#climate_crisis
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This heatwave has eviscerated the idea that small changes can tackle extreme weather
George Monbiot (The Guardian)
Dangerous heat will become the norm, even in the UK. Systems need to urgently change – and the silence needs to be broken.
Can we talk about it now? I mean the subject most of the media and most of the political class has been avoiding for so long. You know, the only subject that ultimately counts – the survival of life on Earth. Everyone knows, however carefully they avoid the topic, that, beside it, all the topics filling the front pages and obsessing the pundits are dust. (...)
This is not a passive silence. It is an active silence, a fierce commitment to distraction and irrelevance in the face of an existential crisis. (...) But while the people who dominate the means of communication frantically avoid the subject, the planet speaks, in a roar becoming impossible to ignore. (...)
We have seen nothing yet. (...)
We do not deserve this. The billionaire press and the politicians it promotes may deserve each other, but none of us deserves either group. They are constructing a world between them in which we have not elected to live, in which we may not be able to live. (...)
They do so on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, animal farming, finance, construction firms, car manufacturers and airline companies, but also on behalf of something bigger than any of those interests: the power of incumbency. (...)
Over the past few years, I’ve begun to see that mainstream environmental movements have made a terrible mistake. (...) It goes something like this. There is too little time and the ask is too big to try to change the system. People aren’t ready for it. We don’t want to scare away our members or provoke a fight with the government. So the only realistic approach is incrementalism. (...)
But while they have been playing patience, power has been playing poker. The radical right insurgency has swept all before it, crushing the administrative state, destroying public protections, capturing the courts, the electoral system and the infrastructure of government, shutting down the right to protest and the right to live. While we persuaded ourselves that there is no time for system change, they proved us wrong by changing everything. (...)
Only a demand for system change, directly confronting the power driving us to planetary destruction, has the potential to match the scale of the problem and to inspire and mobilise the millions of people required to generate effective action. (...)
There was never time for incrementalism. Far from being a shortcut to the change we want to see, it is a morass in which ambition sinks. (...)
Some of us know what we want: private sufficiency, public luxury, doughnut economics, participatory democracy and an ecological civilisation. (...)
So let’s break our own silence. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and others by pretending that small measures deliver major change. (...)
But a major question remains. Given that we have left it so late, can we reach the social tipping point before we hit the environmental tipping point?
> See also: Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis (Media Lens)
The dangerous heat England is suffering at the moment is already becoming normal in southern Europe.’ A firefighter tackles a wild fire in Gironde, France, 17 July 2022. Photograph: Thibaud Moritz/AFP/Getty Images.
Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #sea_level #ocean_level #water_security #drought #desertification #paris_agreement #cop26 #government #international_cooperation #pollution #water #water_quality #supreme_court #lobby #rupert_murdoch #media #journalism #journalist #corporate_media #state #public_opinion #heat_wave #extreme_weather #food_shortages #deforestation #bush_fires #propaganda
Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis
Media Lens
(...) Increasingly, now, we do have citizens among us: scientists – particularly, climate scientists – who are awakening from their ‘mainstream’ slumber to the reality that they are citizens of a decaying society on a dying planet. (...)
To be fair, even veteran activists are asking themselves: ‘In what kind of world have we actually been living all along?’ For when it comes to anything other than maximising profit for corporations and pacifying the public, there appears to be no-one piloting the ship of state. (...)
The confusion and outrage are understandable. But why is climate denial still so prevalent? Why are so many people behaving as if there is no crisis? (...)
State-corporate interests generate and galvanise public fear into action with great efficiency when they want to. We need only think of World Wars I and II when millions of people were mobilised to kill and be killed to defend ‘democracy’, the ‘Fatherland’, the ‘Motherland’. After 1945, public fear and outrage were similarly brought to fever pitch by ‘red scares’ insisting that ‘The Russians are coming!’ As Zinn noted, the alarm was also rung to devastating effect in 1990 at the time of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. (...)
The same was true at the time of Nato’s assault on Serbia in 1999, also in 2003 when Iraq was invaded and conquered, in 2011 when the Libyan government was overthrown, and when the same attempt was made in Syria. (...)
This is why there is no sense of climate crisis, of emergency. It has nothing to do with human indifference; it has to do with people with authority and power – interests fanatically committed to expanding profits – NOT producing banner, front-page headlines of this kind:
‘CLIMATE COLLAPSE: THE WORLD LOOKS THE OTHER WAY. WILL YOU? OR WILL YOU BECOME VERY, VERY ANGRY?’
‘FOSSIL FUEL INTERESTS ARE KILLING US FOR SHORT-TERM PROFIT: THE WORLD LOOKS THE OTHER WAY. WILL YOU? OR WILL YOU BECOME VERY, VERY ANGRY?’
