosate was first released as an herbicide in 1974 under the trade name “Roundup,” but its use didn’t explode until the mid-1990s when Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) released the first “Roundup Ready” crops.

But they use more proactive tactics, too, leveraging philanthropic organizations backed by the billionaire class that owns these corporations, state power, and international institutions to force their way into new markets, particularly in the Global South. The Rockefeller Foundation, with the backing of the U.S. government, was instrumental in bringing industrial agriculture to (or forcing it upon) the Global South during the postwar era, along with the dependence on proprietary seeds, inputs, and machinery that it brings. They opened up vast new markets in Asia and Latin America for northern agrochemical companies.

The process has been repeating itself over the last two decades with genetically modified crops and potential markets that were “left behind” by the previous Green Revolution, spearheaded by groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), founded by those two foundations and supported by international institutions and Global North countries, including Canada, is working to bring genetically modified, commodified seeds, and industrial farming to Africa. According to their own “Results to Date” infographic, one of their main achievements so far has been commercializing 562 seed varieties.

There is a reasonable discussion to be had about the impacts of industrial farming on total yield and the costs and benefits for human and ecological health in a region. But there’s one thing that’s very clear: bringing large-scale commercialized agriculture that is heavily dependent on proprietary seeds and proprietary chemical inputs to a region that is dominated by smallhold peasant farming represents a massive new market for agrochemical companies. And it’s not necessarily a willing market: as Ashok Kumbamu, a sociologist at Mayo Clinic, wrote, a “philanthropic-corporate-state complex” is driving what he calls today’s “Gene Revolution” and leading to “the dispossession of millions of primary agricultural producers from their means of production, nature, and indigenous knowledge systems.”

This agricultural revolution is a mechanism by which capitalism manufactures the proletariat, transforming subsistence farmers existing largely outside the global capitalist system into wage-earners that have to pay rent to the owning class in order to survive.

The industry’s push into Africa isn’t just about new markets: it’s also about creating new products (with captive markets) by patenting and commodifying genetic material of plant strains produced over thousands of years by local farmers. It’s a modern, biotechnology-based form of a process known as “enclosure of the commons.” AGRA funds research focused on identifying, breeding, or engineering high-yield varieties that produce well at large scales in various regions in Africa. When they find those varieties, they encourage the patenting and commercialization of them—indeed (it’s one of their highlighted accomplishments). This forces farmers who have themselves carefully produced climate-adapted crops over hundreds of generations to start purchasing seeds annually from corporate owners.

As Carol Thompson, a professor of political science who studies the interactions between global capital and smallholder farmers, put it,

Removing seed from the public sector and privatising it are the coercive innovations that AGRA finances.

Companies selling glyphosate have also used some of the traditional tactics that Carson wrote about to create self-perpetuating markets by shaping government regulation and government-funded programs. In Canada, for example, glyphosate is used regularly by the logging industry, sprayed on clear-cuts to kill non-coniferous plants in an alleged effort to make their monoculture plantations more productive. The catch, aside from the obvious ecocidal side effects, is that thanks to the research of scientists like Dr. Suzanne Simard, we’ve known that this strategy doesn’t really work for decades. But it’s so entrenched—thanks to the agrochemical industry’s massaging of our legal systems to guarantee a long term market—that both government and private companies are still doing it, poisoning our ecosystems along the way (don’t pick berries in a clear-cut).

Power line rights-of-way, railroad tracks, road margins, and more are also sprayed with glyphosate (and other herbicides) in Canada. But as Carson pointed out in 1962, these annual spraying programs are environmentally destructive and unnecessary. Selective treatment of tall shrubs and trees would, at least in many cases, accomplish the same goal with less work, less expenditure, and less ecological devastation, but, predictably enough, these are programs supported (if not created) by chemical companies because it establishes a permanent growing market for them.

Carson gave us a vivid and compelling description of the barren world that the agrochemical industry was creating. But hidden within that was a clear analysis of why it was happening: the inherent drive to accumulation within capitalism and the willingness of corporations and capitalists to use every tool available to them, including the state itself, to create markets and grow profit. The climate crisis has shown itself to be a symptom of the same fundamental problem over and over again, from the auto industry shaping suburbia and manipulating the public into wanting ever larger vehicles to the fossil fuel industry funding academia, spreading disinformation, and using the power of the state to block divestment campaigns.

It’s not just environmental problems: the opioid crisis emerged as a result of the same drive and through many of the same mechanisms, and of course, the infamous tobacco industry did too.

Capitalists saw the depth of Carson’s critique even while the environmental movement didn’t. That’s why there’s still a website called “RachelWasWrong.com” today espousing the “life-enhancing value of chemicals.” It’s funded by right-wing think tanks like The Heartland Institute and it’s just another entry in the 60-year campaign to discredit her work and distract attention from the real issues.

The answer to the ongoing chemical apocalypse is not to vigorously fight each chemical. Nor is the answer to the climate crisis to vigorously fight each individual source of emission. And neither answer is to convince the users of these products—the farmers and the foresters, drivers and airplane travelers—to stop. Instead, we have to address the way that corporations create, shape, and control demand, leveraging the state as a tool. Demand-focused policy that pins the blame on so-called consumers can never do that.

An effective environmental movement has to be one that pursues policies aimed at disempowering the capitalist class and loosening its grip on state power. Anything less just leaves us on the same kind of chemical treadmill as industrial agriculture: every time our resistance to one disaster grows, capitalists will simply seize it as an opportunity to sell us a new one.

https://mronline.org/2023/01/10/the-les ... nt-spring/

The real Green is a Red

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

90% of world’s people to face combined extreme heat and drought
January 9, 2023
Compound threats will most severely affect poor people and rural areas

Image

More than 90% of the world’s population is projected to face increased risks from the compound impacts of extreme heat and drought, potentially widening social inequalities as well as undermining the natural world’s ability to reduce CO2 emissions in the atmosphere — according to a study from Oxford University’s School of Geography.

In the wake of record temperatures in 2022, from London to Shanghai, continuing rising temperatures are projected around the world. When assessed together, the linked threats of heat and drought represent a significantly higher risk to society and ecosystems than when either threat is considered independently, according to the paper, published this month in the journal Nature Sustainability.

These joint threats may have severe socio-economic and ecological impacts which could aggravate social inequality, as they are projected to have more severe impacts on poorer people and rural areas.

According to the research, ‘The frequency of extreme compounding hazards is projected to intensify tenfold globally due to the combined effects of warming and decreases in terrestrial water storage, under the highest emission scenario. Over 90% of the world population and GDP is projected to be exposed to increasing compounding risks in the future climate, even under the lowest emission scenario.’

By using simulations from a large model and a new machine-learning generated carbon budget dataset, they quantified the response of ecosystem productivity to heat and water stressors at the global scale. This showed the devastating impact of the compound threat on the natural world and international economies. Limited water availability will hit the ability of carbon sinks to take in carbon emissions and emit oxygen.
Abstract of
Future socio-ecosystem productivity threatened by compound drought–heatwave events
Nature Sustainability, January 5, 2023
Compound drought–heatwave (CDHW) events are one of the worst climatic stressors for global sustainable development. However, the physical mechanisms behind CDHWs and their impacts on socio-ecosystem productivity remain poorly understood.

Here, using simulations from a large climate–hydrology model ensemble of 111 members, we demonstrate that the frequency of extreme CDHWs is projected to increase by tenfold globally under the highest emissions scenario, along with a disproportionate negative impact on vegetation and socio-economic productivity by the late twenty-first century. By combining satellite observations, field measurements and reanalysis, we show that terrestrial water storage and temperature are negatively coupled, probably driven by similar atmospheric conditions (for example, water vapour deficit and energy demand).

Limits on water availability are likely to play a more important role in constraining the terrestrial carbon sink than temperature extremes, and over 90% of the global population and gross domestic product could be exposed to increasing CDHW risks in the future, with more severe impacts in poorer and more rural areas. Our results provide crucial insights towards assessing and mitigating adverse effects of compound hazards on ecosystems and human well-being.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... d-drought/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 17, 2023 3:25 pm

Image
A crowd in Goiania, Brazil, protests the destruction of the Amazon. Credit: Hpoliveira/Shutterstock

The framework convention on climate is dead. Now what?
By Luiz Marques (Posted Jan 17, 2023)

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is open to national adherence by the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) or Earth Summit (1992), entered into force in March 1994.[1] Currently, 198 countries or parties have ratified it, making it a virtually universal treaty. Since 1995, it has given rise to the annual Conference of the Parties, or COPs, with one clear purpose: “The Conference of the Parties, as the supreme body of this Convention, shall keep under regular review the implementation of the Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt, and shall make, within its mandate, the decisions necessary to promote the effective implementation of the Convention.” [2]

Of the twenty-seven meetings that the UNFCCC has carried out to date, there is a general understanding that the most recent one, held in Sharm-el-Sheik, Egypt, was the most inconsequential.[3] Comparing its results to those of COP26 in Glasgow, for example, should not make us forget that there are more similarities than differences between them. Both share the same paralysis and the same idea of transforming carbon emissions into carbon markets, making it possible for rich countries and corporations to translate the abyss of the climate crisis into business opportunities, capitalism’s lingua franca.

The Setback Represented by COP27

Nevertheless, the setback represented by COP27 in relation to COP26 is undeniable. In Glasgow, civil society could protest without suffering repression inflicted by a bloody dictator like General Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, who counts 65,000 political prisoners in his 223 jails, according to a conservative estimate.[4] The choice of Egypt as the host of COP27 is an affront to democracy and a clear victory for that military regime, strongly backed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.[5] In short, COP27 not only was more chaotic, but it was also called the first dystopic COP, with allegations that the Egyptian police had installed spy software even in the official COP app.[6] In Glasgow, at least some pledges were made: (1) reduction of methane emissions, (2) increased resource transfers to poor countries for adaptation, and (3) reduction of coal consumption, as well as some equally empty declarations about reducing deforestation and cooperation between the United States and China. These were only promises, of course, but the final text of Sharm-el-Sheikh was worse. It suppressed that anodyne reference to progressively decreasing coal consumption and introduced encouragement of “low-emission technologies,” which can be read as new projects for the extraction and consumption of natural gas. As we know, natural gas is basically made up of methane (CH4), the principal of the various greenhouse gases (GHG), after carbon dioxide (CO2). Burning natural gas effectively emits less CO2 than oil or coal, but it is not a low-emission combustible, as methane leaks throughout its production and consumption chain can make its use even more emissive of methane than from coal itself. [7] COP27’s final text ultimately suppressed new pledges about more ambitious reductions of GHG emissions and did not even mention dates, however far off, about these emissions’ peak.

The COPs Lobbyists and Sponsors

The COPs have allowed an absurd amount of meddling by lobbies for the fossil fuel industry, the major figure responsible for destabilizing the climate system. COP27 managed to surpass COP26 in complacency with this industry. COP26 registered 503 people linked to these lobbies. The number of these lobbyists with access to the “blue zone,” that is, reserved for official negotiations, was larger than the delegation of any country present. COP27 registered 636 lobbyists from the industry in its official delegations. No less than 29 countries brought a total of 200 lobbyists registered in their delegations. There were 70 lobbyists linked to oil and gas in the United Arab Emirates’s delegation and 33 of the 150 members of Russia’s delegation had direct links to the country’s fossil fuel industry.[8] Those lobbyists, thronging the halls and negotiation tables in the resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh, were more numerous than the members of any national delegation from Africa in the supposedly “African” COP. Strikingly, Mauritania’s delegation included Bernard Looney himself, British Petroleum’s current CEO, as well as four other employees of the corporation.[9]

This type of conflict of interest extends to the choice of the COPs’ sponsors. Yes, even the richest host countries turn to sponsors, as if a COP were a sports championship. Let us look at examples of the last four COPs. COP24, held in 2018 in Katowice, Poland, was sponsored by the country’s largest coal and gas corporations, with state control or large state participation.[10] The principal sponsor of COP25 in Madrid was the BMW group. The principal sponsors of COP26 were Unilever, whose plastic packaging could cover eleven soccer fields per day, and Scotland’s two natural gas giants, SSE and Scottish Power.[11] Not being left behind by its predecessors, COP27 had Coca-Cola as its sponsor. That corporation, named the world’s worst plastic polluter five years in a row, produced three million metric tons of plastic in 2017 alone, the equivalent of 108 billion PET bottles, made from petroleum, or 200 thousand per minute. Between 2019 and 2021, its production of plastic rose from 3 to 3.2 million metric tons, an increase of 3.5 percent in the use of virgin plastic.[12]

A Mirage in the Sharm el-Sheikh Desert: The Mechanism of Loss and Damage

COP27’s much vaunted “result” was the acceptance of the principle that rich countries should compensate the most vulnerable countries for losses and damages caused by the impacts of the climate emergency and climate anomalies, the so-called “Loss and Damage Finance Facility.” This is just a smoke screen to hide the failure of substantive negotiations about fossil fuel pollution and environmental destruction. That mechanism, which would supposedly complement mitigation and adaptation efforts, had already been discussed in preparatory meetings for the Earth Summit in 1991. It then dealt with compensating Pacific island nations (signers of the Alliance of Small Island States, AOSIS) for rising sea levels, droughts, and desertification.[13] The financial mechanism then proposed was never established and the idea only began to be discussed outside AOSIS’s sphere with the Bali Action Plan as part of COP13, in December 2007, perhaps influenced by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report from that same year, which stresses the inevitability of impending climatic disasters. In successive COPs, the AOSIS and other poor countries continued to insist on the need for adoption of indemnification mechanisms, until the idea was resurrected by the emotional impact of the devastating Haiyan Typhoon that killed at least 6,300 people in the Philippines alone during COP19, hosted in Warsaw in November 2013.[14] Perhaps the image of Yeb Sano, the Philippine delegate to COP19, is still vivid in the memory of some. Upon hearing news of the catastrophe, he broke down in tears and announced he would fast until a “meaningful outcome is in sight.”[15] The tragedy and strength of Yeb Sano’s reaction, associated with the dire warning of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, were possibly decisive for establishing the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage associated with Climate Change Impacts in 2013. It then contemplated indemnities to countries more vulnerable to the impacts of climate emergencies, including “slow onset events” and disasters provoked by extreme weather events. A long new hibernation period for the idea then followed, again frustrated in COP26, until African countries were able to pull it back out of the drawer. The recent destruction in Pakistan caused by absolutely anomalous rains perhaps contributed to this. These rains caused António Guterres, UN Secretary General, to declare with his habitual lucidity, “We are heading into a disaster. We have waged war on nature and nature is tracking back and striking back in a devastating way. Today in Pakistan, tomorrow in any of your countries.”[16]

However, re-acceptance of the Mechanism for Loss and Damage in 2022 by rich countries does not imply anything concrete. It did not establish who should pay, who should have the right to receive payment, when payment would be disbursed, what the nature of the disbursement would be, and under what conditions it would be activated. These crucial issues were pushed to COP28 and they, in turn, will probably be relegated to successive meetings.[17] This mechanism created in 1992 will probably meet the same end as the promises made by the rich countries in COP15 (2009) to “mobilize” $100 billion per year for the poor countries until 2020—a promise that has never been fulfilled, now postponed until 2025, with 70 percent of the transfers undertaken in 2019 being in the form of loans, including from private banks, further exacerbating the most vulnerable countries’ foreign debt.[18]

The Death of the 1992 Convention on Climate Change

These are the recent facts that we needed to summarize. It is not the case, however, of detailing the failures and the twists and turns of these and prior COPs. What is important is to understand something much more important: the loss of relevance (if it ever had any) of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change itself (referred to hereafter as the Climate Convention) and its more important offshoot, the Paris Agreement, celebrated in 2015, in the fight against the climate emergency. Demonstrating this irrelevance is the main objective of what follows. A year ago, I presented a summary of analysis by Dave Borlace regarding COP26’s “results” (Glasgow, 31/X – 12/XI/2021). The journal Revista Humanitas Unisinos later published the text, the conclusions of which I recall here.[19]

“Unless Im wrong (and I’d truly like to be wrong), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, born in 1992, is dead. It died in Madrid in 2019 and was buried in Glasgow. The Seventh Day Requiem Mass will be in Egypt in 2022 (COP27) and the one-year mass will be officiated in 2023 (COP28) in the United Arab Emirates, one of the oil capitals.… COP 28 will almost be a macabre ritual of fossil fuels’ final victory. By then, greenhouse gas emissions will be well above the levels reached in 2019 (with or without the omicron variant).”

In 2022, these GHG emissions, even with the resurgence of the omicron variant, are now effectively above 2019 levels. COP27’s failure showed that there was neither hyperbole nor a presumption of prophecy on my part; only recognition of the corpse of the most important international treaty on the climate emergency, still formally in effect. This or any other diplomatic accord becomes a dead letter when, at the end of a reasonable time, it is completely ignored in such a way that reality is far removed from the objective that gave rise to it. This is what happened. Let us remember what its objective was, expressed in the Convention’s Article 2 in 1992: “The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”[20]

As we can see, the objective is made up of two assertions that must be analyzed separately: (1) the “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere” and (2) their stabilization “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Analysis of these two principal assertions contained in this objective gives evidence of the extent of the failure of the 1992 Convention, as each objective has been wholly contradicted by reality. Let us examine them separately.

The Stabilization of Greenhouse Gas Concentrations in the Atmosphere

GHG atmospheric concentrations have continued growing. Worse, they have continued growing at an ever-greater rate (acceleration), as the first 24 COPs succeeded one another, as shown in Figure 1, relative to atmospheric CO2.

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Figure 1. Acceleration of the Increase in CO2 Atmospheric Concentrations (measured in parts per million) between 1960 and 2018, in Step with the Succession of the Twenty-Four COPs Held between 1995 and 2018
Source: Barry Saxifrage, “CO2 vs the COPs,” Canada’s National Observer, December 12, 2018.

We know that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 had never surpassed 300 parts per million (ppm) in the last 800 thousand years.[21] In 1992, they reached 353 ppm and in May 2022, they reached 421 ppm. They are now more than 50 percent higher than in 1750 (278 ppm) and 20 percent higher than in 1992, when the Climate Convention was opened to adherence by the parties. As the graphic above illustrates, they grew at the average rate of 1.5 ppm per year in the 1990s. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 grew at an average of 2 ppm per year, jumping to 2.4 ppm on average per year in the second decade. In the six years between 2015 and 2020, that increase occurred at the average annual rate of 2.55 ppm.[22] These concentrations increased, ultimately, 2.84 ppm between January 2021 (415.15 ppm) and January 2020 (417.99 ppm).[23] In only sixty years, the speed of that increase has almost tripled, going from an average annual increase of 0.9 ppm in the 1960s to an average annual increase of 2.4 ppm between 2010 and 2019. Rebecca Lindsey reports that “the annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases.”[24]

To stabilize these concentrations, as was the objective of the 1992 Climate Convention, presumed the immediate ending of net anthropogenic emissions of GHG, beginning with CO2. Thus, one of the most excruciating aspects of the 1992 Convention’s failure is the permanence of the growth rate of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. As much in the decade of the 1990s as in the decade of the 2010s, these emissions have increased at an annual average rate of 1 percent.[25] Preliminary estimates of anthropogenic CO2 emissions for 2022 indicate an increase to that same rate of 1 percent (0.1–1.9%) in relation to 2021.[26] The year 2022 now has the greatest anthropogenic emissions of CO2 in human history. The conclusion is incontestable: neither the 1992 Convention nor the Paris Agreement of 2015, celebrated at COP21, had any effect on the evolution of global emissions and atmospheric concentrations of CO2.

