Inside the 'Tokamak' fusion reactor under construction at the ITER fusion project in France, Sept. 2021. Still mostly an expensive and devilishly frustrating chimera.
In a dramatic scientific and engineering breakthrough, researchers at the Bay Area’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab recently achieved the long-sought goal of generating a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than was directly injected into a tiny reactor vessel. By the very next day, pundits well across the political spectrum were touting that breakthrough as a harbinger of a new era in energy production, suggesting that a future of limitless, low-impact fusion energy was perhaps a few decades away. In reality, however, commercially viable nuclear fusion is only infinitesimally closer than it was back in the 1980s when a contained fusion reaction – i.e. not occurring in the sun or from a bomb – was first achieved.
While most honest writers have at least acknowledged the obstacles to commercially-scaled fusion, they typically still underestimate them – as much so today as back in the 1980s. We are told that a fusion reaction would have to occur “many times a second” to produce usable amounts of energy. But the blast of energy from the LLNL fusion reactor actually only lasted one-tenth of a nanosecond – that’s a ten-billionth of a second. Apparently, other fusion reactions (with a net energy loss) have operated for a few nanoseconds, but reproducing this reaction over abillion times every second is far beyond what researchers are even contemplating.
We are told that the reactor produced about 1.5 times the amount of energy that was input, but this only counts the laser energy that actually struck the reactor vessel. That energy, which is necessary to generate temperatures over a hundred million degrees, was the product of an array of 192 high-powered lasers, which required well over 100 times as much energy to operate. Third, we are told that nuclear fusion will someday free up vast areas of land that are currently needed to operate solar and wind power installations. But the entire facility needed to house the 192 lasers and all the other necessary control equipment was large enough to contain three football fields, even though the actual fusion reaction takes place in a gold or diamond vessel smaller than a pea. All this just to generate the equivalent of about 10-20 minutes of energy that is used by a typical small home. Clearly, even the most inexpensive rooftop solar systems can already do far more. And Prof. Mark Jacobson’s group at Stanford University has calculated that a total conversion to wind, water and solar power might use about as much land as is currently occupied by the world’s fossil fuel infrastructure.
Long-time nuclear critic Karl Grossman wrote on CounterPunch recently of the many likely obstacles to scaling up fusion reactors, even in principle, including high radioactivity, rapid corrosion of equipment, excessive water demands for cooling, and the likely breakdown of components that would need to operate at unfathomably high temperatures and pressures. His main source on these issues is Dr. Daniel Jassby, who headed Princeton’s pioneering fusion research lab for 25 years. The Princeton lab, along with researchers in Europe, has led the development of a more common device for achieving nuclear fusion reactions, a doughnut-shaped or spherical vessel known as a tokamak. Tokamaks, which contain much larger volumes of highly ionized gas (actually a plasma, a fundamentally different state of matter), have achieved substantially more voluminous fusion reactions for several seconds at a time, but have never come close to producing more energy than is injected into the reactor.
The laser-mediated fusion reaction achieved at LBL occurred at a lab called the National Ignition Facility, which touts its work on fusion for energy, but is primarily dedicated to nuclear weapons research. Prof. M. V. Ramana of the University of British Columbia, whose recent article was posted on the newly revived ZNetwork, explains, “NIF was set up as part of the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program, which was the ransom paid to the US nuclear weapons laboratories for forgoing the right to test after the United States signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty” in 1996. It is “a way to continue investment into modernizing nuclear weapons, albeit without explosive tests, and dressing it up as a means to produce ‘clean’ energy.” Ramana cites a 1998 article that explained how one aim of laser fusion experiments is to try to develop a hydrogen bomb that doesn’t require a conventional fission bomb to ignite it, potentially eliminating the need for highly enriched uranium or plutonium in nuclear weapons.
While some writers predict a future of nuclear fusion reactors running on seawater, the actual fuel for both tokamaks and laser fusion experiments consists of two unique isotopes of hydrogen known as deuterium – which has an extra neutron in its nucleus – and tritium – with two extra neutrons. Deuterium is stable and somewhat common: approximately one out of every 5-6000 hydrogen atoms in seawater is actually deuterium, and it is a necessary ingredient (as a component of “heavy water”) in conventional nuclear reactors. Tritium, however, is radioactive, with a half-life of twelve years, and is typically a costly byproduct ($30,000 per gram) of an unusual type of nuclear reactor known as CANDU, mainly found today in Canada and South Korea. With half the operating CANDU reactors scheduled for retirement this decade, available tritium supplies will likely peak before 2030 and a new experimental fusion facility under construction in France will nearly exhaust the available supply in the early 2050s. That is the conclusion of a highly revealing article that appeared in Science magazine last June, months before the latest fusion breakthrough. While the Princeton lab has made some progress toward potentially recycling tritium, fusion researchers remain highly dependent on rapidly diminishing supplies. Alternative fuels for fusion reactors are also under development, based on radioactive helium or boron, but these require temperatures up to a billion degrees to trigger a fusion reaction. The European lab plans to experiment with new ways of generating tritium, but these also significantly increase the radioactivity of the entire process and a tritium gain of only 5 to 15 percent is anticipated. The more downtime between experimental runs, the less tritium it will produce. The Science article quotes D. Jassby, formerly of the Princeton fusion lab, saying that the tritium supply issue essentially “makes deuterium-tritium fusion reactors impossible.”
So why all this attention toward the imagined potential for fusion energy? It is yet another attempt by those who believe that only a mega-scaled, technology-intensive approach can be a viable alternative to our current fossil fuel-dependent energy infrastructure. Some of the same interests continue to promote the false claims that a “new generation” of nuclear fission reactors will solve the persistent problems with nuclear power, or that massive-scale capture and burial of carbon dioxide from fossil-fueled power plants will make it possible to perpetuate the fossil-based economy far into the future. It is beyond the scope of this article to systematically address those claims, but it is clear that today’s promises for a new generation of “advanced” reactors is not much different from what we were hearing back in the 1980s, ‘90s or early 2000s.
Nuclear whistleblower Arnie Gundersen has systematically exposed the flaws in the ‘new’ reactor design currently favored by Bill Gates, explaining that the underlying sodium-cooled technology is the same as in the reactor that “almost lost Detroit” due to a partial meltdown back in 1966, and has repeatedly caused problems in Tennessee, France and Japan. France’s nuclear energy infrastructure, which has long been touted as a model for the future, is increasingly plagued by equipment problems, massive cost overruns and some sources of cooling water no longer being cool enough, due to rising global temperatures. An attempt to export French nuclear technology to Finland took more than twenty years longer than anticipated, at many times the original estimated cost. As for carbon capture, we know that countless, highly subsidized carbon capture experiments have failed and that the vast majority of the CO2 currently captured from power plants is used for “enhanced oil recovery,” i.e. increasing the efficiency of existing oil wells. The pipelines that would be needed to actually collect CO2 and bury it underground would be comparable to the entire current infrastructure for piping oil and gas, and the notion of permanent burial will likely prove to be a pipedream.
