I can not think of a greater tragedy in existence than to allow the greed of a few to destroy all life on earth.

“What is it going to take?”

It’s the question I whisper as I do the dishes. It’s the question that ticks along in my mind with the indicator at traffic lights. It’s the question that I settle into my pillow with at night.

“What’s it going to take?”

This is the question pounding in the mind of everyone who comprehends the current trajectory of our planet.

We ask this question because we know how much we personally would give to avert climate collapse.

Everything.

I can not think of a greater tragedy in existence than to allow, in any capacity, the greed of a few to destroy all life on earth. I would give everything to avert climate collapse.

This is what those of us who see the reality of our situation are doing. We surrender everything – as the late and great activist Zoe Hulme-Peake said, “it takes all of us, it takes it all from us.”

But with every report of a flood, a fire, a famine, a new border wall, a new oilfield, and with every accompanying rush of rage and grief, we hear the silence of our leaders, and the grinding machinery of business as usual. We fear that our everything will not be enough.

Looking back, moving forward

I’ve been engaging in direct action for climate justice full-time for the last five years. In that time we’ve seen the explosion of multiple global mass civil disobedience movements, from School Strike for Climate to Extinction Rebellion and its offshoots. The tradition of non-violent direct action to protect forests and shut down destructive operations has remained strong, and acts of property destruction and sabotage have become more common. I have engaged in all of these spheres of action.

As the crisis escalates, so do attacks on people like me who are sounding the alarm, as governments collude with their corporate masters to erode our hard-won democratic rights. Peaceful protestors are labelled terrorists and given hefty jail sentences, like the 15-month sentence I received for disrupting a single lane of traffic for 25 minutes. The climate movement around the world is facing difficult questions – questions about communication, strategy and tactics, about escalation and repression, about organising and collaboration, and ultimately about our political system as a whole.

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I can give some reflections on the five years that I’ve been living them.

What is this, some kind of joke?

After the mega fires of 2018-2019, I watched a comedy duo in Bega set a whole room laughing as they described their climate apocalypse plan of killing their neighbour for the last can of beans. I was struck by the irony that the climate movement frets over whether property destruction is an appropriate tactic, while also laughing about our seemingly inevitable trajectory towards starvation-driven murder.

I knew they weren’t exaggerating, even if they didn’t realise that. If you and your family were starving, and there was a way to make sure you all survived, I am sure you would lie, cheat, steal, smash and burn anything in the way of keeping yourself and the ones you love from slipping into a painful death of starvation – if the fires and floods don’t get you and yours first.

Understanding this – really understanding it and feeling deeply what it means – means being regularly confronted with moments of deep confusion and frustration. How is it that these people – a room of well-informed, well-intentioned lefties – were unable to draw the connection between what they know about our future with what that means for our present.

What is it going to take?

What’s in a word?

A couple of years later, while I was sitting in Silverwater prison after blocking the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the name of climate justice, I made a phone call to my media team asking them to contact Emeritus Professor Will Steffen, whom I had met with previously, to help me amend a quote he had given me.

We had met at a café in Canberra shortly before we famously burnt a pram outside Parliament House.

We were contemplating making the tactical move from mild disruption of roads, to destruction of property. Will had given us an hour of his time to explain the threat, so we could be certain we had our information on good authority and could show our response was appropriate.

He told us in no uncertain terms that on our current trajectory we face a “precipitous drop in human population” and “hell on earth”.

While sitting in prison a year later, having done my best to platform these words by splashing paint, setting things on fire and blockading the Harbour Bridge, I suddenly became worried that “precipitous” was not speaking to enough people, so I asked if we could change it to “rapid.”

It seems surreal that such a minor point can have such gravity, but having witnessed apathetic and cynical responses time and time again, these things feel like life and death questions – how do we communicate to the public that billions of lives will be lost if we keep burning fossil fuels, allowing our biodiversity to perish through land clearing, and the polluting of water? Could an overly academic word be the difference between 200 and 200,000 people on the streets? Maybe I should have asked if the expert opinion could be “We are all going to die!!”.

Nature-based solutions

We are using more resources than the world has to offer. We are chewing up the life of our planet and spitting it out in fidget spinners and billionaires flying around the world. Our whole system is based on the idea that we have complete domination over nature. This egotistical mindset could kill us all. It is not until we are humbled by our position in nature, as a part of, and responsible for, the health of the rest of the living world that we will be able to save ourselves.

The full quote from Professor Steffen was this:

“Massive floods, fires and heatwaves are sending us a clear message. On our present trajectory, we risk heading into a collapse of our globalised civilisation and a precipitous [rapid!] drop in human population — put simply, hell on earth. But we can avoid this disastrous future if we change the way we think, live our lives and interact with the rest of the living world. This means listening to and respecting the wisdom of indigenous cultures and moving away from rampant consumerism.”

What is strategic? There are two arms of how to think about averting climate collapse, one is the practical levers that need to be pulled to avert breakdown. The other is gaining the social and political will to organise society into doing them.

One of the most interesting things about joining the fight to protect the planet is the pressure to suddenly understand natural sciences, social sciences, political sciences and historical examples of change. With a background in theatre and philosophy, suffice to say that I am not a scientist.

However, I’ve realised that there is no carbon budget, every tree is sacred in a climate emergency and we are past the point where just zeroing out emissions will be enough. We need to engage in drawdown and repair of ecosystems if we have a chance of surviving the latent warming and destruction that is already locked into the system.

There is no time left

We had decades of warnings, negotiation and broken promises. We are now in our final hour. As Prof Hans Shellenhuber says “Climate change is now reaching the endgame, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accept that it has been left too late and bear the consequences” (p. 3). That was in 2018.

We have a huge responsibility as this continent is the third largest exporter of carbon emissions in the world.

Outrageously, despite all the warnings there are 116 new fossil fuel projects currently on Federal Government’s annual Resource & Energy Major Project list.

There have been decades of warnings, of negotiations, of lobbying (on both sides with a considerable difference in resource capacity), of promises and broken promises. Andreas Malm notes that more carbon stocks have been released since the first COP where the United Nations met to address global warming, than in the 75 years before it (p. 7).

So we are back where we started, “What is it going to take?”

I know your job seems important right now, I know your ‘clean record’ so you can still fly overseas seems important now (not that it actually stops anyone from travelling, so far), I know that police are scary, the state is scary. I know, I have been arrested 33 times now, and let me tell you, it sucks. First Nations people have been telling us about the atrocities of the state’s “justice” system since colonisation. I will share why I think we should be doing it anyway.

How civil resistance creates political will

Historically, civil resistance has created extraordinary breakthroughs in social, political and economic issues. When freedom, resources or power is hoarded, and asking nicely hasn’t worked, ‘the people’ have risen up as a collective, to demand better. This is an important part of democracy. It is a phenomenon that occurs when the structures of co-operation in society have failed so much, and are causing so much suffering, that people make extraordinary personal sacrifices, and are supported by peers to do so, in order to highlight an issue that needs to change.

Thanks to these people, we have made great leaps and bounds (although there is still much work to do) with issues like workers rights; thank you for the eight hour working day, women’s liberation; thank you for the vote, queer rights; thank you for marriage equality; refugee justice; thank you for supporting freedom and safety, First Nations’ justice; thank you for supporting justice and Country.

Civil resistance can not be ignored. It is a disruption of ‘business as usual’. Petitions and lobbying can be ignored, but civil resistance, when done properly, can not be ignored.

Civil resistance has a purpose, it is to change the trajectory of society to be more just. It pulls on certain leverages to achieve this.

Leverages like, drawing attention to an issue that the political class want to keep quiet. Or can target economic leverage; like costing money to power structures. This can trigger them to seek negotiation where previously they have ignored the issue. Another leverage is engaging public sympathy for the activists themselves, through facing repression.

In the campaign to save the Franklin River, the organising activists held a survey of what motivated people to come and protect that ecosystem. The number one motivating factor for people turning up was seeing other people get arrestedby police.

We motivate each other by demonstrating the appropriate response, which takes courage.