Far from alarming us, front page headlines are still literally celebrating indications of looming climate collapse. On January 2, the Sunday Telegraph front page featured a smiling, costumed performer at London’s New Year’s Day parade, under the headline:
‘Warmest New Year’s Day on record’
(...) Even when the impacts of climate change are not being celebrated, they are still being questioned. A BBC article asked:
‘Are soaring temperatures linked to climate change?’
How, in 2022, with everything we know, can this even be a question? By contrast, during ‘red scares’ and ‘the war on terror’, often bogus ‘threats’ were shrieked out as undisputed and utterly terrifying. Any expressions of doubt were reviled as genocide-denying treachery.
This surreal combination of celebration and denial is being produced in the context of devastating weather extremes that are only going to get much, much worse. (...)
More than 20 US states were experiencing dangerously hot temperatures impacting nearly 100 million Americans as grim footage was shared of thousands of cattle killed by dangerous temperatures, raising the much-feared spectre of global food shortages as temperatures continue to rise. (...)
It is reported that the current drought in Italy threatens more than 30% of national agricultural production. In Sydney, 50,000 people have been urged to evacuate their homes as floods hit Australia’s largest city for the third time this year. (...)
Climate scientists are warning that ‘every heatwave occurring today is more intense due to climate change.’ Heatwaves linked to climate change reportedly killed 157,000 people worldwide between 2000 and 2020, with four-fifths of those deaths during the 2003 European heatwave and 2010 Russia heatwave. (...)
António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has been scathing in his denunciations of the fossil fuel industry and their political backers. Addressing a climate conference organised by the White House, he warned:
‘We seem trapped in a world where fossil fuel producers and financiers have humanity by the throat. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has invested heavily in pseudoscience and public relations – with a false narrative to minimise their responsibility for climate change and undermine ambitious climate policies.’
He continued:
‘They exploited precisely the same scandalous tactics as big tobacco decades before. Like tobacco interests, fossil fuel interests and their financial accomplices must not escape responsibility.’ (...)
Scientists like Kalmus are now pleading with the corporate media to drop the denialism and phony ‘balance’, and hit the alarm button with full force:
‘The single biggest media failure of all time is how the media still isn’t treating global heating as an emergency.’
He added:
‘Climate journalists, the climate emergency just isn’t a normal thing to report. There need to be new rules/norms/practices when our entire planet is at stake. It’s a singular story.’
(...) How to escape state-corporate control of the means of mass communication?
It is a problem no-one has yet managed to solve. But a powerful step in the right direction must be for scientists to radicalise and mobilise – to look deeply and understand the true nature of corporate politics and corporate media – and to act together to demand public insurrection, rebellion and revolutionary change.
> See also: It’s democracy v plutocracy – this is the endgame for our planet (The Guardian)
> See also: ‘There Is No Way To Fool Physics’: Climate Breakdown And State-Corporate Madness (Media Lens)
Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #sea_level #ocean_level #water_security #drought #desertification #paris_agreement #cop26 #government #international_cooperation #pollution #water #water_quality #supreme_court #lobby #rupert_murdoch #media #journalism #journalist #corporate_media #state #public_opinion #heat_wave #extreme_weather #food_shortages #deforestation #bush_fires #propaganda
It’s democracy v plutocracy – this is the endgame for our planet
George Monbiot (The Guardian)
The US supreme court is helping to destroy our climate. But it was a much smaller decision, closer to home, that was the final straw for me.
It feels like the end game. In the US last week, the third perverse and highly partisan supreme court decision in a few days made American efforts to prevent climate breakdown almost impossible. (...)
The day before, in the UK, the government’s climate change committee reported a “shocking” failure by Boris Johnson’s administration to meet its climate targets. (...) [T]he UK government also announced that it intended to scrap the law protecting the UK’s most important wildlife sites.
But the final straw for me was a smaller decision. After two decades of disastrous policies that turned its rivers into open sewers, Herefordshire county council (...) finally did the right thing. It applied to the government to create a water protection zone. (...) [T]he UK’s environment minister, Rebecca Pow, refused permission, claiming it “would impose new and distinct regulatory obligations on the farmers and businesses within the catchment”. This is, of course, the point. (...)
Just at the point at which we need a coordinated global effort to escape our existential crises – climate breakdown, ecological breakdown, the rising tide of synthetic chemicals, a gathering global food emergency – those who wield power string razor wire across the exit. (...)
I never imagined that we would one day confront what appears to be an ideological commitment to destroying life on Earth. (...)
As Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has documented, hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money (funds whose sources are unknown) were poured into the nomination and confirmation of the three judges appointed to the court by Donald Trump. (...)
