What’s driving Europe’s record-busting heatwave?
July 15, 2023
Blistering heat harms human health, has dangerous social and economic consequences
July 10 2023: land surface temperatures across Europe. ESA/Copernicus Sentinel data. CC BY-NC-SA)
by Emma Hill and Ben Vivian
The Conversation, July 14, 2023
Europe is currently in the midst of a heatwave. Italy, in particular, is expected to face blistering heat, with temperatures projected to reach 40℃ to 45℃. There’s even a chance that the current European temperature record of 48.8℃, set in Sicily in 2021, could be surpassed.
Searing temperatures have spread to other countries in southern and eastern Europe, including France, Spain, Poland and Greece. The heat will complicate the travel plans of those heading to popular holiday destinations across the region.
Heatwaves, which are defined as prolonged periods of exceptionally hot weather in a specific location, can be extremely dangerous. Europe has experienced its fair share of devastating heatwaves in the past.
In 2003, a heatwave swept across Europe, claiming the lives of over 70,000 people. Then, in 2022, another heatwave hit Europe, resulting in the deaths of almost 62,000 people.
The current heatwave is being caused by an anticyclone named Cerberus after the three-headed monster-dog that guards the gates of the underworld in Greek mythology. An anticyclone – or high-pressure system – is a normal meteorological phenomenon in which sinking air from the upper atmosphere brings about a period of dry and settled weather with limited cloud formation and little wind.
High-pressure systems tend to be slow moving, which is why they persist for days, or even weeks at a time. They often become semi-permanent features over large areas of land. When high pressure systems form over hot land, in regions like the Sahara, the stability of the system generates even hotter temperatures because the already warm air is heated even more.
Eventually, the anticyclone will weaken or break down and the heatwave will come to an end. According to the Italian Meteorological Society, the Cerberus heatwave is expected to persist for around two weeks.
What role does climate change play?
High pressure systems, like the one currently affecting Europe, have been expanding northwards in recent years. It’s difficult to ascribe a single event, such as a heatwave, directly to climate change. But as temperatures continue to warm, we are seeing changes in atmospheric circulation patterns that can lead to increased occurrences of extreme temperatures and drought in Europe.
Research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms this trend. Its data shows an increase in the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events since the 1950s. A separate analysis of European heatwaves revealed an increasing severity of such events over the past two decades.
In the summer of 2022, southern Europe experienced higher temperatures than usual for that time of the year. Spain, France and Italy saw daily maximum temperatures exceed 40°C. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service attributed these unusually hot conditions to climate change and suggested that such events are likely to become more frequent, intense and last longer in the future – indicating a concerning trend that may continue this year.
The dangers of extreme heat
Heatwaves and extreme temperatures impact human health in a number of ways. These conditions can cause heatstroke, leading to symptoms like headaches and dizziness. Dehydration resulting from the heat can also affect respiratory and cardiovascular performance.
There have already been reports of heat-related health incidents in Europe during the ongoing heatwave. An Italian road worker died, and there have been numerous cases of heatstroke reported across Spain and Italy.
The Italian Ministry of Health has advised residents and visitors in affected areas to take precautions like staying out of the sun during the hottest part of the day, remaining hydrated and to avoid alcohol consumption.
But the effects of heatwaves go beyond individual health. They have broader social and economic consequences too. Extreme heat can damage road surfaces and even cause railway tracks to buckle.
Heatwaves can also lead to reduced water availability, affecting electricity production, crop irrigation and drinking water supply. In 2022, scorching heat meant French nuclear plants were unable to run at full capacity as higher river temperatures and low water levels affected their cooling ability. Research indicates that extreme heat has already had a negative impact on economic growth in Europe, lowering it by up to 0.5% over the past decade.
As temperatures continue to rise, heatwaves will become more severe. It’s crucial that governments worldwide take swift and decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately.
However, it’s important to note that even if we were to completely halt global greenhouse gas emissions today, the climate would still continue to warm. This is due to the heat that is already absorbed and retained by the oceans. While we can slow down the rate of global warming, the effects of climate change will continue to be experienced in the future.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... -heatwave/
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Profit-Driven Systems Are Driving Us To Our Doom
JULY 15, 2023
Business executive wearing a mask and holding cash banknotes. Photo: Getty Images.
By Caitlin Johnstone – Jul 13, 2023
I just read a disturbing paragraph in a New Yorker article about the Instant Pot, a popular electronic pressure cooker whose parent company recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy:
“So what doomed the Instant Pot? How could something that was so beloved sputter? Is the arc of kitchen goods long but bends toward obsolescence? Business schools may someday make a case study of one of Instant Pot’s vulnerabilities, namely, that it was simply too well made. Once you slapped down your ninety dollars for the Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1, you were set for life: it didn’t break, it didn’t wear out, and the company hasn’t introduced major innovations that make you want to level up. As a customer, you were one-and-done, which might make you a happy customer, but is hell on profit-and-growth performance metrics.”