Civil Resistance is broadly supported when it is non-violent, in both a strategic and moral framework. Briefly, engaging in violence, including property damage, causes an escalation of political and therefore police violence. The state typically has more tools and capacity to engage in a violent fight, and therefore it is not strategic to engage might vs. might.

That is not to say that violence is not an important strategic player in civil resistance. Non-violent resistance exposes the violence inherent in the system. Grass roots organisers weaponise the state’s violence against itself, with non violence, to achieve sympathy and outrage – the backfire effect.

While broad support of civil resistance goes to the non-violent parts of the movement, there are great examples of a ‘radical flank’ working successfully within the ecosystem of a movement. In the civil rights movement there were armed protectors of the community. Some wings of the suffragettes blew up empty buildings, threw rocks through windows and slashed paintings.

A local example of this was when our team in Canberra started to throw real paint around The Department for Environment, people were outraged. The movement was largely challenged by the property damage, saying, “We agree with the cause, but we don’t like the methods.”

Three Extinction Rebellion members were charged with defacing public property at the Department of Agriculture. Two were sentenced while one had his charge dismissed.

Yet there were also some who said that it felt like the appropriate response to the damage being done to the planet. This opened a conversation about proportionate damage being done to the planet. Difficult conversations, but necessary ones. If parts of the movement are so concerned and outraged about the damage of a little bit of paint, you better be literally up in arms about the destruction of our livable planet.

These types of actions often engage the public’s acceptable response to an issue. They open up a debate on the seriousness of an issue vs the action taken, also known as the appropriate response.

When I burnt the pram, destroying the tiles under the pram with melted plastic, people felt it was justified because of the message – you are killing our children’s future.

Note: Sometimes groups accept that actions will be largely unpopular at the time, but still be effective at platforming the message, or deemed a necessary intervention to prevent a greater injustice. Being liked is not the same as being effective as an activist, we are not trying to get elected, we are trying to engage a point.

Disruption to destruction

In our final hour, where all else has failed, is there a strategic way to physically stop the death machine? Or, are we relying on them agreeing with us and shutting themselves down?

In the dark cells of Canberra police station, my friend and I were playing charades through the glass windows of our enclosures.

She was miming, I was guessing.

It’s a book…

First word “How”

… then she is making explosive gestures.

I excitedly, without thinking about where I was, yelled out the book title my comrade was alluding to – “How to Blow up a Pipeline!!!” – I enthusiastically called from my cell.

When I realised what she had tricked me into screaming out, while under police surveillance, I could not help but laugh and appreciate her audacity.

The obtusely vibrant orange book by Andreas Malm, which does not include instructions on how to blow up a pipeline, instead, explores the philosophy of property destruction in the context of non violent direct action.

It is very persuasive.

The book quotes R.H Lossin, one of the finest contemporary scholars in the field, “Sabotage is a sort of prefigurative, if temporary, seizure of property. It is – in reference to the climate emergency – both a logical, justifiable and effective form of resistance and a direct affront to the sanctity of capitalist ownership.” (p. 68).

Ultimately, we need to shift the appropriate response to the omnicide of our planet from polite dissent, to unignorable and effective action.

We need a calm and focused panic.

That’s what it feels like to ask “What is it going to take?”

Everyday, constantly looking for the most impactful thing to work with people on.

It seems so easy, no chainsaws, way less trees cut down.

No mining equipment, no mines.

We all want a mass movement to shut the system down, and achieve change. We are working very hard to mobilise as many people as possible. Unfortunately, mass movements are hard to engage, and take a lot of resources. In between waves of mass momentum, small and direct groups can get a lot done.

The challenge when engaging in sabotage, is that reactions can be very aggressive. The repressive and aggressive backlash from it can collapse a campaign’s momentum. For example, the loggers of our beautiful and sacred forests are capable of incredible acts of violence in retaliation for their tonka toys being touched, meaning those in forestry campaigns often steer away from damage, for how it can collapse a functional blockade.

Another prominent example of sabotage is Jessica Reznicek, who did in fact sabotage a pipeline, then openly took responsibility for it. She is now serving eight years in prison.

Jessica’s confession was a powerful and inspiring act that has moved many around the world, including myself, to be brave enough to face prison. However, some have argued to me that if all the key organisers put themself in prison for years, then it would leave the movement very shy of competent people in the very short time we have left to do something.

Also, how many times could Jessica have stopped that pipeline in the six years she has since served? Conversely, how many people have taken action because they have been inspired by her bravery. *raises hand*

It is of no doubt that mass participation in disruption is needed to shift this system – thousands of people on the streets. I propose that we also need militant teams who are willing to destroy the death machine. Teams that have a degree of separation from the mass participation organisers, but supported within the movement – keeping the mass organisers untainted. This protects mass organisers, whom often have to be publicly accountable, from the dissent and bad optics that sabotage has from the broader public, and the legal consequences. Unless it’s symbolic damage, like the burning pram or spray paint.

The important thing is that we function as an ecosystem of effective tactics.

Working together

It means nothing unless we are doing things together. Relationship building and working together are the most important things. The people and organisations around us now, these are the ones we are going through this with. I’ll admit, sometimes I meet people, and tactics, that just rub me the wrong way. However, I recognise that now is the time and if anyone is working on this stuff, then they have a seat at my dinner table and a serve of whatever I have to share. They are kin and deserve my respect. We need an ecosystem of tactics and I remain humbled by the fact that nothing anyone is doing has worked… because emissions continue to rise.

Aric McBay’s brilliant Full Spectrum Resistance (2019) explores the tension between small radical groups and larger parts of the movement. It puts forward the idea of the ratchet as an analogy of how “smaller militant organisations push progress forward” while “larger moderate ones hold and consolidate gains.”

“It is unfortunate that some resistors do not grasp that. I have written about the myopia of liberals who don’t understand the key role of militants. But there are plenty of militants who fail to grasp the important role that moderate organisations can play in radical change” (p. 191).

This was evident in my case for the Harbour Bridge. The new anti-protest laws were rushed through parliament, hardly anyone knew it had happened. I blocked the bridge a week or so later, and got put in prison. This stirs an outrage and brings attention to the concerning laws, giving more momentum for larger organisations, like Unions and Human Rights Watch to express concern at the anti-protest laws, and challenge them with the larger resources at their disposal.

Larger parts of the movement, especially those working on consensus, have slower decision making capacity. Smaller autonomous groups can form out of these larger groups for rapid response under different more radical banners.

A healthy movement consists of small decentralised radical groups and key organisers engaging mass participation co-ordination

So yes, everyone’s job is valid, and thank you for all the work you are doing, no matter who you are. However, there was recently a study released by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, where the case is made that protest movements are more effective than the best charities (NGOs). They observe that for the amount of money protest movements function off, they show a lot more results. So, protest movements are a good investment for the philanthropist who doesn’t want civilisation to collapse.

I think of my job in the movement to be a node in the mycelium. I try to connect, and build relationships with as many people working on this stuff as possible. I call myself a cross pollinator as I build relationships with Disrupt Burrup Hub, in Perth, who are fighting the largest gas expansion project on the continent, while also working with XR Sydney on a zombie march at Town Hall. I speak at The Greens events, in cinemas, in backyards. I try to hold hands with people across as much of the spectrum of resistance as I can. I invite you to this vision, of one big diverse movement, doing as much as we can.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Be healers – because this work is hard.

We must learn to work together.

Repression

If their greatest weapon is to keep us apart.

Our greatest strength is to stay connected.

The police have been taking on a robo-cop-esque mentality with some punitive behaviour, they call strategic incapacitation. I thought it was the court’s job to deliver punishment, however, the police use their powers to enact their own justice. One way they do this is with bail conditions, like house arrest, or non-association conditions, another way is with actual violence, sound cannons and chemical warfare (pepper spray).

Being on the frontline is tough. The police use intimidation to make us fear using our voice, or talking to our community. Fear is a powerful weapon and it leaves lasting scars. In non-violent direct action training we have a saying, “The action isn’t over till the last fine is paid.” But maybe it should say “Till the last wound is healed.”