Once the favoured justices were in place, the same networks started using their financial power to steer their decisions. They do so through “amicus briefs”. (...)
In this case, the supreme court has strayed way beyond its mandate of interpreting the law, into the territory of the executive and the legislature: making the law. It is imposing policies that would never survive democratic scrutiny, if they were put to the vote. By seizing control of regulatory power, it sets a precedent that could stymie almost any democratic decision. (...)
The media often represent politicians’ interests as if they were mere political preferences. Very rarely is the lobbying and political funding behind a decision explained in the news. (...)
All these cases expose the same political vulnerability: the ease with which democracy is crushed by the power of money. We cannot protect the living world, or women’s reproductive rights, or anything else we value until we get the money out of politics, and break up the media empires that make a mockery of informed political consent. (...)
Until we change our political systems, making it impossible for the rich to buy the decisions they want, we will lose not only individual cases. We will lose everything.
> See also: ‘There Is No Way To Fool Physics’: Climate Breakdown And State-Corporate Madness (Media Lens)
‘When I began work as an environmental journalist I never imagined we would one day confront what appears to be an ideological commitment to destroying life on Earth.’ Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP.
Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #sea_level #ocean_level #water_security #drought #desertification #paris_agreement #cop26 #government #international_cooperation #pollution #water #water_quality #supreme_court #lobby #amicus_brief #rupert_murdoch #media #journalism #journalist
For 50 years, governments have failed to act on climate change. No more excuses
The Guardian
Conflict and Covid make these troubling times, but national leaders must cooperate and take action now.
At the end of February this year, the world’s governments signed on to a statement that was startling in its strength and clarity. “The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and planetary health,” reads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. “Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.’” (...)
It is true that other issues are causing grave concern in many societies: governments worldwide are tackling poverty and hunger, wars and civil conflicts, the rising cost of food and energy, health systems and economies crippled by Covid-19.
But as three former UN climate chiefs, let us be clear: as the world’s first major environment summit - the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment - recognised, the crises in security, health, development and the environment are linked. (...)
The further climate change progresses, the more we lock in a future featuring more ruined harvests and more food insecurity along with a host of other problems including rises in sea level, threats to water security, drought and desertification. Governments must act against climate change while also dealing with other pressing crises. (...)
While developed countries accepted the convention’s principle of equity and thus their responsibility to lead climate action, their performance has been disappointing, not least in reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases and in mobilising financial support for developing countries that need it. (...)
But the sum total of policies in place now will take us to a world hotter by 2.7C and perhaps a catastrophic 3.6C above pre-industrial levels.
If science has not persuaded most governments to act, perhaps economics will. The IPCC provides clear evidence that societies will be more prosperous in a world where climate change is constrained, than in one left to burn. (...)
Fifty years ago the international community faced a similar litany of troubles: depletion of natural resources, desertification, the legacy of atom bomb testing, mercury contamination, cold war proxy conflicts. Geopolitics split the world. Yet at the 1972 Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, leaders agreed to cooperate on threats faced in common.
Now, with geopolitics made frosty by superpower disagreements and with nations bleeding from Covid and conflict, the world’s people need their leaders once more to work together. (...)
Leaders agreed to cooperate on threats faced in common at the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, 1972. Photograph: Pressens Bild/AFP/Getty Images.
Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #sea_leve; #ocean_level #water_security #drought #desertification #paris_agreement #cop26 #government #international_cooperation
Atoms and Ashes by Serhii Plokhy review – why another nuclear disaster is almost inevitable
The Guardian
A grim account of the downhill slide of atomic power since its heyday in the 1950s illustrates why it can never be the solution to global heating.
Once hailed as a source of electricity that would be too cheap to meter, atomic power has come a long way since the 1950s – mostly downhill. Far from being cost-free, nuclear-generated electricity is today more expensive than power produced by coal, gas, wind or solar plants while sites storing spent uranium and irradiated equipment litter the globe, a deadly radioactive legacy that will endure for hundreds of thousands of years. For good measure, most analysts now accept that the spread of atomic energy played a crucial role in driving nuclear weapon proliferation.
Then there are the disasters. Some of the world’s worst accidents have had nuclear origins and half a dozen especially egregious examples have been selected by Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy to support his thesis that atomic power is never going to be the energy saviour of our imperilled species. (...)
“Nuclear power is too costly and it takes too long to build a reactor and it is inherently unsafe not only for technological reasons but also because of the risk of human error.” (...)
[T]he nuclear industry has gone past its spring and summer years and should be allowed to reach a useful but limited autumn before it is quietly forgotten as a dark global experiment that should not be repeated.
