Monoculture tree plantations are not forests. They do not harbor biodiversity, and they are far more susceptible to drought, fire, and pest infestation than are actual, natural forests.
So when advocates for “Green Growth” promise we can keep the economy going by planting trees to capture carbon and maintain a healthy biosphere, do not believe them. It’s a lie. It’s a perpetuation of business as usual.
The best way of using trees to capture carbon is — don’t cut down forests!!
And the best way to reduce carbon in the atmosphere is — stop burning fossil fuels!!
So much bad news, everyday, everywhere... does it lead you to despair? Or does it does it make you ANGRY? 🤬
I hope it's the latter, because anger might just be our best hope.
That's the message of this stirring opinion piece by Alec Connon...
In the last twelve months, one-third of Pakistan has been submerged in flooding that killed thousands and displaced millions. Prolonged heat waves and drought have exacerbated a global food shortage that has raised the number of people living with food insecurity from 440 million to 1.6 billion. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released a desperate warning of approaching climate cliffs, and fears have emerged of the impending collapse of oceanic currents critical to Earth’s climate system.
Given this context, the fact that fewer investors now support ending fossil fuel expansion should appall anyone paying attention. It’s a sign that our current economic system is fundamentally flawed, that it’s incapable of adapting to the demands of a heating planet, and that investors, the people and institutions at the very heart of our economic system, are incapable of thinking about anything other than the most short-term of profits.
I know this is the part of the article where I’m supposed to pivot to hope, to leave the reader feeling that there’s something they can do, an action they can take that will make a difference. But today, I’m finding solace not in hope, but in anger.
Anger is the rawest of emotions, an emotion uniquely capable of destruction ― destruction of both the self and broader society. But anger, properly channeled, is also one of the great motivating forces of social movements. In the face of injustice, we can and we must be angry. Not only is it okay to be angry at the institutions and people pushing us toward irreparable ecological breakdown, it’s essential.
Anger at the institutions hurtling us toward climate breakdown is not only okay and understandable. In the fight to rein in the climate crisis, it might just be our best hope.
It's not an excuse, and China should be condemned for relying so heavily on coal as a power source.
BUT — it's also important to remember what the country is doing with all that power. A large part of it supports the manufacturing and shipping of cheap products to satisfy the insanely high demand of consumers in the US, Canada, and Europe. We can't require the Chinese to change their ways unless we're willing to change ours first.
"China approves coal power surge despite emissions pledge"
China has approved a major surge in coal power so far this year, prioritising energy supply over its pledge to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, Greenpeace said Monday.
The world's second-largest economy is also its biggest emitter of the greenhouse gases driving climate change, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), and China's emissions pledges are seen as essential to keeping global temperature rise well below two degrees Celsius.
China relied on coal for nearly 60% of its electricity last year.
The push for more coal plants "risks climate disasters... and locking us into a high-carbon pathway," Greenpeace campaigner Xie Wenwen said. "The 2022 coal boom has clearly continued into this year."
What's your preferred form of climate and environmental activism? Voting Green? Writing letters? Going to protests? Maybe blowing up pipelines?
Published at the beginning of 2021, "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" by Andreas Malm sent shock waves through the climate movement.
From 2018 onwards, Extinction Rebellion and the climate strike movement had brought tens of thousands on to the streets. But even as public opinion swung behind their calls for radical change, emissions and investments in fossil fuels continued to grow.
The problem, said Malm, was their absolute commitment to non-violent civil disobedience – the most stringent rule of XR, in particular – which left fossil capital nothing to fear from public opinion in bourgeois states where “capitalist property has the status of the ultimate sacred realm”.
Instead of disruptive protests and mass rallies, Malm called for a campaign of sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure, to break the taboo against targeting property. Or, he contended in one of the book’s epigrams, “property will cost us the earth”.
As activists around the world take increasingly desperate actions against destructive projects, Malm told the Guardian he had not “a shred of hope” elites were prepared to take the urgent action needed to avert catastrophic climate change.
“If we let the dominant classes take care of this problem, they’re going to drive at top speed into absolute inferno,” Malm said. “Nothing suggests that they have any capacity of doing anything else of their own accord because of how enmeshed they are with the process of capital accumulation."
Emissions keep going up. Extinctions are on the rise. Nothing has changed.
So, is it time now for some of us to take a step over the line?
Would you commit a "crime" if you knew that doing so could potentially save thousands of lives?
Those are tough questions, and they are given thought-provoking and perhaps challenging answers in this piece...
The environmental movement has offered waves of demonstrations, petition drives, lobbying and other forms of protest. Yet, despite all that, Earth and its inhabitants are losing the war waged against us by capitalism. It follows that a reevaluation of strategy and tactics of the environmental movement is in order, including a closer examination of how nonviolence should be understood and practiced.