Just think about that for a second. Under our current systems for profit generation, which is the primary driver of human behavior on this planet, making a quality product that lasts a long time instead of quickly going obsolete or turning into landfill will actually drive you into bankruptcy.
An article in The Atlantic about the bankruptcy filing similarly illustrated this point last month:
“From the point of view of the consumer, this makes the Instant Pot a dream product: It does what it says, and it doesn’t cost you much or any additional money after that first purchase. It doesn’t appear to have any planned obsolescence built into it, which would prompt you to replace it at a regular clip. But from the point of view of owners and investors trying to maximize value, that makes the Instant Pot a problem. A company can’t just tootle along in perpetuity, debuting new products according to the actual pace of its good ideas, and otherwise manufacturing and selling a few versions of a durable, beloved device and its accessories, updated every few years with new features. A company needs to grow.”
This just says such dysmal things about why our planet is facing the existential crises it’s now facing. Corporations will die if they don’t continually grow, and they can’t grow without things like inbuilt planned obsolescence or continued additional purchases, which in a sane society would just be regarded as shoddy craftsmanship. Our entire civilization is driven by the pursuit of profit, and to keep turning large profits your corporation needs to continually grow, and your corporation can’t continually grow unless you’re manufacturing a crappy product that needs to be continually replaced or supplemented, and you can’t manufacture those replacements and supplementations without harvesting them from the flesh of a dying world.
As writer Robert Moor recently observed on Twitter, “The fact that Instant Pot is already being framed as a corporate cautionary tale — the company that went bankrupt because they made a product so durable and versatile that its customers had little need to buy another one — instead of as a critique of capitalism is deeply, deeply depressing.”
It’s really heartbreaking to think about all the ways human potential is being starved and constricted by these ridiculous limitations we’ve placed on the way we operate as a collective. Resources being allocated based on how well they can turn a profit stymies technological innovation, because the most profitable model will always win out over less profitable ones that are more beneficial to people and our environment. Someone could invent a free energy machine that lasts forever and costs next to nothing, and even though it would save the world you can be certain it would never see the light of day under our current systems, because it couldn’t yield huge and continuous profits and it would destroy many current means of profit generation.
Science should be the most collaborative endeavor in the world; every scientist on earth should be collaborating and communicating. Instead, because of our competition-based models, it’s the exact opposite: scientific exploration is divided up into innovators competing against other innovators, corporations competing against other corporations, nations competing against other nations.
If we could see how much we are losing to these competition-based models, how much innovation is going unrealized, how much human thriving is being sacrificed, how we’re losing almost all of our brainpower potential to these models, we’d fall to our knees and scream with rage. If science had been a fully collaborative worldwide hive mind endeavor instead of divided and turned against itself for profit and military power, our civilization would be unimaginably more advanced than it is.
This is doubtless. We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich.
Our competition-based, profit-motivated systems limit scientific innovation, and they also greatly limit the scope of solutions we can avail ourselves of. There’s a whole vast spectrum of potential solutions to the troubles we face as a species, and we’re limiting ourselves to a very small, very inferior fraction of it. By limiting solutions to ones that are profitable, we’re omitting any which involve using less, consuming less, leaving resources in the ground, and leaving nature the hell alone. We’re also shrinking the incentive to cure sicknesses and eliminate problems rather than offer expensive, ongoing treatments and services for them.
Or even a project as fundamental to our survival as getting all the pollution out of our oceans. The profit motive offers no solution to this problem because there’s no way to make a surplus of money from doing so, and in fact it would be very costly. So the pollution stays in our seas, year after year. People have come up with plenty of solutions for removing pollution from the sea, but they never get rolled out at the necessary scale because there’s no way to make it profitable. And people would come up with far more solutions if they knew those solutions could be implemented.
How many times have you had an awesome idea and gotten all excited about it, only to do the math and figure out that it’s unfeasible because wouldn’t be profitable? This is a very common experience, and it’s happening to ideas for potential solutions to our problems every day.
The profit motive system assumes the ecocidal premise of infinite growth on a finite world. Without that, the entire system collapses. So there are no solutions which involve not growing, manufacturing less, consuming less, not artificially driving up demand with advertising, etc.
It’s hard to appreciate the significance of this artificial limitation when you’re inside it and lived your whole life under its rules. It’s like if we were only allowed to make things out of wood; if our whole civilization banned the entire spectrum of non-woodcraft innovation. Sure such a civilization would get very good at making wooden things, and would probably have some woodcrafting innovations that our civilization doesn’t have. But it would also be greatly developmentally stunted. That’s how badly we’re handicapping ourselves with the profit motive model from the pursuit of viable solutions.