The political system is working hard to clamp down on any activism. Laws are changing around the country in response to the rising determination of protesters. We win when we have the strength and courage to keep taking meaningful action together. They win when we fear sitting in our seat of power, or are fighting amongst ourselves. Whatever you do, don’t fight each other in the public domain. Have the respect to have direct conversations and build relationships within the movement.

Remember, repression is activating. If we can demonstrate the injustice of the repression, it mobilises more people. We just need to summon the courage to face it, and we don’t do it alone.

Reform vs Revolution

If there is one thing a functioning government should be ticking off its list of accomplishments it is – not kill everyone. We can argue till the cows come home (go vegan.) how our government should be keeping us alive. But essentially every one of the citizens should be in agreement that a good government should not collapse civilisation. Especially not with this much notice and research about how not to do that.

After delivering a talk at Swinburne University on the climate crisis and activism called, “Heading for Extinction and What to do About it.” A lecturer came up to me and said, “The most frustrating thing is that we have all the solutions we need to heal the planet, we just are not implementing them.”

This government is lying and withholding information on the risk of climate breakdown. The Office of National Intelligence (ONI) released a report for the Labour Government on how the climate crisis will fuel national security threats. They refuse to release the report and its findings.

How can people make informed decisions on how (and who) they want to govern the country without all the information? What right does a government have to hide the risks from us? They know the risks though, they have the brief, and yet they are still approving logging, coal and gas projects like Woodside.

“Woodside’s estimate of the annual emissions from the project suggest about 4bn of carbon dioxide equivalent could be released – equivalent to about 10 years of Australia’s total carbon pollution.”

That makes them murderers. This two party system has failed us. It has become a pantomime of theatrics while this land is pillaged for its resources, regardless of the safety of the people.

We need something new.

There is hope in citizens assemblies, there is hope in handing land back. When First Nations people care for Country, biodiversity is protected.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life

Whatever the answers may be, I’m still certain that only people power can save us. Governments and elites have proven time and again that they’d rather murder us all than accept the truth of this crisis – they will not change until we stand up and make them.

What is it going to take? All of us, and everything, courage and commitment. It will take unignorable and effective action from small autonomous teams to mass mobilisation – all working together in a calm and focused panic. It will take strategic damage, and NGOs as one big ecosystem. It will take being healers of each other, and connectors too.

It will also give. It will give purpose, and hope. It will give you a community of the bravest of hearts. The best kind of people, those willing to set aside comfort and luxury, to fight for life.

Republished from GREEN AGENDA, November 3, 2023

https://johnmenadue.com/full-spectrum-resistance-we-need-militant-teams-who-are-willing-to-destroy-the-death-machine/

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As we enter the month of June, scorching temperatures are already making deadly heat waves around the world. Data confirmed last month was the hottest May on record, putting the Earth on a 12-month streak of record-breaking temperatures. On Wednesday, the World Meteorological Organization announced there is an 80% chance the average global temperature will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels for at least one of the next five years. “We’re going to see a more chaotic planet as the climate heats up,” says Jeff Goodell, a journalist covering the climate crisis. Goodell describes “the heat wave scenario that keeps climate scientists up at night”: a major power outage that could cut off air conditioning and cause thousands of deaths from extreme temperatures.

In Mexico, it’s already so hot that howler monkeys and parrots are falling dead from the trees. “What we’re experiencing right now goes beyond what is normal,” says Ruth Cerezo-Mota, climate researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “We have been saying this for many years now.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Deadly heat. As we enter the month of June, scorching temperatures are already gripping parts of Arizona, California, Nevada, as well as countries around the world. In Arizona, extreme heat sent 11 people to the hospital as thousands waited to enter a campaign rally with Donald Trump. In India, 33 poll workers died from heatstroke on a single day last week during India’s national elections. In Mexico, it’s so hot, howler monkeys are falling dead from the trees. Data confirmed last month was the hottest May on record, putting the Earth on a 12-month streak of record-scorching and -breaking temperatures.

Meanwhile, a new report has found the rate Earth is warming hit an all-time high last year, with 92% of 2023 record heat caused by humans. On Wednesday, the World Meteorological Organization announced there’s an 80% chance the average global temperature will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels for at least one of the next five years.

On the same day that report was released, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres gave a major speech on the climate crisis right next to the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History here in New York City. The U.N. secretary-general said the world can still meet the 1.5-degree target if governments drastically speed up the phaseout of fossil fuels.

SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES:Today is World Environment Day. It is also the day that the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Change Service officially reports May 2024 as the hottest May in recorded history. This marks 12 straight months of the hottest months ever. For the past year, every turn of the calendar has turned up the heat. Our planet is trying to tell us something, but we don’t seem to be listening.

Dear friends, the American Museum of Natural History is the ideal place to make the point. This great museum tells the amazing story of our natural world, of the vast forces that have shaped life on Earth over billions of years. And humanity is just one small blip on the radar. But like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we are having an outsized impact. In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger. But we are also the solution.

So, dear friends, we are at a moment of truth. The truth is, almost 10 years since the Paris Agreement was adopted, the target of limiting long-term global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is hanging by a thread. The truth is, the world is spewing emissions so fast that by 2030 a far higher temperature rise will be all but guaranteed.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in a major address on the climate crisis Wednesday to mark World Environment Day. Again, he was speaking at the Museum of Natural History here in New York.

For more on deadly heat and the climate crisis, we’re joined by two guests. Dr. Ruth Cerezo-Mota is a researcher at the Institute of Engineering at UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She is joining us from the city of Mérida in the Mexican state of Yucatán. And joining us from North Carolina, Jeff Goodell. He’s covered the climate crisis for over 20 years at Rolling Stone magazine, the author of The New York Times best-seller, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. He’s got a new op-ed in The New York Times, “The Heat Wave Scenario That Keeps Climate Scientists Up at Night.”

What is that scenario, Jeff?

JEFF GOODELL: Well, that scenario is a look at what would happen if there were a five-day blackout during an extreme heat wave, looking at the kind of cascading consequences of these two events together. It was based on a study done by some researchers at Georgia Tech and Arizona State University. And it looked at — you know, we think of air conditioning as this sort of technofix for extreme heat. You know, often people will say to me, “What’s the problem with the planet heating up? We’ve just got to get more people air conditioning.” And this study really looked at the sort of false illusion of security that air conditioning has kind of provided for us.

It showed that in this blackout scenario where you had a total blackout for two days and then three days of restoring power, which is not kind of beyond the pale of kind of reality at all — we had a five-day blackout similar to that in Texas a few years ago. In that kind of a scenario in a city like Phoenix, where there’s virtually 100% penetration of air conditioning, you would have 800,000 emergency room visits and more than 13,000 deaths within 48 hours, which is hugely shocking and sort of disturbing findings.

And what’s interesting about this is the way that it shows that some of these — that technofixes, like air-conditioning and things, which are certainly important tools for living in hot climates, but they also amplify our vulnerability in ways that we don’t really understand or are not aware of. And so, air conditioning is sort of like this sort of sword of Damocles hanging over a city like Phoenix or a city like Austin or Houston or places like that, that are completely dependent upon it. And it just shows this sort of — our understanding of our vulnerability to extreme heat is far more complicated than we understand at first glance.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s amazing, this report. In Phoenix, about 800,000 people, roughly half the population, would need emergency medical treatment for heatstroke and other illnesses. The flood of people seeking care would overwhelm the city’s hospitals. More than 13,000 people would die. That’s in Phoenix. And, of course, that’s a place that 99% of the buildings are air-conditioned. Then you go to a place like Detroit, that’s even older, much less AC, and the number of people that would be affected, especially older people. And, of course, AC causes more global warming. I was really struck in your piece by what you called not a Hurricane Katrina, but a “heat Katrina.”

JEFF GOODELL: Yeah, exactly. And in comparing — in this study, in comparing the three cities, the other — in Atlanta and Detroit and Phoenix, the emergency room visits and death rate as a consequence of this five-day blackout that I described are far lower in these other cities because of less dependence upon air conditioning. So, in some ways, one of our sort of favorite technofixes for a hotter world, air conditioning, is increasing our vulnerability to that extreme heat. We’re building buildings that don’t have natural ventilation, that you can’t open windows in. So, when the power goes out, they become like convection ovens, and people die.