Meanwhile, we know that new solar and wind power facilities are already cheaper to build than new fossil fueled power plants and in some locations are even less costly than continuing to operate existing power plants. Last May, California was briefly able to run its entire electricity grid on renewable energy, a milestone that had already been achieved in Denmark and in South Australia. And we know that a variety of energy storage methods, combined with sophisticated load management and upgrades to transmission infrastructure are already helping solve the problem of intermittency of solar and wind energy in Europe, California and other locations. At the same time, awareness is growing about the increasing reliance of renewable technology, including advanced batteries, on minerals extracted from Indigenous lands and the global South. Thus a meaningfully just energy transition needs to both be fully renewable, and also reject the myths of perpetual growth that emerged from the fossil fuel era. If the end of the fossil fuel era portends the end of capitalist growth in all its forms, it is clear that all of life on earth will ultimately be the beneficiary.
The opinions expressed in these articles are the author’s own, and may not represent this publication’s specific position.
An offshore Chinese wind turbine. Their size has grown enormously since the early days of this technology.
As the images suggest, a great deal is being invested in these technologies, and their maintenance and eventual replacement raises the issue of expanding global industrial refuse.
Are wind generators and solar panels a replacement for fossil fuels? A lot of people still seem to believe that, even after the recent flood of bad news on this front, but a few people are already beginning to suspect something.
Although some people claim that wind and solar farms have an EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) of 5 or even 7, it is trivial to prove that this just isn't so. If, for each 1 kWh of energy invested in their design, marketing, production, installation, maintenance, removal and safe disposal, they were to return 5 or even 7 kWh over their useful lifetime of, optimistically, 20 years, and assuming a constant (inflation-adjusted) cost of energy, they would produce at least 400% of pure profit! Compare that to a bank deposit or a guaranteed income investment yielding 3% over inflation (if you can find one!). Over the same 20 years it would produce a mere 80% profit, which is equivalent to an EROEI of just 1.8. If wind and solar installations were so lucrative, their promoters would not be asking for government subsidies; they would be running away from frenzied mobs of investors shouting "Shut up and take my money!" Such a huge, and guaranteed, rate of return, is something to die (or at least risk going to jail) for.
A "floating" solar power farm in Japan. The solar arrays sit atop crops. However, upon disposal, even with some recycling factored in, where will this kind of junk go?
Instead, the wind and solar energy sectors have turned into gigantic state subsidy sponges. Not only have they squandered money and natural resources, but they have become a major headache for grid operators because they have managed to force through regulations requiring grid operators to take whatever electricity they produce regardless of demand. However, there is generally little risk of them ever producing too much electricity; for instance, wind farms for all of 2021, for all of Germany, have produced just 20% of their rated capacity and solar farms barely over 10%. In any case, all they have to show for several trillion dollars of squandered public funds, and huge swaths of land and sea blighted by their installations, are much higher electricity rates. In Russia, which has so far avoided this green plague and has instead concentrated on developing hydroelectric and nuclear generation capacity, electricity rates are 10 (ten!) times lower than in the West. Thus, the real EROEI of wind and solar is not 5 or even 7 but much less than zero: they are a net waste of energy.
While such very simple analysis is sufficient to demonstrate that wind and solar farms are not just unprofitable but a net waste of energy, a more in-depth look would reveal that they also impose exorbitant costs on the rest of the electric grid. That is, if wind and solar installations were entirely free, connecting them to the electric grid imposes costs on other energy producers because their output fluctuates randomly, depending, as it does, on the availability of wind and sunlight, instead of being matched to real-time electricity demand. This forces other electricity producers to waste fuel, whether by spinning idly or by rapidly ramping up and down, in order to compensate. In turn, this causes energy rates to fluctuate wildly (in some cases going negative on cool, sunny, windy days while shooting up into the stratosphere on cold or hot, overcast and windless ones), making it impossible for energy-intensive businesses to plan their production so as to avoid financial losses.
The problem of ragged energy generation from wind and solar, which is unmatched to real-time energy demand, could be remedied by the introduction of mass energy storage, but electricity storage doesn't exist except for a few boutique applications, and scaling it up would only compound the overall waste of energy. There are just a few locations on Earth that could reasonably be used for mass electric storage: that is where there is a lake at a high elevation in close proximity to a lake at a lower elevation that could be connected together using pipelines, pumps and turbines; all other mass electricity storage ideas have so far turned out to be duds and, given the physics of the problem, are likely to remain so. Thus, it would be far more cost-effective and energy-efficient, overall, to keep wind and solar farms disconnected from the electric grid; not as good as never building them at all, but a major step in the right direction. As far as building any more of them, here is an interesting datapoint: spot prices for polycrystalline silicon, a major ingredient in solar panels, having reached an all-time low of $6.30/kg in mid-2020 have since gone up 600% to $36/kg and are now predicted to continue to increase over time.
In September 2019 Dongfang Electric (DEC) took the wraps off China’s first 10MW turbine. The turbine will boast a 185-metre rotor diameter, “suitable for offshore projects with 8.5-10 metres/second wind speeds.”
Thus, the effective EROEI of wind and solar farms is comparable to that of a classic cargo cult, in which native tribes that have become inured to the indignity of regular airlifts providing them with humanitarian relief in the form of, say, beer and pizza, when suddenly deprived of this affront to their native dignity, take to building fake airstrips with fake control towers, and burning bonfires in place of runway lights, in the hopes of luring more transport planes laden with aforementioned beer and pizza. The natives then sit around and wait for some transport planes to land, remaining hungry and sober. Eventually, sanity returns and they wander off into the jungle in search of something to eat. With regard to renewable energy, we are not quite there yet, but it may be time to try to move things along because with any more of this nonsense a lot of people will end up very cold and very hungry—and very angry as well.
Dmitry Orlov (born 1962) is a Russian-American engineer and writer on subjects related to "potential economic, ecological and political decline and collapse in the United States", something he has called "permanent crisis". Orlov believes collapse will be the result of huge military budgets, government deficits, an unresponsive political system and declining oil production. Orlov was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and moved to the United States at the age of 12. He has a BS in Computer Engineering and an MA in Applied Linguistics. He was an eyewitness to the collapse of the Soviet Union over several extended visits to his Russian homeland between the late 1980s and mid-1990s. In 2005 and 2006 Orlov wrote a number of articles comparing the collapse-preparedness of the U.S. and the Soviet Union published on small Peak Oil related sites. Orlov’s article "Closing the 'Collapse Gap': the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US" was very popular at EnergyBulletin.Net. He continues to write regularly on his “Club Orlov” blog and at EnergyBulletin.Net. You can support Dmitry's work by contributing to his Patreon account.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
All image captions, pull quotes, appendices, etc. by the editors not the authors.