And some solutions would be really great right now. This planet just had its warmest week in recorded history, and Antarctic sea ice is now failing to form in what for the southern hemisphere is the dead of winter. Even if you still want to pretend global warming isn’t real, this planet’s biosphere is giving us plenty of other signs of looming collapse, including plummeting insect populations, a loss of two-thirds of Earth’s wildlife over the last 50 years, ecosystems dying off, forests disappearing, soil becoming rapidly less fertile, mass extinctions, and oceans gasping for oxygen and becoming lifeless deserts while continents of plastic form in their waters. So our need for immediate solutions to our environmental crisis is not seriously debatable.
But we’re not getting solutions, we’re getting a world ruled by corporations whose leaders are required to place growth above all other other concerns, even concerns about whether the future will contain an ecosystem which corporations can exist in or a human species for them to sell goods and services to. Corporations function as giant, world-eating sociopaths, because our current models let their leaders and lawyers wash their hands of all the consequences of the damage their monsters inflict in the name of growth and the duty to maximize shareholder profits.
People worry about the world getting destroyed by machines driven by a heartless artificial intelligence, but we might end up destroying it with a kind of artificial mind we invented long before microchips: the corporation. So much of humanity’s dysfunction can be explained by the fact that corporations (A) pretty much run the world and (B) are required to act like sociopaths by placing profit above all other concerns.
As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, ecocide will continue, because ecocide is profitable.
As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, wars will continue, because war is profitable.
As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, exploitation will continue, because exploitation is profitable.
As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, corruption will continue, because corruption is profitable.
There is no “good” model in which human behavior can remain driven by profit without these destructive behaviors continuing, because so many kinds of destructive behavior will always necessarily be profitable. No proponents of any iteration of capitalism have ever been able to provide any satisfactory answers to this.
The call then is to move from competition-based, profit-driven systems to systems which are based on collaboration toward the common good of all. We’re a long way off from that, but a long way can be cleared in a short time under the right conditions. Our species is at adapt-or-die time, and the adaptation that must be made is clear.
https://orinocotribune.com/profit-drive ... -our-doom/
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I despair of these people.. Do they not understand that politics will always come first and the term 'de-growth' is a poison pill to most people on this planet. Without the necessary political groundwork nothing of real consequence can be accomplished. Or are they eco-fascists?
Needed: Either degrowth or two Earths
Originally published: City Lights on June 14, 2023 by Stan Cox (more by City Lights) | (Posted Jul 17, 2023)
“In Real Time” is a monthly series on our blog by Stan Cox, author of The Path to a Livable Future and The Green New Deal and Beyond. The series follows the climate, voting rights, and justice movements as they navigate America’s unfolding crisis of democracy.
Read previous “In Real Time” dispatches here. Listen to the “In Real Time” podcast for audio editions of all dispatches, and hear monthly conversations with Stan on the Anti-Empire Project podcast (scroll down). Also see the evolving “In Real Time” visual work in the illustrated archive.
In a May 30 essay for the New York Times titled “The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring,” one of the architects of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Brian Deese, wrote,
Nine months since that law was passed in Congress, the private sector has mobilized well beyond our initial expectations to generate clean energy, build battery factories and develop other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
There’s just one problem. Those technologies aren’t going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to reduce emissions fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe is to phase out the burning of oil, gas, and coal by law, directly and deliberately. If, against all odds, the United States does that, we certainly will need wind- and solar-power installations, batteries, and new technologies to compensate for the decline of energy from fossil fuels. There is no reason, however, to expect that the process would work in reverse; a “clean-energy” mobilization alone won’t cause a steep reduction in use of fossil fuels.
I think top leaders in Washington are using green-energy pipe dreams to distract us from the reality that they have given up altogether on reducing U.S. fossil fuel use. They’ve caved. This month’s bipartisan deal on the debt limit included a provision that would ease the permitting of energy infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines like the ecologically destructive Mountain Valley fossil-gas pipeline so dear to the heart of West Virginia’s Democratic senator Joe Manchin. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has issued new rules allowing old coal and fossil gas power plants to continue operating if they capture their carbon dioxide emissions and inject them into old oil wells. And under the IRA, those plants that capture emissions will receive federal climate subsidies, even if they use the carbon dioxide that’s pumped into the old wells to push out residual oil that has evaded conventional methods of extraction. And the IRA did not even end federal subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, which could have saved somewhere between $10 and $50 billion annually. Taken together, these policies could extend the operation of existing coal and gas power plants much further into the future.
GDP Growth? . . . I’m Sorry, That’s Not Available in Green
The 20th century’s fossil-fuel bonanza, with its extension well into this century, has enabled an explosion of economic growth that dwarfs anything humanity had previously achieved. Not coincidentally, it has also empowered our species to cause ecological degradation on an unprecedented scale. Humanity’s industrial and agricultural activities have an impact on the Earth that now exceeds, by a whopping 75 percent, nature’s ability to endure them without lasting damage. In other words, we would need almost two Earths to sustain a world economy this size over the long term—more than two, if it continues growing.