And, you know, there are a lot of things that we can do to reduce this vulnerability, things like solar panels on rooftops, microgrids, battery backups, so we’re not so dependent upon the grid itself, and also building buildings that have passive cooling, that don’t require air conditioning, that have natural ventilations, that are built in ways that are suitable for the hotter world that we’re building for ourselves.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, most of the rest of the world doesn’t have that kind of access to air conditioning. I want to go down to the Yucatán, where our next guest is, Ruth Cerezo-Mota. We just read this report about howler monkeys falling dead out of trees. If you can go from monkeys to human beings and what it means for Mexico right now, which is also — and Yucatán experienced a major heat wave, and yet at the same time you’ve just elected your first woman president in Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, who is a climate scientist, like yourself. In Mexico, nearly 61 people died from a record heat wave that just ended. Can you talk about all of this?

RUTH CEREZO-MOTA: Yeah. Hi. Yeah, we are experiencing really extreme weather. And I just want to complement something that you were saying about the air conditioner. Yeah, we need to consider that we — it’s also an unfair situation, because there is many people that will not be able to afford an air conditioning, so it’s not really a solution, either. But in any case, yes, people is dying here because of the heat. Animals — there was this report of hundreds of monkeys falling just from trees. And before that, the week before that, there were parrots, as well. And, of course, here in Yucatán, most of the city has air conditioning, but not all the small towns. So, yeah, it’s a big problem.

And yeah, on a very hot Sunday, last Sunday, we had elections, and there was massive participation, and we got our first president. But I don’t think it means good news in terms of environment, at least not now. When she was a mayor in Mexico City, there was a couple of things that she did that clearly was against or was not eco-friendly, like, for example, she built a bridge for cars, and in order to do that, they destroyed part of a wetland that it was of the very last natural reserves in Mexico City, which — and it turns out, it didn’t solve the problems. It didn’t solve the traffic that was supposed to be the problem. And because it was done over the wetlands, when it’s the rainy season, it gets flooded. So, then, you have — now you have floodings. You destroyed part of the environment, of the reserve, and you didn’t solve the issue that was the traffic in that area.

Also, while she was in campaign, she promises to continue what López Obrador is doing. She’s talking about the Tren Maya, that we know it has several impacts on the environment. There has been deforestation of at least 10 million trees. They have polluted the water. They have injected concrete on waterholes. And we are here in the peninsula. We don’t have surface body — water surface bodies. We all depend on underground water. And now that water is polluted by concrete and metals that they have been injecting to build the railroad.

So, definitely, in terms of environment, at least now, it’s not a good news. So, maybe once that Claudia start her period, maybe she distance herself from López Obrador and all these programs that go against the environment.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go —

RUTH CEREZO-MOTA: But so far, it’s not a clear evidence of that.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a clip, the heat wave also killing those 150 howler monkeys found dead on the forest floor, according to Mexico’s Environment Ministry, due to heatstroke, dehydration, malnutrition or the spraying of crops with toxic agrochemicals. This is Mexican biologist Gilberto Pozo in the Mexican state of Tabasco.

GILBERTO POZO: [translated] We have registered 83 dead specimens. There are also orphaned calves, because many adults, adult females, have died. Some offspring have managed to survive. That is the problem with this species’ mortality in this very hot season in the state. The temperatures have reached 123 degrees Fahrenheit. And the wildlife is suffering because of the lack of water. There has been a lot of habitat degradation, so there is more light penetration, higher temperatures and water scarcity. Above all, there has been an increase in the number of fires, that damage the few habitats or refuges for these species.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Ruth Cerezo-Mota, would you like to elaborate on that, the flora, the fauna, and how all life is affected?

RUTH CEREZO-MOTA: Yeah, definitely, these extreme events that are becoming more frequent and more intense. And we knew that before. We knew that. We have already observations all around the world in different regions that these extreme events will become more often and more frequent and more intense when they happen, and not only the heat wave, but floodings and extreme precipitation. So, we knew all this, and we have been saying this for many, many years now.

So, it takes a toll on everything. So it affects health. It affects biodiversity. It affects — at the same time that we experience a heat wave, we also experience a very dry season. We are coming from last year, as well. It was very low levels of precipitation that we have here in the country, partially because of El Niño, but partially because of this climate change. So, there is no water. We have experienced, as well, not only Mexico, but in very — in other parts of the world, fires. We are getting these compound events in which you have all the perfect conditions for fires, for events that wouldn’t happen otherwise. So, we have a dry environment, windy and a lot of organic material, so then you have the perfect conditions to start the fires. And because it’s so hot and because there’s so little water, it’s very hard to control those fires, so there’s a massive devastation. Plus, the animals there are dying, because they are not able to adapt to this heat that we are experiencing. It’s not normal.

So, even though here, the peninsula of Yucatán, normally we experience a hot weather, what we are experiencing right now goes beyond of what is normal. So, we are — plus, it has lasted for more than one month, where we have had these conditions of 45 maximum degrees centigrade, and the minimums of 38, 35, so really not — that minimum is not healthy anymore, not for humans, not for environment. And it doesn’t seem to — that it’s going to end soon. So, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to end with Jeff Goodell. If you could comment on climate refugees, as President Biden tries to shut down the border, the U.S.-Mexico border, limit the number of people who can come, the reasons people leave their countries, and what they’re affected by, and also the laws that prevent people, like in Texas, the attempt to stop people from even getting — workers getting water breaks?

JEFF GOODELL: Yeah. Well, one of the, you know, kind of rules of life is that when conditions get too intolerable — too hot, in this case — living things move on to find more suitable climates. That’s what humans do. That’s what, you know, plants do. That’s what animals do. We all have to, in order to survive, find our kind of what I call in my book our Goldilocks zone, where it’s not too hot, not too cold.

And, you know, what happens when it gets too hot, crops fail, water resources fail, people move on. And that is what’s happening at the U.S. border. Migration is a very complex topic. There’s lots of reasons why people are on the move. But certainly, climate change and crop failure and water scarcity is a big part of that.

And so, we’re going to see a more chaotic planet as the climate heats up. In my book, I call heat the engine of planetary chaos. And that’s what we’re talking about here. So we’re going to see more people trying to move across boundaries. We’re going to see more politics driven by that kind of resistance to migration. We’re seeing it in the United States right now. We’re seeing it in Europe. We will see more and more of that.

And in states like Texas, where I live, we have a governor who’s a hard-right MAGA Republican, who has decided that — you know, he has passed legislation or signed legislation that prohibits any city or municipality in the state from passing any laws that require shade breaks or water breaks for workers during extreme heat conditions. The politics of this are perverse. They are brutal. They are barbaric. But that is the way our world is moving. You know, the idea that Governor Abbott has is a loss of productivity by giving people shade breaks, but it’s really going back to the old kind of coal mining days where, you know, productivity is elevated above human life.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to continue to talk about this, of course, as we move into these incredibly hot summer months. And even those who have access to shade are determined by their wealth, particularly thinking of the unhoused population. Jeff Goodell, we want to thank you so much for being with us, New York Times piece, we’ll link to, that you just wrote, “The Heat Wave Scenario That Keeps Climate Scientists Up at Night,” author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. And we want to thank Dr. Ruth Cerezo-Mota, climate scientist from the Institute of Engineering at National Autonomous University of Mexico, today speaking to us from Yucatán.

When we come back, Black women’s voices, the focus of a project from V-Day, the global activist movement to end violence against all women, gender-expansive people, girls and the Earth. It’s called VOICES: a sacred sisterscape. Back in 20 seconds.

https://truthout.org/video/heat-waves-are-killing-the-vulnerable-worsening-inequality-across-the-globe/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

Marine heatwaves are becoming more frequent under global warming and this is having a significant impact on species’ ability to recover.

Since April, the world has seen record high ocean temperatures and that’s bad news for the plants and animals that call the ocean home.

Longer and more frequent bouts of extreme temperatures can cause the exodus of some species and the invasion of others, with potentially devastating impacts on the resident ecosystem.