‘Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima’ by Serhii Plokhy is published by Allen Lane
A digitally altered image of a US nuclear weapon test at Bikini Atoll, July 1946. Photograph: United States Department of Defense
Tags: #books #nuclear_power #atom #atomic_power #nuclear_disaster #nuclear_weapons #global_heating #global_warming #climate_change #climate_crisis #energy #nuclear_energy #nuclear_disasters #electricity #radiation #atomic_waste #nuclear_waste #Chernobyl #Three_Mile_Island #Fukushima #Windscale #Bikini_Atoll #hydrogen_bomb_test #radioactive_cloud #Pacific #Kyshtym #Urals #plutonium #radioactivity
‘There Is No Way To Fool Physics’: Climate Breakdown And State-Corporate Madness
Media Lens
In the terrifying opening to his 2020 novel, ‘The Ministry for the Future’, Kim Stanley Robinson depicts an intense heatwave in India. (...)
This month, an intense heatwave did indeed hit northern India with temperatures reaching a record high of 49.2C in parts of Delhi. This was the fifth heatwave in the Indian capital since March. (...)
Meanwhile, the highest daily level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere was recorded. (...)
Scientists are warning that the 1.5C global heating limit set by governments is about to be breached. (...)
On top of all that, climate scientists recently reported that global warming could cause the most cataclysmic extinction of marine life in the past 250 million years.
If the news media were not owned and run for the benefit of state-corporate elites, all this would be huge headline news – day after day, month after month. There would be vigorous debate across all the main media outlets, building pressure on governments to implement the urgent radical changes required to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. (...)
For example, Corporate Europe Observatory, a non-profit research and campaign group which monitors and exposes corporate lobbying on EU policy making, recently warned that:
‘Fossil fuel giants are shaping the EU’s response to the energy crisis.’
Six big energy companies were named: Shell, BP, Total, ENI, E.ON and Vattenfall. (...)
In the never-ending corporate quest for profit, even as the planet’s life support systems are failing, oil and gas corporations ‘are planning scores of vast projects that threaten to shatter the 1.5C climate goal.’ If governments allow the projects to proceed, these ‘carbon bombs’ will ‘trigger catastrophic climate breakdown.’ (...)
In this country [UK], the madness extends to all three of the main political parties – Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservative – calling for climate protesters to be ‘cracked down on’ and for their rational demands to be rejected. (...)
Veteran climate scientist James Hansen, who warned the US Congress of the dangers of global warming as early as 1988, injected some reality missing from ‘mainstream’ reporting:
‘There is no indication that incumbent governments are even considering the fundamental actions that are needed to slow and reverse climate change.’
As we wrote at the time, last year’s UN Climate Summit in Glasgow was a greenwashing festival, full of empty rhetoric. Last month, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said it was ‘now or never’ to save humanity. (...)
Nasa climate scientist Peter Kalmus (...) warned:
‘Earth breakdown is much worse than most people realize. The science indicates that as fossil fuels continue to heat our planet, everything we love is at risk.’ (...)
It will take truly massive, sustained public activism – perhaps on a scale never seen before in human history – to shift course away from climate catastrophe. (...)
The historical record also shows that improvements in society are rarely, if ever, bestowed as gifts from above. Power typically only ever makes concessions when it is forced to do so by pressure from below.
Time is running out too rapidly to fundamentally reform society and create a real democracy that people deserve. The immediate priority is to exert insurmountable pressure on existing power structures, not least our own governments, to change course away from climate catastrophe. If we cannot do that, there will be no human civilisation to reform or restructure.
Tags: #climate #clamte_change #climate_crisis #climate_beakdown #climate_protest #global_warming #heat_wave #india #media #corporate_media #news #news_media #journalist #journalism #Corporate_Europe_Observatory #Shell #BP #Total #ENI #E_ON #Vattenfall #fowwil_fuel #eu #european_union #ipcc #un #guterres #Extinction_Rebellion #Just_Stop_Oil
Revealed: the ‘carbon bombs’ set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown
The Guardian
Oil and gas majors are planning scores of vast projects that threaten to shatter the 1.5C climate goal. If governments do not act, these firms will continue to cash in as the world burns.
The world’s biggest fossil fuel firms are quietly planning scores of “carbon bomb” oil and gas projects that would drive the climate past internationally agreed temperature limits with catastrophic global impacts, a Guardian investigation shows.
The exclusive data shows these firms are in effect placing multibillion-dollar bets against humanity halting global heating. Their huge investments in new fossil fuel production could pay off only if countries fail to rapidly slash carbon emissions, which scientists say is vital.