A Level that Avoids Dangerous Anthropic Interference in the Climate System

The second assertion of the 1992 Convention’s objective refers to containing warming “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” A dangerous level is made up of two variables: (1) the magnitude of warming to be avoided and (2) the speed of that warming, since time is the key factor for adaptation of ecosystems to new climatic conditions.

The 1992 Convention’s text neither conceptualized nor quantified the limit of that anthropic interference nor stipulated the dates for stabilizing those concentrations. This omission is not due to ignorance, since there already was a growing consensus in 1992 that warming should be less than 2°C above the preindustrial period. It is not possible here to summarize the formation of that consensus.[27] Let us just remember that, after a marginal assumption by William Nordhaus in 1977,[28] a scientific proposal of that limit of danger was already in the 1990 report by the Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI).[29] This was specific regarding the two indicators that should not be surpassed: the speed and the level of global warming. The maximum speed of warming was set at 0.1°C per decade. That speed of warming was already being surpassed during the 1970–2015 period: 0.18°C per decade and should reach 0.36°C per decade between 2016 and 2040.[30] Thus, the current rate of global warming is now reaching a velocity more than three times the maximum rate stipulated by the SEI in 1990. As for the level of warming to not be reached, the 1990 text was more nuanced:

Two absolute temperature targets for committed warming were identified. These limits entail different levels of risk: (i) A maximum temperature increase of 1.0 °C above preindustrial global mean temperature. (ii) A maximum temperature increase of 2.0 °C above preindustrial global mean temperature. These two absolute temperature targets have different implications. It is recognized that temperature changes greater than the lower limit may be unavoidable due to greenhouse gases already emitted. The lower target is set on the basis of our understanding of the vulnerability of ecosystems to historical temperature changes. Temperature increases beyond 1.0°C may elicit rapid, unpredictable, and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.

That maximum level of warming of 2°C to be avoided surfaced again in 1995 as a commentary to COP1 in a declaration of the Advisory Council on Global Change. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber was behind the proposal.[31]

The Disconnect between the 1992 Climate Convention and the Science of Its Time

In 1992, diplomats and their governments not only already knew that 2°C average global warming above the preindustrial period should be avoided, but they also knew that this warming limit would be surpassed in the succeeding decades. Between 1975 and 1990, projections of warming proposed by Wallace Broecker, Jule Charney, Carl Sagan, and James Hansen, among others, showed that warming greater than 2°C would be produced throughout the first half of the twenty-first century.[32] In 1990, two years before the Climate Convention, the IPCC stated in its First Assessment Report:

Based on current model results, we predict, under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about 0.3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2°C to 0.5°C per decade).… This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1°C above the present value by 2025.[33]

“The present value” of superficial global warming in the years 1980–1990, to which this IPCC First Assessment Report referred, was between 0.4°C and 0.7°C above the preindustrial period (1950–1900), as the remarkably similar evaluations by the six most important climate monitoring agencies show, illustrated in Figure 2.

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Figure 2. Annual Averages of Global Air Temperature at a Height of Two Meters Estimated Change Since the Preindustrial Period (left-hand axis) and Relative to 1991–2020 (right-hand axis) According to Different Datasets
Red bars: ERA5 (ECMWF Copernicus Climate Change Service, C3S); Dots: GISTEMPv4 (NASA); HadCRUT5 (Met Office Hadley Centre); NOAAGlobalTempv5 (NOAA); JRA-55 (JMA); and Berkeley Earth.
Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service/ECMWF.
Source: Copernicus, “Globally, the Seven Hottest Years on Record Were the Last Seven; Carbon Dioxide and Methane Concentrations Continue to Rise,” January 10, 2022.


Therefore, since its First Assessment Report, which reflected the scientific knowledge of the 1980s (we must insist: two years before the 1992 Climate Convention), the IPCC had already predicted a warming of 1.4°C to 1.7°C by 2025, or a warming of about 1°C in three decades (0.3°C per decade in thirty-five years: 1990–2025). This projection was confirmed as correct for 2024, as James Hansen and colleagues show in Figure 3.

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Figure 3. Global Surface Temperature Relative to 1880–1920 Mean
Source: James Hansen, Makiko Sato, and Reto Ruedy, “August Temperature Update, a ‘Thank You’ and Biden’s Report Card,” Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program, Columbia University, September 22, 2022.

In fact, in 2022, James Hensen, Makiko Sato, and Reto Ruedy noted the following about the graph:

We suggest that 2024 is likely to be off the chart as the warmest year on record. Without inside information, that would be a dangerous prediction, but we proffer it because it is unlikely that the current La Niña will continue a fourth year. Even a little futz of an El Niño—like the tropical warming in 2018–19, which barely qualified as an El Niño—should be sufficient for record global temperature. A classical, strong El Niño in 2023–24 could push global temperature to about +1.5°C relative to the 1880–1920 mean, which is our estimate of preindustrial temperature.[34]

The World Meteorological Organization, in concert with other international scientific collectives, reinforces these projections.[35] According to its more recent five-year forecast, there is a 48 percent chance that at least one year between 2022 and 2026 will reach a mean global warming of 1.5°C (with a 10 percent chance that it will reach 1.7°C), always insisting that those chances are increasing with time. In fact, in the five-year period of 2018–2022, those chances were only 10 percent.[36] In the 2020–2024 five-year period, they jumped to 24 percent; in the 2021–2025 five-year period, they surpassed 40 percent. Today, as we have seen, they are in the area of 50 percent. Therefore, the chances that global mean warming will surpass 1.5°C in at least one year of the five-year periods beginning in 2023 or 2024 will probably be greater than 50 percent.

Given the state of scientific knowledge available between 1975 and 1990, we can conclude, in short, that the 1992 Climate Convention not only died during our time, but that it was also condemned from birth not to reach its objective:

*It should not have proposed the stabilization of the atmospheric concentrations of GHG but, rather, their reduction. The IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990 stated that, in the last 160 thousand years, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 had never surpassed 300 ppm.[37] In 1992, atmospheric concentrations of this gas had already reached 353 ppm. More importantly, the growth rate of these concentrations (1.5 ppm/year) should have already been considered anomalous and, above all, alarming; they should have caused a shock, because its evolution could no longer be considered safe for humanity and many other forms of life.
*The Convention remained silent about what the dangerous level of anthropic interference in the climate system that must be avoided was, when it had already been proposed that this level was between 1°C and 2°C above the preindustrial period.
*It, alas, had been widely known by the scientific community since 1979, or at least since 1990, that this dangerous level of anthropic interference in the climate system would be surpassed in the second decade of the twenty-first century, or rather, nearly two decades after the opening of the 1992 Convention to international adherence.

Current Science Underestimated the Impacts of 1.2°C Warming

The 1992 Climate Convention was unable to make explicit (let alone prevent) what would be a dangerous interference in the climate system, because it was out of step with the science of its time. But it was also unable to do so because even the best science of our time has proved incapable of establishing an adequate correlation between the current rise in temperature of around 1.2°C and the global impacts driven by that rise. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, published in April 2022, unequivocally concedes that limitation: “The extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are larger than estimated in previous assessments (high confidence).”[38] Indeed, no one foresaw that, with a mean global warming between 1.1°C (2017) and 1.2°C (2021), heat waves would reach such a magnitude even in latitudes north of the Tropic of Cancer or south of the Tropic of Capricorn, pulverizing regional temperature records, as shown in some few examples in Table 1.

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Table 1. Temperature Spikes in Some Countries between 2017 and 2022.
Sources: Atlas España, “Una histórica ola de calor, con temperaturas de más de 45 grados, azota Argentina,” El Correo, January 16, 2023; “Hottest temperature on Tuesday clocks in at 47.1C, as heatwave continues,” Ekathimerini, August 3, 2021; EC/Agencias, “Este es el nuevo récord oficial de calor en España, según AEMET,” El Confidencial, August 2, 2022; Phoebe Weston and Jonathan Watts, “Highest recorded temperature of 48.8C in Europe apparently logged in Sicily,” Guardian, August 11, 2021.

In Brazil, the temperature hit 44.8°C in Nova Maringá in November 2020, the highest on record in the country. Between 2019 and 2020, local heat records were broken in Cuiabá, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, Vitoria, Brasilia, and Goiania.[39] Forest fires and droughts have taken perennial rivers in Europe, the United States, and Asia to their lowest levels and even dried them out almost completely over the last two summers. Such anomalies may be the “new normal.”[40] As Will Steffen, Timothy Lenton, Johan Rockström, Stefan Rahmstorf, Katherine Richardson, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, among others, have pointed out, more importantly, it is now clear that the climate system can pass tipping points at much lower warming thresholds than previously assumed, leading this system to transition more or less abruptly and irreversibly to another state of equilibrium.[41] For the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001), the threshold for high and very high risks of abrupt and irreversible changes in the climate system was between 5°C and 6°C of global warming above the preindustrial period. In 2018, in the IPCC’s Special Report “Global Warming of 1.5 oC,” published in 2018, such risks are mounting with much lower levels of warming.[42] There is already a moderate risk with a warming of around 1.5°C. This becomes high as 1.5°C is exceeded and very high after a warming of 2°C.[43] There are growing probabilities that this critical level of warming will be reached before 2040, given the current inability of societies to face the climate emergency.[44] Bill McGuire sums up the scientific consensus regarding what the years 2025–2040 have in store for us: “Be in no doubt, anything above 1.5°C will see the advent of a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and surging sea levels. A rise of 2°C and above will seriously threaten the stability of global society.”[45]

Although painful, it is necessary to state without mincing words the death of the 1992 Climate Convention. It is of no use to continue pretending that the next COP will do what the previous twenty-seven have not. More than useless, it is harmful to continue selling the anxiolytic that emissions derived from burning coal will diminish (they reached 15.3 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2021, the highest ever)[46]; that GHG emissions will drop more than 40 percent by 2030 (even if governments keep their promises, they will still have increased nearly 5 percent in relation to 2019)[47], and that in 2050, capitalism will, finally, magically, reach the promised land for net carbon emissions.

What Now?

There is no proposed substitute for the Climate Accord in sight, so simply discontinuing it will bring nothing positive. It is imperative that it be revived, redefined in a much more radical way, to make it effective. This will only be possible with even more vigorous intervention by society itself in decision-making, not only in the COPs, but at all levels, including at the highest levels of the international legal order. The climate emergency will not be confronted if we do not understand it as part of a broad socio-environmental crisis. It is inseparable from the other systemic crises that are accelerating: annihilation of biodiversity, industrial pollution, and the abyss of economic, social, gender, and other inequalities.[48] These four crises—climate, biodiversity, pollution, and inequalities—amplify each other and express themselves as a whole as a crisis of democracy and, more broadly, a crisis of civilization.

In the context of efforts to reduce (already extremely dangerous) anthropic interference in the climate system, as was the 1992 Climate Convention’s objective, today we have a great assortment of proposals and initiatives. These should, of course, converge in the construction of a systemic alternative to capitalism[49] that will require: (1) absolute reduction of consumption of material and energy (and not only in relation to any unit of the GDP), beginning with that obtained by burning fossil fuels and (2) the perception that nature can no longer be ontologically reduced to a “resource” for economic activity. It is fundamental to validate the biosphere as a subject of right, as it is not a means to an end for the human species. Alongside this major objective, sectoral and specific social mobilizations can be observed today. Civil society’s struggles are still modest, but they are often effective at their specific levels. This diversity of systemic and concrete approaches, scopes, and practices is positive. We find not opposition, but rather complementarity, among them. Without a radical critique of capitalism and anthropocentrism, the human project will lack conditions for its survival; but without diplomacy, without incremental state polices, and without specific and concrete initiatives from civil society, the forces to advance strategically will not be accumulated. We must construct greater articulation between struggles fought by communities in their territories and efforts to construct an effective democratic global governance. The central ideological obstacle to such an articulation is the national-militarist axiom of absolute national sovereignty that still governs the international legal order. If we do not overcome that axiom, there will be no chance for peace and a concerted action among the peoples of the earth.

In Latin America, and in particular in Brazil, three basic points have guided a set of proposals and practices that must be strengthened:

Zero deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, conservation of the vegetation cover of the other Brazilian biomes, and a warlike effort to restore these biomes with native species. The two conditions absolutely necessary to reach this objective are:
a. A drastic reduction in cattle ranching, the main cause of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and other biomes. This implies an equally drastic decrease in beef consumption in Brazil, since almost 80 percent of this consumption is domestic.[50] Recommending a reduction in the consumption of meat may seem a paradox in a country in which almost 60 percent of the population suffered some level of food insecurity in 2021.[51] But it is not with meat that we can feed a population, but rather with nutrients of plant origin. A healthy and ecologically sustainable diet proposed by Lancet magazine in 2019 stresses that: “This healthy reference diet largely consists of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and unsaturated oils, includes a low to moderate amount of seafood and poultry, and includes no or a low quantity of red meat, processed meat, added sugar, refined grains, and starchy vegetables.”[52]

b. The removal of Latin America and especially the Amazon and the Brazilian Cerrado from their position as a commodity supplier for the globalized food system. The insertion of the continent in this system is largely responsible for destruction of the biosphere in this region, the richest on the planet; of the seventeen biologically megadiverse countries in endemic species, five are in the Amazon region (Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela).[53] Brazilian agribusiness is the great vector of biological destruction and climate imbalance in Brazil. It should be discontinued as quickly as possible in favor of organic food production through agroecology practiced by small farmers close to urban consumption centers. Today, agribusiness is Brazil’s major enemy. It is largely to blame for: (1) forest fires; (2) the elimination and degradation of forests, soils, and water resources; (3) annihilation of biodiversity; (4) zoonoses; (5) pesticide poisoning; (6) water eutrophication; (7) carbon emissions; (8) violence against Indigenous and maroon (quilombola) populations[54] and, in general, against rural communities and their ways of life. Former president Jair Bolsonaro has been rightfully accused of genocide and will also be accused of ecocide as soon as the International Criminal Court typifies that crime.[55] During his administration alone (more precisely, between August 2018 and July 2022), the Brazilian Amazon saw 45,586 km2 of primary forest eliminated by clear-cut deforestation, an area greater than the state of Rio de Janeiro (43,696 km2) or, for U.S. readers, greater than the sum of the areas of the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut (41,720 km2). Reality is still even worse because measurements by the National Institute for Spatial Research do not register forest degradation and clear-cut deforestation in areas smaller than 6.25 hectares (about the size of six soccer fields).[56] Here is another way to measure the ongoing ecocide: in 2021, something like 500 million trees were eliminated (a mean of around 1.5 million per day) just in the Brazilian Amazon.[57] Agribusiness is basically a criminal activity, covered up and encouraged by Bolsonaro, since practically all of this deforestation is illegal. As noted above, agribusiness is also responsible for the majority of Brazilian carbon emissions. In 2021, Brazil emitted 2.42 gigatons of GHG (2.42 GtCO2e), an increase of 12.2 percent in relation to 2020 and the greatest recorded since 2003. Agribusiness answers for 74 percent of that total, as 25 percent of these emissions occur directly from agropastoral activities and 49 percent of it is from deforestation, generally perpetrated by ranchers or for their benefit.[58] Brazil is the world’s seventh greatest emitter of GHG and the fourth largest per capita, after the United States, Russia, and China.[59] If the Brazilian Amazon were a country, it would be the ninth greatest emitter of GHG in the world, mainly because of agribusiness.[60] Methane emissions in 2021 by JBS (a Brazilian company that is the world’s largest meat-processing company, by sales) alone surpassed the combined methane emissions of France, Germany, Canada, and New Zealand. Emissions by Marfrig (the second-largest Brazilian food-processing company, after JBS) equaled Australia’s entire livestock sector.[61]

The second proposal for actions to be urgently strengthened is the protection and demarcation of Indigenous lands. There are 223 territories whose demarcation processes need to be concluded on an extremely urgent basis.[62] Others, in addition to those mentioned, should be demarcated in parallel with the expansion of environmental protection areas, on a continental and global scale. The law must be enforced, since even the lands already demarcated and areas designated for environmental protection have been victimized by unpunished invasions and aggressions. Not only Indigenous and quilombola lands, but the entire Amazon rainforest and the remaining tropical forests on the planet must benefit from a much more rigorous legal status. In the case of the Amazon, ideas and proposals in this sense have been laid out by representatives of the peoples of the Amazon rainforest, in concert with other segments of South American societies, in the realm of the Pan-Amazonian Social Forum and the World Amazon Assembly. These and other social organizations and movements, and not lobbies for oil and agribusiness, must have a guaranteed seat at the next COPs.
In 2023, COP28 in the United Arab Emirates will be the macabre triumph of fossil fuels. But COP29 or 30, which will probably take place in Belém do Pará, in the heart of the Amazon, must tackle an agenda centered on two basic axes: (1) massive adherence to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative and (b) deglobalization of the food system. This system has never been at the center of negotiations in the COPs. We must, therefore, tackle it head on, if we wish to avoid the ongoing annihilation of biodiversity, poisoning of organisms by pesticides, and global warming that will outstrip the adaptive capacity of countless species, including our own. As Michael Clark and colleagues show, “even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target.”[63] In fact, that system represents the second-greatest source of global GHG emissions and answers today for nearly one-third of those emissions.[64]
In 2008, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, remembering the objective of the 1992 Climate Accord to avoid dangerous anthropic interference in the climate system, affirmed: “No conceivable international CO2-reduction strategy (including the one hoped to transpire from the COP15 negotiations in Copenhagen next year) could possibly avoid that the planet will enter the dangerous anthropogenic interference zone, where largely unmanageable climate impacts (like sea-level rise in the multimeter range) lurk. All we can do is to limit the warming in excess of the 2.4°C.”[65]

Today, thirty years after the Climate Convention and almost fifteen years since Schellnhuber’s prediction, this is most scientists’ perception: we are closer than ever to suffering “largely unmanageable climate impacts.”[66] The present decade offers humanity the last chance to deviate from this disastrous trajectory that has already been outlined beyond a reasonable doubt, but whose worst outcomes we can still avoid. It is still up to us.

Notes
[1] See: https://unfccc.int/files/essential_back ... onveng.pdf.
[2] UNFCCC, Article 7.2.

[3] Oliver Milman, “Like Vegas, but Worse,” Guardian, November 11, 2022.

[4] “‘Prison Atlas’ details Egyptian Cases, Prisoners, and Judges,” Human Rights First, July 3, 2022; Ruth Michaelson, “COP27 backfires for Egypt as signs of repression mar attempt to bolster image,” Guardian, November 20, 2022.

[5] The White House, “Joint Statement Following Meeting Between President Biden and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi in Jeddah,” 16/VII/2022; Mohammed Abu Zaid, “El-Sisi thanks Saudi Arabia and UAE for their support,” Arab News, June 14, 2022.

[6] Bob Berwyn, “For Many, the Global Warming Confab That Rose in the Egyptian Desert Was a Mirage,” Inside Climate News, November 24, 2022.

[7] See, for example, A. R. Brandt et al., “Methane Leaks from North American Natural Gas Systems,” Science 343, no. 6172 (2014): 733-735; “Some recent estimates of leakage have challenged the benefits of switching from coal to Natural Gas.”

[8] “Over 100 more fossil fuel lobbyists than last year, flooding crucial COP climate talks,” Global Witness, November 10, 2022.

[9] Matt McGrath, “COP27: BP chief listed as delegate for Mauritania,” BBC, November 10, 2022.