Global warming manifests as a gradual increase in temperatures over time around the world, caused by increased greenhouse gas emissions.

However, scientists are finding that the most important impacts come from short-term spikes in temperature.

In the ocean, these discrete periods of extreme temperatures, lasting weeks to months, are called marine heatwaves.

Marine heatwaves can be generated by either the atmosphere or by ocean processes.

For example, weather systems like high pressure systems can lead to low cloud and greater solar heating while ocean changes can be driven by strengthened poleward currents that move heat from high to low latitudes.

The likelihood and intensity of these atmospheric and oceanic drivers of marine heatwaves can also be affected by large-scale phenomena like El Niño or La Niña.

Larger portions of the oceans are likely to experience marine heatwaves during El Niño events.

Marine heatwaves can have dramatic impacts on marine organisms and ecosystems that may extend for long periods after temperatures have returned to normal.

Impacts range from the suppressed growth of microscopic marine plants to mass deaths in fish and marine mammals, encroachment of invasive species and toxic algal outbreaks.

Importantly, marine heatwaves have been associated with extensive dieback of species like coral reefs, kelp forests and seagrass beds that form the homes and breeding grounds for a large amount of the ocean’s biodiversity.

These impacts can have devastating knock-on effects for fisheries, aquaculture and tourism industries, with individual events linked to direct losses of up to hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Ningaloo Niño that formed early in 2011 was an iconic extreme event.

Intensified winds along the Pacific equator — associated with an extreme La Niña — forced warm water westwards and through the Indonesian Archipelago, into the Indian Ocean and poleward along the coast of Western Australia.

This flood of warm water caused a record-breaking marine heatwave that wiped out the endemic kelp forest for over 100 km along the Australian coast along with one-third (1,300 square kilometres) of the Shark Bay seagrass meadow, a UNESCO world heritage site.

The Ningaloo Niño caused deaths and reduced reproduction in abalone, scallops and crabs that led to the closure of associated fisheries for several years.

The Tasman Sea is another hotspot for ocean warming and marine heatwaves.

Two consecutive extreme events occurred the summer of 2015/16 and 2017/18. Their causes were very different.

The first was primarily caused by an intensification of the warm East Australian Current while the second was caused by a long-lasting high pressure system over the ocean.

These and previous events brought an invasion of sea urchins from mainland waters that led to the decimation of kelp forests off eastern Tasmania.

The 2015/16 event alone led to new diseases in cultured oysters, poor salmon performance and high mortalities of abalone. Together this led to economic losses of more than half a billion dollars.

As marine heatwaves exist on the backdrop of long-term global ocean warming, these extreme events are becoming more intense and more frequent.

Over the past century the number of days each year experiencing marine heatwave conditions has increased by more than 50 percent.

The shorter time between marine heatwaves means that many populations no longer have the time to recover between events, which can lead to species moving their range or being wiped out.

And this will only worsen in the future.

Many studies show that some coral reefs are losing their hard corals.

And with increased future warming the very existence of tropical coral reefs are in doubt.

Since April, the oceans have been warmer than at any time during the instrumental record.

It’s probably at least 100,000 years — before the last ice age — since temperatures could have been this warm.

As a consequence, scientists are seeing more of the ocean experiencing marine heatwave conditions than ever. And that’s before the added push from the developing El Niño.

Over the past few weeks alone, there have been extreme marine heatwaves in all of the ocean basins, including around the UK and Japan, off Peru and in waters extending off of the Californian, Florida and east and west Canadian coasts.

As the Northern Hemisphere enters its warmest season, marine heatwaves are at their most dangerous, pushing marine organisms above their thermal limits.

Over the next few months, expect reports of significant ecosystem harm to start to emerge.

An understanding of the physical drivers of these events and their biological impacts provides scientists with some ability to forecast their likelihood in the future.

This can help marine resource managers make decisions, like moving aquaculture stocks, reducing fishing quotas or taking direct action to suppress warming (like shading of aquaculture cultivation areas, or moving aquaculture pens out of harm’s way) in small, high-value regions.

But ultimately, to avoid escalating impacts the only solution is to stop greenhouse gas emissions.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

https://johnmenadue.com/more-marine-heatwaves-could-spell-disaster-for-ocean-life/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

“We need to tackle the root cause and get serious about reducing record levels of greenhouse gas emissions,” said the head of the World Meteorological Organisation.

As scientists around the world on Thursday released new data about recent record-smashing heat, one United Nations adviser placed blame for the lack of ambitious climate action on the fossil fuel industry’s decades long disinformation efforts.

“There is this prevailing narrative—and a lot of it is being pushed by the fossil fuel industry and their enablers—that climate action is too difficult, it’s too expensive,” Selwin Hart, a special adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres and assistant secretary-general of the Climate Action Team, told The Guardian‘s Fiona Harvey.

“It is absolutely critical that leaders, and all of us, push back and explain to people the value of climate action, but also the consequences of climate inaction,” said Hart, former executive director of the Caribbean at the Inter-American Development Bank and Barbados’ ambassador to the United States and the Organisation of American States.

Investigations by academics, journalists, and lawmakers as well as ongoing legal battles have exposed how Big Oil not only has heated and polluted the planet but also knew about the devastating impacts of fossil fuels decades ago and opted to spread lies so shareholders could make massive profits—which they continue to rake in today.

“Climate appears to be dropping down the list of priorities of leaders,” Hart said, pointing to polling that shows people around the world want a rapid transition to clean energy. “But we really need leaders now to deliver maximum ambition. And we need maximum cooperation. Unfortunately, we are not seeing that at the moment.”

According to The Guardian:

[Hart] warned that the consequences of inaction were being felt in rich countries as well as poor. In the U.S., many thousands of people are finding it increasingly impossible to insure their homes, as extreme weather worsens. “This is directly due to the climate crisis, and directly due to the use of fossil fuels,” he said. “Ordinary people are having to pay the price of a climate crisis while the fossil fuel industry continues to reap excess profits and still receives massive government subsidies.”

Yet the world has never been better equipped to tackle climate breakdown, Hart added. “Renewables are the cheapest they’ve ever been, the pace of the energy transition is accelerating,” he said.

Hart’s comments came as the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) announced that last month “was the second-warmest July globally in our data record, with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 16.91ºC,” or 62.44ºF.

From June 2023 to June 2024, each month was the hottest on record, according to C3S. Samantha Burgess, the agency’s deputy director, noted that now, “the streak of record-breaking months has come to an end, but only by a whisker.”

“Globally, July 2024 was almost as warm as July 2023, the hottest month on record,” Burgess stressed. “July 2024 saw the two hottest days on record. The overall context hasn’t changed, our climate continues to warm. The devastating effects of climate change started well before 2023 and will continue until global greenhouse gas emissions reach net-zero.”

The U.N.’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said Thursday that the new C3S data “underlines the urgency of the Call to Action on Extreme Heat” issued by Guterres last month, shortly after July 22 became the hottest day ever recorded.

“Widespread, intense, and extended heatwaves have hit every continent in the past year,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo in a statement. “At least 10 countries have recorded daily temperatures of more than 50ºC in more than one location. This is becoming too hot to handle.”

Saulo highlighted that “Death Valley in California registered a record average monthly temperature of 42.5ºC (108.5ºF)—possibly a new record observed for anywhere in the world. Even the remote frozen ice sheets of Antarctica have been feeling the heat.”

“The WMO community is committed to responding to the U.N. secretary-general’s Call to Action with better heat-health early warnings and action plans,” she pledged. “Recent estimates produced by WMO and the World Health Organization indicate that the global scale-up of heat-health warning systems for 57 countries alone has the potential to save an estimated 98,000 lives per year. This is one of the priorities of the Early Warnings for All initiative.”

“Climate adaptation alone is not enough,” she added. “We need to tackle the root cause and get serious about reducing record levels of greenhouse gas emissions.”

C3S wasn’t alone in releasing new data on Thursday; the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also shared some key points for the country’s climate in July, with the full report set to be released on Tuesday.