In this context, we need to ask ourselves whether the destruction of planet-killing machinery is necessarily an act of violence. The answer should be no, because it prevents violence against nature. But, as a whole, the environmental movement’s dedication to the strict avoidance of property destruction is extreme in comparison to virtually all other social justice movements.
I posted a version of the post below last year, shortly after I started on Mastodon. At the time I had maybe a couple of hundred followers. Now that I have more than that, I’d like people to see this who haven’t seen it before…
🚶 🚲 🚋 🚶 🚲 🚋 🚶 🚲 🚋 🚶
If the United States had made walkable and bike-friendly cities a priority beginning in the 1950s or 1960s, or even in the 1970s, and had used federal funding to heavily boost low-cost mass transit rather than spending 💵 billions 💵 on the interstate freeway system, then we could have had a much better world today. CO2 in the atmosphere might still be under 350 ppm instead of at 420 and climbing, and we would have a realistic chance of keeping climate change under control.
Of course, that would mean that the auto industry and the oil industry and the paving industry and the suburban building industry would not have made billions (trillions?) of dollars in profits for their owners, so who am I kidding... The capitalists always win.
Now, it's too late to make a meaningful difference in avoiding a dreadful future. Of course we'll still get lip service from politicians and their pet journalists about the great strides we're making in this direction, but at this point that's mostly just #greenwashing.
Warum gilt eigentlich ein Stündchen auf der Straße zu sitzen als Nötigung; CO2 auszustoßen, das für Jahrtausende die Lebensqualität der Menschen beeinträchtigen wird, aber nicht?
@rahmstorf
Einfache Antwort: weil diese Form wieder einmal die Falschen Leute, die die nicht einmal ein Epsilon der fossilen #CO2-Emissionen zu verantworten haben. Und diese Form der Totalblockade bringt der #CDU nur noch mehr stimmen.
Wenn das von den #Klimaaktivisten so intendiert ist, beispielsweise um die ungeliebten #Grünen zu schädigen, dann muss man sagen: Ziel erreicht!
Warum wir das #CO2 nicht einfach aus der Luft saugen können
#Kohlendioxid einfach aus der Luft filtern. Das klingt super. Und die Technologien dafür gibt es auch schon! Viele Menschen scheinen zu glauben, das Carbon-Dioxide-Removal allein uns aus der #Klimakatastrophe führen kann...
Why is the climate breaking down? How fast is it happening? What changes will it bring?
Here is a very informative piece that answers these questions, providing an overview of why we're in a crisis and how bad it could get in the near future.
Increasing risk from weather-related disasters (storms, floods, droughts, famines), disruptions in the food supply, and rising international tensions, leading to conflict and violence — all of this is covered in a succinct must-read article.
"The Terrifying Reality of Climate Change"
World leaders have gathered repeatedly to address the urgent issue of climate change. They set a target to limit global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as this was deemed the threshold for disaster.
Unfortunately, the latest reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) make it clear that we will surpass this limit.
Even if governments act aggressively and implement all the policies agreed upon in Paris, we will still see a temperature increase of 3.2 degrees. Moreover, no industrial country is currently close to achieving these policies.
This means that even the best-case scenario is bleak.
If countries met the emissions targets tomorrow, the world’s ice sheets would still collapse in our lifetimes, resulting in the flooding of over a hundred cities, including Miami, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.
Southern Europe would suffer from permanent drought, and the annual area of the United States scorched by wildfire would increase by 600 percent.
And this is the optimistic view.
The UN’s worst-case scenario predicts a temperature increase of 4.5 degrees by 2100, which would make equatorial regions uninhabitable, cause huge firestorms, flood two-thirds of the world’s cities, and increase tropical disease in the Arctic.
What’s particularly concerning is the rapid pace at which global warming is occurring. Half of carbon emissions have occurred in the last three decades, and the majority has happened since World War II. This has brought the planet to its knees within effectively a single generation.
A boom in wind and solar has pushed the amount of electricity produced by renewable energy to record levels last year, according to a new analysis.
The use of coal, oil and gas to produce electricity is expected to fall in 2023, according to the report. This would mark the first year to see a decline in the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity, outside of a global recession or pandemic.
Levels of planet-heating pollution from fossil fuel electricity generation may have already peaked, the report found.
The findings show the world has reached the “beginning of the end of the fossil age,” the lead author of the research, Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, said in a statement. “We are entering the clean power era.”
Ha-ha, no, that's completely out of touch with reality. This is NOT the beginning of the end for fossil fuels, though I wish it was.
Note that the story is careful to focus only on electricity generation, neglecting to mention the huge and growing use of fossil fuels in mining, manufacturing, transportation (tankers, cargo ships, planes), agriculture, and more.
