Tag: climate crisis

Climate Change In The American Empire

Here’s to 2022.

A new year to displace one of the twenty previous warmest years globally since records began: the last twenty apart from 1998 with its strong El Niño.

The summer of 2021 saw the Met Office in the UK issue what was its first-ever “extreme heat warning.” Over in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia, flash floods left more than 120 people dead.

“You don’t expect people to die in a flood in Germany. Maybe in poorer countries, you could understand it, but not in Germany” was a comment that went viral.

Question: What’s the difference between climate change and COVID?

Judge Annuls Gulf Of Mexico Oil Auction Over Climate Impact

A federal judge invalidated the results of an oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday saying the Biden administration failed to properly account for the auction’s climate change impact.

The decision has cast uncertainty over the future of the U.S. federal offshore drilling program, which has been a big source of public revenue for decades but also drawn the ire of activists concerned about its impact on the environment and contribution to global warming.

The Gulf of Mexico accounts for 15% of existing U.S. oil production and 5% of dry natural gas output, according to the Energy Information Administration.

In the decision, Judge Rudolph Contreras of the United States District Court of the District of Columbia ruled to vacate the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Lease Sale 257, which offered about 80 million offshore acres (37.4 million hectares) in the Gulf of Mexico in an auction last November.

climate crisis Drilling Gulf of Mexico Joe Biden Legal System Oil and Gas

Indigenous Farmworkers Hold The Key To Healing Our Burning Planet

Anayeli Guzman was born into a Mixtec-speaking Indigenous community in San Miguel Chicahua in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her family raised chickens on their land, and as a child she would help plant corn, squash and radishes. They ate handmade tortillas with beans, eggs and salsa. Her grandparents taught her to care for the land and to revere the rain. Few people worked for wages. Rather, families owned small plots and grew seasonal, drought-resistant crops, exchanged produce with nearby communities and helped each other with big projects.

After migrating to the United States to be with her husband, Anayeli (along with 11,000 other, mostly Indigenous, immigrant farmworkers) toils for meager wages in the $1.9 billion wine industry of Sonoma County, Calif. In the past several years, record-breaking wildfires have ravaged the area, often during harvest season.

climate crisis Environment Farmworkers Worker Rights and Jobs

The Limits Of Privatized Climate Policy

For many in the climate movement, Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 was a moment of euphoric optimism. With Joe Biden in charge, we could look forward to a possible return to climate action and diplomacy. No longer would policy be shaped by denialists, politicians proudly in Exxon’s back pocket, and a media fixated on the “costs” of public investment. A year on, it’s become easier to see the limits of the Biden administration’s approach, and how little has really changed.

There have been moments of genuine ambition from the Oval Office. The clean electricity pledges of the fall 2021 budget package and the climate-related investment promised in early versions of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act were among the most significant climate commitments we’ve seen from the U.S. government (hence the staunch resistance to their passage from Exxon’s man on Capitol Hill, Joe Manchin).

Biden administration climate crisis Privatization Socialism

Scientists Tell Advertising Industry To End ‘Complicity’ In Climate Crisis

On Wednesday, a group of more than 450 scientists called on advertising agencies to cut off their fossil fuel clients and to end their ties with an ongoing misinformation campaign that has time and again killed progress on addressing the climate crisis.

In a joint letter, the scientists say that they are “consistently faced with a major and needless challenge” of having to correct false information and rebut the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to downplay the severity of climate change. The expensive and glossy ad campaigns “represent one of the biggest barriers to the government action science shows is necessary to mitigate the ongoing climate emergency,” the letter stated.

The letter was sent to advertising companies WPP, Edelman, and IPG, as well as some of their clients, including Unilever, Amazon and Microsoft, which all have announced various climate and sustainability pledges.

Capitalism climate crisis Environment Media

Scientists Say Chemical Pollution Has Passed The Safe Limit For Humanity

The Earth has remained remarkably stable since the dawn of civilisation 10,000 years ago. In 2009, experts outlined nine boundaries that keep us within the limits of this steady state. They include greenhouse gas emissions, forests, biodiversity, fresh water and the ozone layer.

While we have already estimated the limits for global warming or CO2 levels, scientists have not looked at chemical pollution. The wide range of different polluting sources means that, before now, experts have not been able to reach a conclusion on the state of this particular boundary.

There are reportedly around 350,000 different types of manufactured chemicals – or “novel entities” as they are known – on the global market.

climate crisis Environment Plastics pollution

London Jury Acquits Three Extinction Rebellion Activists

Three Extinction Rebellion activists who disrupted a London train during rush hour were acquitted by a jury Friday.

The three defendants, who said they were motivated by their Christian faith, did not deny their actions. Instead, they argued that their protest was lawful under the Human Rights Act.

”When a jury hears the truth about the escalating climate crisis, with the depth and seriousness they won’t get from the government or the media, they understand the urgent need to act,” Extinction Rebellion’s Zoë Blackler said in a statement emailed to EcoWatch. “The real criminals here aren’t 3 committed Christians who are risking their liberty to sound the alarm on a threat of existential proportions. The real crime lies with a government failing to do what’s necessary to safeguard the future of the human race.”

climate crisis Extinction Rebellion Legal System London

Strong Evidence Shows Sixth Mass Extinction Of Global Biodiversity

The history of life on Earth has been marked five times by events of mass biodiversity extinction caused by extreme natural phenomena. Today, many experts warn that a Sixth Mass Extinction crisis is underway, this time entirely caused by human activities.