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Up to You.
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We don't live in a democracy. And our freedom is disappearing fast.
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JOE BIDEN IS CONTINUING DONALD TRUMP’S DEFORESTATION PLANS
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Despite pledging to reverse deforestation at COP26 this week, the Biden administration is moving forward with a plan that would devastate a major national forest’s old-growth trees and grizzly bear habitat.
Rick Bass says he does not consider himself a “typical tree hugger.” The 63-year-old Texas transplant is an avid hunter and started his professional life as an oil and gas geologist. But Bass fell in love with the Rocky Mountains in college, and in 1987, he moved to a “blank spot on the map”—the remote wilderness of the Yaak Valley in Northwestern Montana.
Bass, never quite at home anywhere else, found himself surrounded by a rugged landscape of rocky peaks and coniferous forests, including the Kootenai National Forest. To hear him tell it, there is nowhere quite like the Yaak Valley.
On Biden’s watch, the US Forest Service is quietly moving forward with a series of Donald Trump–era plans to open up commercial logging in the Kootenai, despite the fact that the impacts of these projects were never subjected to rigorous analysis.
It wouldn’t take long for Bass to realize that the area was under constant threat from road construction and commercial logging, because of the untapped timber in the area. In 1997, Bass and three other social activists cofounded the Yaak Valley Forest Council (YVFC) to protect the natural habitat of the “sensitive, threatened, and endangered species” around him, including grizzly bears and lynxes.
More than two decades later, they’re still fighting—and they say the Joe Biden administration isn’t helping.
On Tuesday, president Joe Biden was one of 100-plus world leaders who pledged to end and reverse deforestation by 2030 during the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland. His Build Back Better framework, similarly, pledges “historic” investment in forest management.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, Biden has been plowing ahead with his predecessor’s approach to deforestation of public lands in the Kootenai National Forest.
On Biden’s watch, the US Forest Service is quietly moving forward with a series of Donald Trump–era plans to open up commercial logging in the Kootenai, despite the fact that the impacts of these projects were never subjected to rigorous analysis.
Bass says he was initially relieved about Biden’s presidential win in 2020, hoping it would bring about a shift away from the Trump administration’s permissive environmental stewardship. But the continuation of logging projects have left him feeling betrayed.
“This is not the man I voted for, and in my opinion, he is not keeping his word about science and climate change,” Bass says. “Our national forests absorb 12% of CO2. Please do the math, Joe.”
‘THE SPAWN OF A TRUMP EXECUTIVE ORDER’
Located south of Canada’s boreal forest, the Kootenai is a picturesque old-growth forest, meaning it contains trees that are hundreds of years old. Douglas fir, subalpine fir, lodgepole pine, western red cedar, and other trees make up its canopies. The ecosystem is one of the most diverse in the state of Montana, serving as a vital corridor for a number of threatened species, including grizzlies.
Wayne Kasworm, a wildlife biologist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, tells us that there are 55 to 60 grizzlies in the region. The region’s bear population has been listed as endangered for years, and Kasworm says that for the population to stabilize, there would need to be at least 100 bears in the area connected to surrounding populations either in the United States or Canada.
“Continued growth is dependent upon low levels of human-caused mortality and the continued habitat protections put in place, largely through motorized access management,” says Kasworm, referring to a system for establishing limits on road density and keeping core areas free of roads.
Plans from the Forest Service could complicate that goal. In November 2020, after months of president Donald Trump complaining about agency mismanagement, the Forest Service created a new rule to exempt many logging projects from rigorous reviews.
The rule did so by relaxing the standards of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). As the Washington Postnoted at the time, “The rule change . . . gives Forest Service officials broad authority to use loopholes called categorical exclusions to bypass NEPA requirements.” The Post noted: “Categorical exclusions are projects deemed to have no environmental impact, and as the rule is written, they can be applied across the nearly 200 million acres of forest that the Forest Service manages.”
According to Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies (AFWR), which works to protect the Northern Rockies from habitat destruction, the rule was a culmination of decades of political support for the logging industry, despite environmental concerns, that dates back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan and Obama: Different labels for the same capitalist poison.
The support hasn’t been limited to Republican administrations. Garrity says that logging “really went up under [Barack] Obama.”
Out of the new Trump logging rule arose the nearly 100,000-acre Black Ram Project. Currently in the public comment period, Black Ram would authorize commercial harvesting of 4,000 acres in the Kootenai National Forest, including clear cuts of roughly 580 acres of hundred-year-old trees. The area to be logged would include parts of the national forest’s grizzly bear recovery zone, says Kasworm.
The YVFC is one of several environmental groups that oppose the project, which the council’s cofounder, Bass, characterizes as a “Trump zombie sale,” borrowing the term from environmentalist Bill McKibben.
“It’s the spawn of a Trump executive order directing the Forest Service to increase the volume of logging by 40% on public lands,” says Bass.
Bass notes that “there are now five current or upcoming contiguous projects” on the Three Rivers Ranger District of the Kootenai, which totals more than 314,000 acres, and he says that none have undergone rigorous environmental review. He calls the area “the meat of the Yaak,” explaining that it represents “a third of a million acres, in the habitat of the most endangered grizzly bear population on the continent.”
Kasworm is less concerned about the project. “The Black Ram timber sale has gone through consultation with the US Fish and Wildlife Service,” he says. “It is the service’s opinion that the effects of the proposed Black Ram Project on grizzly bears are not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the grizzly bear.”
Kasworm added:
The project may result in adverse effects to a few individual female grizzly bears as a consequence of the potential disturbance and/or displacement related to the temporary increases in motorized access in the action area that could displace grizzly bears from otherwise suitable habitats.
‘WE SHOULD NOT BE CUTTING THEM’
Despite opposition from environmental groups and Biden’s recent statements about deforestation and protecting public lands, it is very possible that Black Ram moves ahead.
Under Biden, the Forest Service already approved the controversial Ripley Project in May, which authorized commercial logging of nearly 17 square miles as well as road and trail building in the lower end of “the Yaak”—a region Bass says includes “all the lands lying north of the Kootenai River, east of Idaho, south of Canada, and west of the artificial impoundment of Lake Koocanusa.” Roughly 30% of that logging would involve clear cuts.
Bass is even more concerned with Black Ram. He explains that the project impacts “the oldest forest in Montana, and the most mysterious, with large sections having never burned; possessing the oldest trees; holding beneath its roots the most water.”
He adds that the logging project is a transnational issue, because Yaak grizzlies go back and forth across the border with Canada.
The Forest Service claims Black Ram and Ripley projects are necessary to reduce the risk of wildfires in the region and promote healthy forest growth. But studies indicate that logging can actually increase the severity of wildfires.
According to expert analysis by the Bushfire Recovery Project, the likelihood of a crown burn, in which the tree canopy burns, is roughly 10% in old-growth forests, compared to 70% in forests that have been logged in the past 15 years, since such projects trigger an upswell of young fire-prone trees, dry out plants and soil, and increase wind speeds through the forests.