[10] “Corporate sponsors of COP24. The corporations bankrolling UN climate conference in Katowice, Poland.”

[11] Robbie Kirk, “For Its Corporate Sponsors, COP26 Is a Platform for Greenwashing Their Polluting Practices,” Wire, November 9, 2021.

[12] Sandra Laville, “Coca-Cola admits it produces 3m tonnes of plastic packaging a year,” Guardian, March 14, 2019; Stéphane Mandard, “Coca-Cola, sponsor de la COP27 et ‘champion du monde’ de la pollution plastique,” Le Monde, November 15, 2022; Judith Evans, “Coca-Cola increased plastic use ahead of COP27 summit it is sponsoring,” Financial Times, November 1, 2022.

[13] See INC 1991.

[14] Lívia Preti Boechat & Wagner Costa Ribeiro, “O Mecanismo Internacional de Varsóvia para Perdas e Danos: uma análise de seu primeiro ciclo,” Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente 58 (2021): 830-49.

[15] “Philippine delegate weeps at UN climate conference,” Al-Jazeera America, November 11, 2013.

[16] Munir Ahmed, “UN chief asks world for ‘massive’ help in flood-hit Pakistan,” AP News, September 9, 2022.

[17] Sindra Sharma-Khushal et al., “The Loss and Damage Finance Facility. Why and How. Discussion paper.”

[18] “Poorer Nations Expected to Face Up to £55 billion shortfall in climate finance,” Oxfam, September 20, 2021; Josh Gabbatiss, “Why climate-finance ‘flows’ are falling short of $100bn pledge,” Carbon Brief, October 25, 2021.

[19] Luiz Marques, “Resumo dos resultados da COP26” (from Dave Borlace, “Blah, Blah, Blah? Is that all our leaders provided at COP26?”), Revista do Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, November 30, 2021.

[20] See: https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf.

[21] Rebecca Lindsey, “Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” NOAA, June 23, 2022.

[22] Cf. NOAA.

[23] See: “CO2-earth.”

[24] Lindsey, “Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.”

[25] Glen Peters, “Global fossil co₂ emissions increase amidst turmoil in energy markets,” Center for International Climate Research, November 10, 2022.

[26] Pierre Friedlingstein et al., “Global Carbon Budget 2022,” Earth System Science Data 14, no. 11 (2022): 4811-900.

[27] Carlo C. Jaeger and Julia Jaeger, “Three views of Two Degrees,” European Climate Forum – Working Paper, 2/2010; “Two degrees: The history of climate change’s speed limit,” Carbon Brief, December 8, 2014.

[28] William D. Nordhaus, “Strategies for the control of carbon dioxide,” Cowles Foundation Paper n. 443, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University, 1977.

[29] F. R. Rijsberman & R. J. Swart, “Targets and Indicators of Climate Change,” Report of Working Group II of the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases, Stockholm Environmental Institute, 1990.

[30] James Hansen and Makiko Sato, “July Temperature Update: Faustian Payment Comes Due,” August 13, 2021.

[31] “The Father of the 2 Degrees Limit”: Schellnhuber receives Blue Planet Prize,” Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, October 19, 2017.

[32] Wallace S. Broecker, “Climatic Change. Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” Science 189 (1975): 460-63; Jule Charney (coord.), Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment Report of an Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate, July 23-27, 1979; James Hansen et al., “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” Science 213, no. 4511 (1981): 957-66; James Hansen et al., “Global Climate Changes as Forecasted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Three Dimensional Model,” Journal of Geophysical Research 93 (1988): 9341-64.

[33] J. T. Houghton, G. J. Jenkins, and J.J. Ephraums, eds., Climate Change, the IPCC Scientific Assessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), xi.

[34] James Hansen, Makiko Sato & Reto Ruedy, “August Temperature Update, a “Thank You” & Biden’s Report Card,” Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program, Columbia University, September 22, 2022.

[35] “United in Science 2022. A multi-organization high-level compilation of the most recent science related to climate change, impacts and responses,” OMM, PNUMA, Global Carbon Project, Met Office, IPCC e UNDRR.

[36] Luiz Marques, “Os recordes climáticos de 2017 e o legado da atual geração,” Jornal da Unicamp, February 5, 2018.

[37] As seen in the text, today we know that 300 ppm of atmospheric CO2 has not been exceeded in the last 800,000 years, but 160,000 years were already enough to sound the alarm. Cf. Houghton, Jenkins, and Ephraums, eds., Climate Change, the IPCC Scientific Assessment, xv.

[38] IPCC, Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group II, Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Summary for Policymakers, 2022, 8.

[39] State of the Climate in Latin America & Caribbean 2020, OMM, August 17, 2021, 24; Josélia Pegorim, “Recorde de calor em Vitória, Belo Horizonte, Brasília e em Goiânia,” ClimaTempo, January 16, 2019.

[40] Paulo Hockenos, “Could the Drying Up of Europe’s Great Rivers Be the New Normal?,” YaleEnvironment360, September 6, 2022; Samya Kullab, “Politics, climate conspire as Tigris and Euphrates dwindle,” AP, November 18, 2022.

[41] Will Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 9, 2018; Timothy M. Lenton et al., “Climate Tipping points – too risky to bet against,” Nature, November 27, 2019.

[42] V. Masson-Delmotte et al., eds., Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.

[43] Lenton et al., “Climate Tipping points – too risky to bet against.”

[44] Michael Mann, “Earth Will Cross the Climate Danger Threshold by 2036,” Scientific American, April 1, 2014; Idem, “Why Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036,” Scientific American, April 1, 2014; “When might the world exceed 1.5C and 2C of global warming?,” Carbon Brief, December 4, 2020.

[45] Bill McGuire, Hothouse Earth (Icon Books: 2022), 26-27.

[46] IEA, “Global Energy Review: CO2 Emissions in 2021,” March 2022.

[47] See the UNFCCC’s Report, “Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement. Third session. Nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement. Synthesis report by the secretariat,” September 17, 2021.

[48] “Scientists categorize Earth as a toxic planet,” Phys.org, February 7, 2017; André Cicolella, Toxique planète. Le scandale invisible des maladies chroniques (Paris: Seuil, 2013).

[49] Pablo Solon (org.), Alternativas sistêmicas. Bem viver, decrescimento, comuns, ecofeminismo, direitos da Mãe Terra e desglobalização (São Paulo: Elefante, 2019); Luiz Marques, Capitalism and Environmental Collapse (Springer, 2020); Luiz Marques, O decênio decisivo. Propostas para uma política de sobrevivência (São Paulo: Elefante, 2023).

[50] Vanessa Albuquerque, “80% da produção brasileira é destinada ao mercado interno,” Brangus, June 6, 2022.

[51] Bruno Lupion, “Fome cresce e supera taxa de quando Bolsa Família foi criado,” DW, April 13, 2021.

[52] Walter Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems,” The Lancet 393, no. 10170 (2019).

[53] Russel A. Mittermeier, Gil Robles, and C. G. Mittermeier, Megadiversity: Earth’s Biologically Wealthiest Nations (1999); UNEP, Biodiversity A-Z: “Together, the Megadiversity Countries account for at least two thirds of all non-fish vertebrate species and three quarters of all higher plant species.”

[54] Quilombos are maroon communities, formed since the nineteenth century by enslaved people who took refuge in the forest.

[55] Patrícia Valim and Felipe Milanez, “Genocídio? Sim, genocídio,” Folha de São Paulo, December 27, 2021.

[56] INPE/PRODES, Monitoramento do Desmatamento da Floresta Amazônica Brasileira por Satélite: “Independente do instrumento utilizado, a área mínima mapeada pelo PRODES é de 6,25 hectares.”

[57] Aldem Bourscheit, “COP26: Nearly 500 million trees cut down in the Brazilian Amazon in 2021,” InfoAmazônia e PlenaMata, November 5, 2021.

[58] “Emissões do Brasil têm maior alta em 19 anos,” SEEG/Observatório do Clima, November 1, 2022.

[59] “Emissions Gap Report 2022. The Closing Window,” PNUMA, 2022.

[60] Paulo Artaxo, “Se fosse um país, a Amazônia seria o 9º maior emissor de gases de efeito estufa,” PlenaMata, November 3, 2021.

[61] “Emissions Impossible. How emissions from big meat and dairy are heating up the planet,” Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy & Changing Markets Foundation, November 15, 2022.

[62] “Ataque aos Guarani Kaiowá joga luz sobre paralisação da demarcação de Terras Indígenas,” Instituto Socioambiental, 13/VII/2022; Débora Pinto, “Relatório do GT dos Povos Originários pede novas demarcações de Terras Indígenas já no início do governo Lula,” ((o)) eco, December 15, 2022.

[63] Michael A. Clark et al., “Global food system emissions could preclude achieving the 1.5oC and 2oC climate change targets,” Science 370, no. 6517 (2020): 705-8.

[64] IPCC, Climate Change and Land, 2019: “If emissions associated with pre- and post-production activities in the global food system are included, the emissions are estimated to be 21–37% of total net anthropogenic GHG emissions (medium confidence)”; Francesco N. Tubiello, “Greenhouse gas emissions from food systems: building the evidence base,” Environmental Research Letters, 16, 2021.

[65] Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “Global warming: Stop worrying, start panicking?” PNAS, September 23, 2008.

[66] Jeff Tollefson, “Top climate scientists are sceptical that nations will rein in global warming,” Nature, November 1, 2021.

https://mronline.org/2023/01/17/the-fra ... -now-what/

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The world is warming and big oil predicted it
Jason TschantreJanuary 15, 2023 157 5 minutes read
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The years 2014 through 2022 were officially the hottest eight years ever recorded, according to studies by NASA, the European Copernicus Climate Change Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 2022 was either the fifth or 6th hottest year ever, depending on the study, with heat waves across Europe and Asia and record-breaking temperatures in London, Berlin, Madrid and other European cities. 2016 was the overall hottest year recorded thus far. These studies also show that the world has already warmed 1.2° C (2.1° F) since the second half of the 19th century, when fossil fuel usage first became widespread. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that to avert catastrophic health impacts and prevent millions of climate change-related deaths, the world must limit temperature rise to 1.5° C, and that every additional tenth of a degree of warming beyond that will take a serious toll on people’s lives and health

Increasing temperatures around the world have already led to increasing droughts, fires, floods, famines, heat-related deaths and mass migration. The UN’s World Health Organization calls climate change the number 1 threat to world health, with as many as 250,000 climate-related deaths predicted to occur between 2030 and 2050. The WHO also stated that those most susceptible to climate-related death are the least responsible for climate change – people in “developing” countries, and poor people who already lack access to healthcare and the social determinants of health, such as jobs and housing.

For anyone who is still skeptical that climate change is real and already happening, a series of recent and deadly weather events in the United States and Europe will serve as evidence. Much of the United States experienced a deep freeze over Christmas. The West Coast is currently experiencing non-stop atmospheric rivers, and this week, the southern states were hit with extreme winds and deadly twisters — a result of warming in the Gulf of Mexico. In Europe, there was a winter “heat wave” last week, which brought unusually high temperatures, such as a high of 70 degrees Fahrenheit in Poland.

These adverse weather events should come as no surprise given the record high temperatures over the last 8 years, and those record highs are also not surprising, given the data collected by scientists in the decades since fossil fuel usage began. The rising temperatures follow a predictable pattern that governments and NGOs have been tracking for decades. But there is another group that is even less surprised by these outcomes than the governments and NGOs — oil corporations themselves.

New research from Harvard and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research shows that oil companies like ExxonMobil have known they were causing climate change since at least the 1970’s. Previously unknown predictions by ExxonMobil from 1977 through 2003 were even more precise than those published by academic and government scientists in the same time periods. ExxonMobil was able to predict current global temperatures with an average “skill score” or percentage of accuracy of 72% (plus or minus 6%). In some cases, their predictions were up to 99% accurate. The authors of this research, Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, have proven that in spite of Big Oil’s disinformation and doubt campaigns, they actually knew with extreme precision what their products were doing to the planet.

In fact, Big Oil knew about climate change before the 1970’s. In 2021, researchers uncovered speeches from scientists to oil industry executives dated from the 1950’s, which warned of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect, melting polar ice caps and the possibility of coastal cities underwater. Speeches by oil executives themselves, and even a speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson, clearly explained the science of climate change. Even a female scientist in the mid-1800s — Eunice Foote — discovered the greenhouse effect, but was discounted, due to her gender. Amidst all these realizations, there is a gathering awareness that the oil industry has understood climate change all along. We now know that oil corporations were some of the biggest contributors to the very science that uncovered and predicted climate change. In spite of their awareness, however, fossil fuel companies deliberately waged disinformation campaigns to sow doubt among the public.

The same researchers who published this Harvard study have been uncovering the plot by big oil to mislead the public about climate change for over a decade now. In her 2010 book “Merchants of Doubt,” Oreskes exposed campaigns by oil companies to spread disinformation. Then in a 2021 paper by Oreskes and Supran, the authors outlined some of the rhetorical strategies oil companies used. For example, in the media, oil companies were able to frame climate change as a “risk” rather than a reality. They also placed special emphasis on consumer “demand” rather than their own supply of products they knew were harming the planet. They framed climate change as “everyone’s responsibility,” rather than those who were actually producing and selling fossil fuels, and they managed to invent the narrative that fossil fuels would be “necessary for the foreseeable future,” while preventing awareness of renewable energy sources, and obstructing legislation that would develop them. They did all this because, as capitalist enterprises, they could not accept any alternative that would cut into their profits and their market domination.

Rising global temperatures caused by burning fossil fuels, and corporate blockage of legislation that could fix the problem represent a dilemma that cannot be solved by capitalism. Under capitalism, the purpose of the state is not to serve the people, but to look after and protect the affairs of the capitalist class, ensuring its profits, its unrestricted access to markets and its exploitation of the working class. Congress cannot seem to agree on passing laws that would help people, or make ordinary working peoples’ lives easier. However, it always manages to agree on helping corporations, clearing away impediments when corporations are looking for more resources and more markets. This includes Congress’ unwavering loyalty when passing trillion dollar military budgets. Continued war and military might ensures that the United States and its Western allies have unfettered access to international markets, materials and labor. Any attempts to pass laws for the benefit of the working class on the other hand, such as Biden’s doomed “Build Back Better” plan, inevitably fail. That is the intended function of the U.S. capitalist government, which is actually run by the biggest corporations and industries, such as big oil.

Only socialism, with its interests in people and the planet over profit and its utilization of planned economies, can solve the problem of climate change. Under capitalism, the only plan is to concentrate as much wealth as possible into the hands of the few. Capitalism has no plan for the vast majority of the population, or the planet that 100% of the population lives on. A socialist planned economy takes into account the needs of all people — both in the United States and across the world, since climate change is a global issue — and manages the usage of industry and technology to meet those needs in a way that is sustainable to the planet. Scientists are in agreement that such a sustainable economic plan is entirely possible. A major component of that plan, however, involves ending the destructive capitalist economy, and bringing about a new political and economic reality under socialism.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 19, 2023 3:27 pm

Here's a really good idea:

Venezuela’s Seed Law Should Be a Global Model
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 17, 2023
Owen Schalk

Image
A farm worker holds bell peppers during a harvest in Cubiro, Venezuela.

For peasant farmers, the battle over seed rights is critical to their livelihoods

Seeds are an often-overlooked political battleground in industrialized countries like those of North America and Europe, but for peasant farmers in the Global South, the battle over seed rights is critical to their livelihoods.

Locally shared seeds are crucial for many rural communities—“genetic keys to biodiversity and climate change resilience,” as researcher Afsar Jafri states, as well as “records of cultural knowledge” and “the ultimate symbol of food security.” However, farmers’ ability to continue sharing and planting these seeds is under constant threat by multinational corporations and the states that back them.

In 2015, the six largest agribusiness corporations—BASF, Bayer AG, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta—controlled 63 percent of the commercial seed market. In 2018, Bayer acquired Monsanto for $66 billion. The resulting corporate entity controls nearly 60 percent of the world’s proprietary seed supply.

Patented seeds against farmer livelihoods

The imposition of patented transgenic seeds onto rural communities has had a catastrophic impact on human livelihoods and biodiversity protection. In many countries, seeds have traditionally been the collective property of farmers—however, these farmers’ right to control their own seed supply is being attacked by corporate forces which have captured capitalist states around the world.

In 2010, the government of Colombia adopted Law 970 as part of a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States government. Under the terms of the FTA, Bogotá gave legal monopoly to seeds produced by US and European corporations and forced Colombian farmers to only use certified seeds manufactured by these companies. Farmers who were caught saving seeds or planting unregistered seeds were subject to fines or jail time. These laws were a condition for Washington to agree to the FTA.

Law 970 not only precipitated a rise in food production prices, since farmers were forced to purchase seeds from companies like Monsanto rather than use communally shared seeds; it also caused the Colombian state to destroy food products grown from saved seeds. This occurred in 2011 in towns like Campo Alegre, where Colombian authorities raided the warehouse and trucks of rice farmers and destroyed 70 tonnes of rice that was not produced in accordance with Law 970.

The state’s violent criminalization of seed saving and localized food production in Campo Alegre and other towns provoked a nationwide farmers’ protest, which succeeded in having the law suspended for two years and rewritten. However, these changes did not represent a policy reversal, as attacks on peasant livelihoods and targeted assassinations of peasant leaders continue to plague the countryside at a terrifying rate.

Seed monopolies and globalized capitalism

In India, the government’s imposition of the kind of industrial capitalist agriculture promoted by the IMF and World Bank has led to tremendous rates of dispossession and pollution—and, of course, mass resistance as demonstrated by the farmers’ protests of 2020-2021. Such policies also take aim at farmers’ ability to save and share seeds locally. One statistic claims that of the roughly 100,000 varieties of paddy seeds that existed in pre-independence India, there are only around 5,000 left today.

As Jafri writes:

The forced replacement of traditional seeds by chemical responsive hybrid seeds…is eroding the rich genetic diversity that India’s farmers have evolved over centuries, increasing farmers’ vulnerability to climate change, floods, droughts and other environmental disasters. At the breakneck speed which the traditional seeds are already being replaced with company seeds, [the] day is not far when Indian farmers will be forced to become completely dependent for seed supply from [transnational companies].

The corporatization of seeds and the criminalization of seed saving is a key feature of the post-Cold War push for capitalist globalization of the type embodied by the neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs) advocated by the IMF, the World Bank, and the Washington Consensus. These austerity reforms and the aggressive push by Western countries for FTAs in the Global South have put tremendous pressure on rural livelihoods in many ways, including by attacking small farmers’ production and distribution of the local seed varieties. The planting of these seeds is ecologically, economically, and socially regenerative, but they earn no profits for the transnational companies whose interests are paramount in FTA negotiations.

The “colonial project” of genebanks

Seed saving is a key element of sustainable agricultural production because, as Canadian researcher Patrick Chassé writes, “this incremental selection process created unique landraces, or varieties of plants that are well adapted to their environment.” However, the national and international pressures exerted on seed-saving farmers are immense:

Some farmers still diligently save their seeds, but most have abandoned this tradition because they face financial pressure to produce large volumes of uniform crops that can be sold in grocery stores. Around the world, farmers have become dependent on large companies that sell specialized seeds that, by design, cannot be saved… Many heirloom varieties that were well adapted to specific eco-regions have been lost in this chase for maximum yields.