The oil and gas industry is extremely volatile but extraordinarily profitable, particularly when prices are high, as they are at present. ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron have made almost $2tn in profits in the past three decades, while recent price rises led BP’s boss to describe the company as a “cash machine”.
The lure of colossal payouts in the years to come appears to be irresistible to the oil companies, despite the world’s climate scientists stating in February that further delay in cutting fossil fuel use would mean missing our last chance “to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”. As the UN secretary general, António Guterres, warned world leaders in April: “Our addiction to fossil fuels is killing us.”
Details of the projects being planned are not easily accessible but an investigation published in the Guardian shows:
- The fossil fuel industry’s short-term expansion plans involve the start of oil and gas projects that will produce greenhouse gases equivalent to a decade of CO2 emissions from China, the world’s biggest polluter.
- These plans include 195 carbon bombs, gigantic oil and gas projects that would each result in at least a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over their lifetimes, in total equivalent to about 18 years of current global CO2 emissions. About 60% of these have already started pumping.
- The dozen biggest oil companies are on track to spend $103m a day for the rest of the decade exploiting new fields of oil and gas that cannot be burned if global heating is to be limited to well under 2C.
- The Middle East and Russia often attract the most attention in relation to future oil and gas production but the US, Canada and Australia are among the countries with the biggest expansion plans and the highest number of carbon bombs. The US, Canada and Australia also give some of the world’s biggest subsidies for fossil fuels per capita. (...)
World oil reserves, 2013 (Wikipedia)
Tags: #oil #gas #global_warming #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #oil_companies #co2 #china #Middle_East #Russia #US #Canada #Australia #carbon_bombs #oil_reserves
‘Record after record’: Brazil’s Amazon deforestation hits April high, nearly double previous peak
The Guardian
Climate analysts are astounded by such a high reading during the rainy season, and is the third monthly record this year.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon surged to record levels for the month of April, nearly doubling the area of forest removed in that month last year – the previous April record – preliminary government data has shown, alarming environmental campaigners. (...)
Destruction of the Brazilian Amazon in the first four months of the year also hit a record for the period of 1,954 square km (754 square miles), an increase of 69% compared to the same period of 2021, clearing an area more than double the size of New York City.
Deforestation in the Amazon has soared since rightwing president Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019 and weakened environmental protection. Bolsonaro argues that more farming and mining in the Amazon will reduce poverty in the region. (...)
Preservation of the Amazon is vital to stopping catastrophic climate change because of the vast amount of climate-warming carbon dioxide it absorbs. (...)
> See also: ‘Relentless’ destruction of rainforest continuing despite Cop26 pledge (The Guarian)
Tags: #brazil #brasil #brazilie #amazon #forest #rainforest #deforestation #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #golbal_warming #co2 #logging #illegal_logging #cattle_farming #environment #bolsonaro #jair_bolsonaro #co2 #carbon_dioxide #cop26
#ukraine
it really looks like Armageddon
a completely rotten Western oligarchy in decline wants to vanquish an Eastern rotten oligarchy in decline... just in order to get by with China -
the new power ... and #Ukraine must bleed for it...
Selenskiy just rejected any more compromise/negotiations - another puppet...
and the #EU is following like a dog... I always took the #Green party #Grüne as a neoliberal tralala party ... but did not suspect them to be moles of the #Atlantic-bridge #Atlantik_Brücke ...
where is the #climate-crisis ? where is the #Covid-waiver ?
a complete desaster presuming that the #EU will ever become some kind of democratic player - go on dreaming #DIEM
a complete desaster presuming that our oligarchs ever spend any more thinking about #climate_crisis
the brain-dead #NATO is back again as the killer organization it ever was - same for Putin's new version of #stalinism
so: game over folks
we are „governed“ by criminals and psychopaths and always were...
and there is no way out - unless we get rid of them (haha !) - game over - full-stop
From Drought to Deluge on a New Planet
Tom Dispatch
Consider this perhaps the strangest thing of all in our all-too-strange world: the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced essentially never leads the news. Yes, the immediate crises of our world, most recently Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, are 24/7 headlines for weeks at a time. And any set of events that sends millions of us into external or internal exile, as has become all too common on this planet of ours, should indeed be a focus of attention. But to put all of this in context, it’s estimated that within three decades up to a mind-boggling 1.2 billion human beings could be driven from their homes thanks to the burgeoning climate emergency. (...)
When [climate change] hits as fire or flood, as a dramatic weather disaster of some sort, the news often loves to show us the calamity at hand (and the all-too-photogenic weeping survivors). But the cause of it all, climate change itself? No such luck. (...)
Only recently the authoritative U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest devastating report, produced by 1,000 scientists, on what we’re doing to ourselves. In the midst of the Ukrainian events, it got hardly a moment’s notice. (...)