This is an old story, long ignored. But no more. The enormous resource requirements of the “green” energy rush are drawing a lot of public attention to a disturbing phenomenon discussed in last month’s installment of “In Real Time”: the insupportable damage that will be done to humanity and Earth in the quest for the mineral resources needed to build new energy infrastructure.
The unfathomable quantities of ores that will be mined to manufacture batteries required by electric vehicles and vast new power grids, and the damage and suffering that will result, have been the subject of many recent headlines. But if countries keep pushing for new energy systems big enough to fully support 100 percent of the economic activity now made possible by oil, gas, and coal, they will not only fail to stop greenhouse gas emissions but will fail to prevent the violation of other critical planetary boundaries, including biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, and soil degradation. We’ve already crossed those red lines, and we’ve kept going. Nothing can grow forever. But the mere attempt to keep the world’s big, rich economies growing into the long future will crush any hopes we may have for that very future.
At the heart of industry’s claim that the world’s economies can expand without limit is the idea of “green growth.” Like the fabled economist’s can opener, the green-growth assumption allows us to believe that the impossible can be made possible. In this case, that means generating greater aggregate wealth year by year while emitting fewer tons of greenhouse gases, extracting fewer tons of resources, and causing less ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss, and other damage to the Earth and our fellow humans.
Here’s one of the many research papers from recent years finding that economic growth has never been achieved over large geographical areas for extended time periods without having serious environmental impacts. The authors further find that “there are no realistic scenarios” for sustaining a 2 percent annual growth rate without excessive resource extraction and greenhouse-gas emissions, even with a “maximal increase in efficiency of material use.”
To hear a less technical takedown of green growth, one that even politicians can understand, enjoy this presentation by social scientist Timothée Parrique to the European Parliament’s recent “Beyond Growth” conference. Much has been made of the fact that in recent decades, Europe’s GDP has grown steadily without increasing carbon dioxide emissions. This has prompted giddy claims that “decarbonization” of economic growth is finally happening. But producing more wealth with the same quantity of climate-altering emissions is not the same as reducing emissions.
One of Parrique’s slides at the conference showed that over the past 30 years, as wealth accumulated on the Earth’s surface while carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere and oceans, the European Union achieved no significant reductions in the rate of carbon dioxide emissions—except from 2008 to 2014, the Great Recession years. The EU managed to reduce emissions only when their economy didn’t grow!
Societies must decide: do we want a growing GDP or a livable future? We can’t have both.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the U.S. makes the right decision and pulls back within ecological limits. For starters, that would require rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and building a modest renewable energy system that would only partially compensate for the diminishing supply of fossil energy. Under those conditions, the economy would shrink, and it would need to keep shrinking until it’s small enough to stop transgressing ecological limits. At that point, we would have achieved, in the late ecological economist Herman Daly’s words, a steady-state economy.
That period of shrinkage would not be a recession. A reversal of growth induced by a deliberate, well-planned reduction in the supply of energy and material resources available to the economy would have effects wholly different from the misery caused by recessions—if we establish policies to guarantee material sufficiency and equity throughout society. That is to say, if we ensure that everyone has enough while preventing excessive production and consumption.
“A Planned, Selective, and Equitable Downscaling”
Last month, The Economist expended 1,400 words belittling the EU’s Beyond Growth conference and treating its attendees as recession-loving misanthropes. Alluding to recent GDP stagnation in some European nations, The Economist asked, “For what is Europe, if not a post-growth continent already?” Parrique took on their rhetorical question with this pithy response:
In reality, degrowth differs fundamentally from a recession. A recession is a reduction in GDP, one that happens accidentally, often with undesirable social outcomes like unemployment, austerity, and poverty. Degrowth, on the other hand, is a planned, selective and equitable downscaling of economic activities. . . . Associating degrowth with a recession just because the two involve a reduction of GDP is absurd; it would be like arguing that an amputation and a diet are the very same thing just because they both lead to weight loss.
This distinction between the reductions in economic activity that happen during recessions and those that would occur in degrowth economies is important. But to gain popular support for degrowth, still more elaboration is going to be required. Those of us who’ve grown up in industrial societies have been taught our whole lives that GDP growth is essential to everyone’s well-being and quality of life. This quasi-religious belief in the goodness of growth persists despite numerous studies published over the past three decades demonstrating that once people’s essential needs have been met, further GDP growth does not increase life satisfaction.