In fact, you know what this CNN article really is? It's propaganda. It's corporate media collaborating with Big Oil and the government to reassure us, hey, it's okay. We've got this. There's nothing to worry about. The future looks great! You can keep driving, keep flying, keep shopping, keep buying. 😃
So, to get closer to the truth, let's see what actual oil investors are predicting about future prospects for fossil fuels.
This is from OilPrice.com, "The No. 1 Source for Oil and Energy News."
If it were true that there was an actual energy transition taking place, there would be no point in investing in oil and gas, as there would be a point at which a demand signal would be sent by the market that these fuels were no longer needed. There is no such signal being sent, in fact it’s quite the reverse. The market has instead been telling us that, despite minor fluctuations driven by external economic conditions, there is steady, resilient, and increasing demand for oil and gas.
There will be no cut off of oil and gas in 2030, 2040, or 2050. There is of course energy "addition," in the form of wind, solar, biofuels, and hydrogen. These “intermittent” sources will share a modest part of the global energy load along with “on-demand,” petroleum sources as long as we retain an industrial economy.
Below is a graph used in that article. It's taken from the U.S. Energy Information Administration's (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook 2022.
As you can see, the future does indeed look bright for oil and gas. But not so bright, I'm afraid, for a healthy biosphere. 😢
I'm nearly 70 years old. Many of my followers here are seniors, like me, or are at least middle-aged. Most of us are angry and probably grief-stricken about what human industry is doing to the biosphere.
But what must it feel like to be a young person in your teens or your twenties and be looking toward a future of near-certain disaster, the collapse of society, destruction of everything you hold dear? I can't imagine the pain.
It would be understandable if they reacted by simply giving up. Or perhaps by lashing out in anger. But some of them, showing incredible courage and determination, have formed movements to change what they can and save at least a vestige of the civilization they are inheriting.
Sophia Kianni, Vanessa Nakate, and Greta Thunberg (@gretathunberg), three of these young climate activists, recently posted an opinion piece at Common Dreams. Let's hear what they have to say...
President Joe Biden’s recent approval of the Willow Project in Alaska has alarmed many young people and once again made us question his seriousness about addressing the climate crisis before it is too late. As if that were not enough, the Biden administration is also auctioning off more than 73 million acres of waters in the Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil and gas drilling — double the size of the Willow Project if it goes ahead as planned. The President faced one of the greatest tests of his commitment to addressing climate change, and he failed.
Young people and members of marginalized communities are the ones who will bear the brunt of the consequences of the escalating climate emergency. The rubber-stamping of such projects sends a message not just to our generation but humanity as a whole: The future of our planet and the present well-being of frontline communities are being sacrificed for short-term economic gain and political expediency.
Scientists warn us that crossing the threshold of 1.5°C could trigger multiple climate tipping points, leading to irreversible and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity. The Willow Project, set to produce 600 million barrels of oil and generate roughly 278 million tons of carbon emissions, goes directly against the word of climate scientists.
As young people who will inherit a burning planet, we are gravely concerned about the long-term impact of the Willow Project and the precedent it sets for future decisions on climate and energy policy. We have said it before and we say it again: We need system change, not climate change. We need people in power who show real climate leadership, who will work with young people and stand by their promises.
That means stopping the Willow project and ensuring there can be no more of its kind. It is the only way to secure a livable planet for all. It is also a chance to listen to our generation and take the first important steps away from a broken political system where leaders care more about short-term political gain than our collective future.
"We need system change, not climate change." YES! 💯
In the U.S., efforts to develop renewable energy and to shift away from coal, oil, and gas are hampered by the colossal amounts of 💵 money 💵 still waiting to be made by those willing to sacrifice the climate, the ecosphere, and the future in favor of profits.
Here's Bill McKibben, in the Rolling Stone...
If we are to meet the climate targets set by scientists, we have to leave 90% of the fossil fuels that have been discovered underground. And at current prices, that means stranding about $100 trillion worth of assets in the soil. If you want to understand why the battle over climate progress is so fierce — why the fossil-fuel industry fights so hard, with all the political influence it can buy — remember that $100 trillion. It’s a lot of incentive.
Last year, we were hit with a staggering number — $2.8 billion — that's how much profit the fossil fuel industry has earned daily for the past 50 years. Which is a problem, because the people making that money have the motive and the means to try to keep it alive.
“It’s a huge amount of money,” Aviel Verbruggen, the academic who calculated that figure, points out. “You can buy every politician, every system with all this money. It protects [producers] from political interference that may limit their activities.”
You can see this happening at the highest levels — at last year’s global climate conference in Egypt, there were 636 fossil-fuel-connected people registered in attendance, dwarfing the delegations from almost every country. This year’s climate conference, COP28, is scheduled for Abu Dhabi, and its chair is also the CEO of its national oil company.