Whiplashed
Those Who Contribute the Least to Climate Change Suffer the Most
By Jane Braxton Little
(...) While California may be a poster child for extreme weather events, they are occurring almost everywhere. Such wild swings from tinder-dry to inundation are known as climate or weather whiplash. (...)
When it comes to weather whiplash, Australia is exhibit A for Anthropocene, the current geological epoch dominated by the human impact on the environment. (...)
Conflicts between wildlife and humans are already common enough, but climate scientists expect them to increase as droughts, floods, and fires push animals off their normal ranges and into agricultural areas. (...)
And here’s the only good news: climate change is a problem with a solution. We humans created it, which means it’s solvable. That, however, would require societal and political will of a kind we simply haven’t seen yet. And that’s the bad news. (...)
“a damning indictment of failed climate leadership… that reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.”
Swain, the UCLA climate scientist, put it this way: “We’re on a train going faster and faster down the tracks with perfectly functional brakes. But the drivers, for whatever reasons, are choosing not to engage the brakes.” (...)
A regular antidote to the mainstream media
Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change #ipcc #headlines #media #news #jpurnalism #journalist #disinformation #refugees #climate_refugees #climate_whiplash #weather_whiplash #anthropocene #australia #california #forest_fires #bushfires #drought #global_warming #sea_level #flooding #rain_bomb #extinction #texas #storm #hurricane #extrme_weather #water_quality #soil #erosion #agriculture #cattle_farming
Fossil fuel firms among biggest spenders on Google ads that look like search results
The Guardian
One in five ads served on search results for 78 climate-related terms placed by firms with interests in fossil fuels, research finds.
Fossil fuel companies and firms that work closely with them are among the biggest spenders on ads designed to look like Google search results, in what campaigners say is an example of “endemic greenwashing”. (...)
Advertisers pay for their ads to appear on the search engine when a user queries certain terms. The ads are appealing to businesses because they are very similar in appearance to search results: more than half of users in a 2020 survey reported they could not tell the difference between a paid-for listing and a normal Google result. (...)
However, Shell’s net-zero strategy relies heavily on carbon capture and offsetting, according to a Carbon Brief analysis, which says: “Despite its ‘highly ambitious’ framing … Shell’s vision of a continued role for oil, gas and coal until the end of the century remains essentially the same.” (...)
“Since at least the 1980s in the US, there has been a very concerted effort by public relations agents to help polluting companies develop strategies to ‘go green’ while maintaining business as usual.
“Many of the initiatives companies are taking are very piecemeal and will not amount to any kind of long-term or systemic change.” (...)
The analysis also looked at “snippets”, which are not paid-for but are chosen by Google’s algorithm as the most relevant result. The Guardian found the snippet chosen for “fracking” linked to the website of an oil and gas lobby group, the Independent Petroleum Association of America. (...)
A years-long piece of research by the US Environmental Protection Agency concluded in 2016 that in some cases fracking had harmed drinking water supplies.
Unlike Facebook, Google does not have a publicly accessible ad library, meaning it is difficult to analyse advertising on the platform. (...)
> See also: The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing (The Guardian)
Tags: #capitalism #environment #pollution #waste #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #cop26 #global_warming #aur_pollution #neoliberalism #market_fundamentalism #inequality #cerrado #desert #rivers #amazon #co2 #nox #fossil_fuel #deforestation #brazil #brasil #flooding #heat_dome #extreme_weather #forest_fires #media #carbon_footprint #oil_industry #lobby #desinformation #economic_growth #consumerism #citizen #protest #Fridays_for_Future #Green_New_Deal_Rising #Extinction_Rebellion #ExxonMobil #Royal_Dutch #shell #Aramco #Goldman_Sachs #google #greenwashing #McKinsey #Independent_Petroleum_Association_of_America #alphabet #snippets #google_snippets #lobby
Brazil: deforestation jumps in world’s largest savanna as scientists raise alarm
The Guardian
Destruction of trees, grasses and other plants in the Cerrado is a major source of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Deforestation last year rose to the highest level since 2015 in Brazil’s Cerrado, prompting scientists on Monday to raise alarm over the state of the world’s most species-rich savanna and a major carbon sink that helps to stave off climate change.
The Cerrado, the world’s largest savanna spread across several states of Brazil, is often called an “upside-down forest” because of the deep roots its plants sink into the ground to survive seasonal droughts and fires. (...)
Destruction of these trees, grasses and other plants in the Cerrado is a large source of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions, although it is far less densely forested than the more famous Amazon rainforest that it borders. (...)