This disconnect between a nation’s overall economic growth and its residents’ quality of life is hardly surprising when we look at the United States, where the bulk of the wealth generated in recent decades has been captured and accumulated by only a tiny minority. As of last year, the wealthiest 1 percent owned one-third of the nation’s total household wealth, while 50 percent of households in the lower half of the wealth scale held only about 3 percent. Many of those households had no net wealth at all, and growth is doing nothing to help them. Of the new wealth that’s been generated since the depths of the Great Recession in 2009, the richest 10 percent have accumulated 75 times as much per household as have those at the bottom 50 percent. (In this graph on the Federal Reserve’s website, you really have to squint to see the bottom 50 percent’s share, in pink.)
To restate the above more succinctly: in an affluent country, money can’t buy you happiness, but having a lot of money does help you acquire even more. And that’s always to the detriment of humanity, ecosystems, and our collective future.
Despite the fact that economic growth has plunged us into an ecological emergency, and even though half the U.S. population does not share meaningfully in the wealth that it produces, almost anyone you ask will express a positive view of economic growth, and most people will recoil at even the mildest suggestion that the time has come for degrowth. To help dispel the ingrained perception that growth is good and degrowth bad, the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has invoked an apt analogy:
Take the words colonization and decolonization, for example. We know that those who engaged in colonization felt it was a good thing. From their perspective—which was the dominant perspective in Europe for most of the past 500 years—decolonization would therefore seem negative. But the point is precisely to challenge the dominant perspective, because the dominant perspective is wrong. Indeed, today we can agree that this stance—a stance against colonization—is correct and valuable: we stand against colonization and believe that the world would be better without it. That is not a negative vision, but positive; one that’s worth rallying around. Similarly, we can and should aspire to an economy without growth just as we aspire to a world without colonization.
Hickel, Parrique, and other degrowth scholars stress that it is wealthy countries that need to undergo degrowth. What the rich nations are calling “growth,” he writes, is in reality “a process of elite accumulation, the commodification of commons, and the appropriation of human labor and natural resources—a process that is quite often colonial in character.” Those are the aspects of today’s economy that need to degrow, along with wasteful and superfluous production, not the essential goods and services that can ensure a decent life for all.
The obligation to reduce material production and ecological degradation rests with the rich nations, and with rich populations in the rest of the world. Parrique showed another graphic at the conference illustrating how economies with “unsustainable prosperity,” like that of the U.S., must shrink, while economically deprived economies should be guaranteed the means and opportunity to build and transform.
A degrowing society’s goals would not be just reverse images of growth goals. One would not see, for example, a degrowth counterpart to the Federal Reserve aiming for a 2 percent annual decline in GDP. The goal in a degrowing society, presumably, would be a good quality of life for everyone, within ecologically necessary limits. And just as the owning and investing classes saw the biggest increases in wealth and consumption in the age of growth, they would experience steep decreases in the age of degrowth. The economy could instead be dedicated to providing good quality of life for all, which would mean a big improvement for the estimated 140 million poor and low-income people in the U.S.
The most effective strategies for how to accomplish degrowth would doubtless differ from country to country, as would the intensity of political opposition to the very idea of degrowth. Bipartisan elite resistance would be especially strong in the U.S., I expect, but that would be no reason to drop the subject. In fact, it’s a good reason to get even louder.
I remain convinced that a phaseout of fossil fuels is a small but urgently needed first step that could lead to degrowth and eventually a steady-state society that lives within ecological limits. That, along with ecologically necessary restraints on renewable energy development, would trigger what many would see as a national crisis. But we can make it a fruitful crisis, one in which we’re all obliged to find our collective way into a new, equitable, society—based on an inalienable right to a good life and inalienable limits on material production and consumption.
https://mronline.org/2023/07/17/needed- ... wo-earths/
Yes, we might aspire to 'de-growth' but will you impose it upon the underprivileged? If such a thing is to come to be it must be lead and largely practiced by the 'Golden Billion'. Which will never happen without a
political revolution.
Methane gas is flared off during a drilling operation in the Permian Basin oil field on March 12, 2022 in Stanton, Texas. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images/CommonDreams.org)
Study shows methane leaks put climate risk from gas ‘on par with coal’
Originally published: Common Dreams on July 13, 2023 by Kenny Stancil (more by Common Dreams) | (Posted Jul 15, 2023)
The fossil fuel industry has long argued that fracked gas can serve as a “bridge” to a renewable-powered future, but a new study confirms that uncontrolled leaks make it as dangerous for the climate as coal.
So-called natural gas is derived from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and composed mostly of methane—a planet-heating gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over its first 20 years in the atmosphere. A methane leakage rate of as little as 0.2% is enough to render gas equivalent to coal in driving global warming, according to a peer-reviewed manuscript accepted last week in Environmental Research Letters.
The paper is set is be published next week. According to its abstract:
Global gas systems that leak over 4.7% of their methane (when considering a 20-year timeframe) or 7.6% (when considering a 100-year timeframe) are on par with lifecycle coal emissions from methane-leaking coal mines.