Seeds are still saved in Western countries like Canada, but they tend to be treated as artifacts, isolated in research centres called “genebanks” which are designed to preserve the seeds for decades. While genebanks may save the seeds from extinction, they are generally not concerned with reintegrating the seeds into their natural environment, a move which would threaten the profit margins of the large agribusiness corporations with which the Canadian state has historically allied itself. As Chassé writes: “This means that the naturally democratic act of seed saving has been replaced by a reliance on large research centres that store seeds far from the communities and landscapes that created the plant.”

After visiting Plant Gene Resources of Canada (PGRC), a genebank on the University of Saskatchewan campus, Chassé was unable to shake the impression that the facility and others like it are a “colonial project.”

Genebanks store thousands of plant varieties, but most of these were created by anonymous farmers and peasants. This crop diversity now often benefits industry. Around the world, small producers have struggled to remain competitive against industrial farms that invest heavily in increasing production and minimizing costs. These monolithic operations are always searching for new crop variants, hybrids that produce more while resisting the spectrum of diseases that are created by relentless monocropping. These desirable traits that favour commerce are often extracted from the ‘heritage’ varieties that were created by centuries of small farmers. As Michael Taussig acerbically observed, “seeds banks are booty, relics of despoliation.”

Agriculture in Chávez’s Venezuela

Venezuelans have decided to take an entirely different approach to seed politics. With the election of Hugo Chávez in 1999, rural development and self-government were foregrounded through laws focused on agrarian reform and land redistribution. Additionally, the new constitution, approved by popular referendum in December 1999, emphasized the importance of food security “through the promotion of sustainable agriculture as a strategic basis for integrated rural development.”

Chávez himself railed against transgenic foods on many occasions, highlighting the ways in which this model of agriculture dismantles a nation’s food sovereignty. In 2004, for example, he terminated a contract with Monsanto to plant 500,000 acres of transgenic soybeans on Venezuelan soil, announcing instead that the land would be used to grow yuca, an indigenous crop.

The Venezuelan government promoted local organization via participatory measures like the Organic Law of Communal Councils, placing more democratic control of production in the hands of both rural and urban communes and thus eroding the central role of national and multinational agricultural companies.

In addition to supporting grassroots production in urban centres, Chávez sought to engineer a rural renaissance by encouraging migration out of cities and into agricultural careers. He stressed the need to attain national food sovereignty by moving away from imports toward self-sustaining networks producing indigenous crops in ecological ways. He explained that people in Venezuela were drawn to the cities by a “centripetal force,” and that his policies aimed to reverse the trend in order to “occupy the geographic space of the country in a more harmonious and balanced way.”

One of the most progressive steps toward protecting small-scale agriculture in the country came after Chávez’s death, with the National Assembly’s passage of a new Seed Law in 2015. But while the Seed Law was approved after his death, its roots can be found in the agricultural philosophy and doctrine of popular participation espoused by his government from 1999 to 2013.

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Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez recording a TV show in Hacienda Bolívar in the southwest region of Colón. Photo by Prensa Miraflores/Flickr.

The 2015 Seed Law

Telesur contributor Quincy Saul referred to the passage of the 2015 Seed Law as “arguably the biggest thing to happen in Venezuela since the death of Hugo Chavez,” an occurrence in which “a movement of small farmers took on one of the largest corporations in the world [Monsanto], and won.”

Following the Seed Law’s approval,

imported seeds (especially of garden vegetables) have practically disappeared, entering into the illegal economy. Meanwhile, seeds for more traditional crops, which have always been under popular control, have become more important in campesino production…In that sense, the law is more than a law: it is a plan for action to gain seed sovereignty.

While the radical land reform measures pursued under Chávez have stalled under Maduro, the passage of the Seed Law at a time of increasing political and economic crisis represented a major win for the scientists, small farmers’ movements, and local organizations who had been pushing the state to enact such legislation for years.

The Seed Law was the result of years of consultation with social movements and peasant organizations in the country. In addition to prohibiting transgenics and the privatization of seed varieties, the law promises governmental support for the protection and expansion of farmer-run seed systems. The stated objectives of the law as outlined by the Association for Plant Breeding for the Benefit of Society (APBREBES) are to:

support a transition from industrial agriculture to agroecology and an eco-socialist agriculture; promote the production of seeds at national level and ensure self-sufficiency; protect agrobiodiversity; promote the traditional and local knowledge and practices of peasants, afro-descendant and indigenous peoples, and other local communities; prohibit patents and plant breeders’ rights on seeds; prohibit transgenic seeds; and guide public policies so that differentiated standards and policies are applied according to the scale of production…the law prohibits seeds that endanger ecosystems, biodiversity, human health and food sovereignty. Violation of these prohibitions may be penalized with 5 to 10 years of prison.

The Seed Law created a National Seed Commission, comprised of four governmental representatives and three representatives from social movements, as well as a Popular Council for the Protection of the Local, Peasant, Afro-descendant and Indigenous Peoples’ Seeds. As APBREBES explains, “The Council’s role is to promote peasant seeds systems, including the conservation, use and exchange of seeds, local seed banks, community seed production enterprises, collaborative breeding and participative certification mechanisms; as well as to participate in policy making and provide inputs to the National Seed Commission.”

Implementing the Seed Law from below

As political confrontation intensified in Venezuela, the oppositional-controlled National Assembly passed a different seed law that called for the return of imported transgenic seeds and seed patents. At the same time, opposition demonstrations against the state sometimes vandalized government-run food research and distribution centres, including the National Institute of Nutrition and laboratories for the production of ecological farming inputs. Meanwhile, US-led sanctions precipitated a collapse of government revenues, meaning the state had few resources to support the implementation of the Seed Law.

Nevertheless, local organizations and communities began to implement the Seed Law from below. Plan Pueblo a Plan, a peasant-created initiative to push back against Venezuelans’ reduced access to food as a result of sanctions, joined with Proinpa (Integral Producers of the Páramo) to establish five centres for the local production and distribution of native potato seeds. Pueblo a Pueblo producers also began efforts to recover corn, legume and tuber seed varieties that had largely vanished under the pre-Chávez industrial agriculture model.

And it isn’t only Pueblo a Pueblo and Proinpa. Seed production centres were built throughout the country after the passing of the Seed Law – but, at the same time, the Bolivarian Revolution’s precarious position resulted in the re-emergence of more market-centred forces in the state and the increased power of interest groups such as agribusiness. As a result, the gains made after 2015 are in a dangerous position.

The Seed Law in danger

Despite the fact that the Seed Law prohibits the use of transgenic seeds, there have been reports of companies using genetically modified seeds on Venezuelan land. In November 2022, Esquisa Omaña of the organization Venezuela Free from GMOs stated: “Campesinos have denounced the presence of GMO seeds in different parts of the country. This violates the 2015 Seed Law.” The organization called on the National Seed Commission to look into the complaints but apparently found “no capacity or interest” from state institutions to investigate.

Ricardo Vaz blames the increased influence of private companies since 2015 for the state’s lack of interest in investigating allegations of Seed Law violations. “[T]here is a reconfiguration process going on that surrenders protagonism to the private sector and multinational corporations,” he argues. “In what concerns food production, agribusinesses have become the main actors, with the government openly calling for foreign investment in the sector and offering all possible advantages.”

In 2022, several Venezuelan officials floated the idea of revising the Seed Law in order to drum up international investment in the country, while elements of the press have condemned seeds traded between farmers as “pirate seeds.” Venezuelan agribusinesses have organized events around the reintroduction and promotion of transgenic seeds, including an April event in the city of Maracay titled “Future of the Technology of Genetically Modified Organisms.” One of the groups behind such events, the Venezuelan Association of Seed Companies (AVESEM), is associated with multinational giants Bayer and Syngenta.

Pablo Alvarado, representative of the state of Guárico for the Pátria Para Todos (PPT) party, has called for a revision of the Seed Law in order to generate more foreign investment. “Intellectual property must be protected,” he stated, “because we need to adapt to globalization, to new investors, we have to protect ideas, technology.”

While Alvarado asserts that he is not calling for the reversal of the Seed Law, peasant organizations and agroecologists in Venezuela find such statements worrisome. Activist and biologist Giselle Perdomo has said that there are clear economic interests behind such calls to alter the Seed Law:

The interests are clearly economic, with a desire to bring transgenic seeds to the country, particularly corn, and thus develop this type of industrial agriculture with pesticides, which on the one hand promises productivity, and on the other hand contaminates rivers, soils and affects food sovereignty… The Seed Law also reinforces the viability of the peasant seed trade. We see in different press articles a desire to criminalize the trade of what they call “pirate seeds.”

The Seed Law as a global model

Despite the pushback the Seed Law continues to face, it remains a model for how countries around the world can safeguard their biodiversity, ecology, social and economic fabrics, and food production systems from national and transnational agribusiness.

Other social movements in the region have clearly taken notice. For example, the Colombian House of Representatives has been presented multiple times with draft legislation “to prohibit the entry, production, commercialization and export of genetically modified seeds.” These proposals were rejected under former President Iván Duque, but current leader Gustavo Petro, who criticizes genetically modified crops and used the language of food sovereignty to promote sustainable agricultural practices, may revisit the question in the future.

While Venezuela has often been discussed in the media, usually as a simplistic cudgel against the left, the realities of political struggle in the country have produced numerous gains that can and should inspire others, foremost among them being the 2015 Seed Law. The law provides a model for how the knowledge and traditions of small-scale farming can be defended against corporate dispossession—but ongoing debates about its revision also highlight the precarity of such changes and the need to continue defending gains even after they have apparently been secured.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... bal-model/

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And here's a really bad idea:

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Oregon Coast (Photo: Saul Foster)

A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate
Originally published: MIT Technology Review on December 24, 2022 by James Temple (more by MIT Technology Review) (Posted Jan 18, 2023)

A startup claims it has launched weather balloons that may have released reflective sulfur particles in the stratosphere, potentially crossing a controversial barrier in the field of solar geoengineering.

Geoengineering refers to deliberate efforts to manipulate the climate by reflecting more sunlight back into space, mimicking a natural process that occurs in the aftermath of large volcanic eruptions. In theory, spraying sulfur and similar particles in sufficient quantities could potentially ease global warming.

It’s not technically difficult to release such compounds into the stratosphere. But scientists have mostly (though not entirely) refrained from carrying out even small-scale outdoor experiments. And it’s not clear that any have yet injected materials into that specific layer of the atmosphere in the context of geoengineering-related research.

That’s in part because it’s highly controversial. Little is known about the real-world effect of such deliberate interventions at large scales, but they could have dangerous side effects. The impacts could also be worse in some regions than others, which could provoke geopolitical conflicts.

Some researchers who have long studied the technology are deeply troubled that the company, Make Sunsets, appears to have moved forward with launches from a site in Mexico without any public engagement or scientific scrutiny. It’s already attempting to sell “cooling credits” for future balloon flights that could carry larger payloads.

Several researchers MIT Technology Review spoke with condemned the effort to commercialize geoengineering at this early stage. Some potential investors and customers who have reviewed the company’s proposals say that it’s not a serious scientific effort or a credible business but more of an attention grab designed to stir up controversy in the field.

Luke Iseman, the cofounder and CEO of Make Sunsets, acknowledges that the effort is part entrepreneurial and part provocation, an act of geoengineering activism.

He hopes that by moving ahead in the controversial space, the startup will help drive the public debate and push forward a scientific field that has faced great difficulty carrying out small-scale field experiments amid criticism.

“We joke slash not joke that this is partly a company and partly a cult,” he says.

Iseman, previously a director of hardware at Y Combinator, says he expects to be pilloried by both geoengineering critics and researchers in the field for taking such a step, and he recognizes that “making me look like the Bond villain is going to be helpful to certain groups.” But he says climate change is such a grave threat, and the world has moved so slowly to address the underlying problem, that more radical interventions are now required.

“It’s morally wrong, in my opinion, for us not to be doing this,” he says. What’s important is “to do this as quickly and safely as we can.”

Wildly premature
But dedicated experts in the field think such efforts are wildly premature and could have the opposite effect from what Iseman expects.

“The current state of science is not good enough… to either reject, or to accept, let alone implement” solar geoengineering, wrote Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, in an email. The initiative is calling for oversight of geoengineering and other climate-altering technologies, whether by governments, international accords or scientific bodies. “To go ahead with implementation at this stage is a very bad idea,” he added, comparing it to Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s decision to use CRISPR to edit the DNA of embryos while the scientific community was still debating the safety and ethics of such a step.

Shuchi Talati, a scholar in residence at American University who is forming a nonprofit focused on governance and justice in solar geoengineering, says Make Sunset’s actions could set back the scientific field, reducing funding, dampening government support for trusted research, and accelerating calls to restrict studies.

The company’s behavior plays into long-held fears that a “rogue” actor with no particular knowledge of atmospheric science or the implications of the technology could unilaterally choose to geoengineer the climate, without any kind of consensus around whether it’s okay to do so—or what the appropriate global average temperature should be. That’s because it’s relatively cheap and technically simple to do, at least in a crude way.

David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, warned of such a scenario more than a decade ago. A “Greenfinger, self-appointed protector of the planet… could force a lot of geoengineering on his own,” he said, invoking the Goldfinger character from a 1964 James Bond movie, best remembered for murdering a woman by painting her gold.

Some observers were quick to draw parallels between Make Sunsets and a decade-old incident in which an American entrepreneur reportedly poured a hundred tons of iron sulfate into the ocean, in an effort to spawn a plankton bloom that could aid salmon populations and suck down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Critics say it violated international restrictions on what’s known as iron fertilization, which were in part inspired by a growing number of commercial proposals to sell carbon credits for such work. Some believe it subsequently stunted research efforts in field.

Pasztor and others stressed that Make Sunset’s efforts underscore the urgent need to establish broad-based oversight and clear rules for responsible research in geoengineering and help determine whether or under what conditions there should be a social license to move forward with experiments or beyond. As MIT Technology Review first reported, the Biden administration is developing a federal research plan that would guide how scientists proceed with geoengineering studies.

Balloon launches
By Iseman’s own description, the first two balloon launches were very rudimentary. He says they occurred in April somewhere in the state of Baja California, months before Make Sunsets was incorporated in October. Iseman says he pumped a few grams of sulfur dioxide into weather balloons and added what he estimated would be the right amount of helium to carry them into the stratosphere.

He expected they would burst under pressure at that altitude and release the particles. But it’s not clear whether that happened, where the balloons ended up, or what impact the particles had, because there was no monitoring equipment on board the balloons. Iseman also acknowledges that they did not seek any approvals from government authorities or scientific agencies, in Mexico or elsewhere, before the first two launches.

“This was firmly in science project territory,” he says, adding:

Basically, it was to confirm that I could do it.

A 2018 white paper raised the possibility that an environmental, humanitarian, or other type of group could use this simple balloon approach to carry out a distributed, do-it-yourself geoengineering scheme.

In future work, Make Sunsets hopes to increase the sulfur payloads, add telemetry equipment and other sensors, eventually move to reusable balloons, and publish data following the launches.

The company is already attempting to earn revenue from the cooling effects of future flights. It is offering to sell $10 “cooling credits” for releasing one gram of particles in the stratosphere—enough, it asserts, to offset the warming effect of one ton of carbon for one year.

“What I want to do is create as much cooling as quickly as I responsibly can, over the rest of my life, frankly,” Iseman says, adding later that they will deploy as much sulfur in 2023 as “we can get customers to pay us” for.

The company says it has raised $750,000 in funding from Boost VC and Pioneer Fund, among others, and that its early investors have also been purchasing cooling credits. The venture firms didn’t respond to inquiries from MIT Technology Review before press time.

‘A terrible idea’
Talati was highly critical of the company’s scientific claims, stressing that no one can credibly sell credits that purport to represent such a specific per gram outcome, given vast uncertainty at this stage of research.

“What they’re claiming to actually accomplish with such a credit is the entirety of what’s uncertain right now about geoengineering,” she says.

Kelly Wanser, executive director of SilverLining, a nonprofit that supports research efforts on climate risks and potential interventions, agreed.

“From a business perspective, reflective cooling effects and risks cannot currently be quantified in any meaningful way, making the offering a speculative form of ‘junk credit’ that is unlikely to have value to climate credit markets,” she wrote in an email.

Talati adds that it’s hypocritical for Make Sunsets to assert they’re acting on humanitarian grounds, while moving ahead without meaningfully engaging with the public, including with those who could be affected by their actions.

“They’re violating the rights of communities to dictate their own future,” she says.

David Keith, one of the world’s leading experts on solar geoengineering, says that the amount of material in question—less than 10 grams of sulfur per flight—doesn’t represent any real environmental danger; a commercial flight can emit about 100 grams per minute, he points out. Keith and his colleagues at Harvard University have worked for years to move forward on a small-scale stratospheric experiment known as SCoPEx, which has been repeatedly delayed.

But he says he’s troubled by any effort to privatize core geoengineering technologies, including patenting them or selling credits for the releases, because “commercial development cannot produce the level of transparency and trust the world needs to make sensible decisions about deployment,” as he wrote in an earlier blog post.

Keith says a private company would have financial motives to oversell the benefits, to downplay the risks, and to continue selling its services even as the planet cools to lower than preindustrial temperatures.

“Doing it as a startup is a terrible idea,” he says.

For its part, the company says it’s operating on the best modeling research available today, and that it will adjust its practices as it learns more and hopes to collaborate with nations and experts to guide these efforts as it scales up.

“We are convinced solar [geoengineeering] is the only feasible path to staying below 2 ˚C [of warming over preindustrial levels], and we will work with the scientific community to deploy this life-saving tool as safely and quickly as possible,” Iseman said in an email.

But critics stress that the time to engage with experts and the public would have been before the company began injecting material into the stratosphere and trying to sell cooling credits—and that it’s likely to face an icy reception from many of those parties now.

https://mronline.org/2023/01/18/a-start ... e-climate/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 02, 2023 3:07 pm

Even with emission cuts, 2º heating is likely by 2054
January 31, 2023
AI system says climate will warm faster than promised by Paris Agreement

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A new study has found that emission goals designed to achieve the world’s most ambitious climate target – 1.5º Celsius above pre-industrial levels – may in fact be required to avoid more extreme climate change of 2º.

The study, published January 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides new evidence that global warming is on track to reach 1.5º C above pre-industrial averages in the early 2030s, regardless of how much greenhouse gas emissions rise or fall in the coming decade.

The new “time to threshold” estimate results from an analysis that employs artificial intelligence to predict climate change using recent temperature observations from around the world.

“Using an entirely new approach that relies on the current state of the climate system to make predictions about the future, we confirm that the world is on the cusp of crossing the 1.5º C threshold,” said the study’s lead author, Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh.

If emissions remain high over the next few decades, the AI predicts a one-in-two chance that Earth will become 2 degrees Celsius hotter on average compared to pre-industrial times by the middle of this century, and a more than four-in-five chance of reaching that threshold by 2060.

According to the analysis, co-authored by Colorado State University atmospheric scientist Elizabeth Barnes, the AI predicts the world would likely reach 2º even in a scenario in which emissions decline in the coming decades. “Our AI model is quite convinced that there has already been enough warming that 2º is likely to be exceeded if reaching net-zero emissions takes another half century,” said Diffenbaugh.

This finding may be controversial among scientists and policymakers because other authoritative assessments, including the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have concluded that the 2º mark is unlikely to be reached if emissions decline to net zero before 2080.

Why does half a degree matter?

Crossing the 1.5º and 2º thresholds would mean failing to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, in which countries pledged to keep global warming to “well below” 2º above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing the more ambitious goal of limiting warming to 1.5º.