According to expert analysis by the Bushfire Recovery Project, the likelihood of a crown burn … is roughly 10% in old-growth forests, compared to 70% in forests that have been logged in the past 15 years.
Reducing fire risk isn’t the only reason to protect old-growth trees like those in the Kootenai National Forest, says Joan Maloof, executive director of the Old-Growth Forest Network, which also opposes the Black Ram Project.
“Old-growth forests, in particular, are rare and precious, and we should not be cutting them,” says Maloof. “We only have 4% left [of these old-growth forests] in the western US. Old-growth forests are habitat for thousands of species, and they store more carbon than any other type of forest, keeping it out of the atmosphere. Logging releases that carbon.”
To try to stop the Black Ram Project, AFWR has already filed an administrative objection to the plan. The group is also willing to go to court over the matter; in late September, Garrity’s organization filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Ripley Project, and he says it is likely to do the same over the Black Ram Project.
“We can’t sue on that one until the forest supervisor signs a decision,” says Garrity. “And he has not yet done so.”
To Bass, the Forest Service’s Black Ram plan is a desecration. Archaeologists estimate that human beings have been in the Yaak Valley for at least 8,000 years, but the ecosystem itself is far older. Formed by glaciers thousands of years ago, the area still bears the remnants of ancient history. For that reason, Bass says standing in the Kootenai is “humbling.”
“It changes your scale of time, the way we often do when we’re in the presence of something that is sublime and complicated and beautiful,” he says. Walking through the cedar fronds and fir trees, he knows how important it is to tread carefully.
As he puts it, “You’re very aware of the strangeness underfoot—that you’re walking across the carcasses of millennia.”
Walker Bragman is a journalist and JD whose work has been featured in Paste Magazine, the Intercept, HuffPost, the Independent, Salon, Truthout, and the Hill.
Thank you for visiting our ecoanimal defence section. Before leaving, please take a moment to reflect on these mind-numbing institutionalized cruelties. The wheels of business and human food compulsions—often exacerbated by reactionary creeds— are implacable and totally lacking in compassion. This is a downed cow, badly hurt, but still being dragged to slaughter. Click on this image to fully appreciate this horror repeated millions of times every day around the world. With plentiful non-animal meat substitutes that fool the palate, there is no longer reason for this senseless suffering. And meat consumption is a serious ecoanimal crime. The tyranny of the palate must be broken. Please consider changing your habits and those around you in this regard.
Up to You.
^3000US citizens have no real political representation.
We don't live in a democracy. And our freedom is disappearing fast.
I don't want to be ruled by hypocrites, whores, and war criminals.
What about you? Time to push back against the corporate oligarchy.
And its multitude of minions and lackeys.
The Paris Climate Agreement Is Pure PR, A Fraud.
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PATRICE GREANVILLE
Ever since the Paris Accords, signed, after grotesque delays, in 2015 by 196 countries, representing almost the totality of politically organized humanity, I have denounced this treaty as being more a case of window-dressing and cynical p.r. than a serious attempt to push back against the dreadful consequences of capitalogenic climate change and its usual correlate, unrelenting ecological destruction. It is therefore a pleasure that a man whose work I esteem highly, historian Eric Zuesse, has now produced something that is as conclusive about this topic as the gravity of the situation requires. In 2010, in the wake of the BP Gulf disaster, I wrote an essay that sought to raise awareness about the deep cultural and systemic roots of the problem. Below a passage from that essay:
BP's oil blowout in the Gulf Coast is a tragedy of truly incalculable dimensions, in all likelihood a far more severe reminder than the Exxon Valdez of humanity's malignant connection with oil. The global corporate class --which has effectively blocked and coopted humanity's advance toward a more democratic and probably "ecofriendlier" world for many decades--had ample warning about the high probability and ecological cost of its short-term profit policies. Mostly unreported or downplayed by the corporate media, which every day that passes lengthens its record of complicity in its masters' crimes (and I'm not even thinking here of Fox News, which is by design a criminal enterprise), the oil industry has seen thousands of accidents injurious to the environment just in the last quarter-century. Many of these in the Gulf Coast, on platforms similar to BP's Deepwater Horizon, which now threatens to wipe out a huge and critical ecosystem in a single blow. How could anything so despicable, affecting at least four states, the health of the world's oceans, countless animals, and precious swamplands, happen so easily?
The short answer that few want to hear is that with this incident the Gulf Coast was at last predictably sacrificed to capitalism on the scaffolding of political chicanery it has erected over many decades to hide its pestilential control of all political institutions in America. It was bound to happen. As far as the Earth is concerned, a business firm operating in the merry Reaganesque/Thatcherite universe of unregulated capitalism is an insidious cancer engaged in obsessive expansion till its host collapses. And harbor no illusions: regulated capitalism can only delay the inevitable, for even under "best behaviour" a capitalist entity that indulges its central defining obsession to grow continually at all costs in a very finite and increasingly fragile planet is clearly on a collision course with nature.—PG
The Paris Climate Agreement Is Pure PR, A Fraud.
By Eric Zuesse
The Wikipedia article on the 2015 “Paris Agreement” says that “Negotiations in Paris took place over a two-week span, and continued throughout the three final nights.[10]” and that:
The negotiations almost failed because of a single word when the US legal team realised at the last minute that "shall" had been approved, rather than "should", meaning that developed countries would have been legally obliged to cut emissions: the French solved the problem by changing it as a "typographical error".[13] [That statement — that France instead of America raised the objection to “shall” — is false. Actually, it was the chief American negotiator, Todd Stern, who labelled it that and demanded it to be eliminated from the text.] At the conclusion of COP21 (the 21st meeting of the Conference of the Parties), on 12 December 2015, the final wording of the Paris Agreement was adopted by consensus by the 195 UNFCCC participating member states and the European Union.[14]Nicaraguaindicated they had wanted to object to the adoption as they denounced the weakness of the Agreement, but were not given a chance.[15][16]In the Agreement the members promised toreduce their carbon output"as soon as possible" and to do their best to keep global warming "to well below 2 degrees C" (3.6 °F).[17]
In my first inaugural address, I committed this country to the tireless task of combating climate change and protecting this planet for future generations. Two weeks ago, in Paris, I said before the world that we needed a strong global agreement to accomplish this goal -- an enduring agreement that reduces global carbon pollution and sets the world on a course to a low-carbon future. A few hours ago, we succeeded. We came together around the strong agreement the world needed. We met the moment. I want to commend President Hollande and Secretary-General Ban for their leadership and for hosting such a successful summit, and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius for presiding with patience and resolve. And I want to give a special thanks to Secretary John Kerry, my Senior Advisor Brian Deese, our chief negotiator Todd Stern, and everyone on their teams for their outstanding work and for making America proud.
It was nothing but theater, to fool the public. It succeeded in doing that.