The net climate impact from coal is also influenced by SO2 [sulfur dioxide] emissions, which react to form sulfate aerosols that mask warming. We run scenarios that combine varying methane leakage rates from coal and gas with low to high SO2 emissions based on coal sulfur content, flue gas scrubber efficiency, and sulfate aerosol global warming potentials.
The methane and SO2 co-emitted with CO2 alter the emissions parity between gas and coal. We estimate that a gas system leakage rate as low as 0.2% is on par with coal, assuming 1.5% sulfur coal that is scrubbed at a 90% efficiency with no coal mine methane when considering climate effects over a 20-year timeframe.
Recent aerial measurement surveys of oil and gas production in the United States show methane leakage rates ranging from “0.65% to 66.2%, with similar leakage rates detected worldwide,” the abstract states.
These numerous super-emitting gas systems being detected globally underscore the need to accelerate methane emissions detection, accounting, and management practices.
Lead author Deborah Gordon, an environmental policy expert at Brown University and the Rocky Mountain Institute, told The New York Timeson Thursday that if fossil gas leaks, even a little,
it’s as bad as coal.
“It can’t be considered a good bridge, or substitute,” Gordon emphasized.
What the world requires is to move away from all fossil fuels as soon as possible, to a 100% renewable energy future.
As the Times noted, the study “adds to a substantial body of research that has poked holes in the idea that natural gas is a suitable transitional fuel to a future powered entirely by renewables, like solar and wind.”
Despite mounting evidence that expanding fossil fuel extraction and combustion is incompatible with averting the worst consequences of the climate emergency, the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year by congressional Democrats “includes credits that would apply to some forms of natural gas,” the Times reported.
“When power companies generate electricity by burning natural gas instead of coal, they emit only about half the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide,” the newspaper observed.
In the United States, the shift from coal to gas, driven by a boom in oil and gas fracking, has helped reduce carbon emissions from power plants by nearly 40% since 2005.
But that ignores the dangers posed by methane, the primary component of fossil gas. Emissions and atmospheric concentrations of methane continued to climb in 2022, thanks in large part to massive leaks from fossil fuel infrastructure. A study published in October found that pipelines transporting fracked gas in the Permian Basin oil field of the U.S. Southwest are leaking at least 14 times more methane than previously thought.
Another recent study found that more than 1,000 “super-emitter” incidents—human-caused methane leaks of at least one tonne per hour—were detected worldwide last year, mostly at oil and gas facilities, including in Louisiana and Pennsylvania. In addition, it identified 112 global “methane bombs,” which are defined as fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release what amounts to 30 years of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution.
Methane is responsible for an estimated 30% of global temperature rise today, and scientists have made clear that policymakers must prioritize cutting this short-lived heat-trapping gas to avoid climate chaos. Even a temporary breach of the 1.5°C threshold—something experts warn has a 50% chance of happening by 2026—could trigger irreversible harm from multiple tipping points.
Robert Howarth, an earth systems scientist at Cornell University who sounded the alarm about methane leaks more than a decade ago, praised the forthcoming study.
“Their conclusion is to once again point out that natural gas may not be any better at all for the climate than is coal, particularly when viewed through the lens of warming over the next 20 years or so, which of course is a critical time” for meeting climate targets, he told the Times.
“I do hope the policy world and the political leaders of the world pay attention to this, as I fear too many remain too fixated at simply reducing coal use, even if it results in more gas consumption,” Howarth added.
What the world requires is to move away from all fossil fuels as soon as possible, to a 100% renewable energy future.
https://mronline.org/2023/07/15/study-s ... with-coal/
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Xi's statements on ecological conservation
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2023-07-18 08:30
President Xi Jinping has on many occasions emphasized the concept that "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets". Here are some of his remarks on the concept.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202307/1 ... e87_1.html
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COOPERATION IN THE FACE OF THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
THE AMAZON: BETWEEN SOVEREIGNTY AND INTERNATIONALIZATION
eder pena
Jul 17, 2023 , 9:36 a.m.
Global capitalism is concerned with the degradation of the Amazon on the one hand and on the other is designed to degrade the region (Photo: Getty images)
Until last Friday, July 7, more than 4,000 people had been evacuated by military authorities fighting against illegal mining in the Venezuelan Amazon. This was reported via Twitter by the operational strategic commander of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB), General Domingo Hernández Lárez.
As part of the Autana Operation that has been carried out recently in the border area with Brazil and Colombia, particularly in the Yapacana National Park in the Venezuelan Amazonas state, a humanitarian channel was established for voluntary evacuation that adds "to the duty and constitutional right of environmental protection," said the senior military official.
" CLEAR THE AMAZON OF ILLEGAL MINING"
The following Monday in the "Con Maduro+" program, President Nicolás Maduro instructed the FANB to continue the fight against this activity that causes serious social and ecological damage in the area. He stated that:
"The first thing to do is cleanse the Amazon of illegal mining, prohibit deforestation, (...) go for soil regeneration, total reforestation, supported by the divine, spiritual and ancestral power of the indigenous peoples who live in the Amazon."