Already, the world is 1.1º hotter on average than it was before fossil fuel combustion took off in the 1800s, and the litany of impacts from that warming includes more frequent wildfires, more extreme rainfall and flooding, and longer, more intense heat waves.

Because these impacts are already emerging, every fraction of a degree of global warming is predicted to intensify the consequences for people and ecosystems. As average temperatures climb, it becomes more likely that the world will reach thresholds – sometimes called tipping points – that cause new consequences, such as melting of large polar ice sheets or massive forest die-offs. As a result, scientists expect impacts to be far more severe and widespread beyond 2º.

In working on the new study, Diffenbaugh said he was surprised to find the AI predicted the world would still be very likely to reach the 2º threshold even in a scenario where emissions rapidly decline to net zero by 2076. The AI predicted a one-in-two chance of reaching 2º by 2054 in this scenario, with a roughly two-in-three chance of crossing the threshold between 2044 and 2065.

It remains possible, however, to bend the odds away from more extreme climate change by quickly reducing the amount of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere. In the years since the Paris climate pact, many nations have pledged to reach net-zero emissions more quickly than is reflected in the low-emissions scenario used in the new study. In particular, Diffenbaugh points out that many countries have net-zero goals between 2050 and 2070, including China, the European Union, India, and the United States.

“Those net-zero pledges are often framed around achieving the Paris Agreement 1.5º goal,” said Diffenbaugh. “Our results suggest that those ambitious pledges might be needed to avoid 2º.”

AI trained to learn from past warming

Previous assessments have used global climate models to simulate future warming trajectories; statistical techniques to extrapolate recent warming rates; and carbon budgets to calculate how quickly emissions will need to decline to stay below the Paris Agreement targets.

For the new estimates, Diffenbaugh and Barnes used a type of artificial intelligence known as a neural network, which they trained on the vast archive of outputs from widely used global climate model simulations.

Once the neural network had learned patterns from these simulations, the researchers asked the AI to predict the number of years until a given temperature threshold will be reached when given maps of actual annual temperature anomalies as input – that is, observations of how much warmer or cooler a place was in a given year compared to the average for that same place during a reference period, 1951-1980.

To test for accuracy, the researchers challenged the model to predict the current level of global warming, 1.1º, based on temperature anomaly data for each year from 1980 to 2021. The AI correctly predicted that the current level of warming would be reached in 2022, with a most likely range of 2017 to 2027. The model also correctly predicted the pace of decline in the number of years until 1.1º that has occurred over the recent decades.

“This was really the ‘acid test’ to see if the AI could predict the timing that we know has occurred,” Diffenbaugh said. “We were pretty skeptical that this method would work until we saw that result. The fact that the AI has such high accuracy increases my confidence in its predictions of future warming.”

(Adapted from materials provided by Stanford University)
Abstract
Data-driven predictions of the time remaining until critical global warming thresholds are reached
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 30, 2023Leveraging artificial neural networks (ANNs) trained on climate model output, we use the spatial pattern of historical temperature observations to predict the time until critical global warming thresholds are reached. Although no observations are used during the training, validation, or testing, the ANNs accurately predict the timing of historical global warming from maps of historical annual temperature.
The central estimate for the 1.5°C global warming threshold is between 2033 and 2035, including a ±1σ range of 2028 to 2039 in the Intermediate (SSP2-4.5) climate forcing scenario, consistent with previous assessments. However, our data-driven approach also suggests a substantial probability of exceeding the 2°C threshold even in the Low (SSP1-2.6) climate forcing scenario.

While there are limitations to our approach, our results suggest a higher likelihood of reaching 2°C in the Low scenario than indicated in some previous assessments—though the possibility that 2°C could be avoided is not ruled out. Explainable AI methods reveal that the ANNs focus on particular geographic regions to predict the time until the global threshold is reached.

Our framework provides a unique, data-driven approach for quantifying the signal of climate change in historical observations and for constraining the uncertainty in climate model projections.

Given the substantial existing evidence of accelerating risks to natural and human systems at 1.5 °C and 2 °C, our results provide further evidence for high-impact climate change over the next three decades.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... y-by-2054/

World Bank is no friend of working people or the planet
February 2, 2023
Policies facilitate the upward distribution of wealth, regardless of human and environmental cost

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by Pete Dolack

Every so often, the World Bank puts out a paper that calls for better social protection or at least a somewhat better deal for working people. The public relations people there evidently believe we have very short memories.

No, dear reader, the World Bank has not changed its function, nor have elephants begun to fly. Without any hint of irony, the World Bank’s latest attempt at selective amnesia is what it calls its Social Protection and Jobs strategy, in which it purports to advocate that the world’s national governments “greatly expand effective coverage of social protection programs” and “significantly increase the scale and quality of economic inclusion and labor market programs.”

Hilariously, the World Bank titles its 136-page report fleshing out this strategy Charting a Course Towards Universal Social Protection: Resilience, Equity, and Opportunity for All (pdf).

In that report, the World Bank, with a straight face, writes that it “recognizes that the progressive realization of universal social protection (USP), which ensures access to social protection for all whenever and however they need it, is critical for effectively reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity.” Furthermore, the report builds on a previous document that allegedly offers “an overarching framework for understanding the value of investing in social protection programs and outlined how the World Bank would work with client countries to further develop their social protection programs and systems.”

The report asserts goals of achieving equity, resilience and opportunity for all people, especially the developing world’s most vulnerable, and “to create opportunity by building human capital and helping men and women to access productive income-earning opportunities.”

We arrive at that favorite set of code words, “human capital.” We’ll return to that shortly. But before we highlight the actual record of the World Bank and its role in imposing devastating austerity on countries around the world, at enormous human cost, let’s take a brief look at the International Trade Union Confederation response. The ITUC, which represents 200 million workers in 163 countries and has 338 national affiliates, says its “primary mission is the promotion and defence of workers’ rights and interests.” Readers may recall that the ITUC issues a yearly report on the state of labor, consistently finding that not a single country fully upholds workers’ rights.

In its four-page summary of the World Bank declaration, the ITUC said it agrees with the World Bank’s stated goals, and “agrees with the Bank that the lack of social protection for the majority of the world’s workers in the informal economy is a challenge that needs to be urgently addressed.” Nonetheless, the ITUC “has a number of considerable reservations to some of the policy messages” and disputes “the rigor of the analysis underpinning some of the policies proposed.”

The ITUC writes: “The Bank’s vision of universal social protection appears to prioritise the extension of targeted non-contributory social assistance at the expense of social security, when both forms of support serve distinct and complementary functions.” Further, it “disagrees with the Bank’s critique of social security schemes, especially pensions, as an undue burden on public finances and ‘regressive’ in nature.” The World Bank’s “solution” to make pension and social security systems sustainable “mainly involve reducing public subsidies to social security, strengthening the link from contributions to entitlements through defined-contribution schemes [retirement plans in which you pay into but have no guarantees as to payout], as well as strengthening the role of voluntary and private pensions.”

In other words, it’s work until you drop! That is already a long-term goal of right-wing ideologues and corporate interests not only in the United States but around the world.

Underneath the rhetoric, the usual right-wing prescriptions

And, true to right-wing form, the World Bank places the onus for unemployment squarely on individuals. The ITUC critique says: “the onus of addressing unemployment appears to focus on the individual, rather than on the broader structural forces at play. The [bank report] disregards in particular the measures that governments can take to create new, quality jobs, such as proactive industry planning, public sector job creation, and public investment — including in labour intensive sectors with strong social and environmental dividends, such as infrastructure, care and the green economy.” Finally, the World Bank claims that labor regulations are “excessive” and threaten employment, and advocates lowering already meager worker protections.

Once again, the World Bank has not forgotten its raison d’être; it has not suddenly changed its stripes. Elephants will continue to not fly.

Did we really expect otherwise? A look at the World Bank’s record provides all the evidence anyone could want of it being one of the world’s most destructive agencies, an organization dedicated to enhancing corporate plunder and imposing punishing austerity. A one-two punch with the International Monetary Fund. Both organizations do the bidding of the Global North’s multi-national corporations through playing complementary roles.

When I last checked in at the World Bank, in 2018, the bank was in the process of completing its World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work, which opened with quotes from Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. That was merely a feint. What we soon read in examining the report is that the problem is “domestic bias towards state-owned or politically connected firms, the slow pace of technology adoption, or stifling regulation.” Sure, jobs are disappearing, but that’s no problem because “the rise in the manufacturing sector in China has more than compensated for this loss.”

Essentially, the World Bank was advocating that we become sweatshop workers in China. What else to do? “Early investment in human capital” — in other words, pay lots of money for advanced degrees you won’t be able to use — and “more dynamic labor markets,” which is code for gutting labor protections and making it easier to fire workers.

Elephants didn’t, after all, fly five years ago, either.

The World Bank has even declared itself above the law. Unfortunately, at least one U.S. court agrees. A lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington on behalf of Indian farmers and fisherpeople ended with a ruling that the World Bank is immune from legal challenge. The bank provided $450 million for a power plant that the plaintiffs said degraded the environment and destroyed livelihoods. The court agreed with the World Bank’s contention that it has immunity under the International Organizations Immunities Act. The World Bank thus was declared the equivalent of a sovereign state, and in this context is placed above any law as if it possesses diplomatic immunity.

Another suit, however, also filed by EarthRights International against the World Bank for its role in turning a blind eye to alleged systematic human rights violations by a palm oil company in Honduras for a project it financed, was allowed to proceed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019. That case, however, appears to yet be decided by the trial court. So the World Bank can sometimes be sued in the United States legal system but it remains to be seen if it will have to shoulder any responsibility.

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Three Gorges Dam, a project funded by the World Bank that displaced 1.3 million people (photo by Christoph Filnkössl)

The World Bank has a long history of ignoring the human cost of the projects it funds. The World Development Movement, a coalition of local campaign groups in Britain, reports that the World Bank has provided more than US$6.7 billion in grants to projects that are destructive to the environment and undermine human rights, a total likely conservative. To cite merely three of the many examples, the World Bank:

Loaned an energy company in India more than $550 million to finance the construction of two coal-fired power plants. Local people, excluded from discussions, were beaten, their homes bulldozed and reported reduced food security and deteriorating health as a result of the power stations.
An Indonesian dam, made possible by the World Bank’s $156 million loan, resulted in the forcible evictions of some 24,000 villagers, who were subject to a campaign of violence and intimidation.
In Laos, a hydropower project made possible by World Bank guarantees displaced at least 6,000 Indigenous people and disrupted the livelihoods of around 120,000 people living downstream of the dam who can no longer depend on the rivers for fish, drinking water and agriculture.
A study of World Bank policies, Foreclosing the Future, by environmental lawyer Bruce Rich, found that:

“Drawing on Bank studies, project evaluations and sectoral reviews, it is shown that the World Bank still suffers from a pervasive ‘loan approval culture’ driven by a perverse incentive system that pressures staff and managers to make large loans to governments and corporations without adequate attention to environmental, governance and social issues. In 2013, Bank Staff who highlight social risks and seek to slow down project processing still risk ‘career suicide.’ … [The bank] has continued to binge on enormous loans to oil and gas extraction, coal-fired power stations and large-scale mining generating environmental damage, forest loss and massive carbon emissions.”

Destroying the environment in the service of short-term profits

Want more? The World Bank has provided nearly $15 billion in financing for fossil fuel projects since the 2015 signing of the Paris Climate Accords. An October 2022 report by Big Shift Global, a coalition of 50 environmental organizations across the Global North and South, notes that despite World Bank claims that it would end financing for upstream oil and gas production, it has other avenues to promote fossil fuels.

One of these methods is to send funds to a financial institution, which in turns sends the money to the fossil fuel project. Another is to provide non-earmarked funds but make the money conditional on instituting reforms encouraging fossil fuels.

The biggest fossil fuel funding, according to the Big Shift Global report, is $1.1 billion for the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline, a gas distribution project in Azerbaijan. Another $600 million went toward a gas storage project in Turkey and another eight projects were given at least $100 million by the World Bank. Projects that the World Bank has financed include expansion of coal.

Other work by the World Bank includes $2.8 billion so that Ghana could move its energy mix from mostly hydropower to majority fossil fuels, and pressured Ghana to enter into gas contracts that causes it to pay $1.2 billion annually for gas it doesn’t use, which also has put a greater debt burden on the country.

The World Bank also encouraged Guyana to use a Texas law firm that has Exxon as a major client to rewrite its petroleum laws, while providing money for oil and gas development in Guyana. That development will benefit Exxon as the fossil fuel multinational snagged a contract under which Guyana doesn’t receive any of the profits until the costs of the field are paid off. In other words, the Big Shift Global report says, “Exxon can continue to charge Guyana for every newly developed oil field. It could take decades before the money trickles down to the people.”

The World Bank attempted the same whitewashing stunt with its fossil fuel funding, once issuing a report lamenting global warming while completely ignoring its role in worsening global warming. At the time of that whitewashing report, the bank was providing billions of dollars to finance new coal plants around the world. By any reasonable standard, the World Bank is a key organization in the concatenation of processes that has brought the world to the brink of catastrophic climate change.

The policies of the World Bank and its sibling, the International Monetary Fund, have constituted non-stop efforts to impose multi-national corporate control, dismantle local democratic institutions and place decision-making power into the hands of corporate executives and financiers, the very people and institutions that profit from the destruction of the environment.

A trail of evictions, displacements, gross human rights violations (including rape, murder and torture), widespread destruction of forests, financing of greenhouse-gas-belching fossil-fuel projects, and destruction of water and food sources has followed the World Bank.

It works in conjunction with the International Monetary Fund, whose loans, earmarked for loans to governments to pay debts or stabilize currencies, always come with the same requirements to privatize public assets (which can be sold far below market value to multi-national corporations waiting to pounce); cut social safety nets; drastically reduce the scope of government services; eliminate regulations; and open economies wide to multi-national capital, even if that means the destruction of local industry and agriculture. This results in more debt, which then gives multi-national corporations and the IMF, which enforces those corporate interests, still more leverage to impose more control, including heightened ability to weaken environmental and labor laws.

The World Bank complements this by funding massive infrastructure projects that tend to enormously profit deep-pocketed international investors but ignore the effects on local people and the environment. The two institutions are working as intended, to facilitate the upward distribution of wealth, regardless of human and environmental cost.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... he-planet/

Using the Three Gorges Dam as an example here leaves out a lot of the motivation the PRC had in making that decision.

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

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Capitalism and the Climate Collapse! Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet!

Originally published: Capitalism and the Climate Collapse! Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet! on January 26, 2023 by Entitled Millennials / Double D (more by Capitalism and the Climate Collapse! Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet!) (Posted Jan 28, 2023)



In this episode of his “Thinking Out Loud” series, Double D analyzes an interview with John Bellamy Foster, where he discusses his new book, ‘Capitalism in the Anthropocene‘, and his arguments for how capitalism is the driving force behind climate change. Double D analyzes some of the contradictions of capitalism, and how those contradictions are the primary cause of climate collapse. He cites capitalism’s inherent obsession with growth, citing a system of “compounding growth” which leads to the economy doubling roughly every twenty-five years. He points out how this contradiction has led to an economy of such a scale that its continued growth is impossible on a small planet with limited resources. He also asks his viewers to consider what this compounding growth has done in just the last two hundred years since capitalism’s “coming of age”, pointing out that in that time we have already pushed past three of the nine planetary boundaries which lead to climate crisis.

Double D goes on to compare this “growth for growths sake” to the modus operandi of a virus or a cancer cell. He dismisses nihilistic points of view that compare humanity to a virus or a cancer cell, suggesting instead that capitalism is the cancer, a cancer which has been allowed to fester for far too long in the civilizational organism. He compares social movements, militant organization, and the movement towards socialism as a medical procedure that can eliminate the cancerous growth of capitalism which threatens all life on this planet.

Going on with the video, Double D discusses the failings of social relations which occur under the capitalist system. Citing the article with John Bellamy Foster, he examines our mass marketing consumer culture, which serves as a synthetic replacement for actual human needs such as community belonging and the time and resources necessary to pursue self-actualization. Citing his own recent departure from his job, he notes how much less he has had to consume while not being a part of the 40+ hour a week work grind. He then asks his viewers to consider this on a mass scale, suggesting that part of the transition from capitalism to socialism should necessarily involve using existing productive capacities to ensure that all human beings have the necessities, while requiring them to work far less. He cites the pandemic as an example of how drastically carbon emissions can be cut when human beings are permitted to slow down and simply exist rather than carry on as cogs in a terminal growth machine.

Ending the video, Double D ruminates on China’s recent push for an ecological society. He uses this analysis as a chance to examine the global south’s inevitable economic development, suggesting that without “green reparations” that will help developing countries modernize in a sustainable way, no amount of green initiatives in the global north will be enough to stop the tide of ecological collapse. Closing the video, Double D asks his viewers to comment with their vision of an ecological civilization, with a special focus on how they feel the transition from capitalism to socialism can make that dream a reality for future generations.

https://mronline.org/2023/01/28/capital ... te-planet/

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Bolivia Signs Lithium Deal with Chinese Company
January 30, 2023Bolivia, China, Lithium, Luis Arce

The state-owned Yacimientos del Litio Bolivianos (YLB) has signed an agreement with the Chinese company CATL BRUNP & CMOC (CBC) for the operation of two industrial complexes with Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) technology in salt flats in the departments of Potosí and Oruro.

The document was signed by YLB’s president, Carlos Ramos, and CBC’s representative, Qinghua Zhou, in a public ceremony held at the Casa Grande del Pueblo on January 20th.

“By the first quarter of 2025, Bolivia should already be exporting lithium batteries, with national raw material. There’s no time to lose, the country cannot wait any longer, it cannot experiment any more, we have to go at a safe pace to gradually industrialize this valuable natural resource. Congratulations to all the Bolivian people, because today begins the era of industrialization of Bolivian lithium”, said the President at the ceremony held at the Casa Grande del Pueblo.

Many years passed, “including during the coup d’état of 2019, one of the reasons was Bolivian lithium” and this became evident with the crisis that the world is facing today for energy, which has put on the discussion table of all countries the way to produce cleaner energy in a context of climate crisis,” he added, highlighting the importance of the metal.

Arce indicated that Bolivia will work with foreign companies, within the framework of respect for the sovereign business model, where the Bolivian State plays the leading role in the administration of natural and strategic resources.

“Today, January 20, 2023 is a date that will remain engraved in the memory of our country because a long-awaited dream begins to be fulfilled (…) Direct extraction technology provides a viable, real and quickly implemented solution”, said the Minister of Hydrocarbons and Energy, Franklin Molina Ortiz, highlighting the determination and political vision of the Head of State for the development of the energy project.

“This whole selection process took considerable time to evaluate and today we are seeing the result of this process. The works to be carried out are destined to specific areas of the Uyuni and Coipasa salt flats. We hope that these industries will be highly productive and will be up to the development that our country needs”, said Carlos Ramos Mamani, president of YLB.

The agreement consists of carrying out the necessary activities for the operation of two industrial complexes. Each will have the capacity to produce up to 25,000 tons per year of battery grade lithium carbonate, at 99.5% purity, and semi-industrial processes.

CBC participated in the piloting process along with seven other companies and met the requirements established by YLB, which considered experience and technology applicable to the characteristics of the brines, a lithium recovery from the brines of at least 80% and lower water usage, among other factors.

CATL BRUMP and CMOC

CATL is the world’s leading energy innovation technology company, with a market value of nearly $200 billion. It has the world’s first carbon-free battery factory and a world-class headlamp factory. Nearly 4 million electric vehicles in 53 countries and regions around the world use CATL batteries.