NOAA’s top takeaways were:

• The average temperature of the contiguous U.S. in July was 75.7ºF, 2.1ºF above average, ranking 11th warmest in the 130-year record.
• The Park Fire is the fourth-largest wildfire in California history as of August 6; beginning on July 24, it burned approximately 401,000 acres and destroyed over 560 structures.
• On July 15, a derecho that spawned 32 tornadoes broke the Chicago-area record for most tornadoes in a day.
• On July 1, Beryl became the earliest Category 5 hurricane and the second Category 5 on record during the month of July in the Atlantic Ocean.
• Alaska had its wettest July on record.
• Four new billion-dollar weather and climate disasters were confirmed in July. The year-to-date total currently stands at 19 disasters.

Other major events in July included California’s Thompson Fire, which forced over 13,000 people to evacuate, and Washington, D.C. enduring 101ºF on July 17, tying a record for the longest streak of temperatures above 100ºF. NOAA also found that “for the January-July period, the average contiguous U.S. temperature was 54.5ºF, 3.2ºF above average, ranking second-warmest on record.”

Republished from Common Dreams, August 08, 2024

https://johnmenadue.com/fossil-fuel-industry-propaganda-blamed-as-record-heat-scorches-planet/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

By Joseph Winters / Grist Climate News

Proponents of the voluntary carbon market say it’s a mechanism not only to advance sustainability goals, but also to funnel much-needed cash to some of the world’s poorest countries. 

The idea is that companies seeking to “offset” their climate footprint will help pay for the development of projects that sequester or prevent greenhouse gas emissions — endeavors like planting trees to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, or protecting forests that were ostensibly in danger of being chopped down. These projects, which generate exchangeable “credits” representing 1 metric ton of greenhouse gas emissions each, come with the promise of jobs for local residents, and project developers often pledge to devote part of their revenue to public infrastructure like schools.

In Africa, the voluntary carbon market is “a powerful means to address climate change and uplift communities,” according to one nonprofit that writes nonbinding standards for the sector.

It’s increasingly unclear, however, whether that narrative holds up to scrutiny. A series of reports published since last November by the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch, or CMW, has highlighted a near-total lack of published research on how much money flowing into the carbon market actually winds up supporting climate mitigation projects or reaching local communities. One report called attention to a lack of fair and transparent benefit-sharing agreements, clauses in projects’ design documents that detail how they will distribute revenue and nonmonetary benefits to people they affect. 

Most recently, an analysis published by the group last week found that, while most carbon credit projects are located in poor countries, they are largely controlled by companies based in wealthier North American and European countries. The authors said there is “no evidence” that the voluntary carbon market, or VCM, brings economic benefits to communities where projects are based, a point that human rights and environmental groups have long been making.

“When it comes to knowing if the VCM is actually working as a tool to channel finance from the Global North to the Global South, there’s no information there,” said Inigo Wyburd, a policy expert for Carbon Market Watch and the author of the newest report. “It raises serious questions as to, well, are these communities really benefiting?”

The most recent report looks at two samples of carbon credit projects: one composed of 30 from around the world, and another of 39 projects just in Africa. Only 13 percent of the projects in the global sample are located in countries with the highest level of “human development,” based on a U.N. metric encompassing education, health, and living standards. But nearly 60 percent of the companies that own, develop, monitor, and vet the projects are based in the world’s most developed countries.

The numbers are even more pronounced for the African sample, which shows that less than 10 percent of projects are based in countries with the highest U.N. development index. Sixty-two percent of all the projects’ developers and 63 percent of their owners are located in the most highly developed countries outside of Africa. 

According to Wyburd, this doesn’t necessarily mean that companies based in rich countries aren’t directing revenue to local communities. In a way, it makes sense that there would be more companies from wealthy countries participating in carbon credit projects, since they have better access to capital and technology. But paired with the lack of transparency on financial flows, the geographical disparity is concerning.

“As many companies are not based in the same region where their project is carried out, any money that is not directly assigned to project implementation is potentially diverted to become profit for actors located in the Global North,” the report says. Notably, the analysis found that at least 10 projects across both samples were missing documentation on things like monitoring and verification.

The CMW paper only hints at what African rights and environmental groups have been saying much more forcefully. Last year, a coalition of organizations across the continent published a scathing critique of the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative, an effort to develop the continent’s voluntary and government-run carbon markets and bring it $6 billion in annual revenue by 2050. 

While the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative has promised to share revenue equitably and transparently with local communities, the environmental groups called the program “a new form of colonialism,” saying it would exacerbate climate change and obstruct “the attainment of genuine African development pathways.” More broadly, they criticized all carbon credit projects, which they said would commodify Africa’s land and other resources in order to benefit foreign corporations.

“Rich countries are passing the burden of climate action from rich to the poorest countries,” the authors wrote, “in return for which African countries are asked to package up projects that fit the demands of the Northern companies to deliver tons of carbon.”

This problem has already played out across Africa, Asia, and South America, where communities have repeatedly reported being fleeced by companies seeking to generate carbon credits. In one instance, the Switzerland-based company South Pole and Carbon Green Investments — a firm founded by a wealthy Zimbabwean businessman to receive proceeds from South Pole — sought to generate credits by ostensibly preventing deforestation around Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe. Like other projects, part of its allure was that it would also raise money for local communities. But an investigation from the news site Follow the Money, the Germany newspaper Die Zeit, and the Swiss broadcaster SRF could only account for a tiny fraction of the funds that were promised to support schools, health clinics, and vegetable gardens. Dozens of village chiefs, local politicians, and villagers told the outlets they had doubts about the project; some said there was no money reaching them.

Farai Maguwu, director of a Zimbabwean research and advocacy organization called the Centre for Natural Resource Governance — which was not one of the groups involved with the critique of the Africa Carbon Market Initiative — told Grist in an interview last year that the Kariba project developers had made the local community out to be “ignorant people” who would “destroy their environment” if not for the carbon credits. He said projects like Kariba were “shortchanging” locals: “using them to generate millions of dollars which are never plowed back into those communities.”

“It’s quite irritating when they present these self-serving projects as an opportunity for Africa,” he added.

South Pole told Grist it could not comment on “the actions of other organizations,” and that it had only acted as a “consultant” to the Kariba project; the responsibility for distributing funds to stakeholders “was never with South Pole.” The company said in a press release last year that the Follow the Money investigation had been published “out of context,” and that the company’s intention has always been to “do well as a business by doing good, including creating lasting impact in some of the world’s poorest places.” Several months later, the company cut ties with the Kariba project, though it said it “continues to believe in the significance” of the project for local communities.

The Africa Carbon Markets Initiative did not respond to Grist’s request for comment, and Carbon Green Investments could not be reached.

Meanwhile, carbon credit activity on the continent seems to be growing: Based on Carbon Market Watch’s analysis of publicly available data, 841 projects based in Africa issued 17 percent of global carbon credits between 2020 and 2024, up from 433 projects issuing 7 percent of credits between 2010 and 2020. 

Wyburd, with Carbon Market Watch, said he isn’t against carbon credits necessarily. “I think there are good projects,” he said. “I think there are developers and implementers trying to make a real difference. But it’s difficult to differentiate them from the bad, and that is inherently because of this lack of transparency.” 

Although the voluntary carbon market is not formally regulated, Wyburd called for stronger disclosure requirements from bodies like the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, a nonprofit governance body that aims to provide oversight for the sector. His report recommended that companies make project-level financial reports publicly available, and that standards bodies conduct regular audits to make sure documents are accurate and up to date.

Some environmental groups are less optimistic. In its publication last year, the coalition of African environmental groups asked African governments to “withdraw from and take no further interest” in any carbon market mechanisms. To fund sustainable development, they said African nations should: create a “polluters pay fund” that charges companies per ton of carbon they emit, demand that wealthy countries send more climate finance and cancel “odious debts,” and redirect fossil fuel subsidies toward renewable energy.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/08/09/carbon-credits-are-supposed-to-funnel-money-to-poor-countries-do-they/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

NATO’s expansionary military targets are deeply at odds with the need to scale down global emissions to avoid deepening the climate crisis. Nato’s goal of dedicating 2% of GDP to military spending is set to exacerbate climate breakdown by diverting billions of dollars away from essential climate investment and significantly increasing CO2 emissions.