Here is how Britain’s Guardian, under the headline “How a ‘typo’ nearly derailed the Paris climate deal”, phrased the matter: this Agreement was, confirmed by US secretary of state, John Kerry, that the US had objected to Article 4.4 on page 21 of the 31-page final agreement. US government lawyers had found, it was said to their horror, that they had unwittingly approved a vital word which could make the difference between rich countries being legally obliged to cut emissions rather than just having to try to: “shall” rather than “should”. Here is global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright on the significance of the two words: This article requires developed countries to undertake economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets but developing countries to only “continue to enhance” their mitigation efforts. In the draft that was presented for adoption there were two critical words - “shall” and “should”. The expression “shall” applied to the developed countries’ obligation and the word “should” applied to the developing countries’ obligation.
There was a crisis. According to some, it had always been intended that both rich and poor countries should have the same obligation, namely “should”, not “shall”. This was of huge importance to the US especially, which, it said, would have had difficulty signing up to any legally binding obligation to implement its reduction target.
One reporter, at the time, Lisa Friedman, of Climate Wire, said that when “the Americans spotted the ‘shall’, word began to spread that the United States had a problem.” It was the Obama-appointed chief U.S. negotiator, Todd Stern, who noticed the word, called it “a clerical error,” and demanded that it be replaced by the legally empty “should.” It wasn’t the French Government that raised the objection and gutted the text, but, instead, Obama’s negotiator, who did this gutting of the text.
In other words: the U.S., which had contributed far more to creating climate-change than had any other single country, and which had reaped the vast economic benefits from all of that fossil-fuels burning, was demanding that the poor countries, which were only beginning to industrialize, must be obligated just as much as the U.S. would be obligated, to reduce fossil-fuels-burning, or else the U.S. wouldn’t sign the Agreement — and neither would its allies, such as France.
In order to understand Obama’s motive in this, one must understand his motive in a certain key phrase that he used throughout his Presidency but which was downplayed by the press and therefore never attracted the public’s attention as it should have done.
Barack Obama repeatedly referred to the United States as being the only indispensable nation — that all others are “dispensable” — such as when President Obama addressed America’s future military leaders, at West Point, on 28 May 2014, by telling them:
The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.
In the age of oil, and due to capitalism's moral myopia, animals have always paid an enormous price for human miscalculations.
He was telling the military that America’s economic competition, against the BRICS nations, is a key matter for America’s military, and not only for America’s private corporations; that U.S. taxpayers fund America’s military at least partially in order to impose the wills and extend the wealth of the stockholders in America’s corporations abroad; and that the countries against which America is in economic competition are “dispensable” but America “is and remains the one indispensable nation.” This, supposedly, also authorizes America’s weapons and troops to fight against countries whose “governments seek a greater say in global forums.” In other words: Stop the growing economies from growing faster than America’s. There is another name for the American Government’s supremacist ideology. This term is “fascism.”
So, Obama’s representatives demanded that the word “should” would apply not only to the poor countries (as in the original draft) but to the rich countries, including the U.S. — and Obama got his way, at the very close of the conference, in order to have the PR benefit of seeming, to the gullible throughout the world, to be in favor of halting global warming. It was pure PR (for Obama, and also for leaders of the other highly-developed countries; and, thus, global warming won’t be affected, at all, by the Paris Climate Agreement, nor by the other, similarly insincere, mouthings by billionaire-financed ‘environmentalist’ ‘charities’. It is all theater.
However, this does not mean that there is no possible way that humans might be able to halt and to undo the catastrophic harm and terminal danger that we have perpetrated upon the biosphere. There might be such a way, but it has nothing to do with any international agreements, and it also has nothing directly to do with suppressing the consumption of fossil fuels, but it is instead entirely focused upon outlawing the purchase of investments in fossil-fuels-extraction corporations such as ExxonMobil.
The way to stop global warming (if it still can be stopped) is to ban purchases of stocks and of bonds — i.e., of all forms of investment securities (corporate shares and even loans being made to the corporation) — of enterprises that extract from the ground (land or else underwater) fossil fuels: coal, oil, and/or gas.
For example: in 2017, the world’s largest fossil-fuels extractors were, in order: 1. Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia billionaires); 2. Chevron (U.S. billionaires); 3. Gazprom (Russia billionaires); 4. ExxonMobil (U.S. billionaires); 5. National Iranian Oil Co. (Iran billionaires); 6. BP (UK billionaires); 7. Shell (Netherlands billionaires); 8. Coal India (India billionaires); 9. PEMEX (Mexico billionaires); 10. Petroleos de Venezuela (Venezuela billionaires); 11. PetroChina/CNPC (China billionaires); and 12. Peabody Energy (U.S. billionaires). (NOTE: U.S. billionaires, allied with Saudi, UK, Netherlands, and India, billionaires, are trying to absorb, into their team, Russia, Iran, Mexico, Venezuela, and China, each of which latter nations had actually nationalized their fossil fuels, so that those nations’ Government, instead of any billionaires, would own those assets, in the name of all of the given nation’s residents. Though Russia ended its side of the Cold War in 1991, the U.S.-and-allied side of the Cold War secretly continued, and continues, today. Consequently, the U.S.-led team failed to achieve total conquest of the Russia-led team, and is now increasingly trying to do that: achieve total global hegemony, so that the entire world will be controlled only by U.S.-and-allied billionaires. This explains a lot of today’s international relations.) All fossil-fuels extractors compete ferociously, as producers of a basic global commodity, but the proposal that is being made here will affect all of them and all countries, even if it is done by only one country.
It needs to be outlawed (in some major country, perhaps even just one) in order to save our planet. Here’s how and why doing that in even just a single country might save the planet (this is a bit long and complicated, but avoiding global catastrophe is worth the trouble, so, you might find it worth your while to read this):
These companies exist in order to discover, extract, refine, and market, fossil fuels, in order for these fuels to be burned — but those activities are killing this planet. Buying stock in, and lending money to, these firms doesn’t purchase their products, but it does incentivize all phases of these firms’ operations, including the discovery of yet more fields of oil, gas, and coal, to add yet more to their existing fossil-fuel reserves, all of which are discovered in order to be burned. Unless these companies’ stock-values are driven down to near zero and also no investor will be lending to them, all such operations will continue, and the Earth will therefore surely die from the resulting over-accumulation of global-warming gases, and increasing build-up of heat (the “greenhouse-effect”), from that burning.
To purchase stock in a fossil-fuel extractor — such as ExxonMobil or BP — or to buy their bonds or otherwise lend to them, is to invest in or fund that corporation’s employment of fossil-fuel explorers to discover new sources of oil, gas, or coal, to drill, and ultimately burn. Such newly discovered reserves are excess inventories that must never be burnt if this planet is to avoid becoming uninhabitable. But these firms nonetheless continue to employ people to find additional new places to drill, above and beyond the ones that they already own — which existing inventories are already so enormous as to vastly exceed what can be burnt without destroying the Earth many times over. To buy the stock in such corporations (or else lend to them) is consequently to fund the killing of our planet. It’s to fund an enormous crime, and should be treated as such. To invest in these companies should be treated as a massive crime.