A comprehensive assessment of evidence of this ongoing extinction event was published recently in the journal Biological Reviews by biologists from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France.

“Drastically increased rates of species extinctions and declining abundances of many animal and plant populations are well documented, yet some deny that these phenomena amount to mass extinction,” said Robert Cowie, lead author of the study and research professor at the UH Mānoa Pacific Biosciences Research Center in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).

Biodiversity climate crisis Denialism Extinction

When To Build Sea Walls

During the month of December 2021 two warnings of impending sea level rise were issued by highly respected groups of climate scientists. These are professional scientists who do not deal in hyperbole. Rather, they are archetypical conservative serious-minded scientists who follow the facts.

The most recent warning on December 30th is of deteriorating conditions at the Arctic and Greenland. The second warning is the threatening collapse in Antarctica of one of the largest glaciers in the world. As these events unfortunately coincide so close together, one at the top of the world, the other at the bottom, should coastal cities plan to build sea walls?

The scale of time and material and costs to build seawalls is nearly overwhelming. In fact, it is overwhelming.

Adaptation climate crisis Sea level rise Sea Walls

Climate Change: Navajo Nation Faces Drought, Fire, Flooding

Gallup, New Mexico — It’s an overcast, windy November day as Zachariah Ben stands tall over the small, folding table at a local flea market.

His tsiiyééł sits low on his neck and it’s clear that his dark brown hair is very long. Before him, on a black-and-white Pendleton blanket, sit two products — Bidii Baby Food and neeshjizzii — that share a common element, naadą́ą́, or corn. He’s already sold out of tádídíín, or corn pollen, this year, which sells fast during the summer and fall.

But tádídíín is not the only thing missing from the table. Over the summer, he offered a variety of melons grown at Ben Farms, owned and operated by his family, at different flea markets in the Four Corners area on Saturdays and Sundays.

climate crisis Farming Indigenous culture Navajo nation

The ‘White Saviour’ Deal For Nature

There is no denying that the world’s biodiversity is under serious threat. A recent proposal that has gained significant traction to address this decline is to designate 30 per cent of the earth’s surface as protected areas by 2030 (commonly referred to as the Global Deal for Nature, or the 30×30 Plan). This proposal will be discussed at the world’s top-most biodiversity summit expected in 2022 in Kunming, China. The 30 per cent reservation for “nature” is itself viewed as part of a roadmap towards the idea that “Nature Needs Half” – a campaign calling for half of the world to be dedicated to nature, rather than human activities.

At first glance and given the urgent need to act to halt species extinction, nature conservation seems like a common-sense solution.

climate crisis Colonialism Environment White Savior

Occupy Biden Demonstrates How To Hold Politicians Accountable

During the 2020 presidential campaigns, it was common for people who planned to vote for Joe Biden to say that they recognized he was a corporate-friendly candidate but that we just needed to elect him and then he could be pressured to act in the interests of the people. Well, unlike the marches after President Trump was elected, that mass pressure on Biden has not materialized. Now, a coalition of smaller climate justice groups (not the Big Greens) has just completed a weeklong occupation of land close to the President’s home with two demands: that he declare a climate emergency and that he stop any new fossil fuel projects. Clearing the FOG speaks with one of the organizers, Karen Igou, about the action and next steps in the campaign to pressure Biden. Igou also speaks about actions we need to be taking outside of the political arena to address the climate crisis.

climate crisis Fossil Fuels Joe Biden Occupy Biden

Fifteen Things Biodiversity Protectors Are Watching Out For In 2022

It’s no secret that the diversity of life around us is plummeting fast. In 2020 alone, scientists declared more than 100 species to be extinct. And that’s bad news not only for the creatures themselves, but for those of us (that would be all of us) who rely on them for food, to produce oxygen, to hold soil in place, to cleanse water, to beautify our world and so much more. According to the World Economic Forum, nature plays a key role in generating more than half of global GDP.

So, what can we do to reduce future harm? One big thing is to identify emerging threats and opportunities to protect biodiversity and proactively shape policies and actions to prevent harm early on.

Agriculture Biodiversity climate crisis Environment

2021: A Grim Year For Planet Earth

Toronto, Canada – Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the deadly manifestations of the climate crisis, there were few places to hide for most of us in 2021.

Ageing billionaires riding booming stock markets could take their first flights into space in their own rockets, but for the rest of Planet Earth’s 8 billion people with their feet on the ground it was a year of placing hope in the hands of scientists and our political leaders to turn the tide.

Our review of 2021, as seen through the eyes of IPS reporters and contributors around the world, must begin as a year ago by paying our respects to those who lost their lives early, while also extending our gratitude to the often anonymous individuals fighting to make things better.

Capitalism climate crisis COVID-19

After The Wars In Iraq, ‘Everything Living Is Dying’

As far back as 2005, the United Nations had estimated that Iraq was already littered with several thousand contaminated sites. Five years later, an investigation by The Times, a London-based newspaper, suggested that the U.S. military had generated some 11 million pounds of toxic waste and abandoned it in Iraq. Today, the country remains awash in hazardous materials, such as depleted uranium and dioxin, which have polluted the soil and water. And extractive industries like the KAR oil refinery often operate with minimal transparency. On top of all of this, Iraq is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, which has already contributed to grinding water shortages and prolonged drought. In short, Iraq presents a uniquely dystopian tableau—one where human activity contaminates virtually every ecosystem, and where terms like “ecocide” have special currency.

climate crisis Ecocide Environment Iraq

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