Meanwhile, BRUMP is known worldwide in the recycling of used battery resources as a holding subsidiary of CATL. The company accounted for nearly 50% of battery recycling in China in 2021.

Meanwhile, CMOC is a world-class new energy metals mining group. It is the second largest producer of cobalt and niobium in the world and has a market value of US$20 billion.

https://kawsachunnews.com/bolivia-signs ... se-company
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 12, 2023 5:50 pm

Nestlé’s Blatant Misconduct Shows Us the Darkness of Capitalism
By Ashley Gjøvik - February 7, 2023 4

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[Source: boucherie-abolition.com]

From inventing the need for mass-scale baby formula leading to the deaths of infants, to redirecting much needed water from impoverished areas to bottle and sell back to the same communities, to exploiting child labor and slavery, Nestlé will stoop to any moral low to make a buck.

[This article inaugurates Ms. Gjovik’s new column for CovertAction Magazine spotlighting the abuses of U.S. multinational corporations worldwide.—Editors]

Corporations like Nestlé are essentially doomsday machines: man-made creations that will ultimately destroy humanity if allowed to continue as they are. Multinational corporations are required by law to place the financial interests of shareholders above all other matters, even if that requires them to prioritize the bottom line above the common good. In this nightmare of our own creation, if it is more cost-effective for corporations to commit mass atrocities and pay a fine, than to not commit atrocities, the corporation is compelled to commit atrocities to ensure shareholder returns.

Further, this maximization of profit through unhinged business practices and investment tactics creates a cycle of destruction further fed by governments and institutions relaxing rules to entice companies to do business in ways that financially benefit that government. This enables the businesses to create more profit by cutting corners around labor rights, safety protections, and environmental standards. As negligence is further normalized, governments must entice businesses with more concessions, which encourages even worse behavior from corporations. Governments and business then race each other to the bottom in a destructive spiral that harms everyone.

In the Unites States, corporations claim a legal status as if they were human beings. While this is a fictional concept, if the corporation Nestlé were a person—Nestlé would be the worst kind of person, someone you would never want to be in the same room with. Nestlé is the American Psycho of corporations.

Yet, a company like Nestlé only exists because of the acquiescence and facilitation of its gross misconduct by governments and society. This case study on Nestlé’s business practices highlights some of the most egregious behavior by corporations.

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[Source: nstle.cz]

A Corporation Called Nestlé

Founded in 1866 by Henri Nestlé, today the Nestlé corporation owns more than 2,000 brands.[1] Nestlé is the world’s largest food company and is one of the most multinational of companies, with more than 450 manufacturing facilities in more than 79 countries, sales in 186 countries, and employment of 276,000 workers. In 2021, Nestlé reported $87 billion in sales and $22 billion in global profit. Around 30% of Nestlé’s total sales came from the United States, where Nestlé reported $26 billion in sales. [2]

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Henri Nestlé [Source: nestle.cz]

The Nestlé name is widely associated with a controversy. Nestlé’s success is arguably due to its incredible brutality—from inventing the need for mass-scale baby formula leading to the deaths of infants, or redirecting much needed water from impoverished areas to bottle and sell back to the same communities, to exploiting child labor and slavery to gather ingredients for consumer products it admits have no nutritional value—Nestlé is an incredibly unethical company.

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1911 Nestlé ad in Good Housekeeping magazine. [Source: zmscience.com]

Yet, most of us probably regularly purchase Nestlé products, even if we think we avoid doing so. Nestlé’s owns an impressively extensive list of popular brand names including: Acqua Panna, Alpo, Beneful, Blue Bottle Coffee, Boost, Buitoni, Carnation, Cheerios, Coffee Mate, DiGiorno, Dreyer’s, Fancy Feast, Garden of Life, Gerber, Haagen Dazs, Hot Pockets, Kit Kat, Lean Cuisine, Nature’s Bounty, Nescafe, Nespresso, Nesquik, Ovaltine, Perrier, Purina, Pure Life, Stouffers, Starbucks Coffee at Home, Sweet Earth, San Pellegrino and Tombstone Pizza.[3]

Nestlé is also a major shareholder in L’Oréal, the multinational cosmetics conglomerate, which Nestlé reports as an “associate” on its financial reports.[4] L’Oréal itself owns many popular personal care brands like Lancôme, Garnier, Maybelline, Essie, Redkin, NYX, CeraVe, Urban Decay, and Kiehl’s.[5]

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[Source: zmescience.com]

“Nestlé Kills Babies”

Nestlé’s most infamous scandal is around its baby formula products.

If mothers are able to breastfeed their babies, they are advised to provide their babies only breast milk for the first six months of life.[6] However, in the 1970s, Nestlé began sending representatives dressed as nurses to hospitals in impoverished countries to promote the company’s baby formula as replacement for breast milk, including sending families home with one free can. In these areas, the water that must be used to mix up the formula and clean the bottles was not safe.[7] Nestlé convinced these mothers to reject their own breast milk in favor of its infant formula.[8] Then, the mothers could not switch back to breastfeeding because, after one can, it was too late in the lactation cycle.

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[Source: theboycottbook.com]

The result was an estimated one million dead babies every year from malnutrition or diseases contracted from dirty water or bottles.[9] In 1974, a report was published in Switzerland titled “Nestlé Kills Babies.”[10] All of this led to massive boycotts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Nestlé insisted that the real problem was only access to water, while at the same time beginning to seize public waters for bottling and polluting the water that remained.[11]

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Protests in 1970s against Nestlé. [Source: listverse.com]

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[Source: corporateaccountability.org]

In May 2007, an investigation found evidence Nestlé was still engaging in questionable infant-formula marketing practices in Bangladesh.[12] Then in 2011, Nestlé was investigated for bribery in the Chinese baby formula market—including bribing medical staff to promote its infant formula to new mothers.[13]

Undeterred, in April 2012, Nestlé deepened its involvement in the market by purchasing Pfizer’s baby formula business (SMA) for more than $11 billion.[14] In 2019, Nestléʼs own report still found at least 107 instances of non-compliance with international baby milk marketing rules.[15]

Last year, the World Health Organization and UNICEF issued a report finding ongoing “extensive and aggressive marketing practices used by the formula milk industry to target new and prospective parents” which “exploit emotions, the fears and the ambitions of women and families at a time they’re potentially most vulnerable.”[16] Nestléʼs baby formula practices are a stunning example of free-market murder over decades.

Bottling the Commons

In poor regions, Nestlé and others have been taking water from aquifers, springs, rivers and lakes—and putting it in plastic bottles or turning it into flavored and sugary drinks—then dumping their used and dirty water back into water sources. Locals are then not able to drink tap water and end up paying extortionate prices to the European and U.S. corporations for bottled versions of their own previously uncontaminated tap water.[17] In 2020, Nestlé reported $6.4B in bottled water sales.[18]

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[Source: pinterest.com]

For years, activists have accused Nestlé of lining its own pockets through back-door privatization of public water supplies. Access to water is a human right.

Corporate privatization of the commons seizes a public resource and converts it to a private good, and Nestlé has been implicated in this for decades. In fact, the source of America’s corporate water crisis can be traced back to 1976 when Perrier opened an office in New York.[19] The firm partnered with a U.S. executive who had recently left Levi Strauss, and they built a marketing campaign to convince Americans to pay for water.[20]

Nestlé acquired Perrier in 1992 for $2.6B.[21] At that time, Perrier had issued a recall due to reports of benzene in the bottled water and also faced a fine in New York for false advertising.[22] Perrier was apparently a culture fit for Nestlé.

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[Source: nestle.cz]

By 2016, bottled water sales had surpassed soda as the largest U.S. beverage category, with Americans consuming 12.8B gallons that year.[23] In addition to seizing public waters, Nestlé’s manufacturing process uses far more water than the output provides (only about 70%). Meanwhile, Nestlé also dumps a significant amount of now polluted water back into water basins and aquifers.[24]

While other companies moved their operations out of drought-ridden California, Nestlé’s CEO said he would pump more out of the San Bernardino National Forest if he could. Nobody actually knows how much Nestlé extracts from this source—which it has been doing without a permit since 1988—paying only $524 a year to bypass the requirement.[25] In 2021, California’s Water Resources Control Board asked Nestlé to stop the unauthorized water diversions after a probe revealed multiple violations and depleted resources.[26]

Nestlé has shown no shame or contrition for any of this. In fact, former Nestlé chief executive and chairman Peter Brabeck called water a “grocery product” that should “have a market value.” He later amended that, arguing water can be a human right, but only 25 liters a day.[27] Today, Nestlé’s website continues to argue that “non-essential” use of water is not a human right and should “carry a cost.”[28]

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Peter Brabeck [Source: nbcnews.com]

Slavery-made

Nestlé’s unlawful business practices are not limited to fatally unethical marketing. Nestlé has also been implicated in child labor, human trafficking and slavery—for decades.

The U.S. Department of Labor reports that more than 1.5 million children work in the cocoa industry in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, which produce 60% of the world’s annual cocoa harvest. More than 40% of those children are exposed to dangerous working conditions, including chemical usage, burning fields, swinging machetes, and heavy lifting—activities that international authorities consider the “worst forms of child labor.”[29]

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Nestlé child laborer in the Ivory Coast. [Source: change.org]

In Nestlé USA v. Doe (2021), former child slaves who were trafficked into Côte d’Ivoire to work on cocoa farms filed suit under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) against Nestlé USA.[30] They accused the corporation of aiding and abetting the illegal enslavement of thousands of children on cocoa farms in Nestlé’s supply chains.[31]

Nestlé USA effectively controls much of the cocoa production in the Ivory Coast and operates “with the unilateral goal of finding the cheapest source of cocoa in the Ivory Coast,” resulting in a “system built on child slavery to depress labor costs.”[32] Nestlé knowingly profited from the illegal work of children and Nestlé’s contracted suppliers were able to provide lower prices than if they had employed adult workers with proper protective equipment.[33]

In Nestlé’s Petition for Certiorari, Nestlé’s lawyers did not deny there was slavery in its supply chain but instead argued, among other things, that corporations cannot be liable for violations of customary international law or human rights violations.[34] Nestlé lawyers extensively referenced the Nuremberg Trials in their argument for impunity, desperately pleading that even the corporation that supplied Zyklon B gas, which the Nazis used to kill millions, was not convicted during that trial.[35]

During oral arguments, the U.S. Justice Department, on behalf of the U.S. government, supported Nestlé. Deputy Solicitor General Curtis E. Gannon contended that a new act of Congress would be needed to create liability for domestic corporations under the ATS (liability which the lawyer described as corporations being “discriminated against”).[36] Gannon, on behalf of the United States, said the case against Nestlé alleging child slavery could “threaten foreign affairs interests” for the U.S. government.[37]

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Chief Justice John Roberts. [Source: wfmynews2.com]

Upon inquiry from Chief Justice John Roberts as to whether the U.S. government believes a corporation could ever be liable for setting up a U.S. corporation and sending U.S. employees to the Ivory Coast for the express purpose of setting up a cocoa farm that uses child slavery, Gannon responded, “Well, I think that it—it depends on how much conduct happens in the United States and how much conduct happens overseas.” [38]

Deputy Solicitor General Curtis Gannon, the U.S. government’s lawyer, famously authored the Justice Department memorandum approving President Trump’s “Muslim Ban” (Executive Order 13769) in 2017, when he was Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. Before joining the Justice Department, Gannon worked at the infamous union-busting firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.[39]

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Curtis E. Gannon [Source: lawyers.justia.com]
Nestlé USA v. Doe was dismissed in favor of Nestlé. The decision was the latest in a series of U.S. rulings imposing strict limits on lawsuits brought in federal court based on human rights abuses abroad.[40] To make matters worse, which is only possible with the depravity of a corporation like Nestlé, the company was also alleged to have orchestrated a chocolate price-fixing conspiracy, violating antitrust laws in the sales of its products manufactured with child slave labor.[41]

Nestlé’s human slavery supply chain is not exclusive to chocolate. In 2020, a documentary exposed Nespresso’s supply chain use of child labor on Guatemalan farms.[42] The documentary visited seven farms linked to Nespresso and found children working eight hours a day, six days a week, and who looked as young as eight years old.[43]

Earlier, investigations also found migrants were lured by false promises to work in Thailand’s seafood sector, then kept in debt bondage and degrading conditions. When workers died on the job, it said the bodies were simply “thrown into the water.” In 2014, Nestlé confirmed the forced labor was part of its supply chain in Thailand.[44]

Waste… All the Way Down

Nestlé’s misconduct also includes degradation of the environment and a direct role in causing the current climate crisis.

Nestlé’s plastic packaging is produced from plastic resin created by petrochemical companies like Exxon, Total, Aramco and Shell. The process of manufacturing plastic, as well as the extraction of the raw materials for it, releases enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, approximately 108M metric tons per year.[45]

Plastic also enters into the product. Concentrations of microplastic in bottles of Nestlé Pure Life water were as high as 10,000 pieces of plastic per liter of water, the highest of any brand tested.[46] Some of the microplastics the researchers found in Nestlé’s water included polypropylene, nylon, and polyethylene terephthalate.[47] Nestlé was sued in 2018 over the high levels of microplastics, with plaintiffs alleging Nestlé “intentionally, negligently and recklessly concealed and omitted the truth” about the plastic contamination.[48]

Nestlé released a statement saying that it had “ambitions” for its packaging to be 100% recyclable or reusable by 2025. However, environmental groups and other critics pointed out that Nestlé had not released clear targets or a timeline to accompany its ambitions, nor made additional efforts to help facilitate recycling by consumers. [49] Greenpeace released a statement saying, “Nestlé’s statement on plastic packaging includes more of the same greenwashing baby steps to tackle a crisis it helped to create. It will not actually move the needle toward the reduction of single-use plastics in a meaningful way, and sets an incredibly low standard as the largest food and beverage company in the world.”[50]

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[Source: greenpeace.org]

In the organization “Break Free From Plastic”’s 2020 report, Nestlé was named one of the world’s top plastic polluters for the third year in a row.[51] Nestlé even admitted that most of its bottles are not recycled, even while Nestlé concurrently flooded the market with misleading advertisements claiming the opposite. Only about 31% of plastic bottles end up getting recycled, creating millions of tons of garbage every year, much of which ends up in landfills or the ocean.[52]

A single plastic bottle can take anywhere from 450 to 1,000 years to decompose in a landfill.[53]

After so much controversy, Nestlé largely divested from its North American water-bottling hustle, selling most of the business in 2021.[54] While Nestlé is no longer the face of the U.S. bottled water problem, it is still responsible for the damage to the environment and the terrible systems it put in place.

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[Source: boucherie-abolition.com]

Nestlé was also caught purchasing palm oil from mills with reckless means of production, including chopping down millions of hectares of forests and removing Indigenous peoples from their lands.[55] In 2010, Greenpeace campaigned for Nestlé to end deforestation in its supply chain.

Nestlé promised to do so by 2015, but in 2017 Nestlé noted 47% of its palm oil still came from problematic plantations.[56] Then in 2019, Nestlé was also accused of sourcing palm oil from producers linked to the forest fires in Indonesia.[57] A recent Global Witness report documented the still ongoing harm, terror and impoverishment of communities due to corporate pursuit of palm oil, including by Nestlé.[58] Rest assured, Nestlé still claims to be “working hard” on the issue.[59]

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[Source: palmoildetectives.com]

Further, a former Nespresso executive warned in 2016 that Nespresso pods create extensive waste. Made from a combination of plastics and aluminum, the coffee pods are not biodegradable. It can take between 150 to 500 years for the aluminum and plastic capsules to break down in a landfill. In order to recycle the pods, the aluminum capsules have to be shredded, the coffee has to be taken away with water, the varnish has to be burned and the aluminum has to be re-smelted.[60]

Nespresso capsules are not pure aluminum due to Nestlé’s intellectual property and anti-competitive interests: The capsules contain silicon as part of a patent which was used to prevent rivals from making their own pods that could work in Nespresso machines.[61] As of 2019, 70% of Nespresso pods were assumed to be headed to landfills.[62]

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Eugène Schueller [Source: edanafashion.wordpress.com]

L’Oréal has its own shameful history, starting with the company’s founder, known Nazi sympathizer Eugène Schueller.[63]

L’Oréal faced protests and boycotts due to testing cosmetics on animals,[64] suspected use of child labor to obtain mica for cosmetics,[65] deceptive advertising,[66] and high levels of lead in lipstick products.[67]

L’Oréal also allegedly uses carcinogenic and endocrine-disrupting chemicals in its beauty products, including: formaldehyde, PFOAs, carbon black, titanium dioxide, BHA and others.[68] L’Oréal is currently facing numerous lawsuits over PFAS contents in its beauty products.[69]

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[Source: whathappensinthechairstaysinthechair.blogspot.com]

Nestlé’s food products have also been found to contain not just toxic chemicals, but also low-quality filler products, including a “horsemeat” scandal in one of its pasta brands in 2013.[70]

A Friend of Paramilitaries

Nestlé apparently does not care who it harms with its supply chain or marketing, so why would labor rights be any different?

In the U.S., the National Labor Relations Board’s public database shows 169 Unfair Labor Practice charges filed against Nestlé (though there may be more under the names of other subsidiaries).[71]

In one recent case, the NLRB found against Nestlé USA in 2020, issuing an order against the corporation for unfair labor practices at a Wisconsin facility that produces DiGiorno pizza.[72]

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[Source: wpr.org]

The NLRB ordered Nestlé USA to cease and desist from, among other things: coercively interrogating employees about their protected concerted activities, and suspending or discharging employees because they engage in protected concerted activities.” [73] The Board ordered Nestlé to post a notice to employees admitting it violated federal labor laws and promising to follow federal labor laws going forward. [74]

The year before, a report by AFL-CIO alleged that Nestlé had been involved in several workers’ rights abuses, that Nestlé USA management had continually interfered with workers’ organizing rights, and Nestlé was involved in anti-union campaigning.[75]

Nestlé’s union busting is deadly in South America. A Colombian trade unionist, Luciano Romero, campaigned for the rights of workers at Nestlé’s factory in Colombia for years, including documenting violations of human rights at the factory. Before his murder, Romero was repeatedly falsely branded as a guerrilla fighter by the local representatives of Nestlé. He was also accused, without grounds, of being responsible for a bombing on the factory premises in 1999. In Colombia, a defamation of this kind can effectively amount to a death sentence.[76]

In September 2005, Luciano Romero was stabbed 50 times in a murder by paramilitaries.[77]

In 2006, Nestlé and the paramilitary members were sued for the murder of Romero, as the company had a long-standing relationship with the paramilitary forces and Romero’s widow alleged the murder was in retaliation for his blowing the whistle on Nestlé’s use of expired milk in its popular Milo brand drink.[78]

Image
[Source: lawanddisorder.org]

In 2007, Romero’s killers were convicted and, while passing sentence, the judge also ordered an investigation into the role of management at the Nestlé subsidiary where Romero worked.[79] A criminal complaint was filed against Nestlé in Swiss courts in 2012, but then dismissed in 2013 due to the statute of limitations having expired.[80] The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights then submitted a complaint calling on the European Court of Human Rights to examine the judiciary that dismissed the complaint, which was also promptly dismissed.[81]

In 2012, a flyer was left at the home of Rafael Esquivel, another Nestlé labor union leader, with a death threat stating “you will have to be exterminated, you have until first December to disappear from Valle, otherwise you will see blood running on second December.”[82] In 2013, more death threats were sent to dozens of trade union members and human rights defenders, including other members of a Nestlé labor union.[83]

In 2013, the same trade union Romero had worked with accused Nestlé of ordering the murder of Oscar López Trevino, who had worked for the company for 25 years. Trevino was shot and killed by paramilitaries that year, following the initiation of a hunger strike campaign by workers against Nestlé over unfulfilled labor agreements.[84]

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Oscar López Trevino [Source: teamsternation.blogspot.com]

Today, Nestlé has a page on its website entitled “Does Nestlé allow labor unions?” which Nestlé answers: “Nestlé supports collective dialogue and negotiations with employee unions…wherever local legislation applies…Nestlé suppliers should allow Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining, unless government policies or other norms prevent them from doing so.”