The only people who will suffer from outlawing the purchase of stock in, and lending to, fossil-fuel extractors, are individuals who are already invested in those corporations. Since we’ve already got vastly excessive known reserves of fossil fuels, discovering yet more such reserves is nothing else than the biggest imaginable crime against all future-existing people, who can’t defend themselves against these activities that are being done today. Only our government, today, can possibly protect future people, and it will be to blame if it fails to do so. The single most effective way it can do this, its supreme obligation, is to criminalize the purchase of stock in fossil-fuels extractors, and to bar loans to them. Here’s why (and please follow this closely now):
The IMF says that“To limit the increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius — the more conservative of the goals agreed to by governments at the 2015 climate change talks in Paris — more than two-thirds of current known reserves, let alone those yet to be discovered (see Table 1), must remain in the ground (IEA 2012).” Obviously, then, what the oil and gas and coal companies are doing by continuing exploration is utterly idiotic from an economic standpoint — it’s adding yet more to what already are called “unburnable reserves.” Thus, waiting yet longer for a technological breakthrough, such as fossil-fuels corporations have always promised will happen but nobody has ever actually delivered (and such as is exemplified here), is doomed, because if and when such a real breakthrough would occur, we’d already be too late, and the uncontrollably spiraling and accelerating feedback-loops would already be out of control even if they weren’t uncontrollable back then. We’d simply be racing, then, to catch up with — and to get ahead of — an even faster rise in global temperatures than existed at that previous time. Things get exponentially worse with each and every year of delay. Consequently, something sudden, sharp, and decisive, must happen immediately, and it can happen only by a fundamental change becoming instituted in our laws, not in our technology. The solution, if it comes, will come from government, and not even possibly come from industry (technological breakthroughs). For governments to instead wait, and to hope for a “technological breakthrough,” is simply for our planet to die. It’s to doom this planet. It’s to abandon the government’s obligation to the future (its supreme obligation). The reason why is that what’s difficult to achieve now (preventing the murder of our planet), will soon be impossible to achieve.
On 13 November 2019, the International Energy Agency reported that “the momentum behind clean energy is insufficient to offset the effects of an expanding global economy and growing population,” and “The world urgently needs to put a laser-like focus on bringing down global emissions. This calls for a grand coalition encompassing governments, investors, companies and everyone else who is committed to tackling climate change.” Obviously, we are all heading the world straight to catastrophe. Drastic action is needed, and it must happen now — not in some indefinite future. But the IEA was wrong to endorse “calls for a grand coalition encompassing governments, investors, companies and everyone else,” which is the gradual approach, which is doomed to fail. And it also requires agreement, which might not come, and compromises, which might make the result ineffective.
I have reached out to Carbon Tracker, the organization that encourages investors to disinvest from fossil fuels. Their leader, Mark Campanale, declined my request for them to endorse my proposal. He endorses instead “a new fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty supported by movements calling to leave fossil fuels in the ground.” When I responded that it’s vastly more difficult, for states (individual governments) to mutually pass, into their respective nation’s laws, a treaty amongst themselves (since it requires unanimity amongst all of them instituting into each one of their legal systems exactly that same law), than it is for any state ON ITS OWN to institute a law (such as I propose), he still wasn’t interested. I asked him why he wasn’t. He said “I’ve chosen a different strategy for my organization.” I answered: “All that I am seeking from you is an ENDORSEMENT. I am not asking you to change your ‘strategy’ (even if you really ought to ADD this new strategy to your existing one).” He replied simply by terminating communication with me and saying, without explanation, “We don’t always agree.”
Carbon Tracker is secretive of the identities, and size of donations, of its donors, but its website does make clear that it’s a UK organization that has designed itself so as to be as beneficial for tax-write-offs to U.S. billionaire donors as possible, and “Our UK organisation has an Equivalency Determination (‘ED’) which allows it to be recognised by the IRS as a 501(c)3 US Public Charity. We have held the ED since February 2016 and is maintained annually by NGO Source on behalf of our major US donors.” In short: it’s part of the U.S.-led team of billionaires. Perhaps this organization’s actual function is that (since the nations that have nationalized their fossil fuels haven’t yet been able to be taken over as outright colonies or vassal-states controlled by the U.S.-led group) the residents inside those outside countries will be paying the price (in reduced Government-services, etc.) from a gradual transition to a ‘reduced carbon’ world. (Everybody but those billionaires will be paying the price.) This mythical aim, of a ‘reduced-carbon’ ‘transition’, would then be a veiled means of gradually impoverishing the residents in those nations, until, ultimately, those people there will support a coup, which will place U.S.-and-allied billionaires in charge of their Government (such as happened in Ukraine in 2014). This appears to be their policy regarding Venezuela, Iran, and several other countries. If it is additionally influencing the ‘transition to a low-carbon economy’, then it’s actually blocking the needed change in this case (which isn’t, at all, change that’s of the gradual type, but is, instead, necessarily decisive, and sudden, if it is to happen at all). However, Carbon Tracker is hardly unique in being controlled by U.S.-and-allied billionaires, and there are, also, many other ways to employ the gradual approach — an approach which is doomed to fail on this matter. A few other of these delaying-tactics will also be discussed here.
Some environmental organizations recommend instead improving labeling laws and informing consumers on how they can cut their energy-usages (such as here), but even if that works, such changes, in consumers’ behaviors, are no more effective against climate-change than would be their using buckets to lower the ocean-level in order to prevent it from overflowing and flooding the land. What’s actually needed is a huge jolt to the system itself, immediately. Only systemic thinking can solve such a problem.
Making such a change — outlawing the purchase of stock in, and prohibiting loans to, fossil-fuel extractors — would impact enormously the stock-prices of all fossil fuels corporations throughout the world, even if it’s done only in this country. It would quickly force all of the fossil-fuel extractors to eliminate their exploration teams and to increase their dividend payouts, just in order to be able to be “the last man standing” when they do all go out of business — which then would occur fairly soon. Also: it would cause non-fossil-energy stock-prices to soar, and this influx of cash into renewable-energy investing would cause their R&D also to soar, which would increasingly reduce costs of the energy they supply. It would transform the world, fairly quickly, and very systematically. And all of this would happen without taxpayers needing to pay tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars, or for governments to sign onto any new treaties. And if additional nations copy that first one, then the crash in market-values of all fossil-fuels corporations will be even faster, and even steeper.
As regards existing bonds and other debt-obligations from fossil-fuels extractors, each such corporation would need to establish its own policies regarding whether or not, and if so then how, to honor those obligations, since there would no longer be a market for them. Ending the market would not be equivalent to ending the obligations. The law would nullify the obligations, but the corporation’s opting to fulfill those obligations wouldn’t be illegal — it would merely be optional.