The added destruction is particularly concerning, scientists say, when considering that roughly half of the Cerrado has been destroyed since the 1970s, mostly for farming and ranching.
“You’re transforming thousands of square kilometers annually,” said Manuel Ferreira, a geographer at the Federal University of Goias.
“Few other places on earth have seen that rapid of a transformation.” (...)
An aerial view shows a dead tree near a forest on the border between Amazonia and Cerrado. Photograph: Amanda Perobelli/Reuters.
Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #brazil #brasil #cerrado #savanna #deforestation #conservation #forest #nature #drought #bush_fire #forest_fire #bolsonaro
I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures the madness I see every day
Peter Kalmus (The Guardian)
A film about a comet hurtling towards Earth and no one is doing anything about it? Sounds exactly like the climate crisis.
The movie Don’t Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it’s also the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen. (...)
The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. (...)
But this isn’t a film about how humanity would respond to a planet-killing comet; it’s a film about how humanity is responding to planet-killing climate breakdown. We live in a society in which, despite extraordinarily clear, present, and worsening climate danger, more than half of Republican members of Congress still say climate change is a hoax and many more wish to block action, and in which the official Democratic party platform still enshrines massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry; in which the current president ran on a promise that “nothing will fundamentally change”, and the speaker of the House dismissed even a modest climate plan as “the green dream or whatever”; in which the largest delegation to Cop26 was the fossil fuel industry, and the White House sold drilling rights to a huge tract of the Gulf of Mexico after the summit; in which world leaders say that climate is an “existential threat to humanity” while simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production; in which major newspapers still run fossil fuel ads, and climate news is routinely overshadowed by sports; in which entrepreneurs push incredibly risky tech solutions and billionaires sell the absurdist fantasy that humanity can just move to Mars. (...)
There may only be five years left before humanity expends the remaining “carbon budget” to stay under 1.5C of global heating at today’s emissions rates – a level of heating I am not confident will be compatible with civilization as we know it. And there may only be five years before the Amazon rainforest and a large Antarctic ice sheet pass irreversible tipping points.
The Earth system is breaking down now with breathtaking speed. (...)
A lack of technology isn’t what’s blocking action. Instead, humanity needs to confront the fossil fuel industry head on, accept that we need to consume less energy, and switch into full-on emergency mode. (...)
The Earth system is breaking down now with breathtaking speed.’ Photograph: Niko Tavernise/Netflix/PA.
Tags: #movies #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #climate_science #amazon_rainforest #deforestation #savannah #antarctic_ice_sheet #tipping_points #fossil_fuel #fossil_fuel_industry #fossil_fuel_ads #cop26 #oil_companies #klimaat #klimaatverandering #klimaatcrisis #film #ocean_level
The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing
The Guardian
Since the 1980s, fossil fuel firms have run ads touting climate denial messages – many of which they’d now like us to forget. Here’s our visual guide.
Why is meaningful action to avert the climate crisis proving so difficult? It is, at least in part, because of ads.
The fossil fuel industry has perpetrated a multi-decade, multibillion dollar disinformation, propaganda and lobbying campaign to delay climate action by confusing the public and policymakers about the climate crisis and its solutions. This has involved a remarkable array of advertisements – with headlines ranging from “Lies they tell our children” to “Oil pumps life” – seeking to convince the public that the climate crisis is not real, not human-made, not serious and not solvable. The campaign continues to this day. (...)
Tags: #capitalism #environment #pollution #waste #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #cop26 #global_warming #aur_pollution #neoliberalism #market_fundamentalism #inequality #cerrado #desert #rivers #amazon #co2 #nox #fossil_fuel #deforestation #brazil #brasil #flooding #heat_dome #extreme_weather #forest_fires #media #carbon_footprint #oil_industry #lobby #desinformation #economic_growth #consumerism #citizen #protest #Fridays_for_Future #Green_New_Deal_Rising #Extinction_Rebellion
‘Fossil Fuelled 5’ Put 1.5° in Jeopardy, Report Finds
Canada, the U.K., the United States, Norway, and Australia —planning to approve (and subsidize) new fossil fuel projects, a contradiction which it says undermines their recent claims of leadership in tackling the climate crisis.
#environment #cdnpoli #climate_retards #climate_crisis
https://www.theenergymix.com/2021/11/14/fossil-fuelled-5-put-1-5-in-jeopardy-report-finds/
Life at 50C: Lytton - the town that burned down in a day - BBC News
Canada fell from 58th to 61st spot in the latest Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), released this week during the COP 26 climate summit in Glasgow, with its current climate performance and 2030 targets well below what would be consistent with a 2.0°C limit on average global warming.