Nestlé’s own website says it does not believe suppliers need to allow for human rights if it is contrary to local “norms.”[85]

Spying on Critics
Nestlé is just as bad with its critics. In 2003, Nestlé used a private security company to infiltrate the anti-globalization group ATTAC. Nestlé planted a spy who joined ATTAC’s editorial board and monitored ATTAC’s research and drafting of a book criticizing Nestlé’s practices that was published in 2004 (“Attac Contre L’Empire Nestlé”).[86] The spy even attended workgroup meetings at members’ homes.[87]

The spy was employed by a company called Securitas and run by a former MI6 officer working for Nestlé. ATTAC took legal action over the breach and expressed concern that trade unionists at Nestlé sites in Colombia who have been targeted by paramilitaries may have been put in danger.[88] Nestlé was found liable for the spying and a Swiss court ordered Nestlé and its security company to pay compensation .[89]

Just this year, Nestlé was caught offering “quid pro quos” to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, an influential U.S. policy group.[90] Nestlé was identified as a top “contributor,” sending the policy group hundreds of thousands of dollars.[91]

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Boycott Nestlé poster from 1978. [Source: zmscience.com]

Taking Until There Is Nothing Left

There appears to be no line that Nestlé is unwilling to cross, with a key example being Ethiopia.

Following 30 years of wars and famines, the people of Ethiopia were suffering terribly in the 1990s.[92] Nestlé acquired a company whose subsidiary was nationalized by the Ethiopian government in 1975 (decades prior) and then sold in 1998.[93]

In 2001, despite the struggles in Ethiopia, Nestlé filed a claim for $6 million from the Ethiopian government, “as a matter of principle.”[94] $6 million is only 0.01% of Nestléʼs annual sales, but would be a devastating loss to an already struggling country.[95] Nestlé eventually reduced the request to $1.5M following public outrage.[96]

Conclusion

Nestlé’s rebuttal to most accusations of misconduct is essentially to claim it is an ethical, caring and child-friendly teddy-bear of a transnational corporation which just does not know what goes on in its supply chain and always wants to do better, but is constantly harassed by hateful critics. When caught red-handed, Nestlé is then willing to point to IG Farben and use the legal precedent from the Holocaust to argue why it should be granted impunity for egregious human rights abuses.

Since 2000, only considering the United States, Nestlé and its subsidiaries were cited for more than a hundred legal violations, facing $27 million in fines.[97] One must ask: Is all of this misconduct and devastation contributing to anything actually beneficial to society? No. Nestlé, a food company, has recently acknowledged that more than 60% of its food and drink products do not meet a “recognized definition of health” and that some products “will never be healthy.”[98] Nestlé does not even sell food with nutritional value. Nestlé sells terrible ideas and filler, produced through human rights violations, but which drive billions in profit for the soulless corporation.

However, as terrible as Nestlé is, it is only one head of the corporate hydra. There are many others. We can talk about protests and boycotts—we can write exposés and file lawsuits—but this only attempts to hold the line. To actually stop the downward spiral, we must abolish the atrocity of capitalism and globalization that is the multinational corporation.

While claiming corporations have the rights of a human, yet also requiring these corporations to only prioritize shareholder profit and pleasure, we have created a demented Dionysian monster that happily views fiscal opportunity in the destruction of humanity.

We cannot sit back and hope the United States will intervene for the benefit of the common good. When the democratically elected government of Guatemala decided to impose obligations on real estate owned by the United Fruit Company, the U.S. violently overthrew that government. When Chile elected a socialist president who wanted to nationalize copper mines, that democratic government was destroyed by the U.S. and replaced with a dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet.[99] The U.S. has a long history of siding with corporate interests at all costs.

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Diego Rivera’s famous painting “Glorious Victory” about United Fruit and the 1954 coup in Guatemala, hanging in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. [Source: pinterest.com]
With Nestlé, the United States has already worked to fight lawsuits and dismiss charges attempting to hold Nestlé accountable for horrendous human rights violations. The U.S. is apparently happy to race to the bottom, hand-in-hand with these monstrous corporations. The corporation and the state have already become one institution, with extensive centralized economic power, and increasingly destructive behavior.

We need a global awakening and revolution by the people. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said in 1809: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” We are not free and together we are our only hope to stop this downward spiral of environmental degradation and human rights abuses.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... apitalism/

Notes & references at link.

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

BP profits prompt windfall tax call
By JONATHAN POWELL in London | China Daily Global | Updated: 2023-02-08 09:55

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Out-of-use petrol pumps belonging to the British energy company BP stand on a forecourt in London, England on Tuesday, as the company reported record annual earnings. KIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH/AP

Lawmakers in the United Kingdom have renewed calls for a tougher windfall tax on energy companies following BP's announcement of record profits.

BP said on Tuesday that its profits had more than doubled, to 23 billion pounds ($27.7 billion) last year, amid surging oil and gas prices, partly due to the outbreak of conflict in Ukraine.

Other major energy companies have recorded huge profits in the past week, with Shell revealing earnings of nearly $40 billion and Exxon Mobil posting record earnings of $55.7 billion, reported the BBC.

It noted the price of Brent crude oil had reached nearly $128 a barrel following the outbreak of the conflict, but that it has since fallen back to about $80, and that gas prices have now also come down after a spike.

Soon after BP made its announcement, lawmakers, workers' unions, and lobby groups expressed anger over the profits, reported the Press Association.

Trades Union Congress General Secretary Paul Nowak said: "As millions struggle to heat their homes and put food on the table, BP are laughing all the way to the bank."

Last summer, the UK government introduced the Energy Profits Levy, a new 25-percent surcharge on the extraordinary profits the oil and gas sector is making. Last month, the surcharge was increased to 35 percent.

BP said it would pay 1.8 billion pounds in UK tax for 2022, a big increase on its previous estimate, as the UK's new higher windfall levy pushed taxes on UK profits up to 75 percent in total.

The company said it paid out nearly 10 billion pounds to shareholders and increased its dividend for the next year.

The opposition Labour Party's Shadow Climate Secretary Ed Miliband called on Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to introduce a "proper windfall tax" on energy companies.

He said: "What is outrageous is that as energy giants rake in these sums, Rishi Sunak still refuses to bring in a proper windfall tax."

Last week, Sunak told Parliament the idea of a windfall tax sounded "superficially appealing" but that it would ultimately deter investment.

BP also announced it would miss its target for reducing oil and gas output, having previously promised that its emissions would be 35-40 percent lower by the end of this decade.

It said it was now targeting only a 20-30 percent cut, as it needed to keep investing in oil and gas to meet current demands.

The company also announced an adjustment to its green investment strategy, revealing plans to invest up to $65 billion between 2023 and 2030 into renewables and low-carbon energy products.

Bernard Looney, BP's chief executive, told Bloomberg TV: "The energy trilemma is we must have cleaner energy, for sure, and at the same time we must make sure that energy is secure, reliable and we must make sure that energy is affordable."

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... ad93e.html

US Plans Plunder of Africa for “Green” Revolution
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on FEBRUARY 11, 2023



Journalist Jeremy Loffredo joins The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal to discuss deals hashed out at the recent US-Africa Summit to open African nations up to heavy mining by US corporations seeking minerals necessary for electric vehicle and smartphone batteries. Loffredo discusses the prevalence of slave labor conditions in these mines, and the demand by US corporations for weakened labor regulations in nations like Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/02/ ... evolution/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 14, 2023 4:32 pm

Ohio alarmed by toxic chemicals
By HENG WEILI in New York | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2023-02-14 12:22

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Aerial view of a train derailment containing the toxic chemical, vinyl chloride derailed on Feb 3 in East Palestine, a village of 4,700 people in northeastern Ohio near the Pennsylvania border. [Photo/VCG]

The fiery derailment of a train in Ohio is generating health concerns with reports of more toxic chemicals involved than previously thought.

The derailment occurred on Feb 3 in East Palestine, a village of 4,700 people in northeastern Ohio near the Pennsylvania border, about 50 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.

About 50 of the 150 cars on the Norfolk Southern Railroad train derailed as it traveled from Illinois to Pennsylvania.

Residents have filed a federal lawsuit in the derailment and are seeking to force Norfolk Southern to set up health monitoring for residents in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The lawsuit filed Thursday by two Pennsylvania residents calls for the rail operator to pay for medical screenings and related care for anyone living within a 30-mile (48-kilometer) radius of the derailment to determine who was affected by the release of toxic substances. The lawsuit also is seeking undetermined damages.

No one was injured in the derailment, which investigators said was caused by a broken axle.

Three days after the accident, out of concern of a possible explosion, authorities decided to release and burn vinyl chloride inside five tanker cars, sending hydrogen chloride and the toxic gas phosgene, used during World War I battles, into the air.

Vinyl chloride is a colorless, industrially produced gas that burns easily and is used primarily in the manufacture of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe and other products, according to the National Cancer Institute. It also is a byproduct of cigarette smoke.

Environmental regulators have been monitoring the air and water in surrounding communities and have said that so far, the air quality remains safe and drinking water supplies have not been affected.

But some residents have complained about headaches and feeling sick since the derailment.

On social media and in news reports, some said that fish and frogs were dying in local streams.

Kirk Kollar of the Ohio EPA said the levels of toxic chemicals observed in nearby waterways "were immediately toxic to fish", Newsweek reported.

Some shared images of dead animals or said they smelled chemical odors around town. The arrest of a reporter during a news conference about the derailment led to online criticism of the law enforcement response.

Melissa Henry, an East Palestine resident, said that she and her two boys had stayed with her parents for nearly five days while waiting for the derailment to be cleaned up. She left on Saturday before the mandatory evacuations were ordered because her youngest son's "eyes turned red as tomato and he was coughing a lot", she said.

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People speak at an assistance center, following a train derailment that forced people to evacuate from their homes, in New Waterford, Ohio, US, Feb 6, 2023. [Photo/Agencies]

A town hall has been scheduled for Wednesday at 7 pm to allow residents to ask questions about the effects of the derailment, East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway said in a press release Sunday.

US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who spoke at a National Association of Counties Conference on Monday, received some criticism for not mentioning the Ohio derailment in a discussion about infrastructure.

A Norfolk Southern list of the cars that were involved in the derailment, and the products that they were carrying reveal several more toxic chemicals that were released into the air and soil after the crash, ABC News reported. Among the substances were ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate and isobutylene.

Contact with ethylhexyl acrylate, a carcinogen, can cause burning and skin and eye irritation; inhalation can irritate the nose and throat, and cause shortness of breath and coughing, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The toxins that burned in the wreckage had the potential to be deadly if officials did not evacuate the region, experts told ABC News last week.

Some of the toxins spilled into the Ohio River — a drinking water source for 5 million people and the largest tributary of the Mississippi River — near the north West Virginia panhandle, causing officials to shut down water production in the area and transfer to an alternate water source, West Virginia Governor Jim Justice told reporters on Feb 8.

On Feb 12, the US Environmental Protection Agency, after monitoring the air, said it had not detected contaminants at "levels of concern" in and around East Palestine, although residents may still smell odors, The New York Times reported.

Just after the derailment, about 1,500 to 2,000 residents in East Palestine were told to evacuate the area. Schools were closed, along with some roads.

On Feb 6, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine extended an evacuation order to include anyone in a 1-by-2-mile area surrounding East Palestine, including parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania. On Feb 8, the governor's office said residents were permitted to return home.

"It raises all kinds of questions," DeWine told Fox & Friends last week when he was asked whether hazardous materials are too dangerous to transport by rail. "We've seen it up close and personal the last few days. This is a big, big deal."

Norfolk Southern offered residents who did not want to return home assistance with hotel expenses.

On Twitter, financial commentator @unusual_whales, which has 1.1 million followers, wrote of Norfolk Southern: "The $55 billion dollar company has offered the town $25,000, or $5/person, for the accident."

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... aeb10.html

***********

Ohio train derailment exposes system-wide failure

After 50 derailed train cars caused a massive fire and led to the release of toxic fumes into the air, workers argue that corporate cost-cutting was the culprit

February 13, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch

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For unionized rail workers, the train derailment exposes systemic failures in a railroad system that is driven by profit, not safety. (Image via the Environmental Protection Agency)

On February 3, a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio. 50 out of 100 train cars ran off the tracks, igniting a massive fire that could be seen from miles away. Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio issued an evacuation order on February 5, due to the possibility of a major explosion. Local community members and activists across the country have sounded the alarms regarding the impacts the incident could have on public health and environment. Many have pointed to reports of animals dying en masse as evidence. Yet, despite the public outcry over the environmental and public health catastrophe, the actions of Ohio authorities reflect an attitude of concealment.

A reporter with NewsNation was recently violently arrested while covering one of Governor DeWine’s news conferences regarding the derailment. Police officers claimed that the reporter, Evan Lambert, was being too loud while the governor was speaking and in response, tackled him to the ground and handcuffed him. Lambert was released from jail the same day. “No journalist expects to be arrested when you’re doing your job,” Lambert told NewsNation.

Ohio officials claim that they have received no reports of animals dying in or near East Palestine, despite multiple public reports of local animal deaths. NewsNation obtained a video of dead fish in the Ohio River near East Palestine. According to Wildlife Officer Supervisor Scott Angelo, these fish could have died due to toxic fumes dissolving oxygen in the water, although the causes have not been confirmed. Farmer Taylor Holzer claims that his foxes have fallen mortally ill after the derailment.

Many concerns of East Palestine residents, as well as those of the rest of the nation, stem from the fact that the derailed train had 20 cars carrying hazardous materials. Norfolk Southern Railroad conducted a “controlled release” on February 6 of several tankers that ran the risk of explosion. State officials are yet to inform residents of East Palestine about what effect this “controlled release” of toxic fumes, combined with a massive fire burning for five days, will have. Five of the derailed cars contained vinyl chloride, a carcinogen linked to various forms of cancer. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is monitoring two other toxic chemicals: phosgene and hydrogen chloride. Public health experts have already indicated that the effects of these chemicals could last decades. “There’s a lot of what ifs, and we’re going to be looking at this thing 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line and wondering, ‘Gee, cancer clusters could pop up, you know, well water could go bad,” Silverado Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist, told NewsNation. Most recently, the EPA discovered that three other toxic chemicals were present in the derailed train.

Railroad workers point to cost-cutting as the culprit
For unionized rail workers, the train derailment exposes systemic failures in a railroad system that is driven by profit, not safety. Railroad Workers United (RWU), a cross-union workers’ organization, writes, “in the last 10 years, the Class One carriers [rail companies with the highest revenues] have dramatically increased both the length and tonnage of the average train, while cutting back on maintenance and inspection, and we have a time bomb ticking.”

A report by The Lever highlighted that in 2017 during Republican Donald Trump’s presidency, Norfolk Southern lobbyists successfully rescinded regulations aimed at improving railroad safety regulations. Specifically, the company successfully beat back measures that would require train cars carrying hazardous, flammable materials to be equipped with electronic brakes which can stop trains more effectively than conventional brakes. Railroad company donors delivered over USD$6 million to Republican Party campaigns in the 2016 election cycle, but still claimed that safety regulations would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.”

Norfolk Southern made a record of over USD$12 billion in revenue last year, and recently announced a USD$10 million stock buyback program.

Last year, railroad workers in the US were on the cusp of a strike, which would have shattered the US economy as rail workers are some of the most essential workers in the nation. Workers were demanding more sick leave to combat the effects of “Precision Scheduled Railroading,” a corporate scheme to cut costs by demanding more work from fewer workers. Infamously, President Biden and the US Congress blocked rail workers’ right to strike by rapidly passing legislation that forced workers to accept an agreement without sick days.

Railroad Workers United argues that Precision Scheduled Railroading, and the overworking, lay-offs and lack of safety measures that unionized workers were fighting for last year were a primary reason for the derailment. One of the causes of the derailment, RWU argues, is that a damaged car was allowed to leave a terminal due to cut inspection times and layoffs. The train was also not blocked properly, the group claims, because blocking a train properly takes longer and therefore has been mostly done away with by rail companies. More Perfect Union has pointed out that rail companies have cut 22% of railroad jobs since 2017. Unionized workers were planning to use their right to strike to combat this trend in 2022. Instead, they were forced back to work on penalty of arrest.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/02/13/ ... e-failure/

I've read the the corpses want train crews reduced to one person. What could go wrong?

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

How Precision Scheduled railroading at Norfolk Southern caused a toxic Vinyl Chloride mushroom cloud over East Palestine, Ohio
Originally published: Naked Capitalism on February 12, 2023 by Lambert Strether (more by Naked Capitalism) (Posted Feb 14, 2023)

For want of a nail… Here’s the carnage in East Palestine the day after the derailment:

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And here’s mushroom cloud after the “controlled release”:

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And in video:

[youtube]http://twitter.com/i/status/1622820522433052674[/youtube]

I think we can all agree that mushroom cloud is not looking good, and not to be minimized, despite what the State of Ohio is doing, and what the conspicously silent Pete Buttigieg is not doing:

Image

The NOTAMs (recently in the news) restrict the airspace around the toxic mushroom cloud. You’d think there be a press release or something, even if not a heartfelt statement from Buttigieg, but no.

“East Palestine” in the NOTAMs is where Norfolk Southern (NS) train 32N derailed 1. Here it is on a map:

Image

As you can see, East Palestine is conveniently located between Youngstown, OH and Pittsburgh, PA, which the prevailing winds may protect; but not the Ohio River2, a little under twenty miles to the South.

In this post, I will not cover what has been well-covered elsewhere: The derailment itself (50 cars, 20 of which carried toxic materials, 14 of those vinyl chloride), the subsquent fire, which burned for three days, the ultimate “controlled release” of the poisonous gas, the toxicity of vinyl chloride, the effects of the poison on locals, their pets, and their streams, or the arrest of the reporter who asked questions at Governor DeWine‘s presser. On the bright side, Norfolk Southern donated $25,000 to community shelters. NS is also funding a hotline to a toxicologist at an environmental consulting firm. The EPA has a timeline.

Rather, I shall begin from the very concrete (“for want of a nail…”) and move to the very abstract: From the wheel, to the truck, the cars, the firm (Norfolk Southern), and the owners.


Steel Wheels on Steel Rails
Steel wheels on steel rails inherently produce 85-99% less friction than rubber truck tires on roads; the contact point of a wheel to the rail is about the size of a dime. Hence the inherent advantage of rail over trucks for moving goods:

Compared to truck—its main competitor—train is cheaper (in the U.S. it’s 4 cents vs 20 cents per ton-mile), more efficient (the record-breaking train was 682 cars and 4.5 miles long carrying 82,000 metric tons of ore), and more sustainable (one ton of freight can be moved over 470 miles on just a single gallon of diesel fuel).