By its own admission, Nato recognises that climate change increasingly threatens its missions and operations worldwide. In Iraq, extreme heat and frequent dust storms have disrupted operations. In Kosovo, wildfires and severe flooding have become more common. In the Arctic, melting ice and unpredictable weather have complicated navigation and logistics, while in Africa, prolonged droughts and desertification destabilise regions and exacerbate conflicts over resources. NATO’s Mediterranean missions are also affected by rising sea levels and hotter temperatures, threatening coastal installations and impacting personnel health.

In 2023 alone, Nato members collectively spent $1.26 trillion on their military, an increase of $126 billion on 2022. This staggering sum could have covered twelve years of the promised, and still not delivered, $100 billion annual climate finance to support low- and middle-income countries. Rich, polluting nations are now three years overdue on their commitment to mobilise this $100 billion annually. However, the reality is even grimmer. According to Oxfam’s Climate Finance Shadow Report 2023, while donors claimed to have mobilised $83.3 billion in 2020, the actual value is likely closer to $24.5 billion. The inflated figure includes projects with overstated climate objectives and loans cited at their face value, not accounting for the financial burden these loans place on already indebted countries. 

Military expenditures directly contribute to environmental degradation through increased carbon emissions. Nato’s overall military spending in 2023 of $1.34 trillion produced an estimated 233 million metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e). This is more than Colombia’s or Qatar’s annual GHG emissions. The UK, along with the US, Poland, Greece, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, and Latvia, have gone beyond the 2% target. Earlier this year, then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak increased defence spending to 2.5% of the GDP in 2024. The current Labour government has retained this policy. 

The current global situation is dire. As the world edges closer to irreversible environmental change, armed conflicts and violence are escalating. Between 2021 and 2023, casualties surged dramatically due to four major conflicts: the civil wars in Ethiopia’s Tigray region and Sudan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. During this period, no fewer than 59 state-based conflicts were recorded across 34 countries: the highest level since 1946.

Nato’s priorities are morally indefensible on a number of levels. In terms of our environment, while Nato countries pour billions into military budgets, contributing significantly to environmental degradation, they fail to meet their climate finance commitments.

https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-earth-cant-endure-natos-ambitions/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

Joshua Frank, What (Not) to Do in a Tinder-Box World

POSTED ON AUGUST 13, 2024

What a planet we’re now on. Whether it’s days (the two hottest ever recorded, back to back), months (the 13 hottest in a row), or years (2023, the hottest ever by far), we’re now eternally setting new heat records. Oh, and in case that isn’t enough, we seem unable to ensure that ever more grim records won’t follow by cutting back radically on the flow of greenhouse gasses from fossil fuels we’re sending into the atmosphere in a distinctly overheated fashion. The latest example: emissions from methane (responsible for “half of the global heating already experienced”) which are still rising remarkably rapidly across the planet.

And whether it’s floods or fires, the result of such emissions and a significantly hotter planet is weather that’s all too literally from hell. If, in fact, you happen to be living in certain parts of California, for years now you’ve been experiencing both devastating fires (2021, typically, was the driest in that state in at least a century) and devastating atmospheric rivers in a record fashion. The latest of that state’s horrific blazes, which are getting worse thanks to climate change, is the Park Fire. While I was writing this, it had already burned through 389,791 acres (609 square miles) and was still only 18% contained, which already made it the fifth-largest fire in the state’s history and, mind you, it was just one of 100 fires burning across the West.

The governor of California, Gavin Newsom (unlike governors in states like Florida and Louisiana who have functionally denied the very existence of climate change), has gained a reputation for working to rein in global warming and transition to a 100% clean energy grid, including a state ban on the sales of fossil-fuel powered cars by 2035. And yet it tells us something about the all-American world we now live in that even Newsom, as TomDispatchregular Joshua Frank reports today, is all too ready to take his eye off the prize when local politics makes such an approach seem useful, if not enticing, to him. How truly sad! Tom

“Where California Goes, There Goes the Nation”

Gavin Newsom’s War on Rooftop Solar Is a Bad Omen for the Country

BY JOSHUA FRANK

California Governor Gavin Newsom appears to be taking climate change seriously, at least when he’s in front of a microphone and flashing cameras. His talk then is direct and tough. He repeatedly points out that the planet is in danger and appears ready to act. He’s been called a “climate-change crusader” and a leader of America’s clean energy revolution.

“[California is] meeting the moment head-on as the hots get hotter, the dries get drier, the wets get wetter, simultaneous droughts and rain bombs,” Newsom typically asserted in April 2024 during an event at Central Valley Farm, which is powered by solar panels and batteries. “We have to address these issues with a ferocity that is required of us.”

These are exactly the types of remarks many of us wish we had heard from so many other elected officials addressing the climate disaster this planet’s becoming, the culprits behind it, and how we might begin to fix it. True, Big Oil long covered upinternal research about how devastating climate change would be while lying through its teeth as its officials and lobbyists worked fiercely against any kind of global-warming-directed fossil-fuel legislation. It’s also correct that the issue must be addressed immediately and forcefully. Yet, whatever Governor Newsom might say, he’s also played a role in launching a war on rooftop solar power and so kneecapping California just when it was making remarkable strides in that very area of development.

Consider California’s residential solar program (its “net-metering“), which the governor has all but dismantled. Believe it or not, in December 2022, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted 5-0 to slash incentives for residents to place more solar power on their homes. Part of the boilerplate justification offered by the CPUC, Newsom, and the state’s utility companies was that payments to individuals whose houses produce such power were simply too high and badly impacted poor communities that had to deal with those rate increases. They’ve called this alleged problem a “cost-shift” from the wealthy to the poor. It matters not at all that the CPUC, which oversees consumer electric rates, has continually approved rate increases over the years. Solar was now to blame.

It’s true that property owners do place those solar power panels on their roofs. What is not true is that solar only benefits the well-to-do. A 2022 study by Lawrence Berkeley Labs showed that 60% of all solar users in California then were actually low- to middle-income residents. In addition, claiming that residential solar power is significantly responsible for driving the state’s electricity rates up just isn’t true either. Those rates have largely risen because of the eternal desire of California’s utility companies to turn a profit.

Here’s an example of how those rates work and why they’ve gone up. Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), whose downed power lines have been responsible for an estimated 30 major wildfires in California over the past six overheating years, was forced to pay $13.9 billion in settlement money for the damage done. The company has also been found guilty of 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter for deaths in the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County. In response to those horrific blazes and the damages they inflicted, the company claims it must now spend more than $5.9 billion to bury its aging infrastructure to avoid future wildfires in our tinder-box of a world. Watchdog groups suggest that it’s those investments that are raising electric bills across the state, not newly installed solar power.

In short, large utilities make their money by repairing and expanding the energy grid. Residential solar directly threatens that revenue stream because it doesn’t rely on an ever-expanding network of power stations and transmission lines. The electricity that residential solar power produces typically remains at the community level or, better yet, in the home itself, especially if coupled with local battery storage. Not surprisingly then, by 2018, 20 transmission lines had been canceled in California, mainly because so many homes were already producing solar power on their own rooftops, saving $2.6 billion in total consumer energy costs.

A recent Colorado-based Vibrant Clean Energy analysis confirmed the savings rooftop solar provides to ratepayers. Their report estimated that, by 2050, rooftop panels would save California ratepayers $120 billion. That would also save energy companies from spending far more money on the grid (but, of course, that’s the only way they turn a profit).

“What our model finds is that when you account for the costs associated with distribution grid infrastructure, distributed energy resources can produce a pathway that is lower cost for all ratepayers and emits fewer greenhouse gas emissions,” said Dr. Christopher Clack of Vibrant Clean Energy. “Our study shows this is true even as California looks to electrify other energy sectors like transportation.”