This would be taking from individuals who have been investing in what the overwhelming majority of experts on global warming say are investments in a massive crime against future generations, and we are now in an emergency situation, which is more than merely a national emergency, a global one, so that such governmental action would not be merely advisable but urgently necessary and 100% in accord with the public welfare and also in accord with improving distributive justice.
The only way possible in order to avoid getting into the uncontrollable feedback-cycles (feedback-loops) that would set this planet racing toward becoming another Mars is to quickly bring a virtual end to the burning of fossil fuels. That can happen only if fossil fuels become uneconomic. But common methods proposed for doing that, such as by imposing carbon taxes, would hit consumers directly (by adding a tax to what they buy), and thereby turn consumers into advocates for the fossil-fuel industries (advocates on the fossil-fuels-companies’ side, favoring elimination of that tax upon their products). In this key respect, such proposals are counterproductive, because they dis-incentivize the public to support opposition to fossil-fuel extraction. Such proposals are therefore politically unacceptable, especially in a democracy, where consumers have powerful political voice at the ballot-box. Any carbon tax would also anger the consuming public against environmentalists. Turning consumers into friends of the fossil-fuels extractors would be bad. What I am proposing is not like that, at all. Investors are a much smaller number of voters than are consumers. Everyone is a consumer, but only a relatively tiny number of people are specifically fossil-fuel investors. To terminate the freedom those investors have to sell their stock, by making illegal for anyone to buy that stock, is the most practicable way to prevent global burnout (if it still can be prevented). This needs to be done right now.
How was slavery ended in the United States? It became illegal for anyone to own slaves — and the way that this was done is that it became illegal for anyone to buy a slave. The same needs to be done now in order to (possibly) avoid runaway global heat-up.
Once it’s done, those firms will go out of business. (First, these firms will increase their dividend-payouts to their stockholders while they lay off their explorers, but then they’ll cut their other costs, and then they’ll fold. But the objective isn’t that; it’s to make their products uneconomic to produce, market, and sell; and this will do that, even before all of those firms have become eliminated.) All of today’s existing economies-of-scale in the fossil-fuels-producing-and-marketing industries will then be gone, and will become replaced by new economies-of-scale that will rise sharply in non-carbon energy, as R&D there will be soaring, while the fossil-fuels producers fade out and fade away.
This is the only realistically possible way to avoid global burnout. It must be done. And even some top executives in fossil-fuels extractors harbor personal hopes that it will be done. For example:
Shell CEO Says Governments, Not Firms, Are Failing on Climate Change
Ben van Beurden expressed concern that some investors could ditch Shell, acknowledging that shares in the company were trading at a discount partly due to “societal risk”. “I am afraid of that, to be honest,” he said. “But I don’t think they will flee for the justified concern of stranded assets ... (It is) the continued pressure on our sector, in some cases to the point of demonisation, that scares asset managers.” “It is not at a scale that the alarm bells are ringing, but it is an unhealthy trend.” Van Beurden put the onus for achieving a transformation to low-carbon economies on governments.
He didn’t suggest any specific policies which governments should take, but he did say “that not enough progress had been made to reach the Paris climate goal of limiting global warming to ‘well below’ 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.” Furthermore:
Delaying implementation of the right climate policies could result in “knee-jerk” political responses that might be very disruptive to society, he said. “Let the air out of the balloon as soon as you can before the balloon actually bursts,” van Beurden said.
He is, in a sense, trapped, as the head of one of the world’s largest fossil-fuel extractors. He doesn’t want to be “demonised,” but he is professionally answering to — and obligated to serve — investors who are still profiting from destroying the world. Though he acknowledges that consumers cannot initiate the necessary policy-change, and that investors aren’t yet; and though he doesn’t want government to do anything which “might be very disruptive to society,” he does want governments to “Let the air out of the balloon as soon as you can before the balloon actually bursts,” and he’s therefore contemplating — and is even advising — that governments must do the job now, and not wait around any longer to take the necessary decisive action.
Here’s what that type of governmental action would be (and unlike the Paris Climate Agreement, it doesn’t require an international consensus — which doesn’t actually exist among the nations).
Why is this the ONLY way? No other proposals can even possibly work:
The concept of “bridge fuels,” such as methane as being a substitute for petroleum, is a propaganda device (another delaying-tactic) by the fossil-fuels industry and its agents, in order to slow the decline of those industries. For example, on 16 November 2019, Oil Price Dot Com headlined “Why Banning Fossil Fuel Investment Is A Huge Mistake”, and Cyril Widdershoven, a long-time writer for and consultant to fossil-fuel corporations, argued against an effort by the European Investment Bank to “put more pressure on all parties to phase out gas, oil and coal projects.” Widdershoven’s argument is that “experts seem to agree that the best way to target lower CO2 emissions in the EU is to substitute oil and coal power generation in Eastern Europe with natural gas.” He says, “Even in the most optimistic projections, renewable energy options, such as wind or solar, are not going to be able to counter the need for power generation capacity. If the EIB blocks a soft energy transition via natural gas, the Paris Agreement will almost certainly fail.”
The unstated “experts” that Widdershoven cited are, like himself, hirees of the fossil-fuels industries. Furthermore, this go-slow approach is already recognized by the IMF and IEA to be doomed to fail at avoiding global burn-out.
Furthermore — and this is perhaps the most important fact of all — government-support has largely been responsible for the success of fossil-fuel corporations (especially now for natural gas), and, if fully replaced by government-support going instead to non-fossil-fuel corporations, there will then be a skyrocketing increase in R&D in those non-fossil-fuel technologies, which skyrocketing R&D, there, is desperately needed, if any realistic hope is to exist, at all, of avoiding global burn-out.
On 17 December 2019, I had sent this argument (emailed, under the “Subject” line of “Here is the way to avoid happening again what just happened in Madrid:”) to the:
What is needed is a method which (unlike international agreement on carbon-trading credits) won’trequire agreement among nations, which are too corrupt to take the necessary collective action to avert catastrophe. Here’s the solution which could be implemented by, say, the EU, or even just by Germany, or just by India, or just by China, alone, if not by any of the far-right countries (such as U.S. and Brazil), which action, taken by any one of them, would create the necessary cascading-effect among all nations, that could transform the world and perhaps save the future (and please do follow closely the argument here, and click onto any link here wherever you might have any questions, because this is a truly new idea, and every part of it is fully documented here):
—
Then came the argument that I’ve just presented. On 8 April 2020, I received back a reply that was full of the usual platitudes and said “Europe will continue to lead the global low-carbon transition we have agreed. I hope on your continued support for reaching the common climate objectives.”
I also emailed the entire argument to all of the lawyers on the staffs of all of the billionaires-funded ‘nonprofits’ or ‘charities’ that are active supposedly against global warming, and not a single one of those persons even responded, at all.