However, if you want that advantage to be real and not just theoretical, you’ve got to maintain all that steel in good working order; after all, when things go wrong with a train that’s 4.5 miles long, they can go very, very wrong. Norfolk Southern adopted Precision Scheduled Railroading (see NC here, and alert reader Upstater, here) in 2019 (“average train speed increasing by 10%”), achieving a record operating ratio of 60.4% in 2022 3. In so doing, it threw away the inherent advantage of rail. Specifically, in the East Palestine disaster, it did not maintain its steel wheels.

Railroad Trucks
On modern freight cars like the fire-blasted tank cars littering East Palestine, wheels come two to an axle, axles come two to a truck, trucks come two to a car. Here is an image of a truck:

Image

I’ve highlighted the journal, which is a bearing in which an axle turns. If a bearing overheats, it’s called a “hot box.” The heat is intense, and can damage the truck or even the car. The result will be a derailment 4. And the train that derailed at East Palestine had a hot box. Kudos to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for actually doing some reporting:

(Video at link)

(The hot box appears at 0:19.) And in prose, they describe the CCTV footage they found:

At 8:12 p.m. on Feb. 3, the southbound freight train passed by Butech Bliss, an industrial equipment manufacturer in Salem. One car, a few dozen behind the first locomotive, glowed brightly on the bottom as it passed.

A minute later and a mile down the track, a camera at a meat processing plant called Fresh Mark captured the same fiery axle.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation into the derailment, said it believes a mechanical issue with one of the rail car axles is responsible for the accident. Board member Michael Graham said at a news conference on Feb. 4 that the train crew had gotten an alert “shortly before the derailment indicating the mechanical issue,” and started to apply the brakes.


So why the hotbox? The Holler interviewed 22-year railroader and SMART-TD member Clyde Whitaker:

It looks like a faulty bearing caused a catastrophic derailment. These railroads are turning profits hand over fist. They’ve cut their workforce to bare bones. And now they’re paying the price for it because the wheels are falling off the train basically. Carmen were inspecting cars about three minutes per car. That’s always been the industry standard. Now it’s 90 seconds per car.

Is that because of PSR?

Yes. It’s a rush job right now. These guys are under pressure. I mean, they’re working men and women. And, you know, if they don’t hurry up and get this car done, they’re gonna be fired.


(Here is another NS train with a hotbox. Must have been frustrating for the crew, having lousy communications with the dispatcher.)

Railroad Cars

Railroad Workers United describes the difficulties of “blocking” (organizing) the cars under PSR:

The train severed a knuckle between two cars at Attica, IN. This occurred while the train was going downhill and while in dynamic braking. Pretty much the only time a train breaks in this scenario is when the train isn’t blocked properly. In order to mitigate in-train forces, railroads prior to PSR would build trains with the heavier cars on the head end and the lighter cars on the rear end. This prevents severe slack run-ins and run-outs throughout the trip and if the train’s emergency brakes are applied, you don’t have heavier cars running into lighter cars which causes jackknifing. This particular train had 40% of it’s weight on the rear 1/3 of the train. Most of this tonnage was made up of loaded tank cars which are very heavy and slosh back and forth when coming to a sudden stop. This sloshing after a stop can continue the pushing of more cars off a track in a jackknifing situation which is what occurred in this Ohio wreck. This block of tank cars was placed directly behind a block of cars that were in the middle of train which were equipped with cushioned draw bars. The draw bars on these cars slide in and out independent of the car body which helps protect the merchandise carried within from damage. These type of draw bars are usually on automobile carriers to prevent the cars/trucks inside from being damaged. Placing cars with these draw bars in the middle of a train creates elasticity. Building a train like this (Head end = locomotives, which are the heaviest part of any train, followed by heavy mixed freight loads, followed by a block of cushioned draw bar cars, followed by a block of heavy tank cars (such as the case with this 32N) is akin to placing two bowling balls on the ends of a rubber band and praying the rubber band doesn’t break.

And:

Train was not blocked properly because PSR calls for limited car dwell times in terminals. Blocking a train for proper train handling (placing the majority of weight on the head end and ahead of cushioned draw bars) takes longer so this practice has been mostly eliminated by the rail carriers.

So again, the friction advantage of steel wheel on steel rail thrown away, this time through not blocking the cars properly.

Railroad Firms
Due to NS intimidating (or corrupting) the regulators, train 32N was not classified as a “high-hazard flammable train,” despite its obviously hazardous and flammable cargo. Such a classification would have affected both its speed and its route (possibly not through East Palestine). From Lever News:

Though the company’s 150-car train in Ohio reportedly burst into 100-foot flames upon derailing—and was transporting materials that triggered a fireball when they were released and incinerated—it was not being regulated as a “high-hazard flammable train,” federal officials told The Lever.

Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials—including the one in Ohio—from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.


I don’t have a documented connection to 32N’s classification and PSR, but it seems pretty obvious. Here from 49 CFR § 174.310—“Requirements for the operation of high-hazard flammable trains”:

(2) Speed restrictions. All trains are limited to a maximum speed of 50 mph. The train is further limited to a maximum speed of 40 mph while that train travels within the limits of high-threat urban areas (HTUAs) as defined in § 1580.3 of this title, unless all tank cars containing a Class 3 flammable liquid meet or exceed the DOT Specification 117 standards, the DOT Specification 117P performance standards, or the DOT Specification 117R retrofit standards provided in part 179, subpart D of this subchapter.

No railroad company dedicated to increasing average train speed by 10% through PSR would ever want to comply with that statute (which also imposes restrictions on the routes to be followed and allowable cars).


Railroad Owners

Here are the owners of the NS:

Image

No doubt they are very happy with the Operating Ratio that NSR achieved through NSR. The chain of causality that begins with the hot box ends at their desks.

* * *
At least one railroad union was suggested nationalization. From Governing:

Last month, Railroad Workers United (RWU), an umbrella advocacy group for rail-industry union workers, did something it’s talked about doing for 10 years: It called for the sprawling network of rail infrastructure in North America to be publicly owned.

The reasons why, according to a resolution adopted by RWU’s international steering committee, include the railroad companies’ hostility to workers’ unions, steady reductions of workforce over the years, disinvestment in railway infrastructure and an obsessive focus on profits over service.

Other countries, including Japan, China and parts of Europe, have extensive, high-functioning rail networks that are publicly controlled, RWU members note. And they say public ownership of other transportation infrastructure in the U.S. shows there’s no inherent reason why railroad tracks should be private.

“I don’t think it’s too radical to think that this can be done in a different way,” Grooters says. “To create the railroads, there was a lot of public investment that made that happen. Right now that’s being liquidated.”


Of course, some of that public investment is being set on fire and rising into the sky, but what of that?

NOTES:
1. Norfolk Southern, unsurprisingly, has form with toxic derailments:In a similar incident on July 11, 2012, an eastbound Norfolk Southern train derailed 17 cars within the city limits of Columbus.
Three of the cars that derailed were carrying over 86,000 gallons of denatured ethanol. Once breached, the ethanol in the tank cars ignited, fueling a large fire.

The derailment led to the evacuation of over 100 people and cost over $1.2 million.

2.This map shows that the derailment was near a stream called “Sulfur Run” which connects to the small “State Line” Lake; drone footage from Reuters seems to show a watercourse to the left of the derailment. So if the chemicals haven’t made their way into the water supply and the Ohio River, they will soon.
3.Freight Waves includes some hilarious corporate Newspeak from NS COO Cindy Sanborn: “We are taking a ground-up approach to the development of the plan in order to explore what is possible when we remove historical constraints and take a fresh look at our business.”
Translating: You gutted work rules where you could, and cut head-count to the bone and beyond.

“We had some accelerated attrition in several core locations of our network that we had to really increase the pipeline for those locations. And that’s largely [oh yeah] in place.”

Translating: Your skilled workers couldn’t take the abuse anymore, so you outsourced what you could and replaced the rest with untrained newbies. But will no one think of the Operating Ratio?

4. I highlighted brakes because Cory Doctorow and Lever News are both advocating improved braking systems. This is a good idea, and better brakes would have brought the train to a halt faster after the hot box was detected, but the proximate cause of the detailment, as of this writing, seems to have been a hot box, not the brakes.

https://mronline.org/2023/02/14/how-pre ... tine-ohio/

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THE US FACES THE GREATEST ECOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE IN ITS HISTORY
Feb 13, 2023 , 1:22 p.m.

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Due to the risk of explosion, authorities evacuated about half of East Palestine's 4,800 residents as a precaution (Photo: AP)

The United States may be facing one of the greatest ecological catastrophes in its history. And it is that the derailment of a train in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3 with 50 wagons of vinyl chloride and other dangerous substances represents a danger to life in the area.

During the accident, approximately 100,000 gallons of vinyl chloride, a highly toxic chemical that doctors associate with the appearance of cancerous tumors, was spilled and burned.

Some estimate that acid rain and phosgene will decimate the ecology of the entire territory. People in other nearby areas could face serious injuries including skin burns and severe lung damage.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said the evacuation zone surrounding the derailment has expanded to two states, while warning those still in the immediate area that they could face "serious danger to life."

Although the railway company said they have controlled the situation and are preventing a huge explosion that could unleash a deadly maelstrom with a radius of more than 1 mile, it is not certain when the evacuees will return home. Some 500 residents refused to leave their homes.

Until now, the accident has been handled with complete secrecy and the press has said almost nothing about it. Even a television reporter was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and arrested for trespassing while covering the derailment. Evan Lambert was held in custody for about five hours before being released from jail, NewsNation reported .

Is the sudden appearance of "UFOs" and their media coverage just a smoke screen for this ecological catastrophe?

https://misionverdad.com/eeuu-enfrenta- ... u-historia

Google Translator

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Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition
February 12, 2023
An appeal to leaders, institutions, and our brothers and sisters, from the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South.

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On February 10, a collective of movements, civil society organizations, activist groups and their partners launched this Manifesto. A collective effort of dozens of groups and individuals in the Global South, the manifesto outlines the shortcomings of the status quo, “clean energy” approach of the richer countries of the Global North to the transition away from fossil fuels. It also offers new visions of ecosocial transition and transformation that are gender-just, regenerative, and popular, that are at once local and international.

An appeal to leaders, institutions, and our brothers and sisters, from the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South, February 10, 2023

More than two years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic—and now alongside the catastrophic consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—a “new normal” has emerged. This new global status quo reflects a worsening of various crises: social, economic, political, ecological, bio-medical, and geopolitical.

Environmental collapse approaches. Everyday life has become ever more militarized. Access to good food, clean water, and affordable health care has become even more restricted. More governments have turned autocratic. The wealthy have become wealthier, the powerful more powerful, and unregulated technology has only accelerated these trends.

The engines of this unjust status quo—capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and various fundamentalisms—are making a bad situation worse. Therefore, we must urgently debate and implement new visions of ecosocial transition and transformation that are gender-just, regenerative, and popular, that are at once local and international.

In this Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition from the Peoples of the South, we hold that the problems of the Global South are different from those of the Global North and rising powers such as China. An imbalance of power between these two realms not only persists because of a colonial legacy but has deepened because of a neocolonial energy model. In the context of climate change, ever rising energy needs, and biodiversity loss, the capitalist centers have stepped up the pressure to extract natural wealth and rely on cheap labor from the countries on the periphery. Not only is the well-known extractive paradigm still in place but the North’s ecological debt to the South is rising.

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What’s new about this current moment are the “clean energy transitions” of the North that have put even more pressure on the Global South to yield up cobalt and lithium for the production of high-tech batteries, balsa wood for wind turbines, land for large solar arrays, and new infrastructure for hydrogen megaprojects. This decarbonization of the rich, which is market-based and export-oriented, depends on a new phase of environmental despoliation of the Global South, which affects the lives of millions of women, men, and children, not to mention non-human life. In this way, the Global South has once again become a zone of sacrifice, a basket of purportedly inexhaustible resources for the countries of the North.

A priority for the Global North has been to secure global supply chains, especially of critical raw materials, and prevent certain countries, like China, from monopolizing access. The G7 trade ministers, for instance, recently championed a responsible, sustainable, and transparent supply chain for critical minerals via international cooperation‚ policy, and finance, including the facilitation of trade in environmental goods and services through the WTO. The Global North has pushed for more trade and investment agreements with the Global South to satisfy its need for resources, particularly those integral to “clean energy transitions.” These agreements, designed to reduce barriers to trade and investment, protect and enhance corporate power and rights by subjecting states to potential legal suits according to investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms. The Global North is using these agreements to control the “clean energy transition” and create a new colonialism.

Governments of the South, meanwhile, have fallen into a debt trap, borrowing money to build up industries and large-scale agriculture to supply the North. To repay these debts, governments have felt compelled to extract more resources from the ground, creating a vicious circle of inequality. Today, the imperative to move beyond fossil fuels without any significant reduction in consumption in the North has only increased the pressure to exploit these natural resources. Moreover, as it moves ahead with its own energy transitions, the North has paid only lip service to its responsibility to address its historical and rising ecological debt to the South.Minor changes in the energy matrix are not enough. The entire energy system must be transformed, from production and distribution to consumption and waste. Substituting electric vehicles for internal-combustion cars is insufficient, for the entire transportation model needs changing, with a reduction of energy consumption and the promotion of sustainable options.

In this way, relations must become more equitable not only between the center and periphery countries but also within countries between the elite and the public. Corrupt elites in the Global South have also collaborated in this unjust system by profiting from extraction, repressing human rights and environmental defenders, and perpetuating economic inequality.

Rather than solely technological, the solutions to these interlocked crises are above all political.

As activists, intellectuals, and organizations from different countries of the South, we call on change agents from different parts of the world to commit to a radical, democratic, gender-just, regenerative, and popular ecosocial transition that transforms both the energy sector and the industrial and agricultural spheres that depend on large-scale energy inputs. According to the different movements for climate justice, “transition is inevitable, but justice is not.”

We still have time to start a just and democratic transition. We can transition away from the neoliberal economic system in a direction that sustains life, combines social justice with environmental justice, brings together egalitarian and democratic values with a resilient, holistic social policy, and restores an ecological balance necessary for a healthy planet. But for that we need more political imagination and more utopian visions of another society that is socially just and respects our planetary common house.

The energy transition should be part of a comprehensive vision that addresses radical inequality in the distribution of energy resources and advances energy democracy. It should de-emphasize large-scale institutions—corporate agriculture, huge energy companies—as well as market-based solutions. Instead, it must strengthen the resilience of civil society and social organizations.

Therefore, we make the following 8 demands:
1.We warn that an energy transition led by corporate megaprojects, coming from the Global North and accepted by numerous governments in the South, entails the enlargement of the zones of sacrifice throughout the Global South, the persistence of the colonial legacy, patriarchy, and the debt trap. Energy is an elemental and inalienable human right, and energy democracy should be our goal.
2.We call on the peoples of the South to reject false solutions that come with new forms of energy colonialism, now in the name of a Green transition. We make an explicit call to continue political coordination among the peoples of the south while also pursuing strategic alliances with critical sectors in the North.
3.To mitigate the havoc of the climate crisis and advance a just and popular ecosocial transition, we demand the payment of the ecological debt. This means, in the face of the disproportionate Global North responsibility for the climate crisis and ecological collapse, the real implementation of a system of compensation to the global South. This system should include a considerable transfer of funds and appropriate technology, and should consider sovereign debt cancellation for the countries of the South. We support reparations for loss and damage experienced by Indigenous peoples, vulnerable groups and local communities due to mining, big dams, and dirty energy projects.
4.We reject the expansion of the hydrocarbon border in our countries—through fracking and offshore projects—and repudiate the hypocritical discourse of the European Union, which recently declared natural gas and nuclear energy to be “clean energies.” As already proposed in the Yasuni Initiative in Ecuador in 2007 and today supported by many social sectors and organizations, we endorse leaving fossil fuels underground and generating the social and labor conditions necessary to abandon extractivism and move toward a post-fossil-fuel future.
5.We similarly reject “green colonialism” in the form of land grabs for solar and wind farms, the indiscriminate mining of critical minerals, and the promotion of technological “fixes” like blue, green, and grey hydrogen. Enclosure, exclusion, violence, encroachment, and entrenchment have characterized past and current North-South energy relations and are not acceptable in an era of ecosocial transitions.
6.We demand the genuine protection of environment and human rights defenders, particularly indigenous peoples and women at the forefront of resisting extractivism.
7.The elimination of energy poverty in the countries of the South should be among our fundamental objectives—as well as the energy poverty of parts of the Global North—through alternative, decentralized, equitably distributed projects of renewable energy that are owned and operated by communities themselves.
8.We denounce international trade agreements that penalize countries that want to curb fossil fuel extraction. We must stop the use of trade and investment agreements controlled by multinational corporations that ultimately promote more extraction and reinforce a new colonialism.
Our ecosocial alternative is based on countless struggles, strategies, proposals, and community-based initiatives. Our Manifesto connects with the lived experience and critical perspectives of Indigenous peoples and other local communities, women, and youth throughout the Global South. It is inspired by the work done on the rights of nature, buen vivir, vivir sabroso, sumac kawsay, ubuntu, swaraj, the commons, the care economy, agroecology, food sovereignty, post-extractivism, the pluriverse, autonomy, and energy sovereignty. Above all, we call for a radical, democratic, popular, gender-just, regenerative, and comprehensive ecosocial transition.

Following the steps of the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South, this Manifesto proposes a dynamic platform that invites you to join our shared struggle for transformation by helping to create collective visions and collective solutions.

Click here to endorse this manifesto with your signature.https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIp ... &w=1&flr=0

Initial organizational sponsors

Actrices Argentinas
Censat Agua Viva-Amigos de la Tierra Colombia
Consumers Association of Penang
Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South
Extinction Rebellion Medellín
Focus on the Global South
Friends of the Earth Malaysia
Global Justice Now
Global Tapestry of Alternatives
Greenpeace
Grupo Socioambiental Lotos
Health of Mother Earth Foundation
Peoples Response Network
Seminario permanente Re-Evolución de la Salud
Third World Network
War on Want
WoMin

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... the-south/

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Bolivia-China Lithium Deal is a ‘Scientific Revolution’: Expert
February 14, 2023

The recent agreement signed between Bolivia and China to install two industrial complexes with Direct Extraction of Lithium (EDL) technology, in Potosí and Oruro, represents a technical and ‘scientific revolution’, says Brazilian International Relations professor, Bruno Lima.

Lima, who authored a recent paper titled; “The ‘lithium mineral war’ and the Empire in Latin America”, in an interview with Sputnik, says that “if other countries copy the Bolivian model of lithium industrialization and have a profitable association for technology transfer, they will be successful.”

Likewise, he explains why Latin America must end the export of raw materials and replace the practice with industrialization: “[Bolivia] will not be limited to selling in the international market, but will create a complete cycle. A part of the lithium is sold to the international market, for example, to China, but the other part is dedicated to processing, transferring, and technological development.”

However, the Bolivian model will require investment. He points out that China, the Bank of the South, and the BRICS bank could contribute to this process. Lima also believes that this industrialization should take place outside the US dollar framework:

“If these operations are done outside the dollar standard, then it would be perfect. We would really be talking about a quality leap for the Latin American presence in the market and in the international system”, he asserted.

According to the agreement recently signed between Bolivia’s state-owned company YLB and the Chinese company CATL BRUNP & CMOC (CBC), the Bolivian state-owned company will supervise the entire soft metal industrialization process, from extraction to commercialization. The Chinese partners will invest more than $1 Billion for the start-up and construction costs of the industrial complexes.

https://kawsachunnews.com/bolivia-china ... ion-expert
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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