Fossil fuel was pretty cheap from the start, but it hasn’t gotten significantly cheaper. That’s because it’s less a technology than a commodity — and you have to work harder to find that commodity now that the easy stuff has been burned. The coal is farther back in the mine; the oil is down at the bottom of the ocean now, or under a polar ice cap.
The endless payoff can’t last forever — eventually the economics of renewable energy will prevail. Any delay in shifting away from fossil fuels is profitable to Big Oil and damaging to the rest of us. So we must build movements to speed up that transition.
"Oil Giant Shell Knew About Climate Impacts Even Earlier"
Following explosive revelations about what ExxonMobil knew about fossil fuels driving global heating, investigations in 2017 and 2018 uncovered that Shell Oil's scientists privately warned about the impact of its products in the 1980s.
However, newly unveiled records show that "Shell began collecting knowledge about climate change in the 1960s. The company not only kept well abreast of climate science, but also funded research. As a result, Shell already knew in the 1970s that burning fossil fuels could lead to alarming climate change."
Faced with a global oil crisis, rather than using its climate information to publicly sound the alarm and shift to cleaner practices, the company "focused instead on a nonsustainable profit model."
The following year, a study Shell was involved with warned that "increases in the CO2 content of the atmosphere could lead to the so-called greenhouse effect... which would be enough to induce major climatic changes." Three years later, another report warned that "the continued burning of fossil fuels will lead to a manifold increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration."
Duncan Meisel, executive director of the campaign Clean Creatives, which targets advertising and public relations firms that work for fossil fuel companies, declared Monday that "what these new documents show is incredibly disturbing."
"In the 1980s, Shell scientists laid out two pathways for the planet: one where energy companies undertook a smooth transition to clean energy and one where fossil fuel demand continued to rise, creating 'more storms, more droughts, more deluges,'" he summarized. "Since the publication of that forecast, Shell has pushed at every turn to create more fossil fuel demand, creating exactly the devastating outcomes they predicted."
The Center for Climate Integrity said the records provide the world "more damning evidence" that the company knew its business model was having disastrous impacts on the world and its people. As the group put it: "They knew. They lied. They need to pay."
If you take all the energy buried deep in the earth and under the oceans via photosynthesis and animal metabolism, energy from the sun that was packed away over a span of 500 million years as coal, oil, and gas… and then burn through that fuel in the brief period of about 200 years, what will happen?
Think about it.
We’re igniting all of the stored energy from half a billion years of life activity in only two centuries. That’s a ratio of 2.5 million to one — which means we are using this energy two and half million times faster than it was created and stored.
I mean, even though they are polluting the atmosphere and wrecking the climate, they're also paying for "carbon offsets" like planting trees. And that's a good thing, right?
In the UK, over half a million recently planted trees have died beside a single 21-mile stretch of new highway. A government agency points to poor soil and extreme heat as the main causes.
Many tree experts say this is symptomatic of a focus on tree planting over tree care. Only growing trees capture carbon or improve habitat.
But, you know, who cares if all those young trees die? The important thing is that Big Oil gets their subsidies and write-offs plus a ton of great publicity for "going green." Right?
Global #carbon#emissions in 2022 remain at record levels – with no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to limit warming to 1.5°C, according to the #GlobalCarbonProject science team.
If current emissions levels persist, there is now a 50% chance that #GlobalWarming of 1.5°C will be exceeded in 9 years.
RWE ist sich für keine Widerwärtigkeit zu schade. Erst die Gewalttäter der Polizei zum Durchsetzen ihrer Konzerninteressen einsetzen und dann auch noch eine fette Rechnung dafür ausstellen, die natürlich nicht die Polizei selbst bezahlt, sondern die steuerzahlende Öffentlichkeit, deren Zukunft für RWEs Profite geopfert wird.
RWE stellt der Polizei Einsatzkosten von knapp 150.000 Euro in Rechnung
"Es geht zum Beispiel um die Nutzung von RWE-Fahrzeugen durch die Polizei - etwa im Februar 2022, als Aktivisten einen Braunkohlebagger bei Lützerath mit Steinen beworfen haben. Der RWE-Konzern spricht bei seiner Unterstützung für die #Polizei
von Aufwendungen als Verwaltungshelfer*innen "
RWE-Trading-Trick: Wie der Kohle-Konzern an der “Klimawende” noch Profit macht
"Erst Profit auf Kosten der Umwelt, in Zukunft Profit mit der „Klimawende“ – #RWE scheint dies mit einem tiefen Griff in die Trading-Trickkiste zu glücken. So hat sich der Konzern mit günstigen #CO2-Zertifikaten schon früh eingedeckt und sitzt nun auf Reserven im Wert von 10 bis 13 Milliarden Euro." https://perspektive-online.net/2021/09/rwe-trading-trick-wie-der-kohle-konzern-an-der-klimawende-noch-profit-macht/