However, such lower costs also mean less profits for utility companies, so they have found an ingenious workaround. They could appease climate concerns while making a bundle of money by building large solar farms in the desert. In the process, nothing about how they generated revenue would change, energy costs would continue to rise, and little would stand in their way, not even a vulnerable forest of Joshua trees.

Solar Panels vs. the Joshua Tree

“Why Razing Joshua Trees for Solar Farms Isn’t Always Crazy,” a troubling Los Angeles Times headline read. Sammy Roth, an intrepid environmental reporter who has written insightfully and cogently on the way humanity is altering the climate, was nonetheless all in on uprooting thousands of Joshua trees in California’s Kern County to make space for that giant solar farm. The “Aratina Solar Project,” a sprawling 2,300-acre installation in the heart of the Mojave Desert, would transfer electricity to wealthy coastal areas, powering more than 180,000 homes. As Roth reported, “There are places to build solar projects besides pristine ecosystems. But there’s no get-out-of-climate-change-free card… Hence the need to accept killing some Joshua trees in the name of saving more Joshua trees. I feel kind of terrible saying that.”

He should feel terrible. Roth believes that tearing up Joshua trees, already in great jeopardy due to our warming climate, is the price that must be paid to save ourselves from ourselves. But is sacrificing wild spaces — and, in this case, also threatening the habitat of the desert tortoise — truly worth it? Is this really the best solution we can come up with in our overheating world? There do appear to be better options, but they would also upend the status quo and put far less money in the pockets of utility shareholders.

Here’s how Californians could think outside the box or, in this case, on top of it. A single Walmart roof averages 180,000 square feet. In California, there are 309Walmarts. That’s 55,620,000 square feet or 1,276 acres of rooftop. Home Depots? There are 247 of them in California and each of their roofs averages 104,000 square feet, totaling 25,668,000 square feet, or around 589 acres. Throw in 318 Target stores, averaging 125,000 square feet, and you have over 39,750,000 square feet or another 912 acres. Add all of those up and you have 2,777 acres of rooftops that could be turned into mini-solar farms.

In other words, just three big box stores in California cities ripe for solar power would provide more acreage than the 2,300-acre Joshua-tree-destroying solar installation in Kern County. And that doesn’t even include all the Costcos (129), Lowes (111), Amazon warehouses (100+), Ikeas (8), strip malls, schools, municipal buildings, parking lots, and so much more that would provide far better options.

You get the picture. The potential for solar in our built environment is indeed enormous. Throw in the more than 5.6 million single-family homes in California with no solar panels, and there’s just so much rooftop real estate that could generate electricity without wrecking entire ecosystems already facing a frighteningly hot future.

In 2014, it was estimated that solar power from California homes produced 2.2 gigawatts of energy. Ten years later, that potential is so much greater. As of summer 2024, the state has 1.9 million residential rooftop solar installations capable of churning out 16.7 gigawatts of power. It’s estimated that 1 gigawatt can conservatively power 750,000 homes. This means that the solar generation now installed on California’s roofs could theoretically, if stored, power 12,525,000 homes in a state with only 7.5 million of them. Already, in 2022, it’s believed that the state wasted nearly 2.3 million megawatt-hours worth of solar-produced electricity. 

And mind you, this isn’t just back-of-the-napkin math. A 2021 geospatial analysis of rooftop solar conducted by researchers at Ireland’s University of Cork and published in Nature confirmed what many experts have long believed: that the U.S. has enough usable rooftop space to supply the entire country’s energy demands and, with proper community-based storage, would be all we would need to fulfill our energy production demands — and then some! If properly deployed, the U.S. could produce 4.2 petawatt-hours per year of rooftop solar electricity, more than the country consumestoday. (A petawatt-hour is a unit of energy equal to one trillion kilowatt-hours.) The report also noted that there are enough rooftops worldwide to potentially fully feed the world’s energy appetite.

If residential solar has succeeded exceptionally well and has so much possibility, why are we intent on destroying desert ecology with massive, industrial-scale solar farms? The answer in Gavin Newsom’s California has much more to do with politics and corporate avarice than with mitigating climate change.

Profit-Driven Utilities

Despite what Governor Newsom and the California Public Utilities Commission have claimed, electric rates have increased not because of solar power’s massive success but because of old-school capitalist greed.

“Rooftop solar has value in avoiding costs that utilities would have to pay to deliver that same kilowatt-hour of energy, such as investments in transmission lines and other grid infrastructure,” reports the solar-advocacy group, Solar Rights Alliance. “Rooftop solar also reduces the public health costs of fossil-fuel power plants and the costs to ratepayers of utility-caused wildfires and power shut-offs. Rooftop solar also provides quantifiable benefits through local economic development and jobs. It preserves land that would otherwise be used for large-scale solar development. When paired with batteries, rooftop solar helps build community resilience.”

Nonetheless, blaming rooftop solar for California’s increased electricity rates has been a painfully effective argument. So, here’s a question to consider: Why does it seem like Newsom is working on behalf of the utilities to limit small-scale rooftop solar? Could it be related to the $10 million Pacific Gas & Electric donated to his campaigns since he first ran for office in San Francisco in the late 1990s? Or could it be because key members of his cabinet are tight with PG&E executives? (Dana Williamson, his current chief of staff, was a former director of public affairs at PG&E.)

Then, consider the potential conflict of interest when the law firm O’Melveny & Myers, which previously worked for PG&E, was tasked by Newsom with drafting wildfire legislation to save the company from bankruptcy. PG&E would, in fact, end up hammering out a deal with CPUC to pass on the costs of the bailout, a staggering $11 billion, to ratepayers over a 30-year period.

It all worked out well for the company. In 2023, PG&E, which serves 16 millionpeople, raked in $2.2 billion in profits, nearly a 25% jump from 2022.

“The coziness between Gavin Newsom and [PG&E] is unlike anything we’ve seen in California politics… Their motive is profit, which is driven by Wall Street,” says Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of California Solar & Storage Association, who has over a decade of experience monitoring the industry. “[The utility companies] have to keep posting record profits, quarter after quarter. It’s a perversity that nobody is really thinking about.”

It’s pretty simple really. Growth means more money for California’s utilities, so they’ve gone all in on expansive and destructive solar farms. Ultimately, this means higher bills for consumers to cover the costs of a grid they are forced to rely on as home solar systems become increasingly expensive.

(More) Bad News for the Climate

Newsom’s war on rooftop solar has had another detrimental impact: it’s threatened the state’s clean energy goals. And the governor hasn’t said a word about that. The California Energy Commission estimates that, to meet its climate benchmarks, the state must add 20,000 megawatts of rooftop solar electricity by 2030. At this pace, they’ll be lucky to install 10,000 megawatts. With such a precipitous decline in home solar installations, the 20,000 megawatts goal will never be reached by that year, even when you include all large-scale solar developments now in the works.

The Coalition for Community Solar Access estimates that 81% of solar companies in the state fear they’ll have to close up shop. Bad news for the solar industry also means bad news not just for California, the nation’s leader in solar energy production, but for the climate more generally.

A rapid decline in new solar installations also means massive job losses, possibly 22% of the state’s solar gigs, or up to 17,000 workers. In addition to such bleak projections, disincentivizing rooftop solar will also hurt the Californians most impacted by warming temperatures and in need of relief — those who can’t afford to live along the state’s more temperate coast.

“Rooftop solar is not just the wealthy homeowners anymore,” State Senator Josh Becker, a San Mateo Democrat, recently told CalMatters. “Central Valley people are suffering from extreme heat. The industry has been making great strides in low-income communities. This [utilities commission decision] makes it harder.”

The slow death of new residential solar installations is likely to mean that most of California’s electricity will continue to be made by burning natural gas and sending more fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere. All of this may also be a sign that rooftop solar across the country is in peril. Utility companies and those hoping to gut residential solar programs in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina are already humming Newsom’s “cost-shift” tune.

“They [the big utilities] know it’s a pivotal time,” Bernadette Del Chiaro tells me, with a sense of urgency and deep concern for what lies ahead. “They are fighting really hard, and they are fighting hardest in California because where California goes, there goes the nation.”

https://tomdispatch.com/where-california-goes-there-goes-the-nation/

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