The president confirmed that he receives daily reports from the FANB Strategic Operational Command (Ceofanb) to follow the progress of the protection of the Amazon in Venezuela and explained that illegal miners in the country, Colombia and Brazil have caused serious damage to national parks .
He pointed out that the humanitarian evacuation has been carried out in two weeks by means of an air and river bridge, and that Operation Autana includes personalized attention to the miners who voluntarily abandon the illegal deposits, medical check-ups, relocation to other states of the country and a registry, which which involves complex but effective logistics.
Maduro expressed his full support for the revitalization of a specific agenda to preserve the Amazon, which respects the sovereignty of the States of the region and the rights of the indigenous communities, for which the Venezuelan State will support the development of the plans that are designed together in the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OTCA), which unites all Amazonian nations, including Venezuela.
LOOKING TOWARDS AMAZON COOPERATION
A key in the President's statement was that the protection of the Amazon will also depend on the unity of "all South American institutions." His words are given in the framework of the preparation of the ACTO summit that will take place next August in the Brazilian city of Belén do Pará.
This body, created in 1995 under the parameters of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty (1978), has not met since 2009. Since then there has been no activity by the entity and, therefore, no joint actions by the eight member countries. Its relaunch arises from the initiative of the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, and his meetings with different presidents of South America, including Maduro.
The preparatory meeting held in the city of Leticia, capital of the Colombian department of Amazonas, was attended by the presidents of Colombia and Brazil, Gustavo Petro and Lula, who discussed the regional coordination of countries with Amazon territory to preserve the largest tropical forest of the world.
Lula and Petro lead the regional coordination of the Amazon countries to preserve the largest tropical forest in the world (Photo: Twitter)
A Venezuelan delegation headed by the Minister of Ecosocialism, Josué Lorca, along with their counterparts from Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Suriname also attended. The head of the Venezuelan environmental authority pointed out in the presidential program that the Amazonian countries have developed an agenda for the "revitalization" of ACTO.
In Leticia, they sought to generate inputs, create strategic conservation actions, establish joint works and languages to strengthen the cooperation treaty that has been created for 40 years and analyze the issue of sustained financing that allows the forest to become a climatic pillar for the humanity.
In this regard, Lula da Silva assured that:
" Talking about the Amazon is talking about superlatives: it is the largest tropical forest in the world, home to 10% of all animal and plant species on the planet; it has 50 million inhabitants with 400 indigenous peoples who speak 300 languages, has the largest freshwater reserves on the planet, including a true subterranean ocean".
SOVEREIGNTY OR INTERNATIONALIZATION?
Last November Petro was visited by the head of the United States Southern Command, General Laura J. Richardson, with whom he discussed anti-drug policy as a matter of primary progress for both countries.
In addition, the Colombian president proposed creating a military force that would focus on the "protection" of the Amazon rainforest. The objective of said force with military scope would be to address the fires that are increasingly frequent in the area and that, according to Petro, represent a security problem that involves all of humanity. The president of Colombia, a country that is a global partner of NATO, said:
" I proposed to the general the construction of a force, which she already told me had a plan in Brazil, a military force with helicopters, etc., but destined to put out the fires in the Amazon jungle, which is the main security problem of humanity today".
On the other hand, during his visit to Washington last February, Lula said that he believes that the United States will help protect the Amazon, although he did not specify how: "We are not talking specifically about the Amazon Fund," he added.
In recent decades, a debate has been installed regarding the claim to internationalize the Amazon by the so-called "international community." The argument, which at first sight seems laudable, is that the region is considered essential for the preservation of the quality of life on the planet because its high forest mass would allow the purification of excess greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide ( CO 2 ), would contribute enormous amounts of oxygen to the atmosphere and would regulate the cycles and climatic patterns of the planet.
In addition, the largest basin in the world, which represents 20% of the Earth's fresh water, has large mineral deposits such as iron, copper, manganese, cassiterite, bauxite, nickel, kaolin, titanium, vanadium, gold, diamonds, gypsum, limestone, rock salt.
Also a wide biocultural diversity expressed in its more than 400 indigenous peoples and a significant number of biological species on the planet in 7 million square kilometers of forests and savannahs. There is a consensus that these characteristics provide "wealth" to the region, but also "salvation" to humanity, and therein lies the bipolarity of our imaginary.
It is said that the Amazon possesses "wealth" and that it also means "salvation" to humanity (Photo: AFP)
The discussion about its status as "international heritage" was revived in 2019 when French President Emmanuel Macron declared that the idea of conferring international status "is a real question that would be imposed if a sovereign State took concrete measures that clearly oppose the interest of the planet".