I also contacted both of my U.S. Senators and communicated with the Senator’s specialist staffer on environmental issues. One of them never replied, but the other said that outlawing purchases of investments in something might be “unconstitutional.” I asked how that could even possibly true, because narcotic drugs are illegal to purchase, and many other types of purchases also are illegal in America. The staffer never replied.
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[/su_spoiler]
Scientists who Issued ‘Climate Emergency’ Declaration in 2019 Now say Earth’s Vital Signs are Worsening
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HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
A rapid and urgent phaseout of fossil fuels is needed, scientists warn, in order to avoid crossing dangerous climate tipping points.
Wildfires in Chubut, Argentina, March 2021. Credit: Greenpeace Media.
From devastating wildfires to rising methane emissions, Earth’s vital signs are continuing to deteriorate, scientists warn. An urgent global phaseout of fossil fuels is needed, they say, reiterating calls for “transformative change,” which is “needed now more than ever to protect life on Earth and remain within as many planetary boundaries as possible.”
The warning comes roughly a year and a half after a global coalition of 11,000 climate scientists declared a climate emergency, warning that global action was needed to avoid “untold suffering due to the climate crisis.” The new paper examining Earth’s vital signs, published in the journal BioScience, is authored by some of the same scientists who helped spearhead the climate emergency declaration.
“There is growing evidence we are getting close to or have already gone beyond tipping points associated with important parts of the Earth system, including warm-water coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets,” William Ripple, a professor of ecology at Oregon State University (OSU) and one of the paper’s lead authors, said in a statement.
The team of researchers and scientists, collaborating from Massachusetts in the U.S., Australia, the U.K., France, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and Germany, took stock of 31 variables that collectively offer a gauge for the planet’s health. Many of those metrics have worsened since the group originally declared a climate emergency in 2019.
Both methane and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have reached new record highs, the study reveals. Sea ice has dramatically shrunk, and so too has the ice mass in Greenland and Antarctica. Wildfires in the U.S. are burning more acreage. And deforestation in the Amazon is occurring at its fastest rate in 12 years.
Ruminant livestock — cows, sheep and goats — now exceed 4 billion, and their total mass exceeds that of humans and wild animals combined. Cows in particular are huge contributors to climate change due methane emissions released from belching, and deforestation resulting from clearing land for livestock.
Forests cleared in Brazil for agriculture. The Bolsonaro regime has given many ranching interests and short-term agro-croppers carte blanche to do as they please. This fragile region continues to be wantonly destroyed by amoral industrialism. Credit: CIFOR. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
The global pandemic offered only a modest and brief respite from some of these trends, the scientists note, such as a short drop in the use of fossil fuels as the world went into lockdown, but a quick rebound in oil and gas consumption demonstrates that the world remains stuck on a dangerous track.
The worsening vital signs “largely reflect the consequences of unrelenting business as usual,” the authors said in a statement.
Not every data point was negative, however, and there were some signs of hope. The level of fossil fuel subsidies has declined since 2019, although part of that was due to the collapse of energy use and market prices during the pandemic.
Fossil fuel divestment also picked up pace, increasing by $6.5 trillion between 2018 and 2020. And a growing number of governments have officially recognized the climate emergency — pledging to cut emissions and accelerate a push towards clean energy.
The authors also note that the share of global greenhouse gas emissions coming under some form of carbon pricing — a way of discouraging unchecked greenhouse gas emissions — also increased from 14.4 percent to 23.2 percent, largely due to expanding carbon pricing in China. While that offered some hope, the scientists found that the global average carbon price under these programs stood at around US$15.49 per ton, much too low to ratchet down emissions.
The authors said global carbon pricing needs to increase “severalfold to be highly effective” in cutting the use of fossil fuels, and it should be linked to a “socially just green climate fund to finance climate mitigation and adaptation policies in the Global South.”
The scientists said the world needs to rapidly phase out fossil fuels, scale up carbon pricing programs at the global level, and develop climate reserves to protect natural carbon sinks such as forests, wetlands, and mangroves.
“Policies to alleviate the climate crisis or any of the other threatened planetary boundary transgressions should not be focused on symptom relief but on addressing their root cause: the overexploitation of the Earth,” the authors wrote in their paper.
The warning comes as politicians continue to drag their feet on ambitious climate action.
On July 22, a report from BloombergNEF was released, finding that G20 countries — the richest nations in the world — subsidized fossil fuels by roughly $3.3 trillion between 2015 and 2019.
The following day, the environment ministers of G20 countries met in Naples, Italy. They failed, however, to reach a consensus on calling for a global phaseout of coal, and they also could not agree on tightening up the climate goals laid out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The summit in Naples is meant to lay the groundwork for the much more important climate negotiations to be held in Glasgow later this year.
Flood damage in Germany. Credit: Greenpeace Media.
The Ponina Fire in Oregon, April 2021. Credit: National Interagency Fire Center.
Meanwhile, governments are also not following global calls to shift their pandemic-related economic recovery programs to forms of “green stimulus.” The International Energy Agency (IEA) said only 2 percent of global fiscal stimulus is being funneled into clean energy. “Not only is clean energy investment still far from what’s needed to put the world on a path to reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century, it’s not even enough to prevent global emissions from surging to a new record,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol said.
The lagging response to a worsening climate crisis comes despite the destruction from disasters becoming more pronounced, with record heat in the Pacific Northwest, wildfires across the American West and in Siberia, and horrendous floods in China, Belgium, and Germany.
“Climate change is not abstract right now. It is in our face,” Ripple of OSU told DeSmog. “Just seeing the suffering around the fires, the floods, the heat waves and the drought … it’s accelerating a lot faster than I personally thought even two years ago when we made our scientist warning of a climate emergency declaration.”
“I think we’re all sitting back and reassessing,” Ripple said. “A lot of us are shocked about the speed and magnitude of what’s happening right now.”
Nick Cunningham is an independent journalist covering the oil and gas industry, climate change and international politics. He has been featured in Oilprice.com, The Fuse, YaleE360 and NACLA.
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necessary control equipment was large enough to contain three football fields, even though the actual fusion reaction takes place in a gold or diamond vessel smaller than a pea. All this just to generate the equivalent of about 10-20 minutes of energy that is used by a typical small home. Clearly, even the most inexpensive rooftop solar systems can already do far more. And Prof. Mark Jacobson’s group at Stanford University has calculated that a total conversion to wind, water and solar power might use about as much land as is currently occupied by the world’s fossil fuel infrastructure.
Brian Tokar is the co-editor (with Tamra Gilbertson) of Climate Justice and Community Renewal: Resistance and Grassroots Solutions (Routledge 2020) and the author and editor of six previous books on environmental issues and movements, including Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change (New Compass 2014). He is a lecturer in Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont and a long-term faculty and board member of the Vermont-based Institute for Social Ecology.
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