#lip_service #climate_crisis #environment #cdnpoli #GHG increases #polluters_win
FALSE HOPE: Countries’ Net-Zero Pledges Pay ‘Lip Service to Climate Action’, Analysts Warn
In a withering condemnation of developed nations’ claims to be making headway against the climate crisis, scientists say the United Nations climate conference, COP 26, has “a massive credibility, action, and commitment gap,” after a week of promises and declarations left the world heading to at least 2.4˚C average warming if not more.
#useless #COP26 #environment #world #climate_crisis #global_warming
The whole cloud business should be reviewed. For movies maybe we should go back to the old DVD
Streaming’s dirty secret: how viewing Netflix top 10 creates vast quantity of CO2
The Guardian
Explosion in popularity of shows on Disney+ to YouTube raises question of impact on planet
Streaming has a dirty secret. The carbon footprint produced by fans watching a month of Netflix’s top 10 global TV hits is equivalent to driving a car a hefty distance beyond Saturn. (...)
Every activity in the chain required to stream video, from the use of huge datacentres and transmission over wifi and broadband to watching the content on a device, requires electricity – the majority of which is generated by emitting greenhouse gases. (...)
The growth in internet traffic has been stratospheric in the last few years, with as much as 80% of the data capacity taken up by the popularity of the bandwidth-heavy services of a handful of companies such as Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Activision Blizzard, which makes Call of Duty, and Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite. (...)
Every activity required to stream video, from the use of huge datacentres to transmission over wifi and broadband, requires electricity. Photograph: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock.
Tag: #climate #climate_crisis #climate_change #global_warming #co2 #fossil_fuel #cloud_service #cloud_storage #streaming #streaming_service #pollution #air_pollution #youtube #netflix #disney #disney+ #prime_video #facebook #activision_blizzard #games #epic_games
‘Green growth’ doesn’t exist – less of everything is the only way to avert catastrophe
George Monbiot (The Guardian)
It is simply not possible to carry on at the current level of economic activity without destroying the environment.
There is a box labelled “climate”, in which politicians discuss the climate crisis. There is a box named “biodiversity”, in which they discuss the biodiversity crisis. There are other boxes, such as pollution, deforestation, overfishing and soil loss, gathering dust in our planet’s lost property department. (...)
Nature recognises no such divisions. As Earth systems are assaulted by everything at once, each source of stress compounds the others.
Take the situation of the North Atlantic right whale, whose population recovered a little when whaling ceased, but is now slumping again: fewer than 95 females of breeding age remain. (...)
Studies of bees show that when pesticides are combined, their effects are synergistic: in other words, the damage they each cause isn’t added, but multiplied. When pesticides are combined with fungicides and herbicides, the effects are multiplied again. (...)
When rainforests are fragmented by timber cutting and cattle ranching, and ravaged by imported tree diseases, they become more vulnerable to the droughts and fires caused by climate breakdown.
What would we see if we broke down our conceptual barriers? We would see a full-spectrum assault on the living world. Scarcely anywhere is now safe from this sustained assault. A recent scientific paper estimates that only 3% of the Earth’s land surface should now be considered “ecologically intact”.
The various impacts have a common cause: the sheer volume of economic activity. (...)
When we box up this predicament, our efforts to solve one aspect of the crisis exacerbate another. For example, if we were to build sufficient direct air capture machines to make a major difference to atmospheric carbon concentrations, this would demand a massive new wave of mining and processing for the steel and concrete. (...)
Or look at the materials required for the electronics revolution that will, apparently, save us from climate breakdown. Already, mining and processing the minerals required for magnets and batteries is laying waste to habitats and causing new pollution crises. Now, as Jonathan Watts’s terrifying article in the Guardian this week shows, companies are using the climate crisis as justification for extracting minerals from the deep ocean floor, long before we have any idea of what the impacts might be. (...)
But there is no such thing as green growth. Growth is wiping the green from the Earth.
We have no hope of emerging from this full-spectrum crisis unless we dramatically reduce economic activity. (...) Sustaining our life-support systems means doing less of almost everything. But this notion – that should be central to a new, environmental ethics – is secular blasphemy.
‘Combined impacts are laying waste to entire living systems.’ A dead North Atlantic right whale washed up on a beach in New Brunswick, Canada. Photograph: Nathan Klima/Boston Globe/Getty Images.
Tags: #environment #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #co2 #pollution #global_warming #economy #growth #green_growth #deforestation #overfishinh #soil_loss #biodiversity #whales #insects #bees #agriculture #fertilizers #fungicides #herbicides #caterpillars #moths #coral_reef #coral_bleeching #rainforest #timber_cutting #cattle_racnhing #trees #mining #deep_sea_mining #ocean_levels #floods #sea_levels