The European president added that installing this quality "is a path that will remain open in the coming months and years," since the challenge of climate change affects everyone and no one can say: "This is just my problem."
These expressions were rejected by then Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who demanded that Macron retract as a condition for accepting $22 million in aid from the G7 to Brazil to fight the fires in the Amazon.
Some background :
*The captain of the United States Navy, Mathew Fawry, suggested in 1817 that the United States take the initiative to stimulate the creation of the "Sovereign State of the Amazon."
*The Bolivian Syndicate of New York consortium, whose director was the nephew of then US President Theodore Roosevelt, determined in 1902 that it would have sovereignty over part of the territory that was in dispute between Brazil and Bolivia, which was stopped by local elites and ultimately annexed the province of Acre to Brazil (Treaty of Petrópolis, November 17, 1903).
*In 1989 Al Gore, then Vice President of the United States, stated before the Senate of his country that "contrary to what Brazilians think, the Amazon does not belong to them but to all of us."
*That same year François Mitterrand, then president of France, created the doctrines of "relative sovereignty" and the "right of interference", with which he pointed out that "Brazil needs to accept relative sovereignty over the Amazon."
This notion that the region "belongs to the world" is not new, the incursions after its natural assets date back to the European colonial invasion that began in 1492. What does seem new is the position of both left-wing presidents and the strange detail that makes Bolsonaro look more nationalist than Lula.
WHO PROTECTS WHAT?
The response of the former Governor of the Federal District and former Minister of Education of Brazil, Cristovam Buarque, to the question about what he thought of the internationalization of the Amazon, in the year 2000, became famous on the web. His presentation focused on what it is " important for humanity" such as the Amazon.
The politician referred to the fact that oil reserves, the financial capital of rich countries, museums such as the Louvre, the nuclear arsenals of the United States or the Manhattan area, the town where the main headquarters of the Organization of United Nations (UN) because they are also important for humanity.
Initiatives to intervene in countries to ensure that nature is "well managed" arise from the colonialist logic that infantilizes the countries of the Global South. This colonialist logic arises from countries like France, the United Kingdom or the United States, which are the same ones that refuse to reduce capitalist accumulation, the real cause of global greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation (also called "change of land use"). land"), which has reached 17% of the Amazon.
The Amazon already emits more CO2 than it absorbs due to a combination of deforestation, climate change and fires (Photo: BBC)
The global environmental crisis has internationalized the effects of a civilizing model that, on the one hand, is concerned with the degradation of the Amazon and, on the other, is designed to degrade the region. A study published by the journal Nature in 2021 revealed that the region already emits more CO 2 than it absorbs due to a positive feedback between deforestation, climate change and fires.
Due to the "butterfly effect", the Amazon supports much of the global food system by regulating rainfall patterns around the world. Scientific models published by the Journal of Climate show how its continued deforestation could significantly reduce rainfall, which is vital for food production in the United States and Brazil itself, which today generates 66% of the world's soybeans, 42% of corn and 30% of your poultry, for example.
DISPUTES, NEGOTIATIONS AND DECISIONS
It is clear that the Amazon region is of interest to the United States, but it is even more so for Brazil, whose military doctrine assumes that:
" National Defense, in addition to being an important vector for the preservation of National Sovereignty, also allows the maintenance of territorial integrity, the achievement of national objectives, the protection of the people and the guarantee of external non-interference in the national territory. and its jurisdictional waters, including the overlying airspace, the river beds and the sea, the river bed and the marine subsoil".
Geopolitically, Brazil, which is part of the G20 at the same time as the BRICS, maintains its strategic depth in non-interference. However, it is understood that, in the face of the global crisis in process, there is a risk of a militarization of environmentalism , namely: using the excuse of the crisis to intervene and advance in the takeover of territories in which capitalism already decides. globalized through its corporations.
It should be noted that in the Macron-Bolsonaro episode, he did not appeal to a sovereign nationalism but rather defended the "right" to plunder by the landed oligarchy that brought him to power. On the other hand, an intervention such as the one proposed by Macron or eventual support from Biden would not be based on mere environmental concern, but on tackling disturbances that could alter the existing but declining world order.
Lula aspires to global leadership within the climate agenda, while Petro does the same regarding his "debt-for-nature" initiatives, his efforts look to "green" agendas in which global elites refuse to cede their benefits economic and geostrategic. In this sense, there is a risk of a foreignization of the cause of the protection of the Amazon that translates into a reinvigoration of Western influence on the continent.
In addition, these green transition agendas have as a material strategic base the same minerals that are under the jungles they claim to defend.
Latin America is shaping up to be the arena of battle between declining and emerging powers. Venezuela requires a vision, sovereign and at the same time regional that supports mechanisms such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and ACTO itself that balance the power of the initiatives of Western countries, with a regional bloc that has bargaining power and decision of the countries of the Amazon basin in favor of sovereignty.
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